The Hillman Is Waiting

A third post about the Automobile Association. The first two are here and here. 

Detailed route maps were another service offered by the AA. You can still get them online, but in the 1960s they came in paper booklets setting out your route from beginning to end, junction-by-junction. This old example was on the internet. 

From around 1960, we began to hire cars for holidays. We went all over the country: Barmouth in Wales, Edinburgh and Aberdeen, Cromer in Norfolk, Kent, Devon. Finding your way was not then straightforward. It was before motorways, and you had to go through several large city centres. We always sent for an AA route map. Mum sat in the front seat turning the pages and reading the directions out loud. Sooner or later it ended up in confusion. 

In 1960, we headed for Christchurch, Dorset. “Where’s that?” Grandpa asked. “Near Southampton,” Dad told him. “You’ll never get there, son,” he said. He was almost right. We got hopelessly lost going round in circles in Leicester, despite the route map. “You are one of many,” said a bemused man sitting on his front garden wall watching the traffic.

The hire cars were always Hillmans from Glews Garage, then a Rootes Group dealer. The Hillman Minx was a lovely car, respectable and middle class. Dad liked them because they are mentioned in a poem by John Betjeman, which tells of a lifestyle we could never even hope to aspire to: “The Hillman is waiting, the light’s in the hall, The pictures of Egypt are bright on the wall”. But we could have a Hillman. 

So, it was no surprise when, in 1963, Dad collected a Hillman Super Minx from Glews as usual. I noticed almost straight away that it was brand new, but he did not let on immediately we had bought it. Mum had one of the biggest shocks of her life. 

I can’t work out where we went for that first trip; I think it was south. A few days later, I noticed one of the pedals was wet, and it turned out to be leaking clutch fluid. Directed by the AA Handbook, we soon found the nearest Rootes Group dealer who carried out a temporary repair until the master cylinder could be replaced at home 

Later that year we went to Aberdeen, and the following year to Inverness and Loch Ness. Here it the Super Minx (the blue one) at Jedburgh on the way to Scotland in 1964. Next to it is an earlier model, an ordinary Hillman Minx.

Dad was incredibly trusting with that car. When, a few years later, I learnt to drive, be let me borrow it on Saturdays for trips with friends to places such as Leeds and York. I will now admit to driving rather fast sometimes, but I never so much as even scratched it, although once or twice it was close. Perhaps he hoped I would so he could have a new one. It was becoming a bit of a rust bucket by then. 

Cars did not last long in those days, but the Hillman Avenger that later replaced it seemed cheap and tinny in comparison. The chap who bought the Super Minx kept it going for another 5 or 6 years. Dad gave up on Hillmans after that, and his next cars were a Triumph and a Morris. The Rootes Group was bought by Peugeot Talbot, and I stupidly bought a Samba, the worst car I ever had. 

Airmyn and Rawcliffe Hill

This is not so much about railways, but about an area I knew well which a railway ran through.  

I was on the Rawcliffe bus with my mother, looking across the fields at a nearby metal bridge. It was a bright, sunny day, long before I started school. She would not yet have been 30. 

“Is that Boothferry Bridge?” I asked. 

“No, that’s the railway bridge.” 

A few minutes later I asked again. 

“Is that Boothferry Bridge?” 

“No, that’s the railway bridge.” 

I asked three or four times. A woman in the seat opposite looked at us and smiled.

The bridge carried the Goole to Selby railway line across the River Aire near Rawcliffe. It was a similar structure to Boothferry Bridge, but that is a road bridge across the River Ouse a couple of miles downstream. I had probably just learnt its name. 

On 21st May, I included this evocative picture of a rather ancient train arriving at Goole around 1960. More recently, I mentioned the Flanders and Swann song “The Slow Train”, which contains the line “No one departs and no one arrives, From Selby to Goole, from St. Erth to St. Ives.” 

It turns out that the train pictured is the very same Selby to Goole train. It travelled back and forth between the two towns for much of the day, and was sometimes called “the Goole and Selby Push and Pull” because it ran tender-first in one direction, so did not need to turn round. You can find pictures of the same engine and coaches at the Selby end. 

That railway holds some of my earliest memories. Although I travelled on the line only once, the bridge, the railway track, and the area nearby form a backdrop to my childhood. I passed often and always looked out for them. 

My one trip on the line was when, still very young, Dad took me to see the powerful East Coast Main Line locomotives that then passed through Selby. I suspect he wanted to see them more than I did. 

The Goole to Selby route was a single line track, about 10 miles long. I learnt the station names: Goole, Airmyn and Rawcliffe, Drax Hales, Barlow, and Selby. I remember being fascinated as Dad explained how the drivers had to possess a token to enter each section of track, and watching the tokens being handed over by the signalmen. Tokens were like large metal keys, with sturdy wire loops so they could be handed arm to arm, with minimal risk of drops. There was only one token for each length of track, which meant that successive trains had to travel in opposite directions. I think there were two sections of track, with a changeover point half way to allow trains to pass. The driver and signalman had to swap two tokens simultaneously without stopping, giving one and receiving one, not an easy procedure. When we went, trains were still steam hauled before diesel multiple units were brought in.

The line pretty much bisected Goole and Rawcliffe by Airmyn and Rawcliffe Hill, where the road ran over the railway. It was a local landmark, the countryside being so flat. I passed at least once a week. 

I liked the big lorries that came over the hill through Rawcliffe from the West to call at the nearby Woodside Café. At times, there could be 20 from all over the country parked there. Even after the M62 was built, drivers made the short detour to call in. 

Mum liked to walk to the adjacent Bluebell Wood from which it took its name, to see and pick the abundant bluebells. We did not know better then. I remember going on another warm sunny day, also pre-school, past the distinctive Glews Garage, and the row of houses known as White City that were built for returning war veterans.

Airmyn and Rawcliffe station was next to the hill. For a time, Dad had a customer who lived in one of the station cottages. I liked to sit and wait for him when he took me to Grandma’s. “What a fantastic place to live,” I thought. Around the same time, my mother’s sister and her husband rented a smallholding nearby across the main road. I liked visiting there too. They had cows and chickens. 

This is Airmyn and Rawcliffe station in the early 1960s. The stations were all made of wood. 

Working late one Friday night in a thunderstorm in the dark, Dad arrived home very shaken. He had pulled up in his van behind a car that had stalled half way up Airmyn and Rawcliffe Hill, and was immediately hit from behind by another van that had failed to stop in time. He eventually made it home with the rear of his van smashed in, its contents ruined, and a painful back. I think it was one of the reasons he decided to retire a year or two later.  

Even after the railway closed completely, Airmyn and Rawcliffe Hill remained for many years, with a tricky bend in the middle and the empty track bed running underneath. I became quite skilled at drifting round the bend in my Mini Van without slowing down. Eventually, the road was levelled, but the local landmark remained beside the new section of road, still with a tricky bend, empty track bed, and silent and unused railway bridge across the fields. 

The Goole to Selby Line had only a short life; in fact, it has now been closed longer than it existed. It opened in 1910 and closed in 1964 as part of the Beeching cuts. It never attracted the expected goods traffic, and passenger numbers were low. 

This football special for Selby Town supporters travelling to a match against Goole during the 1950s was an exception. Those were the days when if you needed a longer train, you just got more coaches out of the carriage sidings. 

Much of the track has now been taken over by the A645 from Goole to Drax and Selby, which uses the railway bridge, and cuts about 8 miles off the previous route via Rawcliffe and Snaith. All that remains of the site of Airmyn and Rawcliffe Hill is a roundabout. The station cottages are still there, but unrecognisable. Unless you know, you would never imagine there had ever been a station there or any railway at all. Glews Garage stood prominently just off the M62 for many years, with its name on the roof in large red lettering, but has now gone, and White City is no longer white. It is good to see the Woodside Café still in business beside the wood, but few lorries stop there now, and I suspect there are no more bluebells.  

I still look for all of them, though. 

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. 

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?

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”

Georgina Pocklington’s Terrible Legacy

Another old photograph. It shows my maternal grandparents, her sister and husband, and four of their children, on a lovely day on the beach at Bridlington on the Yorkshire coast around 1936. Apart from the clothes, it could be this year. And, apart from the two men, all are descendants of Georgina Pocklington who I wrote about in June. You may recall she died aged 45, of what was essentially a poverty-related illness, a few years after her husband deserted her. She also left us a terrible legacy. 

The happy, smiling woman on the left is my grandma, and the bald man on the right my grandpa. She was born in 1899, and he in 1901. “She baby snatched him”, he said. Previously, she had been engaged to another he died in the war. My grandpa was just too young to serve. They would have been around 35 and 37 in the picture, but look older. Grandma went white very young, and like many of his family, Grandpa lost his hair early. 

The dark-haired woman at the back is my Grandma’s sister, Aunty Gina (named after Georgina Pocklington), with her husband in front wearing shorts. I liked them enormously, and have written about collecting loose road chippings on my tricycle for him to make a new front door step, and when older going after school to watch television. They would help anyone. He made new pelmets for us, and kept an eye on the house when we were away. They were a happy and contented couple. 

There are two children from each couple. The curly-haired girl next to my grandpa is my aunt, aged about 4. She is called Aunty Bina elsewhere in this blog (Aunty Bina’s Farm). In front of her is Uncle Owen, her older brother. The others, front right, are their cousins: the girl is Aunty Olga who in an earlier post described their village as a lovely place to grow up; I know much less about the boy, except he had 5 children and moved away. Not present is my mother, possibly looking after the family shop, nor her youngest brother who had yet to be born. 

Georgina Pocklington left us a legacy of cancer. I know it was her because she had children by three different fathers, and it appears in all three lines of descent. It could have come further back through the Pocklington family, but I suspect it was from Georgina’s unknown father. It would cost hundreds of pounds to obtain the death certificates to be more sure, but even that might be inconclusive because we would need to go back before registration in 1837. 

The women tend to get breast cancer around the age of 60, like my mother and her mother’s mother, or the men or the women tend to get bowel cancer slightly older, like my grandma’s cousin and son. Those who escape are prone to environmental cancers, like me in cigarette-smoky offices, houses, buses, cinemas, and pubs, and polluted 1970s Leeds; and one of Olga’s daughters who ran pubs for many years. Some have the misfortune to be affected much earlier, like my brother who got bowel cancer in his thirties, and one of Olga’s granddaughters who developed breast cancer at the shocking age of 30. 

Not everyone succumbs. My grandma suffered a stroke at 73, and both girls in the picture lived to a good age, Bina to 81 and Olga to 86. You can think the illness has missed a line, but then it crops up again unexpectedly a generation or two later. One of Bina’s daughters, i.e. my cousin, has just been diagnosed with breast cancer at 61, as was another of Olga’s daughters. 

When Bina dies, I wrote to Olga to tell her, and she telephoned me twice the same day, forgetting she had phoned once already. Foolishly, I told her, which distressed her. I wish I had simply talked with her again. It was the last time we spoke. 

Without getting into the complexities of the family tree, likely deaths can be seen in the descendant lines of Georgina Pocklington’s children to three different fathers before, during, and after her marriage. Another of grandma’s cousins, who was around the same age as my mother, died from breast cancer around the same time, and one of her nephews who was a few years older than me died of bowel cancer 7 years ago. Aunty Gina, the dark-haired woman in the picture, lived only to 67. Her husband, very distressed, survived her by just a few months. 

In a line of descendants from another cousin who moved to Horwich in Lancashire, the illness is widespread. One, a senior nurse, said some years ago that she thought there must be a rogue cancer gene in the family. But geneticists who have looked at it maintain there is insufficient evidence. 

Coming back to the picture, my grandfather’s family have not enjoyed better luck, although this is really for a different blog post. His father was one of just three from eleven to live beyond their early thirties, and he lost a sister in infancy and an older brother in the First World War, leaving him the only sibling. He then dies of a sudden heart attack in his fifties, as did both the son born after the picture and a grandson, in their thirties. And, Uncle Owen, who I just remember, he died in a military accident while on national service.   

I find it astonishing that one picture, a snapshot from a very different time, reminds us of so much.  

What a feeble, sickly lot we are. 

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?

Fixing A Hole

New Month Old Post: first posted 7th February, 2015. A rather contrived piece about how the Beatles ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ accompanied my DIY jobs through the years. This piece was published in The Guardian newspaper (second item on the page linked here).

Fixing a Hole by the Beatles 

“I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in /
And stops my mind from wandering / 
Where it will go”

1968: A-level examinations year. We moved house and I was allowed to decorate my new bedroom as I wanted, and listening to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on my reel-to-reel tape recorder I covered the flowery wallpaper a responsible dark blue and irresponsibly failed my A-levels. I’m not sure which my mum thought worse, the room colour or the exam results, but after I left for an office job in Leeds, the flowery wallpaper returned.

1970: “Painting the room in a colourful way.”
 
To the tape of Sgt. Pepper, I painted the walls of my rented room an adventurous orange and unadventurously stayed for seven years, ignoring my mum’s frequent hints about the dreadful colour.

1978: A mature student in Hull. With Sgt. Pepper loud in stereo through my Akai tape deck, Leak amplifier and massive Wharfedale speakers, I emulsioned the room an impulsive dark red and unimpulsively got a first, despite living with such a dismal colour my mum said.

1990: “Filling the cracks that ran through the door”

In a good career in Nottingham, I at last meet someone who appreciates my interior design skills. I moved in with my old stereo and tape of Sgt. Pepper and mended the doors and window frames. I like to think my mum would have been impressed too but sadly by then it was too late. We sold the house and moved back to Yorkshire.

1993: Sgt. Pepper is now on a cheap cassette player as we paper our bedroom ceiling using the two chairs relay method. Standing one behind the other, the person nearest the wall sticks one end of the pasted wallpaper to the ceiling and the person behind sticks the next bit. The first person then moves with chair behind the second, and sticks up some more, and so on, right across the room. We both end up slippery and sticky, with more paste on us than on the paper, which slowly detaches itself and drops down.

2015: “Taking my time for a number of things that weren’t important yesterday.”

I only hear music in the car these days. Sgt. Pepper comes on and reminds me that now the kids are grown up we need to re-paper the bedroom ceiling which has cracked under the weight of all their junk – and mine – up in the loft. I wonder if the tape deck, amplifier and speakers still work?

Akai 4000 DS Tape Deck, Leak 3200 Tuner Amplifier and Wharfedale Glendale Speakers

Jokes

Some have very good memories for jokes. They can reel them off one after another seemingly for hours. Professional comedians such as Ken Dodd and Bob Monkhouse could keep going all day. 

On the other hand, I have always struggled to remember jokes. But just as with memorable things people have said, as I wrote in the last but one post, I can remember quite clearly when and where I heard the few I do remember, and who told them. Again, I suspect this short list (which contains mild bad language but nothing too unseemly) reveals a lot about me. 

This came from Brenden in the shared house in Leeds, about 1973. 
A man walked into a public lavatory and slipped on a large slick of urine on the floor, and landed on his back in it. 
He stood up soaking wet. 
A second man then came in, slipped in the same way, and also ended up on his back in the pool of urine. 
“I just did that,” the first man said. 
“You dirty bugger,” said the second man. “You should get it cleaned up.”

I like these wordplay transposition jokes. This was from PC, another in the shared house around the same time. 
What is the difference between a prostitute and a bumpy road? 
One knackers your tyres. The other tires your knackers. 
A similar one, from my brother while he was at university, involves a bad marksman and a constipated owl. The bad marksman shoots but can’t hit. 

Here is one from the radio while I was waiting in the car for my wife about 20 years ago. It was told by Clement Freud on the programme ‘Just A Minute’. I consider it a perfect joke, with a surprise punch line, and an inbuilt logic that creates a wonderful image. I never tire of this one. 
How does a blind parachutist know when he is near the ground? 
The dog’s lead goes slack. 

My wife does not have a good memory for jokes, either. I suppose we place more value on our own humour. But here is one she does remember. 
What do you call someone who used to like tractors? 
An extractor fan. 

That, sadly, is the paltry sum total of what I can dredge out of my head at this moment. I won’t be applying to go on Jokers Wild. 

Wise Words

Words echo through the years. I hear and remember them as if it were today. The written word can be as memorable. Here are some that stayed with me, the ones that come first to mind, which probably say as much about me as their speakers or writers. Do any resonate with you, or do you remember others?   

You know very well John that men are afraid of living alone. 

(JB, English Literature Teacher on the evening class I took when retaking Advanced Level exams in my mid-twenties. After the course ended, John (another student) and I went with him for a drink, and he was complaining that creative output declines or ends after marriage, as had happened to him. John asked him why he had got married then.) 

It takes you ten years before you realise how crap you are. 

(Tim Keech, Hull guitar teacher. It applies to other skills as well, from computer programming to blogging. My own variation is: No matter how good you think you are, there is always someone better. I used to say this to the computing students. Another variation is: The more you know, the more you realise you don’t know. Or as the friend I call Gilbert in this blog put it: You know fuck all Tasker. He was very astute.)

The motorcycle you are maintaining is yourself. 

(Slightly misquoted from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Again, it applies to almost anything in which you are so deeply immersed it becomes therapeutic and cuts out all other concerns. This was something else I used to tell computing students.)

If those countless millions began to see the possibilities he saw and were then frustrated, there might be hell to pay. And they have been frustrated. 

(Ted Simon in Jupiter’s Travels, an account of his journey round the world 1973-1977 on a motorbike, observing the different living standards between rich and poor countries. He was right.) 

You always fall on your feet, don’t you. 

(My mother after I scraped six Ordinary Level exam passes at school, allowing me to progress post-16 into the Sixth Form. She knew how little work I had done.)  

I’ve got more common sense in my little finger than you have in your whole body. 

(My mother during her final illness, as my impractical dad struggled to erect bean poles, a job she had always done but no longer could. He usually responded with Aren’t I lucky to have married such a practical wife! But I could have strangled him when he visited one day to find me with the floorboards up, channels cut in the walls, wiring neatly laid out, as I was installing some new spur sockets in the bedroom. Aren’t you lucky to have married such a practical wife! he said.)

Always make sure your driving wheels are on firm ground.

(My dad on driving on muddy ground, but it seems to have wider meaning. Another useful tip was: In ice and snow, drive in the highest gear possible so as not to spin the wheels.)

This is the life. 

(The friend I call Neville in this blog, sometimes laying on the ground in hot sum out in the countryside with his shirt off, but more often up a mountain sipping a cup of coffee from a thermos flask, hiding from driving rain and sleet behind an inadequate rock, exhausted. He is blessed with the gift of always remaining cheerful.)  

It’s a bugger, i’n’t it. 

(The family friend I call Uncle Jimmy in this blog, on serious illness. At the end, my Aunt said we had better get him into hospital. “All right,” he said, “but we’ll have a cig first. We’ll have one o’ yours.”

Age is like cricket. Some make a century while others are out for a duck. A score in the seventies is a useful innings. 

(Me in a draft too bleak to post.) 

There were many others, but I will stop with those. 

Grandad Dunham’s Flight Simulator

New Month Old Post: first posted 18th November, 2015

SGI Dogfight for the IRIS workstation

Like something from the future, it was the most amazing colour graphics workstation I had ever seen. I had got a job in a university where it was used to understand complex proteins by constructing and manipulating computer-generated images of the kind of ball and stick molecular models photographed with Watson and Crick in the nineteen-fifties. These models give insights into life at the sub-microscopic level, such as how molecules of oxygen displace molecules of carbon dioxide in haemoglobin. The details are so magically implausible you could come to believe in creationism. One researcher was moved to tears on seeing for the first time an image of part of the antibody she had been working on for three years.

It was the nineteen-eighties. The workstation came with a set of demonstration programs, among them a flight simulator. It was well in advance of anything any of us had seen before. The best you could have at home at that time, which replicated the dynamics of flight and motion with any reasonable accuracy, were black-and-white wire-frame simulations such as ‘Aviator’ and ‘Elite’ for the BBC Computer. The workstation simulator had coloured graphics and a choice of aircraft. You may now pause for a moment to speculate about the relative amounts of time we spent flying aeroplanes and modelling proteins.

At first, I was the only one who could land the Jumbo Jet without crashing. I had not wasted hundreds of hours flying under the ‘Aviator’ suspension bridge for nothing. I was one of the glorious few to have fought my way through to the secret code for my ‘Elite’ badge. What the others did not seem able to grasp – and some of them are now eminent professors – is that the pilot of a Jumbo-Jet sits the equivalent of three storeys high. You are still thirty feet up in the air as you touch down. If you try to land with your seat at ground level you will be too low, and smash into the runway with terrific force and die.

It all seemed terrifically futuristic. Yet my brother had a flight simulator twenty years earlier in the early nineteen-sixties. You might call it Grandad Dunham’s flight simulator. How could that be? Grandad Dunham was our great-grandfather who died in 1941. He spent the last two years of his life living with his daughter’s family. When he moved in, his son-in-law carried his chair through the streets of the town on his back.

I now have that very same chair, twice refurbished, and very comfortable it is too. On its back and covered with an eiderdown it makes a wonderful aeroplane cockpit. My brother played in it happily for hours. Sometimes he would let me be his co-pilot. He chalked some controls and instruments underneath the seat. They are still there after sixty years.

What makes it particularly poignant is that my brother died at thirty-six. The grandchildren he never saw are now about the same age he was when he drew those simple chalk marks. They can have all the latest tablets and smartphones, and simulators so realistic you forget they are only software. But one thing I do know. No matter how advanced the technology, it will never be one-half as much fun as Grandad Dunham’s eiderdown-covered chair with the chalk marks on its upturned seat.

Elite and Aviator for the BBC Computer

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. 

Tips, Ships and Executorships

New Month Old Post: first posted 14th April, 2017.

'Waylands', 93 Ferriby Road, Hessle (now 'Woodlands Lodge')

“Never appoint a bank as executor to a will.” My dad’s advice was born out of sheer frustration.

“You’ll be all right one day son,” his own father had told him in expectation of a life-changing legacy due on the death of an ailing wealthy spinster then living permanently in a hotel in Harrogate. As things turned out she lived another forty years, by which time the legacy was no longer life-changing, having dwindled away in excessive, unnecessary fees.

Edwin Ernest
Atkinson (1872-1939)

It was one of those quirks of family history that testators fail to foresee, which result in their money going to unrelated beneficiaries they never knew or had heard of: in this case my father, his sister and the husband of their late cousin. It originated in Edwin Ernest Atkinson, chairman of the Yorkshire Dale Steamship Co., and Atkinson and Prickett Ltd., shipowners and brokers of Hull. 

On leaving school, Edwin had first worked as a clerk for the Aire and Calder Navigation Company at Goole docks, and then as a coal exporter with the shipping company J. H. Wetherall & Co. In 1906 he began in business on his own, joined in 1911 by Thomas William Prickett.

Within twenty-five years both were wealthy men with handsome houses on the outskirts of Hull at Hessle. Edwin’s was called ‘Waylands’, at the corner of Woodfield Lane and Ferriby Road. It had eight bedrooms, an oak-panelled dining room, two other large reception rooms, a billiards room, domestic quarters, coal-fired central heating, outbuildings, cultivated gardens, a heated greenhouse and vinery, tennis courts and a croquet lawn. Thomas William Prickett had a similar property nearby,  ‘Northcote’, at 85 Ferriby Road. Among their dirty British coasters with their salt-caked smoke stacks were the SS Yokefleet, SS Swandale, SS Easingwold and MV Coxwold. There were trains of railway wagons bearing the company name.

Atkinson and Prickett ships: SS Yokefleet, SS Swandale, SS Easingwold, MV Coxwold

When Edwin died in 1939 at the age of 66, he left a life interest in most of his £27,000 estate to his wife and only surviving daughter. In terms of price inflation, this would be today’s equivalent of £1.5 million and a great deal more in earnings or property price inflation. It was a considerable sum of money. His wife died less than two years later, thus his daughter, Constance Ruby, still in her thirties, assumed a life interest in the whole sum, to live in comfort and luxury for the rest of her life. She was the lady in the hotel at Harrogate.

Note that Edwin only left a life interest to his wife and daughter, rather than the capital sum outright. They therefore received income from investments, and the capital remained intact. It was a throwback to earlier times when women were not expected to manage their own financial affairs. It also kept the money out of the hands of unscrupulous husbands they might later marry.

Numbers 8 to 2 North Bar Without, Beverley, with the fifteenth century gate to the right

Constance Ruby never did marry, although she did have a brief engagement at the age of twenty. She later became Clerk to the Archdeacon of York, living in the Precentor’s Court at York Minster. After her father died she moved with her mother to Harrogate. Later in the nineteen-fifties, she moved to Beverley, into a half-timbered eighteenth century house immediately without the North Bar (the fifteenth century gate). She died there in 1983. As she was the last surviving descendant of Edwin Ernest Atkinson, the capital passed in equal shares to the families of his three siblings. 

One sibling was my great-grandfather’s second wife, who he married five years after his first wife had died. There were no further children, but a deeply shared interest in Methodism saw them happily through the next twenty-four years. They, and Edwin’s other siblings, died long before Constance Ruby, so the money passed to their families. One-third of the capital passed through my great-grandfather’s second marriage, through his children who had also died, to my father, his sister, and their late cousin’s husband.

It was not so simple. An unfortunate legal charade had gobbled up much of the inheritance. The solicitor who managed the capital trust had sensibly established, with documentation, the names of the beneficiaries in readiness for when the trust was wound up. But then, at some point during the nineteen-seventies, the National Westminster Bank trustees department persuaded Constance Ruby that her affairs would be better handled by them. They began the costly process of establishing the beneficiaries all over again, but after several years were still not convinced they had identified them all. Everything came to a standstill after Constance Ruby’s death. It took considerable persistence to have the case transferred back to the original solicitors and at last sorted out.

Around this time, bank Executor and Trustee departments were becoming known for their outrageous fees. An article in The Times in 1985 explained how one executor saved nearly £7,000 by handling a simple £100,000 estate himself. Solicitors charged less, but were still expensive. We have no way of knowing what fees were taken out of the Atkinson trust, how well the investments performed, or how much income was paid out over the years, but when my father and his sister at last received their legacies, what would once have been life-changing sums had shrunk away to just over £3,000 each. Their cousin’s husband (i.e. Edwin’s sister’s husband’s granddaughter’s widowed husband) got £6,000. Welcome amounts for sure, but nothing like what my grandfather had predicted. £3,000 might then have bought a small car. The total value distributed to all beneficiaries was around £37,000. Had the capital kept pace with retail price inflation it would have been ten times that amount (fifty times today). 

In later years, when my father made his will, true to his principles he appointed me as executor. After he died I handled everything myself. It was fairly straightforward. In another case, I was able to manage sums in trust for children until they reached the age of eighteen. More recently, I handled all the paperwork for the estate of another family member. Despite being complicated by inheritance tax (inevitable for owners of houses in the Home Counties) it was still trouble-free. Estate administration can be a long-drawn-out and time-consuming process that tests your patience and endurance, but if you have the time to cut out the banks and solicitors and do things yourself you can save an awful lot in professional fees; sometimes tens of thousands of pounds. You can bring things to completion much more quickly too.  

Further information:  Patrick Collinson (2013). Probate: avoid a final rip-off when sorting out your loved one’s estate. The Guardian, Sep 21, 2013. Maggie Drummond (1985). Finding a will and a way to cut costs. The Times (London, England), Feb 16, 1985; page 16.