Airmyn Clock

This delightful folly is Airmyn Clock. It was erected in 1865 by the tenants of the Airmyn Estates to honour their beneficent landlord, George Percy, the second Earl of Beverley, who had funded  the village school some years earlier.

It greeted me regularly throughout childhood: on the way to Grandma’s on Saturday mornings, visiting friends by bicycle, on cross-country runs from school, learning to drive round its awkward bend, walking to sixth-form parties and under-age drinking in the Percy Arms. I never took much notice of it in those days. What I could not then have imagined is its connection to my wife, despite her being from the South of England.

Airmyn Clock was designed by Henry Francis Lockwood, an architect best-known for his grand buildings around Bradford, such as the City Hall, St. George’s Hall, Salts Mill and the whole of the associated town of Saltaire where a Lockwood Street is named after him. The clock bears a strong resemblance to his larger Italianate designs, Bradford Wool Exchange in particular. He may have been known in the Airmyn area because of his earlier practice in Hull.

Henry had around ten children, which makes for a complicated genealogy. One line, by way of Ireland and Devon, found its way to the Home Counties where my wife was born. She is a direct descendant of Henry Francis Lockwood.

My wife therefore claims strong Yorkshire antecedents. When we moved (back in my case) to Yorkshire, she took to pronouncing the short Northern As like a local. It would not have gone down at all too well to be asking her Bradford service users whether they were managing all right in the “baarthrum”. 

Image from Geograph. Creative Commons Licence. Copyright Neil Theasby.

Academics

Working in a university is a privilege. You get to meet and mix with some of the cleverest people, especially if you do research and give talks at conferences. You can find yourself sitting along the dinner table from an academic celebrity. The most impressive person I encountered under such circumstances was Jerome Bruner. To adapt a saying of my mother's, he had more wisdom in his little finger than I have in my whole body.

But those you actually work with can be just as impressive. Professor Alan (A.D.B.) Clarke of Hull University was one of those people who seemed to look deep inside you and know everything about you in just a few seconds. He had helped uncover the academic fraud of Sir Cyril Burt, upon which the British system of selective secondary educacion was based, with children selected for grammar school by intelligence testing at the age of eleven. I sat in Alan Clarke's 'Life-Span Human Development' tutorials for a year, absorbing every word. "Koluchova," he would say (she conducted one of the first scientific studies of children brought up in extreme isolation), "she stayed with us when she visited the U.K.". He seemed personally to know everyone who was anyone in psychology. We were awestruck. It showed me the power of personal anecdote.

Others I worked with more closely. Frank, with whom I shared an office for two years, was one of the cleverest people I have known. He had a degree and Ph.D. from Oxford University, and had seemed destined for a high-flying academic career until he had some kind of breakdown. He switched to university computer centre management, but another breakdown put him in a mental hospital. There, he met his wife, another patient. He was Jewish and she Catholic, and they had eight or nine children by the time I knew him. Long-term medication had left him with a permanent tremor and a staccato node of delivery that gave an air of affable authority. One day, instead of turning up for work in his usual casual attire, he appeared in a suit with his hair slicked down. I heard the students laughing in his lecture next door. "I must apologise for my appearance today," he had told them, "but I had to take my children to the nit doctors." (laughter). "And the reason why my hair is so neatly flattened is that I had to have the treatment as well." (Louder laughter, prolonged).  

Noel, another I worked with, knew everything. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? "The egg he would say," without hesitation, and explain it scientifically. How long is a piece of string? "Forty-two and a half inches" was his answer, "because that is the amount needed to hold up a navvy's trousers". I once saw one of his lectures: "Today's topic is Ethics," he began. "No, that's not a county in the South-East of England, it's a system of behaviour." The students sat blank-faced. I swear some of them wrote the whole thing down word for word, and will reproduce it in an exam answer.

Trevor was another who amused me. We were discussing the art of marking. "I can mark anything at all," he said, and looked around the room. "I could mark that filing cabinet if I had to," he pointed, "it's a B-minus." I knew exactly what he meant and had to agree. B-minus it was.

Just a few of the characters that come to mind. They are all dead now.