This is the true story of my life.
My name is Basil Riegels. My father was born in Germany, in Dusseldorf, in the year 1842. He came to England when he was seventeen and stayed here for the rest of his life. He was married to a Miss Cory who I believe came from Stratford-on-Avon and by this marriage he had one daughter, Kathleen. He was employed by a firm of wine shippers called Fireherd. He was a wine taster and I believe he was very expert at this. He could tell what type of wine it was and vintage and where it came from.
He was asked by his firm if he was willing to go to Harrogate to wind up a small wine merchants and grocer’s shop which had failed and they owed some money to the firm. This he did and when he saw the shop he decided that he would like to keep on the wine merchant’s business for himself. This his firm agreed to. As Riegels was a German name his friends in Harrogate advised him to trade under the name of Riegels-Cory which sounded more English. Why he left his firm was because being continually with tasting this wine he said it used to affect his health. It was as bad as drinking quite a lot. So that’s why he gave it up. At this time, I think my father must have been fairly well off because his daughter Kathleen had her own pony and trap and she seemed to have everything she wanted.
My mother was called Powell. She was one of eight children. There was Ada, Gertrude, Lavinia, Edgar, Kate, Annie (my mother), Thomas and Ernest. Of these children, only three were married but Lavinia, who we used to call ‘Auntie Vinnie’, married a Frederick Drake. They had two boys, Fred and Douglas. Fred was born in 1879 and Douglas fourteen years later in 1894. My uncle Ernest married a Sarah Walker who we called ‘Aunt Sally’. They had one daughter, Gertrude, who was born in 1898. Her father was a photographer and soon after they were married they went to America. The little girl, Gertie, was only very young so they decided to leave her with my maiden aunties, Ada and Kate. My Uncle Ernest died in America I believe so his wife, my Aunt Sally, came home and when she got home to Harrogate she went to see my Aunties and asked them if they would be willing to adopt Gertie and this they did. They brought her up and she lived with them until she was married.
My mother and my Aunt Gertrude had a very good china shop in James Street in Harrogate. My mother Annie, she became a great friend of Kathleen, my half-sister and used to go and see her quite a lot at the shop on Station Bridge where my father lived. Every evening she went there, my father always used to take her home at night. I suppose this had been going on quite a long time. His first wife had died. I don’t know when she died but she was already dead at that time. Anyhow, one night when my father was taking my mother home he said “How’s your sweetheart Miss Annie?” and she replied “I haven’t got a sweetheart”. Here she was proved wrong because eventually my father proposed to her and they were married. So evidently she had a sweetheart after all.
My half-sister, Kathleen married a Ben Ryder and from this marriage there were two children, Thelma and Margaret.
My cousin, Douglas Drake, and my half-sister’s daughter, Thelma Ryder were both entered next to each other in the births, deaths and marriages column. This was rather strange because eventually they married each other. They were not blood relations of course but they were both blood relations of me; one being my cousin and the other my niece.
My eldest brother William Powell Riegels was born in 1895 at Station Bridge House in Harrogate. Also born at that house was my brother Ernest Rudolph Riegels.
About the year Nineteen Hundred and One my father went to live in a little village in Yorkshire in Nidderdale called Hampsthwaite. It was a very pretty little village and we enjoyed being there very much. My half-sister’s husband, Ben Ryder died when his two daughters were very young so my father invited them over to Hampsthwaite to live with us. At that time there were four children living there.
Before Kathleen, Thelma and Margaret came to live there, my father employed a governess (I think she was Swedish) to look after the children, the two boys. When they came to Hampsthwaite, the Ryders, my father said “How on Earth can one governess look after four children. He employed another governess. I think she was also Swedish or Norwegian. My father was a very keen naturalist and gardener. He knew the names of all the flowers and birds and everything. He used to tell my two brothers about it. He used to take them out and round about the villages and up the River Nidd and they used to have a good time with him.
My brother, William, had a little toy gun and one day he came marching up the garden followed by Thelma and Margaret Ryder behind him. In his hands were five dead rats. I suppose he must have found them in the farm which was not very far away. Anyhow, he met my father in the garden; he said “Look father, I’ve shot these”. Even in those days he was a great romancer.
I was born Nineteen Hundred and Five so that made still more children to look after. We had still another governess. I think my earliest memory was seeing my father ill in bed. He had been advised by a friend to take all his money out of the shares he had it invested in and invest it in another company. A little time after that, the company went bankrupt and he lost all his money. This made him very ill and he was very worried about leaving my mother with three boys to look after. He said Kathleen has had everything and the boys will get nothing. He must have known he was dying because he told my mother that the last thirteen years of his life had been the happiest years of his life.
We lived opposite the doctor of the village, Doctor Ashby and he attended my father for about six months until he died. Before he died he told my mother not to forget to tell the doctor to take off the bill the price of a gun which he had lent to the doctor. Anyhow, when he died, in came the doctor’s account which was very big one indeed. She mentioned the gun to the doctor and said would he take it off the account. But he said “Oh, no. Your husband gave me the gun Mrs Riegels”. Well, my mother didn’t know what to do but luckily she had a cousin, William Hannam who was head of a large firm of solicitors in Leeds. Doctor Ashby owned a motor car. They were very few and far between in those days. I remember it was a tourer type car, and vertical light green and dark green strips running all round it. This he had kept in our coach house for a long time, for many years. My mother told the solicitor, Mr Hannam, about this and he said “Right, we’ll soon fix the doctor”. So he reckoned up how long the car had been in the garage, the coach house, and sent a bill in to Doctor Ashby charging him sixpence a week for garaging his car and this bill came to very much more than the bill the doctor had sent in for his services to my father. But he didn’t pay the balance; he just seemed to forget about it so my mother got off paying the account. When my father died of course we had to get rid of the governesses and my half-sister Kathleen got a job as a housekeeper in Bradford to a German called ‘Altman’.
When my father had lost his money and gone bankrupt, the debtors were mostly trade accounts and they were very good to my mother and they made all the furniture over to her so she had leased the house and furniture for herself. Of course it was very difficult bringing us three boys up so she decided to take in paying guests. Well we had one or two and the last one who came was a Mr Finden, the son of Amy Woodforde-Finden, the Indian love lyrics composer. I remember one time she came; she lost a diamond ring valued at three hundred pounds – an earring, rather. Well my mother was frantic. We searched and searched the garden and after a very long search, we found this earring much to the relief of my mother.
The house we lived in in Hampsthwaite was really fantastic. Facing the road there was a huge coach house with a very large room on top. Next to that came the dining room, then the drawing room, then the breakfast room. Then a huge kitchen, pantry and a large wash house. Beyond that we had hen houses and stables, pig sties etcetera. At the back of the house was a huge orchard with loads of fruit on it. In the front garden we had a cherry tree and a great amount of roses and in front of the garden was a rather large field which was used as a paddock.
When my father was in businesses on Station Bridge, of course motor cars were not much used then and he had a man who used to drive a horse and cart to deliver the orders. This man, they called Will McDonald. My brother used to go to school in Harrogate to a Western College which earlier Fred Drake had been to. At the time of my brother going to school, there were sixty day boys and sixty boarders. It was run by a Mr Allen whom all the boys christened ‘Tally’. On the railway at that time, it was a single track at Hampsthwaite, but the next village, Ripley, there was a junction there. My brother was traveling on the train, he was very interested to watch the signal man at Ripley junction who had a staff, they called it a ‘staff’. It was an old thing made of cane and at the bottom there was something in it. I don’t know what it was, some safety device. Anyhow, as a train came through Ripley, the signal man used to hold up the staff and the engine driver leaned out of his engine and this thing was just flung over his arm. He wasn’t allowed to go on the single line without this staff. It was to make sure there was no other train coming along. My brother had watched this for a long time and he used to get in the back of the train and after the signal man had given the staff to the driver he used to walk back to the signal box and my brother used to take him such things as newspapers and hold it out to the signal man who used to take it from him. They thought it was a huge joke, this! Anyhow, everyday, practically, he used to take him something different such as apples, pears, fruit of all kinds and mushrooms and different things. One day he, my brother, filled a large brown paper bag full of liquid cow dirt. As usual the signal box man was waiting for the present from my brother. Well, he caught hold of this bag and the bag burst all over him and you can imagine the mess he was in. Well he immediately telephoned the station master in Harrogate who was waiting at the station to try and catch my brother but he was a pretty good runner, my brother was, Bill, and I don’t think he ever was caught. Meantime they seemed to forget about it but I don’t suppose the signal man forgot about it for quite a long time!
After my father died, my brother, Bill, who was ten years older than I was, used to take me everywhere. He used to walk miles and miles through the country along the river. We knew nearly every stone in the river and every tree round about. When I got tired he used to just pick me up and carry me home. He was very good indeed to me. But Rudy, he seemed not too bothered with me very much. He used to like roaming off by himself such as following the otter hounds or going on very long walks along the river towards Pateley and he used to be away all day sometimes.
Often the three of us, the three brothers; we used to go bird nesting and round Hampsthwaite there were three fairly large woods. I remember Ripley Wood, Gormires Wood and Lister’s Wood. Gormires Wood, they must have had some pretty hot keepers there because every time we went there we used to take the village policeman’s son with us so that if we were caught we thought we wouldn’t get into so much trouble.
Two boys; Edgar and Alan. Alan was about my age and Edgar was about the same age as my brother Bill. When they went out bird nesting, before they left they decided, my brothers, what kind of nests they were going to look for. It would be perhaps a Kingfisher or river birds such as Sand Martins, Dippers, Herons and so forth. Another time it would be birds of the Finch family. We used to go to different places to look for them. He knew just the place to look for these nests and it was seldom we failed in getting what we wanted. But we never used to take all the eggs out of the nests; we always used to leave some in. Just one or two according to how many eggs the birds laid.
As you know, Rooks build at the top of very high trees and the branches at the very top are very thin and not safe to climb on. Well, my brothers decided they wanted some Rooks’ Eggs one day so they took me along. I must have been three or four, I should think then. They put some padding round me; round my stomach and tied a clothes line on to me. My brother had some climbing irons. There wasn’t a tree in the district he couldn’t climb. I presume he’d take me up on his back and carry me up as far as he dared go to branches that would bare his weight, or both our weights and say to me “Off you go” and I had to climb to the top on these thin branches and get the eggs for him. He said they’d made it safe for me; he did tie the rope on a branch close to where he was standing in the tree. I don’t think I fell very often but I certainly remember falling once and there I was hanging on the end of a clothes line. He soon got me back safe and sound down to Earth again. From that time I’ve always had a dread of heights. I couldn’t bear to look down from a high building or anything, it used to make me quite dizzy.
My two brothers were pretty good swimmers and they used to take me down there with them and I was scared to death to go in so in the finish they throw me in and I can still see the sand at the bottom of that river and how I got out, I don’t know. But I did.
My cousins, Douglas and Fred Drake, used to come to Hampsthwaite very often to see us and they would go for a bathe. I never remember Fred going in the water but Douglas, he was a good swimmer as well as my brothers. Very often we had quite a lot of spectators on the bank watching us. Well one day, my brother dived in and swam under water and there were some trees close to the bank and he went under these trees and just had his head popping out of the water so that he could breath. My cousin Fred, he started dancing about on the bank and said “Oooo, they’re drowning! They’re drowning! What shall we do, they’re drowning! Won’t somebody jump in and get them out?” At last some brave feller used to dive in and look for him. Couldn’t find him ‘cause he’d swum across to the other side of the river and used to come out quite a few yards down below. Of course this made the chap who’d dived with all his clothes on furious.
The farmer who owned the land was called Jimmy Addyman and every time he saw us he used to chase us off the land. One time, in fact, he took all their clothes away and they had to go back to the farm and beg for mercy and ask for their clothes back. Normally when they weren’t swimming and just in their ordinary clothes, they saw the farmer coming and he used to… I think he enjoyed chasing us… but he never used to catch us because my brother knew all the shallow spots in the river and he used to just get me on his back and walk straight across the river in his clothes. I don’t know what my mother thought about this but anyhow we were always well out of reach of the farmer.
I remember one time, myself and my two brothers were walking along the railway line jumping from sleeper to sleeper. I remember it was just near Lister’s Wood and there was a bend in the line and you couldn’t see round it. We’d just got round this bend and suddenly, luckily my brother, eldest brother was walking in the middle and Rudy and myself at either side of him. Suddenly he gave us a great push and one rolled one side of the bank and one the other and he jumped off and a train was practically on top of us. We were walking into the wind and we hadn’t heard this train coming at all and the driver just coming round the bend of course had not seen us and it would have just been hopeless for him to pull up so I think my brother Bill did us a good turn that day or else this story would never have been written.
It was in Hampsthwaite I first learnt the art of tickling trout. I was too young to do it myself but my cousins Fred and Douglas and my brother found us a spot where there were some quite nice trout. It was only a shallow beck which ran into the Nidd. As you know, as soon as you walk along a shallow stream like that, the trout always dive under the stones, big stones. What you had to do was get in and roll your trouser legs up and take shoes and stockings off which my cousin Fred did, and wade in and put your hand under the stone and you could feel the trout under the stone and you used to call it ‘tickling’. You just used to rub your fingers along the fish’s stomach until you got to its gills and then you used to push you finger and thumb in the gills and you had a nice trout in your hand. Of course we knew this was illegal and we always had a look out to see that there were no keepers coming. But I don’t think we were ever caught doing that.
At Ripley, there was an old castle there and I think the Ingilbys lived in this castle. It was in some large grounds and there was quite a big wall all round this place and all we managed to do was look over the wall. They had a herd of dear there I remember. I often longed to see the castle, what it looked like, but to this day I have never actually seen it.
I don’t know if you remember seeing on the television recently “The Flaxton Boys” a serial called “The Flaxton Boys”? Well, this was taken at Ripley Castle and that was the first time I actually saw the castle, on television. That must have been a dangerous place to go because they must have had some pretty sharp keepers there because I don’t think, well, my brother never even took me into there. I should think he’d been in many times but he didn’t risk it with me being so small and he thought perhaps he couldn’t run fast enough away from the keepers.
When we were living at Hampsthwaite we used to be very fond of getting pets. We had a tame jackdaw, a tame rook, rabbits and we even had a tame hedgehog there. These birds, they used to fly quite freely. They were never caged up. We got them of course when they were very young just when they were fully feathered. One time, the jackdaw, he disappeared and we didn’t see him for weeks until one day my mother was pushing me along in the pram and we were going over the bridge at Hampsthwaite over the River Nidd when a flock of jackdaws came over and one swooped down and settled on my mother’s head but it didn’t let her catch it. He was making a terrific fuss of us and stayed with us quite a few minutes and then off it flew back to this flock of jackdaws and that was the last we saw of it. It had evidently recognised my mother and came down just to say hello to us.
When my brother first started school he was always sent to school with this Will McDonald and he didn’t like the idea of this at all. He went for quite a time with him but he got tired of this because he didn’t like the other boys to let them see that he had to be brought to school. So as Will McDonald was taking him along he’d just say “Just a minute, I’m just going into this shop to buy some sweets, I won’t be long”, and he used to nip out the other door and disappear. I don’t know what Will McDonald used to say to my father, whether he ever told him or not, I don’t know. Anyhow, soon he started going by himself and all was well.
I don’t know much about my father’s family but I know he had a few brothers and sisters and he had a nephew called Laurence Buhlmann. Well he invited this Laurence to come along to help him in the shop and he thought it would be a good chance for him to learn English. Well he didn’t get on very well with Will McDonald. I don’t know quite how long he stopped with us but eventually he left and joined a firm of bachelors, nursery men, up at Harlow Carr and there he learnt the business of market gardening. Of course this was all before I was born. I got to know all this from my mother later on.
One time, my father saw quite a crowd of chaps outside the shop so he went along to see what was the matter and there he saw a little hand coming up with a bottle of beer. My brother was down in the cellar selling these bottles of beer, a penny each to these men. I don’t know what the price of beer was in those days but my mother used to tell me a bottle of whiskey cost only three and sixpence. My father, he got to know all his regular customers of course and if he thought any man was spending too much on drink he used to refuse to serve him. This made my mother very cross. She said “Well, he’ll only go somewhere else and buy it”. So my father said “Well, it won’t be on my conscience anyhow”.
As I have mentioned before, my brother was a very good runner and he used to go to all the villages round about with a friend of his called Arthur Barker and it was seldom they came home without a prize. I heard that in one race there were brothers running. Another brother was a starter. Well, he had a pre-arrange signal with these two brothers who were running. He’d get his gun and said “Get ready. Get set. Go!” The next time he’d say “Get ready. Get set Go!” and the gun used to go off straight away and of course they good a good start, these two brothers. Well, my brother and Arthur Barker weighed things up and they decided to go in the next race the minute he said “Get set”, off they went. Well, the starter hesitated quite a time and so of course my brother and Arthur Barker had set off and they were penalised a yard for a false start. Another time he’d say “Get ready, Get set, Go!” and off the brothers went. This went on for quite a long time so this Arthur Barker who was very much older than my brother; he went and knocked the starter out. He was a pretty good fighter! The two brothers set on them as well and so they had quite a scuffle and had to get out of the village pretty quickly.
The great day in Hampsthwaite of course was when the feast came every year. We used to have a fine time there and I’m sure every time the feast left there were quite a lot of wooden balls short. In those days they used to put real coconuts on the stands. Not these dummy ones they usually have on now. They were very big and very heavy ones and even if you broke a nut they used to give you a coconut in exchange for it.
I remember the coronation of King George the Fifth. They wanted somebody to put a flag up on the school weather cock. Well this school had a very steep roof and I think it must have had a coping stone on the ridge of it. They hadn’t got a ladder high enough to reach the weather cock and they said “Well there’s only one person who can get up there and that’s Willy Riegels!” So of course they asked him to put this flag up. Well he soon got it up and after the coronation, of course they wanted it taking down again but my brother said “Right-o, I’ll take it down but I want five Shillings for taking it down!” This they refused to give him so it stopped up many years. There were remnants of it years later. Bits of flag and bits of rope and it just rotted away.
I can remember Blériot. He was the first man who flew the channel. I think the Daily Mail gave a prize of a Thousand Pounds or something like that for the first man across and Blériot was the first man to fly the channel. Well we thought that was wonderful in those days and I think the next year, I think it was about nineteen hundred and ten, they had the first air race round England and we found out they were going to land on The Stray at Harrogate. I don’t remember how we got there. I don’t think we walked because it would have been too far; it was five miles to Harrogate. I think we may have stayed with my aunties for the night. Anyhow, we were on The Stray very early in the morning and I can only remember three men who were flying. They were Blériot, Beaumont Hamel and Lou Cody. Lou Cody was Buffalo Bill’s brother. I can remember him coming to land quite distinctly. He had a bi-plane and it just looked a mass of struts and wires and he was sat in the middle. No cover what so ever. As he came into land he was wobbling about like nothing on Earth. How he got down safely, I don’t know but he did and we had a great day that day.
One time when we were at Hampsthwaite, there was a bridge just outside the station and there were some loose stones on this bridge and my brother, myself and Gertie Powell, she was with us, and I don’t know what happened but I think my brother pushed these stones over the top onto the train. Well of course there was quite a commotion when the train stopped at the station. All the people got and walked up the line towards the bridge. This time we were all picking Margareets and all would have been well, only Gertie, she said to the Station Master as he came along “It wasn’t me Mr Hargrave. It wasn’t me. It was them. They did it!” Luckily, my father was very friendly with the Station Master and we got off. We were very lucky indeed to do so because it was a silly thing to do and very dangerous but of course, we were only kids at the time and didn’t realise what the danger might have been.
Another time the local parson, Mr Peck, went on his holidays and they had a new one to take over duties for a fortnight until he came back. Well, my brother, he went to the church yard and he had a white sheet over his head and I don’t know what else, but he was dressed as a ghost. This parson saw him and my brother walked towards him saying “Death. Death. Death.” And the parson was saying “Go ‘way. Go ‘way. Go ‘way” and backing away from him all the time. Well, my brother still went on walking towards him. Last of all, this poor parson, he turned and ran. If there was anything done in the village, my brother was always blamed, even when he was at school in Harrogate. Anything happened; it was always Willy Riegels who’d done it.
The doctor’s son Stanley Ashby was a great friend of my brother Rudy. I remember they had a huge bed of strawberries and this was surrounded by wire netting and a wire netting roof which you could walk underneath. Sparrows kept getting in through the wire and holes that had rotted away and there used to be quite a lot of sparrows in these strawberry beds so they used to catch them with nets. The doctor used to give the boys a few coppers for these sparrows. He used to have sparrow pie. I think he’s the only man I’ve ever heard of having sparrow pie but he seemed to enjoy them quite a lot!
After my father died she didn’t go to Doctor Ashby. She had a doctor in Harrogate and when I was about five she visited this doctor and he said “Why don’t you go to Harrogate Mrs Riegels and open a boarding house?” He said “I know a very good spot in Harlow Moor Drive” He said “I’ve some very rich patients and I can assure you that’ll always keep you full up with visitors” and he said “You don’t want to be too far up Harlow Moor Drive. Just about half way”. So we went and had a look round and we found number twenty three was vacant and the house was called ‘Bymoorer’. I think now it’s a Bella Vista hotel. It’s still there.
[23 Harlow Moor Drive is now flats]
When we left Hampsthwaite, of course, Mr Finden had to go. He used to have fits. He was in the Zulu war and he saw his brother killed by a native with a spear and this brought on the fits. The doctor advised him to live in the country and that’s why he came to Hampsthwaite. So of course when we left, he had to go. He went to a farm close to. About a month later Mrs Finden came to us in Harrogate and told us that her son was dead. He evidently had a fit in the bathroom and he started shouting out as he always used to do when he had these fits and the people at the farm, they went up to the bathroom, knocked at the door and there was no answer so of course they didn’t do anything. Eventually when they did open the door, they found him dead, drowned in the bath. When he was living with us in Hampsthwaite, he used to tell my mother about these fits and he used to tell her what to do: to lie him down and cover him with a blanket and keep him warm and then he’d soon recover, which he did quite soon. I remember Mrs Finden told my mother that if he’d still been with her, her son would still have been alive. Anyhow, he was buried at Hampsthwaite church yard and eventually both his father and mother were buried in the same grave and the tombstone is still there in Hampsthwaite church yard.
[St Thomas a Beckett Church and graveyard, Hampstwaite]
When I went to Harrogate, I went to Weston Council School in Cold Bath Road. I remember we thought a great deal about one of the teachers, I think his name was Tomlinson. We had a lady teacher, I remember, she used to wrap our knuckles with a great big pointer she had. If we did anything very bad we were sent to the Headmaster. We used to get the cane from him. By Jove, didn’t it half hurt! We had wheels on our hands for quite a time afterwards.
[Western Primary School, Cold Bath Road, Harrogate]
One day we were drilling in the yard and I remember it was a very hot day and I fainted. I fell down on the concrete unconscious and caught my chin on the ground. I remember coming round; I was in the hands of this Mr Tomlinson in school. They roughly bound up my chin and sent me home with two other boys. When I got home my mother sent for the doctor and he said “Oh, we’ll need to have some stitches in here” so I was taken down to the Infirmary in Harrogate and I had about six stitches in my chin and of course great big bandages all round my head. I remember next door there was a lady visitor who was looking out of the window and she saw me in the garden and she said “Hello little boy. What have you been doing?” So I told her that I’d fallen at school and cut my chin. So she said “Just a minute. Wait there. Don’t go away” and she went back into the room and she said “Now, I wonder if this will make you better” and she throw me something down. I didn’t know what it was at first but when I picked it up, it was a golden Sovereign. This was the first sovereign I’d ever owned. And it certainly made me feel very much better!
Before we left Hampsthwaite, my brother Bill and my cousin Douglas Drake (his name was Douglas Harold Drake), they got a hammer and chisel each and went on to the bridge at Hampsthwaite and on this bridge there were little alcoves that you could go in to in case there were any horses and carts coming along. Just to get out of the way to let them pass. In one of these alcoves my brother and cousin Douglas, they carved their initials, WR and DHD in six inches letters on the bridge very deeply cut into the stone. To this day they are still quite plain. That must have been about sixty years ago.
[Hampswaite Bridge over the Nidd with it’s passing places]
Another time my friend Douglas, they lived in Harrogate and Fred, he must have been well into his twenties at the time. He built a little kind of cart with wooden boxes and at the back you had some burning rag for smoke coming out as if it was an engine and on the wheels, some pieces of tin that used to catch the spokes and make a terrific row as they were going down the hill. I think he must have had his younger brother with him, Douglas, and my cousin Gertie and he set off from Harrogate in this thing. He was dressed in shorts and had a school boys’ hat on. I don’t know what on Earth the people in Harrogate thought of it when they saw him going through the town like that. Anyhow , as I said before, it was five miles to Hampsthwaite and there was a big hill called a ‘hollings’ going down into the village at Hampsthwaite and this thing got out of control. Of course with these two younger children in the car, he got a bit frightened and there was no brake on this gadget so he stopped the thing with his hands; got hold of the wheels with his hands and cut his hands very badly.
I remember he was a very keen musician. I think he was one of the youngest people in England to get his cap and gown for music. I don’t know whether he was a teacher or not at that time but he lived in, when he was married, he lived in Burley-in-Wharfedale. He was an organist there. He could play anything you’d like to put before him by sight. Later on he came to live in Harrogate and I think he was over eighty when he died and he was still teaching at that time.
When we went to Harrogate I was about five years old. My eldest brother would be about seventeen I think. Anyhow, I stayed at the Council School; I don’t know quite how long; two or three years. Then I eventually went to Weston College. I think soon after that the 1914-18 War broke out. When I went to Weston College, this Mr Allen who first had it, he failed and it was taken over by a Mr McGreggor who was Headmaster when I went and when my brother, Rudy, went also.
He employed this Mr Allen, who was the previous head, as a teacher and by this time he was getting on in years. He must have been about seventy, I should think. Well this Mr Allan, ‘Tally’, he used to teach us and he couldn’t keep control of us. We were a very rowdy lot and we used to do all manner of things to him. For instance, we had a blackboard that was reversible. You just turned it round and could use both sides. Well, we used to screw this blackboard up very tight for a day or two. He used to push it with his walking stick. He had a thick Ash walking stick that was used by the wounded soldiers. He always used to give this board a great big push. Well, we’d leave it very tight for quite a long time and suddenly we’d slack it right off. Well, he’d get his walking stick, give it a push, and of course it used to fly round and hit him on the head! “Oh, has somebody been doing something to the boards?” So we’d say “Yes sir. We oiled it for you. We thought it would be easier to push round” Sometimes we used to put an ink pot or something on top of it and it used to fall on his head.
It was at this time that my eyes started to go bad and I couldn’t read the blackboard from the back of the class so I had to come in the form in front. Right at the front of the class. Well, when he was writing on the blackboard we used to take his newspaper out of his pocket and write: ‘Tally-ho, Tally-ho, Tally-ho’ all over his newspaper. We used to put coloured chalks in his pocket. He’d be feeling in his pocket and not looking and writing on the blackboard – he used to just dab his hand into his pocket and pull out a chalk and writing away without looking at the blackboard and then he’d see that he’d written it in two or three different colours. “Oh, I didn’t know I had any coloured chalks in my pocket and he’d put his hand in his pocket and he’d find quite a lot. He said “Would any of you boys like them?” and he used to give us them all back.
I remember the very first day I went to this school. Of course at the Council School, we didn’t learn French and this ‘Tally’ used to teach French. Well he handed us all a book and we stood round his desk and we were translating from this French book into English. It came to my turn and of course as I’d never seen any French before, I was just stood there dumb. Didn’t say a word. So he said “Come on boy! Read on! Read on! Translate it!” I still didn’t say anything so he’d get his walking stick and gave me a good whacking with it. So I thought “This is a fine school I’ve come to”. Anyhow, at last one of the boys spoke up and said “Please sir. He’s only come today. He’s a new boy. He’s only started today.” So he said “My poor boy. My poor boy. I’m so sorry, here’s sixpence, I do hope that will make you better” But every whacking we got from him after that, I’m sure we thoroughly deserved. We used to get a piece of rope and crawl out to the back of the class and tie it to a desk at the back of the class and put a ring round near the blackboard. And I don’t know how it was that he never saw it but anyhow, when he got his foot inside this loop, I used to give it a jerk up and pull it tight and he was fastened by his leg to this rope. He’d just followed this rope to the desk it was tied to and the poor lad whose desk it was tied to, he used to get the good hiding. I used to get off! He never seemed to get the right one. He never used to send us to the Headmaster. He always used to deal with us himself. You can tell he used to give us some whackings with this Ash walking stick.
I can remember one day in particular. It was about five to twelve just before we left for home for dinner and I hadn’t done a thing but he set on me and he hit me all over the place. On the head, the back and the shoulders. I was black and blue all over. I was feeling furious! But at twelve o’clock, out we came to go home to dinner and I was feeling very cross about him at this time. I wasn’t at all pleased with him but on the way home he was saying “How’s your mother” and “How are you brothers getting on? Are they alright” and he said “I remember your eldest brother very well when he used to come to school. He never used to bear any malice. As soon as he’s hit us he used to forget all about it and that was it. He never seemed to know what time it was and he used to say “Now boys if you’re very good, I’ll read you a story” and I remember this story distinctly. It was called ‘Tommy Smith’s Animals’. Well he went on reading and reading and reading ‘til he got perhaps ten minutes after school time and we wanted to get home so to give him the signal we used to all lift up our desks and give them three ‘bang, bang, bang’ as hard as we could, crash these desks down and rush for the door and it was Lord help the last one who got out because by that time there was quite a crush getting out of the door and they used to get the whacking with this walking stick.