Thursday January 19, 1956 73010 on 8:45.  “All games canceled.  Anyone who wants to run may use the Splash Baths.”  Daft notice.  Snowed slightly in night, but none left in morning.

So reads one day’s scrawl in my 1956 diary.  It’s a small, red, leatherette-bound book, gold-blocked on the front “With the compliments of Standard & Triumph Services (Lancaster) Ltd., Standard House, Thurnham Street, LANCASTER    Tel 2366”.  Dad bought the spares for his 350cc Triumph Twin motorcycle there. He got his own diary from Lune Mills (Jas Williamsons & Sons) where he worked; Mum kept her busy schedule on the Lancaster Caledonian Society’s calendar, so this annual largesse from Standard & Triumph was surplus to both their needs, and had trickled down to me. I’d never kept a diary before, but it wasn’t too onerous a task: there was only a tiny space – 65 by 20mm per day - for the most important items in life to be recorded in this one.

1956:  now what would have been the most important items in life at that time? For that matter, what was life like at that time?  Maybe something of a résumé is in order.

I was 13.  I went to the Grammar School – Lancaster Royal, of course – henceforth “LRGS”.  Why say “of course”? Well, it’s funny how things were so self-obvious in those days.  One knew nothing of the War, though I’d been born, just over a decade before, right in the middle of it, just as it got so fatally chilly for the Germans in Stalingrad.  The War was just a fact and a factor occasionally talked about by grown-ups in grave tones, when discussing the problems of the day.  One lived through rationing, and hated powdered egg and any derived concoction (like gritty “scrambled egg”).  One religiously saved any rubber band, string, brown paper from parcels, and added any nut or bolt one found by the roadside to the jam jars in Dad’s garage. One still does, actually, though the jars are in one’s own garage these days; force of habit. And people think “recycling” is a new fad…..   All so obvious then.  No choice in those days.  Perhaps it was better that way.

One went to Primary School (Skerton).  There wasn’t any other choice, and few enough teachers even to run those schools which were available.  And of course one learned how to add up pre-decimal currency in one’s head.  “Come on children.” Miss Brown would say, “It’s nice and sunny outside, so we can take our shopping out into the playground.” Groans all round.  Not that we disliked playground or sun, but “shopping” was that nightmare lesson where we visited the “shop” (a desk laden with empty packets of domestic items) and had not only to work out in our heads the cost of three boxes of soap flakes at 2 shillings and threepence threefarthings each plus a twopence halfpenny lollipop, but also tell Miss Brown what the change would be from three half-crowns. ¹ God, I break out in a cold sweat even now at the thought of it – she could be really sarcastic, Miss Brown, when you got it wrong.  A real leveler, Skerton County Primary School in the early ‘50s (it’s now, God forbid, a walled off enclave in “The Skerton Learning Centre”). It took in an interesting mix of kids from backgrounds of the professions, trades, local industry, local shops, the Ramparts and nearby streets – and from gypsy families.  That list roughly represented a descending order of likely academic prowess, and ascending order of aggressive nature.  This blend of cultures certainly contributed to a full education – not just the three ‘Rs’ but also self-defence and keeping your mouth shut and your head down.

I really pity the kids of today, unable to enjoy (or not allowed) the freedom of walking home from school, and condemned to the unhealthy transports of Mummy’s car.  Note, incidentally, walking HOME from school.  From 8 years old, I ceased to walk TO school: instead, I went on the back of Dad’s motor bike!  “We’re all going to draw a nice picture today of our favourite present at Christmas.” said Miss Rogerson, one day in January 1953. (Funny, we never got to see her picture of HER favourite present, but that by the way…...) So I drew a rough, but recognisable picture of Dad handing me a sizable, brown-paper-wrapped cube.  Miss Rogerson frowned ever so slightly, when commenting on my masterpiece to the class, and asked gently if we might be told what was actually in this package which made it so favoured.  Her frown deepened quite violently when I said “A pillion seat for the motorbike, Miss!”, perhaps a shade too chirpily. This was apparently neither comprehensible, nor of any interest for the class, for Miss Rogerson went on abruptly to review Judith Weaver’s depiction of her pretty new Christmas dress.  These events shape you, you know, and I still think it was unfair discrimination.  After all, what better Christmas gift than a brown-paper-wrapped motorbike pillion seat on which I could sit every morning, and what better link than that I should sit on it on the way to the school for which I had drawn the picture? Ah well, if they won’t recognise genius …..

Anyway, as I was saying, I walked home from school – rain or shine, as I remember. Turn left out of the school gates, along Main Street, above the Ramparts, quickly past the gypsy caravans near the Royal Oak - all chrome plating, washing lines and snarling dogs - then down past the little shoemaker’s shop opposite the pub ² to Skerton Mill and Halton Road. Up the hill past John O’ Gaunt Rowing Club, maybe call in at Eric Johnson’s house (he later went to LRGS too ) ³ . On past Mount Avenue, Whalley Road and Green Lane through the dip, past the piggeries on the right ⁴ and the hockey pitch on the left towards the Canal Bridge ⁵ . Hang over the rounded wall at the top of the bridge for a moment to watch the sticklebacks in the clear water, before the dash down to Carus Park, where we lived. This picture is recent, but you can still see as a dark green ridge, just over the foreground fence line, the small stream (a collapsed drainage channel) which I used to dam and sail small model boats in, even in the late ‘40s. The two prominent bungalows (left centre) were built in the early ‘50s. Our house was two doors further away towards Lancaster.  I was fascinated by the building work, with its piles of clean bricks and smell of mortar and new wood.  But the biggest fascination came from the still-exposed (and of course unused!) sewage drains, leading to the septic tank in the garden down towards the river. My favourite evening sport, after the labourers had gone home, was to fill one of their buckets from the oil drum full of water for mixing mortar, tip the water down the drain inspection hatch at the house, then rush down to the septic tank to see if I could beat the water arriving there. I never did. But beaten I was, later, by Dad. After a few days of this – as I thought – harmless enjoyment, entirely befitting a budding hydraulics engineer-to-be, the builder’s foreman came one evening to our house.  A young lad had been seen pouring water into the drains, he explained, one must admit with great restraint. Could this lad be stopped please.  He was single-handedly holding up the completion of the bungalows. Dad was always philosophical when ‘tanning’ my backside with the non-bristle side of Mum’s hairbrush, and he explained good-naturedly, after this mutually embarrassing process, that the builder had been waiting on approval of the drains by the Building Inspector, before closing up the drains and backfilling the excavation.  This approval could unfortunately not be given as long as the septic tank brickwork could be seen to be leaking water inwards. And said brickwork was manifestly highly porous, as each morning, a level of water had built up in the tank …………..  Oh dear!

Returning to my walk home from Skerton School: the route described is a good walk, a mile and a quarter or so, even today – but nothing even faintly unusual for a 7 year old in those days. In truth that was actually the route Mum thought I used to walk home.  If it wasn’t raining, I often went down the path just after the John O’ Gaunt Boathouse onto the “Promenade”, a couple of hundred yards of concrete path right by the River Lune, looking out to Skerton Weir and Lansil and the other factories on the other bank. I neither realised then how significant that Promenade would become in later, LRGS Boat Club, life, nor did I especially care for the view.  The fascination was the slimy, mossy stretch of concrete – unchanged today - where water drained over it from the Park into the River.  I could slide and pretend-skate there – marvelous Then the other really hush-hush, never-tell-Mum, diversion was the in those days even more hazardous path from opposite the Halton Road Cemetery gates, along the high, muddy bank of the Lune down to the base of the Aqueduct Bridge, western end, southern side.  There is now, as then, a little beach down there, with stones ready to throw into the river.  Even in those easy-going days, this route was forbidden – and therefore exciting – small boy territory.  Its proscription wasn’t because of any consideration of my safety, as I remember, but simply because my shoes invariably came home from it thickly caked in mud!

Just as an aside, if you walk from that little beach upstream through the Aqueduct arch and look up at the stonework forming the landward edge of that arch, you’ll see that the canal is leaking!  In fact, it has leaked there as long as I remember.  One of my earliest memories is of a night in late Spring 1947.  It had been a ferociously cold Winter and early Spring, and the canal, river, household pipes – everything had frozen. So had the water leaking down that stonework.  Over the months, an enormous shell of ice, many feet thick formed as more water trickled out of the canal. The night concerned was in April, I think, and one or two days into the sudden thaw which came then.  We were awakened by a thunderous roar, which shook our house some 200m away, as the tons of ice parted from the stonework and smashed down onto the riverside path, and the other ice on the river.  I suppose avalanches in Lancaster are actually quite rare.

Well, anyway, to get back on topic, midway through the sixth year at Skerton, two in the “Primary School” and four in the “Junior School”, the 11-plus came along. The actual examination was held in the Girls’ Grammar School – the first of only two times I ever went there. A fair number of us from Mr Gates’ final year class found we’d passed, and would be going to the Grammar School from September 1954.  The problem was that this news came in March, but we were still at Skerton until July.  Immediate chasms opened up in the class, and the Summer Term was difficult. The jibe “Grammar Snob” was leveled.  Didn’t know what it meant – I guess our existence was too youthful and sheltered to understand why a Secondary Modern school – the alternative for those who failed the 11-plus - should be so different.  So many chums just weren’t any more.  There was Maly (Malcolm) Gates, our School goalie, Malcolm Finnerty, called “Fidgety” by our teacher, Mr. Gates; he was no relation to our goalie, but, was, I found out later, Brian Gates’s father; Brian became Second Prefect at LRGS.) Then there was Trevor Allinson, who’d acted such an eloquent bush of the thorn hedge in our production of Sleeping Beauty, Ronald Hartley, Ian Boow, Valerie Lennon and Celia Bottomley: why didn’t they talk to me any more? And another divide:  apparently the brighter girls were all to disappear too, well, not disappear, just go to some other place (that Lancaster Girls Grammar School).  In effect they DID disappear, LRGS being in those days determinedly non-co-educational - another meaningful factor in one’s teenage.  But in compensation we were promised mysterious riches called rugby and cricket, and something which no-one could quite explain at that time called “cadets”. Oh, and “University”, if we were very good.  Actually, I sort of understood about University:  it was where Mum and Dad had met, and where Dad played golf for the blues, was it? No, where Dad had got a blue for golf. I’d no idea what it meant, but royal blue was my favourite colour (I loved the Skerton blazers) and golf was where Dad and I sneaked off to every Sunday, to Mum’s evident disapproval. So University was obviously what would happen. Self-obvious?  Well, yes; it was just that.  Once said, never questioned.

Anyway, leaving  Skerton behind, what did dear diary reveal as the most important things in life in January 1956?  First and foremost seems to be “73010 on 8:45 ”.  Now, you’re going to have to get used to this. OK, everyone has a form of code for their diary, but there’s a fair chance that only a privileged few of my former classmates at LRGS would understand this entry!  How come? Because we were the trainspotters.

“73010” is easy to explain.  British Railways Standard 4-6-0, class 5MT, really just a 1950s update of the faithful and ubiquitous Stanier “Black Five”, but pretty as a picture.  Just look at those raised up Riddles running boards.  Oh, sorry about that; relapsing into trainspotter-speak again!  Anyway, here is the picture, and you can judge on prettiness for yourselves.  I have no image of 73010, but this is a sister-machine. Trainspotting had its own language, well, dialect anyway.  You caught some of it above, and I’ll enlarge on it later. Moreover, trainspotting was a respected sport in those times.  It had clear benefits, some obvious at the time, some which one only sees well into adulthood and career. Again, more on these later.

On with the diary entry: “73010 on 8:45.” Why 8:45, and what has it to do with this chatter  being entitled “Quarter to niner”?

Poor old Nat got a sheet because of the “Quarter to Niner”.  Not in 1956, though; I guess it was more like Autumn 1957. We were standing silently in lines under the eyes of various prefects and sub-prefects in the Grammar School’s New Building Corridor, he waiting to go into Latin with Joe Young in classroom NB3, and I into Mike Hinton’s History in NB2. Nat (Norman) was one of those who came to LRGS in the same group as I from Skerton.  His nickname came inevitably from the Bolton Wanderers star of the time. The strange thing was that Nat wasn’t actually interested in trains. But we’d always been mates since Skerton times, and I guess he just wanted to be friendly. “What were on’t Quarter to niner terday, then, Forbes?” he whispered between the queues. “Er, talking in the corridor: that’ll be a sheet, Lofthouse.” came the inevitable shout from the sub-prefect.  We all froze in horror, as always when a) a mate and b) one of the sensible lads, who never normally got punished, slipped up and got caught.

Couldn’t concentrate all lesson after that, thinking how awful Nat must feel.  A “sheet” was one of the punishments which prefects could award to those breaking School rules and procedures, such as the requirement to queue in silence outside the classroom until the teacher arrived. Light offences earned just a warning or a single sheet.  Serious matters could be 3 sheet affairs. The “sheet” was a sheet of foolscap-sized, close-lined paper stocked in and issued from the Prefects’ Room just to the left of the stage in the Assembly Hall (today used as a scenery store).  The offender had to collect this paper, fill it by copying out neatly and repeatedly the rule he had offended, and hand in the completed work to the Prefects’ room again within a couple of days.  The sheet, if accepted for neatness, was torn up before the offender’s eyes, and put in the wastebin. Very demeaning, and depressing.  A register of sheets awarded, and record of those completed, was kept by the Prefects, and late sheets tended to earn a high rate of interest in further sheets.  The register also provided statistics consulted occasionally by form masters looking for confirmation of discipline problems.  They were very rare, but bad cases could notch up 20 sheets in a week.  Sheets could only be completed at home; writing them at break or lunch time was itself an offence. So these individuals were losing 5 hours of homework or leisure time in a week – they didn’t last long.  No announcement, no publicity, they just weren’t there any more.

Back to the diary: the ‘Quarter to Niner’ was officially the 8:44 train departure from Lancaster Green Ayre station to Morecambe Promenade. I never found out where this train originated, Leeds or Bradford I guess.  In any case, the locomotive was usually from Leeds Holbeck shed.  It had dual significance for us LRGS trainspotters. Firstly it was an important and heavy train from a distance, thus with the possibility of a mainline express passenger locomotive, probably a “namer”, as motive power. If Holbeck were stretched to find an engine of their own, they would send any big enough machine which was handy, so that some remarkable strangers, never usually seen in Lancaster, could appear from Nottingham, Wakefield, even London, much to the excitement of the Green Ayre spotters.  Secondly, the train was usually on time, and actually arrived at Green Ayre just before twenty to eight.  So it was possible to wait at Green Ayre, see the train arrive and copy down the engine number, then sprint off on one’s bike out of the station forecourt, along North Road, into Chapel Street, stand on the pedals up Great John Street, rattle across the cobbles in Dalton Square, charge the bottom of the East Hill incline, walk the last hundred yards, heave the bike, sweating, into the bike shed under the town end of the New Building, puff up the steps from the Armoury, then “Walk, boys, don’t run!” along the New Building Corridor past Dally’s room (NB4) and still get into Assembly before the Five to Nine deadline. Whew!

This critical timing needed some preparation.  No time en route or on arrival to search for vital kit. So, before leaving home:

• check cycle lock in saddlebag side pocket, and its key ready to hand in trouser pocket; 
• check School hymn book in blazer pocket, ready to use in Assembly (no hymn book = 1 sheet offence); 
• check school cap rolled up in other blazer pocket, ready to wear from Green Ayre onwards (failure to wear cap in Town = 1 drill offence)  [A “drill” meant reporting after school to a supervising Master for an hour’s work sweeping leaves, pulling the cricket pitch roller, moving furniture, even painting scenery for the School Opera ….]
• check it WAS a school day. (We got so tired some days, that the next morning proceeded on autopilot, and once, honestly, I did finish up on Skerton Bridge at 08:40, wondering where the traffic had got to – that Sunday morning ….)

I can’t find a picture of an actual “Quarter to Niner” train, but this shows the interior of the station, with a local electric train at the relevant platform at Lancaster Green Ayre station.

“All games cancelled.  Anyone who wants to run may use the Splash Baths.”  Daft notice. 

What’s this: sarcasm at 13 years old, young Forbes?  Well, yes, it was.  The point I was making was that rugby on a muddy field in January, just after a snowfall, was not, let’s say, the most attractive concept. So the prospect of a Thursday afternoon completely free not only of lessons, but also of cold mud or rain Thursday afternoon was magic! Given this, who would voluntarily go for a cross-country run (never pleasant over the muddy fields, hills and lanes between LRGS and Caton), even if they could enjoy a warm bath in the Splash Baths afterwards? “Lower Firs”, “Upper Firs”, “The Ridge”, “Junior Set” and, God forbid, the “Senior Set”. Bring back any painful memories? No, we saw that notice at about noon, and were long gone by 1 pm, after lunch, in my case off to a warm fire and Meccano set at home.

Just as a footnote to this Chapter, and as an illustration of the family regime, this time from my father’s side, there was that day of light snowfall later in January 1953.  The motorcycle pillion seat so misunderstood by Miss Rogerson was firmly affixed to the rear mudguard of Dad’s Royal Enfield (predecessor of his Triumph Twin). The problem was, that, perched jauntily behind Dad, I wasn’t too securely fixed to the pillion seat.  As Dad turned out of the drive onto the snow-covered Halton Road on our way to Skerton School, and his to Lune Mills, the back wheel slipped sideways just a little, and I promptly fell off. Silent pause.  Without comment from either side, as the incident was clearly to be regarded as a function of my own incompetence, I rapidly popped back onto the pillion, and we moved slowly off again towards Town.  But only a hundred yards later, the back wheel spun again as the bike started up the slope of the Canal Bridge.  Off I tumbled anew, and this time Dad, a tall, taciturn Fifer, was moved to speech. “You’re not really trying very hard, are you?” was the dry comment.

Some illustrations via Science & Society Picture Library http://www.nmsi.ac.uk/piclib/