Derek Houghton - working at Marriott's

Robert Marriott

I got the job through my father seeing Mr. Robert Marriott, who was a great gentleman, a fine man. He told my father to take me to see him on the Tuesday, I think it was, and he said. ‘Yes, I’d like you to start, start, tomorrow, go down to the yard, meet Mr. Frank Wright, who is the foreman plumber.’ And probably one of the best plumbers there ever was and the best men there ever was, and then he said. ‘Then next week I want you to go up to Chellingham.’ They were doing some work on the old castle up agin Berwick on Tweed and of course they loved this. So I went down and reported in to Mr. Wright and said. ‘Right, but I’m going up to Chellingham next week.’ He said. ‘Who said?’ I said. ‘Mr. Marriott.’ He said. ‘I’m your foreman not Mr. Marriott, you’re stopping here.’ And there I stopped.

We did quite a bit of jobbing work around town at that time and it was my good fortune to work with people like Bert Massam and Shinner Frear and thought that was good grounding. We did quite a fair amount of work in connection with Professor Richardson who I think at one time was president of the Royal Academy. Most of this had been done just before the war, before I got there. During the war we worked on a lot of small Army camps, did a lot of maintenance work there. One thing I remember in particular, when the first Americans came to Rushden, they come up to Rushden Hall and we did some repairs and got that habitable for them to use.

We did also in those days what we term “a term contract” with the Army which meant we went and did maintenance work on all the Army sites around the area. Surprising how many there were, searchlight sites and ack-ack gun sites, right from Corby out to Kingscliffe and back down round, all the Northampton area. The other men probably got called up and for quite a period the only plumbers almost in Rushden, I think, were Frank Wright and myself. We would go out all day, working a lot of work around the Sharnbrook and North Bedfordshire area, come back and find notes screwed into the vice in our workshop and we’d go trotting off to do work there until, oh, might be 10, 11, 12 o’clock at night. It was interesting and we made good fun of it.

Some Marriott's workers in the early days, left and in 1935, right

Just after the war, remember working quite extensively on Wimpole church in Cambridgeshire and a little bit of work, I wasn’t involved all that much, but a little bit on Hatfield House and quite a few churches around the area. I remember making special copper heads and lead drainpipes for them and it was all very interesting work. And schools, one I remember again in particular was the Henry Gotch school at Kettering, I remember that vividly. And what else, well various, it was a long while ago now wasn’t it? But lots of sites I can say right from, probably, about Towcester right out to Peterborough and beyond and then north to Leicester and well south to north Bedfordshire. Later in years I remember I went to places like Milton Keynes and Hemel Hempstead, but not in this context probably.

I got called up just for 18 months and the first job I came back to was the Turney’s, the chicken farmers at Quinton Green outside Northampton. Mrs Turney was one of Robert Marriott’s daughters and we did this work there. Every Friday, after lunch, we left our lunch bags in a specific spot and one of the lads used to have to take these bags and put some straw in the bottom. When we came home at night we picked our bags up and there were 9 eggs in them. Just 9, never half a score, but 9 eggs there were. I remember that very well, as did my mother, because I’m talking of 1945/6.

A Marriott van

You know, particularly as a plumber, we worked in lead. I worked on the roof after the bomb damage at the Victoria Hotel. I worked on that and various repairs on Rushden church but these were all done in lead and all joints were soldered pipe joints. The lead was, well dressed as we called it, boxed up in the corners. No cutting and lead burning as there is, I think, today, I’m a bit out of touch. We were going around, particularly around Rushden, jobbing work, pushing a hand cart with all our kit and ladders and what on. Yes, up some of those bigger buildings in Rushden, just on ladders. Health and Safety would go bonkers nowadays to the things we were doing.

Now I remember, I say, with bricklayers when the labourers nodded, as we called the board on the head, bricks on and up the ladder that way, which, yes, it was interesting I suppose. There’s some marvellous characters there, Bunny Brown from Podington, Mackie Carter from Bozeat and a chappie named Rip Underwood from Wellingborough who was supposedly the practical joker to end all practical jokers. A family from Wellingborough who were bricklayers, that were stalwarts for a bit, the Kempshire family. I remember George Osborne, who came to us during the war, who worked actually on the fairgrounds and used to make themselves that fairground rock. He’d still got his permit to get sugar, he used to make it and bring it and sell us that.

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