One childhood ritual during the days between Christmas and the return to school was the day trip to London.
The main purpose was the January sales and the destination: “the London shops”.
Swindon had a department store – McIlroys on Regent Street (it even had those amazing overhead wire and pulley cash railway systems that transported money and sales slips to a central cashier and change and a receipt by return. Ping!) (In an earlier version of this post i mistakenly referred to pneumatic tubes.)
But nothing compared with the size, grandeur, and magic of Oxford Street.
To give you a flavor, here’s a video of the crowd at Bourne & Hollingsworth and the aftermath of the first day of the sales.
There’s a couple more here and here if you can withstand the humor and the attitudes of the times.
Covering the scrum at the January sales was a routine feature for Pathé News – rather like showing Australians eating Christmas pudding on the beach, or the Saturday summer traffic jam on the Exeter by-pass.
The journey was part of the adventure
It meant rising in the dark, a bus to the station, and a train to Paddington – a place of hustle, bustle, steam, and soot. It’s an overload for all the senses. A vaulted cavern at the end of which a moving staircase carries you deep into the bowels of the underground maze of the London tube. Bakerloo line to Oxford Circus.
And just look at the roof!
At Oxford Circus, the escalator (“Please stand on the right”) trundles you up to the booking hall on the street level. My mother knows exactly which exit to use to head to Selfridges.
Her purpose is to find a bargains on serviceable clothes for work and I remember one item in particular – a blue tweed coat that was to last her decades.
We always took a look at the toy department – not to buy of course, but to wonder at the displays and the elaborate electric train layouts. One year we did buy some plastic bubble goop which had a most distinctive smell and was probably full of toxic compounds deadly to small children.
Refreshments
Then it’s time for refreshments! To a Lyons for cups of tea and baked beans on toast or egg and chips.
Lining up and helping ourselves and then searching for a table was all part of the experience.
The Sights
The afternoon was for seeing the sights. Madame Tussaud’s one year, the Tower of London and the Natural History Museum on others. Or perhaps a matinée at a theatre. And this meant taking the bus – in the smoke-filled upstairs of course, and – if possible – the front seat. So much to see.
Even in the 1960s it was still common to see the remains of bomb damage although this photo is from 1954.
And, of course, as it got dark the Christmas Lights!
Tea-time
Another Lyons for tea and a Bath bun and then time to think of home.
With time to kill before the train it’s possible to fit in a visit to a news cinema.
One year we went to the news cinema at Victoria Station on the Buckingham Palace Road side near platform 19. This would have been my mother’s old stamping ground from her years of teaching in Pimlico.
Perhaps that’s why we went. Or maybe it was just coincidence.
News cinemas are a thing of the past but they were once dotted all over London, offering cheap entertainment and news as a way to kill time in the warm.
Programs typically lasted one hour, and were shown continuously, without any interval between performances. It was a mix of news, cartoons, and travelogues with reports on sporting events.
It was all part of the novelty and excitement of a day up in town.
Home
Back to Paddington. Check the mesmerizing, ever-clicking departure board for the home train – stopping at Reading, Didcot, Swindon, Chippenham, Bath Spa, and Bristol, Temple Meads. Can you hear the echoey announcement?
And the journey. Scouting down the length of the platform for an empty compartment and corner window seats if possible.
Remember that sensation of sitting in a stationary train as the one alongside you pulls out?
And glimpses into the lives of strangers afforded by the lit windows of the backs of the Westbourne Park terraces as the train gathers speed, clicking over the points, charging through industrial west London, and then into the dark of the countryside. The sudden jolting whoosh of a train hurtling in the opposite direction.
Intoxicating.
The featured image by Kevin Parrish shows the Clun Castle – GWR 4073 Class No.7029 – waiting to depart from Paddington in 1960. The locomotive was fitted with a double chimney in 1959. and was the last Great Western steam locomotive to haul a passenger train from Paddington, on June 11 1965. It was built at Swindon Works in May 1950 to a design by Charles Collett and was named after Clun Castle in Shropshire.
This is lovely thank you! Those pathe films are always good and I’m sure Bristol Temple Meads isn’t really a place, just somewhere that’s announced!
Temple Meads sounds like the setting for a scene in a Shakespeare history play where gardeners comment on the shenanigans of assorted dukes and earls and their legal quarrels about who is the rightful heir to the the throne of King Edward.
Agreed on the Pathe films – always interesting and revealing however hokey.
A beautiful, atmospheric account with stunning illustrations.
Thanks Jim. iI was fun to put together.
What a delightful post – your evocative writing reminded me of going ‘into town’ to go shopping with my mother (in the very small city of Perth in Western Australia). I remember there was a pneumatic chute system for cash in one of our department stores and the female staff in another all wore black skirts and white blouses which puzzled me at the time!
Going to London was always “up” even though it’s on the bottom of th map (!) and mostly low lying geographically being close to the estuary end of the Thames.
Those outfits showed ‘respectability'”. Those “girls” might be out of the house and working but they had to be kept standards of morality and were expected to maintain them. Whiteley’s on Queensway, in Bayswater, was notorious for its rules and rigidity.
A wonderful journey. For a while I lived at Chertsey which was near Reading but I think we had to get on either the front or back of the train which split apart at Staines.
And for a very short while I had a job showing people to their tables in Harvey Nick’s cafe.
Probably out of Waterloo – Weybridge, Addlestone, and Virginia Water with a split at Staines.
I don’t think I’ve ever been to Harvey Nicks, which is still there. It always puts me in mind of Edina and Patsy and Ab Fab. “Stoli, darling and pop the Bolli”
I enjoyed every moment…seeing your life through my eyes, and your brilliant writing! Thank you
That’s a very generous comment. Cheers Lynn.
Enjoyed and can relate exactly to your reminiscing. What about the food section at Harrods? Always worth looking and marveling at. Thanks for the memories.
I never went there as a child.
Food in my family was a simple affair of garden produce, other veggies, cheese, milk, eggs, bread, nuts, fruit etc. enhanced only by items from the health food store on Fleet Street – gourmet delicacies as Vecon, nut butter, Tartex, and Instant Postum.
Although this isn’t a part of my past, I loved the sights, sounds, and overall feeling your post offers. Excellent!
Kind thoughts. Thanks.
Fabulous! Your images and narrative made me feel a part of the experience – something I’d never even heard of!!
Ta for this one!
As your writing has shown so well so many times – there is nothing quite so powerful as those sensations and feelings from childhood.
Oh my Lord, you have evoked so many memories and it seems you saw, felt, heard it all in the way I did. Not only that, but I caught the same train. After the local stations closed down, we always got off in Chippenham. I can still smell British Rail, still recall the sound of those old lifts with the door that slid across. I remember cups of tea while waiting, trying to stay off the cold platform and I can feel the shudder of those trains rushing through. I think hauling my suitcase on and off trains was the origin of my back trouble! No wheels then and my bag was always full of books. I also remember Lyons. We used to go to the one in Kensington High Street, that is when we didn’t go to Derry and Tom’s Roof Garden (where they had a bomb!) Newsreels too. I actually wrote a brief essay about waiting on a platform at Paddington but your words are far better.
So many distinct and evocative smells and sensations! The stale underground air, old chip fat, the tobacco smoke everywhere; the rough feel of the train seat upholstery; the speed and hustle of everything, the glamor of the Selfridges lifts, the slop of the tea, the creak of wooden floors, the ceaseless roar and fumes of buses and taxis, the claps of the closing doors of the train carriage.
I don’t think I ever went to the D&T Roof Garden I remember when Derry and Toms went out of business and the building went dolly-bird fashion and design-for-living as Biba’s. It was the kind of place that people like me went to ogle rather than to spend money.
And speaking of Derry and Toms (bombs) there was also the Monty Python sketch that had the New Zealand All-Blacks losing to the Derry and Toms Soft Toy Department rugby team. As so often, Monty Python presciently nailed the lunacy of our current time.
Josie, Lovely article, bringing back great memories of 1960’s life in Swindon, trains and special one-day trips to Oxford St shopping! Mum loved the London shops, and one memorable day in Selfridges we saw my first real live TV star casually shopping for some trinket – Clint Walker from Cheyenne! Sadly I was too shy to get an autograph. I used to love the train journey up and back… we used to go more in the summer so we were able to walk around the parks and Buckingham Palace. Sometimes we were joined by my aunt and uncle who lived in Blackheath.
About McIlroys… I recall the canisters to transport cash from the counter to the cashier not being in pneumatic tubes, but attached to taut overhead wires and launched by some sort of spring/trigger device. The first time I saw this, it reminded me of a spider web, with the cashier at the center and all the payment counters arranged around the perimeter, all connected by their individual wire. But as I am writing this, I realise that I may be thinking of the payment arrangement in British Home Stores, across Regent Street, where Mum shopped more regularly than in McIlroys.
Hi Martin – I think you are right on the cash transfer system. I miswrote. I think the cash railway was a mechanical set of wires and pulleys not a pneumatic tube. (I shall have to go correct the text.) In any event it was all quite magical to watch.
Great to hear from you. Good memories.