I confess I am not a great fan of autobiographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace, it just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…
Top row. The case which I made for the steel gadget (centre) and the Swiss Army Card (top right) with all its tools laid out (Knife, Pen, Screwdriver multi-tool, Scissors and Tweezers. The “card” itself features a Magnifying Glass and an LED Torch. Bottom – the Swiss Army-type penknife which was a parting gift from my students at Sligo Technical College – they knew I liked a good gadget!
I love gadgets – what can I say! The steel gadget was in my pocket for many years of sign-writing and whilst it has many capabilities, it’s most frequent use was for levering open cans of paint! The Swiss Army card is not cheap, £35 for a proper one (don’t even bother with cheap imitations) I use it every day, principally the knife (peeling oranges especially), and the scissors, it also means I am never without a “James Bond” pen! The Swiss Army style penknife lives in my briefcase and is also regularly used… I was never in the Boy Scouts and I think that in part is why I have come, self-taught, to always “be prepared”…
Gardening
The early days of of our current allotment – Barbara weeding, Barbara’s flower section, me building a pond and raised beds.
The first garden I really took notice of was my Grandad’s. He had been a game-keeper ever since surviving the First World War and it was not well paid so he had to grow produce to feed his family. So the garden I remember was a rabbit-proof enclosure carved out of the field in front of the cottage where he and my Granny lived in Nuneham Courtenay. Incidentally, the estate to which the cottage belonged, had moved the entire hamlet of original inhabitants to a new site along the main road bordering the estate – such was the power of the upper classes then. The estate now belongs to the band Radiohead and I imagine they have their recording studios there. My Grandad’s garden contained raspberries, gooseberries and blackcurrant canes and this is what I chiefly remember – the smell of blackcurrant must and the taste of a ripe berry can conjure that garden to this very day…
My mother naturally carried on the tradition of growing food with part of the garden and later an allotment devoted to growing vegetables and my sisters and I were given a portion to grow our own choice of vegetables. Two uncles on my mother’s side remained, after the Second World War, as professional gardeners – one in market gardening and one as a gardener for a school. And so it was that the gardening “gene” or is it “meme” was passed on to my sisters and I.
When Barbara and I lived in Ireland, we had a cottage with three acres of land – two we leased back to Tony, the farmer we bought the cottage from but still had more than enough space to make a garden – mostly for vegetables. Returning to England in 2005, we eventually had time to start an allotment since our house has no garden, only a yard – although that is full of flowers and shrubs in containers. Oh, and with my love of miniature worlds (and gadgets), I have since my teenage years, grown bottle gardens and latterly, windowsill gardens which I keep at work to brighten the office…
One of my miniature gardens after its annual tidy-up.
Geography andGeology
A souvenir of Iceland given to each member of our choir by our Icelandic counterparts – it is a lump of Icelandic lava carrying a cutout map of Iceland.
Another inheritance from my mother was my first introduction to Geology. Not only did she delight in finding fossils at Charmouth, and fossils are after all located in rocks of a particular geological age, but she also bought a tumble-polisher and when we visited Australia in 1968, it was at her instigation that we visited Lightning Ridge where the Black Opal comes from. So I collected not only fossils but also rocks and minerals and when I went to the University of Birmingham, it was to study Geography and Geology. But many things that I learned at school and university, it was not until later in life that I encountered the reality of the knowledge “in the field”. When we lived in Ireland near to the Ox Mountains, you could see scratches in the bare granite where the glacial ice sheet had dragged fragments of rock across it, just half a mile from where I live, you can see hillsides littered with boulders plucked from them and dropped where they fell as the ice melted. But the most exciting geological moment in my life came when visiting Iceland on an exchange with an Icelandic Choir. They took us on the “Golden Circle” bus tour to see the eponymous “Geyser”, to see the wall of ice in the distance which is the “Long Glacier, the stupendous waterfall “Gullfoss” which features in the film Prometheus (https://youtu.be/Z2Ht9I8ik_4) but most exciting of all, we walked down the rift valley at Thingvellir. Iceland is where the Mid-Atlantic Ridge rises above the surface of the Atlantic Ocean and allows us to see Continental Drift in action – Iceland is literally splitting apart and new land is being created and Thingvellir is on the line of that split – on one side of the small valley you are on the European plate and on the other, the American plate. This particular location is stable at the moment but as regular scenes on the news tell us, nothing is ever fixed and safe in Iceland and new volcanic events can and do happen all the time…
Thingvellir rift-valley has the European plate on the right-hand side and the American plate on the other. At the bottom of the valley is the site of the oldest democratic parliament in Europe which was held once a year
The reason this place had particular resonance for me, was that when we studied Continental Drift at school, it was a new idea and the key piece of evidence for it was and is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge where a series of parallel and symmetrical mountain ridges lie either side of the centreline which emerges above water, there in Iceland. Not only is there a symmetry to the form, but each range of mountains records the orientation of Earth’s magnetic field at the time when it was created, frozen into the rock. I came home so excited with this idea that I shared it with my father as we washed up together that evening. I never knew whether the scepticism he evinced at the idea of continents moving, subduction zones and mid-ocean volcanic land forming, was real or just designed to get me to lay out the theory and its evidence for him. Whichever, I finally stood at the spot where the evidence is right there to be seen with one’s own eyes…
One final story about geology and myself – I was coming home from work on the train some years ago when amongst the group of staff from the University of Bradford, was a new face and he was lamenting that if he could not find someone to take a stack of redundant maps off his hands, then he was going to have to send them to landfill. I could not bear the idea of this and volunteered to take them and so under my bed is a stack of Geological maps covering almost the entire United Kingdom including the one below. I love these maps but I need to decide what to do with them before I pop my clogs – any ideas?
This is a “Drift” Geological Map of Aylesbury which means it shows what is at the surface be it soil, or exposed rock. The other type of geological map is the “Solid” and shows the underlying rocks.
I confess I am not a great fan of auto-biographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace but it just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…
This recent addition to the street architecture of Oxford’s main shopping street, Carfax, adorns the entrance to an alleyway sandwiched between two department stores and leads to the back entrance of Frewin Hall.
If you have ever received a comment from me on WordPress, you may have wondered about my username Frewin55 – short story, Frewin is my middle name and 1955 the year I was born and so I turned 70 just last month. The more interesting and turbulent story of why I was named Frewin is told in a recent poetry post I made for dVerse Poets Pub – Whats in a Name.
Fossils
A selection of fossils garnered over the year which I keep not just for their intrinsic interest but also because they remind me of the places and times they were found…
Fossils and thus Geology, are another interest that I got from my mother. We used to holiday in Charmouth, Dorset – part of what is now (since Jurassic Park popularised dinosaurs) called The Jurassic Coast although the same feature occurs in East Yorkshire where the same rocks appear having snaked their way up through the geology of England. I wrote about my mother, Charmouth and fossils in a poem called Cast in Gold here,
In the picture (top row from left) you can make out a Turritella in a cross-section, a section of a bed of bivalve fossils, a colonial coral from the Middle Carboniferous at Rathlee, Ireland where we used to live, ditto the one below. Left hand column – Various Ammonite fragments from Charmouth, the top one is made from Iron Pyrites – Fool’s Gold. Second column – a “Devil’s Toenail from Runswick Bay, East Yorkshire and below, two fragments of Crinoid beds. Third Column, the two white fossils are coral that my stepson brought back from Mexico – they are much closer to modern corals than the Carboniferous examples. Below them, three Rhynconella fossils which by corrugating their shell shape, could maximise their intake of water to filter for food whilst only opening a tiny amount and thus keeping safe from predators. Fourth column, Belumnites so called because of their resemblance to bullets – from Charmouth, just this year when I introduced my partner to the joys of fossil hunting. Bottom right, a recent (geologically speaking) piece of Bog Oak – a very fragile piece of wood preserved in the bog that formed when the climate became much wetter five thousand years ago – first drowning the trees and then growing five feet of peat bog to bury and preserve the base of the trees. Five thousand years is a mere moment in geological time and it is unlikely that the bogs and bog oaks will survive as fossils in the long term – most likely, the current climate change will stop the process of peat bog formation and the bogs and their fossilised trees will be eroded away…
Film
My love of Film began with a book -a Pelican, from the publishers Penguin and like all Penguin books, Film, by Roger Manvell, wore the “utility” style cover from the immediate postwar period which became so iconic. My father had a little bookcase exclusively full of these Penguin and Pelican books which I guess he had bought before he married my mother. “Film” contained sections of B/W stills from films such as Battleship Potemkin (the woman shot in the eye on the Odessa Steps), Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or (the eye and the razor-blade) and The Seventh Seal – all images so intriguing that they lit a fire in my young brain even though it would be years before I would have a chance of seeing these films.
The iconic scene of playing Chess with Death from The Seventh Seal – Ingmar Bergman’s monochrome masterpiece.
When I first dipped into this book, we didn’t even have a TV and when we did, the only films shown were in my father’s words “American rubbish” and it would not be until I lived in London, post-university, and got a job at the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton, that I finally saw some of these “arthouse” movies. I started as a general helper, selling tickets, ushering, clearing up between films and serving cakes, quiche and coffee but not sweets and popcorn – an innovation in Cinema fare for those days. The Ritzy showed at least 10 different films over the course of a week and since it had a single projector, that meant the projectionist had to combine an average of seven “cans” of film into one large and heavy reel – cutting off the header and footer from each can’s contents and splicing the sections together and then reversing the process when the film was finished with. This was so much work for the projectionist, one of three founding members of the cinema, that when I asked if I could help (nothing venture nothing gain) he jumped at the chance. I can truly say that this was one of the most enjoyable jobs I have ever had and by the measure that when you find something you love, it doesn’t feel like work.
The Ritxy Cinema as it was when I worked there around 1980.
Nowadays, cinemas, even small ones, have digital projectors and cans of film are a thing of the past and many great works are to be found on streaming services so much of the romance of the physical cinema has been lost for most people, the lights going down, the audience hushing, the ads, the previews and finally the film itself…There is one thing which is particularly magical about a real film projector and which only projectionists get to see… You can open the “gate” which is where the film passes through the beam of light which projects it onto the screen. To create the illusion that our eyes and brains see as moving images, it is necessary that the projection is broken up into individually illuminated frames, so when you open the gate, the synchronised flashes of light illuminating the fast-moving film, make it appear that the film is stationary, that is magical enough, but look more closely at the frames in the gate and you can see the characters moving in miniature just as they are doing on the cinema screen…
I confess I am not a great fan of autobiographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace. It just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…
As with my sister Carol, I have chosen a memento mori that I keep beside me on the bookshelf that contains my poetry and plays books, and reference books from several of my disciplines. My mother had many ornaments in her last apartment – most not to my taste but I chose this little group of geese made of plastic, pottery and bronze respectively and they sit beside me as my nearest reminder of my mother. But in the same way as I speculated about what I had inherited Nurturewise from my father, so I will try to show what my mother gave to my makeup…
To my father, my mother, Elsie May Cook, was a wonder of achievement – before they met, she’d already lived several lives – born a gamekeeper’s daughter in 1920, left school at 14 to work in domestic service (proper Upstairs, Downstairs/Downton Abbey), risen to be a childrens’ Nanny, Left service to join the Womens’ Army during the Second World War rising to be a Sergeant and then after the war, training to be a State Registered Nurse which she had to give up to get married to my father – no married nurses back then… To my father, that showed fortitude, resilience, and character and he was not wrong but over my lifetime, my understanding of my mother, as initially seen through my father’s eyes, has become more nuanced. There was a side to my Mum which did all those things with plucky determination to transcend her origins and through most of that time she chose to be known to her friends and colleagues by a different name – Jill. When she had achieved that upward social mobility, however, I feel that whilst she would have vehemently denied it, she suffered from Imposter Syndrome – a crippling shyness that led her to isolate not only herself but also us children. Don’t get me wrong, we had a rich and stimulating home life from being read aloud to at an early age and teaching us so that we were all able to read before we went to school, through a trip around the world by ship to live in Australia for six months, and the nurtural legacy that each of my parents gave us. As I set out yesterday, my Father made me both a Designer and also, what eventually settled out as being a humanist. From my mother, I got Art and storytelling and if I have been dilatory as a painter, I have, at long last, become a writer and a poet and I think that is down to my mother’s storytelling. Yes, indeed, our somewhat claustrophobic upbringing did not prepare us for the total immersion of leaving home for university. Still, there are worse things to overcome and to blame my mother is like blaming a parent for giving you an unfortunate gene. After all, we are not yet at the stage where all parents are screened for inheritable problems and whatever hand we are dealt, it is up to us to do the best we can with it…
My mother, Jill as she liked to be called back then, in army uniform…
So I could repeat some of the many stories about the many lives my mother lived before she even met my father – the trip to Tunisia as a 16 year old nanny who was left holding the baby alone in a hotel where only one person spoke English whilst the family went on a trip around the country, the Downton Abbey worthy stories of domestic service, the bullying sergeants she took on in defence of her girls, the time she alerted the base to a spy, but I think it is more interesting to speculate about the drive for upward social mobility (not that she would have recognised that term) versus the Imposter Syndrome that affected her once she had arrived. In any case, she herself drew back from telling tales of the war as time went on though in the light of current events and the overturning of all that was being fought for back then, she should arguably have been telling those stories more…
I suppose it might have started with my Grandad – he was an angry or perhaps a bitter man – cheated of the upward mobility that some of his children achieved. Before the First World War, his older brother, wanting to escape the not particularly nice family he found himself in, decided to emigrate to America where the promise of hard work rewarded with liberty and equality, was a beacon to those bound by the strictures of the English class-system. He wanted to take my Grandad with him but as the latter was under 16 and needed his parent’s permission, and since they were dismayed at losing one breadwinner and source of future support, he was denied it. The brother wrote to Tom (my Grandad) advising him to lie about his age and join the army and fight in the war which nobody anticipated would last for four whole years and that he would send money in the meantime so that Tom could join him after the war when he no longer needed his parent’s permission and he was true to his word; however, the family took and spent the money, so when Tom, who had miraculously survived the whole war, returned home, he had no choice but to find a job in England. His first choice was to become a school-teacher, but that job, like certain others, librarian for example, had become reserved for women – so many men had died during the war, that families now had to turn to their daughters to go out to work and support them. Remember, this was before the days of the Welfare State with its basic safety net. Tom became a gamekeeper, returning to the animal husbandry he had learned growing up on a farm. His brother in America turned the same skills towards teaching and after marrying a “Southern Belle”, he ended up as a Lecturer in a Veterinary College…
My Mum, Grandad and Granny in the early sixties.
When my mother, who was apparently a bright and willing learner at school, brought home work specially set by the teacher for her, my Grandad’s bitterness manifested and he said she could take it back and not bother because she would end up in domestic service like most people in their class. This is a man who had spent four years in hell fighting a war which was arguably a squabble between competing cousins – descendants of Queen Victoria and pursued with all the insensitivity and crass disregard for human life of the ruling and upper-middle class of England, a war in which men were literally cannon-fodder. And so it came to pass that my mother went into domestic service at age 14, saving in the form of six penny stamps each week which were eventually sent back to the family to support her five brothers and sisters.
One of the houses my mother served in and on the right, the staff – my mother with an arm round the dog.
Thus the disappointment of my grandad was passed on to my mother although she showed great loyalty to him when, during the Second World War, my mother rose to be a Sergeant in Signals and was then put forward for officer selection. She had truthfully listed her father as a Game Keeper and on being pushed to redefine him as an Estate Manager which she refused to do and so failed to make the grade. Years later, when we went by ship to Australia, my parents would only travel on “one-class” ships – those were the days when ships were a regular means of transport and not for cruises and many of them had First and Second Class areas – this egalitarian attitude says something about my parent’s view of the world…
A photo-op which my mother labelled “Propaganda” – certainly not P.C. my mother is at the far end of the line.
My mother sitting at the back of her landlady’s house on the Island of Portland where she was managing the switchboard at the fortress where the invasion was being planned. She looks calm and happy here but just a few feet away, she had to grab the landlady’s two sons and dive for cover when a German fighter strafed the back gardens for no good reason…
I was not sure if my mother was a qualified SRN when this picture was taken, but my sister Helen tells me the badge she is wearing means that is probably just qualified – so a “graduation” picture. She trained and then worked at the Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford.
After the war, opportunities were offered to people o become nurses, even if, like my mother, they had not completed school education, and so with some initial special assistance, she eventually qualified as a State Registered Nurse. Just six months later, having met and married my father, she had to give up nursing since you could not be married and nurse – such a waste! You would think that with all these transformations, the accumulation of transferrable skills, my mother’s confidence would have built up so that she could have conquered anything – certainly my father believed so, but…
My mother sitting with my father in a sailing boat of some kind in their early years.
When my parents met, sailing was my father’s hobby and whilst my mother enjoyed the sailing, I think, she did not feel confident with the social life in the bar at the end of the day’s sailing. In those days, Oxford University was still populated by quite upper to upper-middle class students even if that was about to change. My father was a “Grammar school boy” from Manchester and not one of the “great” “Public (read Private, fee-paying) Schools” like most students and he had to learn enough Latin to pass the entrance exams in just one week – a record my mother constantly reminded me of as a spur to my own efforts! A compromise was arrived at between my parents, they would spend one year doing as much sailing as possible – this included my father skippering yachts for people with the money but not the skills – and after this. my father would turn his back on sailing for good, saving my mother from mingling. As I described yesterday, my father designed the first commercial GRP sailing dinghy and whilst my school had a couple of Alphas, on which I learned to sail, I never once sailed with my father and no provision was offered for me to pursue sailing outside school.
Another way in which, I realise in hindsight, that my mother managed to avoid uncomfortable contacts, she claimed not to be able to drive even though she possessed a driving licence she gained during the war which qualified her to drive anything up to and including a tank! She would have a token attempt at a driving licence once a year on a suitable beach with three children in the back and a very competent husband in the passenger seat! This ensured that she would not be able to collect us from friend’s houses or worse still, have other parents calling in on return visits. I understand – I do – I was sent to the top prep school in the country, The Dragon School, because what else would my parents do but offer us the best they could scrimp and save to provide, but meeting the possibly higher class other parents was a step too far… As I said at the outset, I don’t blame my mother and indeed it took many years before I really understood what had happened and by then I had made my own way in the world. The Dragon School was not easy for me either mixing with the sons of the “great and good” and so I too have been touched with imposter syndrome and so I have sympathy and forgiveness for my mother, after all, what doesn’t kill you…
Mr and Mrs Peel, who wanted to adopt my mother…
There is one more story I need to tell about my mother which may or may not have affected her sense of self in the world, since I don’t know whether she was aware of it at the time or only told by her mother much later on. When she was a little girl, the couple above, who lived close by to my grandparents, having got to know my mother, at least, if not the whole family, proposed that they might adopt her, they being childless. My grandparents wouldn’t hear of it of course though it may have been a temptation since they had six children – enough for future support – and it would have been a wonderful opportunity for my mother to be adopted by some upper-middle class people. Who knows what her life might have been but for sure, I would not be telling you this tale… I don’t know the name of the couple, only that he had some sort of job that may have been ambassadorial or possibly even intelligence work – I do know that they had travelled extensively including to Japan and, via my mother, I have inherited their portraits and the rather beautiful watercolour of a Shinto shrine below.
The final resting place of Lord Tokugawa Ieyasu (德川家康, 1543 – 1616), the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate, at Nikkō Tōshō-gū (日光東照宮), Nikkō (日光), Tochigi Prefecture (栃木県), Japan.
So, what to conclude from my mother’s story, and her part in mine – beware of what you want, especially upward mobility because achieving it is no guarantee that you will feel comfortable when you get there. Old establishment, aristocracy and even natives of a particular location have a way of subtly or not so subtly, making newcomers, or as they say here in Cobbydale, “Incomers” – feel less than welcome or at least not one of them – ever…
In a recent writing group. I penned this poem about going to the Remembrance Day Service with my Mother and it’s lasting effect on me…
Remembrance
St. Giles, the broad street, where the fair is held on happier days is turned over to remembering – to Remembrance Sunday. At one end of St Giles is the Martyrs’ Memorial where three priests were burnt to death over a difference in religious beliefs and though we knew the memorial years before we learned the history I’m not sure even my parents knew enough to explain such savagery.
At the other end of the street wide as a motorway and normally lined with cars parked at right angles to the curb such is the space there stands the War Memorial large, as befits a city of one hundred thousand with bronze plaques naming the dead of Oxford from two World Wars.
St. Giles is thronged in all solemnity, with citizens, soldiers, sailors, and airmen – past and present, and even cadets amongst whose rank I’ll one day stand and hope I’m not the one who will faint as much from the emotion as the heat if it’s a sunny day. But today we stand beside my mother wondering at her silent weeping recalling such stories as she has seen fit to tell us of the war and her part in it. Later she will go deeper telling of the six men any one of which she might have married who went to war but never came back.
Our mother’s tears sear the meaning of “Abide With Me” and “For Those In Peril on the Sea” into our hearts forever. Then the two-minute silence broken by the guns in the park and we all relax as Remembrance is replaced by moving again – moving on, for those who can…
I confess I am not a great fan of autobiographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace. It just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…
Dad
In the ever-ongoing debate over Nature v. Nurture, at least with Nature we can now examine DNA to see what assortment of benefits and disbenefits we have inherited from our parents – trying to assess what our legacy is from parental Nurture is more difficult, often abstract and can take years to become apparent either to ourselves or to others but if there is a single physical artefact that points to what I received from my father, it could well be this scale ruler.
My dad was a lecturer in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Oxford, what some people would call “an Academic” but as he was wont to point out – to most of the world, the word “academic” means irrelevant and he tried always to be relevant. Eschewing the flashy temptations of much new technology, my father, Stuart Swinford Wilson, moved increasingly towards Intermediate or Appropriate Technology which is based on the idea that if you give a tractor to a village in the developing world, you may put half the village out of work but if you give them an improved spade, say, the village will flourish. Of course a spade is hard to improve on, though when I lived in Ireland for ten years, I learned that the long-handled, lozenge-shaped shovel in use there, is far superior to the short-handled, square shovel used in England. Further back in time, Brunel, on being asked to introduce his railways to France, discovered that labourers still used wooden shovels which were so hard to use that Brunel promptly brought in his army os Irish “navvies” to show them how it should be d0ne…
Back to the Scale Ruler – although the 1:1 scale on it is in millimetres, all the other scales – 1:100, 1:20, 1:200 etc. are used by Designers, Architects and Map-makers to measure things on drawings at different scales. Influenced by my father’s work, I took the option of Technical Drawing at school and once I attained sufficient skill, my father invited me to produce illustrations for his various projects and in doing so, switched on my designer “gene” (not to be confused with “designer jeans”!).
A sketch idea of a manual (and bipedal) sawmill – typical of the Intermediate Technology projects I illustrated for my father as I grew up in the late 60’s and early 70’s.
My father’s first contribution to design, and arguably the most far-reaching, was to design the first commercially produced GRP (fibreglass) sailing dinghy. A keen member of the Oxford Univesity Yaught Club, their sailing venue was the oxbow snaking, large tree-banked Thames at Port Meadow where shallows on the inside of every bend and flukey winds due to the trees, made for challenging sailing and though it produced good sailors who could turn on a sixpence at close quarters, it was hard on the Firefly dinghies which disintegrated after a few years punishment. Reading about the new material, GRP, my father, working with Bossoms boatbuilders, designed the Alpha sailing dinghy setting the precedent for the way most subsequent GRP boats would be made with a moulded top and bottom joined together to seal in the flotation. There were no departments to assist University staff to develop, patent and profit from their inventions back in those days, so others took the Alpha forward, learning from the experience to produce the more widely known Bosun, which I believe served as a sailing trainer in the Royal Navy amongst others.
The original brochure for the Alpha.
The OxTrike was the ultimate Intermediate design my father pursued. Cycle rickshaws are often just a bicycle welded to a rickshaw but this engineer designed version has many advantages but requires little more skill to put together…
The pedals send a single chain back to a modified Sturmey Archer gear box with a pair of chains going back to two half axles, each with it’s own free-wheel sprocket meaning there is a limited differential action. Sturmey Archer refused to take up the idea and most cycle-rickshaws that are factory made today, have DeRailleur gears with all their attendant problems… Talk to me in the comments if you want more information.
So as my father moved towards a more ethical view of design, he and I would talk, often whilst sharing the washing and drying-up and from these talks, my own humanist philosophy grew into being as well as a critical view of the direction of travel of the modern world – see here for a critique of the cult of the car and our approach to the electric vehicle “Time to Divorce the Car”. One thing that happened that my father didn’t know the impact of, followed his being invited to write an article on Bicycle Technology for Scientific American. A chance introduction at his college – St. Cross, where he was a founder member, led to the invitation and it’s fair to say that my father was unaware of the prestigious nature of this publication. In those pre-internet days, the publishers sent a box (1500) reprints of the article, to the author and directed all enquiries to them to deal with – none of the immediacy of commenting that we now enjoy, and one person in particular, had a strong reaction to the article that never reached my father. A few years ago, watching the film “Steve Jobs” – there was a scene where Jobs was talking to the Apple Chairman about an article he had just read about bicycles. My ears pricked up!. In the article, my father included a graph by Vance A. Tucker of Duke University in which he ranked the energy efficiency among man and other animals of their travelling, per gram, per kilometer. It showed that the energy consumption of a man on a bicycle was one fifth that of an unaided man walking – all of which led Steve Jobs to formulate what would become one of his favourite sayings – as he explained to his Chairman “The computer is like a bicycle for the mind!”
The graph that so inspired Steve Jobs.
The cover of Scientific American highlighting my father’s article – note the price!
There is much that I could say about my father, but there is one thing that reflects on the more personal aspect of him and of his relationship with my mother – she never really liked his beard although when you see how prominent it was when they met (below left) – it was obviously not sufficient obstacle to their engagement, however, she pressed him to gradually whittle it down and on the way back from Australia after an absence from oxford and friends, of some eight months, she finally triumphed and the beard was gone…
Left, my father (with my beaming mother) throwing a shape aboard a yacht in about 1954. Centre, on the SS Northern Star shortly before shaving off his beard altogether. Right, finally clean shaven…
Draughtsman/Designer
My technical drawing skills came in handy once I finally found my way into Signwriting which I practised for some 17 years. Computer-cut signs were in their ascendancy but I was strictly a hand-painted signwriter and this involves a lot of drawing out on paper before transferring the design to the sign board, but more of that under “S”. Then in 1999, I had a car crash and broke my hip and thereafter I couldn’t work up a ladder as I had been doing. I painted a few large scale murals using a scissor-lift platform but a change of direction was necessary. An architect friend who lectured at Sligo Institute of Technology, got me taken on as a part-time lecturer in Modelmaking on the Interior Design School. This course came under the auspices of the Engineering Department and so I found myself following in my father’s footsteps… Whilst there, I first learned and then immediately taught (as teachers do), AutoCAD – Computer Aided Design a programme used to design anything from the intricacies of a Silicon Chip to the layout of an entire city but mostly engineering and architectural drawings. Teaching an evening class, one of the students, realising the task would be too great for him, asked me to design and get planning for a house he wanted to build. Since there is no qualification needed to do such a thing – I agreed and completed the task. He and his wife decided not to move after all and sold the design and land on to someone who did build the house, albeit having butchered the design somewhat (a common fate of architect-designed houses). The house was not completed until after I left Ireland to return to England to be nearer our growing grandchildren, but on a subsequent visit, I caught the house having its final interior decorating being done…
The house I designed at Grange, Co. Sligo, Ireland.
On returning to England in 2007, I had AutoCAD as another string to my bow and did my first professional drafting work at the age of 50! I have worked in an Architectural Metalwork department and as an office junior (albeit the oldest in the firm) in an architectural practice and I use my AutoCAD skills in my current role as a factory manager and also as the designated draughtsman for a mosque which project I have been involved with for the last eight years…
So for most of my career(s) if asked what I do, I have replied “Designer” because that is not only a job I have done in various guises, but I feel it is central to who I am and how I see the world, always looking to see how things work and how to make them work better if possible, and I owe this direction to my father, even though I did not see the road ahead mapped out that way at all, back when I was considering which direction to go in…
I confess I am not a great fan of autobiographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace. It just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…
Carol
Carol loved collecting glass artwork and before she died, offered a piece by way of a memento. I chose this perfume bottle with it’s prickly cactus stopper to remind me of how the little irritations that Carol was capable of feeling or giving out, could produce pearls…
“My sister Carol was a force of Nature!” This is how I began the eulogy to my late sister Carol when she died some 30 months ago. But you didn’t know her and as this is my memoir of sorts, and though I have hundreds of stories about Carol, I seek to write only about what Carol meant to me and the influence she had on my life so this is the merest selection… An early incident that showed a strong and assertive side of Carol in relation to me, was an iconic image (within our family) – a coloured slide (cheaper in those days than prints) in which Carol is squatting on my plastic football and refusing to give it back. Photographed from above, Carol looks both defiant and cute, as do all children photographed from this angle, with enlarged heads and small bodies. Later, when our sister Helen was born, Carol assumed (or was assigned) the role of “difficult middle child” and with her flaming red hair, she also aligned with the cliché of combative redhead. But mostly we had a loving and mutually supportive relationship – one in which she was not afraid to speak her mind about what she believed best for me. I recently learned the very appropriate meaning of the name Carol – ‘a joyous song to sing’ from a fellow poet’s piece on names.
Carol sitting defiantly on my football…
Carol trained in Community Arts and was an artist and poet as well as working tirelessly for the cause of refugees, Eritrean and later Syrian, using art to normalise the new lives of children, travelling to international conferences and in latter years, working each Summer with a Youth Club here in Bradford. Sometimes, during the ten years when we both lived in Ireland, I would assist her with face painting at some show or holiday event and the bags of equipment I kept for her when she was here in the Summer are languishing in the corner behind me…
My efforts on the left and Carol’s on the right – taken at Rosses Point with Knocknarea in the background.
Carol (and I) were inveterate collectors, and after her cremation, when it was agreed that I would carry half her ashes back to England to join my parents, her partner and I looked around for something suitable to transport them. This teapot was always my favourite from her teapot collection and now sits, relieved of it’s cargo, on the bookshelf to my left.
As teenagers, when in need of money, I sold various collections of mine to Carol – stamps for one – and she told me that I never stuck with collecting but nevertheless, was happy to purchase them… Carol was like a best friend who you could not bullshit and would always keep you up to the mark!
Another difference between Carol and I and which we shared the progress of when we had video calls, was our approach to shaping Jade trees -Carol (on the Right) preferred a grove of trunks whilst I am shaping mine as a single-trunked tree – I now have custody of both since she died…
My sister Carol – indomitable to the end…
I couldn’t close this brief sketch of Carol and my relationship to her without including her writing since she is in part responsible for my finding myself as a writer also. When Barbara and I lived in Ireland, Carol took me along to a writing group (in person group) and over the years since we would exchange poems and other pieces – here is one of her poems…
Dangerous Dreaming
Be dangerous and dream in this shit hole, and when you dream, dream big. Dream radical. Dream sans frontiers.
Some decry dreamers as if they were feckless, ineffective, unworldly. They underestimate the potential of dreams.
Dreams are powerful. Dreams are strong. Dreams are the first step to liberation, To a new world of possibilities.
Dreams are essential, like breathing. If you forget to dream, you might as well be dead. Dreams are a way of staying alive, even in a shit hole.
Dreams keep you in touch with yourself, the way you want you to be. So dream on, especially in a shit hole, until reality catches up with your dreams.
Dream on, dangerously.
Cars
I have a love/hate relationship with cars! I grew up in an era when the different marques and manufacturers had distinctive styles – unlike today’s offerings where a few owners have grouped companies together, sharing basic substructures and where the cost of developing safety features like crumple zones, has resulted in a dismal similarity across the board. Furthermore, in my lifetime, the consequences of the unfettered growth of private car ownership and consequently, on the growth of cities and the colonisation of the countryside by commuters, the devastation of the planet, has become more than apparent in the form of climate change. You can read an article I wrote with a blueprint for changing our relationship with the car here. Still, I have a love of certain cars – now mostly vintage, for their flair and design…
My Grandfather – Arthur, who died before I was born, with an Austin Seven embellished with a splendid Art Deco lady on it’s bonnet. The Austin Ten was the first family car that my father drove us around in…
I particularly love Citroens, starting with this “Maigret” prewar beauty (photographed on a recent reunion of schoolfriends at The Shuttlewoth Collection where all the aircraft and cars are in fully working condition) but going on to the “goddess” – the Citroen DS – surely the most futuristic car ever to grace the roads. and what about the Citroen Pallas whose dashboard resembles that of the Starship Enterprise…
Another Citroen I would love to own – the iconic 2CV – a car with the largest sunroof, can be wound up to 70mph on the motorway, seats which can take out to be used as deck chairs and all the panels of the car can be changed using just a screwdriver… Photographed in Paris last Summer!
A beautiful two-tone VW Beetle – the old shape which I still prefer – photographed on a visit to Bayeux to see the Tapestry…
Cooking
A Sabatier carbon-steel knife I have used every day for 58 years…
My Mother was traditional in her view of gender roles, she stayed at home and my Dad was the breadwinner – furthermore, she declared that I did not need to learn to cook but my sisters would one day have husbands and so she taught them cooking whilst I merely watched whenever I could and leaned what there was to learn. Out of my sisters and I, only I have cooked professionally! When I left to go to university (a wife not yet in the offing) my parents gave me two recipe books “Cooking in a Bedsitter” by the journalist /writer Katherine Whitehorn, and “The Paupers Cookbook” by Jocasta Innes also a journalist and writer. My ambitions in cooking aspired to more than expediency and economy and so I added “A Book of Mediterranean Food” by the somewhat racy food writer Elizabeth David – a book and writer credited with changing the course of food in postwar England (I didn’t know about the racy bit back then but I am sure it would only have encouraged me to experiment both in the kitchen and beyond…) Books on Chinese and Indian cuisine followed and so I developed a kind of personal fusion style. I wrote more fully on this here as part of the Six Degrees of Separation meme. I will share from that piece, the other gift my parents gave me as I left for university – and if the cookery books were a little banal – the carbon steel Sabbatier boning knife, was decidedly high class and high maintenance! Carbon steel rusts easily and so you must clean and dry it immediately after each use… I have used this knife every day for fifty-eight years, it has seen me through two food businesses and countless meals and feasts…
My essential cookery equipment:- Top row, Airfryer, Pressure Cooker (InstaPot), Frying Pan, middle row – Take-away containers for use in the microwave, Pyrex measuring Jug, old-fashioned Measuring Cone, Microwave Steamer, Wok. Bottom left: knives including an old fashioned cutlery knife for spreading things, can-opener, a wooden spoon that was once symmetrical but has worn down with stirring, spatula, slotted spoon, soup-ladle, silicone spatula, whisk, tongs (my step-daughter converted me to the usefulness of tongs) and a grater.
I confess I am not a great fan of autobiographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace. It just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. There is now a term for this type of image – “Knolling” or “Flatlay” and you can find the fascinating origin of this nomenclature here. The memory of this Exhibition (or Exhibit if you are American) has never left me and in addition, the BBC produced a series of programmes (now available as a podcast) A History of the World in 100 Objects, or in book form if you are not able to download from the BBC.
This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…
Boredom Box
I have a love of miniature worlds and also of gadgets (more of that under G) and I put this tiny box together to carry in my jacket pocket so that I might never be found at a loose end… It contains a Codewords puzzle, a Sudoku set from a Christmas Cracker, some wool and a miniature crochet hook so that I might practise or demonstrate Tunisian crochet, an IKEA pencil, plus the tools from a cheap Swiss Army card whose cheapness was revealed when the casing broke – consisting of a pen, a nail file, tweezers, a toothpick and a pair of scissors. I have never had to use the boredom box in anger but it is as well to be porepared
Business
I realise that this is not strictly an object apart from the fact that every picture exists as a print, a slide or just a digital collection of 1’s and 0’s… This is the factory where I work 2.5 days a week (semi-retired)… Myself (centre) with some of the staff of the bakery in the factory in Bradford, England. We make Gelato, Puddings and Gateaux for our own Restaurants and also Wholesale. The thing that stood out (pardon the pun) for me in this picture, was how much taller I am ( at 6′ 2″) than my colleagues apart from Adam who is from Sudan – a country noted for tall thin people!
Let me say at the outset – I am not a good businessman – at least when pursuing business on my own account… You may have gleaned from the A for Art and Architecture, that I had some difficulty deciding what course to pursue in life although I prefer not to think of this as indecision but rather as having too many options to choose from. For many years, if asked what I did, I would say “Designer”, and that covered a lot of activities – Signwriter, Draughtsman, Architectural dabbler and these are all creative roles though within the confines of a brief or practical application. There has also been another quite different string to my bow – working in business, which I came to enjoy – and although I frequently got to employ my design skills in the service of those businesses I worked for or set up, I would say that there has never been a perfect balance between creativity and business skills – except perhaps my restaurant, but that will come under R…
A 1970’s bottle of Liquid Gumption from the time I worked at the factory producing it. This bottle feature in a website called “Rubbish Walks” which collects and displays a museum of rubbish…
Actually, the first business I worked in was a factory making Liquid Gumption (cream cleanser), Woodwards Gripe Water, and Wrights Coal Tar Soap and they were made by Sanitas located quite near to where I was living in London at the time. I had just left my first job after University, working for The Greater London Council under “Red” Ken Livingston where I had spent a year as a Trainee Administrator (learned how to write reports) and a year in the Print and Design Section (learned how to produce artwork for print by paste-up) but since these roles had either not suited or proved dead-ends, I needed a job to pay the rent and went to a work agency. After a week digging out huge tanks full of dried silica slurry, and having proved myself as a hard worker, the company took me on to work on Liquid Gumption kitchen and bathroom cream cleanser which was swapping silica(hazardous to the worker’s health) for chalk as the “scouring” agent.
A bottle of Woodwards Gripe Water similar to the one produced in the 70’s but probably lacking that alcohol used to extract the ginger flavouring…
The department making this very old soap, had the worst smell I have ever smelled during the manufacture – we had to go through this department to reach the canteen and you took a deep breath and tried to make it through to the other end without taking another…
The factory also made Wrights Coal Tar Soap and Woodwards Gripe Water which in those days, in addition to the active ingredient, Bicarbonate of Soda (to make the babies burp) and Dillseed oil (flavouring and slight anaesthetic), it also contained an extract of Ginger made by steeping dried kibbled (raked apart) ginger in pure alcohol. The finished product thus contained an appreciable amount of alcohol which no doubt helped to soothe the babies but was later deemed a health hazard and removed… We used to obtain sample bottles of the concentrated ginger tincture that had been kept by the lab for sufficient time and dilute them with water and sugar to make ginger wine/liqueur!
The Sanitas factory in Brockwell, also housed some regional offices of the company and from the factory floor you could see people moving around behind frosted glass that delivered “borrowed” light into the factory and yet we had nothing to do with those office workers. The only individual who moved between the world of management and the shopfloor was the Factory Manager, whose name I have long forgotten, but who wore a white coat – little did I think that I would one day also wear a white coat and occupy that very same role… It says something about the industrial relations of the 1970’s that such stratification existed and I like to think that it is a little better today…
The next business I worked for was called The Good Food Shop and was in Lamb’s Conduit Street in London and was run by one, Tony Page who sadly I have lost touch with. It was here that I blagged my way into cooking at weekends to take a little pressure off the chef. I was a reasonable though enthusiastic cook but here I learned to make 6 buckets of salad each morning, six quiches, ratatouille, chilli-con-carne, beef-in-beer, and other staple dishes of the time which stood me in good stead when I eventually opened my own restaurant. I later went to work full-time for Tony when he acquired the shop next door and wanted to open a Wholefood Shop about which I knew a little more than him. After The Good Food Shop closed due to losing half it’s lunchtime trade when the newspaper industry moved from Fleet Street to Wapping, I worked in several businesses with Tony. I will forever be indebted to Tony for introducing me to the spreadsheet which in those pre-PC days, he produced on graph paper, in pencil with lots of rubbing out. Excel spreadsheets form a large part of my work today – chiefly monitoring prices and profitability of products in the factory where I work.
What I am forced to admit, is that whilst I have not succeeded in my own businesses, I have been “a useful engine” in other people’s businesses (more of that later). Creativity exercises one part of my brain and business skills another – I have never found a position or activity in which the balance is quite right…
Unlike my partner Barbara, who grew up with no books in the house, I have always been surrounded by books, my father’s collection of post-war economy cover Penguins and Pelicans sat outside his bedroom door in their now iconic orange (fiction), azure (non-fiction) with other colours for biography and crime. My parents bought the complete Encyclopedia Britannica which was for us what the internet is today. Other bookshops contained all of Dickens unabridged, wrist-wearying hardbacks – and then there was the local library. At four books each a week, my youngest sister, Helen, would choose the Enid Blyton books she had not yet read and immediately begin reading in the corner of the library, carry on in the car going home and by tea-time she was finished the first of her four picks – the result – she became a speed-reader which was confirmed when her school in Australia (more of that later) tested all the pupils to determine their reading level.
This bookcase, the one beside the desk where I am writing from, represents about two-ninths of the books in the house. These particular ones contain reference books, but also poetry, plays, design, art, music to play and some novels. Elsewhere there are cookery books, therapy and a lot more novels and at least a third of all the shelves are double stacked…
I read once, that everyone, by the time they become an adult, has picked a character from a book they’ve read, on which to model themselves. I wonder if that means that in an age where children read fewer books, characters from film and tv are now role models – Elon Musk certainly seems to have imagined himself as some kind of super-hero though sadly appears to have become a super-villain… After reading this theory, I searched my soul for clues as to who I might have picked and came to the conclusion that it might have been “Doc” in John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. He was a real-life Marine Biologist who lived in Cannery Row and as well as being a close friend of Steinbeck, Doc seems to have been able to mix with everyone in Cannery Row from the “bums” in the Palace Flophouse to the girls in the whorehouse (though he was not a client). Doc was known to entertain “high-class dames” when he would fire up classical music on his gramophone. Doc and Steinbeck wrote up a marine biology expedition which Doc invited Steinbeck along on and the result was The Log from the Sea of Cortez. My mother was proud to say that she raised us to be able to speak with anyone from a tramp to the queen so it is perhaps not surprising that I should have identified with and modelled myself on such an egalitarian and kind polymath…
I am addicted to books and goodness knows what my children will do with them all if we are not forced to downsize before departing this mortal coil – then all the special books that have associations none but I or Barbara know, will stand on a level playing field and if they are not chosen to be kept, will suffer the indignity of the market place or worse – the charity shop – perhaps I need to think about that…
Barbara
A photograph of Barbara during lockdown when we were lucky enough to spend 6 months locked down in Crete. We shouldn’t have been at this beach where the cafe was of course closed and we had the place to ourselves. Though it was Winter in Crete, there were many sunny days like this…
I am not going to say too much about my partner and love of my life Barbara, partly for her privacy and because this is not her story but there were many times when I counted on her support just as she receives from me. We have been together, with a couple of brief hiatus’ for 42+ years. The picture above featured in a poetry post I made called One Day which will tell you all you need to know…
I confess I am not a great fan of autobiographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace. It just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. There is now a term for this type of image – “Knolling” or “Flatlay” and you can find the fascinating origin of this nomenclature here. The memory of this Exhibition (or Exhibit if you are American) has never left me and in addition, the BBC produced a series of programmes (now available as a podcast) A History of the World in 100 Objects, or in book form if you are not able to download from the BBC. This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…
Brushes +, Top left, a handy brush roll, once my mother’s; top right, plastic palettes, and below them a selection of palette knives and a glass container for water; bottom left, large brushes for watercolour, centre my watercolour brushes and to their right, sponge brushes for large-scale calligraphy and bottom right, one of many sketchbooks – this particular one is paper made from elephant dung which has proved to be quite absorbent making it good for quick outdoor sketches. Not all the pictures in this A to Z will be “knolling style” and I am not sure whether the original Parker Knoll technician who invented the form would find this example nearly neat enough…
If a Writer is a person who writes then I may consider myself to be a writer but if the same stricture were applied to being an Artist, then I could not claim that title, at least not on a regular basis. Of course, writing is an art form, but there was a time when I did seriously consider the possibility of becoming a “Fine Artist” and for that matter, I briefly considered studying to be an Architect. I decided against being a painter because I saw even at 16, how the art world works – you find a gallery that likes your work and they promote you until you want to do something different in style and then they say “No! Do more of what sells!!!” (Unless you achieve the stature of say, David Hockney and then you can do whatever the hell you like!) So you must submit or starve in a garret… A slight simplification, but enough to put me off going down that road. As for Architecture, I took out a book from the library whose first chapter simply said “So you want to become an Architect?” and the next chapter, with even greater brevity, said, “Don’t!” It then went on to outline the seven-year process of qualifying as an Architect before you really enter the workforce and have to find your own path. The same logic caused me to reject joining the Royal Air Force at 16 because even though paying your way through University and attaining a pilot licence were tempting, there was no guarantee that you would be fit to become a fighter pilot at 21 and who knows what else you might end up doing – perhaps not even flying at all – uh-uh!
A box of fish photographed (much to my partner’s puzzlement) on Naxos and painted some years later in Ireland.
This multimedia piece was made in the studio I set up for both signwriting and art when I first moved to Sligo in 1995.
But having spent the first paragraph of a sort of memoir saying what I didn’t choose to do, I did continue to be an artist on and off and I have worked in Architecture to an extent, and so this first post of the 2025 A to Z Challenge celebrates these two areas of endeavour by me. How did I even get into Art? Well in 1968, my father took a sabbatical year from his post as a Senior Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering at Oxford and spent two terms as an exchange lecturer at the University of New South Wales. In 1968 it was cheaper for a family of five, plus my Granny, to go by ship than to fly to Australia, and so we had a world cruise thrown in. Four weeks around the Cape of Good Hope, because the Suez Canal was closed due to the Six-Day War, then six weeks across the Pacific and via the Panama Canal back to England. Needless to say, this was a mind-expanding experience for a fourteen-year-old on many levels, but one thing that happened had far-reaching consequences. We disembarked the ship in Perth, Western Australia and spent two weeks with some relations on a farm near Bunbury. Growing there we encountered Paper-bark Gum Trees that like all gum trees, shed their leaves continuously all year round and so are in effect, evergreen but they also shed their bark and as the name implies, the Paper-bark comes away in wads of multi-layered tissue-thin, varicoloured bark ranging from red, through browns to white and even black if bush fires have blown past the tree. Later in Sydney, we visited a gallery where some artist had collaged paper-bark along with oil-painted sky and lake. My mother criticised this combination and felt hat with the palette offered by the paperbark, oil paint was unnecessary. My father challenged her and said that if that was the case then she should demonstrate it for herself. So our relatives in Bunbury duly sent a parcel of bark and together with dried seeds, leaves, moss and suchlike, she collaged landscapes which were well received back in Oxford. She next set about organising weekend exhibitions on the University Park railings and for several summers we children had to spend every weekend sitting at the exhibition. Eventually, I decided to have a go myself and produced and even sold a few there. You could saunter up behind people and earwig on their comments and I came to learn a universal truth about art – Even if You the Artist Do Not Like a Piece – There May Be Someone Out There Who Thinks It’s the Bees’s Knees!
One of my mother’s Australian Paper-bark collage pictures.
Later, I found it necessary to stay on an extra year at school and not having a full timetable, decided to add Art and Geology to the Geography A-Level I was re-taking. Yet still I had only 11 hours of timetabled lessons and so I was allowed out of school to visit some of the great museums and art galleries of Oxford. I discovered the Print Room of the Ashmolean Museum (a kind of mini British Museum) and if they weren’t too busy, the staff would sit me down with – wait for it – boxes of Turner watercolours (5) or a box of Thomas Girtin’s work (a friend of Turner). I doubt whether they would allow such things today, but these boxes of old masters’ work had a direct influence on my own efforts for which I am eternally grateful and I can still visualise the luminous paintings of Venice by Turner, to this day… However, for the reasons already given, I decided not to pursue Fine Art and yet I have, from time to time, got my paints, or other mediums out ,and made an artworl or two, so here are some of those pieces…
A street in Valetta, Malta – watercolour 1980.
A screen print based on a tiny photograph in a national newspaper of the annual Thames Barge and Smack Race – a wonderful punning name that conveys the jostling that can characterise a sailing race. I have used the overlapping transparent layers to try and convey how the skipper of a boat in a race must focus on everything from the adjacent boat to what is going on in the distance…
This was a wedding present to my late sister and her husband and is a base relief carved in 22mm MDF from a drawing by Eric Gill, artist and the typographer who gave us Gill Sans and Gill Transport (London Underground).
The Haiku at the bottom of this piece is the source of the title of this blog – multimedia 1995
A work in progress after a holiday in Morocco, the largest canvas I’ve tried at about 5.5 feet 4.3 feet, Acrylic.
And what of Architecture? I had studied Technical Drawing at school and I occasionally produced some illustrations for my father’s work and although I was heavily influenced him in many ways, I was not strong enough at maths to follow him into engineering and despite his disdain for architects generally, he admired Frank Lloyd Wright who made his students go out into the desert and build their own buildings. And so, briefly, I considered Architecture until I read “that book” Instead, I eventually worked as a jobbing signwriter for many years – an applied art, where you get to develop your own style and inject a modicum of creativity into every job – more of that in later posts. However, in a life-changing moment, I broke my hip in a car crash, spent a year on crutches and could no longer work up ladders so a change of direction beckoned. A friend of mine in Ireland, where I was living at the time, got me a job part-time, teaching Modelmaking to Interior Architecture students in the Engineering Department of Sligo Technical College (now a university I believe). Nothing fancy like finished building models but rather, how to think in 3D – so lots of cereal packets and Sellotape! Whilst doing this, I had the chance to first learn, and then teach AutoCad which is the computer version of the Technical Drawing I had learnt at school. Eventually, we moved back to England to see more of our growing grandchildren and AutoCad enabled me to get a job as a professional draughtsman starting at the ripe old age of 50! A few years later I worked in an architect’s office for a year or so – the oldest one there and yet the office junior. Along the way, I designed a house in Ireland which got built and designed the converted stables which is now our house and I have been the draughtsman for a Mosque in Bradford for the last eight years (mosque building is an incremental affair as funds are raised).
A house that one of my AutoCAD evening class students asked me to design for a lovely site he had bought. He subsequently sold the site and the design (which I had got through planning) to somebody else, who dropped some of the features and built it. This is a common story for architects, the clients making changes – anyway, I visited the house when the outside was complete and they were just finishing decorating inside – so that’s another one off the bucket list – a house designed and built…
Our house before and after – a “stable-conversion” which had been used as a workshop fo decades and which I redesigned as a house….
So despite the non-choices I made when contemplating what to do with my life, I have, amongst many other things, worked in an Engineering Department like my father, painted a body of pictures and dabbled in Architecture after all…
I confess I am not a great fan of auto-biographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace but it just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. There is now a term for this type of image – “Knolling” or “Flatlay” and you can find the fascinating origin of this nomenclature here. The memory of this Exhibition (or Exhibit if you are American) has never left me and in addition, the BBC produced a series of programmes (now available as a podcast) A History of the World in 100 Objects, or in book form if you are not able to download from the BBC.
This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…
Just to give you a little taste of what is to come, the photo below, which is in Knolling style (though not all will be – this A to Z is a sort of metaphorical Knolling) shows the contents of the briefcase I take to work with me on my semi-retired 2.5 days a week…
Top row (left to right) Laptop, Wireless Mouse, Charging Cable, Pocket Book for Analogue Notes, Pens and Highlighter, various papers and copies of my chapbook. Middle Row, Diabetic Testing Kit, Hairbrush, Folding Toothbrush, Lip balm, Mouthwash, Dry Mouth Spray, Laser Measuring tool and case, Earbud set, Electronics Case Third Row, Wireless Phone Charger, Plug-in Phone Charger, Superman Power-pack, Various Electronic Cables Bottom Row, Briefcase, Masks (left over from Covid), Scale Ruler, Folding Shopping Bag, Ibuprofen, Reading Glasses, USB sticks Lower Right, Multi-tool Pen-knife.
10 lines Even lines are just 2 syllables Odd lines are longer but without syllable restriction The even lines make their own mini-poem if read separately The meter and rhyme are unspecified
And the theme of your poem should be
The history/meaning of your name or one you wish you had or an imaginary one
I was born in the gatehouse of Frewin Hall, Oxford which is part of Brasenose College of which my father was then a don. In return for this subsidised college house, part of his duties was to lock the gates at 9pm each night as the students were curfewed in those days – imagine! My Grandfather on my Father’s side died during my Mother’s pregnancy with me and this poem tells the result of the conflict between my domineering Grandmother and my parents… There is a Frewin family who presumably built Frewin Hall but as far as I know, I am the only person to have Frewin as a middle name, so if you have ever wondered about my “handle” Frewin55, now you know. (I was born 8th March 1955.)
The view through the gateway of Frein Hall – the cottage where I was born at home is on the left and you can find out more about it here
