Origins
 

There’s so much knowledge and experience on here it makes me wonder what everyone once did.

16th birthday - ICI apprentice, night school two evenings a week, and playing in a ‘group’ with friends in local pubs such as The Boat House in Runcorn at the weekend.

The Boat House led to the first girlie friend. Star quality, obviously. Then I found out what to do. No not that, I mean proper chord sequences. Also my first lessons in how to dodge the new phenomena of flying stools. The ones you sit on. Great nights though. Then, at about midnight, a 2 hour walk home with Hofner Senator and Watkins Amp. I was the first left-handed guitar player that played it the right way round. Thanks to Lonnie Donegan, the Vipers, and Chas McDevitt and Nancy Whiskey.

We, Billy Mullen and Bobby Didsbury, oh, and later with my good friends George Newby, his brother Norman (plus tea chest base) and sister Doris Lamb, used to book a charabanc from Yates coach hire for our out-of-town gigs to take us and a local assortment of paying ‘fans’ to exotic venues like Crew Working Men's Club and others. The curtained back seat on the coach was not offered to the fans. Well, not all of them anyway. Not at once.

After 2 years of unlimited fame, and very limited fortune, it was obvious I was not made of the right stuff to be an Instruments Artificer. Or the next Eddie Cochran either. The Indentures were cancelled. That was swiftly followed by a brief notice in Runcorn Weekly News. The very first apprentice at my works ever to have his indentures cancelled. I’ve still got the instruments I made in the workshops.

Then at eighteen, a job advert in your actual Liverpool Echo for trainee butchers in your actual London. Live-in, no less.

You have led an interesting life Ray. What happened from the age of 18?

What is fascinating about this club, is how we come from all walks of life?

Instalment two next week Gary. (Keep 'em waitin').

Thank you Ray, looking forward to hearing more of your exploits. I wonder what the deal was with the curtains in the back of the coach? :)

Phil

Ah, the age of innocence! At least then, anyway. Picture the scene on the coach:

Adoring local fans, all over 16. Most of them girls that went to the same school as you, but on the floor above yours. (Especially the impossibly gorgeous Barbara Garret who went on to marry the school hero).
A noisy coach load of clatter and loud Rock and Roll with plenty of Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Gerry Lee Lewis and Eddie Cochran.

On the return: the addition of modest quantities of, er, Vimto.
The curtain? In the interests of decency, decorum and well, frankly, modesty, those curtains shall remain closed.

How's that for a Social atmosphere?
The difference between then and today? No funny whiffs of itching powder, silly ciggies or wraps of anything. We all emerged unharmed but grown up.

I left school at 15 well 14 years old and my first job was at a local engineering firm as an apprentice tool setter, I was never cut out for a academic future as you can probably tell :D
I told the gaffer there that I'd left school & all was good until the school board showed up at the works & the boss went ballistic at me :o
He literally kicked my ar$e out the door only to say come back in 6 months time when you've finished schooling,:o I must have made a good impression :}


The film Saturday night Sunday morning was the exact same setting I worked in setting up the lathes as a tool setter.


https://i.imgur.com/cT74hJKl.jpg




Apprentices wage were bad £4.10 shillings for a 40 hour week back then :eek:


I then went back to the local job centre that had vacancies for work on drilling rigs, Not the offshore type but the inland drilling rigs doing core drilling for the then NCB finding the coal seams prior to opencast mining.
That was working away all week all over the country & a very dirty job too, It was a change of clothes every single day courtesy of jumble sales that my missus bought as they got thrown away after every shift. :eek:


I did that for a good few years even worked on the first channel tunnel drilling core samples.


That work dried up & we were made redundant so back to the job centre & saw they were offering courses for class 1 articulated driving licence so I took that & passed my test working for a variety of local haulage companies until retiring. :bowdown:

Good morning Ray, On the school run, I remember when I was the coach prefect there was no snorting crack, no marijuana and no sex was allowed. Of course it was a different world with old fashioned ways.

How are you?

Good morning Phil. Not too bad, you?

Ah well, two out of three’s not bad.
Those ‘old fashioned’ ways were a product of good manners and respect for the more palatable public behaviour that seems to be a bit missing. Times change, obviously, and you move on with them or you don’t. For each, it depends on how entrenched those old ways remain. We must move on!

Tomorrow is the day a year ago that I fell on the marble floor and broke my neck. C3,C4,C5,C6 needed plating and another around the front. That was bad enough, but the associated clinical Delirium was absolutely terrifying.

Unfortunately, it set off various other nuisances that were lying in wait just for an excuse to manifest themselves. Nearly there though, expecting a biggie op elsewhere in the next couple of months and that should be an end to it. Or me!

What’s even worse is that my 75 has been winking at me from the driveway ever since. I surrendered my licence to DVLA before being told to and haven’t been able to get it back.

The opportunity has not been wasted though. The car has been through a top to tail mechanical refurb so that when, if, DVLA finally get over themselves I might get out and about again! Hey ho, just part of life’s rich pageantry. At least I’ve saved a bit on the insurance.

Good morning Ray,

Is there a chapter 2 to “This is my life”?

Today we are driving to London. Tomorrow I get the results of the treadmill ECG test I had done in London on 5 August which is part of a pre-op assessment for an open operation to repair an abdominal aortic aneurysm using a synthetic graft. When I get through all of that, I can make plans for the future.

All the best with the DVLA, do keep us posted.

Looking forward to chapter 2.