I read recently that a major study of the UK media had found that "children in the UK have developed a television and bedroom culture because their parents are too worried to let them play outdoors." "Half of six and seven-year-olds in the UK", the study found, "have televisions in their bedrooms, nearly three times as many as French or German children. They spend an hour a day more watching television than their continental counterparts. In total, the study found children spent an average of five hours each day watching TV, playing computer games, listening to music or on the Internet."

Well, in the 50's when I was growing up in Manchester only a few houses had TVs and of course no one had computers and the Internet was still a long way off for home access. Not only did kids not have their own TVs but very few of them had their own bedrooms in which they could hide-away. But more importantly for the kids of the 50's the street was the "playstation." We spent each day out on the street with all the other kids and I don't think our parents worried that much about our safety. In fact even on rainy days I remember lying on the floor with the front door open shouting across to friends in adjoining houses just waiting for the rain to end so we could get outside. It wasn't very often that anyone was daft enough to let us have friends to play over. I do remember though playing next door at my friend Lynda's house. On stormy days I loved to play there because Lynda's mom was always worried about lightning. She reckoned that if a thunder bolt hit it would roll right through the house if you opened all the doors to let it get in and out, so she always had the front and back doors wide open just in case. She was lovely lady.

The games that children played were of course seasonal, reflecting the realities of the climate, but they also tended to mirror the fascinations of the time. So cricket and French cricket were popular in the long summer holidays that in those days lasted for years. Whereas footie in its many forms was battled out between the reds and blues in the dying light of autumn and winter between the escape from school and "Come on our David it's time for bed, I'll not tell you again!"

Gender was also obviously a factor in the games we played. It's not PC to say that sort of thing these days, but it was true then. There certainly were times when we all played together in a huge game of kick-the-can or hide-and-seek or even hopscotch but the girls didn't usually get to play footie and, speaking for myself, I was never up to the highly technical games of skipping or the tricks they could do juggling 2 or 3 balls at a time while spinning around or putting one hand behind their backs. The best I could do was have every girl on the street laughing at me trying to retrieve 3 tennis balls from under a car.

Now I'm no expert on this children's play thing. My only qualification is that I was one once but that was a long time ago and my memory is fading fast. However, I'm going to take a shot at this because I think that in the play of kids we get a sense of the culture of a period. If anyone out there wants to add their own two penneth please feel free.

Whip and tops were not year-round toys. It seemed as though all of a sudden they were in the shops and everybody had them. Then people would get sick of them and lose them before next year. This really was a game of skill that some kids mastered and others were just hopeless at. The tops were stout little wooden cones with a metal stud at the base on which they would spin if you did it right. The whip was a stick with a heavy cord attached. You wrapped the cord around the top and then steadying the top with one finger you pulled the whip quickly unwrapping the cord and sending the top dancing across the flags. Some people could hold the whip and top in one hand and launch them in mid-air. To add to the effect we would go to Bill's, the corner shop, and buy a box of coloured chalks and make a design on the top of the top so that when it spun the colours would appear to mix and once again some kids preceded Andy Warhol as pop artists.

Don Onley is the owner of "The Toycrafter" a small manufacturer of wooden toys located in Rochester, NY. He collects all kinds of spinning tops, peg tops, gyroscopes, and any other top related items such as items with spinning tops in the brand name and logo, books about spinning tops of all sorts, etc. His toys are available in hundreds of gift and toy shops around the world. If you are interested in purchasing a top you can access Don's site at this address: http://www.toycrafter.com/pegtopassortment.htm

Don sent me the following description of how to use a whip top:

Wind the top with the whip - similar to the way you wind a regular peg top, but without going around the crown. Swing the whip and the top - sort of an odd feeling two handed thing. Right hand on the whip handle, and left holding the top in place till the last minute. I think the top needs to be right side up - i.e. point down. I keep my body low and swing the whole thing close to the ground, letting go of the top (not the stick) part way through the swing. I've never gotten a very fast start, but the principle is that you can add spin with the whip! Then keep the top going by whipping it - again keep the whip low and parallel to the ground. Long strokes with good follow-through. The principle is that the whip will wrap itself around the top when it hits it, and then impart spin as the whip goes on beyond the top. The string or thong is first winding itself around the top, and then unwinding - imparting spin. One critical factor is to wrap the top in the right direction when you launch it so that as the whip is unwinding from the top - after first winding itself around the top - during the whipping process it is adding spin in the right direction.

One of the skills to acquire after you can keep it spinning is the art of lifting the top and depositing it in a different (planned) location on each whip action. At just the moment when the top is fully wrapped on each swing, it is lifted - spin added - and thrown to a new spot. A skilled person can actually "walk to school or the store propelling their top along with them."

Having chalk to colour your top often spawned other uses for the chalk and this included hopscotch but it also included drawing on the flags. Kids played school drawing lessons on the pavement for other kids to follow but it was usually primitive art work that spread across the "fronts" of houses. Now of course this wasn't always popular with the woman whose "front" it was and this activity often spurred them on to swill down the flags outside their house destroying the latest art exhibition.

Another chalk related activity was hopscotch. Whilst this was a unisex activity it was the girls who ruled because it was the girls who knew the rules. If there was any constant in street play it was that most games had rules and hardly ever was there agreement on what those rules were and there was never full compliance on the application of the rules. So girls always had the upper hand. First of all they were better at the skills like hopping with enough control to advance the tin can to the next numbers. they had smaller feet and rarely touched the lines and they knew the rules and since they were never written down it was hard to prove that they just changed them to suit the situation. Hopscotch was one of those games that could go on for hours. Now I think about it there were at least two kinds of hopscotch. The regular one where you threw a small flat tin, like the ones throat lozenges came in, or a stone, to a number, hopped on the numbers skipping over the number in question, going on to the end turning around and coming back picking up the can on the way back. There was another variation though where the hopper moved the can to another number with the hopping foot. The layout of the numbered blocks was another variation because there was the layout with the half-moon top and another that was completely rectangular.

I always thought this was Kitcan because that was how we said it. Now I don't think it was in the rules that you had to play kick-the-can in the evening but I don't remember ever playing it any other time. First of all I remember it going on until dusk and beyond and I also remember getting dragged in to go to bed with it still going on and having to lie on my bed in the front bedroom listening to all my friends still out there having fun. Now the other thing is I never remember having a can to kick, we used a football. Basically it was a form of hide and seek. A ball was placed in the middle of the street and someone was "it". Everyone else had a count to 100 or whatever was decided to go hide usually down the back entries squished in by the backyard gates, in the spaces between the bay windows on New Bank Street, behind cars or lorries, that sort of thing. There was usually an agreement on just how far away you could go to hide. Then the person who was "it" sought out the others. Unlike Tick, you didn't need to touch them just point them out and run back to the ball and touch it with your foot thereby capturing the kid in question. When caught, the kid had to return to the location of the ball while the person who was "it" tracked down the rest. Where this got interesting though was that while the person who was "it" went off down the street towards New Bank Street to find someone else, a kid who was still free could come out of his/her hiding place and run towards the ball. If they got to the ball first they would kick it away as far as they could. The "it" person had to go get the ball and all the prisoners were free again. As you can imagine it was almost impossible to get to the end of this game and often the person who was "it" got fed up and walked off before we got to the end. I remember playing a variation on that theme in which more than one person was "it".

This takes no explanation at all since this game is played all over the place. In North America the kids call it tag. They even play a version of American Football called Tag Football in which you only have to touch the person with the ball to stop their progress rather that tackling them. Normally the one who was "it" chased the others and when they "ticked" you, then you were "it" and there were rules like "no touch backs," meaning you had to go get someone else, you couldn't tick the same person back. The frozen version of tick had an element of Kick-the-Can to it because once ticked a kid had to stand still as if they were frozen in place. The one who was "it" had to try to get everyone but anyone who was still free could tick the frozen kids and free them. It was a good playground game.

I remember that many of the games played on the street involved a ball of some kind. Playing with balls though caused all kinds of problems between kids and adults and often led to street warfare between parents. The problem was of course that we played in the streets and there were windows to be broken and neighbours who resented the fact that we were kicking the ball or throwing the ball on their house wall. Then there was the problem of back yard walls. It always seemed to me that the reason why you often saw lads who had grown up in the inner city climbing Everest had less to do with their desire to get out into the wild places away from the city than the fact that they learned climbing skills at a very early age. You couldn't play ball in Longsight for long if you couldn't get over a backyard gate, get the ball and get back over the gate without getting caught.

As always, girls were the real stars when it came to ball games because they were the ones who could juggle 2 or 3 balls at a time. Their complex games involved high speed bouncing games against convenient walls and when that became too tame they would toss the ball between their legs or twirl around prior to catching the ball. All of this was accompanied by singing of various rhymes. The picture opposite was taken near Pink Bank Lane circa 1955 and was donated by Shelagh Street.

Cricket was a problem because it was hard putting the stumps in the cobbles so we used to draw them with chalk on the blank walls of houses that had their fronts on another street. Just like at Wimbledon this spawned arguments over chalk marks to determine if indeed someone was out. Over the backyard wall and you were out and you had to get the ball. Since we were lucky to have a place to draw one set of stumps we usually only had one batter although we did from time to time have a second batter who stood by the bowler's crease and ran when the batter up got a hit. Mind you we didn't very often have more than one bat so that wasn't usually possible. Sometimes someone had a real bat and on other occasions we had something that looked like a bat that someone's Dad made. I remember one time someone had an actual set of wooden stumps hinged on a base that we could set up in the middle of the street but that didn't last long because we had people shouting at us about windows.

Football was a bit better because whilst we did draw a goal on the blank wall, as you can see in the picture at the top of the page, you could, when the lady in that house got her husband to come out and tell us to get lost they were sick of listening to the thudding on their wall, go back into the middle of the street and put your coats down to make goal posts. Then of course we had arguments over whether the shot went over the invisible crossbar.

There were versions of both of these games that were more manageable and less likely to get us into trouble. French Cricket was played with one bat and a tennis ball. The stumps were the batter's legs and he had to use the bat the protect them. The other kids stood around and aimed the ball at his/her legs. The batter defended himself with the bat and the bowlers would retrieve the ball but had to throw from where they stopped the ball that the batter had hit. The batter was unable to move his feet to face the bowler - he had to use the bat. The trick was to fend off the ball to the kid who had the worst sense of direction. You were out if the ball hit your legs.

Like the North American "furzeball" fad in which a group of boys try to keep a small soft ball in the air as long as possible by kicking it to each other, we used to play headers. Heading the ball to each other and trying to keep it up as long as possible. This was a really popular activity under the shed at the Sand Park. 

Left: A younger Les Cotton posing for the camera (Second last) Right: A photograph donated by Graham Todd who describes it as follows: "In the lower photo, I am second from the left in the nearest rank, followed by Norman Hallsworth, who is followed by his younger brother Raymond. Robert Arnold is in the middle rank, facing the camers second from left."

Above: Photograph donated by Graham Todd. Graham says, "Northmoor Road Whitweek parade passing the old Co-op laundry on Hemmons Road, on its way back to Bickerdike and Northmoor Road. In the middle rank between the two scouts is Robert Arnold facing the camera, with me staring ahead trying to avoid the camera, following behind. Immediately behind the flag bearer is Ian Lees, also of Santley Street.

I want to thank Shirley Baker for giving me permission to display her photographs on this page. The images are taken from a wonderful book called "Street Photographs: Manchester and Salford". The book is an amazing collection of images of Salford and Manchester during the period 1960-1973. Like no other photographs I have seen of our cities, these images capture the soul of the twin cities during that period. Not just a record of streets and buildings, Shirley's photographs have captured the spirit of people living in dreadful conditions and finding something to laugh about.