Scholar

With my days at Secondary Modern School at an end, I decided on a career in  catering, which meant three years training; one year on a pre-catering course at the Wulfrun  College, followed by two years at Wolverhampton Polytechnic, now niftily renamed the Wolverhampton University. The final two years were filled with lessons on housekeeping, speech, baking and cake making, hygiene, The art of laying a  table and silver service, Zymology (Beer and Wine making), cellar keeping, World food production, butchery and Wednesdays were spent in the kitchens preparing meals for the tutors…. at least there was no P.T.! I made a number of new friends during those years, Derek Carter, Les Simkiss, Manfred (Richard Kelsey), he looked like Manfred Man, and a lad with the name of Robert Whittle, cousin of Lesley Whittle, a young woman who would be kidnapped and murdered by Donald Neilson, (given the nickname the ‘Black Panther’ by the tabloids), just 5 years later. Amid this busy world of study and a part-time job, as commis-chef at The Newbridge Hotel, a small but popular pub and restaurant in Tettenhall, a leafy suburb of Wolverhampton, I’m pleased to say that I always found time to pander to my love for fantasy and horror movies. TV gave us ‘The Outer Limits’ around 1964/5 followed by ‘Out of the Unknown’, ‘Lost in Space’, ‘Tales of Mystery and Imagination’, ‘Time Tunnel’, ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Land of the Giants’. Oh, and the Doctor had a new face following his first regeneration. Derek Carter, a fellow catering student was a big fan of science fiction so I often had his company when I went to the cinema on Sundays. We would even ‘bunk’ off lessons and go over to Birmingham to see the odd film, and can recall hanging on for grim death onto his motor bike when we rode over to take in ‘The Mysterians’. He wasn’t so keen on horror and it still brings a smile to my face when I recall how he’d  jumped during the cellar sequence in 1958’s ‘House on Haunted Hill’ or cringed at the climax of ‘Dracula’. I965 was the year that mom decided that she wanted a house with a separate parlour, so the family made the final move into a house overlooking the East Park, where we all quickly settled in. At the Polytechnic I studied and went through the usual teenage fashion fads and also started the popular and equally fashionable habit of smoking, it was the thing to do at Uni, (don’t fret I gave it up over 35 years ago). My Sunday only double bills were slowly drying up, but there was still a number of 50’s movies on offer and those years at college and university gave me some new movie gems, ‘Dracula, Prince of Darkness’, ‘Witchfinder General’, ‘Quatermass & the Pit’ and ‘Plague of the Zombies’ and some awful duds including ‘Blood Beast Terror’, ‘Sting of Death’ and ‘Slave Girls’!