Merthyr Imp
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Posts posted by Merthyr Imp
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Something my mother used to say (this was in Lincolnshire) was: 'He knows how many beans make five!' Meaning someone who couldn't be fooled, or knew what they were about.
As a child this used to puzzle me and I would ask her: 'Well, how many beans DO make five?' But she would never give me a straight answer.
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Hi,I just want to tell you that tonight on BBC four there has been two Rock and Roll half documentary's
9pm-10pm Rock and Roll Britannia
Thanks for the tip-off about that. I must say Six-Five Special seemed a lot less cutting edge than it did at the time! Hands up who spotted the ex-boxer Freddie Mills in one of the clips shown.
My hero was Tommy Steele, and I've still got this book:
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Now that was a car that I always wanted !
Looks like they were made by the Austin motor co .
Gosh - I've just seen the price! Our pub must have been doing good business at the time.
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This was my first car! It would be a collector's item now. I don't know the maker, but I daresay Austin would get a cut from the sales. It was originally green , but we repainted it red - it was probably still green at the time of the photo as it looks a bit battered. Solid metal, not like kids' pedal cars of more recent times, although you had to be careful of some of the edges against your knees (no long trousers in those days!). The boot and bonnet both opened - the latter to reveal an imitation engine, and the headlights worked from a switch on the dashboard. What looks a bit like a spotlight was actually a horn or hooter, but whether it was original or whether my father fitted it I can't say.
The photo would have been around 1953 or 1954.
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Morris 8.
We had one of these (all black though) when I was about 9 or 10, to be precise in the 1959 to early 1961 period.
Note the rearward opening front doors which was the norm in those days, and regarding hand signals, etc, there were no indicators of the modern type - remember those little orange semaphore arms that cars had? In this photo you can see it in its slot between the two door windows. It makes you wonder just how visible those were. As I remember they had a little bulb inside, but the light must have been hardly visible in daylight and surely not very noticeable at night either.
One thing I remember my dad saying is that the headlights were very feeble and were on a 6-volt system instead of the 12 volts of more up to date cars. Does that make sense?
But I went on two long holidays with my dad in our Morris 8. In 1959 during the long hot summer that year we visited North Wales, travelling via Manchester where we visited the Belle Vue Zoo and what would now be called theme park. Then it was on to Liverpool where I remember a trip on the ferry to Birkenhead and back before we went through the Mersey Tunnel and worked our way along the coast as far as the other side of the Menai Bridge before turning for home. We stayed bed & breakfast along the way, although the only place I can remember staying is Colwyn Bay.
The following year we decided on a camping holiday and took a tent in the car, heading for the south coast. I'm not sure if it was the first night, but I remember a camp site on the hill overlooking Portsmouth. We also visited Southampton, having a look at the docks but weren't lucky enough to see any of the great ocean liners. We did have a boat trip to Cowes on the Isle of Wight, where we saw the Saunders-Roe works and the mothballed Princess flying boat:
http://1000aircraftphotos.com/Transports/Princess.htm
After making our way along the coast it was around Hastings when it began to rain, which continued for two days and literally put a dampener on things. I remember at one camp site the Morris wouldn't start, probably due to the rain having got under the bonnet (on the spark plugs?). But we managed a ride on the Romney, Hythe & Dymnchurch Railway before making our way up to London for my first visit there (aged 10). I remember seeing the trolleybus wires there on our way through the suburbs - they ran in London for another year or two. We then had a tour round the sights of London in the car, and although the rain had stopped by then I think we'd had enough of the tent as I remember we spent the last night in the car somewhere in a lane end off the old A1 to the north of London.
Well, none of this is much to do with Notts, but a few memories prompted by the picture of the car!
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These are what I was on about ...... I knew I hadn't gone senile !!
Off of the Nottingham FB groups site.
https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/947207_4733379744148_452649691_n.jpg
Yes they're trolleybuses, and at the back they looked like the picture in Michael Booth's posting on 5th May and didn't have doors at the front. Hope that clears it up!
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I only know of the ice hockey team of that name.
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Was he a little bull ?
No - here he is:
http://www.knightfeatures.com/KFWeb/content/features/nonkffeatures/UM/Ferdnand/Ferdnand.html
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Anyone else remember the cartoon, 'Ferdinand' in the Nottingham Evening Post?
Yes - wasn't it actually 'Ferd'nand'? He wore a sort of pointed hat, and I don't think there was any text, it was just the drawings - a 2 or 3 frame strip.
Speaking of the Post, how about the characters that used to appear in the heading of the Football Post? See below a scan of my copy of the Post Football Guide for 1964-5 which shows them. They represented the nicknames of the teams that were covered in the paper. In case anyone's not aware, they were (from left to right):
Chesterfield - 'The Spireites' (a man with a crooked hat like the church spire)
Lincoln City - 'The Imps' (someone's idea of an imp - not much like the actual Lincoln Imp - see my picture!)
Notts County - 'The Magpies' (a magpie wearing a hat)
Nottm Forest - 'The Foresters', as they used to be known before 'Reds' caight on (meant to be a representation of a forester)
Manfield Town - 'The Stags' (a man with stag's antlers)
Derby County - 'The Rams' (a man with ram's horns)
Leicester City - 'The Filberts', as with Forest, another old nickname (meant to be Gilbert the Filbert, who was the subject of an old song)
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One man operation????? How would you collect the fares?????
A small window was removed at the back of the driver's cab on the left, and the idea was that he had to turn more than half round in his seat so fares could be collected from people as they got on. As catfan says, not a very successful idea.
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The Hillman estate was all the vogue.
I thought this was the vogue:
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That's the style Merthyr Imp . I can just see them, in my minds eye, with the trolley bus stuff on top too.
Er - yes, but they weren't trolleybuses and had nothing on the roof. The diesel engine was transverse at the back as with this later version:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/23207961@N07/5602140903
Another thing is that the trolleybuses were never painted in that livery style - they were all green with the three narrow cream bands:
https://www.flickr.com/groups/trolleybus/pool/johnmightycat/page2/?view=lg
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I stand duly corrected and chastised, I have just had a quick gleg online and every picture I've found has the rear platform.
The doors I remember all had four 'slats' to them as opposed to the Bournemouth ones two.
You're possibly remembering the early Daimler Fleetlines introduced in the early 1960s (which were not trolleybuses!):
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New members can't be expected to read the thousands of old posts before they dare post something.
Now you tell me.
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We had to do Shakespeare for O Level so did one of his plays every year working up to that.
English Literature O Level was one Shakespeare play (Twelfth Night in my year), one 'modern' play (Saint Joan by G.B.Shaw) and one novel (Far From the Madding Crowd as I mentioned before)
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At High Pavement (1961 to 1966) I remember in the first form the first book we had to read was also Three Men in a Boat. We also studied the Sherlock Holmes stories, then I remember The Day of the Triffids (John Wyndham), The Invisible Man (H.G.Wells), Coral Island (R.M.Ballantyne) Kidnapped (Robert Louis Stevenson) and Hard Times (Dickens - and it was a hard time reading it!) For O Level it was Far From the Madding Crowd (Thomas Hardy).
The first three of those, plus Sherlock Holmes, have remained among my favourite books to this day.
Almost of those could be considered classics, or - except maybe for Coral Island - adult fiction, but these days all my son (aged 12) seems to get at his school is 'teenage fiction'.
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I also had a building set that had real miniature bricks. You built a house just the way you would build a "real" house. It took forever to build and to take it apart you soaked it in water to dissolve the "mortar". I have no idea what it was called though.
That would have been Brickplayer. I never saw one myself, but it used to be advertised in the Meccano Magazine.
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Yes, if you could see Woolworth's in Derby you must have been going from one station to the other. Surely it would have been from Friargate to Midland, from where you could get to various seaside places - may have been Blackpool, or how about Llandudno?
So would it have been more convenient from where you lived to get a train to Friargate and change stations in Derby rather than go to Nottingham Midland and set off from there simply changing trains as necessary without having to cross Derby town centre?
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Here's another photo of Broad Marsh as it existed at that time. I can date this to the first half of 1970, as NCT Leyland Atlantean no. 527 was new that year, and I changed from my Instamatic to a 'proper' camera in the July.
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My da used to say I'm going to turn my bike around. Meaning he was going to the. Loo
In the late 1960s/early 1970s I worked with someone who used to say 'Just going to see if the train's in the station'
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I'm interested in the lower picture. Did the broken brick wall face Canal Street? and were the buses parked in a sort of dead end?
It looks like the time when Carrington Street was being cleared. I'd be very glad to see any more because I'm interested in the time when Broad Marsh was being re-developed.
I'm not sure just how it was oriented (forgotten!). You could be right. All I can say is that it was at the time when the original semi-circular layout of Broad Marsh bus station had been replaced for a few years by the 'straight' version next to the viaduct as seen in this photo of Barton's Bedford VAL no 989. This is the type of vehicle, of course that featured in 'The Italian Job'. Not many were built.
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Merthyr Imp, are you sure about the location of the first shot (469)? I might be totally up the spout, but I would have guessed this was round the back of Chilwell garage. (In addition the 24 wasn't a Huntingdon Street route - I think it was either Stathern or Long Clawson, which I'm pretty sure both started from Broad Marsh).
No - it was definitely Huntingdon Street. Below is a photo of Barton AEC Reliance no. 934 (with home made lower front end) taken at almost the same spot but from slightly further back.
And the photo below is from further back still. A Red & White Motor Services Bristol RE. What that was doing in Nottingham I don't know - possibly on an Associated Motorways service, but it was VERY rare to see a Red & White in Nottingham (they were a South Wales company).
You'll see the little church/chapel in the background - part of it can just be made out in the photo of 469 (along with the tree).
A good many photos have been taken in that spot - it features in many of those by G. H. F. Atkins which appear in several books.
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Here's a couple of my photos:
469 parked at Huntingdon Street in the late 1960s
474, I think at Broad Marsh, sometime in the eatrly 1970s
I don't think I travelled on one, but imagine them being rather cramped - especially if you were going all the way to Skegness, which service they were used on at one time.
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I've just been reading through this thread an' it's bin tekkin me back.
Someone mentioned children using the word 'puddywinks' meaning something easy or simple. In my day it was puddywinkles, or sometimes easy puddys, or just puddys for short.
I've come across those lists of Nottinghamspeak expressions before. How about:
mekkit guh bakkards - put the car into reverse
snote tuh duh wi me - it isn't my fault
knee-ow - no
wotcher on about? - what do you mean?
sup wi yo? - what's the matter?
gerraway wi yuh - I don't believe you
gerraht! - I don't believe you!
I sometimes like to confuse people here in the valleys by talking about safto, or asking ayamashed?
My Bike rides
in General Hobbies and Interest Chat
Posted
That must have been the Lincoln to Grantham line - closed in 1965 if I remember right.