The Ascent of Man

New Month Old Post: First posted 21st March, 2016

Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals: so that, unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape – he is a shaper of the landscape.

Everyone needs at least one role model to inspire them: probably more – different role models for different roles. One of mine came in the unlikely shape of a little man with glasses who looked like my grandfather and had trouble pronouncing his ‘r’s.

How could anyone be so clever? How did Jacob Bronowski’s life come to be filled with such grand ideas while mine was littered with the tedious transactions of budgets and profit margins? Why was his world populated by brilliant minds while I shared mine with dreary accountants and businessmen? Why couldn’t I shape the landscape rather than being just a figure within it? I wanted to be an omniscient polymath, too.

I missed most of Bronowski’s momentous thirteen-part BBC television series The Ascent of Man when it was first broadcast on Saturday evenings between April and July, 1973. I would have been out at the pub. Even when it was repeated at the end of that year, twice a week on both Thursdays and Sundays, I doubt I caught it all. But it affected me profoundly.

Bronowski was passionate and mesmerising, with fascinating hand gestures. He spoke straight to the camera in precise sentences for minutes at a time without background music, rapid cuts, or unnecessary images. Yet he held your attention. He gave us a warm, intelligent, gimmick-free exploration of science and humanity. It was unsettling that a single individual could be so knowledgeable about so many varied subjects, from architecture to evolutionary biology, from poetry to relativity. When he appeared on other programmes, such as Parkinson, you realised he was not reading a script. The breadth of his knowledge and understanding were genuine. 

I bought the book. I read it, and then read it again. I knew all thirteen chapters. Turning through the pages now brings back so many fascinating things: the flying buttresses of Rheims Cathedral where the building hangs like a cage from the arched roof; the Peruvian city of Macchu Picchu; a demonstration of the Pythagorean proof in the sand by drawing real squares on the hypotenuse and the other two sides; the coloured shafts of the spectrum that beamed out of Isaac Newton’s “Triangular glass-Prism”; Gregor Mendel choosing to test for seven differences between peas when he could not have known that the pea had just seven chromosomes; the surreal massive model head, several metres across, that was visible to a radar scanner while the real man standing beside remained invisible to its long electromagnetic wavelength.

Of course the answer to the riddle of Bronowski’s erudition, as he himself might have said rhetorically of others, is that the man was a genius. When the television series was repeated again in 1975, I saw every episode, and something else then struck me. It was that Bronowski’s journey through science was personal and autobiographical. He recalled his own moment of revelation around 1950 when he was working on a mathematical model of the teeth of an Australopithecus baby, the Taung skull, to discriminate them from the teeth of apes, when, “... having spent a lifetime doing abstract mathematics about the shapes of things,” he said I “... suddenly saw my knowledge reach back two million years and shine a searchlight into the history of man.” From that moment his commitment moved from the abstract to the human.

He was able to talk about periods in his career when he had collaborated with other people of genius. He had known Einstein, Daniel Lehrman, James Watson, Leo Szilard, and John von Neumann. He spoke of them with fondness and enthusiasm.

He remembered Einstein’s lack of materialism in lecturing at Cambridge in an old sweater and carpet slippers with no socks. He talked of afternoons spent with Leo Szilard at the Salk Institute in California, and recounted a tale about the moment when, in a mental flash, Szilard conceived the idea of the nuclear reactor. He had stopped at a red light, and before the light had turned green had realised that if you hit an atom with one neutron, and it broke up to release two, then you would have a chain reaction. The only improbable part of the story, said Bronowski, is that “I never knew Szilard to stop for a red light.”

Bronowski described John von Neumann, the founder of game theory and computing science, as “the cleverest man I ever knew,” and “a genius, in the sense that a genius is a man who has two great ideas.” He shared an anecdote of how, during the war, after they had been discussing a particularly difficult nuclear problem, he had telephoned von Neumann early the next morning to tell him he was right, and von Neumann complained that he only wanted to be telephoned early in the morning to be told when he was wrong.

This anecdote served to illustrate how von Neumann was in love with what Bronowski called “the aristocracy of the intellect”, with which he fundamentally disagreed and considered dangerous. What we need, he argued, is “democracy of the intellect”, where knowledge sits with people who have no ambition to control others. Elsewhere, in what is perhaps the most often repeated sequence from the series when he walks into the pond at Auschwitz crematorium and scoops up the mud of human remains, he talks of the dogma and arrogance that comes from a false belief in absolute knowledge. He talks about the devastation of Hiroshima. It was a moral and ethical lesson that all knowledge is imperfect. Bronowski would surely have been dismayed by the Monty Python quip that he knew everything.

Even today, despite subsequent developments in computing, neural imaging, molecular biology, robotics, and so on, his book and series remain an exemplar of intelligent broadcasting. I was in awe and in envy. His intellect ranged across areas as diverse as literature, poetry, art, architecture, chess, mathematics, nuclear physics and biology, and yet he retained a deep sense of humility.

It was unsettling. From that time I wanted to embark upon my own version of his personal journey, starting by going to university. It felt a failing not to have been. I was drawn towards the ideas Bronowski had talked about: the human sciences, cultural evolution, psychology, sociology and anthropology. I had no idea where it might lead except that it would be a step in the right direction. At twenty-four, without university entrance qualifications, when it was not easy to get in, when completing a degree was just as difficult, it seemed a mountain to climb, but I knew I had to try.


Jacob Bronowski
The Ascent of Man (5***)
When I read The Ascent Of Man again in August, 2015, I gave it a book review rating of 5*** because I had indeed read it over and over again, possibly six times, since I bought it in 1975, through which it became of considerable personal influence. I noted that reading it yet again, it may have lost a little of its freshness, but I remained in awe of Bronowski's encyclopaedic knowledge and ability to explain things. I keep wondering whether to buy the DVDs, or whether that would spoil it for me.

Agents Of Maths Destruction

New Month Old Post: First posted 18th February, 2018. 

Who needs brains any more except to ponder how computers and calculators have changed the way we do everyday calculations?

At one time we needed brains for long multiplication and long division, drummed into us at primary school from time immemorial. It is so long since I tried I’m not sure I can remember. Let’s try on the back of a proverbial envelope.

Long multiplication and long division with numbers and with pre-decimal currency

To do it you had to be able to add up, ‘take away’ and know your times tables – eight eights are sixty four, and so on – but just about everyone born before 1980 could do these things without having to think. 

Those of us still older, born before say 1960, could multiply and divide pre-decimal currency – remember, twelve pence to the shilling, twenty shillings to the pound. You had to have grown up with this arcane system to understand it. Perhaps we should have kept it. It might have put foreigners off from wanting to come here and there would have been no need for Brexit. As the example reveals, even I struggle with the division.

Logarithms and Antilogarithms

Then, there were logarithms and antilogarithms, as thrown at us in secondary school. To multiply or divide two numbers, you looked up their logs in a little book, added them to multiply, or subtracted to divide, and then converted the result back into the answer by looking it up in a table of antilogs. For example, using my dinky little Science Data Book, bought for 12p in 1973: 

To multiply 2468 x 3579:
log 2468 = 3.3923; log 3579 = 3.5538; sum = 6.9461; antilog  = 8,833,000

To divide 3579 by 24:
log 3579 = 3.5538; log 24 = 1.3802; subtraction  =  2.1736; antilog  149.1

It’s absolute magic, although the real magicians were individuals like Napier and Briggs who invented it. How ever did they come up with the idea? It was not perfect. Log tables gave only approximate rounded answers and it was tricky handling numbers with different magnitudes of ten (represented by the 3., 6., 1. and 2. to the left of the decimal points), but it was very satisfying. You needed ‘A’ Level Maths to understand how they actually worked, but not to be able to use them. Some also learned to use a slide rule for these kinds of calculations – a mechanical version of logarithms – but as I never had to, I’ll skip that one.

A Slide Rule

Due to a hopeless lack of imagination, I left school to work for a firm of accountants in Leeds. Contrary to what you might think, our arithmetical skills were rarely stretched beyond adding up long columns of numbers. We whizzed through the totals in cash books and ledgers, and joked about adding up the telephone directory for practice. The silence of the office would be punctuated by cries of torment and elation: “oh pillocks!” as one desolate soul failed to match the totals they had produced moments earlier, or a tuneless outbreak of the 1812 Overture as another triumphantly agreed a ‘trial balance’ after four or five attempts.

A 1960s Sumlock Comptometer.

But when it came to checking pages and pages of additions we had comptometer operators. Thousands of glamorous girls left school to train as Sumlock ‘comps’, learning how to twist and contort their fingers into impossible shapes and thump, thump, thump through thousands of additions in next to no time without ever looking at their machines. By using as many fingers as it took, they could enter all the digits of a number in a single press. It probably damaged their hands for life. I still don’t understand how they did it. There was both mystery and glamour in going out on audit with a comp.

A 1950s Friden Electromechanical Calculator

Back at the office we had an old Friden electro-mechanical calculating machine. What a beast that was. I never once saw it used for work, but we discovered that if you switched it on and pressed a particular key it would start counting rapidly upwards on its twenty-digit register.

“What if we left it on over the bank holiday weekend?” someone wondered one Friday. “What would it get to by Tuesday?”

Fortunately we didn’t try. It would probably have burst into flames and set fire to all the papers in the filing room. But we worked it out (sadly not with the Friden). It operated at eight cycles per second. So after one minute it would have counted to 480, after one hour to 28,800, and after one day to 691,200. So if we had started it at five o’clock on Friday, it would have got to 2,534,400 by nine o’clock on Tuesday morning. So, counting at eight per second gets you to just two and half million after three and a half days! It shows how big two and a half million actually is.

The obvious questions to us awstruck nerdy accountant types were then “what would it get to in a year?”– about two hundred and fifty million, and “how long would it take to fill all twenty numbers in the top register with nines?”– about thirty nine million million years. As the building was demolished in the nineteen eighties it would have been switched off long before then. But what would it have got to? 

An ANITA 1011 LS1 Desktop Calculator (c1971)

The first fully electronic machine I saw was a late nineteen-sixties ANITA (“A New Inspiration To Accounting”), one of the first of many truly cringeworthy acronyms of the digital revolution) which looked basically like a comptometer with light tube numbers.  Then, fairly quickly with advances in integrated circuits and chip technology, came the ANITA desk top calculator followed by pocket handhelds that could read HELLHOLE, GOB and BOOBIES upside down, and 7175 the right way up. Intelligence was as redundant as comptometer operators. We revelled so much in our mindless machine skills that I once saw a garage mechanic work out the then 10% VAT on my bill with a calculator, and get it wrong and undercharge me. It can still be quicker to do things mentally rather than use a calculator.

Around 1972, my dad saw one of the first pocket calculators for sale in Boots. It could add, subtract, multiply and divide, pretty much state of the art for the time, but at £32 (about £350 in today’s money) and not as compact as now, it required large pockets in more ways than one. I told him it was ridiculously overpriced. Infuriatingly, he ignored me and bought one. On the following Monday they reduced the price down to just £6. It was his turn to be annoyed but the store manager refused to give a refund. He stuck with that calculator for the next thirty years.

How often now do we even use calculators? Not a lot for basic arithmetic. Do we ever doubt the calculations on our computer generated energy bills and bank statements? Do we check the VAT on our online purchases? Do accountants ever question the sums on their Excel spreadsheets? Just think, a fraction of a penny here, another there, carefuly concealed, embezzlement by a million roundings, it could all add up to a nice little earner.

Pen And Ink

 

Prompted by these long-unused fountain pens in my desk, I tried to think back to when I last used pen and ink; not biro, felt tip, gel pen, or any of the other variations, but proper liquid ink. It must have been around 1987. 

At primary school we only used pencil. Every classroom had a large “industrial” sharpener fixed to a desk near the front, with pencils at the ready. I seem to remember pencil monitors responsible for sharpening the pencils. But, at some point during junior school, around the age of 10, we were allowed liquid ink: by then no longer nib pens dipped in inkwells, but fountain pens. I do still have my Dad’s old inkwell, though, glass and heavy, almost impossible to knock over, encrusted with decades of dried ink.  

We used mainly blue or boring blue-black ink, permanent or washable, Stephens or Quink. I liked Stephens Radiant Blue, and once had a bottle of red. Brilliant blue light shone through the bottles, like sunlight through a prism. It was as if you could touch, feel, taste, and hear it. 

We definitely had fountain pens by secondary school. All my school notes, work, year-end examinations, Ordinary and Advanced Levels, as well as personal letters and everything else, were in fountain pen. Biro was forbidden at school without saying: horrible, messy, blotchy things. Useful paraphernalia included blotting paper to ensure the ink was dry before turning the page. 

In accountancy in the 1970s, our working papers (the equivalent of hand-written spreadsheets), drafts for typing, year end ledgers, and so on, were still in fountain pen. We only used biro to tick (check) things off, usually in red and green in alternating years. Then, again, a few years later, taking Advanced Level examinations for a second time, my notes and exams were all in fountain pen. It continued through university: one clever chap, who got a First, fascinated us by the way he worked his fountain pen through exams, steadily without a break. For me, it was fountain pen again through my Masters course and early work as a university research assistant. I remember having to pay to have my dissertation typed. 

What changed is that biros gradually improved, and other types of pens became available. From about 1983, I became an early user of electronic text. We had a BBC Micro Computer with a WordWise chip, and a dot matrix printer. Dot matrix was low quality, but the software enabled you to write straight into a computer. Then, two years later, I got a job in a computing department with a good quality printer. You printed into the system from your office, then walked down the corridor to collect the output.  

I bought a decent printer to use at home. The regulations for my thesis stated that it must be typed, but I used my home printer anyway, and got away with it. By then, it was near impossible to tell the difference. I believe I continued to write personal letters in pen and ink until I lost touch with Brendan in Tanzania, mentioned in previous posts, and that would have been it. I probably used biro after that. 

Most of us as school had Platignum fountain pens, not the more expensive Parker, who still emphasise quality (“a free Parker Pen when you take out our life insurance policy”), but I tend to press so hard I wear them out just as quick as any other. I must have worn through 30 fountain pens in my time. 

The earliest had a small lever on the side, which you opened, dipped the nib in ink, and closed again to suck up ink. The later ones pictured are all filled by unscrewing the barrel. The yellow one is squeezed by hand. It was the last of four cheap ones from the stationer W. H. Smith’s I wore out while re-sitting my ‘A’ Levels, and being the kind of obsessive I am, I wrote the date of March, 1977, inside. That cheerful shade of yellow must have been worth at least an extra 5%, and the radiant blue another 5%. 

The silver one is a Parker Pen that works the same way, but better quality. It may have been my dad’s. The red one is a Sheaffer cartridge pen. These were refilled by replacing a disposable plastic ink cartridge, which was more expensive but much less messy. They were available from maybe 1970, and most of my last pens were of that kind. 

I imagine most followers will remember fountain pens well, but those under 50 might find them as strange and archaic as quill pens and inkwells. My daughter was not really sure what a fountain pen is. Things have changed very quickly.

Prophets Of Profit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Class Journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paranoia?

The last post mentioned the Beethoven Symphonies received as a leaving present from my first job. There is a second story loosely associated with it. 

As mentioned, that job lasted five years. I worked mainly under a man called Len, one of the Seniors just below Partner level. I enjoyed his dry sense of humour, but he could never understand my obsession with Monty Python and Jethro Tull. He thought them subversive. That, of course, was their appeal. 

Otherwise, we got on well and had similar interests. Len walked the Yorkshire Dales before it became popular, and took stunning photographs. He got me interested in coin collecting. He was knowledgeable about classical music, and to him I owe much of my love of it. He liked to play the Beethoven symphonies on the Stereo Cartridge player (remember those?) in his car while we were travelling to clients. Another quirk was that he was the best whistler I ever knew, as good as professional entertainers. In parts of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, he had a trick of whistling both the main and counter melodies at the same time by means of a warbling action with his tongue. I tried for years to emulate it, but was never able to. 

We went to wool spinners and dyers in Yeadon and Guiseley, an Engineering works in Ossett, a company in Bradford that made television adverts, a large firm of solicitors, a chain of bookshops with branches in York and Sheffield, Joe Kagan’s clothing factory at Elland, clients at Selby; jobs where you followed trails through offices and factories and asked questions; jobs that took a month instead of a few days; jobs dealing with systems. Not only were they interesting, your lunch was provided, sometimes in an executive dining room, or pub lunches or the original Harry Ramsden’s fish restaurant at Guiseley. 

There were small clients too: grocers, hairdressers, little garages, a model agency, a man who refurbished and exported old metalwork machines, and so on. Another client was the first winner of Bruce Forsythe’s ‘Generation Game’ television show. He showed us the prizes he had won on the conveyor belt, and talked about how Brucie had been the perfect host, taking all the contestants out for a meal after the show, and then for drinks with his friend, the Scottish singer, Kenneth McKellar. 

Len handled some of the most interesting clients, so it was good to work with him. He trusted me to be thorough and accurate. Even when occasionally he wanted me to do something tiresome, he would say that only the good guys get the bum jobs. I think he liked me, but not all was well between us when I left. I suspect other Articled Clerks, two in particular who were always in league with each other, thought there was favouritism, and had it in for me. They enjoyed working for Len, too. Other Seniors were not so pleasant to work with, and some jobs were a chore. There was one warehouse just a short walk from the office where you could be stuck for months doing the most tedious work imaginable. 

I mentioned to Len I was going to London for the weekend, to a friend’s twenty-first birthday party. It was also the weekend the clocks changed, and the topic moved on to wondering what happened with the telephone speaking clock. I joked that I would still be awake, so could go in a phone box to check. Idle chat, quickly forgotten, but I later remembered one of the two Articled Clerks was also present in the room. 

On the Monday, Len seemed unusually quiet. I was at my desk when he appeared to try to telephone an Inspector Green, and asked “Did you manage to trace it?” Naturally, I asked whether anything was wrong. Len said he had received abusive telephone calls in the early hours of Sunday morning. The calls were drunken rants full of Monty Python references over a background of shouted insults and foul language. 

He asked about the trip to London. Was it a good party? Had there been a lot of drink? Had I been in a phone box to check the speaking clock? Had I been too drunk to remember? Then he said, “It was you who made that call, wasn’t it?” He was convinced. “It sounded just like you”. I was always going on and on about Monty Python. He accused me again two or three times before I left that job, and then twice more when I saw him later at staff reunions, lastly about twenty years ago. 

The accusation was deeply upsetting, but I probably handled it badly. I did not have the social skills to deal with it. Whoever made those calls, it was not me. I would never do such a thing. Actually, I think we had returned to where we were staying soon after midnight. I have searched my mind over and over, could it have been me? I can imagine the phone box and turning the dial, Except I didn’t. It may be paranoia, or simply coincidence, but I strongly suspect those two other Articled Clerks, privately educated to put competition before principle, were behind it, as if it was all a game. 

Sadly, the damage was done. I did not work so much for Len again, and there was a distance between us. I regard it as my first experience of underhand, bastard behaviour to gain advantage. There were other examples from the same individuals, such as taking all the credit for stock checking carried out by others on a Saturday morning in a silent factory, after spending most of the time playing with fork-lift trucks and electric overhead cranes. 

Len left the firm some years later. He was not eligible for Partnership because he was a Chartered Company Secretary rather than a Chartered Accountant (Chartered Secretaries handle the statutory duties of large companies - he liked to call it the Institute of “Secs”). When other Articled Clerks became qualified accountants, some in due course were offered Partnerships. Len found himself working for them, given more and more of the bum jobs, and fewer interesting ones. It was hard to take from those he had helped train.  

Record Box 1- Beethoven’s Symphonies

I have two boxes of vinyl LP records (Albums) which I have decided to sell or pass on, but I would like to remind myself of what is in them first. They bring back forgotten stories. Two boxes is not a huge number, some friends had shelves floor to ceiling, but I had a reel-to-reel tape deck instead. I do still have my Sansui record turntable, but it has been in the loft for 30 years, and no one here is likely to use it. The tapes are long gone, but the LPs remain. 

I spent my first five years after school as an Articled Clerk with the same employer. When I left they held a collection for a leaving present. What would I like? I asked for the Deutsche Grammophon boxed set of Beethoven Symphonies conducted by Herbert von Karajan, the definitive version of the day. It seemed an appropriate leaving present from a professional firm. 

But, you observe, that is not the von Karajan set pictured, it is Karl Böhm. When I took the von Karajan set home, I put on the Ninth Symphony which begins with a very quiet section, and was dismayed to be able to hear an intermittent high-pitched whistle in the background. The manager of the record shop could not hear it, but it was still clearly audible to me on his equipment. Now I am older, it is unlikely it would be, like the high-pitched cat scarers our neighbours have in their front gardens, which my daughter can hear but I can’t. 

The manager offered to exchange the records, but fearing that the van Karajan sets would all be the same, I asked for the Karl Böhm set instead. It was disappointing. You might think that Beethoven’s Symphonies are Beethoven’s Symphonies, and always the same, but that is not the case at all. Somehow, the Böhm recordings did not have the same sense of excitement, at least for me, and I have rarely played them. He performs them marginally slower and more stately. 

It taught me that conductors, performances, and recordings can be quite different. There used to be a programme on Radio 3 on Saturday mornings called ‘Building a Library’, which compared different recordings of the same classical pieces. I think it is now in the afternoon. The variation is astonishing. Some recordings are pretty poor alongside others. 

So it is with Beethover’s symphonies. My wife has a set of CDs on period instruments conducted by Roger Norrington. They are much too quick and bright for me. My current preference, from online sources, is Daniel Barenboim with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which is made up of musicians from the Spanish world and the Middle East, including Israel and Palestine.

Here is a link to my favourite, the Sixth (Pastoral) Symphony, recorded in 2012. At 42 minutes long few may want to watch it through, and this YouTube version is broken by a couple of irritating adverts, but the balance and the way the different instruments and their solos are brought forward is, I think, absolutely superb. The video, of course, adds a dimension absent from stuffy 1970s recordings. The musicians look as if they are enjoying themselves, although the woodwind tend to show off a bit. Barenboim looks as impressively in command as ever. 

https://youtu.be/aW-7CqxhnAQ 

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 Cats With A Bank Account

Anyone seeking evidence that the BBC is not what it once was, look no further than this report from Nationwide in 1973. 

https://youtu.be/zEp-bigGqYI

As someone who was working in accountancy at the time, several things in this report trouble me greatly.  

Aside from tax and inheritance questions such as whether the correct tax was paid on interest received (cats do not have a tax allowance), and what happened to the money after the cats died: how did the beneficiaries or next-of-kin proved their right of inheritance, I have questions about the operation of the bank account. 

Presumably, Quicksilver and Quince had someone write the cheques for them, possibly the lady in the film, but how did they sign them? If it was with a paw print, then how did the bank verify the signatures as genuine, rather than the paw prints of criminal cats who steal cheque books? One paw print looks much like another as far as I can tell. 

And if the account required joint signatures, rather than either one, then how did the bank verify that both have actually signed, rather than just one that has put its paw mark on the cheque twice? That Quince looks a bit shifty to me.  

We need assurances that the bank account was operated legally and not in false names. 

Information Systems

Let’s have another boring computing post.  

Writing in November about how careful we once had to be in saving and backing up our computer files, I remembered something else that was difficult: just getting information in or out of a computer. It happens now as if by magic: writing and reading stuff on smart phones, social media, Blogger, ... it is  all so easy. We don’t have to think about what goes on behind the scenes. Most of us have no interest. 

But, until the nineteen-nineties, computers were for nerds. As one of those nerds, I feel fortunate to have seen how things developed. I could still write programs to accept typed-in text, or to send a screen to a printer, but thankfully I no longer have to.

My desk at work in 1990

Back in 1970, computers were near-fantasies. Few had seen one except on television or in futuristic films: ‘Tomorrow’s World’ and ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ come to mind. At work in accountancy, we had one client who used ledger cards with magnetic stripes, and there were golf-ball typewriters with primitive memory, but they were thought of as business machines rather than computers.

My friend, Neville, was the first I knew to latch on to the potential. He undertook a project as part of his business studies course, and that led to a job in the computer division of a Hull supermarket. This is the kind of thing he worked on: a system to help supermarket managers replenish stocks. They drew lines on forms that could be read by machine. It used forests of paper. The used forms (blank on the back) kept Neville and friends in rough notepaper for years; me throughout my university studies. They were great for lecture notes.

1970s Supermarket Stock System

Around this time, I took a job with a Leeds clothing manufacturer where account entries were made through yet more football-coupon forms. The forms went to a data centre to be coded on to punched cards and fed into “the computer”, which we were never allowed near. The data was printed on huge concertinaed sheets bound into weighty folders. Later, we all had to go on a course to be taught how to write numbers properly, in readiness for Optical Character Recognition which cut out the card punching part of the process. The weighty folders remained long after I’d left.  

1970s Nominal Ledger System

Later, on a computing course, I learnt programming on teletypewriter terminals connected to a mainframe computer. They printed all your input and output on wide rolls of paper, and reprinted it all repeatedly. 

These step-by-step exchanges continued after screens came in. Everything was typed in as text and printed on to a scrolling screen. It even happened with games. I remember playing a version of ‘Star Trek’ in which you moved the ship by typing a location you wanted to fly to, such as G27, and it dislayed and re-displayed your new position and those of all the objects around after every move. The ease of Windows, icons, mice, pointers, and colour graphics were still a long time away, and touch-sensitive screens even further. Voice and gesture input were not even dreamed of.

Not until around 1985 did we see the kind of systems we might recognise today, with on-screen forms and menus. The first I worked with was written in DIBOL and looked like this:

 

You could get quite excited about it. But, although it looked a bit like a modern windows system, it wasn’t. Every part of that screen is made up of text-like characters. It had to be planned out very carefully. Fortunately, not by me.

This system can be seen on the right-hand screen in the photograph of my desk at the top of this post. It was on a ‘dumb’ terminal connected to the DEC computer system. The screen on the left is an IBM business PC of that time, similarly unsophisticated. It was really something to be allowed two screens! 

Just a few more of the things I kept. Like the old disks and tapes on the earlier post, they were used as teaching examples. They won’t be needed again.

Unprincipled Spivs

Moving from the public to the private sector was something of an eye-opener. It was a very different culture. I had not expected to be working with such an unprincipled set of spivs.

Previously, I had only worked in the accountancy profession and universities where the main considerations were thoroughness and accuracy. In accountancy, we checked everything to the penny. There was no short-cut sampling and rounding as now. It was similar in universities. We aimed to review and understand all previous work in a field before attempting to extend it. Where I did have dealings with the private sector, it was either with audit clients wanting to demonstrate compliance, or with the research arms of large companies governed by quality procedures. You could say that things were done properly.

Then, along came nineteen-eighties ‘Thatcher’s Britain’, when competition and cost-cutting were king. You could say that standards began to drop.

Universities were driven to seek commercial partners. By then, I could bullshit pretty convincingly about ways to make computers easier to use, so when a systems company with problems came along, I was sent to talk to them. It was not supposed to be part of the plan for them to offer me a job on a lot more money. Feeling near to burnout with university work, I took it.

It was a medium-sized systems company driven by sales and profit, with an eye on what things cost and how long they took. The computer system they sold had been developed for an equipment maintenance business, but as the system expanded to handle more and more business functions, other companies wanted to use it too, and it became valuable in its own right. By the time I joined, there were around seventy computing staff, and the system was used by some of the biggest firms in Europe, from cash machine operators to telecoms companies. It had become immensely complicated and few fully understood it any more.

I identified problems, improved the information provided to customers, and began to take on consultancy roles, as they said I would. I can’t complain about that. But I disliked the prevailing ethos which was aggressive, competitive and sales-led rather than professional.

It oozed down from the owner. He had left school early and chanced upon the opportunity to lease and maintain office equipment, such as internal telephones and fax machines. He was a first-rate wheeler dealer and could spin a good yarn, and the business grew rapidly. He was also arrogant and ruthless. I cannot repeat all the sexist, racist, homophobic and explicit things I heard him say. In one meeting, he complimented a non-white staff member on his wonderful sun tan, and asked where he went on holiday to get it. In another, he likened a map of Scandinavia, “where our biggest customers are, Ladies”, to a “penis and testicles”. I suppose he thought it humorous; the sort of humour I had not heard in years. His attitude was that if customers were not complaining, we were giving them too much too cheaply.

This brand of arrogance pervaded company culture. Many of the staff, especially in sales, went along with it. They were paid ‘loadsamoney’ to drive around in company sports cars. There was pressure to go out drinking and socializing with customers. I did not feel ‘part of the team’. I don’t know if others felt uncomfortable too, but if so, they hid it well. The promise of more money and a company car tends to keep people in line, even when they never materialise.

The owner did not tolerate dissent. If you wanted to keep your job, you kept quiet. Those who crossed him were sacked, sued or both. One employee broke his leg playing football and was dismissed because “the injury was his own fault”. Another left to set up his own company and foolishly solicited business from his ex-employer’s customers. He was brought to the brink of bankruptcy.

The firm took on large numbers of new computing staff to redevelop and modernise the system. When they had served their purpose, 50% of the systems division were made redundant. I was tipped off by my manager that it was coming. He said that even if I survived I should get out as soon as I could. The phrase “unprinciples set of spivs” was his. I survive but he didn’t.

In all, I stuck it out for nearly four years. As I said, it was well-paid. The crunch came one Friday morning when I had to drop everything to go to Stockholm to sort out an urgent problem. I popped home to pack a bag and leave a note that I might not be back until Tuesday. It began to look as if more work like this would come my way. It might sound exciting, but it was all work. There was no free time to see the places you visited.

Newly married, with a family in mind, this was not the kind of life we wanted. It was a relief a few months later to find another university job. Although on a lower salary, I reasoned that the public service pension benefits compensated for that.

‘A’ Levels Again

Failing ‘A’ Levels at school was not much of a setback. Such were things in the nineteen-sixties, I soon received offers to train as a Chartered Accountant. That lasted for four years, but I failed the professional exams and left to train as a science teacher. I stuck that for just four months before returning to unqualified accountancy work, an unmitigated disaster.

There was a repeating pattern, scraping through early exams without much effort, and thinking I could do the same again as things got harder. You can’t. Basically, I never did the work.

It was a long way short of where I thought I should be, and damaging to self-respect and mental health.  I felt I should have done much better at school and gone on to university like many of my friends. I wanted to try again to prove I could do it, but getting in would not be easy because, unlike today, places were limited. People told me it was foolish, that the same would happen again and I would fail the exams and become unemployable. I should try again to qualify as an accountant. I was not going to listen to any of that. The best advice came from my friend Brendan, “For goodness’ sake don’t cock it up again”, mock anguish on his face as he imagined the consequences. Somehow, I knew that if I did, this time it would not be through lack of effort. It gave me a new sense of direction.

Older students sometimes got in to university without formal qualifications, but I would have been deluding myself to try. If my exam record told me anything at all, it was to learn to work and study effectively, and gain confidence. I needed to take ‘A’ levels again.

Inspired by reading interests, I switched from the sciences to the humanities, and started working towards ‘A’ Levels in English Literature and Geography. It was deadly serious, a last chance. I could not mess things up again. I took them part-time in less than a year. It was exciting and reckless.

I handed in my notice at work to free up the time needed. The idea was to swap permanent employment for short term contracts. But I found only four months’ paid work. After Christmas I stopped trying and signed on the dole (unemployment benefit) for four months. It paid my rent and kept the mini-van running. Financially, I hardly noticed a difference. It would be impossible now the rules are stricter and the benefits more miserly.

If that seems reprehensible, it was almost a lifestyle choice in those days. Some spent decades on the dole, students signed on during university vacations, and writers have told how the dole enabled them to develop their craft. Some justify it by suggesting that the cost has been recovered many times over through higher taxation, which may be true, but only for a minority. 

I began to study by correspondence course, but then along came two strokes of luck. One was finding a one-year English Literature course at Park Lane College in Leeds. It was intended for re-sit students, and they tried to dissuade me, especially as I had never studies English Literature at any level, but they had space and accepted my course fee. Another student had similar aims and background, and we were a great source of inspiration to each other. That is why attending a class beats a correspondence course nearly every time. You need to be with others of similar purpose.  

The other, in Geography, was that my cousin borrowed a set of notes from one of her friends who had got an A Grade. They were exquisite, and showed me what I needed to know. Is it possible to fall in love with someone through the beauty of their geography notes? With a little extra help from a friend who was a geography teacher, I decided to do that one on my own. 

The English Literature class cut the course down to the essentials. It is not necessary to study every text on the syllabus when you have to choose which ones you answer questions on. I applied the same principle to Geography. One section covered weather, vegetation and soils, but as you could answer questions on only one of these in the exam, I just did soils. Similarly, where the syllabus offers choice of geographical region, I studied only those on which I planned to answer questions.

I managed to maintain focus and not mess about. I got up at a sensible hour and planned my time. I went for brisk walks after breakfast and sat down to work: three hours every morning, three hours every afternoon, plus three hours twice a week at college. I planned what I needed to cover and by when, and largely managed to stick to it. 

Other ideas came from Dennis Jackson’s ‘The Exam Secret’ and Harry Maddox’s ‘How To Study’: get a copy of the syllabus to ensure you know what you are doing; narrow down your notes to things you can use in the exams; get copies of previous papers and practised answering questions under exam conditions; use memory aids such as mnemonics and mind maps; pretend to give talks on topics; attempt to emulate role models, i.e. people who are good at what you want to do. Above all, make sure you know exactly what is required of you in the exam. I never had before. 

Meanwhile, I had been applying for university places. It had not gone well. Of the six universities you were allowed to choose, three had rejected me outright, and the others had set a high bar. I put Hull as first choice, which wanted two grade Bs, and Lancaster second, which had asked for grades B and C.

I got two grade As. 

 

In the nineteen-sixties and -seventies, ‘A’ (Advanced) Level grades were awarded competitively. The top 10% got grade A, the next 15% grade B, and so on down to grade E which was the lowest pass grade. Overall, 70% passed. The next 20% received an ‘O’ (Ordinary) Level equivalent and the lowest 10% a straight Fail. 

Night Cleaner

My mother would have said it was the only proper job I ever had. Being stuck in an accountants’ office didn’t count. Nor did poncing around in universities. But twelve-hour nights in a canning factory, well, that was the kind of work her family had always done, and people from her village too.

I was a night cleaner: not the sort of cleaner that normally comes to mind with mops, buckets and toilets, but sturdier stuff involving wellington boots, waterproofs and hosepipes. Our job was to clean the factory machinery overnight in readiness for the following day’s production. I spent three university summers there. It was very well paid.

Some of the permanent employees resented the students for the easy opportunities they had, especially Ken the electrician. His job seemed mainly to keep everything covered in a thick layer of grease to protect switches and circuits from all the water swilling around, but it was no match for our high pressure hoses. From the ladders we climbed to wash stray peas and other vegetables from the hoppers and seamers, it was impossible not to short-circuit his electrics now and again. It sent him apoplectic.

“Call yourselves bloody students? You don’t even have the intelligence you were born with. What the hell do they teach you at university? You can’t even piss straight.”

I once accidentally filled his toolbox trolley with water, the stream from my hose tracing a perfect arc across the factory ceiling. What he thought of that is unrepeatable. It involved the contents of my underpants and what would happen to them were I to do it again. 

The “regulars” knew how to keep the students in their place. The names they gave us, the sayings they used, the jokes they told, were outrageous. Mick, another night shift “regular”, had one of the most creative and imaginative senses of vulgarity I have encountered. He said if anyone tried to drink his tea while he was in the “bog” (toilet), he would tear open their throat and get it back while it flowed through. He didn’t just spit in his cup to make sure no one drank from it, he rubbed a certain part of his anatomy round the rim.

When Nevil Shute (in ‘Slide Rule’) wrote that people from this part of the world were “brutish and uncouth, … the lowest types … ever seen in England, and incredibly foul mouthed”, he simply didn’t get it. It might have been unsophisticated, but it was clever and hilarious.

Donny, however, was different. He was gentle and softly-spoken. He was the night cleaning foreman, our boss. He did not put you down when you missed something, but patiently showed you what was wrong so that you gradually learnt the job. Being quiet, he came in for a lot of teasing from the other “regulars”.

Much of this took place in the factory canteen. Typically, we would start our shift at six in the evening and help in the factory until production ended. We would then take a meal break before the canteen closed. One of the canteen staff was called Josie, a divorced lady who lived in Donny’s village. With her lovely dark hair, she must have been extremely attractive when young. It was made out that Donny had a soft spot for her. This led to rampant invention about what Donny dreamed about. How often did he walk secretly past her house? When would he pluck up the courage to ask her out? Did he keep her picture on the wall next to his bed? Josie laughed, but was clearly embarrassed. Donny said nothing, but took it in his stride. 

The final year I worked at the canning factory was its last. It was to close permanently at the end of the season. The “regulars” were served with redundancy notices. During the final week only Donny and I were on nights. We often finished early except for in the yard where we had to wait for daylight. Donny asked if I would run him to his girlfriends’ in my Minivan, finish on my own outside when it was light, and clock off his time card at six, which I did. It was the first I had heard of a girlfriend. He revealed it was Josie. 

I didn’t see Donny again, but thirty years later I noticed an obituary notice in the local newspaper which my father always saved for me. It was Josie. The final line read, “With heartfelt condolences to Donny, her long-time loving partner”.

Weekend in College

(New month old post: first posted 23rd September, 2015)

You been tellin’ me you're a genius since you were seventeen,
In all the time I've known you, I still don't know what you mean,
The weekend in the college didn't turn out like you planned,
The things that pass for knowledge, I can't understand.

It was as if Steely Dan’s phenomenal ‘Reelin’ in the Years’ was aimed directly at me, cutting through the pretentiousness to the stupidity beneath. It was actually four months but might just as well have been a weekend for all the good it seemed to do. With the anticipation of arrival smothered in a blanket of disillusion, I detested myself as much as the subject of Becker and Fagen’s song.

City of Leeds and Carnegie College

It was the first of two attempts to escape accountancy. After four mind-numbing years, I decided it was not the career for me, and applied to train as a science teacher. You needed five G.C.E. Ordinary level passes, and to have studied your specialist subjects to Advanced level. In other words, you did not actually need to have passed the Advanced level. That was me exactly. I didn’t tell them about the failed accountancy exams.

It beggars belief that you could become a Secondary years science teacher with nothing better than weak Ordinary level passes in your specialist subjects. They should have told me to go away and re-sit Advanced Levels and reapply, assuming I still wanted to. Anything less would be to inflict my limited knowledge and ineffectual learning techniques upon other poor innocents. But you can talk yourself into anything if it’s on offer.  

Around 1960

The City of Leeds and Carnegie College, now part of Leeds Beckett University, was one of the loveliest campuses in Britain. It was built in 1911 in a hundred acres of parkland that once belonged to Kirkstall Abbey. Hares ran free in the woods and each spring brought an inspiring succession of leaf and flower. The magnificent main building dominated a sweeping rectangular lawn called The Acre, lined by solid halls of residence named after ancient Yorkshire worthies: Fairfax, Cavendish, Caedmon, Leighton, Priestley, Macauley and Bronte.

But instead of moving into halls, I remained off-campus in my seedy shared house. It meant not taking full part in the friendly community of cosy study bedrooms around the grassy Acre, and the activities I might have enjoyed. I felt old and awkward. The music drifting from open doorways flaunted the easy friendships within. While the Carpenters sang that they were on top of the world, Steely Dan mocked that “college didn't turn out like you planned”.

The course quickly became tedious. Chemistry classes were interminable, like being back at school. I began to sink into the old malaise and find fault in everything. A biology technician “humanely” despatched rats for dissection by cracking their necks on the edge of a bench. We sampled the vegetation growing on The Acre lawn, my accountant’s brain adding up the data almost before the other students had got out their calculators. In English classes, reading through a play, I realised that some of the others were not fluent readers. It was astonishing. They were training to be teachers for goodness’ sake.

We were sent out on teaching practice. I found myself in a Comprehensive School on a council estate. After two weeks, we were asked to plan and teach a small number of lessons ourselves. I had good ones and bad ones. In the best, observed by the teaching practice tutor, the children used Bunson burners, all happy and engaged in what they were doing. Do they still let them do such dangerous things? Fortunately, no one saw the worst from which I was saved only by the school bell.

The school had none of the liveliness of the grammar school I had attended myself, and staff made no secret of their dissatisfaction. “Here I am with a First in English,” said one, “and I’m supposed to teach kids who have no interest in reading anything at all.” And one of the most inspiring teachers left to open a pottery.

Despite good marks, the doubts grew as I returned to my old employer to earn money over Christmas. The uninspiring course, the mediocrity, the dismal school I’d seen, it was not what I wanted. It was not a substitute for university. More hopes and dreams dashed by another abandoned course. What now?

I was by no means the last to leave. A few went on to successful teaching careers, but many never taught at all. During the year that my course would have finished, the press was rife with accounts of unemployment among new teachers. Despite a chronic shortage just two years earlier, Governments had not planned for the falling birth rate. Around two thirds of newly qualified teachers were unable to find jobs.

One poor girl in London had previously been guaranteed a post, but after staying on at college an extra year to improve her qualifications with a Bachelor of Education degree, she now had to find work outside teaching. Perhaps it was fortunate I did leave.

It was thirty years before I visited Beckett Park again. The passage of time gave rise to quite an unsettling experience. I was haunted by half-remembered faces and snatches of conversation from a particularly intense episode in the past: here is where I usually managed to find a parking space for my Mini; across there is where I resented a tutor telling me I would have greater authority if I stood straighter and walked with shorter steps; that window, in Leighton Hall, is the study bedroom where a girl I seriously fancied took me one afternoon for nothing more than a cup of coffee and a long talk.

Ghosts aside, the place looked much the same. Most of the original Edwardian campus survives, although the internal use has changed, such as residences replaced by staff offices and teaching rooms, with students bused-in from off-campus and financed very differently.

Smoke gets in your eyes. You can convince yourself anything is right when you’re desperate enough.

[The original post was even longer and more over-written than this, but if you are interested, it is still here]