Wednesday 16 July – Fairly hectic day at work – met Annalisa for lunch. Met Bobbie after work – had meal at Mayflower & went on to Woody Allen Film after – v nice.
Mayflower was one of the better Chinese restautrants in Chinatown – now (writing in 2020) resurrected as New Mayflower.
The Woody Allen film in question would have been Hannah And Her Sisters, which went on general release in the UK a couple of days later. No doubt we went to a preview at the Curzon West End (just opposite the Mayflower).
I still think Hannah And Her Sisters is a great movie. But gone are the days that I’d complain about a hectic day at work in which I had lunch with a friend and left work early enough to have a meal and then see a movie. Such a snowflakey-sense-of-entitlement-youngster, I was.
Pretty busy at work today. Went to LC [Laurence Corner] etc.
Met Graham Watson for a drink – Mike came too (is leaving office).
(Met Jon Graham on way home).
Earlyish night.
I hasten to add that Laurence Corner was, for me, work – not a fun outing at lunchtime. Mike (he who was leaving the office) must be Mike King, who, by that time, I think was doing much of the work on the Laurence Corner account and who was, presumably, handing over some of the reins to me.
Graham Watson was an old friend from school. I vaguely recall running into him in London and thus meeting up. Coincidentally Jon graham was also a friend from school and (if I recall correctly) I didn’t realise he was still hanging in Streatham until this chance encounter. Jon and I met up again more than once, IIRC. I’m not sure whether Graham and I did. Perhaps Graham gave me the bumps…again!
Several years earlier, Graham Watson & Paul Deacon giving me the bumps, Tim Church feigns a lack of interest, picture “borrowed” from Paul’s facebook posting with grateful thanks.
With thanks to Martin Cook, from whom I have “borrowed” the above photograph, depicting Wayne Manhood with soccer ball and trophy, front-centre. Link available only to Alleyn’s Facebook alumni – hence the crossed-out appearance of this link..
Prescript
This posting has generated a lot of discussion on the Alleyn’s 1970s Alumni Facebook Group, not least people pointing out that Wayne died 1985 or 1986 – consensus coalescing around 1986. As I have said on the group:
It’s extraordinary how memory plays tricks. I so clearly remember a maudlin conversation with Jimmy Bateman about the fragility of life on that very first occasion that he and I went to that UCL Bar and then The Sun, summer 1981, but I now realise THAT conversation must have been triggered by the sudden death of my uncle a few weeks earlier…
…I’ll update/correct the blog piece once I have gathered more thoughts – not least my own. Some of the comments are very moving and so many interesting thoughts. Thanks again.
Below is that updated piece, with the original, jumbled piece below that, just for the record.
21 February 2020 – A Better Informed Reminiscence Of How I learnt the News Of Wayne Manhood’s Demise
The collective brains of the Alleyn’s School alums suggest strongly that the tragic event happened in the spring or summer of 1986. At that time, less than a year after I had come down from Keele, I was spending almost all of my time with Keele friends and work colleagues. In fact my first reference for meeting up with anyone from school in 1986 was late June, when I met up with Andrew (Andy) Levinson in Streatham:
What I now know for sure though is that, despite my suggestion that I clearly remembered the event of learning the news about Wayne, the truth of the matter is that I do NOT recall the actual learning of the news. What lives on, though, is the effect the news had on me. The first one of our generation to go. The senselessness of it. Those emotions unquestionably stuck.
As Steve Butterworth so eloquently put it in the e-mail he sent me – I’m sure he won’t mind me reproducing these words:
…It was not fair but Wayne was the unlucky one that night.
I still visualise the flowers that we’re strapped to the offending lamppost that he crashed into, when travelling on the South Circular!
I expect you’re right about June, as the sun shone brightly at his funeral, but the year was 1986.
None of the above detail (or at least my memory of it!) changes the sentiments in your piece. Thank you for that.
Below is the original, flawed, jumbled-memory piece below unchanged, just for the record.
My 13 February 2020 “Original”, Jumbled Memory Posting
I’m not entirely sure why this tragic event has popped into my head lately. Possibly because I have recently learnt of the demise, or near demise, of several contemporaries (from walks of life other than school).
Wayne Manhood was the first of my contemporaries I learnt had died.
People of our parents’ generation often talk about “remembering what they were doing when they learnt that John F Kennedy had died”. My generation has a similar thing with “the day Princess Diana died”. My guess is that many people from my Alleyn’s School cohort can remember what they were doing when they learnt that Wayne Manhood had died.
I learnt that Wayne Manhood had died from James “Jimmy” Bateman in a bar in UCL, where Jimmy was doing a holiday job in a bubble chamber research laboratory.
I’m pretty sure it was the first time we thus met up that summer, 30 June 1981, because I think the tragic event had occurred before I got back from University. But I will stand corrected if I have got the actual dates confused.
Don’t ask what I’d been doing in Braintree, Essex that day. That’s a different story.
Neither Jimmy nor I knew Wayne Manhood all that well…but everyone in our year knew Wayne. Almost everyone in the school knew Wayne Manhood, not least because he represented the school in so many sports. And also because he was an outgoing and thoroughly nice fellow. Wayne and I had been in the same class in the first year:
In truth, I don’t remember whether or not we were in the same class again after that. Was he in 4AT/5AT? Someone out there will know.
In the later years, I only really remember talking to him at cricket matches, on those rare occasions that he wasn’t on the field of play for more or less the whole match. He could bat, could Wayne, much as he could play football and field hockey to very high schoolboy levels.
I remember Wayne encouraging me to play cricket rather than score and umpire so much, refuting my suggestions that I was no good, wisely saying that I could enjoy playing that game (and other games) at a reasonable level.
Yes, it was Jimmy Bateman who broke the news to me that Wayne had died. I’m not sure how he had heard the news, nor even how much detail he was able to share with me. I still don’t know much about what happened. A night out with some old boys from the school. A motorcycle. A fiendish bend in the road in Forest Hill. Am I remembering this correctly? Others might correct me or add detail. The detail matters little.
I remember Jimmy Bateman and I sinking quite a few beers that night. We’d no doubt have done that anyway. I suspect we started in the UCL bar and progressed on to The Sun in Lamb’s Conduit Street, a favourite real ale pub with a fine selection of ales back then (no more, in February 2020), which I continued to frequent for many years.
I remember the song David Watts as an earworm for the news of Wayne’s death. I had acquired a second-hand copy of All Mod Cons by The Jam a few weeks earlier and had been listening to it a lot in the preceding weeks. It was not the tone of envy nor the gay subtext of the David Watts song that resonanted about Wayne, of course, but the notion of a boy most likely from school, a young fellow who was good at everything he attempted:
…he is the captain of the team…
… I dream I could fight like David Watts…
Lead the school team to victory,
and take my exams and pass the lot…
Of course, we are a lucky generation. My father, who was 20 when the second world war started, lost many friends who were in the flower of their youth. Our grandparents’ generation similarly lost so many of their young in one or other of the world wars.
But in some ways, the very fact that losing a compadre at such a tender age was so rare in our generation made Wayne’s death all the more tragic, unexpected and shocking. Life isn’t fair and life is fragile. I hadn’t yet reached the age of 19 in June 1981, but I learnt a little more about those aspects of life when I learnt about Wayne Manhood’s death.
It will soon be 40 years since my cohort left Alleyn’s School. It makes no sense that Wayne saw hardly any of that time.
I have no idea why this subject popped into my head a week or so ago and refused to budge without me writing it up. But write it up I now have. I very much welcome other people’s memories of Wayne Manhood and his passing.
Saturday 28 June – Worked hard today – went to Levinsons briefly – [squiggle] etc. Mainly work.
Sunday 29 June – Did exam in morning – went to G [Grandma] Jenny in afternoon – watched cup final early evening – went for drink with Andrew after – met Mary etc.
I was working hard at that time, doing my accountancy exams (presumably that Sunday morning thing was a self-administered mock) while working full time and helping to bring dad’s business (he had sold the shop in Feburary) to a graceful closure with the tax authorities.
This was still less than a year after I left Keele; my diaries suggest that I almost exclusively spent my spare time with old friends from Keele apart from my work crowd and some of my old BBYO crowd.
This reference to spending time with Andrew Levinson is the first reference to an old friend from the street or school in 1986 (unless I’ve missed saomething on the skim).
“Mary etc.” I think must be a lovely young woman I knew at Keele named Mary who kept popping up wherever I happened to be in that first year after I left Keele. I remember bumping into her when I was doing accountancy courses in Latimer Road and also that she ended up in Streatham for a while.
I dread to think where Andrew and I went for that drink and therefore where Mary etc. were also hanging out back then – our end of Streatham was not great for pubs and I doubt if we wandered far. Horse and Groom most likely – it’s had a makeover fairly recently (he writes in 2020) but was well grimey back then.
Here is the typed up version, scanned from what I think must be carbon copies. Is there anyone else left on the planet who remembers what carbon copies were?
I guess I prepared these for our glorious return visit in January 1986 for the traditional UGM/AGM thingie.
I might have some notes or other artefacts from the meeting itself which I’ll post separately if/when I find them. I know I did attend the meeting. I’m pretty sure several/most of us did. If June said you had to be there, you had to be there.
I remember Nigel Dempster writing a whole load of factually inaccurate stuff about Keele Students’ Union generally and me in particular. I also remember writing a rebuttal, which the Daily Mail, surprisingly, published.
This letter request from June Aitken probably explains why I cannot find copies of the rebuttal and other materials – I suspect that I simply sent them to her without making further copies for myself. In 1985, photocopying/scanning was not the simple, almost automatic thing it is today.
Perhaps this letter from June is now all that remains of the Dempstergate debacle.
Met John after work – went to see Topical Heatwave (footlights review) – then for meal – nice evening.
I remember the show rather well. We thought it was quite good. Not vastly better than the Ringroad stuff I just finished doing at Keele, obviously, apart from the more significant production budget of course.
I learn, from searching that the cast was Bill Cashmore, Chris Luscombe, Alison Cook, Daniel Strauss, Kathryn Crew, Graham Wynne, and that the director was Charlie Pattinson. One or two familiar names in there.
The diary is silent on where we went for our meal – not even a mention of the type of meal we ate. Probably a modest eatery along Southampton Row. Italian perhaps.
You know that a posting really is for the completists, when the highlight of an 18 day period reads “met Petra in London – went to St James’s Park and Chinese lunch.”
I was doing the first of several intensive study periods at Financial Training in Latimer Road. That was a shlep from my parents house in Streatham Hill – a train to Victoria and then two tubes.
The courses were intensive but really just crammer courses from my point of view. Most of the material was already within my personal body of knowledge, but I needed to have that material readily to mind in forms that would get me through the exams.
Then I returned to work and was working, as oft I did, for Laurence Corner, which used NH for accounting services as well as audit.
Enough preamble, here are the diary notes, for the sake of completeness.
Saturday, 28 September 1985 – went to library and shops and did some work – stayed in evening worked etc.
Sunday, 29 September 1985– Lazyish day – did some studying – had lunch with folks – saw Grandma Jenny etc.
Monday, 30 September 1985 – intensive course today. Revised at home in evening.
Tuesday 1 October 1985 – test and more classes today – spent evening in revising (had a game of cards too).
Wednesday 2 October 1985 – exam today at FT – went ok – v. tired after – lazy evening.
Thursday, 3 October 1985 – got result of exam – did v well – went to NH [Newman Harris] before going to learner drivers course. Aarons [Lionel & Dina] we’re here in evening and spoke to Petra.
Friday, 4 October 1985 – last day of course – got away early – spent evening in.
Saturday, 5 October 1985 – met Petra in London – went to St James’s Park and Chinese lunch – spent evening at home.
Sunday, 6 October 1985 – lazy day – did some work, had big lunch etc.
Monday, 7 October 1985 – office ok – stayed in evening/did some work etc.
Tuesday, 8 October 1985 – work ok – did some studying in evening.
Wednesday, 9 October 1985 – office ok – went over to Andrea’s for dinner – very pleasant evening – feeling a bit ill though.
Thursday, 10 October 1985– work ok. Caroline for lunch – went to backseat drivers in evening – not feeling too good.
Friday, 11 October 1985 – work (VL) [Laurence Corner] ok – had an easy evening in.
Saturday, 12 October 1985 – did some studying/shopping/taping etc – stayed in evening worked etc.
Sunday, 13 October 1985 – lazyish day – did some work etc – big lunch etc, lazy evening in.
Monday 14 October 1985 – office ok – VL. Easy evening – did some studying etc.
Tuesday 15 October 1985 work ok? – VL – stayed in evening – did some work/study.
Full day on [Financial Training] course – went to Annalisa’s -> meet John and Mandy. Saw Jumpers and had Chinese meal.
Again, nothing specific about the Chinese Restaurant. Probably Mayflower or Joy King Lau, is my guess.
Jumpers. I remember enjoying the play and the production without being bowled over by it. The cast was very 1970s/early 1980s sitcom heavy, which made them familiar, perhaps to excess. At least in those days you didn’t get sycophantic audiences giving “stars” standing ovations simply for turning up and walking on to the stage.
Image generated to my specification by Nano Banana 2 Lite (Google Flow)
I think it was dad’s suggestion, having seen a promotional flyer.
I sort of wanted to learn to drive, but also sort-of realised that I had no need for a car, nor the means to buy and run one, until I had qualified, which was three years away at least.
Thus, I joined a municipal “learner drivers course” that taught you everything you ever wanted to know about driving but were afraid to ask…but didn’t take you anywhere near an actual motor vehicle to actually learn to drive.
I sort of liked the course and sort of recognised its futility.
It was more interesting than doing my Financial Training homework…
…actually, probably a similar level of uninteresting but at least it was differently uninteresting.
I seem to recall that one or two of the people on the course with me were quite interesting, in that they were rather different form most of the people I got to meet through my University and then working life.
I referred to it as Learner Drivers Course in my first two diary entries, before switching to my nickname for the course:
The Back Seat Drivers Course.
Dad probably rued the day he recommended that I take this course, as I am sure I pointed out his minor breaches of the Highway Code from the safety of my back seat whenever I spotted same as his passenger. Serves you right, dad.
