Talking of electoral matters, David 'Screaming Lord' Sutch was born on this day in 1940. Sutch, an eccentric rock'n'roller and self-publicist, stood in forty-odd parliamentary by-elections, invariably losing his deposit - though he once beat the candidate of the Continuing Social Democratic Party, shortly before the SDP collapsed (Sutch subsequently offered the leadership of his National Teenage Party to David Owen). Several of Sutch's National Teengage Party policies later became law - votes at 18, passports for pets, all-day pub opening - but his principal aim was to get noticed. With his trademark top hat and rosette-covered leopardskin jacket, he was indeed unmissable on stage when the results were called out.
As a musician, Sutch can be generously seen as a goth-horror/ shock-rock pioneer, his stage act involving coffins, knives and daggers, fake blood, skulls and offal. Joe Meek saw enough promise in him to produce a single, but Sutch was never more than a cult act. On the other hand, he was amazingly well connected and could spot talent, giving early opportunities to the likes of Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, John Bonham, Noel Redding and Nicky Hopkins. All of these performed on his album Lord Sutch and Heavy Friends, which has a reputation as one of the worst ever made (I'm not going to check). His follow-up album, released as Hands of Jack the Ripper, featured (among others) Ritchie Blackmore, Matthew Fisher and Keith Moon - none of whom knew they were being recorded.
And where was this legendary album recorded? According to Wikipedia and every other source I can find, at the 'Carshalton Park Rock'n'Roll Festival'. Eh? I must have missed that, though I was living on the edge of that very park right through the Sixties. Does anyone know or remember anything of this 'festival'? Malty? Were you there?
Thursday, 10 November 2016
Concluding unscientific postscript
Next time there's a big vote, will the pollsters and pundits be taken as seriously as ever, despite their laughably bad record? They have now got three big ones in a row completely wrong: the 2015 general election, Brexit and Trump. Apart (perhaps) from the 2010 general election fudge, they haven't got anything right since Blair's easily predictable victories - and before that they called the 1992 election (which John Major won with the biggest vote in British electoral history) completely wrong.
There's a pattern here, isn't there? A tendency to over-represent the more leftist/ politically correct/ status quo-ist opinion. I don't suppose this is intentional, but something is clearly going very wrong, and unless they fix it the pollsters and pundits have surely forfeited any right to be taken seriously next time.
But they will be, we may be sure of that.
There's a pattern here, isn't there? A tendency to over-represent the more leftist/ politically correct/ status quo-ist opinion. I don't suppose this is intentional, but something is clearly going very wrong, and unless they fix it the pollsters and pundits have surely forfeited any right to be taken seriously next time.
But they will be, we may be sure of that.
Wednesday, 9 November 2016
Don't Panic!
Anyone remember this from 1980? That was how it felt when Reagan was elected - and yet he turned out to be the greatest US President of the postwar period. That's the thing with Presidents - you don't know what you've got till they stop being candidates and take up office. Chin up, eh?
Tuesday, 8 November 2016
Who Will Win (if anyone)?
With the fate of the Free World hanging in the balance, all eyes naturally turns to Old Nige to discover who's going to win this US Election thing. On this occasion Old Nige can only scratch his hoary head and offer an uncharacteristically hesitant prediction. I think there is still a chance of a Trump win (as I've felt all along), but G-man Comey's speed-reading of 650,000 emails in nine days might just have snatched it back for Hillary. Here's what I fear might happen: La Clinton wins the White House, Trump wins the popular vote. This would be just about the worst possible outcome - more a case of everybody losing than anyone really winning - so let's hope I'm wrong. It's not unknown...
Monday, 7 November 2016
A Hero's Life: Bernard Freyberg
Freyberg won the VC for his role in the battle of the Somme, leading his battalion - from the front, under heavy machine-gun fire, and repeatedly - in the capture of Beaucourt-sur-l'Ancre, then refusing to leave the battlefield until he had issued final instructions to his men, despite having been wounded four times. When he won the VC, Freyberg already had a DSO to his name, won for swimming to shore and lighting flares to distract the Turkish army during the Gallipoli landings. He returned safely, under heavy fire, from that sortie, but went on to take a total of nine wounds during his First War service, the worst from a shell exploding at his feet. He also gained two more DSOs. His love of action and ability to survive 'mid shot and shell later earned him the nickname 'Salamander'.
Freyberg rose rapidly through the ranks, becoming the youngest general officer in the British Army, and his career continued to thrive between the wars, but in 1937 he was obliged to retire on health grounds. This, however, was not the end of the story, as he returned to active service in the Second War, commanding the Allied forces in the battle of Crete and going on to lead the 2nd New Zealand division through the North African and Italian campaigns, picking up more severe wounds along the way, and yet another DSO. He was well liked by the Kiwis who served under him, both for his personal courage and for his concern with their welfare - and he even managed to have a good relationship with Montgomery.
After the war, Freyberg accepted an invitation to become Governor General of New Zealand, and was garlanded with more honours, including the title of Baron. After his term as Governor-General, he returned to England, taking up residence in the Norman gateway of Windsor Castle, where he was Deputy Constable and Lieutenant-Governor. He died in 1963 from one his many war wounds, and is buried along with his wife and son in the churchyard of St Martha on the Hill, a beautifully sited old church near Guildford (about which Martin Tupper, author of the Victorian bestseller Proverbial Philosophy, wrote a very bad poem, Old St Martha's).
Why was that Wellington pool named after him? Freyberg had in his youth been a powerful swimmer, twice winning the New Zealand 100-yards championship. He was also a registered dentist, is thought to have fought in the Mexican civil war, and probably had a spell as a prizefighter in New York - all this before his military career even began. What a man...
Sunday, 6 November 2016
The Battle of Pollocks Crossing
Although I've written a good deal about J.L. Carr, the Card of Kettering, on this blog (try a search in the box above), there are several of his books I've never read. So, when I spotted a copy of The Battle of Pollocks Crossing (Penguin paperback, with a rather lurid cover) on the shelves of a local charity shop, I snapped it up. I've just finished it now, and a hugely enjoyable read it was.
The Battle of Pollocks Crossing is the novel inspired by Carr's unlikely spell as a schoolteacher in the prairie town of Huron, South Dakota. That was in the late Thirties, and Carr sets his novel a decade earlier, when farming was in a state of collapse as the good earth turned to dust, and the banks and corporations foreclosed on ruined families. This is no Steinbeckian social-realist tragedy, though; it's a richly funny comedy, with the horrors of the agricultural depression forming a dark backcloth to the comic action - at least until everything comes together in the luridly dramatic climax.
The story is ingeniously framed within the present-day recollections of the elderly George Gidner, who at the start of the novel is angrily refusing to return to Palisades, South Dakota, the scene of his traumatic experiences of half a century earlier. The old Gidner appears intermittently throughout, and at times the narrative, which is mostly in the third person, slips into the first. The viewpoint is largely the young George Gidner's, but parts of the story are necessarily told from outside - as when, at the beginning, Gidner lands the teaching position in Palisades, courtesy of the Anglo-American Goodwill League, who are glad to be shot of a posting that no one wanted.
The initially idealistic Gidner, a Yorkshire lad, thinks the experience will make him a Different Man, and so it does, but not in any way he might have envisaged. By the time the train finally delivers him at Palisades, a prairie outpost of mind-numbing tedium, the process of disillusionment is already under way, and he finds little to slow it down as he gets to know the town and its inhabitants (and as he finds out about American teaching methods - all crackpot theories, endless questionnaires and rigidly prescribed readings).
Facing the prospect of struggling to survive on a tiny stipend, Gidner is taken under the wing of the town's banker, storekeeper and number one character Henry Farewell (stress on the first syllable), who rents him a room in his rooming-house. Farewell is an old-fashioned Anglophile with a library of 18th-century English classics, and lively memories of his own stay in England as a young man. He bombards young Gidner with anachronistic questions about life in England, and regales him with memories of his own sojourn there, when he settled in a country inn with a notably pneumatic landlady. Farewell's orotund account of his 'discovery' of England runs in counterpoint to George's equally eccentric 'discovery' of America - in the course of which he decides, just as J.L. Carr did, to write a history of the place he has found himself in and its people. But events overtake that project, along with everything else, as the enigmatic Farewell plays his last hand...
The Battle of Pollocks Crossing is a short novel, coming in at under 180 pages, and a quick read (even for the likes of slow-reading me), the rich and characterful dialogue carrying things merrily along. A colourful cast of small-town characters - each of them presenting some new conundrum to the hapless Gidner - keep the wry comedy bubbling, even as, towards the end, George realises just how little he knows of what is really going on in Palisades, and in Henry Farewell's head. This is a highly distinctive work, one that could only have been written by J.L. Carr - and yet it could hardly be more different from his masterpiece, A Month in the Country. If you come across it, do give it a try.
The Battle of Pollocks Crossing is the novel inspired by Carr's unlikely spell as a schoolteacher in the prairie town of Huron, South Dakota. That was in the late Thirties, and Carr sets his novel a decade earlier, when farming was in a state of collapse as the good earth turned to dust, and the banks and corporations foreclosed on ruined families. This is no Steinbeckian social-realist tragedy, though; it's a richly funny comedy, with the horrors of the agricultural depression forming a dark backcloth to the comic action - at least until everything comes together in the luridly dramatic climax.
The story is ingeniously framed within the present-day recollections of the elderly George Gidner, who at the start of the novel is angrily refusing to return to Palisades, South Dakota, the scene of his traumatic experiences of half a century earlier. The old Gidner appears intermittently throughout, and at times the narrative, which is mostly in the third person, slips into the first. The viewpoint is largely the young George Gidner's, but parts of the story are necessarily told from outside - as when, at the beginning, Gidner lands the teaching position in Palisades, courtesy of the Anglo-American Goodwill League, who are glad to be shot of a posting that no one wanted.
The initially idealistic Gidner, a Yorkshire lad, thinks the experience will make him a Different Man, and so it does, but not in any way he might have envisaged. By the time the train finally delivers him at Palisades, a prairie outpost of mind-numbing tedium, the process of disillusionment is already under way, and he finds little to slow it down as he gets to know the town and its inhabitants (and as he finds out about American teaching methods - all crackpot theories, endless questionnaires and rigidly prescribed readings).
Facing the prospect of struggling to survive on a tiny stipend, Gidner is taken under the wing of the town's banker, storekeeper and number one character Henry Farewell (stress on the first syllable), who rents him a room in his rooming-house. Farewell is an old-fashioned Anglophile with a library of 18th-century English classics, and lively memories of his own stay in England as a young man. He bombards young Gidner with anachronistic questions about life in England, and regales him with memories of his own sojourn there, when he settled in a country inn with a notably pneumatic landlady. Farewell's orotund account of his 'discovery' of England runs in counterpoint to George's equally eccentric 'discovery' of America - in the course of which he decides, just as J.L. Carr did, to write a history of the place he has found himself in and its people. But events overtake that project, along with everything else, as the enigmatic Farewell plays his last hand...
The Battle of Pollocks Crossing is a short novel, coming in at under 180 pages, and a quick read (even for the likes of slow-reading me), the rich and characterful dialogue carrying things merrily along. A colourful cast of small-town characters - each of them presenting some new conundrum to the hapless Gidner - keep the wry comedy bubbling, even as, towards the end, George realises just how little he knows of what is really going on in Palisades, and in Henry Farewell's head. This is a highly distinctive work, one that could only have been written by J.L. Carr - and yet it could hardly be more different from his masterpiece, A Month in the Country. If you come across it, do give it a try.
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