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ROCK STAR'S NORFOLK CHILDHOOD.
By Trevor Heaton.
"I remember those times with great
fondness" says Queen's Roger Taylor.
ROGER TAYLOR WAS THE KINGS LYNN SCHOOLBOY WHO GREW UP TO BE A SUPERSTAR AS PART
OF A THE ROCK GROUP QUEEN. hE TALKS ABOUT HIS EARLY LIFE IN THE TOWN, AND HIS STRONG LINKS TO IT'S ANCIENT FISHING COMMUNITY.
Kings Lynn was proud of the new maternity wing at the West Norfolk and Lynn Hospital, off London Road. So when it
was announced that the Queen would be coming to open it officially, it was the icing on the cake for townsfolk and the band
of health workers and volunteers who supported the hospital's work.
When the Queen (now the Queen mother) arrived for
her two hour tour of the hospital on Saturday August 1st 1949, she was handed a golden key to perform the official ceremony,
watched by serried ranks of the great and good of Lynn. The opening over, the Queen chatted to the 16 mother's or mother's-to-be
in the new unit.
The first one she spoke to was Mrs. Winifred Taylor, who lived with her husband Michael at 87 High Street,
in the heart of the town's shopping centre. The Queen told her how lucky patients were to have "such a lovely place". She
chatted to Mrs. Taylor about her new son, and his name.
And thus, at six days old, Roger Meddows Taylor found himself
at the centre of attention.
It was something he would have to get used to. For years later, he joined with Brian May,
John Deacon and Freddie Bulsara-who had changed his name to the much more memorable "Mercury" to form Queen, and went on to
grab the world of rock music by it's collective scruff of the neck and sell countless millions of singles and albums.
But
let's press the rewind button for Roger Taylor, the superstar singer, songwriter and musician and go back to a little four
year old who was trying his best to resist his mother's efforts to get him to start his first day at Rosebery Avenue school
in Gaywood, on an autumn day in1954.
"I remember being dragged off to school on my first day hanging on to the ice
cream sign because I didn't want to go" he laughs.
But, with a bit of persuasion, he let go and found himself travelling
the few hundred yards from the Beulah Street to the school, where he joined the 40 or so pupils in the reception class and
settled down to this new phase in his life.
Roger's parents, Winifred and Michael, a manger with the Potato and Marketing
Board, had moved to the streets off Gaywood's arterial Wooten Road, soon after his birth. Beulah Street is now much as it
was then, a neat collection of classic early 20th century town villa's. Sturdy, no nonsense houses, the bricks-and-mortar
equivalent of a pair of sensible shoes.
A couple of years after the houses were put up around 1913, the German's sent
Zeppelins over the east coast and people from the town used to come and stay in the houses to escape the bombs. Nowadays a
simple bridge goes over the Gaywood river which runs at the bottom of the road, joining Wooton Road to the River Lane sports
pitches. Wooten Road itself is much busier than in the early 1950's, with a constant stream of commuters going back and forth
to hundreds of the houses which have sprung up on the outskirts of Lynn over the past generation.
But back then, things
were quieter, and Beulah Street was a cul-de-sac, with the road petering out by the river (a fact which caused many a missed
heartbeat to unwary drivers over the years) and then looking out over miles of heath and farmland to the town proper.
"Not
a bad place to grow up in", as Roger finally concedes. "The road used to be very quiet. I remember going down to the end of
the street and looking into the river. I used to see the odd pike or two. I was constantly warned not to fall in". He say's
he didn't.
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