I have had a song on loop in my head for two or three days, by one of those uncool singers you would not have admitted you liked to your friends at school. The kind that during the height of sixties and seventies top and rock, would never have been played by Tony Blackburn on Radio 1, and would probably have had their own prime-time television show on a Saturday night.
There were lots of them: Val Doonican and Clodagh Rodgers, or perhaps in America, Doris Day or Andy Williams. Memories were made of this by Dean Martin, and magic moments by Perry Como.
We also had Andy Williams. He was pretty good, but most definitely not cool. I much preferred Britain’s Matt Monro, who was not cool either, but his recordings of Portrait Of My Love, Born Free and the James Bond theme From Russia With Love are incredible. What a voice! What a singer! If I was asked to name favourite uncool singers, he would be top of the list.
I am thankful for that train of thought because it evicted the tune that was stuck in my head. You can have it instead. Any covert Roger Whitaker fans out there?
He gave the impression of having a high opinion of himself, but Leaving Durham Town possibly vindicates it. Sugary sentiment but a great tune.
So, who was your favourite uncool singer? Did Yorkshire Pudding have a regular date with Moira Anderson Sings? Did Dave Northsider just pretend he never watched the Des O’Connor show? Was JayCee just an old-fashioned girl who liked Eartha Kitt? Who was yours? You can own up here in complete confidence. Your secret will be safe with us.
But the fool on the hill sees the Sun going down And the eyes in his head see the world spinning round
I have been watching Brian Cox's series Solar System in absolute astonishment for the past five weeks. Our solar system is bigger and far more complex than we could have imagined only just a few years ago.
I write this from memory, so may have some things wrong. Whatever I write cannot possibly do the series justice.
Most of us grew up with nine planets, more recently reduced to eight, but the latest telescopes and space exploration reveal infinitely more objects within the sun's gravitational field than this. Many are very small, while others are quite large.
And while we may have thought there was little beyond the dwarf planet Pluto, there seem to be millions of icy objects in the same region, known as the Kuiper belt. The largest known so far, discovered only in recent years in the darkness, has been nicknamed FarFarOut. All these objects, like the planets, orbit the sun in the same plane, but even further out lies an enormous sphere of rocks and particles a light year across. It contains mobile objects that travel across the heavens and approach the earth from all directions. They are the comets.
It is not just the number of objects that is astonishing. It is the variety. They can be made of rock, gas, water ice, nitrogen ice, or something else. Ice can form mountains and canyons ten times the size of those on Earth. Other objects have internal heat sources that create violent monsoons, dust storms, or volcanoes that shoot out into space.
How these phenomena have formed can often be deduced from space probe photographs and other data. They are subject to similar physical and geological processes whatever they may be made of. Underlying it all are just a small number of forces, mainly gravity. But the gravity of different objects can interact in numerous ways. Some are heated by gravitational friction, alternately squeezed and released by the gravity of a larger planet.
There are some very strange objects indeed. Once above a few kilometres in size, objects will be shaped by gravity into a sphere, but one body has been seen to defy this law. This is thought to be because it rotates at eight times the speed of the earth, which flattens it into an elliptical shape through centrifugal force.
The strange rings of Saturn are also down to gravity. They consist of particles of various sizes, possibly from a decaying moon. They orbit at different rates, and the larger objects are gradually speeding and slowing the others with the eventual outcome that all the particles will fall down to the surface of the planet. They have not been there forever, and will in time disappear. It is only coincidence that we are here at the same infinitesimal moment in time, able to see them.
Ganymede, the largest moon of Jupiter, has a salt lake of water beneath the rocky surface, more than all the water on Earth. This was deduced from the magnetic aurora of the moon, which does not behave as it otherwise should. It has all the conditions we think necessary to support life. What form aqueous life buried deep inside a moon or planet might take, we cannot begin to guess.
But the strangest planet of all is the Earth. It is the only one with liquid water on the surface, maintained by a combination of gravity, temperature, and atmospheric pressure. If different, the water would boil away into space, or freeze solid.
What I like about Brian Cox is that he explains these processes, and how they have been worked out, in lay terms, without exaggeration or the loud, overenthusiastic excitement that spoils so many documentaries these days. Give him the concentration he deserves, and you are rewarded. What he is telling us speaks for itself. It is outrageous. And he laughs, as if he cannot quite believe it either.
Then I thought about looking into the night sky and the millions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, probably most with solar systems of their own as complex as ours. And the billions of stars and planets in all the other galaxies there are. And the time scales involved: thousands of billions of earth years.
Son gave a look of disapproval. I had used an unacceptable word (yet again!).
Because of swollen feet, a side-effect of pills to inhibit Exon 14 tumours, it was becoming difficult to put my shoes on. I had been wearing mainly walking shoes for some months, but even these had become tight, and I had bruised the side of my ankle making it painful to walk. Shuffling awkwardly, I stepped down heavily and hurt my back. It took three inactive weeks to get better. In the meantime, I finally gave in to nagging advice from our resident family occupational therapist, and bought some wide-fitting, wide-opening Cosyfeet shoes. And cosy they are. I can walk around the village again.
“I’ve had to get some spastic shoes”, I told my son.
The thing is, “spastic” was once a perfectly acceptable word. It was not until 1994 that The Spastics Society renamed itself Scope, the charity for people with cerebral palsy. “Spastic” had become a term of abuse, and parents were being put off. Children would call each other “a daft spastic” for clumsiness or mistakes. Just as a word, it sounds effective and humorous. It actually means subject to spasms, and remains in medical use in other circumstances. “Scope” is neutral, but the Society lost public awareness.
In contrast, Mencap, the society for children and adults with learning disabilities, continues under a name with negative connotations, but everyone recognises what it is. The name went through several changes after the charity was founded in 1946 as The National Association of Parents of Backward Children. “Backward” became another term of abuse. “Are you a bit backward?” was hurled at someone slow to understand a point.
Many other terms have fallen out of use. Mongolism was the scientific name for Downs Syndrome. Cretinism was thyroid deficiency severe enough to cause confusion and physical changes. They were accepted medical and academic terms into the 1980s. I still have a small book by a professor at the university where I did my psychology degree, an internationally respected authority in learning disability, that contains a table setting out the legal and scientific uses through the years of terms used to describe ‘mental deficiency’, ‘mental retardation’ and ‘subnormality’ according to I.Q. It is interesting that ‘idiot’ denoted the lowest I.Q., with ‘imbecile’ slightly higher, and ‘feeble-minded’ and ‘moron’ above, which does not seem to be the pejorative usage today.
From Clarke, A.D.B. and Clarke, A.M. (1975): Recent Advances in the Study of Subnormality. MIND (National Association for Mental Health), London. Page 5.
Such terms were used to discriminate and exclude people from society, irrespective of ability. Until perhaps the 1960s, eugenics, sterilisation, and euthanasia, were openly discussed. Institutionalisation lasted even later, although, with support, many occupants could have lived independently. Alan and Ann Clarke did a great deal to alleviate this by showing what people could do, rather than what they could not.
Then there are the labels for nationalities, ethnicities, and race. They were not always used maliciously. When a Canadian-born great-nephew turned up on leave during the Second World War, my great-grandfather said that this “Yank” (can I still say that?) had knocked on the door. It was a description, not a judgement. The family put him up for a few days, delighted to hear about their Canadian relatives, and it seemed to relieve some of his anxiety about having to go back to the war.
Returning to the slang term for Americans, no doubt many will dislike it, and it wasn’t used accurately anyway. I dislike being called a Brit. I am British, or English, or from Yorkshire, but as Brit is now used widely in the British media, and by some British bloggers, I am not likely to win that one.
National and racial labels are often used to stir up division and hatred. There is a Monty Python sketch about a television show called Prejudice, in which viewers are invited to come up with derogatory names for various nationalities, and contains a section called “Shoot the Poof” (although even Monty Python in 1970 steered clear of race). The sketch can be found online, but some will find it so offensive I am not going to post a link. On watching again, I still find it hilarious. Michael Palin as the awful show host is brilliant, but as with the comedy series ‘Till Death Us Do Part’, not everyone sees that the laugh is at and not with the holders of these views.
I misused one of these words in frustration. If you saw my feet you would see why. I’ve got some spastic slippers as well now.
In 1977, Eastern Europe was still in the grip of Communist regimes controlled by the Soviet Union. In Czechoslovakia, there had been a crackdown following the liberal period known as the Prague Spring, and subsequent Soviet invasion. the playwright Václav Havel had been imprisoned several times for opposing the Communist system. He became President after independence.
That autumn, I was in the middle of a few idle weeks between receiving the ‘A’ Level examination grades that had got me in to university as a mature student, working for the summer on night shifts in a canning factory, a walking holiday in Iceland, and starting my new course. One Wednesday evening, with nothing to do, I clicked through the three television channels we then had, wondering whether there was anything I might watch. I caught the beginning of a televised play which seemed to be about university lecturers. I quickly realised it was something special.
It was Tom Stoppard’s ‘Professional Foul’. It opens with a scene on an aeroplane in which a Cambridge Professor of Ethics, Professor Anderson, is on his way to a philosophical colloquium in Prague to give an invited talk. Another academic on the plane from a lesser, working-class university, McKendrick, forces him into conversation, but Anderson shows no interest in the colloquium, or anything philosophical at all. We later learn he has an ulterior motive for accepting the expenses-paid invitation, which is to go to a football match between England and Czechoslovakia, a World Cup qualifier.
In true Stoppard fashion, the plot becomes more and more complicated from then on, with interleaving themes and clever word play. The main themes are how ethical behaviour can be compromised by real-life events, and the oppression of individual expression by authoritarian regimes.
In Prague, Professor Anderson spots two English footballers at his hotel. He is also approached by a Czech ex-student, Holler, who despite getting a First, is only allowed in Czechoslovakia to work as a cleaner.
Holler asks Anderson to smuggle a thesis out of the country. This gives Anderson an ethical dilemma. The thesis concludes that the morality of the state should be derived from that of the individual, which is a position not permitted under a system that denies freedom of thought. Anderson, however, concludes that as a guest of the government, it would be unethical to take the thesis, but agrees to return it to Holler’s flat the next day, rather than risk him being caught in the street with dissident material.
He calls at Holler’s flat on the way to the football match, to find it being searched by police. They prevent him from leaving, but switch on the radio broadcasting the match. One of the footballers from the hotel commits a deliberate ‘professional foul’ to deny the opponents a scoring opportunity. The police also commit a professional foul of their own by planting foreign currency in the flat.
Anderson returns to the hotel exhausted, with the thesis still in his possession. Later, Mrs. Holler and their son arrive to ask for his help. They tell him that Holler was arrested on the way home from visiting him the previous evening. Disturbed by their plight he promises to do all he can. It makes him think further about his ethical dilemma over Holler’s thesis, and revise his position.
After dinner, McKendrick holds forth loudly to the other residents in the hotel lounge. He is clearly very drunk, and enamoured by his own linguistic dexterity. He lectures them about the ethics of professional fouls by working-class footballers. One of the footballers thumps him to the ground. Anderson helps him back to his room and leaves him to sleep it off.
In light of what he has seen, Anderson re-writes his talk to discuss the conflict between the rights of individuals and the rights of the state, including freedom from search and interference, and whether it is ethical to put someone in prison for reading or writing the wrong books. The worried chairman cuts his talk short by arranging a fire alarm. Two more professional fouls.
At the airport on the way home, Anderson’s luggage is carefully searched while McKendrick is allowed straight through. Another academic is detained for carrying letters to Amnesty International. On the plane, McKendrick and Anderson discuss this, and Anderson mentions the thesis. McKendrick asks where he hid it, and Anderson reveals he took advantage of McKendrick’s unconsciousness to hide it in his brief case. Another professional foul. McKendrick is furious, which Anderson understands, but concludes that his unethical actions were justifiable in the real-life circumstances. He surmises that ethical philosophy can be very complicated.
Although the play conveys a menacing sense of state repression, it is entertaining, clever and funny. The quick-witted Anderson character is delightful. It is set in very different times to now, in a country where those who held the wrong opinions suffered discrimination. It could easily return, either there or here.
This misses an awful lot out, but the plot is much easier to summarise than the philosophy. I did not understand the half of it, but it brought home the fun in playing creatively with ideas, and that it might be part of university life. If my course encouraged just a small amount of this, I was going to enjoy it.
The play is on YouTube (here). I still don’t get all the philosophical references, though.
All the palaver of pre-digital photography: it seems as much of the past as typewriters and tape recorders: the business of loading the camera, rewinding, posting off the film, waiting for the prints or slides to come back hoping they will ‘come out’ all right, rationing your few remaining shots to avoid having to buy a new film, ordering extra copies for Grandma, and cluttering up drawers with boxes of colour slides, photograph albums and packets of negatives, and lofts with the slide projector, carousels and the glass-beaded screen.
And then there were those of us who took things a stage further: home processing. For that you needed another whole cupboard full of esoteric paraphernalia.
It was Duncan across the road who got me started. His dad developed his own photographs and had given him a packet of out-of-date contact papers. They darkened in light, so objects such as leaves or your fingers would leave a white silhouette. You could even print crude photographs from negatives in the same way. The problem was that the contact papers would continue to darken until they were completely black all over. Your silhouette or image lasted only five minutes at most.
Well, one thing led to another, and before long I was making proper prints from negatives. I turned the yellow shed into a dark room, got a device for exposing photographic paper to illuminated negatives for just a few seconds, and began to spend my pocket money at the local chemists on packets of contact papers and bottles of photographic chemicals: developer to bring out the images and fixer to make the prints light-proof.
With the idea of taking photographs of London, we went down on the train
to stay for a few days with Duncan’s grandma in Hounslow, where
turboprop aeroplanes rumbled low overhead smelling of paraffin, and we
had to be up early so her night-shift lodger could use the same bed. We
freely roamed the Underground on our Rail Rovers (would you let two fourteen-year-olds do this now, naïve as we then were?), went to the Science Museum,
saw the Houses of Parliament and The Monument, howled with laughter at The Road to Hong Kong
in which Bob Hope and Bing Crosby get fired into space in a capsule
designed for monkeys, and got free tickets for the live Friday lunchtime
broadcast of The Joe Loss Pop Show with guests The
Barron Knights and regular singer Ross McManus – Elvis
Costello’s dad. Actually, it was a bit disappointing to find the guests
were only The Barron Knights whose act basically consisted of making fun
of other groups. A few weeks earlier they’d had The Rolling
Stones and The Searchers.
London Airport, 1964 (renamed Heathrow in 1966)
I took my new Kodak Brownie Starmite camera (12 images of 4x4 cm on rolls of 46mm 127 sized film), but none of the photographs I developed at home were much good. Only one commercially developed shots came out, taken at London Airport (not yet called Heathrow): the last frame on a colour film left over from an earlier family holiday.
I used the Brownie camera for the next ten years but with black and white film because colour was so expensive. I could occasionally afford the flash bulbs though: disposable one-use plastic coated bulbs filled with magnesium and oxygen, sparked off by a battery. They melted when fired, leaving ash-filled knobbly glass inside the protective plastic coating.
Black and white film was easy to develop at home if you had a
light-proof
developing tank, and one conveniently materialised at Christmas. The most
difficult
part was getting the film into the tank. You had to separate it from its
light-proof backing paper and feed it into a plastic spiral which went
inside the tank, but you had to do it completely in the dark. The
yellow shed was just about dark enough for contact printing – you could
do that in the dim orange glow from the contact printer – but film was ultra-sensitive and had to
be handled in pitch-black. You had to wait for night time, and then found yourself with head and arms beneath
thick bedclothes, trying not to breathe on the film, getting hotter and
hotter and gasping for oxygen. You really had to get a move on.
Once the film was safely in the tank the lid stayed on and you could work in daylight. It was essentially the same process as developing contact prints. You filled the tank with Johnson Universal Developer for a fixed amount of time, emptied it and replaced the developer with Johnson Acid Hypo Fixer for around a further thirty minutes, rinsed everything thoroughly with lukewarm water, took the film out of the tank and just like in Blow Up hung it to dry weighted by a bulldog clip to prevent curling. After that the negative images on the developed film could be contact printed (I have archived a copy of the Paterson instruction booklet which shows and explains the process).
It was always exciting to take the shimmering wet film out of the tank to see the dark negatives for the first time and try to make sense of what they were. You could easily have forgotten because the earlier images on the film would often be several months old. When you then printed the photographs it was fascinating to watch the images emerge under the surface of the developing fluid, trying in the dim light to judge when they were ready.
I was never more than an occasional snapshot photographer, but my uncle gave me his old enlarger for making prints bigger than the negatives and I avidly watched the BBC series Better Photography on Saturday mornings through the autumn of 1965.
Later, the Brownie Starmite was superseded by a Zenith E, a fairly basic Russian-made 35mm single lens reflex camera for which I bought extra lenses, an electronic flash gun and extension tubes for close-ups. I later tried the more complex process of colour developing and
printing but tended to have difficulty with the colour balance because of my colour deficiency. Eventually I moved on to colour slides, and home processing came to an end.
Now, of course, everything is digital and so another of those experiential manual skills has been lost to the electronic world: the exercise of judgement, the physical manipulation of the materials, the strange saliva-inducing smell of the chemicals, the darkroom perfectionism – all gone! Instead, we compile our digital albums, Photoshop our images, blog about what fun things used to be and can be vaingloriously creative without physical skills at all. It’s good in many ways, but not always as satisfying.
- Maurice Fisher’s website Photographic Memorabilia is a real treasure trove of images and information about photographic film processing and equipment.
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.
We opened a tin of country garden vegetable soup. Sheer laziness, I know, but it was fine. However, we were surprised to see that the contents included rice and pasta. I know they have to keep the price down, even though it was not a cheap brand, but country garden vegetable soup containing rice and pasta, well, you wonder which country’s garden vegetables they have in mind.
I am not the first to say this, but before around 1970, at least in the north of England, rice was for puddings, and few knew what pasta was. “Foreign muck”, as my mother would have called it, was laughed at.
From somewhere in my head, came this forgotten song about an Englishman who married an Italian, who, in the days when men never entered the kitchen, gave him only Italian food.
https://youtu.be/aGFpVN2xwXU
Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren recorded the song as a follow-up to their hit, ‘Goodness Gracious Me’, which arose from their roles in the film, ‘The Millionairess’ (1960).
Sellers was at the height of his popularity. I never understood why. To me, he seemed a self-regarding show-off, and not a particularly likable person. I found much of his humour unfunny, and in retrospect it was often cruel, with every -ist and -phobia going. He was brilliant at inventing comic voices and characters, as you can hear in the song, but it was the kind of humour that laughed at odd accents and eccentricities. I side with the eccentrics. Underneath, I think he was an immensely talented but flawed, deeply unhappy soul. He seemed unable to be himself. He died of a heart attack in 1980, aged 54. There are conflicting views about the exact nature of his relationship with Sophia Loren. I suspect she had better sense.
Following recent posts about the cats with a bank account and the survivor of the Titanic disaster, I have been browsing further through the BBC archive. This 7-minute gem from 1973, from the Nationwide reporter Bernard Falk, would not have looked out of place in an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It is about the god-forsaken East Yorkshire seaside resort of Hornsea, and a controversy about a proposed nudist beach that had the locals spitting venom:
“It’s objectionable. All this sex and every wretched thing, more and more of it.”
“I’m telling you it will attract the wrong class of person ... The hooliganism ... Drinking and everything else. ... You’ll get all the scoundrels out of hell coming ... all the riff-raff out of Hull, Leeds and all over ... And they’ll be breaking in ... And crime.”
“What difference does it make covering their private parts up to their health? I ask you that much. Not the slightest.”
“I don’t think children should be watching people in the nude. This is a family resort. ... Why don’t they find themselves a little plot, fence it in, and cavort about to their hearts’ content?”
“I don’t think I’d like to meet a party of nudists.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZWHVpB21ec
Good East Riding folk like these were in abundance where I grew up, less than forty miles from Hornsea. I sometimes went to a friend’s caravan there, and in the nineteen-thirties my great-grandfather’s cousin owned a newspaper shop in the town. They could be my distant relatives. However, as you may know, Yorkshire Pudding’s formative years were spent not a beach pebble’s throw from the place. Could that man in the Fedora be his dad?
New Month Old Post: first posted 10th February, 2016
What do you think of those who, watching films or television programmes set in the past, say: “they would not have used the phrase ‘too right’ in the twenties”, or that nineteen-fifties midwives would never have taken such an attitude to abortion, or that a locomotive shown in a wartime scene had not been built until the fifties? Are they nit-picking pedants or defenders of authenticity? I am about to join them.
In 2016, a television programme, “Back In Time For The Weekend”, took a family back to live as in the past. Episode by episode, their house and its contents were changed to how they would have been through the decades from the nineteen-fifties to the present day. Their furniture, decorations, kitchen and household appliances, and home entertainments were appropriate to the date. At the start of the series they had no television set or refrigerator, and they did not have a home computer until Episode 4 set in the nineteen-eighties.
Episode 2 was about the nineteen-sixties, when car ownership became more common. Supposedly in 1961, the family were given a blue, D-registration Morris Mini (above). The problem was it was a 1966 Mini, in 1961, five years before it was first registered. I know because I had one, blue, D reg., exactly the same, as in my blog header. Was the BBC research department taking shortcuts?
Those Minis had something called hydrolastic suspension. Instead of separate springs, the front and rear wheels were connected by pressurised pipes. The idea was that when a front wheel went over a bump, the pressure would tighten its paired back wheel to reduce the bounce. It was rubbish. Mine kept gradually losing pressure and sinking down into its wheel arches. It had to go every few months to be pumped up. It is astonishing after fifty years they found one that had not been scrapped years ago. The family of two adults and three teenage children in the programme would have weighed down the back and shone the headlights up into the air.
Here is my uncropped picture taken on the Cam Gill Road North of Kettlewell late in 1974 as we were putting on our boots for a walk to the top of Great Whernside. It was blowing a gale on top, but we were able to shelter in the large hollow summit cairn.
The phrase “stiff upper lip” has cropped up in blogs and comments recently. For example, behind the seemingly idyllic 1930s village childhood of my last two posts lay unmentionable death, disease, and hardship. And, all too soon, those children would have to face conflict and events in distant lands. They just got on with life, and made the best they could of it.
I recently came across this BBC archive clip which captures the phrase perfectly. It is 7 minutes long, but I can almost guarantee you will watch spellbound from beginning to end. It is very powerful: an eyewitness account of the loss of the Titanic in 1912.
Frank Prentice was an assistant storekeeper on the ship. As it began to sink, he helped lower and load the lifeboats, and then, when he could do no more, took refuge high on the stern. He jumped into the water at the last moment. On the point of freezing to death, he was fortunate to be pulled into one of the lifeboats.
He was 23 at the time of the disaster. Soon afterwards, he would have had to face the First World War, in which he was awarded the Military Cross as a Major in the Royal Tank Regiment. The film was made in 1979 when he was 90. There is a Wikipedia page.
Stiff upper lip: we will need a lot more of it if the world takes a turn for the worse. Shirkers, moaners, and preening attention-seekers should take note. Unfortunately, they are unlikely to read this.
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.
The flatland where the River Humber branches into tributaries was once an expanse of permanent marsh. It dried out gradually over the centuries with the construction of river banks and drainage ditches, making agriculture possible. Some areas were improved by a process known as warping.
In warping, river waters are diverted into the fields to deposit layers of fine, fertile silt. It is carried out by building low embankments around the fields and filling them through a breach or sluice in the river bank. The water flows into the fields at high tide, and after being allowed to settle, is drained back as the tide goes out, leaving silt behind. When carried out regularly over two or three years, three feet of silt might be laid down.
I remember my uncle, the farmer (see Aunty Bina’s Farm), explaining why he preferred certain fields for crops, and others for his “be-asts”. Potatoes, sugar beet, and wheat grew best on warp land, whereas the cattle grazed on pasture.
I may be mistaken, but looking now on Streetview, I fancy that the line of the low bank around the field followed the line of the lane. The fields were for crops, while the cows grazed behind the house.
But thinking about it now, it puzzled me. The buildings in the far distance are on the other side of a railway line, and there is a canal beyond that, with the river at the other side of the canal. How could the river water have been diverted into the fields?
Perhaps the water came from a different river. The River Aire is around two miles to the North behind the camera, and the River Ouse about three miles to the East, but I think these would have been too far, and several main roads, the villages of Rawcliffe and Airmyn, and the town of Goole were in the way. My guess is that the warp water must have come from the river beyond the railway, canal, and buildings - the Dutch River (or River Don).
Wikipedia provides an answer: “The first reliable report of warping seems to come in the 1730s from Rawcliffe, which is near the confluences of the Ouse with the Aire and the Don, where a small farmer called Barker used the technique.” Neither the railway nor the canal would have been there then. The Knottingley and Goole Canal was opened in 1826, and the Wakefield, Pontefract and Goole section of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway in 1846. The warping must have been done before these dates. Some of the brick outhouses at the farm could easily have dated from that time, and knowledge of the warping would have been passed down by word of mouth.
The railway, canal, and Dutch River can be seen running parallel in the lower left quarter of this 1962 map (pre-motorway). The oddly straight Dutch River is clearly another man-made feature. It was constructed in the 1630s by Dutch engineers, who diverted the River Don to drain the moors of Hatfield Chase, hence the name “The Dutch River”. The River Don originally flowed further East into the River Trent. Warping of my uncle’s land must have used water from the diverted river Don.
More extensive warping schemes were carried out in the Nineteenth Century along the original course of the Don, as far East as Adlingfleet on the Trent, and as far South as Crowle. One large area is served by the enormous Swinefleet Warping Drain (centre bottom of map) which runs for 5.6 miles (9 km) and has a permanent sluice into the River Ouse. The drain and much of the network of drainage ditches are deep and wide. Some are stocked with fish for anglers, and all provide habitats for frogs, sticklebacks, water voles, and other wildlife. It is astonishing to think it was all dug out by hand. But, we do not only alter our landscape. Families with Dutch names still live in the area, and the local name for drainage ditches is dykes.
Swinefleet Warping Drain
Swinefleet Sluice where the warping drain enters the Ouse
Two areas of unreclaimed land remain just to the South: Thorne and Hatfield Moors, which together form the largest expanse of lowland peat bog in the country. Even the intrepid Yorkshire Pudding’s Geograph project has not much ventured there.
One last piece of trivia. In the film “The Dam Busters” (1955), the aeroplanes are shown flying along a Dutch canal. It was actually filmed flying East along the Dutch River. The Goole shipyard cranes can be seen as the planes approach the River Ouse and then bank left over the town. Please don’t tell the East Riding Council. It will give them ideas about what to do with the place.
Dave Northsider is now trying to work out how he can divert river water into his polytunnel.
New Month Old Post: first posted 30th October, 2016.
A song for dads to sing to their children.
What a super singalong on BBC Four on Friday!
It Started with a Kiss, or rather for us with a bottle of Chilean Shiraz. It was followed by a fabulous edition of Top Of The Pops 1982, from 15th July. After several weeks of watching the constipated faces of Brian Ferry and Martin Fry (get the look!), it was great to have some good tunes for a change. Following Errol and Hot Chocolate came Dexy’s Come On Eileen, the perennial Cliff Richard, David Essex’s Night Clubbing, and Irene Cara’s Fame (although I have never understood the line in that song about qualifying for a pilots licence).
Later, there was a concert with the then (in 2016) 83-year-old Petula Clark who has brought out a new LP. Goodness, she is even more perennial than Cliff Richard. My great-grandfather used to like her and he died in 1960. Her voice is a bit thin now, but the music and band were superb. She kept us waiting for her ultimate singalong song but it duly arrived near the end. I then blotted my copybook by reprising my own lyrics from when the children were little. They went something like this.
When you’re in bed and Mummy’s snoring beside you
You can always go, downstairs
When you are cold and Mummy’s got all the duvet
There’s a place I know, downstairs
You can lie down on the settee, and have it all to yourself,
Choose some bedtime reading from the books upon the bookshelf
How can you lose?
It’s warmer and quieter there
You can forget all the snoring, no need to stay there
Just go downstairs
Sleeping on the settee, downstairs
Sleeping so peacefully, downstairs
Everything’s waiting for you.
When you’re in bed and Mummy’s been eating garlic
There’s a place to go, downstairs
Onions and curry, chilli, tikka masala
Seems to help I know, downstairs
You can open all the windows and the air is clear and nice
Fill your lungs with freshness that’s free of herbs and spice
How can you lose?
The night is much cleaner there
You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares
Conservative governments are non-interventionist. They do not like the state to run anything. They spent the 1980s and 1990s selling off the country’s assets and giving away the proceeds. It continues today in their unwillingness to pay for public services or regulate things properly. Some of them would privatise health and education if they could get away with it. That is why, if my health holds out, I will not be voting Conservative at the next election. I will see the bastards* go to hell before I do.
And yet, in the 1980s, they did intervene. A 1978 television documentary, ‘Now the Chips are Down’, made clear how woefully unprepared Britain was for the silvery white heat of the computer revolution. It scared the Thatcher government so much that they funded a number of costly initiatives. Two in particular stood out for me.
In one, the BBC was recruited to raise awareness of the skills needed. It led to the ‘Computer Literacy Project’, which ran from 1982 to 1989. It was linked to the specially commissioned ‘BBC Micro’, which was taken up by many homes and most schools, with over a million sold.
In the other, the ‘Microelectronics Education Programme’, massive amounts of money were spent putting computers in schools, setting up and funding resource centres, and training teachers. Politicians boasted that Britain led the world in “equipping the children of today with the skills of tomorrow.”
Did it actually achieve anything, or was it bluster and spin?
At least it got my new career off the ground. After escaping from accountancy into a dream job as a university researcher, I knew as much about these new concepts and technologies as anyone. It would be hard to overstate how immersed, obsessed even, I was in this bright new world of colour and light.
I recently discovered that the television programmes, and more, are freely online in the ‘BBC Computer Literacy Archive’. It has the 1978 documentary which set things off (still informative 45 years later), and Dominic Sandbrook’s wonderfully evocative reflection on the social changes of the nineteen-eighties (not only computers). Incredibly, one programme even shows my own small part in this.
Watching again now, I am struck by how aware we were of the social questions posed by what was about to come. How would people spend their time in a world with less work? How should wealth be shared across society? It is not turning out as well as it might.
Most fascinating for me is the series ‘The Learning Machine’ (1985), about computers in education, the area in which I worked. Here, once again, are the names and faces I knew and discussed things with at workshops and conferences, such as the main writer and presenter, Tim O’Shea.
He was scathing of the Microelectronics Education Programme, which, he said, had foisted cheap, underpowered computers and poor software upon parents and schools. The attractive message about improving the quality of education, disguised what was really on politicians’ minds: the job market, supporting British industry, and making education cheaper. Eventually, we might even do away with schools and teachers completely.
The then ubiquitous programming language, Basic, comes in for particular criticism. It encouraged tangled, undecipherable code, leading self-taught home and school users to think they knew how to write software, when, really, their knowledge was badly lacking.
I think Tim was broadly correct, but we were all still trying to understand how to use computers in education, and few teachers had the skills to teach programming. I was taught structured methods and had no difficulty creating reliable, intelligible Basic programs several hundred lines long.
It can also be argued that the initiatives did have benefits, but they were two decades in the making. A generation of youngsters became fascinated by computers, seeding Britain’s successful computer games industry. So, perhaps it did work out well in the end. Tim did well too. He became Principal of the University of Edinburgh.
One other series caught my eye: ‘With a Little Help from the Chip’ (1985), about helping those with special needs. I was astonished, in programme 3, to see a one-minute clip of software I designed and coded, being used in a school for deaf children. I have written about the programs before, but never seen the TV programme. It brought back all the satisfactions of going into schools to observe and collect data.
Do you ever wonder, were it possible, whether you would happily go back to an earlier point in your life? I would, to this time for certain. And I would jump at the chance of another forty years. Most of all, it was an innocent, optimistic time, focused on what we were doing rather than the unrest and disruption taking place. We were trying to make the world a better place. We could do with more of that now.
* A name used by Margaret Thatcher for Eurosceptic right-wing Conservatives.
I missed most of the nineteen-eighties. I was working as a university researcher, writing a thesis in my spare time, and volunteering with the Samaritans. As well as all that, my mother was in and out of hospital with breast cancer, and then died. It left little over for anything else, and I gave no great thought to events taking place around me. Even the re-runs of old Top Of The Pops programmes from that time have seemed refreshingly new to me in recent years.
Yet, in Britain, it was a decade of great change: to commerce and industry, to individual and national identity, in lifestyle, and in politics. Almost every week there was some new controversy about the morals of the young and the state of the nation. Most of it went over my head.
So, forty years late, I have been back in the nineteen-eighties. I started with a 2016 television documentary, “The 80s With Dominic Sandbrook”. If nothing else, it is wonderful nostalgia.
It takes us through the years of Margaret Thatcher and the IRA Brighton bombing, her “special relationship” with Ronald Reagan, and her nation of young computer programmers. Our hearts and minds are invaded by Japanese video games and VCR video nasties such as Cannibal Holocaust, much to the outrage of Mrs. Mary Whitehouse, a puritanical Christian campaigner. We fall under the influence of the American consumerist dream, and the lifestyles of television shows such as Dallas. There is the civil unrest of racism, and we are terrified by the “gay plague” of AIDS, fought with surprisingly frank publicity and the example of Princess Diana. There is a gradual increase in sexual tolerance and acceptance of diversity. We go to war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands, and with the striking miners.
Is it rhetoric to say “we went to war” with the miners? It was certainly planned like a military campaign. The miners and other trade unions had been causing trouble for years, and the Thatcher government was determined to see them off once and for all. A sweeping programme of pit closures was announced, bringing miners out on strike throughout Yorkshire and elsewhere. The government had prepared by stockpiling mountains of coal at power stations, and were fortunate that the Nottinghamshire miners stayed at work, thinking their jobs were secure. An information assault was mounted, branding the miners as “the enemy within”, portraying then as uncouth animals making outrageous demands, prepared to be violent if not met. The image and persona of their leader, Arthur Scargill, seemed to fit perfectly. The mainstream media reinforced it, with reporting doctored to portray the miners in an unfavourable light. It had elements of regional and class snobbery designed to appeal to voters sympathetic to a right-wing government.
But another documentary, made to correspond with this year’s fortieth anniversary of the strike, gives a different perspective. “The Miners’ Strike: A Frontline Story”, recalls the personal experiences of fifteen men and women involved in different ways: striking and strike-breaking miners from working and striking areas, their families, and members of the police force. It is powerful stuff, with harrowing recollections of hardship and brutality.
One of the worst incidents occurred at Orgreave near Rotherham on the 18th June, 1984, where the miners planned to carry out peaceful secondary picketing. The police allowed them to approach and assemble without hindrance, and then brutally attacked them. The police were armed with batons, shields and riot gear, and hacked down the miners from horseback. It was like a medieval rout. At the time, it was widely presented as an act of self-defence by the police, but, later, miners were compensated for assault, wrongful arrest, unlawful detention and malicious prosecution.
The strike ended after a year when the defeated miners went back to work. Essentially, they had been trying to defend their communities. They accepted that mines had to close, but not that it had to be done so abruptly, leaving whole villages near-destitute. You cannot “get on your bike and look for work”, as one cabinet minister told them, when you have a mortgage on an unsaleable house, and there is no work to be had anyway. And you can’t go to university late like I did when you have a family. The changes could have been introduced gradually, with support, as with later pit closures. Many of the affected areas never recovered, and remain amongst the poorest in Europe.
Even now, there are many who choose to believe the media propaganda of the day, rather than recognising Margaret Thatcher and her Conservatives as uncaring, self-serving leeches who sold off the country’s assets and gave away the money.
At the end of his programme, Dominic Sandbrook wonders how Britain might have looked had the miners and IRA succeeded. Would it have remained a trade union fortress holding out against globalisation and the advance of technology? No, it would not. Change was unstoppable, and trying to hold it back would have been futile. But it did not need to be handled with such incompetence.
John Going Gently recently mentioned the long-running BBC radio show “I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue” (ISIHAC). For those who don't know, it is a spoof panel game in which teams are asked by the chair to do silly things, very silly, very funny. It started in 1972, and has been running almost continually since: an incredible 52 years.
John included links to a couple of examples, and as he said in a comment, they should be prescribed on the NHS as treatment for depression. The one titled “The Complete Lionel Blair”, a compilation of a double-entendre gag running across a large number of shows, is almost too painful to take. You cannot believe such delightful dirty-mindedness could be broadcast on the radio.
In 1972, I was still in the shared house in Leeds, where we often audio-taped television and radio shows to hear again. We fancied ourselves as comedy script writers, but apart from a couple of snippets in the magazine Private Eye, all else was rejected.
ISIHAC was one of the series we recorded. Most of it is now gone, but I still have a tape with the very first four programmes from 1972. They were lost to the BBC for many years, and some may still be.
Humphrey Littleton was the chairman from the start, continuing until his death in 2008. Much of the success of the show was down to his deadpan delivery, as if genuinely baffled by the audience reaction to what he had to read out. Barry Cryer took over in the second and third programmes, but Humph returned for the fourth. The first panelists were Graeme Garden, Jo Kendall, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie, with John Cleese instead of Jo Kendall for the fourth programme. All had been in the show’s precursor, “I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again” (ISIRTA), which we also recorded; also mostly lost.
I digitise the shows to refer to in another post. For what it’s worth, here are the four half-hour programmes again. The BBC seemed uninterested when I tried to give them back some years ago.
The production took time to settle into its established format, but many of the elements are there: one song to the tune of another; swanee whistles; late arrivals; limericks; the non-associated words game. These episodes are probably more of historical interests than classics, but they still raise a laugh: “Announcing late arrivals at the Plumbers’ Ball: Mr. and Mrs. Closet, and their son, Walter Closet.”
There are some surprising treasures in the depths of the BBC iPlayer.
In 1962/63, Jack Ashley, then a television producer but later a well-known Labour M.P. and campaigner for disability rights, made a 45-minute film, ‘Waiting for Work’, about unemployment in Hartlepool in the North of England (made before he became totally deaf).
The film could have been from my own childhood: the people, the homes and their contents, the shops, the pubs, the shipyard. Where I am from did not suffer mass unemployment as early as Hartlepool, but here were the same kind of lives I grew up with. Although my father would have been considered white-collar rather than blue, and later ran his own business, this is definitely the kind if background I came from. A real glimpse of a once familiar past.
The film is here (https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p053r2q1/waiting-for-work), but as most will not want to sit through 45 minutes, and the iPlayer is not available outside the U.K., here are some screen-shots, probably far too many. (Update: links to YouTube copy added at end)
There was still work to be had
but the shipyards are silent
and many are on the dole.
Out-of-work men are embarrassed to have to look after the children
and do the housework while their wives are at work. The children don’t like it.
Jack Ashley interviewed families about how unemployment affected them.
Pubs were still busy,
as was the High Street,
but many families were struggling.
Shopkeepers talked of decreased trade,
even the newsagents and hairdressers.
Luxury goods were hard to sell
and the second-hand shops had more sellers than buyers.
A few of those interviewed had been able to find work in the south of England, but those that owned houses in Hartlepool were unable to sell, and many did not want to leave the community of their parents, relatives and friends.
Like most of northern Britain, this was still a mare-orientated monoculture. Few women appear in the film and there are no persons of colour. It would inform today’s woke young things why some older people have the views and language they do, especially the part where unemployed young men (most then left school at 15) talk about how their lives are limited by lack of money. They cannot afford to go to the pictures (cinema) or buy records:
“You have to cut down on all your things ... you can’t be expected to enjoy yourself when you’re on the dole ... it’s very rare I go out with a girl now ... when you take them out you ... have to pay for everything ... you can’t get far with fifteen shillings ... you can’t expect to take them out ”
“Do the girls ever offer to pay for you?”
“They offer, but it’s more or less accepting charity.”
The whole way of life would now be dismissed as unenlightened, and inferior to cultures that have replaced it.
Some of us were lucky, the beneficiaries of grammar school education, first-rate universities without fees, and student grants so generous that some even managed to save money. Most were not so lucky. I wonder what became of the people in the film.
