In that baby-boom era, I suspect that Jean-Pierre & Marie-Therese (Monsieur et Madame) Schambill were as conscious as my parents that their son, Jean-Michel and I were relatively rare examples of only children. The fact that Jean-Michel and I had got along well and allowed the grown ups to enjoy their holiday time in relative peace was probably a fair chunk of the rationale behind the Port Leucate adventure in 1971.
The Schambills had a villa in Port Leucate, as did a friend of theirs, depicted above, who was also to holiday their with his son, Luke and (I think) his mother or mother-in-law.
Luke, Me & Jean-Michel Made Three
I think Luke was a bit older than us, but not too much so and we all got along. I remember that Luke liked a cartoon character named Lucky Luke, so of course that was his nickname and of course we played cowboys with him in the Luke role, whatever that might have been.
In truth I don’t remember all that much about this holiday. The small stack of 20 photographs that I have uncovered, fifty years on, help a bit – Flickr album here or below:
There is also some cine – just a couple of minutes 13’15” to 15’20” in the following reel:
You get to see what the Port Leucate beach looks like and also the villa we stayed in is depicted briefly.
I remember the food. Several of the French adults had been raised and/or had lived for several years in North Africa, so meals in the villa had a distinctly French/Maghrebi style to it. I remember finding it very exotic and taking to it; whereas I think my mother found it a bit strange. Cous-cous? What’s that?
I know we corresponded with the Schambills for some time after that holiday – certainly Jean-Michel and I were sort-of pen pals for a while. I have a feeling that one or other or possibly both of Jean-Michel’s parents in time visited mum and dad in Streatham, but I don’t think I saw them again after that 1971 holiday.
I wonder what they…and in particular Jean-Michel, might be up to now?
This holiday in Juan-les-Pins was my first taste of travel outside the UK and my first time on a plane. I was coming up to eight years old and remember little about it in truth.
One of my few abiding memories of the holiday is connected with the headline photograph – I do remember learning to swim under the tutelage of the swimming instructor depicted. The picture illustrates the physical element of his method, which was combined with the constant repetition of his sole word of English – “swim” – stated in a baritone French accent, part entreaty, part hypnotism I imagine.
Suffice it to say, the fellow’s method must have worked on me – I did eventually learn to swim. I think my neck might be a bit longer than it otherwise would have been too.
Jean-Michel Schambill & Me
My other abiding memory was meeting & befriending the Schambill family. Jean-Michel was bit older than me, but well “within range” and our respective parents seemed pleased for us to become pals.
A rummage through old photographs has uncovered a few pictures from that holiday that I probably hadn’t seen since the time, including the picture below, with me and Monsieur Schambill on a pedalo, with Madame Schambill doing the hard work by the looks of it.
Meanwhile, in Juan-les-Pins, we stayed in the Hotel De France, as depicted in the picture below.
Looks quite posh. I don’t think it is there now – at least not under that name.
There is a decent stretch of 8mm cine from that holiday – the first 13’10” of the reel below. You can see “Monsieur Swim” at work. You can also see Bill Ruffler – of Ruffler & Walker fame, having a go at water-skiing. I do remember mum and dad going on about the coincidence of running into the Rufflers in Juan – Bill’s business premises were a few doors down from dad’s shop in Battersea.
The photos above and a few more are all in a Flickr album – click here or below:
Not many detailed memories from that age and stage, but my impressionistic recollection is that I had a wonderful time and found the whole “going abroad” thing quite thrilling.
That’s probably because I enjoyed a fleeting moment of stardom in Cinderella (interviewed on stage), whereas I was overlooked in the throng of eager children during Aladdin.
In my mind, I had MET Dick Emery and would share that vignette with anyone who might listen, whereas I had merely “seen” Norman Vaughan and never warmed to the latter as a comedian…there might have been other reasons for that lack of warming of course.
As for Joe Brown and Peter Noone, my memory is mightily confused now that I have done a bit of research into these two pantos and acts. The It’s Behind You! – Pop Stars In Panto piece linked here explains a bit more. In truth, I remember Peter Noone’s performance (and Herman’s Hermits as an act) far more vividly than I remember Joe Brown’s performance or Joe Brown & The Bruvvers as an act.
I don’t remember seeing a collective of Hermits, only Peter “Herman” Noone, but the recorded history suggests a plurality of Hermits, as does a lisgting from The Observer at the time
…I do recall that one of my very early “party pieces” was to sing, I’m Henery The Eighth, I Am. No doubt encouraged by both of my parents, who were great lovers of Edwardian-style music hall.
My (possibly flawed) memory has Peter Noone singing it in Aladdin, but possibly I saw Joe Brown singing it in Cinderella instead…or as well…or neither – perhaps my parents simply taught me that song ahead of seeing one or other of those performers because my parents knew that they had famously sung that song.
While below is a vid of Peter Noone singing it with Herman’s Hermits:
Anyway, point is, possibly on the back of seeing that song performed in these pantos, it became one of my party pieces for much of my infanthood.
Then I more or less forgot about it for best part of 50 years…
…until I remembered it again and wrote an adaptation of the song, which I retitled The Thomas Gresham Nativity Song and performed for The Gresham Society…
…which might only be described as a mock Tudor performance piece. Well, I suppose I was a kid from a mock Tudor house in Streatham:
Mock Tudor Smarty Pants
For those especially interested in this sort of thing, below is a recording of the original music hall version of I’m Henery the Eighth, I Am, sung by Harry Champion:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cocky little Streatham kid c1968
We returned the following year to see Peter Noone and Norman Vaughan in Aladdin, but that, as they say, is another story.
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:
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
