Not So Smart

Two things: energy meters and me. 

A succession of energy suppliers has been pestering us for years to have a smart meter. We’ve held out this long because we don’t see the point. It’s for their benefit, not ours. The energy suppliers are paid to fit them, and meters don’t save you any money if you don’t use energy unnecessarily. 

But we don’t think it will be all that long until they become compulsory, and as EDF were offering us a fixed rate tariff that cut £150 off the annual bill provided we had a smart meter, it seemed the right time to do it. We checked their calculations and signed up two months ago, made an appointment for the meter installation, and got the lower rate immediately. 

The installer couldn’t do it. First of all, there is not enough space on the electricity supply base board. Secondly, because the gas meter is in the garage at the other side of a double brick wall four yards from the electricity meter in the house, the signal strength would probably be too weak for the two to communicate. He took some photographs and said that EDF would be in touch about what happens next. 

They weren’t. All we had was emails saying we must have a smart meter to remain on the fixed tariff. So I phoned them. It seems we continue to wait. Apparently, they cannot alter the tariff while the matter remains open. 

I estimate it needs at least £500 of work to resolve the problem with the electricity base board. I hope they don’t say it is our responsibility. And that would not solve the issue with the gas meter anyway, so we would still have to submit manual readings. 

Smart meter roll out in the U.K. is a farce. It was all supposed to be finished five years ago. The mistake was to give the energy suppliers their way to fit them piecemeal, rather than have the national power grid install whole areas at a time. Private industry knows best, of course! We all pay for the inefficiency through increased bills, while the energy suppliers rake in the payments to give to shareholders. 

I am not so smart either. First of all I had another fit and a night in hospital. It was two days after flu and covid jabs, and I also got the fine balance of hydration, nutrition, temperature, and tiredness wrong that day, but whether they had anything to do with it, I don’t know. 

I am also struggling more generally. In addition to the reading difficulties written about previously, the pills I take to poison the tumours also poison me. One side-effect is to deplete blood albumin. It should measure 35-50 g/L. Mine is 21. 

Albumin transports all kinds of things around the body, so the consequences are challenging and many. When you have a serious condition you learn more about human biology than ever they managed to teach you at school. 

Reading with text-to-speech is slow, and I feel very tired much of the time. Posting and commenting take a lot of time and effort. I no longer comment as much as I would like, but I read more than I comment. I enjoy your posts, and continue to do what I can.

This is not to seek sympathy, but just to say how things are. I am more interested in your thoughts about smart meters. 

Farmwashing

I have a pre-school memory of going into town with Mum to do the shopping. She stacked it on and around me in the pushchair. 

In those days you had to shop for fresh food two or three times a week. No fridges for us until the 1960s. Meat kept only for so long in a mesh-fronted meat safe. Milk was delivered daily to the door. You had to buy from different shops: the grocer, the butcher, the greengrocer, and others. Nearly all produce was locally grown and in season. Life was simpler and less frantic. Most mothers did not work, and one ordinary wage could support a family. 

Now, of course, you can buy anything you want at any time of the year: fresh peas and new potatoes in Winter, strawberries at Christmas, and oranges at other times. You never saw blueberries at all. It is flown in cheaply from all over the world. 

Perhaps we expect too much. The toll on the environment is enormous, therefore many prefer to spend a little more and buy locally-grown, ethically-produced meat, fruit, and vegetables. To meet this need, supermarkets offer special brands with idyllic-sounding farm names on the front of the packet. It implies that the product is from those farms. 

This is deliberately misleading. Behind the image of quaint British family farms usually lies a reality of industrial-scale production, with much imported from abroad. Three of the biggest producers have a combined annual turnover of £4.8 billion. The ‘farm’ on the label, such as Tesco’s Redmere Farms, does not exist. It is just a marketing device. At the same time, the real farms this imitates are being driven out of business as their own products are devalued. Large numbers of small farmers fear having to give up their farms, and few believe that supermarket claims to support British farming reflect their actual behaviour.

This is in effect theft, stealing the goodwill of the small farmers. Such cynical manipulation of customers and consumers by big businesses of all kinds (we can probably think of others), with the pursuit of profit above all sense of morality, needs to stop. I can get very angry about it.  

We buy some of our own vegetables from Riverford who have created a website and four short videos with more about Farmwashing. You will never look at a supermarket vegetable aisle in the same way again. 

The website and videos are at www.stopfarmwashing.co.uk and also on YouTube:  

Reginald

I keep going on about how family history research can turn up fascinating and unexpected things. My wife’s great-great-grandmother, who was widowed at 19, re-married a high official of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, 40 years her senior (23 and 63). We therefore find well-connected, upper-class cousins amongst the distant relatives. Many were odd, or potty, or both. One of my favourites is this splendid gentleman, John Reginald Rowallane Armytage Moore. He was born in County Cavan in 1876. 

Reginald lived in Ireland until his early twenties, and then moved to Vancouver as an estate agent. There, in 1909 aged 33, he met and married 22-year-old Amy (Maisie) Campbell-Johnston. Their story then becomes distinctly unusual. 

On paper it seemed a perfect match. He was high-born Anglo-Irish, and she was descended from the first Marquess of Montrose. But Maisie left after just a few months. She told one relative it was because Reginald was gay, but I am not so sure. You will have to make up your own mind. Not that it would matter much these days, but it did then. 

By 1911, Reginald is back in London alone, still an estate agent, while Maisie has gone to California to stay with a friend called George Mordecai. Soon afterwards, Reginald moved to Sydney, Australia, where a newspaper reports he had joined the rowing club, having previously won competitive rowing competitions in Canada. 

He remained in the southern hemisphere up to and through the First World War, serving with different forces in different countries. He spent a period in the Matabeleland Mounted Police in Southern Rhodesia, and then served in the forces in both New Zealand and Australia. One would have expected someone of his background and class to have been an officer, but it appears he was only an ordinary serviceman. He seems to have found it easy to move around. 

In New Zealand, he was one of the 23-strong relief force that sailed to Samoa in 1916 to replace part of the garrison there. New Zealand forces had been the first anywhere in the world to recapture land back from the Germans, i.e. Samoa, and the relief force was made up of men aged 40 and over to free up younger men to fight in Europe. 

He turns up in Australia early in 1918. He enlisted as a gunner in the 12th Field Artillery Brigade, which sailed for Europe in June that year. The photograph is from this period. They arrived too late for active service, but were engaged in post-Armistice duties in France. He was discharged in England in 1919. 

For the rest of his life, he lived in a flat in Earls Court Road from where he ran a dancing school, a highly unusual occupation for a man of his background and era. It does not seem to have been particularly successful. Although both his mother and his sister treated him more generously in their Wills than other siblings, excusing his debts, and setting up trusts to provide him with a good income, he left only £167 when he died in 1951. Surprisingly, he left this to Miss Kathleen Fricker, one of three unmarried sisters who lived in Wandsworth. Who was she? His Will had been made over 20 years earlier. 

This leaves a lot of gaps and questions. He apparently had a lady friend, but was also a man’s man and adventurer. How was he able to move easily between military postings, or was he forced to? And the school of dance? He sounds every bit as dashing as the photograph suggests. Ships’ passenger lists describe him as 6 feet tall, with dark complexion, brown hair and blue eyes. What could be more arresting than a handsome, six-foot Matabeleland Mounted Policeman? I bet he looked grand in the uniform. 

The South African Mounted Police in 1960 probably had a similar uniform

It is not clear what his relationship was with Kathleen Fricker, but had they wanted to marry, they would not have been able to, because he remained married to Maisie. And before blaming him for the shortness of that marriage, it is worth hearing a little more of Maisie’s story, which is even more bizarre. 

Maisie Armytage-Moore was a larger-than-life character who dressed in black, smoked cigars, and loved boxing and American Indians. Three years before marrying Reginald, while still a teenager, she became friends with a notorious American stagecoach robber, Bill Miner. He taught her to ride and built her a skating rink. Another friend was a North American Indian girl, Lena Vogt, who taught her about Indian ways and the outdoors. This was later very significant. Also around this time, she wanted to elope with a Christian preacher, the George Mordecai mentioned earlier. 

Three years after her short marriage, she went off to the USA with a man called Martin Joseph Murphy, a lumberjack and part-time boxer, with whom she managed a boxing troupe travelling around logging camps. She also worked for a union called International Workers of the World, which in 1919 was involved in a serious labour riot in Centralia, Washington, and she had to return to Canada. She had five children with her, presumably all born to Murphy. 

Around 1927, she began to work for a lawyer called Tom Hurley, an advocate for American Indian justice. Maisie also founded ‘The Native Voice’, a publication for and about first nation people. She was still known as Armytage-Moore, but was by now with Tom Hurley. She seems not to have divorced because of her Episcopalian faith, and could not have remarried because Hurley was Roman Catholic. Maisie only married Tom Hurley after Reginald died in 1951.  

Maisie became very well-known as a champion of First Nation people, and there is lots about her online. Many thought it subversive, and she and Tom were sent to prison at one point. It would certainly have appealed to Maisie’s non-conformist nature. She was clearly a headstrong woman, but also very odd. 

One story tells how she inherited a casket said to contain the preserved heart of her ancestor, the first Marquess of Montrose, who was executed in 1650. She had it sent out to Canada. Her grandchildren used to open the casket, take out the heart, and play with it. Imagine them daring each other to touch it, or chasing after their friends with it. One granddaughter remembers her horror when she took it out and it broke into two pieces. 

So, why did Maisie walk out of the marriage so quickly? Wild, dynamic, independent woman or ineffectual, possibly gay, dreamer? Six of one and half a dozen of the other is my guess. 

Maisie’s collection of Indian art and artefacts is in the North Vancouver Museum and Archives. The heart is in the Montrose museum in Scotland. 

Uncool Singers

I have had a song on loop in my head for two or three days, by one of those uncool singers you would not have admitted you liked to your friends at school. The kind that during the height of sixties and seventies top and rock, would never have been played by Tony Blackburn on Radio 1, and would probably have had their own prime-time television show on a Saturday night. 

There were lots of them: Val Doonican and Clodagh Rodgers, or perhaps in America, Doris Day or Andy Williams. Memories were made of this by Dean Martin, and magic moments by Perry Como. 

We also had Andy Williams. He was pretty good, but most definitely not cool. I much preferred Britain’s Matt Monro, who was not cool either, but his recordings of Portrait Of My Love, Born Free and the James Bond theme From Russia With Love are incredible. What a voice! What a singer! If I was asked to name favourite uncool singers, he would be top of the list. 

I am thankful for that train of thought because it evicted the tune that was stuck in my head. You can have it instead. Any covert Roger Whitaker fans out there?  

He gave the impression of having a high opinion of himself, but Leaving Durham Town possibly vindicates it. Sugary sentiment but a great tune. 

So, who was your favourite uncool singer? Did Yorkshire Pudding have a regular date with Moira Anderson Sings? Did Dave Northsider just pretend he never watched the Des O’Connor show? Was JayCee just an old-fashioned girl who liked Eartha Kitt? Who was yours? You can own up here in complete confidence. Your secret will be safe with us.  

Knitted

I am constantly amazed by what some bloggers make in wool and fabrics. They have spent a lifetime on crafts I would not know how to begin. But it does not stop me from writing a post about knitting. 

The village of Upper Denby not far from where we live has a knitting and crafts group that has been busy creating a display on the village green for Remembrance Day, this weekend. Here are some of the things they have made. All are either knitted or crocheted. 

Meanwhile, Mrs D is busy knitting little Santas and Snowmen to sell and provide raffle prizes for the school Christmas Fair. 

I sometimes think there are satisfactions in life us blokes miss out on. Surely I could knit a rat. 

Solar System

But the fool on the hill sees the Sun going down
And the eyes in his head see the world spinning round

I have been watching Brian Cox's series Solar System in absolute astonishment for the past five weeks. Our solar system is bigger and far more complex than we could have imagined only just a few years ago. 

I write this from memory, so may have some things wrong. Whatever I write cannot possibly do the series justice. 

Most of us grew up with nine planets, more recently reduced to eight, but the latest telescopes and space exploration reveal infinitely more objects within the sun's gravitational field than this. Many are very small, while others are quite large. 

And while we may have thought there was little beyond the dwarf planet Pluto, there seem to be millions of icy objects in the same region, known as the Kuiper belt. The largest known so far, discovered only in recent years in the darkness, has been nicknamed FarFarOut. All these objects, like the planets, orbit the sun in the same plane, but even further out lies an enormous sphere of rocks and particles a light year across. It contains mobile objects that travel across the heavens and approach the earth from all directions. They are the comets. 

It is not just the number of objects that is astonishing. It is the variety. They can be made of rock, gas, water ice, nitrogen ice, or something else. Ice can form mountains and canyons ten times the size of those on Earth. Other objects have internal heat sources that create violent monsoons, dust storms, or volcanoes that shoot out into space. 

How these phenomena have formed can often be deduced from space probe photographs and other data. They are subject to similar physical and geological processes whatever they may be made of. Underlying it all are just a small number of forces, mainly gravity. But the gravity of different objects can interact in numerous ways. Some are heated by gravitational friction, alternately squeezed and released by the gravity of a larger planet. 

There are some very strange objects indeed. Once above a few kilometres in size, objects will be shaped by gravity into a sphere, but one body has been seen to defy this law. This is thought to be because it rotates at eight times the speed of the earth, which flattens it into an elliptical shape through centrifugal force. 

The strange rings of Saturn are also down to gravity. They consist of particles of various sizes, possibly from a decaying moon. They orbit at different rates, and the larger objects are gradually speeding and slowing the others with the eventual outcome that all the particles will fall down to the surface of the planet. They have not been there forever, and will in time disappear. It is only coincidence that we are here at the same infinitesimal moment in time, able to see them. 

Ganymede, the largest moon of Jupiter, has a salt lake of water beneath the rocky surface, more than all the water on Earth. This was deduced from the magnetic aurora of the moon, which does not behave as it otherwise should. It has all the conditions we think necessary to support life. What form aqueous life buried deep inside a moon or planet might take, we cannot begin to guess.

But the strangest planet of all is the Earth. It is the only one with liquid water on the surface, maintained by a combination of gravity, temperature, and atmospheric pressure. If different, the water would boil away into space, or freeze solid.

What I like about Brian Cox is that he explains these processes, and how they have been worked out, in lay terms, without exaggeration or the loud, overenthusiastic excitement that spoils so many documentaries these days. Give him the concentration he deserves, and you are rewarded. What he is telling us speaks for itself. It is outrageous. And he laughs, as if he cannot quite believe it either. 

Then I thought about looking into the night sky and the millions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, probably most with solar systems of their own as complex as ours. And the billions of stars and planets in all the other galaxies there are. And the time scales involved: thousands of billions of earth years. 

Unimaginable. Beyond belief. Beyond understanding. 

Tips, Ships and Executorships

New Month Old Post: first posted 14th April, 2017.

'Waylands', 93 Ferriby Road, Hessle (now 'Woodlands Lodge')

“Never appoint a bank as executor to a will.” My dad’s advice was born out of sheer frustration.

“You’ll be all right one day son,” his own father had told him in expectation of a life-changing legacy due on the death of an ailing wealthy spinster then living permanently in a hotel in Harrogate. As things turned out she lived another forty years, by which time the legacy was no longer life-changing, having dwindled away in excessive, unnecessary fees.

Edwin Ernest
Atkinson (1872-1939)

It was one of those quirks of family history that testators fail to foresee, which result in their money going to unrelated beneficiaries they never knew or had heard of: in this case my father, his sister and the husband of their late cousin. It originated in Edwin Ernest Atkinson, chairman of the Yorkshire Dale Steamship Co., and Atkinson and Prickett Ltd., shipowners and brokers of Hull. 

On leaving school, Edwin had first worked as a clerk for the Aire and Calder Navigation Company at Goole docks, and then as a coal exporter with the shipping company J. H. Wetherall & Co. In 1906 he began in business on his own, joined in 1911 by Thomas William Prickett.

Within twenty-five years both were wealthy men with handsome houses on the outskirts of Hull at Hessle. Edwin’s was called ‘Waylands’, at the corner of Woodfield Lane and Ferriby Road. It had eight bedrooms, an oak-panelled dining room, two other large reception rooms, a billiards room, domestic quarters, coal-fired central heating, outbuildings, cultivated gardens, a heated greenhouse and vinery, tennis courts and a croquet lawn. Thomas William Prickett had a similar property nearby,  ‘Northcote’, at 85 Ferriby Road. Among their dirty British coasters with their salt-caked smoke stacks were the SS Yokefleet, SS Swandale, SS Easingwold and MV Coxwold. There were trains of railway wagons bearing the company name.

Atkinson and Prickett ships: SS Yokefleet, SS Swandale, SS Easingwold, MV Coxwold

When Edwin died in 1939 at the age of 66, he left a life interest in most of his £27,000 estate to his wife and only surviving daughter. In terms of price inflation, this would be today’s equivalent of £1.5 million and a great deal more in earnings or property price inflation. It was a considerable sum of money. His wife died less than two years later, thus his daughter, Constance Ruby, still in her thirties, assumed a life interest in the whole sum, to live in comfort and luxury for the rest of her life. She was the lady in the hotel at Harrogate.

Note that Edwin only left a life interest to his wife and daughter, rather than the capital sum outright. They therefore received income from investments, and the capital remained intact. It was a throwback to earlier times when women were not expected to manage their own financial affairs. It also kept the money out of the hands of unscrupulous husbands they might later marry.

Numbers 8 to 2 North Bar Without, Beverley, with the fifteenth century gate to the right

Constance Ruby never did marry, although she did have a brief engagement at the age of twenty. She later became Clerk to the Archdeacon of York, living in the Precentor’s Court at York Minster. After her father died she moved with her mother to Harrogate. Later in the nineteen-fifties, she moved to Beverley, into a half-timbered eighteenth century house immediately without the North Bar (the fifteenth century gate). She died there in 1983. As she was the last surviving descendant of Edwin Ernest Atkinson, the capital passed in equal shares to the families of his three siblings. 

One sibling was my great-grandfather’s second wife, who he married five years after his first wife had died. There were no further children, but a deeply shared interest in Methodism saw them happily through the next twenty-four years. They, and Edwin’s other siblings, died long before Constance Ruby, so the money passed to their families. One-third of the capital passed through my great-grandfather’s second marriage, through his children who had also died, to my father, his sister, and their late cousin’s husband.

It was not so simple. An unfortunate legal charade had gobbled up much of the inheritance. The solicitor who managed the capital trust had sensibly established, with documentation, the names of the beneficiaries in readiness for when the trust was wound up. But then, at some point during the nineteen-seventies, the National Westminster Bank trustees department persuaded Constance Ruby that her affairs would be better handled by them. They began the costly process of establishing the beneficiaries all over again, but after several years were still not convinced they had identified them all. Everything came to a standstill after Constance Ruby’s death. It took considerable persistence to have the case transferred back to the original solicitors and at last sorted out.

Around this time, bank Executor and Trustee departments were becoming known for their outrageous fees. An article in The Times in 1985 explained how one executor saved nearly £7,000 by handling a simple £100,000 estate himself. Solicitors charged less, but were still expensive. We have no way of knowing what fees were taken out of the Atkinson trust, how well the investments performed, or how much income was paid out over the years, but when my father and his sister at last received their legacies, what would once have been life-changing sums had shrunk away to just over £3,000 each. Their cousin’s husband (i.e. Edwin’s sister’s husband’s granddaughter’s widowed husband) got £6,000. Welcome amounts for sure, but nothing like what my grandfather had predicted. £3,000 might then have bought a small car. The total value distributed to all beneficiaries was around £37,000. Had the capital kept pace with retail price inflation it would have been ten times that amount (fifty times today). 

In later years, when my father made his will, true to his principles he appointed me as executor. After he died I handled everything myself. It was fairly straightforward. In another case, I was able to manage sums in trust for children until they reached the age of eighteen. More recently, I handled all the paperwork for the estate of another family member. Despite being complicated by inheritance tax (inevitable for owners of houses in the Home Counties) it was still trouble-free. Estate administration can be a long-drawn-out and time-consuming process that tests your patience and endurance, but if you have the time to cut out the banks and solicitors and do things yourself you can save an awful lot in professional fees; sometimes tens of thousands of pounds. You can bring things to completion much more quickly too.  

Further information:  Patrick Collinson (2013). Probate: avoid a final rip-off when sorting out your loved one’s estate. The Guardian, Sep 21, 2013. Maggie Drummond (1985). Finding a will and a way to cut costs. The Times (London, England), Feb 16, 1985; page 16.