The continuing story of the house Joe and Mary Ann Scott lived in for over 50 years and the families that have lived here since. *
I doubt I will ever know how Joe and Mary Ann spent their Sundays.
Despite a decade of research and extensive conversations with people who knew them, they remain an enigma. I can tell you their basic biographical details, from birth to death, but pretty much everything else still sits in the shadows.
And as I sit here on a Sunday morning I ponder about how they spent their Sundays in this house.
Today with so much technology, all day shopping, and wall to wall entertainment, pretty much all of your waking time can be filled with things to do, and see.
But not so in the decades stretching back from the 1960s, when a Sunday was a quiet day.
I say quiet, but for many of us who grew up in the 1950s, boring would be a more accurate description. The telly closed early, and in the first half of that decade, it actually closed down for a few hours in the afternoon into the evening.
Retail laws prevented purchases of a whole range of products, including certain food stuffs, which in one case resulted in a local shop keeper wrapping up what mother had sent me to buy in heavy duty brown paper with a clear instruction “to tell no one what was in the package”.
It was as Tony Hancock mused in 1958, a day to be endured, made worse on one Sunday afternoon when it began to rain, leading him to moan “That’s all we wanted. You watch, it’ll go dark in a minute, we’ll have to switch the lights on. I think I’ll go to bed”.**
Adding to the gloom for me, the prospect of school in the morning which hung over the day, slowly getting worse as we headed towards the evening.
The exciting optimism of a Friday evening followed by a busy Saturday when all things were possible was dashed by the almost total absence of things to do on the last day of the weekend.
There were of course the parks to play in, but almost everything was closed and there was a sense that you might as well have been in out of season, Brighton, or Blackpool on a dismal grey day in November.
I have no idea how different it was for grownups, but if Tony Hancock’s experiences are anything to judge, it was at best unexciting, and at worse, quite grim.
Now I know there were all those 1950s organized activities, like fishing, collective bike rides and rambles in the country, but there will also have been acres of empty time stretching from breakfast to tea time, interrupted by Sunday dinner, a bit of gardening and listening to “Two Way Family Favourites”, Educating Archie and the Navy Lark on the wireless.
Nor was the evening much better, for the choice I seem to remember was “Sing Something Simple on the Light Programme, or “I Love Lucy and Sunday Night at the Palladium on the telly.
That said there was always Sunday dinner which in our house was grand and unlike that at
23 Railway Cuttings, East Cheam, home of Mr. Hancock where his companion’s dinner was so memorable it led him to utter in despair, “I thought my mother was a bad cook, but at least her gravy used to move about. Yours just sort of lies there and sets”.
Location; Chorlton
Pictures; Joe and Mary Ann’s house, 1974-2017, from the collections of Andrew Simpson and Lois Elsden
*The story of a house, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20a%20house
**Sunday Afternoon at Home
Hancock's Half Hour Series 5 Episode 14, First broadcast on the BBC Light Programme in April 1958, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007jsys
Despite a decade of research and extensive conversations with people who knew them, they remain an enigma. I can tell you their basic biographical details, from birth to death, but pretty much everything else still sits in the shadows.
And as I sit here on a Sunday morning I ponder about how they spent their Sundays in this house.
Today with so much technology, all day shopping, and wall to wall entertainment, pretty much all of your waking time can be filled with things to do, and see.
But not so in the decades stretching back from the 1960s, when a Sunday was a quiet day.
I say quiet, but for many of us who grew up in the 1950s, boring would be a more accurate description. The telly closed early, and in the first half of that decade, it actually closed down for a few hours in the afternoon into the evening.
Retail laws prevented purchases of a whole range of products, including certain food stuffs, which in one case resulted in a local shop keeper wrapping up what mother had sent me to buy in heavy duty brown paper with a clear instruction “to tell no one what was in the package”.
Adding to the gloom for me, the prospect of school in the morning which hung over the day, slowly getting worse as we headed towards the evening.
The exciting optimism of a Friday evening followed by a busy Saturday when all things were possible was dashed by the almost total absence of things to do on the last day of the weekend.
There were of course the parks to play in, but almost everything was closed and there was a sense that you might as well have been in out of season, Brighton, or Blackpool on a dismal grey day in November.
I have no idea how different it was for grownups, but if Tony Hancock’s experiences are anything to judge, it was at best unexciting, and at worse, quite grim.
Nor was the evening much better, for the choice I seem to remember was “Sing Something Simple on the Light Programme, or “I Love Lucy and Sunday Night at the Palladium on the telly.
That said there was always Sunday dinner which in our house was grand and unlike that at
23 Railway Cuttings, East Cheam, home of Mr. Hancock where his companion’s dinner was so memorable it led him to utter in despair, “I thought my mother was a bad cook, but at least her gravy used to move about. Yours just sort of lies there and sets”.
Location; Chorlton
Pictures; Joe and Mary Ann’s house, 1974-2017, from the collections of Andrew Simpson and Lois Elsden
*The story of a house, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20a%20house
**Sunday Afternoon at Home
Hancock's Half Hour Series 5 Episode 14, First broadcast on the BBC Light Programme in April 1958, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007jsys
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