The Winter of 1947
Rose Hill Park - St Moritz of St Helier
By Ted Blowers
Walking in the snow
Donated by Ted Blowers
Transport came to a standstill
Donated by Ted Blowers
The winter of 1947 was indeed a cold one. I remember well the huge slide that developed at Rose Hill park. There were so many people using it that it became glace ice. People were going down it on ice skates and we kids were going down on all manner of sleds. Some had home-made ones with wooden runners - most had no steering device, you just had to stick your foot out and hope to get a bit of drag to pull you to the left or right. We also purloined milk crates when the milkman wasn’t looking. The best ones came from the United Dairies. They had handles rounded at the corners and if you could get two and tie them together, they made a great sled which wasn’t too hard to steer. There were kids going down on all sorts and once you were on your way there was no getting off or avoiding anyone who was in the way. It was a wonder there weren’t some serious accidents. There was a piece of Anderson shelter which was the side and one half of the top. If you have never seen parts of an Anderson shelter, the sides were like a letter J turned upside down - the curved bit being the top. They were very heavy about one 8th of an inch thick, made of corrugated galvanized steel. There were dozens of kids riding this thing. You could probably get six to eight on at a time. How they got it back to the top to me is a mystery. They must have had some bigger kids with them. One of the urban legends that refers to that piece of shelter is that someone lost a couple of fingers when it went over a bump, came down and they were hanging on the side - but how true that is I don’t know. What I do know is that as the track was used more it gradually got longer and longer until we were right up to the fences that bordered the park. Apart from the noise, which the owner of the fence wasn’t too impressed with, it was the eventual smashing into his fence with the piece of Anderson shelter, that caused the constabulary to intervene and that was the end of that.
The other thing that has never failed to amuse me in my twilight years is how in the winters which were colder in those days, most years if we didn't have snow we would have frost so thick that you could make a slide quite easily which was nearly always made on the pavement. The more you slid, the longer they got and the bigger run up you would take to go. This had its own variations - some more accomplished sliders would crouch down in a squat position (this was called little man), some would try one leg (this usually ended in disaster). Great would be the outrage when we would come back from school when some adult had come out and put salt or ashes on our slide, or sometimes they would do it in front of us of course. As an adult, I can see the danger, particularly as there was a blackout. We would just go home when it got dark with no thought for the poor unfortunate that might be coming home from work or the pictures, suddenly finding his legs going like Bambi when he or she hit the slide. The bit that makes me smile is that we would never make a slide in the road in case the horses slipped - wonderful logic.