Seize the Day

by Mike Read

  CHAPTER 11

  YOU’RE HISTORY

  MY FIRST ENCOUNTER with history was being taught to play chess by a friend of my parents, John Liulf Swinton. John was some twenty years older than my mother, but enjoyed a similar intellect, and he taught me to play before I even started school. Where’s the history in that? The answer is in the stories that came out while he was trying to instruct me on the King’s Gambit or the Bishop’s Opening, for John’s father was Major General Sir Ernest Dunlop Swinton KBE, CB, DSO, RE, credited with inventing the tank and appointed official war correspondent on the Western Front by Lord Kitchener.

  Being the son of such a man must have been a hell of a thing to live up to. That’s possibly why I remember John as a somewhat nervy man whose wife rather dominated him. Ellen Schroeder Swinton certainly scared the life out of me when I was young. Later, for reasons best known to herself, she became our cook, but I found her food quite unpalatable, the main reason being her long, greasy hairs that got entangled in the contents. She’d frequently, and rightly, scold me for folding over the bread on a jam sandwich when I should have been cutting it, but I’m sure she had a good heart as she often gave me her loose change. Even as a kid always on the lookout for some extra sweet money I was loath to take her coins, though, as they were always dirty and stuck together with something unsavoury of, I suspected, human origin. I always gave the money a seriously good clean. Indeed, even as I write this a historic queasiness washes over me. I always thought she was Swedish or Norwegian. It turns out she was Danish. The actress Tilda Swinton is related somehow – I believe Ernest was her great-uncle, which makes her John’s niece, but that doesn’t really affect the action here.

  Putting history on hold for a moment, unless you count the history of cooks, let me wander briefly onto the subject of cooks. Our first was Cookie Dawson, who had a rather bland brown dog and still wrote to Father Christmas. I chanced to see her list of festive wants one year and it was headed by something called a ‘dunlopillo,’ which seriously made me question whether I’d go on writing to Santa when I got to an age where a dunlopillo was the one thing that would make me shriek with joy on Christmas morning. Cookie Durr was tall and quite austere, while Ann Brice, a Geordie through and through, was jolly decent and sent me birthday cards and the like. Somehow she never had the ‘Cookie’ tag attached to her like the others. Her son Leslie, who was to die tragically young in a road accident, gave me my first vinyl records. Whether it was stuff he’d grown out of and suddenly found uncool or whether it was simply a philanthropic moment I couldn’t say, but I was certainly grateful and it started me on a long and winding road.

  In any child’s life there is a queue of adults asking you the tricky question ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ My answer, even at a tender age, was that I had no intention of growing up. I’d seen the film Peter Pan and knew categorically that such a thing was possible. On the off-chance that I was wrong I usually went for veterinary surgeon or archaeologist. Once I’d ascertained that a vet dealt with sick animals and not frisky types that were full of life, I came down firmly on the side of archaeology. Uncle Jack Haslam (Uncle Zak when I was younger as I had some trouble with my ‘J’s) had other ideas. He was a larger-than-life, dominant character who felt that my future was in the chemical industry of the north. I didn’t quite see it that way, but was reluctantly wheeled around massive and forbidding factories that neither excited nor inspired. Bleaching, dyeing and other unnamed aspects of it had, I suspect, been founded the previous century to work in tandem with the great Lancashire cotton industry. It was not talked about that much, but there was an underlying sadness, in the only son of Jack and his wife Dorothy having been killed in a car accident. More than that I was never told, nor did I seek further information. Their house was called Brooklands as Jack had raced there in his younger days, and by coincidence I would attend Brooklands College years later. I must have been seen as the lad designated to step into the role they’d assumed their son would take, with a view to one day becoming lord and master. My dreams and aspirations, though, lay elsewhere and not in the dark satanic mills of Lancashire, where affluence and effluence had become acceptable bedfellows.

  I guess I was about eight years old when I went on my first archaeological dig. Not an official dig, you understand, but Ken Lewis, the father of two friends of mine, Brian and Jeremy, invited me to join them on their part-time forays into the past. I warmed to it immediately and was soon identifying arrowheads, scrapers, borers, sickle blades and other prehistoric tools. Spotting knapped flints, the bulb of percussion and those little fissures incurred by the shock of knapping became second nature. If I’m walking over likely terrain, I still look to the ground, where others may look to the sky. As other children gathered flowers, conkers, acorns or tadpoles, I’d arrive home with pockets full of stones. My mother was supportive, my father bemused.

  I haunted Weybridge Museum when I could, listening to the stories of the curator, Dorothy Grenside, herself, I suspect, a great age. I discovered later that this lovely old lady had been a champion swimmer, a tennis player, an eminent watercolour artist and poet, and one of the pioneering women motorists. I only knew her as someone who fired my enthusiasm for exploring the past. I was able to track down and buy a copy of her 1917 book of poems, Open Eyes. Museums now have a designer air about them; then they had nothing more than rows and rows of display cases with the name of the piece and the donor handwritten in ink on a small, yellowing card. Having had a deep fascination with history from an early age, the lure of a museum was great.

  A favourite spot for us flint hunters was somewhere we called ‘Flint Hill’. That wasn’t its proper name, if indeed it had one, but it was close to the deep railway cutting between Walton-on-Thames and Weybridge and the excavations a century earlier must have churned up thousands of Neolithic implements, many of which ended up in our box room jostling with the model railway for shelf space. I found looking for flints exacting, rewarding and highly compelling. Complete arrowheads were something of a rarity as their fragile tips tended to snap easily, but the more solid tools were usually complete and slipped comfortably into your hand. Great workmanship, and it was extraordinary to wonder who had held it in 4000 or even 9000 BC, only to be discovered in an age that those toolmakers could never have imagined. Our findings were fashioned before the discovery and use of copper, bronze and iron, and on the site of what to them would have been a terrifying vast iron road haunted by monsters with red eyes that pierced the night, shrieking and belching steam.

  When I left home I donated thousands of Palaeolithic and Neolithic flints, Roman pottery, ammonites, crystals and a whole range of historic goodies to the Weybridge Museum. I kept one tin trunk full, but on a clear-out one day my father tipped the contents out into the garden. ‘Well it’s where they came from,’ was the reply to my indignant pose. I made sure that I was well out of reach before chipping in with, ‘Huh, if it had been a trunk full of golf balls you wouldn’t have thrown them away.’ My mother, more of a garden habituee than my father, encountered New Stone Age craftsmanship for years to come, almost breaking her ankle on the bigger items and snapping many of the more delicate pieces.

  At Brooklands College, alongside my classes in English literature and British Constitution and art, I started to go out with Vivien Berry, with whose sister I was studying. Vivien lived at Laleham, some 7 or 8 miles from Walton-on-Thames, but I was happy to miss the last bus back to Walton for a few extra minutes with her. Those ‘extra minutes’, though, were often taken over by Major Berry with a few tales of life in the military. I knew any canoodling had come to an end when he marched in with the opening gambit, ‘Have I ever told you about this particular skirmish in Burma…?’ The pipe would be filled, tapped on the hearth, lit and the tales would begin. In youth it drew a sigh of exasperation; as an adult the response would be, ‘Hey look, we can kiss goodnight anytime, but these Burma tales are gripping.’ It’s good that our paths still cross and Vivien and
I are able to catch up and flatter each other that the years haven’t altered us too much! At least we recognise each other so it must be vaguely true.

  While I was at Brooklands College I got involved in a major archaeological find after a series of aerial photographs that had been taken of the River Wey just by the ‘wall of death’, a steeply banked section of the old Brooklands motor racing circuit, revealed the grass growing in a different direction. This was intriguing. It seemed in all probability that the meadow we’d all sat on and walked on had once been a reasonably substantial building. Very slowly, once the dig began, the outline of a sizeable structure emerged, but it was, of necessity, an extremely pedestrian process. The eventual consensus was that we had located the lost manor of Hundulsham, once the domain of Bishop Odo, William the Conqueror’s half-brother. Research revealed that it had passed through many hands over the centuries but the family that held it the longest were the Wodehams. In 1290 they had 2 acres at the rent of one rose per annum. Very romantic. By 1324 they held 80 acres at a rent of 6 shillings, the area later expanding to almost 100 acres.

  All was well until the late fifteenth century, when the descendants of Sir Bartholomew Reed, former Lord Mayor of London, seized Hundulsham from the Wodehams, who later would contest the ownership. When challenged over the legality of his claim, William Reed denied that there had ever been a manor there. The Reeds were very powerful, with many connections, so whether he demolished the manor to prove a point or whether nobody dared question his word and it fell into disrepair, we’ll never know. There is no further reference to the building or to any future families living there, so it seemed that we were the first to re-discover the lost manor of Hundulsham. One of the areas that I worked on was a room where a tiled hearth had gone from vertical to horizontal, so maybe the Reeds did destroy the property. I had some of the tiles at home for many years. I’m not sure where they went, but I can make a shrewd guess. Maybe a future historian will discover them cheek by jowl with the Neolithic tools and be totally baffled. The demolition of Hundulsham would hardly have mattered to the Reeds, for they had other houses, including Otelands (later Oatlands), which they gave to Henry VIII in a part-exchange deal, and plenty of land. How marvellous it would be to stroll down the meadow today and look for any artefacts that still remain. Marvellous but impossible.

  The site is now home to a delightfully attractive sewage plant, easily visible from the train as it leaves Weybridge station heading south-west. Underneath it somewhere is a rose that was handed over for a year’s rent. How indiscriminate progress is. I haven’t checked to see if I am a descendant of the power-hungry, avaricious, bullying Reeds of Weybridge. Surely not?

  The great British inventor Barnes Wallis had his office at Vickers Armstrong, later BAC, on the Brooklands site and came to the college to give us the odd lecture. He was inspirational, engaging and still so full of excitement for the future. He would show us, by demand of course, unseen footage of the testing of his revolutionary (pun intended) bouncing bombs at Reculver in 1943. One of his sons was our chemistry teacher at Woking.

  Even in the years at Radio One and TV Centre, my enthusiasm for the past didn’t dim and on more than one occasion I managed to sneak something historical into the shows. On Saturday Superstore in the mid ’80s, I did several outside broadcasts from a major dig at York, complete with hard hat and trowel, for the York Archaeological Trust alongside historian Richard Kemp. The site of Anglo-Saxon York had apparently been a puzzle for many years, but now it had been located on the area previously occupied by the Redfearn Glassworks at Fishergate. The extensive dig also produced finds from a nearby twelfth-century former Gilbertine priory, which assisted with study into the cemetery population, health, diet, appearance and life expectancy. The Gilbertines were unique in that they were the only totally English religious order, having been founded in the 1130s by Gilbert of Sempringham (later St Gilbert), a parish priest from Lincolnshire. They disappeared with the Dissolution of the Monasteries, so it was fascinating to re-discover elements of their existence. We dug, uncovered, washed, examined and filed. I was also delighted to launch the trust’s Archaeological Scholarship. I was enrolled onto its committee of stewards and received various papers for discussion, but alas geography and travelling time meant me falling by the wayside after a while. That summer they did find part of a Roman helmet in pretty good condition with an embossed rosette. An exciting dig. I still have my certificate confirming that I am not only a fully fledged Viking but also a comrade in arms of Erik Bloodaxe and ‘entitled to conquer, plunder or trade in any lands encountered’. Take me on and you’re also dealing with my pal Mr Bloodaxe.

  On a broadcasting trip to Jamaica a year or two back with Adventures in Radio we were informed of an old site that had just been uncovered when some dense undergrowth had been cleared. The remains were of old Colonial buildings, with even older Spanish architecture underneath, the homes of those long gone. I was invited into what had been a crypt. The question as to what had happened to the occupants was answered as we stumbled across a handful of old graves. These were the last resting places of English settlers. All was still, hot and humid with not a breath of wind, as someone muttered, ‘There must be ghosts in a place like this.’ The supervisor overheard and turned on us with a loud mocking laugh, barking, ‘There are no such things as ghosts.’ At that very moment we heard a mighty crack and looked up to see a massive section of a huge tree break away and crash towards us from a great height. Weighing, we guessed afterwards, somewhere in the region of half a ton, it missed one or two of us by no more than a couple of feet. There was absolute silence. Everyone was shocked. Our organiser, Tim Jibson, went as white as a sheet and was shakier than an amusing jelly in the shape of Shakin’ Stevens. No such things as ghosts?

  I also enjoy sporting history and a long-term part-time project is the ultimate book of the history of the FA Cup Final, with a write-up of every final, photographs of every winning side and a whole load of facts to boot. It’ll be full of useful and fascinating stuff: for instance jazz musician Humphrey Lyttelton’s uncles both played for the Old Etonians in the 1876 final, and the 1878 final between Wanderers and Royal Engineers was refereed by a Bastard. A forerunner of many, you may think. Perhaps, but he was the only genuine Bastard, Mr S. R. Bastard in point of fact.

  I also wrote a screenplay about the 1873 FA Cup Final between the Old Etonians and Blackburn Olympic. I was originally cast as consultant to Julian Fellowes, but he proved to be too busy so I landed the role and was delighted with the result. Taking in football history, social history and relationships on and off the field, it examines the eve of the professional era and the first time that the FA Cup went north. The Old Etonians, Old Harrovians, Old Carthusians, Oxford University and Royal Engineers had had it all their own way until the working-class teams from the north brought in training, diets and … money! The game would never be the same again.

  My interest in history led me to becoming increasingly involved with the Heritage Foundation and the blue plaques they erected. Initially commemorating comedians, they soon progressed to plaques for all areas of the entertainment industry. For several years, I was the vice-president and Robin Gibb the president. We shared a love of history and with the foundation’s chairman, David Graham, were involved with erecting plaques for such luminaries as Sir Norman Wisdom, Sir John Mills, Peter Cook, Keith Moon, Kenneth Williams, Joe Meek and Jerome Kern.

  The Kern plaque, unveiled by Robin and Les Misérables lyricist Herbert Kretzmer, had a special meaning for me. A few years earlier I’d watched the Kern biopic, Till the Clouds Roll By, and had become strangely obsessed by one particular scene. This depicted Jerome and his manager cycling through an English village. One of them gets a puncture and the manager goes to find help, leaving Kern by this quaint rose-covered cottage, featuring the delightfully un-English address (on the US-style mailbox!) of something like 1093 Main Street. Intriguing how England was perceived by Hollywood film moguls. He wandered in
through the open door, sat down at the very conveniently placed piano and played until a young lady appeared, questioning his presence. In a nutshell he thought she was the maid, when in fact she was the daughter of the house, and they subsequently fell in love. Why I became dead set on finding out in which village these events played out in real life I have no idea. It plagued me for weeks. I googled, I researched, I drew a blank. Three months later I was having dinner with some friends on a steam train in Kent. I asked whether they still lived by Walton Bridge. They did.

  ‘Do you know that, on the very spot where your house is, both Turner and Canaletto, at different times obviously, painted the old bridge?’ I asked them.

  ‘We did, but do you know the two pubs across the river?’

  ‘Yes I do, The Swan and the Anglers.’

  ‘What do you know about the Swan?’

  ‘More than you imagine. I often played in the garden when I was a kid and I did my very first paid gig, singing and playing guitar, for a friend’s eighteenth birthday in the main room, of which a photograph still exists.’

  ‘Ah, but what you probably don’t know is that the room in which you played your first paid gig was the room in which the American songwriter Jerome Kern was playing the piano when he met his wife-to-be.’