February's DYW cover

ANNUS horribilis apart, hasn’t she done well? Prime Ministers, pop stars and fashion crazes have come and gone, and the country isn’t remotely recognisable as the one in which twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth Windsor ascended the throne on 6 February 1952 following the early death from lung cancer of her father, George VI, a heavy smoker.

Austerity Britain was effectively bankrupt from the war; rationing was still in force; cities and towns still bore the scars of German bombing, we hadn’t enough new housing and a quarter of what we had was wholly inadequate and unsanitary with shared or outside loos. Slowly but assuredly living standards rose and our national prosperity increased as we became a country that had ‘never had it so good’ – though many will argue we’ve lost a lot of ‘values’ along the way, and made ourselves many problems.

Our one constant through seven decades is that we have had the same head of state – something that will almost certainly never happen again. Elizabeth became our oldest monarch ever in 2007 and in 2015 is set to surpass Victoria’s record reign of sixty-three years. It is a remarkable achievement of endurance and duty – and I’m certain after the reaction to last year’s royal wedding knees-up the country will wholeheartedly embrace this Diamond Jubilee, possibly with more fervour than it will the Olympics.

The main thrust of events, by the way, comes on the Bank Holiday weekend of 2-3 June when Her Majesty leads a flotilla of a thousand boats down the Thames on the Sunday. All we need is for some jolly boating weather …and for a crock of gold medals a month later. That will put a smile on faces.

Street cred ...Wendy Marshall joins the cast of Coronation Street

And February’s issue of Down Your Way magazine is sure to put a smile on your face too as we stroll down memory lane. South Yorkshire lass Wendy Marshall tells of joining the nation’s longest running TV soap in 1973 and celebrating her eighteenth birthday in Coronation Street’s Rovers Return.

Maggie Poppa hears of Rugby League’s record points scorer Neil Fox growing up in a sports-mad family in a pit village near Wakefield, and do you remember when you’d been to the local flicks then acted out the hero or heroine’s deeds in your own adventure playground, the fields around your home?

We celebrate Dicken’s 200th anniversary which is touching Yorkshire where he came to expose the scandalous treatment of schoolboys. The daughter of Scarborough Gala Land’s guess-your-weight jockey shares her memories of working there – and we’ve more of your lively letters on Leslie Gee and BBC Children’s Hour’s Romany.

Our Flashback feature focusses on Fish and Chip king Harry Ramsden and in our Yorkshire Roots we have appeals for help finding pianos made by Leeds firm Eccles, an Ampleforth connection for a Sherwood family and discovering a ‘missing’ sister one family didn’t know existed.

And can you help supply more information on two brave, almost forgotten war heroes?

Programme from the Bradford Alhambra panto Cinderella starring Wilfred Pickles

We love our pantomimes – oh yes we do – and in January’s issue of Down Your Way we roll back the years to the Sunday school and church pantos of youth, and to the professional ones put on at theatres in our towns and cities.

Barbara Lister sold programmes as a child in Halifax’s Grand Theatre and she shares some of the memorabilia she’s amassed down the years.

And we hear of the reaction when comedian Albert Modley turned up to see a friend at a guest house in Blackpool.

Roy Hattersley is as passionate as ever about his politics and he tells Maggie Poppa of his Sheffield boyhood, what he thinks he’ll be best remembered for, and what his priority would be if he was PM.

We reveal how the 1941 blitz of Hull significantly influenced the RAF’s heavy bombing retaliation on German cities.

Jean Pedelty recalls the brutal way felons were despatched in Halifax in the middle ages.

Lord Hattersley

While Ronald Silkstone pays tribute to the generations of Yorkshire womenfolk whose drive kept family life intact and the home going.

And we bouffant what hair we’ve left, squeeze into those drainpipes or break out those polka dot dress to rewind those sounds of the 1950s when Billy Fury and Alma Cogan filled the charts. We meet the husband and wife duo whose club stageshow is reminding their audience of their first dates, their anniveraries.

We have eight pages of your special letters and queries from playing the Punch and Judy Man on the Flaxton Boys to the good times to be had with the 1940s Gang.

In our popular Yorkshire Roots we reminisce with a woman privileged to grow up in a lovely old house in Bolton, Bradford. And just what is the origin of the surname Sheepshanks?

We also  start a new feature – Pubs with a Past – by calling at the Puzzle Hall Inn in Sowerby Bridge.

It’s a merry old Christmas of memories, angelic carollers doing the rounds, gifts to our troops on the Western Front, peace and harmony and a chance bumping into the Messiah maestro Sir Malcolm Sargent in Huddersfield.

There’s a school play thrown into uncertainty when the boy playing Rumplestiltskin goes down with chickenpox. And a letter from Santa Busby Claus still treasured after seventy years.

Flaxton Boys, Phil Maskery and Dai Bradley from 1970

And it’s Sunday tea-time on Yorkshire TV in the late 1960s and to the stirring music of Prokofiev, two boys charge across the front of Ripley Castle. Yes, it’s those well-loved Flaxton Boys and we look back at those
more innocent days in December’s Down Your Way magazine.

We reflect too on the life of the literary phenomenon who created the greatest schoolboy character ever, Billy Bunter, and who died exactly fifty years ago on Christmas Eve – Frank Richards.

One of only six-rated Michelin Star chefs, Frances Atkins tells us of her life in the kitchen and what it’s like to be cooking hundreds of festive meals each night.

Nigel Berry began working in Doncaster market just after Britain went decimal and in forty years he’s seen many changes. He’s still as committed as ever to this top market.

And readers have the chance of winning a luxury country hotel break at Simonstone Hall in Hawes.

Trams on Briggate, Leeds, in the 1930s evoke our memories of transport from the past in November’s Down Your Way magazine.

We take an inside look at everything from the penny farthing to space travel in the latest Window To Your Past exhibition, which you can still catch up on by visiting www.window-to-your-past.com.

There is West Yorkshire Police transport from the 1940s and 1940s, the first clippie on the Scholes bus, horse-drawn buses in Wakefield, well-heeled spectators at Brooklands motor racing circuit and aerodrome (from where we have a picture of a Sopwith Camel which helped win supremacy on the Western Front).

A Ten Pound Pom reflects on her family’s decision to seek a better life in Australia in the mid-60s – and why they chose to return to Huddersfield.

In today’s world of deluxe loos and quilted toilet paper we return to the days of earth closets, night soil men and honey wagons.

Roger Harvey receives his OBE

David McLaughlan profiles the largely-forgotten Bridlington journalist and Methodist, H L Gee, whose Francis Gay column survives to this day.

Roger Harvey, of Harvey’s in Halifax, tells Maggie Poppa why Christmas begins early for the family owned department store.

Ian Dewhirst recalls his two years as a national service squaddie in the 1950s – and all that bayonet practice, route marches, Bren guns and bull.

David Lewis shares extracts from his book on one of the last Ouse bargemen, Laurie Dews.

We have your memories of Gala Land in Scarborough – and oh what a special place it was for many of you.

There’s also much much more including John Gilleghan’s latest in his series of Interesting Churches – St Wilfred’s, Brayton; Len Markham who waves goodbye in York to his daughter as she leaves for a year in New Zealand; and memories of Bert Eccles and his Millionaires who brought music into the lives of Leeds folk in the 1930s and 1940s.

And we mark the 125th anniversary of the world’s leading direct seller of beauty products with your memories of  ’Avon Calling’. There’s also your chance to win an Avon hamper of goodies.

Did you once do, or still maybe are doing, the doorstep rounds of your village or town in Yorkshire selling Avon cosemetics? Avon first arrived in the UK in 1959 and this year is celebrating its 125th anniversary since the company was set up by the bookselling son of Irish immigrants to America?

In November’s issue of Down Your Way we are looking for readers’ brief memories of their experiences – what was it like selling this new to Britain product in the 1960s? What was it like knocking on people’s doors? How did things change down the years?

If you have any memories DYW would like to hear from you now – by email to kev@dalesman.co.uk or to editorial@downyourway.co.uk.

And if you have any pictures of yourself with your display products etc, please send them to.

Our November issue will be in the shops from 25 October when readers can win a Avon hamper packed with beauty products.

As a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl in Leeds in Coronation year, Mary Milner directed what was probably the first film in England made entirely by schoolchildren.

Shot in Kodak Super X 16mm in black and white with no sound, the film Brought to Justice lasts just sixteen minutes and its somewhat melodramatic content is described as ‘the pursuit and capture of a villainous criminal’.

In September’s issue Mary tells how this pioneering work at Ellerby Lane School came about, designed to develop the children’s interest in cinema, their critical appreciation and improve their written and spoken English.

Also featured in the magazine is Calendar Girl Angela Knowles who updates us on her life more than a decade on from the hugely successful film.

And Yorkshire’s unlikely movie mogul J Arthur Rank, who became one of the biggest players in the post-war film industry, is profiled.

Buffalo Bill’s early twentieth-century tour to northern towns is remembered; also recalled are the Bradford dancing dynasty, the Everetts, Sheffield’s vinyl goddess Violet May, and Halifax’s frantic rocker Don Lang.

While in our Yorkshire Roots section we look at Leeds artist and author Will Scott whose early life was coloured by the music hall, bill stickers and street scenes.

Did the 1960s swing for you? Or did the pop, fashion and art ‘walk on by’?

Film company producer Jane Magowan is looking for people who were then in their teens or twenties and may have home movie archive of themselves, friends and family taken at the time, for a programme for UKTV Yesterday Channel called The Sixties Unswung.

Says Jane: ‘The show is a light hearted look at the not so hip side of 60s fashion, music and TV – so,  not the Beatles and Mary Quant but Englebert Humperdinck and Kays Catalogue. Really the premise of the show is that there’s a lot more to the 60s than is represented by a small elite in London’.

She is especially keen to talk to anyone who was a fan of Englebert, Acker Bilk or Ken Dodd or who has a fashion story to tell – maybe about their own fashion disasters or how they tried to keep up with the latest trends.

Jane  can be contacted at DoubleBand Films, tel 028 9024 3331 or via the website www.doublebandfilms.com

We get a good head of steam up in July’s issue for after being meticulously restored these past five years, the Flying Scotsman, that icon of rail beauty and speed between the wars, will be unveiled in its apple green livery, and from August will be on display at the National Railway Museum in York.

We’ll be looking at what the nation is getting for keeping No 4472 in Britain.
We mark the 250th anniversary OF worship at Talbot Lane Methodist Church in Rotherham, which started as a small octagonal chapel which John Wesley recommended as right for missionary work.
Godfather of British jazz Stan Tracey talks about his life and influences to Maggie Poppa and we hear how one family escaped the doodlebugs over Kent for a safe Yorkshire haven in Thixendale.

Plus we have pictures of Arthur Lucan before his Old Mother Riley days and look at the quaint cures and household hints of the WI of fifty years ago.