Went to work for Tommy Towle aged 12
Lily Baum and friends negotiated for a holiday for the staff
JEAN Chester, aged 89, has been in touch to tell the fascinating story of her mother’s time working for Tommy Towle’s hosiery company in the early part of the 1900s.
Jean said that her mother, Lily Baum, left school when she was 12 after taking her reading and arithmetic tests.
At that time Tommy Towle had just started his business up in a shed in Mountsorrel and Lily’s mum asked him if he had a job for her daughter.
Jean said that Mr Towle replied he hadn’t anything in the factory right at that moment, but was waiting for some linking machines to arrive and she could be trained on them when they did.
In the meantime however he said Lily could go and help his wife round the house, Ellen at their Rothley Road home.
Production at the business began to grow and with Mountsorrel now being too small, a new factory was specially built at Sileby and Lily, now aged 14 went to work there as well
Jean said: “She had to walk to Sileby to work every day.
“She had to be there by 7.30am.” Jean added that a group of ladies in Sileby, who lived near the factory, opened up their homes at midday and cooked dinners for the factory workers to come and eat for a few pence.
At that time holidays were not on the agenda for many factories, but when she was around 14-15 years-old Lily heard that the workers in the Yorkshire mills were getting a week’s break.
She and her fellow workers got together to ask Mr Towle for time off for a holiday in Blackpool.
Jean said that he granted them five days off, but only if they had it all together at the same time, as he could then close the factory for the period and save on the running costs.
“They were the first people to have a week’s holiday at Towle’s. Before that they only had bank holidays,” said Jean.
Lily and her fellow workers saved towards the trip, but had to ask permission from Lily’s parents for her to go along as she was so young.
“She went with two married women, who promised my grandad, Amos Baum, that they would never let her out of their sight,” said Jean.
The workers headed off to Blackpool and the pleasure beach, posing for photographs, which depicted them sitting in a hot air balloon basket.
The picture was posed of course, but after it arrived at the Baum household, Amos was none too pleased thinking that his daughter had actually gone up in an air balloon.”
Amos himself was quite an adventurous character, he was employed as a shot blaster at Mountsorrel and Enderby quarries and during the California Gold Rush in the mid 1880s he went over to America to work as a blaster for the gold mining companies.