Family Postcards

I know! A full month without a post! You lucky people! But here I am again, having spent a number of weeks with my brother trying to get to a state where we could sort out the probate following the death of my unmarried uncle. Until that happens there will be scant news of the process and findings, but I now know where my hoarding genes come from. Not just the collections of my uncle but of family members I have only just found out about... I never knew the names of my great-grandparents until we started on this, but now I've started to draw up a family tree. How long before I find myself out on a limb, I wonder...

Anyway, I can't see any harm in having a quick look at some postcards from the 20th century that various family members sent or received. There could be more of these to come...

Sent home to Castleton, Rochdale from Southport by my Great-Grandad to my Great-Grandma who, for whatever reason, had been left at home. 24 September 1906. "Arrived safe about 1/2 past 1 o'clock. The weather is grand here. Yours W.T.B."

W.T.B. was William Thomas Burke, my Great-Grandfather. He's not exactly pouring his heart out here, but it would be too easy and perhaps unfair to draw conclusions from so few words. Funny though that I never even knew his name until now... The rides are long since gone from Southport, but just up the coast in my own home town of Blackpool the Pleasure Beach still has their own version of Sir Hiram Maxim's Flying Machine still in operation. Sir Hiram originally wanted to install controls so that riders could send the gondolas up or down but with thoughts of cars stalling and diving or simply being too low when the ride slowed and crashing into the landing stage, the request was denied, leading to the designer dismissing the ride as "merely a roundabout".

Sent by "Emily" to my Great-Aunt Cissie on 19 August 1907. "Dear Cissie, I arrived on Saturday at 11:30am. Enjoying myself very well and I hope you are, though you are at home. The weather is nice so I hope to return in the best of health. Your affectionate friend, Emily." Cissie was my Grandad Burke's sister.

Another Blackpool postcard sent by my Great-Great-Aunt Florrie home to her mother in Rochdale on 22 August 1907. "Dear Mother, I am still enjoying myself. Yesterday we went on the Helter Skelter and got stuck in the middle. On Thursday we kept having showers, but never keeps us in. Florrie". Florrie Woolfenden was the sister of my Great-Grandmother on my paternal grandmother's side.

Manchester Piccadilly - somewhat different to the present day! This card was another sent by "Emily" to my Great-Aunt Cissie in Castleton, Rochdale on 29 November 1907. "Dear Cissie, I was glad to hear from you and will meet you at quarter to seven. Please bring programme if for entrance. All are well, have plenty of time to talk tomorrow, your loving friend Emily." Cissie at this time would have been aged somewhere between 10 and 14 I think. I only remember her as a quite wrinkled old lady who had never married and who chain smoked unfiltered cigarettes. I rather think though that she was quite a character during her youth and there's a super photo of a very confident young woman in full 1920s flapper-style complete with head dress that will no doubt find its way onto the blog at some point.

Five years later Cissie sent this card from Colwyn Bay back to her mother (my Great-Grandma Burke) in Castleton, Rochdale on 17 August 1912. "Dear Mother, Arrived here quite safely, got lovely digs. Rained here this afternoon, fine now. We are rather a long way from Colwyn Bay centre but in a nice position lovely scenery. With love from Cissie."

A local postcard sent from their home town on 7 September 1961 by my Grandad and Uncle Geoff to my Grandma who was on holiday at Morecambe Bay Holiday Camp, Heysham. "Dear Mum, Hope you are having a good time. Have you won anything at you know what? We expect to arrive on Saturday between 2-00 and 2-30. Love Geoff and Dad"

The mention of winning refers to whist drives - she would play every night if possible and would sometimes tut or grumble under her breath if my Mum and Dad insisted we play for matchsticks not pennies when she played cards with me and my brother when we were small! Yet she would have gone mad at the thought of gambling in any other way. Inflation has gone mad here - all the postcards from 1906-12 were sent for a ha'penny (a halfpenny - pre-decimal coinage. 24 of them would be the equivalent to a 5p coin today, though that ignores inflation). In 1961 it cost tuppence ha'penny or 2½d, equivalent to 0.521 pence of today's money without inflation. Just to be clear, that's £0.00521 pence... Add in the effects of inflation and today it costs 56p to send a postcard second class or 65p first class. There was only one class of postage in 1961 and post was delivered twice a day.

Comments on a postcard please...

Found Photos, 35mm 828 Format Film Negatives

We recently suffered a death in the family and it's fallen to my brother and I to sort out the estate and possessions. My Uncle Geoff had been a keen photographer in the past and whilst few have surfaced so far, I was rather hoping to come across a collection of old photos of family and views showing elements of social life no longer with us.

The other day I found a tiny metal canister and it turned out to have a roll of black and white negatives in it. The film was 35mm wide but with only a single sprocket hole for each frame along the bottom edge of the strip. There were no sprocket holes at all along the top edge. A bit of research tells me this is 828 format film, created by Kodak in 1935 for their Bantam range of cameras.

The image format was 40x28mm, a touch bigger than the standard 35mm film, which itself had only been introduced the previous year in 1934. This is a full-frame from one of the photos. Locomotive 4478, named Hermit was built for LNER at Doncaster, entering service in July 1923.

I've no way of dating these photos but guess they are from the late 1940s or early 1950s. There appears to be evidence of an itchy trigger finger...! Winding on the film would not be as simple as a single action of a lever and would certainly not be motor-driven!

Whilst 35mm film came in its own canister which went into the camera, 828 film was a roll film with backing paper. The spool of film had to be held tight to stop light from getting to it as you loaded it into the camera and then threaded the loose end of the film onto an empty take-up spool - which had come from the previous film to have been shot. Depending on the camera either you wound the film on after taking a shot until the single sprocket encountered a pin that stopped any more film advancing, or you wound it on until the next frame number, printed on the back of the backing paper, showed through a tiny red plastic window in the back of the camera.

The remaining shots are of bands parading through Manchester town centre.

This is Manchester in the immediate post-war years. Gaps in streets are evidence of the work of Hitler's Luftwaffe. Bomb sites in and around Manchester remained common through until the end of the 1960s and sporadically even afterwards.

In the area of Piccadilly Gardens this shot has the Littlewoods department store in the background.

I quite like this shot though as it shows some of Manchester's trolleybuses. I can just about remember riding on them as a child. Manchester had nine routes covered by a total of 189 trolleybuses. Introduced in 1938 the last trolleybuses were withdrawn on 31 December 1966.

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Barton Swing Aqueduct

The Bridgewater canal was a marvel of engineering. Canals made it possible to transport people and goods long distances in an unheard of short time. People could take on a barge drawn by a single horse goods that would have required many carts and horses over land.

Where the Bridgewater needed to cross the River Irwell a bridge was constructed in 1761 to take the canal overhead as an aqueduct. All went well until the 1890s when the River Irwell was to become the Manchester Ship Canal. Those ships destined for Manchester and Salford docks would crash spectacularly into the canal bridge.

The answer was a swing bridge to carry the aqueduct. The photos show it in the open position. In this position the aqueduct is aligned along the island that was constructed to take the brick tower that contains the control system.

The aqueduct is an iron trough 330 feet long and containing around 800 tons of water held by gates at each end. Other gates hold back the water in the canal itself. Amazingly there is a similar swinging bridge on the island on the other side of the brick tower to take the road over the Manchester Ship Canal! I was standing on it to take the top photo

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Off the Rails, On the Road

Dear diary...

The week started with a train ride up to Bonnie Scotland. Edinburgh in fact. The train was packed with people lugging heavy suitcases - ye gods, how did those poor people manage in the 1950s and 60s with those tiny flat leather suitcases? At least in the 1930s and 40s they had trunks. Not the swimming kind you understand... those knitted woolly things with a gusset that hung down to your knees once wet would have been useless for carrying clothes about on holiday.

These days though people drag hard plastic cases of the size you might see on the back of a lorry having just brought it from the port. Anyway there were lots of those on the train. And the journey was enlivened by a loud American telling a woman, who insisted her dog had to have a seat, how to react when coming face to face with bears, moose and wolves. All of which roam the streets of Edinburgh I expect...

I was staying in the Travelodge on St Mary Street which has the advantage over lots of Travelodges that it has a place to eat in. Not that I used it at night but it did mean I got a breakfast on the two days I was working in Edinburgh!

At night I mooched along the Royal Mile and ate both nights in a Garfunkels. The prospect of an Eastern European trying to explain to a German couple what mushy peas are was quite amusing. He obviously had no idea apart from the main ingredient... Just for the record, you do not prepare them like mashed potatoes... Although just down the road a bit they prepare Mars Bars like fish and chips I suppose...

Anyway I arrived home by another train which was much less crowded on Wednesday night in time to hear about the cat having been taken ill on top of my desk (note to colleagues - that's why I had to ask for replacement memory sticks to be sent...) We may have to replace the telephone too... Luckily the puddle didn't reach as far as the computer!

Then today I've been in Manchester at the JISC Regional Support Centre Northwest's annual conference held this year at Manchester University. Nice car too - the hire company dropped off a brand spanking new Hyundai i30 with only 19 miles on the clock. I haven't smelt that new car smell since I was a lad and Dad bought a new Mark 1 Escort in the 60s.

Once in Manchester I found the car park dead easy, despite only asking Chrissie where we were late last night once she was already tipsy! "I'll be there from half seven! she said. "I won't..." I responded wittily.

Found the campus map dead easy. Alas someone had been round all the campus maps, knicking the red dot and the "You are here" sign. Coupled with the reluctance of local authorities to pay for street name signs - or the reluctance of owners of new buildings to allow them to be sullied with street name signs - that made finding where I was going rather more difficult than it should have been. It was the Barnes Wallis Building, but whichever way I looked I couldn't see a building with water pouring from a breech in the wall...

There were only a few exhibitors besides myself and the stand that probably got most notice was this one with the massive screen with a new material that could be stuck to either plastic or glass and allowed you to project either from the front or rear.

They were showing a video loop taken in some huge aquarium in Okinawa which included several whale sharks swimming about. I couldn't help thinking how brilliant it would be though to have your mates round for a bar-b-que and sit lolling in the garden whilst your entire bedroom window showed Lord of the Rings...

And now I'm in Telford again - it's becoming a second home as I try to stay in every single room in this Premier Inn near the station. The travel should start to dry up for a few weeks now as summer approaches and college and university staff start to think about holidays. Tomorrow I shall be teaching some eager folks all about Managing Multiple Projects in a Complex Environment.

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1950s Shopping

Imagine a world with no shopping malls, no indoor covered walkways and no supermarkets or hypermarkets.

Yes, it's another nostalgia page and welcome to the 1950s, where the weekly shopping was delivered by the grocer who actually owned the store where you shopped. My Grandad was such a grocer and is seen below, leaning on the counter of the shop with Mum who, before I came along and was followed by my brother, used to help out as assistant in the shop.

It was not a large shop even though it was on one of the main shopping streets in Rochdale's town centre. Think corner shop size. Also you can see many of the goods stacked on shelves behind the counter. People didn't just pick up what they wanted and take it to the counter - they asked for it and he would get it for them. Personal service, delivered with a smile and clothed in a white coat!

There were no refridgerators to keep goods cool. Just a marble top that Grandad would keep things like butter and margarine on - all waxed paper or foil wrapped - plastic tubs didn't exist yet. Foil was incredibly thin and called "silver paper". Lots of things were wrapped in it including chocolate and cigarettes, which had a layer inside the packet. Silver paper had two layers, the thin metallic-looking wafer thin layer, loosely attached to a thin layer of tissue paper. The nearest thing to it now is the foil that wraps individual chocolates in a box.

Butter also came in large barrels that Grandad would split down by hammering off the hoops so that the staves would fall apart. The barrel stood on the marble counter top to keep it cool but in the summer the butter would melt and go rancid in a very short time. Any that ran off would be scraped back - a never-ending task. It was sold by weight into waxed paper bags and he sold it whether it was solid or liquid. In October he would save the butter barrel staves for our bonfire on the 5th of November! We ate rancid butter as a matter of course - there wasn't any other option on hot summer days.

Bacon came rolled and tied with string and he had a big red hand operated slicer that I always wanted to play with but he wouldn't let me. The circular blade was incredibly sharp - it wasn't unknown for a grocer or butcher to lose a hand. All it took was a moment's lack of attention. There was a sliding adjustment on a scale and customers were always asked how thick they wanted their bacon. No.6 was the most popular.

Again in hot weather meat and bacon went quickly off. There was a butcher's shop two doors away and Grandad didn't sell meat apart from processed sliceable meats such as ham, corned beef and bacon. When maggots appeared he would pick them off and dispose of them out the back but the bacon would still be sold. And before anyone shrieks and wails, he always used to say that when he had had to remove maggots, that was the time customers came back to say how tasty the bacon had been! I always remember bacon as having much more taste than it seems to in 2006 (when this article was originally written). Mind you, we lose taste buds as we grow older but even so... It was certainly not pumped full of water and additives as it is these days.

Lots of things were sold from sacks or large cases by weight. Sugar, tea, coffee, even biscuits. The shop had a coffee grinder and when someone wanted coffee they were sold the beans by weight and then Grandad would grind the beans for them for free. The smell was gorgeous! He and Nanna had a big electric coffee percolator at home which was silver with a glass knob on the top. It used to come out on Sunday mornings and it always fascinated me watching coffee splash against the inside of the glass knob.

Tuesday was half-day closing in Rochdale and all shops closed at lunch time. Wednesday and Thursday afternoons were Grandad's delivery days. He took orders from customers for their weekly shopping and would pack the goods into cardboard boxes that tinned goods came packed in to the shop.

On those afternoons he would load the boxes into his car and drive all around the town delivering them. I always enjoyed going with him as a youngster because it was a chance to sit in the front seat. Boxes would fill the boot and back seat and we would go back to the shop a couple of times to fill up again. And yes, that's me above "helping" load the car.

At these times the shop would be looked after by Mrs Gallagher, his assistant. The law required shops to have somewhere for female staff to sit and so there was a single wooden chair provided - which older customers used much more than Mrs Gallagher!

In the 1960s I became aware of Grandad being worried about something called a "supermarket". He joined a buying group called Mace and became a "Mace Grocer". They advertised on TV with a cartoon figure called Milly Mace and I was dead impressed that my Grandad should be part of something on TV! They even supplied him with pencils which were triangular instead of hexagonal and had Milly Mace and the logo stamped on, gold over dark blue. Totally impressive for a young lad! I'd never seen a pencil that wasn't either hexagonal or round!

The supermarket opened a couple of hundred yards away from his shop, closer into the town centre. It was a bit like a Spar shop is now, a large shop but only about twice the size of Grandad's but it was filled with shelves and bins and people had to rummage and get all their own stuff and then take them to the counter where they were put into paper - not plastic - bags. Grandad hoped that this lack of service would lead to its downfall but as we all now know...

Every woman carried her own shopping bag. It might be a wicker basket or a sturdy affair - Mum had a leather one that lasted ages. They were exensive - they had to last ages! There were no plastic bags or carriers. Paper carrier bags with string handles and metal eyelets to stop them ripping were charged for often and in any case ripped if anything heavy was put in them. Large goods were wrapped with brown paper and string. Brown paper was used for so many things... We saved it and used it again. We drew on it. If we hurt ourselves sometimes we had it wrapped around us - remember the second verse of the nursery rhyme "Jack and Jill"?

Up Jack got and home did trot as fast as he could caper
He went to bed to mend his head with vinegar and brown paper

Brown paper had something in its chemical make-up that actually did have beneficial effects on sprains, bruises and aches. There was a line in one of the Sharpe TV historical episodes where Hagman, the old soldier tells his new officer, Sharpe, about the benefits of "...oil of parafin and good brown paper." Vinegar was widely used from ages long past as a disinfectant. In times of plague, money was dipped in it to try to prevent the spread of disease. I'm going back a bit now - I can't remember that!!! My brother Frank and I used to sit for hours though, dipping pennies and ha'pennies in vinegar to restore the bright copper colour.

Rochdale had a couple of department stores, Iveson Brothers was one that I would later work in for a year and a bit, but for sheer shopping luxury most people caught the bus or train to Manchester. The No.9 bus took longer because it was a "stopper", or the 24 would take you there much quicker. It was always a treat to go on the top deck and if Nanna was with us she would fascinate me by "talking" to people she knew who she saw on the pavement whenever the bus stopped. Nanna had been a mill girl and they had all learned to lip read because of the noise of the factories.

Manchester had Lewis's store and Paulden's (which was taken over by Debenhams in the 1970s), each of which had large toy departments with model railway layouts and hands-on areas where kids could play with toys and then pester to have one bought! Best of all, one exit from Lewis's led to an arcade which had a huge window display of Bassett-Lowke's toy shop with a huge life size clown and a train layout that you could "work" by dropping a penny in a slot. It was always a disappointment if other kids had put a penny in and your parents deemed that enough!

As kids we never realised why the arcade always seemed so busy - it was (I was told much much later) a favourite patch of Manchester's "ladies of pleasure". Dad used to tell of one who came up to proposition him whilst on one side he held my hand and on the other was my brother Frank. "I'm a little busy..." he pointed out.

Manchester also had trolley buses! Trams had disappeared around the time I was born but trolley buses were still in use and it was fun to ride on them as they were so quiet in comparison to normal buses.

In the early 1960s the shop next to Grandad's became available and he moved into it as it was slightly bigger. The lease on the other shop was kept on and Mum opened it as a wool shop, selling balls of wool, buttons of all shapes, sizes and colours and she and Nanna spent all their spare time knitting furously - cardigans, tops, baby clothes... We would go there after school, I remember Grandad Burke used to pick us up from school sometimes and we would walk to their house.

We had a collection of toys at the shop and we would play in the back room whilst Mum looked after the shop.

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There's No Business Like Snow Business

Blackpool actually saw some snow the other day! It snowed big flakes and everything! For ten minutes! Wow...

It didn't result in this though unfortunately. I took this photo at the top of a mountain in Kitzbühel in Austria in 2002. Blackpool hasn't had snow that thick in quite a while...

I had to go to Manchester yesterday as I had a meeting at the university and I took the train. As soon as we left Preston the white stuff was evident on the ground and there were fields and hills that looked decidedly white and wintery.

An inch of snow on the ground in Blackpool happens once every blue moon and thick snow is very rare.

I took this in 1996 and this was the last time that snow fell in any quantity in Blackpool.

Beyond that you have to go back to 1981 when we had 8 inches and the town ground to a halt for almost a week. Even half an inch is enough to get the kids out expectantly with sledges but the sad fact is that buying a sledge in Blackpool is to be saddled with something doomed never to be used. But you never know... 1981 to 1996... 1996 to.... We're overdue!

Memories of Manchester

The photos today are from 9 April 1998 and we were visiting Manchester.

We came originally from Rochdale so Manchester, being the nearest large city, was very familiar to us. We grew up with it, although it had changed hugely in the 1980s with the creation of the Arndale Centre down Market Street.

With the 1990s trams came back to Manchester, running between the two railway stations of Victoria and Piccadilly. The Metro Link also connects Manchester with surrounding towns.

Eighteen months previously to these photos the IRA had exploded a huge bomb here which destroyed the Marks and Spencers store on Corporation Street and badly damaged the Arndale Centre, seen on the right shrouded in corrugated iron and the historic Royal Exchange, which here has a sign telling shoppers that 30 shops are now open again.

Also destroyed were the offices of British Engine, where my Dad worked for almost twenty years before moving to Blackpool.

The night before the explosion, Fran and I were in Manchester with a party from work, visiting the theatre.

I walked down to Deansgate to visit the cathedral.

Manchester's cathedral is of the Perpendicular period (15th Century), though it was badly damaged by bombing in the Second World War. The 130ft tower was rebuilt in 1867.

As I entered, I was accosted by an elderly lady who was acting as a Cathedral Guide. "Most of us are in our 80s," she confided, "...but I'm only 72!"
"Still too old for me, love..." I thought.

Manchester's cathedral is somewhat gloomy inside. Dark stone, made darker by the smoke of Victorian factories gives it this feeling although it can be dramatically enlivened by a shaft of sunlight through a window. But then... this is Manchester...! Happily however, it did happen during my visit and the change was worth the seeing.

There was a service going on so I had no chance to view the carvings of the choir stalls.

I have some earlier photos of Manchester, showing a very different Market Street before the Arndale Centre. But you'll have to wait until I scan them!

Rain? In Manchester???

Well it goes without saying doesn't it?

This was the view from my hotel window, first thing on Thursday as we prepared to introduce another set of delegates to the delights of Risk Management. The drive from London had been a tad prolongued the night before - it took us three hours to get from around Euston to the M1 motorway and we didn't reach our hotel until a quarter to midnight.

It was nice therefore to be staying in the same hotel that was the venue for the workshop as it meant we didn't have to be up at the very crack of dawn and we could have a leisurely breakfast. The conference centre was in the basement and the lift had a strange habit of immediately answering the call of a pressed button - which meant when you reached the basement the voice announced where you were but the doors didn't open and you went back up again to pick up the next set of passengers...

Funny the first time...

Anyway the day went well and it was a thankfully shorter journey back to Blackpool and home to my own bed!

Trafford Centre Shopping

Yesterday we had a trip over to Manchester to meet up with the Metcalfes - that's Uncle D, Auntie B and Cuzzy Kate!

I was really impressed with this place when it first opened; the architecture is fun and the place is visually very good.

Around the eating section there are themed "streets" and the main seating area is like a cruise ship's deck with a huge video screen set in the front of the "bridge" superstructure.

It's the shops that let it down. Fine if you're a female - although how all those clothes shops manage to make a profit is beyond me. When the place first opened there was a section at one end with lots of small shops and stalls. They included one selling musical instruments and a "Last Picture Show" selling movie and comic-related stuff. Now that's been replaced by a huge John Lewis store.

The only real male-oriented shop is an excellent model shop right up at one end near Debenebenebenhams. There is also a Virgin rip-off store, an HMV, a Waterstones, W H Smith, Jessops and that's the male interest bit done with.

There's only so many DVDs and CDs you can look at (I did come away with 6 DVDs...)

Anyway, excellent steak and ale pie in the "Trafford Tavern" - big chunky and appealing! Or was that the waitress...? No! No! No!