The Road to Nab End : A Lancashire Childhood - William Woodruff

From his birth in the carding room of a cotton mill in 1916 until he ran away to London, Woodruff lived in the heart of Blackburn’s weaving community.

When he was four-years-old, the demise of Lancashire’s supremacy in the cotton textiles industry due to the crash of 1920 meant his father was thrown out of work. From then on, including the period of the great depression, Woodruff and his family faced a life blighted by extreme poverty.

Reading this book today, it is hard to comprehend that within living memory – and in what was then the richest country in the world – so many couldn’t even afford to buy enough food. For the ordinary Lancashire families, unemployment was an ever-present threat, ‘If you worked you ate. If there was no work you went hungry’.