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HISTORICALLY SPEAKING, the town of Stone in north Staffordshire, on the banks of the River Trent, provides a fine example of increasing prosperity largely due to the development of communication routes. Admittedly, the railway was reluctant to begin with, but they began laying it in 1848 following the thriving coach trade on the London-Chester road and the goods traffic on the Trent and Mersey Canal, whose company offices were in Stone.

 

The town is probably named from the Anglo-Saxon word stanas, a cairn of stones. According to Saxon history, Queen Ermenilda had it built over the grave of her two sons Wulfad and Rufin around AD 670. Their father, King Wulthere, was a pagan and killed his sons on learning that they had become Christians. It may be a reflection on the lesser status of women down the centuries that he had no apparent objection to his wife and daughter themselves following Christianity. Ermenilda had a priory built on the grave site, and Stone Priory had grown by the 13th century to be the largest in the county. Its church became the Parish Church of St Michael but the name Abbey Street is now about all that remains of this once important local institution.

 

Inns and pubs with stables sprang up during the 18th century as Stone was the third horse-changing station from London and the first from Chester. The turnpike road also carried Manchester and Birmingham traffic and by 1834 the High Street itself had 13 of the town’s 21 inns, with 38 stagecoaches passing through every day. Bent’s and Joule’s breweries were established in the town, with warehouses down by the canal. Josiah Wedgwood himself had initiated the canal development. Opened in 1771, it became substantially responsible for Stone’s tremendous economic growth. Shoe manufacturing and related supply crafts and industries employed hundreds of local people during the early-mid 19th century, with the town’s population trebling to 8,349 between census years 1801 and 1841.

 

The first piece of turf for the railway was cut by Viscount St Vincent, owner of several very desirable and extensive mansions in the vicinity. Of the three Houses at my school into which pupils were organised, mainly for competitive sporting purposes, one was named after the Viscount.  Another was named for Earl Granville, Lord of the Manor of Stone (that was my House, colour blue) and the third after Lady Forester who had made a noteworthy contribution to the cost of building a Town Hall for Stone in 1870. In time, this building became the town’s cinema, which is the way I recall it during the 1950s, though I don’t remember going there very often. There was probably no direct bus service between Raleigh Hall and Stone, so it would be a case of cycling the six miles there and back. I know I saw ‘The Dambusters’ there and ‘Reach for the Sky’, probably also ‘Meet Me in St Louis’ but not much else. Another factor was the long-running rumour, amplified into a permanent local joke, that the cinema’s internal structure was unsound. Many of the kids at school – as well as some rather more reliable sources - had stories about sitting in the stalls while small lumps of masonry fell on them from the balcony. I think it was completely closed for repairs for quite a time. My latest research reveals that the cinema is ‘now replaced by shops’.

 

My cycling to and from Stone eventually became very frequent, especially at the weekends after I’d established a regular girlfriend relationship about the time I became seventeen and had moved into the sixth form. At Alleyne’s Grammar School any public display of friendship – or, even worse, affection - between a boy and a girl, whether in school or out of it around the town, at any time of day or night, was most seriously frowned upon. This view seemed to be taken by nearly all the older staff and most notably by the Headmaster and his secretary, the desiccated Miss Hird. Sightings of such behaviour, like walking along the street together, were regularly reported back, interviews held and parents informed by letter. My mother attended occasional meetings with the Head and my housemaster at this time. It was probably this that prevented me from ever being appointed a full prefect and wearing the much coveted school cap with a white band across the peak. I know my fledgling love-life caused both my parents a good deal of inner tension. It didn’t help that, for reasons I never knew, neither of them liked the girl in question very much.

 

It was through this amorous connection that I got to know Stone and its surroundings rather better before I left home. I would cycle over there after lunch most Sundays, meet S. and go for a very long walk all afternoon. We developed detailed knowledge of all the routes and private places near and along the canal, and across and around the piece of historical common land called The Plot. In time, we probed the interior of the National Trust area called The Downs Banks, notoriously known for and used by ‘courting couples’. To go through the Downs Banks gate with someone of the opposite sex was to make a single, clear and unambiguous statement. On return from these walks, we had Sunday tea with S’s mother, father and younger sister. After that, we watched television, when S. and I sat very close together on the settee. We didn’t have television at home and, perhaps because I hadn’t developed the watching technique, sitting there in front of the screen often sent me to sleep. Years later now, with much less worth watching, it still works its often desired soporific effect.

 

Then I would cycle home in the dark, walking my bike up the extremely steep hill at the Filleybrooks, then batting along between the dark, quiet fields through Yarnfield and Coldmeece, finally to home. The great car ownership explosion hadn’t taken place yet (we are in the late Fifties) and there was virtually no traffic on this minor country road on a Sunday night. In the depths of winter, when the air was clear and frosty, the sky glittered with every star in the cosmos. I could easily spot many of the larger constellations and would cycle along looking up at them and occasionally also at the road in front of me.

 

One night while especially entranced by the quality of the star show, I was so engrossed that I’d gone along for ages with my eyes pointing heavenwards when I found myself unexpectedly flying through the air, landing eventually in some thick tufts of grass on the verge. My front wheel had gone down into a drainage channel between the road and the ditch, the bike had stopped instantly and hurled me forward over the handlebars. Falling into the grassy cushion of the verge, I was completely unhurt, and my immediate reflection was that it had all happened in a weird kind of slow motion experience as I was gently lifted up from the saddle, arced upwards and then down towards the ground, like a meteor. Undamaged but still slightly surprised, I got back on the bike and carried on. It was one of those moments when, despite knowing that there couldn’t possibly have been anyone around to see your temporary foolishness and loss of dignity, you still have a quick look around, just in case.

 

It was the cinema that took us to Stafford on Saturday afternoons during the colder months of the year. Instead of shivering out in the countryside somewhere, we could sit in the Odeon, warm and comfortable, watching the moving pictures for hours on end, and engaging in the little acts of mutual tenderness for which the back rows of cinemas were so well known. This was the time of the continuous performance at cinemas, where the film, the newsreel, the cartoon, the travelogue and the trailers just went on and on, round and round. Except for a very special presentation - a rare event - you could go in at any time you liked and stay as long as you liked. I used to catch a bus from Sturbridge at about two o’clock in the afternoon, returning about ten at night. I told my parents I wanted to have a good look around the bookshop and other places in Stafford before I met S. The truth was that we met up as soon as I arrived there and got our seats on the back row halfway through the afternoon, seeing the programme right round about three times. This meant you could both engage in the tender mutualities and, by the time you came out, have seen the whole of the main feature, albeit it in fragmented instalments whenever your eyes happened to engage with the screen.

 

There was only one thing better than this. At Longton, over in the Potteries, there was a cinema whose back three or four rows were all double seats and going there, in cinema terms, was similar to the ‘naughty’ feeling you had when you went walking in the Downs Banks. When the usherette asked you ‘Doubles?’ you replied ‘Er, oh, yes please’ but not too quickly, as though the thought had only just occurred to you. Or as though you’d only just found out that they even had doubles there. We only went there twice because of limited public transport, and I’ve no idea what films we saw. From the point of view of social standing among one’s peers, it was definitely something to make known when you came into school the following Monday. Many of the others had never been there, so the concept of ‘Longton’ had salacious teenage overtones, such as perhaps Soho had in the 60s or Bangkok today might have for so-called sex-tourists.

 

Stafford, like Eccleshall, stands on the River Sow. It has plenty of evidence of Iron Age and Roman settlement and had played a substantial part in the development of the regional pottery industry as early as the 9th century. Its name comes from the marshes near the town, Staith Ford. Following the Conquest, the area was dotted with Norman strongholds, including a fort built at Stafford itself. Trade and manufacturing expanded during the 18th century, most notably through the shoe industry which dominated the town’s economy, making it a ‘major town in England’. During the 1950s, the industrial leader must have been the gigantic English Electric. The town has a University now, formerly the Polytechnic, and before that ‘Stafford Tech’. The latter decades of the 20th century have seen the nationwide decline of traditional manufacturing and the development of modern industrial estates on the town’s outskirts along with new housing projects. Apparently, the town has expanded considerably and rapidly.

 

Daniel Defoe tells us he visited Staffordshire during his tours of towns and cities in England and Wales during the mid-1720s. Leaving Penkridge, where to his immense surprise he discovers what he has to describe as ‘the greatest horse-fair in the world’, he finds it only ‘two hours easy riding’ to Stafford. It seems the town was undergoing an economic expansion phase at that time too – and that people round here were exceptionally good runners:

 

‘tis an old and indeed antient town, and gives name to the county; but we though

to have found something more worth going so much out of the way in it. The town

is however neat and well built, and is lately much encreas’d; nay, as some say, grown

rich by the cloathing trade, which they have fallen into but within the reach of the

present age, and which has not enrich’d this town only, but Tamworth also, and all

the country round.

 

The people of this county have been particularly famous, and more than any county

in England, for good footmanship, and there have been, and still are among them,

some of the fleetest runners in England; which I do not grant to be occasion’d by

any particular temperature of the air or soil, so much as to the hardy breed of the

inhabitants, especially in the moorlands or northern part of the county, and to their

exercising themselves to it from their child-hood; for running foot-races seems to

be the general sport or diversion of the country.'

 

Thinking about Stafford now, I recall a succession of wintry nights after a long session in the Odeon, walking along under the trees eating chips, the night lit by widely spaced streetlamps with misty haloes around them, the low-lying swathes of fog thickening across the dark meadows near the river. My other key memory is working for the Post Office sorting or delivering the Christmas mail. I would cycle the eight miles from Raleigh Hall to Stafford, via Great Bridgeford, at five in the morning, usually in bitterly cold weather, to arrive at the Sorting Office and wolf down a full fried breakfast before starting work. We hurled parcels around, charged trolleys through the sorting hall, clanged the lift down to the station platform, and heaved bags of mail into the hired removal vans waiting on the street outside.

 

One year I went out on deliveries around the Stafford suburbs with a real postman in a real red Royal Mail van. One of our parcels was a turkey, simply wrapped up in sacking with an address label round its neck and a little bag over its head. Day after day we tried to deliver it but there was no one in to receive it and we weren’t allowed to just leave parcels on the doorstep. Day after day we brought it back to the Sorting Office where it went into a special cage with other delivery failures and came out on the round again the next day. We finally managed to deliver it on Christmas morning: I say ‘we’, but this time my postman said he’d better go to the door himself in case there was a complaint or some anger involved. I don’t think there was any trouble but there definitely wasn’t a tip from that call.

 

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LAST WORD: For many years afterwards, whenever I’d been near

a pile of the old-style (pre-plastic) mailbags, usually on railway stations,

their special smell took me straight back to those winters in Stafford

during the ten busy and absorbing days just before Christmas.

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