Over the past four years, Saddleworth Voices have recorded almost 70 interviews to preserve fond memories and anecdotes of all things local.
With the support of Saddleworth Parish Council, Delph Community Association, Delph library, Saddleworth Museum, and the North West Sound Archive in Clitheroe, the team of volunteers has created an oral record of our times, with the added advantage of capturing accent and dialect.
Copies of the recordings are currently available in Delph library, Saddleworth Museum, and at the NWSA.
Here, Martin Plant looks at the life of Edward Haslam.
Edward (Ted) Haslam has lived in Delph, with Sue, his wife, for over 30 years. An active member of the community, he has stood for election for the Parish Council and has been a governor of Saddleworth School and Denshaw School.
Ted was born in the 1930s in Chadderton, one of five children. His father, Robert Cecil, was head carder at the Dawn Mill in Shaw, where the ASDA store now stands.
During the war, his father, as a skilled fitter, worked at A.V.Roe and other factories helping to build Blenheim, Wellington, and Lancaster bombers. Ted’s mother was Hilda Thorpe before her marriage in 1926.
Ted attended St Matthew’s Primary School, but when war-time air raids began children had six months off school until it had its own air-raid shelter built.
During this time, Ted’s elder sister, Edith, gave them lessons. Ted recalls: “She was always the bossy one so I think she enjoyed it!”
Ted looked forward to air-raids because if they lasted over half an hour in the shelter you could open your iron ration box, which contained, amongst other things, Horlicks tablets which were Ted’s favourite!
They lived at Parkfield and before air-raid shelters were constructed near by, the safest place to be during a raid was at home in the pantry under the staircase. They could hear the sound of bombs, anti-aircraft fire and the clattering of shrapnel on the roof.
Once, a Messerschmitt fighter plane crash landed in a field. It was nearly intact and was awaiting collection by the authorities. In the meantime, children kept pulling bits off it for souvenirs. By the time it came to be taken away, “half of it was gone!”.
Ted and his friends spent days looking for shrapnel. He says: “It used to slide on the cobblestones and end up at the kerbside. Cotton from the mill would become attached to it and so that’s what we’d look for.”
One night a stick of four bombs fell in a field in Chadderton but there only were three big craters. Ted and three friends the next day found the hole where the fourth bomb had buried itself deep in the soft soil.
He remembers: “We tried to set it off by jumping up and down on top of it! Fortunately, we weren’t successful!”
From the age of 11, Ted attended North Chadderton Boys’ Secondary School. It was next to the girls’ school and although they didn’t mix but could talk over the fence! Edith had been head girl there.
Ted enjoyed school – though he remembers being caned by Mr Haslam (no relation), the headteacher, and that the Manual (woodwork) teacher had a stick with a little nail in it “which he used to hit you on the backside!” They thought one of the teachers was a German spy!
Ted left school at 14 years old and began work at Platt Bros, later becoming an apprentice toolmaker before, at the age of 20, he signed on to do National Service in the RAF as a radar mechanic.
He was posted to Felixstowe but was keen to serve abroad. He applied for a posting to “any far distant part”, with the support of “Chiefy” his Flight-Sergeant, and duly received his notification… in Middleton, ten minutes from home!
A later posting was to Bridlington, to the early warning station on Bempton Cliffs. His younger brother, Peter, joined him there as a radar mechanic too.
They helped maintain the “superb” equipment deep underground. Antennae scanners above ground were used to detect (enemy) aircraft.
Ted received “top class” training so when he returned to “civvy street” he found that with his former apprenticeship at Platt Brothers his experience counted as much as if he had gone to university.
Ted learned even more at A.M.Lock in Oldham at a time when industrial electronics “were taking off”. They were agents for manufacturers of blood cell counters and nuclear thickness-measuring systems using radioactive sources which could be used in the steel, glass, or paper industries.
Ted used to visit steel rolling mills which had “amazing processes” – ingots ofsteel two feet wide, ten feet long, and one foot thick were super-heated in a furnace and passed back and forwards through a rolling mill until they were 0.1 inch thick and hundreds of feet long!
Ted set up business on his own in the Oldham area, making transistorised replacements for valve operated control units in packaging machinery, and electronic variable speed drives for industrial machinery.
After receiving poor financial advice, Ted started another company with his brother Peter making electronic instruments for measuring water flow; an electronic control unit for an artificial kidney unit designed by Liverpool University; and electronic control systems for self-adhesive labelling machines. Machines were sold all over the world.
Ted met his second wife, Sue, at an Open University summer school and they bought a house in Delph over 30 years ago. He has three children: Nick, from his first marriage, who
is a marine consultant; Roberta, an architect; and Sam, a graphic designer who attended Saddleworth School; and four gandchildren, two of whom are currently at Delph School.
He has been a keen member of the Labour Party, was secretary of the Delph branch, and once went to hear Harold Wilson.
He stood for the Parish Council but didn’t get in – which he says “was probably a good thing as they seem to work hard and all they get is abuse!”
Ted’s father died of Byssinosis, a disease caused by exposure to cotton dust, which is perhaps one reason why Ted loves Saddleworth and its position in the hills, open to clean air.
