Tag: Woodfield Avenue

The Very First Match Of The Very First Cricket World Cup: I Was There (In Our Living Room), As Were Tom And Jerry, 7 June 1975

I witnessed the very start of world cup cricket from the comfort of our family living room in Woodfield Avenue.

How do I know? Because my diary says so.

It’s just possible that you cannot read the first two lines of the 7 June 1975 diary entry – allow me to help:

Saw Prudential Cup. England won, Old 51 not out.

I described the match as Prudential Cup, not Cricket World Cup. David Kendix – Middlesex CCC treasurer, international cricket scorer, ICC guru on rankings/statistical stuff and “Man From The Pru” would no doubt approve.

At that time, the tournament was not being promoted as, nor (as I understand it) was there an express intention to initiate, a regular cricket world cup. It was simply billed as an eight team international one-day cricket tournament, sponsored by Prudential, to help fill the scheduling gap created by South Africa’s apartheid-induced suspension from international sport.

But in my mind at the time it most certainly was a world cup and I remember being absolutely captivated by it. I’ll write more in subsequent pieces about how that captivation manifested itself in me over that summer of 1975. This article will focus only on that very first day.

Here is a link to the scorecard from that televised match.

My diary comments on the score are quite interesting, more for what they omit than for what they say. True, England won the match. True, Chris Old scored 51 not out.

I did not remark on Dennis Amiss scoring a magnificent 137 – perhaps in honour of my favourite bus route at the time; the route from our house to Grandma Jenny’s flat.

Nor did I remark upon the England team score of 334/4, which was a very high score in those days, albeit in 60 overs rather than the now-standard 50.

Even more remarkable, but absent from my comments, was the paltry India score in reply, 132/3 in 60 overs, with Sunil Gavaskar on the mother of all go slows, scoring 36 not out in 174 balls. He must have decided that India stood no chance and he would have a bit of batting practice instead.

Below is a highlights reel from that match, upon which you will hear the voices of Richie Benaud and Jim Laker:

My focus on Chris Old will have been, in part, as a result of my having met the Yorkshire team some six years earlier and thus adopting my Yorkshire friends for the duration of my childhood:

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

But also, to be fair on myself, I was probably awestruck by my childhood hero Chris Old’s batting at the end of that one day innings – you didn’t see anyone score 51 runs in 30 balls in those days – it is commonplace now.

The rest of my diary entry for that day relates to something completely different:

Dad heard from insurance – got two films -Jerry and the Goldfish, Dr Jekyll and Mr Mouse

There had been a flood at dad’s shop and a fair chunk of stock got damaged; some beyond use, some beyond looking merchantable. I had helped dad clear up the place and my reward was to be some damaged stock that might still be useable. It turned out that these two Standard 8mm Tom and Jerry cartoon films were that reward.

If I recall correctly, both films were more than a little water-marked and also subject to snagging in the movie projector, so I don’t think I watched them all that much. No wonder the insurance company’s loss adjuster told dad that he could scrap them.

I wonder whether dad’s commercial insurance was with Prudential back then? Weird coincidence if it was.

Anyway, we can all watch those animated movies now, easily, on YouTube:

Jerry and the Goldfish – click here.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Mouse – click here.

One Sir – Humanoid Or Similar, But When Was Some Enchanted Evening?, 19 February 1975

Following the 30 December 1974 seminal reference to Paul Deacon in my diary:

Breaking The World Record For Coin Catching With Paul Deacon, Woodfield Avenue, 30 December 1974

…I have a few more references to Paul Deacon in my early 1975 diary, at least one of which for sure was a recording session.

The relevant passage reads:

19 February 1975: went to Paul Deacon’s house. Played all day. “One sir, humanoid or similar”.

I do remember making that recording. The phrase came from Star Trek and for some reason we latched on to it. I even remember the second section of the phrase: “low level of activity”.

We derived a little tune from these phrases and made silly recordings, long since lost. I can even remember the tune, but I feel loathe to attempt a retrospective recording.

Paul might remember it all himself or use various methods of bribery, intoxication or both to get me to give a rendition.

Postscript/Update: Overnight, after sending Paul this piece, not only did Paul submit a comment (below), he also sent me an audio file. Clearly this rendition is an octave or two lower than the pre-teen original, but needless to say, the tune is note perfect. The recording is, it is, in its own way, authentic:

Thank you, Paul. Of course, that 2018 rendition will have been recorded, with ease, using whatever simple recording gadgetary comes as an essential, basic component in Paul’s computer.

Back then, in February 1975, I think Paul was using a cassette deck for his recordings, but perhaps he was already using reel-to-reel – he was certainly well into the latter eventually.

But, by then, we the Harris family had no ordinary reel-to-reel – we had a brand new Sony TC377…

…which looked like the above image and had, amongst its many features, a wonderful feedback/echo chamber facility. With that facility, Paul and I recorded a sort-of psychedelic version of Some Enchanted Evening on one occasion. It might have been the occasion registered in the following diary entry:

Wednesday 9 April 1975. Paul Deacon came for day. Nice time.

The details are lost in the mists of time, but for sure I was enjoying those school holiday muck around with tape recorders days.

Such a shame the tapes seem to have been lost forever.

With thanks to Paul for his comment below, I’m guessing his book look like this image – which you can click through to a well-known on-line store

Breaking The World Record For Coin Catching With Paul Deacon, Woodfield Avenue, 30 December 1974

In 2004 I was honoured to have formed part of a team, as a NewsRevue writer, that really did win a Guinness World Record – explained and illustrated in the piece linked here and below:

Ultimate Love and Happy Tories, Ivan Shakespeare Memorial Dinner, Café Rouge Holborn, 3 March 2017

But I had clearly forgotten that, 30 years previously, I was involved in another world record feat. The reference in the diary dated 30 December 1974 clearly reads:

Paul Deacon came for day – we broke world coin catching record.

Ok, so perhaps that record was not independently authenticated and certified. Perhaps the world coin catching record is not quite so prestigious as longest running live comedy show.

But a world record IS a world record and we broke it.

We went on to spoof the event in a rather childishly silly (even by our standards) recording we made in April 1977, by which time coin catching had become known as coin tossing, it seems:

Execution Scenes, Coin Tossers And Miscellaneous Silliness Recorded With Paul Deacon, 12 April 1977

I have no recollection of the rules of coin catching and how the world record was established. The 1977 recording might contain some clues, but only to the extent that “rules” and “establishment” probably played a very small part indeed. I’ll guess that the coin was tossed in a conventional “start of a match” stylee and then caught (or not),

More importantly, this diary entry is the first mention of Paul Deacon in my diaries and I actually think that day might well have been the very first time that the two of us got together during the school holidays to lark about.

In which case it was genuinely a milestone or seminal event, even if not genuinely a world record.

Postscript One

Paul Deacon has chimed in with some essential additional details:

Haha. I seem to recall I was good at stacking coins on the back of my elbow then catching them with a flick of the arm downwards. Also spinning a coin one handed. What a sad lad

Postscript Two

A link to this posting kicked off quite a controversy on the Alleyn’s 1970s Alumni Facebook Group. A veritable Coincatchgate.

For those readers who are members of that group, here is a link to that controversy.

Stumps In the Back Drive, Thank You, Cyril Barnett, circa 1 June 1974

A sighting of the following in Salford in March 2019 – click here or below for more about that trip…

…recovered a memory from my childhood.

Playing cricket in the back drive behind our houses in Woodfield Avenue.

There was nowhere suitable to erect my stumps. Propped against the garage door was unsatisfactory.

There was one vaguely suitable pot-holey area but that meant bowling up hill with little run up and the holes were not well placed for the even distribution of stumps.

That same yard some 50 years later, with thanks to Ayres Treefellers for the picture

Until, one day, the kindly gentleman next door in 3a, Cyril Barnett, proudly produced for me a piece of plywood with three holes in it specifically designed for the insertion of the stumps.

This device – which was a rudimentary version of the above Salford loo stump device and which bears some resemblance, in design terms, to the beer-carrying device King Cricket has named The Device…

England v Pakistan at Old Trafford – match report

…worked brilliantly for yard cricket, enabling the stumps to be placed wherever made sense – which was different placement depending on whether it was simply bowling practice or a game of yard cricket with a mate.

The best thing about this form of stump device was the ability to make the entire thing fall over if you really did hit the stumps flush and with reasonable force. This I rarely managed myself with my floaty donkey-drops – it was more a thing that my opponents might do to me with a bit of medium pace, full and straight.

Sadly no photos survive of Cyril Barnett’s device but I have found a picture of Cyril, probably taken two or three years after he manufactured my stump-thingie.

Cyril teaching me pancake making while my dad was teaching me a bit about photography.

What a kindly neighbour he was. He would have appreciated the two night visit to Manchester in March 2019 that triggered this memory, in part because Cyril was from Manchester himself. Also because I went there to see Rags The Musical and the rag trade was precisely the thing he was in…when he wasn’t doing carpentry or pancake making with and for me.

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.

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

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.

Andrew & Fiona Come To Play, Standard 8 Home Movie, Woodfield Avenue, c August 1966

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.

I’m pretty sure the birthday party film – click here – is 1967 and I think we look a little older in that one – although no less cute.

The Day The England Football Team Won The World Cup Final, Nunu’s House, 30 July 1966

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.

Me, Fiona & Andrew Levinson, probably “that summer”.

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.

Go figure.