I must go down to the sea again

A powerfully dramatic sea doing its best to broach the coastal defences. Nothing quite like a bracing walk along the prom on a gale-lashed sunday afternoon. There's an undercliff walk from Saltdean all the way to Brighton thanks to its remarkable accessibilty. The original 'Dover' road along the cliff tops has long since vanished and to prevent further encroachment during the recession-hit nineteen thirties Brighton Corporation embarked upon a programme of sea defences. Huge government grants provided work for ex miners and workers from some of the most distressed areas of Wales which is why there's still a preponderence of Evans' and Jones' in Brighton's eastern Kemptown area. My wife's father and grandfather as locals found employment there after a lifetime of farm work. The labour was hard and governed by the tides and with virtually no mechanical assistance, extremely dangerous. My father-in-law's job was initially as tea boy in charge of producing industrial quantities of the thirst quenching fluid, ready mixed with condensed milk and sugar, served up in scrubbed galvanised buckets. Later he progressed to being a labourer where the combination of freezing water and piece-work eventually drove him to sign up with the Lifeguards (military version) for an equally colourful and character-forming career. The undercliff work was completed and still stands today as testament to those hardy souls who built it.

Log cabin in the sky

Approximately this time last year we made one of our regular trips to the USA. Guided by good friends we visited hither and yon but were much taken with Beech Mountain North Carolina. This is as far from the America of the tourist books you can get. The cabin is home to some of the most hospitable folks you could wish to meet. No mains water or electricity - just a well and a 'sometime' generator and the glow of oil lamps. Theirs is a tough life of farming, factory work and making do in conditions most of us would find intolerable. We met the family around the kitchen table on a dark rainy day; the cabin was warm and we could have been back in the nineteenth century. The mother, a diminutive woman up in her eighties with sharp attractive features and her nephew in his fifties, skinny, tall and wearing dungarees. Our friend led the conversation around to the telling of stories, for we were with one of several families from whom his parents had collected traditional songs and tales throughout the 30s. 40s and 50s...amongst which was the song 'Tom Dooley' (Frank Proffitt) made world famous by The Kingston Trio. The conversation about kith and kin ranged back and forth when eventually the nephew asked if we'd like to hear one of his 'Jack Tales' - would we! He commenced the story in a most dignified manner with an accent that at times was almost impenetrable; the story is of 'Jack' of Jack and the Beanstalk fame and the different tales are of his many adventures. For a quarter of an our we were transfixed and transported back to a time when this sort of thing was the norm, where the only entertainment was that which you made yourself and the skill of the singer or storyteller was your only theatre. As the story progressed the teller became more and more animated, gesturing to better describe the antics of Jack and the talking animals and laughing at the jokes he had heard a thousand times before. We were helpless with the infectious laughter and felt at one with the tale, the teller and the homespun magic. It was as natural as could be. We had been given a short glimpse back into the time of our ancestors. Even the accent...it was familiar, it was a kind of East Anglian! overlaid with a mountain drawl and added 'thee's' and 'thou's' which were pure Elizabethan English, but it was unmistakable. After the tale was finished the teller was at pains to let us know that the stories "come from England you know, come over with our kin long times ago, even afore they settled on th' mountain". And all those Hicks' and Proffitts' and all, they have something really precious. Something we've lost in our relentless search for the new, the gaudy and the temporary. Something everlasting, an anchor in their own culture that still works just like it always did.

All things must pass

My old Dad died last month. I wondered if I should even blog this and upon sober reflection decided that it wouldn't be a bad idea if only to record the passing of another from that wartime generation. So no mawkishness, just a brief remembrance. If there was such a thing as a 'good' war my old man had one. As an RAF aircraft mechanic his task was to follow the advancing forces through North Africa and Italy repairing, rebuilding or destroying (if necessary) any disabled aircraft that came his way. Whilst still in Egypt the combined forces thought it would be a jolly wheeze to let the chaps blow off a bit of steam by forming an inter-services speedway league. There was no shortage of workshops, mechanical skills and materials so to the likes of Dad who'd been a grass track racer before the war this was Nirvana. By the time they got to Brindisi things were properly organised with cinder tracks being laid down and specialist motorcycles in full production. Of course everything was make do and mend and engineering ingenuity knew no bounds...from robbing ex-Wermacht BMWs for their prized overhead valve top ends to stripping despatch riders' bikes to virtually nothing, the lads were away. Here's a picture of Dad on his particular mount which followed as closely as could be the design of pre-war speedway machines. Competition was fast and furious and it wasn't unknown to recruit professional riders like Split Waterman as 'ringers'.

Post-war came peacetime flying in Dakotas, Viking, York, Hermes, Britannia, VC10 and 707. The logbook is one of three which covered his career. Remarkable entries in the late 40s carry such matter-of-fact comments as 'coal into Templehof' (airport during The Berlin Airlift) or 'emergency landing, port engine failure' or 'return to Blackbushe twin engine failure'. But I know of dozens of other situations that he was expected to remedy as a flight engineer far from home - I mean even allowing for the fact that most passenger aircraft are now jets, can you imagine persuading the passengers to disembark and yank on a rope attached to a propellor in order to start the engines? He did...the fact that the passengers were all squaddies on a trooping flight home and were marshalled by a barking Sergeant Major doesn't lessen the achievement in my eyes.

A quiet accomplished man, he had more intuitive engineering talent in his little finger than I could ever hope for. Never boastful, always ready to disembowel and put right my mates cars and 'bikes, he was extraordinarily free with his time and knowledge. I appreciated him, I loved him...but did I really know him? I don't think I really did. Should I have made more effort? - you bet. Happy landings.

Methanol and Magners

One event I look forward to each year is The Brighton Speed Trials. First run in 1903 this makes it one of the oldest motor 'sport' events in Britain. But it's the location that absolutely confirms it. Madeira Drive runs from Brighton's Palace Pier to Black Rock, parallel to the sea and is owned by Brighton Corporation - indeed it was originally surfaced specifically to allow straight line racing there. On this particular Saturday in September the road is closed from early morning until 6.00pm in the evening when it must, upon pain of mayoral discipline, be re-opened for normal traffic. By 8.00am people are already crowding the railings high above the track for a free days' spectating. It's not there you want to be though. Pay up and look big! a ticket will take you wherever you want to go within reason but it's the only way to really soak up the atmosphere. An unlikely assortment of vehicles attempt their fastest times over a standing start quarter mile - it used to be over a kilometre but that got too fast and what with its being an ordinary road, it's now 440 yards in old money. There are modern cars, racing cars, sports cars and vintage cars - then there are the motorcycles, both new and of great antiquity, which for my money provide the highpoint of the day with their ludicrously fast times, spectacular burnouts and gorgeous aroma of Castrol 'R' vegetable oil. Within the pit area vehicles are lined up either side of the road and the drivers and crews are as interesting and varied as the machinery. The immensely wealthy with their exotic cars chat easily with the craggy old rockers and their antedeluvian motorcycles. Indeed with the latter it is difficult to gauge the cross-over between man and machine...oil, petrol, grease, baggy old racing leathers and whispy grey hair combine to produce a kind of all-in-one effect of rider and 'bike. A push start from a smartly dressed young man produces a bark and calico-tearing noise from a 1930's Rudge whilst the elderly pilot acknowledges the assistance with a cheery wave. Meanwhile further up the paddock, retired art teacher, James Augustus Tiller (his parents named him for Augustus John) fires up his tatty orange 1950's Allard sports car - this one's different though and stuffed full of the finest American speed parts you can shake a spangled stick at - the earth shakes as the rev counter rises and falls to the rhythm of his right foot. Soon he'll be attacking the tarmac for his umpteenth Speed Trials and probably winning his class yet again. Rumour has it that the car is already willed to an animal charity to be sold after his death - who knows? the whole thing is an enigma. He's a charming man and willing to answer any questions the young petrol heads queue up to put to him. The white banner proclaiming Start line is stretched above Madeira Drive as I walk towards the 'launch site'. The cars are forming an orderly queue awaiting their 15 seconds or so of glory...as a competitor you'll be lucky to see much more than a total of one and a half minutes of track time throughout the long day! So why on earth is this event always over-subscribed? - quite simply, there's nothing else remotely like it; virtually nowhere else in England do they allow the once-common practice of closing the highway for such a race...that and its unique position. Raffish, naughty old Brighton, the tart with a heart, seems ideal. The smell of fish and chips and vinegar pervade the atmosphere vying for your olfactory attention with the smell of burning methanol and hot oil. Fairground music comes tumbling across the sea from the Palace Pier and a child loses his helium balloon whilst mother chomps into an unfeasibly large hot dog; and everywhere urgent scurrying, scratching of heads and barked knuckles whilst performing a hasty plug change, pouring of petrol, wiping of googles, bravado chat about past runs and every, every year I say the same thing - 'I must have a go before I die'. Of course I never do and probably never will, but as the Magners begins to take hold I see myself crouched over the tank of my motorcycle gunning the throttle, my eyes fixed steadily on Black Rock, I bring the engine to a crescendo, drop the clutch and I'm gone. Unlike TE Lawrence who also loved such things I will never write 'The Seven Pillars of Wisdom'.

Doorway conundrum

Here's an intriguing doorway. Can anyone tell me why it is this small and where it is located? We spent a pleasant couple of hours at the location in question where I indulged my rather chavvie (and new-found) taste for Magners and ice. Cider is what I started on and I suppose it's some sort of regression. Yes, yes, yes, I know it's not 'real' cider, but that Kingston Black my uncle introduced me to years ago was, and probably still is proper wheelbarrow mixture and not at all suitable for a lunchtime session.

Father of Chapel

Wandering around Lewes in the early evening I looked again at a building with which I was once very familiar. WE Baxter Ltd, printers and bookbinders, a company with its roots right back in the early nineteenth century. Its founder George Baxter was a pioneer in the craft of colour printing and the prints he made are now highly collectable. Utilising a laborious method of separate engravings for each oil-based hue, the image was built up with many layers of individual colours all needing to 'register' perfectly one upon the other. None of your 4 colour process or CMYK here, then. Enormous numbers of these prints were produced, some estimates exceeding 100,000 which is nothing short of remarkable when you consider the primitive hand production methods. I worked at Baxters back in the early nineteen seventies and even then it was a business somewhat lagging behind the times. Theirs was a letterpress shop rather than having adopted the soon-to-be-universal photo-lithography. A world of hot metal type individually cast at great speed by Monotype casting machines. There was the clatter of the compressed air keyboards with anything up to a dozen men tapping away on what looked like vast typewriters producing spools of perforated paper making up the coded copy which, when fed into the casting machines on the floor below told them which fonts, upper or lower case letters, punctuation marks and numerals to use. If the keyboard room was loud, then the casting room below was like Dantes Inferno - everyone who worked there was practically deaf and wore no ear protection. The stifling heat radiated by the individual cauldrons of molten type (hot) metal was almost unbearable. Great shiny ingots of lead alloy embossed with the name 'Fry' were automatically lowered into the melting pots to replenish the quantities required to make all the letters needed to set a book, or a magazine or any of the printed ephemera we produced. The caster operators selected the correct Monotype matrices for whichever font was specified and the machine cast the words letter by letter in a continuing stream of fresh, hot type. The trays of type would then be rushed to the composing room where the overseer would select which compositor would be suitable for a particular task. Everything now was made up into paragraphs, have illustrative blocks added and the whole locked up in a 'chase'. Laid on a proofing press, the virginity of the type was deflowered by the application of a roller full of black ink. The resulting 'pull' usually on newsprint was then looked at by the compositor who rectified any defective characters, rising spaces or obvious spelling errors before passing a fair copy to 'the readers'. If all else was racket and mayhem, then the proof readers room was perfect quietude. Here, ancient men sat in Dickensian splendour on high stools with writing slopes before them. It was their job to read and correct all copy set by the company. Referring to original manuscripts or text supplied by customers they were tasked with reading every word and numeral to check for spelling, punctuation, style and even sense. They used hard blue long-leaded pencils to make their marks and when their work was complete, the copy was returned to the 'comp room' for correction. Then the whole process was gone through again. Finally, passed for press, the chase with its locked up type went into the machine room and was delivered to a machine minder whose task it was to print the job. As I sit at my Mac, the whole damned thing seems unbelievable now.

Of course the printing works has long since gone becoming a development of bijou residences called, unremarkably, the Printworks. The facade you see here is of the only remaining part of the original building and fronts onto School Hill. Thankfully it was a requirement that the gilded lettering and signwriting be restored and it is well maintained. I spent five happy years at Baxters with a workforce mainly of 'Rooks' (Lewes born residents). I like to think that the ghosts of printers and compositors stalk the trendy Ikea-bedecked rooms of the new flats and tut-tut at the slipshod grammar and typos (just like mine) in virtually every publication they might pick up. No 'spill-chok' for them, just ghostly blue pencilled proof readers marks in the margin of Wallpaper magazine.

Misspent youth

One of my earliest memories is of being taken into a pub. A country pub, where such niceties as 'no children admitted' were sensibly ignored. Of course, as well as expanding my horizons it instilled in me a lifelong fascination with the places and a taste for alcoholic refreshment in its manifold forms. Pubs were wonderful back then. Well, not all of them, some were real dumps and had reputations for being the sort of places you could go for a good fight or to find female (or male) company of the kind which necessitated money changing hands. I suppose those places still exist but they are no longer thick with the fug of cigarettes and pipes, the lamps no longer glow hazily and the back of bar displays no longer hold packets of the numerous brands of cigarettes and tobacco. Neither do they dispense Mars Bars, Biscuits or Smiths potato crisps...all of which, apart from the nicotine-based items seemed to be purchased as placatory take-home items in a vain attempt to restore domestic bliss after an evening's indulgence. Quite how that worked when wives were being presented with a pickled egg wrapped in greaseproof paper, and the old man whispering booze-fumed entreaties I'm not sure - the promise of cupid's intentions was rarely matched by any sort of action. But back to pubs. My favourite aunt was involved for many years with a gentleman whose business was photography and his main client was Watney's brewery, both pre and post Red Barrel. Consequently I was the grateful recipient of numerous Watneys trinkets which had been left over from photo shoots - those little red barrels which seemed to adorn every keyring of the string-backed motoring glove class, and the collar of every dog of breeding. My bedroom was corrupt with virgin beer bottle labels, uncut and fresh from the press - Watney's Pale, Watney's Brown, Cream Label Stout - all highly collectable today, but mere trivia to me then. My night time reading was illuminated by a Watney's beer barrel shaped lamp and suruptitious Players cigarettes were extinguished in a Watney's barrel shaped ashtray, I'm surprised that they didn't produce a branded potty for the loose bladdered drinker. Needless to say all this breweriana has vanished and I don't even have a red barrel for my keyring...today I suppose it would be a symbol of what havoc the great brewing giants wrought on the small regional brewers.

The country pubs I knew were a very different pint of mild. From the unbelievably rustic and sparse to the 'Your hosts Den and Gwen welcome you' variety boasting extreme middle class comforts in the form of electric log fires and all the above breweriana strewn around the place for want of any other decoration. But they were cosy - a warm glow exuded from the moustachioed landlord as he dispensed the beer to the merry accompaniment of a saucy jest with a "don't mind if I do squire - just a shilling's worth" as the whisky tumbler was aimed precisely at the optic of the White Horse brand. Saloon and Public...everyone knew their place. My aunt aspired to the saloon bar class although she spent most of her time working with cowmen and farm labourers...that's what the Land Army does for you. My rose tinted spectacles take me back to The Greyhound in Hever, Kent where, courtesy of the sainted aunt who'd leave a few quid behind the bar, my cousin and I learned the delicate art of getting intoxicated whilst being of little trouble - behaviour which has stood me in good stead ever since.

The technically appalling shot is of a bar tray promoting soft drinks and mixers by Messrs. Hooper Struve and which neatly sums up the late 50s pubby atmosphere as the retailers would have had it. No leggy lovelies like her in The Greyhound alas. But maybe in the Coach and Horses, Danehill, where the tray is in the back bar.