The Magic that was the East Leeds Old Codgers Reunions

It started as a germ of an ides between three friends and turned into the minor miracle that was the East Leeds Reunions.
Three old friends who were all East Leeds Lads would regularly walk the Yorkshire acres during the week and usually have a weekly night in a pub. Because we all came from East Leeds the conversation was invariably about the East Leeds area and the folk we remembered who lived therein.

           Old map of our area

Let me define the Leeds 9 area we counted as ‘Our East Leeds’: it was the three Leeds suburbs of: Cross Green, East End Park and Richmond Hill. So the boundaries were, York Road to the West, Osmondthorpe Lane to the North Knostrop to the East and the river to the South.  This area was made up of hundreds of terrace houses (mainly back to backs) seven primary schools: Ellerby Lane, St Hilda’s, All Saints, St Charles’s, Victoria, Mt St. Mary’s, East End Park Special School and near enough on the periphery South Accommodation Road School and Saville Green School, ‘Ossy’ and ‘Corpus’ were great East Leeds Schools but a bit outside our catchment area. Twelve pubs: Cross Green, Bridgefield, Fishermen’s Hut, Black Dog, Hampton, Spring Close, Prospect, Hope Inn, Cavalier, Accommodation Inn, New Regent (Slip) and The White Horse: seven Cinemas: The Picture House Easy Road,  Princess, Star, Regent, Shaftsbury and Premier, the churches: St. Hilda’s, St. Saviours, All Saints. Mount St. Mary’s, St. Patricks, The surviving chapels: Bourne Chapel, Richmond Hill Chapel, and Zion Chapel.

In addition there were a couple of Coops, Post Offices, Doctors playing fields and hundreds of corner shops, so as you can appreciate the area was self-contained there was hardly a need to leave the area apart from football matches or fashion shopping in the city centre, so you lived cheek by jowl with the 7,000/8,000 folk who inhabited it. 

So to get back to the old friends out walking and reminiscing we talked a lot about The market District Boys Club which we had all three attended in in the 1950s and someone suggested; how about having a reunion of the market District Boys club: Here are Just a few notes about the Market District Boys Club:  The Market District Boys Club was opened in 1885 by the Rev Mackay  of Leeds Parish Church as a club in Brussels Street to take lads from a tough area and to keep off the streets and onto the straight and narrow. In the 1950s when we attended the club it was still under the auspices of the Parish Church (now Leeds Minster) but now a widely popular youth club open to both sexes and an attraction for successful lads football and rugby teams until its demise in the late 1960s here is a picture of the five story building before its demise and a lovely earlier picture of urchins in the big bath which was still in operation during our time at the club, what a great advert for LUX The market District Boys Club opened 1885

so we made this a reality and held it in The Palace Pub the nearest pub to the site of the club in Brussels Street. We contacted as many old members as we could and advertised it in the press and elsewhere we had a good turn out and folks brought photos augmented by those from the Parish Church archives going back as far as the second world war a great night was had by all, lads who hadn’t met for 50 years were reunited old nick names were trawled groups tended to form from the years guys had attended the club and you could hear voices still complaining, ‘We should never have lost that match ‘ etc.

An Early picture of lads in the big bath at the market District Club in the 1920s what an advert for LUX and amazingly that is a hundred year old picture!

We had another couple of Market District reunions at the British legion Club on the sexton Gardens Estate where we invited girls to come along too as in our years at the club although it was still called a boys club it was thrown open to both sexes. It was either at that second reunion or perhaps when we were on one of our walking expeditions that someone came out with the statement, ‘Those market District reunions were alright but why just the Market District why don’t we open it up to all the folk who lived in our area in the 40s/50s/ and 60s?’

‘Would they come?’

‘Let’s try and see, wouldn’t it be great to see all those old faces.’

We contacted an old mate was landlord of The Spring Close pub which was actually in our area and he was delighted he said it would be great to see the old pub full again, so we put out feelers and advertised it in the Yorkshire Post Newspaper and we filled the place out. After a couple of reunions in the Spring Close pub we out grew it and moved to The Edmund House Club where we flooded all the downstairs room and folk in different rooms were missing each other so they opened the upstairs concert room for us and we filled that too, like ‘Topsy’ it grew and grew until we were attracting 300/400 regularly for the remainder of the next twenty years it was difficult to count the total number in attendance at any one time as folk were constantly coming and going all the time, although we had hoped to attract mainly old folk who had attended the seven schools it was open to all, no admission no membership we had no fees and no committee just a list of names that continued to grow with each meeting. People we had never anticipated would come came. They came out of the woodwork. Folk were reunited with old mates they never thought they would see in life again and because old and young came you generally found yourself in the middle of three generations : your generation, the older than your generation filled with the folk who had chased you around the streets for being cheeky, shopkeepers, teachers and the clergy, then your own generation followed by generations of folk younger than yourself who had been cheeky little kids who you would give a clip around the ear, now old wars were forgotten everybody was on even footing.

Like magic folk arrived some coming all the way down from Orkney and even arranging trips from Australia to coincide with the reunions. Few of us actually still lived in the area which although still well-loved was quite run down now and didn’t now have a large indigenous population anymore  but  many took the chance to have a look around the old area, one was amazed to see how steep and dangerous was the ‘Navvy’ that he had descended as a lad. There was at least one occasion where two young lovers who had drifted apart and married others had now lost their spouses and were reunited for a few bonus years together again Old rivalries were still remembered but without rancour. I recall the School’s Cup Final between our two heavyweight schools in 1951: Ellerby Lane and Victoria were due to play out the Schools Cup Final which was the highlight  of the Leeds Schools football year it was to be played at East End Park’s Skelton Road ground, Ellerby Lane School were firm favourites to win but the Skelton Road Football ground had traditionally a lucky dressing room and an unlucky dressing room, Ellerby Lane sent a lad up to secure the lucky dressing room before the match but the Victoria team arriving later turfed him out and took over the lucky dressing room themselves, true to tradition Victoria, the underdogs but playing out of the ‘lucky dressing room’ won the match and it has been a bone of contention ever since that because Ellerby Lane had ‘bagged’ the lucky dressing room they should have been able to play out of there and would have won the match and this had been steaming for over fifty years. Well both teams were at the reunion and mischievously I managed to get the old captain of the Victoria School team from that match fifty years ago and the captain of the  Ellerby Lane School team for that match together talking about this and that and then I threw in the bombshell when  I said ‘About that lucky dressing room final in 1951’ then I backed off and watched them go.

Then there was Masie and Kathleen best mates at school who had fallen out over some triviality and never mended it, we got them back to being best friends again after sixty years. Old school teachers turned up to the reunions, the clergy turned up we treated them with respect but we were mates now not subordinates. Of course now you had two pictures of folk, as you used to know them and how they looked now, which picture did you want to keep? I heard a group of guys from an older year than ours saying ‘so and so’ is still the prom queen isn’t she.’ Every class in every school had a potential ‘prom queen’ most of them were here. 

All those people each had their array of tales to tell we talked about the great characters: Rocking Horse, a famous policeman from a time before ours, Big Ernie the commissionaire at the princess everyone went to the Princess cinema and knew Big Ernie, Harry Bendon, singer round the pubs, Abbe White patron  of the Easy Road picture House always standing at the door in his dress suite, Cleggy, demon woodwork teacher at Victoria, Willie Knott the school boy king also from Victoria, Bob Bates who ran St Mary’s football teams seemingly for ever and many more. We also spoke of the places, East End Park itself, Paddy’s Park, The Navvy, The Quarry, Black Road, Red Road and Nozzy all portals to adventure.

Joan’s tale:  ‘The Pantomime’ where the kids put on the pantomime ‘Cinderella’ in a street opening to raise money for Leeds to help buy the aircraft carrier Ark Royal fund is a good example of what a tight knit community and spirit we had (see Joan’s tale ‘the pantomime’  on this East Leeds Memories site)

The reunions were so popular some folk wanted us to have two a year and we started doing that the only problem was, that some folk who only wanted to come once a year were missing out on ever catching those they wanted to see but attended the other reunion so we reverted to one a year usually the first week in November, we wanted to keep the whole thing informal so we didn’t have any signing in or one of us sitting on the door that would have stopped the three of us mingling and catching up with all our own old buddies but we did have some sticky labels made out and left on the table where you came in in the different colours for each of the old schools: green for Mount St. Mary’s, yellow for Ellerby Lane, red for Victory, blue for St Hilda’s etc. so people coming in could stick them on their tops  and if they wished join those who had attended their own old schools.

Because we were ‘oldies at the start of the reunions mainly in our sixties and the older ones in their eighties after 20 years the grim reaper had been merciless in his reaping we sixty year olds were now in our eighties and the eighty year olds, well you can guess what had happened to them. But thankfully we had collected all the stories we could and had them printed up into a couple of books which we published all proceeds going to the ‘Help the Heroes.’ Fund, sadly I believe they are out of print now but most of the tales appear here on the East Leeds Memories site. In 2020 the coved epidemic put paid to all assemblies so we were unable to have any reunions and by the time the ban was lifted I was the only one of the three original founders left and we were generally too old and dispersed so the reunions drifted away but while it lasted I think it was one of the best ideas we ever had.

Tags: Australia, British Legion Club, Covid, EaST leeds rteunions, M\rket District Boys Club, Our East Leeds area, Spring Close Pub Otrkney, The Big bath, The Lucky Dressing Ropom