What goes around comes around

What does that mean, actually? Does it mean that if you do something wrong it will eventually return to bite you on the bum? More positively, it had crossed my mind as being apposite because I recently discovered that the publisher of my first 3 books is no more and that probably means that any unsold copies are no more, too, and that suggests that the means to produce any more of them also no longer exists.

As they have not exactly been selling like hot cakes for the last few years, to my knowledge, does this mean that any surviving copies will suddenly become sought after again, that their second-hand value will rocket and that I am going to be pestered for a re-print, which I will obviously have to resist in the interest of the purity of the original version over the potential riches from as yet untapped new markets?

No, because I am now a blogger, with 46 blog entries completed already and 2,000 visits to my blog clocked up only yesterday. Gratification is so much more immediate this way, especially if someone makes a comment – which they don’t, or tells their friends about it [no evidence of this, happening either, to be honest].  No matter - I will continue to plough my lone furrow! I’m even going to try to be more newsworthy in future, so please don’t go away. You probably won’t hear it here first, but I won’t always be far behind and the value-added component will hopefully make it worthwhile. The photos alone will surely be worth a second or two of anyone’s time. 

 

Bigger than Blackpool's  -  New Brighton Tower

On the Buses

Our visit to the Wirral Transport Museum at Taylor Street, Birkenhead, started with a trip on the Heritage Tramway from Woodside Ferry - and for a very reasonable two quid return which included entry to the museum. What a great set up. Restored Wallasey tram No. 78 was rescued after more than 30 years on a farm in North Wales and is now on the blocks again for further attention. I am too young to remember the Wallasey trams but my dad insisted that he knew each one by number from the sound it made before it came into view around the corner.

Talk about “All Our Yesterdays.” Within 10 minutes, I was re-introduced to someone’s diminutive younger brother who had tagged along with us big boys for extremely important park football matches in the early 60s and who now re-appeared as a knowledgeable senior volunteer at the tram depot, a former pupil of mine who had only recently chucked away his geography exercise book with my name on the front [probably about time] and additionally I’d recognised a picture on the notice board of a former colleague, who is also a long-standing member of the tram team.

With memories evoked at every turn, we were soon face to face with the familiar, two-tone yellow Wallasey double-decker bus alongside its old rival, the blue Birkenhead version. These vehicles were still bursting with the same civic pride that they possessed at the time, with their recognisable registration plates - HF for Wallasey and BG or CM for Birkenhead, municipal heraldry adorning their flanks as well as those distinctive colour schemes. Shared services [route numbers 9, 10 and 11] provided Birkenhead buses with legitimacy to wander into Wallasey’s air-space and vice-versa, but the point was that we always noticed the difference. I think they even smelt different when you climbed on board.   

The livery of the Wallasey buses was described as “sea green,” which more accurately described that on the trams that preceded them, but it was actually and emphatically two shades of yellow. This was apparently due to a mix-up over an enquiry about the colour the new vehicles were to be painted. The reply had come back to “see Green,” meaning ask Mr Green, who was the manager at the time. In any event, our yellow buses were always referred to as sea green thereafter.

Two close friends worked on the buses, completing many years’ experience between them as driver and conductor and, of course, they had some stories to tell as a result. Suffice it to say that they enjoyed their work and that the merry japes characterised by the now uncomfortably dated “On the Buses” sit’ com’, were, in reality, seriously understated.

The next big day at the museum is the Wirral Bus and Tram Show on Sunday 2^nd October 2016. Get along there if you can. You will not be disappointed. The model railway, displays, photographs, explanatory panels and the range of beautifully restored and fully operational buses and trams are guaranteed to provide a glow of contentment. The association with places, people and events from times past makes the present so rewarding - and youngsters are assured of a fun day out as well.

Bring-backery

The term bring-backery is attributed to Lord David Willetts, the former Tory MP. It describes a nostalgic inclination to resurrect selected practices from a somewhat rose-tinted past. As a principle of government, it is not a good idea. Things have been jettisoned for a reason. I prefer to keep faith with the optimistic notion that mankind gradually makes changes which turn out to be for the better.

I recall that the birch, capital punishment, fox hunting and grammar schools have all come into this category in my life time. As a boy, I was formally hit with a stick more than once - a bamboo cane rather than birch – and although it may be tempting to add that it “never did me any harm” in that stereo-typical response that some proponents often unthinkingly resort to, it was actually part of a violent culture that was actually very damaging overall, and which as far as domestic abuse is concerned, has by no means been fully consigned to the dustbin of history. That is where all of these examples belong.

Grammar schools perpetuated and entrenched the advantages already established by the middle class, in spite of the fact that they had often initially been set up as charitable institutions. Far from encouraging social mobility, they ended up hindering it. All the evidence points that way. The current flag-bearers are the successful products of that system but they got there at the expense of the majority who received a second class education by definition and by intention. If you choose to select, you must also choose to reject at the same time.

Am I being a little hypocritical, therefore, in currently spending so much of my time advocating the attractions of a bygone age in the form of the steam railway? Not at all. Technology marches on. You can’t dis-invent things even if you might want to. Guard-less trains are on the way in - if it is indeed the case that there is no practical or safety requirement for one to be present. Technological progress is relentless.

You can, however, value the contributions to advances made by pioneers in the past and this is the crux of the preservation movement. We are flagging up past achievements, saving examples of artefacts that were seen as new-fangled in their time and remembering practices which were cutting edge in their day. Far from trying to impose out-dated modus operandi on contemporary situations, we are ensuring that we remember some glorious episodes in our past.

As the enthusiast waiting at Waverley station in Edinburgh for the Flying Scotsman to arrive in the documentary 4472 Flying Scotsman, first broadcast on BBC2 in 1968 [and still available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/steamtrains/7307.shtml] remarked “A nation that forgets its past has no future. Let’s leave it at that” Let us indeed.

Just 5 years after the triumphant film was made I photographed Flying Scotsman on Edge Hill sheds in Liverpool. She had just returned from her trip to America and was in a sorry state.

An appreciation of the steam railway preservation scene

What professional enterprises the heritage railways have become since steam was first banned from the national network in 1968. I want to thank publicly all the dedicated visionaries and grafters who have made this possible over the years. To begin with, these lines tended to provide rather short trips, on severely truncated routes, in infrequent trains, running to rather sparse timetables. Often with only one engine in steam, I thought myself fortunate if the locomotive was a prized survivor from BR and not a former industrial tank.  

Today, the heritage railways have extended and consolidated to provide a vast range of different visitor experiences, from Peppa Pig to “pigging out” in an indulgent, luxury dining car experience. The Barry legends have continued to come off the production line for the second time in their lives and gala days with the leading players, especially, offer a feast of authentic steam entertainment for enthusiasts and a much wider public. They continue to re-establish old links with the national network wherever they are able to and have rejuvenated and improved the quality of their infrastructure almost beyond recognition. Inventive marketing strategies continue to bring passengers back to the railways as they used to be.

On the main line, steam still abounds despite recent problems. Nearly half a century after the disappointment of the national ban that accompanied the official end of steam in 1968, we now have a revitalised steam railway scene. The Great Britain roams the country and a range of operators comb the network conceiving new routes and itineraries for steam. I could never have dreamt that I would watch a Streak pass through Newark at 92 miles per hour, in 2013. Fire risk, engineering works, congested pathways, engine failures, well-publicised mishaps and under-booked trains still lead to postponements and cancellations but fail to dampen enthusiasm. All this while the national network itself is ablaze with a wide range of liveries and the system is just bulging at the seams with more passengers than it has ever carried before.

My own lean years, as far as steam was concerned, coincided with family and work commitments, so for some time it became a sideshow, visited less frequently than I would have liked, but valued on the rare occasions all the same. Our children experienced many a ride behind steam that they have no doubt long forgotten. Perhaps they have simply merged into a single steamy haze, as we entertained them with Connect 4, Flower Fairies, Star Wars figures, Hula Hoops [the edible kind] and Ribena, huddled around the Formica-topped tables in the Mark 1 coaches, wiping the condensation from the window and peering out into the damp and gloom of an English half term holiday landscape. Under such conditions, I kept the faith - if somewhat intermittently.

Ivatt Class 2 2-6-2 tank No. 41241 in Haworth yard on the KWVR, February 1969

My preserved steam photo archive is largely the results of these forays into a railway world that I suspected had gone for ever in 1968. Dates were in some cases a little imprecise, so I decided to simply quote the years and months when the films were developed - in the old way, with two visits to the chemist, or, later on, by mail order. Most of these pictures were taken before digital technology suddenly made the practicalities of railway photography a whole lot easier. I’m glad I occasionally persuaded my young family to dip into my old hobby for the day. I’m equally pleased that I usually remembered to take my camera with me. 

Grammar schools? The photograph

A photograph of 4921 Eaton Hall taken at Crewe c.1962 by a grammar school boy in short trousers. Posted in 2016 by a retired pensioner in short trousers. I have sometimes worn long trousers during the intervening period.

Grammar schools? The best thing about our grammar school was the railway society

“We will build a better Britain not just for the privileged few.” So said Mrs May in her first speech as Prime Minister. Yet, ever since she took office we have heard rumblings that those who favour the expansion of grammar schools are expecting her to lend a sympathetic ear to the cause. What could fly in the face of her stated intention more than the resurrection of an education system that was past its sell-by date in the 1960s?

You could just about argue up until then that a management class needed treating differently from those who were destined for the mass-employer heavy industries of the past [coal mining, ship building, steel making, dock labouring, railways and their attendant services]. In our lifetime, the industrial landscape has been transformed and now everyone needs a different kind of education.

Far from providing a vehicle for disadvantaged pupils to excel, grammar schools existed to perpetuate the advantage of the middle classes. Our grammar school was full of them, and working class kids were but a small and actually - though admittedly anecdotally - a generally less successful minority.

In my book Train Spotters [Countyvise, 2010, p.10] I put it like this:

“I started train spotting soon after I began secondary school in 1960. It proved to be an excellent reason for passing the eleven plus exams.

What an abomination they were. To issue life chances at such a ridiculously young age, to separate brothers and sisters, split up friendship groups and to do unimaginable damage to the self-esteem of a majority of each year group beggars belief. I believe they still sit it in some parts of the country, though, overall, the blatantly bi-partite system of my youth has disappeared.

I suspect that specialist schools and academies and a range of other initiatives serve to obfuscate. They baffle the unwary and by-pass those with no realistic alternative to their community school and they effectively maintain an advantage for more discriminating parents and those who can afford to move catchment area.

Oblivious to how some of my peers in the last year of the juniors were feeling at being labelled as failures, I was dead chuffed to pass it at the time, political awareness being a year or two down the line yet. The one member of our group to fail actually only became a close friend a couple of years later, by which time his parents had done what was quite common in our relatively middle class enclave and sent him to private school instead, to rescue him from the ignominy of having to attend the local secondary modern.

However, I was delighted, along with all of my carefully groomed class, which was already streamed by ability at the age of nine, to be an official success.

On a purely selfish level the transfer at eleven turned out to be a majorly critical event, because at that time our grammar school had a railway society, which I and my friends, old and new, were quick to join. I bet the secondary modern did not even have a railway club, never mind a society.

Better still, this group went on trips to railway sheds and works, in addition to putting on film shows after lessons, in a blacked out geography class room. There, we saw whatever the society was able to get hold of, mainly, I think, British Transport Commission advertising and promotional films.

Instead of relying on Dad to put trains in my way in a rather intermittent fashion, mainly at holiday times, the railway world suddenly got a whole lot bigger for me and a lot more accessible.”

I continued my discussion with myself about grammar schools in the, as yet, unpublished memoirs of my time as a teacher – in comprehensive schools, of course:

“I had passed the eleven plus exam, but at the grammar school I attended I failed most of the “O” levels that I sat. Had I taken art instead of trying to please my dad by taking Latin, I would have sailed seamlessly into the sixth form with the required four passes needed to progress to “A” levels. Instead, I wasted a further year, languishing in what was laughably called “Remove,” a sort of half way staging post between the fifth form and the sixth, but demonstrating in their choice of a name for it what they actually thought of us. The term actually has its derivation deeply set in the public school system of the past. They were probably only too pleased to have had an opportunity to resurrect it for that reason alone. Our classroom was carefully placed in a little annexe to the main building and adjacent to the toilets. When the classroom door was left open on a warm day I could smell the loos from my seat.

What a bunch of second chancers we were in there. Some had already been there a whole year and were planning to go around again. The year before I landed in it, a comparatively dynamic member of Remove had won privileges from the headmaster, in an uncharacteristically radical move, thus allowing us to be treated, on paper at least, like the others of our age who had already moved on to the sixth form proper.

I remember a geography teacher giving us something to do that involved a lot of writing, then putting his feet up on his desk and reading the newspaper. A linguist gave up trying to teach us altogether after receiving a less than enthusiastic response to his instructions and on one occasion he even went to lie down across a row of chairs at the back of the room and feigned going to sleep, in protest at our lack of cooperation.

Serious card games played for money were undertaken in the back corner of the room during some lessons. When they let us out from our den as far as the science laboratory, some lads would entertain themselves by lobbing the house bricks - which were being used as make-shift Bunsen burner stands - across the class room to each other, while the teacher was facing the blackboard. Rule One, I thought. As a teacher, never turn your back on the class for more than a second.

The laboratories always stank of gas when we were in there, as boys constantly fiddled with the gas taps throughout the sessions. Others sometimes splattered ink from their fountain pens down the backs of the masters’ gowns, as they prowled the aisles between the rows of desks, during yet further tedious note copying sessions. It was not great teaching and very little learning took place, in our class, at least.

The overall impression I was left with was that they would have preferred it if we had already left the school at sixteen. I think they regarded us as imposters in their privileged and selective world. We were an embarrassment to them and only two splendid, youthful and inspiring teachers, one of history and one of English, made realistic efforts to engage us properly throughout the whole year. In more modern parlance and for much of the rest of the time, our needs were most definitely not being met.” 

As can be seen, I was not the typical grammar school boy, but neither was I by any means the only failure within that system. The regime was internally, as well as externally, discriminating. If you were no good at games and mediocre at academia, they did not want to know. The whole system was elitist. They were only interested in those whose successes gave the school “a good name.” Though it is hardly fair to measure it by modern standards, had it been OFSTEDed, it would have never have passed in a month of Sundays. It was not inclusive in any way. I have friends who also thought it served them badly.

You may conclude that I am biased because I did not succeed there and that my attitude is one characterised by a feeling of “sour grapes.” Actually, I think my relative failure gave me the opportunity to stand back and analyse what I went through more objectively, rather than being swept along on the tide of acclaim that the top pupils enjoyed. Perhaps this explains perhaps why so many advocates are still around to remember the best days of their lives in a system which selectively and purposefully made successes of them to such a degree that they eulogise about it to this day. They view it through rose tinted spectacles. They see it as encapsulating everything that was good about the good old days. They see it now as some kind of panacea for everything that has gone wrong with society since. Their views are anachronistic. That world has gone.

“You are the cream of the town,” extolled the woodwork teacher. Nothing like inculcating a bit of superiority in a group of eleven year olds, in spite of the fact that he was simultaneously hurling an unfinished tea pot stand to the other end of the room because of the lack of quality in the shaving of its bevelled edges.

We have to make educational success a reality for all, not just the privileged few, and that brings us back to Mrs May. What does she have in mind? Will it be more loopholes - sneaky back door extensions of existing grammar school provision into other nearby towns, in order to circumvent the law which currently prevents new grammar schools being set up, as happened recently in Kent? Will she be upfront and present the case for new grammar schools as a generally good thing and try to persuade the parents of the unselected 80% or so that a system that gives a marked advantage to the selected 20% is an appealing proposition? Voting for that would be like turkeys voting for Christmas.

My feeling is that they will try to find another loophole or ruse to make it possible gradually, so as not to attract too much attention.  It will be the drip, drip of change, like the gradual privatisation of the NHS. They will make it as complicated, obscure and piecemeal as possible, designed to confuse and  draw the sting from those opposed to it. Those with the cards in their hands are always on the lookout for ways to maintain their advantage. This is just their latest trick.

I like to ride my bicycle - on the old S&D

On the 8/8/1964 and at the end of our family holiday in Somerset, I rode my green bicycle to Radstock, clocked the 3F 0-6-0 “Jinty” tank No. 47276, parked my bike in the green SR guard’s van and enjoyed my only journey ever on an S&D line train, to Bath Green Park, behind Standard Class 5 4-6-0 No. 73054. I then cycled the short distance to Bath Spa station, where I re-joined Mum, Dad and my sister for the trip home to Merseyside.

3 days’ shy of 52 years later, on 5/8/2016, here I am again, with my wife and our new, white, fold-up bikes and I’m crossing Midford Viaduct for the second time in my life. Just over my shoulder but also looking north, the film crew making the Titfield Thunderbolt were panning right from a shot of the approaching south-bound SR Light Pacific, just in time to focus on the ex-GWR 14XX 0-4-2 tank at the head of the Camerton branch-line train running below the viaduct and heading for Limpley Stoke. They recorded a number of takes before the two trains were positioned well enough for the sequence to flow and then, hey presto, the iconic and instantly recognisable first few frames of the film were safely in the can.

 

We parked the car at Midford, the name itself enough to excite and entice. This recently added Sustrans cycleway [route 244 and part of national route 24] is bound to be a bit hilly, I thought. The S&D was renowned for the challenging nature of its northern section out of Bath. Luckily, my wife has recently been on a cycling proficiency course, where she found out how to mount and dismount properly and how to go up and down hills.

We fought our way up through Combe Down tunnel at 1 in 100 before drifting down the 1 in 50 of Devonshire tunnel and past Bath’s urban fringe. The return journey provided my wife with an opportunity to employ everything she had learnt as we powered up the grade without the need for double-heading or a banker. Coasting through Midford without stopping at the platform, which is still intact, we reached Wellow on time. We dismounted correctly and filled our tanks at the excellent café adjoining the trekking centre, now occupying the track-bed on the edge of the village.

As I sat pondering and enjoying my coffee, I concluded that If it can’t be a railway then a cycleway is probably the next best thing. It felt like my initial brief flirtation with the old S&D had gained me access to membership of a special club. Ever since, when I flick through the pages of an Ivo Peters photo album, or any of the dozens that have followed him, I think, “Yes, and I was there and it was special.”

Graveyards

The cat has got fleas. My wife resolves to take action immediately. She means business. A trip to the vet follows. The cat is treated appropriately and, for the time being, is banished to the garden. An expensive and powerful spray is acquired. Wearing a facemask, I give the lounge carpet a good seeing to. It has since become a graveyard for house flies attracted to their doom through open doors and windows. They are piling up in there. What’s in that spray? On the can it says it’s “dangerous to the environment.” Doesn’t that include us? I think I would prefer to take my chance with the fleas and keep the front room battle-ground as a chemical-free zone.

My first visit to the locomotive graveyard that was Barry docks was taken on the 24/4/65. This picture was my first ever railway colour slide. A grey day and a mediocre camera were insufficient excuses for my failure to hold the thing steady. The picture just about shows Merchant Navy Class No. 35025 Brocklebank Line amongst the rows of condemned engines. She eventually became the 169^th locomotive to be rescued. She is owned by the 35025 Brocklebank Association and is being restored at their base at Sellindge in Kent.

I sat in the garden and reminisced about my four visits to Barry. On the first three, the yards were stuffed with those rusting hulks. It was a sad sight but how grateful we all are now to the former proprietor, Dai Woodham. I visited Barry again in recent times, only discovering fifty years later that the whole set-up was just a stone’s throw from the beach and the other attractions of a typical holiday resort. Until then they had seemed to be a world - as well as half a lifetime - apart.

I looked up into a blue sky to see the latest crop of fledgling house martins. They nest annually in the gable end of an adjacent property. They are tiny little arrows with wafer thin wings, wheeling high overhead in their search for flies as they stock up for their long migration, a first trip to Africa at only a few weeks old. What a hazardous first journey, but what an extraordinary, mind-boggling and wonderful thing. I hope they are not struggling to find enough food to eat up there. Most of the flies around here are dead - prostrate on our lounge floor. That reminds me, where’s the dustpan and brush?