Month: April 1974

Russell, Herbie, Cougar, Fives, Tennis, Latin & Then Months Of Silence: The Last Few Days Of Holiday & The First Few Days Back At Alleyn’s, Late April 1974

Back then, if I wrote “Herbie” I meant this anthropomorphic vehicle…

I ran out of steam for diary entry writing towards the end of April 1974. Well, I had been doing it for nearly four months by then. I suppose I had earned a sabbatical, or perhaps I was afflicted with juvenilia-writer’s-block.

When I returned to diary-writing at the end of November 1974, I think my efforts were pretty much continuous for a further 15 years. I regret the absence of entries between May and November 1974, but there’s not much I can do about that now.

Ian Sandbrook (who was my 1S form master and is now my e-mail-pen-pal) suggests that I could ask a chat-bot to make up some entries. But that strikes me as a rather low grade task for such a pinnacle of technology. If vast amounts of processing power is going to produce confabulatory text, it should do so on matters of greater import than my 11/12 year old’s diary entries.

I might try trawling my memory and the memories of other Alleyn’s alums for tales of derring-do in the summer term of 1973/74 and the autumn term of 1974/75. I certainly have a few summer holidays memories to share from that year.

Anyway, let’s make the most of what we have left, a few rather sketchy days bringing up the end of the Easter break and the start of the summer term:

Sunday, 21 April 1974 – Classes morn. Afternoon G[randma] Anne.

Monday, 22 April 1974 – Russell [Holland] – Herbie and Run Cougar Run. A good day.

Tuesday 23 April 1974 – New [term] at school, G Jenny afternoon, Classes.

Wednesday, 24 April 1974 – Sports – fives and tennis – uneventful – all ok.

Thursday, 25 April 1974 – Latin ok.

Russell Holland was a friend from my primary school, Rosemead.

There’s Russell at our Rosemead passing out parade, left of picture. Alan Cooke (both Rosemead and Alleyn’s) is the other boy in this picture

Ten years later, the words “herbie and run cougar run” might have been describing a smoke-filled room in the Keele Student’s Union performing comedy for louche, mature students from the Open University:

My First Ringroad Performance and Related Memories, Keele, 18 August 1984

…but I digress.

In 1974, it meant going to the pictures with Russell to see the films Herbie Rides Again and Run Cougar Run.

Here’s the Herbie trailer:

It’s quite a childish idea, an anthropomorphic car with a mind of its own, but then the Herbie movies were Disney films. My anthropomorphic car, Dumbo, writes sensibly about all manner of things when the fancy takes him, sometimes on my blog and sometimes on King Cricket, such as the following piece about his run in with the police…

Lord’s net practice – journey report

…but again I digress.

It seems I played a bit of tennis as well as cricket that summer term at Alleyn’s and it seems we started learning Latin, I think with Doggie Johnson, the junior school head.

Perhaps I am confusing my Hebrew classes with my Latin classes, but I think the lessons might have gone a bit like this:

OK, in truth my memory fades, but I still find that Life of Brian sketch one of Python’s very best. If other alums from my year wish to chime in with memories from that third term at Alleyn’s, real, false or just funny, now would be a good time.

If you need a musical memory jogger, the following was Number One and a sound you just couldn’t avoid at that time:

Two Weeks Of Easter Holidays In My First Year At Alleyn’s, Mid April 1974

Escaping from the Colditz prisoner of war camp…but only for fun

Tennis continued to loom large in my Easter holidays story, although it is clear from my diary entries that others were losing interest, making the visits to the tennis club rarer:

OK, OK, I’ll translate it. Just hold on a tick.

Sunday, 7 April 1974 – Yomtov [Pesach, aka Passover], so no [Hebrew] classes. Not a good day.

Monday, 8 April 1974 – Bought paints. Painted soldiers. Another bad day!!!!

Tuesday, 9 April 1974 – The Black Arrow [1973] cartoon in morn. Afternoon tennis coaching. No classes, so later tennis.

Wednesday, 10 April 1974 – A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court cartoon. Tennis very good Gary and Mark were there only -people are losing interest.

Thursday, 11 April 1974 – very uneventful.

Friday, 12 April 1974 – Good Friday – Dad home. Good fun. Dad had fun too! Shopped for suits.

Saturday, 13 April 1974 – took a rest. Uneventful day.

I managed to find the Connecticut Yankee film on YouTube, but not The Black Arrow one from the 1970s:

I’m trying to work out who Gary and Mark (the last lads standing with me playing tennis) might have been. I’ll guess that Gary was Gary Sugarman who lived in our road. Gary did have a brother whose name escapes me – possibly Mark. I don’t remember a Mark in our street or entourage from thereabouts.

Stuart Harris (my partner in crime from the glory of the tennis tournament the week before) might remember.

I Didn’t Just Learn Tennis In The School Easter Holidays Of 1974, I Smashed It

I love my note for Good Friday that I had fun and that dad had fun too. There is something rather charming about that, though I say so myself.

Let’s move on to the next week:

Sunday, 14 April 1974 – No classes. G[randma] Anne afternoon. Pesach over – bread delicious.

Monday, 16 April 1974 – Easter Monday. Morning dull. Afternoon British Museum. Elgin Marbles – sound guided.

“Hey you – frieze!”

Tuesday, 16 April 1974 – tennis morning. Afternoon uneventful.

Wednesday 17th April 1974 – nothing much at all. World At War good.

Thursday, 18 April 1974 – G[randma] Jenny afternoon. Nothing else.

Friday, 19 April 1974 – tennis morn. Afternoon barber. Timeslip, I Dream of Jeannie, good.

Saturday 20 April 1974 – Alan [Cooke] for day, Sinbad, played Colditz, Andrew [Levinson] too, v good day.

My guess is that the Sinbad we saw must have been this one – click here.

https://youtu.be/B6F3VpHXfic

I certainly didn’t own the Colditz game, so that must have entered our house with Alan or Andrew. Either of you care to own up to owning it? Escape From Colditz was its full name – click here to read all about it. I vaguely remember the game.

“V good day” is a rave review. Thanks, fellas!

Postscript: Cookie Confesses

A message from Alan Cooke which I think unequivocally solves the “source of Escape From Colditz” query:

The Cooke household certainly owned ‘Escape from Colditz’. It was an unusual board game as it required one player to be the German Security Officer who essentially had to thwart all the others.

The rules were a bit vague in some areas allowing vibrant ‘discussion’ in family play 😉

Alan Cooke, 22 April 2024

I Didn’t Just Learn Tennis In The School Easter Holidays Of 1974, I Smashed It

Stuart Harris & Me In My (Or Should I Say My Parents’) Garden, 1976

I wrote a “Fifty Years Ago” piece last week about my first tennis lesson:

Fifty Years Of Tennis, Starting At Woodfield Grove Tennis Club, 30 March 1974

I remembered that Andy and Fiona Levinson were involved and several other kids of our age from the street and local area. The following week’s diary is revealing in several additional ways.

I’ll transcribe the diary entries in full at the end of this article, because I want to focus on a couple of key facts that leap out of the page at me.

The first obvious point is that tennis gets a mention in every entry, except the Sunday one which was dominated by (Hebrew) classes and family s*it.

But the item that screamed off this page at me, inducing mixed emotions of joy and embarrassment, is the entry for 3 April:

Wednesday 3 April 1974. Morn uneventful. Afternoon tennis: Gary [Sugarman] Stewart [sic – actually Stuart Harris] and John [almost certainly Davies], M singles & doubles tournament – SH & I won!

The reason for my embarrassment is that I maintained, for best part of half a century, that I had never won anything at hand/racket sports.

True, there was the match that I had misremembered to be the crowning moment of my youthful play, a winning quarter-final against Johnny Eltham at Fives in 1975…

An Uneventful Day Playing Fives, 9 June 1975

…an event rather ingeniously commemorated by Rohan Candappa – if you click the above link you can read about it.

Then an interval of best part of half a century, until, in 2022, real tennis success in The Lowenthal Trophy at Queen’s …

Finally…Unprecedented Success At Tennis, The Queen’s Club, 11 May & 27 May 2022

…when I again asserted, it seems wrongly, that I had never previously achieved tournament success.

Yet, it seems that my very first tournament, at Woodfield Grove Tennis Club, was, in fact, a winning one.

Just imagine the scale of that tournament and what it must have meant to all concerned. At least four participants (four are named in my diary piece). Further, the tournament was won by a couple of genuinely local boys.

Stuart Harris, my partner in crime for that tournament victory, is not a relative of mine. Our street, Woodfield Avenue, was blessed with a Harris family at each end.

Ours, the smaller Harris family, just me and my parents, at the north end of Woodfield Avenue. Stuart’s family, with multiple children, at the south end of the same road. Stuart’s dad was named Nathan, known as Naff. Stuart’s family were referred to as “The Naff Harrises” to distinguish them from our family, which might thus have been described as “The Tasteful Harrises”, but were probably known as “The Peter Harrises”…or possibly an adjective I would prefer not to learn about after all this time.

Parenthetically [did you see what I did there], calling my family “The Peter Harrises” would subsequently do no good at all, when another unrelated Peter Harris moved in next door to my parents’ house. A nightmare for the postal and delivery services ensued.

The headline photo shows me and Stuart larking around in The Tasteful Harris garden a couple of years later. Sadly, we have no pictures of me and Stuart in action, pulling off our stunning tournament victory that day in 1974, but I did commission DALL-E to reimagine the scene using AI technology and I think it has done quite well:

That tournament success seems to have preoccupied me so much that I simply scrubbed out the following two days. Presumably the celebrations went on deep into the night and then into the next night…

…or perhaps I was starting to lose interest in diary writing for a while, as evidenced by my seven month “sabbatical” between late April and late November that year.

Anyway, I shall use this diary discovery to try and reconnect with Stuart after all these years (I think I have found him) and we’ll see if any amusing memories and/or law suits ensue from him.

Postscript: Stuart Harris And I Are Indeed Now Back In Touch With One Another

Stuart, amongst many other things unrelated to this piece, points out that there was a Stewart in our street: Stewart Starkin, who quite probably was part of our tennis-take-up group that Easter. Indeed, re-reading my diary entry I strongly suspect that the name Stewart does indeed refer to the other Stewart and SH refers to Stuart Harris. That means that there must have been at least five of us in that tournament, which puts the victory on an even more impressive footing, don’t you think?

Here, For The Record, Is That Entire Diary Week Transcribed.

Sunday 31 March 1974 – Classes in morn. G Anne, Ida trouble [that means a family row]. VERY BAD DAY.

Monday 1 April 1974 – Tennis v good in morn. Afternoon OK. Andrew [Levinson] for badminton.

Tuesday 2 April 1974 – Tennis instruction v good. Classes good. Donuts for class notes. [Some form of sweetmeat bribery to do our studies, if I recall correctly]

Wednesday 3 April 1974. Morn uneventful. Afternoon tennis: Gary [Sugarman] Stewart [sic – actually Stuart Harris] and John [almost certainly Davies], M singles & doubles tournament – SH & I won!

Thursday X

Friday X

Saturday 6 April 1974 – Tennis morn. Afternoon uneventful. Seder v good – sung Ma Nishtana – v enjoyable evening.

Oh boy, was I hooked on the tennis early.

Here is another 1976 take on the dynamic duo that won that Woodfield Grove trophy in 1974 – the pictures below taken the same day as the headline picture: