July 1975 – Ian Louis Harris

Creative Avoidance During The School Holidays, With Alan Cooke, William Gilbert, Arthur Sullivan & The Telly, Not Least The Ashes: Last Two Weeks Of July 1975

Shouldn’t you be doing…something else, Harris?

This period of the summer of 1975 is the first documented example of my unquestionably masterful deployment of creative avoidance…that thing otherwise known as procrastination.

My Bar Mitzvah (the Jewish coming of age ritual) was coming up on 9 August. I was all-but grounded by my mum – I should imagine in part to focus on my preparation and in part for fear of misfortune befalling me ahead of the big day.

This is how I occupied myself:

I know you need a transcript with explanations, dear, reader, just give me a moment…

Sunday, 20 July 1975 – [Hebrew classes] prize day. Got best pupil cup! I am the greatest. Went to Makro. Two hour wait.

It was quite a surprise to win a star pupil prize at Brixton cheder. More than a year earlier, I had confessed to the Rabbi that I didn’t believe in God and wondered whether, in those circumstances, it was appropriate for me to progress with my Bar Mitzvah. Rabbi Ginsbury “explained” that it was. That story is told in this linked piece – here and below:

“Freed At Last, Freed At Last…”: Brixton Cheder In Early 1974

Monday 21 July 1975 – uneventful. Did some recording etc. TV Star Trek, My Honourable Mrs.

Tuesday 22 July 1975 – more recording. Uneventful.

Wednesday 23 July 1975 – Alan [Cooke] came. Lovely day. TV BA and LC [Bud Abbot & Lou Costello] in The Noose Hangs High

Well done, Cookie. You were clearly deemed to be safe enough company, at least if you came over to our place, for me to have some respite from my Bar Mitzvah preparations…not that I see any sign of preparations in the diary.

The phrase “lovely day” tells me that this must have been a real highlight for me during that period. I suspect that we spent some of the time playing that makeshift game of ours, where we set up Hot Wheels tracks and flat pack cowboy town houses, using the hot wheels cars to demolish the houses. We brought new meaning to the term “creative destruction”. Such a shame we couldn’t video our activities on smart phones in those days – those Hot Wheels demolition runs must have looked so cool…

…which is more than can be said, most likely, for the Abbot and Costello film. That pairing never did, for me, what Laurel & Hardy and/or The Marx Brothers could do.

Thursday, 24 July 1975 – went to Brixton. Had haircut. Saw Grandma Jenny.

Friday 25 July 1975 – uneventful day. More recording. TV Mahler’s 8th and Ten from the Twenties.

That broadcast of Mahler’s 8th, which was the first night of the Proms that year, was a memorably big deal in our household. It was a simultaneous broadcast on TV and stereo radio, which dad was very keen to experience to the full. I do recall my mother’s verdict on Mahler – I paraphrase:

not for me – too much going on. Mahler is music for culture vultures.

You can judge for yourselves, as the recording of that very concert is available on YouTube:

Saturday 26 July 1975 – shule in morning. Shopping afternoon. TV Crown Court.

Sunday, 27 July 1975 – went to Makro. Got typewriter and paper. TV Italians, Robin Hood.

That very first typewriter of mine, which was not of the highest quality, played an essential role in my clandestine “career” as a gossip columnist at Keele several years later:

The Immaculate Conception Of H. Ackgrass: At Keele With Pete Wild & On Merseyside With Bobbie Scully, Early January 1984

Monday 28 July 1975 – cleared out room. TV Star Trek, My Honourable Mrs, The Happy Catastrophe.

Tuesday 29 July 1975 – went shopping in morning, got more WSG and ASS [William S Gilbert & Arthur S Sullivan] records. TV Time Detective, Al Jolsen.

Wednesday, 30 July 1975 – had haircut, more WSG and ASS. Two presents, all okay.

I had almost forgotten about my obsession with Gilbert & Sullivan that summer. I am sure that it was partly distraction activity from what must have felt like a trial by July, i.e. the impending “trial by ordeal” of my Bar Mitzvah, but also because I had enjoyed school productions such as Trial By Jury and knew that my parents were warm to the material too.

I wasn’t buying the records – heaven forbid – I was borrowing them from the library and scraping them onto tape. I was also reading about the Gilbert & Sullivan genre and memorising some of the patter songs. The evolution of my taping habit can be seen on the following sheet. The labours of that fortnight being tapes 8 to 14:

Thursday, 31 July 1975 watched cricket – England collapse and come back. WSG & ASS. Routine.

Did I mean that England’s batting collapse was routine? Or that England’s batting collapsing and then coming back was routine? Or that me doing more taping and memorising of Gilbert & Sullivan material was now routine?

Actually there was nothing routine about that second Ashes Test, which was at Lord’s.

I wouldn’t have realised it at the time, but the unusually long time it took for debutant David Steele to appear at the crease when the first wicket fell, was due to his getting lost in the pavilion, on his way from the home dressing room to the Long Room, by descending further than he should have done into the basement.

That is one of my favourite Lord’s stories – a location/anecdote that I point out as a matter of course to any guest that I am showing around the Lord’s pavilion. Which is something I do with some regularity these days. Routine in fact.

Friday, 1 August 1975 – watched cricket – England OK. WSG & ASS of course.

Saturday 2 August 1975 – went to shule. Found dad’s watch. Heatwave.

Dad was good at mislaying watches. The 1975 “reported incident” will have been his beloved Omega watch. But I remember he had a “scientific” watch that he hid before going on holiday in the mid 1970s (perhaps 1975 or 1976) and never found again. Janie and I discovered it in his “muck room” (workshop) when clearing the house in 2012!

I have asked Gemini what the weather was like in London on 2 August 1975. It replied:

On 2 August 1975, London was at the beginning of a significant heatwave, with temperatures widely reaching around 32°C (89.6°F) by that date or shortly after.

Things were certainly hotting-up a week before my Bar Mitzvah.

But where in my diary is any mention of me preparing, other than going to shule on the Saturday mornings leading up to the big day? Presumably, in my 12-and-a bit year-old, secular mind, the words and music of WS Gilbert and Arthur S Sullivan were ample preparation for Hebrew recitative from the testaments.

“A wandering minstrel, I, a thing of shreds and patches…”

The First Week Of The School Summer Holidays, 13 to 19 July 1975

Yes, I know, you can’t read it. I’ll transcribe it below. Not a lot went on. My main purpose for the next few weeks was to be ready for my Bar Mitzvah, which was a big thing. Between times, it seems I did a lot of taping and watching television and not much going outside and enjoying the summer.

Sunday, 13 July 1975 – classes good. Played boule with dad. TV West Side Story.

Monday 14 July 1975 went to West End. Had bar mitzvah test. Passed with flying colours. TV Star Trek, My Honourable Mrs.

Tuesday, 15 July 1975 – classes good. Last lesson with Morris. TV The Gold Diggers of 1935.

Wednesday, 16 July 1975 played with Andy. Made more recordings. Got a case. Deciding holiday.

Thursday, 17 July 1975 – made more recordings, TV Apollo – Soyuz link up – landmark, Three Comedies of Marriage.

Friday, 18 July 1975 – another uneventful day. Went to Uncle Cyril [next door], more tapes etc, TV Main Chance.

Saturday 19 July 1975 – went to shule in morning. Uneventful afternoon. TV The Jokers, Crown Court.

The tapes I was making, colluding with “Uncle” Cyril Barnett next door, were a mixture of gramophone records and reel-to-reel tapes of his.

One box set of gramophone records comprised a collection: Herbert Von Karajan Karajan Conducts The Popular Classics. I taped the whole collection apart from:

those items I already had (I had been given a box set of Tchaikovsky Ballet Suites for my Bar Mitzvah)
Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus, which my mum would have deemed inappropriate – not least for a kid who was about to have his Bar Mitzvah. Mum’s attempts to dissuade me from Christian sacred music failed dismally, as my interest in early music (although not religion per se) blossomed later, but that’s another set of stories.

Here is a link to a YouTube Music playlist of the von Karajan collection as I recorded it (i.e. in the sequence I recorded the items)

The other material mostly comprised albums from musicals of the 1960s. I’ll trawl my lists for those and playlist them separately. One of them, I recall, was Fiddler on the Roof sung in Yiddish, which pleased Grandma Anne no end. It does sound appropriate (albeit a bit weird to the untrained ear) given the context of the musical. It occurs to me, of course, that you can find pretty much anything on YouTube music, and of course that obscure thing was no exception. Here’s a link if you are curious – I’ll listen to it some other time, for old time’s sake – although I think this recording is a more recent album.

Breaking Up Isn’t Hard To Do: The Last Week Of Term In My 2AK Year At Alleyn’s, 6 to 12 July 1975

Me & Grandma Anne A Few Weeks Later

So much happened in that week, which was the last of my second year at Alleyn’s. Here’s the diary page.

Naturally, readers are already writing in to complain that they cannot read my scribble, even though I haven’t even finished writing up this piece yet. Here’s a transcript:

Sunday, 6 July 1975 – Went to classes. Grandma Anne gave me £100. Great.

Monday, 7 July 1975 – more relaxing. Fives good. TV Sportstown, Star Trek, Waltons, Horizon.

Tuesday, 8 July 1975 – classes good. No bar mitzvah class. Uneventful.

Wednesday, 9 July 1975 – we won cricket. I got a hat-trick and eight runs. TV The Ascent of Man.

Thursday, 10 July 1975 – classes good. Picking up mix-up. TV Jacques Cousteau, Comedy of Marriage.

Friday, 11 July 1975 – broke up from school hurrah. TV Walt Disney, Celebrity Knockout. England flop in first test.

Saturday 12 July 1975 – shule in the morning, Andrew in the afternoon. Aussies dish out more punishment. Susan’s wedding.

£100 was a princely sum in those days. This was my bar mitzvah present. Of course I was allowed nowhere near it – straight into a savings account where it probably ended up making a small but significant contribution to the first deposit I made on a flat nearly a quarter-of-a-century later.

Still, no wonder I have a dreamy expression on my face in the headline photo, which was taken at the bar mitzvah party a few weeks later. I have previously written up one quirky aspect of that party. It was Candappa’s fault, sir…

My Very Brief Junior Career As A Limbo Dancer, The Peacock Club, 10 August 1975

I have also previously written up my hat trick taking heroics in the cricket at Alleyn’s school. A relatively common topic of my conversation, even 50 years later, when talking about my own cricket playing “career”…because there’s not much else of note to talk about.

The Day I Took A Hat Trick At Cricket, Alleyn’s School, 9 July 1975

The phrase, “broke up from school hurrah” sounds like something out of a Billy Bunter book and doesn’t read like me – but it does indicate my enthusiasm for that Alleyn’s school year to have ended – an annus mirabilis (by my standards) in sport but annus horribilis academically.

I had been eagerly anticipating the opportunity to follow England in the 1975 Ashes. I had not fully engaged with cricket aged 9/10 when Australia had previously visited, in 1972. By 1975, I was a proper cricket-mad youngster.

The remarks “England flop” and “Australia dish out more punishment” read like headlines from tabloid newspapers that I couldn’t possibly have seen. Here’s a link to the scorecard from that first test.

I suspect that I spent more time than was good for me watching that cricketing road crash unfold in slow motion. 50 years later, I realise that my habits, in that regard, have not changed much.

I didn’t much follow popular music back then, but I do recall that Van McCoy’s The Hustle was riding high in the charts that summer and was my earworm around the time we broke up from school.

Can you listen to and watch the following vid without trying some of the moves and getting the whole tune stuck in your head as an earworm? Of course you can’t.

The Day I Took A Hat Trick At Cricket, Alleyn’s School, 9 July 1975

Ascent of Man photo ESO/H. Dahle, CC BY 4.0

On 23 September 2016, I was honoured to witness live Toby Roland-Jones taking a hat-trick for Middlesex, sealing the County Championship for my beloved county – naturally I Ogblogged about it – here…

…but that wasn’t the first time I had witnessed a hat-trick live. Indeed, it wasn’t the first time that month, September 2016, that I had witnessed a hat-trick live – I saw Middlesex on the wrong side of one at Trent Bridge, Nottinghamshire – Ogblogged about here – just 17 days before the day of glory…

…but that Trent Bridge one wasn’t the first hat-trick I had witnessed live, although it was the first professional one.

The first hat-trick I witnessed live (and the last one for more than 40 years) was, remarkably, my own.

I don’t have many glorious feats of cricket to report. Let’s be honest about it; I’m not much good at playing cricket. I love it, but I’ve never been much use at it. But on 9 July 1975, the last match of 2AK’s trophy-winning season, I reported with little ceremony in my diary the following:

The irony of having watched The Ascent Of Man after such an auspicious sporting achievement is not wasted on me.

I remember the hat-trick remarkably well. I am pretty sure we were playing up on Alleyn’s top fields – not the very top one but the large, “lower top field”. That was mostly used as the second eleven pitch, but for the juniors I recall that field was divided in two, with a couple of strategically located mini-squares, so all four classes could play at the same time.

I can’t remember the name of the master who was umpiring. I do remember that my first wicket was a clean bowled and the second was a caught and bowled. The master and I then had the following conversation:

“Do you realise that you are on a hat-trick, Mr Harris?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“What are you proposing to do about it?”

“I’m going to try and bowl the same ball again, Sir.”

Which I did.

The “same ball” being pretty much my only ball. A moon ball, ludicrously slow, with an attempt at spin on it; probably a bit of top spin but nothing else in its favour other than being straight.

You see, I was very keen, so I used to practice bowling in the back drive against the garage door for ages. I didn’t get much better at bowling, but I was usually at least able to bowl the ball straight in those days.

Clean bowled.

In my memory (undoubtedly a falsy) the master was rolling on the floor laughing when I took the third wicket in three balls. I’m sure he really did laugh, anyway.

9 July 1975, a truly memorable date in (my personal) cricket history. The ill-fated 1975 Ashes series started the very next day; I don’t think this fact is even faintly relevant to my story, but I wanted to write it nonetheless. I can write what I like on Ogblog.

A lot of very good bowlers have played an awful lot of cricket without ever taking a hat-trick. I know that I’m not and wasn’t ever a good bowler. My hat-trick was at a very elementary level and only has significant meaning to me. But it is a memory I have carried with me all my days since and I shall continue to cherish that memory until I am gaga and/or dead.

I wonder who the hat-trick victim was? That much has slipped my mind completely. His too, almost certainly.

The Production We Didn’t See – Entertaining Mr Sloane by Joe Orton, Duke of York Theatre, Possibly 7 July 1975

Mum sporting cruel spectacles

Michael Lempriere had arranged for our drama class to go and see Entertaining Mr Sloane by Joe Orton. It would have been the mid 1970s Royal Court revival production (probably the West End transfer thereof), with Beryl Reid as Kath, Malcolm McDowell as Sloane, James Ottaway as Kemp and Ronald Fraser as Eddie.

Here is a link to some good resources and reviews of that production. Good reviews from that source, naturally. It seems that the Spectator hated it though; a harsh paragraph at the end of a lot of stuff about other productions here.

Anyway, when my mum got wind of it that we were going to see THAT play, she went into high horse mode, for reasons I cannot quite work out. I think she just felt that we were far too young for…whatever it was…not that she really knew anything about it, other than the fact that she probably mentioned it to a friend and that friend looked horrified at the thought. perhaps a sample of two priggish friends.

Mum was probably in a grumpy mood generally at that time – she was in and out of hospital for the first half of that year, culminating in a hip replacement in May. Anyway, she decided not merely to ground me from this one – I might have got away with just minor embarrassment for that. She got on to the school and got the outing cancelled. How un-hip was that?

Several of my drama pals were mightily unimpressed with this, as was I. We were all very disappointed as much as anything else. Michael Lempriere handled the matter with great dignity I’m sure, but that couldn’t prevent the ribbing. In particular, I recall Bob Kelly giving me a hard time; not least suggesting my mother’s physical as well as behavioural similarities with Mary Whitehouse. As my mother had chosen to go down the cruel spectacles line during the mid 1970s (illustrated with a 1977 picture below) this was a difficult charge to deny.

I’m not entirely sure when the theatre trip that never was should have happened. My diary is silent on the whole matter. I am guessing it was supposed to be an after exams jolly at the end of my second year, but it might just have been a start of the next academic year jolly for our drama group. If the latter, we didn’t miss out on Ottaway and McDowell, we missed out on Harry H. Corbett as Ed and Kenneth Cranham as Sloane.

I did eventually get to see a production of this play, but not until January 2001 at the Arts Theatre. My moral compass was not adversely affected by witnessing the play, as far as I can tell, nor was Daisy’s, although we were to be seen sunning ourselves in South-East Asia only a few weeks later…

Entertaining Mr Sloane by Joe Orton, The Arts Theatre, 27 January 2001

Meeting With Triumph And Disaster At The End Of My 2AK Year At Alleyn’s School

Triumph on the cricket pitch meets disaster in the exam hall

By my mediocre standards as a sportsperson, my second year at Alleyn’s was an annus mirabilis. Actually, the success all seems to have come in a rush in the final term, so it was possibly no more than a terminus mirabilis.

Tony King: “Even yer Latin was pretty shite, Harris!”

No week better sums up the peaks and troughs of that particular period of my school life than the one depicted and described here.

I know, the words need transcribing. Here goes:

Sunday 29 June 1975 – Went to classes sports. Got certificate for second place in the 4 x 80 m relay – very enjoyable time.

Monday 30 June 1975 – the swimming gala. We came ↓ [bottom, presumably]. Getting some [exam] results, some not too good. TV Star Trek, Waltons, Horizon, Anaesthesia.

Tuesday 1 July 1975 – classes good TV

Wednesday, 2 July 1975 – We’ve [2AK] won the cricket league by beating to 2BM 86-80. TV The Ascent of Man

Thursday, 3 July 1975 – uneventful day. Preparation for concert. TV Jacques Cousteau, Comedy of Marriage.

Friday, 4 July 1975 – Day of concert. All went well. On to Grandma Anne. Don [Donald Knipe] kicked up a fuss. 24th in class.

Saturday, 5 July 1975 – had an exeat. Mum in peeve all day. TV Canon, That’s Life.

I cannot believe it. That certificate for coming second in the 4 x 80m relay failed to avoid my mother’s cull of my juvenilia and memorabilia. I do recall it had pride of place with my pile of near-irrelevant certificates for many years.

As for the swimming gala – the “we” in that comment was presumably 2AK. Our year had some cracking good swimmers in it, but, looking at my 2AK names list, we lacked most of not all of our year’s swimming and water polo heroes. Swimming was not one of my strong suits.

I had far less excuse for my dismal performance in class. Suffice it to say that my myriad extra curricula activities that year, combined with my mother’s diminished influence while in hospital/rehabilitating much of the time, had drawn my attention away from the business of learning stuff that gets results in school exams.

But who cares? 2AK won the league in the interclass cricket that year, no doubt strongly influenced by my voice-captaincy.

Parenthetically, I still have no recollection of any duties performed by the vice-captain in such circumstances, nor do I recall who our captain was. I’ll guess that the captain was Ian Feeley or Dave French. It’s hard to tell who was deemed to be captaincy material back then. I mean, we ALL went to the right sort of school, didn’t we?

Jumbo Jennings did not play cricket for us that season, I am 99% sure, because when he broke through in house cricket the following year, he surprised everybody…including himself probably, as I don’t think he much liked cricket.

I have copious, near-illegible notes about performance scribbled at the back of my diary. Perhaps THAT is what a vice-captain is supposed to do. The stats. I might scan those and add them as a appendix here for my completist readers and for cricket historians of the future.

As for the lower school concert on the Friday…

…my role is neither mentioned in my diary nor in the quaint, comprehensive write up for Scribblerus by Mr Kingman, which is linked here.

I’m pretty sure that I had been elbowed out of the lower school orchestra by the end of the year, by dint of being so very, very awful at playing the violin. My mother never really got over that, coming from a family of virtuoso violinists and multi-instrumentalists…

Turn It Up To Max & Spit: The Baltic Origins Of My Mother’s (Marcus) Family Revealed

…how come Andy Levinson, from a family of medics, was making so much better a fist of the violin than mum’s little darling? Jovito Athaide is also mentioned in that concert write up and I do remember him as being a musical talent. It was so sad to learn that his life was cut tragically short through heart failure.

I do vaguely remember the Tom Sawyer dramatization, which is also mentioned. I don’t suppose my deep south accent cut the mustard then, any more than it would now, so I’ll guess that my role in that concert was to be a gopher/fixer for the teachers.

Don Knipe “kicking up a fuss” at Grandma Anne’s place is part of a long and very peculiar story. Edwina Green, Don’s wife, was our family doctor. They were great friends of my grandma and indeed the whole “Streatham branch” of our family. The story is set out in the following linked piece, if you like reading weird:

Strange Case Of Dr Green And Mr Knipe…And Beluga Caviar And Scotch Whisky And A Bust Of Hitler, c22 December 1981

Moving on, I wonder whether I made the connection, back then, between “24th in Class” reported on the Friday and “Mum in a peeve all day” reported on the following day. That connection is certainly clear to me now.

The word “peeve” makes me think of Andy Levinson’s vocabulary more than my own. Do you still use that word, Andy? I certainly don’t…or at least didn’t. I might start using it again, now that the diary has brought it back to the front of my mind.

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