Voices of Postwar England

Dolly Lloyd was very active in Liverpool throughout the nineteen seventies and eighties campaigning with local groups for “Homes not Roads.” As well as providing spaces for local elderly people to meet, Dolly and others were aware of the importance to provide facilities for young people. In the following excerpt Dolly talks about the small Y-T-S scheme they set up in Liverpool:

length of audio clip: 2 mins.

Dolly Lloyd : When the, the youths started to come in, I said we’ve got nothing much to do for these. The Archbishop Warlock was coming then for the first time in St Anthony’s to introduce himself and we went along to that and he came along and he said er ‘what can we do about our youth hanging around corners, blah, blah, blah.’ So anyway I’ve got in touch with um […] Open Eye, and they got together and they said what is the job? So they helped me and I got a YTS scheme off the ground and that was to bring wood around to the fires of the people in the dwellings, for their fires and to go for a message or what to the corner shop down here, whatever. And that went on for four years. Then they, I asked Age Concern, can I use their name, we are a group, I’m a group of pensioners calling ourselves Vauxhall Age Concern to get this off the ground. They agreed, that’s fine. Anyway, we got that off the ground because I felt well they can’t be going on messages and things, there’s other things they’ve got to learn. Apprentices then, you were fourteen, you know, to learn anything. So there was an old garage along by Scilly, and we got that opened for them to learn plumbing and thingyed that and it was out of my hands then. I said “Well now you’ve got to do a better job than that. You can’t go around visiting people all the time. You’ve got to do something real worthwhile” and that ended there. Well it was four years which was a long time to have them like working. Some of them are married now with kids you know and…[laughing].