Song for John

September 27, 2015, 6:43 am

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Tonight Brian Eno gives the John Peel Lecture at The British Library. Like many thousands of music fans in Britain, I doubt there can ever be anyone of his stature, cultural bravery and sheer self-effacing friendliness and familiarity. When John died, something in British pop culture, a huge light, went out. So I wrote a song for John.  

My Mate on The Radio

     

A song for John Peel

Although we never met

I’ll never forget sixty-seven

They were pirate ship days

When music held sway

And we thought we were living in heaven.

When you spoke to the world

To each bloke and each girl

We all felt like we had a new brother

Now it’s forty years on

And although you’re gone,

We’ll remember you like no other

You were my mate on the radio

You gave me the best, kept me in the know

You were gentle and fun, flower power and sun

And I always tuned in to your show to hear

My mate on the radio.

Ivor Cutler and Cream,

Jethro Tull, Soft Machine

Frank Zappa, The Smiths and The Fall

Family, Free, the blues, poetry

Together we fell in love with them all

Songs in wellington boots and Misty in Roots

Undertones hip hop and funk

Muddy Waters and Wolf, Blind Willie McTell

Without you we’d all have been sunk.

Killing Joke Gang of Four

The Pistols The Damned

The Undertones, Faces, Banshees

Memories are still clear

of those great Top Gear[i]Years,

Only God knows what you meant to me

The Faces The Buzzcocks , all part of your scheme

Helping them all to live their musical dream

I’m so sorry that you had to go

You were my mate, yes my very good friend,

We never shook hands but right up to the end

You were my mate on the radio.

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[i] John Peel’s original BBC Radio 1 show was entitled TOP GEAR, long before overgrown juveniles

And petrolheads Clarkson and Hammond  sullied our screens.

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WHAT'S THE POINT OF IT ALL?

May 15, 2015, 7:00 am

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R.I.P. BLOGGING

I have just deleted 170 posts going all the way back to 2010. In some strange way, it felt good. Wiping away all the conceited drivel and opinionated trash written with that one aim in mind; self-aggrandizement. You like to think that, because you're a writer, what you have to say might be looked at by strangers who would consider 'following' your wild, ill-advised expeditions into politics and literary self-pity. But what is blogging other than 'showing off', like some cyber pub bar bore or know-it-all barrack room lawyer. Time to shut up shop. The dispossessed have deserted any hope of progress.
The rancid tumor of introverted greed has triumphed over the body politic.

So the Britain I imagined I knew turns out to be nothing more than a chimera, a vapid cloud of dead spirits. For 55 years I believed in equality, fairness, in an egalitarian notion of our shared humanity and compassion. 

May 7 2015 has eradicated all that. 
Who needs such outmoded guff.

The things I once believed in share the same historical shelf as the ideas of the Flat Earth Society and Creationism. So why bother wasting time with the catalogue of self-regarding emotional out-pourings which have crammed the many pages of this blog for five years? 

To hell with England. To hell with expression.

What's the point of it all?

The Dumps of Doom

October 3, 2015, 11:18 am

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TOXIC TIME BOMBS

Before Saddam Hussein blotted his copy book by invading Kuwait, Iraq possessed significant stocks of  chemical and biological weapons, many of which were happily supplied by Britain, Germany, the USA, France and Russia up until 1989.

  In the New York Times in August 2002 a senior intelligence officer, Colonel Walter P. Lang, talking of the Iraq-Iran war in 1988,  declared that the CIA ‘were desperate to make sure that Iraq did not lose’ and that ‘the use of gas on the battlefield was not a matter of deep strategic concern’.  Another American intelligence source claimed ‘the Pentagon wasn’t so horrified by Iraq’s use of gas – it was just another way of killing people – whether with a bullet or with phosgene, it didn’t make any difference…” 

Eventually, when all the current hot air and rampant hypocrisy has blown over, if there really are remaining hidden caches  of menacing weapons lurking in the Iraqi desert, what will the noble Allies do with them once they’re discovered?

No matter who made, bought or sold them, getting rid of WMDs – especially the CBWs (that’s Chemical and Biological Weapons) is a task no nation likes to face up to. This is a secret, sinister process which has been handled over the past sixty years with an incredible clumsiness and in consequence has turned parts of the globe into toxic time bombs.

Of course, there’s nothing new about this ‘dirty tricks’ department of war-making. In 400 B.C. the Spartans burned wood treated with sulphur and pitch to gave their enemies some serious breathing problems resulting from poisonous sulphur dioxide fumes[1]. The Crimean Tatars in 1346 had the novel idea of catapulting plague-ridden corpses into  Italian trade enclaves. In medieval times if your horse caught a disease its corpse became a handy weapon if dumped in your enemy’s well or stream. The Conquistadors both deliberately and involuntarily wreaked havoc with diseases among Native Americans. As one Spaniard, Francisco de Aguilar,

Aquilar, who spent the last 40 years of his  life as a Catholic monk, with no South American Indians to worry about ...

brutally records in 1525, ‘God saw fit to send the Indians smallpox’.[2] By the time the British had gained a foothold in the New World we see the likes of General Jeffrey Amhurst, in 1763,  presenting the Indians with blankets deliberately infected with smallpox, developing a nasty little ‘ethnic cleansing’ method which continued right into the 20^th Century, gathering momentum in the   1920’s when Britain used chemicals against the Kurds in Iraq, with Churchill recommending the use of gas ‘against uncivilised tribes’.[3]

 

Gas the buggers!

Winning a war with disease: General Jeffrey Amhurst

By December 2^nd 1943,  Allied forces had spent 85 days in Italy in their massive campaign, code named Operation Avalanche, to drive the German Tenth Army northwards and eventually out of Italy.[4] By this time the fine Mediterranean weather which the troops had enjoyed at their September landing in the Gulf of Salerno and at Taranto had turned into persistent rain and icy winds.

Throughout the Apennine Mountains, Montgomery’s 8^th Army and the US 5^thArmy under General Mark Clark spent the weeks up to Christmas locked in cold, wet battle with a stubborn and implacable foe. Yet even as the military casualties mounted on both sides, 100 miles behind the front line in what may have seemed the relatively safer haven of Bari on the Adriatic Coast, the hapless civilian population was about to suffer a grisly, unexpected blow.

 

The SS John Harvey

On that chilly December 2^nd.,  the U.S. merchant ship S.S. John Harvey was tied up in the port of Bari waiting to discharge her deadly cargo – 2,000 M47A1 bombs, each containing up to 70lbs of sulphur mustard. Also in the John Harvey’s  holds was an unknown but sizeable quantity of high explosives. At 7.30 p.m. the Luftwaffe launched a raid on Bari. For thirty minutes the bombs and shells pounded the port until at 8pm, close to the John Harvey, an oil tanker  suffered a direct hit and blew up.[5]  Within minutes the American freighter also fell victim to a massive explosion which threw debris and exploding shells over a wide area.

A ball of fiery, twisted metal,  she rapidly sank with all hands.

Yet the SS John Harvey was much more than just another victim of war. Due to her horrific cargo, she was the epicentre of  a grim outreach of death and injury. Although a restrained U.S. Government report later stated that 83 men had been killed and 534 civilians wounded, another source[6]based on information collected in Bari  suggests that the exposure to the exploding mustard bombs killed over 1,000 Italian civilians within a few days of the explosion, as well as causing over 630 serious military cases.

 

The devastation closed the port of Bari for over a month

Our history of World War II tells us that the use of poison gas, namely Zyklon-B, was reserved by the Nazis in Europe solely for the destruction of the Jews.

Only one other nation resorted to chemical/biological agents between 1936-45 - Japan[7]. The Japanese Army took great pains to keep this embarrassing episode

under wraps, but in 1989 British writers Peter Williams and David Wallace carried out extensive research which culminated in their book,  Unit 731,  which revealed a catalogue of grim experiments which included dropping bombs filled with disease-carrying fleas,  various pathogens, plague, anthrax and cholera.

From Hell: Japanese military 'know-how' in action

These foul acts were carried out in China  against not only communists and Allied prisoners, but on dense areas of civilian population. In a special ‘information exchange’ deal with the Allies at the end of WWII,  most of the main Japanese perpetrators of these war crimes escaped punishment, and eventually landed good jobs in Japanese hospitals and medical schools. The dark end of the scientific community looks after its own.

For the so-called ‘civilised’ West, by WWII chemical weapons on the battlefield simply weren’t cricket. Even Hitler, who had no qualms about gassing millions of innocent civilian victims with carbon-monoxide and Zyklon-B, had pale reservations over the use of mustard gas and other nerve agents in the European theatre of war, following his own trench experiences in WWI. Never the less, the Nazi military-industrial complex went into overdrive with a massive CBW production programme.

Although the Hague Convention of 1907 had outlawed chemical weapons, the Generals of 1914-18 had ignored it. The more determined Geneva Protocol of 1925, ratified by 33 nations,  also sought to make chemical warfare illegal, yet even then Winston Churchill was willing to consider the prospect of gas warfare as late as 1944.[8], when Britain had enough mustard gas stockpiled to kill off almost 1000 square miles of the Reich.

 

A nice little earner - filling mustard gas shells.

The prevailing attitude to these horrendous weapons over eight decades can best be illustrated by the very nation which originally abstained from supporting either the Hague Convention or the Geneva Protocol – the U.S.A.

In 1977 a study carried out by the Stanford Arms Control Group declared that

“the Geneva Protocol is essentially a no-first-use agreement, and in no way prevents the development of chemical weapons as deterrents…”[9]

Although they did finally agree to ratify in 1935, the American military complex,  just like the Asian and European arms industries, continued to forge ahead with chemical weapons manufacture.

But the mid to late 20^th century has been the CBW’s golden age of research and development. More horrific ways to die in agony have been invented by the men in white coats since the late 1930’s than during any other period in history.

There is, however, an obstinate and inconvenient problem to all this.

If, as has been the case, you try and out-do your potential enemies by manufacturing many thousands of tons more of this stuff than they do – (which, of course, being ‘civilised’, you would never dream of using) – where do you put it?  And as soon as you replace that unfashionable lung-rotting, brain-strangling microbe with a brand-new vein-bursting, skin-eating instant killer, once you’ve stopped celebrating, what do you do with your old stock? Sell it off? Maybe. Give it to the dustmen? Hardly.  You could try burning it, but it’s an extremely expensive process, and the first rule of weapons development is profit.

Underground? That’s costly and can be hard work. No. There’s an easy place to dump your horrors. The same destination man has chosen for his garbage, effluent and everything else he wanted to forget for centuries – the ocean.

When Marshal Konev’s 1^st Ukrainians of the Red Army  rumbled across Poland in January 1945[10], they were about to make a grim discovery just outside the town of Breslau (now Polish Wroclaw) on the River Oder.  The village of  Dyernfurth-am-Oder was dominated by a spectacular, self-contained industrial compound. It covered an area 1.5 miles by 0.5 miles and at its peak employed no less than 3,000 German nationals, all equipped like some denizens of Hell with rubber suits and respirators.

Since 1940, Dyernfurth’s speciality had been the mass production of some of the most toxic nerve  agents known to man; Tabun, Sarin, Soman and VX.  To go into the separate effects (on the bronchial tubes, lungs, eyes, skin, blood and vital organs) each one of these virulent killers has on the human frame in any depth here would make for sickening and pointless reading. Rest assured that any one of these Nazi nasties left mustard gas in the shade. Tabun, for instance, was so toxic that the production rooms had to be lined with double glass walls, with a stream of pressurised air running between the glass panes. Frequent decontamination took place with ammonia and steam, yet between 1942-45 there were still 300 serious accidents and ten horrific deaths at the plant[11]There was a large, high-security underground facility where shells were filled and sealed with these deadly compounds ready for storage.

What astounded Allied Intelligence and the Soviets was the sheer volume of production of these agents in wartime Germany.

In the Summer of 1944, Tabun alone was being produced at 1,000 tons per month,

whilst the old favourite, phosgene, was being stockpiled at 3,100 tons per month. The basic building blocks for these weapons, such as methanol, was being produced at 10,900 tons per month by October 1944, and cyanide at 336 tons.[12]

If Churchill had got his way, and used gas on the Reich, the obvious German preparedness for retaliation would have resulted  in unspeakable mass horror and death on the British mainland. 

The remains of the Sarin factory of death at Falkenhagen

Yet the Soviets were far from horrified by this factory from Hades; they were fascinated. The Nazis, preparing to blow the place up,  had already dumped thousands of tons of Tabun and Sarin into the River Oder. But Dyernfurth was saved. Throughout the decades of the Cold War the USSR enhanced its CBW skills and worked hard to devise suitable weapons delivery systems which might carry virulent new strains of smallpox or plague to wherever it might be needed.

Once the iron curtain had fallen, a veil of mystery covered not only this but several other  poison plants throughout the former Reich. Within months of the Red Army’s discovery, both Dyernfurth and another Sarin plant at Falkenhagen were back in production, this time under Russian control[13]. Yet their ultimate quest was for newer, even deadlier gases – and their growing problem was disposing of the thousands of tons of defunct yet deadly shells already in storage.

 

Deadly biological warfare shells left to rot in Europe

Elsewhere in Germany the Allies were also discovering massive stockpiles of chemical and poison gas shells. In Berlin, Munster, Luneberg and other locations the tonnage was mounting – within months almost 300,000 tons of nerve agents were awaiting destruction.  There was only one way to go - out to sea.

Between October 1945 and  August 1948 up to 40 German merchant ships[14]were commandeered by the victorious Allies,  filled to the gunwhales with CBW shells and explosives, sailed out into the North Sea, the Skagerrak of and the Bay of Biscay, and deliberately sunk. Disposing of over 175,000 tons of this vile material was a thankless, secret and extremely hazardous job and at this stage little is known about the volunteer Merchantmen and Royal Navy Reserves who carried out these operations. The majority of the commandeered vessels were loaded in Hamburg, by German dockers, in the main totally unaware of the ton upon ton of death which was being lowered into the holds. At least the Allied sailors were afforded protective gear when preparing these vessels for destruction, but the German dock workers rolled up their sleeves and with little else than leather gloves as defence, allowed the breath of hell to pass through their hands.

With 21^st century environmental hindsight, such ecological irresponsibility over four decades later  appears outrageous. But in 1945 Europe was in a physical and political mess.  Disposing of the detritus of war was just another tedious task, to be completed in any way possible.

Every combatant nation had a similar problem. Despite the Italian tragedy of the SS John Harvey, the Americans never the less chose the beautiful Adriatic near Bari to dump large quantities of Phosgene, cyanogen chloride bombs, hydrogen cyanide, etc. shortly after WWII ended.[15]The result has been a toxic time bomb which frequently wreaks its revenge on innocent Adriatic trawler men, who often bring deadly, glutinous clusters of mustard gas up in their nets. Neither were the Americans afraid to use their own ‘back yard’, either. 32,000 tons of captured chemical weapons were sent down in US coastal waters. The Japanese sank unspecified  tonnages of CBW’s in the Pacific and Sea of Japan. Many land burials also took place; secret chemical dumps abound all over North America. In Britain, especially in counties such as Wiltshire,  gas shells from both World Wars are scattered beneath the surface, and  still lie in wait for hapless ploughmen. (The Ministry of Defence has destroyed all records of such burials older than 25 years…[16])

Dumping poison gas into the Atlantic in the 1960s. It's still down there ....

But perhaps the greatest horror story of WWII CBW dumping has yet to be fully told. It has remained hidden from the West by four decades of the Cold War. Fifty five years after WWII ended, Swedish fisherman still annually report CBW accidents in the Baltic Sea. Danish fishermen are said to pull up 2,500 tons of chemical bombs every year. [17]In some areas of the Skagerrak, where gas wrecks are known to exist, large numbers of dead starfish have been found floating on the surface.

Since the fall of Communism and the Berlin Wall, the records of both the Stasi in East Germany and the KGB in the former USSR have become subject to scrutiny.

 What they will eventually reveal about Soviet  dumping in the Baltic will only confirm  Scandinavian  suspicions; that this beautiful, mainly shallow, enclosed sea, noted for its clear water, has probably suffered from more CBW dumping than any other stretch of water world wide. According to a Russian document released on the Internet in April 1999[18],  munitions taken from Peenemunde, (Hitler’s V1 and V2 rocket plant on Germany’s Baltic coast), alone offer just the tip of a terrifying Soviet iceberg of Baltic dumping;

          408,565 Mustard gas shells

          71,469 250-kilogram mustard  bombs

          17,000 Adamsite/diphenylchlorarsine bombs

          1,004 one-and-a-half tonne containers of mustard gas

          189 tonnes of cyanide (in rubber bags)

          10, 420 chemical 100mm mortar shells

          7,860 barrels of Zyklon-B.

This harvest of horror – only a small example - currently languishes on the sea bed somewhere between the Swedish Island of Bornholm  and the Latvian port of Liepaja.  Because of the prevailing cold war secrecy of the time (dumping, apparently, went on well into the 1960’s)  full records of exact positions of these dumps remain to be found. But a great many vessels were commandeered, loaded and sunk before the new masters of Eastern Europe could get to grips with their deadly legacy.

The search goes on; and as yet, no-one knows what eventual effect these decomposing shells might have on the marine environment.

 

Bornholm: A favourite dumping area for poison gases

 Throughout history,  white coated Boffins have burned the midnight oil to come up with formulae which have changed the world, eradicated diseases and made humanity’s burden lighter.  But, like Jekyll and Hyde,  every enlightened chemist has his dark counterpart, crouched like one of Macbeth’s three witches over the cauldron, hell bent on destruction. In the end, designing death is a fast track to profit.

Dr. Jean Pascal Zanders, the Project Leader of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s Chemical Warfare Project, regards ocean chemical dumps, even five decades after WWII, as a dangerous, hidden legacy which the international community has yet to face up to.  The Stockholm Institute (SIPRI), which works in partnership with the University of Bradford’s Department of Peace Studies,  monitors all evidence of possible zones of pollution and regularly issues reports and documents.   After years of secrecy no-one can really say how much of this toxic weapons material is still stockpiled in Russia. Saddam Hussein was just one moustachioed madman capable of using such horrific devices – it is estimated that he killed 60,000 Iranians this way in the Iran-Iraq War, in addition to using poison gas against the Kurds in his own country.  CBWs are  arms of sheer temptation to those governments with little or no regard for humanity – and that’s a long list. Apart from our own piece of chemical hell real estate, HMG’s Porton Down research Establishment, we only need to look back a few years to Vietnam and the use of Agent Orange and that most disgraceful weapon, napalm.

Yet as the science of war and the study of biology make ever larger advances, new, more subtle strains of microbes, germs and chemical compounds come onto the market,  making some of those old favourite snot, blood and blisters varieties obsolete. That’s when the dumping starts. Tread with caution in Wiltshire, keep your eyes open down on the beach – and be careful where you swim.

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Notes / Sources

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[1]Grossman, Zoltan The Pot Calling The Kettle Black – A History of Bio-Chemical Weapons

   http://www.applicom.com

[2] Wright, Ronald; Stolen Continents – The Indian Story John Murray, London 1992

[3]Grossman,  Zoltan see also Blum, William,

   Killing Hope; U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since WWII’.

[4] Various, Ed. Pimlott, John L. The World at Arms Reader’s Digest, London 1989.

[5] Compton, J. A. Military Chemical & Biological Agents. Telford Press, New Jersey 1988.

[6] IBID.

[7]Grossman, Zoltan. (See note 1).

[8] See Speer, Albert Inside The Third Reich Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, London 1970.

On August 5^th 1944  Churchill called for a report on England’s capability for gas war against Germany.

[9] Warren Howe, Russell Weapons Abacus, London 1981.

[10] Werth, Alexander;  Russia at War 1941-1945 Barrie Books, London 1964.

[11] Paxman, J. & Harris, R. A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret Story of Chemical and Biological Warfare, Hill & Wang, New York 1982.

[12] Speer, Albert Inside The Third Reich.

[13]Stockholm International Peace Research Institute The Problem of Chemical & Biological Warfare

Humanities Press, New York 1971.

[14] List of gas ships supplied by Bjorn Axel Johanssen, Kalmar, Sweden and checked/verified by

     Professor Theodor  Siersdorfer , Essen, Germany, 1999.

[15] W.R. Bankowitz/University of Bari see also http://www.mitretek.org

[16] BBC Radio 4 Costing The Earth documentary, June 1997.

[17] Philip Facius, Chairman, Danish Environment Council in Green Left Weekly October 1999.

[18]Bodarenko, B. B., Kasyanenko, L. G. Arch Foes Saw More Mercy than The Baltic http://www.pgs.ca/pages/cwcwbaltic.htm

BLUE ROOTS

October 9, 2015, 3:26 am

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‘Ye Blews’

Blues means what milk does to a baby.

Blues is what the spirit is to the minister.

We sing the blues because our hearts have been hurt,

our souls have been disturbed.

Alberta Hunter

As waggish musicians are wont to say,

‘You should always have a W. C. Handy’

Whilst jazz was simultaneously emerging in New Orleans and Chicago, like all music at the time, the only way you could hear it was by being there at a live performance, or by taking advantage of the huge, burgeoning printed sheet music industry and playing the popular tunes yourself, at home. Yet towards the end of the 19^th century, something exciting happened.

       Emile Berliner (1851–1929) was a German-born American inventor, and alongside all the other attempts at recording sound, such as his own cylindrical machine, which he dubbed ‘the gramophone’ in 1887, (a system already in use via the machines of the equally inventive Thomas Edison), in 1888 he managed to surpass cylinders by using discs. Yet such devices were still, for many, simply fascinating playthings.

However, Berliner persisted and managed to sell his new disc-based technology, albeit at first to toy manufacturers. But in 1895 he succeeded in raising a substantial investment of $25,000, and with this he established the Berliner Gramophone Company. Even as Berliner continued to burn the midnight oil in his workshop, coin-in-the-slot, sound-reproducing machines, perhaps the earliest form of juke box, were becoming a popular attraction in amusement arcades, and as early as 1890 the New York Phonograph Company opened the first recording studio.

Putting music on a disc was one achievement, but trying to stabilise the speed of the turntable was a different challenge.

So Berliner teamed up with Eldridge R. Johnson, an engineer, who designed a clockwork spring-wound motor. In 1901, Berliner[1]and Johnson knew that together, they had something impressive, so they joined forces. The Victor Talking Machine Company was formed.

      By 1902, recordings were being made by performers sitting in a studio, playing into the large horn of a gramophone. The recordings were made onto thick wax discs. By 1902 the immensely popular operatic celebrity, Enrico Caruso, essentially became history’s first recording star as one of the earliest performers to embrace the new technology, ‘cutting’ his first record, Vesti le gubba from Pagliacci. It sold more than a million records.

Soon, the hand-cranked Victrola would be superseded by the invention, by Lee de Forest, of the triode, an electronic amplification device having three active electrodes.

      Against the tragic backdrop of the Great War of 1914-18 (although it must be remembered that the USA did not enter the war until April 1917) African American music making had developed into a variety of vibrant styles. Jazz had taken off in the south and as far north as New York and Chicago, and jazz scenes were developing in places as far apart as Kansas City and Los Angeles. All the accrued cultural heritage of struggle and deprivation experienced through two centuries of slavery, the continuing racism, the immense transcendent outlet of the spiritual and various European influences had all fused together to create a new, improvised and uplifting musical form. Cutting its own swathe through this was yet another means of expression. Unlike the spiritual, this wasn’t religious, but secular. This was the Blues.

Like the word ‘jazz’ there are numerous theories surrounding the origin of ‘blues’ as a musical appellation. Its provenance, when studied closely, is quite surprising. Because of the way we now think of the blues it simply sounds too hip and modern for the word to have a history prior to the birth of jazz. We can confidently sidestep the ‘official’ first musical mention from 1912, in W.C. Handy's Memphis Blues because long before Columbus, in Britain as far back as 1385, the adjective ‘blue’ meant ‘low spirited’[2]. There are other historical examples, one quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary (2^nd edition) which tells us of it being in use in 1741 for ‘depression, low spirits.’ 

David Garrick in his 'Blews' outfit, no doubt ...

In that year, the great 16^th century actor, David Garrick, wrote in a letter:

      ‘I am far from being quite well, tho not troubled with ye Blews as I have been’[3].

‘The blues’ is also a diminutive of blue devils, bad little demons associated with despondency, depression and sadness. Blue devils have been with us since 1616, from a poetry collection entitled  Times’ Whistle:

      ‘Alston, whose life hath been accounted evill, And therfore calde by many the blew devill’[4].

If we need any further proof of the provenance, in 1798 George Colman the Younger wrote a one act play, set in France entitled The Blue Devils.

      As a musical style, yes, the term ‘the blues’ has been around since 1912, which inevitably takes us to ‘the Father of The Blues’William Christopher Handy (1873 –1958). The first publication of blues sheet music was Hart Wand's Dallas Blues in 1912 but the prominence of W. C. Handy dominates the genre’s history.

 

W. C. Handy

      

As this story deals with the way in which R&B musicians were frequently the victims of appalling treatment and skulduggery over money and royalties, it is a sad fact that such dubious dealings, although mainly the province of some promoters and managers throughout history, should have coincided with the rise of recorded music, and have continued up to this day.Memphis Blues was Handy's third composition, but his first blues. However, it began life as a political campaign song in support of Edward Hull Crump (1874-1954), who was running for Mayor in Memphis in 1909. It was originally an instrumental entitled Mr. Crump, with a bit of a jive/rap vocal thrown in to help ‘Boss’ Crump, one of the early builders of the modern Democratic Party and eventually one of the South’s most powerful politicians, on his mayoral way. The mayoral campaign kept Handy busy all over town, assembling bands and musicians to give repeated performances of Mr. Crump. The lyric seems simple enough:

      Mr. Crump don't 'low no easy riders here

      Crump don't 'low no easy riders here

      We don't care what Mr. Crump don't 'low

      We gonna bar'l house anyhow

      Mr. Crump can go catch hisself some air.[5]

However, even in 1909, almost five decades after emancipation and the Civil War, there are still West African roots here. West Africans always had what were known as ‘songs of derision’, so although Mr.  Crump is a campaign song, it has all the hallmarks of the Southern black man’s penchant for ‘telling it like it is.’ It pulls no punches, yet at least Crump was a ‘straight’ politician, and by all accounts not like the rabid segregationists of later decades. Others in the Crump Camp were more devious.

     

Beale Street, Memphis.

In Memphis, Handy had to pay L.Z. Phillips at Bry's Department Store, the representative of the publisher Theron Bennett, (who was also a notable ragtime composer and musician) for the printing of the first sheet music edition, 1,000 copies, of Mr. Crump. Phillips had convinced Handy that he was only printing the music on speculation in the hope it would sell well throughout Memphis. Phillips seemed positive and Bennett, who was visiting Memphis, offered Handy national distribution and exposure, an irresistible deal. Handy, by no means a rich man, was in the shop with Phillips and Bennett when  the initial 1000 copies were delivered. Bennett was still in town a week later when Handy went into Bry’s Department Store to check on sales. Bennett showed him a remaining pile of 1000 copies, suggesting sales were slow. He then suggested that Handy sell him the full copyright to the composition outright. Because of the popularity of the song, this confused Handy, yet what he didn’t know was that the wily publishing duo had actually printed 2,000 copies, and the first 1,000 had indeed sold like wildfire. Still, Handy, thinking he may have written a turkey, agreed to sell his copyright to Theron for a mere $50. In the following weeks, another 10,000 copies, complete with Bennett's imprint, rolled off the presses. Months passed and Bennett sold Handy’s work for a substantial sum to publisher Joe Morris. Adding insult to injury, George Norton, one of Bennett's lyricists, was hired by Morris to add words to the song, a move which Handy considered highly objectionable. 

      Needless to say, but once Theron had bought the copyright, he knew that he’d make a fat profit because there’d be no royalties due to Handy until the copyright ran out. It would be 1937 before Handy could re-claim his highly successful composition, and when he completed his first book on the blues, he had even been refused permission to include the song.[6]

This notorious episode did however convince Handy to form his own successful publishing company, Handy & Pace[7].

      As an early demonstration of the felonious way in which African American performers would be treated by publishers, managers, promoters and record companies, W. C. Handy’s Mr. Crump/Memphis Blues experience is an early milestone of cynical opportunism. It seems poignant that under the revised song’s later title, Memphis Blues, that Handy could pen such a magnanimous verse as:

      ‘Folks I've just been down, down to Memphis town,

      That's where the people smile, smile on you all the while.

      Hospitality, they were good to me.

      I couldn't spend a dime, and had the grandest time’

Of course, there’s always another side to every story. In his book The Country Blues,

Sam Charters

Samuel  Charters writes: ‘Handy later complained bitterly that he was cheated out of the rights to his song, but the man who bought the rights from him was acting in good faith and had as little idea as Handy did the song would become so successful.’[8]

If that’s the case, then Theron Bennett must have been a saint among his peers. As will be seen, the practice of grabbing copyright and composer credits from innocent artists became one of the big bonuses

in being a publisher or a record producer, jobs which were often combined. For example, Lester Melrose, rightly famed for recording many of the greatest country blues artists for RCA and Columbia for their Chicago ‘race music’ subsidiary, bragged that he had recorded 90% of all the black music African Americans were dancing to across the USA. Dedicated though Melrose was to bringing the blues to a wider audience, he only paid artists a recording fee, and made sure that before they left the studio they had fully surrendered the compositional copyright to their songs over to him. Thus, with no artistic, creative or musical skills, Melrose is said to have gained royalty payments for up to 3,000 blues compositions, whilst not writing a note or a word of any.

Lester Melrose

This would appear to be true, as his tax return for 1938 shows him making a staggering $139,000 – a huge income for the time. Melrose was able to retire to a splendid villa in an orange grove in Florida, where he died in comfort in 1979.[9]

      It didn’t take long for the word ‘blues’ to become a popular addition to a song title. A new musical structure had developed. Primarily a vocal form, lyrically, it wasn’t religious, but secular, although it contained echoes of slavery and field hollers through its call-and-response pattern and the syncopated rhythms of work songs and spirituals. Its hallmarks were a repeating harmonic structure with melodic emphasis on the flatted or “blue” third and seventh notes of the scale. Its common form featured a 12-bar phrase using the chords

of the first, fourth, and fifth degrees of the major scale.

With the advent of the gramophone, records began to match the popularity of sheet music. Although a white Broadway star, Marie

Cahill recorded The Dallas Blues in 1917, and the early 1920s saw the first black blues recordings, and women led the charge. Mamie Smith (1883-1946) was the first African American singer to record. 

Mamie Smith

Her 1920 Crazy Blues, written by Perry Bradford, an experienced Minstrel and Vaudeville performer, was to be followed in 1923 by Ma Rainey’s (1886-1939) Boll Weevil Blues. Fine vocalist though she was, in a variety of popular styles, Mamie Smith wasn’t really a blues singer, but Crazy Blues sold 10,000 recordings the first week and 75,000 within a month. Ma Rainey certainly was a blues singer and went on to make over 100 recordings. These early recordings, with their jazz accompanists; would soon earn the title ‘classic blues.’

      By the end of the 1920s the blues, especially due to classic female artists, had become a major element of African American and American popular music. It even had exposure, often due to Handy’s arrangements, to white audiences in theatres and clubs, such as the Cotton Club and numerous Beale Street venues in Memphis through special blues shows organised by the Theatre Owners Bookers Association The record industry began recording blues performers. New labels such as Okeh Records, Paramount Records and the American Record Corporation, all found it worthwhile to record African American music.

NOTES & SOURCES

---

[1]Berliner invented many other products, such as an early version of the helicopter, the acoustic tile and a loom which enabled the mass-production of cloth.

[2]www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=blues

[3]www.wordorigins.org/index.php/site/comments/blue_blues/

[4]Gent, R.C. (Ed.)The Times Whistle: A Naïve Daunce of Seven Satires and other Poems. English Text Society, London 1616.

[5]Avakian, George: Liner notes to Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy, Long Playing Record, Label: Columbia CL 591 Canada, 1954

[6]http://www.myzacharias.com/vr/coll/a/armstrong/louis/wchandy.php

[7]http://ragpiano.com/comps/tbennett.shtml

[8]Charters,  Samuel  - The Country Blues. New York: Rinehart. 1959 Reprinted as The Country Blues: Roots of Jazz by Da Capo Press, with a new introduction by the author 1975

[9]Reich, Howard and Gaines, William: Jelly’s Blues: The Life, Music and Redemption of Jelly Roll Morton Da Capo Press, New York, 2004.

Hidden Treasure

October 12, 2015, 4:05 am

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NEVER MIND THE NAZI GOLD TRAIN - 

WHERE'S THE COCOS GOLD?

I crossed the Pacific four times during 1960-1962, and one sunny dawn, when I was at the wheel on the bridge, on the horizon I saw Cocos Island, a place which had fascinated me since I'd read Ralph Hammond's children's novel, Cocos Gold, in 1950.       Cocos Island lies about 550 miles due west of Panama City in Latitude 5 32' 57'' North, Longitude 87 2' 10'' West, and is not to be confused with the Cocos Keeling Islands. It is an awful place. With its oppressive heat, peaks and pinnacles, and its uninhabitable jungles, this is not the idyllic Pacific island of the imagination. Yet, as a place to bury treasure, it is perfect. This is the location which inspired Robert Louis Stevenson to write Treasure Island. There are many accounts of secret caches of treasure on Cocos, and from the various documents I have studied, I offer the following digest.

 

This is all Robert Louis Stevens' fault. But at least it gave us Robert Newton, parrots on shoulders and the overwhelming desire to say "Aaar!"

As Spain’s grip on her colonies began to wane, in 1820 a revolt against ‘the Motherland’ by Peru was imminent. José de San Martín, recognized as the military strategist behind much of the South American struggle for independence, had a bold plan to defeat the Viceroyalty of Peru, the last stronghold of Spanish power        on the continent. With careful planning and meticulous attention to the smallest detail, he was successful. As instructed by San Martin, the city of Lima’s Catholic clergy saw the need to protect the fabulous treasures which had been built up during the centuries since the Spaniards first invaded. This would involve moving the booty far away for safekeeping. For this purpose, a British ship was chosen. Captain William Thompson of the brig Mary Dear  was entrusted with one of the most fabulous treasures ever to grace a vessel’s holds. His mission was to sail with this precious cargo to Mexico. It included two life-sized statues from Lima’s cathedral of the Blessed Virgin holding the Divine Child, each cast in pure gold; 273 jewelled swords and candlesticks, and an enormous hoard of silver and gold artefacts worth some $60,000,000.

Jose de la Serna (San Martin)

          But the ‘Loot of Lima’ was too much for Thompson. As happens to many men faced with the immense temptation of gold, all reason, compassion and humanity      departed him. Once the Mary Dear had left port, Thompson and his crew set about murdering the ship’s passengers. Instead of Mexico, he headed west to Cocos Island, burying the loot in a hidden cave. Now a wanted man, Thompson joined forces with a notorious pirate, Benito Bonito, who had treasure of his own to hide.          Later, the British Navy caught up with Thompson, but although his crew were captured, he escaped. Fearful of being caught, Thompson would not go back to      Cocos. In 1844 he met a stranger called Keating, and one drunken night revealed the          secret of his treasure on Cocos. Keating set about organising an expedition, but Thompson died before the departure. Keating then set

Rascally Captain William Thompson.

sail with a Captain Bogue, But when they landed on Cocos, although they did uncover treasure, greed and the lust which had driven Thompson before now overtook Captain Bogue and Keating. Their crew mutinied and made off with some loot, whilst Bogue and Keating’s tiny boat, overloaded with treasure, capsized. Bogue drowned and, after drifting in the ocean for some time. Keating was eventually picked up by a passing vessel and was taken to Newfoundland, where he died.

Before his death, Captain Thompson left some instructions for the possible location of the treasure. He had written, concerning a bay known as Chatham Bay:

     "Once there follow the coast line of the bay till you find a creek, where, at high water mark, you go up the bed of a stream which flows inland. Now you step out 70 paces, west by south, and against the skyline you will see a gap in the hills. From any other point, the gap is invisible. Turn north, and walk to a stream. You        will now see a rock with a smooth face, rising sheer like a cliff. At the height of a man's shoulder, above the ground, you will see a hole large enough for you to insert your thumb. Thrust in an iron bar, twist it round in the cavity, and behind you will find a door which opens on the treasure."

     Another version, dictated by Thompson on his death bed, is:

 "Disembark in the Bay of Hope between two islets, in water 5 fathoms deep. Walk 350 paces along the course of the stream then turn north-northeast for 850 yards, stake, setting sun stake draws the silhouette of an eagle with wings spread. At the extremity of sun and shadow, cave marked with a cross. There lies the treasure."

     Keating’s Quartermaster, a poor man named Nicholas Fitzgerald was bequeathed Cocos’s secrets by Keating, but sadly was never financially able to mount an expedition. Fitzgerald's wife wrote a letter containing Keating’s instructions. It is      preserved at the Nautical and Travellers' Club in Sydney, registered under No. 18, 755. It gives these instructions:

     "At two cable's lengths, south of the last watering-place, on three points. The cave is the one which is to be found under the second point. Christie, Ned and Anton have tried but none of the three has returned. Ned on his fourth dive found the entrance at 12 fathoms but did not emerge from his fifth dive. There are no octopuses but there are sharks. A path must be opened up to the cave from the west. I believe there has been a fall of rock at the entrance.”

     In the Caracas Museum lies the breath taking inventory left by Fitzgerald at Coiba:        

"We have buried at a depth of four feet in the red earth: 1 chest; altar trimmings of cloth of gold, with baldachins, monstrances, chalices, comprising 1,244 stones. 1 chest; 2 gold reliquaries weighing 120 pounds, with 624 topazes, cornelians and emeralds, 12 diamonds. 1 chest; 3 reliquaries of cast metal weighing 160 pounds, with 860 rubies and various stones, 19 diamonds. 1   chest; 4,000 doubloons of Spain marked 8. 5,000 crowns of Mexico. 124 swords, 64 dirks, 120 shoulder belts. 28 rondaches. 1 chest; 8 caskets of cedar-wood and silver, with 3,840 cut stones, rings, patents and 4,265 uncut stones. 28 feet to the northeast, at a depth of 8 feet in the yellow sand; 7 chests: with 22 candelabra in gold and silver weighing 250 pounds, and 164 rubies a foot. 12 armspans west, at a depth of 10 feet in the red earth; the seven-foot Virgin of gold, with the Child Jesus and her crown and pectoral of 780 pounds, rolled in her gold chasuble on which are 1,684 jewels. Three of these are 4-inch emeralds on the pectoral and 6 are 6-inch topazes on the crown. The seven crosses are of diamonds.”

     The hoard’s location is thought to be within 100 yards of 5 degrees, 30 minutes, 17 seconds latitude north and 87 degrees, 0 minutes, 40 seconds longitude west, south of the Bay of Hope, north-northeast of Meule Island, possibly in a cave that is     accessible at low tide. One version states that the Loot of Lima is buried in 4 different caches all within 100 yards of each other in an area an eighth of a mile   inland near Chatham Bay. Keating's wife claimed the Loot of Lima was cached in a bay hidden from the open sea with a small crescent-shaped beach with black roots on either side. A German hermit who lived on Cocos, Heinz Hemmeter, thought the treasure was lying in a pool at the bottom of a waterfall.

     The Lima cathedral treasure has been estimated to be worth well over $60,000,000. However, also part of the cargo of the Mary Dearwas the State Treasury, which cannot safely be estimated. Numerous expeditions have attempted to recover this immense wealth but all have failed. Mud slides, rock slides, all manner of geological movements on Cocos have probably obliterated the locations so meticulously catalogued by the pirates. Benito Bonito, famed for his violence as ‘Benito of the Bloody Sword’, is said to have also buried more plunder on the island. In 1819 at Acapulco he intercepted a rich mule train loaded with treasure which he loaded into his ship, the Relampago. Benito’s additional Cocos hoard is listed at around $25,000,000. 300,000 pounds weight of silver bars, plate and coin was hidden in a mountain cave. Using gunpowder, he blew away the face of the cliff. The silver is said to be buried on the north side of Wafer Bay.

     Another Bonito location holds 733 gold bars, 4 by 3 inches in size and 2 inches thick, numerous articles of jewelled church ornaments, 273 gold-hilted swords inlaid with jewels, plus various other valuable items. Bonito was a busy man. A third hiding place is said to conceal iron kettles filled with gold coin.

     Cocos attracted other pirate hoarders. Captain Edward Davis, with his vessel the Bachelor's Delight, was a successful pirate along the western coast of the Americas. He is reputed to have visited Cocos at least twice to bury plunder at Chatham Bay in 1684 and 1702. In addition to 300,000 pounds of silver bar and plate the documents tell us that he “'put away 733 bars of gold, 7 kegs of gold coin and a quantity of church jewels and ornaments…”

     Sir Francis Drake was a regular visitor to the island and has also been suspected of storing loot there. In 1845 in a cave overlooking Wafer Bay a British adventurer discovered a chest containing Spanish gold coins, and in l931, a Belgian treasure        hunter unearthed a 2 foot gold Madonna which was sold in New York for $11,000.      Sailors visiting the island in 1793 noted a peculiar carving on a large rock in Chatham Bay which read: “Look Y. as you goe for ye S. Coco"with four branched crosses, and there is also a carving on a stone of a sombrero which has become known as ‘Bonito’s Hat’. In 1939 a bar of gold was excavated from a stream close to a waterfall on the island. It sold for $35,000. Other stories, their provenance and accuracy questionable, include the discovery by soldiers in the 1880s of over $100,000 in coinage from around the world alongside 300 silver ingots in a cave.

Another hopeful hermit, a German named Gussler, spent years on the island and gave up after only finding six gold coins.

      

When the soldiers used explosives to blast out the roots of a cedar tree on the shore of Wafer Bay, the explosion revealed a cave containing gold ornaments placed there by one of Bonito’s men, Evan Jones, whose letters were found in a nearby box. There are even legends suggesting that Captain William Kidd buried loot on Cocos.

     One final, fascinating and persistent legend centres on the island’s highest point, Mount Iglesias. It is here that the last remnants of the treasure of the Incas  could have been brought, hidden in a network of caves and still guarded by the last descendants of the Inca race who remain hidden from all visitors.

Discs That Time Forgot

October 20, 2015, 6:17 am

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Soundtrack to Misspent  Youth:

The discs that time forgot.

1959: Ben Hewitt: He came, made a few records, then vanished. But for a while he made me happy.

Having recently involved myself with the BBC’s forthcoming project, The People’s History of Pop, scheduled for BBC4 TV next year, (whether anything I have to offer is of any value remains debatable) I was inspired to shuffle through my box of ancient 45rpm records, at least those which have survived over the past  six decades. Dusting these down a few oddities emerged to remind me of a time when everything seemed possible, a time of energy, enthusiasm, adventure. (In effect, youth …) Rock and Roll, bless it,

I couldn't afford a ticket to this, but I waited around the back stage door of the Regal. When Buddy threw some photographs from a dressing room window, I got trampled in the scramble, but never got a copy ... but I have all his recordings now.

had only just arrived, and any record that took my fancy on the fuzzy airwaves of Radio Luxembourg or the even more fade-in-fade-out American Forces Network was eagerly hunted down. Back then, in the 1950s, apart from the Light Programme’s  Two Way Family Favourites, you would be lucky to hear more than 30 minutes of pop music a week  on BBC Radio. It was ‘common’ and low-rent, until the charts began at the NME and someone had to take notice and give us what we desired - Rock and Roll.  I earned just about enough with my newspaper delivery round to afford a single every week. That’s how I discovered Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and

One of the best 50's records never played today; It was a top ten hit in Britain, but Marvin never scored with it in his homeland, the USA. And I don't know who Colin Cater is.

Jackie Wilson, and dozens more, including Elvis. On the weeks when there was no desired record to track down, I’d use the money to go to the cinema.

My first ten discs in 1957 were 10” 78 rpms and I no longer have them. But some of the old 45s remain. Even early Lonnie Donegan. He came first, then for a while, Hank Marvin and The Shadows. Looking at them now is like staring down a time tunnel to a simpler, more positive era. Why I bought some of these, such as Ben Hewitt or Don French, escapes me now. But these discs remain as distant facets of a colourful teenage life, the first steps towards decades of exciting musical discovery.
It would lead to the Blues, to Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and B.B. King. Which all reminds me, this week on BBC Radio 4 Desert Island Discs features Keith Richards. That's going to be interesting ....

My Jerry Lee Lewis EP: wonder what became of the cover?

The Beatles, not on Parlophone, but the German label, Odeon I have 2 of their singles on Odeon. I don't suppose they're collectible, but a nice conversation piece.

A fine record. Still love this.

A real oddity, but from the 1970s. I worked for a while for Polydor Records and was given this single sided pre-release acetate by The Sweet. Wonder if it's worth anything?

Oh yes. Teenage angst beyond compare. Apparently French gave up  music to continue his education and became a successful businessman. But he left us this.

     

When the Sioux Came to Hull

October 22, 2015, 3:14 am

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T O  T H E   E N D 

O F   T H E   E A R T H

‘And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth,

you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing,

for the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered.’

Black Elk, Sioux Holy Man.

In 1888, eleven years after the murder of Crazy Horse, the Sioux, penned in on their reservations and bombarded with yet more land-grabbing treaties, had become little more than a sideshow, a brave memory on the Plains. Yet they were still far from ‘tame’, and their wildness was much in demand in another area – the new phenomenon of the Wild West Show.

Colonel William Cody, known as Buffalo Bill, was the king of Wild West showmen. I learned that his huge entourage of cowboys, sharp-shooters, horses, cattle and buffalo – and, thrilling to me – plains Indians, had at least twice set up camp on Hull’s traditional fairground on Walton Street.

     Later in life, I researched more into Cody’s Hull visits, and unearthed two remarkable stories. At the end of one visit, towards the end of the 19^th century, when loading the Wilson Line steamers in Hull’s docks, ready to travel back across the Atlantic to their native land, a number of buffaloes panicked on the dockside and escaped along Hull’s Hedon Road. Cody despatched wranglers and Indians on horseback to round the poor beasts up. The thought of the Sioux and various whooping cowboys racing through the streets of my home town on a buffalo hunt filled me with amazement. It still does. Yet there were other stories which put my hero people onto my native soil.

    

Long Wolf's grave in Brompton Cemetery

Chief Long Wolf, a veteran of the Sioux wars was buried in Brompton Cemetery on June 13, 1892. He was 59, and died of bronchial pneumonia when touring with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Also in his grave rested an Indian girl named Star Ghost Dog, who had died just 17 months old after she had fallen from her mother’s arms as they rode together on horseback. In 1997 a British woman, Elizabeth Knight, tracked down Long Wolf’s family in the Black Hills in South Dakota. Long Wolf’s remains were taken home, and he now lies in the ancestral burial ground of the Oglala Sioux tribe, the Wolf Creek Community Cemetery at Pine Ridge. He had a great grandson, John Black Feather, who commented;

     “Back then, they had burials at sea, they did ask his wife if she wanted to take him home and she figured that as soon as they hit the water they would throw him overboard, so that's why they left him in England.”

     Yet in 1888, there were others lost in a strange land. After their final well-attended performance in Manchester, the Buffalo Bill show decamped to Hull where they would board the Wilson steamers and head home. The Sioux, more than any cowboys, were extremely prone to homesickness. Yet Cody paid well and had a genuine rapport and an affection for the Indians, and many great braves and chiefs travelled with him around Europe, including Sitting Bull. He would drink and eat with them after a show, and often slept in their tipis.

    

    

The great Medicine Man, Black Elk.

On that day in question in 1888, three Lakota Sioux, led by the legendary holy man, Black Elk, became lost on the streets of Hull. By the time they found the docks, the tide had gone and their compatriots with it. Only one of the three spoke any English. They knew they were stranded, with only their wages for the last performance. Somehow, with the help of a number of slightly amazed Hull people, somewhat fazed to come across full-blooded American Indians in their native

costume wandering around the city, they managed to find Paragon Station and bought tickets to London. There they joined another Wild West show, Mexican Pete’s, yet had to serve another full year throughout Europe on a dollar a day before they would finally run into their old boss again in Paris in 1889. There are other versions of what happened, placing the events of  this story in Salford, Manchester. Wherever it happened, it seems that everyone wants to claim some historical connection with the Sioux, and indeed, why not.  

     In France, Cody threw a party for Black Elk and his companions, gave him $90 and a steamer ticket back to New York. After two winters away from his people, Black Elk, whose father was a contemporary of Crazy Horse who knew him well, arrived home, to find that the plight of his corralled, starving people was even worse than when he had left. Yet Black Elk has left us a great legacy. In 1932 the writer John G. Neidhardt met the great man, then well over 100 years old, at Pine Ridge, and after many long conversations wrote his story in the classic book, Black Elk Speaks. And to think – he walked the streets, albeit briefly, of my home town.

 

Buffalo Bill's Indians ready for a show

The Skull of Doom.

October 26, 2015, 1:06 pm

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Seeing Through The Crystal Skull

The Mitchell-Hedges Crystal Skull

There is great treasure there behind our skull

and this is true about all of us.

This little treasure has great, great powers,

 and I would say we only have learnt a

very, very small part of what it can do.

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991)

VJ Enterprises was founded in 1991. Their website www.v-j-enterprises.com/ tells us that they are ‘A New Age organization whose goal is to share with the public the best information which describes the prophesied Golden Age. Our services include various types of public lectures and workshops focusing on such subjects as the Crystal Skulls, UFOs, Peru, Crop Circles and the Bible Code and the Manifestation of the Aquarian Age.’

The phenomenon of crystal skulls remains a controversial archaeological mystery. We’re informed by skull fans that 13 crystal heads have been discovered in various locations around the world, from Tibet to the USA. Joshua ‘Illinois’ Shapiro, who runs VJ Enterprises, leaves their importance in no doubt.  ‘I personally feel that the Crystal Skulls are not only here to share ancient knowledge and wisdom, but to assist in awakening our race to higher spiritual laws and understanding of itself ... If the Crystal Skulls were not brought by extra-terrestrials then certainly we must conclude there have been civilizations much more technologically or spiritually advanced than our own today.’

Mitchell Hedges (right) with his daughter Anna in Belize

The most famous of these glittering noggins  is the ‘skull of doom’,  allegedly discovered in 1924 by a 17-year old Anna Le Guillon Mitchell-Hedges, (1907-2007) The discovery of the skull, allegedly found beneath an altar in Mayan temple ruins, is said to have taken place on Anna’s 17^th birthday. She was on an archaeological dig at the ancient Mayan city of Lubaantun (‘place of fallen stones’) in British Honduras (now Belize) with her adoptive father, the adventurer F. A. ‘Mike’ Mitchell-Hedges (1882-1959). Mitchell-Hedges had travelled to Belize on a mission to find the ruins of Atlantis. This clear quartz skull weighs about 11 pounds and measures 5.25 inches high. It is reminiscent of stone skulls made by the Aztecs. However, Aztec skulls are stylized, and the Mitchell-Hedges skull is more realistic, complete with a detachable jaw.

            The controversy over this artefact goes all the way back to its claimed day of discovery. You might think that the biggest gem ever found, among ancient stones in a jungle by a 17 year old girl, could have been the prime success of the dig. Yet despite the repetition of the story in later decades, Mike Mitchell-Hedges never mentioned it. It only appeared in his 1954 autobiography Danger My Ally,and it is dispensed with quickly, vanishing altogether in later published editions. As to the ownership of the skull, the passage in the book seems cryptic:

            ‘How it came into my possession I have reason for not revealing.’ He goes on to give it a brief description, that scientists believe that it took 150 years to make, it’s 3,600 years old, and ‘the embodiment of all evil.’ In fact the whole entry in the 1954 book only covers 13 lines, which, if the artefact is so important, seems curious.

Legend has it that the skull of doom was used by Mayan high priests to not only concentrate on death, but to will it. It has gathered a reputation as a malevolent relic. Apparently, if you take the mickey out of the skull, you could die, and with further shades of the popular ‘mummy’s curse’, others are supposed to have been struck down with serious illness. Yet the controversy about how the skull was discovered is based on the suspicion that Anna Mitchell-Hedges, who lived to be 100, (a bonus which caused her to re-designate her cranial guide as ‘the skull of love’ rather than ‘death’)  may not have even been on the expedition at all in the 1920s, and only visited Labaantum for the first time many decades later for a TV documentary. Earlier versions of the ‘discovery’ involve the suggestion that her father ‘planted’ the skull beneath the altar, so that she could find it inside a deep hole, or cave beneath or inside of a pyramid, and enjoy the experience as a birthday present. The man behind all the myth and legend making is Mitch himself. Explorer, gambler, author, and soldier with Pancho Villa in the Mexican Revolution, he was quite a character.

Much of Frederick A. Mitchell-Hedges’ life was taken up as a deep-sea fisherman. He wrote numerous articles and books complete with that usual fisherman’s braggadocio about the size of ‘the one that got away’. But he didn’t refer to his sport as such; he called fishing ‘deep sea research,’ and expanded his yarns for the Randolph Hearst newspaper empire into more mystical marine territory which included sea monsters, epic struggles with giant fish, and the obligatory courageous reports of struggles with man-eating sharks. He would sail off to the Caribbean at weekends, where his penchant for tales of danger and discovery were embroidered with claims to have discovered lost continents on the seabed, as well as island tribes who had never met the white man before.

So what happened to the skull of doom once Anna was supposed to have unearthed it? According to her own version, her dad gave it to the Mayans as a gift, and apparently they ‘loved him’ for bringing them medicines and clothing. That’s a neat cover for it not appearing again in the family for another 20 years. The Mayans had it. So, how did it come to be in a collection of artefacts belonging to a London art dealer? Anna’s explanation is as follows.

When explorers in the first half of the 20^th century went off on long expeditions, to beat the burglars, it was not unknown for them to leave valuable items back home in the care of friends. The skull was, apparently, left with an old school friend of Mitch’s, Sidney Burney. But in 1943, Mitch was horrified to discover that Burney had put the skull up for sale at Sotheby’s in London.

Learning of this skulduggery the day before the sale, Mitchell-Hedges was, apparently, ‘so furious that for a while he was unable to speak’. He tried to get in touch with Burney, but failed, so arose at 5 am the day of the sale and headed for London, hell-bent on getting his skull back. What transpired when the rage-muted Mitch arrived at Sotheby’s is not clear, but apparently it was Sidney Burney’s son selling the skull, not Burney Senior. Sotheby’s allegedly refused to withdraw it from the sale, so Mitchell-Hedges must have quelled his wrath with the realisation that the only way he’d get the skull back was to buy it. This he did, at a cost of £400. It seems an odd solution, because if someone had purloined your property and put it up for sale, the first thing you’d do is call the police. However, the sceptics believe that far from being ‘stolen’ by Burney, in fact this was the first time Mitchell-Hedges had come into contact with the contentious crystal noggin. According to the July 1936 issue of the British anthropological journal Man, the skull was owned then by Burney.           Its history prior to the sale at Sotheby’s, from the 1920s onwards, begins to look like another of Mitch’s tall tales. Sidney Burney, and those who were on the Lubaanatun expedition, denied that Mitchell-Hedges found the skull.

After her father’s death, the skull became Anna’s property. She maintained that Burney only had the piece as collateral against a debt Mitchell owed Burney. So why didn’t he simply pay off his debt rather than travelling to London and forking out £400 – a huge sum in war-torn 1943?

Anna has occasionally put it on display, claiming it was kept in Atlantis before it was brought to Belize, and that it came from outer space. You could view it for a fee. Today, it is owned and cared for by her widower, Bill Homan, who continues to perpetuate its mystical properties.

So, what about the history of the skull itself? Is it ancient, does it have paranormal properties?

In 1970, Anna allowed a crystal carver and art dealer named Frank Dorland to examine it. Scrying (also called seeing or peeping) is a magic practice that involves seeing things psychically in a medium, usually for purposes of obtaining spiritual visions and less often for purposes of divination or fortune-telling. Dorland pronounced the skull as excellent for scrying. He claimed that, depending on the position of the planets, it emitted sounds and light. He stated that it came from Atlantis. And it gets better; those popular old rascals, the Knights Templar, had carted it around with them during the crusades. On October 27, 1970, Frank Dorland had borrowed the skull from Anna Mitchell-Hedges.  One of his acquaintances was the supervisor of the Hewlett-Packard advertising account, Richard Garvin. Due to HP’s advanced scientific facilities as leaders in the manufacture of crystal oscillators, Dorland took the skull for tests to the Hewlett-Packard laboratory in Santa Clara.

At the laboratory, the skull was immersed in a tank of benzyl alcohol, which has the same refraction index as quartz crystal. In a benzyl alcohol solution, it would almost disappear. By passing polarized light through the skull and rotating it, it would be possible to locate the axis and observe ‘twinning.’ This is a splitting of the direction of crystal growth which happens under strong impact. It can happen to a single crystal, or to separate ones which can twin and grow together. Noticeably darker stress marks appearing on the Mitchell-Hedges skull showed this process around the eyes, nose, and jaw area. Dorland had suspected the skull was composed of separate pieces of quartz, but the technicians at Hewlett-Packard technicians reported that the skull, and its jawbone, was ‘almost certainly a single crystal of quartz, rather than a composite of three crystals.’ Mitchell-Hodges had already suggested that the artefact could have taken 150 years to make, so his daughter must have been over the moon when the HP boys suggested it may have taken ‘300 man-years of effort’,

The lab found that the skull had been carved against the natural axis of the crystal. Modern crystal sculptors always take into account the axis, or orientation of the crystal’s molecular symmetry, because using lasers and other high-tech tools, carving against the grain will shatter the crystal. These were wonderful additions to the skull’s growing mystique, and even more so when HP could find no microscopic scratches on the crystal indicating the use of metallic tools. Dorland’s hypothesis was that it had been hewn out with diamonds, with the finer details achieved with a combination of water and silicon.

Armed with such potent, high-tech facts, the paranormal road was open to add as many psychic attributes to the skull as you wished. Dorland, who had it for quite some time, began to experience visionary phenomena. Through the skull he claimed to be able to see buildings and architecture from various historical periods by looking into the eye sockets. He claimed it had an ‘aura’ which he found fascinating. It was said to give off the sounds of chimes, bells and other assorted noises, including chanting or singing human voices. When he had it in his bedroom overnight, he could hear what he claimed to be the sound of a jungle animal – a big cat – on the prowl.

According to the encouragingly thorough Strange Magazine (www.strangemag.com), there was an even weirder and more disturbing episode during Dorland’s possession of the skull.

Anton Szandor LaVey (above) (1930 –1997), was a writer, occultist and musician who founded the Church of Satan in San Francisco. He wrote The Satanic Bible and established LaVeyan Satanism, a synthesized system advocating materialism and individualism. Oddly enough, he described his church as ‘atheistic’ possessing no belief in the God or Devil, a claim which must have surely narked the Fallen One. As LaVey once quipped. ‘It’s hard being evil in a world that’s gone to hell’, but he did his best. It was a big mistake by Frank Dorland to allow LaVey into his house. The Frisco Lucifer, always looking for publicity, was accompanied by the editor of an Oakland newspaper. LaVey said that the skull had been made by Satan himself, and therefore must be the property of his church. Apparently Dorland had a hard time getting LaVey to leave. The ‘churchman’ was also omnipotent as a musician, and as Dorland happened to have an organ in his house, LaVey stubbornly sat at the keyboard to practice his demonic skill.

The skull should have been kept in its special vault, but on the day of LaVey’s visit, it was out of its usual sealed environment and on display in the house. Eventually the bargain basement Beelzebub departed, and Dorland and his wife put the skull away and went to bed. It was not to be a happy night.    Dorland recalled that ‘All night long there were lots and lots of sounds,’ yet he searched around and could find nothing. The next morning the sleepless couple discovered that their possessions lay scattered around, although doors and windows remained locked, and there was no sign of a break-in. ‘We had a telephone dialler,’  said Dorland, ‘that had been moved from the telephone at least thirty-five feet to the front door - and it lay right across the front door threshold. I never believed that this happened until it happened to me....’ What in fact ‘happened’ seems to have been classic poltergeist activity. Needless to say, Dorland thought that LaVey’s strong, evil ‘vibrations’ had interacted with the psychic power of the skull, saying ‘I think there was a conflict of one type of energy against another type of energy which interfered somehow with physical objects.’ Eventually Anna Mitchell-Hedges took the skull back and it remained with her until her death.

Good old Indy - no-one's fooling him!

The greatest expert on the world’s crystal skulls, Nick Nocerino, died in 2004. Nocerino devoted his life to studying crystal skulls, claiming that that no one knows how they were made and that they are impossible to duplicate. He founded The Society of Crystal Skulls International, an organisation that uses some unusual research methodology, including remote viewing, psychometry, and scrying, and it owns a collection of crystal skulls from around the world. 

Some skulls made of stone are genuine Mesoamerican cultural artefacts from such civilizations as the Aztecs. They are known as ‘death heads’ or skull masks. That’s too prosaic for New Agers. As far as they’re concerned, these skulls are either from Atlantis or extra-terrestrial in origin. They are claimed to have magical powers, emitting weird noises, and can spontaneously produce holographic images. This is good enough reason for the purveyors of paranormal trinkets to ensure that their stalls have a good selection of skulls in all materials – crystal, steel, carved from wood, stone, moulded in resin; there are thousands available around the world today.

At least 13 other skulls have made their debut over the years, many said have magical healing powers and mystical origins. The British Museum in London has one. However, in 1966 they carried out a study and survey of these artefacts. Utilising electron microscopes, it was revealed that two of the skulls examined possessed straight, perfectly-spaced surface markings which indicated that they’d been subjected to a modern polishing wheel. The hand-polishing process on genuine ancient objects would reveal irregular tiny scratches. The British Museum’s conclusion was that the skulls were made in Germany during the past 150 years. This would explain how they were manufactured with tools unavailable to the ancient Mayans or Aztecs.

In 1992 when the Smithsonian Institute received what was insisted to be an ‘Aztec’ crystal skull from an anonymous source who claimed it was bought in in 1960 in Mexico City. Research by the Smithsonian concluded that there was a crucial link between the skulls so popular with New Agers. He was a dubious character named Eugène Boban.

Eugène Boban (or Boban-Duvergé) (1834–1908) was the official archaeologist at the court of Maximilian I of Mexico (1832-1867). Regarded as a serious French antiquarian, he was also a member of the French Scientific Commission in Mexico. He appears to have possessed a number of crystal skulls, most of which he sold, and one now resides in the Musée du Quai Branly and another in the British Museum. The Paris skull is said to represent the Aztec god of the dead Mictlantecuhtli, yet does not seem to offer any occult powers.

Perhaps Boban’s post as the French Emperor’s official archaeologist paid well, but even so it must have been a short-lived career. Maximilian was only Emperor of Mexico from 1864 to 1867, his throne provided by Napoleon III’s occupying French forces. After just three years, in 1867, the French left, but Maximilian was reluctant to give up his imperial life, mistakenly believing that the people of Mexico supported him. With his armies gone, he refused to go home, and was captured by Benito Juarez’s Republican forces and executed by firing squad on June 19, 1867.

This disaster must have left Eugène Boban high and dry and strapped for cash, but he carried on dealing in antiques in Mexico until 1880. According to conclusions reached by Jane MacLaren Walsh of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, in Crystal Skulls and Other Problems (Smithsonian Institute Press, 1996), the crystal skulls purported to be enormously ancient which were on display in various museums were only manufactured between 1867 and 1886, and it appears that Boban acquired his skulls not from ancient Mesoamerican sites but from a source in that 19^th century hothouse of engineering technology, Germany.

In the May 27 2010 online edition of Archaeology (www.archaeoogy.com)  Walsh states that she ‘had two opportunities to examine the Mitchell-Hedges skull closely and to take silicone molds of carved and polished elements of it, which I have analysed under high-power light and scanning-electron microscopes ...The microscopic evidence presented here indicates that the skull is not a Maya artefact but was carved with high-speed, modern, diamond-coated lapidary tools....It is not unreasonable to conclude that the Mitchell-Hedges skull, which first appeared in 1933, (when it came into Sidney Burney’s possession) was also created within a short time of its debut. ‘

The crystal skull you can see in the British Museum today first appeared in in Eugène Boban’s Paris shop in 1881. Four years later, in Mexico City in 1885 he tried to sell it as an Aztec skull, but this ruse was thwarted by the curator of a Mexican museum who denounced it as a fake. The resourceful Boban soldiered on, and according to the New York Times, December 19, 1886, he managed to flog it off at an auction at Tiffany & Co in New York City. Just over two years later, it was bought by the British Museum where it still resides in the Wellcome Trust Gallery.

 

The British Museum Skull 

This is the BM’s caption describing the exhibit:

‘A life-size carving of a human skull made from a single block of rock crystal (a clear, colourless variety of quartz). It was acquired by the Museum in 1897 purporting to be an ancient Mexican object. However scientific research conducted by the Museum has established that the skull was most likely produced in the nineteenth century in Europe. As such the object is not an authentic pre-Columbian artefact.’

As for the skull of doom/love, if we accept the Smithsonian study, everything seems to point to it being carved in Europe, probably as a copy of the British Museum skull sometime between 1900 and the early 1930s. Who created it or sold it to Burney is unknown. Boban died in 1908, so he cannot be implicated. So perhaps the real mystical legend began when Sydney Burney finally sold the skull in London to Mitchell-Hedges at a Sotheby’s on October 15, 1943. It remains a terrific yarn, and as such it’s no surprise that Spielberg got a film out of it. Trust the paranormal to offer top line entertainment every time.

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The Real 007

November 2, 2015, 3:22 am

≫ Next: MANUEL a film by Tao Ruspoli

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THE ULTIMATE  SPOOK

NOVEMBER 5 2015 WILL BE THE 90th ANNIVERSARY OF

THE EXECUTION OF AN ESPIONAGE LEGEND.

The Bizarre World of Sidney Reilly – The Real 007.

Sidney Reilly: The Man who inspired James Bond.

Beyond the misty boundaries of espionage there are walking, human mysteries, conundrums of the psyche who leave behind a strange record of lives lived which are so complex, incredible and multi-faceted that they will remain a source of puzzlement and wonder for all time.

Whatever James Bond achieved in fiction is nothing compared to the real-life exploits of the so-called ‘Ace of Spies’, Sidney Reilly.  Even 007’s originator, author Ian Fleming, admitted his creation’s limitations when he said

 “James Bond is just a piece of nonsense I dreamed up. He’s not a Sidney Reilly, you know…”  

Sidney Reilly was a cunning chameleon, a devious, bold survivor, and the inspiration behind Bond, the ultimate enigma, feared by both political extremes, from capitalist to commissar. In the words of one researcher, ‘Reilly was so twisted he had to take his pants off with a corkscrew’. He may have come too early for the age of missiles, helicopters, Goldfinger and Blofeld, yet his dark hand is traceable in some of the early 20^th century’s dirtiest deals. He was a con man who held a dozen passports, described by the U.S. Government as ‘world class’, a chemist, a businessman, a master of disguise, a forger, and was fluent in a number of languages. He could fool the rich and famous and bring down governments, and then vanish like a ghost. His headed notepaper bore the double-headed Russian eagle with the legend Mundo Nulla Fides – ‘Put No Faith in The World’, or, literally – ‘Trust No One’. Anyone who came into contact with this man of mystery soon understood the deep significance of that motto. 

Sidney Reilly would have loved to look like Daniel Craig ...

And, as with Messrs. Craig, Connery, Moore and Brosnan, women couldn’t get enough of our Sidney. Any serial bigamist who had an estimated eight wives at the same time, with a mistress alongside each, deserves our attention.

He left a legacy of riddles. How did he become the fictitious Sidney Reilly,  claiming to be a ‘British gentleman’ of Irish descent? Did he die in front of a Soviet firing squad in 1925, or did he live on with yet another identity until the 1940s?

He was born to the Rosenblum family, either as Georgi, Shlomo or Sigmund – (sources differ) in  Odessa in Russia on March 24 1874 or 1873.  His father was a Jewish doctor, Markus Rosenblum, who had given up medicine to become a shipping agent and broker. Yet even these biographical details are suspect, as according to Reilly’s latest biographer, Professor Richard Spence of the University of Idaho[1]  there is no record of a Markus Rosenblum living in Odessa at that time. Reilly never mentioned Odessa as his birthplace. He cited both Clonmel, Ireland, and at other times, St. Petersburg, Russia as places of origin.

Reilly learned from an early age in a virulently anti-Semitic environment that plain survival was the noblest cause of all. The oppressed Jews were blamed for everything, including the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Pogroms – violent and murderous attacks on Jewish communities, were a regular occurrence, with the cry  Bei zhidov, spasai Rossii! (Kill the Yids and save Russia!) ringing through the streets. If you were a Jew in this climate, it made sense to have money – as much as possible. Money made life easier, it offered protection in tight corners and oiled the commercial wheels. Having money – and being prepared to kill for it -  became the guiding rule of Sigmund’s life.

For his entry into the international affairs of Great Britain we have a choice of scenarios. Professor Spence favours young Sigmund, with a qualification in Chemistry, arriving in London from France in 1895. Another current biography by Britain’s Andrew Cook[2]favours the lad stowing away on a British merchant ship bound for South America. There he took on the identity of a South American called Pedro, and became a cook at a British mission. When the mission was attacked by local Indians, it was Pedro to the rescue, bravely saving the endangered Brits whilst scaring off the local tribesmen. One of the mission members was a certain Major Fothergill, a British agent, who showed his gratitude to ‘Pedro’ with a generous cheque for £1,500. Rosenblum found a passage back to England. In London, he was soon mixing with a panoply of bizarre characters  who operated on the fringes of late Victorian society. If they had money – Sigmund was interested. He had begun trading as a chemist making profitable patent medicines with his own firm, Rosemblum & Co, then with the Electric Ozone Company, ostensibly carrying out research into the use of Ozone in the filtration systems on submarines. This brought him into contact with Basil Zaharoff, a fearful character of tremendous wealth and political influence, who had built his fortune on arms sales.

Basil Zaharoff displaying his many 'honours'.

Zaharoff was known as ‘The Merchant of Death’ (he excelled in bribery, blackmail, with a reputation for having competitors assassinated). Twice young Sigmund’s age, he took the callow chemist under his dark wing. They were made for each other. Zaharoff taught his devious young protégé  three rules he would always live by; that the best way to gain influence over a man was through a woman, that one should bet on all sides in a contest, but bet the most on the strongest man, and in politics, one should “begin on the left…and then work over to the right…”.

As if Zaharoff wasn’t depraved enough, it is thought that young Sigmund came into frequent contact at this time with the so-called ‘Beast Incarnate’, the black magician, Aleister Crowley.

Aleister Crowley, the self-proclaimed 'Great Beast'.

Posing in London as a Russian nobleman, Count Svarov, Crowley claimed to have returned from a spying mission to Russia on behalf of the Foreign Office. Such a fanciful yarn was bound to attract Sigmund’s attention. Crowley’s ‘magickal’ maxim ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law’ would have appealed immensely to the libidinous Rosenblum. But neither Crowley nor Zaharoff had been his first London contact.

One of the great Fortean mysteries of all time is still the indecipherable Voynich Manuscript, which is today lodged in the rare books department at Yale University. In the 1890s, the man who would eventually unearth this arcane tome at a Jesuit monastery in Italy, Wilfrid Michael Voynich, bibliophile and rare book dealer, ran his business in London. Not long after his arrival in England Sigmund realised that London was a hotbed of exiled Russian anti-tsarist revolutionaries. Information was his currency, and before long he was working for the Tsar’s secret police, the Ohkrana.

Wilfrid Voynich

Wilfrid Voynich, a Pole, had been an anti-tsarist nationalist who, like Sigmund, had trained as a chemist and had escaped from a Warsaw prison where he had been held for his political activities. Voynich had valuable contacts  among the many Russian political exiles in London, and as a rookie in the information business, Sigmund clung to Voynich like a limpet. Even more valuable to him was Voynich’s wife, Ethel Lillian Boole Voynich, the daughter of the prominent mathematician, George Boole. Another committed revolutionary, she took to Sigmund, unaware that every piece of information she let slip might end up in Scotland Yard or on the Tsar’s desk in St. Petersburg.

In 1899 she wrote a novel, The Gadlfy, whose central character, Arthur Burton, is said to be based on her interesting young friend.

Although a substantial sum at the time, the £1500 Sigmund had been given by Major Fothergill was dwindling away. His espionage wages from Scotland Yard – and elsewhere-  were not yet paying enough to run his hedonistic lifestyle.

Sigmund needed capital.

Through his connection to Superintendent William Melville at Scotland Yard, he came into the orbit of Sir Henry Montague Hozier, the Managing Secretary of Lloyds of London.  Whatever similarities there were in the two men’s character, they were in the area of serial infidelity and a nose for intelligence work. Hozier would eventually become Winston Churchill’s father-in-law. It was one of his associates at Lloyds in the Naval Intelligence Division, Albert Kaye Rollit, who would unwittingly move Sigmund closer to the money he needed. Rollit, Melville and Hozier were all Freemasons - as was Sigmund Rosenblum. They shared another passion – race horses, which eventually saw Sigmund being introduced to the 65 year old Reverend Hugh Thomas, another fan of all things equine. Thomas was very well-heeled for a clergyman, with his own stud farm, property in London and a Welsh estate. He also held an impressive portfolio of stocks and shares. Sigmund soon put the first of Basil Zaharoff’s rules into action. Thomas’s wife, Margaret Callahan Thomas, was the 23 year old daughter of an Irish sea captain, Edward Reilly Callahan.

Reverend Thomas had a bad heart. He had tried manfully for five years to produce an heir to his estate, but Margaret’s hoped for pregnancy had failed to materialise. Enter the young stud, Sigmund. By the summer of 1898 she was not only in love with the swarthy young spy, but carrying his child. Naturally, the old clergyman thought he’d scored at last.

He planned to celebrate the pregnancy by taking Margaret – and Sigmund - to sunnier climes, but as they were about to leave for the continent, he died from heart failure in a Newhaven hotel room. There may well have been some complicity in the Reverend’s death between Sigmund and Margaret. There is no record of the nurse who was supposed to be present at the death. The death certificate was signed by a doctor variously called S.W. or T. W. Andrews. The Royal College of Surgeons had no such member listed at the time. With his skill as a forger, it is possible that the death certificate was forged by Rosenblum.

Five months later Margaret, now a rich young woman, married Sigmund at Holborn Registry Office. He set about liquidating the late Reverend’s assets, a process which culminated in an auction at Christies. Now with adequate funds, he cleared off to Spain, possibly on a spying mission for Melville. Margaret was not invited.

In December 1898 he returned.

Six months later, with a passport in the name of Sidney George Reilly, he and Margaret left their house in London’s Upper Westbourne Terrace and Sigmund Rosenblum vanished. He may have been involved in a major counterfeiting operation which had pumped millions of fake roubles into the Russian economy. If Sigmund was to face any charges on this, then his cover with the Ohkrana and Scotland Yard may have been blown; so, he had to go abroad – to China.

The next few years of Reilly’s life becomes a complicated roller-coaster ride of business dealings, illicit affairs and, of course, the further development of his spying career around the world – especially in Russia.

By the time the First World War began he was regarded by the British Secret Service (MI6) as their top man. Code-named ST-1, this hard, cold enigma treated his women with contempt – and by this time Margaret was history.

His daring exploits beggar belief. At one time, at Cannes on the Mediterranean coast, he managed to talk his way on board the private yacht of the French Rothschild family to procure Persian oil concessions for Britain by disguising himself as a Catholic priest. At the height of World War I he turned up at a meeting of the German High Command dressed as a German officer, where he sat in, unnoticed, then reported back to MI6.  But it was in Russia where the enduring legend of Sidney Reilly  would be fully formed.

Reilly was fascinated by all things Napoleonic. He collected anything to do with Bonaparte. His plans for Russia following the overthrow of the Romanovs by the Bolsheviks in 1917 have an almost Napoleonic flavour. Reilly really believed that he could be the one man who could give back to Russia her former imperial glory. He would do it by intrigue, secret deals and dirty tricks, just as he did everything else. If spying had been a ‘gentlemanly’ occupation before Reilly, then the new rules of play under his direction would be as far from cricket as one could get.

But not everyone who worked for His Majesty’s Government found this brash braggart to their taste.

Robert Bruce Lockhart

Robert Bruce Lockhart was an erudite, keen young diplomat who had been sent to the new Bolshevik Russia in 1918 by the British government as an envoy to keep Lloyd George’s cabinet informed on the new Soviet state’s intentions. Lockhart was a pragmatist. On an earlier posting to Russia he had repeatedly warned London that the power of Lenin and Trotsky would eventually mean that the west should at least have a dialogue with the new socialist regime. Yet his advice fell on deaf ears. King George V and the deposed Tsar Nicholas II were close cousins. If there was any way the radical new usurpers could be toppled, despite simultaneously running the Great War, then Sidney Reilly would find it.

MI6 despatched their ace of skullduggery to Moscow, without informing Lockhart.

In addition to fermenting counter-revolution,  the centre piece of Reilly’s grand scheme was to arrest Trotsky and Lenin and, rather than execute them, parade them through the streets of Russia on a cart, minus their trousers.

Lenin

‘Better they look fools than martyrs’ was Reilly’s Russian strategy.

In Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was then called), the British Embassy had been vacated by senior diplomats, who had returned to the comfort of England rather than face the rigours of advancing communism. In their place in the embassy was a brave, highly-decorated Royal Navy submarine captain, the 37 year old Francis Cromie. Courageous though Cromie was, he was out of his depth in Reilly’s field of espionage.

Captain Francis Cromie

In Russia, Reilly  had established yet another identity for himself as Comrade Relinsky, an officer with the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police and fore-runner of the KGB.  He also became a fictitious Greek businessman, Mr. Konstantin. To the Americans he was ‘one of theirs’ with the odd name ‘Ser Ruis’. Each of his ‘characters’ in Russia soon had a wife. His identity would change even on train journeys between Petrograd and Moscow.  He would board as the Greek at one end, and disembark at the other as Relinsky.  There is no doubt that, with his previous experience working for the Tsarist Ohkrana, Reilly was feared by certain members of the new Cheka, who, like him, would have had much to hide about their previous affiliations. The sight of Reilly in their midst would fill them with fear lest he talked, providing fertile ground for blackmail, something Sidney excelled at.

By August 1918 there were serious Allied plans afoot to intervene in the new Russia. Trotsky and Lenin were told that Allied troops had been sent to Murmansk and Archangel to protect British armaments lest they fell into the hands of the Germans and to form a bulwark against the Kaiser’s troops.  But behind the scenes a different plot was developing. If the Allied force could join with the sizeable, disaffected tsarist factions, then the threat posed by the Bolsheviks – and any inspiration they might give to the rest of the world’s workers – could be removed.

When a party of Lenin’s Latvian Praetorian Guard secretly visited Captain Cromie at the Embassy in Petrograd, he listened carefully to their offer – that, with the right amount of finance, they could mobilise several thousand Latvian troops who would fight alongside the Allies to bring Lenin and Trotsky down. Cromie  sent the keen   counter-revolutionaries to Moscow to meet Lockhart and Reilly, posing as the Greek, Konstantin. Reilly immediately organised the transfer of 1,200,000 roubles in funds from London, which (although not all) was passed on to the ‘rebels’.

The money had, in fact, gone straight into the coffers of the Cheka; the whole thing had been a Bolshevik ‘sting’, set up to discover the real intentions of the Allies. Handing the money over had been a gamble, but risk was Reilly’s game and the Cheka agents had done a convincing job.

Such was the bold sweep of Reilly’s plans at this time that Bruce Lockhart had been forced to accept that Allied policy was now the spy’s full responsibility. Reilly’s scheme included blowing up bridges, the delivery from secret locations to Moscow of several batteries of  British heavy guns, and he had discovered the location of a sealed trainload of gold which was bound for Germany – for Sidney, an irresistible bonus should he get his hands on it. In Petrograd, Captain Cromie would proceed with plans to scuttle the Baltic Fleet. Reilly’s Napoleonic dreams seemed achievable.

Head of the Cheka: 'Iron'Felix Dzerzhinsky

The Cheka were now fully aware that Russia was under serious threat, but the organisation’s leaders, ‘Iron’ Felix Dzerzhinsky and his deputy Jacob Peters  played it cool and bided their time. Peters was in a dangerous situation – Reilly had known him in London and there seems no doubt the hidden truth of the Cheka deputy’s dubious political past was enough for Sidney to be able to make Peters complicit in his schemes.

However,  what happened on Friday August 30^th1918 forced their hand.  In Petrograd that morning the city’s Cheka boss, Moisei Uritsky, was assassinated. Was Reilly behind this? Probably, as it seems possible Uritsky may have known too much about Reilly and Peters. Worse was to come that evening when a young woman, Fania Kaplan, fired two shots at Lenin as he left from giving a speech in a factory. Lenin survived, but was seriously wounded. There is a strong possibility that Reilly was also behind this plot.  These two events, plus the threat of Allied intervention, all now combined to create what would be known as ‘The Terror’.

Hundreds were arrested or executed that night. The following day, Saturday 31^st, the Cheka invaded the British Embassy, arrested everyone, and shot Captain Cromie dead. Even the brave Cromie’s death may have been the result of Reilly’s scheming. He saw the naïve captain as a loose cannon who knew too much.

The game was up, and although Allied troops had indeed landed in Archangel, their network of support in Russia had been destroyed, as nearly every British diplomat or agent had been imprisoned. Reilly, of course, vanished, but in his perambulations by train between Moscow and Petrograd he was almost caught. The Cheka had boarded the train looking for him. Reilly bumped into a Bolshevik sailor in the corridor. He attacked him, stole his uniform and bundled  the unconscious mariner through the window onto the track. Now kitted out as one of the Soviet Navy’s finest, ‘Comrade Relinsky’ asked the marauding Cheka agents if he could ‘help to look for Reilly’, an offer they couldn’t refuse.

Despite Reilly’s efforts, the Soviet Union was to survive for over 70 years, but he carried on his devious work. In Britain in 1924 he helped to forge the infamous ‘Zinoviev Letter’, a scurrilous Russian fake exhorting British workers to revolt. It’s appearance in the Daily Mail  brought down Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government.

His death, as one would expect, has been as big a conundrum as his life. There are suggestions that he survived as a businessman for many years either in the USA or in Israel, as ‘George Rosenblum’.  Biographer Andrew Cook believes Reilly was probably executed in Russia, on Stalin’s orders, on November 5^th 1925.[3]

Whatever the truth – do we really want to know? In Reilly’s case, we can never stamp ‘case closed’ on the file – everyone loves an enigma.

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Honoured By Strangers
is available as an e-book
from Constable & Robinson /Little, Brown Ltd.

Sources:

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[1]Spence, Richard B.Trust No One: The Secret World of Sidney Reilly.

Feral House, Los Angeles, 2002.

[2] Cook, AndrewSidney Reilly: ST1 (On His Majesty’s Secret Service)

Tempus Books, UK 2002.

[3] IBID. See also Boycott, Owen,How Fate, and Stalin, finally dealt the ‘Ace of Spies’ a losing hand.

The Guardian, September 7 2002.

FURTHER READING:

Bruce Lockhart, Robin:Reilly Ace of Spies MacDonald, London 1968.

Written by  Robert Bruce Lockhart’s son,  this is a stirring yarn which incorporates all the fact, fiction and myth surrounding Reilly, yet lacks any sources, footnotes or a bibliography.

It was the basis for the 1983 12-part TV drama Reilly Ace of Spies starring Sam Neill.

Bruce Lockhart followed his book with Reilly: The First Man  in 1987 as a sequel.

Kettle, MichaelSidney Reilly: The True Story of The World’s Greatest Spy  (London 1983)

Reilly, Pepita and Sidney The Adventures of Sidney Reilly  (London 1931) supposedly partly written by reilly himself, although this seems doubtful; ‘Pepita’ was one of his bigamous wives.

Websites: for Reilly, the Zinoviev letter, etc.,

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Ssreilly.htmis an excellent source.

Finally, my own book,

Bainton, RoyHonoured By Strangers – The Life of Capt. Francis Cromie CB DSO RN 1882-1918

e-book, Constable & Robinson 2014 Airlife, Shrewsbury 2002  features many of Reilly’s exploits and dealings with Cromie.

MANUEL a film by Tao Ruspoli

November 7, 2015, 6:33 am

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Rest in Peace, Manuel Molina 1948-2015. This wonderful little film explains what Flamenco really is, what it means; a celebration of life, friendship, passion, heritage, culture. These scenes could have been from any decade in the past century, because what we regard as the 'modern' world is a temporary mirage. This is the romance of eternity, the joy of living, a refreshing view of what God is, and a positive idea of the hereafter. If there's a heaven, and Manuel is in it, I hope I get there. It'll be a fine place.

Joyful, independent, and unique, he died in much the way that he lived—uncompromising, always forging his own path, quintessentially flamenco. No one better could write his epitaph:

Let no one cry the day I die;

It’s more beautiful to sing,

Even if the song comes with pain

The Colour of Ice

November 24, 2015, 9:23 am

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THE COLOUR OF ICE

Bloody Vikings. That’s what you needed to be to find any pleasure in this God-forsaken corner of the globe. Hell, they must’ve been tough bastards. A horizon of ice, blizzards which stung you every few hours like a hail of tiny white bullets. Steely grey water punctuated by bergs, growlers and floes. And yes, over there, to starboard, there is some terra firma. Who the hell ever gave it that name - ‘Green’ land? Even viewed through binoculars, it appears as anything but green. It looks like the rest of this area; pallid, cadaverously dead, inhospitable.

   I usually enjoyed the 4-8 watch, especially the morning stretch. But there in Baffin Bay, way up off Greenland’s frozen west coast, no matter what watch you kept, there was an insistent mood of melancholy. Yet I blessed the modern research ship, our nomadic platform of hermetically sealed civilisation, able to bang defiantly through the ice as we dreamed of home in warm cabins, enjoyed good food … and even a lowly deckhand like me got paid.

We were collecting seismic data for possible oil fields in an area seaward of Canada’s 12 nautical-mile boundary, beyond the Outer Land Fast Ice Zone to the Greenland border. No exotic ports to waste my wages in. No bars, brothels or loose ladies. Not a bad number for an old hand saving for his retirement.

It was in a murky, way below zero chilling darkness that I came off the wheel at 0500 hours, when, as I went to leave the bridge the Chief Mate, clutching his binoculars, murmured “…what the bloody hell is that…” I paused and peered through the dark greyness at the horizon, as ever, littered with the ghostly, towering icebergs. But between them there was something else, something odd, an indistinct, misty silhouette. We were doing about ten knots and heading in its direction. As the shape clarified in the mounting dawn gloom, we both gave a nervous laugh. It was an old sailing ship. She was a four-master, square-rigged on all except the after mast. The Mate looked at me. He knew I’d been at sea when he was still in his cradle.

   “What d’you think?”

   “Judging by her rig,” I said, “she’s a barque. Pretty old, too.” He handed me the glasses and went into the chart room to check the radar. In the few minutes he was away, I could see the mystery ship more clearly. She had no navigation lights. No lights anywhere, and no sign of life on her decks. Her stiff sails were hanging in hard-frozen tatters. Her rigging was heavily encrusted with ice. This was a dead ship, a drifter. My relief crewman on the wheel, a young lad from Nova Scotia, now spotted it.

   “Hey - maybe that’s one of those new Johnny Depp movies they’re making? Another Pirates of the Caribbean?” The Mate turned on him and sneered.

   “We’re in bleedin’ Baffin Bay, you clown, not the West Indies! I don’t see any palm trees, do you?” Ten minutes later we had a better view. It wasn’t pleasant. There was something very unsettling about this derelict. She was afloat, yet with her timbers clad with heavy ice it was a wonder she hadn’t gone under. Oddly enough, she appeared to be moving in our direction. I hung around on the bridge as the Mate went to rouse the Captain out of his well-earned slumber.

    Captain Thorstein, a heavily bearded middle-aged Norwegian, was not best pleased to be wrenched from his warm bunk. Yawning, he stood there in his bathrobe and slippers. Yet he looked in silence for a long time as the distance between us and this frozen phantom decreased.

   “This is remarkable … very strange.” He rang down to the engine room to stop. We then gave the ancient mariner a blast on our whistle. No visible response.

   “Get the Aldis lamp, chief,” said the Captain, “ask him who the hell he is.”

Signals were flashed. Nothing. The Skipper dashed back to his cabin to get dressed. I could have gone below, but I remained transfixed by this approaching spectre.

   “Did they ever find the other ship from the Franklin expedition?” asked the Mate.

   “I think they found both,” I replied, “but this old tub’s a barque, a different rig, and she’s much older.” I zipped up my parka and went out onto the wing of the bridge for a smoke. It was lighter now and the drifter was just half a mile away. This close it looked even more sinister than ever. The skipper re-appeared and called all hands. The Mate suggested we approach the derelict and secure her alongside us, but I was relieved when the skipper rejected the idea. A decision was made to launch one of our inflatables to take a boarding party over. I was reluctant to be chosen, but with still over two hours of my watch left, and being fairly experienced, I got the dreaded call.

   Bouncing along, six of us, through an ice-infested obstacle course of deadly grey water, we were stunned into a state of disbelieving silence, disturbed only by the splutter of the outboard motor. Soon the ice-encrusted ancient wooden monster towered over us. As we passed under her stern, beneath the frost we could see the gilded, peeling name ‘Satyricon’.

   The Mate addressed his second in command. “You went to a good school, didn’t you, Thompson?”

   “Yes Chief, why?”

   “Satyricon. What’s that , a Greek god or something?”

   “No sir,” replied Thompson, “It was a Roman book by a man called Petronius. He was a big friend of the wicked Emperor Nero.” Our Bosun, Moncrieff, a dour old Shetland islander, puffed frantically on his briar pipe, staring up at the drifter with a wild expression.

   “Och, no … I dinnae like this, lads. Not at all. We should’ae left this ole’tub tae her fate. This is the devil’s work…” I wanted to laugh, but couldn’t. He had a point.

There were various stiff, frozen old ropes hanging over her side, but the Mate thought them too dangerous to use. After several attempts with a grappling iron and heaving lines, we managed to get a block and tackle hooked amidships enabling us to attach a Jacob’s ladder.

One by one we followed the Mate up the ladder, Moncrieff  remaining on the inflatable.

   As the five of us stepped onto that slippery, ice-bound deck a prickly, electric feeling of nauseous dread spread from man to man. The Mate and Second Mate were both equipped with powerful flashlights and walkie talkies. We all stood there for a few seconds, gazing around the deck, then aloft at the stiff, frozen old canvas and brittle rigging. Her hatch and lazarette covers were still in place. There was a blackened, rusting iron chimney astern of the mainmast.

    No-one spoke at first, then the Mate split us into two groups. I was to go with him to the quarterdeck to find what we presumed would be the Captain’s quarters, and the Second Mate would take two men forward to explore the fo’c’sle accommodation. Underneath her coating of ice she still felt reassuringly solid, yet something told us to tread very carefully indeed.

   Forcing open the quarterdeck door took some heavy physical force. I was praying it would stay shut, but ice creaked against ice as the dark interior was revealed. I followed the Mate in. Then the horror truly commenced. To starboard an open cabin door revealed a grim tableau. A frozen man, a corpse in an 18^th century greatcoat was crouched cross-legged on the deck, his head swathed in torn strips of old blanket. In his blue-green sticks of fingers he held a flint and a silver tinder box. Before him on the planks a small heap of partly burned wood shavings. The Mate shone the powerful torch beam and we shuddered at further revelations.

We disturbed a rigid blanket in a bunk, and as it cracked into shards, beneath it we discovered the frozen cadaver of a young woman, eyes still open and staring, her bared teeth set in a rictus of agonized death. Yet it was the pyramid-shaped canvas, an enshrouded heap on the deck close by which caused us to gasp and tremble. As we lifted the canvas, beneath knelt the brittle body of a small boy, his tiny hands welded together in an attitude of prayer. In this small cabin we were looking at the final tragic, miserable demise of what appeared to be a family. We jumped as the Mate’s walkie talkie crackled into life. The second mate’s voice burst into the frigid air.

   “Oh, Jesus H wept, Chief! We can’t stay here! You’re not gonna believe this - over!”

   “I know, Thompson. Whatever you’re seeing we can match it. But stick with it.”

‘Stick with it’? Was this some new maritime masochism? I wanted to be out of there and down that ladder, pronto.

We left this chamber of horrors and found ourselves in the larger Captain’s cabin. Sure enough, there was the ill-fated Master, sat like a pale marble statue at his desk, his inflexible blackened digits still clutching a quill pen. Before him, lying open, was the log book of the Satyricon. We huddled by him, reading the pages over the dead skipper’s bony shoulders. In those few minutes, which seemed like a grim eternity, we discovered that this ship had left Portsmouth on a long trip to China in 1759. The last entry he had been writing as the ice crushed the life from his veins told us that he and his crew had met their fate on or around November 21, 1773. Where had they been for 13 painful years!? And what the hell were they doing off the west coast of Greenland? Scarier still, how had this utterly refrigerated vessel been lurking in this remote region for 242 years without being spotted? We stood in horrified reverence for a few seconds, until the Mate said

   “Christ. D’you realise what this means? They must have found the North West Passage three years before even the Admiralty sent Cook out to look for it. This guy’s a hero!”

   “No, Chief,” I spluttered, “he’s a bloody corpse, and this ship’s a creepy graveyard. I don’t want any more of this.” The Mate looked at me and I could see he agreed. He took out his mobile phone and began taking pictures. He tried to pick up the crumbling log book but it fell to pieces. All nautical discipline left me. “For Christ’s sake, Chief - leave it! Let’s go!”

We left the quarterdeck and made our way forward. Thompson and his two startled, white-faced accomplices were staggering from the fo’c’sle.

   “Don’t go in there, Chief - don’t!”

   But we pushed past them and entered what was now a darkly sinister mariner’s mausoleum. Rigid corpses in bunks, skeletal remains in rotten hammocks, and the ultimate horror. A large cooking pot suspended by a chain over a pile of charcoal. It contained bones; human bones. The Chief snapped more pictures, but I flipped. I ran. Within seconds we were all scrambling down that ladder, almost capsizing the inflatable in our desperation to escape.

   Back on board our safe, warm, 21^st century refuge, we assembled in the saloon to report to Captain Thorstein. Rum was passed around. We needed it. The skipper found our tale hard to believe. But the Chief took out his phone. This would convince the Captain. Yet the little screen simply displayed six milky, opaque rectangles … the colour of ice. When we all went out on deck, the Satyricon had vanished.

After we were paid off in Glasgow, I never went to sea again. In disturbed dreams on dark winter nights, I still see that tiny figure, hands frozen in prayer, and I wonder where he is now. And that cooking pot … those bones.

Basement Jack

November 30, 2015, 12:49 pm

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BASEMENT JACK

There was no colour then. Everything was dark. The black, naked trees stood out against the iron sky like long-legged arthritic spiders. It was always damp, often foggy. There was a smell of ancient mud and rotting weed coming off the river. There must have been summers, but it’s the winters we’d remember. Perhaps any winter after a war feels like this. There was still a lingering smell of cordite and charred embers. And there was that house.

    We were told it was the Luftwaffe who had created that abandoned ruin. But if a bomb had dropped on that neglected, ancient abode down by the docks, it had only made a hole in the roof. No-one really knew how old the place was. When you’re ten years old architecture and provenance are meaningless; derelict buildings are places of adventure. We lads in the old docks gang called it Jack’s House. Some of us called it Jack’s Jinxed house, because it emanated fear and loathing. Yet such danger to boys is as a flame to a moth. It had an atmosphere which seeped like squirming tentacles through every shattered door and window frame. I can never remember that place in sunlight. It was a cold place, as wintry and as scary as a remote mountain cave. There was a legend, you see… and rumours. What more irresistible attraction did a sinister pile of crumbling bricks need for a gang of short-trousered, scuffed-kneed, dirty diminutive daredevils than legends and rumours?

And what a legend.

   “Don’t you go playing in Jack’s house” was the parental admonition. We all received this every time we ventured out in the winter twilight of the after-school afternoon. When we asked ‘Why?’ a different variation on the legend came from parents   “Boys have disappeared in that house.” Or “Little Jimmy Morgan went in there before the war and he’s never been seen since.” Other names were mentioned. Boys, girls, but always children. And every time, we would issue our own request: “Tell us the legend, Mum and Dad.” And in the gaslight, our shadows dancing on the walls, as the kettle boiled and the fire spluttered, with serious faces, they would.

   “That was Doctor Jack’s house, before the Great War, and the one which came after, before the Kaiser, Hitler, before Himmler, when Churchill was a young buck. Doctor Jack was a clever man. He was a biologist and a surgeon. Some say he was so clever that when Myra, his wife, died, he was able to bring her back from the dead. But no-one knew what happened really. He had three sons. One of them was killed in France. The other two were wounded, gassed and burned in the trenches. When they came home, they had no faces; just a fleshy slit for a mouth, staggered teeth like tombstones, eyeballs rattling in purple-veined, painful sockets above holes where there was once a nose. They were hardly alive. And after that cruel Great War, they all lived in that house, a brilliant, broken man and his two living corpses, and that place, like them, was slowly rotting away. No-one knows what became of them. No one remembers Dr. Jack’s funeral, or what happened to his sons. But beware, because that old house is storing something.”

And naturally, no matter how many times we’d heard this, we would ask what ‘something’ meant. The answer varied, but my Grandfather always explained it thus:

     “Ink.” It seemed odd, and we’d repeat the word; “Ink? Ink?”

  “Think about it, boys. At school, your ink wells, your scratchy pens. What happens when you spill ink on a desk?”

  “We soak it up with blotting paper.”

  “And what colour is the ink?”

  “Black.”

  “Well, boys, there you have it. That place is a huge blotter soaking up the blackness and despair. The fabric of that house is storing grief, anger and horror.”

   But we were young, and though impressionable, we never dwelled too long over Granddad’s gloomy prognosis. It was terrific stuff but even so to us it was baloney. So, obstinate urchins that we were, we would still go to Jack’s house. We never played our favourite game there; Commandos and Nazis, because it felt wrong. Whenever we stumbled through that splintered, hanging door and passed through the veil of cobwebs, we imagined ourselves as Howard Carter, discovering the tomb of Tutankhamun. Our HQ was probably once Dr. Jack’s study. We had found our own little treasures there. A meerschaum pipe, a buttoned boot, some military buttons, three rifle bullets and a silver tobacco tin. We had two stained, fading, framed sepia pictures, one of a stern looking Victorian man with a walrus moustache, pork chop sideburns and piercing, almost lizard-like eyes. The other was a family group. The same man, but younger, standing alongside a seated woman, young, smiling, with three small boys gathered at her feet. We in the gang assumed this was Dr. Jack’s family, but we dare not take these artefacts home. We hid them in an old wall cupboard, and when we gathered there, the five of us, we would sit cross legged in a circle on the threadbare, rotting old Persian carpet, light candles, and like some bizarre, prepubescent ritual, pass these strange, fusty items among us. They felt like electric, spirit-imbued talismans of the old house. They gave us a shudder, and those shudders were a special thrill. 

 But the space between a shudder, a thrill and true fear is a narrow one.

There were only four of the gang that fateful late November night. Our fifth member, Tommy, couldn’t come out to play because he had a cold and had been off school. That left me, Eric, Stan and George. It was odd because when we’d called round for Tommy, his religious, Catholic mother had looked us up and down on her doorstep, then pale-faced and morosely wide-eyed peered out into the frost-laden fog and said “Ah, just look at it. Almost dark, lads … so cold and damp. Whatever you do, don’t be going down to Jack’s house. Play somewhere else tonight.”  As far as we were concerned that request was like a line from a movie script. Don’t go to Jack’s! Don’t go? Where would the plot of an adventure be in that decision? Darkness? Fog? Bring it on!

    And so we skipped on, through gas lit terraces, back alleys, over piles of crumbling brick rubble, courtesy of Heinkel and Fokke, until there, squatting on the riverbank, silhouetted against the sky, loomed Jack’s house. That smell arose again. The mist had cleared a little and a low moon had broken through, it’s sickly areola encircling it like a shroud. That smell was the same but tonight there was something else. The mix of mud, cordite, burnt timber and rotting weed was overlaid with something more pungent. We stood on the remains of the shattered perimeter garden walls of the house and sniffed. Eric wrinkled his nose, but before he could offer a thought, Stan stepped in. “Hospitals,” he murmured.

George sniggered. “Naw. Smells like our lavvy when mam puts disinfectant in it.”

But I agreed with Stan, and Eric’s view supported mine.

    “I remember that smell. When I was in the hospickal  after I’d fell on that steel rod and it went through me leg. An’ when I ’ad me tonsils out. It’s that stuff they give ’yer to knock you out. It’s a hospickal smell alright.”

Eric had a small flashlight, and we followed its low-battery beam through the tangled undergrowth and up the three stone steps to the house. That smell seemed stronger. Inside, we carefully crept along the crumbling hallway with the plaster peeled from the walls, and crept into what we called our ‘den’, and found our candles still laid out on the floor. George got a box of matches out and lit them up, whilst I retrieved our selection of trophies from the old rotting cupboard. It was only then, as we attempted to form our circle that we realised Stan was missing. Eric frantically flashed the diminishing torch beam around the room. I began to shout.

   “Stan? Stan! Stop messin’ about! Where are you?”  I picked up one of the candles and held it aloft. Our monstrous shadows loomed up the diseased old walls all around us. Where was Stan? Suddenly our boyish bravery left us, leaving only the reality of the nasty darkness of the house. With two candles on the floor, one dripping burning wax onto my fingers and a dim torch we staggered into one another, and with each repeated cry of “Stan! Stan!” the panic in our voices crept higher. Then Eric, sensible Eric, stood stock still in the doorway to the hallway. He shone the flashlight at me and George. He spat the words out in a loud, staccato whisper, the shadow trickery of the candles turning his eyes into black holes.

   “Shut up you two! Shut up! Listen! Listen…”

The we heard it. It was unearthly, seemingly distant yet we knew it was near. Stan’s plaintive, reedy voice. “Help! Help me! I want me Mam! No! No!” Then the torch batteries finally gave out. All we had now was the candle I was holding. Stan’s voice rang out again, screaming this time. Hearts thumping, George, Eric and I huddled together and I held the candle aloft as we stepped into the dilapidated hallway. The voice seemed to be emanating from the very end, beyond the broken down staircase. We had never ventured there before because it ended in a boarded-up door secured with planks and nails. But as I held the candle up as high as I could, we were now shocked to see the planks lying on the rotten floor, and the previously obscured door slightly open. And from that black crack came poor little Stan’s scream again.

   “Mam! No! No!Help me!” Eric gasped and turned.

   “Let’s get out! Let’s go!” But George found enough courage for the three of us.

   “Bugger off Eric! We can’t leave Stan! He’s our mate!” And so, in close single file, me leading with the candle, we approached the door. I pushed it and with a long, spooky creak it opened wide. There were stone steps. Stan’s tragic cries were closer. Everything was now bitterly cold and our combined, terrified gasping filled the air with exhaled vapour. We began our descent. I held the candle at arm’s length. We were only half way down into what appeared to be a basement when we all froze and screamed in unison.

Looking up at us with piercing, glowing amphibian eyes was a figure in a long white coat. He had a large moustache and massive side whiskers. But that white coat was streaked with blood and gore. In one hand he held a large, bloody scalpel, in the other a big syringe. He bared his jagged green teeth. In the gloom behind him we could see two tables, upon which lay two dismembered cadavers. And beyond … oh, sweet Lord, no, no. Beyond, on the wet stone wall, hanging in manacles, crying, bleeding, screaming … Stan. Poor Stan. Our little friend Stan, who we would never ever see again. And that was when we became cowards. That was when we ran. When we looked back from the perimeter wall, the house had caught fire. We’d left the candles burning. The next morning, all that remained was four walls of blackened brick.

   No-one believed us. Nothing was found. What had been a basement was a charcoal pit.  There were no bodies. It is 60 years since that terrifying night. Eric and George are dead. When they finally bulldozed Dr. Jack’s house, I stood and watched. Above the rolling rumble of tumbling masonry, I heard what my conscience demanded. Stan’s voice again, accompanied by a distinct odour of anaesthetic. 

What the Dickens!

December 10, 2015, 4:24 am

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Carol singers, a whiff of chestnuts, frantic last minute shopping, pretentious TV ads for vastly over-priced fragrances. It’s here again, Christmas. But don’t imagine you can relax - there’s the enforced indigestion of the Boxing Day sales to face up to, and no doubt the Easter Eggs are already waiting on pallets in supermarket warehouses.

The great Alastair Sim in the definitive movie version. Scrooge, 1952.

However, we always have Dickens. What would Yuletide be without A Christmas Carol? It’s been a play, various musicals, and has been filmed fifty times since 1920. Charles Dickens (1812-1870) knew all about poverty, after being a child worker in a blacking factory whilst his parents languished in a debtor’s prison. He began writing his “little Christmas book”, as he called it, in October 1843 and finished it in six weeks, just in time for Christmas.

  

The book was an enormous success, selling 6,000 copies within days of publication. It became an instant hit as a play and musical in London and New York. 10 years after its publication, Charles Dickens gave the first public performance of his abridged version in 1853 in Birmingham’s town hall before a delighted working class audience of 2,000. In America he was the rock star of his day, touring for weeks on end to massive crowds in full evening dress, with a bright buttonhole, a purple waistcoat and a glittering watch-chain. His stage equipment consisted of a reading desk, carpet, gas lights and a pair of large screens to help project his voice. On his tour dates, for breakfast he had two tablespoons of rum with fresh cream, and at tea time a pint of champagne. To limber up for his performance, he would drink a raw egg in a glass of sherry. In the show’s interval, he consumed a cup of beef tea, and later went to bed with a bowl of soup.

His last performance of A Christmas Carol was on March 15 1870 at London’s St. James Hall. After he’d finished, exhausted he told the rapturous audience “From these garish lights, I vanish now for evermore, with a heartfelt, grateful, respectful, and affectionate farewell.” The crowd went wild, stamping and cheering. Three months later, aged 58, he died.

The superb musical version starring Albert Finney, 1970's Scrooge - sadly a box office flop.

In popularity, Scrooge and the three Spirits of Christmas run a close second to Santa Claus, Christmas trees and turkeys. Yet in his private life Dickens was not always a pleasant man. He treat his wife badly, and his dispute with the original illustrator of The Pickwick Papers, Robert Seymour, led to Seymour’s suicide. These blemishes aside, with stories like Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol he’s been pulling at our heartstrings for almost 150 years. In the Soviet Union Dickens was a literary giant, yet he was no socialist. His simple message was kindness and benevolence. Even in today’s world of banking greed and high finance, there are plenty of recognisable Scrooges around. So this Christmas, with food banks, desperate refugees and the homeless on our streets, let’s remember Tiny Tim’s words;

“God bless us, every one.”

RIP Lemmy: Another Man Done Gone

December 29, 2015, 4:54 am

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I was never a massive heavy metal fan, and I found Motorhead's music basic, albeit lively and driven, yet never challenging. However, Lemmy was one of those characters who personified the genre's self-made 'wild life' reputation. He was a basic man in many ways; he seemed as if he'd go on forever, but that wildness has finally overtaken him. Were Motorhead good musicians? Well, they were fast, that's a fact, but subtle? Never. No crying in your beer balladeering here; just three chords, tricky licks and the truth. They survived the 1970s punk revolution when all the other bouffanted, spandex heavy metal poseurs were sidelined, because Lemmy and his band outstripped the Pistols and The Damned or the Ramones with a well-established reputation for bad boy antics. They were the one heavy metal outfit the punks could still admire. And yet, for a resident of L.A.,  there was an old-fashioned, English heart still beating in Lemmy's hoary old chest; on the tour bus he re-read P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster over and over. That peculiarity alone gives him a sense of endearment. The music world's lost a true character, and no doubt Satan is already standing back in horror at his new arrival. RIP, Lemmy. You'll be missed.

Old Year, New Year

December 29, 2015, 4:59 am

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OLD YEAR, NEW YEAR

Four seasons, cold, warm, dark, light,

Twelve months, the measure

This year of days and nights has passed

With so few thoughts to treasure.

The clock’s hands tick on, unstoppable

Upon their midnight climb

Santa Claus has now surrendered

To old bearded Father Time

Once more we face another year

Searching for a solution

To how we’ll live and how we’ll love

Whilst lacking resolution.

---

RIP The Thin White Duke

January 11, 2016, 5:13 am

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THIS REVOLUTIONWASTELEVISED ...

David Bowie and Mick Ronson enjoy dinner on the Train to Eternity

It’s hard to believe or even accept David Bowie’s death at the age of 69. There is a theory in left wing politics about Revolution - the theory of ‘permanent revolution’ - where we keep the rebellion going, churning over, re-inventing, polishing, progressing. That was David Bowie’s art in a nutshell. With every album he transformed himself into something new. Ziggy, the Thin White Duke ... the Young Americans, Major Tom, Master of the Dance ... Bowie was everything - pure musical sophistication. His superb ability as a composer of timeless songs was matched by his ever-changing image.  Now the Gene Genie is back in the bottle. 

I never got to see him live, but I have a frail, tenuous connection to the Great Man. In the 1960s I played guitar in a Hull band called The King Bees. In a fit of petulance I resigned because they wouldn’t let my girlfriend ride in our van. My temporary replacement was a young Hull Corporation gardener  named Mick Ronson. Now Mick and David are together again. They’ve already got a bass player up there with Lemmy … Heaven must be like a permanent Glastonbury. 

Life? Get on with it ...

January 17, 2016, 7:43 am

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Life’s for Living

GET ON WITH IT

Ignore the creak of limbs,

The ache of climbing stairs,

Old age is still life;

Get on with it.

Ignore the failings of the world

Ideas you fought for,

Not achieved.

Old age is your reward;

Get on with it.

When the heart expires,

The breathing stops,

When light goes out,

Relax; what was once old age,

Is now something else.

Get on with it.

The late, great Louis Armstrong once said “If I’d known I was going to live this long, I’d have taken more care of myself.” As I approach the age of 73, I count myself lucky that despite years of self-abuse, the over-eating, the tons of tobacco I’ve consumed and the gallons of beer, I still have enough residual energy for this sedentary occupation of writing.    In the space of a month three popular icons of entertainment have left us, all brought down by that busy deputy of the Grim Reaper, cancer. If we’d lost actor Alan Rickman before December, no doubt the media would have quoted his famously delivered line in his role as Sheriff  of Nottingham; “Christmas is cancelled!” In Ace of Spades, Motorhead’s  Lemmy famously sang “I don’t wanna live forever”. On his final album, in the song Lazarus, David Bowie sings “Look up here, I’m in heaven.” All three of these performers had their Biblical three score and ten; Rickman and Bowie at 69, Lemmy at 70. They had full lives where their talents were recognised and they were duly rewarded, and rightly so. Yet today and tomorrow many other human beings of equal yet overlooked ability will expire, some only to be recognised decades after their passing. I often think of Vincent van Gogh in this respect; how would he have felt had he known that his paintings would one day sell for millions of dollars, often to people who only see art as an investment, rather than an inspirational pleasure?

Mortality is a grim subject to air in the bitter depths of January, but every time a famous person’s passing makes the news, it should make those of us ordinary folk still living more determined to make more of the life we have, not only for ourselves, but for those around us. People assume that somehow the gym, jogging, botox, vitamin supplements, fame and wealth will keep mortality at bay. However, even if you win the next Euro-millions rollover, if the reaper wants you, you’ll have to go. But that shouldn’t be a depressing thought; it should inspire us to be better human beings. Sadly, even writing these words makes me a hypocrite, because I can be irritable, tetchy and often intolerant. There is much in the 21^st century world to rail against. Maybe the secret to improvement is at least an element of self-recognition when it comes to your flaws. I know my lovely wife, Wendy, would be quick to point out that most of the sentiments I’m expressing here will appear to be at odds with my inherent impatience.

When you’re in your 20s the idea of your mortality is very different to when you're 50. At my wedding in 1966, if someone had said I’d be celebrating 50 years of marriage in 2016, it would have seemed like science fiction. In some ways it is. But as those 50 years rolled on, life and the way it was lived became more important. As you pass the half century mark, things begin to happen; your parents grow old and expire, children grow up and became parents in their own right, and all the love and affection you’ve spent a lifetime building up becomes much more valuable. We can choose to concentrate more on our friendships, become caring and careful, and try to consider others before ourselves. Those who have not yet passed through middle age can steal a march on us old folk by starting that process now. The  modern world is in a bad way. Religion is no longer a beacon to better behaviour. There are too many competing gods and they all seem to be intolerant of one another. Politics struggles to move us forward, yet remains ineffective. It’s down to us; the way we behave to one another, how much help and understanding we give to our neighbours, family and friends, the way we listen, the way we speak.

So as the endless obituaries prove, we don’t live for ever. If you do get to my age, it has a title: I call it ‘The Season of Funerals’. Your contemporaries, either those close to you or those big names you admire, begin to drop like flies.

Our late lovely daughter, Sarah, taken by cancer on December 23 2012, aged 46, always said she’d never wanted to become “an old woman”, yet by her caring nature, with 30 years working in the NHS, she had a full, happy life, kind and understanding. She left us a legacy of good memories - and that’s something we should all aim for. As Louis Armstrong suggested; ‘It’s a wonderful world’. It would be nice if the world woke up to that fact and tried to make it so.

DietHard

January 25, 2016, 3:35 am

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To celebrate the launch of this January's annual dieting attempt, I decided to gather a few of my portly comrades to pose with me for a 'before and after' photograph. The annual hope has returned - by April I'll be attractive ... DIETHARD As it does every January, the corporate media juggernaut rampages through our post-Yule conscience and tells us to get thin. Our mid-winter guilt is pillaged to prepare us for their next profit-gathering feeding frenzy, Valentine's Day, where we must be David Beckham/Beyonce fit, shedding the free bonus blubber they donated to us via Ferrero Rocher, Mr. Kipling, Brandy Butter and all things KFC. But unlike Ronald MacDonald, we're not'lovin' it'. Slimming World will be signing on new members. Weight Watchers will be watching weight, and they'll keep watching it because it'll still be there when the next batch of wobbly suckers signs in next January. I've never been slim for 60 years. My parents were bloaters, my brothers are cellulite strugglers. Yet all the experts who tell me about dieting are always thin people, people whose waistband has never fluctuated. They regard us with helpful, barely concealed disgust. And it's time for the publishing industry to hammer home the message; get thin or you'll wreck the NHS. So we've had them all; the Atkins Diet, the Hip and Thigh, the Commando Diet, Felicity Kendal's exercise DVD, countless Carol Vorderman-type 'detox' plans ... it goes on. This year? I'm trying the toughest, most complicated plan of them all; the SIRT diet. But if this doesn't work (Google it - it's too complex to outline here) then I am already researching my own diet plan. It's called the PPD - the Pork Pie Diet. Full details will be available in April, which will be the time my current diet has miserably failed. Publishers, be aware. The PPD could be your breakthrough seller for next January.

Goodnight, Dear Friend.

February 24, 2016, 5:21 am

≫ Next: Farewell, Sir George, and Thanks.

≪ Previous: DietHard

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 Goodnight, Gerry. Sweet Dreams.

In our dotage now, those of us who once thought that 50 was 'old' age; It isn't. 70+ is old age, and what once seemed like a joke about zimmer frames, incontinence pads and late night cocoa is not quite as funny any more. There's not so much to laugh at when we wake up on yet another morning.

On Friday February 19th a man I have known and loved for almost fifty years quietly faded away after a long struggle. Gerry Browning, 1933-2016 was a quiet, placid man. Gerry was a champion rambler, a man of wide open spaces who knew the beauty of the vast underpopulated swathes of Britain.  He knew his compass, could read his maps, and he taught us all that just beyond the next hill there lies more beauty than the valley we're still in. Gerry had deep, almost hidden yet searing passions which could surface in colourful emotion. His love of Rugby League and his adoration of the Airlie Birds, Hull FC, a lifelong commitment. And for a working class lad who had spent his life as a highly skilled bricklayer, it always surprised me that in his other passion for modern jazz, just how much he would enhance and influence my own tastes in music. On my first camping trip with Gerry at Robin Hood's Bay way back in 1971, after staggering back from the pub to our tents, Dave Iles and I and the other camper whose name we've forgotten suggested to Gerry that his leadership and knowledge warranted him having a proper title as expedition leader. As he unrolled his sleeping bag, he quietly said "Oh ... just call me Chiefie..." And that's what Gerry became, and has always been for the past 45 years. Then, close friends all, we used to assemble in Hull's Olde White Hart pub each week and Gerry would enlighten us on the latest jazz releases, among other things, and discuss the merits of Hull FC. After other walks we all did together, an initial event  featuring about 8 of us took place at Litton in the Yorkshire Dales. It was called the 12 mile pub crawl, and the walk was in honour of a close friend of ours, Mal, who had committed suicide.

On that walk we designated ourselves as The Over The Hill Club, and over the years we've had numerous weekends and expeditions, all led by Gerry, some highly memorable, like the riotous night we spent in the Black Sail Youth Hostel in the Lakes.

You may have left us, Chiefie, physically, but you're still our map and our compass. The last words you spoke to me in hospital were "You lads walk on - we'll all meet up ahead." I know that's true. Bless you for being our friend, and rest in peace, Chiefie. We'll see you off properly on March 11th, 2.30 pm  at Haltemprice Crematorium. 

Farewell, Sir George, and Thanks.

March 9, 2016, 12:36 pm

≫ Next: The Oblivion Express

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Once we've lived our three score and ten these things begin to happen. The shafts of sunlight which illuminated our lives vanish, leaving only shadows. What would our culture have been without the bold, innovative 90 well-spent years of Sir George Martin's life on this planet? He was an old fashioned 'gent' with no whiff of snobbery. He kept his tie on, but his heart and ears were open. He made us laugh with Peter Sellers and the Goons, and most of all, he opened a sealed door to the wider world for The Beatles, his skill and inventiveness the canvas upon which their brushstrokes would be made. We, the British, and you, the World, should be proud that such a man existed. Thank you, Mr. Martin; your place in cultural eternity is assured. 'And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make ...'