Berry Brow was once described as the most charming village in Huddersfield.
Indeed it was so picturesque that photographs of it could have easily led viewers to mistaking it for an Italian hill town.
All that disappeared once the planners got their hands on it in the 1960s and set about demolishing it in a major act of cultural vandalism.
Huddersfield Corporation decided the tight banks of terraced housing had to go because many of the houses had no inside toilets or bathrooms.
Now one of its former residents, 82-year-old Betty Dyson, has shared her memories of growing up in the village with Examiner readers.
It seems unimaginable in these days of huge supermarkets but at one time Berry Brow was a thriving village boasting seven fish and chip shops, seven butchers, six bakers and five pubs. No longer there are The Black Bull, The Brown Cow or The Butcher’s Arms though The Golden Fleece and The Railway remain.
Betty, who now lives with her husband, Stanley, in Dalton, says she was born in The Golden Fleece where her father was the landlord, Tommy Laister.
She said: “It was a time of flagged floors and spitoons round the bar and saw dust on the floor.
“We left when I was three or four and moved to Deadmanstone house - a place said to have derived its name from being the resting place of coffins being transported to Almondbury Parish Church in the Middle Ages though a more lurid theory is that an invading Scot was walled up there alive).
“And I lived there with my dad and mum, Beatrice, until I was nine and we moved to Newsome.
“It’s heartbreaking to see what happened to the old village, it was so picturesque.
“I don’t remember The Golden Fleece well as I was so little but there were outside toilets with wooden seats in Deadmanstone, stone floors and we used newspapers cut into squares instead of toilet rolls.”
One incident she does recall being told about later was when she was just 12 months old and somehow ended up getting ‘drunk’ after taking a few sips from the pint pots kept underneath the taps of the barrel.
She slept soundly for a day and her parents fetched the local medic, Dr Waddy, who she says “just laughed and told my parents to let her sleep it off. He said she is just drunk!”
Betty went to Berry Brow School which she says was “nice” and which she says is still going though it has been modernised.
“I remember the teachers especially Miss Beaumont, she took me to her house for tea, I was a bit of a favourite of hers.”
Another memory of the village is of her pushing her face against the window of Mr Littlewood’s sweet shop with her friends and wondering what half a penny would buy.
And she recalls the cobblers at the top of Waingate and, although she can’t remember the owner’s name, she does recall his mouth always being full of tacks and him endlessly spitting them out!
In addition there was a greengrocers and Co-op “where every time you bought anything you gave your number and it was put on a little ticket. In a few months you got ‘the divvy’ which people used to look forward to.
At the bottom of Waingate was a little shop where a man used to charge batteries up for wirelesses though she says “we only had the radio on at certain times because you didn’t want the expense of running the battery down.
“We went back to The Golden Fleece four years ago with one of my sons, Granville, and there were three to four photographs on the wall of my father which was nice.
“They were happy times in Berry Brow. It was a time of gaslights, a time when wives and mothers baked their own bread and you used to get washed in a tin bath in front of the fire.”
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