J B Kohn / Field's Fishing Tackle of Kentish Town

[Reedling]

I used to go to the Regal cinema ABC at Woolwich for Saturday morning pictures and this is the tune we used to sing to...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEvgLH6Ug9Y

[Steve59]

Listening to the song again almost brought a tear to my eye, doesn't seem that long ago yet so much has changed.

[Reedling]

It did me Steve59, especially when I started pinning my minors badge on my short sleeve jumper, oiked up me short trousers, and tightened my snake belt.

Mum used to give us half a crown on a Saturday morning this got us a bus ride, flicks and pie mash and liquor at Manzes.

[Lea Dweller]

So glad someone else remembers this...I thought I might be alone. I loved the luminous ABC Minor badge I had.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzWjw7AO_Xo

Like a lot of folk online I'm convinced we had a different song in the Fifties.......


Certainly Wikipedia has another piece of music credited:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_Cinemas


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY31cFvnpD0

I remember the song we all sung at the Odeon in Camden Town on Saturday morning, it went "We come along on Saturday morning greeting everybody with a smile, we come along on Saturday morning knowing it's all worthwhile, as members of the GB club we all intend to be good citizens when we grow up and champion's of the free" etc I can sing it all sixty odd years later. I used to go with my two older sisters and one day just before November the 5th we went in and were told to look under our seats for a chalk cross, I had one and had to go up on the stage to get a box of fireworks, no health and safety in those glorious days!

[Nobby]

Free whizz-bangs? Result!

Remember jumping jacks, bangers and Catherine wheels?


Ours had all been fondled so much half of them spluttered out.......guilty......

[Steve59]

You haven't lived if you didn't lose your eyebrows making a genie out of a box of bangers.

[Lea Dweller]

Nostalgia is King! I remember one bonfire night in the early fifties almost all of the occupants of the council flats that we lived in of of chalk farm road, London N.W.5 (four blocks of them) turned out to watch the fire works. I had got my older sister to buy me one rocket with my pocket money and I put it in a milk bottle with the intention of setting it off. The caretaker of the flats insisted because of my young age that he would do it. Well, he lit the blue paper and with baited breath we all waited for it to whoosh up into the sky. Sadly, as it ignited the bottle tipped and the rocket went straight through the caretaker'a first floor flat window, setting fire to his net curtains in the process. With that we all rushed up to his flat to find that the rocket had burnt itself out on his bed! An absolutely true story, which I have clearly never forgotten.

[Rod]

I had a biscuit tin specially for my fire works, it used to be kept under my bed for at least a month each year, then I would make a Guy with some of my clothes, put it on the soap box cart, and head for the Pubs in Kilburn, I used to make a fortune off the Irish lads coming out of the boozers, some even gave me as much as half a crown, I expect they were too sozzled to know the difference, but when you think a banger cost a penny, you can imagine the explosives I used to sleep on top of That all came to an end when my mates realised just how lucrative the Kilburn pubs were, then there would be half a dozen guys outside each one, Great times, when people trusted each other, and the PC brigade hadn't taken control, I say that but a friend of mine who had lost one eye as a youngster, then stupidly looked into a milk bottle after a banger had fail to go off, it went off in his face, damaging the good eye, so they shipped him off to a special school, and I never saw him again, so maybe we were a bit careless, as well as carefree,

[Reedling]

Bangers went into the end of the handlebar on the bike!

[Steve59]

Funny enough I use to have my Guy outside either Fields tackle shop the greengrocers or army recruitment office all next to each other on Highgate road.
Perhaps the older ones of you gave me a penny or two back in the mid 1960's.