Tag Archives: Moira Road

by jfwknifton | 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 :

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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Filed under History, Humour, my Dad, My House, Nottingham, Personal, Russia

Tagged as 9 Hartshorne Road, Birmingham, BLT 141B, Bridlington, Burton-on-Trent, Derby, Donald Ward’s scrapyard, Ferrybridge, Hillman Minx De Luxe, Leicester, M6, Moira Road, Nazi paratroopers, Orange Arrow, Pontefract, Savoy Hotel, Scarborough, Spetsnaz, Stoke-on-Trent, village idiot, Wigan

by jfwknifton | November 27, 2019 · 6:17 am

The place where I grew up (3)

Last time, we finished Part Two standing in the middle of Moira Road with our backs to the traffic, hoping that Woodville, my natal village, did not yet have anybody with a silent electric car. First on the right is the Junior School that I went to, now closed down and fenced off, and used by Derbyshire County Council as a Youth & Community Centre:

My Dad went to the Junior School in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and I went there in the late 1950s and early 1960s. My Dad then worked there, and, in fact, taught me in what would one day be Year 4. I was also taught by Miss Cartwright, Mrs Burman and Mrs Simpkin. All four of them were excellent teachers and tried as hard as they could, even though their classes had around forty five to fifty pupils.

Next to the school is the church of St Stephen:Nowadays it’s a lot more dramatic as St Stephen the Martyr, but we all knew it as St Stephen’s. After going to the school next door and standing in the playground as a little boy and watching the swifts nest under the eaves of the church, Fred had his funeral there in 2003.

The next building was the Church Hall where our School Choir, District Champions, gave a concert for the Old Age Pensioners in 1962:

I think it’s just being repaired rather than being derelict. Next comes the only shop in the road, namely Hopper’s, which always seemed to sell the coldest fizzy drinks and ice cream, when we returned from playing sport at the Recreation Ground. Hopper’s had a door which clanged with a mechanical ringing effect and this unique sound was emphasised by a grey, metal grille on which customers were supposed to wipe their feet as they entered the shop.

Here is the shop today, alas:

Between the Church Hall and Hopper’s is the house where Fred, my Dad, was born on November 30th 1922. No blue plaque as yet. It’s the house with the three windows in the roof:

Right at the very far end of Moira Road was another shop which was close enough to the Recreation Ground to provide cold fizzy drinks and ice cream for young children playing sport up there. I have forgotten the name of the shop owners, but they were much more like a convenience store with tinned vegetables and canned fruit for sale. Here is the shop today. It’s as good as derelict if you’re thirsty from a good game of football:

Next time a trip up High Street, or, as my Grandad would say, a trip “up Box”, using the old expression for Woodville, taken from the man who took the toll money in the eighteenth century. We’ll see Albert Taylor, Reg Ashmore, Renée and her chip shop and Graham Fowell, who left his Dad’s business to become a minister of the church.

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Filed under History, Humour, My House, Personal, Politics

Tagged as chip shop, ert Taylor, High Street, Hopper’s, Miss Cartwright, Moira Road, Mrs Burman, Mrs Simpkin, Old Age Pensioners, Reg Ashmore, Renée, School Choir, St Stephen, St Stephen the Martyr, the Junior School, Woodville

by jfwknifton | April 7, 2018 · 8:14 am

Earthquakes and Lights in the Sky

At least one physical phenomenon is very rare in Nottingham. Would that it were not so:

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“Northern Lights,” or “Aurora Borealis” was first recorded as having been seen in the neighbourhood of Nottingham during the winter of 1755-1756. The Northern Lights appear at their best according to an eleven year cycle, and 2015-2016 was quite a good year, so keep yourself entertained by doing a very long backwards calculation!
Here is a website which will tell you when is a good time to look for the Northern Lights.

Another physical phenomenon is almost equally infrequent in Nottingham…Thank Goodness!
And luckily, when it does happen, it tends to do little damage, and it soon gets forgotten. Who remembers this one now?…

“August 23 1752 The severe shock of an earthquake was felt in Nottingham and the surrounding district, about 7 a.m. Great alarm, but not much damage, was the result. The day was remarkably fine, both before and after the shock.”

And forty years later, another earthquake came to nothing…thank goodness:

February 25, 1792 Between the hours of eight and nine this evening, an alarming shock of an earthquake was felt in the Midland counties, but particularly at Nottingham, many of the inhabitants running out of their houses, expecting them to fall upon their heads. The shock was preceded by a rumbling noise, like the rolling of a cannonball upon a boarded floor.”

Another Victorian source mentions an earthquake on October 6th 1863:

“The earthquake appears to have been felt over a great part of England” and it was decidedly more severe in the western parts of the country, especially the West Midlands:

“At Birmingham walls were seen to move, and people rose from their beds to see what damage had been done, for though the rumbling, grating sound is like a passing train, it was known at once to be something more. At Edgbaston successive shocks were plainly felt, and houses were shaken to their foundations. At Wolverhampton everything in the houses vibrated. The houses cracked and groaned as it the timbers had been strained. The policemen on duty saw the walls vibrate, heard everything rattle about them, and were witnesses to the universal terror of the roused sleepers.
At Cheltenham, a deep rumbling noise was heard, the heaviest furniture was shaken, the fire-irons rattled, heavy stone walls were heard to strain and crack, and the boys at Cheltenham College were all under the impression that the rest were engaged in making the greatest possible disturbance.”

I was unable to find a picture of the boys of Cheltenham College, but, much better, here are the splendid young ladies of Cheltenham Training College around the same period:

And what of Nottingham? Well…

“October 6th 1863 A slight shock of earthquake was felt early in the morning in Nottingham, and in most parts of the country.”

and then, just over a year later:

“October 30th 1864 Slight shocks of an earthquake were felt in Nottingham, and in various parts of the country.”

Those two earthquakes were so insignificant that they have, literally, not passed “the test of time” and I have not been able to find really very much at all about them.

In fairly recent times, my Dad experienced an earthquake in South Derbyshire:

“On one occasion when he was walking home from his job as a teacher at Woodville Church of England Junior School in Moira Road, Woodville, Fred was the hapless victim of an earth tremor. It must have been quite frightening because, as he was to relate many times in subsequent years, he was able to watch the pavement rippling up and down with the force of the shock.

Seismological records for the local area show that this event occurred most probably on February 11, 1957. Here is my Dad’s quiet little mining village around that time, in the late 1950s: