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I know this is misplaced, but it fits in with the first line of Nico’s post above.

I had a Royal Enfield tourer with a Sturmey Archer hub gear in the back wheel. It never gave any problems, but why did they have that annoying tick-tick-tick?

The version we had was “What can go up a chimney down, but can’t go down a chimney up?” Which perhaps makes it a bit clearer. Anything that could make my hair curl would be better than good! It would need to find it first.

That’s really weird! The cherry rhyme was a favourite of both my maternal grandfather, born Werrington 1889, and my father-in-law, born Stafford, 1918.

This is now, that was then! Plus it was my in-laws! https://checkmypostcode.uk/st52qj#.YCbDoi3fUgo

My m-i-l was born in Newcastle in 1920, and grew up in the Westlands. They would think Rosemary Hill Road was a bit down market!

I have just been in the kitchen fettling the remains of yesterday’s stew into a mug of soup for a drink this morning. Won’t need a piece to accompany it as it’s got some lumps in, just the liquidiser to smooth it out a bit. A saying of my mother in law’s came into my head, if anyone pushed away...

Maurice, there is a Lombardo version, taken too slowly imo, and a version by Jock McDermott which has the worst vocal imaginable, so don’t bother searching! Buried amongst my cassettes I have a quickstep instrumental version, but I don’t know whose band it was, although I suspect Whiteman...

Not sure if this link works, but an almost completely forgotten song from Jack Hylton, “Singing a song to the Stars”. There are very few recordings available on the internet, but this is a good one.

In the style of the Temperance Seven, but different. And we must not forget The Alberts.

Another memory awakened, the smallpox scare. I had a Saturday job at a local butcher’s shop. The lady assistant in the shop was chatting to a customer who said “have you had the smallpox thing?” The reply, “Yes, it’s just like scoring pork!”

Quite right, they seemed like knitting needles to our 5 to 7 year old eyes! I recall quite clearly a steriliser using boiling water in the corner of the room, and glass syringes like garden sprayers. Whenever we got rounded up by the nuns and marched off to the clinic round the corner there was...

Finally, for a while, I think, Bennie Loban and his Music Weavers/Bob and Alf Pearson (Sterno 598)

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Especially the way that Denny Dennis puts them over.

Annette Hanshaw imitating Helen Kane in Betty Boop mode. Explanations available on receipt of a suitably handsome remuneration.

Sorry, Maurice, I don’t recognise that name. From looking into Reg Bassett, it seems that, unless a band got onto the Beeb, there wasn’t a lot of coverage to spread their fame outside the local area. RB was the resident band at Trentham Gardens ballroom, a place where you would have found me on...

Maurice, I finally got round to listening to “Temptation” and quite enjoyed it, agree with you on the vocalist though. Grofe did the orchestration of Rhapsody in Blue for Whiteman, amongst others, I think one of the attractions of this era is the trouble taken properly to present the music, even...

This is all getting very serious..... The words of this just crack me up, rhyming “sawmill proprietor” with “winked his glass eye at her” - priceless!

There is so much more, but at this time, just a memory of a big band, the output of which I have spent many hours listening and dancing to on Saturday nights at Trentham Gardens ballroom, but who seemed to make no records...