Philately will get you nowhere (unless you’re Dennis J. Hanson)

New month old post: first posted 26th March, 2015

From when I was fairly new to Blogging, and often wrote very long posts. Yet it has had over 12,000 views, so I have left it unchanged. The original 70 comments are here, although most commenters (other than Kid - thankyou) seem now to have dropped off Blogger. 

 

The ads were irresistible: 

ALL FREE OVER 200 STAMPS PLUS THE FAMOUS PENNY BLACK & CAPE TRIANGULAR FACSIMILES The famous 1840 British “PENNY BLACK” and the 1853 “CAPE TRIANGULAR” facsimiles (originals worth about £45) plus a genuine dealer’s mixture of 200 unsorted stamps (Catalogued over 30/-.), all ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just ask to see our New Approvals. (Please tell your parents.)

This old PENNY RED and approx. 500 stamps for only 1/-. Here’s a super bargain that no collector can afford to miss! Send only 1/- today for this guaranteed and unsorted collection of about 500 stamps, often containing scarce and unusual stamps, plus this Great Britain 1d. Red issued 100 years ago. ... This very valuable offer ... is to introduce our Latest Approval Books. Please tell your parents when sending for Approvals.

This famous BLACK SWAN plus 213 stamps all FREE! The 213 are all DIFFERENT and include 14 Special Stamps (catalogued at over 10/-) such as the 80 year old British ‘Penny Lilac’. Whole collection is catalogued at over 45/-, yet it will be sent FREE to all who ask for our New Approvals. Please tell your Parents.

Wow! Two hundred FREE stamps! Five hundred for a shilling! ‘The Children’s Newspaper’, ‘Meccano Magazine’ and most comics were full of such offerings from a massed approval of stamp dealers – heaps of stamps free, or for just a few pence, if only you would ask to see their Approvals. The most prolific pedlars were the Bridgnorth Stamp Company and - undoubtedly the best because it was just along the road from where I lived - Dennis Hanson’s Philatelic Services of Eastrington. Some of his promotions took the form of a super stamp quiz. 

The quiz is from 1963 but for anyone who fancies submitting a late entry (at the time of writing I believed the business still existed) I’ve added my answer attempts below at the end. I suggest you increase the value of the 3d. stamp to take account of inflation (second class should do it), and oh yes, don’t forget to tell your parents.

Dennis Hanson started buying bulk stamps while still at school in Scarborough in 1935, sorting them into small packets, and selling them to his school friends and also through his father’s general store. He moved to Eastrington two years later and over the years has traded under a variety of names including Philatelic Services, D. J. Hanson, The Stamp Club and The Universal Stamp Company. He was still in business seventy-five years later although he has never gone online. Over this time, dozens of Eastrington ladies have found agreeable employment fixing stamps into Approvals booklets and posting them out to customers.

Dennis Hanson and his staff in 1993 (from Howdenshire History)

As one of those customers it’s not easy to explain the appeal of stamp collecting to the screen-fixated youngsters of today, yet it used to be among the most popular childhood hobbies for both girls and boys. You could spend hours in exaltation, sorting through piles of stamps, carefully separating them from their envelope corners in a bowl of water, and drying them out between sheets of blotting paper.

The attraction was of course in the sheer beauty of the stamps, their vivid colours and stunning art work, and the way they captured the imagination by association with the history and geography of the world - conflict in Europe, communist revolution, African exploration, colonial independence. Looking again at my old stamp album (having just retrieved it from the loft where it was in a brown paper parcel wrapped up long ago by my dad). I’m amazed to see how much time I must have spent drawing little maps and transcribing information about different countries.

Stamps from Aden, where my aunt and uncle lived for a time, overflowed their page very quickly

 

Dennis Hanson clearly had a great knack for marketing. The whole purpose of the give away offers was to entice you into spending your pocket money on his Approvals which were mouth-wateringly presented in little chequebook sized booklets. Even when you managed to resist and return them all unpurchased it wasn’t too long before another booklet arrived, and then another, and you had a job to stop them coming.

A wodge of approval booklet pages from which the stamps have been removed show that I didn’t resist. I spent a small fortune – around 60 empty pages with a total value approaching £5 (which would have a purchasing power of around £100 today, and more than double that in terms of earnings): “Very scarce set of 6 mint & used Albania 1917 Koritza Eagles 2/-”, “Complete fine-used set of 2 Hungary 1952 Railway Day (catalogued 1/6d.) 9d.”, “Handsome set of 6 mint Paraguay 1958 President Stroessner 1/6”. And then a page in red ink: 

Superb stamps given Free. They are not for sale they are FREE . . . Set of 3 unused Herm Island 1954 Triangular Sea-Birds, local stamps with a face value of 1/2d., from part of the United Kingdom. Now obsolete and scarce. . . . YES, ABSOLUTELY FREE OF CHARGE. If you purchase 5/- worth or more from this Approval Book you may take this page right out of the book and keep it. These grand stamps will add lots of value and interest to your collection! It’s our way of showing our appreciation of your valued patronage.

This doesn’t count yet more pennies expended at the corner shops that also plied philatelic produce in racks of cellophane packets.

Very soon, my spring-backed, loose-leafed Movaleaf Stamp Album, bought one afternoon from Clifford Moss of 31 Woodhouse Lane on a trip to Leeds with my dad, was bulging with stamps from all the old countries, many no longer in existence, such as “Jugo-Slavia”, the Weimar Republic of Germany, and British colonies such as Northern and Southern Rhodesia, and Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika. 

Still more interesting is my dad’s 1930s Triumph stamp album where among many other surprising things we find Queen Victoria’s head adorning stamps from the six Australian territories which issued stamps separately until 1913. It’s also surprising to note that my dad must have continued to collect stamps into his twenties and thirties because his album contains lots of Elizabeth II issues.

As with most people, my interest waned as I grew older, although losing myself in my album now, in reverie, I could easily imagine taking it up once more, becoming expert in a specific area, something unfashionable and politically incorrect, perhaps stamps of the British Empire, assimilating all the lessons from history they bring with them.

What began to turn me off was in fact the antics of the very same Dennis Hanson who so altruistically cultivated my interest in the hobby in the first place. His bulk packets of unsorted stamps contained far too many cheap and flimsy ones from far eastern countries, and a disproportionately high number portraying the grim bespectacled face of King Baudouin of Belgium who looked like the dad of one of my friends.

Even more unforgivable were the Approvals that weren’t really proper stamps at all. The Herm Island stamps mentioned above were one example, used only for a private postal service from Herm to the nearest official post office on Guernsey, and obviously printed as a commodity to sell to tourists. But it was the stamps of South Molucca that really annoyed me.

“These Stamps will never be catalogued” it said on the front of one booklet. On another “Stamps of the South Moluccas Republic and the Forgotten War. ... although not listed by Gibbons, they are undoubtedly of philatelic interest.” And although they may have looked magnificent with their colourful images of the mammals, birds, fish, butterflies and plants of a small group of Indonesian islands, the republic never gained independence. Some stamps were issued by a would-be government in exile in the Netherlands, and others were produced without authorisation by a German stamp dealer. None were ever postally used and no reputable dealer should ever have touched them. Four pages crammed-full of bogus Republik Maluku Selatan stamps in my album show I was well and truly taken in. 

So, Mr. Hanson, having worked up a fury over being diddled fifty years ago, I’ve decided to send in my quiz answers even if you are over ninety. I’ve just now posted them off. It will be interesting to see whether I get any response. Sadly I can no longer tell my parents.

My quiz answers: 1 – Twopenny Blue; 2 – No; 3 – British Guiana 1 cent Magenta; 4 – Yes; they are produced for collectors but many avoid them; 5 – Sweden; 6 – Yes, they bear the name Grønland; 7 – Yes; 8 – Hungary; 9 – Yes; 10 – No, they are for guidance only.

POSTSCRIPT  - No reply at all. Not even a facsimile.

SECOND POSTSCRIPT
In early August 2015 I received the following email:

My name is Charlotte Hanson I was googling my Grandad Dennis Hanson and came across your recent post. My Grandad sadly passed away on 29/07/2015. I know he would have loved to have read your post and give you a personal response to your quiz questions if it wasn't for his ill health this year. It makes us proud to find so much information about him on the Internet so thank you.

I replied to say how sorry I was to hear of her grandad's death, and thanked her for not jumping on my rather irreverent post. Dennis Hanson made a go of doing his own thing – an example for us all I think. A notice appeared in the Yorkshire Post and other regional newspapers, and an obituary on the East Yorkshire Local and Family History blog.


Other Hanson items (right click and open in new tab for full size):

In the original comments was a discussion of a box of around 200 unused approvals booklets sold on ebay in August 2017 for £227. Here are the images associated with the listing (right click to enlarge):

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.  

My Brother: The Engineer

From early on, it was obvious my brother would become some kind of engineer. He had little interest in History or English at school, it took two or three goes to pass English Language at Ordinary Level, but when it came to Maths or Physics or anything mechanical or electronic, he was a natural. This was also apparent in the toys he had. 

In the few years between us, toys became more sophisticated and technological. My early toys were mainly metal, the most complex being a Hornby clockwork train set, a Meccano construction kit, and a working model steam engine used only under supervision. My brother’s toys were more electronic, with increasing use of plastics. He had a Scalextric electric motor racing track, Lego instead of Meccano, and model aeroplanes that were light enough to actually fly. 

Two toys in particular showed his talents. The first was a Philips Mechanical Engineering kit he received around the age of 9 or 10, followed by a matching Electronic Engineering kit shortly afterwards. 

Suggested Projects: Mechanical Pump and Electronic Organ

The mechanical kit had a variety of plastic wheels and aluminium parts that could be assembled in limitless ways, and an instruction book of projects from the simple to the sophisticated, such as clocks, pumps and vehicles of various kinds. They were powered by elastic bands, water power, air pressure, or gravity, or by the electric motor included in the kit. The electronic kit was similar, with resistors, capacitors, coils, transistors, diodes, switches and loudspeakers, which could be wired together to create circuits on a baseboard. Suggested projects included radio receivers, amplifiers, alarms, a moisture indicator, and a time switch. With both kits together you could create vehicles controlled remotely by lights or sound. 

Brother with his Electronic Engineering Kit

But my brother had most fun when he began to dream up his own projects. He made a device to administer electric shocks, and another to close his bedroom curtains automatically when it got dark, and to open them again with a switch. There was a similar device for the door. 

We moved to a house where the previous owner had a burglar alarm which we wanted taken out, but the alarm company removed only the control unit, leaving all the wiring throughout the house and the magnetic door switches (which is how alarms worked then). Before long, my brother had a panel in his bedroom indicating which doors were opening or closing. No one could sneak up on him. He worked out a way to tap the magnetic emissions from the house telephone wire, and could listen in to everything that was said. Another device automatically switched on the tape recorder if there were any sounds in his unattended bedroom. 

Not all went as intended. Up later than he should have been, an air-raid type siren he was making went off in the early hours next to our parents’ bedroom. 

He tried out all kinds of ideas. Our parents had a butane-fuelled cigarette lighter refilled from a pressurised canister. He used the canister to make a powerful flame thrower that could squirt burning gas and incinerate the enormous spiders that lived behind the garage. And, if they were squirted with non-burning gas,, they dropped frozen solid to the ground and smashed into brittle pieces. 

At a time when relatively few got into university, he was offered a place at Bradford to do Mechanical Engineering. Not only that, but tipped off by an uncle who was active in the engineering professional bodies, and knew who was going to be on an interview panel, their interests, and hence the questions they were likely to ask, he got a bursary from the government’s Property Services Agency, and was paid a salary. He had, of course, to work during the university vacations, and was expected to remain with the agency after graduation. He was based in  Croydon, designing air conditioning systems for a series of new prisons under construction, when he became ill, and we lost him a month before his thirty-seventh birthday. His children are older than that now. He would have been 69 today. 

Teenage Part-Time Jobs

Did you have a part-time job while at school, such as a newspaper round or in a shop? 

My wife had both. She took over her brother’s paper round at 14, and was so reliable they promoted her to the slightly better-paid job of ‘marking up’. That meant being in at 6 a.m., 7 days a week, to unpack the newspapers and magazines from the suppliers, and sort them into bundles by house number and paper round. There were 8 rounds of about 30 houses each. It was complicated by the weekly and monthly magazines: The Radio Times, The TV Times, the local weekly newspaper, Weekend, Woman’s Own, The People’s Friend, The Lady, Jackie, Amateur Photographer, The Beano, and more. The Sunday papers with their multiple sections and colour supplements were particularly heavy and troublesome. At least it was warm in the newspaper shed. She did it for about three years. I doubt I could have stuck it at all. It was hard enough getting out of bed in time for school. 

Later, in the sixth form, she had a Saturday job in a book shop, sorting and tidying shelves, serving customers and dealing with orders, which included checking the microfiche for books in print and available. That’s what happens to the able and competent. They get more responsibility. 

I never had a regular job, but sometimes stood in for friends when they were away. Two I remember especially.  

A similar off-licence to where I worked

One was my friend Gilbert’s Saturday morning job at an off-licence. The owner was getting on a bit, and could no longer lift and move the heavy beer crates. The shop was at the end of a terrace on the corner of a side-street, with a step up to the front door, and a secure brick store for stock at the rear. 

You loaded the crates of empty bottles inside the shop on to a two-wheeled sack barrow (hand truck) and wheeled then down the step and along the sides street to the stock shed. There were usually around 10 crates of empties because in those days glass bottles carried refundable deposits of a few pence each. 

Then, the owner identified what he needed to re-stock the shop. 

“I’ll have two of these and these, and three of those, and two of those, and one of those,” he would say, pointing at crates of Hull Brewery bitter, Magnet pale ale, Carlsberg lager, Bass stout, and so on. You stacked them ready to wheel round to the shop, and took them load by load along the side street. 

That was tricky. The full bottles were heavy, and the pavement bumpy and uneven. If you picked the wrong path you would come to a dead stop, and it was difficult to get moving again. Gilbert did it for so long, he reckoned he could draw every slab and crack from memory. 

Once you reached the front, you wheeled the crates up the step into the shop, and re-loaded with more crates of empties to return to the store. 

“Never drink anything left in the bottles,” the owner repeatedly warned. “You don’t know what it is. People spit and pee in them.”

If you were trusted, you were asked to take the week’s takings to the bank on your bike. The bank notes, cash, cheques, and paying-in slips were all in a leather pouch, which you handed to the bank clerk to open and process, and then returned with the completed paying-in book. Very easy, but it did strike me I was riding through town with hundreds of pounds in my pocket: perhaps the equivalent of up to £10,000 today. 

“Don’t get nobbled, will you,” the owner always said when you set off. 

Front Page and Articles in The Sheffield Green’Un of 29th August 1970

The other memorable job was after I had learnt to drive. Dudule did it on his motorbike, and I was one of the few who could help out by borrowing my parents’ car. It involved collecting newspapers from the railway station on a Saturday evening, and delivering them to shops in the villages of Old Goole, Swinefleet, Reedness, and Whitgift, which was 6 miles away. 

Each Saturday evening the presses of the Hull Daily Mail printed a sports newspaper known as “The Green 'Un”, listing the day’s football and racing results with local match reports. Much of it consisted of pre-prepared articles, but for the rest, considering that games did not finish until nearly 5 o'clock, it seemed incredible they could compile and print a newspaper, and have it on the train to arrive 25 miles away by 7. The wholesaler at the station divided the papers into labelled bundles, and you were on your way. I enjoyed that job the few times I stood in. 

However, our school did not approve of part-time work. You could just about get away with a Saturday job so long as you were not daft enough to get a detention, or be selected for one of the sports teams. Jobs during the week were another matter.

One lad, whose dad had a butcher’s shop, was out after school every day delivering meat on the butcher’s bike (basket on front, metal sign hanging from crossbar). He had some amusing stories, such as falling off and spilling meat across the road. He simply picked it up, wrapped it up again, and delivered it as if nothing was wrong.  

It had to end when he was spotted delivering meat in his school uniform, and the traditionalist, old-school headmaster, who had been there since 1936, asked to see his dad. It was inappropriate for a Grammar School boy to be engaged in such activities after school, he told him. It would affect his homework, and if he wanted to deliver meat he should leave so his place could go to someone who would make more of the opportunities. 

What head teacher would dare say such a thing now? And as for newspaper rounds, microfishe, deposits on bottles, cracked and uneven pavements, cash takings and paying-in slips, Green 'Uns, butchers’ bikes, meat deliveries, ... all disappeared, or just about. And it barely scratches the surface. There were also holiday jobs: I worked in a canning factory and my brother was a gardener at the cemetery in which he now lies. They did things differently then. England in the 1960s.

Developing, Printing and a Trip to London

New Month Old Post: first posted 20th July, 2016.

All the palaver of pre-digital photography: it seems as much of the past as typewriters and tape recorders: the business of loading the camera, rewinding, posting off the film, waiting for the prints or slides to come back hoping they will ‘come out’ all right, rationing your few remaining shots to avoid having to buy a new film, ordering extra copies for Grandma, and cluttering up drawers with boxes of colour slides, photograph albums and packets of negatives, and lofts with the slide projector, carousels and the glass-beaded screen.

And then there were those of us who took things a stage further: home processing. For that you needed another whole cupboard full of esoteric paraphernalia.

It was Duncan across the road who got me started. His dad developed his own photographs and had given him a packet of out-of-date contact papers. They darkened in light, so objects such as leaves or your fingers would leave a white silhouette. You could even print crude photographs from negatives in the same way. The problem was that the contact papers would continue to darken until they were completely black all over. Your silhouette or image lasted only five minutes at most.

Well, one thing led to another, and before long I was making proper prints from negatives. I turned the yellow shed into a dark room, got a device for exposing photographic paper to illuminated negatives for just a few seconds, and began to spend my pocket money at the local chemists on packets of contact papers and bottles of photographic chemicals: developer to bring out the images and fixer to make the prints light-proof.

With the idea of taking photographs of London, we went down on the train to stay for a few days with Duncan’s grandma in Hounslow, where turboprop aeroplanes rumbled low overhead smelling of paraffin, and we had to be up early so her night-shift lodger could use the same bed. We freely roamed the Underground on our Rail Rovers (would you let two fourteen-year-olds do this now, naïve as we then were?), went to the Science Museum, saw the Houses of Parliament and The Monument, howled with laughter at The Road to Hong Kong in which Bob Hope and Bing Crosby get fired into space in a capsule designed for monkeys, and got free tickets for the live Friday lunchtime broadcast of The Joe Loss Pop Show with guests The Barron Knights and regular singer Ross McManus – Elvis Costello’s dad. Actually, it was a bit disappointing to find the guests were only The Barron Knights whose act basically consisted of making fun of other groups. A few weeks earlier they’d had The Rolling Stones and The Searchers.

London Airport, 1964 (renamed Heathrow in 1966)

I took my new Kodak Brownie Starmite camera (12 images of 4x4 cm on rolls of 46mm 127 sized film), but none of the photographs I developed at home were much good. Only one commercially developed shots came out, taken at London Airport (not yet called Heathrow): the last frame on a colour film left over from an earlier family holiday.

I used the Brownie camera for the next ten years but with black and white film because colour was so expensive. I could occasionally afford the flash bulbs though: disposable one-use plastic coated bulbs filled with magnesium and oxygen, sparked off by a battery. They melted when fired, leaving ash-filled knobbly glass inside the protective plastic coating.

Black and white film was easy to develop at home if you had a light-proof developing tank, and one conveniently materialised at Christmas. The most difficult part was getting the film into the tank. You had to separate it from its light-proof backing paper and feed it into a plastic spiral which went inside the tank, but you had to do it completely in the dark. The yellow shed was just about dark enough for contact printing – you could do that in the dim orange glow from the contact printer – but film was ultra-sensitive and had to be handled in pitch-black. You had to wait for night time, and then found yourself with head and arms beneath thick bedclothes, trying not to breathe on the film, getting hotter and hotter and gasping for oxygen. You really had to get a move on.

Once the film was safely in the tank the lid stayed on and you could work in daylight. It was essentially the same process as developing contact prints. You filled the tank with Johnson Universal Developer for a fixed amount of time, emptied it and replaced the developer with Johnson Acid Hypo Fixer for around a further thirty minutes, rinsed everything thoroughly with lukewarm water, took the film out of the tank and just like in Blow Up hung it to dry weighted by a bulldog clip to prevent curling. After that the negative images on the developed film could be contact printed (I have archived a copy of the Paterson instruction booklet which shows and explains the process).

It was always exciting to take the shimmering wet film out of the tank to see the dark negatives for the first time and try to make sense of what they were. You could easily have forgotten because the earlier images on the film would often be several months old. When you then printed the photographs it was fascinating to watch the images emerge under the surface of the developing fluid, trying in the dim light to judge when they were ready. 

I was never more than an occasional snapshot photographer, but my uncle gave me his old enlarger for making prints bigger than the negatives and I avidly watched the BBC series Better Photography on Saturday mornings through the autumn of 1965. 

Later, the Brownie Starmite was superseded by a Zenith E, a fairly basic Russian-made 35mm single lens reflex camera for which I bought extra lenses, an electronic flash gun and extension tubes for close-ups. I later tried the more complex process of colour developing and printing but tended to have difficulty with the colour balance because of my colour deficiency. Eventually I moved on to colour slides, and home processing came to an end.

Now, of course, everything is digital and so another of those experiential manual skills has been lost to the electronic world: the exercise of judgement, the physical manipulation of the materials, the strange saliva-inducing smell of the chemicals, the darkroom perfectionism – all gone! Instead, we compile our digital albums, Photoshop our images, blog about what fun things used to be and can be vaingloriously creative without physical skills at all. It’s good in many ways, but not always as satisfying. 

- Maurice Fisher’s website Photographic Memorabilia is a real treasure trove of images and information about photographic film processing and equipment.

Ten Years

I started this blog on 11th August, 2014, which means it has been going ten years as of today. The idea was to write a kind of autobiography covering how life has changed in England since I was little. 

The changes are many. After the war we still had ration books, bombed buildings, gas lights in the street, and Prefab houses. Later, in Leeds in the 1970s, my job took me to banks, building societies, manufacturers, merchants, shops, publishing and entertainment concerns, and businesses of all kinds that packed the city and further afield. Nearly all have gone. You could take evening classes in almost anything, and there were four or five cinemas in the city centre. The Leeds trams were no more, but sometimes I had to use the trolley buses in Bradford. 

I then went late to university, which led to a new career near the edge of the computer revolution, and saw change as it took place. I suppose I played a small part in it. I also came late to having a family, which has been great fun. I wanted to write it all down. 

There were few readers at first, but when I began to comment more on other blogs a few years ago, and chanced upon this friendly community, things began to pick up a bit. 

At times during the last two-and-a-half years I thought I would not see this day. I was as good as told it, but I am still here. The next milestones are more fruits of the garden, my birthday, and then Christmas. And then we will be into 2025 and hopefully it all comes round again. Or will it? That sounds gloomy, I know, but it is what it is, and that is all there is to it. 

It does not get easier, as my comment and response rates are beginning to show. The list of what I can no longer do, am not allowed to do, or would be stupid to try, is depressingly long. My reading difficulties make blogging slow and difficult, and I have thought of giving up, but it is one of the things that keeps me going, and I still have posts to write. I enjoy the exchange of humour, ideas, and opinions, reading what others have posted, and writing creatively. I am amazed others read it. Thank you so much, everyone. 

The White Stool

I keep this stool in the greenhouse. It is a bit too narrow to be stable when you stand on it, so I use it mainly to sit on. The greenhouse is a lovely bright warm place to sit on your own for an hour or two, not talk to anybody, and do absolutely nothing. 

The stool is very old, at least a hundred years I would guess, possibly more. It came from my mother’s parents and might have been made by her father or an earlier relative. The legs are fixed by nice tight mortice and tenon joints. Rough and ready, but not many could knock up something like that now. 

I painted it white as a child in 1964 or 1965 when I developed a craze for painting things. Well, it’s better than gawping at a screen all day as they do now. Weren’t we lucky to be able to play with tools and messy and dirty things in untidy sheds, rather than having to live in the empty, pristine houses and gardens that seem to be fashionable now. 

We used to use it as a cricket wicket. Here it is with my eight-year-old brother in 1964 in front of the coal house. He has his eyes tight shut. I said his bowling was so rubbish I could hit it with my eyes closed, and proved it. He said that mine was no better, and had to prove it too.

The Horse Race Game

We had a Blue Peter afternoon. 

For those not from the U.K., Blue Peter is a BBC Television children’s magazine programme that has been running at least once a week since the nineteen-fifties. Amongst a wide variety of content, it is known for encouraging children to make things out of cardboard, pipe cleaners, household waste items, and “sticky-backed plastic”. One of its best-remembered creations was a version of the Thunderbirds Tracy Island in the nineteen-nineties. 

That was amusing in itself. Television re-runs of Thunderbirds generated a stream of toys and merchandise, and Matchbox Toys brought out a Tracy Island play set just before Christmas. It sold out within days. Blue Peter responded with a home-made version made from paper mache. Thunderbird 1 was launched from a Yoghurt pot, the hangar for Thunderbird 2 was a tissue box, and Thunderbird 3 launched out of a toilet roll. The BBC was inundated with so many requests for the free instructions, they had to stop sending them out, and instead released a VHS video of presenter Anthea Turner making it (see the BBC archive). 

Our Blue Peter afternoon was spent making a horse racing game for the memory group Mrs. D. runs. The theme that week was Royal Ascot. 

We came up with a track made from long pieces of card marked with lines, with cardboard fences. For the horses, I printed out two-sided chess knights in different colours. They were stapled around movable cardboard stands.  

The rules were kept simple. Each player has a horse to move according to the throw of a dice (I can hear my maths teacher telling me if there is only one it is a die). If you land on a space before a fence, that counts as a refusal and you have to move back three spaces. The first to the finish line is the winner. With around ten participants taking turns, the game lasts more than half an hour.

Horses are go. F.A.B. Anything can happen in the next half hour. 

It was fantastic fun, with laughter and excitement. One lady must have had a “donkey”, because it kept refusing the first fence when most of the others had nearly finished. Some wanted to bet on the outcome, but that was not allowed, although they could try to predict the winner. One could not remember which was her horse, and one kept taking the die out of the cup and turning it in his hand, not knowing what to do. They laugh at each other because they think that they are the only one that is with it, and that all the others (including the volunteers) are completely gaga. 

“Parka”
“Yuss Billaidi”
“Put down one hundred pounds each way on the green-yellow one, at 7:2”
“They won’t allow it, Billaidi” 
“Oh! And Ascot used to be such fun” 
“Yuss Billaidi”

Of course, I wanted to strive for perfection by colouring the track green and drawing white railings along the sides, having water jump, colouring the horses in jockey colours, and making one a zebra, but Mrs. D. said we had spent long enough. Perhaps we should send off for our Blue Peter badges anyway. 

We spent days making things like this as children. One of the best Christmas or Birthday presents you could get was a roll of Sellotape, a bottle of glue, a ball of string, and a few cardboard boxes. My brother made himself an aeronaut’s flying suit out of cardboard, complete with streamlined leggings, gauntlets, helmet and wings. He bounded around the house in it, jumping on and off the furniture making flying noises. 

Would many of today’s youngsters, who seem to spend most of their time playing games and messaging each other on their phones, have the interest, persistence, or even the practical ability to make such things?

Credits: The voices of Lady Penelope and P. were provided by JayCee and Parker, with American and Australian versions by Steve Reed and Andrew High Riser, and German sub-titles by Meike Riley. The horses were fed on silage grown by Dave Northsider, their stables built by Debby Hornburg, and the zebra ridden side saddle by Debra who seeks. The horses are writing a guest post for Tigger’s Mum. Tracy Island and the race game were made by Mrs. D. who let Tasker think he was helping. Thelma played Anthea Turner, and Yorkshire Pudding was Brains. 

Bangers and Mash

We opened a tin of country garden vegetable soup. Sheer laziness, I know, but it was fine. However, we were surprised to see that the contents included rice and pasta. I know they have to keep the price down, even though it was not a cheap brand, but country garden vegetable soup containing rice and pasta, well, you wonder which country’s garden vegetables they have in mind. 

I am not the first to say this, but before around 1970, at least in the north of England, rice was for puddings, and few knew what pasta was. “Foreign muck”, as my mother would have called it, was laughed at. 

From somewhere in my head, came this forgotten song about an Englishman who married an Italian, who, in the days when men never entered the kitchen, gave him only Italian food.   

https://youtu.be/aGFpVN2xwXU

Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren recorded the song as a follow-up to their hit, ‘Goodness Gracious Me’, which arose from their roles in the film, ‘The Millionairess’ (1960).

Sellers was at the height of his popularity. I never understood why. To me, he seemed a self-regarding show-off, and not a particularly likable person. I found much of his humour unfunny, and in retrospect it was often cruel, with every -ist and -phobia going. He was brilliant at inventing comic voices and characters, as you can hear in the song, but it was the kind of humour that laughed at odd accents and eccentricities. I side with the eccentrics. Underneath, I think he was an immensely talented but flawed, deeply unhappy soul. He seemed unable to be himself. He died of a heart attack in 1980, aged 54. There are conflicting views about the exact nature of his relationship with Sophia Loren. I suspect she had better sense. 

The Blue Mini

New Month Old Post: first posted 10th February, 2016

What do you think of those who, watching films or television programmes set in the past, say: “they would not have used the phrase ‘too right’ in the twenties”, or that nineteen-fifties midwives would never have taken such an attitude to abortion, or that a locomotive shown in a wartime scene had not been built until the fifties? Are they nit-picking pedants or defenders of authenticity? I am about to join them. 

In 2016, a television programme, “Back In Time For The Weekend”, took a family back to live as in the past. Episode by episode, their house and its contents were changed to how they would have been through the decades from the nineteen-fifties to the present day. Their furniture, decorations, kitchen and household appliances, and home entertainments were appropriate to the date. At the start of the series they had no television set or refrigerator, and they did not have a home computer until Episode 4 set in the nineteen-eighties. 

Episode 2 was about the nineteen-sixties, when car ownership became more common. Supposedly in 1961, the family were given a blue, D-registration Morris Mini (above). The problem was it was a 1966 Mini, in 1961, five years before it was first registered. I know because I had one, blue, D reg., exactly the same, as in my blog header. Was the BBC research department taking shortcuts? 

Those Minis had something called hydrolastic suspension. Instead of separate springs, the front and rear wheels were connected by pressurised pipes. The idea was that when a front wheel went over a bump, the pressure would tighten its paired back wheel to reduce the bounce. It was rubbish. Mine kept gradually losing pressure and sinking down into its wheel arches. It had to go every few months to be pumped up. It is astonishing after fifty years they found one that had not been scrapped years ago. The family of two adults and three teenage children in the programme would have weighed down the back and shone the headlights up into the air. 

Here is my uncropped picture taken on the Cam Gill Road North of Kettlewell late in 1974 as we were putting on our boots for a walk to the top of Great Whernside. It was blowing a gale on top, but we were able to shelter in the large hollow summit cairn. 

Near Kettlewell, 1974

Great Whernside Summit Cairn, 1974

Downstairs

New Month Old Post: first posted 30th October, 2016.

A song for dads to sing to their children. 

What a super singalong on BBC Four on Friday! 

It Started with a Kiss, or rather for us with a bottle of Chilean Shiraz. It was followed by a fabulous edition of Top Of The Pops 1982, from 15th July. After several weeks of watching the constipated faces of Brian Ferry and Martin Fry (get the look!), it was great to have some good tunes for a change. Following Errol and Hot Chocolate came Dexy’s Come On Eileen, the perennial Cliff Richard, David Essex’s Night Clubbing, and Irene Cara’s Fame (although I have never understood the line in that song about qualifying for a pilots licence).

Later, there was a concert with the then (in 2016) 83-year-old Petula Clark who has brought out a new LP. Goodness, she is even more perennial than Cliff Richard. My great-grandfather used to like her and he died in 1960. Her voice is a bit thin now, but the music and band were superb. She kept us waiting for her ultimate singalong song but it duly arrived near the end. I then blotted my copybook by reprising my own lyrics from when the children were little. They went something like this.

When you’re in bed and Mummy’s snoring beside you

You can always go, downstairs

When you are cold and Mummy’s got all the duvet

There’s a place I know, downstairs

You can lie down on the settee, and have it all to yourself, 

Choose some bedtime reading from the books upon the bookshelf

How can you lose?

It’s warmer and quieter there 

You can forget all the snoring, no need to stay there 

Just go downstairs

Sleeping on the settee, downstairs

Sleeping so peacefully, downstairs

Everything’s waiting for you.

When you’re in bed and Mummy’s been eating garlic

There’s a place to go, downstairs

Onions and curry, chilli, tikka masala

Seems to help I know, downstairs

You can open all the windows and the air is clear and nice

Fill your lungs with freshness that’s free of herbs and spice

How can you lose?

The night is much cleaner there

You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares

And go downstairs

Have a weak cup of tea, downstairs

Crackers or toast for me, downstairs

Everything’s waiting for you.

I was lucky not to have to sleep downstairs.  

School Woodwork

New Month Old Post: first posted 1st April 2018.
  
The practically skilled will mock the mess I made. If I could do it again now, I think I would have the patience to make a decent job of it. At school, I didn’t care enough.

The room smelt of sandpaper, sawdust and lacquer. It housed eight workbenches: the solid wooden kind with shoulders at the sides, tool cupboards underneath and a vice at each corner. And in our tough new carpenters’ aprons: loops around necks, strings tied at the back, deep pockets at the front, we really looked the business.
 
With that pencil-behind-ear can-do competence that only real woodworkers possess, Tacky Illingworth showed us how to shape a piece of wood into a ship’s hull by pointing the bow and rounding the stern, how to chisel out a couple of recesses in the top to leave a bridge, fo’c’s’le and fore and aft decks, and how to attach dowel masts and a funnel, simpler than but not dissimilar to the model in the picture. Mine was awful: irregular, lob-sided, gouge marks and splinters where it should have been flush-flat smooth. At the end of the year I didn’t bother to take it home. I think we made them only because it involved a variety of tools and techniques, rather than for any functional purpose.

I did learn to love the beautiful, age-old tools though: the tenon saw with its stiffened back, the smoothing plane, the spokeshave, the carpentry square, the brace and bit, the mallet and woodworkers’ chisels, and best of all, the marking gauge.

How could you guess what a marking gauge is for unless you know? Why does it have a sliding block with a locking screw? What are the spikes for? Why two on one side and one on the other, and why are they moveable? A mystery! I’ve got my own now. I last used it to mark how much to plane off the bottom of a door when we got a new carpet.

After spending the following year in Metalwork, we were allowed to choose which to continue. I returned to the relative peace and safety of woodwork, the lesser of the two evils. We had to decide upon a project, so I went for the ubiquitous book rack in its simplest form: a flat base with two vertical ends and a couple of pieces of dowel for feet. I selected a beautiful plank of mahogany which my parents had to buy, and began to cut out what were supposed to be stopped (half-blind) dovetail joints – visible underneath but not at the ends. It was far too ambitious. At the end of the year the book rack laid unfinished on a shelf in Tacky Illingworth’s stock room, wrapped in a soft cloth. His school report flattered me: “Progress is slow but does work of good quality”. Perhaps I had not yet made the mess it eventually became.

That could have been the end of the story because there were no crafts in subsequent years when ‘O’ levels took priority, but an unexpected change of policy allowed games-averse weaklings to escape to art or crafts instead. Metalwork was no longer on offer. It had been replaced by pottery, which was tempting, but for some bizarre masochistic reason I went for woodwork again. Maybe I refused to be defeated. Tacky Illingworth proudly retrieved my unfinished book rack from his stock room, still in its protective cloth from eighteen months earlier. 

I even finished the thing. I wrote the date on the bottom: April 1966. It’s a real mess of course. At one end I broke through the wall of the ‘pin’ part of the dovetail and had to stick it back in, and the joints were so loose that even glue could not hold them together. Tacky reluctantly allowed me to fix it with screws. It has been on my desk for over fifty years.
 
I wondered could I find it hiding in old photographs, and yes, here it is in various Leeds and Hull corners of the nineteen-seventies. It still holds one of the same books.
 

As I said, if I were to make it again today, in the same way with hand tools not machines, it might not be perfect but I like to think it would be better. That would match my other subjects. At the very least I would hope not to break the ends. It probably comes down to patience, and perhaps a bit of care and confidence as well. As someone once said, education is wasted on the young.

Proof of the Pi

The proof of the pudding, they say, is in the eating, but what about the proof of the pi?

The ancient Egyptians, the Babylonians, Archimedes and blogger Bob Brague will tell you that we need pi (π) for circle geometry, and that it is roughly 3.14159. Blogger Yorkshire Pudding will also tell you that we need pie, lots of it, but he would be referring to the kind he makes from minced meat topped with mashed potato and baked. Yorkshire Pudding is right. There is no need for mathematical constants and strange symbols. We only need to know that the distance around the circle of a shepherds pie, as near as dammit, is three and one-seventh (22/7) times the distance across. You can use this to ensure you are baking enough for everyone. 

I took for granted what they said about pi at school, without any real understanding. If understanding is the ability to think of the same thing in different ways, and to be able to switch between them, this is my attempt to do that. 

So, this is another mathematical post, like the one in January about the Pythagoras theorem. I wondered whether the same technique could be used to illustrate similar concepts; such as pi.  

Here is a circle of 14 units across, zoomed in on the top right-hand quarter to make it easier to see and count. The quarter-circle is 7 units high, and it takes 11 units to go around its edge. So to go all the way round the full circle would take 44 units, which is three and one-seventh times the distance across the whole circle (14 x 22/7 = 44). 

Does it also work for area? Can it show that the area of a circle is three and one seventh times the area of a square fitted from the centre to the edge (American: Area = πr²)? 

Here is the circle again, with a square drawn from the centre to the edge, zoomed in on one quarter. 

If the square is divided into a 7 by 7 grid of 49 smaller squares, then most of the smaller squares are inside the circle, but some are outside. Of those outside, some are complete squares while others are part-squares. Counting them, I reckon that a total equivalent of around 10½ smaller squared are outside the circle, leaving 38½ inside. I have tried to show how I counted 10½ by putting numbers on the quarter-circle. Those with the same numbers make up one square. 

Multiplying this by 4, it would need 154 (38½ x 4) of the smaller squares to completely fill the full circle. This is equal to three and one-seventh times the 49 in the square on the radius (49 x 22/7 = 154). 

To prove this visually, I used three larger squares to cover three-quarters of the circle. Then I moved the parts that were outside the circle (shown in grey) into the fourth quarter. So far, in all, this has used 3 larger squares, a total of 147 smaller squares. 

But it does not quite cover all the fourth quarter of the circle. We need an extra 7 smaller squares (shown in yellow), in other words, one-seventh of a larger square.  

So, the area of a circle is equal to three and one-seventh times that of a square drawn from the centre to the edge. (Area = πr²)

Arithmetically, it takes 38½ smaller squares to fill the fourth quarter, but there are only 3 x 10½, or 31½, available to move. We are 7 short. 

I get it. At least I think I do. 

Hand Signals and Semaphor Indicators

Amongst the audiotapes I mentioned towards the end of last year, is one recorded by my aunt and cousins in the early nineteen-sixties. My uncle had taken a job in Germany, but they had yet to join him. They mention near the beginning that I had brought my recording machine so they could wish him a happy birthday. My own thirteen-year-old voice is heard briefly at the end of the tape, but the less said about that, the better.

What forgotten memories it brings back!  

After the usual birthday song, they talk about what they have been doing. My youngest cousin says: “Here is a song we learnt at school”, and begins to sing:

Sides together right,
Sides together left,
Sides together right left,
Sides together both.

We did that one in my year too. It was a dance in which you moved your arms about like a boy scout semaphore signaller. It then moves on to your toes: “Sides together point, sides together point ...”. Dear Miss Cowling: how you loved to join in. Remind me how to point both toes at the same time.

Then my aunt mentions she is about to take her driving test. Our town was a great place for it. It is completely flat with no hills. To test your hill start, you either did your three-point turn on a street with a particularly high camber, or went through a T-junction where the road rises a few inches due to the spoil dug out from the docks. There were also no traffic lights, no roundabouts, and only one zebra crossing. It limited what you could fail on. A few years later, I passed first time, four months after my seventeenth birthday. The test centre there closed years ago.

Even so, my aunt was anxious about the test. She took it in a Fiat 600 shipped back from a previous overseas stint in Aden. The Fiat was fine there, but a bit tinny and unsuited to the Yorkshire weather. There was always something wrong with it.

Things did not begin well. She told the story many times. To say she was a nervous driver, lacking in confidence, would be understatement. The examiner made no attempt to put her at ease, staring blank-faced ahead throughout, giving strict instructions in a stern voice. 

In those days, you had to be able to use hand signals. Remember those? Sides together right for a right turn, a kind of circling movement for left, and a wave like a sea gull to slow down. There were also special signals for white-gloved policemen on point duty. It was not easy through the tiny windows of the Fiat, especially if it was throwing it down with rain. The longer it went on, the surer my aunt became that she had failed.

It was a relief to finish the hand signals and be allowed to use the electronic indicators. However, the Fiat did not have the modern self-cancelling flashing lights we have now. They were the old semaphore type. A little orange-tipped arm, about six inches long, flipped out from the side of the wing. You had to remember to put it back in again after you had turned.

So when one of the semaphore indicators flipped out but refused to flip back in again, my aunt lost all remaining hope of success. She pulled up, got out, and tried to push it back in by hand, but it was firmly stuck.  

“Well, that’s it now,” she sighed hopelessly. “I’ve failed. Drive me back to the test centre and I can go home.”

The examiner was stolidly unsympathetic.  

“Get back in woman,” he barked.

She meekly did as told and completed the rest of the test using hand signals.

When they got back, my aunt answered the obligatory questions about road signs, braking distances, and the Highway Code, certain it was futile. The examiner completed his paperwork in stony silence.

“I am pleased to inform you that you have passed,” he announced. He had to repeat it.

“Thank you. Oh thank you,” she stuttered in disbelief. “I promise I won’t let you down.” 

1957 Fiat 600