Saturday Afternoons - You Grunt, I'll Groan!

Can you have a relationship when neither party speaks to each other?

One relation who hasn't really featured thus far in the series of blogs is our great-grandfather Willie Wight. 

He lived until his early nineties as did his wife, known affectionately by we great-grandchildren (Anne, Iain and me) as Wee Nana. They lived all their married life at London Road, Dalkeith in the upstairs part of the building. It was a solid, well built house-it's a listed building and is still there today.

The house was situated opposite the old Stewart's Shell Garage. I fondly recall looking out the windows at the petrol pumps with the old shell design on top of each pump. The coal fire would be blazing giving off a grand heat on a winter's afternoon.

'Saturday Afternoons, Dalkeith' (Peter Hoffmann, 2004)

Willie Wight was a remarkable craftsman: as a blacksmith he created gates and railings for prestigious projects and as the town locksmith could open bank doors if the local bankers mislaid their keys.Willie Wight was also a miser. In his bedroom he kept a safe next to his bed - fascinating, if one had the bottle to sneak in - the difficulty came if he or someone else might enter his room - you would be cornered unless of course you were to dive under the bed!!

One Christmas down at Portobello at Grandma Jo’s he tried to slip me an old penny as a present. I looked at it, considered it, then returned it to him and said 'No thank you!' He laughed so he wasn't entirely without a sense of humour (returning the penny to his waistcoat pocket), although 1958 may have been the last time that he smiled; to me his de-facto demeanour was taciturn and silent. But he highly regarded my father Ken Hoffmann - because of his exploits on the seven seas I expect he thought he was a real man!

Our grandmother and grandfather (Josephine and Willie) visited them every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon to give them a hand, do some shopping, cook meals and check they were okay.

My Aunt Heather was usually always there on a Saturday and occasionally my mother too.. I liked spending any weekend I could with my grandparents so I quite regularly visited on Saturday afternoons when I accompanied them. 

I always enjoyed visits to Dalkeith -it's a small market town with an interesting history - it always has a nice feel to it. Many of the buildings were old and stone built - it was quite different to the grey housing schemes at Oxgangs. Between the years 1989 and 1996 I had an office in the town working for Midlothian Council.

On the Saturday afternoons everyone disappeared out shopping - buyng mixed sweets from Woolworths; triangle shaped scones at the baker's; and fish for the afternoon tea. I meanwhile sat in the sitting room with the silent one - we called him Pumpa - a great moniker eh! 

But really, he never spoke. Like Grandpa Broon, but without the whiskers, he sat under a great cloud of pipe-smoke. Similar to the smell of cigars which take me back to 1960s with Pumpa, Gaga and my father sitting in the front room on Christmas afternoons I similarly liked the smell of the pipe tobacco.

The boxes of matches he used always interested me because they weren't the Bluebell Matches we used at home or Swan Matches with which my grandfather lit his cigarettes with. I was fascinated by the different designs on the boxes. I suspect he bought them from his local pub, The Black Bull.

He always had sweets on him which, similar to the matches,  I hadn't come across at Ewart's Newsagents at Oxgangs Broadway.The sweets were liquorice Pontefract cakes - believe it or not he might very occasionally deign to give me one (thus at least acknowledging my existence) which I enjoyed, particularly the taste and the consistency. But more usually he would feed himself and simply ignore me - well he was born in the age of Queen Victoria - children should be seen and not heard!.

Although many people would have found it an unsettling environment I was quite happy - I knew where I stood with him - there were no surprises.  We'd settle down to watch the wrestling, listening to Kent Walton's  low keyed Canadian accented voice providing the commentary on Jackie Pallo; Mick McManus; The Royal Brothers, et al.

He would then switch over to BBC where we would get David Coleman talking as the teleprinter gave out the early football results. The full results were then read out by Tim Gudgin who had as memorable a voice as Walton's.

I enjoyed the wrestling and in our way we communicated - we both wanted the outrageous Mick McManus to get beaten and we both agreed not to speak to each other unless he offered me a sweet when I would say 'Thank you'..

A Catalogue of Catalogues!

Did each household at The Stair assume there was only one catalogue-the one which their family used?

We used the Chorlton Catalogue but I can find little trace that it ever existed-it seems to have mysteriously disappeared from history. With the new found prosperity of the late 1960s many families in the lower social classes such as ourselves at Oxgangs began to spend occasional money on some luxury goods in addition to necessities and practical items.

Mrs Anne Hoffmann ran her Chorlton Catalogue very well and efficiently-she had to given the up and down nature of life at 6/2 Oxgangs Avenue-one week my father was in work, the following week he was out of work and then two weeks later he was back in employment.

We tended not to call it the catalogue and instead it was rather affectionately known as The Club. This may have been because not only did she order items for our immediate family-Anne, Iain, herself and me, but also for the likes of my Aunt Heather and my Grandfather. I assume it was a pet name she gave it-it could of course have been code so that my grandmother didn't know that orders were being placed-I think she must have disapproved! Occasionally there would be whispers of I'll speak to you later, Anne from Heather-I assume that would be if she were ordering a camera or some such thing-she was a bit of a technophobe or fiend-she was always interested in the latest development whether it was a tape recorder or electric knitting machine!

The concept of the catalogue was a simple one-I suppose credit was extended so that one could purchase an item up front with a view to paying the money back over a period of twenty weeks. I assume the prices were slightly inflated. For the more expensive items one could pay over thirty eight weeks and the overall price would no doubt have been even higher. Mrs Anne Hoffmann reminded me recently that on one occasion my grandfather got new tyres for his car-more often it would be his winter long-john's-sorry, too much information!

Mrs Anne Hoffmann was as good as she possibly could for be for us children, because a lot of the time we were impoverished; and of course the arrival of the new catalogue-either the Autumn/Winter or the Spring/Summer was a big event in the household-oh how we sat and feasted our eyes over the toys, sports goods and cycles before turning to the fashion section. When she at last used her Edinburgh University education and got a job with the Civil Service when we were a little older, then we got some greatly valued items-mainly as birthday or Christmas presents, but sometimes out-with after pestering her to death!

Iain Hoffmann got a rather wonderful Johnny Seven Gun as a birthday present and also the James Bond Aston Martin with the ejector seat from the Goldfinger film. He also got a nice slot car racing game-it wasn't Scalectrix but it was good quality and great fun to play.

Iain and I got the famous Wayfinder shoes-they had a secret compass hidden in one of the heels inside the shoe and animal tracks on the soles-I wasn't sure how many of these animals roamed Oxgangs, not to mention it being a pain to keep taking one's shoe off!

In 1971 when I began to go along to the Edinburgh Athletic Club Mrs Anne Hoffmann pushed the boat out and I got a good tracksuit and a particularly stylish pair of training shoes-they were similar to Adidas with three stripes, two of which were blue and one red. It was a happy day and life changing event when the parcel arrived! Indeed, whenever we awaited an order, the first thing we asked when we got in the front door from school was Has it arrived yet? Disappointment, followed disappointment, and then exhilaration on the magical day when we came home to discover a big and bulky brown parcel!

As I said in the introduction, for some daft reason, I assumed there was only one catalogue-Chorlton's so I was amazed as I got a wee bit older to discover when visiting friends' homes that there was a catalogue of  catalogues out there! What other catalogues were used during the 1960s in The Stair? It would be good to hear from any of The Hanlons; The Duffys; The Blades; The Hoggs; The Swansons-indeed any readers of the blog!

The Penny Didn't Drop

Did anyone in the The Stair do hobbies back in the 1960s?

Initially I couldn't recall anyone doing so then remembered Douglas Blades (6/6 Oxgangs Avenue) collected railway ephemera.

For a while I did a little bit of stamp collecting - partly intrigued by the Stamps on Approval adverts in The Hornet and The Victor - partly because my Aunt Heather collected stamps and they looked fascinating - and also, because it helped me achieve the only Cubs' badge that I ever got, my Collectors' Badge.

I of course was taken in by the stamps advert not realising what the term (small print) On Approval meant and instead believing the stamps were free, along with a magnifying glass, etc.

Anyway despite reminder letters I never sent the pack or the money back to the company.

Other hobbies were short lived - collecting a few football team pennants; or the little cloth or vinyl badges of towns that one had visited (not many) - the Dublin badge came from my grandparents but I did visit Pitlochry with them; these could be sown onto your anorak; then there were football programmes but again this hobby was relatively short lived.

However, the one hobby if it could be called such is that every time I came across a Victorian coin I kept hold of it.

It was mainly pennies - I had a few half pennies and possibly a single Victorian shilling. However, over a couple of years I amassed an immense collection of Victorian pennies - given that there were 240 to the pound I must have accumulated over one hundred coins.

They mainly featured the old Victoria but I also had a fair number of the young Victoria too.

Clearly the Bank of England wanted to get its money worth because some of the old copper coins were so very worn that you couldn't make out much of the design never mind the date - indeed some of them must have been in common circulation for over 150 years - never mind walls but if pennies could have talked what stories they could have told - whose hands had these coins passed through over the centuries and decades - Dickens; Stevenson; Churchill; The Beatles...?

Although often I might be hard up or in need of money I remained steadfast and kept my collection intact for several years.

And then for no particular reason on one lazy summer afternoon during the school holidays I decided my collecting days had come to an end.

I ventured up to Ewart's newsagents at Oxgangs Broadway.

In some trepidation I ordered lots and lots of sweets and comics keeping the coins hidden from view.

When the counter was littered with a feast of delights (the assistant must have begun to wonder) I then produced the coup de grace and proceeded to pay with Victorian pennies and half-pennies -around 100 coins!

The poor shop assistant didn't know what had hit her!

Hillend and 'Jean Claude-Killy'

How many primary schools offered skiing as part of their curriculum back in the 1960s? Eton, Loretto, Watsons? Well, actually, I was thinking of Hunters Tryst Primary School.

Hillend Ski Slope in the shadow of the Pentland Hills

In an earlier comment, Ruth Blades (Kaye) remembered  Hillend Ski Slope. For the likes of David Lines, Bryan Rennie, Norman Stewart and me we were very lucky-in our last year at school (P7) we had the chance of attending skiing lessons. We were incredibly excited. This would be the first occasion that a class from the school had been offered this opportunity. Lothian Regional Council had developed an artificial ski slope-the longest in Europe-on the north facing side of the Pentland Hills.

So, each Friday morning for a term or so, we were transported by bus the mile or two up the road to Hillend from Hunters Tryst School. It was a lovely break from school. Unfortunately, I never took to it at all. Wearing heavy and uncomfortable boots it was a bit of a long trudge up the road from the cabin at the Biggar Road entrance to the artificial slope; the weather was poor and we often ended up soaked; and I could never quite master the skis-they felt awkward and cumbersome. Also, I didn't particularly like the Austrian instructor called Hans. On top of that I never had the 'bottle' for going down the slope from the top-even back then when it was at a more intermediate level. Apart from that, it was fine-boy, what a wimp!

A nice surprise was that someone from The Stair who did take to skiing was Iain Hoffmann. Up until then Iain hadn't previously excelled at sport, but did have 'the bottle' to go down from the top-a bit like his diving where, like 'the old boy' (Ken Hoffmann) he was always happy to throw himself from great heights into water-oops, shouldn't have mentioned Ken Hoffmann-I feel another Ken Hoffmann Being Different story coming on!

Iain ('Jean-Claude Killy') Hoffmann circa 1969
(Photograph, Glasgow Herald)

Iain went on to represent the school in a skiing competition-here's a lovely photograph of him (above) that appeared in the Glasgow Herald newspaper at the time-I don't know how the family became aware of the photograph-perhaps someone got the newspaper at my Aunt Heather's office at work? Anyway, it's captured a lovely moment in time.

Most unfortunately, Iain was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis last week-it would seem he's had the condition for years, but it's taken until now to identify it as the slow progressing type-he's being very positive about it-hope in a very small way the photie gives you a lift Unc.

And who would have thought it-a school located in Oxgangs  offering skiing lessons!