I REMEMBER being really angry when my parents admitted that there was no such person as Santa Claus.

I REMEMBER my father telling us children that on Hogmanay there would be a man at Kirkintilloch Cross who had as many heads as the days in the year.

I REMEMBER carols being played and sung by the Salvation Army outside our tenement building in the dark.

I REMEMBER that our family and the family of our father’s brother George used to get together every New Year’s Day, meeting in each other’s homes on alternate years. There was always a huge meal, and I think there was a bit of rivalry between our mother and Aunt Jen.

I REMEMBER our parents taking us to a pantomime in a Glasgow theatre. I was more interested in the musicians in the pit than what was happening on the stage. In those days theatres had fairly big orchestras.

I REMEMBER that, as a young man, I used to attend the New Year’s Day performance of Handel’s Messiah in St. Andrew’s Halls. Every seat was occupied by the time the Glasgow Choral Union and the Glasgow Orchestral Society took their places, and from midday till three o’clock we sat enthralled by the music.

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Naturally being a church organist for many years Christmas had added importance for me. As early as October, music had to be chosen for the special services, and, if a cantata was to be performed, September wasn’t too early to start practising.

Christmas services were always very well attended, and it was a great experience to accompany the singing. Unfortunately a problem arose one Christmas Eve service at Lenzie Old Parish Church. Because the licensing hours had been changed, the hour of the pubs’ closing time coincided with the time folks were arriving for the service, and quite a number of drunks came into the church. There was a lot of noise and some disruption, and we soon learned that ours was not the only church to be affected in this way. Many of the congregation vowed never to come again to a Christmas Eve service, which was sad for a solution to the problem was found. In the years that followed, rather than turn people away from the church, any drunks were led in to the hall where they were given coffee and something to eat, and they could hear the singing coming from the church.

Christmas Day services are designed for the children of course, but I was always sorry for our own three girls on Christmas morning. Instead of playing with their toys and games, they had to come to church with us, although I don’t remember them complaining.

I’m often asked if I miss playing church organ. Well, all that was a long time ago. My answer would be - no, I don’t miss it, but when I hear “O come all ye faithful” on Songs of Praise……………
 

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Christmas in the 1930s was very different from the Christmases of today.

In Scotland Christmas Day was just like any other working day, with offices, shops and factories open as usual, and Hogmanay and the New Year were much more important, New Year’s Day being a general holiday.

I believe that there was Midnight Mass in most Catholic churches on Christmas Eve, but the other churches didn’t have any services either then or on Christmas Day.

We children of course became very excited as the big day drew near. I remember that the living room in our tenement house looked wonderful with paper decorations round the walls and extending across the ceiling. I mentioned in an earlier blog that Rita doesn’t think we got many presents. I seem to remember that we did, but memory can play tricks, and I may be thinking about one particular Christmas.

Each year we went to the Sunday School Christmas party where we played the usual games and Santa Claus handed out gifts to us all. I don’t think people had Christmas trees in their homes in those days, but there was always a big tree at the party.

Our parents usually took us to Glasgow to see Santa Claus in a big store. On one occasion we were passing through a number of corridors lined with toys and novelties, when we came across a huge teddy bear, taller than an adult. As we passed it, our father shook its paw and said “How d’you do?” And its head fell off!!!

On the Sunday nearest Christmas Day, we sang the usual Christmas hymns in church, but there was no tree and no decorations.

It wasn’t till the late 1940s that Scotland began to make more of Christmas. Perhaps the change was due to our servicemen coming back to civvy street, having experienced how it was celebrated elsewhere. This was certainly the case in our church when the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols was introduced, but I think it was some time later that services on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were begun. I remember one local minister telling me that he went to bed at ten every night, and had no intention of changing his routine!

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As I already indicated, New Year was much more important in those days, and most families had some kind of celebration on New Year’s Day. In our house we stayed up on Hogmanay, and when midnight struck we wished each other a Happy New Year, had a small glass of non-alcoholic wine with some shortbread or a piece of New Year bun, and went to bed.

In other homes of course families would gather to toast the New Year with something a bit stronger than our Co-op wine, and would have a party which might last till early morning. Many folk would go out “first-footing” and it was important to take a bottle with you.
The “first foot” is the first person to visit you after midnight and, in order to bring good luck, he should have dark hair and carry a lump of coal. I understand that in some areas he carried a piece of cake or bun, coal and a coin, to ensure that there would always be food, warmth and money throughout the coming year. I’ve heard that some folk at midnight open their back door to let the old year out, and open the front door for the new year to come in.

My first experience of celebrating New Year in the traditional way didn’t happen till I was 27 years old. Jean and I had become engaged the previous August, and I think she was anxious to initiate me into the customs of her family. Strangely enough, neither of us can remember much about that night. (No insinuations, please!) I know we started off in her house and then went out, but who we visited we can’t recall.

remember that, when I was a boy, there was one New Year’s Day programme on the wireless that my father would never miss, and that was Harry Lauder. I could never understand his popularity, yet at one time he was said to be the highest paid entertainer in the world.  

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I think I’ve already said that I wasn’t terribly keen on learning the piano. However, like everything else, my parents made the decision, a piano was bought and Rita and I went every week to Aunt Frances for lessons. The fact that she was our aunt made no difference - she was pretty strict with us, and, supervised by our mother, we each did our half-hour’s practice every day. Very soon I discovered that I liked to have an audience, and was always keen to perform for anyone who would listen.

Frances had a string of letters after her name, and used the recognised methods of teaching. Later on however, she was clearing out her sheet music, and I acquired a number of popular songs which I eagerly practised - Old Faithful, O Play to me Gypsy, When I grow to old to dream, I’ll never say “never again” again, and my favourite Red Sails in the Sunset.

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During the few years before the war, our summer holidays were spent at Lower Largo in Fife. Despite the fact that this was a fairly small resort, there was a concert party performing twice daily on the pier. The first year we were there, it was in the open air, but after that the shows were inside a large tent. Of course I was thrilled with them, and would have attended all the performances. When we were back home, I spent hours at the piano, pretending I was playing for the concert party.

At secondary school a big annual event was the dance and, in preparation for this, there were dancing lessons. I was usually given the job of pianist, with the result that I never really learned to dance satisfactorily.

The music for the actual night was provided by a band made up of boys slightly older than I was. A few years later their pianist left and they asked me to join them. I suppose that they would probably have had no more than 4 or 5 engagements per year, but my parents said “No”. That was a great disappointment to me. Playing in a dance band was not quite respectable, it seemed!

A time came when I did play at dances, but, in order to book me, one band-leader used to approach my father to get his permission. I’m sorry to say that there were occasions when I played at dances without telling my parents.

I’ve been remembering the many “classical” pieces I learned in those far-off days. One of them was the famous Minuet by Paderewski.

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During the second world war there were many charity concerts in aid of the war effort, and very often I took part as accompanist. Most folk had to spend their holidays at home and during the Glasgow Fair Fortnight there was every type of entertainment in the parks or in the local halls, and I had a great time playing for them.

While in the RAF I was able to enjoy my music to the full. Our small band, consisting of trumpet, guitar, double bass, vocalist and me on piano, played regularly on the camp and in nearby Carterton.

I had an unusual musical experience when I broke every rule in the book. The Royal Naval School of Music at Burford were holding a big dance there, and, strangely enough, they didn’t have a pianist available that night. They got in touch with our CO’s office and I was delegated to do the job. And so it came about that a RN vehicle was sent for me, and, on arrival at the dance hall, I had to change into the full dress uniform of a RN musician - totally against all regulations!!! That was the first time I played with a full dance band, and it was a great thrill!

After demob I played with a number of bands, mainly deputising, and it wasn’t till I was married and we had our three children that I joined a “big band”. The Metronomes line-up was 2 trumpets, trombone, 2 saxes, piano, drums and vocalist. They played for dancing every Saturday night in Riddrie, Glasgow, and had quite a number of dances and weddings elsewhere.

Eventually, reflecting the general changes in popular music, the services of the two sax players and myself were dispensed with, being replaced with guitars. Rock ‘n Roll had arrived!!!

 

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 This is our friend Leonard Lewis who died in December aged 78

He and I met at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire where we were doing our National Service. We soon became friends for we shared a keen interest in all things connected with entertainment. We joined the station concert party where he was a jack-of-all trades and I provided the music. For one of our shows we had the professional assistance of Ralph Reader of Gang Show fame who was on our station planning that year’s RAF Pageant at Olympia.

One of our cast was a civilian worker Bunny Shayler, a comedian who had his own small group of entertainers outwith the RAF. Leonard and I joined them and we did quite a number of shows around Oxfordshire. I remember going to one village in the wilds where, on our arrival at the hall, Bunny was greeted with “Are you the man from the BBC?” (He rather traded on the fact that he had once been on BBC Midland Children’s Hour). Not long afterwards though, he appeared on radio in Hughie Green’s “Opportunity Knocks”, and I was one his supporters who accompanied him to the live broadcast in the Paris Cinema, London.

 This is a photo of Leonard with me taken sometime in the late 1950s. 

After demob Leonard worked in rep at Morecambe and Ashton-under-Lyne before going to the Library Theatre, Manchester. I met up with him again when he came to Glasgow to join the BBC as a TV production assistant. He and his wife Jean and their three little girls came to live in Lenzie and our two families got on well together.

In 1963 his work took him back to England, and his family followed of course. From then on, his name appeared regularly in Radio Times as director or producer of Z Cars, Softly, Softly, When The Boat Comes In, The Good Companions, Flambards and others. Before he retired, he was executive producer of the long-running BBC soap “Eastenders”.

I must mention that the playwright Alan Plater wrote a very fitting obituary which appeared in the Guardian on 11th January 2006.

This is a photo I took of Leonard and Jean at their home in Somerset.

 

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Like so many others, my time in the Service began at RAF Padgate. From there, I went on to RAF Bridgenorth, Shropshire for square-bashing, and then to Halton where I trained as a dental assistant. I spent a few weeks at St.Athan in South Wales before being posted to Brize Norton where I would stay for the rest of my service.

Of all the jobs in the RAF at that time, mine surely was the cushiest. Located in Sick Quarters, the dental surgery had a personnel of just two, the dentist and myself. From the time I started at Brize Norton till the day I left for demob, I was never on parade and never had to be inspected. The reason was that, when all the other airmen were on the square at 8.20 a.m., I was with the medical orderlies in Sick Quarters attending to the dental sick parade - and very few reported dental sick!

The first dentist I worked for was Flight-Lieut. Cloutman. He was a real upper-class type who was obviously keen to make the RAF a career. When he was posted elsewhere I was quite glad, and imagine my surprise when his successor turned out to be someone I knew by sight. Flying Officer Copstick had just graduated from Glasgow Dental Hospital and this was his first posting. We worked well together.

Morning break was at ten o’clock, and you could go either to the NAAFI or to the Church Army for tea, coffee, rolls, etc. The Church Army hut was handier and I usually went there. There was always a number of us waiting outside for the door to open, and I remember that each day the radio inside the hall was playing the Housewife’s Choice signature tune.

In many ways my job was just an ordinary five-day week job - free at week ends and in the evenings. Wednesday afternoons were for all kind of sports, and you needed a really good reason to be excused. And yes, I had a good reason! Rehearsing with the concert party and with the Brize Rhythm Group.

Lots more memories to come - but one more just now. This might be called My Most Embarrassing Occasion. I managed to get home leave frequently but there was one Christmas when that wasn’t possible. Now, there’s a tradition in the RAF (perhaps in the other Services too) that the officers serve dinner to the airmen on Christmas day. I was looking forward to the meal, but got the shock of my life when I went in, for out of all the people there I was the only one not in uniform!!!!!!!
I was so used to being in civvies in the evenings and week ends that it never entered my head to wear uniform. And no one had thought to tell me what was expected. Now, the remarkable thing is that not one of the officers spoke to me about what could have been considered a serious faux pas.

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In October 1943 I began dental studies at the Anderson College of Medicine in Glasgow. For the first year there were only two subjects Chemistry and Physics - at school I had dropped Science after Third Year. I didn’t find the course interesting at all, and listening to lecturers reading from well-used scripts was a bit of a bore. Nevertheless I passed the exams without difficulty.

I enjoyed the next year more for that consisted of Anatomy and Physiology, and we made a start in the Dental Hospital lab. Some of the classes were held in St.Mungo’s College next to the Royal Infirmary, and I think it was there that we had to attend lectures where a dead body was dissected. Quite a few students fainted at the earlier sessions, but it wasn’t till a later occasion that I suddenly felt dizzy. I slipped out of the room and sat with my head between my knees till I recovered.

This was wartime of course and, like every other building, firewatchers were needed to alert the authorities should enemy action result in a fire. I took my turn at Anderson college and two of us had to stay overnight. We slept in a large dimly-lit room lined with shelves of glass jars containing all sorts of foetuses . A bit scary!

In the dental lab we were taught the work which is done by dental mechanics, and looking back it seems as if we spent most of the time queuing up at the office to get the materials we needed or to have our completed work passed as satisfactory. I found that, whereas at school the staff were genuinely interested in our progress, the very opposite was the case at the dental hospital.

I must mention that during my time there I did something bad. Contrary to regulations I made a set of dentures for my father!

Among the students I made a number of good friends, quite a few of whom, like me, gave up the struggle. One of them became a primary school teacher and for a while taught in Kirkintilloch.

And of course the time came when, armed with probes, drills, and shattered nerves, we were unleashed on the patients. Attired in white coats just like real dentists, we tried to convince the public and ourselves that we knew what we were doing.

And that was when I realised that this career was not for me!

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Jean and I were married in 1954. Our first house was a 3-apartment in Loch Road, Kirkintilloch.

Ten minutes walk in the direction of Lenzie led to Woodilee Hospital, better known locally as “the asylum”. We found that quite a few of our friends from outwith the district had reservations about living so near to such an institution. Of course I had always been used to seeing patients out walking about the town and knew that the more serious cases were kept locked up.

One of the patients I knew quite well. He was a very good dulcimer player and appeared regularly as a solo artiste at local entertainments. He kept a little notebook in which he recorded every tune he could play and every one of his engagements since the 1920s. His big moment of fame came when he performed on a early STV show hosted by Bill Tennant. It was said that Peter could have been discharged from the hospital any time, but his family wouldn’t agree to “sign him out”.

Some of the patients just appeared to be eccentric. There was one man who seemed to be very wealthy for he wore an astonishing range of expensive suits, including complete highland dress and cowboy attire. I seem to remember that he used to visit the small shop near us and buy a large number of loaves to feed the birds, though I may be getting him confused with another patient.

Built in 1875 the Woodilee grew to be a very big place (in 1930 it had 1250 beds) with its own successful farm. I remember when the hospital staff used to hold an annual dance in the ballroom and there was always a tremendous rush by the general public to obtain tickets. I often played at functions there, and for a couple of years provided the music for the staff’s pantomime in the Town Hall.

As time went on there were big changes in mental health, with more and more patients able to live in the community. So the Woodilee gradually treated fewer people until it finally closed in 2001.

In its final years there were a number of wards for people with Alzheimer’s disease, and among them was my father. He had gradually become a problem at home for my mother (although she didn’t admit it for quite a while). That was certainly the best place for him. He always knew us when we visited and seemed to be quite content. He died there on 13th July 1982 aged 88.

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The First World War seemed to be very much in people’s minds when I was small. I have a national newspaper which was issued on the day I was born, and it’s surprising that a fair amount of news in it either directly or indirectly concerned the war. My parents frequently referred to it in general conversation and my father often spoke of “when he was in the army”. As a very young child, I thought he had been in the Salvation Army for that was the only army I knew.

I particularly remember that, if I was given a toy that was “Made in Germany”, that was bad, but if it had been made in Britain that was good!

My father was among the many local men who volunteered as soon as war was declared, joining the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. He fought in France and a sniper’s bullet got him in the shoulder.

And that’s really all I know of his time in the army. I very much regret not having asked him for his full story, but, as so often happens, it’s only when old folk are gone, that we think of all the things we might have found out about their life.

I once asked my father what was the happiest time of his life, and his reply surprisingly was “my time in the army”.

This is a photo of him, probably taken in 1915, when he would be 22 years old.

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I was 10 years old when we moved to the semi-detached house in Northbank Avenue. The street we left was one of contrasts. Bisected halfway down by Oxford Street, the upper part where we lived consisted of well-kept tenements, 4 villas near us, a primary school, a church and 2 more private houses.

My pal Andrew lived in one of the bigger tenement houses across the road. He was one of a big family, and each time I called to ask if he was coming out to play his mother, having answered the door, would go off to fetch him. That was when his siblings one by one would peep out from the kitchen door to inspect me, each head appearing at a different level.

The lower part of the street, which stretched down to the main road, had a picture house, a bus garage, and a small hall which may have been used by British Legion members. Quite a few of the houses were of the room and kitchen type with outside toilets, and the families who occupied them seemed to have a large numbers of children. I was inside one of those houses only once, and that was when I was teenager. I had to deliver a message to a semi-professional musician who lived there with his wife and 3 or 4 children. Where they all slept I don’t know, but Bob’s double bass took up valuable space in the bedroom!!!
There were two “sweetie” shops, one of which was really the living room of a house. Another one was used by a shoe repairer for his shop. We children had a morbid interest in the fact that he had just one leg and got about on crutches. A member of the Salvation Army band, he taught his two sons the trumpet and when they grew up both were well-known locally as dance band musicians. The younger one for a while worked in London with some of the country’s top dance bands.

I must say a little bit more about our picture house. Of the two cinemas in the town, the one in our street was the least attractive. The films shown there were often unknown and the brightness of the screen seemed to dim every twenty minutes or so. Of course you must remember that in those days it took years for new films to come to a local picture house. However that didn’t stop many folk being enthusiastic cinema-goers, and, with each picture house changing their programme every two days, it was possible to see a different show six nights a week!!!

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