Eagle-eyed viewers might have noticed that my photo of election leaflets on the previous page didn’t include a Conservative Party leaflet. Let’s remedy that, with these images of an ancient artefact excavated from the boxes in my understairs cupboard archive.

Between a page of press cuttings on the 1978 York floods and before many pages filled with magazine pictures of David Essex (swoon), this double-page spread of election leaflets graced my late 1970s scrapbook.

Two from the 1979 European elections and one promoting the candidate for MP for the City of York in that year’s general election. All Conservative party leaflets, because that’s what my parents voted. Presumably the Labour Party leaflets had ended up in the bin (no recycling facilities back then).

I was far too young to vote, and I have no idea why I carefully stuck these into my scrapbook, but can only assume that the excitement of the elections in 1979 had somehow reached me and entered my consciousness, and that I felt it needed to be recorded as an important thing, before I got to puberty and got distracted by David Essex.

These images are enlargeable should you wish to study and compare them with 2015 election leaflets.

In that year’s general election the Conservative candidate for York was Dr David Tod. The promotional information goes straight in to highlighting that he’s ‘A Yorkshireman …’ in its opening words, and the second paragraph begins ‘A York resident …’

He didn’t win the seat, Alex Lyon did, for Labour. The results were as follows:

(Source: Wikipedia)

But it didn’t matter what happened here in York, Margaret Thatcher was on her way to Downing Street, as Twitter reminded me:

Daily Mirror, 36 years ago today. pic.twitter.com/sptZU1PfYI

— Thatchersrise (@Thatchersrise) May 4, 2015

But let’s not drift off to Downing Street, let’s focus on the local, as that’s what this site is really about. I noticed a small local detail on David Tod’s leaflet, that it was printed by Wood and Richardson, at that time based in King’s Square, apparently. Anyone remember that? Anyway, King’s Square is where we’re going next.

The post Back to the 70s: 1979 election leaflets appeared first on York Stories.

My sister Kay kept a diary in hard-backed notebooks, starting on Christmas Day 1971. Folded up in the front of this first ‘volume’ was this account of the Queen’s visit, from earlier that year, June 1971. It was written at the time, presumably on the day or shortly afterwards, and is interesting because it’s the perspective of a 13 year old girl, observing what was clearly an exciting event. (The horses seem to be a focus of interest.)

I’ve wanted to include this for a long while, and the day of the Queen’s 2012 visit to York seems appropriate.

Sadly I don’t remember the 1971 visit, even though I was apparently taken to see the royal couple pass by the end of Beckfield Lane, as they departed York via Rufforth.

The images of the handwritten pages can be enlarged, if you’d rather read the original ‘historic document’.

Royal visit, 1900th anniversary – June 28th 1971

7.30 – I got up, had a drink of tea and got dressed. I polished my shoes and then hung around until it was time to go to meet Jacky. I was wearing my turquoise skirt and shetland wool jumper, tights and black shoes.

9.25am – I went up the avenue and met Jacky. She was wearing her green hot pants and an orange thing, a stripey coat, choker and suede bag. We got a bus and Garry also got on the bus. The route was swept, not a scrap of litter anywhere. And oh! the red, white and blue. There were Union Jacks everywhere. Blossom Street looked lovely, tubs of flowers down the road, the sky blue and cloudy, the trees rocking in the wind. Already people were lining up to see the Queen, with flags, flasks, macs and sandwiches.

Knavesmire Road was already quite crowded. People selling flags, programmes, papers, ice creams and furry things. I bought one but lost it later. While we waited, chatting to an old lady, several policehorses went up and down. They were really lovely, really magnificent.

We waited for hours. It rained hard. It was cold and windy. Then she came. The Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress came first. Queen Elizabeth looked wonderful in lime green.

We heard the gun salute and saw a fly past. Some ‘planes formed ER in the sky. We wandered along towards Blossom Street. The Household Cavalry, the coach and Cleveland Bays came past from Dringhouses Stables. All this waiting suddenly seemed worthwhile. All the gleaming black horses, dazzling ceremonial dress of the troopers.

We went along the crowded street, crossed the Knavesmire and went down Albermarle Rd, past school and along until we were opposite Odeon. The State Trumpeters were lined up on Micklegate Bar. People were looking out of windows and soldiers and police lined the streets. We waited again.

Then the procession came again. It was gorgeous. Wonderful black horses and Cleveland Bays. The queen was looking lovely, and Prince Philip was wearing a top hat. The trumpeters played a fanfare, they passed under the bar and were gone.

12.50 – The crowds broke up, the troops marched off and traffic began to move again. Another squad of Household Cavalry came by, and then we waited for the bus.

1.15 – I got on the bus, drove home, had my dinner, watched the pageant on telly in the afternoon.

5.00 – Walked with Mum and Lisa to Wetherby crossroads.

There was a policeman directing traffic.
The Queen and Prince Philip arrived in a car. Got a wonderful look at them both and they looked lovely. They went on to Rufforth.
Watched them on the news and ‘Look North’.

– – – – – – – – – –

I stalled in including this account, because although copyright is mine (© www.yorkstories.co.uk, in this case) and I don’t have to ask permission, I would have liked to check. Sadly I can’t as Kay died in 2001. We did once discuss our ‘embarrassing teenage diaries’ and how we’d leave them to one another. This document she may have found particularly embarrassing, as the adult Kay wasn’t such a fan of the monarchy, as I recall.

Having shared them with you, I’ve folded up these two sheets of paper back into a small square, as they were before, and returned them to the 1971 diary. Which, of course, is marked ‘PRIVATE – Do Not Touch’.

Sorry Kay, hope you wouldn’t have minded.

The post The Queen’s visit to York in 1971, by Kay, aged 13 appeared first on York Stories.

Within its old pages I’ve rediscovered what could be seen as a prototype of this website … or maybe not. But I did find it quite funny. Feel free to laugh at my rubbish drawings.

The 1970s scrapbook version shows clearly that at the time I’d been heavily influenced by the exhibitions at the St Mary’s Heritage Centre, circa 1975-6.

The design from the Heritage Centre leaflet, a logo for ‘A Walk Round York’, is once again copied, and the following pages appear to be an attempt to catalogue various bits of York for some kind of readership, who are given instructions as to what PTO stands for (rather dim of me, as most people understand the concept of a scrapbook and would expect to have to turn the pages, but still). Readers are clearly envisaged as being keen to see my next contribution, as promises of future content are made. It’s rather bigged up – with YORK MINSTER being promised, but only achieves about 3 pages of content before I got to the last page, whereupon it appears to have been entirely abandoned.

I present a few key facts about York Minster, copied from somewhere, and include a photo taken by my dad, of York Minster across the rooftops. Also included is a rubbish drawing, which is clearly an attempt to copy the photo.

There’s also a page on the MUSEUM GARDENS, as proudly proclaimed in blue biro on yellowing old paper stuck down with even more yellowing sellotape.

It includes photos of the hospitium (by my dad), with big gaps where there must have been other photos – which perhaps fell out in the intervening years after their sellotape gave out – and this drawing of a peacock.

The wonders of our Museum Gardens are summed up thus:
‘Consists of the ruins of St Mary’s Abbey, Peacocks, A museum, and Gardens’.

Possibly aware that I’ve left my imagined eager readers rather disappointed by this inadequate description, the page ends with ‘MUSEUM GARDENS
CONTINUED
SOON -’

It took me almost exactly 30 years, but this story was continued, and later expanded upon. Thankfully in the intervening years I learned a few more words, and how to spell the word ‘Photagraphs’ properly.

Footnote:
If you’d like to know what peacocks really looked like, and don’t believe they used to wander about in the middle of town, there’s a photo here, of a Museum Gardens peacock on nearby St Leonard’s place.
Beautiful, isn’t he. To paraphrase (again) memorable lines by Sylvia Plath – ‘the peacocks are gone. Still the park remembers how blue they were.’

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This was my take on the Castle Museum, when I was about 8 years old:
“When I went to the castle Museum there were lots of nice things there and I liked the old fashioned streets with the shops in and the little machines that you put one pence in and little figures did different things.”

One pence?! I think they’ve cleverly adapted those old machines since, to take account of inflation.

The post 1970s review of the Castle Museum appeared first on York Stories.

Later, it was known as The York Story, a fact which has come to mind as a result of the ‘York Stories turf wars’.

This scrapbook, apparently compiled between 1974 and 1976, includes mention of several local museums visited. It has the usual tickets and leaflets carefully stuck into it with sellotape, which is now all brittle and yellowing.

I’d also copied a logo from the leaflet, not just on this page, but on a later page of the scrapbook, suggesting that my childhood self had been deeply impressed by this new heritage exhibition.

The church had been disused for some time, and declared redundant. After opening as the Heritage Centre around 1975, the venue was renamed ‘The York Story’.

I went to The York Story too, some years later, and it might have been the memory of it that brought the ‘York Stories’ domain name to mind, in January 2004. I wouldn’t have dreamed of suggesting that I was qualified enough to provide ‘The’ York story. But the pluralist approach of ’stories’ seemed more appropriate for all the walks/views/observations I was gathering together online in an enthusiastic fashion.

I suppose I would have been in my early teens when I went to The York Story. I remember it seeming far more exciting than the usual museum-type place. Some older visitors, apparently, weren’t so enthusiastic. The Hutchinson and Palliser guide to York, published in 1980, says:

‘It has proved a curious venture. The drawings, models, paintings are pretty enough; the attempts at ‘period’ pathetic; the scholarship not infallible; the more sophisticated electronic elements unreliable. Recording the architectural development of the city with scarcely a single real architectural or historical object in sight, where so much was readily available, and putting design and theme before evidence leaves it an enjoyable misconception.’

Crikey. They weren’t impressed, clearly. But I was. I was perhaps wowed by the ’sophisticated electronic elements’. Hard to recall what these were exactly (I doubt they’d seem sophisticated today) but I can remember loving it.

If you remember visiting here, when it was St Mary’s Heritage Centre, or The York Story, I’d be interested in your memories of the place. An article in the Press archive from 5 August 2004 regarding lost ‘treasures’ of the city includes a brief and rather mysterious reference to it: ‘the York Story in Castlegate had an unhappy ending.’ Anyone know more about this?

St Mary’s, Castlegate is now of course used for art installations and is managed by York Museums Trust.

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