A post about the Hartley Bank Colliery mineral railway on the Horbury and Sitlington Facebook page today prompted me to go up into the attic to look out this spread from the spring of 1962. This must have been the first time that my brother Bill and I explored so far in Addingford, with our friends, the Cassidy brothers, Steven and David. We dressed for the occasion, armed with a couple of garden canes and with two of us wearing World War II tin hats.
I’m glad still to have these exercise books, but unfortunately they don’t often take a diary form like this: I was more likely at that time to be turning the latest Biblical epic into a cartoon strip. I drew hundreds of Roman soldiers. Having said that, I have a complete run of diaries from my Grammar School years.
“It may not have been a long walk we went on but when we were back we had the benefit of playing commandos and learning how to swing on trees, seeing frogs mating, toads and a canal salvage boat in action.”
My summing up of the ramble (spelling corrected), spring, 1962
I don’t mention it in my comic strip but ‘learning how to swing on trees’ reminds me of an occasion, perhaps later that day, when all four of us were swinging over a water-filled ditch by the canal near our ‘Frogtown’. I ended up in the water and stormed off back home on my own, blaming Steven for my downfall.
Notes on the Panels
Panel 1: Gathering together at the end of our driveway, Smeath House, Jenkin Road, Horbury. Our family lived in the ground floor flat, the Cassidys in the first floor.
Panel 2: Setting off via Grove Road, crossing Westfield Road and down Addingford Lane (the A642 Southfield Lane Horbury bypass was constructed a few years later).
Panel 3: Addingford Drive hadn’t been built at the top of the slope, so the woods and scrub alongside Addingford Steps, with steep paths running through them were ideal for a game of commandos.
Panel 4: Crossing the bridge over the railway, the footway alongside the Hartley Bank mineral railway and the bridge over the canal at the foot of the Balk.
Panel 5: The open-ended shed is one of the coal loading bays alongside the canal at Hartley Bank Colliery.
Panel 6: Repairs to the canal. They did a good job: over half a century later, these interlocking steel sections are still holding up this section of the canal bank.
Panel 7: Steven.
Panel 8: Welder at work, note the goggles.
Panel 9: I think that this is my brother striding by in the foreground with long socks, short trousers and yellow pullover.
Panel 10: ‘Frogtown’, a notch cut in the canal bank to allow coal barges using the British Oak loading chute to turn around. This effectively cut off a stretch of a public right of way. The route of the footpath is still marked on the OS map but, 60 years later, the route hasn’t been reinstated.