The town that grew, and the village the Reckitts built
It helps to understand the world William grew up in. In the space of a lifetime, Hull had turned from a town into a city: in 1801 it held some twenty-two thousand people; by 1901, more than two hundred and thirty thousand — drawn in by the docks, the fishing fleet, and the mills and factories crowded along the river. On the east bank, where William was raised, stood the seed-crushing works that pressed oil from rape and linseed, and where his own father had started out. It was a prosperous quarter, and a crowded one: families packed into back-to-back terraces and narrow courts — the squalor that would trouble the consciences of the men who owned the works.
Chief among those works was Reckitt & Sons. Isaac Reckitt had begun making starch in Hull in 1840; by William Edmund’s day the firm was a giant, its Dansom Lane works turning out the starch, laundry blue and black lead that carried Hull’s name into kitchens across the Empire — “Reckitt’s Blue” in every washday tub. To pack that blue and starch was William Edmund’s own trade for much of his working life.
The Reckitts were Quakers, and their wealth came with a conscience. In 1907 Sir James Reckitt resolved to give his workpeople “the opportunity of living in a better house, with a garden” — and built them a village to prove it. Laid out on a hundred and forty acres to the new garden-city pattern — wide tree-lined avenues, greens, no more than a dozen houses to the acre, its own hall and shops — Hull’s Garden Village opened in July 1908. It was to James Reckitt Avenue, at its heart, that William Edmund’s father came to die in 1926; and in the world of that model suburb William Edmund and Minnie themselves grew old — children of Hull’s labouring east side, housed at last as the reformers thought working people should be.
Composed for this site from published local history — the family’s world, not one of Mum’s records.