Hooptedoodle #219 - The Away Game (plastic mac & pilchard sandwiches)

This is really just a note to myself – I have seen some of the reaction to the recent Hillsborough verdict – I do not wish to make any me-too comment, nor falsely claim any personal involvement, but Liverpool was my home town, and I am well aware of the depth of feeling that has prevailed there for the 27 years since the tragedy.

Cold shadows that come down the years from 1989 are the extent of the government paranoia about civil unrest, urban terrorism and potential class war, and the growth in crowd trouble and neo-fascist hooliganism which marred soccer in those days. The cages behind the goals at Hillsborough where the fatal crush took place were designed as animal pens, quite simply because football crowds were viewed as exactly that – animals. Especially, I need hardly add, northern football crowds, where the proportion of Tory voters might safely be assumed to be very low indeed.

Maximum-wage heroes - Liverpool FC, season 1961-62 - Big Tam Leishman,
in the middle of the front row, still looks like something from Frankenstein's lab 

I am even less qualified to comment on this than I usually am – which may be saying something. The last time I went to watch an away league game of my beloved Liverpool FC predates Hillsborough by many years – it was on Saturday, 18^th November 1961 (I checked), when I was a schoolboy – my mate Ken Bartlett got us tickets for the Huddersfield Town vs Liverpool match, in the old English League Division Two (in which Liverpool were staging, I think, a remarkable five-year run of 3^rd place finishes, in the days when only the top two clubs were promoted at the season’s end!). Football crowds were not the high-profile violent menace which they had become by Thatcher’s time, but my 1961 memories of our day out involve very little of the match we went to see – all I can remember is the misery of the journey, the squalor and the sense of worthlessness which the police and the logistical arrangements instilled in the travelling fan.

Leeds Road, Huddersfield - pre-war photo

Ken and I were experienced visitors to Anfield, Liverpool’s home ground, though my parents insisted that I never went in the Kop end, which was famous for its passion and the surges on the terracing – as a small chap, I used to go to the Anfield Road end, which at times was scary enough.

Our trip to Huddersfield started quite early, queuing to board one of the old Football Special trains from Lime Street station. We were late getting on the train – we waited for our friend Tony Potter, but he didn’t show up, though we had a ticket for him, and we eventually gave up on him and squeezed on board. I was shaken by the police presence – I don’t know what the size of the travelling support was in those days; records show that the crowd at that game was 23,000-odd, which is not bad considering Huddersfield were having a poor season, and I guess the visitors might have brought 5,000 or so with them. In 1961 a good proportion of these would have been on the trains. There was a hefty contingent of Liverpool Police and Transport Police at Lime Street – including a good number of senior officers – the police were aggressive and profane throughout, even though there was no trouble at that time of the morning. I was upset that the police were so abusive, when it did not seem to be necessary.

It was a tradition that British Rail would use old or obsolete rolling stock for these trains – the fans, after all, were barely human, so it was probably deemed adequate. There was no heating, the toilets did not work, in some carriages there was no lighting, and only some of the carriage doors were unlocked – for security. We were also crammed in – 4-a-side in a filthy compartment designed to hold six. People standing or squatting in the corridors. Much shoving and swearing to get us all in.

The journey was cold and it took ages – the Football Specials, of course, had to work around the normal timetables of sensible trains for decent people, so the routing may have been odd, and we spent lots of time waiting at signals. We arrived in Huddersfield on a cold, soaking wet afternoon – it was already very dark at 2pm, when we got off the train. That was the first shock. We were not in a station – we were unloaded – had to jump down – in a siding somewhere, and were herded along what appeared to be a disused railway line, past derelict factories and rubbish dumps, accompanied by a lot of policemen – some of these had come on the train, some were local and met us there.

Industrial heartland - Huddersfield in the Old Days

The idea was to keep this horde off the streets of the town as completely as possible – it was a long, wet, muddy walk to the old Leeds Road ground, and only the later part of the walk was along paved streets. We got into the ground without incident, always with the watching constables, and the game itself was almost an unreal interlude (we won 2-1, Melia and Hunt scored the goals, though I don’t remember a great deal about it), and then it was time to get us all out of the town again.

The return march seems to have been more direct – we actually walked through central Huddersfield – I recall being surprised that they had trolley-buses – but you could not stop – certainly no chance of going into a pub or buying food. Prodded and abused, we were at least taken to a station this time. The train, however, was the same as before, and we reached Liverpool many hours late, frozen stiff, and I was seriously traumatised by the experience. I was never allowed to go to an away game again – in fact the home games were off limits for a few weeks as well.

The point of this insignificant tale, if there is one, is that there was no trouble – maybe that is a vindication of the methods, I really don’t know. It was a competely routine transport exercise, to move PAYING CUSTOMERS (I capitalise that to remind myself that we were not, in fact, convicts or prisoners of war) to a public sporting event in a town that really was not so far away. It must have happened, just like that, many, many times, every weekend, all over the country. The police, famously, did not relish football duty on the weekend, and it was very obvious that the fans were uniformly regarded as vermin. Again, maybe we were – I certainly felt degraded and distressed by the experience – Ken and I were just naïve young boys from a decent school, and being shouted and sworn at on a routine basis was upsetting.

Of course, it was all right really – just a growing experience, something to toughen us up, but if you wanted to radicalize the working classes that was one way of going about it. My grandmother use to say that if you expect the worst of people, that’s just what you will get. It doesn’t seem particularly sensible that league football matches should become a long-running war between the police and the public, especially if they didn’t have to, but that was certainly the tradition.

Hooptedoodle #213 - Elegance of the 1960s

A friend shared this on his Facebook account, and I thought it was so good that I should borrow it here - splendid stuff.

Despite the manic Britishness of the whole thing, I find this clip strangely uplifting. This must have been one of the more powerful Lambrettas, I guess - 175cc? Still a daunting load for such a small unit, though - I guess it would get a little out of breath going over the old Hardknott Pass.

We've been making rather slow progress with organising a summer holiday. Appropriately inspired by the earnest pluck of this lot, I am determined to try a little harder.

And the caravan, you will note, can be erected by morons...

Hooptedoodle #210 - Jim and Ike and the Cowhouse

From time to time I post here what I consider some of the more entertaining tales by which my family commemorate our quirkier ancestors. I’ve grown a little wary of doing this, since some of the comments I’ve received make it pretty clear that the authenticity of these stories is a matter of some doubt, that the tales are sometimes thought to be faked for the viewing audience.

Not so. If I had the strength or the moral fibre I would protest – I might even expostulate, if I knew how. If I had the imagination to invent this stuff I would be quietly pleased. This does not preclude the simple possibility that a bunch of lies has been handed down the family over the years, of course, but, though the tales may have been polished in the retelling, I believe they are substantially correct. Anyway, here’s another one…

A surviving "cowhouse" in the south end of Liverpool - this one at Aigburth/Sefton
Park - these were still a common sight when I was a kid, though few of them were still
working dairies. Typically, in their heyday, these places were run by people with a farming
background - i.e. who knew one end of a cow from the other

Recently, while I was visiting my mother in hospital, we had a lengthy conversation about Great Uncle Jim. My mother remembers some of these old characters with astonishing clarity and detail, and a lot of affectionate humour. Since she cannot always remember where she is on a given day, or why, we have to cherish the good bits of her memory, I think.

Now then. Let’s go back just a little. Great Grandfather George was my father’s father’s father (which is a straightforward idea, if tricky to say), and he was a moderately wealthy market gardener (vegetable farmer) near the small town of Rainhill, in Lancashire. He was a tenant farmer, and his business was run very efficiently by his wife Ellen, who was not a local woman – she came from somewhere further south – possibly Gloucestershire, as I recall.

The big problem was George’s thirst. Things got to a point where he would set off with his horse and cart all loaded up, on a Saturday morning, to take the produce to Warrington Market, and the horse would bring him back on Sunday, drunk and penniless. Every rum-pot in Warrington knew where to cadge a drink if George was in town. He was a celebrity, of a sort.

Brickmaker's Arms public house, Warrington, c1900

Ellen did a remarkable thing for those days – sometime around 1895 she decided she had had quite enough, and left her husband, and went to the nearest city (George is believed to have died in Warrington workhouse eventually).

Warrington workhouse - old George is in an unmarked grave somewhere here

She and her teenage sons moved into Liverpool with what little savings she had scraped together, and she opened a dairy (a milkhouse or “cowhouse”, as they were known, with a couple of cows and everything) in the vicinity of Hill Street, Toxteth. The idea of a dairy in such a location seems very far-fetched now, especially in post-Derek Hatton, modernised Liverpool, but such things were common in those times (non-UK readers who do not know about Derek Hatton are congratulated on their good fortune). The sons were Jim (the elder) and Ike (Isaac, my granddad), and they were up before dawn every day; they milked the cows, and delivered the milk in the neighbourhood – filling customers’ jugs from churns on their handcart.

A Liverpool milk-float - not Ellen's - the Anfield Dairy looks rather up-market

I believe the dairy did reasonably well, the hand barrow was replaced by a horse-drawn cart, and eventually Ellen sold up and retired, and Ike got himself a job in what was the then brand-new electrician trade, and he went into business converting houses to electric lighting – subsequently he was a foreman with Mersey Docks & Harbour Board, in the Electrical Workshop at the docks, and he (of course, since he was my paternal grandad) married and raised a family.

Toxteth - c1900 - not very rural - this is Wilson Street, at the Dingle

...and here is a supper bar in St James St

Jim never married – he missed the countryside and he returned to his roots (literally?), working on a few farms in Lancashire and Cheshire before acquiring a smallholding at Willaston, in the Wirral Peninsula. My dad could remember episodes from his childhood when all the family went for a working holiday on Jim’s farm at harvest time – the women, girls and infants slept in the farmhouse, while the older boys and the men all slept in a big shed, which was freshly painted out with bitumen each year to keep the fleas down – sounds pretty fancy – must have been great for the Liverpool catarrh, you would think. Dad always treasured the memory of these childhood visits, and throughout his life was fascinated by farming and the countryside. He remembered an incident when he must have been about five or six, when Jim’s carthorse, Samson, got overexcited and pushed its way into the back kitchen. There was no room for the horse to turn around, and the women in the house ran screaming while Jim confronted the monster. He punched it on the nose, and the astonished horse backed smartly into the yard – unfortunately, Samson was now wearing the doorframe and the beams across his shoulders, and most of the kitchen promptly collapsed, but my dad always saw this as a great success for his uncle, despite the collateral damage. You can see that, as a hero figure, an uncle who punched carthorses was a cut above a dad who fixed people’s lighting.

More like the thing - Willaston Village, Wirral, around the
same date - Jim had a smallholding at Nine Acres, not far from here

So this is shaping up to be an idyllic tale of Old Uncle Jim, who ran a lovely farm in lovely Cheshire, where the sun always shone, and where disobedient horses were disciplined promptly and with terrible strength. The truth is, Uncle Jim was a bit mad.

Jim knew for certain that any stranger who came near his farm was up to no good. One weekend he intercepted the collective gentry of the local hunt (yoicks!), who were crossing his land, and told them that if he saw them again he would shoot them. They dismissed him airily, as you would expect, and two weeks later he fired a shotgun during a hunt, allegedly at them, and was arrested. He spent a little while in prison, and then some time in a mental institution.

When I knew him he was over 80, I guess, and I was a very small child – if I had started school then I had only just started. Jim was long retired  - he gave up the farming, basically because he was always too lazy to make any money. He then lived in a council flat at Knotty Ash, Liverpool, which was many miles from our house, yet for a while he regularly visited us around teatime on a Saturday – my dad used to buy fish and chips for our weekend treat on Saturdays, and Jim was more than happy to drop in, unannounced, and share. He always claimed that he had just been passing, but a journey from Knotty Ash on the tram was a lengthy undertaking, requiring much planning. He used to come via the Saturday market in Garston, where he used to purchase crazy gifts for me – once a plaster figurine of an Alsatian dog, daubed with gold paint, often a bundle of pencils which only had about an inch of lead in each end, and once a framed picture of the Pope (cut from a magazine) – interesting in their way, I suppose, but each of them a poor swap for a decent plate of fish and chips.

Jim and Ike both had telephones installed in their homes – neither had many friends, and they kept in constant touch by means of this new technological wonder. I was once in my granddad’s house when he was on the phone to his brother, and I remember that they both shouted so loud that I thought they could simply have opened the window and communicated without involving the telephone service. Like a lot of retired men of their era and their background, they sort of lost their way a bit, having no useful role in the community. Ike was desperate to fix stuff, to repair things, to be useful and respected.

He repaired a handbag of my mother’s, and it was about twice as heavy after he had fixed it, the new leather patches contrasted strangely with the original material, and it would not open properly. It went in the bin.

He agreed to fix Jim’s alarm clock, which had stopped working. After he had got it working, he quizzed Jim on why it had been so rusty – he had had to strip down and hand-polish all the internals with oil and carborundum paper – a lengthy job. When Jim explained that it had fallen in his chamber pot one night, Ike said he was a dirty bugger, and they didn’t speak to each other for some weeks.

Ike’s worst ever repair job was when my Auntie May brought back a delicate silver bracelet from Spain – from the first foreign holiday any of that family ever went on (if you ignore Uncle Les’s time in Tunisia and Italy in WW2). He thought it looked disappointingly flimsy, and offered to improve it for her – this involved very large blobs of extra solder at every joint, and Auntie May was heartbroken, though it was definitely stronger – Ike was getting a bit past it by then, if that is an admissible defence…

Jim lived on his own in his flat in Knotty Ash, and he got very frail and very dotty. He still insisted on riding his bicycle, to everyone’s despair, in spite of frequent blackouts. On one occasion a motorist found him lying in the road, helped him up and stood him up in a shop doorway to see if he was all right – Jim punched him because he felt that the motorist must have knocked him off his bike. I believe that may have been the end of Jim’s cycling.

For a while my father used occasionally to travel on his Lambretta scooter (125cc) to visit Jim, to see how he was getting on, and invariably found him to be cheerful, full of energy and completely bats.

Lambretta 125, just like my dad's - that pillion seat was not
recommended for long distances - I still walk with a limp 

He was making a fried breakfast one Sunday when my dad arrived, and Jim invited him to share it, though there were no plates – the idea was they would both eat from the frying pan, since this saved on the washing up. Needless to add, the frying pan was never washed either. He also offered my dad some homemade bread to go with it – he said that he had become very keen on baking, which he thought was doubly useful since it kept his fingernails clean. My dad declined this splendid offer. Uncle Jim asked my dad (who was, like his father, an electrical man) to have a look at his radio, which hadn’t worked for a while. Apparently it was a real museum piece – Jim hugged it and pressed his ear to the silent speaker – he said that he was sure there was still life in it (actually, he referred to it as “him”), and that he had heard “him” speaking sometimes when he was in the other room. My dad swore that Jim had a length of wire from the EARTH (ground) terminal on the radio chassis, and the other end was in a plant-pot full of soil from his yard – I’ve never been sure about this – it sounds too much like an Irish gag.

Ike had a severe stroke when he was about 75, and died within a couple of days, but he died secure in the proud knowledge that he was something of a local rarity, since he owned his own house (he had bought it with the £500 he inherited from the sale of his mother’s dairy), and that he owned the first TV set in his street; they had bought it so the neighbours could watch the (1953) Coronation on it. Since he already had a telephone that he overcharged the neighbours to use, this was the ultimate in Beating the Joneses. My granddad was quite big-time – as a foreman in the electrical workshop, almost unbelievable nowadays, he used to wear a waistcoat and a bowler hat. My lasting childhood memory of him is sitting in his armchair, resplendent in waistcoat and silver watchchain (which I have somewhere), with the cufflinks and detachable starched collar removed from his work shirt, slurping a cup of tea.

Jim was well into his eighties when he died – his end was unfortunate, solitary, and in some ways had a lot in common with his life. He was boiling eggs on his gas stove in his little flat when he seems to have had some kind of dizzy turn. The coroner’s inquest reckoned that the pan of water boiled over, extinguishing the gas flame, and Jim was gassed while he was unconscious.

That’s enough about that lot. I also might add, in passing, that I have a relative from a different branch of the family, who was gaoled in the 1970s for spying for the Russians – this is absolutely true, by the way. I think I’m probably not allowed to say anything about this story, so I’ll leave it for the moment. Just saying.

Things could get worse.

Hooptedoodle #187 – But Clouds Got in My Way

The Technology Illusion

When I first started driving, I owned a series of fairly dodgy pre-owned cars, and – though I sometimes look back on this period with some affection – the reality is that a journey was far more of an act of faith than I would be prepared to put up with now.

A number of things have moved on, of course: the technology has improved, the reliability of robot-built, computerised vehicles is unrecognisably better, the roads are better, the annual “MoT” tests have put most unserviceable vehicles off the road in the UK, and the whole approach to motoring has changed. When I consider the risks I put my young family through back in the 1970s I cannot help but shudder - driving in the Scottish Highlands in a Renault 12 which only worked some of the time, or travelling to France in an ancient 1300cc Cortina (yes, 1300cc - that’s about 1.5 horsepower with a tailwind, in a 2 ton vehicle consisting mostly of angle-iron girders, packed to the gunnels with kiddies’ high-chairs, camping equipment, and actual people).

It was not possible to go motoring in those days unless you had a working knowledge of distributors, carburettor jets, hydraulic bleed nipples and a whole catalogue of suspect bits. Far too often a long journey would require an early stop in a layby somewhere, with the bonnet up, trying to find where the power had gone, or what the strange noise was – or had we imagined it? The AA patrols were like guardian saints in the wilderness – if you got to your destination without some kind of mechanical catastrophe then you felt you ought to go to evening mass to give thanks. Those cars I had were really not fit for purpose – I used to lie awake, in my tent on my holiday campsite, wondering where in the Jura mountains I could get hold of an alternator for an obsolete British Ford, whether the brakes would make it all the way to Lausanne, whether the water-pump leak was serious, whether the exhaust pipe repair would last. If you listened really hard, you could hear these jalopies rusting. The only bits of the bodywork which were not rusting were the bits that had already rusted away and been replaced with fibreglass and porridge.

Nowadays, a car consists of a number of sealed boxes. Nobody really knows what they do – they are made by robots in a factory far away. If your car causes problems, which is very much less likely now, it is no use hoping to have a techie discussion with a proper mechanic about the distributor rotor – the mechanics are just fitters these days, and no-one remembers what a distributor was – diagnostics are carried out by plugging in a laptop computer, which will tell the man which box he needs to replace; if he has one in the store-room then you might get your car back today, otherwise he will email the supplier for one and you’ll get it back tomorrow.

It’s a different thing altogether, and I cannot pretend that it is not better. It seems to me that in the 1970s the reality of owning a car was that you had to understand, more or less, how it worked, or else you had to have a friend who could understand on your behalf. You were the direct successor to a whole line of men wearing their caps back to front, who knew that being a proper motorist required that you were also some kind of engineer. Now we are completely at the mercy of the repair-shop’s laptop, and everything is expensive, but at least we are excused the need to know how a car works, and – most importantly – we can now almost afford to take for granted that when we set out on a journey we are going to arrive at the far end.

The man with his cap back to front is a useful icon for my view of technology. When my father moved up to Scotland, in 2001, I took my laptop around to his new house to sort out a few issues with utility suppliers and so forth, and he was very interested in it. My dad was a very smart man – he was an electronics engineer who worked latterly for the UK Atomic Energy people, and he had lived through the development of computers. He had been involved with some of the earlier commercial applications of computers, performing forecast estimates of electrical supply requirements for power stations, doing mathematical modelling of reactor performance and so on. The computers he had worked with were the size of a room, with cabinets full of tape drives and deafening air-conditioning, and you communicated with them via punched paper tape or punched cards, but he knew all about computers.

My laptop intrigued him. “So what is it?” he asked, “Is it a word-processor, or a calculator, or an information storage device? – what is it?”

I said it was all these things, and could do a whole pile more – all we needed to do was provide a suitable application program, and the scope was almost limitless. I tried to explain conceptually what the functional bits of the machine were, and how an operating system glued everything together as “services” for the end-user. I also emphasised that I was not any kind of engineer, though I used computers a lot, and in fact earned my living with them. My dad was disturbed by the fact that he really couldn’t grasp this at all. For a start, anyone who was not any kind of engineer was probably beneath contempt, but he found it a surprise – and not a very comfortable surprise – that he was in a room with a small device costing a few hundred pounds, the nature of which he couldn’t get a feel for at all.

So he fell back on the engineering bit – “How does it work?” – and when my dad said how does it work, he meant semiconductors, bits of wire, transistors and logic gates (or their modern equivalent), diodes. When I admitted that I really didn’t know, had never built one and would be terrified to open one up, he snorted and jammed his cap firmly on, back to front, and that was the end of his interest in computers. 

One alarming aspect of the passage of time is that we catch ourselves turning into our fathers. We use the Internet a lot here – well, as much as our rural broadband allows – and the other night the Contesse was doing some digging into her family history, and found that she had a great-uncle who served in France in WW1. She found him on a Roll of Honour listing the WW1 service of people who were natives of Morayshire (North East Scotland), though he was a sapper in the Canadian Army. She had no record of this great-uncle previously – he does not appear on any family trees which have been produced to date – so this was all interesting and new.

Good. Very good – but it occurred to me that we would have been unable to explain to my dad, for example, what we had just done. Not least, this is because I for one simply don’t really know. Where did the information come from? – where has it been stored? – how does the search engine work? how does the information get organised and returned? – and how does it happen so fast? Don’t know. I have a vague, doodly idea of how all this works, but I don’t wish to understand it in detail – I am an end-user; I only need to know how to make use of it. My dad would certainly have regarded the term end-user as derogatory. He would have realised that the information had not somehow been stored in some dark place within the Contesse’s laptop, but his attention would have been focused on how the Internet worked rather than how to make use of it. His cap was worn the wrong way round for an end-user. He would have found the Internet wonderful, and intriguing, but would have been distracted by the nuts and bolts. Well, clouds.

Today my son comes to tell me that he has some good news in connection with his computer. Normally the words “good news” and “computer” do not sit together well in this context, but on this occasion I am well impressed. He lost his mobile phone a few months ago – a severe upset which, of course, we all got to experience to the full. A big theme of last week was trying to get Windows 10 to work on his laptop – we succeeded after a lot of research and some in-fighting. As a consequence, he now finds that his Microsoft account includes access to a cloud-type facility (is that the word?) called OneDrive which was available to users of Windows 8 (which was used by his lost phone) but not Windows 7, as his laptop was previously. Now, to his delight, he finds that he has access to all the photos and documents he lost with his phone, since they had all been faithfully hoovered up into OneDrive, without his knowledge or intervention, and are sitting there waiting – like Greyfriars Bobby – for what? Again, I would have had dreadful trouble explaining to my dad where they have been, or how we came to get them back. It doesn’t matter, but I can feel my cap starting to turn a bit…

It would now be possible to go on at great length about the illusory tech-savvy to which a complete generation now appears to attach great prestige, and about how these people are the endest of end-users – my dad would have worried about them – he would even have worried on their behalf, since they do not appear to know quite what it is they are doing. Maybe it doesn’t matter, after all – maybe we don’t need real technicians – maybe we just keep throwing the stuff away and getting our credit card to buy a new one, and trust in the Cloud.

I won’t do that. I’d like to end with an affectionate story about the first time my mother met my SatNav unit. This was about 8 years ago, back in the days when my mum still went out. She was introduced to Martina, the very polite, calm, English voice which my Garmin uses to give instructions. Mum was very impressed, listening to the Voice of Martina as we drove along.

“She’s very good, isn’t she? – she seems very calm, and she must have an awful lot of people to deal with at the same time. Where is she?”

No, no, I said – she wasn’t anywhere; the voice was a computerised thing that lived in the little black box in my car. The only thing that was outside the car was a satellite – or maybe two satellites – I couldn’t remember.

“Good heavens,” said my mum, “you mean the woman is in a satellite?”

No, no – there is no-one in the satellite - the only thing the satellite does is send a signal which says “here I am”, and probably sends an accurate time signal – everything else is done inside the car. I was very much aware that my father would have been very unconvinced by my description, but I stuck with it.

“So there is no woman, then?” said Mum.

No – it is a series of digital recordings of a real woman’s voice, but it is a little computer making the noises. The system is just (just!) a satellite system and a little box on my windscreen.

My mother thought about this for a while, and then said, “No – I can’t see how that would work at all – there must be a woman somewhere who knows where your car is.”

So that was that. Nothing further to discuss about SatNavs.

Hooptedoodle #185 - The ABC Man

Last month Ian Allan passed away, one day short of his 93^rd birthday. Who? Well, in his way, Allan was one of the most famous and influential men of his generation.

Ian Allan (left), in his early 20s - checking facts

You see, he more or less invented trainspotting in the UK. Well, he didn’t really invent it, but the books and enthusiasts’ guides he published (and which the company he founded continues to publish) organised it and codified it, and have been the backbone of the Nerd World since 1942.

Allan was born in 1922 in Horsham, Surrey, and educated at St Paul’s School. An accident at an Officers’ Training Corps camp when he was 15 resulted in the amputation of one of his legs, and he was not greatly gifted scholastically, so by 1942 he was employed in a clerical department at the Southern Railway, a humble role which, as it happened, suited him perfectly. He was fanatically enthusiastic about all things to do with trains and locomotives, and, since his employers refused to have anything to do with the project, he published at his own expense a booklet describing all the rolling stock of SR, and was rather shaken when all the copies sold out very quickly, necessitating a further printing. He went on to produce successful booklets for the other British railway companies, and the first edition of his volume on London Transport systems sold out all 20,000 copies within 4 days of going on sale. After that, things really took off.

In post-war, rationed, miserable, penniless Britain, Allan had provided the basic tools for an inexpensive hobby which became a near-religion, claiming the attention of vast numbers of boys (of all ages). In 1949 he and his wife founded the Ian Allan Locospotters’ Club, which eventually had some 230,000 members. His little booklets covered a remarkable number of titles, originally on railway topics, but later on trams, buses, aviation, all forms of road transport, shipping, military subjects, model-making – you name it. About half the kids in my class at grammar school were trainspotters – at weekends, on railway station platforms all over the country, there would be little groups of enthusiasts, each with a knapsack containing a flask of tea and a number of Allan's precious ABC books, so that “spotted” locomotives could be marked off in the lists.

Trainspotters at Newcastle, 1950

Just as well his mother never knew...

My cousin Dave had an astonishing number of the bus books – and I do mean astonishing. He was an easy kid to buy presents for. Not only was it necessary to have the booklet for every known vehicle fleet, but constant change in those fleets would require new editions every couple of years, and, naturally, they would be snapped up as soon as available. Though the individual books were only a couple of shillings each (in my day), they would form a major investment for the true disciple. Dave and I spent many hours at the Ribble bus sheds, in Liverpool and Preston, scribbling numbers into notebooks. I guess my unsophisticated tastes were honed at an early age…

Allan was always an enthusiast

Ian Allan Publications are still going strong – their output is glossier and more ambitious now, but they still seem to hold the same important place in the hearts and minds of transport fans, and their reputation for accuracy and quality still holds. Allan also produced market-leading monthly magazines on railways, buses and model railways, which I believe are still going strong, and at various times he bought the Hastings Miniature Railway and the Great Cockrow Railway (near Chertsea). He was honoured with an OBE in 1996.

If you wish to see how influential ABC books were, just have a look on eBay – any day, any week, almost any subject.

My old school chum Andy “Cocky” Roche once announced that he had seen a girl trainspotter at Carlisle station, but this was greeted with total (and somehow reassuring) disbelief. Anyway, if he had seen one, she would most certainly have had one or more of the ABC books with her; thanks very much, Mr Allan.