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BBC On This Day
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Me and my mother on the beach at St Bees.
If my dad had a successful day like this one, we'd have salmon every meal until it was gone - at least until we got a freezer in the 1970's
I'm sure they thought I would enjoy being dragged around over the snow on the lid of an old tin chest. My expression in this photo tells a different tale I think
Grandma was the only grandparent I knew and she died in November 1963
The lambing season was always something I looked forward to and often it coincided with the Easter school holidays
I had two uncles who were successful in the world of Hound Trailing, a Cumbrian sport involving racing hounds over an aniseed trail. This is the 1964 puppy champion "Longcroft" and his trophies!
Here I am , on the right, with two of my schoolfriends in 1970 or 1971. Living in a rural area made it more difficult to spend time with mates at the weekend but we'd travel on the bus (where there was one) on our bikes, on foot or preferably by persuading people to give us lifts.
Relaxing after a day on a horse in the Rocky Mountains of western Wyoming.
With my new family Pamela and her children Charlotte and James in 2005 on our wedding day
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Early Days
I was born on Monday 28 October 1957 in Whitehaven hospital in West Cumberland the only child of a farmer and a factory worker both of whom had married for the first and only time at the age of forty. Consequently I had a childhood surrounded and fussed over by aunts, uncles and other adults in their forties and fifties and spent much of my time with them on the family farm. My earliest memories of what was then "Grandma's" are of a farmhouse without electricity, of oil lamps and candles, stone floors, cows milked by hand, an outside "dry" toilet and a radio the size of a modern TV on which they listened to the home service and, in the evenings, Radio Luxembourg.
My parents and I didn't live on the farm but in a small terraced house in a village a few miles away and we did have electricity. We also had a TV - purchased especially to watch Coronation Street in 1961 - and during my first ten years acquired a plumbed in bath, a fridge and a washing machine to replace the dolly tub I remember peering into as a toddler. See more photos here
Work Experience
Visiting the local butcher one day with my Mum, he was loading his van with deliveries and jokingly asked me if I wanted to go with him. Apparently I said "yes" and got in his shiny new Morris Mini van and off we went, with my Mum's full agreement. We visited shops and factories delivering sausages, mince, chickens etc and, on the way back, called at the Abattoir to collect a large vat of blood with which to make black puddings. Read more here
School
In 1962 I started school at the local Church of England School, St Paul's in Frizington. It was a victorian school building with outside toilets and a rectangular playground next to a small stream into which, inevitably, children often fell. I was a reasonably well behaved and reasonably bright little boy among some fairly tough characters some of whom weren't too keen on those who they regarded as "swots". Read more here
On the farm
In 1965 my Dad's two unmarried brothers and a sister had moved to a traditional lakeland hillfarm in the Ennerdale valley and Dad travelled to work there each day. Throughout the next seventeen years I went to the farm at every opportunity - rules were few and far between and I had the freedom to explore, play and learn. Few children, it seems to me, have that to the same degree today. Health and safety was considered but not allowed to interfere with my fun - I rode on farm machinery, climbed on haystacks, played with calves, pet lambs and sheepdogs, splashed around in farmyard puddles and learned the hard way that cows kicked and hens pecked. As soon as my legs were long enough, 1968 I think it was, I was allowed to drive a tractor. (on the strict condition that I didn't tell my mother!!) Read more here
We trained hounds to follow an aniseed trail and, during the summer, travelled the length and breadth of the Lake District to take part in races, or trails as they are known.
My First News Event
There were also occasional unexpected moments of excitement - like the day in 1970 when a large red and white hot air balloon crashed nearby. I ran to the scene and, along with half a dozen other people found a dazed Canadian called Ray Monro who had just become the first person to cross the Irish Sea in a balloon. Incredibly, I later found out that his flight that day, lasting only four and a half hours, was, at the time, the longest balloon flight in history. Read more here
Life did change quite a bit in 1975 when I passed my driving test and acquired a little gold Morris Mini Clubman. Read more about my teens here
Work
By the time I left school in 1976, with a reasonable crop of 'O' and 'A' levels, I had developed a real attachment to Cumbria and its traditions and had no real desire to leave. The choice for most leaving Whitehaven Grammar School that hot summer was either University or a job at Sellafield. Sellafield was, and still is, the largest employer in West Cumbria and has dominated the news here for most of my lifetime. Never one to follow the crowd however, I had no enthusiasm for either and, as I'd counted out becoming a farmer, replied to an advert for a trainee Chartered Accountant with a firm in Whitehaven. I eventually passed all the exams and qualified and settled into a happy, carefree, single life - I stayed with the same Accountancy practice, becoming a partner in 1992.
Play
I enjoyed walking and cycling in the Lake District and took regular foreign holidays. After a trip to California in 1984 I developed a real interest in North America and have returned a number of times, particularly to the western states of the USA. I've also travelled in various parts of Europe and have a particular fondness for Italy after making some friends there and learning, rather badly, to speak the language. I love travelling and exploring places off the beaten track but still believe that nowhere quite matches Cumbria for sheer scenic beauty - coming home from Manchester airport I always take a look at the fells as we turn off the M6 at Kendal and wonder why I bothered going away!!
Technology of course has altered the way we work tremendously just in the course of my working life but perhaps the most significant changes I've seen in the last fifty years are the opportunities and the choices available to people from relatively "ordinary" backgrounds - the opportunities for work and travel, the choice of lifestyle, the availability of information and opportunities for continuing education, even the ability to regularly eat out in restaurants are things our parents would have regarded as being close to fantasy fifty years ago. These opportunities, together with the high quality education we received make us, I'm sure, a very fortunate generation.
Life now
My long held single status changed two years ago when I married Pamela. Pamela, sadly, lost her first husband to cancer in 2002 – both had been friends of mine since school and he was the first of my close friends to die - and we began spending time together during the subsequent twelve months. We were married in July 2005 at St Michaels Church, Lamplugh and moved to the village, which lies on the western edge of the Lake District, shortly afterwards. We are right on the edge of the National Park - if we open our front door and run we'll be inside the boundary in less than 10 seconds! Also with us are Pamela's two children - Charlotte who is studying at Oxford and James who will be heading off to University in London (providing his ‘A’ levels go as expected) in September. They seem to have a more pressured life than we had at that age although the opportunities available are much greater - I do wonder though if they will see the same degree of change in their first fifty years and, given their relative affluence now, whether they will look back with the same amusement at how things used to be.
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