© Joe Douglas. 2016

I joined the fair at Langholm in Scotland. I cycled up to Langholm (50 miles) and spent a couple of nights there working. The stall was set up with One-Arm-Bandits for the first nights business and I had to placate more than one agitated Scotsman wrestling with the machine saying loudly -  

‘It Will Nae Pull -  It Will Nae Pull - A want ma penny back’ when his penny had got stuck.

Early next morning  there was a visit from the town authorities telling us to remove the one-armed-bandits as they regarded them as gambling.

 The one-armed-bandits were replaced with Wheel-Em-In tables and the arguments changed from  being about machine faults to the position of pennies relative to square edges on the board.  One punter decided to crawl over the table into the middle to ‘sort me out’. I hit him on the side of his head with the change bag and his friends dragged him off the table with many apologies for his behaviour. Later that night I counted the cash in the bag and there was several pounds in old pennies. I bet he had a headache.

I travelled from Langholm to Keswick with uncle Billy Taylor. The trip was interesting as he was in his late 60’s which, in the 1950’s was considered old, especially for driving large lorries with a four wheeled living wagon behind.

The first serious stop was after 31 miles at the Red Dial, a hostelry, conveniently situated on the crown of a hill, east of Wigton.  He parked the lorry and wagon just over the crown of the hill and went inside for some ‘refreshment’. We returned to the lorry and as I was climbing into the cab he stopped me and told me to go and give him a push. Fortunately the gradient helped and I managed to get the load rolling and sprinted down the road to catch up and climb into the cab.

The hill stop and start was repeated again in about 11 miles at the Castle Inn at Bassenthwaite and 7 miles later I was very relieved when we pulled onto the field in Keswick. By the time he had  slept off the effect of his drive and refreshment breaks his stall was up and the pubs were opening.

As a reward for my efforts he gave me my first wristwatch, a Russian Sekonda. (One of the prizes off his Hoopla stall). It worked very well but I thought I had ruined it when I wore it while washing dishes in a stream when camping. It filled up with water so I hung it above a lit Primus stove to dry out. It worked perfectly for another couple of years before I dropped it on a tiled fireplace and it shattered into dozens of pieces.

A Ride From Scotland