The Show Must Go On: A young man’s adventures with a travelling show in 1950s Britain

By Bernard Ross and Rus Slater

"running away from home" aged 15 Bernard Ross joined a travelling funfair, this book follows his adventures as one of the last live funfair wrestlers in the UK

• Language: English
• Publisher: AUK Authors
• Release date: Jan 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781785380587

Book preview

not-so-innocent.

Chapter 1

An End

In her hands was a bouquet of wildflowers gathered from the surrounding meadows.

Her clothes were her ‘Sunday best’, and she wore every piece of her jewellery; necklaces, bracelets and rings. The large, gold hoop earrings, that she had worn every day since she was seven years old were in her ears. She even had her late husband’s miniature Great War medals pinned to the breast of her black woollen coat, just below the fur-trimmed collar.

She was cold. Stone cold. Stone cold dead.

She had been lovingly laid on her narrow bed, dressed in her finery, surrounded by all her possessions.

Outside, in the rain, in a circle around her, stood her ‘family’. Some forty people, ranging in age from babes-in-arms to people in their sixties. To two of them she was Mum, to others, Grandma, Auntie or Old Mrs Rose. The ‘old’ was not a term of disrespect, but a formal title rather like the queen ‘mother’. To some she was loved, to all she was respected, to a couple she had been feared. They stood in the drizzle, stiffly and in silence as a mark of respect.

As the first tiny tongue of flame began to grow and multiply along the doorstep of her ‘van, there was a palpable relaxation in the assembled circle of people. This may not be the end, but it was the beginning of the end.

An hour later, the caravan roared. The heat from it had caused the only movement in the people; they had shuffled back a few feet to escape the worst of the heat that had originally been welcome in the chill early morning mist. The respectful silence that had pervaded the meadow was now shattered by the crackling of old timbers, the sizzling and popping of blistering paint and the bursting of jars and cans in her store cupboards. The people remained silent.

This was the passing of the matriarch. Though her husband had died many years before, passing the reins of the Show to her sons, she had been there for as long as anyone could remember; indeed she had lived ninety-six years with the Show, and for the past seven had never left her ‘van. Each evening her elder son, Charles, had knocked respectfully and taken a cup of tea and a glass of port with his Mum. His wife, Anne, had cooked and delivered Mrs Rose’s meals and had cleaned the van each day. It had fallen to one of the young lads to empty her chamber pot twice daily.

The pot-bellied stove in the van had not been cold for that past seven years. Now it glowed red in the blazing inferno.

Still the people stood in respectful silence.

With a loud bang, one of the ‘blooms’ burst explosively. As that corner of the van dropped, the shock load broke one of the main structural foundation beams. As the floor of the ‘van buckled the walls caved inwards, pulled by the remaining weight of the cupboards and pictures inside. The barrel roof broke in two and collapsed, and the whole caravan disappeared in a cloud of brilliant orange sparks and flying embers. The assembled people flinched and were grateful that they had moved back earlier. Still the people stood in respectful silence.

As the cloud of embers settled, the roaring died down. Starved of so much air, the fire took on a less aggressive tone, flames danced rather than leaping.

Still the people stood in respectful silence.

Slowly the flames became smaller. The last standing timbers collapsed or slowly keeled over into the bright mass of smouldering, red embers.

Still the people stood in silence, though an observant and alert watcher would have seen the occasional shuffle of feet as people tried to keep warm and aching joints moving in the cold, damp, afternoon drizzle.

Bright red embers gave way to white ash edges and the heat slowly dissipated. Cold crept in as the height of the fire fell, closer and closer to the ground.

Still they stood in silence, as if frozen and uncomfortable.

At last Charles turned and walked slowly away. His wife, Anne, followed and the people took this as their cue to disperse, still silent, back to their own ‘vans.

Tonight there would be no show; there would be no movement to another field. There would be much drinking and much storytelling about the old days. The days when Showmen’s ‘vans didn’t have ‘blooms’, but iron rimmed wooden wheels. The days before Charles’s Dad had gone off to the War.

Tomorrow there would be some bloody sore heads! And mine would undoubtedly be one of them.

Chapter 2

What Am I Doing Here?

By force of two years of habit, I tended to wake early in those days and, so it was that morning that I awoke shortly before dawn.

My head was throbbing. My eyes were gritty and sore. My mouth felt and tasted like the bottom of the proverbial budgie’s cage. I lay in the darkness waiting for the various pains to subside and watching the weak grey edge of the dawn’s light creep across the inside of the roof of the 15 ton AEC Mammoth Major 8 truck that was now my home.

There is nothing like a death to make a man ponder the meaning of his own life, even a man as young as I was; for I was only 17 years old.

You, dear reader, don’t know me from Adam, so it would not have crossed your mind, as it did mine, to wonder what the hell I was doing here. Had I been born into a travelling family, had I had a showman’s blood coursing through my veins, then there would have been no question as to why, at this tender age, I was parentless and sleeping alone on the cab of an ancient, knackered and heavily bastardised former army truck.

My name is Bernard Ross and I was born into a relatively normal middle class family in Surrey. I attended a private preparatory school and seemed, from that young age, to have a fairly clear, professional, middle class life ahead of me.

It is popular today to believe that fatherless children and homeless youths are a phenomenon of broken Britain; that conglomerate mess which resulted from years of liberal policies, national shame and ego-centricity that have been such a feature of successive governmental policies since the swinging sixties. But in reality, it started long before that.

I was born in 1943 and my parents were traditionalists. My mother had been educated at a convent and my father at Chigwell School, a small but successful public school in Essex. They had met whilst striving to improve themselves at Pitman’s secretarial college and had married in 1930. My mother had immediately become a housewife and my father secured a management job in merchandising.

My mother’s traditional values included what must have been, even for the age, an amazing level of sexual inhibition because it took them 13 years to produce me!

And I’m an only child!

She was also a great believer in forward planning for her unborn children and so she saved money to send me, at the appropriate stage of my life, to my father’s alma mater, Chigwell School. In my formative years, I went to a fee-paying preparatory school in order to prepare me for the career plan my parents had mapped out for me.

However, my father’s employer was the US Air Force at Ruislip and in 1951 they offered him the opportunity to take a contract job at one of their bases in West Germany. The average salary in the UK in 1951 was £546 per annum. The Yanks were offering my father an annual salary, in Germany, for three years, of £4800. It was an opportunity he couldn’t resist, but my mother was a traditionalist. She would not countenance leaving England, especially not to go to Germany, to rub shoulders with the very people who had just spent six years bombing the living daylights out London. One of my earliest memories is of the quiet, whispered arguments and the long stony silences that resulted from the two of them each sticking to their guns. Eventually my father went alone. I stayed with in England with my mother in Buckhurst Hill.

Father was good at his job but lonely in his new life; he was the only Briton on a base of 3000 Yanks in the midst of a nation most of whom he couldn’t even talk to. With no family to go home to at the end of the working day, and few friends to spend his time with, he turned to the bright lights, well stocked bars and the card games of a garrison town in an occupied country. Let’s face it, he could afford to. Soon he was involved with a German woman and it wasn’t long before he asked my mother for a divorce. Disgusted with him she agreed and so I was now officially from a broken home.

1950s divorce settlements were not as generous to ex-wives as they are in the 21st Century and, even though she was represented by no less a personage than Sir John Mortimer, my mother found life as a divorcee, a constant financial struggle. My childhood home was invaded by a stream of paying lodgers and my mother also went to work as a shorthand typist for a local solicitor. Hence, I was an early latchkey kid, developing a streak of self sufficiency and independence that ultimately became a critical survival factor in my later life.

I took my 11 plus and was as I said, destined for Chigwell School. Sadly, it now transpired that the money my mother had carefully saved up had been purloined by my father to pay off his gambling debts. Public school therefore was not an option, but I still managed to get a place in the grammar school in Leyton. This wasn’t a step down as the school has produced such intellects and influencers as Frank Muir and Derek Jacobi.

My mother was obviously not cut out for a stressful life and when I was just 14 she had a nervous breakdown. I was farmed out to my grandparents, ten minutes walk down the road, to give her a break to recover. The final part of her convalescence was a brief holiday in Butlin’s and, whilst she was there, she met an older man who was grieving for the recent loss of his wife. It must say something for the fledgling National Health Service that the prescribed ‘treatment’ for bereavement or nervous breakdown was a week’s stay in a spartan chalet in Clacton and nightly ‘knobbly-knees’ contests.

My mother clearly became relatively fond of this chap and, as he was in need of a companion and carer, my mother married him and moved to his home in Southern Kent.

The 1950s is credited as the era that invented the teenager and the one thing my mother’s new husband didn’t want or need was a boisterous teenage boy. Unwelcome into the new life of either my mother and stepfather, or my father (who by now was back in the UK with his German wife and working for the USAF in north- west England), I no longer had a home that would support my continued education. I had to quit school. Whilst my mother packed up, put the house on the market and moved to Hove, I found a small bedsit and, being quite good at maths, managed to get a job as a booking and ledger clerk at Baxter’s, a wholesale fish merchants, in Billingsgate market. I was 15 years old.

Such an entry-level job in the 21st century would mean sitting at a desk with a telephone and a PC in a warm comfortable office away from the shop floor. In 1958, things were a bit different; I actually sat at a four-foot high, slant topped Dickensian style desk, perched on a high stool. My feet were above wooden floorboards that were covered with sawdust. I was constantly surrounded by sweating, grunting porters heaving tottering stacks of wooden crates full of fresh, salted, frozen and stinking fish. Not only was my nose assaulted by the stench, but my ears constantly rang out to the calls and yells of the porters. This wasn’t the occasional, single heavily accented, One pound fish! of Muhammad Nazir in 2012~ it was a 10 hour cacophony of noise from several thousand, hard working and hard swearing men who made Billingsgate famous the world over for the quality of its fish and the quantity of its profanity. Long before Health and Safety and Union regulations made workplaces ‘comfortable’, the physical labours of the porters may have kept them warm, but I froze sitting still all day trying to concentrate on columns of handwritten figures.

Billingsgate market was a tough place to work, though I never met them, both Reggie and Ronnie Kray were employed there at the time, and the attitude of the employers was similarly unsympathetic. I worked a 48 hour week, starting work at 5 am, including Saturdays, in return for a wage of five pounds.

My life at this period wasn’t all gloom and despondency, I had a girlfriend! Her name was Sarah and she and her parents lived nearby. We were fifteen going on nineteen and we were, unlike Leisl Von Trapp, not ‘quite naive’. Sarah was still at school and her parents would not allow her to visit my bedsit. I don’t think my landlady would have been impressed either, so, since we were clearly too young to go to a pub, Saturday evenings were generally spent in the front room of her parents home, ostensibly listening to the daring music and chat of radio Luxembourg.