Growing up in Lee-on-the-Solent Read online

  Before the roads became adopted, if rain and puddles had made it impossible to walk in the middle of the road as we normally did (cars were rarely encountered), we had to walk along the edges of the road, and this was the absolute worst situation. On these occasions the darkness seemed even more intense and the imagined monsters even more malevolent, with the shrubbery at the side of the road seeming to reach out to grab passersby.

  Hangouts

  Despite the occasional scary walk home during the dark winter nights, I was very much the Lone Ranger without a Tonto, and I would spend hours on my own in Lee public library, most times staying until closing. My favourite was reading encyclopaediae in the junior reference section. In those days the silence rule was rigorously enforced and everyone spoke with hushed voices when checking in and checking out their books. Once you were in the library, you didn‘t speak at all.

  The children’s section was in the front of the library on the west side with the ‘newspaper room’ at the front on the east side, and the main (adult) library taking up most of the rest of the lower floor of the building. During the war there was a temporary office alongside the newspaper room, where mothers would go at strictly regulated times, ‘Two o’clock till three o’clock’, with their families to collect free bottles of very concentrated orange juice and rosehip syrup. The bottles were about the size of a medicine bottle and the contents tasted a lot like medicine.

  Throughout the war and after, Lee Tower was the absolute focus of life in Lee-on-the-Solent. When making arrangements, the most frequently heard phrase was ‘see you up the Tower ‘. This didn’t actually mean at the top of the Tower, but somewhere in the vicinity of the complex.

  The cinema was on the east side of the building and it had a Circle and Stalls, and between the two levels, there was a short stairway on either side. It was not unknown for youngsters - yes, including me - to pay to go downstairs and then to sneak up one of the stairways, most times to get caught by an usherette, and either sent back down or sent out of the cinema. On Saturday mornings it was threepence for downstairs, and sixpence for upstairs. For that princely sum, normally there would be two films, one or two cartoons and maybe a Pathé News. The prices were significantly dearer in the evening: a shilling in the stalls, and 1s 9d in the circle. The films were changed every Monday, Thursday, and Sunday. That is six different films plus the Saturday morning matinee, and the Pearl and Deane trailers and advertisements. Mr and Mrs Rogers, who had two daughters and lived in Wootton Road, could be seen almost every Sunday, Monday and Thursday evening walking past our house and down Gosport Road on their way to the cinema.

  Lee Tower

  On the west side of Lee Tower building was the ballroom which, during the war, was also used as a gymnasium by the Fleet Air Arm. After the war it reverted to being a ballroom, and the Bert Sharpe Band became one of the long-term resident bands. Before we were old enough to go into the ballroom, I, together with other youngsters, would often gather behind the Tower on Saturday evenings and peep enviously into the ballroom through any gaps that had been left in the curtains. My sister later said that when she was old enough to go to dances, she would on occasion, when ‘sitting out a dance’, look out through similar gaps. She said it was quite educational because young sailors with young ladies outside were totally unaware that they could be seen getting up to what they were ‘getting up to’.

  The Tower itself had a lift or stairs to the top. It was 3d ‘thrupence’ to enter. A few years earlier, when I was younger, the trick used to gain a free trip to the top was to wait until the lift had begun to ascend with the customers and attendant in it, then to nip under the barrier, onto the stairway and run up. We would wait at the point where the stairs coincided with the back of the lift, until the lift was on its way down again -once it had passed - we would run to the top. Getting down was a bit trickier, especially if business was not too brisk.

  Although growing up in the 40s and 50s in Lee-on-the-Solent meant that the Tower was always the main assembly point, another important meeting venue, especially for teenagers, was the Bluebird Café on the corner of Milvil Road and Marine Parade opposite the Tower. Basically it was a hut with a veranda and - most importantly - a jukebox. My favourite record, in 1949 was ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’ sung by Frankie Laine. But on one occasion, after I had played it twice in succession, I had to beat a hasty retreat when I went to play it a third time.[2]

  The Amusement Arcade was also a Mecca for young people, especially in the summer. Originally the building had been the railway station booking office and waiting room, until the line was closed in the early 30s. Now, two decades later, it enjoyed a revival as a ‘hang out’.

  Between the Tower and the row of shops and flats on Marine Parade were the remembrance gardens, with the memorial to the fallen in the centre. These gardens were cupped by a semicircular one-way road that the buses to Gosport and Fareham would pull into and stop in front of the Tower. The Fareham buses, mostly single-deckers, would stop on the eastern section of the semicircular road and the Gosport buses, mainly double-deckers, would stop on the western section.

  As a general rule we would walk to and from Lee Tower, but when we wanted to use the bus to get home from the cinema, if we had just missed one and it was pulling away from the bus stop, we would run through Pier Street, and although there was two-way traffic in the High Street, invariably we would manage to catch the bus at the stop at the junction of Pier Street and High Street.

  The area of the library was another focal point for social activity, particularly for the adults in Lee. Opposite the library was the Lowry Hall, which was always known as the Lowry Hut, and which was used by the Women’s Institute, British Legion and other institutions. Also there were many functions held there such as whist drives, jumble sales, and concerts. A very popular tap-dance group of girls from Gosport, the ‘Sunshine Kiddies’ whose ages ranged from about seven to fourteen, occasionally put on a performance at the Lowry Hut.

  Not far from the library, on the same side of the road, was the Police Station, which continued to be located there until the 1960s. During the war, much of the constabulary’s time was taken up with catching people who were contravening blackout regulations or cycling without lights ... or they were chasing after young miscreants.

  2 www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(Ghost)_Riders_in_the_Sky:_A_Cowboy_Legend

  A Bit of Liberating

  HMS Daedalus as a military establishment had a large bearing on the lives of the people in Lee-on-the-Solent, including our family. Apart from it being a target for the German Luftwaffe during the war, it was a source of employment. It also put the town firmly on the map with its annual Air Display which always attracted many visitors, and brought in a lot of trade as well as providing advertising for the ‘resort’. But the Air Displays didn’t always go to plan: in 1947 there was a bad air-crash, as was reported in the press at the time.

  July 1947... Inquest on the air-show crash. The Pilot was warned not to do any aerobatics, but in spite of that, he attempted to do a roll and crashed. He was told to carry out a fly past to demonstrate a Blackburn Firebrand carrying a torpedo. After taking off he came over the aerodrome at about 50 ft and when at the Eastern end pulled up to about 200 ft and started to execute a roll. While in the inverted position he started to lose height there appeared to be an attempt to right the aircraft and it disappeared from view. He was single and 22.

  There was a sequel to this. Brian’s dad worked in a telephone exchange at the then top end of Manor Way, near the present-day junction with Cheltenham Crescent. On the day of the air show he came home somewhat distressed and needed to take a few days off work.

  Brian told me some time later in a quiet voice, almost a whisper as if it was some family secret, that his dad had heard the crash on that day, and had gone out of the telephone bunker. Not far from the exchange he saw what he thought was the pilot’s helmet, not
the hard shiny type of today, but soft brown leather headgear. When he bent down to pick it up, he discovered that the unfortunate pilot’s head was still in the helmet.

  Although Dad had been posted away on a few occasions during the war, for the majority of his time in the Fleet Air Arm he was based in Daedalus. In the summer of 1946 he was a CPO in charge of quite a large team of young sailors that worked mainly on the servicing Swordfish aircraft. Somehow he had managed to arrange for me to go into Daedalus on a few Saturdays when I was not at school. On these visits I began to learn a lot about the Swordfish aircraft, and what life was like for the young Fleet Air Arm mechanics.

  At the end of each Saturday’s duty, he would let two of his team have a forty-eight hour pass for the following weekend. On one of these Saturday mornings, when I had been allowed to accompany Dad onto the base, there must have been something special going on the following weekend, because the young servicemen seemed to be very keen to please ‘Chief’, as they called him and - in order to curry favour with him - two of them even let me put a repair patch on one of the planes.

  The Swordfish or ‘Stringbag’ was made of a wooden frame with material stretched over it, and this meant that it was quite easy to accidentally damage the ‘skin’, which generally would be repaired with a patch of the same silver coloured material, ‘glued on’ with ‘dope’. At the end of the day Dad asked me who should get the passes. Obviously I chose the two who had let me do the repair.

  ‘Acquired’ items on a military establishment which found their way into civilian houses were known as ‘Rabbits’ - there were even cartoons about this in the local press. I wonder if they were they called Rabbits because they had burrowed their way out? There was a saying at that time, ‘if all the Rabbits that had come out of Portsmouth dockyard were to be returned, half of the houses in Portsmouth would fall down’. This, although anecdotal, gives some idea of how widespread the petty pilfering was. Of course this was at a time when there were virtually no places where you could easily get materials.

  Over the garden fence – Mum, Herb and Hilda

  Dad, ever resourceful and generally honest, hated to see anything being wasted, and if material was to be thrown away or destroyed he would find a use for it and ‘liberate’ it. Later that summer on a weekday, when again I had been allowed to go in with Dad, the following little incident took place. Earlier that week he had come across some small pieces of hardwood that were to be thrown away and which he decided would be useful for a for a job at home that he had in mind, so he had ‘liberated’ them and put them in a safe place. At midday Dad and I were just about to wheel our bikes out of the Daedalus main gate to make our way home for lunch, with the ‘Rabbits’ in his saddlebag. He told me to hold his bike and wait while he had a word with one of policemen on the gate that he knew. Apparently he said to him that he had seen some wood in the hangar and asked if would be alright to take it out that evening. The policeman said ‘That’ll be alright Jack’ (although my dad’s name was John, he was always called Jack or Jimmy or Bill). We went through the gates and cycled home. That evening when Dad came out of the gate, he was called into the gatehouse and he and his bike were searched ... .too late of course - he already had the wood at home. He just told them that he had changed his mind.

  Gym club: I am in the front row, third from the right

  In 1947, when I was fifteen, I was able to join the gym club at school. It was something that I greatly enjoyed and I discovered that I had a very good sense of balance and excelled on the parallel bars. Within a year I was awarded my gym colours and eventually became vice captain of the team. We were quite a strong team and in a competition against the Army Gymnastics Team at Aldershot, we gave them a jolly good run for their money..

  Armed with the confidence that I had gained during the frequent gym club sessions, and seasoned with a wish to show off, I ‘demonstrated’ on a number of occasions an outward-facing handstand on the handrail at the top of the steps behind the ballroom at the back of the Tower. It was a drop of about twenty feet. Although I claimed that it was the exuberance and the confidence of youth, if I am truthful, I have to admit that I was just showing off. Another favourite ‘showing off’ activity, for some of us, was sprinting across the promenade just to the east of the Tower and launching ourselves into the air onto the shingle beach, using the sloping shingle to break our fall. One day a passerby even asked us to repeat the jump so that he could take a photograph of us. It may have looked quite spectacular, but it was only a drop of about seven feet, so it was small fry compared to the gang entrance requirement down at Elmore a few years earlier.

  On the seafront where Chaplin’s restaurant now stands was a seawater swimming pool, which was about 240 feet long. In summer of 1945, I held the record for swimming the fastest length, as timed by the swimming pool attendant. But it was a briefly held record: within half an hour it was taken from me by Peter Brown who had, with his parents, lived in South Africa for some time, and he was an excellent swimmer. He was a few years older than me and in fact at one time had been my swimming mentor. He took two seconds off my temporary record, and that put me in my place. When the tide was low or the sea was too rough we tended to use the swimming pool, but at other times it would be quite a lonely place. It was during this summer that a German prisoner of war taught some of us lads how to dive. The prisoners had large yellow patches sewn into the backs of their clothes, but they were allowed to walk unaccompanied between where they worked on the land or building sites and where they were to be ‘locked up’ for the night. This particular prisoner would stop for a swim at the swimming pool on his way back to Stubbington. Somehow we got talking to him, probably just out of curiosity: this was the first German that we had met face to face. He told us that he came from Leipzig and he was quite well accepted, but it was not really the done thing to like the Germans at that time. Interestingly, there were quite a few German prisoners of war housed and working in the area who were involved with the building of the new Bridgemary estate. Anyhow, this prisoner of war could see that we were having difficulty with diving, and he offered to help us. Looking back I realise that he was very authoritarian, which of course is an alleged Teutonic trait. Nevertheless, when he commanded ‘Don’t look at the water! It will still be there when you get there!’ and then when he said ‘Dive!’ we obeyed instantly and instinctively and learned to dive pretty well. We were taught to do jack knives and swallow dives, from what must have been a six-feet board. Later we even ventured to dive from what must have been a fifteen-feet board.

  Within about a year of the diving lessons, the diving boards were removed, the pool was shortened and the deep end was partly filled in and made into a kiddies’ pool; later it was completely filled in.

  Although I represented the school in swimming and gymnastics, I was no athlete, but that summer turned out to be quite fruitful for me at a sports day put on by the personnel from Daedalus in their sports field. This venue was opposite the Tennis Club in Manor Way, and was bounded by tall trees adjacent to the road. I teamed up with a girl called Beryl, who was one of three girls fostered-out in the same house in Seymour Road. We were remarkably successful in all of the races including the wheelbarrow race, the three-legged race, and many others. It was almost embarrassing the number of prizes which we won ... well almost, but then again, perhaps not. I think that we won all but one race.

  At this Sports Day there was also a Baby Show at which soft toys were presented as prizes and these had been made by Dad.

  A press report at the time stated: ’the civilian staff of HMS Daedalus held sports fete in the grounds of Edinburgh House. The prizes for the baby show were kindly given by C.P.O. Green ... they were toy Elephants.’

  This brought back memories for my sister and she recalled the toy elephants that Dad had made for her a few years previously.

  Stop Me and Buy One

  In the summer of 1948 I managed to get a
number of different jobs. In the High Street towards the east end was Browning’s, the baker’s, the proprietors of which had tragically lost their son in the raid on Daedalus 16 August 1940. In addition to the bakery they also had franchises for selling ice cream at Lee, Stokes Bay and Bridgemary - this I know because that summer I worked for them selling ice cream from a tricycle. I joined the ranks of what were known as ‘stop me and buy one’ ice cream men.

  On one of my days off, I was among a gathering of young chaps who had swum out to the end of the remains of the pier. It was an impromptu gathering - some of the group I knew but there were others who were complete strangers to me. As the tide had dropped quite a bit while we were on the jetty just ‘chilling out’, a collective decision was made not to swim back to the beach. Instead we set about walking along the tops of the girders to the beach, and where there were gaps in the ironwork we swung hand-over-hand along a one-inch wire hawser that stretched from the Tower to the end of the pier, in line with the top of the girders. Unfortunately there was a problem with this, as we soon discovered. The hawser cut our hands to pieces as we made our way across the gaps. We all persevered and managed to get to the last intact piece of girder and climb down, but needless to say none of us ever tried that again.

  Not exactly a summer of painful experiences, but there was a second incident a couple of weeks later. On this occasion Vic Newman, a friend from school and fellow gym club member, who lived in Fareham, came to Lee for the day and we met up near the Tower to go for a swim. Although it was low tide we decided we would still go in for a dip. We were on the beach near the Amusement Arcade and Vic, who liked to run into the sea, ran down the beach and splashed through the shallow water. Normally we only swam in that area when the tide was high and we didn’t know that there was a mussel-bed near the pier which Vic ran straight across; his feet were extremely badly lacerated and there was blood everywhere. However, with the help of another person on the beach I managed to get him to the St John’s Ambulance hut, which was near where the Skate Park is now situated. They bandaged his feet and he managed to hobble home with me. It goes without saying that we never tried swimming near the pier again at low tide.