Talk About Local is mapping part of the social history of the industrial era when whole towns would shut down for two week summer holiday together.
For modern families, with busy schedules it’s kind of a dream that your entire family could be off work and the kids off school all at the same time. But when I was a kid, Northampton used to shut down for factory fortnight every year – the last week of July and the first week of August. The local footwear factories and their supply chains would have a co-ordinated vacation, usually coinciding with the first two weeks of the town’s school holidays. The town would go dead, the populace would take off for the coast in Norfolk or Spain and The Northampton Town show would take over Abington park. Back in the 50s and 60s my grandad would close his leather factory (they made hand-grained morocco), put the family in the car and drive them all to Clacton-on-Sea.
But of course all this faded away with the decline of the shoe factories as a dominant employer. Northampton now is more of a warehouse town, delivering stuff 24/7. But the factory fortnight still resonates some of the remaining shoe factories like Church’s still shut for factory fortnight (although the factory shop stays open) and a fair few people, perhaps those a bit older still stick with the tradition.
Factory fortnights were common in towns with closely interlinked supply chains and probably peaked in the 1950s. Newark had a robust factory fortnight. In Stoke-on-Trent, Potters Fortnight is still apparently a popular holiday time, despite the lack of potteries. In Glasgow, the Glasgow Fair was similar. And the North East also had this tradition, to some extent based on Wakes Week usually resulting in a shut down in late June. There were even some co-ordinated regional shut downs where individual towns took turns to make sure one manufacturer was still open.
Although factory fortnights have largely died out, we still pick up echoes of it in our local work. So as a bit of local history we want to map the memories of factory fortnights across the country and what weeks they were in. When was the factory fortnight in your town? do you have any memories to share?
To put your town’s fortnight on the map: you can:
tweet us @talkaboutlocal
add information into the comments below or
add it directly onto the map as follows:
– go to the noticeboard http://factory.n0tice.com/
– sign up or log in to n0tice.com
– click on the blue ‘post’ button
– click on ‘report’
– enter the location, in the headline box put the name of the fortnight and the dates
– in the description box, please feel free to add pictures, URLs or any other information you have about the holiday in your area.
– click to post.
Your entry will automatically update on the map. It has been created using the Maptastica.com app which is part of the free open journalism toolkit which Talk About Local has been helping to develop. It can be embedded on your own blog or website too.
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I grew up in a steel town called Stocksbridge, about 10 miles NW of Sheffield. The town was dominated by Samuel Fox’s steelworks, later British Steel. We had ‘Stop Weeks’, a fortnight in the summer during which the melting and rolling processes stopped in order to allow annual maintenance. However, because my father was a fitter, we didn’t go away. He worked 12+ hour shifts during the fortnight, to make the most of the shut down. One thing I remember vividly was not being able to sleep because of the quiet… no locos, arc furnaces or rolling mills rumbling away.
At the end of Stop Weeks, and a couple of big pay packets, the majority of the fitters/machinists/electricians/pipefitters/welders’ families would go away for their own fortnight… except for a few who drew the short straw to provide breakdown cover. So our time in Morecambe/Blackpool/Southport used to coincide with some Newcastle/Durham and Scottish shut downs – adding enormously to my regional education and stock of accents to mimic.
I’m from Stafford originally. Or rather the edge of Stafford where it meets the countryside. With one bus an hour. We didn’t have factory shut own. But when my mate Nigel moved to Stok-on-Trent they didn’t just have factory shutdown. They had their very own name for it. Potters Fortnight.
During it, my mum and his mum would arrange to go to Rhyl on the train with them, me and Nigel.
We’d arrange it during Potters Fortnight.
When we got to Rhyl the place was a Welsh seaside Stoke-on-Trent.
Future conversations with them since their move to Stoke would revolve around Potters Fortnight which was as just as much a landmark as Easter and Christmas.