Nab End and Beyond: The Road to Nab End and Beyond Nab End

About this book

William Woodruff had the sort of childhood satirized in the famous Monty Python Yorkshireman sketch. The son of a weaver he was born on a pallet of straw at the back of the mill and two days later his mother was back at work. Life was extremely tough for the family in 1920s Blackburna treat was sheeps head or cow heel soupand got worse when his father lost his job when the cotton industry started its terminal decline. At 16 William leaves the poverty of Blackburn for London where he finds no streets paved with gold but filthy tenements and such squalor only a great city can conceal. He gets a job in an iron foundry and finds lodgings with a beer-swilling landlady and her familya predatory daughter and a tattooed madman of a son with whom he has to share his bed. Then at night school William discovers his love of learning which eventually takes him to Plater college Oxford. As Mosleys blackshirts provoke fighting on the streets William witnesses the courage of ordinary people in the face of war: a war in which he himself will soon be fighting