Article submitted by Alison Kane

We had a café down in Cross Street called Finlays Café, it was Nelsons before that. During the war men in the army came back from Dunkirk and they were stationed around Larne and Killwaughter.

Mill workers

My mother worked in Browns factory as a weaver. The picture shows her wearing an apron and they maybe wore a shawl going up to work. The picture shows the gates of the factory shut to take the picture. The rest of the factory is behind the wall. At the back of the factory were the furnaces where the firemen had kept the fires going. It was Larne weaving factory. She had 2 looms which I remember because I worked there too. A lot of people came from the Ballymena area to work in it. I heard that one of the brothers went away on a cruise and one of them was lost overboard then the other one was left to carry on. When he got too old there was no family to take over as neither of the 2 brothers married. Then there was a bad time for getting the flax to weave with. They had a special place where they did damask, patterned. I worked there too. The factory closed down. As there were big families both the men and the women worked there. If someone died there was hardly anyone at work because the whole family was in it. In those days it was all big families, everybody knew everybody else.

It was tiring work. You had to stand at the looms, you didn't get sitting. You started at 8.00am in the morning. You had 12.30pm to 1.00pm was your dinner then you stayed until six. You worked 5 ½ days a week. Monday to Friday and half a day on Saturday. I operated machinery with shuttles weaving back and forward and the head was lifting yarn up and down. There was a great big spool at the back with maybe a thousand threads through it. Whatever sort of pattern they wanted the heads lifted it and the shuttles moved up and came down again. It was all automatic. The noise was terrible and caused an awful lot of deafness among people. It wasn't dirty work but after the yarn was dressed there was so many threads depending on the pattern. If there was a business who wanted it they got their name on the border but teacloths just got made in Ireland on the border. But they were all in spools with different colours. People sent in orders.

There used to be an awful lot of people who came from Scotland to Larne. The English didn't come unless they had a tie here, maybe people had left here to work in England and came back. Henry McNeills was a lovely hotel and a place called the Towers. McNeill owned a lot of hotels all over Larne.

The picture of the Back Road School was taken around 1920, I was 8 or 9 years old. At that time Miss Lesley taught the junior and senior infants and Miss Moore and Mrs Moore taught the others. Upstairs was older children. When you first started your day began at 10.00am and then it changed to 9.00am. Then you got from 12.30pm - 1.00pm for your lunch and we went home. We had to go to the Old Glenarm Road to get to Waterloo Road, just in front of the factory, and it was all running up hill home but back down to school it was all down hill. You stayed in school until 2.00pm up until the juniors, and after that you got out at three. Tom Pullin was the teacher there for most of my years and then in my last year in was Mr Logan, he came from Carrickfergus. I stayed at school until I was 14. My birthday was in February and my mother let me stay on until 6 July, which was a holiday, and then I had to start work. My father died on 7 July.

The first place I went to work was the Mourne Clothing Factory. I learned to make boys knickers - boys short trousers. I stayed there for a little while, the money wasn't all that good. We had to travel from waterloo Road, down the Mission Lane to where Allens is now. That was where the Mourne Clothing Factory was first. I enjoyed school and work.

At school, all your schoolwork was marked out of 10. If you did all your sums or algebra right you got 10, otherwise she deducted one for everyone that wasn't right. You had exams to do. If you didn't get a certain number with your work you didn't pass into the next class you had to stay another year in the same class. I was fortunate, I never had to stay 2 years in the one class. I was always in the first six. You had to sit in order in the class, the highest scoring at the front. Boys and girls mixed. Both had to best be behaved or you got caned on the hand. Some of the teachers were awful cruel and if they took a dislike to you there was nothing you could do to appease them. Your mother could give you a clout on the ear and you thought nothing of it same with the teachers.

That school belonged to the Unitarians, the head of the town church. That was the only school in Larne that never got scripture teaching during the year. You had no scripture examinations. Presbyterians had prayers and could sing. But not at the Back Road School.

There wasn't a great lot of big shops in Larne. There might have been someone started something up in their parlour. Some of the houses on the main street you would walk past and see their sitting room. Then the next time you walked past they had curtains up and then a shelf up and maybe sweets or if they were good at baking soda bread or wheaten bread or pancakes and they started a wee shop.

Larne market was on a Wednesday as today and it used to stay open until 4.30 or 5.00pm. There used to be far more on it. The first stall you saw as you walked into the market was George Donnellys, they came from Belfast, it was a lock up place. He just used to bring down whatever he had fresh with him. There used to be another man came with cans of sweets. Whenever the cans were empty he would have sold the can. There was a lid on it and then you could have went for buttermilk or whatever you wanted in it. Things have changed now.

The Almshouses were for people that were well done for and then their money was lost and they could appeal especially and they got to live in the almshouses. Then they built the health centre.

Special thanks goes to the Larne Millennium Initiative for its help in sourcing this story.

Your Responses

Marion Lilly - May '06
It was interesting to read of some of the history of my family the Lilly's (Lilley) depending how you spelt it. My mother spoke of the Mourne Clothing Factory and I believed she worked briefly there back in the 1940's.