ALAN WHITFIELD shares his recollections of Barkerend - as well as a very ‘fishy’ memory.

I was born in Edinburgh in 1942, and when my father was demobbed after the war he moved the family to Bradford, I assume for work, as we had no connections with the city.

Our first house was No 1, Upper Bolton Street, off Barkerend Road. I think there was also a Lower Bolton Street leading off the other side of Barkerend Road. It was a cul de sac, with large three bedroom houses. No electricity, a large Yorkshire range in the kitchen and gas lighting.

There was a narrow passage between adjacent houses leading to back yards, with outdoor toilet and midden for the bins. Coal was delivered down a chute to the cellar.

I recall on Saturday mornings walking along Barkerend Road to the battery shop to get a newly charged lead acid battery for the cat’s whisker radio.

My first school was at the top end of Barkerend Road, opposite the Hippodrome cinema, where we went for the Saturday morning movies, mainly Westerns.

There was a working mill in Barkerend Road, with the usual mill pond that was full of goldfish. There was a shop which I think was called Gascoignes, a very exotic foreign sounding name to us at the time.

We later moved to Thornton, which was a much more pleasant place, with cleaner air and lots of fields and woods for young boys to explore.

Other memories are the great flood in the late 1940s, roller skating on Manningham Lane, summer picnics in Lister Park, trips to Saltaire, trams with ‘reversing’ wooden seats and seeing Buddy Holly live at the Gaumont in 1958.

* Alan also recalls a bizarre spectacle of the 1950s: “Jonah the whale was a smelly fin whale which was taken around the country on a large trailer after being washed up ashore somewhere in the UK in the 1950s.”

Harpooned off the Norway coast in 1952, Jonah was one of three dead fin whales toured around the UK in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Thousands of people visited the preserved finbacks.

In a letter to the T&A in 2006, Mark Worden recalled seeing Jonah in 1971: ‘I have a postcard album and in it is a postcard bought from a travelling show when it came to Keighley. I was nine or 10 at the time and have a vague recollection of driving to Keighley with my family and walking to a piece of land, where the tax office now stands. Behind a screen of old sacks was a lorry with the carcass of a whale on it called Jonah, which was packed with ice to stop it going off I presume. Every day it was painted with formalin to stop it rotting away.’

* Does anyone else remember seeing Johah the whale in the Bradford district? Email emma.clayton@nqyne.co.uk