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.
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:
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.
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.
Grundig TK35. Photograph by Michael Keller, from Rad-io.de.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Grundig TK35, ram-packed with thermionic valves. Photograph by Michael Keller, from Rad-io.de.
…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.
Both of my parents, dad in particular, made recordings of my favourite books being read to me. This was mostly, I suspect, because they knew that I couldn’t resist fiddling with the old Grundig and so would listen to the recordings rather than nag them to read the book again. Fiendish, cunning and I very much approve.
Grundig TK35, ram-packed with thermionic valves. Photograph by Michael Keller, from Rad-io.de.
One of those wonderful recordings is The Gingerbread Man, the very book that Joe over on King Cricket was complaining about having to read three times a day.
Always keen to help out, here is the recording of my dad reading The Gingerbread Man to a very little me:
I don’t have a picture of me around that time with that book, but I do have a picture with a similar book, long since forgotten and I don’t think ever recorded:
A Very Little Me With the Big Brown Bear Book
Simply adorable I was; goodness knows what went wrong.
I do still have my dilapidated copy of the Gingerbread Man. Not too many of my children’s books survived the cull, but (probably because of the recording) I couldn’t bear to part with that one.
Thanks for triggering the nostalgia, Joe. I’d been trying to pluck up the courage to listen again and start uploading these recordings to Ogblog. You gave me cause.
This is a supremely cute little home movie, including “an outbreak of” kissing and eventually “an outbreak of” squabbling. Not quite a Tarrantino ending but…
…I certainly sense Dad’s cinematographic machinations all over this piece – good on him.
It was filmed at our house.
I’m no expert on children’s ages, but although mum and dad guessed summer of 1967 (making me and Andrew about 5 and Fiona about 4), from reviewing other materials (photos and cine), I think this one might be a year earlier, 1966, with me and Andrew around 4 and Fiona 3.
There are very few dates from the early part of my life for which I can write a dated Ogblog piece.
But family folklore, even from a virtually-sports-free household like my parents’ home, kept the memory of this day alive for me.
My parents had been invited to a “watch the final party” in the street – Woodfield Avenue in Streatham. I suspect it was at the house with the biggest TV and my guess is that would have been the Benjamins at No 36 or the Levinsons at No 42; probably the former.
Goodness only knows what the other parents did with their children, but the party was to be an adults only affair and mum wanted our cleaner, Mrs Nugent, aka Nunu, to babysit for me.
Strangely, Nunu and her family also wanted to watch the final, but they were willing (possibly even keen) to have a toddler – me – with them. So basically I was bundled off to Nunu’s house. I think it was in Tooting.
For reasons that I am unable to fathom, it seems that my hosts, the Nugent family, were not interested in making a fuss of me to their usual level. I tolerated this for a while, but towards the end of the second half of the match I started to seek more Nugent attention than was forthcoming.
I don’t think Ted Nugent was among them, but I might be mistaken
Mr Nugent, perhaps unwisely with the benefit of hindsight, told me that the match would be over any minute and that we would soon indulge in activity more to my taste. At that point everyone was in a good mood. England were leading 2-1.
They thought it was all over…
…but unfortunately for me and for the Nugent family, an inconsiderate West German (named Wolfgang Webber, I now learn) scored a 90th minute goal, levelling the match.
So when someone from the Nugent family broke it to me that the match was not in fact over as scheduled but that there was to be a further 30 minutes of play, to which they wanted to devote their almost undivided attention…
…I am told this did not go down too well with me.
And quite right too. Why can’t these idiots conclude their football matches on time as promised? Daft sport.
Anyway, the rest is history. An hour or so later all was smiles, celebrations and cup presentations.
I never really did reconcile myself with soccer football after that.
But the strange thing is, my preferred sports, cricket and tennis, tend to have matches that last much longer than soccer matches, with score-related, i.e. temporally-indeterminate breaks and endings.
I know that my parents had especially fond memories of this holiday. They had a few holidays overseas together before I was born; this was the first of those.
The photo album is dated October 1958 but dad says on an early part of the Standard 8mm film that it is early November, so I guess the holiday spanned the timeframe set out in the headline.
No doubt they enjoyed their third wedding anniversary on this holiday – [insert your own joke along the lines of “000-errr, leather wedding anniversary” here]. I am posting this on 6 November 2022, which would have been their 67th wedding anniversary, which is quite a number with which to conjure. Star sapphire, apparently.
But I digress
Anyway…
…dad’s 8mm film of that holiday is probably his masterpiece in the matter of such holiday films. It has a full soundtrack with dad’s (Peter’s) voice transferred from the original standard 8 film. It includes many scenes from the Côte d’Azur, including Menton, Nice and Cannes. Also a trip to Grasse.
One highlight is dad (Peter) lighting a cigarette using just a magnifying glass. Another highlight is mum (Renée) showing off her legs. But the real highlight is at the end, where you see their car being driven onto the air ferry – there was a brief period when ferrying your car to France by air was the fashionable way to go! Here and below is a link to that classic vid:
As a child, I loved looking through our holiday pictures and films, including my parents ones from before I was born. The video of this one was my personal favourite.
A week or so later John messaged me to say that he and Pippa had uncovered a third reel, which was emblazoned with the mysterious words:
Proof. Do not erase.
Actually I guessed that this would probably turn out to be a recording of their parents’ wedding, as John had told me when we were going through the first batch that Pippa was half-exoecting to hear a recording of their parents’ wedding, as she remembered the folks telling her that such a recording existed.
Anyway, in early February 2020 John brought the mystery third spool round to Clanricarde Gardens and my trusty Sony TC377 (combined with the computer) did the rest.
The recording runs to just under 35 minutes and is surely a rare and wonderful relic for the White family to have.
