Childhood recollections from England
One noticeable symptom of aging, I Ànd, is a tendency to reminisce about childhood memories. It is usually not recommended to talk at length about these memories for fear of boring the listener but in small doses, people can usually enjoy reading about them when they are ready to do so.
Recently I have been thinking about my memories of road transportation in England, when I was growing up in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
My father worked for a wire and nail manufacturer and was provided with a company vehicle primarily for work, but available for limited private use by the family. The very Àrst car that I remember was a four door, black 1940’s Ford sedan. All cars were black in those days and Henry Ford himself proudly proclaimed that you could buy a vehicle in “any color as long as it is black”.
I remember that it was common to have a heavy travelling rug, permanently located on the seat of our car to stop us from literally freezing on long winter journeys. A travelling rug was a heavy duty woolen blanket with an ornate fringe on both ends and it was necessary because the cars of the day did not have interior heaters. It amazes me now to recall that the water cooled combustion engine, and radiator designed to reject heat, were invented so many years earlier but apparently, in England, nobody considered putting a radiator inside the car to provide heat for the passengers!
Of course with no heater there was also no windshield defroster which made leather driving gloves another necessity in a car. The driver needed to use the back of the hand to maintain a tiny Àeld of vision through an otherwise frozen solid piece of opaque glass.
The turning signal device on this car was another amazing contraption in those days with a little plastic illuminated Áag popping out from each side of the bodywork to indicate an intention to turn left or right. Barely visible in the daytime sunlight it wasn’t much better at night time due to an inadequately powered light bulb in an almost opaque plastic arm. It was truly an invention to behold but with a doomed future.
A Ford Popular, that my Father later owned, was provided with vacuum powered windshield wipers. Another questionable invention because, connected to the engine manifold the speed of the wiper was directly proportional to engine manifold pressure. This resulted in causing the wipers to completely stop when the car was climbing a steep hill at full throttle, or conversely, to go at such high speed that they often would fly over the hedgerow if you removed your foot from the throttle.
The development of the automobile, required the development of roads to accommodate cars in the ever increasing numbers.
Driving at night in remote areas of Britain, however, was a treat in those days with little trafÀc around, and the main roads being superbly illuminated, on the centerline, by devices called “cat’s eyes” invented by Percy Shaw and installed in most of British main roads by 1947. Cats eyes comprised a recessed rubber body inside a cast iron box. The “eyes” themselves were double solid glass lenses mounted to face both traffic directions. The cleverest part of Mr. Shaw’s design was that when a car drove over the rubber, the cats eyes were cleaned of mud and grime by being depressed into the rubber housing and residual rainwater in the cast iron housing provided lubrication for this cleaning action. A brilliant automatic cleaning system requiring no external power except for the car tires driving over it.
The British people are fanatical about their cars. They clean them lovingly, every week, in their drive ways and love to quote their performance specifications to anyone who is willing to listen over a pint in the pub.
Don’t ever suggest that Brits should get automatic transmissions, for heaven’s sake, because that is just not considered “driving.” You have to have a gear shift in your hands and a clutch on the Áoor to warrant the title of “driver!” The younger generation, seem to periodically “morph” into professional race car drivers, screaming down the “rabbit warren like” country lanes frantically shifting up and down the gearbox and pumping the clutch pedal. Now that’s proper driving they say!
Another childhood recollection of mine is that every afternoon, at roughly the same time, we would feel a deep rumbling sensation throughout the house and then, looking outside, we would see billowing clouds of smoke, interspersed with steam, and eventually the outline of a steam driven lorry would appear. With its’ wooden wheels, solid rubber tires, and exposed chain drive it roared past the house, dropping hot ashes on the asphalt road behind it, and spewing voluminous amounts of soot in the air to land on the clean laundry adorning the numerous washing lines along its’ route.
In the mid 50’s, my school friend Rob and I planned, to spend our summer vacation in the Cornish fishing village of Mevagissey. We had been there previously with Rob’s parents and they now arranged for us to stay with their friend, Mrs. Prettyjohn who lived on Battery Terrace in this quaint little village. The only trouble was that Mevagissey was over 300 miles from where we lived, and we weren’t old enough to drive, so we suggested to our parents that we would hitch-hike to Mevagissey and back. This thought horriÀed our parents and so my Father arranged, through his working contacts, that we would travel by a series of trucks belonging to British Road Services. We would stop en-route at various depots to change drivers, or load and unload, but we would have a guaranteed delivery date and time. Nobody told us that we would be riding on top of the tarpaulin securing the load without seat belts, goggles, helmets or any other kind of personal protection equipment and we became extremely vigilant as far as spotting upcoming low bridges or overhanging tree branches. It is hard to believe now that our loving parents would endorse this mode of transport, lasting some 15 hours each way, and think that hitch hiking was more dangerous.
We did have a good time though and ended up totally sun tanned and thoroughly scratched up exactly the way we wanted it to be as young boys without a care in the world.