​Keith's Story Chapter Two - Beeston Fields to Boots
At Beeston Fields Secondary Modern School the years were divided into three streams, “upper” “middle” and “lower”.
I was in the “upper” stream throughout the four years I was there.
The headmaster of the school was K.D. Roberts and my form teachers were
1 upper S.A. Houghton - known to us all as “Sid”.
2 upper A.H. King - known as “Albert”
3 upper Keith V. Shaw always referred to as “KVS”
4 upper Frank H. Long the final and best teacher I had.
Other teachers I remember were:
Mr. Appleby “Spud”
J.H. Arden
A.B. Spencer
C.B. Cottam, the assistant head. Known to the boys as “Charlie”
S. Wilcox, the woodwork teacher, who really loved wood.
P.F. Hill, the metalwork teacher
H.W. Barker, the science teacher known as “Lex” after the actor who played Tarzan.
Some of my school pals were:
Mick Kerry:
A very gifted footballer, who went on to have a good amateur career. We were very keen on bird watching. He was later to be my best man. And so appears later in the history.
Graham “Nobby” Cox: He was an exception sprinter and long jumper, and was South Notts. Champion, but was not interested in the training offered to him to go further. He joined Boots with me when we left school and is also mentioned later.
David Bestall: Who later ran a business called “Bestall’s Taxis.
Alex “Bob” Shepherd: He was called up to National Service into the Royal Air Force on the same day as I was and became manager of “Georgettes”.
The flower shop on Beeston High Road.
Barrie Smith: Was a tall lad who represented South Notts in the High Jump
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One morning in 1952 our lesson was interrupted when Mr. Roberts, came into the class and whispered something to Mr. Shaw, our teacher. Someone at the front thought he heard him say that Mr. King our music teacher was dead.
(He had been away from school for about a week) and the whisper ran around the class that ‘Albert’ had died.
When Mr. Roberts left, Mr. Shaw announced that King George V had died, and we were all to go home, as the school was to close immediately. We all ran out of school feeling very relieved!
The early part of my schooling there was disrupted because Mam was taken into hospital in 1950 for a hysterectomy, and from there she was sent to Adbolton Hall for a long period of recuperation.
As I was the eldest, I was taken out of school for six months to look after the family, which meant cooking, cleaning, washing and all the other household duties for a family of five.
Only during school holidays did I get some respite, because Terry went to stay with Mam’s sister, Evelyn and Frank, whilst the twins went to Gert and Len’s. But I still stayed at home looking after the house and Dad.
Dad used to say that in the beginning I was so concerned at serving his dinner as soon as he came through the door that very often the meal was only half-cooked. He often had to eat half-raw potatoes – but with practice, I improved.
One incident sticks in my mind.
He has asked me to fry him some fish, which I did and was quite pleased with the results, and as he came in I lifted the fish on to the plate, missed, and it fell onto the coco-matting rug we had near the door to wipe our feet on.
That day Dad had bread and cheese for his dinner!
For many years, like most of my contemporaries I was totally hooked on train spotting, and because of my connections with Netherfield and Colwick, it was the British Railways Eastern Region (ex-LNER) engines I was interested in, so several of us from school used to spend many hours at Nottingham Victoria Station.
A platform ticket cost a penny, but if we managed to sneak in through the exit gate at Upper Parliament Street we didn’t have to pay, but we ran the risk of being thrown out by the Station Master if he caught us.
If this happened we climbed the wall overlooking the station and sat on the top.
Often we walked into Nottingham after school and sat on the wall until it got dark, sometimes I used to wait to see the 10pm Grimsby fish train which was always a double-header, but this got me into trouble as it made me late home.
However Grantham was the place to go to see the prestige engines of the Eastern Region, and so I had to find a way to raise some money to buy a ticket to get there.
During the school summer holidays I used to collect blackberries and sell them to the neighbours for them to make jam.
I charged 3d for a 1lb. jar and 6d for a 2lb. Jar and with the money I bought a train ticket to Grantham, and there saw many of the powerful Atlantic and Pacific engines including the great A4’s, which we called “streaks” such as Mallard and Sir Nigel Greasley.
All the numbers and names were carefully noted and underlined in the Ian Allan ABC pocket book and compared with others who we met.
An underline meant you had seen or ‘copped’ the engine and a star meant you had been on the footplate or ‘cabbed’ it.
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LNER 2866 ‘Nottingham Forest’ at Nottingham Victoria Station.
The wall we sat on can be seen behind the coal tender
As in all these hobbies and pastimes we were all very competitive and there was much one-upmanship over who had seen what.
I had a big advantage because many of the Netherfield folk including Uncle Len worked on the railway and so I often managed to get into the sheds and see engines under repair, and was able to cab them.
Many of the Easter Region engines were denied to us because they ran exclusively on Scottish rails and rarely if ever came south of the border.
Then one lad in the class came with his book after the school holidays with many of the Scottish engines underlined.
We were all full of jealousy at his list of rare engines until he confessed that his dad had been to Scotland on a business trip and took his Ian Allen with him, from then on nobody believed his list.
In 1951 we had our first family holiday - a week in Mablethorpe.
We stayed at a bungalow owned by a Mrs. Watson near to the South Pullover, and the Sand Dunes. Grandma, Granddad and Laddie, Granddad’s dog, came with us.
Here I am outside Mrs. Watsons Grandma and Grandad on Mablethorpe sea front
Two incidents during that holiday are still very clear in my mind:
On the 10th of July, on the way home to our bungalow after an evening spent in the The Fulbeck, we sat on a low wall listening to a radio commentary coming from an open window of the boxing match between Randolph Turpin and Sugar Ray Robinson, given by Eamonn Andrews with inter-round summaries by W. Barrington-Dalby, which Randolph Turpin won on points, much to our delight.
The other incident happened on the Friday, the day before we were due to return home. In those days it was expected that anyone who went on holiday to the seaside brought back some rock, sweets were still on ration, and so to buy rock meant using up your coupons. I was given the money and the coupons for all the family including Grandma and Granddad and a list to go and buy the rock from the town. After collecting all the rock I set off back to the bungalow and decided to call into the penny arcade as I had a few pennies left. Well I had some luck for a change and began to win quite a few pennies, this went on for quite a while until eventually I had amassed about two shillings; a small fortune!
I was so excited that I ran all the way back to tell the rest of the family, and when I arrived they asked me where the rock was. Then I remembered I had left it in the Arcade. I ran back, but it had gone! So no one had any rock to take home, and no more coupons to buy any. I was not a popular boy!
My best friend at school was Mick Kerry. Who was later to be my best man when I married Margaret (but more of that later)
Mick lived at 188 Station Road, Beeston. His Dad, George, was a postman and he had a sister Susan, and a younger brother David. Many years later David became our postman.
Mick was a very good sportsman and excelled at football, at one time he played for Long Eaton Town as an amateur.
He shared my interest in bird watching, and we spent many hours in the osier beds by the Trent, which later became the gravel pits, and are now part of the Attenborough Nature Reserve.
As Mick’s birthday was in February, he left school after the spring term, but I had to wait until August.
In 2016 I learned that Mick had died on the Greek Island of Rhodes where he had been living for many years.
Graham “Nobby” Cox was also a good friend. He lived on Birch Avenue, so I spent most evening in the Beeston Rylands with Mick, Nobby and many others. It was there I first developed an interest in cycling. We all had bikes we had made ourselves from assorted parts and although they were not the most elegant of machines they took us out and about.
Most weekends the group of us from the Rylands went cycling, usually into Derbyshire, and often accompanied by one or two girls who tended to slow us down and were by and large nuisances.
Ann Bywater was probably the best of the cyclists, but we had to wait at the bottom of Foster Avenue for her on Sunday Mornings until after her attendance at mass at the Catholic Church.
Ann eventually married Rex Johnson, another of the gang, and they had 4 sons, two of which were twins.
The marriage ended after 10 years as Rex went off with Ann’s best friend.
One other girl, whose name escapes me, was not a very good cyclist and we usually went off without her, but one Sunday she followed us as far as Derby, where she collapsed with exhaustion, so we left her at the railway station and carried on to Matlock.
Her parents came to our house to complain at the treatment she had received from her so-called friends.
The result was I got told off, and she never came out with us again – a small price to pay!
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I became more ambitious and decided I needed a better bike and so I began a paper round at Dickinson’s paper shop, which was on the corner of Evelyn Street and Humber Road. I earned 8s. 6d. a week, 4s. of which I kept and gave Mam 4s. 6d. to help with the housekeeping.
With my pocket money I bought my first bike, a BSA Gold Vase.
I bought it from Wallbank’s at the top of Humber Road on Hire Purchase and I remember Dad going with me to sign the forms, and I was very proud of it.
I was allowed to keep it in the front room, leaning on the dining table, and I spent a lot of time cleaning it.
Ian Taylor, who lived at number 19, was also keen to develop his cycling proficiency and so every Sunday morning we would go out on our bikes. Usually it was somewhere quite local, although I remember once we went to Derby, and on another occasion Leicester.
Then on one warm, sunny Sunday morning in 1952 we decided to be more adventurous and one of us suggested riding to Skegness.
We decided against telling our parents as we knew they would stop us, but as we would need provisions, Ian persuaded his sister Janet to make us some jam sandwiches and we set off.
All the way there the sun shone and the wind was at our backs.
The day was very pleasant and we kept encouraging each other by saying what heroes we would be when we rode into Evelyn Street that evening after our epic journey. By the way, I was 14 and Ian was 12.
We eventually arrived at Skegness tired but happy, and after buying some rock, to prove we had got there, and sitting on the beach for a rest, we set off for home at about 4pm. and immediately we realized we were in trouble.
A strong wind had sprung up and it was in our faces, and worse than that it began to rain, and we had no waterproofs. As we struggled on the rain turned to hail and it began to get dark, and we had no lights.
We managed to get to Sleaford before Ian could go no more, and he fell off his bike.
I knocked on someone’s door and a lady gave us ham sandwiches and a glass of milk each.
She was very concerned about us, but we convinced her we felt much better, and continued the journey.
A few miles further on Ian was once more in trouble, so after a rest I made him agree to get back on and we carried on with me pushing him.
At just after midnight we reached Grantham and by then I too was totally exhausted so we went into an all-night cafe on the main road and with the last of our pocket money, bought a cup of tea between us and decided we would have to tell the police.
At that moment, into the cafe walked Ian's Dad.
Apparently Ian had told his sister Janet what our plans were when she made the sandwiches but he had made her swear under pain of death not to tell anyone.
But after midnight she had told her parents, and her Dad had come looking for us in his car.
You can imagine the reception we received when we were brought home at 1 am from our mums.
But the next morning Dad said to me that although he agreed with mum that what we had done was stupid, he thought we were very brave to try it, and if I wanted to go on long bike rides in the future I should join a cycling club.
So rather than killing my enthusiasm, he encouraged me to try again, and for many years I had a very successful and enjoyable career as an amateur road racer with the Sherwood Cycling Club, and took part in many races including the prestigious Skegness 100 mile race.
As a postscript to this story, in 2005 I was asked to be the treasurer of the Midlands Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme and there I worked with Jan Thornley, a lady who had been the Mayor of Broxtowe and a distinguished member of the local council over many years. She was almost blind and an rather disabled, and in conversation with her I discovered she was in fact, Ian’s sister Janet, and told me the family recounted this story every time they met together.
Ian was now living in the south of England.
In 1953 we had the first television in the street. It was rented from Rediffusion, to enable us to watch the coronation of Queen Elizabeth ll.
I say we, the truth was that all the neighbours crammed into our house and they sat there all day with the curtains drawn, (this was because the 9 inch screen was not very bright) and we were told to go and play.
I remember being very hungry, as no food was prepared until the happy couple had gone away on honeymoon later in the evening.
Other memories of early television viewing was every Friday Night, a neighbour Jack Hall came to watch amateur boxing and he smoked a pipe full of very powerful tobacco filling the room with smoke.
Also, on Saturday Nights I was allowed to stay up late and watch a programme called Café Continental.
This was accompanied by another treat, a large Jaffa orange.
Also in 1953 the family returned to Mablethorpe for another week’s holiday.
Dad spent his spare time looking after an allotment, which helped to feed the family. He also kept chickens and rabbits to supplement the meat and egg rations.
During the war his first allotment was on Queens Road, Beeston, next to the Queens Road Methodist Church, later he moved to one on the Hassocks, behind the Beeston Boiler Sports Ground.
Both of those sites have now been built on.
As a young boy I had to go to help him, and every evening in summer before I was allowed out to play I had had to go to the allotment to draw water from the well and water all the plants.
In winter I was sent off on Sunday morning to pick brussel sprouts from plants covered in frost or even ice.
His friend Bill Fletcher, who had the adjoining allotment, once fell into his well, badly cutting the bridge of his nose on the steel rim.
He carried the scar for the rest of his life.
Dad also did some part-time work in the evenings, and at weekends for a man called Fred Hayes (or Haynes).
Fred had a yard at the bottom of Humber Road in the old Humber factory site. He lived in a caravan on the site, and did a bit of everything, building sheds, greenhouses, farm woodworking etc.
Dad helped him in the yard, and installed Beeston Boilers into greenhouses that Fred built.
Every Sunday Mam cooked an extra dinner, and I took it round to Fred in his caravan between two plates, he used to give me sixpence for delivering it, a princely sum in those days.
I also went to the ‘Jug and Bottle’ at the Queens Hotel, a public house on Queens Road, most evenings when Dad was working in the yard to collect a jug of beer for them.
Dad was also a very good dart player and played for the White Lion on Middle Street.
For a number of years he was the team secretary and he used to bring home the scorebook, and I had the job of working out the team averages.
When the family grew up, Dad was able to return to his main love, which was the same as his father’s - fishing.
He was a member of the Manchester Unity Fishing Club and fished in all their matches, in various venues around the country.
Later I joined him in the club, and one year had the pleasure of beating him in the annual Christmas Prize match, known as the ‘Fur and Feather’.
I won a turkey; he won a dozen pegs.
At the presentation, the secretary said:
“If you ask nicely Tom, perhaps your son will let you have a slice of his turkey on Christmas day in exchange for a few pegs”.
One year Dad went to Christchurch in Hampshire for a week with a group of friends from the Manchester Unity, and during the week he caught a huge barbel, and came home with a photo to prove it.
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Dad with his Barbel caught at Christchurch
As I was in second place in my final year at school, a careers officer who visited the school told my Mam and Dad not to let me go to work in a factory, as this would hold me back. I really wanted to take an apprenticeship and become an electrician, but in those days and apprenticeship meant that rather than receiving a salary, you had to pay the company for the training you received and an apprentice electrician worked for three years before qualifying.
As I was the oldest child and money was scarce it was important that I helped with the family income. And so I had no choice – factory work it was.
Looking back over my time at Beeston Fields through my school reports there is a theme developing which was to be with me for the rest of my life.
K.V. Shaw in year 3 wrote: Keith has done very well and is an intelligent boy. His only fault is that he tends to be somewhat erratic and to jump to conclusions without thinking. Frank Long in year 4 wrote: A capable lad- though a talkative one at times. It was Frank Long who said the immortal lines about me: “Stevenson, you must have been inoculated with a gramophone needle”, and “Your tongue is the nearest thing to perpetual motion I have ever seen”.
The headmaster’s final report sums up my reputation as a talkative and overenthusiastic scholar.
And so my school days ended on one Friday in July 1953 and on the following Monday I began working for a living.
I began work at The Boots Pure Drug Co. Ltd. as a trainee on the Beeston site on August 5th. 1953.
My salary was just over £2.00 per week.
Also, in common with all Boots trainees we attended the Boots College one day a week. My day was Thursday.
I began working in the Packing Materials department of the soap factory, and one of my jobs was to keep the girls who worked on the conveyor belts supplied with the various packaging items.
But these women were typical factory girls, who immediately they saw me decided to embarrass me as much as they could.
Their language was like nothing I had heard before, and to make matters worse they often grabbed at me as I walked past the conveyor belts pushing the barrow. This was a great shock to me, as before this job I had not had much contact with women older than me, other than family members or friends of the family. I suppose these days it would be called sexual harassment.
One of the older trainees told me that the only way to stop them was to give then some of their own medicine back, but as many of them were my mother’s age, I could never bring myself to do it, so for the first six months, I continued to run the gauntlet every time I went onto the factory floor.
All this use to make me feel very uncomfortable and worst of all I used to colour up and blush, which made the situation worse.
Then one day I decided I could stand it no more and so I followed the work mate’s advice, I screwed up my courage, and after the usual attacks from the girls, I grabbed one of them and fondled her breasts, there was a great outcry from the rest of the girls and I never had any more problems.
After six months I was moved to D10 “wets”. In D10 I worked in the area where all the cough mixtures and medicines were made, and then I moved on to the Specials Lab. From there I moved to “Poisons” and finally to D6 “drys” where I worked in the tablet department and finally finished up in Speciality Packing before being called up.
Whilst working in D6 I became friendly with Greville Clow, who shared my passion for cycling, so one year we planned a cycling tour of the Norfolk area using the YMCA hostels. After many evenings pouring over maps and sending off postal orders to the various hostels, we set off on Saturday by train to Grantham (to avoid the boring bits!) and spent the first night in Holbeach. The second night was spent in Hunstanton. From there we visited Sheringham and stayed overnight in Cromer, then on to Great Yarmouth (where we stayed two nights). On the way back we visited Cambridge and stayed in a small village to the North of Cambridge. The next day, Friday we rode home from there non-stop and arrived home in the early evening.
One August Bank Holiday Saturday morning, Mick Kerry, Graham Cox and I met to decide what to do over the week-end, someone suggested a bike ride to Colwyn Bay, after the usual dares, we set off there and then, arriving in Colwyn Bay at night-fall, with nowhere to stay and no-one knowing where we were. We tried the Youth Hostels but they were all full, so eventually booked into a bed and breakfast house, which took almost all our money.
On Monday we were starving hungry having survived for two days on just a breakfast, so we pooled our resources, and bought a loaf of bread and a packet of digestive biscuits, then sat on the beach devouring digestive biscuit sandwiches.
This gave us just enough energy to cycle back home, during which I remember all we talked about was food!
Graham Cox also joined Boots from school, and we saw a lot of each other.
We decided that we needed to improve our education so we went to night school throughout 1954 and eventually sat the pre-senior technical exam for Maths English and Science, which we passed.
Following this, in 1955 we went to the People’s College in Nottingham and began three year O Level courses in Maths, Physics and Chemistry. We also decided we would like to learn to dance, mainly to have a better chance of meeting girls!
So we began dancing lessons at the Jessop’s School of Dancing on the Hockley, Nottingham. Graham gave up after a month or so, but I persevered and with a girl called Iris Humphrey who became my regular partner, we took and passed several certificates. There were two other girls that I used to go dancing with. They were sisters, Iris and Joan Bradderwick who lived on Humber Road South. We often caught the 5a bus together on Queens Road.
Both were older than I was, in fact Joan often used to come to the house in an evening to “baby-sit” the twins when Mam and Dad went to the White Lion, where Dad was in the dart team.
The third thing we tried was swimming. As neither of us could swim we began going to Radford Baths in an evening, but I hated it. I was afraid of the water and worse still, Graham learned to swim and I didn’t. So I concentrated on dancing and left the swimming to him. After learning to swim, Graham decided to build a canoe, and so he spent most of one winter building it from a fibre-glass kit in his bedroom.
In the spring when all was complete and ready to launch he found he could not get it through the bedroom door!
Being a trainee at Boots was not very taxing. The main thing to do was to keep out of the way of the bosses and look busy. It was the first time I had really come into contact with girls. Before then, they were just members of my friends who did not play football, and slowed us down when cycling. I thought of them as a nuisance. But at Boots things changed.
I began to meet many girls at the college, as there were only about 14 lads to 250 girls, and they all dressed up to go to college. Throughout the rest of the working week I would find any excuse to go to the areas where the girls worked to chat with them. One of my favourite hunting grounds was the order office on the top floor of D10 this was where Pat Onion who I mentioned earlier worked. Another thing that brought me into contact with them was the bus trips.
One or two of us had the idea to arrange bus trips out on a Saturday, so I booked a coach from Lamcote Coaches in Radcliffe on Trent and sold the seats.I did this mainly because the organiser had a free seat. The first trips were to London and a summer trip to Blackpool followed.In November 1955 I had a coach to London arranged, but was two passengers short.Bill Yates, a friend who helped me to organise the trips said two girls from D10 packing were interested in coming their names were Margaret James and Shirley Wood. I did not know them, but was relieved to sell the last two seats.
As the coach set off first from the end of Evelyn Street, I was always the first on and from there the driver moved on to several pick-up points, so I did not always see who got on board.
When the coach reached London it parked outside King’s Cross Station and we all went our separate ways.
I was with a group of four lads who had planned on going to see Spurs play at White Hart Lane, so we went into a café first for a coffee and Bill started talking to a couple of girls in the café.
When he brought them over I did not know them and thought they were local girls, but it turned out they were Margaret James and Shirley Wood who had boarded our bus in Bramcote, and they asked if they could they spend the day with us?
I remember feeling very annoyed at this because we missed the match, and spent the day wandering around the shopping areas of London. All this I blamed on the two girls who I began to dislike more and more.
This was my first meeting with the girl who was to become my first wife!
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That Christmas, Boots held a Christmas dance at the YMCA on Shakespeare Street in Nottingham and I had planned to go with Iris Humphries, my dancing partner from the Jessop’s School of Dancing who live on Arleston Drive, Wollaton. Iris could not come as she had a cold, so I asked Margaret James to come instead. I did not know her well because she went to College on Wednesdays, but she agreed.
That was the beginning of a relationship that was to last for 22 years.
It was during this period that Mam decided to go back to work.
Like most women of her generation once the children were born she gave up work and became a full-time wife, mother and housekeeper. But as the children were now growing up, and needing less attention, she began working as a waitress as Hand’s Café in Beeston.
Later she moved to work in the Chilwell Ordinance Depot, an on her first day there she took the opportunity to change her name!
Mam had always hated the name Martha, so when her work colleagues asked her what her name was she said, “Call me Pat”.
She was never quite sure why she chose that name, all she would say when asked was “Anything is better than Martha”.
When she arrived home she announced to Dad that from then on she would only answer to her new name.
This was not well received by Dad, but Mam insisted, and so from then on everyone knew her as ‘Pat’.
‘Pat’ Stevenson
