Yet Another Cycling Forum
Off Topic => The Pub => Topic started by: mrcharly-YHT on 07 February, 2018, 10:43:08 am
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The town nearest to where I grew up had a 'topless' men's hairdresser (no I never had a haircut there).
One of the rural pubs used to have 'see-through barmaids' twice a year. A quirk of licensing laws meant that nudity or stripping was totally illegal in drinking establishments (teh big city had strip joints, allegedly), but lawmakers had not considered that clothing could be transparent. So a company used to provide barmaids clad in completely transparent vinyl clothing for one evening, to work behind the bar only (so drinkers didn't get handsy). As a callow youth I was taken to said pub by my father and sent to the bar by my father for beer; I don't know which was redder, my scarlet cheeks, or the barmaid's lipstick.
Two miles up in the hills beyond our farm was an honest-to-goodness hermit. Never saw him. He lived either in the bush or an abandoned caravan and did odd jobs for our neighbour. Only time he spoke to people was during sheep sheering when he worked with other people. Rest of the time he just lived alone in the bush, for decades to my knowledge.
Other neighbour was very elderly with twisted gnarled fingers. When hauling hay bales, one bent little finger got caught and stuck under the bailing twine. So he took out his pocket knife and cut his finger off, tied some string round the stump and carried on feeding the cattle. . .
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I may be wrong...we are talking about 35 to 40 years ago, but as far as I remember it, the pub which used to be on this site used to have strippers on every Sunday:
<iframe src="https://www.google.com/maps/embed?pb=!4v1518000782348!6m8!1m7!1s0_X2XCwv0IrVc-_-D1vQKQ!2m2!1d51.57644533818023!2d-0.02988965570879727!3f118.61577030477007!4f15.512330844279887!5f0.7820865974627469" width="400" height="300" frameborder="0" style="border:0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
I found this rather funny as a teenager as across the road is building which is/was a major church
<iframe src="https://www.google.com/maps/embed?pb=!4v1518000937289!6m8!1m7!1sJTUdPjm4vHs9eLFV7FD7bw!2m2!1d51.57597288218732!2d-0.02982747194104663!3f317.7931879274504!4f16.006469370069325!5f0.7820865974627469" width="400" height="300" frameborder="0" style="border:0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
We also used to have a tramp who used to watch us play football on the school fields. When we finally got talking to him, it turned out that he used to play in the Southern League back in the 1940's. He offered to coach us, but for some reason, our mother would not let him.
There also used to be loads of "bomb sites" including the ones which were on the corner of our street where we used to play. In the late 60's they redeveloped the area as Hillyfield estate and Whitebean tower. It was fun watching them building these places and playing there when the workers went home at night. Strangely, the whole lot was pulled down in the late 80/ early 90's, so lasted less than 25 years!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/domesday/dblock/GB-536000-189000
The street straight ahead is Hamilton Road where my first ever girlfriend: Dawn, lived..... I was 7 at the time.
Oh and just to the left of this road was a newsagent.... I worked there for a day before packing it in....where I "stole" a bike from outside.... I thought it was a friends but it turned out to be owned by a rather large and very angry bloke.
Got to stop now and do some work but here is another picture....https://www.facebook.com/walthamstowinpictures/photos/pb.889123587798593.-2207520000.1467523541./1195711503806465/?type=3&theater The wooden building in the near ground is the school I went to as a junior.... it moved there from St Andrews Road in 1968 and again I believe it has been replaced with a new building.
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Well not strictly speaking where I grew up (York) but still legendary in North Yorkshire and Teesside. Friday night "nips and chips" a fish and chip shop in Redcar where the female staff were topless on a Friday night. It got shut down pretty quickly for obvious heath and safety reasons apart from anything else and I don't know anyone who actually went but it was a real thing in the 80s.
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The emergence of a well organised terrorist organisation, bombing, murder and civil unrest. Internment/concentration camps for dissidents rounded up without trial. The overthrow of British rule followed by vicious intercommunal violence, the displacement of large numbers of the population, partition, threatened invasion, intervention by Lyndon B. Johnson. A coup d'etat followed by an actual invasion and then partition that continues to this day. I don't recall any strippers.
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We had some bare headedness up on the moor, but that often ended up with ducks getting well fed according to the 'local' song1. Not much else of note happened there abouts though.
1. walking out with Mary Jane sans flatcap, terminal chillness, interment, worm feasting, ducks feasting, duck a la orange, cannibalism. Quite a dark tale really.
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Talking rabbits trying to get from the site of Tesco to an idyllic cuesta in northwest Hampshire. Apparently.
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Occasionally the cows would come onto the drive if you forgot to shut the gate before milking time.
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The street straight ahead is Hamilton Road where my first ever girlfriend: Dawn, lived..... I was 7 at the time.
Oh and just to the left of this road was a newsagent.... I worked there for a day before packing it in....where I "stole" a bike from outside.... I thought it was a friends but it turned out to be owned by a rather large and very angry bloke.
Got to stop now and do some work but here is another picture....https://www.facebook.com/walthamstowinpictures/photos/pb.889123587798593.-2207520000.1467523541./1195711503806465/?type=3&theater The wooden building in the near ground is the school I went to as a junior.... it moved there from St Andrews Road in 1968 and again I believe it has been replaced with a new building.
The house immediately to the left of the end of Hamilton Road nearest the camera is Larrington Towers.
The newsagent is still there, though it changed ownership four or five years ago and is now more corner shop cum offie. I bought a bag of sugar there the other day.
Hillyfield Primary School Academy is still there but has been pretty much totally rebuilt since I moved here in 1996.
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I think they found the skeleton of Richard III in some car park near to where I spent the ages of six to ten.
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Jimmy Gilmore, who lived across the road from us, built Sunderland flying boats during WW2, and spent 48 hours on a raft after the Princess Victoria went down in January 1953.
My mum opened the curtains one morning to find a soldier lying prone on the front lawn, with his rifle aimed at the house next door to Jimmy's. She opened the window and received a hissed mouthful of abuse and some angry gestures, whereupon she noticed a couple more soldiers on next door's lawn and a few more scattered here & there. After a while a squad rushed up the drive opposite and burst the door in: nobody home. They started carrying crate after crate out, and armfuls of assorted weaponry. "But," said my mum later, "they were such a nice young couple - they always put out a good clean line of washing".
My uncle was kidnapped by the IRA, who were very courteous about it. "We just need your car for a couple of hours, then you'll get it back, no problem." They took him blindfold to a house somewhere - probably up the Shankhill - and left him with a single guard, a pleasant chap who served tea and biscuits and didn't mind having a chat. Chap turned out to have a family; uncle asked if he wasn't worried about getting killed doing what he did. "Not at all," was the reply. "I'm insured." Later, uncle was taken back to where he had been lifted. His car was waiting, minus his address book. "You know what for. Keep quiet." He went straight to the police, and later my mum received death threats on the phone. Nothing else happened though.
A chap called Ronnie Bunting was a friend of a friend. We often all went round together. His father, a retired Major, was Paisley's right-hand man and a right strait-laced bastard. He got Ronnie so pissed off that he joined the INLA and was later assassinated by a hit squad.
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In the early 90s, British Gas connected the wrong pipe to the town, and blew up every gas meter in the town. Apparently the town was connected to the wrong pressure gas. The now borked meters meant that there were gas leaks into everyone's house. The electrical supply was then shut off to the town to prevent electrical sparks blowing the town up. The police then drove round and told everyone to leave their houses and just stand on the street in the dark.
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We had zero 'ethnic food' takeaways (and I include such exotica as pizza and kebabs) until the mid-1980s. That was the same time as we got our first black person (from the Seychelles, I can only assume his parents took a serious wrong turn).
I am reliably assured that you can buy both pizza and kebabs now and there is, behold, an Indian restaurant.
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Sweet cheese on toast! Where I grew up was stultifyingly boring by comparison . . .
In 1927* the aqueduct carrying the canal over the river about a mile out of town collapsed and the town centre flooded - 3 people drowneded in their beds. A fact which passed into local memory but came back to haunt the builders of the shopping centre some 50-odd years later, as they managed to build the ground floor of the main mall below street level and on the flood plain of the (now culverted) river . . .
*A matter of record in the local archive. I might look old but certainly wasn't around for that...!
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Now, that must have been Irksome.
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I've recently related how my grandmother was a level crossing keeper - I was sent to her most school holidays. The main traffic on the line was chalk - heavy trains around 70 wagons long, which had to climb a very step incline to to the West Coast main line. I witnessed several break aways, where wagons came away from the train and ran back down the incline and through two sets of closed level crossing gates (presumably with stains on the guards van floor).
Sent from my P01W using Tapatalk
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Looking back on my childhood area, it seemed to be entirely populated with characters from some dystopian rural nightmare.
The family who fostered (then adopted) the 3 children who had been kept in a locked room for years, fed through a letterbox (they were covered in sores and ulcers). The foster family were an improvement; they fed them, clothed them in mostly new clean clothes. Discipline was administered with a cattle prod (that's a taser in modern parlance).
The dysfunctional family over the hill that kept completely savage dogs; they attacked anyone, including their own children and were only restrained by being driven back with a stockwhip. Why? Every neighbouring farmer warned them if the dogs were seen off the farms they would be shot.
There were many more like these. Some I shouldn't really talk about because rumour and well, people will still be alive and not happy with rumour spreading. Just think of nasty books about rednecks in rural USA and you get the idea.
Packs of feral dogs roaming the hills, attacking livestock, only retreating from people if you had a gun. Turned out half of them had collars and were from the towns. They got shot, eventually.
Oh and the 'big cat'! How could I forget that one? An 'escaped panther' or somesuch was seen taking sheep. Spotted multiple times. Finally a group of farmers spent days tracking it down and shot it - it weighed 60lb - sent it to university for identification and it turned out to be a gigantic domestic feral cat. 60lb!
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When we first moved into our house in Norn Iron we'd occasionally see a bunch of local farmers come by with sticks and scrawny dogs. They hunted rats, for entertainment I suppose. Being only 4 I didn't go along and wouldn't have been welcome anyway; one of them had sold off the land to the company that built our house and they all resented our presence.
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Aged about 5 I lived here (http://www.picturethepast.org.uk/frontend.php?action=printdetails&keywords=Ref_No_increment;EQUALS;NTGM005721&prevUrl=).
We caught newts in the canal and kept them at school in a tank- until one weekend when they escaped and we found them dried up on the classroom floor.
That kid in the picture isn't me, but (s)he could easy have been. That second lamppost was where I buried the potato my witch-mother magicked the wart on my hand into. Guess now I've told where it's buried the wart will come back.
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That kid in the picture isn't me, but (s)he could easy have been. That second lamppost was where I buried the potato my witch-mother magicked the wart on my hand into. Guess now I've told where it's buried the wart will come back.
Nope. When someone digs it up, the potato will have become a mandrake. It will eat their body, inhabit their skin and come seeking you . . .
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Other than three entries in the Doomesday Book of 1086 my hometown is famous for breakfast cereals, aluminium beer barrels and a wind farm by the A14 on the site of Wold Farm where I learned as a yoof to ride a motorcycle. There used to be many small factories turning out handmade leather shoes but these have long since closed.
An inconspicuous A6 shoe town in Northamptonshire.
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The village I grew up in had a Bicycle Manufacturing company in it.
Before my time.
edited for a terrible autocorrupt.
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My home town is famous for DH Lawrence, the formation of the Midlands Railway, and for being one of the few places where the mostly impenetrable East Midlands dialect is spoken. Every tea shop now has to be named after Lawrence though he hated the place, and by all accounts it hated him (and nothing I've read wouldn't indicate he was a bit of a obnoxious twat, though I might share some of this sentiments about the place, I wasn't exactly in tears when I got the train to university). Whenever they dramatise Lawrence, they have to use Yorkshire accents, he was a bit more faithful to the dialect in the books. As I've mentioned, my American gf back in the day, after a weekend there commented that she'd not understood a single word for the entire time. It's not that bad, but I suppose if you're not British and assume everyone talks like they've tumbled out of a Richard Curtis film, it's a shock. I apparently speak 'posh' these days.
Oh, and on a bicycle theme, Raleigh moved there (and think still are there, though I imagine it all made in China these days).
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I was unaware that my borough was famous for papermaking until I read a book on London in the 19th C some years ago.....
However, I should have noticed that they pulled down my first school to build a giant Bowaters Scotts toilet roll factory upon it. See
http://www.guardian-series.co.uk/news/10237777.History_Feature__Walthamstow___The_birthplace_of_soft_toilet_paper/
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King John (the nasty one played by a lion in Disney's Robin Hood) stayed in the local pub (it's still there) and was savaged by bed bugs. He was sufficiently angry to insist that the weather vane on the church opposite was changed to one of a bed bug to shame the village forever. It is also still there.
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Thinking about it, the village I did most of my growing up in had a mill in which they wove the fabric that made the uniforms the German Navy went to war in 1914 wearing. This was a surprise to me as the village in question was the small and insignificant (even if it's name was not) when compared to the market town two and a half miles down river and the posh spa town 3 miles up river.
The market town down river was at the time I learned to drink beer famous for having more public houses per head of capita than anywhere else in Britain and was somewhat of a magnet for minibus loads of rugby players visiting for pub crawls.
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You're all doing it wrong. The place where you grow up is supposed to be where nothing ever happens.
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You're all doing it wrong. The place where you grow up is supposed to be where nothing ever happens.
So you can moan about it being boring and how you can't wait to get away from this place?
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You're all doing it wrong. The place where you grow up is supposed to be where nothing ever happens.
So you can moan about it being boring and how you can't wait to get away from this place?
Exactly.
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Well that sums up where I grew up. Everything that ever happened there happened a long time before me.
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You're all doing it wrong. The place where you grow up is supposed to be where nothing ever happens.
So you can moan about it being boring and how you can't wait to get away from this place?
Exactly.
I thought that I'd done a pretty good job of showing that in nearly 1,000 years my home town remains stubbornly boring and totally lacking in notoriety.
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You're all doing it wrong. The place where you grow up is supposed to be where nothing ever happens.
So you can moan about it being boring and how you can't wait to get away from this place?
I remember the circus, elephants and all, parading past our house on it's way from the station (or the nearby goods yard) to the site near Fairway Avenue. That would have been the early 1960s.
5 weeks after I'd got away from the place (bonfire night 1975) a boy was eaten by a lion which had escaped from the circus.
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I quite enjoyed growing up (other than the usual stuff) in my home town. I suppose in some ways we were lucky. Schools were indifferent and low pressure and weren't striving to tick boxes to get themselves higher up a league table. I seriously had no idea I was clever (oh quite snickering at the back, I got certificates, even if I probably can't find them*) until I was about fourteen when one of the few decent teachers (Ms - defiantly Ms – Taylor, biology) pointed out the possibility. I didn't actually believe her at the time but then I was a teenager and blessed with the inalienable nihilistic knowledge of all teenagers. My parents, as lacking in aspiration as most of my teachers, didn't care either. They couldn't to this day tell you what I went to university to study. I dunno, when I see friends torturing their kids into academia, it all seems so joyless. All that work so they'll likely get jobs they don't really like to pay for two cars and a mortgage.
We could bomb about all day on our BMXs without the risk of ASBOs or the letters to the newspaper. We didn't sit around indoors staring at a screen. Our moral panics were satanists (allegedly sacrificing babies in the cemetery) and video nasties. Turned out that there were no baby-sacrificing satanists and watching Texas Chainsaw Massacre and I Spit on Your Grave didn't turn you into a serial killer. Nor, for that matter, did home taping kill music.
No one got too fussed if you went to the pub aged 15. Occasionally the police would move us on, sometimes they gave us a lift to the next pub. There was the town's pub crawl, to be attempted once a year. All twenty-two pubs (I'm sure there's fewer now) which was a serious drinking and logistical challenge (back then they opened at 6.30 and closed at 11pm).
Of course, it was shit in some ways. Everyone was unemployed, the final pit closed in 1986 and much of the textile work had gone abroad. Everything was coloured with xenophobia, most people didn't go anywhere. We used to go down Nottingham once a year for Christmas shopping, which always seemed an epic trip, but was an entire seven miles. I recently cycled it on my Brompton in a not very many minutes and to much incredulity. My mum once took me a coach trip to that most exotic of destinations, the Birmingham Bull Ring Centre. A day trip to Skegness was serious business. You always took your own food on a trip, food from otherwhere couldn't and shouldn't be trusted.
Anyway, I contrarized this thread with totally believable stuff happening and it being quite dull. Sorry, no one got eaten by lions.
*Stuffed inside my PhD thesis. Where that is, on the other hand...
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I occasionally bump into people who grew up in the same place as me. "It was a good place to grow up," they tend to say, "but too odd to live in now." In fact I can't think of anything particularly interesting that happened there. We had a bearded hippy who became the first Green Party candidate to be elected a mayor (he was actually my mum's best friend's ex-husband). We had a mill that made the material in a special colour for the pope's robes and the Coldstream Guards. Nearby, we had a man who made oddly shaped bicycles and another man who walked to London with a cat and became Lord Mayor. That's about it.
The only thing remotely comparable with mr charly's place is that now Jaded and Flatus both live (near) there!
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The only thing remotely comparable with mr charly's place is that now Jaded and Flatus both live (near) there!
Are you saying that Jaded and Flatus are comparable to Australian rednecks (and raise savage dogs)?
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The only thing remotely comparable with mr charly's place is that now Jaded and Flatus both live (near) there!
Are you saying that Jaded and Flatus are comparable to Australian rednecks (and raise savage dogs)?
I haven't heard anyone say that they're not.
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I think they found the skeleton of Richard III in some car park near to where I spent the ages of six to ten.
I remember being told (in conspiracy theory style) that he was buried in a Leicester car park. Didn't believe a word of it ::-)
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Oh and the 'big cat'! How could I forget that one? An 'escaped panther' or somesuch was seen taking sheep. Spotted multiple times. Finally a group of farmers spent days tracking it down and shot it - it weighed 60lb - sent it to university for identification and it turned out to be a gigantic domestic feral cat. 60lb!
60Ib for a 'domestic' cat seems unlikely. Norwegian forest cats are considered pretty enormous but generally up to about 8kg. 60lb is half a small human!
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Well that sums up where I grew up. Everything that ever happened there happened a long time before me.
That describes the village i grew up in. It gave it's name to a failed 1970's attempt at peace in northern ireland and had hosted the open golf but nothing since i was born.
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Oh and the 'big cat'! How could I forget that one? An 'escaped panther' or somesuch was seen taking sheep. Spotted multiple times. Finally a group of farmers spent days tracking it down and shot it - it weighed 60lb - sent it to university for identification and it turned out to be a gigantic domestic feral cat. 60lb!
60Ib for a 'domestic' cat seems unlikely. Norwegian forest cats are considered pretty enormous but generally up to about 8kg. 60lb is half a small human!
One of our farm cats weighed in at 28lb (measured by me picking him up and stepping on scales). He wasn't fat. Among other hobbies, he killed a fox once, and notably beat up (before it ran away, through a screen door) an Alsatian belonging to a visitor. So 60lb doesn't seem unfeasable.
Rangers up in Arnhem land are regularly shooting cats weighing 15kg.
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The world's heaviest (because fat) domestic feline was 18kg/40lb according to the Internets. I wouldn't want it to fall on me.
One of my cats weighs 3.5kg. This doesn't appear to impinge on her consciousness when facing down other cats.
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<Strokes one of his rabid dogs...>
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ian, you are neglecting some significant factoids about your home town:
1. It is home to the oldest pub (possibly)
2. Travel there is the most interesting thing to do of an evening in the town I grew up
3. It was not home to Robin Hood.
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Nottingham makes up for lack of actual Robin Hood by naming everything after him. I suppose it provides immunity to this sort of nonsense (https://www.citymetric.com/transport/beginner-s-guide-my-get-me-there-manchester-s-hilarious-attempt-reinventing-london-s). It becomes confusing when other places name things after Robin Hood, though, as they're breaking the system.
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It's the SHERIFF of Nottingham isn't it, Robin was from Loxley, wherever that it.
At least that's how I remember it, and I should know cos I'm a toxophilitist I am
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Loxley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loxley,_South_Yorkshire)
Barnsdale (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnsdale)
There was no 'Sheriff of Nottingham' until the 16th Century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Sheriff_of_Nottinghamshire,_Derbyshire_and_the_Royal_Forests)
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There's a Robin Hood's Bed on Blackstone Edge above Rochdale. If he actually existed, he got about a bit, but possibly never to Nottingham. Robin Hood Airport is named after an obscure town planner, RH Airport.
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There's a Robin Hood's Bed on Blackstone Edge above Rochdale.
And in Stretford (http://www.robinhoodbeds.co.uk/)
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Doesn't surprise me; they're a shifty lot down there (I married one!).
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Conclusive proof (http://www.robinhoodbristol.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/MG_8469-2-768x512.jpg)
Maid Marian (http://www.robinhoodbristol.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/IMG_0085-1-700x525.jpg)
Sheriff of Nottingham (http://www.robinhoodbristol.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/IMG_0094-700x525.jpg)
HTH
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We would never say we're from Nottingham. Nottingham was a day out until we were teenagers and the twin sirens of drink and girls from afar appealed (to us more than them, I surely recall). Mostly all I remember of this period was the straining bladder on the last bus home. That and mooching around Selectadisk on the very rare Saturdays I wasn't cleaning up the fruit and veg section of the local Coop (my signature Saturday afternoon task, rather shockingly to today's youth, we packed up the supermarket and went home at 5pm).
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According to the local rag, a guy was seen shagging an Alsatian in the middle of the hilltop football pitch, but ran off* before he could be identified.
*the dog either ran off with him, or wasn't a grass.
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10 miles from where I grew up, and a good 100 years earlier, at the place in Bedford where the Midland Leicester-Hitchin line crossed the LNWR Oxford-Cambridge line on the level, an MR train and an LNWR train collided. Both engines were wrecked and both drivers were killed. What is totally random and unbelievable is that both engines had the same number and both drivers exactly the same name.
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Loxley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loxley,_South_Yorkshire)
Barnsdale (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnsdale)
There was no 'Sheriff of Nottingham' until the 16th Century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Sheriff_of_Nottinghamshire,_Derbyshire_and_the_Royal_Forests)
There is also a Loxley, with a Hall, just outside Uttoxeter, that also lays claim to a Robin of Loxley.
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If I grew up in Burnt Oak (but I don't know if attending school from 14-18 'counts'), I could say that Jack Cohen had one of his earlier emporia in the area.
Its modern successor is closing on 14 April.
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Loxley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loxley,_South_Yorkshire)
Barnsdale (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnsdale)
There was no 'Sheriff of Nottingham' until the 16th Century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Sheriff_of_Nottinghamshire,_Derbyshire_and_the_Royal_Forests)
On the other hand, the 'Earl of Huntingdon' legend and a lot of other stuff, including the connection with Richard I and the seige of Nottingham Castle, was lifted from the life of this guy (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David,_Earl_of_Huntingdon). Never mind Earl of Huntingdon; he could have been King of Scotland
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10 miles from where I grew up, and a good 100 years earlier, at the place in Bedford where the Midland Leicester-Hitchin line crossed the LNWR Oxford-Cambridge line on the level, an MR train and an LNWR train collided. Both engines were wrecked and both drivers were killed. What is totally random and unbelievable is that both engines had the same number and both drivers exactly the same name.
There was a nasty one at Shrivenham near here, where a goods train broke in half and the next signalmam didn't notice the train had no taillight when it passed (which was an essential part of the job before track circuiting). The guard of the goods train (who gradually coasted to a halt in his van, along with the rearmost wagons) was also a bit slow on the uptake and, by the time he'd got out and started running down the line to put down detonators, a passemger train arrived very fast and hit the wagons.
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I grew up in Moss Side, Manchester. Emmeline Pankhurst (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmeline_Pankhurst) was born there.
Phil Lynott (http://www.prideofmanchester.com/music/PhilLynott.htm) of Thin Lizzy was also brought up in Moss Side and attended the
same school as me, Princess Road Junior School;
(although he was there a few years before I started in 1967).