The Chapel Yard & Low Holland

To give some indication of how the average size of families has decreased and how housing standards have improved in Fairburn during the last sixty years, several properties which are still in use can be compared.

Chapel Yard, which was originally known as Chapel Square, was according to the records,two cottages and a barn. The barn was used as a meeting place for worship. Later more houses were built making ten in all. Around 1925/26 no fewer than twenty six adults or workers and twenty four children lived in these ten houses, without piped water and with paraffin oil lighting and outside toilets. At the present time there are eighteen adults and three children occupying the same dwellings and all havereasonably modern facilities, some with central heating.

In the three houses known as Meadow View, during 1925/26 ten adults and ten children lived there, again without any piped water, etc. Today four adults and two children occupy these houses. This seems to be the pattern throughout the village.
Low Holland also had large families living in small houses most of them one up and one down with a small landing on top of the stairs, this one room down served as a living room, kitchen, sitting room, and even became the 'bathroom' on Friday nights when the tin bath came out of the cellar, the water carried in from the tap in the yard and put in pans and kettles to boil on the big black leaded fireplace. This had a coal oven which usually contained some stew and bones simmering away for hours, this would mingle with the lovely smell of home baking and bread rising on the hearth.

In front lay a pricked hearth rug, pieces of old cloth painstakingly cut to the same size and pricked on to harden or sacking. In the middle of the room usually stood a big square table, much prized because hard earned money paid for this and it had to last, so old socks and rags were tied round the legs to stop itchy feet kicking and scratching the proudly polished legs.

The middens were usually shared and emptied once a month, the midden mens job was a very smelly job to say the least, the only way then of emptying them, was to get in and shovel it out, and summers were hotter in those day PHEW: Kids played all sorts of games round the middens, hide and seek, taws, kick off can, whip and top, coloured chalk on the top to see who had the best pattern as it spun. The lads chalked a dart board on the midden door and underneath chalked on the wall a set of wickets, - many a window was broken down Low Holland.