Kendal Oral History Group aims to compile a picture of earlier times through the recorded memories of the area’s older residents. Harry Holmes was born in 1920. He was interviewed in October 2000:

ME DAD bought me mother a washing machine.

It was a frame with legs and it had a square tub on it, going narrower at the bottom, and a lid at the top, and in the lid was a shaft and like a posser thing on the end of it, and a handle.

And you'd close the lid and you'd go back and forward with your handle to do the washing, poss [wash] it all inside.

It had little loops at the end, it had a little loop at the end and it used to go round like this.

You'd whap away at it for ages.

And it had a wringer and a mangle.

I used to go and bring the washing from Stricklandgate down on to the riverside, and I used to get cardboard boxes, tear all these boxes up and stick 'em underneath the boiler to get a bit of heat up!

You know Abbot Hall, the art gallery?

There's a square yard there, and there's an oval bit in the middle?

I think it would be King George V's Jubilee when Hayes & Parkinson made a temporary dance floor down the bottom end of the grass in Abbot Hall.

It was popular and it was so successful they decided they'd make a permanent one.

Well, they put teak planks in there for the dance floor with about eighth-of-an-inch gap between them all so they could let the water through.

It was so successful and it went on for years and years.

And they used to put soap flakes on to make it slippy, bubbly if it got wet, and when it rained you worked a froth up.

The fashion was like Oxford bags in those days, and I had just bought a new suit.

And I went home one night and everything was all right, but next day when I went home from work me mother had it hanging on the door downstairs and all the front of the legs was all congealed with soap flakes.

It had dried hard.

It was a hell of a job to get rid of.