TONY JACKSON. THE FAMILY INCREASES.

Over a short period of time three children arrived, Dean, Hayley and Lisa to increase our family.

My wife, Jackie, will be collecting her thoughts, shortly, about her life. They will then be added to this Web Site so I will leave certain aspects of our life together to be described by her.

This includes a section where around this time in our lives she showed me how to choose a breed of dog successfully.

I have already described in the pages of my father's life how we acquired our first car:

This car was used to take the family on numerous holidays but let's begin with one when they didn't go with us.

It was October 1968, our children were still very young ( Lisa 6 weeks old) when my mother suggested that Jackie and I should have a holiday abroad - neither of us had ever been out of our own country. We accepted her invitation and we booked a week's B/B and evening meal at the Hotel CASTILLA in Benidorm (£42 each).

Click here to see Benidorm photos

THE BEGINNING OF OUR CAMPING HOIDAYS.

Having experienced the joys of camping when I was quite young I was keen for Jackie and the children to do likewise.

We purchased a very small tent and spent one night on the East coast. Then we bought a bigger tent that we could stand up in and had a week's holiday at Scarborough. We had a downpour but it didn't rain!

We kept our drinking water in a plastic bag like this but the tap was at the bottom:

It was hanging from high tent support when one evening around 10pm Jacqueline decided she would make a cup of tea. She turned on the tap which came detached from the bag. A jet of water shot out all over the bedding we had just prepared.

It was not a very comfortable night's sleep.

You may remember me saying on Dean's web pages that he once sleepwalked and I had to pull him back by his feet when he was crawling under a tent flap. Well this was that tent.

Our final tent purchase was  a TEXAS 3 bed roomed tent with a large living area. The tent was purchased from a company in Huddersfield. Price £149. The tent is still serviceable and is in our loft at Dronfield today (2011).

Our Ford Anglia was now 9 years old and showing its age. I remember returning from one holiday and driving through a heavy thunderstorm. Our children were in the back of the car and made a complaint that went something like this - " Dad, we are paddling in water back here!" There was a hole in the bodywork that had let water in and the rear foot wells were about 3 inches deep in rain water.

OUR SECOND NEW CAR

Our Anglia was sold to the secretary of Brinsworth Working Men's Club for £60. Being a Ford fan we purchased another Ford, a Cortina Mark III from Harrisons for £1,200.

The Cortina was quite a roomy car ideal for a growing family. At one of our daughter's birthday parties I remember taking all the children attending the party to Jordanthorpe swimming baths. All 12 of them went in the car:_

2 on the front seat,

4 on the rear seat,

4 more sat on their laps,

and the last 2 in the boot.

This was before seat belts were compulsory. In hindsight I was a complete fool- I would have been locked up and the key thrown away had we had an accident.

We had a fairly comfortable standard of living at Godric Drive because we were both hard working. Jacqueline ran the home completely, doing all the housework, cooking, washing, ironing and looking after the children. She did all this and still managed to work in part time employment. And if that wasn't enough she worked in the evenings behind the bar at Brinsworth Club and somehow still found time to make many of our daughters' clothes.

I was earning good money as a Technical Officer at PO Telephones (as it was known then). I worked most Saturdays on overtime, was paid a good car allowance and joined Jacqueline working at the same club in the evenings and Sunday lunch.

These are the people we worked for:

Left to right. The Steward, Barry Vera, his wife, Pam and Assistant Steward, Peter.

The club even paid me an extra £1 for each club microphone I repaired and another £1 from the Steward, Barry Vera, when I undertook his duties on his Wednesday nights off.

I once took two weeks leave from work and with the aid of Jacqueline stood in for the Steward and his wife whilst they were away on holiday. I had received very little training and nearly had a catastrophe when I was cleaning out the pumps one morning. I had completed pumping the cleaning fluid into all the pipes successfully. Then the pump pipes in the cellar, which had been disconnected from the barrels, had to be placed in a bucket receiving a constant flow of clean water. The steward had warned me not to let the ends of the pipes come out of the bucket or air would get in and they would cease to function.

 I had connected rubber bands round the switches of all the 15 pumps in the 3 upstairs rooms and they were all pumping away to remove the cleaning fluid when the water flow suddenly stopped. I went downstairs to find several pipe ends out of the water and air had been sucked up into the pipes. I almost panicked when I realised that the Steward had not told me how to overcome this problem. It was gone 11am, the Cub opened at noon and I had no draught beer and lager to serve. I sat on a beer keg in the cellar and tried to use what practical knowledge of physics I had.

I needed some pressure to force the air out. The draught best bitter was fed from a huge tank that I knew was pressurised so I connected each pipe in turn to this tank. It worked but I was using good draught beer to complete the flushing of the pipes instead of water. I daren't use too much beer to flush the pipes or the club profit would be down when the stock check was carried out when the Steward returned.

I got away with it except for one isolated comment. Next day one of the Club's lager drinkers said to me " I don't know if it was your lager that did it, Tony, but I couldn't get off the toilet yesterday".  Ah well, the little cleaning fluid he drank didn't kill him!

ON THE MOVE AGAIN.

After a total of nearly 16 years of living at Brinsworth Jacqueline began to tire of the place and she set the seeds that we should move.

In November 1977 we put our house up for sale (£11,000)and searched for a new home back in our birth place, Sheffield.

We checked out several places Fulwood, Millhouses and Ecclesall and finally chose this house in Bradway:

We moved on 11th January, Hayley's birthday to 30, St Quentin Rise Bradway. £13,750.

I was attracted to it because it had a large garage and a huge storeroom running adjacent to the garage.

The disadvantage was that it was three stories high.

Although the garage was quite long it was about 2 feet short to allow my car and Jackie's to fit in. I drew up some plans, got them accepted and built the 3 foot extension you can see in the above photo.

Jacqueline and I missed the atmosphere of evening bar work so we both got a job here:

Dore & Totley Golf Club.

When Dean and Hayley reached 18 they both used to help out at this club on busy evenings.

In 1985 when Cindy, our first Yorkie was 10 years old we bought:

Another one, HOLLY

She was such a well-behaved dog. Her favourite toy was a small rubber ball that she would chase and retrieve after it was thrown for her. She used to chew on it and it gradually got smaller and smaller until it was half the size of a golf ball.

Because of the pleasure we had from Yorkies we bought another in 1986:

                         Now we had three.                      HOLLY   CINDY and     Kelly

When Holly was about 6 years old I took all three of them to Millhouses Park for a run. I had all three of them in my arms as we went to the gate and Holly, in her excitement, wriggled free. I tried to break her fall by catching her on my foot but she yelped and then couldn't stand on one of her back legs.

An immediate visit to the vets proved that her leg was broken and her bones were too small and delicate to repair, ( she was only just over 4lbs in weight). Her rear leg was amputated.

Kelly our third Yorkie had a very unpleasant nature. She was jealous of Holly and used to attack her. For some reason she never picked on Cindy.

Kelly came to a tragic end through my negligence. One day I went to our garage in Dronfield and left the gate open. Kelly followed me and stood on the drive whilst I was backing my car out. She was so small and I didn't see her. Why she didn't move I'll never know but I backed over her. She died instantly. I was shattered, labelled myself a killer, and was very depressed for ages.

Cindy continued and lived to be 16. At 10 and a half years old Holly became ill during the night. I sat up with her until the vet opened and he asked me to leave her there for observation. It was Christmas time 1995 and I was putting up the tree when the telephone rang. It was the vet who said Holly had died there of a heart attack.

I was inconsolable for so long that Jacqueline had a counsellor ring me to try and help.

I started playing badminton at King Egbert's School on British Telecoms sport's evening. Jacqueline, Dean and I also used to play at Sir Harold Jackson's School on Saturday mornings. We hired the hall and played with our next door neighbours, the Jones family plus Mike Ward and his family.

I joined a Bradway club and played competitively in the Work's League for several years. I then joined Abbeydale Badminton Club where I am still playing 25 years later. At one stage I played regularly with the three men below:

The chap on the left, Dave  Western, I played with for about 20 years. On a club night, 30th September 2010, we had just played together and come off court. He sat down and then collapsed in a heap on to the floor. His colour went from red to purple and then blue - I realised immediately he was having an heart attack. He had stopped breathing and had no pulse.

Just a few months earlier I had attended a first-aid training course at the school where I go voluntary to help teach on Thursday mornings. I was able to put into practice what I had learnt and with together with a Fire Officer who had come to the hall to pick his two children up, we carried out  CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation). We kept this up for over ten minutes but Dave showed no signs of life. When a paramedic arrived he administered an electric shock to his heart from a defibrillator then fed him pure oxygen. After a few minutes Dave's eyes flickered and he started to breathe. He was taken by ambulance to the Northern General Hospital and made a full recovery. I went to visit him there and with tears in his eyes he put his arms round me and said I can't thank you enough. Before he was released from hospital he had a double heart bypass operation and discovered he was also diabetic. The Fireman, Martin, of Low Edges Fire Station, subsequently received an award certificate from his employers for his off-duty life-saving actions.

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Continued in next Section.

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