Peter's childhood of fumes and black buildings

Today's generation might find it difficult to conceive what life was like for folk in the 1950s and 1960s, in which few people had televisions, cars or mod cons, most working class homes were still without central heating or fitted carpets, and some still had outside toilets where ice ran down the walls in winter.

Now the atmosphere of those times has been conjured up by a new book by a former Shrewsbury headteacher taking a nostalgic look at what it was like growing up in those decades.

Peter Traves, from Pontesbury, who was head of The Wakeman School from 1995 to 2001 and advisor to the Department of Education, decided to put pen to paper after realising that the way of life he knew while growing up was more distant to his five-year-old granddaughter than the Victorian era was to his own childhood.

"Not Great Hopes: A Birmingham Boyhood", has been published by Brewin Books. The title is taken from a quote by the obnoxious Mrs Elton in Jane Austen’s "Emma" - “One has no great hopes of Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.”

“We had less, but everyone had less. There was no stigma. My childhood was more typical of how most people were brought up. People didn’t have a lot of money but we weren’t starving. We didn’t live in slums, but we certainly didn’t have luxury and people wanted something better for their children,” says Peter, who was born in 1950 and raised in the Northfield area of the city.

His father worked as a salesman for the gas board and later as a shop manager selling TVs and electrical goods. Peter’s mother worked in a milk bar before finding a job in the comptometer room at chocolate manufacturer Cadbury’s.

The book covers a period from 1950 to 1968 when the skyline of Birmingham and other towns and cities radically changed.

He laments the loss of the great Victorian city of his early childhood and buildings such as the red brick Victorian gothic reference library and the old New Street Station with its imposing Victorian façade and huge single span roof which was then claimed to be the largest in the world.

The book is a mix of social history and personal biography. Peter looks back in fondness to his childhood – the delights of dripping on toast, camping holidays in Wales or Devon, day trips to Shropshire and watching his favourite football team Aston Villa.

“We didn’t have a TV or a car until I was about 10. A TV was equivalent to several months' income. Until 1955 there was only one channel. It would close down, so parents could put their children to bed.

“Television for us was a social experience. It wasn’t the isolating experience that media consumption is now. There were certain programmes on in the week that we would all watch together as a family – game shows, American TV shows.

“Then the big debate was whether watching TV could makes us go blind or damage us morally. One of the themes that runs through the book is how much more deferential society was in the 1950s and 60s.

“There was an educated upper class that wanted to protect people from TV – people like Malcolm Muggeridge who would rave that TV was lowering standards of culture.

“But there wasn’t ever a time where the working class would gather in their living rooms to discuss James Joyce, Charles Dickens or listen to Mozart’s Requiem. TV, in fact, opened up these experiences to everybody.

“I still remember now turning the TV on and hearing an incredibly beautiful aria from Madam Butterfly. We never went to the opera, but TV had brought opera to us.”

Not all Peter’s memories are rosy. For years he thought the natural colour of buildings was black.

“One of the effects of having coal fires was the smog. Thousands of people would die in the smog every year. It now seems surreal. We would have a bus go up the Bristol Road at walking pace with a man in front waving a flag. You couldn’t see very far in front of you. You didn’t know where the pavement ended and where the road began. It was very disorientating.

“A bus would loom up and gradually dissolve into the mist. Sometimes the smog would last for days and it was the only time when the schools would close. We never closed for snow!”

Peter moved away from Birmingham to attend university in London where he met his St Lucian-born wife Merle. The couple lived and worked in London before moving to Pontesbury in 1989.

But when Merle started a new job teaching at a school in Nechells, Birmingham, in 2010, it was an opportunity for Peter to move back to the city part-time. The couple rented an apartment in the centre where they lived mid-week and enjoyed taking full advantage of all the culture the city could offer. Peter found himself reconnecting with his roots.

For the last six years of his career he was the Director of Children’s Services in Staffordshire. After retirement in 2010 he acted as a consultant adviser to the Department for Education, based in Birmingham.

"Not Great Hopes: A Birmingham Boyhood" is published by Brewin Books priced at £14.95. It is on sale at Pengwern Books in Shrewsbury and online with Amazon, W H Smith and Blackwells.