Hooptedoodle #335 - Me and the Bird Man...

Another Hooptedoodle - three on the bounce is normally a sign of something or other. On this occasion, it's because life is a little upside-down at the moment with my son's school exams - not a great deal of upheaval for me, since the Contesse is doing the organising and transport, but I have had a few days on my own at home. I've taken the opportunity to make decent progress with prepping more soldiers for the French Refurb, but I am reluctant to post yet more photos of bare-metal Les Higgins figures and the pervading mess. I could, of course, just keep quiet for a few days, but that could set a very dangerous precedent.

Yesterday I was reading about an incident I saw - or at which I was present, I suppose - when I was a small boy. On Whit Monday, May 21st 1956, I was taken by "Uncle" Duggie - a family friend - to the air show at Speke. Duggie was a Liverpool police officer, he was ex-RAF (he had been a middleweight boxing champion in the RAF) and he had more brass neck than you would believe, so he was an ideal man for taking you around - he seemed to know just about everybody, and he was quite happy to walk into areas which were supposed to be off-limits to the public.

Valentin demonstrating some of his later wings, suspended from a scaffold. If anyone thinks this looks like a bad idea, please put up your hand. [This set-up was a pose for photos, one of which subsequently appeared on the cover of his book]

It was a lovely, hot day. The place was packed. One big attraction was the scheduled appearance of the French Bird Man, Leo Valentin, who was to fly with strapped-on wings for our entertainment. Not much happened in those days - not like this. The events of that day, I learn, were also remembered by other, eventually more famous Liverpool kids than me - George Harrison and Paul McCartney were there (at that time they both lived in the new council housing estate at Speke, close to the airport), as was Clive Barker, the sci-fi writer and film-maker. Of course they were. There were 100,000 people there - anyone who could get there was bound to have been there - a big family holiday-out for the whole city. I was a very timid child, and was very worried about the Bird Man, and some of the planes were a tad noisy, and I didn't care for big crowds - so it wasn't such a perfect day for me, maybe!

Liverpool airport is at Speke, which then was outside the south end of the city. I remember being parched with thirst - no-one carried water in those days, for some reason, and queuing for a cup of industrial tea didn't seem such a great idea. I also remember that it was very hard to see much. If you were a small person, it wasn't a straightforward matter to see the sky between the adults. Valentin's flight was delayed - when he eventually made an attempt it was in a period when the crowd had started to wander around the airfield, and the events, which certainly did not last long, almost appeared incidental - many of those present must actually have been unaware of it. Valentin's approach run (with a new, larger style of wing, ferried up in a DC3) was pretty much unnoticeable (we couldn't hear the commentator anyway), his exit from the plane went wrong, he damaged one of his wings in the doorway, and I got a very brief glimpse (between adults) of Valentin, wrapped in his parachute, falling to the ground, maybe a mile away. There was a bit of a collective gasp, but a great many people around me never noticed.

A strange atmosphere fell over the place. It was one of those "nothing to see here, move along please" moments - the organisers obviously had to allow a slight gap for emergency reaction, but the show must go on. It was only when I got home (via the 82 bus) that I realised what had happened. I had simply assumed that Valentin wasn't flying today. In fact his emergency chute had failed, and he'd fallen 9000 feet into a cornfield, at Halewood. He was, of course, as dead as a door-nail. For some reason the local paper made a big fuss about the fact that his watch was still working. Someone missed an advertising opportunity there. Here's a nice little, rather homespun, video clip, to which I link with humble thanks and no permission.

Valentin had been a war hero, and was given a fancy military funeral in France - none of this reached the UK press. As far as I was concerned, he was really just another example of a common phenomenon of the times - you queued for hours to see something, and then nothing happened. Well, not for me - obviously things must have been a bit intense for him.

I believe this is the actual Beverley, at actual Speke, on the actual day [actually]. I am not on board - not bloody likely.

At some point in the afternoon Uncle Duggie got us past a rope barrier to look at a Blackburn Beverley and chat with its pilot - a friend of his from the RAF. Although the official record of the show says that the Beverley was a "no-show", I can confirm that it was very much there, and it did perform a fly-past later, with Duggie's pal at the controls. Duggie had managed to negotiate a look inside the thing, and asked me did I want to have a look around it - not flying in it, you understand, just having a peek, which wasn't allowed either. Since my timidity would not allow me to do anything which was not permitted, and since claustrophobia was another problem to add to my aforementioned list, I declined. I am ashamed to say that I turned down the opportunity to look around a newly-commissioned RAF Beverley, in 1956. Sorry, gentlemen. Sometimes I wonder how I ever survived this big, tough world. Sometimes I think that if I had a time machine I would go back and give myself a kick up the backside.

When there was no airshow, the spectator gallery on the roof at Speke was quite a popular attraction. I went a couple of times - it was very windy up there, and there weren't many planes to look at, I can tell you. What a miserable beggar I was!

Speke airport is now known as Liverpool John Lennon Airport. It always strikes me as ironic that Lennon himself only had a very brief involvement with the airport as a youth, when he was (I think) fired from temporary employment as a gopher in the cafe, for having a generally unhelpful attitude and making a deliberately unsavoury job of the sandwiches. That's how you go about getting an airport named after you. Charles de Gaulle had to work a bit harder for his airport, maybe.   

Hooptedoodle #334 - Local Research to Get One's Teeth Into

High-profile local advertising - Barker & Dobson advert on the Liverpool Overhead Railway, mid 1950s. B&D's factory was just a few miles up the hill, in Everton

I was born in Liverpool, as I keep mentioning here (possibly as some form of excuse?), and grew up supporting Liverpool Football Club. The other big club in the city, Everton, also has a long and proud tradition. Since as a kid I spent some years forbidden to travel to away matches, I often used to go with similarly paroled friends to Goodison Park, to watch Everton when Liverpool were playing in far off places.

Nowadays, in the age of hate and trolling, the Liverpool vs Everton thing can be as unpleasant as you might expect - families banned from intermarrying etc - but in my youth things were a bit less frenzied, and I grew up with a soft spot for Everton which I might be well advised to keep quiet about now.

Everton FC - 1909

Everton, as you may or may not know, have been known as "The Toffees" since what my dad's cousin Harold Shaw used to refer to as "time immoral". Like all such traditions that we absorb in early childhood, I never questioned it or wondered about its background.

A bit of cod [personal] history. There were an astonishing number of sweet factories in Liverpool. Now I think about it, this is obviously because, as the headquarters of Tate & Lyle, Liverpool was the place through which most of the cane sugar from the Caribbean arrived in Britain. If it hadn't been for post-war rationing, we'd all have had no teeth.

Another fact which has only dawned on me gradually is that many of the makers of sweets I was familiar with as a kid were Liverpool-based. This is not just because they were local firms who had a grip on the market - a number of them were nationally famous, and they just happened to have their factories in the city.

I got involved over the last couple of weeks in a pleasant exchange of email reminiscences about vintage sweets. I did a bit of gentle research to find out what happened to such-and-such a maker, and mostly I learned that the history of  the UK sweet industry is pretty alarming - a lot of hostile takeovers - and very complicated. I also learned something, at long last, about why Everton FC are the Toffees.

I've always been familiar with Everton Mints, which were a hard, black-and-white, humbug-like boiled sweet with a toffee centre, manufactured by Barker & Dobson, whose factory was in Everton. B&D, founded in 1834, were big and successful - they made chocolates and posh biscuits and all sorts - in fact their gift tins still change hands for decent prices in eBay. It's possible I always assumed that the football club's nickname had something to do with B&D.

B&D factory - Everton, 1960s

The height of sophistication - B&D ad from the 1920s - apparently the lovely lady has a weakness for "Viking" chocolates [made with raw fish?]. As the copy line states, "Nowadays it's Barker & Dobson's chocolate". Don't laugh, somebody probably got a bonus for that one.

...and, of course, since toffee was trendy, they would work to cater for the latest advances in home entertainment. Here we see a tin commemorating how Mr & Mrs Cavity and their children would sit around the steam radio, enjoying light entertainment and chewing ferociously. [A sub-plot of selection boxes of toffee was that I always finished up with the walnut toffee, or the mint one, both of which were grim.]

...and, as time passed, B&D were always there, at the cutting edge. Now we have the Gummy family enjoying TV, slurping away on toffees "and other specialities". Mr Gummy, as you see, smokes his pipe while eating toffee, which is pretty disgusting really.

Anyway, it didn't. A lady named Molly Bushell (1748-1818) started making toffee containing ginger on an open-air stove behind her cottage in Everton, sometime around 1770, and she became quite successful. At this time, Everton village was something of a tourist attraction, with splendid views of the river from the slopes of Everton Hill. As the business grew, Molly was helped by her daughter, and also by a cousin, Sarah Cooper. In later life, she appears to have fallen out with Mrs Cooper, who opened a rival shop in Browside (also Everton). Much later, the remaining interests of these cottage businesses were taken over by the firm of Noblett's, who from 1876 or so took over the manufacture and marketing of Everton Toffee. Everton FC came into being in 1878, and the sale of toffees at the games quickly became a tradition, vendors offering "Mother Noblett's Toffee" inside the ground.

Sarah Cooper's toffee shop in Browside - note Everton reserves training in the sloping field opposite

Mother Noblett's Toffee advert - Liverpool Echo

Noblett's Toffee Shop - they had a shop in London Rd, and this one at 30 Old Haymarket. According to my Gore's Directory for 1900, the shop to the left of "Leonard Noblett, confectioner" is (or had been) John & T Edwards, wholesale grocers; on the other corner of Albion Place is Lipton's, the famous tea importers and blenders. I would guess this photo must be approximately contemporary with the 1909 football team picture. Old Haymarket was pretty much laid waste to make room for the entrance to the new Mersey Road Tunnel, which was started in 1925.

Tavener-Routledge were another famous Liverpool sweet maker - their fruit drops were much loved. They too have disappeared. So - where did they go?

The other lot - Liverpool players Ian Callaghan, Phil Thompson, Terry McDermott and John Toshack check out the lollipops during a state visit to Taverner's factory in Edge Lane - 1970s

Very complicated - a succession of local dinosaurs ate each other until big national dinosaurs came on the scene and ate everybody in sight. Barker & Dobson at various times owned the rights to Vicks (cough sweets?) and Victory V lozenges (which were addictive, since the recipe contained chloroform - no, really - which had to be changed, of course). B&D were subsequently bought by a Blackpool firm named Tangerine (not another football reference?), and later the whole lot was bought out by Bassett's.

When I was at university, I shared digs for a while with a guy who was addicted to these things. He used to get through a pack in an evening, which made him a dangerous man to be near. He lived to become a chemistry professor, but frankly it's a wonder he never exploded.

You can still buy Everton Mints - these days they are branded as Bassett's, but I don't think this is quite the same Bassett's who used to make Liquorice Allsorts and jelly babies in my youth. Bassett's now is just one of a series of long-established brands acquired by the Cadbury group. They are most certainly not in Everton!

Only thing I don't understand now is that there seems to have been a brand of toffee called "Molly Bushell's" marketed in Australia in fairly recent times. If this is nonsense, and something I misunderstood, then apologies - it won't be the first time. 

Just a coincidence? Was Molly transported to Oz for damaging people's teeth? Any ideas?

Coming Up - Ney Day?

There's a great deal made of anniversaries these days. The great thing about an anniversary is that we know when it's coming round, so the media people can prepare something in advance, during slack periods. Sometimes these anniversaries can seem a bit contrived, or they commemorate something that isn't very interesting, or that nobody has heard of (which is a special case of "not very interesting", I suppose).

Recently it was the 54th anniversary of my Uncle Harold accidentally reversing into the lady next door's car, in Bromborough. The stature of this anniversary is limited by the fact that very few folk who knew of the incident at the time are still alive, and those who are cannot remember it anyway, so it is unsatisfactory on a number of counts - not helped by the fact that no-one was hurt.

No - we have to aim higher. This post is all the Duc de Gobin's fault, by the way, since he reminded me of the classic Waterloo film from 1970. Subsequently I was browsing around the subject of the movie - online, like - and I discovered that Dan O'Herlihy, the Irish actor who played Marshal Ney in the movie, was born on 1st May 1919. If Steiger will always be the true Napoleon to many of us, then for me O'Herlihy will forever be the iconic Ney, the man who told the Emperor to abdicate, for goodness' sake. You can't get any more important or influential than that - though it surprises me that I never saw O'Herlihy, as far as I know, in anything else. It has been suggested that they had to pay so much to secure the services of Steiger, Plummer and Orson Welles in the Bondarchuk movie that they economised by filling the rest of the cast with lesser lights - first-rate actors who were less well-known. And Terence Alexander, of course. 

Anyway, this means we are fast approaching the 100th anniversary of the birth of The-Man-Who-Played-Ney. I don't expect this to get into the BBC Radio 4 world news on 1st May, so I guess I'll have to commemorate Ney Day privately. I can always watch Waterloo again, of course, with a mug of cocoa, but I'd welcome any good ideas about a suitable way of celebrating.

Any thoughts?

To get myself in the mood, here's the classic opening sequence, in which we discover that Napoleon's Marshals were trained to speak in turn, in the best traditions of panto, that Marshal Soult was a Scotsman (played by an Italian actor), that Napoleon wore specs and that Marmont was a rotten scoundrel. Great stuff. Love it.

***** Late Edit *****

Scrapbook stuff, courtesy of the Interweb.

Ney (Michel, not Dan the Man) was born in Saarlouis, which these days is in Germany - his birthplace is now an Italian restaurant, but the situation is rescued by the fact that its address is 13 Bierstrasse, which is more like it. I don't know if the restaurant is the original building, but since his father was a cooper, it is no surprise that they had a big cellar.

Here's young Michel in the 4th Hussars, 1792.

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Hooptedoodle #330 - The Anfield Iron

I'm not going to make a meal of this, I always find it very uncomfortable when there is scope for a "me too" tribute to former celebrities. So this is going to be a very simple "thank you" to a hero from my youth, a football player, no less, who in his prime was a central part of my lifelong club, my home-town team, in the years when, miraculously, unbelievably, they progressed from being the second best team in the city to become the undisputed top team in the country (a long time ago now!). Tommy Smith died today, peacefully, after a period of illness, aged 74.

Tommy Smith, Liverpool FC

Tommy was a local lad, a working class kid from an impoverished background, and his chief characteristic was that he was the toughest, dirtiest, most intimidating defender of his day. It was a personal misfortune of his that he was a contemporary of Norman Hunter of Leeds, who had a lot of the same qualities but was a superior footballer, so that poor old Tommy only ever got a single international cap for England.

No matter. He was a sporting hero from a bygone age. Nowadays, given the price of season tickets for the Premier League, fans are not really looking to see local kids playing for their team - they expect to see expensive Brazilians, Spaniards, Africans, Frenchmen, whatever. I suppose it's a bit like other expensive forms of entertainment; I confess that if I spent a lot of money to go to the opera, I'd be disappointed if the cast all came from the streets around my birthplace.

Tommy had serious injury problems toward the end of his career - latterly, he was often able to play only because he was stuffed full of cortisone injections, a practice which would probably have club management gaoled in these more enlightened times. As a result, he could hardly walk in his last few years.

Never mind - he will always be young for those who saw him in his pomp. He will always be the man who headed the goal which put Liverpool ahead in the final of the European Cup (Champions' League), in Rome in 1977, versus Moenchengladbach - the first year Liverpool won the competition.

Thanks, Tommy. Cheers, la.

Hooptedoodle #321 - Paint Pots and Pies

Today I went into Edinburgh to visit a family member who is in hospital - he's had a long spell in there thus far, and it is likely to continue for a while. I took the train in (which means they were running today, obviously) and, since I was a bit early for 2pm visiting, I decided to go via the Tollcross area, and visit the Wonderland model shop. It was a decent sort of day, if a bit cold, so I walked fairly briskly from Waverley Station to Tollcross. Better and better. Makes it feel a bit less self-indulgent.

I enjoyed my visit to Wonderland, of course, though I didn't buy anything while I was there. I am rather annoyed to admit that I couldn't remember what it was I'd wanted to get! This must be an age thing, I guess - regularly, when I'm painting, I suddenly realise I could do with a pot of such-and-such a colour, and since Wonderland is my only local Vallejo stockist, I add the required shade to my mental shopping list. Well, chaps, the bad news is that mental shopping lists are no longer enough - for the second such visit in the last few months I found myself staring at the Vallejo racks with no recollection of what it was I'd wanted. Yes - agreed - written lists from now on.

On the way up to the hospital (still walking) I decided to get some small offering of biscuits or similar. The relative in question would really not appreciate grapes or anything healthy, in fact he might even throw them at me. So I found myself looking in the window of what I would term a "traditional" baker's shop. There, in the front, they had a tray of individual custard tarts, such as I have neither seen nor thought about in maybe 30 years. I am very partial to all sorts of cakes and buns, I must admit, but my all-time favourites are probably a bit poncey - I'm very fond of religieuses, sachertorte - stuff like that. Custard tarts do not normally feature in my hit parade.

However, there they were. A British Standard custard tart is a pretty solid fellow - egg custard in a soggy shortcrust case - the filling is commonly topped with grated nutmeg (probably to make it taste of something), though this is less popular in Scotland. I must have eaten quite a few in my time, but none of them was great, I think, and they were all a long time ago. Maybe they are still around, and in great demand, but my perception is that cakes from the supermarket these days tend to be packets of individually wrapped brioche buns with chocolate chips, or 5-in-pack "fresh-baked" cookies with embedded white chocolate bits, made with so much cheap sugar and palm oil that your face feels hot and your breathing gets muffled. Something has shifted - the global village does not seem to offer much in the way of a proper custard tart. This must be progress.

I bought a bag of doughnuts and went off for my visit.

It was only on the train later, coming home, that I started thinking about custard tarts. Hmmm....

I never really liked them, and I'm sure I still don't, but I'm going to have to get some just to prove it. You know how these things gnaw at you?

Hooptedoodle #319 - Nostalgia Trip

Posts have been a bit sparse of late on this blog. No matter. One thing I had been meaning to say something about was a recent visit I made with my wife to Liverpool, my birthplace, at the start of December. We went only for a few days, and we weren't very lucky with the weather, but it was good fun, and I did a few things - mostly rather silly, personal things - that I've been meaning to do for years.

I have only one surviving relative in Liverpool these days - cousin Mark, with whom we met up for dinner one evening while we were there - so normally there are no pressing reasons to visit the place, apart from self-indulgence, and my last visit was in 2012. We stayed at the Campanile, which is very cheap and cheerful, at the Queen's Dock. We visited the cathedrals (on the wettest day I can remember) and trogged around the old city centre, with me trying to recall what old buildings used to be on particular sites in my day. Yes, I know - how pointless is that?

I have to say that the city is far cleaner and more prosperous than I remember it, but it is disturbing how much it has changed - I have a feeling that some of the change has lost a few things as well. Babies and bath-water come to mind.

I went to have a look at the house where I was born - well, all right, I wasn't born there at all, I was born at the Maternity Hospital (in Oxford Street?) like most other people from the South end, but I lived there from ages zero to 10.

6, Belvidere Road - that's Liverpool 8, Toxteth, if you insist, but it is certainly among the posher bits of Toxteth, and I suppose it's more accurate to refer to it as Princes Park. We got the bus from the city centre to Princes Avenue, and walked down to Belvidere, which had changed very little (though the houses look better-maintained, and some charitable soul has replaced the railings and gates, which obviously were not required to be thrown at Hitler after all).

We had a splendid walk through Princes Park to Sefton Park, and then through Sefton Park to my grandmother's old house in Mossley Hill. When I was a kid we used to do this walk (both ways, in fact) most fine Sundays, and I was keen to see it again. It always seemed an enormous distance to walk with small children, but in fact it's not nearly as far as I remembered - probably only a couple of miles each way.  It was a fairly dry day, and everything seemed very fresh and familiar. I haven't walked through Princes Park since the 1960s, I guess, but it hasn't changed much.

From my grandmother's old house we continued up Penny Lane to Smithdown, had a coffee and took the bus back into town. That's another one for the bucket shop list - I'm really pleased I did it, and I don't need to think about it any more!

We also took advantage of our only other dry day to travel by ferry across the Mersey to Seacombe. Then we walked along the riverside promenade past Wallasey as far as New Brighton, on the end of the Wirral Peninsula, complete with the Perch Rock Fort, which Turner painted in some of his wilder sessions, but the old Tower Ballroom, where as a youth I once saw Little Richard, is long gone. New Brighton was definitely looking a bit gone-to-seed - we took the Mersey Railway back under the river to James Street. Great walk - I was impressed by the number of fishermen on the promenade - when I lived in those parts there would have been nothing alive to catch in the Mersey, that's for sure!

On our last evening we went to the Philharmonic Hall in Hope Street, to see the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra in action. Marvellous. High spot of the concert for me was Stravinsky's Firebird, which is a great favourite of mine. The previous occasion on which I was in the Phil was probably Speech Day in my final year in the Sixth Form at Quarry Bank School. Hmmm.

Some photos follow - nothing too onerous, I hope.

Over the hills and faraway - travelling south on the M6 over Shap Fell. The Lake District is somewhere over to the right

It still surprises me that Liverpool has become a tourist centre...

Jesse Hartley's old port sometimes doesn't sit well with the new buildings - my father, his two brothers and their dad all worked at Liverpool Docks at various times - I wonder what they'd make of it now

6 Belvidere Road - my first home - we lived in the top flat (which I think is two apartments now). It looks better maintained now than it was back in my infancy. The street is quite elegant, and hasn't changed a lot, but the labyrinth of little terraces around the back - Miles St, Clevedon St, South St, Hawkstone St and so many others - real Toxteth - has been knocked down and replaced many years ago

Let us not speak of the purple dustbins...

Princes Park - scenes of childhood...

...and its lake, which once had rowing boats for hire

Linnet Lane - apart from the lack of my kid sister's pram and a few modern cars, looks about the same

Lark Lane - quite arty these days - leads to Aigburth and my old primary school at St Mick's

The cafe in the middle of Sefton Park - seems to have sprouted some modern wings, but recognisably the same place. I think it was painted cream, and I remember there was a Wall's Ice Cream man selling ices from a pedal-tricycle cart here on Sundays. Note the shadow of the Ghost of Christmas Past

The quiet end of Queen's Drive, Mossley Hill - this is the great ring road which loops around the city to Seaforth and Bootle in the North.

My Nan's old house, on the corner of Briardale Road and Herondale. She was still resident here when she died in 1980 - not much has changed, though someone has roofed over her backyard - how very odd?

Sefton Park's celebrated Palm House, a fabulous old facility which has been rescued from vandalism and general wear and tear numerous times over the years

The Peter Pan statue in Sefton Park - one of my earliest memories from childhood; in fact it has been shifted - it is now located near to the Palm House; as far as I remember, it used to be in the flower garden near the big lake.

This is something - very quirky building - Dovedale Road Baptist Church, where my parents were married in 1945. They had met at the youth club here. The building was completed (I think) in 1903, and by the perversity of history it had closed as a church about 6 weeks before our visit! Right opposite was Dovedale Rd Primary School, which included John Lennon and my cousin Dave among its alumni. Yes, I believe the church may have been designed by a madman.

Absolutely - THAT Penny Lane. Lucky to have kept its name - the city council was planning to change the names of all streets in the city which referred to families who were associated with slavery or slave-supported businesses - the plan was shelved when they realised that Penny Lane was one such, and that there would be a great many disappointed tourists if it had been called Nelson Mandela Street instead.

The Lady Chapel in Liverpool Anglican Cathedral. Speak it in whispers, but I was a member of the choir here when I was about 12 - that was until they found out what was wrong with it.

The Royal Iris - the latest of a great many Royal Irises - the ferry for Seacombe (Wallasey) - back in the day, the Seacombe ferry had a white funnel, the Birkenhead ferries had brick-red ones.

Wallasey Town Hall, looming above the River Walk

Nothing else to do now but wish everyone all the very best for the New Year. 2018 has definitely been a duff one for me and my family - we are hoping for rather better in 2019. Once again I regret to observe that I have been overlooked in the New Year Honours List, but I thought I'd share with you my great pleasure that John Redwood has been knighted, presumably for being a pain in the arse for so many years, and for services to xenophobia. How lovely. Gives me a warm feeling in my stomach - possibly dyspepsia?  

***** Late Edit *****

Penny Lane Supplement...

In response to Steve's comment, a couple of old pictures. Penny Lane is an old street in the Allerton area of Liverpool (Liverpool 18, in old money) which runs between Smithdown Place and Greenbank Park. Apart from the fact that it intersects with the road where my Nan used to live(!), it is not all that interesting. On the other hand, "Penny Lane" was the name of the old tram terminus which was at the intersection of Allerton Road, Smithdown Place, Church Road (Wavertree - where the Bluecoat School is), Elm Hall Drive and - well, Penny Lane. The area was known as "Penny Lane", mostly because that was what it said on the front of the trams and buses. As it says in the song, the shelter for the transport terminus is on a roundabout in the middle. That shelter has now been tarted up into a Beatles-themed place. The barber's shop still exists, though back in the 1960s it was owned by Roger Bioletti's granddad (Roger was a year below me at grammar school) - nowadays it, also, lives on the Beatles connection. The main point here is that both the shelter and the barber were, and still are, in Smithdown Place, which is the (sketchy) setting for the song, at the area which has been known for donkeys' years as "Penny Lane", though Penny Lane itself is only one of the streets which runs into that junction.

I may have explained that so brilliantly that even I can't understand it any more. Here are the pictures - all borrowed from elsewhere:

 

Bioletti's barber shop, Smithdown Place, 1960s

The shelter, in 1956 - looking in exactly the opposite direction to previous photo - this time looking along Allerton Road - the barber's shop must be just off the left edge of the picture

Somewhat later view of the shelter - circa 1970? - here we are looking towards Church Road, with Allerton Rd off to the right and Smithdown to the left, and Penny Lane itself directly behind us.

The actual song is a bit of a montage of boyhood memories - some poetic licence in there - the Fire Station is in Mather Avenue - a couple of miles away past Allerton Road, on the way to Garston - on the way, in fact, to McCartney's home at Forthlin Road, which is off Mather Avenue.

All the Beatle-theming and tourist exploitation is probably OK, but ironic to those of us old enough to recall that Liverpool youth in the 1960s was regarded by the local authorities as just as much of a pestilence as you would expect. Visitors today may be directed to the New Cavern in Mathew Street, but they will not see much information about the fact that the council closed the original place down the first real chance they got. Mind you, it was unhygienic and failed every possible H&S test you could think of, but it's nonetheless true that they had regarded it, and places like it, as blots on the official presentation of Liverpool the Commercial City (and former Second City of the Empire, if anyone could remember that). That particular rubber stamp must have been banged down with a lot of satisfaction. How times change. How attitudes are re-engineered to suit.

Slavery and Beat Clubs - choose your viewpoint to fit the times in which you live!

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