Wishing for a rail journey

Posted on 26th October 2021 by 192.168.1.1

We went to see the Mappa Mundi, that artefact of a pre-modern world in which the mythological combined with the geographical and historical, that theological statement about the nature of Christendom.

Afterwards, I dropped them off at Hereford station, they to travel northward to Llandudno, I to drive southward and homeward. I should have loved to have made the journey back to Somerset by train.

Of course, railway travel has not the elegance that was once possible. The 1715 service from Newport to Taunton might once have had a locomotive and carriages, but, five years ago, when I last travelled on it the train was a four car diesel multiple unit. The seating was utilitarian, not built for long journeys.

Travelling eastward, lines joined from the right and the left, the reason for the convergence became apparent. Now gone without trace, the Severn Crossing toll booths on the M4 motorway were then still visible from the window, the lines joined to run through a tunnel beneath the Severn.

If any station has been omitted from the list of stops, it is hard now to recall what it might be. Once Bristol is reached there seem few possibilities that could have been overlooked. There is always a poetry in the way in which the stations are announced, a rhythm that lulls one into a sense of ease where the name of a stop might be missed: Severn Tunnel Junction, Patchway, Filton Abbey Wood, Bristol Temple Meads, Bedminster, Parson Street, Nailsea & Backwell, Yatton, Worle, Weston Milton, Weston-super-Mare, Highbridge & Burnham, Bridgwater, Taunton.

On approaching the great cathedral of railway architecture that is Bristol Temple Meads, the train slowed to walking pace. An announcer told us that the slow progress was because we were following a late-running service to Weymouth and that our routes would diverge at Bristol.

To have been travelling to Weymouth on that fine June evening would have been an enviable prospect, to have walked the promenade and to have sat on a bench and eaten fish and chips. The train passed so slowly through Stapleton Road station that, in days when carriage doors could be opened by the handle on the outside, someone might have run along the platform and leapt aboard.

Temple Meads is a wonderful declaration of Victorian confidence, a statement that engineering and science would shape the religion of the new age. The railways effected a revolution as profound in the Nineteenth Century as “smart” technology is in the Twenty-First.  Journeys that once took days now took hours.

Commuters filled the carriage at Bristol and the luxury of spreading a jacket, case, laptop and book across four seats ended. It was hard to imagine that they ever felt the need to give much  thought to Brunel and the ways in which his genius helped to change the landscape of the country and the fabric of ordinary lives.

It’s hard to imagine Brunel would have been overly impressed by the journey time of four and a half hours from Chester to Bridgwater, and would have been baffled that anyone might travel through the Welsh Marches to Newport before catching a train to Somerset when the obvious route would have been through Birmingham, but he didn’t have to cope with a fare structure that meant that it cost three times more to travel on the obvious route.

What was reassuring was that the trains were busy, that opportunities for spreading out, even in the rearmost part of the train, were limited, and that the poetry of railway station names will continue to be recited for at least a few years to come.

 

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Putting out the Ritz

Posted on 24th October 2021 by 192.168.1.1

There is a cupboard in my mother’s kitchen that is always well stocked with various treats. Cakes, cookies, biscuits, chocolate, the selection changes, but there will always be a wide range of temptations and a high level of calories. Among the range last evening, was a box of Ritz crackers, a box in the design I remember from my childhood.

Ordinarily, the biscuits in our house did not extend beyond McVitie’s Digestives and Huntley and Palmer’s Rich Tea. It was  said that Palmers had first baked biscuits in my grandparents’ farmhouse, it seemed an unlikely story. George Palmer was from Long Sutton, (a Quaker, he was first cousin of Cyrus Clark, founder of C & J Clark), but the thought of a significant businessman baking biscuits at the family farm at Pibsbury was stretching even childhood credulity a little too far.

In the years when Ritz crackers were a new product on the shelves of the local shops (the original design has been revived because 2021 marks the 60th anniversary of their appearance in Britain), they were not the sort of thing to be found in our kitchen cupboards on an ordinary Saturday evening in the year.  Ritz crackers were not for ordinary times, they were for special occasions.

Ritz crackers appeared each Christmas, they were a staple part of festive fare. There were people who might serve them topped with such things as soft cheese and grape halves, which seemed altogether too exotic. It seemed a waste of the crackers to mask their taste with something else. Putting toppings on Ritz crackers seemed like making Black Velvet by adding champagne to Guinness, you spoiled the crackers as much as you spoiled the stout.

The taste of Ritz crackers was the taste of happy moments, the scent of the box is sufficient to conjure memories of Christmas, and the very occasional parties that might take place.

It was easy for a boy to get into trouble by taking too big a handful from the box, told not to be greedy. It was hard to explain that one could never have too many  Ritz crackers, that each tasted as good as the previous one.

Only years later did the thought occur that the name “Ritz” might have been intended to create an aura of class around the crackers, that people who ate them might have thought them indicative of living the high life. To a boy eating them, they could have been called anything and still tasted as good.

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Fifty-five years after Aberfan

Posted on 19th October 2021 by 192.168.1.1

It seems a long time ago that I last discussed Aberfan with anyone. In fact, I discovered that it is only two years.

In the last school in which i worked, each week during tutor time we had a word of the week. The word that week was “landslide.” Turning on the PowerPoint presentation, I asked someone to read the word and the definition.

The definition was the fall of rocks or earth from a mountain or cliff.

“There can be other forms of landslides,” I said, “once when I was six, a great big tip of rubble dug up from a coal mine in Wales slipped onto a primary school.”

“Did anyone die, sir?” asked one of the students.

“They did,” I said, “one hundred and sixteen primary school children died under that rubble. I know because my Dad was one of the rescue workers.”

I had paused, not knowing what to say next.

I pressed the button for the next slide in the presentation. I had not looked at it previously, it told the story of Aberfan. It told the story because the word of the week was chosen to coincide with the anniversary of the Aberfan disaster.

One of the most profound memories from my childhood comes from those days after my sixth birthday.

My father is standing in the farmyard talking to my grandfather, the only words I remember spoken by my father are “they were exhausted.” My father is wearing dark blue overalls and black Wellington boots, which are covered in black dust.

During the years that followed, the background to that scene slowly unfolded.

My father had been a member of the Civil Defence Corps and had gone to help with the digging at Aberfan, where on Friday, 21st October 1966, the day before the half-term holiday, a coal slag heap had slipped, engulfing a farm, several houses, and Pantglas Primary School. 144 people had died; 116 of them schoolchildren.

It was years later that I heard the story of the Reverend Kenneth Hayes, the minister of Zion Baptist church in Aberfan.

Hayes’ son, Dyfrig, had been one of the children buried in the school. Twelve hours after Dyfrig’s body had been found, on the Saturday night, Hayes stood up at Zion Baptist on Sunday, 23rd October to lead worship. The church was packed, the congregation was comprised of those too old or too young to help with the digging and journalists from around the world. Kenneth Hayes led the service and at the end announced the singing of Safe in the arms of Jesus, before sitting in his chair and weeping.

It is now fifty-five years later, and if I read the account of what happened and watch the black and white television interviews with those there, tears still well up in the eyes.

 

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A bigamist in the family

Posted on 17th October 2021 by 192.168.1.1

After a short life, lived in the shadow of illness, Ellen Miriam Poulton, my great grandmother died at the age of twenty-three, leaving behind three children. Her two sons, Sidney Herbert and Stanley George, for whom there are birth certificates were born in November 1906 and August 1908. Her daughter, Ida Frederica, had no birth certificate, in some places her date of birth is recorded as July 1907, elsewhere it is recorded as July 1909: the latter date seems more likely, although it does not accord with the age recorded on the 1911 Census return.

Ellen had children when she was eighteen, twenty and twenty-one, and it seems there was a further pregnancy when she was twenty-two. Her death certificate from Saint James infirmary in Balham is dated 5th March 1912.  Under “cause of death” William M. McCormac the doctor has written, “Pelvic Cellulitis (originally puerperal June 1910) Septic Peritonitis.” Ellen seems to have died from an infection associated with pregnancy and from inflammation of the peritoneum that was possibly caused by the infection from the year before.

Ellen’s death brought the dispersal of her three children. Ida stayed with her grandmother in Wandsworth, Stanley was sent to a Poor Law School in Hampshire and joined the Royal Navy at the age of fifteen. There is no record of where Sidney spent his childhood years.

Ellen’s death was registered by “E. Knox” who is recorded as “cousin.” Hoping the search would give me more clues about my great grandmother, I searched for “E. Knox.” There were not many cousins and I quickly discovered that Ellen’s cousin Emily had married Nathanael Knox in 1911. He was forty-three when they married and Emily was twenty-four. The marriage is on the returns for Medway in Kent and in the 1911 Census, they are shown as being married for less than a year.

What was baffling was that they are shown as being married again in 1926, when Nathanael was fifty-eight and Emily was thirty-nine. Why the second marriage?

Nathanael’s first wife had separated from him in 1907 and had left to go to Australia in 1910. Perhaps Nathanael felt that having been separated for four years and his wife having left the country, he was free to marry. However, he was never divorced.

The marriage in 1926 was after Nathanael’s first wife had died in Australia. Would it have been because the authorities knew the first marriage was not legal? If so, would he not have been prosecuted? Having seemed to have been married for fifteen years, was it the case of making sure the right thing was done for the sake of pension and inheritance and other matters?

The problem with records is that they don’t provide a narrative.

 

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Magpie songs

Posted on 14th October 2021 by 192.168.1.1

There were seventeen magpies on the roof of a house. Seventeen, never before have I seen so many magpies gathered together. Perhaps an evolutionary adaptation is taking place. Perhaps with the increasing incursions of scavenging gulls, the magpies that survive will be those with a capacity for collective action.

I could find no version of the magpie song that went up to seventeen birds.

Those of a certain age will remember the theme tune of the ITV children’s programme, Magpie. Intended to be a rival to the BBC programme Blue Peter, it never seemed as interesting to an earnest little boy who would sometimes sit and watch it. Both programmes had very distinctive theme tune. Blue Peter had a sailor’s hornpipe, while Magpie had an English folk song dating back to at least the Eighteenth Century.

The Magpie tune was accompanied by lyrics that are easily recalled fifty years later:

One for sorrow, two for joy,
three for a girl, four for a boy,
five for silver, six for gold,
seven for a secret, never to be told.

A book of Somerset folklore revealed that the superstitions attached to the bird, and the songs sung about it, were less sanguine than the catchy song on the television:

Magpies are the rustic’s augur bird. If you see a magpie on your right hand as you go to market whatever business you do first will be very lucky. If it is on your left, turn round and go home, for nothing will prosper with you that day. If you see a single magpie when you are on a journey spit over your left shoulder to break the ill luck. An onion however, carried in the pocket will make this unnecessary, and the bird is only unlucky when one is travelling alone. A magpie perched on the house is unlucky, it brings illness to the hale and death to the sick.

A Somerset version of the song that was the origin of the Magpie television theme tune was overheard being sung by a carter boy in about 1890.

One is sadness, two is joy,
three a girl and four a bouy,
five a wedding, siz a loss,
Pyatt, don’t’ee steal my hoss.

“Pyatt” was the dialect word for a magpie, “py” being from “pie,” the French name for the bird, and “att” being a diminutive term.

The carter’s version of the song seems very different in its tone from the words of the theme tune. It has sadness, bereavement and theft in its lines.

Has sanitising songs been a modern development?

Magpie was first broadcast in 1968 and it was obviously thought necessary to adjust the lyrics of its theme tune. Five decades on from its airing, children no longer learn the rhymes of the past, or, if they do, they learn versions from which anything considered unpleasant has been excised by adults who fail to realize that children relish the gory and the macabre.

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