Ray Gosling’s Goole

(First posted 15th October 2017. The YouTube videos linked below are quite long. I don’t expect many will want to watch them through.)

Gosling’s Travels: Goole (1975, 26 minutes)

In 1975, the radio and television broadcaster, Ray Gosling, made a film about Goole: a place I used to know well. The inhabitants were appalled. They had been looking forward to a film about a pleasant little town on the banks of the Ouse, with friendly folk in homely homes, about canals and railways, brave mariners who sailed the North Sea, the strange salt and pepper pot water towers, and the proud rise of a town from nothing to one of the country’s busiest ports in less than a hundred years: the story of the port in green fields.

But Ray Gosling was never going to stick to that. He homed in on the eccentric linguist who sought out foreign sailors to practise his Russian, businessmen who looked shifty and evasive, dockers who appeared scheming and workshy, the mysterious world of pigeon keepers, and, most embarrassing of all, the star turn, some young ladies who also liked to consort with foreign seamen, although not to practise their language skills. Goole: working-town low life in ragged abundance.

Watching again on YouTube, I see the problem. Right from the start, he goes for the jugular:

I’m walking the streets of a flat little town in Yorkshire that most of you will never have heard of: Goole. And those who do know where it is, between Doncaster and Hull, have nicknamed it Sleepy Hollow, because nothing has ever happened here that’s made the headlines in a newspaper. The place has no history worth putting into history books, and they don’t really manufacture anything. 

You might say: “What did you expect?” It was what Ray Gosling did. He was different from other broadcasters. He was cheeky and a bit common, working-class with an East Midlands accent, a university dropout, C-stream and proud of it. He made films about the little things of life, to him more important than the big things: caravans, allotments, sheds, the seedy, the left behind, the small-scale concerns of ordinary people. He was one of them. He wrote about them, ran things and campaigned for them.

The film is pure genius. He had seen the times they were a-changin’  long before Bob Dylan. He had tried to help the lively working-class community of St. Ann’s in Nottingham when the local council wanted to flatten and redevelop the whole district, but the community was lost in the end. He could see that Goole’s canal trains of coal-loaded compartments known as ‘Tom Puddings’, hydraulically hoisted into the air and tipped into the holds of ships, were nearing their end. Goole was a working museum that could not last, no more than the well-meaning vicar and police chief in the film, gullible anachronisms innocently trying to set up a wholesome mariners’ club not run by mariners. It was never going to supplant the Dock Tavern.

He had read On the Road and seen Rebel Without a Cause and The Wild One (a film banned in Britain) and understood the implications. He saw change in the hearts of young people rejecting their fuddy-duddy parents’ expectations. His autobiographies, Sum Total and Personal Copy are fascinating memoirs of the fifties and sixties. “We were the first generation to be able to busk with our lives” he reflected in 2006 in one of his last films, Ray Gosling OAP. And as he sat waiting for his cluttered Mapperley house to be forcibly sold due to bankruptcy, unable to move around the heaped accumulations of a lifetime’s work: piles of files, mountains of books, scattered nick-nacks; he said:

All my life, I’ve known we are what we collect, what we pick up, so my room with all the detail I’ve kept is what made my work, it was important, to me. The silly nick-nacks are not just nick-nacks, and they’re not silly.

That is truly uplifting to hoarders like me: the glorious antithesis of decluttering.

Ray Gosling OAP (2006, 59 minutes)

Hopefully, the links to his films on YouTube will remain active, but they might get blocked for copyright reasons. There is also an archive of his work at Nottingham Trent University.

I'll leave the last word to Ray himself, part of an article in the TV Times in 1975:

... I don’t think facts always tell the truth. And I’m not a promotion man for God, Queen and the Ruling Class in Britain Beautiful – but we do search for the good in a place. And try to film what people naturally do. Try to avoid dwelling on obvious eccentrics, though that’s difficult. We are such an individual fruit and nutcase lot. I’m not hawking any pet philosophy or seeking hidden meanings. The films are simply place-tasters.

I don’t know what you’re going to make of Goole. People live nearby refer to it as Sleepy Hollow, because nothing ever happens in Goole. That’s why I went. It’s one of the most forgotten places of England. Britain’s most inland port, 50 miles from the sea. Just as Bath doesn’t make enough of its spa water, Goole doesn’t make enough of its dirty canal water. Still it is the 11th port of the land. Behind the parish church, you can see hanging from the jib of a crane, Britain’s balance of payments. Steel: in and out. Russian timber imported. We got turfed-off a Russian boat, camera and all – nicely, but firmly. And Goole exports: coals for every purpose.

The great local row was in the pigeon club. Should the birds be flown, next season, from north to south? Opinion divided. I like Goole, I do hope I’ve done it justice.

There was a nice man we wanted to film there; Albert Gunn, dental mechanic, pigeon racer and performer in the amateur Kiss Me Kate at the Grammar School – but Albert was ill, so we couldn’t.

That’s the problem I find filming as against writing. With pictures we have to prove it. Our folks have got to perform in front of the camera.

Fort William

Ben Nevis across Loch Linnhe from Corpach

I was a bit apprehensive when Mrs. D. and I set off for Fort William last week. It is thirty years since I was last there and when your age begins to begin with a seven you wonder what you can no longer do. Was I still up to walking in the Scottish Highlands? Did I have the stamina? Would my legs and back last out? How would I cope with the long drive? 

I used to go there a lot. The first time was in 1964 with my parents when I took this shaky photograph of the Ballachulish ferry with my Brownie Starmite camera. The ferry avoided a nineteen-mile detour round by Kinlochleven which could take over an hour in holiday traffic. It was replaced by a road bridge in 1975, but the old ramps are still serviceable as the modern picture shows. 

I went again on camping and walking trips with friends in the seventies and eighties. We pitched our tents countless times at Glencoe and Fort William, and passed through on our way to Skye. 

We always walked the big stuff. We climbed Ben Nevis straight up the four thousand feet from Glen Nevis: up the steep grassy slope into the Coire Eoghainn corrie where we heard a cuckoo, then up the boulders of the right shoulder and on through the snow to the top. Much more fun than the relentless ‘pony trek’.

Nearing the top of Ben Nevis from the south via Coire Eoghainn, 1974

We back-packed and wild-camped our way across Rannoch Moor which, unlike now, was practically empty of any other walkers. We traversed the ridge of Aonach Eagach in Glencoe, the scariest walk I have ever done, stupidly going around some of the pinnacles instead of scrambling over them. Even scarier than the Cuillin ridges above Glen Brittle in Skye.

Paths along the Cuillin ridges above Glen Brittle, Isle of Skye, 1976

We tried nothing like that this time, not that we would have done anyway, but poor visibility and a wind-chill equivalent of -7°C (19°F) on the peaks around Ben Nevis gave a good excuse. We could see the mountains in the murk but rarely the tops. However, there are lots of low-level walks around Fort William I would never have considered in earlier years. 

There is a stunning walk of around four miles there and back from the end of Glen Nevis to the Steall waterfall. When I trekked the 13 miles from Corrour in the opposite direction in the nineteen-eighties there was hardly anyone around, but on this day there were lots, some coaxing five year-old children over the steep and rocky terrain, everyone soaked, but everyone with smiles on their faces. 

 

Looking East from Steall in Glen Nevis

Looking West from Steall in Glen Nevis

The Steall Waterfall

For more solitude we went to Loch Arkaig to the west of Loch Lochy in the Great Glen. The track along the north shore is one of the routes to the remote and sparsely populated Knoydart peninsula, reachable only by boat along the coast or a sixteen-mile hike across rough country. The story of how the population was cleared by the landowner in the eighteen-fifties and left to survive out in the open is cruel beyond belief. We walked a couple of miles along a forestry road on the south shore before retracing our steps thoroughly soaked. Even my underpants were wet. Trying to survive out in the open in weather like that does not bear thinking about, even with the protection of modern outdoor clothing. 

 

Forestry track along the shore of Loch Arkaig

 

Eas Chia-Aig Waterfall near Loch Arkaig

Yet another day saw us in Glen Roy. What an incredible place that is. Twelve thousand years ago it was a glacial lake, marked out by three successive shore lines (the “parallel roads”) along the sides of the valley – the lowest is the oldest and the highest the most recent. Analysis of the sedimental layers show that the lake system existed for 515 years, and when the ice-dam finally burst it released five cubic kilometres of water in a spectacular “jökulhlaup” that carved out the River Spean gorge. The entire glen is full of glacial features. 

 

Glen Roy - the "parallel roads"

Glacial deposits in Glen Roy

Glen Roy

 

Despite sunny periods to begin with in Glen Roy, the weather soon turned for the worse, and again we had to retreat. In fact, we got soaked every day. We originally booked the cottage for early June but rearranged it for the end of October because of lockdown. For the whole week we got out promptly each morning, returned to the cottage to dry out and have something to eat, and then went either for a touristy drive to somewhere like Oban or Glenfinnan, or did our local walk. 

 

The cottage was at Banavie at the end of the Caledonian Canal between the sea lock which opens into the sea loch at Corpach and the flight of eight locks known as Neptune’s Staircase, which made a handy three-mile circular walk, usefully past a bottle bank. All in all, we had a good week despite the wetness, with so many bursts of intense happiness I thought I was beginning to turn into Gerard Manley Hopkins. And yes, given drier weather, I might still be up to something a bit more challenging. Not Ben Nevis, though.

Banavie: Neptune's Staircase

Looking towards the sea lock on the Caledonian Canal at Corpach

Another view of Neptune's Staircase at Banavie:
Heritage 4-6-0 ‘Black Five’ 44871 running tender-first crosses the Caledonian Canal
returning to Fort William from Mallaig with the Jacobite Express excursion train
on the 30th October 2020

Lastly, for any bovine photographers out there, this is what you have to cope with on some of the quieter roads. Remember to fold your mirrors in. 

The Song Book

If by chance I loose this book 

If by chance you find it 

Remember Kathleen is my name 

And Clayton comes behind it. 

 

 

Around 1960, my father came home with a copy of The News Chronicle Song Book given to him by an acquaintance who lived in the East Riding village of Asselby. It was in a terrible state, but he stuck it back together and fitted a brown paper jacket on which he wrote: “This book was paper backed and repaired on a wet Thursday afternoon February 25th 1960 by [him, me and my brother]”. A father on his half-day off keeping his two children occupied during school half-term.

 

The introduction suggests:

Singing together is a form of amusement and delight. It is a glorious way in which we can, in large bodies, express something which we could not tell in any other way. But the love for Community Singing should be started and finished in the home. … With this Song Book the “News-Chronicle” hopes to encourage and bring back singing in our home. The Community Singing will take care of itself.

I wholeheartedly agree but have never been much of a community singer. Despite a good sense of pitch, I find it difficult to hear my own voice in groups. At home, though, yes. What fun it gave us. No one played an instrument, we just turned the pages and sang. 

 

The cover gives an idea of what it contains. Looking again now turns up some great favourites: 

• Dashing Away With a Smoothing Iron 
• Come Lasses and Lads 
• Billy Boy 
• David of the White Rock 
• Ye Banks and Braes
  
• Marching Through Georgia 
• Camptown Races 
• Go Down Moses 
• A Roving 
• Eternal Father 
• O Come, All Ye Faithful 

Wow! How long a list can get I away with? All two hundred? I feel a sing-song coming on. 

‘Twas on a Monday morning … me Nancy kittl’d me fancy … doo-dah doo-dah … to trip it up and down … tell old Pharoah to … bring me the harp I adore … I’ll go no more a roving … in peril on the sea. 

                                                *                          *                          *

 

We have a tape recording from 1963 of one of my dad’s unselfconscious performances. His granddad had been a sea captain which, he said, conferred upon him an inherited natural aptitude in the delivery and interpretation of sea shanties. 

 

“And now from my sea shanty series,” he announces, his tongue in a twist, “the old song book page one hundred and twenty four: Bound for the Rio Grande.”

 

Two children mutter and snigger in the background. 

 

“One moment please.” 

 

Struggling to keep a serious demeanour and in tune, he begins to sing: “I’ll sing you a song of the fish of the sea ...” 

 

That must be one of the daftest opening lines of any song, ever, and it defeats him. A hesitant pause is followed by a total breakdown into helpless laughter. All three of us. 

 

 

I suppose the lyrics of some of these songs are questionable these days, but not as questionable as the lyrics we used to sing on guitar nights in Leeds where I lived after leaving school, where familiarity with these songs gave me malign influence. Imagine four twenty-ish-year-old lads in a shared house with guitars and bottles of beer.  

 

Tavern in the Town became a song about the television rent collector who was a creep, and what he did with sheep. So did Camptown Races with the “doo-dah”s changed to “dildo”s. They are stuck in my head forever, and, of course, unrepeatable. Except for the one to the tune of The Ball of Kirrimuir about the owner of the house who knew we would never do any cleaning so did it all himself in return for us doing his washing up: 

Dave does all the cleaning, and that’s a job he hates, 

And so to appease him we have to wash the plates. 

… possibly the only case where our version was less deplorable than the original (although you won’t find any such words in the book). 

 

The book has given sixty years of pleasure and continues to do so (perhaps that’s for a later post), more than twice as long as the original owner assuming she got it new when published in 1931. Who was she, I often wondered, the girl who misspelt “lose”? I never thought to ask. The wonders of internet genealogy reveal she was born in 1924, married someone called Roantree in 1951, moved in later life to Bridlington and died in 2010. By the time her book passed to us, she had three children of her own. I never knew them despite being of similar age and from the same area. She must have written the inscription in the nineteen-thirties. Did she ever think of it again? 

 

I don’t know if anything remains of Sycamore Farm. All I remember of Asselby is a village on a road to nowhere, on a tongue of heavy mudstone between the confluence of the Rivers Ouse and Derwent, where there was once an awkward bend through a disused railway crossing. I went once or twice to the Black Swan pub there but preferred the Kings Head at the end of the road in Barmby-on-the-Marsh. They had a better dartboard.

 

Traffic Cam

I have been watching the post (or the mail if you call it that) in trepidation.

Recently, we took daughter back to university: you can’t do art studio and ceramics stuff at a distance online. So she has to chance it with our hurdy gurdy covid policy – let all the students catch it otherwise we’ll have to bail out the universities, and the private landlords will go bust and we can’t upset them because they vote for us and donate money, and we’ll just have to cross our fingers that not too many students develop serious chronic health conditions.

Anyway, that’s a digression. On the way back, after leaving the motorway, you have to run the gauntlet of speed cameras. I know where they are and have learnt to be careful, but you know how it is: you have been going along at 70 and have to re-adjust to slower roads, and you are tired after five hours driving and are nearly home, and perhaps you relax too much and don’t pay enough attention. I got through most of the cameras unscathed but was left wondering about the really nasty one which is obscured by bushes just after the speed limit changes from 40 to 30. It is one of those high-tech, bi-directional Truvelo D-CAMs with no flash and hardly any road markings. I was watching out but when I thought about it again it was half a mile behind and I had crept back above 30 with no memory of passing the camera or checking the speed.

I hate the things. They caught us on Lendal Bridge in York during the first week it was restricted to buses and taxis only. There were few signs or road markings. By the time we realised where we were going there was no alternative but to proceed across. A similar thing happened in Newcastle. We found ourselves unable to turn round with a choice of either entering a private car park or going through a ‘bus gate’. At least they provide nice photographs of you driving where you shouldn’t. And at least Newcastle let us off with a first-time warning, and York council had to refund the penalty after the Lendal Bridge restrictions were challenged and judged unlawful.

    

Remember how it used to be? There was a time near Selby in the blue mini (see blog header), in the days before servo-assisted anti-lock brakes, when, foot-down, I came round a bend to see a parked car on my side of the road and a bus coming towards me. I scraped past with a deep scratch along the side. There wasn’t a mark on the parked car but the man who had been peeing behind it had a dripping wet trouser leg. It gave new meaning to the phrase “making a run for it”.

In a later car, when I lived in north-east Scotland, I would do the 750-mile round trip home several times a year. In those days you could dash along for miles at ninety without much fear of offending the police. I once managed the one-way trip, with one rest stop and one petrol stop, in less than six hours. The smooth slate-grey colour of my exhaust pipe was the envy of every motor sport fan. On other occasions, when there was no traffic on the three miles of gradual descent on the motorway between Sheffield and Doncaster, that little car could do a hundred.

Still later, in 2001, I had a new Golf funded by travel expenses. Once it was well run-in I wondered how fast it could go but chickened out at a hundred and twenty (193 km/h) on the M1 south of Sheffield. Nowadays, the cameras would have you straight away, followed by a court appearance, a heavy fine and disqualification. Do it too many times and you would go to prison.

I only did that kind of thing a few times and would not do it at all now. These days, there is no alternative but to observe the limits. That’s a good thing. I know of too many tragedies to think otherwise. And I do try to keep to the limits all the time, we both do, particularly since someone close had to go on a special course after getting caught by a camera.

The university trip was nearly three weeks ago. You should be informed of camera transgressions within fourteen days. The post lady has just walked by. Nothing for us. I think I’m safe for now. But, it’s probably only a matter of time.

Ties Teens and Sells

Emptying the household waste baskets, I interrupted my son’s video call. He continues to work at home most days. He had put on a smart shirt and tie, and was talking to some important-looking blokes in suits. 

“Sorry,” I apologised when I went back later.

“We were in conference with coun-sel,” he explained. That’s how he said it: “coun-sel,” with too much emphasis on the ‘e’ of the second syllable.

He could see I was looking to mock him. “Just emptying the bas-kets,” I was about to say.

“I know it sounds pretentious,” he said. “I thought I would never say it like that, but we have to avoid confusing coun-sel with coun-cil. It wouldn’t do to be asked to phone the council and to phone the counsel instead, not at the rates they charge.”

“It’s like when I started work,” I said, dredging up a memory from the distant past as usual.  

I told him about two people checking over a set of accounts to make sure they had been typed correctly. The one reading out loud from the handwritten draft kept saying things like “thir-tie” and “for-tie” instead of thirty and forty. I thought it sounded silly until it was pointed out that if the typist had typed thirteen in place of thirty, or the other way round, it might be misheard and wrongly passed as correct. Soon, I was pronouncing all my -ties and -teens too. Some you didn’t really need to change, such as twenty because it would never be confused with twelve, but we changed it anyway: “Twen-tie pounds, fif-teen shillings and eleven pence.”

“That would be so easy to carry through into everyday life,” he said. “You don’t usually talk about barristers outside work, but we’re always talking numbers. You could end up saying it without thinking. We deal with about thir-tie or for-tie coun-sel and thirt-tie or for-tie coun-cils.”

“It’s so powerful,” I said, “that even when you tell someone about it, they start doing it themselves, even after fifty years.”

“Fif-tie,” he corrected me.

North Yorks Walks

It was great to be out on the North York Moors again, although there was a time when I would not have said that. It is where my first proper walks were, with boots, cagoule and rucksack, fifty years ago. My friend Neville used to drive us up on Saturdays in his Ford Anglia and we would spend the day walking. Don’t ask me where: the names Helmsley and Chop Gate sound familiar. Neville had been walking for longer than me and knew all the routes. He persuaded me along and I just followed – literally. 

More often than not he would disappear off into the distance and leave me trailing behind in wretched misery, with swollen ankles, and feet blistered by badly fitting boots. That first pair was fine for a few miles but I could never get the right combination of thin and thick socks to avoid rubbing. Nowadays I wear just one thick pair and stick on a piece of micropore tape at the slightest hint of trouble, which is not very often. As for ankles, from quite an early age I was forever going over and spraining them. I once jumped half way down the stairs and went over with a crunch. The pain was unbelievable. I always went over at least once on Neville’s walks, and still do sometimes, but it doesn’t usually hurt now. Mrs. D. says I’ve got lax ligaments. People cringe when I put the soles of my feet and my knees together at the same time.

On one walk, on Fylingdales Moor near the strange radome “golf balls” (replaced in 1992), I was so far behind I took a wrong fork, and rather than backtrack two hundred yards took a short cut across an area signed “Ministry of Defence. Danger. Unexploded Mines”. I was past caring. Another time, Neville organised a group of us to attempt the Lyke Wake Walk – a 40-mile crossing of the moor from Osmotherly to Ravenscar – but I had to give up less than half-way with one ankle puffed-up like a balloon, and red-raw heels and toes. My heels had blisters upon blisters and my toes looked like they had been stripped with sandpaper. It showed the world for what it is: the beauty and the pain.

The beauty won: the beauty of the Yorkshire countryside. Somehow, I persisted, and my feet, ankles and even I toughened up. We walked in all weathers. I must have been very warm-blooded because, even in the coldest winds and wettest rain, I wore only a cagoule over t-shirt and jeans. I would even go out like that in ice and snow. Now, maybe ten pairs of better-fitting boots later and owner of warmer clothing, I wish I got out more often. So, on holiday last month, it was great to be out on the North York Moors again. One walk was around the enigmatically-named Hole of Horcum.

Panorama of the Hole of Horcum, 2007 (Adam Jennison, Wikimedia Creative Commons)

The Hole of Horcum is a huge natural amphitheatre 400 feet deep and three-quarters of a mile across, just west of Fylingdales Moor. Legend has it as ‘The Devil’s Punchbowl’, formed when a giant threw a handful of earth at his wife. That doesn’t make much sense to me. Apart from the fact that no one would even dream of throwing a handful of earth at his wife, the giant was called Wade, not Horcum. I think Horcum must have been his dog, one of those enormous English Mastiffs, and the hole is where he buried a bone and then dug it up again. In any case, curmudgeonly geo-morphologists have to go and spoil things by telling us the Hole was formed by a process of water-erosion called spring-sapping? 

The Hole of Horcum, 17th August 2020

My own picture is from roughly the same viewpoint as the panorama, taken from the edge of the hole soon after we began circling anti-clockwise. The purple heather was putting on a better show this year. On reaching the far right-hand side we went off at a tangent along a path to a five-way junction at Dundale Rigg (what a name for a folk band!). From there you can divert to Skelton Tower (an 1830s shooting lodge) and marvel at the steam trains on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway far below. However, we continued on to the sleepy village of Levisham and then looped back East and North along the side of a wooded valley, picking our way through nettles to reach the footpath across the floor of the Hole, visible in the above photograph. In seven miles we had walked the whole of Horcum.

Levisham Village

Entering the Hole of Horcum, 17th August 2020

Another day we walked along the cliff top, along the track bed of the old Whitby to Middlesborough Middlesbrough railway, which closed in 1958. Some of the now-dismantled structures along the line, such as the Staithes Viaduct, were remarkable. At Staithes you can still make out the brick abutment on the hillside across the valley from the village car park that was once the site of Staithes railway station. The viaducts survived as potential Second World War targets only for unaffordable maintenance costs and declining passenger numbers to achieve what Hitler did not.

We joined the track at Sandsend, following in the footsteps of the intrepid Mr. Yorkshire Pudding who was there last year, and also ourselves in 1997, with the same two people in the next photograph as above. Whereas Mr. Pudding’s group continued the six miles north to Runswick Bay, we turned inland towards the village of Lythe and returned to Sandsend by a higher path across fields, giving a bird’s eye view of the resort.

The old railway track north from Sandsend, 19th September, 1997, looking towards Whitby Abbey

Looking down on Sandsend from the higher cliff path, 16th August 2020

The final photograph is from the cliff tops south of Whitby near the Abbey, which gives fine views in the opposite direction, north towards Sandsend. You can see Sandsend and the wooded cliffs where we walked.

Looking north to Sandsend from near Whitby Abbey, 21st August 2020

From the Abbey you descend the famous 199 steps back into town.

For more photographs, this guy’s web site is a real treat:  
Sandsend to Runswick Bay
Hole of Horcum (he starts at Levisham). 

Partners and Seniors

(First posted 6th October, 2015. 1,050 words)

Andrew and I were speaking in hushed voices, trying to look as if we were working.

“G-eight”
“Splash”
“B-nine”
“Miss”
“G-nine”
“You’ve hit Mr. Hawkwind.”

We were playing Partners and Seniors. It was based on Battleships, a pencil and paper game for two players.

In Battleships, each player draws two 10 x 10 grids for their own and their opponent’s fleets of warships, and positions their own fleet secretly in their own grid. Typically, they would have an aircraft carrier occupying five squares, a battleship occupying four, a destroyer and a submarine of three squares each, and a minesweeper occupying two. Neither player should be able to see the other’s grids.

The objective is to sink your opponent’s fleet before they sink yours. There are many variations but we played it as follows. Players take turns to shoot by naming a square in the opponent’s grid. If the square is occupied by one of the opponent’s ships then it is announced as a ‘hit’. If the square is adjacent to an opponent’s ship it is a ‘splash’. If the square is neither occupied nor adjacent it is a ‘miss’. A ship is sunk when all its squares have been hit. Players use their second 10 x 10 grid to record the results of their shots and to decide where to target subsequent shots.

Except we weren’t playing Battleships. Our game had evolved into Partners and Seniors. In place of warships we had Chartered Accountants. Instead of aircraft carriers, destroyers and minesweepers, we had partners, seniors and articled clerks from the firm where we worked. Mr. Hawkwind was one of the partners. He occupied four squares.

We were working out of the office on the most mind-numbing of all the audits we did. You could be there for months putting ticks on ledger cards. It was like disappearing off the face of the earth.

The client was a cloth merchants, an old family firm. They bought rolls of cloth from the manufacturers in every weight, weave, colour, stripe and herringbone imaginable, and re-sold it in suit lengths – the amount needed to make men’s bespoke two-piece or three-piece suits, with or without extra pairs of trousers. The rolls of cloth were stored elsewhere in the building, away from the damaging effects of heat and light. The cool, shadowy stillness of the warehouse had a strange musty smell: a mixture of dyes, preservatives and the scent of the cloth itself.  

The firm supplied just about every tailor and outfitter in the country. In other words, they had a lot of customers: twenty trolleys full. For each customer there were one or more yellow sales ledger cards around eight by ten inches in size. The cards were arranged alphabetically in boxes on long-legged, wheeled trolleys like miniature babies’ prams. They referred to them as buses. “Have you seen the ‘B’ bus?” “Could I have the ‘QR’ bus when you’ve finished?”

Some of the office staff had been there for decades, from the days when most clerical jobs were done by men. They all still wore suits and ties, and kept their jackets on all day. Only the office manager, in the room next to ours, worked in his shirtsleeves. He was not an attractive sight: a fearsome, grossly overweight man who always left his unpleasant outdoor shoes, or in winter his stinking wellington boots, beside the radiator.

One of the clerks, in his mid-forties, all worry-lines, teeth and thick glasses, would have been tall had he stood upright, but was bent over from years at a desk. As he stooped to push the ledger buses, his jacket draped itself around the cards as if trying to consume them.

One Friday afternoon we listened, able to overhear the office manager tell the clerk, completely out of the blue, that he was no longer needed. “You realise this is absolutely no reflection on you in any way whatsoever,” he tried to reassure him, as if it made things better. The clerk seemed unable to reply. A week or two later his job was taken by a new girl straight from school.

The business was beginning to struggle and trying to cut costs. Demand for made-to-measure suits was falling because of changing fashions and cheaper, ready-made, ‘off-the-peg’ garments. One floor of the warehouse was now empty. Within not so many years the family owners would decide to give up the ghost and lease the building to the old adversary: the Inland Revenue.

But that was in the future and the firm still had a few years left to run. As auditors, we were required to check that every sale the firm had made during the year had been correctly recorded on the correct ledger card. So for several weeks each year, a couple of articled clerks would spend their days ticking off the cards against the order books and sales invoices. Then, to ensure they received an appropriate breadth of professional experience, they would go through all the incoming payments and tick those off against the ledger cards too. One year you would use a red pen, the following year a green, and then back to red again. The exhilaration was tangible. You really looked forward to getting up in a morning.

What made the task seem even more superfluous was that the ledger cards were partly computerised. They were printed by machine, and each yellow card carried three dark-brown, machine-readable, magnetic stripes to record all the transactions. It was an early, primitive system, but really, wouldn’t some kind of statistical sampling been sufficient to ensure the cards were reasonably accurate? Any mistakes that crept in could have been corrected as and when they were discovered. The firm must have wanted everything checked by the auditors. Articled clerks were paid a pittance so it didn’t cost a lot. Perhaps they needed to keep tabs on the inexperienced staff they were now taking on. 

I never did find an error. That is not to say there weren’t any, but the job was so soporific that any I came across would probably have got ticked correct anyway.

Is there any wonder we invented diversions such as Partners and Seniors and firing rubber bands at paper cups to brighten up the day? 

“J-nine”
“You’ve just sunk Mr. Hawkwind.”

Mr. Hawkwind would have sunk us if we’d been caught. 

Twelve Bar Blues

In 1965, Paul McCartney awoke with a lovely melody in his head. He hurried to the piano so as not to forget it, and came up with these words:

Scrambled eggs,
Oh my baby how I love your legs,
Not as much as I like scrambled eggs,
We should eat some scrambled eggs.

Like many dabblers with musical instruments, I too occasionally wake up with a tune in my head. Sometimes they might even be original. And sometimes there are words. Out of the fertile depths of my own imagination have emerged such timeless classics as: Sitting In Bed With A Cold, I Can’t Sing Very Well and She Was Only A Chartered Accountant’s Daughter. I contend they are every bit as good as Scrambled Eggs. If only Paul McCartney had left things as they were I might have been up there with the greatest songwriters in the world. Unfortunately he had to spoil it by waking up another morning with a completely new title and set of lyrics for his tune: Yesterday.

I am probably going to get into trouble for this, but I woke up one morning with a fully formed set of twelve-bar blues lyrics in my head. The idea seems so obvious it cannot be original, yet there appears to be nothing like it on the internet. Gender stereotyping it certainly is, possibly sexist as well, but if it is offensive then please re-educate me. Otherwise, could someone tell me where it came from? It is not autobiographical.


[hackneyed riff to begin:]

I’m in a house full of women, a house full of women and me
I’m in a house full of women, a house full of women and me
There’s her mother, my woman, three daughters, the maid and me 
[hackneyed riff]

I’m in a house full of women, where do you think that puts me?
I’m in a house full of women, a house with a hierarchy
There’s her mother, my woman, three daughters, the maid, the dog and me
[spoken: “don’t even beat the dog”]

Went down to the pub
Came home to my bed
The lights were out
The door was locked
Now I’m sleepin’ in the shed

I’m in a house full of women, a house where I always lose
I’m in a house full of women, a house where I don’t get to chose  
Can’t leave the seat up, drink whisky, smoke, fart, swear or play the blues.
[hackneyed end riff]

A Very British Revolution

I have been enjoying very much the re-runs of Thatcher: A Very British Revolution each night on BBC2 this week (the last one is tonight). I missed it when shown the first time last year.

Having lived through the period, and perhaps not always taken full notice of what was happening, it has been fascinating to watch this open-minded account of her rise and fall, to see the archive news footage and to hear the reflections of the likes of Michael Heseltine, Norman Tebbit, Nigel Lawson, and especially her press secretary Bernard Ingham, personal assistant Cynthia Crawford and speech writer Michael Dobbs (who later wrote House of Cards). It is very even-handed, and all from the supposedly lefty-ridden BBC!

At the time, a lot of people in the circles I moved hated her apparent impassiveness over the communities her policies destroyed, but the series gives you a sneaking admiration for the woman in giving leadership and having some kind of vision of how the country should be run. Wouldn’t it be helpful to have something more like that now! I think she was undoubtedly right that the coal mines and the unions could not continue as they were, but I still think the privatisations a step too far (despite having profited from them).

Anyway, I’m not going to say more. If you want a review, I like Lucy Mangan’s in The Guardian. My own position is perhaps a little to the right of this, but not much.

Even better, the five-episode series is available for the next 11 months on iPlayer. It’s brilliant.

 

UMIST

Student life 1974 and now

UMIST Mathematics and Social Sciences Building (when new)

I have been meaning to post about this for some time. I thought of it again this week because we are going to have to take daughter to retrieve the rest of her possessions from her shared house at university (not UMIST). It will be the second chock-a-block car load. The first was in March when the university campus closed due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Two full loads of a family estate car! Indeed, some students hire Transit or Luton vans to move their stuff. The materialistic society! Not how things were.

Arriving at university, 1974

This lad is supposedly just arriving at UMIST (the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology) as a new student in 1974. A suitcase, rucksack, soft bag and guitar case accommodate all his worldly goods (although one could question the feasibility of this). You can imagine he lugged it to Manchester on the train. 

It is from a 15-minute film (linked below) made by the UMIST film and television society to give an idea of student life. It’s a real time-capsule for those of that university or college era.

I went to UMIST myself a few years after this for a one-year postgraduate course as mentioned in the last post, and much is familiar, especially the Brutalist Maths and Social Sciences building with the letters UMIST at the top (12:46 in the film), where my course was based. I used to avoid the lift and huff and puff my way up to floor L feeling fit and superior until one day I was overtaken by a Ph.D. student running up the stairs with a rucksack full of bricks on his back.

For me, the film feels more like the three abortive months I spent at teacher training college in Leeds in 1973, or visiting friends at university around 1970 before I went as a mature student. The titles at the beginning say it was made in 1972, but the list of courses, cinema programmes, the name of the person running for election and the dates of rag week clearly date it as 1974.

Among the evocative things are: the dingy, sparsely-furnished accommodation; those electrical appliances; the A/V equipment; the Greenslade gig; the student societies; rag week (would health and safety let them use those floats now?); the cars – I recognise them all; the long gone shops such as Ratners which made the biggest PR mistake ever; “chalk and talk” lectures. And is that George Best who back-passes the ball at the start of the Manchester United match?

I love the background music tracks written especially for the film, accredited to Nick Rhodes, although not ‘that’ Nick Rhodes who would have been only eleven at the time.

It makes three years at university look the wonderful experience it can be, but, interestingly, less than a minute of the film (11.49-12.46) is concerned with academic work.

I have few problems with that. University is supposed to be a shared learning experience. You learn as much socially, by talking things over with other students, as you do from lectures and course materials. If you take away the social, there seems little point in being there.

And they are taking it away. Daughter has not had a good experience at her university this year. Firstly, there was no teaching because the lecturers were on strike, and then the university campus closed half way through the second term because of the coronavirus outbreak. She has been home since then. And for next year, some universities are now announcing that teaching will be online and there will be limited access to tutorials, laboratories, workshops and studios, and few student union activities.

She is doing art. Her particular interest is decorative ceramics. How can you do a degree in art if you can’t use studios and workshops, or show your work to other students? Similar questions arise with laboratory sciences, computing subjects, music and others. Is there any wonder students are beginning to say they are thinking of having a year out? They are not going to be saddled with student debt for lectures and tutorials through Zoom.

That would affect university finances, especially if overseas students don’t come. That’s a big chunk of Britain’s university income. I predict insolvencies in the sector. Will the government bail them out? Probably not. They are hotbeds of liberals and socialists.


MORE ABOUT UMIST

UMIST started out as Manchester Mechanics Institution, then Manchester Technical School and later Manchester Municipal College of Technology. It became a university college in 1956, able to award degrees on behalf of the University of Manchester, and changed its name to UMIST in 1966. It became a completely autonomous university in 1994 but merged back with the University of Manchester in 2004 and is now no more. The Maths and Social Sciences Building is due for demolition. Courses were mainly in the applied sciences, hence the male student majority. Look at that list (at 11.49 in the film): chemical engineering, electrical engineering, chemistry, polymer and fibre science, textile technology, management sciences, ophthalmic optics, mathematics, computation, civil and mechanical engineering, metallurgy, physics, biochemistry, mechanical engineering, building …

Funnily enough, I visited the Maths and Social Sciences building again around 2003 (although I did take the lift this time). As soon as I was inside it came back what a depressing building it was to be in.

Instruments

How many musical instruments are there in your house?

It came up in conversation a few weeks ago at the orchestra where Mrs D plays bassoon. Some answers were truly astonishing.

Our answer is 29. That surprised us but it is nowhere near as many as some. At the folk band I’m in, one chap, let’s call him Clive, could probably outdo them all. He spends every spare moment attending residential workshops of one kind or another, for ever having just come back from a few days playing Dixie banjo or resonator slide guitar, or making Bodhráns, or something similarly esoteric. He keeps bringing along his latest instrument to show us. You get the impression he could single-handedly equip an attempt on the world record for the largest ceilidh band (at present 288). 

To get to our 29, I have counted anything capable of playing a simple melody in tune with other instruments. It is boosted by the kids’ instruments that are still here as they haven’t really left yet. Son takes after mum and did grades in piano and violin. Daughter is more of a dabbler like me but can get a tune out of almost anything.

Piano
Electronic Keyboard
Trombone
Bassoon
Son’s violin
Daughter’s violin
Clarinet (Buffet B12)
Clarinet (Selmer Signet)
Epiphone jumbo acoustic guitar
Teisco Tremo Twenty electric guitar
Ashbury electro-acoustic tenor guitar
Tanglewood electro-acoustic guitar
Nylon stringed acoustic guitar
Mandolin
Soprano ukulele
Baritone ukulele
Single octave ‘toy’ xylophone in D
Chromatic harmonica
Ocarina
Tenor recorder
Alto recorder
6 descant recorders
Penny whistle
Set of ‘toy’ plastic whistles in C

The Cramer upright piano (pictured), from my wife’s childhood, is the oldest, followed by the electric guitar acquired for £10 from a friend of my brother around 1972, but it still plays. The bassoon is next, then my Epiphone acoustic guitar from Kitchen’s music shop in Leeds around 1975. I still have the receipt for the Buffet clarinet for £237.58 dated the 14th March, 1990. Except for some of the recorders, the others are mostly less than twenty years old. The four-string GDAE tenor guitar (also pictured above) is newest, bought this year. I am still too much in denial to admit how much it cost.

We have, between us, also had other harmonicas, bassoons, violins and guitars, including an electric bass lost many years ago during a house move. It seems only yesterday I was pretending to be able to do an A-chord on my first guitar (a metal stringed Sheltone) around 1965. It wasn’t an easy guitar to play, but it strengthened my hands and toughened the ends of my fingers.

Review - Penelope Lively: Treasures of Time

Penelope Lively: 
Treasures of Time (4*)

Sometimes, it can be difficult writing these occasional book reviews, but it helps in reflecting upon what I have just read and what I understand of it. This elaborate tale was harder than most.

Treasures of Time is about the truth of our perceptions and memories. Do we live the lives we think we live? Are things as they seem? Penelope Lively deftly handles multiple points of view and multiple time frames to show how different people can experience and remember the same places and events differently – edifying stuff for a memoir writer.

Laura Paxton is approached by a BBC documentary film maker planning to make a programme about her late husband, the acclaimed archaeologist Hugh Paxton. She still lives in their idyllic Wiltshire cottage close to the site of the excavation that made her husband famous, and remains stunningly beautiful. But she is no intellectual. She is one of those classic comic creations, like a Jane Austen character, who seeks social and cultural approval and belittles those beneath her standards. She accepts the BBC’s approach with alacrity, unaware of the misgivings of her historian daughter, Kate, and her invalid sister, Nellie.

I’ve come across too many people like Laura. They want to take over and organise your social life and cannot understand why you might not want to comply. They disapprove of your sense of humour and take offence when your opinions differ from theirs. When the television crew arrives, she engages them in genteel sherry parties with her society friends, although they would much prefer a pint at the local pub and being left to get on with their work. “Ma has always found people’s tendency to work a nuisance,” her daughter Kate explains. “It stops them doing other things she might be wanting them to do.”

I identify with Kate’s boyfriend, Tom, who is just about to complete a Ph.D. thesis on William Stukeley, the eighteenth century investigator of Stonehenge. Tom has climbed to Oxford from an ordinary upbringing and observes things most clearly. He wonders how Laura has “so extraordinary a knack of instantly putting everyone else at a disadvantage … You could go far, with a talent like that.” And, as one does when you find yourself unexpectedly in the company of those of more advantageous background, Tom says and does the wrong things, such as outspokenly criticising one of Laura’s friends for selling off a historically significant family heirloom. I’ve been similarly tactless, it has given me sleepless nights, but what I like about Tom is that he is not troubled by imposter syndrome or self-doubt.

So, we have archaeology, academic research, history, social mobility, the impact of the past upon the present and an almost farcical mesh of contradictory perceptions. Laura, Kate and Nellie look at a scene and see or remember it differently. From these differences we learn that Laura’s marriage was far from perfect. She had no interest in archaeology. It was her sister Nellie who was Hugh Paxton’s soul mate. She worked with him all his life, accompanied him on digs and co-authored academic papers. Kate has vague flashbacks of their intimacy, and of her mother’s indiscretions too. Hugh Paxton had been bedazzled by Laura’s beauty, and married the wrong sister.

The novel, originally published in 1979, is now in the Penguin Decades series, considered landmarks of their time. At under 200 pages it is relatively short. Written more recently it might be three times as long with extensive period detail and sumptuous descriptions of archaeological artefacts. It keeps to what it is, essentially a miniaturist tale in which nothing much happens, or as the blurb says, “an acutely observed story of marriage and manipulation.”


Key to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful, 4* enjoyed it a lot and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.

Previous book reviews 

Fish Finger Sandwiches (with Piccalilli)

In response to a comment about fish fingers I made recently on his post about home-made oven chips, the usually infallible Mr. YP said he thought only small children ate fish fingers. Well, wrong! Those of us who remain eternally young at heart still do, a favourite from my teenage years, staple Friday night fare ready on returning home for the weekend from my digs in Leeds after leaving school.

I have never blogged a recipe (unless you count Dill in Mustard Sauce), but if Debra Who Seeks can do it for the first time in twelve years then so can I for the first time in six, as we would appear to share similar gastronomic preferences. So here is: Fish Finger Sandwiches (with Piccalilli).

Put the fish fingers straight from the packet on to a tray and grill for about 15 minutes, turning once or twice. In the meantime, cut and butter the bread.

When the fish fingers are done, put them on to the bread. As it is important to have a balanced diet with plenty of vegetables, spread with piccalilli. Assemble the sandwiches. Don’t worry if it looks a bit messy, it will get much worse once you begin to eat them, and so will you. It might help to have a couple of tissues handy. Those plastic bib-trays that toddlers and geriatrics hang round their necks are also useful.

If you are one of those obsessives who consumes excess vegetables with every meal then you could try Mrs. D’s less messy variation in which the fish fingers are placed on a bed of sliced radishes with mayonnaise. Keep one fish finger spare so you can cut a square for the cat (who, preferably, will have its own plate).

For pudding (no, not him again), three satsuma oranges are a perfect complement, although the more discerning might wish to try Newcastle Brown 99, another of my original Leeds-era recipes (bite a chunk of Cadburys Flake, take a swig of Newcastle Brown straight from the bottle and mix in the mouth).