Below is Janet Mackey’s written history of her recollection of living in Egglescliffe. You can follow what she says in her oral history by clicking the above and sitting back and enjoying what she says.
Janet MacKey was interviewed by Brenda Henderson on 21stJune 2017.
I have lived in Egglescliffe Village all my life. I was born in the house I live in now. My mother ran the shop and the Post Office, which she inherited from some people called the Doughtys.
I can’t tell you how long the Post Office has been going but it is a lot of years, because the Doughtys ran it for a lot of years before my mum took over. But it closed in 1979, which was then just the Post Office. Two or three years before that it was a shop and a Post Office.
I think my mother took it over in the late ‘fifties, early ‘sixties, from Rachel and Sally Doughty. She was running it before I was born. They were getting on in years when mum took it over. The Doughty sisters were a family that lived in the area for a long, long time. They were well known in and around the area.
We all used to help mum out in the shop and the Post Office. I was only a child and I remember sneaking down the stairs and helping myself to sweets and things! If we went on holiday my brother, who was quite a bit older than me, would sometimes take over for a week or so.
The Post Box was in the wall outside the house. What was the Post Office is what is now my dining room. If you look at the front of the house it’s the right-hand side window that was the shop and Post Office and just to the right of that window is where the Post Box used to be. The original Post Box was in the house. When the Post Office closed down it was moved over next to the Telephone Box.
Janet MacKey was interviewed by Ian Reynolds on 6thOctober 2017. Supplementary information for previous interview.
Friday night used to be book night so after tea, without fail, dad had to sit and do all the books for the Post Office and the shop. Some nights it went easy and some it didn’t. I remember sitting and helping him count the stamps to see how many we had left.
Half day closing was a Wednesday afternoon. That was the day that mam went down to Yarm – her and my ‘Auntie Pop’, which was Colin Hyde’s mum – they used to get up to all sorts of mischief doing their shopping and catching up on all the gossip.
I remember an incident where we were getting ‘funny phone calls’; people ringing up and threatening to chop us up into pieces. I don’t think the police ever found out who it was but because we were a Post Office (and at the time I think there had been some Post Office raids) they came and fitted an alarm system. But this was the early to mid-seventies and it was pressure pads on the landing and one by the front door as you came in, and one at the bottom of the stairs. But we kept forgetting they were there and setting them off when we got up in the night to go to the loo! And we had to lock the dog up because he kept setting them off as well. And around that time – ’76 or ’77, they fitted security screens. Whereas we used to have an open counter they put up glass security panels in the Post Office.
My sister used to work for Smiths on the farm. She worked with the horses a lot but did other things on the farm as well. Her and two other girls used to go out riding the horses for exercise. They used to come and stand outside the door, shout my mum and ask for cans of pop or cigarettes. My mum, bearing in mind she was terrified of horses, would have to go out and hand out all this stuff to these girls sat on massive horses.
We never got away with anything because everybody knew my mum so if we were up to mischief everybody knew who we were and would threaten to tell my mother.