This is a transcription of cassette tapes recorded by my grandfather John Edward Watson that detailed his family history & his earlier life. I had done a full transciption, but I managed to lose the copy of it I had online. Now I only have the first part of the transciption, which I have reproduced below. [That is why it seems to ‘end’ so abruptly].
Brief Synopsis: John Watson was born & raised in Yorkshire. His father was a police officer (& had been a rear gunsman in WWI). John was apprenticed to his uncle Edgar Cyril, a pork butcher, when he left school. He served in the army for a few years after WWII had finished. Then he worked for Goodyear, the tyre company. John married Carol Pearson & they had three children. They emigrated to New Zealand. when his youngest (my mother) was five. The transcription follows:
My name is John Watson. I’m going to do a tape of the family.
I shall tell you of our family; Ernest Watson my father, Edgar Cyril Senior my uncle, Margaret Watson my mother – she was a Senior of course.
Edgar Senior
For simplicity’s sake – or for my sake – I’ll start with Edgar so that I can have a pattern to work on when it comes to other people. A pork butcher in
Burley Rd in Leeds, he was very skilled in his trade, one of the better pork butchers in Leeds – and there were about 30 or 40 of them altogether. I was apprenticed to him, and prior to that, to his cousin Harry Morton also a nephew of my uncle’s but from Annie’s side of the family. He was 10 years older than me and was in the army when I joined the shop.
Edgar was the first child and the only boy in a family of five. He was born about 1895-6 as he certainly served in World War I. His father was John Senior, my grandfather. His four sisters in order were Doris, Margaret, Jessie and Gladys. A thumbnail sketch of Edgar – he grew up in the “Kendal’s” district of Leeds, close to the centre, a five-minute walk from the Town Hall and Infirmary. It was an interesting part of the city, Dickensian – cobbled streets tall brick terrace, houses – all gone now.
After council school at age 12, he was apprenticed to a pork butcher and ultimately qualified under a man called Steinmann, of German origin. He learned to make sausages, brawn, pork pies etc.
He left there to join the war, and became a signaller and batman to an officer in the West Yorkshire regiment. That meant seeing the quarters were tidy, and taking messages to Headquarters by working his way through the trenches and back to his dugout. One story he told: ‘there were several Batmen where the officers were, in a house in France. The officers were upstairs, and the six batmen downstairs settling down for the night. The officers wore heavy riding boots, which always took some getting off. One officer, struggling away, suddenly flung it to the end of the room with a bang, and one batman shouted, “Pull the other one off and we can all get to sleep!”’
Edgar was like that, a joking sort of fellow, conscientious but with a humorous side. I can see it coming out in John Allis at times, a bit of mischief coming through.
He was one of the lucky ones who survived the war unscathed, and he met Annie Fothergill and soon married her.
She was energetic and lively and a go-ahead. She soon found a shop in Burley Rd. where she and Edgar set up a butchers shop. Edgar’s father John Senior was a cabinetmaker and fit it out with shelves and counters. It was a busy area, with a post office, Laundry, clothing shop, carpenters, beef butchers shop and a little club called “Westfield”. There was also a tripe shop specializing purely in tripe – huge hooks hanging from the ceiling with great white sheets of stomach linings.
Edgar and Annie lived on the premises and worked all hours, on Saturday nights open till 10 or 11, waiting for people walking home from the pubs and cinemas, Annie and Edgar standing there in striped aprons selling pies.
Uncle told me once about getting a motorbike from Watson-Cairns in Leeds in about 1921. Annie insisted on getting a red “Indian Chief” with sidecar. It was filled up with petrol and Edgar was taught how to ride it. He was shown the levers and how they worked and they were off! She was in the sidecar with a big hat and scarf and on to Burley road in fine style. But! He had to do a right hand turn into Toses’s yard where everyone was out to see them, Annie waving triumphantly. Edgar couldn’t manage the turn – he went up the steps of the butchers shop and came to a rapid stop, catapulting Annie over the top! The bike had to be taken back to the shop for repairs.
After that Edgar mastered it, and they had many happy outings.
In a few years time Annie wanted a car, so bought a Bullnose Morris Oxford from Adams Co. off Stony Rock Rd. They changed the car every two years. I remember the Bullnose. They would drive to their seaside cottage with everything tied onto it but the kitchen sink. It had a dicky seat full of luggage. The coast was only 60 miles away but they needed spare tyres and petrol cans in 1934.
Their last car before the war was a 1939 Morris 12. Stored through the was, as there was no petrol, caused the mileage to be extremely low, and after five years it had only done 2000 miles.
In 1939 Annie decided to buy a new house in a better district – Kreskeld Lane, Bramahope. Their house, “Brookfield” cost 1000 pounds.
Then Annie died of bone cancer, and Edgar brought his sisters to live with them and run his house. Dorris was very capable, having been a WAAC in the First World War, and they ran the house very well – until Edgar began chatting up the ladies over the back next-door fence – a mother and daughter, Mrs Stafford and Marion.
When he finally ‘popped the question,’ much to everyone’s surprise, it was to Marion, and she accepted!
That then displaced the sisters and Barbara. The two Stafford ladies moved in with Edgar and it seemed to work very well for them all. Edgar bought a large boarding house in Harehills for the sisters, so all were satisfied. Mrs Stafford’s husband had been an engineer on Malcolm Campbell’s ‘Bluebird’ trials in the 30’s. It held the land speed record for a number of years. Campbell’s son, much against his father’s wishes, raced on Lake Windermere, beating all records – but died tragically when his boat flipped.
I joined the pork butchers shop in 1944, while the war was still on. In those very uncertain times, it seemed the best thing to do. I enjoyed working with Edgar but left in 1946 to do my National Service, and when I came out in 1948 I continued with my uncle and became a journeyman. I realised, though, that there was very little future there for me, as with a new young wife who was fairly extravagant, I would only ever be a manager for her. My plans for expansion were too way out for Edgar who was nearing retirement.
So I looked for other work in the transport field. Finally getting a job with Goodyear as an office manager, my pay was exactly twice as much. Business at the shop went quiet as the population had gone with the pulling down of thousands of houses, and the shop was finally sold to a younger man. Edgar retired and after a few years died, and Marion a few years later. Her mother lived on! Edgar was born 6.7.1893 and died 26.1.1969.
The bakehouse had a large gas oven and benches for making pork pies. A storeroom for spices and pickles, big ones for the Christmas period – there was an exotic aroma in that room. Below was the boiling room, with vats for salting pork, pressed meats, gravy, also fat rendering for pie pastry. Pickling the meat to make it nice and pink. Also, machinery for chopping and grinding sausages and polony.
Up front Edgar calling out to passers by to try his goods neatly displayed in the window. Shouting down to the kitchen staff to bring up more goods. His line of patter to the constant queue of women who listened hoping to get extra to their weekly wartime rations for their menfolk, was “have you seen me tap dance?”
We would hear this brilliant footwork from the cellar above us, pop up to have a look and see one hand on the shelf and the other hand on the butcher’s block suspended in air! Another tale he’d tell was that he was descended from the Vikings, telling the girls about marauding and pillaging. Shouting out “Seniors Pork Pies are the best!” in true market fashion.
Mornings for me were largely spent in the cellar and after a marvellous huge dinner of roast meat and veggies cooked by Mrs Sellars, we’d begin the business of making pork pies. 20 dozen would be a normal days supply for two hours work, and listening to ‘Woman’s hour’ or ‘Mrs Dales Diary’ passed the time pleasantly. The price of a small pie was threeha’pence or one shilling and sixpence a dozen. But wages had to be made for four people.
The hardest work was the cleaning up – getting rid of the grease. Here you have a sample of the life of a pork butcher on the 1940’s – hard work but happy.
…………………… Tape 2.
Ernest Warnock Watson
My father was born 29.12.1895 in Whitby; the name Warnock was his mother. His father was Edward Martin Watson, born in 1865, and his father George was born in 1830 and was an Engine driver. My Grandfather Edward Martin was a Station Master at Washington Co. Durham.
Dad’s early life is vague. He was brought up by different people and entered the Butchers trade at the age of 12 in York. He had his great aunts Isabel and Margaret who lived in Elgin Terrace, Whitby. Isabel was a very religious and intelligent woman, buy never said much about Dad’s childhood, except that he was brought up in Hawsker and lived in Ruswerp then in York. He discovered a brother and sister who lived in London when he was 40. He volunteered for the army in WWI South Staffordhouse Regiment. He spent four years in the trenches in terrible conditions – being attacked by gas, sickness and disease, and was wounded three times.
I went before an army board at interview before my commission and five very senior officers asked what my father did. When I said he was only a private soldier and a Lewis Gunner, the General said he was not only a private, he was a very brave man to have survived all those years on a Lewis Gun.
On leaving the army my father joined the police force and lived in Barracks, having no home. He met my mother Margaret Senior at a police ball. They married, and Hilda was born in 1924, and I was born in 1925.
We lived in Miles Hill Mt. A very nice house with a lean to glasshouse and a pleasant garden. Many appointments as it had once been a private home. They rented because police were given a rent subsidy, but no incentive to buy a house.
Dad was on shift work, one week on nights the next week on days. We always had to keep quiet as Dad was sleeping and friends were too noisy.
One day my teacher asked the class who had got a radio. I was the only one not to put up my hand, as we had to be quiet for Dad. We got one shortly after and all enjoyed listening to Tommy Handly and Henry Hall.
Dad was a gardener, liked a beer and went to Church. Once he decided to be confirmed but then realized there was no record of a baptism, so it was all done together much to my embarrassment! He always enjoyed family parties and did conjuring tricks that didn’t work to amuse the children.
He and my mother had lots of laughs, although they were very different. My mother was tidy – he wasn’t. As they got older Dad became nearly blind, which was horrible. He’d had a hard life and was suffering from servile dementia. Mother became very deaf, but they managed to cope. She even took him into the pub, a place she’d never been to, and have a cup of tea while he had a beer.
He was a big man though, and hard to manoeuvre onto a bus. Mother nursed him as long as possible till he went into a Geometric ward at St. James, and then died a few years later of Pneumonia.
I remember lots of stories of him – he used to play in the street and one year we all got skates and we drew a big figure eight on the road with chalk so we could practice our figure skating a ‘la Sonja Hein. Along strolls Dad, hugely tall in his uniform, cape over his shoulder. When he got to us he said, “Do you know it’s illegal to deface the Kings Highway and the adjacent thereof?” I puzzled over that so I went to ask Mum, “What’s an adjacent? Dad says we mustn’t deface it!” It made her laugh so much. She told the tale over and over again.
Dad was in the South Staffordshire regiment, no. 14324 for 30 years in Leeds City Police no. 271. We have his WWI medals, ‘Pip, Squeak and Wilfred’ plus a defence medal for WWI of which we are all very proud.
Ernest Watson was a fine swimmer and won many badges and prizes for swimming for the police.
In spite of all his hardships he was jolly and happy with his family and we enjoyed yearly holidays in Whitley. He was known as the Irish policeman because lots of his jokes were Irish humour. One against himself. Giving evidence in court the felon was climbing up a tall pipe that the lawyer got him so confused that he made the statement, “Then the accused was falling off a climb pipe,” to the amusement of the court.
John Senior
Born 18.3.1876 – Married 1890 – Died in 1940
I remember him at parties, although I don’t remember his wife Ellen, who died 11 years before I was born. She had a nervous condition and was finally put into care until she died, sadly away from the family. Doris and Edgar were away in the war and Margaret at 18 was left to look after the younger sisters Jessie 15 and Gladys 9.
John was a carpenter – known as a joiner and cabinetmaker. He was a real craftsman – all his work was detailed with scrolls and unlaid work. He worked for a firm called ‘Mountains’ in Leeds, for property owners and undertakers, making elaborate coffins. His Cath was steam-driven, powered by coal.
John was a tall handsome man in his mid 60’s, as I knew him. Mam always dropped in for tea on the way home from shopping. He always gave me a sixpence. He would send me to the corner shop when I was about six with a big jug for a quart of beer, me being careful not to spill. When he retired, though, Mam said he could only afford to give me one penny. I was quite pleased to get a bigger coin; it seemed better value.
Theirs was a jolly house, always busy, parties were held there, especially at Christmas. Uncle Frank would play the piano and men smoked fragrant cigars, and we could smell the Christmas dinner cooking – another Dickensian scene!
One occasion I noticed that a cigar was left smouldering so I decided to try it. I became very sick and when Mam noticed and questioned me I threw up, the smell was so vile.
Gladys was engaged to Frank who worked at a music shop selling sheet music – on commission only and at one penny per sheet he didn’t make much. He played in dance bands and Gladys would occasionally sing, too. They couldn’t afford to marry for years, but they were great at parties, always thinking of new games to play as well as the old favourites.
I should say a bit about Ellen Hargreaves. Her brother was Arthur who inherited a farm of milking cows. His daughters Ruth, Cathy and Joyce, delivered milk from a church and ladle pulled by a horse called Peggy.
I used to go up to the farm in Shadwell for holidays, meeting up with my other cousins to play.
I remember that Joyce maimed the manager of the local Pit once, when a bull run amok into the yard, and someone picked me up and threw me into the hen run while the locals chased and caught the bull.
I showed myself up as a city boy and was always in trouble. I used to cycle there and back from home.
The dairy was run by the girls, and butter and cheese was sold locally. Florrie, their mother, had a sister called Laura Wagstaff who’s husband and son’s worked down the coal mine, and when four blackened men came into the back yard four bowls of hot water, soap and towels were ready – they would swill themselves and scrub each other till they were clean, and everything else was black.
Donning clean clothes they were allowed into the house for a hearty meal served by the girls, and all managed by Aunt Laura. The men were treated like Kings, but they were the wage earners.
Probably four times six pounds went into that household per week – compared with my dad on 4½ – 5 pounds weekly. On Friday night payday Aunt Laura would wait at the gate with her pinafore outstretched and each man would drop his pay packet in, and from that Laura would run the household. She gave an allowance to the men (beer money). The girls bought the food, paid the rent, bought clothes, gave the Church money – everything! It was known as clean punny night.
Margaret Watson
Born Feb 6th 1899
Margaret Watson was Uncle Edgar’s sister. When Doris, Margaret, Jessie and Gladys mother Ellen Hargreaves died, Margaret was left to care for her two younger sisters and father, her brother and the oldest sister being away in WWI in France.
Margaret worked for a firm of Fashion Ravinwear called Healons as a personal secretary to the boss, until she met Ernest Watson at the Police Ball in the Town Hall.
He swept her off her feet – or vice versa – and they married in 1923 and went to live in Armley. Hilda was born in 1924, but they decided to move out to a modern Council Estate where I was born.
It was a good area for me to grow up in, as they were all young families around with lots of friends to play with. I still have friends going back to our preschool days.
Margaret prided herself on being an excellent housewife and mother. She had given up her job as all women did on marrying. She could have had an excellent career, as did one or two of her friends. Gladys Bostwick was one – she rose high in her chosen field and was responsible for the Brook Bond Tea ad with the ‘chimpanzee’s tea party’ advertisements, so popular; the young Princesses were guests there on one occasion.
Margaret had two children, and lost a third in a menstruation cycle accident that ended in a miscarriage.
Dad overturned it on a railway line on the way him from Redear. In those days they had large motorbike combinations, it was probably a BSA 600cc with a Box side ear. He was in hospital with a broken leg, and he lost a finger in the spinning wheel.
Margaret called herself a practical Christian. She worked hard in the Church and the family were regular attendants at communion. She used to get we children dressed in our ‘Sunday Best,’ before she hurried us up the hill to the sound of Church Bells.
She was a busy, active, and kindly woman. She delivered the Church magazines and I went quite often as a young boy with her. She always made the effort to visit and chat and to see if anyone needed anything.
I was intrigued by one old lady. In her youth she had been a maid to Florence Nightingale, who by then was an old lady. She was always pleased to talk about those days when we suggested Florence must have been very clean and fussy. We were told, “Not her! She was a mucky old thing! She had 27 cats making their mess around the place!”
One old lady was so poor and she was concerned that one day the Vicar might call, and although she kept a little store of biscuits at ease they would go stale, so Margaret would replace the biscuits with new ones each time she called. But the Vicar never called! So mam went to see the Vicar Chris Sampson and gently suggested that it would be much appreciated!
Another thing she loved was shopping. Going to the City 1 ½ pound bus, looking at Marshall and Snalgroves, Hitchers, Shofields, Rewiss’, do the rounds.
The ‘Button Shop’ was always interesting as mam did a lot of dressmaking. The ‘shopping’ always ended in a treat – a Sally Lunn or custard slice from Lewis’s to eat when we got home. She liked treats. She’d say, “We’ll listen to the radio, and eat maltesers or current palsy in front of the fire – we always had a little supper before we went to bed.
We used to cycle. Mam wasn’t very keen but they had a Tandem, and as a six year old I had a Raliegh with 20-inch wheels and I could keep up with 10-year-old Hilda and my parents.
We’d go on picnics to Eccup, all well organised as she did everything. We had yearly holidays in Whitley and always stayed at Miss Evans’ Boarding House, where the guests shop for their own meals and Miss Evans would cook it – a good arrangement for mam – if she came back with lamb chops, that’s what they’d have; or a couple of crabs and salad, that would be tea for today. I spent the time happily rowing around the harbour.
The war had a big effect on everyone’s lives. We were evacuated into the country three days before war broke out. We went off to school as normal. My mam said goodbye like an ordinary school day, they were advised that was best. We were herded onto buses at the school and driven out of the city. No one knew what to expect, but the idea was to separate the families to make sure that some people from each family survived, in case of bombing.
I went to Grafton and Yorkshire, and Hilda went to Lincolnshire. Margaret involved herself in First Aid Training.
Dad had a tough time – when the air raid sounded he would set off to walk to the Town Hall. He would get there in time for the all clear and then he’d ‘go back’ home. This could happen three times a night.
Leeds was not bombed but the German planes would pass over on the way to Manchester or Liverpool. As the war settled in it was clear that Leeds was a fairly safe place to be. Hilda came home, but I stayed longer – 18 months altogether – enjoying life on the farm, and I would cycle home to see the family.
One-day mam brought the weeks rations for a family of four. She said, “We can’t complain about the cost of living. This only cost six shillings, sixpence.” At that point she chocked and cried. Dad had an allotment where he grew vegies, which helped.
Margaret was a loving grandmother. She enjoyed taking five year old Charles to the pantomime at Christmas, and they’d tell about the comedians and they would laugh in the telling.
She also loved the other grandchildren, and it must have seemed like the end of the world when we came out to New Zealand. But she did come out to see us, and liked everything she saw. She thought it was like Glasgow and Scotland. We hoped she would stay here but she felt she should go back home.
She was very deaf in later life. We would have to write and warn her if we were going to ring at Christmas time, and though she never heard us she would do all the talking, telling us about her garden and Hilda’s children.
She died at 72, suddenly, while she was staying for Christmas at Hilda’s. She had a very nice little celebration meal, and died in the night. It was a shock for the family, but a great way for her to go. There’s so much to tell about Margaret.
Our kitchen at home always smelled of delicious cooking. It was very small with a gas cooker, and a table that could only just fit four people. It also had a big washing machine, and on washday became a laundry. The hot point was one of the first in the district. During the war Mam became anaemic and couldn’t do it the old manual way. She always had clean washing lines by running them down with a soapy cloth to get rid of the soot caused mainly by coal fires.
She called herself a plain cook, and we’d come home from school in the middle of the day to a two or three course meal – stew rice pudding, nourishing food. We’d go back to school for the afternoon and at four we would come home to new bread and homemade jam, or teacakes.
Sunday tea was held in the dining room and visitors were given “high tea” – meat, salad, fruit and custard.
She was a small lady. She liked good clothes and was rarely to be seen without gloves and handbag and hat, even to wearing the hat to go to the dustbin in the garden, she couldn’t stand the wind blowing her hair around. Mam and Dad did most things together, especially decorating! Dad was tall enough to reach the ceiling and between them they would wallpaper and paint to Margaret’s high standard.
She was always proud that he was such a handsome man – although she didn’t care for his card-playing friends. They would rock back on her chairs and weaken the legs. Dad used to get complimentary tickets at the cinema in the 30’s, and the family would see films like ‘Roberta’ and ‘Rose Marie’. I used to look down when the kissing started!
After retirement from the police dad worked at the Yorkshire Copper works, and one wet night he had a fall on the slippery cobbles. The injury from the fall accelerated his failing eyesight due to hardening of the arteries. It was not considered a work accident, but he became blind before he was sixty, dashing all their hopes of retiring to a cottage in Ruswip.
Mam cared for dad, keeping him tidy and clean, and against her principles she’d take him into a pub and get him a beer. In fact, she became his boozing partner. He was a big man and hard for mam to push onto buses, as the senile dementia advanced, he became awkward and she couldn’t cope. He lived for years in hospital until he died of pneumonia, leaving mam to live her remaining years peacefully.
John Watson
I’m going to tell you the bits of my life that not many people would know about – up to the time I came to New Zealand.. This is more difficult in that the people I’ve known previously – my mother etc. are dead, and they can’t be cross-examined. I’m still around so I can be, and my inaccuracies can be proven. So lets deal with some facts – I’ll talk about my boyhood – how I grew up through school and church and friends and youth hostelling, the things we did when we were young, up to going in the army, learning the trade, getting married. So we’ll go through those stages of life hoping we’ll put something on record that you don’t really know about. I’d like these to be picked over, corrected and edited. If I give the basic information it can be the story of my family which will be lost if I don’t put it on record.
I am 72 years old and I was born at a very early age – only a small baby at the time -and the date was the 1st of May in 1928, at 24 Marlesborough Crescent, which was a new council house, or corporation house as we called it, which my parents rented in the north-eastern part of Leeds. The greatest influence in my early life was certainly from my mother – a good woman, a good mother – and I guess working from the limited material she had she did as good a job as a mother could in bringing me up. I’ve got school reports which go back to Potneuton School, and I was probably a five or six year old in the infants, and I recall some of the headmistress’s comments which said he is very easily pleased with his own work and attempts to rest on his lorrals. And I’ve looked back on these recently and I recall, how true, I’ve always enjoyed doing whatever it is I am doing, and I’ve never pushed myself to the point that I become an Olympic Champion or a county cricket player or the leader of a sports club – I’m prepared to go so far and say, that’s fine, I’ve had a good shot at that and that’s good enough for me. So those early reports – I find it interesting – sort of showed a character that probably lasted in me all my life.
My mother was very conscientious in bringing us children up and my sister and I had a good childhood.
I went to council school and when evacuated went to Borough bridge. An interesting feature at that school was that it was 50% Jewish – mainly refugees from Germany. It was already a very heavy Jewish population due to the clothing trade so they fitted in well.
Our teacher Mr. Smith was a very strict master – of the old school. Very handy with the cane – it was the old-fashioned sort of swish of the cane, and if anyone stepped out of line you’d get three of the best or six of the best. It wasn’t as brutal as people imagine – it was just their method in those days of keeping everyone’s attention – a simple way of keeping a class of boys controlled, which would got rowdy if we had a teacher who was a softy. It did work – I think I was caned twice over the hand, usually because there was some mischief going on and there were half a dozen culprits and I was one of them – but it was that rare in years to be up the front of the class and given a wack. There were some kids who seemed as if they were always in front of the cane – they were the disruptives, the ones that were always trying to push the boundaries, and upset the class. You would feel sorry for those kids sometimes, but it was – I don’t know – I can’t say it was a good thing, but it was a simple way of keeping a class in check. Mr Thomas was a lovely Welshman – quite soft and gentle – who taught art and Literature, but we did what we wanted to in his class, ran riot, answered him back – but with old Mr. Smith we paid attention, he was a good teacher. At the age of seventy I suppose, he’d been brought back from retirement during the war, because there were a shortage of people for the civilian jobs that had to be done. He taught Science, Chemistry and Maths and held our attention.
It was at Technical School that I really began to understand and wanted to learn. The teachers were qualified tradesmen and gave us an insight into engineering.
I did well at Tech; it made sense to me. It was all practical learning. Most of the kids who came out of tech were not referred to jobs. On leaving I was offered a job at Dorman Longs in Middlesborough, at 16 yr old, as a cadet. Instead, my parents decided I should join my Uncle in his port butchers shop. The Headmaster was disappointed for me, but with the war and bombing, mam preferred me to stay at home. We didn’t know which way the war would go, we didn’t know if we would speak in German in the next month or two or the next year or two, and the idea was that if I got into the pork butchering trade I could be independent in my own account or I could work for someone else as a tradesman in that field. It is just one of those functions that you come to as you go along and you either go left or right and depending which way you go the other alternative is gone and will probably never be seen again.
I was a very good athlete at school, I had the build – the length of leg and the good stamina – but stamina or not I had good physique. I was never very good at distance, or tough games like rugby, I played a bit of soccer but I shone particularly at athletics. Arthur Clarkson and I ran a brilliant relay race – we ran like rockets – and I have a medal to prove it. I was untouchable in the high jump at Tech– being tall I was half way up to start with and I could beat the others. Sprinting was my particular field, which I carried on with through to the army. Later in the army in Vienna I won the high Jump competition against the French, American and Russian armies. Our company also won the tug-of-war.
I had good friends as a boy. I’ve always known Arthur; we went to school together and played in the street with Gerald Green and Tom Philips. There was also Stan or Wilf Hutchins as he now is, living in Canada.
We all used to go cycling – by then we were well into the war, so there were few cars on the road and we were quite safe – joined the YHA and it seemed like we could cover massive distances round the country. A four-day holiday became quite an adventure. We were very fond of Wales. I seemed to be the main organizer of these trips working out the route, accommodation and the food we should take. We also joined the Youth Club at Church. I had always been involved with St. Mathews Church through my mother and after confirmation at about 15-16 I joined the Youth Fellowship. It was expected that we must attend 12 communions, but it meant we couldn’t go on our Sunday tramps, so the Curate have us permission to worship at other Churches. But the curate had to warn the church on our tramp that there would be six extra that day, and then receive feedback that we had turned up tramping boots and all. Arthur and Tom would never come with us!
After Tech I went to work at my uncle Edgar’s pork butchers shop. I enjoyed it – a big advantage for me was that I got a big lunch every day. Being wartime, it was considered a great perk to be able to bring home tasty bits of meat, sausage, and pork pies on my bike.
My apprenticeship was broken by conscription into the army in June 1946 at 18 years, completing the last two years afterwards.
A detailed apprenticeship. The study of animals, diseases and accounting. We used to learn about these conditions that we’d find in an animal, tuberculosis and things like that. It was our job to reject the diseased meat which should have been rejected at the slaughter yard. In each year of exams I came top of the class. I think that was only because I’d learnt a lot in recent years – I’d learnt a lot in the army, I’d learnt the procedures you go through in order to swot up and learn and answer questions precisely. I’d relatively become quite good at that and I found it no trouble at all to pass the examinations that were necessary in that trade – in fact I did my upmost I think to put the other chaps off by suggesting we finished early and have a pint down at the pub or something. Anyway, besides the point, I won’t labour about the apprenticeship side of things.
I must tell you about the army, and again I’ll try to be brief – I’m amazed at how much tape we’re getting through and I’m not getting an awful lot of fact over. I joined the army as an 18 year old in June 1946. I was enlisted – I was called up, it was compulsory military service. I loved the army.
It was hard work working at the pork shop – quite menial, a lot of work – cleaning and scrubbing and degreasing shelves and benches. To me the army was like a holiday after the butchers shop. The basic Infantry training with the Green Howard’s at Richmond in Yorkshire, for six weeks of basic infantry training which everyone goes through before they go out to their different selected jobs in the army. You’re taught all the parade ground stuff, how to shoot your rifle, you get the quick march up and down, and make your bed and get your kit all laid out correctly for inspection, and they give you what everyone believes is a pretty hard time, but I loved it – I thought it was fun, great; got on with it.
Delightful old town – old premises, barracks, parade ground. Friendships were built very, very easily and I enjoyed the activity.
In that period of army training you got the selection officer – we used to joke about him, say it was his job to get square pegs to fit into round holes, because if a chap had been a driver in his previous occupation they’d probably make him into a cook – there was a reason for that. A cook would be made into a driver, because to be a cook in the army is totally different to being a cook in civilian life, so there was a tendency to say well we can’t put this bloke in as a cook because he thinks he knows it all, you’re better to put someone in who knows nothing about cooking and teach him how you make the breakfasts, you make the lunch you make the evening meal the army way rather than having a lot of experts who want to do it as if they’re the chief chef of everything.
I was sent for cor training from infantry to Royal artillery posted to 240th regiment, a light anti-aircraft, which was situated in North Wales.
The officer selection board was in Chester WASB. We walked past an old chap shabbily dressed – a possible gardener – and asked him the way, politely. Thank goodness, because he turned out to be a LT Colonel.
The whole three days turned out to be aptitude tests. Everything we did was observed and given marks for. Dozens of questions to draw you out and classify you. I felt compared to the other cadets who had good schooling and backgrounds, feeling I came out badly. But was I surprised to be chosen to go to OCT 4 at Aldershot under RS M ‘TIBBY’ BRIT. Drill instructor from the Coldstream Guards. I loved the parades – at least two a week with bands playing, 1500 men marching in step was a great feeling. I was relegated and had to do the whole course again – because I decided I didn’t want to be an officer. But they refused to send me back to my unit, and I had to go on – this time RASE Transport. I finally got my commission as 2nd LT and spent a very happy summer in North Wales on Amphibious Ducks. We did gunnery training in the outback of Wales – firing both the guns out to sea and targets towed behind aeroplanes and targets towed behind amphibious ducks out in the ocean ½ mile off shore – and there lies an interesting story that we may get back too.
I was enjoying army life, I thought it was good.
In the 240th regiment I was introduced to boxing as a sport – some sport – anyway it goes with gunnery training this bombarding thing you do with guns is very much like the bombardment thing you do when boxing an opponent. I was selected because of my size to represent the battery as was another close friend then, Colin Atkinson. We were sent down to the gym and told to put these gloves on, and start fighting, and given a few clues as to which glove you held where, and how you ducked and dodged and we entered into the strange world of boxing which didn’t last very long but as a sport I enjoyed it. The fact that as you get higher up in the selections you could get hurt and permanently which means its not a very good sport – but there are other sports you can get hurt in, you can get hurt motorcycling or horse-riding or playing rugby or soccer – but I think in boxing you could get hurt more than most.
While I was doing this 10 or 12 week training in North Wales I went through to Chester where we had to go into this WASB – War Office Selection Board. The address was I think Ivy House, Oxford road, Chester. So you got a bus from the railway station in Chester and you asked the bus driver how you got to Oxford road and he dropped you off at the end of the road, and you walked up the road until you found this address, and I remember there was this gardener fellow just behind the front gate and he was weeding and putting plants in – there on his hands and knees, covered in mud with a straw hat on, and looked a bit of a yellow pup. And I said, “Excuse me,” because there were no notices on the place apart from it said it was Ivy House, I said, “Excuse me, can you tell me if this is the War Office Selection Board, you know the place where officer cadets go?” and he said, “Yes it is, you go round the back and someone will meet you round there”.
We went round the back and sure enough this was the War Office Selection Board and we were shown where our bed would be for the next two or three days and we were got up early in the morning and we were given tasks to do. There was one occasion where a man came into the room and there was probably a group of ten of us sitting round the edges of this room – it was quite a small room – and he threw a smoking pipe and a packet of tobacco, just threw it down on the floor. What was happening was that everything we did was analysed, and watched and recorded so obviously we had to disgust this pipe on the floor. And with different levels of enthusiasm people would dive in and say, “Oh, pipe smoking!” and away they would go – obviously they had had some sort of training in this speech making, and this fellow would be away on the subject of tobacco, pipe smoking, where it came from, and all about it – and then someone would argue with him about the dangers, the medical effects, the effects it could have on your lungs, and some people couldn’t get a word in edge-wise. From this the selection board would sort of say, “Well he’s a pushy sort of fellow, he knows what he’s talking about, he showed initiative because he was the first one in,” and that was followed up and we’d pass onto something else.
There was some interesting little puzzles that they had out in the garden where you were given a piece of rope and two planks and you had to reach an island in the middle of a large goldfish pond. How you did it was up to the person who was given the job of leading his little group of three. From this was decided if you’ve got any brains in your head, whether you’ve got any powers of leadership and whether you got fussed up with a lot of detail that wasn’t necessary.
I found these were fun things. That particular puzzle was in the children’s encyclopaedia and I’d known the answer to that since I’d been a six or seven year old. You lay one plank diagonally across the corner of the pond, which gives you about a two-foot lead in and the other plank can then lead from the middle of the first plank to the corner of the island, in a T-shape. When neither of the planks is long enough to reach the island, in a T you’re able to brace the corner and walk across. The rope had nothing to do with it – people got into a real mess with the rope, which just wasn’t necessary. That was a little test in which I did remarkably well in.
We did another test where we go to use a 44 gallon drum and a plank to get over a barbed wire fence – it was meant to be as if we were escaping from a prison camp, and the fence had bells and cans and things on it so if you touched it your alarm went off and you obviously failed the task. Somehow I got my team of six across this fence without hitting the bell and it was the first time it had been done. So I was doing very, very well in these practical things although academically I was miles behind the other people who were public school or at least Grammar school.
The upper crust of army society – you know, Dad is a brigideer type of a fellow. You sat before boards who asked you stacks and stacks of questions on what sports you’ve played, what newspapers you read, what schools you’ve been to, were you interested in music or theatre. They drew you out to find out what sort of person you were, what you did in civilian life. I felt I hadn’t got a particularly good chance of succeeding through this selection stage, and it was quite some days before the results came back because in our particular patoon in the gunner unit at least half of us were officer cadets with a big white badge behind our gunner badge – a big white background – so we were the selected ones.
And then the results came through like waiting for your school Certificate results, and Colin Atkinson was a pass and I was a pass, but quite a few chaps failed and got almost suicidal about it. This meant we were going to go onto OPTU, a training unit in Aldershot.
Army life was becoming quite exciting for me at this stage – I fired rifles and I fired guns and I’d gone through a funny little three-day course in Chester and I passed. A point in the selection board in Chester which was fun: The man who was in charge of the selection was in the hands of a left-handed Colonel, and that left-handed Colonel was the gardener who was picking around in the weeds just inside the gate, so he was the first person who you approached and he got the first impression of you, and if you called him ‘sir’ and you said, “Excuse me sir, could you please tell me…” you were obviously in for a good high rating. And then there was the other fellow who said, “Er, my man you probably don’t know anything about anything, but I’m going to be an officer and I want to know where to go.” So he was in a position where he was able to get an initial assessment of everyone who came into the place because he was the gardener; he was also the left-handed Colonel and the boss. I thought that was rather funny and a little bit crafty.
So from there next posting was down to Aldershot under the loving care of one regimental sergeant major, Tibby Britain, who was nationally famous and probably internationally famous for his skills, and his skills were the precise drilling of people who think cold stream guards, RSM, he spent all his time as a drill instructor and he drilled and again most people saw that as an invasion of their privacy – a horrible military thing they had to go through; and I loved it. There were two major parades we had to go through in a week on Tuesday and Thursday and the course was an eight-week course. Once a fortnight an intake passed out so you had three passing out parades before you actually came to your own passing out parade. You’d have good military bands there – either the Grenadiers or the Coldstream military bands would be there for the big parade. Everything was precise – the inspecting officer was either the CIGS, which in our case was C Marshal Montgomery. We once had the commandeering chief of the French forces there, General Delac Detashinae.
I loved it, because it was all done with a flare that was appropriate to the day. For instance when the French Chief was the inspecting officer there was some 1500 men on parade so it was a large and accurate parade, but the music which the band was playing as the inspecting officer approached and the officers mess and as they said their good mornings to each other, and we’re standing smartly in the parade grounds waiting for the first commands and for the whole thing to begin, and if you like, the prelude music that they were playing was “La Lasium Sweep” from Farndal from the La Lasium Sweep probably. It was pleasant music, and I considered it first class music and I wasn’t grizzling at all – I was like someone on a holiday who was enjoying every minute of it.
Funnily enough – well probably not funnily enough – in fact I was relegated in that course and had to do it all over again. It was in a way my own silly fault. I had a pal, Jock Blackwood, in the unit, who was very, very left wing – he father was a trade union leader from Scottish shipyards, and Jock said, “The only reason that we’re here is that we’ve got a Labour government and the Labour government wants to suck up to us working folk – they want some of us to have pips on our shoulder, because in the past its been the privilege of the people who go to public schools, the upper crust of England, you know, the sort of people we don’t want – and I’m gonna have no part of it and I’m gonna go see this RSM of Britain and tell him I want to be out of here, and I want to go back to my unit and be a corporal like I was before I came” and I thought what a wonderful, wonderful approach to life this guys got. Jock Blackwood had hid interview with RSM Britain and explained his viewpoint, and in the queue waiting to go in after Jock was this bright, long, thin pork butchers apprentice, and I was marched in, in front of Britain and I sort of said, “I’d like to go back to my unit because I don’t think I want to be commissioned, I want to have a good life in the army as a corporal or sergeant or whatever my unit wants to make me up to,” and they said, “You’re relegated for eight weeks, do the course again.” And I checked with Jock and he was going back to his unit! He’d got what he wanted. All I got was, stuck my neck out and got relegated for eight weeks so I did the whole course again, and I found that I had an advantage in that having done it once, especially on the academic side, the military law side, the essay writing the various things that I was a bit shaky on I improved so much on in the second time around – discussion groups, lecturettes – we gave a short five or ten minute talk on a subject of our own choice.
And again the selection process that we had to go through I went through twice only to ultimately make the decision that I wanted to go into a working unit because the war was over and there was no hard work being done – the infantry was just standing around polishing their buttons, the artillery was standing around polishing their guns – but the transport units were still working as transport and supply units, so I elected to go into the RSC which meant that I got to yet another barracks in Aldershots and do the RSC training which was eesy peesy after the basic OPTU with the RSC of Britian in charge. I went through the RSC transport wing and got my commission – a happy day when everyone sits there in their uniforms and says, “Oh, aren’t we smart!” and you realize that you’ve come to a milepost – that’s all – you’ve got a long way to go before you’re accepted as an efficient, worthwhile officer – but at least on that day you’ve got a pip on your shoulder and your posh uniform which you all paid a lot of money for.
Our first post – and a few of us went together which was rather good because this comradeship was beginning to develop – we were posted to a unit in North Wales which was an amphibious unit – it had amphibious tanks and amphibious ducks. It was the greatest summer of my life to date – a very, very happy summer. We had all this equipment and our task was to learn how to operate them – we’d take them out into the sea, float them out into Cardigan Bay, do exercises, turn them around and beach land them, bring them out of the river in mud, learn how to use the winches in order to assist you to get out of difficult situations, maintain the vehicles – we lived with a grease gun in our hand – everything that went into the salt water had to be greased and greased and greased until the bearings were completely pumped out – likewise with amphibious tanks where there were many more places on them to be greased – but it was fun. It was a great unit. This was in Tarwin in North Wales.
I found myself after a short period of time with the RSC unit in one of those amphibious ducks towing our target up to Tongfani which was three miles north of us and when we got off Tongfani the lads with both the guns started opening fire to our targets and when I was on the boat with the gun we found a little trick that when you used your sight-correction trigger and brought your shot a little bit further forward, you could get the people in the ducks as frightened as anything because they released the shot was getting closer and closer to them, and they’d start waving jackets upon the end of barge poles as if to say, ‘can’t you see what you are doing?’ And they were in quite a panic while I had now changed roles, and they were still doing the same things, they were still clicking the triggers and aiming a little bit short between the target and the boat so I thought that was rather funny the way it came right back on me.
I got a commission in the RSC, and got a posting to go overseas to Austria, which sounded rather exciting – this Yorkshire port butcher boy is getting well extended – and I reported then to Holden unit in Fratford. We were held their for 10 days and I was given the job of defending officer – my weaker side, the legal side of our training – but there was a great shortage of officers, there was a surplus of people going through the military courts because they had given an amnesty on people who had been involved in anything that was criminal in military law and deserters being the main ones who had been told that if they came forward they would be treated with leniency because they wanted to clear the records, find out where these people had got to because quite often people went into hiding because they were unable to face going back into the army, or for domestic services as such, they may have been running a farm and the farm was going downhill fast and they thought ‘blow this, I’m not going back to sit on a gun site for the rest of the war, I’m going to do what I’ve got to do’ and by changing identity and by moving to a brothers farmhouse or something they could be hidden. So if they came back now on the very serious charge of desertion, they were told that they’d be treated leniently. I had the job of defending one man and through legal offices we were told how to conduct our defence, and we were told as this man had come back through the amnesty plan it would be reasonable for him to plead guilty and for me to do a plea of mitigation to say what a nice sort of fellow he was and that we should be lenient. So I talked to this fellow in his cell as defending officers do – I tried to remove any nervousness that he had so that he could appear as a competent, confident witness when we put him in front of the court. From the information I got from him I was able to put his case forward which was his plea of mitigation, which was basically: when he went home on leave in one stage in the war, his wife was very, very sick with two children and not handling it very well, and he felt that it was necessary for him to take over the household and look after the children and his wife, because otherwise he didn’t know what they would have done. He was a good, honest man who had now come forward to say he is very sorry, he knows he should have completed his military services but the circumstances were such that he was under such domestic pressure that he couldn’t do this.
There was a rapid getting together of heads as the decision was made and he got four years, four years imprisonment. Better than being shot in front of a firing squad, but that was under amnesty! I thought that was rather terrible, to defend a man then see four years of his life taken away from him. He came up to me, saw me just before he got sent away to the military prison, and he said, “Aw, thankyou sir. Those are the nicest words that anyone’s ever said about me,” and he went away quite happily thinking that he’d got away with murder. And he probably had. I think I realized then that in justice and in law there is very little truth. People tell their story as the see it from their viewpoint, and the fact that you forget some sides of the argument and you emphasise other sides of the argument mean that you can put up a story that could convince anyone. I realized then that there is a very big difference between the law and true justice. But as in democracy, it’s probably the best system we’ve got.
Shortly we were onto a ship. We did have a brief embarkation leave when I went home to Leeds and managed to meet up with most of my friends and especially my family, and show off my nice bright Karki uniform with its little shiny pip up on the shoulder. And then the leave was cut short because we didn’t have jabs for overseas. So we had to go through 14 inoculations in the week before we sailed (they can’t give them to you all in one day, so we had to go back a week early from our leave). So we had all this stuff pumped into us, to protect us from Cholera and you name it – it must have been everything that had ever been in the military handbook.
Onto the ship at Harrage, where we crossed to the hook of Holland, then into a train called the Medlock Sea, and that went for two days and nights to get us down through Germany. We finally arrived after going through the corner of Switzerland and Bulveria at Vilac in Austria (just north of the Italian border). I was again thrilled with everything – I’d seen the Alpine mountains, the snow on the peaks, a beautiful countryside, German and Austrian people in their country costumes – the leather shorts and the braces and the girls were in their dermal dresses with their embroidered tops – I thought it was delightful that I was getting paid 21 pounds a month as a second left tenant for seeing it. At Velac I reported to my unit – my RSC transport unit, 57 company. My commanding officer was a Major Donald Grill, and he greeted me with, “One thing you’ve got in front of you Watson, is you’re going on a skiing course, a unit ski instructors course and when you come back you’ll be able to teach skiing to all the men in the unit because after all it is a form of military transport and you’re the one who’s going to do it.”
I said, “Smashing, wonderful,”
And he said, “You’re joking aren’t you? You’re taking it out of me.”
I said, “No, no, no. Its wonderful, I really would like to be involved in that, yes.”
And he said, “Well I’ve asked all the other officers in the unit, and they’ve all turned me down with some excuse – they’ve either got a knee that doesn’t work properly or their circulations such that their hands go cold as soon as they open the fridge door, and there was not one of the four junior officers that they had that would look at going to the job and he had to force someone to go, and so he was forcing me to go. The fact that I wanted to go was beyond his wildest dreams.
It was a month or two until I moved up to the mountain training school where we did this course, which I thought was wonderful. We had various people in, some air force personal, people in from Germany; a few people from Austria (not many) but each unit that wanted to have a ski program for winter had a unit ski instructor on the course. One infantry unit had a corporal, a man called Plank, excellent material, he was a PTI, I think, Physical Training Instructor, he skied extremely well right from the word go. We did this course with Austrian instructors – brilliant instructors – two I think had been in the Olympics before the war. Our theoretical instructors were; one Professor Green who lectured on the subject on the Alpine and snow structure, avalanches, landslides – he was the scientist. We had Dr. Upholster, and in our instructors we had Hans Packer, Bruno Pick and Crustal Maire. Crustal Maire was a famous Austrian – he was like our Shaun Fits Patrick if you like – he was a tennis player in summer, Skier in winter, he was a footballer played guitar, he was a pop star on guitar and singing, he was a yodeller, and he was quite a character, one of our Austrian Instructors. Over the top of them we had English Army instructions; so between them we had English instructions, and Austrian demonstrations.
It was a wonderful course, I loved it – I think it was six weeks long. It was largely kitting up, knowing how to handle snow, how to survive in snow – we slept out in snow caves on one occasion; we lived in a high Alpine hut. We started in the village of Mulnuts where we did five days on theory – indoor lectures. They told us that the snow would fall on the 15th of October, because they’d looked at the mountain and they’d measured how far the snow was working its way down the mountains on a daily basis – it did snow on the 15th of October, and that struck me as amazing. England’s a bit like Auckland – it doesn’t have a climate, it has weather, and anything can happen at any time – in the Alpines they seemed to know just what was happening to that point, they could give you 10 days warning as to when the snow would fall.
From there, in the snow, we climbed to an Alpine hut called the Hokamblick, and from there we did our ski training. I loved it.
MY ANCESTOR PHOTOS 