Hobbies

A lot of people get so involved in their work that they have no time for hobbies, others watch sport like football and rugby as a sort of escape, well I have always been into collecting and hobbies, like records and books I end up with hundreds and have to catalogue them, I once worked out that I would have to play my long playing records continuously until I was ninety if I wanted to hear them all. With cigarettes it was up to forty a day at times, Barbara said what ever you do you go over the top, thank heaven you are not into drink or gambling. I used to sneak records and books into the house and hide them upstairs, then bring them into my collection when Barbara was out, and that's a full grown bloke in his forties. I once left some records out side the front door step to wait an opportunity to sneak them in, well Barbara found them and hid them in the garage and it was months before she let on. I have a feeling that she was up to my little ways all the time.

At Spring Grove Terrace I started home made wine making I specialised in the extra strong like potato, barley and elderberry. I fermented it in five gallon tubs in the cellar and as the temperature was on the low side it resulted in a long slow fermentation I used to take the specific gravity and try to convert all the sugar in to alcohol before clearing it. I normally had about two hundred bottles ready for drinking lined up on shelves in the cellar. The toilet was in the cellar and when I ran out of shelving I took off the toilet door to make extra shelves. We had some posh visitors from London and they just rolled about laughing when the lady asked were the door had gone and I explained that it was a matter of priorities and it had to be done.

I once entered a bottle of barley wine in the Ledsham village fair, there was only four bottles entered and there was three prizes, the other three wines were not clear, not labelled properly and one of them was in a sauce bottle, mine was an excellent wine in a correct bottle with a first class label and it lost, it did not get a prize, I was shattered.

I later entered a bottle from the same batch in a County Show in which there were more than one hundred bottles and it won the first prize, so either the Vicar of Ledsham was not a drinking man or the show was a little bit bent in favour of the locals.

The wine was mostly about sixteen percent alcohol and one evening I had a wine drinking party and invited some union mates, they thought home made wine was a bit of a joke and were drinking it by the half pint glass like they would beer, well they did not all make it home that night and a few had to sleep it off on our front room floor. One hard drinker was still drunk two days later.

Then there was my camera, I took my camera with me wherever I went and must have gone through thousands of films, it a great pity I did not take pictures of the old railway stations like Little Gomersal, together with the old buses and coal mines but I wasted a lot of film on country scenes and snapshots. I have recently had a clear out giving members of my family and friends all the photo’s I had of them and threw lots of the rubbish away. I did do some good work and won a few awards in exhibitions. Yorkshire TV used to have a programme called Take A Picture or something similar, it was a first class show with good local judges and involved the local people, I entered one or two pictures with some success one picture was shown by one of the judges, it was a sort of multi picture made up of about six separate shots, he said it showed a lot of skill, but then I did say they had good judges. I did a lot of good work with birds and squirrels in our back garden, one of these was part of a YTV exhibition held in Harrogate.

Regrettably YTV tried to make the show too flash and made a real mess of it, they introduced celebs as judges, reduced the input from the public and made the program a bit too slick and trashy.

Then there is my water colour painting, after I retired I attended the unemployed centre in Leeds market buildings, there was a fine painter and teacher there who's name to my shame I just cannot remember, he did the cartoons for the Evening Press in York and was a first class modern painter. He started me on the road and gave me encouragement to keep going, he would spend lots of time helping backward and slow learners in a way that I feel I could never do and I admired him for the work he did at the centre.

I shall never be a great painter but I have had some success, one of my paintings to the Post Office National exhibition was selected to go to a international exhibition to represent the UK. and a couple of years ago I won the first prize at the national exhibition in Oxford against some very strong competition. Barbara and I were treated to a free trip to Oxford with four star accommodation and I was presented with a cup by the Director.

I have given painting classes at a local authority school and at The West Yorkshire Playhouse one of the north's greatest theatres. When you think that I have heart disease, chronic bronchitis, thrombosis in the legs and am supposed to be a retired old age pensioner you might say what ever next. Well I joined a drama group, when I went to my first session I ended up with a selection of what appeared to be very middle class people pretending to be chimpanzees running round talking to each other in grunts, well things could only get better. At a later session we had to write and perform a work before the group, well I did this little story.

My family were very poor and we lived in a small mining village, we had a very fine whippet and my dad used to take it each Saturday night to a different pub a few miles away. He used to sell the dog to some punter and the very next day as soon as they let it out for a wee it ran back home, my dad had sold that dog more than fifteen times and he said he was better than any homing pigeon. Well I when I was about thirteen years old my mother lost me, she lost me playing cards, a bloke from the other side of the village was having a game of brag at our house and my mother having three fives had no money left so put me up as her stake, well he had three tens and promptly took me home to his wife." I've won this kid" he told her with great pride. Well they gave me a bed in the attic but I only seemed to have slept a short while when this bloke, Tom they called him, woke me up and took me off to the morning shift at the local pit.

Well down the shaft we went and I got the job of pushing a little tub on a set of tram lines, there I was up to the seam and down to the shaft time and time again. There was small parts of the wall were the coal had sort of crystallised and I found one place where it was like glass and you could see through it into another shaft which seemed to be full of water. I was looking through this glass when I saw a German U-boat sail by heading due west. I told Tom and he rushed me up the shaft to see the manager, well he was an air raid warden and knew all about such things. He said that the shafts went right through to the coast and were full of water, the sub must have found a way in. Good lord I shouted the sub is heading west towards Cleckheaton it could torpedo the Town Hall. Well I knew of an air shaft on the moors and led them to it. We had sticks of dynamite from the stores, we listened for the subs engine and then dropped the dynamite down the shaft and that put an end to the attack and saved the Town Hall which is still there today, which proves that we got the German U-boat. If you don't believe me, well you go to Cleckheaton and you will see for yourself the Town Hall is still there, thanks to me all those years ago.