sunday school

I wonder if there are still any of those quaint attempts to religiously educate our young souls by sending them to ‘Sunday schools’ anymore? I doubt it. Today, Sundays are more likely to be spent wandering around B&Q, Ikea or MFI than taking the collection in church. I doubt also, whether many children who have experienced it, would like to go back to their youth to re-live even one day of it. I hated Sunday school almost as much as I hated regular school. The saving grace was that it only lasted an hour or so and there was no arithmetic or spelling lessons to tax my poor brain. The downside was that it ruined my whole Sunday.

Before we had all-day tv, computers and electronic games machines for entertainment, the average child would be out playing with their mates in the streets around their houses. They would be up to their necks in muck, grass stains and various cuts and grazes by the end of the day. For those of us unfortunate to be members of a Sunday school, there was no such pleasure on Sundays. The first restriction was that you had to wear your very best clothes and be spotlessly clean. So the day got off to a bad start by having to have a bath, whether or not you’d already had one that week! Then you were trussed up in all those horrible, clean new clothes that were normally only worn for such occasions as visits to/from relatives, Sunday School and the odd wedding. They never fitted properly because they were bought a size or two too big for you to ‘grow into’, or you had already grown out of them. You had to take care not to rip or dirty them for the rest of the day, which meant – no playing out.

We’d walk the half-mile to the Methodist Church. The urge to kick stones, climb trees or throw dirty sticks at anything on the way, had to be curbed so we arrived pristine. None of our family was a Methodist and neither of my parents ever attended, so God knows why we had to go! The classes were held in back rooms of the Church before the morning service. Some of the less fortunate kids had to join their parents in the service after classes, but most of us would be released. It must have had some benefit because I remember the terrific sense of elation when it ended!

The classes were split into age groups. The youngest had ‘nice’ Bible stories read to them. They would sing a few childish hymns like ‘All things bright and beautiful’ and draw pictures of palm trees, lambs, shepherds, wise men, baby Jesus, Joseph’s dream coat, Easter eggs and bunnies and other such biblical scenes. Older children would have more serious stories read to them about plagues of locusts in Egypt, Jesus throwing a wobbly in the Synagogue and various nasty characters of the day, like Pontius Pilate and King Herod. Fitting these stories into a meaningful theme was no easy task for me, but the general impression was that all religious activity happened in either Egypt, Bethlehem, Jerusalem or Palestine (wherever they were) and that God, Jesus and Santa Claus were all basically good guys, as long as you behaved yourself. If you didn’t, then “woe betide you.” No presents at Christmas and watch out for the ‘Holy Ghost’ who knew everything you did and who was sure to scare the living daylights out of you. This was enough of a threat to ensure we got home equally pristine by resisting the urge to kick stones, climb trees or throw dirty sticks at anything on the way back.

Several times a year there was a “special” day. There was the Christmas party, where we would be treated to a magnificent culinary spread of potted beef, egg and cress sarnies, jelly and blanchmange. Games such as “Beetle Drive”, “Snap” and “Lexicon” provided hours of riotous fun, So did the surreptitious forages into the store rooms where there was an old piano. There was always someone showing off by playing both parts of Chopsticks. My friend Terry and I didn’t possess such talents, but using a couple of walking sticks for guitars, did a great impersonation of The Shadows playing Apache.

There was the annual prize giving for good attendance that usually consisted of a children’s book containing bible stories, pictures of palm trees, lambs, shepherds etc. Also annually was the Harvest Festival. We were encouraged to make up packs of goodies using old shoeboxes filled with fruit, bread, or tinned food. Sometimes, an odd child brought a shoebox full of coal, which was clearly inedible and caused derision from the rest of the fruit-wielding mob. What puzzled me – we were led to believe they were offerings to God to celebrate all the good things that had come our way over the last year. Why would he need those things as he had apparently created the whole universe by magic? How would he collect them – I had never once seen him actually attend Sunday school or Church for that matter? I later discovered they gave it all to old people. who presumably would have starved otherwise, so that was good.

We also had the occasional day trip. Holidays were a rare thing for us, so this seemed like a great treat. We visited far-flung places like Southport, Bolton Abbey and Knaresborough. Unfortunately it was marred for me because I suffered with travel sickness. It usually resulted in throwing up into a grease-proof sarnie bag, which had been saved by some well organised adult, who was familiar with kids and travelling.

When Sunday school finished, it wasn’t much better. We weren’t allowed to change into our old clothes and play out with our mates. Those who weren’t made to go to Sunday school and there for lacked moral fibre, would no doubt end up as thieves and murderers! We were allowed to do quiet and ‘clean’ activities: reading, writing, or playing inside with our toys, just as long as we stayed spotless. This was ten times more liberty than my mother had been allowed. The expectations on her generation were that you spent the rest of Sunday reading the Bible. If she visited her auntie, she would be allowed to sew or knit, but that was considered a moral sin by the more staunch thinkers of the day.

At the start of this, I gave the impression that Sunday school was a fate worse than death for most kids. Looking back, there are some fond memories and the moral code of conduct it encouraged in us, did no harm at all. There was no glue sniffing, graffiti or vandalism from bored kids who don’t appreciate the values of respect and decent behaviour. Maybe the kids of today would benefit too, from drawing pictures of palm trees, lambs, shepherds etc and the threat of that Holy Ghost watching their every move!

children of the 1950's

Let me tell you about ‘little’ me first. I was a very shy and insecure child, not exactly a wimp but not very confident, often scared of retribution from adults and authority figures - more of a follower than a leader. That resulted in a lifelong, internal rebellion against those authoritarian types who are basically just control freaks and bullies. You have to realise that we were a different species then. Not only were children supposed to be ‘seen and not heard’ but also adults would probably have preferred us to be ‘not seen or heard’. We could have been forgiven for thinking we were some type of inferior race that adults just had to tolerate. We were scolded for the slightest thing, often not even genuine demeanours.

For example, my grandparents had an upright piano in their front room. This was the room that was never used but kept ‘for best’. Apparently grandma could knock out the odd hymn or two but we never ever heard her play it. It was simply a piece of furniture she polished and presumably some sort of working classes status symbol. My sister and I often spent an afternoon there while our parents were working or busy.

There were few toys to entertain us so inevitably we would explore the house and eventually find, to me, the most exciting and interesting thing in it - the piano. We would carefully lift the lid and press a key or two. Wow, the lovely resonance of the strings was so enchanting even though I couldn’t play a tune. The bass notes in particular sounded so good. There were the two pedals, which I thought were for driving it, as if it was a car. They were a complete mystery but nevertheless worth a few presses. Within minutes grandma would come storming in and chastise us, swiftly shutting the lid and banning us for life from touching the thing. End of fun and musical exploration for us!

Ordinary children of the 50s had few treats. They were mainly the reserve of Christmas, Easter and birthdays. Toys were relatively simple and we made our own fun and games from everyday things and imagination. We lived and believed our games. Boys played at ‘cops and robbers’, ‘cowboys and Indians’ and mimicked our comic heroes such as Dan Dare and Davey Crocket (king of the wild frontier). WW2 was not far behind us, so playing war games was popular. The enemy ‘Japs’ and ‘Nazi’ soldiers, so often featured in our politically incorrect comic-books, seemed like real threats to a young lad with a good imagination. They were no doubt still lurking in the bushes at the back of the laundry. Girls played soft sissy games like ‘mummies and daddies’, pretending to feed and dress babies and wash clothes. We were basically mimicking adults but with an innocent childish twist. That innocence seems to disappear much quicker in children of today, yet their parents also tend to over-protect them. I’m sure our parents did care but they didn’t worry about us coming to any real harm. We had lots of freedom to roam the neighbourhood and as long as we arrived back in time for ‘tea’ or bath time, then all was well. Life was a big adventure and we explored it every day. TV wasn’t available 24/7 and we didn’t even own one until I was 10 years old.

the cuckoo

The cuckoo is a mysterious creature rarely seen (I have only ever seen one, which was at the top of a mountain in North Wales). When I was a child It puzzled me, because the evidence was apparently all around us. Copious amounts of so-called ‘cuckoo spit’ festooned the plants where we played. It was hard to believe that one or two cuckoos were responsible (even a gang of pubescent schoolboys would have difficulty providing that amount of saliva). Now, I know it is created by a small insect called a frog-hopper. Then there’s the weird business of laying one egg in an unsuspecting bird’s nest and kicking out all the other babies. It’s a kind of lazy yob of the bird world. These oddities added to the suspense and mystique of the event I am about to describe. This story is not about small birds in clocks, or spit. I doubt if anyone else has heard of this because my grandfather invented it. It was an annual affair that rated in the same scale of excitement as Pancake Day and Bonfire Night.

This is what he told us. ‘Every Spring, the Cuckoo comes and if you’ve been good children, he brings a small present for you.’

We believed that ‘The Cuckoo’ came with gifts for me and my sister and our close neighbourhood friends. First it would fly into a nearby tree, then if all were well, into our parents’ bedroom. It opened the window slightly (not an easy task for a bird laden with gifts) and waited for us below to shout for him. To make him deliver the goods, we had to shout ‘cuckoo’ repeatedly as loud as we could. After a while, a small wrapped present slowly made it’s way down to us on the end of a piece of string. It had a name written on it and that person would take the gift. We would all shout again for the next present until we all had one.

Grandad was a canny old chap and who loved a practical joke or trick. He would wind us up to fever pitch by telling us he’d just seen The Cuckoo in a tree, then disappear upstairs to act it’s part. To add excitement, he kept us waiting and shouting and came out periodically to ask if The Cuckoo had been. Sometimes the present got half way down only to disappear again before we could reach it, which caused more frantic “cuckoo” shouting. My friend usually got over-excited shouting ‘It’s Barry here cuckoo’ in order to ensure his present reached him ASAP.

Naturally, we never caught sight of the fabled animal (it was extrememly shy according to grandad). We couldn’t figure how it opened the sash window in the bedroom (even Dad had difficulty with that one) and carry several presents. We assumed it had similar magical powers to Santa Claus and as there was a present involved in it, we didn’t really care. The event finished with grandad nonchalantly appearing again and asking us if he’d been yet. To grandma’s disgust and for those who still had any vocal chords in tact, the finale was a singing session of ‘John Brown’s Cow went frrrrrp (raspberry blowing) against the wall’

the bath

As I said earlier, the bath in our house was in the living room! I don’t think there had ever been a bathroom. People living in those small working class houses would originally have used tin baths that they placed in front of the fire and filled with hot water from pans. So I suppose it was a luxury to have a real bath that was plumbed in, even though it was in your main living area.

Dad, who was a very practical type, had disguised it by “boxing it in” with plywood painted to look like real wood and fitting a hinged top which covered it completely and doubled up as a work surface and dining table. There was a sort of shelf we called the “leaf” which slotted into the side so that you could sit up to it to eat your meals, a 50’s style breakfast bar. It served as a dirty linen container too. When someone wanted a bath, the lid was lifted and clipped securely to the wall. The dirty washing was removed and piled to one side and once filled with nice hot water, you could enjoy the luxury of a bath whilst listening to the wireless or later, when we got one, watching tv. Afterwards we would get out and stand in front of the open fire whilst getting dried. I never saw my parents having a public bath in front of the rest of the family like that though. They either didn't have baths or waited until we were tucked up and fast asleep.

To an outside observer the bath was just a rectangular box with a red linoleum lid, no-one would have suspected what was inside, which you’ll see was to my advantage on one occasion. Every week or two we would get a visit from a bus driver called Billy Monarch. He was a rather outgoing, blunt and loud character who came to collect the football pools money. A sort of lottery thing based on the football results of the week. Well as a child I was very shy and found Billy’s presence somewhat overpowering. He would always overstay his welcome as far as I was concerned, telling his funny tales of life as a bus driver and taking whatever opportunity he could to get a laugh out of my parents, sometimes at my expense, or so it seemed to me. One night I was in the bath when there came his tell-tale knock on the door, a loud rat-a-tat-tat. I knew instantly it was Billy and flew into a panic. He knew nothing of the bath and would have made a big deal seeing me sat there in the buff, causing untold embarrassment and probably using the experience as new material for his comedy act with the others on his round.

“Don’t let him in, don’t let him in” I pleaded.
“Don’t be silly.” said mum trying to pacify me. “He’s seen naked boys before.”
“I don’t want him to see this one.” I thought. “Put the lid down quick” I implored.
After much huffing and puffing about it she agreed and then let Billy in. I laid flat out there in the hot and steamy dark bath, trying my very best not to move and slosh the water about, or sneeze, cough, belch or make any other noise. Not an easy thing for a young lad! Boy would he have got a surprise if I had and thinking about it now, would love to see his reaction had I let out a loud bubbly fart. Eventually he left after what seemed a lifetime and the lid was lifted to reveal a wilting, semi cooked but relieved me.

the outside loo

Once a normal part of the ordinary working class household, the outside loo was a part of our lives that has many memories attached for me. There are still thousands of little brick or stone built outhouses standing at the bottom of the yards of the small terraced houses around the country. They are very much associated with the hard working Northern towns and cities. I suppose they were in some ways a more hygienic and healthier arrangement than the soft option of modern housing with centrally heated bathrooms that germs and bacteria probably thrive on, and that we all enjoy the luxury of these days. The lead pipes and overhead water cistern did tend to freeze up in winter, though a bit of hessian wrapped around the pipe and a small paraffin lamp glowing away in the corner, kept the temperature just enough above freezing point to stop it. The lamp would also provide just enough light so you could see where you were peeing too. When there was severe frost it was a common sight to see icicles hanging from the overflow pipes outside. We would snap them off and mess about with them. Sometimes we would suck them like iced lollies! Kids huh?

There was a small obscure glass window in the door of our toilet, which let enough light in during the day. I remember finding numerous faces and figures lurking in the pattern whilst sitting there “waiting for something to happen”. My favourite was a Red Indian with full head-dress. I somehow felt that he was watching over me in a sort of protective way. The outside toilet seemed quite a threatening place to a young child. I was always slightly uneasy at the thoughts of large spiders lurking above me. Constipation was a rarity for me.

Another strong memory was the shear logistics of going for a poo. I used to wear little short trousers held up by a pair braces, as most boys did then, (although I think I was pretty lucky in having a pair of Dan Dare Braces). In winter I would have a jumper over the top, which meant that I couldn’t drop my braces down without taking it off first. There was nowhere to put your jumper in the toilet so it had to come off first whilst still in the house. The downside to that was, first it announced to the rest of the family that you were going for a poo and secondly it was damn cold in winter.

Toilet paper was something of a disappointment then, thank God for Andrex and the soft, multi layered, absorbent stuff we enjoy now. In those days it was usually Izal or Bronco, a sort of tough, greaseproof type of paper on a roll that smelled of disinfectant and absorbed nothing. It merely spread things around but at least your finger didn’t go through the paper! Often we would run out of it and have to put up with torn up pieces of newspaper hung on the back of the door. That was even worse than Izal as the print would rub off onto your bum. At least there was some reading material to hand for those long visits, except you only ever got a quarter of the story.

Having no inside toilet was a problem at night so most people would have a “gerry”, “Po” or “Gazunder” under their bed. The gerry was a sort of gigantic porcelain teacup that was really only intended for peeing into but also proved useful especially if there were young children in the house. As every parent can testify to, they have a tendency to want to throw up or get unexpected bouts of diarrhoea at the most unearthly hours of the night, so the gerry under the bed was quite a handy thing to have. One memory that still lingers is finding a cardboard circle, about a half-inch in diameter, floating in my gerry one morning. It was out of the top of a bottle of “Buttercup Syrup” (a popular cough medicine that was ever present in our house over winter). I remembered my mum giving me a dose at bedtime and I was most puzzled as to how I could have possibly swallowed it without realizing and even more puzzled at how I had passed it without doing myself some serious injury. On reflection in later years it became obvious it had simply dropped out of the bottle and into the gerry.

On the whole I am glad of the cosy bathrooms we have now to perform our ablutions, as they were a mixed blessing at best. Let’s consider some other final advantages though. They were more private than a bathroom, standing at the bottom of the yard you could let rip with as many loud farts as you needed without the fear of embarrassment from being overheard from your family. The postman may have had the odd fright occasionally mind. They were well ventilated (draughty as hell) so there was no need for those aerosol air fresheners that simply announce the fact that someone has just had a good clear out and probably account for the hole in the ozone layer. They took little in the way of decorating, the occasional slap of whitewash on the rough walls usually sufficed to freshen it up and clear out the spider’s webs.

early life as a baby boomer - our house

From about 1953 we lived in a small terraced house in Yorkshire that was one of ten, arranged in two facing strips of five. They were built around the early part of the century and intended for workers of the nearby Lakeland Laundry. Ours had been sold to a private owner. We referred to these houses as ‘the blocks’. For example we would say, ‘I’m just going to play around the blocks’ which gave our parents some reassurance that all was well and we wouldn’t be far away. No one worried much about the safety of their children, as long as they were aware of the dangers of the main road and other hazards. Even those concerns were mild as there was so little traffic then and sometimes you could sit for ten minutes, waiting for the next car to come into sight. Photo left is the front of the house. The upper window is where the fabled ‘cuckoo’ lowered his gifts to us. (See cuckoo posting).

We had two main rooms downstairs and a tiny kitchen. The front room or sitting room was ‘for best’ and had: a moquette covered suite; a china cabinet for our few treasures; dining table and chairs and a bookcase. It was only used on very rare occasions e.g. when special visitors were due such as relatives from Derbyshire or at Christmas time. The back room or living room had: an old black enamelled fireplace with oven; two armchairs; a treadle sewing machine; a ‘utility’ sideboard with a wireless on it and under the window, a bath - more about that later! The kitchen was tiny, about three feet wide and ten feet long. We had: a pot sink at one end; an electric cooker in the middle and a kitchenette at the other. The kitchenette was a common piece of furniture then. It was like a small, painted welsh dresser with cupboards top and bottom where we stored our few cooking utensils and provisions. We had an electric kettle but that was it for electrical appliances – no fridge or washer. The picture (1966) below is the back of the house.

The tiny window, bottom left, was the kitchen. Upstairs were two decent sized bedrooms and a small box room that was my bedroom (top left). Outside was a small, stone outhouse divided in two. One side was the coalhouse and the other the toilet (no inside luxuries in those days). Dad had built a shed over the front of the outhouses to give more privacy and protection from the weather and to provide useful storage space. It was a multi-functional place. In there we had: an electric boiler; a mangle and a dolly tub. The dolly tub was a galvanised barrel used for doing the weekly wash. Usually on Mondays, mum heated a few gallons of water in the boiler to fill the dolly tub. If the weather were nice she would put it outside for more room. The dirty clothes went in with washing powder and the clothes were pummelled with a posser. That was a sort of long stick with a bell shaped piece of copper on the end, which you pulled up and down in the dolly tub to agitate the clothes. If she were washing white items, like bed linen, she would put a dolly blue in to make the clothes look whiter. It was a small stick with a little cloth bag tied to the end that contained some sort of blue colouring. After she had ‘possed’ them for a while, she ‘fished’ them out with a stick and ran them through the mangle to squeeze out the surplus water. If the weather was dry they were hung outside on the washing line. In winter they were hung over the clotheshorse, which was put in front of the open fire in the living room. The washing would eventually start to steam as it dried. It was tough luck for us if we were sitting there, as we would be totally excluded from any heat reaching us from the fire. There was no central heating then.

We had a decent sized garden at the front where dad grew fruit and veg. There was a small garden shed where dad bred a few budgerigars. We had a blue one named Paddy in the house and mum taught it to say a few phrases such as ‘who's a pretty boy?’

baby boomer intro

What better time and place could I have asked for to be born - 1951, England? OK there probably are some better options but it is probably one of the more interesting periods/places of the 20th Century to land on this planet. I’m thinking that as a teenager, what could have been more exciting than spending it in the heart of the cultural revolution that was taking place with it’s centre right here in Britain during the 1960’s?

It was a great time to be emerging from your childhood into the adult world. Being born a few years earlier would have probably meant that I was newly married, with a couple of kids and a mortgage and out of the social scene that was spiralling to a peak of new discoveries that were a teenagers paradise. Sounds too good to be true doesn’t it? Well actually it wasn’t that good but if you liked pop and rock music and all that stuff, it was pretty damn good. Being born a few years later meant I would have been stuck with listening to the likes of Brotherhood of Man and Alvin Stardust instead of Eric Clapton, CSN&Y, Santana and Jimmy Hendrix.


It’s probably just coincidence but the fifties, being half way through the century, seemed to be a turning point in our society and the sixties saw an end to a lot of things that had not changed much since our parents were children. I am old enough to remember the delights of steam trains, Dan Dare, “the corner shop”, Bill and Ben, valve radios or “wirelesses” as they were called then, and a host of other things that are in danger of getting lost from our consciousness.

I am still young enough, however to witness the fantastic discoveries and inventions of the late 20th century – computers and the internet, CD’s, man’s landing on the moon, “keyhole" surgery, etc. These things are still with us and ever present in our daily lives so it’s the images and memories of the 50’s and 60’s that I intend to invoke. If you were born later than 1965 you are probably too young to associate much with this but your parents might be able to endorse what I have written and maybe expand on it. This picture shows our little family with my grandparents (mother's side) in our front garden. In case you had doubts, I'm the little chap with his shorts pulled up to his shoulders!

I am writing this blog from a highly personal point of view, some of the images can be proven as fact and others – well, unless you were a shy, sensitive and somewhat imaginative child, you might not agree with my observations. On the other hand you might discover that someone else exists on this planet that was as bent and twisted as yourself! Buckle your seatbelts, set the time machine to “somewhere in Britain during the mid 20th century" and see where you land. Have fun.