Web Page 872

The School is 50 years old this month, see the News and Views section.

Top Picture:

A 1950’s Dinky Collection

Bottom Picture:

An Ian Allan Combined Region train spotters Companion

Collections

Now lads this is a page for you, I expect most of you will remember some of the items mentioned below from the days of your youth. What is it about boys, I wonder, that make them collect so many different things?

So here are just a few of the things that I and other boys can remember collecting when we were lads.

In junior school, come the Autumn, conkers was the great thing and here I was lucky as in the garden next door, and overhanging into my garden, was a massive conker tree. So, as you can imagine, when the conker season came round I was never short of conkers in fact I remember bagging them up and taking them to school and selling them until Mr Hawkins the headmaster at Solent Road Junior School heard about this bit of trade and stopped me. Do you remember all the various schemes for making you conker harder? Pickling it in vinegar was one and baking it in an oven was another, but whenever I tried to do this the first method gave me a soggy conker and the second make the item so brittle that it shattered at the first blow!

When the conker season was done it was then time for marbles and we all had our own little bag in our pockets with a dozen or so marbles in it, some small and some large glass alleys. These were collected and swapped with great seriousness in case you swapped away a good one by mistake. I seem to remember that we used to buy our marbles from the strange tuck shop run in the back of his house by Mr Shaw. The shop was actually a version of Arkwrights and was opposite Solent Road School on the corner of Solent Road and Highlands Road.

Once we got tired of marbles it was the season for Dinky Cars. Those were the days when you had to have a racing car in British Racing Green, ‘cos they were the best. Who would have thought that the cars we used to collect, race across the playground and down the pavement and swap are now worth in excess of £250 each if they are in good condition. Mind you if you were lucky enough to have kept certain Army Tanks or a Tank Transporter it would probably be worth well over £1250 by now!!!!!

Back to more mundane things, Chewing Gum Cards. These cards featured scenes from popular films Quo Vardis with Charlton Heston or any of the John Wayne classics. There was also a series I remember featuring female film stars and it was nothing to hear two boys deep in conversation, ‘I will swap you one Kim Novak and one Sophia Loran for one Diana Dors’, If only it were true!!! I never collected cigarette cards they were too early for me but I did collect the cards which came with the packets of Brooke Bond Tea and I had quite a collection of completed albums. I found out after he had died that my father kept my collection of Tea Card Albums for some reason, I am grateful he did otherwise they would have been lost like so many other things.

Most of us collected stamps of some description, this was in the days before the First Day Cover market, we all got our stamps in little Stanley Gibbons packets that we bought, along with the hinges, in the tuck shop or via the system of approvals. Stamp approvals were strange as they enabled us to see a choice of stamps at home with no obligation to buy. I understand the system still carries on to this day.
One of the main hobbies for boys was train spotting. There were always a group of boys hanging around Cosham station and the local footbridges. They all carried notebooks and a copy of the Ian Allan ABC Spotters Companion for the Southern Region and some also carried a copy of the Western Region version as two GWR locomotives ran through each day. There was much excitement if a locomotive with a name came through, if a King Arthur or Lord Nelson was spotted great joy ensued but gloom and doom was the order of the day when a West Country Class turned out to be Bodmin or Ottery St Mary yet again.

With the Ian Allan train-spotting books came the membership of the Ian Allan Train Spotters Club, which entitled one to wear a special button badge. Now badges were another thing that was avidly collected and they varied from the Tufty Road Safety Club to Golly badges and everything in between. It seemed to me that practically every product was happy to give away badges in those days.

Some boys would meet on top of Portsdown Hill on a fine day and collect the names on the sides of the coaches as they brought the excursion day trippers into town. Other items of collecting mania were matchbox labels, toy soldiers, cowboy comics and allsorts of items that to a young boy were very important treasurers.

Well I suppose I must admit it, I was a train spotter, did collect coach names, had a stamp collection and a lapel full of button badges but I did not collect Cowboy Comics!

Hey! How about one of you girls writing about the things you collected?


Ah well back to today,

Keep in touch

Peter

DUSTYKEAT@aol.com
Pj.keat@ntlworld.co.uk

You Write:

Peter B writes:-

The School Motto "Truth is Strength" was always the Motto of Court Lane School as long as I was there and I think the school badge was the same as at the top of your blog. I don't know where it came from but to my knowledge, "Truth is Strength" was a well known phrase or saying.

School News and Views:

A few memories of the opening of the School
I remember that in the first week of the life of Manor Court,(which was originally going to be called Court Manor but had the name reversed at the last minute as the senior Maths master Norman Folland pointed out that Manor Court flowed better) we spent a lot of time manhandling desks, chairs and cupboards( Child Labour?) along the roads on flat trolleys from Court Lane to Manor Court. We then had to haul the furniture into the classrooms. In fact the whole school did not open in September 1960 as the week before the official opening date the building was vandalised (there is nothing new in his world is there?) and the hall and some of the classrooms were damaged. As far as I remember it was just the 'A' streams that moved in first as they were starting on their GCE courses and the other classes moved in some five weeks later. However whilst I was there the metalwork, woodwork and domestic science classrooms remained at Court Lane so it meant a wander from one building to another which was always fun. We also had our own playing fields so the dreaded bus journey to Farlington came to an end.
Where did the name come from? Again my source of information was the late Norman Folland and his explanation was this:- the powers that be wanted to include the name of the previous school in the title of the new school so that is where Court came from. Manor referred to the manor house which lay just off Lower Drayton Lane and so Court Manor or later Manor Court !!!

Pop News:

Reg Presley, lead singer with The Troggs, has suffered a stroke.His family said Reg, 68, was playing with his grandchildren on holiday in Spain when he had to be taken to hospital in Malaga. Brenda, his wife for 48 years, said: "It was very frightening. He had a serious stroke and was in hospital for a week.He is recuperating and is back in our house in Spain, but he won't be back in the UK for a while. "Reg is still very unsteady on his feet and he has double vision and his speech is still a bit slurred. We are taking one day at a time." Reg, whose biggest hits with The Troggs were Wild Thing and Love Is All Around, was still active with the band. A gig scheduled for a few weeks' time at Liskeard, Cornwall, has been cancelled.

On this day 18th September 1960-1965.

On 18/09/1960 the number one single was Apache - The Shadows and the number one album was Down Drury Lane to Memory Lane - A Hundred and One Strings. The top rated TV show was No Hiding Place (AR) and the box office smash was Psycho. A pound of today's money was worth £13.68 and Tottenham Hotspur were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

On 18/09/1961 the number one single was Johnny Remember Me - John Leyton and the number one album was Ipswich Town. The top rated TV show was "Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was One Hundred and One Dalmations. A pound of today's money was worth £13.25 UN Sec General killed in plane crash. The big news story of the day was Take Your Pick (AR)".

On 18/09/1962 the number one single was She's Not You - Elvis Presley and the number one album was West Side Story Soundtrack. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was Lawrence of Arabia. A pound of today's money was worth £12.89 and Everton were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

On 18/09/1963 the number one single was She Loves You - The Beatles and the number one album was Please Please Me - The Beatles. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was The Great Escape. A pound of today's money was worth £12.64 and Liverpool were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

On 18/09/1964 the number one single was You Really Got Me - Kinks and the number one album was A Hard Day's Night - Beatles. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was Dr Strangelove. A pound of today's money was worth £12.24 and Manchester United were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

On 18/09/1965 the number one single was (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction - Rolling Stones and the number one album was Help - The Beatles. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was The Sound of Music. A pound of today's money was worth £11.69 and Liverpool were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.