Patties

Tates Fish and Chip Shop in Rawcliffe High Street, 2000

I am trying to keep up with blogs and comments. It is becoming somewhat intermittent, but I am still here! 

Last week, Yorkshire Pudding mentioned patties, which are deep-fried battered potato cakes made and sold by fish and chip shops in East Yorkshire, but rarely else where. We had them in Goole, too, which was just over the river in the West Riding. He describes them as: 

“a staple option in most fish and chip shops in the East Riding of Yorkshire. I have never seen them for sale in Sheffield or Leeds. ... A patty is round - about 3.5 inches across and about 1.5 inches thick. It is made from mashed potato seasoned with sage and onion. Then it is dipped in a batter mixture before being deep-fried.” 

For me, it raised a question. A bit more about Georgina Pocklington’s family history is needed to explain. You may remember I wrote in an earlier posts that she had eight children with three different fathers, among them my grandma’s half-sister, Aunty Bina. 

Aunty Bina had ten children herself, i.e. my grandma’s half-cousins. She used to recite their names: 

“... there was Aunty Bina who had Blanche, Tom, Gladys, Lena, Olga, Fred, Ena, Dolly, Albert and Jack. ... They had fish and chip shops all over.”

You could say they had a fish and chip dynasty. It was founded by Aunty Bina’s husband, Tom Tate. Later, their youngest son Jack (born 1919) took it over, and my mother and other relatives helped in the shop when called upon. It still bears its name in Rawcliffe High Street, pictured in 2000. It has quite recently been renovated with a new white UPCV door and shop window, and a new sign in similar style, and has lost all its character. I don’t know whether it remains in the family. Jack Tate was known far and wide for the size of his fish. He used a Swan Vestas match box as a template.

I visited Jack around 2000, when working out that part of our family history. It was a privilege to see him. There were many he turned down. He remembered my mother helping in the shop. 

Many of Tom Tate’s children set up and helped each other open fish and chip shops themselves. So as well as Jack in Rawcliffe, there was one in Goole, one in Snaith, another in Retford, and, surprisingly, the eldest four children had shops in Rotherham. They were born in the 1890s, so had retired before 1970. We audited fish and chip shops when  I worked in accountancy, and you could see what good businesses they could be. 

[ADDED LATER] Tom Tate’s (junior) fish and chip shop in Rotherham is mentioned in Mike Marsh’s ‘Growing up in Goole, Volume 3’, although not by name. Mike Marsh was a childhood friend of Tom’s wife’s aunt, who arranged for them to stay with the Tates in Rotherham to see Donald Bradman and the Australian cricket team play Yorkshire at Sheffield in 1948. The Tates met them at Rotherham railway station, gave them unlimited fish and chips for tea, and took them to the theatre. After returning from Sheffield to Rotherham the following day, Brian’s “ever-generous uncle” bought them a real cricket bat and ball.

The ones in the Goole area certainly sold patties, but if there were once four fish and chip shops in Rotherham, with recipes originating in Rawcliffe, could you also once buy patties there, and can you still?

The AA Book

The Automobile Association Handbook, 1986-1987. I became a member when I bought my six-year-old blue mini in 1972. My dad joined around 1960. 

The Handbook was originally annual, then twice-yearly, and from the 1990s undated. I have seen later editions, but the date is only in the small print. Like others, I kept mine in the car and threw the old one away when a new one came out. This one found its way to the bookcase. 

It contained a wealth of useful information for motorists, such as tips on basic car maintenance, driving in winter, and road signs. It listed AA telephone numbers, recommended repairers, and hotels. It had road maps covering the whole country, and more detailed motorway maps showing all the junctions and service stations. You could get by pretty well without anything else unless you needed a larger-scale local map. I  used mine to navigate all over Scotland and elsewhere. 

It was always interesting to browse through the Gazetteer section, which gave details of every place in the country with a population above around 10,000. From this, we see that Goole in Yorkshire had a population of 17,127 (which would have excluded the local villages). Following Local Government reorganisation, it had moved from The West Riding of Yorkshire to become “the hub of Humberside”. It shows the telephone area dialling code as 0405 and the map grid reference. Markets were held on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, and there was a cattle market on Mondays. Goole is 20 miles from Doncaster, 27 from Hull, 26 from Scunthorpe, and 23 from York. A very rare error shows London as only 18 miles away, when it probably should read 188. We can see that Goole had one AA recommended hotel, the Clifton, which is a 2* hotel, and that Glews Garage was an AA approved repairer, and also then a Vauxhall agent. I am sure that previous editions showed further information, such as early closing day which was Thursday, but this practice had probably been discontinued by 1986. 

AA approved hotels were rated from one to five stars according to quality and services offered. 5* hotels, such as the Queens in central Leeds, were the best and most expensive. 

For bigger places, the Gazetteer showed local maps, such as for Hull, which had a population of 268,302, three 3* hotels and one 2*. These city centre maps were good enough to find my way to meetings and interviews in Durham, Leicester, Nottingham, Huddersfield, Edinburgh, and even central Manchester. 

The Handbook also showed road maps for the whole country. The example is  East and West Yorkshire from Huddersfield to Hull  (right click and open in new window to enlarge). By 1986, there were also junction-by-junction motorway maps. The example shows the corresponding part of the M62. Before the 1970s, there were few motorways in this region. I remember driving across the Pennines on the Western M62 for the first time, around 1973, and being awestruck by the astonishing grandeur. 

Again, I think the Handbook once included details discontinued by 1986. I seem to remember lists of vehicle registration plates. For example, vehicles ending WW or WY would have first been registered in the eastern part of West Yorkshire. But one detail still included is the mileage chart, which is something else I loved to ponder. It gives the distance from Aberdeen to Hull by road as 361 miles, and from Inverness to Penzance as 723. 

There have been many changes since the handbook was published. Among them, many of the named hotels have gone, Goole does not hold cattle markets, and Glews Garage no longer stands proudly with its name in iconic huge letters on the roof beside the M62. Goole, traditionally in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and then moved to the ridiculous Humberside, is now in East Yorkshire, even though historically in the West Riding. However, the motorway goes no nearer to Hull, despite considerable road improvements since I started driving.

As with so many of these artefacts, they set off unexpected chains of thought not considered for years, but rather than create an overly-long post, I will save them for another.    

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. 

Le Tour de Yorkshire

New Month Old Post: first posted 28th April 2017. This event no longer runs, but here is what I wrote about it in 2017.

Improved and original logos

 

In the early nineteen-sixties, I remember going along to Boothferry Bridge to watch The Milk Race pass by – a national cycling event also known as the Tour of Britain, sponsored by the now defunct Milk Marketing Board. Some blokes on racing bikes flashed past amidst the everyday traffic and it was all over in less than a minute. It wasn’t worth the bother. Cycling must be the sport with the biggest disconnect between doing (riding a bike is fun) and watching (tedious). I’ve never been to a cycling event since.

 
So it’s irritating to find the Tour de Yorkshire imposed on us this weekend, with roads closed most of the day bringing maximum disruption to our activities, just to see people on bicycles for a couple of minutes. I’m keeping well away.

And they call it “le Tour de Yorkshire”. What pretentious twaddle! Et le moins dit à propos de la côte de Silsden et de la côte de Wigtwizzle, mieux c'est.*

Surely, if it’s in Yorkshire, shouldn’t it be called t’baiyk race roun’ t ‘roo-ads?

[* The less said about “côte de Silsden” and “côte de Wigtwizzle” the better.] 

Georgina Pocklington

Another old photograph: this from around 1893. It shows the wonderfully named Georgina Pocklington (born 1857) and her mother Elizabeth (born 1835). They lived nearly all their lives in the villages of Rawcliffe and Cowick, Yorkshire. They are my Great-Great and Great-Great-Great grandmas on my mother’s side. 

Elizabeth and Georgina Pocklington, c1893

When my uncle, the farmer who married into the family, said mischievously that if the Blue Line bus had not started running through Rawcliffe, they would all have been imbeciles because of inbreeding, Georgina and Elizabeth illustrate what he had in mind. Through them, I find myself related and doubly-related to no end of people in the villages. I hasten to add that I found no consanguinuity.  

I will say little more about Elizabeth because she complicates things enormously. Suffice to say her grandfather fathered 21 children. No one I knew remembered much from before her time, but there were second- and third-hand tales from after. For me, they give substance to the raw names and dates. 

Georgina had an unimaginably difficult and short life which illustrates how hard it could be in the nineteenth century. It can’t have been a very happy life. She had a difficult childhood, illegitimate children, a scoundrel of a husband who deserted her, and she died long before her time. 

Her mother was unmarried, and her brother - her only sibling - died aged 11. Her mother then married a widower named James Tasker. Although James was later supportive of Georgina and her children (he may have paid for the family photographs), she was left with her grandparents through childhood. 

James Tasker was my Great-Great Grandfather’s brother. When Georgina’s mother became Elizabeth Tasker, family members later came to think that Georgina was also a Tasker, whereas she was not related to them at all except through her mother’s marriage. It caused much confusion. 

Even more confusingly, one of Georgina’s descendants had children with one of James’ from his first marriage, which made their later children both half-siblings and 4th cousins. That may be a detail too far, but it begins to show the complexities involved.   

Georgina had eight children: two before marriage, four during, and two more after her husband deserted her. The first, Sabina, born when Georgina was 18, was said to have been by the son of a Leeds doctor with whom she went into service. I suppose that pregnant servants were commonplace in the 1870s. I find my mind racing to imagine the goings on in the house. The doctor’s son would not have carried any blame, of course. 

Georgina then married George Coulson in 1879, and had four children. I spoke to their grandson, then 89, in 2003. He said that George Coulson was a big fellow, a bit rough looking, who earned extra money through boxing, taking on all-comers in travelling fairground boxing booths. He accumulated enough to go to a world heavyweight championship fight in America around 1890. He stayed. It was thought he may have had another family in Texas. When Georgina’s last two children were born in 1894 and 1897, no father was named. I remember their descendants as having light hair and scary pale eyes. I was terrified of two boys just a little older than me. 

Georgina died from Erysipelas in 1902, aged 45. This was a common and very nasty streptococcal infection causing a swollen, bright-red skin lesion, most often spreading over the nose and cheeks. Infection was usually through a cut and could lead to septicaemia (or blood poisoning as it would then have been called). Penicillin now clears it up in a few days. The youngest children were brought up by their older sisters.  

It is not clear when George returned, but it was certainly before the 1920s. None of the family would have anything to do with him. I think they probably held him responsible for their mother’s early death, leaving her in poverty, with all the difficulties and illness it brings. They said he had gone off and left then when they were young children, so they were not going to help him now. Sabina would not have him in the house. He had to sleep on the steam room floor of his brother’s farm. He died aged 92 in 1947, in Selby workhouse. 

Most of Georgina’s children had many children of their own, yearly all in Rawcliffe. I previously wrote about walking along the High Street with my grandma, who described almost everyone we passed as her “cousin”, although they may have been second cousins, half cousins, or similar. She recited their names so often I can still do it too: “There was Aunty Bina, and she had Blanche, Tom, Gladys, Lena, Olga, Fred, Ena, Dolly, Albert, and Jack”.

Now consider this. Sabina’s husband was my great-grandfather’s cousin on my father’s side. That makes their children doubly-related to me through both my father’s family and my mother’s. This is what happens when five-eighths of your ancestry is from the same small area. 

If the Blue Line bus ...  

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. 

Please Help The Children

Among my oldest photographs is this fascinating image, probably from 1907. The pretty girl marked with an X is my lovely grandma, or Nanna as we called her, who would then have been 11 or 12. I previously wrote about her here.  

I do not know the names of the others in the picture. The surly young lad lounging suspiciously against the wall behind them would probably be questioned these days, but that is just how ordinary people would have looked in their working clothes then. 

Like her father and many others at that time, Nanna was an active churchgoer: Methodists. The group are collecting for charity: the placard shows pictures of impoverished children, some with crutches, and says “Twelve branches - London, Provinces, Canada” followed by the names of clergymen. “Please help the children to-day”. The light-coloured box appears to say “Children’s Home Appeal 1907”. 

I can identify the location precisely. This second picture, also from the early 20th century, shows it to be at the top of the underpass - we called it the subway - outside Goole railway station. I am informed that the chimney in the background was that of Short’s ginger beer factory in Pasture Road, long gone. 

The pub on the far left is The Station Hotel. This can be seen more clearly in these two later photographs from the 1950s or 1960s judging by the cars. In one, the wall inside the top of the subway is visible. There was also another subway at the other side of the road. Pedestrians did not always use them, though. 

Together, the photographs identify the location of my grandma’s group beyond doubt. 

Today, the subways remain, but the railway station (I refuse to call it a train station) has been rebuilt, the sidings and goods yard sanitised and pedestrianised, and the railway gates replaced by half-barriers. The Station Hotel, a scene of my misspent youth, has been converted into flats. The part of the wall where the young lad stood remains, but beyond, where my grandma’s group were, has been demolished. 

No one from the 1907 picture can still be alive. My grandma died aged 58 in 1954. She would have been a strong positive influence; she was caring, intelligent, easy to talk with, and full of sound advice. Her mother died in 1910 when she was 13, she lost friends during the First World War when she was in service in Southport, Lancashire, she brought my father through polio and his sister through rheumatic fever which left her with a heart condition, and lived through the Second World War. Apart from possibly a couple of quite distant cousins, I am now the only one who can directly remember her, and they are only vague impressions. 

Lastly I ask - now old and chill -
If aught of her remain unperished still;
And find, in me alone, a feeble spark,
Dying amid the dark. 

Haunted Houses

New Month Old Post: first posted 1st March, 2016
It could do with being shorter. Since originally posted, the 1921 Census has become available

The 1939 Register
 
Somewhat obsessively, I have been an active researcher of my family history for over twenty years now, buying countless genealogical resources and subscriptions. Along the way have been some surprising and even astonishing findings, as well as many mundane, but in February when the findmypast site released a new resource, The 1939 Register, I experienced an entirely new reaction.

Rather like a census, The 1939 Register records the names and addresses of everyone living in England and Wales on the 29th September, 1939, just after the outbreak of the Second World War. It did not go into as much detail as a normal census, but was carried out in a similar way for wartime purposes: to issue national identification and ration cards, to administer conscription, and to plan population movements in the event of mass evacuation. It was later used by the National Health Service at its inception in 1948. As no census was taken in 1941, and as the records for the 1931 census were destroyed by fire during the war, the Register is the most complete survey of the population between the as yet unreleased censuses of 1921 and 1951.

What makes it different for me is that, as a snapshot taken just over a decade before I was born, The 1939 Register is almost contemporary. Other population surveys such as the 1911 census were from so long ago that just about everything has since changed, which will also be true of the 1921 census when they finally let us see it, but much of the information recorded in The 1939 Register remained unchanged into the nineteen-fifties. Many of the same people were at the same addresses as I remember them. If my parents were still around they would be fascinated.

I can see the two-bedroom terraced house my parents rented from 1946, where I first lived. It is occupied by a canal tugman and his family. They had brought up six children there. Wherever did they put them all? 

The people next door are the same as I remember, as are those at the corner shop next-door-but-one. Across the road is the same gentlemen’s hairdresser, then newly married. He would remain there with his wife, childless, for the next thirty years. It was where I used to be sent for my hair cut – short back and sides the only style on offer – every three or four weeks throughout the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties. Once old enough to go unaccompanied, I would wait my turn in the smoky den of his barber’s shop (it would never have been called anything so epicene as a salon) trying to make sense of the swaggering conceits of the older customers. From time to time the hairdresser’s timid wife would materialise at the through-door from the house to leave a cup of tea, and then dematerialise as silently as she had arrived. 

In the mid nineteen-fifties we moved to a new address, up in the world to a small semi-detached house. The 1939 Register shows it occupied by the shipwright’s family we bought it from. The adjoining neighbours were still there when we moved in, father, mother and grown-up children. The mother and father would die in the nineteen-sixties but one of their daughters would remain in the house, unmarried, for the next sixty years. The neighbours at the other side are a young widow still in her thirties and her elderly mother. They too were still there when we moved in. The mother died soon afterwards, but the widow remained long after we had left until she died at an advanced age in the nineteen-nineties. She became a close family friend. Up and down the street are so many other familiar names: the master mariner; the butcher; the mother and her daughter who in turn became the mother of the boys we played with when they visited their grandma. 

The Register is more flexibly searchable than almost any previous resource. Whereas the censuses, for example, can be trawled only in limited ways, The 1939 Register search is so powerful you can find almost anyone, even when they are partially mistranscribed in the index. The main limitation is that you are not supposed to be able to see anyone born less than a hundred years ago, although often you can. In most households, such as my father’s parents’, the children are blacked out, and only the names of the adults are shown. But despite being born in the nineteen-twenties, my mother can be seen with her parents, her name amended after marriage, a result of parts of the Register continuing in use with the National Health Service until 1991, after she had died.

You can find just about any house built before 1939. In Leeds, I can see the elderly couple I lodged with in 1970 at the same Kirkstall address in 1939, although then they are not elderly. The husband is a railway clerk. The address also has one ‘closed’ line for their daughter who would later marry a corporation surveyor and have one son. At other places I lived, much later in some cases, the 1939 residents had moved on long before my time. One through-terrace is occupied by an engineer’s turner and his wife, both born in the eighteen-seventies. Another is occupied by a wool foreman with his wife and four children. The only back-to-back I lived in is the home of a shoe repairer and his wife, both in their mid-twenties. At yet another mid-terrace there are nine residents: a couple born in the eighteen-seventies and seven grown-up children. The father and one of the sons are asphalters. Again, how did they fit them all in?

Some houses I have known were larger. In the Levenshulme area of Manchester, in the early nineteen-eighties, I lived in a three-bedroom, bay-windowed terrace with front and back gardens. Next door lived a widow who in 1939 is there with her husband and mother-in-law. The husband, the neighbours and the occupants of my address have mainly clerical occupations. I still have some of the next door neighbour’s late husband’s drill bits and an ancient tobacco tin full of wire staples which she gave me when clearing out her shed. The hardware was probably there in 1939 but the Register lists only people. I lived in yet grander surroundings in the Avenues area of Hull. In my day they were already what are now called HMOs (Houses in Multiple Occupation) but in 1939 they were occupied by the likes of Ministers of Religion, newspaper reporters, merchants, lecturers, collectors of taxes and people of private means. 

Like having the gift of premonition, if you are near my age or older, you look through The 1939 Register and find you knew or can remember so many of those named in it. You know what happened to them, who they married, who their children were, and when they died, or at the very least, what became of their houses. Do they return as ghosts to light their coal fires in the mornings, the husbands going off to work and the children to school as they must have done so many times? Do the wives cook and clean for their return? Do they relive their happy days, sad days, sunny days, rainy days, Easters, Christmases, an holidays? Will we?

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

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):