Looking back: 'I realised I was never going to become the next Margot Fonteyn!'

Ballet hopefuls make their move, pictured here on March 9, 1967

As not every family had a television set, and we didn’t have computers or mobile phones, it was all important to find things to occupy ourselves.

As our parents would tell us ‘Satan makes work for idle hands’.

The most popular hobby was collecting. It didn’t matter what you collected as long as you did! Particularly stamps!

The Yorkshire branch of the Cameric Cigarette Card Club met once a month to sell and swap with pauses while individuals pass round treasures from their private collections

You could buy a little packet of mixed stamps from the Post Office and stick them into your album.

They were usually an unexciting selection and you soon collected albums of useless and worthless stamps but, if nothing else, they did educate you to the fact that there were places like Mongolia and Azerbaijan, even if you’d no idea where they were!

Boys often collected football cards which were sometimes found in cigarette and tea packets and programmes which were harder to find given that they never knew many people who actually went to matches.

Fuelled by my love of the Sadlers Wells books by Lorna Hill, I persuaded my mother to let me have dancing lessons every Saturday attending the Fayre-Daviso School of Dance on Barnsley Road, which was run by ex-Tiller girls Zena Fayre and Ninette Daviso, daughter of Portuguese circus performer Hercules Daviso.

The Gloops escort Elise Lilley, aged 81, to open the Christ Church Garden Party, Hackenthorpe. June 9, 1984

Alas, it was soon evident that I was never going to become another Margot Fonteyn and I gave that hobby up after a few weeks!The magazines we read gave us the chance to join clubs.

There was the ‘I Spy Club’ which published books and badges, although there were certain limitations when you were a child.

Few families had a car and so the ‘On the road’ book was pretty useless as was ‘Spotting wild animals’ Not a lot of those in Firth Park!There was the Enid Blyton magazine promoting membership of the Busy Bees, raising money for the PDSA and Girl magazine where we could become Girl Adventurers!

In 1958, Blue Peter started on television, becoming instrumental in promoting hobbies for children, albeit rather sexist at that time.

But the favourite club by far was Sheffield’s own Gloop’s Club to which every self-respecting child belonged!

Originally with a motto of ‘Thmile’, it was changed to ‘Smile’ after parents complained that it would make their children short tongued!

The Gloop’s cartoon, featuring Gloops who was a large friendly black and white cat, ran in the Star newspaper with the club co-ordinated first by Aunty Edith and then by Auntie Janet and Uncle Timothy.

You were encouraged to do good deeds just like Gloops, and he was a popular figure at local fairs and galas.

There were competitions in the Star to include colouring competitions, with the winners displayed in the front window of Kemsley House on High Street. Alas, not me!The most important hobby of all for myself and my sister was always reading, and we were taken down to Firth Park Library at a very early age, which lead to a lifetime love of books.

Also, a hobby of my sister and myself was penfriends.

We had them from all over the world. Mine included an Icelandic fisher boy and a girl from the West Indies.

But I worried that the girl from Hampshire might decide to visit. I may have exaggerated a bit about our council house and let her think it was more like Chatsworth.