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.

Panora

This is my dad’s school Panora photograph from the nineteen-thirties. Its length makes it difficult to show. The firm, Panora Limited, specialized in school and college groups and was founded in Clerkenwell in 1916. Groups sat in a semi-circle, the camera panned round, and the picture was printed to make it look as if the whole school has been sitting in a long straight line.

Dad always imagined that when we eventually came to clear out his house, all his things would be dumped in a large skip on the drive with the Panora picture smashed on top. But it’s not. It’s on the wall in our office.

I recognise a few of the teachers: the new headmaster on the second row from the front behind the gap between the seated boys and girls, and the young English mistress five places to his right. Both remained at the school until they retired during my time there. I can name some of the other teachers too from staff and class photographs taken shortly before I went, such as the man with facial injury from the First World War, and my dad’s form teacher. How privileged to be a grammar school teacher prior to around 1960, esteemed, unhassled and reasonably well-paid.

And here is Dad. He’s the serious-looking one on the left of the middle row in this small group (from near the top-right of the main picture).  

You may notice he is standing with one shoulder higher than the other. That’s because he had a short leg caused by poliomyelitis contracted as a toddler just after he had learned to walk. He had to learn to walk a second time. The boy who lived two doors along the street caught it first, and the infection is thought to have spread along the drains of the outdoor toilets. My dad had to wear a leg-iron for several years and had an awfully thin leg for the rest of his life. It didn’t stop him walking a lot, but it did eventually do for him because he broke it in a fall at home, ended up in hospital, and died of respiratory failure in his eighties.

On the other hand, it may considerably have prolonged his life, and nor might I be here. It made him unfit for war service, so he spent the Second World War on his Velocette motorcycle as an air raid patrol messenger. In contrast, his friend, Arthur Mann, who is next-but-one at the other end of the middle row wearing glasses, became a pilot officer on bombers in the Royal Air Force.

My dad went for a drink with Arthur whilst he was on leave, just before he was due to return to his squadron at the end of November, 1943. “I could see in his eyes he didn’t want to go back, and how frightened he was,” Dad told me many years later. A few days later, Arthur and his aeroplane were lost over Germany.

Rawcliffe War Memorial. Arthur Mann is on the 1939-1945 panel.
I know about many of the other names too. The stupidity of war.

From the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and other records, I can see that Pilot Office Arthur Mann, son of Arthur and Annie Mann of 30 High Street, Rawcliffe, Yorkshire, 207th Squadron of the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, died aged 23 on the 2nd December, 1943. He had been in the R.A.F. for three years, having trained in Canada. He had been a qualified pilot for about fifteen months, and taken part in ten raids over Germany as Captain of an Avro Lancaster Bomber. The squadron had recently moved to R.A.F. Spilsby in Lincolnshire.

Earlier, from his village school, Arthur had won a County Minor Scholarship to the Grammar School and then joined the clerical staff of the Electricity Board. He had played for Rawcliffe Cricket Club, and as outside right for Rawcliffe United Football Club. He is commemorated in Berlin 1939-1945 War Cemetery and on Rawcliffe War Memorial.

Lancaster 1 ED601 took off 16.37 on 2nd December, 1943, from RAF Spilsby. Crashed near Saalow 6km NW of Zossen. Crew of 7: Flying Officer Harry Frederick Charles Bonner, Sergeant Frederick Lloyd Brisco (Canadian), Flying Officer Edward Vincent Harley, Pilot Officer Arthur Mann, Sergeant Sydney Martin, Sergeant Norman Farrar Petty and Sergeant Alfred Sugden Rushby.