Heaven is just a …

OK.

Just a quicky. More later.

How about Graceland for the main attraction? Then eating burgers in downtown Memphis, with Neil Young on the PA?

Yeah, the Peabody ducks sneaked in there, too.

 

Black Friday

Well, that’s the carbs of Thanksgiving out of the way. So now to a healthier diet.

The alternative to posting here (trying to use Facebook) has proved somewhat fraught.

So, a passing thought here (prompted by the New York Times front page): the US still allows HCFC-22 as a coolant. That puts it in 140 million central heating air units nationwide. This stuff is therefore present in every landfill — 0r rather was, and is leaking out. Bye bye troposphere.

And this in a country where your bar snack packet warns you it may contain nuts.

There are more nuts in the environmental destruction lobby.

Normal service will be resumed …

Perhaps. One day.

Meanwhile Malcolm is off to the storm-battered State of Noo Joisey, in time for Thanksgiving.

A side-trip to Memphis and Nashville is on the cards. Expect — in the future — ignorances on the topics of the Blues, alt-country and how the Scots-Irish made good.

Meanwhile, thanks to the few who have frequented tho blog. Your interest and occasional feed-back has kept an old man (a) off the bottle (well …) and (b) exercising the odd brain-cell. Feel warm about your efforts at personal care in the community.

There are several posts in the ‘pending’ file (for example, Malcolm wants to have a go at the history of Doire before it became Stroke City). They may eventually see the light of cyber-day.

Who knows? You may find updates at http://www.facebook.com/MalcolmRedfellowsHomeService

 

O frabjous day!

Callooh! Callay! He chortled in his joy.

And why, for goodness’ sake, Malcolm?

Norwich City 1 Manchester United 0

Norwich recorded only their second win over Manchester United in 15 league matches thanks to a brilliant headed goal from Anthony Pilkington.

The ex-Huddersfield forward struck 30 minutes from time when he flicked in Javier Garrido’s cross from the left.

As in:

• … famous win [breakingnews.ie]
• United suffer Norwich stunner [fifa.com]
• Pilkington header stuns United [Sky Sports]
• United stunned [Sporting Life]

and many, many more.

Meanwhile, the ComRes monthly poll for the Sunday Mirror and the Sindie has:

• Con 31% (-2),
• Lab 43% (+2),
• LibDem 10% (nc),
• UKIP 8% (-1).

As Anthony Wells skims it:

The twelve point lead is the largest ComRes have shown this Parliament in either their online or their phone polls.

The fieldwork was done between Wednesday and Friday, so most of it would have been finished before the results of Thursday’s election. It is too early to expect any impact from them in the polls.

Short of Nadine Dorries providing a tasty snack for Crocodylus porous [below], can the weekend get any better?

My enemy’s enemy is — not necessarily — my friend

When David Blackburn at the Speccie recommends a piece by George Eaton at the Staggers, in the bushes something stirs.

Both sides, in short, are evaluating what happens now the Lib Dem vote has collapsed. And whether the UKIP surge can continue. Either way, it is for Labour to exploit and the Tories to repulse  and repel (actually, they do that, en masse, quite well).

Eaton’s piece is the terser, but makes three points (which Malcolm glosses here) on the back of the Corby by-election:

• The Labour vote increased proportionately by nearly 10%. Were that to be the norm at a future General Election — which, we must assume is still slated for 7th May 2015 — Labour would romp it. As it happens, Malcolm would not be surprised if — given the faintest glimmer of an economic silver lining in 2014 — the Coalition didn’t somehow collapse this ‘fixed’ (in any sense you choose) parliament. Indeed, Cameron may be able to achieve just that by his long-trailered, long-over-due ‘big’ speech on Europe — and some kind of pledge/promise/wishful thinking on a referendum (cue Tom Newton Dunn at The Sun — this is one topic where the Murdoch press are a ‘must read’).
• If the Lib Dem decline persists, Labour stands to pick up those Tory/Labour marginals where the Lib Dem vote exceeds the present Tory majority (Eaton counts 37 of these). Several of those are seats (such as Clegg’s) with a large university student vote. The previous generation of those students (who will have passed on by 2015) were blinkered by the Lib Dem hypocrisy on fees, and by natural resentment at Labour’s involvement in US wars: go figure.
• If the Lib Dems do a Lazarus, and/or if the incumbency factor works in the Lib Dem MP’s favour, the Tories also lose out — because, again on Eaton’s arithmetic, there are 38 Lib Dem seats where the Tories run second. What Eaton doesn’t include is the West Country factor, where the Lib Dems (in fact, unreconstructed Liberals) have deep roots, and should continue to blossom.

Blackburn attempts to put a good face on what was an appalling day for the Tories:

• the rise of independents;
• that it was all a profoundly anti-politics election, and low turnout is a long-term trend. Err … is it? —

What is agreed by all-comers, is that Cameron is:

• damned if he does — any concessions to the rabid Right and the UKIPpers alienates the centre, leaving that ground open to the Labour ‘One Nation’ ploy.

and

• double-damned if he doesn’t — the Tory Right and the Right Outside are ‘on manoeuvres’, as Norman Tebbit cogently explains:

… there is plenty for the Conservative strategists to worry about. Whilst the BNP did rather poorly, particularly in Corby, UKIP on the whole did rather well. In the very low poll at Manchester, UKIP came within half a dozen votes of overtaking the Conservatives. At Corby, where the Conservative vote collapsed, UKIP scored a respectable 5,000-plus votes, triple that of the Lib Dems, and at Cardiff they marginally increased their vote.

In short, while Labour seems to have stemmed the loss of votes to BNP, the Tories are still losing support to UKIP; and even worse for Mr Cameron, UKIP is strengthening in advance of the 2014 European elections. The Tory cry that a vote for UKIP is a wasted vote may be wearing a bit thin.

All that is the prime focus on today’s editorial in The Independent:

Mr Cameron is caught in a difficult bind. He is facing a Labour Party showing tentative signs of recovery from its 2010 defeat, while to his right there is an anti-EU party attracting votes at a point when Europe soars up the political agenda. But if the Tory leader hardens his stance on the EU to appease Eurosceptics, he risks giving up an even greater share of the more moderate centre ground he once sought to occupy. And his departure from this electorally fertile terrain in other policy areas is one of the reasons his party struggled in the by-elections.

That’s without tangling too closely with the tar-baby (a dangerous metaphor, Malcolm fully appreciates, but one which he can happily defend on non-racist terms) of ‘localism’. ‘Localism’ may have been a good notion in happier times, but the centralisers of Tory policy (Gove, Shapps, Pickles …) have done for it, good and proper.

And another thing …

The North impinges further south each year.

The Tories are rapidly heading towards extinction north of the Trent and outside of the leafiest of shires. David Blackburn, in that piece noted above, cheerfully quotes himself from the previous day:

… the Tories’ woeful showing in South Yorkshire (beaten into 3rd by the English Democrats) and in Durham (finished a miserable 4th), to say nothing of the debacle in the Manchester Central by-election (where the party lost its deposit), should concern the party.

That is, not necessarily, even for socialist bigot like Malcolm, a good outcome.

‘Should concern the party’? Should concern the nation! For all its faults the Tory Party (indeed the two-party system) is essential to British democracy as we know it. Much as the Lib Dems might wish for a “three-party system”, that — as we have painfully discovered through this benighted ConDem coalition — arrives at sterility and even extremism (Gove, Shapps, Pickles … Duncan Smith, secret courts). Of course the whole system could — and arguably should — be given a whole new architecture, by devolution of real power to regions and localities and/or by proportional representation. For the time being, pending that day of universal liberation, we have to work within the parameters we have got.

Now we have the weekend commentariat to expect in the Sundays. That should be instructive, particularly if one or other of the ‘usuals’ comes up with a different, original interpretation. And, as Malcolm’s Dear Old Dad frequently opined: ‘It must be true: it’s in the papers’.

How to distort “news”

The Daily Mail is a low-down, dishonest, corrupting Tory rag — and needs constantly to be exposed for that. Fortunately, the Mail itself does so on a daily basis. Its whole existence is predicated to the Big Lie:

… the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

Malcolm deliberately disguises the source of that quotation, lest it fall foul of Godwin’s Law.

Today’s front page is a magnificent example of the Big Lie:

The essence of the Mail piece is:

Prescott loses police commissioner poll in his own back yard of Hull to a TORY

Except the election wasn’t just for Hull: it was for the whole Humberside Constabulary area. Here is the difference:

The political complexion, as of 2010, of the parliamentary constituencies of Humberside looks very skewed:

Ten constituencies, five Tory, five Labour, which might seem an even balance. The County seats all Tory: the Borough seats tending Labour, as one might expect. A closer look at the numbers suggests the Humberside area is safe Tory country: David Davis’s Haltemprice and Howden is regarded as the second safest Tory constituency in Britain, and has never deviated from that loyalty since 1837.

Add up the 2010 results and we have 40.8% Tory, 34.2% Labour and 25% Lib Dem:

Now consider Thursday’s results of the Police and Crime Commissioner election (though Malcolm never did get the hang of how to ‘commission’ crime):

Accepting that Prescott lost on the Second Round (39,933 to 42,164 or a 48.6/51.4% two-party split), on that first count:

• Prescott caned the Tory — it is, in crude terms, a four or five per cent swing (and it has to be accepted that the “county” types turned out far, far better than the urbanites);
• the Tory vote went AWOL, barely squeaking in ahead of the independent — even the egregious Godfrey Bloom (surely one of the more disreputable and bizarre UKIP types, which itself is saying something) splitting off a sixth of the total poll;
• the Tory candidate was only rescued — just — on that second round by rolling up the odds-and-sods vote: those 19,375 who did express a second preference split for the Tory 2:1;
• the Lib Dems were totally creamed: even proportionately, more than a third of their vote evaporated.

For the record, Paul Davison — who ran that close third —  is an ex-Police Superintendent, and probably the best qualified of all the candidates.

The real determinant was tthe total failure of second preference transfers (which, as every aficionado of Irish politics knows, is key to the whole operation). Only 27% of the odds-and-sods ballots bothered to make a second preference. That is either a failure of voter education or a clear statement by a majority to vote “neither of the above”. 51,665 second preferences did not go for either the Labour or the Tory in the final run-off — which amounts to an absolute majority of those who turned out. We should not forget the “alternative vote” was the preferred option in the Great Constitutional Débâcle of 5th May 2011. If we needed concrete evidence that AV is a sham, and no substitute for proper proportional representation, here is the concrete evidence.

Yet the Daily Mail says it was all about Prescott, and the Daily Mail is a dishonourable rag.

And the Daily Mail says it was all about the city of Hull, and nothing to do with the other lands north and south of the estuary, and, for sure, the Daily Mail is a dishonourable lie-sheet.

… and one Englishman to sink it.

The punchline, of course, to that bitter Belfast gybe about the building of the Titanic.

Factor one: a tradition

Belfast was building ships as early as 1663. By the mid-nineteenth century the business was big, and getting bigger. When Anvil Point was launched (1st April 2003) she was keel number 1742 (and last) of the vessels to come off the Harland and Woolf slips.

Yet only one gets popularly remembered — and she was probably the shortest-lived of the lot.

Factor two: an image (bad)

Belfast hasn’t had a lot positively going for the city these last few decades.

The Europa was, after all, not just the place where the world’s press bedded down. And rarely ventured forth. And talked. And broadcast therefrom. And drank each other under tables. It was also, famously, the most bombed hotel in the world. Which included Beirut. For the record: twenty-eight, and hopefully not counting. For that reason, NBC news includes the Europa in its Ten hotels that made history — so consider the others for comparison:

• the Ritz, Paris: Diana Spenser Windsor’s nookie joint before Pillar Thirteen, but more worthily the resort of Ernest Hemingway;
• the Crillon, Paris, notoriously the Gestapo’s favourite watering-hole in occupied Paris;
• the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where James Earl Ray did for Martin Luther King;
• the Greenbriar, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, which was the Congressional nuclear bunker and Cold War funk hole, a.k.a. ‘Project Greek Island’;
• the Berchtesgaden Resort, built on the site of Hitler’s Bavarian pad;
• etc., etc.

To be truthful, Belfast is, was and always will be a long, long way from being a ‘beautiful’ city. Nobody is likely to croon that they left their heart in Belfast City, though it has its television transmitter high on a hill, and The morning fog may chill the air (and on occasion, not clear all day) — admittedly the sea is rarely blue, but it can certainly be windy.

The place can certainly do with a golden sun to shine for anyone.

OK: it’s irrelevant to the main argument here; but let’s do it:

Potential

By the millennium the two main cities of Northern Ireland, Belfast and Derry (let’s leave the wasteland of ‘Craigavon’ out of this), were both in positions to exploit their considerable waterfront potentials. Both did so, though — as Northern Irish politics go — the main money stayed east of the Bann.

In Belfast, with the demise of Harland and Woolf, there was one of the largest inner-city brown sites in Europe: though London’s King’s Cross ought to have beaten it for  the funny moolah (but that industrial desert had been hanging around, unexploited, for decades). Some smartass promptly designated the old H&W acres the ‘Titanic Quarter’ — and a legend was born:

Gosh: how Mediterranean! All we need now is the little cable cars.

Bayeux Tapestry — phooey!

Yes, Malcolm has seen it. And preferred the booklet version with added colouring. Apart from anything else, the dog-Latin makes more sense when it’s highlighted and not faded into oblivion. Nor, last August, were Malcolm’s grandsons greatly impressed either. Once seen, noted, included in school projects, soon forgotten.

But this is different:

The most expensive piece of Titanic memorabilia sold at auction – the 33-feet long design plan – is coming back to Belfast.

The 100-year-old scale drawing was sold last year in England for almost a quarter of a million pounds, but the anonymous buyer has agreed for it to go on show at the new Titanic visitor centre in Belfast.

The huge plan, regarded as the Holy Grail of Titanic memorabilia, shows the intricate detail of the ship – from the location of the squash court, to the Turkish baths to the first-class lavatories.

That omits a few crucial details:

• why is such an artefact worth only a couple of hundred grand at auction?
• how was it abstracted from the H&W plans office, except to be an exhibit at the official enquiry (still has the chalk markings drawn on it in 1912 to show where the iceberg struck — which must surely be ‘Crown copyright‘)?
• how genuine is the ‘provenance’ of ownership, and can we be told it, please?
• why, for heaven’s sake, is such an object not in public ownership, one way or another?

If this major piece of naval architecture arrives back at the Drawing Office (there, to the left of the picture), overlooking the Thompson Graving Dock, and is put on public view (admission will of course be charged), we have a feature which, so far, has been seriously missing from the whole Titanic farrago.

Except …

One important element in the legend has already been returned to Belfast.

The three great behemoths — the Olympic, the Titanic and the Gigantic (rapidly renamed Britannic) — were too big to enter Cherbourg harbour. Cherbourg was a major port for accepting passengers, both of the haut-ton and those rough, but profitable steerage emigrants. So a pair of tenders was commissioned, also from H&W: the Nomadic for the quality, and the Traffic for the plebs. Now aren’t those evocative, telling names? As with everything else in the Titanic story, we are not all in this together:

When that ship left England it was making for the shore,
The rich refused to ‘sociate with the poor,
So they put the poor below,
They were the first to go.
It was sad when that great ship went down.

The Nomadic is the noble vestige of the great days of Belfast shipbuilding, and likely now to be a permanent resident.

She has a heroic history, serving in two World Wars: first as a minesweeper and a ferry for American dough-boys arriving at Brest, then — in the second Unpleasantness — evacuating refugees from Cherbourg in 1940, then requisitioned by the Royal Navy as a minelayer and general transport. Back in post-war France Nomadic was again a tender to the great liners,until air-travel made that a memory, then a Parisian floating restaurant and night-club.At her lowest ebb, she was seized for debts, and bound for the breakers, so in 2006 the Northern Irish  Department for Social Development divvied up €250,001 to bring her home to Belfast, where is being conserved and restored.

Perhaps the best is yet to come.

Better to marry than burn?

Malcolm wishes to be honest: he doesn’t give a fig (there’s significant metaphor in this context!) whether a formalised same-sex partnership is called a ‘marriage’ or not.

He feels ‘Dot Wordsworth’, who does the etymology and exegesis bit for The Spectator (and very well: Malcolm doesn’t miss a single ex-cathedra utterance) was particularly political and subtle in her post on ‘marriage’. For once she totally ignored the whole etymology of the word. Let Malcolm help her to find her place in the OED (which she cites so frequently elsewhere, when it suits):

Etymology:  < Anglo-Norman and Old French, Middle French, French marier (c1145; used in lit. and extended senses) < classical Latin marītāre (used of people and animals and in viticulture) < marītus husband (compare marīta wife) < marītus , marīta ‘married’, of uncertain origin. The first element is probably not, as proposed by Priscian and many subsequent etymologists, mari- , mās ‘man, male’; it may be cognate with a number of words for young men and women, e.g. Welsh merch girl (see merchet n.), Lithuanian merga young girl, ancient Greek μεῖραξ young girl (or, in Hellenistic Greek, boy), Sanskrit marya- young man; compare also Crimean Gothic marzus wedding.

In other words, the original usage implied no more than mating. It even extends to grafting vines, which is about as asexual as can be managed.

As for the present little furore over ‘marriage’, Malcolm wonders if we’ve been here previously. Even if a long while ago. Over the summer Malcolm was reading R.I.Moore’s The War of Heresy: Faith and power in medieval Europe. That received a mention here.

The whole argument is too complex to rehearse her; but the essential point in this context is that, at the first millennium and for the couple of centuries that followed, the Catholic Church was taking control of the institution — was institutionalising — the concept of marriage:

The church was increasingly treating marriage as a sacrament, which meant that it should be performed before the altar and not, as was commonly the case, outside in the churchyard, customarily the forum of the community rather than the domain of the priest. This brought marriage, the most fundamental of social institutions, and therefore the conditions under which it could take place, under the control of the church itself rather than the community. [page 116]

That might remind us of the Wife of Bath:

… lordynges, sith I twelf yeer was of age,
Thonked be God, that is eterne on live,
Housbondes at chirche dore I have had fyve —
For I so ofte have ywedded bee —
And alle were worthy men in hir degree.

If the tradition of marrying “at the church door” had persisted until the late fourteenth century, when Chaucer was writing and expecting his audience to recognise a country tradition, then the “sacralising of marriage” still had a way to go in the West Country.

Questioning the sacrament of marriage, as Moore insistently illustrates, was a frequent heretic’s route to the pyre.

Let us also remember: when the Church controlled the institution of marriage, it also determined rightful inheritance. Which, in the feudal period, meant deciding social class and the definition of ‘nobility’.

When Wolsey fell, the Chancellorship of England came to Thomas More: that marked the moment when the higher clergy lost their established right to the highest ranks of the royal service — what we might now term the “civil service”. Until 1529, therefore, the Church in England ran the royal courts of Equity. That was the origin of the binary legal system — the common-law and equity courts — which existed down to 1875 (and still has fossilised remains in the law of the land). For the failures of the Court of Chancery see the saga of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which (as Dickens hastens to remind us in the preface to Bleak House) was no gross literary exaggeration:

I mention here that everything set forth in these pages concerning the Court of Chancery is substantially true, and within the truth. The case of Gridley is in no essential altered from one of actual occurrence, made public by a disinterested person who was professionally acquainted with the whole of the monstrous wrong from beginning to end. At the present moment (August, 1853) there is a suit before the court which was commenced nearly twenty years ago, in which from thirty to forty counsel have been known to appear at one time, in which costs have been incurred to the amount of seventy thousand pounds, which is A FRIENDLY SUIT, and which is (I am assured) no nearer to its termination now than when it was begun. There is another well-known suit in Chancery, not yet decided, which was commenced before the close of the last century and in which more than double the amount of seventy thousand pounds has been swallowed up in costs. If I wanted other authorities for Jarndyce and Jarndyce, I could rain them on these pages, to the shame of — a parsimonious public.

Malcolm, then, feels we are entitled to question whether the clerics have an absolute lien on ‘marriage’. Over his lifetime, we have ceased to distinguish between ‘married’ couples and ‘living in sin’. Gradually, legal rights that belonged only to the one institution have been extended to all comers. The ‘civil partnership’ was, and is, at best a convenient fudge.

Time to move on again.

Quite how all that fits with 1 Corinthians, chapter 7, is open to theologians as they count angels on pins.

The not-so-great and the not-so-good, no. 29: Joe “Spud” Murphy

As for the numbering of this irregular series: E&OE.

To be fair, the only “not-so-good” in this post belongs to the (ig)noble Montagu family. Well, OK: a certain Taoiseach gets a mention  — but, thanks to the competition among the holders of that office, he is squeezed out of the medal places for blackguardry. Beyond that …

And, no, it’s not April Fool’s Day.

In 1954: the world changed

Seamus Burke invented the cheese-and-onion crisp.

He did so at the behest of Joseph Murphy, a go-getting Dublin entrepreneur who deserves his place alongside the Tony O’Reillys and Michael O’Learys. But Joe Murphy got there before either of those luminaries.

Joe sprang from Dublin “trade”: his father ran the builder’s business, his mother the retail side with a paint shop. His education was the Synge Street Christian Brothers, which was to south Dublin’s inner city as Eton was to the English rolling acres: it was a tougher number, but the students were better people.

A Malcolmian aside

Put it like this: in recent years Synge Street CBS worked out why so few of its boys were applying for university entrance though the Central Applications Office — entries had to be made in January, when post-Christmas parents were strapped for cash.

Solution: Con Creedon, a past pupil, made a legacy, and the trust fund provides scholarships. Now nearly 60% of Synge Street boys are getting the Leaving Certificate points and going on to tertiary education.

Eat your heart and your ‘academies’ out, Mickey Gove. 

Sinning

When he left school, in his mid-teens (a sign of ambition in itself: too many Dublin lads towards the end of the 1930s — and later — had left school far younger), he went into the storeroom and then behind the counter of James J Fox & Co, conveniently across the road from Trinity’s Front Gate and the Bank of Ireland. During Malcolm’s Trinity years, Dear Old Dad prompted a once-a-year visit for a Christmas present (usually a briar pipe).

That move in retail was a decided move by Joe: the family already had two of his brothers in the priesthood, and that would have been a natural career move for an upwardly-mobile CBS boy. “To hell with this,” he allegedly declared, “we need one sinner in the family.”

The deep fat fryers of O’Rahilly’s Parade

O’Rahilly’s Parade is off Moore Street, Dublin, a bullet’s shot from the GPO, noted for two events (only one of which seems publicly memorialised).

It is named for the Director of Arms of the Irish Volunteers, Mícheál  Ó Rathaille. Ó Rathaille claimed the headship of his clan, and insisted therefore he was The O’Rahilly. On the Friday of Easter Week, O’Rahilly volunteered to reconnoitre an escape route out of the GPO. He was either mown down by British gun-fire in (then) Sackville Lane), or died of wounds much later through intentional British neglect.

Anyway, in O’Rahilly Parade, the other legend — that of Joe “Spud” Murphy — took shape. Already he was on the up: he had realised that Ribena was not available in the Republic, so he imported it. Ball-point pens were another (for Dublin) innovatory line. By then he had a van and eight employees. He had an addiction to the potato crisp, and he had his wife — officially Bernadette, but always “Bunny” — slicing potatoes, to fry them in a couple of deep-fat fryers. Even Murphy’s prodigious appetite could not keep up with the production, and so the notion came to market the surplus.

Findlaters, the grocers to Dublin’s ton, were already taking Murphy’s Ribena and other products and imports, and agreed to market his crisps — which were now officially Tayto Crisps (again, allegedly, because that was how Murphy’s infant son called them). Murphy’s genius for marketing had the packets emblazoned with Mr Tayto, whom we met, above.

Now flavoured!

This was a time when all crisps came in two flavours: unsalted and salted — consumer choice involved locating the small screw of salt in each packet, adding it to the other contents, and shaking the bag. Decades on, reinventing the blue salt sachet was to be another marketing break-through.

This was not good enough for Joe: like Alexander the Great, he yearned for new worlds to conquer. So, Seamus Burke experimented with a kitchen table of condiments and additives, until — ta-rah! — Joe was satisfied with the cheese-and-onion variant. This was released upon an unsuspecting world in 1954, and Joe’s fortune was made.

Well-shod Joe, not from Hannibal, MO

By the start of the 1960s Joe was a millionaire, and being hailed by Seanie Lemass as the epitome of Irish drive and success.

The Tayto neon sign guided South Dubliners back to safety from forays across O’Connell Bridge. There was a regular sponsored Tayto programme, and insistent ad-spots, on Raidió Éireann. Joe wafted around the city in his Rolls-Royce (never more than two years old). Valet-parking it for Joe was an opportunity to double a flunkey’s weekly wage. He was a universal Mr Affability.

Joe never really got the hang of his wealth. He would arrive at an outfitters — Brown Thomas or Switzers in those good times when they faced each other off across Grafton Street — and ask to see shirts or (a particular favourite) cashmere golfing sweaters  — both of which he had like Imelda Marcos had shoes. He avoided decisions of colour or cut by ordering the lot presented to him.

Expansion and retirement

Tayto continued to grow, buying up other manufacturers, and was employing 300 by the start of the 1970s. Tayto even crossed the Border: the Castle at Tandragee, County Armagh, became Tayto Castle. This had been the seat of the Dukes of Manchester (their other pad was Kimbolton Castle) until the 9th Duke went broke, retired to hunt heiresses in the USA, and survive as a con-man. The Castle was requisitioned for military use, and suffered further indignities at the hands of the US Cavalry, until Tommy Hutchinson bought it in 1955.

By now the Tayto empire was being stalked by international predators: a Chicago food group had a stake as early as 1964. By 1983, Joe celebrated becoming sixty by selling out and retiring to Spain. He continued to decorate the golf-courses around Marbella, in his cashmere sweaters, and to delight the pro shops by constantly updating his clubs, until his death in late 2001.

The sublime Allan Smethurst

We start with the station ident. of Anglia Television, in its original monochrome. Remember: all those sophisticated computer manipulations, of which the BBC and others are so fond, started here: with a silver hunting trophy on a roundtable, rotating to the sound of Handel (adapted by Malcolm Sargent). A quick trip down memory lane, showing how a decent piece of silverware, representative of sound local values, was corrupted and corroded into yet another of those meaningless corporate logos is available here.

That previous post earned response from Doubting Thomas, this blog’s other reader, reminding Malcolm of:

the Singing Postman’s song about a nice loaf of bread.

Sadly, that reference would go unrecognised and uncelebrated by the vast plurality of the world’s ignorance.

The best resort is the Guardian‘s obituary, just after Christmas, 2000:

The Singing Postman, Allan Smethurst, who has died aged 73, was well known in the late 1960s for his Norfolk dialect songs such as Hev Yew Gotta Loight, Boy? and Moind Yer Hid, Boy.

Born in Lincolnshire, he moved with his mother and stepfather to Sheringham, in Norfolk, at the age of 11. A George Formby fan and self-taught guitarist, after joining the post office in 1953 he began to write comic, yet closely observed, songs about rural life, which he sang in a heavily accented Norfolk voice. The subject matter ranged from the village cricket match and the ladies darts team to mass-produced food (Oi Can’t Git A Noice Loaf).

Superficially, these were quaint parodies, but they were popular in East Anglia itself, an indication that Smethurst’s compatriots identified with this affectionate portrait of their idiosyncrasies. The Guardian’s Dennis Barker called him “a bookishly melancholy folk-satirist”.

Thet go arn a bit:

Smethurst first found a regional audience through appearances on BBC Radio Norfolk’s Wednesday morning magazine show. The presenter, Ralph Tuck, the owner of a family firm of seed merchants, gave him the sobriquet “the Singing Postman”, and, when record companies showed no interest, financed the pressing of 100 copies of a four-song vinyl disc in 1964. It was distributed in East Anglia, and sold more than 10,000 in four months. The regional press breathlessly announced that the Singing Postman was outselling the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in Norfolk record shops.

So click, and enjoy:

That ought to have taken you to the UEA’s film archive, and a short Ralph Tuck feature on Smethurst.

There are all sorts of ironies about Smethurst as “normal for Norfolk”. He was by birth a Yellow Belly from Lincolnshire, with roots in North Norfolk. He worked as that iconic rural postman around Lavenham, in Suffolk. None of the images in the film are of Norfolk: the baker is in Stowmarket, the pub in Stowupland — just to the east of Stowmarket, and the fairground up on the Lincolnshire coast. Smethurst’s accent is exaggerated, rather stage-y — but, when Malcolm’s ear was better, he reckoned he could hear the unconscious shifts around the linguistic map (and the East Anglian accent varies considerably: some count as many as eight Norfolk varieties).

What is also of interest in that short film is listening to the narrator, Ralph Tuck. His is the middle-class, educated Norfolk voice.

Tuck was a comfortably-off seed-merchant (better believe it!) who lived at Reydon, on the Halesworth Road out of Southwold. His house is now a B&B—cum—hotel. As a sideline Tuck had a radio spot on the Norwich local radio station. Tuck’s accent is what one heard much of the time, in banks, across the counter of shops, in ordinary discourse. When local television arrived, Tuck and several others with ‘polite’, even polished regional accents had a clear run. And took it.

And thereby hangs a tale, much more important and enduring than the worthy Allan Smethurst.

Not quite a Malcolmian aside: Anglia Television

British commercial television arrived in London in 1955. The franchise for East Anglia was awarded to a consortium of well-intentioned local businessman and local ‘characters’, and Anglia Television went live on 27th October 1959. From the beginning the station had ambitions, and its launch was marked by a movie-length networked play (filmed at the Associated Rediffusion’s Wembley studios) for the ITV Play of the Week, The Violent Years, with headline stars Laurence Harvey and Hildegarde Knef.

On the other hand, what made Anglia a success was its regionalism. This was the first opportunity many East Anglians had of hearing their voices, their accents unfiltered by metropolitan superiority.

There ought to be a provable direct link between the emergence of local radio and television broadcasting, particularly as the strings were loosening in the 1950s, leading to the rise across Britain of local playwrights and novelists. That’s not romance: it’s strict economics. Not only did ITV double (and by the 1960s treble) the TV channels available, all stations increased their transmitting hours. That meant the providers had to commission many new programmes and features. And that meant the revenue  available for script-writers. In short order the monopoly BBC fees of around £100 an hour for a script was up ten fold. The prize spot for an aspiring script-writer was a place on the Coronation Street team, with wherewithal for the mortgage and the Jaguar in the garage.

Recursio ad infinitum

You’ve had one of those, when you found yourself locked into one of those endless website loops from the disreputable ends of the net.

It’s a pompous way of saying, “going round in circles, and getting to sod all”. [Though theologians prefer a more astral definition.]

After thirty-five years faithfully serving its local audience, Anglia TV was sold into the various consortia and shifting cartels which now own the shell of Channel 3. The main feature of that was the curious share-dealings of Jeffrey Archer and his “fragrant” wife, who had the insider knowledge.

More happily, Anglia’s archive seems to have ended up, as with that Smethurst film, with the University of East Anglia.

Oh well …