The dog catcher …. forgotten friends ….and icy windows

It is one of those bittersweet things about getting old that random memories flood in without warning.

Icy windows, 2024

On any one day they can be a mix of thoughts from the ice that formed on the inside of windows to half forgotten friends or just how things were done in the olden days.

I’m not unique in this, only with 75 years behind the clock there are more of those memories and heaps of time for them to settle and zip off in different directions.

Today it was the ice, which at 7am streaked across inside of one of our double-glazed window units.

And now just a little after 9, those icy patterns have all but gone.  But not so sixty years ago when the ice formed on the inside of the glass and stayed all day and sometimes into the next.

But back then we didn’t have central heating and so one of Dad’s last jobs of the night was to light the hurricane lamps and place them in the roof space to raise the temperature on very cold nights.

A task which was mirrored by his other nightly one of filling five hot water bottles and placing them in our beds before we retired.

Yesterday it was the dog walkers passing the house of which, here in Chorlton there are many.  Occasionally the owner will let the pet off the lead and that always reminds me of the stray dogs that wandered our streets when I was a kid.  I suspect some had just got out when the door had been left open, but others will have been put out for the day to wander and prowl the neighbourhood, always returning late in the day.

The not stray dog, Bagel, 1980

Providing they were not captured by the dog catcher who also travelled the same streets.

Not that I ever saw a dog catcher it was just one of those folk stories that I was brought up with, which began with mum muttering about the stray dog in the street, followed up by mention of Battersea Dog’s Home and a check on our own dog.

In rural areas in the 19th century stray animals were put in the pinfold.  Here in Chorlton ours was beside the village green and owners of these itinerant animals would be fined while those that were never collected might be sold off.

So it was with the farmer Mary White who found a brown pony in the September of 1850.  She farmed 52 acres across the township and lived by the green not far from the pinfold.  Once she had ascertained that no one in the township owned the pony she went to the expense of advertising in the Manchester Guardian that “the owner may have it on giving a description and paying expenses.  If not owned in fourteen days, it will be sold to pay expenses.” 

Memories of a cattle market, 1954

All of which just leaves the indulgent and very personal reflections on the legion of acquaintances, former girlfriends and work colleagues that we all have.

In my case I can recall the names of all the girl friends I dated and remember their faces, less so old school companions and sadly many of those I worked with comeback as an image or half-forgotten name.

A few still sit in the phone list and we talk or what’s app, but others like Peter Broom, Michael Titchner and Dribble are lost, although in the case of Dribble I still see him the day he fell fully clothed into the pool after a swimming lesson when we were first years in Secondary Modern.  His real name was Paul Driver, but from that moment till he left four years later he was always “Dribble”.

I have no idea what happened to any of them and more sadly to John Cox and Jimmy O’ Donnel who I hung around with during our junior school years.  Jimmy, I know was living in the west country at the turn of the century, but the flurry of telephone conversations withered.

So, a ramble and perhaps not as focused a history blog, but there you are. 

Location; 75 years of my past

Pictures; window with ice, November 2024, and the not stray dog, December 1980, Derby cattle market, June 1954

* Manchester Guardian, September 25 1850