Life Isn't All Smooth Waters

By Neil Reid

An interesting varied life from 1934-2014 experiences living in five countries with a stimulating mix of farming, British aristocracy, politicians and spies.

The author who was already at school in the UK when the Second World War was declared describes wartime childhood, post war life, his fathers service in MI6, military service in Germany, his career in agriculture managing the agricultural estates of the Queen Mothers and Mountbatten families, leading for six years a successful major protest organization and being a Member of a British Parliamentary Committee but declining to become an M.P. Emigrating to Canada in 1981, he started a new career with interesting changes. Although his wife with whom he had four children, died there in 1998, he later married a Cuban and now has a home in Cuba where he spends the majority of his time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: May 24, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504966795

Neil Reid

The author was at school prior to the start of the Second world War has clear memory of German bombing and seeing Winston Churchill. His father was a member of the SIS (MI6) and following the war was Head of Station in Vienna. His mother an artist and teacher in consequence raised the author and siblings largely on her own. Following attending an ancient English School, he studied agriculture at Aberdeen. After military service in Germany, an agricultural career managing large historic estates brought him into close personal contact with the families of the Queen Mother and Lord Mountbatten. Protest involvement resulted in him becoming a member of a British Parliamentary Committee but declining invitation to become an M.P. In 1981 at age 47 he, his wife and family immigrated to Canada where he started a new management career. Ten years after his wife died he married a Cuban and now spends most of his time in Cuba. With a fascinating background he lucidly describes eighty years of unusual life and of history.

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© 2016 Neil Reid. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse  05/24/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5049-6678-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-6679-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015920097

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Contents

An Inch Too Short

War Looms

Foreign Service

‘We’ Win The War

Peace Without Prosperity, Frying Tonight

A Farmer’s Boy

Student Days

National Service

Work

Entry To Management

The Cost Of Trust

Return To Agriculture

Starting To Move South

Hertfordshire And The Bowes Lyon’s

The Luton Airport Battle

The Opportunity For A National Airports Policy

Politics?

Improvements

Brabourne/Mountbatten Move

Immigration

AN INCH TOO SHORT

Born in Bradford, Yorkshire of Scots parentage, I was registered there at birth as Ranald George Carlyle Reid but by the time I was christened at Gilcomston Church in Aberdeen where my maternal grandfather was an Elder, my name had been changed to Neil Smith Carlyle Reid. I was told later that this was because the English were calling me Ronald not Ranald. My older brother Ian was born in 1931 and my sister Kirsteen known as Kirsty in 1939.

My father graduated M.A. at the University of Aberdeen in 1927 when he was 22. The economic challenges of the twenties and consequent difficulties in finding secure employment resulted in many Arts graduates spending a further year taking a teaching diploma after graduation and then teaching. One of the last Acts of the Scottish Parliament in 1697 was to determine that every parish in Scotland should have a school and that education should be available to all free. England adopted similar educational policy in 1875 almost two centuries later. Scotland’s history with four Universities by 1500 when England had two and the Union of the Parliaments in 1707 with political authority centred in London followed by the divisions created in 1745 brought about the Scottish Enlightenment but also reduced economic development potential and resulted in large numbers of generations of well-educated Scots necessarily having to seek employment in England and abroad during the following centuries.

My father came from a poor but respectable family his father, a lithographer who worked much of the time in the US, had paid his own fare home to volunteer to serve as a Jock in the Gordon Highlanders at the late age of 37 in 1914, and to be killed near Amiens in France in 1917 at the age of 40. This left my grandmother with a 6" bronze plaque bearing thanks from the King and Country and a private soldiers pension. She had two daughters and two sons the eldest son was killed on a motorbike at age 16, leaving my grandmother to raise the other three children, two girls and my father who was the middle one. Caroline the eldest daughter was too old to be eligible to compete for the Kitchener Scholarships which commenced in 1921, so she worked for a bank then immigrated to South Africa again working in a bank and was commissioned in the South African Air Force during the Second World War. When Verwoerd and his apartheid government were elected in 1947 Caroline said she refused to live under the Nazis and moved to Southern Rhodesia at that time providing the best education available to the black population in Africa and the agricultural breadbasket of the African continent. She died in 2004 aged 101 in what had become Harare, Zimbabwe, by then a destitute country, under the appalling Mugabe Dictatorship.

Both my father and his younger sister Joan won Kitchener Scholarships to attend University. My paternal grandmother died at a comparatively young age, just two weeks prior to my birth and my father’s only comment to me later in life was that she had worked herself to death raising her children alone. In consequence I only knew one set of grandparents. Although my mother was a year older than he, she and my father attended the same secondary school, Aberdeen Central School later renamed Aberdeen Academy. My mother was the eldest of six and her father was a Police Inspector in the Aberdeen City Police where his father-in-law, my great- grandfather, had served as a Chief Inspector. My father was a regular visitor as a child to my grand-parent’s home and was I think much influenced by the stability and family structure within the home. Thus it was that following graduation in seeking secure employment in the economically stressful period of the late 1920’s he turned to the Police. There was however a problem, in that the minimum height requirements for the Scottish Police Forces was 5’10. My father was 5’9. In consequence being ineligible he of necessity considered England where he found that the City of Bradford force was thought rather progressive, having introduced a system of district police boxes. Painted red, each was about 5’ Square, with a small door, a fixed desk along one wall, a single chair and a telephone. Each Constable had a beat which started and finished at the box, where he reported at intervals. Even Bradford, with a height restriction of 5’9 had momentary doubts, as the Constable responsible for taking measurements of recruits, made my father cringe by banging the measuring bar on his head and then saying: Half an inch too short." Re-measurement however was made and it was accepted that he made the grade with one eighth of an inch to spare. Another measurement taken for uniforms, which provoked comment, was that in a force of 320 members, my father had the largest cranium upon which to balance the famous British Bobbies pointed hat. So, he was accepted and became the first University graduate to join a police force in Britain. A compulsory five years had to be spent as a Constable before seeking promotion, but in 13 years he had risen through the various ranks to become a Superintendent, a record for any police force in the country.

My mother debated entering University as she had an excellent record of academic achievement. However, she followed her main interest and attended Gray’s School of Art, where she took both the Diploma and Post Diploma courses, completing five years study in four. She then took a further year of study obtaining her teaching Diploma. When a student she earned some pin money by singing and giving stories on childrens programmes in the early days of the BBC. This followed taking part in concerts across the North-east of Scotland as a member of the Students charity group. In 1928 she moved to London and for curiosity submitted her portfolio to both Heals and Liberty’s. Both offered her positions as a designer within a week. She in the brief intervening period was offered a position teaching, security again beckoned and she accepted. The relationship with my father never ceased, he was her only boy-friend when she was fourteen and he thirteen. In early 1930, she left employment in London, moved to Bradford and married him.

Bradford although built almost completely of gorgeous cream Yorkshire stone, was black. At that time the centre of the World’s woollen industry and in the heartland of the dark satanic mills it boasted one mill chimney for every day of the year. The City is set in a basin, with a stream, the Bradford Beck, known justifiably as t’mucky beck running largely underground in a culvert which proved to be of insufficient capacity in 1948 when following prolonged downpour water rose up through the drainage system and flooded the City centre to a depth of 4’6. My older brother Ian, younger sister Kirsty and I were born in Bradford. Had our father had been one inch taller we might well have been born in Scotland. The saying Where there is muck, there is money", may well have been coined in Bradford. Originally a small market town in Airedale where sheep and wool had been the staple economic base for generations, the industrial revolution transformed it with much of Australia’s wool production being imported there for conditioning and processing.. The Leeds Liverpool Canal the construction of which had commenced in 1770 gave transportation access over the Pennine Hills to Manchester and the west coast with the Five Rise Locks which had been completed at Bingley adjacent to Bradford in 1774 being the highest in the country. The high humidity and ready access to large volumes of soft water from the millstone grit formations in the Yorkshire Dales provided ideal conditions for storing and washing wool. Wool derived wealth was the reason why the Rolls Royce Motor Company sold more cars in Bradford than any other city in Britain. The largest mill chimney in the world Listers almost 300 feet high was built entirely of Yorkshire stone and it was said that prior to being raised to their elevated position a horse and cart was driven around the capping stones, dominated the western skyline. The Lister family’s original mansion and 54 acre gardens later became the City Art Gallery and the City’s largest public park with a lake, an example of a petrified tree and also of a prehistoric cup and ring boulder.

Yet, despite the prosperity Bradford also boasted 25,000 back to back houses. These were in terraces running up the hillsides with a central wall dividing houses on each side and stone privies. In consequence there was no through airflow. Living and working conditions resulted in the actual physical growth of Bradfordians being inhibited. To provide bathing opportunities other than a tin one in front of the fireplace, the City of Bradford Corporation built 27 swimming pools with Slipper baths. In contrast to the housing many of Bradford’s public and private buildings were magnificent. Some of that money was used to employ the best architects of their day, and buildings such as the City Hall with statues inset of the Kings and Queens of England and Great Britain. St. Georges Hall seating over 1600 now the oldest concert hall still in use in the UK commenced construction in 1849 following an architectural competition and opened in August 1853 having been financed by a group of German origin Bradford Jewish wool merchants. It was there where I went as a boy to hear the Halle Orchestra conducted by Sir John Barbarolli playing Elgar and the Rite of Spring by Frederick Delius, the latter had attended school at Bradford Grammar School. Other splendid buildings included the Swan Arcade, the Jacob Behrens building in Forster Square, and Rawson Market, Bradford’s public buildings compared with any City in the country in architectural merit, but they were all uniformly black. Given a good wash, Bradford could have been the Paris of the north. The places of worship were predominantly chapels. The traditional West Yorkshire non-conformist Wesleyan, Congregational, Methodist and Salvation Army chapels, far outnumbered the Church of England churches although of course it had the Cathedral. Many of those chapels have gone or now have minarets attached and serve as mosques following the importation of mostly illiterate peasant workers from Pakistan to do shift work at a time when many mills were performing three eight hour shifts per day. The City has been wantonly re-developed as its historical buildings have been torn down, the Swan Arcade for example a predecessor of the later concept of shopping malls having been opened in 1880 was demolished in 1962. Indeed a Labour MP, named Mitchell when asked about Bradford on the BBC around 1975, responded, Bradford? e’ee I knew Bradford when it was still standing. With the centre of the City at about 350 ft., and with outlying districts like Queensbury rising to over 1,000 ft. smoke hung over the central basin and those 25,000 back to back houses whilst the outlying modern suburban districts looked down upon it. The working class bordered on the edge of poverty and even in post Second World War years, I saw a family drinking their tea from jam jars. Corner shops sold a concoction called sarsaparilla and Fish and Chip shops were to be found in every district with an even larger number of pubs and bars.

At the time I describe, some of the worst slum areas had already been cleared, to make room for new small slum clearance walk-up apartment dwellings three stories high on the original sites like White Abbey and with new small semi-detached houses being built on City Council estates on the outlying edges of the City. This increased the need for transportation and the City ran an efficient mixture of trams, buses and trolleybuses to serve the community. However, the livery colour was a sombre dark navy blue complimenting the blackened buildings. In about 1946, my brother Ian suggested to the Deputy Head of Bradford City Transport, Mr. Lyall Christie that the colour should be changed to pale blue and cream to cheer the place up and behold, it was! The hills, some of which were very steep, made transportation difficult, and many of us developed the ability to leg on and leg off buses when moving. The traffic included all the vehicles carrying the massive bales of wool, most of which originated in Australia and to enable sharp turning and mobility, mechanical horses were used. These were three wheeled power units, hitched to low lying flat decks. All the mills and wool storage buildings had jutting out arms with pulleys which lowered cables with claws to set into each side of the bales and then raise them to whichever warehouse floor level was their destination. The streets beside the mills were cobbled and the clatter of the wood and leather clogs worn by the mill workers resonated along them.

My first home was in Fairbanks Road where I was born being about half way up the hill from the centre of Bradford but I have no memories of it. Shortly afterwards, we moved further uphill to Whitby Road still terraced, but with small gardens and a back lane. The ice cream man used the back lane to sell his 3d cones and 2d and 4d wafers. Today his lovely little pony drawn cart with four barley twist brass corner supports for the canopied roof to cover his ice cream tubs will hopefully be in a museum. At the top of Whitby Road was Duckworth Lane with numerous small family operated private shops supplying a multitude of kitchen and household needs a branch of Martin’s Bank and a Police Station. One of the little grocery stores named Gilletts, sold chocolate marshmallow biscuits with a little daub of red jam in the centre, at two for a penny, and if well behaved when shopping my mother would buy one for each of us, in return, Ian and I carried the brown leather shopping bag between us. Mrs. Ingham an antique dealer sold her wares from her fairly substantial house quite close to the shops. My mother’s knowledge of and interest in art, drew her into Mrs. Ingham’s house and that is where I first became aware of the beauty and craftsmanship of so many antiques. I also learned of Art Nouveau and Art Deco. Mrs. Ingham’s knowledge of art was limited, my mother’s was not. In consequence she made some wise purchases with the little money she had. I recall a wonderful box with a reclining dragon on the lid, which she purchased for a small sum because it was black knowing that it was a deep tarnish of silver. Some 8 inches long, it proved to be solid silver and she later at a time when life was difficult for her gave it to my sister as a 21st birthday present. For me, the object of most attraction and beauty was an art nouveau glass vase. The upper layer of maroon glass covered deep yellow glass and was cut in the cameo form of flowers. It sat on three deep blue ball shaped feet and was signed Richare. My attraction to glass, its plasticity, form and feel has lasted all my life. That vase was my 21st birthday present from my mother and I can look at it as I write. She purchased the vase in 1929 in London, where she saw it being used as part of a window display in a ladies boutique. When she approached the shop owners, they did not wish to sell, but a week later following another approach, relented and her prize cost two weeks of her teaching pay.

My earliest memories are predominantly related to Aberdeen where my grand-parent’s house was our second home. I remember clearly, the wedding reception for my mother’s youngest sister Margaret, when she married Peter Nagele in 1937 and I was three. The reception was held in the Palace Hotel at the junction of Union Street and Market Street, adjacent to the end of Union Bridge, the Hotel eventually burned down in 1942 and after many years as a vacant site was replaced by a C & A store. I recall the Hotel’s large dining room overlooking Union Street, the window positions and how the tables were placed, the bride and groom sitting at the top table, and that on my plate was a red pickled pepper which I was told I didn’t have to eat. I do not recall my clothes, but was told in later years that I wore a blue satin romper suit. Another early memory is of Mr. Duncan. His daughter Nettie was a close friend of my grandmother and being single, lived with her father and we visited them. Mr. Duncan sat in a winged armchair beside their fireplace, he had a white spade beard and a budgerigar sat in a cage on a stand beside the chair. Of further fascinated interest to me as a child was that he used a spittoon which sat in the fireplace. The room had French doors opening on to a garden profuse with flowers. The old man engaged me in conversation and told me all about the Boer War and a siege at Mafeking which had ended in 1900 having lasted six months. However, at the time of the Boer War, Mr. Duncan was 60 years old, having been born in 1842. When we had our conversation he was 96 years old and lucid. In later years I have wondered whether the doubts expressed by politicians about the verbal history of the North American Indians is a matter of political convenience rather than conviction. My youngest grandchildren, born in the 21st century are verbally separated from Mr. Duncan born 160 years ago only by me. My grandfather took Ian and I for walks in the 340 acre Hazelhead Park which continued into the woods on the western edge of the city and where in season, we gathered blueberries and yellow raspberries. The park had been the grounds of a mansion and contained a wonderful maze with a high tower from which the supervisor could direct those who got lost in the maze, back to the entrance – a cause for relief for many.

Granda also took us for walks around the very busy harbour, where ships were docked from various ports including the Baltic ones of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Aberdeen was at that time, the largest fishing port in Europe and an 5.00 a.m. early morning visit to the fish market allowed one to see the auction of enormous cod, huge almost square skate and halibut, wonderful haddock and in season, vast quantities of herring, truly the fruit of the sea prior to the laws of diminishing returns from over activity by the international fishing industry decimating fish stocks. On one occasion, we were joined by a visiting great uncle Willie, the only time I met him. But I remember him well because Uncle Willie showed me how to select crabs for purchase – always the females, and when we reached home, how to boil and subsequently dress them. The Scottish partan crab is delicious with the brown body flesh having a wonderful sweetness. During his holiday time when my father joined us, he took us bird watching and we learned that woodpigeons lay two white eggs at a time and usually three clutches in the season we were also taught how to suck their raw eggs. The bird variously known as the peewit, lapwing or known in north-east Scotland as the theuchat, lays its eggs in a hollow in the ground and he taught us how to identify and find their nests with four lovely brown spotted tan eggs neatly arranged with their pointed ends in the centre. He told us that back at the time of his childhood in Aberdeen, peewits eggs were a gourmet item in London, and they were collected around Aberdeen to be sent south by train. However, the demand exceeded supply and using both their wits and climbing skills, youths collected the much more profuse seagulls eggs which closely resembled those of the peewit, from the cliffs at Muchalls just south of Aberdeen and sent the gulls eggs with more than a hint of amusement to the gullible Londoners. The taste must have been interesting. Prior to concerns about conservation, my father had as a child, collected birds eggs and the collection which lacked few British birds, was kept during our childhood stored in boxes of sawdust. In his later years, he offered the collection to the University of Aberdeen and when they declined, offered them to the Vienna Museum of Natural History, which accepted and where the collection remains. In his later years, my father would form part of that museum’s field research team as the ornithologist and said that sitting around the fire in the evenings in the wilds of whichever country they were camping in and discussing the day’s finds by the individual experts was a joy. His ornithological knowledge developed as a child along with being able to live off the land, was to serve him well in his later career, it also gave ample reason for always carrying field glasses. In Bradford I recall neighbours especially one who would allow me to watch her baking and the visits with my mother to Lister Park, where we fed breadcrumbs to the ducks and envied older children using the rowing boats which could be hired.

As I have gone through life I have become increasingly aware of the major influence of my grandparents upon my development. My grandfather in particular patiently spent many hours walking with me in the countryside, initially around Aberdeen and later following retiring to Banff, walking around the town and up Deveronside through the woods to Alvah where he had been born and where at that time my great grandfather had been a Grieve, later climbing the farming ladder to become the tenant farmer of Midhill of Seggat at Auchterless. He was the fourth generation of eldest sons to be named George Smith. I was told that my great grandmother had told my great grandfather when he departed to register the birth of their first born, to add his mother’s maiden name of Carnegie as a middle one, he however made the mistake of following a Scots tradition of joining friends to ‘weit the babes heid’ prior to attending the Registry Office where when asked for the names to be given to his child he responded: ‘Och jist George Smith the same as ma’sel’. When a generation later my grandfather registered his third child and eldest son, he belatedly remedied the matter and my uncle the fifth generation eldest male was named George Carnegie Smith. My grandfather as the eldest child of eight, left school at the age of twelve and was ‘fee’d awa fae hame’. At that time farm employees were described as farm servants and were employed for a fee for six months following which if they wished to seek a new employer they attended the local feeing market. The last time my grandfather was fee’d was at Turiff when he was nineteen and received an increase of six shillings to add to the six pounds received for the preceding six months. The single men lived in bothies and were given their ‘keep’, meaning that the farmer’s wife fed them and usually without generosity. Life was hard and the nineties were not economically good for Scottish farming but I was told by him that that in the area of the Deveron that there was agreement that the men in the bothies would not be fed salmon more than three times a week, as my grandfather could remember the river gleaming with the silver of salmon when there was a run. In his lifetime he had seen the introduction of the motor car and lived to hear Sputnik in space.

My grandfather had met my grandmother the eldest of seven children when she was in service as the cook at Netherwood House at Alvah. She wisely said that she would not marry anyone employed as a farm servant, so he moved to Aberdeen. Although only turning twenty, he made a successful application to join the Aberdeen City Police Force and four years later they married. He was a physically well-built solid six footer who won sprints at local Highland Games held at places like Haddo House and Fyvie Castle. Although patient and slow to anger he had a strong moral sense and despite his lack of formal education, he rose through the ranks to become an Inspector and in 1926 during the General Strike when some of the strikers meeting in the Gallowgate in Aberdeen started a riot my grandfather ordered the Police to draw batons and led a baton charge dispersing the rioters. He was elected on to the national committee responsible for negotiating police pensions. His main recreation was swimming which he did almost daily being the Coach of the Aberdeen Penguins Swimming Club. His favorite stroke was the trudge which had been invented by John Trudgen in 1879 and long since abandoned as it was improved to become what is now known as freestyle. He taught beginners including me, breaststroke initially but never taught the trudge. In retirement in Banff he was initially elected to the Town Council and at the following election was elected to be a Baillie (Magistrate) The first case he heard involved a man who when inebriated had physically assaulted a woman on the Strait Path a steep road leading from Low Street to the High Street. My grandfather heard the case and then summarised saying: We’re nae hae’in that in Banff - fourteen days. The weekend prior to that case which gave notice to the local lags that Baillie Smith wasn’t going to be a pushover, I visited my grandparents and having been given the usual cup of coffee upon arrival settled down to inquire what had been going on the previous week. In response my grandmother replied that they had had the Kirking of the Council on Wednesday this being an occasion upon which the new Town Council attended St. Mary’s the Parish Church to pray for guidance, my response was to turn to my grandfather and enquire: Well now that you are a Baillie, did you have to wear a chain? back came the reply: Na, na, the Provost wore a chain, the rest o’ us jist ran louse. When he died in January 1958 over quarter of a century after retiring from the force the funeral procession wound down through Banff and across the Bridge of Deveron to the family burial plot in MacDuff, there was a saluting policeman on every corner, most having travelled fifty miles from Aberdeen. In 1938 when I was four years old I had to enter hospital in Bradford to have my tonsils removed and I recall following the operation when lying with a very sore throat looking from my bed across the ward at the other children sitting with the nurses at the fireside and eating bananas, I have gone through life knowing with a degree of resentment that I am a banana behind. I was however fortunate in tasting pineapple at a picnic we had with family friends Bob Edgar and his family at Semmerwater one of Bradord’s trout stocked reservoirs where Bob had a licence to fish and didn’t taste another until long after the war.

WAR LOOMS

1939 was a year of change for me as a child and more significantly, for the civilized world. I entered Lilycroft Road School in Bradford in March, but my stay was brief. My mother was pregnant and having a difficult time. So, Ian and I moved to our grandparent’s home in Aberdeen, which was very familiar as we spent at least four weeks a year there every summer. At that time they lived in Stanley Street and our friends included the children of Bryce the local plumber a name cast in the iron overhead toilet cisterns. I transferred to Ashley Road School, where instead of doing exercises on paper, we did them on slates. Our grandfather taught us to swim, usually at Justice Mill Lane, where there was a wonderful pool with a ten metre diving tower, the deep end of the pool being 15’. Sometimes when he took us to the beach, we would swim at the old thirty three and a third yard pool there, which was fed with sea water, making one float more easily. Travel to the beach was by tram and those in service on the Hazelhead-Beach route number 1 were open ended on the upper decks. Trams did not turn around at the terminuses, instead, the driver took his seat and brass steering handle from one end of the tram to the other and attached them to the appropriate points. However, they were unable to detach the foot operated warning bell, and as the curving stairs at each end rose from the driving area, we children had great fun when descending the stairs from the open ended area to leave the tram, by stamping successively on the bell. The old open ended trams on route 1 greatly contrasted with the streamline double sized trams on route 4, Bridge of Don to Bridge of Dee. While we were in Aberdeen that summer, the Government issued identity cards to the population. I was SUFC 15:6.

My mother spent much of the time in Bradford where she had an excellent consultant, Mr. Stewart. My sister Kirsty born after a difficult pregnancy at the end of July was five years and four months younger than me. At the end of the summer, we returned to Bradford, where during our absence in Aberdeen, we had again moved home even further up the hill to suburban Duchy Crescent part of the Duchy Estate a private development where our neighbours were business and professional people with Mr. William Jowett who with his brother had formed and developed Jowett Cars manufacturers of the Jowett Javelin and Jowett Jupiter cars and the Bradford van, living in the house at the corner from Duchy Drive to Duchy Crescent where we lived at number 12. Who was to know at that time, that Jowett Cars was to survive the Second World War but to cease production by 1952 because of the crippling 66.66% purchase tax imposed by the Attlee Government an example of taxing the rich and by so doing eradicating employment for the poor. Other neighbours included business people, the principal of a chartered accountants partnership Mr. Leonard Smith who owned a super charged Armstrong-Siddeley saloon, a Bank Manager named Mr. Eastwood and the owner of Stevensons, manufacturers of floor and furniture creams. Until the even numbering reached 20 where the Eastwoods lived including their only child Brian always called Joey by we children, the Crescent had houses on only one side with a small field opposite, beyond number 20, there was a field on our side of the Crescent and the houses were on the opposite unevenly numbered side, we had in consequence plenty of recreational space. There was a driveway to the garage which being built on a slope allowed a coal cellar and a potting shed underneath. There was a nice back garden with seven apple trees, six Russets and a Bramley for cooking apples, a plum, a pear and a greengage tree and the front garden had white lilac and laburnum trees. I accompanied my father in our car, a brown and black 1934 Standard Little Nine to the woods to gather rotted leaves as humus to make compost my first horticultural activity. Initially my father had coupons for a petrol allowance but in 1941 the car was laid up in the garage on petrol drums for the duration of the war. I entered my third school Haworth Road Primary where the headmaster was Mr. Illingworth, his daughter also taught there. The school’s main catchment area was the Haworth Road Estate, a council developed and owned slum clearance project. It I think first made me socially aware as many of my classmates lived there. To reach the school, I had to walk from the Duchy Estate, cross the very steep Heights Lane, then through the Haworth Road Estate to the school at the far end, in total a distance of well over a mile each way.

The world at that time was awaiting Adolf Hitler’s decisions with bated breath. In September, we waited no longer, Ribbentrop and Molotov acting respectively for Hitler a National Socialist and Stalin a Communist had signed a pact on the 23rd August dividing Poland which was subjected to Blitzkreig by Germany on 3rd September and invasion by Russia on 17th September. I remember war being declared by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, not one inclined to take a decision if it could be avoided. His Government blundered on until May 1940, Hitler having pulverised Poland, turned his attention westwards to Holland and Belgium, whereas the Dutch fought, Belgium capitulated. French incompetence and resignations by leaders actually resulted in France having no government and no army commander at one stage and this was our closest ally, eventually surrendering on June 22, 1940 with Hitler personally visiting Paris six days later. The joint British Expeditionary Force and the French had unfortunately advanced well into Belgium duly leading to the debacle of Dunkirk. The advancing German army avoided the much vaunted French built Maginot Line which even included air conditioning, by the simple expedient of going around the end. In early 1940, the British Labour Party in opposition, refused to join in a national coalition government under Chamberlain giving notice that change of leadership was essential. Chamberlain then offered his position to Lord Halifax, an equally strong supporter of appeasement. The Labour Party was about to have its finest hour. Holding a party conference in Bournemouth, their executive clarified that they would not support a coalition government under Halifax. However they determined that they would support such a government under Churchill. The Labour Party conference voted to support Churchill a Conservative, by 2,450,000 to 170,000, a 93% victory. A vote was demanded in the House of Commons with a resulting 380 to 0 result in favour of Churchill. On May 10, 1940 Winston Churchill became Prime Minister at the age of 65. He formed a national coalition government including members of the Labour Party in the Cabinet and with Clement Attlee the Labour Party Leader as his deputy. Great speeches withstand both repetition and time, when he addressed the House of Commons for the first time as Prime Minister, Winston Churchill having accepted his new role said:

I would say to the House, as I have said to those who have joined this Government: I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength God can give us. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word; it is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.

Few politicians can claim to have so fully declared and subsequently fulfilled their promise, their policy and their aim. Churchill did and could. He was fifteen years older than Hitler, nine years older than Mussolini, eight years older than Franklin D. Roosevelt and four years older than Stalin, but happily outlived them all eventually retiring as Prime Minister at the age of eighty in 1955.

The BBC radio news kept us informed, and at school air raid shelters were built in which when practices were held, we had the luxury each time of choosing a piece of coloured Wrigleys chewing gum from a large Jar. This was to supposedly to protect our teeth from the shaking of the anticipated bombs. A wailing air raid siren was installed on the school roof. At home an Anderson air raid shelter constructed of corrugated iron and covered with 1’ of soil was built in the garden. We were issued with gas masks in small rectangular boxes, how I envied Kirsty as a baby, her mask had a little flat rubber bill reminiscent of a duck, whereas ours had circular removable filters as a nose piece. The last question asked by my mother whenever we left the house, was Have you got your gas mask? We played Cowboys and Indians at school mainly because one boy Donald Proctor had a small Indian tent, a feathered headdress, a leather tunic with bow and arrows and a tomahawk. In 1940 the German Luftwaffe ruthlessly bombed the civilian population of London, building upon their Blitzkreig experience of Guernica and Warsaw, the Battle of Britain was on. Fighter pilots were our heroes of whom Churchill correctly said Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. Following London, other British cities and their civilian populations were similarly pounded by the Luftwaffe. On 22 June, 1941 Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, so much for one Dictator trusting another. At the end of the summer holidays in 1941, I transferred to the elementary Daisy Hill School.

The name Daisy Hill was derived from the school’s location not any lady of repute. With two academic streams, A and B, and four years of elementary education, there were eight teachers and a headmistress. All nine were single later middle aged ladies belonging to the generation of British women who lost boy friends and fiancés, their potential husbands, in the First World War. The British census of 1921 revealed that women exceeded men by almost 2 million. The Canadian poet Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae who himself died in January 1918 wrote:

I left to earth, a little maiden fair,

With locks of gold and eyes that shamed the light.

I prayed that God might have her in his care.

And sight.

The social divisions between those pupils from the Haworth Road Estate and the rest of us were reflected in the very high percentage of the former who were allocated to the B stream of classes. Few passed the tests to move them into the A stream. Two exceptions I recall were Betty Wolstenhome, her birthday was on the 27th March, the day prior to my own, and Terry Wilkinson. Terry I particularly remember, because he broke a leg and was unable to attend school for a period being confined to his bed. Miss Ackroyd our teacher at our then grade suggested that we might like to visit Terry as individuals and might be able to take him some kind of nourishing treat. I told this to my mother, who gave me a precious egg – we children got one per week in the rations, to take as a gift. So, on Saturday morning I walked to Terry’s home in Haworth Road Estate and entered the house, one of the Council owned properties. It was very small but neat and tidy and Terry was propped up in a single bed at the window of the front room. His mother took the egg and I went and sat by Terry at the window. Five minutes later, Mrs. Wilkinson entered bearing the newly boiled egg, which Terry duly consumed as I watched, uncertain whether I was pleased to see him consume the gift, or envious of him getting my precious egg.

The main Haworth Road after which the estate was named, was on the route from Bradford to Haworth, home of the Bronte sisters. As the road drew even nearer to the City, it became Toller Lane, named after the then still existing toll bar which stuck out into Toller Lane at the T junction with Leylands Lane. The toll bar itself held a tiny little shop where a very elderly Mrs. Shoesmith sold odd items like matches and shoe laces to eke out a living. After she died, the City decided to remove the historic toll bar and it was taken down stone by stone, boxed and sold to the USA a fate eventually shared by London Bridge about which it was said that the Americans had thought that they were purchasing the historic Tower Bridge, only to discover that they had bought an edifice dating from only 1880 made, like Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, of Aberdeen granite. Proceeding further towards the City down Toller Lane, one passed Masham Place where another literary link occurred, for J.B. Priestley, author of ‘The Good Companions’, was born and raised there. Duchy Estate adjoined Toller Lane opposite the Toll Bar and beside the Hare and Hounds pub which was ‘tied’ to Hammonds brewery and beside which was a crowned lawn bowling green, where the players were frequently watched by Ian and I from our bedroom window during the late summer evenings.

We as children were well aware of the bitter costs of war. One of our regular morning hymns at school was: For those in peril on the sea. Perhaps as children we recognized the service of the merchant seamen in contributing to the war effort before some of the allied governments. Also, who could forget Miss Beswick the Headmistress, telling us one morning that the father of one of our fellow pupils had been killed in action, asking us to be kind to that pupil upon her returning to school. We had occasional visitors at home, usually at weekends. In addition to the Americans visiting in 1942, cousin Ronald Smith would throughout the war years arrive wearing his civilian clothes including kilt and sporran and bearing a small back pack containing his army uniform, toiletries and books. We boys knew Ronald, who was my mother’s cousin, as a somewhat odd if not eccentric character. He usually changed into his kilt on the train, but I do