Young Thugs

Tuesday, 26th December, 1967. Boxing Day. Went with Phil and Neville to see Magical Mystery Tour on television at the Lowther. You won’t bump into any teachers there but it’s not rough like some of the other pubs down by the docks.

No one in except Bloddo as usual standing on his own at the bar, grimy gabardine mac riding tight round his stomach, bicycle clips riding tight round his ankles. Phil noticed that his purple socks matched his purple nose.

Sat waiting for it to start at 8:35. Changed channel to BBC1. Bloddo muttered something under his breath about “young thugs”.

Who was he, I wonder all these years later. Where was he on Christmas Day when the pubs were closed? It wouldn’t have hurt to have asked would it? Casual indifference. Young thugs.

That’s how Phil remembers it. My version is different. It wasn’t Bloddo who called us thugs. I don’t think we even needed to change channel because David Frost was on when we arrived and Bloddo ogled the Breakaways. The TV schedule bears that out.

I think it happened afterwards as we walked rowdily home with three pints of beer inside. We passed a middle-aged couple arm-in-arm. The woman whispered “young thugs” which I overheard and repeated to Phil who fell into helpless drunken laughter: a mixture of pride and disbelief because three more unlikely young thugs there could never have been. Three grammar school boys! We were under-age drinkers if that counts. And young thugs.

Whose version is right? Is anything on this blog right? Were we called thugs twice?

But back to the Beatles’ film. It was rubbish. No plot. No structure. Just surreal events and silly-joke characters on a tour bus. Like ‘Buster Bloodvessel’. It didn’t help it was in black and white. Even when repeated in colour on BBC2 a week and a half later, hardly anyone, or any pub, had a colour set.

I still don’t like the songs. They have a strange, directionless feel, like that last directionless year at school, waiting for the van to come to take me away, the fool on the hill, the Bloddo at the bar, now I’d lost myself instead. You say,“Why?” And I say, “I don't know.” You fail exams on nights like that. 

A Silly Christmas Love Story

At a writing group I sometimes attend, it was suggested we submit Christmas-themed pieces to The Writers’ Magazine. This is mine, previously posted here in 2015 (not against the rules) and I was delighted it was accepted. It appears in the December 2019 issue, and below (about 1500 words).

Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs

And what's wrong with that? I'd like to know, 'cause here I go again. 
(Paul McCartney)

From mid-November to the end of term, when the hockey and rugby pitches slid shirt-soakingly wet from the autumn rains, or skin-scrapingly rough from the winter frosts, games lessons were displaced by dancing practice. The boys and the girls, and their teachers Mr. Ellis and Miss Poskitt, came together in the gym to prepare for the school Christmas party. The girls tolerated it. The boys felt embarrassed. Miss Poskitt enjoyed it and joined in. Mr. Ellis did not.

The wall bars, climbing ropes, horizontal beams, benches, spring boards, vaulting horses, medicine balls and rubber mats were all stowed away, and the boys and the girls assembled dolefully on opposite sides of the gym.

Mr. Ellis called them to order. “Gentlemen,” he announced with false gaiety, “please cross the floor and take your partners for the Dashing White Sergeant ... and walk, don’t run,” he added in an exasperated voice on seeing that some boys were already half-way there. “We walk across the floor in a civilised manner and courteously ask the young lady to grant us the honour of the dance.”

Now I know this sounds awful – sexist male chauvinistic objectification you might call it – but it is simply the way things were for thirteen year old boys in the early nineteen-sixties. There were some girls you would happily dance with and others you would not. Nat Lofthouse always wanted to dance with Wendy Godley but because she was pretty so did everyone else. On the rare occasion he managed to be among the first to cross the floor he was usually bundled aside by one of the more civilised and courteous members of the rugby team, and would find himself face to face with Wendy’s friend, Amanda. Even when not among the first to cross the floor, he still usually found himself face to face with Amanda. And when it was a ladies choice, when the claws came out and the fur started to fly, yes, you’ve guessed already, Amanda always chose him. He began to suspect a conspiracy.

Sadly, Amanda was not one of those girls you wanted to be seen dancing with. It was not that she wore glasses and had spots but more to do with the hideous and rather slimy orthodontic brace that glinted inside her mouth. She was taller than him too. Why did he keep ending up with Amanda?

The class knew The Dashing White Sergeant well. The school had only about half a dozen records for its feeble gramophone so they danced the same dances every year. They went straight into it:

Rum-tum rum-tum rum-tum tiddle-liddle,

Rum-tum rum-tum rum-tum tiddle-liddle,

Rum-tum rum-tum rum-tum tee,

Tiddle-liddle liddle-liddle rum tum tum.

The remainder of the afternoon was occupied by a varied choreography of allemande holds, steps forwards, backwards and sideways two-three-four, hops, spins, do-si-dos, grand chains, polkas, waltzes and two-steps. The willow was well and truly stripped. It was odd though that whenever you were supposed to progress on to other partners, Nat always found himself back with Amanda. It definitely was a conspiracy.

The following week he decided on a new tactic. When Mr. Ellis began to instruct them to take their partners, he would set off early, walk not run, be civilised and courteous, and grab hold of Wendy first before anybody else.

“Gentlemen,” said Mr. Ellis, and Nat set off. “Please cross the floor to take your partners for ...” Nat realised he had gone too soon.

“Ah! Lofthouse,” said Mr. Ellis in predatory mock surprise, “How wonderful to see you so keen. Perhaps today you would like to ask Miss Poskitt for her hand so you can demonstrate the Veleta Waltz for the benefit of us all.” Unconstrained laughter echoed around the gym.

Da-ah de da-ah de da-ah de dum,

Da-ah de da-ah de da-ah de dum,

Da-ah de da-ah de da-ah de dum,

Da-ah de da-ah de diddle-lit-dit dum.

On the first run through of each dance it was Miss Poskitt’s custom to select an unfortunate victim to demonstrate it. It was never Mr. Ellis, he never danced, it was always one of the boys. And when she danced, her natural, neat, flowing movements transformed her from an ungainly girls’ sports teacher into a graceful danseuse. On each third beat of the Veleta she rose nimbly on alternate ankles poising briefly to show off her athletic, hockey-player legs. As she moved him around the floor and changed sides to demonstrate the man’s leading role, Nat felt as powerless as John Betjeman’s subaltern partnering Miss Joan Hunter Dunn: weak from the loveliness of her “strongly adorable tennis-girl’s hand”. He glowed bright red as Mr. Ellis led the class in a round of applause.

*                   *                  *

The following year, when the playing fields were once more cloaked in fog and blattered up with mud, dancing came back as predictably as an unwanted partner in a well-executed Circassian Circle. The boys and girls assembled reluctantly as usual on opposite sides of the gym. As always, it was the first occasion in the school year when classes of the same age came together and an interesting new face might be noticed. Any new member of Wendy and Amanda’s A-stream girls would be seen for the first time by Nat’s B-stream boys.

Nevertheless, when Nat crossed the floor to take part in the traditional partner-selection ritual and was brutally barged out of the way by one of the school prop-forwards, he was surprised to find himself face to face with a new girl, an attractive new girl who glowed with health and perfection. Actually, he’d spotted her a couple of months earlier and wondered who she was, the sporty girl playing tennis with Wendy. She played so well, so athletically, a true Miss Joan Hunter Dunn. Nat hesitantly mumbled his request to dance. The new girl gave him a lovely smile, thanked him for choosing her and said she would be delighted to accept.

They took to the dance floor for The Military Two Step: Heel toe, heel toe, de diddly diddly dum de diddly, heel toe, heel toe ... Never had Nat seen anyone heel and toe so elegantly. Not even Miss Poskitt.

“Look at you!” his partner whispered wide-eyed at the end of the dance. Nat was taken aback by her intimate, affectionate tone. She turned to face him, looked him up and down, and stepped so close he could feel the warmth of her face on his. She reached up and placed her hand on top of his head, and then moved it backwards over her own. “You’re taller than me now,” she said.

To his astonishment, Nat realised it was Amanda. What a change!

I don’t need glasses now,” she laughed, amused by his bewilderment, “or that hideous brace.” 

And then, before they could say more, it was The Finnjenka Dance to the school’s newly acquired record, March of the Mods by Joe Loss and his orchestra. Joe Loss? Dead Loss! Within seconds Amanda had marched on to the next partner and was gone. But as always, as if through some secret feminine wile, she ended back with him just in time for The Gay Gordons.

Da, Dah-de dah-diddy, Dah-de dah-diddy, Dum dum dum diddy, Dum dum dum…

“We’re dead good,” Amanda raved at the end. “Really great! Natural partners! Ace, brill and fab! You have to come round on Saturday. I’ve got all the music at home. Come round to practise on our own. Then we’ll go to the party together.” Nat wished she would keep her voice down. Mr. Ellis pretended not to hear. Miss Poskitt rolled her eyes and blew them a kiss. 

Nat loved being bossed and organised by Amanda. They did go to the party together. It was at the Baths Hall where every winter the pool was drained and boarded over with a dance floor, the only hall in town large enough to accommodate the whole of the school year. They danced all the dances, and held each other glad all over into something good to The Honeycombs, Dave Clark Five and Herman’s Hermits. They laughed when the science teacher, Mr. Richardson, as ever, stood up and recited entirely from memory a long poem about young Albert and a lion called Wallace and a stick with an ‘orse’s ‘ead ‘andle.

It had begun to snow during the party, and after Auld Lang Syne they came out into a winter wonderland and walked home together merrily singing Jingle Bells and pretending to be reindeer. Nat dared to kiss Amanda’s soft warm cheek and she produced a piece of mistletoe to hang on his imaginary antlers. She kissed him back and gave him a tender hug.

He was sad that before school resumed again after the holidays, Amanda had left with her family and moved to Johannesburg.

*                   *                  *

The next year everything changed except the weather. The Christmas party took place in the pristine new school hall and the traditional dances and Mr. Richardson’s recitation were consigned to the past. Nat found an excuse not to go. He hid at home from the cold, dreaming of tennis and Christmas dancing in the summer sun at the other end of the world.



Mr Ellis also appears in:

Jim Laker, Mr. Ellis and the Eagle Annual

Tackling Rugby

The wonderfully evocative photograph of the school Christmas party captures exactly how things were in those far off innocent schooldays. Multiple copies of the image appear across the internet but if it is still the copyright of H. Armstrong Roberts/Retrofile/Getty Images I will remove it on request of the copyright holder. 

Mrs Quackworth (reposted by Smorgasbord Blog Magazine)

Sally Cronin’s fourth and final selection from my archives for her Smorgasbord Blog Magazine is a post from a year ago about a next-door neighbour we nicknamed Mrs. Quackworth. I don’t know how she ever put up with our muck-chucking fights across her garden.

It has been interesting to see which items Sally would select, it being hard to know for sure which posts others particularly like. Had I been asked to select four myself they might have been completely different. Thanks, Sally, for the many hours you must have spent looking back through our archives - not just mine but all the others too.

The Smorgasbord repost invitation is here

The reposted post is here

Mrs Quackworth 

 

With the Operatic Society around 1920

Until I was ten or eleven I had to share a bedroom with my younger brother. We were sent to bed at the same time, which meant he got to stay up later than I had at his age and I had to go sooner than I thought I should.

It was not even dark in summer. We could hear Timmy from next door-but-one bumping along the pavement on his trolley, made from a long board and some old pram wheels. We were in bed but he was still playing out at ten o’clock at night. That was really unfair. He was two years younger than me.

Downstairs we could hear the next-door neighbour talking with our parents. She sounded like a duck, as did her name ...
 
Read original post (~1200 words)

Rather a studious kind of boy

A few years ago I contributed to a book about the firm where my father used to work. Recounting people and incidents over the phone I was told: “I remember you as being rather a studious kind of boy”.

I suppose that’s right. I was too timid to join football, rugby or cricket teams and rarely participated in any other sports. I read a lot, played and listed to music and spent possibly too much time on my own.

It occurs to me that, as they age, those sporty people who played highly physical team games can no longer do so. Some manage to keep up club and racquet games for a while, and others take up the likes of bowls and walking football, etc., but eventually even these can become too much. Readers, writers, musicians and creative people, on the other hand, can keep going until they lose their marbles, or even longer.

I’m glad to have been rather a studious kind of boy.

Paul McCartney's Ram

When Paul McCartney’s long playing record Ram came out in 1971, a lot of people hated it. They were especially irritated by the embarrassing sight and sound of Linda McCartney and her wooden, astringent vocals. Why was she on the record anyway: as if it were a primary school music class where everyone has to join in enthusiastically banging tambourines and triangles, even the talentless? She was even accredited fully as co-creator, which no one really believed.

I simply dismissed it. It was not The Beatles. I was fed up with it emanating from Brendan’s room in the shared house. After all, didn’t I have more sophisticated tastes? Didn’t I think of myself as a knowledgeable connoisseur of serious music like progressive rock, particularly Jethro Tull who had just released Aqualung? How could the McCartneys’ frivolous and inconsequential warbling possibly compare?

The only legacy, for me, was that even to this day, whenever we drive past a certain cut-price supermarket I sing the following mondegreen:

Lidl Lidl be a gypsy get around
Get your feet up off the ground
Lidl Lidl get around.

I mentioned this recently in commenting on another blog about post-Beatles Paul McCartney. I looked up the lyrics to discover that the actual words are “Live a little” from the track Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey who “had to have a bath or he couldn’t get to sea” – another misheard lyric, it’s “berth”.

One thing led to another and I ended up recently getting the CD as a birthday present (I don’t do streaming). What a revelation! Judging it inferior to Jethro Tull was being Thick as a Brick.

I now think Ram is amongst Paul McCartney’s best and most innovative output: so rich in ideas – melodies, harmonies, arrangements, decorations, quirky bits – almost every part of every track is different. It‘s an amusing, joyful record, a bit late-Beatles, like the brightest parts of Abbey Road and The White Album.

Another reviewer describes it as a “domestic-bliss album”. Despite personal and contractual pains in disentangling himself from the Beatles, Paul was now living a contented and enviable lifestyle, very happy with Linda and children in their rural retreat. You hear it throughout. And Linda’s voice is just about OK too, or at least you get used to it. 

Maybe I liked Ram all along but did not want to admit it.

The Yellow Shed

Three views of the yellow shed – I don't have a complete photograph.

“Every man should have a shed” the saying goes. Well, I got a shed at the age of twelve when I took over the yellow one in the garden. Did that make me a man?

There I drank my first bottle of John Smith’s Magnet Pale Ale, brazenly bought from the corner shop with my own pocket money in the confidence they would assume I was on a parent’s errand. And there I tried one of my mother’s menthol flavoured Consulate cigarettes and well and truly wished I hadn’t.

Whether these experiments in manliness were as masculine as they seemed at the time I’m not sure. Magnet Pale Ale might have been copiously consumed by Tristan Farnon in the James Herriot books, but it was promoted by the image of a comely young woman with smooth bare legs and shoulders, long ear rings dangling evocatively below blonde Marilyn Monroe curls as she alluringly raises her stemmed glass to declare it “a magnet for me!” Consulate cigarettes, “cool as a mountain stream”, also employed a preponderance of girly social situations, not at all like the manly virility of the Player’s Navy Cut sailor or the Marlboro cowboy, or the self-assured independence of the raincoated, Sinatra-like, “never-alone” Strand character.*

The yellow shed became my own private space. It was my dark-room, games room, chemistry laboratory and music studio. I imagined myself carrying out investigations into original problems, creating new knowledge, an academic in the making. Apart from a few gardening tools, yard brushes and a stepladder, most of the clutter had moved to our new asbestos garage.

Among my old, self-developed 127-sized negatives were two photographs of the inside. Oh what memories!

 

We made a folding bench to go on the end wall. I painted the inside with clean white paint and hung curtains over the window and door. I constructed a cement ridge to stop water pooling under the door. It was icy cold in winter and swelteringly hot in summer. I arranged my great-uncle’s cigarette card collection in their packets along the ledge near the roof. The damp gummed them all together and my mother threw them out.

Pinned to the wall is a map of the East Riding from Flamborough to Spurn, Bridlington to Barnsley, and photographs of singers and pop groups. The large one is The Animals, and although the others are too small to make out, I think The Hollies and The Searchers are among them.  Beneath them, on the ledge above the white ‘meat safe’ cupboard, my half-sized cricket bat lies next to a wooden block drilled with holes to hold pens and pencils.

You can see my ‘new’ bicycle with its straight handlebars, white mudguards and three speed Sturmey Archer gears, and the Philips EL 3541 reel-to-reel tape recorder used to record pop-music from the radio, and to boost my homework grades by recording the series of science programmes we listened to at school.

Chalked around the half-sized dartboard are the words “TRY TO HIT THE BOARD NOT THE WALL”. Impressively, there seem to be no tell-tale dart holes in the woodwork, even on my high resolution image. However, I hope I moved the tape recorder and bare-bulbed table lamp out of harm’s way before throwing any darts. I especially hope I remembered to protect the bottle in the corner just behind the watering can, because this is the hexagonal emerald-green bottle of hydrochloric acid, still three quarters full, mentioned in a previous post.

One can only be appalled by the electrical wiring. It’s a wonder I didn’t electrocute myself or burn the place down. The power supply enters the shed through a hole in the wall above the stepladder – you can just make it out running along the wall outside from the house, above the coal house door in the first picture. At the same end of the shed, a very old fashioned electric fire stands on a couple of wooden blocks nailed to the ledge, its mains cable hanging by a hook. The supply to the tape recorder and table lamp at the other end runs along the roof. There seem to be rather a lot of joins wound round with insulating tape, or perhaps, horrifyingly, sellotape. However, the twisted pair cable along the rear wall, running through a home-made switch box, is merely the lead to the extension loudspeaker fixed above the electric fire – the very same speaker on which my dad listened to Hancock’s Half Hour in the front room in the nineteen fifties.

One warm summer afternoon, the shed door wide open and the extension speaker full on, I switched on the tape recorder, plugged in the microphone, and began to broadcast my own music programme complete with jokes and witty repartee. The Animals, Searchers and Hollies could clearly be heard a dozen or so houses in all directions, up and down the street, across the road, and at the back. Between records came the jokes. “Did you hear about the constipated mathematician?” I was heard to ask, and before my mother could come running out of the house to put a stop to it I provided the answer. “He worked it out with a pencil.” Outrageous in the polite company of the early nineteen-sixties.



* One could write a whole piece about cigarette advertising. One amusing fact is that Marlboro cigarettes were originally marketed for women with slogans such as “Red beauty tips to match your lips and fingertips”, but Philip Morris gave the brand a sex change in 1954 when they began to advertise it as a filter cigarette for men, and introduced the ‘Marlboro Man’ who exuded masculine virility.
 

Mrs. Quackworth

With the Operatic Society around 1920

Until I was ten or eleven I had to share a bedroom with my younger brother. We were sent to bed at the same time, which meant he got to stay up later than I had at his age and I had to go sooner than I thought I should. Not only that, but bedrooms were bedrooms in those days, and bed meant bed: curtains drawn, lights out, no entertainments, no talking or even books. Beds were for sleeping.

It was not even dark in summer. We could hear Timmy from next door-but-one bumping along the pavement on his trolley, made from a long board and some old pram wheels. We were in bed but he was still playing out at ten o’clock at night. That was really unfair. He was two years younger than me.

Downstairs we could hear the next-door neighbour talking with our parents. She sounded like a duck, as did her name.

“Mrs. Quackworth,” I quacked in my best duck voice. 

“Mrs. Ackworth,” Martin corrected me.

“Mrs. Quackworth.”

“Mrs. Ackworth,” he said more loudly.

“What’s a quack worth?”

“MRS. ACKWORTH” he yelled, lengthening each syllable as he shouted.

“MIIISSIIIS AAAAAACK WORRRRTH.”

Downstairs, the conversation stopped.

“Why is Martin calling me?”

“Shut up and go to sleep,” mother shouted up the stairs.

“That boy’s spoilt!” Mrs. Ackworth said.

*                             *                              *

I don’t know how she put up with us. We would run around, yelling at the tops of our voices:

“WHAT A GOAL!”

“FOUL! SEND HIM OFF!”

“WHOAAAAAAA! YEEEAAAYYY! WHEEEEEE!”

The ball rattled against the fence, thudded into her French windows, bounced across her garden and flattened her plants. We climbed over her rockery and ran across the lawn to retrieve it leaving a trail of dislodged stones and scuff marks.

We had muck-chucking battles with Timmy whose house was the other side of hers, depositing debris and detritus across her path. She rarely complained as she swept it up. One day we used blackberries as ammunition, stolen from the allotments near the railway, too bitter to eat. Most went astray, leaving lasting purple stains on her green shed. Stray brambles grew around her garden for some years afterwards.

I was six when we moved in next door. Mrs. Ackworth seemed ancient, but she would still have been only in her fifties. She had a deep, cultured, musical voice which had for several years gained her leading contralto parts with the local operatic society, although it had since been ruined by smoking – giving a duck sound. In her day, she had sung all around Yorkshire. Newspapers had said she was one of the best contraltos in the county. She listened to classical music on the wireless, talked about opera and the arts, and helped with the local Conservatives. The effect was formidable. She was always “Mrs. Ackworth”, never “Ethel”. People thought her fearsome.

Despite more than a twenty year age difference, she struck up a close friendship with our mother who had the knack of taking people as she found them.

“She only came from a fish and chip shop,” mother told us when we said she frightened us and asked why they were always in and out of each others’ houses, “and it’s lonely in a house on your own.”

Mrs. Ackworth had lived there the thirty years since her marriage, but her husband had died just a few months later leaving her with little means of support. Male admirers quickly gathered to help, admirers of her voice you understand, especially a wealthy property owner, himself married and twenty-eight years her senior, who set her up with a small milliners shop. She had been at school with his eldest daughter. It was said that during the nineteen thirties, when cars were rare, there would be only one in the street, her benefactor’s car, parked late at night outside her house. There were rumours they had toured Europe together. When he died he left her a considerable sum of money but his family somehow managed to deprive her of it.

Mrs. Ackworth used to watch us from the kitchen window as we played in the garden. It felt intrusive, but I know now she was thinking about the children she never had. She was distraught when we moved again after a decade or so, but we kept in touch through the years, through the inevitable succession of marriages, births and deaths. In effect, she became a surrogate grandma.

“You’d better go see Mrs. Ackworth,” my brother and I were told when we were home, and so we did, to sit and be criticised beside her coal fire and look out through her French windows at the rockery, lawn and shed. Later, we took our wives, and then our children. The house still had all the original nineteen-twenties fixtures, with kitchen cupboards and fireplaces with grained paintwork. Her furniture was of the same period too, or older. Her face brightened like the sun on seeing she had visitors.

“Mrs. Quackworth,” the children would say.

“They're spoilt. You’ll turn that girl into a proper trivet.”

The house smelled of cigarettes and boiled rabbit, and she always had a bottle of sherry on the go on the sideboard. Age made her more and more outspoken. We used to say we went to be insulted.

“What colour is that you're wearing? Grey? How drab! And what’s the matter with your hair? Are you going bald?”

“Your father says he’s going to give up smoking. I can’t see why. He’s not a smoker. One or two a day doesn’t count.” She considered herself a proper smoker: one or two packets a day.

One day she found him waiting for his pension in the Post Office. “What are you doing in here taking up a space?” she said to the amusement of the long queue. “Surely you don’t have any need for your pension, not you with all your money.”

She complained he had offered her a lift home “in case I had any heavy bottles to carry” she told us. “Anyone would think I was a drinker.”

She stayed active into her nineties, making the coal fire in the mornings, trudging to the supermarket for shopping and carrying home her heavy bottles. We were beginning to think she would outlive us all. When the time eventually came and her will was found there was a surprise in store. Although it was not worth anything like as much as she might have imagined, and a fifth of what it would fetch today, my brother and I were astonished to discover she had left us the house. For just a few weeks, the open fireplaces, grained paintwork, French windows, green shed, rockery and garden belonged to us. I swear if we had looked carefully enough, we could have found stray brambles still growing in the dark corners.

Some months later, my father bumped into Timmy’s parents shopping in town.

“We see Mrs. Ackworth’s house is sold at last,” they said. “The end of an era! Does anyone know what happened to her money?”

My father struggled to hold his tongue.

Hayley Payley Snow On The Ground

My dad used to sing a strange Christmas song that hardly anyone seems to know now. It went like this:

Haley paley snow on the ground
The wind was bitter and cold
When a poor little sailor boy covered in rags
Came to a lady’s door.

The lady looked out of her window on high
And cast her eye upon him
Come in, come in you poor little child
You never shall want any more.

When he got to “come in, come in”, he pretended to pull me towards him, malevolently, like a monster or one of those evil deviants we never used to mention. 

“What’s all that about?” I wanted to know in later years. “What does ‘haley paley’ mean?”

“No idea” he said, “but Franky Drury used to sing another verse, a rude one.”

He would never tell me what it was.

Some years ago I looked for the song on the internet and found nothing. Looking again now, there is still very little. The story it tells seems to have been related to an old English and American ballad called The Soldier’s Poor Little Boy or The Poor Little Sailor Boy. Recordings include a 1927 version by the Johnson Brothers, one from the Max Hunter Folk Collection sung by Reba Dearmore in 1969 and a 1922 recording by C. K. Tillett. In at least one version, the lady takes the boy in because her own son has been killed in battle. In others the boy turns out to be the lady’s long lost son “William that’s come from the sea”. There were more verses with several variations, but my dad only sang the words above. 

There are also possible references to the Poor Little Sailor Boy title in nineteenth century newspapers. The earliest I found was in the Norfolk Chronicle or Norwich Gazette of 25th July, 1807. If that does not seem particularly old, we should bear in mind that many of what we think of as ancient Christmas carols were written as recently as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The tune for Haley Paley, however, is quite different to The Poor Soldier/Sailor Boy. The Yorkshire Garland Group (an archive of Yorkshire folk song heritage) has a seven-verse version in 6/8 time, which appeared on a 1971 LP Transpennine, performed briskly by Harry Boardman and Dave Hillery (unfortunately, the YouTube links to the individual tracks are now blocked). The site also refers to a shorter variation called Early Pearly sung in slower 3/4 waltz time by an eighty-five year old from Hull in 2009. At the end she moves into a second tune similar to the American recordings above. If “hayley payley snow” is a corruption of “early pearly snow”, that at least makes sense. There is also a discussion at The Mudcat Café which suggests the song was sung mainly in Yorkshire. I wonder how many of these orally-transmitted songs are now lost forever.

My dad’s tune (below) differed only slightly from the Hull one. As the Garland Group web site observes, such variation is the nature of oral transmission.

Top of the Pops 1983

I am getting myself up to date with the current pop scene by watching the Thursday and Friday evening re-runs of Top of the Pops 1983 on BBC Four. Spandau Ballet, The Police, Culture Club, and others, shine like gemstones out of the mud. Clearly, I still have a long way still to go. I need to start with everything I missed during the nineteen-eighties while immersed in university postgraduate work to the exclusion of just about everything else. 

But I have begun to realise they are not showing all the programs. They are missing some out. Now and again they jump a week, and sometimes you notice a ham-fisted cut near the end just before the presenters announce who will be on the following program.

For example:

• On Thursday, 16th March, 2017, they showed the edition from Thursday, 19th May, 1983.
• On Friday, 17th March, it was from Thursday, 26th May, 1983.
• Then on Thursday, 23rd March, they showed the edition from Wednesday, 8th June (it was broadcast on Wednesday that week).
• And today, Friday, 24th March, it is from Thursday, 23rd June.   

So what happened to the 2nd and 16th June 1983? You might be ahead of me here.

Another one they omitted was the 50 minute long programme of Thursday 5th May, 1983, celebrating 1000 editions of Top of the Pops since it was first transmitted on 1st January, 1964, presented by a collection of then Radio 1 DJs.

The answers are to be found in the Radio Times Archive, also known as the Genome Project. On Thursday 2nd June, 1983, Top of the Pops was presented by Tony Blackburn and Jimmy Savile. On the 16th June it was Mike Read and Dave Lee Travis. Savile and Travis would also have been in the 1000th edition. The BBC are no longer showing programs presented by either of them.

Now, I don’t doubt that Savile was a monster, and that to see him again on our screens would be disturbing, but surely, couldn’t they just edit him out? They could always slot in one of the short Sounds of the Sixties programmes to make up the time.

As regards Dave Lee Travis (and some may take issue with me here), why are his appearances being treated as harshly as Savile’s? Although Travis was accused of multiple indiscretions, he was only convicted on one count of indecent assault for which he received a three-months suspended sentence. Appalling as that is, even the Judge described his offence as of a “different order” to other high profile convictions.

Travis claimed he was simply a “tactile” person. “Tactile” behaviour was rife in the mileau of the nineteen seventies and -eighties, as anyone with experience of office life at that time will testify. Every week, Top of the Pops showed (mainly) male presenters sandwiched between apparently adoring, (mainly) female fans. It seems unsurprising that things sometimes got overly “tactile”, and that unchecked, some individuals continued it for years. It doesn’t mean it was right, or that the (mainly) female recipients of the (mainly) male attention sought it. But does Travis really warrant the same restrictions as Savile? Convicted offenders of all kinds appear elsewhere on our screens.

We being prevented from seeing an important archive of popular music. As Harriet Walker wrote in the Independent, “it is part of the fabric of our slightly moth-eaten national quilt”.

Sheffield band The Human League are just one significant act to suffer collateral censorship and have retaliated by releasing a DVD of their Top of the Pops appearances with Savile and Travis chopped out. Wouldn’t it be better to be able to watch their performances in the context in which they were originally shown. If The Human League can make the edits, why can’t the BBC?

Alt-0247 and Rule: the Ed Sheeran Prize for Computer Science Education

Perhaps there should be a new category at the next Brits, the award for the year’s most outstanding contribution to computer science education, the first winner to be Ed Sheeran for his new album ÷ (pronounced Divide). This follows up his previous albums (or LPs as I still call them) + (Plus) and × (Multiply).

In trying to search for the new album, my daughter was frustrated by the lack of a ÷ key on her computer. She was about to go through the tedious procedure of using the ‘Insert Symbol’ menu in Microsoft Word to create one, which she could then copy and paste into the search box, when I said “Just type Alt-0247”, and the stargate opened into a whole new world of understanding. Ed Sheeran’s title had brilliantly illustrated the concept that everything you do on a computer has an underlying numerical representation.

The concept is ASCII – the American Standard Code for Information Exchange. I found it extremely useful in the early nineteen-eighties in working with Tandy TRS-80 and BBC computers, when I had the dubious honour of being the author of an educational computer program called Munchymaths.

ASCII had been developed twenty years earlier by IBM’s Bob Bemer and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) as a standard way to represent characters in computers. It allows computers to communicate with each other.

In ASCII, the divide (or obelus) symbol is represented by the number 247, and can be produced by typing Alt-0247 on the number keypad.

To do it, hold down the Alt key while typing 0247 on the number pad, (number lock must be switched on), and the ÷ symbol appears when you release the Alt key. Some of us know this, and some of us don’t. It’s the Great Alt-0247.

Here are some other well known phrases or sayings in ASCII format:

• To be, or not to be; that is the Alt-63
• We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created Alt-61
• Alt-62 love hath no man than this
• To see the World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Alt-8734 in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour

Apologies if some or all of these symbols do not work or render as intended on your device. They appear correctly in the most used fonts in Windows 10 on Microsoft computers, but different devices, software and font selections use different codes. There are now several versions of the extended ASCII table to provide for the enormous number of characters computers are called upon to represent, such as  ê   €  Œ   ¶  and so on. The infinity symbol ∞ is particularly troublesome. Unfortunately, ASCII is not as standard as it could or should be.

Furthermore, ASCII is only an intermediate representation to make things easier for us stupid humans to understand. Underneath ASCII there are lower-level concepts such as octal, hexadecimal and binary, but let’s not go there now.

Ed Sheeran, however, is always going to be spoilt for choice for new album titles.

Downtown

A super singalong on BBC Four on Friday! 

It Started with a Kiss – or rather it started for us with a bottle of Chilean Shiraz followed by a fabulous edition of Top Of The Pops 1982, from 15th July, which began with Errol and Hot Chocolate and their famous song. After several weeks of having to contend with the constipated singing faces of Brian Ferry and Martin Fry (get the look!), it was great to have some good tunes for a change. Errol was followed by, among others, Dexy’s Come On Eileen, the perennial Cliff Richard, David Essex’s Night Clubbing and Irene Cara’s Fame (although I have never quite understood the line in that song about qualifying for a pilots licence).

Later, there was a recorded concert with the now 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 copy book by reprising our own version of the lyrics from twenty years ago. It 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 turn on the fire

You’ll be warm and quiet, it’s all that you desire

How can you lose?

The night is much kinder there

You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares

And go downstairs

Sleeping on the settee, downstairs

Sleeping so peacefully

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, it’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

And go downstairs

Have a weak cup of tea, downstairs

Mild crackers, plain toast for me, downstairs

Everything’s waiting for you.

I was lucky not to end up on the settee again that night.  

Developing, Printing and a Trip to London

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 Terry Hardy 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 a bit like a flatbed scanner for exposing photographic paper and negatives to light 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 with Terry’s grandma in Hounslow for a few days, 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?), 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 were any good except for one of London Airport (not yet called Heathrow): the last frame on a colour film left over from our family holidays.

I used the Brownie camera for the next ten years but always 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.

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. 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 much more complex process of colour developing and printing but tended to have difficulty with the colour balance (see Colours I see with). 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 satisfying darkroom perfectionism ... all gone! Instead we compile our digital albums, Photoshop our images, blog about what fun things used to be and exercise our vainglorious self-expression in all kinds of other undemanding, pretentious, posey ways.


- Maurice Fisher’s web site Photographic Memorabilia is a real treasure trove of images and information about photographic film processing and equipment.
- The images of the Kodak Brownie Starmite camera and AG1 flash bulb are by Adamantios and Gotanero on Wikimedia Creative Commons. The image of the Paterson contact printer is in the Paterson developing tank instruction booklet. Inclusion of the cover of Better Photography is believed to be fair use. The other images are my own.
- My developing tank was a Paterson Major II but strangely, as shown in the photograph, the instruction booklet supplied was for the earlier Universal II model. The difference was not significant.

Lytton Strachey

It was a most unlikely book for me to be reading, the life story of an effete, gangling, weirdo, homosexual biographer with a big nose, unkempt beard and light, reedy voice. Had I known beforehand I would never have looked at it and thus missed out on a formative literary experience and improbable source of inspiration.

I acquired Michael Holroyd’s biography of Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) by negligence.* It was the book of the month from the postal club I was in, one of those that sends their selection automatically unless you tell them you don’t want it. It arrived due to my inattention.

I opened its 1144 printed pages wondering what on earth I had got, and was immediately drawn in by the Preface: an account of the time Holroyd spent researching and writing the book. He did much of this work at the home of Lytton’s brother, James Strachey, who was every bit as odd as Lytton. James and his wife Alix were psychoanalysts. It was said they had rented the attics of their house to various tenants and psychoanalysed them into such state of insensibility they no longer knew anything other than the amount of their rent and when it was due. Alix Strachey had once been a brilliant cricket player and was now an authority on cowboys. James Strachey had translated the whole of Freud’s work into English, producing a cross-referenced and annotated work of such glittering scholarship that a German publishing house was considering translating its twenty-four volumes back into German. For me, this kind of eccentricity is hard to pass by.

Lytton’s papers were stored in an outbuilding, the ‘studio wilderness’. They were in such abundance it took Holroyd five years to work through them. He describes this period as “not simply the composition of a large book, but a way of life and an education.” As he ploughed through the plethora of Lytton’s early correspondence with its detailed accounts of faulty digestion, illness, apathy and self-loathing, he began to experience many of the same ailments himself and wondered whether they could be posthumously contagious. If so, he resolved that the subject of his next biography must be someone of extraordinary vitality.

Holroyd was working from sources largely untouched for decades. He became a foremost expert in the colourful lives and characters of the now-famous Bloomsbury Group, which included the writers Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, the economist John Maynard Keynes, and the post-impressionist painters Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. His life as a writer and researcher seemed hugely preferable to mine. My days as a trainee accountant were spent constructing tedious control accounts and trial balances. It was anything but an education. There had to be things more edifying than an accountancy correspondence course.

If Holroyd’s account of writing the biography drew me in, his early descriptions of the Strachey family had me hooked. There were numerous uncles, cousins and other visitors, many either distinguished, completely potty, or both. Holroyd describes them as “the flower, perhaps, of originality gone to seed.” One Strachey uncle had lived in India for five years, and subsequently organised his life to Calcutta time, breakfasting in the afternoon and living by candlelight – at least that is what the biography says, but isn’t Calcutta time some four hours ahead of London time? Was he twelve hours adrift? Shouldn’t he have had his breakfast around four o’clock in the morning?

Other oddballs walk on and off stage throughout the book. One of my favourites could have been invented by the comedian Ronnie Barker. He was “dr. cecil reddie”, the headmaster of Abbotsholme School in Derbyshire where Lytton spent the 1893-94 school year, and a leading member of “the league for the abolition of capital-letters.” In retirement he corresponded with “lytton” from his address at “welwyn-garden-city, hertfordshire.”

Having chuckled my way through the first few chapters, I became immersed in Lytton’s school and university days. I identified with his shyness and awkwardness in company, the feeling of somehow not fitting in, his difficulty in making friends. But when he got to Cambridge he began to thrive. He was elected to the Cambridge Conversazione Society, otherwise known as the Cambridge Apostles, a highly secretive group which met in members’ rooms on Saturday evenings to eat sardines on toast and discuss intellectual topics.

The Society is rumoured still to be active. Members consider themselves the elite of the elite. Membership is by invitation only and potential recruits are unaware they are being considered. But despite the secrecy, one has to wonder whether Apostles might be identifiable by their supermarket trolleys overstocked with excessive quantities of tinned fish and toasting bread on Saturdays. They need to address this security weakness urgently.

Through the Apostles, Lytton became friends with leading writers and intellectuals of the day, such as Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, Rupert Brooke and John Maynard Keynes. Many of them thought Lytton one of the cleverest people they had encountered, but the immediate success he might have expected eluded him. His history degree was Second Class, his application to the Civil Service unsuccessful, and he was twice rejected for a University Fellowship. He found himself back at home in London writing reviews for the Spectator and other periodicals, and generally drifting. Churning out articles left little of his scant energy for the great work he hoped to write. Eventually, at the age of thirty-one, he did manage to produce a book, a history of French literature, but it failed to bring him either the wealth or the success he sought.

I would have been happy enough to get into any university, let alone Cambridge, and it would have been the sauce on the sardines to be invited to join a secret club as well. My not-so-exclusive group of mates who met on Saturday evenings in the Royal Park Hotel to drink five pints and tell sexist and racist jokes did not have quite the same intellectual mystique. Even so, Lytton’s life at this time seemed no more purposeful than mine, with a similar pattern of futility and wasted energies. But wouldn’t it have been nice, when feeling a bit fed up as Lytton often did, to be able to take oneself off to relatives in the Cairngorms, or to friends in Sussex or Paris? I was slave to a thirty-eight hour week with just three weeks’ annual holiday.

One of the most startling revelations of Holroyd’s book was its frank treatment of bi- and homosexuality. At its time of publication, the diversity of Bloomsbury predilections was not widely known. The exposure of John Maynard Keynes as one of Lytton’s lovers was received with considerable resentment. When President Nixon declared “We are all Keynesians now”, the world sniggered at the thought he might be referring to something other than economics.

Lytton’s proclivities also gave irony to his alleged response to the First World War military tribunal that assessed his claim to be a conscientious objector. When asked: “What would you do if you saw a German soldier attempting to rape your sister?” he is said to have answered ambiguously: “I should try to come between them.”

Neverthess, some women were attracted to Lytton, and Lytton to some women. At one point he proposed to Virginia Stephen (later Woolf), who initially accepted him, although both rapidly decided it not to be a good idea. Then, in 1915, he was captivated by an androgynous young painter, (Dora) Carrington (she was known by her surname only). Their story begins when she crept stealthily upon his sleeping form intending to cut off his beard in revenge for an attempted kiss, and Lytton suddenly opened his eyes and gazed at her. Holroyd takes up the tale: “... it was a moment of curious intimacy, and she, who hypnotized so many others, was suddenly hypnotized herself.” From that moment they became virtually inseparable. Her sumptuous portrait of Lytton is a sure statement of love. They eventually set up home together and were often simultaneously besotted with the same, usually male person. Carrington killed herself two months after Lytton’s death in 1932. Their story is told in the 1995 film ‘Carrington’.

Lytton Strachey by Dora Carrington (1916)

In 1918, Lytton’s fortunes changed. His book, ‘Eminent Victorians’, caught the mood of a war-shocked nation, cynical and distrustful of the rigid Victorian morality that had led to the conflict. The title is of course ironic. It dismantles the reputations of four legendary Victorians. To summarise Holroyd: Cardinal Manning’s nineteenth-century evangelicism is exposed as the vanity of fortunate ambition; Florence Nightingale is removed from her pedestal as the legendary ‘Lady of the Lamp’ and revealed as an uncaring neurotic; Dr. Thomas Arnold is no longer an influential teacher but an adherent to a debased public school system; and General Gordon, the ‘hero’ of Khartoum, is shown to have been driven by the kind of misplaced messianic religiosity all too familiar to those returning from the trenches.

‘Eminent Victorians’ reflected the attitudes of Lytton’s Bloomsbury circle of friends. In many ways they anticipated the way we live now. Their way of life foreshadowed wider changes to society, in particular the displacement of public duty and conformity by private hedonism and individuality. But the success of ‘Eminent Victorians’ was not due only to timeliness. It revolutionised the art of biography. It showed off Lytton’s virtuosity as a writer: his repertoire of irony, overstatement, bathos and indiscretion, his fascination with the private and personal. For the remainder of his life his income was at today’s prices in excess of £100,000 per year.

Holroyd’s reputation, too, was shaped by his biography of Strachey, establishing him as part of England’s contemporary literary elite.

For me the book was something of a revelation: both Strachey and Holroyd. Despite its subject matter being worlds away from my own time, place and social class, it stripped away the veils of convention and conformity that school, church, state and society had thrown over us. The parade of headstrong eccentrics showed it was not unacceptable to be different; that you did not have to follow convention or do what others expected; that not everyone has launched themselves into an upward career trajectory by their twenties; that we can all have doubts and be demoralised, yet still come good. You just have to make your own decisions rather than have them made for you.

The pop-culture philosophers had been trying to tell us much the same thing. Northern working class England in the fifties and sixties was as rigidly Victorian as the mores rejected by Bloomsbury. People worked long hours, had few holidays and were poor. Authority went unquestioned and unchallenged. Strachey and his elitist friends were no champions of the servant classes, but by the nineteen sixties the times they were a-changin’. Opportunities were there for all. For me it was not Bob Dylan or John Lennon that brought the message home, but a rare biography of Lytton Strachey. 


* It was the 1973 edition published by Book Club Associates, which was based on previously published parts. The biography was revised in 1994 to incorporate material that had become available since the earlier editions, but I still prefer the detail of the 1973 version. There is now an enormous amount of other material about Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington and other members of the Bloomsbury Group.  

Book Review
I re-read the 1994 edition again in October, 2015, and wrote the following

Michael Holroyd
Lytton Strachey: The New Biography (5***)

A big book and not one to hurry. I have read it at least four times, twice in the 1973 version and twice in this 1994 edition. You become absorbed in the lives of the Bloomsbury Group during the period 1900-1930. Lytton Strachey was one of the most interesting members, in some ways quite inspirational.


Key to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful, 4* enjoyed it a lot and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.

Previous book reviews 

Recording Artiste

Tasker Dunham reprises his Akai 4000DS tape recorder, Teisco MJ-2 Tremo Twenty guitar and 1970s multi-track guitar recordings

Well, who didn’t want to be a rock recording artiste in the early 1970s? They were stalked by groupies and earned a fortune. Rock music was still proper music, and posers who were more interested in what they looked like than how they sounded were still a minority.

Sadly, my own career as a rock musician progressed no further than the occasional front-room jam session with friends, and most of the time it was just me on my own in my bedroom. But with the help of my Akai 4000DS I did make some recordings. And you can hear them here. What a treat! Or maybe not.

A year or two after upgrading my record player to hi-fi with a Heathkit AD-27, I began to think about getting a stereo tape deck. There was a lot in the press about the Akai 4000DS, and on seeing one in a York shop window I decided that was it. It took some time to save up. I eventually bought one in February, 1975, from Comet, Leeds, for £94.50. I still have it with its original box, and it still works when I have the urge to get it out just one last time. With it I bought a pair of first-rate AKG K160 stereo headphones. The documents at the end of this piece were at the bottom of the Akai box.

Overnight, I became one of the most active borrowers from the music section of Leeds Central Library which then consisted almost entirely of vinyl LPs. Naturally, most of what I borrowed I taped. The Akai sound quality came near to that of the original records, and easily outperformed the audio cassettes and soon-to-be-obsolete stereo audio cartridges that most people were using then. Perhaps the main disadvantage of reel-to-reel was lack of convenience. The spools of magnetic tape could be awkward to load and manipulate, and could never be played in a car. But what they lost in convenience they gained in quality. Even when audio cassette players were enhanced by Dolby Noise Reduction to reduce tape-hiss, the 4000DS was still superior. Akai did in due course pay lip service to market fashion by bringing out its own Dolby model, the 4000DB, but it seemed unnecessary.

In the record library, I chanced upon lots of lesser-known recordings – serendipitous discovery tends not to happen these days with online sources. Among the most memorable were recordings by Eric Kershaw, the subject of an earlier post, and Laura Nyro. I became fascinated by Laura Nyro’s multi-layer recordings in which she sang all her own harmonies.* I wanted to try it myself – not necessarily the singing but the multi-track recording.

Laura Nyro of course had a state-of-the-art recording studio which was beyond me, but I did have a newly-bought Akai 4000DS. Among its facilities were tape dubbing, sound mixing, sound-on-sound and sound-with-sound recording, which allowed you to mix and merge two tracks at a time.

Now, let’s be absolutely clear about this. Nothing of my own unoriginal music, insensitive compositions, bad timekeeping or clumsy performances are in any way comparable to Laura Nyro, but I did manage to put together several pieces, and in recent years digitised them to YouTube. So now, the nearest I’ll ever get to being a rock star with a recording contract, I am going to post them here.

The guitar in the recordings, incidentally, is a nineteen-sixties Tremo Twenty, also sold as the Teisco MJ-2 or E-200. Until I got it out of its original stiff canvas/cardboard case to photograph for here and looked it up, I had no idea that, despite being pretty basic, the Tremo Twenty version is fairly rare. One collector states he knows of only three still in existence, one in a museum in Switzerland. Well mine makes four. It might originally have come from Woolworths, but I bought it second hand from a friend of my brother for £10. It no longer has the original knobs because I had to replace the pots, and is a bit worn and battered now and unflatteringly adorned with forty year old stickers and transfers, but it still plays.**

First efforts were simple two-part chord and melody improvisations mainly around Beatles’ songs, followed by three-part pieces which involved laying down a bass line first. In places these improvise some way from the original melodies. I also attempted a Bach Two-Part Invention from some piano music left in the rented house I lived in. There are a couple of my own tunes I later reworked with music software. Except for one short example, I will spare you me singing.

Here is the list of recordings:

• Here, There and Everywhere  (chords and melody with some planned improvisation)
• Yesterday  (chords and melody with some planned improvisation)
• It’s Only Love  (bass, chords and melody with some planned improvisation)
• You’re Going To Lose That Girl  (bass and chords with planned improvisation)
• No Reply  (bass and chords with planned improvisation)
• J S Bach Two-Part Invention #1, in C Major  (two melody lines) This is a long way from perfect but I was fairly satisfied with it at the time, despite one or two slight synchronisation problems in the recording.
• Improvisation to an unknown piece (chords with truly improvised melody). I wish I could still improvise lead guitar parts on the spur of the moment as in parts of this. Most of the above were pre-planned, but this wasn’t.
• Red Mini Van (own composition: three-part bass-chords-melody jazz piece)
• Walk With Ladies (own composition: three-part bass, chords and melody, followed by a section reworked more recently with music software)
• Blue (own composition: three-part bass, chords and melody, followed by a section reworked more recently with music software)
• Not Good Enough (also called Impress - own composition: bass and chords with two voice parts - oh dear!)

Leak 3200 tuner-amplifier and Wharfedale Glendale XP3 speakers

The 4000DS was not my last piece of expensive hi-fi equipment. When at last I got to university in 1977, I expected to have to self-fund the first term due to a previous grant for four months at teacher training college. Surprisingly, I was awarded a full grant, so the money I had saved went on hi-fi equipment and a holiday. My dad had commandeered my earlier Heathkit stereo to play his Bing Crosby records, so I bought a new system for university: a Leak 3200 tuner-amplifier and a pair of Wharfedale Glendale XP3 speakers. I later added a Sansui SR-222 turntable and a Sharp RT-10 cassette deck.

In total, the tape decks, headphones, tuner-amp, turntable and speakers came to roughly £500, which is today’s inflation-adjusted equivalent of about £2,800, and possibly half as much again in terms of earnings growth. Not bad for a university student. Reckless perhaps, but not as reckless as the risk of blowing it by feeding an electric guitar through it.


POSTSCRIPT: I contacted the owner of the website MIJ_60s_Guitars who responded “That is one rare guitar. It’s the first real Teisco I have seen with that logo. And the first surf green MJ-2L guitar as well. So I was double excited to see it. I have one like this that is copper brown, but Teisco brand. It is still the only copper brown one I’ve seen. But any surf green Teisco is really rare.”

** If you want to hear an MJ-2 played well, take a look at this. Bear with it for a couple of minutes - he starts with the chords to the Beatles Day In The Life before he really gets going. 

* Laura Nyro (1947-1997) is not especially well known, but she was a major influence upon a whole catalogue of distinctive and original artistes. Elton John described her as one of the most important, overlooked performer/songwriters. I was knocked for six by the genius and originality of the first of her records I borrowed from the library, Christmas and the Beads of Sweat, and by the energy of the next, Eli and the Thirteenth Confession. She rarely performed live; her forte (perhaps in both senses of the word) was the recording studio where she layed down impressive multiple layers of sound, singing all the harmonies herself. Eli’s Comin’ illustrates this brilliantly. 

There is an identical instrument, same colour, same instrument number, but much cleaner, pictured a couple of scrolls down at http://www.jedistar.com/jedistar_vintage_guitar_dating_t3.htm.   Here are close ups of my own logo and instrument number:

Instruction booklet covers and receipts: