Apologia pro vita sua (Apology for your life)
1933
I was born at 2.30 pm on the 3rd December 1933 in the maternity unit at Reedyford Hospital, Nelson Lancashire. My birth site was demolished in the 1990s and there is now a motorway roundabout covering the place where I cried my way into a separate existence. My father was Abraham Taylor, a cotton worker born Jan 1901. Although at the time of my birth, with England in a depression, he was probably working in the building industry as a hod-carrier in Blackpool. My mother, Lily, nee Laycock was three years younger than my father, she was also a cotton worker and for most of my first eight years (when we left Nelson for Manchester) she was a weaver usually running four looms and sometimes six. She was of too nervous (easily flustered) a disposition to run more, although many people ran eight looms. I had an elder sister, Ruth and a brother, Edmund. I had been preceded into the world by a brother (Brian) who died of meningitis at 12 months, two years before I was born. I believe (from what my mother said) that I was a consolation baby. I don’t remember any particular strife in our family although clearly father was boss and did all the disciplining in the family. I think we must have been at least as happy as most.
1937
I have few memories before about 4 or 5 but can remember that I started school at Walverden Infants School, Nelson, headmistress Miss Speak.
I lived at Smith Street then and played on the adjacent little park I had two girl friends, Jean Pickup and Celia Sparkes. My boy friends were Brian Blackburn, (killed by a truck whilst sledging down a hill in winter) Denzil —, Clement —, Roy Taylor, Kenneth—. I saw a sheep killed at a small slaughterhouse nearby which frightened me. I often came home to an empty house as both parents were working. I was nervous and used to hide under the tablecloth (oilcloth) with it pulled over my head whilst sitting in a chair.. Jean Pickup had a Shirley Temple doll. Not much to remember, but that is all I can recall as I write this. From now on my memory is much better but no doubt fallible.
In early 1939 we moved from Smith Street to 19 Manor Street which was up Barkerhouse Road towards the edge of Nelson town. I lived all my life up to 18years in rented houses. Up to the age of eight, I wore wooden soled leather clogs with a buckle. The clogs had shaped iron pieces which were nailed on and replaced by the clogger when worn down to the wood. One could make sparks by dragging the clog metal against the stone flags. I went on Google hoping to find a picture of my clogs but although there were hundreds of fashion clogs, there were none of the type I wore which were totally utilitarian and the cheapest form of footwear available. Mine had a solid wood base so they did not flex like a shoe and a leather top with a clasp. The leather was nailed with bright nails to the wood and you kept them waterproof with black polish. All the kids wore them and they somehow kept your feet warm in the snow better than boots. I played top and whip and hide and seek and fighting. Either I or a friend once ate a live worm for a dare and both got into trouble when our parents found out. I once spent my school dinner money (2.1/2d I think) on chocolates at Mather’s newspaper shop on the way to school. Father found out—there was a row. My brother Edmund burnt my hand whilst pouring melted gas-tar (used for sealing between cobbles and torn up by kids) into a mould, he was dressed down by my father and I cried in sympathy
Whilst living at Manor Street, my father rented a half acre of land and made a ‘hen pen’ so that we had fresh eggs and very occasionally, a boiled hen which was always very tough.
He planted the rest of the area with seed potatoes and in 1938 or 39 I got the bright idea of digging some up and sitting on the wall of the property and selling them to passers-by for a penny a pound, although I did not have scales. Someone reported this to my Dad and ructions ensued. I used to get a ‘Wednesday penny’ to spend and loved going to the Nelson open market where Barmy Mick sold toys of sorts that I could afford. It’s not much of a collection of early memories but it is all that I can recall and I have set down only the things I believe to be true. I have a hazy memory of being in trouble with the law at Manor St and seem to remember crying when being talked to by a uniformed policeman but I’m not sure if this was a dream.
1939
From here on my memory, whilst still probably selective, is fairly accurate insofar as I have been able to cross-check. The war started 3rd September 1939. We were issued with gas masks. My friends and I walked up Tumb Hill frequently and played around several dangerous quarries. I was taken often on weekends by my parents to Communist Party outings at a place called The Clarion (an Independent Labour Party institution) near Roughlee, Nelson where there were children’s races and lemonade. I used to dream of witches (it was the area of The Lancashire Witches) as my brother and probably others told me stories about them, and I frequently wet the bed. Both father and mother were members of the Communist Party although mother went mainly because of father’s influence. I moved from Walverden to Bradshaw Street School and was a “middling” student. I was fond of fishing and went often to the outflow of Nelson reservoir and to the notorious “Dog Oyle” (Dog Hole—so called because people often drowned dogs there). I caught many sticklebacks, the males had a red breast and I took them home but they always died.
This year I became a great fan of the movies and went every Saturday afternoon to the Regent (now operates as a Pakistani cinema). I was fascinated by Hopalong Cassidy, Ken Maynard and the Lone Ranger and simultaneously loved and was terrified by Flash Gordon’s adventures and the terrible Ming—Emperor of the Universe. An episode in which clay men materialised out of the side of a tunnel in which Flash was trapped, dominated my nightmares for years. Admission was 1d or 1 1/2d and five sticks of a sticky confection called Coltsfoot Rock cost 1d. Children in the movies used to interact with the events on screen, calling to the hero to “look out” as the Indians crept up on him. Many used to urinate on the floor and some dropped their money which rolled down the sloping floor. I once found a new threepenny bit (or did I dream that, as I often dreamed that I had found money). When I left the movies, we play acted events we had just seen, particularly galloping a horse, holding the reins with the left hand and slapping one’s buttock with the other. All kids were very careful not to step on the junctions between flags (stone slabs of about 18 inches square) with which the streets were paved. “If you tread on a nick, you’ll marry a brick and a beetle will come to your wedding!”
1939-1941
I think I remember war being declared by Mr. Chamberlain, and my sombre father and upset mother of the time. I can certainly recall the war being discussed with the defeats then occurring and many famous ships lost, like the Hood and Ark Royal and my parents were probably worried but did not show it much to the kids. There seemed to be no direct effects that I noticed on our family from the war; although rationing was in, we always ate enough. Private and public shelters were going up and in late 1940 and 1941 we saw and heard remote flashes and explosions, probably from the Manchester area. On a walk with other kids down a remote lane near a deserted quarry above the Nelson valley we came across many smoke makers—these had old oil and rags or wicks and when operated produced copious smoke—the idea was to blank out a target from bombing, as bombing was largely done visually.
In retrospect, they had probably been put there as a blind to make the Nazis think there was a target. We vandalised some and lit others and then ran away. (Why do the young vandalise? —we could never let a bottle pass by—if there was no return money on it—without wanting to smash it). I liked the War, as the rule at primary school was: if the air raid siren sounded in the evening and the all-clear sounded before midnight, school started at 10 am; if after midnight school started at 1245 (after lunch). I did not perceive any danger from the war and was quite happy to believe that all the Germans were bad. I had school dinners, a 2-course meal delivered by Govt. contractors and served in the school hall – we often found caterpillars in the cabbage- but those we didn’t find were probably nutritious enough. Eventually, I hated school meals and much later when in Manchester went instead for liver and chips to worker’s British Restaurants.
In late 1940 my father, who had spent his life in the cotton industry, was directed under the wartime Labour Laws into training as a “fitter”. He was always a year too old to be called up into the army; [he was 38 when war started and 20 to 37 year olds were called up, the call up age advanced a year every year but so did he]. Fitter/metalworkers were needed in the booming aircraft industry. This added a new dimension to his life as he had ability as a home handyman and ‘fitter’ was a much more interesting trade than was cotton. He had been working as a “loomer” and “twister and drawer”, both esoteric cotton trades. He had a training course of about 15 weeks at Great Harwood, which was 15 miles away, so he had to board and only came home at weekends. Much of the time I slept with my mother who was very nervous because of the war, and I resented weekends when my father came home and I had to sleep on my own or with my brother.
My sister always took my side in any problems at home or with my elder brother and was an excellent student having won a scholarship to Nelson Secondary School; my brother also went there for a year or so. He was quite skilled at repairing bicycles and making model aeroplanes. Toys, sweets and food were all rationed, but like many of the working class, we were probably better fed and nourished than we had been pre-war. I will talk more about food as it was a big concern to me when young – it is a wonder that I did not become obese once rationing ceased and there was food-aplenty (when I was in Canada). Due to the necessity of receiving much of its food by sea, England immediately went onto food rationing. In Germany it did not start till 1943 (so I found out 20 years later) but they did not tell us during the war that there was no rationing over there! Almost everything was rationed even bread for a while, but we were never short of bread. Fats were the worst and we had only 2 oz. a week each of butter and the margarine varied from poor to awful whereas milk was quite plentiful as we had children in the family and received a special allowance. Canned goods were rarely bought even though plentiful on the shelves as you had to use ‘points’ for them and a tin of salmon was many points. Fresh fish was not rationed but often not available and there were always line ups outside the fish shops. Queuing became a way of life. It was rumoured that people joined a queue without knowing why they were queuing!
Every Saturday before sweets were rationed, I suppose about 1941, I would wait in line for about an hour at a sweet store that manufactured ‘rock’ in a back shed. Sugar was always short. Meat was rationed but not offal (liver trotters & kidneys). The meat ration was small but seemed to me ample but it paid to always patronise the same butcher. One humorous note: there was a horse meat shop nearby that sold it for animal consumption. It was rumoured people were eating it so the queue always had a long line of people with dogs! I am sure that we ate horse-meat and also whale meat but I can’t remember which years.
Clothes were rationed by another points system so a pair of pants cost so
many and a shirt so many. Clothing styles were restricted to minimize the materials used and had to have a special label CC41 to show they met the Utility standard! Restaurant meals were not rationed and this allowed wealthy people to eat out, (which we never did apart from the fish and chip shop) frequently saving their rations so it was not a level playing field.
We got some luxury things spasmodically, once some delicious peach jam from Australia and canned pork from the US. I remember when my mother opened the canned pork it was covered with a thick layer of lard. She scraped that off and made magnificent short pastry with it and we had a fabulous pork pie.
The flour was a kind of grayish-brown colour but not like whole wheat. They had added a lot of chaff (real chaff this time) to make it go further. We rarely saw a banana for 5 years and seldom oranges but I think we were healthier for the low fat diet
I learned from later reading that in Norway where they were even more severely rationed the heart attack and stroke rate dropped sharply during the war in spite of the stress of the German occupation but rose again when the war ended. The RAF crews always got a Bacon and Egg breakfast when they returned from an operation and nobody would begrudge them that.
We kids played “tin-it-ring” (called kick-can by some), ralivo (relieve-o) an excuse for rough play, soccer, but never with a real football until the later war years. By this time I had graduated from the infants to primary school and went to Bradshaw St School. I can remember nothing of the school except going through a phase of staring at the blackboard and being quite mesmerised. We were quite safe in Nelson and but for the War I would probably have stayed there and my life would have been very different. But I moved to Manchester in 1942 when I was 8yrs. and 2 months.
1942
The worst of the blitz, away from London, occurred in 1941 and 1942 and in February 1942 my father, having finished his course was ordered to the Ford aircraft engine site in Manchester as a fitter. He stayed in aircraft and other military production throughout the war and was a shop steward and union organizer. But in 1946, when the troops were being demobilized, the unions demanded that all who had not served a 5-year apprenticeship (they were called ‘dilutees’) should be kicked out of engineering. He was amongst the first to be ejected, in spite of, or maybe because of, his militancy and union activity. My father was very bitter about this but had to go back into the cotton industry, eventually moving back to Nelson in the late 50’s by which time the cotton industry was in terminal decline – but I get ahead of myself.
Now, back to 1942. He rented a terraced house with 3up and 3down, and a bathroom but also an outside toilet, at 22, Thomas Street, Stretford, a southerly suburb of Manchester. This picture shows the house in 1990 with new windows and the washhouse, air raid shelter and outside toilet all demolished with backyard parking added.
I did not want to leave my friends and Nelson, but of course had to go. All except my father went in the removal van (it is called “flitting”) and we had a very cold ride over the Pennines (high hills) in the back of the van. My father met us at the new house and we all helped unload the furniture.
My sister was still at home and so my brother and I slept in one bed. The area where we lived had some advantages from a boy’s point of view. The streets were flat and smooth being “tarmacked”, whereas Nelson was nearly all cobblestones and hilly, and as I had just discovered skating and “bolly truck” riding, the streets were ideal. The skates were found by my father years before when demolishing an old skate hall, and he or my brother modified the skates to fit me.
The “bolly” trucks were simple constructions using four wheel bearings, the most prized being those from heavy trucks which we extracted from the rubbish bins at the back of truck garages (bearings which were no good on a truck were good for our bolly carts). Some boys used car wheel bearings but these were only about 2 inches in diameter. Our house had tools such as drills and saws which my father kept locked up when he was not there—he wanted to supervise me, but I learned to pick the simple lock with a hair grip and so had access whenever I liked. We also had a plentiful supply of nuts, bolts and screws so our house was a centre of “mechanical activity” from truck making to bike maintenance. I still remember the day I learned to ride a bike. My “cousins” – actually my father’s cousins although they were near me in age – in Swinton, Gerard and Joynson Glover, had a small bike which allowed my feet to touch the ground whilst sitting on the saddle and this I rode down a small hill which ended in a field. I rode down and walked up, and by the end of the day I could ride.
At home my father had a large ex-policeman’s bike which was unrideable by me. I got a little red bike “done up,” that is, repainted and repaired by my father for Christmas in 1942 which it seemed that I was never off. I used to ride this thing as far as Swinton, nine miles, to play and stay with my cousins. We fished a lot for newts and carp in the pit dam. My “uncle” Jim was a miner, a brutal man with a shaved head, who mentally and physically abused his wife, Aunt Lucy, who was always very kind to me. She hung herself when I was twenty, which upset me greatly.
When I first arrived in Stretford, I soon made friends and established a sort of dominance or leadership over four or five kids who became “my gang,” and I became slightly sexually active at the age of nine with the girl who lived next door for 6 months (Jean Perceval) whose father was in the Navy. Somehow, we got to touching each other’s genitals, which I think was more pleasurable for her than for me, although I didn’t avoid it, but I think largely I was attracted to it because I sensed that somehow there was a taboo attached to it by adults. In the “gang” were Jacky Hamilton, Bernard Spencer, Reg Minshull, and Noel Tisdale augmented with brothers and young kids who we called “tichies.” Other kids I knew were Gordon Weatherall, John Palmer, Brian Smyth, Ronnie Hornsby, Roy Wadsworth, John Trainor, the Coombes kids, Kenny Haynes and Malcolm Horrocks. Of the girls, I remember Maureen Shields, Audrey Trotter, some Maquire girls on Taylors Rd, who I think were distant relatives, Eileen and Ethel Bird, Margaret Taunton, (I stood in the rain for an hour once aged 14, outside her house just to catch a glimpse of her), Joan Austen, Sheila Piercy. Later girls I was interested in were Eunice Crowther, Beryl Gorse, June Southall, Ann Pollit, June Royle and others from Lostock School (secondary).
We also had evacuees stay with us for a few months, one was called Brian who had a young mother with him and my brother told me 40 years later when I was checking information with him for this biog. that she had seduced him when he was about 16. It was certainly possible, as she told risque jokes which upset my mother. I remember that she told one about a dog called ‘Toss’ the point of which I did not understand at the time. To help out with income we also later rented the middle downstairs room (after my sister went into the A.T.S.) to an assortment of people over the years; ranging from a German Jewish refugee to a young woman who worked at the Co-op, and a Spanish refugee from Franco’s Spain. My father met these at the International Club where he played chess on a Sunday evening.
My gang played all games together and terrorised any local opposition, especially the poor Irish who had moved from Southern Ireland pre-War and were (at that time) at the bottom of the social ladder. They were rumoured to keep coal in the bath, and to defecate on the floor on newspapers and burn it, as they had neither baths nor toilets where they came from (not true of course). I had a sort of love-hate relationship with the O’Hare family. In their house I first saw the bleeding heart religious symbol in a wall picture. One of the O’Hare’s—Patrick—was a frequent target for ragging by me, but was fiercely defended by his bigger sister Molly, who once knocked me to the ground with a hefty slap for ragging Pat—up till then I had no respect at all for girls’ physical ability, and a few months later it happened again when I was floored by a fourteen-year-old girl whilst cheeking her. It made me realise that girls, especially the bigger ones, could hurt.
Jacky Hamilton had a sister, Stella, who was about nine years old and she and I used to fondle each other, often lying on the couch in her house, with her brother keeping guard and her mother drinking with blokes at the pub whom she often brought home for the night. The mother eventually bore twins and suffered a violent assault from her husband when he came home on demob. leave (after war years of absence) and neighbours talked. I saw those twins often as they grew up and they were always neglected, shoeless in the autumn street and two ‘candles’ running from their nose. I hope their later life was a happier one.
I had developed a reading habit and had started the ‘Just William’ series, borrowing from the Stretford Library. The red bike, mentioned previously, was stolen from outside the public library even though it had a lock and chain. I chained it with the wheel to the frame and I guess it was just carried away. My father was furious at the loss of the bike as he had had to work overtime to pay for it. He did not believe that I had locked it up and swore never to buy another thing for me. He did not, but it was not long before I had more money in my hand than he did.
1943
The area around our house was a paradise for a small boy of ten. Many bombed houses close by provided hiding places and firewood for the daily fires we lit after school. Also a large commercial laundry and dry cleaners (Yap’s Chinese Laundry) which was hit by a landmine had dozens of wrecked machines including a big boiler in which we often played and we had our November bonfires there when they were eventually permitted.
I went to Gorse Hill Primary School from age 8, where for some reason I was often caned (for being dirty I think, as I couldn’t keep my hands clean although my mother always sent me to school tidy).
I don’t think it was schooling, although they sometimes punished you with a ruler on the knuckles for failure to learn, as I was a reasonable student. (Perhaps it was for being cheeky). Anyway, I used to be caned frequently and painfully by the deputy headmaster, a Mr. Newton. This went on for a year. I was afraid of Mr. Newton but when I eventually complained to my father he powerfully interviewed Mr. Newton, after which it stopped immediately. I was terrified of the cane, which was always given on the hands and often struck the fingers or thumb instead of the palms intended.
The caning stopped immediately after the interview and I lived in relative peace until I passed the precursor of the eleven+, at which time I was ten and a half when I sat in June 1944. I could have had another try at it 12 months later had I failed. I went to Stretford Grammar School in September 1944 and stayed until October 1949. Many of the students at S.G.S. were fee paying with only a few “scholarship” boys from the slums. Many of these boys from the middle classes truly gave themselves airs and looked down upon we sons of workers. I made friends with Kenneth Haynes, a fellow slum-dweller, and Peter Kitchen who lived initially in Davyhulme but later moved to Moss Side where his mother ran a dry cleaning shop at which I stayed on many weekends later on as Peter became my best school friend. This friendship persisted throughout my school years and has been on-going for some sixty years thereafter. (I still see Peter (2006) when we visit each other’s countries).
1944
Most of my grammar school teachers were either female or old or both or occasionally newly graduated like the female biology teacher (Miss Beardsmore) who struggled trying to teach a class of jeering boys about frog fertilisation. My actual knowledge of human sexuality was an amalgam of dirty jokes, folklore and drawings glimpsed in the library. We thought that babies were born by slitting the woman open from the belly button down, that sanitary towels were for wiping men’s cocks after intercourse, hence the loops in each end which were to put your fingers in! So much for my knowledge of anatomy! We received no information at school and my parents were totally mum on the subject; a far cry from the youth of today.
Father always had the six o’clock news on during teatime and so I heard every day first hand reports of the war, an interest which persists to this day. From the early defeats to the growing progress of the Allies, I have remembered a great deal of it and it probably accounts for my fascination with all things to do with the Second World War.
Me, ready to go dancing and outside Grammar School eating an ice cream and my sister Ruth who was in the ATS
At this time I developed a more mature interest in girls and went to the Stretford Trades and Labour Club to learn to dance. It was free on a Wednesday from 730 to 930 and I learned the Veleta, Square Tango, Waltz etcetera. Initially, this was by being held firmly by the often seemingly large mothers who brought their children and marched me through the steps until I learned them. They all seemed to have big bosoms and wear corsets which you could feel with your right hand around the waist. I was very fond of the Batty twins, Dinah and Sheila who came with their Mum. I also liked Sheila Pearcy who had red ringlets and she liked a boy called Alan, not me. This Alan had a nice voice and sang over the mic. accompanied by the pianist during the band’s interval. I thought if I also sang nicely she would leave him and go out with me – oh! naivety. Anyway I did sing, “I’m going to buy a paper doll to call my own…” but was conscious of a rising background noise of public inattention as I sang. So ended my singing ambitions and I never got to know Miss Pearcy!
Stretford Labour Club where I learned to dance and Stretford Grammar School 1944-1949
But at dancing I became quite good and always had a girl to take home and kiss, often it was Philomena Hill whose elder sister Mary was going out with my brother. As I got older I went to Cadman’s Academy of Dance in Stretford where I learnt most of the syllabus for Bronze Medal though never took the test. My brother also went and met his (eventual) wife Eunice there.
1945
The European war ended and we had a “street party” to celebrate VE (Victory in Europe) Day. The Japanese war seemed of minor interest in our house although I did have an uncle captured in Singapore and confined in Changi jail and who survived the experience. Mrs. Coombs (who had fourteen children alive; I played with some) dominated the organisation. She was a tall and broad woman, and we could not imagine how Mr. Coombs who was quite small and wiry could make love to her and father all those children (as we used to say ‘one hiccup from Mrs Coombs and he would be spreadeagled on the ceiling’). The family lived in a house no larger than ours, six rooms with a living area of about 900 square feet total. Where did they all sleep? And in addition the Coombs boys all kept pets at home including rabbits, tortoises, tadpoles and fish. My strong recollection of the house was that it always smelled of urine (or was that just the rabbit hutches?) A boy was killed in our street—Jimmy Brown, not a particular friend as he was a year or two younger than us. He ran out from the front of a stationary bus and was struck by another. Rumour had it his head was squashed. His mother was distraught and as a mark of respect we all skated or played on the other side of the street. She often peered at us through the curtains.
1946
In summer we played a lot of cricket with bat and ball owned by a neighbour, Alan Lovatt who was an undersized but tough Scots kid, who having beaten me in a fight, took over my gang. In winter we used to bang on doors to get occupants to chase us. When that was too dangerous we would put a safety pin with a button threaded on, stick it in the door and operate it remotely with cotton. We also threw clay balls and grass and earth (called sods) at each other and at houses.
Girls we had little time for except to jeer at, although we did play “house” or “truth or dare” occasionally, which invariably had a sexual side of some sort to it particularly with the older boys. I often went swimming in summer in a filled clay-pit called Trafford Park Lake, set in the midst of heavy industry. It was always cold and every summer it would claim a drowning victim or two. I also fished for small perch and carp. Got a fright once as I stepped ashore on a small island and a swan made a dash at me and sent me into the water post-haste. Someone killed the swans a few weeks later. In winter the lake would freeze, but never really hard enough and once I was in the middle of it when it started to crack, but just regained the shore without going in. I would probably not have survived that as I was not a strong swimmer although I could swim by eight years of age. About this time I got really interested in money, trying paper rounds and buying sweet ration coupons from slum kids and selling them for three times the price to my “rich” school friends. You had to know which shops would take “loose” ration coupons.
1947
I played cricket and soccer at school but always for the “rabbits” (those left after the First and Second Elevens were chosen), and I was always “small” for my year as I was usually at least six months younger than the average of my contemporaries in class and puberty tends to widen any differences. I was better at swimming and swam for my school house (Sherwood). Played shove ha’penny and cards and soccer with a tennis ball. During first year at school I was good academically (in Lower III) but after that was less than mediocre until Upper V (last year) when I came good again and got a reasonable school certificate. I still have every school report, saved for me by my father. I can’t imagine how I got a D (fail) in Math one year, then the next year got A’s. I have always liked, and thought myself reasonably good at, math.
1948
My financial situation changed vastly when I got a job as an “order boy” at Hollingsworth’s licensed grocery store –this meant they sold alcohol and groceries- on Chester Road Stretford. I received only 2 shillings a week as ‘spends’ from my father. This job entailed riding a clumsy bike modified to carry boxes of groceries and deliver them to patrons’ houses for which the shop paid me 6 shillings a week.
This modest stipend was augmented by wives giving us tips, (never saw a single househusband) ranging from a penny to sixpence and empty bottles, but the major source of income was in bottles and jam jars and occasionally soda siphons (the ‘rich’ drank whisky and soda) on which there was a two shilling refundable deposit. Jam jars were a ha’penny for a small and a penny for a large, beer bottles were from twopence to sixpence. Jam jars were refilled with syrup from a large barrel in the shop. I could soon recognise the value of any bottle or jar and where it could be cashed in before returning to the shop. This Hollingsworth’s was one of the biggest grocers in the area in the era before supermarkets and it had a liquor licence. Tight rationing was still in operation so the food which we stole was easily saleable or eked out our family rations.
One of the other order boys showed me what could be stolen and I devised a way of hiding the goods under a box in my carrier. It had to be a strong box to take the weight of the legitimate boxes placed on top. In this way I smuggled out eggs, sugar, tea, biscuits, jellies and jam jars full of syrup. Some of the food I gave to my mother saying that we had been given it but I don’t think I fooled my father. The rest of it was eaten or sold, so this further added to my income. After closing on Saturday at 1 o’clock, I usually had £1 which was a large sum for a fourteen-year-old, sometimes thirty shillings. My father had about 7/6 a week left over after paying the rent, rates, food, other bills and buying 200 Woodbine cigarettes, his weekly ration, so he was not impressed at the way I squandered my money and the apparent ease by which I came by it. I got Peter Kitchen a job at Hollingsworths and we worked there until school finished and we entered working life. We used our money to go to the movies, of which I was a great fan and to the speedway and wrestling at Belle Vue. I also saw at Belle Vue, Frank Sinatra and Johnny Ray when they were very young.
All went well with my job and religious instruction at school until the Great Hymn Book Incident. I had a school hymn book at the beginning of the year but lost it, and the prefects who checked hymn books every morning as you entered the hall for morning prayers kept reporting me. Although I had money I didn’t want to “waste” any on a hymn book.
Eventually I was put on detention until I bought one, which meant I would lose my job after school. I told my father, and he being a militant atheist came to school (in his boiler suit, unshaven after he came off night shift) and so powerfully berated the Headmaster (Tom Booth) that I was taken out of morning prayers and the two periods of religious instruction a week, as apparently the education law allowed for “non-believers” to opt out. This was fine except that thereafter I became known to teachers as “that little atheist, Taylor” and also suffered scorn and a few fights from ribbing about my atheism and father’s appearance—he was compared to Mr. Lillee, the caretaker-grounds man who also wore a boiler suit. It was great not to go to morning prayers and I usually did my homework at that time, an event noted by one master on one of my reports.
In June of 1948 whilst alone in the classroom as the rest were at prayers, I found out that I was sexually mature. I was delighted with this ability, as I was almost the only boy in my class who had not sexually matured. I went through the delights of frequent masturbation with a minimum of guilt, as I knew that everyone did it. I took an immediate and overwhelming interest in girls! One evening, Peter Kitchen and I went out with June Southall and Eunice Crowther and stayed out very late. Peter was in Longford Park and I was in the nearby meadows. I went home eventually, but Peter, who stayed in the park until midnight decided to sleep there and go straight to school in the morning. He would probably have told his parents he had stayed at my house. His parents were much more liberal than were mine. He was asleep at 2am when the cops did a bike patrol and found him in a park shed. His parents were called and came and collected him, the cops having noted his name, address and school. Co-incidentally, the park scout hut was burned down by vandals that night. The cops came to school the next day and caused a scandal for us both when we were hauled out of class together. We were innocent, our minds were on girls not arson! (This story was verified in 2002 by Peter who had the same recollection as I)
1949
My final days at school are of interest. I sat and obtained the School Certificate getting sufficient passes and three Credits in June of 1949 and when the holidays came did not realize that, not being 16, I would have to go back to school until I was 16 in the December of 1949.
All of my schoolmates left school and I returned alone on Sept 6th to a new class. I did not go into the Sixth form as I was determined to leave as soon as possible. So I started to repeat the work which I had done in Upper 5 R and was bored and unhappy in a class full of strangers and made my own and my teacher’s life a misery. I kept nagging my father to let me leave, but he held out for about a month and then said “tha can leave when tha’s found thisel a job, I’m not havin thi on‘t dole”. This was music to my ears, and within a few days I saw an ad. for a ‘smart boy’ in the window of the local Co-op. grocery store
As the Co-ops were a sort of socialist organization, we were keen members, and I was well known to the manager, a Mr. Mason. I popped in and applied and Mason, who knew I had been at grammar school, was happy to accept me and assured me that I could aspire to ‘even his status’ if I worked hard. I would have taken the job if it had been cleaning toilets! I don’t think that I was unhappy in the job which consisted of weighing sugar into blue packets, cleaning the bacon slicer, mopping the floor and making tea for everyone’s breaks, but a chance conversation, three weeks after I started at the Co-op, with Eileen Bird – an old girl friend with whom I had earlier learned the delights of maturer sex on the railway embankment- soon had me make a significant move. She told me that she worked at Capsules Ltd. in Stretford where she packed cigarette lighter fuel into tins at a table with a long line of girls and they all listened to the radio and sang along with it. This sounded better than weighing sugar, especially the long line of girls, so I went along uninvited to the Capsules Ltd office to apply.
It was my great good fortune that the Managing Director, Harold Marcel Guest a little Belgian Jew, (who subsequently did a lot for me and appeared to like me) happened to be in the office at that time. It was really just a small family firm. His wife supervised the girls and his son, who we had to call ‘Mr.Kenneth’, looked after chemical mixing and transport.
Anyway I asked if ‘there was please a job on the packing line’ and presented my school certificate. He said that with such a certificate I should not be aspiring to the packing line and did I by any chance speak French? To cut short what was a long interview, my schoolboy French got me a job as office boy and typist of export documents, some of which were in French as they exported a lot to Belgium. It also gave me status with the factory girls which I was not loath to exploit. I can remember being very happy at Capsules, my dating life improved, Mr. Guest was very tolerant of my mistakes ( I once cut him off by touching the wrong key on our PBX, from his phone call to Belgium) and he encouraged me to ask his daughter, Pauline, to go to a Liberal party dance he was organizing. I did take her and later asked her out to the Longford Cinema, but when I put my hand on her breast (most girls didn’t object) she screamed and I never asked her out again. She didn’t tell her father what had happened though and she later defied him and married a penniless communist. I never knew she had such guts.
I can’t explain how I came to leave Capsules and go to Sabena Belgian Airlines, my next job, which was the start of my wanderlust that is with me to this day. Peter Kitchen told me in 2002 that his father had seen the ad. for the airline and suggested to Peter that he apply, but Peter got a job on a newspaper which he really wanted that same week. Peter said he passed the job details on to me. I cannot remember anything about this period except telling Mr. Guest that I had applied to Sabena and being fearful of his displeasure. But on the contrary, he said that although he would be sorry to lose me, he realized that I would have better long-term prospects with Sabena. He also knew Sabena as he exported via them to Belgium and actually knew the manager, Mr. Davis. He did put in a good word for me as Mr. Davis told me later. I left Capsules Ltd in Nov of 1949. The reference which follows was given to me in July of 1951, when I realised that I would have to flee to Canada to avoid National Service and would need references over there.
Davis thought I was rather badly dressed for an interview but another person at the interview (Mrs. Elizabeth- Betty – Crouch) thought I was the only applicant with ‘personality’. Later, she and I used to dance the samba to the radio music when we were the only two in the office. Anyhow, between Mr. Guest and Mrs. Crouch I got the job. I really loved working for Sabena especially as I was measured for a uniform at the expensive military tailors on Market St. Manchester and provided with shirts and ties to match. The uniform was aircrew design, and although I was only the ‘garcon de bureau’ it did not stop me from acting as if I was at least an airline steward if not aircrew. I quickly learned all that was required for the job. I made a bit of money from selling out-of-date timetables to a waste-paper company. I then realized that I could over-order lots of timetables from head office and have all the more to sell (I was responsible for dispatching new timetables to travel agents). My boss was later complimented by head office in Brussels on the great timetable distribution job we were doing for the airline!! My lying (or was it just precociousness) nearly brought me unstuck shortly after. I used to bring coffee from a local shop for everyone in two large thermos flasks recently bought from Boots chemists. One day I clumsily broke both whilst washing them, and in a panic, decided I had better get them replaced. I typed a letter on Company paper to Boots saying that the thermos’s had exploded and caused a small injury to staff. I said I would say no more about it if they replaced them. I signed it under my boss’s imprint “A.C.L.Davis Commercial Manager”. When I took it to Boots they immediately replaced the thermos’s, but as I was leaving the Boot’s manager told me that he would call Mr. Davis and personally apologise. (Were they worried about being sued?). I was petrified but could not think of anything to say and flew back to Sabena. Fortunately, only Betty Crouch was in the office, and I told her what I had done. She nearly had hysterics laughing at my predicament, and when the Boots man called she accepted the apology on behalf of Mr. Davis and declared the matter closed. Over the next two years she often used to twit me at office parties as she got tipsy saying “remember those thermos’, naughty Norman”
1950
I became eligible for a staff concession flight and had a holiday in Belgium on a free ticket from Sabena. I notice from my passport that I took £6 to spend (exchange control in Fr. B). Doesn’t sound much but it was over a week’s pay. On the day I was to fly out of Manchester, 20 December 1950, there was a thick fog and no SN621 flight came in. I was so disappointed, but Mr. Davis (my boss) booked me first class (at Sabena’s expense) on the overnight sleeper train to London and arranged for me to fly out of London Airport—Heathrow—on the 21st. I had a severe dose of ‘flu, but in the excitement of my first flight (on a Convair) I forgot about it. I was given a free room at the Hotel Cecil on the Rue Jardin Botanique in Brussels—my first night ever in an expensive hotel. I saw the sights and shopped for nylons and perfume at “Au Grand Magasin Printemps” (I think), a department store. The young female assistant blushingly explained that the “les nylons” I asked for were knickers and that what I wanted were called “nylon bas”: nylon stockings. I dined almost alone in a large restaurant at the Cecil, intimidated by the waiters and not quite sure which cutlery went with which dish. I had a high temperature from the flu and slept intermittently that night but enjoyed the luxury of my first big hotel. I was collected by a stewardess and taken on a tour of Sabena central booking and out to Melsbroek Airport and I spent a few days in Belgium.
My return was to be into Manchester Airport, so I wrapped the nylons (three pairs, I think) around my waist next to my skin, along with a small bottle of perfume for Mum. I hoped I could keep a straight face when I went through airport customs and after a routine flight I did go through customs without incident. BUT waiting for me in the arrival lounge at Manchester Ringway Airport were all the Sabena staff who had come to welcome me back and have a Christmas drink. Unfortunately, Mr. Davis had invited the airport Chief Customs officer to the party, and when Jack Davis said, “Here’s our Norman, just got back from Belgium. You’d better search him thoroughly, he’s probably carrying a ton of contraband”, I nearly dropped dead in panic. Everyone laughed of course and nothing happened but when I showed John Flannery (still a friend in 2006 although getting pretty ancient) in the toilet what I had got still wrapped around my middle he just about cracked up (and went around telling the story for the next fifty years!). I traded the nylons for sex with a girl called Helen Ricketts, who also went out with Yanks and who was far more experienced than me.
1950
I was still best friends with Peter and we got ourselves into a bit of trouble at this time. My boss at Sabena (Jack Davis) had bought a house in Hazel Grove, Cheshire. He went to London to sell up his house there and move his family up north. He didn’t want to leave an empty house, so he asked me to sleep there for three or four days. I did so and on the Saturday invited Peter around. The house was high on the side of a hill and looking out the window we saw two girls walking along the road. We called out to them and asked if they would like a lemonade; they would. That was how we met Enid and Sheila. We were sixteen or seventeen at the time and the girls were actually fifteen and fourteen respectively but we thought they were sixteen or seventeen. We only saw them occasionally and I at least had only gone so far as heavy petting with Sheila. Then Peter’s mother told us she was going to her sister’s pub in Bakewell for the three-day holiday long weekend (there was no father living at home as Peter’s parents were now divorced). Peter and I were going on a week’s holiday to Brighton the next week where there was a horse race meeting. (Peter worked all his life on the racing editions of newspapers and fancied his chances of beating the bookies.) I just went along.
We must have mentioned to Enid and Sheila that Peter’s house would not have a parent at home, and I can’t remember who suggested it – it could have been the girls as they were very “forward” or it might have been one of us – but anyway it was arranged that they would come and stay a night and that boys would sleep with girls. We were to leave two days after and go to Brighton. The long weekend duly arrived and the girls having told their parents that they were staying at each other’s houses, arrived with a change of clothes (The working class did not have home phones in those days). Probably, if they had gone back home after one night no one would have been any the wiser. As it was, we all had such a good time that when they said they didn’t need to go home on Sunday we agreed. Up to this time, although I was quite sexually experienced (for a youth in the late 1940s), I had never before slept the night with a girl – all my experience had been in parks, on canal banks, down alleyways or on railway embankments, so it was a mind-blowing experience for me. I had Sheila, and even though she was only fourteen (which I did not then know) she was much more experienced than I was.
Anyway, we said goodbye on the holiday Monday to the girls as they caught their bus back to Hazel Grove and we set off for Brighton and our racetrack holiday. Little did we know what was a-brewing. At Brighton we more or less broke even with our bets until the final day when we had left little more than our rail fare back from Brighton to Manchester. Peter got a hot tip from a racing tipster “Prince Monolulu” advising him that “Lancashire Lassie” would win the 3 o’clock race. I learned later that such tipsters would tip five or six different horses in the same race (to different people) each of which had a chance of winning in the hope that one of them would win. They then keep an eye out for the person collecting the winnings and ask them for a share. Anyway Peter overcame my reticence and we staked all we had including most of our rail fare on “Lancashire Lassie”; we backed it to win, as the odds were better. Naturally it placed second and we had done our dough, but “not to worry” said Peter, “I’ll just phone Mum and she’ll send us enough to get home, by wire.”
But when we rang his Mum she shouted, “What have you been up to?” A parent had been there and we were in dreadful trouble – those girls were only fourteen and the parents are going to tell the police.”
Although I was in the phone booth, I could not hear exactly what his Mum had said, but I could tell by his face that things were very bad. When he told me what she had said I thought about running away, but finally decided we had better get a temporary job to get enough money for our fare home and face the music. So we went to the main Brighton hotel and got a job washing dishes, it was the same hotel at which Margaret Thatcher was nearly assassinated by the IRA about thirty years later. There was no electric dishwasher, just two very large sinks and us. The work proved very onerous and paid little more in a day than we had to spend on food and lodging. We quit after a couple of days and decided to hitch-hike back to Manchester and made good time until around Stafford when the only lift was on a truck delivering bones to a Manchester glue factory. There was no room in the cab so we had to ride on the canvas covered bones which stank to high heaven; then it started to rain. I was a sorry, bedraggled and frightened boy when I fronted up to Peter’s mother.
The reality wasn’t quite as bad as we had been led to believe. One of the girls had been beaten by her father but stuck by her story that they had slept together. Peter’s mother had told the fathers that the boys (us) “were not like that” and that “certainly Norman would not have indulged in such behaviour”. She asked me did we sleep with the girls and I said “definitely not”. Mrs. Kitchen always thought I was a much better person than I really am, and that I was a good influence on her son! Anyway, we had to go around to the parents and say we were sorry for the upset we had caused by letting the girls stay.
It was quite a fright though, and may account for the fact that I often went out with women older than me in later years. It was very sobering to realise we could have been charged with statutory rape or carnal knowledge. Needless to say, I was always hyper-cautious thereafter.
1951
Why I Went to Canada…
Late in my seventeenth year, John Trainor, a nearby friend, was inducted into the Army to complete his two years of National Service. This period was later reduced to eighteen months and eventually cancelled. Although I am against the idea of military service, it seems to me that the period of National Service doesn’t do lazy and untidy young males any harm at all! I now know that military services use the early period of military service (square bashing) as the period for brainwashing the recruit into obedience to orders and to make all recruits similar in behaviour. They do this by shaving you almost bald, and mistreating you for six to ten weeks.
At the end of this period you get posted to job training or to your unit and things improve considerably for most recruits. You have been taught the military’s way and the great variability among recruits; from boys from comfortable homes with doting parents to tough deprived slum kids for whom Army food, clothing and culture was often an improvement, has been reduced. In a word, you have been made into a soldier (sailor or airman).
None of this, of course, I knew, and when both Peter Kitchen (who is 4 months older than me) and John (both from very different backgrounds and in different parts of the Army) arrived after square bashing with their shaved heads and told (no doubt embroidered) stories of deprivation, bullying, cruel and unusual punishments, dreadful food and non-stop polishing (bull), I decided almost on the spot that I would have none of that and would somehow avoid National Service.
At the time I was working for Sabena Belgian Airlines, and had a uniform (indistinguishable to a female teenager’s eye from an aircrew’s uniform) which was useful in making that difficult first contact with an unknown female, earning quite reasonable wages, living at home and paying board and generally quite enjoying life, but realised along with every other healthy seventeen-year-old not in a “reserved” capacity, the “Nasho” was staring me in the face.
My father had a brother (Uncle Bill) in Canada with whom he had reasonable (for my father) relations and I asked my Dad to write and ask him if I could go and stay with him and do a bit of work on the farm until I found something else. Bill wrote back to say that he had help enough on his farm, having three children aged fourteen to eighteen, but would get me a job as “hired man” on a nearby farm and look after sponsoring and immigration details. Bill was true to his word and set the wheels in motion from the Canadian side, so it was up to me to raise the trans-Atlantic boat fare – flying was out of the question in 1951. I had a credit balance of about £8 to my name so had to raise over £60 for my passage, and in quick time, as I would have to register for National Service shortly after my birthday in December 1951, when I would be eighteen. After that I would expect to be in the services within six weeks.
My pay at Sabena was about £5.10s a week and after deductions I had about £4.10s of which I gave my mother £1, leaving me £3.10s a week to save at maximum, and I had only about twelve weeks to my birthday, so I really needed another job. I answered an advertrisement in the “Evening News” for someone to handle invoicing and small office work on evenings and weekends for £2.10/- a week; no tax. I quite liked the job, which was near Altrincham Railway station and so convenient for travel to and from my home and the job was very easy – too easy as it turned out.
One evening, after I had been there for two weeks, the proprietor asked if I would like a drink and as it was only about 8pm I said I would. In the pub he swung the conversation round to sex and as he was driving me to the railway station he put his hand on my upper leg. I pushed him off vigorously, and he nearly lost control of the truck. I called him a f . . .king brown-hatter (the local slang for a queer), he braked suddenly and I jumped out. I thought about complaining to the cops but decided against it as it might complicate my departure from England. But I still needed an extra job.
I can’t remember how I came to know that Capsules Ltd. (Mr. Guest’s old firm where I had worked for two months) required an evening worker for their new night shift, (maybe Eileen Bird who still worked there and with whom I occasionally had sex told me) but being a favourite of Mr. Guest’s, I got the job mixing vats of gelatine, glycerine and water which made the basic material to be moulded into sealed tubes containing two or three cc’s of petrol for use in lighters, which many smokers had in those days. That period passed as a blur as I was frequently overtired and as I did a lot of the work in my Sabena uniform (why??? Maybe I went straight from my Sabena job), it was often spattered with gelatine which I had to get off before turning up for work at Sabena the next morning. It did peel off easily. So by early January I both had the money and expected the military at my door any day.
1952
I asked Norman Foulkes, a co-worker at Sabena, to use his contacts in the travel industry to get me a cheap fare across the Atlantic to Canada and eventually he came up with a passage on a cargo ship which offered “working” passages to five persons for 50 or £60 each. We had to sign on as crew which was about some legal requirement of insurance, but we had no work and dined with the Captain and officers. The shipping company was the Seaboard Line and the vessel the S.S. Seaboard Trader, an old Liberty ship which had a Canadian crew.
I had a farewell dinner/party from Sabena and everyone, including relatively new employee, John Flannery (still a friend of mine in 2005), was there. Jack Davis made a speech that brought tears to my eyes, and gave me £5 out of his own pocket, although he wasn’t sympathetic to me evading National Service. He later sent me a glowing reference when I asked which helped me later in getting jobs.
I see from my passport that I took with me; only £4 worth of Canadian currency so must have landed with very little.
My departure from home was a very subdued affair. My last night in England I went to the Gorse Hotel Stretford (a very grubby local pub) and I sat at a table with some of my friends who were not yet in the services and my father. We drank halves of bitter and there was almost no conversation. My father gave some standard advice about staying out of trouble and this being the start of manhood etcetera, and at closing time we all trooped off into the smoke-smelling dark fog.
In the morning, I had a tearful farewell from my mother and a handshake from father and I and my two second-hand battered cardboard suitcases boarded the local bus to the train. I had a sense of suppressed excitement and freedom but it was far from euphoria.
On arrival in the early morning in London (I had been on the overnight train, but did not have the money for a sleeper and so sat up) I somehow managed to find my way to the appropriate dock (in Limehouse I think but maybe not) and find the ship. She looked very big to my inexperienced eyes, but was in fact an ex-wartime Liberty ship. This type was designed and built in the hundreds (if not thousands) in America as the general cargo carrier for the Allies during the War (WW II) and hundreds were sunk in the Atlantic and Pacific campaigns. After the War, they were bought for a song and formed the backbone of the world’s merchant fleets until the post-war surge in prosperity and new designs wiped them from the scene.
Anyway, there I was, sharing a cabin on the “Seaboard Trader” of Canadian registry, with a Merchant Navy apprentice who was going to a position in the Canadian Merchant Navy. I can’t recall much about him except that he was pale, sober and quiet. The ship was also quiet.
After (to me) an extraordinary first meal of unlimited meat and three veg. hot rolls and lashings of real butter and apple pie and ice cream, I retired to my bunk in the knowledge that we were due to leave about 8 am the next morning. The ship was very quiet and I was soon asleep.
But not for long. The ship was quiet because almost all the crew were ashore wenching and drinking as sailors do on their last night in port. (I know this because I later became one.) There was shouting, screaming, minor fights and scuffles as the rabble returned and had to be separated from their floozies and got below. All the passengers (six) got up and watched the spectacle, and as the noise gradually declined, peace and quiet again descended.
My passport does not have a departure stamp, maybe because we were ostensibly “crew,” but there is a “landed immigrant” stamp for Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, for February 11 1952, and I am almost certain that the crossing took ten days, so it would be fairly accurate to say that I left England on February 1st 1952. I can see from the exchange control stamp for my £4 worth of Canadian currency in my passport that I got it on 28th January 1952, which would have been as close to my departure as possible.
An enormous row of shouted orders, clanging, banging and ship’s bells and tug’s whistles woke us up at daylight. Even though it was quite foggy (normal in London at that time of year), we made our way out into the Thames for our departure.
It seems strange to me now, surrounded by supermarkets and fridges packed with food, what an impact the food on that Canadian ship had on me. I can remember very little about the crossing other than that I ate a lot, that it was very rough (lots of seasickness all around but not me!), grey all the time and cold. I gorged myself at every meal and had a reputation as “the hungry one”—probably because of food rationing in England which went on until 1953, and even after, many things were in short supply.
The “Seaboard Trader” was a Liberty Ship, one of a class produced in the USA to carry wartime freight and make up losses due to German/Japanese submarine warfare. They were built from keel to finish in an average of fifty-seven days and over 2000 were built during the war. The “Seaboard Trader” had a three-cylinder steam engine of about 3000 horsepower, and I spent some time in the engine room with the “black gang”—navy slang for engine room personnel. To see the massive connecting rods (piston to crankshaft) rushing up and down was simply awe-inspiring to me. The Atlantic was grey and rough but I never felt sick. Soon I was called on deck to see us entering the long narrow bay, at the head of which was the Nova Scotia port of Halifax, my Canadian port of entry, where my passport was stamped “LANDED IMMIGRANT” February 11 1952.
Halifax seemed to be completely snowed in, I had seen snow but not this thick or this cold, but the Canadians were prepared for it, they had the clothes, and their buildings, buses and trains were superheated. I was totally underdressed, having only a thin suit, a pullover and utility unlined raincoat and a brown trilby hat my father had donated. My feet and ears froze, but soon I was on the connecting train to Montreal and after a wait there, on to Toronto. In Toronto I had to wait a long time for the local train to Newmarket where Uncle Bill was to meet me. I have few recollections of the entire trip Halifax-Newmarket, except that I slept a lot and was hungry as food seemed to cost a lot and I had little money ($12 Canadian as far as I know).
Finally, the train chugged in to Newmarket, a typical rural Canadian town of about 3,000 people, and Bill and his three kids, Barbara, Bernard and Billy, were on hand to greet me. I must have looked a forlorn and peculiar sight as I got off. I remember feeling very tired and weak and Billy’s crushing hand grip as they greeted me. Then it was into Bill’s new Chevrolet car and off to my first few days on his farm. But that is another story!
Feb–Oct 1952
On the farm…
Although Uncle Bill had arranged work as a “hired man” on a farm near him, about five miles outside Newmarket (a small “dry” town—having no liquor sales whatsoever) and not on my Uncle Bill’s and Aunt Della’s farm, Bill had wisely decided I would spend a bit of time with him, as I obviously knew nothing useful, before going to my destination farm which was on the other side of the road and about 500 metres north on the Fourth or Fifth Line as they called the road. When Bill met me, the slender pale youth that I was, he must have been quite worried about his commitment to his neighbour, Sheldon Walker. Bill’s son was 5 foot 11 inches well made and strong! I am 5ft 9”. (But now in 2005 Billy is very ill being overweight and having diabetes). So it was that we arrived back at the farm to one of Aunt Della’s large meals and then I must have gone straight to sleep. I heard everyone get up in the dark and it was barely light when they eventually awoke me and I joined everyone for breakfast at about 8.15. The breakfast was satisfyingly large and at the time I heard my first ever commercial radio sung jingle on the Toronto station they always listened to. The commercial was for “People’s Credit Jewellers” on Yonge St—I had it memorised after a couple of days. The house was nice and warm and ran on a furnace fuelled by wood. A quarter of Bill’s farm was pine forest and there were many dead trees. I learned that the farm was a standard Government “block” of about 110 acres and had an eight roomed house, a grain shed, implement shed and a very large barn. In winter, which was very cold, the cows and horses and pigs lived under the barn, the top was full of hay and a storage area for wheat and oats.
Bill was a dairy farmer whose main income was his milk cheque from a herd of about 50 Holstein cows, 35 of which were milking at any one time. He planted wheat and oats and grass for his own use.
I was a city boy who hadn’t been nearer than 10 feet to a farm horse or cow and was quite nervous of them initially. Anyway, after breakfast I was kitted out in Wellingtons, jeans, old parka and gloves and went to be “a farmer’s boy.”
Bill must have regretted his decision to have me (although he never complained) as I knew absolutely nothing. My cousin Barbara had to show me how to wipe the poop off a cow’s udder with a cloth and mild antiseptic solution, how to harness a horse, to grind oats as cow food, etcetera etcetera. My first big failing came on the manure mound. In the barn were forty pens where the cows spent the winter night and any days there was a blizzard. Their body heat and the low roof kept the barn surprisingly warm. They pooped all night and being herbivores it was copious and sloppy. My morning (and afternoon) chores were as follows. Arise at 5.45 am, don warm clothes, stagger to the barn, sweep clean the manger part in front of each cow, wash its udder, clamp its neck so it couldn’t move whilst being milked and give it a scoop of ground oats and some molasses to keep it quiet.
Only Bill or Billy was allowed to fit the milking machine. My job was to empty the machine, as Bill removed it, into a bucket, weigh it on a spring balance note the result on the cow’s records and pour it into a milk churn which sat in a chilled water tub about 8 feet square. We used to produce 6 to 8 churns of milk every day. The cows received ground oats with a dob of thick molasses and a large forkful of hay. This done I had to “muck out”. An overhead rail ran past the rear of every cow stall and on the rail was a tipping car. All the poop was forked up and put into the car then pushed on to the next cow. Every morning and evening 3 or 4 car loads of manure were produced. Every full car load, the barn door was opened and the car pushed to the end of a swinging beam which allowed it to be distributed over a large area. This operation (building up the manure pile) had been going since the previous November so there was a pile of frozen manure about 4 feet thick and 40 feet radius arc. These chores just described were done twice a day (sometimes 3 times a day on 3X farms) every day of the year and took about 1 3/4 hours on Bill’s farm. (I later found an almost identical system at the farm I went to). So a farm day went something like this: rise 5.45; chores till 7.30; wash up (Della insisted on real cleanliness, no farmyard muck in the house so it was a good wash and “house” clothes on before every meal); 8.00 breakfast, very large, many eggs, toast, porridge and coffee, bacon if wanted; 8.45 farm work; 12.00 wash up and lunch; 1.30 farm work; 5.30 wash up and tea—or supper as it was called; 6.30 evening chores; 8.15 finished for the day.
This we did Monday–Friday. On Saturday we finished at lunch time but still had to do evening chores, and Sunday we did only morning and evening chores.
To me, it seemed an unbelievable lengthy work week, coming from my 8.45 to 5pm five-day week at Sabena, but Bill assured me it was “easy” compared to what he was required to do when he arrived in Canada as a farm boy aged 14½, and I believed him. Anyway, back to my first failure. I had learned how to harness the horses, Fred a gelding and Nelly, a mare, to the manure spreader. I wondered how it would be possible to spread manure, as in February the pile looked rock solid frozen, but it was only the top four inches—the inside was kept soft by bacterial action. You hacked off the top with a large axe (nearly lost a foot in my earliest swings). It took two horses to pull a fully-loaded manure spreader, which looked something like this:
The horses harnessed were on either side of a wooden beam about 4 inches by 4 inches and 10 foot long. I successfully filled the spreader with at least a ton of manure, sat on the driver’s seat and tried to pull away, without noticing that one of the wheels was deep in a frozen rut.
I slapped the horses, who tried their best, but couldn’t get free. Finally I tried to turn but snapped the beam in half. What a fool I felt as I reported what I had done. Anyway Billy cut a small pine tree, and we shaped and replaced the beam, and I started work on the pile about three hours later. I think I did about 14 days of chores and reducing the manure pile. I eventually quite enjoyed taking the horses to a back paddock, spreading the load and galloping back. Although loading wet manure each time was not fun, I was getting stronger every day and more used to the routine of early rising and hard work. After we had cut and dried the hay, Bill said I had to go to his neighbour Sheldon’s farm and would be paid $50 a month and keep. This eventually increased to 65 or 70 dollars over the months as I got better at everything
Sheldon Walker had a farm about the size of Bill’s but was more prosperous, as I guess he’d inherited it many years previously. He had a wife, and a daughter of fifteen who had acute acne and was quite overweight. This didn’t stop me necking with her on a Saturday night after going to the movies as I gradually grew more and more desperate for female company. There was an older hired man who had a wife and lived in a small cottage on the farm, but I saw little of him except at chore (milking) times morning and evening. Sheldon was probably quite a fair and patient man (although at the time I thought him very critical) who suffered my early ineptitude and taught me (along with what I had learned at Uncle Bill’s) all I needed to know for success as a farm boy, or as they said, a ‘hired man’.
I learned the seasonal ways of farming. Mixed rain and snow in March and as soon as the ground was dry, ploughing with a tractor (not me, I couldn’t plough a straight line). Then harrowing–that is chopping up the ploughed clods into a fine tilth- was my job.
Two horses were used for the harrow and I would walk behind them at horse pace (fast) for two or three hours backwards, forwards and across without a break to harrow a ten-acre field. Then we sowed spring wheat, and oats, spread manure on pasture, planted acres of field corn for silage; so the months went by. Every Saturday, Billy, Ron Pottage another farmer’s son and I went to the movies in Newmarket in Ron’s large Ford, bought by a doting father. The show was often George Formby or Norman Wisdom, both highly popular.
We all smoked Sweet Caporals outside in the interval as unlike England at the time, you could not smoke in the cinema. After the show we went for “French fries” (first time I heard the words) to a milk bar and played the juke box, trying to attract girls to our table. Boys outnumbered them two to one, so we were never very successful, although I had a couple of high school girl friends (Betty Daley and Barbara —-) for a time.
With Barbara, above me and Betty Daley on Ron’s Ford
I found the time on a Sunday to play baseball (softball), ice skate on a frozen pond (till April), and in summer play soccer in the long evenings for a migrants team, mostly Germans and Irish, in Newmarket.
Meanwhile the grass, corn, wheat and oats grew, we hoed, fixed fence and overhauled machinery; then it was “haying”. Not for us the luxury of bales and a bale transporter. Our hay was cut into wide rows, turned twice to keep it dry, then thrown by pitchfork alone on a low truck with a person on either side trying to pitch hay as the horses walked along—it wasn’t bad until the load reached 5 foot high, after which it was tough until you reached 7 foot when it was taken to the barn and “mawed”, packed down. I thought haying was hard work, but by August first the oats, then the wheat, ripened, and no combined harvester like you see on TV today. The grain was cut flat, pulled into a bundle called a “stook” by the cutter and binder machine and stacked by the stooker (me) and the eight or ten stooks ( in England, called ‘sheaves’), stood on their ends to form a triangle to dry. (see diagram)
Within a week, these stooks were dry, pitched onto a horse driven truck and taken up to the threshing machine where the straw ended up in bales and the grain in 100lb sacks which we transferred to the barn or granary. Wet weather would wreck the threshing so farmers worked in a gang on each others’ farms and often finished a field by the light of car headlamps.
When I had finished Sheldon’s crop of field corn in late September; very heavy work throwing seven-foot corn plants around (the plant and the cobs were all silaged for winter cow food), he decided there wasn’t much work on his farm for me, and I was hired out by him as a day labourer and did finish-up end of season work at a couple of other farms. So you can see that in my short time on the farm I had learned and done a lot.
I should mention that I was in the 4H Club, a sort of rural skills scouts, and Billy and I won prizes at the annual show in Newmarket for our calves. I was by this time a strong young man, bronzed and healthy.
With my calf competition entrant ‘Olive’ 1952
However, in mid-October Sheldon told me that all the seasonal work on his farm was finished (we’d had the first frost) and he couldn’t pay me a wage but would keep me on until next February for my food and board and I would only do chores. I was unhappy about going down to no pay, but a bit apprehensive about going to the city to try my luck, but when the day arrived for me to receive no pay; I decided to go to Toronto and left on the earliest Saturday coach from Newmarket to Toronto, arriving there about 11am. I don’t know exactly when but about October 20th 1952, aged 18 and 10 months would be pretty close. So ended my only period of farm work. I can safely say (in 2002), “I had never really worked before and I’ve never worked so hard since.” I have admired farmers from that day on.
Toronto 1952 to England 1953
I knew of the famous Toronto papers, the Globe and Mail and the Daily Star, which Sheldon had delivered daily and I think it was in the Globe and Mail that I saw an ad. for a “customs clearance clerk”, but first I needed accommodation, so I walked from the bus terminal at Bay and Dundas Streets along Dundas St. W and saw a “rooms to rent” sign. I rented a room with breakfast and packed lunch for a reasonable figure (I forget what) and took the room for a week. I did not have much money saved from my farm work (probably about $100) and had no idea what I would do in the event of being unable to get a job.
I had one suitcase with my clothes, my main asset being a new blue suit and a couple of shirts and a tie bought in Newmarket out of my farm earnings.
The accommodation I was in rented all the lower rooms to prostitutes and I realised this about the third day. I left this accommodation soon after I landed a job, as at that stage I didn’t want to live in a whorehouse and through the Globe and Mail got a room and full board for $22 a week with Mrs. Woods who had a very sick husband and a son about my age who was very mean to his mother. This home was at 48 Cambridge St at Bloor and Danforth near a big bridge. Tramcars ran all over Toronto in those days.
But before this happened, I needed a job and had already found one as a custom’s clerk in the paper. I didn’t write but went directly to the advertisers’ address at Bay St. not far from Front St. Toronto, for Canadian Johns Manville Co. Ltd., importers of building materials from the big parent company in the USA. (The owner, Tommy Manville, was famous for having been married six times in an age when that was uncommon.) I looked in Google to see if they still existed in 2008 and they do but have moved to Cornwall Ont.
I had on my blue suit, shirt and tie, and carried my school cert. and the references which I had from Mr. Guest (Capsules) and Mr. Davis (Sabena) which I still have.
Something must have been just right as I got the job on the spot and was told to report for work the next day, at the princely salary of $75 a week for 35 hours and paid overtime if needed. The mail boy was called Laurence or Lawrence and he lived not far from Mrs. Woods, and as I had no other friend, I palled up with him. I saw my first television show ever at his house around Nov. 1952, a small black and white set. I saw early “Ed Sullivan Shows” and the “Lucky Strike Show” and was quite impressed.
A co-worker at John’s Manville was Bill Boyle who had got an English office girl there pregnant and had just married her. She was called “Loveday”, the first time I had ever heard that name. Bill had been a steward for Shell Oil Tankers and became influential in my becoming a sailor later. He plied me with stories about the girls in Venezuela who could be had for 2B’s (Bolivars, the unit of currency, then worth about 30 cents I think). I remembered these stories later. Meanwhile, I went to Bill and Day’s flat for cards and even went duck hunting with him and tried out as a bugler at Bill’s reserve regiment, the 48th Highlanders of Canada., but without success. I went to the 48th‘s annual ball at the Toronto Royal York Hotel in a kilt and rented equipment. My date was arranged by Laurence the mail boy, a heavy long-haired girl for whom I had to buy a corsage—an orchid which cost about $10. We danced a lot but going home in the taxi when I tried to kiss her she pushed me away! I was downcast to be rejected by such an unattractive girl and was getting desperate for female company.
I worked at typing and delivering customs documents for rail carloads of roofing products imported from the US. Typically, I got a telex from Johns Manville (U.S.) and made up the necessary documents, took them to HM customs on Front Street and cleared the consignment which could then be taken to the JM warehouse. Compared to farm work, it was money for jam. I don’t know how I filled in the time; I seemed to have so much of it after the farm. I learned how to bowl (10 pin) and was in the JM team who met other firms in some sort of league. I was a poor bowler (100) but would reliably turn up so kept my place.
After a month or so there was a vacancy for an order clerk (a promotion) whom the Head of Orders, an angular old maid who was very nice to me, suggested I apply for. I did, and got the job and a $10 a week raise. I was quite happy with the job and with the digs at Mrs. Woods who was more like a mother to me (her own son was an absolute shit). The son joined the navy shortly after and I relished the thought of how he would get done over and abused by the NCO’s; pay him back for being so horrible to his Mum. Her husband died of a stroke whilst I was a boarder and I took over doing “man’s” jobs around the house for her. The only thing missing was suitable female company. I had been reasonably popular with the female sex in England whilst at Sabena, but on the farm and initially in Toronto I just could not seem to meet girls. All this was to change with my association with Arthur Murray’s. It seems a fact that major changes in my life are in pursuit of or fleeing from the fair sex! Anyway, one Friday I saw an ad. “Dancing Teachers wanted at Arthur Murray’s, apply in person 10 am Saturday”. So, having the day off, I turned up. I have detailed earlier how I attended “Cadman’s School of Dancing” in Stretford Manchester and had covered the syllabus for a Bronze (the lowest) medal in Ballroom Dancing there. But I need not have worried, as they were mainly interested in selling lessons rather than my dancing ability.
Becoming a Dancing Teacher December 52-June 53.
Initially, I saw Murray’s as a place to meet girls. I wasn’t trying to supplement my income or to change my job from clerk, as I was quite happy in my work at Johns Manville. Being a fairly newly arrived Limey, I had never heard of Arthur Murray Dance Studios. Murray was a dancing teacher at the start of the ballroom dancing craze which went from about 1930 to 1960. From his base in New York he got an early TV show as the TV era started in about 1948 and soon was networked by NBS to most American cities. He was an early franchiser and took 10% of the gross, providing only his name, selling methods, attendant publicity, dance manuals and fancy report cards for students. The same steps were taught at every studio. The newly opened Toronto studio was on the corner of Yonge and College streets, very central, and had lots of neon and mirrors. Inside it had two lecture rooms, four small practice rooms and two medium-sized ballrooms, along with admin offices and male and female staff rooms. I saw the Arthur Murray Show on TV a few times in 1952-3. He was an indifferent dancer, but a multi-millionaire, as each city had an A.M. studio, all paying 10% of gross. Whilst I was there he started franchised Charm Schools and one opened next door to “my” studio, but I never went in there.
Basically, Murray’s were in the business of extracting every possible dollar from clients, and to do this staff were paid large commissions. The actual pay for me teaching someone for an hour was (I think) $2.50 which rose to $3.50 if I was a “quota” teacher—that is, someone who had taught twenty paid hours during the week. Teaching a beginner was quite hard work and I early realised that the high money and low effort went to those who SOLD lessons, not to those who actually taught them; but I am getting ahead of myself.
I was quite innocent of sales manipulation when I went to the first meeting of my course. There were ten of us, eight females and two males. We all eventually graduated and started work except for one, a Spanish lady who had a faint moustache and not much “gift of the gab.” I don’t know which parameter caused her failure.
The ratio of male to female teachers represented the inverse of the sex of the customers, 80% males and 20% females. The customers were mostly lonely inept males of all ages and mostly middle-aged women, many newly widowed or divorced.
We were put through a speed version of the dancing steps we were to teach. The course was three weeks of three nights 7-10 and Saturday 10-4. Learning to teach dancing took a quarter of the time and learning to sell lessons and extend and renew courses took the other three-quarters. Being a reasonable dancer to begin with, I had no problems except to learn all the female steps in six dances (Quickstep, Waltz, Foxtrot, Tango, Samba and [Rumba Cha Cha.) The only ones that I was not already proficient at were the Latin American. The Cha Cha was set to take North America by storm (as was the Twist about 1960).
On the selling side I knew virtually nothing, so it was an eye-opener to have some elementary psychology thrown my way. After the theory, we had to role-play, taking the various positions of resistant customer, teacher, “dance analyst,” “head of skills,” etc. Perhaps if I follow a customer from beginning to end, the process might be clear.
She (the customer) sees an ad in the paper or on TV. This offers a free lesson (one hour is implied), and improvement in self-image, confidence, fuller social life through free dances, and hints at romance or marriage. She phones in and gets an appointment, and is assigned to a non-booked teacher (me!). I meet her at the check-in, turn on the charm and take her on a quick tour, find out what she does (useful in assessing how much money she may have), assess her as manipulable or difficult and take her into a private room, show her something simple (basic waltz), tell her she may be able to reach bronze medal status and tell her the cost of each hour’s tuition and how it comes down if you sign up for lots of hours. (Any money she pays over, I get 5% of.) At this stage, I have to make a judgement—is she likely to sign on or is she just curious and has just come in for the free hour and has no intention of taking further lessons? If the latter, I rush through a few steps, then get rid of her as fast as is decently possible.
If she looks like a prospect, I tell her that a “dance analyst” will look at her and based on his opinion I will suggest the kind of course she should embark upon. “Dance analyst” is the role any teacher not actually teaching undertakes and the action is always the same. You introduce the student, do a few steps while the D.A. looks on, wise and judgmental, writing copiously on a “dance analysis” form which has several categories: personality, physical ability, sense of rhythm, carriage, dance intelligence (what’s that?). Naturally, she scores high everywhere and at the end of 10-15 minutes he comes over and says something like, “Norman, I don’t know where you found this lady, but you have someone with real talent on your hands. This lady, if she puts in the time and the effort, could go all the way to a gold medal.” The spiel is more or less always the same. The D.A. goes away, and now comes the tricky bit—if you can sign them up (a watertight legal contract) for X hours of tuition before they leave the studio you have them and you have your commission, and, if you want to, you have priority to be their dance teacher. If they leave without signing, they will probably realise it is a lot of money (about $10 an hour) they are committing to, and you will never see them again.
The only variation on the foregoing, and one that nets you 10% not 5% commission, on sign-up is where you “cold-call” (select a name from the phone book and talk her into coming to the studio for a lesson). Not only do you get 10% of what she initially pays, but whenever she extends or buys more hours you get 3%, whoever does the later selling, as you got her into the studio initially.
This selling technique and role-playing comprised the major portion of the training of an Arthur Murray dance instructor. Whilst I was initially fairly naïve about the psychology of selling, I caught on fast and was soon making as much money from my part-time hours at A-M as I was from my full-time clerk’s job. I now am ashamed of the ease with which I used people’s emotional needs to extract money, but at that time I never even thought of it. In addition, the big bonus was that I was suddenly mixing with attractive girls (not students but the other female dance teachers) in a favourable setting. My female-starved life took a rapid turn for the better. For a start, female dance teachers outnumbered male by four to one, and when the studio closed at 10pm many of them wanted to go dancing, usually to a downtown Toronto (Mogambo?) Club, which sold booze and stayed open until 3am. Under the strange licensing rules in Toronto, you had to “eat” as part of the licence, but you could order only bread and celery sticks (the cheapest item) and still get liquor. Furthermore, in order for a female to look good on the dance floor (and other diners actually looked on and applauded) she needs an equally good male partner. So I was in the happy position of being asked to go clubbing, of dancing the night away as often as I wanted and escorting slightly drunk attractive women home! I was really enjoying my new life when I met a French Canadian dancer, Aileen (or maybe Arlene) Jalbert, transferred from another town and with whom there was instant mutual attraction. I soon started going out with only her and partnering her in the demos we gave at various venues and contacts. I also quit my job at Johns Manville as an order clerk, became full-time at AM’s, and had quite enough money. Ms. Jalbert’s parents liked me and I sometimes stayed overnight. Who knows what would have ensued but for THE ACCIDENT which brought about a radical change in my life…
One Sunday (probably Queen’s Birthday weekend in June 1953) I was at Aileen’s in the morning. She had not been feeling well, and someone, not me, suggested that we all go to Lake Simcoe, about sixty miles north of Toronto, for a swim. My fateful contribution was to suggest the route (Don Mills Road?) as, having worked on a farm near there, I knew the area. It was agreed that we should go by the route I suggested. We piled into the car, Mr. Jalbert driving, his wife alongside and Aileen and I in the back. I had my arm around her. Seat belts were unheard of. Somewhere near Newmarket [actually Ravenshoe on the fourth line] (I am trying to get a contemporary newspaper article), with our car going at least sixty miles an hour up the major road, I suddenly saw a car pull out from a minor side road. This picture is imprinted on my memory, but I have no recollection of the crash even to this day. But minutes after, I am helping Aileen out of the back of the car. We are only slightly hurt. The front of the car is wrecked; the windscreen and her father have gone—the other car I cannot see. I can hear groaning nearby; I think it is Aileen’s father. We discover her mother on the floor of the car. She has hit the windscreen and/or dash; she has massive cuts to her face and jaw and a big piece of flesh is missing from her upper thigh. Her legs are twisted at a funny angle. I try to comfort her; she is just alive. Aileen is in total shock but walking slowly around uninjured. After what seemed like ages, ambulances arrived. As the only coherent one I am asked questions about health insurance that I do not know the answers to. I go to the hospital (Newmarket) last, by myself and do not see Mrs. Jalbert again ever as she died, nor contact Aileen, apart from phoning her days later. I sit alone for ages in a waiting room. Probably the small hospital’s resources are stretched with it being holiday Sunday, and I needed little attention. I run to the toilet and vomit furiously (shock??). Eventually a doctor comes and puts two or three stitches in a cut down the side of my left eye. The blood was all dried after the wait. I am taken (or maybe collected) to my Uncle Bill’s farm outside Newmarket and put on a sofa in the cool quiet lounge. I fall asleep immediately. Later that night or early next day I return by bus to my landlady’s house, 48 Cambridge Ave. at Bloor-Danforth, Toronto. The next day I went to Arthur Murray’s, but was immediately sent home for a week.
During the week I phoned Aileen two or three times, but she did not want to talk or have anything to do with me. I must have been in shock of some sort and can remember little of the time. I must have had the stitches out at some stage, but cannot remember this.
Now, here came another significant switch in my life, but I cannot remember exactly the sequence or even why I did it, but I do remember that I had a miserable couple of weeks after the accident.
I must have seen Bill Boyle a John’s Manville employee with whom I had kept in touch and asked him how I could become a “ship’s steward” and go to Venezuela and adventure, as he had been on the same ship with Shell Oil as I eventually got on. I must also have needed assistance in going to the right place and getting the necessary docs. My passport and Canadian Seaman’s card and Discharge Book confirm the following: The accident was on June– 1953.
By July 12th 1953 I have applied to Shell Oil, been sent for and passed a medical, had an eye test and bought my first spectacles, got a Company booking on a sleeper train Toronto to Portland Maine, on which I shared a sleeper cabin with the second engineer going to the same ship. I became part of the crew of the TES “Paloma Hills,” a T3 tanker sailing a “milk run” Portland USA to Venezuela with occasional other destinations. So ended my brief dancing career, which taught me many things, mostly pleasant, and now started my seaman period—nowhere near as pleasant initially but significant nonetheless.
Life at Sea July 12-December 22 1954: The T.E.S: Paloma Hills
Me at sea, and with dancing teachers (right rear) and the “Paloma Hills”
Looking at this short period at sea of five months, ten days it seems amazing that I saved up enough money for a trip to England at the end of it, and had the adventures that follow. I was not a gambler or big drinker like many sailors
When I arrived on the ship, an oil tanker, I was shown my duties by the chief steward (a Newfoundlander) and the ship sailed for Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela, within hours. There were forty-three persons in the crew comprising thirty deck, galley and engine room and thirteen officers and “nco’s”: bosun, chippy, sparks, electrician etc.. The ship was organised on the four on eight off seven-day system. Watches changed at 12 midnight, 4 a.m., 8 a.m. 12 noon, 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. I think I was paid $85 a week and all found. You didn’t actually get any money except for what you asked to go whoring and drinking ashore. This was given in the USA after you had had your FFI (free from infection inspection or as we used to say ‘presented your short arm’ to the harbour doctor), received your condoms (nobody used them) and were ready to step ashore. Anyone who failed the FFI was discharged. One could be re-employed once cured. Your money was in the ship and you received it when you paid off and left the ship. Immediate needs like razors, cigarettes, work pants and shirts etc. were obtained from the purser’s Slop Shop opened two hours a day and the cost was deducted from your “money in the ship.” As I was the new “low” man on the ship my duties were:
3.30 a.m. Make and serve the 4am watch’s breakfast for the deck and engine watch (I just boiled, poached, fried or scrambled eggs, bacon, toast and tea or coffee); finish at about 4.45 am having done the same for the coming-off-duty watch, about eight men in total.
4.45 to 7 a.m. Off duty (I developed the knack of rapidly going to sleep, I still have it)
7 a.m. Peel the day’s potatoes by hand, about 40 lbs. usually, more if we had chips (before the days of frozen chips). Serve breakfast to the 8am watch change and all the day workers (electrician; chippie; bosun etc.).
8.45 a.m. Wash up everything, dishes in a massive dishwasher and galley pots and pans by hand. Make up bunks, sweep cabins, clean sinks for all officers except the Captain. Deck officers lived amidships; Engineers lived aft. We had frequent fire drills and were made very fire conscious (a fact of interest later). Everyone swore every other word, but not when speaking to an officer.
11.30am. Help in the galley; First and Second Cook prepare and serve lunch, then I clean up everything. Finish at 1.30 then off duty until 4 p.m. and work until 6 p.m. Every third or fourth day I had one hour’s work from 7.30 to 8.30 p.m. with food for the watch change at 8 p.m.
It was not a lot of hours, but they were spread over the day and there were no days off except for the fourteen hours in Venezuela and twenty hours in Portland (Maine) or other U.S. port, when everyone who could get ashore did so and had their “grease and oil change”! I would probably have quite enjoyed this life once I got used to it, but there was another role (of which I was not aware): that I was required to play, as new man on the ship; that of Ship’s Fool.
On my first day the Captain’s personal steward and waiter in the officers’ mess (I served only in the crew’s Pig or mess) introduced himself and said he would be my friend, show me the ropes and look out for me as there were several “peculiar” things about the ship. Being rather naïve, I trusted him. I told him that I had been a dancing teacher which was a big mistake. He told me to beware of the chief cook, a French Canadian called Denis Despins who was something of a weightlifter and who my friend said was “a raging queer” who couldn’t resist young blokes. (“Gay” was not part of the vocabulary in 1953.) Denis, (who was actually very heterosexual as I found out later when I became friends with him,) was soon ogling me at every opportunity and waving his fingers, which convinced me that he was “after” me. I was very nervous about being on duty alone with him, which often happened in the course of ship’s routine, and I always carefully locked my cabin whenever inside it. Everyone except me was in on the joke and I was frequently advised by others to watch out for Denis. One evening my friend invited me to look through Denis’ cabin porthole and sure enough, there was Denis lying on his bunk dressed in panties and bra writhing away. I was very scared on seeing this and asked my friend what I could do. He said that if I wrote a complaint with all the details, he would see that the Purser got it and took some action to protect me. Needless to say my writings (which I am sure you can imagine) were read to all the crew to their great amusement in the evening when I wasn’t in the Pig, and never passed to the Purser.
Next, they got a key to my cabin from the Steward, and having passed a hose over the ship’s side and into the porthole, filled a condom on my bunk until it was about 40cm diameter and tied it off. When I went down at 10 p.m. for a sleep until 3 a.m., I found it. It was quite immovable, and when I tried to roll it off my bunk it burst, soaking my mattress.
These and other pranks were played on my first trip south to Venezuela. Our destination, Puerto la Cruz, was our most common. My friend said he would take me to the brothels and pick out a nice clean girl for me. In this way I met “Scarface” (I never knew her name). His actions were intended to humiliate me, as she was older than most (about thirty), and had been wounded by a drunken Swedish sailor and given a deep facial knife gash, but I took a liking to her (and to a degree, she to me), so that over the months I saw only her and took to bringing her little presents (like soap and scent) from America. She was the first whore I had ever been with and I later had reason to be glad I had a more-than-customer relationship with her.
I was also much troubled by my conscience about using a prostitute and worried how my mother would react if she ever found out, so much so that every time that I left Scarface I would vow to myself that I would not come ashore next time and thus stay away from temptation—but I never kept to that! Fortunately, because she had few customers and knew how to keep herself clean I caught no diseases from her, whilst several shipmates were caught, mostly with clap or crabs.
I used to be furious at the tricks that were played on me, usually on the journey Portland to Venezuela, and would vow to “pay-off” (leave the ship) as soon as we returned North, but the teasing would be held in abeyance for the return trip and I would think: “It’s not so bad and I’m saving a heap of money”, so I would not quit. Of course, the problems started again as soon as we left the U.S. port and headed south.
Many things were done to me, but I will just relate one more. This concerns “Spark Watch”. This con should not have caught me, but it did—partly from my own gullibility and partly because the crew (who were all in on it and had done it to every other beginner before) played their parts well.
It started by me noticing a junior seaman with a red fireman’s hat and a bucket of water and a ladle having a cup of tea in the Pig when I was on duty. I couldn’t help overhearing (as I was meant to do) the discussion about “Spark Watch” with the seaman saying, “No, I don’t enjoy it but I’m off duty and it’s a way of earning four hours time and a half.” When I came off duty I was invited to the boat’s upper deck (near our single funnel) to see the guy on “Spark Watch” and there he was, sitting under the moon. So I was primed and I was also aware from the frequent drills of the real importance attached to fire drill and fire awareness around the ship, an oil tanker.
So when a while later my name appeared for “Spark Watch” typed on an official-looking bit of paper on the crew notice board, I gave it no more thought. For four nights, from 8 p.m. to midnight, I sat near the funnel waiting for sparks, being visited by various crewmen who managed to contain their laughter until out of my hearing. All the crew enjoyed it immensely. I thought nothing of it until I got my fortnightly payslip which did not show the 4 x 4 x 1.5 hours of extra pay for “Spark Watch”. When I indignantly demanded to know where my “Spark Watch” pay was, the Purser called me a “f…ing stupid limey idiot” and told me to get out.
Things were very bad by the fourth week and I was so angry and frustrated that I was offering to fight bigger people than myself and being provoked, I once chased a guy onto the after deck. Of course it was a set-up to get me out there and as I went out the companionway (door), I was doused from head to foot by a full slop bucket of galley waste emptied from above. When I screamed for revenge, someone said, “You look like you need a soojie (wash-off in sailor talk), Norm”, and proceeded to pin me to the deck with a high-power salt water fire hose. I chased my attackers around the ship without catching anyone until I was exhausted. I was so angry, I might have done anything, so it was probably as well I could not catch anyone. I do believe I would have quit because of this final indignity when we got north on that trip but relief was in sight. The second cook paid-off and everyone moved up a notch, including me. I became Officers’ Steward and Shell hired a new “galley boy” to take my place.
I was delighted to be no longer the butt of the ship and eagerly took part in tormenting my successor with all the tricks that had been played on me, including my own invention, “Will-signing Procedure”. I should have been sympathetic to newcomers but I must confess that I wasn’t!! We replaced two galley boys in four trips! Many incidents occurred at sea and on land but I will recount only the most significant one.
First, some background: Venezuela in 1953 was governed by a dictator, President Jiminez, who kept power through army/police. Civil rights were few and military justice short and sweet. The ship flew Blue Peter thirty minutes before sailing and blew the siren at thirty minutes, and ten minutes and five minutes, and then sailed. All crew had to rush from bars/brothels and be on board or miss the ship. There were big iron deposits (mines) not far away in inland Venezuela and sometimes crew jumped ship to get well-paid employment there, so the absence of an occasional crew-member never held up the departure. The other important fact is that although our “milk-run” was normally Portland-Venezuela-Portland we could go to other destinations than Puerto La Cruz. I actually went to Perth Amboy (NJ) and Baltimore (MD) in the US and to Cardonne, Curacao, La Guira etc. So there was no guarantee that the ship having left Puerto La Cruz would return there on its next trip.
I was sitting in a bar drinking up the last of my shore money with ten minutes to sailing time. I had been with Scarface (this occurred in Puerto La Cruz) and was finishing off my shore hours in the bar. I decided to leave the bar—a very rudimentary place with swing doors. I gave the door a good shove (the proprietor swore I had kicked it—not true) and one side fell off its hinges onto the floor. The owner came over gesticulating in Spanish of which I understood little. I offered him the money in my pocket but I did not have much and he knocked it aside. I knew the ship was leaving and I would be safe once I got inside the Shell Oil compound only a mile away. I decided to run away fast and bolted. I ran quickly and was not far from the compound when a military vehicle stopped twenty feet ahead of me. I ran towards it. A soldier/policeman got out, operated the bolt on his rifle, pointed it at me and shouted; probably halt or stop in Spanish—the meaning was clear enough. I stopped, raised my hands and nearly evacuated my bowels. An officer who had a pistol and a sword drew the sword. I thought I was going to be decapitated but he struck me with the flat of the sword on the backside, motioning me into the truck. I entered the truck as I heard the ship blow for departure.
I could speak virtually no Spanish, the police no English, and I was deposited in the public jail. The jail was a rectangle with central barred doors at one end, a roof extending about ten feet from the walls and the centre open to the sky. Relatives, friends, and the Church fed the inmates, most of who were in for drunkenness, fighting or theft and many were released after a day.
At first I thought, “I’ll soon be out of here,” but as I was unable to communicate, had little money, no passport or friends and the jailers had no reason to like me, I soon realised I was in a spot. Fortunately, Scarface heard of my plight and came to see me, bringing food (boiled fish and beans ugh!) and would have bribed me out but did not have enough money. Still, she was my one contact, came daily and kept me from despair. I hoped that my ship would come back to Puerto La Cruz (It sometimes went to a different oil port), and to my intense relief it returned ten or eleven days later. The Purser soon heard I was locked up and brought down the necessary bribe to get me out. I never saw a magistrate. About US $50 was deducted from my “money in the ship”—a large amount. I was very grateful to Scarface and from then on spent my time solely with her at her house and never again in bars whenever I went to Puerto La Cruz.
People came and went in the crew (one caught syphilis) and by 1st November I had risen through Captain’s Steward to Second Cook. Not long after, and again I’m not sure why, (plain homesickness for an imagined England?), I decided to have a two-month holiday in England. My seaman’s discharge book shows that I paid off on December 22nd 1953 in Portland Maine and went by bus to New York City to get a ship to England. The earliest ship I could leave on, the “Franconia” ,was 6th January 1954 and although I was in a cheap flophouse near the departure pier, I needed a temporary job to preserve my savings. This was soon solved by my going into a café on Broadway (much sleazier then than now) which had an ad. for a “short order cook”. I got the job and often had to work very fast dishing up eggs any style, bacon, hash browns and pancakes, but it paid the rent and the food was free and plentiful.
I boarded the “Franconia” (6th January 1954), met a Scottish lady of about thirty at the first dance and stayed with her until Liverpool where my passport shows me arriving 12 January 1954. It also shows that I brought in US $256 and Canadian $86 (quite a bit of money). I had intended staying about a month, then returning to my second cook’s job with Shell Oil, but other events were to intervene.
12 January 1954 to February 1954: England
My mother and father came on the train from Manchester to Liverpool where the “Franconia” docked, and were waiting on the pier as we came in. I had been very overawed by my father at eighteen, but now at twenty he seemed much smaller and slighter than I remembered him. He had also had all his teeth removed at age fifty-two. I think it was then that I resolved to look after mine, (I still have most of them at 74). His lack of teeth, which did not help his appearance, persisted as he never wore his National Health ill-fitting false teeth. Back home in Thomas St. Stretford; England seemed grubby and rundown and meeting my old friends was something of a letdown. Most of them were in the services and those who were home somehow seemed to have become less interesting. It was probably a classic case of “homesickness” in Canada when I had certainly yearned for Manchester and my pals, remembering only the good times. Now I would not be sorry to leave sad old grubby England for glitzy North America! But I had only just arrived and decided to go dancing on my own to Sale Lido, a large dance hall with the floor over a swimming pool. As I set out I had no idea I was at a juncture in life’s adventure.
I had a few dances and after about an hour a quickstep started. I had been getting a soft drink so by the time I got back to the floor most girls had been taken; but across the floor I saw a blonde- haired slim attractive-looking girl and set off in pursuit. As I got to her and she turned to face me I saw that she had a quite disfiguring scar about as large as a cupcake alongside her (right?) eye. The flesh in the wound had healed with that uneven surface, like a burn, which it was not. Everything else about her, teeth, breasts, hair, legs, eyes, seemed just right and I was able to just ask her for the dance and ignore the scar. She said “yes”, and from that moment I was with her until about 2 a.m. She was a good dancer and liked to be shown off. She was with a girl friend but we quickly lost her. I did not have a car, so we bussed and walked to her house in Timperley. She lived in a largish semi and was the daughter of a market gardener with extensive holdings nearby. Her name was Shirley Warburton. She was twenty, the same age as me, and was wonderful to kiss, as I found out about a hundred times between midnight and 2 a.m. She told me that she got the scar in a car accident (the family was well off and owned an Austin Princess) and that she felt she was ugly. I told her I thought she was beautiful and had never liked any girl as much as she.
So to compact the story, we were together almost all the time, so much so that my mother was very curious as to why I was almost never home. What might have happened had the military not got wind of my return to England (remember I had slipped off to Canada avoiding National Service and my name would have been with immigration and on the passenger list) I will never know.
One Saturday afternoon I came home to Thomas St. to wash and change before going out when my father met me at the door and told me that the Military Police had been to the house looking for me. My father, (who was in military prison in 1920 for deserting the Lancashire Fusiliers active in Southern Ireland during the troubles), hated MP’s and told them I hadn’t been at home and not to come back, but I realised I was on a short leash. A mad scramble of phone calls and visits to travel agents and I had a booking Liverpool-New York on the “Saxonia”.
I should mention that my father had by this time been tossed out of his wartime job in engineering back into the cotton industry, and both my parents wanted to return to Nelson. I said they should buy a house in Nelson where they were cheap. He said that at his age he needed a hefty percentage deposit (20% I think). I had some money that I would not be needing (thinking I would get a job immediately on return to Canada), so I loaned him £60 or £65. He said, “I’ll pay you back with the going interest”, and he eventually did, every penny calculated, about eighteen months later. Many were the tearful hours as Shirley and I held hands, bemoaned our fate in being so summarily parted, and swore eternal fealty. (I know now that neither of us stuck to it, but we were sincere at the time.)
February to December 1954: Canada
Twenty days after we had met she came to Liverpool to see me off, and we both cried as the gap between the jetty and ship widened.
In all honesty, I should admit that I did have a couple of flings with girls on the “Saxonia”—Irish girls who we picked up in Queenstown (Dunlaoghaire) Ireland. The ones I sojourned with were going to New York City on “nanny” contracts. They couldn’t have meant much as I cannot even remember their names. I don’t know the date I left England, but my passport shows me as entering Canada at Fort Erie (Niagara Falls) on February 18th 1954, and I had booked by bus New York-Toronto. In Fort Erie I was sitting on the bus and our passports, collected by the driver, were given to Canadian Immigration. A customs officer came onto the bus and asked, “Will Norman Taylor come with me please”. I had a moment of panic, thinking it was to do with my evading National Service, so I stood up; but so did another person! What a coincidence! He got off and did not come back and the bus moved on to Toronto with me. So it was that I arrived in Toronto and secured my old “digs” at Mrs. Woods in 48 Cambridge Ave. Toronto, where I would have arrived about February 19th 1954, aged twenty years.
I wrote passionate letters to Shirley throughout 1954, and she also to me, also putting lipstick kisses in the letter and on the envelope seal—something I had not seen until then. Although I had several other women during the time we were apart, I assuaged my conscience easily (how like a man!) by assuring myself that a man needs sex with a woman sometimes, but that I loved only her!
Anyway, cold reality and my cash situation forced attention to work. Toronto and Canada were in a periodic slump at the time and there were few jobs around, none at sea. The dance business was in decline, so Arthur Murray’s was out. I scanned the papers and chased jobs but after ten days without success took a job as a Fuller Brush Man.
My “territory” was not far from where I lived, and after six hours training I set off with my suitcase. My landlady, Mrs. Wood, bought a brush, my only sale that first day. I had no talent for door-to-door selling, having my best success with women, who seemed to want someone to talk to and were willing to buy a brush from a personable young bloke willing to yak and drink tea. However, my sales were very modest and I made just about enough to pay my board. But it was one of life’s lessons and showed me a way of life I certainly wanted to avoid.
Anyhow, after two weeks or so British-American Oil had an ad. for a “clerk” which I chased and got. My job consisted of photographing old invoices so that they could be economically stored. That’s what I did all day, put six invoices in a frame, pressed the shutter switch, another six, did it again, again, again!
It’s no wonder that I raced off for my breaks to the canteen, where one day I smiled and winked at a woman aged about twenty-five who turned out to be a clerk in another department. Within a few days I moved in with her, abruptly leaving Mrs. Woods who had been so kind to me (why do we do these things??). [I saw quite a bit of the clerk on and off during 1954 as later I came into Toronto every six or eight days on Lake Boats Why can’t I remember her name?]
British-American Oil had a marine division both deep-sea and on the Great Lakes. I desperately wanted to get out of my photographing job and haunted the marine department as the pay was much higher at sea than on land. Eventually I was offered a job as a Second Cook on a B-A Lake tanker, the BA Peerless, at a good salary.
The run was from Clarksons, near Toronto, through Lake Ontario-Welland Canal-Lake Erie-up the river past Detroit/Windsor-Lake Huron, bypassing Lake Michigan-through Sault Ste. Marie (the Soo) and into Lake Superior-then as far west as possible to the “head of the lakes”, Duluth/Superior. There, we filled up with crude oil piped down from oilfields in (I think) Alberta, and took it to the B-A refinery at Clarksons on Lake Ontario—then we did it again every six or eight days.
My vessel was the B-A “Peerless” a modern Lake tanker, as big as could squeeze through the locks on the Welland Canal.
A lot happened to me developmentally during the period April 4th to December 12th 1954. I seemed to glimpse my working future and come to certain realizations that I had to change my life somehow.
But off I went to join my ship at Clarksons as we waited for the Lakes season to begin. Ice clogs certain areas so there is an official “Lakes Open” day when navigation starts. The chief cook was annoyed that his son had not got the second’s job and there was a bit of tension that I did not at first understand. I bunked with the son. So we started our back-and-forth run. Our turn-around time was quite short, so I shopped and drank in the US and saw my girlfriend, the B-A clerk, in Toronto.
She must have been unavailable one week as I was at a loose end, so went to the Latin American Dance Studio on Eglinton Ave. Toronto for a “free dance lesson”. I wasn’t going for a lesson of course (as it was the usual con. job I had practiced at Arthur Murray’s) but in the hope of meeting a female. I did meet one in the person of Irene Jacob, a thirtyish German dance teacher. I dropped the female clerk and Irene soon became my regular “date” and I usually stayed with her in Toronto. We went dancing whenever possible and as the relationship developed she told me lots about herself and Germany during and just after the War (WWII). I was twenty and she was thirty? (She wouldn’t tell me her age, so maybe she was over thirty). If thirty, she was born in 1923 and would have been twenty-two at war’s end in 1945. She told me she was always hungry in the latter part of the War and lived in old Prussia. She and her parents fled west as the Russians rolled closer. Her mother was raped by (Hungarian? Bulgarian?) troops, not Russian, whilst she managed to remain hidden. She made it to the Allied (French) North sector of Berlin and traded sex for food, coffee and cigarettes, eventually becoming the permanent mistress of a French officer, who got papers for her and installed her in Paris when he went back to Paris after demobilisation but he continued to live with his wife. Eventually, Irene got a free passage to Canada as a “refugee” as she was unwilling to go back to the Soviet occupied zone. She never heard from her parents again. In Toronto, she had a job as a secretary and part-time dance teacher. Having had much sexual experience, she took me in hand and I first learned properly about female anatomy which she showed me in great detail and which I had never really seen until then. And from her I realised (but had not until then) that women had equally real and deep-seated sexual urges as do men. Up until her I had thought that women have sex to please men and that they did not have real orgasms. I had always been too quick and too selfish up until then, so it is a wonder any girl ever went out with me twice! Anyway, I was quite taken with Irene and her frequent tutelage and had she been younger who knows what might have transpired? But of course during all this time I was imagining myself in love with Shirley Warburton after our hectic two-week affair, and she wrote equally passionately although was equally faithless! Reality eventually caught up with us—but not for some time yet.
Shortly after starting on the Lakes I sent off to ICS (International Correspondence Schools) for their course to become a TV repairman which was advertised extensively in the magazines I read. I found the course quite easy to do. One day the ship’s electrician saw me doing the course and suggested I should try and become a ship’s electrician as I “had the brains” but before I did anything about that the ship’s wireless officer/purser suggested that I become a radio officer, and gave me some publicity from Marconi’s Wireless Sea School. I took the bait and applied to Marconi and (probably on the strength of my School Certificate and my ICS TV diploma) B-A Oil gave me UNPAID leave to go to sea school for the eight-week course and said I might get a job deep-sea if I passed. The Marconi School in Toronto was an exhausting experience (learning I mean, not Irene) and I had no trouble with the radio tuning and theory, but lots of trouble learning to send and receive Morse at twenty one words per minute. This is quite a slow speed, as many people quickly get to thirty but I found it hard. I eventually passed it on my second (and last allowed) attempt.
Back at B-A, after a while when the Purser/Wireless Op. was rotated, I combined the jobs of Second Cook and Wireless Officer, being paid a half rate for each job. This was easy to do as there was little radio traffic on the Lakes, unlike deep-sea life. I was still unpopular with the chief cook, whose son was demoted on my return and I often engaged in political argument about McCarthy and Communism with the cook and others on board. This was in 1954, and I now realise that most of my statements were just pro-Russian party propaganda taken almost verbatim via my father. To understand this side of my personality you should read my father’s short biography. Anyway, the year wore on and as far as I knew I would be getting my job back on the Lakes next year (1955) or, hopefully, an even better job on a B-A deep-sea tanker where the wireless officer had a lot of status. So it was with some surprise that, when we did our last trip in December (due expected ice and the end of the Great Lakes season) and were to tie up until the Lakes opened again in April ’55, I got my final pay slip and a note saying that I would not be rehired. I asked why this was but got no answer. The chief cook told me it was because I was a “commie bastard”, and he was probably right about the reason. I had my twenty-first birthday on Dec 3rd 1954 whilst passing through the Welland canal for the last time on our way to tie up for the winter just outside Toronto. I didn’t even get a card, and made a little cake for myself with one candle which I ate by myself—Boo-hoo!
So I went to the end-of-season party on the “Peerless” and got drunker than I can ever remember. The crew brought in four whores from Toronto and a wild party developed. I think I was lucky in that I believe I spent most of the time with Byron’s (a Newfie fireman) sister, (a visitor not a whore). Otherwise I might have lost what money I had saved as the entire crew was paid off the day of the party and I had a lot of dollars. In the morning, apart from a raging thirst and a very sore head I could not remember anything from about 10 p.m. the previous night. This scared me some and I never did it again. I was at a loose end again, so I decided I was through with Canada, would go back to Shirley and England and do my National Service.
Airfares were still too expensive and I again booked passage on one of the Cunard ships, the ??, which got me to England after Christmas 1954, but before the New Year. I had a rapturous reunion with Shirley and in a short time had taken a room as a boarder at her house in Timperley where she lived with an elder brother and mother. The brother loaned me a bike and on the strength of my sea cook’s experience I got a job as under-chef at Manchester Ringway Airport restaurant, to where I commuted the three or four miles to Shirley’s. There was to be no “living together” and we were carefully watched, but love will find a way. We talked and decided to ask her father, who lived (divorced) about half a mile away, if we could be engaged. He controlled the money in the family and Shirley wanted him onside. The interview with him was painful. He called me a “deserter” which technically I wasn’t and said he’d never let his daughter marry a “scum of the earth” merchant seaman. I must have been overawed, as I lamely agreed to do my National Service and get a trade if he would let us get engaged. We were both over twenty-one by now so didn’t really need his approval, but Shirley wanted it. We never did get properly engaged. I knew my days of freedom were numbered and that the military would soon be on my tail.
I did not want to be inducted into the Army, so off I went to the RAF recruiting office in Manchester (Deansgate?) to turn myself in. This must have been about 20th January, and I entered (enlisted according to my RAF Certificate of Service) the RAF on February 17th 1955, but not as a National Serviceman for two years, but as a Regular for three years. This came about because the interviewing RAF officer, looking at my school certificate, ICS TV diploma and Marconi Second Class Wireless Operator card spoke more or less as follows: “If you go in as a conscript you’ll never get promoted and you’ll probably end up in the cookhouse as a RAF cook’s assistant—WHEREAS if you sign up for three years, you can have your choice of trade-training, you get thirty days leave a year (versus fifteen days for a Nasho), good promotion prospects, twice the pay and free travel warrants and when you count the leave you are really only doing nine months longer than a Nasho but get all the benefits.” I WAS PERSUADED, and signed up there and then for three years. Fortunately the recruiting officer was not a liar and things turned out as he had suggested. I did a couple of tests and was selected for training as an Air Wireless Fitter on successful completion of medical and square-bashing—but this was a few weeks ahead and Shirley and I enjoyed my last days of freedom—so much so that on Valentine’s Day 14th February 1955, having seen her mother and brother leave for a few hours we were in an upstairs bedroom, when her brother returned unexpectedly (to get his girlfriend’s Valentine present which he had left without). We had locked all doors and the brother had no key, but we heard him get a ladder and place it near an open window of the bedroom we were in. We managed to get under the bed just before he got to the window and we stayed quiet and prayed. He stamped cursing around the bed but got his parcel and left without discovering us.
Three days later, on February 17th 1955 I was enlisted in the RAF for a period of three years. Once again I was on a new tack and my life was to change direction during these three years.
February 1955 to February 1958: Royal Air Force
I went into RAF service like everyone else as an AC2 (Aircraftman Second Class), the lowest of the low, but even on entry, my pay was almost twice that of a National Serviceman. After kitting out at a station near London I was sent to RAF Hednesford, a square-bashing camp, or as it was called, “recruit basic training”. Most of the twenty-one people in my group were eighteen years old, although the guy nominated as “senior man” was a thirty-year-old Irishman called Charlie Nono. It was a big advantage to me to have been in the Canadian merchant navy, be 21 and to have knocked around with some fairly rough types, as the bullying and ragging which the drill and discipline encompassed did not upset me. I learned all the basic marching and drill movements and to tell the truth, apart from the 6am start, quite enjoyed drill. We spent hours on the usual inane tasks, polishing boots and buttons, painting coal white, polishing the bedsprings etcetera, but being older I learned “the ropes” fast. I found that if you were in the boxing team you got: less drill, extra milk and food, fewer bull duties, and, at my weight we had a good Midlands area ABA champion (137 lbs. Lightweight) in the same team, so I should never have to actually fight, being only a reserve. I did train and spar with enthusiasm, and met a tall National Serviceman on the team, who was quite a good boxer and gave a particularly obnoxious Scottish drill corporal a pasting which we all relished when the corporal, thinking he was as soft as he looked, challenged my friend to a fight.
So my boxing days were idyllic until the last weeks of square-bashing when we were fighting in an area championship and the great lightweight on our team was injured (he broke his thumb in training) and I had to actually fight. I won the first fight but lost the second and third fights badly and quit the team, but by then square-bashing was over. I was posted to RAF Yatesbury for a thirty-six-week course.
But before I went, Shirley’s brother drove her to Hednesford and I went out with them in their Austin Princess car. Maybe it was that with my shaved head and rough uniform and low rank I did not cut the dashing figure which I had in the past, but, whatever the reason, I sensed that Shirley’s passion had begun to cool, so much so that shortly after Easter (April 1955) I received a letter to the effect that “things seemed so distant that our unofficial engagement was off and I was free to go out with whoever I liked.”
I felt fairly low at this point and thought I had been in a way tricked out of my freedom by Shirley, which wasn’t true. Anyway, being the optimist I am, I settled down to enjoy RAF Yatesbury and look out for a new girl friend.
I was in a twenty-one-person hut with the rest of my class, AWF77, and quite enjoyed all the electronic training we did and passed the periodic tests quite well. I made a friend of the Education and Sports Officers who could always be relied on to get me out of any unwanted weekend duty. I started going two evenings a week to Swindon Technical College on the first year of an Ordinary National Certificate in Electrical Engineering, and I played soccer for the station. I went regularly to the weightlifting room but stayed away from boxing! I was reasonably strong and spent my weekends chasing the “sausage queens”. The local girls all seemed to work in a big sausage factory in Calne. I had little success as there were four big RAF bases within coo-ee of Calne and blokes outnumbered sheilas five to one. I was a lonely ACI, and could not compete in rank (and hence cash) with other RAF personnel. It was much better at the NAAFI club at Chippenham, but that was a few miles away and the last station bus left at 11p.m. — not enough time to get up to any mischief with any girl I could latch on to.
I had regular leaves, forty-eight hour and seventy-two hour passes and several free rail warrants, and as Shirley blew hot then cold I saw her occasionally during this time, but the old fire was dampened. About June of 1955 I went to stay with my parents in the terraced house they had bought in Nelson, and bemoaned my lack of a car. My father reminded me of the money I had loaned him a year or two previously. He now had the capital and had calculated the interest he would have paid, had he borrowed from a building society. It was about £70-, a tidy sum, and he insisted that I take it. My Uncle Norman recommended a small garage in Nelson, and I bought a 1934 Hillman black four-door saloon, rego #BU8542, for £55, and managed to drive it back to Yatesbury. It had a tiny horizontal speedo and never did much more than 55mmph. It also trailed blue smoke everywhere and required to be filled up with oil every time it was filled up with petrol. Nevertheless, it was a great success at camp. I used to get six passengers plus me in it every Saturday and go to the NAAFI at Chippenham, where we could stay until the early hours. I charged 2/6d for the return trip and made money from it. Being a car owner (there were only two other cars owned by trainees, as we had a special car park), I began to “pull the girls” and usually spent Saturday afternoons on a riverbank or at the coast (Weymouth) with one or the other.
In what seemed like no time it was Christmas 1955 and I was twenty-two, training was over and I was going to be sent to a new station. I was promoted (as were all who passed the course) to JT; Junior Technician with one upside down stripe and my pay was instantly tripled, as the RAF had trouble hanging on to its tradesmen. The bad news was that I had drawn Christmas guard duty, but would get a long “posting” leave over New Year. I pulled all the tricks that I knew to get out of the Xmas duty, but at that time of year all my influential friends had gone on Christmas leave and I was stuck. I eventually went to Manchester on leave on the 29th December 1955 with an expectation that I would take Shirley to a New Years Eve dance (that was in the last letter I had from her in early November; we had started writing again). I stayed at my brother’s flat in Manchester and when I rang Shirley she said she was serious with someone else and did not want to see me again. I didn’t know it, but my life was about to take a major new direction on the last day of 1955. I winged (complained) to my brother about having nowhere to go on New Year’s Eve and he suggested that I call the lab. assistant with whom he worked and see if she was free. He didn’t know the number but her name was Elizabeth Caley and she lived in Old Trafford. It was not a common surname (being Manx) so I could likely find her. This proved to be correct so I cheekily phoned (I always had the gift of the gab with women, which made up for my moderate looks) and after some persuasion she agreed to go out with me.
1956-1958: I meet and court my first wife, marriage and children
Thus I met Liz on New Year’s Eve 1955 (Dec. 31st) on a blind date previously arranged by phone; we went to the movies as I had left it too late to get into any decent dance. I know originally that I was just looking for someone to take out on NY Eve but was immediately impressed with her. She had on a pink silk or satin blouse and talking to her on the way home from the movies she seemed more intelligent than most girls I had been out with and nice to kiss under the street light at the end of her avenue. I decided that I liked her a lot and wanted to go out with her.
On completion of my training as an Air Wireless Fitter at RAF Yatesbury, I was posted to RAF Cranwell near Lincoln in Jan 1956, where I stayed until being demobbed. I mostly serviced Vampire jet trainers which were flown by the Officer Cadets, but worked occasionally on Proctors. I had a motor bike, a Tiger 100, having sold my Hillman Minx to Chris Kitchen just before leaving Yatesbury, Wilts. I motorcycled to Manchester most free weekends to see Liz and stay at her house, 10 Knutsford Ave Old Trafford. I got rid of several existing girl friends and did not seek any new ones at Cranwell. I made a friend of the station Education Officer and Sports Officer and started at Lincoln Tech. with 2nd yr Ordinary National in Electrical Engineering. Free transport and meals were provided by the RAF to continue my education. I played various sports at Cranwell, always a good way to get out of guard duty and manoeuvres etc. I had a short holiday in Belgium, my last as a single man.
The relationship with Liz developed but we remained chaste. We visited a friend bedridden with Parkinson’s disease and saw the old cottage where she used to live and of which her father had the fondest memories. We often went to the movies or walked around Longford Park. She went to Butlin’s Holiday Camp in Ayr Scotland with friend Barbara in August 1956 and I hitchhiked there in uniform, no problem with getting lifts.
Jim, Liz’s father, who I quite liked, taught me fly-fishing and we went to Ladybower reservoir several times and once to the Lake District and we did many country walks to Lower Peover, (strange name, pronounced Peever) and other locations. He seemed not to dominate in the family which was quite different to my father. I thought I got on OK with my future mother-in-law, Ruth, who seemed to wear the pants in the Caley menage.
As I grew to like Liz more and more over the months, I got the feeling that we both wanted the relationship to advance and when I asked myself why not (although I had reservations at my lack of cash I had great confidence that I would make good financially somehow) I could not envisage life without her. I could see no reasons why I shouldn’t propose and I was sure that if I didn’t get a move on someone would come along and snap her up, so I asked her to marry me on New Year’s Eve 1956, exactly one year after we first met. She accepted but I had no idea whether she was enthusiastic or not. I don’t think I did a very romantic job of proposing, the place being on the sofa in her lounge room. I think I said “I love you and I want to marry you, will you?” then when she said ‘yes’, I formally asked her father for her hand; it being approved, it didn’t take long to set a date.
Her mother weighed in asking that we be married in an RC church, I was not very keen being rather anti-catholic at that time (which I am not now having worked with nuns for 20 years), but, not wanting to start relations with my putative mother in law on a bad footing, I agreed. Maybe she did it for her husband’s sake as she herself was a N.Irish protestant, I think, with no love for the Catholic religion, whilst Jim seemed to be a lapsed Catholic.
When we enquired at St. Alphonsus’, the nearest RC church, we were told that I had to take ‘instruction’ in the faith so that we could be married there.
This was done by the RC padre at RAF Cranwell who I saw twice a week for about 6 weeks. We talked a bit in general about Catholicism and I, determined to pass the requirements, put up only weak arguments which he easily demolished. The book for the course was Sheehan’s Apologetics which was a question and answer book for doubters. They were not the questions I would normally have asked being mainly ‘Dorothy Dixers’.
It was quite amusing to also have sex instruction from a celibate, especially as I thought I knew everything, which of course I didn’t. He told me that buggering my wife-to-be was not an acceptable form of birth control, although he said that some in the church thought that it was! Anyway, I got the necessary approval so we could be married in church although we couldn’t have a full ceremony but at least it was a church wedding. I had to promise that we would raise the children as Catholics which neither of us had any intention of doing.
1957
The bride’s parents arranged and paid for the wedding on 8 Jun. I had few friends and guests, I think only my parents, brother and wife, three RAF friends and Jack Davis, Norman Foulkes and John Flannery with whom I had worked at Sabena and my Uncle Norman. My father at first refused to go to the wedding and kneel in a Catholic church, (I had got some of my antipathy from him) but my mother leaned on him and he showed up in a new green suit and even cried in the registry, a thing I would never have suspected. He had had a hard life and found it difficult to show emotion, and I was the same but not quite to that extent. The church part of the wedding seemed to be over very quickly The reception was at the Oaks Hotel Chorlton and music was provided by we three RAF boys, me on tea-chest bass, two guitars and the piano played by Phil. one of the Caley guests. We mostly played and sang Lonny Donegan skiffle tunes, then all the rage. I even wore dark blue suede shoes at the wedding, which Ruth had objected to.
After the reception, we left by train to London and had the first honeymoon night at the Victoria Hotel London, a lovely ‘first night’. We were on a Thomas Cook fortnight Spanish Holiday. We took the boat-train to Dover and the ferry to Dieppe. A strange man seemed to follow us around the ferry and stare at us; he disappeared when I moved aggressively towards him.
The Wedding and honeymoon in Spain and my last picture as a single man
We had a lovely honeymoon in Spain at Lloret de Mar after the scary bus journey from the railhead to Tossa and Lloret. We often danced at Las Cuevas nightclub where we won a bottle of champagne for jiving. Liz tells me that she was sick from drinking it but I do not remember that. We sunbaked, swam, visited castles and old churches and lazed around. In those days, the police were on the beach so there were no bikinis in Franco’s Spain – what a difference now! We met two other newlyweds who asked ‘what did you do on your honeymoon? This sent us into a fit of giggles. The old lady who made up our room (two single beds –pushed together) we christened ‘Orangina” after her hair colour and the popular fizzy drink. They could not cook 3 minute eggs at the hotel, which I asked for every morning, they were either slimy or rocks. All honeymoons must come to an end and we left Spain on 22 Jun and arrived in England 23 Jun. We had had a happy honeymoon
As we arrived back in Manchester by early morning paper train, it seemed that we had made a great start to our marriage; I thought, the more I know her, the better I like her. I had to borrow some money from Ruth to get back to camp as I had sold my motor bike to pay for the honeymoon, and glad that I did, or we might have not even had that.
At camp I got increased pay as a married man but was not eligible for married quarters for 1 year. I took a horrible flat in nearby Sleaford (there was a shortage of RAF rented accommodation); one room and a landlady from hell, one bath per week and herself always complaining about something.
Liz was bored with me away all day but soon after started to be sick and depressed. Neither of us thought of pregnancy as we had ‘taken precautions’ so we went to the nearest RAF Hospital where the MO said ‘classic pregnancy symptoms but we’ll take a sample’. When it was confirmed about 4 days later I was mortified as I hadn’t planned on children until we had a house etc. I had hoped that we would both work, I would finish my technical education and we would quickly save up lots. Liz went home to Mum and I went back to Cranwell RAF Station where I was lucky enough to be promoted to A/Corporal and given my own room and supervision of a billet of 22 erks. I went to Manchester as often as possible and cannot remember a lot about this period except studying electronics hard, until I was demobbed on Feb 3rd 1958.
1958
Whilst in the RAF I had tried to get formal educational qualifications. and completed ONC before I left and had several City & Guilds in Telecommunications. I liked these as you could prepare for the exam yourself and if you got enough (Full Technological) it counted similar to a Higher National Diploma which should get me a good job and membership of an engineering institute. I must have got a job instantly on demob. as I was at Ferranti Wythenshawe on Feb 6th when the Busby Babes (ManU football club) crashed at Munich. I had a good job with lots of overtime on offer. They were building the Bloodhound guided missile and I learned a lot about radar, klystrons and the new invention, transistors, very quickly.
Near the end of the pregnancy Liz got high blood pressure (toxemia?) and went into hospital for several days and came close to losing the baby. Whilst in hospital she was frightened by the lurid gossip of other women and had an awful labour. The overall experience of giving birth was traumatic for her, and I was insufficiently sympathetic to say the least. Steven was born Apr 2nd 1958, I was praying for it not to be Apr 1st. Ruth and I went on my newly-purchased motorbike to Wythenshawe hospital (she was game!) to see them for the first time shortly after the birth. I was horrified by the shape of Steven’s head (which was normally distorted by birth and forceps but I didn’t know that), and very relieved when he came home and was normal. Liz must have got pregnant about two weeks after the wedding.
Life was tough for us all. My in-laws were very good sharing their house with us and putting up with the disruption a baby causes. I was jealous of the affection Steven received and realised that my star had set to a large extent. I had got a job immediately on demob. at Ferranti Wythenshawe as a tester and must have got another motor bike as I can remember sliding around the roads in Feb on ice and snow going to work. I also took a whole slab of C&G exams at Salford Royal Coll. of Tech. (now Salford University) as I was desperate to improve our position. I had enjoyed being in Canada and had always made good money there and thought I would do a lot better with my new qualifications and experience, but can’t remember when I decided to go, but I think both of us wanted to have our own place and Canada seemed to be the place to get it.
1958: Canada
So, on the 16th June 1958, having left Ferranti with good wishes and a great reference, I obtained fifty pounds worth of Canadian dollars, (not much for a family to land with), we said a tearful farewell to our families and set off on the Empress of Canada ex Liverpool and my passport shows we landed in Quebec on June 25th 1958. We travelled with my sister in law and niece (Eunice and Anne) who were returning from a holiday in England. Don’t remember much about the voyage. Steven was only 12 weeks old and Liz had probably not really recovered from the birth and was sad to leave her folks.
First picture of Liz with Steve,; In Canada at Malton and my first licence.
We stayed two nights with my brother in a crowded flat outside Toronto then moved to a basement flat in a Jewish house. Their son was nice but a nuisance as he seemed to prefer our company to his parents. I took the driving test in the owner’s car, my old Canadian farm-days licence having expired 2 years earlier. I cannot imagine what we did for money at that time as there is no record other than the 50 pounds in my passport. Maybe Liz had some. Anyway, I got a job quickly (with TCA, Trans-Canada Airlines, now called Air Canada) at Malton (Toronto airport) servicing Viscounts, and DC4 and DC6’s. I was sent on a course to service the first jets, DC7’s I think, but had left TCA before they arrived. I think I was on shift-work and we got a basement flat at Len and Marion’s at 40 Churchill Ave. Malton very close to the airport. It was nice to be on our own and Len and Marion were very friendly. We enjoyed our weekly shop at the supermarket where we went in Len’s car which he kindly loaned me. We had a record player and started to collect LP’s, buying one each week. Steven was progressing well and we seemed to be on the way to happiness. I can’t remember much else about this time except that I injured my back at work and had to lie prone for 3 or 4 days, and I had a big row with my brother and did not speak to him for 5 years.
We were not making much money and I was restless to progress financially and heard at my TCA work of the big bucks being made on the DEW and Pinetree radar defence lines by electronic technicians.
I found out the address and went for the technical exam, but failed, but only just and was invited to go back in a month, at which time I passed. Castro took over in Cuba, which I applauded at work, but was looked at askance by my workmates. I had never held my tongue about my communist sympathies so it is a miracle (or evidence of poor security checking) that I got the job on the DEW Line. I eventually went on to be cleared up to CRYPTO which allowed me into rooms where secret level traffic was being sent and received and I also worked on Strategic Air Command Bases and other high security sites. In spite of my left-leanings I am sure that I would never have spied for Russia. (However, I get ahead of the tale). The entire north of the N.American continent was covered by interlinking radar stations designed to detect Russian bombers seeking to attack the US over the shortest route, the North Pole. The main Russian bomber was the Bear, and the US had B52’s stationed at Goose Bay Labrador and Thule Greenland (and many other bases which I did not visit) ready to reply to any threat. Anyone interested should read a short history of the Cold War.
I wanted to go and earn big money, with low tax, and food and accommodation provided at a men only remote location and Liz’s Mum had developed ovarian cancer so it was decided that she would return home to England when I went North after I had raised her and Steven’s air fare. She stayed on in Malton after I left until about April, and I flew off to Montreal where I teamed up with Eric Hands (with whom I worked all my Northern time and who is still a correspondent in 2007) and we both flew to St.Johns, Newfoundland. We worked for a contractor to the US Dept of Defence, Canadian Marconi. The Canadian Government insisted that some of the lucrative contracts on the Lines, which were 90% in Canadian territory, were awarded to Canadian firms.
I do not know when I went to St.Johns but as David was conceived about Nov.3rd 1958, and we had Christmas dinner with our landlords in Churchill Avenue, I must have gone in February or March of 1959 as there was still plenty of snow in Montreal and Newfie when I was travelling.
1959: On the Pinetree Line
Eric and I billeted at Mrs. Dancey’s boarding house on Longs Hill, St Johns, Newfoundland. Although the family had been in Newfie for generations they still had an Irish brogue as did most of the natives. Eric and I shared a room and travelled to work together. Mrs. D. had three daughters who she was trying to marry off to any of her boarders and Eric was actively pursued. She did get rid of one onto an English boarder, poor fellow. Newfoundland was a depressed area in 1959, and although we did not get enormous pay whilst we were in the depot (compared to what we got in the field touring around the Arctic) it was still 2 or 3 times as much as a local worker received and much more than I made at TCA at Malton.
In addition, all engineers were rated GS11 which is a rating that applies in the public service and military of the US and specifies the ‘rank’ and the privileges to which one is entitled such as allowances, dining facilities and accommodation. A GS 11 was the equivalent of a Captain in the USAF and gave us entry to BOQ (Bachelor Officers Quarters) the PX (shop) and the Officers Club at any base we were at. I think cigarettes were $2 a carton -20c a pack- and it was a period when I and all the team smoked heavily, mostly Camels, Chesterfield and Lucky Strike, none of them tipped. I was assigned to the test equipment and electronic standards section with Eric, and two weeks later Al Keen arrived in his hound’s-tooth coat, slacks and trilby, looking and sounding like a stage Englishman. He was actually born in Hong Kong of rich parents, tea planters, and had spent his life at boarding schools. Rebelling against his folks he had married a working class London girl (Rose, still a friend in California) fallen out of favour with his parents and was making his living as a technician. His wife came to St. Johns with him. We three; Eric, Al and I formed a little Pommy club and had roast dinner and bread and butter pudding most weekend at Al’s made by Rose. Al became quite rich decades later (after his father died) and has a big catamaran in San Francisco on which I stayed in 2000 and sailed around Alcatraz Island. The work in the depot was very amenable, and although we were much in demand as partners for the local women (nurses homes and boarding schools were always inviting us out) because of our wealth and access to the USAF Officer’s Club (by far the swankiest place in St. Johns) Al and I managed to stay true to our spouses, but only just! There were so many unattached women in St Johns because there were no jobs for men but fishing and sealing (a bloody business) and the men went to mainland Canada looking for work and the women ( in those days) stayed put.
Liz, who was pregnant with David, was going back to England and as soon as I had the fare she left Toronto with Steven and flew to Gander in Newfie.[Liz is the date in your old passport ?] She had an overnight stop (or was it 2 nights) and I brought her to St.Johns and we stayed in a fairly run-down hotel. The landlord told us tales of riots by the crews of merchantmen staying there and waiting for a trans-Atlantic convoy during WWII, a journey on which there was a very high death rate from torpedoes. Steven slept in a drawer of the dressing table as there was no crib. That night there was a blizzard and the snow level crept up to the window-sill of our first floor room. When we went for a walk later, after the snow ploughs had been through, there were dead pigeons in the street. I was allowed on board the Constellation at Gander to say a sad goodbye to my family.
After two months working in the depot, a calibration team was formed and we set off, Eric, Al, Denis, John and I moved from station to station up the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. I did not keep notes on which stations I visited on which tour and as I went on several tours later, accurate details of the trips are impossible to put together. Eric and Al, both of whom I still correspond with cannot recall either. But during my entire time with Marconi I visited the following stations: Newfie; St.Anthony, Stephenville, Labrador: Cartwright, Fox, Makkovik Cut-throat, Hopedale, Saglek, Frobisher and Resolution.
The main base in Newfie was Pepperell AFB and in Labrador; Goose AFB. Denis, was the team leader, an amiable Greek migrant to Canada, who had done three tours. We travelled by whatever means the USAF could provide also depending on the season. So I went variously by helicopter, boat, float plane, and cargo plane to these stations. Some were large and others were 1 radome 15 man stations called ‘gap fillers’. Our team job was to fly in with our equipment, check and repair all their test and standard equipment against ours and then get the USAF commander, usually a Major, to arrange our transport to the next station that we were booked for. Most of these commanding officers were quite affable and professional like many Americans I have worked with, but later, when I became a team leader, I had an interesting experience to be related in due course. All this activity relates to the pre-satellite age when the ‘threat’ was from manned bombers. Sputnik, the first (and Russian) satellite was launched on Oct 4th 1957 and caused consternation in the American military as no one knew they were so advanced in rocket technology. It should not have surprised anyone as the Russians captured German tech. centres and scientists and took everything back to Russia. The Americans got Werner Von Braun who became head rocket scientist eventually. So it was quite a thrill to listen to Sputnik’s cheeps and chirps as it transmitted on about 136Mhz. All the radar stations were linked by a tropo-scatter system so the signal was put on it and all could hear it in real time (not a recording).
I have been lucky to be there at interesting technological moments as I was also there (on a satellite tracking station in Canberra Australia) at the time of the first moon landing to hear Armstrong’s comments in near real time.
So we worked our way up and down the line and quickly learned which were the ‘good’ stations, with an affable commander and friendly troops, where the trout fishing was good in the vicinity or we could use the rifle range, and which were ‘bad’ stations where there was a lot of tension and sometimes bar fights. On the good stations we worked slowly and spent as long as we decently could whereas at the bad ones we worked non-stop and as fast as we could to get away quickly, so our visits usually lasted from 4 days to 10 days. There was a lot of poker played at every station. The USAF people had to stay there for 18 months and were very bored, gambling on anything, but I managed stay out of it and save most of my income. One evening (at Cutthroat I think it was,) I was a little drunk( booze was $1 a shot-pour your own) and I got to bragging about my running ability – which wasn’t that much better than ordinary – when the Philco techrep., an obnoxious American civilian said ‘why you Limey asshole, I bet you couldn’t even run from the station to the helipad and back in 10 minutes’. We decided to have a bet of $50 instead of a punch-up, but this aroused the onlookers who were a bit bored, and depending on whether they liked or hated the Philco rep. they backed for or against me. Soon there was over $3000 in bets laid. I went off to bed and as I sobered up realised that I might be in over my head. So about 3 am, with nobody about, I went off on a trial run. It took all of the ten minutes there and back, but I was still a little unsteady and drunk, it was dark and a rough road, so I knew I could do it easily in daylight and sober.
The appointed day arrived and almost everybody clustered near the finish line (good job the Russians didn’t attack that day). I had my watch on and knew where I should be at what time and could probably have finished a minute or more early, but to give them a thrill I timed it so that I came over the line with 10 seconds to spare- what a finish, it was like a mini-olympics ! all the noise and cheering of the bet winners and the few non-committed. The American took his loss in good grace and a party ensued at which the commander, a USAF Major, presented me with a cup (made only from three food cans soldered together) and made a flattering speech. I still have the photo.
At work at Pepperell AFB Newfoundland. Thule Greenland AFB Strategic Air Command pass. My movie camera; and receiving the ‘cup’ from the Base Commander, Major ???
So we worked and I saved money and the team moved from station to station and nothing noteworthy happened until we came to a small station, a gap-filler, but I can’t remember where. Eric had started to grow a beard during the trip, it was wispy like most new beards. We landed by helicopter, I was now acting team leader as Denis had gone back to St.Johns on family business so I reported, as soon as we arrived, to the station commander. (We travelled with USAF orders). The CO was surly and drunk and clutching what looked like a glass of Scotch. He stared at me with bleary eyes for a while and then said “OK get to it, but that beard comes off, I don’t allow anyone particularly ‘beardy wierdies’ to have a beard on my station.” I thought he was talking about me as I had a moustache at that time, but it turned out he must have seen Eric. I was new at the team-leader game and hesitant to defy the CO, so I said that I would talk to Eric. Eric said “no” in very undiplomatic language, the CO said Eric had to get off the station but the rest of us could stay. I said that I couldn’t work without an essential team member and a stalemate ensued. None of the team would start work without Eric.
The CO said he would not feed or transport us – the stalemate continued. I called my boss John Oliver at Marconi St Johns for advice and a flurry of activity ensued between Marconi chiefs and the USAF. Eventually we all left the station, and another team was rescheduled to call there a month later. We continued with our schedule.
I was worried that I was finished as a team leader but by the time we got back to St.Johns it had all fizzled out, in fact the boss congratulated me on my handling of the problem but I hadn’t really done anything. It was a boring life for USAF personnel, stuck on a tiny station on the edge of a cliff in Labrador; mosquitoes in summer and pitch black for 20 hours in winter, no wonder they drank a lot. The garbage from one of the camps was thrown into a chute that led over a 300ft cliff down to the sea below. At this camp one of the USAF personnel had slid to his death via the garbage chute.
I received mail and photos from England infrequently and was always delighted to get news. It was a lonely life and I was looking forward to getting home again. I used to fantasize about how passionately my wife would greet me, not really thinking about how hard it must be for her stuck at her parents and very big with child whilst looking after a 1 year old as well. Anyway we did about three ‘loops’ along the Labrador coast and whilst there on August 1st 1959 our second son David was born. This time it was at home and, as far as I know, without the difficulty accompanying Steven’s birth. I was very glad to get the news and picture a while later.
I have all my passports and they are invaluable for dating visits to foreign countries, but you don’t get a stamp when you return to England so I have no accurate knowledge of when I quit Canadian Marconi and returned to England, but guess it was about September of 1959 [Liz do you know when?]. I must have arrived with a fair amount of money (even though I only worked from about Feb to September) because soon after my return to England we put a very large deposit on a nice semi-detached house in Cheadle Hulme (full price 1300 pounds I think; see photo below) and bought a second-hand Ford Popular car.
I got re-employed by Ferranti at Wythenshawe at a higher grade than before. Maybe I would have settled down but I can remember being disappointed at the lack of enthusiasm with which my wife met me and again, probably because she had recently given birth, she seemed uninterested in sex, whereas in my Arctic loneliness I had dreamed of little else. Anyway, for whatever the reason, I was not all that happy at home and being paid only about 600 pounds a year at Ferranti, I was itching to go back to the Arctic to earn three or four times that; enough to pay off the house and buy a nicer car. I know I was at Ferranti for a very short while, because I got a letter from Tom Haggar of Canadian Marconi telling me that a team was going out shortly to Greenland and needed a team leader; was I interested? This made up my mind and I left poor Liz with a 19 month and a 3 month old baby by herself and went back to Canada for another tour. Ferranti were of course not very happy and I feel like a rat even now for what I did after they had welcomed me back. So I took the Canadian job and I left and thought, “oh well, she has her parents and the Franklands next door to keep an eye on her,” but I realise now that it was pretty thoughtless and inconsiderate of me to leave, even downright mean.
Anyway, my passport shows that I was back in Gander, Newfoundland on Oct 28th 1959. I had a couple of weeks in St.Johns getting the team and equipment together and regret that whilst in St.John’s, that in a spirit of rancour I thought “well, I stayed faithful last time here in spite of the numerous opportunities and temptations and much good it did me, she is just not interested in that side of our marriage, I might as well stray, what she doesn’t know can’t hurt her and the affairs won’t be anything to do with love and family”. I, and many men I know, have always had a problem in remaining faithful to our spouses. From my point of view there is a lot of truth in the idea that men are basically programmed (or have a strong instinct triggered by testosterone) to want as much sex as they can get with as many women as they can get; it is only culture that constrains our urge to copulate promiscuously. (I was interested to learn, recently, that our closest relative, the chimpanzee does more or less the same thing, with the alpha-males being the most successful and the bonobo another near-relative is even more sex obsessed, both male and female, whilst the gorillas remain ‘true to one’: we seem to have missed the gorilla gene!) I’m sure that this is true for me as it has only been with the waning of testosterone production as I age that I can look at a woman simply as a person and not a potential partner. The only other time I looked at women without desire was when being treated with female hormone in the late 60’s as part of a libido reduction treatment – it worked. But perhaps the foregoing is just rationalisation and there is no excuse for people who behave like me, who knows? Readers will have to judge me as they see fit.
Whatever the reasons, Tom Haggar and I had a little competition to see how many girls we could bed in the two weeks before we left for North Labrador and Greenland. I can’t remember who won but there were quite a few girls involved. Anyway, soon it was up the Labrador coast again over Christmas and the early New Year, saving lots of money, then off to Thule in Greenland with a party. Marconi had just won the service contract and wanted to send an experienced group on the first time through. So I flew back to St.Johns and then off to Greenland, to the Strategic Air Command Base there. It was nearly 10 hours flying due north in a Hercules I think, to Thule and fortunately my time was spent during late spring to summer, when, being so close to the Pole (77 degrees North), the sun hardly set. I was housed in a 3 metre square room with the smallest window to conserve heat losses. I played tennis by the light of the sun at 10 pm one evening.
3 on the ice cap of Greenland outside Thule (me on R). The first house I ever owned. The picture of Liz I had with me in the Arctic
The work was similar to other stations and the Officer’s Club was very luxurious. There was said to be a woman behind every tree (but you were 1000 miles N of the tree line). An interesting and (as it proved) eventful meeting occurred at the O-Club. We got talking to a group of guys who were working on the secret BMEWS station that was being constructed about 10 miles away. They told us that BMEWS stood for Bewildered Men Existing Without Sex (in fact; Ballistic Missile Early Warning System) and when we compared pay slips we realised that they were being paid nearly double the quite generous amount that we were receiving. We realised that our anti-aircraft radar warning system was going to be out of date pretty soon as the Russians were investing in ICBM’s and not manned bombers any more and that soon the DEW and Pinetree line would become a thing of the past. (This awareness of BMEWS became of interest later as I eventually worked on a Site). Meanwhile, I worked and saved and climbed Mt.Dundas, Thule, which was about 5 miles from the base, on a day off.
We found lots of ‘gold’ bearing rocks in the streams we crossed, it looked so realistic, but someone knew about the mercury amalgam test which we tried after cracking a few thermometers back at the base, and it was of course iron pyrites. The only buzz of interest occurred at the Officers Club when a civilian Pan-Am over-the-Pole flight was forced down at Thule and the crew including 5 good looking air hostesses went to the O-Club. Every male in the area was there that night and I couldn’t get nearer than 15feet to them. On the way south to St.John’s we dropped in to Sonderstromfiord to do a little technical job, then it was back to Newfie where once again I resigned from Marconi and returned to England with just about every penny I had earned still intact.
Relations with Liz were a little better, we paid off the house (about 1300 pounds I think) and bought a new Volkswagen. In those days a VeeDub was a prized car and we used to salute one another and give a little smirk when we met another car on the road (unlike English cars, VWs did not rust !!!). Then I had to find a job. I did not have the hide to re-apply to Ferranti after my bad treatment of them although they were desperate for staff. I found a job at a 5 man 30 women firm about 500 meters from home, F.C.Robinson and Partners. They made short run technical items for industry and also had a contract with Manchester University to produce instruments for their Ph.D students. There was only one electronic engineer there and myself and an apprentice, the others being managers, female assemblers or office staff. I got on very well with the engineer and we virtually did what we wanted at our own pace. I worked on many interesting one-off designs such as a baby-stopped-breathing alarm(then unheard of, now commonplace), a flow-meter for a sheep’s duodenum, a 30Kv insulation tester and the most interesting thing, designed by a Manchester University Ph.D student, an analog computer for testing small horsepower motors. This machine ended up about the size of, and looking very like, an upright piano. Made mostly of switchable banks of resistors, capacitors and inductors, one could set up all the variables (including stalled current investigations) and see what was going to be economic to produce. Of course, such an instrument is no longer necessary with computer design available, but then, in 1960, it was state of the art.
I have put all the above down to show that I was quite happy and interested in this job although it paid only 750 pounds a year and really it was my most enjoyable electronics job. I should have been a hands-on design engineer, it was always fun. I was also happy at home, Steven and David were thriving and we had few debts, a nice house and car, so why in late 1960 did I look in the Electronics Weekly job section for a new job?? I do not know!!!
Continued in Autobiography (Part 2: 1961-2010)