The areas of Woolton where we kids met and played without any adult supervision were many. It could be a park, a field, and a road but there were two areas where we all mixed - Woolton Swimming baths and Woolton Public Library. Most organised activities had to do with a church and Woolton had its share of churches. There was St Mary's Catholic Church, St Peters Church of England, the Methodist Church at the bottom of Church Road, the Congregational Church on Woolton High Street and the Unitarian Church on Gateacre Brow. My dad always said that Unitarians were very good people.
Most of us borrowed books from the library, which had been an old Methodist chapel, or went to evenings organised by the librarians to educate us about books and show a lantern slide show or a play. But the area we all met most days of the week was Woolton Public Baths. We were lucky in Woolton because we had our own little baths which, according to my granddad Ashton, was built by the gentry so that they could swim there instead of having to swim in the River Mersey at Oglet Point near Hale where whales sometimes got stranded and which was becoming polluted from the Widnes Chemical Works up river.
As a child growing up in Woolton I had lots of maiden aunts I could call in to see for a talk or a sweet - usually an Uncle Joe's Mint Ball - and get sixpence pocket money. I had an Aunt Sissy who had a sweet shop called Elizabeth Ashton's Sweet Shop not far from John Lennon's house on the corner of Cobden Street and Quarry Street. Another favourite aunt was Aunt Ethel Ireland who once took my sister and me bathing at Oglet on the Mersey. I remember that we walked there and she told us that this was the last place she saw her boyfriend, Reg, before he went off to the Somme in 1916 where he was killed. She said, "Reg trickled the red sand down my breast and said, "As many grains of sand as there are on your nipples will be the number of children we will have when the war is over". Neither Aunt Ethel nor any of my other aunts ever had any children because their men never came back. But they all had similar stories to tell and one of the memories I still treasure today is of all the love these maiden aunts gave to my friends and me as children.
After the 1914-18 wars the Woolton Baths were taken over by the Woolton Parish Council and then later by Liverpool Corporation. It was there that we all learnt to swim as our parents had done before us. Though it was only a tiny pool measuring just 18 metres by 10 metres they had a very successful water polo team, which Rod Davis and my dad played in. We all had contracts for the baths and many were the hours I spent walking up and down Quarry Street with John or Ivan or Pete and all the others to and from the baths or playing in the children's playground on swings and roundabouts. It was a place to meet and have fun with and talk to girls and begin to explore our knowledge of the opposite sex.
Sex, or our knowledge of sexuality, was limited so, I suppose like generations before us, we learnt from those in our peer group who had been there first - or said they had. John Lennon had usually done it first and so we fumblingly followed. Just as in the code of honour we followed then I feel honour bound now not to divulge who found out what with whom, where or when. And I am not going to name John's sources of information on sexual relations though I knew them well and he shared his knowledge quite freely.
Favourite love-making places as I remember them after Youth Club at St Peter's Hall or some such meeting, or chance meeting, or a night in Woolton Picture House (the 'Bug House' as we called it) were the dark lane and graveyard of St Mary's Catholic Church, St Peter's Church Field or lane going up to it, The Mill Style, Strawberry Fields Grounds, Woolton Woods and Out Lane. I'm sure I have missed out many but I'm sure I do not think we were any different from all the generations before or since. The change or revolution that John and the Beatles ushered in was to talk openly. He told the truth, he sounded right to us kids - but it did shock the life out of our parents!
The Youth Club run by Jack Gibbons played a very important part in our lives. The Tuesday evening meeting in the St Peter's Church Hall where we had dances to 78rpm records played on an electric gramophone player and speakers was the highlight of the evening. I think we used to take 3 old pence each week towards buying new records. Victor Sylvester, Joe Loss and Edmundo Ros seemed to be in and we were taught to do the quickstep, the waltz and foxtrot. Those who could afford it went to the dancing school in Penny Lane. But the times were changing. In Liverpool there were always records from America brought in by seamen or you could go to the shop in Allerton Road where the girls who made silk and nylon stockings at Woolton's Bear Brand Stockings factory rushed at dinner time to buy the latest 78s which they played before buying it. When I think back we did not call it Rock and Roll. It was regarded as being the music of Black America and I'm sure we called it Rhythm and Blues. I stand being corrected on that but records of Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Bill Monroe and Blue Moon of Kentucky (I think it was made by Sun Records of USA) could be heard at our youth club though Jack Gibbon was not keen on them and moved slowly in case our parents found out. Then Buddy Holly appeared and that was really crazy stuff shortly followed by Rock and Roll. On the Mill Style footpath I found a record hidden in the grass. A performer called Elvis Presley called it ‘Blue Suede Shoes’. I took it home and played it on our wind-up gramophone in the back room of the house. My mother heard it and went wild. She called it 'The Devil's Music' and wanted to get the record off me to smash it to pieces. I fled upstairs, out through my bedroom window, down the drainpipe and ran off to Newstead’s Farm on Quarry Street where I had a part-time, after school job. I hid the record behind some bales of hay that were used to feed Julie the house cow. Gilbert Scott, the farm manager who also ran a youth club at Allerton - I think it was at All Hallows Church - found it. He took it to his youth club and the kids had gone wild so he asked me if it was my record and I told him the story. He suggested that I should sneak it into the pile of records Jack Gibbons used to put on the front of the stage at St Peters Youth Club. This I did with my conspirator-in-crime, Rod Davis. As I remember my sister and her mate, Hillary Balmer, had seen us do it and when the record got put on the auto-change and was played Jack went into a blue rage and threw us out of the club and threatened to tell our fathers. He never did! He was a decent sort was Jack and it wasn't all that long before Elvis was being played in the club. By the way, my big sister, Pauline and her mates who were about 3 years older than me always said that they did not like John and couldn't understand why I did. They said, "If you knew what we know you would not" but she never, ever told me what it was. I guess it must have been some girlish thing between them and John.
It was said in the Woolton and Liverpool of my childhood that when we looked from the top of Woolton Hill we could look over to the Welsh mountain, Moel Famau (Mother of Mountains) which we called the Jampot Mountain and could sometimes glimpse Snowdon beyond and that the Welsh people did the same and looking towards us thought they could see Paradise away from the drudgery peasant farming, slate quarrying, mineral mining and poverty.
The Liverpool of our childhood had wealth, jobs and employment or the promise to be able to sail off on a boat to anywhere in the world for new opportunity. Liverpool had grown from a little fishing port in the diocese of the big city of Chester to a city with one Church of England cathedral built from the red Woolton sandstone, and talk of another to be built for the Catholic Church. Its wealth had come from trade which included, sadly, slave trading but it was a city where the Welsh, Scots, Irish and indeed people of all nations, creeds and beliefs found a home, work and - though it did not always happen - peace. Not only did the great passenger liners going to North America come into Liverpool but liners from all over the world arrived bringing immigrants and migrants seeking their fortunes or, perhaps, just a better way of life. Often they did not get any further than Liverpool - having arrived they stayed.
I went to school with many Jewish children whose parents had escaped the gas ovens of Nazi-occupied Europe. Liverpool welcomed them and made them feel at home in time. I am not sure that we lads knew about it or understood it as we mixed freely and happily with boys and girls of all races, religions and creeds. I think it was true that most of us boys had some Welsh in our language - usually some very bad 'non-chapel' words but Welsh words of greeting which were in common use or we could at least say Llanfairpwllgwyngllgogerychwyrndrobwllantisyliogoggogoch, the longest word in the Welsh language which means 'the church of St Mary by the Hollow of white aspen, over the whirlpool, and St Tysilio's church close to the red cave'.
So it was with our accepting attitude towards race that we absorbed the cultures of the world without anyone using, or trying to use, culture to frighten us or use it as a social control mechanism. I think it is true to say that Liverpool and Woolton (the much older civic centre) was, is and hopefully always will be a multi-faith, multi- cultural city which stands as a beacon of optimism and hope in a pessimistic world. It was such a place that inspired John Lennon and why the world finds and will hopefully always find hope, love, joy and optimism in all the Beatles' songs. It would be untrue to say that there was never any racial tension in Liverpool but it was often very confused and was perhaps fermented by others. I remember on one occasion coming out of our very Protestant Bluecoat School and standing and laughing at the antics of the extreme Protestant organisation on a march. I remember walking with Ivan Vaughan on a Sunday night home from St Peter's Church choir snowballing one another in a snow-covered Church Road and one of the snowballs hit the Catholic Archbishop Downie's car as he drove past the Woolton Quarry. He lived in Archbishops' House opposite in Church Road and both he and his chauffeur got out of the car and asked us for our names and which school we went to as he was going to tell the headmaster. It would be serious double trouble because if he did and our parents found out they would certainly have supported Archbishop Downey. We lads all knew the Archbishop very well. He used to walk around Reynolds Park off Church Road reading his bible and composing his sermons and praying. He was a saint-like man and he loved us girls and boys and often spent time to talk with us, as did his predecessor Archbishop Heenan. Both men had black Labrador dogs and they walked around the parks and village with us. I remember crying when Archbishop Downie died. He was a sort of father figure to us kids as was Archbishop Heenan who I often met in my Granny Ashton's humble little cottage where he would drop in for a cup of tea whilst my Grandmother Agnes held court with all in the village who dropped by for a 'cuppa'. My granny loved to talk like all folks of her generation. That's how they learnt and how we kids learnt. She talked to folk of all religions, creeds and races. She liked to talk to nuns from Knowle Park. As she used to say "They are good women".
As far as I know all Woolton folk were the same and I am sure the Woolton atmosphere was what inspired John Lennon's songs. In the Woolton of our childhood there was freedom to roam, to wander as far as we wanted without supervision, a freedom I am afraid modern childhood does not grant. We would take off to Liverpool alone of the bus and take the ferry to New Brighton and go for a swim in Harrison Drive Salt Water Open Air Pool and come back home on the ferry and listen to debates on Liverpool's Speakers' Corner at the Pier Head where a world of ideas would be pulled apart and discussed in an informed, intelligent way. We hardly ever saw a policeman.
Such was the wonder world of the Woolton of our childhood.
Attached documents:
(a) 'The Ballad of Woolton Green' (anon)
(b) 'I Remember, I Remember' by J.F.Marsh. Taken from
J.F.Marsh's book Parts 1 & 2 ‘The Story of a Woolton Pub' 1930 in which the author wrote in the preface:-
Breathe there the soul so dead
That never to themselves has said
This is my own, my native spot.
J.F.Marsh (after Walter Scott) - a Native of Woolton
(c) By Beeman
By David Ashton
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
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