I was born in the 1940s in York, England and grew up in north-west London. I went to school in Mill Hill and Kingsbury and graduated from the University of Sussex.

I lived and worked in London until the early 1970s when I took up a career in computing and lived and worked in Dorset, Hampshire, Wiltshire, North Somerset, West Somerset and I now live in Great Torrington, Devon.

This is a collection of memories, anecdotes, a couple of very old and corny jokes, a spot of sarcasm and a bunch of images, some of which might even be relevant.

Apart from my own photographs some of these pictures are copyrighted. All copyrights are acknowledged. This is not a commercial website.

If you are viewing this website on a Microsoft Windows © computer you can view larger versions of my pictures by right-clicking and selecting 'Open image in New Tab'.

Be warned! This website is a candidate for the most boring website of the year award.

It's a great memory trip for ME but may well be a big yawn for YOU so you might like to just click away now (but then you would never know what you missed).

If you are interested in learning more about life in the 1900s I recommend that you look at a website set up by Pat Cryer whose background has some parallels to mine: www.1900s.org.uk/

I took these three photographs at the Bletchley Park museum in Buckinghamshire.

So much of what is there was also in the kitchen at Holmstall Avenue where I was raised in the 1950s.

The first gramophone record which I remember my parents buying for me was a 10" 78rpm shellac record by Ann Stephens: Teddy Bears' Picnic / Dicky Bird Hop. Amazingly, many years later I was able to buy the same recording on a CD.

One Christmas I was given a David Nixon magic set just like the one shown here.

David Nixon was a well-known magician popular in the 1950s and 1960s. He had regular television appearances and there are videos of him on YouTube.

This is a picture of a bedroom window in our house, which had no central heating, in the 1950s on a particularly cold winter's morning.

The thing to note is that the frost was on the INSIDE of the window.

For a number of years in the 1950s and 1960s my mother's parents lived at Elvington, a small village near York.

The house, called Sunnymead, comprised two old railway carriages set above ground parallel to each other about twelve feet apart.

It had a large wooden veranda in front and the whole of the area between the carriages was carpeted living space with windows across the far end. Bedrooms, a lounge, bathroom and kitchen led off either side accessed through heavy carriage doors all beautifully painted.

It was a wonderful place and I have many fond memories of staying there.

The first car that I remember my father having was a Ford Thames 5cwt van. He used it for business but also domestic use. Because it had no side windows when he bought it, the van qualified as a commercial vehicle and so was free of purchase tax. He got a friend of his who was a skilled metal worker to cut windows in the side panels.

When we used it for family trips and holidays my sister and I sat in low canvas camping chairs like this in the back. No anchoring and no seat belts in those days.

This picture shows us driving off the Isle of Wight ferry from Lymington for a holiday on the island.

My father's next vehicle was a Vauxhall Victor Estate. Its number plate was 296 PP.

When he finally sold it the car was bought by a chap named Peter Potter who bought it for the plate. Transferring the number was not easy in those days.

The school was about two miles from home. Initially my mother took me to school on a seat on the back of her bicycle. My grandfather was a carpenter and built the seat.

When I was a bit older I took the bus to school on my own.

The bus stop was less than half a mile from home. I could catch either bus 140 (a double decker RT) to Bunns Lane, Mill Hill or Bus 251 (a single decker TD). The fare was exactly one penny although it did later go up to 1½d.

The one penny bus ticket to school. My bus stops Burnt Oak and Bunns Lane Mill Hill are printed on the ticket.

Mill Hill Broadway station.

The walk from the Mill Hill bus stop to St George's School was about half a mile. To cross the main line track I had to go under the subway in Mill Hill Broadway station - no ticket barriers or gates then. This was rather frightening when a train went thundering over the top. Almost all trains were steam in those days.

There was a small siding outside where the mail van was left.

The 240a bus ran from Mill Hill to Edgware. The TD bus is shown here at the end of Mill Hill Broadway coming under the main railway line. Note the signal box on the bridge.

There was a sweet shop in Station Road in Mill Hill and when sweets came off ration in 1953 I was able to go there to spend my pocket money on the way home from school.

The walk between school and the 140 bus stop meant walking along Bunns Lane and a bridge over the LNER rail line between Mill Hill East and Edgware.

Sometimes on the way home a friend and I would climb down the embankment to what was left of Mill Hill (The Hale) station. This was to have been part of the London Underground line to Edgware from Mill Hill East. This proposed line is shown on the map at the very top of this website.

This was long before the M1 motorway was built which now goes parallel to the mainline railway through Mill Hill.

•   There were a couple of American families living near us. One family lived in the house opposite and I have a memory of two young girls sitting outside in their front garden drinking bottles of malt vinegar - or so I thought.

It was only years later I realised that it must have been Coca Cola which of course I had not heard of at the time.

•   The Biro ballpoint pen first went on sale in the UK in the 1940s. I remember a boy at school had one in the mid 1950s. I don't know how or where it was bought.

•   Very close to Holmstall Avenue is Carlisle Road which has a number of small factories and warehouses. In the mid 1950s there was a fire in a bubble gum factory there.

With a lot of other local children I remember 'salvaging' quite a lot of packets from the fire. I don't remember my parents' reaction.

•   A number of women living near us in Holmstall Avenue worked from home. One neighbour made and sold costume jewellery and another neighbour across the road worked from home selling and fitting Spirella corsets. https://www.corsetiere.net/Spirella/Corsetiere/Fitter.htm

And another woman two doors away worked at home making children's billiard tables. I remember her getting deliveries of wood, rubber strips, pots of glue and rolls of green baize from a toy company called Kays.

The Co-op Burnt Oak - with the flags flying.

When I went shopping with my mother we would sometimes go to the Co-op (The London Co-operative Society) which was a large multi-storey department store on the corner of Stag Lane and the Edgware Road.

Anyone who was a child around that time would be able to tell you their mother's Co-op 'divi' number. My mother's number was 466009. Using the number on purchases built up a 'dividend' which could be claimed back.

When making a purchase in the Co-op your money was placed by the assistant in a small cylindrical container which was carried in a vacuum tube to the cashier at the back of the shop. Your change and receipt were returned in the same container through a second vacuum tube.

There was also a grocer in Burnt Oak (which I think was called Williams) which gave small thin metal loyalty tokens like coins. These could be saved up and spent in the shop.

Opposite the Co-op was a pub called The Bald Faced Stag and next door was the Express Dairy café. You can probably work out which one my mother would take me into to buy me a 'coffee dash' - hot milk with a dash of coffee when we went there for elevenses.

The pub remained until it was finally knocked down in 2013

At the end of Holmstall Avenue there was a Forbuoys newsagents. My father used to send me there when I was young to buy his tobacco - a two-ounce tin of Mick McQuaid or Balkan Sobranie. He smoked a pipe. I remember him lighting up in the kitchen and filling the room with dense sickly-smelling smoke. My mother smoked cigarettes occasionally. They both gave up quite early in my childhood.

My mother's mother smoked Du Maurier cigarettes. My father's father smoked roll-ups. I don't remember anyone else in my family smoking. I had a few cigarettes when at university but fortunately never developed the habit. Other things were being smoked then too but I can honestly say that I never tried them. Alcohol was enough for me.

  •   In the 1950s there were 'pig bins' in the street. It was my job to take kitchen food waste wrapped up in newspaper and put it in the pig bin. This was literally used to feed pigs.

  •   If I was ill my mother would give me 'pobbies' which was bread chopped up with warm milk and sugar. I think this is a Yorkshire recipe. (See Google)

  •   Comics I loved as a child were Dandy, Beano and Topper (which sometimes had free gifts).

  •   In those days the milk came in foil-topped glass bottles and the milkman delivered with a horse-drawn milk float.

  •   The coalman's cart was also pulled by a horse. The coal was delivered in sacks in enormous unprocessed lumps and had to be broken up before it could be put on the fire.

  •   At the end of Holmstall Avenue in Holmstall Parade there was an undertaker's business which I notice is still there (2023). One of my friends, Michael had his ageing and ailing grandfather living with his family.

If the undertaker saw us playing in the street he would always ask Michael how his grandfather was. He seemed very interested in his health.

  •   One summer my woodworking skills extended as far as building a ride-on trolley from a plank and two short lengths of 2" x 2" timber forming axles. Four roller bearings pushed on the ends of the timber formed wheels and a bolt through the front axle and a bit of rope enabled steering.

There is a back alley behind the shops in Holmstall Parade with a convenient hill. The extremely loud roar of metal on tarmac got a few complaints I seem to remember.

Frozen food has not always been available. I don't remember when we first had a freezer in the kitchen. It was probably just a freezer compartment inside a fridge.

I do remember salting runner beans. These were easy to grow in the garden but in order to preserve them they were kept in glass jars in layers separated by salt. And the cooking salt did not come in small cardboard packets but in blocks about 9 inches long which had to be crushed with a rolling pin (my job).

We were able to buy freeze-dried vegetables which had to be cooked in boiling water for some time. One brand was called Surprise Peas. This gave rise to a schoolboy joke.

    Q: What do you get with Surprise Peas?
    A: Sore legs.

My first train set was a Hornby 'O' gauge and with birthday and Christmas presents I had quite a lot of track and points which would be spread across the living room carpet.

I also had plenty of Meccano. The good thing about Meccano was that you could gradually build up by buying accessory sets. So, for example, with set 2, adding set 2A meant that you had the equivalent of set 3.

The largest set was set 10 which cost £10, a lot of money.

A friend of my father gave me a large amount of Meccano. This was pre-war stuff and a different colour from the 1950s pieces. I learnt about gears using Meccano and I remember building a vehicle with a differential drive.

When I was twelve I moved on from clockwork trains to an electric Hornby Dublo set.

I also had a number of Dinky Toys which were to the same scale as the Dublo and I still remember quite a few of them.

My father set up on trestles a 6ft x 4ft board on which the track was mounted with a station, level crossing, signals etc and painted roads.

A friend Andrew and I used to spend time playing with the Dinky toys and train. We had separate 'businesses' on the board such as a farm, garage, car sales, milkman, railway etc. Each business had a paper wallet containing Monopoly money and we would play as the businesses trading with each other.

Just around the corner from our house there was a Savoy cinema in Holmstall Parade. The first film I saw there was 'Davy Crockett: King of The Wild Frontier', a Walt Disney film released in 1955.

In the late 1950s we had a holiday in Mallorca. We stayed at a resort called Puerto Soller in the north west of the island in the Gran Hotel Ferrocarril (The Railway Hotel). Trams passed through the centre of the town between the cafés and the tables and chairs. (The trams were still running in 2002 when I visited again).

I remember the currency; there were not many coins but plenty of tatty old paper notes including one peseta notes (worth about one penny).

In the late 1950s I passed my 11-plus exam. I had an interview at Harrow School but I was very nervous and had a streaming cold and I failed to be accepted.

I started at Kingsbury County Grammar School, Princes Avenue (now Kingsbury High School).

The school was used in filming the TV series "Grange Hill" in the late 1970s.

I used to walk to school - a distance of about three-quarters of a mile.

Classes were mixed and in my first year there were four classes and the total intake for the year must have been well over 100.

There was no streaming and classes were just in alphabetical order of surnames. The roll call for my class was from Lynton to Samways. There were three Robinsons - very confusing for the teachers.

Surnames were used for the boys and first names for the girls.

My father also went to Kingsbury County School. One of the teachers I remember was Kate Reddish who was a very posh-spoken woman. "My name is weddish as in weddish-bwown".

It turned out that she had also taught my father. As he was born in 1919 he must have left the school around 1937 which means she was teaching at the school for at least twenty years.

Other teachers I remember are Mr Cowie who taught mathematics and certainly cultured my interest in the subject; Willy Hughson a Welshman who taught French and who was a dead shot in class with a piece of chalk if you were not paying attention.

Dr Brock who taught History and who liked to discuss philosophical subjects; Mrs Everett who taught Geography; Mr Smart who taught English and who would set end-of-term crossword puzzles and Mr Abrahams who taught Latin and seemed to ignore the girls sitting at the back of the class, knitting.

I also took Woodwork and Technical Drawing. I still have a T-square which I made in class.

For a few years we had a Greek tortoise which we called George. He was an escape artist and we had to paint his address on the underside of his shell. My father had to keep patching holes in the fence.

At home I had my own room. I built a wooden unit into an alcove which housed six tropical fish tanks. I once kept a slow worm and at another time a toad. I used to feed the toad with fly maggots. Once when we went on holiday a load of the maggots hatched and escaped. We returned to find hundreds of blowflies at my bedroom window. My parents were not pleased.

The Edgware Road (A5) ran past the end of our road and until 1961 trolleybuses 666 and 645 ran there. My friends and I would sometimes take a trolleybus to Edgware and go fishing for sticklebacks in Canons Park Lake.

This picture was taken at Edgware on the A5 where trolleybuses turned round to go back into London.

Trolleybuses were dismantled in 1962 at Colindale depot just down the road and I remember climbing over the gate and collecting souvenirs from the partly demolished vehicles.
The last day of trolleybus 666: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg5Tzh8nppw/

An early girlfriend lived two doors away in Limesdale Gardens. I remember her trying to slow down a 78rpm wind-up gramophone to play a 45rpm vinyl record which did not do much for the vinyl. Her father worked at Elliott Brothers in Borehamwood which was a computer company and he used to bring home electronic parts for me. I used to make stuff with transistors.

In my early teens I had penpals. There was no internet and no mobile phones so writing letters was the main method of long-distance communication. I had penpals in The Netherlands, The USA, Gloucestershire and Yorkshire (all female). I once met the penpal in Yorkshire when I visited with my parents. We discovered that she was 4'11" and I was 6'2". I have pictures.

I visited Stroud in Gloucestershire and stayed with another penpal. At a party there I met Wendy who also lived in Stroud. We developed a relationship.

The singer Helen Shapiro had a number of top ten hits in the early 1960s. I discovered that she lived in Hendon, only a few miles from Edgware. Her address was in the phone directory so one Saturday I cycled there with my copy of her vinyl LP 'Tops with me' and knocked on her door. She came to the door and signed my LP.

There were few radio programmes playing pop music in the 1950s and 1960s. There were no local radio stations and the only commercial radio station I could listen to was Radio Luxembourg. It could only be heard at night and I used to tune in on an old valve radio with headphones.

The pirate radio stations started in 1964 and BBC Radio 2 started in 1967.

When I was in the 6th form we occasionally had 'dances'. I don't think they were called discos in those days. Of course there was no alcohol involved. One of the dances featured a local group called The Beachcombers. I later found out that the very energetic drummer whose drum kit nearly fell off the front of the stage was Keith Moon who later joined the group The Who. They had many chart hits in the 1960s.

I once arranged for a female singer who had a minor top 20 hit record when I was in the 6th form to appear at one of the dances. She was accompanied by a piano player. Unfortunately her style of music was definitely not suitable for a school dance and I was not popular as a result.

A Walter tape recorder similar to the one I owned.

In my teens electronics was a hobby. I built a 10watt valve amplifier and a record player and played around with transistor circuits. I also built a massive loudspeaker cabinet about three feet high.

A favourite haunt of mine was the government surplus stores such as Proops in Tottenham Court Road and Henrys Radio in The Edgware Road.

I had a succession of tape recorders and used to record 'Pick of the Pops' from the radio and tracks from friends' LPs. I had dozens of tapes and hundreds of hours of recordings. I also built up a massive collection of vinyl 45s and LPs mostly bought second hand and even bought 45s in bulk at auction into the 1980s.

In the early 1960s a friend and I ran a fan club for a girl singer who had a couple of top 20 hit records. Her agent Dick Katz had offices in Tin Pan Alley (Denmark Street) and supplied us with news and signed photographs to send out.

When she appeared for a season at The London Palladium we were able to go backstage and meet her and other stars. We produced a regular newsletter. I typed the skins on an old typewriter and we printed them on a very old Gestetner electric duplicator.

At the age of 19 I was still considered to be a child so my time at university must have been very worrying for my parents because of the lack of communication.

There was no internet and there were no smartphones. There was a telephone with a coinbox in the entrance hall of the guesthouse where I lived during my first year.

Soon after starting at university I was whisked off to hospital in Brighton with acute appendicitis. I presume that the hospital must have phoned my parents.

In the 1960s only about 10% of young people went to university and education was free. Tuition and accommodation fees were paid by the government and I was paid a means-tested grant of about £350 per year. This was paid in instalments - one per term and so it was necessary to have a bank account.

There were no cash machines in UK until 1967 so to draw cash it was necessary to write out a cheque to "Cash" and to take it into a branch. Barclays Bank had a small branch on campus. There was also a regular branch in Brighton which was enormous by today's standards and had at least 10 counters.

All students were able to receive mail at the university. In the main building, Falmer House, there were very large pigeon hole units where all the incoming mail was placed.

In those days there were quite a few mail order companies selling books. Readers Digest and Heron Books were two. A couple of us hit on the idea of signing up for book subscriptions to these companies using false names and addressed simply to Falmer House, Brighton, Sussex. I received a number of 'free' books in this way. The red reminders were simply thrown away.

Falmer House, University of Sussex 1960s.

In my year there were more female students than male students. In Freshers Week the university put on a free wine and cheese party where I remember having a really good time, drinking a lot of mead and getting to know a lot of people.

In November 1964 Queen Elizabeth II opened the university library. There was a frantic tidying up of the site during the days before. The university was still a building site with lots of construction work going on.

There is an amusing description of the event written by a fellow student here: www.sussex.ac.uk/alumni/looking-back/royal-connections

A couple of days before her majesty visited, turf was laid over all the areas she would be likely to see when approaching the library. Unfortunately the local moles had other ideas and on the day there were many lifted turves.

Perrimay Charlotte Street Google Street View 2020.

Sussex University policy was that during their first-year students would live in bed and breakfast accommodation in Brighton. During my first year I shared a room on the first floor of a guest house in Brighton: 'Perrimay' in Charlotte Street. The room on the first floor which had a balcony. All rooms used shared bathrooms.

1960's rates were about two pounds per person per night for bed and breakfast.

Charlotte Street where I lived at the guesthouse Perrimay in runs south from Upper St James's Street.

Drinks sold in the university bar in Falmer House were priced reasonably but there was much annoyance when the price of a pint of beer was increased from 1/10d (9p) to 2/- (10p).

Food and drink places of which I have fond memories include:
  •   Henekey's galleried pub in Ship Street,
  •   The Shades Bar in The Steine,
  •   The Cottage in The Lanes with a wonderful spaghetti bolognaise,
  •   The Corner House restaurant in St James' Street which did low priced meals for students and where you could get a free meal if you were waiting for your grant to come through. It had a wonderful juke box with amazing bass. The floor vibrated when we played 'You've Lost That Loving Feeling' by The Righteous Brothers,
  •   The Pie Shop where you could buy a hot meat pie and a fruit tart for less than two shillings (10p).

Some of us experimented with seances and a ouija board but I think we all concluded that although there was probably some sort of telepathy going on maybe by subconscious signals there was definitely no communication with people no longer alive.

Photo 1973: © www.arthurlloyd.co.uk.

There was a wonderful, little cinema, The Continentale in Sudeley Place in Brighton (see left). We used to joke that they would restart the film if you arrived late. The curtain ran on metal runners and sounded just like a living room curtain being drawn.

One year I had a summer holiday job working at a mink farm in Plumpton, Sussex. I have vivid memories of it being a hot summer and mink food comprising the leftover bits from farmed chickens after preparation for supermarket sale arriving in large vats for grinding down. These were not chilled and to say on a hot, sunny day that they were aromatic would be an understatement.

One summer I stayed at a girlfriend's home in Hartest, a small village in Suffolk near Bury St Edmunds. This was the first time I had ever slept in black sheets.

Another year I stayed with a girlfriend at Lowdham Post Office which in those days was an old thatched cottage. Lowdham is a small village near Nottingham. In Nottingham I remember the pub Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem which is built into the rocks under Nottingham Castle and in 2023 was still the oldest pub in England.

I remember once going to a party in Hove. The house was slightly inland from the flat in Western Road where I was living, and at the top of a slight hill.

In the small hours I left and set off to walk home somewhat the worse for wear. I found a bicycle leaning against a hedge.

My beer-soaked logic suggested I could borrow the bike to free-wheel down the hill to where I lived.

The next thing I knew was that I was inside a police box having a conversation with a Police Constable, the owner of the bicycle. The Brighton and Hove police were used to dealing with intoxicated students and I was fortunate that there was no further action and I was taken back to my flat in a police car.

The 'bobby on the beat' in those days would not normally carry a radio and would rely on a public phone box, a police box or a car radio to communicate with headquarters.

My flatmate played acoustic guitar and two friends of ours were also musicians. One also played guitar and sang and the second was lead singer in a small amateur band. As I had the amplifiers, speakers and a tape recorder we had jam sessions.

With me as songwriter and the others as musicians we made a couple of demo tapes (which I still have on my computer) and we took them to Tin Pan Alley - Denmark Street in the West End of London home to a large number of music publishers and pop music agents.

We took our tapes to a couple of publishers. They did actually listen to our tapes but of course no sales.

One, I remember, said he was looking for songs with a strong beat and words, quoting from a chart hit at the time called 'Concrete & Clay' by Unit 4 + 2. "The sidewalks in the street, the concrete and the clay beneath my feet begins to crumble . . ."

During one summer we four friends had a holiday, camping in a vintage bell tent on Guernsey in the Channel Islands at l'Auberge Divette Jerbourg Road, St. Martin. We travelled in a very old van and went across on the Weymouth ferry. I remember we visited the Cellar Club in St Peter Port on several evenings.

In 1967 my parents had a one-room extension built on the side of the house where we lived. During the summer they went away on holiday for a couple of weeks which I took as an opportunity to have a party with some of my friends in London.

I set up a bar in the new extension. When they returned I had a problem explaining to my parents the beer stains on the bare floorboards.

In my third and final year I lived in Norwich House at Falmer and so spent lot more time on campus. Take a look around: sussex.ac.uk/study/accommodation/on-campus/norwich-house/

I graduated from The University of Sussex with a BSc in Maths & Physics.

Burnt Oak - my local London Underground station.

A season ticket from Burnt Oak.

1938 stock in the LT Museum in Covent Garden.

I have always had a great love of the history of London Transport in the 20th century, partly because I lived through at least half of it.

I have a vague memory of trams in London and travelling through the Kingsway tram tunnel.

I rode regularly on London trolleybuses and RT buses.

I really became very attached to the 1938 stock trains on the Northern Line. The fare for a single ticket into London was 2/9d (14p).

I have visited the London Transport museums at Acton and Covent Garden several times and I have been on a couple of their 'Hidden London' tours.

I have a good collection of photographs, tickets etc. I also have quite a few model RT London buses.

The telephone switchboard similar to the one at Earls Court exhibition centre when I was working there in the 1960s.

In 1967, still living with my parents, I started work as a trainee manager with Electrical Engineers (ASEE) Exhibition Ltd in Museum House, Museum Street, London WC1 close to the British Museum.

The company organised the biennial Exhibition at Earls Court exhibition centre in London, run by the Association of Supervisory Electrical Engineers (ASEE). The general manager was Phil Thorogood (radio ham G4KD) who was a friend of my parents.

The work was general office administration and included organising the inaugural dinner at the London Hilton Hotel for about 900 guests including ambassadors and high commissioners from all over the world with the inherent problems of protocol - who sits where.

I was also responsible for issuing lorry passes for the lifts at Earls Court. The exhibition was held every other year and so there was plenty of work for me to do until after March 1968 when the exhibition was held.

My annual salary was £900.

I sometimes worked with a colleague on a Gestilith offset litho printing machine, an awesome piece of equipment. Paper sizes in those days were foolscap (13" x 8") and quarto (10" x 8"). The weights of paper were also measured differently.

In 1968 I started work with Industrial and Trade Fairs Ltd, Commonwealth House, New Oxford Street in London WC1. I was involved in several exhibitions at Earls Court and Olympia and acted as Press Officer.

The Ariel Leader motorcycle.

This is the same colour as the one I owned in the 1960s.

In February 1969 I was fined £4 for speeding and £2 for excessive smoke while riding my Ariel Leader motorcycle.

Above is a picture of my driving licence endorsement

The Ariel Leader is a 250cc 2-stroke bike and when filling with petrol it was necessary to add 2-stroke oil (no unleaded petrol in those days). The oil lubricated the cylinder and crank case but also burnt off with the fuel creating smoke.

When free-wheeling down hill for any distance it was necessary to blip the throttle every few seconds to keep the engine lubricated.

In the winter of 1969/1970 I finally left home and moved into a one-room bed-sitter in Gleneagles Road, Streatham in South London. It was an awful place with a shared bathroom.

I occasionally stayed overnight at a Teacher Training College in Streatham when I was dating a young lady who was training there. I wasn't the only male to be seen sneaking out of the girls' accommodation block early in the morning.

I took my girlfriend to see the rock musical 'Hair' at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London. We had good seats in the stalls. I hadn't told her about the show beforehand so she was very surprised, to say the least.

It was the first show to be put on in London after the removal of censor restrictions in 1968. (Try Google for further information.)

In early 1970 I moved in to a house in Nutbrook Street, Streatham, South London. The house was owned by two friends of mine from university, Andy and Jill. They had bought the house with a sitting tenant in the upstairs flat. The elderly tenant eventually moved out and I moved in.

During 1970 we made structural changes to the house and completely rewired it and re-plumbed it to create two self-contained flats. I learnt a lot about plumbing and electrical installation and became very familiar with the 14th edition of the IEE wiring regulations.

Andy was a petrolhead and I remember driving with him to the Caterham Cars factory where he bought a Lotus 7 kit car which he subsequently built.

Being driven by him accelerating into corners and driving round a roundabout was something of an experience. It felt like your backside was about six inches above the road.

At the end of 1970 I set up a printing business from Nutbrook Street using an Adana 8x5 letterpress printing machine and many racks of lead type.

I used an accommodation address in London's West End. My idea was to set up a mail order business but unfortunately there was a 3-month postal strike in early 1971 and decimalisation caused me some problems so the business didn't really get off the ground.

In the middle of 1971 I started doing temporary work with The Conduit Bureau in London. Jobs included:
  •   House of Commons Messenger. I seem to remember a lot of bars in the building.
  •   Operating a massive collating machine for Unilever, a manufacturing company for domestic products at Unilever House in Blackfriars where foolscap questionnaires were put together for doing market research which in those days was done with a clipboard and stopping people in the street.
  •   Unloading lorries for a transport company in London.
  •   Working for Protheroe and Morris, estate agents in the city of London which included stocktaking for a garden centre in Kent and an orchid auction.

I finally closed down The Terra Nova Press in October 1971 and sold the Adana printing machine and many racks of type for £35 in March 1972.

At around the same time Andy and Jill moved to a house in Anstey Road in Peckham after selling the Nutbrook Street house. Andy's parents had lived there for most of his life and were retiring to Whitstable in Kent. I lived there with them until early in 1973.

35 Doughty Street

The Blue Lion, Grays Inn Road.

I started work as Assistant General Manager at The Radio Society of Great Britain (RSGB) at 35 Doughty Street London WC1, just off Grays Inn Road at the end of 1971. The General Manager was Douglas Findlay DFC, G3BZG who was a friend of my parents.

Lunch was often taken at The Blue Lion pub in Grays Inn Road, sometimes with George Jessop G6JP who wrote many books about amateur radio and was an expert on VHF radio.

In 1973 I moved to a flat in the downstairs half of a converted semi-detached house in Brook Avenue, Edgware.

In early 1974 I started work as Information Officer at The British Paper and Board Industry Federation in New Fetter Lane, London.

On 3rd August 1974 I started as buyer at S. H. Simon (Electrical) Ltd, an electrical wholesaler in Rushgrove Avenue, Colindale, London.

A university friend of mine was working there as buying manager. I joined the staff as an assistant buyer. Our customers were contractors large and small, other wholesalers, retailers and occasionally Joe Public popping in for a plug or a light bulb.

Fluorescent lighting was a big seller and I can remember quite often having to telephone Thorn Lighting, Crompton lighting and others for quotations for hundreds of fittings and tubes all in one order.

One thing I remember is having to work out discount percentages. For example. We would have basic trade discounts arranged with suppliers. Sometimes they would have special offers with additional discounts. And if we had a particularly large order to be delivered directly to a contractor's worksite we would negotiate an additional discount. But the contractor would also be expecting us to give an additional discount.

For example, a supplier discount might be something like 25% / 12% / 5% / 2½% (These were multiplied not added. No pocket calculators in those days)

While working at S H Simon I learnt a large number of manufacturers part numbers and surprised myself at just how many, including a large percentage of the MK and Crabtree catalogues.

We had good working relationships with other electrical wholesalers in the area and would often help each other with stock needed in a hurry.

There was a large company in Birmingham called Midland Electric Manufacturing (MEM). They produced heavy duty switchgear and had problems in keeping up with demand either because of materials shortage or else because they had to re-tool to make different types of equipment. This meant that it was sometimes necessary to order items months in advance.

We became very good at predicting future stock needs and this often placed us in a good position for negotiating with other wholesalers who did not have stock.

I finished working at S. H. Simon on 13th February, 1976. I then joined the newly-formed government sponsored Training Opportunities Scheme (TOPS) which set me on the road to a long and happy career working in computers.

Details of my career in computing from 1976 to 2003 are here: www.geoffnewland.me.uk/computercareer/