Prologue

You are old Father William the young man cried

And pleasures with youth pass away

And yet you lament not the days that are gone

Now tell me the reason I pray.

(Robert Southey)

I have been greatly blessed by being given the opportunities to enter a number of different worlds such as the worlds of the stage, ballet, arts council, Paralympics, sport, the theatre, local and central government to mention just a few. I have been pressed by a number of individuals to record and reveal these various worlds. I started to do this when I was asked to relate the work of the development of sport for disabled people and in my search for this, was struck by the variety of life which I have been lucky to experience. As I too rapidly approach my ninetieth birthday I hope the reader shares some of the pleasures and sadnesses of a long and varied life and that future generations have a document which is a form of social history. I have recorded in some detail the appointment of artistic directors, major building schemes, the role of the local council leaders and certain sections so that those who are interested specifically get a fairly dispassionate flash shot picture of things as they were.

The way to success, disappointments and life’s double entry system

I have been fortunate in that over the past five or six decades I have been associated with the success of a number of major ventures such as bringing the Northern Ballet Company to Leeds in a world class dance house, developing the new two-theatre Leeds Playhouse, creating the Yorkshire Dance Centre, the creation of the British Paralympic Association, the UK Sport Association for People with Learning Disabilities, Sport Aid, et al. To claim more than an involvement with these successes would be untrue and offensive as in each case the achievement was that of groups of determined, talented people. When being asked during a BBC interview, what is the secret of my “success” I answered jocularly but in all honesty: Decide what one wants to achieve, find someone who can make it happen, give that person his or her head and sit back and claim personal success.

The truth is that the so-called successes so generously attributed to me in many different fields are the success stories of a large number of men and women who have shared ambitions and have turned them into reality. I have felt it a great honour to have been associated with so many brilliant and honest men and women who have achieved so much. For instance: The Playhouse – William Weston; Northern Ballet – Mark Skipper; The UK Sports Association for People with Learning Difficulties – Liz Dendy and Tracey McCillen; The British Paralympic Association – Barry Schofield; three remarkable women who came up with the idea of the Yorkshire Dance Centre, to list just a few. They deserve our admiration, recognition and respect. For much of my life, 57 years as a Labour-elected representative and member of council in Leeds, I have been honoured to work with some outstanding public servants and volunteers. “Honour” in this case is not a fulsome hyperbole. Quite early on in my life I realised that if one was to achieve anything one had to have access to the source of power whether it be in local or central government or in the private or voluntary sectors. Thus I became a Leeds City Councillor, stood twice as a parliamentary candidate and was thrice generously recommended for the House of Lords by Denis Howell, Lord Dean and later by Lord Merlyn Rees. If you have the power or just enough influence, you have the chance to make a difference and that is what I believe we all are on this earth to do.

I was born in 1928, a year which someone wrote facetiously was otherwise an uneventful year, a year in which train drivers earned £ 3.50 a week in the old currency (240 pence to the pound), female cotton workers earned £ 1.25 a week, a pint of beer cost 2p and a postage stamp cost 1/2p. In that year in Leeds, 53 cases of smallpox were recorded, 351 of scarlet fever, 36 whooping cough, 21 measles, 634 diphtheria, 105 child deaths from diarrhoea and 485 cases of pneumonia. Doctors would normally charge two shillings and six pence before they would see a patient. For many families this was a sum they could not afford. Often doctors would not demand the two shillings and six pence. Local remedies were deployed, like taking a child with a whooping cough to a neighbouring gas work to breathe the ambient air. Specifics like antiphlogistine, brimstone and treacle, Indian brandy and Fennings’ Fever Cure were common. The working class in cities lived in appalling slums and the number of pawnshops in an area was a barometer of local poverty. The greater the poverty the more pawnshops there were.

Had I been at birth a sentient creature I might have had second thoughts about entering this pestilential place and life. I was enormously fortunate in being born into a marvellous family living in the centre of Leeds, the third child of five born to father and mother of blessed memory, Horace Michael and Mary Elizabeth. We were an exceptionally happy and argumentative family, a family of great love and tolerance. The first home I remember, a stone’s throw from the present Civic Hall, had four bedrooms, a bathroom, toilet, two living rooms (the front room only to be used on special occasions, visitors or musical evenings), front and back doors and a small garden at the front and a yard at the back. It was a house surrounded by slums, where middens were the norm as were homes with no hot water system, sharing a toilet with other families and homes often lit by gas lamps. Leeds had some of the worst slums in the UK. Poverty was stark.

I remember an incident which has stayed with me for my whole life. A lady who knew my mother called to ask if she could borrow a toilet roll as she was expecting some relatives to call and did not want them to have to use the normal toilet paper which was torn sheets of newspapers. It is a strange memory to have retained as I must have been no older than five at the time. I find it poignant as it shows someone trying to put a brave face on their adversity. Another memory also remains and that is of families being literally turned out of their homes into the street because they could not pay the rent and of learning what was meant by the term moonlight flit: leaving without paying the rent arears.

It was, however, an interesting place to live. We were poor in the sense that money was extremely tight but by comparison with those living in the neighbouring slums we were well off. Just a hundred yards or so from our house was a blacksmith’s shop which fascinated me as a small child to see the forge burning so hot and bright and roaring when the blacksmith used the bellows. I was immensely impressed by his courage and ability to shoe the big dray horses. I always wondered why they did not kick him over the road instead of patiently letting him do his job. The horses seemed enormous to me and I never went near their rears expecting quite stupidly that they would kick me. The blacksmith was a jovial man and was always ready to give me a smile and let me look at what he was doing. Just opposite the forge was a factory making men’s clothing. Little did I know then that many years later I would be of great assistance to the lovely Jewish family who owned the factory and wished to relocate to other premises. Just a bit further away was a large clothing factory called Hepworths and in a slightly different direction but close to home was a factory called Zanuk which was a medical/chemical factory with a pervading smell of ointment at a hundred metres. We used to say if someone led us blindfold from home to the city centre we could tell from the smells or noise where we were: fish and chip shop, Carlton pub, Zanuck (smell), Hepworths and Woodhouse Lane (tram cars sound).

We lived in and enjoyed 19 Carlton Mount, a large end of street house with full toilet and bathroom facilities which the surrounding homes did not have. My dad had got a local builder to dump a load of sand in our small front garden which became a playground for the local small children who would never have the chance to go to the sea side. Carlton Mount was different from the surrounding streets for they all were “through houses”, the condition of some not so great but they were palaces compared to the back to back houses all around. Our home too had electric light in an area where gas lamps were the norm. The local poverty was a scandal. We moved from Carlton Mount and years later the area was cleared under a massive slum clearance programme. By one of those weird coincidences, decades later I was asked if I would agree to my name being given to a residential block to house students at the Leeds Polytechnic/Met University. I agreed most willingly and found that Atha House was built almost on the same spot as our old home. I found the brief ceremony quite affecting.

Blandford Gardens

The move to our new home was only a distance of a few hundred yards but in terms of environment it was a move from purgatory to heaven. Our new home was a well-built house, two attics, two bedrooms, one bathroom and two ground floor large rooms, a front room – preserved as a Front Room – and a living room with a quite large kitchenette attached plus a tiny back yard. Situated close to the Leeds University, the house still stands and is in an area which has been taken over by people presumably on decent salaries who wish to be within walking distance of the two universities, colleges, shops and offices. I never pass the end of the street today without glancing in the direction of 11 Blandford Gardens, our home for three decades. By one of those remarkable coincidences, three or more decades later I was chairman of the Social Service Committee and we were looking for a suitable home for young lads leaving care. I was asked to visit a house and to my overwhelming surprise it was 11 Blandford Gardens. The house was being decorated and the front room had been stripped to the plaster and there on the plaster were the pencilled names Paul, John, Bernard and Sheila, marking our individual heights. I was quite moved by this remarkable coincidence. It seems that my dad marked our heights on the plaster before applying the wallpaper at which he was quite adept. I cannot quite remember what my feelings were – very mixed I am sure. Opposite the end of our street was a long complex of Leeds City Council buildings: a council school, Blenheim for boys and another for girls, a school for the deaf and the dumb (sic) and another building to train the blind. The presence of Blenheim Boys Council School so close meant we could get there in a matter of seconds which meant we should always have been there on time but that was not always the case. It was an exceptional school in those days because it had a special relationship with the university which was five minutes’ walk away. The school admitted on a regular basis men, I do not remember any females training to be teachers and this had the effect of making the school rather more academic than so many others. Why we were not exposed to the good ministrations of trainee women teachers I know not especially as we had two women teachers on the staff.

Miss Kelly

As a little boy I looked on one of them with the admiration I would show for some lady of the silver screen and the other appeared to be a strict tyrant and more associated in the film metaphor with a witch. She was the formidable Miss Kelly who did not need the ubiquitous stick, i.e. the cane, to maintain discipline and who became friendly with my mother not surprisingly as she had taught my brother Paul, then John and finally me. In many ways she was remarkable. She lived in Arthington, a tiny village on the opposite side of a wide valley. There was no direct route from there to Leeds, the roads being quite circuitous given the terrain except for the train which crossed the valley by a great viaduct. Miss Kelly lived in a lovely old cottage right at the end of the viaduct. Walking on the viaduct was illegal and prosecutions were not uncommon. Miss Kelly however, received permission to use the viaduct as a pathway so saving her considerable time and effort in those days when cars were a rarity and bus services extremely rare. She was never late for school and never left early unless we all did. As part of my mother’s entente cordiale with this Madame Desfarge I was delegated to perform certain duties in support of the lady. One of the duties was to take her discharged accumulators to have them recharged and then later collect them after they had been charged. Accumulators were basically wet batteries which could be recharged over and over again and were a blessing to those who lived too far out to be connected for electricity or gas. They were glass and contained a liquid, an acid, the formula for which escapes me.

Baxter and I, Baxter being my closest friend then and in the future, formed a deep affection for this vinegary spinster hiding behind a reconstruction of one of Macbeth’s witches and for at least a decade and a half we would go over on our bikes, then motor bikes and then by motor car to see the old girl, cut her grass and tidy her hedges. I never saw anyone visiting her nor did she ever refer to relatives or friends.

We were often given a jar of her home-made jam or marmalade, the ultimate sign of her affection or appreciation. I often wondered was there some past affair which had turned out badly and that caused her to live the solitary life, my imagination creating a picture of another Miss Faversham. Who knows?

One of her most enduring characteristics was her passion for making jam or marmalade which was not like any marmalade I had tasted. She had cupboards full of this delicacy, each jar standing upright in ranks order by year so one could see that some had been made twelve years or more ago. Some of the early vintage jams seemed to be rebelling by growing their own whiskers. As during the war and for many years after food rationing, a jar of jam would have been greatly appreciated but not if it was of the older be-whiskered vintages.

Blenheim School

Miss Kelly was a character in the play and her leading man was the headteacher, a character which in a way reflected the school. Mr Percy Smith, the headteacher, was a small fellow, rather rotund and in retrospect a first class headteacher. Discipline in the school was strict, the use of the cane used as a matter of course by some. Smith was a dedicated educationalist and worked hard to get some students up to a level where they might win a Leeds City Scholarship to a Grammar School – the ultimate success. In its own way, it reflected the way in which some state schools worked all out in order to get one of their students into Oxford or Cambridge. These scholarships were few in number and the competition fierce. My eldest brother Paul was highly intelligent and was a natural student. I still have a copy of a letter Percy Smith wrote imploring the council to grant Paul a scholarship which he was in due course given. This was treated by the school as a great success. The family relations with the school were very warm. My mother had received a very lovely wedding gift of bone china cups, saucers and plates which only appeared from the cupboard on very rare and important occasions, one of which was when the school borrowed them when they were having important visitors to the school whom Mr Smith wanted to impress.

I have happy recollections of Blenheim School. The teachers were strict but fair. Some did not resort to physical punishment but others did. Many a child received a clout on the back of his head for some misdemeanour but this was accepted by the boys as a natural part of life. One of the teachers, Mr Dunn, God bless him, played the violin and he taught any boy wanting to learn the violin to play using instruments belonging to the school. Both my brothers learned the violin with him and progressed very quickly as they also received lessons from my mother who was a good violinist who before her marriage had earned money by playing at dances, weddings and other jollies. I had my first violin lesson with Mr Dunn and then war broke out – a case of post hoc rather than propter hoc.

I enjoyed Blenheim school and the rough and tumble with the other lads. There was bullying by some boys but this never happened to me as I had two big brothers and although not quite the mafia, were an unspoken threat analogous to and a lesser form of the current political reason for having nuclear weapons: a working deterrent. I am sure neither had any idea of nuclear or other deterrence and indeed in those years the nuclear threat to civilisation did not exist except in the minds of some remarkable individuals. The school had no playing fields or playing areas. There were two playgrounds, one on the roof and one encircling the building but they were not designed for ball games or any contact sport. For cricket we were walked fifteen minutes to Woodhouse Moor where we played on a cinder pitch, no green and pleasant land. The surface meant if a cricket ball being bowled or hit contacted the ground there was no way in which even a genius mathematician like Turing could have projected the angle, speed or direction of the ball. This made the game exciting but not designed to produce cricketers for Yorkshire.

The facts of life and health issues

A number of abiding memories of the school remain with me today. One was being taught the facts of life. Until then as a wee lad I had imagined children being created in heaven and sitting on a long bench waiting to be born. When a child was needed on earth the child at the end of the bench dropped off to land in the appropriate bed and arms of the mother and the others would shuffle up so the next one was ready to go when called. This quaint belief was of my own making sense of the phenomenon of birth which did not occupy my mind in any particular way. I was eight when the facts of life were told to me graphically in the playground by a slightly older but much better versed child than I. I can recall that moment and its precise location in the schoolyard. I dismissed this as dirty talk as my mother and father would not dream of doing that kind of thing. Quite unthinkable. However, my concept of newborn babies coming down from heaven was shaken. Another scene which stays in my mind was the daily morning procedure before class could start in the classroom. Certain boys identified by a doctor or nurse had to stand in class, proceed to a cupboard, take out a large jar of cod liver oil and a spoon, take a large spoonful of the cod liver oil, swallow it, lick the spoon clean and put it and the jar back in the cupboard and return to their seats. Class could then begin. By the next day the licked spoons had acquired a fine layer of fluff which was consumed by the lads who did not seem to be concerned as this was a daily habit Monday to Friday.

At this time in the 1930s very many children had bow legs, skin disorders, rickets, bronchial and other chest complaints, ringworm and disorders solely attributable to poor diet and poverty. The death rate was high from serious disease like scarlatina, scarlet fever, diphtheria, mumps, measles, tuberculosis, whooping cough, et al. All are recorded in the published annual reports of the Medical Doctor of Health. The labour council of that time had commenced a campaign to meet the medical needs of the poorest children. This included regular inspection by the “nit nurse” who regularly inspected the hair of all the schoolchildren for lice and nits. They also started a dental service for children and I remember with some horror my first drilling by a dentist who operated the drill by a pedal i.e. a treadle. The treadle driving the drill was similar to the one I was familiar with at home where my mother used a treadle-driven Singer sewing machine. The pain inflicted by the dentist’s drill was in inverse proportion to the speed of the drill which in turn depended on the use of the treadle. Slow speed – maximum pain. High speed – just pain. There were two dentists in Great George Street, one good at the treadle and the other more reflective and possibly motor deprived and so poor with the treadle. A number of ruses were used to make sure you got the fast one and not the slow one. Some dentists could use the treadle very effectively.

Boots for the Bairns

In addition to the labour council’s efforts to ameliorate the condition of the working class there were numbers of excellent initiatives by some of the haves to help the have nots, one of which sticks in the memory, namely the Boots for Bairns initiative. This was a genuinely altruistic organisation which provided boots, not shoes, for those in greatest need. It was a great service but had one big drawback. The wearing of such splendid boots immediately identified the boy or girl as being so poor they needed this help and so with the lack of any human feelings the kids with Boots for the Bairns often experienced catcalling and the occasional fight. This seemed so wrong to me at the time. I believed in solidarity, though I am sure I never knew that word when I was young. We should have been supporting the bairns with boots, not laughing or worse at them. Sadly I have seen similar attitudes in adults over the years.

Early years Convent School

My schooling had preceded Blenheim School for I was sent at the age of five to a convent school nearby which little Catholic boys could attend until they were seven. Then they had to leave. Both Paul, my eldest brother, and John who was 18 months younger than Paul, had had this experience and shown no adverse effects. It was, however, to prove to be of inestimable value for me as there I met another five-year-old boy who lived in a pub – the Fenton Hotel – which I imagined to be rich palace – and who became my life-long friend. Tony Baxter was diffident, very quiet and not good at the education game. He was regarded unfairly as being a “bit backward”. He and I after being let out to go home would often go adventuring, i.e. exploring the immediate neighbourhood in a way no six or seven year would do today. We of course never got more than a couple of streets from our proper itinerary in our voyages of discovery and if Tony had to cross a main road to get to his home, the public house, there was always someone to see him or us across whether we liked it or not.

The nuns varied from the very kind and loving to the harshness of a company sergeant major. I most feared Sister Veronica who walked with a thick walking stick, which she would wave in remonstration or anger like Bluebeard rather than a member of a Holy Order. We learned, however, to read and write using a slate, chalk and a duster which was like a large dumpling and which every now and then caused us to go to the door of the classroom and bang the duster against the outside wall to clear it.

I must have found the two years satisfying as I have no bad recollections. Some fun ones remain. I can still see a nun sticking her head out of a window which was directly above the outside urinal where the boys went to pee. On this occasion three boys were contesting who could pee the highest. They were cheered on by other boys including me, and we were making a lot of noise. The nun’s head appeared and she told us to be quiet and hurry up and do our business and get out. She reinforced her order by tipping out a bucketful of water. This interruption broke up the competition and caused strong argument as to who had been the winner. Another episode which I remember with some despair is when during a lunchtime break, a girl said to me something to the effect: “I will show you mine if you will show me yours”. I had a little sister and had seen young babies being bathed and so I had a good idea of what I was to see but thought “You never know”. She, on the other hand, had never seen a boy baby, hence her interest. Having seen “hers” I showed her “mine” and then came the comment I remember today: “It’s not much”. Such wisdom/acuity from a six-year-old totally innocent child.

Brothers and sister

My brother Paul was the oldest and academically gifted by comparison with John and then myself. Next came my sister, Sheila Mary Elizabeth and finally David, the youngest of us all. (My parents felt that naming us all after saints, we might become saintly. Not sure it worked!) Sheila was an extremely bonny child and later a very good-looking girl, then woman. She was, of course, my mother’s pride and joy and we, the others, were very protective of her too. I remember when I was about six sitting on the sofa with Sheila at the other end. My mother asked me to eat some tomatoes because if I did Sheila would. I hated tomatoes but did as directed and pretended it was manna from heaven; an early indication of my acting career (if that is what I can call it). The result: I still hate tomatoes. She likes them a lot. The final addition to the family was David who being the youngest was deeply loved by all. He was a lovely little boy with a beautiful personality. Then tragedy intervened. He died. Pure distilled tragedy. He still remains in my daily prayers after eight decades. David became ill and the doctor was called. Later he called back and we were all told to go upstairs out of the way. We watched from the bedroom window of our home in Blandford Gardens the street below and saw the doctor hurry out to his car and rush back into the house. It was not long after that, that we were told David had gone to heaven. The tragedy affected us all deeply, my parents particularly so. I remember nothing of what happened then, as my mind involuntarily seems even today to expunge memories which are too tragic to replay mentally. This strange trait has persisted all my life and I find I cannot recall many of the tragic moments of the loss of such dearly loved ones at the end of their lives. A protective mental aberration or blessing – I am not sure which. By contrast, I remember other minimal things. For instance, I still remember as a small child the lovely smell of baking bread. My mother baked all our bread and to enter the living room on a cold winter’s day when the bread was rising in their containers around the fire to encourage it to rise, remains with me today.

Paul went on to graduate at Leeds University in modern languages having already learned Russian in the Royal Air Force, achieving the rank of sergeant. He was a bit of a polymath and ultimately became headteacher of a school in Leeds. John was not seen as academic initially and his school progress was undistinguished, a euphemistic expression in his case. He was regularly in trouble and was rusticated for one week for being seen without his school cap and with his hand on a girl’s shoulder while he was riding a bicycle by her side. He later graduated from Carnegie College, then the most distinguished PE college in the country, won a Fulbright Scholarship to go to the USA to do a Master’s degree followed up by a Ph.D. and finishing his career as a lecturer at Loughborough University. Sheila was not in any sense academic. She loved reading, was interested in art and went to the College of Art in Leeds where Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth had been students. Her real love, however, was dancing. She trained in a local ballet school, the Pamile School of Dance, to go on to make a career as a professional dancer appearing on one occasion as principal girl with an up-and-coming couple called Morecombe and Wise. As the years passed she made a good career in television, working inter alia in Coronation Street and directing some episodes.

The Modern School

I was a bit of an idiot at Leeds Modern School, which was a grammar school run like a public school with all its advantages and weaknesses. It was a very good school as evinced by the number of students who went to Oxford or Cambridge. Perhaps the best known of these supreme achievers was Alan Bennet who joined the school as I left. Again, the weirdness of life is evinced in that many years later as a member of Equity and a small-part actor on film and TV; I appeared in one of his TV films shot in Morecombe. I have kept the very kind letter I received from the director thanking me for playing my part so well. I cannot remember how big the part was – possibly just a few lines. It was only when I got into the sixth form that I learned the joy of study. I wish every child could discover this thrill which does not just occur in academic studies but in every aspect of life. When one sees the magnificent engineering in a jet engine, for instance, one wonders at the skill of those who physically produced it. In those days there was the School Certificate, equivalent roughly with GCSE or GCE and the Higher School Certificates, the equivalent roughly of A levels. I wanted to do French and History A levels and one subsidiary subject, German. As I had not done German before the school refused to allow me to join the German classes as I would slow the process down and I would be unlikely to meet the standard required by the examination. Subsidiary subjects did not require study of German literature but the German language exams were the same. My parents, keen to get me to do what I wanted suggested, I should take private lessons. A Jewish family, Steinitz, of escapees from Germany just after the war had started, were recommended. I met them and one of them agreed to prepare me for the examination. That old lady seemed to me to be old but was possibly in her late fifties. I had a one-hour lesson each week in her front room. As many young people do, I had scrawled on the front of my exercise book and I had drawn a swastika because I had found out that in a different culture, India, it represented healing. I turned up for my hour-long lesson. Miss Steinitz saw the swastika, immediately became physically sick and had to run out of the room. My lesson was abandoned. These three old ladies had lost all the members of their family in Germany. Not one was believed to be still living; aunts, uncles, cousins the lot. I felt quite awful that I had so distressed the family I had come to love. The damage was repaired the next week when I explained the reason the swastika was drawn on the book. I was definitely not a Nazi supporter. Her teaching was so good that the headmaster, Dr Geoff Morton, on the advice of Mr Fritschi, the German teacher, allowed me to join the German classes for the final term which produced the necessary result for me to go to university. I have always felt Miss Steinitz got me into university and not me.

The Nineteen thirties and Grandad

It is difficult for me to convey the essential quality and sense of the 1930s when I was a small boy. Leeds had one of the worst slum problems in the country and in the case of the worst slums they would equate to what one may find abroad in parts of India today. My grandfather used to take us boys for a walk after coming out of Sunday Mass. The itinerary always had some lesson to teach us or something interesting to see. I remember seeing a donkey, which was a rare sight (horses by comparison were everywhere), pulling a small cart behind it. My grandfather explained that it was carrying night soil to the leather works just a quarter of a mile away where the night soil was used in the tanning process. Leeds had a considerable number of tanneries at that time. The trip we pestered him to take us on was to East End Park where the so-called Paddy train pulled in carrying miners from the adjacent pit. They were covered in black coal dust – no pithead baths existed for them in those days and as they advanced in a crowd from the train to the road where they would go their own ways, they seemed to me to look like an invading army.

My grandfather had been a miner at one time, a quarryman at another and a bricklayer’s mate before he retired. He was full of stories which I positively loved. He was keen to show us evidence of how unfair life was for so many. This, of course, was a time of deep depression. He took us on one of our pilgrimages though not a Sunday trip, to the Leeds market and a very fine market it was. Very grand and listed. He took us, however, to the very bottom of the open market to what was called the Tatters Market. There people would buy and sell clothes which looked more like rags, kitchen articles or anything that you could get a half penny or penny for. There was a pile of spectacles for the poor to try on and see if they could read as a result. The vision I have which will not go away was seeing what looked like an old man trying on false teeth. I was horrified and at the same time mesmerised. How could anyone think of putting in their mouth the false teeth of someone you knew nothing about. My grandfather pointed out that if you had no teeth, you found it difficult to eat anything which was not soft. I remember Jim Quinlan, my grandfather, with deep affection. He was a rough and tough little feisty Irish working man who loved his pint or two or three or more. Although quite small, about 5ft 7inches, he was very strong. My mother felt the disgrace of his very occasional street fights and inebriation but always welcomed him into our home where he lived for some time in our family and indeed died in Blandford Gardens at the age of 72 which was in those days, considered to be very old age. May he rest in peace.

An alien world

The world I knew in the 1930s was so different from now that it seems an alien world. There were few private cars on the road and so a car was a very significant indication of wealth. Horse-drawn vehicles were everywhere but were rapidly decreasing as the petrol-driven lorry began to increase. As boys we loved to hang on the back of the horse-drawn vehicles which often prompted a cry to the driver of “Whip behind”, a shout which suggested he should deploy his whip towards the back of the cart where the miscreants were stealing a ride. Also in that period there were Leviathan vehicles driven by steam and belching thick black smoke from their fire grates. These vehicles were so heavy that they ran on wheels of steel with a rubber tyre which was not pneumatic, just an inch or so of a thick coating of solid rubber. The air was so polluted with soot that the day after my mother had washed the kitchen window sill, it was covered with a fine film of soot. A shirt collar in one day would carry a black mark from the pollution. When the city became fog bound in winter the fog turned into smog, that is fog containing smoke with its sad effects on chest complaints. The effects on the inhabitants were such that Leeds had its dedicated Chest Clinic. The atmosphere could be so corrupted that it was difficult to see more than a pace or two ahead. I remember years later driving my motorbike from Headingley to our home in Blandford Gardens in a very intense smog. Sitting on the bike gave me much better vision than someone driving in a car with a bonnet stretching ahead. On this occasion I drove slowly and was followed by a long trail of nose-to-tail vehicles including buses. When I got to where I needed to turn off to go to my home a hundred or hundred and fifty yards away, I turned off the main road, Woodhouse Lane, after giving the appropriate signal. I was horrified but vastly amused to see this very long caravan of cars and buses following me down Blenheim Walk, not realising they had left the main road. When I got to my street I stopped, walked back the few paces to the bus at the head of the queue which had stopped when I disappeared and offered the driver to walk him down to the road he should have been on, a matter of a couple of hundred yards. I had to laugh inwardly whilst acting the good Samaritan as I remembered reading that when the first cars appeared on the roads, a man with a red flag had to precede him and here I was doing something similar so many years later.

The Medical Officer of Health for the city collected statistics which were recorded annually in his report. This showed that annually 120 tons of solid particles fell on the city centre and 140 tons on a major engineering site, Kirkstall Forge, the great steam hammer the pounding of which could be heard at a distance of more than a mile away. It was often said that one reason Leeds, the third biggest city in the UK, was not bombed more heavily than it was in the war was because it is based in a series of small valleys and hills which contained a constant cover of pollution so aircraft could not see it as a city. We know the Germans were intent on bombing Kirkstall Forge, a very large industrial complex, because after the war photographs of Leeds and Kirkstall Forge were found in the Luftwaffe archives. They were taken by the Graf Zeppelin which made a tour of England ostensibly on a good will visit just before the war but in fact it was taking photographs which would be useful when war came. I remember the Zeppelin flying over Leeds. I remember with absolute clarity hearing the sound of its engines whilst reading a book. I would normally have rushed outside as on hearing a plane you wanted to see it as they were still something new and wonderful. I, however, continued reading and so missed the sight of this great gas bag which almost everyone else had seen. It flew very low over the city as the post-war photos showed.

A childhood in the working-class areas had its benefits. Opportunity for play or mischief abounded. For instance, it was possible to light the street gas lamps by a sturdy kick so many of the gas lamps in the area were lit during the day. An act of vandalism of sorts and subject to passer-by intervention followed by exit left at speed. If you were up to no good any adult would speak to you, chase you off if necessary. However, if you were lost or crying almost everyone would stop to help. The communities did exist on a street level, on a small area level and a wider level. People helped each other in a way which does not happen now. I remember a neighbour knocking on the back door and asking my mother if she could spare a cupful of sugar …

Materfamilias

My mother was always being called out, often for some minor thing such as a child getting hurt or a call to my mother to go and help Mrs Baldwin (a midwife and layer-out with her own portable table for that purpose) “lay out” a neighbour who had died. The custom then as I understand it was that the women washed the body and then put the best dress or suit on the corpse to receive those coming to express their respects. In a society which was not homogenous the death rituals could be very different. The Jews had their own very impressive rituals, the English were pretty conservative in their grieving but the Irish working class had a much more rumbustious approach and turned the grieving into a beer-drinking session whilst the chat got louder and louder, pierced from time to time by someone singing one of the melancholic and lovely Irish songs. Those lovely songs were part of my childhood, pace my grandfather, who never lost an opportunity to declaim his Irish ancestry. When I was about nine or ten, if he called to see my mother I would escape to the Front Room and sing to a single-finger accompaniment on the piano, Danny Boy, or Rose of Tralee, or some other favourite from the Irish Song Book. I also from time to time “did” some of the more lachrymose music hall songs like the Poor Blind Boy which I sang loudly, the words of which I can still remember. “I am just a poor blind boy though my heart is full of joy, though I never saw the light, etc, etc.” This concert nearly always produced a penny from my grandfather, though my older brother John suggested giving me a penny was just to shut me up.

Music

Our family was a musical family. We owned an upright Angelo piano. My father had joined the army as a boy entrant well before the war broke out in 1914. He was put into a music school as a boy soldier which proved to be a major contributor to his life. The Army Music School must have been good because my father was a professional musician before he married my mother, making a good living on the cruise liners like the Mauretania. In the afternoon he and two colleagues, one on the piano, one on the violin, and my father on the cello played in the first-class lounge and in the evening he played the drums and trumpet for dancing. My mother was a good violinist who had also played professionally for dances and other social occasions. I have no idea how my mother could have learned how to play it so well. We often had “soirees”, though that would never be a term used, in the Front Room which was only used occasionally and on a Sunday. Dad, Mam and a pianist, Miss Driver, who also played professionally for the Pamile School of Dance, played trios, and my mother would sing an aria or two or a couple or so Irish songs. My mother had a fine operatic voice, good tone, wide and accurate range. In summer the windows were open and we often collected a small crowd who sat or stood outside our open windows to listen to the “concert”. In those days not everyone had a wireless and almost all could never afford to pay to go to the Town Hall for its frequent concerts. They would occasionally call out to suggest a song for my mother to sing. My two brothers learned to play the violin quite well and their playing was good enough to appeal to the ear. I was forced to play the violin but never mastered it though several years later I found great pleasure in playing in one or two of the very simple amateur orchestras which abounded. I, of course, was immediately condemned to join the school orchestra when I could barely read the music and play it at the same time. It seemed to me that one could not do both at the same time. Particularly difficult it is to be in the third violins. If you are in the first violins you have the melody and so, if lost, easily identify where you are in the music. In third violins there is no such help. So three bars rest is a trap for any unware violinist leading to a whispered question to one’s co-murderer of the piece: “Where are we?” The answer was often a shrug. We were both lost. Over the years I had no proper tuition but my mother from time to time showed me how to use the different positions on the violin and a love of classical music was enhanced.

I find it difficult to understand how a very basic working-class family could have been so well educated at home. I knew arias from operas which were so abstruse at that time they are only heard in London or the International Opera Houses today. My mother’s repertoire was highly selective and contained arias from operas rarely if ever played except in major world opera houses.

I have not played the violin for decades, not since we moved from Blandford Gardens, a family-sized home to a tiny bungalow with no room to have anything but the essentials. I never learned to play the piano but I could read music. I have missed the piano the most as I loved to “do” the Moonlight Sonata first movement, both hands and any slow bits of Beethoven sonatas which I could finger out and hear in my mind – Schnabel. To anyone listening it would have been torture. To me Schnabel. I could only do the slow bits and had to give up the fight when the Beethoven sonatas moved from andante to presto or appassionato. When my mother died my father simply could not involve himself in music as this made the loss even more painful. It was some long time before he turned to the cello again. I loved to hear him playing Bach’s unaccompanied cello variations. Looking back to my childhood in central Leeds I feel a massive sense of appreciation of times long past. As a little street Arab as we were sometimes called, we experienced a freedom not available to the modern day’s boy of 10 or 11.

Air Raids