A new job, finding accommodation and a wedding date set

Back in Newcastle I began my career in architecture. Ken Appleby and I continued to share the house in Bowsden Terrace and we both started work with Edward & Partners on the same day. As a junior architect in a well-established practice, I was given some of the more mundane jobs to do such as building surveys and assisting senior staff in producing detailed working drawings. 

The first job, with Ken, was a full survey of the old Rutherford College in Bath Lane. Some of it was dirty work, scrabbling about in cellars and attics. We would come back to the office in the afternoons to draw up the survey from site dimensions. 

I gradually progressed to bank premises for Midland Bank Ltd (now HSBC) and domestic work seeing small alteration jobs through to completion. 

At the end of my first full year, I had completed my first design project, a student residential block, Ethel Williams Hall, for Newcastle University. The original building had been opened for female students in 1950. This new extension I designed was actually built after I left the company but it stood the test of time for nearly 40 years before being sold off and demolished to make way for a private housing development in 2000. At the time of writing, we live only a few hundred yards from the site in Benton, Newcastle. 

Ethel Williams Hall of Residence (Newcastle University Archives)

My time with Eileen was now an integral part of my life. I no longer had studying to do so my evenings and weekends were free. I accompanied her on singing engagements which brought me into contact with a whole new world of formal dinners, conferences and local concerts. I like to think I gave her some moral support. In the process I began to appreciate what it was like for her to perform in front of different audiences. 

In November 1959 we set the date for our wedding: 6 June 1960. I decided to formally ask Eileen's father, Jimmy Brennan, for his daughter's hand in marriage (much to the amusement of the rest of the family) but I think he appreciated the chance to talk man to man with a squad of women in the house. 

In the run up to the wedding we made a couple of attempts to find alternative accommodation for me, but to no avail. Ken had taken a flat in Jesmond to live with Valerie. No other students were able to take on Bowsden Terrace at that point in the academic year. I was therefore left to deal with the final handover to a landlord who had not visited his property during several years of student occupation. When I showed him round I thought he was going to have a heart attack on the spot as the old chap was not in the best of health in the first place. He was so shocked by the years of student 'wear and tear' that he made no attempt to ask for damage payments. He just wanted to go home and forget about it. Having said that, he hadn't spent a penny on the place in all those years. 

I almost rented a ground floor flat in Gosforth. I had actually moved in on the Saturday morning. Eileen and I went out to lunch to celebrate however, when we returned, the landlady was immediately on her high horse, laying down the law about female company with severe restrictions imposed on visiting hours. It was clear we would have no peace so tempers flared. The result was we called a taxi and I was out of there within the hour. 

We also tried to rent a flat above a shop in Walkergate but because we were not yet married the agent would not allow me to rent it. Can you imagine that happening in today's housing market? We were resigned to having to wait until we were actually married before we could find a place to live together, even though our plan was always to wait until the wedding before Eileen moved in. In the few weeks before the ceremony I moved in with Wynne and John Hipkin, Eileen's sister and brother-in-law. 

Eventually we struck lucky and were able to rent a fully furnished end-terrace house in an area of Newcastle with the delightful name of Spital Tongues. (The name is thought to be derived from spital, a corruption of the word 'hospital', and tongues meaning an outlying pieces of land.) No.1 Burnside belonged to a retired couple who were planning to visit their family in Canada for nine months so it was clean and comfortably furnished. The main living room was on the first floor with wonderful views overlooking Leazes Moor. 

All these years later, Eileen and I still have very fond memories of those early months of married life in our first home together.