A Surprise at The Gateway Tea Rooms

Monday 5 June 2017. We are in Evesham, Worcestershire and having traipsed round the shops, Market Place and Abbey Grounds, we look for somewhere to sit down with a drink. That somewhere is The Gateway Tea Rooms on a corner of the Market Place and it has something rather special to show us.

First impressions are of your average standard English tea rooms. Similar establishments can be found almost anywhere in the country, especially where they are housed in an old building in a town frequented by tourists.

And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I love tea rooms. We are great coffee drinkers (albeit very weak coffee by most people's standards) but there's something about drinking tea in a tea room that appeals to me. It's an english tradition and as such it needs people to carry on the tradition lest it dies out. Who needs to wait ten minutes whilst someone farts about with a noisy machine making a bucket of coffee anyway? A bit of Instant in a cup and add hot water and you can serve ten people whilst the "barista" (pah!) is still banging the grounds out of his ridiculously expensive equipment.

The Gateway served a good cup of tea in a proper teacup with a saucer. Pastries, cakes, sausage rolls and fruit pies were on display to tempt us, as were bottles of cordials. A few people came and went and it was when a group who had been sitting in the corner by the fireplace got up to leave that I spied a glow coming from a square shape next to the fireplace.

I couldn't make out what it was from where we were sitting so I got up and trundled over, to have a look. This was amazing! Set into a recessed space was what looked like a scale model of a transept or chancel of a cathedral. It was bare of furniture - no pews or monuments - but the tracery of stonework on the ceilings, the detail of stained glass in the windows was brilliant. I nipped into the the room behind the fireplace but the external detail had not been added.

Even so, just look at this. This model was about 18 inches tall by 12 inches across. The "stained glass" had been drawn on tissue paper and the interior was lit through it, producing the wonderful effect you see here. The owner told us that it was a model of part of Amiens Cathedral in France. It had been made in 1915 by a Mr Frederick Beck, who had obviously been impressed with the real thing that he must have seen either in pre-war years or as a member of the Services during World War One. What his connection with the cafe or it's past owners was has been lost to history, but it is thought that this was just a part of a larger model of the full cathedral. What an undertaking!

By the time we left the cafe it was drizzling again outside. Not to be put off, we set off down the hill to see the river, passing yet more black and white timbered buildings, including this courtyard with the upper storey joining the buildings on either side, over the entrance to what were presumably stables at one time.

Aw look, come on... I can't visit every tea rooms you know... There was a sign on the pavement pointing to "Tom's Barbers", but I've no idea who Tom was or why I should be expected to go there just because he does... Should it not be "Tom The Barber"? Specialisation really had it in for the barbering trade. At one point they were the one and only place to go to, not only for a haircut, but for bad teeth to be pulled, amputations and all manner of surgery. Most people now have forgotten or have never known that the familiar red and white striped pole represents blood on a bandage... And all with just one pair of scissors...

We approach the bottom of Bridge Street and there in front of us is a bridge. That's uncanny... And what a splendid humpty-backed thing it is too. The house on the corner is rather splendid also. I've no idea what it is or was, but you can't help but be impressed with the size of the chimney on the top!

Ah... and now we've got here it's decided to start raining in earnest. Thankfully we're in Evesham... No it's raining here too, and rather exposed on top of this bridge so we take a look and then head off back up the hill to find the car. The river is the River Avon - one of four River Avons in England. This is sometimes called Shakespeare's Avon. It runs from Naseby in Northamptonshire (where the Civil War battle was fought) and runs through Stratford-upon-Avon to Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire where it joins the River Severn. The name derives from the old Celtic "abona", meaning "river".

Cotswolds Holiday Index

Old Photographs and a Touch of Glamour

It's been a busy old time! I know you were expecting the next instalment of the long weekend and that will come soon I promise.

This explains some of the stuff I've been spending time on recently. I mentioned a while ago that a new scanner had brought the possibilities of scanning my larger 120 film negatives. These are two and a quarter inches (6cm) square. Therefore they carry the potential for much better quality than 35mm film.

Here's an example of a shot I took in 1979 of country star George Hamilton IV

He was taking part in the annual carnival parade along the Promenade and had to put up with being squashed next to that year's Carnival Queen. I'd have stepped in if he hadn't wanted to...

I also mentioned that I'd been given the loan of some old negatives of Blackpool from 1968 and here's a sample.

The old UCP shop on the site later taken by Clarkes's Shoes and which is now Nando's (see below). UCP was a chain that once sold that most Lancashire of dishes: tripe. It was once a most commonly eaten dish. Indeed it was a fast food that sold in bulk to men coming home from the pub. Its place in that respect would be overtaken by fish and chips.

I have it in mind to take photos from the same viewpoint as these old photographs as much as is possible. The centre of Blackpool changed hugely with the building of the Houndshill shopping mall. Streets disappeared. Others were blocked at one end. The properties along Victoria Street were demolished to make way for brand new shops on both sides of the street that narrowed the street considerably. It became a pedestrianised area.

Also in my scanning I have reached a point where I was heavily involved in the Blackpool & Fylde Photographic Society. I tend not to publish portrait photographs, many of which were taken during the second half of the 1980s. Not that they were all of beautiful girls...

There was murder and mayhem on the night that the local Vikings came to model!

Model Trains at Fleetwood

Today I took myself off to Fleetwood High School to see an exhibition of model trains.

I never put so much effort into model trains myself. I was happy if I could set up a track and got one end to meet the other so a train could go round it instead of all this fiddle yard nonsense where you send a train from one end to the other and then send a different one back...

But if I'm totally honest, I never bothered much with scenery either... The front of the sofa was a mountain range and I had couple of plastic Airfix platforms and a few buildings, none of which in a real town would have stood anywhere near each other...

This one was modelled on a container yard. The crane gantry went up and down and the crane came down and picked up containers from lorries and placed then on trains or vice versa. The modern diesel engines made quite realistic sounds too - an innovation that was quite missing from the train sets of my childhood.

But I couldn't help feeling it was a boring setting for a model railway... sorry guys! Get some trains going, never mind all this fiddling about lifting boxes up and down... Still... whatever floats your boat I suppose!

And talking of things that I never had as a kid - this stall (Kytes Lights) had LED lighting sets for emergency vehicles and platform lighting etc. Brilliant! Really realistic too - model ambulances and fire engines had blue flashing lights behind their grills!

There was a large Scalextric track in the main entrance. The trouble with Scalextric was always two-fold: you needed a space the size of your entire home's footprint and the cars move at a scale rate of something roughly twice the land speed record and therefore fly off at corners far too readily...

I used to have a OO scale set called Minic Motorways which was excellent and you could have trains and cars going and both scaled the same! There was even a level crossing so you could crash them into each other!

Chesfield Tramways represents a 1950s town with Blackpool trams running through it. A brilliant set with copper wires strung over the roadways and mostly scratch built trams running up and down. There were Glasgow and Sheffield trams in their fiddle yard I noticed so they weren't just Blackpool trams. The trams actually do pick their current up from the overhead wires too.

A massive layout and N gauge trains allowing for a really intricate and detailed scenery layout. Or a lot of grass... The river crossing was good but not enough trains going for me. Surely that's the point of model trains? I can't be doing with all this bell clanking and lever pulling and signal setting - just get some trains going! Heh heh - ain't I a stinker?

This one was good - I loved this scenery! The setting was Arizona and there was a wrap-around layout with operators standing inside. There were more buildings on the other side so I wondered if we were seeing the back of it, but there was a train going round all the time, so top marks. The loco was making all the right noises too, including a deep hooter blasting out to wake the folks in the nearby reservation...

But for the best ever train sets you need to watch an old Addams Family episode. Two trains would be on a direct route to collision and the watching guest would say "They're going to crash!"
"You think so?" Gomez would say, pressing the plunger to blow up one of the trains!

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Childhood in the 1950s and 60s

Another page from the old Nostalgia website.

That's me on the left, playing with a jigsaw with my brother Frank, with Great Grandad (known as "t'other Grandad") sitting in the chair. It must have been a family party occasion - on the left of the photo a folding chair awaits a late visitor who has missed their place on the settee (always called a "couch" in those days!) The jigsaw looks to have wooden pieces and would have been moved onto after having mastered the wooden cubed blocks with 6 different scenes to be put together. The paint used would probably have been highly leaded and would have made us ill had we sucked on them too much... In those days kids were expected to eat a certain amount of dirt, dropped toffees were washed under the tap if a grown up saw it fall, or rubbed on a sleeve if not...

The open fire looks and probably is unlit, as a wire mesh fireguard would have been in place to stop us burning ourselves otherwise. A set of fire irons would hang on a stand and include a poker, set of tongs for picking up lumps of coal, small brush and a small shovel. Smokeless zones came in later - we still burned coal which gave off a thick smoke at times and always seemed to require a vigorous poke by grown-ups whenever there was a boring lull in conversation. The coal was delivered by incredibly blackened rough looking men who tipped sacks of the stuff into the coal bunker outside the back door. They would have a wagon full of sacks that quite often was still drawn by a horse, though flat-backed lorries were starting to replace the horses.

Rag and bone men still wandered the streets with a horse and cart, buying odd bits of furniture or old clothes and shouting "Rag'n'BOOOOAN!" - a call that we kids loved to imitate until the rag and bone man got fed up of us and threatened to call a policeman. Now, in case you think "what a stupid, wet thing to try to stop kids shouting", let me tell you that such a threat would be enough to send most kids flying home on the verge of tears! Policemen were "Bobbies" and were partial to giving any troublesome kids a clip around the ear. If you were stupid enough to tell your parents why you were crying then they would give you another for getting into trouble with the police. Don't even attempt to tell me this was cruelty and that it's better now that we can sue anyone who touches us. We learned what was right and what was wrong and we rarely gave cheek to strangers. Well, unless they looked as though they couldn't run fast and there was no one else around...

Toys were either unmoving things requiring imagination or were purely mechanical. I had one of these Merit driving games and the "gear lever" style stick operated a scissor movement underneath the playing field, moving a magnet about that would move the model car on the carboard playing surface. It was nowhere near as big as it looks in the illustration!

Magnets were a favourite tool of the toymaker - we had magnetic soccer games with long poles to move our players from underneath the playfield table and I had a bus that ran along a track until it zoomed into the "depot building". When it came out it would have been converted from a double deck to a single deck as the roof stuck to the magnet in the depot. A loop of track and it went back into the depot travelling the other way and would pick up the roof again. Magic to our minds!

Here I am, Christmas 1961, age 7 and 3/4, playing with my own magnetic fishing set. Kept you rivetted for almost 5 minutes...

Speaking of magnets and magic, there was the Magic Robot which had a swivelling base. You slotted the robot into it's base on a board and swivelled it until a rod it held pointed at a question. You then stood the robot on a different part of the board, surrounded by lots of answers and it magnetically twizzed round until it pointed at the answer to your question!

We had a collection of model soldiers - plastic models were starting to replace the tin ones. Tinplate cannons had a spring action that you could use to shoot matchsticks out to knock over your opponent's soldiers.

Dinky and the later Corgi toy cars were eagerly collected. In fact I still have some of them! The early ones had no windows or interior fittings and until we were a bit older things like opening doors, bonnets and boots were unheard of! Matchbox cars were fun and cheaper than the larger Dinky or Corgis! Dad still had his Hornby clockwork train set - the scale was such that you could only have a very simple oval track.

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He later bought us a Hornby Dublo set - it had three rails as the engine picked up the current from the middle rail. When we eventually got a more modern Hornby set, we had to replace lots of metal wheels from this set as they shorted out the current which made great sparks but not a lot of movement!

Cowboy programmes were all the range on television and so almost every boy had guns and holsters and would play for hours shooting each other and flopping down on the grass to play dead! Christmas 1961 again. The guns were obviously fake and no one ever worried we were being seduced into lives of violence. If we could afford it we would spend a penny on a roll of caps which exploded somewhat unrealistically in the guns, but were also good fun just thrown on the fire or hit with a stone!

The Danes had yet to unleash Lego on us and the most popular building toy was probably this one - Bayko. Judged as hideously dangerous now because of the metal rods that had to be pushed into a plastic base so that bricks could be slid down between them. I can't honestly remember anyone losing an eye, but I did hurt myself a few times with them I suppose. We just learned to be more careful. As can be seen from the illustration, the houses you could build were definitely not the sort soon to be earmarked for slum clearance...

Our house was not this fine, but neither was it one of the many terraces - for the moment anyway! Even so there were terraces and there were terraces! Not all were slums. All sorts of card games existed - special packs for "Happy Families" and the excellent "Speed" or we would play rummy and chinese patience... At school we would play football, cricket, hopscotch (our junior school had squares already painted out in the yard - that was seen as a bit sissy!) The best hopscotch grids were drawn by scratching a stone on the pavement! Chalk was sometimes used, but not essential!

Dad and his brother, Uncle Geoffrey were keen model aeroplane enthusiasts. Radio control was unheard of at the time. They made gliders, models powered by rubber bands and control-liners with a real engine. These had wire cables to the wing tip attached to the rudder. You unrolled control wires about 50 feet to a handle and then the plane flew around you in a circle and by tilting the handle you could make it go up or down until it either crashed, ran out of fuel and crashed, or you got dizzy, fell over - and it crashed...

They had engines that used ethanol or diesel fuel that you started by flicking the propeller with a finger. You had to be quick or the prop would whiz round when the engine fired and whack the back of your finger hard enough to draw blood and hurt a lot! The photo shows Dad and Frank in 1982 having a bit of a reprise of this activity.

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Confessions of a Studio Photographer

My very first job - as opposed to collecting football pools whilst still at college - was as a photographer, working in a small studio in a northern mill town.

I was 19. I'd been interested in photography for years, had bought all the relevant magazines on subscription and, as most teenagers would be, was easily self-persuaded that life as a professional photographer would be either hob-nobbing with the rich and famous, or an endless succession of naked or near-naked females parading in front of my lens, from which every now and then I would have to wipe the steam...

It was nothing like that. For a start, the studio owner, who was incredibly handsome and well coiffured, had a monopoly on the naked and near-naked females - and an incredible method for persuading even the reluctant ones that they should be... "Brought a change of clothes? Oh... well never mind we'll do some bare-shoulders shots..."

For seconds, as the junior of the establishment, my job was mainly being up to my elbows in foul-smelling chemicals and in either near or total pitch darkness, developing films and printing black and white prints by the hundred. Most of these were incredibly boring passport photos, interspersed with head and shoulders portraits of the town's new but large immigrant population, destined to be sent back to relatives overseas and once in a while something that made me perk up (sorry for the choice of words) and smile!

When the owner went out doing weddings or other work I was allowed into the studio to take passport photos or to make appointments for portraits. Only if it was a rush job was I allowed to take the photos myself. However, one Saturday afternoon an asian gentleman came in, adamant that he needed photos taken and delivered as soon as possible.

All went well until he started to strip off his clothes... "Er... what sort of photos did you have in mind?" I stammered, looking slightly aghast at the trouser belt being unbuckled.

It turned out he was a wrestler - it was very popular on Saturday afternoon TV at the time and he was wanting promotional photos. He had on his wrestling tunic underneath his clothes. I was very relieved at that.

Later that day when the owner came back and asked with a grin; "So did you get anyone's clothes off then?" I was able to look back at him, calmly and coolly, and nod sagely...

A Cottage Industry

Thursday 22 February 1996

Corfe Castle. Somewhere I'd always wanted to go to having seen so many beautiful photographs, but when we got there the weather had decided to do the nasty on us and we had to wander around in the rain. Still, without a doubt it was a lovely place to visit.

Not only the castle was of architectural interest. Almost every building was unique and we found the smallest Town Hall in England, a village pump encased in a blue-painted wooden casing and a gorgeous view of the ruined castle on its high mound, towering over the main street.

Fran was interested in finding the inspiration behind one of her Lilliput Lane cottages, Purbeck Stores.

We decided that the shop shown above was the closest contender.

February is probably not the best time to see England, though it gives a different perspective to some of the picture postcard views that you see on chocolate boxes, jigsaws and cards.

We vowed to return in better weather. All we've actually managed to do since then is visit in summer... which is not quite the same thing!

Large Versions of the Photos: Corfe Castle shop, Purbeck Stores model

Today in Blackpool

"We're doing a charity walk", Fran said. "What???" "It's only a mile..." she added hastily. Ah, well that's not so bad perhaps!

Mind you, walking for a mile along the cliffs at Bispham, north Blackpool is akin to walking ten anywhere else. Utter the words, "We've had fifty miles per hour gales!" to anyone from Blackpool and they'll look at you in contempt and say "That's not a bloody gale!" So off we went to find all Fran's mates from work. They had either all sensibly stuck a wet finger in the air and decided to stay at home or Fran got the wrong message about meeting place, time or day.

"Let's just go for a walk on our own then," I suggested as the wind whipped tears out of my eyes to the extent they were dripping off my chin onto my coat. So we walked from Red Bank Road (where the illuminations finish at Bispham) down to the Gynn (the roundabout on the Promenade road) and back. This is about 2 and a half miles altogether perhaps, half of it done at the trot with the wind behind us and the return with us leaning forwards at an angle of 45 degrees, enjoying the sudden but thankfully brief downpour. All along the way there were little groups of men in high visibility jackets working on the tram tracks. Given that Easter is next weekend I can with confidence say there's no chance of seeing a tram in Blackpool unless you nip up to the tram shed. They do seem to be getting on with it though.

From the cliffs we also had a good view of the stricken ferry, Riverdance, that as every Blackpool resident predicted, has stubbornly refused every attempt to re-float her and has now rolled over to an angle of 110 degrees and is busily engaged in burying her head in the sand a few more inches every day. Several weeks of being battered by the hefty winter seas as the tide comes in twice a day have had their toll and the structure of the ship is starting to get damaged. So presumably now they will start to draw up plans for dismantling her and hope to keep any leakage of oils and fuels to a minimum. Not an easy task I should imagine. It will be easier though to keep contamination down whilst it is above the sand than it would be if it sank down much further! Every time the tide comes in it washes sand away from around the hull, letting the ship settle a bit more then filling the gaps back up with sand.

Talking of disasters... Down at Uncle Tom's Cabin the long disused boating pool which had had some recent use as a go-kart track now looks even more attractive. Yes, this'll bring the families back... You know, with all the hotels and the council bemoaning the fact that families don't come to Blackpool any more you only have to look around and wonder what they would find to do that doesn't cost money. Yes we have one of the best beaches in the country, but when I think of all the things I loved to do as a kid, once away from the beach, pushing my toy yacht around a boating pool came high on the list. All that new expanse of tarmac on the new Promenade - I'm sure they could have included a paddling pool and a model boating pond.

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Dinky Cortina

I've almost given over buying magazines these days as there's so many interesting articles, blogs and so on to be found on the Internet.

However, browsing online at random without something in mind is a bit mind numbing and also burns time like nothing else. We were in WH Smiths this morning and I saw a toy collector's magazine and thought "why not?"

Sure enough there were a number of illustrations of cars and toys I have had and on seeing the photo of the Dinky model Ford Cortina, by lifting my head upwards to the shelf over my computer I found the actual article!

Mine (of course) is the one without a box and without a full covering of paint... The photo in the magazine showed a model issued in South Africa, which may account for the green colour instead of the blue. It had sold in 2006 for 2,230 UK pounds.

[cough!] [splutter!] Wow!!! Two and a quarter thousand pounds!!!

I should take more care of the few cars I have left from my childhood! The boxes were all thrown away as soon as they were opened for the first time and the car taken out so mine would never reach those lofty heights but even so...!

I took the Cortina from the shelf and gazed at it lovingly. I opened the doors - the first Dinky toy I remember with opening doors actually. The plastic dashboard and steering wheel fell out.

Lovingly I fitted it back where it had come from and it went back as good as gold, slipping into place as easily as it must have done for the original Dinky engineer. The seats were a bit dusty so I gave it a dusting....and broke the back of one of the tip-up seats... It's lying now on my desk in two parts and I'm looking at it and feeling more aggrieved than 5 minutes ago. That's knocked a good 2,229 pounds and 70 pence off the value...

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