Hooptedoodle #423 - A Salute to Old Ben

 This is probably going to seem a little weird. Though he has been dead for nearly 14 years now, today I plan to spend a little time commemorating the 100th anniversary of my father's birth.

No particular agenda - for years now, I've occasionally been reminded that my father, if he had lived, would be x years old on that day. Each time, I laughed a little and shrugged it off - not a significant event. What I am tracking, I guess, is personal landmarks in the history of my immediate family - in other words, my own mortality.

Anyway, whatever the underlying sentiment, old Ben would have been 100 today. I intend to visit his grave, and I have purchased a very small birthday cake. After tea, I also plan to drink the last of the last bottle (of two) of De Montal 1965 which he bought me for my 50th birthday; I had previously bought him two bottles for his 70th, so it was not unlike a very slow and ponderous game of ping-pong. I can't think what else I might save it for.

 

You can just make out the "new" cemetery at the South-East end of North Berwick - very handy for Tesco. My sister is buried here too, and there is a space reserved for my mother, who is now 96 and in residential care in the little town. I have no plans to join them.

My thoughts today will be mostly of unsentimental stuff: how peaceful my life has been since he passed away, how angry and bewildered he would have been if he had survived to see 2022, and some measure of gratitude that he spent his last days very comfortably in a low-stress environment, though (like the swan's legs beneath the surface) I was one of the privileged few who had to race around fixing things for him, making sure he didn't get upset and didn't upset anyone else.

All the best, then, Ben - happy birthday - thanks for everything. I guess I won't have to think about this any more.

Hooptedoodle #420 - Whence the Pars?

 The other day I went out for lunch with my good friend Jack the Hat, and, inevitably, we got into our interminable old men's discussion about the history of football, who was the greatest player we ever saw, what was the exact team line-up for the Scottish Cup Final of 1975, and other varied and interesting stuff.

Well, it's maybe a bit specialised, but we get a lot of value out of it. One of our regular subtopics is the history of the Scottish teams. We got into the subject of club nicknames the other day. Let's not dwell too much on details, but we agreed that there is something particularly odd about the nickname of Dunfermline Athletic FC, who are known to their fans as "the Pars", and have been for a very long time.

Dunfermline are not one of the great teams of Scottish football, but they have been around for a very long time, and numerous generations of their supporters have doubtless gone to their graves with the club's badge engraved on their hearts, so they deserve to be treated with all due respect.

They are currently in the Scottish Championship, which is one level below the top league (The Scottish Premiership), and, though they have won the second-level league title numerous times, the only major trophies on record are two wins in the Scottish Cup, which they won in 1960-61 and again in 1967-68. They have had a good number of distinguished players, including internationals, but the most famous of these are individuals who went on to become successful managers in England, notably Owen Coyle, Sir Alex Ferguson and David Moyes.

 

The lads of Dunfermline Athletic posing with the Scottish Cup in 1961

 

Anyway, back to the point. Why the Pars? Well, there are a number of theories, some of them remarkably stupid, but the most likely is because of the club's playing strip. In the early days, Dunfermline played at various times in blue or maroon, but since 1909 they have worn black and white vertical stripes. The nickname is most likely to have come from the Parr, a juvenile form of the salmon (a very important fish in Scotland), which is similarly decked out in black and white stripes.

So there you have it - a piece of information which is unlikely to come in useful in your local pub's quiz night, but there is a wider context which I find interesting. Anyone got any more stories about the nicknames of sporting clubs, any sport, no matter how minor, never mind how disputed or convoluted the history of the name? I'm interested in this stuff, for reasons which have more to do with social history than sport, to be honest. I'm also horrified how little sense of the past modern sports fans have, but that's another issue.

All printable suggestions welcome!     

Hooptedoodle #418 - New Year Trip to Kelso

 Since Saturday (New Year's Day) was bright and not too cold, and as I had no possibility of a hangover, I went for a drive to the town of Kelso, in the Scottish Borders. The place is around 50 miles from here, but it's a town I haven't visited for years, and I always liked it.

The Borders region has some very attractive towns, and I used to visit there quite often; my first wife's family came from St Boswell's and from Coldstream. It's a sparsely populated area, very agricultural, but there is a lot of history around those parts. Most of the towns are on the main modern routes into England - the A68 (to Jedburgh and Carter Bar), the A7 (to Hawick and Carlisle) or the A1 (to Berwick and Newcastle), but, although it always had an important strategic position on the mighty River Tweed, people don't normally visit Kelso unless they are going to - erm - Kelso.

My first father-in-law took me to see the sheep sales there, on a Saturday morning long ago, and subsequently I was a guest at various family functions in the town over the years, mostly at the Ednam House hotel (I think there were family connections!).

One effect of the pandemic has been that I have become even more of a recluse than I was before, and I've been nurturing an unreasonable urge to visit some of these old Borders haunts, if only to prove that they still exist!

On Saturday, then, I made a brief but enjoyable visit to Kelso, which was once the county town of Roxburghshire, by the way. Not much traffic, and I didn't get breathalyzed once (I was quite looking forward to it...). I took only a few photos, since the visit itself was the main objective, but I thought they might have some appeal in my blog. When we can travel about again, I recommend the Scottish Border  country as a place worth a visit. From Kelso it's only a few miles to Melrose, site of another great abbey and also Sir Walter Scott's military collection at Abbotsford...

 

New Year's Day in the main square - never seen it so quiet - it was certainly busier back in the days of the sheep sales. The Cross Keys hotel is something of a local institution. The town, as you see, was shut.

 

 

Another hotel - this is the Ednam House, where I've attended numerous weddings, wakes, 21st birthdays and Christmas dinners, back in another century. My first wife's uncle was once captain of Kelso's rugby team, and a Scottish international (traditionally the area is famous for rugby, in addition to wars and sheep-stealing), so the family were local celebrities! 

 

 

Kelso has a famous abbey - I'm afraid this is a very poor photo of it. A great area this for ecclesiastical buildings - Dryburgh Abbey is just a few miles away - where I think Earl Haig is buried.

 
 

 

The town has a very fine bridge over the River Tweed, which is not the border with England at this point, though it will become so not far downstream. 

 

 

Apologies for this one - it amuses me to think that this may be a must-see site for visiting Beytles fans. I am, as ever, easily pleased by such silliness. I don't know what a Royd was, but Kelso Abbey obviously had one

***** Late Edit *****

Since I was asked about the matter, I did some reading and now realise that the Kelso Ram Sales are still going strong - here's an aerial shot of a recent one [used without permission, of course]. The Events Centre is on the other side of the river from the town - you can see the bridge and the Abbey in the background, and you can see a few modern suburbs in the right backround, south of the Tweed. Maxwellheugh has an industrial park - my first wife's family owned the sawmill in Spylaw Road, south of the river - long gone.

*********************

Hooptedoodle #416 - Another Mystery Object

 Not so exotic, in fact, but I'd never seen one before. It seems we have one in our house, though I didn't know. If you've seen these, you will know immediately what it is, otherwise you may be as puzzled as I was!

The item is made of leather, with a metal buckle - as you see, it is constructed like a belt or strap. The bulbous part is perforated on one side, and stuffed (I believe) with horsehair. This would be regarded as rather an old-fashioned item to have in the house, though I am told that they have been in some demand during the lockdown period.

Like to have a go? I'll keep unpublished any comments which include guesses or are otherwise spoilers - I'll publish and reveal what it is in a day or two. The coin in the last photo is a British 2p piece, for scale.

***** Late Edit *****

I'm very pleased with the responses - thank you all very much, so I've decided to add the dénouement a little earlier than planned.

Rob has got it - it's a Knitting Belt - as used by Shetland knitters (and others). You fasten it around your waist and, as Rob explains, one needle may be anchored by sticking it through one of the apertures, and I understand it is a major help if you are using 3 needles! Here is a lady using a knitting belt...

I'm pleased with all the suggestions, and will make sure we hang onto ours (which my wife bought at a craft fair in another century); it obviously has a great many other uses which will come in very handy.

It remains only for me to wish everyone a peaceful and relaxing Christmas. I'll see you on the other side!

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Hooptedoodle #415 - Muted Celebrations

 This completely pointless post follows from a telephone conversation I had with Older Son No.3 on Saturday. I rang him up to see how he is doing - he has had some problems with his physical health recently, and is working from home, so I phone him up from time to time to see how he is coping. We had a fairly downbeat discussion about what his solitary Christmas is likely to be like, and from there we got onto the general topic of celebrations that fall flat, and I have to say that we finished up having one of the best laughs I can remember for a while!

He recalls that on his actual 21st birthday he was studying for exams, and he had recently been forced to move his accommodation to a different hall of residence, since there had been a fire at his previous one. He now shared a landing with 4 students from Sri Lanka (this was in Glasgow - he still lives in Glasgow). He says they were nice enough lads, but they kept to themselves, and communication had been limited.

However, somehow they were aware that this particular day was his 21st, and at about 6:30pm his doorbell rang and there were his 4 neighbours, looking very embarrassed. One of them said "happy birthday", and handed him a pack of 6 cans of beer. Suitable encouraging gestures were made, so he drank one of the cans, standing at his door, while they applauded politely, and then they shook his hand and went away, leaving him to his exam revision. That was the full glory of his 21st birthday.

Like me, he tends to see life as a series of clips from potential sitcoms - very low-budget sitcoms, at that.

I remembered my actual 21st birthday too, so I shared that with him. Another TV script, I'm afraid, and I still laugh [nervously] at it now. I was on study-leave from university, so had gone home to Liverpool - leaving my girlfriend and most of my normal social circle many miles away - so that I could get my laundry done and eat some healthy food and possibly even get in some serious cramming. My actual birthday was on a Saturday, so my mum was very keen that we should have some little family party - at our house - to grace the occasion.

My dad was very much opposed to the whole idea - at the time he was on very prickly terms with his siblings, largely as a result of my grandmother having had a fatal stroke the first time we took a turn at having her stay at our house, a couple of years before. Just a bad break, I guess.

Anyway, after much argument, family members were invited to our house on the Saturday afternoon. I had the interesting challenge of finding something half-decent to wear. It was all very stilted; a few invitees called off for plausible reasons, I received some presents, made appropriate small talk with relatives - some of whom I couldn't really remember - and we had vol-aux-vents and Ritz crackers with cottage cheese and shrimps on them - the sort of food I later associated with team meetings at work. Well intentioned, but grim.

My dad got fed up with this very quickly, and at about 4:30pm he brought one of the kitchen chairs through to the sitting room, turned on the TV, and sat in the middle of the party, staring fixedly at the horse racing until everyone picked up on the awkwardness and remembered that they really did need to be somewhere else. By 5:30 everyone had left. My parents didn't speak to each other for a week or more, and we had vol-aux-vents from the fridge for tea until they were finished. Vol-aux-vents still make me laugh.

I didn't visit my parents again for some years, so there was an upside to the story, at least.

Anyway, son Peter and I laughed long and loud at the recollection of our birthdays, all those years ago. The point of trotting out this nonsense is simply that I suspect there may be a wealth of stories of failed celebrations out there. My own stag-party ended with me, as the only one left standing, having to take about half-a-dozen of my mates home safely, since they, at least, had had a roaring time.

The only other epic I can think of from my own history was a registry-office wedding I attended in Edinburgh when I was a young chap. I was the Best Man for the event - in the circumstances, I think I may have been Chief Witness, but it's the same sort of deal. The groom was a good friend of mine, and his intended was the daughter of some actual, genuine, titled nobility (I think they were Lord and Lady Dick-Lauder, though don't quote me on this), who were hostile and graceless throughout, and seemed to have come along to the event mostly to pour scorn on the assembled commoners. I had sweated blood over a speech and everything, but the celebration was stopped in its tracks when the bride didn't show up. Very embarrassing all round, but another great TV show in the making.

So...

Anyone got any good-going personal tales of embarrassment, misunderstandings and/or physical violence from celebrations that went disastrously wrong? I'm sure there must be plenty - in fact if there are I'll feel better about the whole subject!

Another Old Wargaming Video - Southern Television

 This seems to me to be the sort of video that everyone with any interest in the subject will have seen, but it's new to me, and I thought it might be worth an airing here.

This was posted on Youtube by Caliver Books a couple of years ago. It looks like a clip from the early 1980s, and it features a brief potted history of (local) Southampton manufacturer Miniature Figurines, followed by a "how to play wargames" section featuring a very young Iain Dickie.

Pick the bits you like; I was impressed by the very weird opening sequence, of lead castings being melted, run backwards (which is satisfyingly surreal, and will be a big hit with all entropy fans), and by the presenter in the end section, Fred Dinenage, whom I vaguely remember as the host of kids' science programmes, including an explain-everything show entitled How?, which ran in various manifestations from 1966 to recent times. Also, of course, Dave Higgs working on 15mm figure masters with a soldering iron is pretty compulsive viewing.

The Bold Fred visits wargaming matters such as "why?" (which is a relative of "How?"), the role of dice in the game and the important issue of how wargamers' wives are likely to be hostile to their hobby.  

Hooptedoodle #412 - Personal Audio Time-Capsule

This is a very odd post, even by my standards. I have been sorting out some old archives of sound recordings - all manner of stuff, and I found two surviving examples of nature/wildlife recordings I made 20 years ago, which I have now put in a secure library until I think what to do with them.

I moved to my present address, which is on a farm on the South East coast of Scotland, in August 2000. At the time I was living on my own. I was commuting daily into Edinburgh, so during my first Winter here I only ever saw my house and garden in daylight at the weekends.

I was fascinated by the garden birds here. I had also acquired a good collection of the nature recordings of the Canadian, Dan Gibson, which were sold in airport gift shops in the USA under the general heading of Relaxation Tapes. I found them very therapeutic - this was a stressful time in my private life, and they helped me to sleep! 

 

I had a very good portable tape recorder, and decided I might try some nature recording here as a new hobby venture. I had good mics and everything, so I had a few sessions, which were very pleasing, but it became obvious very quickly that I was going to be frustrated by the number of low-flying microlights coming down the coast here from the airfield at East Fortune. Reluctantly, I shelved the project, and - of course - never went back to it. I have one surviving session which I listen to occasionally - about an hour, in 2 half-hour files, recorded one Sunday morning, 11th March 2001 - that's 20 years ago, and as it happens exactly 6 months before 9/11 (the Day the World Changed Forever).

 

The sun coming up - my garden photographed in March 2001. I note that my garage door was blue in those days (I had forgotten), and a number of mature trees and the electricity pole have disappeared since then. The recordings were made just off the left of the picture, next to the garage...

The recording was originally stereo analog, but I converted it to digital and made some mp3 transcriptions because the small file size is handy, and for nature sounds the quality is probably good enough. I listen to it from time to time because it's a lovely, relaxing thing to hear (at low volume, while reading, for example), and also because it's interesting for me to observe the definite changes in the ambient sounds over 20 years. If I tried it again now, the recording would be swamped by wood pigeons and collared doves - back in the day, there was much lively chatter from blackbirds, greenfinches, jackdaws and all the smaller chaps. Fabulous. Greenfinches have just about disappeared here now.

I set up my mics at the bottom of the garden - there is a wood beyond the wall - and left them to get on with it. Since there seemed to be some fighting going on, for the second half hour I shifted the mics a little further from the wood - nearer to the farm lane, to tone it down a bit. It's a Sunday, but there was noticeably less motor traffic 20 years ago. You can hear occasional parties of ladies on horses trooping past on the concrete road - it takes about 5 minutes to walk here from the stables, so when you hear horses it will probably be 5 minutes past the hour, paying parties of riders setting off every hour from 10am onwards!

At least one microlight appears during the recording (must have been sparse traffic that day); my friend Ian, who is a flyer, tells me that the engines in microlights now sound different, though I don't know what the changes have been.

Also, during the recording there are occasional high-flying airliners passing over, heading from the south east - straight over our farm. These would be planes from Amsterdam and Frankfurt, headed for Canada and Seattle. The transatlantic flights from London used to go out over Ireland, and of course we never saw any return flights, since they came in on the Jet Stream, directly West to East, rather than on the Great Circle. It seems to me that we very rarely see passenger planes flying over here now. Are there less of them? Do they go a different way now? Am I just too stupid to notice? Whatever, it used to be a commonplace here to see vapour trails against the blue sky, coming over the Cheviots at 35,000 feet and straight over here - I seldom see them now. Maybe this is a pandemic thing.

 

Another photo - same day. This is Horace, my 1989 Land Rover 90, next to the gate onto the lane. Horace was a lot of fun, but it cost a fortune to keep him on the road! [An LR 90 was what they called Defenders before they were Defenders]

In case you are mad enough to want to listen to it, the recording - my personal Time Capsule! - is on Google Drive. If you click on this link, you should be allowed to open a folder which contains 2 half-hour files - a Sunday morning in my garden, 20 years ago, horses walking past and the lot. If you know your birds, see who was there! If you wish to download it that's OK, but please don't abuse the share rights!

Les Higgins - Some Background Trivia [independent verification needed...?]

 I have been collecting, painting and fighting with the little products of Les Higgins Miniatures for about 50 years. I am still a devout fan, although they do bring some frustrations to the serious collector and they are regarded as something of a niche, off-mainstream manufacturer now.

 

The ensign from set MP19, officers and NCOs for the Malburian period. They have an unsurpassed elegance, I think, but they are small for 20mm - these chaps are 1/76, which means they don't fit with plastics!

There is, as always, a nice little biography at Vintage20Mil, and I had some useful discussions with Clive Smithers about LHM and the successor firm, Phoenix Model Developments. I was aware that Les was primarily a sculptor, and part of his background was in the design and casting of pewter figures for use on sporting trophies and so on, though my knowledge is very sketchy and I had never seen examples.

A while ago, a friend sent me a link which I have now (at long last) got around to checking out. It seems that Les was also a keen archer, a member of the Northampton club. In 1957, around the time when he was producing his first "subscription series" drop-cast ECW 20mm figures, he was commissioned by the Countess Manvers* to make a 2-foot tall statue of Robin Hood, as an archery prize to be known as the Thoresby Trophy, competed for each year in the grounds of Thoresby Hall, Nottinghamshire, as an attraction to raise the profile of the estate at Thoresby Park.

 

The Thoresby Trophy for archery, sculpted by Les Higgins, and first competed for in 1958

My primary source here is a memoir about a gentleman named Peter Bond, which you may find here, in the annals of Northampton Archery Club. Apart from the pictures, the narrative mentions that Les and his wife, Pat, had a son, Gary, who also became a noted sculptor.

 

The Chairman's Trophy, also the property of Northampton Archery Club, which was sculpted by Les Higgins' son, Gary, who was a keen archer and member of the club

I publish this post with familiar caveats - I have no permission to use the club's material, so if any objection is raised I may pull this at short notice(!). Also, of course, my understanding of this may be complete bunkum, based around the coincidence of there being two sculptors from Northampton with the same name in the 1950s - I doubt it, but it's possible!

* The Countess Manvers (Marie-Louise Roosevelt Pierrepont, née Butterworth, 1889-1984) is quite an interesting character - she studied art extensively and had something of a reputation as an amateur  watercolourist. She moved to Thoresby in 1939. 

 

Countess Manvers at work in London in 1962

Hooptedoodle #410 - Big Bang in Oman

 The kick off for this yarn is an incident we had here about a month ago on the farm. Some unusually well organised hooligans appear to have arranged an impressive firework display on the beach in the early evening. It lasted about 15 minutes, was very noisy, and scared the resident horses very badly, as you might expect. Apart from being inconsiderate, this is also very illegal. One horse in the stables was injured, fortunately not seriously, but it took a while for everything to calm down afterwards. There was a pile of rubbish left on the beach, but there was no sign of the perpetrators, only 20 minutes after it finished. [Bad strategy here - the farming family sent a couple of people down to the beach, whereas they would have done better to wait for the baddies coming up the lane from the car park, on their way out. I may even have heard the getaway cars, come to think of it. Note for next time.]

This incident has reminded me of my favourite-ever firework story, of which I am so fond that I was sure I must have trotted it out here before. I did a quick search on this blog, but couldn't find it, so - if I have told it before - any mismatches between this version and last time can be attributed to old codger's licence, which is a noble tradition. I also have to own up that one reason the story is a hit with me is because I am shamefully scared of all sorts of fireworks. I come from a long line of cowards.

In the days when I was musically more active, I was involved in a jazz festival in the Middle East (this, I reckon, was October 1998), flying from Amsterdam to Bahrain by Gulf Air business class (I only ever flew in anything other than steerage class if someone else was paying - normally, my seat on an aircraft was equipped with oars). I found I was sitting next to a rather scruffy-looking English chap on the plane, who I assumed must be another musician; however it transpired that he was a technician working for a British company who specialised in putting on what he described as "high end" firework displays. It seems that fireworks are very popular in the Emirates and thereabouts, and he was on his way to do some estimating for some mighty forthcoming show.

He told me some entertaining tales of life in his industry - he had set off big bangers all over the known world, and some of the sums of money involved were very scary indeed; let us not get into the politics, but the cost of one of these shows would have fed or educated an awful lot of people for a long time.

He told me about one very special show in Muscat which had gone badly, some years earlier. He was (disappointingly) pleased that his company had not been involved; it was a Dutch organisation, who were sued into oblivion as a result.

The event was (I think) connected with the National Day, and many hundreds of invited guests of the Sultan of Oman and his family were there. Royalty, heads of state, film stars, the Stinking Rich and all sorts of international gangsters - the place was dripping with jewellery, there were $1000 dresses all over. The heart of the event was a 2 hour concert dinner, featuring the Vienna Philharmonic, Andrea Bocelli and so on and so on. Fireworks were to be tastefully added to the entertainment throughout, building to a blockbuster finale, complete with full orchestra. There were 3 articulated wagon-loads of fireworks, and the technology was all state of the art for that time - lighting, orchestral cues and the firing of the pyrotechnics were all driven by MIDI, which is where we were at in those days.

Everything started around 7pm in a huge garden setting, built specially for the occasion. There were some introductory speeches, and then the orchestra began with some very gentle Strauss, while champagne and the first appetisers were brought out. The requisite, subdued floral-effect fireworks were started up, and, because of some (mooted) electrical fault, the entire 3 trucks-worth of fireworks all went off in a single, sustained barrage lasting about a minute.

No-one was hurt, fortunately, though some may have been temporarily deaf for a day or two. There was a general state of shock, as you would expect, with people sitting, concussed, in their soot-stained finery. I had a wonderful moment wondering how they must have spent the rest of the evening, but apparently some contingency plan snapped into action, everyone was hustled away to waiting transports, and the site was cleared very quickly. There may have been a few beheadings - legend does not relate - but there was certainly a complete news embargo. This, of course, was in the days before social media would have made such a thing impossible.

That's the end of the story, really. I failed to find any evidence of this Big Bang online - maybe it never happened, though the guy's stories were generally very good and seemed plausible - I can't think why he would make it up. Form your own judgement. Quite why I should be quietly pleased by the idea of so many rich people being frightened at such extreme cost is something I'll have to think about, but there we are.

If you have been upset by this story, please phone our usual number for counselling. Whatever you do, please take care with those sparklers in the UK on November 5th.

 

Wargames which Turned Weird - (1) The Surprise Railway

 This follows from an email exchange with a friend - we have got into a discussion of the strangest wargames we've been involved in. His suggestions have been generally more entertaining than mine; most of my own involved grandiose projects - often with multiple participants - sometimes organised by established clubs - for which the average budgerigar could have accurately predicted disaster. Games which could never end, games which were scuppered by the non-arrival of a key participant, one game which was stopped by a burst water pipe in the flat above. You know the kind of thing - all this must be small beer to you veterans.

One game I still remember with trembling was my first attempt at staging a proper miniatures battle. In a big rush (I was looking for a new hobby), I read Featherstone's War Games from cover to cover, plus various magazine articles, and decided that Airfix-based ACW would be just the thing. I had no modelling skills, no knowledge, no idea. I bought the First Bull Run volume from the Knight's Wargame Series, and pored over every word [when you have a minute, count the ways in which this was a very silly approach].

Whatever, I was too busy to do much thinking - I spent about six weeks daubing paint on hacked Airfix troops - boxes of the beggars. In the pub, I spoke of my new project to my downstairs neighbour, Ken, who was very enthusiastic about the idea and offered to help me to get started. He seemed to be coming from the right sort of direction, since he had a large model railway stored away in his cellar, and also had an enormous dining table in his apartment.

Since my own model railway scenery was stored away in a box in a cupboard in my parents' house, in a distant city, I let him persuade me that he would be just the man to host a trial battle - he had plenty of HO-scale trees and stuff, even exotica such as papier-maché hills. If I just brought along my armies and a working knowledge of some rules or other, he would set up the field, and would stock up on beer.

We had some discussion about a suitable scenario. It was obvious that Bull Run itself was well out of scope, but I found a scenario in a magazine which involved a fight around a railway depot. Ken was very excited by this; we scribbled out a rough map, with a little railway and all that, and we arranged that I would bring my soldiers, rulers and dice down to his flat on Friday evening, and Ken would have the battlefield set up, ready.

When I arrived, on the Friday, I was dumbfounded to find that he had totally ignored our sketch-map and constructed a complete loop of railway, with a station and a tunnel, and a couple of little (modern) trains which were going round and round. Have you ever had a moment when the Universe slips a little? My armies were obviously irrelevant in this setting; I realised that this nice man who had invited me to look at his etchings had an evil plan.

I pointed out - diplomatically - that this was not at all what I had in mind, but it got rather nasty very quickly. He was obviously as disappointed as I was. Storming out was easy, but he was my neighbour, and he snubbed me for the next two years every time our paths crossed. Fair enough - I snubbed him too. In fact we got into a sort of running contest to see who could get his snub in first. Snub Wars.

My wife and I moved away to another house about 4 years later, and some time after that I bumped into him at a friend's wedding. He was quite affable, and asked me was I still doing the "toy soldier thing"; I admitted that I was, and he said he would like to come to one of my games sometime. Gave me his business card. I flushed it down the toilet approximately 15 minutes later. 

I never go out with men who do model railways on a first date.

I still laugh about this. The wargaming context is almost incidental, I suppose, but it rates as one of my classic Tricky Moments - I was young and awkward enough to be upset by it. Nowadays I'm just awkward, so such things don't bother me. 

Anyone like to offer any horror stories?

Hooptedoodle #408 - Miles & Omar - Backgammon revisited

 

 

My yuppie backgammon set, from Jenner's, circa 1979. Some nice, turned wooden playing pieces would set it off handsomely, eh?

Yesterday I was sorting out some board games (not of the wargaming variety), which currently live on top of the big bookcase in our sitting room. You need a step-stool to see them at all, since the bookcase is nearly 7 feet high, so this was a serious undertaking. I found some amazing stuff up there, but decided to keep only a very few games: apart from some good sets of traditional dominoes, I'll hang on to my best chess set and board, an old set of Scrabble (essential), the base set of Carcassonne (much loved - with a couple of the expansion sets), De Bono's L-Game, a nice old set of Nine-Men's Morris (Merelles), and - last but not least - my Backgammon set, which I haven't seen for about 20 years, and haven't played for 30. 

I got to thinking about Backgammon, which I used to play a lot, and enjoy very much. It was a game which I knew of as a small child, but only because there was a board marked out on the back of a folding Draughts (Checkers) board I had. Sometime in the late 1970s I became friendly with a fellow named Miles, whom I got to know during my visits to the National Library of Scotland reading rooms, in George IV Bridge, Edinburgh. I used to spend a lot of time at the NLS at that time, because I was studying for professional exams, and if I removed myself from home distractions and babies and suchlike I had a better chance of getting some heavy studying done (though I seem to have read quite a bit of Napoleonic stuff during these same visits, which suggests my dedication was still a bit lacking).

Miles worked as an assistant at the NLS. When I got to know him better I found that he wasn't actually a librarian - he was pretty heavily qualified as an Art Historian, but he seemed to have got stuck in a temporary job in the Library for something like 10 years. They didn't pay him an awful lot, either; he and his wife rented a grim little flat up a tenement stair in Leith - a bit like downtown Beirut. I met him for a beer one evening, and went to his house for supper. Miles produced an ancient backgammon set, set it up, and during the next hour or two he taught me the rules and we played a few games. I loved it. A couple of weeks later, Miles made a return supper-&-backgammon trip to my place, but this time we played on my old folding board, and the game loses a lot like that. Ideally, a proper board should be boxed in, so you can throw the men around and they slide expertly into the corners, and the dice stay off the floor, and you should have a real wooden "bar" in the middle to place pieces on when they are out of play. The sound and the feel of the game are important, so my utility version wasn't nearly so good. Lesson learned.

Next time Miles visited me he promised to bring his old set with him. This had been his Greek grandfather's. His grandfather had taught him the game when Miles was at primary school (in London - the family owned a restaurant), and had given him his old set. The rules Miles taught me, by the way, were what his grandfather had played - I'll come back to this later.

Anyway, on his next visit, he didn't bring his old Greek set; instead, he presented me with a brand-new and rather posh boxed set - all leather and polished wood - which he had bought in the gift department of the old Jenner's store in Princes Street (long gone). I was suitably overwhelmed, but very pleased, and my new, yuppies' backgammon set, which had very little authentic class but was satisfyingly expensive, featured in our fortnightly games evenings for the next year or so. A couple of house customs grew up:

(1) you always knew which end contained the "home boards" - it was the end next to the wine bottle! 

(2) we didn't use the Doubling Cube. Ever. Miles told me that his grandfather said that it was just a device to make sure the player with the most money won in the end, so it was ignored. Miles and I used to play a-penny-a-point, using his grandfather's scoring system (which, again, I shall come back to).

Then Miles suddenly got a job more in keeping with his qualifications, and moved away to That London to work for The Royal Collections, where his first involvement was the cataloguing of historical drawings and engravings at Windsor Castle. My (first) wife was a little shocked by Miles' new status and evident salary; she classified each of my friends as either "vulgar" or "creepy" (I don't know if anyone made it into both categories - she set very high standards for everyone - apart from herself, for some reason...), and I guess that Miles was probably a creep, since he was a very courteous chap.

So that was my Backgammon career on hold. I missed my friend and our games, but I moved on (as one does). 

One day a few years later my wife came across my trusty Jenners Backgammon Set (probably on top of another bookcase), and brought it to my attention, which astonished me. Normally my hobbies were beneath contempt, but Backgammon was somehow associated with Omar Sharif, which was very interesting indeed. I must explain that my first wife had a thing about Omar from earliest puberty (no - hers, not his - don't be silly). Omar, you had better believe, was neither vulgar nor creepy; she had seen Doctor Zhivago a number of times, and on each occasion she required some days to recover her equilibrium - she had very little idea of the storyline, however, despite all that study. I digress...

Anyway, possibly because of some imagined link with Omar, I was encouraged to find someone to play with, and eventually I talked a work-colleague, Edward, into coming around for a game. I had to teach him my house rules, but we got on very well, and a new fortnightly series started.

Tragically, it didn't get very far. It was my turn to go to Edward's house, out in the suburbs, when I got a message the day before our meeting that his wife had died very suddenly (in fact she had committed suicide, I am still horrified to recall) and that was definitely the end of backgammon until further notice - the clock is still running, awaiting my return. You can see this would be a bit of a trauma. [The poor lady's demise had nothing to do with her husband's new interest in backgammon, as far as I know.]

Back to this week. 

I dug out my old set - cleaned it up (still looks good), and did a bit of online reading to refresh my knowledge of the rules. Hmmm. It seems this is more complicated than I had remembered.

OK - I bumped into the Doubling Cube very early - it states that this is an option, but playing without it is regarded as like riding your bicycle with stabilisers fitted. That's all right - in my book, coolness is not essential. If Miles' version of the game has a long tradition in the village squares and coffee houses of Greece then that has a nobility of its own. I then had a look at scoring systems, and I didn't find Miles' granddad's system anywhere, though I did read that there are a lot of local variations in traditional rules.

Which, at long last, brings me to the point. My compliments to anyone who has got this far (apart from Frobisher, who certainly will not have put up with all those adjectives and stuff). If anyone has any experience of Backgammon (and if you haven't, may I say that I believe it is well worth checking out?), I'd like to run Miles' granddad's scoring system past you. Have you seen it before? It worked well for me for some years, should I be nervous about admitting to this? Are there any ancient Greeks in the house?

The system is:

* The loser of a game pays the winner 1 penny (or whatever) for each of his men (pieces) which is in his own (the loser's) Home Board at the end of the game, 2p for each man which is in his own Outer Board, 3p for each man in his opponent's (the winner's) Outer Board, and 4p for each which is either in his opponent's Home Board or on the Bar.

* This basic total is paid over as it is if the loser has commenced "bearing off" his men before the game ends.

* If the loser has not yet borne off any of his men, the result is a Gammon, which means that he must pay twice the total.

* It can get worse: if the loser has not yet borne off any men, and any of his men are in his opponent's (the winner's) Home Board or on the Bar, the result is a Backgammon, and he pays three times the total.

I think this system does affect the strategy a little, since players will try to minimise the cost of a defeat. If you are interested in the rules of Backgammon, you'll find them here.

The Old Metal Detector - a Personal Recollection

 It is certainly not my place to offer any kind of official tribute to Clive Smithers - I have neither the authority nor the knowledge - but I have not seen any media mention within our hobby since he passed away on 15th July, apart from private emails, and I felt I ought to write something.

He and I were good friends for some years. I made his acquaintance, as did a number of others who shared his hobby interests, through correspondence associated with eBay purchases, and I met up with him at wargame shows at Stockton and Falkirk. Since he lived only a couple of hours drive away, I was privileged to visit him a few times at Langley Moor, which was always a remarkable experience, including explorations of the soldier and magazine collections in his attic [which, famously, had to have the floor strengthened with steel girders to support the weight of stored metal, and out of which, less famously, I almost fell on one occasion!] and a good Old School lunch in the Miners' Institute. 

 He stayed here with us on, I think, five occasions, for wargaming weekends. He was always a very courteous and enthusiastic guest, and he was very kind to my youngest son, which I shall not forget. He first came here in 2008, and his last visit was in December 2012, a date I remember very well, since he arrived the day after our village fire station burned down. The fire station is immediately next door to the railway terminus, so I had an interesting journey to pick him up from the train!

As the years passed, he had increasing problems with his health, and eventually travel became more difficult. He suffered with diabetes, and had a series of alarming issues connected with this. On one occasion he came here wearing a surgical boot, a treatment for a bone condition known as Charcot's Foot, from which he recovered after months of wearing this torture device. He bore the encumbrance with praiseworthy good humour, and, typically, expressed his determination to paint up a unit of ECW infantry named after his condition. I don't know if he ever did, but it was a nice idea.

Like a lot of wargamers and collectors, I have quite a few ex-Clive figures around, and I guess there were some veterans of mine in his attic. He was a phenomenon. His knowledge of the history of the hobby and the manufacture of toy soldiers was encyclopedic. If I ever had a mystery figure of whose provenance I was uncertain, Clive would know what it was. His greatest lasting contributions to the hobby were his wonderful blogs, notably the Hinton Hunter, the Lone S-Ranger and Vintage Wargaming, which I certainly hope can survive in some way as the standard references they have become. 

I know a little of his background. A native of Durham, he studied History at Oxford, and did postgraduate courses in business and Theology. When I first knew him he had his own business, a consultancy which specialised in project management and website design, most of his clients being local government and charities. He called his firm Esra Solutions, one of Clive's many private jokes. At some early point in his working life, he fell out with some business associate or other, who accused him of "not knowing his arse from his elbow". When he set up his new enterprise, Clive named it Esra ("arse" backwards) as a gentle act of revenge. I have in my possession one of his corporate handouts, a pair of cufflinks engraved "esra" and "woble". The joke lives on.

When he last came here, in 2012, he had just started work as director and secretary of Lord Crewe's Charity - his job seemed to be to organise just about everything, from meetings to the website, including interesting extra duties such as managing the town of Seahouses, which is owned by LCC. It was very apparent from the number of phone calls he received while he was here that this was not a job that you walked away from at the weekend, and I believe that his workload, together with his deteriorating health, greatly reduced his spare time subsequently.

I met him again at Stryker's birthday wargame bash in 2016, in Bath, and he was in poor shape physically. However, I visited him at Langley Moor the following year, to swap some figures (of course), and he seemed rather better, though he admitted he no longer travelled very much. That was the last time I saw him. Apart from occasional email contact, we lost touch, and I was surprised how much time had passed when I was informed by Mark that he had died on 15th July. I reckon he must have been 58.

He was a remarkably intelligent and very amusing fellow, very good company, and could be extremely generous. He had a devotion to toy soldiers since childhood, and seemed to have a nostalgic view that a pastime for gentlemen had been rather spoilt by over-commercialisation and by the influx of the unwashed hordes (make your own joke out of that), yet he had a waspish contempt for what he saw as posturing within the hobby, and for self-promoting cliques for which he had little time. He was also, let us not forget, a passionate supporter of Newcastle United.

I am glad that I knew him; I am sad that he died so young, and offer my condolences and best wishes to his friends and family. 

***** Late Edit (6th August) *****

I received a very nice note from Clive's elder brother, thanking me for my efforts to write something suitable. He mentioned that the funeral was on Wednesday (4th August). It seems Clive had an emergency op for cancer in March, and had been receiving chemotherapy subsequently, though the coroner recorded pulmonary embolism as cause of death. Clive was 59, in fact, and is survived by two brothers and a sister.

His family are aware of the significance of his blogs, and will try to ensure they are left as they are.

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Hooptedoodle #400 - Roller Towels as We Knew Them

 Recently I was looking at some old photos of domestic kitchens - circa WW1, I guess, and I saw a picture of one of these...

In case you don't recognise it, this is a traditional roller towel - linen on a wooden roller - such as my grannie had on her kitchen wall, and they were found in various other places (all my friends' grannies' kitchens, for a start) - they were everywhere, once, but I had forgotten about them completely.

Two yards of linen, stitched to make a loop. My grannie's would certainly have been clean (boiled) every day. We had them in the washrooms at my primary school - I was at primary school in the 1950s, though the school itself was pretty much Victorian. That was less satisfactory, the soiled towel would go round and round, getting wetter and filthier as the day went on. I guess they must have been in factories and pubs and everywhere.

By the time I was working, and in the habit of going into pubs, they had been replaced by linen rolls in metal dispensers which were usually serviced by a contract company - and they seldom seemed to work very satisfactorily - they would jam, or the towel would end up in a sodden heap on the floor. Eventually, of course, all this was replaced by paper towels, to ensure someone could make money from the conversion of forests into non-recyclable paper waste, and later still by hot air blasters. I guess this has all been progress - driven by the search for improved hygiene.

 Anyway - back to the point. I can see some arguments in favour of the old linen roller:

* It would always be in the same place - no-one could walk off with it

* If it was used sensibly, each user drying their face/hands and moving it down a little, it might have dried off by the time it went right round

* No-one could use it to clean his football boots (or whatever)

* It kept it off the floor

* It was Official Issue - it would be maintained and refreshed by the Keeper of the House (Grannie)

My grannie's used to be on the wall next to the big sink in her back kitchen (scullery?) - when he came in from work, my grandad used to wash his face and hands with Stergene (bottled laundry detergent), I believe, which is scary, and on one famous occasion he accidentally washed his face with liquid ammonia, from which he seems to have recovered all right, and recovered long before his wife forgave him for his language. 

Here's an old vote in support of roller towels, with useful life-style tips for the enthusiast:

Kitchen Work Made Easier.

 

It seems strange to speak of the roller towel as a convenience, when it should be considered a positive necessity in every well-ordered household, yet there are many more kitchens without them than with them in some parts of the country— the cook substituting her work apron, or, worse, a dish towel, to wipe her hands upon. A roller and fixtures can be bought ready to screw into the wall. Six towels is a bountiful supply for one roller. Buy a good quality of linen crash, making each towel two-and-a-half yards in length; sew in a seam and fell neatly. Roller towels that have been in use a few months make the best tea towels, as they are soft and pliable, a quality by no means to be despised. Cut in two, hem the edges and again supply the towel drawer with new roller towels. In this way the drawer can be always supplied with strong towels for kitchen toilet purposes, as well as soft ones for the dishes. — The Weekly Wisconsin (May 13, 1889).

Conversely, it was also identified as a menace to health, as here: 

 

From a public information advertisement in the US in 1915

 While shaving this morning, I wondered if a variant could have been produced - a Moebius Towel? - with a single twist in the towel before stitching - this could gradually have presented us with both sides of the linen before we got back to the soiled bit. Nah - it wouldn't work, but I do find shaving very boring.

 

Still in the Boxes... more rarities?

 Since I haven't yet tidied up the ex-Eric Knowles boxes or put them back in The Upstairs Cupboard, I did a little more digging around, and came up with these, which might be of interest to people, like me, who care for fossils:

 

Here are some very dashing Scots Greys - I can almost hear the cinema organ. From the general style, I would guess these might be Alberkens (the official catalogue number is BNC 2, which I have never seen, even in a photo), but these are mounted on sheet metal bases, and - though badly faded now - the paint job seems to have been pretty fancy at one time. No markings - someone did a unit of these for Eric.

 

 

For comparison here are some French cuirassiers: (L to R) a couple of Greenwood & Ball, a Hinton Hunt OPC (FN 102) and an Alberken OPC (FNC 3). The Greenwood & Balls mostly have sheet metal bases, and appear to have been improved - I can hear the shouts of "Tradition!" from here... 

 

...but no - hold your horses (!) - one of them still has the original, cast base, which says "MADE IN ENGLAND by Greenwood & Ball" - this doesn't show up too well in my picture, but, if you want to see it more clearly, place a piece of thin paper against the computer screen, and rub gently with a soft pencil...

 

 

So, having established that there are some (tweaked) G&Bs present, here are a couple more - this time dragoons, again with sheet metal bases. These figures are very slightly tall and lean in comparison with Hinton Hunt (for example), but fit in reasonably well, as the pictures show, so - if you are more knowledgeable than I am about G&B (and most carbon-based life forms are) - then you can have a guess what period and range these come from. They seem too big for the three-quarter-inch diorama series. Anyway, G&B they certainly are, and 20mm too.

 

 

Here's a one-off - this is another of these improved OPC mounted figures which I suspect are both cast and enhanced by Mr Gilder - note that this is another of these distinctive, Airfix-style horses. This is very similar to the tweaked Grenadier à Cheval which started this whole study project, but this chap has gold epaulettes and a bicorn, and he has no musket, so I think he's supposed to be an officer for the mounted grenadiers. Because you won't see many of these around, I've done 3 views of him.

 

Good grief - I thought I was ugly until I saw him. A number of the PG (?) figures show some corrosion of the areas of the figure which were treated with flesh-coloured paint - I've seen this quite a lot on old figures - I wonder what the paint was? Some lead in the pigment?

 

 

I also dug out, for a photograph, some samples of an ex-Eric unit of the 2eme Eclaireurs de la Garde, which have unmarked bases (in fact the bases may be sheet metal), and they look sort of like Alberken, though I suggest that they don't look very like the official FNC 4. I have plans to restore these fellows back to duty condition, though the 2eme Eclaireurs had a very limited service record, and have a very good chance of not being required for action very often.

I hope you enjoyed that lot - time for me to get properly tidied up and get on with a sensible weekend - I hope to paint some WSS figures today, but we seem to have a North-East wind again, and the attic is perishing cold!

***** Late Edit *****

 

"I wonder what history will say about them, eh? You couldn't pass me the loofah, could you, Soult?"
 

Completely different topic - my DVD for the 1970 Waterloo movie has to be just about my greatest buy ever - I think I paid £3.90 for it, years ago, and I must have watched it over a hundred times. However, I observe that there is a BluRay version available. Now, I use a BluRay player, which definitely improves the quality of the picture from my DVD, but I was thinking about buying the BluRay disc. Some of the reviews on Amazon are really pretty terrible - subtitles in random languages, all sorts of issues.

A question: does anyone have a BluRay disc of Waterloo, and is it any good? I see there is a "Special Edition" to be released on 14th June this year - I feel I ought to get a copy!

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Some Figure Paleontology - Back in the Old Boxes...

 On the phone yesterday with Stryker, the topic of vintage Hinton Hunts came up, as it tends to. In particular, I was interested in the Hinton Hunt French Napoleonic Grenadier à Cheval, which was made in 2-piece and OPC forms. I was vaguely aware (that's "vague" by normal standards, not necessarily mine) that I have a decrepit unit of ex-Eric Knowles OPC Gr-à-Ch in one of the Old Boxes, so I determined to have a dig in there and see what I actually have. Knowledge is power.

I was pretty sure that my unit was mixed - I thought that most of them are Alberkens - or 20mm Minifigs of some sort (I'm not good at distinguishing between these - I have always sort of assumed that the ones which look a bit like Hintons are Alberkens, and that the ones which don't aren't). I also knew that some of them were different, and assumed that they must be Hintons.

Having got my coffee level to the required threshold, I tied a rope around my waist, donned my head torch and set off on my adventure. Box "J" is the one containing ex-Eric French cavalry - I tell you so that you may remind me next time I do this. In there I was surprised to find that my Gr-à-Ch are not Hinton Hunts at all, but are all what I had assumed to be Alberkens (I would welcome any more definite identification). They come in two varieties, as I shall attempt to show. I gave them a good wash, and attempted some photos.

 

Here, on the left, is a single example of the original figure, with two examples of the modified one. Someone, as you will see, has had a serious go at the modifications - replacement sword blade and scabbard, an added musket and a superior paint job. Definitely the same horse, though.

 

From the front, the difference is surprising - the figures on the right are much wider, have a sword arm which is away from the body and are much more detailed. Hmmm.

I've now checked a couple of places online, and it seems that the Alberken OPC Gr-à-Ch was a pretty close copy of the HH model, which these patently are not. Maybe Minifigs produced a separate design? Maybe these are something else altogether? I am interested by the very different stature, the replacement sword-blade, stuck-on musket and (I think) scabbard. Has someone just smartened these up, or am I looking at two different generations of the same figure? Interesting. The horse, which is definitely not an HH clone, has an unusual configuration - the hindquarters are a bit low-slung (short back legs - what my Grandma used to call "Ducks' Disease") and I am not at all convinced about my previous assumptions about Alberken/Minifigs.

I am happy to accept that I'm probably not going to be able to do much with these, but would like to know what they are, and who is likely to have done the modifications. Just out of interest, like.

Speaking of ex-Eric soldiers, I have now washed and cleaned up the next "cannonfodder" refurb batch, being Hinton Hunt French line infantry from exactly that source. They are now on bottletops, and in project boxes, ready for work, but I shall not start them immediately. I intend to get to them before four years, however.

Hooptedoodle #395 - Just the Thing for the Grand Duke's Study

 My wife has been clearing her late mother's house recently, preparing to sell the place. This has not been especially easy in a time of lockdown, and the closure of the charity shops has been a major problem in the disposal of household trivia. Some of the larger and more valuable items have been sold through local social media pages, and a lot has been given away. One item I was interested in for myself was a wall clock.

I've always had a thing about clocks - I associate chiming clocks with sunlit afternoons at my Posh Auntie May's house in West Kirby when I was a kid. There is something soothing about them. They go with the smells of furniture polish and coffee. The clock in question is built in a traditional style, but it is probably only about 45 years old. For a featured clock in a hallway or similar I think I'd prefer something genuinely old - with ghosts and all that. Still, this is a proper, wind-up clock with a pendulum. Not a battery in sight. It keeps good time, and really is perfect for the Grand Duke's study.

I paid the advertised price and hung it on the wall.

Very good thus far. The tick is pleasing, and is actually no louder than the noise the battery clock which preceded it made.

And, of course, it chimes - how long that stays switched on is a matter of wait and see, but at the moment I'm enjoying it.

Hooptedoodle #394 - Auprès de Ma Blonde

 Here we go - a song from the time of Louis XIV, reckoned to date from the Franco-Dutch War of 1672-78, and much loved as a marching song by French soldiers right up to modern times. The informal performance here is by the remarkable Olivia Chaney, who is English, though her accent is spot-on. I'm very much in favour of Olivia, generally.

I was taught this song by my mother when I was a toddler. Years later, in my French class at school, we were asked if anyone knew any French songs, and I offered this, for which I was put on detention by our teacher (the Headmaster, as it happens), because the song was inappropriate. When I protested that it was a very old song, and told him where I had learned it, he said it had been inappropriate for a very long time, and my mother could take a detention too.

The romantic drama in the verses has been hand-polished over the centuries, I am sure, but the chorus is straightforward enough:

Next to my blonde, who does it well, does it well, does it well;
Next to my blonde, who makes me sleep well.

The Headmaster, Bill Pobjoy, has been dead for years - his biggest claim to fame was the fact that he expelled one John Winston Lennon from the school (before my time, I hasten to add), of which he was always rather proud. In truth, I think old JWL needed to be expelled. 

***** Late Edit *****

My old friend Norman, who is something of an expert on all things to do with the Beatles, has gently taken me to task over the Lennon episode - he points out that, strictly, JWL was not expelled, but the school arranged for him to transfer to Liverpool Art College. Technically, that is correct, and there are a number of books which testify to this now (some of them almost certainly written by Norman), but there is no doubt that there was no way that Lennon was going to be allowed to stay - the place at the Art College was engineered (partly under pressure from one of the teaching staff, Philip Burnett, who was convinced that Lennon was a mad genius), but JWL was very firmly escorted to the exit.

A digression follows - possibly an unnecessary one, but fairly conclusive in my mind.

It was the practice at the school for successful or prominent Old Boys (former pupils) to return from time to time, to give an address to the senior school (this was a boys' school, by the way). On one such occasion, Peter Shore, who after many years of active work for the Labour Party had finally been elected, a few years before, as MP for Stepney, came to speak to the 5th and 6th forms about his life in politics. The talk was pretty boring, I regret to recall, but it was also heavily Socialist, which caused very apparent unease to Mr Pobjoy, who shared the platform with our guest speaker.

Shore finished off his talk with an unbelievably weak call to glory (this was mid-1960s): "...and let us work to make sure that the Britain of the Beatles is a Labour Britain!".

There was a smattering of routine applause, then the headmaster, po-faced, stood to offer very taut thanks to our guest, and added the message that one of the Beatles had been a pupil at the school, and that he was pleased to say that he had expelled him. Dead silence - we all filed out, listening for pins dropping, to return to our classes.

It goes without saying that no musicians were ever invited to speak.

 

Peter Shore, MP

I raise the matter only to give the unofficial, but obviously whole-hearted, view of the individual involved. Further claptrap: Peter Shore went on to hold a number of Shadow posts in Labour Opposition cabinets, and held some real offices in Harold Wilson's government. His political career is thought to have been hindered by his lengthy devotion to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (to which he became strongly opposed in later life). He died, Wikipedia tells me, in 2001. As a side issue, I am delighted to note that his father-in-law was the Canadian-born historian and academic, EM Wrong. A finer name for a historian never existed, surely. This is straight out of Monty Python.

Enough - I hope that gets Norman off my back.

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