My Brother: The Engineer

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

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

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

Suggested Projects: Mechanical Pump and Electronic Organ

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

Brother with his Electronic Engineering Kit

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

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

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

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

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

The White Stool

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

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

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

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

The Horse Race Game

We had a Blue Peter afternoon. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump

New Month Old Post: first posted 12th November, 2016.

He was to be President of the United States, but across the North of England the word ‘trump’ remained an acceptable, almost polite substitute for the four letter word beginning with ‘f’ and ending with ‘t’ which to my mind is so coarse and common I can hardly bring myself to write it.

“Poo! Who’s trumped?” my mother would exclaim on walking into the room where my brother and I were playing. We might say that too, but if either of us had used the f-synonym we would have had our faces slapped as hard as if we had used that other f-word; not that we had ever heard either in those innocent times.

I was around eleven when I first heard the more common term for trumping. It came from an adult. We were on holiday near Southampton and had driven to London airport (not yet called Heathrow) to wave my aunt and cousins off to Aden. We waited inside a high glass-walled enclosure for their BOAC Britannia to take to the air, sheltered from the roar of the engines but not from the acrid smell of the fuel. It was close and stuffy, and the kerosene hung around us mixing with the pong from the clothes of a family friend who had been sick on the train travelling down with my aunt. To make matters worse my brother periodically kept discharging his own contribution into the atmosphere. We used to eat meat in those days.

I was mortified when another aero-watcher, a middle aged man, turned and forcefully told me to stop farting. I had no idea what he meant. The embarrassment stemmed not from what I had been wrongly accused of but from the fact that a complete stranger had spoken to me.

On another early nineteen-sixties holiday we drove to Devon in a hired Hillman Minx. It was a long journey from Yorkshire in those pre-motorway days, and as dusk fell we were still miles from our lodgings. My brother and I lay on the back seat comatose with headaches, trumping.

“Good God! It smells as if somebody’s babbered themselves,” complained Mum. I knew it was bad because she rarely blasphemed.

“Can we have a drink of water?”

“No. You’ll be widdling and piddling all the way. You’ll have pickled yersel’s before we get there.”

“I could do with a jimmy riddle myself,” said Dad from the driving seat.

Like most people from the South, my wife had never come across this usage of the word ‘trump’, but she soon picked it up, as of course have our children. It seems more humorous than offensive.

I am convinced it used to appear in a dictionary we had at Junior School. We used to look it up and giggle. “Trump”, it read, “a small explosion between the legs.” Perhaps I am mistaken because I cannot find it anywhere now. I am told, however, that the Oxford English has the definition: “to break wind audibly (slang or vulgar).”

But as for “President Trump”, to me it sounds more of a command than a title of high status.

Airfix Modelling

New Month Old Post (first posted 14th August, 2014).

In 2009, I came across a magazine called ‘Down Your Way’ which published pieces submitted by readers. I was dismisses of most of the content, which was unjust because the best way to improve one’s writing is to write lots, and getting something into print gives the ultimate encouragement. Teenage Son had the right attitude:
    
“Well, if you’re so good, let’s see you get something in there.”

The result was ‘Airfix Modelling’, published the following year. It may not be entirely accurate, especially with regard to the present day, and there are other things I would change too, but I have resisted the urge to tinker. It seems to be trying too hard to entertain. I also dislike the captions used in the magazine (“model boyhood”, “glued to a hobby”) which were added by the editor.

It was, in effect, the start of this blog, although it did not appear in this form for some years. 

January 1, 1965.  Friday. Made F4 UID Corsair from Airfix, and also a station booking hall.

January 2, 1965. Saturday. Made Airfix station platform.

Most of us remember Airfix, the make-it-yourself model aeroplane kits. There were also ships, vehicles and even, it seems from my diary, railway buildings. The Airfix company flew off the ground, so to speak, in 1955, in a World War Two Supermarine Spitfire. It sold well and became the first of an enormous product range. For a couple of decades, Airfix was a very profitable business. Its faithfully reproduced, 1/72 scale models, came as injection-moulded plastic ‘trees’ of parts that slid and rattled enticingly inside their sturdy cardboard boxes. You broke off the parts one by one and glued them together with clear, stringy, cellulose adhesive, which the instructions called ‘cement’. You squeezed it out of a metal tube, releasing an exhilarating chemical vapour. 

Some parts, such as wings and the fuselage, were fairly large. Others, like the engines, fuel tanks and ailerons (to be an Airfix modeller you really had to get to grips with aero-terminology), were smaller, but still easy to handle. The tiniest parts, such as the pilot’s joystick, the propeller shaft and the machine gun barrels, which in the finished model were all supposed to move forwards, backwards, up, down and round in a realistic manner, usually ended up glued firmly to your fingers in a horrid sticky mess. You knew you were going to be spending the next couple of hours peeling rubbery ‘cement’ from your fingertips, nails, nose, hair, ears and any other exposed and unexposed bits of the body it had managed to stick to. 

You could always spot inexperienced Airfix modellers by what appeared to be globs of mucous matted into the sleeves of their jumpers. The best way to glue very small parts was to apply minute amounts of ‘cement’ with a pin or matchstick, but you needed to have progressed beyond the novice stage to know that.

Kits were graded according to difficulty, but that was not as helpful as it seemed. The easiest kits, with the largest parts, were also the smallest models. What boy, no matter how young and inexperienced, would truly want to build the smallest and easiest models, when the largest and most difficult had the most impressive pictures on their boxes?

For me, the ultimate was the Short Sunderland III Coastal Command’s Fighting Flying Boat, which came in a massive box with an all-action painting of four powerful engines, roaring away on a high-mounted aerofoil above a magnificent white hull, banking to the right on the lid. Once I had one, my younger brother had to have one too. It took my Dad ages to make it for him, about three months of sticky fingered Sunday afternoons, and the ruined sleeves of several jumpers.

You could literally spend weeks making Airfix aeroplanes, and that was only the first stage. Next came painting. The paints were in tiny containers. One brand was Humbrol, a Hull company that had originally made paint for bicycles. Their paint came in delightful tiny tinlets, with little metal lids you prised off with a coin, just like real full-sized paint tins. Airfix’s own brand was in little glass bottles, like nail varnish bottles with a brush fixed to the underside of the screw top. I liked gold and silver best. They looked dense and sparkly against the glass of their bottles, and glittered as they flowed from the point of your brush. 

Sadly, there was not much call for gold and silver. The largest aircraft surfaces, such as the wings and fuselage, tended to be green or blue. I found it impossible to apply the colour evenly over these large areas. I was so disappointed when, after painting a Dornier Do217E, one of the first models I made, a splendid World War Two German bomber with realistic rotating gun turrets and elevating barrels, it dried as patchily green as a forest canopy from the air. 

My disappointment was replaced by disbelief when my mother, with real enthusiasm, exclaimed, “Oh Tasker, it looks just like a real one!” Whether it really looked like a real one in camouflage, or whether she was just trying to cheer me up, I still do not know. 

You then had to apply the ‘decals’. You and I would call them ‘transfers’, but the instructions always called them ‘decals’. Looking this up now, I find it is short for decalcomania, derived from the French ‘decalquer’, a ceramic decorative craze from the 1870s, but let us stay with ‘transfers’. They came on a card from which, when moistened, you could slide the transfers on to the model. 

You positioned the German crosses, the RAF ‘roundels’ (red, white and blue rings to you and me) and other markings, exactly as they would be on the original, a finishing touch that made for a highly realistic model, although not realistic enough for some. Perfectionists took things a stage further using a repertoire of illusions, such as filing the bottoms of the wheels flat to give the impression of bulging pneumatic tyres.

There was just one overriding, inescapable problem with Airfix models. They did not actually fly. They were not that kind of model. You could only pretend to fly them. Holding them in your outstretched hand you could, climb, dive, yaw, pitch, roll, bank and loop around the living room, making terrifying explosive sounds and screaming engine noises as you machine-gunned the family cat. Mind you, Sooty the cat had his own ideas about that and was pretty adept at leaping acrobatically up from the floor and smashing the model out of your hand with his teeth and claws, gouging out a couple of strips of flesh in the process. What would Churchill have given for air defences like that in the war? Enemy bombers ferociously snatched out of the air and disembowelled by batteries of enormous furry felines. The Battle of Britain would never have happened, and Churchill’s ‘never in the field of human conflict’ speech would have had to be completely different.

Alternatively, you could admire your models standing on the bookcase in your bedroom, until they got squashed beyond recognition by a busy mother with a pile of sheets and blankets. Or, you could hang them from the ceiling with invisible threads of black cotton, except that the Short Sunderland III Flying Boat was so heavy it would have necessitated a length of steel cable, a Bob the Builder safety helmet, and a rolled steel joist up in the roof. You could end up with a couple of dozen models suspended in perpetual dogfights all around your bedroom, until one day, when light had rotted the cotton, and you had imperceptibly grown a few more tenths of an inch taller, you inadvertently nudged one with your head, sending it crashing to the floor in a plume of accumulated dust that hung thick in the air like smoke, as you accidentally tripped on your model and trod it into the carpet.

To be truthful, there was not a great deal you could do with the finished models. The interest was in the making of them. It taught you patience and perseverance, and gave you confidence in the use of terms like fuselage, ailerons and landing gear, admirable qualities and skills even today. 

It seems hardly anyone makes Airfix models these days. The activity fell into decline from the late ‘70s and the company went bankrupt. Ownership of the rights went through several financial crises and takeovers, with at one point Airfix being owned by Humbrol, the paint company. You can still buy the kits, but at prices that in 1965 would probably just about have bought you the real thing. Those who do still make them are as likely to be adults as children. A fifteen-year-old boy who made model aeroplanes today would need to keep pretty quiet about it to avoid being beaten up at school. 

Maybe the increase in the cost of plastics contributed to the decline, or maybe it was more down to social change and the emergence of computer games. One thing that did not occur to many of us in 1965 was that for some fifteen-year old-boys, breathing cellulose vapour would become an entire pastime in itself, rather than just a small part of the pleasure of model making.

I remember the American Corsair fighter mentioned in the diary as the last model I made. The first had been a Fairey Swordfish, an early World War Two torpedo biplane with fiddly wing struts. But other parts of my diary show that by fifteen my interests were poised to move on, from making models at home to more outgoing things in the real world, although I know now I still had some way to go. 

“You still have,” said Teenage Son, unimpressed.

 

 

[Originally published as ‘An Essential Piece of Kit in a Model Boyhood’ by Tasker Dunham in Down Your Way: Yorkshire’s Nostalgic Magazine, Issue 145, January 2010, pages 46-48. ISSN 1365  8506. Country Publications Ltd., Skipton, North Yorkshire.]

 

Oil Lamp

In Bright In The Background, I recalled how my brother gouged a deep groove into the front of our parents’ brand new sideboard the day after it was delivered (I wasn’t entirely blameless). I guess my brother would have been around ten at the time which may excuse things a little. But it did not put an end to our unruly “riving about” as Mum called it. We did a similar around six years later when we should have known better, when my brother was taking his ‘O’ levels and I had started work.

I can be fairly precise about the date because it was shortly after the February 1972 power cuts. Most of our electricity was then generated from coal, but the miners had gone on strike forcing the government to schedule power cuts to private homes. The Central Electricity Generating Board divided days into three-hourly time-slots and assigned homes to areas. Power was then rationed by areas. Typically, your power would be switched off for two time-slots on three days each week, and you would also be on standby at other times in case further cuts became necessary. Rotas were published in regional newspapers. 

I remember being in our shared house in Leeds, playing chess by candlelight. At least we had a gas cooker and a gas fire. 

At home, Mum brought an oil lamp back from Grandma’s after she moved into a smaller house. I remember she had three or four of them from the days before electricity reached her village. Mum must have used them in her childhood and Grandma in hers too, because the wheels that adjust the height of the wicks are embossed:

        Evered No. 4 Duplex
        Evered & Co. Ltd.
        London and Birmingham

which dates them as Victorian, perhaps from as early as 1850. All parts, including the glass shades, were original. I never thought to ask about them, or how long they had been in the family.

Mum filled the lamp she had brought home with fuel, trimmed and adjusted the wick, and set it alight. As far as lighting was concerned, there might well have been no power cuts at all. It was easily bright enough to read by quite comfortably.

That was the last time it burned. A week or so later, the two naughty too-old-to-be-boys knocked it over and broke the shade. Zoom in and you can see where my brother stuck it back together with Evo-Stik.

And so, fifty years later, it found itself in our loft. And a leaflet came through the door from a Mr. Madgewick of Wombell. It gave me great expectations. The leaflet was covered in drawings of gold and jewellery, coins, military items, furniture, musical instruments, china and ceramic, typewriters, cameras … I immediately thought of the oil lamp in the loft. 

      Anything old and interesting considered
      Instant cash paid

And he did. It was like the daytime TV antiques programme ‘Dickinson’s Real Deal’. At first he said he was not interested, that he might have been had the shade been intact. But as he started to leave without it, he suddenly turned back and “to do me a favour” named a figure and pulled a roll of bank notes out of his pocket. I’m not kidding it could have been £10,000 thick. It was my turn to pretend not to be interested. Eventually, he and counted some notes into my hand.

Another piece of clutter gone from the loft.

Of course, I’m sure I’ve been done.

Lenses and Tubes

I’ve been in the loft again. This time it was old photographic stuff.

The lens on my present digital camera (a 7.1 megamixels Canon Digital Ixus 70 bought in 2007 for £170) has a 3x optical zoom and a 12x digital zoom if one is happy with loss of image quality. That, of course, is nowhere near as good as more recent digital cameras where 20 megapixels and a 25x optical zoom (or more) would not be uncommon, and even many camera phones would now better it. Even so, I still find it adequate for everyday purposes (note to family: it may be time I had a new one).

But in the old days of film cameras, lenses were usually of fixed focal length. You could get zoom but they tended to be expensive, so people usually used interchangeable fixed lenses, typically a standard lens, a wide-angle lens and a telephoto lens.

My Zenith E came with a standard 58mm lens which was a little long, a bit like always being on 1.2x zoom. It also had quite a narrow field of view, so I bought a 35mm wide-angle lens for indoor shots, and also a 135mm lens for distance. My understanding is that the 135mm lens is equivalent to 2.7x zoom. For 4x zoom I would have needed a 200mm lens, and for 8x zoom a 400mm lens. As well as being  expensive, they would have been very heavy to carry around when out walking.

Here, captured from mid-auditorium by the 135mm lens, is my brother receiving his degree at the University of Bradford from “that old man with a dirty hanky” as my aunt put it (he was younger than I am now). I stood up to take the picture, the Zenith gave off its customary loud “clunk”, and I managed to sit down again before people on the rows in front turned round to see what the noise was.

But what did we do for close-ups? My digital camera has quite a useful close-up ‘macro’ feature, but lenses were not so straightforward. They could be near-focused to some  extent, but true close-ups required a set of extension tubes (sometimes called extension rings) which screwed between the lens and camera body.

I had a set of three tubes of 7mm, 14mm and 28mm, which, in combination, gave seven different levels of magnification. They screwed together with such satisfying precision. I took this close-up of Southern Iceland from a map of Scandinavia in an atlas in 1977.

Here are the lenses and tubes down from the loft. They are destined for the charity shop, although whether they are worth anything when these days you can pick up top of the range Leica, Canon and Nikon stuff for next to nothing, I don’t know.

 

 

 

And for the true nerds, here is the instruction leaflet for the extension tubes.

Bright In The Background

In the early nineteen-sixties, I received a Kodak Brownie Starmite camera for Christmas. I developed and printed its 127-sized (4cm²) black and white negatives at home. Despite being a fairly basic camera, it is striking how good the image quality could be if you managed to avoid camera shake.

The pictures of Sooty the cat in one of my June 2021 posts reminded me that, in old photographs, objects in the background can often be as evocative as the main subject. They bring back endless associations, and a tale of two naughty boys and a new sideboard.

One outdoor picture shows Sooty sitting on the back doorstep with an old-shaped tall milk bottle instead of the more squat ones we have now (if we have them at all). The only colour picture of him I have, on a Kodacolor film I was given in 1964, finds him sitting next to the asbestos garage. It leaked water underneath the sides, so boards were placed to deflect rain falling from the roof.

Indoor pictures tend to have more things in the background. The Starmite camera had a built-in flash for single-use, magnesium flash bulbs. They shine bright through the years.

Here again is Sooty in our nineteen-sixties living room with its flowery wallpaper. The 405-line black and white television reflects the flash bulb. I am surprised to see we already had a fitted carpet rather than stained floorboards around a central carpet square.

The tiled open fireplace has brass tools and a fireguard. That was a job to get going on a cold winter morning, holding sheets of newspaper across the front to create a roaring updraft. The ships-wheel ash tray had belonged to my great grandfather; its wheel was a cigar-trimmer. In the corner is an ancient (even then), stand-alone electric fire with exposed elements mounted on an insulator. People sometimes lit cigarettes with it.

At the other side of the room, a curtain over the door excludes drafts, with a ‘roly-poly’ draft excluder blocking the gap at the bottom. Also in the living room is the fold-down dining table. The other room, less-used, was kept for ‘best’. 

A fruit bowl stands on the sideboard. It is now in my office, a container for things like device chargers and USB leads. I still pile books on top of it. The circular mirror that was above it is now unused, somewhere in my loft.

I remember the wooden-armed armchairs with spotty red upholstery and antimacassars over the chair backs to protect them from grease when people washed their hair no more than once or twice a week at best, and some men wore Brylcreem or Silvikrin hair oil. I can see, smell and feel it now, white in the jar.

My brother and I would sit in those chairs in the house on our own on Saturday afternoons watching the wrestling on the television (along with up to 20 million others in Britain). There was Mick McManus the villain who always beat the good guy, Jackie Pallo, with his underhand antics. Another great was Yorkshireman Les Kellett, a friend of a friend at Hensall. But my favourite was Ricki Starr, the wrestling ballet dancer, who caused great amusement at the height of sixties homophobia by prancing and pirouetting effeminately around the ring in ballet shoes and tight trunks, a prelude to the delivery of an unexpected lethal drop-kick to his opponent’s head. It was so exciting, particularly the cheating that went on behind the referee’s back in two-man tag-team bouts. Pure entertainment! We laughed, cheered and shouted, and when something decisive happened, we celebrated by pushing down with our feet, kicking the chairs over on to their backs.

One Friday, our parents had a brand new sideboard delivered – the one in the above photograph – to replace the scratched and ancient second hand one we’d had. I can smell its beautifully polished wood. The very next day, my brother and I watched the wrestling on television as usual. Perhaps it was Ricki Starr finishing off his opponent with one of his aeroplane spins, or Jackie Pallo administering his trademark sit on back breaker and arm lever. We jumped and cheered as ever, and kicked our chairs over. The side posts of those chairs were hard. My brother’s hit the brand new sideboard and gouged out a semi-circular groove on the front of the bottom drawer. Zoom in and you can see it. Believe me, there was hell to pay.

Hedge Trimmer Safety, 1968

(first posted 20th September 2016)

The Black & Decker D470 (U-272) Hedge Trimmer

If you want the kids to cut the hedge and mow the lawn, get them some dangerous power tools and they’ll do it happily while you’re at work. On no account stay home to watch or they won’t do it. Or if they do, they’ll make it look so risky you’ll have to do it yourself. 

My brother and I fell for it. We moved to a house with a six-foot high hedge all along the side. We had to cut both sides because it was next to a field. Dad came home with two seriously businesslike items of equipment: an Atco petrol mower and a Black & Decker electric hedge trimmer with a sixteen-inch blade. The mower, to which I owe a useful understanding of engines, particularly the operation of the clutch, is long gone, but the hedge trimmer is in my shed. It still works, and I still use it.

Electric hedge trimmers are brutal pieces of equipment. They cause more than three thousand injuries in the U.K. every year, mainly lacerated fingers and electric shock. After all, they are designed to cut through twigs the thickness of your fingers. Today they boast numerous safety features. They have two switches to ensure you keep both hands on the machine at all times, and the blades stop the instant either switch is released. They have blade extensions: fixed teeth which extend beyond the cutting blades so you cannot hurt yourself by accidentally brushing the trimmer against your leg. They have cable protection such as coiling and a belt clip to stop you cutting through it. They have guards to protect your hands from flying or falling debris.

Not only that, they also come with pages of warnings against the ill-advised actions of idiot users. They tell you to wear heavy duty gloves, non-slip shoes and suitable clothing, not to wear a scarf or neck tie, and to tie up long hair. They suggest eye and ear protection, but to be aware that ear protection impedes your ability to hear warnings. They advise against using the trimmer in damp weather, and to watch out for roots and other obstacles you might fall over. And you should always use an RCD (GFCI) circuit breaker.

Your imagination starts to work overtime as you picture the terrible accidents and injuries that might occur. The manufacturers really do think you are an idiot. They say you should never use the equipment while tired or under the influence of drugs or alcohol. You must not permit bystanders, especially children and animals. You should not cut where you cannot see, and should always first check the other side of the hedge you are trimming. Never hold the trimmer with one hand, they say, hinting that those who do might henceforth be left with only one hand to hold it with. And to ensure they have covered everything, including themselves, they tell you never to use the trimmer for any purpose other than for cutting shrubs and hedges. They seem unwilling to specify what these other purposes might be in case you take it as a recommendation. “Do not use the trimmer for shearing sheep,” they could say, “or for grooming your poodle.”

Some manufacturers even include warnings about vibration-induced circulatory problems (white finger disease), and provide advice specifically for those whose heart pacemakers might be affected by the magnetic fields around the motor. And all of this is before they get on to things that might go wrong with petrol driven trimmers and their toxic exhaust fumes and inflammable fuel, which I suppose would have applied to the motor mower my brother and I used to enjoy unsupervised.

The warnings seem so comprehensive they must be based on real accidents and incidents that have occurred over the years since home power tools emerged in the nineteen-sixties. Did someone, somewhere, magnetically disrupt their heart pacemaker and drop down dead? Did someone else, in their business suit straight from the office, catch up their necktie and die through strangulation? Could you really chop up your pet cat hiding at the other side of the hedge? And did some simpleton, under the influence of drugs or alcohol, imagine their hedge trimmer as a light sabre, and prance down the garden like Obi-Wan Kenobi to be electrocuted when the power cord tightened around their ankle and tripped them into the fish pond? 

So, just how many of these safety features do you think are designed into the 1968 Black & Decker D470 (or U-272 in the United States) electric hedge trimmer? Practically none of course, save for blade extensions and a few warnings. The manufacturers thought it more important to tell you about its power, speed and ruggedness, and the sharpness of the tempered spring steel blade. There is nothing to prevent you from using it one-handed, and it will keep going even when you put it down. One-handed is actually useful: you can reach further without having to move your step-ladder.

When you switch off it takes two or three seconds to stop. That is why my brother did have an accident. At home on his own one summer afternoon aged about fifteen he helpfully thought he would trim the hedge. He caught the end of his finger in the blade and had to phone Mum at work because he thought he might need to go to hospital, which he did. He had cut about a third of the way into the side of his nail and only noticed when his arm began to feel wet. 

Maybe I shouldn’t use it, but I do. It may be so old as not even to get a mention on the Black & Decker web site, but why buy a new one when it is still good? Modern ones are so feeble they need replacing within ten years. This one has already lasted over fifty.

In any case, hedge trimmers are only the third most frequent cause of garden injuries requiring hospital treatment. Far more people are hurt by lawn mowers and even by plant pots.

Instruction sheet for the Black & Decker D460 and D470 (U-272 or 8120) hedge trimmers

Green Dog

This is Green Dog, a plaster model made by my niece over thirty years ago when she was six or seven. Why is it green? Because her father, my brother, helped paint it. Like me, he had protanopia. He would have thought it was brown. He died when my niece was eight.

Protanopics have difficulty distinguishing browns from greens because we do not detect all of the red component of brown. For the same reason, orange is sometimes seen as yellow or light green because the red component of orange is weak. Red poppies fail to shine out from fields of green, and red fuchia flowers look nearly the same as the leaves. Purple and mauve look blue. Our ginger and white cat is delightfully camouflaged against the lawn, especially if there are snow patches. I’d be completely stuffed if there was a tiger in the garden.

Green Dog looks quite normal to me. I only know it is green rather than brown because someone told me, and because I ran samples of the head colour through Name That Colour (https://chir.ag/projects/name-that-color/#55642B) which identifies it as a mixture of browny-gray-greens with fancy names like “Woodland”, “Kelp” and “Verdigris”. 

On the bottom my niece wrote “To Grandpa from C---”, with four hearts and five kisses. My dad kept it for his last fifteen years, after which my daughter had it as a reminder of her grandpa. It has been neglected and ignored since long before she went to university.

Recently, it was my niece’s birthday. She has reached an age at which she has been of this world for longer than her father was. We packaged up Green Dog and posted it off to her with a note explaining that he (?) had been feeling lonely and rejected and thought he would be better looked after back in Sussex where he was born, in a house with three lively children – three grandchildren my brother never knew. 

My niece had no memory of it. She had to decipher her own writing on the bottom to work out what it is. It is now in her display cabinet. There is a three in four chance that one or both of her sons will see is as a normal brown dog too.

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.

 

Peyton Place and Top Deck Shandy

(First posted 7th April, 2015)

Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay.

“What rubbish?” was my fifteen year-old self’s first thought, but something in that luxuriant opening sentence and the sensuous description of New England’s “lovely womanly Indian summer” enticed me to read just a little further. By the end of the first few pages, with their sprinkling of references to whores, peckers and venereal disease, I decided it might be prudent to study it more discreetly. I looked up the meaning of Indian summer and read on by torchlight under the bedclothes.

In those days, a child reading ‘Peyton Place’, even a fifteen year-old, would have been as shocking as the furore that followed its publication in 1956. The book was banned in Canada until 1958, and even later for the more delicate Australians.

It is tame stuff compared to what children are exposed to now, but, unlike today, our innocence was well-protected. In contrast, our physical safety received little thought. We could wander wild for hours near roads, rivers and railway lines, and climb trees and light fires. Nowadays, things are the other way round. While depravity and consumerism roam free, health and safety are controlled to the point of paranoia. Carefree freedom ran off with childhood innocence.

One affair that illustrates these changes for me is the Top Deck Shandy Pan Books promotion of the 1960s.

It was when I had my first party. Hugo, my foreign-language exchange partner from Belgium, was with us, and around fifty other Belgians and Germans were staying nearby. The party was subject to three parental conditions: (i) numbers were limited and by invitation only; (ii) the bedrooms were out of bounds, enforced by my mother’s washing line wound tightly round the door knobs; and (iii) there would be no alcohol. We were, however, allowed Top Deck Shandy, so we bought in several dozen cans.

What is incredible about Top Deck Shandy is that despite being supposedly a low-alcohol drink marketed to children, it then had an alcohol content of 2% proof (about 1% by volume), equivalent to almost one quarter the strength of beer. Nowadays, it would be illegal to sell it to anyone under the age of eighteen, yet, in the 1960s and 1970s, it could be seen on school trips without any concerns raised by teachers. Things are now so different that children have been excluded from school for innocently taking in cans of perfectly-legal ‘Ben Shaw’s Bitter Shandy’ (0.5%) and shops have refused to sell zero-alcohol wines to pensioners unable to provide proof of age. No one is prepared to risk being accused of promoting under-age drinking.

You would have to drink fifteen cans (5 litres) of today’s ‘Ben Shaw’s Bitter Shandy’ to consume an equivalent amount of alcohol to one bottle of beer. You would probably be sick before you got there.

The party with the Belgians and Germans was brilliant. No one turned up uninvited, no one got drunk, and thanks to Hugo’s popularity with the girls, boys were hugely outnumbered. Nothing got out of control, unlike at a couple of other legendary parties around this time. There were just two consequences. One was that my young brother had to take the next morning off school because he was kept awake very late. The other was that I had several dozen Top Deck Shandy labels. At the time, Top Deck Shandy was running a Pan books promotion. For every six labels you sent off, you could select a free paperback book from a list. I had enough labels for nearly all of them.

I know what I got because they were, until not so long ago, in a box in the loft. My first choices were predictable: ‘The Dam Busters’ by Paul Brickhill, ‘Dr. No’ by Ian Fleming, ‘The Saint Goes On’ by Leslie Charteris and ‘The Satan Bug’ by Ian Stuart (a pseudonym of Alistair MacLean), books I would probably have bought or borrowed from the library anyway. Frank Edward’s bestseller ‘Stranger Than Science’ was another memorable selection, a set of supposedly true accounts of strange events beyond scientific explanation. I’m not ashamed to say I devoured it uncritically. Then, beginning to run out of options, I decided that Nevil Shute’s ‘A Town Like Alice’ was likely to be all right because, after all, he had been the chief engineer building the R100 airship at nearby Howden. It turned out to be a soppy romance but enough of an adventure story to be enjoyable. Lastly, with hardly anything left to choose, I sent for ‘Peyton Place’ by Grace Metalious.

Peyton Place sold 60,000 copies in its first ten days. It has been described as a depiction of life in a small New England town, stark and crude in its search for realism. I thought the small New England town in which it was set might be interestingly like the small Yorkshire town where I lived. It wasn’t.

It goes on quite a lot about straining, such as when, observed from a distance by her husband, the unfaithful Ginny Stearns walks off with a stranger, “... her breasts and thighs straining through her dress to rest against the stranger’s side” (page 81). Then on page 108, when the thirteen year old Allison MacKenzie parades in front of a mirror wearing padded foundation garments “... the top of her new dress swelled magnificently, the fabric straining against her rubber breasts...”

The book is obsessed with breasts. One biographer of Grace Metalious suggests that defining women according to their breasts was only to be expected in an age when Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell and Jayne Mansfield filled the screens, but feminist ideologies escaped me then. I was simply fascinated that Betty Anderson’s nipples were “always rigid and exciting and the full, firm flesh around them always hot and throbbing” (page 203), and I paid careful attention to the dangers explicit in the scene, when Rodney Harrington, driving a speeding car, takes his hand off the wheel to reach for the hard exposed breasts of his female companion and drives straight under a brightly lit trailer truck (page 314).

I know the page numbers because I noted them down faintly, in pencil, just inside the back cover, so I could find them again. I especially liked page 150 when Michael Kyros rips off Constance MacKenzie’s still wet bathing suit and “... she felt the first red gush of shamed pleasure that lifted her, lifted her, lifted her and then dropped her down into unconsciousness.” It produced strange stirrings in the trouser department.

Clive Anderson said that radio is like television but with better pictures. If this, by extension, applies to novels, it was surely true of Peyton Place. I have never seen either the film or television series it spawned, but I cannot image that five hundred episodes of the 1960s soap could sustain the same intensity, despite having Ryan O’Neal, Dorothy Malone and a very young Mia Farrow. On the 14th August, 1965, around a year after the author, Grace Metalious, drank herself to death at the age of thirty-nine, I noted in my diary it was one of the best books I’d ever read.

Today similarly scandalous tales of drunkenness, incest, rape, abortion, illegitimacy, high-school sex and patricide are everywhere, not least on pre-watershed mainstream television drama set in schools. They leave nothing to the imagination and you are in no doubt that these things could easily occur even in small towns in Yorkshire. Still uglier things, obnoxious and amoral, are widespread on the internet. Peyton Place would hardly count as soft porn now.

Am I mistaken in thinking the world a much kinder place, free and innocent, when you could feel grown-up drinking 2% shandy, and reading Peyton Place under the bedclothes was the height of wickedness? 

 

 

Notes

- You can download a PDF, Epub or Mobi (Kindle) copy of Peyton Place (and a large number of other public domain books as mentioned in my preceding post) from https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20160613. Some of the television programmes are on YouTube. The names of the characters differ slightly in the English, American and television versions.

- Top Deck Shandy may have had paper labels in the 1960s, as opposed to the printed cans of the 1970s pictured.

- This interesting article touches upon how insidiously our health and safety culture and gender stereotyping were already beginning to change by the 1970s. 

- The sale of alcohol in the U.K. is regulated by the 2003 Licensing Act which prohibits the sale of alcoholic drinks stronger than 0.5% by volume to anyone under 18 (see section 191 ‘meaning of alcohol’).  

Bike Gadget

In the town where I went to school, the roads belonged to bicycles. Everyone had one and nearly everyone used them. Four times a day, when the women rode to and from the clothing factory, or the children to and from school, or the men to and from the railways, docks and shipyard, they packed the roads three and four abreast. With no room to overtake, motor vehicles had to crawl along at bicycle speed. When the railway gates closed, cars, vans, lorries, buses, and even motor cycles had to wait patiently behind hoards of pedal cyclists who zig-zagged to the front of the queue. Who needed a motor car when you could ride everywhere on level roads for free? Pancake country. 

My brother had a speedometer on his bike. On windy days he could get up to 30. Pretty good with the heavy steel frames and Sturmey Archer three-speeds we had then. One day he rode up and down the street trying to go too fast through a police radar trap. They just laughed at him.

These last few sunny ‘lockdown’ weeks have seen me back on my bike more than in a long time. It is hilly where we live now, which has always put me off, but I’m getting used to it. I’ve worked out routes where the slopes are not too bad, and when they are I am not ashamed to stop for breath or even to get off and push. I keep my brakes on down hills and will need new brake blocks soon. I don’t care about the high-speed prats whizzing past on their carbon-fibre, disc-braked, thousand-pound machines as if only miles matter, or the bolt upright electric pootlers pedalling leisurely uphill with smug faces. Do your own thing! It doesn’t matter what they think. I am enjoying the clean air and quiet country lanes, all straight from the shed door. Glide like a bird with the wind in your feathers and sun on your wings. 

As John Denver said: Country roads take me home to the place I belong, West Yorkshire …  Here are a few pictures (click to enlarge):

Now, after all these years, I’ve got a speedometer too, not an analogue one with a ‘speedo cable’ like my brother’s in the sixties, but a “bicycle computer”. It works by timing the rotations of a tiny magnet fixed to one of the spokes. It has to be set up for the correct wheel size, but once that’s done then speed, distance and other details are all there at the touch of a button. The other day I did 7.04 miles in 47.31 minutes (excluding stops) at an average speed of 8.9 mph, reaching a top speed of 19.4 m.p.h. and burning 114 calories. It is not a good idea to fiddle with the display too much while riding.

My brother would have gone straight out and bought a better one. I wish he was still around to do so.