Remember the days of the old schoolyard : 1963-1969 : Cordwalles Junior School, Camberley

 “I don’t wanna go,” I was shouting as I struggled to hang on to the car door for dear life. I was being kidnapped and forced into a vehicle outside my home that was wanting to carry me away … to my first day at infant school. My mother was trying her gentlest to push inside the family car her five-year-old son who was usually well behaved and never angry or upset. Passers-by on their way to work in town were gazing. Passengers were pointedly staring out of a passing double-decker bus. What was wrong with that belligerent child? My mother was equally horrified to witness my first tantrum.

I enjoyed being at home. I had plenty of activities to occupy myself there. I never found myself at a loose end. My parents had a remarkably hands-off attitude to my upbringing, letting me put on records, listen to the radio, watch television or play in the back garden whenever I wanted. There was no regime to follow. I was perfectly content organising my own life and did not require a school to instruct me what I should do and when. During the past year, my mother had been sending me to Mrs Potten’s ‘Gay Tree’ nursery school on Grand Avenue in order to mix with other children because I was an only child. I had found most of my peers there to be noisy and bossy, whereas I was quiet and calm. To seek acceptance, I must have adopted their rather posh accents, committed to immortality when my father recorded me on his Uher reel-to-reel tape machine reciting the two ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’ books that I knew by heart.

My mother already harboured an aspiration for me to marry ‘above my station’. Whenever we walked into the town centre, on passing Bath Road, she would suggest I call on ‘Wooty’ who lived at the far end of that cul-de-sac in a large house backing onto the grounds of Sandhurst Royal Military Academy. I had met Alexandra Wooten at nursery school but had not developed a particularly close friendship with her, preferring the company of more down-to-earth Liam who lived only four doors away from our home … until his Irish parents moved away to Blackwater. Despite my mother’s persistence, I may have only visited Alexandra’s house once to ‘play’ because, unsurprisingly, I found we had no common interests.

My reluctance to attend primary school was due to anticipation that a new set of peers would be similar to Mrs Potten’s charges, the only children of my age I had so far encountered. I was mistaken! My fee-paying, town centre nursery school had been dominated by the offspring of Camberley’s middle class, whereas my state primary school was located on the peripheral council estate where I had been born, built to rehouse South Londoners whose homes had been destroyed by bombing during the War and subsequent slum clearance. Patronisingly, the council had named the estate’s streets ‘Kingston Road’, ‘Mitcham Road’, ‘Surbiton Road’, ‘Wimbledon Road’ and ‘Carshalton Road’, as if newcomers would feel more at home by eulogising their former hometowns some twenty miles away. Naturally, none of those roads led to the places after which they had been named.

I quickly discovered how wrong my expectations about school had been. My new classmates seemed perfectly normal. Unlike Mrs Potten, teachers did not require us to dress up in costumes and repeat archaic speeches for Biblical reenactments, or to watch violent ‘Punch & Judy’ puppet shows. Instead, we were given interesting creative activities to do and treated with respect and encouragement. Teachers addressed us by our first names. I loved school. I quickly retired my quasi-posh accent. I had already mastered the reading and writing skills with which some of my peers were struggling and was now teaching myself to type. One day at home, my mother had asked me to put away her electric iron and, without realising it was still plugged in, I picked it up by its plate and screamed, burning my right hand. She had to bandage my thumb and index finger for a while, so I continued to learn to type at home using my middle finger … the way I type to this day. I had wondered if my erased fingerprints would ever return, but they did eventually.

After two years, we all moved to the adjoining primary school where teaching was more structured. I attended my first morning assembly in the main hall but was baffled when the principal instructed us to recite something called the ‘Lord’s Prayer’. Everyone around me bowed their heads and recited a kind of mantra I had never heard. It felt unnervingly as if I had mistakenly been invited into some kind of cult in which all the teachers and children had already been indoctrinated … except me. I had no understanding of what was going on around me, more so because next we were told to sing strange songs from a thick book of incomprehensible ancient lyrics I had never heard played on the radio. It was impossible to sing when you had no idea what the tune should be.

Afterwards, having observed my bafflement, a teacher asked why I had not participated in the religious part of our school assembly. She seemed shocked that I had never heard of ‘hymns’ or ‘prayers’, asking whether my family was ‘Christian’. I had no idea what that word meant, so I returned home and asked my mother, who replied that we were not religious. She wrote a brief note to my teacher explaining that simple fact and, thereafter, I was excused from the section of daily assembly devoted to hymns and the like. Every day for the next four years, I would sit in a nearby small side-room alongside several children including classmate Jacqueline Dixon, a Hindu who initially asked me what was my religion. I had to tell her and the other non-Christians sequestered there that I did not seem to have one. I was an oddity.

Although my aunt Sheila worked as a ‘dinner lady’ at the school, I always returned home to take lunch. I would stand alone at the bus stop at the top end of Upper College Road, staring across at the modernist St Martin’s church on the opposite side of the roundabout, puzzled as to what might go on inside. I had heard classmates talk about attending something called ‘Sunday School’ there, next door to the home of classmate Annette van Hartaan Veldt. This church must have been where almost everyone else at school had been indoctrinated into their cult. It seemed to take an age until Aldershot & District Traction Company Limited’s number 1, 2 or 3C bus arrived to carry me one mile home for a halfpenny fare. (Once I had grown to be amongst the tallest in my class, the bus conductor insisted I pay the adult one penny fare despite me still being a child.) Arrived home, I would have just enough time to snack something and then catch the bus back for afternoon classes.

After school finished at four, if it was not raining, I could save the bus fare by walking home alone the length of Upper College Ride. This downhill route passed through a 400-yard stretch of Ministry of Defence woodland, a natural barrier intended to isolate the council estate from private housing around the town centre. It was always a lonely journey bereft of fellow pedestrians and scary on dark winter afternoons, me worrying an escapee from Broadmoor might jump out from behind a tree. The money saved I would blow in the sweet shop near my school on ‘Batman’ bubble gum packets, ‘Flying Saucers’, ‘Swizzels Love Hearts’, ‘Lemon Sherberts’ or a ‘Lucky Bag’. I was obsessed with the ‘Batman’ TV show and, as well as requesting my mother fabricate the superhero’s ‘utility belt’ for me to wear, I saved enough sweet wrappers to send for a ‘Batman’ poster that would grace my bedroom wall.

My favourite school activities were summer days when the teacher would take our class outside, thirty of us sat cross-legged in the shade of a huge tree behind the main building, writing essays in exercise books balanced on our laps. Those remain some of the happiest days of my life, before homework and exams impinged on my childhood, and before my parents sent me to a faraway school stuffed with posh boys and requiring a bottle-green uniform.

My least favourite school activity was ‘swimming’ in the newly constructed, unheated rectangular above-ground pool on the playing field. Alongside were two tiny windowless wooden huts in which girls and boys were shepherded separately to change into their costumes, and where I hated my mates spying me naked. I was so rake-thin that the bottom of my rib cage protruded, making me imagine I had some kind of physical deformity not evident in my schoolmates. My acute embarrassment destroyed any enjoyment and inhibited my capacity to learn to swim … which sadly I never overcame.

In my final year at Cordwalles, teacher Mr Hales encouraged us to open savings accounts with Trustee Savings Bank [TSB]. Once a week after class registration, he would ask if we had coins to deposit, record their value in our individual bank books and update our balances. It was a great way to make us understand the value of money, particularly as the monetary system was about to convert to ‘new pence’ from shillings. Would a school today actively encourage ten-year-olds to manage their first bank accounts in class?

I made some really good friends – including Paul Rowell, Michael Heinrich and Martin Bell – who would invite me to their houses on the estate after school. I was surrounded by peers of both sexes, of various religions and diverse races. I feel very lucky to have been educated in such a safe, sympathetic and uncompetitive environment, full of stimulation and encouragement that immensely shaped my attitudes and life thereafter. Unfortunately, it made my subsequent education and career make me feel all the more like a fish out of water, forced to navigate pathways amongst privileged, entitled people who seemed to have had very different childhoods that had fostered their cold, cutthroat, self-centred outlook on life.

I was sad to leave my primary school in 1969, after which I no longer saw the classmates with whom I had spent the previous six years. My parents failed to appreciate that their decision to continue my education at a distant school tore me away from roots I had forged on Old Dean Estate and isolated my social life by forcing me to travel daily to the other end of the county. At Cordwalles, I had felt like a normal boy living a normal life. I was never again made to feel that I fitted in so comfortably.

Postscript. The first time I went to church was in 1967 to accompany my mother to the final service of St George’s, built by the local Middleton family in the 1890’s on St George’s Road at Knoll Road, prior to its demolition to create a car park adjacent to Herman Solomon’s Garage. Despite never having known my mother attend any church, she was annoyed that our nearest one had been sold off as part of Camberley town centre’s modernisation. 

More than two decades later, having recalled that I had once opened a savings account at school, I walked into the TSB Camberley branch in London Road and asked if I could withdraw the balance. It took several weeks for the staff to locate my details and obligingly add years of interest to my balance before I could withdraw a small sum that I had almost forgotten I had.

Virtual Tour of Cordwalles Classrooms

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/12/remember-days-of-old-schoolyard-1963.html]

An elite academy for aspiring rent-a-gob politicians : 1976 : Durham Union Society

“I’m sorry but you must wear appropriate attire to attend,” the usher told me sternly.

I thought I had been dressed normally enough, but apparently not. I was waving my club membership card, having paid the annual subscription during Freshers’ Week. Only then did I learn that it was insufficient merely to be a paid-up member. Nobody had told me I needed additionally to wear an academic gown to be admitted, one of those flimsy black material things belonging to previous centuries or ghost movies. Since my arrival at university, I had spotted a few students wafting around the streets wearing such gowns and I had considered their fashion sense preposterous, particularly in the ‘Year of Punk’. Why would I waste £37 of my Surrey County Council student full grant on such an anachronistic garment? Now, to my frustration, I was being refused entry to the society’s first debate of the academic year and had to walk the mile back to my college in autumnal darkness.

I was unaware then that Durham University was so normalised to its elite status that it even labelled its relationship with the local population ‘town and gown’. Evidently it never had considered itself an integral part of Durham, one of Britain’s poorest working-class regions, because its students were not drawn from the locality but from some of Britain’s poshest families whose offspring had proven insufficiently academic to gain admission to Oxbridge. I recall my shock during a party at fellow student John Cummins’ town centre flat when I learnt that his parents had purchased that property for the duration of his studies. Whilst processing my astonishment, I rudely fell asleep on his sofa in the midst of the revelling. Only later did I discover that such investments by rich parents were commonplace. (Despite showing little interest in the pop music with which I was obsessed, later John landed a job at ‘The Tube’ music TV show and was then appointed Channel 4’s launch head of youth television.)

Clubs had never been for me. At school, the only one I had joined was ‘Strode’s Film Club’, a sixth-form wheeze by classmate and film buff Martin Nichols to legally screen in the main hall X-rated movies such as ‘Straw Dogs’, ‘Lord of The Flies’, ‘Canterbury Tales’, ‘North by Northwest’, ‘Celine and Julie Go Boating’ and ‘Closely Observed Trains’. Now, as a naïve fresher at university, I had been told it was essential to join numerous clubs, particularly the debating society, so I had paid my money, only to be turned away from its first event. A historian had written in 1952:

“When a young man comes into residence in Durham, in seven cases out of ten he decides to become a member of the Union Society. […] And he is then in the succession of many whose first experience in oratory and official administration, gained in the Union Debating Hall and clubrooms, has stood them in good stead for the rest of their lives.”

I was unable to benefit from this ‘experience in oratory’ until later in the year when I discovered the club held one annual debate where neither membership nor a gown were necessary to attend in the Great Hall of Durham Castle. It seemed bizarre that the town’s castle operated as neither a tourist attraction nor the home of some wealthy bigwig, but as a college of the university in which 150 students had lived and studied from 1837. Apparently, between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, its oversized dining room had been renowned as Britain’s largest ‘Great Hall’. I sat at the back in my usual student-wear to quietly observe a debate dominated by white males wearing gowns.

What I witnessed stunned me. It was difficult to decide what impacted me the most. Adolescents of my age acting as if they were already middle-aged men, seemingly in imitation of their family’s upper-class characteristics. Boys confident enough to stand up and talk loudly and at length on global issues about which they displayed only the most basic understanding. Conversely, their peers not replying with factual corrections because they too were eagerly awaiting a chance to stand up and mouth their own ignorance. Overloud voices and theatrical flourishes as if the debater were the lead actor in a school play. Mob-like cheering and jeering at speakers as if it were some medieval tournament. Rude audience comments shouted out during speeches, eliciting rumbustious laughter. Loud banging of fists on tables and foot stomping like a mob of noisy yobo’s.

What proved most baffling were the moments when a participant whom I vaguely knew would stand up to argue a point of view that I had thought was the opposite of their personal beliefs. It appeared that, in this playground, moral certitude had to be sacrificed to the altar of argument purely for argument’s sake. It was an intellectual game whose purpose was to impress one’s peers with wit and verbosity rather than facts or evidence. The medium WAS the message, not the content that was being spoken … or more often bellowed. During an evening of insufferably posh accents, visions of fencing, guns at dawn and gloves smacked across opponents’ cheeks crossed my mind. It was evident that many of my fellow students must have already practised this parlour game for years in ‘debating societies’ at their private schools … while, in my parallel state school universe, I had been occupied presenting pop music programmes on London pirate radio stations.

At the event’s conclusion, I stumbled outside into the night air, reeling as if I had been returned to Earth after abduction by an alien civilisation. Perhaps you required blue blood to feel at home in there. I resolved not to renew my club membership nor to attend further debates. The academic Sir Walter Moberly had commented in 1950: “Undergraduate debates are not conducted at the deep level at which convictions are really formed.” This notion that an individual can lack personal conviction to debate or argue a point forcefully was a foreign land to me. I could frame an argument for my principles, but why would one propose a point of view that is not one’s own? Unless you never bother with ‘convictions’ and follow a path of merely blowing with the prevailing wind.

It was not until 1990 that Britain’s primary legislature, the House of Commons, allowed its proceedings to be permanently televised, following its eleventh vote on the issue during the preceding twenty-two years. The motion was opposed by then prime minister Margaret Thatcher because “my concern is for the good reputation of this House.” Initially, only close-up shots of the politician holding the floor were permitted because a wider view would have shown the public the faces of their elected representatives jeering, hectoring, desk banging and rabble-rousing during many speeches. This restriction was later relaxed, allowing the rest of the world to witness for the first time the childish habits of grown men who had never moved on from ‘bunfights’ in oak-panelled dining rooms during ‘High Tea’.

Watching those early televised broadcasts vividly recalled the one debate I had attended more than a decade earlier. I suddenly understood that Durham Union Society had been established in 1842 as ‘A Nursery of the [House of] Commons’, as noted a headline in ‘The Guardian’ newspaper. My privileged contemporaries had been in training to become politicians since an early age. Durham had merely been the latest stop on their route to the elevated roles to which they had forever been told they were entitled. Articulating this notion of ‘power’, Sir Winston Churchill had once observed at the Oxford Union: “If you can speak in this country, you can do anything.”

House of Commons rules strictly forbid members to call each other ‘a liar’ or to make an accusation of ‘lying’. As a result, just as I had witnessed in Durham, speakers are permitted to spout any old tosh that comes into their heads and get away with it. How can a critic ‘speak truth to power’ in a forum where the currency of ‘truth’ is not merely devalued but prohibited? Politicians know they can say whatever is expedient in the moment without any recourse, while the rest of us would be sacked from our jobs for what our world considers to be lying.

In my own field, the lack of, ahem, ‘conviction’ of politicians responsible for the British government’s media policy has been evident often. In March 2010 whilst in opposition, Ed Vaizey MP said “the government has set a provisional target date of 2015 [for digital radio switchover] and we are sceptical about whether that target can actually be met.” However, by July that same year and after an election had appointed him the new government’s culture minister, Vaizey conversely said that “2015 is an achievable target date and we will work to support that ambition.” Ho hum.

During the period when I seemed to be the only City analyst covering the radio broadcast industry, I would occasionally be contacted by the BBC to be interviewed for a programme. Before sunrise one day, a BBC car collected me from home to take me to the studios of the ‘Today’ programme on ‘Radio 4’ for a live item about digital radio switchover. On arrival, I was told that I would be answering the presenter’s questions and then the government minister would be introduced and quizzed. However, the minister had insisted that I not be permitted to follow up or respond to what he would be saying. It was obvious that my presence in the studio would suggest a semblance of ‘balance’ whilst not actually allowing genuine debate or argument.

I had arrived at the BBC early and spent an age waiting in the show’s ‘green room’. The minister arrived late, accompanied by a flunky, entered the room and said to me: “So you are the person they have brought here to tell me that everything I am about to say is wrong.”

Just as I had witnessed in Durham, patronising privileged toffs like him function in a world where they insist upon immunity from contradiction or correction to the drivel they shout. Despite my anger at his comment, I followed the instructions for that morning’s appearance, but have refused every BBC invitation since. Where there is purposefully no genuine debate, what would be the point?

Is this the “honourable tradition” maintained by graduates of debating societies like Durham Union Society, the phrase attributed to the club in 1952 by its historian who suggested it:

“… should always retain at least some its present rooms as a gentlemen’s club. There may it long offer to future generations those opportunities for the making of friendships, for argument, and for training in life and thinking …”?

‘Training’ for a ‘life’ as a conviction-free politician?

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/11/an-elite-academy-for-aspiring-rent-gob.html]

I can't dance to that music you're playin' : 1970 : Emperor Rosko, The Paris Theatre, London

 “Would you like to dance?” the girl asked.

I was dumbfounded. Nobody had ever asked me to dance. Particularly a girl!

“Er, no thanks,” I mumbled pathetically.

“Oh, go on, please,” she chivvied. Anyone else would have been flattered. But me? I was terrified. 

“Sorry, but I can’t dance,” I tried to explain. The girl looked disappointed but gave up and walked back to the stage. It might have been the beginning of a beautiful friendship. But I blew it.

It was true. I have never been able to dance. Too self-conscious. Too buttoned-up in that English way. The last occasion I recall dancing wildly was the 1977 Trevelyan College Summer Ball to which fellow student Zena Carter had generously invited me and whom I must have embarrassed immensely with my feeble attempt at ‘Saturday Night Fever’ moves I had just seen at Durham’s cinema. All the posh male students in attendance wore black tuxedos, while I looked completely out-of-place in a borrowed white suit, jigging around to the local live band ‘No Exit’ featuring a certain ‘Sting’. I still cringe. Three years later, my job would be adding hit songs by his next band ‘The Police’ to local station ‘Metro Radio’s playlist.

But that was in the future. Back in 1970, another reason I turned down the girl’s invitation to dance was that I had become terribly shy. At primary school I had considered myself no different from my classmates. Then, after moving to grammar school in 1969, I was developing a creeping sense of inferiority, not comprehending why my termly school reports criticised me for not being sufficiently vocal in class. Achieving classwork and exam results near the top of my year of sixty students was seemingly judged insufficient unless you flaunted your cleverness by regularly sticking up your hand in class and pushing yourself in front of teachers. In my new ‘streamed’ school, populated by many privately educated ‘prep school’ protegees, it appeared a boy might inexplicably be considered deficient for simply being ‘quiet’ and demonstrating no interest in blowing his own trumpet. I responded to my school’s reproaches by retreating into shyness in company … which dogged me for decades to come.

I might have felt less self-conscious about the girl walking up to me in the end seat of the fourth row on the left side of the centre aisle, had my mother not been sat right next to me. I was embarrassed. I was twelve years old, though I appeared older because of my height. I had written to the BBC Ticket Unit to request a pair of tickets to attend the live broadcast of Emperor Rosko’s Saturday lunchtime ‘BBC Radio One’ show at London’s Paris Theatre. None of my new schoolfriends appeared to be interested in the music I followed, so my mother had accompanied me on the train from Camberley.

The Paris Theatre had been an art-house cinema showing French films in Lower Regent Street until the BBC acquired it in 1946 and equipped it with a radio studio to record concerts and live comedy shows before a seated audience of around 400. From 1968, the weekday lunchtime ‘Radio One Club’ show had been broadcast live from the venue, hosted by a station DJ and showcasing a live band in front of an audience who had all sent to the BBC for their ‘Club’ membership cards. It was the station’s earliest attempt at outreach to its listeners and, by the 1970’s, was extended from London to cities around the country. In 1974, it was replaced by the touring ‘Radio One Roadshow’ whose format was similar to the large summer outdoor events Rosko had been organising independently since the 1960’s.

I was a huge fan of Rosko’s weekly radio show because he played reggae and new American soul records as yet unreleased in Britain. At that time, when around 100 new singles were released a week in the UK, record companies would wait to see which American singles proved successful in North American charts before committing to a British release date. This delay could be months, often allowing British pop artists to ‘cover’ American soul hits before the original was available in shops. My parents owned Julie Grant’s single of ‘Up On The Roof’ which had reached number 33 in 1962, but they had never heard the original by The Drifters which failed to chart in Britain. Grant successfully parlayed her chart success into several television appearances and a concert tour with The Rolling Stones, another British act recycling American black music at the time.

Each week I would record Rosko’s 90-minute Saturday show onto an audiocassette and listen to it repeatedly on headphones while I did my homework, before recording the next show over it the following weekend. This was the first occasion I heard James Brown’s ‘Sex Machine’ single, Rosko playing the A-side one week and its B-side the next. It changed my life! Many outstanding tracks like this recorded onto my cassette I went on to buy as imported American singles from ‘Contempo’ at 42 Hanway Street or ‘Record Corner’ in Balham, the main retailers for new American black music as yet unreleased in the UK. Many of those songs first heard on Rosko’s show I still know by heart and treasure to this day. Without the benefit of a black music radio station in Britain (London soul pirate ‘Radio Invicta’ did not launch until December 1970), Rosko was the nearest experience available, even though he mixed reggae and soul with some pop and rock tracks.

What marked Rosko’s shows out from the rest of ‘Radio One’s output was that he simultaneously operated a mobile discotheque (the ‘Rosko International Roadshow’) and compered concerts by American soul artists touring the UK. That gave him a unique insight into the specific music British audiences wanted to hear, something that many of his studio-bound radio colleagues did not understand. The other factor was that Rosko was allowed to choose his own records to play on the radio, whereas the music in most shows was selected by ‘Radio One’ producers, the majority of whom preferred twee British novelty acts to ‘foreign’ reggae and soul. These ‘gatekeepers’ could determine through national airplay whether a record was to become a hit or not in Britain, so the charts inevitably reflected their value judgements.

I was fascinated when analysing the British singles charts from this period to discover the volume of chart-topping pop songs that are never played as ‘oldies’ nowadays because they sound embarrassingly quaint or sentimental. Compare that to the significantly lower chart positions achieved by many black music recordings considered now to be ‘classic’ or ‘standards’ [documented in my book ‘KISS FM’]. It is forgotten just how ‘white’ the BBC’s popular music station sounded overall, despite valiant attempts to play more soul by daytime DJ’s Tony Blackburn and Dave Lee Travis. My appreciation of reggae was sparked by Rosko but had to be developed by evenings tuned to ‘Radio Luxembourg’ which Trojan Records paid to play their latest reggae releases. In 1971, singer Nicky Thomas even recorded the song ‘BBC’ to chastise ‘Radio One’ for not playing enough reggae, its release accompanied by a protest march to Broadcasting House. This had no evident impact on the station’s producers who were almost exclusively recruited from the white middle-classes and who moulded ‘Radio One’ in their own image.

This was why my visit (without dancing) to the Paris Theatre that Saturday was to become such a memorable experience, having enjoyed some of my favourite soul and reggae tunes played loudly through Rosko’s enormous sound system loudspeakers. When the girl asked me to dance, Rosko had been playing Edwin Starr’s ‘War’, a remarkably innovative Motown production by Norman Whitfield recorded to protest the Vietnam War with its chorus: “war … what is it good for? … absolutely nothing!”

A few years ago, I created a Spotify playlist of several hundred Whitfield productions, such remains my unbridled enthusiasm for his work (often with songwriting partner Barrett Strong). At the beginning of October this year, something prompted me to return to this playlist and update it with songs Whitfield subsequently recorded for his own label, notably by Rose Royce. I spent the following days listening non-stop to songs from my enlarged playlist such as ‘War’, ‘Stop The War Now’, ‘Friendship Train’, ‘Unite The World’ and ‘You Make Your Own Heaven And Hell Right Here On Earth’ all recorded half a century ago, all explicitly criticising violence and promoting peace. This was the music I was listening to only days later when news broke of atrocities committed in Israel. The music was appropriate … but the timing was inexplicably spooky.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/10/i-cant-dance-to-that-music-youre-playin.html]

If you can’t stand accounts, get out of the kitchen : 1966 : Whites of Camberley payroll & the pink fridge

 “Grant, why haven’t you written anything? What did you do yesterday evening?”

Our teacher had walked along the row of desks in the classroom and noticed that I had yet to start writing. I had been staring at a blank page in my exercise book, trying to imagine a way to pen two sentences and crayon an accompanying picture. I had to draw a deep breath to explain:

“Yesterday I helped my mum in our kitchen, calculating the Income Tax and National Insurance on an adding machine for the fifty people where she works, updating their record cards for Inland Revenue and then writing those amounts on their pay packets.”

The teacher looked thoughtful for a while. What on earth was this eight-year-old boy talking about? He had a wild imagination! After some reflection, she said:

“Just write that you went out to play with your friends and draw a picture of them.”

I did not relish the idea of lying but, if even my teacher could not find a way to summarise what I had really been doing the previous evening, I would follow her suggestion. This was the first (and last) occasion I tried to explain to anyone the work I did once a week with my mother in our home kitchen. Classmates remained oblivious to the range of administrative duties I performed regularly for my mother’s employer and my father’s business. While they were playing with their Sindy or Action Man dolls, I was busy reconciling accounting entries in a financial ledger.

The kitchen was a rear extension to our suburban, two-up two-down, semi-detached house. Downstairs had been transformed into one massive room since my father had removed the dividing wall. From the front of the house, you could now look through the window and see straight through to the rear garden. Visitors would gasp and enquire why the ceiling had not fallen down as ‘knock-throughs’ were unheard of in the early 1960’s. I remember the dust clouds when builders installed an iron girder in the ceiling to replace the wall they had just demolished.

The kitchen had once been of adequate size but now was somewhat cramped following the arrival of our latest ‘mod con’ – a fridge. Before then, milk bottles had been stored precariously on the rear window’s outdoor sill. Two years earlier, my father had been intrigued by a private ‘for sale’ advertisement in his favourite journal ‘Exchange & Mart’ (think ‘eBay’ on paper) and had arranged a viewing. We drove miles to locate the U.S. Air Force base and suddenly entered a parallel, colourful 3D world only previously viewed in 405-line, black and white location shots of ‘I Dream of Jeannie’ and ‘Bewitched’. It was a miniature slice of modern-day America incongruously tucked into a hidden, rural corner of bleak, post-war Britain.

My father had to switch to the right side of the road to drive our pink and white ‘Rambler Classic 770’ station wagon along the base’s wide roads lined with identical, single-story chalets built on spacious plots around which was a complete absence of fences. This was the North America to which my parents had long dreamed of emigrating and why they had embraced all things American since the 1950’s, including their children’s names, the oversized American Motors cars they drove, the pop music they loved and their ‘Life’ magazine subscription. Three decades later, when I glimpsed the neighbourhood in ‘Edward Scissorhands’, I was transported back to my first childhood impression of American suburbia on that day.

We located the house of the lovely American couple selling the fridge who explained they were about to be posted ‘back home’ at the conclusion of their tour of duty and were selling their household contents. The fridge was a huge American ‘Kelvinator’ and, to our amazement, was bright ‘Bermuda Pink’. It had a huge horizontal chrome door handle, a foot pedal to open the door if your hands were full and a freezer compartment which I was already scheming to fill with ‘Zoom’, ‘Fab’ and ‘Funny Faces’ ice lollies or blocks of ‘Neapolitan’ ice cream, on sale in the corner shop yards from our home. Smitten, my parents needed no convincing to purchase the fridge with cash they had brought.

The Americans asked if my parents wanted a foot-high stack of DC Comics which they were happy to throw in for free. Although the fridge would not fit in our car, we could take the comics home with us. Before we left the base, we popped into its ‘grocery store’ which was filled with American brands of cookie, breakfast cereal and sweets that, until then, we had only seen in American magazine advertisements. Having spent ages selecting a variety of items, we were disappointed at the checkout to be told that the shop only accepted American dollars or credit cards, neither of which my parents possessed. We would just have to wait a little longer to sample such delights once our emigration had been realised.

A fortnight later, a truck delivered the fridge to our home. However, because everything in America was genuinely ‘bigger and better’, it was found to be too wide to fit through the house’s backdoor. My parents’ unbridled enthusiasm had overshadowed the practicality of measuring their purchase, as the fridge had appeared perfectly scaled inside the American-style kitchen we had visited on the base. Now it had to remain outside unused (houses had no outdoor power points) for more weeks until a solution was executed. The old sash window at the back of our living room had to be replaced with a modern double-glazed version and, during this building work, the wall below it would be unbricked to carry in the oversized fridge and then replaced (floor-length ‘French windows’ were unknown then).

This operation successfully moved the fridge into the living room but, once again, my parents had failed to measure the internal doorway to the kitchen extension. It was too narrow. The door was removed from its hinges. It still did not fit. The door frame had to be removed. Only then, accompanied by my father’s considerable vocabulary of swear words, did the fridge just fit with tenths of an inch to spare. Finally, the object was inside the kitchen. Our home now had not only an enlarged living room but also a door-free walk-in kitchen, both of which were unusual. It may have contravened building safety regulations but it had accidentally created a large, unified downstairs space which we loved. There still remained one problem. The fridge operated on America’s 110-volt system so a large transformer box had to be found and bought before it would function.

We now had a huge fridge but a considerably smaller kitchen space. This is where, once a week, my mother would bring her adding machine home from work and all the paperwork necessary to calculate and record the wages to be paid to the staff of Whites (Camberley) Limited where she worked as bookkeeper. Founded by Percy White in 1908 and now managed by his son Peter, the family business had diversified from bicycles into car sales and repairs, a service station and coach hire from its plum town centre location at the corner of London Road and Knoll Road.

At the beginning of each tax year and after a government budget announcement, telephone-directory-like books were mailed to every employer in the country, filled with tables to calculate how much Income Tax and National Insurance contributions were to be deducted from pay, according to the worker’s tax code and whether they were paid weekly or monthly. The skill I perfected was in looking up the appropriate amounts for each member of staff every week, entering these figures on the employee’s blue card and then writing these amounts on small brown ‘wage packet’ envelopes. My mother took these to work the following day and counted out cash from the company safe to insert in each. I always wondered if Whites’ staff ever wondered why their pay details appeared in an eight-year old’s handwriting.

I learnt to be nimble on the adding machine, keying in amounts that my mother would read out, producing totals that could be torn off from a roll of paper. At the end of each ‘tax year’ in April were additional tasks of totalling up each employee’s contribution card, reconciling these amounts with the ledger entries and sending all the cards to Inland Revenue. We also had to handwrite P60 end-of-year certificates for each employee and, if a worker left their job during the year, we had to write out a P45 form in triplicate. Only a small table would now fit in the kitchen so we had to cram the ledger, adding machine and documents there, plus lay paperwork out on the worktop area and even on top of the fridge. As no homework was set by my school, these evenings proved no distraction from my education. Instead, I became an expert in double-entry bookkeeping and the intricacies of the British taxation system at an early age.

I adored the DC comics that had accompanied our pink fridge and handled them with the utmost care, keeping them in pristine condition under my bed. They were as yet not on sale in Britain, so I was looking forward to buying more once we emigrated. However, for reasons never understood, my parents decided to give up their long-held plan to move to Canada and instead they bought a plot of land locally to build their own house. Although their obsession with Americana remained unabated, it was tinged with the sadness of a shared dream that had failed to materialise. Within a few years, their marriage disintegrated and our family broke up for good. My mother cancelled her decade-long subscription to ‘Life’ magazine. After the 1973 oil crisis, American cars became too expensive to run, particularly when she was now a single parent.

When we moved out of our house in 1968, we sadly left the pink fridge behind. I always wondered what transpired as the new owners would have had to knock a hole in an external wall to remove it from the house if they no longer wanted it. That huge pink fridge was as indestructible as Captain Scarlet!

Two decades later, I returned home to retrieve my treasured DC comic collection, only to discover that my younger brother had crayoned all over them and torn out pages while I had been away. Our 1960’s dreams had all turned to dust.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/10/if-you-cant-stand-accounts-get-out-of.html]

Economics! Economics! Read all about it! : 1974 : Mr Hodges, Strode’s College

 “Each of you will subscribe to ‘The Times’ newspaper and read it every day,” Mr Hodges told us. “In class, we will discuss one of its news stories about economics.”

What?? It was my first lesson of a two-year Economics A-level course taught by a newly appointed young teacher wearing a dapper suit that could have been hiding a Che Guevara T-shirt underneath. His thick moustache signified the educational wind of change in the air. A revolution had torn through our school during the summer holidays and life for us students would never be the same. Ye olde buildings remained intact but events within had unexpectedly fast-forwarded to the late twentieth century.

A modest name-change from ‘Strode’s School’ to ‘Strode’s College’ failed to communicate the extent of the transformation. When I had arrived five years earlier, it was a grammar school whose calendar seemed to be set in 1869. The all-male teaching staff wafted around in faded black gowns as if momentarily materialised from the staff room of the University of Transylvania. Girls had ne’er been enrolled since Henry Strode founded the school in 1704. Latin lessons were compulsory. Boys wore bottle-green blazers, shorts and caps that were not permitted to be removed until we reached home. Pupils had to choose ‘arts’ or ‘science’ A-levels but not mix the two.

Headmaster James ‘Jock’ Brady would cane the bare backsides of boys in his office without the inconvenience of parental pre-approval. When carpeted for my first minor demeanour, as neither my parents nor my primary school teachers had ever laid a hand on me, I refused point blank to bend over and submit to Brady’s corporal punishment. Thereafter I was sanctioned with detentions, mediocre termly school reports and passed over for school prizes. Some of Brady’s staff seemed to be competing with him in a Strode’s league table of sadism. Writing on the blackboard, our biology teacher would suddenly spin around and hurl the wooden board eraser like a missile at the head of a student he suspected was not paying sufficient attention.

Our raised-from-the-dead English Literature tutor seemed to both teach and dwell in a dimly lit cobwebbed outbuilding that daylight had never touched, a hovel straight out of ‘Tom Brown’s School Days’. He would pace along our aisles of Victorian wooden desks, eager to whack his cane across our hands if we failed to recite our homework word-perfect. I can still reel off passages from ‘Henry V’ without the faintest notion of their meaning because the school never contemplated showing us a production. Neither were my parents of assistance since the only theatres I had been dragged to were a West End pantomime with Cliff Richard playing Buttons and appearances at Camberley Civic Hall by Lenny the Lion and Pinky & Perky.

For the first five years, my school ‘short break’ had passed standing beneath the window of the enigmatic Sixth Form Common Room hut at the edge of the Playing Field, hearing records played at extreme volume and banging on the window to be handed down a chilled bottle of Coke in exchange for some pocket money. Sixth-form prefects randomly picked on us younger students for minor infractions and handed out after-school detentions like confetti. I was once sent home by a teacher for wearing brown, instead of regulation black, socks. My slip-on Hush Puppies were deemed unlawful because shoes were required to have laces. My long journey home would result in missing an entire day of classes, and for what educational purpose? ‘Discipline over learning’ should have been the school motto … in Latin, of course.

I passed those years daydreaming of being chosen as a Prefect once I reached the Sixth Form. But the revolution denied me that power. Prefects were abolished. The Head Boy position was abolished. Girls were admitted. Uniforms were abolished. Morning and afternoon registration ended. Students were only required on-site when their timetable required attendance for a class. The Sixth Form Common Room was closed. A new teaching block was built for girls to learn Domestic Science. A host of new teachers, including women (gasp!), were employed for previously unknown subjects. Female toilets were built. Headmaster Mr Brady retired to his mansion in the nineteenth century from whence he had come. The canes were put away. One entire century of enlightened progress had been compressed into a single school summer holiday.

In our first Economics lesson, Mr Hodges gave each of us a text book but insisted the economic news stories we would read in ‘The Times’ were equally important. A discount student subscription enabled it to be delivered by a local newsagent every morning. My parents had always read ‘The Daily Express’ which I skimmed but found unedifying, exemplified by its anti-Common Market ‘Back Britain, Buy British’ masthead. However, ‘The Sunday Times’ had been my parents’ weekend preference since the 1960’s for its ground-breaking ‘Magazine’ colour supplement, permitting me to devour the newsprint sections they discarded unread and which introduced me to investigative journalism on topics such as the thalidomide scandal.

My daily journey to Strode’s by bus and train was one hour in the morning, but two hours in the afternoon that included a half-hour wait at Egham railway station and forty minutes at Camberley bus station. Though this travel elongated my school day to ten hours, it offered me the ideal opportunity to read newspapers thoroughly. Even before Mr Hodges introduced me to ‘The Times’, I had been purchasing ‘The Evening News’ at Egham station to read on my way home, it being unavailable as far out of London as Camberley. I recall once pushing open the waiting room door on Egham station’s westbound platform, only to be confronted by a couple wearing the uniforms of the adjacent Catholic girls’ and boys’ schools noisily engaged in sex on the wooden bench seat. After that graphic shock, I always waited outside on the platform.

Mr Hodges’ revolutionary teaching method stimulated my fierce appetite for the daily news cycle by reading ‘The Times’ cover-to-cover (except for the sports pages). Initially, it proved challenging to grasp the detail of British government machinations and the influence of global developments on the economy. However, significant events such as the 1973 oil crisis, ‘winter of discontent’ and ‘three-day week’ provided plenty of real-world material to discuss and analyse what ‘Economics’ was all about. I loved learning about the interaction of economic policy with politics and international news stories.

In the Lower Sixth form, some of my closest school friends decided to apply to study at Cambridge University, which encouraged me to do likewise. Tim, Martin and Philip planned to first complete their A-levels and then focus during a ‘year out’ solely on their applications. This avenue was not available to me as my family’s dire financial situation meant my single-parent mother could not afford to support my studies for a further year. Despite his substantial arrears, my absent father had already persuaded Farnham court on my sixteenth birthday to reduce his maintenance obligation for me to £1 per year. I had tried desperately to find a summer job in 1974 to assist my family but to no avail.

As a result, I was required to sit Cambridge’s entrance examination papers at the same time as studying for my A-levels, with extracurricular one-to-one tutorials generously fitted around my timetable by Mr Hodges and a maths teacher. Somehow, I managed to pass by a slim margin and was called for interview. I travelled to Cambridge alone, wearing the one stiff grey suit that my mother had bought for me to attend my cousin Lynn’s church wedding. On the train, I read the day’s papers thoroughly to ensure I could confidently discuss the British government’s economic policies and the latest international affairs. After all, I had applied to study economics.

“What sort of school is Strode’s?” my elderly interviewer asked.

“It’s a sixth form college,” I replied, “that used to be a grammar school.”

“Of which school sports teams have you been captain?” he asked.

“None,” I replied.

“What positions of responsibility, such as Head Boy, have you held at school?” he asked.

“None,” I replied. “Our college does not have a Head Boy or Prefects.”

“What does your father do?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied truthfully.

“What do you mean you don’t know?” he immediately shot back at me.

“My parents are divorced and I haven’t seen my father for several years, which is why I don’t know what he is doing presently.”

“But he must have a profession, like a doctor or a banker or a barrister. What is his profession? Who employs him?”

“He qualified as a quantity surveyor and used to be self-employed.”

He seemed unsatisfied by my response. My father had left school at age fourteen. What could I do? I was not my father’s keeper! My interviewer waved towards a corner of the dingy interview room.

“There’s a piano over there,” he said. “Can you play something for me?”

“Sorry but I can’t,” I admitted. In my head, I was reflecting that I could name every minister in the present British government cabinet, if asked, and every aspect of its economic policy. However, my interviewer seemed convinced I was destined to be another Jane Fairfax.

“Did you not learn piano at school?” he asked.

“No. My school is focused on academic subjects, which is how I passed nine O-levels,” I replied.

The ‘interview’ continued in this same baffling style for half-an-hour. Not a single question was asked of me about economics, current affairs, news or, indeed, anything relating to the real world in which I lived. Enquiries were wholly about my success at making myself noticed by my peers and being appointed to team responsibilities by schoolteachers. There was no opportunity for me to mention having been male head of my family for the last few years, visiting solicitors, phoning courts, responding to Final Demands, writing endless letters to the tax office, utility companies and benefit agencies. Even if I had desired, I had insufficient free time to glorify my ego because I had all these responsibilities at the same time as passing three hours a day commuting to and from school.

On the long train journey home, I was not upset because I had no understanding of what had just happened. From an early age, I had had to invest and believe in the concept of ‘meritocracy’. Otherwise, I would never have bothered struggling to succeed in life. It was only years later I fully understood that my application, having lacked the benefit of wholehearted support from my school, had been made to a Cambridge college that accepted only around a hundred new undergraduates a year. Probably between zero and five of those accepted that year would arrive from state schools such as mine, regardless of how many had applied. My answers to the interviewer had merely reinforced a prevalent belief that boys like me were unsuited to aspire to study alongside the favoured elite from private schools. It had never been about academic ability alone. It required proof that you longed to be accepted by ‘them’ as ‘one of us’.

Unsurprisingly, the college I had applied to rejected me. My name was then placed in a ‘pool’ of applicants, probably filled with young people like me who had failed to prove at interview that they were ‘gentleman’ or ‘deb’ material. Eventually, I was informed that every other Cambridge college had similarly rejected me. The dream was over. It’s just one of those things you put down to experience.

What did not end was my insatiable appetite for reading newspapers, stimulated by the amazing Mr Hodges, that led me to ravenously consume a broadsheet daily for decades to come. For that I remain eternally grateful to a teacher who broke away from our school’s usual text book rote learning and opened the door to me understanding the big world beyond.

[8mm film of Mr Hodges by classmate & dear friend Martin Nichols]

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/08/economics-economics-read-all-about-it.html]

Blinded by the light : 1967 : Architectural Drawing Services, 27b High Street, Camberley

 It was a mystery. Questions were asked. Answers were not forthcoming. Nobody could understand what had happened. Evidently something must have occurred. But what? And how? The professionals were stumped. I could not help. I had no answers either. Had I been in an accident? No. Had I hit my head? No. Had my face been hurt? No. I remained as baffled as were they. I had no answers. The whole thing was to remain a complete mystery … for decades.

Once a year, we were told to stand in line in the corridor in our underwear. Boys in the morning, girls in the afternoon. I hated standing around near-naked in public. One by one we were ushered into an office where a nurse rushed through an eye test, a hearing test and pinged our underpants’ elastic for a gender check. It was the result of my eye test that held up the ‘production line’ for processing my classmates. The record card had logged my vision as 20/20 one year ago. How come, now, I was so short-sighted that I could read no further than the second line on the eye chart? It was a complete mystery.

Children tend to join a ‘family business’ once they have finished their education. I was put to work by my father before I started school. Once I could walk, I accompanied him on appointments to measure houses, shops, offices and factories where I held the end of a long tape measure marked in feet-and-inches, wound out from a brown holder the size and shape of a discus. Once I could read, I ensured copies of design periodicals including ‘Architects Journal’ were returned to his office shelves in strict chronological order. Once I could write, I used Letraset sheets to transfer stylised, appropriately scaled men or women pushing pushchairs onto his ‘artist’s impression’ building elevation plans. Such was the volume of graphics and lettering I used that the well-thumbed, thick, ring-bound Letraset catalogue became the closest we had to a Bible in our house.

My father’s office was a Portacabin behind the garage in our back garden. As our house was only 300 yards from the town centre, clients could visit him easily. However, my parents were about to move to a house they had been building two miles on the opposite side of town that was reached by an unmade road. It would prove useless for a business. The solution was the rental of a town centre office at 27b High Street on a busy pedestrian alleyway connecting to the Knoll Road public car parks. It had three rooms: a small lobby, a main room large enough for two drawing boards and a desk with an electric typewriter, plus a smaller back room. My father registered a company named ‘Architectural Drawing Services’ and ordered letterheads, invoices, statements and business cards with an olive-green border from Southwell Press in Park Street.

The office windows faced the wall of the Midland Bank building on the other side of the alley. My mother had applied to work there in the early 1950’s, desiring a job closer to home than the administrative role at Elizabeth Shaw’s chocolate factory she had taken after leaving the grammar school on Frimley Road. Thrilled to learn that her application had been successful, she was disappointed to be told she could not work there because no women’s toilet existed in the building where only men were employed. Instead, she was offered the same job at the Midland branch in Farnborough where she could use the female public toilet in the newly built Queensmead shopping plaza … which she accepted and had to commute.

In my father’s new office, I was given three additional tasks. At the end of each month, I typed the invoices, statements and their envelopes. If clients’ payments were overdue, I had a box of green, yellow and red warning stickers I would lick and attach to their statements, printed with progressively strident threats. I handwrote details of each invoice into a large accounting ledger, the opposite page of which my mother updated with bill payments she had made.

Secondly, once school finished at four o’clock, I would pay a halfpenny to catch the number 1 or 2 or 3C bus to the town centre and wait in my father’s office until he was ready to drive us home for ‘tea’ at our new house. He would regularly ‘pop out’ and leave me alone in order to (I learned much later from my mother) spend an hour or so with his current mistress. Clients and potential clients visiting the office late afternoon might find it manned only by a polite nine-year old boy, banging out documents on an IBM Selectric typewriter he had mastered years earlier. It must have seemed bizarre.

Things could have been worse. If I had been born a hundred years earlier, I might have been sent up chimneys as I was appropriately thin and tall (only Pamela Munroe and Marina Hirons were taller in my class of thirty). As it was, I was made familiar with most aspects of running a small business by the time I finished primary school. These were skills that schools (and even university) failed to consider worthwhile imparting, and why girls like my mother had to be sent subsequently to ‘secretarial school’ to learn the practical aspects of commerce about which their male bosses would never need to worry their unpretty big heads.

My third task was to work in the rear office that was off-limit to clients, kept darkened by a venetian blind across its window and contained two printing machines. One was an absolutely massive dyeline printer that used ammonia solution and photosensitive paper to reproduce paper copies of 36- by 48-inch architectural plans drawn onto tracing paper. There was no ventilation from the room as the door to the main office had to be kept shut to keep out the light, as did the one window to prevent a breeze blowing the blind. The second machine was a Rank Xerox monochrome photocopier that used ultraviolet light to print onto photosensitive A4 paper.

During term time, I would regularly do small copying jobs for my father after school on both machines. I hated the smell of the ammonia, the heat generated by the machines and the bright light emitted by the photocopier. During this era, such machines were uncommon outside cities and my father soon realised he could subsidise their cost by offering copying services to non-clients. He was approached by the Associated Examining Board [AEB], the only GCE examination board not linked to a university, which had moved from London to nearby Aldershot in 1966 and was seeking a business to contract for photocopying services. It would mean taking on a lot of seasonal work but the returns would prove significant. The deal was done.

Schools in the UK and former colonies took GCE exams every June, sent them directly to the persons appointed to mark them, who then sent them to AEB. A percentage of papers for each subject were then forwarded by AEB to a different academic whose job was to check that the initial marking was appropriate and consistent. They were sent a photocopy of the student’s marked work to ensure the original would not be lost. Turnaround time for these tasks was critical as exam boards notified students of their results in August before the new school year started the following month.

My mother was occupied at home caring for my younger preschool brother so it fell upon me to fulfil this contract. Most of my school summer holiday had to be spent in the darkened back room of my father’s office, photocopying thousands of examination scripts for days on end. It was hot work and the ultraviolet light flashed around the edges of the document plateau thousands of times. AEB were pleased with the results and renewed the contract to execute the same work for their less busy December exam retakes. Bang went my Christmas holidays too!

The outcome, which everyone had apparently failed to anticipate, was my mother taking me to Leightons opticians at the top of the High Street to purchase my first pair of NHS glasses with thick lenses in tortoiseshell frames. I refused to wear them at school, not because I feared being bullied (something never witnessed at Cordwalles Junior School) but because it was so rare then for children of my age to wear glasses. My stubbornness perplexed teacher Mr Hales who struggled to comprehend why I could no longer copy down things he wrote on the blackboard. Had one of 4H’s brightest students suddenly become illiterate?

Subsequent eye tests proved just as baffling to opticians who could not understand why my eyesight had deteriorated so suddenly during one year, but then remained static for years afterwards. It confounded me too for a long time until I finally understood the havoc wreaked on eyesight by lengthy unfiltered exposure to UV light. The only positive side effect was that, in every workplace I have since worked, I have been the one person in the office who can be relied upon to fix a malfunctioning photocopier!

Once I progressed to secondary school in 1969, I became too busy completing mountains of homework to continue the monthly office tasks. Besides, my father was about to upgrade my ‘help’ to evaluating the potential profitability of local property deals for a considerably more lucrative sideline he had discovered. I also suspect he preferred I spend less time at his office because, the older I was, the more difficult it became for him to disguise his dalliances with women.

In 1972, my father left our family forever to run off with recent teenage bride Suzie Anthony who lived a few doors away. The courts ordered him to pay the mortgage on our house and maintenance to my mother and her three children. He avoided payment, claiming he was unemployed despite living in salubrious, gated St Georges Hill, Weybridge. He broke into our house while we were out and stole almost everything he had ever provided for us, including some of my treasured vinyl records purchased with pocket money. My mother had to take both a day job and an evening cleaning job to try and make ends meet.

On my sixteenth birthday in 1974, my father applied to Farnham court to reduce my maintenance payment to £1 per year, arguing that I was now old enough to take a job. The court agreed, despite him already owing thousands in arrears and me about to take eight O-level exams and hoping to continue my education with A-levels and university. I received a letter from the court informing me of its decision at a hearing of which neither I nor my mother had prior knowledge. When the amount owing mounted even further, he fled abroad. Farnham court said it was our responsibility to trace his whereabouts.

In 1976, entirely coincidentally, my first paying job was processing examination papers at AEB in Aldershot. Almost a decade had passed since I had similarly handled thousands of students’ handwritten GCE scripts from all over the world in my father’s office. It was difficult not to believe in some kind of ‘fate’.

My father died in 2013 though I was not invited to his funeral. A handwritten will bequeathed the majority of his assets to my younger brother whose contribution to my father’s business in Camberley had been … zero.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/07/blinded-by-light-1967-architectural.html]

Just my imagination running away … to Australia : 1972 : Eric Hall, Strode’s School

 A schoolboy babysitting two infant-school-age girls at night? Quick, call the police! Notify child protection services! … But wait! This was the 1970’s. That boy was fourteen-year-old me. Back then, few would have jumped to the (mistaken) conclusion that anything untoward was happening. How naïve we seemed to be!

My mother had few close friends and I fail to recall how she had come to know Cathy Bingham, who had recently moved into a new-build house at the far end of Byron Avenue, less than a kilometre away within our suburban housing development. Seeking a means to supplement my meagre pocket money, my mother had suggested to Cathy I could babysit her two young daughters if she and her husband wished to go out for an evening. I could only help out on Friday or Saturday as my school set two homework subjects each weekday and required my efforts to be submitted the following weekday. The resultant babysitting arrangement worked well and I was grateful for Cathy’s generous compensation which funded my purchase of more reggae and soul records.

Cathy was a genuinely lovely person who had moved to Camberley from Peru where her husband had apparently been posted by his employer. Prior to the birth of her daughters, she had had a job driving new cars from their Detroit production line down the Pan-American Highway for delivery to dealerships in Lima. I considered this a ‘dream job’ since my father had already stimulated my interest in American cars and I longed for the day I would be able to drive long distances myself.

One babysitting evening, once the girls had been put to bed upstairs, I spent the remainder of my time sat on the sofa in front of the television. I watched a recent British movie named ‘Walkabout’ about a father who suddenly abandons his two children in the middle of the Australian outback. The scenery was spectacular and the story fascinating of the children’s chance meeting with an Aboriginal boy who demonstrates his traditions to them and saves their lives. It made a huge impression as my first television experience of Australia beyond the formulaic ‘Skippy’ series.

I had already leafed through many large-format photo books of faraway lands, including Australia, whilst sat at a desk in the first-floor reference section of the local public library. I had been impressed by the mud-brick high-rise buildings in Yemen, the desert libraries of Timbuktu and the Ayers Rock sandstone monolith. Along the same Dewey Decimal shelf, I had recently discovered the first ‘Lonely Planet’ guide as a Roneo-ed set of booklets hand stapled together. All these readings had stimulated my desire to travel abroad, since most of our family holidays to date had been taken within Britain.

Australia was also on my mind after a recent chance meeting with a young Australian girl who was working in the bookshop on Station Road in Egham. I had made an earlier visit to the shop in 1970 to order a book (that changed my life) documenting American black music, ‘The Sound of The City’, which I had seen mentioned in its author Charlie Gillett’s weekly column in ‘Record Mirror’ magazine. My second visit was to exchange several ‘book tokens’ that had been awarded me as ‘School Prizes’. On that occasion, shop assistant Jan Somerville spent considerable time helping me choose paperbacks that might interest me, including ‘Exodus’, ‘Dune’ and ‘Topaz’. Her advice was particularly useful as I had no idea what to buy, my parents having almost no adult books at home.

I was instantly smitten with Jan as she was the first interesting girl around my age (well, she must have been two years older) I had met and, to my lusty adolescent eyes, she resembled heartthrob Susan Dey from ‘The Partridge Family’. She explained that her family had temporarily moved to Britain and she had found a job for a year in Egham’s large, well-stocked independent bookshop. After that, during my school lunch-hour, I would pop into the shop and chat with her regularly. When she finally returned to Australia with her parents, she gave me a slip of paper with her address in Clontarf, New South Wales. I was sad to lose my first ‘schoolboy crush’ but we wrote to each other for a while and she sent me a small toy koala which I have kept since. I had hoped to visit her one day … but life intervened.

All this explains why, on the occasion that English Language homework required me to write an essay about a landscape I had never visited, I naturally chose Australia. My teacher, Eric Hall, was a young man (relative to the majority of ancients that taught us) who wore tweed suits and was eager to show off what he probably believed was his sardonic wit. However, I read his attitude as sarcasm, a quality I found less than endearing after having arrived at the school wholly ignorant of his subject. Many of my classmates had previously attended private ‘prep’ schools and already knew what a noun, adjective, verb and tense were. I had never heard these terms because my state junior school had been keen to develop our creative skills rather than grammatic pedantry. I faced a steep learning curve at Strode’s School.

When I started my third year, I had been disappointed to be told that Mister Hall would be our ‘form master’, with whom we were required to register our attendance twice a day. My already poor rapport with him deteriorated considerably when, without prior consultation, my father impulsively booked a package holiday at an Egham travel agency for me and him to visit Florida during school term to witness the launch of an Apollo space mission. As a result, my mother was angry that her husband had not discussed this indulgence beforehand and had apparently demonstrated no desire to be accompanied by her and my two siblings. Mister Hall was outraged to be informed of my impending absence as a fait accompli and insisted that my trip be cancelled, which my father refused. Subsequently, my relationship with not only Mister Hall but most of the school administration was soured. I was never to be awarded a further School Prize.

At the end of our English Language period, Mister Hall walked around our desks, handing back each of our essay books … except for mine. After returning to his seated position at the front of our classroom, he said:

“You can all go now. Except for Goddard, who I want to see afterwards.”

Now what I had I done wrong? He opened my workbook to the page of my latest essay and pointed at it disparagingly.

“Your essay about Australia was very descriptive and incredibly detailed. Have you ever visited Australia?”

“No,” I replied.

“Well, I just do not understand how you could have written about somewhere you have never experienced with so much detail about its landscape and features,” he commented sourly.

I had no idea what he was trying to imply. I had worked very hard to produce a good essay and now he was trying to say obliquely that my work was too good? How was I expected to explain that?

“I’m interested in Australia,” I said. “I have seen films and read books about it, which is the reason I chose to write my essay about it.”

“Well, I am afraid I do not believe that you wrote this essay,” said Mister Hall angrily. “I have come to the conclusion that you must have copied it from some book. That is the reason that I have had to give you a fail mark for this piece of work and, naturally, this will be reflected in your end-of-term report.”

I was horrified. How could Mister Hall be so cruel? I understood he had never liked me, but I had never contemplated he could be so nasty to a student who had worked as hard as they could in order to be successful in his subject. From then on, despite my regular ranking as one of the top five students within my year of sixty pupils, Mister Hall’s comments in my termly school reports were consistently negative. His and a few other teachers’ similar attitudes to me during my seven years at Strode’s coloured my entire secondary school experience. For the first time, I learnt what it meant to be despised by an adult in a position of authority. It was an incomprehensible change from my previous positive experiences at Cordwalles Primary School, where my incredible teachers had been generous to a fault with their mentoring of me and my classmates.

I had no choice but to soldier on at school under the tutelage of Mister Hall. I took the GCE ‘O level’ exam in English Language the following year and achieved an ‘A’ grade. Three years later, I passed the ‘Use of English’ exam required of entrants to Oxford and Cambridge universities.

Before those subsequent academic successes, my life was changed irrevocably later in 1972 when my father deserted our family to run off with a newly married teenage bride who lived a few doors away on our street. The brief trip to Florida was the final occasion I spent time with my father until the day he died. Not only did he unknowingly negatively impact my school life for the remaining four years, but he knowingly impacted my family’s lives forever. The evening that I had chanced to watch the father in ‘Walkabout’ maroon his children in the outback was paralleled only months later in my own life when my father walked away from his three children, condemning them to an unexpectedly different future.

Despite these personal setbacks, Cathy Bingham’s experience of driving through the American continent in the 1960’s continued to inspire my ambitions. In 1984, I hatched a plan to hitchhike from the United States down the Pan-American Highway to Nicaragua to visit my friend Tony Jenkins who was there providing news reports to ‘The Guardian’ and ‘BBC World Service’. I visited the London embassies of all the countries I would pass through and obtained the necessary visas. However, this plan was stymied by a six-month wait for the BBC to inform me whether my second-round interviews for separate producer jobs at ‘Radio One’ and ‘Radio Two’ had been successful. In the end, I was rejected for both. Angry that my travel plans had been thwarted by the excessive wait, I enquired why to BBC Personnel, only to be informed by its employee that in future I would need to prove to interviewers that “you are one of us”.

Evidently, I never was.

[8mm film of Eric Hall by classmate & dear friend Martin Nichols]

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/05/just-my-imagination-running-away-to.html]

It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you hobnob : 1980 : Durham University Careers Advisory Service

“The Treasury,” said one.

“Banking,” responded another.

“The Civil Service,” replied another. It was my turn.

“Radio,” I said.

There was stunned silence. I felt all eyes turn toward me. Time seemed to pause while my colleagues processed their apparent incomprehension.

“What do you mean by ‘radio’?” eventually enquired the Economics professor in whose dark, dingy Old Elvet office our tutorial group was meeting.

I was somewhat taken aback. Who does not understand the word ‘radio’? Had he never read about Marconi? I grappled to maintain my decorum. I looked around at my fellow students dressed in three-piece suits or dress shirts or lavender cardigans with slacks over shiny black shoes. They appeared to have already been moulded into mini-me versions of their fathers (naturally there were no women). Their appearances were as dull and middle-aged as the careers they had said they desired. I was sporting my usual cheesecloth shirt, flared jeans and platform shoes, de rigueur 1970’s student-wear. Evidently, I inhabited a different dimension from my colleagues. Had Ann MacGregor twiddled the dials of her SAGE computer and sent me back a whole century to an era before radio had been invented? Where were Doug and Tony? I hoped they had not landed the other side of the street, inside Durham Prison.

“’Radio’ as in ‘broadcasting’,” I answered, struggling to control my patience, “where I want to produce programmes for a radio station.”

“Oh … kay,” said the tutor with the weariness of a grizzled academic attempting to explain monetarism to the village idiot. “So why are you here studying economics?”

“Because economics interests me,” I replied.

That was my second faux pas of the day. I looked around again and realised that my fellow students were not there primarily because of any enthusiasm for the subject. They were simply fulfilling their destiny, determined from the day they had been born into families who had then spent huge sums over two decades on their private education. For my colleagues, a job within the top echelons of government or commerce was not a career ambition. It was a birth right. It was simply the ‘payback’, the ‘return on investment’ expected as reward for the six-figure sum that Tarquin’s parents had spent to secure his social status. He and his former school chums felt entitled to their guaranteed shiny futures.

In the 1970’s there was no degree course in radio. No degree course in media. I was amongst Britain’s 94% of children who had attended state schools. Now I was amongst the 14% of the population to attend one of the country’s 45 universities. I had been forced to choose the academic subject in which I performed best at my school … and in which I was interested. With minimal career guidance, I had selected the university which I believed offered the best reputation. What nobody had advised me was that Durham was stuffed to the gills with toffs whose academic record at private schools had not proven exemplary enough to win them a place at Oxford or Cambridge. As someone who was certainly not ‘privileged’, had I wished to spend three years in a ‘Chariots of Fire’ theme park?

In my tutorial group, when one fellow student had spoken for the first time, I failed to understand a single word he had said. I assumed he must have been speaking some unidentifiable foreign language. Then I looked around and noticed my fellow students nodding in agreement as if they had understood him perfectly. I was confused. The next time he spoke, I struggled harder to comprehend his speech and managed to pick out the odd word in English. Only then did I realise that he habitually spoke in an upper-class accent so cut-glass as to prove almost incomprehensible to someone like me. Hand on heart, I am not exaggerating. I would have understood every word spoken by The Queen, but this young man’s speech was so stilted as to be easily mistaken for a parody of an upper-class twit.

I cannot recall a single conversation about economics with a fellow student on my course. Our academics never asked us to work in project groups. The toffs were being groomed to assume their rightful place as ‘captains’ of industry or government, for which there was no apparent necessity for them to converse with someone from the lower classes. It was evident to them from my accent, dress sense and demeanour that I resembled the servants or the ‘help’ their families employed at their mansions. I was similarly invisible to them, not having the ‘right stuff’ conferred by a private education, as had more than 90% of students at Durham. Worse, I betrayed no ambition to try and join their ‘club’. Unlike them, my parents had paid nothing toward my education, which made my chosen career very much my own affair.

I already subscribed to ‘Broadcast’ magazine and bought ‘The Guardian’ on Monday for its media job advertisements. Now it was time to visit the university’s Careers Advisory Service to locate suitable job vacancies. Its one-room office in a modern two-story building in Palmers Garth was filled with standalone shelf units of file holders, each collecting documents from one employer. I made an appointment to talk with an advisor but the earliest date was more than a month away. During the waiting period, I worked my way along every file on every shelf, searching for any employer within the media. What surprised me then was how few of the 4,000 Durham students seemed to require the facility. What I failed to understand was that most jobs for the upper classes were the outcome of who they knew or who their family socialised with, rather than requiring the bother of a formal application.

On the day of my appointment, I brought along my articles published in the student newspaper in a portfolio I had created from sheets of thick A3 black card stitched together. The advisor I met was an elderly woman with grey hair and John Lennon-style wire-frame glasses, like Granny from ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’. Asked about my career choice, I replied it was ‘radio’.

“We cannot offer you any help if you choose to pursue a career in the media,” she said sternly, staring at me over the top of her spectacle frames. What? I felt outrage that I had waited more than a month for her so-called ‘advice’.

“But I started producing radio programmes seven years ago in London and …” I told her.

“I’m sorry, but getting a job in the media is all about the people you know,” she interrupted and then stood up to go.

I was abruptly left alone, not even having been offered the opportunity to show her my portfolio. Or explain to her the details of my prior radio experience. Or my election as editor of the student newspaper. Or my election as editor of the annual student handbook. Or my election as deputy president of the students’ union. Or my success arguing with the University for an unprecedented increase in the student union’s subscription income. Or my success turning around the student food shop from loss to profit. None of that seemed to matter. I was appalled by the ‘careers advice’ I had just been given. My long awaited ‘interview’ had lasted less than a minute.

Eight months later, I received a letter from the Careers Advisory Service. I presumed it must be a circular sent to former students to update its records. But no! It was a personal letter requesting my help to advise an undergraduate who desired a career in radio and asking me to show him around my workplace. My initial thought was to tear this letter into little pieces and throw it on the living room fire. How very dare they! … However, a few days later, my benevolence got the better of me and I realised I should help a student who might be in a similar situation to mine not so long ago, regardless of how much contempt I felt for the letter’s sender.

I now had a full-time job at Metro Radio, the commercial music radio station in Newcastle, which I had achieved by responding to an on-air announcement I had heard asking for candidates. The vacancy had not been advertised in either ‘Broadcast’ magazine or ‘The Guardian’. I resolved to contact the student and arrange to chat and show him around the station’s premises. Whether he went on to pursue a career in radio I never discovered.

By then, I had learnt precisely how ‘selective’ the university was about recruiting students. In 1978/9, I had been the student representative attending Durham University’s ‘Admissions & Matriculation Committee’ where statistical reports showed that some years certain of its colleges had accepted not a single student educated in a state school. These data were never published.

Four decades later, surely things must have changed? Er, maybe not. A 2022 headline in the Durham student newspaper screamed ‘Durham has lowest state school intake of any UK university’ and quoted student Keely Brown:

“… many [Durham University students from state schools] have no prior knowledge of what awaits them at university, let alone experiences of classism or discrimination and, alongside feelings of imposter syndrome, it can feel like Durham isn’t the place for them.”

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/05/it-aint-what-you-do-its-way-that-you.html]