Released November 1964, the First of two singles from this group, the 'A' side 'The Twelve Days Of Christmas' is not on You Tube, while checking my storage I have both sided of their second single from May 1965 so I probably have a copy of that single, when I was buying lots of Christmas records I would get many I had never heard before.
Bob Rivers sadly passed away earlier this year, I first came across a CD of his when I was in the HMV store in London, I had a long service award and took it as HMV vouchers, I had a couple of pounds remaining, I saw a Bob Rivers Christmas CD at £1 so I brought that and another cheap CD, I went on to acquire most of the Bob Rivers CD's.
One of the buildings we dealt with was in Shaftesbury Avenue, in one corner of the building had some Social Housing incorporated, we had nothing to do with the housing, it overlooked one of the flat roofs, the roof was the responsibility of the Landlord, one of the families living their regarded the roof as their own personal rubbish dump tins bottles and general refuse was thrown on to the roof, in their wisdom the senior management had decided not to renew the window cleaning contract, we had a job issued that there was human excrement on the windows, the little sh1ts that lived there had taken their excrement wrapped it in toilet paper and thrown it against the windows, as a workaround to remove the excrement we used the fire hoses to blast the stuff off, on another front actions were started to evict the family.
A couple of weeks later a child was murdered in the Seven Dials area (part of Covent Garden), it turned out the little sh1t worked as a Rent Boy and he had been murdered by one of his customers, there was a memorial set up for him, reading the letters form his classmates 'he was such a wonderful person', are we talking about the same little sh1t, the family dissapeared, the Landlords cleaners cleared the rubbish from the roof, we had no problems from that area again.
Be careful what you wish for sometimes wishes do come true.
Released 30th November 1962, the last single by Paddy Roberts, and a bit prophetic as Christmas seemed to start earlier each year in the UK it is was not hemmed in by Thanksgiving, the start of Christmas was when Father Christmas arrived at Bentalls in Kingston usually late October, we would be taken to see him mid December, my mothers thinking was if the Christmas decorations have to come down on twelfth night they go up twelve days before Christmas, some shops were selling Christmas cards in June, another indication the Christmas was approaching was the advert for Timex watches on television, on Christmas Day the adverts extolling you to but this or that ended and changed to ones to book your Summer Holidays, though these start well before Christmas now.
PADDY ROBERTS - 'Merry Christmas You suckers' - 1962 45rpm - YouTube
Yesterday I went to the Toy-fair at Kempton Park, it was very busy possibly due to the date being close to Christmas, the Toy-fairs tend to be either model car oriented where there are more people selling model cars or ones where Model Trains are in the ascendance, yesterday's was one where model car's were more prominent, the queue to get in was the longest I had ever see it, one of the things I do is buy the old Triang mineral wagons and replace the chassis with a Bachmann one from either the China Clay wagon or the Salt wagon, they both use the same underframe, there were plenty of the triang mineral wagons there, most were priced at £5 or more and by the time you have acquired the Bachmann wagon the cheapest I have found was £4 but prices normally start at £7.50, I decided it was project not viable at present, I had spent most of my money and was having a last look around before I left, I noticed a bov under one of the stalls that I had missed on my initial walk round, the box contained a large number of Bachmann 16ton Mineral wagons all with coal loads, unboxed at £6.50, I ended up buying 16 perhaps I should have brought the lot, I rejected the odd ones that were damaged, mainly missing brake parts and some were from a later period than I model, one stall had a box of pigs they were a bit large for most scales.
The 'B' side of this 1980 release, this record was issued on 2 different labels.
I Should Have Left the Light On for Santa