John Lennon

1940 - 1980

The Vanished World of a Woolton Childhood with John Lennon

by DAVID ASHTON

Page 6

The Sunday School trip to the charming Merseyside Irish Sea resort of Southport was of a different genre. Whereas the choirboys' trip would have about 12 boys and women folk as well as the Rev Prycee, the Sunday School trip was a big bun fight with thousands of kids and their parents meeting up at Gateacre Railway Station for the long, long Cheshire Lines train to Southport. This was a day trip with lots of madness and memories.

There were girls and sisters in long flowing summer dresses, their hair with ribbons in plaits or tied up at the back, and new sandals.

The boys had summer shorts and shirts on as we walked down Gateacre Brow carrying the picnic sandwiches, bathing towels and costumes and anything else parents and guardians had decided to take because they came as well.

The excitement on the way was looking for rabbits in the fields we sped past on our non-stop train or trying to see Aintree Racecourse as the Cheshire Line railway track, closed in the 1950s thanks to Beeching's axe, past Ince Blundell's Stately Home, Ainsdale Hills along the sand dunes and then, right beside the sea, passing Seaside Railway Station and Birkdale until Southport Palace, Pier and Funfair could be seen and we arrived finally at the long since closed Southport Lord Street Station - the end of the line.

The day now belonged to us and our parents or guardians. There was usually a walk to the funfair where, if you were lucky and funds were in, you got a ride on the Ghost Train or the Big Dipper. I remember seeing a Mechanical Elephant outside the funfair that looked like the real thing.

To this day I wonder how it worked. Next was a picnic lunch in the Floral Gardens beside the Marine Lake or the Floral Palace and a trip on the steam-hauled 15 inch narrow guage railway in its open carriages through the beautiful floral gardens and park to what my dad used to say was one of the longest piers in Britain which runs out into the mouth of the River Ribble estuary.

We only had enough money to go through the turnstile to walk along the pier. We could not afford the train which went to the end of the impressive 1460-yard long pier which was second only to the one at Southend on Sea my dad would say with his pride in his Merseyside home.

He used to say that before the 1939-45 Second World War you could sail on a pleasure steamer to Blackpool and Lytham St Anne's but "the tides gone out from Southport and not come back since the war.

The sands shifted and the sea has gone further out". But I always remember looking back from the end of the pier on miles of wide sandy beaches and the sea front with its hotels and there, over the Ribble Estuary, the promised land of Blackpool with its Tower and its world-famous Funfair. But Southport's funfair was, to us children, just as exciting and enchanting.

After a trip walking along the sands past Southport's Marine Lakes with its yachts scudding across the water we arrived in the picturesque Hesketh Park with its woodland setting of duckponds and lakes containing wildlife and parkland with peacocks strutting by.

Sometimes we even made it to the tearooms at the Botanical Gardens where I seem to remember they had an aviary of exotic birds from all around the world.

But we had to get back to Holy Trinity Church for tea where the Rev Pryce Jones would say grace and check that everyone had arrived back. I remember that on one trip two boys were missing and a search was set up for them.

They were Graham Hale and John Lennon. We others had to go for the train while parents searched for them and my dad asked the porters at the railway station if they had seen them. Yes, they had!

They were in the porters' waiting room drying off because they had been running as fast as they could along the beach and had run into the Marine Lake and got soaking wet!

The train pulled out on time, I recall, and while some fell asleep others watched for rabbits scurrying home before nightfall. And so we arrived tired but happy at Gateacre Railway Station with a 2-mile walk back up the hill to our homes on top of Woolton Hill - the end of a another memorable St Peter's Sunday School trip.

The 3rd Allerton Cubs met in St Peter's Church Hall which was where the Quarry Men played with local Woolton lads - Eric Griffiths, Rod Davis, Colin Hanton, Pete Shotton and John Lennon - on July 6th 1957.

It was there that Paul McCartney met John. The Scouts had their own hut on the Church Field where the Rose Queen was held. The Scouts had been founded shortly after the end of the First World War in 1918 by Dicky Ball who lived in a thatched cottage which had been the Woolton Post Office.

It was the oldest house in Woolton but sadly, instead of being preserved as it should have been, it was pulled down many years ago.

Dicky Ball also ran his father's bricklaying business and had acquired the scout hut which had been a Boer War wooden army hut about sixty feet long by 15 feet wide. My dad, Ted Ashton, his twin brother Geoff and my grandad Edward Ashton helped Dicky Ball erect it and my dad was later, before the Second World War, to become Scout Leader of the 3rd Allerton Scout while my mother, Irene Ashton, was Cub Mistress.

I think this was where they met and got to know each other although they were also cousins. These uniformed scouting organisations played a big part in Woolton's life from the Scout Band which played at Rose Queens and monthly church parades and marches around the village to collecting jam jars for recycling or Bob-a-Job Week where we went from door to door doing any sort of work for a shilling for the Cub and Scout funds.

A favourite Bob-a-Job of mine was cycling down to the Gateacre Institute, to the Oddfellows Hall where, about the time of the Bob-a-Job week it was also time to renew the ration books which we all had during and long after the war for food, clothes, furniture and, worst of all!, sweets.

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