Friendship's Timepiece

June 16, 2015, 7:23 am

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A WATCH, A TANK AND A FRIENDSHIP  

Should we be poetic and sentimental over material things? Wordsworth went for the organic, nature, with his daffodils. Can you wax lyrical over a wristwatch? No? If that’s the answer, I stand in defiance.

RED STAR ON THE WRIST

Your black face, your red star,

Your inaudible tick-tock,

Your rugged brassy metal,

I have stared at you upon my wrist

For almost half a life.

Nightly, sitting tired and aging

Upon the mattress edge,

I wind you up again,

And through your scratched glass

The symbol of a struggle flickers.

Who made you, sturdy tovarich?

Who put that symbol of defiance,

That T34 upon your face?

Who sat at a Christopol bench,

Assembling meticulous movement?

Comrade Vostok, snug upon my wrist,

You have marked the times,

Red second hand sweeping

Chronometer marking,

Moments of love and of grief.

Kommandirskie, you are as tough

As the people who made you

As victorious as your tanks

My biology is transient

Your horology lives on.

The story of how I got my watch always reminds me of a better side of humanity and friendship. In 1986, I was working as a sales representative for a typesetting company in Grimsby. I was driving 1,000 miles per week throughout the UK. Our speciality was setting complicated timetables for bus companies and airlines. One such customer was Midland Red Buses in Rugby. One Monday, I received a phone call in our Grimsby office from Midland Red, where I was due to visit the following day.

    “Roy. Could you do us a favour? We’ve got a young Russian student here from Leningrad. He came over to study computer-assisted shipbuilding at Wallsend, but somehow ended up in Walsall. As his funds have run out, he’s ended up studying our transport system instead, but we’ve had the poor lad in the office for the past few days and don’t know what to do with him. He speaks good English. We’ve clubbed together and bought him some trainers, but if he’s studying business he’ll need to report back in the USSR about more than just our bus fleet. Any chance you could take him on the road with you for a couple of days to show him what a UK salesman does?”

I said I’d have to run it past my boss. He was a tight-fisted, awkward commercial pedant and I had to use all my guile to convince him that we’d simply be fostering good Anglo-Soviet relationships. He sneeringly agreed, adding

   “But we’re not paying for any of his meals or drinks or accommodation, and he travels in the company car at his own risk, and don’t let his presence interfere with your work, and get rid of him as soon as you can.” Such corporate humanity was underwhelming.

    So the next day in Derby, I picked up my young guest, the handsome, 18 year old Edward Emdin, and never have I experienced such delighted company. I was driving a new 2 litre Granada Ghia and to Edward it seemed as if he was on Sunset Strip in a Cadillac. We were bound for London for 2 days. He asked many questions. Being an incorrigible leftie and an admirer of early Soviet history, I became slightly bemused by his own less than enthusiastic take on the subject. I arranged for us to stay over that night with a good friend, another unrepentant Bolshevik, Bill Brewster. We decided that night to go for a meal and a few pints at the Slug and Lettuce in Islington. As we ambled along the streets en route to the pub, Edward stopped several times when he saw fly-posters on walls put there by organisations such as the Socialist Workers’ Party.

    “Roy! Bill!” he cried, “What is this? I see pictures of Lenin and Trotsky on your streets? How is this permitted in London? Why are they here?”

We explained the awkward concept of our freedom of political expression. But we could see that, Russian or not, young Edward’s passion for Soviet Icons hardly matched ours. We bought him a meal, I think it was either pasta or a pizza, and in the pub told him he could have anything he wanted. We drank plenty of beer, with Edward settling on Guinness as his favourite. Having little or no money, he frequently expressed his gratitude for our generosity. He was a young man of impeccable manners, and both Bill and I liked him a lot.

   The following day I let Edward accompany me on several calls to London bus companies, explaining to their marketing managers that his presence was part of some Anglo-Soviet education project. I think in those Reagan/Thatcher months of ‘the Evil Empire’ some of my customers thought I’d lost my marbles.

But Edward was diligent, took note of everything, and expressed his deep appreciation for 48 unexpected hours in the company of a stranger. I dropped him off in Walsall and we exchanged addresses. He later wrote to me from Leningrad and we kept in touch.

    Months later, I received another call in our Grimsby office. It was Edward. He was back in the UK, this time in Coventry. We met up and had lunch, and as we parted that day, he handed me a small parcel, telling me it was a gift in appreciation of our friendship. Thus I received my Vostok Kommandirskie T34 Tank officer’s watch. For almost three decades this rugged timepiece with its butch black leather strap has graced my aging wrist and kept accurate time. At midnight I wind it up, and as I gaze at the little image of the T34 tank and the red star above it, I think of Edward.

   Yet that meeting in Coventry would not be our last.

In 1997 I finally succumbed to my raging muse and took the risk of writing full time for a living. As the new millennium kicked in, my first major commission was for Honoured By Strangers, a biography of a forgotten WW1 naval hero, Captain Francis Cromie CB DSO RN (1882-1918) Cromie had commanded the Royal Navy’s Baltic submarine flotilla in 1915, fighting alongside the Tsar’s navy against the Germans. But when the revolution broke, Trotsky pulled Russia out of the war. Cromie scuppered his subs, sent his 200 men home via Murmansk, and stayed behind as Naval Attaché in the British Embassy in Petrograd, simultaneously conducting an adulterous liaison with a beautiful socialite, Sonya Gagarin. Defending the British Embassy against invading Red Guards on August 31 1918, he was shot dead and is buried in what is now St. Petersburg.

   It was a sheer delight being sent to St. Petersburg by Saga magazine, accompanied by my good friend the photographer Graham Harrison, to write up Cromie’s story as a 2-part feature which helped to promote the ensuing book. Whilst there, a planned trip to Tallin went badly wrong when, at the Estonian border I discovered that my visa was inadequate, and I had to leave the train in the middle of the night. I was banged up by border guards in a station called Kingisett on the Russian border. In the morning I was bundled back onto a train bound for St. Petersburg, where I had no accommodation booked. Graham Harrison had stayed behind in St.P to take pictures, but I was alone with nowhere to stay until we would both meet up again three days later. I had Edward Emdin’s phone number. Would it work after all this time? From a booth at the Warsaw Station I called, and the minute I said ‘Edward?’ the reply came back; “Roy?” Within an hour he had collected me from the station and taken me to his apartment, where I would stay for the next three nights.

Svetlana and Edward Emdin outside the Baron Steiglitz Museum

    Buses or shipbuilding had not had any influence on his post-Soviet career. He was married to a delightful lady called Svetlana, and they had an intelligent boy, Robert. To my surprise, I discovered Edward was now an international art dealer with his own impressive gallery, Solart, based in St. Petersburg’s ornate Baron Steiglitz Museum. Staying with the generous, warm-hearted Emdins was a delight.

When Graham Harrison and I returned to St. Petersburg in 2004 for our research trip on my book A Brief History of 1917: Russia’s Year of Revolution (Constable & Robinson, London). On that trip

both Graham and I stayed at Edward’s apartment . Whatever I did for this young man in 1986 has been re-paid tenfold, and somehow, I hope Graham and I get to see him again in that magnificent city before I die, Putin, Obama and international tensions allowing.

    And so I look at my wonderful Soviet watch every night and think of the happy, successful Emdins. I once asked Edward what he disliked most about his school days in the old USSR. He said it was ‘Kalashnikov practice’. Every day pupils had to break down and re-assemble the gun at ever faster speeds. My out-dated sense of romance for the revolution and the 1941-45 Great Patriotic War which included the horrendous 900 day Nazi siege of Leningrad probably has no resonance with the happy, 21^st century staff in the Solart gallery. But we are differentiated and oddly united in an understanding that those who  have lived a history have a much different view than those, like me, who have simply read about it.

And the Soviet T34 tank on my watch? It deserves a mention. It was first  encountered by the Nazis in 1941.German tank general von Kleist called it "the finest tank in the world" and Nazi tank ace Heinz Guderian confirmed the T-34's "vast superiority" over German armour and found it "very worrying." The T-34 was the mainstay of Soviet armoured forces throughout World War II. It was the second most-produced tank of all time after itssuccessor, the T-54/55 series.

The Russians are a great, brave and generous people. They have been through more suffering and privation over the past century than most of us can imagine. And so my accurate, reliable, somewhat battered old watch will continue to remind me, day after day, of those good Russians who have added such pleasure to my life. Thank you, Edward and Svetlana. You have kept my time and my faith in humanity ticking over for 30 good years.

Robert, now all grown up, with his dad, Edward.

---

Denying Shakespeare

June 21, 2015, 12:20 pm

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Treasons, Stratagems and Spoils

The Bludgeoning of  The Bard

Speaking at your daughter’s funeral is a terrible task for a father. So in those harrowing days of grief following our Sarah’s untimely death, aged 46, on December 23, 2012, I struggled with the dilemma of what I might say to the mourners. This also raised a serious question of conscience. As a writer in love with literature, poetry and prose, and being no stranger to public speaking, I felt that those attending at Mansfield’s Crematorium on January 4^th 2013 would expect me to speak. Yet I had to somehow separate the possible conceit of a ‘performance’ from the very sad reality of the situation.

    Births, marriages and deaths are those occasions when the ordinary man faces the terror of expected oratory. So in those 12 days, which included the incompatible ‘festive season’ of Christmas and Hogmanay, between Sarah’s departure and her funeral, whilst for me there was no terror to face, there was another mountain to climb; emotion. This wasn’t some poetry slam or a reading at a writer’s club. I was saying goodbye to our first-born.

   There are some poems I have recited where the passion of the words is so visceral that I struggle not to weep; for example, Wait for Me by Konstantin Simonov. Our daughter wasn’t an intellectual. She was a fun-loving music and film fan whose inner compassion was released in her lifelong occupation as a carer and an NHS nurse. Yet I had to find some words which expressed the way I would feel on that awful day. So, even though I knew that Sarah’s reaction would have been “What the bloody hell is he on about!?”there would only be one man to go to for such an event: William Shakespeare.

   Our son, Martin, an English Scholar whose PhD thesis was entitled Tragedy in The Age of Shakespeare gave a poignant and emotional eulogy on the theme of his closeness to his beloved sister. I felt it contained much of the plain, domestic aspects I might have overlooked. Sarah’s husband, our son in law, Ivan, had done something I ought to have been capable of; no terror for him - he had written a poem which reduced us to tears.  Yet despite my misgivings over my choice, I mounted the lectern to speak and commenced with the only words which matched my grief.

I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises, and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air—look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire—why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me. No, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

Fighting back the tears was difficult. I then reminded the gathering that Sarah would have been more than bemused by her Dad’s peculiar choice, and continued my eulogy around what she meant to us and her place in the family. Yet although I knew what Sarah might have thought about my choice of the Bard, (who at least did say it is a wise father that knows his own child), he got me through an emotional public bottleneck where my own creativity might have failed miserably.

Why is Shakespeare Important?

He was naturally learned;

he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature.

He looked inwards, and found her there.

John Dryden (1631–1700) Essay of Dramatic Poesy

Ben Jonson dubbed William Shakespeare ‘Sweet Swan of Avon’, saying ‘He was not of an age, but for all time!’ Most of the world agrees. Laurence Olivier once commented that with Shakespeare we touch "the face of God" If you look at the way Good Will was regarded by the major poets and writers across the literary spectrum, you’ll find no shortage of justified adulation. His greatness only came to me, a rough-hewn hack with three paltry GCE O levels, after years of blundering through reading matter and frequently gasping at some brilliant line, asking ‘Who the hell wrote that!’ only to discover is was that man yet again. Why does his work span the whole globe as the greatest benchmark in drama and verse, translated and performed in just about every language? To me, it is because he speaks of humanity in such a timeless way, and touches every emotion. And so I find an aggravating perversity in the fact that there exists a tight conclave of academics and, sadly, famous Thespians, who stubbornly believe that William Shakespeare was a fraud who wrote next to nothing. Why do they believe this?

The Anti-Stratfordians.

Mark Rylance

Al Pacino once said that actor Mark Rylance played the Bard "like Shakespeare wrote it for him the night before". Yet Rylance, who surely owes a great percentage of his fame to Shakespeare, leads the pack of hounds who refuse to believe that the Swan of Avon was anything more than his chief American detractor, Delia Bacon (1811-1859) said was ‘no more than a 'vulgar, illiterate...deer poacher' and 'Lord Leicester's stable boy.' Shockingly, Rylance is joined in his thoughts by such other beneficiaries of Will’s talent as Sir Derek Jacobi, and even Vanessa Redgrave. Further back, giants such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a writer named Herbert Lawrence, (who was a close friend of another Shakespearian Thespian, David Garrick), Benjamin Disraeli and the great Mark Twain all clambered on board the ‘Shakespeare was an illiterate nobody’ band wagon.

Pacino as Shylock

The festering root of this calumny has to be the peculiar hate-filled obsession of  America’s Delia Bacon, who spent three years in England in the mid-19^th century  locked in a cold, damp room attempting to ‘prove’ Shakespeare’s talent was the combined outpourings of Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser and Francis Bacon, all members of a secret Elizabethan society which also included Sir Philip Sidney, Lord Buckhurst, the Earl of Oxford, and Lord Paget. She referred to Shakespeare starkly as ‘that wretched player’. This gathering of Elizabethan toffs, according to the erratic

Over grilled, over-cooked, and unfortunately, over here. DELIA BACON

and ill-informed ramblings of dotty Delia, saw the plays as a way to  promote their  radical political philosophies, and not seeking to be recognised for their ‘beliefs’ used Will’s name as a convenient umbrella. Yet she stubbornly refused to examine primary sources, avoided the reading room at the British Museum, and relied totally on her own in-built Transatlantic prejudice, writing to Nathaniel Hawthorne that “There was no man dead or alive, that really on the whole gave me so much cause of offense with his contradictions. He appeared to be such a standing disgrace to genius and learning, that I had not the heart to ask anybody to study anything." Her subsequent 600 page book The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded was roundly trashed by the critics as the uninformed junk it undoubtedly was, but like all subsequent conspiracy theories, from Apollo 11, 9/11 to aliens crashing at Roswell, she had set a dirty snowball rolling down history’s muddy hill. How bizarre, therefore, that it would attract the rapt attention of seemingly intelligent people like Rylance, Jacobi and Redgrave.

Mr. Looney ... if the name fits ...

Years later, the mission to destroy Shakespeare had a new controller. The suitably named John Thomas Looney (1870 –1944) an English Tyneside school teacher kick-started the ‘Oxfordian’ theory, that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550–1604) was the true author of Shakespeare's plays. Looney began his philosophical life as a Methodist, later becoming an adept of something called the Religion of Humanity. It wasn’t enough for Looney to suggest that de Vere was the author of most of Shakespeare’s poems and plays. He went on to claim that de Vere had also written works published under the names of other poets. Looney, like Delia Bacon, might have been forgotten by now but they have remained as grubby compass points for Bard deniers everywhere.

   Inevitably, in this writer’s lowly, blue-collar proletarian opinion, this is a question of class consciousness. A Stratford dullard? The agrarian son of a country glove maker? A lower middle class lad with scant education? How on earth could he compete with classically educated Earls, Lords and Princes? No, it wasn't possible. Where did he get his vocabulary from? Did he steal it? Did a humble gypsy like Django Reinhardt, even with a missing finger, become the greatest jazz guitarist because he mixed with European aristocrats? Then again, as Oscar Wilde said, “Really, if the lower orders don't set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them?” One thing’s for sure, though, and that is much of art has, in the past 200 years, become the domain (and in many cases the property) of the higher echelon of society. Go to any gallery opening, opera, literary fiction event, and you won’t see many plumbers, bricklayers or even glove makers. Yet Shakespeare’s words slice through everything. However, this sad story is about denial; a refusal to accept that a man from ‘the lower orders’ could, simply by living, listening and reading, eventually leave behind for humanity a semantic treasure chest of such value, passion and human understanding.

   So I’m sorry, Messrs. Rylance, Jacobi and Redgrave (herself a so-called champion of ‘the Working Class’) until you absolutely prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Bacon, the Earl of Oxford or any other of the ‘noble’ notables propping up your beliefs produced Good Will’s fine work, I’m having none of it.

   The deniers, however, have their opponents among those with as much experience with the Bard as they do. For a number of years Trevor Nunn, directed the Royal Shakespeare Company. He said "To accept that someone from the lower orders, not formally educated at Oxford or Cambridge, could be a genius is very hard for us." Similar sentiments are expressed by Peter Hall, who founded and directed the RSC from 1960 to 1968.

So Shakespeare’s words darted between the tears to send my dear departed daughter to the heaven she deserved. Maybe I should say that whoever wrote the plays and sonnets, we should still praise the Lord they exist. But I shall always have the Great Man’s visage in my thoughts. In any case, as the poet said: 

Scorn not the Sonnet: Critic, you have frowned, 

Mindless of its just honours; with this key 

Shakespeare unlocked his heart.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Miscellaneous Sonnets

The House of Vulgar People

June 25, 2015, 8:26 am

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The House of Vulgar People

The following is an extract from my memoir All Aboard The Calaboose, of my days in the Merchant Navy 1959-1966. It deals with one of the most frequented seamen’s bars in the world, Joe Beef’s of Montreal. My first visit there was a real eye-opener. Now read on …

‘He cares not for the Pope, Priest, Parson or King William of the Boyne; All Joe wants is the Coin. He trusts in God in the summer time to keep him from all harm; when he sees the first frost and snow poor old Joe trusts the Almighty Dollar and good maple wood to keep his belly warm. For Churches, chapels, ranters, preachers, beechers and such stuff, Montreal has already got enough.’

Statement printed on a card given out in Montreal

by Charles McKiernan, a.k.a. Joe Beef (1835-1889)

The New York Times was not impressed, however, calling Joe Beef's Canteen "a den of filth" and writing that:

The proprietor is evidently an educated man, and speaks and writes well. But he is a little nearer a devil and his place near what the revised version calls Hades than anything I ever saw.

Beef was known for keeping a menagerie of animals in his tavern, including four black bears, ten monkeys, three wild cats, a porcupine and an alligator. The bears were usually kept in the tavern's cellar and viewed by customers through a trap door in the barroom floor. He sometimes brought a bear up from the basement to restore order in his tavern, to fight with his dogs or play a game of billiards with the proprietor. One of his bears, Tom, had a daily consumption of twenty pints of beer and would sit on his hindquarters and hold a glass between his paws without spilling a drop. On one occasion, McKiernan was mauled by a buffalo on exhibit and was sent to hospital for a number of days. Another time, a Deputy Clerk of the Peace was inspecting the tavern in order to renew the license and was bitten by one of McKiernan's dogs.

He ran his tavern from 1870 until his death from a heart attack in 1889, at the age of 54

Here’s me: Sailing Into Montreal: July 1960.

Montreal.At last the feeling I had anticipated about what lay at this side of the Atlantic was being borne out. This may not have been Manhattan or Brooklyn, but it all felt very, very American, despite the continuing insistence on dual languages. When we were given an early finish the crew all seemed very animated. It was a fine, mild day and everyone went to the Steward for a sub. I asked Bill Smith what was afoot.

   “Joe Beef of Montreal, The friend of the working man.”

   “What does that mean?” I asked.

   “It means we’re all going for some good cheap beer to Joe Beef’s bar. It’s what a sailor does in Montreal.” And so we did. Yes, the beer was cheap, we drank plenty of it, and I was lucky to get into the busy establishment at all with my fresh-faced 17 year old looks. I just tagged along and found somewhere out of sight to sit and let others go to the bar. As I would subsequently discover, there were specialist, boozy destinations like this all around the coastlines of the world where sailors, dockers and working men would congregate, and we were the lucky ones because we were the travelling workers and could experience them all. That said, few if any establishments would possess as colourful a history as Joe Beef’s.

 Later in life, I delved further into the story behind this popular watering hole, and the result was nothing if not inspiring.

     Charles McKiernan, who became known as Joe Beef, was born in Ireland in 1835 but found his way to Montreal as a soldier in the British army. Apparently he was a quartermaster and always on the look-out for stores, and when meat rations were down, he always seemed to find some source of supply, becoming known to the squaddies thus earning the name ‘Joe Beef’. In 1868, he bought his way out of the army and became the champion of Montreal’s working class when he opened the Crown and Sceptre Tavern on St. Claude Street behind Marché Bonsecours. It soon became known as Joe Beef’s canteen where the labouring classes, as well as the unemployed, the destitute and the drifters could get a free lunch, cheap beds, and dubious entertainment between 1868 and 1889.

     Beef had no time for the lofty, church-going powers-that-be who ran Montreal and Quebec province. It was a time before such luxuries as social security when the only charitable help available came from the church.

When St-Claude Street was widened in 1870, he moved to larger quarters, a three-storey building located on Common Street. Joe liked to ruffle the feathers of the upper classes and the law by calling his own establishment the ‘Great house of Vulgar People.’

Social services led by religious groups encouraged those who sought help to sign a pledge to abstain from ‘intoxicating drinks.’ But Joe knew what a down and out working man needed; a drink and a bit of fun. Therefore his booze-fuelled charity was very welcome.

His generosity was appreciated, and despite spreading around the wealth his bar earned to the less fortunate, his assets were still valued at $80,000 at his death, a vast sum in those days. Joe Beef’s canteen was also a kind of early job centre or labour exchange, and he was always agreeable to lend out the tools necessary to get a day’s work, such as shovelling snow. If you were down and out, with nowhere to rest your head, for 10 cents you could sleep in Joe’s dormitory, be given a meal, (even if you didn’t have the 10c). The only condition was that you would be given a bath, disinfected, and required to sleep naked to keep his sheets clean.

     In Victorian Montreal, public drunkenness which could get you arrested and fined for disorderly conduct, or ‘vagabondism’. Those who were unable to pay a fine of about $1.50-$2.50 could be imprisoned for a period of around 10-15 days. Unable to work while they were imprisoned, their families would often be the ones to suffer most. Above his bar, Joe Beef hung a portrait of the town Recorder with a number of dollar bills tucked into the corner of the frame. With these, he paid the fines of his regular customers. He supported striking miners and canal labourers, sending them bread when they were locked out, yet at the same time, demonstrated his magnanimity  by sending the same supplies to the militias who were controlling the situation.

   But there was more to Joe Joe’s philanthropy than paying his customers’ fines and lending out tools to workers. He raised $500 a year for the Montreal General Hospital, and was prepared to support the hospital by providing a doctor to do house-calls in the working-class areas, but this was an offer turned down by the starchy, sanctimonious higher echelons running Montreal. They wanted nothing to do with a man who peddled alcohol and lewd entertainment.

     50 years ago when our crew breezed in, Joe Beef’s was still, in some ways, the ‘House of Vulgar People’. Yet vulgar people can be fun, and our vulgarity was portable. But boy, did we have some good times in Joe Beef’s bar.

Want to read much more? You can get All Aboard The Calaboose from me - just send me an e-mail roybainton@hotmail.com and I'll tell you how. 

Aspiration!

June 27, 2015, 6:15 am

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BIG BOY'S BLUES

July 4, 2015, 11:28 am

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That’s Not All Right, Mama.

‘“Down in Tupelo, Mississippi, I used to hear old Arthur Crudup bang his box the way I do now and I said if I ever got to the place where I could feel what old Arthur felt, I’d be a music man like nobody ever saw.”

Elvis Presley

Tom McGuinness, (left) a British blues pioneer, ex-member of the chart topping 60s favourites  Manfred Mann, returned to his first love, the blues, in 1979 as a founder member, with Paul Jones, of the UK’s premier R&B group, The Blues Band, currently  celebrating their 35th anniversary.

     Tom once told me a story which haunted me for years. Not long before he died, in the early 1970s, legendary bluesman Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup came over to Britain from the US to play in one of the highly successful American Folk Blues festivals which had been running as popular events since the mid-1960s. 

   As Crudup had nowhere to stay, Tom invited him to bed down at his flat in London. What struck him immediately was how poverty-stricken the great man seemed to be. After all, Crudup had written three of Elvis’s biggest hits – including his first multi-million selling single on Sun Records, That’s All Right, Mama. Many had already dubbed him ‘the Father of rock’n’roll.’  Yet he didn’t even have a decent guitar, was poorly dressed, and when he took his stage suit out of his battered old suitcase at Tom’s place, he discovered that the rats back home had eaten the back out of his jacket. McGuinness had to find him some new threads to wear to perform in.  Tom had the privilege in 1970 of recording The London Sessions with Crudup, along with Benny Gallagher and Hughie Flint.

   Big Boy Crudup’s is perhaps the cruellest and most poignant story concerning non-payment of royalties. In his wonderful book, Between Midnight and Day: The Last Unpublished Blues Archive ,photographer, writer, blues manager and promoter Dick Waterman outlines his battle for Crudup’s royalties with a sensitivity which can literally move a reader to tears.

        Arthur was born in Forest, Mississippi, on  August 24th 1905, and died on 28 March 1974, in Nassawadox, Virginia. Six foot four inches tall, he was no stranger to hard, physical labour, and for most of his life worked in various rural jobs. Unlike many of his musical peers, he was a late-comer to learning the guitar, which he didn’t pick up until he was 32. His guitar playing mentor was a local blues player known as Papa Harvey. Arthur never became what we’d call a virtuoso on the instrument, but his spirited and rhythmic accompaniment, along with his high, clear voice soon got him noticed. After an early spell in Clarksdale, Mississippi, playing at blues parties, like many other men in the region, in search of a better living he headed north to Chicago, where he played on street corners. At first, the windy city didn’t provide him with the income he’d hoped for, and he ended up living in a packing crate underneath Chicago’s elevated railroad.

          The story goes that he was playing for loose change on the sidewalk when he was discovered by Chicago’s legendary blues ‘Mr. Fixit’, Lester Melrose. Melrose had moved to Chicago around 1914, and hoped to find success as a catcher for the Chicago White Sox baseball team, but his trial failed. He became a grocery salesman. Around 1920, together with  older brother Walter and Marty Bloom, he established The Melrose Brothers Music Company, a publishing house and music store on Chicago’s south side. It was in his shop that he met Jelly Roll Morton (1885-1941) who would become Melrose’s chief writer and arranger. By 1925 Lester had found his metier – as a record producer and, most importantly, a talent scout. He sold his share in the shop and began promoting the best of the many blues artists who were arriving in Chicago, and his aptitude paid off handsomely with  the recording of It's Tight Like That with Tampa Red (1904 -1981, a.k.a. Hudson Woodbridge and Hudson Whittaker), an influential guitarist and singer from Georgia. Of course, as a publisher, Melrose was as wily as the rest, and knew the value of taking possession of his artists’ compositions.

 

Tampa Red

      Crudup landed a significant gig to play at Tampa Red’s house. His playing went down well enough to get him signed, through Melrose, to RCA/Bluebird Records, who released his first recording, If I Get Lucky. Over the years he would cut dozens of tracks for Vocalion and Bluebird, tour with Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller) and Elmore James, among others, with most of his songs, in particular, Mean Old Frisco establishing him as a major figure on the blues scene. Yet the non-payment of royalties led him to fall out with Lester Melrose. In a 1973 documentary , Crudup said 

“Every time I’d go make a record, I’d ask Lester, ‘How many records would a man have to make that he didn’t have to work on the farm?’ I could hear my songs on the jukebox all through the South. I had a disc jockey tell me, ‘Now, Arthur, you’re supposed to be in good shape. Your records are selling second from the top. I never knew how much progress I was makin’ because Melrose didn’t tell me. ”

Eventually, sick of the music business, he headed down to Mississippi where for a while he ran a bootleg liquor operation, an enterprise which equally matched his skill as a musician, as, apparently, folks came from far and wide for Big Boy’s moonshine.  Yet whilst he was making a few bucks distilling Virginia’s finest, his compositions, such as That’s All Right, Mama, My Baby Left Me and So Glad You’re Mine would all be recorded by Elvis Presley and legally this should have made him a rich man. Yet that was not to be. He would die virtually penniless.

Elvis owed Big Boy Crudup a few dollars (or at least Tom Parker, his manager did)

In 1968 Dick Waterman, a truly great photographer, superb chronicler of the blues and manager of stars such as Buddy Guy, Big Mama Thornton and Bonnie Raitt, was Crudup’s booking agent during the late 1960s blues revival. He asked Crudup if he’d received any royalties. He had; a few sporadic cheques for nine, twelve and eighteen dollars. Unfortunately, on April 12 that year, Lester Melrose had passed away in his sumptuous villa down in Florida, aged 74, owning the rights to over 3,000 songs, none of which he had written. Waterman enrolled Big Boy Crudup in AGAC, the American Guild

of Authors and Composers, and the fight for Arthur’s royalties began.

Dick Waterman, (left) and another great fighter for missing royalties, Bonnie Raitt.

A large firm, Hill and Range, had taken over the affairs of Lester Melrose. After nearly five years of legal wrangling, AGAC informed Waterman that they had come to a settlement with Hill and Range. Waterman agreed to meet Crudup in New York at Hill and Range’s office. With his daughter and three sons, the old man had driven all the way up from Virginia, where he’d spent his later years as a farm labourer.

          That arrival in a cold New York had promised to be an exciting day, as the cheque Arthur expected to take home with him was for $60,000. They went into Hill and Range’s offices and the lawyer asked them to wait whilst he went upstairs to the President’s suite to get the cheque. It was a long wait. Yet when the lawyer returned, he was not bearing money – just bad news. The company wouldn’t sign the agreement, saying “It gives away more in settlement than you could hope to get through litigation.”  Waterman describes the tragic scene; “Arthur looked at me and I said, ‘They’re not going to pay you, Arthur. You’re going to have to sue them. We’re going to have sue Lester Melrose’s widow.’ But the idea of a black man suing an elderly white woman—it just wasn’t gonna happen.”

          The message was cruel and clear – yes, we owe you – yet you’re an old black guy and if you want your money, you’ll have to see us in court. The prospect of pursuing Rose, the surviving widow of Lester Melrose was hopeless.  With great dignity Crudup thanked Waterman for all his efforts, saying

          “I know you done the best that you could. I respects you and I honours you in my heart. Them people got their ways of keeping folks like me from getting any money. Naked I come into this world and naked I shall leave it. It just ain’t meant to be.”

Compared to Virginia, it was decidedly wintry in New York and both Arthur and his family weren’t dressed for the weather. Shivering, they turned towards their old car, his sad parting shot being

“I ’spect we better start driving now. We got a ways to go.”

          A poor man, he died shortly after, on March 28, 1974. But Dick Waterman hadn’t finished. Disgusted, on his way home from Crudup’s funeral, he had a meeting with another lawyer, Ina Meibach, in New York City. Meibach acted to stem the flow of any record company royalty payments to Hill and Range. At that time Chappell Music was in the process of buying out Hill and Range and Dick’s action on behalf of the late Arthur Crudup showed up on Chappell’s corporate radar as the very thing in the take-over package they didn’t want to buy – a legal dispute over an artist’s estate. That would have generated some unpleasant publicity. As Dick said,

    “We had the leverage that we needed”.

          The first cheque Arthur’s family received was for $248,000 dollars, and since then they’ve had over $3 million more.

          One might imagine that there’d be some kind of marker or plaque alongside Virginia’s Route 13 noting that the “Father of Rock ’n’ Roll,” the legend who gave Elvis his first-ever hit and whose work was covered by everyone from Eric Clapton to Creedence Clearwater Revival and Elton John lived and died here. As Dick Waterman commented, “There probably wasn’t a week during the decade of the 1970s when there wasn’t an Arthur Crudup song on the Billboard Top 200 albums,” he says, rambling off a list of seminal rock albums from Clapton’s Slow Hand (“Mean Old Frisco”) to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Cosmo’s Factory (“My Baby Left Me.”)  As well as the likes of Elvis and Clapton, he wrote numerous other blues classics for artists such as B. B. King, Big Mama Thornton and Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland.

          His grave in Franktown, Virginia had to wait until 25 years after his death - the 1990s – before it even had a headstone. Stories about royalty rip-offs occur throughout the music business, but some of the downright chicanery pulled off back in the bad old days has been put to rest. Over the last decades of the 20th century musicians have become more shrewd. They’ve no doubt taken the astute advice of Willie Nelson, who famously gave away the rights of one of his first, and most famous, songs Family Bible for a pittance;

          “What I’m saying to all you songwriters is to get yourself a good Jewish lawyer before you sign anything, no matter how much (the publishing or) record companies say they love you. ”

You can read a lot more about royalty rip-offs, racism,dodgy managers and other tragedies in my book Good Time Charleys: Tough Tales fromRhythm & Blues. e-mail me at roybainton@hotmail.com for details

PARASITIC PENSIONERS?

July 12, 2015, 11:17 am

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PENSIONERS: THE NEW PARASITES?

What a damned mess the British Labour Party finds itself in. Its old Socialist heart is buried deep beneath a layer of subcutaneous corporate fat, the obese result of the Blair years, when sucking up to the City was seemingly part of the long-term plan for securing a nice corpulent future for a stars and stripes-kissing warmonger. So today we have one of the original ‘Blair’s Babes’,

Harriet Harman shamelessly supporting Osborne’s benefits cuts, Tristram ‘the handsome one’ Hunt in the Observertelling the faithful they should be more ‘patriotic’ whilst supporting a sub-Thatcherite air-head, Liz Kendall. Another Kendall supporter, Chukka Umunna, was congratulated by some Tory harridan on BBC’s Question Time for ‘thinking like a Tory’. Of course he does. That’s the replacement of Clause 4 - ‘think like Tories’.

Meanwhile, the party’s metrocentric corporate ‘suits’ are getting their M&S knickers in a twist because something called a ‘Socialist’, in the threatening shape of Jeremy Corbyn, is moving up the popularity chart for the forthcoming comedy of a leadership election. All of this, however, seems irrelevant when one realises that May 7 2015 was the Labour Party’s final swan song. This particular parrot is well and truly expired, gone to its maker.

Yet there are bigger social problems for an electorate adrift on a sea of effluent.

One of the oldest weapons governments have at their disposal is still in use by our newly-elected rulers. The ancient principle of ‘divide and rule’ encourages divisions among the electorate to prevent organised opposition to government policy. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the growing gulf between Britain’s younger generation and UK pensioners.

George Osborne’s welfare cuts are viciously aimed at the under-25s, for whom the ‘national minimum wage’ will not apply. Scrapping housing benefit for those aged 18 to 21 will impact seriously on many families, where up to 4 million under-30s are still living with their parents. The removal of caps on student loans will soon place a university education beyond the reach of the poor. Even those young people who have found work realise that becoming a ‘hard working tax payer’ is no longer enough to get you on the first rung of the housing ladder. Meanwhile, by a media campaign of insidious stealth, the unfairness of this situation is being diverted from the Chancellor onto another sector of society, the old. Some suggest that David Cameron’s wooing of the aged, by maintaining pension increases and other benefits, was a device to hoover up those extra ‘grey’ votes to put him back in number 10. If so, it worked. But as a ‘divide and rule’ weapon it will no doubt bring Osborne, who still needs to find more massive cuts, much joy. Set the young against the older generation and as the discontent soars, he will have new choices. Rather than redress the imposition of further misery on the young, he may well have hidden plans to level the playing field by ‘punishing’ the aged, now that their votes have served his purpose. This has already begun with the removal of the over 75s TV licence. This gave the new government doubled satisfaction. Not only has it saved them £608 million, they have been able to shift the debt onto an organisation they openly despise and would dearly love to privatise, the BBC.

A new report by a think tank, The Intergenerational Foundation, takes aim at UK pensioners.

One of its founders, Angus Hanton, (left) suggests pensioners are ‘bedroom blockers’ because once families have grown up, these old parasites continue to live in houses with spare bedrooms. (His own parents, however, rattle around in a £1.5m five bedroom suburban house …) Hanton castigates the old by suggesting they say “We did something to deserve our comfortable lives, we’re entitled” adding “the baby boomers are experts at that.”  Is being old, with all its aches and pains, the daily descent into immobile senility and monthly funerals, such a ‘comfortable life’? Must we feel guilty for working for 50 years for today’s three meals a day, a roof over our heads and a bit of medical attention?

1931 (the decade Cameron is taking us back to) and look - not an Armani suit in sight!

If you’re young, consider this; being old is no sin. We can’t help it. It will happen to you, too. However, the drive for social equality and the battle against austerity is a battle we should all be fighting, young and old, shoulder to shoulder. It’s not an age thing: it’s a human fight, and the powerful people we’re struggling against are not human; they are another breed from a strange world, it’s the planet known as Greed.  

HARD CASE

July 13, 2015, 11:40 am

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Hard Case

“It's only after we've lost everything

that we're free to do anything.”

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

The sun shone through the ornate windows of the Café Delmas and glittered on the cutlery. Sharon gazed out at the Parisians, or perhaps more accurately, the tourists, criss-crossing the Place de la Contrescape. Brian had been right, of course, and as he sat opposite, sipping his coffee, she could see that ‘I told you so’ look in his eyes. His romantic streak had brought them here to the City of Light, and perhaps, after 40 years together, she ought to have recognised what he’d had in mind. Yet dreamy though this all was, as she sat there, she couldn’t help replaying that day of argument a month before …

     “Oh, bloody sodding great,” she spat the words out as if ejecting a wayward fly which had entered her mouth.

    “Our 40^th wedding anniversary, and despite everything I’ve said now you want us to go to Paris?”

    “Well,” he said, trying to sound conciliatory, “it’s all about romance, surely?”

    “Well it might be, but I know you. You’ve been banging on about Paris and all that period after the First World War ever since you saw Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. You’re not so much thinking about our romantic anniversary as trawling around places where Picasso and all that Bohemian lot hung out.”

    “Well, that’s not fair. That’s all part of the romance of Paris, isn’t it?”

    “It might well be, but you ignored me when I suggested Tuscany, and then I thought we’d agreed on Sicily. You’re as big a fan of Inspector Montalbano as I am - I wanted to see his apartment by the sea. Now it’s bloody Paris! And there’s the weather to contend with. It’ll be lovely in April in Sicily - but Paris?”

    “Well, doesn’t the phrase ‘Paris in the spring’ mean anything?”

    “Yes, but Palermo in the spring sounds even better.”

    “But Paris is the most romantic city in the world.”

    “And it’s full of pretentious French people!”

    “Well - what about the Mafia?” he asked, in a quieter voice.

    “The sodding Mafia?”

    “Yes - the cosa nostra, the mob - Palermo - that’s their headquarters. We might get whacked.”

    “Who do you think we are? Tony and Carmela Soprano? Are you some secret ‘made man’ or something? The bloody Mafia- you do talk crap some times.”

He flopped onto the sofa and lit a cigarette.

    “OK, let’s do a deal. Three days in Paris, then we’ll fly to Sicily for three days.”

She sighed and shook her head.

    “Yeah, right. We barely get unpacked in Paris before we’re packing again for Sicily. Some bloody anniversary holiday this is turning out to be.”

The argument continued. After a good night’s sleep, the next day she had been at the hairdressers. Mavis, the stout, middle-aged happy-go-lucky proprietor listened to the story of Paris vs. Palermo, her voice soaring above the hum of the hairdryers.

    “Well, love, if you ask me, Paris is a better bet for an anniversary. I went there with my Jack before he died and it really is as romantic as they say it is. And it’s civilised. You know where you stand in a place like that. You’ve got great transport, the Metro, terrific restaurants, Notre Dame, the Seine … mind you, I don’t know much about Sicily but it looks a bit dilapidated to me. A lot of crime they say. I suppose you can get good pizzas and pasta there, but it’s not what I’d call a top tourist destination. But Paris? Oh, Sharon, you ought to give it a try, honest. You’ll thank me for it. Save Sicily for next year.”

And so they had agreed. A week in Paris and a week in Sicily the following year. Sharon felt defeated, and Brian was elated. Yet now they were in Paris, and indeed the mild spring was everything she’d hoped it would be, she had to admit that as an anniversary venue, there was none better.

   After finishing their coffee they wandered along the crowded Rue Moffetard. Getting in with the ambience, Brian lit up a Gitanes and placed an arm around her shoulder.

    “Well, what do you think?”

    “All right, smartarse,” she said, “it’s all fine but for one thing.”

    “The hotel?”

    “You must be psychic. Yes. What’s it called again?”

    “The Hotel Saint Medard.”

    “I don’t know who Saint Medard was, but he would have to be a saint to have stayed there. And vertically challenged. It’s a dump.”

    “Look, love, just because it’s old, and has historical character, doesn’t make it a dump. I know it’s a tough climb up those stairs to that top room - “

    “Room? Hell, Brian, it’s a cupboard! Getting out of bed for a pee last night was an obstacle course. I sat on the edge of the bed and almost scraped my knees on the wall. All that creaky old panelling and floorboards. Our garden shed’s more comfortable.”

    “Yes, all right, I get the message. But it’s booked and paid for now, and we only need to be there for bed and breakfast, so it’s not the end of the world. Come on, after we’ve checked out where Gertrude Stein and Cole Porter used to live, we’ll find a restaurant for tonight and get some champagne down our necks. That’s why we’re here.”

As they ambled along Sharon mulled over that last bit - ‘that’s why we’re here’. Of course they couldn’t be in Paris and not see all the artistic places of interest which occupied Brian so much, but if they’d been in Palermo there wouldn’t have been quite this amount of cultural tourism to deal with. She swore to herself that when they got to Sicily, she’d be in charge.

     The Hotel Saint Medard was a four-storey ramshackle edifice down an ancient cul-de-sac off the Rue Monge. It seemed to have survived everything French history might have thrown at it. The Revolution, Napoleon, two world wars. It had obviously never been built as a hostelry. Perhaps, in the mists of time, some Parisian artisan family had lived here, but judging by the size of the rooms they could well have been dwarves. The un-carpeted stairs creaked with every step, the staircase winding its way up past the first three floors through narrow, almost Stygian gloom, the width so tight that you had to keep your elbows in to avoid scraping them on the ubiquitous timeworn, dark wood panelling.

After an afternoon of walking old streets and photographing various blue commemorative plaques, they had returned to the hotel to freshen up and get ready for their anniversary dinner.

    From the tiny top window of their room, they could at least see the open spaces of the Square Capitan. Sharon gazed over at it as the afternoon sun cut low through the trees. It was an unusual sight, a mix of what appeared to be an outdoor arena and colourful flower beds.

    “What’s that place, Brian?” He moved over to the window, his guide book in his hand. He leafed through the pages then began to read.

    

    “Square Capitan. It was when Rue Monge was being built in 1870 that the Arènes de Lutèce were discovered. The inhabitants converted this Gallo-Roman amphitheatre into a cemetery when Lutetia was invaded by barbarians in 285 AD. It was then turned into a square in 1918. Square Capitan next to the Arènes de Lutèce is named after doctor, anthropologist and historian Louis Capitan, who redesigned it in the style of a formal Italian garden in 1916.”

     “Thank you, Simon Schama,” she said, as he patted her gently on her derriere.

Whilst she struggled with the throes of ablution in the cramped shower cubicle, Brian pushed open the small window so that he could lean out for a smoke. As he moved into position with his elbows on the window ledge, his trousers became snagged on what appeared to be the head of a nail protruding from the wood panelling on the adjoining wall. As he cursed under his breath, tugging at his pants to release them, he began to thoroughly agree with Sharon. This place was too small for anything but hobbits. He’d begun to regret turning down a deal at the Holiday Inn in exchange for his surrender to a more historical experience. He bent down, yet as he tugged to free himself, suddenly the ancient nail slid out of the corner of the old panel. The wood became loose, and as he disentangled the nail from his trousers, he noticed that the panel was now jutting a good two inches from the wall.

    Ever the curious romantic, Brian stared at this and pondered over the potential fact that this panelling had been in place for perhaps two centuries. Like a kid staring into a cave and expecting bats, he wondered what might be there in that narrow margin of blackness behind the loose corner of the panel. The temptation was too much; he tugged at the wood, and other tiny nails around its edges began to pop out until, with a creak and a cloud of grey dust, it fell away and onto his feet.

    He was taken aback by what he saw. There, in a cavity about two feet deep, lay what appeared to be a leather suitcase. It was encrusted with dust and old cobwebs. Then a slight wave of panic overcame him. He was in an ancient Parisian hotel and he’d damaged the fabric of the room. What would the manager say, how much would this cost? Yet he calmed down, realising that he could easily put the panel back and perhaps knock the nails in with the heel of a shoe.  It was that leather suitcase which began to obliterate any other concerns. He leaned down, carefully thrust his hand into the cavity and grabbed the handle. Whatever was in the case, it was heavy. He pulled it out but the handle had rotted slightly and bits of old leather flaked between his fingers. It was messy, but he still had the copy of the newspaper he’d read on the plane. He found it, spread the pages out to cover the double bed, and hauled the case onto it.

   The locks on the case had all but rusted away, but they still held the lid in place. He tried to free them with his thumbs, but they seemed solid. He went over to his shoulder bag and retrieved his Swiss Army knife. He dug the blade into the key slots in the locks and first one, then the second, clicked open.

    “What the bloody hell have you got there?”

Startled, Brian looked round to see his semi-naked wife drying herself with a towel, staring in horror at the mess on the bed. She then glanced at the hole in the wall and the panel on the floor.

    “Brian! For God’s sake! Have you taken leave of your senses? What a bloody mess - this is a hotel, not a garden shed! Who do you think you are - Keith bloody Moon?”  He realised how bad all this looked yet his heart raced with excitement. He raised his hands, palms outwards.

    “It wasn’t my fault, love. I caught the panel on my trouser leg and it came away - and this was hidden in that hole.”  Sharon tied the towel in a turban on her head whilst glaring at him.

    “It’s bugger all to do with us. It belongs to the hotel. Whatever that is, Brian, put it back, stick that bit of wood back on, and clean that mess up, or this is going to cost us a packet. Good God, you’re like a kid sometimes!”

    “Don’t you want to see what’s in it?”

She puffed out her cheeks and blew out in exasperation, shaking her head violently.

    “No, put it back! For Chrissakes, Brian - it’s our wedding anniversary, not Raiders of the Lost Ark! “

But he was having none of it.

    “Sorry, love. I’ll put it back but first,“ he began to prise the case open, “I want to know what this is.” The old leather seemed to crack and groan as the lid was forced back. What appeared to be some crumpled clothing, perhaps silk, formed a top layer. At the side of this was a small leather satchel. He picked it up and opened it. Inside were some small bottles, a bar of soap, a dried-out, rotting flannel, and what appeared to be a lipstick tube and a rusting powder compact. Sharon stood by, clasping her hand to her mouth in nervous awe. He laid the items on the bed, and the rest of the case’s contents were revealed. Wads of type-written sheets of quarto paper, some tied with faded blue and red ribbons. The whole case was filled with these manuscripts, some obviously carbon copies. Brian deftly removed one and blew the dust from its cover page, then gasped, falling to his knees at the side of the bed. Sharon stared anxiously down. 

    “What’s up?”

He held up the manuscript in one hand and traced with a shaky, trembling finger across the title line, which read

INTO THE FOREST

A Short Story

By

Ernest Hemingway.

He dropped it onto the bed and frantically rummaged through all the other manuscripts, gasping at each one. He turned to Sharon, who was still frozen in her stunned, mouth-clutching posture.

    “Christ, love. Do you knowwhat this is?”

She inhaled and exhaled deeply.

    “No, but it smells like trouble. And don’t tell me who Ernest Hemingway was. I’m not that thick.”

     “God. We were there this afternoon - 74 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine!”

    “Oh. Yeah, tell me about it - that’s why my feet still ache…”

    “Sod your feet! That’s where he would have written all this stuff! This is Hemingway’s missing suitcase. This is all the work he’d written before he was even a published novelist. This must have been here since 1922.”

   “What in hell’s name are you on about? Hemingway’s missing suitcase? 1922? How do you know that?”

He stood up, rubbed his hands on his trousers and stared out of the window.

    “You see, darling, that’s the difference between Sicily and Paris. I’m not knocking Sicilian history, but big things happened here as well. Big, 20^thcentury things. I was always fascinated by Hemingway.”

    “Yes, and I’ve always been tired of you banging on about him. So how do you know what heap of old rubbish is - and how long it’s been here?”

   “Get dressed. I’m nipping out to get a bottle of wine or  champagne .… no, damn it - whisky. We totally, utterly need a drink. Don’t touch this. Stay in here. Don’t let anyone in. We need to talk.”

    “Oh, give over, Brian!”

He grabbed her shoulders and stared intently at her.

     “You have no idea how important this is. Just have some faith, Sharon. Believe me - this is big. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

    It had taken thirty minutes before he arrived back with a bottle of Vat 69 and a bottle of Moet Chandon. Sharon had got ready for the evening, and in her green velvet dress and make-up she looked attractive as she sat by the small, woodworm-riddled dressing table. He poured two glasses and sat on the bed, staring at the paper filled suitcase.

    “Right love. I’m going to tell you a story, then you’ll realise what I mean when I say this is important. This’ll go down as the most historic wedding anniversary in European history. Ernest Hemingway was 23 years old and in Lausanne in Switzerland in December 1922. At that time he was correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star, covering the Peace Conference. The journalist and editor Lincoln Steffens, who Hemingway had met in Genoa, was also there. Steffens really admired Hemingway’s writing and asked to see more. The year before, 1921, Hemingway married Elizabeth Hadley Richardson. He always called her Hadley. They soon moved from the USA to Paris, because this was the most creative artistic and literary community in Europe then. He sent a message to Hadley that she should come to Lausanne on the train. She packed up all of Hemingway’s papers in a suitcase, to take them with her to Switzerland. He hadn’t asked her to take all his writing, but she thought it would be a nice touch to re-unite him with his work. She packed everything she could find, even the carbon copies. Remember, there were no photocopiers then, no laptops or memory sticks - “

    “Yes, smartarse, I know that - I’m not stupid…”

    “Right, yes, point taken, I’m just adding a bit of drama here, although it doesn’t need it. So off she went to the Gare de Lyon railway station, got on the train, found her sleeper compartment, and there would be a wait before the train set off.  So, while the train was still standing in the Gare de Lyon, Hadley went to buy a bottle of Evian water for the trip. Sadly, she left the suitcase unattended on the train. When she came back, it was gone.”

    “Crikey. I’ll bet she was popular after that …”

    “Not much. At that point, nothing of Hemingway’s fiction had been published. Back at their apartment at 74 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine, there was nothing left. She’d packed everything, both the originals and their carbons. Only two short stories survived the disaster. ‘Up in Michigan’, which Hemingway had hidden in a drawer because Gertrude Stein had said it was un-publishable, while ‘My Old Man’ was out with an editor at a magazine. What we have here, must be everything else.”

    “So who does it all belong to now?”

    “Well, obviously, the Hemingway estate, or maybe his publisher. It was always thought that the thief, whoever he was, would have skedaddled out of the station, opened the case somewhere and been quite disappointed to find nothing more than a load of paper, Hadley’s lipstick and underskirt. People suggested he would have chucked it all the Siene. After all, Hemingway wasn’t famous then. That was to come later. But by God, do you realise what this lot is worth now?”

    “How do you know all this stuff?”

    “Insomnia. I know this stuff because I read in bed every night while you’re laid there snoring.”

    “Charming. It’s just a box of old paper though.”

    “You wouldn’t have said that about the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is literature’s Holy Grail, and we got to it before Dan Brown did.”

    “But it isn’t ours.”

    “It could be.”

    “What do you mean?”

    “Well, the hotel probably didn’t know it was here. We could just buy a slightly larger suitcase, stick this inside, and - “

    “And get arrested for theft. How would you get it through customs? Where would you say you got it from?”

He blew a raspberry, poured another whisky and lit another Gitanes.

    “It’s the story, Sharon, the story. We could be like, what - Howard Carter discovering Tutankhamun or even Indiana Jones!”

    “If you were Harrison Ford we’d be on that bed but you’re not. You’re a retired electrician and this is a load of old paper.”

     “No. It’s solid gold, love, solid bloody gold. Hemingway shot back to Paris once Hadley had told him what happened. He could hardly believe it. Broke his heart. He wrote a letter to Ezra Pound, in January 1923, ‘I suppose you heard about the loss of my Juvenilia? I went up to Paris last week to see what was left and found that Hadley had made the job complete. All that remains of my complete works are three pencil drafts of a bum poem which was later scrapped, some correspondence and journalistic carbons.’ I’ve read that bit so many times. See what a bloody great yarn this is? I know all about it down to the fine detail because it’s always fascinated me. Poor Hemingway. Well, Papa, wherever you are, here it all is, safe and sound, waiting to be published, and we found it, two middle aged Brits on their 40^th wedding anniversary. The press are gonna love this.”

    Brian gathered the stuff together, closed the case and placed it back in the cavity, pushing the panel back in place and tapping two of the rusty old nails in with the base of the Champagne bottle. He was feeling buoyant, half drunk and excited, Sharon less so, as they stepped out into the Parisian night and made their way to the Fleur des Amite restaurant. It was a brilliant meal. Langoustines, a tasty Daube de Boeuf Provencal followed by Tarte au Limon with cream. Sharon enjoyed it all, yet felt totally ill at ease as Brian continued to rave on about the suitcase. As they drank brandy and coffee, she dabbed her lips with a napkin and stared long and hard at her husband.

    “Why are you looking like that?” he asked.

    “I’m just thinking about the past 40 years. We’ve had our struggles but we’re happy, aren’t we?”

    “Yes. I suppose so. The kids have grown up, we’re free, and I’ve got my pension. Mortgage paid off. We’ve a few bob in the bank that’ll see us out. So?”

    “So we don’t need Hemingway’s suitcase.”

    “Oh, love, come on!”

    “What will it bring us? Maybe a few extra quid and a lot of unwanted attention. In any case, the hotel will claim it as their own. And you can’t simply nick it and hope to get away with it. If you do, this’ll be the last wedding anniversary we’re having.” He regarded her for a few moments. He realised how close they were, how much in love they had always been. Yet he found her attitude over this hard to accept.

   “So what do you suggest then? We just finish the week, go home and forget it all? The greatest discovery in modern literature? We have a duty here.”

    “Bollocks!” she spat.

    “That’s not ladylike language.”

    “There’ll be worse if you don’t shape up and listen, Brian. Duty my arse! Before we leave that bloody awful shack of a hotel, make sure you place that wood panel back as securely as possible - no trace that it fell off. Then once we get home, drop an anonymous line to whoever publishes Hemingway’s stuff these days, telling them that his missing case is hidden in room 14 of the crappiest old hotel in Paris. That way we can watch the developments from a safe distance. No intrusion into our lives, and you’ve done your duty to literature.”

    “Maybe I should tell the hotel manager that it’s there.”

    “Don’t be daft! That’ll bring usinto it. We’ll get charged for damaging his crappy room. And suppose he already knows it’s there? Maybe he’s saving it for some kind of retirement pension. And another thing - it doesn’t belong to anyone - not the hotel, not us - but the late Ernest Hemingway’s descendants. It was a theft, after all. Some creepy 1920s French toe-rag crept onto that train and nicked that case. Maybe that hotel used to be where he lived. The only solid thing to come out of this is that we know where it is.”

    It was raining heavily when they arrived at East Midlands Airport. Paris now seemed a fantastic blur. They had hardly spoken on the plane. Brian had stared through the window, his thoughts occupied solely by the suitcase, that hidden, historical, stolen, secret suitcase packed with utterly epic literary history. Had he really seen those manuscripts? Would he wake up and discover that this had all been some bizarre dream, and that they were actually coming home from Sicily? But it wasn’t a dream.

Once home they unpacked. He made some tea, sat at the table and lit the last of his Gitanes. Sharon came and sat opposite him. She felt relieved to be back and calmer now that they were well away from the eye of a potential storm.

    “Well? Did you enjoy Paris?”

    “What do you think,” he said, blowing out a cloud of aromatic smoke. She waved her hand.

    “At least I’ll be glad when you’ve finished those bloody awful fags. That stink will always remind me of that hotel. So; what are you going to do?”

    “Spill the beans.”

    “Don’t do anything stupid, Brian.”

    “No. I don’t think it’ll involve the police, or publishers. We need an academic on this.”

Unable to sleep, that night, crouched over his laptop with a glass of Scotch close by, he typed his letter.

Rector of the Academy of Paris,  The Sorbonne

47, rue des Ecoles  75230 Paris Cedex 05

Sir or Madam,

This is exclusive and important information which I hope your department can deal with.

I have to inform you that the batch of missing manuscripts written by Ernest Hemingway prior to 1922, which were in a suitcase stolen from a train in the Gare de Lyon in December that year, are hidden in a cavity in the wall of room 14 in the Hotel Saint Medard off the Rue Monge.

Sincerely, A literary well-wisher.

He hit the Google ‘translate’ button and printed the message out in French, along with an address label. After sealing it and applying a stamp, despite the fact that it was now 3 am, he ventured out into the damp street and dropped it into a post box.

    Brian’s weekend reading included a regular treat; The Guardian on Saturday and The Observer on Sunday. For two weeks he tuned into every TV and radio news broadcast and scanned every single page of his weekend newspapers. He felt unsettled, uncomfortable, and seethed with regret that he hadn’t removed the case himself and done something more specific and realistic. But it was too late now. It seemed obvious to him now that his letter to the Sorbonne would have been treated as a stupid, cranky prank. Who in their right minds would have believed such an anonymous claim posted from England? Three weeks went by. The nights drew in, the clocks changed and winter was upon them.

    Then, one night as they finished dinner, as they watched Channel 4 News, with the sound turned down, Brian spluttered into his teacup as the familiar image of Ernest Hemingway appeared on the studio screen behind presenter Jon Snow. He fumbled for the remote. Sharon started, dropping her cup.

     “What the hell - “ he raised his hand at her interjection.

     “Shut up! Shut up! This is it!” He turned up the volume as they watched a report from Paris with the voice-over;

    “High drama in the French capital this week, after an anonymous tip-off that one of the biggest mysteries in 20^th century literature appeared to have been solved. In 1922, a suitcase full of typewritten manuscripts by the then un-published Ernest Hemingway was stolen from a train at the Gare de Lyon station. Until now, it had been suspected that the thief had thought them of no value and probably dumped them in the Seine. On Monday a group of academics from the Sorbonne University descended on this hotel - where the anonymous source claimed the missing suitcase was hidden. But the management were far from helpful. The manager, Claude Lebrauc, refused to co-operate and called the police.”

The scene cut to Lebrauc standing at the hotel reception desk, with the voice-over translating;

    “This is a ridiculous prank. My family have been here in this building since 1912, and if there had been any such items hidden here, they would have been discovered by now. Of course, I welcome the publicity, but since we finally allowed the gentlemen from the Sorbonne to examine the room, they too have come to the conclusion that this is exactly what it appears to be - a wicked hoax.”

The item ended with a shot of room 14 with the wall panels removed. The cavity was empty.

The item finished, and Brian turned off the TV. Sharon turned to face him, smiled, then burst out laughing. Brian was angry.

    “Oh, so that’s hilarious, is it?” But she laughed again.

    “Yes, in a way. But more than that, it’s a relief. That bloody manager will have nicked that case and any bets it’ll turn up somewhere in a couple of years. But it won’t involve us, so can we get on with our lives now, please?”

Brian stared down at the tablecloth, scratched the back of his head and shrugged. The adventure was well and truly over and done.

   

As the TGV from Paris came to a halt in Geneva’s busy Genève-Cornavin railway station, a well-dressed Swiss couple stepped onto the platform. He was a big well-built man with a full grey beard, in his late 60s, wearing an expensive Homburg hat and a smart overcoat buttoned up against the Yuletide cold. She was perhaps twenty years his junior, clad in furs, her blonde tresses tumbling onto her shoulders from beneath a sable hat. They ordered a porter to bring a trolley, onto which their luggage was loaded to be taken to a waiting limousine out on the station concourse. It had begun to snow.

    Among the expensive Gucci, Rimowa and Victorinox travelling cases, the misshapen, polythene-packed item festooned in parcel tape was totally incongruous.

   The uniformed Chauffeur stepped out, opened the boot and began to load the luggage into the car. He wrinkled his nose in a slight expression of puzzlement as he reached for the polythene package. But his tall and elegant master waved him away, lifted the item himself and placed it on the limo’s rear seat.

   “A little sentimental souvenir, Maurice,” he purred, as the chauffeur touched the peak of his cap in a salute.

    “I will take care of this. It belongs to an old family friend…”



Keep Your Trousers On

July 15, 2015, 7:03 am

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Never Forget your Umbrella

Sex: the thing that takes up the least amount

of time and causes the most amount of trouble.

John Barrymore

The forbidding exterior in 1930 of what was to become Gravesend Sea Training School.

The following is an extract from my Merchant Navy memoir, ALL ABOARD THE CALABOOSE. In January 1959 I arrived at Gravesend for a 6 week course on catering which saw me eventually entering the Merchant Navy as a steward on my 16th birthday April 1 1959. Back then few of us knew much about sex. Therefore it was down to the government's Crown Film Unit to tell us would-be mariners just how life threatening a bit of illicit nooky could be. DON'T READ THIS IF YOU'RE SQUEAMISH.

There were lots of different things we needed to know about before we sailed around the world. Those old Gravesend instructors came from that put-upon, wartime generation where caution and good manners were the order of the day. We were warned about personal hygiene, for example. If I had opted for an apprenticeship as a plumber or a bricklayer I doubt whether my boss would have been too bothered if I farted now and again or had cheesy armpits. It would have been the adept manipulation of the pipes, bricks or wiring which mattered. Nor would he have been concerned if I belched, sneezed or had less than pristine fingernails. The same lack of concerns, for all I know, probably extended to the lads on the deckhand’s course, but for us stewards, everything, from your teeth to your haircut to the shine on your shoes was of maximum importance. And we were constantly reminded about manners and etiquette. Step aside for the lady; open the door for her. Call her madam, call him sir. Smile; assume a posture which demonstrated dignified servility. Always hold a chair for a lady, be discrete and gentle when offering to light her cigarette. Smile graciously. Be clean, clean, clean, and once you’d become clean, get washed again. Not too much Brylcreem or Brilliantine. Teeth cleaned morning, noon and night. Never smell of cigarettes.     Those of you already growing whiskers, no five’o’clock shadow, no facial hair. Beards and ’taches were for film stars, not stewards. And tattoos maketh not the sailor. In fact, there were so many aspects to our potential grooming we were only a few places removed from becoming cardiac surgeons. In addition, all this hygiene had to be carried over into our personal life beyond the dining saloon,  Mr. Hawkins duly warned us of this one rainy afternoon after showing us how to make mint sauce and carve a leg of lamb.

    “After dinner tonight, lads, I need you all to assemble in the recreation hall at 8 ’o’clock for a very important talk about some special ladies who you are bound to meet on your travels. And you’ll have a very interesting film show. So be there – and that’s an order.”

    It was a memorable gathering that night in the hall. The chairs were arranged, cinema-style, in rows, a screen had been erected and Mr. Hawkins and a man we were led to believe was a ‘medical officer’ stood at the back of the hall supervising a large film projector on a table. Captain Adams went to the front of the hall and called us all to attention.

    “Pay attention, gentlemen, because the film you are about to see is crucial for you all, and if you take on board its implications the memory of this will keep you aware of your duty and your health. You are young men about to embark upon a career which will take you to distant lands, and you will experience exotic cultures and different ways of life. As sailors, it is inevitable that you will strike up relationships with the opposite sex.”

The very mention of the word ‘sex’ resulted in a ripple of subdued guffawing across the hall. Adams looked impatient.

    “This means girls, and women.” More guffawing.

    “Yes, you may be sniggering now, but unless you pay attention in detail to what you are about to see, then you’ll be laughing on the other side of your faces in a few months’ time and your career could well be over.”

This was all a trifle mystifying. The lights were turned out and the legend in stark white on a black background flickered onto the screen: 

Crown Film Unit

Central Office of Information

Ministry of Health

Central Council for Health Education

I can’t recall the actual title of the film, but it involved the words ‘Danger’ and ‘Venereal Disease’. As I’ve already mentioned elsewhere, time and memory play tricks, so what follows is a hazy melange of the things I recall being included in this terrifying few hundred feet of celluloid.

     During about 45 minutes we all went from cocky young testosterone-driven whippersnappers to sickened, paranoid wrecks. Images of poor servicemen’s mangy meat and two veg were juxtaposed with recreations of shady ‘foreign’ nightspots where immoral ‘floozies’ flashed their stocking tops as banknotes changed hands between them and various sailors and soldiers who disappeared up darkened stairways. There was maximum drinking and smoking involved and the occasional obligatory smoochy saxophone on the soundtrack. Eventually, these hapless young ‘men of the world’ were back in Blighty, visiting hospitals with pus running out of their willies - and suspicious scabs all over the place. The massed intake of breath from the gathering at each new level of horror almost created a window-crushing vacuum in the hall. There was one sad guy relating the treatment for clearing his urinary tract with the use of something casually referred to as ‘the umbrella’, a device probably designed by the Spanish Inquisition and patented by Torquemada. This would, apparently, in its umbrella-closed mode, be inserted into the end of the penis, thrust deep inside the urethra, and then the umbrella would be opened up and pulled out slowly to ‘scrape’ away any leprous accumulation, accompanied by maximum agony and much screaming. That’d bloody teach us to mess about with ‘loose’ women! The sledge-hammer morality oozing from the screen would have given Mary Whitehouse palpitations, had it not been for the frequent appearance of scabrous, crab-infested todgers. Then, by the time we’d got past the comparatively near-benign nature of gonorrhoea, we entered the mordant twilight zone of syphilis, complete with blindness, brain damage, wheelchairs and agonizing death. The whole thing was rounded up with a look at pubic lice, condoms, personal hygiene, how to wash behind the foreskin, etc., etc. As the whole grisly spectacle flickered to an end, the silence in the hall was complete. Captain Adams dismissed us and everyone filed out into the cold yard in abject silence.

    What followed that night, in retrospect, was as poignant as it was hilarious. With just an hour to go before we were all due in our bunks for lights out, the wash house was packed with lads, trousers around their ankles (me included) scrubbing away furiously at their heavily soap-sudded nether regions. Considering that about 85% of us had never got beyond the ‘giggle band’^[1], our only erotic liaison being our right hand, then the power of the Government Information film service was fully proven. To go to sea after this fearfully memorable episode and not see the opposite sex in a totally threatening light would take some doing. How would we know the difference between a woman and a ‘lady’? What lurking horrors of the flesh might lie behind a come-on smile? Not that any of us had ever had a ‘come-on smile’, but it was worrying none the less. For months to come, even the sight of lingerie in a shop window would have us scratching. Considering all this today, it’s also worth noticing how male-orientated such advice was. Men were the victims, women were the threat? But if that was the case, where did the women get these bugs from in the first place? We knew for a fact now, after watching the show that the old idea of contracting syphilis from a toilet seat was a non-runner.  There was another film made at the time by the COI entitled The People at Number 19  in which a woman (again) has to face up to the fact she’s caught the clap, and suffer a breadknife-brandishing husband. Hopefully we’ve moved on a little since then, thanks to penicillin.

 

A naughty lady ready to send us to the clinic in The People at Number 9

    As the weeks rolled on, the January intake of 1959, the amassed owners of the cleanest genitals in Gravesend began to look forward to their final days and ultimate discharge, ready to go home and put their names down for the big adventure - their first ship. We had various tests and exams, and my friend Owen and I got through with flying colours. On the final Friday before being sent home on the Monday, we were given a most peculiar lecture by our favourite catering taskmaster, Mr. Hawkins. For once we’d had a decent lunch that day - sausages, as I remember, with onion gravy. We’d had a boat drill on the pier which jutted out into the Thames, and afterwards we were led into the hall by Hawkins, who snapped us all to rapt attention with a puckish grin on his round visage.

    “Well, girls, you lot will be on your way home in a couple of days to your mums and dads.”

We’d noticed before that Hawkins had a penchant for referring to us as ‘girls’, which some of us were not particularly happy about.

    “Now, girls, to begin with, when you join your first ship you’ll have the lowliest rank on board - even lower than the ship’s rats or the cat - catering boy. You’ll have to be on your guard, watch, listen and learn - and that means making sure that your superiors are kept very happy by your charming young company. The purser, the cook, the second steward, the chief steward, all these gentlemen will want you to make them happy. So if the chief calls you into his cabin late one night because he’s feeling lonely, then if you want to get on in life, it’ll be up to you to provide him with a little happiness.”

Owen nudged me and we exchanged glances. What the bloody hell was he on about? Somewhat bravely, Owen put his hand up. Hawkins beamed in his direction.

    “Ah - a question - an inquiring mind. Yes?”

    “Sorry sir,” said Owen, “I’m a bit puzzled - how can we make a chief steward or a cook any more happy - I mean, if we do our job right, won’t that be enough?”

Hawkins chuckled and nodded sagely.

   “Ah, the innocence of youth. Let me put it this way, girls. Let’s imagine; you’re on your ship; I’m your chief steward and you’re wondering about making me happy one lonely night. You decide against it, so I talk with the Captain. So think about it - what would you rather have - the Captain’s discharge with your kitbag on your back, or my discharge with me on your back?”

Years later, I think we all had a complete understanding of what was, back then, Mr. Hawkins’s baffling scenario. It would become startlingly clear in the first months at sea that our fresh-faced innocence and lithe youthfulness could fetch a high premium out on the briny - if you were so inclined.

    And so the great day came. We cleaned those damned shiny dustbins for the last time, collected our suitcases, all said goodbye to one another - sadly, forever - and caught our trains home. Riding home on Tuesday March 24^th 1959 on the bus from Hull’s Paragon Station I was in a state of buoyant elation. I’d done it. I had a whole week to myself, and my 16^th birthday, the age at which I was eligible to sail, was but 7 days away on April 1^st. I’d had two years at a nautical school and six weeks at a sea training school, I had a passing out certificate, a seaman’s discharge book, and I was ready to go.

---

[1]The Giggle Band, you ask? This is a reference to that area of flesh (in the days before tights) where a woman’s stocking tops ended and the knickers began. As the old hands would say, ‘get past there and you’re laughing’. 

ALL ABOARD THE CALABOOSE (400 pages) IS ONLY AVAILABLE TO FAMILY, FRIENDS AND OLD SAILORS, BUT IF YOU'D LIKE A COPY, MAIL ME AT roybainton@hotmail.com and I'll give you the details.

---

CAMERON'S DREAM TICKET

July 21, 2015, 4:39 am

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DAVID CAMERON’S DREAM

Well, comrades, here he is, in all his glory at the poignant and emotional Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival on July 19^th - Jeremy Corbyn, the man the Tories fervently hope will win the Labour leadership election. It’s a rousing speech, packed with truth and common sense. But what was once a mighty steam locomotive, the Labour Party, is now nothing more than a battered little clockwork train set, something the Bullingdon Boys’ nanny has scattered over the Axminster for George, David and Boris to play with.

Corybyn’s heartfelt rhetoric is meat and drink to an old leftie like me, but there are bitter social and political bullets to bite. Prominent among these is the fact that the current generation of adult voters are basically ‘Thatcher’s Children’. They have had the notions of equality, compassion, public service and fair play blow-torched from their souls by decades of aggressive right wing corporate propaganda. The poor have participated in their own demonisation; just watch Benefits Street, Benefits by the Sea and all the other poverty-porn, and there they are, being manipulated by media Svengalis with all the skills of Josef Goebbels. They have been taught in a rough fashion that the word ‘socialism’ is some kind of semantic Ebola. They have opted for the quasi-racist vacuity of UKIP and the blatant lies of a cabinet of millionaires who have convinced them that the only viable society is one run by global corporate finance. Profit before people; the only way. Selling socialism to this electorate, or the 56% of young people who decided not to vote, is as valid as selling snow to Eskimos. They don’t want a fair society. They  proved that beyond doubt on May 7.

If Corbyn wins the leadership election, such a result would send orgasmic tremors throughout the British media. Murdoch, Dacre, the Barclay Brothers and the entire Tory Party will crack open the Bollinger by the crate. All the fascistic-tinged rhetoric will be wheeled out; ‘Evil, Out-Dated Reds’ will be splashed across front pages, Britain’s ‘recovery’ will be ‘endangered’  and every past aspect of Corbyn’s life will be dragged up. If the Tory establishment could saddle Miliband with the sobriquet ‘Red Ed’, then they’ll have a field day with this leader - he’ll be everything from Stalin through to Trotsky and Pol Pot.

So, is there anything positive for an old socialist to enjoy should Jeremy win? Well, yes, actually, there is. It will highlight the rank and file’s utter disgust for the treachery of fervent Tory-supporters like Harriet Harman and Liz Kendall. But the nicest thing will be this. As the Labour Party is now little more than a shambling zombie shadow, bereft of any of its original values, it will indeed be stone dead by the end of this year. But it would be nice to think that, with Corbyn as leader, as the decaying corpse is lowered into the grave (or tossed into Trotsky’s ‘dustbin of history’) that it will be buried with its old socialist heart still beating.

Picking up the Banner 1957-1960. Painted by Gely Mikhailovich Korzhev-Chuvelev, 1925-. At Russian State Museum. Oil on Canvas, 156 x 290cm.

As for those of us old flat-earthers left behind, we can live out our lives like banished cave-dwellers on the fog-bound slopes of a mountain of dreams. We’re the fag-ends of a vanishing species who believed in a society where everyone cared about everyone else, a world where the words ‘welfare’ ‘care’ and ‘compassion’ had not been replaced by two gilt-edged catch-all nouns; AUSTERITY and GREED.

Vote Corbyn and let’s go out with a bang.

Jeremy Corbyn - Most Dangerous Man in Britian

July 26, 2015, 7:49 am

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Yes, this is a rant. But it's a rant about something real, something meaningful. The metrocentric suits of the current Labour Party should be as outraged at what they've allowed to happen, just as this man is. Where's the passionate argument in the slick, on-message blathering of Kendall, Cooper and Burnham? If it takes a manic performancelike this to stir up anger, then let him rave. He's nailed it, big-style. 

A FORTEAN MYSTERY

July 30, 2015, 2:39 am

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Charles Hoy Fort (1874-1932) was an American writer and researcher 
into anomalous phenomena. Today, the terms Fortean and Forteana 
are used to characterize various such phenomena. 
Fort's books sold well and are still in print today.  
I first began reading Fort's works 50 years ago, 
and one Victorian story collected by Fort, 
which came from a curious report in the London Times, 
has always haunted me. 
The following yarn is my fictional take on that peculiar event.

Out of the Marvellous

The chess-board is the world,

the pieces are the phenomena of the universe,

the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature.

The player on the other side is hidden from us.

Thomas Huxley,

English Biologist (1825-1925)

Dark and ragged like the damaged wings of a savaged bird stood the forlorn branches of the trees, frozen in misery against the oppressive low grey fog of the stooping sky.

     In the Year of Our Lord 1853 this was not the day of absolute bliss they had in mind. Long had the bride and groom dreamt of their act of union, envisioning it beneath the chirp of spring’s arriving birds, perhaps wheatears or chiffchaffs, hovering over them in an azure firmament. Yet there were no avian guests. That the Gods had decided different could only be an ominous disappointment. It seemed as if the sun itself, like a spent candle, had spluttered out and died. Even the grass of the graveyard appeared to have forgotten its duty to be green, opting this day for a strange shade of murky khaki. Only the medieval stonework of the tiny church was true unto itself, its ancient green and mustard freckled moss crawling across the rugged slabs, obliterating the marks of long-dead masons.

    The air around the church was heavy, a perverse, crushing weight of humidity, not of a tropical nature, but a dense, cold clamour which stroked humanity with pitiless dead fingers. It seemed to make even breathing difficult, as if some foul, silent consumptive wall of wet air had insinuated itself into every present pair of lungs.

    There were few guests in the church. Perhaps thirty at most. The happy couple stood at the altar as the vicar went through the motions. The ring was produced. There was a kiss, a couple of sighs from the congregation. These were not rich people. Not notable. They were poor workers. A stonemason and a kitchen maid. They had wished for a bright day in the little old church on the hill, but had staggered into something else entirely. The pre-nuptial bliss of heady expectation appeared to have been swept away, and the joy of their blessed union only seemed to materialise in brief flashes. The organ played, accompanying a shuffle of feet and sporadic coughs, the couple turned to make their way along the aisle, and then it happened.

  Clang!Scrape. It was loud, disturbing.

Everyone froze. The old oak double doors flew open, to reveal the elderly verger, his creased black cassock hanging limp around him, his visage pale, wide-eyed, open-mouthed and momentarily speechless.  The congregation gathered in a tight group behind the bride and groom wondering first what that sound had been, and then directed their communal gaze in the direction of where the verger pointed with a shaky, bony and.

   It was huge. A ship’s anchor, caught up in the curvature of the Gothic arch of the church’s main portal. A proper ship’s anchor, wet, even displaying here and there tiny remnants of shiny, deep green seaweed. Although it must have weighed more than a ton, it was not on the stony floor, but up there, its huge bent iron fluke grating and jammed aloft against the door’s keystone. The vicar pushed his way forward through the gathering to face the dazed verger.

    “What on earth is this, Robinson?” The Reverend’s accusatory tone suggested that this bizarre maritime intrusion might be his verger’s doing. The anchor moved slightly, its pointed fluke crunching, clanking and grating against the old stonework as if it was being pulled from above.

    “I do not know, Reverend. I am at a loss … but step outside please …” The puzzled vicar followed the stunned verger out onto the path which cut through the churchyard. Behind them, the murmuring wedding party shuffled more like mourners out into the grey, wet, clinging air. The verger pointed up beyond the church door. The anchor was attached to a heavy, three inch thick hawser which stretched skywards, disappearing into the low, sinister overcast which even obscured the church’s steeple. Every few seconds the hawser snapped taut, pulling at the trapped anchor.

The groom stepped to the front of the crowd.

    “I have heard that certain men in France can fly a steam-powered dirigible or a balloon, sir. Perhaps such a voyage is in progress here and their anchor has become trapped.”

The bride’s portly, red-faced father came to his new son-in-law’s side.

    “No lad, no. I’ve seen balloon men in flight. In all my years in the navy, I have come to recognise a ship’s anchor when I see one. Look at the size and weight of the device! Look at the heavy rope attached - such a weight would be enough ballast to stop any balloon leaving the ground! If any ballooning men tried to even coil that rope in their basket, why, there’d be no room for humanity. This is a ship’s anchor, lad, aye, and a big ship at that.”

   The chattering party, all staring upwards, now assembled itself in a wide semi-circle around the scene as the vicar walked up and down, his face a mask of frustration.

    “Well whatever this is, ladies and gentlemen, we are 80 miles from the sea here, but if that anchor is not released from the archway then the fabric of our church could be damaged.” His eyes following the line of the rope in the sky, he cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted.

    “Ahoy there! Ahoy above! Slacken your rope and your anchor will be freed! Call back if you can hear us!”

Everyone fell silent. From above the low, heavy cloud there came a strange rumbling, a sound as if cannon balls were rolling on a wooden deck. Then a creaking, like timbers challenged by a tidal swell. The rope snapped tight again, and with a crash a piece of masonry fell from above the church door, shattering into chunks on the ancient flagstones.

The vicar shouted again, as did other men in the party, followed by more wooden rumbling from above. The rope was taut now, the anchor’s fluke still trapped beneath the arch. Slowly, the crowd fell silent until suddenly the bride, her bouquet in one hand, pointed upward with the other, gasping;

    “Look! Look! Oh, sweet Lord!”

Where the rope vanished into the heavy overcast, a pair of legs appeared entwined around it. They were clad in cream canvas trousers, the feet in black leather boots. To the massed gasp of the observers, the rest of the figure shinning down the hawser came into view. He wore a waist-length navy blue moleskin jacket, a white canvas waistcoat and a black fur cap. He descended slowly, his young, pale face a mask of anxiety framed by straggly, wet ringlets of blonde hair. His livid-lipped mouth appeared to open and close like that of a fish in a pond. When he reached a height just above the church door, he paused and stared fearfully down at the circle of startled faces.

    “What is the meaning of this, sailor?” said the vicar, adopting a haughty, pompous tone. But the young man’s mouth, fish-like, simply opened and closed again. He turned his face away from them and descended a little further until his boots touched the arch above the church door.

    The groom, father-in-law and vicar stepped forward, staring up at the terrified youth.

    “You must free this anchor immediately!” barked the vicar, “and take your balloon elsewhere!  This is a house of God and this is outrageous!”

The sailor slid down further and began frantically kicking at the anchor’s shank in an attempt to free it.

     “Tell your captain to slacken off!” cried the father-in-law. The youth simply stared back, his mouth opening and closing silently, wearing an expression one might expect from someone who had seen a gathering of ghosts.

The groom turned to the verger.

    “Do you have any ropes here in the church?”

The verger clutched his temples.

    “Yes. In the belfry, we have some there.”

    “Then let’s fetch them” said the groom, “that lad needs our help!”  Whilst the hapless sky sailor continued to kick and pull at the trapped anchor to no effect, the verger, the father-in-law and the groom re-appeared with a large coil of rope. The father-in-law, proving his nautical past, hastily tied a running bowline, stepped beneath the anchor and threw the loop up over the anchor’s free fluke. He paid out the line, the men in the party instinctively stepped forward and grabbed it, and all began to pull together. The anchor clanged and scraped, more small chunks of masonry fell to the ground, whilst the strange, silent sailor hung on for dear life still kicking at the anchor’s shank which had now begun to move. Sensing imminent danger, the gathered women moved several paces back and stood watching in silent awe among the churchyard’s mossy gravestones.

   Suddenly, the hawser from the sky slackened off, the anchor broke free and dropped from the archway, and suspended on the end of its swinging rope just a foot above the church path, moved pendulum-like an a wide arc, narrowly missing the assembled charitable tug-of-war team with the terrified sailor clinging on, his eyes tightly closed as if expecting some disastrous impact. The anchor swung back and forth a couple of times, then became still, hovering above the path, its taut hawser a vertical sisal column, its source still obscured by the dense low cloud.

The frightened young sailor, still hanging on, now opened his eyes as the wedding party, now just a few feet below him, gathered around, regarding him in some awe.

    “Who are you?” asked the vicar.

The mariner freed one hand and pointed up along the hawser. Again his mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out. Then, without warning, he lost his grip, and with an unpleasant thud, tumbled onto the church’s gravel pathway, landing spread-eagled on his back. The father-in-law charged forward, supported the stricken youth with an arm around his shoulders. His eyes, set in that pale, sad face, were deep blue and filled with tears. The father-in-law stroked the lad’s head.

    “There lad, there. Where in God’s name have ye come from? Here - you’re wet through. Talk to me son - can ye talk? What’s up yonder - is she a balloon?”

The sailor’s chest heaved up and down. He shook his head. He seemed to have difficulty in breathing. When his faint voice finally broke through, it came with a gargle, as if his lungs were filled with water.

    “I am drowning, sir. Truly this place and all here are marvellous. But my ship awaits, my captain is a hard man, and I cannot live here, though verily, sir, I wish I could. Take me out of the marvellous … help me lest I drown; I can breathe no more …”

The father-in-law laid the lad gently down.

    “Get yonder rope free!” he shouted, pointing to the hovering anchor.

    “Now, lads, step up. We must tie this poor soul to the anchor, or he will die.”

Three men held the limp sailor aloft as the father-in-law tied him securely to the anchor. As the vicar stood back and observed the suspended youth, a strange, deep wave of compassion engulfed him. The vision of the sailor secured to the anchor shocked him as it was reminiscent of the crucified Christ. The vicar fell to his knees and silently prayed as the father-in-law stood by the anchor, and in a loud voice projecting upwards yelled

    “Haul away above up there - haul away before your brave salt dies his death!”

Above from the greyness came a wooden rumbling and what sounded like the thump of footsteps on timbers. The anchor suddenly lurched upwards, two feet, four feet, stop, start, stop, start, until, just before its shank pierced the dense sky, the limp sailor opened his eyes, smiled down at everyone and waved. Then the whole bizarre apparition was gone.

    Later on that day, the foul wet air cleared and the sun came out. In the village inn, as the wedding party tried to enjoy their feast, they muttered in subdued tones about signs and omens. It would be, said the groom, ‘a wedding day to remember’. But when the somewhat shaken village blacksmith burst into the bar and demanded a large rum, telling the smirking landlord he had witnessed a ship, a frigate in full sail, pass by in the sky above his forge, then apart from the wedding party, the other regulars laughed out long and  loud. But the vicar, the verger, the father in law, the bride and groom knew that whatever life held in store, at least the world they inhabited was, according to a spectral, drowning sailor, nothing less than marvellous.

v v v v

SPACE IS ACE!

August 6, 2015, 4:03 am

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WE’RE ALL COSMONAUTS, REALLY …

 

I blame this movie for fueling my empty future hopes ...

As one gets painfully older, it becomes more difficult to ‘live’ in the present when the past is such a rich place to dwell. Also, as biology continues to fulfil its dark promise of decay, we realise that the future we hoped for in our youth will only happen after we’ve expired.

When I was a boy, back in junior school, I was totally obsessed with two subjects. One was the life of Tsunke Witco, a.k.a. the great Lakota Sioux chief Crazy Horse, the other was space travel.

The cast of BBC Radio's 1950s epic serial Journey Into Space - star actor Andrew Faulds (bottom left) a.k.a. 'Jet Morgan' even became a Labour MP!

Even now I can look back to the spark which sent me into orbit. It was hearing Gustav Holst’s Mars,from his Planets Suite. I remember my inspiring, imaginative Mother telling me as I heard that terrifying military beat climbing to an apocalyptic crescendo that this music was all about the Martians invading the earth. War of The Worlds was one H. G. Wells story she was well familiar with. Throwing a nightly dose of Radio Luxembourg’s serial Dan Dare, Pilot of The Future into the mix, and Dare’s weekly starring role in the Eagle comic, plus Monday night thrills from the BBC’s Journey Into Space and I was already designing rockets and space suits.

I would have been about ten when I discovered there was something called the British Interplanetary Society, and I wrote them a letter. I can’t remember what I wrote, but in those pre - I.T. days, when the good manners of communication still allowed real time for thoughtful human interaction, I received a reply, welcoming my interest. I don’t have the letter now (I wish I did) but it was signed by someone called Arthur C. Clarke.

Space stayed with me, and my Mother nurtured my interest by taking me to see any film which touched on the subject. Prominent among these celluloid signposts were George Pal’s Destination Moon and the utterly weird (and scary) The Man From Planet X. I made rockets from the cardboard tubes from toilet rolls and egg shells. At school I drew space suits and wrote stories about alien invasions. Space was ace.

The film which scared my short pants off and led me to the cul de sac of UFO research.

In my teens I discovered Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, H. P. Lovecraft, Richard Matheson, Theodor Sturgeon and many others, the imaginative, often lurid covers of their Sci-Fi paperbacks a weekly bookshop thrill. I also discovered the UFO phenomenon, and that colourful, harmless old fraud, George Adamski. His hilarious book Flying Saucers Have Landed accompanied me everywhere, a kind of down-market companion to Moby-Dick. All this mystery and spiritual speculation convinced me that there must be other species out there in the cosmos, and that one day I might see them.

The wonderful, inspirational light of my literary life, Ray Bradbury

After the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, I thought we were on the way to the stars. I was 26 years old, and imagined that by now, almost five decades later, we’d have bases on the moon and colonies on Mars, and that I might get to see the earth from the comfort of an orbiting satellite hotel.

And that was the future. My wishful past  was driven by an imaginary future which never happened, in the same way that the great proletarian revolution never happened, or my guitar playing never reached beyond Jimi Hendrix’s boot heels.

Now, since the publication of my 2013 work The Mammoth Book of Unexplained Phenomena,I’ve become cynical about all those interplanetary hopes and dreams. I look at photographs taken by rovers on Mars and wonder. There may have been someone up there once, but not any longer. Are UFOs from another planet? I doubt it. If so, and they’ve so much superior advice to give us, why don’t they land and get on with putting us straight? We’re still murdering one another, demonising the poor, whilst the rich stuff their pockets and laugh in our faces. Come on, Man From Planet X, or Klaatu from The Day The Earth Stood Still - show us what space means for humanity. Sort us out! We’ve sent dozens of probes spinning through eternity and not received one phone call from ET. If UFOs are anything, then they’re the only true image the future has to offer; they are time travelling tourists, unable to land and interfere with the time/space continuum; three centuries hence some futuristic Thomas Cook will offer trips back to see what a mess we all made of our world.

Timperley's Interstellar voyager, the mighty Frank Sidebottom - Space is Ace!

Yet, to quote another terrestrial hero, Frank Sidebottom, Space is Ace and will, for me, always remain so. So now I’m careering out of life’s orbit, past the stratospheric time limit of three score and ten, I have a deep suspicion that once our personal solar batteries conk out, then something else might kick in. Maybe, in death, a gate to the cosmos opens and we’re allowed to enter, as in Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey.

Therefore I think we’re all cosmonauts at heart. So celebrate your past, enjoy the present, and smile cynically at your imagined future, because it’ll only happen when our own internal computer shuts down. Roger that, CapCom.

The Dark Ocean

August 19, 2015, 1:52 am

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The Dark Ocean

 

Is there anywhere more spookily remote than a lighthouse?

‘Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse,

strewn with many a philosophic wreck.’

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Is there a lonelier, more isolated job other than that of a lighthouse keeper? For those seeking solace, with time to meditate, surrounded by the high seas, without the inherent dangers involved in being a mariner, then perhaps the lighthouse with its daily routines is as close as you’ll get to a monastic life. Yet the strange and the inexplicable are always keen to poke their icy fingers into the lives of isolated men.

Great Isaac Lighthouse, Bimini

The Biminis are a group of small islands about 50 miles (80 km) east of Miami, Florida. There’s a lighthouse there which is a familiar landmark for cruise ship passengers en route to Nassau from Florida. It’s un-manned now, although equipped with an automatic light. However, the Great Isaac lighthouse is the scene of a famous lighthouse mystery.  On 4 August 1969, (some sources claim December 22) when the relief crew was sent out to change shifts, the light station was discovered to be abandoned. This was very odd, because everything in the building was undisturbed. The two lighthouse keepers had simply vanished, and have never been found.  Due to its location, the Great Isaac mystery has become yet another curio in the catalogue of Bermuda Triangle mysteries.

Around the world’s remote and dangerous coastlines there are many abandoned lighthouses, often complete with stories of hauntings. One such location is the Point of Ayr lighthouse, which has stood, in various incarnations, since 1776 on Talacre Beach in Wales. This isolated yet cheery red and white sentinel rising from the sands has no doubt saved many a sailor’s life as it guided their ships across Liverpool Bay from the Welsh town of Lllandudno.

Abandoned? Point of Ayr

It was abandoned in 1840. Although since then it has at times seemed derelict and neglected, it was refurbished in 1994, but remains un-occupied, standing as a lonely watchman in front of the bay’s offshore wind farm. But as with many such buildings, the Point of Ayr light is known to be haunted. Occasional visits to the location by spiritualist mediums have resulted in claims that the spirit of a lonely man, known to locals as Raymond, who died of a broken heart, haunts the light. There have been sightings of a ghostly lighthouse keeper walking around the top of the tower. Some tourists report feeling unwell and disturbed when they’ve been there. Now the broken-hearted phantom has been commemorated by a innovative local artist 

Angela Smith, whose 7-foot tall sculpture (left) made of hundreds of pieces of highly polished, medical-grade stainless steel, named ‘The Keeper’ stands on the walkway at the top of the tower, the wind whistling through his open metallic ribs like some otherworldly wind chime.

Sometimes notions of ‘curses’ attached to lighthouses have been solved with the appliance of science. A so-called ‘cursed’ lighthouse for a while was the Ship John Shoal light, off Delaware, USA. The US Congress decided that a light was needed there in 1850, but the sheer logistics of erecting the building became a huge challenge, and it took 27 years to build the iron tower, which was not finished until 1877. Its name derives from a wrecking at the location of the light in 1797, when the ship John, en route from Germany to Philadelphia, ran aground on Christmas Eve. This misfortune put paid to the Yuletide expectations of her German crew who were looking forward to festivities in their planned destination. Thankfully, the cargo and crew were all saved and the men enjoyed the unexpected seasonal hospitality of sympathetic families along the Cohansey River.  As well as other peculiar legends around the light, it was commonly believed that the place was cursed in the 1880s. This took the form of a persistent illness that left several keepers sick or paralyzed after extended stays. The curse went on for years, until it was discovered that the structure’s red leaded paint was seeping into the rainwater tanks. All the old paint was stripped away and replaced with a coating of tar. Problem solved; the curse was lifted. However, 3,000 miles away across the stormy Atlantic, the new lease of life the Ship John Lighthouse crew enjoyed may well have been welcomed by a trio of their ship-guiding peers. Sadly, even a coating of tar on their abode would not have saved the Scottish lighthouse men Donal Macarthur, James Ducat and Thomas Marshall.

The Mystery of Eilean Mor

Eilean Mor is one of the principal islands in the Flannan Isles, also known as the Seven Hunters, a lonely cluster about 20 miles (32km)  west of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. Although it means ‘Big Island’ in Gaelic, at 39 acres this isn’t a massive place, but for sailors a forbidding one. It rises 288 feet above the Atlantic Ocean, with perilous sheer cliffs up to 150 foot high. It was here in 1895 that work began on a 75 foot high lighthouse, and from 1899 it commenced beaming a guiding light to sailors up to 25 miles out at sea. In 1971 the last crew of keepers left and the light was automated, and it still shines on today.

Where did they go? A wild and lonely place ....

 More fiction and speculation has been churned out over this genuinely strange story of vanished lighthouse men than any other island-bound maritime mystery. I was cajoled by some of its less steadfast aspects when writing about it several years ago, relying on versions told by such romancers as Vincent Gaddis in his none the less fascinating Invisible Horizons (1965).  Some of what has been passed off as fact for the past century appears to be anything but. This is regrettable, because the story needs no such embellishment – its truth stands alone in its genuine weirdness. As well as Gaddis and others, we can blame the colourful imagination of Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (1878-1962), a prolific poet and close friend of Rupert Brooke. His 1912 ballad, Flannan Isle lies at the root of much of the unnecessary detritus this puzzle has gathered down the decades.

Yet, as we crowded through the door,

We only saw a table spread

 For dinner, meat, and cheese and bread;

          But, all untouched; and no-one there,

          As though, when they sat down to eat,

          Ere they could even taste,

Alarm had come, and they in haste

          Had risen and left the bread and meat,

          For at the table head a chair

Lay tumbled on the floor.

There are shades of Conan Doyle’s fictitious rendering of the Mary Celeste here, and things are not helped by a later stanza which goes:

And how the rock had been the death

          Of many a likely lad:

          How six had come to a sudden end,

          And three had gone stark mad:

          And one whom we'd all known as friend

          Had leapt from the lantern one still night,

          And fallen dead by the lighthouse wall:

Vincent Gaddis: Inspirational romantic: He never let the facts get in the way of a good story ...

Eerie hints of creeping madness, shifting personalities, the wages of loneliness and isolation. Meat and drink to a poet. The three keepers, James Ducat, Donald McArthur and Thomas Marshall, were at the end of a 14-day shift in December 1900 but had been prevented from leaving the island due to bad weather. A passing ship, the steamer Archtor, had found it odd on the night of December 15 that the lighthouse, which was normally visible for 25 miles, was unlit. When the relief tender, the Hesperus, set off to the island, the weather, with mountainous seas, had been

so bad that they had to stand off for some time, but when they did finally get a man ashore, the truth became evident, as this telegram of 26th December 1900 reveals, sent by Captain Harvie, the master of the Hesperus, the Lighthouse Tender:

‘A dreadful accident has happened at Flannans. The three Keepers, Ducat, Marshall and the occasional have disappeared from the island. On our arrival there this afternoon no sign of life was to be seen on the Island. Fired a rocket but, as no response was made, managed to land Moore, who went up to the Station but found no Keepers there. The clocks were stopped and other signs indicated that the accident must have happened about a week ago. Poor fellows they must been blown over the cliffs or drowned trying to secure a crane or something like that. Night coming on, we could not wait to make something as to their fate. I have left Moore, MacDonald, Buoymaster and two Seamen on the island to keep the light burning until you make other arrangements. Will not return to Oban until I hear from you. I have repeated this wire to Muirhead in case you are not at home. I will remain at the telegraph office tonight until it closes, if you wish to wire me.

Master, HESPERUS’

All the real, genuine documentation of this case, including the above, is available at the Northern Lighthouse Board’s website www.nlb.org.uk/However, you’ll not find any of the other revelations which have clung to the yarn as told by Gaddis and others. One of the strangest is Gaddis’s inclusion of entries from the log kept by the lighthouse men, the source of which he attributes to an article by Ernest Fallon in the August 1929 edition of True Strange Stories magazine. It was by repeating these entries when writing this story some years ago that I incurred the displeasure of the Northern Lighthouse Board. Regrettably, the following words are still being peddled by many ‘unexplained’ websites today: 

December 12th: Gale north by northwest. Sea lashed to fury. Never seen such a storm. Waves very high. Tearing at lighthouse. Everything shipshape. James Ducat irritable. (Later): Storm still raging, wind steady. Stormbound. Cannot go out. Ship passing sounding foghorn. Could see lights of cabins. Ducat quiet. McArthur crying.

December 13th: ‘Storm continued through night. Wind shifted west by north. Ducat quiet. McArthur praying. (Later:) Noon, grey daylight. Me, Ducat and McArthur prayed.’

December 15^th: ‘Storm ended, sea calm, God is over all.’

There are distinct echoes of Gibson’s poem here; ‘And three had gone stark mad’ Gaddis and others claim that these entries were all written in Marshall’s handwriting. The archives of the Northern Lighthouse Board do not corroborate this at all, the handwriting was Ducat’s, and the log seems to have only been kept up to the 13^th. There were some final brief notes by Ducat in chalk on the slate written about weather conditions at 9am on the 15^th. Whatever befell the men possibly occurred between then and the night of the 15^th. Nautical logs are not personal diaries. Any man writing about praying or God, passing facile comments about his shipmate’s moods or even using phrases such as ‘sea lashed to a fury’ would have faced more than a few questions from his practical, no-nonsense superiors ashore. Vincent Gaddis was a decent and highly entertaining writer, but his penchant for invention included such contrived conversations as ‘Looking forward to shore leave?’ asked the skipper, smiling. ‘Aye’, Moore answered, ‘It’ll be good to be back on land for a space where you can see people, talk, and have a drink or two. ’Tis pretty lonely there some times.’ Gaddis wasn’t there; how could he describe a ‘smiling’ Captain or report conversations? These little verbal excursions in his work might add colour, but they’re bogus, and none of these words appear in any of the documents held by the Northern Lighthouse Board.

Dee Time! Back in the 60s and much later ...

Yet my original resort to the creepy log book entries had another result. In 2006 I was contacted by none other than Cyril Nicholas Henty-Dodd, (1935 –2009), better known as Simon Dee, one-time high profile British television interviewer and disc jockey who hosted a twice-weekly BBC TV chat show, Dee Timein the late 1960s. (Some suggest that that Dee was the model for the Mike Myers character Austin Powers). Dee was keen to produce a documentary about the Eilean Mor mystery, but when I stripped it back to its factual basics, mysterious though they are, he expressed his ‘bitter disappointment’ and I heard nothing more.

The mystery of the log entries remains. Where did Ernest Fallon get these from? We must conclude that they are an invention. If not, and somewhere they exist, then they are genuinely strange. But Fallon wasn’t alone in his embroidery. Children’s author Carey Miller in his 1977 Mysteries of The Unknown includes the story that when the man, Moore, is sent onto the island from the Hesperus, when he ‘opened the door of the lighthouse three huge birds of an unknown species flew out to sea from the top of the light’. There is no evidence to support this. As ever, for the newspapers of the time this sinister event presented a field day for inventive journalism. It began with a report in The Scotsman dated December 28 1900, stating that one of the cranes on the island had been swept away by the severe weather. The official report contradicts this. Then the Oban Timesweighed in with three misnomers on January 5 1901. They reported that there was a half-eaten meal on the table in the lighthouse, (other reports even tell us that it was mutton and potatoes) that a chair had been pushed back as if its occupant had arisen in haste, and that there was an oilskin found trapped in the wreckage of the island’s west crane. The first two claims are entirely spurious and the third appears nowhere else, and in any case, even if the sea had swept away one of the keepers, the loss of his oilskin seems unlikely.

          So the question will remain forever; what really happened? All manner of suggestions have been presented down the years. The paranormal lobby have been busy creating legends of the ‘strange atmosphere’ and peculiar history of the island. Even piracy has been suggested – although they would have been a pretty dumb bunch of Jack Sparrows to attack Eilean Mor. The inevitable sea monster has been cajoled from the deep, time slips, other dimensions, and the evergreen favourite, alien abduction. What a bunch of Venusian tourists would want with three horny-handed Scottish lighthouse keepers is beyond imagination. If their disappearance was not supernatural, then the culprit must surely be the sea. Even though the lighthouse stood over 300 feet above sea level (91m) the sea at Eilean Mor was so violent at times that spray lashed the top of the light. The jetty was reported as battered and the rails were twisted. Perhaps two men had gone out in a storm and a third had seen a huge wave coming and gone out to warn them, with tragic results. We’ll never know. Freak waves are not restricted to Pacific tsunamis. When I sailed through a hurricane in the Pacific, I had no idea how high the waves were, but they towered above the ship like mountains. Two vessels in the South Atlantic in 2001, the MS Bremen and Caledonian Star, both encountered 98ft (30m) freak waves. Bridge windows on both ships were smashed, and all power and instrumentation lost. In 2004, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory ocean-floor pressure sensors detected a freak wave caused by Hurricane Ivan in the Gulf of Mexico. From peak to trough it was around 91ft high (27.7m), and around 660ft (200m) long. The open sea can be a terrifying place.

The mystery of Eilean Mor continues to inspire creative writers and musicians. Part of Gibson’s poem is quoted in Horror of Fang Rock, an episode in the Dr. Who series (complete with the misspelling ‘Flannen’). The Genesis song The Mystery of Flannan Isle Lighthouse is featured on the band’s compilation Archive 1967-75. The missing men inspired Hector Zazou's song Lighthouse, subsequently performed by Siouxsie on the album Songs From the Cold Seas, and the opera The Lighthouse by Peter Maxwell Davies is also based on the incident.

In 2000, exactly 100 years after they disappeared, silence fell for one minute on nearby Breasclete, west of Lewis, in honour of the three men, in an event covered by the BBC in Scotland.   A reporter with BBC Radio nan Gaidheal in Stornoway, Alasdair Macaulay,  who had researched the incident, said: ‘I have heard about a woman at Crowlista in Uig who had been hanging out her washing on that day. She was said to have seen a massive wall of water coming in from the west. She apparently ran back to the house as this large wave hit the shore. Her washing and washing line were said to have been swept away.’

Such is the all-consuming power of the sea; merciless, inhuman, and 
forever mysterious.

The Mammoth Book of Unexplained Phenomena by Roy Bainton, Constable & Robinson, London, Running Press Inc. USA. 600 pages of absolute weirdness.

I'm A Reject!

August 20, 2015, 8:07 am

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Rejoice, Rejoice - I’m a Labour Reject!

In 21^st century UK politics, what’s the very worst political animal you can admit to being? A Conservative? A Liberal? Scottish Nationalist? Let’s go down the list into murkier regions … a UKIP member? BNP? Monster Raving Loony? A closet Nazi? No. It’s none of the above. The worst political identity you could give yourself in the UK today is that of a Socialist.

   There once was a famous British political party called Labour. It advocated Socialist ideas, such as fairness, equality, a Welfare State with universal benefits, public ownership of all the main utilities such as power, transport, the Post Office and telecommunications. It even managed, against the odds, to create a wonderful entity called the National Health Service. But something happened along the way. The word ‘Labour’ wasn’t enough. It’s an old word. It has overtones of hard work, toil, and even …ugh!- dirty hands. So they cleaned it up by adding the prefix ‘New’. It no longer remained as an organisation with its original tactile egalitarian ideals. It ditched its Clause 4 commitment to the very people whose hard-earned union contributions had built it.

It became a ‘brand’, a logo, a floppy red rose waved by young, London-based metropolitans in smart suits, slick robots all fitted with a cranial chip from the central computer to keep them ‘on message’. 

They were younger, smarter and better dressed than Margaret Thatcher’s horrendous waxworks of deranged draconian despots. They made her dull, greyly anodyne successor John Major look like a discarded helping of cold fish and chips to their enticing quasi-political nouvelle cuisine of fresh oysters, guacamole, polenta and a nice crisp Sauvignon. They convinced us, hiding behind the tattered remains of Labour’s older banners, that even after all the ravages our society had endured under the Iron Lady that the pound shop Valhalla of ‘Socialism-Lite’ was just a vote away, and we fell for it.

    Fast forward two and a half decades and we are governed by a corporate cabal of right wing extremist tyrants who make Margaret Thatcher look like Rosa Luxembourg with Norman Tebbit as Che Guevara.

It seems utterly incredible, especially after the 2010-15 Parliament, that a dumbed-down British electorate could have put these beasts in the driving seat, but there they are. Thus Labour implodes, and tail-spinning like an out of control Boeing 747 they grasp at the joystick of a leadership election in the hope that its result will land them safely back on the long, vague runway of remote power.

 

What a scruff! Where's that man's jacket, for heaven's sake, and why has that beardy man got his hand on his hip?

Kendall, Burnham, Cooper: all the smart operators, veterans of Question Time, the glamourous, all the micro-chipped freshly-showered and coiffured message machines were assembled, batteries fully charged up from Blair’s national grid, with proper rose-waving ‘moral’ back-up from Kinnock, Campbell, Mandelson and Blunkett. But what’s this?!! Who let a Socialistinto the mix?

It had seemed a novel, quirky idea; a cynical nod to distant times gone by, a romantic gesture to stir memories of what the party once was, what it used to stand for. No-one would vote for him, surely? After all, the electorate preferred global capitalism, they preferred austerity and benefits cuts, and who were Labour to disagree with all that? So they allowed a ‘leftie’ to stand on their coconut shy, and became dismayed when all the hard balls were aimed it Kendall, Cooper and Burnham.

  

This has required some serious back-tracking. What a big, dumb mistake - asking people to ‘support’ the party for a measly £3. And so they changed the rules. A War Criminal, as a kind of political surgeon, was allowed to step into the theatre to give misguided potential Corbyn voters the involuntary heart transplant he so vehemently recommends.

But now that I’ve received the following anesthetic e-mail, I know I’m in good hands, because the man with the scalpel is a man of Faith, a peace envoy, a friend of Bono, and he’s good at stitching things up, as this reveals:

Leadership 2015 (leadership2015@labour.org.uk)

Sent: 20 August 2015 04:16:44

         

Dear Applicant,

 Thank you for your recent application to become a Supporter of the Labour Party. As part of the process to sign up as a Supporter all applicants are asked to confirm the following statement;  I support the aims and values of the Labour Party, and I am not a supporter of any organisation opposed to it.

 We have reason to believe that you do not support the aims and values of the Labour Party or you are a supporter of an organisation opposed to the Labour Party and therefore we are rejecting your application.

Although you may have received or may still receive a ballot paper, it will not work and if you do vote it will not be counted.

Should you wish to dispute rejection by the Labour Party you would have to submit and pursue an application to join Labour as a full member.

Kind Regards

The Labour Party

Sent by email from the Labour Party and promoted by 

Iain McNicol on behalf of The Labour Party, 

both at One Brewers Green, London SW1H 0RH.

Website: labour.org.uk.  To join or renew call 0845 092 2299.

A Labour Party spokesman said they would not comment on individual cases, claiming “The Labour Party has a robust system to prevent fraudulent or malicious applications. All applications to join the Labour Party as a member, affiliate or supporter are verified, and those who are identified by our verification team as being candidates, members or supporters of another political party will be denied a vote.”

The party said there are several reasons why prospective party members could be rejected. They include not being on the electoral register, or having stood for another political party at the last general election, local elections or European elections. They also include people who nominated candidates for other parties at previous elections, and those who are known campaigners for, or members of, other parties.

I belong in none of these categories. Having been a Labour voter and union member since 1961 (even though I became, for a while, a member of the Communist Party in the mid-60s, which I left because it was too middle class), I have voted Labour in every local and national election over the past 54 years. I was briefly a Labour Party member in the 1980s. I left after Kinnock refused to attend a Miner's picket line, and would have in any case when they ditched Claue 4. In the last local Council and Mayoral elections in Mansfield this May, I worked hard for Labour's unsuccessful Mayoral candidate, Martin Lee, wrote speeches and designed leaflets, and actively campaigned for Labour on the street. Admittedly, I'm an unrepentant, left-wing Socialist, an endangered species, but I always saw Labour, even under Blair, as a valid buffer against the increasing draconian nastiness of the 'New' Tories. I'm 72 and still working. Will I ever vote Labour again? I doubt it. Will this election end up as a fiasco? I suspect so. The current Labour Party is nothing more than a very dark, sinister and corporate right-wing shambles. Hardie, Bevan and Atlee must be turning in their graves. Now, can I have my £3 back? Oh, sorry - I forgot - that doesn’t happen under capitalism, does it … so here's your new logo:

Nazi Gold?

September 1, 2015, 4:28 am

≫ Next: Forgotten Hero

≪ Previous: I'm A Reject!

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Is There Nazi Gold in That Polish tunnel?

Polish authorities have blocked off a wooded area near a railway line after scores of treasure hunters swarmed south-west Poland looking for an alleged Nazi gold train.

The city of Wałbrzych and its surrounding wooded hills are experiencing a gold rush after two men, a Pole and a German, informed authorities through their lawyers that they had found a Nazi train with armaments and valuables that reportedly went missing in the spring of 1945.

If it's true, and the train is discovered, and indeed does contain an estimated 300 tonnes of gold bullion and other valuables, then it'll be stolen goods without a doubt. There have been some impressive heists since WW2, such as the Boston Brinks robbery of 1950,$2.5 million, Britain's 1963 Great Train robbery, £2.5 million, the Nice safe deposit boxes raid of 1976, an estimated $6 million, another $6 million in South Africa the same year in a platinum heist, and £1.5 million in jewels and valuables in Marbella, Spain. But add all these together and the fade into insignificance alongside the rapacious robbing machine that was Himmler's SS.

In my fanciful novel, Empire of Thieves, I covered the story of one of the final desperate raids by the SS. The dates and the characters are real; the dialogue is my imagination, so here's the chapter from the book. Enjoy.

Berlin, April 22 1945

Cops and Robbers

Capital … has no motion that has not been imparted to it,

but is a reservoir of force which will perpetuate the motion

of the machinery after the propelling power has ceased.

Senator Leyland Stanford (1823-1893)

Churchill had advocated seizing the capitals of Berlin, Prague and Vienna before they were overrun by the Red Army, but his voice no longer counted. Supreme Allied Commander General Eisenhower was contented with the idea of the Red Army taking Berlin. It was the prize many of Stalin’s troops had already died for. Yet the massive red tentacles of an interminable scarlet octopus of grim retribution, revenge, murder and rape were already enveloping the city, and the constant artillery bombardment and bombing had reduced its beautiful old streets to rubble. Already, to the east of Berlin, wherever the Red Army appeared, they carried with them an unforgiving hatred, a lust for vengeance for every foul thing National Socialist Germany had done to their homeland. This was their long-awaited revenge for the massacres, the blitzkrieg, the slaughter of millions of innocent people, the burning of villages and towns, the insane Nazi racial policies and the homicide of millions of Jews. The wild sons of the Steppes were an unstoppable wave of ruthlessness, pillaging vicious beasts, devoid of any chivalry, made so by the enforced lust of war. Their officers and commissars would turn blind eyes as Germany’s female population, from schoolgirls to grandmothers, would be repeatedly violated, with those who side-stepped the option of suicide left mentally and physically damaged for life. This tragic payback for Germany could have never been imagined by the arrogant ‘victorious’ regiments of the Reich, the blowtorch battalions who had rolled their murderous blitzkrieg forward in Operation Barbarossa four years earlier.

Yet still Hitler, pumped full of crazy pharmaceutical compounds with up to 17 injections per day, fumed in his bunker, waving a newspaper at Albert Speer, jumping with sardonic joy at the news that Roosevelt was dead, as if this was yet further proof of providence guiding him to victory. The dogged faithful, Bormann, Goebbels, Hitler’s doctors, Brandt and the quack Morrell, and the hard core of the SS still crowded the bunker, almost convinced that there would still be a turning point in the Reich’s history to avert defeat. By 11 April, American troops were within 48 hours of Berlin, but they advanced no further. Frustrated though the GIs were, they knew that the big prize was Ivan’s. And now, the Russians were at the city gates.

In the corpse-strewn streets the air was thick with the pulverised dust of atomized architecture and the acrid, all-pervasive smell of cordite. In sad futility, women still queued for that rare commodity, bread. Whenever an exploding shell shattered the queue, its bloody gaps of death were closed up as the surviving hungry wives and mothers moved forward. Better to step over a neighbour’s torn corpse and risk death than miss the last crumbs from the baker’s shelves.

The city was already in ruins from Allied bombing. Now yet more Soviet artillery shells began to fall in the streets. Berliners were finally getting a nasty taste of what their glorious  Wehrmacht had inflicted upon the besieged city of Leningrad for 900 days. The people faced these events with stoicism. They had placed their faith in a false god, an immoral, unprincipled madman. This was the culmination of his reign, the abrupt, premature end, after only 12 years, of his ‘1,000 year Reich’. Many had already taken their own lives, almost 7,000 of them.

Late in the afternoon of April 12 in the incredibly still standing Philharmonic Hall, Albert Speer had ordered a final performance by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. What was left of Berlin’s music lovers took their seats. It was cold as there was no heating, and the grim-faced audience sat swathed in their overcoats and scarves as conductor Robert Heger raised his baton, knowing this may be the last music he would conduct for some time. Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, Brunnhilde’s final aria from die Gotterdammerung, and the finale, Bruckner’s RomanticSymphony. The last, poignant tones of the Bruckner had been, as instructed by Speer, a musical message to all in the cold building; if you could leave Berlin, this is the signal to do so. Beyond this music, only degradation and death remained. As the fearful, chilled and unhappy Berliners began to file out of the venue, still mentally savouring the fine musicianship they had just witnessed, the insane reality of their situation in the Nazi state struck home with evil gravitas. Standing by the exits were the fresh-faced children of the Hitler Youth in their uniforms, holding forth baskets full of cyanide capsules, free, courtesy of the Reich, to all those who no longer thought life worth living.

By April 22 it was clear to those few Nazi diehards still in Berlin that it was all over.

At Berlin’s SS Headquarters some telephone lines still worked.

A robber 'just obeying orders' Josef Spacil

The one on the desk of the head of the SS budget administration section, 38 year old SS Standartenführer Josef Spacil was ringing loudly. He wiped the brick dust off the handset. The voice on the line was sharp and commanding.

“Spacil! Kaltenbrunner. How are things there?”

“Terrible, Herr Oberst. We can almost smell the Bolsheviks. They’re on the outskirts now. Everything is wrecked. Many of our departments are packing up and leaving. But we’re intent on going down fighting. How are things in Austria?”

“If you think you’ve got problems, think on. The Russians have taken Vienna. The Second and Sixth Panzers have been routed. The Bolshevik bastards are raping and pillaging. At least for the time being we’re safe here in Salzburg. But I will not surrender to the Russians, never, ever. The Americans are getting closer. So you need to get out of Berlin because if Ivan gets you, Spacil, you’re finished in more ways than one.  It can only be days now. How many good, reliable and committed SS men can you get together?”

“How many do you need?”

“Enough to rob a bank.”

“Sorry, Herr Oberst, did you say ‘rob a bank’?”

“When were your men last paid, Spacil?”

“They haven’t been paid for weeks.”

“Well, you’ll need to brief them well. Tell them if they want their wages then they’ll have to go and take them. Here’s the plan. The Reichsbank, Kurstrasse. You know it well?”

“Of course, but -”

“But nothing! Shut up and listen! We’re down here in the Alpine Redoubt and we’re going to try and hold out. But we need money to oil the wheels, and even though our men have been acting on all sorts of orders to remove stuff from the bank from various quarters recently, whatever’s left in those vaults is ours.”

Mr. Nasty: Ernst Kaltenbrunner

“You want us to rob the Reichsbank?”

“For God’s sake! Of course I fucking do! It’s not immoral; all the gold and currency in there is ours anyway. Think of it as a Robin Hood mission. Paying us - the poor, those who’ve been fighting on whilst that crowd still eat their soup and croissants in the bunker. We’ve been collecting loot for Himmler for five bloody years, so it’s time we had a bonus.”

“But what about Reichsfűhrer Himmler? What about the police?”

“Just remind yourself, Spacil - We are the bloody police!”

“But you realise, Herr Oberst, as I’m given to understand by the Leibstandarte’s Sepp Dietrich, that the Reichsfűhrer still has his own special vault and his deposits at the Reichsbank?”

“Yes, yes, yes. Fuck Himmler! That’s why the previous raids didn’t touch that. We know all about the bloody Max Heiliger accounts. He has them in several banks, and in Switzerland, but we can’t be everywhere.”

“So what do we do in that case? Is the Reichsfűhrer in contact with you?”

“Unfortunately, yes. Now, listen and listen carefully. He’s given me the name of an Untersturmfűhrer Gluckmann in the Leibstandarte. He’s still at Lichterfelde. Dig him out for this mission because he’s one of the Max Heiliger so-called ‘guardians’. Bloody Himmler, with his melodrama! He has the documentation to get the bank to open Himmler’s vault. Whatever’s in there, for Christ’s sake keep it separate from the other loot. Don’t send that by road. It has to go on the train - Himmler’s arranged a train from Tempelhof. It will terminate in a siding at Radstadt, and we’ll look after his precious cargo from there. Have you got that?”

“It all seems very complicated, Herr Oberst. There’s been a lot of allied bombing on the tracks.”

“There’s been a lot of allied bombing everywhere, Spacil! But we’re talking Himmler here, and that means complications, but even I refuse to get the wrong side of him. God knows where he’s going to crop up next. He failed miserably to be the next military hero with his bloody Army of the Vistula. He’s spent half his cowardly time in and out of Hohenlychen Sanatorium with his imaginary illnesses. Some military hero! The man’s a hypochondriac.”

“I’d heard he hasn’t been at the Fűhrerbunker since the Fűhrer’s birthday.”

 “I’ve heard that he’s going north to Flensburg or somewhere away from the fighting. He thinks he can open peace negotiations. That’s like asking a Jew to open a pork butchers. He was always a naïve bastard. But forget all that, it’s over, Spacil. Take as many men you can muster - good men, strong men, men who remember their oath - and they need to be fit - there’ll be a lot of humping and lifting - remember this Gluckmann, some of the Chancellery Leibstandarte lads would be right - make sure you’re all armed to the teeth, take plenty of ammo, grenades, everything - and if the staff at the bank complain, shoot the bastards.”

“What will the Fűhrer think?”

“If he ever decides to talk to me, I’ll let you know. Now, listen up. Himmler’s train is only four box cars and two saloon carriages with accommodation, so at least you’ll have somewhere to bed down between watches. It’s in siding number four at Tempelhof. Obersturmbannfűhrer Anton Schnelling is in charge of the yard. He has my authority and Himmler’s instructions. Don’t take any shit from the train crew, either. You’ll also need as many L-4500 heavy trucks as you can get.”

“I don’t know how many we have serviceable. Then there’s fuel.”

“Stop presenting obstacles, Spacil! There’s a Wehrmacht fuel dump at Luckenwalde. I’ve checked and there’ll be enough to get the convoy down here. If the army give you any trouble, you’ll have to either bribe them or fight it out. Tell them its important Reich business.  Whatever you can get onto the train, then see to it. The rest can go by road to the planes. You need plenty of fire power and security on the train. The rest of the stuff goes straight to Tempelhof airport, where  planes have been requisitioned in my name. You’ll have no trouble there. Load them, get your wife on board as well, and I’ll meet you in Salzburg. The train will probably take a while to get down here, depending on the state of the line and the bombing, but make sure the men on board stick with those box cars. Have you got all that?”

“How much stuff do you think there is?”

“There’s still loads of it. But take everything you can. Gold, currency, valuables, gems, the lot. We need it all.  It’ll take you all a while to shift it, but you’ll all be rich men if you do.”

“What do I say to the bank staff?”

“You say ‘hands up!’ Tell them the Fűhrer has requisitioned the state’s reserves for a final military push. Tell them anything, but get those vaults emptied!”

27 year old Untersturmführer Mickael Gluckmann’s platoon of the SS-Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler were among the most committed Nazis still in Berlin. Tall, stunningly Aryan with his broad physique, blonde hair and sharp blue eyes, as a Second Lieutenant with an Iron Cross he was looked up to by his men. They had all been through much together, and even as the Russian shells continued to fall around them, they refused to accept the slightest possibility that the Reich was in retreat. As he addressed the selected 36 men in the Lichterfelde Barracks, he could see by the expression on their faces just how much of an impact this final mission was going to have.

“So there you have it, men. We’ll be joined at the bank by other SS support squads and some Volksturm and Hitler Youth who’ll do most of the humping and carrying. Our job is to enter and secure the bank, take no shit from the staff or management, ensure they open the vaults on pain of death, and if they don’t, we’ll use explosives. But they’ve had so many official raids recently I think they’ll know the drill. This is different however. Our orders come direct from our highest authority, SS-Gruppenfűhrer Kaltenbrunner. The contents of the Reichsbank vaults must be released to us in order for us to continue the struggle in the south against Bolshevism.”  He proceeded, with the use of a large architectural plan of the bank, to allocate the men their duties and positions during the raid.

   It was dusk when they stormed through the massive doors. Faced with a grim SS phalanx of cocked rifles, Luger pistols  and machine guns, the stunned staff in what remained of the once beautiful Reichsbank building, much of which had been reduced to rubble by the US Air Force in February that year, did as they were told. Hands held high above their heads, they waited until their superiors, the directors, entered the main reception area. Led by an outraged, portly middle-aged man in a smart suit, black silk waistcoat and crisp white fly-collared shirt, they formed a thin rank between the massed SS and the rest of the terrified employees.

“What is the meaning of this and who are you?” Standartenführer Spacil stepped forward, his Luger aimed at the man’s chest.

“It’s plain to see who we are. So who are you?”

“I’m the duty manager, Artur Romberg. What are all these armed men here for?” Spacil clicked his heels and gave a nod.

“SS Standartenführer Spacil at your service, Herr Romberg. We have instructions from the Fűhrer to remove what deposits, reserves and other valuables remain in your vaults for the purpose of defending the Reich. You will facilitate this by opening all the relevant vaults and rooms to my men, and your staff will assist our men in removing the contents to the transports we have waiting outside. Any resistance to this request is punishable by death, as ordered by the Fűhrer. Heil Hitler!”

The confused Romberg dutifully returned the salute and glanced at his alarmed assistants.

“But this is outrageous! The SS and the Wehrmacht have already plundered this building several times this year! This is the national bank of Germany, not a village peasant’s savings account! This is robbery! I wish to see your authorisation!”Spacil stepped forward and jammed the barrel of his pistol into Romberg’s chest.

“This is my authorisation! Now do as I say before we start shooting - and if you refuse to open the vaults, we have explosives. Do you understand?”

Romberg’s face drained to a pasty white and he stepped back a few paces.

“Very well, very well. But I insist my clerks take an inventory of everything you remove, and that you sign a receipt.”  Spacil sneered, looked around at his squad, and they all laughed.

“That’s fine with us. Let’s keep it legal, eh? Now lead on - we haven’t much time - we’ve trains and planes to catch!” Romberg looked around at his assistants and the rest of the assembled staff and clapped his hands.

“Very well, ladies and gentlemen. You heard the officer. Down to the vaults and give all the assistance requested…”

Guards were stationed outside the building, others in the reception, as the clatter of jackboots echoed across the dusty marble floors as dozens of further armed SS made their entrance. Low trolleys were brought out ready for loading, and soon, in the basement, the nighty steel doors of the cavernous vaults swung open. For almost two hours the SS men, and the aged, wheezing members of the Volksturm, accompanied by the keen, fit teenagers of the Hitler Youth laboured to clear the Reich’s fiscal storehouse. Trolley after trolley was loaded with gold bars, sacks of jewels, canvas bags of foreign currency, until, at the end of the main vault, a further door remained unopened. Spacil grabbed Romberg by the scruff of his neck and pointed at the mystery entrance.

“What’s that - get it opened!”

“I can’t do that! It belongs to SS-Reichsfűhrer Himmler himself. That is his personal vault. It can only be opened on his own personal instruction!” Spacil raised his Luger at the back of the man’s head and fired a shot at the ceiling. Trembling, Romberg fell to his knees with a whimper, as Spacil violently shook him by the shoulder.

“Open the damned door, or the next one goes into your skull!”

“But I need authorisation! If I do this my family will suffer!”Spacil looked around and spotted Gluckmann.

“What’s bothering you, Gluckmann? Have you seen a ghost or something?”

“No, sir. It’s just that I was in the original Leibstandarte squad responsible for the items in this vault. We gave an oath to the Reichsfűhrer that we would protect it in perpetuity, no matter what, at all costs.”   Romberg looked desperately from Spacil to Gluckmann.

“I need a password for authorisation.”Gluckmann took a deep breath and murmured “Stahl Adler.”Relieved, Roberg began gesturing wildly to the staff.

“Very well, you know the drill! Open it!” Romberg’s dashed over to the heavy door, and worked at the combination dial until, at last, the assistants swung open the heavy steel portal.       

Spacil entered the vault with Gluckmann and surveyed the many neat wooden packing cases   stacked high to the ceiling. About a dozen of them seemed very peculiar, over ten feet long. Each one was carefully stencilled with the symbol of the Reich, beneath which were the letters SA H.L.H. As the removal of the contents began, Gluckmann retained his concerned expression.

“Some of the men here and I took an oath to the Reichsfűhrer to protect this material.”

Spacil laughed and patted the younger man on the back.

“Well, Gluckmann, rest assured that’s exactlywhat we’re doing, protecting it all, is it not? And as usual, Himmler’s as meticulous and organised as ever. And you and your Leibstandarte will be riding the train.  That’s some very careful crating and packing there. I wonder what the hell he’s got in those long boxes - any ideas?”

“Yes, sir. Very valuable Persian carpets. The Reichsfűhrer seemed to be particularly obsessed with them.” Spacil shook his head in dismay.

 “Dear oh dear. Bloody carpets. All this gold and he collects carpets. Only the best for the boss, eh? What’s the letters on the crates stand for - do you know?”

“Stahl Adler - Steel Eagle. That’s Himmler’s personal designation for the goods, but this is all officially deposited under the bank’s Max Heiliger account. H.L.H. is Heinrich Luitpold Himmler, so there’s no mistaking who this all belongs to. He’s going to be pretty incensed about this raid if anything goes wrong.”

Spacil pondered for a moment as the workers assembled and began moving the boxes.

“Well, maybe he should’ve stayed in Berlin to face the music instead of scarpering off up north. But just to keep him happy, we ought to make sure that what’s in this vault goes onto the train. You’d better oversee the loading, Gluckmann.”

A further two busy hours passed until the last of the 15 large, heavy Wehrmacht trucks had been loaded up. Spacil gave a cynical laugh as he signed Romberg’s hastily assembled inventory and receipt.

“Where is this all going to?” asked Romberg.

“That’s between me and Oberst Kaltenbrunner. Stop worrying. You’ve issued   your precious receipt. If I were you I’d pocket some currency and get out of Berlin tonight, before the Ivans get here.” As he finished speaking, another artillery shell fell across the street, exploding and shattering bricks and concrete into the air, some of it falling with a thud on the canvas canopies of the trucks. The low-lying cloud over the city glowed red with the reflection of a hundred fires, and the sound of gunfire and artillery thumped and crackled from all directions. Four SS armoured cars, two at the head of the convoy, and two at the rear, revved up their engines as a dozen well-armed motorcycle and sidecar outriders took up positions at either side of the trucks. Spacil boarded the lead armoured car, and standing like an old time western wagon master, waved the convoy into forward motion, shouting “Tempelhof!”.

In the second armoured car, Mickael Gluckmann lit a cigarette and looked back at the ruined Reichsbank. He would remember this night for the rest of his life.

v v v v

 Empire of Thieves by Roy Bainton is available for Kindle at Amazon.com or in paperback from the author, signed. If you'd like a copy, e-mail me at roybainton@hotmail.com  and I'll give you the details.

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Forgotten Hero

September 5, 2015, 12:08 pm

≫ Next: King Arthur's Reserve

≪ Previous: Nazi Gold?

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Forgotten Hero

It can be strange the way writers of non-fiction sometimes accidentally stumble into a story. Only two years into my full-time writing career in 1999, I was invited, as a script writer, by a friend, an academic working at the University of Kalmar in Sweden, to visit the country to meet a marine archaeologist, Bjorn Axel Johanssen, who was working on a potential TV documentary about wrecks at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. 

That night in Kalmar we visited a Chinese restaurant, drank copious amounts of beer, and ambled back through silent, snow-clad streets to Bjorn’s warm, comfortable apartment. Over yet more beers he produced a VHS tape and slotted it into the player. It contained enthralling footage, taken by Kalmar’s diving team, of various wrecks. In one WW1 wreck’s cabin, through the clear water, the divers’ lamps eerily illuminated a very well-preserved bunk with the captain’s sea boots still standing in a corner.
   I asked how this was possible. Bjorn explained. The Baltic is a small and shallow sea, its unique feature is its brackish water – a mixture of fresh water and saline seawater. This means that, for example, wooden wrecks, often quite ancient, remain well-preserved due to the lack of shipworms which infest other oceans. Iron and steel wrecks also look remarkable, without the intense encrustation of organisms you would see in the much deeper Atlantic or Mediterranean. We watched shots of four wrecks in a sequence, and then Bjorn pointed out the fascinating fact that all these vessels had been sunk in one day in October 1915 by one British submarine. I was intrigued. I asked him if he knew which submarine had wrought such destruction. He searched his files. It was HMS E19.

The TV documentary never happened. Back in the UK, in an attempt to salvage something from the trip, perhaps a magazine feature, I phoned the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Gosport. I asked if they had anything on HMS E19. The curator replied “Yes, a couple of pages. But would you like to see the service record of her captain?” I asked “Why - is he interesting?” She replied, rather slowly and cryptically “Oh, yes. Yes indeed… without a doubt.”

Two days later, the contents of a large manila envelope insinuated the heroic spectre of a murdered man into my writing life, and he’s been at my shoulder like a spirit pursuing redemption every day for the past fifteen years. I had found a handsome, brave and intelligent neglected hero, Captain Francis Newton Allen Cromie, CB, DSO, RN, but what was I to do with him?

Born in Ireland in 1882, educated in Wales, at the age of 18, Cromie saw his first action with the Naval Brigades during China’s Boxer Rebellion.  By the age of 24, he was in command of a submarine and had received the Royal Humane Society’s Bronze Medal after almost losing his life when he saved a drowning sailor washed overboard in the English Channel. Sartorially elegant, teetotal, handsome and non-smoking, Cromie was a skilled watercolour artist, musician, orator, singer and raconteur. Loved by his crews, in addition to his compassion and bravery, as the Bolshevik Revolutions broke, he also became a consummate mediator during many dangerous confrontations.

Until Lenin arrived back in Russia on his sealed train, the new submarines of Britain’s Royal Navy were fully occupied in the Baltic, fighting alongside the Tsar’s Imperial Navy, and the sailors of both forces looked up to one man. In September 1915 he took command of HMS E19, and two other submarines, entering the Baltic to join the Royal Navy’s sub flotilla based in Reval (today’s Tallin).

On October 3rd HMS E19 set out on a voyage of destruction, and on one day alone, October 11th 1915, Cromie sank 5 ships in the Baltic Sea. E19 scored 9 victims between October 3 - November 2, and on November 7th enraged the Kaiser’s Navy by adding the cruiser Undine to the casualties, topping off a successful patrol on December 4 by despatching the 1300 ton freighter Friesenberg. Yet the frigid Russian winter had set in, curtailing further action in the frozen Baltic until the spring.

Tsar Nicholas II visited Reval on the Royal Train and awarded Cromie one of Russia’s highest honours, The Order of St. George, the equivalent of the VC. In 1916 he would receive the DSO from the Admiralty, and later the Legion of Honour from the French. Cromie took overall command of the Reval Flotilla, and he and his 200 sailors were feted wherever they went. He soon mastered the Russian language. In a speech he made to assembled actors, poets and musicians in a Moscow Theatre, to a standing ovation he said:

“You are all artists - musicians, poets, novelists, painters, composers: you are creators. What you create will live long after you. We are simple sailors. We destroy. But we can say truthfully that in this war we destroy in order that your works may live.” 

The British contingent shared their accommodation in the long Baltic winter, with the sea impassable, with the Russian Navy on board an old warship, the Dvina.    In March 1917, The Bolshevik Revolution had begun; the Tsar’s Navy mutinied, murdering over 1,200 of its officers. His skill as a mediator saved many naval and civilian lives.1918 Trotsky signed the Treaty of Brest Litovsk, which brought Russia out of the conflict, making Cromie’s flotilla surplus to requirements, with no war to fight. The White Finns offered Cromie a personal sum of £50,000 to prevent Red Sailors from entering Helsinki, whilst the White Finns ‘dealt’ with their own Bolsheviks ashore. He refused the offer. The Treaty of Brest Litovsk stipulated the surrender of Cromie’s flotilla to the Germans. The Finnish business community then offered him, a personal fortune of £5 million for his seven boats. He refused, sailed the submarines into the Gulf of Finland and in the sight of the advancing Germans, scuppered the whole flotilla. His 200 men were then sent home on a gruelling ten-day train journey to join a UK-bound ship in Murmansk.

Cromie's Russian love, Sonia Gagarin, The Cruiser Aurora, on the Neva Pictures  by Graham Harrison Obstinate as ever, Cromie, though married man, was carrying on an affair with a young Russian socialite, Sonia Gagarin. He became a regular figure at Petrograd’s British Embassy, staying behind alone once his men had gone home to fight his clandestine war against Germany single-handed. Cromie was always the charming ladies’ man. He went around with two Baronesses, Baroness Schilling and the enigmatic double agent, Moura Budberg, Great Aunt to  Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg. Yet Sonia Gagarin was his true Russian love, whilst Baroness Budberg fell hopelessly in love with H. G. Wells.  Soon, the murky world of espionage, where Cromie was well out of his depth, would engulf him as the Allies secretly planned military intervention against Lenin. Among Cromie’s cloak-and-dagger associates was the duplicitous ‘Ace of Spies’, Sidney Reilly, the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s 007.

Following a carefully planned ‘sting’ by agents of the Cheka, (the fore-runner of the KGB) the British Embassy was raided by Red Guards on Saturday, August 31st 1918. Cromie, pistol in hand, defending his last outpost, was shot dead on the building’s grand staircase. He was 37.

 As they were all under suspicion of being complicit in Allied counter-revolutionary plans, the majority of British nationals in Petrograd were arrested and thrown into the Peter & Paul Fortress. With no-one to arrange Captain Cromie’s funeral, the task was taken on by the neutral Dutch and Swedes, who stepped forward to give a brave man a proper burial.  When his ragged, ad-hoc cortege passed along the banks of the Neva en route to Petrograd’s Smolensky Cemetery, along the embankment, lounging sailors on the decks of the moored Russian destroyers of the new Soviet Navy, suddenly realising whose funeral this was, spontaneously formed ranks and gave him a final salute.

Churchill praised Cromie as ‘a man of great ability’, and The Times carried a short report of his death on September 5th.  Cromie was posthumously awarded Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB)  from King George V, which was collected by his widow Gwladys at a special investiture at Buckingham Palace.

Cromie charming a lady at the Petrograd Tennis Club

Writing Cromie’s biography, Honoured By Strangerswas a tough job. Clues were thin on the ground. I spent 2 weeks in Russia visiting relevant locations. In the old British Embassy, which now houses the St. Petersburg University of Arts and Culture,  the staff and students were drop-jawed as I told them Cromie’s story, and the grand marble staircase still had the impact marks of the bullets fired on that fateful day.

The book got 18 rave reviews, then vanished as the publisher, Airlife of Shrewbury, went into liquidation. I retained the rights to the book but it has taken 14 years for it to be re-issued as an e-book. Throughout that time, I was determined to see Cromie’s story presented to the public. Saga magazine ran it as a 2-part feature, and paid for my trip to Russia. I’ve had countless meetings with TV production companies in the hope of a documentary, all fruitless. I’ve tried every avenue I could think of - Max Hastings, the History Channel, Channel 4, BBC TV and radio, even sending the book to Jeremy Clarkson. The only decent, gentlemanly response came from Private Eye’s Ian Hislop, who had the good manners to write and explain that he found it fascinating, but was ‘too busy’.

So here we are in the midst of a media orgy of Great War centennial documentaries, and I ask this question: a handsome hero, submarine warfare, an illicit love affair, the Bolshevik revolution, espionage, and murder: what’s not to like!? I’ve done all the hard work. There’s plenty of material, brilliant locations, hundreds of potential screenshots. But nobody seems interested. I’ve even written the screenplay.

Perhaps this particular hero is fated to remain neglected. A poignant coda; his heartbroken Russian lover, Sonia Gagarin, moved to the USA and married a Russian émigré called Rostkovsky. She died, childless and alone, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1979. She would never visit Russia again, and unless some creative director spots this story in time for the centennial of her lover’s murder in August 2018, neither shall I.

ROY BAINTON

Honoured By Strangers, 

The Life of Captain F.N.A. Cromie CB DSO RN (1882-1918)

is available as an e book from Constable & Robinson. 

Roy Bainton (Royal Literary Fund Associate Fellow, Society of Authors, NUJ, President, Nottingham Writers’ Club)

King Arthur's Reserve

September 9, 2015, 4:36 am

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KING ARTHUR’S RESERVE?

The question of whether or not they've found a hidden Nazi Gold train in the Polish mountains remains unanswered, and the latest news is that digging on the site will not commence until Spring 2016. So, keeping rail mysteries in locomotion, let's ponder over the persistent rumours that Britain has plenty of steam locomotives hidden away in them thar hills, a great organic mode of transport if we're ever 'nuked' by some unfriendly nation. Collect your flashlights, bring a flask of coffee, let's get subterranean.

Hidden Steam Locomotives, mothballed in polythene.

In 2002 I interviewed the late author Barry Herbert, who had been enjoying some success with his books on railway ghosts[1]. During the conversation he told me a peculiar story of his meeting with a retired Sheffield engine driver, who, like him, was a dedicated railway buff.

Warning; FOAF imminent - (a ‘friend of a friend’) yarn!

Other than the location, Sheffield, Mr. Herbert refused to give me details of his footplate friend’s identity, claiming that the retired driver had signed the Official Secrets Act.

The aftermath of the 1963 Beeching Report, which decimated Britain’s rail network, coincided with the dark days of the Cold War and the growing paranoia around the possibility of nuclear Armageddon. As a long-serving steam locomotive driver, the hapless Sheffield railwayman was among many who were designated the sad task of seeing their faithful engines, which were to be replaced by diesel units,  off onto their final trip to the breaker’s yards at Barry Island in South Wales. He’d already heard strange stories of footplate crews being sent home early from work only to return to find ‘their’ engine had vanished during the night. Then, one night in 1967, he’d been approached by ‘a man from the MoD’ and was asked, along with a selected few other drivers, to become part of a special crew taking selected locomotives on a journey not to the scrap yard, but to a secret location, where they would be mothballed for future use.  However, every driver, fireman or Fat Controller employed in this scheme was required to sign the Official Secrets Act and never reveal the whereabouts of their slumbering Thomas Tank Engines.

Urban Myth  - or Conspiracy nuttery?

Where do you hide a train?  There are plenty of old tunnels - do they contain secrets?

    The facts are thin on the ground, but there were selective records kept of all locomotives decommissioned and scrapped. Members of the train spotting fraternity are noted for their meticulous thoroughness, and those with a keen eye soon spotted the absence in the records of approximately 70 engines. It is known that at one time the Royal Engineers ran courses for the Sappers in steam loco driving[2].With the closure of the Longmoor Military Railway in 1969, which ran 70 miles between Liss and Bordon in Hampshire, the MoD lost its own in-house training facility. All this could be cited as circumstantial evidence, although it doesn’t prove locos were ‘spirited away’. However, if they have been hidden, then their location remains the Holy Grail for romantically-minded rail fans.

This secret fleet of locos, claimed by train aficionados to be Stanier 8 and 9F models, most of which were only 10 years old, with an expected service life of between 50 and 100 years were to be kept in reserve in the event of a nuclear attack. The USSR had already done this, as had Sweden and some other Eastern European countries. It became known as the SSR (Strategic Steam Reserve). Railway fans of a more quixotic bent saw these fine machines in the role of a mechanical King Arthur, ready and waiting to answer the call in the hour of Britain’s need. Being organically propelled vehicles, and, at the time, the UK having huge coal stocks, they offered the prospect of some kind of transportation in an apocalyptic Mad Max landscape where everything electrical had been trashed due to the immense electromagnetic radiation given off by a nuclear blast.

          The majority of serious railway observers regard the SSR as nothing more than a fanciful legend. But this is the age of conspiracies, and there’s no shortage of determined choo-choo theorists out there who remain determined to follow the rusty rails which they hope will lead to Arthur’s mothballed leviathans. So - if there’s any veracity in all this - where are the missing locos? Time to go underground.

It’s well known that had the Soviets threw a few megatons at us, then whilst we, Joe Public, would end up as crispy bacon, our noble leaders would have survived at the British government's alternative seat of power in the underground ‘city’ known as Burlington[3], 100 feet below ground at Corsham in Wiltshire. Covering 35 acres, 1km long and 200 meters across, its ten miles of tunnelling was built between 1956 - 61 to safely house 4000 ‘worthies’ -   the Prime Minister, Cabinet Office, local and national government agencies, intelligence and security advisors and domestic support staff. After Burlington was decommissioned in 1991, it still remained secret until it was declassified in 2004. You’ll find no railway lines down there, because our rulers had their own fleet of battery powered buggies to get around on. However, some SSR hunters cite Burlington’s close northern neighbour,- Tunnel Quarry Central Ammunition Depot as a potential loco store. It has underground railway platforms and a siding which many ‘hunters’ claimed as the final wartime destination for the Royal Train, transporting the Windsors to Burlington bunker; and that the 4,000 Whitehall staff’s requisitioned trains would disembark there ready for them to take up their Burlington residence. Tunnel Quarry remained in MoD hands, to house the Corsham Computer Centre, and its rail link[4] to the ex GWR main line could have been used to house the SSR[5].

Shunting at the Portal end of Box Tunnel in 1979

Another favourite potential locomotive hidey-hole is Brunel’s 1836 Box Tunnel[6] between Bath and Chippenham. Rail travellers would be familiar with the Western portal to the tunnel, but there’s also an elusive Eastern portal. This is a small side tunnel to the north leading to an underground quarry which supplied the fine Bath stone used for many buildings along the line. Some claim that the locos are hidden away there behind large steel doors.

Then, in 2000, I came across an intriguing web site run by one of the SSR’s leading enthusiasts, Rory Lushman[7]. Headed ‘Heapey, There’s Trains in Them Thar Hills’, this is a solid testament to the boundless investigative determination of an enthusiastic urban (or in this case, rural) explorer. After dismissing the idea of the Box Tunnel as the SSR’s hiding place, Lushman tells us “I was put in contact with a man called Paul Screeton who told me about another possible site. Paul has been investigating for many years unusual stories across the country, especially those concerning rail myths. He came across a railway worker who claimed to have seen lines of locomotives at an old former Ordnance factory in Heapey, Chorley.” The ensuing ten pages offer all manner of tantalising hints - elderly locals who used to call this place ‘the steam train graveyard’, and mysterious reports of nocturnal comings and goings. After his lengthy exploration of the site (albeit from a restrictive distance) Lushman sums up:

“The locals recount the tales of the steam trains being kept in the hillside. We know for definite that the site is still visited by lorries and the police. What is going on in this small village of Heapey? Do the locals care? Is there something more than old ammunition, or maybe even new ammunition kept in the hillsides. Could old steam trains be kept there?”

Of course, this was all pre-Google Earth. So using this I took a look at the site and indeed there are four roads which end in tunnel entrances, and the site is still secured by serious fencing and walls, and patrolled by security guards. Could there be trains in there? Not according to secret bases expert Alan Turnbull[8]. Turnbull admits that Heapey is still secret and still active, but has doubts about King Arthur’s locos.

Other possibilities include one of the three Woodhead tunnels in Yorkshire (although the favoured Tunnel 3 now carries National Grid cables), locations in Wales, and Scotland has its own clan of SSR hunters. This, for example, is from a forum discussion on the subject at http://www.secretscotland.org.uk/[9] :

“SSR is a possible explanation for the long tunnel in Greenock from the top of the town (where the Kilmacolm line and the link to  the Paisley line join) to Princes Pier.  This remained double tracked and the rails were still there the last time I looked …Why would you leave the rails in a disused tunnel?  The rails also continued through the Paisley link tunnel joining the Wemyss Bay line at Inchgreen … and I am talking recently.”

Ultimately, the Strategic Steam Reserve wears the same mythical cloak of Joseph of Arimathea visiting Glastonbury, or Adolf Hitler staying at a B&B in Liverpool on the late 1920s. Anti-SSR adherents (and they’re legion) have some strong counter arguments. Locos stored in damp tunnels would need regular attention to stop them seizing up or rusting away. And here’s another thought - perhaps we already have the SSR in the many preserved steam lines throughout the country. But these mighty iron beasts, waiting there in the subterranean darkness … it should be a notion to keep any fortean in motion.

NOTES & SOURCES

---

[1]Sadly, W.B. Herbert passed away in 2008, but his entertaining books are still available: See Railway Ghosts & Phantoms, David & Charles, 1989, The Phantom Goods Train, Silverlink Publishing, 1998, and A Stranger in The Fog, Silver Link, 2001.

[2]According to the latest REME recruitment video www.army.mod.uk/rolefinderbecoming a ‘train operator’ is still part of the overall transport training course.

[3]See the comprehensive website www.burlingtonbuker.co.uk

[4]There’s a video of how they built the bunker that backs onto the platforms...

http://www.britishpathe.com/video/underground-factories  

And in this video (at 2min 13sec) it shows the trains and bomb unloading in use in the tunnel...

http://www.britishpathe.com/video/su...for-our-armies

[5]See Who Killed The Strategic Steam Reserve at http://englishrail.wordpress

[6]Some claim Brunel deliberately aligned the tunnel so that the rising sun is visible through it on his birthday,   9 April each year,. True or not, in Angus Buchanan’s book Brunel: The Life and Times of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Hambledon and London (2002), on page 269 Buchanan writes:

‘The alignment of the Box Tunnel has been the subject of serious discussion in the New Civil Engineerand elsewhere. I am grateful to my friend James Richard for making calculations which convinced me that the alignment on 9 April would permit the sun to be visible through the tunnel soon after dawn on a fine day.’

[7]http://www.angelfire.com/mn2/Oubliette/Heapey.htmlLushman, Rory: Heapey - There’s Trains in Them Thar Hills!

[8]Alan Turnbull BAe Systems Heapey Depot Conspiracywww.secret-bases.co.uk

[9]http://www.secretscotland.org.uk/forum/m-1242495333/s-0/2009, an entry by ‘The Fox’.

In addition to the sites mentioned in the above,

Locomotive pictures: Stanier 9f: www.rmweb.co.uk

Stanier 8:  http://www.lner.info/locos/O/o6.shtml 

Has Corbyn Won the Booby Prize?

September 12, 2015, 7:55 am

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Jez we did… but …

If you’re an old leftie warhorse like me, then you couldn’t help punching the air this morning when Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour Leadership election hands down on the first round with an amazing 59.9% of the vote. As someone whose request to be a £3 supporter was rejected by Labour’s McCarthyite city machine, it felt good that, even without my insignificant cross on a ballot paper, such a victory had been achieved. Yet the fact that I was ‘purged’ along with an estimated 3,000 other applicants no longer bothers me. Being purged by Blairites is a badge of honour. And to you, smarmy warmonger, beneficiary of the ever distant ‘night and fog’ Chilcot Inquiry, no - we didn’t need that heart transplant after all.

This morning’s BBC TV coverage was an exciting bit of unusual daytime TV. But as the euphoria fades, one has to be realistic and realise that Corbyn faces a party and media Armageddon over the next 4½ years. Since Blair the Labour Party has become a comfortable place for careerists who have no idea of what it’s like to be a ‘worker’ in the old fashioned sense of the word. With the odd exception, very few of them have ever got their hands dirty. Of course, neither has Corbyn, but at least he understands the plight of those who have. These sartorially well-presented, overtly youthful metropolitans and mainly middle class academics have successfully defied the old adage that ‘politics is show business for ugly people.’ It undoubtedly still is for gargoyles like Theresa May, Eric Pickles and Iain Duncan Smith and other front bench Tory behemoths, who continue to substantiate William Makepeace Thackeray’s observation that “An evil person is like a dirty window; they never let the light shine through.”

The reason 21^stcentury Tories like the subjugated state of ‘New’ Labour is that Blair’s acolytes are so much like them. They see people like Liz Kendall, Chuka Umunna and Tristram Hunt as their slightly rebellious teenage children with too much pocket money; but don’t worry, like Prescott, Peter Hain, Jack Straw and Blunkett, eventually, successfully lobotomised, they’ll ‘grow up’, take the ermine and doze away at £300 per day plus on the House of Frauds red benches.

And now Labour faces a crossroads. The man facing the accelerating traffic from all sides, Comrade Corbyn, is the biggest coconut in the shy, the easiest target on the rifle range. If we judge by the expressions on the faces of Umunna and Hunt at today’s announcement, the first battles Jez faces will emanate from the wings of his own Labour stage. No doubt the knives have been sparking on the grindstone for the past month. If the Blairites can bring him down, then their prediction that his presence at the helm would keep them out of power for at least a decade will have been proven. “We failed because we said we would.” That will make them comfortable. They’ll cry crocodile tears at the opposition’s impotence, but still collect their salaries and expenses, picking up the odd few extra grand for those second and third consultancy jobs Parliament loves so much. With Corbyn returned to the back benches, and Dennis Skinner retired at home in Bolsover, Tom Watson locked in cupboard, they can carry on living the Blairite dream.

But good grief, Comrade Corbyn. How will you overcome the following?

•     The global corporate stranglehold on the world, Britain’s poodle relationship with the Pentagon, the NSA, and the looming threat of TTIP?

•        How will you face the challenge of 95% of a media who despise everything you stand for, and who will now open up a continuous artillery barrage of lies, ‘revelations’ and dirt digging on you and whoever you place in your shadow cabinet?

•       How will you fare in the lion’s den which is the City of London, the banks, among the wolves of Wall Street and everything they stand for? They own UK plc. Will they surrender it back to us easily?  How big a battalion of supporters across the land will you need to put fairness and equality back on the rails?

•    Comrade, do you really think the greedy, cash-grabbing buccaneering privateers who jealously guard their stolen possessions such as the railways, gas, water, electricity and the Royal Mail will suddenly capitulate to Socialist common sense?

The questions roll on, and you are not a young man. How will you halt and reverse the headlong Tory drive to wreck our NHS and replace it with a Virgin/Serco/G4S pay-up-front health ‘business’? Can you stop the destruction of the world’s greatest broadcaster, the BBC?

Yet despite the challenges, for the moment let’s steal a Thatcher phrase and ‘rejoice, rejoice’. All that can be hoped is that the momentum for change demonstrated in the past three months will continue to surge ahead. Yet even with half a million members, the Labour Party is a lone, limping hamster in the shadow of the marauding capitalist hyenas. So if it all fails, and evil continues to triumph as it has over the past decade, let us at least look back upon today, when a brief shaft of common sense sunlight pierced the clouds. It’s been a great day; it remains to be seen if any greater ones lie ahead. If there are, I hope I’m still around to see them.

Skullduggery!

September 17, 2015, 8:22 am

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Bones of Contention

(and other body parts…)

If you’re searching for tangible evidence in the murky fog of conspiracy theories, new world orders and secret societies, facts, figures and names are slippery eels.  However, beyond the myths and legends surrounding the Bilderberg Group, the Illuminati  and the Freemasons, in the leafy Ivy League enclaves of  Yale University  there is one  perceptible organisation, obsessed with death, the Skull and Bones Society. This secretive group, dating back to 1832, has been populated by some of America’s most influential industrialists, politicians, bankers and presidents, among them  George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and the failed presidential candidate John Kerry. Whereas their membership list[1] is no secret, their saturnine rituals, performed in The Skull & Bones Hall, otherwise known as the windowless, red stone Newhaven "Tomb” certainly are.

One of the ‘Bonesmen’s’ morbid fascinations has been the acquisition of body parts.

GERONIMO’S SKULL

In 1986, Ned Anderson, chairman of the San Carlos Apache tribe in Arizona, led a campaign against the Skull and Bones Society for the return of the skull of none other than the great warrior, Geronimo, who died of pneumonia in 1909. The story goes that in 1918, a group of 6 well-heeled ‘Bonesmen’ stationed at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, robbed Geronimo’s grave and removed the chief’s skull and some bones.

According to a centennial history of Skull and Bones by a 1923 initiate, Francis Otto Matthessen, there exists a 1919 log book featuring the skull, which is apparently now displayed in a glass case in the Tomb. Matthessen names the grave robbers, among them one Prescott Bush, the father and grandfather of the U.S. presidents.

Over the past decade 20 of Geronimo’s descendants have tried desperately through the U.S. Courts to have the skull returned, but in 2010 Judge Richard Roberts dismissed the lawsuit against Skull and Bones and Yale, saying the plaintiffs cited a law that applies only to Native American cultural items excavated or discovered after 1990[2].

The privileged and the rich: Skull & Bones members with a young George W. Bush, in light suit standing next to the grandfather clock.

MUSSOLINI’S BRAIN

The sad theft of Geronimo’s remains is just one example of the melancholic fascination with the possession of purloined body parts. In 2009, for a few hours on E-Bay, you could bid for three glass vials containing a dictator’s brain and blood.The initial asking price was 15,000 euros, or £13,000[3].

At the end of World War 2, after being shot with his mistress Claretta Petacci by anti-fascist partisans,  Mussolini's body was strung up on a lamp post by a petrol station near Milan. The Americans, no doubt interested in how the mind of a dictator works, removed his remains and kept the interesting bits. Mussolini’s wife, Rachaele, expressed her horror in her memoirs, and in 1966, America returned part of the former Duce’s brain to his widow. Yet the macabre story didn’t end there. Forty-three years later, Mussolini's granddaughter Alessandro discovered what was left of her granddad being peddled on E-Bay and the auction was abruptly aborted.

ANNE BOLEYN’S HEART

Heart searchers at Erwarton Churxh with researcher James Marston

You could drive through Erwarton in Suffolk and hardly realise you’d been there. The village, in the parish of Babergh, 14km south of Ipswich on the Shotley peninsula has a population of just over 100, and a pub, The Queens Head, which closed in 2009.

      Yet like many seemingly insignificant villages, Erwarton has an interesting little 13^th century church, St. Mary’s. The church organ dates from 1912, and it bears a curious attachment; a copy of a drawing by Holbein of Anne Boleyn, together with this legend: after her execution in the Tower of London, 19 May 1536, it was recorded that her heart was buried in this church by her Uncle, Sir Philip Parker of Erwarton Hall. It goes on to reveal that in 1837 a lead casket was discovered in the church, believed to contain the hapless Anne Boleyn’s heart, yet the casket had no inscription. Historian Alison Weir[4]  points out that ‘heart burial had gone out of fashion in England by the end of the fourteenth century’ and identifies the uncle in question as Sir Phillip Calthorpe of Erwarton, who was married to Amy (or Amata) Boleyn, Anne’s aunt. Yet the story of the heart reverberated around the world for decades after the discovery, and an article in the New York Times dated November 13 1881 confirms Weir’s correction and tells us that Erwarton’s parish clerk, James Amner, who died in 1875, was present with the rector, Rev. Ralph Berners, when workmen, restoring the church, found the heart-shaped lead casket behind the north wall. It was opened and contained what appeared to be a pile of dust. It was re-buried in the Cornwallis vault, beneath where the organ now stands.

THE REMAINS OF THOMAS PAINE

America’s independence owes much to Thomas Paine, Born in Thetford, England on January 29, 1737. A great revolutionary, the author of The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason, he inspired Washington’s army during the Revolution of 1776.As his service to America had been at his own expense. in 1784 New York State gave him a confiscated Royalist farm in New Rochelle, and Congress awarded him $3000. Paine died in New York City on June 8, 1809, and only six mourners, including two freed slaves, attended the funeral. He was buried on his farm.

        In 1819 Britain’s William Cobbett, political activist and author of Rural Rides, another ‘dangerous man’, at one time Paine’s rival who had come to admire him, without permission dug up Paine’s remains and brought them to London with ambitious plans for a memorial which never materialised. Paine’s bones, in a series of boxes, were handed down through the generations of Cobbett’s descendants. What became of them is uncertain, although it is claimed that there is a rib in France, some of his bones were made into buttons and in 1987, a Sydney businessmen bought Paine's skull while on holiday in London. It was sold to another Australian named John Burgess, reputed to be a descendant of an illegitimate child of Paine's[5]. The last bit of news on the tale was that Burgess’s wife was trying to raise $60,000 for DNA testing. Is it Paine’s skull? Both Gary Berton, president of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association and The New Rochelle Citizen Paine Restoration Initiative have been on the trail. Berton said the skull was  the right size and has some incised markings which are believed to have been made by Cobbett and his son.

However, all that definitely remains in New Rochelle of the great are his mummified brain stem and a lock of hair, kept in a secret location.

NAPOLEON’S PENIS

DON'T PANIC! THIS IS ONLY A PECULIARLY SHAPED POTATO... BUT YOU GET THE IDEA.

He may have ruled Europe with a rod of iron, but as for Napoleon Bonaparte’s physical extremity, much enjoyed by Josephine,  it seems to have suffered the ultimate indignity.  The unkindest cut of all, the removal of Bonaparte’s penis is said to have been carried out by his physician when the Emperor died in exile on St. Helena in 1821. The doctor may have given it to the priest who gave him the last rites. The priest’s descendants, the Vignali family  in Naples,  crop up in an article by Guy Lesser about a rare book dealer, A.S.W. Rosenbach,  in the January 2002 issue of  Harper’s Magazine. Sadly, the fleshy relic does not seem to have been well preserved. Lesser writes:  "Rosenbach evidently had been fond of showing off his collection of Napoleon relics to his most favoured clients, acquired in the mid-1920s, from the Vignali family of Naples, the descendants of Napoleon's chaplain and last confessor on St. Helena. The relics included hair, cutlery, clothes, and, as the piece de resistance, so to speak, a short length of dried leather, kept by Rosenbach in a small blue morocco box--and delicately referred to, in his day, as 'Napoleon's tendon’. The ‘thing' had been quietly sold by Rosenbach in the mid-1940s"

The wayward Willie has been compared at various times to piece of leather, a shrivelled eel or a bit of beef jerky. In 1927 it went on display in Manhattan, when TIMEmagazine likened it to a "maltreated strip of buckskin shoelace." In 1977, John Lattimer[6], of New Jersey, the world’s leading urologist who had treated Nazi war criminals awaiting trial, reputedly  forked out $3,000 for the battered baguette  (some sources claim it was $38,000)  and stored it under his bed where it stayed until his death in 2007. His daughter inherited[7] it as a probably unexpected bonus in her father’s will, and has had offers up to $100,000. At least that’s a more dignified sum for an Emperor …

St. FRANCIS XAVIER’S TOE

When the faithful go in search of a miracle, they can have no better reward than a body which refuses to decompose. At the age of 46, the zealous Catholic missionary St. Francis Xavier, worn out from his various Asian sea voyages, died on Saturday  December 3, 1552 on the Chinese island Sancian.The body remained buried – and fresh - for ten weeks in a coffin full of lime.It was then transported on a decorated galleon to Goa as the saint himself had wished to go there. Huge crowds, including the Viceroy himself, accompanied by the nobility, gave the cadaver a royal welcome.

On March 14,1554 the corpse, in a wooden coffin with damask lining, was taken to the Church of Ajuda at Ribandar. Dead or not, Xavier just kept on travelling. Two days later he was delivered to the Church of S. Paulo in Goa on March 16, 1554 and the strange life of a relic began when the little toe on the right foot was bitten off by Dona Isabel de Carom, a Portuguese woman, who claimed she was anxious to have a relic of the Saint. Apparently, it gushed blood. Three other toes were later removed from his right foot. One of the purloined extremities ended up at the saint’s birthplace, the  Castle of Xavier. After 60 years of not mouldering in the grave, the ecclesiastic souvenir hunters were at it again. On November 3, 1614,  Father General Claude Aquaviva instructed that the right arm was to be cut off at the elbow. It arrived in Rome  the following year, where it remains in a silver reliquary in the church of Gesu.Today, St. Francis Xavier is spread far and wide[8]. As well as the toe, displayed in a silver reliquary in a Goa cathedral, one of his hands is in Japan, there’s yet another relic elsewhere in Goa - a diamond-encrusted fingernail, and for all we know, he may have a toe in the door at other clerical locations.

THE MAORI HEADS

Back in less enlightened times, when Britain, France and Germany had empires, many branches of non-European humanity were seen simply as biological curiosities. Our intervention in such cultures back then must have had all the characteristics of today’s ‘alien abduction’ phenomena.  Even as late as the 1960s, touring fairgrounds, alongside their 2-headed sheep, often had their 10-foot mummified South Pacific Giant or a brace of tiny, unfortunate mummified  little characters doubling as either Polynesian pygmies or even ‘captured leprechauns’. However, the abduction of hapless tattooed Maoris developed into a grisly business for collectors of the exotic. Around the world today about 500 intricately tattooed Maori heads, known as ‘tai moko’ are either hidden away in dusty vaults or stored in boxes in various museum stockrooms.

The sad thing about this repugnant trade is that many Maoris were kidnapped from New Zealand, forcibly tattooed, then be-headed. In May 2011[9] the head of one such unfortunate warrior was handed back to the Maoris in Rouen, Northern France, where it had languished in the city’s museum for the past 136 years. According to museum director Sebastien Minchin, up until 1966 the head  had been displayed as part of the museum's prehistoric collection. Although the Maori committee and the New Zealand Consul were pleased with the hand-over, there are still an estimated 15 of these heads awaiting return throughout France, and in recent years 300 tai mokos have returned home from countries around the world.

‘EL NEGRO’

In the same dark, colonial collector’s  netherworld which decapitated Maoris lies the story of two opportunistic mid-19^th century  French taxidermists, the Verrueax brothers,  who, finding themselves at a burial site in the Kalahari desert, decided to take a break from stuffing lions and rhinos and exhume the body of a recently buried African man.  Soon they had him well stuffed and suitably embalmed, and before long the morbidly curious of Europe were queuing up to see their handiwork.

As the two maladjusted stuffers were a bit disappointed with their victim’s light skin, they decided on their own method of making him ‘African’ by adding a layer of black polish. He eventually came to rest in Spain at a Catalonian town called Banyoles, where, known to locals as ‘El Negro’, he resided for a century in the Darder Museum until in 1992, when Alphonse Arcelin, a local Doctor of Haitian descent, raised objections. The town fought to keep the corpse, and even issued boxes of chocolates commemorating his presence, but common sense eventually triumphed, and he was finally laid to rest in a dignified burial ceremony in Botswana in 2000[10].

SANTA’S STICKY BONES

Traditionally, St. Nick may squeeze down your chimney on Christmas Eve, but the jolly old redcoat’s mortal remains might put Rudolf right off his carrots.

The Middle Ages were the high watermark for the lucrative Christian business of attracting pilgrims to holy body parts and possible miracles. The long-dead, real St. Nicholas was originally lying in peace in a grave in Myra, Turkey. However, in 1087 the wily elders of the Italian town of Bari, looking for a suitable, cash-raising  religious attraction, hit upon the wheeze of hiring a gang of pirates (some called them ‘privileged mariners’) to nip over to Turkey and raid the Myra crypt and bring Father Christmas to Bari. The mission was a success, and the buccaneering blag is celebrated every year with a massive parade followed by a firework display.  Commissioned by Abbot Elia in 1087, the Romanesque basilica of St. Nicholas in Bari now attracts thousands of pilgrims who hope to benefit from the strange liquid called ‘Manna’ which oozes from St. Nick’s casket[11]and is said to cure various illnesses.

THE KING’S HEAD GOES HOME

King Badu Bonsu of Ghana’s Ahanta tribe  seems to have pushed the invading Dutch over the edge in 1838 when he decided to lop off the heads of two Dutch emissaries  and use them to decorate his throne. When Major General Jan Verveer discovered what had happened, he promptly had the king hung and then decapitated, and took his head back home to Holland. It’s modern location, the Leiden University Medical Centre, was revealed by Dutch novelist Arthur Japin, who was researching his latest work.  For decades, the poor old Monarch had been staring out through the glass from a dusty jar of formaldehyde in a store room in the centre’s anatomical collections department.  In July 2009 the Dutch government received a deputation from Ghana to arrange the head’s return. The ceremony was not a particularly joyful occasion, despite the ceremonial tipple of Dutch gin and the red robes of the visiting Ahanta tribesmen. They were still angry; the King’s great, great grandson,Joseph Jones Amoah exclaiming "I am hurt, angry. My grandfather has been killed…”[12] The party were also displeased as they thought they had only come to identify the relic, not return it, as they would first have to adhere to tribal protocol by reporting back to their chief. However, the king’s head went home a few days later, with the Dutch hoping that they’d righted a wrong.

            The ages of imperialism and colonialism may be long past, but the lamentable enthrallment with bits and pieces of the departed, or even the whole body, is still with us. The frozen cadaver of the ‘Prince of Pop’, Michael Jackson, remains un-buried in a bare brick room in a gold casket encased in a clear fibreglass container. Jackson’s 79 year old mother can’t bring herself to have him buried[13] for fear that grave robbers might moonwalk into the cemetery, and like a scene from ‘Thriller’, make off with a Jacko souvenir.

It’s a pity all those religious zealots, fairground barkers, taxidermists, and Lenin’s 1924 embalmers didn’t know anything about the modern science of cryonics.If the old chestnut about Walt Disney’s frozen noggin is true, saints and sinners could, like baseball legend Ted Williams, whose body was frozen in 2002, become major live attractions in the years to come.

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[1]http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/bones.htm For a full membership list

[2]Los Angeles Times May 3^rd2011

[3]Daily Telegraph July 20 2011

[4]Weir, Alison The Lady in The Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn  Vintage, 2010.

[5]For two engrossing leads on Paine’s remains read Collins, Paul The Trouble With Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine Bloomsbury, 2006. There is also a fascinating article in the New York Times dated May 31^st 1914 at http://query.nytimes.com/memo/archive-free/pdf?

[6]http://cg.scs.carleton.ca/~morin/misc/np/  This site claims Lattimer paid $38,000 for the penis.

[7]http://jezebel.com/5797973/a-visit-with-napoleons-penisThis is a video where the writer, Tony Perrottet, author of Napoleon’s Privates, (Harper Entertainment, 2008) visits Lattimer’s daughter to track down the penis. For some peculiar reason, although he verifies its existence in the basement,  the camera is not allowed to film it.

[8] TIME magazine, May 10 2011

[9]www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13329600

[10]"España sólo devuelve huesos del negro de Banyoles" (in (Spanish)). www.xornal.com

[11]At www.stnicholastv.com you can see a video of priests collecting the ‘Manna’ from the tomb.

[12]Huffington Post July 7 2009

[13]http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1206917/Michael-Jackson-grave-robbing-fears-force-family-freeze-body.html#ixzz1SkazE5xF

TAKE IT TO THE BRIDGE

September 23, 2015, 8:47 am

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                   TAKE IT TO THE BRIDGE:

A life in Music: What it’s all meant to me.

A brief musical memoir as submitted to

the BBC’s People’s History of Pop website.

THE MAN WHO STARTED IT ALL

 It had already started even before those 10  78’s which accompanied the record player I received for my 14^th Christmas in 1957; although I’d been blown away by Lonnie Donegan, when I played the first 78 - Reet Petite by Jackie Wilson, I knew there was much, much more to enjoy out there. I’d heard the best of it all by getting up at 5 am in the dark, doing my homework whilst listening the US charts on Europe’s AFN (American Forces Network) which, like Radio Luxembourg, fades in and out aurally like waves washing up a pebbled beach: when the sun came up, the music vanished,

but now I had ten platters of my own.

The magnificent Jackie Wilson

The first 45 rpm EP I bought was by Johnny Cash; it included I Walk The Line, and it even impressed my Mario Lanza-loving Dad.

Seeing Buddy Holly at the Regal in Hull on March 19^th1958 - I couldn’t afford a ticket so I stood outside the stage door and gazed up as he stuck his head from the dressing room window, threw out some photos - but I never got one. It was the same year, same venue, when I waited patiently for Lonnie Donegan to get his autograph, and he aggressively told me:

“Piss off kid - can’t you see it’s fuckin’ raining?” But as an idol, he did not fall.

Getting my first £1.10 shillings battered, finger-slicing second hand Framus guitar from Poole’s Corner pawn shop in Hull, and taking it to sea with me.  That guitar would be my passport to everything; parties, musical evenings in New Zealand and Australia; I traded it in for a new Yamaha model, learned all of Buddy Holly’s songs and the full Donegan canon, and those six strings remained a friend for life.

Then in the early 60s, joining bands in Hull, with my new Watkins Westminster amplifier and Hofner Verithin guitar, both on Hire Purchase thanks to my mother. With The King Bees I almost made it; leaving the band because they wouldn’t let my girlfriend travel in our van. My temporary replacement was a young Hull Corporation gardener called Mick Ronson.

My Hofner Verithin. I wonder who has it now?

Music brought me the love of my wife, (50 years of marriage to celebrate in 2016). I gave her guitar lessons; we went to gigs; the first being P.J. Proby on the tour where he split his pants; The Pretty Things, many others, we got deeply into the Blues; saw John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, Rev. Gary Davis, Chuck Berry, and many more. The Stones, Johnny Kidd & The Pirates at Hull City Hall, Supertramp at the Regal; Hall and Oates at Sheffield City Hall, and I was in Hull City Hall on February 15 1970 when The Who recorded their album (which was known for years as ‘Live in Leeds’ but this has since been rectified…)

Marriage and children restricted me to guitar playing in the kitchen, but my broad knowledge of music landed me a dream job as manager of the large record department at Gough & Davy in Hull. From there I was headhunted by Polydor/Deutsche Grammophon and became involved, averaging 1,000 miler per week, with promoting Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic, followed by a stint on the pop catalogue launching albums like Saturday Night Fever, Jean Michel Jarre’s Oxygene and Sham 69, among many others.

Then it was back into music retail, as manager of Gough & Davy’s Grimsby shop, where despite my age (mid 30s by then) I became a champion of the town’s punks for stocking the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Buzzcocks and others. The punks would take me to ‘educational’ gigs and I’d write reviews for the NME, Sounds and Melody Maker. I managed a local synth band, White Russia, and we got their single played by John Peel. As punk faded, some of its more sophisticated drop-outs took me to see A Certain Ratio at Rockafellas in Leeds. (My review was in the NME) I had seen the future; my guitar frenzy re-surfaced and although two decades older than anyone around me, we decided to form a band. What swung us was to be my favourite gig of all time: the catalyst which took me back to playing live: Dexy’s Midnight Runners at Cleethorpes Winter Gardens on July 10 1980.

The soul-stirring, superb Dexy's Mk 1.

The venue was in uproar; a huge fight between some unruly skinheads was in progress on the dance floor. Then all the lights went out; all we could see was the lights on the band’s amps: then, in the scuffling darkness, Kevin Rowland’s voice rang out from the PA: “For F**s sake, BURN IT DOWN!” and that chest-crushing brass exploded into the hall, the skinheads stopped scrapping, and with the rest of us, stood drop-jawed in deference to this almighty soul sound. What a night. Within weeks 8 of us has formed a brass section, found a drummer, I played bass, and Group Therapy was formed. We got a short deal with Kamera records,

(offered to us by Saul Gelpern, who later managed Suede) and our single got played by John Peel on Radio 1. Our next record was to be a 12 inch 4 track EP. Kamera booked studio time at Fairview in Hull (where the Housemartins recorded). We cut the 4 original tracks, and on the drive home that night to Grimsby we all reverentially listened to the cassette. Oh yes, we were going to make it! We knew we had something going because people loved the few gigs we’d played.

Group Therapy in Grimsby 1982: Photo Grimsby Evening Telegraph

But then fate took a hand. Kamera records went bust. The master tapes for our EP vanished into some accountant’s receivership black hole, and all we had left was our cassette. Over the coming months, the band fell apart.

Then came my long association with The Blues Band. (Paul Jones, Tom McGuinness, Dave Kelly, Hughie Flint/Rob Townsend, Gary Fletcher - now in their 35^th year, 22 albums, and still NEVER invited onto Jools Holland’s Later!)

The Blues Band 1982

I became a close friend of the band’s Dave Kelly and especially his late sister, Jo Ann Kelly. My wife and I ran their fan club for 25 years. I wrote the band biography, Talk To Me Baby, in 1994, never imagining they’d still be playing in 2015. When I had my 50^thbirthday party, Dave Kelly, Gary Fletcher and drummer Rob Townsend drove up to Humberside from London, with equipment and road crew, for no fee (!) and were the stars at my party, at which the brass section from Group Therapy

joined them on stage as Dave Kelly went through the soul catalogue. No man could have had a better night to celebrate his half century.

The Expanding Wallets

During the Miner’s Strike we formed what we called a ‘Radical Skiffle’ group, The Expanding Wallets, and toured all over for miner’s benefits. Totally acoustic, we also busked wherever we could.

By the time I’d reached pension age, I was living in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, still mad for the blues and R&B, and ended up fronting a local band, NiteMayor, so called because our drummer, Tony Egginton, was the elected Mayor of Mansfield. On my 70^th birthday at Boothy’s Club in Mansfield, all those punks and the line-up of Group Therapy turned up and we spent a night on stage with a packed invited audience playing everything from English folk, with live poetry, R&B, with other special guests, including the ‘Paul McCartney’ of the Bootleg Beatles.

Music is never far away. As well as countless CD liner notes, I’ve written tour brochures for many artists, including B.B. King, Willie Nelson, Mark Knopfler, The Temptations, Four Tops and many others, including Smokey Robinson, who invited me up to his dressing room to thank me ‘for the words’.  A privilege indeed.

I’m 72 now. Surrounded by 3,000 records, both vinyl and CDs, I’ learning Flamenco guitar and Bluegrass banjo. I’ll probably not get the chance to play live much now. Will I have another mega pop bash on my 75^th? Watch this space.

Music: the sweetest form of love and emotion there ever was. Next to my wife and children, it’s been the driving force of my life.