Memory Lane…..You are what you read.
For the first portion of my life most of the newsprint I read came through the portals of Frank and Sylvia’s Chapmans shop in Passage Road in Saul.
My parents bought me no day to day luxuries but gave me generous pocket money for me to allocate as I wanted and to balance between comics, sweets or a balsa wood glider. Occasionally Grandad would supplement it by slipping me a two shilling piece. Comics were an essential and you only had a choice of two the Dandy or the Beano and it really did not matter which. You got either Korky the Kat or Biffo the Bear. Within a few years the Eagle appeared which was a totally different type of publication Dan Dare the pilot of the future battling against The Mekon. But more importantly the centre pages were a cut away drawing explaining how things worked and the reader very soon knew the basics of the Metropolitan-Vickers Gas Turbine. A few friends took the Lion Comic but nothing could compare to the Eagle. A favoured aunt would buy you the Eagle annual for Christmas and life began again. The Eagle had a sister comic The Girl but as I did not have a sister I never read it but was told it was full of ponies called Charlemagne and stories of the nasty girl swat in the upper dorm.
Then came Rock and Roll… where? what? how?. It was not on the radio, well not the BBC anyway. You had to tune to 208m medium wave for Radio Luxemburg…where is Luxembourg? Somewhere where they broadcast Rock and Roll but every other minute it hopped and went quiet. No matter and there was a newspaper dedicated to the music. “Frank…could you order me the New Musical Express, please” and he did ,on the school bus and in school we poured over it and studied the hit charts more avidly than anyone did the Financial Times stock list.
My parents did not take a daily paper but they had the evening Gloucester Citizen which as a teenager news was unimportant but the small adverts were worth reading. “Lost, Tuffley area, gents bicycle with new saddle, answers to Horace”. “ Pets: Labrador puppies six weeks £5”. “Daaad can we have a dog?” “No”. We also had the Radio Times with BBC 1 television only. Last weeks copy was cut into four a hole put in the corner, hung up with string and doubled as toilet paper. Izal had yet to be invented! Mother took Womans Weekly well it was not worth looking at I did not need to know how to sew together an Angora sweater. On Sundays they would have The Observer which was pages and pages of everything a teenager does not want to know but next door they had the News of the World which at the time was Bonker’s Gazette with every page filled with the intimate sex lives of someone famous. For a lad going through puberty this was amazing class A pornography. At the other end of the scale my friends parents took The Methodist Herold which was God’s own Newspaper.
With motoring approaching it was time for Frank to supply The Autorcar because I needed to choose between a new Riley Pathfinder or a new Ford Zephyr. The reality was I bought a 1936 Ford 8 for £25.00 but the magazine was read from cover to cover every month and one became a motoring expert.. Better than Hubert Hall who bought Farmers Weekly…what! four pages on how to improve your silage and next week it is about how to treat Warble Fly. Even the adverts were for Sheep Dip..come on! Ivor Wren took Commercial Motor and that was worthy of borrowing.. the New Guy Invincible, Atkinsons, Albions and The Rowe Hillmaster that was something like. Geoffrey Howard took the New Statesman which was all about politics and I was not old enough for that. Another of Frank’s supply was Motor Sport magazine essential reading for those wanting to know Eric Carlssons Saab stage times…but grow up…and I did.
“Frank could you please deliver me a daily paper” “Yes Mike what do you want”. “The Manchester Guardian ,please Frank”……….
“Sylvia, I am worried about that lad” “Why Frank” “He wants The Manchester Guardian”