When I was about 16, I went off with a friend, who is now a vicar, to walk the Pennine Way. At the end of the first day, we decided it was not for us, and caught a bus and then a series of trains, ending up in Blackpool.
There - at the behest of the future vicar - I watched my first "X" film, which was loosely adapted from the already very loose works of the Marquis de Sade, and starred Koo Stark. I also smoked my first cigarette, and this I did sitting aboard a Blackpool tram while bloated with Watney's Red Barrel, or whatever was the fashionable brew of the time.
I have associated trams with working-class pleasures ever since, and I'm very pleased they've returned to Croydon, and may soon be returning to the heart of London. Transport for London is currently mounting a series of exhibitions showing ideas for a tram that will go from Camden to Peckham, and might relieve congestion on the Northern Line. This is quite timely, because it is 50 years next July that the deputy chairman of London Transport, while standing before the last tram to run on public service in London, made a valedictory speech beginning "Goodbye, old tram!" - or rather, as this was the 1950s and the deputy chairman was middle-class, "Goodbye, old trem!".
I've seen footage of that occasion, and everybody in the vicinity of that tram, except the Dan Maskell-ish deputy chairman, was obviously pissed, but then the trams were a boozer's friend: a quick and cheap way of getting home from the pub, especially if you lived in the less smart half of London, the south, where trams were more plentiful.
No wonder they inspired raucous music-hall songs, and no wonder they were looked down on by the ever-growing numbers of the automobile-owning middle class, who characterised trams as clanging, ugly things that seemed always to travel through rain, got in the way of cars, were "spotted" by acne-covered oiks, and ridden only by proles.
In PR terms, the trams of 1952 were the buses of today. But whereas buses are merely reviled, trams were abolished - victims, like so much and so many in this country, of the class war.
