When This Old Hat Was New

It was not altogether a surprise, having encouraged readers to listen to Chris Foster performing "When This Old Hat Was New" (in the post Another Six Penn'orth), that some commented: "A fine tune and a rich voice, but what in the name of Cecil Sharp are the actual words he is singing?" Which is a good question. I was never entirely sure myself.

That song is on his album All Things in Common from 1979. I never actually owned a copy, but it was frequently on the turntable at the house my future partner shared with a handful of medics in Bristol (all "junior doctors" at local hospitals, a trade soon to be rebadged "resident doctors", apparently, a curious choice). It was in that house that I learned never, ever to open an illustrated medical journal, a stack of which were kept next to the toilet. Particularly the one that had a regular "diagnose the skin condition" competition on the cover.

Anyway, talking of illustrations, and as I noted in that earlier post, I have always felt strangely moved by that album's cover art by Mike Tycer:

Those faces – oddly leonine when they're looking one way, moustachioed men when looking the other – beneath flat caps that might also be crowns, and above interlinked hints of boots, knees, and shrouded figures... Those are our ancestors working the land, sustained by the land, generation after generation. It's an image that rewards study, and of a quality which is actually not very characteristic of the typical 1970s LP sleeve, despite the received idea that album art flourished during the heyday of the 12" vinyl, 33 rpm long-playing record – roughly, mid-1960s to mid-1980s – and went into a decline when the comparatively tiny CD took over the mass music market.

So, look out, before we get onto those lyrics, here comes a digression.

I did actually check out this commonly-held view a while ago by looking at my surviving LPs, admittedly a small and idiosyncratic sample. But I found that – rather than the brilliant cover art I was expecting to find – I was mainly looking at bad paintings, crude montages, timid typography, tacky colour combinations, and poorly-reproduced photographs. It was also surprising how little creative use had actually been made of those generous 144 square inches on either side. Large areas of plain, blank colour predominated, and text was either kept to a minimum – generally no more than a list of tracks, and a few acknowledgements – or the lyrics were spread over the entire thing, in a tiny, unreadable font, often in the eye-dazzling colour combinations made fashionable by the "underground" press at the time. There were pointless gatefolds, opening onto nothing much of interest, and a surprising amount of corporate "noise" plastered over everything – company logos, copyright notices, serial numbers, etc. – that had once, somehow, been transparent.

There are exceptions, of course; there are always exceptions. From my sample, I found that Jethro Tull's Stand Up, David Bowie's Hunky Dory, Steely Dan's Katy Lied, and Weather Report's Mysterious Traveller still retain their original charm. The parody of Sgt. Pepper by the Mothers of Invention (We're Only In It For the Money) is still convincing, even in its original semi-censored version. The sleeves of jazz and classical label ECM have always been satisfying, of course, with their cool Nordic look and stylish use of photographs and typography; so much so, two entire books have been published of ECM's best designs. But by far the majority were either totally bland or downright offensive to my 21st-century eyes.

So it is hard to explain why everybody seems to think the opposite is true: that a high percentage of those LP sleeves were some kind of apotheosis of graphic design. But here are just a few reasons why that is not the case:

• If you can, just look at a typical magazine from the period, particularly the adverts, and compare with the current-day equivalent. The acceptable standard of commercial art was simply lower.
• "Full colour printing" was still a novelty in the 1960s, and cheap full colour printing required various technical compromises that overruled design considerations.
• The taste for surrealism has not aged well. Particularly when in the form of poorly-painted, sub-Dali-esque fantasy or psychedelia. Little Feat's Sailin' Shoes is a personal favourite, musically, but that cover (no. 18 in Rolling Stone's top 100 covers, I see) is simply tacky.
• Manipulating photographs used to be much more difficult. For every After The Gold Rush there are 100 horrible cut and paste jobs made with blunt scissors: see Disraeli Gears.
• Hipgnosis made a (probably) deserved name for themselves, and that reputation has somehow floated everyone else's boat. But how many other music packaging design teams can you name? And how many times do you really need or want to look at the sleeves of Houses of the Holy (tacky) or even Dark Side of the Moon (elegant but dull)?
•  As a fan of illustration, I find it hard to think of many illustrators working within the music field whose work stands out for me. Some people rate Klaus Voormann? Maybe. Peter Blake, I suppose. But let's not talk about Roger Dean or Mati Klarwein, please: I didn't like their stuff at the time, and it hasn't improved. I suspect that as a routine gig album-cover work may not have paid well.
• Things tend to get better, but we prefer to think they get worse. Otherwise, we'd just be very, very jealous of our own children's good fortune. As if!

In the end, album covers are just commercial packaging, and there's no more reason to consider them an art form than we do cereal packets or ready-meal boxes. After all, some of the best albums have the worst covers and are none the worse for that. Stop staring at the cardboard and put the round black vinyl thing inside on the turntable so we can listen to it!

OK, then. End of digression.

So, to get back to "When This Old Hat Was New"... On the back cover of All Things In Common Chris Foster noted:

This song is traceable back to a piece called Times Alteration written around 1630. The theme of old people looking nostalgically back at their earlier years is a well worn one, but in 1630 England was in the throes of an economic and political upheaval that probably gives this song a little more justification than usual. Looking nostalgically back to a golden past before the Norman Conquest was something that was popular at the time. Many people laid the blame for their troubles at the door of the Norman tyrant even though he had been dead for well over 500 years. But the Romans being a charitable institution really stretches credibility to the limit.

But you'll be wanting to see the actual lyrics. In his version the song goes like this: 

I am a poor old man, come listen to my song,
Provisions now are twice as dear as when that I was young.
It was when this old hat was new and stood above my brow,
O, what a happy youth was I when this old hat was new.

It is but four score years ago the truth I do declare,
When men they took each other’s words, they thought it very fair,
No oaths or bonds they did require, men’s words were so true,
This was in my youthful days when this old hat was new.

When the time of harvest came and we went out to shear,
How often we were merry made with brandy, ale and beer.
And when the corn it was brought home and put upon the mow,
The workers paunches was well filled when this old hat was new.

The farmer at the board head stood, the table for to grace,
And greets all as they came in, all took their proper place.
His wife she at the table stood to give each man his due,
And O! what plenty did abound when this old hat was new.

But now the times are altered, the poor are quite done o’er,
They give to them their wages like beggars at the door.
Into the house we must not go, although we are but few,
It was not so when Bess did reign and this old hat was new.

The commons they are taken in and cottages pulled down,
Moll has got no wool to spin her linsey-wolsey gown;
The weather’s cold and clothing thin and blankets are but few,
But we were clothed both back and skin when this old hat was new.

When Romans in this land did reign, the commons they did give,
Unto the poor in charity to help them for to live;
But now the poor is quite done o’er, we know it to be true,
It was not so when Bess did reign and this old hat was new.

As the saying goes, nostalgia is not what it was... Even, it seems, in the seventeenth century. After all,  what did the Romans ever do for us?

It is not inevitably the case that things always get better, but somehow they do seem to, despite our best efforts to make things worse. It's salutary to remind ourselves of little things like the plague, witch hunts, religious wars lasting decades, gruesome public executions, surgery without anaesthetics, mass illiteracy, and, yes, even the quality of the graphic design of LP record sleeves, back when this old hat was new.

Besides, you could always get yourself a new hat, you miserable old git.

Typically awful 1970s LP sleeve for comedy folk duo The Tryptolites

(I wonder whatever happened to them?)

Somewhere in the Dolomites

This painting of the view from a mountain pass in the Dolomites was made by my partner's great-aunt, Mary Creighton McDowall, and hangs in the bedroom of our Bristol flat. It was done either during or, more likely, on return from a motor tour of northern Italy [1] in the 1920s, as documented in the book written by her husband, Arthur McDowall, Peaks & Frescoes: a study of the Dolomites (OUP, 1928), and illustrated with a number of her own coloured linocuts. It looks rather more finished in this photograph than it actually is: the oil paint is thinly applied on board and has a brushy, sketchy feel to it.

But here's a question: where exactly is this? It does have something of a resemblance to one of the more famous peaks in the Dolomites (Langkofel in German, Sassolungo in Italian), but it's hard to establish the same viewpoint. We've tried using Google Maps and various other approaches, with mixed results. A certain amount of artistic license may be at work, of course, especially if the painting was worked up from sketches made on the spot, or even from several different spots. But if you're familiar with the area and recognise where it is, then we'd be very glad to hear from you.

They were an interesting couple. Mary was one of the children of Mandell Creighton, historian and Bishop of London. She attended the Slade School of Fine Art, 1903-06, where her contemporaries included Dora Carrington, and was a founder member of Vanessa Bell's Friday Club, alongside the likes of Gwen Raverat, Clive Bell, Henry Lamb, Bernard Leach, Saxon Sydney Turner, Duncan Grant, and Mark Gertler. Which, with the notable exception of Gertler, was quite an assembly of the artistic wing of the upper reaches of London society. However, Mary seems to have been at the more conservative end of this proto-Bloomsbury spectrum, both artistically and socially, and apparently quarrelled with Vanessa Bell following the famous artistic watershed of Roger Fry's Post-Impressionist exhibition in 1910. Her husband Arthur was a fellow of All Souls in Oxford and a prolific writer and journalist, notably giving positive reviews in the Times Literary Supplement of Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves, the early "experimental" work of Vanessa Bell's sister, Virginia Woolf. I suppose you could say they were Bloomsbury-adjacent, but too conventional in their views and behaviour ever to belong to those circles.

As well as a few of those "peaks and frescoes" linocuts, we have another of Mary's paintings in our house, probably unfinished, as seen in the background of the photograph I used for my Christmas card in 2010. Apparently dozens of her oils on board were stacked in the garage of another elderly Creighton relative, all slowly going mouldy, and this one, painted on a stout piece of softboard somewhat abraded at the edges, was given to my partner, selected more or less at random. It stands propped against the wall, opposite the downstairs toilet in Southampton.

In the relative warmth and dryness of our house, a superficial milky bloom that originally covered the paint gradually disappeared, and as the colours strengthened more details emerged. It has been like watching the painting paint itself, day by day, month by month, year by year. In itself, the picture is not anything that would have grabbed my attention in a gallery, but it has inevitably become the object of intense scrutiny and speculation during my daily seated meditations. Enough to make me question that tired old cliché "like watching paint dry" as the epitome of tedium; after all, what could be more engaging, given the right circumstances?

But just to return to that painting of the Dolomites: if you do know your way around those mountains and recognise the scene, then do please weigh in with an opinion. Even if just to confirm that, yes, that does look kinda-sorta how Langkofel / Sassolungo must have looked in the 1920s, when standing near a certain calvary by a particular rocky roadside. Although it is probably now a major tourist traffic route, with car park, toilets, and a restaurant... (But probably not with a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swinging hotspot).

1. The area had only just become part of Italy, of course, following its annexation after WW1. To this day, the majority language of Südtirol aka Alto Adige is German. As it happens, in 2010 I had an exhibition (see The Italian Job) in the town known as Innichen to German speakers, and San Candido to Italians, not very far from Langkofel / Sassolungo.

The Revenge of Art

I don't usually want to get into unanswerable questions like "What is Art?"; it's not something most of us give a second thought to, even if art interests us a great deal. After all, what sports fan needs to ask "What is sport?" (although someone should probably be asking this about "breaking" and skateboarding, recently included in the Olympics). You know it when you see it. But here are two extracts from some things I read recently that, in their different ways, together offer an interesting perspective on the nature of the artistic enterprise:

It’s not that I don’t want to be understood, but I can’t, like Spielberg, say, make a film for the general public—I’d be mortified if I discovered I could. If you want to reach a general audience, you have to make films like Star Wars and Superman which have nothing to do with art. This doesn’t mean I treat the public like idiots, but I certainly don’t take pains to please them.  Andrei Tarkovsky (Sight and Sound, Winter 1982-1983)

I love literary fiction, but there are ways and means of getting away with a mediocre literary fiction book where there isn’t a way of getting away with a mediocre mainstream book.  Richard Osman, from a conversation between Lee Child and Richard Osman (Guardian, 14 September 2024)

Put another way, not all pictures are "art", but – certainly on the evidence of most recent exhibitions – it is a lot easier to get away with poorly-crafted pictures when they are touted as art. In fact, an affectation of artlessness seems to have become a desirable characteristic of art. [1] Which has also had implications for photography, I think. Be patient, and we'll get there eventually.

I don't think it's controversial to suggest that at some point in the history of the West (as in, the inheritors of the legacy of European culture) "art" levanted [2] from its long-term partnership with "craft" and set up shop as a separate category of endeavour in its own right. The point of departure is generally located by art historians somewhere in the eighteenth century, but the parting of the ways only really got going in the nineteenth and early twentieth, when artists – it's often said in reaction to the invention of photography – began to ascribe to themselves and their work various intangible properties, formerly the preserve of religion, and sought to raise their efforts to a level above those of former partner, craft, as well as the mere verisimilitude of that upstart contender, photography.

The creative life has always been a gamble, but making paint-marks on a piece of canvas came to be regarded by some as a quasi-sacramental act, worth enduring poverty and hunger, and which required total commitment to a life outside conventional society – even conventional artistic society – like the desert hermits of the early Christian centuries. See Van Gogh; see Gauguin. Others were able to monetize this mystification of the act of painting – see Monet; see Picasso – and lived the comfortable life of bohemian aristocrats.

Since then, the art that excites the auction halls and attracts deep-pocketed art-abductors [3] has become the equivalent of a share certificate: worthless in itself – just some paint on a canvas – but a token promising a potentially enormous monetary return (or loss...) to its possessor. Or perhaps it's more like a cheque (remember those?) drawn on a bank with a famous name but which may or may not already have gone out of business. That bank being wherever those self-ascribed, intangible, quasi-religious properties are kept; the woo-woo reserves of art, you might say.

So bad it's art?

So good it's craft?

But I went over this ground fairly thoroughly a few years ago in the post Reformation (still worth a read, I think). What I really wanted to say is that art seems to have been having its belated revenge on photography. How? Well, let's start by stating the obvious, the "why". Whatever did photography do to painting in the first place?

So somewhere around 1840, the painter Paul Delaroche saw a daguerreotype, and is alleged to have exclaimed, "From today, painting is dead!" (although in French, obviously: «La peinture est morte, à dater de ce jour!»). If you've ever seen a good daguerreotype – they really are far more impressive than any photograph on paper – you'll understand how he felt. They are spellbinding, like little magic windows onto an exquisitely precise re-rendering of reality, far beyond what anyone could achieve with traditional art materials and techniques, no matter how talented. Which is why there has been no painting at all ever since, and why artists have been spoiling for revenge.

Well, not exactly. But something major did happen. Very few painters since then have bothered to acquire the complex set of skills, passed down from master to apprentice for centuries, that were needed to become even a third-rate painter of the sort of work that fills the most boring rooms in every major gallery. How far photography was responsible for this is debatable; the invention of paint in portable tubes around the same time also played a big part in this change. Not to mention the rise of the bourgeoisie, the decline of the church and aristocracy as patrons of the arts, blah, blah, blah... But you already know all this.

But let's blame photography. Upshot: painting was transformed from the painstaking reproduction of the way things and people look (when painted, anyway) into the extravagantly colourful and free making of marks. Bold self-expression was elevated over the careful disciplines of craft, which was not necessarily a good thing (ask any conservator) or a pretty sight; some delved selves are downright unpleasant. Suddenly, massive deposits were being paid into those woo-woo reserves of art, in the form of competing manifestos and declarations of artistic intent and independence. And how we have all loved those Fauvists, Impressionists, Expressionists, Cubists, and Whatever-else-ists, ever since! They are the benchmark of what most of us regard as art. But when we want reliable, indexical representations of how the world actually looked at any given moment, unadorned and uninterpreted, then we turn to photography, not "art".

A photograph of some photographs

But wait... Quite early in the twentieth century certain anarchic spoilsports had spotted that something essentially fake was going on here: surely those reserves of art woo-woo were as imaginary as any other woo-woo? Did artists really have a hotline to whoever / whatever they imagined was picking up the phone at the other end? In fact, it seemed obvious that the "art-ness" of art lay precisely in this con-trick that artists were pulling – that they alone had access to such a hotline – and did not reside in the actual end products of their labours. Cue Dada, Duchamp, and all that. "Art" was an idea, an act, a process, not a thing. In fact, it was whatever artists said it was, from the original urinal to the more recent Work No. 227: the lights going on and off. Anything else was just interior decoration, mere craft.

At some point in the later twentieth century this lively orgy of impish bubble-bursting had cooled into an austere, black-polo-necked orthodoxy that disapproved of displays of self-expression and craft skill as reactionary hand-waving, a view which found a congenial home in many of the art schools. As with atonal music, the more baffling the general public found their art, the better the polo-neck crowd liked it. Like Tarkovsky's quotation above, this didn’t mean they were treating the public like idiots, but they certainly weren’t taking any pains to please us. Any appeal to popularity such as the creation of colourful confections relying on the deeply suspect appeal of "beauty" was just plain embarrassing. What, you still want to paint like the Expressionists? Puh-lease! Didn't you get the memo?

Ideas were the thing, not craft or self-expression. Life-drawing and other venerable survivals of the painterly skill-set were banished, and conceptual art, installations, video, and – yes! – photography took their place. But this photography was not photography as understood by, um, photographers.

Ah, photographers... How badly so many of us want our work to be acknowledged not just as photography, but as art. And yet so few of us follow any medium other than photography, or inform ourselves about actual contemporary art practices and concerns, or even visit exhibitions or buy books of photography that is acknowledged as art. But the thing is, the attraction of the camera for academy-trained "artists using photography" is that it is a mechanical tool which enables them to pull off the cake-and-eat-it trick of deploying "indexical" representation, but without those embarrassingly démodé taints of craft skill or – yuk – "beauty" (unless self-evidently ironic). So the more drably hands-off and uncompromised by any suspect expressive baggage their photographs are the better. Which, obviously, is precisely the opposite of what is valued and vaunted by self-declared, craft-worshipping "fine art" photographers, with their calendar-ready landscapes, "painterly" abstracts, and overcooked "surrealism". So last century... Do keep up, guys!

Now, the fact is that most wannabe artists, whether academy-trained or amateur, are not brainiac intellectuals, endowed with the capacity for original thought, much less era-defining artistic talents, but simply dedicated followers of fashion. So when those affectless, bleak, and faux-naïve photographs started to seep out of the art schools, mainly in the form of expensive books from prestigious publishers, certain ambitious photographers took note – so that's where it's at now! – and followed suit. Advanced skills, personal style, beauty? No thanks! We get it now: the world is sad and disenchanted and we're all doomed, so grey is the colour, and prosaic is the word. These may look like barely competent, humdrum snapshots, but that's because they are art, see? There is no craft, no self-expression, none of that "beauty" nonsense here, but that's all on purpose... Which makes all the difference. And where they led, others followed. So that's where it's at now!

And Art laughed in triumph. The long game had paid off: revenge at last... Now, where did I hide those brushes and paints?

Nice, but is it art?

(Constable's "The Hay Wain" on loan to Bristol Museum & Art Gallery)

1. See, for example, the work of Rose Wylie or Humphrey Ocean, both Royal Academicians.

2. My favourite new word, acquired from Language Hat (no relation).

3. What we should call those who buy artworks and imprison them in vaults, never to be seen in public again.

Curriculum, Elevation, England & Nowhere

I was looking back through some of the older books in my Blurb "bookstore", and I was struck by several things (apart from quite how many of the things I've made). Seeing them again with fresh eyes, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the photographs, for example, most notably those I had been producing in my exploratory lunchtime strolls around the university campus where I used to work. If nothing else, they demonstrate the creative benefits of working within tight constraints of time and place. But the most striking thing was the effort I had been putting into the design, sequencing, and intent of the books I was making then. I suppose I was still full of the energy and enthusiasm generated by the feeling that I might be on the brink of a new and fulfilling late-life career. Hey, don't laugh, it could have happened.

Of these books, Curriculum and Elevation are the stand-outs for me. It's hard to believe that they were created as long ago as 2011 and 2013, in the final few years before I retired at age 60 in 2014.

Curriculum in particular is still one of the peaks of my photographic and bookmaking efforts, and although as far as I recall no copies at all were ever sold, I did give away a few and, as always, I deposited a copy in the library of my old college [1] , so it may yet find its way to posterity. I also still remember the enjoyable investigative labour of finding and verifying some suitable quotations, which were inserted at intervals to put a little graphic-design "air" into the three visual sequences of photographs.

I think both books deserve another outing, so have decided to make them available as free Issuu flipbooks (click the central device for a full-screen view):

Just for good measure, I have also added another of these older Blurb books to Issuu: England and Nowhere, a book made in 2016, in the early years of retirement and following the boost to my energy and enthusiasm given by my second exhibition and residency in Innsbruck, Austria.

I remember sending this one out as a book "dummy" to various publishers, galleries, book competitions, and so on, only to be met by an enigmatic and unreadable silence. It was disappointing at the time, but I know now that this is simply the (unbelievably arrogant) default mode of the art and publishing world: we're just too busy, too important, and too fastidiously up ourselves even to acknowledge receipt of "unsolicited" material. So, welcome to the slush pile, Mr. Nobody, or in that venerable brush-off: don't call us, we'll call you.

I like to think a sense of that early creative buzz can still be felt in the tight editing and sequencing of these relatively old books: they are solidly crafted bits of work, well-constructed display cabinets for the photographic curiosities within. I confess I also like to think that something of it persists in the work I am producing a decade or so later, although I'm less inclined now to put quite so much effort into sequencing my photographs and digital images.

Why not? Because I have come to realise that people will always make their own personal connections and associations with visual art, no matter what hints and signposts a book's compiler has placed along the road. It no longer surprises me, for example, that someone will invariably pick an image I had intended as sequence "filler" as their favourite in the entire book. [2]

In the end, I think, you could pretty much arrange your pictures randomly, and some sort of "meaning" would emerge, perhaps even something better (and certainly something more personal to the individual reader) than anything you had intended. We are meaning-making creatures, and can't help ourselves. I'm reminded of these words from photographer Frederick Sommer:

I have five pebbles, not too different in size and weight, yet a randomness about them. If I drop them on the carpet they will scatter. Now we could run an experiment and we would find that we cannot put these pebbles in shapes that would be as elegant and as nicely related and with as great a variety as every time they fall. It is better than anything we could do. I have great respect for the way I find things. Every time something falls I look. I cannot believe the relationships. The intricacy. You hear a noise and you say “What is that?” Respect for the affirmation of the unexpected.

So, here you go, feel free to make whatever you like out of England and Nowhere. I did my best with it, but now it's over to you:

1. An institution that has endured from 1263 into the present day seems a reasonably good bet for posterity, I think. As a result of my self-interested generosity quite a collection of my stuff has been accumulating there; thirty-one books, in fact. So far, that is... I think I've still got a few more in me. Any fellow Balliol readers may enjoy page 39 of Curriculum, btw.

2. Actually, "all killer, no filler" is never a good formula for a photo-book (quite apart from the difficulty of creating 40+ images of "killer" quality). The good stuff needs to be set within and spaced out by at least the same amount of OK stuff, both to highlight it and to create a sense of rhythm. Although, as I say, most readers will ignore all that editorial effort anyway...

King and Emperor

I've been tinkering with writing something about my mother for some while (relax, it's for family consumption, not for this blog), and in the process of looking for evidence I recently dug out a battered copy of a souvenir book that was handed out to local schoolchildren by Hitchin Urban District Council upon the accession to the throne of George VI in 1937. Somewhat heroically, it has somehow made it all the way to 2024.

It has an official council bookplate inscribed with her name; she would have been fourteen at the time, and about to leave school. It's a hardback bound in dark blue cloth, medium octavo in size (6½" x 9¼"), with 56 thick paper pages and 32 black and white "plates": really quite an elaborate production. The title is George VI, King and Emperor, and it contains exactly the sort of royalist and imperialist biographical puff-job you might expect for a newly-minted King. Sit up straight, child, when you read this book!

"Mother's maiden name" redacted...

(but surely no longer used as hack-proofing?)

It's been hanging around the dustier recesses of my bookshelves forever, but it had never occurred to me before to wonder whether this had been a gesture unique to Hitchin, or whether other local authorities had perhaps done something similar? To my surprise, a quick search on the Web showed that copies of the exact same book had actually been distributed by (presumably) pretty much every council in the country to (presumably) pretty much every child in every school under their control. The same book, that is, but suitably localised not only with a bookplate, but also with the gold-blocked arms of the local authority on the front cover, and a tipped-in foreword by some local dignitary on a thinner paper stock. It must have cost an absolute fortune to produce so many thousands of these as giveaways, but I haven't been able to discover who actually paid for this largesse.

Here's a little sample from the Hitchin foreword:

We want you to remember as you read the book that you live and go to school in a town which, from the days of Edward the Confessor, has been a Royal Manor. All through the ages Hitchin has belonged to the Kings and Queens of England. Each little town, and still more each Royal Manor, adds its separate lustre, its particular ray of glory, to the crown of England.

Hmm. We'll pass over the rather parochial use of "England" there, and simply remark that it's hard to imagine that anyone would even have contemplated going to this sort of expense to celebrate the accession of Charles III in 2022. At least, not without the expectation of recovering the costs or, more likely, turning a handsome profit. We live in a very different country now from the Britain of 1937.

Surprisingly, perhaps, not even the British Library seems to have collected anything like a full set of all the local variations of George VI, King and Emperor, although as a former cataloguer I can imagine what went on:

CATALOGUER 1: What! There are hundreds of them! It's the exact same bloody book!

CHIEF CATALOGUER: Oh, no they're not... Look: different cover, different foreword?

CATALOGUER 2: But it will take all of us months to get them done, maybe longer, given everything else we have to do! It's such a waste of time!

CHIEF CATALOGUER: Well, OK, I suppose they are pretty much all the same... Look, do a few, then take the rest to the big bin out the back. But only after it gets dark... And stand to attention as you chuck 'em in!

Confusingly, his real name was Albert...

(and definitely not "Puoal Ecac")

(and I absolutely deny that is my handwriting)

Of course, despite being the official "spare", Albert/George was never really expected to become King. So you can see why in 1937 it might have seemed important to those who were running the royal PR operation to give the royalist cause a vigorous polish, given the severe tarnishing brought about by the abdication of George's older brother Edward, simply in order to marry an odd-looking and scandal-adjacent American dominatrix divorcee.[1] On reflection, I suppose that event might be seen as marking the start of the tradition of the male Windsors reliably and regularly putting their royal foot in it whenever possible, especially when it comes to, um, relationships.

Under the circumstances, you do have to concede that planting a book stuffed with jolly anecdotes about the emergency-replacement King's former life, travels, charitable works, and family into so many relatively book-free households was quite a good strategy. Summink t' read, ain't it? Nice pitchers, too! And it's clear that this is the not only copy to have survived to the present day, although the dozens for sale on Abebooks and elsewhere are not quite the battered, torn, and heavily-crayoned family heirloom ours has become. It's not exactly a family Bible, but it seems a shame to dump it now.

Censorship! Although whether of the text or the commentary, who knows?

(Puoal Ecac, that's who)

1. I may be putting my knighthood at risk here, but I'll just quote Wikipedia:

Rumours and innuendo about her circulated in society. The King's mother, Queen Mary, was even told that Simpson might have held some sort of sexual control over Edward, as she had released him from an undefined sexual dysfunction through practices learnt in a Chinese brothel. This view was partially shared by Alan Don, Chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who wrote that he suspected the King "is sexually abnormal which may account for the hold Mrs S. has over him". Even Edward VIII's official biographer, Philip Ziegler, noted that: "There must have been some sort of sadomasochistic relationship ... [Edward] relished the contempt and bullying she bestowed on him.

Blimey! Wot about them royals, eh? There's nothing about that in the book... For some reason I am reminded of one of my favourite apocryphal stories. Here it is, as rendered in the Hampshire Advertiser, 17th October 1900:

Mr. F. R. Benson, the celebrated Shakespearian actor and scholar, is, I believe, a Wintonian, and he is also well-known in Southampton. During his recent season at the Lyceum he produced, among other plays, “Anthony and Cleopatra.” It will be remembered in the second act, at the palace of Cleopatra, certain revels are held, which were the ordinary entertainments in the days of Egypt’s Queen, but which are somewhat bacchanalian for the present day. At one of the performances an elderly lady and gentleman sat in the stalls of the Lyceum. They watched the dancing of the gauzy-robed maidens of the East; they saw the slaves swinging the burning censers, and the fair Cleopatra making passionate love to her warrior hero. For some moments they gazed in open-mouthed astonishment. At last the wife turned to her husband, and in tones more in sorrow than anger said “Dear! dear! what a contrast to the home life of our own dear Queen.”

Note that to be a "Wintonian" is not some abdication-worthy inclination, but merely to be someone from Winchester. One of my work colleagues, at carefully chosen moments at very dull meetings, would murmur, "How different, how very different, from the home life of our own dear Queen...", which would infallibly provoke bouts of painfully stifled hilarity. (I know... Sometimes being at "work" was rather more like being at school...)

But, look, I may finally have written a footnote which rivals the post in length!

Summer Break

Here is a little gallery of photos taken during our summer break in and around Bristol. All taken either with my iPhone 12 mini or a Panasonic GM5, a tiny micro 4/3 camera, fitted with either a Panasonic 14-42 or 35-100 zoom.

Climbers on the Avon Gorge

Nephew Matt, a top tattooist

Old mirror at Clevedon Court

Bristol Channel at Clevedon

Door in Massive Attack compound

Berkeley Square, Bristol

Boat shed, Clevedon

Pond in Leigh Woods

Kitchen window

Ashton Court woods

Massive Attack

It seemed to me, by the end of my working life in 2014, that I had spent the best part of 30+ years either clearing up the mess created by ill-laid plans or making myself unpopular by my efforts to prevent the mess happening in the first place. As I have said several times before in this blog, my main insight into the smooth working of institutions that are in the business of doing stuff was this:

In any organisation, most people are passive onlookers, little more than passengers working their passage on a journey whose reward is a monthly salary and whose destination, in the short term, is the weekend and, in the long term, retirement. Therefore, to ensure the success of any enterprise, whether it be a voyage of discovery, a zoo, a business, or a university, two unusual personality types are necessary at senior level: people who make things happen, and people who make things work. These are two very different and equally rare sets of characteristics, hardly ever embodied in a single person. The two types often hold each other in contempt, openly or secretly, but, when brought together – by force, if necessary – they can generate an awesome transformative energy. The true inner secret, however, is this: People Who Make Things Happen must never be given a complex task to see through, and People Who Make Things Work must never, ever be put in charge. [1]

That's right: despite my day-dreamer persona, laziness, and artistic inclinations, I discovered to my enormous surprise that I am also very much a Person Who Makes Things Work. When I look around me, I see the litter of fixable chaos everywhere, induced and then abandoned by People Who Make Things Happen. They're welcome to their imaginary gold-braided hats, smart uniforms, and glittering prizes: I carry my virtual oily rag and spanner with pride. Made a mess? I, or one of my crew, can fix it! Or could have fixed it, if you'd only thought to bring us in earlier. Our guild membership tattoo reads, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". We're not keen on change for change's sake, or simply to decorate your CV, but we're here to help.

Quite often, the core problem is a simple matter of failing to count quantities, or "logistics", to use a word you'll often see painted on the side of delivery vans. You'd be amazed how often some self-styled Make It Happen visionary has failed, for example, to do a simple sum like "how many people would it take for how long and at what expense to complete this task?" Nearly always, in my experience. How often have I been told, having pointed out the likely consequences of pouring several gallons of ambition into a single pint pot of reality: "I'm a big-picture person – I don't bother myself with these nit-picking details!" And how often have I been thanked for saving someone from a career-wrecking misjudgement? Just the once, actually, but that was a really BIG one.

Why am I telling you this? Because last week I saw a classic example acted out on a grand scale in public.

As anyone who follows the UK news or the music scene will probably be aware, there was an open-air concert by trip-hop combo Massive Attack in their home town of Bristol on Sunday 25th August. We were taking a break there in our flat, which is very near Clifton Downs, the large open area of common land at the top of the Avon Gorge where the concert was to be held, and I had several enjoyable walks around the perimeter of the site, watching and photographing the progress of the installation of the stages, lights, enormous screens, and other outdoor concert essentials, and then on Sunday seeing the first large groups of ticket-holders arriving, around 3:30 pm, for a main act performance scheduled to start a full five hours later at 8:30. Rather them than me, I thought, no matter how good the support acts might be.

Massive Attack are an act from a time well after I had stopped paying attention to pop culture. I have never been to a rave, or indeed any event where the music is characterised by samples stolen from, ahem, real music plus (in the hilarious wording of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994) "sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats" (I don't think they wanted to outlaw the likes of Philip Glass). It's just not my idea of music and, frankly, by the 1990s I was too busy changing nappies [2] and earning a living as a professional wet blanket and Destroyer of Dreams (see above) to care much about what was going on in some muddy field far away.

The thing is, by now the logistics of festivals and open-air concerts have become well-established and routine. You know: X thousand people over D days require a readily-determined amount of space, catering, facilities, and so on. You can probably get a handy look-up table from Michael Eavis's people to work it out. The days of the muddy disasters of the late 60s are long gone; why, even the first large-scale festival I ever attended – the Knebworth Festival of 1974 – went off pretty much hitch-free.

But, some Make Things Happen people had decided that this Massive Attack concert would pioneer a thoroughly green, carbon-free approach to the business: that, and not the music, is what got it all the coverage on the news. So all toilets and rubbish were to be be composted, all catering would be vegan, nothing would be allowed on site that couldn't be recycled, no power would rely on fossil-fuel generators, people would be encouraged to walk or travel to the site by public transport (including laid-on electric bus shuttles from Temple Meads rail station), and so on.

Obviously, these were incredibly ambitious and worthy goals but, having listened to the radio, walked around the compound a number of times, and knowing the area well, my Mr. Make Things Work warning lights were already going off. It seemed thirty-four thousand tickets at £79 each had been sold. Woah... What, here? In there? As always, vision and intention are one thing, competence and delivery quite another. I wished them luck, mentally, and hoped they'd ordered enough pint pots for this impressive volume of ambition.

So, as it happened, the day after the event, Monday, one of my partner's oldest friends came round, bearing tales passed on to her by a neighbour who had been there and, apparently, was still fulminating with anger. As anticipated, no one had been allowed into the site with their own food or drink – people were actually searched – including those with children in tow. Were there exceptions for, say, diabetics or those on specialised diets? I don't know. It seems everything had to be bought on-site, but by late afternoon pretty much everything for sale had run out: she had queued for over an hour only to find there was nothing left to buy. There simply hadn't been enough catering laid on for thirty-four thousand hungry and thirsty people forbidden from bringing their own sustenance. Why? To minimise non-recyclable litter; no other obvious reason.

Moreover, apparently the space inside the compound was crammed and disorganised: queues were intersecting with dancing crowds in a chaotic and potentially dangerous way once it became dark. There was very little lighting in the public areas, so you had to wonder: what if something unexpected had happened and panic broke out? There was little shelter from the hot sun during the afternoon, and none at all from the downpour of heavy rain that started at 8:30, just as Massive Attack came on stage, as all the tents had by then been closed.

At that point many people decided they had to leave, including our informant. But getting away from the site was difficult. Although it was pouring with rain people were denied access to the special buses, scheduled to leave at the end of the show, not before, and which anyway required the display of a special wristband. Some started ordering Ubers and taxis, but access to the Downs was closed off to traffic. And so on. You get the picture. Wet, hungry, thirsty people, unable to get away other than on foot, having reluctantly decided to miss the headline act: all for just £79.

Don't know about younger, but police are definitely tubbier, these days

The frustrating thing is that none of this need have happened with proper foresight, which always means, in the eternal wisdom of wet blankets and Destroyers of Dreams everywhere: hope for the best but FFS plan for the worst. It was just as well that the very worst, or something like it, didn't happen on Sunday. Outbreaks of the very worst do seem to be becoming more frequent at mass gatherings – they're such an easy target for nutters of all stripes – but I didn't see any ambulances or fire engines parked nearby, for example, on a "just in case" basis. I hope I was mistaken.

Naturally, interviews with people like Bristol's Green MP Carla Denyer emphasised the importance and success of the event's eco-experimental aspect. Of course; but when people are invested in an enterprise for reasons that are, ultimately, quite distinct from its true nature – "green" is great, but is not why so many people had paid £79 for a concert ticket – then any failings are wished away and the successes talked up, perhaps with a bit of muttering about "a few lessons to be learned".

I have to say a certain off-putting air of self-rectitude could be detected floating in the air, like the purported odour of sanctity. I mean, vegan-only catering? Really? Not to mention 34,000 people corralled into a compound resembling a detention camp, while apparently being subjected to graphic virtue-signalling videos about Palestine? Was this meant to be a concert or a re-education camp for the complacent middle-classes of South West England?

Now, the concert's Ts & Cs give every appearance of careful thought, but seem not to have been backed up by proper logistical planning, the sort of stuff that ought to be comparatively routine and dull, like ensuring enough supplies of food and drink, adequate toilets, and strategies for unexpected events and emergencies. This is why People Who Make Things Work need always to be involved at executive level, and their perspective given its due. I mean, where do you even put 30,000 litres of water (that's two large water tankers), never mind the perishable ingredients for thousands of vegan burgers? [3]  Assuming, of course, that these things were ever actually present on site. I don't know.

My guess – perhaps unwarranted – is that some People Who Make Things Happen may have been put in charge of making all those nice ideas work in practice, and some crucial elements in the chain of implementation had been omitted, underestimated, or failed under stress. If so, as always, it will have been because those admirable people will have concentrated on the excitement of the vision thing – not least being seen to be innovative and on-message – and assumed someone else would be attending to the boring facts, figures, and compromises of actual delivery. Noooo...

1. I know... Any variation on the "two sorts of people" thing is always a bit dubious. My favourite is "There are two sorts of people: those who believe there are two sorts of people, and those who don't". For an enjoyably ironic exploration of another "two sorts" (in this case Apollonian vs. Hermetic) see W.H. Auden's poem "Under Which Lyre", delivered at Harvard in 1946, when many "GI Bill" ex-military students will have been present.

2. For American readers, "nappies" are "diapers".

3. Just give that a minute's thought. Be generous, and assume that only half of those you have required not to bring their own food want to eat during the concert. That's still about 15K meals. People are likely to want to queue for food from, say, 5:30 to 8:30: three hours, but with a peak hour around 6:30-7:30. So all food outlets combined will need to process and retail 5K meals an hour, or more likely 2.5K 5:30-6:30, 10K 6:30-7:30, and 2.5K 7:30-8:30. Your challenge: how many outlets, how many staff, and how much food-safe storage are required to meet that demand? You'll be needing a calculator. BTW, do you know how many meals a busy burger drive-through can serve in one hour? (The number 600 seems to come up a lot...). Do you think Vikki's Vegan Victuals Van can handle the job? But then, why trouble yourself with such questions? What matters is that whatever food is available is strictly plant-based; that's the bottom line, anything else is just detail! Hmmm. There comes a point where delegation shades into dereliction...

Another Six Penn'orth

While I've been away having a break in Bristol I have noticed a few people looking at an old post from February 2016, so I thought I'd better remind myself of what it was about. Ah, right, that one! Calculated to amuse about ten people, I'd guess, but I think it's still quite fun eight years later, so I might as well re-post it. I particularly enjoy the fact that it also incorporates a post from eight years earlier, written in 2008 When This Old Hat Was New [1].

Whether giving it another airing now is pleasingly "meta", a case of this blog eating itself, or me turning into my own tribute act (Autoerotic Hat?) is a little troubling. I'd better post something new, quick! And when I get home tomorrow I'd also better find out what I've done with that sixpence...

1. Go on, give it a listen, it's a great song, and I have always felt a deep connection with the album cover art by Mike Tycer.

Sing a Song of Sixpence

I forgot to mention my traditional birthday present to myself. In my post about the "Keats Walk", Sixpence a Pint, I mentioned the letter Keats wrote to his publisher while staying in Winchester, in which he says "there is on one side of the city a dry chalky down where the air is worth sixpence a pint". Without doubt, I would say, that dry, chalky down is Twyford Down, in those days still joined by a neck of land to St. Catherine's Hill.

So, being a sentimental sort, I bought myself a George III silver sixpence on Ebay, minted in 1818, the year before the famous walk through the water-meadows. Who knows? This very coin may have jingled in the immortal pocket. It's certainly been in and out of a few Christmas puddings and bride's shoes in the meantime, too. Maybe I should give it a wash.

This talk of poets, letters, and sixpences reminds me of an old post from 2008, which I may as well revive here. If you have ever sat a literature exam, it may amuse you. Or possibly induce a panic attack. You may turn over your papers NOW:

"When I try to put all into a phrase I say 'Man can embody truth but he cannot know it' ... The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence."
W. B. Yeats, in his last letter, 4th January 1939.

Questions (Time: 3 hours. Use one side of the paper only):

1. In your two penn'orth, was Yeats quite the full shilling?
2. By "the Saint", does Yeats mean the popular 1960s TV drama starring Roger Moore? No? Are you sure?
3. Discuss the impact of decimalisation on The Song of Sixpence. Please show your working.
4. Can you refute Hegel?
5. Can a woman know truth but not embody it? Are men thereby always and inevitably wrong?
6. Draw a contradiction.

Around the World in Eighty Beers

As we head into the doldrums of summer and before I take a break from blogging for a couple of weeks, I thought I'd give an unsolicited testimonial (I've always enjoyed that expression, for some reason) to an old friend's new book. 

I've known Martyn Cornell since we were both at school – he was a couple of years ahead of me – and although we haven't actually met for many years now we've stayed in touch. I'd say that what Martyn doesn't know about beer isn't worth knowing, except that he'd disagree: it's precisely what he doesn't yet know that he's most keen to find out. His research and myth-busting (and there are a lot of myths in the beer world it seems) are excellent, and he's not afraid to tread on toes where lazy writing and the transmission of false received ideas are concerned; to be honest, I think he rather enjoys it.

So, if you are into beer, or simply admire meticulous research into a fascinating area of social, industrial, and commercial history then you will enjoy Martyn's latest book. Here's his description of the idea behind the "eighty beers":

The idea of ATWI80B – and I believe it’s a unique one – is that each chapter starts by looking at one contemporary beer, across more than 40 different countries, from Norway to New Zealand and China to Brazil, and uses that beer as a springboard to talk about the history of the beer style that beer represents, the history of brewing in that country and the history of that brewery.

You can  check it out here. Currently it's a hardback volume – my copy arrived a couple of days ago, and it's a handsome thing – but an e-book version is promised, and I'd be surprised if a paperback isn't forthcoming.

Incidentally, Martyn's research skills were able to open an interesting sidelight onto my own family history. 

My mother was born in 1923, but I was able to find my maternal grandparents easily enough, together with her older sister, one year old, in the 1921 Census when it was released. To my surprise, they were living in a pub, the Seven Stars in Charlton, a tiny hamlet near Hitchin in Hertfordshire. One of the innovations of the 1921 Census was to include the name and address of a worker's employer, so a further surprise was to discover that my grandfather was working as a fitter in a "Portland cement" factory situated in some large chalk quarries at Arlesey, north of Hitchin.

I was curious to know who else was living in the Seven Stars, and it turned out to be a veritable rookery of relatives. There was my great grandmother and her second husband George; the son of her first marriage Herbert, 20; her step-son Charlie, 23; plus her two children with George, Edna and Eric, 11 and 9 respectively. Apart from Tom, George and Herbert were builder's labourers, with Charlie working in a tannery (a notoriously stinky job). All nine of them were sharing three rooms, with one room in common, presumably a kitchen space of some kind.

 As I couldn't find any such pub in present-day Charlton, I was curious what had happened to it. Well, in the case of a mystery pub, who ya gonna call? Beer Busters! Martyn replied, the very next day:

In fact the Seven Stars closed that same year, 1921 - it was one of several places in the area that had their licences taken away by the licensing magistrates as "surplus". (This was a nationwide movement that had been going on since the early 1900s. Brewers paid into a fund to compensate pub owners whose pubs were closed.) The Seven Stars was only a beerhouse, that is, licensed to sell beer and cider only, not wines or spirits, and it was leased to the local brewer, Lucas of Hitchin (which closed itself a couple of years later after having been sold to Green's of Luton).

As someone quite interested in "finding things out" myself, I was curious how he was able to establish this so quickly:

I could tell you about the Seven Stars because something like 40 years ago I spent a couple of days at McMullen's brewery transcribing their annotated version of the 1904 licensing magistrates' survey of all the pubs and beerhouses in Hertfordshire: Macs had kept the survey up-to-date for around 20 years by marking on it when particular pubs or beerhouses had their licences "refused". It's a fabulous resource, not least because it tells you what brewery owned each pub...

As I say, outstanding and properly-sourced research into a niche but important aspect of social, industrial, and commercial history.

There's a bit more "only connect" action going on here, too. As it happens, in 1903 when Ivy was six years old her father was killed in a dray accident while he was working as a brewery labourer in Hitchin. Whether the brewery concerned was Lucas I don't know, but it seems more than likely. There was no obvious connection to be made with the Seven Stars pub – sorry, the Seven Stars beerhouse – itself in 1921, other than the fact it was leased to the Lucas brewery, where Ivy's father may have worked: they were almost certainly simply renting the rooms they occupied. Unless, of course, there was a connection between the licensee and some local builder or even the tannery – not impossible. A bit of additional research in directories by Martyn found a Henry Hinstridge listed as a beer retailer in Charlton in 1890. It's a lead: more research needed (this time by me, though)...

Add together two labourers, a tannery worker (argh!), and a cement works fitter, and there would have been quite a lot of demand for any washing and cleaning facilities. I doubt there was running water on tap upstairs at the Seven Stars in 1921, and you can't wash in beer, however attractive that might sound to some. The river Hiz and a millpond were close by, however, and those plus any nearby pump may have sufficed. It must also have been more than a bit over-crowded up there, and not a little noisy at night when the beerhouse customers got into their stride. [1] But these are the sort of insights that add some colour to the bare facts of family history. What a shame I never bothered to ask my grandparents about their life together before they became old, invisible, and died... Not once, not a single thing.

But that's another post, for later in the year. Have a great summer, if such a thing is possible now that our planetary thermostat has started to malfunction... Maybe a nice cold beer would help? Just be thankful you don't share rooms with a tannery labourer. 

Tannery workers in Hitchin, 1890s (Hitchin Museum)

1. [Drunken voices singing] Oh, what's that smell? (what's that smell?) / Has someone opened up a door to Hell? (door to Hell?) / There's such a blinkin' stink, I can hardly hold me drink /  And there's hours before the landlord rings his bell (rings his bell)...