​The Tragic Story of Bon Accord on the Occasion of their Defeat on the Football Field

or,

"Sorry for your Loss"

It was on the 12th September 1885,

When we were not yet alive,

That Arbroath took to the soccer field

In the First Round of the Scottish Cup

Against the Aberdeen side "Bon Accord".

Which side would be the first to yield?

Alas . . .

On this day, a world record was set.

Arbroath beat the goalie of Bon Accord 

And put the ball in the net

No less than FORTY-ONE times in a single game.

Fortunately . . .

Five of the goals were deemed to be offside

And so Arbroath came off the field with pride

For they had beaten Bon Accord by 36-nil

A record world wide which stands still

Which is what Bon Accord's goalie must also have done,

Or surely he could hae stopped at least one!

in the style of William Topaz McGonagle   

Time for a few more photos

Probably because I can't take a decent photo to save my life, for a long time now I've played around using photo manipulation to construct new abstract, semi-abstract or surreal photos.

Here are a few I entered into our local camera club display night.  One of them at least you've seen before.

 There's a place near us called Brooklyn, where there is a long steel bridge which had to be replaced about 70 years ago.  The old line has been converted into a siding which is a good  place to put vintage trains from time to time.  Above is the photo as taken which is pretty boring, and below is "Midnight Express" rejigged from the same image.

In Sydney Harbour is an island which has been home to several different purposes.  It has been a shipyard which has handled both the old Queen Elizabeth and the old Queen Mary.  Before that it was a jail, and this is a jazzy workup of the Garrison Building.

The moon, a peacock named George, some seals, the country in upper South Australia, and a moonlight night all come together to form "Porpoise Party" five images altogether to make one!

This is also a compound image.  Believe it or not, the outer "blades" are made from a poor photo of the Aussie bush, and colours taken from a couple of garden flowers.  I loved the "Catherine Wheel" effect, so I called it "Wheeee!"

This is an architectural shot.  Somewhere in Sydney, approximately in Elizabeth Street near to the Museum of Sydney, there is a tall block of offices.  Because I had my camera with me, Security wouldn't let me take any interior shots, but my two companions were allowed to take as many photos as they wanted provided they used their smart phones.  So I was left outside and as it happened I got four prizewinning shots while I was waiting for my friends to reappear.  I had to reflect the shot, invert the colouring, and do a bit of this and that.  This is the result!

Using a similar technique, I manipulated two Eiffel Towers to give a grasshopper's head, or a devil's coal red eyes.  I haven't exhibited this yet, so it will be interesting to see if it gets a similar reception to "Working all night"

Recently I celebrated my 71st birthday, and my wife gave me aa wonderful book of landscapes.  There was one particular black and white shot of an aircraft vapour trail, and straight away I thought of Paris . . . and when I read the caption it WAS Paris.  So to conclude, here is my homage to the photographer of the black and white photo which I had remembered.  Taken from the bridge which connects the Ile de la Cite and the Ile St Louis, I call it "The sunset trails"

Sunday School and Farmer Steele

Sunday SCHOOL

I loved going to school so much, when I started in 1951 at the age of five, that when I heard that you could go to school on Sundays as well, I really wanted to go.  My mother mysteriously said that it was not like ordinary school, but if I really wanted to, I could go along on the understanding that I couldn't drop out, I would have to keep going.  This should have been a hint to me, but the idea of a sixth day at school made me so happy I somehow missed that oblique warning.

I, and several others were shepherded into a building near Tewkesbury Abbey.  The penny did not drop.  After all, just about everywhere in our small town was near the Abbey.  We went in, and a lot of nuns sat us down in rows.  The penny dropped.  We were in the front row because most of us were smaller than the older children.  A nun gave out some tatty hymn books, but not to the front row.  Someone played the piano, and most of the children sang or mumbled a hymn.  I did not know the hymn, I did not have a hymn book, and I suppose I felt foolish.  Afterwards we had to sit on the floor in circles and listen to stories about God.  It wasn't as exciting as Thomas the Tank Engine.  Then we stood up in our rows, tried to sing some other unknown hymn without hymn books, and then row by row we were allowed to leave.

I don't think I was bored, but I was upset, because it was nothing like the day school, and I couldn't understand why I had been denied a hymn book.  I had had to promise Mum that I would continue to go.  I went week after week, becoming unhappier and unhappier, until eventually I cried.  Mum wanted to know what was wrong, so I told her I never got a hymn book.  "All right", said Mum, who had a wicked sense of humour, "tell the nuns that because you weren't being given a hymn book, you would go with your teacher to the Baptist Chapel!"

And like a very small, totally unguided missile, that's exactly what I did.  The Baptist Chapel was far more fun, I got my very own hymn book, and best of all, my teacher's father was a lay preacher.  Whenever he became impassioned, (what the Welsh know as "Hwl", he sounded just like a sheep!

IN THE FIELDS, or, HOW I MADE AN IMPORTANT DISCOVERY

My best friend, Nicky Price and I played in the field behind Nicky's home.  There were actually two fields, with a brook on the far side, and a deep pond on the side where the houses had been built.  One day, we were on one side of the pond, when the farmer, Mr Steele arrived with his tractor and trailer on which his son, Victor Steele, sat with a large ball of barbed wire.  They had come to mend a fence next to the pond.

They both got down and Victor carried the barbed wire across to the pond.  I can't remember now, whether Victor tripped, or whether he just wasn't paying attention, but he dropped the barbed wire into the pond.  As I've said, it was a deep pond.  There was a pause, then Mr Steele said, "Victor you bloody idiot, you've bloody dropped the bloody barbed wire in the bloody pond.  You're bloody useless!"

What happened after that, I don't know, because I ran back to our house, where Mum and Dad were in the kitchen.  "Mum, Dad!" I cried, "You'll never guess what Mr Steele said to Victor!"  I then repeated what I had heard, word for word.  Swearing was disapproved of in those days, so I let rip.  My father's look darkened.  "I didn't say that, Mr Steele said that" I said.

I had discovered inverted commas.

SCHOOL ILLNESSE

SCHOOL ILLNESSES

Thinking back, there were some pretty nasty illnesses still around.  Chicken Pox, Measles, German Measles, Scarlet Fever and Pneumonia were all caught by my classmates.  There were no innoculations for those, although we had "had the needle" for diphtheria as a child.  The cure for chicken pox, if you knew someone who already had it, was to go and play with them until you caught it, and then another child would come and play with you.  Because you could catch it only once, if you were lucky you got a few days off school, survived a contagious disease and improved your social life by making two new friends.

Tuberculosis was still around, and large white vans used to come to schools.  They contained a portable X ray machine.  We used to have to strip to the waist, push against a white plate, which was ALWAYS cold, there would be a whirr and that was that.  I assume that anyone who had a chest infection was summoned to their doctor.

I used to suffer from croup very badly.  When I coughed, the noise woke people up at night.  When the noise woke up half of Queens Road, Doctor Shephard was called and he arrived in his black Wolseley car.  He was an old man even (especially) to a child of my age, and quite forbidding.  He never removed his jacket.  He listened to my chest with his stethoscope, tapped my chest with two fingers, and said "You've got croup, John.  I'll give you something to cure it, and I'll come and see you again tomorrow."

He then delved into his bag and pulled out a glass syringe, a small saw, a small jar of dry penicillin powder, and a glass ampoule of distilled water.  With the saw, he made a small nick in the neck of the ampoule.  Next he fitted a needle to his syringe and drew up the distilled water from the ampoule, which he then threw away.  It was fascinating.  Then he put the needle into the jar containing the penicillin powder, and squirted in the water.  Next he pulled out the syringe (and needle), pushed his spectacles back onto his forehead, and gave the jar a good shake.  Lastly he put the needle into the jar and sucked up the penicillin solution into the syringe.  He motioned me to turn over and the next thing I knew, there was a sharp pain, followed by a quick swab with some meths.  (I recognised the smell from my Dad's camping stove).  Next morning, he would arrive as promised and repeat the treatment.  The dedication of Doctors in those days was amazing.  My mother had complications when I arrived, and Doctor Shepherd must have left his surgery to attend my mother in Cheltenham, over nine miles away.  Thinking about it, his must have been the very first face that I ever saw

The reason I mention all this illness is because TB (tuberculosis) was still prevalent.  My mother used to cough from cigarettes.  "Craven A,  For Your Throat's Sake".  Senior Service "as recommended by doctors"  My mother had the X ray, but fortunately (!) all she had was a scar on the lung which required bed rest.  We were provided, thanks to the Government, a "Home Help" who came from nearby and was paid to do domestic duties.  Her name was Mrs Messenger, and I became a friend of her son, Paul.

SCHOOL ILLNESSES

 

Thinking back, there were some pretty nasty illnesses still around.  Chicken Pox, Measles, German Measles, Scarlet Fever and Pneumonia were all caught by my classmates.  There were no innoculations for those, although we had "had the needle" for diphtheria as a small child.  The cure for chicken pox, if you knew someone who already had it, was to go and play with them until you caught it, and then another child would come and play with you.  Because you could catch it only once, if you were lucky you got a few days off school, survived a contagious disease and improved your social life by making two new friends.

Tuberculosis was still around, and large white vans used to come to schools.  They contained a portable X ray machine.  We used to have to strip to the waist, push against a white plate, which was ALWAYS cold, there would be a whirr and that was that.  I assume that anyone who had a chest infection was summoned to their doctor.

I used to suffer from croup very badly.  When I coughed, the noise woke people up at night.  When the noise woke up half of Queens Road, Doctor Shephard was called and he arrived in his black Wolseley car.  He was an old man even (especially) to a child of my age, and quite forbidding.  He never removed his jacket.  He listened to my chest with his stethoscope, tapped my chest with two fingers, and said "You've got croup, John.  I'll give you something to cure it, and I'll come and see you again tomorrow."

He then delved into his bag and pulled out a glass syringe, a small saw, a small jar of dry penicillin powder, and a glass ampoule of distilled water.  With the saw, he made a small nick in the neck of the ampoule.  Next he fitted a needle to his syringe and drew up the distilled water from the ampoule, which he then threw away.  It was fascinating.  Then he put the needle into the jar containing the penicillin powder, and squirted in the water.  Next he pulled out the syringe (and needle), pushed his spectacles back onto his forehead, and gave the jar a good shake.  Lastly he put the needle into the jar and sucked up the penicillin solution into the syringe.  He motioned me to turn over and the next thing I knew, there was a sharp pain, followed by a quick swab with some meths.  (I recognised the smell from my Dad's camping stove).  Next morning, he would arrive as promised and repeat the treatment.  The dedication of Doctors in those days was amazing.  My mother had complications when I arrived, and Doctor Shepherd must have left his surgery to attend my mother in Cheltenham, over nine miles away.  Thinking about it, his must have been the very first face that I ever saw

The reason I mention all this illness is because TB (tuberculosis) was still prevalent.  My mother used to cough from cigarettes.  "Craven A,  For Your Throat's Sake".  Senior Service "as recommended by doctors"  My mother had the X ray, but fortunately (!) all she had was a scar on the lung which required bed rest.  We were provided, thanks to the Government, a "Home Help" who came from nearby and was paid to do domestic duties.  Her name was Mrs Messenger, and I became a friend of her son, Paul.

Momentous changes happen

Meanwhile, there had been other changes.  The Cottons had moved out to be replaced by Uncle Mervyn and Auntie Diana Grindle, (of whom, much more later), and across the road at number 9 Queens Road, the new people were the Prices and their children Nicky and Pauline (of whom, also much later).  Mervyn and Diana Grindle made a path from their prefab in Warwick Place around to our kitchen door, which went underneath the window of my parents' bedroom.  One day, when I was playing in Mum's bedroom, Diana shouted across the immortal line, (Yoohoo, Kath, the King's dead!)  And so he was.  He had been a heavy smoker.  The date was 6^th February 1952.

For a month, the red mast heads of the Daily Mirror became purple in mourning for the late King.  He lay in State for several days in the 900 year-old Westminster Hall, but amongst all the flags at half mast, Buckingham Palace did not fly any flag.  The reason for this was that the next Monarch was overseas at the time, and had to interrupt a planned visit to Australia while she was still in Africa.  Princess Elizabeth, the wartime motor mechanic, had become Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, Monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of all her Dominions and Territories Overseas. As most people know, the Royal Standard is only flown in places where the Monarch actually is.

The New Elizabethan Era had begun.  The National Anthem was always sung in those days after the cinema, concert or play.  For many months, audiences used to sing "God save the Kiqueen"  It was almost as though she didn't become Queen instead of a Kiqueen until the Coronation, which took place on a rainy day, June 2^nd 1953.

SCHOOL AND SOME CONSEQUENCES

I started school in January 1951, just before I was five.  It was the middle of winter.  When I woke up on a winter's morning, there was frost on the inside of the windows.  There were these wonderful leaf patterns of ice, and if you breathed (not blew), your warm breath would melt the ice, and water would trickle down the window pane.  Often, my mum would put my clothes on my bed so that they would warm me IN bed, and then I would have warm clothes to wear when I got out of bed.  In the sitting room we had a Valor Heater.  Ours was a grey paraffin stove.  It was warmer than the surroundings, but that's not saying a lot!

Anyway, in 1951, I started at Trinity Infants' School in Tewkesbury.  It was actually two buildings, one on either side of Trinity Walk.  The school was brick with great big windows and it was divided into two classrooms and a large space where we did PT, slept in the afternoons, had assemblies.  We didn't seem to have lessons.  Our teacher was Mrs Cook and she was nice but she was old.  We played with toys that had been played with too much, had to try and sleep in the afternoon (which I hated, but I don't remember why) and then we played games and sang songs until it was time to go home.

GOING HOME

Memo to Mums and Dads.  Make sure you arrive at your child's school BEFORE the end of the school day.

At our school, we had to sit up straight and wait for our mothers to arrive in the classroom.  Then you could stand up and go.  Mrs Wiggins and Carol; Mrs Nash and Peter; Mrs Stone and Wendy.  My mother usually turned up about fifth or sixth out of almost 40 mums.  It was almost certainly no more than two or three minutes, if that, but it seemed to be E-T-E-R-N-I-T-Y.  There was no play school, no kindy (kindergarten wouldn't have been a very good name only six years after the end of the Second World War).  There was also no real conception of Health and Safety as we know it today.  Our school playground was an asphalt square, and on the furthest side from our classrooms, there had been a building which had been demolished.  Most of the destroyed building had been carted away, but there were still some bricks stuck in the ground at crazy angles, so that there were points of the bricks sticking up out of the ground.  Whenever we played on the rough ground someone inevitably tripped up, but one playtime, I went an absolute cropper.  When I stood up, my clothes were bloody and I notice these dark drops of blood dripping down in front of my eyes.  I was given some first aid and then I'm not sure what the sequence of events was.  I remember my Mum arriving.  I don't know how they contacted her as we didn't have a phone.  Maybe a teacher ran down the street to my Gran's and found my mother there and brought her to the school.  Mum walked me down to the local hospital where the wound was washed and yellow flavine dabbed on, followed by a plaster.  My grazed knee was cleaned and gentian violet applied. No stitches.  I remember being disappointed that I wouldn't have any stitches to show off when I went back to school in full colour.  There weren't many purple=legged, yellow-headed boys in the class.  It can't have been a totally trivial wound, though, as I bear a small scar on my forehead to this day.

 

MISS STEPHENS, ONE OF MY FAVOURITE TEACHERS, DESPITE EVERYTHING

The following school year I was in Miss Stephens' class.  She volunteered for the Red Cross, I think, and she always smelled of disinfectant.  About four decades later I happened upon her while she was doing her shopping.

"Hello, Miss Stephens," I said, "How lovely to see you"

"Please, call me Edna" she replied.

"By all means, Edna it is, Miss Stephens" I said rather lamely.

By this time I was in short trousers and it was 1951 again.

"I haven't seen your mother for a while" she said.

"She's very well, Miss . . . Edna".

She grinned.

 

Edna Stephens (and incidentally I could never call her Edna!) was responsible for one of the early embarrassments of my life.  One day in class she enquired who wanted to do knitting.  My hand went up, together with all the girls.  Then she asked who wanted to do clay modelling.  Up went all the boys hands, including mine!

"John, you've already chosen to do knitting"

The class laughed.  Boys didn't knit in 1951, but I did.

And off I started.  Miss Stephens cast on twenty stitches of plain stitch in green wool.  Painfully slowly I went along a row.  The girls were going much quicker, and the boys were making clay cows – in fact clay more or less anything you wanted provided it was in clay.  My knitting was full of holes, and although I didn't know how to cast on, each row got longer and longer.  I was taught fisherman's stitch, and purl, and after about nine rows I had about ninety stitches in a row.  I know that to be true, because my Mum kept the "object" until the day she died.

In about November or December 1951, probably at a weekend, we gathered near the Cross with Union Jacks to wave, as King George VI and his mother, Queen Mary, swept through Tewkesbury in their big black car. . . and then I suppose we went home.

 

SOME NOTES ON OUR HOUSE

After the Second World War, there was a housing shortage, and vast numbers of prefabricated houses were prefabricated in factories, and later they were erected on site.  These were the famous "Prefabs". Although they were "cold in winter and hot in summer", they were excellently designed and fitted out for their day.  There was a coal shed and a garden shed made of corrugated metal.  The house itself had a coal fire (enclosed with fire doors) attached to a back boiler which was right in the middle of the house.  On one side of the fire was the room fitted out as a kitchen.  It was very modern.  It was inside, there was no obvious fireside, but there was lots of preparation space, a hot tap and a cold tap, and a gas fridge.  Through the door was the front room, which was used regularly.  This was where the fire was.  Through the door opposite was the hall, with the front door on the left and the other two bedrooms and the bathroom at the end.  There were two hot taps and two cold taps serving a wash basin and a bath.  There was also an indoor toilet.  I had the front bedroom, and my parents had the back bedroom.  I was not allowed into the back bedroom without permission.  (When I was clearing my mother's bedroom in a different house, fifty years later, I still felt uneasy being in her bedroom, even though she had not lived there for six months or so, and had passed away a few days earlier!)

What you have to remember is that Gran's house, which we had just left, had an outside toilet, an added on shed which acted as a kitchen, and a shared outside wash house.  Apart from the back room, none of the rest of the house had any heating at all.  In comparison, the prefab was a palace. 

Underneath the kitchen table which had a coir mat in red and cream stripes, I used to play with canary pudding tins, which I used to stack on top of each other.  For Christmas Santa brought me a tin plate spinning top with a siren. 

We had a corner plot at number 68 Queens Road.  I am still in touch with Tony, (he was three years older than me, and lived at number 2 Warwick Place).  We didn't have a lot in common, but we played together.

OUR GARDEN

So my father had a corner plot, and he grew vegetables.  He grew runner beans, french and dwarf beans.  Broad beans, potatoes (two varieties, Arran Pilot and King Edward, I think), peas, sprouts, curly kale, purple sprouting, brussels sprouts, carrots in rows, rhubarb in the corner.  There were lots of snapdragons and marigolds and dahlias along the borders, and large red poppies.  Elsewhere there were roses and a small lawn.  And I think, sweet peas, whose flowers were so fragrant.  One thing we didn't have, that many of our neighbours did, was a boundary hedge.  We had a primitive post and wire fence which dated back to when the house was first built, and a gate that didn't close without effort.

Marjorie from Windgather came to stay.  I went in our car with Dad to Cheltenham Lansdown station to collect her.  Her train arrived with a red engine on the front, which meant that it was still painted in LMS colours.  The LMS had been nationalised at the start of 1948, and it is the only LMS engine I can remember.  That's all I remember about her visit!

My only other two memories in 1949 were both significant in their own ways.  Once I could walk, I chose not to.  Instead of crawling, I sat and moved myself round with my bottom sliding along the well polished linoleum, which had a wood block pattern.  This was sufficient independent movement to get rid of the pram, and get me a pushchair.  I suppose the nearest modern equivalent would be a stroller, except that mine had silver mudguards!  One day we were going shopping.  On the way to the town we passed the cricket field and I remember I suddenly thought "It's 1949!"  Nothing else.  This was my first conscious knowledge, that I remember, of time.

The other memory was of much greater significance.  Our house was at the top of a small hill in Queens Road, and just round our corner was a steeply sloping Warwick Place.

I was playing in our garden with a small stick, and I threw it in the road.  I remember that.  I also remember lying in the gutter crying my eyes out.  What had happened was that as I dashed into the normally empty road, a young man on a bicycle came speeding round the Warwick Place corner and hit me so hard that I was knocked over and hit my head on a kerbstone.  I don't remember being taken to our doctor, but I'm sure I was, and that he rendered first aid.  A few weeks later I was diagnosed with Epilepsy, which of course has changed and limited my life ever since.

 I don't recall it, but the young man was off to a tennis match, he apparently had the racquet in one hand and a box of balls in the other, which meant that he was riding without holding the handlebars, so that he couldn't swerve or apply his brakes.  The strange thing is, that ever since that occasion, when I have heard that story told, I have never ever had any feelings against the fellow.  I don't even know his name.  As far as I am concerned, it is Kismet, Karma, Fate.

After a short while I started to have small "turns".  My brain seemed to be switched off, then on again, and I didn't even fall over.  Mr Anderson, my specialist, prescribed phenobarbitone to work on the epilepsy, and benzedrine to wake me up from the sleepy side effects.

I was on barbiturates and amphetamines – uppers and downers, at the age of three.  I have never understood the attraction of "recreational drug use"

 

LEARNING TO READ

My Mum and Dad didn't teach me the ABC, instead, years before it became generally used, my parents taught me a sort of phonetic alphabet.

"Ah, Buh, Cuh, Duh, Eh, Fuh, Guh"

They also bought me some readers.  These were books with simple sentences.

"Sing, mother, sing"

"Mother sings to Mary"

"Mary sings to John"

"They sing together"

and,

"The cat sat on the mat"

"Tuh huh eh". [ No John!, the TH is always called "Thuh" or "Thith"]

"Thuh cuh-ah-tuh (cat) Suh- Ah-Tuh (sat) ,Oh, nuh (on) [good, John, well done!] Tuh, huh, eh [we've already done this] I look back and see "Thuh" "Muh, Ah, Tuh, (mat).  [So what's that all together then].  "The cat sat on the mat"  "Well done!" said Mum.  "You can read!"  But of course I couldn't.

We went through the orange book, the blue book, the yellow book and even the red book, but I knew, and Mum knew, that I had memorised sentences.

One day, when I was about four, my mother was running my bath preparatory to my bed time.  I was looking at a sentence and I was able to work out for myself: "Sing mother sing".

"Mummy, I can read" I shouted as I headed for the bathroom.  I was promptly scooped up and returned to the books. Look Mummy. "Sing mother sing". [Very good!  What's the next bit?] "Mother sings to Mary" [Very good!]"  Now she turned to another book, and opened up a page.

"What does this say then?" she enquired.

A sea of letters swam into my eyes.  But I took little bits and gradually put the shapes of the letters together.  "The cat sat on the mat and had some milk.  Afterwards he purred."

My mother was already purring.  I was in bed when Dad came home from work.  He came into my room and said "I hear you can read".  Almost certainly (although I don't remember it on this occasion) he would have given me his special smile, which was reserved for very special occasions (and ice cream!)

Very soon afterwards, I was taken into Smith's in Tewkesbury High Street and Dad bought me "Thomas the Tank Engine" by the Rev W Awdry, and that introduced me to the joy and possibilities of reading.  I never had to bother with "Sing mother sing" again.  Instead I had a proper book with real stories.

It was 1950, I was four, and I could read.  I can't really remember much about 1950.  It's not that I don't have any memories.  It's just that I don't have any events to hang those memories on.