Milk bars with jukeboxes also arrived as places where teenagers could hang out on their own and where kids were encouraged to listen to and even make their own music, skiffle. Hackney had its very own milk bar in Mare Street, where you could also buy that other modern innovation: espresso coffee straight from Italy. To see the shiny new Gaggia Espresso Machine spluttering away amid clouds of steam and spilling out its glamorous new drink was a wonderful and liberating experience, one that belonged exclusively to the young. Not only was skiffle played on the jukebox but groups of kids would give impromptu performances too.
British skiffle music was a homegrown development of American rock’n’roll that shot to prominence following the release of Lonnie Donegan’s hit record ‘Rock Island Line’ in 1956. Its main appeal was that it was cheap to imitate and therefore popular among the young, who could improvise or build their own instruments at little or no cost. Not only was skiffle a different type of music, one we could call our own, but it was also easy to have a go. No need for expensive instruments, just get a secondhand beat-up guitar or, if you couldn’t afford that, you could join in with your mum’s washboard or a large box with a string attached for a bass. And, better still, you didn’t even have to be American. Whereas rock stars like Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry were looked on as superstars that we could never aspire to be, the leading skiffle proponents were local working-class kids like ourselves. Along with Lonnie Donegan, other homegrown acts such as The Vipers and Tommy Steele burst onto the scene, encouraging British kids like me to have a go. When I was ten years old, there was talk of some of us in our class forming a homemade skiffle group. I auditioned in front of the boy who decided he’d be the group leader, giving a full rendition of ‘Cumberland Gap’. I thought I’d performed pretty well, but his only comment was, ‘You need to move your hips more.’ And so, at the tender age of ten, that was the end of my career as a rock star. Mind you, the group never formed anyway.
My parents and grandparents were forever grumbling about rock’n’roll. Although not quite a teenager yet myself, I wanted to watch television programmes like 6:5 Special and Oh Boy! just coming on to BBC television in the late 1950s to cater for this new young audience but Dad wouldn’t hear of it. ‘That music is rubbish,’ he used to complain. ‘It’ll never last like the old songs.’ And he’d quickly turn over to ITV, much to my great disappointment. In the mid-1950s, many Victorian and Edwardian Music Hall songs were still well known. We are now about as far away from the mid-1950s as they were from the late Victorian and Edwardian period so I think it’s safe to say we can dismiss the theory that rock’n’roll singers and songs will never last as long! I mean, whatever happened to Cliff Richard anyway?
It was with the start of Junior School that I began to make some real friends with whom I played outside of school. In particular, there were Andy Shalders, Bob Marriott, Peter Hannaford, John Walker, Howard Bradbury and Terry Gregory. We formed a group – I think it would be wrong to say a gang – and stuck together for the whole of the time we were in Junior School. Of these boys, my best friend was Andy, a slightly tubby boy, who, like me, was very keen on playing and watching sports. His father managed a grocer’s shop in Chatsworth Road and, although it wasn’t one we frequented as shoppers, I did go round there quite a lot to play with Andy. There was one occasion when I was there alone in the shop after he had gone off to the toilet. For some reason I decided to see how sharp the bacon slicer was. I can confirm that it was very sharp indeed – I just touched it and it almost sliced my finger off! There was blood everywhere. I ran home as fast as I could. Fortunately, it looked worse than it was and Mum was able to sort everything out with an Elastoplast. Andy must have wondered what had happened when he came back from the loo and saw a trail of blood on the floor but no sign of me.
Bob Marriott lived closest to me. He had quite striking ginger hair and lived on the top floor of a terraced house in Chippendale Street. The bottom floor was occupied by the owner, Mrs Percy, a widowed woman in her eighties. She had snow-white hair and was always dressed completely in black from head to toe as though in perpetual mourning. I had strict instructions to knock on the door twice if I wanted to see Bob as one knock was for Mrs Percy and she wasn’t happy if a caller knocked once and made her come to the door and then it turned out to be for upstairs. Bob said when that happened she complained to his parents and wouldn’t let him forget it for days afterwards. His father was in the wood trade like my dad and also worked in Shoreditch. Bob was the only friend I had whose parents actually owned a car, a Ford Zephyr, which enabled them to go off to such exotic locations as Cornwall for their holidays.
I often walked back from school with Terry Gregory as he had to pass my house on his way home and, whereas conversations with most of my friends revolved around sport, Terry and I used to discuss some deep scientific conundrums such as when did time start and did the Universe come to an end. It was all very deep stuff for Junior School children. Terry lives in Australia these days but I am still in touch with him and even visited him a few years ago.
Peter Hannaford was the boy who introduced us all to the wonders of the female form. He had discovered a newsagent’s shop in Lower Clapton Road that displayed copies of H&E (Health & Efficiency) in their front window and took us up there one day after school. So there we were, seven ten-year-olds stood gazing in the window at the front covers of these magazines for some minutes. I’m not sure what we all made of the experience other than somehow knowing we were doing something a bit rude that our parents and teachers wouldn’t approve of and that this was our little collective secret. I don’t think actually looking at bare female breasts in itself really did anything for us at that age. It was more the fact of doing something a bit naughty that we knew we shouldn’t be doing that was the thrill. It also enhanced Peter’s reputation as a grown-up ‘man of the world’.
Johnnie Walker was a very quiet lad and, although he enjoyed playing football and cricket with us, he always seemed happier when we decided to settle for a board game or a game of marbles – something less energetic anyway.
As with all the others, I got on well with Howard Bradbury, but he was also a rival of mine when it came to running. We were both fast runners and often raced each other on the fields after school and in the holidays. But the real test came with the School Sports Day every year. This took place on Millfields at the back of my house so I was always on home ground. There were four houses at school, Red, Yellow, Green and Blue, and we used to compete against each other in various events such as running, jumping and throwing to win individual prizes and the overall team prize. Those were the days when there was proper competitive sport in schools, none of this non-competitive stuff they have these days to spare the losers’ feelings. As a fast sprinter, I was always entered into the 50 Yards for my team, the Reds. In each of the four years I was in Junior School, the 50 Yards came down to a race between Howard, who was in the Blue Team, Patrick McConnell, Yellow, and David Brown and me for the Reds. We were the first four every year. Patrick was always the one to beat and he won the race three times, his only loss being to David. Second, third and fourth varied and I did manage second on a couple of occasions. Even if I couldn’t win, it always gave me a great sense of satisfaction to be able to beat Howard.
The seven of us used to play together at playtime, not without any others, but always together. The games we used to play included football, Cowboys and Indians and ‘War’. The Junior School playground was divided into two sections, one for the boys and one for the girls, as presumably it was felt that the boys would play too rough for the girls. The girls’ playground was behind a wall but there was an opening through which we could see them playing.
Mostly we weren’t interested in what they were doing as it seemed to consist mainly of ‘cissy’ skipping games or Hopscotch. But sometimes they played at handstands against the wall, and being upside down, of course, meant that their dresses dropped down over their heads to expose their knickers. When this
happened there would usually be a crowd, particularly of the older boys, round the opening, trying to get a look. Why they bothered to do this was a bit of a mystery to me as we used to do P.E. together in our normal mixed class and saw the girls in their vests and knickers then anyway.
Meanwhile, back in the boys’ playground, at the beginning of playtime, two boys would quite often get together, link arms and walk round the playground chanting rhythmically, ‘Who wants to play Cowboys and Indians?’ (Or whatever it was they wanted to play.) If you wanted to play, you’d link arms and this would go on until there were enough boys linked up to make a decent game. Sometimes there could be as many as ten or twelve boys walking through the playground in a line, chanting. The game would then commence. If it was Cowboys and Indians, you would be given the choice of which side you wanted to be on but as nearly everyone wanted to be a cowboy there was always a certain amount of coercion on the part of bigger and stronger boys to make sure others ‘volunteered’ to be Indians. The game then proceeded with everyone using their fingers as guns, pointing the index and middle fingers and making a shooting noise, which was a sort of a guttural ‘K-K’ sound. One of our teachers once said to us, ‘Why don’t you say “bang” instead of making that funny noise?’ We thought this was a remarkably silly thing to say as everyone knew that guns went K-K, not bang. When you fired at someone, they were supposed to die, but the act of shooting at them was nearly always the cause of an argument: ‘You’re dead!’, ‘No, I’m not, you missed!’, ‘No, I didn’t!’ and ‘Anyway, I shot you first!’ Sometimes this argument could actually lead to real blows with fists, though most times it was settled in a reasonably amicable manner, i.e. the bigger boy would get his own way. If you were shot, you were dead until one of your side released you by touching you and you came back to life.
War, of course, was a similar game, only fought between the English and the Germans. Although we were all born after the Second World War, its legacy still played a big part in our lives. When I started at school, it had been over for only seven years and some rationing was still in force. All our parents had lived through the nightmare, with many of our fathers having seen active service somewhere and with their own exciting tales to tell. Indeed, many of us had older siblings who had been born during the War and, rightly or wrongly, there was still an intense feeling of animosity towards Germans generally. No one seemed to separate Germans from Nazis – as far as the generation that had come through the War was concerned, they were the same thing.
This feeling of intense hatred towards the Germans led to a real crisis of conscience for Dad in 1957 as, during the summer holidays, John, who was studying French and German at A-level, took part in an exchange programme, which meant his staying with a German family for two weeks and, horror of horrors, a German student, Michael Thermann, staying with us. For John’s sake, Dad did his best not to let his discomfort show, but he barely said two words to Michael for the entire fortnight that he was with us. Michael did amuse us, though, because whenever we gave him an apple he used to eat the lot, stalk, core, pips, everything, and when he had fish he would eat the bones. He never left anything. We didn’t know whether this was normal German behaviour, whether he was being polite in not wanting to leave anything or whether he was just so afraid of my dad that he didn’t dare leave anything.
This feeling of animosity rubbed off on us, of course, though I like to think that as my generation grew up we realised that Germans and Nazis were far from the same thing. But when we played those games, it was all very simple: the English were the ‘goodies’ and the Germans were the ‘baddies’. Absolutely nobody wanted to be a German, but someone had to be for everyone to play the game, so the same rules applied as finding Indians for the Cowboys and Indians games. As well as playing War outside, most boys would draw war pictures in the classroom, either in actual art lessons or when there was a bit of spare time. The most popular picture was of a British plane dropping bombs on a German battleship; it made for an exciting image. All of these feelings about the War and Germans were reinforced by much of the popular culture of the time since films, books, comics, songs and television all owed much to this legacy. There were numerous television programmes presented by generals like Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery and Lieutenant-General Sir Brian Horrocks, and classic films such as The Dam Busters and Reach for the Sky were staples of 1950s cinema.
Another reminder of the war years was the fact that every now and then in the early fifties the army would hold exercises on Hackney Marshes, during which they would send up barrage balloons. As soon as word got round that this was happening, all the boys in the neighbourhood got there as fast as they could. To us, it was very exciting but to our parents I expect it was just another reminder of days they’d rather forget.
Sometimes the act of two boys linking arms was an end in itself when it was done behind their backs as these would become ‘bash-ups’ and the boys themselves would run round into everyone they could, trying to knock them over. In self-defence you and a friend would form a bash-up of your own. This game was very much frowned upon by the teachers, who stopped it whenever they saw it happening.
There were a number of quieter games as well that seemed to appear seasonally. These were games like conkers, marbles, gobs and ciggies. There was, of course, a good reason why conkers should be seasonal, but why the others came and went on regular cycles I’m not really sure. Getting hold of conkers wasn’t that difficult as there were a few horse chestnut trees around Millfields. The trick was to pick the best ones – usually small hard ones – soak them in vinegar and then bake them for no longer than two minutes. This, so it was said, would make them really hard and almost unbreakable.
Marbles were always made of glass and some had quite intricate coloured patterns inside. There were a number of different games we would play with marbles; most commonly, the first player would flick a marble along a few feet, then the next player would flick his marble and try to hit the first one. If he missed, the first player would go again. This would continue until one of the players hit one of his opponent’s marbles. He would then win all the marbles that had been played. For some reason I was quite good at this game. I started off with just one marble that I borrowed from another boy and finished up with a sizeable collection.
Ciggies was a game where you could win a large collection of cigarette cards. There were two variations of this game, dropsies and flicksies. In dropsies the participants would stand up and the first boy would just drop his ‘ciggie’ (cigarette card) to the ground. The next to go would drop his and if it covered the first one he won them both. This was more difficult than it sounds since ciggies were usually very light and floated in the wind, so very rarely just fell straight.
The more popular game, though, was flicksies. In this, any number could join in and you had to hold your ciggie between your index and middle finger and flick it at the wall. Whoever had the ciggie that finished nearest the wall won all the others; this too was more difficult than it sounds as you had to be careful not to flick so hard that the ciggie hit the wall and bounced back a long way. There was a fine judgement in getting it just right. For both this and dropsies, the thicker the card the better and sometimes two cards were stuck together for that very reason. Some cards were even sold with gummed backs.
After a while, I wasn’t too keen on this game since I didn’t want to lose my cigarette cards as I found the information on the back of some of them very interesting. Two sets I can still remember well were a ‘Kings and Queens’ set, from which I learnt a lot about the history of British Kings and Queens, and ‘Coach Companies’, which featured such companies as Premier Blue, Empire’s Best and Midland Red. There were also many sets of footballers and cricketers, which I collected. I used to buy my cigarette cards from a really tiny shop on the corner of Rushmore Road and Glyn Road, called The Cabin. As the name suggests, it was the size of a small shed and adults had to duck to get into it. The shop sold mixed packets of six cigarette c
ards costing 1d.
The other seasonal game, gobs, was played with five small cubes like dice, only without any numbers on the sides. There were two main variants of this game as well. The simplest consisted of tossing up one gob from the back of the hand and picking up one or more of the others from the ground while it was in the air and catching the tossed gob and so on until all five stones were picked up. The other was tossing up first one stone, then two, then three and so on from the palm of the hand, and catching them on the back of the hand. The winner was the first player to successfully complete whichever variant you were playing. There was no prize for this, just the satisfaction of winning.
As well as providing the space for somewhere to play, the playground also housed the toilets. There was one in the boys’ playground and another in the girls’ and they were the only toilets for pupils in the school. We didn’t have the luxury of indoor toilets. If it rained or snowed, we were allowed to play in the hall or in our classrooms, but there was no such luck if you wanted to go to the toilet – you just had to brave the elements.
I mainly played all my games at playtime as I used to go home for lunch. This usually consisted of a sandwich of some sort and a glass of orange squash. Mum and I would have lunch at the kitchen table while listening to the radio. The programme we liked best was Workers’ Playtime, which used to be broadcast live from a factory canteen ‘somewhere in Britain’. This had begun as a wartime programme to help keep up morale at home but became so popular that it continued until well after the War. Usually, the bill consisted of a couple of singers and comedians. Some of the singers we first heard on these programmes included Julie Andrews, Anne Shelton, Dickie Valentine and the ‘girl with the giggle in her voice’, Alma Cogan. My favourites, though, were always the comedians and it was here that I first heard the likes of Ken Platt – ‘I won’t take me coat off – I’m not stoppin”, Al Read – ‘You’ll be lucky, I say you’ll be lucky’ and Tommy Trinder – ‘You lucky people!’ Oh yes, they all had their catchphrases. It was on this programme that we heard the following joke: ‘A man came up to me the other day and said, “Have you seen a lorry load of monkeys pass this way?” So, I said to him, “Why, did you fall off it?”’ I can’t remember whose joke it was, and it might seem pretty innocuous, but Mum thought it was hilarious and repeated it for years afterwards.
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