Category: 2 – When you were little

I was born on 14th October 1953, near to Alexandra Palace in North London. This is the place where my sister regularly goes to a craft exhibition.

I was born in a nursing home which was 1.4 miles from the flat where my parents had lived since they were married. At the time I was born, the house in Guildford was being built in which they lived for most of their married life. This map shows where I lived as a small baby.

This is an interesting question, because I didn’t read the papers when I was first born! So I have had to look up some news items. The only thing that I know is significant about my birthday is that I shared my birthday with my father’s father. It was also my grannie and grandad High’s wedding anniversary. Nothing changed much on the day that I was born. However, 1953 was quite an eventful year.

• 31 January–1 February – The North Sea flood of 1953 kills hundreds of people on the east coast of Britain.
• 13 April – Ian Fleming publishes his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale.
• 16 April – The Queen launches the Royal Yacht Britannia at John Brown & Company shipbuilders on the Clyde.
• 24 April – Prime Minister Winston Churchill receives a knighthood from the Queen.
• 25 April – Francis Crick and James D. Watson publish their description of the double helix structure of DNA in the paper Molecular structure of Nucleic Acids

• 2 June
  • The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II takes place at Westminster Abbey, celebrated as a public holiday.
  • The Times exclusively carries James Morris’s scoop of the conquest of Mount Everest by a British expedition on 29 May.

• 19 September – Sir Hubert Parry’s 1916 setting of William Blake’s “Jerusalem” first appears as a permanent feature of the Last Night of the Proms (televised on the only available channel, the BBC).
• 26 September – End of post-war sugar rationing. This meant that I was one of the first of a new generation of children who had terrible teeth.
• 2 November – The Samaritans telephone counselling service for the suicidal is started by Rev. Chad Varah in London.

• There were some significant new products available for the first time in 1953
  • Matchbox toy vehicles are introduced by Lesney Products of London.
  • Laura Ashley sells her first printed fabrics.
  • J. C. Bamford of Rocester introduce the backhoe loader, now universally referred to as a JCB.
  • E. Gomme introduce the popular G-Plan furniture range, which may make it more retro than Abigail realises.

Well, I was small, though I was long for my age and I was a boy. In my day, babies did not have a choice as to whether they would grow up as a boy or as a girl. Quite frankly, I think that it is a daft idea to give children a choice as to what gender to grow up into. I think that we should play the hand that we have been dealt and be sensitive to those who have been dealt a confusing hand. My grand children can ask their mums to explain all that!

Otherwise, I think that I was a perfect child. There are few pictures of me as a small child. This is the only one I have that is scanned at the moment…

You cannot see it from this picture, but for the first five years of my life, I had blonde hair.

This is a difficult question to answer. To be shy is to be nervous or timid in the company of other people. Before I could walk, my parents and I had moved to a new house in Burpham.

The house was in the first phase of what turned into a large housing estate over the following ten years. All the children in the neighbouring houses were all much older than me. So as I never went to play school and just played with my sister, I really did not know what it was like to be in the company of other people.

This would be a simple question for my grand-children to answer, but for me the question never arose in my childhood. I simply did not know who super-heros were supposed to be. Before I started school at the age of five, I did not know that there were such things as comics, with pictures. My only knowledge of television came from the age of four when my grandfather passed on his first TV, bought to watch the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953. It was a black & white model that could only get the one channel from the BBC. Colour TV’s only came in when I started at secondary school. More to the point, it was only when I started at primary school that I discovered that new TV’s could also receive a channel from ITV which not only had adverts but also showed cartoons of the likes of Popeye!

My parents did not approve of comic books, which probably explains why it took me so long to learn to read. They would not take me to the Saturday morning cinema which showed all sorts of exciting things (mainly American). I think that they were basically snobbish! It was only in 1962, when I was nine, that a magazine was published that they approved of and which I was allowed to spend my pocket money on. Look and Learn was a British weekly educational magazine for children published by Fleetway Publications Ltd from 1962 until 1982. It contained educational text articles that covered a wide variety of topics from volcanoes to the Loch Ness Monster. It did not have super-heros, though one edition did have a piece on Prince Charles…