Furnival's of Fleckney, Nina Stibbe and Bryan Magee

Nina Stibbe, another member of the Market Harborough school of literature, once wrote about Fleckney in the Guardian:

Fleckney became industrialised in the late 19th century when hosiery companies fled the city. Rowley & Co, whose Leicester works had been stormed by weavers in riots in 1885, built a factory on Saddington Road. Its red brick design included a high wall along the street for protection in the event of further unrest. This wall (itself now protected) reinforces Fleckney’s identity as working-class compared with its more cottagey neighbours. 

Leicester’s second best pop, Furnival’s of Fleckney, was still bottled in the village when we arrived; Thorn Lighting had a factory there and the new industrial estate was home to Pukka Pies, where my brother worked part-time during his O-levels - and was once locked in the freezer for being pretentious (he was reading a book).

Fleckney is still an industrial village - the photo above shows one of the older factories there. Because industry came late, it was never on the railway and the canal passes by a couple of fields away.

Furnival's of Fleckney made me [rick up my ears, because the firm used to have a warehouse in Highfield Street, Market Harborough, directly opposite our house. (Don't look for it: It's not there any more.) I think I remember kids climbing over the fence to steal empty bottles so they could claim the deposit back on them. Think of it as enhanced recycling.

But that building wasn't always a warehouse: it had once been a factory. And for a description of it during the war I turn again to this blog's hero Bryan Magee.

This passage comes from his book Growing up in a War - Magee was evacuated to Market Harborough during the war and lived literally round the corner from where I used to live:

The factory in which Kath worked was a few yards beyond the end of our garden, its chimney visible to someone sitting in our back room. Previously it had manufactured swimming costumes, but now it was packing parachutes. 

Its chimney emitted not just smoke but noise: about every five seconds it gave a loud, vibrant belch that was a nerve-racking nuisance for everyone living near it. At one level of my mind I got used to it, and ceased to notice it, yet at another I was conscious of it all the time. 

The people in the neighbourhood complained to the local authority, but were told that nothing could be done: the chimney had once had a silencer, but this no longer worked, and a replacement was unobtainable in wartime. The factory had to carry on because it was involved in essential war work. So the people around it would have to put up with it. ('Don't you know there's a war on?')

Yesterday I posted a video of Magee reporting on the satire boom in 1963.