East Leeds Memories

Jaw-Bone yard – Knostrop’s Golden Acre.

Before this month’s tale I have to report that due to Covid 19 we have been unable to arrange the Old East Leeds Codger’s Reunion for this year.

Jaw Bone Yard

(‘click’ on pictures to enlarge)
Jaw-bone Yard was our magical playground in the heart of Knostrop. I believe there had been some whale’s jaw-bones at the entrance of the yard at one time but that was before my time. The yard was a dirt impacted area surrounded by seven houses and stables and barns. I recall some of the names of the cottages: Jaw-bone House was at one time the farmer’s house and then there were: Ash Cottage, Ash Lea, Wisteria, Rose Cottage, and a couple more whose names escape me. Some of the Houses were Jacobean others eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Electricity did not arrive in the yard until the 1950s. The houses had gardens at the front; it was the back doors that opened into the yard. I was born in 1937 around 1941 Mam opened the back door and said, Go out and play. I joined the gang already playing out there and it was then my life began
Jawbone Yard was the centre of our activities: seven houses backed onto the yard and out of the houses came seven kids, augmented by the lads and lasses from the ‘ABC’ houses, the Hall, the Lodge and sometimes too; our friends who joined in the fun from ‘The Top’; which were the streets which sat at the top of Knostrop Hill. This was the gang and didn’t we have a ball! We played every game under the sun in that yard: cricket, rounders, kick-out can, speedway bowlers (hoops) and all the general schoolyard games. The lads and the lasses all mucked in together. We played football with a tennis ball – you were lucky if you could get hold of even a tennis ball while the War was in progress, for just about everything being produced by the nation was to support the war effort – so proper footballs were out of the question. The positive side to this was it certainly taught us how to control a ball. Some of the lads became so proficient that they could ‘keepy-uppy’ with a tennis ball. Harold Sedgwick could even keep it up on his ankle! This all made it that, much easier when we finally did progress to a proper football.
We who played in the yard were fortunate in that one of the dads, who worked on the land at the time, would find balls that had been lost down drains and had ultimately found their way onto the land. He would bring them home and leave them in a grate where we would find them. Mind you a ball had a short lifespan with us, especially when we were hitting out at cricket; balls would fly into the long grass in the adjacent field and become lost. You were out if caught one handed off a wall or if you hit the ball onto a house roof.
Kids from school would say, ‘Can I come home with you after school and pay in your yard.’


In the case of hitting it onto a roof the culprit would be the one to climb onto the roof and retrieve it. The ball would usually be lodged in one of the gutters so you had to climb up onto the roof, via a coal house, then it would be necessary for you to lean perilously over the edge in order to reach it. Like kids all over we were oblivious to the danger.
It pleasantly amazes me that trivial incidents can still be brought to mind after half a century and a lifetime of other more important experiences have elapsed. For instance Keith Gale, a participant in our games, having read the original draft brought to mind an incident, which had occurred when we were playing cricket in the yard. On this occasion Gordon (Oscar) Brown was batting – we could never get him out he was like a limpet. Ball after ball he would just play a dead bat: ‘podging’ as we called it. On this particular day Gordon must have had a rush of blood to the head for he smote a ball mightily, it bounced first on a house roof and then onto a coalhouse roof, finally to be caught one handed by Peter Whitehead. By our rules we believed this to have been have been out, but good old Gordon wouldn’t budge, he stood his ground claiming that as the ball had bounced twice this did not constitute being out! The beautiful thing about this little tale is: that although Keith had been out and about for over fifty years carving out a life for himself, with all the toils and tribulations entailed, that most trivial of incidents had not been erased from his memory.

There was one particularly daft game that we played where one of us would stand facing the stable wall and the rest would choose a film star’s name without letting on what it was. We would form a line across the yard about thirty yards back and the one facing the wall would shout something like, ‘Veronica Lake take two giant strides’ or perhaps, ‘three fairy footsteps.’ Then the person who had chosen that particular name had to execute the ordered manoeuvre without being seen. Should the one calling the shots turn and catch one of us in the process of moving then the name of the culprit would be shouted and they would be out. The first person to reach wall without being seen won.
At one time we had an old wooden wheelbarrow, we would take in turns to sit in the barrow with our eyes closed while some other member of the gang would spin it around and then set off in a series of changing directions. The idea was for the one having the ride to try and guess where they were. In the middle of the yard there stood a huge wooden shed, it had three large gates at the front to accommodate flat four wheeled carts. We would use the gates as the goals in winter or the central palings as the wickets in summer. We could shelter inside the shed when it rained and perhaps play with the large wooden boxes which were intended to transport the vegetable produce to market; cabbages, cauliflowers and especially rhubarb. The boxes could be fashioned into all manner of constructions, houses, cars, whatever we fancied at the moment.

Pauline Brown, (now Mrs Rushfirth), remembers that shed too and another game we played called ‘Escape’. Someone would stand on top of the granary steps with a torch or a bike lamp, shining it on the shed gates and moving it backward and forward and we would try to escape in the dark bits. Pauline recalls it as: quite frightening. We had obviously been brain washed by watching prisoner of war films. .

There was another shed in the yard too, one in which sacks were stored – I believe the sacks must have been filled with soot for when we climbed about in there we’d get ourselves ‘black bright’. On other occasions we played whip and top, conkers, hula-hoop. We had phases when we played with potato guns, catapults or sped around the yard with bowlers in impromptu speedway races. We had dens everywhere, sometimes in the bushes where we could pull off the ‘green stick’ branches to make weapons. One type could be hollowed out for to use as a blowpipe while another ‘springier’ type could be fashioned into the bow for bow and arrows. Sheltering from the rain under a den’s green foliage is among the sweetest experiences life has to offer.

We were a bit light on girls but the ones we had were great, Pat and Pauline from the yard, Brenda, Rita from the New Hall Lodge and very occasionally, Lizzie, from the ABCs. all the rest were lads but the girls all mucked in and pulled their weight especially when we were collecting wood for the bonfires. You could tell which the girls were: they were the ones who practised their pirouettes when there was a lull in the game and did ‘crabs’ up against the wall with their frocks tucked in. There was always a god cohort of dogs running with us

One particular time everyone seemed to be wearing wooden clogs – I think they may have been an attempt to offset the problem of shoes wearing out too fast, or was it that being made out of wood they did not attract clothing coupons? Whatever, the idea was a fad and went out within a few weeks. Then of course there were the bikes, Denis Harrison had a bike on ‘fixed wheel’, it was unforgiving, if you put your feet on the ground before the bike had properly stopped it would punish you by trapping the back of your legs with its pedals; that was really painful. There was another bike which had a bell as big as a teapot and yet another, a butcher’s bike, which had you scared for the basket bit didn’t turn straightaway when you turned the handlebars giving the impression you were not going to make a corner. Peter Whitehead later organised ‘East Leeds Wheelers’ a proper cycling club. Meetings were held in a little building where the dustbins were usually kept. Membership to this club was quite exclusive and mainly taken up by a more ‘up market’ class of cyclist than us ‘yardies’, who rode ‘drop handlebar’ bikes and mostly lived at ‘the top’.

Jawbone Yard was part of a market-garden owned by a couple of brothers: Percy and Fred Allinson. They would arrive at the yard in a couple of beautiful pre-war blue Wolseley motorcars. The sight of such a motorcar today has me drooling. To be fair they put up with a lot from us kids but sometimes they would tell us off, if for instance we were playing with boxes that had already been packed with produce for market.

The area was famous for rhubarb growing being in the golden triangle with Leeds and Wakefield. It was said to be something to do with the soil and soot from the West Riding industry. Rhubarb grew everyware some of it even grew wild, our name for it was, ‘tusky’ and we ate it until it was coming out of our ears, in reality it was a bit of bravado, without custard or sugar it was too sour and made us wrinkle up our faces. We always had a contingent of dogs following us about. It was not antisocial in those days to just open you door and let your dog get out and about the business of being a dog. When we were out though they would always latch onto us, it was a great life for a dog too if it lived in Knostrop. We had a great dog, called Smokey. He would follow us everywhere when we were playing out. Unfortunately, when school started he couldn’t handle it and would make his own way up to school where he would sit in the cloakroom near my coat. When the classroom door opened, he would be in and smelling around among the desks for me. At first, this was a novelty and the teacher had the kids writing a composition about ‘Smokey’, but then he began to guard the door and wouldn’t let anyone in. After he tried to bite the School Board man the teacher told me he’d not to come up again. Mam had to keep him in or tie him up after that but holding him in check was like trying to hold quicksilver. He would even jump out of a bedroom window into the flowerbeds if that were his only avenue of escape.


In the early days we were allowed to play on a grassed area adjacent to the yard where a permanent pile of dried ‘oss muck provided an improvised boxing ring for us. Dried ‘oss muck has a great aroma, one I still enjoy today. Eventually, unfortunately for us, a fence was erected to preclude us from this area. This exclusion, which made it difficult for us to retrieve our ball, had us singing in defiance a contemporary popular song; Don’t Fence Me In. At the east end of the yard were two stables, which usually housed a couple of horses. I remember there was a black one called ‘Prince’ he was not much bigger than a pony; sometimes he would pull a small trap. More powerful horses were stabled to pull the loaded vegetable carts to market. Pat and Pauline’s dad worked with the horses. Pauline writes: ‘My earliest memories are of my dad ploughing the fields with the horses, he was employed at the market garden. Looking back it was very hard work, long hours and poor wages. Back to the horses, one was called Tidy and the other Blackie, both were big shire horses, I liked to watch them being groomed and fed in the stable.’

Our own house backed onto the stables where the big shire horses would sleep in the stalls in a standing position, they were too big to lie down. On odd occasions, a horse would slip onto the floor in its sleep. Then there would be a great commotion as the horse flayed the sides of the wooded stall trying to regain its feet. ‘Hoss down!’ would be the cry and the foreman, Mr Lightfoot, would be sought to try and assist the horse back onto its feet. Sometimes a poor horse would develop boils. I say, poor, because a terrible way of lancing the boils was used. First, the air was burnt out of a jam jar by means of a lighted candle underneath, so causing a vacuum, then the lid would be removed and the open end quickly slapped over the boil making a seal with the horse’s flesh which caused the yellow matter to be drawn out of the boil and into the jar. It got rid of the boil but the horses didn’t half complain. On May Day the horse’s tails would be tied up with coloured ribbons. On Whit Sunday it was our turn to be made to dress up like ‘dog’s dinners’ ourselves. .

Pauline remembers how she liked to decorate bricks, yes bricks! She would mix water with the lime that was heaped in a pile ready for use on the land and make it into a paste. Then she would decorate the brick with daisies, leaves and such. ‘They looked good enough to eat’, she claims. It didn’t take much to keep us happy in the yard!

I think our absolute favourite game was one we just called ‘chasing’. We could play ‘chasing’ in all seasons; it was fun whether it was the light or the dark nights. To play the game; first a couple of sides were picked by the old ‘dip-dip-dip’ method, then one team would run off and after a prescribed period the other team would run after them and try to catch them before they could return to base. In the process of this game we covered miles and miles, over fields through woods, haystacks, rhubarb sheds. We had the lot at Knostrop. The area we covered was so vast that when I consider the game now it astounds me how we ever managed to locate individuals who had run and hidden often several miles away and sometimes in the dark too, but amazingly, we did!

When the game was over we would congregate around one of the gas lamps and talk. Sometimes there would be road works and a night watchman – perhaps we would sit with him for a while around his coke brazier watching the blue red flames and choking on the fumes. Maybe we’d tell a few yarns and then accompany the watchman while he checked his lamps. Pauline remembers being scalded when one of the lads, Brian Smith she thinks, tried to jump the brazier and knocked the boiling water from the big iron kettle all over her legs, causing here to miss school for a while.

In the spring we’d likely go to the pond and collect frogspawn in a jam jar and observe it over a period of time while it turned, first into tadpoles, which eventually lost their tails, grew legs and finally turned into frogs. Then we’d set them free. Invariable a trip to the pond would end up with wellies full of water and a telling off from our mams. In the winter when the pond would be frozen we’d walk gingerly on the ice. I’m told previous generations were more adventurous and would skate on the pond but we didn’t run to ice skates.
As the yard had been there for well over a century I often thought of the many other generations of kids who had a golden time in that yard but no more golden ages now, the yard as with all of Knostrop was bulldozed down in the 1960s on our watch to make was for the Cross Green Industrial Estate .
Pauline as the last of the gang to leave the yard is honoured by having the last word.
‘I was the last of the gang to leave Knostrop; I was in my late twenties. We had to leave owing to re-development. I remember the day we left our lovely old cottage, the only home I knew and loved. I burst into tears I couldn’t help it, I was so unhappy to be leaving. It didn’t seem to matter that we were moving to a new home with hot and cold water, bathroom, indoor toilet, central heating and easy access to town and the shops. I had never been used to mod cons so I didn’t miss them.

The older inhabitants of Knostrop were turfed out of this semi-rural ideal to more modern urban living. But modern conveniences do not necessarily make up for a friendly rural community. ‘You could take the folk out of Knostrop but could you take Knostrop out of the folk!’ Some of the older ones found it difficu settle and perhaps passed away earlier than they should. Such is evidently the price of progress – and Knostrop – like the War, lives on only in our memories. But when we are gone – who will remember then
They built a factory on the site of our lovely yard which was later to burn down at the cost of a million pounds. How dare you suggest that was anything t