‘Tis a day to remember my dad, who would have reached his 100th birthday today, had he lived a further 12 years and a few days.
I have very few pictures of dad when he was little, but I love this one:
As a baby and small boy, he grew up in the slums of Fitzrovia. People think of the East End of London as being the overcrowded part where the immigrant communities lived, but there was a West End equivalent which was (to some extent still is) the centre for the rag trade in London.
I’ll write a bit more about that elsewhere, but suffice it to say here that the Harris family migrated to South West London in the early 1930s, where they established themselves on Clapham Common North Side and became pillars of the South West London Jewish Community known as Bolingbroke.
As a young man dad served in the Second World war in the Ordnance Corps, mostly working on photography, cinematography and poster design. I’d like to write up some of his stories from that era at some point, but not for this piece.
He went back to art school after the war (Central) but met my mum in the early 1950s and realised that he’d need a proper job if he was going to settle down with mum.
He and his older brother Alec went into a joint venture around photography, which landed dad with Photo Mart on St John’s Hill in Battersea:
With Uncle Alec’s financial acumen and dad’s understanding of photography and cinematography, this turned out to be a reasonably good idea.
Below is mum’s favourite photo of the two of them, so woe betide me if I omit the one below, I think from 1958, the same holiday as Dad’s cinematic masterpiece, shot in Standard 8mm, also below.
Then I Came Along
My earliest Ogblog pieces about dad revolve around the wonderful recordings he made of him reading stories to me. As a small child I used to listen to these over and over. I have many, but so far have only uploaded a couple of samples:
The Gingerbread Man, c1966 – click here or below:
Hare and Guy Fawkes, dated 5 November 1967 – click here or below:
Dad had absolutely no interest in sport, yet it was dad who introduced me to Geoffrey Boycott in 1969, inadvertently lighting the cricketing touchpaper in my heart:
I haven’t yet organised many of the family holiday films and photos onto Ogblog, but they are there if you can be bothered to delve through my Flickr account…
People do look at this stuff. A researcher spotted Dad slapping on the sun tan oil, a clip I filmed in La Manga 1976, which resulted in me earning quite a few bob while dad was immortalised as a meme, in this advert for Visa.
Dad was one of the most placid fellows you are ever likely to meet. His friends often described him as laid back. Mum, a different personality, reflected that if he laid back any further, dad would probably fall over.
I hardly ever remember dad losing his temper about anything. But on one very strange occasion he did and I am proud of him for it. It is related in this strange tale – click here or below:
Dad retired in the spring of 1986 and at first found retirement hard, until he returned to the world of art and largely lost himself in there. He produced some excellent work, much of which is stored in the Noddyland attic and some of which adorns our walls.
So auspicious was dad’s 80th birthday, 11 August 1999, that we were able to organise a total eclipse of the sun as well as a birthday party at Woodfield Avenue for him. Now THAT’S impressive, no?
I could write lots more about dad- I shall write lots more on Ogblog about him, but shall do so in the context of the stuff I shall be writing up at the time. Dad wouldn’t have wanted me to go to too much trouble writing this up, simply because it would have been his 100th birthday today. He was that sort of dad.