Author Topic: Totally random unbelievable stuff from the place where you grew up  (Read 6491 times)

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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essexian

Re: Totally random unbelievable stuff from the place where you grew up
« Reply #1 on: 07 February, 2018, 10:57:45 am »
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.

Re: Totally random unbelievable stuff from the place where you grew up
« Reply #2 on: 07 February, 2018, 10:59:11 am »
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.


I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that.

Re: Totally random unbelievable stuff from the place where you grew up
« Reply #3 on: 07 February, 2018, 11:02:38 am »
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.

Move Faster and Bake Things

Beardy

  • Shedist
Re: Totally random unbelievable stuff from the place where you grew up
« Reply #4 on: 07 February, 2018, 11:14:26 am »
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.
For every complex problem in the world, there is a simple and easily understood solution that’s wrong.

Re: Totally random unbelievable stuff from the place where you grew up
« Reply #5 on: 07 February, 2018, 11:35:03 am »
Talking rabbits trying to get from the site of Tesco to an idyllic cuesta in northwest Hampshire.  Apparently.

Jaded

  • The Codfather
  • Formerly known as Jaded
Re: Totally random unbelievable stuff from the place where you grew up
« Reply #6 on: 07 February, 2018, 11:39:28 am »
Occasionally the cows would come onto the drive if you forgot to shut the gate before milking time.
It is simpler than it looks.

Mr Larrington

  • A bit ov a lyv wyr by slof standirds
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Re: Totally random unbelievable stuff from the place where you grew up
« Reply #7 on: 07 February, 2018, 01:02:45 pm »
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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hellymedic

  • Just do it!
Re: Totally random unbelievable stuff from the place where you grew up
« Reply #8 on: 07 February, 2018, 01:05:12 pm »
I think they found the skeleton of Richard III in some car park near to where I spent the ages of six to ten.

T42

  • Apprentice geezer
Re: Totally random unbelievable stuff from the place where you grew up
« Reply #9 on: 07 February, 2018, 02:52:35 pm »
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.
I've dusted off all those old bottles and set them up straight

Re: Totally random unbelievable stuff from the place where you grew up
« Reply #10 on: 07 February, 2018, 06:35:57 pm »
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.

ian

Re: Totally random unbelievable stuff from the place where you grew up
« Reply #11 on: 07 February, 2018, 06:59:40 pm »
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.

Torslanda

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Re: Totally random unbelievable stuff from the place where you grew up
« Reply #12 on: 07 February, 2018, 09:37:37 pm »
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...!
VELOMANCER

Well that's the more blunt way of putting it but as usual he's dead right.

Re: Totally random unbelievable stuff from the place where you grew up
« Reply #13 on: 07 February, 2018, 09:40:04 pm »
Now, that must have been Irksome.

Re: Totally random unbelievable stuff from the place where you grew up
« Reply #14 on: 08 February, 2018, 08:58:47 am »
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).

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Too many angry people - breathe & relax.

Re: Totally random unbelievable stuff from the place where you grew up
« Reply #15 on: 08 February, 2018, 09:40:27 am »
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!

<i>Marmite slave</i>

T42

  • Apprentice geezer
Re: Totally random unbelievable stuff from the place where you grew up
« Reply #16 on: 08 February, 2018, 10:29:56 am »
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.

I've dusted off all those old bottles and set them up straight

Re: Totally random unbelievable stuff from the place where you grew up
« Reply #17 on: 08 February, 2018, 11:22:11 am »
Aged about 5 I lived here.

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.

Re: Totally random unbelievable stuff from the place where you grew up
« Reply #18 on: 08 February, 2018, 11:26:06 am »
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 . . .
<i>Marmite slave</i>

Re: Totally random unbelievable stuff from the place where you grew up
« Reply #19 on: 08 February, 2018, 12:43:08 pm »
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.

Jaded

  • The Codfather
  • Formerly known as Jaded
Re: Totally random unbelievable stuff from the place where you grew up
« Reply #20 on: 08 February, 2018, 12:52:50 pm »
The village I grew up in had a Bicycle Manufacturing company in it.

Before my time.

edited for a terrible autocorrupt.
It is simpler than it looks.

ian

Re: Totally random unbelievable stuff from the place where you grew up
« Reply #21 on: 08 February, 2018, 12:57:52 pm »
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).

essexian

Re: Totally random unbelievable stuff from the place where you grew up
« Reply #22 on: 08 February, 2018, 01:01:44 pm »
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/


rogerzilla

  • When n+1 gets out of hand
Re: Totally random unbelievable stuff from the place where you grew up
« Reply #23 on: 08 February, 2018, 01:08:06 pm »
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.

Hard work sometimes pays off in the end, but laziness ALWAYS pays off NOW.

Beardy

  • Shedist
Re: Totally random unbelievable stuff from the place where you grew up
« Reply #24 on: 08 February, 2018, 01:28:45 pm »
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.
 
For every complex problem in the world, there is a simple and easily understood solution that’s wrong.