Mary Jane Hill Bardgett of ‘Kia-Ora’ 16 Mikado Road, died in 1947, aged 83.
She was born Mary Jane Hill in Lincoln in 1864. In 1891 she married James Bardgett, a saddler from Westmoreland. They married in Leeds but moved to Cleethorpes to run a pub – the Leeds Arms, and then the Cross Keys. They then moved to Australia and spent the next 15 years living in Melbourne and Perth. Although working as a saddler, James made several unsuccessful journeys into the bush, searching for gold during one of the later gold rushes. Two sons were born in Australia: James William 1893-1972 and Clarence May 1898-1982. In the early 1904 they moved to Nottingham, where another son was born – George Leonard (1904-1972).
James then bought a saddler’s business at 9 Gibb St, just off the High Street, Long Eaton and the family lived above the shop. By 1921 he was unemployed and they were at 9 Clifford St (probably the same house, as the saddler’s shop seems to have been on the corner of Gibb St and Clifford St). He retired due to ill health in 1926 and died in 1929. The shop disappeared when Woolworths (now B&M) was expanded after WW2.
After James’s death, Mary Ann moved to Mikado Road in Sawley to live with her oldest son, James William (Bill) Bardgett.
Bill had served in the Royal Field Artillery in India during the Great War and took part in the Third Anglo-Afghan War on the Northwest Frontier in 1919. He’d married in 1917 and after leaving the Army he got a job with the Long Eaton Co-Operative Society’s Draycott Branch. They lived in a council house on Beech Avenue, Long Eaton and had 2 daughters.
In 1923 his elder daughter, Winifred Clarice May, aged 4, was badly burned. Her mother had moved the fireguard slightly aside to clean the grate. She took the ashes outside and when she came back in the house Winne was in the passage with her flannelette nightdress in flames. She put a sports coat over the child to smother the flames, with the help of a neighbour. Another neighbour was Dr C.S. Archer, who came straight away and applied dressings. He thought she might survive despite the burns, but she died of shock later that day.
After this tragedy they moved to Mikado Road and Bill began to drive a Long Eaton Co-Op butchery delivery van, a service that continued into the mid-1980s. There are some grainy photographs of Bill’s vans in the Long Eaton Advertiser archives. As far as we know, the van wasn’t used by the local Home Guard during WW2. Bill was still driving the van aged 70 in the 1960s. He remained in Mikado Road until his death in 1972.
Another Sawley resident, Eric West, originally of Reedman Road and later of Wilmot Street, started a 50-year career with Coop butchery department when he began as Bill’s assistant in 1934. Eric also ran the Sawley Nomads cycle speedway team.
But why was Bill Bardgett’s house in Mikado Road called Kia-Ora? The phrase was originally a Māori greeting, which then became the name of a lemon and orange squash in Australia. It was launched in the UK in 1917, but didn’t become popular until the 1970s, so the name probably goes back to the family’s time in Australia during the gold rush.
Bill Bardgett’s brother Clarence started work as an apprentice butcher in Hemington, at the age of 12. During WWI he served with 10th Battalion, Sherwood Foresters. After their marriage in 1922 at the Mount Tabor Church, Clarence and his wife Dorothy moved to Langley Mill, then Eastwood, where he bought his own butchery business in 1944. When he retired 20 years later his son Eric took over.
