Flanders and Swann

Who remembers Michael Flanders and Donald Swann? They wrote and sang comic songs and appeared as guests on TV shows in the 1960s. Flanders sat in a wheelchair due to Poliomyelitis, and Swann sat at the piano. 

Their best remembered song has to be “The Hippopotamus”, with its chorus “Mud, mud, glorious mud”. They had great fun with words. The lengthened ‘a’ in “the Hippopotamus” to rhyme with “was no ignoramus” still amuses me. Another song I remember is “The Gnu” (with a hard ‘g’), “spelt G-N-U-”.  

Michael Flanders wrote and sang most of the words and delivered comic monologues, and Donald Swann wrote the music and played piano. You could easily assume that Flanders, a large, impressive, bearded man with a rich voice, was the act, and the slighter and quieter Swann was merely the accompanist, but the music was every bit as important as the words. Donald Swann wrote catchy tunes and was an accomplished musician.  

I especially like “The Slow Train” about the 1963 Beeching cuts, and its litany of quirky station names: Blandford Forum, Mortehoe, Littleton Badsey, Dog Dyke, .... The way the halting rhythm of the music captures the halting rhythm of a labouring steam locomotive is delightful. Not only that, the song mentions a certain Yorkshire town.  

https://youtu.be/U6OHD2uCpfU

Miller′s Dale for Tideswell ...
Kirby Muxloe ...
Mow Cop and Scholar Green ...

No more will I go to Blandford Forum and Mortehoe
On the slow train from Midsomer Norton and Mumby Road
No churns, no porter, no cat on a seat
At Chorlton-cum-Hardy or Chester-le-Street
We won't be meeting again
On the Slow Train.

I'll travel no more from Littleton Badsey to Openshaw
At Long Stanton I'll stand well clear of the doors no more
No whitewashed pebbles, no up and no down
From Formby Four Crosses to Dunstable Town
I won't be going again
On the Slow Train.

On the Main Line and the goods′ siding
The grass grows high
At High Dog Dyke, Tumby Woodside
And Trouble House Halt, the sleepers sleep.

At Audlem and Ambergate no passenger waits
On Chittening platform or Cheslyn Hay
No one departs, no one arrives
From Selby to Goole, from St Erth to St Ives
They′ve all passed out of our lives
On the Slow Train, on the Slow Train.

Cockermouth for Buttermere ...
On the Slow Train, Armley Moor Arram ...
Pye Hill and Somercotes ...
On the Slow Train
Windmill End.

Prophets Of Profit

For UK readers the series is at 
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0027bnq/episodes/player 

Economics is something I have never studied, so The Prophets of Profit, a series of five 15-minute programmes on BBC Radio 4, was something of a revelation. For me, it gave new insight into what seems to have gone wrong in corporate Britain and America over the past fifty years. I am thinking of disasters such as water companies paying large dividends and bonuses, and borrowing huge sums, while failing to invest in their networks, and the Post Office prosecuting hundreds for theft when they knew full well that their own computer system was at fault. I was aware of much of this, but not in such clear focus. This is my, probably naïve, understanding of what the series said. 

It begins in 1970, when Milton Friedman argued that the purpose of business should be to maximise profit, and nothing else. Employees, suppliers, customers, and other stakeholders, were not the concern of business. Nor were social or environmental responsibilities. Those things would look after themselves as greater profits filtered through society. They would create more economic growth and employment. 

Business academics then began to think through what this might mean in practice, and the idea that shareholder value was all that mattered became predominant. Businesses began to do whatever they could to maximise share prices. Chief executives who thought otherwise soon found themselves out of a job, or their companies taken over. 

I thought back to my own experience of the nineteen-seventies, while still working as an accountant. I spent a couple of years with The Burton Group, centred around the clothing retailer. I was in the Property Division, and at that time we were busy selling off our shops and leasing them back. 

Sir Montague Burton, the company founder, had spent a lifetime buying the best retail sites in every town and city in the land. It was said that in the early days he stood counting the numbers of passers by, and bought the sites with the most. Think of almost any Burton branch you can remember, and the chances are it was on the busiest corner plot in town. 

Making and selling men’s suits was profitable business. Apart from work clothes like overalls and boiler suits, men wore little else. The best suit would become the everyday suit, and then that would become the suit for leisure activities. I have photographs of my father and grandfather sitting on the beach at the seaside, wearing suits. 

The Burton Group also owned other businesses. I remember Top Shop, Top Man, Dorothy Perkins, Evans Outsizes, and Ryman the stationer, but there were probably others, all in prime retail locations. You can easily see that selling off these properties and leasing them back would release bucket loads of cash, which could be used to pay large bonuses and dividends, boosting the share price. 

Actually, Burtons were not that bad, but many companies took things to extremes, breaking up their businesses and selling or closing down the least profitable parts, with no regard for the social consequences. Privatisation was part of this ethos, too. It was thought that private ownership would attract more investment in public utilities. 

For a period, this philosophy re-invigorated tired Western economies, but the world as Friedman knew it changed, with unforeseen consequences. He did not anticipate changes in working practices, corporate deregulation, and globalisation. 

Again, thinking back to the nineteen-seventies, we started work and left at the appointed times. We took the specified lunch breaks. Work was social, and we had time to chat with our colleagues. We spent many lunch breaks playing cards in the office. We even played games with elastic bands and paper clips during work time if we could get away with it. Practices such as zero-hours contracts, timed toilet breaks, and the regular ten-hour day, would not have been tolerated. Most were paid enough not to need to juggle multiple jobs. Now, for so many, this is the reality. Another recent radio series, Workplace Britain, explored these changes. There were accounts of helpdesk workers so busy they never exchanged a single word with the person in the desk next to them. These things may generate greater profit and efficiency, but can’t be good for mental or physical well-being. 

As regards globalisation, if company ownership goes overseas, so do the profits. Australian investment bank Macquarie owned Thames Water for ten years to 2017, during which period it took huge bonuses and dividends without investing a penny of its own money. Since privatisation in 1989, water companies have paid £72bn to shareholders, while taking on £60bn of debt. Some privatised companies are even owned by overseas state utilities. One trade unionist said that we seem to have no objection to state ownership, so long as it is not Britain. 

Much worse, some overseas owners have more interest in closing down businesses and moving them to their own shores. Think of Chinese ownership of strategic industries such as steel works and oil refineries. We need oil and steel, so if they take away our ability to produce our own, they can hold us to ransom for theirs. 

The 2008 stock market crash brought home just how badly wrong the shareholder value movement had gone, with a degree of renewed concern for the planet, providing secure jobs, and progressive social change: diversity, equity, and inclusion. But many think this went too far, and putting profit above all else may be returning, especially in American politics. 

Pour The Macallan On My Grave

I remember from a long time ago, a series of small announcements in the Personal Columns of national daily newspapers. They were subtle understated advertisements for a brand of Scotch whisky. I think there were several different ones, but I now recall only this: 

The Will said to: 

“Pour The Macallan on my grave

To ease my dead soul’s thirst

So I poured the Macallan on the grave 

But through my kidneys first.” 

That is all it said. I can now find no record of these ads, which seems unusual considering the nature of the internet.

Record Box - 6, Female Singer-Songwriters

Yet another look at my old vinyl records before passing them on.

In 1974, I fell in love with female singer-songwriters. I suppose the truth is that I fancied them all for their insights and emotions. This music touched me deeply. It was the start of a turbulent few years, and more than any others, these records bring back what those times and places felt like in the most intense way imaginable. Some are now too painful to listen to. 

Carly Simon started it we that immortal line: “You’re so vain. I bet you think this song is about you.” I spotted her LP “No Secrets” in the wonderful Leeds Record Library, and tape-recorded it. It was sensational: her pitch-perfect, crystal-clear voice; the arrangements, the brilliance of the musicians, and her knack of putting a perfect melody and emotion to any lyric. Who else could write such a tune and verse about childhood friendship as: 

“The Carter family lived next door for almost 14 years

With Gwen and I inseparable from rag dolls through brassieres

Then Gwen began to bore me with her giggles and her fears

The day the Carters moved away, I had to fake my tears

I told new friends Gwen Carter had become a silly pest

And then I found I missed her more than I’d ever have guessed” 

Oh, and then it had that cover photograph! My copy is from a second-hand shop sometime later. 

I went straight back to that section in the library, and Carole King’s “No Secrets” was soon on my tape. She had of course been writing a string of hit records for other performers since the late nineteen-fifties, but this was her first solo LP. The arrangements were simpler than “No Secrets”, mainly King and piano, but the quality of the songs was just as impressive. How do you dream up songs like these, I wondered? I had no chance. 

Joni Mitchell really bowled me over. Again, she had been writing hits since the nineteen-seventies with the likes of “Both Sides Now” (Clouds) and “Big Yellow Taxi”, but her LP “Court and Spark” was a level above. It had a kind of loose-structured melody and lyrics, and unusual arrangements. 

Around that time, I had read Victor Pritchett’s “Midnight Oil” about his determination to become a full-time writer in Paris after the First World War. What would it be like to chuck your job and do that? Joni Mitchell’s song “Free Man in Paris”, said to be about the media promoter David Geffen, went round my head for weeks: “I was a free man in Paris, I felt unfettered and alive ...”. I bought “Court and Spark”, and further LPs followed over the following years.

Back in the record library, Laura Nyro’s “Eli and the Thirteenth Confession” drew my eye. I taped that and several others by her, and later bought two LPs, and recently others on CD. 

She was incredibly talented. She had been writing songs since the late nineteen-sixties, but was not well known, being little interested in fame. Important musicians such as Elton John cite her as a major influence. I knew some of her songs such as “Wedding Bell Blues” which had been a success for The 5th Dimension. There was something unusual about the melody. 

I also envied the way she multi-tracked her songs, building layer upon layer, singing all the harmonies, and playing all the instruments, which was something I would have loved to have been able to do. The title song “Eli’s Coming” is a great example. I wanted multi-track recording kit like this. The sound mixer on my Akai 4000DS tape deck was so limited. 

Her songs were like no one else’s. Her tunes, chord sequences, and tempo changes went in completely unexpected directions. She had a powerful 3-octave vocal range that could convey every emotion from pure joy to deep mental pain. It could sometimes be overpowering, but also subtle and delicate, as in the beautiful “Upstairs by a Chinese Lamp”. Sadly, she lived only to 49. 

It was as if she understood my own unstable emotions at that time. These were particularly formative years, weighing up other careers, uncertain whether a change was sensible. I bounded from elation to despair: the excitement of imagining the possibilities, talking things over with those who could help, then realising some things were not for me. Could I be a registered mental nurse, or a probation officer, or work in sales or advertising, or be a writer in Paris? Was it realistic to believe I could get into university? 

I did get in and very happily changed careers, but can no longer bear to listen to Suzanne Vega. She came a decade later during another emotionally turbulent period. I saw her on stage and was drawn to the wide jangly chords of her guitarist, and her ability to write a good tune. Again, her sombre and depressing songs reflected my mood at that time. 

I had been through an unpleasant, abusive relationship. You do not see them coming, and before you know, you have been taken over completely and blame yourself for all that feels wrong. I escaped to a job in Scotland, which was a good career move that later opened doors, but my mother died just as I started. My dad found it almost impossible to bear. I was now at least eight hours away and felt responsible. He visited me, and I hardly recognised the disorientated, shrunken old man stumbling lost along the railway platform. Yet he was only 65. On top of that, I found I was working for a self-absorbed, manipulative pillock of a professor who liked to micro-manage everyone: a jump from one kind of toxic situation to another. 

Eventually, I escaped again to a job with a Midlands software company. However, I had little in common with others there. Most were younger for one thing, and unlike the intelligent, educated, university types I had been with, and their wide interests. They laughed loudly at the owner’s offensive sexist and racist jokes in staff meetings, and seemed interested mainly in cars and late-night drinking. “Nice place Bristol”, one said. “Lots of lovely wine bars down by the docks.”

The offices were on the eighth floor of a building with an unprotected, full-height, rear stairwell, where the toilets were. I used to cling to the wall fearing what I might do. 

Things gradually improved, especially socially, and I felt more positive. A happy marriage and children came along rather late in life. The job paid well and did wonders for my confidence. But there was a lot of hassle and increasing foreign travel. When the time seemed right, I was glad to return to a university job, albeit for a lower salary. 

As I said, this music brings these years back intensely. I would not want Susanne Vega’s songs about solitude and domestic violence to do that. If allowed only one of these records, I would ask Laura Nyro to take me back to the best years. I think she was the most original and talented of all, yes, even more original and talented than Joni Mitchell. Her songs were rarely a simple verse and middle eight, and you could never predict where they might go. I think you hear her influence in both Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon. 

I came across this video that tells Laura Nyro’s story and explains her originality (although you have to put up with some rather long and annoying ad breaks). Her story would make a memorable film. 

Le Tour de Yorkshire

New Month Old Post: first posted 28th April 2017. This event no longer runs, but here is what I wrote about it in 2017.

Improved and original logos

 

In the early nineteen-sixties, I remember going along to Boothferry Bridge to watch The Milk Race pass by – a national cycling event also known as the Tour of Britain, sponsored by the now defunct Milk Marketing Board. Some blokes on racing bikes flashed past amidst the everyday traffic and it was all over in less than a minute. It wasn’t worth the bother. Cycling must be the sport with the biggest disconnect between doing (riding a bike is fun) and watching (tedious). I’ve never been to a cycling event since.

 
So it’s irritating to find the Tour de Yorkshire imposed on us this weekend, with roads closed most of the day bringing maximum disruption to our activities, just to see people on bicycles for a couple of minutes. I’m keeping well away.

And they call it “le Tour de Yorkshire”. What pretentious twaddle! Et le moins dit à propos de la côte de Silsden et de la côte de Wigtwizzle, mieux c'est.*

Surely, if it’s in Yorkshire, shouldn’t it be called t’baiyk race roun’ t ‘roo-ads?

[* The less said about “côte de Silsden” and “côte de Wigtwizzle” the better.] 

Georgina Pocklington

Another old photograph: this from around 1893. It shows the wonderfully named Georgina Pocklington (born 1857) and her mother Elizabeth (born 1835). They lived nearly all their lives in the villages of Rawcliffe and Cowick, Yorkshire. They are my Great-Great and Great-Great-Great grandmas on my mother’s side. 

Elizabeth and Georgina Pocklington, c1893

When my uncle, the farmer who married into the family, said mischievously that if the Blue Line bus had not started running through Rawcliffe, they would all have been imbeciles because of inbreeding, Georgina and Elizabeth illustrate what he had in mind. Through them, I find myself related and doubly-related to no end of people in the villages. I hasten to add that I found no consanguinuity.  

I will say little more about Elizabeth because she complicates things enormously. Suffice to say her grandfather fathered 21 children. No one I knew remembered much from before her time, but there were second- and third-hand tales from after. For me, they give substance to the raw names and dates. 

Georgina had an unimaginably difficult and short life which illustrates how hard it could be in the nineteenth century. It can’t have been a very happy life. She had a difficult childhood, illegitimate children, a scoundrel of a husband who deserted her, and she died long before her time. 

Her mother was unmarried, and her brother - her only sibling - died aged 11. Her mother then married a widower named James Tasker. Although James was later supportive of Georgina and her children (he may have paid for the family photographs), she was left with her grandparents through childhood. 

James Tasker was my Great-Great Grandfather’s brother. When Georgina’s mother became Elizabeth Tasker, family members later came to think that Georgina was also a Tasker, whereas she was not related to them at all except through her mother’s marriage. It caused much confusion. 

Even more confusingly, one of Georgina’s descendants had children with one of James’ from his first marriage, which made their later children both half-siblings and 4th cousins. That may be a detail too far, but it begins to show the complexities involved.   

Georgina had eight children: two before marriage, four during, and two more after her husband deserted her. The first, Sabina, born when Georgina was 18, was said to have been by the son of a Leeds doctor with whom she went into service. I suppose that pregnant servants were commonplace in the 1870s. I find my mind racing to imagine the goings on in the house. The doctor’s son would not have carried any blame, of course. 

Georgina then married George Coulson in 1879, and had four children. I spoke to their grandson, then 89, in 2003. He said that George Coulson was a big fellow, a bit rough looking, who earned extra money through boxing, taking on all-comers in travelling fairground boxing booths. He accumulated enough to go to a world heavyweight championship fight in America around 1890. He stayed. It was thought he may have had another family in Texas. When Georgina’s last two children were born in 1894 and 1897, no father was named. I remember their descendants as having light hair and scary pale eyes. I was terrified of two boys just a little older than me. 

Georgina died from Erysipelas in 1902, aged 45. This was a common and very nasty streptococcal infection causing a swollen, bright-red skin lesion, most often spreading over the nose and cheeks. Infection was usually through a cut and could lead to septicaemia (or blood poisoning as it would then have been called). Penicillin now clears it up in a few days. The youngest children were brought up by their older sisters.  

It is not clear when George returned, but it was certainly before the 1920s. None of the family would have anything to do with him. I think they probably held him responsible for their mother’s early death, leaving her in poverty, with all the difficulties and illness it brings. They said he had gone off and left then when they were young children, so they were not going to help him now. Sabina would not have him in the house. He had to sleep on the steam room floor of his brother’s farm. He died aged 92 in 1947, in Selby workhouse. 

Most of Georgina’s children had many children of their own, yearly all in Rawcliffe. I previously wrote about walking along the High Street with my grandma, who described almost everyone we passed as her “cousin”, although they may have been second cousins, half cousins, or similar. She recited their names so often I can still do it too: “There was Aunty Bina, and she had Blanche, Tom, Gladys, Lena, Olga, Fred, Ena, Dolly, Albert, and Jack”.

Now consider this. Sabina’s husband was my great-grandfather’s cousin on my father’s side. That makes their children doubly-related to me through both my father’s family and my mother’s. This is what happens when five-eighths of your ancestry is from the same small area. 

If the Blue Line bus ...  

Signal Boxes

Another of my railway books. It would be hard to out-nerd me on this one: Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Traffic Control Maps, Volume 3 Yorkshire 1895, by T. T. Sutcliffe. It is a book of sketch maps and other details about signal boxes on the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway. 

It is mainly maps and tables. One of the simplest maps is of our local line between Shepley and Penistone. To the North, it continues to Huddersfield, and in the opposite direction from Penistone, after initially turning West, it continues South and East to Sheffield Victoria or Barnsley. 

At Penistone we can also see the junction to the Woodhead Tunnel route to Manchester, which closed to passengers in 1970, and completely in 1981. The Yorkshire section is now a cycle path, and trains between Penistone and Sheffield are diverted through Barnsley, increasing the journey time from about 15 minutes to an hour. Sheffield Victoria railway station is also now no more. 

The map also shows the branch to Clayton West which as well as passengers, also carried coal. Building a tunnel on the line involved shattering large quantities of slate at Skelmanthorpe, which is still known locally as Shat. The branch line closed in 1983, and the track bed is now used by the volunteer-run narrow-gauge Kirklees Light Railway, a tourist attraction. 

The book contains few photographs, and the few there are make the book even more esoteric because they are all of signal box architecture. One shows the Clayton West Junction box which is close to the top of the sketch map. According to the text, this box is of interest because of the unusual design of the eaves. The Note 8 referred to, gives details of the original designer. I told you it was nerdy. To find images of wider interest you have to look on the internet. 

As well as the maps, the book lists all signal boxes (or cabins as the author prefers to call them) in the region, together with statistics such as their sizes and the number of levers they contain. The map symbols mark bridges, tunnels, level crossings, water troughs, and other features. Signal boxes are named and shown as a circled cross. 

The book also covers other lines I know well: such as around Huddersfield and Leeds, and the journey I used to make regularly between Goole and Leeds through Rawcliffe, Snaith, Knottingly, and Methley Junction when I first started work. Some maps are much more complicated, such as Wakefield. Mainly for my own interest, here is the Goole page. 

But instead of more signal box maps and images, I would rather show this enormous and incredible mural (widely available on the internet) at Manchester Victoria station, which shows the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway network from Liverpool to Hull. It is thought to date from 1904. How’s that for a Monday mural, Andrew in Melbourne (High Riser)? Enlarged (open in new tab), the whole network can be made out clearly.  

I also like the lists of shipping destinations, especially from Goole. The railway company had its own fleet of Lancashire and Yorkshire steamers, nicknamed the “Lanky Boats”. Goole was once around the tenth busiest port in the country (by tonnage), and a small crowd used to assemble each tide time on the Lock Hill to see the ships coming up and going away. 

This is Volume 3 of 4, Yorkshire 1895. Volumes 1 and 2 are Lancashire 1895 and 1922, and Volume 4 is Yorkshire 1922.They were published in the early 1980s. It must truly have been a labour of love, and I can only admire the creator of something so focused and detailed.  

Class Journey

When I describe myself as working class, it irritates my wife and family no end. 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” they say. “You had professional jobs in accountancy, computing, and universities. Your father employed fifteen people, and owned a four-bedroomed detached house with a double garage and garden in a nice part of town. He had a good car. You had books and music at home. How can that be working class?” 

I protest that much of that came later, but they won’t have it and excited voices are raised. They don’t like the idea that if I am working class, it might make them working class too. 

“I would not have married you if you had been working class,” my wife once said. 

No, we are not working class now. The kids were embarrassed at school to be called “posh” because they did not have particularly strong local accents. But I grew up working class. 

Like many of my age and background, especially from the North of England, I have been on a kind of class journey, and changed. It was not a deliberate or conscious change, but without it, I would not have been able to do the things I did. Class was, and to a large extent remains, a big influence on opportunity in England today. We make scores of micro-judgements about each other’s backgrounds all the time, and treat each other accordingly. It influences whether or not we are offered a particular job or promotion, or who we select as friends or partners. 

The street where we lived until I was 6, although it seemed shabbier then

It is largely the circumstances of your childhood that define you: how you lived and the friends you had. We lived in a rented two-bedroomed terraced house until I was six, and then moved up in the world to a three-bedroomed semi. My dad worked as part shot assistant, and part salesman travelling around the local villages three days a week. Some days he was not home until seven or eight. On Thursday mornings (half-day closing) he went to work in a boiler suit to clean and maintain the firm’s four vehicles, which took a lot of time in the forties and fifties. He worked on Saturdays and had only two week’s holiday a year. 

Like many ‘housewives’, my mother did not work. Ordinary jobs paid enough to bring up a family quite comfortably on one income in those days. Work was social, without the intensity it can now have. 

We then lived in one of the semi-detached houses on the left until I was 18

It might be more accurate to say we were well-brought-up working class. We did not rent a council house, and my dad was not a manual worker. He took over the business when I was 12, but we did not move to the larger house until a few months before I left school. I never really lived there. I moved on to shared houses in Leeds with ordinary lads from ordinary parts of Wakefield and Manchester. 

Let me list how the fathers of my schoolday friends earned their livings: dock worker, railway labourer, engine driver, joiner, council lorry driver, gas meter reader, clothing factory worker, scaffolder, stone mason. They were the children I mixed and played with, and was influenced by. Many lived in council or rented housing. A little above were a butcher with his own shop, a chiropodist, an electricity board clerk, and a man who selected ships’ crew, but it was a working class area in a northern working class town. We used local pronunciations such as “watter” (water), “owt” and “mowt” (anything and nothing), “whee-ere” and “thee-ere” (where and there), and “moo-ere” (more). I knew the difference, but did not mix with any children from professional families except, in my late teens, one whose parents were teachers. Some years later, I felt perfectly at home working in a canning factory. 

A few years ago, I came across an old cassette tape recorded at a friend’s house when I was around 17. We switched on the recorder and let it run: five of us I think. The accents, the bad language, how we spoke about girls at school: you would be in no doubt that we were uncouth working class. It made me so uncomfortable I threw the tape away. 

We moved to a large house in this (then) leafy part of town when I was 18

Although I soon moved to shared houses in Leeds.
The first was a wrong-way-round house, with entrance at what was built as the rear.
The front entrance was only on foot.

But I am speaking about the economic working class. There are other indicators. Culturally, we were not typical. My dad had educated interests. He read a lot, listened to the BBC Home Service (now Radio 4), and liked poetry. He was a churchgoer, and followed up the monthly Bible Readings they sent. We had encyclopaedias and books, and my dad talked to me about them, and I read them. He involved me in his Thursday jobs around the house, such as maintaining bicycles and cleaning boots, and interested me in things around town such as ships in the docks, the railways, and the shipyard. I had hobbies and used the public library a lot. I had good general knowledge. 

Mum also read a lot, and was in a drama group. Although she was clever, and could have gone to the Grammar School, she chose to stay at her village school and left at fourteen. She helped in her mother’s grocery shop until she married, where they provided tea (i.e. an evening meal) for my father’s travellers out late on their rounds. 

I think this background helped get me into the Grammar School where I had a good education and intelligent friends. The Grammar Schools were created to supply the country’s need for educated professionals: social engineering on a grand scale. It took me into the accountancy profession, and contact with privately educated colleagues and business owners. We had to get on with everyone from office and factory workers to the rich. My accent began to shift, my language became more elaborate, and I began to understand how the world worked. 

Going late to university and working in higher education around the country brought further sophistications. My accent still reveals my Yorkshire roots, and some even detect which part of Yorkshire, but it is unsettling to encounter those who never moved away, and realise just how different I am now. They often sound uneducated. 

Do genetics influence class? How did my great-grandfather lift himself from a background of agricultural labourers to become a ship’s master after running away to sea? And my grandfather successfully started his own business, and employed others. Another great-grandfather was active in the Methodist church, with wide religious knowledge. My mother’s father worked in a paper mill, but his family had (and still has) an almost innate understanding of all things mechanicals. They can mend almost anything. These things run through families for generations, although the genetic elements no doubt interact with other factors in complex ways. 

Perhaps class differences are no longer what they were, but they are still there in the background. It shows in what you do, your interests, how you spend your time, your friends, the language you use, how much wealth you have, and many other things. The private education sector perpetuates class differences by handing more opportunities to those whose families have paid the enormous fees. I don’t want to make “chip-on-the-shoulder” excuses, but my culturally rich family background is nothing compared to the advantages some have. 

I did all right in the end, and it has been mainly down to merit. Some academic achievements cannot be bought. I hope that is not being smug. Although selection was not entirely unbiased, I regret the abolition of the state Grammar Schools and the social mobility they gave to so many from ordinary backgrounds like mine. 

My Picture Book of Ships

New Month Old Post: first posted 25th July, 2016

On the bottom shelf of my dad’s bookcase were some of his childhood books. He was nearly as daft as me for keeping things. There might have been many more treasures but for mum’s propensity for throwing things away, although the bookcase was sacrosanct, even to her.

I always knew he had them, of course, but never took the time for anything more than a superficial glance at the pictures. He must have treasured them greatly. All have his name and address inside and some also the date.

The earliest and most dilapidated is My Picture Book of Ships which he got in 1926 at the age of five. To a child at that time the cover must have looked thrilling: the vast bulk of the ocean liner soaring proud above the waterline, the towering hull and funnels, the dense spray from the bow-wave hinting at the rumbling power of the great engines and propellers, the huge anchor tight against the ship’s side. People yearned to travel in the luxury of these floating palaces. They were the dream machines of their day: the supersonic jets, the Lamborghinis, the spaceliners, the high speed trains, the earth moving machines, the ice road truckers. Even their names implied substance and opulence: Majestic, Britannic, Olympic, Leviathan, Edinburgh Castle.  

We used to look at it together when I was little. We studied the sixty-two illustrations but never read it. The text tells of two children, Tom and Betty, who ceaselessly ask Father questions about ships. They also play at ships: Tom is Captain and Father the pilot, while Chief Officer Mother sleeps “on watch” below and poor Petty Officer Betty gets ordered around.

Father of course answers all their questions patiently, knowledgeably, and at length. He tells them about how the voyage of an ocean liner is organized, how sailors are trained, shipbuilding, shipwrecks, coal and oil power, sail, cargo vessels, lifeboats, lighthouses and lightships, paddle steamers, and ferries. How he knew all this stuff is not clear. He just did. Perhaps he was a seaman himself, or maybe like my own dad his grandfather had been a Captain and his cousin was at sea. Oh yes, all dads knew everything there was to know about ships; especially when they had grown up in a Yorkshire port.

Dads could describe and explain all the pictures: cargo being unloaded at London docks, the Harwich-Zeebrugge railway ferry with wagons on board, a big ship under construction inside a massive gantry, and boys lining a high mast at a sailors’ training school. I certainly would not have wanted to have been the baby thrown through the air to a lifeboat in a rescue at sea. My dad used to pick me up and pretend to act it out.

But that is not what used to frighten me most. I was terrified of the strange double-page cartoons inside the front and back covers. Why a factual book about ships should contain such irreverent drawings is a mystery. They are not even proper ships. They show traumatised people in canoes, punts and rowing boats on an overcrowded river, being attacked by pigs, cows and swans, knocked overboard by clumsy oarsmen or tormented by badly controlled fishing lines. They all have ugly ears, gaping mouths and grotesque faces. I could never bear to look. It is still difficult now.

As Nick Ross used to say: “Don’t have nightmares. Do sleep well.”

My Picture Book of Ships published by Ward Lock & Co. (c1922) is believed to be out of copyright.

Record Box - 5, Jethro Tull

Continuing to examine my old vinyl records before passing them on.

For many years, Jethro Tull was my favourite band by far, as shown by the 18 LPs (albums) in my record box. I was initially attracted in 1969 by the unusual sound of their single ‘Living In The Past’, which I now know was due to the 5/4 (five beats to the bar) time signature, which was and still is unusual in popular music. I went out and bought their LP ‘This Was’ straight away. It did not sound much like the single, having been released a year earlier. 

‘This Was’ had a strong rhythm and blues element, due to the influence of Mick Abrahams who left the band after its release, leaving Ian Anderson as the main creative force. But I liked it enough to buy the second LP, ‘Stand Up’. This was more like the single, with prominent bass, unusual tunes, arrangements and rhythms, and more of an ‘underground’ progressive rock feel. I was also entertained by the band’s unconventional subversive element, and their seventeenth-century rustic appearance (we had learnt at school about the inventor of the seed drill, whose name the band has adopted). One newspaper described them as a mixture of “pop, jazz, and jokery.”

The third LP, ‘Benefit’, hooked me completely. On first hearing the track ‘Play In Time’, I interpreted it as beginning on the beat instead of the up-beat, until it slowly and magically shifted into its correct position. The effect was sensational, but once heard correctly, it was never possible to experience the magic again. 

In Leeds, Roger the PhD student, one of the house sharers, claimed to like only classical music and considered pop and rock to be trivial rubbish. One day in 1972, he came in just as I started to listen to the fifth LP, ‘Thick as A Brick’. He sat down and quietly listened all through, fascinated by the complexities, musical sophistication, variety of themes, time signatures and tempo changes. He declared it to be at last popular music worth listening to. It validated my musical choices because a number of other friends did not like Jethro Tull at all, and thought I had lost my senses. “Ian Anderson sounds like a sheep”, one said. Another friend saw them live and thought ‘Thick as A Brick’ was brilliant, but too difficult for the band to play.  There was a lot in the press about how original they were, but popular classical conductor André Previn dismissed it on a television chat show as nothing not done before. Nowadays ‘Thick as A Brick’ is considered a progressive rock classic. 

Ian Anderson’s lyrics were also clever and original. The BBC radio presenter Alan Freeman was an admirer. I remember him drawing attention to the song ‘Weathercock’ on his Sunday afternoon programme in 1978 when the folk-rock LP ‘Heavy Horses’ came out. Does the weather cock reflect or determine the weather?  

        Good morning weathercock, how’d you fare last night?
        Did the cold wind bite you, did you face up to the fright?
        When the leaves spin from October and whip around your tail
        Did you shake from the blast and did you shiver through the gale?

        And give us direction, the best of goodwill
        Put us in touch with your fair winds
        Sing to us softly, hum evening’s song
        Tell us what the blacksmith has done for you

        Do you simply reflect changes in the patterns of the sky?
        Or is it true to say the weather heeds the twinkle in your eye?
        Do you fight the rush of winter? Do you hold snowflakes at bay?
        Do you lift the dawn sun from the fields and help him on his way?

        Good morning weathercock, make this day bright
        Put us in touch with your fair winds
        Sing to us softly, hum evening’s song
        Point the way to better days, we can share with you

In this YouTube video of a live performance in 2005, Anderson’s flute, the musicianship of the other band members at that time, the way the track builds to the instrumental section at the end, and the overall arrangement, remind us just how good they were. 

I bought just about every vinyl LP for twenty years, and then one on cassette tape. I saw them play live in Berlin in early 1982 when they played new tracks from ‘The Broadsword and the Beast’. I wondered what the Anglo-Saxon runes were on the cover, and spent ages painstakingly decoding them, guided by letter frequency. They spell out the verse of the title song, “I see a dark sail on the horizon, set under a black cloud that hides the sun. Bring me my broadsword and clear understanding. Bring me my cross of gold as a talisman.”

A few years later, around 1990, tied up by work and family, I stopped buying or listening much to music at all. More recently, I bought two DVDs of Jethro Tull performances, and interviews with Ian Anderson and other band members. It dismayed me how Ian Anderson’s subversive humour had been replaced by an entitled pompousness. Perhaps it had already started by 1985 when he recorded the LP ‘A Classic Case’ in which the band played their music with the London Symphony Orchestra. It must be difficult not to let all that success go to your head. 

As well as the LPs, I have the 1971 EP, ‘Life Is A Long Song’, (“But the tune ends too soon for us all”). So true. A funeral tune, perhaps.  

It would be difficult to choose a favourite track, but the title track ‘Heavy Horses’ would be a good contender. I love this nostalgically sentimental video with (after 70 seconds) its images of the beautiful animals that used to work our lands. I also like the less well-known but in some ways similar title track ‘Too Old To Rock And Roll, Too Young To Die’. As for Living In The Past, well I suppose that is what I do most of the time in this blog. 

Please Help The Children

Among my oldest photographs is this fascinating image, probably from 1907. The pretty girl marked with an X is my lovely grandma, or Nanna as we called her, who would then have been 11 or 12. I previously wrote about her here.  

I do not know the names of the others in the picture. The surly young lad lounging suspiciously against the wall behind them would probably be questioned these days, but that is just how ordinary people would have looked in their working clothes then. 

Like her father and many others at that time, Nanna was an active churchgoer: Methodists. The group are collecting for charity: the placard shows pictures of impoverished children, some with crutches, and says “Twelve branches - London, Provinces, Canada” followed by the names of clergymen. “Please help the children to-day”. The light-coloured box appears to say “Children’s Home Appeal 1907”. 

I can identify the location precisely. This second picture, also from the early 20th century, shows it to be at the top of the underpass - we called it the subway - outside Goole railway station. I am informed that the chimney in the background was that of Short’s ginger beer factory in Pasture Road, long gone. 

The pub on the far left is The Station Hotel. This can be seen more clearly in these two later photographs from the 1950s or 1960s judging by the cars. In one, the wall inside the top of the subway is visible. There was also another subway at the other side of the road. Pedestrians did not always use them, though. 

Together, the photographs identify the location of my grandma’s group beyond doubt. 

Today, the subways remain, but the railway station (I refuse to call it a train station) has been rebuilt, the sidings and goods yard sanitised and pedestrianised, and the railway gates replaced by half-barriers. The Station Hotel, a scene of my misspent youth, has been converted into flats. The part of the wall where the young lad stood remains, but beyond, where my grandma’s group were, has been demolished. 

No one from the 1907 picture can still be alive. My grandma died aged 58 in 1954. She would have been a strong positive influence; she was caring, intelligent, easy to talk with, and full of sound advice. Her mother died in 1910 when she was 13, she lost friends during the First World War when she was in service in Southport, Lancashire, she brought my father through polio and his sister through rheumatic fever which left her with a heart condition, and lived through the Second World War. Apart from possibly a couple of quite distant cousins, I am now the only one who can directly remember her, and they are only vague impressions. 

Lastly I ask - now old and chill -
If aught of her remain unperished still;
And find, in me alone, a feeble spark,
Dying amid the dark. 

Streptocarpus Blue Leila

Otherwise known as South African Primrose. 

Split into three in March, and all have survived. I find the trick is not to give them too much water. That kills them off. Let them dry out completely and then water very sparingly and they will give a stunning display. They are not yet anywhere near their best. 

Neither am I, after a pretty desperate week, with a spell in hospital which knocked the stuffing out of me. I feel frightened and depressed at the hopelessness of my situation, and have not been here much at all. I have done a few things today, but it is a struggle to keep positive. A bottle of beer will help; maybe a Newcastle Brown Ale. They said to restrict fluid intake because of my low sodium levels, so maybe half a bottle. 

Hope to have a new post in the next day or so. 

RESPONSE TO COMMENTS: Thank you all for your positive support and comments on this post, and apologies for sounding so down. Things such as the Blue Leia provide interest to keep me going for now, but for the past week I have felt very much in limbo, a bit like in your final year at school when you are waiting to discover what will happen to you regarding jobs or continued education. I have to keep fighting. 

Switzerland 1975

What we were supposed to be able to see was this: 

The 8,000 foot (2,400m) Bunderchrinde Pass between Adelboden and Kandersteg was one of the highlights, but not as we expected. We should have been able to look back to the sunny Adelboden valley and its surrounding peaks, and ahead to the main chain of the Bernese Alps and mountains. 

What we actually got was this; it was the 23rd August. 

The idea was pretty audacious, arrogant even. Having backpacked across Rannoch Moor in Scotland, following a line on a map, carrying our tents and equipment, we thought we would do the same across the Swiss Alps. Five of us caught the train to Gstaad to walk the fifty or so miles to Grindelwald. 

No one had heard of the Via Alpina then, or any other long distance trails; or at least we hadn’t. And except near the Eiger and Jungfrau, there were no signposts or footpaths as now. It was map and compass, following our own route. We had a real sense of adventure. I remember spending days poring over maps to work out start and end points accessible by train. There were no other walkers in the wilder parts. It would be very different now. Despite the awful weather, we think it was one of the best trips we did. We still talk about it. 

We especially remember the humour. I could recount so many things: such as how we were plagued by the mountain pigs and cattle. We collected wood to build fires, but it did not keep them away. The pigs kept trying to get in the tent, and a cow ran off with Neville’s special private bad of Gold Blend instant coffee. He had to make to with Maxwell House like the rest of us. Dudule, who takes great delight in teasing Neville mercilessly, got the blame for years. He says that by now there must be a whole herd of Alpine cows that will eat only Gold Blend and nothing less. At Lenk, we escaped to an isolated hay loft for the night. 

The weather for the first few days was not too bad, but then it changed. When we reached Adelboden, we spent a planned rest day on the mountain, and walked behind the ice. Gavin, later a vet, and Kev, about to become a geography and geology teacher, kept us informed about the plants, insects, and geology. As Neville waved his pipe in response, the stem flew off and fell into a crevasse. But he is nothing if not well organised, and had thought to bring spare bits. He had been smoking that same pipe for years. It had had four new bowls and three new stems, but it was still the same pipe he had been smoking for years.  

Then the heavens opened. We sheltered from heavy rain all day behind a hut. My unusual capacity to do absolutely nothing for hours came in useful that day. Soaked through, we gave up and booked into a hostel, and dried out in front of a roaring fire. Kev was not happy that some cooked meat in his rucksack began to smell awful and turn green. It pervaded all else in there for several days.  

We set off for Kandersteg over the Bunderchrinde pass. “For expert hikers only”, guides now say, but Kev, who is pretty good at mountaincraft, kept us safe. As we climbed it began to snow heavily, but we reasoned that snow is not as wet as rain. We reached Kandersteg and booked into another hostel for two nights. It is untrue that snow is not as wet as rain. 

Kleine Scheideg: the man with the stick demonstrates how
to move pigs, cows and Neville (just out of the picture).

Hopelessly behind schedule, we took the train to Lauterbrunnen, walked up to Wengen, and camped. The Swiss mountain railways are incredible. After another train to Kleine Scheideg we made our way to the Eiger foothills where we camped again. I doubt you could put your tent anywhere you wanted now as we could then. 

Like Chris Bonington, whose mountaineering books I soaked up, I have climbed on the North Face of the Eiger - well, the first 100 feet (30m) of it. 

Our time up, we made our way to Grindelwald and a series of trains home. The train north along the French border was interminable, about ten hours, but I can still list most of the places where it stopped: Basel, Mulhouse, Metz, Lille, ...

Some more pictures:

Haunted Houses

New Month Old Post: first posted 1st March, 2016
It could do with being shorter. Since originally posted, the 1921 Census has become available

The 1939 Register
 
Somewhat obsessively, I have been an active researcher of my family history for over twenty years now, buying countless genealogical resources and subscriptions. Along the way have been some surprising and even astonishing findings, as well as many mundane, but in February when the findmypast site released a new resource, The 1939 Register, I experienced an entirely new reaction.

Rather like a census, The 1939 Register records the names and addresses of everyone living in England and Wales on the 29th September, 1939, just after the outbreak of the Second World War. It did not go into as much detail as a normal census, but was carried out in a similar way for wartime purposes: to issue national identification and ration cards, to administer conscription, and to plan population movements in the event of mass evacuation. It was later used by the National Health Service at its inception in 1948. As no census was taken in 1941, and as the records for the 1931 census were destroyed by fire during the war, the Register is the most complete survey of the population between the as yet unreleased censuses of 1921 and 1951.

What makes it different for me is that, as a snapshot taken just over a decade before I was born, The 1939 Register is almost contemporary. Other population surveys such as the 1911 census were from so long ago that just about everything has since changed, which will also be true of the 1921 census when they finally let us see it, but much of the information recorded in The 1939 Register remained unchanged into the nineteen-fifties. Many of the same people were at the same addresses as I remember them. If my parents were still around they would be fascinated.

I can see the two-bedroom terraced house my parents rented from 1946, where I first lived. It is occupied by a canal tugman and his family. They had brought up six children there. Wherever did they put them all? 

The people next door are the same as I remember, as are those at the corner shop next-door-but-one. Across the road is the same gentlemen’s hairdresser, then newly married. He would remain there with his wife, childless, for the next thirty years. It was where I used to be sent for my hair cut – short back and sides the only style on offer – every three or four weeks throughout the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties. Once old enough to go unaccompanied, I would wait my turn in the smoky den of his barber’s shop (it would never have been called anything so epicene as a salon) trying to make sense of the swaggering conceits of the older customers. From time to time the hairdresser’s timid wife would materialise at the through-door from the house to leave a cup of tea, and then dematerialise as silently as she had arrived. 

In the mid nineteen-fifties we moved to a new address, up in the world to a small semi-detached house. The 1939 Register shows it occupied by the shipwright’s family we bought it from. The adjoining neighbours were still there when we moved in, father, mother and grown-up children. The mother and father would die in the nineteen-sixties but one of their daughters would remain in the house, unmarried, for the next sixty years. The neighbours at the other side are a young widow still in her thirties and her elderly mother. They too were still there when we moved in. The mother died soon afterwards, but the widow remained long after we had left until she died at an advanced age in the nineteen-nineties. She became a close family friend. Up and down the street are so many other familiar names: the master mariner; the butcher; the mother and her daughter who in turn became the mother of the boys we played with when they visited their grandma. 

The Register is more flexibly searchable than almost any previous resource. Whereas the censuses, for example, can be trawled only in limited ways, The 1939 Register search is so powerful you can find almost anyone, even when they are partially mistranscribed in the index. The main limitation is that you are not supposed to be able to see anyone born less than a hundred years ago, although often you can. In most households, such as my father’s parents’, the children are blacked out, and only the names of the adults are shown. But despite being born in the nineteen-twenties, my mother can be seen with her parents, her name amended after marriage, a result of parts of the Register continuing in use with the National Health Service until 1991, after she had died.

You can find just about any house built before 1939. In Leeds, I can see the elderly couple I lodged with in 1970 at the same Kirkstall address in 1939, although then they are not elderly. The husband is a railway clerk. The address also has one ‘closed’ line for their daughter who would later marry a corporation surveyor and have one son. At other places I lived, much later in some cases, the 1939 residents had moved on long before my time. One through-terrace is occupied by an engineer’s turner and his wife, both born in the eighteen-seventies. Another is occupied by a wool foreman with his wife and four children. The only back-to-back I lived in is the home of a shoe repairer and his wife, both in their mid-twenties. At yet another mid-terrace there are nine residents: a couple born in the eighteen-seventies and seven grown-up children. The father and one of the sons are asphalters. Again, how did they fit them all in?

Some houses I have known were larger. In the Levenshulme area of Manchester, in the early nineteen-eighties, I lived in a three-bedroom, bay-windowed terrace with front and back gardens. Next door lived a widow who in 1939 is there with her husband and mother-in-law. The husband, the neighbours and the occupants of my address have mainly clerical occupations. I still have some of the next door neighbour’s late husband’s drill bits and an ancient tobacco tin full of wire staples which she gave me when clearing out her shed. The hardware was probably there in 1939 but the Register lists only people. I lived in yet grander surroundings in the Avenues area of Hull. In my day they were already what are now called HMOs (Houses in Multiple Occupation) but in 1939 they were occupied by the likes of Ministers of Religion, newspaper reporters, merchants, lecturers, collectors of taxes and people of private means. 

Like having the gift of premonition, if you are near my age or older, you look through The 1939 Register and find you knew or can remember so many of those named in it. You know what happened to them, who they married, who their children were, and when they died, or at the very least, what became of their houses. Do they return as ghosts to light their coal fires in the mornings, the husbands going off to work and the children to school as they must have done so many times? Do the wives cook and clean for their return? Do they relive their happy days, sad days, sunny days, rainy days, Easters, Christmases, an holidays? Will we?