Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

I was singing “Lazybones,” sitting on the top step of our home in Shakespeare Street, using one of the wheels of my little metal tricycle as the steering wheel of my imaginary car. From the top step Mum and I would wave to the old people who were in St James’s Hospital, Beckett Street, housed in what had been the old workhouse and is now Thackray’s Medical Museum. Dad came home from work, pushed past me on the steps, and smiled when he heard me singing “the lazy song,” the song I would ask for whenever he was playing the piano. “You can bring him in now.” That was the voice of “Aunt Maggie,” our neighbour. The date was 27 June 1933. My father came into my bedroom, picked me up out of my bed and carried me into Mum and Dad’s bedroom and pointed to my brother Keith, who was lying in a drawer taken from the sideboard that was acting as a makeshift crib. I was four years and two days old.

Comment

Comment

Harding’s dad probably had the sheet music of Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer’s song and may have known the early recording by the British bandleader Jay Wilbur:

Harding’s Shakespeare Street ran parallel with Beckett Street and was replaced during slum clearance by the Shakespeare flats – Shakespeare Approach, behind the flats, follows some of the same path. The modern Shakespeare Street was Harding’s Glebe Street. Here’s a map overlay and here’s a 3D visualisation from Google Maps:

Something to say? Get in touch

Original

I was singing Lazy Bones sitting on the top step of our home in Shakespeare Street using one of the wheels of my little metal tricycle as the steering wheel of my imaginary car. From the top step Mum and I would wave to the old people who were in St James’s Hospital, Beckett Street, housed in what had been the old workhouse and is now Thackray’s Medical Museum. Dad came home from work, pushed past me on the steps, and smiled when he heard me singing ‘the Lazy Song’, the song I would ask for whenever he was playing the piano.
‘You can bring him in now.’ That was the voice of ‘Aunt Maggie’, our neighbour. The date was 27 June 1933. My father came into my bedroom, picked me up out of my bed and carried me into Mum and Dad’s bedroom and pointed to my brother Keith, who was lying in a drawer taken from the sideboard that was acting as a makeshift crib. I was four years and two days old.

181 words.

Tags

Tags are assigned inclusively on the basis of an entry’s original text and any comment. You may find this confusing if you only read an entry excerpt.

• Back-to-back house (4) ·
• British dance band (1) ·
• Burmantofts (3) ·
• Child (17) ·
• Harding, Norman (1929-2013) (3), trade unionist and tenants' leader who worked for the Workers Revolutionary Party whilst in London ·
• Hoagy Carmichael (1) ·
• Jay Wilbur (1) ·
• Johnny Mercer (1) ·
• Lazybones (song) (1) ·
• 📌Leeds (235) ·
• Music (25) ·
• Piano (1) ·
• Slum clearance (5) ·
• Song (20) ·
• 📌St. James’s Hospital (1) ·
• Tin Pan Alley (1) ·

All tags.

Similar

• 27 April 1888: Edwin Wild (6 months) of Sheffield is attacked for his milk by a ratting ferret while being cared for by his grandparents
• 23 August 1933: John Betjeman witnesses the opening of the Leeds Civic Hall
• 18 April 1812: Dressed as a country lass, George Butler recites the West Riding dialect tragicomedy of Richard and Betty at the Theatre Royal, Ripon
• 1 December 1851: John (65) and Betty (73) of Wibsey are at long last united in a “funny wedding” at Bradford
• 31 December 1848: A fragment of the Richmond Hagmena song, performed this New Year’s Eve by the town pinder
• 15 December 1888: Frank Kidson longs for Leeds’s musical Christmasses past
• 25 September 1880: Thomas Harper reveals to the Leeds Mercury’s young readers a mnemonic song of monarchs (except Oliver) used in the village school at Weldrake (York) in the 1770s
• 11 May 1985: A fire at the Bradford City stadium kills 56
• 24 December 1938: The Christmas Eve dream of Douglas Holmes, 10, in Seacroft Hospital, Leeds
• 30 October 1981: Joanne, Michelle and Carl go caking in their Sheffield villages