“MY SCHOOL DAY” BY KEITH MOTT
Being busy is something that suits me, as I have a low boredom level and I have to be doing something all the time. Christmas has always been a very busy time for me personally, not just with the celebrations, but life in general always going up a gear and everything gets busier. When I played in the bands in the 1960’s and early 1970’s and we were always busy driving up the motorways and gigging, but at Christmas the work load seemed to nearly double and sometimes we played at two venues on the same day. I was born in Feltham, near Heathrow Airport in 1950 and when I was a young school boy, we lived in Chestnut Road, Kingston, and I had a job on Kingston market working for Albert Collis on his fruit stall. I got up early in the morning on week days and walked to the market to unload the van and help set up the fruit stall, then went to school and then returned to the market after school to pack up the stall. I worked all day on the stall serving on Saturday and I can remember some of my school teachers come to our stall for their discount on the fruit. The market was very busy over the Christmas period and I worked all the holiday week selling fruit on the stall. I also worked in the school summer holiday and can remember Boots chemist was in the market place and I was for ever in there getting wasp stings on my hands treated after getting stung putting hands in the plumbs when serving. During the school holidays I used to go on some Mondays with Albert to Brentford Wholesale Market for new stock and the late great Henry Cooper, the champion heavy weight boxer was sometimes in the market Café as he had a greengrocer business somewhere in London. Albert used to give me a box of fruit with my wages on a Saturday night and it was great taking it home to the family. I loved fruit then, as I do now and ate it all day long on the stall, until it came out of my ears! I recently found a 1960’s Borough of Kingston-upon-Thames film on YouTube and it featured all the main places in the town then, including the market place. It was amazing, as it showed Albert Collis’ stall in the market and his late wife, Jean, selling the fruit. It must have been filmed on a week day when I was at school. It was brilliant to see! My first pigeon lofts in the 1950’s were all knocked up with orange boxes from Kingston market and all the local kids had pigeons, including Billy Hammond, Russell Blunden and Bobby Warren. I was 11 years of age when my parents, Fred and Iris, purchased my first drum kit and I used to practice in the back bed room to all the old Beatles and Rollin’ Stones records. My parents could not afford a full drum kit and I started with an Olympic snare drum, bass drum, high hat and one cymbal stand. Working hard on Kingston market as a ‘barrow boy’ earned me a few quid and I saved up and bought the rest of my drum kit, side tom tom and floor tom tom, myself. LOL! Brilliant days!
I can remember my dear late grandmother, Caroline, telling me at a very young age that her brother was a drummer in a dance band, but no one in the family was a pigeon fanciers. Myself and my younger brother, Phil, started keeping pigeons in our early youth and the Mott Brother’s pigeon career stared when we obtained a pair of birds, ‘Alma’ and ‘Charlie’, from a school friend, which were housed in a small rabbit hutch. This pair of pigeons was bred at the loft of Terry Smart, who was in partnership with the Groombridge family of Kingston and it is common knowledge that Terry with his wife Carole, became the secretary of the London & South East Classic Club some 25 years later. After a few years of flying our pigeons around the rooftops, we had to give them up for a short while, as we moved house. I played the drums and was very involved at the time with the top rock n’ roll band, ‘The Impalas’, and we played with many top artists, including, Dave ‘Screaming Lord’ Sutch, Shakin’ Stevens , Heinz Burt (The Tornados) and Gene Vincent at the London Palladium in 1969. I attended Rivermead Secondary School in Kingston and I did my first drum solo in public at a big school ‘gang’ show, when other local schools, and all the parents attended. Our next door neighbours, in Chestnut Road where we lived soon got fed up with my drums beating out to the best of the 1960’s music scene in the spare bedroom and called the police in a couple of times to shut me up. My dad couldn’t wait for me to join a band and was highly delighted when I finally took the drum kit on the road. I was soon sitting in on recording and television dates playing the drums, and was lucky enough to record tracks at ‘Morgan’ studios, which was one of the best recording studios in the UK at that time and Shakin’ Stevens was recording there that same day. One of ‘The Impala’s’ tracks was played on BBC Radio One several times at that time. Being a busy rock drummer and playing at all premier venues all over the UK was my life for many years, but in 1969 Phil and I decided to start up pigeons again, this time to do the job properly. We obtained some good stock and start racing, which we had never done before. We acquired some Kirkpatrick and Kenyon stock from the late Johnny Winters of Kingston, which formed the basis of the Mott Brothers loft, and joined the now, disbanded Molesey & District H.S. We won our first race from Weymouth with 159 birds competing in 1973 and the pigeon was our mealy hen, ‘State Express’ and she was bred by the late Fred & Derek Skull Brothers of Molesey. Phil and I won many firsts and averages in the early years, mostly in hard channel races, and were top prize winners in the strong Molesey club in 1975.
Unlike a lot of kids, I liked school and have always liked sport. I stayed on an extra year at Rivermead School to sit my GCE ‘O’ level examinations and passed several. I only wished I had learnt how to read and write! I have been very keen on Rugby since my school days, playing a lot when I was young and when I was in my second year at school, I played for the fourth year ‘colts’. I don’t live too far away from Twickenham Stadium and have been there many times through the year and seen some great matches. I can remember, all those year ago, the school Rugby team use to have an annual outing to Twickenham to see the Oxford and Cambridge Universities match, and we all used to go by train to see some really great Rugby. When we went to see that match in the early 1960’s, Twickenham wasn’t the world class stadium it is today, the stand were big sheds painter green. Great days!
My wife, Betty and I are very family orientated and our five grandchildren sleep over at our home in Claygate most weekends and they all have their own interests. Sasha, the oldest, use to spend most of her time in the pigeon loft, Ryan playing games on his X Box, Katie likes fishing with her dad, Mark, and the youngest, Sophia and Connie; well they just spends most of their time getting on your nerves. Not really, they are both the next generation of animal lovers! Sophia also spends a lot of her time with the pigeons and for a little girl with tiny hands, she handles them really well. Connie was saying ‘Gaby Vandenabeele’ at the age of three and knew all the birds by name in the loft, and on her regular visits to Claygate enjoyed feeding the pigeons. When she was just a toddler, she was walking down Working High Street with her mum and on spotting some pigeons on the pavement in front of them, she said, ‘look mummy, Vandenabeeles’. LOL! Our daughter, Caroline, was always in the pigeon loft when she was a toddler, carrying pigeons around under her arm and was judging at major shows when only a young girl. Her fifteen year old daughter, Sasha, is following in her foot steps and judges at major shows with me every winter, including the Southern Counties Show Racer Open Show, RPRA Southern Region Show and the Emsworth & Havant Open Show in December 2013. When our Sasha was a toddler she spent a lot of time in the summer months sitting in my young bird section, hand feeding the inmates and makes them tame, which gives them confidence.
TEXT & PHOTOS BY KEITH MOTT
(www.keithmott.com)
