Birthdays

October will soon be over, and we have put the clocks back. That should have brought two more birthdays because my brother (pictured) and I were both born in this month, but, tragically, he only made it to 36. Even his children have now lived longer, and I have been here over twice that, despite what the oncologists keep telling me. 

He would have been 70 this month. There was quite a gap between us. The explanation, according to my mum, was that she had a miscarriage two or three years after I was born. I don’t know whether it makes medical sense or not, or how she knew, but she said it was due to rhesus incompatibility. Mum had an uncommon blood group that sensitized her to mine, which caused future pregnancies of the wrong type to miscarry. 

My dad expanded the story many years later. It happened when we were on holiday in a caravan at Primrose Valley, Filey, on the Yorkshire coast. I don’t know how she dealt with the foetus, but she said she could tell it was a baby girl. I believe she spent a day resting in the caravan and then continued the holiday. No tests, no doctors, no hospitals. 

AA Assistance

 

In writing about the Automobile Association Handbook last month, I said the more you think about such artefacts, and the more other commenters contribute, the more you remember about them. The AA Handbook it a good case in point. I began to think about childhood memories of the AA, and later needing their assistance. It may be of interest only to me. I think there will be a third post, too. 

I was aware of the AA from an early age. At that time, AA patrolmen still used motorbikes, with sidecars for their tools and equipment. One garaged and maintained his bright yellow bike in the back lane behind our primary school. As six year-olds we were fascinated. I am delighted to see the brick garage still there in the wall in the lane, now locked but recognisably the same. I thought about the children who walked with me to school, and what we talked about. How many still remember that 70 years ago an AA man lived there? 

Until the 1950s, AA members were issued with metal radiator grill badges, and patrolmen would salute motorists displaying a visible badge. I have an early memory of being in a car and being saluted, but when and where I have no idea. 

No salute meant a problem or hazard ahead. Apparently, this originated as a warning to members of police speed checks. Patrolmen could not be prosecuted for failing to salute. The practice would have ended in the late 1950s when motorcycles were superseded by small vans, which have gradually increased in size to the much larger vans now used. 

The main role of AA patrolmen was then, as now, to rescue motorists whose cars had broken down. Members were issued with keys for AA phone boxes to summon help. These all seem to have gone now, presumably because mobile phones made them obsolete, but my key remains on the key ring. 

I have needed help on three occasions. One was in the 1980s, on the A1 south from Scotland. The front end of the exhaust pipe broke loose from the engine, hacking and scraping along the road like an ancient tractor. The AA men tied it up and drove slowly ahead with me to Halfords. That Talbot Samba was new, my worst car ever. 

Another occasion, around the same time, was somewhere on the M1 south when the exhaust pipe of the car in front fell off and bounced under mine. A little later, there was a smell of petrol. The fuel supply pipe was fractured, and an AA man mended it with a length of plastic pipe. It stayed in place until I sold the car. 

But my first need was on Sunday, 1st September, 1974, on the M62 going home from Leeds, the day before I started a new job. It was also the day the new M62 opened from Whitley Bridge (J34) to Leeds. I was in my clapped-out blue Mini (the one in the blog banner), and after accelerating from the new slip road thinking how great it was, the engine cut out and would not restart. I coasted to an emergency telephone, but they were not yet operating. There was very little traffic, so I walked across to the other carriageway hoping to get a lift back to Whitley Bridge for help. Almost immediately, a police car came along. I thought I was going to be in real trouble, but actually the policemen were very helpful. They drove me back to the car and called the AA for me.

My most unusual experience with the AA was around 1972, again in the blue Mini, in Leeds. I stopped to give way at the junction of Royal Park Road and Queens Road in Headingley, and the front driver’s side wheel collapsed. At that time there was a scruffy garage across the road, run by the appropriately named Mr. Greasley (like a name out of Dickens), who took in my car with his trolley jack. Apparently, a wheel bearing had broken. Yes, he could mend it he said, and did. 

Unfortunately, it began to make a noise within weeks. My usual garage said that a wheel spacer was missing. They repaired it again, but Mr. Greasley refused to refund me for his shoddy work. He asked for the broken parts, “in order to test them”, and lost his temper when asked for a receipt. After weeks of argument, I asked AA Legal Services for help, who obtained a full refund. It was not a lot of money, but to me at that time it was. 

Our most recent encounter with the AA was my wife’s. She had an auxiliary steering wheel lock which broke at home in the locked position. As we had the Home Start service, we call the AA. It took the patrolman over an hour to remove it. It made you realise how effective these locks are. 

Uncle Owen

Last week, a man called Geoff came for a chat. He is a little older than me, and we had never previously met, but we have a kind of family link through my late Uncle Owen. 

Owen was my mother’s brother. He appears in my recent post showing the picture taken at the seaside around 1936, which mentions that he died in a military accident in his early twenties, while on National Service.  

One of many sad aspects is that he need not have been there. He was bamboozled into signing up for three years instead of the minimum two because, they said, it would be “good for his trade”. It was during the additional three years that he died. He was a plumber, and had just one year of his apprenticeship left to complete. He would nearly have finished but for that extra year. A plumber in the 1950s: what a lucrative trade that would have been! 

He was in the Air Force, and was hit by an aircraft shell that went off accidentally and exploded in the chest and abdomen. He stood no chance. Many years later, my father told me the injuries were so horrific, the coffin was sealed, and the only part of the body allowed to be seen was the head and face through a hatched window in the coffin lid. The funeral procession stretched beyond the end of the village High Street, and there was a military guard of honour and salute. I was only 3 at the time, but when older, I used to help my grandpa tend the grave. Last time I looked, the small gravestone was broken and collapsed. 

I can just remember him. He was well-known and popular, sang in the church choir (I have his prayer book), and played in the village cricket team. He had been married for 15 months to Aunty R. My grandparents had to intercept her as she returned home to Rawcliffe from work on the bus, to tell her about the awful telegram they had received. 

I liked Aunty R enormously. She was always smiling. She was a skilled invisible mender at the clothing factory. She and Owen had grown up next-door-but-two to each other, childhood sweethearts. They spent their wedding night at our house, while we stayed with my grandparents. 

One of the saddest photographs I have is of Aunty R with family members and friends three months after Owen died. She is in the centre of this picture wearing what we would then have called a costume (she is replaced by my mother in the second version). She puts on a brave face, but there is pain and sadness in her eyes. I am also in the picture, still aged under 4. Later, she came with us on holiday to Filey, and my grandparents took her with them to stay with friends in Scotland.

Aunty R remarried some years later, and moved to Huddersfield, near where we now live. I knew where she was, but did not want to revisit it while her husband was alive. About 5 years ago, after she was widowed a second time, I sent her some photographs, and she was very pleased to see them, and speak on the phone. She was then a surprisingly active 90-year-old, but died 2 years ago after falling.  

To return to Geoff, my visitor: he married Aunty R’s much younger sister. They also lived in the Huddersfield area, but I was not sure where. When I discovered it was only within two miles of me, R’s sister by then had early-onset dementia, and Geoff had cared for her full-time for many years. She died over a year ago. My last memory of her is of a little girl, about 3 years older than me, sitting in the sun on the front doorstep with her mother, eating a packet of potato crisps. There were over 6 blue wraps of salt in the bag. 

Geoff and I had an immediate rapport, with so many shared references and experiences, it was as if we had always known each other. We knew the same people who lived in the High Street where I spent every Saturday, and he was at school with my mother’s second cousin who helped me work out that part of our family tree. He could talk about the village social life, and who was related to whom. 

It wa’n’t long afoo-ere we’wer’ in West Riding Rawcliffe talk.  

I mentioned Uncle Owen was a plumber, and that I remembered him and my grandpa building an outside lavatory in the back yard. Before that, I said, they had an earth closet and an ash midden. You shovelled the lavatory contents through to the ash midden, a brick building with no roof, to be burnt with the household rubbish. Periodically, council workers shovelled the ash midden contents into bins by hand, and carried it to a lorry. He knew exactly what I was talking about. 

“If you don’t pay attention at school”, my mother used to say, “you’ll end up working on t’shit carts”.  

That really got Geoff going: things I’ve mentioned before. “It was so primitive,” he said. “Boiler on first thing Monday morning heating water, then all day washing with a dolly tub and peggy stick, and wringing it out with a hand wringer. Then using the leftover hot water to fill the tin bath, which hung in the yard for the rest of the week, and taking turns in the bath with the same water. Tuesdays were spent drying the heavy wet washing with wooden clothes props over a washing line, and Wednesdays ironing. Unbelievable!” he said. “It was little more than 60 years ago, yet when you tell ’em about the shit carts, they think you are talking about the dark ages.”

He knows I am ill and cannot easily get out now, but said he would like to call again. It would be good if he did.  

As for Uncle Owen, he should have been busy installing indoor upstairs bathrooms, kitchen plumbing, and central heating systems. He could have had his own business, and his younger brother could have served an apprenticeship with him. Who knows, I might even have been a plumber myself. I would have had more cousins, and everything would have been different. 

“That Don’t Impress Me Much”

And I still use the same dismissive facial expression. 

“That Don’t Impress Me Much”

Class Journey

When I describe myself as working class, it irritates my wife and family no end. 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” they say. “You had professional jobs in accountancy, computing, and universities. Your father employed fifteen people, and owned a four-bedroomed detached house with a double garage and garden in a nice part of town. He had a good car. You had books and music at home. How can that be working class?” 

I protest that much of that came later, but they won’t have it and excited voices are raised. They don’t like the idea that if I am working class, it might make them working class too. 

“I would not have married you if you had been working class,” my wife once said. 

No, we are not working class now. The kids were embarrassed at school to be called “posh” because they did not have particularly strong local accents. But I grew up working class. 

Like many of my age and background, especially from the North of England, I have been on a kind of class journey, and changed. It was not a deliberate or conscious change, but without it, I would not have been able to do the things I did. Class was, and to a large extent remains, a big influence on opportunity in England today. We make scores of micro-judgements about each other’s backgrounds all the time, and treat each other accordingly. It influences whether or not we are offered a particular job or promotion, or who we select as friends or partners. 

The street where we lived until I was 6, although it seemed shabbier then

It is largely the circumstances of your childhood that define you: how you lived and the friends you had. We lived in a rented two-bedroomed terraced house until I was six, and then moved up in the world to a three-bedroomed semi. My dad worked as part shot assistant, and part salesman travelling around the local villages three days a week. Some days he was not home until seven or eight. On Thursday mornings (half-day closing) he went to work in a boiler suit to clean and maintain the firm’s four vehicles, which took a lot of time in the forties and fifties. He worked on Saturdays and had only two week’s holiday a year. 

Like many ‘housewives’, my mother did not work. Ordinary jobs paid enough to bring up a family quite comfortably on one income in those days. Work was social, without the intensity it can now have. 

We then lived in one of the semi-detached houses on the left until I was 18

It might be more accurate to say we were well-brought-up working class. We did not rent a council house, and my dad was not a manual worker. He took over the business when I was 12, but we did not move to the larger house until a few months before I left school. I never really lived there. I moved on to shared houses in Leeds with ordinary lads from ordinary parts of Wakefield and Manchester. 

Let me list how the fathers of my schoolday friends earned their livings: dock worker, railway labourer, engine driver, joiner, council lorry driver, gas meter reader, clothing factory worker, scaffolder, stone mason. They were the children I mixed and played with, and was influenced by. Many lived in council or rented housing. A little above were a butcher with his own shop, a chiropodist, an electricity board clerk, and a man who selected ships’ crew, but it was a working class area in a northern working class town. We used local pronunciations such as “watter” (water), “owt” and “mowt” (anything and nothing), “whee-ere” and “thee-ere” (where and there), and “moo-ere” (more). I knew the difference, but did not mix with any children from professional families except, in my late teens, one whose parents were teachers. Some years later, I felt perfectly at home working in a canning factory. 

A few years ago, I came across an old cassette tape recorded at a friend’s house when I was around 17. We switched on the recorder and let it run: five of us I think. The accents, the bad language, how we spoke about girls at school: you would be in no doubt that we were uncouth working class. It made me so uncomfortable I threw the tape away. 

We moved to a large house in this (then) leafy part of town when I was 18

Although I soon moved to shared houses in Leeds.
The first was a wrong-way-round house, with entrance at what was built as the rear.
The front entrance was only on foot.

But I am speaking about the economic working class. There are other indicators. Culturally, we were not typical. My dad had educated interests. He read a lot, listened to the BBC Home Service (now Radio 4), and liked poetry. He was a churchgoer, and followed up the monthly Bible Readings they sent. We had encyclopaedias and books, and my dad talked to me about them, and I read them. He involved me in his Thursday jobs around the house, such as maintaining bicycles and cleaning boots, and interested me in things around town such as ships in the docks, the railways, and the shipyard. I had hobbies and used the public library a lot. I had good general knowledge. 

Mum also read a lot, and was in a drama group. Although she was clever, and could have gone to the Grammar School, she chose to stay at her village school and left at fourteen. She helped in her mother’s grocery shop until she married, where they provided tea (i.e. an evening meal) for my father’s travellers out late on their rounds. 

I think this background helped get me into the Grammar School where I had a good education and intelligent friends. The Grammar Schools were created to supply the country’s need for educated professionals: social engineering on a grand scale. It took me into the accountancy profession, and contact with privately educated colleagues and business owners. We had to get on with everyone from office and factory workers to the rich. My accent began to shift, my language became more elaborate, and I began to understand how the world worked. 

Going late to university and working in higher education around the country brought further sophistications. My accent still reveals my Yorkshire roots, and some even detect which part of Yorkshire, but it is unsettling to encounter those who never moved away, and realise just how different I am now. They often sound uneducated. 

Do genetics influence class? How did my great-grandfather lift himself from a background of agricultural labourers to become a ship’s master after running away to sea? And my grandfather successfully started his own business, and employed others. Another great-grandfather was active in the Methodist church, with wide religious knowledge. My mother’s father worked in a paper mill, but his family had (and still has) an almost innate understanding of all things mechanicals. They can mend almost anything. These things run through families for generations, although the genetic elements no doubt interact with other factors in complex ways. 

Perhaps class differences are no longer what they were, but they are still there in the background. It shows in what you do, your interests, how you spend your time, your friends, the language you use, how much wealth you have, and many other things. The private education sector perpetuates class differences by handing more opportunities to those whose families have paid the enormous fees. I don’t want to make “chip-on-the-shoulder” excuses, but my culturally rich family background is nothing compared to the advantages some have. 

I did all right in the end, and it has been mainly down to merit. Some academic achievements cannot be bought. I hope that is not being smug. Although selection was not entirely unbiased, I regret the abolition of the state Grammar Schools and the social mobility they gave to so many from ordinary backgrounds like mine. 

Coal

Last week’s pictures of coal imported through Immingham docks to keep our last blast furnaces at Scunthorpe operative, bring home to me how much Britain and our heavy industries have changed over the last forty years. The furnaces were within days of running out of raw materials and going cold. Once that happens they are damaged beyond repair, and cannot be re-started, and Britain would have lost its ability to manufacture its own steel. The government had to step in at the last minute to save this strategic industry after the duplicitous Chinese owners, rather than buying more supplies as they claimed, had actually been selling stocks off. Goodness knows what it is going to cost us all. I come back to the economics later, below.  

We never used to import coal. In fact, we exported it. My home town owes its very existence to that. It only came into existence in 1826. 

In the eighteenth century, industrial goods from central and south Yorkshire were transported to the Rivers Ouse and Humber along the River Aire to Airmyn, and later by canal to the River Ouse at Selby. But as loads became bigger, and coastal ships larger, these twisting rivers became increasingly difficult to navigate. A new canal directly to the Ouse from Knottingley was proposed, bypassing Selby. This opened in 1826, and the brand new port and town of Goole was built at the eastern end where it joined the Ouse. It eventually carried millions of tons of Yorkshire coal for British and continental markets. Before the First World War, Goole was one of the ten busiest ports in Britain by tonnage. 

By my early childhood in the nineteen-fifties, there was an extensive network of docks, with ships trading goods of all kinds to ports throughout Britain and Europe. The town throbbed and echoed to the sounds of the ships, docks, and railways. 

Tom Puddings

Coal reached Goole by two methods. One was the canal, which used a system of compartment boats known as Tom Puddings pulled by tugs, introduced in the nineteenth century. One tub could tow a train of up to nineteen Tom Puddings, a load of nearly 800 tons. At Goole, hydraulic coal hoists raised Tom Puddings into the air and emptied them straight into the holds of ships. It made an unforgettable noise. 

One of the five coal hoists. This is a still from a short (2½ min)
Vimeo video of it in operation: https://vimeo.com/135597884

Ouse Dock in the 1930s

The second way coal reached Goole was by railway. Again, wagons full of coal could be emptied straight into a ship’s hold by crane or hoist. They could also be winched up an incline and tipped from a high-level coal drop at the dockside. 

The high-level coal drop in Railway Dock in 1988, by then disused

Coal wagons near the engine sheds, 1967

During my childhood, you could watch the hoists from close quarters. You could go almost anywhere on the docks. My dad used to take me to watch ‘Tide Time’ when ships arrived from abroad. You saw them swing round on their anchors in the river, manoeuvre to the quayside and edge into the lock. You could stand right at the edge looking down into the terrifyingly powerful turbulence from the sluice gates. You could follow ships to their berths and watch them load and unload. You saw coal wagons and Tom Puddings moved to the coal hoists and emptied into ships, and watched the ships leave the locks as the tide turned, engines pounding against the currents. Now, except for a footpath across the docks which the port authority tried hard to close, the public has no access at all. 

Reportedly, even if the steel plant at Scunthorpe is saved, we will still need to import large amounts of steel from countries like Spain, France, Germany, and Sweden to build our naval vessels, but at least it would be a start. It would be nice to think one day we will have our own electric furnaces, but as always now, we would no doubt be seeking foreign funding. We used to own all our own assets and infrastructure. Now we pay dividends and interest on it, mostly overseas. Britain, the birthplace of the industrial revolution! Has globalisation gone too far?

What I don’t understand is this. If we have to burn coal to keep our steel production going, then why do we need to import it? Ex-miners tell me, although Britain’s mines are closed, there are still mountains of coal buried beneath the ground, especially here in Yorkshire. Would it cost too much to re-open one, or open a new one in Cumbria as has been proposed? It seems to me that if you are going to burn the filthy stuff, it makes little difference to the environment whether it is imported or mined here. The same with buying North Sea gas from Norway when we could be extracting more of our own. 

I suppose in the long run, if left in the ground, it reduces what anyone anywhere can burn over the decades, but isn’t that just self-righteous self-sacrifice? We might as well use our own. It would surely be far less costly.

 

For  more about Tom Puddings (and there is lots) a good source is https://www.goole-on-the-web.org.uk/vol1/tom-puddings.html - the pdf link at the end of it is good, too.

Trainspotting

My first trainspotting book: Ian Allan ABC of British Railways Locomotives, Part 4 Eastern, North Eastern and Scottish Regions, Nos. 60000-99999, Summer 1959 Edition. 

It was my dad who first showed me the excitement of trains: they were all steam then; all that living and breathing weight and size. We went to the end of the platform, and he walked down the ramp and put a halfpenny on the track. The first train that came past squashed it smooth and flat, as big as a half-crown. It was one of the ways he entertained me on his Thursday half-days off. I would be about 5 or 6. 

There were smelly, express fish trains from Hull to London. You learned to stand well clear as they hurtled through, splashing fishy-smelling water all around. There were dirty goods vans and coal wagons, and sometimes a guards van of racing pigeons would arrive for release on the platform. In contrast, the Hull arm of the Yorkshire Pullman was luxurious in its umber and cream livery, shaded tables, and named coaches. It allowed businessmen two hours in London before returning, dining on the train both ways. It was bound initially for Doncaster where it joined with the Leeds arm. What a slick operation that must have been. 

   

Goole c1960 (from FBCCine on YouTube) (no sound)

A bit older, I would go to the station with friends. I showed them the coin trick. Nobody bothered you. You could stay all afternoon. 

About two hundred yards south of the station was another great place, the “Monkey Bridge”. No one seems to remember why it is so named, but possibly it was because originally the sides were made of strips of metal, which made people walking across look like monkeys climbing through trees.  

Three pairs of tracks ran beneath, the main lines to Doncaster and Wakefield, and the branch to the docks. Standing on the Monkey Bridge, you would see the railway gates open for a train in the station, see the smoke of the locomotive as it started to move, and then stand in the smoke as it passed beneath you, hair and clothes full of smuts. 

At the end of the platform. "Nottinghamshire" bound for Hull.

I liked to see the 4-4-0 D49 County or Hunt Class locomotives from Hull shed, named after counties and famous fox hunts: e.g. Nottinghamshire, The Derwent. They were shorter and more suited to the bends on the line than the more impressive 4-6-2 engines. We felt deprived not to have those, but we were better off than many. We did not realise how fortunate we were. 

For the bigger engines, you had to go to Selby station. Again, my dad took me there first, but later I rode the twelve miles there with friends by bicycle. You would not allow 12-year-olds to ride that busy road on bicycles now. 

Freight train entering Selby Station across the swing bridge.
Ben Brooksbank, Geograph.

Selby was then on the East Coast Main Line between Doncaster and York. Because of a swing bridge over the river at the end of the station, trains had to slow down to forty miles an hour, which gave you a good view of even the straight-through expresses. The ultimate was to see one of the streamlined ‘Streaks’, like Mallard. I think Bittern was the first I saw. 

The “Mess” (short for LMS), around a quarter of a mile south of the Monkey Bridge, was another good place. We named it so because of an ancient metal London Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) noticeboard warning about the dangers. So many summer afternoons we spent there waiting in the hot sun. The fence smelled of creosote. It was where trains from Leeds and the engine sheds were held to give priority to the London to Hull trains. Sometimes they would be held for more than ten minutes. I know because on Fridays in later years I would be on it, and my uncle would be on the London train. If he saw me he would thumb his nose through the window as he went through first. 

Through the 1960s we began to see more and more diesels, and I had to buy a book for those. At first it was mainly multiple units, and then locomotives. But, again, for the big ones, the ‘Deltics’, you needed to be at Selby. The first I saw was named Pinza. 

Sadly, the platform where my dad took me has been shortened and there is no direct London service. The carriage sidings are filled with houses, and the goods yard once piled with coal, with cars. Selby is a shadow of its former self, no longer on the East Coast Main Line which was diverted in the 1980s. Only trains to Hull now cross the swing bridge. Trainspotting is not what it was. 

Goole Station c1960, with the Monkey Bridge in the distance

Back In Time For The Weekend

New Month Old Post: first posted 2nd February, 2016

   

I see BBC2 have a new series starting tonight [in 2016]: Back In Time For The Weekend. Tonight the 1950s.

Some of us were in it long before presenter Giles Coren and the participants the Ashby-Hawkins family.

                    

 

Housewives’ Choice

This is where I lived until the age of 6. It seems unchanged except for replacement doors and windows, and the back bedroom has been divided to make a bathroom. That attic is where I played with my dad. 

The front door opened on to a passage past the front room and stairs, to the back room, with a single-storey kitchen behind. There was an outside toilet behind the kitchen, and we hung a paraffin lamp under the cistern to stop it freezing in winter. There was blue paraffin and pink paraffin, just different brands I think. They had the same distinctive smell, both liquid and alight. 

For hot water we had a gas ‘geyser’. It had blue flames underneath when in operation. For large quantities to fill the bath and laundry dolly tub we heated it on the gas cooker, or lit a fire in an outhouse (the “wash house”) at the end of the garden. A bit later we did get a stand-alone Ada washing machine with a wringer on top and a hose that hooked over the kitchen sink. 

Here we are at the back of the house, ‘tin’ bath against the wall. With no indoor bathroom or toilet you needed a ‘po’ under the bed. The music of the tinkling deepened with the content, especially with enamel metal ones, although I guess they were warmer than porcelain for women to sit on. Did couples have one each, or share? If that sounds primitive, my grandma still used an earth closet. ‘Pos’ were also useful in freezing weather. It was all very well for men; they could wee in the kitchen sink over the dirty dishes. Now we want en-suite bathrooms and a shower every day. 

Before I was old enough for school, I was at home with my mum. Dad went off to work, and Mum began clearing up the breakfast table and doing things in the kitchen (and of course emptying the ‘pos’). I would play on the back room floor. After starting school, the same routine continued during holidays, and after my brother was born and we moved to another house with the luxury of an indoor bathroom. 

At 10 past 9 each weekday, Housewives’ Choice came on the ‘wireless’ as we then called it. It played popular songs. I soaked them in. Before I was 10, I could sing the tunes and at least the first verse of possibly 100 contemporary popular songs. That does not include the older songs my dad sang, traditional tunes, or hymns and carols.  

Last month’s post about uncool singers had me wondering how many I still know. Over the following days they came tumbling out of my head until I was begging them to stop. Here are some I can still make a decent attempt at. I tend to remember the tunes, but not always the words or singers. 

For a start, there was the Housewives’ Choice signature tune. I can also do Workers’ Playtime, Two Way Family Favourites, and Children’s Favourites. Or how about the music Granada Television (then the commercial channel for the whole of the North of England) played before starting up at five o’clock? 

The earliest contemporary song I remember is The Ugly Duckling by Danny Kaye (1952). Danny Kaye also sang Wonderful Copenhagen (1953). I doubt my memories are from those years because I was very young, and they were played incessantly later. 

Also from 1953 is She Wears Red Feathers (Guy Mitchell). He also did Singing The Blues (1957) but I suspect it is the slurred and affected Tommy Steele U.K. version I remember. An older boy copied it as he rode his bicycle along the street. Tommy Steele also sang Little White Bull (1959). 

I mentioned Memories Are Made Of This (Dean Martin, 1955) and Magic Moments (Perry Como, 1958) in last month’s post. Perry Como also sang Catch A Falling Star (1957) and Delaware (1959). I am pretty sure I remember them from that time and still know most of the words. 

Alma Cogan was hugely popular in Britain in the 1950s. I can still do Where Will the Dimple Be, Twenty Tiny Fingers and Sugartime (all 1955) which are fairly awful. But I seem to recall her recording of the brilliant Love and Marriage (1956) being played a lot, even though it was Frank Sinatra that had the hit. Illusion; conclusion; institute; disparage: good for the vocabulary, too. 

Another awful song was Pickin’ a Chicken (Eve Boswell, 1955). Sadly I still know it.

Michael Holiday had a wonderfully rich voice, but died tragically young. I knew The Story Of My Life (1958) all the way through. Is that why I write what I write?  

The Beverley Sisters were also very popular. As well as Sisters (1954), they were well known for Little Donkey and Little Drummer Boy (1959). 

My mother liked to point out that David Whitfield was from Hull whenever he came on, but I could not bring to mind anything he sang. I am surprised to read he sang the theme tune for the TV series, The Adventures of William Tell (1958). Ronnie Hilton was also from Hull.

That’s over 20. There were so many more. This is the personal compilation of a child of the 50s. I had to stop somewhere. It was becoming painful. I can still sing them all. I made the list from memory and looked up other details later. Some were covers of American songs by British singers, and some the silly kind of songs that appeal to children. Commercial compilations of 1950s hits are very different. 

When older, I had a transistor radio. I listened to 208 Radio Luxembourg at night under the bedclothes (Radio Luxembourg circumvented the BBC monopoly and ban on advertising). One night there was a request for ‘Love Me Do’ by The Beatles. I’d never heard anything like it. It stuck fast in my head, and music changed for ever. Parents thought it rubbish, not that it troubled them much. It would be some years before you would hear it on Housewives’ Choice. 

Philately will get you nowhere (unless you’re Dennis J. Hanson)

New month old post: first posted 26th March, 2015

From when I was fairly new to Blogging, and often wrote very long posts. Yet it has had over 12,000 views, so I have left it unchanged. The original 70 comments are here, although most commenters (other than Kid - thankyou) seem now to have dropped off Blogger. 

 

The ads were irresistible: 

ALL FREE OVER 200 STAMPS PLUS THE FAMOUS PENNY BLACK & CAPE TRIANGULAR FACSIMILES The famous 1840 British “PENNY BLACK” and the 1853 “CAPE TRIANGULAR” facsimiles (originals worth about £45) plus a genuine dealer’s mixture of 200 unsorted stamps (Catalogued over 30/-.), all ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just ask to see our New Approvals. (Please tell your parents.)

This old PENNY RED and approx. 500 stamps for only 1/-. Here’s a super bargain that no collector can afford to miss! Send only 1/- today for this guaranteed and unsorted collection of about 500 stamps, often containing scarce and unusual stamps, plus this Great Britain 1d. Red issued 100 years ago. ... This very valuable offer ... is to introduce our Latest Approval Books. Please tell your parents when sending for Approvals.

This famous BLACK SWAN plus 213 stamps all FREE! The 213 are all DIFFERENT and include 14 Special Stamps (catalogued at over 10/-) such as the 80 year old British ‘Penny Lilac’. Whole collection is catalogued at over 45/-, yet it will be sent FREE to all who ask for our New Approvals. Please tell your Parents.

Wow! Two hundred FREE stamps! Five hundred for a shilling! ‘The Children’s Newspaper’, ‘Meccano Magazine’ and most comics were full of such offerings from a massed approval of stamp dealers – heaps of stamps free, or for just a few pence, if only you would ask to see their Approvals. The most prolific pedlars were the Bridgnorth Stamp Company and - undoubtedly the best because it was just along the road from where I lived - Dennis Hanson’s Philatelic Services of Eastrington. Some of his promotions took the form of a super stamp quiz. 

The quiz is from 1963 but for anyone who fancies submitting a late entry (at the time of writing I believed the business still existed) I’ve added my answer attempts below at the end. I suggest you increase the value of the 3d. stamp to take account of inflation (second class should do it), and oh yes, don’t forget to tell your parents.

Dennis Hanson started buying bulk stamps while still at school in Scarborough in 1935, sorting them into small packets, and selling them to his school friends and also through his father’s general store. He moved to Eastrington two years later and over the years has traded under a variety of names including Philatelic Services, D. J. Hanson, The Stamp Club and The Universal Stamp Company. He was still in business seventy-five years later although he has never gone online. Over this time, dozens of Eastrington ladies have found agreeable employment fixing stamps into Approvals booklets and posting them out to customers.

Dennis Hanson and his staff in 1993 (from Howdenshire History)

As one of those customers it’s not easy to explain the appeal of stamp collecting to the screen-fixated youngsters of today, yet it used to be among the most popular childhood hobbies for both girls and boys. You could spend hours in exaltation, sorting through piles of stamps, carefully separating them from their envelope corners in a bowl of water, and drying them out between sheets of blotting paper.

The attraction was of course in the sheer beauty of the stamps, their vivid colours and stunning art work, and the way they captured the imagination by association with the history and geography of the world - conflict in Europe, communist revolution, African exploration, colonial independence. Looking again at my old stamp album (having just retrieved it from the loft where it was in a brown paper parcel wrapped up long ago by my dad). I’m amazed to see how much time I must have spent drawing little maps and transcribing information about different countries.

Stamps from Aden, where my aunt and uncle lived for a time, overflowed their page very quickly

 

Dennis Hanson clearly had a great knack for marketing. The whole purpose of the give away offers was to entice you into spending your pocket money on his Approvals which were mouth-wateringly presented in little chequebook sized booklets. Even when you managed to resist and return them all unpurchased it wasn’t too long before another booklet arrived, and then another, and you had a job to stop them coming.

A wodge of approval booklet pages from which the stamps have been removed show that I didn’t resist. I spent a small fortune – around 60 empty pages with a total value approaching £5 (which would have a purchasing power of around £100 today, and more than double that in terms of earnings): “Very scarce set of 6 mint & used Albania 1917 Koritza Eagles 2/-”, “Complete fine-used set of 2 Hungary 1952 Railway Day (catalogued 1/6d.) 9d.”, “Handsome set of 6 mint Paraguay 1958 President Stroessner 1/6”. And then a page in red ink: 

Superb stamps given Free. They are not for sale they are FREE . . . Set of 3 unused Herm Island 1954 Triangular Sea-Birds, local stamps with a face value of 1/2d., from part of the United Kingdom. Now obsolete and scarce. . . . YES, ABSOLUTELY FREE OF CHARGE. If you purchase 5/- worth or more from this Approval Book you may take this page right out of the book and keep it. These grand stamps will add lots of value and interest to your collection! It’s our way of showing our appreciation of your valued patronage.

This doesn’t count yet more pennies expended at the corner shops that also plied philatelic produce in racks of cellophane packets.

Very soon, my spring-backed, loose-leafed Movaleaf Stamp Album, bought one afternoon from Clifford Moss of 31 Woodhouse Lane on a trip to Leeds with my dad, was bulging with stamps from all the old countries, many no longer in existence, such as “Jugo-Slavia”, the Weimar Republic of Germany, and British colonies such as Northern and Southern Rhodesia, and Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika. 

Still more interesting is my dad’s 1930s Triumph stamp album where among many other surprising things we find Queen Victoria’s head adorning stamps from the six Australian territories which issued stamps separately until 1913. It’s also surprising to note that my dad must have continued to collect stamps into his twenties and thirties because his album contains lots of Elizabeth II issues.

As with most people, my interest waned as I grew older, although losing myself in my album now, in reverie, I could easily imagine taking it up once more, becoming expert in a specific area, something unfashionable and politically incorrect, perhaps stamps of the British Empire, assimilating all the lessons from history they bring with them.

What began to turn me off was in fact the antics of the very same Dennis Hanson who so altruistically cultivated my interest in the hobby in the first place. His bulk packets of unsorted stamps contained far too many cheap and flimsy ones from far eastern countries, and a disproportionately high number portraying the grim bespectacled face of King Baudouin of Belgium who looked like the dad of one of my friends.

Even more unforgivable were the Approvals that weren’t really proper stamps at all. The Herm Island stamps mentioned above were one example, used only for a private postal service from Herm to the nearest official post office on Guernsey, and obviously printed as a commodity to sell to tourists. But it was the stamps of South Molucca that really annoyed me.

“These Stamps will never be catalogued” it said on the front of one booklet. On another “Stamps of the South Moluccas Republic and the Forgotten War. ... although not listed by Gibbons, they are undoubtedly of philatelic interest.” And although they may have looked magnificent with their colourful images of the mammals, birds, fish, butterflies and plants of a small group of Indonesian islands, the republic never gained independence. Some stamps were issued by a would-be government in exile in the Netherlands, and others were produced without authorisation by a German stamp dealer. None were ever postally used and no reputable dealer should ever have touched them. Four pages crammed-full of bogus Republik Maluku Selatan stamps in my album show I was well and truly taken in. 

So, Mr. Hanson, having worked up a fury over being diddled fifty years ago, I’ve decided to send in my quiz answers even if you are over ninety. I’ve just now posted them off. It will be interesting to see whether I get any response. Sadly I can no longer tell my parents.

My quiz answers: 1 – Twopenny Blue; 2 – No; 3 – British Guiana 1 cent Magenta; 4 – Yes; they are produced for collectors but many avoid them; 5 – Sweden; 6 – Yes, they bear the name Grønland; 7 – Yes; 8 – Hungary; 9 – Yes; 10 – No, they are for guidance only.

POSTSCRIPT  - No reply at all. Not even a facsimile.

SECOND POSTSCRIPT
In early August 2015 I received the following email:

My name is Charlotte Hanson I was googling my Grandad Dennis Hanson and came across your recent post. My Grandad sadly passed away on 29/07/2015. I know he would have loved to have read your post and give you a personal response to your quiz questions if it wasn't for his ill health this year. It makes us proud to find so much information about him on the Internet so thank you.

I replied to say how sorry I was to hear of her grandad's death, and thanked her for not jumping on my rather irreverent post. Dennis Hanson made a go of doing his own thing – an example for us all I think. A notice appeared in the Yorkshire Post and other regional newspapers, and an obituary on the East Yorkshire Local and Family History blog.


Other Hanson items (right click and open in new tab for full size):

In the original comments was a discussion of a box of around 200 unused approvals booklets sold on ebay in August 2017 for £227. Here are the images associated with the listing (right click to enlarge):

Farmwashing

I have a pre-school memory of going into town with Mum to do the shopping. She stacked it on and around me in the pushchair. 

In those days you had to shop for fresh food two or three times a week. No fridges for us until the 1960s. Meat kept only for so long in a mesh-fronted meat safe. Milk was delivered daily to the door. You had to buy from different shops: the grocer, the butcher, the greengrocer, and others. Nearly all produce was locally grown and in season. Life was simpler and less frantic. Most mothers did not work, and one ordinary wage could support a family. 

Now, of course, you can buy anything you want at any time of the year: fresh peas and new potatoes in Winter, strawberries at Christmas, and oranges at other times. You never saw blueberries at all. It is flown in cheaply from all over the world. 

Perhaps we expect too much. The toll on the environment is enormous, therefore many prefer to spend a little more and buy locally-grown, ethically-produced meat, fruit, and vegetables. To meet this need, supermarkets offer special brands with idyllic-sounding farm names on the front of the packet. It implies that the product is from those farms. 

This is deliberately misleading. Behind the image of quaint British family farms usually lies a reality of industrial-scale production, with much imported from abroad. Three of the biggest producers have a combined annual turnover of £4.8 billion. The ‘farm’ on the label, such as Tesco’s Redmere Farms, does not exist. It is just a marketing device. At the same time, the real farms this imitates are being driven out of business as their own products are devalued. Large numbers of small farmers fear having to give up their farms, and few believe that supermarket claims to support British farming reflect their actual behaviour.

This is in effect theft, stealing the goodwill of the small farmers. Such cynical manipulation of customers and consumers by big businesses of all kinds (we can probably think of others), with the pursuit of profit above all sense of morality, needs to stop. I can get very angry about it.  

We buy some of our own vegetables from Riverford who have created a website and four short videos with more about Farmwashing. You will never look at a supermarket vegetable aisle in the same way again. 

The website and videos are at www.stopfarmwashing.co.uk and also on YouTube:  

The Carnival Is Over

Yorkshire Square Eight

My last post created some nostalgia for village community life, now remembered only vaguely. Little remained beyond the nineteen-fifties. Much of what we know is second-hand. 

I could have said so much more. Pre-television, pre-car-ownership, pre-eating out, pre-foreign holidays, people created their own entertainment. There were dances, a drama group, a music and opera society, and sports teams. 

I remember the annual fairs on the village green, which my grandma oddly called the village “Fe-ast”, when parts of larger fairs stopped off on their travels around the country, possibly on the way to Hull Fair. The loud piping of fairground organs, the ring of slot machines, the smell of saucy hot dogs, the colour and blur of the rides, the force of bumping cars (dodgems), swings, roundabouts, rifles with rigged sights, brightly coloured wooden ducks swirling through torrents of water, excited voices, all above the hum of diesel generators, still take me back there, to the age of six or seven. 

Then there were the village carnivals, maybe not every year, fading away by my day. So much time, energy, organisation and creativity went into them. There was real talent in the village. The costumes were particularly impressive. 

The 1937 carnival programme named more than 150 participants, mainly children. Proceedings opened with a procession of Heralds, The Lord Chamberlain, the Crown bearer, Standard bearers and Pages, and the crowning of the May Queen. The Queen was presented with a bouquet, and her Courtiers and Maids of Honour received representatives of Britannia, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Peace. 

The main proceedings consisted of children’s dances. There was a Yorkshire Square Eight, Butterfly dancers, Milkmaids and Boy Blues, Spring Flower dancers, a nursery rhyme medley, Indians and Palefaces, Fairies and Elves, Sailors hornpipe and signals, and Jockeys. There were two maypole dances, the first creating a single plait and gypsy tent, the second a double plait, spider’s web and barber’s pole. Later there were larger group dances: a Circassian Circle and a “Mage on a Cree”. The day ended with a march led by the Queen, her Court and a band of toy soldiers. No doubt there were other adult activities well into the evening. I don’t have the pages naming the organisers. Nor do I know how the music was provided, or who designed and made the costumes. 

The programme lists the names of my mother, her brother and sister, and many of her “cousins” and friends. She danced in the Yorkshire Square Eight (above, top row, left). Her cousin, Jean, is in front of her. Jean would later lose a son in an awful railway accident. Another cousin, Alfie, is third from the right on the top row. Her friend, Kitty, is fourth from the right on the bottom row. I went with my mother to watch the Coronation on their television. 

Mother’s brother was an elf (below, top row, third from left). Her sister was a milkmaid (second picture below, top row, fourth from left). Her sister was the only one of four siblings to live to a good age. Other cousins and relatives appear in these pictures, too. 

Fairies and Elves

Milkmaids and Boy Blues

What does any of it matter now? The kids aren’t bothered. And those earlier children were soon to be shaken from their idyll, violently thrown into today’s world of conflict and events in far away lands. My uncle, the little boy in the elf outfit, died overseas on National Service in a tragic air force accident at only twenty-three. I can just remember him. He was clever; a plumber. He would have done well in the building boom. His widow, astonished that after sixty-five years without contact I still called her “Aunty R”, told me how she had arrived back on the bus from work to be told the awful news by my grandfather. My poor grandfather, who had lost all his own siblings when young, and now a son. And his own father would have told him how he was only one of two out of eleven to live beyond their thirties, their names and dates recorded carefully in the family bible. It was all so long ago. It’s just nostalgia.  

The Village

Village Dance Class, 1930s.
My mother (top, 3rd from right) is one of four “cousins” in the picture.
She would have been 100 years old today.

“It was a lovely place to grow up”, said Aunty Olga the last time we spoke. “The best anyone could want”. She talked of a High Street with no motor vehicles to stop you playing in the road, all the relations living nearby, and how everyone knew each other and were friends. There were shops with all you could want, and clubs and groups and things to do. The buses ran late so you could get back from the pictures in town. “Not like now”. 

“Aunty” Olga. We called them all “Aunty” or “Uncle", or if they were the same age as us “cousins”, no matter whether they were really great aunts, great uncles, second cousins, half-cousins, cousins once removed, or some other combination. It was simpler. There were loads of them. “Your mother was more of a sister than a cousin to me”, Aunty Olga said. 

I caught it right at the end, and don’t doubt her. I fetched milk from the farm dairy and talked to the pig in the butcher’s sty. I bought pop from the sweet shop, chips from the fish shop, rolls of gun caps for my cowboy pistol and foreign stamps for my collection near The Green. I marvelled at the old village water pump near the church and walked on my own the three-quarters of a mile along the river bank to my aunt’s smallholding at the ferry houses. I knew the local names that appeared on few maps: Gander’ill; Cock’orner; Cuckoo Park. 

A walk down the High Street with my grandma meant talking to everyone we passed. 

“Who was that?”  
“My cousin.”  
“And who was that?” 
“He’s my cousin too.” 

“How many cousins have you got?” 

I’d wish I’d not asked. 

“Well, there was Aunty Bina who had Blanche, Tom, Gladys, Lena, Olga, Fred, Ena, Dolly, Albert and Jack. She brought up our Jean as well, although her mother was really Ena. They had fish and chip shops all over.”

“Then there was Aunty Annie who married Uncle George, and had Mary, Fred, and Bessie.” She pointed to ‘M, F, and B’, scratched long ago into the bricks of number 88 (still visible today). 

“Do you mean Aunty Mary?” I asked. Aunty Mary had the prettiest face I’d ever seen. 

If Grandma was in the mood, she would go on to list the millions of children of uncles Fred, Bill and Horner, who had moved away to run a paper mill in Lancashire.  

All were prefixed “our”: our Fred, our Bessie, and our Mary. Aunty Olga’s children were our Linda, our Sandra, and our Gillian. It distinguished them from Aunts and Uncles who were not relatives at all, such as Aunty Annie ’agyard (3 syllables). What funny names some had. 

And that was only one of Grandma’s sides. The other was worse. 

Even more confusing, my mother’s Great Aunty Bina was married to my dad’s grandpa’s cousin, which meant I was doubly related to Blanche, Tom, Gladys, and the rest. 

I heard it so often I could recite it to my wife decades later: “Blanche, Gladys, Ena, Lena, Gina, Dolly, Molly, Mary, Bessie, Ella, Olga, Linda...”

“They sound like a herd of Uncle Bill’s cows,” she said. 

Uncle Bill (don’t ask), was from across the river and had married into the family. He said that if the Blue Line bus had not started running through the village, they would have all been imbeciles because of inbreeding. 

I went less and less as I grew into my teens, not realising it was coming to an end. It would never be the same again.