The Rubik's Cube was Lord of the Manor in 1981. I'm adapting the 1986 song Snooker Loopy for the blog post title here, and Rubik's Loopy was certainly very descriptive of the Manor, the forerunner of the North Cambridge Academy, in 1981. The Rubik's Cube was quite an amazing thing in those days. It penetrated the Iron Curtain and made its way into the Western World - and that was really something! It was in January/February 1980 that Erno Rubik demonstrated his invention at toy trade fairs in London, Paris, Nuremberg and New York. This was the original 'Buvos Kocka' - 'Magic Cube'. The first test batches of the Magic Cube had been released in its native Hungary just before Christmas 1977, and there had been a small seepage across Hungarian borders in 1978, 1979 and early 1980, including a few into the UK. But the Magic Cube existed in only very small numbers and there were nowhere near enough to break the major pop culture barrier in the UK or the re...
Mrs Hinchcliffe's Memories of Old Arbury, Chesterton and Vicarage Terrace Part 10: The Monkey Walk, Bilious Attacks, 'The Beaky' of Gwydir Street, The Charleston and High in the Sky over Arbury...
Mrs Grace Hinchcliffe (1910-1998) was Andy's grandmother and shared many memories for the Arbury Archive in the 1980s. This is the tenth part of her recollections, spanning the mid-1920s to mid-1930s. The photograph above shows her, the young Grace Brett, in 1928. Mrs Hinchcliffe remembered a Sunday afternoon ritual much enjoyed by local youngsters in the 1920s: 'The Monkey Walk! On nice Sunday afternoons, in the spring or summer, we'd put on our best dresses or suits and walk round and round Sidney Street, Petty Cury, Market Hill and Market Street - girls in one direction, boys in the other. We'd go in twos or threes and it was all very innocent and fun. We weren't really hoping to find our Mr or Miss Right - we were just being young peacocks!' Mrs Hinchcliffe's cousin, Mrs Muriel Wiles, described a similar ritual at the bandstand on Christ's Pieces [ here ]. Back to Mrs Hinchcliffe's recollections: 'It was exciting being young. There were lots ...