Title
Memories of prefabricated housing in Leicester in the 1940s and 1950s.
Subject
Housing
Description
Olive Freestone talks about her pre-fab house in Leicester in the 1940s and 1950s.
Creator
East Midlands Oral History Archive
Source
Interview with Olive Freestone by the East Midlands Oral History Archive. Uncatalogued.
Publisher
East Midlands Oral History Archive
Date
1945-1962
Contributor
Olive Freestone
Rights
You may use this item in accordance with the licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/uk/
Format
.mp3
Language
English
Type
Oral history
Duration
2 min 4 sec
Bit Rate/Frequency
128 kbps
Transcription
The first thing I remember about a pre-fab, I’d never seen a refrigerator. You see, we were very poor, very, very poor when we were small growing up, we didn’t realise how poor we were. And then when we had this pre-fab, a little detached place. Ok, it was cold in the winter and hot in the summer, but we all… and my daughters still remember mum, remember me doing my washing, laundry, with a dolly-tub and a… you had no washing machines and my daughter remembers me, first thing I ever had electric was an electric wringer. Used to put on your thing, my washing used to go through. That was the thing that sticks in my memory, it was having a refrigerator. That, to us, was a little palace. Just two bedrooms. In fact, my husband designed our bungalow on the pre-fab. It went straight in from the garden into the kitchen, into the lounge, no hall. And then my husband designed this bungalow on the pre-fab, ‘cos he liked it – this bungalow, yes. That was out first home, you see, after the war. How long did you live there? Fifteen years. And of course, just after the war, you had to have utility furniture. What was utility furniture? Well, it was just a sort of a ready-made furniture, there was no choice. I remember we had bed and a dressing table – kidney shaped which I put a frill all round, glass top - and a wardrobe and a chest of drawers, and it was mahogany colour, and that was our room. The girls just had single beds, which had to be utility, you had what you could get in those days.
Interviewer
Jenny Escritt
Interviewee
Olive Freestone
Location
Interviewee's home address.
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