More reminiscences of life in the 1950s...
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 Two
programmes on TV at the moment, although one finishes today, the day I'm
writing this column, the 24th September. Both will be of
interest to nostalgia fans, and both are available on catch-up
television, of course. First off, the BBC have been repeating the
15-episode, 3 series drama Land Girls, a superior kind of drama with
great actors (Mark Benton, Sophie Ward, Jo Woodcock, Seline Hizli,
Danny Webb), brilliant story lines, and a musical score by Debbie
Wiseman, for me our greatest ever female composer. This brilliant
series looks at how the Land Girls transformed the way we lived during
the wartime years, and the series complete with intrigue, murder, German collaborators, German
refugees, and lots and lots of love interest. Superb viewing, something
I am thinking of adding to my Xmas gift list, it's so good! And then
there's Channel 5's new adaptation of the James Herriott memoirs, All
Creatures Great and Small, with Samuel West upstaging everyone else in
the cast; Callum Woodhouse reprises his character from The Durrells,
but he's just as engaging, and makes the show; Rachel Shenton provides
the love interest for newcomer Nicholas Ralph as James Herriott. The
music is a rip-off of the original TV series with Christopher Timothy
and Peter Davison, and not that brilliant, but they've captured the
essence of the 1930s to perfection and the series is perfect, hugely
enjoyable family viewing. Book of the month: Roy of the Rovers - Best Of The Sixties Published
by Rebellion Publishing August 2019
They don't come much more iconic than Roy of the Rovers. The Melchester Rovers striker of legend first appeared in 1954, and went on to become a genuine sporting hero for generations of fans, with his story spanning decades of footballing adventures. Celebrating 65 years of goals and glory in 2019, this second instalment in a spectacular new luxury series collects the very best Roy of the Rovers stories from that glorious decades of British football, the 1960s! The perfect archive companion to the Roy of the Rovers reboot graphic novels and middle-grade fiction published by Rebellion, tying together and bringing full-circle the nostalgia of the brand with the new generation reimagining. The magnificent continuation of Rebellion's Roy of the Rovers series - each story carries the original front cover of the Tiger comic reproduced in stunning full colour - until the strip was relegated to the inside of the comic and another story took over the front cover. The stories are sometimes a little far-fetched, and I find it hard to believe that Bobby Charlton ever had much of a hand in writing the stories, although that was what was claimed... This series is absolutely one of the finest reprints of 1950s/1960s comics, and continues with the 1970s, although I very much doubt I shall get to see any more. In the meantime, you can continue to read about my 1950s exploits, which saw me go from Listen With Mother at the age of four, to becoming a teenager... Growing up in the fifties - continued
The
Third Programme was far more serious; I suppose it was pretty obvious
from the fact that they had a "Light" programme - anything else was
going to be more jolly, more lively, more friivolous. We listened
regularly to all of the music programmes on the Light and Home
programmes; shows such as Henry Hall's Music Night and Henry Hall's
Guest Night; Workers' Playtime; Parade of the Pops etc., etc., and to
the comedy shows like Meet The Huggetts, and The Clitheroe Kid; Take It
From Here; Much Binding in the Marsh; and later, The Goon Show and The
Navy Lark. We listened to everything going because we didn't have a
television. In fact we didn't have a television until 1963, when we
were living in Stevenage New Town and beginning a new chapter of our
life that would see me meet and eventually marry Wendy. The Third
Programme played "serious" music: classical music, that is, and we
regularly listened to the Promenade Concerts, although the name didn't
mean anything to me at the time. Those concerts made me familiar with
the great composers, Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Handel, Haydn etc. But
not to the late Romantics like Mahler and Richard Strauss; nor to the
great opera composers like Puccini and Wagner - those discoveries came
later in my life - after I'd met and started courting Wendy, in fact. I
loved all kinds of music with the exception of modern jazz, and the
really noisy big bands - Glenn Miller's stuff was OK, but the stuff
where they go overboard on the brass and so on was nothing more than a
cacophany of sound that I didn't like - I think it was called Be-Bop or
something like that - horrendous! They had the occasional jazz
programme on The Third Programme but I was really only interested in
traditional jazz, bands like King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Cab
Calloway; then there was Jack Hylton, and the newly discovered
Quintet Du Hot Club de
France, featuring the sublime Stephane Grapelli and the guitar magic of
Django Reinhardt - possibly the greatest guitarist that ever lived;
certainly the greatest ever jazz guitarist!
The
list of things I needed for my foray into the big school was daunting,
and although money was relatively tight at the time, I was taken into
the Bon Marché department store in Kings Square, Gloucester where we
purchased a blazer (maroon, with a gold badge depicting the two "Js"
that represented the founders of the school in 1539, John and Joan Cook); two
pairs of long grey socks with maroon and gold stripes around the tops;
a tie, maroon and gold stripes; two rugby football shirts, maroon and
gold stripes; white cricket flannels, a white cricket jumper, maroon
stripe around the bottom; baseball boots with thick crepe soles, two
pairs of grey shorts (one pair of which were worn once - I persuaded my
Mum that I needed, that I had to have, because I had been the only boy
wearing shorts on the first day) long trousers, and luckily my Dad had
a pair that Mum was able to adapt until the next weekend, when we went
back to Bon Marché to buy two pairs of long trousers; a school cap,
maroon and gold (again only worn once, again I was the only new boy in
the school who had worn a cap); and a pair of shiny black shoes.
I had deliberately chosen the Crypt Grammar School for two reasons: my
two older cousins, Brian and Peter Kimber (sons of Uncle Bill, a scout
master whom I didn't particularly like - neither did I really like
Brian and Peter!) and because the school was old, very old, very, very
old, in fact one of the oldest in Britain, with its foundation dated
back as far as 1503 (officially 1539 but there was a document
discovered during my time there that went back to the earlier date),
and the alternative was Sir Thomas Rich's school, which had a light
blue uniform, and the maroon and gold of the Crypt was far more
sophisticated.
There
was no first form. The eleven-year-old intake (I was still ten for
another two weeks, my birthday being September 13th, were split into
three forms, 2A, 2B and 2C while they sorted us out. The explanation
was that form 1 was a preparatory form dating back to the Victorian
era. Nobody understood this, it was a complete mystery. The form system
at the Crypt was mistifying. Forms 2, 3, 4, Upper Fourth, Fifth, Lower
Sixth, Upper Sixth. Very confusing! I would have been at the Crypt for
one and a half years before my future wife caught up with me in terms of what we were studying. She has
never understood or, I suspect, believed me when I told her that at the
end of the first year, we were sorted into classical and modern
students. I was allowed to ditch the three science subjects, and
geography, and allowed to choose a second language (French was
compulsory for all students), Spanish, and Greek. So I ended up doing
English Literature, English Language, Maths, Latin, History, French,
Spanish and Greek. Along the way I was also allowed to drop Greek. It
was all Greek to me... At the time I was studying my core seven
subjects for GCE O Level at the Crypt Grammar School, Gloucester, Wendy
was doing eleven subjects at the Girls Grammar School in Stevenage.
Yours
Retro Magazine - the latest issue - out now!
The
September
2020 issue of Yours Retro magazine kicks off with everyone's favourite
golden age Hollywood actor, James Stewart and a look back at a number
of his most celebrated films, including Vertigo, Rear Window etc. Then
there's Oliver Reed and how Hammer's Horror films gave him his big
break. There's a brilliant article on women in TV comedy, with the
likes of Lucille Ball and Mary Tyler Moore, a feature on Thora Hird, on
the hit TV show Mission Impossible, and much, much more - this is the
very best magazine on the newsstands, well worth a look, crammed with
brilliant articles and features - sheer entertainment!
(Note to self, May/June 2016 Archives)
The small print: Books Monthly, now well into its 22nd year on the web, is published on or slightly before the first day of each month by Paul Norman. You can contact me here. If you wish to submit something for publication in the magazine, let me remind you there is no payment as I don't make any money from this publication. If you want to send me something to review, contact me via email at paulenorman1@gmail.com and I'll let you know where to send it.
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As
this is the Nostalgia page, and it's all about what happened in the old
days, I'm publishing part four of my memories of the 1950s...
ve
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In
the early 1950s, the BBC was the main radio broadcaster in the UK, with
three main stations - the Home programme, the Light programme, and the
Third programme. The Light programme was the one that broadcast all the
record request programmes, such as Housewives Choice, Two-Way (later
Three-way and occasionally more-ways) Family Favourites, presented by
Cliff Michelmore and his wife, Jean Metcalfe (I didn't know they were married at the time); Children's Favourites,
presented by Derek McCulloch, or Uncle Mac, as he was more commonly known. Two-Way
Family Favourites enabled service men and women to keep in
touch with their loved ones back in Britain by requesting songs to be
played on air with dedications and declarations of love and so on. It
was a rare opportunity for the BBC to play "popular" music records, and
a chance for us youngsters to hear the new wave of crooners, such as
Perry Como, Pat Boone, Dickie Valentine etc., to perform such stalwarts
as "She Wears Red Feathers and a Hula, Hula Skirt", and "Pretty Little
Black-Eyed Susie", and "Magic Moments"; records we would otherwise not have heard without
tuning into the somewhat elusive Radio Luxembourg on frequency 208.
Housewives Choice also played the same sort of records, and was hosted
by people like Jack De Manio, Jimmy Young etc. Children's Favourites
provided us with a chance of hearing anything from Danny Kaye singing
The Ugly Duckling (from the film Hans Christian Andersen), to the
Oberkirchen Children's Choir singing The Happy Wanderer, and even some
classical pieces (Chopin, for example, as played in Sparky's Magic Piano), together with pieces like Hugo Alfven's
Swedish Rhapsody No. 1, which I later discovered had been brutally
butchered and was virtually unrecognisable from the actual piece, which
is an exhilarating showcase of European folk music, as are the
other two rhapsodies by the same composer.
I
wasn't that keen on country and western music - it was a bit hillbilly
and wishy washy for me. But it sure beat the heck out of modern jazz.
Nowadays there are so many more types of music to dislike - it started
with punk rock, which is, in my opinion an abomination; there's rap -
pointless and totally devoid of music, not music at all, really; Reggae
- not my thing at all;
and anything after 1980, really, with the notable exception of Jeff
Lynne's ELO, and people like Randy Newman, Gerry Rafferty, Harry
Nilsson and so on, although as they started in the 1970s, they don't
really qualify for the post-1980 dislike criteria, do they? When they
show endless trailers on the BBC for some group called Little Mix, with
the promise of a prime-time TV programme about them, I despair about
the state of modern pop music. It's just noise, and bad noise at that.
Back in the 1950s, we had post-war Rock and Roll, the sublime pop songs
of Carole King, Bobby Darin; the crooners, such as Frank Sinatra (Bobby
Darin joined him fairly swiftly, and to my mind overtook him to become
the greatest ever performer in that category), along with Nat King Cole (A Merry
Old Soul), Perry Como, Dean Martin, Johnny Mathis et al. We had the
emerging trad jazz groups (trad jazz became a really big thing in the
early 1960s) superb bands like Mr Acker Bilk and His Paramount Jazz Band, Kenny
Ball's Jazzmen, and Chris Barber's Jazz Band. Amazingly, each of the
three band leaders played one of the three principal jazz instruments -
clarinet, trumpet and trombone. I am related by marriage to the
original trombonist in Acker Bilk's band - Johnny Mortimer was his
name,
and he was a nephew of my Uncle George, who was married to my Dad's
sister,, my Aunty Ivy. I never met Johnny Mortimer, but I did see Acker
and his band, twice at Cheltenham Town Hall, and once in Colston Hall,
Bristol - and they were awesome!
The
Light programme also housed the Saturday Morning Skiffle Club, hosted
by Brian Matthew and featuring songs by such groups as Johnny Duncan's
Blue Grass Boys, Lonnie Donnegan's Skiffle Group, Chas McDevitt and
Nancy Whisky. Folk music and Skiffle was as near as we got to the new
music, that scourge of our parents, Rock 'N' Roll that we knew was
being payed in the US courtesy of our music magazines, Melody Maker and
the New Musical Express. For a period of two weeks in the summer
holidays, the BBC decamped to the Earls Court Radio Show, and gave up a
couple of hours each morning to interview people visiting the show and
ask them what music they would like to hear. It was during one of these
broadcasts in the 1950s that I heard Paul Anka singing "Diana", and my
life changed. I no longer wanted to hear "The Ballad of Davy Crockett",
or "The Emperor's New Clothes", although the latter formulated my
approach to many things in my later like, and still does, to a certain
extent, especially when it comes to modern art etc. I wanted to hear Elvis Presley, Eddie Cochrane, Buddy Holly,
Bobby Darin, Bobby Vee, Ricky Nelson and co. Their music was lively,
their music was vibrant and catchy, They didn't sing ballads, they
didn't croon, they let rip. Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard played
the piano standing up! It was a new world order, and it was just a
matter of time before it was going to be played on the BBC. It was the
start of something big. The Saturday Skiffle Club, which started in 1957 with a budget of around £50, graduated into the
Saturday Club in 1959 as the new music started to gain ground, but it was to be
another five years before the biggest revolution in popular music at
the BBC took hold. And in the meantime, I started Grammar School. 
I've
told this story before, but I'll repeat it here. In my last term at the
Crypt, in July 1963, seven or so of us managed to fashion a Ouija
board with scraps of paper with letters on, and a glass tumbler from
the school canteen. We were in a small room at the end of the main
building, a room
that had been given to us as a sort of Lower Sixth Form common room,
and we started to ask questions. They were all about girls, as I
recall. When it came to my turn, I asked the name of the girl I was
going to marry, and we all put our forefingers on the upturned tumbler,
and I swear, as God is my witness, that it spelled out "Wendy". I
didn't know a Wendy, in fact I didn't know many girls at all, as the
Crypt was a boys' school. One of the boys brought along his girlfriend
and her friend, both of whom rode in the bath on wheels that we pushed
from Gloucester to Cheltenham to raise money for the newly-formed
Oxfam in 1962; and I still saw a couple of the girls I had been to
primary
school with at the Friday night youth club in Hucclecote, where there
was a record player, and where we listened to the
Everly Brothers and to the Shirelles singing "Will You Still Love Me
Tomorrow" (a firm favourite of mine then, and still is, it's one of
Carole
King's finest songs, along with "It Might As Well Rain Until
September"). But none of them was called Wendy, and in any case, I
didn't particularly want a girlfriend at that stage in my life.
