Geoffrey Dennis

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Posts posted by Geoffrey Dennis

  1. Hucknall Highway.

    in 'Mucky Ukna' Bull'el Baasford & Hyson Green

    Posted

    Hi, I am confused. The Peppers shop in my memory was smaller than the one in the photo, had only one window and I can not remember it selling papers.My sister believes, based on the age of her daughter, the launderette has been there at least 50 years and in a recent conversation was telling me a micro brewery had set up in what was half of the Peppers shop and had recently extended into the other half.

  2. Henry Mellish

    in All other Nottingham Schools Discussions

    Posted

    In response to philmayfields comment about smoking, I did smoke and there was a shop on George St in Hucknall who would sell you a cigarette with two matches. Why two matches? I always assumed the rationale was either in case the first match went out prematurely or you put the cigarette out half way through and wanted to light the nub. The shop by the way was called Mrs Lees. I was a paper boy for Bullens whilst at the Mellish and if there were any undelivered papers left when I finished my round, Norman the Shop Manager would bribe me with 10 Park Drive to take them out as well. A problem solved and a smoker secured for the future.

  4. Henry Mellish

    in All other Nottingham Schools Discussions

    Posted

    I attended the Mellish between 1955 -1960 and thoroughly enjoyed my stay there Now I know there will be comments about "distance lending enchantment" and though I do admit to having my coloured  spectacles re-tinted, I still believe given the same opportunity I would attend again.I vaguely remember sitting the 11+ Exam but do not recall any body saying what potential effect a pass would have on my life.I certainly don`t remember deliberately changing my attitude towards my mates in my immediate locality after I started at the Mellish but relationships did alter over time. Possibly this was the result of wearing a uniform and using the word "actually" at every opportunity whether appropriate or not.I can honestly say I never saw any bullying at school either by older boys or prefects,teachers however were another matter, a topic I will come onto later.At some stage during my early days I was grabbed by the prefects stood on a chair and asked, not told, to sing a song, which I duly did Having already read Tom Browns School Days I,perhaps naively, saw the song incident as a way of maintaining traditions, rather than bullying.Maybe the incident gained me brownie points because I was never bothered by prefects again and to be perfectly honest never really aware of their presence let alone feeling threatened by them. I cannot remember what song I elected to sing but it certainly was not the Lincolnshire Poacher. Two incidents involving Mr Hutchinson and myself are imprinted on my memory for ever. The first was Mr Hutchinson asking me to bend over with my head a few inches away from the wall whereupon he ran across the room and kicked my backside causing my head to hit the wall. It would be classified as a double wammy these days. Cannot remember what I had done to displease him, probably noticed me breathing. The second incident involved Mr Hutchinson and a class mate of mine who I will call BT. BT had transgressed and was called to the front of the class. Words were exchanged and Mr Hutchinson concluded the discussion by hitting BT at the back of the head. BT started crying I am sure out of frustration more than pain. Mr Hutchinson looked round the room,saw me and said "Dennis your a friend of BT come here".As soon as I arrived and with no warning Mr Hutchinson hit me quite hard at the back of the head, turned towards BT and said "He`s not crying Why are you.I never saw either incident to be representative of the whole of the school rather the efforts of a weak man trying to maintain discipline.and certainly no other master who taught me had to resort to those methods..

    • Like 1

  6. Hucknall Shawls

    in 'Mucky Ukna' Bull'el Baasford & Hyson Green

    Posted

    During our mid teens, friends and I used to camp on the land around Black Rocks. The camping equipment in those far-off days was basic if not primitive and because we were  hitch hiking would share carrying the weight of the tent, Primus stove sleeping bags, food etc between us,so if any body had failed to arrive, we would have been in bother. We would regularly meet up with a Tanker whose driver, having discharged his load of flour at a bakers in Watnall, was on his way back to base through Derbyshire. As he did not go through Cromford he would drop us off as close as possible and we would hitch hike the rest of the way as best we could. Back then bumpers on cars were set a significant distance away from the body. One night a driver stopped for us who only had room for one and the two rucksacks.Never being a person to look a gift horse in the mouth I let my pal get into the car while I spent 15 minutes whizzing though the pitch black Derbyshire night stood on the back bumper As funds were limited we would take all the food we needed with us and spend our money on beer and cigarettes in a pub called the Miners Standard which was run in those days by a little old lady who thank God, had no regard for age limits I remember falling off Cromford Station platform without any ill effects after one of those drinking sessions I remember  also lying in a tent in the middle of the night listening to a radio in a far off neighbouring tent playing a song about a girl called Samantha. This event had such an effect on my psyche, years later it is the name we christened our eldest daughter      

    • Like 4
    • Upvote 1

  11. Whatever happened to those 'old fashioned' ailments?

    in Owt' Abaaht Nowt !

    Posted

    I fell over on a freshly Tarmacadamed Road at the age of 9 Years which caused a condition called Impetigo. Can not remember if I was given any medication to take but do remember my face being painted purple. As the condition was highly contagious I was not allowed to attend school  for several weeks.A colleague of mine was diagnosed with T B at a young age and strangely can remember playing football on the Sunday and being in an isolation hospital the following morning.Fresh Air was the order of the day with the doors and windows permanently open irrespective of the weather conditions outside.Apparently  the older patients took the Fresh Air instructions to heart and used to sneak out to the Pub at night time for a pint or two. 

  17. Hucknall Shawls

    in 'Mucky Ukna' Bull'el Baasford & Hyson Green

    Posted

    As woody said,games of football and cricket were played on the bottom rec,particularly during the summer months . The football games were never structured. The goal posts were a heaped pile of coats and jumpers,the distance between which was ,never measured or defined.The length  and width of the pitch was arbitrary,determined sometimes by a natural obstacle like a hillock or the brook or on other occasions,man made obstacles like the path or a fence.The number of players on each team varied between three and how ever many.If you arrived before the game started you would be "picked" to play for a particular side,arriving late you would hang around behind one of the goals,until you were "nodded on" by one of the players and told which way to kick.In the absence of an official referee,any dispute would be sorted by the eldest or the biggest, Might Is Right. The duration of the game was determined by every one having had enough or when it got too dark to see the ball.I could see part of the rec from my bedroom window and would look enviously on at lads playing football on a fine summer evening between stints at doing my homework.The grass on the rec was allowed to grow long and then mowed. The mowing was a precursor for younger kids to scrape the cut grass together to make dens or to tie knots in the longer strands to make a club with which to hit each other.Just how much Dog wee and poo we got on our hands performing these antics does not bear thinking about. The removal of the green iron railings at the top of the rec was an indicator of the imminent arrival of a fair (wakes) or a circus My Dad had died when I was 10 so money was tight and never available to spend on extravagances such as the wakes .I never felt deprived because I was motion sick on roundabouts anyway. When my Dad was alive, he  insisted we locked the Entry Door to stop people attending the fair using the Passageway as a toilet When the wakes had departed we kids would scour the rec looking for spent bullet casings from the 22 rifle range or money dropped by the visitors. On the rare occasions a circus arrived , "helping" to erect the Big Top would result in a free ticket. A bonus for my Dad were the round Elephant Turds I used to collect in a bucket for his garden. The arrival of the dark , cold, winter nights saw the torches brought out to play Jack Jack Shine A Light  on either the rec or the spare land on which the Post Office stands.Another diversion for the cold days and evenings was the winter warmer. A winter warmer was an opened baked bean type can with series of holes punched through the sides and bottom using a nail Two diametrically opposed holes were punched near the top through which a loop wire was threaded to make a handle. The next stage was to scavenge the local area looking for small combustibles such as sucker sticks , twigs or tiny pieces of coal from the floor of the Coal House.A fire was then lit in the winter warmer and once the flames had taken a proper hold ,the device was spun in an arc around the head or side of body using the wire loop. The rush of air through the holes in the winter warmer encouraged the fire to burn ever hotter. The final spin of the evening saw the wire loop released,resulting in the winter warmer soaring into the darkening night sky like a flaming comet with fiery tail .The rec brook ran down the left perimeter,under the middle foot path and exited via a culvert which had metal bars to preclude human access The metal bars provided an excellent basis on which to construct a grass sod and mud dam resulting in huge lakes of  water. Titchfield St ran from the Connery to the High St parallel with Albert St and had a shop on the corner .The knitwear factory shown on Cliff Ton`s informative map was on Titchfield St and was Calladines, later known as the Hucknall Manufacturing Company .Across the street was a hard surface tennis court which I assumed belonged to the factory although I never saw it in use.

    • Like 4

  18. Hucknall Shawls

    in 'Mucky Ukna' Bull'el Baasford & Hyson Green

    Posted

    Woody is correct, the Factory on the corner of Albert St and the Connery was indeed Wollets whilst directly across Albert St from Wollets was a small shawl manufacturing unit called Saxons. I was born on Albert St in early 1940 and lived there until 1968. I attended Hucknall National School and in consequence walked past Wollets Factory twice a day on my route to School.The bottoms of the large windows of the factory on the Connery side where painted white, although I never knew whether this strategy was to screen out the sun or the inquiring eyes of walkers passing  by. The viability of the whitening out only lasted for me until I grew and could look over.In retrospect the workers must have felt like Goldfish in a very large Goldfish Bowl.Wollets Factory building has been converted into Flats and very smart they look too, although I have been told recently they have acquired some sort of Listed Building status such that only wood can be used in window construction for example.I wonder if any of the Flat occupants are aware of the hard graft which undoubtedly took place whilst the factory was in operation. On Hucknall High Street facing Albert St was the old Post Office Standing with your back to the Post Office, the shop on the left hand corner of Albert St was Shaws Butchers Shop with a slaughter house to its rear and on the right hand corner was Woolworths. At at back of Shaws was an area on which stood buildings in which Baily`s stored pots.Walking down Albert St from the High Street stood victorian terraced houses on the left and Woolwoorths yard on the right At the end of Woolworths yard which was walled was an open area to the side of which stood a large detached house with it`s own field This field extended as far as the High Street and was terminated by a gate.At the side of the house ran the Town Brook which flowed in a culvert under houses on Titchfield St and Albert St.Across the Brook was the beginning of Pearlthorpe Drive , in the first house of which ,lived a lady who ,even in those far off days carried a Pomeranian Dog around in a flat bottomed open top wicker basket.The terraced houses on the left continued all the way up the street as far as Wollets Factory  From the front  room of one of the houses Mr  Haslam sold hardware items including galvanised metal dustbins so, just where he and his wife lived I don`t know  In one of the gardens just past Mr Haslams stood a hand operated water pump housed in what I can describe as a "sentry box" looking cover. Further up the street lived two spinster aunts of mine who having worked in textile factories all their lives were both profoundly deaf Even in the early 1950 there was still no electricity in their house ,so one of my jobs was to go to Mr Haslams to buy gas mantles for their gas lights. Because the mantles were extremely fragile I was always under strict instructions how to carry them..The family house stood on the right hand side next door to a provisions shop which also operated from their front room .Next to this shop was a cobblers run by Mr Wadsworth who wore aTrilby hat all the time and it wasn`t until sometime later I saw he had a growth the size of a tennis ball attached to his head. Poor old lad was in a period pre the National Health.At the top of the street on the right hand side was the Rec which when I was very young still had Air Raid Shelters on the left hand of the path which ran down the middle.At that time Hucknall had two Rec`s,our`s was the"Bottom Rec", the"Top Rec" being on Annesley Road. Will Post more soon.

    • Like 6

  21. Geoffrey Dennis

    in Message Test Forum

    Posted

    27 minutes ago, MargieH said:

    Geoffrey, I found your above reply, but I didn't see it until I'd read the ones on my profile!  It's a bit like letters crossing in the post, isn't it.....  best to continue on here now, I think.

    Please tell us some of your early memories of living in .Nottingham.  That's what we all love to read

    It was the Mellish postings which originally drew my attention to the forum.Please forgive any apparent signs of bad manners for none are intended. Hopefully mistakes will be eliminated as I become more proficient at postings.

    • Like 1

  22. Geoffrey Dennis

    in Message Test Forum

    Posted

    1 hour ago, MargieH said:
    1 hour ago, MargieH said:
    1 hour ago, MargieH said:

    You need to click on 'start new topic' Geoffrey.   Keep trying... you'll soon get the hang of it.    You were born the same year as me by the way.

    You need to click on 'start new topic' Geoffrey.   Keep trying... you'll soon get the hang of it.    You were born the same year as me by the way.

    You need to click on 'start new topic' Geoffrey.   Keep trying... you'll soon get the hang of it.    You were born the same year as me by the way.

     

    1 hour ago, MargieH said:

    You need to click on 'start new topic' Geoffrey.   Keep trying... you'll soon get the hang of it.    You were born the same year as me by the way.