A Glendale Life: Janet Laycock

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What every community needs - more ‘doers’ like Janet

Janet Laycock is very much a people person – and has been all her life. These days she’s so much a part of the local community many people assume she was born here.

“I remember Roy Ancrum, the former head teacher at Glendale Middle School, saying he remembered me as a mischievous child at school,” says Janet “but he can’t have! I was actually born in Skipton and brought up in Scunthorpe.”

Janet’s father, an ex-paratrooper, worked in the steelworks in Scunthorpe after leaving the army. When she was nine her parents bought a fish and chip shop but young Janet wasn’t keen on the idea of life behind the counter. “I didn’t like it a bit. At school I was known as ‘that girl from the chip shop’.”

What Janet really wanted to do was look after young children. So at 16 she left home to take up her first job. She might have been short on formal training in childcare, but she had plenty of initiative.

“I bought a copy of The Lady and replied to an advertisement for someone to look after two little girls in Leeds. I was a mother’s help really – I couldn’t call myself a nanny because I wasn’t trained,” she says.

The family was Jewish and ran a tailoring business in Leeds which opened up a whole new world with Janet taking part in the religious Shabbat dinners on Friday nights. The father was also involved with the Variety Club of Great Britain and tickets for shows were a perk of the job and included seats to see the Beatles in Leeds.

She loved the job but the family split up suddenly after two years. “We were on holiday in Jersey and the mother fell in love with a man who ran a hotel there – and left her husband.” Janet stayed with her young charges in Jersey until they went to boarding school.

Her next job was at Linton, near Wetherby, where the father of the family worked for Arnold Wallace Travel. “I saw quite a bit of the world with that job – New York, Trinidad and Tobago, all sorts of places. I even spent a week at the Cannes Film Festival.” But that family also ended in divorce.

If being a nanny brought benefits, there were also downsides – such as getting close to the children then facing the eventual separation. “It was awful when they were sent off to boarding school,” she says.

In 1969 a new job took Janet to Akeld and she fell in love with Northumberland: “As soon as I came here I knew this was where I should be. It was such a lovely place.”

But again found herself in the middle of a domestic crisis. “That marriage ended when the woman told me she was going to the Horse of the Year Show and wouldn’t be coming back. She said ‘Could you tell my husband?’ A lot of my families seem to end in divorce. It was never my fault – honestly!” Again she stayed on to look after the little boy and his father.

It wasn’t just Northumberland she fell in love with. She was living in the station house in Akeld and one evening there was a fire in the living room. “It was just smoke really, but very worrying. I knocked on a neighbour’s door to get help. I was filthy black with the smoke and the door was opened by a young man I’d never met before.”

That young man was Mel Laycock, a local fencer; the couple were married in 1971. Sadly that meant parting from her young charge at Akeld and she faced some irate criticism from the family for ‘deserting her job just to get married’. She was even banned by the grandmother from seeing him – though she did

Janet on leaving school

catch up via Facebook many years later.

Janet and Mel set up home in South Middleton and soon had a family of their own – Julie, Sarah and Emma. It didn’t take long for Janet to find her niche in the community as well as another family she loved working for.

For the past 38 years, Janet has worked part time for the Vinson fam-

ily at Roddam Hall and then Roddam House doing a variety of jobs from polishing the kitchen floor to taping scores of names on children’s school clothes.

When one of Lord Vinson’s daughters was married at Kew Gardens in London, Janet not only got an invite, she was driven to the railway station and travelled First Class (incidentally meeting a ‘rather posh’ local lady travelling to the same wedding but only travelling Second Class – along with hordes of Newcastle United fans going to a match in London.)

Life changer

Joining Roddam Women’s Institute was also a life changer for Janet who was the group’s secretary for 27 years and president for 13 years. “The W.I. opened a lot of doors for Roddam WI used to meet above the stables at Roddam with members clambering up steps to get to the meeting room. Members also had to have strong bladders as there were no proper loos!

When the Roddam meeting room was declared unsafe, Roddam WI moved to Wooler. At one stage there were three W.I.s meeting in Wooler – Roddam, Doddington and Wooler. Eventually both Wooler and Doddington groups folded with some of their members joining Roddam WI.

Janet’s husband Mel died in 2017 and since then Janet has taken on even more community roles. She’d always organised the W.I bus trips and anything else they needed doing, and she’d read to children at

Glendale First School, but in recent years she’s helped organise the Christmas Lunch put on by Glendale Connect, run an ‘Over 50s’ club in Wooler, and helped set up a local Knit and Natter group. The list goes on.

“I’m actually much more of a doer than a committee person,” she says, “and it’s lovely when people remember you. When they say ‘Oh yes, you’re the Janet that read to me when I was little’. I love that.”

Frank Mansfield