Brian - yes, my Mum made the tassles, that in those days, Men had on their dressing gowns (now most people seem to have them tying their curtains back!)
I remember her fingers being really sore sometimes, and having to go to Tottenham to collect and deliver the work, all on the bus and all, as you say, for peanuts.

Guy Fawkes night. I well remember the wonderful 'nosh up' the parents of my friend, Nigel Firth, gave for local kids at their house at Ponders End which was followed by a firework party out in their back garden. I also recall the guys we built over the years and standing outside pubs and cinemas asking for the traditional 'penny for the Guy, Mister (or Missus)'. Usually collected enough to buy a few 'bangers', rockets and Catherine Wheels. Shame today's kids don't have the same experience, although I suppose most parents are glad nowadays that their kids don't have the opportunity to blow themselves up! Great days, though.

Will be staying with friends at Waltham Cross for a couple of weeks from 11 Nov. We are going to the Food & Wine Exibition and Counnty life Christmas Show . Also i will be taking a trip to Edmonton to have a look around.Can anybody recommend a place on the Green where you can get a decent sandwich.

Carol

These days you'd be arrested on sight for having a bomb, real or not!
You know as a railwayman I cannot stand the incorrect term 'train station' which has adulterated the language in recent years. The correct term is 'railway station', a 'train station' could be a number of things including but not limited to a place where wedding dresses are parked (wedding dresses have trains) or a place where pulses are collected (pulses usually form trains as in dial pulses). 'Train station' is yet one more of those awful Americanisms that younger generations have adopted and carried into journalism to be dissemminated nationwide.
Brian



QT - Jackie wrote:

Talking of Guy Fawkes - my friend I were only discussing our
guys the other day. My friend's Mum was talented with a needle,
and made us one who looked just like Guy himself, with a high
hat, and breeches etc. We wrapped a football in black material,
pulled it up at the top, and wrote BOMB on it, in big letters.
Then we sat on the wall of our Sunday School superintendent's
house, on the corner of Victoria Road and Church St, and caught
all the commuters as they walked back home from the train
station!
Don't know whether it was the fact that the guy looked really
good, or we just chose the right time of day, but we always made
enough to pay for our fireworks AND to put some in our Post
Office Savings accounts!

Just got back from a week on the Trent and Mersey canal (on a
narrowboat) - and despite trying lots of local bitters (near
Burton on Trent - home of the breweries) didn't find mild on tap
anywhere!

Jackie,

I didn't know that tassles were made at home but I can quite imagine it, homework was definitely popular in the early 1960s. Yes, sore fingers from most homework, methinks, it alwats seemed to be the fiddly stuff that was given out for homework. I guess it was because employers knew that times were hard and people would do almost anything to make ends meet and although jobs were not so difficult to find then they were certainly not friendly for young mums who were usually not available before 0930 and often had to be away at or before 1500. My mum walked us to school until I was 8 or 9, after that I sometimes walked my younger sister to school or mum would walk her separately but mum generally collected my sister in the afternoons until ahe too was old enough to walk home alone or with friends.
It does seem rather ridiculous in this day and age that kids are shepherded so much and to such an age, the school run by car is
completely unnecessary as are so many other measures instigated by the apparent need for everyone to earn a wage and the paranoia created by government about child safety in modern Britain. The logical conclusion of course is for every child to be chipped at birth and tracked until death, to be honest I am surprised that the current namby pamby
establishment has not already seen the benefits and instituted such a system as there would be little or no question about people's locations and habits. Then again I think politicians themselves would have a real problem with the nation being able to follow their every move!

Brian


QT - Jackie wrote:

Brian - yes, my Mum made the tassles, that in those days, Men
had on their dressing gowns (now most people seem to have them
tying their curtains back!)
I remember her fingers being really sore sometimes, and having
to go to Tottenham to collect and deliver the work, all on the
bus and all, as you say, for peanuts.

rail technician ref In our house in the 60s my mum threaded string handles into paper carrier bags for a pittance, her efforts were paid for by the thousand as I recall and it was a struggle to get them assembled by collection day.

In ours it was popping together strings of plastic beads ( I remember well the dents in my fingers), and painting plastic toy soldiers, the worst ones were the scots with their kilts. I would have been about six or seven but still had to do my whack.

Denny Rd 46/62

I remember working from home ( for a pittance) painting toy soldiers paid by the thousand and later as a punch card operator for IBM . I worked at the British Tap And Dye company in Nightingale Road n9 for a couple of years back in the 60s too.

Wish I could find out more about the shop premises on the Broadway that was used as an aircraft wireless assembly place during the war. My Mum worked there for a while, soldering wires together for the radio equipment used by the RAF. It was Government policy at that time to 'scatter' industry around the country in unlikely locations as a measure of defence against the German bombing raids on our industry. All I can recall about it is that is was not that far from the war memorial on the Green - can anyone enlighten me (and all of us oldies) any further?

Ron,

I never knew that toy soldiers were hand painted as homework, I assume you are refering to the 52 mm high variety as sold by Britains Ltd.
As a teenager I was a keen history enthusiast and wargamer and had a collection of thousands of Airfix 25 mm figures. Although I had model soldiers depicting WW1 and WW2 my wargaming period of choice was the American Civil War and I hand painted every one of the 2000+ Union and Confederate figures. I also used to make them more lifelike by cutting off and repositioning arms, legs and weapons before repainting them, a very fiddly job and somewhat dangerous as I used to use a razor blade. I recall slicing my thumb and forefinger on more than one occasion. Of course I also got my fingers covered in polystyrene cement and Humbrol piants too. I gave all the soldiers to a friend's son when I was in my 20s, he was into dungeons and dragons and very artistic and made good use of them. My wargaming did not stop there, however, I moved on to board wargames such as Blitzkrieg, Stalingrad and others from Avalon Hill and Strategy & Tactics magazine. I had quite a lot covering from Ancient Rome, Hannibal etc through WW2 Kursk and into the future where China was the agressor in WW3 but I threw most of them out long ago in a house move. In the 1990s I briefly dabbled with wargames once again but on computer and though I have not played them for years I still have several such games including Arnhem. Of course in the modern age computer games moved on in leaps and bounds and although I don't bother with them at all now I have several of the first person wargames.
Brian


QT - Ron Weeks wrote:

rail technician ref In our house in the 60s my mum threaded
string handles into paper carrier bags for a pittance, her
efforts were paid for by the thousand as I recall and it was a
struggle to get them assembled by collection day.

In ours it was popping together strings of plastic beads ( I
remember well the dents in my fingers), and painting plastic toy
soldiers, the worst ones were the scots with their kilts. I
would have been about six or seven but still had to do my whack.

Denny Rd 46/62

I remember the British Tap & Die company in the little industrial area at the bottom of Bounces Road just left of the Cart Overthrown in Nightingale Road.

It seems funny now, I bet most kids wouldn't know what a punched card was if they saw one but of course at the time you are talking about they were state of the art and as common as punched paper tape as used on teleprinters. Somewhere I still have my company pension punched card, a copy of the one held in the London Transport personnel file when I joined in 1977 holding the necessary details for future pension
calculation. Neither of course were ever used as punched cards
disappeared wholesale in the late 1970s and early 1980s replaced by magnetic tapes.

Brian


QT - sylvie wrote:

I remember working from home ( for a pittance) painting toy
soldiers paid by the thousand and later as a punch card
operator for IBM . I worked at the British Tap And Dye company
in Nightingale Road n9 for a couple of years back in the 60s
too.

I would say that the simple term 'station' is heard far more frequently than either 'railway station' or 'train station' so it is hard to know why the latter has crept into the language (and I rather fear it is a term I use myself without realising). Given how lazy modern English can be you wouldn't have thought anyone would bother with the extra word.

Ah, the IBM 029 card punch, what a wonderful machine that was. Such a satisfying mechanical noise as you hit each key and the weird sensation that the machine had finished punching the card before you'd finished typing it. I still don't think use of the blank side of punch cards for jotting notes has ever been satisfactorily replaced. Just the right size for pockets and thick enough to come easily to hand.

Looking at various post,first I can recall lead soldiers being painted,also the Tap& Die when it was in Town Road before moving to Bounces Road,and railtechnician,I still have my Avalon Hill games,so let battle commence.

My recollection is that Avalon Hill games were quite expensive but they were quality. Of course Blitzkreig was the jewel in the crown with room for up to seven players allowing the further complexities of games such as Risque and Diplomacy to add to that of comprehensive wargaming between two major countries. I even bought the expansion kit which incorporated all the additional land sea and air forces that would be required to refight the equivalent of the whole of WW2. The only trouble with such games was that they could takes weeks, let alone days, and the play by mail kit allowed play to continue for months much like chess by mail.
I doubt that many people would have either the patience or the time for them nowadays, much preferring the online first person shoot'em ups and action games such as 'Driver'. I admit to having been a committed 'Driver' player as a result of long hours on shift awaiting failures as a call out lineman. In fact computer gaming was something we all got into in a big way to pass idle time in the call depot.
These days I am not much of a game player although I will play online checkers for a few minutes sometimes, I spend most of my time on my telephone collection.

Brian

QT - eddymonton wrote:

Looking at various post,first I can recall lead soldiers being
painted,also the Tap& Die when it was in Town Road before moving
to Bounces Road,and railtechnician,I still have my Avalon Hill
games,so let battle commence.

Edited by author 05-11-2009 08:44
hello...not posted for a while but read every day..

of homeworking..

i can remember my mum in the 60s homeworking for 'Comfy Kiddy' (sp?)
as i recall a truckload of plastic baby pants were delivered and mum's job was to put each one in a plastic wrapper and then box them up.

i also remember the lady two doors away, Mrs Carpenter i think, who used to homework for MK assembling and then boxing plugs.

i recall 'working' for both of them at some point for a few hours for a few pennies.

my posts would appear to have the characteristics of busses....

of punched cards...

i still have hundreds of them around the house and as Graham suggests, perfect for scribbling notes on the back

my first experience of these punched cards was when i worked as a computer programmer at the London Borough of Enfield, circa 1971.

At the time all data input was via paper tape which was prepared in the 'punch room' by the punch girls. Their age was around 20-25 and they were all very easy on the eye, especially for an 18 year old lad, as i was at the time.

In the corner of the punch room was an IBM card punch which was mainly used to prepare new computer programs. whenever a new program was needed i was always the first to volunteer to escape the computer room and spend a few hours punching cards. ;)

Edited by author 05-11-2009 09:09
Hello Carol 7150, there are loads of different places to eat on the green, Fat Boys do a very nice fry up and you are bound to see some local characters in there, Alaskan Coffee house, a rather nice Italian bakers/coffee shop and several other eateries all on the concourse near the bus station Asda on the South Mall also have a dining area but service can be a bit slow in there. N9 cafe is in North Mall and simlar to Fat Boys. Enjoy your day.

Sorry to interupt the boys games talk, I used to play with my brothers fort, my dad had made it, we had both lead and plastic cowboys/indians/knights in armour a fantastic cannon that fired matchsticks, what happy memories you have stirred up of war games all jumbled up together with cowboys fighting knights lol.

I also remembering my mum doing homework for MK, must have been late 50's she had boxes full of just the 'switch bit', and wearing a apron would put loads in her lap, select one switch toggle, then with a metal file take off the rough edges.