Ken Frost

A Memory of West Gorton.

My earliest recollection is around 1944, we had a milk cart with a beautiful shire horse to pull it.
Ashmore Street ran from Hyde road to Redgate lane, the first building was Edmonds Bakery who made the best eccles cakes in the world.
This particular morning was nothing special the Germans were still dropping bombs in the area trying to hit Longsight sheds and the Railway sidings, but as usual the ocasional incendiary would miss and land in the housing area. One such incendiary landed in Ashmore Street just as my sister sat me on the horse pulling the milk cart, the horse bolted throwing me onto the cobled street.
I spent several days in the Manchester Royal Infirmary with cuts and bruises to my head and legs, I was held together by cat gut sutchers for many days.

We had a gang, the local doctors son Geoffrey Jones was our leader who decided we would all get the chance to learn to play the piano, Like my singing the keys to the piano did not work well and I never did get past chop stix.
As a gang we played lots of games, Kick the can, Rallyvo and knocking on doors.
my mates were Mike walker, Kenny Waterson, David Jubb, Philip Holmes and Johny King we played out all day every day.

At the age of 4 I went into the infants school at St Marks on Robert Street, I can always remember being made to lie down every afternoon for a sleep but like most kids we never did sleep we would make rude noises and every one burst out laughing.

My school friends were a lively lot but I dont remember us fighting much, we were always playing games or practicing football, our school played footbal every Wednesday afternoon on Bennett Street red reck.
The teacher who would take us was a Mr Evans or Mr Platt, we liked Mr Evans he was fair and taught us to play proper football, Mr Platt just stood on the touch line blowing his whistle and shouting abuse at us to get stuck in.

At the age of eleven I was part of a team run by John Turner, we were in a league and played every Saturday afternoon, the players were from a lot of the local schools, the Monastry, Thomas Street,
St Marks and St James.
We had a good team and won a lot of trophies we even had the chance to train on the sports field in Belle Vue and later use the sports pavilion as our home ground

Once I was in my teens I started to go to watch speedway and every Wednesday got into the stadium to watch the novices practice, my cousin Bily Powell introduced me to Peter Robinson one of the riders who was courting his sister Doreen, We were then allowed into the pits on a saturday one of the riders Tink Maynard used to show me how to clean the bike and cut the tread on the rear wheel so it would give more grip, Unfortunately Derek (Tink) was killed in an accident at Norwich stadium. We used to get into Belle Vue free of charge as we would go through the staff entrance at the main gate and go up to see Johny Hoskins who was the Speedway manager.

The house we lived in had two beds and an outside toilet bath night was always a Friday when my mam got the tin Bath down in the kitchen, the water was boiled on the range with numerous pans as we had no running hot water. All the family had a bath on a Friday and as the youngest I was always the last to go in the tub.
Infact we did not have electricity until the late 50s our entaertainment was a radio with an acumulator and a battery, we had to get the acumulator recharged every week by a shop on Hyde road