Cobbled Streets and Penny Sweets--Happy Times and Hardship in Post-War Britain

by Yvonne Young

  COBBLED STREETS

  &

  PENNY SWEETS

  Happy Times and Hardship in

  Post-War Britain

  YVONNE YOUNG

  For Jimmy Forsyth, Newcastle’s adopted

  Geordie photographer

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER 1 THE SUN HAS GOT HIS HAT ON

  CHAPTER 2 BETTING, BREAK-UPS AND BLATTAS

  CHAPTER 3 CATECHISM, CAMPING AND THE CHINA CABINET

  CHAPTER 4 BOGNOR AND THE BEATLES

  CHAPTER 5 BECOMING A BEAT AND DIGGING THE BANDS

  CHAPTER 6 ART, AFFAIRS AND BUDGERIGARS

  CHAPTER 7 LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT

  CHAPTER 8 PURPLE HAZE AND THE CARAVAN AT AMBLE

  CHAPTER 9 THE DIVORCE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PLATES

  COPYRIGHT

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Sun Has Got His Hat On

  When your parents collect things from the past in an old cardboard box, they have no idea that, in time, you will piece their story together. The receipt for Mam’s wedding ring, purchased at The Northern Goldsmiths, 85 & 87 Westgate Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, price £3.00, ‘The Ring Shop For The World’ dated 29 September 1951 (I was born on 24 February 1952).

  When I was around five years old I looked at a photo of my parents in their wedding gear.

  ‘Where was I?’

  ‘You weren’t here yet.’

  Whatever did they mean, how could they be somewhere without me? This was disgraceful. If I wasn’t there yet, well, where was I? Questions they couldn’t answer, but I was there alright. I never understood why being a single mother was frowned upon, but a couple, like my parents, who had married while the bride was pregnant was acceptable. Both these women were ‘up the stick’, the local term, yet the veneer of respectability was what mattered to the community.

  Mam and Dad moved in with Nana, Dad’s mother, at 17 Maria Street, one of the dozens of back-to-backs which steeply sloped down towards Scotswood Road. Five doors up from Vickers Armstrong’s garage and just behind their armament factories. The men in the garage were forever running out to chase kids for throwing stones onto the corrugated steel roof. During World War II, when women were employed to take on the work of men called away, everything was covered in dust and folks had to hold down the china when a tank was on the loose, up one of the streets on a test run. The bombs were filled with explosives, which the women were responsible for putting inside, and this turned their hair and skin yellow. They were nicknamed ‘Canary Girls’. It was a very dangerous job as they fixed the caps down on the bombs and there was always a chance the bombs could go off. The yellow from handling these explosives wore off eventually but there were tales of pregnant women who gave birth to yellow babies. The effects of colouration of the babies’ skin wore off after a couple of weeks, but I believe that the workers suffered skin complaints and breathing difficulties because of the work.

  After the men returned from active service, most of these women lost their jobs, but there wasn’t a great deal of reorganisation as few men were conscripted since the work at Vickers was regarded as being vital to the war effort. It had been a boom time for the company and the shipyards were replacing bombed vessels. There was plenty of work and wages were good, but when nationalisation of shipbuilding and aircraft took place in 1967 over 50 per cent of the company was lost and they were told not to depend on armaments, so work was moved away from Elswick and different ways of working introduced. (They did manufacture tractors for a while, and even one prototype for a doll’s pram, but none of their new products reached the phenomenal heights of production during wartime and into the 1950s.)

  Nana’s place was a downstairs flat opposite a bomb site – apparently, the German airmen were aiming for the factories. Vickers had made our area a prime target for the Luftwaffe. In our area alone, almost 400 people were killed by bombs from German planes between 1940 and 1941, as they tried to destroy our tanks, armaments and shipping but hit local homes instead. Even during my childhood in the 1950s, there was still a lot of damage to buildings around the West End of Newcastle. We played among the rubble, looking for bits of old china. Sometimes we came across a blue piece but even more prized was anything with gold on it.

  Scotswood Road was famous for its forty-six pubs, most of them built on the corner of another street. It was said that rates were more expensive on the main road so by being built on the corner, publicans could lay claim to their address off-road. So pubs mingled in with the corner shops and fish-and-chip shops.

  Music was a feature in our flat as my parents both enjoyed musicals. Dad favoured My Fair Lady and Gigi, while Mam sang songs from South Pacific and Can-Can. I still remember, young as I was, feeling acute embarrassment as I became aware that they were watching me as I flounced around while singing one of those songs. I hid behind a chair and they laughed all the more. But while Mam might have laughed at my attempts to warble, she herself wasn’t so keen to perform when anyone else was watching.

  The only party I had at home was around the same year: some children from our street were invited with their mothers and we ate egg-and-tomato sandwiches. We had a huge brown earthenware teapot which had a handle above the spout – when full, it would have been impossible to hold upright with the regular handle alone. Mam had never actually used it before and put far too much tea in (someone observed that it was like Spanish tea). A game of Ring o’ Roses was suggested and the mothers joined hands with us kids, but none of them wanted to sing, so it all descended into frustration.

  ‘Oh, just play among yourselves. Here, eat some bullets!’

  A friend of mine, Mary, came to live in the area from Scotland when she was seven years of age. After being at the school for just one week, she came home crying.

  ‘Mammy, there’s a girl in my class has got a gun.’

  ‘Have you seen it?’ her mother asked.

  ‘No, but she keeps asking me if I have any bullets.’

  ‘Bullets’ was a north-eastern term for sweets in general. The Black Bullet, a popular minty-tasting confection shaped like little balls, probably started this adaptation. There were many children who were bitterly disappointed while waiting for a parent to return from a first day making bullets at Vickers armament factory, only to be informed they were made of metal, not candy.

  Derelict houses were a magnet for us kids, no safety fencing or blocked-off entrances. We dared each other to go upstairs and walk around the skirting boards of rooms with massive holes in the middle of the floor and blown bricks staring up at us. An old church on the corner of a street was under compulsory purchase. Huge oak doors hung off their hinges and when we ventured inside, most of the flooring on the far side was caved in. On further inspection, we saw there was a flood of water underneath – someone must have been in for the copper piping.

  I have no memory of Nana, but Mam said that she had infinite patience with me, putting my bootees on when I kept pulling them off. Every Sunday, she attended St Aidan’s Church and enjoyed voluntary work. My grandfather Charles died in 1940. He had moved to Newcastle in 1904 from Falmouth, where he had been a mariner, so he slotted right into working on ships at Vickers-Armstrong engineering works.

  Many of the pubs on the Scotswood Road were named after machinery or armament from the factories: The Gun, The Hydraulic Crane, The Rifle, The Forge Hammer and The Mechanics, etc. I loved listening to my Uncle Tom’s stories. He remembered that Grandad rigged a bracket on t
he wall in the backyard to make nets and tents to sell for extra money. More than likely, the materials were gathered from the workplace. All of the homes in the area were painted grey, dark green or brown – battleship colours.

  I enjoyed listening to tales of local characters. There was the rat catcher who called in at the pubs, went into the cellars and placed a lantern with a kipper over the top. He hid in the corner until the rat came sniffing, then grabbed it with his bare hands and chucked it in a hessian sack. The charge to the publican was 4d (2p) for a little rat and 6d (3p) for a large one. If the payment wasn’t given, the catcher tipped them all out onto the bar counter – ‘Here then, have your rats back!’ Sure enough, this would clear the place.

  A neighbour had worked in many jobs but took a job in pest control for a while. Folks went past and said, ‘There goes the rat catcher.’ Everyone knew him because many people had need of his services – in shops, homes and pubs. There were rats in the Co-op, anywhere where there was food. Hundreds of rats ran along the Quayside. A team of eight men laid traps and left them to do their work. Nobody bothered them, people pointed, ‘They’re in there’ and then went away. They all said they could never do that job, especially in the cattle market near the river. There was so much blood running among the cobbles, the rats swarmed everywhere. I was shocked when my neighbour told me that sometimes the rats ran up his trouser legs. He had seen bulls being led by herdsmen using sticks to chase them along and joked, ‘At least the bulls didn’t run up my trouser leg!’

  On my way out from the backyard one day I looked along St John’s Road, near the cemetery, and was horrified to see a huge black bull belting along the middle of the road. The poor thing had escaped from the abattoir and was covered in foaming sweat, steam pulsing from its nostrils. It was terrified and so was I, so I kept looking but only with my head showing from behind the door. The cattle market employees were hot on the beast’s trail in a large wagon. Inside the graveyard they cornered and calmed it down, enticing it into the vehicle with around five heifers. I can’t imagine the terror when the unfortunate creature realised that it was headed back from whence it had escaped. These days, animals are stunned in a more humane way compared to the practice adopted back then.

  There were many stories of escaped animals. On one occasion a pregnant woman was standing at her front door when a bull ran around the corner of her street, where folks were gathered, chatting. They took one look at the bull and stampeded over the woman to get into her house.

  The chimney sweep was a favourite of mine. A father-and-son team visited homes in the area. To me it was fascinating how they carried a long fabric bag, unravelled it and inside were all these poles and a huge circular brush. The bag doubled as a cover to protect flooring from dust and half-covered the fireplace. The sweep slotted all the poles together and the fabulous brush was the crown. I was very curious: what was he doing? What were the poles for? What was going to happen? After every question, he just said, ‘Shush!’

  Later, I asked, ‘Mam, is the sweep called Shush?’

  This snake of a man went up the chimney and then the excitement began. I ran outside and half the street was gathered around our back door in the lane. Everyone knew which house the sweep was working in, so word got around. Then the long-awaited event happened: the brush burst forth from the chimney pot, doing its pirouette. A massive cheer would go up. Folks were easily pleased in those days!

  Guy Fawkes was another important happening in our lane. Weeks before, us kids would be collecting firewood, old furniture, windfall from trees in the park. The stash was protected at all times, as groups from other lanes would be on the lookout to steal from someone else’s supply. We saved up to buy a box of fireworks and quite shockingly, compared to safety standards today, children were allowed to buy loose bangers and Catherine wheels from local shops. On the day, wood was stacked in a kind of wigwam shape and any Guys which had been made from old clothes and stuffed with newspaper were placed on top. The Guys were used beforehand to collect money for fireworks. Kids stood outside the pubs, hoping to catch any passing drunk who might put his hand in his pocket.

  ‘Penny for the Guy, Mister, please.’

  Secretly, we hoped by chance they might be so intoxicated that as they scratted through their change, a two-bob bit might be mistaken for a penny.

  Lanes were quite narrow as housing wasn’t built to accommodate cars in those days and one drawback of the bonfire being too close to back doors resulted in the blistering and popping of paint. But it didn’t matter, people simply redecorated. Guy Fawkes Night was seen as something that just happened, it was tradition and nobody ever mentioned that it should be banned. Catherine wheels were nailed to doors, rockets were stood inside milk bottles and ‘set off’, younger children held sparklers. It was a community gathering and people put potatoes and chestnuts in the fire to bake. Mind you, they didn’t taste all that good! They were left to cool down and ended up tasting charred and rubbery, nothing like the Nat King Cole song had led me to believe!

  There were church processions on Sundays, which started off at Condercum Road (Condercum is a Roman word as they built a fort at the top of the road, it means ‘place with a good view’). From there you can see right across the valley and rolling over the River Tyne towards Gateshead. Services were held in the street and at Easter, a pastor would offer his sermon from the back of a flatbed lorry. Women wore hats complete with hatpin or a head square as an alternative. Mam never attended these gatherings as there wasn’t a religious bone in her body, although she did possess a wide range of headscarves. Some had very elaborate patterns and among her collection were lighthouses, enormous flowers and sailing ships.

  Women enjoyed playing darts in the pub and had their own teams. Folks would sing around the piano and continue singing up the street after closing time. After a while chatting outside someone’s home, a suggestion was made to continue inside. The rug was rolled back and they danced and sang until the early hours. Remember, this was a time when folks didn’t rely on TV or digital devices for entertainment and storytelling was a staple of the community. I liked nothing better than listening to the adults having a chinwag about the good old days, sharing family stories and gossiping.

  Children played out until they were forced to go inside for the night, crafts and knitting were encouraged and the lads would help with taking care of the pigeons in the cree [a hut or pen] or learn how to make tools or household items. There were joiners, fitters, electricians, plumbers and other tradesmen on every street. Many a home, including mine, used items such as the guard for the fireplace (or a ‘bleezer’ as we called it), poker and toasting fork courtesy of the local metal works.

  The local general dealer shops on Adelaide Terrace smelled of paraffin, mothballs and bundles of sticks. When you entered you were greeted by beautiful oak counters and assistants behind them who knew their stuff. The walls of the haberdashery store were lined with wooden doors with glass panels and tiny little drawers which held ribbons, buttons and metal zips. Women who wanted to knit a jumper asked at the wool shop if they could buy a ball a week – ‘Put the balls away’. This meant they had worked out how many balls were needed, then collected one a week, paying as they knitted. Folks couldn’t afford to buy everything at once. Tobacconists sold single cigarettes to those who couldn’t afford the pack and of course, most shops offered ‘on tick’ to run up a tab.

  If someone was wearing a rather tatty garment, another might comment, ‘Where did you get that, Paddy’s Market?’ This referred to a practice on the Quayside where secondhand clothes (now known as ‘pre-loved’!) could be bought for a few pennies. Often they were strewn on the pavement for folks to forage through – there might be a coat better than the one they were wearing. There were second-hand shops in the area for clothing, bric-a-brac and furniture.

  On Sundays the larger expanse of the Quayside was lined with stalls. I recall that rabbits, kittens and budgies were sold, along with low-priced foods and clothing, to
ys, etc. Sometimes an escapologist would entertain the crowds – tales abounded of a time when he couldn’t get out of the sack, which was wrapped in chains. Apparently, he kept the key to a large padlock between his teeth and he had dropped it!

  An old pitman used to walk over the Chain Bridge to a pub on the other side of the River Tyne, but occasionally got into a punch-up with other drinkers. One morning, his jacket was found down by the river and no sign of him. A search was made but he wasn’t found, so a couple of weeks later, a memorial service was held – people assumed he had drowned. However, he had got into a fight with some Dutch bargemen, who were taking coal away from Newcastle, so as he was drunk, they threw him onto the boat. He had to wait until they made a return visit to this city to get home. It didn’t half cause a fuss!

  In those days it was necessary for every house-proud housewife to ‘donkey stone the front step’. In other words, they scrubbed it clean on their hands and knees, bucket at the side, before a yellow rubbing stone was applied. You weren’t allowed to step on it when it was newly done. The fanlight received the same diligent attention – apparently, a dirty step and fanlight meant you had a dirty home. Folks really took a pride in their meagre dwelling places. The women were regularly seen out on the street, wearing Paisley pinnies with scarves tied with a knot at the front, covering their hair curlers (working-class turban style), sweeping their part of the path. Of course, this was also an excuse to gossip (known as ‘gassing’). They would stand around gassing about this one or that one:

  ‘Who does she think she is, the cat’s mother?’

  ‘Aye, man, aal fur coat and nee knickers!’

  Or: ‘What’s she doing, walking up the road with him?’

  ‘Wonder if there’s anything going on?’

  Mam used to say, ‘Look at those two, pulling someone to bits, no doubt!’ But it was perfectly OK when she was doing it herself.