I have seen so many clips from Ken Loach’s film Kes, I felt I knew this book well. I didn’t.
I knew the outline well enough: “grubby little lad in Yorkshire … finds and trains a kestrel … bringing hope and meaning to a drab life crushed by bullying schoolmasters and a downbeat home life,” to quote the Daily Mirror (20th March, 1970). I even once co-wrote a parody called ‘Budge’, poking fun at a friend who kept animals, about a boy who found an escaped budgerigar in his coalhouse and trained it to sing rude songs in a Yorkshire accent.
This entirely misses the poetry of the book: the vivid and lyrical descriptions of the streets and countryside around the coal mining community where it is set. It is an astonishing piece of writing. The story absorbs you completely. Every page shines with brilliance. The language mirrors the shifting emotions: the joy of escape from the dirt and poverty of the town into the natural beauty of the hills, woods and fields; the elation on seeing the kestrel wild and free in flight; the constricting terror in hiding from an inescapable beating; the dread when the bird is missing.
I can only give examples. The first has often been quoted before:
A cushion of mist lay over the fields. Dew drenched the grass, and the occasional sparkling of individual drops made Billy glance down as he passed. One tuft was silver fire … and when it caught the sun it exploded, throwing out silver needles and crystal splinters. (p19)
There is despair at the end as Billy wanders the streets bereft through a scene familiar to anyone who has walked alone through an empty northern town at night:
A shadow rippling across a drawn curtain. A light going on. A light going off. A laugh. A shout. A name. A television on too loud, throwing the dialogue out into the garden. A record, a radio playing; occasional sounds on quiet streets. (p157)
There is the language, the Barnsley dialect, such as in Billy’s words as he comes alive in describing the bird’s first free flight to his class during an English lesson:
‘Come on, Kes! Come on then! Nowt happened at first, then, just when I wa’ going’ to walk back to her, she came. You ought to have seen her. Straight as a die, about a yard off t’floor. An’ t’speed! … like lightnin’, head dead still, an’ her wings never made a sound, then wham! Straight up on t’glove, claws out grabbin’ for t’meat,’ (p66)
(clip of this scene from the film)
The accent would in truth be much stronger than rendered in the book (as in the film clip linked above). After the film was premiered at the Doncaster Odeon in March, 1970, some thought it would need sub-titles for audiences south of Sheffield. Like my mother-in-law, whose recurring nightmare, each time she heard the local accents when she travelled up on the train to see us and passed through Barnsley, was that her grandchildren might grow up to speak like that. (They did and they didn’t. Other kids at school said they talked posh but when they went out into the wider world their Yorkshire accents were obvious.)
The book took me back to my own Yorkshire town: the streets of
terraced housing, the industrial grime, the local accent, but none of it
quite as grim and hopeless as here.
Barry Hines grew up near Barnsley at Hoyland Common. He wrote other
novels and also scripts for radio, film and television. Before becoming a
full-time writer he was an inspirational teacher. He was enormously
influential. He died in 2016 and funds are being raised for a bronze
statue to be
erected in Barnsley in his honour, showing young Billy Casper with his kestrel. The bronze has now been cast but funds are still
needed for the plinth.
The film Kes remains
legendary in the area and many of those who were extras as children are
still around. A fundraising screening at the Penistone Paramount a
couple of years ago was a sell out. The folk ensemble I play in put
on a fundraising ceilidh (barn dance) in Barnsley last year.
As Ian McMillan says in the introduction to the Penguin Decades edition I have, “Going back to the book with the film in my head is a revelation.” Indeed it is. I should have read it a long time ago. I’ll definitely read it again.
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.
The Dead Sister and The Used Up Characters (illustrations by D. Murray Smith)
Sabine Baring-Gould:
Yorkshire Oddities, Incidents and Strange Events (3*)
A Book of Ghosts (3*)
Curiosities of Olden Times (2*)
No, Sabine Baring-Gould was not one of the three wise men (with Baring-Frankincense and Baring-Myrrh) but was no less spiritual. And Yorkshire Oddities is not a dig at certain other bloggers despite what some might think; it was one of his books.
The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924) is often remembered as author of the strident hymn Onward Christian Soldiers, written as young curate at Horbury Bridge, Yorkshire, in the eighteen-sixties, later set to the equally strident tune, St. Gertrude, by Sir Arthur Sullivan. Baring-Gould also collected myths and legends, folk songs and sermons, and wrote enormous amounts of other stuff. In his day he was considered one of England’s best novelists. He found time to father fifteen children as well. I bet he wasn’t much help with the housework.
I was hoping for a free Kindle version of Yorkshire Oddities but the cheapest on the Kindle store was £2.29, so I downloaded his Curiosities of Olden Times and A Book of Ghosts instead. Well, I am from Yorkshire. Later, I did find a free copy of Yorkshire Oddities on that wonderful resource The Open Library. I have therefore spent several weeks with the writings of an out-of-fashion Victorian clergyman.
The ghost stories are readable and entertaining. They bring the occasional shiver from anthropological relics that go bump in the night and a very scary railway compartment. There is a dead finger that inhabits the narrator’s body bit by bit in the hope of taking it over, a dead sister who lives the life of a living one, and a caution for writers not to base characters on real people because it uses up their souls leaving lifeless shells that follow you around. Not too scary, in fact it might better be described as playful, but not bad if you want something free for Kindle and can put up with the odd moralistic rant. David Murray Smith’s illustrations in some editions capture the gentle mood quite well.
Curiosities of Olden Times and Yorkshire Oddities are collections of the weird, strange and eccentric, in both fact and fiction. Among the olden curiosities we find descriptions of gruesome medieval punishments and are warned not to sit in church porches between the hours of 11.00 p.m. and 01.00 a.m. on St. Mark’s Eve (24th April) unless we wish to see the ghosts of those due to die in the coming year passing into the church. However, much of Curiosities... is concerned with religious myths and legends discussed in a lengthy academic way, which can be rather tedious.
But it was Yorkshire Oddities that started this quest. In effect, it is a kind of social history of the county. It offers brief biographies of oddities such as Blind Jack of Knaresborough (1717-1810) who learnt to navigate the entire county alone on a horse and built around 180 miles of turnpike road, and Peter Barker, the blind joiner (1808-1873), who taught himself to make or mend just about anything. There are accounts of heinous murders including the drowning of an unwanted husband by his wife, her lover and an accomplice at Dawney Bridge near Easingwold in 1623 where the bodies of the executed murderers were hung in chains on what later became known as Gibbet Hill.
I was greatly amused by Baring-Gould’s rendition of the Yorkshire accent. He had plenty of practice because his wife, Grace Taylor, was an ordinary girl from Ripponden, but I doubt he would have spoken of her as he reports an unnamed butcher speaking of his wife:
Shoo’s made a rare good wife. But shoo’s her mawgrums a’ times. But what women ain’t got ‘em ? They’ve all on ‘em maggots i’ their heads or tempers. Tha sees, sir, when a bone were took out o’ t’ side o’ Adam, to mak a wife for ‘m, ‘t were hot weather, an’ a blue-bottle settled on t’ rib. When shoo’s i’ her tantrums ses I to her, ‘Ma dear,’ ses I, ‘I wish thy great-great-grand ancestress hed chanced ta be made i’ winter.’ [p224, fifth edition]
“mawgrums” is one of several words that appear in the book and hardly anywhere else. Another is the name of a hill near Heptonstall called “Tomtitiman”.
But to return to Yorkshire accents, Baring-Gould writes:
[The locals] speak two languages – English and Yorkshire … every village has its own peculiarity of intonation, its own specialities in words. A Horbury man could be distinguished from a man of Dewsbury, and a Thornhill man from one of Batley. The railways have blended these peculiar dialects into one, and taken off the old peculiar edge of provincialism, so that now it is only to be found in its most pronounced and perfect development among the aged. [p110-111, fifth edition]
This was written in 1874 but I always felt you could still detect local differences amongst my grandparents’ generation in my neck of the woods up to a century later. Depending which way you walked, you could hear West Riding tykes, Linkisheere yellowbellies and East Riding woldies all within a ten-mile radius.
I was therefore especially interested in the stories of three ‘Yorkshire Oddities’ from this area:
Nancy Nicholson “the termagant” lived at Drax, Newland and Asselby between 1785 and 1854. She nagged and complained so much as to ruin the lives of her husband, relatives and almost everyone she came into contact with.
Snowden Dunhill (c1766-1838) from Spaldington near Howden, was a notorious thief: the Rob Roy of the East Riding. He was eventually transported to Van Dieman’s Land where he dictated his life story which found its way back to Howden and was printed and published.
Jemmy Hirst of Rawcliffe (1738-1829) became so famous for his eccentricities that King George III invited him to visit his Court in London. He rode a bull and wore eccentric clothing including an outrageously broad hat, although anyone tempted to joke or play a trick at his expense invariably came off worst. He became wealthy dealing in agricultural produce and built himself an enormous wickerwork carriage drawn by Andalusian horses, causing a sensation at Pontefract and Doncaster races. A true Yorkshire oddity but somehow he sounds like Jimmy Savile.
I knew these villages as a child but had never heard of any of these characters until more recently when we all began to take more interest in local history: e.g. there is now a pub at Rawcliffe named after Jemmy Hirst. Among their stories are glimpses of lost landscapes and ways of life: the woods around Rawcliffe, otter hunting in the marshlands, the steam packet that sailed from Langrick (Long Drax) to York, and the emergence of the railways.
There is a lot to fascinate but much to skip over. As in Curiosities..., some chapters are overly long with too much verbatim source material. A good editor would not have been amiss.
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.
Another book from the list of those I should have read in my teens and early twenties, but didn’t because of the television we got when I was around twelve, which cut my reading from two or three books a week down to zero for the next ten years. I’ve never read the 1959 book, or seen either the 1963 film or the 1973 television series.
I could easily have become wrapped up in Billy Liar. He might have been me, or at least the rebellious subversive I wished I could be. You have to remember we were under the anarchic influences of The Who, Jethro Tull and Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Billy Liar would have been another
Billy lives in a dismal Yorkshire town, cares nothing for his job as a clerk, has only contempt for his parents and keeps three girls on the go at the same time. He tells outrageous fibs to suit his shifting impulses, acts out jokey sketches with a chum from work and escapes into fantasy where, among other things, he dreams of being a comedy writer. Almost me, except for the three girls on the go: wouldn’t chance have been a fine thing, even just one?
This was nineteen-fifties, working-class Britain, not quite on the cusp of the youth consumer boom, before the upsurge of opportunity, when people worked long hours and made do: such as with the old raincoat Billy uses as a dressing gown. There isn’t a television set or record player in sight, and an Italian-cut suit is the only mention of fashion. Remnants of this life were still around in the late nineteen-sixties when I left school for office work instead of university, especially in office work, but things were beginning to change. I had more choice and was able to get away. Billy couldn’t. I felt disappointed at the end when he bottles his chance and goes back to his home and job.
Keith Waterhouse is often described as one of Britain’s funniest writers. “I don’t mind dark satanic mills,” says Billy, “but by gum when it comes to dark satanic shops, dark satanic housing estates and dark satanic police stations –”, although Billy has no ending to this pre-prepared sentence (p90). He keeps one girl friend’s postcards from her trips to various places around the country because they are at least literate: “I felt mildly peculiar to be treasuring love-letters for their grammar,” he says (p19).
Some of Waterhouse’s descriptions remind me of his contemporary, Les Dawson:
It was quiet outside the Roxy. The evening was warm, but on the crisp side. The sodium lamps were beginning to flicker on and off, dismally. The old gaffers who manned the Alderman Burrows memorial bench at the abandoned train terminus were beginning to crane themselves stiffly to their feet and adjust their mufflers… (p142)
His mimetic rendering of Yorkshire accents is a joy:
Does ta think ah could climb down yon ashpit? Nay, tha’d break thi neck, Councillor! Aye, well ah’sll have to manage it, whether or no. Ah’m bahn down to t’ police station. What’s ta bahn down theer for, then? We’re pulling t’ bugger down. Tha’s not, is ta? Aye, we are that. All yon cottages anall … It’s all change. All change, nowadays. T’ old buildings is going. T’ old street is going. T’ trams, they’ve gone. Aye … It we’re all horse-drawn trams, and afore that we had to walk. It’s all change. T’ old mills is going. T’ old dialect, that’s going, … (p89)
I think I know where Monty Python got the idea from.
Many accounts of Billy Liar make more of his grand fantasies about the imaginary country of Ambrosia, but I found this merely a contextual element, one of several running through the book, a device now well-used by writers to milk for laughs.
Billy Liar is fun to read. It is one of the great nineteen-fifties novels which, along with others by Alan Sillitoe, Kingsley Amis, John Braine, Stan Barstow and others, paved the way for a new style of fiction. Waterhouse’s later novel, Billy Liar on the Moon, set in the nineteen-seventies, might be a good follow up.
Key to star ratings: 5* would read over and over again, 4* enjoyed it a lot and would
recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.
Growing up in a unicultural Yorkshire town (as they nearly all were in the nineteen-fifties), I’m not sure when I first realised there were variations in the way people spoke. I remember a boy climbing around on Filey Brigg with a hammer who said he was “Luckin’ fer fawssls”, and the pen-friends from Bingley, organized by one of the teachers at junior school, who, when we met them, sounded different and used strange words. To my childhood eyes, they even looked different. Goodness, even people from Eastrington and Howden spoke and sometimes looked different to people from across the river in Swinefleet or Rawcliffe: places within a five-mile radius.
Later, meeting different people and living around the country, accents fascinated me. I love hearing Buchan Scots and Asian Yorkshire, and used to have great fun winding-up my South London mother-in-law as to whether it was “rasp-berries” or “raazbriz”. She could give as good as she got.
So, when I read about the British-Irish Dialect Quiz on the New York Times web site, of all places, it was irresistible. I was bound to try it out and join thousands of other bloggers writing about it.
It asks 25 questions about how you pronounce various words, such as “scone” or “last”, and what words you use for certain things, such as for feeling cold or for the playground game in which one child chases the rest and the first person touched becomes the pursuer. It then gives you a map of Great Britain with your area of origin shaded in. If you want, you can continue with a further 71 questions to refine the results further.
It got me pretty much spot-on. Words like “breadcake” and “twagging”, and the way I say ‘a’ and ‘u’, give me away most.
The explanation of the results is interesting too. It mentions that in Britain and Ireland, unlike North America, local dialect sometimes used to change wildly within ten or twenty miles. Such village-by-village distinctions have now eroded, but the article suggests there is no evidence that regional differences are disappearing, even in the face of technological influences. I find that reassuring.
Conversations can be disturbing. They come back to trouble you decades later, especially when they involve some element of social awkwardness, which in my case is quite a lot of conversations.
Not long after taking a job at a university in Scotland over thirty years ago, I was invited to a regular end-of-term gathering at a professor’s house where everyone and everything exuded an air of intellectual wealth and entitlement. Most people there were Scottish, with that precise self-assurance an educated Scottish accent gives you. I felt out of place with my English ears and English voice. I tried to look comfortable in such surrounding.
The professor’s wife, like me, was English – in her case posh plummy English. She had left her brick of a Ph.D. thesis, with its absurdly long title, casually out for all to see on an out-of-the-way occasional table we had to pass, or wait beside, on our way to the loo.
It was only a matter of time before someone was going to bring up the issue of my accent: my “dulcet Yorkshire tones” as they put it. The professor’s wife showed unexpected interest.
“Oh! I’m from Yorkshire too,” she revealed. I was taken in by the hint of something in common.
“Where abouts in Yorkshire?” I asked, predictably.
“C-aaastleford”, she replied, the ‘a’ drawn out as long as the title of her Ph.D. thesis.
Well, you probably know that Yorkshire people have a tendency to blurt straight out what they are thinking, and I did.
“Y’don’t sound as if ya coom from Cassalfud,” I said, in my normal voice of the time.
She looked like she wanted to pick up the thesis and hit me with it.
I wish I could say I passed it off with poise and confidence, but I didn’t. I flinched at every flashback for the next few weeks. I still do, sometimes. It’s like that for some of us who score highly on Asperger tests. At least it means you remember things you otherwise wouldn’t.
I was only invited there the once.
The photograph epitomises how I imagine Castleford was in the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies, when, as in my own Yorkshire home town, the National Coal Board were still recruiting mining apprentices (“Look Ahead Lads!”). If you find the location now on StreetView, the building in the right foreground is the only thing that still remains, barely recognisable. The other buildings have all gone, including what looks like a Tetley’s pub in the row of buildings on the left (they still use the same sign). The cars date the scene to the early nineteen-seventies: from left to right I think they are (all British made) a Triumph Herald, an Austin or Morris 1100, a Ford Escort and possibly an Austin estate on the right. I can hardly begin to make a stab at the cars in the modern picture.
English is a strange thing, especially in its regional forms.
Yesterday, BBC Television News had a report about how insurance companies ramp up premiums so that customers who renew their policies year after year end up paying far more than they should. One poor chap who had kept his home insurance with the same insurer for twenty-one years received a renewal bill of £1,930, but after shopping around he got the same cover for £469.
They asked people at Doncaster Market what they thought about it, including two ladies behind a food stall:
“Well,” said one in comforting Yorkshire tones, “I think it's a disgrace, actually, because I think loyal customers should get tret better.”
“Tret better?” I wanted to rush straight to Doncaster Market, give her a big hug, and sit beside the stall listening to her all day. It’s what my mother would have said.
I’m no grammaticist, but I suppose it’s like met instead of meeted, sat instead of seated, or het instead of heated, as in I’m all het up.
At one time I would have said “tret better” too, but, sadly, I’ve had it educated out of me.
Returning to Yorkshire on the 15:56 First TransPennine Express service yesterday after a family day out in that wonderful city of Liverpool, a man came along the train with the refreshments trolley and asked: “Does anyone want some drinks?”
We wondered how one should answer this oddly-worded question. He seemed to be inviting each passenger to consume several drinks. It seems unlikely that anyone would want, say, a cup of tea, a soft drink and a bottle of water, unless they were very thirsty. And what about snacks? There were a load of those on his trolley too. Weren’t they for sale as well?
“No, but I would like one drink,” might have been an appropriate answer, or perhaps “No, but I would like a packet of crisps.”
There again, he might have been asking whether any one of us wanted to purchase several drinks to be shared amongst our travelling companions, in which case it was extremely perceptive of him to spot that we were travelling as a group.
What should he have asked to take account of all these eventualities?
“Would anyone like any drinks?” is one very minor adjustment that might have worked, although that would exclude snacks. Perhaps TransPennine should therefore radically overhaul their refreshment trolley operative training so that they ask, simply “Refreshments?”
Why does it bother me?
Could it be in any way related to the fact that we were travelling on Diesel Multiple Unit set 185113 and that I’ve always made a mental note of such things?
“You’ll make a lot of money as a Chartered Accountant” was the only thing of substance the headmaster said at the end of grammar school. I could guess what he was really thinking. “Not university calibre.” “Not even college.” Stuck-up southern git!
It was strange that someone so southern had chosen to become a headmaster in such a working-class northern town. He spoke with such judgemental self-assurance you were convinced his pronunciation must be correct and yours miserably deficient: “raarzbriz” instead of “rasp-berries”, “swimming baarthes” rather than “swimmin’ baths”, “campany derrectorre” not “kumpany dye-recter”. It was not universally welcomed.
“You’ve written here that your faarther is a campany derrectorre. What sort of campany derrectorre?”
“He’s got a shop – Millwoods”
“Really? I thought Millwoods was owned by Susan Mellordew’s faarther.”
He appeared not to believe me. Oh to have that conversation again knowing what I know now.
“Perhaps the Mellordews would like others to think that,” I should have said.
Grammar schools were set up to get people into university, or at least teacher training college. Everyone else was a failure to be eased into the grubby world of banking, accountancy or other forms of servility, unless you were a girl, in which case they didn’t really care either way because you would be married with kids in a few years’ time. I didn’t care either. I was quite taken by the idea of making a lot of money, especially as all six of my university choices had given me straight rejections.
At least the local accountants wanted me. They phoned my dad to change my mind about going off to a job in Leeds. “He’ll get just as good experience here,” they told him, but he decided not to pass the message on, as if they wanted me but he didn’t.
I had tried York first. The area training coordinator at The Red House sent me round to Peat, Marwick and Mitchell, one of the biggest and most powerful firms in the country (as KPMG they still are), to be interviewed by another stuck-up posh git whose laconic disinterest oozed the impression that he had indeed made a great deal of money. He would have got on just fine with my headmaster. Not for the last time did I feel I might have done better had I been to Bootham’s or Queen Ethelburga’s.* Real chip-on-the-shoulder stuff!
The Leeds firm were more down to earth. Their offices were in what had once been a cloth warehouse with large airy windows; less depressing than the pokey accommodation of the other firms. A simple half-hour chat with one of the partners, during which I managed to avoid showing too much stupidity, and the job was mine: five years as an articled clerk. I started on the 9th September, 1968; exactly fifty years ago today.
The thing is though, in those days, firms of accountants were desperate for articled clerks. At face value it was attractive: a form of indentured apprenticeship under which a qualified accountant undertakes to inculcate an articled clerk into the principles and practices of the profession. In reality it was cheap labour. They sold it to school leavers through discreet ads in the situations vacant columns, next to those for hair restorers and varicose veins. “Leaving school? Why not become a Chartered Accountant?” It would not have looked out of place if they had added: “No one need know; confidentiality guaranteed.”
Ads were discreet because accountants were not allowed to tout for business, although as things began to change, the bigger firms pushed the boundaries with larger, more flamboyant offerings designed by expensive agencies. One of the most memorable went: “Some think Wart Prouserhice is just as good as Horst Whiterpart, but we know it’s best at Price Waterhouse.”
Today, accountancy training places are so sought after they won’t even look at you unless you have at least a 2:1 and an impressive portfolio of extra-curricular leadership activities – an internship in the House of Commons; volunteering with Ebola victims in Africa; representing Great Britain in the Winter Olympics; that kind of thing. You might then get invited to a day of written tests and observed activities, and if successful to a nerve-racking interview panel. Those who went to Bootham’s or Queen Ethelburga’s might then be offered a place. Back in the nineteen-sixties, five ‘O’ levels and you were in.
Not so many years beforehand, articled clerks had been expected to pay a premium for the privilege of the job. At least by 1968 you got a salary, if that’s what you could call it. Mine was £360 per annum.
Really? Well yes. Here are my first two pay slips. The first covers from the 9th to the 30th September, 1968, i.e. twenty-two thirtieths of a month. So 22/30 x 360/12 equals a straight £22, with a deduction of £3 6s 8d for National Insurance, leaving £18 13s 4d for my first three weeks’ pay. My first full month’s take-home pay was £26 13s 4d. I didn’t have to pay tax because I only started work in September, but I did after April when I got a £2 per month rise. It doesn’t look any better even when adjusted for inflation – £26 13s 4d in 1968 is the equivalent of around £400 today, less than half the minimum wage for an eighteen year-old.
I never did become a Chartered Accountant. I stuck it for a few years, failed a few exams, and then escaped to university. Would I have fared better in my parochial home town of canners, carriers, barbers, farmers, shippers and shopkeepers? I might have fitted in – like a pile of coke outside the gas works – but maybe not. Thirty years later, one lad from my class at school who did go to work with the local firm ended up as one of the senior partners in charge of the whole outfit. He did make a lot of money.
Never use a swear word when you don’t know what it means
“That’s wrong” said Geoffrey Bullard with his thick ape-neck and stare too menacing to return. He ran his fat finger across the words and stabbed the one that offended him: “It should be M Dunham is crap”. He thought everyone else was stupid.
It was too risky to explain it said exactly what I meant. You talk about football teams in the plural: “Rawcliffe United are good this year.” “Howden Town are terrible.” It goes in a song:
M Dunham are crap,
M Dunham are crap,
Ee aye addio,
M Dunham are crap.
Action from a league match between M.Dunham and T.Dunham circa 1960
(click to play digitised cine film)
It was my dad who first pretended we were teams
competing against each other in a league. He was B Dunham, I was T
Dunham, my brother Martin was M Dunham, and M Dunham were crap. I wrote
it down in heavy red wax crayon on the back of the asbestos garage.
I didn’t realise that wax crayon on asbestos panelling is like permanent marker: waterproof, indelible, not-fade-away. So there it was, and there it must have stayed for over fifty years, decades after we had moved. Imagine the disapproving faces of those who later gazed upon it and pitied the poorly educated child responsible for such semi-literate graffiti, and wondered who M Dunham was and why was he crap.
So, Geoffrey Bullard remained in ignorance of our imaginary football teams, and when he wasn’t round at our house bullying me, I could play imaginary football games in the back garden. I had a full league of teams and fixtures, and played out each match on my own on the pitch of dried mud we optimistically called “the back grass”. This differed from “the front grass” only by being slightly bigger and by not actually having any grass, except that is for a few odd blades that struggled out of the earth before being unceremoniously stamped back in again by the boots of make-believe teams of footballers.
I ran up and down with a ball, puffing and panting between one goal defined by chalk marks on the wall of the house and the other by the clothes posts near the back hedge, while providing the roars and boos of the crowd, and an excitable commentary. In my head they were all there: two complete teams of players, spectators, a commentator, the referee, linesmen, and the trainer with his ‘magic sponge’.
I drew up team sheets, match day programmes, fixture lists and league tables. I was everyone and did everything. These days, kids do the same with electronic games with names such as ‘Top European Football Manager III’, but my fantasy was played in the back garden, much healthier for all that running around outside in the fresh air, with more highly developed transferrable skills for all the manual record keeping, and no less unsociable than fantasy football on games consoles.
T Dunham was of course the best team by far. They always won and hardly ever conceded a goal. They usually beat M Dunham (who really were crap) by several goals to nil, and “The” B Dunham by a similar margin (my dad had once been to watch “The” Arsenal while on holiday in London). It was not long before T Dunham were promoted out of the league containing the other Dunham teams into the local district league, where they played against proper teams such as the dockers and the railwaymen, and teams from pubs and the local villages. I picked my players for each match, and posted the team sheet on the wall inside our team hut, in other words the yellow shed. The team was always set out in traditional 2-3-5 formation, with a goalkeeper, two full backs, three half-backs and five forwards. In those days we always had a centre forward, inside forwards and wingers; no one had yet heard of modern formations involving sweepers, overlapping midfielders and offensive 4-3-3 game plans.
One day, Geoffrey Bullard noticed a team sheet on the wall of the shed. “What’s that?” he asked, looking carefully. My team was laid out for all to see, ready for the West Riding Cup Final between T Dunham and Norton Woodseats. The captain, ‘Dunham’, in other words me, was on the left wing, the position I played the only time I was ever selected for my school. Some of the other imaginary players were also names from school. ‘Gelder’ was inside-left, ‘Longthwaite’ was centre-forward, and, as I realised to my consternation about the same time as he spotted it, ‘Bullard’ was centre-half.
“Why am I only at centre-half?” he demanded to know.
I cringed inwardly while he thought about it. He considered himself one of the best footballers in the school, and naturally assumed his rightful role was top goal scorer in the forward line.
“Actually,” he then said weighing it up, “I would make quite a good centre-half,” and proceeded to let me off the hook by showing no further interest.
But the wax crayon was still there on the garage, and in due course my mother spotted it.
“It won’t come off,” she sounded annoyed, “and anyway, what does it mean?”
It dawned on me that I didn’t really know what ‘crap’ meant either. I’d heard people say it, and thought it a satisfyingly grown up word to use. It just seemed to mean someone or something wasn’t very good. You could snarl it in real disgust, curling your upper lip, emphasising the ‘r’ and spitting out the final ‘p’. “C-RAP!” I had been saying it as much as I could.
“What’s this word, ‘crap’?” my dad asked. My mother had obviously been talking to him.
It was my dad’s sister, Aunty Dorothy, a hospital nurse, who gently enlightened us as to what it meant.
“Was it you who wrote in wax crayon on the back of the garage?” she took me aside and asked in her quiet way. “You wrote, ‘M Dunham are crap’, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
“Well you do know what it means, don’t you?”
I shook my head.
“It’s very very rude,” she said looking concerned., “It means babba.” *
I wanted to giggle, but tried my best to look horrified and apologetic.
“It’s not a word we should be using at all,” she warned sternly. “And in any case,” she continued, “it’s wrong to say that. It should be M Dunham is crap.”
* It seems that use of the word ‘babba’ to mean poo is not as universal as I once thought. An internet search reveals very few examples. Similarly, ‘trump’ meaning an emission of wind (I resist an easy American political quip here) also seems mainly to be a northern expression. Both were common in the part of Yorkshire where I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. The word ‘crap’, on the other hand, was beyond vulgarity, and never ever heard. It goes to show how much things have changed.
This is a revised and rewritten version of a piece first posted on 1st September, 2014
The BBC Radio Four announcer said this afternoon that in half an hour there would be a programme about the 2017 City of Culture.
“I know where he means” I thought, but then he mystified me by saying it was about the Ezzall area of the city. It took me a moment to realise he meant ‘essle. There is a difference. In trying to mimic the local accent, he had over-emphasised the initial E.
Like the friend I had when I worked in Scotland. No matter how hard she tried, no matter how many times I demonstrated, she could never say ‘ull without it sounding wrong. The initial U was too strong, almost beginning with a glottal stop. The voice-onset came too soon. It’s a soft gentle U after the dropped H, not a hard one.
It seems to my ears that people not from the region cannot say ‘ull or ‘essle properly, or for that matter ‘owden, ‘edon, ‘altemprice or ‘umber. Please, unless you grew up in East Yorkshire or thereabouts, don’t try. Just put the H in.
In the early nineteen-sixties, I remember going along to Boothferry Bridge to watch The Milk Race pass by – a national cycling event also known as the Tour of Britain, sponsored by the now defunct Milk Marketing Board. Some blokes on racing bikes flashed past amidst the everyday traffic and it was all over in less than a minute. It wasn’t worth the bother. Cycling must be the sport with the biggest disconnect between doing (riding a bike is fun) and watching (tedious). I’ve never been to a cycling event since.
So it’s irritating to find the Tour de Yorkshire imposed on us this weekend, with roads closed most of the day bringing maximum disruption to our activities, just to see people on bicyles for a couple of minutes. I’m keeping well away.
And they call it the / le “Tour de Yorkshire”. What pretentious twaddle! Et le moins dit à propos de la côte de Silsden et de la côte de Wigtwizzle, mieux c'est.*
Surely, if it’s in Yorkshire, shouldn’t it be called t’baiyk race roun’ t ‘roo-ads?
* The less said about “côte de Silsden” and “côte de
Wigtwizzle” the better.
No matter that he is going to be President of the United States. Across the North of England, including in our family, the word trump will remain an acceptable, almost polite substitute for the four letter word beginning with ‘f’ and ending with ‘t’ which to my mind is so coarse and common I cannot even bring myself to write it.
“Poo! Who’s trumped?” my mother would say on walking into the room where my brother and I were playing. We could say that too, but if either of us had used the f-synonym we would have had our faces slapped as hard as if we had used that other f-word – not that we had ever heard either in those innocent times.
I was around eleven when I first heard the more common term for trumping. It came from an adult. We were on holiday near Southampton and had driven to London airport (not yet called Heathrow) to wave my aunt and cousins off to Aden. We waited inside a high glass-walled enclosure for their BOAC Britannia to take to the air, sheltered from the roar of the engines but not from the acrid smell of the fuel. It was close and stuffy, and the kerosene hung around us mixing with the pong from the clothes of a family friend (Uncle Jimmy) who had been sick on the train travelling down with my aunt. To make matters worse my brother periodically kept discharging his own contribution into the atmosphere. We used to eat meat in those days.
I was mortified when another aero-watcher, a middle aged man, turned and forcefully told me to stop farting. I had no idea what he meant. The embarrassment stemmed not from what I had been falsely accused of but from the fact that a complete stranger had spoken to me.
On another early nineteen-sixties holiday we drove to Slapton, Devon, in a hired Hillman Minx from Glews Garage. It was a long journey from Yorkshire in those pre-motorway days, and as dusk fell we were still miles from our lodgings. My brother and I lay on the back seat comatose with headaches, and trumping.
“Good God!” We knew we were in trouble because my mother rarely blasphemed, but the northern words that followed were entirely innocuous.
“It smells as if somebody’s babbaed themselves.”
“Can we have a drink of water?”
“No. You’ll be widdling all the way. You’ll have pickled yerselves before we get there.”
“I could do with a jimmy riddle,” said my dad from the driving seat.
Like most people from the South, my wife had never come across this usage of the word trump, but she soon picked it up, as of course have our children. It seems more humorous than offensive.
I am convinced it used to appear in a dictionary we had at Junior School. We used to look it up and giggle. “Trump”, it read, “a small explosion between the legs.” Perhaps I am mistaken because I cannot find it anywhere now. I am told, however, that the Oxford English has the definition: “to give forth a trumpet-like sound; spec. to break wind audibly (slang or vulgar).”
But as for “President Trump”, to me it sounds more of a command or insult than a title of high status. Will the policies that emerge during his term of office be known as Trumpism, or will they just be plain trumpery?
“A canna mind fit tae dee,” (I can’t remember what to do) Iona had said, puzzling over some detail of the voluntary work we were doing. Attracted by her soft Banffshire accent, I dared suggest we might go see a film together, and we became friends.
Iona was studying theology with a view to becoming a Church of Scotland Minister. I tried to impress her by casually mentioning I had been brought up in the Church of England but was instantly written off as “just a jumped-down Catholic”. I had to creep off to the library to find out what she meant (there being no Google in those days). It was a reference to Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII’s secession of the English Church from Rome in 1534. Jumped-down Catholic indeed!
If that seems dismissive, you should have heard what she had to say about the Roman Catholic Church and its attitude towards women’s ordination.
“Fit wye dae they insist ye hiv tae hae a penis tae be a Minister, and then nae allow ye tae use it? Except for peeing that is, and they wadnae een allow ye that if there wasna nae alternative.” She said this with a kind of forceful but gentle determination that told you she was going to be a brilliant Church of Scotland Minister.
One Sunday, Iona came with me on a visit home. She and my dad talked non-stop about Scottish history, Aberdeen, and all kinds of other things. My dad was a regular churchgoer, and as Iona had not been to Church that day she decided to go along with him to the evening service. I went too so as not to miss anything. So did my dad’s sister Dorothy and her husband Fred. They wondered why I was going to Church with the young lady I had brought home. They did not want to miss anything either.
It was a long time since I had been to a regular service at the Parish Church. In those days it was always well-attended. More recently, I had seen decent congregations at weddings, Christenings and funerals. But this evening when we arrived, we were the only five there. The vast building looked gloomy and uncared for.
Dorothy and Fred took one pew, and my dad, Iona and myself sat immediately behind. We waited for things to begin. I won’t say “waited patiently” because Fred never waited patiently for anything. He rarely sat still. He did everything at a frantic pace. Even so, I was still surprised when he jumped up, disappeared through a side door and re-emerged with a stepladder. Ignoring Dorothy’s exasperated protests, he rushed into the most sacred, chancel part of the church, set up the stepladder, moved the golden cross and candlestick holders out of the way, and climbed up and stood on the altar. Dorothy sighed and turned to Iona with her usual resigned apology: “My husband’s hyperactive.”
Fred then lifted his arms and reached up to the heavens. I thought for a moment he must have been overcome by revelations of everlasting splendour until he began to change the light bulbs hanging from above. Only one bulb was out but he explained it was good maintenance practice to replace them all at the same time. Not even God Himself would dare disagree with a qualified electrical engineer and safety consultant.
I have to admit to being somewhat relieved to realise that that the only brilliance shining down from upon high that bothered him was the number of lumens illuminating the proceedings. I had wondered for a moment whether he might have been engaged in some newly-instigated aspect of worship, in which we now all went up in turn to stand on the altar to declare ourselves, only metaphorically I hoped, sacrificial lambs. I felt sure that when it was my turn I would be bound to get it all wrong and make a fool of myself in front of everyone. It is not easy to let go of your inhibitions in public.
Fred had just put the stepladder away when two further members of the congregation joined us. The first, a serious, shiny-faced man with a brylcreemed comb-over, checked jacket and non-matching striped tie, bid a curt “Good Evening”, went into the pew behind us, knelt down, closed his eyes tightly and began to pray. Then came an old lady dressed up in black hat, gloves and overcoat, with silver brooch and hat pin. She shuffled slowly up the aisle on a walking stick. Dorothy addressed her as Mrs. Fisher and pointed to the seat beside her. She sat down and observed loudly what a wonderfully large turn out we had this evening. Evidently some weeks it was just my dad and Mrs. Fisher.
The Minister entered through the transept from the front and began to light the candles. Fred put his hand to the side of his mouth and turned to Iona conspiratorially.
“This bloke’s a complete idiot,” he whispered none too quietly, disturbing the shiny-faced man from his communion with God.
The Minister, the Reverend Mundy, was a Church Army Evangelist who helped in the Parish by taking the Sunday evening service once a month. He was short, bald and round, but held himself stiffly upright in his surplice, like a little white budgerigar, in an effort to look more imposing than he actually did. Perhaps he imagined he was leading the grand and moving ceremony of Choral Evensong, but this was not Choral Evensong, it was Evening Prayer. There was no choir. In fact, there was no organist either: only the Minister and the seven members of the Congregation. We had to sing the hymns and psalms unaccompanied.
It was a total shambles. Our feeble voices evaporated self-consciously into the roof beams. As we mumbled our way through ‘The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended’ all in different keys, Mrs. Fisher rustled ineffectually through her hymn book trying to find the right page. She might have managed better if she had taken off her gloves. By the time Dorothy had helped her find the page, the hymn Thou gavest, Lord, had ended, and the rustling began all over again as Mrs. Fisher tried to find the Order of Service in her prayer book.
The next hymn was even worse. It was one of those excessively cheerful, suspiciously Methodist hymns, known only to the Reverend and the shiny-faced man. They sang to completely different tunes, each trying to drown out the other as if to ensure God heard them first. Shiny-face was easily the loudest, but in any formal competition I would have called for him to be disqualified on the ground that his checked jacket and striped tie gave unfair advantage.
The psalms, prayers, responses, confession, absolution, creed, canticles and other spoken words of Evening Prayer are set out in the Book of Common Prayer. They go on forever, and the longer they go on, the more you could be forgiven for allowing your mind to wander. Fred’s mind clearly started to wander early on, but was snapped back into focus by the short prayer: “Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord;”prompting him to examine the ceiling for further areas of darkness in need of lightening. He even stood up to survey the rear of the church, but the Reverend Mundy droned on without noticing.
I should have anticipated what happened next and prevented it. I failed to spot that my dad had been dying to tell Mundy that Iona was going to be a Church of Scotland Minister. The opportunity came as Mundy waited to shake our hands after the service. It was never going to work out well.
Mundy brightened up like one of Fred’s new bulbs and began to emit a long, one-sided homily about recognising one’s calling, changes to the liturgy and who should be the new Archbishop of Canterbury. Meanwhile, Fred re-appeared with a heavy wooden extendable ladder and began changing light bulbs high up the walls. Despite being a safety consultant, he did not look very safe to me. He rushed from bulb to bulb swinging the ends of his ladder so lethally he nearly knocked over the still-burning candles and set fire to the altar cloth.
And then, you knew it was coming, the topic Mundy had been wanting to talk about all along. Ingenuousness finally got the better of discretion and he homed in on the incendiary subject of women’s ordination. Iona listened solemnly as he declared it would be a mistake to admit women into the clergy, not, he forcibly emphasised, that he was personally against the idea, but because there would be a schism of two thousand Ministers leaving the Church, and he would not want that to happen. In any case, he continued, he thought a lot of women who wanted to be priests had been born with the wrong anatomy. He thought women should look like women.
Just when it seemed inevitable that Mundy would be obliterated by the “so ye hiv tae hae a penis” put down, the end of Uncle Fred’s ladder whizzed past, missing the side of his head by inches. It was like a portent of Divine Providence. Had he not just told us in one of the readings “... every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire”?
“He’s jist a bletherin’ fool,” Iona said afterwards echoing Uncle Fred. “He disna ken fit he’s spikkin’ aboot.”
***
In an odd sort of way, Iona’s speech reminded me of my grandparents’ Yorkshire dialect. You wondered about their common Anglo-Saxon roots. Even some of the words were the same. They talked about “bairns” and “be-asts” and t’ “watter”, and were amused when my brother had birthday cards “fra lasses”. They were words you wanted to use yourself because they felt like they meant; not clinical, educated English words that “slid so smooth from your throat you knew they could never say anything that was worth the saying at all.” (Lewis Grassic Gibbon: Sunset Song, 1932). For more about Buchan Doric as it is usually called, its origins and how it sounds, and to attempt to spik lik a teuchtar, you can do little better than to look on Google books at (or buy): Doric: The Dialect of North-East Scotland by J. Derrick McClure (2002). I especially like Chapter 4: Examples of Recorded Speech.
Not long after my parents married in 1946, my maternal grandfather took my father to one side and, on account of the fact that his new son-in-law travelled in ladies underwear (so to speak) rather than having some more practical and manly occupation, told him, “Sither, th’d better ’ave these,” and gave him a set of tools. No doubt the items he passed on were surplus to his needs having acquired and inherited a considerable collection over his forty-five years.
Those tools, both my father’s and my grandfather’s, became very familiar
to me. My grandfather’s tools remained in his garden shed-cum-workshop, and after he had
died at what was even then an abysmally young age, I would sneak in to
‘play’ with his wood brace and drill bits, his awls and gimlets, his
planes, chisels, hammers and mallets, and other tools I couldn’t
identify, all logically arranged on purpose made hooks, racks and
shelves. Some may have been handed down from his own grandfather, who had worked with steam engines on barges in the 1870s. Both would have been as appalled by my lack of respect for them
as by my father’s mistreatment of the items he had been given.
My
grandfather’s immaculate collection of tools eventually went to one of
my uncles to be misused by his children, but my father’s neglected
assortment are among the jumble of tools I now have to sort out, having
over the years, just like my grandfather, bought, acquired and
inherited my own surplus.
Now rusty and unloved, so many of them bring back lost associations. There are the bicycle spanners and tyre levers I watched my father use to adjust saddles, remove wheels and mend punctures (see Dad's Thursday Helper). There are thicker spanners and tyre levers from the toolkits of long-ago scrapped motor vehicles – his firm’s delivery vans – some marked ‘Bedford’, another labelled ‘Austin’, all in defunct British Standard Whitworth sizes.
There are broken files and sets of hard-handled pliers now so stiff it takes stronger hands than mine to pull them open. They carry the trademark of Elliott Lucas of Cannock which once made around half of all the pliers and pincers sold in the United Kingdom.
A group of wooden-handled, triangular scrapers reminds me of the time my father acquired a blowlamp and painstakingly scraped layers of old paint off the skirting board in the back room. Those old scissors are the ones my mother used for dead-heading the flowers in the garden.
There is a thick metal punch, its top battered down from when I used it to chip out a groove in the concrete under the door of the yellow shed I had taken over, to form a base for a ridge of cement to act as a barrier to the rainwater that pooled in, although it never worked. That was in 1965 – I know because I remember scoring the date in the top of the cement, it being my birthday.
Among the screwdrivers with bent or rounded blades is one with its wooden handle splintered down to half its original size through being bashed with a hammer when it served as a substitute cold chisel. Other screwdrivers were misused as makeshift levers and scrapers. One of them, the most damaged and least usable of them all, was left by a mechanic under the bonnet of one of my first cars after it had been in for repair. My father and I weren’t the only serial tool-abusers in town.
For the last thirty years or so, my father’s tools lived in an blue metal tool box. The bottom is now rusted through despite the amount of oil and grease covering everything inside, soaking into the wooden handles and attracting a filthy film of old paint, grease, grit and bits of insects. I had to wipe them clean before I could begin to sort them.
In addition there are my own tools, once new but now seemingly as old as my father’s. There are tools for painting and wallpapering, woodworking, home plumbing and electrical work, the legacy of years as a home owner. There are sets of AF and Metric spanners, feeler gauges, a spark-plug spanner, a brake spanner and other specialist implements from the days I serviced my own old bangers. There is a set of miniature silver tools that once came in a pouch designed to be carried in a car glove-box, which were always useless, consisting of an adjustable spanner that did not grip, a hinged set of spanners that were all the same size, and a handle with interchangeable screwdriver blades which somehow failed to fit any screw I ever wanted to turn.
And now – the event that forces me to sort them all out after all this time – I have acquired yet more tools, this time from my mother-in-law, some old and worn, others as good as new, little used and much better than mine.
I am afraid that most of the tools photographed, together with the rusty blue toolbox, are destined for the metal recycling skip, having checked ebay and found them to be effectively valueless.
Two particularly satisfying things I will keep.
“That’s my daddy’s ruler,” my wife said when we unearthed this thirty-six inch Rabone boxwood 1375 folding ruler in my mother-in-law’s garage. These beautiful devices were used widely before the invention of the ubiquitous retractable tape measure. Its four sections can be folded down to a single nine-inch length, or opened out to an arrow-straight yard long rule. There seem to be plenty still left around, probably because they are much too satisfying to throw away.
“That’s my daddy’s oil can,” is what I could have said when we found it in the cardboard box that came from my father’s garage nearly ten years ago. He used to fill it with used engine oil and like the spanners mentioned above, it may originally have been from an ancient motor vehicle tool kit. This type of oil can predated the present day tins with built-in plastic spouts. Unfortunately, because of damage, it would now only serve its original function with a sawn-off shortened spout, so I’ve cleaned it out with a hot solution of washing powder to keep as an object of interest. I recently saw a similar one in a Cotswolds antique shop for £100.
Good. That’s the tools sorted. Now for my accumulation of nails, screws, washers, brackets, hinges, piping, wiring, fuses, electric plugs, wall plugs, bath plugs, coat hooks, cup hooks, curtain hooks, door handles, fork ’andles and other bits and pieces. On second thoughts, it can wait a few more years. If I leave it long enough it will be someone else’s problem. Either that or open my own branch of Screwfix.
Dad turns to the microphone on the mantlepiece, clears his throat and adopts a suitable air of gravitas.
“I will now read some of my favourite poems,” he says in his most dignified voice. The sound of muted giggling emanates from me and my brother sitting on the floor next to the tape recorder. “Ernest Dowson’s Vitae Summa Brevis,” he announces.
The noises in the background become audible whispers.
“What’s he on about?”
“He says Ernest Dowson had some Ryvita for his breakfast.” More snorting and sniggering. Dad continues.
“They are not long, ...”
“What aren’t? Is our Sooty’s tail not long?”
“... the weeping and the laughter, Love and desire and hate:”
The disruption intensifies as my mother bangs on the window and shouts something muffled from the yard outside. Dad struggles to keep going.
“I think they have no portion in us ...”
My mother enters the room and interrupts loudly.
“When I tell you your dinner’s ready, it’s ready, and you come straight away.”
The recording ends.
Would Dowson’s melancholy poetry and vivid phrases ever have emerged from out of his misty dream had he married and had such an unsupportive, philistine family?
Christmas 1962 – an unbelievable fifty-two years ago – was when my dad came into some money and bought a reel-to-reel tape recorder. It was really for the whole family, but as I was the only one who knew how it worked it was effectively mine, my parents being too old to understand such modern technology and my brother too young to be trusted with it. The next door neighbour was appalled at the idea of such an extravagant present for a twelve year old. Her eyebrows must have shot even further through the ceiling a month or so later when the new car arrived. As I said, my dad had inherited a useful sum of money.
The Philips EL 3541, as the YouTube video shows, was beautifully designed and built, part of the last triumphant surge of valve-based electronics before the transistor revolution. In contrasting greys and white, preceding the stark ubiquity of brushed aluminium, the case and controls had pleasantly curved profiles. The main buttons were smooth and soft, but clunked and clicked with a satisfyingly businesslike sound. The whole thing felt substantial and robust, with a reassuringly heavy-duty carrying strap. It looked a bit like a wide, trustworthy face with large eyes and beautiful white teeth.
People are beginning to re-discover that using and owning physical objects like tape machines and vinyl records can have value, a sensory quality you don’t get with digital downloads. Why did we ever throw these things away?
This particular model was a four track machine, which means it could make four separate recordings on each reel of tape, two in each direction. The machine is shown with five inch reels (13cm) which typically held nine hundred feet (270m) of tape, but it could accommodate up to seven inch reels (18cm) holding eighteen hundred feet (540m). Tapes ran at a speed of three and three quarter inches per second (9.5 cm/sec)* which means that a five inch tape ran for around forty-five minutes and a seven inch tape around ninety minutes. So using four tracks, you could record for up to three hours on a five inch tape, and six hours on a seven inch tape, although you did have to turn over and re-thread tapes manually at the end of each track. A seven inch tape could therefore hold the equivalent of eight long playing (LP) records or albums, provided they weren’t excessively long, which they weren’t before the late nineteen-sixties.
Just to complicate things a little more, these numbers are for ‘long play’ tapes. You could also get ‘double play’ (2,400 feet on a 7 inch reel) and ‘triple play’ (3,600 feet on a 7 inch reel) but these were thinner and prone to breaking or stretching, so I avoided them. There were also thicker ‘standard play’ tapes, and five and three quarter inch reels as well, but the boxes always showed the tape length so it wasn’t as confusing as it sounds. Most of my tapes were Long Play five or seven inch reels. Believe it or not, I still have them, some from 1962 and 1963.
Some of the earliest recordings picked up a high pitched whistle
through the microphone. Later I used to remove the backs from the
television and record player to connect wires to the loudspeaker
terminals. It got rid of the whistle but it could so easily have got rid
of me as well.
The earliest recording I have is still on the five inch tape that came with the machine, from the Light Programme at four o’clock on the 30th December, 1962, ‘Pick of the 1962 Pops’ – “David Jacobs plays some of the hit records from the past twelve months**.” It starts off with Frankie Vaughan’s ‘Tower of Strength’, which had been number one in December, 1961, and then runs through a further twenty-three top three singles of 1962, ending with Elvis Presley’s ‘Return to Sender’. There are plenty of solo singers but not a British pop group among them. It was only a month or two before the end of that year that I’d first heard of the Beatles when ‘Love Me Do’ came on 208 Radio Luxembourg late one night on my transistor radio underneath the bedclothes.
I recorded the corresponding shows for 1963, 1964 and 1965, and for 1966 to 1969 the ‘Top of the Pops’ year end shows from television (audio only)**. This was a period when the old guard of solo singers such as Cliff Richard, Elvis Presley and Frank Ifield appeared less and less in the charts, displaced by emerging new groups like Jerry and the Pacemakers, The Searchers and of course The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. In 1964 the top spot was almost entirely British, Roy Orbison being the only exception.
I owned only two actual LP records myself, ‘The Hits of the Animals’ (an export version bought in Belgium) and Georgie Fame’s ‘Sweet Things’, but built up a considerable collection of recordings by exchange borrowing with friends. It included Donovan, Manfred Mann, Sandie Shaw, Jim Reeves, and the early Beatles and Rolling Stones LPs, although I later erased most of them by over-recording with music borrowed from the magnificent collection at Leeds Public Library.
I began to develop an interest in classical music. A friend’s elder brother had gone off to university leaving his record collection unattended in their front room. Attracted first by the sumptuous excitement of George Gershwin’s ‘An American in Paris’ and ‘Rhapsody in Blue’, I sampled the rest of the collection, such as the Beethoven symphonies and Mozart’s ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’. They all went on my tapes. I don’t think my friend’s brother ever knew. Thanks Mike!
On one tape there are early recordings of broadcast comedy shows: the
Christmas ‘I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again’ from 1970; the first four
programmes ever of ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue’ from 1972** which were
for many years lost to the B.B.C and possibly still are; and audio
recordings of early ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’ from television. By
then I was living in a shared house in Leeds where one of our favourite
diversions was transcribing the Python scripts and acting them out.
Like snowy pictures on old videotape, the sound quality has not always lasted well. Perhaps with music this doesn’t really matter as you can always replace it, digitally re-mastered with a clarity that far exceeds the original, and usually in stereo rather than the earlier mono.
But you cannot replace the evocative social and family moments that
were captured. Despite surviving in only thin and feeble form, they are
irreplaceable beyond value.
At a friend’s house a group of us believed ourselves worthy rivals to
the likes of comedians John Cleese, Tim Brooke Taylor and Bill Oddie.
We wrote and recorded our own biblically themed comedy, ‘The Old
Testacles’, most of it unrepeatable because of scurrilous allusions
to countless teachers and pupils then at school, and of course the
relentless uninhibited adolescent filth.
But the family moments remain the most poignant, like my grandma feeding my baby cousin on her knee, speaking in a village accent fashioned and formed before the First War:
“Shout o’Sooty. You shout. What does Sooty say? ’Ere y’are. He du’n’t say ’ere y’are. Who’s go’r all t’butter? Yer gre-ased up aren’t yer? Oh heck! Eat it up nice. Yes you eat that up. Yer can’t come up, me shirt buttons‘ll be runnin’ all ove’ we-re n’t the’? Deary me to dae!”
Most precious of all are my dad’s unselfconscious performances. Because his grandad had been a sea captain, he claimed an inherited, natural aptitude in the delivery and interpretation of sea shanties. He announces the well-known windlass and capstan shanty, ‘Bound for the Rio Grande’, and begins to sing:
“I’ll sing you a song of the fish of the sea...” followed by a hesitant pause, followed by complete breakdown into helpless uncontrollable laughter.
I am on these tapes too, embarrassing in my unbroken voice and long gone local accent, as my dad begins another poem:
“Miss J. Hunter Dunn. Miss J. Hunter Dunn. Furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun...”
As before, my brother and I whisper to each other in the background.
“It’s about Miss J. Hunter’s bum.”
Again we all collapse into irrepressible laughter and my dad is unable to continue further.
* In comparison, cassette tapes, which became successful from the late nineteen-sixties, ran at one and seven eighth inches per second. They had to go slower because they were so short. However, the slower the recording speed the poorer the recording quality, which meant that cassettes were prone to distortion and background noise which had to be corrected by electronic sticking plaster such as the Dolby noise reduction system. But cassettes were so compact and convenient to handle that they soon supplanted reel-to-reel and the rival but troublesome tape cartridge system which emerged around the same time as cassettes.
** It
would be a shame if these recordings were lost for ever so I
have digitised them, put them on YouTube with private access (you can
only hear them if you have the URLs) and linked them below.
I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again ( ISIRTA ) 1970 Christmas Show 30th December 1970
I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue ( ISIHAC ) Series 1 Programme 1 11th and 13th April 1972
I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue ( ISIHAC ) Series 1 Programme 2 18th and 20th April 1972
I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue ( ISIHAC ) Series 1 Programme 3 25th and 27th April 1972
There are problems with the Pick/Top of the Pops programmes because nearly all the music has copyright
restrictions. In any case, many items were cut short at the time of
recording, generally not very well, and one or two were even omitted in
order to fit one hour programmes on to 45 minute tapes. The sound
quality has also not lasted well. But here is a list of what there is.
Pick of the 1962 Pops presented by David Jacobs on The Light Programme, 30th December 1962 at 4.00 p.m.
Pick of the Pops 1963 (presenter unknown but it might be Don Moss) Pick of the Pops 1964 presented by Alan Freeman on The Light Programme, 20th December 1964 at 5.00 p.m.
Pick of the Pops 1965 presented by Alan Freeman on The Light Programme, 26th December 1964 at 4.00 p.m.
Top of the Pops 1966 Part 1 BBC1 26th December 1966 at 6.15 p.m.
Top of the Pops 1966 Part 2 BBC1 27th December 1966 at 6.17 p.m.
Top of the Pops 1967 Part 1 BBC1 25th December 1967 at 2.05 p.m.
Top of the Pops 1967 Part 2 BBC1 26th December 1967 at 5.25 p.m.
Top of the Pops 1968 Part 1 BBC1 25th December 1968 at 1.25 p.m.
Top of the Pops 1968 Part 2 BBC1 26th December 1968 at 6.35 p.m.
Top of the Pops 1969 Part 1 BBC1 25th December 1969 at 2.15 p.m.
Top of the Pops 1969 Part 2 BBC1 26th December 1969 at 6.20 p.m.
