Chas. H. Davis’s Coal Yard

Every Saturday morning from the age of fifteen until he went into the Paras at nineteen, Maurice Sellars shovelled coal into the scales at Chas. H. Davis’s coal yard in Danesbury Crescent, “when coal was available”. From memory, he told Voices of Kingstanding, it cost about 4s 6d a hundredweight. People queued with whatever would carry it home, “the favourite one being an old (sometimes not so old) babies pram.”

This was a coal-fired estate, and in the years of rationing and shortage after the war a coal yard mattered. This one was tucked in next door to the ex-servicemen’s club, behind the swimming baths on Warren Farm Road.

Nutty slack

George Vickers came from Enderby Road on Perry Common, aged ten or eleven, pushing a barrow. He described the way in: “just passed the rear of the baths walking towards the top of Hawthorne Road and also passed the rear of the Ex Serviceman’s Club”. He came for nutty slack, the small coal and dust that made a fire last longer, because “things where hard for Mom & Dad in those days”.

“It was only a small coal yard,” he remembered, “and I remember the burly blokes, Shovelling the nutty slack into a sack and putting it into my barrow as if it were feathers. Hard men Hard times.”

A bag of slack

Maureen Cherry’s grandparents lived in Danesbury Crescent. In the late 1940s, as a little girl, she queued there with her mother. “They usually ran out and we ended up with a bag of slack.” At home her father lagged the outside pipes with old coats to stop them freezing. “Everyone was in the same boat and we were grateful for anything.”

Don Hallett ran errands for the neighbours and got into trouble with his mother for “borrowing” the baby’s pram to fetch the coal. After Maurice Sellars left, a friend of Don’s, Raymond Miller, worked in the yard.

Hard men, hard times

Coal was scarce well into the 1950s: Allan Rooke remembered walking two miles and more with his friends to Kings Coal Yard at Short Heath, joining the queue at half past six in the morning.

Nothing on Danesbury Crescent marks the yard now. But in the kitchens of the estate, where the coal lived in a big cupboard, a pram full of slack from Davis’s was once the difference between a fire and no fire.