ABSTRACT
When interviewed for an oral history project, Mrs Fletcherrecalled her youthful enjoyment of leisure in inter-war Manchester: ‘it was good while it lasted’. From the age of 15 or 16 she sneaked off to the dance halls in Salford. Telling her disapproving father, ‘we’d gone out shoppin, or we’d gone looking at the shops’, she visited the Empress or the less respectable Dyson’s, which she recalled as ‘a right dive’. Saturday afternoons at the dance hall were a special treat for this young woman, however, since at the Empress ‘it used to be a shilling to go in’. After turning over her weekly contribution to the family budget, this shilling represented her entire weekly leisure money, her ‘spends’. Thus, most weeks ‘we couldn’t afford to go dancing, because if we went dancing on a Saturday afternoon, that was the limit and we’d no money left’.
