A Life in a Year – 1st January, The Euro

On January 1st 2002 the universal European currency the Euro (€) was introduced.

The euro is useful because it has simplified travel to Europe but I miss the old pre-euro currencies. To have a wallet full of romantic and exciting sounding notes made you feel like a true international traveller. I liked the French franc and the Spanish peseta and the Greek drachma of course but my absolute favourite was the Italian lira simply because you just got so many.

When going on holiday to Italy you were, for just a short time anyway, a real millionaire. The first time I went to Italy, to Sorrento in 1976, the notes were so worthless that it was normal practice for shops to give change in the form of a postcard of a handful of sweets. That was really charming but it doesn’t happen any more of course!

My most favourite bank notes are probably from Switzerland. Everyone knows that the Swiss are fond of money and they leave no one in any doubt of this with the quality of their notes. Not only are they brilliantly colourful but they are printed on high quality paper as well. It is certain that these notes won’t fall to pieces quite as quickly as our own flimsy five-pound notes printed as they are on tissue paper!

Foreign travel and different bank notes remind me of my dad’s insistence on always returning home from foreign holidays with currency for his personal treasure chest. Even if it was 90˚ in the shade and everyone was desperate for a last drink at the airport dad was determined to bring a souvenir note or coin home and would hang on with a steadfast determination that would deny last minute refreshment to everyone so long as he could get his monetary mementos back home safely. How glad I am of that because now they belong to me and now my own left over bank notes from my travel adventures have been added to the collection.

Benidorm, The War of the Bikini

If Pedro Zaragoza Orts is remembered for the Beni-York skyscraper he is even more famous for the so called ‘War of the Bikini’. In the later years of the 1950s the icon of holiday liberty was the saucy two piece swimsuit but in staunchly religious Spain, still held in the firm two-handed grip of church and state, this scanty garment was seen as a threat to the very basis of Catholic society. According to the official version a French engineer called Louis Réard and the fashion designer Jacques Heim invented the swimsuit that was a little more than a provocative brassiere front with a tiny g-string back. It was allegedly named after Bikini Atoll, the site of nuclear weapon tests on the reasoning that the burst of excitement it would cause on the beach or at the lido would be like a nuclear explosion. Plenty of fallout and very hot!

And it certainly had this effect in Spain and although occasionally allowable on the sandy beaches, it had to be covered up in all other areas; on the promenades and in the plazas and in the shops and the bars and cafés for fear of causing any offence. In one famous incident, a British tourist, sitting in a bar opposite a beach wearing only a bikini, was told by a Guardia Civil officer that she wasn’t allowed to wear it there. After an argument she hit him, and her strike for social justice cost her a hefty fine of forty thousand pesetas. Zaragoza needed tourists and tourists wanted the bikini and with more northern European tourists arriving each year in search of an all over suntan the Mayor knew that the banning of the two piece swimsuit simply couldn’t be sustained or allowed to threaten his ambitious plans.

Zaragoza took a gamble and signed a municipal order which permitted the wearing of the bikini in public areas and in this single act he effectively jump started the Spanish tourist industry. Zaragoza said: “People had to feel free to be able to wear what they wanted, within reason, if it helped them to enjoy themselves as they would come back and tell their friends about the place.” In deeply religious Catholic Spain not everyone was so understanding or welcoming of the bikini however and in retaliation the Archbishop of Valencia began the excommunication process against him.

Excommunication was a serious matter in 1959 and his political supporters began to abandon him so one day he got up early and drove for nine hours on a little Vespa scooter to Madrid to lobby Franco himself. The Generalissimo was suitably impressed with his determination and gave him his support, Zaragoza returned to Benidorm and the Church backed down and the approval of the bikini became a defining moment in the history of modern Spain ultimately changing the course of Spanish tourism and causing a social revolution in an austere country groaning under the yoke of the National Catholic regime. Zaragoza went on to become Franco’s Director of Tourism and a Parliamentary Deputy.

Not many people would have described Franco as a liberalising social reformer and perhaps he just liked to look at ladies breasts but not long after this lots of women on holiday in Benidorm dispensed with the bikini bra altogether and brazenly sunbathed topless and Benidorm postcards had pictures of naked ladies on them to prove it.

One thing I am certain of is that this wouldn’t have made a great deal of difference to my Nan because I am not sure that she ever possessed a swimming costume, never mind a two-piece! She was a bit old-fashioned and the human body in the naked form was only permitted behind closed doors with the curtains closed and preferably after dark. If she ever went in the sea I imagine it would have been in one of those Victorian one piece bathing costumes of the previous century. Grandad too wasn’t one for showing bits of his body normally kept under his bus conductor’s dark blue uniform and didn’t even concede to a pair of shorts, preferring instead to wear his colonial style slacks even during the day. When he came home his impressive suntan stopped at the line of his open neck shirt and his rolled up sleeves.



For people who had never been abroad before Benidorm must have been an exciting place in the early 1960s. Palm fringed boulevards, Sangria by the jug full and, unrestrained by optics, generous measures of whiskey and gin, rum and vodka. Eating outside at a pavement café and ordering drinks and not paying for them until leaving and scattering unfamiliar coins on the table as a tip for the waiter. There was permanent sunshine, a delightful warm sea and unfamiliar food, although actually I seem to doubt that they would be introduced to traditional Spanish food on these holidays because to be fair anything remotely ethnic may have come as shock because like most English people they weren’t really ready for tortilla and gazpacho, tapas or paella. They certainly didn’t return home to experiment with any new Iberian gastronomic ideas and I suspect they probably kept as close as they could to food they were familiar with.

Benidorm is a fascinating place, often unfairly maligned or sneered at but my grandparents liked it and I have been there myself in 1977 for a fortnight’s holiday and then again on a day trip in 2008 just out of curiosity. It has grown into a mature and unique high rise resort with blue flag beaches and an ambition to achieve UNESCO World Heritage Status and I hope it achieves it.

Women at Checkouts

On Sunday I went to the supermarket shortly after opening at ten o’clock to buy a newspaper and a few other bits and pieces (alcohol mostly) and I was surprised to find the store exceptionally busy. I whizzed around the aisles making my selections and made my way to the check outs to discover a queue at every one and it was just my luck to choose the slow moving one because in front of me was a line of women none of whom were in a particular hurry.

Women are terrible at supermarket checkouts and this reminded me of one of my favourite Bill Bryson observations:

‘Although the store had only just opened there were long queues at the tills. I took a place in line behind eight other shoppers. They were all women and they all did the same mystifying thing: they acted surprised when it came time to pay. This is something that has been puzzling me for years. Women will stand there watching their items being rung up, and then when the till lady says, ‘that’s £4.20, love,’ or whatever, they suddenly look as if they have never done this sort of thing before. They go, ‘Oh!’ and start rooting in a flustered fashion in their handbag for their purse as if no-one had told them that this might happen.’

This queue was especially bad where each in turn waited for the request for payment before going through their shopping bag to get their handbag and then going through their handbag to get their purse and then taking an age agonising over method of payment. That’s after trying to find the Club Card that it hasn’t occurred to them might be a good idea to get ready either and then remembering from the recesses of their memory that they have got some vouchers hidden away somewhere in the back of the purse.

If that isn’t bad enough the ones that really irritate me are those who insist on trying to find exactly the right change, ‘just a minute’ they say ‘I think I might have the right money here’ (something which is highly unlikely!) and then rummage about assembling a handful of loose change from inside the lining of the purse, dropping it on the floor and searching for it, counting it out twice, just to make sure, discarding the odd Franc or Peseta that’s been in there for twenty years or so and then, after predictably failing to put the right amount of cash together, apologising for not having quite enough before going to a separate compartment in the purse to find another note. Why can’t they just pay with a £10 note in the first place? It is so much easier, believe me!

I watched with mounting frustration as all of the other queues seemed to be moving quicker than mine and cursed my poor judgment in selecting this one but then there was only one more shopper in front of me with only a couple of dozen items or so, so I decided against moving across to an alternative line. The goods started going through and the scanner was bleeping away at a reassuringly steady speed but before he had finished she stopped him and said that she wanted to pay for the goods in two separate transactions. Why do people do that? Ok, she might have been getting some shopping for a neighbour or her mother or something but couldn’t she just work it out when she got home? Anyway, we went through the whole surprise and purse fumbling routine and when she received her change she unbelievably put everything away, the purse in the handbag and the handbag in the shopping bag and I just knew exactly what was going to happen next. The remaining items were scanned through and the clerk asked for payment. She stared blankly at him for a second or two as if the entire contents of her brain had been wiped clear by standing to close to the laser beam in the price scanner and then went through the entire routine again right down to trying to scrape together the exact amount in change.

The interesting thing is that this woman will do exactly the same thing the next time she shops because women have a complete mental block about checkouts. Men are much better at this sort of thing because as they shop they mentally tot up the likely total of the goods and then at the checkout have approximately the right amount of money ready to hand over in an instant and this makes the whole process much more efficient. My solution to this supermarket checkout hold up problem is that women should be obliged to take a test in basic common sense before being allowed to use them.

1966 - Pickles the dog, Kenneth Wolstenholme and World Cup Willy

The biggest story of 1966 was that the England football team won the World Cup when they beat West Germany 4-2 and Geoff Hurst famously scored the only world cup final hat trick ever. The whole country went football mad that year and everyone knows all about the brilliant victory. But Sir Alf Ramsay’s England team were not the only national footballing heroes of 1966. There was also Pickles the dog , without whom there may not have been a trophy for Bobby Moore and his teammates to lift on that glorious day in July.

The solid gold Jules Rimet trophy was stolen while on public display at an exhibition in London and this led to a nationwide search and the FA chairman, Joe Mears, receiving threatening demands for money to ensure its safe return. Brazil, the then holders of the trophy were understandably outraged and accused the English FA of total incompetence. No change there then and they were almost certainly right of course but by a delicious twist of fate the trophy was stolen again in 1983, this time in Rio de Janeiro and this time it was never ever recovered. It is believed that it was melted down for the precious metal and it will almost certainly never be seen again.

Back to 1966 and this is the point where the story becomes unbelievably weird or perhaps just plain unbelievable. One evening a week after the theft, a man called David Corbett was out walking his mongrel dog Pickles, in south-east London, when the dogs attention was caught by a package wrapped in newspaper lying under a bush in somebody’s front garden. It was the World Cup. I’ll say that again. It was the World Cup! No one has ever satisfacrily explained what it was doing under a bush wrapped in the Daily Mirror but David Corbett received a reward of £5,000, which was a huge sum, the equivilent of over £250,000 today and Pickles became an overnight national hero. I am surprised that he wasn’t in the BBC top one hundred greatest Britons. But some people said that the trophy was cursed and within weeks of the cup's recovery and in a remarkable instance of bad luck, Pickles choked to death when he caught his lead in the bough of a fallen tree while chasing a cat.

Apart from the result there were some other things about the World Cup that are also interesting. The official mascot for example was a Lion called World Cup Willy who wore a Union Flag shirt of red, white and blue, which was strange because this was England that were playing and not the United Kingdom, but as none of the other home nations were in the finals I suppose England generously believed that they were representing Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as well. Embarrassingly England’s first defeat after the World Cup was against Scotland at Wembley in 1967 and the Scottish team that included the footballing legends, Denis Law, Jim Baxter and Billy Bremner promptly declared themselves the new World Champions. Sadly for them it didn’t work like that and lets face it they never will be.

World Cup Willy had a World Cup song that was not unsurprisingly called World Cup Willy that made number one in the hit parade and was sung by Lonnie Donegan who was the first person to become famous playing skiffle music in the UK. He was a guitar and banjo player who also played the washboard and the tea-chest bass and who had a lot of chart success in the 1950s and early 1960s. Anecdotally it was Lonnie who inspired John lennon to learn guitar and form his first group, The Quarrymen. What is strange about Lonnie singing the English World Cup song however is that although he was brought up in East Ham he was in fact born in Scotland. I wonder where his loyalties were when Scotland beat England in 1967? Apart from ‘World Cup Willy’, Lonnie is probably best remembered for another number one hit called ‘My old mans a dustman’.

At the end of the world cup final the words of the commentator, Kenneth Wolstenholme, became part of broadcasting history when as the match was coming to the end in injury time a small pitch invasion took place just as Geoff Hurst scored to put England 4-2 ahead and Wolstenholme said 'Some people are on the pitch ... they think it's all over ... it is now!' and these have become arguably the most famous words in English football, and a well known phrase that has passed into modern English usage. Wolstenholme was not a brilliant broadcaster it has to be said but as well as the World Cup Finals of 1966 and 1970 he commentated on the the first ever game featured on Match of the Day in 1964 and covered every FA Cup final between 1949 and 1971 after which he was replaced by David Coleman.

Saturday Morning Pictures

In the early 1960s for a couple of years or so I went every Saturday morning to the ‘Flicks’ at the Granada Cinema at the bottom of North Street in Rugby opposite the posh new Council offices to the Saturday morning pictures. What a fleapit. It was an old brick building built in the late 1950s and totally without character and charm. Present day residents of Rugby will recognise it as the home of Gala Bingo, what a tragedy!

Every Saturday morning we would get the Midland Red R66 bus, which left from the top of the road, into town and our main objective was to get to the cinema early in order to get a seat in the front row of the balcony if we could. We weren't allowed through the front door because of the damage we could potentially do but had to queue down the side of the building and were admitted through one of the exits at the back. It cost sixpence (two and a half new pence) to get in and the queue was always long even before the show opened and the big boys would more often than not push in the front of the queue.

Inside the cinema was dark and smelt of stale cigarette smoke with seats covered in a red sort of velveteen. Unlike real velvet, however, this material was not soft and for boys wearing short trousers it made your legs itch, which made it impossible to sit still and I am sure that it was the same for girls in their little skirts. The noise levels inside were unbelievable. About three hundred children aged between five and thirteen would scream, whistle, shout and boo at any and every opportunity. To try and keep some sort of order the Manager had a cunning plan, which was to give out silver shillings to children who were sitting still and behaving themselves. Throughout the show, cinema staff would pass through the building and randomly hand out the coins to kids who were trying desperately to behave. Once you had got the shilling of course you could do pretty much behave as badly as you liked!

The show began with some old bloke on an organ that would rise out of the stage floor, like a poor mans Reginald Dixon show, and there would be ten minutes or so of community singing. Next came the birthday spot and paid up members of the Rugby Grenadiers Club whose birthday it was this week were invited up onto the stage to receive a present. After the present came the ritual humiliation of ‘Happy Birthday to You’, that was normally sung by kids in the auditorium with all sorts of unsuitable for print alternative lyrics.

There were always cartoons to get things started and then there were usually about three features each week. A serial (to make sure you came back next week), a short comedy (Laurel & Hardy was always my favourite), and a feature film. This was usually a western that had the good cowboys in white hats and smart clothes and the bad guys in black hats and with unshaven faces and who always looked untidy. The camera would pan from the good guys to the bad guys constantly to cheers for the white hats and boos for the black hats. In these films no-one's gun ever ran out of bullets but surprisingly the good guys never seemed to get seriously injured. Bad guys fell over clutching a fatal wound, but there was never any blood and the good guys always got winged in the arm without causing any real damage. This was completely unrealistic of course. Six shooters in the old west were notoriously unreliable and if someone was unfortunate to take a bullet this would have done the most horrendous damage to flesh, muscle and internal organs. Bullets, or slugs, were made of soft lead and of relatively slow trajectory so if they entered the body they would have bounced about doing unimaginably painful damage and if shot it is completely unlikely that anyone would have shrugged it off as a flesh wound and carried on fighting as they did in these films.



If there was a sci-fi feature this would be something like 'Jet Speed and the invaders from the dark side of the Moon'. The special effects left a lot to be desired and the aliens were always ugly creatures that were always after our women, which thinking about it now is a bit improbable. A scaly black lizard creature is probably more inclined to have the hots for another scaly black lizard creature back home on Mars rather than a soft milky white earth female. Like cowboys the space heroes were dressed in white, often with goldfish bowls over their heads. The aliens usually wore black and had ingenious secret ray guns. As with the westerns we cheered at the whites and booed at the blacks.

If there was a period epic then this would be something Robin Hood, William Tell, Richard the Lion Heart, or my all time favourite, Zorro. Zorro, which is Spanish for Fox, and a by-word for cunning and devious, was the secret identity of Don Diego de la Vega a nobleman and master swordsman living in nineteenth century California. He defended the people against tyrannical governors and other villains and not only was he much too cunning and clever for the bumbling authorities to catch, but he delighted in publicly humiliating them while riding on his horse jet black steed Tornado. Zorro was unusual because he was dressed all in black with a flowing Spanish cape, a flat-brimmed Andalusian style hat, and a black cowl mask that covered his eyes. His favored weapon was a rapier sword which he used to leave his distinctive mark, a large 'Z' made with three quick cuts. It was strange for a hero to be in black, so for Zorro we had to remember to cheer for the blacks and boo and hiss at the Mexican soldiers dressed in white.

For the staff this must have been the worst day of the week, I bet sickness levels were high on a Saturday morning. This must have been a bit like trying to deal with a prison riot. When the films reached the exciting bits we would flip our seats up and sit on the edge and kick furiously with our heels on the seat bottom and make a hell of a din while we reduced the plywood base to splinters. The manager didn’t like this of course and would frequently stop the film and appear on stage to chastise us. This was usually met with a hail of missiles that were lobbed at the stage. The cleaning up afterwards bill must have been huge.

I stopped going to Saturday Morning pictures about 1966 and the Granada cinema closed down because of dwindling audiences about ten years later. I’m guessing it must have been 1975 because I think that the last film shown there was the Towering Inferno, which opened in January of that year. Predictably it was sell-out all week as people of the town flocked to the cinema for the very last time before its conversion to bingo hall.

Predictably it was sell-out all week as people of the town flocked to the cinema for the very last time before its conversion to bingo hall.

1965 - Churchill, Woodbines & Certificates

I have mentioned before that, in his memory box, Dad kept the front pages of three newspapers: 7th February 1958, the Munich air disaster, 23rd November 1963, the Kennedy assassination and finally the Daily Mail of 25th January 1965 which reported the death of Sir Winston Churchill.

I think that few would argue that Winston Churchill was probably the greatest Briton of all time. I know that I can say this with some confidence because in 2002 the BBC conducted a nationwide poll to identify who the public thought this was. The result was a foregone conclusion and Churchill topped the poll with 28% of the votes. The BBC project first identified the top one hundred candidates and the final vote was between the top ten. Second in the poll was the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel who received nearly 25% of the votes. These two I fully agreed with but in third place, and goodness knows what the public must have been thinking, was Princess Diana! Now, the only thing that I can see that Princess Diana ever did was to whine a lot about having to live in palaces, wear expensive jewellery and eat gourmet food and try to undermine and destroy the Royal Family. Not so long ago you could have your head cut off for that sort of thing but by some bizarre twist the British have turned her into a heroine. As low down as number twenty-seven was Emily Pankhurst who fought for women’s suffrage and much further down the list at number fifty-two was Florence Nightingale and in my opinion these two women’s personal legacy to the development of Great Britain as a nation is much, much greater than that of Princess Diana.

There were other anomalies on the list as well. There were eleven Kings and Queens and eleven politicians, ten military heroes, eight inventors and seven scientists, which is what I would expect but then there were eight pop musicians including Boy George! Now, surely there must be dozens of people who could be more appropriately included on the list than that. Even if you do accept that pop stars are great Britains what is even more unbelievable is that Boy George beat Sir Cliff Richard by seven places! John, Paul and George were included in the eight but there was no place for Ringo, which doesn’t seem very fair. Enoch Powell was one of the politicians and he was a raging racist. Richard III is in but not Henry VII. There is an issue of equality because of the one hundred only thirteen were women and I can’t help feeling that there must be more than that. Here are some suggestions of mine; the prison reformer, Elizabeth Fry, the philanthroprist Octavia Hill, the pioneering aviator, Amy Johnson, the nineteenth century gardener, Gertrude Jeckyl and the very embodiment of Britishness, Britannia. John Churchill the 1st Duke of Marlborough and ancestor of the great Sir Winston didn’t even make the list.

In fact Winston Churchill was so great that he was awarded a state funeral and that doesn’t happen very often because this requires a motion or vote in Parliament and the personal approval of the Monarch and consists of a military procession using a gun carriage from a private resting chapel to Westminster Hall, where the body usually lies in state for three days. The honour of a state funeral is usually reserved for the Sovereign as Head of State and the current or past Queen Consort. Very few other people have had them: Sir Philip Sydney in 1586, Horatio Nelson in 1806, the 1st Duke of Wellington, 1852, Viscount Palmerston in 1865, William Gladstone, 1898, the 1st Earl Roberts of Kandahar, 1914, Baron Carson in 1935 and Sir Winston Churchill. So this is a very small list indeed although it might have included one more but Benjamin Disraeli who was offered the honour of a state funeral refused it in his will. We might have to wait a very long time for the next one because I really can’t imagine that it is going to be Boy George.

1965 was the hundredth anniversary of the end of the American Civil War and to celebrate appropriately the USA started a new one in Vietnam. US troops had been there for some time of course but on March 2, following an attack on a U.S. Marine barracks, Operation Flaming Dart and Operation Rolling Thunder commenced and the war was official. An estimated six hundred and twenty thousand soldiers died in the American Civil War and one million one hundred thousand in Vietnam. There were many more unaccounted civilian casualties in addition to that.

In politics Edward Heath became leader of the Conservative Party and began the period when he and Harold Wilson alternated occupancy of 10, Downing Street. Although these two party leaders certainly didn’t have the stature of Gladstone and Disraeli it is just about the last time in British politics when the two party leaders were almost evenly matched and this generated an interest in politics that has been sadly lacking since. Around about 1970 I even joined the Young Conservatives but this was nowhere near as exciting as the Boy Scouts and I didn’t renew my subscription when it ran out.

In the early winter of 1965 there was a lot of fog and a series of multiple crashes on Britain’s new motorways, and as a bit of a panic measure, in December, an experimental speed limit of seventy miles per hour was introduced. This really hadn’t been a problem when motorways were first opened because most cars prior to the 1960s would have had difficulty getting up to seventy m.p.h. in the first place let alone maintaining this speed for any distance without blowing the engine to kingdom come but by mid-decade they were starting to get faster. The history of the speed limit is quite interesting, the first speed limit was the ten m.p.h. limit introduced by the Locomotive Act, or Red Flag Act, of 1861 but in 1865, the revised Locomotive Act reduced the speed limit still further to four m.p.h. in the country and two m.p.h. in towns, which, lets be honest is slower than average walking speed and sort of missed the point of automative power. This Act additionaly required a man with a red flag or a lantern to walk sixty yards ahead of each vehicle, effectively enforcing a walking pace, and warning horse drawn traffic of the approach of a self-propelled machine. In 1896 a new Locomotive Act replaced that of 1865 and the increase of the speed limit to a positively reckless fourteen m.p.h. has been commemorated each year since 1927 by the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run. The motorway speed limit of seventy miles per hour was made permanent in 1970.

Speed limits didn’t make any difference at all to Jim Clark who was one of Britain’s greatest Formula One racing stars and in 1965 he won both the F1 championship and the Indianoplois 500. He was regarded as the greatest driver of his time and won twenty-five of his seventy-three grand prix starts but sadly died prematurely in an accident at Hockenheim in Germany in 1968 when his car left the track and crashed into trees. This was a time when motorsport was a lot more dangerous and life expectancy was a great deal less than it is today.

A significant event of 1965 was the banning of cigarette advertising on television. I am thankful for that because at eleven years old I was at my most impressionable and I am quite convinced that I might otherwise have been seduced by the macho image that cigarette advertisements used to lure teenageres into tobacco dependency. It was about this time that I enjoyed, or perhaps more correctly endured, my first cigarette. My friend David had slipped some woodbines from his dad’s half empty packet and we went into the fields behind his house for a smoke. David’s dad, Harry, wouldn’t have noticed a few fags going missing because he used to smoke about sixty a day and that certainly helped to bring his days on earth to a premature ending. Woodbines were untipped and maximum strength and we lit up and I can clearly remember trying to adopt an adult demeanour and puffing away but without inhaling until an unfortunate combination of sucking in and speaking at the same time involuntarily drew the foul vapour into my lungs, filled my brain with noxious gasses and made me giddy and unsteady. I literally fell over as though someone had punched me in the head, turned an unpleasant shade of green and was violently sick, much to the amusement of my pals. I tried cigarette smoking a few more times after that, as we all did, but I have never forgotten that thoroughly unpleasant experience and gladly never became a real cigarette smoker at any time ever after that. In 1968 Lotus started advertising tobacco on their Formula One racing cars. That didn’t do Jim Clark any good did it!

1965 was a mixed year for me when it came to passing exams. As predicted I failed my eleven-plus in Spring and was sent to secondary school in September in the bottom grade at Dunsmore (or Duncemore) but to compensate for that I did get my Leaping Wolf certificate in the Wolf Cubs and passed my Elementary Test for swimming a whole length of the swimming baths and that was quite something let me tell you, look at the certificate, it is signed by the examiner, Mrs Dick, who was a fearsome creature, Councillor Pattinson, the Chairman of the Baths Committee and Jim Duffy, the Town Clerk no less! Who needed the eleven-plus? Not Me!

Boy Scouts

Two years ago was the one hundreth anniversary of scouting that began in 1907 when Robert Baden-Powell, a Lieutenant General in the British Army, who had served in India and Africa in the 1880s and 1890s, held the first Scout camp at Brownsea Island in Dorset. Since his boyhood, he was fond of woodcraft and military scouting, and therefore, as part of soldiers training he showed his men how to survive in the wilderness. He noticed it taught them to develop independence and to think for themselves, rather than just blindly follow orders and so towards the end of his military career he wrote the principles of Scouting in his book ‘Scouting for Boys’ which was based on his earlier military experiences, and in so doing started the Scouting movement.

I joined the Wolf Cubs when I was seven years old and after I had passed all the tests and received my Leaping Wolf Certificate moved up to the Scouts when I was eleven. At first I was in the Paddox Troop but later transferred to the Hillmorton, which was good for me because dad was the Scoutmaster, which gave me a bit of an advantage when it came to passing tests and getting badges. I liked the Scouts and the quasi-military organisation that came with it with the uniforms and the kit inspections, the law book and solemn promise and the fact that I could legitimately carry a hunting knife on my belt without being challenged; it was a bit like the Hitler Youth Movement but without the nastiness! My only regret about the uniform was that by the time I was in the scouts that old pointy khaki hat had been replaced by the beret; I always lamented the passing of that hat.

Being in the Scouts was genuinely good preparation for later life because it taught discipline, purpose and respect and some truly useful skills like first aid and survival, using an axe and a compass and lighting fires without the aid of a cigarette lighter. Looking now at the Scout progress card however there is one thing I’m not so sure about and that is stalking. In the Scouts you got a badge for being good at that but these days that sort of thing is likely to land you in a whole lot of trouble!



And it wasn’t just stalking because lots of things about the 1960s were more casual than they are now and whilst it seemed normal at the time I suppose today this might be interpreted as naïve. No one questioned the motives of people who gave up their time to be Arkela or Baghera in the Wolf Cubs, Skip or Bosun in the Scouts because these were decent people who gave up their time for the benefit of others. They certainly didn’t have to have checks by the Criminal Records Bureau and there was no sex offender’s register to refer to before they were allowed to do it, they were just good men and women, like my dad, who volunteered because they had a sense of duty and because they enjoyed doing it. Even Robert Baden-Powell's sexuality has been brought into question by modern biographers, who claim to have found evidence indicating he was attracted to boys but this has never been proven and was probably just a mischievous attempt to discredit a genuine British boys hero. In 1899 during the second Boer War Baden-Powell was promoted to be the youngest colonel in the British Army and became famous for resisting the siege of Mafeking when the town was surrounded and outnumbered by a Boer army of eight thousand men but which, under his command, withstood the siege for two hundred and seventeen days until relieved.

Other interesting badges were backwoodsman, explorer (but our troop never got sent to the Amazon or anywhere else remotely interesting) and a woodcraftsman, but I don’t think I managed any of those. I’m fairly sure that I didn’t manage the aircraft modeller either and it didn’t help that my dad was giving out the badges and he had obviously seen my hamfisted attempts at assembling the Avro Lancaster Airfix kit!

When you weren’t getting badges scouting was good for toughing you up. I can recall my first camp in 1965 when I was eleven when I spent my first time away from home and my parents. By the second day I was so desperately home sick that I was feeling really ill. The Scoutmaster, Mr Pointon, or Skip, took me aside and gave me a good talking to about growing up and enjoying the experience and I don’t know how he did it but in a matter of just a few minutes he removed my anxiety and my tears and I was back with the rest of the boys cooking sausages over an open fire and it never troubled me again. I can still recall the conversation as one of life’s defining moments when he explained that if I gave up and went home everyone would think that I was a big girl and I would probably be dismissed from the troop with dishonour and someone would break my staff in two over their knobbly knee! Anyway next day was parents visiting day and it never occurred to me for one moment to pack up my sleeping bag and groundsheet and go home early.

As well as the training and the tests there were a lot of games as well. British Bulldog was a good toughen you up sort of game, which is probably not allowed anymore because it was a bit rough and inherently dangerous. It started with one poor boy, usually the smallest, being picked out to stand at the bottom of a hill while the rest of the Troop charged down and through with the objective of getting to the other side without being caught and wrestled to the ground. This was the job of the boy in the middle who had to intercept one of the charging boys, pin him to the floor and shout British Bulldog 1-2-3. If he was sensible the little boy in the middle would try to intercept the next smallest boy and so on. This boy then joined the first at the bottom of the hill and the rest charged again. This carried on until only one boy remained who had avoided being caught and mugged and he was declared the winner, as he was stretchered off and taken to the infirmary.

Boys stayed in the Scouts until they were sixteen but I never saw it through to the end, dad fell out with the Group Scout Master, Harry Newman in 1969, walked out of a meeting and never wiggled his woggle again and that November I discovered girls and that hanky-panky was more fun than gin-gan-gooly and that was goodbye to the Scouts, which was a shame because I was only a couple of tests away from my First Class Scouts badge at the time and I never got to go on to the Seniors.


Dad (Skip) in the middle, me bottom right: