I dedicate my song today to three Facebook friends who celebrate their birthday today. They are Margaret Drohan and P.J.Slater Pj Slater Senior from Carrick-on-Suir in County Tipperary, Ireland: and Liz Mcfarlane. Have a good day you three birthday celebrants, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.
My song today is ‘Put Your Head on My Shoulder’. This song was written by Canadian singer-songwriter, Paul Anka. Paul Anka's version was recorded in August 1958 and released as a single by ‘ABC-Paramount in 1959. It became successful and reached Number 2 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’.
The song was again popular when it was played in a scene in the movie ‘Susie Q’. It was also popular when released as a single by ‘The Lettermen’ in 1968. This version peaked Number 44 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart; but it was more successful on the ‘Adult Contemporary Chart’ chart where it peaked at Number 8. Several artists have covered the song, including Michael Buble and Nancy Sinatra.
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I was 16 years of age when this song was released by Paul Anka and can remember it well. I worked at a textile mill in Cleckheaton at the time and each year, the work’s Social Club would take workers who had saved for the fare, on a coach-trip day-out in Blackpool. I only went the once but had a memorable day.
The coach was two-thirds filled with thirty women from the spinning, winding and weaving departments, and the remaining third of the bus passengers comprised of male workers from the mill. Half of the women were of married status, but for the purpose of their Blackpool day outing, most of them would revert to be single women for the day. All who boarded the Blackpool-bound coach had sworn in advance never to breach the ‘Day Trip Code’ of what went on, especially when married women removed their wedding rings before alighting the coach in Blackpool, and for the rest of that day conveniently forgot that they were ever married.
All coach passengers knew that the life-long penalty for breaching the ‘Day Trip Code’ was never to be allowed on future mill outings. And if by any means the unfaithful behaviour of any of the married women ever got back to their husband (and the miserable snitcher could be identified), the seaside spoiler would be ‘sent to Coventry’ (not spoken to or interacted with by any mill worker for a minimum of three months). In short, ‘what happened in Blackpool stayed in Blackpool’.
I was a good looking young man and there were two young single women from the Winding Department whom I fancied, if I got half a chance. As it happened, the romantic part of my day was entirely uneventful until the coach journey home. I thought that I’d hit it off with a 17-year-old woman from Scunthorpe in a pub on the seafront, but after buying her two shorts, she went to the loo with her two mates and never returned. She was obviously more interested in getting a few free drinks from a randy boy from Cleckheaton than getting kissed. The only reason my hopes had been originally raised was the bold message emblazoned across the front of her seaside cowgirl hat she wore that said, ‘Kiss me quick’. Obviously, I had not been quick enough to spot the teaser coming my way!
At the end of the day’s outing, it was customary to tip the coach driver. All experienced coach drivers knew that the bus passengers wanted all the inner coach lights turned off on the way back home, so in the interest of his own pocket, he would oblige. Some passengers who had drunk too much no doubt wanted to sleep it off during the three-hour journey back (which included the obligatory watering-hole stops), and others wanted to engage in some ‘hanky panky’ with the person sharing their double seat, without having the prying eyes of other coach passengers know what they were ‘getting up to’ under the Macs that conveniently covered the waist-to-knee area of seated couples.
I managed to get a seat near the rear, and as I walked toward the back of the coach, a young woman about five years older than me from the Winding Department invited me to sit with her on a two-seater. As the young woman who issued the invitation to join her was one of the two women who I fancied, there was no way I intended to look a gift horse in the mouth, although I was somewhat surprised, given our age differences. At the time, I was a member of a Skiffle Group that never got off the ground. The group comprised of workmates and myself from the mill and I was the group’s lead singer. Eventually, the word had previously got around the mill that I had a sexy crooning voice and was a good singer.
And there was I foolishly thinking that my attractive seat companion secretly fancied ‘making out’ with a toyboy from the mill. I should have known that what she really wanted at the time was not ‘a millhand to tickle her fancy’ beneath a light-coloured coat in a darkened coach, but a budding singer to serenade her on the way back home and send her to sleep with my dulcet crooner’s voice. I looked around the nearest seats to ours when the lights went down, and I noticed a few Gannex raincoats that were popular overgarments at the time, discretely covering the laps of a few nearby couples.
First sold in 1824, and made out of rubberised fabric, the Mackintosh raincoat (named after its Scottish inventor, Charles Mackintosh was to become a regular fashion item. During the years that followed, the Mackintosh remained in vogue and never really went out of fashion. By 1951, the UK textile industrialist, Joseph Kagan, upgraded the original Mackintosh raincoat by producing the ‘Gannex’; a waterproof fabric composed of an outer layer of nylon and an inner layer of wool which were separated by a cushion of air.
During the late 1950s, Mackintoshes acquired a bad reputation as they were frequently worn by dirty old men who indecently exposed themselves in public to female strangers. The indecent exposer would hide behind a tree, wall, or a bush, and when the female passed by, he would jump out and open his mackintosh to shock the female by revealing their exposed manhood.
On the Blackpool coach returning back home at the end of the day’s outing, however, the mackintoshes in use by ‘kissing couples’ were used to conceal naked parts of the male (and female) anatomy instead of deliberately exposing them! Thus, the description of ‘dirty’ became forever entwined with the word ‘Mac’ (abbreviation for Mackintosh) to became more commonly associated with devious sexual practices.
All I managed to get from my seat companion on my return coach journey home though was a polite kiss as she gently placed her head on my shoulder and eventually fell asleep after I’d sung her a few songs; one of which one was the song I sing for you today.
While my day trip to Blackpool did not quite live up to my teenage expectations, it did not deter me from the chase ahead. I was old enough to know that there were more birds with whom to nest over the years ahead (the term ‘bird’ was the 1950s and 1960s slang for young women). I knew that ‘one swallow never made a summer’, and that there would be many more seaside outings and summers to be had during my years ahead.
As fate decreed, I didn’t have to wait more than a few weeks longer than that Blackpool trip before a part-time gardening job I was to take on for a Cleckheaton woman in her early thirties was to prove very enlightening in my romantic education.
Love and peace Bill xxx