Category Archives: Nottingham

by | September 29, 2023 · 6:17 am

Goose Fair (1)

Every year, a huge fair is held in Nottingham. It lasts from the first Wednesday in October to the following Saturday. It dates back to a royal charter in 1284 although it is known that the Saxons had held “St. Matthew’s Fair” long before that. Modern belief is that the Saxon fair was based on a fair held by the fun-loving Vikings. A Viking army had captured Nottingham from the Saxons in 868 AD. Its leaders had two of the coolest names ever.

“Ivar the Boneless”

“Halfdan Ragnarsson”

Presumably his Dad was “Wholedan”, or even “Fulldan”.

This combination of Saxons and Vikings would make the Goose Fair well over a thousand years old. Here are some Vikings:

And here are some Saxons:

The name “Goose Fair” comes from the thousands of geese that were driven to Nottingham on foot from Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire and East Anglia. Their feet coated with tar and sand to protect them on the long journey of a hundred miles or more, the geese would provide the traditional Michaelmas dish of roast goose on September 29th. Goose Fair was traditionally held in the Old Market Square in the city centre, although it was moved to the Forest Recreation Ground in 1928. The fair has only been cancelled on very few occasions. In 1646 because of bubonic plague, during both World Wars, and finally in 2020 and 2021.

The Old Market Square was a very different place before 1928.

In the 1700s, the fair was no longer about geese, but was more to promote the sale of Red Nottingham, the local cheese which was traditionally made in the shape of a large wheel. The whole thing became a little too Red Nottingham in 1766, when the natives of the town got a little over exuberant and started “The Great Cheese Riot”.  I shall be doing a blogpost about that glorious day when I have spoken to the Archivist of the Museum of the Fifteenth Dragoons to see if the names of the Nottingham peasants they slaughtered have been recorded anywhere.

By 1900, the fair was all about entertainment of every kind, with Aunt Sally’s (sic), shooting galleries, swing boats, roundabouts and merry-go-rounds (is there a difference?). There were theatres showing short films called “animated photographs”. These included boxing matches from the USA, bullfighting from Boulogne in northern France and the famous “Dreyfuss Affair” which was probably the series of eleven short silent films made by the famous French director, Georges Méliès. The very biggest attraction, though, and the most exciting thing on offer, was the increasingly large number of huge spectacular machines powered by electricity. As Pat Collins, the owner of many of the attractions, said:

“the build-up of the mechanical side was very rapid as the manufacturers turned out better machines in each succeeding year”.

One perennial attraction was the Children’s Corner which was situated away from the main fair, at the junction of King Street and Queen Street:

The enntire Market Square was lined with stalls, which also continued up Market Street. These stalls sold “gingerbread, without which Goose Fair would hardly be Goose Fair”, “coconuts, almost equally indispensable” and a profusion of “comestibles and indigestibles”, the latter including mainly children’s toys, books and fruit. On Market Street, the stalls sold a profusion of wash leathers and sponges, and, for the children, there were “penny prize packets” which contained a mixture of tiny sweets and chocolates. There was also a Cheese Fair and a Poultry Fair, and out at Eastcroft, a large cattle market was held. Punch and Judy shows were very popular and they frequently graced St Peter’s Square, or the area in front of the Talbot public house, a little further on than the junction with Market Street.

Next time, the “Nymphs of fashion”, an ironic title, perhaps, given how willing they were to divest themselves of their clothing.

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by | August 23, 2023 · 6:17 am

Widdle (8)

Last time, I tried to explain why and how there came to be a healthy population of urban foxes living in the leafy suburbs of London. Within a decade, there were large populations of urban foxes in other cities with extensive leafy suburbs, such as such as Bristol, Manchester, Birmingham and Nottingham. One of these sophisticated city foxes even came to be a personal friend of Banksie:

There was nothing to stop the urban foxes.  On average, councils found that for every letter of complaint, there were 25 which said “Hands off our foxes”. And killing them off was very expensive. anyway. And unpopular. The Daily Express reported that…….

“Hackney Council ordered the removal of traps in a popular park within hours of animal lovers reacting angrily to the idea of the inner city foxes being destroyed.”

Nottingham, of course, has its urban foxes. On one occasion. long before I got to know Widdle, I found traces of them near a path between the Ring Road and the tennis courts. Here’s the path, which seems to be Nottingham’s first Linear Litter Bin. The tennis courts are to the left behind the chainlink fencing, and the ringroad is behind the heavy black metal fence on the right:

Something seems to have crawled underneath the chain link fencing which protects the tennis courts:

At one point I found this carefully excavated hole, which I believe to be a fox’s den.

In a city, there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of possible places for a fox family to live, such as disused sheds and out buildings and underneath garden decking. There’s plenty of food, especially if there is a fast food restaurant nearby. Indeed, news was released recently that foxes in cities have begun to have broader, stronger muzzles than their country cousins, because a certain amount of strength is needed to open the discarded food containers. Once the containers are open, though, the food that they contain will contain many more calories than the usual diet of a fox out there in the countryside, eating mice, hedgehogs, beetles and other insects.

It was Kevin Parsons, a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow, who recently announced that investigators had found that “urban foxes had wider, shorter muzzles than those in rural areas. Diet plays a large part in some of the changes. Urban foxes need a stronger bite for the food they eat in cities.

Foxes have all they might need in the city. Even their life expectancy is better than country foxes. The only fly in the ointment is mange which is a disease which can sweep through a city’s fox population and kill nearly every single one. Here’s a fox with the early stages of mange. Look at his tail ! :

Here’s a fox who is past the point of no return. He looks, and is, a terminally sick animal:

Don’t be fooled though! Sometimes a perfectly healthy fox can look as if he is at Death’s Door, when he is moulting, which is, of course, a perfectly normal stage of his life:

Surely you will recognise this rather tatty chap. He is called “Widdle” and was a personal friend of mine. He could look extremely ill when he was moulting, but there was a difference. If a fox is basically healthy, his moult starts at the tail and then spreads up towards the head, which is usually the last to go. Other body extemities, such as the legs, may also stay rich red rather than turn to that tatty fawn-pale orannge-black. And in the three photographs, one of a healthy Widdle and the other two of a fox with mange, that is exactly what is happening.

 

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by | August 11, 2023 · 6:17 am

Brincliffe Grammar School for Girls (4) A cry from history

What traces remain of Brincliffe Grammar School for Girls? Well, in Balmoral Road, the front wall still remains, running from No 23 Balmoral Road, all the way to the corner with Forest Road East and then past that for a few yards. It’s easy to see and it is virtually untouched. It’s a sandstone wall which continues round the corner and runs as far as what would have been the old boundary of the High School in, say, 1895. The wall continues for all this distance and the fact that it matches both of the two remaining Victorian photographs of the school is proof enough for me.

Here are the two pictures of Brincliffe still in existence. This is the older of the two:

And here is the one where the bike has been invented:

And here is a sample of the wall. The brighter, red one is modern, the tan coloured lower wall dates from 1870 at least. At the same time, you can see how, in modern times, it was thought wiser to make the original wall much higher.

The sandstone Brincliffe wall stretches all the way round onto Forest Road East and meets the old boundary line of the old High School (right). Here we are:

But what is this Victorian remnant? Some kind of fire hydrant?

At the side of No 23 Balmoral Road there is a pillar which clearly dates from the turn of the 20th century or earlier, and is visible in the second of the old photographs above. Here it is:

Further down, what has clearly been a gate to the school is still visible. In the controversial “pushbike-and-dog” photograph, it is down near the fir tree, but difficult to see. In the “Welcome, Munsters” postcard, it is the first gate you see in the wall and the ornate tops are clearly visible.  Here it is:

As  you know, I sometimes buy articles connected with the High School from ebay. A while back I produced seven blog posts called “Nottingham High School on ebay”. This link should take you to No 1 if you are interested. Sometime after #7 was published world wide, I bought this:

It shows a group of unknown children from what was called “Brincliffe School” although the presence of little boys must mean that events took place before 1907 when the Girls’ Grammar  School started up. I have no idea whatsoever what is going on with all their sticks and costumes. But the picture and the words that go with it really amount to a cry which comes from well over a century ago. And that wordless cry says

“Here I am. I used to be alive like you.”

And those sentiments are present in the picture but they are also written on the back of the postcard:

It reads, as far as I can see:

“Yours Truly

Bernard Raven

as

A Farmers Boy

First boy on top row to the left”

Just have a look at him. The back row, the boy on the left. He can’t even be trusted to carry a stick, and appears to have lost his. But he is the one we can look at and we know his name. Bernard Raven. He grew up, perhaps he fell in love, perhaps he married, perhaps he had children of his own. I suspect we will never know. But with a little bit of luck, he will be read about, if only for a few seconds, in Australia, India, the USA, all over the world. I hope he was happy with his life.

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by | July 29, 2023 · 6:17 am

Widdle (7) or, more accurately, the Rise of the Urban Fox

After the First World War, London began to expand as a city, particularly to the north and west. What had been farmland was now purchased and then built on. Many, but not all, of the woods were chopped down, the trees and branches were burnt, and new houses were then built on the site. The people who lived in those new houses for the most part worked in the centre of London and new words had to be invented to describe what they had to do in order to get to work. They took the train. Suburban, local trains, whose only purpose was to carry people who were now being called “commuters”, on their way to work. What they did was called “commuting”, and it obviously paid them to do it. Their salaries must have been high enough to justify adding a couple of hours to every one of their working days.

The very best paid commuters lived in what were called the “leafy suburbs”. They could even afford to buy a detached house near the golf course, with four or five bedrooms and a large private garden all the way round it:

In some cases, the leaves of the new leafy suburbs were attached to trees which pre-dated the building of the new houses. Builders with a bit of vision had soon realised that they could save themselves a lot of cash, and finish up with a much better product if they kept as many of the mature trees as possible. All they had to do was to build the houses between them and to do the same with the streets, if they could. Look at the age of these trees:

That slight change in approach by the builders had quite an effect on the suburbs created at the ends of the hundreds of the suburban railway lines which linked the centre of London with the houses where their office workers lived. And, to their credit, instead of just moving on elsewhere, the creatures which had lived in the woods before the developers arrived, made enormous efforts to stay in their homes and not be forced out.

In some cases badger setts survived the building process and remained unnoticed behind the park-keeper’s new storage sheds.

Hedgehogs hunted slugs and snails in rockeries and vegetable gardens, just as they had in spinneys, copses and woods.

Mice, shrews and rats went unnoticed, as they always have. But above all, one animal benefited enormously. That was “vulpes vulpes”, better known as the fox. They carried on their lives pretty much as they always had done, taking little or no notice of human beings and their machines. If anything, life was considerably easier, and food more plentiful now that they lived in a city suburb, which was always a few degrees warmer than the bleak countryside. And very soon London had in excess of 10,000 urban foxes. And many other cities experienced the same process. Bristol. Birmingham. Sheffield. And Nottingham, the home of the most famous fox of them all…….

Here’s another of them, hurrying to the fish and chip shop to see if anybody couldn’t eat all of what are, hopefully, generous portions:

Foxes, like all undomesticated canids, are extremely intelligent. Once they have made a friend such as a big, fat rabbit, they always like to see if they can get even closer to him, perhaps by pulling a likely chain:

And here’s one of the very few photographs of Banksy Fox”…….

Next time, we take a look at the quality of the sausages available in the Iceland supermarket chain, exploring the views of one of their keenest consumers…………

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by | July 23, 2023 · 6:17 am

Brincliffe Grammar School for Girls (3)

There was a strong connection between Brincliffe School and the High School but not, as you might expect, between the boys and the girls. Instead, the connection was a sporting one, and consisted of a number of football matches, all of them played between 1877-1880, when the physical building on Balmoral Road accommodated “Porter & Jones, boys’ school (Tudor House)”.

The High School had played their first match against another school seven years previously. News of the game appeared in the new school magazine, “The Forester”, which introduced a section entitled “Our Chronicle”, which was designed to allow reports about “the sports… of the School.”

Thus, on November 19th 1870, having travelled to Mansfield, the Nottingham High School First XI played a Mansfield Grammar School XV at football, beating them 3-0. Around 110 years later I took the First XI to Mansfield, not in a steam train, but by minibus, and we played them on a darkish Wednesday afternoon. We lost, although by then they had changed their name to Brunt’s School, now changed again to Brunt’s Academy. The Orange Arrow shows the High School, Mansfield is in the middle of the top edge of the map, and then see if you can find Eastwood, the birthplace of DH Lawrence, ex-pupil at the High School (1898-1901).

History always likes to puzzle us with the fogs of confusion that it loves to create, though. Just as we were digesting the fact that the High School played its first ever football match on November 19th 1870, when the First XI beat a Mansfield Grammar School XV by 3-0, I found that there is a some evidence that organised football was played by the High School even before this.

In just one edition of “The Forester”, there is an allusion to a football game between the High School and a Tudor House School XV on February 27th 1878. Charles Edwin Attenborough, the son of a hosier from Bilbie Street, was unlucky enough to break his leg and dislocate his ankle. It was reported at the time that, with the exception of one broken collar bone in, probably, the 1872-1873 season, this was the the first injury of any consequence “since the new school opened in 1868”.

This intriguing phrase might conceivably be taken to imply that football matches had taken place in that short interim period of just over two years between April 1868 and December 1870, when “The Forester’s” first reports appeared. This is so long after the event, though, that we may never know the exact truth.

Seven years after their first ever game against any other other school, the First XI played Mr Porter and Mr Jones’ “Tudor House” on October 31st 1877, probably on a pitch on the nearby Forest Recreation Ground.  The First XI won 15-0 and “The Forester” recorded that Tudor House did not once get the ball into the High School half, at any point in the game…..

“Goals were obtained as fast as the ball was kicked off.”

Fifteen had been scored “when time was called”.

Four months later, on February 27th 1878, again probably on a pitch on the nearby Forest Recreation Ground, the First XI beat a Tudor House XV by 3-2 (as already mentioned above). During this game, thirteen year old Charles Edwin Attenborough was unlucky enough to break his leg and dislocate his ankle. Despite our modern perceptions of the roughness of Victorian football, “The Forester” reported that, with the exception of one broken collar bone four seasons previously, this was the first injury of any consequence “since the new school opened” in April 1868.

And here it is, a photograph thought to have been taken on April 16th 1868, the school’s first day. The first lesson to be learnt was that more toilets would be needed if queuing was to be avoided:

A week or so after the glorious triumph over 15 boys in the Tudor House XV, on March 6th 1878, on the Forest, the First XI again played a Tudor House XV. and beat this slightly more numerous team by 2-0. These two games were the last two fixtures of the season 1877-1878.

During the following season, Tudor House scored their first ever victory over the High School. On a day misprinted in “The Forester” as October 60th 1878, on the Forest, the reporter said that “This was a very even game, but the fact that Bramwell and four other first team members were absent probably tipped the balance in favour of Tudor House.” They won by 1-0. We don’t know what colours the High School played in. In both these photographs, the colours are black and white. They come from 1897 and 1910, approximately:

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A year later, on March 12th 1879, at an unknown venue, but probably the Forest , the First XI played out a skilfully planned 0-0 draw with Tudor House. This fixture took place in an extremely high wind, which encouraged the Tudor House players merely to kick the ball out of play as far as possible at every opportunity. “The Forester” lamented….

“….Unfortunately there is no rule which provides for occurrences of this kind, but we should have thought there would have been a better spirit prevailing to prevent such unsatisfactory proceedings.”

When I was in charge of the First XI, around 2000, I employed this tactic and it was extremely effective. Even better is to kick the ball into the road, the busier the road the better. Boys are not allowed to pursue a ball in such circumstances and it has to be the teacher/referee who has to go and fetch it. Invariably, he always takes ages.

Seven months later, on October 15th 1879, and back on the Forest, the two teams met again, and this time the wind had dropped and the game finished 6-1 to the High School. Only five of the regular First Team were in what “The Forester” called the “motley crew” who won this game. Now, Mötley Crüe are an American heavy metal band formed in Los Angeles in 1981. Please don’t confuse them with the Victorian footballers. It’s easily done:

Being sensible, and playing Tudor House with a weakened team which lacked many of the regular First XI players didn’t last long, though. The very last fixture ever against Tudor House came on February 11th 1880. Again at an unknown venue, the High School triumphed. The score was recorded as

Nottingham High School “at least 12” Tudor House 0

“The Forester” wrote that

“the difficulty in this game was “not to get goals”, so weak were the opposition. Goal followed goal in quick succession, so that it was rather hard to keep a correct account. It was certainly not less than 12 goals, and may have been more.”

I once coached the Second Team in such a match. It finished 13-0 (referee). 14-0 (me) or 15-0 (several of the players). We lost, of course.

We once lost to another school team who had a nine-year old girl in goal. Their member of staff asked me if it was OK for her to play and I agreed, not knowing that she was Spider Woman in her spare time. We lost 3-2.

STOP PRESS

Elsewhere I have spoken about how, in the attic, I stumbled upon the box containing all of my slides from the 1970s and early 1980s.

The photograph below I took around 1976. It was taken from the corridor which ran down towards the then E13, and you can see the roof of the Old Gymnasium and the Assembly Hall, sometimes called the Player Hall. Directly behind that are the two buildings of Brincliffe. To help you identify them, they both have gables picked out in bright white……..

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by | July 8, 2023 · 6:17 am

My best friend, Widdle (6)

The  colour and texture of a fox’s coat may vary due to the change in seasons.  It will be richer and denser in the colder months and lighter in the warmer months. To get rid of the dense winter coat, foxes moult once a year around April. The moult begins from the feet, up the legs, and then along the back, finishing with the neck and head.

Widdle was a fox who came to us, apparently around two years old, one day in 2007. He was looking for affection and for help. He came to us from a desire to understand nice human beings, and most of all, for unlimited access to good quality sausages:

Over the three to four years that we knew Widdle, his appearance changed a great deal. He was certainly not always what our American friends call a “red fox”, because in the spring and summer months, he was the hapless victim of his single annual moult.

According to Wikipedia, quoted above, a fox’s moult “begins from the feet, up the legs, and then along the back”. Sometimes in June, in the middle of the moult, Widdle looked rather like he’d been down to the pub the night before, and had a few too many:

In May, he had tried stretching exercises, but that didn’t last long:

No, the only remedy is a couple of sausages. Or so we thought. It was actually more complicated than that.

Widdle’s main problem with his coat was fleas, particularly during the moult. Here he is, scratching away. As far as we were aware, it was impossible for humans to be infected by fox fleas, and in up to four years with him, we never thought we had. I did once inquire about trying to give him something against fleas, but we were told it was pointless. Something for a dog and its fleas probably wouldn’t work. It might give him an allergic reaction and kill him. And, as soon as he went back to Mrs Widdle, he would be re-infected:

Male foxes fight quite a lot and here he is with part of his coat ripped off, I remember saying to him “That look’s a very painful wound.”, and he said “Well, you should have seen the other fella’.”

By winter, though, Widdle has acquired that magnificent coat that we all know and love. In this photograph, he shows that certainly as far as he is concerned, the neck is the last section to change.

Anyway, by early September, the transformation is complete. All that is missing is the white tip to his tail, which, as far as I recall,  Widdle never had. Well, not in full anyway:

And certainly, by November, it is as if he had been spray painted “fox-red”. He has lost all the black bits on his legs and the black and white stripes on the upper sides of his paws. He is Red Red Red:

The last picture comes from April 2010 when the very first signs of the Great Itching Time are beginning to appear. Even so, the coat still looks exceptionally thick and is standing on end to trap the warm air:

 

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by | June 28, 2023 · 6:17 am

Brincliffe Grammar School for Girls (2) Before and After

Having started my researches abou the Brincliffe Grammar School for Girls on Balmoral Road, I could not resist trying to find out more, and more, and more……..

Using my very sad collection of Kelly’s Directories of Nottingham, I was able to trace just a little bit of history, not so much for the Brincliffe School, but for the site where it would eventually be situated.

And so, in 1876, (the year of Custer’s Last Stand), on the corner of Balmoral Road and Forest Road, on the western side, was “Porter & Jones, boys’ school (Tudor House)”. In other words, the same building which would, one day in 1907, house Brincliffe Grammar School for Girls, had been, thirty years earlier, a private school run for profit, inside what had originally been a private house. The two partners in the business were Messrs Porter & Jones, and they had given the school the name of “Tudor House”.

Three years later, in 1879, the entry reveals that Tudor House had become a boarding and day school and that, of the original partnership of Porter & Jones, Mr Gregory Porter seemed to be the Head Honcho.

In 1881, the house, now apparently the property of Mr Gregory Porter alone, was now No 25 Balmoral Road. No 23 is still standing, the house immediately to the left of the main entrance to the High School staff car park. In 1885, the situation was exactly the same.  Tudor House, and Gregory Porter, were still in business. Here’s Nos 19, 21 and 23 today, complete with original Victorian sandstone wall:

Alas, by 1891, Tudor House was no more, and the school became “a ladies’ school” for ladies. under its Headmistress, Miss Blanche Hall.

By 1894-1895, the Misses B. & K. Hall were running a boarding and day school at No 25. The house was now called “Brincliffe”. Why they had chosen this name, I do not know. Presumably, it refers to the “brink” or edge of a “cliff”, a reference perhaps to the small area of steeply sloping ground to the northwest of the Church Cemetery, overlooking the much flatter and much lower, Forest Recreation Ground.

Here is that “brink of a cliff”:

The slope is actually quite steep and, while not a cliff, it would have seemed a lot more precipitous 140 years ago because there were no trees then. The trees are quite young for trees, only around 80-100 years old. Here is a view inside the trees on a very familiar path down from the High School (and Brincliffe) :

The slope is certainly steep enough to sunbathe on. Here is a lovely Sunday afternoon with people in their Sunday best, relaxing around the long gone bandstand. See if you can solve “Where’s Walter?” and can you spot Robin Hood?

And here is the much lower flat area, which has always hosted any number of football/soccer pitches. In 1865, they had seen the birth of Nottingham Forest, nicknamed at the time, the “Garibaldi Reds”:

So, by 1894-1895, the Misses B. & K. Hall were running a boarding and day school at No 25. It was called “Brincliffe”. And now you know why!

By 1898-1899, “Brincliffe” had been acquired by the Misses Koppel & Hall. It was still No 25. In 1904, Miss Amy Koppel was running the boarding & day school on her own, the premises still with the same name and number.

In 1907, the City Council made it a Girls’ Grammar School, but from 1913 onwards it is listed as just “Notts County Secondary School, Miss Sybil Randall, head-mistress”

I have not been able to find any pictures of the girls in their green blazers and Green Berets, “à la John Wayne”. That crumpled, baggy 1950s blazer is still the only thing I’ve found:

One final detail.

The very first mention of a school on the Brincliffe site was “Porter & Jones, boys’ school (Tudor House)”. We know this already, but one thing I did find was that in 1862, a Miss Sarah Porter was running a “school” on distant Woodborough Road. In 1864 she was named as Miss Sophia Elizabeth Porter, presumably the same person (or perhaps sisters), still in an un-numbered location on Woodborough Road.  Unfortunately I have no directories available for the period 1864-1876.

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by | June 11, 2023 · 6:17 am

Brincliffe Grammar School for Girls (1)

When I am writing blog posts, just like David Bowie and Jimi Hendrix, I don’t normally do requests. On the other hand, I did feel a little bit guilty that, months ago, somebody contacted me and said, very politely, “Maybe one day you could tell us a bit more about Brincliffe School, please?”. Regrettably, I did not record their name. On the other hand, the Hairy Godmother has granted their wish………

Brincliffe School was situated in Balmoral Road in Nottingham, immediately to the east of the High School. This Grammar School for Girls occupied the area between the western corner of the junction with Forest Road East, as far south as No 23, the first house of a row of three storey Edwardian properties. The Orange Arrow tells the tale, indicating precisely the southern boundary of the now demolished school:

Here’s the Victorian equivalent of the same area. The Brincliffe building is south west of the “B-A-L” of “Balmoral Road”.:

Brincliffe didn’t really look much like a school. It was more like a school housed in a private dwelling house:

At one time, when it was a private house, Dame Laura Knight, the artist, had lived there. Not many pictures of the building are left nowadays. It was demolished in the late 1970s. Here is the view from the south. The key to linking up the two photographs is the bottom left of the photograph above, and the centre right of the photograph below. The three windows and the gate with a portico are crucial links. Don’t miss one man and his dog who have stopped for eternity next to the telegraph post.

Brincliffe was an all girls’ grammar school, which operated from 1907-1974. Entry was by passing a competitive examination. Unlike Nottingham Girls’ High School, no fees were payable. Such selective, and free, schools were a fantastic source of social mobility and an excellent examination for the poor.  Everybody in the school had a talent and the schoolwork they did was of a very high standard. At Brincliffe, girls had a genuine opportunity to do what they wanted to do with their lives, with little interferece, except from their own families.

The school produced a Gold Medallist in the 1974 Commonwealth Games, an Oxford don, a member of the D’Oyley Carte Opera Company, any number of students at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and innumerable doctors, dentists, solicitors and politicians. And all of them came from an ordinary background. If you doubt that, then go and look at their Facebook page.

The most famous high achiever from Brincliffe was surely Dame Laura Knight, the painter.   One of her most famous paintings was “Self portrait with a nude”. It caused a right fuss:

She also did a lot of paintings of World War Two. They included “A Balloon Site, Coventry” in 1943:

The superbly composed “Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-ring” in the same year of 1943:

And a portrayal of the crew of a Short Stirling bomber in 1943. It is entitled “Take Off “, and I found in one account that the poor young wireless operator had been killed almost before the paint on the painting had dried :

Dame Laura was one of a very few female artists during her era. Another famous Old Brincliffian was Enid Bakewell who played for the English women’s cricket team in twelve Tests between 1968 and 1979. Her batting and bowling averages show that she could well be  regarded as the best all-rounder that the English women’s game has ever produced.

The Brincliffe School ran from 1907 onwards, for almost seventy years. There was only a single thirty girl form in each year, so everybody knew each other. The pupils used to wear dark green blazers and berets. Here is a typical green blazer of the period:

Brincliffe had only five Headmistresses during its history, the Misses Randall, Yates, Yonge, Lloyd and Carter. Teaching at Brincliffe came to an end in 1974 and I can remember still seeing the typical Victoria building during my first few years at the High School, from 1975 onwards. I have vague memories that, as the school was so close to the High School, we were allowed to use the empty classrooms for some of our smaller classes, such as Sixth Form groups. Brincliffe didn’t die in 1974, but it was severely wounded by a Labour Council’s decisions.  It was merged with another school for girls on Gregory Boulevard. This was the Manning School, formally opened by Alderman Manning in April 1931. (Aren’t local politicians just shameless?)

When Brincliffe and Manning merged, they also became a comprehensive school catering for girls aged between 11 and 16 years. In 1983 the school moved to new buildings in Aspley, a suburb further to the west, whilst the old school buildings on Gregory Boulevard became the Forest Comprehensive School. In September 2011, the Manning School became the Nottingham Girls’ Academy, the first all girls’ academy in Nottingham. It catered for girls aged between 11 and 18 years old.

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by | May 23, 2023 · 6:17 am

My Dad’s cars (3)

I have already told you about the love of my Dad’s motoring life, his Hillman Minx De Luxe, Registration Number BLT 141B. He gave it to me after he retired, and I had it for about two or  three years. Here is a picture of it in the car park of the old Savoy Hotel in 1980, on our wedding day. That’s why the picture’s so shaky:

Here I am driving this 1964 car, as it gradually began to get rustier and rustier :photo 4

It was in this Hillman Minx that, back in 1968, Fred was returning from Wigan down the M6, when, because the motorway was still in the throes of construction, he failed to see the tiny hand-painted direction signs, and finished up in a building site in Birmingham, having missed his turn off in Stoke-on-Trent. That sounds incredible, but he’d never been on  a motorway before. Wigan is a town in Lancashire and is indicated by the Orange Arrow. My Mum’s parents lived there. The other towns and cities are in capital letters. Fred was aiming at Burton-on-Trent near Derby, which is south east of Stoke:

He was driving the same car in Leicester (south east of Derby) when he got lost and was forced to ask a policeman the way. Realising that he was dealing with somebody from out-of-town, this eminently sensible officer told Fred to avoid a rather horrific one-way system by driving fifty yards the wrong way down a one way street, while he promised to turn a blind eye to the whole thing.

It was again in this very same Hillman Minx that, three years later, Fred again missed his way in that very same city of Leicester, and went the wrong way up another one way street. Instead of being able to solve the problem by the previous method, however, Fred was forced on this second occasion to extricate himself from the situation by executing a three point turn in the face of a rapidly advancing four lanes of densely packed vehicles.

I have vague memories too, of getting lost as we went on holiday for the first time to the Yorkshire coast at either Bridlington or Scarborough. We stopped at, I think, Pontefract, somewhere near a power station, to ask the way.

The man that Fred approached spoke with an accent which was completely incomprehensible, and after a few frustrated minutes, Fred just drove off at top speed, angrily spinning the wheels on his rather sedate family saloon. At the time, he insisted that, against all the apparent mathematical odds, he had managed to find the local village idiot at his very first attempt.

Incidentally, above, you can see the Britain’s Lead Soldier version of the village idiot which usually reaches £200 at auction.

Nowadays, I think, in calm retrospect, that the man’s Yorkshire accent may well have been beyond us. It is difficult, though, even to best guess the location of these events. Perhaps it was near the huge power station at Ferrybridge where the A64 to the east coast Yorkshire holiday resorts left the main A1 trunk road, as it would have been at that time. The power station was demolished a long time ago:

Whenever Fred left his car anywhere unfamiliar, such as when he was away on holiday, or for any length of time in his own local area, he would always immobilise it by removing part of the carburettor . On occasion, Fred would even immobilize the car when he parked it on his own drive. It was years after his death that I realized that in this apparently bizarre zeal for crime prevention, Fred was only carrying out the orders that he would have been given in the early part of World War Two, in 1939-1940, when it was a serious criminal offence to leave a vehicle without totally immobilising it. There was a very real fear of imminent invasion, and the arrival of Nazi paratroopers, many of them disguised as nuns. And even in 1975, the Soviet Spetsnaz forces would have drunk a bottle of vodka each in celebration to have found such a fast and classy vehicle as a 1964 Hillman Minx. Here’s their badge in case your car is ever stolen. Spetsnaz are everywhere:

This Hillman Minx was THE car of Fred’s life. He had it for more than sixteen years, before, around 1980, he passed it on to me as a newly qualified driver. I in my turn used the car until it failed its MOT test by a very wide margin, some £300 when my annual salary was £500. I then duly drove it back from Nottingham to Woodville, where my family lived. Fred was then able to drive “that Hillman” as he always called it, on its last ever journey, the short distance from 9 Hartshorne Road to Donald Ward’s scrapyard in Moira Road. Here it is, complete with Victorian bottle kiln:

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by | May 5, 2023 · 6:16 am

My Dad’s cars (2)

My Dad’s first car was an Austin A40 Devon, in Connaught green, with the registration leters of LXJ 701…..

After the Austin A40 Devon, Fred had a 1959 Ford Anglia, registration number SNR 863, which he bought from a garage in nearby Ashby-de-la-Zouch. It was exactly like this:

I can still remember how the milometer on the Ford Anglia spun round as Fred drove sedately along, recording three or four miles for every mile travelled. This, of course, was because the seller had wound back the mileage clock to make the car seem less used than it really was. Here’s the crooked garage today. It has been replaced by an award winning architect’s supermarket:
When I was around eleven or twelve we used to go and visit a nearby toy shop, “Shellbrook Motors” which used to sell Dinky and Corgi die-cast models of cars and larger vehicles, Airfix and Frog aircraft kits, and Hornby model electric railways. By 2017, they had changed a little and were selling artists’ materials, although they did refuse to pay the signwriter’s bill on this occasion:
There were no Ford Anglia type problems of low level criminality and cheap plastic with Fred’s next car, an English Hillman Minx De Luxe, BLT 141B. This beautiful blue car with the metallic chrome side stripe was “the one” as far as Fred’s motoring career was concerned.
He had taken me to Derby one day, and we visited Peveril Garage, on Friar Gate, near the headquarters of the Derby County Supporters’ Club:

Fred told me not to mention anything whatsoever about the day to my mother, under any circumstances. Without consulting her at all, therefore, he bought the car, priced at £510, which was, in those days, a princely sum. Indeed, the price was such a total royal that, when my mother did eventually find out how much the car had cost, she would have had Fred beheaded if she could have organised it. The car was a rich pale blue, half way between sky blue and navy blue. Here is one today:

In later years, when he had problems with rust on one of the wings, Fred was to opt for a total respray, which allowed him to retain the same colour blue for the body, but to incorporate a black roof which added that extra, unique, little detail. Here it is, with James Bond driving it, back in the days when I was 28. I had always wanted a personalised number plate, and this was the time when I changed my name to “BLT 141B”:

This was also the day that I caught both Francisco Scaramanga and Auric Goldfinger hiding together on a building site:

It was in this car that Fred had what were probably the most outstanding motoring experiences of his life. I can still recall, for example, just how scared he was, and indeed, we all were, when he drove a circuit of the Alpine like road which ran around the Great Orme near Llandudno in North Wales.

Indeed, some thirty years later, I returned to look at this road for myself, to see whether it was quite the challenge that it had seemed in the late 1960s. And, of course, the circuit had been considerably watered down since then. All the sheer drops down to the sea had now been fenced off, and, most significant of all, perhaps, a narrow road which I remember as having been two way, had been limited nowadays to just one way traffic. Gentrified, I think the word is:

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