Most readers will know Lavenham, it’s one of the finest examples of a mediaeval village in England. Walk through the streets with their quaint names and look at the old beamed buildings some crooked with age, many of the fine Georgian facades covering even finer Tudor architecture. The church is known as one of the finest in the country, it’s tower being a landmark for miles away, and the whole village is seeped in history.
The Swan in Lavenham is six hundred years old and is a heavily timbered Inn but some interesting events happened more recently.
In the 1970’s Dolly Parton, the world famous country and western singer was touring the country, she was due to appear at the Gaumont in Ipswich and she decided to stay overnight in the Swan. She was most taken by the village and its locals and they were enchanted by her, after a good dinner and a couple of drinks she entertained the customers in the bar with her singing. The local policemen went home to fetch his guitar and accompanied her along with guests and villagers till 3 am.
Howard Marks was the most wanted Drug smuggler in the world during the seventies and he relates, in his book ‘Mr Nice’ how he was at the bar in the Swan when a gentleman asked him the time, as he looked at his watch the ‘gentleman’ who was from Scotland Yard, snapped the bracelets on him. He served quite a long sentence in the USA for his activities but, since his release. he has made a living out of books and lecture tours relating his, sometimes, hilarious adventures. Currently they are filming his book, I hope they put this incident in.
More recently Patricia Cornwell a famous American thriller writer whose books have been made into films, TV series and radio serials, had lunch there and left a £5000.00. tip! Must have been some service and some surprised waiter. Actually she’d seen a notice that said all tips went to a Catering workers benevolent fund but it was remarkably generous. She had tea in the neighbouring pub, the Angel, and, despite the fact that one of the bar staff bought some biscuits from the local shop for her she never left a penny.
Claudia Schiffer the famous model booked a room there so she could change into her clothes for her wedding which was held locally. There were crowds outside waiting to see her in all her extravagant and expensive finery, they included lots of schoolchildren, imagine their disappointment when she came out covered in a blanket, all photo rights having been sold to ‘Hello” magazine. Even rich people seem to be greedy for more and more.
Vincent Price stayed there with his wife, Coral Browne, when he was making ‘Witch finder General’ a horror film made all around Lavenham and still worth seeing. He is said to have complained to the management that he never saw any ghosts and they replied that he was just unlucky as a chambermaid from the 16th century often stalks the passageways carrying a full chamber pot which she sometimes spills, many people have said after hearing a noise they have looked out, haven't seen anything but have noticed the floor quite wet and puddled but in the morning there is no sign, just a faint odour.
During the war the Inn was popular with American air crew who were making daylight raids over Germany, it was very hazardous and many were killed or bailed out and were captured. The signatures of many of them are still on the wall in the bar along with details of their units, albeit they are covered with glass to protect them from wear and tear. Periodically ever since 1945 there have been reunions of these servicemen held at the Swan, David Deacon, a local businessman and historian and member of ‘Upbeat’, introduced me to a couple of the old pilots, this was about 3 years ago, they were both big, burly gentlemen with tanned, open friendly faces but well into their eighties, most of their contemporaries were dead or not fit enough to travel and they were saddened that the trip they were on would probably be their last. They adored Lavenham with all its bitter sweet memories and they seemed to me to represent all that was good of America in the past.
Rumour has it, but there’s no substantive evidence, that Glen Miller, the famous American band leader, spent the evening here before he disappeared on a night flight but no wreckage or evidence has ever been found of when or where in the air he was so tragically lost.
Paul Burrell the butler to Prince Diana stayed there recently and complimented the staff on the food but unlike Patricia Cornwell he left no tip explaining that he was just ‘one of them’. They, the staff were not impressed.
Famous people like to be fairly anonymous when they travel and who can blame them but Jerry Hall the ex wife of Mick Jagger has been spotted in the village as has Kylie Minogue, I dare say lots of famous people pass through and are not even noticed but its great to sit in the square outside the ‘Angel’ on a warm summer evening ‘people watching’ who knows what or who you will see, ultimately it’s not important, just a talking point. As long as the swallows and the swifts turn up every year and as long as the beer from the Angel is kept in good condition I’ll stay happy.
Friday 7 November 2008
Thursday 23 October 2008
'Portrait of Eddie Johnson' by Allan Williams (2008).
Artist Allan Williams asked me to sit for a portrait as part of his 'Before London 2012' project. More about the project and Allan's work can be found here: http://www.allanwilliams.net/
Friday 16 May 2008
LAMENT OF AN OLD MAN.
My Dad drove a lorry, he knew all the best places to get a good dinner, in East London and far flung places like Luton or Watford. “The best coffee shop is in Fairfield road” he’d say, “the plain and syrup is the best.”
He often took me with him, I loved going in his lorry and the places we stopped at for our dinner in the middle of the day were all ‘coffee shops’. The one thing they had in common were big portions of home made food followed by a big mug of tea. If coffee was on the menu I never saw it served.
Another day out was getting a bus to the ‘other end’ we, my pals and I, got off at Oxford street and went into all the big stores to play on the escalators, I particularly liked Bourne & Hollingsworth but my favourite was Gamages, the poor mans Selfridges It was known as but the Sports department was full of stuff that I could only dream of, new football boots, shirts, punch balls, boxing gloves, table tennis bats and tables, cricket balls, games, none of which I could afford even if one had clothing coupons. Then down to the basement to look at the pedigree puppies, rabbits, kittens, parrots and even snakes.
Once a week I’d take the household bag wash to a laundry near Roman road, while by the market I’d get my Mum’s shopping, mainly potatoes and greens. It was all right taking the bag wash because it was dry but when I collected it was soaking wet and twice as heavy, to add to the misery the kitchen, as we called our main living room, was festooned with damp washing making the air damp to breathe.
At times like this I would escape to the library down Wick lane, this was my sanctuary; a blessed place nearly always empty, lots of dark wooden surfaces and brass fittings all highly polished and gleaming, always hushed a place where no one raised their voices above a whisper. For me it was treasure beyond compare; Percy Westerman and his adventure books, Capt. A.E. Johns and ‘Biggles’, R.M.Ballantyne and ‘Coral Island’ Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Treasure Island’ and ‘Kidnapped’ books about Public schools where the boys boarded and had midnight feasts out of hampers filled with plum cakes and potted tongue which I’d never had but longed to, these schools had heroic captains who were always hitting the winning six or scoring the victorious try and who ultimately triumphed over the vicious bully, how I longed for my lorry driver dad to send me to one of these schools. Best of all was ‘William’, William Brown. I couldn’t get enough; William the Outlaw, William the Good, William the Conqueror, Just William every week I’d find another one and when they finally ran out I would sneak into the adult section and take a book by Richmal Crompton only to be disappointed that it was a silly romance. But William meeting with his trusty outlaws Ginger, Henry and Douglas in the ‘Old Barn’ was who I wanted to be, it didn’t matter or I didn’t notice that all my heroes were upper or middle class and I was just a slum boy in a little tiny house in a little tiny street in Bow.
Comics were another love of mine, the Dandy, Beano and Film Fun all made me laugh when I was very little but as I got older I preferred ‘Boys books’ they had lots of text and fewer pictures than ordinary comics, the Hotspur, Wizard, Adventure, Rover, Champion all featuring heroes like Strang the Terrible, Morgan the Mighty, Rockfist Rogan, Wilson the greatest Athlete that ever lived, the Wolf of Kabul who slaughtered Pathan tribesmen by the dozen with his cricket bat, the boys of ‘Red Circle’ public school featuring school captain ’Cripple Dick Archer’ and a horrible house master Mr Smugg who suffered with corns and was always in a temper with his cane at the ready.
Similar hero to those boys books legends was the wireless’s Dick Barton whose unlikely adventures with his sidekicks Snowy and Jock were broadcast every evening, other unmissable programmes were ‘Happidrome’ on a Saturday night starring ‘Ramsbottom, Enoch and Mr Lovejoy’ or ‘Appointment with Fear’ starring Valentine Dyall as the ‘Man in Black’. Listening to that while your Mum and Dad was down the pub on a Saturday night could be an unnerving experience and could haunt your dreams until the next episode which would be even more frightening.
Saturday morning pictures was so anticipated, a serial, cartoons, a comedy short and a film. The serials were varied and the cliff-hanger always so exciting you daren’t miss the next episode, ‘Deadwood Dick’, the ‘Queen of the Jungle’, ‘Flash Gordon’, and most scary ‘The Clutching Hand’. But the joy, the sheer joy when to an almighty and thunderous cheering that has never been surpassed the ‘Three Stooges’ came on. Oh I used to think heaven would be a place that was spent watching “Larry’, ‘Curly’ & ‘Mo’ all day.
All the things we used to do are not an option today, none of it exists,playing football, cricket and games like ‘high Jimmy Nacker’ in traffic free streets, climbing on the roofs of bombed and blasted houses, risking our lives walking along the narrow parapets of the roof tops, live cables coming out of the ground that would flash and emit a noise when hit with a stick, we had sense enough to make sure the stick was wood and not a metal railing; but it wasn’t all good there was kids that died while swimming in the cut and the locks, being told of whole families dying in the bomb wreckage of houses where we were busy looking for shrapnel for our collections; carrying bedding to the shelters night after night listening to the bombs raining down and later the doodlebugs and rockets, carrying the bedding back to the house soon after dawn and being relieved that the house was still there; holes in socks, brown paper and cardboard in shoes, patches on trousers,hankerchiefs made of rag, looking with longing at dummy bars of chocolate in empty sweetshop windows; sadistic teachers who caned so hard as if trying to break your fingers. Playing truant and then wishing one hadn’t after spending miserable weeks filling in time and hiding over Victoria Park, starting off from home as usual, dinner money in hand pretending to go to school and then killing time hoping to meet other kids that were playing truant but one never did.
Taking the accumul;ator to be recharged for the wireless, being careful not to spill the acid on fingers or clothes.
Getting older and working in a dead end job for thirty bob a week, giving Mum ten bob but she giving most of it back to help with fares on the buses going to Aldgate on a long nine hour, five and half day week, and for the shilling dinner in the canteen.
On long summer evenings there was consolations, going to the ‘Wilderness’ at Eton Manor Boys club practising cricket at the nets, diving into the ‘splash’ the tiny swimming pool where boys were not allowed to wear swimming costumes as they swam under the benign gaze of the Honourable Charles Villiers, the old Etonian who founded the club.
Going dancing at the bandstand in the park, completely free and with top dance bands. everyone dancing but some ‘jiving’ with American soldiers in the corner.
Laying in bed till late on a Sunday and then going ‘down the lane’ and meeting all your mates at ‘Solly’s’ record stall in Wentworth street before buying Beigels and pickled herring to take home for Sunday tea.
Every generation pines and looks longingly at their past but no generation has lost so much of the past so quickly and in the space of a lifetime all the traditions and pleasures of youth have disappeared. Like the trams and trolley buses we let things go too quickly, all that is good in the world is disappearing and no one knows what to do.
Future generations will have plenty of history to look at if the world continues to exist and I don’t think they will be very grateful for what we have preserved for them, I hope they can forgive us but I doubt it.
He often took me with him, I loved going in his lorry and the places we stopped at for our dinner in the middle of the day were all ‘coffee shops’. The one thing they had in common were big portions of home made food followed by a big mug of tea. If coffee was on the menu I never saw it served.
Another day out was getting a bus to the ‘other end’ we, my pals and I, got off at Oxford street and went into all the big stores to play on the escalators, I particularly liked Bourne & Hollingsworth but my favourite was Gamages, the poor mans Selfridges It was known as but the Sports department was full of stuff that I could only dream of, new football boots, shirts, punch balls, boxing gloves, table tennis bats and tables, cricket balls, games, none of which I could afford even if one had clothing coupons. Then down to the basement to look at the pedigree puppies, rabbits, kittens, parrots and even snakes.
Once a week I’d take the household bag wash to a laundry near Roman road, while by the market I’d get my Mum’s shopping, mainly potatoes and greens. It was all right taking the bag wash because it was dry but when I collected it was soaking wet and twice as heavy, to add to the misery the kitchen, as we called our main living room, was festooned with damp washing making the air damp to breathe.
At times like this I would escape to the library down Wick lane, this was my sanctuary; a blessed place nearly always empty, lots of dark wooden surfaces and brass fittings all highly polished and gleaming, always hushed a place where no one raised their voices above a whisper. For me it was treasure beyond compare; Percy Westerman and his adventure books, Capt. A.E. Johns and ‘Biggles’, R.M.Ballantyne and ‘Coral Island’ Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Treasure Island’ and ‘Kidnapped’ books about Public schools where the boys boarded and had midnight feasts out of hampers filled with plum cakes and potted tongue which I’d never had but longed to, these schools had heroic captains who were always hitting the winning six or scoring the victorious try and who ultimately triumphed over the vicious bully, how I longed for my lorry driver dad to send me to one of these schools. Best of all was ‘William’, William Brown. I couldn’t get enough; William the Outlaw, William the Good, William the Conqueror, Just William every week I’d find another one and when they finally ran out I would sneak into the adult section and take a book by Richmal Crompton only to be disappointed that it was a silly romance. But William meeting with his trusty outlaws Ginger, Henry and Douglas in the ‘Old Barn’ was who I wanted to be, it didn’t matter or I didn’t notice that all my heroes were upper or middle class and I was just a slum boy in a little tiny house in a little tiny street in Bow.
Comics were another love of mine, the Dandy, Beano and Film Fun all made me laugh when I was very little but as I got older I preferred ‘Boys books’ they had lots of text and fewer pictures than ordinary comics, the Hotspur, Wizard, Adventure, Rover, Champion all featuring heroes like Strang the Terrible, Morgan the Mighty, Rockfist Rogan, Wilson the greatest Athlete that ever lived, the Wolf of Kabul who slaughtered Pathan tribesmen by the dozen with his cricket bat, the boys of ‘Red Circle’ public school featuring school captain ’Cripple Dick Archer’ and a horrible house master Mr Smugg who suffered with corns and was always in a temper with his cane at the ready.
Similar hero to those boys books legends was the wireless’s Dick Barton whose unlikely adventures with his sidekicks Snowy and Jock were broadcast every evening, other unmissable programmes were ‘Happidrome’ on a Saturday night starring ‘Ramsbottom, Enoch and Mr Lovejoy’ or ‘Appointment with Fear’ starring Valentine Dyall as the ‘Man in Black’. Listening to that while your Mum and Dad was down the pub on a Saturday night could be an unnerving experience and could haunt your dreams until the next episode which would be even more frightening.
Saturday morning pictures was so anticipated, a serial, cartoons, a comedy short and a film. The serials were varied and the cliff-hanger always so exciting you daren’t miss the next episode, ‘Deadwood Dick’, the ‘Queen of the Jungle’, ‘Flash Gordon’, and most scary ‘The Clutching Hand’. But the joy, the sheer joy when to an almighty and thunderous cheering that has never been surpassed the ‘Three Stooges’ came on. Oh I used to think heaven would be a place that was spent watching “Larry’, ‘Curly’ & ‘Mo’ all day.
All the things we used to do are not an option today, none of it exists,playing football, cricket and games like ‘high Jimmy Nacker’ in traffic free streets, climbing on the roofs of bombed and blasted houses, risking our lives walking along the narrow parapets of the roof tops, live cables coming out of the ground that would flash and emit a noise when hit with a stick, we had sense enough to make sure the stick was wood and not a metal railing; but it wasn’t all good there was kids that died while swimming in the cut and the locks, being told of whole families dying in the bomb wreckage of houses where we were busy looking for shrapnel for our collections; carrying bedding to the shelters night after night listening to the bombs raining down and later the doodlebugs and rockets, carrying the bedding back to the house soon after dawn and being relieved that the house was still there; holes in socks, brown paper and cardboard in shoes, patches on trousers,hankerchiefs made of rag, looking with longing at dummy bars of chocolate in empty sweetshop windows; sadistic teachers who caned so hard as if trying to break your fingers. Playing truant and then wishing one hadn’t after spending miserable weeks filling in time and hiding over Victoria Park, starting off from home as usual, dinner money in hand pretending to go to school and then killing time hoping to meet other kids that were playing truant but one never did.
Taking the accumul;ator to be recharged for the wireless, being careful not to spill the acid on fingers or clothes.
Getting older and working in a dead end job for thirty bob a week, giving Mum ten bob but she giving most of it back to help with fares on the buses going to Aldgate on a long nine hour, five and half day week, and for the shilling dinner in the canteen.
On long summer evenings there was consolations, going to the ‘Wilderness’ at Eton Manor Boys club practising cricket at the nets, diving into the ‘splash’ the tiny swimming pool where boys were not allowed to wear swimming costumes as they swam under the benign gaze of the Honourable Charles Villiers, the old Etonian who founded the club.
Going dancing at the bandstand in the park, completely free and with top dance bands. everyone dancing but some ‘jiving’ with American soldiers in the corner.
Laying in bed till late on a Sunday and then going ‘down the lane’ and meeting all your mates at ‘Solly’s’ record stall in Wentworth street before buying Beigels and pickled herring to take home for Sunday tea.
Every generation pines and looks longingly at their past but no generation has lost so much of the past so quickly and in the space of a lifetime all the traditions and pleasures of youth have disappeared. Like the trams and trolley buses we let things go too quickly, all that is good in the world is disappearing and no one knows what to do.
Future generations will have plenty of history to look at if the world continues to exist and I don’t think they will be very grateful for what we have preserved for them, I hope they can forgive us but I doubt it.
Thursday 1 May 2008
Camera Shy
Nothing is so boring now as when people get their cameras or videos out (probably disguised as phones). This generation is the most photographed and filmed of any since the world began. There is in everybody's household a plethora, a Mount Everest of photos and film. Every biscuit tin or old shoe box is filled to the brim with photos.
Albums, those lovely thick leathery book like containers for pictures so lovingly compiled by a previous generation, all the family holidays and events tagged with witty, carefully crafted lines such as “Matthew and Andrew look for crabs” under a picture of the two children with fishing nets over their shoulders, the special nights at a restaurant celebrating a birthday, all holding drinks in the air imagining being so original like being in a night club in Hollywood. The big white wedding albums that the photographer would charge a fortune for and all the guest at the wedding would feel obliged to fork out for something they’d only look at once especially if it was only a distant cousin that had got married. All those pictures that one dreaded being brought out when one visited, those hard to suppress yawns while wondering how quickly it could be suggested that one went home. All these have been abandoned, just snap and look instantly at someone's phone, another reason to groan inwardly.
The class and area I was born into took very few photos. If someone in the family was lucky enough to own a Brownie, which was the only camera most of us had ever heard of, there was some taken but film was expensive and, in wartime, hard to come by. The weather had to be right, the sun shining on the photographers back, his hand had to be steady, the posers had to be still with fixed smiles on their faces, no such thing as action or natural photos but maybe just as natural as today's photos when everyone acts as though they are in a sitcom on television and poses accordingly.
There was of course the professionals. Our local one was someone called Griffin, they had a shop in Armagh Road in Bow and everyone I knew, not only my family but in the street or at school had their photos done at Griffins. I’m sitting with a big book called ‘Teddy Bear” dressed in my best clothes aged about six. Kenny my younger brother his hair all curly and long like a girls had a similar one but he was only about three. Many years later my sister, had a carefully crafted picture taken with her friend Joan in which they look like two carefully made up starlets from the J Arthur Rank film school of charm.
We are all blasé now. Fatigued by photos. We wave away in mock horror those that want to take our image, we know what we look like and, in some ways worse, what we sound like. There’s no illusions left, we can no longer imagine we look like Margaret Lockwood or Phyllis Calvert, James Mason or Stewart Granger, there’s no Clark Gables or Hedy Lamarrs hiding amongst us, our dreams have been shattered because we’ve all been caught ‘au naturel’ as we really look.
Its sad though, as we ever hurtle faster and faster into modernity everything we gain costs us. So many little pleasures gone. Looking at old photos of the past was something we took for granted and with close families it was always pleasant to be reminded of some of the good things that happened. We are so much richer materially than we have ever been but so much poorer for what we’ve lost, Sunday Dinner, the whole family enjoying a roast, going to the pub on a Sunday morning with your Dad and Uncles, the Joy of going to the library the sheer peace and tranquility of the libraries, the quiet discipline that everyone imposed on themselves, finding information not on the internet but searching for it and relying on memory. Listening to the news at 6pm on the wireless and the news really being new instead of the same stories over and over again every hour from 7 am till midnight.
Going to the seaside, even though if you chose the wrong week it could be raining how one looked forward to it with such excitement, whereas nowadays people tell you they’ve been to Dubai or Indonesia, or the Dominican republic with such insouciance and matter of factness that one yawns and longs to be deep in the highlands or the Lake district where nature still bears some resemblance to reality, as long as its off season.
It would be nice to go to a restaurant where it was not too expensive and that served food that was nicely cooked but wasn’t extraordinary in its description and where chips were chips and not hand carved or fat, I would like to buy a packet of crisps that didn't;t tell you who picked the potatoes and who sliced them up and who put them in the vat of fat and cooked them. Yes this information is on the back of many packets.
We all of us young and old look back on the past, me more than most, and much of it is illusory as LP. Hartley wrote: “The past is another country” and it certainly is but it still seemed a kinder, nicer place.
Albums, those lovely thick leathery book like containers for pictures so lovingly compiled by a previous generation, all the family holidays and events tagged with witty, carefully crafted lines such as “Matthew and Andrew look for crabs” under a picture of the two children with fishing nets over their shoulders, the special nights at a restaurant celebrating a birthday, all holding drinks in the air imagining being so original like being in a night club in Hollywood. The big white wedding albums that the photographer would charge a fortune for and all the guest at the wedding would feel obliged to fork out for something they’d only look at once especially if it was only a distant cousin that had got married. All those pictures that one dreaded being brought out when one visited, those hard to suppress yawns while wondering how quickly it could be suggested that one went home. All these have been abandoned, just snap and look instantly at someone's phone, another reason to groan inwardly.
The class and area I was born into took very few photos. If someone in the family was lucky enough to own a Brownie, which was the only camera most of us had ever heard of, there was some taken but film was expensive and, in wartime, hard to come by. The weather had to be right, the sun shining on the photographers back, his hand had to be steady, the posers had to be still with fixed smiles on their faces, no such thing as action or natural photos but maybe just as natural as today's photos when everyone acts as though they are in a sitcom on television and poses accordingly.
There was of course the professionals. Our local one was someone called Griffin, they had a shop in Armagh Road in Bow and everyone I knew, not only my family but in the street or at school had their photos done at Griffins. I’m sitting with a big book called ‘Teddy Bear” dressed in my best clothes aged about six. Kenny my younger brother his hair all curly and long like a girls had a similar one but he was only about three. Many years later my sister, had a carefully crafted picture taken with her friend Joan in which they look like two carefully made up starlets from the J Arthur Rank film school of charm.
We are all blasé now. Fatigued by photos. We wave away in mock horror those that want to take our image, we know what we look like and, in some ways worse, what we sound like. There’s no illusions left, we can no longer imagine we look like Margaret Lockwood or Phyllis Calvert, James Mason or Stewart Granger, there’s no Clark Gables or Hedy Lamarrs hiding amongst us, our dreams have been shattered because we’ve all been caught ‘au naturel’ as we really look.
Its sad though, as we ever hurtle faster and faster into modernity everything we gain costs us. So many little pleasures gone. Looking at old photos of the past was something we took for granted and with close families it was always pleasant to be reminded of some of the good things that happened. We are so much richer materially than we have ever been but so much poorer for what we’ve lost, Sunday Dinner, the whole family enjoying a roast, going to the pub on a Sunday morning with your Dad and Uncles, the Joy of going to the library the sheer peace and tranquility of the libraries, the quiet discipline that everyone imposed on themselves, finding information not on the internet but searching for it and relying on memory. Listening to the news at 6pm on the wireless and the news really being new instead of the same stories over and over again every hour from 7 am till midnight.
Going to the seaside, even though if you chose the wrong week it could be raining how one looked forward to it with such excitement, whereas nowadays people tell you they’ve been to Dubai or Indonesia, or the Dominican republic with such insouciance and matter of factness that one yawns and longs to be deep in the highlands or the Lake district where nature still bears some resemblance to reality, as long as its off season.
It would be nice to go to a restaurant where it was not too expensive and that served food that was nicely cooked but wasn’t extraordinary in its description and where chips were chips and not hand carved or fat, I would like to buy a packet of crisps that didn't;t tell you who picked the potatoes and who sliced them up and who put them in the vat of fat and cooked them. Yes this information is on the back of many packets.
We all of us young and old look back on the past, me more than most, and much of it is illusory as LP. Hartley wrote: “The past is another country” and it certainly is but it still seemed a kinder, nicer place.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
