Heywood Grammar School Part 2

Heywood Grammar School was a bit old fashioned, formal and yet a place of great fun.

The first day there, way back in 1965, is remembered in a previous entry and that introduced some of the characters. There were so many more though.

A few years above us there was a lad whose nickname was Prof. I don't think I ever learned his real name. He had a book of double entendres, collected from the sayings of the Headmaster, which he called "Farish Funnies". It was full of things like "I'm not having you boys bringing your dirty balls in here..." or "I'm not having it! Mr Thomas isn't having it - and I'm damn sure Miss Woods isn't having it!!!"

I hated PE. I'd been afraid that the asthma would cause me real problems but it was mainly only the cross country runs that I found impossible. The first one started with a circuit of the playing fields then out onto the roads. By the time I was halfway round the playing field I was in trouble and by the time I got to the gate where the teacher was, I was ready to lie down and collapse, my breath coming in great panting wheezes.

Mr Law grunted, "Asthma?" I nodded, unable to speak. "Back to the changing rooms then," he said. That was the only Cross Country I ran. There were about 5 of us who were excused them and we looked forward to the afternoons when everyone else was sent to run round the streets of Heywood. We were sent out to leisurely walk the streets of Heywood.

A particular mate of mine was Andrew Robertson. For some strange reason we all christened him Sid. I can't remember why but he became Sid for the rest of his school career. Mum and Dad liked Sid because he made them laugh. He made all of us laugh. This was mainly because he liked to laugh... In fact once he started he couldn't stop! He would go off into weird and wonderful paroxysms, food flying from his mouth, should he have recently inserted anything and this would go on many a time until he was helpless with laughter and had infected all around him.

Except for once when he had undergone one of these transformations during a dinner hour. A workman who was digging the road up thought that he was the one being laughed at and Sid arrived back at school with a black eye. He had another bout of uncontrolled laughter trying to tell us how he got the black eye...

Sid was another fan of flying model aircraft and he also introduced me to a mate of his called Paul Fitton, who was in the year above us and who introduced me to the music of The Moody Blues. Paul had a superb hi-fi setup in his bedroom and also had the first set of stereo headphones I ever listened to. I was so impressed I bought the very same model. Hands up today any teenagers who were 14 before they heard music through headphones...?

Now I can't condone the next bit and certainly do not suggest anyone else try it, but for a while there was a craze (limited thank goodness) of making rockets from a mixture of readily available household products. Those doomed to abject failure mixed powders and filled tubes with this. It was highly explosive - I remember it being in the news that someone had made exactly the same mixture to blow open the coin box of a public telephone only to blow his hand off...

We made solutions of it and soaked newspapers in it. Then - here's the most dangerous bit - we dried the sheets over the fireguard of an open fire and rolled them up before stuffing them into cardboard tubes. Most failed to move - as shown, they produced lots of smoke and a roar of sorts but failed to lift off. Bic pen tops you could make whiz about - possibly the reason Bic seem to make them open at both ends these days... (correction from schoolmate Alex Dyson: it's actually because so many people suck the tops of pens and get them lodged in their throats - you can still breath a little through the hole...)

Anyway Frank and his mates had to go one better and made a 3-stage 6-foot tall monster. Displaying "WRN" which stood for "Wardle Rocket Network", they took it up on the moors, lit a long fuse of magnesium strip and took cover behind a small hill.

The explosion was apparently heard half a mile away... The explosion was caused only by the bottom stage however and the top two stages, when rested on a plank of wood as a runway, actually took to the air for about 3 feet before turning to crash in the field. It was impressive looking but hardly aerodynamic! Cine film of this event exists. Wardle had had a flying saucer incident in the late 1950s and residents must have wondered whether the aliens had returned that day!

That marked the end of Frank's rocket aspirations but we in the 5th form were impressed at the success of the plank runway and devised a cunning plan. We reckoned that a 1-foot tall rocket launched from a high window via a runway would fly. We made the rocket, took it to the chemistry laboratory on the 3rd or 4th floor, borrowed a couple of test tube stands to make up a runway of smooth metal rods, poked them out of the window and lit the fuse.

Disaster! A gratifying roar heralded a ten inch flame shooting from the back of the rocket but it stuck on the test tube stands and scorched and blistered all the paint off the window sill until I tipped the whole lot out of the window with visions of a full-scale fire. The Lower 6th Form common room was directly underneath on the ground floor and I remember one lad telling me later of the impressive fireball that fell past the window closely followed by a couple of clanging bits of chemistry equipment...

We got in surprisingly little trouble - I think the chemistry teacher must have been secretly impressed with the sheer cheek. We did have to buy paint and repaint the window sill...

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Illnesses and Ailments 1950s Style

More from the now-vanished Nostalgia web site. My very earliest memory is of an incident that happened when I was two. We had moved from living with Nana and Grandad to a terraced house of our own in Albion Street, Castleton. My Dad was ill and in bed. He had had asthma from being a young boy and he was particularly bad at this time. I remember running up the stairs behind Mum and going into their bedroom and seeing him hanging out of the bed in a state of collapse.

That one scene fades into another where I am looking out of the window of "Aunty Sally" our next door neighbour, watching the ambulance come for him, emergency bell ringing.

Sirens did not come into use until much later and in 1956 ambulances, police cars and fire engines had an electric bell on the front to clear traffic. There was much less traffic anyway and very few of those very few cars had a radio, much less some form of personal music player in their car to block outside sounds out.

Dad's lung had collapsed with the strain of trying to breathe. He was taken to Rochdale Infirmary where the doctors said if the traffic lights had been on red he would have died on the way to the hospital. I only mentioned this memory to Mum when I was in my 30s or 40s and she said it explained why I used to have nightmares after that day for a few weeks. She said Dad's face had already turned blue. My memory is just black and white and I hadn't remembered that.

When I was seven I started to develop asthma myself. Trying to run more than a few steps brought on the most horrendous attacks of it. I could breathe in but breathing out had to be forced and I wheezed and gasped for breath. Aerosols were rare for any purpose - for inhalers they definitely were not in use. The remedy was to measure an amount of liquid into a glass bubble affair with a rubber bulb underneath. The bulb forced the liquid into a fine mist spray which came out the top of the glass bubble into a tube which led to a hard black plastic face mask which covered the nose, mouth and most of my cheeks and chin. It took around 20 minutes hard pumping on every inward breath to calm an attack.

It seems an incredible amount of time now when modern inhalers have an immediate effect but once the aerosol inhalers came in, the old type were still sold with the slogan "An overdose would be beyond the strength of an average man"! Asthma shaped my life from age 7 until my twenties. I was unable to do most sports so have never had an interest in them. Instead I took up music in the shape of the guitar at 12.

For a couple of years I went to a chest clinic at Rochdale Infirmary two mornings a week. I suppose I'd be between 7 and 9. All I can remember is a group of about 20 kids all around the same age, some of whom seemed to have nothing wrong with them and others who were the same as me, and one or two who wheezed and gasped all the time. We did gentle exercises, lay on mats for an hour's sleep then had a competition to see who could blow a bit of cotton wool the furthest along a table.

As a result of those exercises I now have a lung capacity in excess of most healthy people!

I seem to remember sitting with goggles on huddled around a very bright light, which would have been a sun lamp. Sunshine was thought to be good for all sorts of ailments. Some schools were built with special glass that didn't block UV rays - kids tanned as they sat in class... When Ventolin came out I was on it for 25 years, taking 2 puffs at least 8 times a day, more on most days.

An earlier visit to the infirmary came when I was 3. Dad was cleaning out the gutter at Castleton and looked down to see me rubbing my eye. He was horrified to see it bulging out of the socket and, unable to see the cause, took me up to the infirmary. I can't remember this incident at all, but he told me years afterwards that the doctors had taken from the back of my eye socket a long piece of string that had fallen from the gutter into my eye and my rubbing had wound it around the eye inside the socket.

All I remember about the event is that after coming from the infirmary he told me I'd been very brave and that he would buy me any record I wanted. I had no idea what I wanted but we went to one of the two shops in Rochdale that sold records and I stood looking in the window at a display of lots of 78rpm discs, pinned up on a display, pointed and said "That one..." What he bought me was Don Lang's "The Witch Doctor" which I still have in my collection of 78s from that time.

It was important to catch some of the childhood illnesses early. Mumps was a case in point - horrible symptoms in post-adolescent males! If you caught it, your Mum would tell all the other mums and that night after school you had all your chums round to play in a darkened room whilst the grown-ups sat anxiously waiting for the swollen glands to appear...

We had polio jabs and sometimes took the polio vaccine by eating a lump of sugar or a jelly baby that had been squirted with it!

At least some of the real child-killing diseases had been got rid of. As a child, Dad had caught Scarlet Fever. He had been taken into hospital and not allowed visitors at all as it was so contagious. "When it was visiting time all the parents would gather at the railings around the hospital," he told me. "Nurses would make you stand at the window and tell you to wave at your Mum and Dad. Even if they were there, they were so far away you couldn't make them out in the crowd, but you waved anyway... I was lucky - lots of the kids died."

Perhaps "nostalgia" isn't quite the word for this entry...

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Hiram Maxim's Flying Machine

We were in Blackpool this morning to meet up with David and Jeannie for breakfast and afterwards whilst the ladies went off shopping, David and I had a wander round the antiques market in the Winter Gardens. I came across a stall selling old postcards for 25p each and had a brief rummage, coming up with a couple of postcards one of which was this one.

It shows Sir Hiram Maxim's Flying Machine, one of three such machines he produced in the early days of the 20th Century to stimulate public interest in flight, which was very much in its early infancy at the time. The Flying Machine shown was at Southport, standing next to the Water Shute that gives the postcard its caption. It has a number of large open rowing boats suspended from a spider-like arrangement of arms and steel bracing cables which when spinning would cause the boats to fly out sideways from the platform over which they would sit when stationary, this "flight" powered by centrifugal force. The other two Flying Machines were at London and Blackpool.

The Blackpool Flying Machine still exists of course and has been a feature and landmark of Blackpool Pleasure Beach since 1904. I took this photograph in the mid to late 1990s when the motor powering the Flying Machine - still the 1904 original - had been opened up to public viewing by knocking a wall through and installing a large glass window.

Sir Hiram Maxim was an inventor and made his fortune selling the Maxim machine gun which was used extensively in the first years of World War One. Flying was his own personal ambition and enthusiasm. He turned his hand to a number of varied inventions though, one being an inhaler for asthmatics, an example of which is exhibited in the Science Museum in London.