Barbara Chasemore
Barbara talks about working at Alpine Laundry

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My home was the Alpine Laundry in Eve Road. It had been a hand laundry when my father took it over. We moved there about 1932-’33 when I was about eighteen months old and my earliest memories of the laundry is, really, of a very large area with lots and lots of lines going across where all the sheets were hung, and the smell of steam and Lux soap because that's what they used in those days, soap flakes - we didn't have the detergent as we have now. There were large washing machines, very large ones with big doors on them and everything was pushed into the washing machines.

Most of the clients were people who lived in the large homes around Woking and father would collect the washing on a Monday and would then deliver it on a Friday. Most people didn't like their articles to be named so my father had to devise some way of naming the article so we could retrieve them after they had all been washed, which, of course, as you can imagine, caused some problems with mix-ups of sending the wrong shirt to the wrong house.

We had a very large calender and I remember the day, I must have been about seven I suppose, when the calender was delivered. Really, it was just a series of very large drums and you fed in the sheets in one end and they went through the rollers and came out the other end and then you folded them as they came off the machine. You had to be jolly quick.

All the sheets were put in great bins and then there were two girls who would shake out the sheet and hand it to the two girls who were going to feed it into the calendar, then it came off the other end. As I say, it needed a lot, a lot of labour to run the laundry, and it was 8 till 6 of course, an 8-till-6 day.