Scratch prizes

Posted on 6th August 2021 by 192.168.1.1

A Porsche SUV with a personalised number plate was parked outside the convenience store. The driver was at the checkout telling the assistant what she wanted. Her requests were for a variety of different National Lottery scratch cards. Finally, with a handful of cards, she decided that she had all that she wanted.

“£50, please,” said the assistant.

The woman inserted a gold coloured credit card a pressed a number into the key pad. Handed the receipt, she put the scratch cards into her handbag and walked out to her car.

£50 on scratch cards, why would anyone want to spend £50 on scratch cards? Perhaps she was buying them for a group of people. Perhaps there was a syndicate of people who contributed to a weekly fund to buy the cards.

Scratch cards never seemed very exciting investments.  Were I a gambling person a bet on a racehorse or some other competitive sporting contest would seem to offer some excitement, the shouts of encouragement as the runners entered the final furlong, but there seems little that is thrilling about a scratch card.

Perspectives change though, I remember buying a raffle ticket in a Christmas auction and it providing weeks of anticipation, hours of imagining.

It must have been the early-1970s, for the raffle ticket cost 2p. But with the inflation of the middle years of that decade, it cannot have been much later than 1972 or 1973.

The ticket was green and I must have kept it at least until the following March. I felt that the organisers might need time to contact me to tell me that I had won and that, when they eventually did, I would need to produce the ticket to show them I was entitled to the prize.

The top prize in the raffle was £50, a huge sum of money at the time. Large number of tickets at 2p each would have needed to have been sold simply to have covered the cost of the prizes.

£50 was equivalent to at least two weeks of wages for an ordinary person. In those less affluent times, it was the sort of sum of money of which a schoolboy might dream.

For at least three months, that 2p ticket was a source of inspiration. The £50 was spent in many different ways. All the things I wanted could have been bought, and there would still have been money to spare.

Perhaps the scratch cards inspire a similar imagining, although having a Porsche would not leave many things on the list of the things that were wanted.

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Did you ever meet yourself?

Posted on 5th August 2021 by 192.168.1.1

There was an episode of one of those television series where the programme tries to trace family members. A woman of sixty-seven had discovered that she had an identical twin sister from whom she had been separated when they were babies. The women had lived their lives three miles apart.

Would it have been possible for them to have lived so many years and never caught a glimpse of each other? Would it have been possible that no-one saw one twin and thought it was the other and commented upon it? If they had, did they ever think they were seeing themselves?

I remember driving to visit a hospital on a fine spring evening.  The traffic was light, but some person in the control centre in the city must have looked at their monitors and decided that such free movement should not be allowed.  Every single light turned red as the small cluster of cars approached.  Barring there being a herd of cows or a funeral procession led by a horse-drawn hearse, progress could not have been slower.

On the radio, there was music from Alfred Hitchcock movies and every junction provided an opportunity to watch every pedestrian and every other vehicle and ponder whether any might be a Hitchcock character

At one set of lights, someone looking very familiar crossed the road.  A dark blue coat with pale blue shirt and navy trousers, the twenty-something had a mop of dark brown curly hair and carried a Tesco plastic bag.  Examining him closely as the red turned to green, there was a sense of knowing who the person was.

Only fifty yards down the road, did it register that the man crossing the road looked awfully like myself; or he looked as I would have looked a generation previously.

Hitchcock’s music provided a suitable backdrop to trying to remember the stuff from theoretical physics about all of time happening at once and about glimpsing our future or our past out of the corner of our eye.

Except it could not have been me, I had never walked across that dual carriageway in my life.  Unless the many universes theory was correct and in some parallel existence I was buying my food in Tesco before crossing a busy road on the way home.

It was a disconcerting moment. It might easily have been dispelled by turning back to check the man and no doubt discovering the man was nothing like me.

Had I thought I saw myself in my own neighbourhood, had I heard tales of people thinking they had seen me, I think I would have looked for me.

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Who writes the first version of rude lines?

Posted on 4th August 2021 by 192.168.1.1

Writing of Roger Luxton’s “rude songs” yesterday, I pondered where the Bratton Clovelly farmer might have heard the songs that he passed on to Sabine Baring Gould and which were revised because they were considered unsuitable for publication. Did Roger Luxton learn the songs from someone local? Did he add lyrics of his own?

Who starts traditions? Who adapts tunes? Who assembles words?.

Among the songs with various sets of words is Cock o’ the North, some versions of which would certainly not have been considered unsuitable for publication.

The tune was the regimental march of the Gordon Highlanders. It was suggested that the Duke of Gordon was such a powerful man that he was known as the “cock o’ the north.” The earlier title of the tune, it seems, was Jumping Joan. Prior to it assuming that title some three hundred years ago, if it came from the Scottish highlands, it probably had a Gaelic name.  If one turned to oral tradition, stories of the origins of the tune would probably be as plentiful as the different renditions of it.

There are numerous sets of words to the tune, some less polite than others, many of them beginning with the line Auntie Mary had a canary up the leg of her drawers. (The version I encountered in Ulster in the 1980s substituted De Valera for Auntie Mary and had the canary emerging from the leg of the drawers while whistling the Protestant Boys).

The tune may have evolved over centuries, and have been an amalgam of various predecessors, to the extent that no-one can claim to have been the composer.

Unlike the music, words tend to have a more distinctive authorship. However much the lines concerning Auntie Mary or Eamon de Valera may be lacking in merit, someone, somewhere, at some time, must have taken a conscious decision to devise those lyrics and to set them to those notes.

Bawdy lines concerning Auntie Mary, or lines concerning the man who was Irish Taoiseach and then president, were the product of an individual putting the words in those forms. Someone sitting in a pub, or walking down a street, or lying awake in bed, or wherever they were, must have had the tune running through their head and thought, “what about singing those words?” Not only that, they must have shared their thoughts with others and those thoughts must have been widely shared, yet there seems no record of such a process.

Perhaps the Internet will mean that future generations will be clear about the origins of who started traditions, (although, human nature being what it is, there will probably be as many claimants as versions of Auntie Mary). Not only will the source of traditions be clearer, but people like Sabine Baring Gould will not be able to excise lines not to their liking.

Posted in This sceptred isle | Leave a comment

Rude songs

Posted on 3rd August 2021 by 192.168.1.1

A wander through the family history of the Luxtons, my maternal grandmother’s family, brought an encounter with Roger Luxton of Bratton Clovelly in Devon, a man presented as an ideal grandfatherly figure by the clergyman and writer Sabine Baring Gould. In Old Country Life, Baring Gould describes his meeting with Roger Luxton:

“At Halwell, in North Devon, lives a fine old man named Roger Luxton, aged seventy-six, a great-grandfather, with bright eyes and an intelligent face. He stays about among his grandchildren, but is usually found at the picturesque farm-house of a daughter at Halwell, called Croft.

This old man was once very famous as a song-man, but his memory fails him as to a good number of the ballads he was wont to sing.

“Ah, your honour,” said he, “in old times us used to be welcome in every farm-house, at all shearing and haysel and harvest feasts; but, bless’y! now the farmers’ da’ters all learn the pianny, and zing nort but twittery sort of pieces that have nother music nor sense in them; and they don’t care to hear us, and any decent sort of music. And there be now no more shearing and haysel and harvest feasts. All them things be given up.

Tain’t the same world as used to be—’taint so cheerful. Folks don’t zing over their work, and laugh after it. There be no dances for the youngsters as there used to was. The farmers be too grand to care to talk to us old chaps, and for certain don’t care to hear us zing. Why for nigh on forty years us old zinging-fellows have been drove to the public-houses to zing, and to a different quality of hearers too.

And now I reckon the labouring folk be so tree-mendious edicated that they don’t care to hear our old songs nother. ‘Tis all Pop goes the Weasel and Ehren on the Rhine now. I reckon folks now have got different ears from what they used to have, and different hearts too. More’s the pity.”

“A fine old man,” but Baring Gould seems to bring a Victorian reforming zeal to Roger Luxton’s work. He collected four songs from the Bratton Clovelly farmer, only one of which he did not feel a need to rewrite:

Constant Johnny. Words and melody taken down from Roger Luxton. It was a dialogue, and so Mr. Sheppard had arranged it. Such lover dialogues are and were very commonly sung in farmhouses. Ravenscroft gives one in broad Devonshire in his “Brief Discourse,” 1614, entitled, “Hodge Trellindle and his Zweethart Malkyn.” Our ballad seems to be based on “Doubtful Robin and Constant Nanny,” circ. 1680, in the “Roxburgh Ballads.” These dialogue songs between a lover and his lass were very popular. Addison, in The Guardian of 1713, gives snatches of a West Country ballad of this kind, and shows how vastly superior it is to the pastorals of Dresden china shepherds and shepherdesses of Pope and Philips.

However, it is a china figure sort of rural life that Baring Gould wants.

Furze Bloom: The melody from Roger Luxton to the words of the ballad, “Gosport Beach,” which could not possibly be inserted here. I have accordingly written fresh words to it

The Blue Flame. Melody taken down by Mr. W. Crossing, from an old moor man, to “Rosemary Lane.” Roger Luxton and James Parsons also sang “Rosemary Lane” to the same air. The words are objectionable.

Plymouth Sound. Melody taken down from Roger Luxton to a song of this name. There are three songs that go by the title of “Plymouth Sound” on Broadsides, by Keys, of Devonport, and by Such; but all are coarse and undesirable. I have therefore written fresh words to this delicious air.

The fine old man seemed to know some rude songs (and those were songs he was prepared to sing to the clergyman, his wider repertoire might have shocked Baring Gould).

Posted in Out and about | 2 Comments

Astonishing greed

Posted on 2nd August 2021 by 192.168.1.1

The afternoon was passed researching family history. Stories of my great grandfather, Albert Luxton, are part of family tradition. Only by reading through his military records this afternoon did we discover that, born in 1880, he was the youngest among his siblings to serve in the 15th Hussars. Along with Albert, there were older brothers William, Henry and Richard, each enlisting with the Corps of Hussars, each being assigned to the 15th Hussars, each being assigned to other units later in their career.

Military service seemed to have come with severe hardships. Richard was deemed unfit for military service at the beginning of 1900, but was called back to the colours that summer and was despatched to South Africa to join the battle against the Boers. His health did not improve in the decade that followed and he died at the age of 42 in 1914.

Born in 1869, Henry was three years senior to Richard, and perhaps set the pattern for his younger brothers, enlisting at the age of eighteen. Henry completed the twelve years for which he enlisted and was transferred to the army reserve. Back at home in Aller, his wife died just before the First World War, and Henry returned to army life at the age of forty-five. Great great grandmother Luxton became the guardian of his children, a woman whose reputation for severity has been passed down through the generations. Henry’s attestation has “United Kingdom service only,” written across the top. He served as squadron sergeant major in a number of military depots. It was 1920, when he was fifty-one, before Henry returned to civilian life.

The answer to why the four brothers joined the army, facing hardship and risking death, was not hard to find. The occupations listed on the papers are manual work, one is a gardener, the others are labourers. Work was scarce, pay was poor, army life was a better option than remaining in Aller in the hope of improvement.

Listening to BBC Radio 4’s Front Row programme this evening, there was a breathtaking story. The actor Scarlett Johansson has had a spat with the Disney Corporation over her latest film. Disney’s decision to show the film on its television network means that box office takings will not be a s substantial as the might be and Johannson will not earn as much as she might. Disney revealed that her payment had been $20 million. The Radio 4 programme suggested that she might have earned a further $30 million through a share of box office takings. Who in the world needs $20 million, let alone $30 million on top?

The world is still filled with people like Albert and Henry and Richard and William, people who labour all their lives for little reward. There is consolation in the fact that such fundamentally decent people are much more plentiful than those who are astonishingly greedy.

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