The new Working Memories website, which went live at the end of October, is being well received in the town and beyond.
Home in Frome, the popular community history group, records and celebrates the changing life of Frome. Members and friends have now completed the mammoth task of turning their best-selling Working Memories book into a website, workingmemoriesfrome.co.uk/
John Hedges at Frome Museum said, “This site is a very fine piece of work and everybody involved deserves to be very proud of the result. What’s invaluable is the realisation that all this sterling work is not going to be lost and it’s now widely available world-wide.”
Visitors to the website can listen to extracts from the large number of interviews the group held to research their book.
“They will also hear the voices of family, friends and neighbours, the people they grew up with and worked alongside,” said Home in Frome member, John Payne.
Parallel to the launch of the Working Memories website, Home in Frome launched the second edition of the Working Memories book with a brand new introduction. This is on sale at Hunting Raven bookshop where the manager Tina Gaisford-Waller said the book is ‘selling ‘like hot cakes’. The editor, John Payne, added that it makes the perfect Christmas present for anyone with any sort of connection with Frome. “We are also sticking to the 2012 selling price of £10,” he said.
Daisy Bane
One story shared on the website is that of Daisy Bane, who worked at Houston’s cloth factory.
The group explains, “Daisy Bane left school at 14 and went to work setting up the looms at Houston’s cloth factory, a firm long gone, but remembered in the name of a Frome road – Houston Way.
“It was skilled work, preparing the looms for the weavers. It was a jolly place to work, with singing and sweets, and a sympathetic foreman, Alec Copley, whose wife made Daisy’s confirmation dress.
Daisy said, “I was a pattern-warper and my sister Melinda, she was a pattern-weaver. We went to the School of Art to learn our trade. Of course you had your pattern, and you had to read your pattern, but I can’t remember the patterns! I couldn’t read one, not now. It was very hard, mind, but I soon got into it. Every colour had a number. There was always one number I remember. That was 896 and that was Air Force blue. I always remember that number, I don’t know why.”
For more ‘Working Memories’ from Frome, visit the website: https:// workingmemoriesfrome.co.uk
Pictured: Daisy Bane, who worked at Houston’s pre-Second World War – the end of the textile industry in Frome.
