My Life and Times

By Michael J. Burke B.A.

Michael was born in Halifax, West Yorkshire in 1935 and grew up from the age of two in the mining village of Goldthorpe, South Yorkshire. He says, "We kids had a lot of fun, even if we didn't have much money, but later in life I realised how children like me hadn't been given the same chances as the better off ones." Having left school at the age of fifteen without being given the chance to gain any qualifications, Michael proved the system wrong by earning himself a degree at the age of fifty five. He was also very active in local politics. Not only is this his life story but also the stories of his mum and dad, his grandparents and the many aunts and uncles who were part of those close-knit mining communities.

What the client thought:

Michael says: I am 88 years old and I have done many different things my life, so remembering exactly what and when things happened, as well as the many different places I lived in, could have been difficult.

Caroline is really good at gently asking questions that made me look back at my history, which I found most enjoyable. With her help, we pieced everything together. We discussed what photographs would be used and where they would be placed in the book. The dust cover is a real wow!

Extract:

 

Goldthorpe was one of a chain of pit villages which followed the coal seams far beneath the ground. All of them were different depths. Our local one was known as the Sludge Pit, being shallow and always full of water. Barnburgh, two miles away where Irene's (my wife's) dad worked, had a deep seam and she says it was nicknamed the Sunshine Pit because when the sun came out the miners came out on strike. Then there was Thurnscoe, Hickleton ('ickie Pit, we called it), and many more stretching between Sheffield and Doncaster, all closed now.

When I was a boy we used to run up and down the slag heaps which were burning inside and how we didn't get killed I don't know.

Working down the pit was a dangerous job, hot in some parts, cold in others and could be wet. Irene's Grandma wore long bloomers and when they were worn out her mother would cut them into shorts for Irene's dad, adding a pocket for his watch, and that's all he wore at the coalface.

Our house was only a few hundred yards from the Goldthorpe pit. Most pits had rigging at the top, a big wheel for the cable pulling coal up and taking men down. A man sat high up in a cabin taking control, a very important job because if he overwound the cable it could snap with disastrous results.

When I was a kid, there were no baths at the pit and pitmen came home in all their gear and covered in coal dust for a wash in the tin bath in front of the fire. The mine worked 24 hours a day and a fella came round in the morning with a pole, tapping on bedroom windows to wake them up for the early shift.

When a miner went to work he used to have to go to the office where they gave him his lamp and everything like that and his check number. A man at the pit head searched them to make sure they had no cigarettes or matches.

The men all crammed together to go down in the cage. I seem to have a memory of going down the pit once and was underground for five or six hours and the conditions were horrendous but I can't remember any more details. Every one of the boys I was at school with said, "I'm not gonna work down pit!" But nearly all of them did.

Our community was full of big families all living in a small area, all close knit. People knew each other and were often related, either directly or by marriage, families who had all been living there for half a century. You wouldn't pull someone apart behind their back because everyone was connected. There was no shade, you were either Labour or Conservative.

All the miners used to be members of working men's clubs and every week they put money into a collection to take the kids for a day out at Cleethorpes. We never went because my dad didn't work down the pit (he worked in a textile factory). On the day of the outing I'd go down to the field by the railway line with any other kids who weren't going and wave the lucky ones goodbye as their train went past. I never saw the sea until much later when I went to Hornsea on a school outing. I stood for a long time just watching the waves.

Most of the men worked in the mines. The local councillors and MPs and even the unions got together to prevent other industries from coming to the area because otherwise they wouldn't have been able to get enough men to go down the pit, dangerous work in terrible conditions.

As a consequence of that there was hardly any work for ladies, especially girls who had left school at fifteen, so buses used to take them early in the morning to the textile mills in Halifax and Huddersfield. One of the only alternatives was to go into domestic service and Irene's mother worked as a maid in a big house.

In 1957 six miners died in a disaster at Barnburgh and many more were injured. Luckily for Irene's dad he was at home in bed when it happened but went back to help in the rescue. I had a friend called Jack Gundry who was going to get married two weeks later. He used to work alongside the dad of the girl he was going to marry. Jack took that day off to paint the house where they were going to live so he survived but the girl's dad died six weeks later from his injuries. They used explosive at the coal face and always took cover from the flashback but a build up of gases made it far more powerful than expected. My cousin Herbert was caught up in it and his ears were badly burned.

Ifs, Buts and Maybes

By David H.C. Wine

David was born in 1937 in the Somerset village of East Quantoxhead which, he says, nobody has ever heard of and he describes a rural way of life which has now disappeared. After joining The Coldstream Guards David took part in prestigious ceremonial events including the Trooping of the Colour. Later his service with the Royal Army Pay Corps took him and his young family to Germany and Hong Kong, with a move into civilian life seeing him working on pipelines in Iran and the North Sea.

What the client thought:

David says: Knowing very little of my own parents' lives, I decided to write my own memoir but soon realised this was easier said than done. Caroline was asked to do it for me and I'm so glad she did! She is a master with words, a very good listener, she is patient and knows exactly what you want to say. She has enabled me to give my family the story of my own life which my parents were unable to do for me. I'm very proud of it. Thank you, Caroline, you have done a brilliant job.

Extract:

 

When World War II broke out in 1939 the government took control of farming through the local War Agricultural Committees who gave orders intended to maximise production. With imports restricted, grain to feed livestock was scarce so the number of hens was reduced countrywide. Because two other poultry farms existed about a mile each side of us in East Quantoxhead, my father was ordered to close his egg business and plough the land instead. His poor health made this impossible so our field across the track was handed over to a local farmer, which destroyed my father's living. He got by somehow, growing fruit and vegetables, keeping a goat for milk and raising rabbits for the pot. He kept ducks and as soon as they were let out of their shed in the morning they waddled straight into the brook, quacking loudly. Once they were out we stole in, treading carefully, to collect their eggs hidden among the straw. About thirty hens were allowed to remain, though they were whittled down by the fox, and Dad earned a bit of cash by gardening for local people.

Being only two when the war started, that was normal life as far as I was concerned. We would hear the drone of bomber planes in the distance, coming closer and closer with their strange roar rising and falling which I didn't realise at the time marked them out as the enemy. An anti-aircraft battery was stationed about four miles away in the harbour town of Watchet whose booming guns would try to shoot down the bombers on their way to the docks of Cardiff and Bristol.

For us as children it was all very exciting, with no real understanding of what it meant. Having gone to bed before darkness fell, we would hear the sound of planes and my sister Sue and I would rush to the window, dragging over a chair to look out, and see the sky black with aircraft flying above. Then we would dash to the other side of the house to watch them pass over until suddenly the distant skyline would be lit up by an orange glow as incendiary and high explosive bombs set the cities ablaze.

People who had been bombed out of their homes often ended up in the countryside and Mr and Mrs Gregory came from London to live in one of Dad's old chicken sheds for a short time. They cooked in a lean-to on a paraffin stove. I went up there one day and Mrs Gregory was cooking sausages, a real treat in wartime, and she gave me one. Delicious!

Mum took in lodgers in our house, often two or three at a time, who had either been bombed out or were terrified they would be. They had their meals with us and, although this meant a lot of work for Mum, it brought in extra money. Other houses across the village also took people in and next door they had a woman called Mrs Cudlip. She had a terrible screeching voice, you could wake the devil with it. I remember seeing her leaning out of a window one day screaming angrily at someone who had upset her in some way.

We had all kinds of exciting times. After America came into the war we suddenly saw truckloads of soldiers roaring along our road to their training camps. Chasing after their lorries we'd shout, "Give us some gum, chum!" Chewing gum was a fantastic new experience for us war kids! Out would fly sticks of gum, sometimes a whole packet.

 Once a green package dropped near me which turned out to be sugar cubes, almost as precious because sugar was rationed but not as much fun as gum.

Summer Sundays usually meant a trip to the beach with Dad, who took us everywhere, always walking.

"If you see anything metal, don't touch it!" were his strict orders.

You never knew what might wash up - a bomb, a mine or a bullet. Wreckage would appear on the shore, half a rowing boat, an oar, a huge bale of tarpaulin or mysterious pieces of intricately carved wood. Searching for these treasures was a great game.

Before I Forget

By Wendy Shaw

Wendy Shaw was born in 1933 in the Black Country town of Halesowen where her family had once been nailmakers. As a young child she joined the Betty Fox School of Dance and became one of the "Betty Fox Babes" touring theatres and night clubs, singing and dancing. Later she became an actress, married and raised four children then went on to many other adventures.

What the client thought:

Wendy says: I have lived a long and eventful life. One of the big problems with writing my book was the question of what to leave out rather than what to leave in and it didn't help that I kept changing my mind! Caroline was infinitely patient, always insisting that the finished book should be exactly what I wanted - and this was achieved. 

And Wendy's daughter Lucinda says:
What an amazing book! I found it a joy to read and it brought to life all the stories from my mum's past so vividly. I'm truly grateful to Caroline for the patient support and encouragement she gave to my mum, helping her to create this wonderful book. I will treasure it always. It is fantastic to think that for generations to come, whoever turns its pages will be able to open a window onto this rich and fascinating life. 

Extract:

 

Shirley Temple was a child star in the 1930s and early 1940s and it seemed every mother wanted her daughter to be a little Shirley Temple - my mother more than most. She had my hair set in the salon to imitate those famous curls and my dresses were short with bows and frills, just like Shirley's.

At the age of three I was taken for my first dance lesson at the Betty Fox School of Dance over a cake shop in Selly Oak. This involved three hours of travelling and I had three lessons a week, two private ones and a class lesson on Saturday morning. Betty Fox was a very famous teacher and soon graduated to a large house on the Bristol Road. Ballet was never possible for me because my feet weren't right for it.

My forte was tap dancing, musical comedy (which was basically ballet but not "en pointe") and character dancing which was based on traditional dances - Irish, Dutch, Russian etc. By the age of four I had become Baby Wendy Russell with Betty Fox acting as my agent, sending me off to dance in lots of different venues, especially night clubs. Shirley Temple had sparked a fashion for shows to include a child act somewhere on the bill. I earned quite a lot of money which was put into an account for me and came in very useful later when I found myself broke and living in London.

I objected strongly to my loss of freedom. I would have been much happier at home playing with my friends. My mother used to take me on the train to London and other parts of the country to large and prestigious competitions, travelling in my white fur coat and matching hat, as did all Betty Fox's girls. This all meant that I missed a great deal of schooling.

I was often taken to the theatre by my mother and remember my first pantomime very clearly. I was four years old. It was Aladdin starring Jessie Matthews, who was very famous, as the principal boy and her husband Sonnie Hale as Widow Twankey. I was familiar with going to the cinema where a rolling programme was shown and if you stayed long enough you got back to the beginning again. Thinking that was how it worked in the theatre, I refused to leave after the final curtain call, had a tantrum and had to be dragged out. The venue was the beautiful Prince of Wales Theatre, destroyed in a bombing raid in 1941, which was very sad.

My mother had an amazing eye for theatrical talent in all disciplines. There are numerous performers she picked out who went on to become household names. I remember a young lad playing Buttons in Cinderella at the Theatre Royal.

She said, "He'll go far." It was Max Bygraves.

Now That My Beard is Grey

By Manmeet Singh

Manmeet Singh was born into a Sikh family in Kenya in 1935 and grew up in Kisumu on the shores of Lake Victoria where he often watched the swift equatorial sunset. His father was a doctor who drove many miles over rough roads to reach patients or collect supplies, taking the young Manmeet with him to help with the frequent punctures and breakdowns. After studying medicine in London Manmeet's career took him to Uganda, with many adventures along the way, and then back to England where he became a consultant urologist.

What the client thought:

Manmeet says: I have dedicated this book to my late wife Seema who was very keen that I should tell my story but believed I would never do so. I began writing my story but did not get beyond a few pages. I am glad now to have satisfied her wish and Caroline has been the facilitator of this.

And his daughter Aushima says: I'm so very pleased that Dad found you and that you have made this dream a reality. The process has been seamless. Thank you for all your hard work in getting the book to print. You made the process easy and enjoyable for him. The promise of a book has been talked about in our family for so many years and I think my Mum will be looking down feeling incredibly happy that it has now happened. He has a great story to tell and the format looks great.

Extract:

My father decided to start a practice in Kisumu which in the 1930s was a developing town, not much more than a village really, nestling on the north-east corner of Lake Victoria and with a backdrop of hills. I used to watch the sun set into the lake and believed that on the other side was America and that if I sailed a boat far enough across the lake that is where I would end up.

There were no metalled roads, no electricity supply and no reliable telephone service. My father rented a large property, setting up a surgery on the ground floor and we lived upstairs. By the standards of the time it was quite adequate but seems very simple today. The kitchen and washing area each had a cold water tap but there was no running hot water so this had to be heated in a pail over a charcoal burner.

My father's patients were mainly indigenous Africans and Indian traders and in time he looked after Europeans, mainly sisal farmers from the Nyanza province.

There were no doctors outside the town so my father would be called out in emergencies by people who lived in outlying areas. Because few people had telephones, my father was often summoned to out-of-town cases by telegram and I still have a whole stack of these. Some were very amusing:

"Doctor, come quick, my wife gone mad!"

Sometimes an African would arrive, having walked many miles from a village, looking for the "daktari" which is Swahili for doctor. The word mganga meant a doctor held in great esteem and my father was also referred to in this way.

By the age of nine I was accompanying my father on his adventures, soon learning how to jack up the car and change the wheel for our many punctures. Sometimes a stone would fly up and damage the petrol tank so I would slide underneath to patch it up.

 My father would ask the person which direction to take. There were no proper roads nor any road signs. Half an hour later, no village having appeared, my father would ask again in Swahili, "Where is it?"

"Very near." That was always the answer.

Sometimes it became impossible for the car to get close to the village and an ox cart would come to take us the rest of the way. Arriving at a group of thatched huts my father would open up the back of the car and this became his clinic.

No Such Thing as Can't

By Margaret Burrow

Margaret was born in Barrow-in-Furness in 1940, one of a family of nine children. Their mother insisted on high standards of behaviour, even though they were growing up on a very low income. "There's no such thing as can't," she used to say. In later life when Margaret found herself dealing with life changing health problems, she put her energies into helping disabled people, work which earned her the MBE.

What the client thought:

Margaret's daughter Leasil says: I commissioned Caroline as a surprise for my Mum's 80th birthday. It was a wonderful experience for Mum. She took a wander through her lifetime of memories and shared them with Caroline who gently steered her through the process. Mum thoroughly enjoyed those conversations. The end product is delightful, well written and beautifully produced. It is now a family treasure. Thoroughly recommended.

Extract:

The winter blizzards of 1940 were the worst anyone could remember and the snow lay many feet deep, blocking roads and doorways, with people having to dig themselves out of their own homes. It was a cruel trick for fate to play when the war was already causing so much suffering.

In a small flat in the town of Barrow-in-Furness my mother lay in bed about to give birth to her fourth child. Without the luxury of a telephone, my father set off to fetch the midwife, Nurse Garstang. The snow was so bad that he could hardly see where he was and by the time the midwife arrived I had been born, a month before I was expected, and my mother was home alone with my three older siblings to look after. It must have been horrendous for her, to give birth without support. It is only now, looking back, that I can see what a remarkable and strong person she was. When the midwife eventually arrived she checked us over and all seemed well but my spine had been damaged and only in adulthood was this diagnosed. As a small child I had to wear a calliper for a long time because one leg was shorter than the other but no other problems were detected.

For any of you who don't know Barrow, it sits on a peninsular on the north-west coast just south of the Lake District and pushes its nose out eagerly into the Irish Sea, because the sea is what the town is all about. During the war the Vickers shipyard and engineering works brought us to Hitler's attention and bombing raids killed and injured many. Our home was so close to the yard that we could have leaned out of the window and shaken hands with the workers.

Our home was Flat 3c in Devonshire Buildings, an imposing sandstone building built in about 1875 by the Duke of Devonshire to house workers who flocked in their thousands to Barrow to find jobs in the industries he set up. The flats were constructed from red sandstone 3-feet thick

Strict rules applied to the tenants of Devonshire Buildings. Every Monday morning the women on the top floor would scrub the stone stairs, swilling them with water which would flow down to the next floor where someone else would then come out to scrub, carrying on like that to the bottom. While still damp, the steps were rubbed with a special whitening chalk. The women would be down on their knees doing this, often pregnant.

We were very secure and safe in our community where we felt we belonged to a lot of people, not just our family, and everyone was looking out for each other. On warm summer evenings people would emerge onto the streets where there was always someone to talk to. Long skipping ropes would come out, which my father might have made, stretching across the street with lines of children leaping up and down to songs which had been passed down the generations - until somebody tripped up. We called it twining. A woman called Frances Abrahams would bring out her accordion for people to have a singsong and those were magical evenings for me, that feeling of belonging.

Ripples of a Skimming Stone

By Ron Burgess

Ron Burges was born in Flixton, Manchester in 1947 and grew up inspired by the work ethic of his parents who built businesses from nothing to improve the family fortunes which included a move to Glasgow. Later, with his brother Leslie, Ron set up a small company which became the multi-million pound global brand BiP. Ron also tells the stories of some of the fascinating characters on the family tree.

What the client thought:

Ron says: I had never thought of writing down my life story and never would have had it not been that my children believed that I had a story worth telling for them and future generations.They commissioned Caroline Brannigan who, through many patient hours of Facetime and telephone interviews during the covid lockdown period, unfolded my memories. Our relaxed conversations even prompted me to delve deeper into my own ancestors' stories, revealing secrets of their lives that had been hidden for generations. She then skilfully knitted together our conversations to give my story a clear coherent structure. I can honestly say I could never have written my story down without Caroline's patience and expert guidance.

Extract:

In 1983 I spotted an advert in the Glasgow Herald, placed by the local authority, announcing that 2,000 hand driers were required for installation in schools across Renfrewshire. My first thought was that I could supply them if I could find a manufacturer making them. It occurred to me that a factory like that was more likely to be in the Midlands than in Glasgow but, in those days before the internet, they would have no idea about this opportunity to tender for business so far away. The cogs in my mind began whirring. How would such companies get to know about a lucrative local government order like that outside their area? Did some kind of platform exist whereby all companies across Britain could find out about all public sector contracts being put out to tender?

It sounds absurd but that night I dreamt about the business I was going to create, waking up knowing how it would all work. I would buy every newspaper in Britain and collect every advert placed by local government and put them together in a simple magazine. Then companies would pay to subscribe.
I rang my brother Leslie to ask what he thought of my new business idea and if he would be my partner. He thought it sounded promising. Next we took out quarterly subscriptions to every single local newspaper in the country, an enormous bundle arriving each day at the launderette (which Ron was running at the time) which had the large office area upstairs. Then Leslie and I spent hours snipping out the kind of adverts we were looking for, stuck them on paper and noted the closing date for tenders. That continued for three months over the early part of 1983. Even the children helped out at home, all of us sitting round with scissors snipping away. Everyone had fingers black with newsprint. There was no recycling so every week hundreds of newspapers went into the bin - at home, at the launderettes and even in street bins.

A sharp eye was needed, scanning every page. Although local authorities were required by law to put contracts out to tender, they would do everything they could to hide their adverts and we even found one in the "Deaths" column. They didn't want outsiders to spot them, preferring to give the work to local contractors with whom they were hand in glove. On average we were finding 180 notices a week.

Then we waited three months before starting all over again in the autumn in case the adverts were cyclical but the volume again came out at about 180. The next question was how often to publish. Speed was essential to get our magazine to subscribers before the closing date for tenders. Fortunately for us, Alan Sugar had just launched his first Amstrad home computer, revolutionary for its time and its price. A new low cost computer design program also meant we could type in the information from the adverts and lay them out in columns. It sounds so basic today. We indexed everything by category then left space for last-minute entries. We decided to publish every Wednesday, posting them out that day. It was to be printed on A3 paper, folded, starting with 100-200 copies, at first all for promotional circulation. We called it Contrax Weekly.

The first issue was printed in February 1984 and we came up with the name Business Information Publications Ltd. Today it is BiP Solutions Ltd and is a very different animal. Lots of people rhyme it with "pip" but to me it will always be  B "eye" P.

The Ball That Bounced My Way

By John Coverdale
with Caroline Brannigan

John Coverdale was born in 1936 and grew up near the village of Normanby in the North Riding of Yorkshire. Beginning his working life as an industrial chemist in the noisy, dirty but exciting surroundings of an ironworks, he then joined his family's long established firm, Richardsons, producing soft drinks and distributing beers. This is not just his story but those of the many interesting characters he met, both through the company and his passion for motorcycling and classic cars.

What the client thought:

John says: Caroline Brannigan has done a wonderful job. The response I am getting from people who have read my book is absolutely superb. They comment on how well it flows - that is the mark of the expert. Caroline produces books for those people who, like me, wish to set down their life stories for their family and friends. She has the ability and experience to create delightful books which store the joys of the past.

John's daughter Rachel adds, "Dad gave us all a copy of his book at Christmas. I want to thank you, Caroline, for the wonderful work you have done with his memoir. He has thoroughly enjoyed reminiscing and sharing his stories with you and now us.

Extract:

My father was born in 1898 and began working for the family business when old enough. As a seventeen-year-old he used to take a horse and rolley to Redcar to make deliveries. On the way back he would get off and walk behind the tailgate, in the lee of the crates of empty bottles, to get some shelter from the prevailing westerly wind which could be bitter in winter and bring rain. The horse knew the route so well it would walk seven miles back to the brewery on its own.

At the age of eighteen my father was called up to serve in World War I. The night before he left he attended chapel with his two good pals, the Hammerton brothers, who were also joining the Army. Both were killed in action and my father went back after the war to visit their graves. He never went again, I think he found it so traumatic.

Being a tall lad with a long reach, during training my father won an award for throwing mortar bombs and received a war savings card. Then he was sent to the trenches. My father endured not only the shells and machine-guns but the appalling conditions of the trenches, cold, wet and filthy. Lice infested his uniform and he would light a Vesta match, run the flame along the seams and hear the lice crackle in the heat and drop off.

One day just before a big battle he was crawling on his belly over the mud, his rifle balanced across his elbows, leading a wire cutting party to make a gap for the infantry. Enemy machine-guns opened up on them, it was pure hell. My father heard the man behind him shout, "Mother!" He turned round to see what had happened and that was the last thing he remembered before waking up some days later in hospital. He was told that the man behind him had died.

My father had been shot in the shoulder, breaking his collar bone and hitting his shoulder blade. Under the primitive conditions of the field hospital, the bullet could not be found and doctors assumed it had been fired at great range and had ricocheted off. They sewed his shoulder up, not making a very good job of it but the amount of injuries was overwhelming. He was still wearing his uniform, covered in mud and filth and infested with lice.

By the time my father arrived home he was still in a terrible state but at least could walk upright. He was still wearing his lice infested uniform which was burnt by my grandfather in the brewery boiler, after tearing off the insignia.

In the confusion of war his records were lost and my father was posted as a deserter. Eventually the village policeman came to the Old Brewery House with a warrant for my father's arrest. The resultant fracas is now enshrined in Normanby folklore. My grandfather, a large and imposing figure never seen without his ebony stick, set about the unfortunate policeman, pointing out that he knew damn well what had happened and the policeman apologised.

It wasn't long before the Army decided my father could go back for some more and he rejoined the 3rd Northamptonshire. Just before the Armistice he was hit in the leg by shrapnel from a shell which exploded nearby. After that his legs were like polished ivory. He was not, as far as I am aware, sent home this time but remained in France for a while after the war was over.

Back in England, it wasn't long before my father was driving the Richardson lorry, the first to be seen on Teesside. This was a Garner made in the Midlands with solid tyres and was bought from Halifax, with just a chassis. Going over there to pick it up, my father was taught to drive on the spot, sitting on a beer crate balanced on the bare bones of the vehicle, by a fellow who stood behind him shouting instructions. The bodywork then had to be built on in Middlesbrough by WG Edmunds, coach builder

A man called Alfred Edward Pease was in charge of supplying horses from our area to the military throughout World War I and took nearly all ours, which suffered the same ghastly fate as many of those poor animals who were either killed, horribly injured or abandoned as horse meat. My father never forgave him. He knew everything there was to know about horses and was very interested in my riding but was never able to do so himself because of his injuries.

As far as my father and everyone else was concerned, he had made a good recovery and was a strong, fit man standing 6-feet 2-inches tall. In 1988 he was admitted to hospital after taking to his bed and refusing food. A widower by then, he missed my mother deeply.

In the hospital he had a chest x-ray, the first he had ever had in his life. Afterwards the doctor rang me and, in a rather startled voice, asked, "What do you know about your father's history?"

They had found a machine-gun bullet several inches long lodged in his lung. It should have killed him. I went in to see the x-ray and there it was.

The doctor was rather young and had never met someone born in Victorian times. My father refused to believe this extraordinary piece of news, nor that it might have caused blood poisoning or any other number of serious problems.

"It wouldn't do that," he told me, "my cigar smoke will have put a coating on it."

He died four days later, just short of his 90th birthday, but not because of the bullet! At the time he was the longest serving driver in Britain and was a remarkable man. I loved him then and I love him now.

The Girl From The Bank House

by Maeve Fawcett
with Caroline Brannigan

Maeve was born in Kilkenny, Ireland in 1932, the daughter of a bank manager. Home was always the Bank House and she tells entertaining stories of growing up in a small rural town. At the age of fifteen Maeve suffered the devastating blow of losing her mother but picked herself up, continued her education and eventually trained in dentistry. Maeve came to work in England, married a doctor, Pat McCormack, and ran her own practice. They had two daughters. Widowed suddenly in her forties, Maeve threw herself into her work and looking after her girls but found happiness again with Nigel Fawcett, a surgeon.

What the client thought:

Maeve says: Friends had frequently told me that I should write my life story. Eventually my daughters became enthusiastic and set about finding a ghostwriter to undertake the project. Caroline's website immediately caught our eye and my daughters and I went up to Richmond to meet her. We were soon convinced that she would do a good job. Thereafter she visited us as often as she felt it necessary to obtain the relevant facts and she always managed to bring out the achievements I was proud of and the humour of certain situations. She did a great job helping us to choose the photographs and in generally putting the book together.

Maeve's daughters Sheena and Oonagh say: We travelled up to Richmond with our mother to meet Caroline and knew from the outset that she was going to deliver a book we would all enjoy. She listened carefully and patiently to our collective reminiscing, which was not necessarily perfectly aligned, and promised to help with dates. As Caroline was previously a journalist she had no trouble in locating a newspaper cutting from 1943 when a plane crashed in the West of Ireland - a dramatic event from our mother's childhood. We met again to select the photographs and Caroline made additional trips to Nottingham to interview Mum and Nigel in their home. There was a lot of information to pack into one book and Caroline managed this extremely well, mindful of all our expectations, and we are all delighted with the result!

Extract:

In September 1952 I began a course in dentistry at University College, Dublin. My father encouraged us all to take up a profession, he was very good like that, but not pushing too hard. He spent all he had to educate us and it must have been difficult for him.

I was one of a very small minority of women out of 45 dentistry students. Our studies included visiting the hospital at the back of Trinity, following a doctor on his ward rounds, the medical students at the front with the dentistry students craning over their heads from the back. Not only did we have to learn how to look after teeth, we also had to learn how to make them. Many people wore dentures in those days after losing teeth through poor care earlier in life or having extractions because that was the easiest and cheapest way to stop toothache. At one time extraction was the main skill a dentist had to learn. Sometimes young people would have all their teeth taken out to be replaced by dentures so they would never have toothache or dental bills. They didn't think it through because without teeth everything drops and the whole face changes.

When I was a little girl I cleaned my teeth but not very well, using a bristle toothbrush. Nobody flossed in those days which was bad because you were leaving a lot behind, the toothbrush can never do enough, nor was there mouthwash. When I developed trouble I didn't want to go to the dentist and when I did it was a disaster. My mother took me but I made such a scene that she had to take me home again. My father took me back the next week and I had to have some teeth taken out, baby teeth fortunately. I must have been an awful brat. The dentist was a man, as most of them were, and he was pretty awful, slapping me round the face when I was shouting and screaming. That frightened me.

Drills were awful things, foot operated, noisy and grindingly slow. Local anaesthetic was available but they were very mean about it. There was gas through a face mask but that was probably pretty dangerous. When I was a dentist I never did any fillings without giving a local, that helped me to relax as well, otherwise you were worrying about hitting a nerve. After my early experiences I decided always to be nice to my patients, that was very important, playing music in my surgery to distract them a little bit. Some said, "I only come for the music."

Made in Wales
From nowhere to everywhere

By Geoff Williams
with Caroline Brannigan

This book is for sale. Please email for details:

Born in 1932, Geoff grew up in Llay, a Welsh mining village near Wrexham, a close-knit community which provided little in material comforts but much fun and security for a small boy. At the age of six he went to his first match at Wrexham FC, a club he has been supporting ever since. The chance to go to grammar school, followed by an apprenticeship in electrical engineering, led to a long career in sales of wire and cables which took him all over the world, providing many adventures. Geoff also tells of his uncanny ability to bump into famous people and of his long friendship with the comedian Ken Dodd.

What the client thought:

Geoff says: My daughter Pauline persuaded me that I had a story to tell about my life, my travelling adventures and the people I had met. Initially I was reluctant to take on the challenge but Pauline insisted that I occupy my time during the pandemic. It sounded a reasonable idea but I realised it would test my concentration. She recommended that I should look at the website of Caroline Brannigan and I was impressed with her talent and credentials as a memoir writer.

I approached Caroline and we discussed the proposal. I found her to be very professional. We realised that she could not follow her usual procedure of visiting her client so our interviews took place during weekly two-hour telephone calls. Although we had not actually met, I soon became accustomed to her weekly telephone presence.

There is little doubt that Caroline is an extremely talented memoir writer with a remarkable eye for detail. Her work is of a very high standard. It was a pleasure to work with her. Recipients of my book have commented favourably about its quality and presentation. I passed a copy to a friend who is a retired lawyer. He told me he had read the book and was reading it again. "It reads as though it is you talking and is very compelling reading," he said.

I would not hesitate in recommending Caroline Brannigan as an extremely professional memoir writer. Thank you Caroline, you have made an old guy extremely happy.

Extract:

(In the late 1960s Geoff was working for Pyrotenax, a large company supplying all kinds of electrical cables.)

Neil Cunningham, a colleague responsible for our heating cables, came to see me one day and announced that he would like us to break into the under-soil heating mechanisms which were just beginning to revolutionise football pitches. He had read a newspaper article by Don Revie, the hard talking and tough manager of Leeds United Football Club who had taken his team top of the league. They had a reputation as a dirty team but the only dirt Revie was complaining about was mud from the waterlogged and often icy pitches which could lead matches to be postponed. Catching up by playing three games in a single week at the end of the season had resulted in key players being injured and he wanted answers.

Neil Cunningham turned to me and said, "Do you think we can get to see him?"
"It won't be easy but I'll see what I can do," I replied.

After making several calls I managed to attract the great man's attention and received an invitation to the ground at Elland Road. I walked into the boardroom, an impressive and well equipped room with all the trophies shining. For a lad who had once played for Llay United (his home village) this was an occasion I never thought would happen to me, beyond my wildest dreams.

Lined up before me were Don Revie, director Bob Woodward who was in charge of the ground, Chairman Manny Cussins and Les Cocker, the assistant manager. Don Revie turned out to be a very approachable man and over the years we got on together very well. He saw an opportunity to get what he wanted, a better pitch surface and fewer postponements.

Between that dazzling first day and the end result were numerous meetings to decide how deep the cables should go and how many. Could a player damage one or, worse, blow himself up? We went to see scientists who were experts in sports turf who were all for it, then we had to find a company to install them, beginning with a trial.

On the eve of securing the order Manny Cussins was on a train going down to London when he happened to bump into Colonel Bill Dunville, a regional manager of our rivals BICC who was a law unto himself, as all the regional managers were at that time. He knew nothing of cables but knew how to work people. An ex-Army man, he liked to get his way.

"We make these cables, I'd like to draw up a quote for you," he announced to Cussins.

Suddenly we found we had competition and I had to go into Leeds United and explain that BICC knew very little about the heating cable business and would have to start from scratch in developing a solution. Common sense prevailed, thank goodness, and the order was signed to Pyrotenax.

The big day arrived in 1968 with us acting as the main contractor supplying the cables and sub-contracting the laying of them. Some of the most famous players of the day, including the great Jack Charlton, were photographed with the tractor which arrived to make the first cut in the turf.

Slits were made 6-inches down and the cables slipped inside then covered, a better method than previously used which had done much to give under-soil heating a bad name. Everton had scooped up the entire turf at Goodison Park, laid the cables then reinstated the grass, compacting the under-soil badly in the process. After unveiling their proud achievement the club discovered that rainwater refused to drain away and sat sulkily in large pools. However, the Huddersfield company we used at Elland Road avoided that pitfall.

We were there almost every day while work continued through the closed season and I became very friendly with a lot of the players, particularly Jack Charlton and Norman Hunter, both very nice people. After a topping off party to celebrate the end of the project, pitch conditions improved dramatically.

I was invited to a couple of games, sitting in the directors' box, and then into the boardroom for a meal, meeting the visiting directors. In 1972 Leeds United won the FA Cup and through Don Revie I managed to persuade them to bring the cup to Wales and it was placed on display at the Llay British Legion alongside the Welsh Cup, won that year by Wrexham. Norman Hunter came along for the occasion, which was a great thrill.

Me
From Zero to 48

By Mick Cassinelli
with Caroline Brannigan

The council estate in Carrbrook near Manchester where I lived as a kid was a brilliant place to grow up and I made a lot of good friends. We didn't have much money but nor did anyone else. I soon learned that if you wanted something you had to earn it through hard work and by spotting an opportunity. This is the story of how those experiences helped to make me the person I am today.

What the client thought:

Mick says: I'd been trying to write my life story for some time but didn't know where to start. I wanted my daughters to know all about where I'd come from and how I'd built a successful business from nothing. My wife began writing down some of the funny stories she'd heard me tell about my childhood but we realised we'd need help to do it properly. Because of the pandemic, Caroline carried out her interviews over video calls and I was very happy with the way these worked, especially since it gave me greater flexibility to fit them in with my business. Caroline helped me to tell both the funny stories and the sad ones, working with sensitivity. When I was finally able to meet Caroline face to face she presented me with a fantastic looking book done just the way I wanted. She did a brilliant job and I can highly recommend her work.

Extract:

(As young men, Mick and Pete worked together as a team, employed by Pipeline Construction.)

Pipeline Construction was bought out by a company called Morgan Est and suddenly we found ourselves based at their offices in Ellesmere Port, over an hour's journey from home for a 7am start. From there we'd go to Macclesfield, Liverpool and all over. Though we were earning a decent wage we got fed up with the travelling.  As Pete and I drove around between various jobs we'd be dreaming of running our own business but how could two young lads like us make a start with no savings and nobody to help?

We badly needed a break, just some promise of work to give us the courage to take that big leap. Half the contracts for United Utilities were carried out by a company called Enterprise plc so we were hounding them but not getting anywhere. Then we managed to speak to a quantity surveyor with Enterprise called Ian Donaldson who got us in to talk to Stuart Fraser, a project manager only about 22 at the time.

"I've heard about you two," he said when we met. "Your customer scores are absolutely brilliant. Why don't you set up on your own?"

"That's what we're here for," I explained, "but we don't want to leave a secure job without anything on the books."

He promised to give us work fixing blockages and that was the beginning of it all. The year was 2002 and we called ourselves M&P Plumbing and Utilities Ltd (later Caecillian). We hired a van, kitted it out with tools we'd collected over the years, handed in our notice and started working out of my garage. Pete had a mobile phone but I didn't so we shared it.

Enterprise told us, "We'll fax you some jobs over" so we went out and bought a fax machine and waited.
And waited.

The first week came and went in silence. We started ringing but no one was answering. The second week came and went, still no money was coming in and there was the van hire to pay - not to mention eating. One day when we stopped at a petrol station to fill up the van I had a couple of quid and that was it.

"How much have you got, Pete?" I asked.

He added another couple of pounds and I filled up, watching the amount clocking up on the pump, making sure I didn't go over because we had no more money.

Suddenly in the third week the fax machine coughed into life, out scrolled an order for a job to repair a leak and we were straight on it, fixed, back-filled, re-instated. Then we were on the phone again.

"Any more jobs?"

Slowly they began trickling in.

I had to get my head around things I had never had to bother with before, like insurance and paying up front for materials and equipment. Getting an order to fit a shower, I asked Pete, "How are we supposed to find £300 to pay for that?"

Going round to a supplier, I handed over my personal credit card and thought, "What is going on here? Why have I given up my job?"
It was like that for weeks, splashing our credit cards around.

After five weeks the very first payment came in and that was a big day! It was £1,500 to repair an underground leak, backfill and reinstate it. For three months we didn't pay ourselves a proper wage, being paranoid about tax and vat. We had no idea how that all worked. For the first few years we paid ourselves only £300 a week, though we were out day and night.

Slowly we got to grips with all that boring but important stuff and found an accountant. Our bank decided they'd let us have an overdraft - £100! A van came up for sale for £500 and we worked out that even if we could run it for six months that would be cheaper than the hire charges we were paying. In the end it lasted a year.

By the end of that year the work was flooding in from Enterprise. Jobs came through the fax but increasingly via Pete's mobile phone while we were out and about and as soon as they wanted something we'd be doing it.

Pete would pick me up at 7am then drop me home about 6pm, I'd have my tea then we'd be on call for urgent plumbing jobs and could be out again until midnight, usually coming in filthy dirty. We did that every day for about two years and it was very tough but we had our eyes on better things, that was the motivational force behind us. What worked well for us was being able to offer so many different skills, from indoor plumbing and boilers to mains pipes and new water supplies. Being just the two of us we could be more flexible and faster than our bigger competitors. And we were good!

90 Years of Ebb and Flow

By Denis Pizzey
with Caroline Brannigan

Born in London close to the Thames in 1929, Denis Pizzey comes from a long line of men who made their living on the river. Here Denis tells their story and relates his own adventures on the water as a boy. Choosing a different course, Denis went on to be an electrical engineer, surviving tuberculosis and marrying the girl who nursed him!

What the client thought:

Denis writes: For my 90th birthday my friends and relatives decided that a book of my life would be a great present for me. My daughter contacted Caroline Brannigan who has a particular talent for drawing things from your memory in the most pleasant way. Caroline wrote with care and professionalism and I can only say how pleased I am with the results. Thank you, Caroline.

Denis's daughter Mary adds: We are really appreciative of how you managed to work through this with him, despite all the hiccups. Your work was extremely professional and yet not intrusive. Many many thanks. Everyone who has received a copy of the book has been so complimentary of it and it has led to many interesting and new conversations.

Other comments from family and friends include: I've just finished reading Denis's book and felt the need to tell you that I thought it was SO beautifully written - managing to keep his voice throughout - and the photographs were so well chosen. The whole book was wonderful - and very moving!

Extract:

At this point Denis is 21 years old.
Because of my previous illness, which they had told me was pleurisy, I used to attend a chest clinic in Maze Hill, not far away, under the care of Doctor Geans. One day he came up to me and said, "Have you applied for a pension yet?"

"What for?" I asked, mystified.

"Before they took you into the Army for National Service, I had lots and lots of arguments with them, telling them it was unsafe and that you shouldn't be called up because you would be liable to secondary problems," he told me. "I'll get the almoner to write a letter which you must copy in your own handwriting." And he gave me an address to send it to. This I did and was awarded a one hundred per cent disability pension.

I was left to work out for myself, from information I've gathered over the years, that I must have had tuberculosis in my lungs, though the doctor never mentioned the word. Perhaps he thought I had already been told but I hadn't. You can have secondary reactions in any part of the body, even the brain. In my case it was the elbow and, though I didn't know it at the time, the spine.

One evening after finishing work at Earls Court I had a lift back to Victoria. As I was walking towards the Tube to go home I collapsed in the middle of the road and remember lying there with the traffic going round me. My back had given way and that was the start of my trouble. A policeman got me out of the road and I was in a lot of pain. I could walk only if bent double.

Unbeknown to me, three vertebrae near the top of my spine, the eighth, ninth and tenth, had collapsed suddenly and I lost an inch in height instantly. Tuberculosis had been lurking there, silently doing its damage. Having no idea how serious it was, I turned down the policeman's offer to call an ambulance and struggled home to Charlton, taking the Underground to Charing Cross then a train to Woolwich and a bus to Charlton. As soon as I got home I fell into bed.

My father, who was still working with rowing crews at that time, offered to give me a massage with strong smelling White Horse liniment and that hurt.

"It'll be all right," he said, "it'll ease off." But it didn't ease off. The doctor wouldn't come in the door until my parents put half a crown in his hands (two shilling and six old pence). He just looked at me and didn't say much at all, except that I must have ripped something and it would improve. After three weeks, which I spent almost completely in bed, the doctor returned and said to my father, "He's putting it on. He doesn't want to go back to work." That upset my dad quite a bit because he knew it wasn't true. Though I didn't have much of a relationship with him, he was very protective. They had a bit of a row and my father said, "I want him taken to hospital and I want an ambulance to take him down there. The boy can hardly walk!"

I can remember him saying that quite clearly. The doctor replied, "He got all the way from Victoria so I don't see why he needs an ambulance."

My father got his way and I was taken to St. Alfedge's Hospital, a former workhouse in Greenwich, where I was x-rayed and sent away because the results wouldn't be ready until the following week, the staff having all gone off for the weekend. The ambulance took me home again then back to hospital on the Monday.

Sitting in the chair opposite a line of doctors, trying desperately to get comfortable, I saw they were all whispering to each other. Then one of them came over and said, "Get on this trolley and try to lie still. Don't move if you can help it."

How the collapse of the vertebrae had missed my spinal cord was a miracle. Looking at the x-rays later on, I could see it had bulged out on both sides but nothing had gone inwards, which could have left me paralysed.

They made a plaster cast of my back then put it down on blocks over a bed and told me to lie on it, making fundamental errors because that was about the worst thing they could have done. Once they put pyjamas on me it didn't fit exactly anyway. From time to time the nurses would turn me over, brush out the plaster cast and put me back in. I was there for three weeks like that, in a lot of discomfort and receiving no real treatment. Still no one mentioned the word tuberculosis.

From there I was transferred to St Vincent's, a specialist orthopaedic hospital in Pinner, Middlesex. I arrived by ambulance, wearing my pyjamas, lying on my plaster cast and when the staff first saw me they couldn't stop laughing because it was completely the wrong thing to do! St Vincent's began to put things right by making up a metal frame which went from the top of my back with a collar and a loop round my head, down my spine, then it branched into two down each leg. At the end were two uprights for my feet. I was bandaged into this contraption. Their plan was to isolate the affected joint and try as much as possible to part the diseased surfaces by stretching me out a bit.

Wooden blocks were placed onto a bed and I was laid on to them, in my frame, with a gap of about six to nine inches below me. Bedclothes were tucked round me. I remained like that for a year.

Penicillin was the new wonder drug which had been used first to save the lives of wounded servicemen, to miraculous effect, and had now been refined for general use in the civilian population. Then streptomycin came along which was an effective treatment for tuberculosis and I was one of the first to be given the drug, through an inter-muscular injection into my thigh every day for about six months, using a very big needle. I was also being injected with penicillin and think they were done together. But still nobody said I had TB, maybe they all thought I already knew.

You might ask me how I was able to endure such a terrible thing but I was only like it for a year. One bloke had been in there for six years and some of them had to have amputations. Nobody ever said, "If we do this you will get better." I just hoped that I would.

Everything had to be done for me but you soon got used to it and stopped feeling embarrassed. The one thing I could do was move my arms so I could just about feed myself, breaking the rules by putting one hand behind my neck so I could tilt my head forward just a tiny bit. Then the ward sister would come round and lay into me.

"You've got to keep your head still!"

St Vincent's specialised in bone conditions, including secondary infections resulting from TB. The wards had open verandas down one side to provide the fresh air which for a long time had been the only treatment for tuberculosis. There were brick columns but apart from those you were looking straight out into the grounds. As long as the weather was all right the verandas were open, day and night. I didn't think too much of that! Only in heavy rain or snow did they drop the tarpaulins to close them off. Our beds were often pushed right outside so that we didn't even have a roof over us and after one blizzard we were out there throwing snowballs at each other. A basin was placed beside me each day with a flannel so I could wash my face and any other bits I could reach and in winter one hand ended up covered in chilblains. Other than that I was warm enough, with a hot water bottle under my frame to warm the air beneath me.

They made a plaster cast of my front and once a month I was taken out of the ward, which had about twenty five patients, into a more private and much warmer area where the cast was placed on top of me. Then the nurses turned me over carefully so that my spine would not move, took off the frame and cleaned me up. It was a very pleasant experience to have your back washed after so long.

Most of my fellow patients were suffering from osteomyelitis, a serious bone infection, and because we were all under thirty we developed great friendships and got on like a house on fire. Four beds would be pushed round a small table so we could play cards.

St Vincent's was a really nice hospital, run by nuns who wore big white butterfly-shaped hats and long blue robes. They made up the senior staff who were training younger lay nurses in orthopaedics. Because I was still there on my 21st birthday in June 1950, the nuns organised a little party for me with a cake and bottles of beer. It was quite a pleasant do.

It was at St Vincent's that I met my wife Alicia, who I soon came to call Lis, a very pretty trainee nurse from Ireland. The first time I saw her was when the plaster cast was being made of my front because she was working in that department at the time.

Alicia remembers:
I'd heard of Denis through the grapevine from the other nurses who said he was a nice chap. When I was transferred to his ward I fell for him hook, line and sinker, those blue eyes looking up - that was the only direction he could look in, lying there on his back 24/7. We could only talk to each other when I was on duty and as time went by I never let on that we were having any kind of togetherness.

Denis had been really ill when he went in and St Vincent's was the only place where they could treat him but it wasn't very nice for him.

Denis continues:
Alicia and I could talk more when she was on night duty. Sleeping was very difficult for me anyway. All the lads in the ward used to pull my leg about her.

At long last they took me out of the brace and I had to learn to walk again. It took a while just to be able to stand on my legs again because my knees and ankles were very painful, feeling like they were full of glass. Once I could get up and move around they discharged me. I still needed crutches and it was nine months before I was back to moving normally.

It's such a long time ago that I have only vague memories of going home again but I know it was difficult. Though I was glad to be out of hospital, it hadn't been unpleasant being there, being among such a friendly group, and I struggled a bit to adjust.

Voyage Round the Top of the World

by Jeffrey Allison
with Caroline Brannigan

The seas of the Arctic offer tantalizing short cuts between continents which open for a few months in summer. The North West Passage weaves across the top of Canada and Alaska. The North East Passage skirts Norway and Russia.

In 2011 Jeffrey Allison, skipper of the Hartlepool-based yacht Eshamy, and Katherine Brownlie, his sole crew member for most of the voyage, became the first people to sail both routes clockwise in one season, right round the top of the world. Over five months they sailed 10,300 miles, dodging icebergs as high as office blocks, sea ice which threatened to engulf them and Russian officials just itching to arrest Jeffrey if he set foot on their soil.

What the client thought:

Catherine Millar, Jeffrey's daughter, says: Caroline provides a very professional service and has written my father's story beautifully. Sadly, he passed away before seeing the final printed copy but Caroline's book has provided us with wonderful memories and she captured his voice brilliantly. Caroline was very patient with us and I highly recommend her, not only to create a beautiful memento but also for the quality of her writing and guiding us so calmly and kindly through the whole process. Thank you so much.

Phil Schofield, who was closely involved with the voyage, says: First of all I was amazed at the quality of the printing, the dust jacket and glossy paper. Then I was even more impressed with the page turning excitement that Caroline managed to capture in her writing. It was a perfect balance between the human story and the technical challenges. I had finished the book by midnight.    

Extract:

The ghosts of the early explorers flitted around us as we headed past King William Island (Canada) and the Royal Geographical Islands. Nearby was Jenny Lind Island, named after a 19th century Swedish-born opera singer. Sweet or not, we knew that poor Jenny was still encased in ice and we needed to keep away from her, despite this being the recommended route.

We were more fortunate than the earliest pioneers for we knew where we hoped to go. They often had no idea of what was ahead or which turn to take in the maze. But Nature was still in charge and decisions had to be made constantly depending on which path looked most free of ice, where the wind would blow us and also where it was blowing the ice, plus changing tides and currents. Some charts were incomplete and some up-to-date internet data on ice was contradictory so we had to weigh up the information and decide what we thought was the best thing to do.

One of the many reasons this passage proved so elusive for so long is that it is necessary to duck southwards at some point to weave through the islands and find the best route west again. Even today that isn't something that can be planned in the comfort of an armchair months before and depends on weather and ice. A decision was needed on where to turn because to continue westwards to McClure Strait on a straight course offered wider seas but would be dangerously close to the edge of the ice.

We chose the narrow route of Peel Sound to make our turning which brought us down between Somerset and Prince of Wales Island and into the Franklin Strait. Katherine and I never discussed what we would do if we got iced in. Either you sit it out for 10 months until the thaw or walk. That could be a very long way. Eshamy carried no tent for such an excursion and we'd have had to rely on our survival bags. I tried to ensure that we would never find ourselves in that position. I had studied the ice for so long that I would only go on if I was sure we'd get through and you work with the weather because you want it to be as easy as possible for yourself.

Prue: You make it sound too easy.

The coastguard plane was buzzing around, seeing what everyone was up to and who was in the country. We spoke to them by radio around Larson Sound and could hear them quizzing a Russian ship which was nearby. I'd already used the satellite phone to let the authorities know as soon as we'd entered Canadian waters.

Our first serious problem of the voyage occurred in Peel Sound when we were 50 miles south of the nearest source of help, a small Inuit community called Resolute. We kept very quiet about this incident and didn't confess to it until safely back home. Prue never knew until Katherine mentioned it. Well, I didn't like to worry her.

Prue: Katherine came to stay with us in North Yorkshire after the voyage and the three of us were sitting here one night when I said, "I can't believe you went all that way and had no disasters. Something must have happened."

They were both looking a bit furtive then Katherine said, "Shall we tell her?"

Everything seemed to be set fair. I was sitting in the cockpit enjoying a nice day and, though there was no wind, I was thinking all was well. Katherine was supposed to be asleep. Suddenly her angry face popped up into the cockpit. "Whatever have you spilt now?" she demanded.

"Nothing! I'm just sitting here!"

Together we dropped down into the passageway where she pointed out a pool of water on the floor. A swift inspection of the engine next-door revealed that the sump was full of water which was lapping around the bottom of the engine. The batteries were already half covered which was potentially very dangerous.

"Get the hand pumps going!" I ordered, turning off the engine. Katherine leapt into action while I tried to find out where the water was coming from. My first thought was that a seacock was faulty and letting water in but that wasn't the problem. Then I stretched my hand down into the water to feel where the prop comes into the stern gland and nothing was coming through there either.

As soon as the water dropped below the batteries we switched on the electric pump. There must have been at least 500 litres of water in the sumps, under the engine and in the sole floor lockers. Once it was clear we spent two or three hours checking every sea cock, every possible opening but couldn't find any that were letting in water. As Eshamy had turned south into Peel Sound, there had been 5 knots of wind to the stern but then it died again as we were busy trying to find the leak. We went only 24 miles in 17 hours. The following day the wind was blowing 15 knots from the north so, as our frantic search continued, we were able to sail most of the day. Then it dropped to 5 knots again so the engine had to go on again, using precious fuel. The air temperature was 13 degrees and the water 7, not the kind of place for an enforced dip but much warmer than we expected.

All the time my mind was working. What are we going to do? Where are we going to go? We weren't far from the coast but were a long way from anything you could call a town. Resolute was our nearest harbour which by now was about 70 miles to the north back the way we had come. Even if we went there Eshamy would have to anchor in the bay with no possibility of being lifted out for repairs. Despite its name, Resolute wouldn't resolve our problem. Our technology meant that whatever happened we could always send a distress signal but, if we were rescued, how could I leave my boat? I'd already lost one boat (more about that later) and the lesson that taught me was, never leave your boat as long as it's floating.

Every possibility was running through my head as we continued our fruitless search for the problem, looking for any possible hull damage. For 12 hours we checked every cupboard and lifted the floors. We found nothing and no more had come in, thank God.

Exhausted and worried, we sat and weighed up the risks. We couldn't see any water coming in yet Eshamy had sprung a serious leak somewhere and what had happened once could probably happen again. We decided to go on. After that we were on high alert for any signs of water but there were none. My mind churned with all the possibilities and eventually I decided that a piece of ice must have got between the prop and the skeg, which is the thing the rudder hangs on to. Later I found the shaft was moving in the flange of the gearbox, which shouldn't have been happening but it was only many months afterwards, once we were safely through both the North West Passage and the Northern Sea Route/ North East Passage, that I was able to make a proper inspection. In a marina in northern Norway I stripped it all down to find that the key and two studs holding it were broken. We must have hit something to force the prop forward and do that damage but what it was I'll never know. If it was ice which had smashed on to the prop and then melted, that would explain why the gap closed again and no more water came in.

For the remainder of the voyage we kept a very close eye on the sump and as we passed over the inhospitable top of Russia, where I knew I would be very unwelcome even in an emergency, it was a worry I could have done without. Katherine and I both kept very quiet about this and it didn't appear on her blog. Her blog was extremely good but did not always tell the complete story. Well, they'd have only worried back home.

Just a Geordie Lass

Ann Clouston

Ann Clouston was born in Jarrow, one of triplets. With no special care units at the time, sadly one baby died but slowly Ann and her brother Bryan began to thrive. Ann grew up to become a nurse and also joined the Territorial Army, eventually taking command of a Field Hospital, achieving the rank of Colonel and receiving the accolade of being made the Queen's Honorary Nursing Sister. Despite all the letters after her name, Ann is still just a Geordie lass at heart!

What the client thought:

Ann says: At first I found it difficult to talk about myself but Caroline manages with her professional approach and friendly manner to put you at ease and draw out the salient points. (Ann has already had a reprint because family and friends have enjoyed the book so much).

Extract:

By the time I was 25 I was ready for a new challenge so went down to Fenham Barracks (Newcastle) to find out about joining the Territorial Army. "I won't know anybody," I thought but when I turned up I knew loads of them because it was a hospital unit, 201 Northern General Hospital (today it's called a Field Hospital). It had no actual beds unless mobilised but had the equivalent capability of a normal hospital of 600-800 beds. At that time all our equipment was stored in Germany, ready for deployment wherever needed.

All the officers were qualified people, doctors, nurses, physios, radiographers and so on. The other ranks were Combat Medical Technicians who could come from any background and we trained them in the paramedic skills they needed.

I took to it like a duck to water and within a month was the fire officer, recruit training officer and lots of other jobs because I was so enthusiastic. Nurses were granted years of seniority so after going in as a Lieutenant I was promoted rapidly to Captain, working my way up until by the time I retired from the TA in 2009 I had risen to the rank of Colonel.

When I first joined, platoons were split into males and females and the women had different uniforms from the men. For going on exercise we had drab green trousers and a top with a separate felt jacket underneath, totally impractical. The rest of the time we were in skirts. Another nursing Sister I knew was also in the TA and she guided me through the intricacies of winding puttees round your legs and polishing boots. Underneath we wore green longjohns, men's.

"Put them on back to front," Sandra told me, "so the opening is at the back."

Absolutely crackers!

My Nanna gave me a couple of new pairs of my Grandad's white fleecy-lined longjohns which were great but too wide and I'd cross over the buttons so all the excess material was doubled up.

Everything was topped off with a beret which arrives new looking like a flying saucer and needs moulding to shape so there I was sitting in the Sisters' home with a wet beret stuck on my head, water dripping down my neck. We had some fun and games like that.

Even when the uniforms got better they were still made for men so the crotch would droop round your knees until you got your needle and thread out.

I knew how to give medical care but couldn't put up a tent, read a map, march or shoot. Standards were exactly the same as the Regular Army. Off we went to the ranges at Ponteland and Whitburn where I got quite good at firing a pistol and a sub machine-gun, though single shots only. As nurses we had to know how to make a gun safe if someone brought one into the hospital and in a war zone I would carry a pistol to protect my patients.

Maiden Scurry was the name of our women's team which took part in competitions at Catterick, North Yorkshire and I was captain. There we'd be, struggling to carry a stretcher across water with a real person on board and invariably someone would fall in. Then an order would come to swim across with the stretcher, making a flotation pack, and off we'd set full of hope only to find that our packs sank almost immediately. Or we'd drop the stretcher. It was all hilarious but the reason you joined the TA was to train for war, you knew that was why you were there and I never forgot it.

Following the Flag!

The travels of Harry and Fran Fynn
As told to Caroline Brannigan

November 2019

Fran and Harry were both born in 1940 at the same hospital in Liverpool. Here they tell their stories of growing up in the city, including Fran’s memories of the blitz and Harry’s experiences during wartime evacuation. Married in 1961, they went where Harry’s Army career took them - including to Singapore, Germany and Northern Ireland - followed by three years with the Royal Brunei Malay Regiment. His Army service complete, Harry then joined the Royal Hong Kong Police and a whole new set of adventures opened up for them.

What the client thought:

Harry and Fran say: We’re delighted! Caroline faced a major challenge when she took on the Fynn story. Not only did it cover two widely differing careers but she also had to control the subjects’ ramblings and inappropriate anecdotes. Despite these difficulties, she has produced a clear, interesting and very readable volume which has been enjoyed by the entire Fynn tribe and many friends. Well done, Caroline and very many thanks for your work in recording our family stories for future generations.

Extract:

Harry and Fran first met at a cinema in early 1959, when they were both nineteen years old. It was the News Theatre in Liverpool where Fran and her friend Irene were working as part-time usherettes to earn extra money for their Spanish holiday. People with a bit of time to kill would come in to watch the news or a cartoon on a rolling programme.

Harry hitched-hiked to Liverpool from Dover and Edinburgh most weekends and used his time while operating an Army switchboard to make free calls to the new phone which Fran’s family had just installed, a party line shared with a neighbour.

Most of the weekends passed amicably except for the time when Fran, in a fit of pique at Harry’s unwillingness to do what she had asked, stamped on his foot with her stiletto heel. With the entire weight of even a slim woman concentrated into a tiny, metal tipped heel, Harry collapsed in one of the main streets of Liverpool city centre. Fran took one look at what she had done and fled, pursued by a limping and cursing boyfriend.

By the time the bruises had faded, good relations had been restored and gradually they began to talk about getting married and going to Singapore together. Fran wasn’t worried about going so far from her family because she felt the need to breathe, to become someone different. She had also heard from her brother, who had been to Singapore during National Service, that it had the best ice-cream in the world.
Fran’s family didn’t want her to get married and definitely not to Harry! Her dad was concerned because he was a soldier and would not be able to care for her properly; “You’ll have more dinner times than dinners,” he told her. Her mum was concerned because he was a foreigner - to her, anywhere two streets away was another country. When Fran first wanted to bring Harry to meet the family her mum said, “Do I know his mother?” She didn’t! Fran tried to reassure her, “She’s a lovely lady!”

To which her mother replied, “Always remember, if it’s in the cat it’ll come out in the kittens.”

In the end, her dad gave her away but her mum came to the wedding only under pressure.

Not being a Catholic, Harry had to go to a priest in Edinburgh to be instructed in the ways of the religion and agree that the children would be baptised as Catholics.

They were married at All Saints Church, Anfield, but only after the priest, who had forgotten all about them, had been dragged away from his dinner table by the best man. The reception was at Sampson & Barlows restaurant in London Road at 12/6 a head (12shillings and 6pence, 62½p).

Don Quixote and other tales

by Allison and Mike Schofield
with Caroline Brannigan

What the client thought:

(The following words are more important than what this book is actually about.)

Allison’s sister Fiona says: My lovely sister Allison was very suddenly diagnosed with terminal cancer. The days ahead for her family were bleak. I couldn’t stand the thought of the darkness that had inexplicably fallen over my sister, her husband and boys. I was desperate to make it better somehow - and that’s how I found Caroline. It’s true to say that she was a life saver - or at least it was a life prolonged. Telling her story gave my sister a focus and gave us all something to hang on to - and treasure now that she isn’t here. 

I called Caroline the day after my sister’s diagnosis and she dropped everything to write Allison’s story, as time was so short. Allison was told she had two to four weeks of life left and might not make it to Christmas. In fact she had an extra seven weeks and passed away just after the book was completed. I believe it kept her alive and gave her a purpose.

You meet some people in your life who do something so special that they leave a mark. Caroline did that for us and she is not only talented and professional but also very empathetic. She makes you feel important and she understands - and I for one will be forever grateful.

Morgan Memories

by Les Morgan
with Caroline Brannigan

August 2019

Les Morgan was born in Grangetown near Middlesbrough in 1930. During the Great Depression his dad lost his job in the steelworks and joined a musical group, Tom Smith’s Harmonica Boys. Here Les tells the stories of his dad, mum and grandparents and recalls his own memories of living in Grangetown and Redcar.

What the client thought:

Les says, Many thanks for your advice and guidance and also the way I was put at ease during our meetings, which I enjoyed and looked forward to.

And Les's son Ian adds, The book is fantastic, thank you.

Extract:

Once a week, (in the 1930s) when Dad was out of work, he would stand in the queue with many other men to sign on and collect the dole. The major part of the queue was made up of men who had served in World War I, many of them physically and mentally scarred by that horrific conflict. One such man lived two doors away and on occasion he would run out of the house waving his arms and shouting. Everyone knew him and he was soon stopped and held until his mother came to calm him down. Then, both crying, they slowly walked home, all at peace, until the next time. Some of the physically scarred were easy to identify by their missing arms or legs, facial injuries and the white sticks carried by the blind.

My dad’s brother Oswald, Uncle Ossie, received injuries to his leg which left him with a limp. Uncle Will, the husband of Mam’s sister Louisa, had problems with his speech. He had been gassed during the war and suffered from shell shock.

Uncle Bill, the husband of Mam’s sister Harriet, was stone deaf and had served as a Pioneer during the war. I didn’t appreciate what he had been through until many years later when I saw a television programme which outlined the hard work and dangers facing the Pioneers while they were tunnelling under the battlefields.

On Remembrance Day at eleven o’clock the works buzzer sounded, followed by the two-minute silence. In those days it was just that, perfect silence everywhere. No one moved and as a very small boy this was difficult for me to understand that first time, not knowing what was happening. When the buzzer sounded again people started talking and moving around and I realised I was free once again, which seemed strange after the stillness of only a few moments before.

Another year I was in a shop with Mam when the works buzzer sounded and once again no one moved, there was complete silence, no tills ringing, no whirring from the bacon slicer, until once again the buzzer went and the familiar sounds returned.

One morning I was in the busy main street when the buzzer sounded, everyone stood still once again it was completely silent. The trolley bus stopped, the driver and conductress stood beside the bus along with passengers who had all alighted and drivers of horses and carts stood beside their animals. There was what I can only describe as a great weight of silence.

So many people had lost loved ones and those who had survived were often suffering. The most memorable sight for us youngsters was a man with no legs who moved himself around Grangetown on an adapted pram wheel base, propelling himself with gloved hands along the pavement. When it was his turn to sign on, his colleagues would carry him up the stairs then return him to his vehicle. So much for the politicians’ promise after the war of “A Land Fit For Heroes”. In the 1970s my experience of being unemployed showed that the treatment of those in the dole queue hadn’t changed. You had to wait outside in the rain to sign on and those having trouble negotiating the stairs had to rely on someone to help.

From Chalk and Cheese to Lettuce and Tomatoes

by Jean and Peter Durnford
with Caroline Brannigan

June 2019

Jean Slingsby was the daughter of an engineer, Peter Durnford was the son of a vicar. In 1963 when they were married, society saw them as “chalk and cheese”. Peter’s family hadn’t expected him to choose horticulture as a career but together he and Jean built up the successful Red Roofs Nursery in East Yorkshire.

What the client thought:

Jean Durnford says: Caroline was very good at getting the story out of us. It’s written in an easy to read style. A friend said it sounds just like us talking but there is no waffle in the book, Caroline makes every word count. She is easy to talk to and asks questions in a way that you are very happy to answer. It was like having a conversation rather than being interrogated. Caroline showed a great interest in everything and did background reading to follow up the information. Thank you, Caroline, for your help and time in creating a book that means so much to us all.

Extract:

We were married during the February half term of 1963 after knowing each other just three months. People called it a whirlwind romance but we’re not whirlwind people really. It was a bitterly cold day during one of the worst winters Britain has ever experienced, with snow lying in the churchyard.

Peter: I didn’t have time to get married after that, it had to fit in with the crops, so it was either that winter or the next.
Jean: That’s what you told my father, anyway!
Peter: I remember being very nervous before the service and afterwards thought, “Thank goodness that’s over!”

After the ceremony at St Mary’s, Cottingham our reception was held at the Newlands Park Hotel in Hull. Then we set off in the Mini pick-up for our honeymoon, a few nights in a very large hotel in Harrogate which was almost deserted because of the severe weather.

Jean had happy childhood memories of the Yorkshire Dales so on our return journey, instead of going straight home, we went on a bit of a tour and attempted the notorious Buttertubs Pass high up near Hawes where we got well and truly stuck in the snow. At each side of the road the snow was piled right up above our heads where it had been cleared. Nobody stopped to help us but in the end we managed to get out again. We were probably a bit mad to go up there but took it all in our stride.

Jean remembers: We hadn’t had much time to get to know each other’s families. My parents weren’t used to posh people and were rather taken aback by my mother-in-law. Our backgrounds were poles apart, like chalk and cheese. It was a different world then. Peter’s father was a lovely person. He was a great collector of books and I’ve been told that every time he went to London he took an empty suitcase which came back full of books. They were everywhere in double layers. That was so different from the home I’d grown up in.

Peter’s mother was so far removed from anybody in a trade like my father that she didn’t know what to make of me and my family. Her elder son had married a bank manager’s daughter and here was Peter marrying an engineer’s daughter. She hadn’t got the faintest clue what engineering was. After we announced we were getting married, she more or less sent for his CV. My father had a letter from her with a long list of questions about him, to see if I was acceptable. Not that it would have made the slightest difference to me and Peter! Whenever he saw her after that my father always pulled her leg about it. She was, as I said, very Victorian in her outlook.

Peter remembers: I don’t think Jean’s dad knew what to make of me either! I do know that my mother was very happy to have Jean in the family.
Jean: She’d got you palmed off at last, she’d been worried you’d never get married!

Within a week of getting married we were back at the cottage ready for the new growing season, as soon as the weather would allow. At the end of the half term Jean returned to work at the school and, not being a driver, Peter had to drive her there and back each day. Eventually she did take her driving test, very reluctantly, but hated driving and would always try to get out of it.

It was only after we were married that Jean moved into the cottage, people didn’t usually live together then. Temperatures were still very low but our coal fire, which also heated the water, kept the back room warm and cosy. Upstairs you just shivered. When our first child arrived we bought an electric fire to take the chill off and much later an electric immersion heater for hot water. The vicar of St Mary’s came to visit. Our area was always known in the village as The Common and people seemed to think all of us down there were still living in the Middle Ages. The vicar walked in, saw the roaring fire and said in surprise, “Oh, it’s quite nice in here!”

To other people we must have seemed rather out in the sticks but there was a great sense of community and we made plenty of friends. We certainly never felt lonely.

With no gas in the area, we had an electric cooker but no fridge until later, nor did we have a washing machine to start with. We had a pressure cooker which was marvellous for cooking stews and so on, making the best of the cheaper kinds of meat because money was very tight. One expense we had to have was a telephone, essential for the business.

We were still keeping chickens in the loft above the garage. Up we’d go to collect the eggs which had to be cleaned before sale. We bought a gadget which consisted of a bucket sitting on a base into which you placed the eggs, very carefully, then covered them with warm water and plugged it in. The bucket rotated backwards and forwards very gently, cleaning the eggs ready to be packed in trays. The noise it made seemed to go, “Oddle poddle” so that’s what we called it, the Oddle Poddle.

The summer of 1963 saw the first tomatoes growing at Red Roofs as well as the lettuces and other vegetables. As the crops became ready, casual workers arrived to pick and pack them. Tomatoes were picked under-ripe straight into large wooden boxes in the hope that they would better survive the journey to market. Growers wouldn’t dream of doing that today.

At that time we were living mainly off Jean’s salary as a teacher, which wasn’t very high in those days, but when we were expecting our first child she gave in her notice at the school. Despite not having much in the material sense, it was a very happy time, wonderful in fact.

Peter: I couldn’t believe my luck!

On the Beat at 15!

By Tony Fletcher
with Caroline Brannigan

April 2019

Tony Fletcher joined the West Riding Constabulary at the age of 15 in 1958 and rose to Chief Inspector. He tells many entertaining tales of life on the beat and documents more serious challenges such as policing the coal strike where many miners were his friends. Adventures after leaving the police service included being part of a group filmed surviving on an uninhabited island for a TV series - “The Island” with Bear Grylls. The book’s front cover shows Tony in 1959 with the West Riding Mounted Police at Pontefract.

What the client thought:

Tony Fletcher says: It was not until I reached 70 years of age that I really reflected on my life. I wanted to record it for my children and grandchildren but felt that I hadn’t the skills to do this effectively, even though I believed there was a story to tell. Through her professional journalistic experience Caroline really helped me to put my story together in a manner that made all my family and friends want to read it. I keep getting requests for more copies! She gave my thoughts some structure and helped me draw out all that I wanted to say. What emerged from her help was a beautiful hardback book that captured my voice.

Extract:

As a young man I had been encouraged to become a miner as a well paid, secure and worthwhile job. For many reasons I am grateful I had another choice and one of those reasons is Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s determination to close Britain’s coal mining industry. In the early 1980s the mining communities in which I had lived and worked and whose inhabitants I had come to know so well had no inkling that the focus of their lives was about to be removed.

The miners’ strike began in 1984 in protest against the closure of just one pit but escalated into one of the most serious and violent confrontations between government and unions ever seen in Britain. Its bitter aftermath continues to divide communities, even families. I was on the front line policing the strike but considered I was just doing my job and expected to be treated as such. I continued to drink in the Allerton Bywater working men’s clubs with my old mates until one day a couple of men turned nasty, calling me a traitor, and the club secretary did nothing about it. I tore up my club and institute union membership card in his face. “You haven’t got the bottle to stand up to them,” I said and left.

As the strike dragged on and money dried up, half a dozen members of the National Union of Mineworkers decided to return to work at the pit in Allerton Bywater. It was my job to get them through the mass of pickets swarming round the pit entrance, seething with anger and frustration at people they regarded as traitors, ‘blacklegs’. These were nearly all people I knew, on both sides.

Miners converged on Allerton Bywater pit to stop anyone getting through. Scenes like this led to laws banning secondary picketing. In great secrecy, a team was set up of a superintendent and two inspectors, including me. I was unaware at the time how strong were the demands from Margaret Thatcher’s government. The orders were, I now know, that these men had to be got into work, even though it could only be a gesture as six men can’t run a pit made for 3,000. They were the first to break the strike in West Yorkshire and created a chink in the armour of the powerful NUM.

This was a village where I had lived and played as a kid and I knew every nook and cranny. The strike breakers lived across West Yorkshire and gathering them together then keeping them safe was a tough job. At two o’clock each morning I got up, put on ordinary clothes and drove an old van, its windows protected by metal grills, to collect the six men who sat in the back, terrified. Had the pickets found us I don’t know what would have happened and I remember feeling frightened. Nobody in Allerton Bywater or beyond knew it was me driving the van. I just disappeared from the front line. Until it was time to make our dash for the pit I kept on the move, hiding down quiet lanes I had known as a lad. It was August 1984 and the weather, in contrast to the atmosphere at the pit, was beautiful.

Meanwhile hundreds of other officers from all over the country were at Allerton Bywater clearing away obstructions put up by the pickets and erecting barriers. Then would come a call to my van, “We’re ready!”

I drove to the police compound near the pit and placed the van at the centre of a convoy. Then we headed for the pit as fast as possible as bricks flew around us and a great roar of noise erupted. Arriving very shaken, the men sat for a few hours doing nothing until it was time to do everything in reverse. Mostly I stayed with them unless a police car could get me out again, sitting low with my head down to avoid being identified. This went on every working day for weeks. As the summer came to an end the mornings became darker.

For some of the officers drafted in from the southern forces the sight of a coal mine was a new experience. After the daily confrontation the pickets wandered home but many of the police remained and some of those who had never been up north asked to see the mine, fascinated by the heavy machinery. They had no idea what it was like to work down a pit or what a mining community was like.

“This is the everyday working life of a miner,” I explained to them, “and most of them are the salt of the earth.” They thought miners were just animals and the conduct of some Metropolitan police officers was disgusting, waving £10 notes from their overtime payments in the faces of strikers.

On principle I believed that men who wanted to go to work should be allowed to but had no idea that by the end of the century most pits in Britain would have closed. I gave very little thought to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and what her long term agenda might be which was reflected in the money thrown at policing the strike. Resources were never a problem and we could have as many officers as we wanted. She saw a loss-making industry that couldn’t last. I just saw a lot of blokes I’d been at school with who wanted to go back to work but were too frightened to defy the union. They were hungry and their children were going without.

After about a year the miners’ strike broke up in disarray and workers returned to pits which would within a decade or so be silent and even wiped from the landscape. In Allerton Bywater I found little hostility towards me, though one or two must have harboured a grudge. Those who had broken the strike suffered and one of the men I had transported in the back of the van later took his own life.

I Never Wanted Him, You Know

by Tony Horncastle OBE

March 2019

When I was born many years after my brother and sister, my mother would say, “I never wanted him, you know.” She loved and cared for me just the same which can’t have been easy during the war years when our home city of Hull was so badly bombed.

I served my apprenticeship to be a brickie and then set up a building business which grew into the wide ranging Horncastle Group of companies. This is the story of my adventures along the way but is also the story of my family and the many interesting people I have met.

What the client thought:

Tony Horncastle says: I am delighted to tell you that the book is a great success and I have had numerous comments from both friends and acquaintances who have read it which are heartwarming. Some were from people of a similar age who witnessed those early times of the Hull blitz and poverty, and others who tell me that they could not put it down until they had finished it. All in all it has been very successful, more than I expected. I have to say I am very grateful to you for your input.

Extract:

After being evacuated in 1939, nothing much was happening so I returned home - just in time to enjoy the Hull blitz! Hull had far more bombs per population than any other UK city. They say that there were sixty raids on Hull before London had any and that 87,000 out of the 92,000 homes in the city were damaged or destroyed. That gives you an idea of the pasting Hull got. Being on the River Humber, it was easy to spot from the air and a tempting dumping ground for bombers heading for or returning from other targets such as Liverpool, Manchester and the industrial areas of West Yorkshire.

“A north east town was bombed last night,” said the news on the radio. They never said where, just in case the enemy hadn’t noticed.

We were fairly well equipped to fight back and I remember the searchlights sending their huge beams up into the sky and when two or three crossed over a bomber all hell broke loose with the big guns going off, which were in a park near us. If I’d been one of those pilots I’d have thought, “I’ll let them have the lot then I’m off!” So we got all our own share of bombs and other people’s as well.

It was strange and exciting and I never felt frightened. We would just get to sleep and the air raid sirens would go. My father slept on but my mum would call out, “Come along Tony!” and with my sister we all ran for the shelter. I’d usually want to go to the outside loo so she’d be bawling at me to hurry. Then we would disappear into the street shelter.

The early shelters were Anderson dug-out types, made of corrugated iron bent over a hole and banked up with sand bags. The earth floors of these shelters filled up with water so hardly got used. Some people had their own in their garden but we didn’t. Then there were solid brick communal shelters in the streets, above the ground with thick concrete roofs and quite comfortable if you got there early before all the seats or bunk beds were occupied. People were chatting about the war, who’d been caught showing a light in the blackout and gossiping generally. There were leaflets given out for children to keep us amused with quizzes and ideas for drawings.

When the bombers were overhead people would fall silent, listening for the whine of shells and bombs, and we youngsters had to be physically restrained from flying out to find shrapnel souvenirs. The whole basis of school life was about exchanging a piece of shell, preferably the nose cone, for the fin of an incendiary bomb, which was quite small. It was a new currency. I can remember the delight of finding those. Our own big guns were firing at the bombers and their exploded shell cases fell to earth in jagged pieces which were interesting but not prized as much.

I have very vivid memories of the blitz of 1941 when the centre of Hull and West Hull got a real pasting. We seemed to get it nearly every night. Our neighbour but two had their own garden shelter and if you were in favour you occasionally got an invite. We were in their Anderson shelter one night, the noise was deafening and I couldn’t believe our house would still be there. When we finally emerged several streets adjacent to us had been devastated and whole rows of terraced houses had gone. Stirling Street was particularly badly damaged. A direct hit with a land mine, a big drum of high explosive, had reduced most of the houses to rubble. It made one hell of a bang and if it had been a bit closer I wouldn’t be writing this now. I was astonished when we came out and saw our house was still there with just a few slates missing.

It was the same night the Hammonds Department store in Hull was bombed and razed to the ground along with most of central Hull. As the jerry aircraft came over several searchlights latched on to them then the big gun at the Costello playing fields nearby would start firing. Our houses weren’t very well built and the Costello gun would inspect all the footings with its vibrations. Yet even through all those bombing raids and Hull’s devastation, as an eight-year-old I cannot recall being scared. I suppose my age group were growing up with it and probably thought such things were normal.

By contrast I was terrified by a young woman living in our cul-de-sac who had been terribly burnt and most of her facial skin had been burnt off leaving her looking ghoulish and ghastly. She rarely came outside but the odd glimpse of her was chilling. Poor woman, I can see her now, and I had nightmares about her often. We are so fortunate these days to be able to help such unfortunate people to recover and live a full life.

When the sirens sounded my father only got out of bed if he was doing fire-watching, extinguishing any small incendiary bombs which fell before they could start big fires. Some bombs didn’t explode and the area was cordoned off until the bomb disposal experts arrived. As children we were fascinated and would get as close as we could to watch.

So bad was the bombing that the council started evacuating whole streets to safe areas and it was quite exciting to think I might get posted somewhere but we never were. If I’m honest, I’m surprised that more people weren’t killed in the bombing considering how many homes were damaged. The civil defence services did well during a very rough time.

We kids got to recognise every aircraft by the noise and shape. I could tell a German plane just by the peculiar chug of its engines. It gets me when people say how awful it must have been in the war because we got used to it. Patriotism played a big part and everybody was on side because the alternative of living under Hitler was terrible. Prime Minister Winston Churchill led us with dogged determination as Britain stood alone against the Nazis. The propaganda was very good, telling us our army, navy and air force were a match for anyone. Whether they were or not I don’t know. I also recall that in the early days of the war an armed trawler from Hull captured a German submarine and, having killed most of the crew, towed it into the docks. It received national publicity and was used to boost people’s morale. This was a period when Hitler was having all the success and anything to strengthen the war effort was highlighted. One of the trawler’s crew, the mate, lived near us and had an unsavoury reputation. Rumours were rife that he had been involved in helping himself to the sailors’ personal belongings.

Everybody in the street hated the arrival of the telegram boy.
“We regret to inform you that your husband (or son) is missing presumed killed” was the standard message.

I remember him arriving at the house opposite and hearing the poor young woman inside cry with anguish. Usually everyone rallied around to offer tea and sympathy and that was it, no counsellors, no carers, nothing, and the war continued.

Up the Ladder

by Charles Tate
with Caroline Brannigan

September 2018

Charles Tate was born near Wakefield in the 1920s and knew from an early age that he wanted to work with wood. After leaving school at fourteen he became an apprentice joiner. Being wartime he joined the Home Guard, carrying a rifle almost as big as himself! Later he started his own business and built about three hundred homes across West Yorkshire.

What the client thought:

Philippa says, My father enjoyed his time talking to Caroline about his past and he has been pleasantly surprised by how many people wanted to read his memories, not just his family. From my point of view too, it was a straightforward process where I knew exactly where I stood in terms of scheduling and costs. Thank you, Caroline.

Extract:

I was born in a one-up, one-down cottage in Yorkshire but my father lost his job in the mine when I was a baby and we had to move to Cheshire where there was work. Our new home was bigger than the one in which I had been born, being two one-up one-down cottages put together. They were built of stone on a slight slope and there was a step up to the kitchen where a door had been knocked through.

The house didn’t have a rear door, probably because about ten feet behind was a sheer drop down into a quarry. There was no fence, they didn’t do things like that in those days, but that didn’t stop us playing out there. We could walk round easily. As a child I didn’t like cabbage and my mother left me sitting at the kitchen table until I had eaten all my midday dinner. While she was in the other room I nipped out and threw my cabbage down the quarry.

“What a lovely boy! You’ve eaten all your cabbage!” she would say, seeing my clean plate.

We had no electricity and had gas lights which hissed gently on the wall. Like many houses we had no bathroom or inside toilet and the only water supply was a single cold tap in the kitchen. Toilets were in a block of four further down the road with several seats and as a small boy I had to hang on tightly. I didn’t mind having to go outside to reach the toilet because that’s what everybody we knew did. During the night we used a chamber pot. Bathtime meant filling a tin bath in front of the kitchen fire so you only did that once a week.

Outside the front of our house the road was unmade and opposite stood a building which was something to do with the waterworks. One day my brother and I opened a hydrant and water shot about twenty feet into the air so we scarpered quickly.

Down the road was a shop with a gas streetlight outside which was lit each evening by the lamplighter who took his ladder from one light to another. One night the lamplighter had climbed right to the top when my brother took the ladder away. The shop owner was called Evelyn Pilling and she was killing herself laughing.

At the age of five I was told I had to go to school so I went along with my mother on the first day. At mid morning break she was surprised to find me home again.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I’ve been to school,” I replied.

Nobody had said anything about staying. I was taken back.

I had an accident and bear the scar but have no memory of it happening. Apparently one washing day my mother had a bucket of very hot water in the back kitchen. I walked up behind her, she didn’t see me, stumbled and the water scalded me. Fortunately a doctor was visiting next door and he sorted me out straightaway. Over the years I forgot all about the scar. When I was eighteen I went for a medical to join the armed forces.

“Do you have any distinguishing features?” they asked.

“No,” I replied.

“What about this scar on your shoulder?”

“Oh, that!” I said.

Like many men during those difficult years of the 1930s, my father had to follow the work and was often away for long periods. The jobs were usually on railway widening, a lot of which was going on at the time, including Northallerton in North Yorkshire and Peterborough. One day he came home and I took a long hard look at him.

“Mum!” I said. “That man’s come again!”

My father thought, “If my own children don’t know me it’s time I got another job.”

Old Salt

By Annette Bodden-Whisker

July 2018

For sale £10 including P&P
A5 82 pages of text plus 8 pages of colour photos
For details on how to order please email

When I was growing up in Jamaica I loved watching an American TV show called The Love Boat, set on a cruise liner, and at the age of fourteen made three promises to myself - to work on a cruise ship, to be a nurse and be in the army. And I’ve done all three! These are the stories of the hilarious adventures I had working on board ship after joining in the 1980s and one terrifying Atlantic crossing.

What the client thought:

Thank you so much for your tremendous help and impressive work putting my story into the correct order and making changes so it’s easy to read. What an excellent service you provide, you guided and advised me every step of the way, making suggestions here and there. Most of all you kept me informed at every stage. I didn’t have to wonder what you were doing or how far you were working in the book.

Extract:

In the 1990s I was promoted to cabin attendant. How I loved that job! On embarkation days some of the cabin attendants had to go to the main gangway to meet and greet passengers as they boarded the ship, looking immaculate in our uniforms with white gloves and smiling nicely.

Then we showed the passengers to their cabins, explained how everything worked and answered any questions they had. I love talking and used to enjoy giving them all the valuable information about the ship, the best ports to visit, the entertainment on board and much more. I found it very amusing working the gangway because the questions they asked were out of this world, such as:

What time is the midnight buffet?
Do the crew members go home each night?
Can I take the ice carving home?
What do you do with the ice carving when it has melted?
Has the ship ever sunk?
I have an outside cabin, will I get wet when it rains?
How do we know which is our photo?
Why is the ship rocking?
Is the toilet water salty?
How do I walk forward?
What time are we taking off?
Where are we sailing to?

Passengers also did daft things. On the last night of the cruise they sometimes packed all their clothes in their suitcase which was taken away, only to find out in the morning that they had no clothes to wear. One passenger had to wrap himself in a shower curtain because his luggage had already been taken off the ship and he had to go through customs before he could get it again.

On that same cruise a passenger went to the purser’s desk to ask why, at some point between him boarding and his cases being put in his cabin, they had been sent to Texas. The purser was completely at a loss for an answer until he spotted that the luggage had been given tags saying Amarillo (yellow) and the passenger thought that meant they had gone to Amarillo, Texas.

Naturally the weather sometimes defeated us and one cruise heading to Grand Cayman had to be diverted because of a hurricane. An elderly lady was screaming on the main deck because her vacation of a lifetime was ruined. She had been so looking forward to going to the Grand Canyon. She had got it totally mixed up.

The Time of My Life

by Jim Baxter
with Caroline Brannigan

June 2018

Ever since I was a small boy I’ve loved cars and motorbikes and in my early twenties built myself a motorcycle which the tax office christened the Jim Baxter Special. I’ve been a bit naughty in my time, driving very fast round Liverpool and getting chased by the police - who turned out to be more interested in what was under the bonnet rather than me breaking the speed limit! They all knew Jim Baxter. I don’t do that anymore - and nor do they! I’ve brought a neglected Ferrari back to life and got many a grand old car purring sweetly again. Most of all I’ve loved preparing and racing vintage motorcycles, especially Scotts, coaxing these wonderful machines and testing them to the limit.

What the client thought:

Jim and his wife Jane in Liverpool say,
For several years we had an ambition to write Jim’s life story. When he suffered a debilitating stroke we had no excuse to delay any longer as there was little else that we could enjoy doing together. We made several attempts but found it was an impossible task, mainly because we knew that Jim had to “tell” the story - not write it, and I had already heard the stories before (several times!) The text would have emerged looking rather bland. In desperation I resorted to my ipad and by a lucky chance stumbled onto Caroline’s website. Our problems were over. Caroline took charge and guided us throughout the whole project. We were well aware that there would be costs involved but we feel it was money very well spent. Some people think nothing of spending thousands of pounds on cruises but at the end of the day, the story of a life is worth more!

The book got an immediate WOW from us on opening the parcel! Caroline, you have done an amazing job on our behalf - can’t thank you enough. We are so excited by the book. You have a very satisfied customer on your hands. The feedback we are getting is fantastic.

Extract:

Vintage cars and bikes excite me most, made between 1919 and 1930, and when I ran my own garage in Liverpool there was always something interesting being restored. When I met my wife Jane we got into motorcycle racing and I loved the exhilaration of riding something built in the days when Britain led the world in motorcycle production. They can still do 100mph. Despite this, it wasn’t until the 1970s that you had to wear a helmet and Jane just wore a headscarf.

Jane remembers:

When we first got together we were in a pub boasting about our prowess on motorbikes. I’d had one when I was sixteen, a 1934 Francis-Barnett Cruiser which I bought for £10 because I lived out in the wilds and needed it to get to work. Jim called it the Frantic Bastard. What I really wanted was a second-hand 150 BSA Bantam but they were too expensive for me at around £70.

Jim hadn’t been on a bike for years and neither had I, then he bought a box of bits which turned out to be a 1929 Scott motorcycle for me. He spent two years completely restoring it to concours condition, including soldering a brand new radiator from brass tubing.
I thought what a wonderful present it was, not realising that this gave him permission to buy whatever bike he liked for himself, starting with his own vintage Scott. A whole procession of bikes came through the garage to be carefully restored but Jim was no good at selling them, only buying.

They were invented by a brilliant Yorkshire engineer called Alfred Scott and known for their distinctive “yowling” engine noise. For their time (from 1908) they had an outstanding performance. In competition they were deemed to be “too efficient” for racing against motorcycles of the same capacity so their cubic capacity was multiplied by 1.32 to handicap them for competitive purposes.

I’ve restored so many Scotts that I’ve lost count. They performed like new when I’d finished. My own Scott was a 1929 Flying Squirrel and I was the only rider on our club circuit with a hand gear change. This was on the right side of the bike. In order to enable faster gear changes I kept my right hand on the twist grip and used my left hand to change gear over the tank. In 1914 Alfred Scott challenged his workers to a trial ride which has evolved into the famous Scott Trial still held today. Though I never took part in this gruelling ride I bought the 1928 Scott bike on which Eric Langton won in the 1930s.

Jane and I volunteered to become scrutineers at Aintree during the 1960s and 1970s, checking bikes before they were allowed to race. In the 1970s they wanted to start a vintage class so I decided to help make up the numbers. We were members of the Vintage Motorcycle Club North West Section and I became best club man in my class at one point. Compared to other riders on later vintage bikes, I wasn’t a real racing man. There’s nothing heroic about what I did, I was just there with the other lads trying to get in front of them and enjoying the fun of being involved.
I’ve raced lots of different vintage bikes and they’re all good fun but my 500cc Scott with its two cylinder two stroke engine was very quick off the mark, running and bumping at the start of a race. I was confident in the knowledge that I’d restored the bike myself and it was in peak condition. That was just as important as any riding skills I might have.

At the Oulton Park circuit a club champion was next to me on the grid. I cheekily tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Would you kindly keep to the left because I’ll be overtaking you on the right.”

“You and whose army?” he replied.

My eyes were glued to his back tyre and the moment that tyre moved I was off and past him but he overtook me on the straight and gave me two fingers. When he lapped me he gave me another two fingers. On the third lap the marshals were pushing bits of his bike into the side because it had fallen to pieces. Weight is crucial and his was a “cheat” bike, pretending to be a Scott but with lightweight parts sneaked in.

Jane remembers:

I must have enjoyed going fast because I blew up one of Jim’s bikes trying to keep pace with a friend on an MV Agusta on the way to the Blackpool Sprint (straight along the promenade). Since Jim was riding mine at the time, that’s what he had to make do with on the sprint.

Your grid position in races was determined by drawing lots - selecting a piece of wire sticking out of a bag held by a boy scout - so a quick start was vital if you were at the back. You ran with your bike to bump start it then jumped on and, being a mechanic, mine always started first time. There’s a film somewhere of me coming right from the back to be ahead of all riders at the first corner.

I never came off in spite of giving myself a fright now and again. Racing at Oulton Park I was disappointed to see another rider pass me until I realised it was just the bike with nobody on it. I reached out to shut it down so the marshals could catch it.

I was too timid to do the terrifying TT on the Isle of Man but Jane and I have followed the route with all its hairpin bends and mountainous terrain. We took part in the island’s vintage time trials on our Scott motorbikes where Jane invariably won the ladies prize and sometimes I’d win the distance award.

Keith Heckles, my very dear friend who’s sadly no longer with us, was a top TT and MGP rider and held the lap record at the 1976 MGP. I only out-cornered him once because I knew the road and he didn’t. He was a lovely man with a great sense of humour and once went round Silverstone on a bicycle sitting on the handlebars, facing the wrong way and ringing the bell with his bottom. He was magic.

One winter we went to Brooklands together and looked for somewhere to stay. All we could book was a bedroom up in the roof of a house which was freezing cold but better than nothing. There were two beds and when we got in between the chilly sheets Keith said, “My feet are freezing!”

I replied, “I don’t care, I’m still not coming into bed with you!”

Keith often repaired things for people. One day a hairdresser he knew called him over as he was walking past and asked if he could mend a hand-held hairdryer.

“Yes, I’ll fix that,” he said.

The shop was on a busy dual carriageway and when Keith took the hairdryer back he decided the traffic was going much too fast. He held up the hairdryer and watched them all slow down immediately, thinking he was a policeman with a speed camera.

He was the most marvellous motorbike rider. One day Jane and I were following him. Just before a left turn we saw him put out his left arm to signal, then his left leg went out and he went round the corner with his arm and leg sticking out, steering with his bottom!

One of our favourite friends was Marjorie Cottle who had been a celebrated racer in the 1920s and 1930s and was a test rider for Raleigh motorcycles before they were better known for their bicycles. Everyone was spellbound by her talks. She’d often stay overnight with us which was rather disconcerting because she’d be bombing around in a rather skimpy silk negligee, puffing on a cigarette. Marjorie was a marvellous person with great spirit and one typical event saw her trying to get out of the car as I drove her to a club meeting in a blizzard. She wanted to walk in front to guide me and I had to physically restrain her because by then she was quite an elderly lady.

I owned a 1953 1000cc Vincent Twin motorcycle and used it to visit a fellow enthusiast, Charlie Rumble, when he had to spend time in Rhyll Hospital following an accident with a lorry - he had to swerve to avoid injury to his grandson who was riding pillion. Unfortunately he sustained leg injuries himself.

To cheer Charlie up while he was in hospital I’d take the Vincent and run the engine outside his ward just so he could hear it. Coming back from one of these visits with Jane’s nephew Paul on the back, a car in front was weaving all over the place and I realised the people inside were eating fish and chips. Every now and again a greasy paper would come flying out of the window. I moved forward until we were alongside as the driver was stuffing himself. When the next lot of litter came out I caught it, stuffed it back through the window and told him he was a filthy pig. Paul never forgot that incident.

When Charlie came out of hospital I modified his car so he could drive despite his injuries. As he was paying for petrol one day, a villain jumped in and tried to steal the car but couldn’t work out how to drive it because I had fitted handlebars instead of a steering wheel.

On a visit to Hoghton Tower, the stately home near Preston, Jane and I left the Scotts outside the cafe where they were spotted by Major Richard Adams who was married to Lady de Hoghton, owner of the ancestral home, after she was widowed. He loved motorbikes but his wife forbade him from riding. They were looking for ways to help the estate and I was looking for somewhere to stage a safe sprint so their long straight drive was ideal. Major Adams said, “If you can run it, be my guest.”

That was the start of the now famous Hoghton Tower Sprint which has been going for over thirty years and which Jane and I set up. Jane printed every programme by hand on an old-fashioned Gestetner stencil machine. Our friends Derek and Jos played a big part in setting it up and on the first day organised free tea and coffee for the riders and their helpers. I was clerk of the course and Jane was timekeeper. Jos kept plying her with whisky in her coffee which wasn’t too good for the accuracy of the timekeeping. Jane even emptied the chemical loos and went into the woods one day to do that and somebody was just about to make off with the spade she’d left there!

I’d seen too many riders leave other sprints with damaged bikes and not a thank you. I wanted ours to be different. When we sent the entrants their “regs” (regulations) we included stickers and toy balloons. Each rider was photographed setting out from the start line and plaques commemorating the event were distributed during the day. Afterwards they received the photo, their results and a certificate with their best time printed on it, signed by me as the clerk of the course.

We were praised for our good organisation and safety standards. Major Adams was thrilled because they made so much money from the public coming in to watch and he was vindicated in his passion for bikes and respect for the motorcycle fraternity.

Jane and I were looking for somewhere to stage a sprint on Merseyside and the track through Knowsley Safari Park looked promising. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I think motorbikes can go faster than lions. Jane and I went up with Keith on our bikes to mark it out and poor Keith, on his Norton, made a world record by skidding on a pile of elephant droppings!

Road racers will look out for brake markers before a bend so they know where to slow down on the next time around. It might be a particular tree or an electricity box. Once Keith spotted a large stone at the side of the road and decided to use that as a marker. He came round the second time, braked at the stone - and much to his surprise ran out of road! The stone happened to be a tortoise plodding its way slowly around the track.
In one race I made the mistake of using a group of Army display riders as my brake marker. They were standing shoulder to shoulder in just the right place. As soon as I was out of sight they all scurried closer to the corner and when I reappeared enjoyed watching me brake far too late.

Bill Burton was a great friend and outstanding character who had raced cars and bikes all his life, winning the Aston Martin Horsfall trophy. He was getting on a bit when I met him and I always said the reason he went so fast was because he couldn’t see the hazards until the last moment.

At New Brighton I asked the marshals to give Bill a push off the grid to save him running and bumping. Unfortunately they pushed him into the wrong race. “It’s not my race!” cried Bill plaintively as he was manhandled into a scrum of modern bikes with fairings on but it was too late and suddenly there was this 1928 bike roaring along with them. He was a terrific rider, much faster than me, and managed to come in fourth.

Jimmy Glesga fae Edinburra

by Jimmy Glasgow
with Caroline Brannigan

March 2018

Wherever I Rove

by Marie Glasgow
with Caroline Brannigan

March 2018

Jimmy was born in Edinburgh in 1938, the oldest of nine children. He tells hilarious tales of a happy childhood despite the family’s struggle to make ends meet. Growing up to become a butcher, Jimmy kept greyhounds and entered an exciting world of unregulated dog racing called flapping.

Marie was also born in Edinburgh in 1938 which has been her home ever since. But some of her family have gone far and wide, creating connections from Scotland across the oceans to Canada, America and Australia. With the help of her brother Felix, Marie tells both her own story and the tales of those who made their lives across the seas.

What the client thought:

These two books were commissioned by Jacqui Glasgow. Marie and Jimmy are her parents. Jacqui says:
It was a real pleasure meeting Caroline. She engaged with my parents sensitively and with good humour to elicit the stories of their lives. She made them feel at ease and they felt the process was extremely relaxed and enjoyable, bringing back stories which were almost forgotten. I am so happy with the memoirs and delighted how Caroline has captured the essence of my mum and dad’s lives. These are priceless little gems full of fantastic stories which can be enjoyed by future generations of our family. Thank you Caroline for your patience and for doing such a wonderful job creating these beautiful books of treasured memories.

Extract from Jimmy's book:

I grew up on a five-storey stair in Tennant Street, Leith. That’s five floors with a flat each side of the stairs. It’s not there any more, it’s been knocked down.

I don’t want to criticise my Dad because he worked hard but his older brothers were right rough and ready and liked a drink and that was what my Dad learned. They didna hand over all their wages to their wives and neither did my Dad. When all us children came along he didna change.

When he came in with the money my Mum used to say to him, “Just keep it and you keep the kids! It’s not enough!”

Nearly all the men were like that then. I seen it when I got older and tried to help her. I thought, I’m never going to be like that. When Dad was away in the war we got money from the Army but it still wasn’t really enough.

There was no room to do washing in the flat so once a week my Mum piled our things in a pram and I had to help push it to the washhouse up in another street. Sometimes she kept me off school to help with the washing. Women would be scrubbing away in clouds of steam. The things they said! I was just a wee lad, folding up the clothes.

“He never got it last night! Think he was gonna get summit if he gave me any money!”

They were swearing, really giving it big words!

“The old bugger come in but I had a splitting headache and was glad of it!”

I didna know what they were saying at the time. My Mum didna say too much because I was there.

We were always on the lookout for moneymaking schemes. Every Sunday men used to sit on the landings of our stairs gambling with cards. Every stair was full of them. There were all kinds of people, some who’d run away from the Army or the Navy. Gambling was illegal so my brother Andrew and me worked as shotties - lookouts. Andrew would be at the back entrance, me at the front.

Every time they changed over to another man dealing the cards they’d throw us two or three pennies. We done well! If we spotted the police coming we shouted, they’d all scramble away and by the time the police came in they’d gone. I gave my mother all the money and she was glad of it and passed a few pennies back to us.

The gamblers used to love drinking sour dook, which was buttermilk. My mother knew all about it from making butter up in Shetland. Sometimes she still made her own butter, shaking up cream in an old jam jar. A woman used to come on Saturdays and Sundays with a big can of it and up would go the cry from the men on the stairs, “Jimmy, get me a pint of sour dook!” I didna like it but the gamblers couldn’t get enough. Another woman used to come round from Newhaven at weekends with a basket of mussels and buckies and they sent us to fetch those for them.

One day I was sitting watching for the police when four or five taxis came down the street, one pulling up at every stair. You didna see taxis in our kind of street very often. Women and men climbed out but they were in ordinary clothes so we didna bother. Then they pulled off those clothes and were in police uniforms! They rushed into every stair and people were jumping off the landings to get away but a lot got caught. The inspector then was called Merrleas and he’d been trying to catch them for years. Me and Andrew just took off as fast as we could and hid.

Extract from Marie's book:

Our parents were Marie and Felix Prior and we were named after them. It wasn’t as confusing at home as you might think because our mother got called Maria and Marya a lot and you knew by the tone of her voice exactly which Felix she was talking to! We also had an older brother called Frank.

Both our Mum and Dad belonged Edinburgh. Our father was born in 1901 and had two brothers and two sisters - Frank, Robert who was killed in World War I, Maggie and Mary, who we always called May. Times were hard then if you didna have much money. Our Dad’s family were very poor and he ended up with badly rickety legs.

At that time rickets was rife among children in poor districts, caused by a lack of good food and sunshine, which stopped bones forming properly.

Felix’s oldest son has traced back to where our family came over from Ireland and on one of the birth certificates the father’s job is given as a fish seller. That man must have been illiterate because he has signed his name with a cross. For a later birth his job was given as cattle dealer, so he was coming up in the world but there was still the same cross again on the certificate.

Our mother was born in 1902. Her name was Marie Philp and she had four sisters and a brother, Mary, Nell, Kate, Annie and Tom.

She and our Dad never said much about their early lives, which is a shame. Our Mum’s mother did a lot of waitressing up at the zoo when there was a function on and I think our Mum and her sister Annie helped out.

There are a few funny stories which have come down through the generations. When our mother was a teenager her family all went to a place just out of the town, Dalmahoy, for a holiday in a farm cottage.

Our mother’s sister brought her pal and the two of them were sent to fetch milk from a farmhouse about half a mile away. They thumbed a lift and this car picked them up and took them away past where they wanted to go. Then the driver stopped and said, “Now you can get out and let that be a lesson to you never to get a lift with someone you don’t know!”

They had all that distance to walk back and our Granny says, “Where the hell have you two been?”

They told her and she leathered the two of them. The pal got it as well. Every time she gave them a whack she said to the pal, “Your mother will be thankful for what I’ve given you today!”

At the end of the holiday the sisters all got together and put horseshoes in their auntie’s suitcase after she’d packed it. They had a long walk and the auntie kept complaining about how heavy the case was! A fish van came along and gave them a lift. There were lots of them this time so that was allowed! There was only one boy in the group and he was the youngest so they stuffed fish down his shirt then ate them when they got home.

Lucky Lovell

by Phil Lovell
with Caroline Brannigan

December 2017

Phil Lovell was born in Sheffield in 1929, surviving so many brushes with death that he earned the nick-name Lucky Lovell. These included his house being bombed in the war, a train crash and two crash landings while in the RAF. Then there was the morning when, on a trip along the River Nile, he woke up to find a crocodile snoozing next to him.

He tells a fascinating story of Sheffield life of the 1930s and 1940s, then many entertaining tales of his posting to Africa with the RAF. Later Phil worked for the city housing department where his maverick way of solving problems led to more adventures

What the client thought:

For many years I struggled to find the time to write my life story. I started to gather information and wrote copious notes but never got on with the writing bit. One day my daughter told me about Caroline Brannigan. From then on the task was made easy with her pleasant manner and the way she patiently and gently gathered information with an efficiency gained from her many years of writing and interviewing. The job was turned from a nagging worry into a very pleasant experience which I really enjoyed. I am extremely pleased with the result because she made it into my book. It sounds as if I had written it myself.

Extract:

Before we could afford a car, Betty and I were enthusiastic motorcyclists. I’d bought my first motorbike when I was 20, an ex-army Ariel 350cc still camouflaged, which I painted. It was a great bike and the beauty of motorcycles in those days was being able to take them apart yourself and put them back together again. Betty rode on the pillion, which had no springs. We went all over the place, Blackpool, Liverpool, Southport, Bridlington, Scarborough and Cleethorpes as well as lots of runs closer to home.

We didn’t mind what the weather was like. Clothing was in short supply so most motorcyclists wore ex-RAF kit which you could buy in military surplus shops. Betty and I had flying suits and my goggles were Mark 8s used by Spitfire pilots. Hardly anyone wore helmets and instead we had woolly hats.

A farmer who knew me asked if I could collect some chicks for him. That was a way for me to make a bit of extra money.

“I’ve only got a motorbike,” I pointed out.
“You’ll get them on the bike,” he assured me.

Off I went 30 miles to a farm and collected a pile of boxes about three feet high, full of at least a hundred tiny fluffy yellow chicks, which I had to strap across the top of the panniers. Then off we all went back to Buxton.

After our wedding I changed the bike for a brand new Norton Dominator, a beautiful model with rear suspension and telescopic forks at the front, unlike the Ariel. I made the panniers for it - you couldn’t buy that sort of thing then. People today can’t imagine what it was like after the war with so many things either in short supply, very expensive or impossible to get.

Living in RAF married quarters, Buxton was a costly place to shop for food so we’d go off on the bike to Sheffield to visit our families and stock up on food from the market. The panniers were stuffed full and Betty had a wooden-framed Bergen rucksack on her back full of tins, the weight resting on the panniers.

One winter’s night we were riding home in the dark along the notorious Thirteen Bends between Baslow and Bakewell. I’d always told Betty that if I got into trouble she should jump off.

“I could never jump off!” she said.
“You must do.”

That night we hit black ice, skidded and I knew I couldn’t hold it.
“Jump!” I shouted.

And Betty jumped.

Then I deliberately laid the bike down, that’s better than hitting something. I lay on the road with my leg trapped underneath but the crash bar I’d added stopped any serious injury. I managed to get up then had to make a choice.

“Shall I go for my bike or shall I go for Betty?”

Betty won. I went back and found her sat in the road unable to get up because the heavy rucksack was still strapped to her back. She wasn’t very happy and was beating her fists on the ground. It wasn’t me she was angry with, just the accident.

I helped her up, we got back on the bike and carried on home. We were both bruised and my knee had to be strapped up for a few days but otherwise we were all right.

She loved her job at the Liverpool Victoria and was very good at it but they didn’t employ married women so sacked her when she became Mrs Lovell. People can’t believe it today. She got a job in the tax office in Buxton then had a call from the Liverpool Victoria begging her to come back.

At seven o’clock each morning I used to take her on the bike 12 miles to Bakewell to get a bus early enough to reach Sheffield on time. One day Betty had just sat down on the pillion when one of her friends leant out of a window nearby and they started chatting. I was sat there with my hand on the throttle, anxious to get going.

At last the window shut and I set off, not realising that Betty had stood up to adjust her coat under her, and she somersaulted straight off the back. It was a quarter of a mile before I realised because you can’t feel a good pillion rider, which Betty was. I put my hand behind me and thought, “She’s not there!”

I went back and she wasn’t very happy about it, but hadn’t hurt herself.

Betty and I had some great motorcycle holidays both before and after we were married, loading up our camping gear and heading for Combe Martin in Devon and Land’s End before it was blocked off. There were no motorways and Buxton to Combe Martin took 14 hours, setting off at 2am. Every time we got behind a hay wagon we just couldn’t get past!

A girl who worked in the Naafi in Buxton begged to borrow my bike one day because her father was in hospital in Blackpool.

“I’ve got to get there fast because he’s not got long to live,” she told me.

It was a big bike and she was less than five feet tall and I agreed reluctantly. When she set off she couldn’t put her foot to the floor.

“Whatever have I done?” I thought as she roared away.

I was on tenterhooks until she came back the next day, having managed to be with her father when he died. Then she told me that all through the war she’d been a motorcycle despatch rider! So I needn’t have worried.

Once when I was in Sheffield Betty’s mother asked me to give her a lift to a friend in Totley. Out we went to the bike where she perched herself on the pillion side saddle.

“You can’t ride like that!” I said.
“I always rode like that with Tom,” she told me. That was her husband and in the 1920s!
“Go on then,” I said and took her all the way to Totley and back and couldn’t even feel that she was there. She was a perfect pillion passenger.

Gama's Journey

by Abdul Qadeer Khan OBE
with Caroline Brannigan

November 2017
A Kindle edition of Gama’s Journey is available through Amazon

When Abdul Qadeer Khan was born in Nagpur, India, he was rather small so his parents gave him the nickname Gama after a famous wrestler, he assumes to provide inspiration. It must have worked because their son thrived and went on to become an MSc in chemistry. After establishing a successful career in India he and his wife Farhana came to Britain where Gama became a respected authority on pollution control, his work culminating in the award of an OBE.

What the client thought:

Caroline is a real professional. She had four meetings with me and by asking the relevant questions helped me to tell my story. Based on these meetings she was able to write my book, Gama’s Journey. We were very impressed with her friendly and polite methods. After a couple of meetings she became our friend. I would recommend her to anybody who wants to have their life story written.

Extract:

It was very hot in the build up to the monsoon so when the rains came it was a relief. All the boys and girls would go out to get wet. It was such a nice feeling. Once the monsoon arrived it would rain very heavily for seven to ten days continually but it was still very warm. Then there would be a few dry days before another week or so of rain. There was a lot of mud everywhere.

Invariably, the monsoon would arrive in my home town on June 7th. Ten days before that it arrived in Kerala and Goa. The monsoon continued until September when the rain became less intense before ending in October.

Our front garden was full of roses and marigolds and at the side was an allotment for vegetables. Our home was in a jungle area where many fruit trees grew. When I wasn’t at school I would be either swimming in the lake by our house or picking fruit, eating it straightaway under the tree - dates, mango, guava, mulberries and other fruits which I have never seen in Britain.

The jungle came close to the house with a lot of snakes. The Nag in the name Nagpur means cobra so we lived in Cobra Town. There were so many of them! Goodness knows how we survived. If someone was bitten the area round the bite was cut and allowed to bleed to wash out the venom. I don’t think anybody in my family was ever bitten. Snakes only bite if they think they are in danger.

Farhana once had a close encounter with a snake. When I went to Britain I went alone to see what it was like and Farhana went back to live with her family until I had settled.

Farhana remembers:
One day our son Asif, who was about two, came in pulling something behind him. My sister thought it was a stick until it moved. She swept the snake on to the floor then picked Asif up, stood on the dining table out of harm’s way and shouted, “Snake! Snake!” My father had visitors so they all came running. They got rid of the snake but my father was very upset. He said, “Gama has gone to England and left his family with me to be safe and now this happens!” As a penance he gave money to poor people.

When I was a boy there were no fridges and food was kept in a cupboard with a wire mesh door. One day a snake got underneath it and my mother shot it dead with a 12-bore shotgun. Forever after that the cupboard was covered in holes as a reminder. At night the light of our lamps attracted insects which in turn attracted the snakes who wanted to eat them. There were a lot of snakes where we used to swim but we were told that if the snake goes underwater it’s not a poisonous one. I don’t know if there’s any truth in that.

Two kinds of monkeys lived in the jungle, one with a black face and the other with a white face. Each group had a dominant male who would attack you if threatened but the others would just rush up then run away again. They were quite big, as tall as a small boy when on their back legs. We would look for a mango tree full of monkeys and throw sticks at them so they ran around, dislodging the fruit which we caught and ate.

One day when I was about ten I was alone when the monkeys spotted me. One of them rushed up and slapped me on the face! I started crying, my brother Achay heard and came running to save me. I always say that I used to be quite handsome until the monkey hit me!

I was told that a tiger used to come at night and sit in the wartime trenches in our garden and watch the house. I’ve seen a panther, hyenas, peacocks and deer in the jungle near our home. I remember a man called Paul was killed by a wild boar at the edge of the lake. Our elders used to point out the tree under which he was attacked and warned us not to go alone into the forest.

Fond Memory Brings the Light

Robin Hutton

September 2017

Robin Hutton was born in Dublin in 1918 where his cot was moved away from the window to avoid snipers’ bullets. When Robin was ten his parents returned to England and he went as a boarder to Fulneck, the Moravian school in Yorkshire. After university he taught there, his career interrupted by war service where he came under fire once more, this time with devastating results. Robin went back to teach at Fulneck and ran the archive after his retirement, having a connection with the school which lasted nearly 90 years

What the client thought:

Robin’s son Roger says, The books look great and we’re very pleased. We’d like to thank Caroline for all her hard work. It’s great to have Dad’s story left to help us to remember him by.

We have all enjoyed the experience of reminding one another of memories forgotten. Dad found Caroline most helpful. He didn't get to see the final book but we have it now and it will be treasured for generations to come.

Extract:

September 1939, just before war broke out, found me visiting my brother Eric in Dublin. It was on this visit that I decided to explore the mysteries of St Michan’s Church in the centre of Dublin. It surprised me to find that it was a Protestant church, Church of Ireland, dating back several centuries. It had vaults where some peculiar air quality had preserved some of the bodies stored there. I paid the entrance fee and warily descended the stone steps to the vaults. There they were, a row of coffins with their lids off, each containing a body, a skeleton covered with leathery skin. It was eerie and weird, even more so when the guide invited me on payment of a further shilling (5p) to “shake hands with the crusader – it will bring you luck!” Tentatively I touched the skeletal fingers of the body in the last coffin as it gazed at me with eyeless sockets, wondering I know not what. Many times since I have wondered whether perhaps, just perhaps, that shilling was the best money I ever spent.

I was well aware of the political situation in Southern Ireland as the clock ticked remorselessly towards war. This was reinforced a few days later when I went by train to Bray, a seaside resort a few miles south of Dublin. There I saw what I was told was the Irish navy on manoeuvres. True or not, what was more disturbing was a conversation between some ladies in the train carriage discussing “a wonderful speech they had heard on the radio”. It was in fact a speech by Goering in Germany.

When Chamberlain made his announcement of the declaration of war I was still in Dublin with Eric. I listened to the Prime Minister on the radio on Sunday September 3rd in Eric’s flat. My first thought was to get back to England as soon as possible but to do so a visa was required. Because I had been born in Dublin and was living there in February 1922 when the Irish Free State broke from Britain, my visa stated that I was a citizen of Eire! Arriving back in Manchester I went to join up but after looking at my visa the sergeant said, “We don’t want you.”

Britain didn’t want citizens of neutral Eire in the armed forces. How very different it was two years later after the terrible retreat at Dunkirk when they were desperate for recruits.

Steel in the Blood

by David and Annifer Lee
with Caroline Brannigan

January 2017

David and Annifer were born into two of the families who helped turn Sheffield into a city famous for steel. They tell their stories of childhood evacuation to the country to escape wartime bombing while the works continued to produce vital products. After joining Arthur Lee & Sons David experienced the fluctuating fortunes of the business over more than 40 years. A highlight was the couple’s appointment as Master and Mistress Cutler.

What the client thought:

David and Annifer Lee say, Caroline Brannigan has the skill and gifts of a talented interviewer and writer which enabled us to produce our memoirs from the years of 1933 to 2016. This has been a gratifying opportunity which we would wholeheartedly recommend.

Extract:

In the early 1970s David was invited to join the historic Company of Cutlers, which was a great honour. Founded in the seventeenth century to protect Sheffield’s cutlery trade and ensure high standards, its modern role is to promote the industry and the interests of the city in general. The Master Cutler is Sheffield’s ambassador of the steel industry.

Members must be in business in the Hallamshire area, manufacturing a cutting edge or the materials which go into it. Membership is open only to 33 people - Master, Senior Warden, Junior Warden, six searchers and 24 members. The term searchers originates from the men who used to ‘search out’ makers and check their standards were satisfactory. Later David was surprised to be asked to become Master Cutler for 1976/77, beginning in the October. “It was very exciting,” says David. His grandfather Percy Lee, his uncle Wilton Lee and father-in-law John Hunt had all been Master Cutlers. Annifer would now become Mistress Cutler, following in her mother’s footsteps. Their youngest daughter Rowena thought Annifer was going to be Mrs Cutlass.

The grand inauguration event was held in the Cutlers’ Hall, one of the finest livery halls in the north of England. Always a demanding job for Master and Mistress Cutler, the function list lengthened dramatically as 1977 dawned, the year of the Queen’s silver jubilee. High profile guests such as the Archbishop of Canterbury attracted press attention and occasionally television cameras and the Lees had to get used to flashbulbs bursting in their faces.

Taking a few lessons in speech making, David’s first attempt sparked this reaction from his tutor: “That was very good .... but how dull!” His material was interesting but David had to change his monotone delivery.

Annifer’s role was more wide ranging and about half of the events on her calendar were attended without David. She found herself President of the Townswomen’s Guild, many invitations came through the Council of Voluntary Service and each religious denomination held events requesting her presence.

At most Annifer was expected to give a speech, having to select an appropriate topic. Her mother advised, “It’s no good relying on David, he has a job to do and his own speeches to write so you’ll just have to get on, write them yourself and do the best you can.”

Annifer recalls, “It was good advice. The verse speaking I had done at school was very helpful and I soon learned to stand up, speak up and shut up.”

Waiting For Tom

Tom and Rosemary Stephenson

October 2016

The title of this book comes from Rosemary who, being married to a busy farmer, was always waiting for him to turn up for meals. She used to say that one day she would write a book and call it Waiting For Tom, though in the end it is the story of both of them. Rosemary and Tom write about farming in the Yorkshire Wolds and Dales. They also describe growing up in the 1930s and 1940s, Rosemary in Sussex and Tom on his father’s East Riding farm.

What the client says:

Without Caroline’s help we would never have completed our story. We are most indebted to her for sorting us out and guiding us through.

Extract:

(Tom tells of his childhood in the 1930s and 1940s on the family farm in East Yorkshire)

Mother sold eggs to the egg packers at Beverley and the money she earned went to pay Mabel and to buy groceries, clothes, and all other household things. Father’s younger brother, Uncle Guy, used to come every Friday evening to help get the wages ready for noon on Saturday. Things were extremely tough in the 1930s and I can remember that Mother had to lend them cash on more than one occasion to pay the wages.

As well as feeding her own family, Mother provided what were known as the louances, mid-morning and mid-afternoon snacks for the men at the busiest times of the farming year such as hay time, harvest and threshing days. Before combine harvesters, cereals were gathered into sheaves then stacked. There they would stay until a steam traction engine arrived to power a threshing machine which knocked the grain from the straw. This process required about eight men. The louances consisted of home baked bread, butter, meat and cheese and perhaps a slice of apple pie. My mother also cooked a huge midday dinner for the family.

We used to thresh nearly every week in winter and lead a lot of the straw straight into the yards. There we left the trailers with gaumers on, which were wide rails angled outwards from the trailer body so that the beasts could eat all the straw. Modern varieties of cereals are much shorter on the stem.

We were fortunate to have electricity in our house but, like many people then, used it only for lighting. Washing was a huge chore in those days, carried out in the wash house next door. On wash day, always Monday, an enormous boiler bubbled away in there over a fire of coal and wood. This was used to fill a dolly tub into which soap was grated, the whole lot stirred with a long stick called a posher.

After rinsing in a large sink the clothes and linen were fed through a mangle on iron wheels, its heavy wooden rollers three feet wide turned by hand using a big wooden handle, the water cascading into a bucket. A wooden shelf below caught the washing. Large items were carried to the line strung across the orchard from an old horse chestnut tree, the small things being hung in the yard.

One large room in the farmhouse had been the old kitchen and dining room where meals were served to the single workers in my grandfather’s time. The big table was still there and could seat three across each end and seven or eight down either side. A wide board full of horse brasses hung above the fire place. This was where mother and her helpers served hot meals to those who had come to buy stock at the yearly sales we held in spring, selling perhaps 200 to 250 beasts – cattle, sheep and sometimes pigs. On sale days the auctioneer Dick Hornsey would stand on a tumbrel and auction the stock near the fold yard door.

The single workmen used to sleep above in a large bedroom which, after I had left school, became my own. As I write this it makes me lift my shoulders and shiver as it was one of the coldest bedrooms in the house. The sun only shone into it for an hour or two at the most in the very early morning. A staircase by the cow house once led up to this room but by the time I moved in a new set of stairs had been added from the big kitchen below.

As a young boy I had a much cosier bedroom with a window looking on to the garden. At night Mother would come to see me when I’d got into bed to teach me to say my prayers and she would often pray with me.

Not every house had a bathroom in those days but we did and a flush water toilet. Smaller country cottages often made do with an earth closet, a wooden seat over a bucket or pit which had to be emptied from time to time. There was a bath, a wash bowl and a small chest of drawers for towels. In a dry summer sometimes there was not enough water to have a bath but then Father had the well deepened to solve the problem.

Before the flush toilet was installed, there was an old toilet down a passage on the way to the stables. This was a wooden seat with a hole over a big tub on wheels. The tub had an iron ring bolted onto the end and when it was full we fastened a horse with traces on to that ring and pulled it out, taking it to one of the ploughed fields to spread out as fertiliser. We rode home standing up in it and as we passed the pond yard often turned in there and had a row round, using shovels as oars.

Nursing In The Navy

Nora Lewis with Caroline Brannigan

A life story with tales from home and abroad
August 2016

Nora Lewis tells her entertaining stories of life as a Nursing Sister, first with the Merchant Navy aboard the Queen Elizabeth passenger liner in the 1960s and then as a member of Queen Alexandra's Royal Naval Nursing Service, work which took her across the world.

Before enlisting, she qualified as an SRN at a London hospital then trained as a midwife, spending time out on the district, pedalling her heavily laden bicycle to women in labour. 

Nora also gives an intriguing account of her childhood when, being the daughter of a prominent railway engineer, she lived in a house on the platform of a busy rural station.

What the client says:

Nora writes:
There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that if I had not found Caroline and used her skill, knowledge and expertise my memoir would never have been written. Random ramblings have been transformed into a coherent story and the book pleases me, my family, friends and acquaintances. Apart from that, it has been a very pleasant and helpful experience recalling sometimes hidden memories - like clearing out an old cupboard, but in a good way! Thank you, Caroline!

Extract:

(Nora was working as a district midwife during her training in London)

In the early hours of one morning I delivered a baby for a woman whose family had come over from Pakistan. She had been very uncommunicative and I was to learn that it was part of her culture, that you just got through the pain of childbirth and that was that.

Her husband remained in the background until the child arrived and mother and baby had been checked and bathed. Then the kitchen door swung open and he arrived with a large tray bearing tea, bread and butter and an enormous fry-up of bacon, eggs, sausage and beans. The new mother tucked in with relish.

Then the door swung open again and out came the same laden tray just for me. As I was writing up my notes the supervising midwife arrived to check all was well. The kitchen door swung open again but this time out he came carrying a little tray with glasses of cherry brandy for us all, including the mother. This was all too swiftly followed by a second round. All this at four o' clock in the morning!

Afterwards we packed up our considerable amount of equipment on to the bikes, including the delivery pack, now containing the afterbirth in a plastic bag.

"Thank you!" we called back to our kind host and off we went into the dark.

Half way down the road the delivery pack fell off with a clang and all the steel bowls went rolling down the silent street into the gutter. As the odd light came on in nearby windows and curious people looked out to see what all the noise was about, we raced to retrieve our things. Standing gasping by the bikes once more, we thought we had got away with it. Then we looked at each other.

"Where's the afterbirth?" I asked.

There, in the distance, was the plastic bag and heading straight for it was a large dog with a hungry look in his eye. We ran down the street to head him off.

"Leave it! Leave it!" I shouted, snatching up the bag from under his twitching nose and making off back to the bikes. By this time we were hysterical with laughter, made all the worse for it being amplified among the neighbouring houses, still mostly dark and quiet. What those behind their twitching curtains thought I just do not know.

Please Take Your Seats

Bill Simpson with Caroline Brannigan

The Story of Kirwin & Simpson
August 2016

Kirwin & Simpson supply seating to Britain's most prestigious theatres and cinemas. With more than 70 years of experience, their work is in demand across the world.

This book tells the story of how Bernard Simpson began repairing seats in his garden shed in 1944, leading to a highly successful family business now in its fourth generation.

What the client says:

Bill Simpson, Bernard's son, writes:
I had never heard of anyone having their life story written and printed in a book, except celebrities and film stars.  I still cannot believe that mine has been written in this way.

At first I was apprehensive but I enjoyed Caroline's weekly visits and our telephone chats and it has certainly brought back many memories for me. I would certainly recommend anyone to do this if they get the chance. It is a once in a lifetime experience.

Extract:

Short notice jobs are all part of the trade. Kirwin & Simpson were called in one afternoon to re-upholster a piano stool ready for that night's performance by Victor Borge, the Danish comic piano virtuoso and comedian. Sometimes sets arrive only the morning before a performance and if something is not quite right or has been damaged in transit it must be repaired. If that involves upholstery then an urgent call will go out to Kirwin & Simpson to come to the rescue. Dressing rooms and bars are now all part of the portfolio.

Occasionally a prima donna will throw a hissy fit and demand instant changes or they will not perform. Managements, faced with embarrassment and losses, must comply. After Kirwin & Simpson refurbished one dressing room, the star concerned complained that the colour of the shower curtain offended him and he would not go on that night if it was not changed. So it was. Another actor well known for his bad temper poured fruit salad over Bill Simpson's head and trashed an expensively upgraded dressing room.

In 1982 the West End made a major coup with the signing of film star Elizabeth Taylor to appear in her American stage hit Little Foxes at the Victoria Palace theatre. Said to have been paid $50,000 a week during the US tour, Taylor was used to getting what she wanted and demanded a dressing room in which everything would be lilac. Kirwin & Simpson's reputation for excellence landed them this tricky contract. Taylor informed the management that she found the sight of fish swimming in an aquarium to be very relaxing before a performance but even this had to have lilac coloured fish. Finding a lilac shower curtain proved extremely difficult. On the Sunday evening before the superstar's opening night on the Monday, Andrew and Anne Simpson finally managed to fit a satisfactory curtain. Anne was transfixed by the rows and rows of shoes lined up awaiting their owner's arrival and tried on a few for fun but found them too tight.

The Road From Crane Moor

by Joan Burke with Caroline Brannigan

June 2016

Joan was born in a small Yorkshire mining community in the 1920s. Her father was employed at the local pit. She tells of his tough working life below ground in an industry which has almost disappeared. During World War II Joan did a heavy manual job in a steelworks producing vital products for the military.

Her story is one of surviving challenging times, of hard work raising two children mainly as a single parent and the satisfaction of coming through it all, still smiling.

What the client says:

Joan writes,
The idea to write a book about my life came from my family.  I wasn't so sure about it myself but Caroline made it so easy and simple for me.  She visited my home several times, asked me questions and just let me talk.  She also helped me to pick out suitable pictures to include in the publication and the end result was a wonderfully well written story that I hope my extended family will enjoy for years to come. I'm really pleased I did this and my heartfelt thanks go out to Caroline Brannigan for bringing my story to life for the generations yet to come.

Extract:

(The parts in italics are extra research added by Caroline Brannigan so younger generations can understand the background to the story)

When I was old enough I got a job at Samuel Fox, the steelworks in Stocksbridge, where the pay was much better but the conditions were very hard for a young woman.

From 1941 women aged 18 to 60 had to register to take the place of men called up from their jobs into the armed forces. The women were conscripted and had to go where sent. They were not allowed to move jobs without permission. Joan was too young at first and does not remember being called up but by the age of 18 was already doing an important job at Samuel Fox's steelworks.

Sammy's, as it was known, was a very large steelworks employing several thousand workers in the valley of the River Don. The plant stretched for about two and a half miles and into Deepcar. The houses of Stocksbridge and Deepcar run up the opposite side of the valley.

When Joan worked there the plant was undergoing huge modernization begun in the late 1930s as war loomed and steel production was seen as vital for making weapons and ammunition.

Sheffield steel plants, so vital to the war effort, were targeted by German bombers and even those further out were hit, including Sammy's. Joan's son Martyn remembers children finding unexploded bombs from time to time while playing around Stocksbridge right up to the 1970s.

Stocksbridge produced some of the world's finest stainless steel. After the war they went back to supplying steel for car parts and Gillette razor blades, fine wire for making into springs for clocks and watches and many other specialised products.

Sadly, the boom times have now gone as developing countries such as India and China have produced cheaper products. However, at the time of writing Sammy's was still in business.

Now I was one of those sleepy-eyed workers from Thurgoland who left their homes in the morning for the early shift, 6am to 2pm. Then you would switch to 2pm to 10pm. After that came the night shift but I was too young to do that, thank goodness. It was a long walk in all weathers to get the bus to the steelworks but usually other people were walking along with me so I did not mind. Looking back, it was a rough life in many ways but you just did not think about it.

In the wartime blackout no lights were showing at all, only the thin beams of our torches pointed down in front of us. Shine it up into the sky and you would get a good telling off. Dad was always very protective and, despite the fact that he was working long hours himself, would come to meet me off the bus when he could.

Going through the gates of the steelworks among crowds of other workers, many of them women during the war, was like entering another world. It was completely different to anything I had experienced before. I'd known about Samuel Fox's all my life but nothing could prepare me for the tough conditions inside, very noisy with steel clanking and machines whirring. They put me in a boiler suit and set me to work.

Most of what we made was for the military. At first my duties were fairly light, packing cartridge clips into long tubes. Before the war the large shed in which I found myself had produced the delicate steel frames for umbrellas and now those skills had been transferred to essential items for the armed services. You had to hope that you never lost or broke something like an umbrella because you would never be able to buy a new one. That first job was not so bad. Being on piece work, it was all systems go to boost your wages. At first I was very slow compared to others whose hands seemed to work like lightning.

I don't know how it came about that I moved into the wire department. Working in a pair with a man, I had to bend down to lift a large and heavy coil of cable as it came off the production line to where he was standing ready to chop off the end and carry it away. That was not suitable work for a teenage girl. It was too heavy but I had to do it. Throughout my shift that was what I did, heave up the coils of cable and pass them on. At the end of the day I was worn out. Later I often suffered from pains in my arms and wondered if it went back to those tough conditions in the works.

With most of the young men away in the armed forces, those left behind were older and often had daughters of their own. Sometimes you could see in their eyes that they really needed someone stronger than they had been given and would try to help me and the other younger women. I could tell that the man I worked with got annoyed if I was too slow but he tried not to show it. They felt sorry for us, thinking "I wouldn't like my daughter to do this." But it was wartime and you got on as best you could. When I got home all I wanted to do was go to bed. I can't remember how long I did that but it was too long.

One winter's day I left work to find snow lying thickly on the ground and no sign of any buses. Wrapping myself up in my coat I set off to walk all the way home. I was already exhausted from my shift and in no fit state to make a journey like that but felt I had no choice. I was walking, walking, walking and thought it would never end. Thank goodness, after a couple of miles there appeared the figure of my father who had struggled out to find me. It was such a relief to see him and I do not know what would have happened to me if he had not come along because within a few minutes I found myself nearly passing out with fatigue. He just managed to catch me as I went down. Leaning on him, I managed to get back somehow and I remember the sight of his feet just plodding on and on through the snow. Dad was not very keen on me being at the steelworks but Mum ruled the roost and if the money was coming in that was it.

Break times were very welcome and we'd crowd into the enormous canteen where women stood behind a counter and spooned food on to your plate. There was not much on offer but they did their best and it was quite good. Nobody expected to have a choice, you ate what you were given and we were ready for it. I was so grateful just to sit down for a while. Later I was moved to work in the canteen and that was much better.

By the time I went to Samuel Fox's the worst of the bombing was over and I experienced no raids, thank goodness, while I was working there.

When the war ended in 1945 men returned from the armed forces to their old jobs and the women who had replaced them were told to leave. Some were happy to go, others resented being pushed out and losing a well paid job.

I Built It My Way

A life in civil engineering

Eric Cooley with Caroline Brannigan

May 2015

Eric Cooley was born in South Wales but spent most of his working life as a consulting structural and civil engineer based in Scotland. His early work in Glasgow ranged from sorting out damp problems in tenements to designing the blocks of flats which replaced many of them. From bridges to hospitals, Eric never knew what projects would land on his desk next or where they would take him and he worked in the Middle East and Australia.

What the client says:

Now that we have reached the end of writing and publishing my autobiography it is time that I thanked you again most sincerely for all your hard work in producing the book. I was very impressed by your attention to detail through all our meetings and preparation of the various drafts. Nothing was too much trouble to you and I had complete faith in your ability to bring the project to a successful conclusion.

Extract:

Those early summers I remember only as sunny and warm and holidays were spent in North Wales close to the family roots in Llangollen. We stayed near my aunt, who looked after my grandfather in their house which was named Cwm Teg, meaning dry valley. In those days the railway company ran a wonderful scheme of camping coaches. Arriving at Cardiff station we looked for the train to North Wales. At the end was our very own coach which had been converted into a caravan on rails with compartments fitted with bunk beds instead of seats and another turned into a kitchen. By removing partitions a fairly large living room had been made. A corridor ran alongside the compartments linking them just the same as in an ordinary carriage of that era. We even had a toilet and washing area.

Climbing aboard, we set off on the three or four hour journey up to North Wales. At Llangollen Station a little shunting engine came to take our coach away to a pleasantly situated siding by open country where it was connected to water and drainage pipes. Llangollen was a short walk away for shopping. Here we would spend a week or a fortnight having a marvellous time. Down the hill from my aunt's house was a canal in which we could swim and also the River Dee. Many happy hours were spent picnicking and messing about by the water or fishing. You can't do that today for barbed wire now keeps out all so-called illegal fishermen.

Barges ran from Llangollen along the canal and for a few pennies you could ride on a horse-drawn barge up to the Horseshoe Falls where the horse would be unhitched and walked to the opposite end ready to tow us home again.

My many aunts, uncles and cousins would often join us, the men perhaps only for the weekend if work was pressing. I remember chattering groups strolling across the bridge over the canal, picnic baskets swinging, the women in sun hats, children skipping along happily, to a place marvellously called World's End, more a small community that a proper village, where we would find a field in which to sprawl on rugs, eat sandwiches, play rounders or just doze in the sunshine.

On other days we might head along the canal to a pretty little country church, then it was another mile through fields to the village of Llantysilio and a pub called The Conquering Hero for a big lunch. You had to make up your own games in those days and on the green outside the pub we played a form of cricket but, lacking a bat and ball, improvised with a stout branch of a tree and a fat twig. In the unlikely event of a catch, the whole side was out. Kick the Can was like hide and seek. Someone threw the can as far as possible and the person who was 'it' had to retrieve it while the others ran to hide. It was a great game which could last for hours, with complicated rules of capture and escape, all based around the can. It was great fun. I had a very happy childhood.

That Old Hen Kissed Me!

Richard Schadla Hall
with Caroline Brannigan

When war broke out in 1939 Richard Schadla Hall thought he was a 19-year-old Englishman. The authorities weren't so sure. Born in America to an English mother and a German father, he grew up as a little German boy near Berlin until the family moved to England in 1928 where he swiftly changed into an English boy. No wonder that when Richard volunteered to fight for his country he was sidelined into the Pioneer Corps with 'the King's most loyal enemy aliens' where he found himself among German and Austrian Jewish refugees, Italian-born Glaswegians and the Latvian-born Coco the Clown.

After being cleared to move to the Tank Corps he became an officer, later serving in the Military Police in peacetime France where once more he rubbed shoulders with some colourful characters. Returning to England with his wife Gwen, he joined the East Riding Police Force, rising to become Chief Superintendent.

What the client thought:

Thank you for the delivery of my story in its final format of a book. A look at all the random and very strange things which happen to all of us on this short and perilous journey through life and how we coped should certainly be recorded and the way you have done it for me is very good.

Extract:

In about September 1940 I found myself posted to Westward Ho! a curiously named seaside village near Bideford on the north coast of Devon where presumably it was thought that we could do no harm. My name, Pioneer Schadla Hall, fitted in well. The camp buzzed with the sound of foreign accents for many were enemy aliens who had been interned on the Isle of Man then released after interrogation. On arrival I applied for transfer immediately but this took some time.

Meanwhile I settled down amid a cosmopolitan mix of recruits in a benign, gently anarchic regime where the sandy beaches and the fact that we were based in an old holiday camp with little wooden chalets added to the surreal atmosphere. One very fat Jewish tailor was so big they couldn't find a uniform to fit him and instead of saluting when he saw an officer his lifted his bowler hat. It was a very strange sort of place all round. I was one of the few who spoke fluent English. The mess room was run by the former head waiter of the glamorous Trocadero restaurant in London, a German, so the food was very good. It was all rather civilized and while our comrades in other branches of the Army shuffled past steaming pots carrying metal mess tins into which dollops food were piled, often one on top of another, we sat at tables eating off china plates brought by waiters.

We were a rather funny lot, kept in order by various captains whose backgrounds were more clear-cut British. I shared a billet with four others - two ex-musicians, the corporal in charge of transport and a Jewish lorry driver. One of the musicians was Cecil Aronovitz, a South African from a family of German Jews who had fled Germany to escape Hitler. Cecil then chose to leave the safety of South Africa to fight on the side of the Allies. A viola player, he later worked with the famous violinist Yehudi Menuhin. So many excellent musicians found themselves in the corps that we had a professional standard orchestra. Coco the Clown was there, a Latvian Jew whose real name was Nicolai Poliakoff. He was the most famous clown of them all and had been working in Britain for many years before the war.

The delighted locals suddenly found themselves invited to shows featuring famous names. It really didn't feel like the Army but more of a side show. Each week a new intake would arrive from the internment camps. At one time a lot of Italians arrived, all of whom spoke with strong Scottish accents, having been rounded up from their homes simply because they had been born in Italy. One of my most dangerous roles in the war was to referee a football match between the Scottish Italian contingent and a team of Germans and Austrians. I wasn't terribly familiar with the rules. The Mediterraneans were losing and got upset, hence my problems.

Being a driver I went into the transport section. One of the other drivers was a German Jew, Von something or other which indicated he had come from a high ranking family, and he had been a racing driver. Another was called Heinz. Coming low in priority for vehicles, we spent our time behind the wheels of two American Fordson trucks, an Albion lorry and one or two staff cars including a tiny two-seater Austin. One day I had to take a senior officer, a very large man, to Bristol in the Austin. Returning across the Somerset hills, his great bulk squashed in beside me, I had a hell of a job getting up the steep slopes, crawling along in bottom gear. I was tempted to ask him to get out and push. But I didn't.

Other duties included a twice-weekly drive to Bideford to get the rations and night duty guarding the coast where it was extremely unlikely any enemy would land. The Fordson trucks had powerful engines which went like the clappers and the German racing driver and I would race each other along the narrow, winding lanes at over 60mph. Luckily very little traffic was around. Later the Transport Section was moved to Ilfracombe about 25 miles away where I was billeted in a hotel. I made friends with a local family who loved golden syrup and I managed to divert a tin to them from my delivery.

Meanwhile things were changing at home. After being released from internment, I think my father moved in with his secretary, I'm not quite sure. He died in 1941. Despite the air raids, my mother moved to a small mews flat which she rented in Notting Hill, West London. The London blitz began in September 1940 and was raging when I arrived on leave at Christmas to visit my mother at her flat.

My fellow Pioneer Norman Eckhart had asked me to drop in on his mother who lived in Islington so I called in dutifully. Before me sat a very fat Jewish lady yawning her head off.

"I am very sorry," she said in a strong German accent, "but I have been on fire watch at St Paul's Cathedral all night."

My mother had become a secretary with the Salvation Army in Holborn who were working flat out to help blitz victims. She was a feisty woman, a more forceful character than my father who was a gentle sort of a bloke, and was 'doing her bit' for the war effort. When the air raid siren went during my visits to her, which it did almost every night, we headed for the cellar as the bombs began dropping. No raids were made on Westward Ho! and my mother was in far greater danger than I was. An invasion by the Nazis was expected but certainly not there.

Had they come I would probably have been shot as a traitor, being a German lad serving with the British Army, but I didn't think about that too much at the time. My life in the safety of the West Country was rather privileged compared to a lot of others. I couldn't wait for it to change.

From Peasant to plc

Eric Hall with Caroline Brannigan

February 2014

Eric Hall was born during the tough economic times of the 1930s in one of the most poverty-stricken villages in Yorkshire, North Newbald near Hull. Life was dictated by the landed estate which owned it. Lessons he learned there helped him on his path to success in a large public company, Farnell.

What the client thought:

Eric Hall says:
Writing my book with Caroline has been a very enjoyable experience. I had put this off for many years. I had so much to say and found myself plunged into the task of looking through the vast amount of material I had collected in my career and personal life. The past nine months have passed so quickly as the work mountain was scaled easily with Caroline’s guidance, help and gentle pressure. I looked forward to each of our meetings.

I can recommend her approach to the work which involved her dealing with a busy old man. Thank you Caroline for all your care, patience and friendship during our time working together. The whole family send their good wishes.

The book is an excellent presentation, with well set out pictures, of a hectic working life travelling the world.

Extract:

Our homes on the village green had no running water or proper drainage and my father’s first job of the day was to walk 500 yards to a spring to fill two covered enamel buckets with drinking water. These were suspended from his shoulders by a yoke and as little kids we’d run alongside trying to take some of the weight. Most houses had a drain outside the back door into which slops were poured. The pig sty would also usually have a drain. These pipes led to the beck which ran nearby and, even before people understood the effects of bacteria, the water was known to be a source of sickness. Towards the end of the 19th century new powers had been given to local government and the council had installed an iron pump on the green to provide what it hoped would be cleaner water to halt the high death rate, particularly among children. The result was the opposite because polluted beck water seeped into the pipe which was eventually sliced in two to cut off this poisonous supply.

Rather than walk to the spring, some people still insisted on taking their water from the polluted beck which looked so pretty bubbling past their doors but was in fact pretty awful. In 1935 pumping stations were built to divert some of our beck water to a new air base at Holme-on-Spalding Moor, as Britain contemplated the awful prospect of another war, but nothing was done to improve our own water supply until mains were installed in 1939.

Under the County Act a new school had been built into which were placed two rows of washbasins to teach children basic hygiene because they turned up with grubby hands after feeding calves, pigs and doing other mucky chores. The basins were still in use when I was there. Even in my childhood, skin diseases were still rife and from time to time epidemics of diphtheria and other serious illnesses would sweep through the village and carry off some of the children. I can vaguely remember little friends who seemed to just disappear.

My mother paid sixpence a week (2.5p) into a scheme to ensure the presence of the local nurse during childbirth. When a new arrival was imminent, I was usually sent out by the nurse to buy her some Craven A cigarettes, even though I was only a very little lad. In the packet were 10 cigarettes plus four free ones marked, “Four for your friend”. My young uncles, knowing the routine, lay in wait for me, insisting, “We’re the nurse’s friends! Those four cigarettes are for us.” I could do nothing to stop them.

With no NHS, people dreaded anything serious which would bring a doctor’s bill and used the local nurse if possible who cost less. There was no well-equipped GP surgery, no free ambulance service whisking you to hospital, no 999 and no phone anyway. When a growth appeared on my ankle the nurse was summoned to perform an operation on our kitchen table. No anaesthetic was given, just the family pinning me down as I screamed my head off. During World War II, my Aunt Nellie (the wife of my mother’s oldest brother) was appointed first aid nurse for the village to treat injuries caused by air-raids. Being in the countryside, she hadn’t much to do and offered to help with more everyday problems. My mother and her sisters would have died rather than go to Nellie and preferred their own home-made remedies.

One of their mysterious ingredients was something called Spanish Black (a kind of liquorish) which came in a dark block and was sliced off for mixing into various beneficial concoctions. Another cure-all was ginger beer which my parents made by mixing ginger and water then feeding it with sugar. They called it, “growing ginger beer”. Chesty coughs were usually treated with peppermint cordial mixed in hot water. Any child who started sneezing was fed a hot drink of lemon and sugar. Otherwise it was a five-mile cycle ride to the chemist in South Cave who mixed his own medicines and pills. Being outdoors so much and living in a mostly self-contained community, we hardly ever seemed to catch colds. In Beverley Market was a little wooden hut containing a chair where a man would pull out a bad tooth for a few shillings. Fillings and so on by a proper dentist were only for the better off. It was there for years and as a teenager I was only too glad to use his services after being struck down by toothache.

Closets, as our toilets were called, were in small brick buildings at the ends of our gardens, white-washed frequently and scrubbed clean every day. No water and sewerage system was available so a wooden plank with a hole was placed above a large bucket which had two handles. Some families had a longer plank with two large holes for adults and a small one for children, so visiting the lavatory could be quite a sociable event. Usually cold ashes from the fire would be sprinkled into the bucket to keep the smells down. The Daily Express newspaper cut into squares would hang on a nail to be used as toilet paper. Once a week at four o’ clock in the morning my father would dig a hole among the raspberry canes and, when I was only seven, my younger brother and I had to carry the bucket to the hole before we left for school and tip it in. It was the custom to make this perilous journey at unsocial hours to avoid the stigma of being seen, even though everyone else was doing the same. Unpleasant though it was, this was a very environmentally friendly way of disposing of waste, contained no chemicals and always ensured a fantastic crop of raspberries. Every year, my father would dig up two rows of canes and plant two new ones. One good thing about being in a village was that nearly everyone had a bit of land on which they could grow food. We had half an acre at one point.

A mischievous trick for young boys like me was to slip out in the dark armed with a thin bit of pipe, creep up to the closet in which sat some unsuspecting child - the victims were nearly always girls - put the pipe through a hole in the wood and blow out the candle inside. This was swiftly followed by running footsteps back to the house and cries of, “They’ve blown my candle out!” Another prank was to tie nettles on to a stick and prod that through.

One of my favourite memories is of Billy Moore, the village joiner, fitting a new closet seat for a very elderly farmer and his wife, Mr and Mrs Beaulieu (which we pronounced Bewler). He had a solemn sense of humour for kids.

One Saturday morning I sat watching him cut two rough holes in the plank. Then he called Mrs Beaulieu for a fitting. “Could you just have a seat, Mrs Beaulieu,” he said and, as she did so, he drew a pencil mark around her bottom (fully clothed, I might add). “Thank you, Mrs Beaulieu,” he said, very politely, and off she went back into her kitchen. Getting out something called a spoke shaver, so named because it was used to shave wheel spokes into shape, he honed the hole to the correct size. “Right,” he said, easing himself up again, “we’re ready for another fitting” and along would come Mrs Beaulieu again until the size was right. Then it was Mr Beaulieu’s turn to be measured for his closet seat. Finally a smaller one was placed in the middle and each one finished by sandpapering.

26,000-Mile Round Trip to Castleford

Brian Kent with Caroline Brannigan

April 2013

Castleford was a working pit town when Brian Kent was born there in the 1930s. When he was nine his father, a miner, died of lung disease. The family’s fuel allowance was stopped and Brian went scratting around on the muck stacks for any waste coal which might burn on the kitchen fire.

After National Service in The Army he married Maureen Kelly from Surrey. Tempted by new opportunities offered in Australia, they took advantage of a government emigration scheme and sailed off among thousands of other ‘£10 Poms’. Later they returned to Castleford, a round trip of 26,000 miles, and Brian embarked on a new set of adventures as a postman.

What the client thought:

I saw Caroline’s advert in the Dalesman magazine and had wanted to do a story about my life, so I contacted her. After talking on the phone, she came to see me and I was very impressed by what she said she could do. The first visit was to set things out and the ensuing ones were to get all the information that she needed.

The atmosphere of our meetings was relaxed and the story unfolded with no pressure. Caroline has an easy, relaxed manner and a thoroughly professional way. She also consulted my wife, Maureen.

Caroline kept me informed by telephone as to how things were going and if something was not quite right she corrected it. She also helped me to select some nice photographs for the book and incorporated them into the story very well.

Her skills really shine through. If anyone wants to have their story written, without doubt I would recommend Caroline Brannigan as she would do justice to any life story.

All my relatives and friends have been very impressed by the book and say how brilliant it is, well set out and a riveting read. I am surprised how many people have taken to it.

Thank you, Caroline for an excellent job well done, from one very grateful client.

Extract:

I was born in Castleford, West Yorkshire in the mid 1930s. The road is still there but the house has been swept away. Standing on the new green next to a sign saying No Ball Games – a rule I would have ignored as a lad - places me right in the middle of our old front room.

Dad was a miner at Briggs’s Colliery and because the owners didn’t care how much dust miners breathed in, he became one of the many who died from lung disease, in his case TB silicosis. I have faint memories of him playing with me when I was about four. After that he was taken to a sanatorium in the fresh air of Ilkley and I hardly ever saw him again. The 30-mile journey would mean nothing today but with no car and little money, it was hard enough even for my mother to get there. For a while he did get better and came home again but later had to return to the sanatorium. In 1945 came the news that he had died.

Our two-up, two-down house in the Cutsyke area was next-door to the working men’s club and typical of thousands built in the town for people who crowded in during the 19th century in search of jobs. Most swapped a gruelling life on the land for a better paid but dark and dangerous existence down one of Castleford’s five pits. With a canal, the railway and many factories, including a big glass works, it was a busy and in many ways exciting place to grow up in. Lighter industries such as tailoring and rug making employed thousands of women. My mother worked at the rug mill, L.R. Davis, which I can still see from my home today. She was one of the first six workers there when it opened.

The most important of our few rooms was the kitchen with its stone floor, a couple of cupboards, a table and chairs in the middle and a deep stone sink like a trough with a single cold tap. Under the staircase was a pantry for storing food. Fridges were a luxury we saw only in American kitchens in films. My mother cooked on a couple of gas rings. By the time I was about nine, my brother was out at work and so was my mother, because she was now the main breadwinner, so I soon had to learn to rustle up something in a frying pan if I was hungry. During the war fresh eggs were in short supply and I became a dab hand at mixing powdered egg to scramble. Like many hard-up families at that time, we ate an awful lot of bread and jam because it was cheap and filling. I can’t touch it now. What I remember most about childhood meals is that there wasn’t much food at all, a combination of rationing and not having much money.

Light came from gas jets on the walls covered by fragile glass mantles. Returning home from school on winter evenings I had to turn on the gas and light it quickly, then replace the mantle without breaking it. This was a tricky thing to do and one day the mantle slipped from my fingers and shattered. I was in big trouble. Evenings in our small, cosy kitchen were accompanied by the hissing of the gas lights and the crackle of the coal range which had a fire in the middle, an oven on one side and a boiler, our only source of hot water, on the other.

A room at the front had the refinement of wooden floorboards but we rarely went in there because furnishing it was beyond our means. Bikes and other bits and pieces found a home there instead. Like most of the people we knew, we had no bathroom and once a week the tin bath was brought from its peg on the yard wall into the kitchen and filled laboriously with hot water.

Our back yard, which was just dirt, was shared with four other houses and had a block of toilets in which each family had their own. In between were shared wash houses with big stone troughs and mangles where the washing was done. I don’t think there was anywhere to heat water so my mother must have filled a bucket in the kitchen and hauled it outside. A wall separated us from the other yards and houses backing on to us and it was easy for me to scramble over to see my pals. That and the street outside with its barber shop and general store was our little domain.

The narrow stone staircase was very dark even in the daytime and at night was lit by a small gas jet at the top. Upstairs were two bedrooms. My parents slept in the front but most of my memories are of my mother alone. She had a bed and a walk-in cupboard, so she was alright and had somewhere to hang her clothes. The back room contained a double bed which I had to share with my brother. It was very common for children to share and some bigger families were eight to a bed. Our room contained nothing else, apart from a blind at the window, had bare floorboards and was very sparse but we managed. Everyone around us was in more or less the same boat so we didn’t feel hard done by, even though we had a bit less because my mother was a widow.

While my father was alive, our coal store was kept filled by the mining company but when he died, that stopped, just when we needed it most. In the harsh winter after his death, I would be sent with a bucket to ask neighbours for coal and they always gave it if they could for ours was a close-knit community where people looked after each other. There was very little state help for anyone sick, unemployed or widowed.

The muck stacks stood round the pits like mini mountains and were always dotted with kids and adults alike scratting about for anything good enough to burn. It could take all day to fill a sack, then I’d hang it across what we called the stack bike, an old bicycle with no tyres, and push it home, my face, hands and knees grimy with coal dust. Sometimes this waste had sulphur in it which would explode with a bang on the fire but it gave heat so we put up with it. Kids with dads working in the pits who had plenty of coal at home would sell their stack pickings but I needed ours for the range. We weren’t supposed to be there but only half-hearted attempts were made to stop us. Better coal was to be found scattered around the railway trucks waiting to leave but that meant dodging patrols, usually under cover of darkness. Sometimes we’d get chased but could run faster and got away with it. We needed the fuel so I had to do it. Despite all the industry around us, the countryside was never far away and Aketon Woods were another source of free fuel. Today the M62 sweeps right across where I once foraged for sticks and played hide and seek among the trees.

Much has changed since then. My town has been struggling to find a new identity since the pits closed but has various new exciting attractions. The sculptor Henry Moore was born here in 1898 and we’re not far from the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. On the site of one of the muck stacks stands Europe’s biggest indoor real-snow slope and people come from all over to ski and snowboard with equipment we never dreamed of. But I was there first! In winter the black gloom of the stacks was transformed by sparkling snow and I’d tie cardboard to my feet, find two sticks and go skiing down the sides, falling in a heap with all my mates.

The air was smoky from the chimneys of the glassworks and the huge ovens where coal was burned to create another kind of fuel called coke, the red glow of the fires clearly visible. Every now and again the town would rock to a crashing sound which I believe was the contents of the furnaces toppling down inside as they burned, like an avalanche. The walk to school skirted round a mine where coal wagons were being shunted around the rail yard with a clanging and a screeching which was thrilling for a small boy.

Cart Horses to Computers

A Yorkshire dairy farmer’s story from the 1930s to 2005

By George Barker

In the early 1930s, Thomas Barker kept a couple of cows on his Yorkshire farm to provide milk for the family. His wife Hannah made butter by hand, packed it into her basket and took the bus to market in the nearby town of Northallerton. The farm had no electricity or mains water and power came from horses. As soon as he was old enough to help, their son George learned to milk by hand. By the time he retired from his own dairy farm in 2005, George had reared a pedigree herd of 250 cattle with computers monitoring every stage of the 1.5 million litres of milk produced a year.

Thomas Barker had a saying, “Bad times don’t last for ever, neither do good” -  something his son would often recall during the roller-coaster ride of farming.

In this book, George also details the Barker family history, going back to the 17th century, a name often seen around Northallerton today, including the town’s well-known department store.

What the client thought:

Don't wait until you are too old, do it now. To make it easier, use a professional writer such as Caroline Brannigan who has the expertise to ask the right questions and bring out your forgotten memories. You owe it to your descendants so they will know what you did with your life. It might encourage them to do the same for their children and grandchildren.

Extract:

It is hard to believe that in only one man’s lifetime we have gone from hand milking into unsterilized buckets to the fast, efficient and hygienic methods of today. Some older people say pasteurized doesn’t have the delicious flavour of the untreated milk of the past but neither does it have the dangers.

Every day of the year, night and morning, my father and our farm lad had to do the milking, with me and my dog helping to get the cows in from the fields in the afternoons, if it was summer. Once my father could sell milk to the Milk Marketing Board, he began to keep a few more cows. By the time I was ten I was given one cow to milk before leaving for school and again on my return. By the time we got a milking machine, there were about ten to twelve cows milking. Do you know how many squirts there are in a pint of milk (about half a litre)? Depending on the cow, whether it’s a good milker or hard-drawn, there are about 400. Cows weren’t giving big yields in those days, when getting a gallon at night and upwards of two in the morning was considered good. But that was still an awful lot of squirts for a little boy’s hands. At first my fingers ached but gradually the muscles grew stronger.

Milking took place in the cow shed where I’d sit on a three-legged wooden stool, my forehead laid against the rough, warm flank of the cow and the bucket standing precariously on the straw beneath. My father held his between his knees but I couldn’t manage that and sometimes the cow would kick the bucket over, especially if there were flies about and she got fidgety. Many years later I got kicked in the mouth and lost part of a front tooth. The dentist had to take the other one out as well and so I had false teeth from very early on in my life.

 Full buckets were poured into 10-gallon churns where they were then taken two at a time, first on a wheelbarrow and then when we got more than two on a wooden trolley to the milk stand at the road end. They were covered with wet sacking on hot days until it was collected. The lorry was open-topped and rattled along the lanes from farm to farm with up to 50 churns secured by a chain for delivery to the dried milk factory in Northallerton. Our record was six churns in a day. Sometimes a churn would be returned the next day as being sour. It depended on who sniffed it. They used to have someone at the dairy called a ‘sniffer’ and if he didn’t like the smell, it was sent back and you didn’t get paid. One day my father got mad about this and put the same milk back on the stand with a different label and it didn’t come back.

In spring my father and Stan would pen the sheep then clip the wool by hand, sharpening the sheers on a stone between clipping each sheep, then my mother and I would roll up the fleeces ready for sale. Every now and again we would herd the flock to my grandfather’s dipping trough. We had a new tup every year and a new bull every three years. At lambing time a cardboard box always stood by the fire in the kitchen holding a frail one which, if it survived, would be fed on cow’s milk from a bottle. We often had pet lambs. Pig killing day was an important event when a relative, a butcher, came up to do the deed. He’d say to me, “You keep back and get ready. I want you to catch the pig’s squeak!” An old tooth off a binder was adapted and with a sharp point the pig was hit with it between the eyes using a hammer and the pig dropped dead instantly. It didn’t have much time to get scared.

Pig killing was always done on a Saturday. On Sunday, the carcass would be cut up and my father would lay the pieces in a shallow, lead bath filled with salt and salt petre and leave them to cure into ham or bacon. In the kitchen my mother and Mary were busy rendering down the fat in a huge pan and pouring it into jars. The blood was mixed with oatmeal to make black pudding. The liver, kidneys and other offal were shared around the community because we couldn’t eat it all at once and with no fridges or freezer, it wouldn’t keep.

It is only since I have been collecting my ideas for this story that I have realized what hard work life was in those days! Harvest saw my father and his workers striding to a corn field with their scythes to clear a path round the edges along which the horses could pull the binder without trampling on any of the crop.

With a clear path cut, the horses would be hitched to the binder, an unwieldy-looking contraption with a long sharp blade to cut the stems which then passed on to great swirling sails, as they were called, which rotated rather like a windmill to scoop up the cut crop and drop it on to canvas collection sheets. They were then pushed into another section to be tied with string and the sheaf dropped to the side. The sheaves had to be picked up by hand and stacked in stooks to dry before the laborious job of building a stack in which the grain would stay safe and dry until winter provided enough time for thrashing. Once a year the canvases of the binder had to be dismantled and sent to the saddler to have their leather straps repaired.

Harvest time and hay time meant everyone helping and I would come home with the sticky tops of barley horns stuck to my clothes. I soon learned to cover my arms to avoid a thousand tiny cuts and to protect my clothes with an old sack. Once the wind and sun had done their job, out we went again on the cart to collect the crop before the rains could ruin them. My hands became filthy with bird muck, for crows loved sitting on the stooks and had left their mark on them. Young lads were always put on top to load the cart and I had to know what I was doing, putting the heads to the middle while keeping a close eye on the weather. The sides of the cart were low but above rose the open shelvings, which had been added on to make the area bigger. With a man on one side forking up sheaves and sending them sailing up to the top of the cart for me to catch, I was kept very busy, often dusty and hot. By the time I had risen eight feet or so up from the cart, it was time to clamber down, fasten ropes to hold it in place and start filling the next one which had come back from the stack yard and stood ready and waiting.

Hay time was much earlier, usually around late June, the grass cut and left to dry much as it is today. A machine with twirling legs like a huge spider was pulled by a horse along the rows to turn it, someone following with a fork to shake out any big lumps. Once it had dried off, it was raked up into long swathes and was stacked up loosely into haycocks to finish the process. I can remember it taking ages in a wet season between showers to dry out enough to be stacked, my father frowning as he watched it deteriorate and turn brown. June is not always a kind month for hay making. Suddenly one day my father would give the order to collect the hay with everyone heading to the fields with rakes and forks to load the carts. Sometimes a horse-drawn hay sweep was used to pull the haycocks along the ground back to the stack yard. Hay was our most valuable crop because it was a good feed, so it was built into square stacks under the protection of the pointed roof of our Dutch barn. Stack building was a skill now almost lost but vital then if crops were to be preserved from the weather. A haystack began with a layer of straw to keep the hay off the damp soil. A forkful of hay was forked up to a picker, then on to a stacker who placed it carefully making sure to keep straight sides within the Dutch barn. Sometimes the close-packed hay started to warm up and move, so a wooden prop was added. Wheat was better able to shed rain off the ends of the straw and it was often stacked outside, the pointed tops thatched with straw to keep the rain off. It was an extraordinary amount of manual labour to produce relatively little.

Farmers didn’t have the technology to both cut the crop and remove the grain at the same time, as combine harvesters do now. Getting the grain off the stems is called thrashing by farmers, though the boffins think it’s called threshing. This mainly took place in winter. Thrashing days were an exciting time for a small boy. Early in the morning, a great hissing and clunking could be heard from the lane as the steam traction engine trundled along, hauling the thrashing machine. My first memory goes back to 1939 and I watched this heavy monster rolling across our field towards the stack yard and then sinking down hopelessly into the mud. My father had to get planks of wood to help it escape. Farmers had to provide the coal and someone had to go to Ainderby Station to collect a load. The cart would be weighed empty, then led beneath a large hopper from which the coal would cascade, then weighed again for the bill.

Men would pick apart the stacks, forking the sheaves onto the top of the thrasher where the binder twine was cut and passed to someone who fed the sheaves down on to the huge, speeding revolving drum, shaking the grain out to fall through several sieves of different sizes, so the bigger and best grains were diverted into sacks. Smaller grains (seconds) went into other sacks. Bags of wheat weighing 18 stone (114kg) were loaded onto backs and carried up granary steps and tipped on to the floor or left stored in sacks. By the time I was 18, I was carrying these huge sacks myself. Barley was in 16 stone bags. It wouldn’t be allowed today.

Our farm had several thrashing days each winter and they were good ratting days, with Punch in a frenzy as the rats fled the diminishing stacks. People stood about with sticks to attack the animals which threatened the food on their table. Many of our neighbours came to help as we would help them. My father would take samples of his wheat down to Northallerton, laying the grains out in his hand. Buyers would bite a grain and if it pleased them would say, “How many quarters of this do you have, Mr Barker?” Wheat was always sold in quarters. A quarter was 560 lbs or a fourth of a ton in weight.

When autumn arrived animals were housed inside and Stan our horseman took a sharp, V-shaped hay spade to cut a large square chunk out of the stack for the horses and my father cut the hay for the cattle. During the long months indoors, our cows stood eight in one byre, twelve in the other, plus the bull, poky little places you can’t imagine keeping cattle in today.

A Merry Dance

Tales of a Scarborough lad from the 'Bottom End' of town
by Terry Baker

Terry Baker was born in 1936 near the harbour in Scarborough, known as the Bottom End of town, and lived there with his family until a wartime parachute mine blew the roof off their home, with them inside.

As far as young Terry was concerned, that was just another adventure in a life full of mischief and mishap - sledging down a snowy street on a stolen ladder, hanging on to a rope as his brother went over a cliff edge to take seagulls' eggs and dodging bullets from an enemy plane.

As a high-spirited little boy, he led his parents and teachers a merry dance. Today, Terry and his wife Kath are keen ballroom dancers.

At 17, he joined the Army and began a life-long love of wildlife as he found himself first in Kenya, then Malaya.

Terry also tells the story of the ups and downs of his steel construction business, including his dramatic years in The Falkland Islands just after the war with Argentina, and his eventual move to running a 1,000-acre game shoot on the outskirts of his home town.

What Terry Baker says:

I didn't listen much when I was at school. It was all a bit boring. Only when I left did I wish I'd paid more attention and since then I've learned a lot, running my own business and handling big contracts. But I still have a hang-up about my writing, so Caroline's service was ideal. I thought she was going to be a stern, teacher-like figure wearing a big hat and telling me off. She wasn't a bit like that and we ended up having a good laugh. The photographs she took for the cover are excellent. I'd like to thank her for the many miles travelled and the hours spent in compiling this book. I held a launch party for my book in a hotel, attended by about 40 relatives and friends. It was a good night.

Extract:

When I joined The Army aged 17 in January 1954, I left Scarborough for the first time. I'd never been on a train before. The furthest I'd been on a bus was a few miles for Sunday school outings. I'd never seen a city and Mr Crosby, who wasn't pleased that I was leaving his farm, warned me grimly, "You'll regret the day you get down to see the big city" but I took not a bit of notice because I wanted to see for myself.

Because I'd signed up blindly for the Rifle Brigade, I wasn't in a Yorkshire regiment but was sent to a training camp at Winchester. As the train set off from Scarborough, I could see my mother and everyone else standing by the fence beside the Mere waving me off. I was very excited as the train picked up speed. I couldn't believe that after years of seeing them coming and going, I was on one at last. I had never travelled at such a speed and couldn't wait to see what the difference was between a town and a city.

The little train from Scarborough pulled under the vast canopy of York railway station where I had to find the London express. Hundreds of people were milling around and trains, puffing steam and smoke into the air, were coming and going from all different places. It all felt very strange.

So inexperienced was I that I didn't know what a platform was. I asked a porter where the London train was and he replied, "You want to be down there on that platform." So I asked, innocently, "What's a platform?" In my mind it was a wooden stage that you stood on. He came back a bit sharpish, "Don't you know what a platform is? Are y' a bit thick." And so I said, "I must be else I wouldn't be here!"

Somehow I found the right place and stood with my single suitcase by my feet as the biggest locomotive I'd ever seen came chugging into the station spraying soot everywhere and hauling more coaches than I could see the end of. There was a garbled announcement over the loud speaker but I just managed to catch the word London and off we went.

At King's Cross I had to find my way to Waterloo so I went to a desk and was directed down some steps to buy a ticket on the Underground. Everyone else seemed to know exactly where they were going as fast as they possibly could but I didn't even know what the Underground was.

Few had the time of day for a young lad from Scarborough. To the annoyance of those behind me, I was completely taken aback by the sight of escalators rumbling their way down into the depths but took a deep breath and stepped out. Tunnels weaved left and right I must have asked a dozen people along the way for directions.

Their London accents, some posh like on the radio and some not, were a shock to my ear. The Tube maps on the walls were a complete mystery to me and I wondered if perhaps I should have paid more attention at school for my reading wasn't very good. When you can't read what you're looking for, you start to wonder, "What the hell am I doing here?"

The Dancing Seedsman

Not so much a life story as a laugh story

by Peter G. Pybus

Peter Pybus was born in Hendon, Sunderland, in 1936.  “Oh my God, that’s the backside of the town!” people told him later. Well, maybe it is, but there’s good people in every town, he says. You can’t help where you’re born.

Peter went on to set up his own business selling seed all over the North East from his base in the Yorkshire Dales, somehow also fitting in working as a Special Constable and secretary of the North Yorkshire County Show.  A huge fan of Scottish dancing, Peter picked the title of his book, saying, “Everyone will know that’s me!”

He survived bombing by the Nazis and, as a founder member of the Federation  of Small Businesses, continues to wage war on red tape and people sadly lacking those two vital senses: common sense and a sense of humour.

What Peter G. Pybus says:

Why write a book? Many of my friends and customers said that I should but I gave up the idea long ago. However, by accident or good fortune, I met Caroline Brannigan. Over a cup of tea she explained all the requirements and has written this book for me in a very professional manner.

It took five or six sessions of two hours each session talking to Caroline, who recorded our conversations on tape. From these recordings, she has produced a first class book.

I can highly recommend her to anyone who might think it is impossible to put their memories into words. Don’t delay, start today!

Extract:

When I was chairman of the Parish Council, three bins for dog waste were provided by the district council. Later I had a call from a woman at the town hall to ask how things were going. I told her, “They’re wonderful. There’s only one little fault, my Jack Russell can’t reach them.”

Common sense went out of the window. She started to tell me how to use a doggie bin and I could not believe what I was hearing. There was me, chairman of the Parish Council, being told how to collect dog dirt.

(and from a later part of the book)

In early 2010 I got an invitation to go to 10 Downing Street, and I thought, “I wonder who lives there?” Anyway, I went down and it was amazing what a huge complex there is behind that small façade. The Prime Minster was missing, in Brussels, no doubt signing off another bit of red tape with which to strangle small businesses.

There was a big crowd in of about 150 from all kinds of groups including the Institute of Directors and the CBI. Alan Sugar was there and wormy Mandelson, both of whom I can’t stand. Much too smooth, both of them. They can turn any negative into a positive. They don’t look you in the eye but anywhere else. Beware anybody who can’t look you in the face, that’s what I’ve always thought. I felt like saying, “Oi! I’m over here!” They were the only two dignitaries who were circulating and both got an awful lot of stick.

Sugar had come out with a statement saying that Government couldn’t be expected to support businesses that were going under if it was their own fault. I overheard a dairy farmer getting at him, “I’m getting 16p a litre for my bloody milk and it costs me 26p to produce it. Is that my fault?” Sugar’s answer was, “Sell your cows.” I thought that farmer was going to explode. “Who the hell’s going to buy them?” he asked. But of course there were never any answers.

I also heard this farmer say, “The trouble with you lot is you get into London and there’s a skin round you. You haven’t any idea what’s happening outside.” He was furious, and the language, well, Downing Street or not he expressed himself plainly.

Mandelson was worming his way round and you could hear him repeating himself, “It’s a worldwide recession, a worldwide recession …. ” like a cracked record, till we were sick of it. The Labour Party had had nothing to do with it. He was getting heckled relentlessly but I have no doubt that our visit there made no difference whatsoever. Then they were voted out anyway.