A long, long time ago, before we had smart phones or freezers, before there was rock and roll..... the welfare of a family used to depend on Dad's earning power and Mum's home skills.
At this time, in Belper, there lived a cheerful chap called Tom.  Because he was friendly, he was well known in that little town.  Because he was well known, his circumstances were no secret.
They called Tom 'slow'.  There were lots of things he would never be able to do, or understand.  Tom would always be dependent on the faster wits of his wife, Hannah.  Because this was no secret, all over Belper, Tom was famous as 'Tom-anna', and tales of the silly things he had done made folk chortle into their tea or choke on their pipes.  Tom-anna was Belper's Mr Bean.
There were many stories about Tom.  Here are two; perhaps you know more? If so, we would love to hear them.

One morning, Hanna stood at the pantry door in dismay.  Every last crust of bread had gone.  She had hungry children to feed and send off to school, but somebody had come home late and eaten their breakfast while they were asleep.
She called sharply up the stairs, 'Tom! Tom!  The wains have got no bread.'
Propped up in bed on one elbow, Tom called back, 'Give them toast instead.'
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Tom and his mate enjoyed a day out at the Goose Fair.  They enjoyed it so much, they spent all their money and had to walk home overnight.  After some miles, they were exhausted, so they decided to sleep in a field until morning. It was a chilly Autumn night and neither of them slept well on the wet grass.  When daylight came, Tom's friend complained about the cold wind.  Tom stood up and pointed at the corner of the field.  'Well no wonder, lad!' he exclaimed.  'You left the gate open!'

Investigating Tom
(Note: these stories were usually told in the broad Derbyshire dialect, and Tom would certainly have spoken like that.  For lots of reasons, we decided to write the dialogue in Standard English, but we are hoping everyone can hear the original in their heads as they read.)
Folklore all over the world is rich in 'simpleton' stories. There are tales about whole villages full of people doing silly things, a fairly local example being the 'wise men' of Gotham.  The Aarne-Thompson-Uther folk tale classification index includes 'Stories about a Fool' (ATU 1200 - 1349) and 'The Foolish Husband and his Wife' (ATU 1405- 1429). Our Tom is part of a long tradition.  It is sometimes suggested that the role of the simpleton in stories is to turn logic on its head, give conventionality a poke in the ribs and remind us all not to get too set in our ways, because there are lots of different ways of thinking.
Looking up 'Tom' in Brewer's Phrase and Fable, we noticed that the name has sometimes been used to represent a kind of Everyman, like Tommy Atkins. It is also used, however, in connection with something being amiss, hence Tom o'Bedlam, Tom-fool, tommyrot and the less familiar Tom Tyler (meaning a hen-pecked husband).
Our Tom may be part of a centuries-old tradition, but his stories are urban, and more modern than the tales we find in the Folktale books. Some of our oldest Belper residents can recall the days when adults would say 'You're a Tomanna' to children who made topsy turvy mistakes.  They were strangers to positive reinforcement in the 1940s.  In fact, some believe that Tom was a real person; somebody they knew about, but just never met.  We have been given a surname for him (which we won't publish here, just in case someone with the same name gets upset).  People claimed to know where he lived.  We have been told two different places. 
The Tom stories have the characteristics of a Friend of a Friend story.  FoaF stories are not always funny - some of them are quite scary.  What they all have in common, though, is that people hear them and believe they are true; that the events in the story really happened, perhaps not to the friend who told them, but to the person who told him.  Tom's stories were retold, not by people who knew him, but by people who thought others did.
Update: In Belper library, we found a book called 'Grandfather's Belper, Second Album' by Michael G Morris (1993).  There is a section in there about a 1962 project completed at St John's school on Nottingham Road about 'Tommy Anna'.  This is doubly interesting because we had been told that Tom lived on Nottingham road and also that he lived in Kilburn.  Their Tom lived on Nottingham Road and worked at the colliery in Kilburn.  Their Tom stories have a slightly different tone from the ones we have collected: their Tom is more a 'joker', whereas the one we know had the role of a 'simple' character in folklore.  Was one of them a real man? Maybe. Watch this space for more updates!