Harvey and Chris Cross remembered good bus services in the 1920s: Billinghams, Fletchers, Pounders, Fred Edwards’ buses ran from 5.30 am, frequently, to Celanese factory in Spondon; on a Chambers bus the ticket would cost five pence return through Dale and Stanton to Ilkeston. In the 1950s buses went to Ilkeston: there was a weekend service from the village centre to Ilkeston, and buses ran daily along the main Spondon to Ilkeston road, as they still do. Today we are served by the Ilkeston Flyer, which runs every 20 minutes and includes a late night service for those who have been visiting the bright lights of Derby.
In Harvey’s younger days, a butcher used to come to the Carpenter’s Arms once a week. Nowadays we are visited fortnightly by the Library van (which will become a victim of cost-cutting in September 2014), but I don’t think supermarket delivery vans have discovered us yet. We are on satnav: the usual scenario is that a strange delivery van will ring us up, asking where are you, and the satnav will invariably have taken it to the little cul-de-sac of Croft Close.
A curious aspect of life in Dale has been relics of local legal systems: in earlier centuries, Earl Stanhope, the lord of the manor and the ‘peculiar’ court, held Manor Court annually. Also, because he owned All Saints’ church and it was a ‘peculiar’, not in the charge of the Church of England diocese, people could be married in the church without warning or banns – somewhat like Gretna Green. Of unknown (to me) origin is the Society for the Prosecution of Felons, which also held court in Manor House; it appears to have been able to send people to gaol. Its AGM was reported in the Derby Evening Telegraph on 1st April 1981, which I imagine many people read as a spoof. It is not: the organisation still exists, chaired at the moment by Michael Barker, a local pigfarmer. As far as I know (and there is a certain amount of secrecy about it all), functions now are restricted to a strawberry tea in the summer.
In contradiction to a Victorian writer’s remark that Dale consisted of ‘inhospitable people’, Dale has always had a fair amount of social interaction. There is a photograph dating from the 1890s of Dale’s football team, with Charles Wheatley in it, with his five brothers. There was a ladies’ cricket team in the years before the Second World War. There used to be fairs: on Easter Monday, with a meal on Tuesday finished by the children on the Wednesday, and on Whit Wednesday led by the brass band. These would take place in Abbey Farm’s stackyard, with swingboats and coconut shies, a rifle range at the Carpenter’s Arms, and stalls down the road. In recent years, we have enjoyed street parties, as for the Queen’s Jubilee last year, when unfortunately it rained as our tea was being finished; we cowered in the old Methodist Chapel, now known as the Gateway Christian Centre.