All in Good Time

This book describes, in vivid detail, what it was actually like to live in the working class district of Belle Vue, Wakefield, the capital of the West Riding of Yorkshire, during the 1950s. Here is home life in a terraced house with its coal fire, its outdoor privy, its front room kept for best, and the challenge of tuning the living-room wireless. Here are the sights and sounds experienced by the young Wakefield Trinity RLFC supporter or patron of the local ‘t’Spit’ cinema. Here are the smells and struggles of learning to swim at the ‘old’ Almshouse Lane baths, the trials and tribulations of the 11+ and grammar school life. It was an era of delayed gratification: the interminable wait for a bike, a television set and a pair of long trousers.

The big national events – the death of George VI and the coronati