Mornings with Col. Thomas

The headmaster of Humberstone Foundation School, my secondary (grammar) school, was a war hero of World War 1, having been awarded a DSO.  He was actually a Lt-Col, but was universally called Col. Thomas.  He took up the post in 1923, and retired while I was there in 1953.  He had a tall, imposing military bearing, finding it easy to command both authority and discipline.

The scene was the same every morning at assembly.  We all took our places in the hall, whispering quietly to each other – nothing louder was permitted.  The staff, all clad in black gowns, took their places side by side at the back of the stage. 

Just before time the deputy headmaster would command us to rise and stand to attention.  Always on the dot at the exact same time, the stage door would open and Col. Thomas, in gown and mortar board, would sweep into the room.  In total silence he would reach the lectern and remove his mortar board.  Only when it touched the lectern, upside down, was it the cue to sit, and the whole school sat down to await the day's announcements.

Under his 30-year spell as headteacher, the school acquired a great reputation for excellence and high standards, such that parents considered it an honour if their son could win admission.  After his departure the school slid down somewhat, but for all the time I was there, the ethos Col. Thomas had imparted to it outlasted him by several years.  That morning assembly set the mood for every school day.

St Aiden's vicar

The Rev. Arnold Herbert Hurt utterly transformed the standing of St Aiden’s, the local parish Church of England at Cleethorpes.  His predecessor, the Rev. Tuffin had seen congregations decline until there were sometimes only two or three people at the services.  He had been old and set in his (low church) ways.  His point of interest to children was that he apparently had a metal plate in his skull from a First World War injury, but he was old and tired. His successor, the Rev. Hurt was a man of great energy, and more comfortable with high church ways.  The church was spruced up, more candles were added, incense crept into the services and there were more processionals with the choir going round the inside of the church.  Attendances climbed steadily, and sermons livened up, with scattered and entertaining stories about the vicar's last parish at Shirebrook.

I was in the choir, even though I was not by any means a good singer, and used to attend choir practice on two evenings a week, and of course Sung Eucharist and Evensong on Sundays.  After choir practice the vicar and his wife would sometimes invite us into the vicarage to give us lemonade and biscuits and let us loll around on cushions on his floor reading from the great piles of comics he kept.  His own child would sometimes be there to play with us.  That child went on to become the famous award-winning actor, John Hurt.  I never met him as an adult, but I greatly admired his talent, and was proud to have had the childhood connection.

Sunset and meat pies

St Andrews was full of bakeries and bakers' shops selling pastries, sticky buns and meat pies, which in Scotland have minced lamb rather than beef.  The bakers' shops all had huge ovens behind them, where staff would work through the night to produce the morrow's delicacies.   

Sometimes as students we'd stay up talking into the early hours of the morning and would finish the night by calling in at the bakeries before going home.  At about 4.00 am the first meat pies would emerge hot and fresh from the ovens, and we would wheedle the staff into selling us some at below the day's asking price in the shops for the cold ones.  We had to eat them carefully because they were so hot inside that they could burn your mouth. 

One June evening a group of us sat at the end of the stone pier that juts out into St Andrews bay.  We had some drink and good company.  We watched the sun go down at about 11 pm, sinking blood red into the waves.  Then we sat and talked about everything, philosophy, politics, religion and economics, for several hours.  At about 4 am we watched the sun rise again from the waves, orange yellow this time.  Then on the way home we visited a bakery and bought hot meat pies to eat in streets lit by the dawn light as we made our various ways home to bed.

Making our own railway

Between the beaches of Cleethorpes and the docks of Grimsby was a no-man’s land littered with abandoned industrial sites.  It featured a collection of huge concrete slabs once used for wartime beach defences, and now piled up crazily and making a good fort to defend in our cowboy fights.

Beyond it there were unused and rusting rails that had once formed a narrow gauge industrial railway, plus the abandoned chassis of a railcar, now just a metal skeleton, but with intact wheels.  A group of us from diverse backgrounds came together.  It took 6 or 8 of us to lift the rails one at a time and position them in a parallel line going downhill to a ditch at the far end, but then we had a track.

It was hard work heaving the wagon chassis up to the top, but we managed it, and then we had an improvised railway.  We wedged the wagon at the top of the track, then clambered aboard, clinging onto the sides as best we could.  The wedge was kicked away, and the wagon trundled down the hill, gathering speed as it did.  The trick was to jump off before it careered off the end of the track and into the ditch.  We always made it safely, albeit with occasional scrapes and bruises as we jumped clear to land on the rough grass at the sides.  The bravest of us, who tended to be the older boys, stayed on until just before it crashed.  Then we manhandled the wagon back up the track for another go, which took a great deal of pushing and heaving.

For weeks it was a regular feature of Saturday afternoons.  We would meet each other there, and when there were enough of us to move the wagon, the game would begin again.  We'd manage maybe half a dozen runs in an afternoon.  There was no formal ending to it, just as there had been a fairly random get-together at the onset.  Gradually one or two of us dropped out over the weeks, until there were not enough of us to shift it.  Then we played other games instead. 

The game was so dangerous that it was inconceivable that any parent or guardian would have allowed it had they known about it, and it is highly unlikely that children today would be allowed the freedom to do it.  But it was immense fun, and the danger was part of that fun.

Due to and owing to

Mr Sleigh was the senior English master at my school.  A tall, bald, imposing figure, he was a strict disciplinarian and was universally known as "Killer," in reference to the homophone 'slay.'  

"The difference between 'due to' and 'owing to,'" he told us, "is that 'due to' always follows the verb to be."  Thus "my train was late owing to a signal failure, but the lateness of my train was due to a signal failure." 

At this point my friend David Middleton raised his hand, with the pocket Oxford English dictionary that we all kept for English lessons open on his desk.

"Please sir, in the Oxford English Dictionary when you look up 'due to' it says 'owing to,' and when you look up 'owing to' it says 'due to,'" he informed the teacher.

Mr Sleigh stared impassively.

"There is a very simple explanation for that, Middleton," he replied.  "It is because the Oxford English Dictionary is WRONG."  The last word was delivered with such great force that the whole class flinched.

I suppose that was one of my early lessons in learning never to accept authority unquestioningly.

Grimsby docks and I-Spy

The I-Spy books were basically children's activity books.  They were promoted by the News Chronicle and cost 6p (2.5p) each.  The idea was to tick off the items depicted in the book when you had seen them.  I-Spy "On the Farm" listed various animals and farm equipment you might see on a farm, and the idea was to check them off as you saw them.

The I-Spy Club had a Native American theme, with Big Chief Eagle Eye presiding.  You could be sent headdress feathers for various achievements such as recruiting new members.  The newspaper column featured exciting things like writing in code by putting the last two letters of a message at the front, but keeping the same number of letters in the words.  Thus "good hunting" became "odhu ntingo," which the big chief regularly signed off with.

As children my friends and I were avid members.  Having obtained "I-Spy Ships and Harbours," we undertook the long walk along the seafront to Grimsby docks and duly ticked off the various fishing ships we saw there.  We entered a fish warehouse, and solemnly presented our I-Spy badges and books.  The fish merchants took us under their wing and pointed out the various different fish, which we recorded in our books.

One merchant enthralled us as we sat amongst his wooden boxes filled with gleaming fresh fish topped with ice.  The important thing to remember, he told us, is that "Ernest West sells the best."  His name was painted over his corner of the warehouse.  We practically filled our I-Spy books, and when I wrote to Big Chief Eagle Eye to tell him about it, he sent back a feather to congratulate me on such a "red letter day."

Spurn Head lighthouse and faraway lands

The beaches of my childhood were in Cleethorpes, looking out into the Humber.  On the horizon every day was the distant thin strip of land that bore the Spurn Head lighthouse.  The lighthouse, painted in broad horizontal black and white stripes, was accompanied by the small stump of a previous lighthouse called the low light.  By day, to a child's eye, the lighthouse represented exotic lands and faraway places.  By night its light slowly pulsated reassuringly in the distance as its mirror rotated.

In fact the Spurn lighthouse is about 5.6 miles from the Cleethorpes beaches as the seagull flies, but to a child it represented "abroad."  

When I was in my early 40s I did something I had dreamed of doing as a child.  I crossed the Humber and drove out to Spurn Point.  One could drive it then, but since a tidal surge of 2013 the final stretch is accessible only on foot, and not when a high tide comes.  I walked up to the lighthouse and touched it, the distant landmark of my childhood.  I looked back across the water.

As a child I had looked out to Spurn, sometimes wondering if anyone out there was looking back at me.  There was, of course.  A middle-aged man was looking back to the beaches of his childhood with fond memories.

Hot Water to get into

There was no running hot water in the house of my childhood.  Hot water was obtained by boiling a whistling kettle on a gas stove.  Poured into a bowl in the sink, this gave hot water for the dishes after meals.  In the mornings before breakfast and school, hands and face were washed in cold water in the kitchen sink. 

Hot water for a bath or for laundry came from the 'copper.'  This was a large free-standing gas water heater in the kitchen.  It had a huge cylindrical copper tank, maybe 25-30 inches in diameter, on legs, and with a hemispherical bottom and a hinged lid.  It was filled by hand.  From the kitchen tap we would fill a bucket with cold water and carry it across to the copper.  It took many such buckets to fill it before we would light the gas ring below it.  It took a long time to heat up; I remember it as about an hour.

When the water was hot, it was transferred to a bucket using a zinc cylinder with a handle to ladle it out, and it took several to fill the bucket, and several buckets to fill the bath, located in a tiny room at the back of the kitchen.  The bath did have running cold water to cool the boiling water to a comfortable temperature.  A similar process was gone through when my grandmother, who raised me, needed to wash laundry.  I never appreciated at the time how many hours she must have spent doing it.

Luxury came when I was 14 years old.  An Ascot gas heater was fitted above the sink.  It gave instant hot water in a fairly thin stream, but it made washing hands and face more pleasurable, and made quick work of washing the dishes.

The song of the ABC minors

The ABC stood for Associated British Cinemas, and they dominated many of the Saturday mornings of my childhood.  Hundreds of children queued up at the Ritz to pay our sixpence (2.5p) for a morning's cinematic feast.  The movies were usually shorts, typically including comedies by Laurel and Hardy or the Three Stooges, and Westerns featuring immaculately clean and well-dressed cowboys such as Roy Rogers, Tom Mix or Hopalong Cassidy.

Best of all were the serials, of which a 30-minute episode was shown each week.  They included Kit Carson, a Western hero up against the Mystery Riders, and Batman, who took on the Japanese Cave of Horrors, a Gotham carnival front for the sinister Japanese war effort.  Each episode would end with a cliffhanger that would be resolved at the start of the next episode. 

Everyone we knew went to these Saturday matinees, and the serials quite often dominated playtime conversations over the following week as we all speculated on the likely outcome.  There was a song we all sang just before the start of each programme from words shown on screen.  With hindsight it now seems rather like the company songs Japanese workers used to sing at the start of their day's work.

We are the boys and girls well known as

Minors of the ABC

And every Saturday we line up

To see the films we like

And shout aloud with glee

We love to laugh and have a sing-song

Just a happy crowd are we

We’re all pals together

We’re minors of the ABC.

Alas, it all ceased for me when I was admitted, just turned 11, to Humberstone Foundation (grammar) School, which featured classes on Saturday mornings.

Astride the world

As schoolboys we would ride our bicycles along the narrow paths that ran parallel to the sea.  The track leading to North Cotes, not far from Humberstone Foundation School, was a popular one, with rough grass on one side and sand dunes and then the sea on the other.  I would ride side by side with the two Davids, since there were no cars to bother about.

There was a ritual we observed when we reached the metal arrow laid into the narrow road and stretching at an angle across it.  It was marked in the centre as 0 degrees, with East on one side and West on the other.  It denoted the Greenwich meridian, which passed through East Lincolnshire.  Apparently in 1884, when Britain was at the height of its power, the world agreed to settle on Greenwich for the line denoting 0 degrees of longitude.  This arrow marked a continuation of that line.  We would stop our bicycles every time we reached it, and pause briefly with one wheel in the world's Eastern hemisphere and the other one in the West.

No-one ever told us or taught us to do this and straddle both sides of the world for a few moments, but we always did it, and the thrill of being able to do it never faded.

Capturing the flagpole

My grammar school, Humberstone Foundation School existed in distant rivalry with Wintringham School, which was a day grammar school like itself.  The schools liked to beat each other at sports matches.

One night the Humberstone Upper Sixth staged a raid, captured the other school's flagpole and erected it in a clearing in the local wood.  They tipped off the other school afterwards so it could be recovered.  Retaliation for this humiliating slight was a possibility, so the Upper Sixth set up a rota of night watches, reckoning that it would be enough if guard was kept until 1.0 am. 

I was in the Lower Sixth, but four of us were invited to assist, so we visited the school after dark to keep watch in pairs.  It was quite exciting creeping around the school grounds at night.

It didn't happen on my watch, but one night, intruders were seen pouring over the school fence just after midnight.  The two on watch switched on their torches and ran toward the interlopers shouting at full voice.  The startled miscreants fled in panic, abandoning pots of whitewash.  The commotion attracted attention and authority was summoned.

The ringleaders at both schools were duly punished, but those lower down, including me, were not implicated and escaped punishment.

Passing time in a news cinema

Before television news there were cinema newsreels, often shown as shorts before the main movie.  They were weekly rather than daily, and presented motion pictures of the main world events, usually disasters or wars.  The most famous in the UK were Pathe News (with a cockerel crowing to introduce them), and Movietone News.  A strident accompanying male voice declared the stories behind the pictures.

There were news cinemas, and on my rare visits to London I would pop into the one on Trafalgar Square.  It offered a show of newsreels plus travelogues, short documentaries and cartoons, with a programme usually lasting about an hour, and with no main feature.  Admission was cheap, and it was a good way to pass the time on a rainy day, particularly as you were allowed to stay in and watch the show over again if you wanted. 

Of course they were victims of television and of television news. They could only show pictures of last week’s news, whereas TV offered it more currently, especially when satellites enabled transcontinental transmissions. It’s a pity in some way, though, because I found the travelogues quite interesting, and sometimes made a note in my mind to visit some of the exotic places they showed.

Foaming Gibbs dentifrice

When I was a child in the late 1940s, Britain’s postwar economy was still in poor shape and luxuries were few.  The toothpaste we used as children was not a paste at all, since there were no plastic tubes and such toothpaste as there was came in flexible lead tubes which you squeezed.  The paint would peel off the tube to reveal the grey lead underneath.  With Britain trying to recover from the destruction and shortages of a world war, lead was needed elsewhere and toothpaste was expensive.  I can't imagine the lead was terribly healthy.

Instead we used Gibbs Dentifice.  It came in a round tin with a dome-like tin cover, and looked like a cylindrical cake of pink soap sitting on the base.  You had to brush a wet toothbrush across it a few times to whip up a foam, rather as men did with shaving cream.  With this somewhat gritty pink foam you cleaned your teeth.

I must have used it thousands of times as a child.  It cost about 7.5d in the old money, or about 3p for a tin.  It had flavour added, a sweet, slightly soapy, slightly sickly taste to it, and it was pink.  The nearest flavour that matches my memory of it is that of Pepto-bismol, the anti-nausea medication.  The fun came as each block neared its end, and I would scrub the tin carefully, and see how long I could make the remnants last.  I suppose I switched to toothpaste in the early 1950s, maybe to Gibbs SR, but the pink block in the tin is now long gone.

Respecting the resident hedgehogs

My friend lived just outside St Andrews proper at Pilmour Cottage.  It was set among woods, gorse bushes and rough undulating pasture.  A couple of hedgehogs decided to share his home, and moved in to a stair cupboard with a gap under its door.  They were very shy creatures, and if disturbed, would each curl up into a prickly ball if they didn't have time to dash back to the gap under the stair cupboard.

All his guests treated them with consideration.  We'd stop talking when one of them came into the room to sample the saucer of milk or raw egg he'd put out.  They would shuffle in, claws scraping on the tiles, amid much loud snuffling.  We'd sit perfectly still and watch until they shuffled away.

One took a liking to his bed, he informed us casually.  At about 6am he would feel it climb up the side to hang down by its claws from under the top blanket, but not inside the sheets.  He would get up carefully when it was time to do so, looking at the bulge of the creature's shape in the side of the bed.  It was always gone when he turned in at night.  He took it all very casually, as part of the respect one affords wild creatures – especially the ones that share your home.

Shovelling parallels of latitude

Not everyone was paying rapt attention as our geography teacher, S E ('Sam') Osborn, taught about co-ordinates on the earth's surface.  He unfurled maps and showed the parallels of latitude and meridians of longitude. He drew on the blackboard, carefully explaining the dimensions of each 10-degree division.

One boy, Alexander Rhind, was almost dozing as the teacher explained, emphasizing his consonants with precision as he always did.

"Parallels of latitude are lines marked on the earth's surface. They are made by men going round the earth with shovels to dig them out."

Suddenly he called, "Rhind! How are parallels of latitude formed?"

The boy jerked up.

"Er, men with shovels," he volunteered quickly.

The teacher gave him a withering look of derision. "You foolish child," he remarked.

Nuclear bomb attack

When I worked briefly on Capitol Hill in Washington DC, I was in the Canon House Office building.  At the ends of the corridors were yellow and black propeller signs telling people what to do in the event of nuclear bomb attack.  If the bell sounded three long bursts in succession, people were to make their way immediately to the designated shelters in the basements.

One quiet day I was alone in the office, with everyone else off to meetings.  At 11 am the bell rang a long burst.  Then it sounded again, another long one, and I wondered idly if it would sound a third time.  It did.

There was no rush of footsteps in the corridor.  Indeed, as I looked out there was no-one there at all.  I walked rather nervously along the empty corridor past what seemed to be empty offices.  My alarm was rising by the time I reached an intersection; where to my relief I encountered a solitary policeman.  I approached him.

“Did that bell just sound three times?” I asked.

“Sure did,” he confirmed.

“What does that indicate,” I enquired.

“Nuclear bomb attack,” he informed me in a bored, offhand manner. 

Then, seeing my expression, he added helpfully, “It’s tested every Wednesday at 11 am.”

I was much relieved, and told him that if I were the Russians, that’s when I’d attack.

Every picture tells a story

My grandmother was on her knees cleaning the ash of yesterday's coal fire from the grate, a task she performed every day of my childhood.  As she slowly rose up onto her feet, she clutched her bent back, smiled ruefully and said with feeling, "talk about every picture tells a story."

My sister and I had long given up trying to make sense of some of grandmother's observations that seemed to lack a logical thread, and we exchanged knowing smiles with each other at the random absurdity of it.

My Aunt Jean, her daughter, saw us do this and remarked, "You think she's daft, don't you?"

We had to admit that yes, it did seem a little daft, so we nodded our agreement.

Aunt Jean then enlightened us.  It seems that in the 1930s there had been a famous advertisement in newspapers and maybe posters that had depicted an elderly woman clutching her bent back in a similar pose, and with the caption, "Every picture tells a story."

The advert had apparently been for some pain-killing medication recommended by its makers for treating the pains of rheumatism.  Now here, nearly 20 years later, my grandmother, rising unsteadily and clutching her back, had made the connection.  No, she wasn't totally daft.

Train windows

In the 1950s much of Britain’s railway rolling stock was pre-war and decidedly old-fashioned.  I would regularly travel by train, either with my sister, or grandmother, or even alone.  The train windows were impressive.  They were set into the doors, and could slide up and down.  A large leather belt hung from the middle of them at the bottom.  You would pull this out a little to release the window, and then lower the wood-framed window by the desired amount, securing it in its new position by fitting one of the holes in the leather belt over a smooth metal stud, there for the purpose.  The windows could be pulled all the way closed or open, or to about 6 intermediate positions.

I remember once on a hot day traveling from Scarborough being quite irritated when the two other people in my carriage suddenly pulled the window from open to closed without asking for my opinion.  I was still indignant as the train pulled into a tunnel, sending clouds of sooty smoke past the window, but not into the carriage.  As it cleared the tunnel, one of the people who’d closed the window pulled on the leather belt to re-open it.  Obviously they knew the line well, and knew when to close the window.

Not catching carp

 I spent most of a summer staying with other astronomy students at Herstmonceux Castle, then the site of the Royal Greenwich Observatory.  The observatory staff lived outside the castle in the nearby villages, so we were the only residents apart from the Astronomer Royal, Sir Richard van der Riet Woolley, and had pretty well the run of the castle.

 We were fascinated by the carp which inhabited the castle's moat.  They were large and docile.  If we dropped snacks of food from the drawbridge, the fish would rise in a heaving shoal, climbing over each other's backs on the surface to snatch each morsel.  We had no fishing gear, but we tied a chip to a piece of string and were amazed to see it greedily devoured.  The string sped away until it ran out, whereupon it came free with no chip and no carp.  Then we conceived a novel fishing method.  We weighted a wicker waste-basket with stones, and lowered it into the moat with strings on each side.  We tossed digestive biscuits onto the surface above it, waited until the heaving mass of fish struggled for them, then hoisted it aloft.

Alas, the fish were too smart.  We caught a couple, but they leapt clear as we pulled the basket upwards. We resolved to perfect our technique the next day, but a note from the Astronomer Royal appeared, ordering us to desist from disturbing the moat's residents, so the carp were left in peace.