Around spring of 1960 Edna gave her notice in at school and began to apply for teaching jobs in the Nottingham area. A reference written by her Head teacher Mr. Wade was again using the adjectives “conscientious” and “very responsible.” I had already been offered the post at County Hall, so we were almost certainly going to live there. She was offered a job at the Luttrall School in Nottingham, another mixed comprehensive. Edna finally left the Bentinck School in July after two years as a teacher there. In later life she always looked back on those years with great fondness and pleasure. Inevitably there had been difficult times but she had learned so much and always remembered the staff and the children she had known.
In the summer of 1960, Keith and Janet were finally married and I was his best man. June and Les were also married that year at Priors Marston. Edna was a bridesmaid together with Josephine and Anne Carvell who was a good friend to both Edna and June. Anne remained in contact with Edna for the rest of her life. In 1961 we travelled over to Blackpool for the wedding of my old school pal Frank Coucill to Ruth. They had met in 1955 when Frank had a summer job working as a conductor on the trams on Blackpool sea front with my old school friends Alan Cockshaw, John Darlington and Jimmy Davies. Frank had been to Liverpool University to study Chemistry but had not completed the course and at that time he was trying to find a new career. Amazingly after the wedding I never saw Frank and Ruth again until we were reunited in 2003, I scratch my head now and wonder how that could have happened, bearing in mind they had continued to live in Bolton over all those years. Stewart and Anne Doncaster were also married and we attended. It seemed to be wedding bells all round for a couple of years.
6. 1960 to 1964 - Nottingham
Once I had qualified at Sheffield I wrote to Dan Lacey at County Hall, Nottingham and was formally offered a post starting in early August. The next problem was to find accommodation. I wrote to several estate agents and received lists of flats to rent. We couldn’t afford much, Edna was between jobs and I hadn’t started. We finally found a flat in Hampden Street, close to the City centre and next door to the School of Art. It was the usual large three-story Victorian house split up into flats. It was not brilliant; we had two rooms, a very large lounge with a sink and basic cooking facilities and a small bedroom off. Toilet and bathroom facilities were shared with other flats on the same level. In the first few days I saw some of the other tenants and my eyes opened slightly wider. I had my suspicions straight away. I know it was summer and the weather was hot but there were several middle aged ladies living there, who seemed to be competing for the shortest skirt and the thickest make up. I think there were four of them, plying their trade in the City. To think we were sharing toilet facilities with that lot, I was worried we might catch something. To be fair they never bothered us and were always very quiet when they came in. We considered moving on, but after a few weeks the two who were on our floor left, which solved the toilet concern. The two “girls” remaining upstairs we had little contact with. I bet Edna was glad about that, it must have been a situation that worried her.
I started at County Hall in the first week of August. I caught a bus in the centre to Trent Bridge. The Architects Department was on the top floor. It was quite a large office; there were five architects groups with about ten in each group. Other sections included, Quantity Surveyors, Services Engineers, Landscape Architects, Clerk of Works, Maintenance and a very large Administration pool. There must have been at least one hundred and fifty worked there. I was introduced to other members of my group. The leader was Eric Turner, tall and balding, always smiling he hid away in a glass cubicle. The two senior men were Dick Patterson and Alan Meikle, very different characters. Dick was smart and smooth, Alan, rough and tough. Both men became County Architects elsewhere in later years. The group’s main project was responsibility for the extensions to County Hall and I was to work on this for the next year. That first morning I got off to a crackling start. At that time I smoked a pipe, and after a couple of hours decided to light up. I filled it, lit it and then couldn’t see an ashtray, so I blew the match out and stuffed it back in the box. My blowing wasn’t that good, in no time the box had ignited with a bang and I was hopping around I could see the others looking at each other thinking what sort of idiot have we got here!
Very soon they gave me a small contract to do myself. It was some alterations in the basement of County Hall; I didn’t have far to go for a site meeting! At first those meetings were an ordeal, the Architect would chair the meeting and there were sometimes as many as twenty there, Contractors, Sub Contractors, engineers, Quantity surveyors etc. It was a bit nerve wracking but being pitched in at the deep end it soon became second nature. Over my working life I always said I was happiest being on a building site rather than in the office. Nottinghamshire County Council operated in a building system called “CLASP.” This was the abbreviation for, “Consortium of Local Authorities Special Programme.” Many other local authorities used the same system. I was not to know it in the early days but I eventually was to spend over twenty years designing system buildings. This was a mixed blessing, I became very proficient at managing and running several major contracts at once but decidedly weak on a knowledge of building construction. You didn’t have to think, all the details and assembly drawings were done for you in a large bound manual.
In November 1960 John F. Kennedy became the new President of the United States beating Vice-President Richard Nixon by a slim margin. Kennedy was only forty–three a Harvard graduate and war hero. He became the youngest elected president in US history and the first Roman Catholic. What has all that got to do with me you may ask? At the time I probably felt exactly the same and probably took little notice of this event. Two years later I was very glad of this man’s judgement during the Cuban missile crisis.
I frequently went on the site of the County Hall extension. I got to know the Clerk of Works well, a grey haired, wiry character called Frank Mee. In his site hut he had a large collection of girlie pictures, the really dubious ones were kept in the bottom drawer. The site foreman, Joe was the image of Arthur Askey, he and Frank together were like a comedy act. Dick Patterson was one of the main supervising Architects for the contract but Joe and Frank were always complaining they could never get hold of him to ask questions. One morning I went in very early to find Frank and several workmen bustling around in the Drawing office. They were moving Dick’s Drawing board, table, drawers, files, everything and reassembling it all on the first floor slab of the incomplete extension before he came in. “ Now we’ll be able to get hold of the bugger,” said Joe. When Dick finally arrived in the office, his jaw dropped when he saw all his stuff had disappeared. To his credit, he grinned and played along with it, spending the rest of the day working at his board on the open first floor slab with labourers working around him, they had even rigged up a phone for him. There were no windows in at that stage either.
The office had a thriving cricket team with regular fixtures; I was soon involved in that. The dashing Rex Goodwin, burly Alan Willis, dour Alan Goodman and jovial John Hague are a few of the players I can recall. All the games were played in the evening over twenty overs, and then the serious drinking began. The sports facilities were excellent, we had a large sports ground down Wilford Lane with cricket, football and tennis catered for. In the winter I turned out for the NALGO football team, playing in the local Nottingham league, surprisingly not all the players registered were County Council employees, nobody seemed to mind. Bearded Clive Trigg from the office was a tough tackling full back. We became good friends with Clive and his wife Chris and also with John and Margaret Hague. John lived at Keyworth not far from Tollerton, both Edna and I forged our baby-sitting skills at their house. John was a lively character who had a good line in impersonations of Tony Hancock. He claimed to be a demon bowler and rushed in with a slingy action, his few wisps of hair straggling across his perspiring brow, always looking suitably offended if he didn’t get a wicket every ball!
It was noisy living in Hampden Street; there was always some dispute, screaming and shouting going on outside throughout the night. Towards the end of 1960 we started looking around to see if we could afford a house and move. Lizzie came up with the generous offer that she would pay the deposit on a property for us, so we began to look seriously. We saw a small two bed-roomed bungalow at Tollerton, about six miles from County hall on the Melton Mowbray road. Bentinck Avenue was on a small estate, but the properties were not uniform and it was quite pleasant. The asking price was £2,200, which was a little more than our budget but we wanted it. Our offer was accepted and I put an application in for a mortgage. In the meantime I asked Bernard Sherwin from our Maintenance section to check it over for me. Bernard was quite an elderly man and had a very lugubrious manner. He rarely smiled and the world for him was a dark, dangerous place infested by death-watch beetle, dry rot, wet rot, broken drains, leaking roofs and subsidence. As we walked down the path he looked worried as usual. I could hear deep sighs as he stared at the shaky garden wall, the bad pointing on the garage and the rust appearing on the metal windows. The thing that made him happiest was when he could produce his pointed knife. This had to be done discreetly with the owner of the house around. He would sink it into floorboards and skirting boards, the easier it sank in the more pleasure it seemed to give him as he sucked in through his teeth. We walked away, and he said, “ I wouldn’t buy that.” We did of course, when the mortgage survey report came I knew what to expect. Luckily I had made a friend Gerry, who I played football with. He was a plumber but could turn his hand to many other trades and was very competent at everything he tackled. He did all the work required at a very reasonable price with the exception of the rebuilding of the front garden wall, that I decided to tackle myself.
Frank Mee taught bricklaying at an evening class at a local technical college. His trade before becoming a Clerk of Works was a bricklayer. When I told him I was going to try and rebuild the garden wall myself he suggested I came along to his class. I did this for several months, all the other lads on the course were apprentice bricklayers and they thought it was a huge joke that an Architect was joining in. There was a lot of ribbing, but it was all in good humour I think they respected the fact I was there with them and trying to learn. They were all doing fancy arches and corbelling and there was I struggling with my plain straight wall. I got there in the end and the wall was rebuilt and approved by the mortgage surveyor
