NEARLY 90 YEARS IN ONE HOUSE.

RECOLLECTIONS OF STANTON’S OLDEST RESIDENT.

Our reporter pushed his way through a particularly stiff March gale to Stanton, to have a chat with a man who has braved the storms of nearly ninety-four years, and who in spirit is still undaunted. His name is Mr. Joseph Wright, and the visitor found him seated in one of the old Stanton almshouses, some of which are monuments of antiquity, having been built in the early part of the eighteenth century. Mr. Wright has made his home there ever since shortly before the war. He is a native of Dale, and few can boast of so long and unbroken an attachment to one parish as can he. He was born at a farmhouse near the old “Cat and Fiddle” at Dale, and there until six years ago he lived. During all those years he slept only once outside the old homestead. He has never been more than ten miles away from home, his furthest excursions beyond the parish boundaries being to Derby and Nottingham. The old farmhouse where he lived was occupied by different generations of the Wright family from the time of its erection in 1761, and the owner, Lord Stanhope, left it rent free to the family of which Mr. Joseph Wright is the sole surviving member. So long as he was able he continued to attend to the work of the farm. Up to a few months ago he used to enjoy short walks, but latterly he has not been well enough to continue them. Throughout his long life he has enjoyed exceptionally good health, the only illness that he can remember being an attack of fever, which laid him up for three weeks. Although he himself indulges in an occasional “pipe,” he thinks that abstention from both liquor and tobacco tend to help one to live to a healthy old age. As he put it, he himself was never “mastered” by either tobacco or liquor.

Mr. Wright indulged in a little retrospect, and some of his memories brought a smile to his face. He related some recollections of his early days, when conditions were far different from those of to-day. He remembers the starting of the Stanton Ironworks. He had plenty of experience of hard work on the farm, and he recalled the times when there was no choice of occupation to speak of; when there were no factories, and men had for the most part to labour on the land. He recalled the hard times when “Tommy shops” were in vogue locally. When work and money were short, people could obtain necessities on credit at these shops until the week-end. When Mr. Wright began to speak of the low rentals charged for land in his early days, an quoted a local case of a half-year’s rent on a hundred acres of farm land amounting to only £14, one could not help contrasting it with farm rentals to-day. He recalled the old method of threshing corn by hand.

Mr. Wright’s ten shilling old-age pension presently arrived, and it reminded him that that sum represented a man’s wages in his younger days, and he remarked on the difference in prices then and now, and incidentally passed a little stricture on the Government. He told of a local foreman roadmender who was paid the princely wage of one shilling per day, his subordinates receiving one shilling a week less. The roads thereabouts were at one period within his memory not exactly all that could be desired. Some had ruts as deep as the length of his stick, he said, and folks found it advisable to get the winter’s supply of fuel in well in advance. After a heavy fall of snow one could not tell which was road and which was rut. He described how people would walk from Dale to Nottingham and not regard it as an incident beyond the ordinary. In his younger days they did not see a great many newspapers. He remembers the pre-railway days, and related how in the forties, when the line from Nottingham to Derby was complete, a number of Dale young people one Sunday night went out to see a train run. With the aid of glasses the worthy nonagenarian still reads his newspaper.

Ticking away steadily in the corner was an old brass-faced grandfather clock. “I shall soon have known it a hundred years,” said Mr. Wright, “and it must be at least 200 years old.”

Our reporter and his host compared ages whilst they were conversing together. “You are quite a lad!"—observed Mr. Wright briskly to the reporter. The latter, of course, is not accustomed to being looked at in perspective from the venerable age of ninety-four, and so he felt momentarily abashed. But he ought not to feel too old at forty after that!

Mr. Wright will be 94 in May next, and we wish him much happiness and a peaceful eventide after his many years of arduous toil.

📚 Sources

• Type: newspaper
  Title: Sandiacre and Stapleford Weekly News
  Date: 1920-03-19