Tag: young people

by Tricia Beddow

North West Theatre Arts Company – Hairspray

They couldn’t have timed it better. NWTAC’s production of Hairspray started on 20th July just one day after Covid restrictions were lifted and it was a sell-out. Moston’s very own theatre at maximum capacity for the first time in 18 months.

For those who haven’t seen the film, Hairspray is set in Baltimore during the early 60’s where schoolgirl Tracy Turnblad dreams of dancing on The Corny Collins TV show. School doesn’t fit in with her plans so, along with her friend Penny Pingleton, she teams up with fellow African American students when they get put in detention. Together, they oust the reigning prima donna from the TV show along with her domineering mother and win the day.

Hairspray is a light-hearted, fun-filled musical with an underlying theme promoting tolerance and integration.

It also happens to be one of my daughter’s favourite films. She knows it inside out; every scene, every song, every dance move. So I was a bit nervous when I took her and the rest of my family to see the show.

Would NWTAC’s version measure up to the award winning film starring the likes of John Travolta, Zac Efron and Michelle Pfeifer?

Answer: they smashed it!

The casting was inspired. Annabelle Cooke bounced out of bed as Tracy with a bright and energetic ‘Good Morning Baltimore’. She was pitch perfect and I knew straight away we were in for a treat.

Eva Carty played Penny Pingleton perfectly while Jonny Molyneux had Tracy’s mum Edna Turnblad down to a tee. Jonny mustn’t have been available when they cast the film so they settled for John Travolta instead! He and his stage husband Gareth Maudsley have comedy timing in their bones.

James Burke followed in the footsteps of Zac Efron playing Tracy’s heart throb. He has a voice that just oozes confidence and rose to the challenge. Meanwhile, Penny’s love interest, Owen Omoruyi-Garci as Seaweed Stubbs, danced his way into her heart while his sister Little Inez (aka Elim Ghebrehiwet) sang her way into ours.

The TV ensemble was led by Anthony Horricks who carried off Corny Collins with professional smoothness. He and the station manager Velma Von Tussle (played by Melissa Grimes) and her daughter Amber (Kate Bannister) were superb.

In the West End, Marisha Wallace as Motormouth Maybelle was described as a show-stopper when she sang ‘I know where I’ve been’. I can only say that NWTAC’s Toyin Lawal, with her wonderful voice and elegance, was equally mesmerising.

Dance routines and songs just kept coming. Not once did anyone’s American accent falter. The full cast of 37 young actors and actresses who train at the North West Stage School did themselves, Beth Singh (Musical Director) and Katie Gough (Choreographer), Prab and the rest of the production team proud. It is such an elaborate show, packed with entertainment, humour and joy.

The past year and a half have challenged everyone but for this company to come through it all and produce a show as good as this is awesome.

My daughter, the whole of my family, loved it!

For all things NWTAC including future shows, professional theatrical training, their fantastic theatre summer school for anyone age 4+, Gap year theatre course, venue/set/costume hire and much, much more just follow them on Facebook and/or on their website where you can sign up to join the mailing list.

by Stephen OLoughlin

May Queen celebrations in working class Manchester

The celebrated folklorists Peter and Iona Opie, authors of ‘The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren’, describe crossing Manchester on a May Day in the 1950s and seeing children across the city taking part in May Day customs.

Until the mid-1960’s May Day customs were widespread in Manchester and Salford. They were of two kinds. One was Molly Dancing. The other was where young girls of a street, with assistance from mothers, would choose and dress a May Queen.

In 1983 an appeal for May Day memories appeared in the Manchester Evening News, what follows is based on the replies.

Mrs D. Thompson writing of her childhood in Longsight:

“We has a wonderful day on May Day. We would be getting things ready for weeks before, having rehearsals and trying on different clothes – out mother’s and fathers.

Girls that could get a white dress (few could afford one), would be the ones who would dance around the maypole.

We would put our names in a hat, and whoever was chosen would be May Queen, and we would dress her up on May Day. An old chair dressed in coloured paper would be her throne. The maypole, an old washing prop, also covered in paper and ribbons.

We has eight long ribbons coming from the top, and as the girls wound in and out round the pole, it would plat itself all down the pole.”

Helen Fedosijewski, born 1909 in Harpurhey recalled ‘The Maypole song’:

  • Around this Merry Maypole
  • And through the live long day
  • For gentle (girl’s name) is crowned the queen of May
  • Joy, Joy, Joy, dance and sing, sing and dance
  • We shall all have hearts so gay
  • Sing and dance, dance and sing, to make the woodlands ring
  • All around the maypole, we shall trot,
  • See what a maypole, we shall trot,
  • See what a maypole, we have got,
  • All our ribbons tied in a bow
  • All around the merry maypole
  • God save our gracious Queen (meaning our May queen, who was sat on a chair)

She continued “We also had a boy, a page, who carried the pole. We knocked on doors, and if we didn’t get any coppers, we didn’t finish the song, and went to the next house. We averaged about 11 pence each. The queen got a penny more, being dressed up in a lace curtain and white dress. All the mothers made paper flowers. It was WONDERFUL !”

Mrs B. Hodges wrote:

“Everything and everybody had to be in order. As the procession commenced, the whole retinue would knock at house doors.

The Queen stood between her two maids, framed in a ‘garf’, a wooden half-hoop, dressed for the occasion. When the householder opened their door, the May dancers would dance around the pole singing:

Cheese and bread, the whole cow’s head, roasting in a lantern. A bit for you, a bit for me, and a bit for the molly dancers.

The queen would be praised, a few coppers put in the box. We would say thank you, and move to the next house. The children enjoyed the planning and plotting. It was a happy time.

Each street had their May Queen, and there was rivalry to be the best. There would be three or four maypoles, from other streets, who would come round and knock on doors in our street – each one with their own Queen and dancers, But, ‘it was considered bad luck, to sing in a street where another May Queen was singing.”

This is an account describing Lowcock Street, Lower Broughton in the 1940’s:

“Great care was taken to get everything just so. It took many nights after school practicing in somebody’s back yard, so nobody from other streets could see. On May Day we would hurry from school, have our tea, then the great time would begin. One child carried a box for the money.

After we had collected our pennies, we would go to a back yard, and have a count up. Then there would be a party, cake, pop, crisps, sweets, biscuits – it was really something, and then we would have a concert, each child either saying a poem, or singing a song.

The Queen’s train would be carefully folded, and returned along with the brush stale and mother’s dress. If there was any money left, it was always shared out.”

Mrs H Thompson wrote of her own childhood in Gorton (1921-26) and her daughter’s in Reddish (1945-51).

‘There were about ten of us and we had quite a feast. Afterwards we would have an impromptu concert, with much giggling; boys hanging around the back yard door.”

Miss E. Chamberlain of Hulme included the words to five different songs, the last of which was:

  • “Last year we had a Maypole. It was a pretty sight.
  • And all the children in it, were dressed in pink and white.
  • With hearts and voices joining, Queen merrily reigns today.
  • For gentle (girl’s name), is crowned the Queen of May.”

The May Day customs occurred in the inner suburbs of Manchester and Salford, encircling the City Centre. From Hulme in the west, through Salford and across to Cheetham Hill, Collyhurst, Harpurhey, Moston, Newton Heath, and Gorton, to Reddish in the east, then south through Longsight, Ardwick and Chorlton on Medlock.

What strikes me is there was no involvement of schools or churches. The activities were street based, organized by the children themselves and passed from generation to generation.

When the Opies drove across Manchester on that May Day in the 1950s, they wouldn’t have been aware that the festivities they were witnessing, probably dating back to the Middle Ages, would have died out a decade later. The last account was from Rhodes Street, Miles Platting in 1966.

by Carole Gausden

Street Life: Proper Poorly

It’s a long time since I heard anyone refer to powks, gathers, carbuncles or a glide. That’s how we talked about a stye, skin blemish, infected boil or squint (strabismus) before we had TV medical programmes to educate us.

And what about chin cough? The popular myth is that you caught it from sitting on cold stone steps. In real life, a proportion of the 30 people buried at St. Patricks Collyhurst, on New Years day 1857, died of it. Today we call it whooping cough.Until mass vaccination all but eradicated whooping cough, diphtheria and scarlet fever, their spectres remained ever present, especially in poorer areas.

In 1869, it was an epidemic of scarlet fever which prompted Medical Officer John Leigh to demand more isolation facilities in Manchester. However it was smallpox which filled most of the 96 beds at the newly opened Barnes House of Recovery and Convalescent Home for Fever patients in 1871. There were workhouse paupers amongst the sufferers, but it was thought necessary to keep their presence secret from the general public.

Twenty years later, the House of Recovery had been enlarged and renamed Monsall Fever Hospital. By then, 80 per cent of patients were under fifteen. Unless a patient was on the ‘critical list’, visiting hours were infrequent and strictly regulated. Children who spent months convalescing at Monsall, must have felt totally abandoned.In the fifties, the belief was that, sooner or later, every child would contract mumps, chicken pox and measles. To get it over with quickly, we were sent to play at the homes of contagious friends.

Bed was the place to be poorly, and if the illness was considered serious, a paraffin stove might be used to warm a freezing bedroom. Acquaintances say they remember hours spent staring at the reflection of the perforated pattern cast on the ceiling by the heater. Others recall a soothing drink made by stirring a spoonful of blackcurrant jam into hot water.Throughout my childhood, TB and polio were the demon diseases. When I was about 9, there was a polio scare. Banner headlines exhorted parents not to allow children near open water. The previous afternoon, my friend Anne and I had been up to our welly tops in the Moston Brook, trying to build a dam. We kept the escapade from our parents, but visions of ‘iron lungs’ and metal leg callipers haunted our thoughts.Later, a polio vaccine became available. Subsequently it would be administered as syrup or on a sugar lump, but for us it was the dreaded ‘prick’, as injections were then commonly known.

My sister went through the whole spectrum of illness, while tonsillitis was my speciality. Our generation’s tonsils were the first to benefit from the miracle drug, penicillin. I had many a spoonful of thick pink liquid that was supposed to taste like strawberries. It didn’t, and the red penicillin sweets, sucked between doses of medicine, reminded me of barley sugars (horrible).Eventually my tonsils burst, and had to be removed at Booth Hall. Two days in hospital was followed by a fortnight off school to convalesce.

Adults seem to think coughs and colds were caught because children simply wouldn’t ‘do as they were told’. Going outside after having a bath or with wet hair, or even walking about the house with nothing on your feet, meant you were asking to be ill. I suspect old remedies like having a sock full of hot onion wrapped around the throat was supposed to remind us to ‘think on’ next time.Although complaints from the past seem to be re-surfacing, I don’t hear anyone mentioning chilblains these days. Girls at my school were repeatedly warned not to stand against the cloakroom radiators as it would only increase the agony. And as yet, I haven’t spotted a ring worm sufferer with a shaven head adorned with Gentian Violet. And when did they stop painting it on throats?

When playing out, a ‘scrawp’ (graze) from a tumble would likely be ignored. But in pre-antibiotic days, it could easily become septic and cause ‘blood poisoning’. A wound that looked nasty would be poulticed first of all, but if that failed, the doctor would be consulted. On two different occasions, I had to have wounds dressed daily by a graduate of the Spanish Inquisition school of torture.

Being poorly in the fifties was no joke, but it was certainly character building.

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