MARTIN’S MUSINGS
By Martin Dove
Growing up in Scarborough
in the sixties: 1962
Martin in 2015
January of
1962 was a bleak month with heavy snowfalls in Scarborough, which was fine for
a kid of 13, going on 14, who loved nothing better than a mass snowball fight
with his schoolmates. It also meant that rugby was often cancelled at school
too, which suited me just fine.
The biggest
blow for me though in January, was discovering that I was too old for Wray’s
annual Christmas party, and missing out on free sweets and crisps. I did still
manage to get into the Plaxton’s Christmas party however, where I was entertained
by Uncle Ray, a ventriloquist with two dummies Ted, and Gerry, and when we got
bored with that he produced Esmeralda, the glove puppet as his back-up plan.
Bayko
As a boy of
13 I was fascinated with Bayko, which was a construction toy consisting of a rectangular
Bakelite base
with a square grid of holes, into which you would insert little metal rods, into
which you would then slot bricks, doors, windows, roofs and chimneys. I spent
most of my winter weekends busily engaged with my Bayko. Of course my DEB
evenings were still going strong too. Curto and Freebloke were still regulars,
along with Cousin Dave, Tony Wade, and characters called Oog, Tucker and
Twidsey. Dove’s Entertainment Bureau now
included magic tricks, and my favorite game of all, which was invented by my
brother Barry, draught football. This was played on a patterned carpet on the
floor, with two pawns at either end for goalposts, and eleven draughts each,
which were the footballers. Players placed their men in whatever position they
liked, and then it was game on. The ball, a marble, was placed in the centre,
and each player had a pencil, which was used to flick the man against the ball,
towards the opponent’s goal. We had rules for throw -ins, corners, goal kicks,
and penalties, and this game was loved by everyone. In fact I was still playing
it with my son, Robert, well into the eighties! Inventing games at DEB nights
was encouraged and Curto came up with two classics, Tony’s car rally, and
Tony’s pub crawl. The pub crawl game involved travelling round Scarborough,
with a limited amount of money, and after visiting six random pubs, and buying
a drink in each, you had to have enough money left to get into the Billiard
Hall, and you also had to still be sober! This was only a board game, I must
stress, although playing the game for real was only a few years away!
I was also a great fan of R Journet’s perplexing puzzles,
which I bought from a shop in town called H O Taylor for 2/3d each. The shop
was like a cross between Ryman’s and The Works, with games, books, pens and
stationery. The puzzles were small hand
held games, which were basically a wooden box with a glass top. Inside the box,
unsurprisingly, was a perplexing puzzle, which usually involved getting a ball
around a course, whilst avoiding the hazards, or slotting a number of balls,
into different holes. 53 years later, I still have these games, although they
are looking rather worse for wear!
Martin’s collection of perplexing puzzles.
I loved the movies
growing up and saw 26 films in 1962. We still had four cinemas in Scarborough
in those days, the Odeon (now the SJT),
the Capitol, (now Mecca Bingo), the Gaiety (now BHF) and the Londesborough (now
Betfred). Films I saw included Blue
Hawaii (Elvis), Carry on cruising,
Follow that dream (Elvis), Hey, let’s twist, Love me tender
(Elvis), and The pure hell of St
Trinians. Observant readers will see an Elvis theme here, and I was a big
Elvis fan, as was my brother, Ray. I can remember seeing Elvis in Jailhouse Rock at the Gaiety cinema in
1957 with Ray, when I was only nine years old. Everyone in the cinema was on
their feet, throughout the film, dancing, jiving, rocking and rolling. As Elvis
was singing “The band was jumping' and
the joint began to swing. You should've heard those knocked out jailbirds sing.
Let's rock, everybody, let's rock” teenagers were fighting, others were
jumping up and down on their seats, and the whole place was just like a prison
riot had broken out! In fact, one youth in the circle, got so excited dancing
around that he fell off the balcony into the stalls, leapt to his feet, shouted
“I’m OK, let’s rock!” and carried on
dancing!
Jailhouse Rock poster.
As well as Elvis, I developed a serious crush on Helen
Shapiro in 1962. I loved everything about her, from her beehive hairdo, to her
deep foghorn voice. Helen had hits such as “Walking
back to happiness”, and “Don’t treat
me like a child.” It’s fair to say that I was pretty obsessed with the
delightful Helen, so you can imagine my excitement, when I heard that she was
coming to Scarborough’s very own Floral Hall. I had already seen her films “It’s Trad Dad,” and “Play It Cool,” and I owned all her
records, which I played all the time, so to see her in the flesh would be a
boyhood dream come true. The big day dawned in June and along with my mate Dave
we took our seats in the Floral Hall (demolished in 1989), after paying our 1/6
for a ticket. Helen was top of the bill and in those days you certainly got
value for your money, with several other acts on the bill, some of which were
also big stars in their day. On the bill were Colin Day, The Four Jays, Dave
Allen, Inge Lise, The Red Price Band, Captain Fleming’s Chimps, and Lenny the
Lion. Needless to say the show was fantastic, and Dave and I hurried to the
stage door after the show as I wanted Helen’s autograph.
I gave my programme to the guy on the door, along with
dozens of other fans, and waited eagerly for its safe return. Sadly when the
chap came back with the programmes, he gave them all to one fan, and asked him
to share them out. I’m sorry to say, not only did I not get the autograph, I
didn’t even get my programme back!
Martin’s 1962 diary.
My Dad was the local secretary of the baker’s union, and
regularly attended regional meetings, and in April 1962, I was delighted when
he asked me to join him on the train to Newcastle. To modern readers, this may
seem strange, but as a lad of 14, this was the furthest I had ever been away
from home! I can still remember my first look at the Tyne Bridge, and the
excitement of being in a big city, for the first time in my life. My dad gave
me some money and left me to explore Newcastle on my own, while he went off to
his meeting. I loved I-Spy books, so this kept me busy for ages, as did my
other hobby of collecting matchbox covers, which I would find discarded on the
streets. I also went to the Hancock Museum, which was, and still is, one of the
finest Natural History Museums in England. I had a fancy for a quarter pound of
mint imperials, so popped into a sweet shop to buy a packet. To my amazement,
the shopkeeper didn’t have a clue what I was asking for, and when he spoke to
me, I realised that I couldn’t understand him either. This was simply a case of
a naïve Yorkshire lad, trying to have a conversation with a Geordie, but I
might as well have been speaking to a Martian for all the sense it made.
Needless to say, I left the shop without my mints!
Tyne Bridge.
I got my first ever job in July of this year, clearing
tables, and washing up at Jaconelli’s ice cream parlour on the seafront. I was
paid £1 for working seven hours, which doesn’t sound very much, but a cinema
ticket was 2/- in those days, so a day’s pay, would get me into the cinema ten
times. The job was menial, and tedious, and the hours would drag by, but the
job did have one saving grace, my sink was right next to the radio, and on
Sundays, I could listen to Pick of the
pops, presented by Alan Freeman on the BBC Light programme, (there was no
Radio 1 or 2 in 1962.). This became the
highlight of my week. There was no form of social media around in the sixties,
so listening to the weekly count down of the hit parade, was the only way to
find out who was number one. Right up until almost 7pm, I would wait with bated
breath to see who was going to be top of the pops. Artists such as Elvis, Cliff
Richard, Ray Charles, Helen Shapiro, Roy Orbison, Neil Sedaka, Billy Fury, and
Adam Faith, were all dominant at this time. The Mersey Beat explosion was yet
to come.
I much preferred listening to the radio to watching TV,
and would listen in my room on my transistor radio most nights. I enjoyed
comedy as well as music. The Braden Beat was
one of my favourite shows, as was Beyond
our Ken. I also listened every Saturday morning to Brian Matthews, who
presented Easy Beat. The show that I never missed was Jack Jackson’s Record Roundup, where he would mix comedy clips with
modern pop music. That man had a terrific influence on my teenage years, giving
me a love of comedy and music, which I still have to this day.
I was still finding money by sieving in the sand and I
was not averse to the occasional visit to Webster’s, the local rag and bone
man. My mum would send me down there with some old jumpers that I had outgrown,
and I once got 2/4d for 4lbs of wool, which I spent on four DCs (Detective
Comics), one ACG (American Comics Group), and one Batman giant annual.
Marvellous!
In the summer months, when I wasn’t working, I often went
to Scalby Mills on the miniature railway, which is still going strong over
fifty years later. Along with Ray and his friends I regularly played pitch and
putt at Peasholm, something I still do every summer, and I also went to see the
dancing waters at the Olympia, on the seafront, which is now an amusement
arcade. I no longer went to the bob a job barbers with my dad, I now had my
hair styled at Tribbels gentlemen’s hairdressers on York Place. On
Shrove Tuesday, I would go down to the seafront with my mates to watch the
skipping, and in those days, the bigger teenagers were quite happy to grab
anyone they vaguely knew from school, grab them bodily, carry them down to the
sea, and chuck them into the water. Needless to say the perpetrators would
often end up just as wet as the victims!
My parents went away to the Lake District for a week in
early October, the same week as Scarborough Fair, and I stayed with my Uncle
Dick, and Auntie Florrie on Cross Street in the old town. I loved my Uncle Dick
to bits, he was a smashing bloke, but staying with them again in 1963, did
cause a bit of a family rift, as you will read about in the next chapter!
Martin’s Mum & Dad in The Lake District.
Sadly my granddad, Wally, passed away in October, just a
year after his beautiful wife Rose in 1961. The Dove numbers were to remain the
same though, as in November my Brother Barry’s wife gave birth to a baby girl, Eileen,
named after her mother.
I now only had one grandparent left alive, my mum’s mum,
Granny Fishburn, who lived in the old town with her faithful dog Judy. (My
Granddad Robert Fishburn died in 1958). I visited her as often as I could, and I
remember that she always gave me raw tripe to eat. Tripe is edible offal, taken
from the stomachs of different animals, with grand names like blanket,
honeycomb, carpet and bible. It sounds disgusting, but I loved it! Honeycomb
tripe was my favourite, which I would shake on loads of salt, and enough
vinegar to fill every wonderful honeycomb. What a treat!
Honeycomb tripe.
My health was still not good in 1962, and I missed a
total of 12 days off school, mainly with asthma, and as a result my doctor sent
me to St Mary’s hospital for a weekly breathing exercise regime. I once wrote
in my diary that there were “only four
kids breathing at St Mary’s”, so I’m not sure if the rest had stopped
breathing, or maybe there were only four of us there? On another occasion I
wrote “mucked around with hats at St.
Mary’s, and then had to lug them around town”. Goodness only knows what all
that was about as I’ve long ago erased it all from my memory banks. There
were several hospitals in Scarborough in 1962, St Thomas’s on the
seafront, St Mary’s on Dean Road, Cross Lane hospital, and the main one on
Scalby Road.
A major turning point in my young life was getting my
first guitar in December. This was something I had craved for ages, and my mum
finally agreed to buy me one as an early Christmas present. I thought I was so
cool, and couldn’t wait to learn, with the ultimate aim of joining a band. I
had three career goals as a 14 year old, comedian, actor or musician, and how
did I get on with those dreams? That will all be revealed in future chapters. I
took my playing seriously and went for guitar lessons with Richard “Tab”
Slater, who lived on Castle Road. I was often at Tab’s house from 7pm until
10.50pm, and then I would have to walk home, carrying my guitar.
Martin with his
guitar.
Famous and
historic events from 1962
Dr No, the first James Bond film, is released.
BBC television broadcasts the first episode of Z-Cars.
Debut of the Rolling Stones
Panda Crossings are introduced.
Monarch -
Elizabeth II
Prime Minister -
Harold Macmillan (Conservative)
Martin Dove
January/2015
Coming soon…1963.
Martin starts working
at Cooplands.
Martin’s budgie
escapes.
Martin decides to live
with Uncle Dick. Bad idea!
Martin sees The Beatles
live on stage.
