Three

Wheels and water

The first of my life-changing moments came in 1951, when I was ten, and the third postwar Monte Carlo Rally took place. Broadlands Drive adjoined the main A6 road between Carnforth and Lancaster and it became known that cars starting from Glasgow on their hazardous route to Monte Carlo would actually pass our road end. Obviously, I didn’t know what a rally was, but my Mum, quite rightly, thought that I would enjoy it, so took me to see the cars passing early one evening. I was completely captivated by these amazing cars coming past at regular intervals among the trundling Leyland, Foden, Albion and ERF lorries making their way down from Scotland. The rally cars were Rileys, MGs, Jowetts, Austins, Sunbeam Talbots, Hillmans, and Jaguars. But not only that, they had roof racks carrying shovels and spare wheels, yellow headlights to make them legal when they got to France, and two or three people in each car wearing wartime leather jackets. And, most importantly, they had huge numbers on the doors and extra spotlights.

We stayed for two hours and my poor mother must have been frozen, but I would not return home, even though my Dad’s dinner had not been cooked. When we did get home, I instantly unearthed my Dinky collection from my toy-box and selected all the appropriate models, then converted them into rally cars by painting numbers on the doors, using little tins of Humbrol enamel that I had previously used when making model aircraft from plastic kits. I went further and put mud on the cars, and I actually biffed in the wing of one with my Dad’s hammer, having noticed that one the cars I’d seen had obviously had a contretemps with something on the icy roads in Scotland. I couldn’t believe what I had witnessed that day, and went to bed the happiest I have ever been. That was it! I was going to be a rally driver when I grew up. Forget the fire engines or big lorries. In fact, when I grew up I did drive rally cars, but also drove fire engines and big lorries, thanks to Top Gear. Dreams can come true!

In 1952, The Lancaster Guardian, our local newspaper, ran a children’s painting competition, and the headmaster at Bolton-le-Sands primary school, which I attended, encouraged me to submit an entry as I obviously had some artistic talent. I laboured long and hard, and eventually produced a painting entitled ‘Monte Carlo Rally,’ which portrayed a variety of cars, yellow headlights shining, descending from snowy French mountains. Pride of place in the painting went to a dark green Bristol 401, and I later discovered what I believe to be the actual car at the Bourne Classic Car Show in Lincolnshire, which I opened in 2006. It is now owned by former European saloon car champion Warwick Banks, who I now know well and who recently let me drive it. On the 1952 rally that featured in my painting, it was driven by Warwick’s father, Bill.

Beyond my wildest dreams and to the great pleasure of my parents, my painting won the competition and my photograph appeared in The Lancaster Guardian, no less. I quite enjoyed my first taste of fame, and it helped me psychologically as I had something of an inferiority complex in my very early school years, being much shorter than the average boy of my age, and not liking football or fighting. I had also had a major deflation during morning assembly one day, when the ferocious headmaster, Mr Parker, decided to judge all the new pupils’ singing abilities. He lined us up and asked us to sing the hymn Fair Waved the Golden Corn over and over again. He then proceeded to call us over to the upright piano he was thumping and thrust his large bald head into each of our chests to hear our vocal ability. When it came to my turn he listened for about five seconds, elbowed me away and said “You’re a grunter!” I was mortified, and I think I cried.

The incident was far from over, however, as I made the mistake of saying “My father is a very good piano player and says I’m a good singer.” With that I was unceremoniously plonked on a table alongside the piano while Mr Parker thumped away to the tune of hymn number 339. I had to sing several verses alone whilst the rest of the school stood and sniggered. It was a bad experience and since that day I have rarely sung a note, usually mouthing the words of the National Anthem or Happy Birthday when necessary, hoping no-one would notice. Of course, Mr Parker was probably right, and my voice had already been damaged by making incessant car noises when I was playing with my Dinkies or riding my mud-spattered bicycle. It was only during my years in television that I realised I had a distinctive (and probably awful) voice which people instantly recognised. At the height of my limited fame on television I would often receive the question “Is that Tony Mason?” when speaking to call-centres to talk about electricity bills, or whatever. I am pleased to say, it has even come in useful and profitable for the odd voice-overs.

So, my early childhood in the immediate postwar years was following a not unusual but varied pattern. I went sledging in the deep snow each winter, skating on the canal at the end of our garden, and played in the dark, dank, air-raid shelter that my father had previously constructed beneath the rhubarb bed just before the war. With other friends of my age I would patrol the village and find empty Tizer bottles, which we would take to the fish and chip shop to claim the deposits on them, spending the few pence on chips. We would often sit on a bench at the junction of the A6 and the road to Morecambe and watch the traffic. I became expert at identifying all the vehicles that came along, and when darkness fell I became the star performer in our little troupe as I could identify cars by the position of their lights. I loved seeing the big trucks trundling back and forth between the Lancashire towns and Scotland. The high-spot of our traffic spotting was at the time of ‘Scottish holidays,’ when hundreds of coaches would transport people to Morecambe for their two weeks’ annual holiday. On one occasion, in 1956, we were joined by various adults who gathered to see a large black limousine containing Russian leaders Bulganin and Khrushchev passing from Morecambe towards the north. What on earth these two communist leaders were doing coming to Morecambe, I really cannot imagine. Another little excitement for our ‘gang’ was to go to Bolton-le-Sands station to train spot and, somewhat dangerously, put pennies on the main line to see them squashed flat.

In my school holidays I used to enjoy watching a local builder and his men construct new, semi-detached houses on the field opposite our house, in Broadlands Drive. I had mixed emotions about this development as the builders were obliterating the off-road bike tracks that I had created, but there were other attractions. An ex-World War II glider was placed near the building site to be used as a store area for the builders. This was a great location to play in, as you can imagine.

I became quite friendly with Mr John Cottam, the builder. He let me help him and taught me how to mix cement, lay bricks, fit floorboards, and even climb the various long ladders to the top of the half-built houses. Health and safety? What’s that? Mr Cottam, who was a friend of my parents, let me go with him in his Austin 10 and trailer to collect building materials from Lancaster and Morecambe. At one point he acquired a new bright green Austin A40 pick-up, and I would sit upon bags of cement or whatever in the open back of the vehicle as it sped along between jobs. Again, health and safety?

In 1950, I remember a picnic with a difference when we travelled by train to Barrow-in-Furness to witness the launch of a great liner, the Chusan. Along with thousands of other people we sat on a huge grass bank, enjoying our alfresco lunch and cheering loudly as the big ship slid majestically into the sea between Walney Island and Barrow.

I was quite a shy child and had a few close friends, but was encouraged by my parents to widen my circle of friends by joining a youth club that was being created in the old boys’ grammar school on St Michael’s Lane in Bolton-le-Sands village. I can remember a Dansette record player blaring away and various soft drinks being offered, and some very embarrassing and ill-at-ease dancing. The evening was supervised by some parents or members of the Women’s Institute, and was all very genteel and innocent although I do remember my first clumsy kiss with a girl called Cynthia. Gosh! This book is getting racy!

Back at home there were great happenings, as my Dad had decided to build a boat. Not a simple little rowing boat for the adjacent canal, but a 16-foot long clinker-built yacht, which he planned to sail on Lake Windermere. He constructed a large wooden and canvas shed at the bottom of the garden in which to build the boat, and also erected a strange device he called a ‘steaming chest,’ into which he placed planks of wood that would be bent into the required shape to suit the curvature of the boat. Where the steam came from I do not know, but it did. He would labour long into the night having returned from his job in Kendal. Lord knows how he had the stamina. Maybe I inherited a bit of this gene, as I was always able to do without sleep when rallying.

Eventually, the ‘Golden Hind’ was finished, and, with the help of half of Broadlands Drive, launched into the canal with my mum breaking a bottle of something on the bow, which didn’t do a lot for the magnificently varnished wood over which Dad had laboured so long and hard. The boat was moored temporarily at the end of our garden and the following weekend was taken to Carnforth, near the gas works, where there was some contraption that could ‘hoik’ the boat out of the canal and onto the back of a local greengrocer’s lorry to be transported to Bowness-on-Windermere, where Dad had acquired a berth in a large boat shed. With still no car in the family, (much to my chagrin), Mum, Dad, Stuart and I would travel by Ribble bus on route 68 (Lancaster – Keswick) taking well over an hour to get there and sail in the boat. I mention the bus details because, by now, I was an avid bus spotter and indeed a member of the Ribble Enthusiasts Club. On a Top Gear item about a vintage bus rally from Southport to Blackpool, which I presented some 40 years later, I was re-installed as an honorary member of this august organisation and given a new shiny badge to prove it.

By the age of nine or ten my Dinky Toy collection had grown massively, and I had managed to acquire over twenty double-deck buses which I painted into my own colour scheme of red – not dissimilar to the mighty Ribble colours – and, of course, put my name – Mason’s Motor Services – on each side. I also put advertisements for Capstan cigarettes, Cadbury’s chocolate, Ilford films, Horlicks, and Chivers jellies on the sides, just like real buses. Advertisements had started to appear on the sides of buses at this point but not on the Dinky models produced by Meccano Limited in Liverpool. Thinking it would save me some time I wrote to Mr Roland Hornby (yes, he of Hornby trains, also produced by Meccano) and suggested he should put advertisements on Dinky buses. I also suggested he should consider other models of cars that were not yet in the Dinky range. I developed something of a rapport with Mr Hornby and corresponded regularly, rather pompously giving him my advice. The great man must have thought I was a complete pain in the arse, but, thinking it might be a way of getting me off his back, wrote and offered me the chance to visit Meccano and see the factory in which he manufactured his products. He said I could take a friend so I selected David Schofield for this great honour, not least because his parents had a nice new Standard Vanguard car and could therefore transport me the fifty or so miles to Binns Road, Liverpool.

David was a very good friend, and his devoted parents had a huge Hornby Dublo model train track in a special room in their house, where I used to spend many hours. Incidentally, following our trip to the Meccano factory, advertisements did eventually appear on Dinky buses, and this gave me a lot of credibility at school, although no doubt most boys didn’t believe that I had instigated this, just as many readers will probably not believe some of the amazing happenings that occur later in my life and will be recalled later.

Both sets of my grandparents were still alive at that time, and we would frequently visit them. Grandpa and Grandma Mason lived in an end-of-terrace house in Carnforth, and we went there with other members of their family for little soirées from time to time. My Dad was a very good self-taught pianist, although he could not read a bar of music. He could play ‘by ear’ and having heard a tune once could instantly remember it. He was good enough to once achieve the accolade of appearing on the BBC radio programme Workers’ Playtime, and played regularly at local dances. I wish I’d managed to emulate him, but I was obviously musically inept for I could not pick it up. He encouraged me to learn the trumpet and the banjo, but to no avail. Both my sister Maureen and brother Stuart learnt to play the piano satisfactorily.

Nevertheless, I contributed to the little musical gatherings at my grandparents’ house by performing as compère and comedy artist. At 14 Alexandra Road in Carnforth there was a big bay window with long thick curtains in front of it. This acted as a little stage, and I was very partial to standing behind the curtains then entering through them just like one would in a proper theatre. Then would follow recitations from various family members, much piano playing, and I would precociously impersonate great stars like George Formby and Arthur Askey by attempting to sing their songs (very badly!). Show business was calling.

Whilst in Carnforth my Dad would often take me to the local barbershop to have my hair cut by Mr Albert Marshall, who was also a part-time fireman, and who would frequently leave clients mid-haircut when he had an emergency call. He would leave the shop and run down Market Street to the fire station, his white overall billowing behind him as he ran. I observed this little procedure several times and found it highly amusing.

I must have been a horrible child, as I had visions of grandeur from an early age. On return from a primary school prize-giving, clutching my copy of Biggles in the Baltic with which I had been presented, I pondered on the career to follow in order to be invited to present prizes there in the future. I also spent a long time, from an extremely early age, practising my autograph for further use.

I certainly had eyes on show business and listened avidly to comedy radio programmes like Variety Bandbox, Variety Fanfare and Educating Archie. My parents regularly took me to see shows at the Winter Gardens theatre in Morecambe – then one of the greatest variety venues in Britain. We saw big stars of the day including legendary names like George Formby, Frankie Howerd, Josef Locke, Albert Modley, animal impressionist Percy Edwards, Wilson, Keppel and Betty, ‘Two-ton’ Tessie O’Shea, and Gracie Fields. My Dad knew someone in the orchestra at the Winter Gardens, so we would sometimes go to the stage door and meet the stars. I remember Gracie Fields being very nice, chatting to my parents and giving a friendly tousle of my hair. If you remember Wilfred Pickles did the same in the last chapter. It’s no wonder my hair eventually fell out in later life with all this ‘tousling’ going on!

Probably my greatest moment as a comedy fan was to see on stage at the Winter Gardens no less an act than Laurel and Hardy. Towards the end of their hugely successful film career they made three tours of Britain, and in May 1947 duly appeared in Morecambe, across the bay from Stan Laurel’s birthplace of Ulverston, which they later visited. In all honesty I can’t remember their act in any detail (I was only six), but I do remember being completely fixated when they first came on stage accompanied by their familiar theme tune, dum, de dum, dum, de dum, didly dum ...

Morecambe’s Winter Gardens flourished from the turn of the century, and the stage was graced by some of the greatest stars of music hall, variety, music and theatre over the years. Edward Elgar, no less, visited the theatre as part of the Morecambe Music Festival before the First World War, and the Halle orchestra also appeared there. Predictably popular entertainers there in the fifties were comedians Morecambe and Wise, not least because Eric Morecambe took his stagename from the town and was often seen locally. His parents lived in nearby Hest Bank and Eric would often be seen walking along canal banks or on the beach alongside Morecambe Bay.

I was very lucky to meet Eric a few times during the late sixties and early seventies when he would visit his parents, George and Sadie Bartholomew, and would occasionally enjoy a quiet drink in one of the local pubs near their village. He drove an Aston Martin at the time and was not particularly interested in cars, but inspected my Mini-Cooper in the pub car park. He was fascinated by the ‘flexy’ navigation light dangling from inside the roof, and proceeded to speak into it, using it as a microphone! He was a very funny man, as we all know, and seemed to enjoy being rude about my ‘little Mini.’

In the early fifties my sister Maureen, by now a state-registered nurse at Royal Lancaster Infirmary, had met and married Edward Parker, a young RAF pilot from Carnforth. I thought Ted was great; he was interested in cars, Ribble buses, trains, and could fly a jet plane. What else could a man want? I instantly decided that I wanted to be a pilot when I grew up and the stage would have to wait. Nevertheless, I did join Bolton-le-Sands Players a few years later and acted as assistant stage manager, scenery painter, and general dogsbody, but also appeared as the French jockey in the farce Dry Rot and as ‘the boy’ in A Christmas Carol. Big stuff!

My younger brother, Stuart, liked more serious matters, and joined the choir at the local church. He was the ‘brains’ of the family, and achieved a first at Oxford before becoming ordained as a priest. We never really saw eye-to-eye on many things, and more or less lost touch before his early death at his home in the Orkney Islands in 2006.

After her marriage my sister Maureen followed her new husband to his first overseas posting in Hong Kong, which in those days was quite a major assignment. She was booked to travel on a troopship, the Dunera, from Southampton, so my mother, brother and I accompanied her and a huge cabin trunk by train to Southampton. It was a great adventure to be sure, and I well remember standing on the docks and marvelling at the size of the vessel. Obviously, many tears were shed before we waved goodbye and headed for London, where Mum, Stuart and I would spend the night, taking in all the sights on our first ever visit to the capital.

I remember being completely overwhelmed by the size of the place, and walking for miles trying to find the rather downmarket hotel that Mum had organised in good faith. We were billeted in cold and draughty attic rooms at the top of hundreds of stairs; I found it quite frightening, and was pleased to waken the next morning and realise we had not been murdered in our beds. I decided that I did not like London, its tube trains, or even its buses, which were mostly AEC’s instead of sturdy Lancashire-manufactured Leylands. I have never really changed my opinion about London, surprisingly, although I have obviously spent a great deal of time there over the years. Never would I have imagined that, at the height of my TV exposure in the nineties, I would hail a taxi in the West End and be greeted by the driver “Hello Tony, where are you going, mate?”

Our family had few holidays, although we did once go to a Lake District B&B in Ambleside, and on another occasion rented a caravan on the banks of Lake Windermere. This, in fact, nearly saw my demise, and at this point this rambling story could have come to an end and you’d have a hundred blank pages to look at!

Lake Windermere can be beautiful in many respects, but has a reputation for being unpredictable, as winds blowing through the ‘funnels’ between the mountains can easily turn into a squall. A local saying goes “Sail the seven seas, then sail Lake Windermere.” During the caravan holiday we were joined by a friend of my parents who brought along his own yacht. He invited me to go with him for a short sail across the lake whilst my parents were otherwise engaged making lunch. I donned a small life jacket and set forth with great excitement.

It was a nasty dull day with overcast skies, and, inevitably, one of Windermere’s famous ‘squalls’ arrived as we were five minutes into our little trip. Within minutes the small ‘Enterprise’ class yacht was being pitched about in a most alarming way. There seemed to be a bit of panic in my father’s friend’s behaviour as he leapt about from one side of the boat to the other, pulling ropes and trying to turn the rudder. I suspected that all was not too well, but hung on to my seat for dear life and said nothing. Then it happened! Within seconds the yacht lurched in the air and fell over as a great wave appeared from nowhere. Needless to say we were both pitched into the lake, my father’s friend at one end and me floundering at the other.

Being a non-swimmer I was very frightened, but was assured by my father’s shouting friend that I would be fine as I was wearing a life jacket and would float happily whilst he righted the boat by fiddling around with ropes, sails, rowlocks and other nautical things. Now this is where he was wrong, for I started to sink and remember going deeper and deeper into darker water and actually getting to the bottom of the lake where I could vaguely see green weeds swirling about in the freezing water. I cannot remember how deep it was but I seemed to be there for ages and felt dizzy and sick with panic, gulping down water. I assume I tried to wave my arms about to regain the surface but as a non-swimmer I probably did all the wrong things.

Suddenly there was a ‘whoosh’ as a large black figure grabbed me, pulling me up vigorously whilst mud and weeds swirled around. To this very day I can still remember the horrid taste of the water. I was still conscious, but only just, and had swallowed a great deal of water. I was then aware of various black arms pulling and tugging me, and was unceremoniously manhandled onto the deck of a boat – but not the boat I had so hastily exited some few minutes (which felt like hours) before. I remember people pummelling me while I was spurting water like a beached sperm whale then further coughing, spluttering, and being sick, and hearing a lot of instructions being given by a man. With the luck of the devil I had survived this great near-death incident, as some Sea Scouts and their Scout Masters were on Lake Windermere as a training exercise, or some such, and had observed our little drama. Presumably they thought it a good opportunity to put into practice their life-saving skills, and, possibly, get another badge for their uniforms.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that I survived to tell the tale, but I have been frightened of water ever since. I eventually learned to swim when I entered Lancaster Royal Grammar School some time later, but to this day I seldom go out of my depth in a swimming pool or in the sea. Latterly I have been employed by P & O Cruises to entertain passengers on their magnificent ships as they sail around the world. I enjoy the trips, but seldom look over the side!

I should tell you that the reason I didn’t float as expected during the lake incident was that I was wearing oversized wellington boots, which filled with water and dragged me down despite my small life jacket, according to the Sea Scout master who saved my life.