Meta Mayne Reid was a well known Belfast based children’s author who was born and grew up in Woodlesford in the years before and during the First World War.
Her full maiden name was Meta Amy Constance Josephine Hopkins. The 1911 census shows she was living with her parents, a sister, and two servants at Wood End farm, marked on old maps just to the west of present day Northwood Falls.
After moving to Northern Ireland and marrying Belfast surgeon Dr. Ebenezer Mayne Reid in 1935 Meta started to publish novels and poetry. She also made a number of appearances on BBC radio programmes. From 1952 to 1980 she specialised in children’s fiction and wrote a total of 24 books. A single copy of an unpublished memoir of her childhood – The Innocent Eye – is now part of the Special Collections at Queen’s University in Belfast.
From Meta’s description it turns out that although the farm she grew up on was called Wood End the family actually lived at The Laurels, a large house with six bedrooms and a garden full of rhododendrons surrounded by a stone wall, which once stood just across the railway bridge at the bottom of Applegarth. It was “islanded in its acre of garden, built of sandstone and roofed with great slabs of the same material hung on wooden pegs,” wrote Meta.
As well as painting a picture of her domestic routine the memoir goes on to give some evocative glimpses into life locally from about 1909, when Meta was four.
For instance this is her description of Church Street: “It was important to me mainly because of its shops in which I spent my ha’penny or penny. Each shop had a personality of its own, though all were untidy, alive, hot-beds of gossip, and full of jumbled goods. Admiral Wilkinson’s was a cave of darkness littered with bulging sacks of vegetables. Mrs. S (Mary Stringer) dispensed drugs, toilet trifles and advice with a superior manner. She was a lone Liberal in a wilderness of Socialists. For mere groceries we went to Mr. Edwards, who owned the first bacon-slicer in the village, did his brown sugar up in blue paper “pokes”, and kept really large screw-topped bottles of lemonade which would last a whole afternoon.” (George Edwards was born at Hannington in Wiltshire in 1860 and came to Woodlesford in 1882 as a signalman on the Midland Railway. He married Louisa Langstaff, the daughter of shoemaker John Langstaff in 1890. After moving to Eccleshill and then Apperley Bridge near Bradford George resigned from the railway in 1897 and established his shop on Highfield Lane opposite the school. George and Louisa were the grandparents of Bryan Edwards who played football for Bolton Wanderers in the 1950s and later managed Bradford City.)
Meta’s parents, Marcus Andrew Hopkins and Elvina (nee Moody), came from County Londonderry. They married in Londonderry in December 1901 and it appears he took over the tenancy of the 230 acre Wood End farm just before that after a notice advertising for a new tenant was placed in the Leeds newspapers by the Oulton based land agent John Farrer in October 1901. His name first appears in the electoral register in 1904.
Before that the farm had been the property of Joseph Crompton Oddie, owner of the paper mill, benefactor of Woodlesford church and previous occupant of The Laurels. He died in 1874 and had left his considerable estate to relatives.
As farmers the Hopkins regarded themselves as middle class and were wealthy enough to employ governesses to teach Meta and her sister Audrey, so neither went to Woodlesford school. This is her memory of it: “Behind Mrs Downes’ shop stretched the rhubarb fields, and their gaunt black forcing sheds, and on the other side of them stood the school, always plangent with the doleful chanting of times-tables. The school was ugliness personified, a dirty one-storey building in a sea of concrete firmly bounded by high railings.” (William Downes was a coal miner originally from Dawley in Shropshire. He and his wife Emma, nee Smith from Oulton, opened their grocery shop on the corner of Station Lane and Church Street in the 1890s. By 1911 they had moved to Hunslet so this memory must be from Meta was very young.)
Another restriction which set the Hopkins sisters apart was a ban on them attending the summer feast held in the field next to their house between the Boot and Shoe Inn and the canal. “I hung over the wall all day watching the preparations. Every year I went to bed in tears, just as the lights were being lit, and lay awake trying in vain to hear the roundabout. Once I was allowed, or contrived to look over the wall when revelry had begun, and breathed in the essential perfume of all such fairs: sweat and trampled grass and horse-droppings and beer.”
Despite appearing to live apart from the rest of the village Meta had a good recollection of local landmarks: “The church perched on a hill above the deeply-cut railway line. The Wesleyan chapel stood flat on the street, firmly shut and anonymous,” she wrote. Her family’s isolation was keenly felt: “The village boys considered us to be stuck-up Irish paddies who thought themselves far too good for the rough and tumble games of Alma Street.” One occasion she recalled later in life was when one of those boys had an accident: “A boy had swung on behind the pony trap which had come down to meet us at the station, and his leg had been almost severed when he caught it in the wheel.”
Meta’s memory of the servants who worked at The Laurels is also vivid. Amelia Longbottom was 22 in 1911, the daughter of a railway platelayer who lived at Red Hill in Great Preston. “Amelia is now only a vision of a sniffing girl going home in a cart lined with straw when she got influenza and became homesick for her two-mile-distant colliery village.” Another maid was Amy Lightholder (possibly Lightowler) who “came from a tiny stone cottage with a matchbox-sized garden, and it may have been her mother who told mine that the cure for whooping-cough was to bind a roasted mouse across the throat of the sufferer.” Amelia married Peckfield miner William Freeman in 1915 and went to live with him at Aberford. She died in 1921 a few months after giving birth to a son. The only Amy Lightowler in the records is a miner’s daughter who married Midland Railway guard Walter Phillips at Woodlesford in 1906. She would have met Meta’s mother when she was passing The Laurels on her way to her job as a firelight wrapper at Seanor’s factory in the old paper mill next door.
Katie Tiffany, “a lively, scatter-brained youngest daughter of a long family of Irish-Yorkshire ne’er-do-wells,” worked for the family during the First World War. Born at Swillington in 1907 she was too young to go to the Barnbow munitions factory where many of the older girls developed “yellow” faces from handling nitric acid whilst making explosives. Katie’s father was coal miner William Tiffany and she must have been only about 10 or 11 years old when she went to The Laurels from her home in Beecroft Yard – “a slum which we were forbidden to enter,” writes Meta.
One night there was much discussion amongst the grown ups at The Laurels over “an evening episode” when Katie had been chased over the fields and into Gypsy Lane by a man. The doctor had been called to examine her and it was only in later life that Meta realised the significance. A cat with magical powers, featured in the first of Meta’s children’s books, was named Tiffany. (Katie Tiffany married bus conductor Richard Reginald Shillito at Oulton church in 1930. They lived in Methley and are believed to have had two children.)
In March 1921 Meta’s parents auctioned off the farm stock including five horses, eight fat bullocks, farm carriages, implements and tools as well as four tons of seed potatoes. The census in June that year listed Marcus Hopkins as “compulsorily” retired, possibly through illness although he didn’t die until 1970. Meta was still living at home and travelling by train to attend Leeds Girls’ High School. A year or so later she went to the University of Manchester. After her parents went back to Northern Ireland later in the 1920s she appears never to have returned to Woodlesford. She has though left behind an engaging memoir of many aspects of the village of her childhood.
This is how she recorded one of the local Christmas traditions from over a century ago when young children were allowed to roam freely. “Waits came in the persons of self-organised groups of village children who sang a couple of verses, then hammered on the back door and chanted:
‘Christmas is coming, geese are getting fat,
Please put a penny in the poor man’s hat,
If you haven’t got a penny, a ha’penny will do,
If you haven’t got a ha’penny, God bless you.’
We kept a stock of pennies and ha’pence, and when those ran out, apples were gladly accepted, probably by the very children who had raided our trees three months before!”
