CHARLES BANNERMAN: Fireworks should no longer be sold to the general public
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Last week I spoke about buying the Football Times from Jocky Lawson’s paper shop in Dalneigh back in the 1960s, and now I’m crossing the road to Christison’s which sold just about everything else.
Every autumn, that included the perennial scourge of quiet residential areas – the penny banger.
A shilling bought a box of a dozen of these things.
You lit the blue touch paper and, rather than stand well clear, waited until the brief fizz began. Then you threw it, not uncommonly into some unsuspecting resident’s front porch, and legged it up the road before that fizz gave way to a pretty monstrous bang.
Alternatively, you could break a few open, pile up the gunpowder and throw in a match to create the flash and smoke of an almighty “genie”.
And penny bangers were just entry level. All varieties of fireworks were freely available at bonfire time, many as cheap as threepence or sixpence, with Toyland on the corner of Drummond and Baron Taylor’s streets a special favourite.
Rockets, Roman candles, jumping Jacks, squibs and a lot more, many of them capable of shooting off at completely unpredictable angles. October would see me invest much of my half crown a week pocket money in fireworks which I kept in a shoebox in a cupboard under the stairs.
On Bonfire Night, the local population, their personal pyrotechnics in their pockets, would gather on the wasteland behind St Valery Avenue where our group of friends had spent days piling up branches and waste household combustibles into an enormous bonfire.
On the two or three preceding evenings, this era of extensive childhood freedom also allowed us pre-teenagers to gather in the pitch dark beside a smaller campfire, “guarding” the bonfire, prompted by the urban myth that other boys were coming to create a premature conflagration.
Bonfire Night officially began with someone casually throwing a burning rag in, precipitating an hour of mayhem with bangs and whistles and balls of fire shooting off in all random directions.
Remarkably, no one ever got hurt, and then everyone would head home, stinking of smoke and sulphurous vapours.
On the eve of Bonfire Night 2022, this all shows how much more tightly fireworks are now controlled, but I still don’t think it’s tightly enough. These are basically explosives and I no longer believe they should be sold whatsoever to the general public.
The risks and inconvenience of the free deployment of admittedly spectacular fireworks are just too great and I’m perhaps lucky to have escaped the 1960s with only a small burn scar on my left hand.
If a failed Catholic attempt to blow up a Protestant Scottish king presiding over an English parliament 417 years ago remains grounds for such celebrations (and I have my doubts), then fireworks must be sold only to properly licensed bodies. And preferably not go bang, causing distress to animals.
The other issue is whether local authorities have money to send up in smoke any more, so maybe we need to find some other safer and quieter way of creating enjoyable social celebrations.
Enjoy cautiously!
