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Daily deprivations

I wrote last week about the creating of one of Newark's most curious old streets, Regent Street.

Built between 1828 and 1830, Regent Street ran between Albert Street and Victoria Street, and was the creation of a local entrepreneur named William Kelk.

Yet despite being designated a street, Regent Street was not really a street at all - it possessed no road and was really nothing more than a row of houses with gardens and a walkway at the front and two passageways behind.

These passageways gave access to the back doors of the houses, but did not run along the entire length of the street.

For although it was possible to enter the passages from either Albert Street or Victoria Street they did not meet in the middle.

The way was blocked halfway along by the rear projection of the large central house - Regent House (pictured).

One former resident of Regent House, Mrs Doreen Rawson (nee Aldridge), has been recalling the time she spent living there and some of the characters who occupied other houses in the street during her early childhood.

Mrs Rawson was born at Regent House (No. 8) in 1922 and lived there until 1956 when she and her husband moved to Grange Road.

By the Twenties Regent House, once a grand residence built for the street's owner, William Kelk, had been divided in two with Mrs Rawson's family occupying the half which lay towards Victoria Street.

Although much reduced in size, evidence of the building's former grandeur was still evident and, as a child, Mrs Rawson clearly remembers the impressively wide staircase and lofty ceilings of the first floor rooms in Regent House which overlooked the gardens below.

She also remembers playing ball with the other children from the street along the back passage and recalls how the high wall behind Regent Street was kept limewashed in an attempt to reflect as much light as possible back into the houses.

Mrs Rawson said: "Although it was open to the sky, on our side (i.e. entering from Victoria Street) the passage was as much as 10ft wide in places.

"This made it quite wide enough for we children to play our games and for there to be outbuildings such as a group of brick sheds where we stored our dustbins and where the communal toilets were."

Right up until the time they were demolished in 1967, the houses in Regent Street never had any indoor plumbing, and both toilets and a pair of cold water taps were located outside in each of the communal passageways.

Adding up the number of people who relied on these facilities, Mrs Rawson recalls that in the ten houses which made up her half of Regent Street there lived a total of 44 people (one family had as many as nine children).

This worked out at one lavatory to about 10 people with water for all 44 having to be drawn from the single cold tap to which they had access on the Victoria Street side.

While such a lack of amenity appears almost unbelievable by modern standards, Mrs Rawson does not recall the circumstances causing any particular difficulties within the daily routine of the street.

Having to obtain all one's water from an outside tap, however, did have its downside. Every drop of water used in the house had to be carried in from the yard, one bucket at a time.

While this was a considerable task on ordinary days, on bath nights or Monday wash days it became a particularly heavy duty.

Every suitable vessel in the house had to be pressed into service as water was carried in from the yard and heated over the coal-fired range.

Then, one kettle at a time, it was poured into the dolly tub or tin bath.

At the end of the day, with no inside sinks or other internal drainage, all the dirty water had to be emptied down one of a number of shared grates in the back passage.

Washing and bathing, recalls Mrs Rawson, always took place in the back kitchen of the houses. Although each possessed a front room with a door onto the gardens, this was "kept for best" and very rarely used.

It was the back kitchen, therefore, which was the centre of family life and where virtually all activities (apart from sleeping) took place.

Remembering the layout of her mother's kitchen at Regent Street, Mrs Rawson recalls the small black leaded range (the only source of heat in the house), a wooden mangle for use on wash days and a system of bowls and buckets for washing up and taking out the slops; there were no kitchen sinks in Regent Street.

Although most of the houses acquired gas cookers (and, indeed, gas lights) in the Thirties, Mrs Rawson can still recall the disruption caused by the simple act of having coal delivered to her mother's house in the Twenties.

Instead of being able to unload the coal down a chute in the pavement (as was the case along most other terraced streets in Newark), coal for Regent Street had to be delivered to the back door of the houses and carried through the kitchen to a short flight of steps leading to the cellar.

These steps doubled as a pantry or cold store meaning that on coal delivery days much of the family's food could become encrusted with coal dust.

Circumstances such as these certainly made living in Regent Street a memorable experience. But, as Mrs Rawson said: "It never did us any harm; it was like one big happy family. If you were short of anything you could just ask next door.

I used to refer to all the adults on that street as aunts and uncles. We all got on marvellously. "Mrs Cannon at No. 3 had nine children and she would take us all swimming in the Trent over Mill Bridge by Jobson's boathouse. Sometimes she would be looking after 15 of us together."

ABOVE: Regent House on Regent Street, Newark. It was demolished in 1967 (shortly after this picture was taken) and was home to Mrs Doreen Rawson for more than 30 years.

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