Into The Modern age

Edge Hill Terraced Houses ---from 1940 onwards

Radio days

The major difference between the soldier returning from the First War and the soldier returning from the Second was that there was no material damage to the city during the First, while a soldier returning from the Second World War  came back to a bleak landscape.  The First and The Second World Wars were both great levellers and they were instrumental in breaking down the Victorian class system, particularly when the vaunted " homes fit for heroes" failed to materialise after 1918 but a serviceman who had fought for his country could no longer tolerate oppressive bosses and quite rightly wanted more from life.  But England was still on the ropes in the early years after the war and it would take another decade before improvements came along.  It was only from the 50' onwards { rationing was still in effect up to 1954 } that a glimmer of the technological explosion which was about to overtake us all began and life in the terraced houses began to improve.  The gas lights were still in use in many homes during the 1950's  but were being phased out as electricity was supplied  to each home and household gadgets slowly followed making life easier all round.  

Very often the electricity supply was extremely basic with wiring to lights only and an absence of points for plugs so that in many cases electric appliances arrived before there was anything to plug them into.  As a result, many householders stripped the wires from  hair-dryers and irons and other appliances and minus a plug they stuck the bare wires into the light switch.
Gas lighting in the street had begun in 1816, outside the Town Hall, but had taken may years before it spread throughout the city.  The gas lamps were lit by gaslighters each evening and the lamp-posts were a never-ending source of fun to kids all over the city who used them to hang swings from the two "arms" at the top.  The last gas lamp was not extinguished until 1973 which underlines just how fast technology has moved in the few short years since then.

Even up until the early 60's television was a rarity and prior to that Radio was king.  Only it wasn't called radio , it was called Wireless and Billy Cotton Bandshow, Palace of Varieties, Dan Dare, Journey into Space, Dick Barton Special Agent were listened to avidly.  Now and again, there would be boxing on  from America and if a British boxer was taking part then everyone stayed up until the early hours to listen to a crackly, hissing broadcast which sounded like it was coming from Mars and inevitably told of another "brave battle by the British boy" who had usually been flattened in the 2nd round----the Heavyweight title was the sole preserve of American boxers in those days.  
Remnants of class distinction still lingered and the B.B.C. news was listened to with a solemnity reserved for Royalty even though listening to the plummy voices of the newsreader in old newsreels it's hard not to fall about laughing today.

The radio itself was a massive piece of equipment encased in a wooden box as big as a wardrobe and was powered by two great batteries as big as suitcases and twice as heavy.  The technical name for one of these powerhouses  was an accumulator. It was imperative that these were kept up to speed and so every so often they had to be taken down to The Wireless Shop where by some process beyond the intellect of the average man in the street they were subjected to some technological  wizardry and returned to the owner for a small fee.
The Wireless shop on Earle Road was run by Mr Ryder who was always dressed in a green overall and doing mysterious things within the innards of one of his multitude of Wirelesses.  The Wirelesses were all in various stages of repair with wires hanging out and they covered the floor, the counter, the shelves, anywhere there was any space.  Any gaps remaining were filled with all kinds of mysterious gizmos which only his esoteric skills could put together ----there were strangely shaped bits of metal and tubes which glowed faintly and valves which fizzed and spluttered and there was never any doubt that Mr Ryder was a scientist of no small accomplishment.  To my mind, there was only one other human being who could even come close to Mr Ryder, one who could make some sense of this multitude of marvels --- that was of course Dr Zharkov and he was in deep space with Flash Gordon and Dale.

Strange to relate, but despite their formidable weight there was never any shortage of volunteers to tote the accumulators to the Wireless shop and the reason was quite simple ---there among the cables and cobwebs in complete contrast to her gloomy surroundings dwelt one of the lovelies creatures for miles around.  Not only was she stunningly beautiful with the face of an angel and the figure of a wood-nymph she also had that rarest of things, a serene nature to go with it, and every customer was greeted with a cheery smile which lit up many a cold day.  She was Mr. Ryder's daughter and helped out in the shop from time to time ---and a whole host of monstrous batteries were cheerfully carried from vast distances across the city just for a glance or a smile from this wondrous creature.  
It was a sad day for the neighbourhood when she joined The Tiller Girls { a group of dancing girls who became famous for their high-kicking and beautiful legs )  but it was sadder still for Mr. Ryder whose trade plummeted in dramatic fashion.


Milk Monitoring

By this time, the terraced houses with all their faults, had become an accepted way of life and people were helping themselves by building bathrooms and improving their homes in every way.  There was a shop on every corner, cinemas had proliferated and pubs were plentiful and what was once a rural suburb was now a massive townscape.  The red-brick facade of St.Dunstans was a church literally at the heart of the community,  built in 1889 with donations from the Earle family who wished to commemorate where their original home stood.  The only reminders of the past were the place names -----The Brook Farm Pub, The Willow Bank,  The Woodcroft,  Piggy Muck Square ---and these were slowly disappearing.  But there was one remnant of the past which stubbornly clung on and refused to go away despite difficulties which were almost insuperable ; there amidst an alien landscape and in conditions totally unsuitable, more than one old farmer retained his herd of cows.  The one off Earle road was kept in a huge brick building and supplied the milk for the immaculate, tiled dairy next door and took the rest round on a horse and cart.  Occasionally, to the delight of the local kids, the herdsman would would walk the whole herd to Sefton Park and back, defying traffic, police and anything else that got in his way and if they were really lucky, one or two of the cows rebelled and would race up and down Smithdown road chased by a horde of kids shouting "Mad Bull !"
The milk that came around each school twice a day was never associated with the cows ----it just came from the dairy and was looked forward to by everyone in school.  To be a milk monitor was an especial privilege as you usually managed to extricate an extra bottle of milk.  Mrs Thatcher may have had a point when she stopped milk in schools but in the days when I went to school it provided much of some children's daily sustenance.



Unnatural selection

Although the area had been dramatically transformed from a farming community into an urban sprawl in a very short space of time there was always Sefton Park and kids from miles around were sent off for the day with a bottle of water and a packet of jam-butties and an orange if you were lucky.  Much of this was eaten and drunk on the long trek to the park and it was common for the big houses surrounding the park to supply drinks of water for parched kids on a hot day.  The park was one huge adventure playground with hills and lakes and caves and the Peter Pan statue surrounded by the Wendy House and the Jolly Roger pirate ship and dozens of  kids could always be seen straggling home bedraggled and hungry usually at  5 o'clock when tea would be on the table.  Despite the hurry to  get to the park there was one distraction which could never be ignored.  This was a pet shop at the top of Smithdown Road which was commonly called The Monkey Shop because there were always a half-dozen chimpanzees in the window and there were always small boys with their noses pressed up against the window.  Above the shop there was a ju-jitsu club and the grunts and groans and smacks of bodies on canvas could be heard on most days.  The chimpanzees were massive creatures and quite who the pet shop owner had in mind to purchase them was a mystery because apart from requiring rations equivalent to a small army they were quite capable of tearing the average man limb from limb if they turned nasty ---even the Black Belts upstairs would never have stood an earthly against these formidable apes.  Looking back, it was cruel to keep such wild creatures in a shop window where in winter they were cold and in summer they sweltered in the heat and were constantly cramped.  It would not be allowed in this day and age but at that time very few people gave a thought to animal welfare and the mention of ecology would be met with a blank stare.

Made in England

Birmingham and Sheffield were still world renowned for their engineering and steel and many of the products were built to last.  Everyone wanted a British motorbike, especially in America, and some still collect the old bikes but the only bikes that the average kid could aspire to in those days was a second-hand, sit-up-and-beg, usually made by Raleigh, built like a tank and just as  mobile.  When Mr. Twiddle opened his cycle emporium in Lawrence Road and filled it, inside and out with gleaming racing machines, as light as a feather and as fast as a rocket, he found that he was constantly besieged by small boys with their noses pressed against the glass.  There were Lincoln Imps, Kingfishers, Sprites and so on, all painted in metallic paint with chevrons and flames licking at the handlebars and all manner of attractive designs.  

Very often Mr Twiddle would come out and chat to us about Campag gears or Derailleurs or tubs and we would nod knowledgeably and even though we had no idea what he was on about it was the heart's desire of every kid to own one of these marvellous machines.  Nobody ever did though, they went to older cycling enthusiasts but there were kids of an engineering bent who with the aid of a helpful father put together machines from the scrapyards --- a wheel here, a frame there, a handlebar, tyres and pretty soon there was a sort of sub-culture of racing bikes which were affordable.  Granted,  there were some strange hybrids but nothing that some stickers couldn't disguise.  

Basically,  Mr Twiddle's bikes were for the well-heeled connoisseur of the racing world and he not only sold bikes but raced them and built them and probably took one to bed with him each night.  He was steeped in bike-culture and liked nothing more than to build a customised bike, a Rolls Royce of the cycling world with a name unique to his shop .  He was building one of these when coincidentally his son was born and in a paroxysm of emotion and enthusiasm he named his offspring after the bike which was called The Lancaster Special and forever after little Lancaster Twiddle had to fight his corner in many arenas and on many occasions.






Bonfire Night

A phenomenon of the post-war years was the annual celebration of Bonfire Night which seemed to be venerated more than V.E. day or any other day for that matter.  For weeks prior to the occasion, children of all ages, like so many Artful Dodgers, would scavenge for wood from every source possible and the bonfires grew accordingly until some of them reached incredible proportions.  Each street would vie with the other in the size of their bonfires and what they lacked in size some of them made up in numbers so that some streets would have three different factions building bonfires in three different parts of the street.  The ceremony of lighting the fires would take place when darkness fell each November the Fifth and the fires would blaze throughout the evening and night with most of the street inhabitants, young and old, sitting around drinking and roasting spuds in their jackets.  Looking back, the dangers inherent in this event were enormous and there were inevitably casualties.  The heat off the fires always blistered paintwork and often cracked the glass in windows.  The morning would find street after street full of smouldering ashes and debris.  Quite apart from the cost of removal of all this debris the streets were impassable for weeks before and after the event but very few people could afford vehicles in the 40's and 50's so the only ones inconvenienced were ambulances and fire-engines.  

One of the most amazing about Bonfire Night was how benevolently adults viewed the event and in many cases contributed to the fun regardless of the fact that most of the kids pushing prams with grotesque caricatures of Guy Fawkes would have been hard pressed to describe who he was or why they despised him with such venom.  

While being a great believer in tradition, from this distance in time there is no doubt that the annual Bonfire Night was and is an anachronism  from medieval times recalling a time of religious intolerance and has no part in modern life.  To burn the effigy of someone who was executed barbarically 400 years previously is to invoke ceremonies more in keeping with covens ----and to my everlasting shame I always joined in as enthusiastically as everyone else. 
The ceremony today is retained only in Parks under supervision and perhaps one day even that will die away.

The Big Match

Football was of course was be loved by all, from aged Grandads to babes in arms and a boy's first football boots were a rite of passage on a par with Bar-Mitzvah only far more solemn.  The boots were far from stylish but they were sturdy and made to a specification borne of experience earned in the mud of the Somme, so it could be a shock to spindly legs when they laced them up and found they could hardly lift a foot off the ground never mind kick a ball.  Add to that, the leather bits which went half-way up your leg and studs 6 inches long and there was many a budding Matthews who took to stamp-collecting instead.  For those who got over the initial shock of wearing boots more suited to a deep-sea diver, the first game played in a clinging morass and a force ten gale was bad enough but it was played on a full size pitch which taxed even pro. footballers.  But the worse was yet to come and if there were any lingering weaklings this was the one to weed them out once and for all ---- the ball was like a Christmas Pudding bound in barbed wire, hard enough to kick but when it first came spinning over, as black as pitch and as hard as rock, it needed true grit to put your head in the way.  Anyone who headed one of those case balls with the laces protruding knew that "seeing stars" wasn't just the preserve of comic-book artists and was worthy to go on and carve out a career in The Sunday League ---- most of them agreed that a slight slurring of their words in later life was a small  price to pay.




Going to the Doctor

The National Health Service began in 1948 --- prior to that a patient had paid the doctor according to his means and according to how much the doctor thought he or she was capable of paying.  Like every other aspect of life health care was moving towards a brighter future but by today's standards some of the medical practices just half a century ago seem primitive and one or two of them worthy of suspicion even then.  Most kids dreaded reaching the age of twelve because they knew that  like turkeys being fattened for Christmas, they were the subject of a government decree which stated simply that they must have their tonsils removed.  Not only that, there were a proportion of the draft who would be chosen to have their adenoids removed also.  Now most kids are like cats and dogs ---they have an implicit trust in the judgement of adults and generally receive the same attention ie; they're fed when an adult thinks on,  are chased off the best armchair and patted on the head every now and then.  But even cats and dogs know that sometimes dreadful things can happen when that judgement is impaired and just as a cat or dog will race out of the vets in fright so small boys aged twelve went into hiding all over the country.  Some of the parents had a vague idea what tonsils were but not one among them could identify an adenoid and very few knew why they had to be removed but nevertheless in this state of monumental ignorance they led their offspring to hospitals all over the country like lambs to the slaughter which says a lot about surgery at that time but says even more about the community at large.
the N.H.S. liked to do things en masse in those days and seemed to take a delight in targeting kids.  But they did get it right now and then and the elimination of tuberculosis and polio via mass inoculation was a massive step forward and a marvellous achievement.  You can still see the inoculation marks on people of a certain age.
Sportsmen had a particularly hard time of it in those days and any footballer who limped off the field lived in dread that it was "a cartilage" which finished many a promising career.

Going to the  Dentist

Going to the dentist in those far off days was an experience something similar to being dragged before the Revolutionary Tribunal ----there was no appeal and few escaped.  Aprés guerre dentists enthusiastically  pursued a policy which followed the  precept that if you had no teeth then you had no problem ---- the logic was unassailable but the practicalities were devastating.  It was a common and widespread practice to remove every single tooth, regardless of age and for the most trivial of reasons and scores of patients submitted to this barbarism and were subsequently fitted with badly-fitting dentures after weeks of pain.  
In the days when doctors and dentists were treated with a reverence usually accorded to deities nobody dared to question their diagnostic skills or challenge the drastic solutions they put forward and patient after patient submitted to the dreaded gas-mask with a child-like trust and awoke to a gaping wound when all they required was a single extraction or in the worst cases a filling -----if anybody questions as to why the Jews submitted to the gas-chambers so trustingly then they have only to look at dentistry in post-war Britain.
If anyone is in any doubt as to the veracity of all this then I can vouch from personal experience the casual manner in which perfectly good teeth were ordained to be extracted when I was dragged whimpering into a room which looked like it had been handed-down from the Inquisition.  The dentist knew right away what the trouble was which was a good start ----- I had something with such a comical name that it couldn't possibly be anything too bad.  Gingivitis is what it was called and while the diagnosis was good the treatment was just the opposite and I was to return the following day when every tooth in my 12 year old head would be removed as a solution to this and any future problem concerning dental matters.
There was of course no Internet in those days but there was the eponymous Encyclopaedia Britannica of which I had been given a full set in the forlorn hope that it would further my education and deep into the night I pored over the G's until I found Gingivitis which it was explained was a disease of the gums caused by a virus.  Even at such a tender age and armed with a least some information it seemed to me to be a strange logic that removed all your teeth when it was the gum that was the unhealthy bit ----it was in the nature of removing your foot because you had a bunion.  Despite the pleas of my mother who believed implicitly all that the High Priest of dentistry told her, I never returned and my gums went back to normal within a week.
Even after my defiance of accepted wisdom my mother retained her faith in the same dentist and determined upon another victim, some time later he removed all of my mother's teeth while she was still a young woman.  But the truly worst part of the whole thing was that my mother could never be deflected from her ambition for me to become a dentist.
There is a corollary to this horror story which I discovered many years later ----it seems that a maverick dentist in Ammerica had pioneered this radical process and justified it with some mumbo-jumbo about dental care and it had been adopted in Britain by a profession, which should have known better, as the utterings of a Messiah.  It seems ironic that Americans today walk around with teeth as white as snow and regard us Brits as back-in-the stone age when it comes to the care of our teeth.



Going to the Pictures

During the 40's and 50's most families went to the cinema once per week with the children also attending the legendary Saturday Matinee.  Very often the adults didn't want to go some evenings and a ritual began which in this day and age would see them frog-marched off to jail and the children taken into care.  Children could not enter the cinema unaccompanied and so children from a very young age would go on their own and  stand outside the cinema until a suitable adult came along.  They would then ask "take one in please" and the consenting adult would then find himself surrounded by up to half-a-dozen kids who he would then escort into the cinema where they would then go their own way.  Looked at from today's perspective, the whole thing smacks of a lack of care on the parent's behalf but the practice was universally common and nobody questioned the rights or wrongs of it.  Perhaps society has changed or perhaps they were just lucky but I never heard of anyone coming to any harm although I would never advocate it now.

Local cinemas in Liverpool 7 were common.  There was The Magnet, The Playhouse, The Grand and the Cameo all within walking distance so that if one cinema was full then you just walked to the next.  Of all the cinemas, the Cameo was the smallest and always seemed to be well attended but the cinema had been a church and many people were superstitious and there were always murmurings of bad luck attending the change.  They might have had a point because there were several fires over the years and a major incident in 1949 when the takings were robbed and the manager and his assistant shot down and killed in the process.  The Cameo opened in 1926 and closed in 1957 and apart from its chequered history had opened its doors to thousands over the years.


Going to the Dogs

From the 1950's onwards the two-up-and two down went into a slow decline.  Not only were the houses and streets looking drab and grey but a whole raft of new council estates were coming into existence where the houses had everything the terraces did not ---they were centrally heated with toiletss on two floors, a luxurious indoor bathroom, showers and gardens.  Although most terrace-dwellers resisted change, one by one they left Earle road and the likes behind as the lure of a gleaming new council property proved too much to resist.  The rows of houses were boarded up one after the other until row after row of streets awaited demolition just as the courts had been demolished before them.  The huge new council estates indeed had beautiful new homes and many people did and still do take a pride in their homes as never before but nothing is ever perfect and the vast estates brought with them their own set of problems not least the lack of any infra-structure or community centres.  The terraced two-up and two-down still exists in pockets throughout the city but they are slowly passing into history and unlike the courts will mostly be remembered with affection although it has to be said that there would be very few who would return given the chance.


The Sunday Dinner and Beyond

Nowadays, I am a vegetarian but once upon a time I used to eat as much meat as the next man and when I was a kid everybody ate meat.  It was a generation that was conditioned to eat meat and to admit being a veggie in the 40's and 50's was tantamount to being taken away and given a pre-frontal lobotomy or at the very least a course of Electric Shock Treatment { this is not quite as radical as it sounds  ---- E.C.T. was very much in vogue in those days and was prescribed for anything from mass homicide to a facial tic ---see One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest }.  Apart from which, if you didn't eat meat then you were liable to get quite hungry ---you have to remember that this was justt after the war and Ration Books were still in use.  One of my favourite meals was spam and chips which I would eat three times a day given the opportunity.  I never knew or cared what spam was but I loved it so much that I actually went as far as to learn how to cook the chips that went with it and spent all the Ration vouchers on it in the shop on the corner.  That was as far as my culinary skills ever got because I could never foresee a time when I would desire anything different from spam and chips.  There was an interesting student variation of Descarte's famous dogma which was part of my own philosophy back then ;
                                        I Think, Therefore I Am             became                 I'm Pink, Therefore I'm Spam
Another great favourite was a dripping butty which for the uninitiated was a pound of lard between two gargantuan crusts of bread which was given to you in the fond hope that it would keep you quiet for a week or two----some hopes.  Yet another delicacy at that time was the ubiquitous sugar-butty which was merely a variation on the above.  Nobody owned a fridge in those days and if they had they couldn't afford to put anything in it so if the cupboard was getting a little bare then connie-onnie { condensed milk in a tin } was a cheap stand-by.  As a result of all this, by the age of three most kids in our school had the cholesterol levels of the average 70 year old man but since cholesterol hadn't yet been invented it was of no consequence at the time.
Hygiene standards were just a step up from the Cretaceous in those days and there was a theory given much credence that if you should come into contact with as many germs as possible then it would give you a life-time immunity from all illnesses.   For the ones that survived, this theory was quite attractive not least because it gave a good excuse not to get washed and was adopted more by boys than by girls.  Everyone carried a hankie back then and this hankie would be used for anything to cleaning your bike to wiping your shoes and every so often your Mum would ask for this hankie which she would then demand that you spit on and then proceed to rub it all over your face as an expression of her undying love , much like a cat licks its kittens.  She would then hand you your reward of a dockers-doorstep into hands that would sustain a houseplant for a year.

Anyway, up to this point, my idea of culinary skill was to have my plate heaped with as much as what was going so that I could hoover it up as fast as possible, ready for the next meal.  But this day we were having black- pudding and I was idly curious for once; what's this ?, what's that? , who's he ? you know ----and just fro something to say I asked " what is black-pudding, anyway"? like you do.  This one question was a defining moment in my life and I nearly fell off my chair when I was told it was the dried blood of a pig and the white bits were it's toe nails.  Worse still it made me wonder what else I was being served up.
So, the infinite trust I had placed in the people who fed me had been dented slightly but there was still plenty of food to go at so I wasn't about to starve.  Nevertheless, I did keep a sort of watching brief on the things that appeared on my plate but at the same time I realized that most of them had been given pseudonyms which made it a little difficult.  Having to give the food acceptable names was suspicious in itself and more revelations were to follow.
Pigs Foot was a delicacy in those days but I could never stomach that greasy skin with the odd hair sticking out and when my Grandad made them do a foxtrot around the plate I had to run out of the room { I think he did it on purpose }  but tripe was something I used to eat with relish { not relish relish but ----oh never mind } until I discovered that it was the lining of a pig's stomach and that was another thing off the menu.  Which illustrates perfectly what is meant by pseudonyms ----for instance I knew perfectly well where a pig's foot came from but tripe could have been picked from a tripe bush for all I knew.
The supreme example of this is of course sweetbreads which I also used to eat with relish { Ok gusto then ---relish hadn't been invented }.  Now this was the biggest con { or was it cojone } of them all because they were a rare delicacy and a treat to be savoured on special occasions.  My Grandad fed them to me like it was the finest caviar and I loved him dearly for sharing this gift of the gods with me.  I was inconsolable when I found out what sweetbreads were and the thought of those poor castrati was too much ------and for a long time there was a rift in my relationship with someone I had trusted implicitly.

I never realised it at the time and although it was not of my making, looking back, I still feel a pang at the sheer drudgery involved in the making of the ritualised Sunday Dinner and I know now that The Women's Liberation Movement stopped dead at the top of our street.  The Sunday Dinner was a sacred ceremony carried out in every household at the same hour each week but it's preparation and aftermath filled the whole day and the process was unvarying.  It  was Harvest Festival, Yom Kippur and High Mass all rolled into one and its disciples worshipped Sunday Dinner and The Holy Roast with a devotion befitting a Trappist Monk.  Like all ancient religions it had its martyrs and her day would start with peeling the blessed potatoes and top-and-toeing the sacred carrot-and-turnip followed by the sacrifice of the hallowed roast-in-the-oven, not forgetting the holy gravy which was all done with whispered incantations and singing along with The Billy Cotton Band Show.  Having done all that, it was time to shed the vestal apron and don the Sacred Sunday Frock and await the coming of the Lord.  This part of the ceremony was strictly observed and involved the arrival of one or more of the male members returning from communion with others of the congregation having imbibed no less than four pints of bitter and banging in unison upon the table until the Dinner arrived.
The ceremonials were completed only when the male worshippers fell into a trance watching T.V while the Queen of the house washed up the dishes in specially prepared water.  Only then did she retire and collapse into the armchair exhausted by the emotions of the day and dreaming of the following Sunday when she would renew her vows to retain the rituals of Sacred Sunday Dinner.