Ian Louis Harris

A Short Holiday In Brighton, During Which I Met Geoffrey Boycott & The Yorkshire Cricket Team, 3 September 1969

That short holiday in Brighton was one of the least memorable of my childhood, but for the fact that we happened to be staying in the same hotel as the Yorkshire cricket team.

I’ll explain the context of the holiday after I relate this seminal moment in my lifelong love of cricket.

Dad and I were in the lobby of the hotel, probably waiting for mum, at the same time as the Yorkshire team were preparing to set off from the hotel to the Sussex CCC ground; I’m guessing this was the morning before the start of the three-day match.

Our coinciding will simply have been happenstance. Dad had no interest whatsoever in any sport, let alone cricket.

But Geoffrey Boycott was a big name in those days – one of very few cricketers who might find himself on the front pages of the paper or on the television news, not just the back pages. Dad knew who he was.

So, as we found ourselves in such close proximity to a big name, dad thought he would introduce me to Geoffrey, along the following lines.

This is Geoffrey Boycott, one of the most famous cricketers in England and indeed the whole world.

Being pretty well trained for a seven-year-old, I looked up at Geoffrey and said words to the effect of:

Very pleased to meet you, Mr Boycott.

Boycott2 — “What a polite young man”, said Mr Boycott, patting me on the head: Sigerson, CC BY-SA 3.0

Geoffrey responded well to these polite enquiries. I’m told that this is not always the Geoffrey way, so he must have been in a decent mood and I guess we came across as suitably deferential, fellow hotel guests.

What a polite young man.

Geoffrey patted me on the head. He might even have added

I do like polite young men.

He then explained the teams presence to me and my dad, half-introducing us to some of the other players. For reasons I cannot explain, Phil Sharpe, Geoff Cope and Chris Old’s names stuck in my head for ever. Perhaps it is to do with the minimal number of syllables to those names.

From that holiday onwards, for many years, I thought of Yorkshire as my team. After all, I knew them. I’d met them. They were my friends.

Here is a link to the scorecard from the match Yorkshire played while staying in that Grand Hotel with us. It did not go well for Geoffrey, who had to retire hurt on 3, just a few minutes into the match. Neither did the match go well for Yorkshire.

My family took that unusually short and proximate break, because I had my adenoids and tonsils removed a couple of weeks earlier, so mum and dad felt that a short break (sea air, ice cream, that sort of thing) not too far from home was the safest option and might aid my convalescence.

There is a short home movie from that holiday – not one of dad’s best:

https://youtu.be/U_EhZsvMRbM

A few transparencies too – below is a link to the highlights of that, which includes some pictures of me in school uniform when we got home and possibly my earliest efforts with the camera – a couple of pictures of dad:

Mum and dad clearly put a lot of effort into trying to keep me amused – frankly that holiday must have been deadly dull for them.

But I met the Yorkshire cricket team on that short Brighton break and my love of all things cricket was surely sparked there.

Cinderella, Streatham Odeon, c30 December 1968

Image borrowed from Betty’s Birthday Blog on the “nigelthedame” website – click here – with thanks for both the image and the information about this production.

With gratitude to a posting on the Streatham,Balham & Tooting Memories Facebook Group, talking about the Streatham Odeon, I remembered going to see as a small child, Dick Emery (amongst others) in panto there. I did a bit of Googling to find out about it and found out quite a bit – not least through the blogpost linked above.

So, that year I saw Dick Emery, Joe Brown and no doubt some other names I would now recognise, in a production by Audrey Lupton & Arthur Lane.

An article on It’s Behind You! – Pop Stars In Panto, describes this aspect of Joe Brown’s performance:

In 1968 Joe was at the Odeon Streatham in Cinderella with Dick Emery. Joe played Buttons and as part of his routine to entertain Cinderella he performed a multi instrumental spot. In this he played guitar, acoustic guitar, ukulele, banjo lutes and even a mandolin!

Is it possible that my later-day love of early music and stringed instruments for the playing thereof was formed all the way back then? Unlikely as I had no memory of Joe Brown’s multi-instrumentation.

More likely is that I caught an earworm at that performance – Joe Brown singing I’m Henery The Eighth, I Am – the hive mind of the Streatham, Balham & Tooting Memories Facebook Group seems pretty sure that Joe sang that song in this panto. For sure I picked it up as a party piece when still a very small nipper – probably at my parents’ behest as they were keen Players’ Theatre-istas before my time and loved that sort of music hall song.

I have found an official review of this panto -in the Guardian – written by an un-woke eleven-year-old named Victoria Bourne:

Victoria Bourne Cinderella Guardian 27 Dec 1968, Fri The Guardian (London, Greater London, England) Newspapers.com

The thing that made the event especially memorable for me, was being summoned onto the stage by Dick Emery himself and answering some fiendishly difficult questions in a manner that, for some reason, seemed to make the audience laugh.

This occasion might, technically, have been the first time I ever “trod the boards” personally and certainly my first interaction with a professional performer.

I was not to see my fine words dealt with by a professional performer again until 1992, when the late great Chris Stanton (coincidentally another fine comedy actor who latterly did good panto) was the first of many to perform my lyrics in NewsRevue.

Chris Stanton: Absurdist & Realist, A Personal Tribute, 9 March 2020

So why did Dick Emery pick on me for the honour of joining the cast on stage and being an unwitting, unpaid comic? The answer is lost in the mists of time.

Possibly I waved my hand and shouted “me! me!” more vigorously than anyone else. Or perhaps my mum did the vigorous waving and shouting for me. Or maybe I just looked like the sort of cocky little kid that central casting would have chosen for the role.

We returned the following year to see Peter Noone and Norman Vaughan in Aladdin, but that, as they say, is another story.

Aladdin, Streatham Odeon, c29 December 1969

I didn’t get summoned to the stage that second time.

What’s become of my pantomime performing career?…

…I should have asked, that following year.

It’s behind you!…

…the audience should have shouted.

Family Holidays In Bournemouth, August 1967 & August 1968

Mum, Dad and I spent a couple of summer holidays at the same kosher hotel in Bournemouth , in 1967 and 1968. Probably a couple of weeks each time. Probably late August.

Were we at The Cumberland? Were we at The Normandie? Was it one of the other “Bournemouth Borscht Belt” hotels. None of us could remember – perhaps someone more knowledgeable can recognise the place from the pictures and help with a comment.

Update: Some “archaeology” on the family stereo (3D) photographs in March 2022 uncovered some lovely pictures from 1968, one of which clearly shows The Normandie Hotel. It seems I was quite a hit with the girls back then – go figure!:

The following slides are from the holiday in Bournemouth in 1967 (same hotel) and then some pictures that were taken subsequently on the same roll of film.

We took a ferry and visited Corfe Castle, amongst other things. This was before dad had that Zodiac sprayed in psychedelic colours, unfortunately, but I’ve used some music which sounds of the period anyway.

I have a little more recollection of the 1968 holiday. Perhaps in part because of the home movie from that holiday – see the silent YouTube embedded below:

Unfortunately, YouTube has blocked the soundtracked version of this film, so you’ll need to imagine hearing a soundtrack including:

Hey Jude, The Beatles;
Jumping Jack Flash, The Rolling Stones;
Baby Come Back, The Equals.

Those three tunes in particular were the soundtrack of that holiday to my memory. Especially the first of those three, which was being played incessantly on the hotel jukebox; not least by me if I could persuade daddy to part with another sixpence so I could hear Hey Jude again.

I had been recording the pop charts from the radio earlier that month, as evidenced by a reel-to-reel tape that survived the decades – written up on Ogblog – click here and below:

Pick Of The Pops Chart Rundowns, Probably 28 July 1968 & 4 August 1968, Possibly 4 August 1968 & 11 August 1968

Can this stuff really have been fifty years ago as I write, in early September 2018?

Yes.

Pick Of The Pops Chart Rundowns, Probably 28 July 1968 & 4 August 1968, Possibly 4 August 1968 & 11 August 1968

I made my first tape recordings in November 1967, from the Radio One show Pick Of The Pops – I Ogblogged about it on the 50th anniversary here:

Pick Of The Pops Top Three, 5th November 1967

Only one other similar spool of that vintage survived, from the summer of 1968. The bulk of the tape comprises most of the top 10 from two consecutive weeks; there is therefore much repetition, but one of the great joys of this tape is that it has those two week’s chart run-downs, by Alan “Fluff” Freeman:

I especially love the way he turns the name “Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich” into a single word:

Davedeedozybeakymickandtich.

I also love the bit, in one of the two chart run downs, when he starts to say “Yummy Yummy Yummy I’ve Got Love In My Tummy” but has to abandon the second part of the phrase midway through because he is running out of time.

I explained in the November 1967 article how the BBC compiled its own chart from various other ones, so it is hard to pinpoint an exact date for the broadcasts. The Sunday early evening show – it was certainly those I recorded – was a rundown of the BBC chart broadcast the previous Tuesday and I’m not sure whether the BBC tended to lag the other published charts or was trying to pre-empt them.

Anyway, the first of the two, above, would have either been broadcast on 28 July 1968 or 4 August 1968; I’d guess probably the former.

The second of the two, broadcast one week later, I captured most of the top ten as well:

At 10, Simon & Garfunkle singing Mrs Robinson:

My editing had got much better between November 1967 and July/August 1968, although was still a little juvenile (I was five going on six). For some reason, I must have hated This Guys In Love With You by Herb Alpert as I edited it out completely from its Number Nine spot. I guess it was too slow and romantic for my 5-year-old ears back then.

Sorry Herb. I rather like the song now.

I have found a truly cheesy, uber-1960s video on Herb Alpert’s YouTube Channel, which accompanied the song back then, so I can present that to you here instead:

Tidy hair.

Anyway, at Number Eight…

…Cupid’s Inspiration with Yesterday Has Gone. Today the lyric might be seen as some sort of mindfulness anthem.

Number Seven was Fire by The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown – which subsequently got to Number One:

Then at Number Six the bizarre MacArthur Park by Richard Harris. I must confess that the five-on-six year old me was totally taken in by the pastiche lyrics for this one. Ever since, I have lived in fear of someone leaving the cake out in the rain, thus wasting gargantuan amounts of effort and (for utterly inexplicable reasons) consigning the recipe as well as the cake to oblivion:

At Number Five, OC Smith with Son Of Hickory Holler’s Tramp. On hearing this song again, I do wonder how all fourteen children, when abandoned by their dad, would only care about mama’s chicken dumplings and a goodnight kiss before they went to bed. Wouldn’t several of these children have reached late adolescence or even adulthood by the time the last one arrived, or did the wayward couple spawn a handful of sets of quadruplets and quins in quick succession? The story is neither well nor convincingly explained. It feels like exaggeration or possibly even fake news to me:

At Number Four, the bubblegum song Yummy Yummy Yummy by Ohio Express. Now here is a truly meaningful lyric with which to grapple:

The Number Three song in the second week of my collection was Number One in the first week – Baby Come Back by The Equals. I really like this track:

Number Two was I Pretend by Des O’Connor. The official (at that time NME) charts have this song as Number One for a week, but two weeks of BBC chart recordings suggest that it never made the top spot on the BBC version. It is a well cheesy song:

Number One was Mony Mony by Tommy James And The Shondelles. Here we find the most meaningful lyric of all…

…fifty years later I discover that the name “Mony” was simply taken from the sign on top of the Mutual Of New York (MONY) Insurance Company building. Now they tell me:

I’ve managed to find a wonderful video for that Number One song – so uber-sixties it is almost untrue. Perhaps some of my more musical friends can tell us whether the band is miming or actually playing their instruments – I find it impossible to tell:

Finally, here is the second of those wonderful classic Fluff Freeman chart rundowns. Probably 4 August 1968 but possibly the following week, 11 August 1968. If it was the latter, that was my dad’s 49th birthday and I write this piece as we approach what would have been his 99th birthday.

By July/August 1968 dad was no longer directly helping me with these recordings, other than (probably) hiding spools of tape from me so I kept reusing the same ones for chart shows.

Why this spool survived is a mystery.

We went on holiday to Bournemouth soon after and perhaps I got bored with or forgot about recording chart shows after that.

It might have been for my sixth birthday that a heap of Beano Records arrived to try and get me interested in more serious music. That attempt succeeded, more on that anon, but my fascination with popular music of that 1960s and then 1970s period has lived on in me.

For now, as Fluff Freeman would put it:

Tara.

Pick Of The Pops, Most Of the Top Ten, 12 November 1967

Grundig TK35, Photograph by Michael Keller, from Rad-io.de.

Greetings, pop pickers.

Last week I Ogblogged recordings dad and I made exactly 50 years ago to the day, on 5 November 1967, including the Pick Of The Pops top three – click here, from Alan “Fluff” Freeman’s seminal chart show.

This week, I’m setting out the recordings I made of most of the top 10 from Pick Of The Pops the following week.

These recordings have more cutting in and out – probably a five-year-old’s attention span incapable of just letting the tape run and unaware at that stage of the wizardry that could be achieved post-recording in that medium.

The first extract actually has a bit of the Tony Blackburn show; the tail end of San Fransiscan Nights by The Animals therefrom. My guess is that it was my desire to record that better that sent me to Pick Of the Pops that Sunday evening, finding this song at number nine, then I kept going.

Next up – at eight – Long John Baldry with Let The Heartaches Begin:

At seven, Donovan with There Is A Mountain:

Then at six, the Kinks with Autumn Almanac:

Into the top five with The Troggs, Love Is All Around:

The least said about The Last Waltz by Englebert Humerdink at number four, the better:

Massachusetts by The Bee Gees at Number Three:

Zabadak by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich at Number Two:

…by which point I guess it dawned on my very junior indeed mind that I already had the top three on tape from the previous week.

Still, I wouldn’t want to keep pop pickers in suspenders, so here is a YouTube of the Number One from that period – Baby Now That I’ve Found You by The Foundations.

Does this bring back memories? Not Arf!

Tara.

Pick Of The Pops Top Three, 5th November 1967

As I write, it is 50 years ago to the day since Sunday 5th November 1967.

On that day, my father and I recorded Hare and Guy Fawkes, Ogblogged here, on our family’s trusty Grundig TK-35.

Grundig TK35; built to last. Photograph by Michael Keller, from Rad-io.de.

Our machine was still playing (although not recording) when I let the scrap merchants take it to a better place in 2012.

The very end of the Hare and Guy Fawkes recording segues rather elegantly into the top three from Pick of the Pops:

Zabadak by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich

…which is followed by…

Massachusetts by The Bee Gees

…and then…

Baby Now That I’ve Found You by The Foundations.

With the excitable tones of Alan “Fluff” Freeman between the tracks.

I have split the audio track into parts, but if you run the files contiguously they run entirely unbroken.

The segue works so well, I can only surmise that dad was experimenting with that recording after we had made the Hare and Guy Fawkes recording.

I am pretty sure I must have been watching him carefully and working out what it took to rig up the radio to the tape recorder and record from the radio.

The next 20+ seconds of tape is taken up with “gunk”, as I describe it in subsequent notes, which I think is my early attempts to work out to record, stop, pause etc. some done that evening, the rest the next day or just a few days later.

The following week I recorded the whole of the top nine from Pick of The Pops. I’ll up that material next week.

Don’t try to compare these charts with anything you see from the Official Charts; the BBC Pick Of the Pops charts didn’t work that way in 1967; they tried to second guess the chart standings by making a “chart of charts” from the NME, Melody Maker and several other chart sources which would all be published on different days and different ways. But the only logical dates for my recordings are 5 November 1967 top three, some gunk in between and then the 12 November 1967 top nine.

After that, I recorded a whole load of other pop music stuff to fill up that side of the tape.

It could only have been me making those recordings after the initial part of the 5th November recording; the cutting and hacking about is too amateurish to have been dad or mum. I also remember mum telling me in later years their mixture of horror and pleasure when they discovered me making my own clandestine recordings.

The reason this particular spool survived is because of the Hare and Guy Fawkes recording and also some other material which dad wanted to keep on the other side of the tape.

Most of the recordings I made as a child would have been wiped by subsequent recordings I made as a child. Tape wasn’t cheap.

There is one other tape of similar vintage that survived; with Pick Of The Pops from August 1968. Those recordings include Fluff Freeman’s fabulous chart rundowns, which the 1967 recordings sadly lack.

I’ll up the August 1968 ones when they reach their 50th birthday.

In the meantime, pop pickers, hit the above MP3 files for the Pick of The Pops top three.

Tara.

Hare And Guy Fawkes, Daddy Reading To Me, 5 November 1967

This recording is the only clearly dated family recording I have. Little me proudly announces at the start of the recording that it is the 5th of November, 1967.

I am Ogblog-publishing the recording on its 50th birthday.

As it happens, both the original recording and its 50th anniversary fell/fall on a Sunday.

I have already Ogblogged Dad reading me The Gingerbread Man story – click here – and there are several other such recordings, one or two with mum, which I shall Ogblog in time.

But those others are, I believe, all quite a bit earlier than this Hare and Guy Fawkes one. I believe this 5 November 1967 one is the last of the readings tapes, not least because I think my personal interest in the tape recorder transformed at that time from passive listener to active recorder on our trusty Grundig TK-35. Another story – I’ll cover that story a little more below and separately later.

Before we made the recording, almost certainly we would have taken family lunch at Folman’s Restaurant in Noel Street – click here to see a photo of that place. It was an enormous restaurant which looked like a massive refectory inside.

Folman’s – scraped from : https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/534521049506003800/

Grandma Anne had, I think, fairly recently been widowed for a second time (my Step-Grandpa Nat I only recall vaguely from when I was very small), so it became our habit to take Grandma Anne to that strictly kosher restaurant in Soho for Sunday lunch.

I recall liking the chicken soup and the chopped liver but not much else there. I also recall my father’s favourite dish being “boiled capon” – a large chicken cooked in broth. I don’t believe that the kosher restaurant capon was a castrated bird – I’m not sure that kashrut would allow even the circumcision of a cock of the poultry variety. I think it was simply a big old boiler chicken that would make a tasty broth; the slow cooking of the aged creature would soften what would otherwise be rather tough meat.

My Vietnamese-style dish, chicken cooked in its own broth, is an exotic and delicious variation on that theme, which Janie and I love as comfort food. I remember distinctly not liking the Folman’s version much as a child, it was nothing like as tasty as my mum’s chicken.

But I wildly digress.

On the recording, you can hear my mum in the background, in another room, having an argument by the sound of it. I’m not sure whether she is arguing on the phone or with someone else who is in the house who is talking far more softly than my mum. I might do some audio-forensics on the sound file one day and see if I can listen in on that aggro from 50 years ago.

The argument can only have been family stuff…probably family business stuff.

I’ll guess that the Hare and Guy Fawkes story-telling at that time was as much about getting me out of the way while the family argument played out as it was about anything else.

But I’ll also guess that my beady-little eyes were, at that time, working out how to make recordings, because the rest of that side of that tape is strewn with recordings from the radio. One of those recordings I believe was made the same afternoon/early evening; I’ll Ogblog that a little later today.

As with our other story book recordings, I ring a bell at the turn of the page. I think the idea of that was to help me learn to read by following the story in the book while listening to the tape.

I also interject with some questions at times, which is rather cute, but I interject less in this one than I did in earlier recordings. I guess the question I really wanted answered by then was, “how do I operate this machine so I can make recordings for myself?”

Here’s the Hare And Guy Fawkes sound file and book cover again.

My Fifth Birthday Party, Standard 8 Home Movie & Photos, Woodfield Avenue, cAugust 1967

I’m pretty sure my fifth birthday party was not held on my birthday because so many people were going to be away late August, including us.

I vaguely recall mum telling me that it was due to be held soon after school broke up but lots of people had measles/mumps/chicken pox or whatever was doing the rounds that season, so they rescheduled the party.

So perhaps it was held in early August.

It certainly looks summery from the cine film and photos.

Dad did a pretty good job of filming this event. Not exactly taxing on his skills.

There are a few photos too – click here for the album. The cutest photo is shown below.

Mummy’s Tape, Woodfield Avenue Grundig TK-35, Mid 1960’s

Here is the entirety of Mummy’s Tape, which was recorded, during the mid 1960’s, on the family Grundig TK-35, which looked like this:

Grundig TK35, ram-packed with thermionic valves. Photograph by Michael Keller, from Rad-io.de.

There is a sorry tale of desecration with regard to a small portion of this tape, which can be found by clicking here or below:

My Very First Audio Recording & Inadvertent Desecration Of Mummy’s Tape, With Friends, Woodfield Avenue, Guessing Late 1966

Still, I only had one mummy and she only had this one tape, bless her. So I think it should be preserved for posterity, in the cloud.

Here is a link to the track listing.

And here are those tracks – the “desecration track” is the seventeenth one:

Brace yourself for the desecration interval…

…and now, back to the music:

My Very First Audio Recording & Inadvertent Desecration Of Mummy’s Tape, With Friends, Woodfield Avenue, Guessing Late 1966

This incident caused a long-term rumpus in our family. I’m not sure my mother ever forgave me for it.

I recorded about two-and-a-half minutes of childish nonsense…

…with friend or friends unspecified…

…on Mummy’s Tape.

She only had one tape, bless her, which I inadvertently desecrated that day.

Mummy’s tape comprises some of her favourite tunes and songs, recorded from various sources on the radio, probably over several years in the early to mid 1960s, around the time of my infancy.

Here is a link to the Mummy’s Tape track listing.

Just in case anyone is interested, I have also uploaded Mummy’s Tape in its entirety, within this piece – click here or below:

Mummy’s Tape, Woodfield Avenue Grundig TK-35, Mid 1960’s

Mum reckons I carried out the horrendous act of desecration when I was about four.

Here is the offending two-and-a-half minute clip.

The clip itself reveals little. I was clearly very young when I did this – I think mum’s “about four” estimate is about right. We (I am with at least one, I think probably two friends) mostly seem to be making noises to take pleasure in watching the recording level lights on the family Grundig dance.

I guess I had been carefully watching what my parents (mostly daddy) did when they recorded me stories so I could listen in their absence, click here or below for an example of that…

Daddy Reading The Gingerbread Man To Me, Guessing Late 1966

…and I thus worked out how to record through the microphone. A non-trivial matter on a Grundig TK-35 I can tell you.

Mummy never let me live this down. A well-known bearer of minor long-term grudges was my mum…and boy did this grudge come back to haunt me for the rest of her life.

For a start, precious tapes, which meant those that mum (and to some extent dad) treasured were kept in a drawer in the living room cabinet that was out of bounds to me until I was much, much older.

But more importantly, subsequent minor infringements of various kinds (and there were many) were often “bigged up” with reference to the tape desecration incident, e.g.:

“you’ve never paid due respect to my property…do you remember that time you completely ruined my tape?”

Well, of course I did and do remember the incident in the sense that I was regularly reminded of it. But I was very small when the incident occurred and have no recollection of the actual playful episode, in which, presumably, I was showing off to a friend or friends and we played with the equipment for a while…

…two-and-a-half minutes or so to be a little more precise.

All the evidence suggests that there was actus reus for the criminal damage to Mummy’s Tape, but in truth I cannot believe that there was an ounce of mens rea for desecration. I doubt if I had even understood, by that stage, the difference between a blank tape and one that had recordings on it which might, if someone surreptitiously recorded on that tape while no-one was looking, would be permanently interrupted with inappropriate material, for the rest of all time.

Indeed, there is evidence that I took pains to avoid recording over anything – there is about 40 seconds of blank space between the previous recording on the tape and the start of my childish recording – so I guess I did have a careful listen to make sure that I was recording on blank tape, not over-recording anything.

At this juncture readers, especially younger people, might wonder what on earth all the fuss was about. Suffice it to say that editing tapes was an even less trivial matter than recording them in those days, which is why most amateur recordings of that era are diffuse with blips and occasionally lengthy intervals of inappropriate material.

I guess mummy carried on recording her tape and only discovered my childish interruption later, by which time it was, in her terms, too late to rectify the problem.

She could, of course, have recorded any material of her own choosing between two-and-a-half minutes and three-and-a-quarter minutes over the space and my material to reinstate her tape as a continuous one of her preferred music…

…but it was far easier and more fitting, instead, to kvetch or broyges for several decades.

I don’t like to point the finger at anyone else in this sorry tale, but something tells me that Andy Levinson might also have been at the scene of the crime at the time; possibly Fiona also. But only I have suffered a lifetime of guilt and shame as a result of two-and-a-half minutes worth of seemingly harmless, childish fun.

Not bad technical skills on the tape recorder at the age of four though – eh readers? This is, unquestionably, my oldest surviving self-made recording; quite possibly the very first one I ever made.

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