Kendal Oral History Group aims to compile a picture of earlier times through the recorded memories of the area’s older residents. Mr Wilf Robinson was born in 1916 and was interviewed in 2002.

My father got a job with J&J Parkers opposite Provincial Office, delivering groceries.

He drove a Model T Ford Van. I used to go with him when I was about nine or ten and this continued when I left school at fourteen.

That’s where he taught me to drive.

There was a man came round to your house, took your order, went back to the shop, put all the orders together, loaded them on to the van and my father delivered them.

You wouldn’t be spending a lot of money in them days.

It’d only be a few shillings but you got your order delivered. When there was holiday periods me dad used to be working sometimes till ten at night delivering groceries.

We used to play in Abbot Hall Park.

We’d make a marble board and play marbles in the gutter. It was a piece of wood with little holes in. We’d chalk a number on or mark it with a pencil and flick your marbles along the pavement and try and get them through the holes in this board.

There were two or three field guns on the bottom of the Abbot Hall Green.

The parts were taken off them and big pieces of wood driven in the barrels and there was one of these huge iron cannons like you’ve seen on castles. On Aynam Road they had a First World War tank.

Of course that was dismantled mechanically. We used to play on them.

I also remember the first fire engine we had in Kendal.

It was steam driven.

If there was a fire the men that went with the bins, with the horse and carts had to take the horse down to the fire station to couple it up and in the meantime there was somebody lighting a fire in the boiler and then they’d go to the fire.

By the time they’d done all this the fire could have been out.

There was a fire where AP’s (now Home Base) is now and by the time they got our pump working and getting steam up a fire engine had come from Lancaster and was putting the fire out.

After that I believe they had a demonstration with a new fire engine which towed a two wheeler pump.

After much debate they decided to just buy the pump and use a lorry to pull it.