In those more tranquil days there were many other happenings now long discontinued. Drunks and fighting dogs were common place, and fighting men were by no means unknown too; whilst I have seen more than once a man belabouring his sobbing wife outside one or other of the towns ‘common lodging houses’. There were three or four or more of these – one in the middle of Gillygate which made way for the Palace Cinema in 1925; another occupying the two stone houses which faced each other in Southgate at the bottom of Smyth Street; and one near the bottom of Horsefair on the north side. When this was demolished by the way, in the 1930’s, it could be seen to be half-timbered with a brick casing.

And that reminds me that when about 1938 property was demolished for the construction of Lower Beastfair (which curiously has been named Valley Road though it is not in a valley and does not even lead into a valley), an adjoining building at the end of Ropergate was revealed to have been built at a time when there stood next to it a building in which the timbers of its framing had projected so as to be embedded in the building subsequently constructed beside it.

Whilst Saturday was the general market day, Tuesday was the day of the cattle market (near Baghill Station). Each brought much activity to the streets. On both days many shops had displays of their goods on the pavement at their fronts, or perhaps on tables on the roadside. This was particularly the case with those places which served the farmers – with cattle troughs, poultry pens, drinking vessels, farmers tools and implements and the like, and there were many shops which had displays outside their premises on other than market days too. A string of boots hanging by a shop door left no doubt in the mind of the passer-by as to what the shop sold, but today, few but the vegetable shops seem to have continued the custom of the shop-front display.

There was no mistaking cattle market day, for from an early hour there would be animals driven through the streets, with drovers and dogs frequently failing to prevent their charges straying into the wrong streets, or into a yard, or even into a shop.

And for not a few of these creatures, their journey to Pontefract was their last, for there were at least three slaughter houses right in the town. Wilson Clayton had one in his yard off Market Place, Austwick killed pigs between his shop (and house) and the Pineapple Inn in Gillygate; but the one in the Pig Market was practically a public one, for it opened directly into the market, which was a convenient snicket between Market Place and Back Northgate, through which I passed directly to and from the King’s School.

The ‘entertainment’ thus provided was much deplored by Mrs Nicholls, wife of the Rev. Thomas Howey Nicholls, head of the King’s School, who was unable to have it restricted. She is, however, understood to have had rather more success with her request to Walter Smith, proprietor of Bon Marche at the corner of Finkle Street and Horsefair, whose window displays sometimes included articles of feminine underwear that Mrs Nicholls felt might undesirably affect boys of the school who passed that way.

The King’s School boys were by no means all from Pontefract. Many came from Castleford, from villages in the district like their fathers to the towns market, and there was a daily contingent from the east, as far as Goole. They came to Monkhill by a Lancashire and Yorkshire railway train, which arrived a few minutes after eight, leaving them time for a leisurely walk to school at nine.

Their return was preceded by two expresses from the west towards Goole and Hull, so they knew when from the school playing field they had seen the first express pass, it was time to set out for Monkhill for the slow stopping train. And if, by chance, they mistook the second express for the first, they knew they would have to run to catch their own train. Others came by train to Baghill from Ferrybridge, Ackworth and elsewhere.

Tommy Nicholls, head for many years until his death in 1918, was a remarkable character. Each morning the whole school assembled for a prayer and a hymn and usually a little pep talk from himself. And with a little luck, a boy arriving after the hall door had been closed could wait just outside it until the end of assembly and mingle with the boys dispersing to their lessons and so escape discovery as having been late. Tommy also took a class or two himself. I had been at the school for only a few days when he had my class of seven and eight year olds in his study for a reading lesson. When, of this dozen or so, I proved to be the only one who could spell ‘expostulate’ (from Robinson Crusoe), he declared I should have a penny (a handsome reward in those days). Reaching into his pocket he found he had no penny with him and I thought that was the end of the matter. But no. A few days later when he marched in to take morning assembly, on the dais he diverted – in a puzzled, anxious, expectant silence by all present, walked straight up to me standing in the middle of the hall with the youngest ones, (for whom there were no places at their desks) and without a word, handed me a penny.

Despite the tendencies indicated by these incidents, Tommy was keenly interested in the academic activities of school life, and would make an unheralded visit to a classroom to see what was going on. Sometimes he would so participate as to take over from the master in charge. One occasion I well remember, when, having superseded the class master, he became so immersed in his subject (I forget what it was) that he over-ran the time for the lesson and the next class for this room arrived with their master to take their places. "Just stand along the wall there for a minute said Tommy. But his ‘minute’ ran on for another period and ‘recess’ arrived (to the great ‘relief’ of at least one of the boys) with the first class still at their desks and TWO other classes standing along the wall ‘for a few minutes more’.

Shop hours in my boyhood were very different from those of today. The general opening hour was eight, which frequently found a cluster of customers waiting for it. Few shops closed at midday nor closed before nine at night, later for some shops, especially at Christmas and similar times when business continued (as on most Saturdays) until not far from midnight.

Letters posted before 9.30 at the head post office (formerly in premises demolished in 1938, facing up Beastfair, but from 1915 in the present building in Ropergate) could be relied upon to be delivered in most parts of the country the following morning, including Sundays; whilst if bearing an extra halfpenny stamp they could be posted at around 10.00pm on the south-bound mail train at Baghill Station (no charge for admission to the station).

Mail could be posted at the head office up to 5.00am for same day local delivery, and I recall a resident in Mayor’s Walk complaining that a letter she posted in the local pillar box before 11.00am had failed to be delivered in Market Place by the 2.30 delivery that day.

Watches and clocks were not quite so plentiful in those days – long before radio time signals were introduced, and the parish church clock with Lord Grimthorpe’s gravity three-leg escapement (installed in 1887 in celebration of Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee) was the town’s standard public timepiece, though the clock in the post office window was generally treated with respect as it was reputed to be set to GMT every morning.

Since a high proportion of the population lived within the sound of the church bells, the daily ‘time bell’ was a real convenience. It was sounded for five minutes before 8.00am, noon, 1.00pm and 6.00pm, marking the opening and closing of most peoples working spells.

At the other end of Market Place, over the Town Hall, there was a bell (cracked for as long as I ever knew it) struck by the old clock which was displaced in the 30’s by a commonplace electric piece of modernity.

Both these public clocks were in the care of a character named Samuel Joseph Stockleymoney, a Londoner who had settled in Pontefract, living at one time at the corner of Gillygate and Southgate, before the second Gillygate widening in 1912, and later in Horsefair. His comparatively cultured accent probably gained him greater respect than his apparent financial status seemed to justify, but he was certainly worthy of the respect he gained by his diving displays in the old swimming bath at the one-time waterworks at the junction of Halfpenny Lane and Back Street. Part of the wall of the heart-shaped tank can still be seen at the back of the water board depot at this site, though the machinery, chimney and water tower went soon after Hitler’s war (the wall went when Kwik Save was built).

I learned to swim in that little old bath, where I spent many happy hours before the present baths were opened in 1912 – when father took the first public plunge at the opening ceremony. I also joined with many others in the summers of 1913 and 1914 in the Park lake, which had one part made specially deep for swimmers, when in 1913 it was doubled to its present six acres. It was in that deeper part that I had the fiercest attack of cramp I ever had in or out of water, as I stretched up to put the crossbar on a water polo goal. At the other end of the lake, at the boat landing stage, other men fell into the water when they failed to climb a greasy pole with a ham at the top as a prize. This was part of some sports occasion of which the date and its other features have escaped me.

I do recall clearly however, another event at the lake. A parade and collection had been arranged on behalf of the RNLI with a lifeboat (of the pulling and sailing type) on a heavy horse-drawn carriage being the central feature. The proceedings were to include a trip round the lake for paying passengers in the lifeboat, but when the vessel reached the lake and was launched, it went straight to the bottom which was a couple of feet below the surface. This resulted in it having to be withdrawn and have the mud washed from its beautiful white surface.

In passing, I might mention that when the work of extending the lake had been nearly completed and the water level had been lowered, as I walked across the narrow dividing strip between old and new, I was surprised to find mussels established there, for I had always understood them to be purely sea creatures.

Now back to the public clocks. Stockleymoney was very proud of his charges and would willingly take an interested visitor to see (and help him to wind) the church clock, the accuracy of which he adjusted by adding or removing a penny from the pendulum bob. The Town Hall clock however, was very old and more difficult to control, so much so that it got me into trouble when it stopped one morning at 8.35 and thereby made me very late for school. My form master (a newcomer from some city) could not be persuaded that the clock on a Town Hall had been allowed to stop.

The Town Hall cracked bell, though normally it did no more than announce the hours, was heard on other occasions during the year. On pancake day it was sounded for a couple of hours before noon (with brief intervals when the ringer’s arm tired), and similarly on 1st May when those interested were invited to take up ‘gaits’ authorising them to run cattle or horses on the park pastures, a privilege for which they paid a fee to the corporation. Many a time, I, like other youngsters was given the treat (or at least the experience) of walking down to the park to see the cattle gathered and milked in the shed which, though dilapidated, stood until 1975 near the Girl’s High School. The pond at which the cattle watered was near the gate on the south side, but was filled in many years ago.

Mayor’s Day (9th November, the local elections having been on 1st November) was another occasion when the Town Hall bell was heard, for it was generally sounded as soon as the new Mayor had been elected, though it could soon be augmented (or drowned) by a lively peal of the eight bells of the church. Mayor’s Day was usually marked by a ‘scramble’ in which the now head of the municipality scattered coins from the Town Hall balcony over the crowd below.

This event however, became very rough and in due course it died, though one Mayor softened it somewhat by a distribution of oranges and apples instead of coins. I have not been able to trace any trustworthy support of the story that one ‘joker’ in the municipal party tossed out a small shovelful of coins which were almost red hot.

‘Scrambles’ on less pretentious lines were not uncommon outside a home where a wedding was being celebrated, and sometimes, the first movement of the train which carried the couple away for their honeymoon was accompanied by two or three fog signals beneath their compartment.

The church bells rang out on many occasions besides those already mentioned, and of course, forty minutes or so on Sunday mornings and evenings, as well as a similar period of practice on Monday evening.

Parishioners of prominence were generally accorded a peal on their marriage, and the depth of a public figure could be marked by a ‘passing bell’. There seems to have been some uncertainty about the rules for this, for there were those who expected single strokes for a man and doubles for a woman; whilst others claimed that the proper thing was one stroke for every year of the deceased’s life.

The funeral of a person of importance could well be marked by a peal of muffled bells, the open tenor at the end of each round striking a sharp contrast with the subdued tones of the other seven. The former ring of eight bells was re-cast and augmented in 1920 to form the present ten-bell ring as part of the parish war memorial. Funerals seem to have been much more marked then than they are today, especially of public personalities. House blinds were lowered, shops closed, and many people – men bare-headed, lined the streets on the route from the church to the cemetery.

Many men lived in, or were, or had been connected with the Barracks, so that a military funeral was not infrequent – and always almost spectacular. Headed by a military band playing a funeral march, the procession would include a detachment of soldiers marching at funeral pace, and amongst them would be a firing party with reversed arms for a volley over the open grave after the committal. The march back to the Barracks, by contrast, was brisk, with the band setting the pace with more normal sounds.

Sunday morning church parade really was a spectacle. Headed by their band in full blast, two or three companies of men of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry and of the York and Lancaster Regiment (so often miscalled the Yorkshire and Lancashire), marched by Wakefield Road and Ropergate to church, where a small party of Roman Catholics were detached and marched off to their own church, and at a later period some non-conformists similarly separated. The band left their instruments in the Buttercross with two or three of their number to look after them, while the men clattered into the galleries and the officers took places in the pews bearing a plate marked ‘Officers of the Garrison’. After the service with the band already in formation at the end of Ropergate, the troops ‘fell in’ on the space in front of the Buttercross and performed their ‘form fours’, the movements of which sometimes seemed to be too intricate for the newest recruits, to the chagrin of those in charge and the derision of old soldiers amongst the spectators. Then away to the Barracks.

One summer this parade was particularly impressive, for the two local battalions were joined by some Northumberland Fusiliers for several weeks. The contrast between the sounds of the visitor’s drums and fifes, and the more dulcet tones of the home sides silver instruments was quite striking, each seeming to set off the appeal of the others. On the parade ground at the Barracks the two bands joined in a musical half-hour before ‘dismiss’ and the bugles called ‘come to the cookhouse door’.

The occupants of the Barracks were prominent in the life of the town. The inn-keepers, of course, welcomed them especially, although a few of the men preferred the quieter atmosphere of the Soldiers Home, at one time in Ropergate and later in Southgate in a house now part of the premises of G. R. Smith Ltd, motor engineers (now Kwik-Fit offices after demolition) where tea and light refreshments were served by voluntary helpers under the leadership of Miss Chapman.

Somewhat similar facilities and parallel activities were provided in the Girls’ Evening Home in Salter Row in premises later absorbed into those of the Co-operative Society.

There was an annual reminder of the part played by the Y and L in the battle of Minden, when the date was marked by the wearing of a flower in the hat of each soldier to recall how his predecessors plucked a flower each from the gardens through which they passed on their way to the battle.

Another parade ought to be mentioned. Every Saturday and Sunday evening the Salvation Army met in front of the Town Hall under the balcony big lamp, and held an open-air service with a collection, before marching off via Salter Row, to their Citadel at the top of Front Street (demolished 1974). The military turn-outs on Sunday were not by any means the only parades of the day, for Sunday evening almost exceeded Saturday evening in its throng of young people who ambled to and fro in Ropergate, which their elders spoke of disparagingly, even disgustedly, as the ‘Monkey Walk’, though they themselves might well have been amongst the many whose romance began in Ropergate on a Saturday or Sunday evening.

Soldiery and the fair were far from being the only features of the streets of Pontefract. Four or five times a year we had a race meeting in the park, with crowds arriving by train at both Baghill and Tanshelf stations. Those from Baghill, having walked up the hill to the town were greeted by numerous wagonettes with raucous drivers shouting "course way six" – an expression I heard a great many times before I discovered it to be an invitation to race goers to ride to the course for a fee of sixpence.

The girls from the ‘cake chambers’ took time off from their work with ‘the Spanish’ (a term arising from the import of liquorice extract from Spain) to line the streets, each with a basket of tins of Pomfret Cakes with which to tempt the visitors to the town.

Near the Buttercross a race tipster (probably dressed in jockey’s silks) would try to sell his recommendations. An escapologist would invite a bystander to pinion him with chains from which, with severe struggles, he would eventually escape, to go round with his hat before the crowd dispersed. Or a performer with a bottle of paraffin would blow a fiery jet skywards before he likewise passed round with outstretched hat.

The Town Crier, who functioned also as Mace Bearer and Town Hall Keeper, was a fairly frequent feature of the streets. In his official black cloak with broad yellow braid, a black and yellow tricorn on his head, he would pause at suitable points, sound his bell vigorously, and announce that the park lake would be open for skating that afternoon, or the contents of such and such a house would be sold by auction at noon that day, or a concert would be held, and so on.

Less formal entertainment was supplied occasionally by an itinerant German band, probably no more than five or six strong, but usually acceptably melodious. Sometimes a one-man band would appear, a drum on his back (with a string to his knee), cymbals between his shoulders (one fixed and the other attached to one elbow), a mouth organ fixed from his chest to rigidity in front of his mouth, and possibly even a violin.

A Russian with a bear which he led on a chain, would have the creature dancing with a short pole which the man carried for the purpose, the performance concluding with each taking a pull at a bottle of beer, and then the inevitable outstretched hat.

The years of which I write saw the height of the ‘tingalairy’ – a mechanical piano, hand-driven, mounted on wheels, and more often than not operated by a couple of Italians, plus, sometimes, a monkey wearing a little red fez and trained to walk or climb to the end of a long light lead and put a little tin cup before passers-by or people drawn to their house-doors or even to first-floor windows. (The true barrel-organ was a different thing altogether and had just about disappeared before my time). Sometimes the second man in the party (for two were required to push the heavy piano) would provide a rhythmical tattoo to a suitable tune, using a couple of pairs of spoons or maybe bones.

There was other music in the streets too. Errand boys went about whistling (many quite skilfully) and their elders (or at least some of them) sang in good harmony as they ambled home from the pubs.

One summer afternoon, early in the age of the charabanc, two of these vehicles drew up, one behind the other, opposite our house and facing the Town Hall. On the front seat of the leading vehicle, up stood one of the passengers, called to the rest (both lots), and conducted them through quite a little concert – all apparently spontaneous and certainly very pleasant. Some church choir outing no doubt, though we never learned for sure. There was somewhat similar but organised public singing at Christmas, when the parish church choir – between thirty and forty strong – toured the town and sang carols at the homes of leading members of the congregation. The Methodist singers went even better , for they mounted a piano (or was it a harmonium?) on a dray and visited their leaders’ homes during Christmas Eve.

All this seems to indicate the spirit which led to or accompanied the foundation of Pontefract Music Festival in 1903. This movement had widespread support, with numerous choirs and soloists attending from most of the towns and villages within reasonable reach – by train, horse, cycle or on foot. In the town itself, flags were flown and competitors with their badges or perhaps rosettes were prominent in the streets.

Much went on in the streets besides the foregoing. There were rag and bone collectors of course, but there were frequent appearances during the season of a man (a hunchback I think) on a light flat cart, with a barrel of herrings, calling "fresh herrings – two a penny". Like his fish, that man and those days have gone; so has the man bearing a basket with a white cloth covering oatcakes, muffins and pikelets (home made); so has the itinerant knife grinder who had a square wooden frame carrying his grindstone, to be driven by a treadle attached to a large diameter wheel which served the dual purpose of power transformer and transport, for the operator moved his plant from place to place by tipping it up and using it like a barrow with two of its feet as handles and its wheel to carry the weight.

Milk distribution was from a churn, which the small man carried and the bigger operator took round in an open-backed low-floored light cart. In each case, the liquid was ladled out in a tin measure with a handle hooked to hang on the inside of the main container. Incidentally, I once heard a farmer declare that he had ladled milk into every possible type of domestic container except one – whereupon his companion promptly added that he had even delivered it into one of ‘those’ when he had called on a wife who had no jug or basin available.

A wooden box and two wheels from old clothes mangles (the kind with a heavy iron frame and two wooden rollers pressed together by a compound leaf spring adjusted by a hand wheel above) sufficed to serve an old woman who hawked scouring stone, the soft local sandstone used to ‘whiten’ doorsteps and window sills. The last time I saw her, she was gathering her material from the cliff off Wakefield Road, opposite Banks Avenue, but she seemed to go out of circulation with the decline of ‘whitening’ in the early twenties.

Horses were for long the mainstay of transport, and although industrious gardeners (or boys acting for a small fee on their behalf) did much by brush, bucket and shovel to keep the streets clean, dust was a problem. In dry weather, therefore, the watering cart was a familiar sight, though whether it did much good is distinctly problematical.

Cleanliness of the streets was not much assisted by the practice of spreading used bark from the tannery in Tanshelf on the footpath adjacent to houses where an inmate lay ill, so that he should not be disturbed by passing footsteps, the sound of which was quite deadened by the tan.

The Tanshelf district by the way, was so named centuries before the tannery was set up, which had nothing to do with it.

Nor was public cleanliness much assisted by the removal of domestic refuse. Practically all the shops in the town had their owners or managers in dwellings above or behind them and each had its ash pit usually with an earth closet (often a two-seater) above it. From time to time the householder was notified to leave his yard door unfastened and some time during the night a gang of men would shovel out the contents – all of it – and barrow it into a heap in the street, to be shovelled thence into a horse-drawn tipper cart and wheeled away to be finally spread in some field outside the town. The area involved in the heaping was sprinkled with a disinfectant powder, but no-one could claim the system to have been very hygienic.

It could well have been the growth of this system as the town itself grew, which led to such pollution of the local underground water, that the Tanshelf waterworks had to be closed and a new well and pumps developed at Roall (seven miles east), and later others at Eggborough and Pollington in the same locality. It is worth noting that during Hitler’s war, when water supplies like other services were at risk from bombing, water from the Tanshelf well was found to be fit for use and emergency pumping apparatus was installed. By this time of course, the town had rid itself of ash pits and earth closets.

Incidentally, in the early days of the Roall works, a breakdown now and then led to the bringing back into use of the Elizabethan pump at the Butter Cross, which was served by a very ancient pipe through Ropergate and Wakefield Road from the stone ‘Waterhouse’ opposite St. Bernard Avenue, where headings gathered water from both sides of the Wakefield Road valley. The waterhouse disappeared in the thirties, and now a tap in the pump box supplies water from the town mains.

It is believed to have been about the 16th century that the liquorice plant was brought to this district, which was long thought (erroneously) to be the only place in the country where the plant could be grown, and the early years of the 20th century found several firms active in the production of sweetmeats based on liquorice.

Of the many firms engaged in this trade, only Dunhills and Wilkinsons now survive, each in alliance with a big group. Robinson and Wordsworth (in Wordsworth’s Yard) did well and moved to new premises in Ferrybridge Road not long before their demise. Ewbanks (in Friarwood) and Hillabys (in Back Street) each developed considerable outputs, but each became a part of one of the sweetmeat giants, and their Pontefract works were closed. Henry Gundill (in Southgate) early gave up the business, and Addingley near Baghill likewise retired; but it was fire which put an end to some others.

One, at the bottom of Horsefair, went up very early in my life, and one at the top of Northgate not much later, followed by the destruction of one of the buildings of Ewbanks, a firm which lost part of its premises through German incendiaries many years later. Hillaby’s works however, probably made the biggest blaze, with a dozen windows on each of three or four stories all spouting flames simultaneously – and scorching the doors on the opposite side of the street.

I had a rather closer association with the fire brigade that fell to most civilians, for father was chairman of the town’s Baths and Fire Brigade Committee, though it was not through this that I went to see so many blazes, either as spectator, reporter or photographer. Farm fires were fairly frequent. One of the earliest I remember was at Parkside Farm, which was struck by lightening, and the accompanying rainstorm was so sharply bounded that although the road near the farm was almost flooded, a score or so yards nearer the town, the road was quite dry.

Other big blazes I remember were of a picture framer in Rochford Court, Corn Market, buildings at the C.W.S. South Baileygate (where I relieved a fireman while he went for his supper) and a malthouse in Northgate.

But my earliest association with fire appliances was in very early boyhood, when some testing or a demonstration took place of the then newly-delivered Merryweather steam fire engine. This had been connected to the mains near the Assembly Room front, and hoses laid to jets down Horsefair. Faster and faster was the engine pushed, and higher and higher went the jets-but the strain became too much for the hoses, one near the engine burst, and I had to dash home across the road for a complete change of clothing.

This engine, it may well be remembered, lived in the centre space under the Town Hall, accompanied by a hose dray and a handcart, the latter for use in the town centre where mains pressure was adequate for any but high buildings or big blazes. This handcart I have helped to push, and can confirm that it was a good load for three or four men. The alarm would be brought to the fire station by a runner or a horseman (or, in later times, a cyclist) who broke a glass in the engine-house door, extracted a key, ran to the church, unlocked the belfry entrance, and there sounded two bells, the ropes of which had been left hanging there – provided the ringers had made the appropriate change when their duties had finished on the previous Sunday evening. This discordant clanging usually brought out the firemen, either from home or from their work, and also horse-keepers who swiftly took the animals from their normal duties and raced to the Town Hall, where the first suitable arrivals were hitched to the engine and the next to the hose dray. Meanwhile, the firemen would have lit the ready-laid fire under the boiler, and usually there was plenty of smoke from the chimney as the engine left for the blaze, where it would arrive with steam up ready for action.

Later, when the possibilities of the telephone system became better appreciated and trusted, a caller would telephone, and as father’s position was widely known, the exchange operator could think of nothing better than to telephone the alarm to him. As he was not always available, one of our shop girls would accept the message, run down the yard to the printing works and pass it to me. So it came about that many a time it fell to me to break the glass over the switch, for the siren, which had by this time been installed, set it howling, and open the engine-house doors.

Considerably before this period, the old steamer had been condemned, on the grounds that its boiler was unsafe, and it was too old-fashioned to be worth rejuvenating, so a motor-driven appliance took its place. I well remember riding on this on one of its first calls, which was to a Knottingley glassworks. The bad state of the road as a result of neglect during the Kaiser’s war had not by then been remedied, and from where I sat amidships (in the open, of course) I could see the front axle and the near side spring. Presently I noticed that one of the bolts holding these parts together had broken, and there was at least one uneasy passenger on this vehicle as it thundered along with its solid rubber tyres bouncing in and out of the potholes.

About this period, some members of the Corporation began to feel that out of town fires should be the responsibility of the local authority in which they occurred, and it was therefore decreed that Pontefract Brigade should restrict its services to the borough only. This decision had curious consequences, and one incident gave rise to the following verses from my brother Gurnie which appeared in the Leeds Mercury, as follows:

Pontefract had other entertainment besides fires and fairs. For some years, a private enterprise leased the castle for a bank holiday gala. The normal admission charge (was it 2d or 3d, half price for rate payers?) was increased for these occasions, though even so it was not very much, and if the weather was favourable there would be a great crowd to enjoy acrobats, clowns, jugglers and similar music-hall turns, and of course, to ramble round the ruins, including the magazine under the lawn, and the stairways through the round tower, for at that time nothing was kept locked and inaccessible.

Frequently the big thrill of the afternoon was a balloon ascent and parachute descent, and one of these I remember very clearly. The balloon was the usual hot-air type, and for it a stumpy little chimney, possibly a yard wide and two yards high, was built in brick on the lawn, not far from the Porter’s Lodge, with a deep trench (reached by three or four steps) below it for the fire. In due course the empty balloon was hoisted above the chimney by ropes between two poles, and the ring at the end of the net enclosing the balloon secured to pegs in the ground, round the chimney. To this ring the parachute was attached and laid out on the grass.

When all was ready the parachutist donned harness attached to the parachute and the fire was lit. On the call being made, two or three dozen eager boy volunteers came forward and held open the neck of the balloon. As it filled with hot air it began to lift and the boys paid out folds of the balloon from the slack laid out on the ground near the chimney. In due course the poles and ropes overhead became unnecessary and were taken away, and the filling continued with the boys paying out the slack until the balloon was held down by only the thin rope threaded through the ring and the tops of pegs in the ground.

During this, with the balloon only half inflated, all should have waited for the completion, when the parachutist would have given the word to cut the thin restraining rope. However, a sudden gust of wind pushed the balloon over to one side, and the sight of this huge object apparently falling on them put panic into the boys on that side, and they ran smartly away. This one-sided strain broke a number of the lines on the main ring, and when the gust passed and the balloon regained its upright position, it put the balloonist’s assistant in a dilemma; cut the remainder and let the parachutist go up with barely half his complement of support lines, or douse the fire and defer the attempt? His instant decision was – CUT! – and away went the part-filled balloon with the man swinging below, looking down anxiously as another gust carried him perilously low over the Porter’s Lodge. However, all ended well and he came down safely in a field somewhere towards Featherstone.

‘Dancing on a boarded floor on the lawn’ was another popular feature of these galas. For this, a band in the rustic bandstand facing the lawn, having played mixed music in the afternoon, settled down to a succession of waltzes and the like. Then, when dusk had lapsed into darkness, came the climax of the day – a grand firework display with a variety of single items, two or three small set-pieces (on frameworks set up against the trees on the far side of the lawn from the terrace) and, finally, a fiery portrait of the King, with the National Anthem from the band leading to a general exodus. Great days, those were!

Another outstanding occasion would be a circus visit. The mere arrival of this was an excitement. Even the presence of men of colour was a novelty, whilst it was an ‘act’ in itself to watch teams of four of them with sledge-hammers swiftly driving in stake after stake with which to stay the ‘big top’.

Frank H. W. Holmes 1971.