I see there’s an exhibition of photos taken in ‘63 around the town. The only thing I know about it is that I had pneumonia as a few month old baby.

What are the recollections of our older generation of that horrendous and pre central heating winter?


https://www.itv.com/news/tyne-tees/2024 ... exhibition

If you poured some ribenna on the window at night, You had a nice ice pop when you woke up.

I was in the juniors, remember us trying to build an igloo and failing badly, also the snow piled up by the side of the road by the snow ploughs.
Getting chased by the Parky ( remember them) in the park because we went on the ice….and oddly enough when it ended we moved into a brand new house.

Paper boy,(Media distribution operative,if you like).Mostly pushed my bike on my round,snowed for weeks.Happy days.

Parents moved from Wagga to council house in Rift House had to get rid of our tin bath.

And none of the schools were closed for Health and Safety reasons, only if the roads were blocked then you walked to school.

When the snow melted, the oxbow part of the river Wear at Durham was 20 feet or more above the tow path evidenced by the rubbish deposited in the tree tops when the water abated.

Soggy woollen gloves….and wellies compulsory.

The red rings round your legs due to wearing wellies all day if we’re wearing short trousers.
Do kids actually wear short trousers for school now, in my day it was short trousers till you went to secondary school ?

Very true, In all weathers too, we must have been as hard as a cannon ball.
Don’t forget balaclava’s….

My mother had 7 kids and not much money at all. We used to go to school from age 5 till age 8 wearing plastic brown sandals in all weather's including heavy snow. You got to school found a radiator took off your shitty plastic sandals wrung your socks then dropped them over the radiator for a couple of minutes before class started then put them back on warm and wet. In the good weather you only had to kick the football ball once before your super sexy brown shitty plastic shit fell apart. We also had them 1p jeans made of blue paper that ripped at the knee within 5 mins of putting them on

Exactly, told to put your wellies on before going to school because it was raining, a hours or so later the sun was splitting the sky meaning all day at school wearing wellies.

Made for interesting footy at play time though.
If you took a kid back from today they’d want Adidas wellies.

I can't remember '63' as I was just a nipper but do remember before we had central heating and quilts the frost being on my top blanket in the bedroom and the inside of the bedroom window being so frosty on the inside you couldn't see through it (single pane in those days)

I'm sure other bunkerites of that era can remember too that it was so cold you actually slept with the bedsheets (at least 3, 4 if you were lucky) over your head as your nose felt like it would drop off.

Yeah really cold in the bedrooms especially…till the old girl talked me dad into central heating…oh the joy.

This is Pools fixtures after Christmas 1962
I wonder how today's players would cope with ten games in one month?

Feb 02 Torquay United (A)
Mar 09 Exeter City (A)
Mar 12 Rochdale (A)
Mar 16 WORKINGTON (H)
Mar 23 Mansfield Town (A)
Mar 25 York City (A)
Mar 30 Gillingham (A)
Apr 01 GILLINGHAM (H)
Apr 06 Stockport County (A)
Apr 08 CHESTERFIELD (H)
Apr 12 BARROW (H)
Apr 13 DONCASTER ROVERS (H)
Apr 15 Barrow (A)
Apr 22 BRENTFORD (H)
Apr 25 Crewe Alexandra (A)
Apr 27 CHESTER (H)
Apr 29 YORK CITY (H)
May 04 LINCOLN CITY (H)
May 08 Oldham Athletic (A)
May 11 Bradford City (A)
May 13 MANSFIELD TOWN (H)
May 18 TRANMERE ROVERS (H)

my main things i remember were at the start of the snow the usual group of us played football on a saturday morning in our local rec when there was no school game. it was about 6 or 7 aside and it snowed continually for the 2 hours we were there. when we came off to the shelter where our clothes wew the snow looked green both coming down and on the floor. luckily when i got home we had a coal fire so wasn,t cold for long. we got rid of the coal fire that year and that cold house was never warm again.

funny how they are closed for snow and not the frozen pavements we had a couple of weeks back that were really dangerous. always question these closed schools being more about the safety of the staff getting there than the kids themselves. 2 i know of were taken to a and e due to bad falls but the roads were clear for the teachers.

Remember when teachers generally lived locally, some at my senior school even cycled to work, but now they travel miles away to work.

Remember PE at the junior school was made to be like a punishment, it could be -5c outside and there'd still be an inspection as to whether you had sneaked a t-shirt under your top before you embarked on an hour of football in a wind chill of -10c, what a bunch of sadists they were in those days, if you got picked to play in goal that was even worse, you'd run around the box while the ball was at the other end of the pitch just to stop getting frostbite.

We used to laugh as when you got back to the changing room your hands were that cold you couldn't pull the zip up on your trousers.

Brings memories of the game of football in Kes!

makes me wonder if teachers do that on purpose by giving them reasons not to attend. i,ve never lived close to my work apart from in one job but always managed to get there for starting time early. when i lived close i was always in a rush and just about made it.

I remember being told i was the only baby that didn't cry at my christening in church around this time.. so maybe this clears things up for me and it was just bloody freezing on the day??


And guess who turned out to be the bonniest baby in our street ?

Was it the bulldog pup two doors down?

Even here in Cornwall it was frozen solid for weeks. I remember it snowing in the back garden and mother putting stuff out for the birds. lapwings starlings the lot and I saw a starling keel over and die from the cold. Sent home from school after sitting cross legged for an hour because the pipes were frozen. Still the milk, post and other things got delivered and steam engines didn't give a shit. People walked miles to work and near where I lived a bus got stuck for three days in the snow and the people were put up and fed by an open fire in a farmhouse. Be interesting to see if it happened again today with the present generation.

We always laugh nowadays with theses bloody weather warnings where you are urged not to travel because of the weather and remain at home…trouble is I bet some buggers play on it but most people don’t have a choice.

and there was never a name given for all that snow that fell.