"I got the blame for it." Highvolume Play Pause Stop

Harry Oldham in the late 1980s.

Courtesy of Nigel Ingham

At a reminiscence group in the late 1980s in Lancaster Harry Oldham talked about a school experience in Sheffield. This was where he remembered growing up with his mother, father, two sisters and a brother in the earlier part of the 1900s.

Harry Oldham lived in the Royal Albert for many years, arriving there before the Second World War.

Although the Albert was in Lancashire it served the seven Northern Counties of England. Harry, as did others who came to the institution, spent his early years in Sheffield, in the county of Yorkshire.

Transcript:

“I used to go to Council School at home and a lad, a dark skinned lad, was sat on the next desk behind me and had a habit of throwing his ink well over me homework. And the teacher came out in the middlde of the classroom and saw it and I got the blame for it and he got away with it. I put me hand out, me hand out to be caned and I got some shiny stuff, like resin, rubbed it into me, well into me hands and a great big long bamboo cane and I splitted it in two in the middle. Never touched me no more since.”