IT'S SNOW JOKE!

Reading the newspaper reports and watching TV footage of people and places coming to a standstill after a sprinkling of snow set me thinking about the white stuff and Brigg in years gone by.
I still retain strong childhood memories of the bad winter of 1962/3, particularly trudging from Hawthorn Avenue to Woodbine Grove prefabs in the teeth of a blizzard which took your breath away.
At Glebe Road school there used to be a childhood song, chanted en masse in the playground, urging: "Snow a bit faster!" Not that headmaster Reg Stocks was likely to have closed the school because of a few inches of the stuff.
Once at Brigg Grammar, things got worse. If the snow was particularly bad, our head H B Williams would wait until the school dinners had been consumed, then send the out-of-towners back home to their villages - including Keelby, Hemswell and Snitterby. However, the Brigg lads had to remain in class - even though most of us cycled to school, which made the going somewhat harder for us than it was for those sitting on a nice, warm bus!
In the documentary film, later converted into a CD/DVD, of school life in 1968, there's evocative footage of a snow-bound BGS, with boys having snowball fights. The film was produced to mark the school's 300th anniversary the following year.
As children we used to like taking our sledges (rusty metal runners duly oiled) to venues like 'Bigby Swings' - better known as the Davy Memorial Playing Field - where the slope provided a perfect platform for high-speed action.
Today, at the same venue, you sometimes see plastic dustbin liners, wrapped around the lower half of the body including the feet, being employed to provide just as good a ride as we used to get from our heavy wooden sledges.
The colour picture used here, supplied to the Telegraph archive by Nellie Reynolds, is of a snowy day at the Brocklesby Ox, in Bridge Street, back in 1974.