Vocal Voices

The big freeze as seen on C5 last night.

I was there, I remember it.

A single coal fire for the whole of the house... if you could get the coal. Wearing outdoor clothes, indoors. Going to bed in your day clothes. Scraping frost from the inside of the windows any time of day. Blackouts. Mum cooking over the fire - stew day after day after day. Roads, factories, farms.... all sorts of things closed. No baths or showers; you were lucky to get a full body wash in front of the fire once a week - mum and dad did after we had gone to bed.

But, weyhey, the schools were closed! Snowball fights, sledging, making igloos, groups of boys and girls all huddled together on the park bench to keep warm.

It weren't all bad. We helped each other out.

Then came the mid sixties. OK, we did have to suffer The Beatles, Elvis and and Cliff, but we also got Soul and the Stones.

I watched it WM the year before our wedding
Hubby spent half his life snow clearing at R A F waddington and I struggled to get to work via bus out in the country but we got through it
Ha the sixties brilliant years

saundra wrote:I watched it WM the year before our wedding s

So you snuggled up.

The local reservoir was made from the slag heap of the Harehills Colliery of the 1860s. Locals would go and dig out any nuggets of coal they could find. It was a decent suburb so there were men in suits and men in clogs all out there digging.

I vaguely remember it! I was only three or four, but can remember a huge snowman in our front garden that took weeks to melt, and paraffin heaters in our bedroom - as like you Frank we only had one coal fire to heat the house.

I was just into my teens. We lived at the bottom of a cul-de-sac and for many weeks we had a brilliant toboggan run down the roadway (not many cars in those days).

saundra wrote:Ha the sixties brilliant years

Can't disagree - I was born in the 60's, definitely a brilliant year

meriad wrote:Can't disagree - I was born in the 60's

of course. Used in a joking way, before Ally and Kaz bite me head off.

Dad, Henry Thompson, Fred Hooper and Steve Horsfall were the men of the street. They organised things - got things done - practical blokes. The coal thing.

Mr Angood was head teacher at Leeds Grammar School and he set up lessons in the front room to keep us all up to speed.

Terrible time then, but looked back at fondly as a special time.

Don't get me started about the 60,

I was 18in1960 Adam faith Billy fury seen them all cliff my idol magic memories

I had boughta Primus stove before the big freeze set in. I was one of the few people on the estate where I lived who was able to boil water
and cook mvegeatables. We had a coal fire but no gas, Had an electric heater but could only have it on at certain times.

I am old enough to remember the winter of 1939/40. I was five at the time and lived in the country. The snow blew across the open
fields onto the gable end of the house and the drift covered the bedroom windows. We used to sledge down a slop between trees.
No risk assessments in those days!!

I remember the winter of 1963.
We made long slides in the school playground.
I remember finding a dead blackbird in our back garden; I read somewhere that one third of all the birds in England died in the winter.
Sharlston dam froze over and we played ice hockey on it!
But I will say that schools never shut down and everybody just got on with it freezing cold for weeks though it was.
We had a coal fire and a two bar electric fire and that was it. Single glazing too and ice on the inside of the bedroom windows on a morning.