Jesse Reynolds
@jessereynolds
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The man in the photo in the doorway on this page is my great grandfather, Arthur Douglas Ellis. He owned the grocery shop there around the late 1930s to early 1940s. I have attached another photo from the same time period. As well as a copy of the same photo of Arthur Ellis from our family collection.
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Thanks for this page! I was reading through my Grandmothers written memoirs She lived in this building with her sister and parents. Some time in the late 1930s. They bought the property as a grocery store. Her name was Kathleen Ellis, her sister Margaret Ellis, her father who ran the store was called Authur Ellis and his wife was Emily Ellis. This is what she wrote about the place:
“Next we moved to another grocery store this time in Oak Road, Bradley it was previously an old inn which was built in 1751. It was an old coaching stop called the Golden Cockerel and people used to stay there on long coach journeys and have their horses changed on the journey between York and London. We used to think it was haunted here because a girl had become sick on a long coach journey and had died in the room where I used to stay. The house used to whistle at night when the wind blew between all the gaps between the stone. My sister and I were very scared here and I remember hiding under the sheets, too scared to even put my face out! The place never had a toilet inside and we had to go to an outhouse to go to the toilet. We used to use a potty in our room if we couldn’t be bothered going outside. It had an old cellar underneath which my mother said Margret and I were not to go in. One day we were so curious when my mother went out that we went under to have a look. It was all filled with cobwebs and smelled of beer as this is where they used to store the beer barrels in the old inn days. We soon got scared and made a hasty exit out of here. I used to help my father to serve customers now and again. Sometimes my friends would come in and I would give them a few more sweets than they paid for when my father wasn’t looking. The customers called my father ‘old skin flint Ellis’ because he used to precisely weigh all the produce to make sure the customers only got what they paid for. The previous owners of this house used to make fur coats and they made my sister a nice fur jacket which my mother paid for. I was terribly jealous of my sister’s fur jacket as I never got one for myself. I later heard that this building had been modernised and sold for a quarter of a million pounds.”
