Great pics my friend
My dad rarely wore his wedding ring for the same reason. He worked in a big engineering firm when I was a kid, (after leaving Richards), James Neill Tools, who specialised in blue Eclipse hacksaw blades and industrial magnets, among other things. They were the biggest small tool manufacturer in the world, at the time, outside the US. My dad would keep his wedding ring in the button-down pocket on the left breast of his coveralls (called a 'boiler suit' here). I remember seeing it, it looked like what I think of as a signet ring really. Anyway, one day he lost the ring, and obviously my mother noticed, and words were said. My parents rarely said a cross word in front of me and my younger brother and sister, but my mother definitely wasn't happy. My dad said he was going to put a note up on the work's notice board offering a reward of £5, which was quite a lot of money in the 1960's, and a good deal more than the ring was worth as scrap or in a pawn-shop. My dad and my uncle, who worked with him at the time, and his work-mates, searched all over for the ring, but they never found it, and nobody handed it in. Obviously, losing it was an accident, but the subject would occasionally come up between my parents over the next couple of years. My dad never replaced the ring.
We were poor when I was a kid, and we didn't go away on holiday every year. When we did, it was to the seaside, and usually to a place called Bridlington, which is sort of on the tip of the nose on the 'man's face' on the north east coast of England, f you know what it looks like. Because the furnaces in the steel works had to be allowed to cool down gradually, many Sheffield workers took their holidays at the same time, the last week in July, and the first week in August. These were known as the 'Works Weeks', though I think they are more correctly called 'Wakes Weeks', which is an older term, which probably has nothing to do with the steel industry. During these two weeks, Bridlington, one of the nearest coastal resorts to Sheffield became a sort of Sheffield-on-Sea. Even the local daily Sheffield newspapers would be shipped to Bridlington. Walking along the sea-front, my dad would constantly be saying hello to blokes he worked with. As a kid I just thought he knew a lot of people!
One day, we went down to the beach. Me and my sister and brother would paddle, and look for crabs in the rock-pools. It was a hot sunny day, the kind that goes on forever when you're a kid. I remember we watched a bloke trying to get onto an inflatable 'lilo' in the surf, for what seemed like hours. Every time he got on, he'd fall off, much to our amusement.
We stayed on the beach much later than usual, only retreating when the tide was right up the sand, walking up the hill, prickly with sunburn, and hungry for our evening meal. Usually, we ate at our accommodation, with mum doing the cooking, but as it was late, and we were on holiday, on this occasion, dad said that we could have fish and chips. Us kids had fishcakes, which is like fish and potato, and less expensive than fish, and my mum had cod roe, which she was rather partial to. My dad was going to have cod and chips, but we were so late that they had run out of cod, so he asked for a meat pie.
We got the food wrapped up, with lots of salt and vinegar on the chips for us kids, and walked back along the sea-front. Finding a bench on the promenade, not far from where we had spent the day, we sat down to eat our meal. Mum doled it all out on the newspaper it had been wrapped up in, which was how things were served back here in the sixties. We were tucking into our chips, and my dad took a bite of his pie, and you'll never guess what was inside...
Not custom quality, but they did do a pretty good job of that one!
Assuming I can, I'll be off down to my local market early. The days when I found pointy treasure there are long gone unfortunately, but I have got to know many of the traders very well, so still go down there for a couple of hours each week 
