David Borrett: The Anton Laundry and its employees

Potentially, some of this new influx were laundry customers with a consequent increase in business but competition was on the way.

In 1926, Wilfred Armstead from Newton Toney, in Wiltshire, had started up a similar laundry in London Street which he called the Andover Steam Laundry, while around 1930, the Andover Family Laundry, run by Charles Gardner, opened up.

Both these laundries occupied buildings used by former breweries and were successful businesses, the Andover Steam Laundry (becoming the Southern Fyne Laundry in the 1940s), lasted into the 1970s, and the Andover Family Laundry was in existence until town development claimed the site for the George Yard car park about 1968.

The Ironing Department at Anton Laundry, c.1912.(Image: Andover Borough Guide)

Back in Marlborough Street, the Anton Laundry continued to thrive despite the new interlopers.

There was very little in the way of modernisation of laundry processes and it was essentially the same business as it was when it started in 1895, occupying the same buildings.

Most of the employees were young women but many stayed working there all their lives.

Mrs Eleanor Grist worked there for 38 years under Miss Bracher, while Miss Amy Tucker celebrated 50 years at the laundry in 1960.

She left school at 14 and as her mother was an ironer at the laundry, it was an obvious place to start work.

First, she was in the repairs department but later progressed to packing and then finally she went into the office.

Both her sister May and her brother Ralph also worked there.

Carnival entry, 1927. Some here were life-long employees.(Image: Edith Howard)

Another employee from 1940-48 was Miss Muriel Dollery who was born in Stockbridge in 1925.

As Mrs Muriel Bower, aged 84 and living in Ontario, Canada, she wrote down her memories of the laundry as it was during her time.

She had her 14th birthday in November 1939 and left school at Christmas.

At the beginning of 1940 she started at the laundry and her first job was marking the incoming linen with a sewn-in mark to identify its origin.

Each mark was unique to the customer and while most of it would have been already marked from previous washes, new items needed her attention.

If there was any damage to the unwashed laundry, the tear or hole was circled with needle and red cotton to show it was there on arrival.

Any damage found after cleaning and ironing and not so-marked would have to be repaired by the laundry.

Once she found a lot of money sewn into some corsets and the girls all gathered round to look.

The money was taken to her boss, Miss Durrad, who sent it back to the customer.

Hours of work were generally 7am to 7pm but longer into the evening on Thursday and Fridays, with half-an-hour allowed for lunch and another half-hour for tea at 4pm.

The weekly wage for the staff workers was a little over £3, which in those days was considered good.

During the war, all the windows were covered with dark cloth in the early mornings and evenings to comply with the blackout.

There were a lot of windows to cover but down in the packing room there were shutters that fitted into the windows.

Everyone either rode bicycles or walked to work.

Nobody drove a vehicle except the van drivers who went out on deliveries.

During the war, much of the work was military laundry which came from the surrounding camps at Andover, Barton Stacey, Tidworth, Bulford, Larkhill and Boscombe Down, as well as Middle Wallop. It was a busy time.

All the laundry to be delivered to the many country houses of the district was packed very carefully into big wicker hampers, many of which had already seen 50 years of service.

First of all, the hamper was lined with tissue paper – at the sides as well as the bottom.

First to go in were the kitchen things such as tea towels, then it was bath towels, sheets and pillow slips, then table linen.

If there were maids’ uniforms, the aprons and caps would be next, followed by a dairymen’s white coat and skull cap – the latter being worn when leaning their heads against the cow at milking time.

Finally, it was the men’s shirts and separate collars, with ladies’ blouses etc. on top.

Another layer of tissue paper then went over everything.

It was important not to allow the laundry to move during transit so string was threaded through the sides of the hamper and tied over the top.

During her time, Miss Bracher would sometimes slip her hand down the inside of a packed hamper and if there was any space, it all had to be done again.

By this time the reputation of the Anton Laundry had grown enormously.

It had a name for high-quality work and this led to difficult jobs that could rarely be done elsewhere.

Problematic stains and delicate fabrics were a speciality.

Mrs Bower was able to name and describe some of the people on the 1927 carnival photograph.

Even though she had not joined until 1940, many were still there in her time.

She remembered Maggie Huxford and a Mrs Steel, both on the float.

Maggie was a nice person whom she liked.

The shorter man to the left was Albert Vincent who used to throw the empty hampers up through a trap door from a downstairs room for the packers to fill upstairs.

To the right was Mrs Davis who always dressed in black and lived in the old cottage attached to the laundry buildings.

She had been the forewoman for many years and now acted as caretaker.

All the washing was done downstairs, the water supplied from the river by means of a borehole; spin dryers were certainly instituted later but maybe traditional mangles were still in use to squeeze out excess water in the 1940s.

The clean laundry was then sent upstairs where there were ‘noisy’ steam presses for shirts and blouses and there is also mention of the ‘calender girls’.

The calender was a mechanised form of drying and pressing where the damp linen was fed through large heated rollers, steam-heated from above and below.

In later years these machines would come to dominate the work-space but it is unclear how advanced the process was in those days.

She could well remember Miss Amy Tucker striding briskly up through the long ironing room to see Miss Durrad in her office which was at the end.

By this time Miss Bracher had died and Miss Durrad was in charge of the day-to-day running as a partner.

At least three men worked in the washhouse – Ralph Tucker, Jack Tubb and Bill Gilham while Mr Waters, who had a club foot, was in charge of the coal boiler.

Life at the laundry during the 1950s was after Mrs Bower’s time but Miss Durrad died in 1951, leaving the third generation of the Bracher family as the sole owner.

Like his father and grandfather, Charles Richard Burbidge Bracher was a farmer at heart and running Parsonage Farm at Hurstbourne Tarrant.

Although he tried to keep both the laundry and the farm going, by 1959, he realised that it was time to sell the laundry and it was bought by Mr Alec John Stevens, whose own history was in the laundry business but was connected to the well-known AJS motorcycle company.

He and his wife Paulette were to steer the business into the modern age.

If you are interested in local history, why not join Andover History and Archaeology Society? Details can be found at andoverlocalhistoryarchaeology.uk.