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Cooper Common
Vic Wood
When we took our London cousins to Cooper Common they were derisive. ”This isn’t a common. It’s just a bit of wasteland.” Truth is they were right. It was just a bit where they’d planned about half a dozen streets but they’d never been built. .There was only one row of houses in low Cooper, the west side had never been built. The streets on the north side of Cannon Street simply ended and what was left was a space from low Cooper to the Newport Bridge approach road.
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Nugent Court
| On maps you see Cooper Common described as ‘recreation ground’ . This too, was a bit fanciful. The only leisure object really was a wall for a handball called Nugent Court. I only discovered it was a handball court as an adult .I never once saw anybody playing handball against it.( I’m not even sure what handball is.) However my mother can remember ‘the lads splitting up into two teams.’ It had been built on the insistence of Councillor Nugent during the depression years so the unemployed young men could have somewhere to occupy their time. “They should never have knocked it down, my mother comments.”.It could have been kept as a monument to a good man.”. Apparently Councillor Nugent was held in very hard regard by the community often being a real thorn in the side of the council championing the welfare of his constituents in the Newport Ward. In fact Nugent Court couldn’t have been left where it was, for near as I can tell, the A66 goes right over the place it stood. Perhaps it could have been relocated. Councillor Nugent's name is remembered in a new street in Newport on the south side of Newport Road |  |
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Games on the Common
My pals and I spent a lot of time on Cooper Common. Quite near to Nugent Court there was a area of sand. There were plenty of loose wall bricks in, amongst and around this. We used to play in this sand using half wall bricks as make-believe cars. You could use a brick to shape out a road for your ‘car’. and construct bridges out of others. I don’t know where this sand originated. Perhaps it, and the bricks lying around, were the remains of an air-raid shelter. (I have learnt that a bomb had fallen on Cooper Common so perhaps it was a filled in crater )
Nugent Court was also a useful play place. Occasionally we bounced a tennis ball up against it and the girls sometimes played twosy-ball on it. The triangular buttresses either end were especially good for playing cowboys, two groups in either end playing shooting at each other. Also we would have stone-fights from end to end. You could hoy a clemmy(throw a stone) and then duck before the other end threw theirs. Now it seems like a dangerous game but I cannot ever remember anyone getting hurt . Maybe we were all bad shots or too fast at ducking back into cover.
We also played with home made ‘pea guns’. Our older brothers (or, in my case, my cousin) made these for us. This was a simple but effective device for propelling a dried pea with some force. It was a pistol shape. One strong elastic band held a trigger block in place which held a pea in another stretched elastic band until the trigger released it. If a pea hit you on the face or on your bare leg it stung a bit but it was great fun.
When there was snow it was even greater fun throwing snowballs. One year, I remember, the council used Cooper Common as a dumping ground for all the snow they had cleared from streets. This created a veritable wonderland of icey hillocks we could slide up and down. Of course it was no longer snow. It was grey and black refrozen slush with considerable amounts of stone chippings and broken tarmac in it.. We were dismayed when eventually the council men came back with a lorry load of salt which they shovelled over it to hasten its thaw.
As I’ve said we did not know what Nugent Court was for. We decided it had been built so that firing squads could execute German spies against it. In fact we were too young to remember the war. (I was only 18 months old on V.E. day). But,for us, the war explained everything. Every derelict house or gap in the housing was caused by the bombing as far as we were concerned. So a wall where they executed German spies is a bit imaginative but as an explanation for gaps in the housing wasn’t that unreasonable given that just over the road from Cooper Common, a large part of Laws St, Booth St, Tomlinson Street, a bit of high Cooper St and the Cannon Street houses on the corners of Laws and high Cooper St were missing as a direct result of a bomb hit, one of the same stick that had hit Cooper Common. |
The Fair
On the common, just on the edge of low Cooper St, there was a rickety old corrugated shed loosely padlocked. Peering in you could see some fairground equipment just a few ‘swingy boats’ and a small roundabout.*** Occasionally I saw this assembled on the corner of the common but it was just the sort of thing for small kiddies nothing like the real fair which came to Cooper Common once a year.
Without doubt this was the most exciting and exhilarating week of the year for me. There were waltzers and other rides, dodgem cars which we called 'bumper cars'. This was more descriptive really because everyone I knew tried their best to bump into everyone rather than dodge them.
There were all sorts of side shows. I used to like the shooting galleries. You soon ran out of money to go on things but it was still just great to be there. It was just so full of noise and bustle.
Each show had its own music and you wandered in and out of competing songs. Then there was the constant buzz of the generators powering the rides and the smell of the diesel fumes mixed with the smell of candy floss. But above all it was bright, a shining oasis in the middle of the dimly lit streets. It wasn't just Cooper Common which was lit up. My bedroom faced that way so even at home in bed I could see the swirling lights reflecting off the clouds. When it left, for a while, the place seemed dark and dull and sort of empty.
*** Tony Caunce, who lived in Welford Street writes: The roundabouts & swing boats you could see in the sheds in Cooper St belonged to Mr Robinson who lived in 45 Welford St
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