One of the last residents of Beecroft Yard was Catherine Elizabeth Alderson, always known in her family and in the wider world as Betty. She was born in 1930 a little further up Church Street at No. 41 but after her mother died when she was only 13 months old she spent her childhood living with her father, his mother and one of his sisters at No. 17 Beecroft Yard. A few years earlier the narrow cul-de-sac at right angles to Church Street had been renamed Raglan Cottages. By the 1930s at least two of the tiny one-up, one down houses had been demolished but there were still seventeen addresses in the electoral registers.
The only facilities in the houses were a water tap in the small kitchen and gas piped from the brewery for lighting. The partitioned bedroom was reached by a wooden staircase from the living room which had a coal fire. Overcoats covered the beds during winter to keep the occupants warm. The weekly wash was done in a peggy tub and the wet clothes were put through a wringer before hanging out to dry in the backyard.
Raglan Cottages had some of the cheapest rents in the area and many of the houses were occupied by coal miners and their families who were new to the area. With no inside bathrooms they had to get clean in tin baths by the fire. A couple of outside toilets were shared by several households although these were relatively modern using water for flushing as opposed to ash middens which many of Betty’s contemporaries had to endure.
One of the few advantages for the children living at Raglan Cottages was that it was opposite the school so they didn’t have far to walk. Betty remembered looking through the railings and crying when her father left her in the playground on her first day when she was just four years old. She quickly settled down though, aided by compulsory short naps in the early afternoons. After failing her eleven-plus examination in 1941 she stayed on there until she was fourteen years old. Even in old age she remembered the names of the headmaster and teachers.
In pre-supermarket days all of the shopping was done locally, the nearest being a grocery, selling fresh eggs and other produce, on the corner of Raglan Cottages and Church Street. There were other shops a little further up, one of them specialising in second hand furniture. Lower down, next to the church, there was a shoe shop. There was also a fish and chip shop in a wooden hut opposite the Two Pointers. Most residents were members of the local branch of the Leeds Industrial Cooperative Society which had a butcher’s shop and a grocery a little further afield on Aberford Road. A share of the profits or dividend, known as the divvy, was paid to each household at the end of the year.
Betty’s memory was that her family didn’t go short of food but others may have done. She said her grandmother made sheep’s head stews with lots of allotment grown vegetables. Locally reared rabbit and plover birds bought at Leeds market were Christmas luxuries.
For thirsty labourers and miners living in Raglan Cottages their nearest pint was in the White Hart just across the road. The orginal premises, which had been there for well over a century, were knocked down in about 1934 and a new much larger pub built further back from the roadside. Betty’s father, miner Bill Alderson, is reputed to have been the first to order a beer there.
During the 1930s not many people could afford long holidays away but there were Sunday School day trips to the seaside and others organised by the Rechabite insurance company. On some occasions hundreds of villagers left Woodlesford station by special steam excursion trains to the seaside at Redcar, Bridlington and Scarborough.
In 1939 Raglan Cottages were declared “slums” by the Rothwell Urban District Council along with the house where Betty was born and many other stone built cottages in Woodlesford and Oulton. She moved to a newly built council house on Green Lea as did several of her immediate neighbours from Raglan Cottages along with many of her friends’ families. There they recreated the close community of Church Street. For the first time they had electricity and bathrooms. Given that the predominant occupation was mining they still had coal fires.
During the Second World War volunteer Air Raid Precautions wardens, including the Woodlesford vicar Dan Ivor James, patrolled the street threatening residents with fines if glimpses of light could be seen through the blackout curtains. Gas masks were issued and small bomb shelters were built in the back gardens but mainly the Luftwaffe’s bombers flew over at height concentrating their attacks on the industrial parts of Leeds.
With most of her classmates Betty left school at the age of 14 in 1944 for her first job in the offices at the Yorkshire Copper Works at Stourton. After taking shorthand and typing lessons at night school she moved on to a permanent position at a family run clothing firm in Hunslet called Southcotts which made school uniforms. Later she had a job at E. J. Arnold’s, a printing firm in Hunslet. In middle age she was employed in the brewery offices at Woodlesford and finally in the cash office at Boots in the centre of Leeds.
The village of Woodlesford ran through Betty like a place name in a stick of rock. On the maternal side of her family she had ancestors who had lived in the area more than two centuries earlier. Some had worked at the brewery, the quarries or in the pits. Others were at the paper mill at the end of Alma Street. Her great grandfather, Boyes Taylor, had migrated to the village in the wake of two of his uncles who had stayed on after working as navvies building the railway in the late 1830s. Martha Metcalf, her great great grandmother, was the daughter of a linen weaver and school master. A branch of the same family became watermen and lock keepers on the Aire & Calder Navigation. Martha’s husband, John Denkin, was the foreman at the paper mill and in 1832 bought the house Betty was born in, along with six others in the same block.
Betty’s mother’s name was Margaret Annie Taylor, known as Peggy. She was born in 1910, “out of wedlock,” the ony child of Betty’s grandmother Clara. Betty was told that her mother’s uncle was her father, a difficult concept for a child to understand. It turned out that her grandfather was a Scotsman called James McMahon who had married Clara’s sister Annie. He appears to have been banished from the family home but served in the First World War and lived in the Leeds area until 1953 although he never met his granddaughter.
Betty was baptised at All Saints church in Woodlesford in July 1931. Despite the loss of her mother she remembered that she had a pretty happy childhood. She had a number of very close cousins on her father’s side – the Aldersons. And it was effectively her paternal grandmother, Louisa, who cared for her up in the tiny house in Raglan Cottages.
By the 1930s Louisa had brought up six children of her own at Stanley in County Durham. Her husband, William Mason Alderson, a pork butcher by trade, died suddenly in 1921, after serving for four years in the Durham Light Infantry in the First World War. So a little while after the 1926 General Strike Louisa had followed two of her sons to Woodlesford where they were able to get work in local pits, mainly it was said, because of their prowess as brass bandsmen.
The older brother, Joseph, played the trumpet and Betty’s father Bill was a trombonist. He was a pub singer too and used to take Betty with him to concerts. Also at 17 Raglan Cottages was their sister, Lily. She never married and helped with the family income by going out to work. For many years she was a canteen lady at Soapy Joe’s in Leeds. She’d been brought up in County Durham and had a Geordie accent which she never lost. Neighbours thought the Aldersons were a Durham family, but it turns out that all bar one were born in Yorkshire and Betty’s grandad and grandma came from York and Malton respectively.
In 1954 Betty married colliery clerk Frank Benson, the son of a miner who lived in Oulton but came originally from the Barnsley area. Frank and Betty bought a small stone built house on Quarry Hill in Oulton. In 1963 they swopped houses with his parents who had lived opposite on Claremont View. Initially both houses had outside lavatories with tin baths by the fire, like she had experienced at Raglan Cottages before the war. On low wages they scrimped and saved to afford to add bathrooms to both houses. After the birth of two sons family holidays were taken at Butlins at Filey and Skegness and then further afield when they acquired their first car.
Throughout her life Betty was part of the church congregation at All Saints in Woodlesford and then St. John’s in Oulton. She was a member of the Girls’ Friendly Society, a young women’s group and later the Mothers’ Union. In retirement she helped ferry older members to church on a Sunday morning. For a long time she was a member of a Woodlesford women’s choir. Another hobby was walking with the Rothwell Footpath Group and along with Frank she was an active member of the Rothwell Bowling Club at the “Rabbit Trap” green off Oulton Lane.
Betty Benson died peacefully at home in January 2026. Click on the You Tube video, recorded in 2009, to hear herBetty Benson’s memories of growing up in Woodlesford.