East end to Sunny Australia

Although I am 75 years old I still like to keep up with my kids and grandchildren so I joined Facebook and am happily plodding along.
I decided to set up a quiz called "what part of london do you equate to" so easy, I completed the questions and answers and there the problem started.
Why do they reckon everybody is a Bill Gates because when I went to publish it was a nightmare worse than solving Rubiks cube I thought it must be me thick as a brick but when I searched Google I found that hundreds upon hundreds of other people had the same problem.
I then searched Google for an easy hands on solution to this problem and the answers made me even more confused.
Why not make these things bloody simple such is lfe

Am searching for anyone from the class of 1949 William Read secondary school Canvey Island
Lets hope they have not fallen off the perch

It was at the Unic cafe' that I met my wife Doreen Burton, she was in the cafe' and needed a lift home and one of her girl friends said to her “he (meaning me) goes your way why don't you ask him for a lift."
So when we came out of the back room she asked me for a lift home so I gave her a lift, just dropped her of and thought no more of it.
Then another night I gave her a lift and one thing led to another and we started going together, I was 25 at the time and Doreen was 17
Reggie had also started courting with Sybil Mayley, I think we only went out once as a foursome because Doreen did not like Sybil. Doreen did in fact have a fight with Sybil outside the Monica pub because Sybil thought Doreen was after Reggie when in fact Doreen was not interested in Reggie at all.
Brian was courting Janet Groves so that you can say was the end of my drinking days and the start of my courtship. Doreen was working then at Pitsea for the Basildon Corporation as a clerk (and she used to cycle from Canvey to Pitsea every day) but later on she got a job in the city (London) working for a wine importer (Halgartens) and travelled up to work every day by train with the rest of the Canvey girls most of the Canvey girls worked in London as there was not much work on the Island only Egans the electrical firm and Neales the book binders.
I still had the Ford Pilot and we had many a good time together in the front and the back seats, (mostly the back)we used to go up to Hunstanton in Norfolk to stay with Doreen's sister Floss and husband Jess who was the local postman (he had smelly feet, that I can remember).
Hunstanton is a very nice sea-side resort and we visited all the local places of interest
Just as a matter of interest Hunstanton is the only East Coast resort that faces west.
Including walking right along the beach and back via the cliff top. Now Doreen's mum did not like me when she found out that Doreen was going out with me as she thought I was cradle snatching and was too old for her daughter (and I suppose I was a bit of a lair)l remember one New Years Eve Doreen asked her mum if she could go out and her mum said yes but be home by eleven Doreen said yes with no intention of being home by that time, I drove her home in the early hours of the morning and was having a snog at the end of her street(which was a cul-de-sac) when we heard her mum coming along calling out "is that you Doreen "when her mum got near us Doreen jumped out of
the car and ran down Lakeside Path to her house, in the meantime I was trying to get the car in reverse and back out of this dead end road and all the time Doreen's mum was chasing me down the road hitting the top of the car with a piece of wood, I finally got the car in gear and backed down the road until I came to a spot I could turn around then I was off like a rocket leaving Doreen to her own devices.
By this time Doreen had got home and jumped into bed fully clothed and was laying there when her mum came in, she threw Doreen's fish tank (complete with catci and rocks )at her in the bed and Doreen just lay there until the morning, Doreen's mum was a bit of a terror, When her son played up (and he was nearly six feet tall) she stood an a chair and hit him on the head with a frying pan (he stood and took his punishment because he knew he would get it some time so he might as well have it there and then).

Everybody goes through a stage of moaning about life, how unfair it is, one day in the early 60s I had been married about 5 years and on this particular day (I was still driving tankers for Caltex) I had been allocated an old tanker to drive with no power steering and only vacuum brakes, noisy and slow and only a short trip to Colchester that involved no overtime and I was having a good old moan to myself about how life was so hard.
I pulled into the transport café at Marks Tey (this was before they built the bypass) for my usual fry up of eggs bacon, and fried bread and toast (no wonder truck drivers used to suffer from stomach ulcers) when a coach load of mentally handicapped children pulled into the car park for a stop on their way to a day’s outing to Clacton and as they got off the coach all grinning and laughing, I watched them for a while and then gave myself what you could call self flagellation and said to myself
“You whingeing bastard Eddie you have a lovely wife, 3wonderful children, buying your own home, a top job paying top money and have all of your marbles (that’s not what some people say but that’s life) and you have got the nerve to moan.”
And from then on I realized there are always people worse off than you so be happy with what you have got

Getting back to my life story on Canvey Island I also got the interest of keeping tropical fish and had quite a few tanks set up in the front room, I also had an oil fire installed which kept the house very warm in the winter.
By now I had sold the Ford to pay expenses and we walked everywhere. I was lucky as it wasn't too far to walk to the Regent Oil Company's depot I took a short cut through the council estate and was there in about thirty minutes.
Doreen had packed up work as our first child was due so now Doreen at the age of 18 was about to become a mother.
My job when it was due was to cycle down to the mid-wife's house and let her know when the labour pains were a certain time apart, So when the time came I was on my bike and away to nurse Morgan's house, praying that she was not out on another call as this would have meant cycling around to the relief nurse and panic stations, this was an the morning of 1st May 1961 and she was in (thank god) so she told me to go back and put the kettle on to boil.
When I got back the waters had broken and Doreen was sitting on the toilet so our first born nearly ended up down the pan.
The mid wife arrived and very quickly our first son was born, he was over nine pounds. I was the chief cook and bottle washer, constantly bringing hot water into the front room and cleaning up after the mid wife. The midwife's name was Nurse Morgan and she knew how to calm worried parents and as it was our first we were both worried
It was still early morning when it was all over as I remember Doreen laying in bed watching the May day parade on the television.
We called our son Michael Leonard the middle name after my father, So then began the start of my life as a dad (hopefully a good one)
Now as this is a warts and all story of my life a will give you a brief description on some of the fiddles that we got up to in the petrol industry
As this was the late 50s modern technology hadn't arrived and all the trucks were loaded through the top (without meters, only dipsticks) by loaders so we would get the loader to put
a bit more petrol into the truck than was booked out, this extra you sold to friendly garage owners at half price and when you returned to the depot you gave the loader a drink (not beer).
The only thing you had to watch out for was the visits of the customs officer who would unexpectedly arrive in the depot and check a few trucks, but we got to know his routine and were never caught.
Because of safety laws the garage owners were not allowed to climb up on the truck so to check their load you dipped the tank and passed the dipstick down to the owner for him to check, so what we did at the delivery before his you would sell some of his petrol to a friendly garage owner and so as it would not show short you would wipe the dipstick at the full mark with a wet diesel rag so it appeared to show full
(A friendly owner was one who bought wonky petrol)
After you had split a compartment of petrol (some garages did not have the storage to take a full load)you would dip what was left to show the customer and you used to lower the cross bar of the dipstick onto the toe of your boot so that the tank showed 400 gallons instead of 430 gallons that was left in the compartment (30 for yourself) which you sold to the next friendly owner.
We also had a deal going with the foreman at the depot when we bought returns back (Some genuine and some fictitious).
But one of the smartest fiddle was using science to make a quid, I shall elucidate on what I mean. These days most underground storage tanks are very large up to 80,000 litres but in those days a lot of the smaller garages only had small tanks of 500 gallons (2,200 litres), the fill hole was a 3 inch pipe and the dip hole was only an inch tube which went almost to the bottom of the tank, now the specific gravity of standard petrol is less than super petrol, so, after you had filled the customers super tank through the fill hole you the very slowly dribbled a very small amount of standard petrol down the dip tube, this remained on top of the super petrol so when the owner slowly dipped his tank (they always dipped very slow so as not to make waves and give an incorrect reading) the reading he got was a lot higher than what he had in his tank so you charged him for it. Now the unfortunate thing for him was that during the course of selling petrol the two gravity's mixed and his dip went down (by this time we were up ,up and away to a friendly garage) so science had won again (and we never used to blush).
There were dozens of ways to trick the unsuspecting owners and we became quite proficient at all of them.

Whilst reminiscing about my enjoyable time on Canvey Island I can recall one memorial occasion which, at the time, being young was then to me really nothing but looking back in hindsight must have been a terrifying thing for my father.
As I have mentioned in a previous posting we used to go down fishing and lay deadlines, bait them up when the tide was out then go back and collect the fish (if any) as the tide went out, there were usually up between 40 to 60 hooks on the lines and when it was cold it was not a pleasant job trying to push the worms onto the hooks.
The bait we used were rag worms which were large red multi legged worms with a pair of pincers in their head that could give you a nasty nip, these we used to dig up from around the base of the old pier supports.
This derelict pier was just over the sea wall opposite May Avenue and from there we used to walk out at an angle towards Chapman Lighthouse and when we were about a couple of hundred yards from the shore we would bait up our lines, these lines were left out on the mud all the time as nobody interfered with them and as we followed the tide out there was no chance for anyone to go out and steal the fish that were caught on the lines.
Getting back to this incident I recall. Early one morning my dad and I went down to collect any fish and bait up the lines ready for the next tide, it was very overcast with a slight mist coming in from the estuary but not enough to worry about.
Whilst we were concentrating on baiting up we were unaware that the mist had turned into a fog and we could only see 20 to 30 yards and when we went to go back to the shore we could not see it at all and had no idea which direction it laid.
What with all the tramping around the lines footprints everywhere we could not find our tracks we made coming out.
We started to walk one way for a while then tried another direction but we were hopelessly lost.
I had no idea of the danger we were in but I could sense that my dad was getting worried because if we walked towards the river there was what we called the 50 foot drop at the channel’s edge.
By this time there were tracks going in every direction so my dad started to shout out very loud “Can anybody hear me” time and time again but we could only hear the sound of the river which seemed to be coming from every direction and an echo of his voice.
After what seemed like an eternity of shouting there was a voice shouting back to us so my dad shouted back to him asking him to continue to shout so we could find our way back to shore, finally we emerged out of the fog and up onto the sea wall.
It was a bloke who was taking his dog for a walk and was the only one on the sea wall at that time.
The thing is neither my dad nor myself could swim so if that bloke was not there we could have been brown bread.
When you think back we were idiots for not taking safety precautions such as having a compass with us or laying out the deadlines in the shape of an arrow pointing to the shore.
As you get older you realize that fate decides whether you live or die, being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Fear is a very funny thing, for example when I was in the army and stationed in the Canal Zone our camp was on the edge of the Great Lakes and we had to do our share of guard duties and this entailed walking around the inside of the perimeter fence all on your Jack Jones with 10 rounds of live ammunition, every now and again the Arabs (just to annoy us) would fire the odd round into the camp which would alert all the camp, upset everyone’s sleep and cause havoc.
And walking around the perimeter you stood out like dog’s balls against the camp lights but nobody worried about this, you just took your turn of guard duty as a run of the mill thing.
Looking back now it makes me wonder why we were so blasé,

Back at Canvey Doreen's mum was getting to like me better and life was good, one thing about Doreen's mum is that she was a fantastic cook and I have never tasted such nice Yorkshire puddings as she made. One day we went up to the west end of London to see the stage show
West Side Story" in 1959 and had seats in the front row of the dress circle and we ate sweets with rustling paper (what a memory).Doreen was 18 on the 16th October 1960 and we had a quiet wedding at Grays registrar office on Friday October 21st 1960, Harry and Val were there and my mum and Rosie and after the marriage ceremony we drove back to the Blinking Owl cafe on the Southend Arterial Road and had a chicken dinner.
On the Saturday we had a reception at the Lobster Smack pub down Haven Road Canvey, now this is an old smugglers pub dating back to the 17th century with big oak beams we had the reception upstairs and had a good time so this was the end of my roving days and the start of my responsible job of raising a family and being a good boy.
I borrowed a car from one of the Regent drivers for a week (it was a ford consul) and that was our weeks honeymoon.
Looking back on my bachelor days I can honestly say I enjoyed myself, I had done things I should not have done, seen things I should not have seen, and said things I should not have said and told a few “porkies" but this is all a part of life. But l never did anything that I am ashamed of and as I have said the fifties was a wonderful decade and I have many happy memories. Although we got into a quite a few scraps never once did we resort to the use of knives or boots, we more than likely upset a few of the older generation with some of our antics but once again it was, to us, all a bit of fun and we never used violence.
If there is one regret looking back in hindsight it is that I had more beers than women and if I could live my life again I would reverse that as you can always have another beer later but not so another woman.
After we were married we stayed with Doreen’s parents (who lived in the Parkway) for a while, now they only had a small place and we lived in the front room with a fold down divan and there was not much room.
At this time the Canvey Council had a scheme going in which (if you could manage the repayments) gave you a 100% mortgage so all the money you had to find was the stamp duty and solicitors fees.
The criterion used to determine how much they would lend you was that the repayments did not exceed 25% of your net wage, and as I had a good job they lent me all of the 2400 pounds to buy a house.
This worked out at sixteen pounds a month which we could afford so we had a local builder called Charlie Fisk build us a chalet type two bedroom house(with garage)at 266 Thisselt Road which was on a fairly large corner block that overlooked the lake, on the next block to us they built a pair of semi-detached chalets.
Now the estate agent we used to buy the house was also a counselor who sat on the committee for loan applications (so you can see the logic in going to him) his name was Sid Alterman a small Jewish man who also built Canvey Island's first shopping arcade and he was a nice guy.
So within a very short time since our marriage we had moved into our own home with very very little furniture and fittings but room to move around and this also gave the room we were using back to Doreen's parents. As I have said this house had a fairly big garden so I devoted a lot of my time in making a very nice garden plenty of flowers and a nice weeping cherry in the middle of the lawn, I also built a cedar wood and glass lean-to on the back to give us more space to put things.

Part 40 TRUCK DRIVING IN THE FIFTIES AND SIXTIES 2nd installment
Modern trucks although being huge (the petrol tankers out here can carry up to 60,000 litres and weigh over 55 tonnes) can be driven like a car, power steering, and power brakes. Fully synchromesh or automatic gearboxes, electric wipers with blades 18 inches to two feet long and a 90 degree sweep that cleans 90% of the windscreen, soft driving seats with air or spring suspension with dozens of different positions, cabs independently mounted on the chassis with either rubber pads or airbags and computers that tell you everything about the vehicle, radios and CD players and very good noise insulation and even petite women drive them.
When I try to describe what it was like driving in the smog in London in the fifties the modern day drivers think I’m pulling their leg but the smog was so thick that the bus conductors walked in front of the bus and guided the driver along the kerb, with the tankers being "cab-over " or forward control it was a bit easier to see the centre line and creep along it, the hard part came when you got to a corner or a roundabout and had to find the correct exit, many a time I have driven around the Chiswick roundabout three or four times until I found the right exit for the Great West Road.
In one particularly thick pea sourer it took us nearly 2 hours drive through London from Canning Town to The Chiswick roundabout
Another problem was abandoned cars people just gave up driving, left their cars and walked home, and quite often you drove into the depot and found out that a lot of cars had followed you in, cars tended to follow big trucks because as they drove through the smog they dispersed the smog and left a relatively clear area.
I will digress from driving now and tell you about the great London smog of December 1952, it contaminated a huge area for 48 hours and caused 4,000 official deaths in that period but it is acknowledged that up to 12,000 (including the 4,000) died in the following months from respiratory problems due to that smog.
This was the catalyst that started the legislation of the Clean Air act of 1956 and although there was a few more smogs after that, the one I got caught in was in 1962, there was a bit improvement in the atmosphere
I was a bit of a chauvinistic pig in the old days and I got annoyed when I saw women driving big rigs (is nothing sacred) the only women that drove trucks in the fifties and that wasn't many looked like huge dock workers. Sorry all you women drivers I hope you don't report me to the equal opportunities or anti-discrimination board, but I have mellowed with age and even accept girls playing in my grandson’s cricket team (reluctantly)
It’s a wonder that all of the drivers those days didn’t end up with stomach ulcers (I did) as the standard breakfast was fried egg, fried bacon, fried sausage and fried bread and all of this sat on the plate in a sea of oil, you ate this full breakfast plus about a dozen cups of tea and then sat in the drivers seat for a long period without any exercise.

TRUCK DRIVING IN THE FIFTIES AND SIXTIES 1st Installment
Having driven trucks for a living from 1952 until I retired in 2001 am including this article in my memories to see if any old truck driver can recall the things I mention and also any young one's can realize how easy it is to drive a big truck now. When I first started driving for the Regent Oil Co (later to become Texaco) in 1957 the first truck I drove was an eight wheeled rigid Leyland Octopus, this was the largest tanker allowed on the road at that time carrying four thousand gallons of petrol (18,250 litres) and weighing 24 tons, no power steering, vacuum brakes, and a very slow crash gearbox with a top speed of 29 miles per hour (46 k.p.h.)
This may sound slow but as the maximum speed limit was only 20 M.P.H. (32k.p.h.) as it was then, it was sufficient. Last week I drove for a while at this speed and realised how slow it was yet we drove for up to eleven hours a day at this speed. This vehicle had a huge steering wheel so as to give you the leverage to get around the corners, and I, being only 5ft 6in and weighing 9stone 4lbs wringing wet, had to stand up in the cab to get around the tight corners also the gearbox was so slow when changing gears that you counted 1, 2, slowly before dropping into the next gear you could pull it through fast but being a crash box if you misjudged it you jarred your wrist.
Brakes were another problem being only vacuum so when descending steep hills you pushed your foot hard on the pedal, your back digging into the back of the hard seat to give you more power, pulled up the long handbrake lever which was connected to a cable drum and a ratchet and hoped nothing got in the way and at the bottom of the hill you slammed the handbrake lever forward to release the ratchet and away you went.
They also had a very heavy clutch.
And to top it all there was virtually no noise insulation so also there were no radios fitted we would not have been able to hear them anyway.
Because of the low speeds and not too powerful an engine we used angel gear a lot, the best place for this was Cockfosters Hill with a long downhill slope and a long hill going up with no side streets at all so it was into angel gear until you going up the hill you reached the speed that you could engage top gear at maximum revs (bearing in mind it was a crash box)
You also had to be double-jointed to drive at night as the light box was situated above the electrical isolation switch (which was mandatory for petrol tankers) at the back of the cab behind your right arm so you felt for the right switch to cut your headlights to indicate to passing trucks it was clear to pull over. Windscreen wipers were another handicap being only nine inches long and a sweep of 45 degrees and if I recall correctly also vacuum operated and when it snowed and stuck to the windscreen the area to see through was minuscule and the seat was a very hard contraption being hooked directly onto the back of the cab with only three height positions and no forward movement.

This period you could call the cream of my youth, I was single, had a car,(A black 1952 ford V8 Pilot with a lovely comfortable back seat) had one of the best driving jobs in the transport industry, plenty of money in my pocket and only my dick to keep, on top of this it was during (What I consider) to be the greatest decade of the twentieth century, the fifties, there was very little unemployment, no violence in the pubs or streets, no racial problems and the rise of some of the greatest legends in the pop world.
There was Elvis Priestly, The Big Bopper, Paul Anka, Bill Haley and the Comets, Johnny Ray, Frankie Lane, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Gene Vincent, Ricky Valence and more.
I can remember standing for hours around the juke box feeding it money and listening to all of these stars; it was sixpence a record or five for two bob. It is impossible to describe the feeling of enjoyment standing around the juke box while this fantastic new music was belting out and when songs like "shake rattle and roll" and “rock around the clock" were released they were played none stop for days
When we came back onto the Island after a nights drinking binge we would drive to the Unic cafe, (which was next to Taylors garage down the village )drive up onto the pavement and skid to a halt about six inches from the plate glass window, (1ust to scare the birds sifting by the window, as you will have guessed we were show offs and lairs) swagger into the cafe' and throw a couple of bob to the girls standing around the juke box for them to play some music and then go into the back room where we would have a game of cards (the owner did not mind this providing we would keep buying food and teas and he also liked a game of cards) we played pontoon or nine card brag at sixpence a hand and he would keep the cafe' open until we all went, sometimes this was as late as early morning.
Now I will say this that during all of my teenage years I never once heard any talk of drugs or knew of anyone who took them, in fact, we did not even know they existed, and I cannot recall anybody even mentioning the word suicide (in fact life was too good to even contemplate it.

By this time Harry had got married to Valerie Hazelton and I started to go out with Reggie Jackson, Lennie Hooker and Brian Eastop.
I had by then brought my first car a 1952 ford V8 Pilot black in colour and in good nick.
We were very smart dressers and we used to go up to Maxie Cohen one of the best Jewish tailors in East London, his shop was by the side of Aldgate bus terminus and his suits cost 25 pounds each and his Crombie overcoats were 20 pounds and as we were only earning about fourteen pounds a week you can see how dear they were, we had two or three fittings and looked quite smart, every time we went up to Aldgate for our fittings we visited Tubby Issacs jellied eel stall on the corner of Petticoat Lane and the Mile End Road (his jellied eels were acknowledged as the best in London).
I was also a Teddy Boy with my fingertip length velvet collared jacket and pockets, drainpipe trousers, and shoe lace tie, not forgetting the thick brothel creeper shoes and brightly coloured socks. Every weekend Reggie, Lennie, Brian and myself used to go up to the Big Smoke (London ) for drinking sessions and visited all of the well known pubs such as The Thomas A Becket and The World Turned Upside Down in the Old Kent Road, The Blind Beggar and the Hospital Tavern in the Mile End Road and the Dew Dragon in Hackney who used to put on a drag show every Sunday morning.
It was a good thing that there was no breathalyzer in those days because although we never got really drunk we were always over the limit. On the way home we would sometimes call in the Green Gate at Ilford for the stage show and they had a singer who thought he was Frank Sinatra.
As I have said when we were drinking we never got drunk, we were always in complete control of our faculties although I did get drunk one Easter down the Monica, we decided to be posh and have liqueurs after every glass of beer, I was drinking drambuie which is a lovely sweet scotch liqueur when I finally wobbled down the back path into our garden I was as sick as a dog over the wire fence of the chicken run, for a week the chooks were pissed and egg production fell but did they look happy. In the summer months we stopped going to London and went drinking in Southend-on Sea as it was full of day trippers who came from London on coach outings
and there was always plenty of singing and dancing going on plus a fair bit of crumpet.
Every weekend scores of charabancs (coaches) used to come down to Southend on day trips to be beside the seaside and, in the autumn to see the lights, on the way home they stopped at a pub for a drink and a sing-song they were usually three parts pissed when they left Southend
the usual stops were the Tarpots pub at Benfleet or the Crown pub at Pitsea, these pubs were only a 25 minute drive from Canvey so we used to go over there looking for a kiss and a cuddle we always had a good time singing and dancing with the tipsy birds and many a promise was made and broken (we had no scruples then).Well I mean you were asked some silly questions such as "Will you come up to London to see me? "Do you love me?. "Please give me your address so I can write to you" (of course we never gave our real address) and all of these silly questions were being asked whilst we were trying to get into their pants, so naturally you promised the world and reneged when the coach left. (Well what would you have done?.)
Lennie was regularly out of work but we always took him out with us because he was our friend and we knew when he was in work he would spend all of his money on us.

We both worked there for about a year (I think) and then another stroke of luck came my way, next door to where I lived in Beach Road there were a couple called Watts, their house was the old Small Gains school house and they had no children, Ernie Watts was a tight old sod, he grew lovely dahlias in his back garden and he would say to anyone who admired his flowers “Would you like a bunch?" and if they said yes he would pick them a bunch and say to them "that will be two and sixpence" and hold out his hand but the good thing about him was he worked for the Regent Oil Company down Haven Road.
He asked me one day if I would like to drive the tankers as he knew the boss and could get me a start.
Now to get a job driving a tanker then (and even now) was like finding gold dust so I said yes and he got me a start, this was in 1958 and was the start of my most satisfying driving job I have ever had, the work was easy and the money was good. The largest truck allowed at that time on the road was a twenty-four ton eight wheeled vehicle carrying a maximum load of 4000 gallons of petrol or 3600 gallons of diesel and this was the vehicle I drove, the maximum speed by law then was twenty miles an hour (an average speed of 16 m.p.h.)so the furthest we could go in an eleven hour day was 80 miles each way and as we could do the whole job in about nine hours we had a couple of hours free time sifting in cafes drinking dozens of cups of tea.
Regent Oil had the contract to supply aviation fuel to all of the American Air Force bases in England and we went to Lakenheath, Mildenhall, Thefford and Bentwaters in Norfolk, Waterbeach in Cambridgeshire and Weathersfield in Essex.
Then in the early sixties the government raised the speed limit for trucks up to 30 miles per hour and the Oil Company's wanted us to drive at the new speed for the same money but the union said "what will you offer us for driving 50% faster" and after a lot of meetings and discussions they said" all we can offer you is sixpence per hour "so we told them that all we could give them was raising the average speed from 16 to 17 miles per hour and this is what we did until we were brought out by the Texaco Oil Company and we negotiated a productivity agreement for a 50% increase in our basic rate and we drove as fast as the law allowed and as the motorways were being built we went a lot farther and faster.
With the opening of the Dartford Tunnel the area we covered was increased a lot and we could cover all of Kent in a day, before the tunnel was built we had to drive into London and go over Tower Bridge to get into Kent so our range was limited, because of the laws governing to carriage of petroleum fuels whenever we went through the Dartford Tunnel we had to wait for an escort before we could enter the tunnel and an escort vehicle traveled in front and behind a convoy of petrol tankers.
After two years at Regent Oil I became one of the union delegates involved in many an altercation with the firm over money and work practices, I was also the union collector and used to stay back at work for a couple of hours on a Thursday collecting members fees which I paid to the branch secretary every couple of months and received a 5% commission for my troubles.
It was whilst I was working at Regent that Ernie Watts became ill, he never used to eat much on the road just a few sandwiches he brought from home, whereas we used to have a fry up every morning which was eggs, bacon, beans, tomatoes and a fried slice, we used to all drive to the nearest transport cafe (either Bob's of Romford or the Halfway House at Horndon)and we would drive like mad to get a parking space.
Ernie was always complaining about stomach pains and we used to tell him to spend some of his money and buy some breakfasts.
He went into hospital for exploratory surgery and they found he was riddled with cancer so they just sowed him up and sent him home but the sad thing was they pumped him full so full of drugs that he did not know he was ill, when anyone went to visit him at home he sat in his chair, his stomach bloated looking like death warmed up and would say to us "I'm getting better now and I will soon be back at work with you" and finally he died so all his frugal spending habits(watching where every penny went) was all in vain.

I left Rotary Hoes and then came a couple of years of fun with my friend Harry, who by then had done his National service, he just did his two years and went to Korea and we jumped from job to job enjoying ourselves, as we only had our “know what" to support we did not give a dam and here are some of the jobs we had.
We both went down to Shell haven as they were looking for labourers at Frankie Pile, a firm that was pile driving for the refinery tanks to be built on now this big Irish ganger came up to us in his big green wellies and said to us “It’s all pick and shovel work here" so Harry said “well I'm picking myself up and going" but I started work and my job was to hang up the top of this pile frame, twenty feet up in the air and guide the skips of cement into the top of the pile tube when it was lifted up by the crane, I stuck this for a couple of months then left
I then met up with Harry again and we both got a job with British Railways, the first job they gave us was on night work when the trains had stopped running unloading ballast from railway carriages, there were two men to every carriage and you shovelled the ballast out through a small door in the side onto the tracks so as it could be pushed under the railway lines, each carriage had two hurricane lamps which you balanced on the side of the carriage so as you could see what you were doing.

But Harry and me decided this was too hard so we kept throwing pieces of ballast at other peoples lamps and knocking them over, in the end the foreman got the shits and we got transferred to another job, this was a wonderful job as we were sent to Stanford-Le -Hope where a single track ran to the refineries at Shell haven (a distance of about six miles)
there was only us two and a ganger who we called Marcus Aralias (because he was an East European) and all we had to do was amble along the track checking for loose fishplate bolts and banging in the loose track nails (and clearing the odd weed or two)
when we had a lunch break Marcus went into a workers hut that was by the side of the track (this was made of old railway sleepers) and me and Harry used to stay outside now this hut had an open coal fire in the middle and Marcus always used to cook his breakfast on it and it was because of this we got the sack.
What happened was one of us (Harry says it was me and I say it was him) quietly climbed up on the roof of the hut and placed a sheet of tin with a brick on top over the chimney, all was quiet for a while then the door burst open and Marcus came rushing out, a pal shade of green and almost choking to death, we thought we had killed him and then for some unknown reason when he came recovered enough to speak he blew his top and told us to piss off and so ended another job.
Harry and I used to go to Southend a lot in the summer and go to the Gliderdrome which was a roller skating rink, neither of us could roller skate but we just went for a laugh and knocking everyone over as we tried to get around the outside of the rink, we used to form a long line and swing around and then the last person at the end of the row would let go and fly out and hit the outside wall.
It was whilst I was going with Harry that we got barred from the Premier Club, now this was a nice club down Lionel Road were we used to go for a few beers and a game of snooker we enjoyed going there but what happened was (and Harry says it was me and I blamed him) we were mucking about playing a game of snooker and one of us pushed the cue right through the green baize on the best table, the manager did his block and threw us out.
Then the truck driving urge burst out from both of us and we got a job with Hall & Company, which was a large sand and ballast merchant, driving tipper lorries we really enjoyed it working from a sand pit at Lindford we used to do six to eight loads a day to Shell haven or six loads a day to the new town they were building at Basildon.
We used to drive like mad and then go to a cafe in Stanford -Le Hope for our dinner, (there was a film made at about this time called Hell Drivers starring Stanley Baker about tipper drivers and we drove just like him). There was a driver called Jack Truss so we called him Jockstrap," one with a big nose he was Simon De Bergerac and another one who was fat we called 'the slug."
There was also a cafe' just down the road from the pit at Lindford where Harry and me used to go and I had a crush on the owners daughter and one Christmas She invited me over to spend the festive season with her and her mother, I did not get my leg over but I had a very enjoyable time, she had a tape recorder and we sang love songs to each other and recorded them, I could not sing then and I still cannot sing but I can tell you this when someone sings love songs to you whilst draped all over you like an octopus it is a wonderful experience.

So began another phase of my life back in civvy street and 21 years old By then the new housing estate at Harold Hill was completed and my dad was working for Rotary Hoes at West Hordon as a lathe operator and he got me a job there as a radial drill operator on permanent nights I did not really like the work and my truck driving bug was calling.
It was during this time that Nobby Gubb got married to Avril Lewis and I was best man at this wedding. Avril's father used to drive a van as a salesman for Goulding where Nobby used to work.
I stayed at this job until my father died on the 2Oth October 1955 in Oldchurch Hospital from a large malignant brain tumor, he was always complaining of headaches but on his last check-up there was no sign of a tumor (so the doctors report showed) but looking back in retrospect I sometimes wonder if this pain could have been the cause of his violent temper sometimes.
There is no excuse for domestic violence but it could have been a reason and he used the booze to try and deaden the pain.
I used to go and visit him but seeing my father go from a 16 stone giant to a bag of bones in a short space of time after his operation has put me off hospital visits and I only go if it is necessary.
Because there was no such thing as savings in our house the problem arose about the cost of the funeral as my mother had no money but luckily his work mates had a collection at work and got enough money for the funeral and a headstone on his grave, he was buried at St Katherine's Church on Canvey Island in a double plot. Sadly to say I had no remorse or wailing when my father died, to me it was just another death, looking back in retrospect maybe I was a bit hard on him as he did try his best with his limited education, we never went hungry and always had a roof over our heads and I can never recall him ever being out of work and he always worked hard.
At this time my mother, who was now only getting a widows pension became a foster mother for Dr, Banardos Home and used to care for young babies (usually colored), she looked after these for a couple of months and then got another one to care for.
Then she was given a six month old Jamaican baby called Rosie Isaac's and then when it was time for her mother to take her back she did not want her as she was a single nurse and did not want the responsibility and just disappeared so my mum wanted to adopt her but as she was a widow they would not let her so she became a foster mother instead which involved regular visits from the inspector checking on Rosie's care.
When Rosie grew up she used to dread these visits as she thought that the inspector might say that my mum was too old to look after her and take her away.
Rosie stayed with my mum until she was 18 and got herself a job and began to buy her own house.
Pat by now had some kids and became insanely jealous of Rosie because she thought my mum was giving more attention to Rosie instead of her children but as mum said Rosie only had her to rely on.
Rosie has never tried to find her real mother because as she said her mum is Mrs. Terry who loved her and fed and clothed her all her early years.

Looking back now it seems a scary thing to be doing because, as I have said, the Egyptians didn't exactly love us and once in a while they would fire the odd shot over the camp fence and the guard would then sound the alarm and every one would have to get up and go on standby
(The locals only did this to annoy us, and they were right)
But then I never worried about doing guard duty then and just regarded it as another job.
We had some Egyptian civilians working in the camp there was the char walla who used to make the tea and coffee in the recreation rooms and the dobie walla who ran an ironing business in the camp and was the first human steam iron I have ever seen
There was no electricity for him so he used a flat iron and an open fire heated up the iron and then took a mouthful of water and sprayed it through a gap in his front teeth and it was a very fine spray.
I flew home for demob in February 1955 just on my twenty-first birthday. And do you know what I cannot recall ever having a birthday party, not even for my sixteenth or my twenty-first
During my time in the army I had learnt a lot of good things, I had learnt how to look after myself, iron, sew on buttons, take a pride in my appearance, be self sufficient and most of all a pride in myself.
When you got issued with your uniform at the start you were given two pairs of boots with toe caps that were all pimply and dull and you had to spend weeks just polishing the toe caps so that they shone like a mirror.
You used to bang the toes with a spoon to flatten the pimples and then iron them with a hot table spoon and spit and polish for hours on end. When all of us raw recruits assembled on the parade ground the first day at Blandford the sergeant major (who looked and sounded like the sergeant major in "It aint arf hot) said to us the following things
firstly he told us that he was like a piece of rope around our necks "you pull with me" he said "and we will get along fine but you pull against me and I'll bloody well strangle you all"
He then said you are now wearing the Queens uniform so every time you go out in it you will walk with pride, throw your chest out and be proud of your uniform and of yourself and walk tall.
This has paid off because I always walk proudly and look people straight in their eyes and if I happen to hear a band playing marching music I swing my arms and march off down the street (silly as a two bob watch).
I feel very despondent when I see the young people of today shuffling along the road, eyes looking down on the ground and a bent back
They seem to have no pride in themselves and no get up and go attitude. The thing is you cannot buy pride, it has to be instilled in ones mind by ones own ambition.

As you will have noticed the British Tommy is a very well behaved human being (Ha Ha !!!!)
Because of the unhygienic conditions in Egypt dysentery was a constant source of infection and when you had it your motions flowed out of you like water and as we all slept in the nude (because it was so hot)it was nothing to see a soldier running across the sand bollock naked heading for the toilet with this stream of watery turds pouring out of his arse.
Everyone used to sing out loud when they were sitting on the toilet, now this might sound silly but the reason was this, when anyone had dysentery and they rushed over to the toilet they would throw themselves on the nearest seat now if you were sitting on that seat you can imagine the mess you would end up with so you sang as loud as you could to avoid anyone sitting on you and let them know the seat wasn't vacant
Because of the conflict with the Egyptians all vehicles had to have an armed escort every time they went out of the camp and all the towns and villages were out of bounds so you stayed in camp all of the time, all you could do after hours was to go to the NAAFI for a beer and a singsong or the Salvation Army hut for a read and a cup of tea and with no women around at all I can see now where that phrase “Your all a bunch of wankers" comes from because that's what we were But the Army had a bit of compassion, as we could not take any leave in Egypt every nine months they flew us to Cyprus to the Famagusta Holiday camp for three weeks leave (I think this holiday camp was owned by the army)the plane was an old Dakota an old World War two twin engine plane that shook and rattled but got us there and back to Egypt.
I have no need to explain to you what we did in those three weeks but just to say that there is no such thing as an ugly woman1 (especially when you are drunk) some are just better looking than others but we also did act respectably some of the time and hired a car and toured all around the Island and saw most of the well known places and drank many, many bottles of wine with the villagers.
I thought that I had a poor upbringing but it was in Egypt that I learnt the meaning of poverty.
We used to have the Egyptians come around the camp clearing up the rubbish and taking the swill from the cookhouse (all the left over food and what had been thrown away by the soldiers)and as they tipped the dustbins into the truck they would scrabble through the swill picking out half eaten sausages, chop bones and bits of meat and then either eat it or put it in a bag to take home now some of this swill had been out in the hot sun for hours1 sometimes days and full of maggots yet they still ate it.
We sometimes had to go to Tel-EI Kebir for spares and we used to take it in turns to go so as to relieve the boredom of the camp and the road ran alongside the Sweet Water Canal for some of the trip, now this is supposed to be the clean water canal but it was putrid as the Egyptians used to wash their clothes in it and even some of the sewerage ran into it and we were forbidden to swim or wade in it.
My job at Shandur was a very diverse one as besides inspecting the road vehicles I also inspected and drove bren gun carriers, half tracks and small tanks, we had a large testing area within the camp so I had a lot of fun. But everyone had to do their share of guard duty at night and this involved patrolling the perimeter barbed wire fence on your own for two hour shifts with four hours rest, we were issued with ten live rounds of ammunition. As the perimeter fence went around the outside of all the tents and workshops there was no shelter whatsoever so on a moonlight night you stood out like dog’s balls against the sand dunes, all alone with just your rifle and you had to be on the alert all of the time as the duty officer would be walking around checking on you.

Then my dream came to a sudden end, it is a requirement in the army that all regular soldiers have to do at least one overseas tour and on this particular day the sergent in charge of the inspection team called me into the office and told me the bad news and on 9th November 1953 I boarded the troopship Dunera on my way to the Canal Zone in Egypt.
Now this is where an unlucky break came my way ,the overseas postings at that time were Germany, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya, Gibraltar, Cyprus, Malta and the Canal zone, the worst one being The canal Zone, well that's where I was posted.
I got myself a good job on board which was cookhouse fatigues, this involved peeling the spuds, cleaning up and buttering hundreds of slices of bread with a four inch paint brush, what you did you laid all of the slices on the table then dipped the paint brush into the runny margarine and then just painted the slices. The big advantage with working in the galley was you did not have to queue up for your food and you got extra rations.
We went through the Straits of Gibraltar then on to Port Said in Egypt we arrived they early in the morning and disembarked and on to a train to take us to Tel-EI Kebir which was the main British army camp in the Canal Zone, this is situated in the middle of the desert.
Because the Egyptians were at loggerheads over the ownership of the Suez Canal they were very uncooperative and kept shunting the train into sidings for hours just to delay us and we did not arrive at the camp until late at night and starving so the cookhouse rustled up some food for us and we scoffed everything, ate slices and slices of this bread which we thought was whole meal, it wasn't until the next day that we discovered that it was white bread but the flour was infested with weevils (a common occurrence out there) so they just cooked the flour and the weevils and they then go crunchy, but I think even if we had known this we would still have eaten the bread as we were that hungry.
Tel-EI Kebir was only a transit camp and after a week we were posted to a R.E.M.E. workshops at Shandur on the edge of the Great Bitter lakes and because of my inspection experience I was given the job of inspecting the vehicles when they came into the workshops
We all slept in tents which were very small and took six beds and we were constantly having disinfect the beds for bed bugs, these came out at night from the crevices of the bed and sucked your blood and left little sores all over you.
As there was no sewerage huge holes was dug out of the sand by the engineers twenty feet long ten feet wide and about fifteen feet deep and over these holes were built movable wooden shithouses1 the buildings had a central gangway and toilets were built each side no doors and the holes in the seats dropping straight down into the hole.
When this hole finally came to within three feet from the top another huge hole was dug and the whole building shifted on skids over the new hole and the other one filled in and warning signs put around the freshly filled holes otherwise you would have disappeared from sight if you had walked over it. One night when one of the holes was nearly full someone dropped a lighted newspaper into the hole and the sewerage gases exploded and burnt the building to the ground.
Another one of their diabolical tricks when the level got near the top was to light a large rolled up sheet of newspaper, drop it into the hole and hope it would float along and singe someone's bum.

It was in the West country that I had my first taste of “scrumpy' a rough brew of cider (nothing like your Bulmers clear cider)this concoction was brewed by the local brewery and was cloudy and very strong and after about three pints you were pissed but unfortunately it did not take effect until you walked outside into the fresh air so would be chatting up the local birds, think you are on a good thing take them outside and end up wobbly legged and as sick as a dog plus the fact you ended up with brewers droop, a sore head and no bird. This fraternizing with the local girls caused quite a few fights between the local lads and the soldiers, as with all garrison towns the girls from all around flocked to the town every weekend for a good time.
After I passed my trade test I was posted to Southern Command workshops at Maidstone in Kent.
Now I will digress a bit now I have always believed that luck plays a very important part of everyone's life and this was where a bit of luck fell my way, after I was only at Maidstone about a week they asked for a volunteer who had a driving licence and was used to driving trucks to join an inspection team so I jumped in and volunteered, now there is an old saying in the army that you volunteer for nothing but this was a fantastic job.
The inspection team consisted of a sergeant, a corporal and a tradesmen (me) and we had a Humber station wagon and travelled all over Southern Command inspecting the vehicles of all the units in that area.
In the army there are two vehicle inspections a year, one by a civilian team and another one six months later by an army team(us).
We did no square bashing or marching, we just drove up to the unit to be inspected and they put us in a spare barrack room we got up in the morning, no parade or inspection ambled down the cookhouse and had our breakfast then started work.
Southern Command area covered all of Kent and a bit of Surrey and Sussex a beautiful area as Kent is known as the Garden of England.
We inspected between five and six vehicles a day, we gave each vehicle a thorough inspection and then went for a ten mile road test so once again I was in my glory (cab happy)
It was at this job that I became a very proficient driver as we had to inspect all army vehicles from a jeep and land rover to the large gun towing vehicles. I will digress again and give you a history of Canvey Island ,it was reclaimed from mud flats in the Thames Estuary by a Dutch engineer in 1663 who built a sea wall around the area and through a series of dykes and ditches drained the land and pumped all of the water out so Canvey lies below the sea level at high tide.
and for this task he was given a land grant of one third of the reclaimed land and Canvey stilt has two old round Dutch cottages from the seventeenth century. Whilst I was working with the inspection team a disaster struck the East Coast of England with terrifying flooding and on Canvey Island at 1 a.m. on the 31 January 1953, a combination of extremely high spring tides, a strong gale force Westerly wind that stopped the tide going out and the following tide was so high that it breached the sea wa111 the sea poured in and the water rose so quick that people were trapped in their beds and houses many woke up with the noise of rushing water and stepped out of bed and into water1 electric power had gone and it was pitch black, the height of the water varied between a few feet and 15 feet
307 people died in this disaster and on Canvey Island 58 died.
Because the flooding also affected parts of Kent we were mobilised and sent to help in rescue work, with the high four wheel drive army vehicles we could travel over the flooded areas we worked all day shifting people from their houses and trying to clear up the mess, it wasn1t till that evening I got a weeks compassionate leave to go home to Canvey to see how my family were. When I got home most of the water had subsided and there was just mud all over the place, our bungalow had about two feet of water and all of the carpets and bedding was damaged the government started a flood relief programme and came around distributing bedding and pieces of carpet and removing the old stuff. The house was still very damp and they used giant hot air blowers from the Royal Air Force to dry the houses out.
After a week of just swanning around the island I went back to the inspection team.

I was now developing the urge but I am not going to recount all of my sexual experiences in this autobiography as I think these things are personal and a gentleman does not disclose such matters.
I will just mention one thing, there was this girl on the Island who was quite good looking but you could never get into her pants but she had one redeeming factor going for her, she would usually give you a hand job (either on the top of the bus, on the train on the way home from Southend, the back row of the cinema or by her front door)and she always had a handkerchief available so we nicknamed her the five fingered widow.
I remember once we were snogging late one night outside her house when her old man came to the front door and called out "Is that you ?” and she called back "I'm coming dad, I'm coming" and I whispered in her ear "and so am I and so am I.
I think that's where the expression "A cock in the hand is worth two in the trousers "came from
For all this she was a very nice girl and I think she remained a virgin until she got married.(and she didn't end up with hairs in the palm of her hand). I have always found out that no man tells the truth about sexual matters, for example if you ask any man how he got on with a bird he rarely says no good but always exaggerates things, All I will hope is when I die and am laying in the coffin with my arms folded and looking up to the heavens all the women I have rooted come floating past me one at a time, so if you ever lift the lid and see me laying there with a silly grin on my face you will know why.
Then on my eighteenth birthday I was called up for National Service, you could either do two years National Service at 25 shillings a week or sign on for three years with the regular army and four years in the Reserves at over two pounds a week, also if you signed on you had more chance of picking your trade other wise you took a chance and with the army if you were a mechanic you could end up a cook and if you were a clerk they stuck you in the infantry. Recapping on my three years in the work force I think that I had a very good initiation as both of the foremen in charge of me were very understanding and helpful to someone who was nervous and worried about the transition from school to work. It is these people who you first meet in your way through life that can determine your whole outlook on life and the way in which you carry on your career.
So I enlisted on the 31st March 1952 for three years and went into the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers as a vehicle mechanic, I did eight weeks initial training and square bashing at Blandford in Dorset then I did a fourteen week trade course at Taunton in Somerset where we learnt every thing about repairing vehicles

At the end of the war the government decided to rehouse all the bombed out people in new towns built around the outskirts of London.
The first one was built at Crawley in Surrey 9where my uncle Frank and aunt Nell moved to).
The other ones were at built at Hainault,Stevenage and then they started to build a new one at Harold Hill, now to get all of these workers to the site they ran special buses from all over the place and one bus ran from Canvey Island so my dad got a job with W. & C. French who were the main contractors for the site and caught the bus every morning.
After a year at Gouldings my father got me a job at Harold Hill as a plant fitters mate which involved helping the fitters repair hoists, generators, dump trucks punners, cement
mixers, and it was here I learnt to drive at the age of 16
How I could do this was as follows. When they built these new towns what they did was to acquire
hundreds of acres, demolish all of the old houses and farm buildings and put in all of the roads first, now this entire area was classed as a private site until all of the houses were built and it was handed over to the London County Council so all of the dump trucks and other building vehicles could run all over the site without having to be taxed, any body could drive on the site without a license so this was my dream come true, every time something broke down on the site I would volunteer to drive out and repair it, if it was a big job I would pester the mechanic to let me drive him out and they usually did, if I went out on my own I would drive round and around the site for hours just to get to the job and I became a very good driver, I was also the teaboy so I drove around to the canteen with the orders I passed my test when I was exactly 17 and a half, the youngest you could be to get your license. I enjoyed working those two years at Harold Hill, the foreman mechanic was Billy O'nealle and he taught me a lot about engines and generators he also used to send me out in the van for nothing just to let me drive around (I was what you would call cab happy).
My brother Roy had joined the Royal Navy at the age of fifteen as a boy seaman and was stationed at Shotley near lpswich in Suffolk and I popped up to see him a few times whilst he was in training

It was about this time that I first met Harry Court and became friends with him (a friendship that has lasted nearly 50 years and is still my best friend) his parents were fairly old and he used to go to boarding school and I met him on our holidays, the first time he came around our house to meet me was nearly the last as our dog Suckey attacked him as he opened the back gate and tore the sleeve of his new jacket and chased him down the path. We carried on going together and got in quite a few scrapes; Harry's parents were very quiet and weren’t very pleased with him going out with me. I used to buy some French letters from an older boy at work for bravado (I don't know why as we would not have known how to use them),we used to blow them up in the pictures and let them go and they looked like a giant airship as they floated across the screen, we also used to fill them up with water and drop them from the balcony into the stalls and it is amazing how much water one holds (what horrible little prats we were then) and I gave a couple to Harry which he put in the inside pocket of his jacket, well Harry's mum decided to wash the jacket so she cleaned out his pockets and found the French letters and with her very staid upbringing she nearly had a heart attack so when she made Harry tell her where he had got them my name was mud from then on. Then when he went back to school I developed a friendship with Nobby Gubb and Derrick Kneller, (Nobby worked at the Wireworks with me.
We went together for three years until I did my army service, It was always a laugh when we went around Nobby's house as his mum had a woman living there who wasn't the full quid1 (a few sandwiches short of a picnic) she was about twenty-two and her name was Doreen and we called her Dopey Doreen (apologies to my wife) we used to take the mickey out of her something horrible and pretend we were going to molest her (we were not very nice young boys then)I still haven't yet worked out if the look in her eyes was fear or hope. Also near Nobby lived a girl called Dawn Bromley and we used to tease her by constantly telling her that we would love to see the crack of dawn. We used to go by train into Southend most weekends in the summer1 have a feed at Peggy's which was at the top of Pier Hill (they had all of the food in hot trays in the front window) then down to the seafront and the amusement arcades, in the evening we used to go roller skating at the Gliderdrome.
Southend has the longest pier in the World stretching for one and a quarter miles into the Thames estuary and during the summer months the whole of the seafront is illuminated by millions of coloured lights which attracted big crowds from London and the surrounding areas, and, of course plenty of girls who came down to enjoy themselves and we did our best to keep them happy and satisfy them in all they wanted.

Not too many people owned cars in the early fifties so the main method of transport was the bus or train The Canvey and District Bus Co with a bus depot at Leigh Beck was the Island's local company .
Trains were also very popular as many Islanders travelled up to London every day to work and it was the best and fastest way to get to Southend at the weekend, the only disadvantage was the last train left at about ten thirty p.m. which restricted the amount of enjoyment you could have.
The taxi rank outside Benfleet Station did quite a good business running passengers onto the Island who had missed the last bus, and as the same three or four drivers were always around we got to know them very well, Sometimes after walking home from Southend we would get to Benfleet and the walk along Lakeside path would be too much so we would take a cab
As I said at the start not many people had cars so the fact that there was a lot of unmade roads on the Island didn't really worry residents but what a change I saw when I came back on holiday North Avenue which used to have the odd car parked in it was chock-a block with cars parked both sides of the road with a small gap down the middle. and so too was East and West Crescent
Canvey in the fifties being relatively undeveloped had quite a few lovers lanes where you could park and keep twiddling the radio knob to try and get Radio Luxembourg.
I am more than likely bias but people of my age went through their youth in what I consider to be the greatest decade of the twentieth century, the Fifties, very little unemployment that I recall, good wages, no racial problems, no drug taking and friendships made that still survive after over fifty years and last but not least the multitude of stars that peaked during the Fifties - Elvis Presley, Johnny Ray, Frankie Laine, Paul Anka, Little Richard, Bill Haley, The Big Bopper, Buddy Holly, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Gene Vincent, Richard Valence, I could go on and on and what a pleasure it was to stand around the juke box and listen to them.
It is impossible to describe the euphoria that came over us as we stood around the juke box and heard for the first time ?Rock around the Clock? and ?Heartbreak Hotel?.
”Dianna” and “Why do fools fall in love. On the debit side was the big flood of '53 but I think the good times outweighed the bad.
Some people reading them might deduce that the youngsters of the fifties were a bunch of hooligans but nothing could be further from the truth, we may have upset some of the older residents with our outlandish behavior and dress sense and our flamboyant attitude but in all of us there was no malice, vindictiveness or vandalism.
Our only aim was to have a good time and enjoy ourselves, there were very very few fights with any of the mainland and London boys that came to Canvey for a holiday because we all had the same goal ,duck hunting, a good pissup and a good feed.
I myself cannot recall any of the Canvey girls being nasty or anti-social they were all nice and they looked forward to the summer months as much as us boys for the many new lads that would come down to Canvey on holiday.

I celebrated my sixteenth birthday on Canvey in 1950 and we longed for summer to arrive as, living at a seaside resort (rather an exaggeration for Canvey but there) the summer season was crumpet hunting time for the local youths at the holiday camps during the day.
And as the Tarpots Hotel and The Gun Inn were quite close to us we would go to these pubs on a Saturday and Sunday night to await the charabancs ( a name that has lapsed into disuse)on their way home to the Big Smoke to stop for the travellers to have a final fling on the outing.
Now this was duck hunting season gone mad as the coaches would pull in, disgorge the load of happy half drunk singing holiday makers who would make merry and half an hour later back on the coach and away.
Then another load of coaches would pull in and off we would go again drinking, wooing, dancing and trying our luck on any female that needed a helping hand.
Many a white lie would be told and many a solemn promise made to some silly questions like Will I see you again? answer yes
Do you love me? answer yes
Will you come up to London to see me? answer yes, trust me
And when one lot of holiday makers departed then another lot arrived to be given the same answers to the same questions, Oh! such was the joys of life.
I must admit I did enjoy my teenage years, I may not go directly to heaven but I definitely won’t be going to hell .

Having babies on Canvey in the fifties and sixties You might ask "What would a mere male know about having babies?." well I will tell you. Nearly everyone had their babies at home during this era and it was the expectant dads job, when the wife said she was due, to jump on his bike and cycle around to the mid-wife's house and let her know the situation ,and you were always asked the same questions " has the water burst? how long between each contraction? Etc". Now if the mid-wife was out on another call she left the name and address of her backup nurse so off you cycled (no matter what time of the day or night it was or the weather conditions were) to find the other one and hoped and prayed that she was in.
The midwives I can recall that worked on Canvey were a Nurse Robson and a Nurse Consella ,one rode a bike and the other drove a Morris minor car When our first one was due Nurse Robson came and that's when she took over ,she came in the door and the first words she said in a very draconian voice to the poor nervous father to be was "Make yourself useful and get me some clean towels and plenty of boiling water "when you had done all of that and sat down she found you another task, but the midwives were very efficient and very good .I wonder just how many Canvyites can say "I had my bare bottom smacked by Nurse Consella or Nurse Robson", thousands I would guess.
Now the in thing is all hospital deliveries to eliminate any complications but I would back the success rate of those old midwives against any hospital of today. being less clinical and more comforting.

The fifties was the era of the Teddy Boys in which the dress was single-breasted fingertip length suit, velvet collar , drainpipe trousers, fancy shirt, bootlace tie, brightly coloured socks, and very thick soled brothel creeper shoes .Now we didn’t wear these clothes so we could gang up and kick somebody’s head in but just to stand out from the crowd and look flamboyant, looking back in retrospect we must have looked right prats ,but then again the style here now is to wear big baggy ¾ length shorts or trousers which I call "Victor Sylvester" trousers ,(plenty of ball-room) with the crutch four inches below where it should be , that look as if they have been purchased from the Salvation Army jumble sale and couldn’t find the right size , or full length jeans the bottoms of the trousers dragging along the ground where they become frayed and in wet weather they get soaking wet and wearing a baseball cap turned back to front so they all look like Jerry Lewis clones .We might have looked prats but at least we were smart looking ones. One thing I will say and that is us Canvey boys were always smartly dressed, The group I went with all bought our suits from Maxie Cohen “Bespoke tailor” who’s shop was beside the trolleybus terminus at Algate (by the underground station) this involved two or three fittings before you picked up the suit so we always made a day out, staying to have a few beers in that area. When we first went to Maxie and told him what we wanted i.e. single breasted, one button, velvet collar, fingertip length and drainpipe trousers he must have thought we were barmy but our money was good and we got on well with him also buying our Crombie overcoats from him too. I also think we must have been egotists because whenever we took out overcoats or jackets off we always folded them so the large Maxie Cohen label was on the outside. The reason why we went off the Island for our clobber was because there was no decent men’s outfitters on the Island the only one being Rogers (who I think was located near Cockle Jacks) who stocked things like flannel jackets and formal shirts and catered for the conservative type of clientele so we bought our accessories in Southend and our “Whistles” from Maxie. Then a good thing happened on the Island, about the mid fifties a new men’s outfitters moved on the Island namely Alf Harley and Sons (I think they also had a shop in London) they had some good and in fashion clothes so we bought most of our gear at Alfs, whose shop was located in Furtherwick Road between Lionel Road and Vaagen Road, but still bought our suits from Maxie. The suits used to cost 25 guineas and the Crombie overcoats 21 Guineas and considering we were earning about 7 quid a week they were very expensive. When I tell my sons and grandsons that I spent 3 and a half weeks full wages buying a suit they did not believe me or that I was a few sandwiches short of a picnic. One big difference I notice now is the style of walking, we walked with a spring in our step, backs upright,( this could have been due to our National Service training) even the odd skip and jump but the present day youth seem to drag their feet along and look towards the ground.

One thing I must stress is that during the Fifties even with all of the different groups of youths on the Island, and groups of Londoners coming down on holidays there was never any violence such as knives, kicking's or assaults, no graffiti or car stealing everybody enjoyed themselves and made their own recreation, maybe upsetting and annoying the then older residents but never resorting to viciousness, something which seems to be the in thing with the present day youngsters who after giving someone a kicking blame the government because they have nothing to do or nowhere to go!
There was always something to do on Canvey then, we used to go cockling, lay out a deadline which involved digging up the rag worms usually around the old wooden pier supports at the end of May Avenue, laying out the line as the tide came in then going back as the tide went out to collect your fish, we also made a quid out of it as we sold some of the catch to a builder Mr. Green and his wife who lived just off May Avenue. One of the lads who used to do a lot of fishing was called Lennie Carver
Also eeling in the small creek that ran through what is now Kismet Park I don't think I was ever bored or had nothing to do in those days.
I do not know how much green open space there is now on the Island but back in those days my father, brother and myself used to go collecting mushrooms in the fields down Northwick Road, also my father bought himself some ferrets and we would spend many a happy hour chasing the rabbits that had escaped the nets.
Often in the summer our mum would take us kids to Benfleet by bus , we would then walk over the railway crossing opposite the Ferry Tea Rooms turn right and walk to Hadleigh Castle collecting blackberries on the way and then when we got home a lovely blackberry and apple pie was cooked
We used to do some silly thing such as - outside of Grooms second-hand shop which was situated opposite Holmes hardware shop stood a large tractor tyre, so one Saturday evening my mate Harry and I wheeled this huge tyre down the High Street and left it outside Venables the chemist, blocking the front door

MORE MEMORIES OF CANVEY IN THE FIFTIES
In recalling memories the past you do tend to forget about the sometimes mundane things that you had to do and only remember the good things, one of the tasks my brother and I had to do in the early fifties was as follows
In those early years on Canvey there were quite a few houses with no main sewer and our job was to dig a rather large hole (about 18 inches square and 3 to 4 feet deep) in which to tip the bucket when it got full, now we lived on a corner block with a lot of passing pedestrians so one of us kept a lookout whilst the other grabbed the bucket from under the seat .ran around to the garden, tipped it in and rushed back before anyone saw you and the lookout would then cover the hole up with a sheet of corrugated iron
When the hole was nearly full it was backfilled and a new hole dug with the old one being marked by a stick so you would not dig in the same place again. Now this system did have it's pitfalls as sometimes the stick would disappear and you would be walking on the garden when you would slowly start to sink into the earth which meant a quick leap to the side or a very smelly disaster would occur.
What a relief when we had the sewer connected and you could pull the chain.
Also I'm not too proud to say that I also wore clothes bought from the Salvation Army jumble sale (and so did hundreds of other Canvey kids in those years as the hall was always full of mums buying clothes) and I sometimes wore Shredded Wheat shoes (does anybody remember them??.)
My mum did a fantastic job in bringing up us five kids under difficult times in London during the blitz and on Canvey after the war, on top of this she was widowed whilst still in her early forties with two of my young sisters still at school and she still found time to foster babies from Doctor Barnardo's home.
They may have come bigger than my mum but they did not come better.
Although the Rio cinema had a Saturday morning matinee for kids most of us opted for the cinemas in Southend, either the Strand near the railway station or the Gaumont cinema up near Victoria Circus now this cinema was an old one with a "Gods"(those who don't Know what the Gods are I will explain, the ground floor of the cinema was the stalls the next two levels were the circle and the dress circle and right at the very top was the Gods) miles from the screen, the seats set very steep so those at the back could see, and to get up there you had to walk up dozens of steps, and any object dropped accidentally from it took quite a while to reach the stalls.
Now because it was very tiring to climb up into the Gods the usherettes very rarely came up there so we virtually had the run of the place.
One of our favorite tricks was to blow up a French letter to a huge size , then release it to float gently down through the beam of the film where it appeared on the screen looking like a huge zeppelin . We also filled them up with water and dropped them from the balcony
It is also unbelievable how much water you can get into the aforementioned item.
On the few occasions when we did go to the Rio Cinema very few of us paid as the following system was carried out.
One of our number would pay the admission fee and then go inside and sit by the side door, when the lights went out he would then creep up to the side door and give the bar a push and the other members of our group would rush in and sit down all in different places . The usherettes would come down and maybe find a couple of non-payers and eject them and the rest would enjoy the film
This trick was difficult to stop as, by law , the side doors must always be left unlocked during performances for safety reasons.
In the fifties and sixties Canvey Council had this wonderful scheme going that allowed you to borrow 100% of the cost of house purchase (provided that you were earning enough to repay the loan) and we brought our first (and only) house in 1960,this cost the grand sum of 2400 pounds and I think the repayments were 16 pounds a month and it was whilst buying this house that I first met Sid Alterman who, besides being an alderman was also an estate agent a real nice bloke who built the first arcade shopping centre on the Island (one entrance in High street and the other in Furtherwick road) quite a big thing in those days but by modern day shopping complexes very small.

A mention must be made of the local cafes where the local youths met to pass the time, one of the most popular was Cockle Jacks being situated in the centre of the Island opposite the Haystack where most of us met to decide our destination that night. We were always welcome there even if we had no money to spend Cockle Jack’s wife Ann and her helper Kit Foster put up with us, noisy but happy just to listen to the Jukebox and chatter amongst ourselves.
Then there was the Commodore situated on the corner of Sea view Road and the High Street (opposite the Admiral Jellico) Owned by an Italian with, if I can recall correctly, had two good looking daughters. The front entrance in the High Street was the café and the side entrance was the fish and chip shop. I do not know a lot about this café as we rarely used it preferring the cafes nearer to the centre of the Island.
Wally Brown’s café at the corner of Long Road and Haven Road was the workers café and you would not find a nicer couple than Wally and his wife Sweeney’s café was another handy café situated next to Benfleet Station and backing onto the creek, a wooden building stuck on piers and an ideal place to wait for the train and having the mandatory jukebox ,the owner, a Mr. Leech, (no relation to the farmer) had a daughter who we nicknamed “Spider” because she was all arms and legs and a son called Vic, they had another café in Leather Lane London and a couple of times we went up there and helped Vic out in the café( not very successfully I might add) when his parents were away

Then there was the Jolly Boys café at the junction of Beach Road and the High Street with Tiny Tim serving behind the counter ( I think he stood on a box to serve, only joking) and dead opposite was Green glades café which, although not having the mandatory jukebox had one very good asset namely not many patrons and an alcove in the far corner at the front of the café where the owner a Mr. Lilliard used to let us play cards “No money boys” he used to keep telling us And we would tell him we were only playing for matches but as he was rather slow moving by the time he shuffled around the corner to coerce us into buying more tea and toast the money had been replaced and little piles of matches were innocently in front of us.
But the best café on the Island that us boys used to use for gambling was a newer café situated in an arcade of shops that Mr. Taylor who owned the petrol station next door had built nearly opposite New Road in the Village. This café was called the Unic , now this was in the mid fifties when we had all come out of the army ,old enough to drink and drive ,now looking back in hindsight it was a very stupid thing to do but in those days there was no such thing as ?Blow in the Bag sir? or random breath tests and, being young and silly we used to go out drinking, weekends we would drive up to London and do a pub crawl round all the well known ones including The Mile End Tavern and a little one tucked in behind Aldgate bus station and sometimes over the south side of London to the World Turned Upside Down, and Joe Lucy’s pub the Thomas a Beckett , both on the Old Kent Road and The Hole in the Wall, during the summer months we stayed local either Southend or any of the mainland pubs where the coaches used to stop on the way back to London loaded up with tipsy young ladies wanting to enjoy themselves (but that’s another story)
When we came back onto the Island after a nights drinking binge we would drive to the Unic cafe, drive fast up onto the pavement and skid to a halt about six inches from the plate glass window, (just to scare the birds sitting by the window, as you will have guessed we were show offs and lairs) swagger into the cafe' and throw a couple of bob to the girls standing around the juke box for them to play some music ( this two bob played 5 records I think) and then go into the back room where we would have a game of cards (the owner did not mind this providing we would keep buying food and teas and he also liked a game of cards) we played pontoon three or nine card brag at sixpence a hand and he would keep the cafe' open until we all went, sometimes this was as late as 2 in the morning.
Oh the joys of youth

SOME MORE CANVEY CHARACTERS
* Sparrow Dent - the scourge of non ticket holders on the Canvey buses although only five feet nothing in thick soled shoes he grew to an enormous six feet when he donned his inspectors uniform, and always seemed to be acting the hard man, we had this annoying habit of chewing up our bus tickets into wet soggy balls which didn't please Sparrow who had to wait until we flattened them out for inspection.
* Another bus inspector I recall was Bert Windsor a rather big bloke with a very bald head (I worked with his brother Ronnie at Regent and he too was lacking what I now lack, hair) Bert wasn’t so officious as Sparrow and you could have a laugh and joke with him (like making out that you had lost your ticket and spend a long time looking for it and then produce the ticket from some queer place on your anatomy.)
* One of the bus drivers I clearly remember was a "Jack the lad " type ( one of your readers on Canvey told me his name was Bert Foulgar)long black hair good looking and wearing an ear-ring and looking like a gypsy, who had a lot of the young girls hearts in a flutter We called him 'Lover boy"
* Dave - last name not known, the resident pianist during the summer season at the Monaco pub on the seafront, small and a bit bald he brought the house down when he sang ( minus his false teeth ) "Shining Sarah sitting in a shoeshine shop, and when she sits she shines and when she shines she sits" Sing that fast and after a few milk stouts and you will see what I mean.

* Joe Overs - Canvey's professional photographer who was always seen riding his bike in much the same style as P. C. Farmer and when you asked him how he was he replied "I'm alright on the whole"
I could go on and on, Tiny Tim from the Jolly Boys café at the beginning of Beach Road, (whose head could just be seem above the counter) Harry Whitcombe a foreman at Gouldings Sheet metal Factory who was also a part time fireman and after the siren had sounded could often be seen peddling furiously down Long Road trying to get to the fire station before the fire went out.
* Billy Hodder - After a year at Gouldings I left and obtained a job on the Harold Hill new town site as a plant fitters mate and a bus used to leave Canvey every morning to transport workers to the site, now the steward on this bus was Billy Hodder (this was Bill's bus and nobody but nobody got on that bus unless Bill said so) and a funnier man I have yet to meet. He would have been the original Arthur English and from the moment I got on the bus until we arrived at the site I was in stitches, jokes rolled out of his mouth in a continual stream and being only 16 at the time a lot of them went over my head, but as everybody else on the bus was laughing so did I. Come to think of it the bus was a Hodder family special as besides Bill there were his brothers Laurie, Ronnie and Buck and two brothers-in-law Bill and Bert ? Lewis and as I said at the start one of the funniest men I have ever met.
I can still visualize Bertie Benson wearing a Trilby Hat and carrying his big brass instrument - I think it was a euphonium. He used to catch the train into the City nearly every day to do a bit of busking and could always be seen walking up Ferry Road towards the station
Also there was a bloke who used to wear smart navy whites in the summer and all through the winter he wore yellow sou westers including a hat and Wellington boots.
Arthur Reid who I suppose would have been Canvey's answer to old man Steptoe
Some of the other characters that I can recall are Mr. Andrews who used to deliver bread around the Island on a three wheeled tradesman’s bike all hours of the day and night, definitely not the fastest thing on three wheels in fact it would be a dead heat between him and a tortoise in a race.
Mr. and Mrs. Harmes who were expert ballroom dancers always in the dance hall floor of the Red Cow on a Saturday night and whilst us lads reluctantly got forcibly dragged onto the floor, shuffling around on the same spot, one hand under your partners bum , the other around the back of her neck, one eye one the clock (seeing how long to chucking out time) and the other eye on your beer Mr. and Mrs. Harmes would be spinning all around the floor oblivious to all the obstacles in their way (us).

Because there are quite a few of these memorable characters I am splitting them up into two episodes
In recalling these people I have mentioned names, now this is no way meant to be derogatory or put them down, in fact I am putting them on a pedestal as they are an integral part of Canvey's history and I hope that older residents who read this can also remember these characters and have a little laugh and maybe an odd tear.
These are some of the people I can recall during my early years.

* The first one I can recall seeing when I moved to Canvey was the Bird Man who used to stand on the corner opposite the Haystack Pub and feed all the birds and sing to himself, the song went something like this ... I'll be pleased to hear the noisy aero planes shan't I - shocking - the damn noise affects me - I can't work for years and years and years every fortnight. Then he would go and recite a cure for a cold which went something like this "two ounces oil of linseed, one ounce oil of turpentine " etc. a harmless happy person we were told that he was a wartime pilot suffering from shell-shock.
* Mrs. Freeman and her daughter, known as The Cat Lady who wore what I can only describe as St Trinians girls uniform (a short skirt with stockings full of holes)and a beret pulled down over her ears and pushing a Tansad canvas pram around Canvey with her cats wrapped up in blankets lying like a pair of babies in the pram.
* Fred and Bill McCabe - Fred was the Editor of Canvey News and Benfleet Recorder and known to us boys as Canvey's leading crime reporter, we used to rib him every time we saw him by asking him if he had caught any villains lately. His brother Bill was a builder and every time we saw him we would say "Keep your chin up Bill" now all the readers who can recall Bill will know the significance of this remark.
* Jack Bradley known to everyone as Cockle Jack (a rather rotund man) who owned the very popular cafe opposite the Haystack was always outside selling seafood from his stall while his better half Ann and her helper Kit Foster did the serving inside.
* Peggy Della with her red beret - whose rich baritone voice could be heard echoing from the Haystack to Lakeside Corner. Her command of the English language - very colourful to say the least - was an education and her rude answers shouted to us on the other side of the road to some very rude personal insulting questions burnt your ears.
* Peter Bond who always wore a knee length maroon jacket and drove around Canvey in a Hudson Terraplane convertible with his two mates sitting up on top of the back seats the car being previously owned by Dianna Dors (So we were led to believe!)
* Lt. Col. Horace P Fielder a leading Tory Party figure who owned the local caravan park (who I think eventually had the Conservative Hall named after him) and had this fanatical notion in his head that all of the local yobs had but one thing on their minds and that was to rape and pillage every one of his female holiday makers and therefore maintained a 24 hour guard on his site trying to chase off any local intruder with his walking stick, but one man with a limp and a bike was no match for the "Hungry" erect (metaphorically of course)_ Canvey boys who he called "Those horrible Oyster Fleet boys". Looking back in retrospect I would have done the same thing as him.
He also had a very nice looking wife called Barbara who was once a Canvey beauty queen (I think)

Essex Way also brings back memories as many a time I used to park my black Ford V8 Pilot at night at the top lay-by near the water tower (just to admire the twinkling lights across Canvey you understand) with my girl friend until our dreams were disturbed by a knock on the steamed up window and a melodious policeman's voice saying "Hello Hello Hello? what have we here then".
Which meant winding down the window one inch and explain to the very nice gentleman that you were just passing the time and listening to Radio Luxembourg, needless to say a grin used to spread across his face and he would depart, this was before the era of random breath tests because I am sure many a time I would have had to blow into the bag.
Whilst on the subject of trains I think a belated thanks is due to the old L.M.S. Railway on the design of the carriages and the very advantageous positioning of the railway stations, this I will explain. The carriages were divided into separate compartments of 12 with a door handle that could be held shut from the inside by putting your shoe against the handle thus denying access to everyone, and a light bulb that could easily be removed with a twist. With regards the stations it was a couple of minutes travel between Southend and Westcliffe and the same between the stations up to Leigh but between Leigh and Benfleet was a superb 8 to 10 minutes or so it seemed and by restricting passengers to the compartment by pushing your foot hard onto the inner handle and removing the bulb as the train pulled out of Leigh you had all this time to do your own thing, hopefully with the female of the species (i.e. read the Evening Standard, play dominoes, snakes and ladders, discuss the state of the economy or PARTAKE IN BIOLOGY LESSONS) and by raising your head you knew that when you saw the lights of Canvey Bridge and the Bus Terminal and Cafe you had one more minute to straighten your tie???? And get ready to disembark, Of course now with the modern trains all one compartment, brilliant lighting and very fast, this type of pleasure is denied to the new younger generation so progress does have it's drawbacks.
My family and I emigrated to Australia in 1970 and we have been back a couple of times since but the old Canvey has gone, most of the landmarks have disappeared and there seems to be no individuals that would hold a candle to the characters that dominated Canvey during the late forties and fifties.
In my next episode I will tell you about the wonderful characters , some of them eccentric, but all of them still very vivid in my memory.

Most of the girls living on the Island either commuted to the City or worked at Egans Factory or Neales a bookbinding firm at Northwick Corner
The girls who used to travel to the City to work went mob handed, nearly on the same bus and train. One of the girls gave me the nickname of "peanuts" as I was always sat on the top deck of the bus in the back seat eating peanuts and it was this one girl amongst that mob that I had a crush on, nice little dimples on her cheeks but as I was rather shy back in those days I did not have the courage to ask her out, I just wonder where I would be now if I had of asked her out??.
I will not mention her name in case she still lives on the Island (Oh the joys of youth.)!!!!!
Who can ever forget a typical Saturday in the Fifties -
One of the most popular cafes was Cockle Jacks being situated in the centre of the Island (opposite the Haystack pub) Whose owner’s wife used to tolerate all the boys and girls meeting there and very rarely spending a lot of money, I think she was happy just to have the café busy ,we would then decide what we were going to do that day, decide what and where we would go , sort out who we were going with then a bus to Benfleet Station, on the train to Southend , a walk to the top of Pier Hill where we went into Peggy's café here all the hot food was displayed in the front window in large trays, filled ourselves up then either went to the Gliderdome for an hours roller-skating or to the Kursal,
The Gliderdome experience was great and as usual we mucked about, we would skate around in a large circle get up speed and the let go of the last person in the line who would then go out of control causing chaos on the rink
Very often we would be so engrossed in enjoying ourselves that we forgot the time and missed the last train to Benfleet (which wasn't all that late) and then we would walk home to Canvey singing and larking about sometimes calling into any fish and chip shop that was just about to close and say "Have you got any fish and chips left" and if they said yes we would say to them "well you shouldn't have cooked so many" and laughingly walk out of the shop.
Sometimes we were stopped by the local police and asked to keep our singing down but it was all in good fun, it is quite a long way from Southend to Canvey so we were knackered by the time we walked (and sometimes rolled) down Essex Way, by that time of course the last bus had gone so another long trudge over the level crossing and along Lakeside Path and home.
One thing I will iterate now and all through these memories is that although we mucked and larked about and sometimes were a pain in the arse to some of the older residents on the Island and got into quite a few scrapes never did we resort to kicking or the use of knives
In fact, by to-day's standards, we were model citizens.

My first job after leaving school at 15 was with Gouldings & Sons Sheet metal and Wireworkers where a lot of local boys had their first taste of working for a living. They had two factories, one in Yamburg Ave (Wireworks) and one in the old market building down on the corner of St. Annes Road (Sheet metal),
I worked at the wirework factory which was only a few minutes walk from Beach Road, my starting wage was 10 pence an hour - a grand total of One Pound Sixteen Shillings and Eight pence a week, of which I gave my Mum one pound. Can you imagine the outcry if you asked your kids now to give up over half their gross income towards the upkeep of the family!
The foreman at the wireworks was a man called Arthur Richards and a nicer man you would not meet, his tolerant attitude to the boys who had just left school helped us to acclimatize to the workforce, when you start your first job straight from school you need a man like Arthur to ease you into adult life not some boss or foreman who think their sh*t doesn’t stink and play all kinds of idiotic tricks on you.
When you had learnt the basics of the job the pay went up to 1 shilling an hour and you were put on piecework which meant the faster and harder you worked the more money you ended up with at the end of the week which was another good lesson in life (work hard and you will prosper).
Mr. Goulding the boss left the running of the factories to his foremen and did not visit the factories all that often, when he did he reminded me of Winston Churchill as he was very big and smoked a cigar.
We all looked forward to pay day and the visit of the Telfer Pie man from whom we bought pies, sausage rolls and slabs of cake and when you came from a poor family the pride in taking pies and sausage rolls home on pay day was tremendous.

This was the end of my poor childhood and the start of me earning a living and building my future.
I can count on one hand the number of times that I had new clothes, most of my clothes came from jumble sales but I never never ever felt embarrassed about this maybe because nearly everyone else was in the same situation but what we lacked in clothes we gained in experience
at the age of fifteen we had smart alec brains in young bodies.
But let me say now that I have never been ashamed of my childhood upbringing and I have never been ashamed of my East End birthplace, in fact I am proud of my accent and could never be a snob.
There is a vast difference from being poor and living in poverty, when you are poor it just means that you cannot afford the luxuries of life
like butter, cakes, afters and new shoes and clothes, but I can say this I have never ever been hungry, there was always enough food for us and we never went short of the essential things. And my father used to say “you can always do a full days work with a full stomach and the arse out of your trousers but you cannot do a full days work with a posh suit and an empty stomach". But to live in poverty is when you cannot buy enough food and even afford second hand clothes so we were only poor.
Also having a poor childhood tends to give you a better outlook on life, you appreciate other peoples predicaments and are not such a skinflint with your money when you start to accumulate it
And I feel that the freedom I enjoyed in those early days in London helped me have more confidence in later years.
So this was now the end of my education and the first step in the great outside world and I can honestly say that the strict discipline in the schools and my home influenced my behaviour and attitude in later years, we were given the cane if we misbehaved and the occasional bang across the knuckles and the blackboard eraser thrown at you if you were not paying attention (but we usually deserved it anyway).
You also learnt to put on a brave face at school when you got the cane although the pain was sometimes excruciating you went back to your seat with a smirk on your face (even though you felt like balling your eyes out) and then sat with both hands under your bum to try to deaden the pain.
So at the age of fifteen I started to earn my keep and build my future
and all through life I have tried to live up to my fathers first words to me when I started work, he said to me" always do a fair days work for a fair days pay" and also "enjoy your work because it will be 50% of your life from now on and no matter what job you do whether it be an engineer, driver or even a shit house cleaner always try to do your best and be happy".

When we left London in 1948 I was going to the Leyton County High school for boys so I had to enlist at Westcliffe High School for boys but as my academic skills were (to say the least) unsatisfactory they were quite happy for me to transfer to William Read Secondary School Long Road (by Jones Stores).
This school was more on my wavelength and at this point I must make mention of some of the teachers at this school.
The name "Slasher" Eales still sends a tremor through every old school pupil when recalling school days, a strict disciplinarian to whom a kick up the bum or a clout around the head was the norm (plus of course the cane) a 24 hour teacher who's beady eyes were always on you even after school, he also took gardening classes and scripture lessons and when Slasher said "dig" you dug and when Slasher said "Pray" you bloody well prayed.
On Saturdays and Sundays he could be seen cycling up and down Long Road and if his telescopic and X-ray eyes caught you doing something wrong or acting the goat then on Monday morning woe betide you.
He was a practicing Christian as he was a sidesman (I think that’s what they call them)
All the time we were at school we thought Slasher was a right B#@!!#d but when you look back in retrospect this man was responsible for keeping thousands of us rascals on the straight and narrow ,taught us the meaning of respect, obedience and the will to work hard, in fact the type of teacher that is required in schools this present time were the aforementioned virtues are sadly lacking.
Another man who used to put the fear of Christ up us was the local policeman by the name of P.C. Farmer, now this huge overweight man used to ride his mode of transport (a bike) with his heels on the pedals and rode very slowly, but this was deceptive as my mate Harry and myself were caught riding two on a bike by him so he gave us a stern lecture and told us to walk to where we were going but being smart arses as soon as he got out of sight and carried on riding we jumped back on and rode around the block and as we went around a corner who should be in front of us was , you’ve guessed it one P.C. Farmer who issued us with a summons to appear at Rochford magistrates court for which we both got fined 10 shillings(I think) a very smart copper that one.
It isn’t until you get older and more wiser that you do realize just how much influence these two men had on your own ideal standard of living
"Gillie" Potter the science teacher and Miss Dalrymple the music teacher - I think - who did her best to try and get a load of us Canvyites to sing in tune "Who is Sylvia, What is she?." an impossible task.
Just to conclude on school life can you imagine about fifteen boys some with voices breaking, some with deep voices and some still with their high voices all trying to harmonize with fifteen girls all singing with high pitched screams with as much gusto as they could produce, With this Cornucopia of sound even modern day music would not be able to beat this.
The Headmaster (I think) was a Mr. Watkins.

The daily walks down to the beach, Andrews Amusement Arcade and the Casino are still fondly remembered.
At the bottom of Maurice Road by the seafront was Andrews, this was rather a small ramshackle fun fare and wasn’t very popular with us boys
Down the seafront was the Casino amusement arcade with rides, machines and a small lake with boats you could hire out.
The penny machines in the Casino were ripe for cheating, when you won on the machine you were supposed to turn the knob twice and get your penny back but we turned the knob very slowly until it was about to click
then you spun the knob very fast and it clicked past the stop and you kept doing it and getting pennies every time, also all of the money used to fall into the bottom of the machine which had a wooden door so as the owner could get the money out but there was a gap at the bottom of the door and there was enough room to slide an hacksaw blade into the gap and slide the pennies out and we did quite well out of this, and of course the more you used the hacksaw the bigger the gap became at the bottom.
The owner of the Casino was a Mr. Beaumont and he and his two sons used to walk around with huge bunches of keys hanging around their necks (these they used to open the machines when they broke down) so we had to keep an eye out for them as they knew what was going on it was just a case of catching us, which, with our street wise intelligence, was a very difficult task.
When they started to come towards s we would be out of the door and up onto the sea wall, pockets full of pennies and rattling like mad.
They got to know us and then whenever we went into the Casino they hovered around us like a bad smell.
We then adopted commando tactics with someone finding out which section of the Casino they were in and we would then duck into the other section and do our bit with the hacksaw blade.
This all changed when we got the lovely taste of Charrington’s beer so our hunting ground became the Monico Pub next door.
I bet many readers have some fond memories of the Monica during the summer months with Dave the pianist a small bald headed bloke who used to take his false teeth out and sing “Shining Sarah sitting in a shoeshine shop and when she sits she sings and when she sings she sits” say that fast and you’ll see what I mean.
Also down on the seafront was the Canvey Model Village a small area made up of a collection of miniature buildings , this was only of interest to the multitude of visitors mainly from East London. , now as far as I can remember there were 2 miniature villages on the Island ,one was behind the Cockle Jacks and the Mathew & Charles row of shops with the entrance in Oak Road where Furtherwick School now is and at the entrance was the fortune teller Maria’s booth and the other miniature village was the one down the seafront
Now whether they were both open at the same time or were the same one that moved it’s location I do not know and of course there were the numerous Bingo stalls dotted along the seafront
Up on the sea wall (level with the Monico pub) was a very unique building shaped lie a ship’s bridge, this was the Labworth Café and the building was one of the few architectural designs by Ova Arup (whoever he is) and very art deco
When we left London in 1948 I was going to the Leyton County High school for boys so I had to enlist at Westcliffe High School for boys but as my academic skills were (to say the least) unsatisfactory because although I had passed the 11 plus exam and won a place at the Leyton County High School each successive year I went down a grade so by the time I left at 14 I was in a C class, the reason for this was that algebra, trigonometry, French, German and Geometry was just too much for me to take in so at Westcliffe they were quite happy for me to transfer to William Read Secondary School Long Road (by Jones Stores) on Canvey Island

Then came another great change in my life when my parents decided to move out of the bomb ruined East End and resettle at Canvey Island Essex, I think because there were plenty of job opportunities outside of London where they were building new towns outside of the greater metropolitan area.
Although only 40 miles from London it was like a million miles away, and although not like the countryside of Devon and Cornwall it was country to my brother and I.
My first memories of Canvey Island when I moved from London with my family just after the war were the wide open country spaces and the unmade roads. My parents had rented a small bungalow at the very end of Beach Road which in the winter became a quagmire and impassable, luckily we had a back path which led up to the High Street, but these conditions were nothing to the pleasures that Canvey gave to a Londoner used to congested streets and little freedom. This back path went past a row of shops that included the "Toothman" who made false teeth, Selby's the barber, a gun shop, a shop used for storage (Just found out it was owned by Ken Macquarie) one used by Mr. Bishop as storage and a few other shops that I cannot recall, the path ended in the High Street by Tremains the newsagent and just past Tremains was Bishops the greengrocers and then Attewells the butchers where my brother Roy had a part time job delivering the orders (this was whilst he went to school and before he joined the Royal Navy as a Boy seaman).
Our next door neighbours were a Mr. and Mrs. Watts (who was instrumental in getting me a job with the Regent Oil Co.) and next to him lived Jack Surrage and his family.
Mr. & Mrs. Watts lived in a bungalow that was at one time a school.”
The bungalow that my father rented was a small two bedroom fibro one and, having sisters, my brother and I slept in a shed in the garden (this may sound rough but the extra freedom it gave us outweighed the discomfort). This shed was provided by the Coastguard Department (unbeknownst to them). During the war they had built a two storey observation post on a field at the sea wall end of Weel Road ( in what is now called Kismet Park I believe) which was used to observe any action in the estuary and was left empty when the war ended, so every night my brother and I stripped a couple of planks from it and with our father walking on the other side of the road took them home. End result one shed in our garden and just a 4 x 2 frame at the seafront.
I suppose he thought it was better for us to get caught than himself (only joking)
On the corner of Weel Road opposite the park was a bungalow in which a boy called Polly Shaw lived with his grandmother (I think).
Our bed in the shed was covered with numerous greatcoats (all obtained from the Sally Army) so we were very warm in the winter, plus the fact that our mum used to put a couple of house bricks in the oven and when it was time to go to bed the bricks were rapped up in an old pillowcase and into the bed.
By sleeping out in the shed we had the opportunity to sneak out and go exploring (only God help us if our father had found out).
That was fantastic as my brother was 12 and I was 14

At this time I was really keen on soccer and watched the local amateur team Leytonstone that played in the lsthmian league and I used to travel on my own to all their away games by the underground railway, in those days there was no danger of being attacked, robbed or molested (then who would want to molest me?) this team, whose ground was alongside the L.M. S. railway station did very well and in the three seasons that I supported them they won the F. A. Amateur Cup Final twice, I watched both of these matches one at Stanford Bridge and one at Highbury and even now I can still remember the names of a lot of the team. they were Jarvis (in goal) Black (full back) Cliff Banham (half back) Leon Josephs and Bunce (right wing) and Alfie Noble (centre forward)
A lot of weekends we were sent round to visit our Aunts who lived near each other, and they were the exact opposite, Biddy (mum's sister who was married to a Frank Franklin) who lived at the junction of South Birbeck Road and Langthorne Road Leytonstone who always gave us the impression of being presented and always gave us sixpence when we left, she lived opposite the slaughter house in Langthorne Road (although I am sure it had a different name then)and you could hear the screams of the pigs as they got their throats cut and watch the blood running across the yard and down the gutters but we always felt uncomfortable there because she seemed so posh so we went there first and then walked around to aunt Nell (who married mum's brother Frank who worked at the same firm as Biddy's Frank)) who lived in Goodall Road Leyton and her garden backed onto Leyton Railway Station, Aunt Nell and uncle Frank lived in an upstairs terrace and we would sit in the garden and watch the steam trains passing, we always had a good time there and enjoyed those visits.now she was a real Eastender, bold, brassy and full of laughs, poor but with a good sense of humour, they had my maternal grandmother living with them ( I thgink Both couples Shared her) and they were always giving her a ribbing.
My grandmother Margaret was only about five feet nothing tall nearly bald with a few thin wispy hairs an half of her teeth missing but, like all East End women who had suffered through the depression and the blitz had a wonderful sense of humour and took all of the ribbing with a smile and a smart comment back.
Then Frank and Biddy moved just a short distance away to Leslie Road Leyton ,this road ran from Leyton High Road to Langthorne Road.
My mother had another much younger sistermy Aunt Joan, I cannot recall if she was single as we did not see much of her
Every November fifth (which is Guy Fawkes day in England) we would make a large effigy of him out of old clothes and stuff it with straw, stick it in an old pram and go around the streets calling out “Penny for the Guy" and collecting pennies and halfpennies, a huge bonfire would be built on a piece of waste ground and there was always plenty of scrap wood from the bomb sites and then in the evening we would light the fire and throw the guy on it and let off all of our fireworks, this tradition is carried out every year on Guy Fawkes day
Because of the freedom I had from my parents and from the money I earned from the job at Spiros I used to travel all over London on the underground (always on my own as I was a bit of a loner) visiting museums, places of interest and sometimes just riding around.
It was when my Dad was working at the Regal Dry Cleaners that I developed my first love for trucks (a love that is still with me now) he asked one of the delivery drivers if I could go with him for a trip during the school holidays so I sat up in the cab, proud as punch while he delivered the cleaning and I had the time of my life.
We also used to visit my Dad's parents, they lived in an upstairs flat in a terrace house with really steep steps up to the flat and steep stairs going down to the small garden ( I still wonder why nearly all of my relatives lived in upstairs flats in a long terrace) at 185 Huxley Road Leyton and they were a real Victorian couple, my granddad sat in this high backed chair (I cannot ever recall him getting up out of it) he had a beard and a big nicotine stained moustache and smoked a pipe and took snuff and we had to go up and kiss him when we came and again when we left, and that's all we did just sit there as they were both too old to get involved in anything,they were a real old couple so we just sat there until we had to leave, they also had an unmarried daughter living with them called Ada, she was as deaf as a post and no matter what you said to her she always said yes I felt sorry for her and I suppose seeing how this old couple lived makes me want to be active and energetic when I get old and retire.
One of the tasks we had to do every time we visited them (that was nearly every weekend) was to go down to the end of the road at the junction with Leyton High Road were there was an off license on the corner return the empty bottle that we were given by my gran and get a quart bottle of Charingtons brown ale and to us being so young the bottle was huge, the go next door to the tobacconist and get a half ounce of snuff.

My mum also had a job as every woman under 40 had to register for work to take the place of the men who had been called up, first she worked at Ramson Paragon, a firm that made carbon paper and then a job with Plesseys the electrical manufactures
Nine times out of ten we wore second hand clothes and shoes but once in a blue moon we would get a new pair of shoes and we dreaded that day because every time you came home from school we would have a shoe inspection to see if we had scraped the toe caps and if there was a scratch we got a whack, this went on until the shoes became worn but we came up with a bright idea so instead of getting a whack every time we made a scratch on the shoes we decided that on the first day we got the new shoes we would climb trees, kick cans and put plenty of scratches on the shoes, this way we only got one big whack instead of many little whacks, good thinking eh?.
I will now tell you about Shredded Wheat shoes, When our shoes became worn out and developed a hole in the sole and mum could not afford another pair (new or second hand) an old shredded wheat box was cut up the same shape as your sole and inserted into the shoe to cover the hole, but stones kept getting into the shoe under the cardboard so you had to keep taking your shoe off and get rid of the stone, also when it rained the cardboard became soggy and made your sock wet so you had to get another box and cut out new inserts. And I remember whenever we went visiting we always sat with both feet on the ground and did not cross our legs as this would have shown the hole in our shoes (doesn't that make you feel sad)
We attended Davis Road primary school and I passed my eleven plus exam with A levels for admission to a high school, it was whilst I was at Davis Road school that I had to start wearing glasses all of the time which restricted participation in many sports although it didn't stop me continually breaking them in fights.
I passed the 11 plus exam and then went to the Leyton boys High school grade A but each year I went down a grade from A to B then C as I think trying to learn algebra, trigonometry, French, and German was just too much for me to cope with. The only thing I enjoyed about the school was the school dinners which I got free because we were poor, it meant that I had afters every day instead of occasionally on a Sunday Some things are as clear as a bell in my memory and my first school dinner is one of those things, I can clearly remember that first afters(sweet) I had, it was a slice of round date pudding (cooked in a long circular baking tin) and custard and it wasn't even Sunday and then to get a sweet every weekday was, to me, heaven come true, It may sound to any-one reading this that I had a very unhappy childhood but the exact opposite was the case, being poor never worried us because what you never had you never missed and as everybody else was in the same boat we did not even notice it and the fact that we got good hidings when we were bad was to us only what every kid got when they played up and because in the East End there was a lot of wife bashing we just ignored it and accepted it as norm..
One thing I must mention here is that my father was always complaining about headaches and mum used to say it was the drinking and because, in those days there was no such thing as sick pay, I cannot ever remember him going to the doctors or ever having a day off work.
My Dad for all his faults was basically a loving father and as I said a possible cause of these outbursts of violence will come to light later, I remember once he brought a tandem bike and weekends we used to cycle for miles up the River Lea towpath to Broxbourne Essex, stopping at the odd pub on the way up and also on the way home so by the time we got home our steering was a bit wobbly but these enjoyable times came to an abrupt end when one day my dad happened to look back and saw me with my feet up on the crossbar instead of peddling, the next day the tandem had gone.
We also went fishing over the Hollow Ponds this was quite enjoyable but this too came to a sudden end because when he wasn't looking or nodding off we would throw stones at the float, he would think he had a bite and would reel in the line this went on for quite a while until he caught us throwing stones so that was the end of that.

My father was a stoker in the Navy ( Royal or Merchant???)when he was young so he had no trade and so was a stoker in civvy street, the first job I remember him having was at the Leyton Council Baths which had two swimming pools and a large room with about twenty bathrooms (ten each side of the gangway) we used to go for a bath every weekend, you paid your money and got a linen towel (embroidered with the name of the council so you could not pinch them) a small bar of soap and you the waited for a vacant room, now these bathrooms had no taps on the inside. The attendant filled the bath from the external taps for you to the regulation depth and fairly hot then you went into the bath got undressed and tested the heat of the water and if it was too hot you shouted out "more cold in number four," or whatever number room you were in and the attendant would turn on the cold tap which was outside in the gangway until you shouted for him to stop. If you were in there too long the attendant shouted out "times up in number four' by that time the water had got cold and you could not get anymore hot so you finished your bath.
My father then changed jobs and because money was tight he had that formed, I used to go down after school and at the weekends and help him run the coal by barrow to the manhole and tip it into the boiler house and then run the slag back to the waste heap and I reckon that all of this hard manual work is one of the reasons that I am so fit now, it strengthened my back, built up my muscles and instilled in me the concept of a fair days work for a fair days money. (It was bloody hard work)
My Dads night job luckily was an easier one as the boilers were oil fired so he only had to maintain the steam pressure and keep the heat up to the ovens.. When he finished his shift he always brought home a hot malt loaf. He also got himself a little job on the side which I used to do for him, it was a small clothing factory called Spiros and it had an all night burner and I used to go to the factory every night, clean out the ashes and fill the fire up with fresh coal I also had to run enough coal in from the back of the factory to last them the next day and on the weekend I would clean the fire right out and relight it on Sunday night ready for Monday morning. This gave me some pocket money, something I had never had up till then
Because we were poor we didn't get any really good presents for Christmas, I remember one year my Dad spent a lot of time in the garden shed making us toys out of plywood, cutting them out with a fret saw, painting them and putting wheels on them but we liked them and played with them but even now when I hear that old song (rarely played) "He's the little boy that Santa Claus forgot " it takes me back to my Christmases when I was small and sometimes a nostalgic tear forms.
My Dad was also a heavy drinker and very often came home drunk, one Saturday afternoon my mum and us kids were walking home from the shops and we saw our Dad on the other side of the road, sitting on the pavement, drunk and leaning up against a wall with a bag of cakes strewn all around him on the ground, mum said "keep walking and make out you don't see him," when we got home she said "go and bring your dad home" so me and my brother went back, collected up the cakes and helped him home.
Mum always cooked Sunday dinner for two p.m. and my Dad always went down the pub on a Sunday morning saying he would be home for dinner but as the pubs did not shut until three we were always sent down at two to tell him dinner was ready, he would come to the pub door say he wouldn't be a minute and bring us out a glass of lemonade and a large arrowroot biscuit and usually came out at three p.m. and by the time we all got home the dinner was either cold or overcooked but my mum would not change the dinner time and dad would not alter his pub times so there was always arguments going on. These times were very distressing for us kids as we used to lay in bed at night hearing the rows and the cries when he hit mum, we used to put the pillow over our ears the cut out the noise.
Very often my mum would have a black eye and she would say that she walked into the door and we would believe her mainly because that it what we wanted to believe but later in life I realized the truth and that is why I always had a great affection for her knowing her struggles to bring us all up during the depression, going short of everything for us and coping with my dad, putting up with us kids who were quite a handful and still having a smile on her face and she was in fact a buffer between us kids and our father as she always used to say if we were naughty "wait until your father comes home" but she very rarely told him. One of her favorite expressions when we were late home from school was "where have you been" and our stock answer was "coming home" this was accepted if my Dad wasn't home but if he was home woe betide us.
Later on in this story I will tell you about my father’s illness that could have been the cause of his behaviour which I learnt about after his death