When I was seven, I made my first visit to the local library in Brooksby’s Walk, and this also became a regular after-school activity. I was a very keen reader and the first time I went there I found it a truly awe-inspiring sight to see so many books in one place. The first book I ever got out was Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows. As I read it, I quickly became immersed in the life of the Riverbank with Ratty, Mole, Badger and, of course, the magnificent Toad of Toad Hall himself – ‘Poop, poop’. Just like Mole, I was ‘bewitched, entranced and fascinated’. I was right there with them as my imagination took me inside Ratty’s little house and Toad’s mansion. And I was with Toad in his car every inch of the way and on his side in the final battle, ‘running round and round the room, and jumping over the chairs’, whacking the ferrets, weasels and stoats with a big stick. I had never read a book like it and I couldn’t wait to get back to the library to find more exciting volumes to read.
After Wind in the Willows, I discovered the ‘Dr Dolittle’ books by Hugh Lofting, Barbara Euphan Todd’s Worzel Gummidge, Biggles by Captain W. E. Johns and, best of all, Anthony Buckeridge’s ‘Jennings’ books. Although I loved playing with my friends and my family, the time spent reading books and immersed in my own world and my own imagination was very special to me so I always made sure I found time to do it.
After playing with my friends or visiting the library, I came home to have tea while I watched children’s television. My favourite programmes were the many cowboy series then on, such as Kit Carson, Hopalong Cassidy, Rin Tin Tin, Fury and, best of all, Range Rider. Wednesdays was always a good day as it became a tradition to have steak and chips while watching Casey Jones, a Western with a bit of a difference as it was about a railroad engineer and his engine, the Cannonball Express. There were also some one-off Western mini-series, such as The Cabin in the Clearing. Other must-see television programmes were Crackerjack, The Buccaneers, George Cansdale’s Looking at Animals, Mr Pastry, Sooty, Twizzle, All Your Own and my personal favourite, Billy Bean and His Funny Machine – ‘Billy Bean built a machine to see what it would do. He built it out of sticks and stones and nuts and bolts and glue’.
In the early 1950s, television broadcasting hours were very restricted. There was little or no daytime broadcasting to speak of, and Children’s Television at 5pm was the start of the television day. There was a short break, or interlude as they were then known, at 5.45, until the news came on at 6pm. During the interlude, the BBC showed some of their famous four-minute films, such as The Potter’s Wheel, The White Kitten and my favourite, London to Brighton in Four Minutes. The news was only a very short bulletin and then there was another break until the evening programmes started at 7pm. During that break, I would either go back into the field to play with my friends, or amuse myself at home by playing with my soldiers or cars, or reading a book.
Dad used to come home from work at about 6.30pm and have his dinner, which normally consisted of larger portions of whatever Mum and I had already had. I mentioned having steak and chips on Wednesdays and that was really a bit of a mid-week treat. On other days, our dinner at that time would normally be something like spam fritters, smoked haddock, saveloys or faggots and pease pudding (the pease pudding having been made by Mum by boiling up split peas in a big linen bag placed in the copper), sausage mash and onions (always referred to in the family simply as ‘S.M.O.’ except I never had the onions because I didn’t like them), toad in the hole, fried mincemeat (which was mincemeat just dry-fried in the frying pan and served up with bubble and squeak) or egg and chips, the chips of course having been hand-cut and fried – no readymade frozen chips in those days. All very simple but absolutely delicious foods. Dinner was always followed by ‘afters’ – jelly and custard, apple or rhubarb pie and custard, tinned fruit (normally peaches or pineapple) and condensed milk, suet pudding with golden syrup or jam (also boiled up in the copper), rice pudding with the skin on top and blancmange, a particular favourite of mine. In the autumn, we often had blackberry pie made from blackberries Mum and I had picked ourselves in Epping Forest.
Sometimes, especially in the early part of the 1950s, Dad came home very late. This was because his journey had been badly affected by a good old-fashioned London ‘pea-souper’. To many Londoners, these smogs had become something of a way of life but the worst smog struck not long after I started school in December 1952. For several days, the streets were filled with a smelly yellow fog that cut visibility down to just a few yards. The street lights were useless as all you could see was a dim glow. It was a very eerie atmosphere all round as sounds were muffled and people walked about with scarves over their mouths and noses in an attempt not to breathe in the foul air. Public transport was at a standstill as buses were unable to run. It was estimated that the effects of the smog killed upwards of 4,000 people.
The severity of the disruptions and adverse health effects forced the British Government to bring in various measures in an attempt to end the crisis, culminating in the Clean Air Act of 1956. Among other measures, the Act introduced smoke control areas in towns and cities in which only smokeless fuels could be burnt; it also included measures to relocate power stations away from populated areas and increased the height of some chimneys. It was hoped this would reduce the amount of smoke in the atmosphere and therefore the number and severity of smogs. Although it took some time to fully take effect, the Act was eventually successful in completely eliminating the London pea-souper. For the rest of the 1950s, however, smogs did continue to blight the capital and there were several occasions when Dad was forced to walk home from work, a distance of some three miles. At times, visibility was so bad that he got lost on the way home, even though he knew the route like the back of his hand. On those days, he arrived home very late indeed, but fortunately these were rare, and became even rarer as time passed.
By the time Dad had finished his dinner, television was back on and we usually watched the early evening programmes until it was bedtime. These included The Grove Family (Britain’s first television soap), Fabian of the Yard, starring Bruce Seton, Eric Robinson’s Music for You and the American comedy series Amos ’n’ Andy and Burns and Allen. Sportsview, introduced by Peter Dimmock, was naturally very popular with Dad and me, though I’m not sure what Mum made of it. We also watched the very first cookery programmes to appear on television with TV’s first chef, Philip Harben. Little could he have known what he started!
When ITV began in 1955, British viewing habits were revolutionised in two ways. Firstly, they filled the 6–7pm gap with programmes like Emergency Ward 10, ITV’s first soap opera, and, secondly, they introduced advertising to television for the very first time, beginning with Gibbs SR toothpaste. Some of the early commercials were of truly epic proportions, especially those for petrol companies like Shell and Esso. They sometimes lasted anything up to three minutes and must have cost a fortune to produce and air. Our favourites were Omo with Mrs Bradshaw, who got her shirts so white you had to wear dark glasses to avoid the dazzle, and Murray Mints, the first company to inject some humour into their advertising with thirty-second cartoon commercials – ‘Murray Mints, Murray Mints, the too good to hurry mints’. ITV also introduced popular quizzes to television, with Hughie Green’s Double Your Money and Michael Miles’ Take Your Pick, both transferred from Radio Luxembourg. Other popular ITV programmes included Murder Bag, which eventually transformed into No Hiding Place, starring Raymond Francis, The Army Game and American imports such as I Love Lucy, I Married Joan and Dragnet – ‘The story you are about to see is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent’.
In the early days, they also combined programmes with adverts by running what were called ‘Admags’. The most popular of these was Jim’s Inn, starring Jimmy and Maggie Hanley as the owners of a village pub. Each fifteen-minute episode consisted of customers coming into their pub to discuss the price and quality of a variety of real products over a pint. They were hugely popular at the time but the BBC objected to
them on the grounds that they blurred the distinction between advertisements and proper programmes and amounted to sponsored programmes, at that time banned by ITV. They were eventually deemed misleading and unfair and were banned by an act of parliament in 1963.
The BBC fought back with programmes like Hancock’s Half Hour, This Is Your Life with Eamonn Andrews and their own American imports such as The Perry Como Show and Highway Patrol with Broderick Crawford, which gave us two new catchphrases, ‘Ten-Four’ and ‘Ten-Twenty’, which were in constant use in our playground for a while.
By the time ITV arrived in 1955, a number of other houses in the street had television as well as us, but, just before the new channel started, we got a new set, a 17-inch Sobell, able to receive it so we were ready from day one. In the very early days, ITV was broadcast over the air waves on what was called Band Three, as opposed to BBC being broadcast on Band One. Bertha next door bought her new television a couple of months after the start of ITV but she was determined to let everyone know she was the proud owner of a set that could receive the new station. On the day it arrived, she got her husband to stay indoors monitoring it while she ran up and down the path outside with a piece of aerial wire in her hand attached to the television, shouting loudly, ‘Can you see Band Three yet, Geoffrey?’ Poor Geoffrey replied several times that he could, but this didn’t stop Bertha running up and down, continuing to shout about Band Three! She only stopped when she was sure that the whole neighbourhood knew they were wealthy enough to afford a new television with ITV.
Although we watched a good deal of television, the wireless was still important and we carried on listening to a number of the popular programmes such as Henry Hall’s Guest Night and Have a Go with Wilfred Pickles – ‘Give him the money, Mabel’.
When I reached the age of ten and was allowed to stay up a bit later before bed, we started going to the pictures on a fairly regular basis. This began with The Wizard of Oz, and moved on to most of the big films of the 1950s, including war epics like The Cruel Sea and The Colditz Story, adventure films such as The Buccaneer and The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men, Brian Rix comedies like Dry Rot and Sailor Beware and Dad’s favourite, The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan starring Robert Morley and Maurice Evans.
We also went to the Hackney Empire to see live shows on a few occasions. By the mid-1950s, the old Victorian and Edwardian type of Music Hall show had mostly vanished but a few theatres still valiantly battled on, the Hackney Empire on Mare Street being one of them. I can remember seeing the comedian Terry Thomas, also one of the first drag acts, Mrs Shufflewick, and the Billy Cotton Bandshow there. To me live theatre was a wonderful experience and much more interesting and exciting than the cinema. The plush seating and surroundings made me feel as though we were going somewhere very special and I really looked forward to our all too rare visits to the Hackney Empire. These visits gave me a love of the theatre, which has lasted to this day.
CHAPTER FOUR
RATIONING, EEL PIES AND MUFFIN THE MULE
The weekend started at nine o’clock on Saturday morning when I got up to listen to Derek McCulloch, universally known as ‘Uncle Mac’, introduce Children’s Favourites on the wireless with the familiar words ‘Hello, children everywhere.’ There then followed an hour of records requested by children of all ages, ranging from hymns and classical music to children’s songs and novelty records. The most popular songs turned up regularly and it was always somewhat comforting to hear ‘The Ugly Duckling’, ‘Tubby the Tuba’, ‘Three Billy Goats Gruff’, ‘The Happy Wanderer’, ‘The Laughing Policeman’ and my personal favourite, ‘The Runaway Train’, week after week.
One week, I even sent in a request myself for ‘Nymphs and Shepherds’. Written by Henry Purcell, this was one of the classical pieces that was played fairly regularly. Although I did quite like it, it wasn’t my favourite and it was really Dad’s influence that made me request it. He thought it would sound better if my name was read out asking for that rather than, say, ‘Tubby the Tuba’. So I wrote in asking for it to be played for me and ‘my brother also’ as I felt I’d have more chance of getting my letter read out if I was requesting it for someone else as well as just me. The week after I’d requested it, Uncle Mac did indeed play the song, but, as he was reading out the names, Mum asked me what I wanted for breakfast so I missed it and I never knew if mine was one of the names read out or not. It was very frustrating; it might have been my first moment of national fame but I’ll never know!
When the programme finished, we went out to the shops and stalls in Chatsworth Road. In the early fifties, some food was still rationed. Rationing had been introduced during the War to preserve food stocks, a vital necessity for an island nation. With the country still in bad shape following the end of the War, food rationing was only gradually faded out. Bread was the first to come off in 1948, while the last was meat and bacon, not taken off until June 1954. Families were issued with ration books, containing coupons for the various different commodities that had to be handed to the shopkeeper when buying goods. They removed the coupons while you handed over the appropriate amount of money. To buy most rationed items, each family had to register at one chosen shop for each type of foodstuff and the shopkeeper was then provided with enough food for registered customers only. As an example of this, we were registered for meat at a butcher’s in Chatsworth Road called Gunner’s and we had to buy all our meat there. There were two other butcher’s shops in Chatsworth Road, Harry Blyth and Hammett’s. I can remember my parents becoming increasingly disillusioned with Gunner’s. They looked longingly into the windows of the other two butchers, who they felt offered better meat. In the end, after some prolonged correspondence with the Ministry of Food, Dad managed to get our designated butcher’s shop changed to Blyth’s. About a month later, meat rationing was ended.
For some reason, most of the shops and stalls we frequented were on the left-hand side going up from Millfields Road. The first, on the corner, was the Stadium Stores. This was a small shop piled almost up to the ceiling with cans and packets of groceries. There was only a narrow passage through to the one part of the counter that was free from clutter. This was where Mr Bogush, the owner, sat and where you bought your goods. The main thing we used this shop for was cat food. I was generally sent out to buy four tins of Kit-e-Kat. They were 7½d each, so four came to half a crown or 2/6d (12½p). For some reason, however, they came in packs of three, so Mr Bogush always had to break open one pack to give me the one to go with the other three. The Stadium Stores was also used for emergency supplies if we’d run out of something, but it was not on our general Saturday shopping route.
Next to the Stadium Stores was a café where we sometimes stopped to buy ice cream. They had a serving hatch that opened directly onto the street, and we would take a bowl along and they would scoop the ice cream straight into the bowl with wafers for Mum and Dad and a cornet for me. We never used the café itself and as far as I can remember we never actually stepped foot over its threshold. The only other shop we used in this lower part of Chatsworth Road was the greengrocer, Godlonton’s. At that time everything was loose and you’d take your large shopping bag along, ask for 5lb of potatoes (or whatever) and they would just be tipped straight into your bag. We bought all our fruit and vegetables here including bananas, which Dad considered to be the height of luxury. Bananas had been very scarce during the War, which is what had led him to this conclusion and, even though they were not so difficult to find by the 1950s, he still treated them with the utmost respect. Because of this, we had them only very occasionally and, when we did, he always told us we weren’t allowed to eat more than one a day.
Next door to Godlonton’s was a shoe mender called Thomas. We would always re-sole or re-heel a shoe rather than throw it away and have to buy a new pair.
The shops we frequented on Saturdays were further up and included Gunner’s, and later Blyth’s and Hammett’s after meat had come off ration, and Sorrell’s, where we would b
uy our cooked meats, such as ham and liver sausage. A great favourite of Dad’s, which we regularly bought here, was wurst, a German salami, which he fried with egg. I thought it was delicious.
Our chemist was formally known as Benjamin’s, but we always called it Benjy’s. There were a couple of chemist shops in Chatsworth Road, and the other was called Fox, Wells. They were both easily identifiable by the four brightly coloured carboys (large bottles) that stood in their window. Like the red and white striped pole that projected outside barber shops, these carboys were signs that immediately identified the type of shop it was.
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