This is my fathers slide, its made of wood and a cellophane protective cover over the paper scale, fixed with glue and a very small panel pin at each end. It's make.....
'UNIQUE' universal II slide rule. Made in England


Everything today is done for us, we don't have to think. As from my previous post, my father had virtually nothing at school. My mother was a shopkeeper and she had to do everthing in her head with paper and pencil. When I was at school again there were no calculators etc. We had a subject every Friday called mental arithmetic were every arithmetic question had to solved in out head (I was under 11 then in primary school). There was no metric system then and you had to remember, chains,inches, furlongs, gills, bushells, quarts pounds, shilling, pence, farthings,feet, yards.
Recently (within the last month of December08) I had three incidents were the 'sales assistants could not calculate or cope with a situation, the first was in the post office when the clerk behind the desik could not subtract the cost of a first class stamp, 36p, from £1:45, the next was when enquiring about a roller blind for our kitchen and the sales person on the other end of the telephone did not know how many centimeters there were in a metre. The last was when in a mini market the tills and the bar code scanner ceased working, only one of the girls knew what to do, i.e she took each item wrote it down and noted the price , the other three girls just looked like rabbits caught in the headlights of a car, dazzed and completely lost......remember when the before bar codes the checkout girls could remember the price of every item they manually added into the till?

1898 Instantograph

Eastman Kodak 1898

My father used this camera as an enlarger in his photographic dark room from 1950 to 1967. It is an Instantograph and was made in 1896 with has a lens by Eastman Kodak Rochester New York. This camera would be similar to the cameras used to take the early photographs of the my family in the early 20th century.

My father used various cameras during the 1950's and 60's which included Rollieflex, Yashica and a Leica,

New Brighton Tower

New Brighton Pier

Photograph from old colour slide, of New Brighton Pier. Note the Royal Iris in the background. The pier as with other British piers is no longer. From this pier you could catch the ferry to Liverpool and also the Llandudno boat to of course Llandudno in North Wales.
Entertainment was available on the pier as well a dancing competitions. The photograph was probably taken from the Tower Grounds where New Brighton had it second fairground, as well as a tower higher than Blackpools, sadly demolished in 1921 due to lack of maintenance. The tower was built in 1896.

There was another pier on the mersey at Rock Ferry that also had entertainment for tourists

Raby Mere early 1950's

Raby Mere between Bebington and Bromborough. Hasn't change very much at all. My fathers car a Standard is in the background.
You could hire a rowing or motor boat here right up to the 1960's. There was an icecream shop just where the green van is, over to the left was a small 'fairground' with swing boats and a penny arcade with mechanical 'electric shock machine' and those football and hockey game machines were the players had hand knitted jumpers.
The road to left used to go to Thornton Hough via the village of Raby, but no longer as the motorway built in 1968 has now made it a cul de sac.

A Triumph Mayflower circa early 1950's. Body work then made of aluminium, it was nick named the poormans Rolls Royce. This was one of my fathers cars, during my life time I can recall him having a split screen Morris Minor convertable, a Triumph Standard, Triumph Mayflower, Morris Minor (1956 reg XMB 595) Volkwagen Cravanette, Ford Cortina estate, Triumph 1300 1967 reg AMB 41F, Fiat 128 and lastly a Ford Fiesta which he gave to me and which was stolen from me on the day I was organising his funeral!
All the cars upto and including the 1956 Morris Minor had NO HEATERS! heaters were optional extras then in cars. I can even recall that when I join the Post Office Telephones (now BT)in 1967 yes sixty seven a lot of the vans which where all Morris Minors had NO HEATERS. The engineers still went out in the winter, climbed telegraph poles and work on cables and travelled in freezing vans with no heaters. If temperatures in an office fall to 60f everyone wants to go home now, wimps.

School photo circa 1915 of my father (second from left top row). Probably at Pilgrim St School as my grand father on my fathers side was the landlord of the Glass Barrel Public House in Market Street.
Although 2+2 (still) =4 there are still 26 letters in the alphabet and 1066, Trafalgar, Sir Francis Drake and all that was and still is the same, as well a manners, good behaviour and politness, there was then no radio, no television, no calculators, computers, subsidised school dinners or buses, probably very few books and one certainly would not have own one's own pen. There were no 'biros', just a nib and ink pot. Schools would not have had central heating and the teacher was someone to be looked up to as a professional who would not close the school because of bad weather.
But still in the 1950's when I started school we wrote with a nib and ink pot, there where still no televisions in schools, they were heated by open coal fire places in each classroom, although central heating was being installed in schools then, but no one had it at home.Calculators and computer where just not heard of, but school teachers were then still one of the highest professions to be admired..........its a pity they don't have this status and professionalism any longer.

John (Jack) Ashley Wild, merchant seaman killed during the Atlantic Convoys on November 5th 1940. Jack was my uncle, my mothers brother. He was recalled, after leaving the navy in 1934 to help with the family business, to the merchant navy during the second world war and served on the ss Beaverford between Liverpool and Halifax in Canada on the Atlantic Convoys which kept Britain supplied with food.Without this service Britain would have starved and would have had to surrender to German occupation. He was married to Mable (nee Crelin) and had two children Barbara and a second little girl, who he never saw, Alma. At the end of the war Mable emergrated to Durban South Africa. Ironically Alma married a Dutch sea captain who was with a Dutch/South African Line similar to the routes Jack her father sailed when he first joined the merchant navy at sixteen. Also its ironic that his eldest daughter Barbara emergrated from Sth Africa to Canada where Jack sailed to from Liverpool during the war

Picture of bombsite taken in the 1950's. A German bomb fell here destroying the housing to the lower end of Fairfield Rd and across to Well Lane. The photo was taken from the 2nd floor of 270 Old Chester Rd where we lived. The house and shop (Wild's Store) no longer exists. We now, or so we are lead to believe, do not bomb residential areas. Tactical bombing is carried out far from our own shores choosing the target by computer, but terrorist use geurilla warfare which can and does on occassion deem to more effective than our high tech weapons

Taken probaly in the 1930's when my father (sitting) was in his late twenties. An aircraft fitter maintaining propeller driven bi-planes,it is a far cry from todays high speed jet aircraft and then, in the thirties, no notion of the space travel that would start only two decades later with the Russians 'Sputnik'and then the Apollo moon landings just 10 years later.My father was born only 4 years after the Wright brothers had first flown in 1904

My grandfather standing (leaning on wheel)






No thought here of the future congestion, motorways and pollution. My grandfather seated on the wheel out with colleagues. Circa 1920's, make of car unknown. As my grandfather was a buinessman inheritng from his father a wholesale chandlery and iron mongery business it was possible for him to own a car, but most people even upto the late fifties did not own a car. I can recall that of all the people I knew at school at that time none of their fathers had cars