Tim in the North East

On a trip to the tip just to the north of Newcastle upon Tyne I saw the Red Arrows flying low in close formation having just left the Sunderland Air Show and returning to land at Newcastle Airport. They all pulled back their sticks and Ros vertically in a column formation before peeling off one after the other to form a line to land in rapid succession . Not part of their official display but very impressive!

'Silver' coins (3d, 6d, 1/-, 2/-, 2/6 and 5/-) up to 1919 were 92.5% silver. From 1920 to 1946 they were 50% silver - but from 1947 they were cupro-nickel with no silver content

This topic has brought out the best in Nottstalgia - collaborative research, involvement of lots of members, open debate and testing ideas, and lots of friendly banter

I got a sympathetic hearing from the M62 police when they pulled me over in my 20 year old Volvo estate late at night for having no MOT. 'Clearly it is a well maintained car' they said 'but 3 months oversight by you is more than we can ignore. Shall we say a non endorsable fixed penalty?'. I recognised that that question was not an invitation to negotiate - and indeed a £60 fine, no points on my licence and strong advice to get it MOT'd first thing in the morning was very reasonable.

First car was a Morris Minor Traveller OVO920F. Had been part of a TV repair firms fleet that their mechanic bought for himself. I bought it from him for £350 in 1974 with 79,000 on the clock. Part exed it 3 years later with 109,000 and a sunshine floor. Still felt a criminal getting rid of it.

I believe Griffin and Spalding had a hostel where there single staff could live - at the top of St Ann's Hill which is off Woodborough Road, between its junctions with Cranmer Street and Corporation Oaks.

It is not my photo - but if you go to this website you will see a picture of 676 in its retro livery https://m.flickr.com/#/photos/youremts/28077707386/

I no longer have a copy of the 1969 RCTS exhibition book ? - it would be fortunate if, in that mine of information, someone was to discover an entry that confirmed the location of the YMCA hut at Midland Station.....

This has been a real joy to share in the detective work - Cliff you had better find some more obscure postcards!

Sadly it is too far away from Tyneside to make a special trip - but I wonder how it compares with the 1969 'Railways of Nottingham' exhibition that was held at Wollaton Hall in 1969? I did attend that and from (distant) memory was very good - but there again I was only 15 at the time.

Here is a long shot. If upu look at the picture of the hut that Cliff posted you can see that it is not rectangular in plan - but more of a trapezium shaped. Therefore, one approach is to look at the old 6" and 25" Ordnance Survey Maps on the NLS website for that era and see if there are any buildings near Midland Station with such a trapezium shaped footprint. The attached is an extract from the 1920 6" map - and I have circled a possible contender for the YMCA Hut - if this is in the photographer wold have had his (or her) back to the railway and would be facing south. That would put the t

The Posaners were our next door neighbours for about 6 years. Very kind and genuine people who took a real interest in you. They had a colour TV from the start of colour broadcasting in 1967 - when we still had a black and white set - and they regularly invited me round (as a 13 year old) to watch programmes in the new fangled colour. It took my parents another 4 years to get a colour set so I saw quite a lot of them!

Was that the Posaner family who had Bennett's typewriters business on Mansfield Road?

If you look at the website for the Nottingham Jewish Congregation (http://jscn.org.uk/small-communities/nottingham-hebrew-congregation/) the Synagogue moved from Chaucer Street to Shakespeare Street in 1954. The Shakespeare Street building was originally a Wesleyan (Methodist) Chapel and was bought by the Jewish congregation after the Methodist church closed. The phrase 'Enter into his gates with thanksgiving' may well have been there from the building's days as a Methodist Chapel as it comes from Psalm 100 in the Old Testament so is common to both the Christian and Jewish scriptures.

Or a Mars bar perhaps?

Thanks for the notification - I will go into Northumberland where there are some seriously dark skies

In 1972 my Austrailan relatives were visiting and went shopping in the Victoria Centre branch of Boots. The sales assistant was startled when they asked if the paper bags containing their purchases could be fastened with some Durex, At that time Durex was a common brand of adhesive tape in Australia - and Durex was the generic used for of all such sticky tape as we might use 'sellotape'.

Ray - brilliant video clip - those 6 minutes recapture most of my early 1960s train spotting experience up the line at Carrington Station. Such a variety of sadly tired locomotives doing sterling work.

That is a great bit of research Cliff. I had mistakenly assumed that the Abel Collin Maternity Hospital was in the Waverley House building on the opposite side of the road at 13 Waverley Street opposite the top end of the Arboretum. That building subsequently became the PNEU school ( which I attended in the late 1950s and early 1960s) and more recently Lovell House of Nottingham High School. The reason for my mistake was that when I was at that school we knew the building had previously been a hospital - as the room used as the cloakroom was built as an operating theatre extension and stil

Mick - I have only just looked at this thread - you have clearly done a great job as I never noticed the migration being done

The lack of railway authenticity has been an issue for quite a while. If you take the example of the film versions of The 39 Steps then whilst none of the three versions strictly follow the book's locations all have Richard Hannay escaping from the train in Scotland. The 1935 version has Robert Donat climbing out of the train on the Forth Railway Bridge - as does the 1959 version with Kenneth More. But in the 1978 version Robert Powell's Scottish train escape was filmed on the Victoria Bridge on the Severn Valley Railway!

In the last years of British Rail I was due to travel from Kings Cross to Newcastle upon Tyne. However, something had blocked the East Coast Main Line at Grantham - so the solution? We were told that not only would our tickets would be accepted on the St Pancras to Nottingham and Sheffield train - but they would also run that same train on to Leeds and York where we could pick up an East Coast service. I got home with a delay of an hour or so and got a nostalgic trip through Nottingham! Don't think it would happen nowadays.

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A friend had a Honda N360 - a city car with a 360cc engine. Absolutely under- powered when used to transport 4 blokes!

Someone once told me that the coast of the Holderness Peninsula in East Yorkshire was where people who believed the earth was flat went to peer over the edge.....