Mike Shaw of Linthwaite last week recalled playing with toy guns when he was a lad.

June Hirst, formerly of Lepton but now of Kirkheaton, says it wasn’t just boys who played with them.

“When I was a little girl, I had a gun with caps and also a water pistol. I also had a white stick which was Roy Roger’s white horse Trigger.”

Amazing the imagination of a child.

“During the 1950s, when I first started teaching, I had a table just inside the classroom door, where the boys put their guns when they came in from playtime – cowboy films were very popular on TV. And they all grew up into very respectable citizens.”

Allen Jenkinson adds: “As kids, near enough every Saturday afternoon, you’d find about 20 of us in the Milnsbridge Picture Palace (6d at the front and 9d at the back).

A couple us would copper up and buy a packet of cigarettes, then we would pay 6d to get in, sit at the front, wait till the lights dimmed and sneak to the back, usually via the toilets, because you weren’t allowed to smoke in the first half dozen rows which were officially for the younger kids.

“After an afternoon of cowboy shoot ‘em ups, war films or Flash Gordon, we’d invade the British Road Services trailer compound next door.

A gang of kids high on imagination, straight out of the flicks, in a trailer compound, can’t be beaten.

Being the weekend, there was only an elderly watchman working and, by the time he’d chased us off, we’d plugged him full of holes and you couldn’t see the place for gun smoke, even if we were the only ones who could see it.”

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