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It will not have escaped the attention of anyone who takes more than the briefest notice of the contents of this website, that I spent my formative years playing guitar in a couple of rock ‘n’ roll bands in west London. Living in South Ealing, my local music shop—where I could buy anything from a plectrum or some spare strings to a Gibson guitar and Vox Twin amplifier—was Jim Marshall’s establishment in Hanwell. He started his business selling drums, and graduated to guitars and all the paraphernalia associated with them. I well recall one evening in 1961 walking to Hanwell just to look and marvel at the blue Fender Stratocaster he had on display in his window. For the uninitiated, the Stratocaster is the Ferrari or Aston Martin of guitars, as played by Hank Marvin and Jimmy Hendrix among many others.
In 1962 or thereabouts, Jim and his team developed his series of Marshall amplifiers, the loudspeaker stacks of which are frequent sights in TV, film, and rock concerts. They are familiar, not the least reason for which being that they have the name ‘Marshall’ emblazoned across their front. It all came about because local guitarists could not get the sound they wanted. Jim’s son Terry described what happened. The Fender Bassman amplifier—made by Fender in the USA for use with bass guitars, and fiendishly expensive—appeared to have the required characteristics. Terry discovered that it had not been patented, so they simply reverse engineered the circuit with some modifications, adding a separate box with four, twelve-inch loudspeakers. The amplifier itself was based on vacuum tubes and the sound was prodigious; I permanently damaged my hearing standing for hours twelve feet from Pete Townshend’s Marshall stack in the Ealing Club. It was said that Screaming Lord Sutch, the last person of any integrity ever to attempt to get himself elected to the UK Parliament, tested the power of Marshall amplifiers by using the particular position of the shop. He got his guitarist to play a riff through one of Jim’s amplifiers, went across the street, and determined whether he could still hear the sound when a double-decker bus went past. The amplifiers were brilliant but insanely expensive. I remember Jim Marshall explaining to me that they produced three different systems; there was an amplifier for a lead guitar at 120 guineas, one for a bass guitar at 106 guineas, and one for a rhythm guitar for I forget how much. For anyone under the age of sixty, a guinea was twenty-one shillings, or in modern parlance £1.05. At the time, the average weekly take-home pay was £12 - £14. You could buy a decent car for less than the cost of a Marshall amplifier. Jim Marshall has passed into legend, and is up there with Fender and Gibson as one of the all-time greats of the music equipment business. His shop was a meeting place for musicians, and was the centre of gravity of the West London music scene. It was there that I became acquainted with Mitch Mitchell, who played for my band for a brief period and then joined Jimmy Hendrix. Later on I met Speedy Keen, who was also with the band for a while before he joined Thunderclap Newman and wrote and sang Something in the Air. Jim Marshall’s shop loomed large in my personal legend, and I spent many hours just hanging about there, hoping that some of the glitz would wear off on me. And it was during those times that I became infected with the Marshall Parp. It is difficult to explain exactly what it was but I shall try. One of the assistants, a musician, would put his lips together and make a ‘parp’ sound. Not for any particular reason; it was like a verbal tic. It caught on and the cognoscenti coming into the shop on hearing a ‘parp’ would reply with the same. Musicians at large, on exchanging a parp, would know that each belonged to the Marshall 'guild'. I started parping and still do. Very few people have remarked the habit, although one friend, Paul—he knows who he is—embraced it with enthusiasm, being as taken by it as I was. I often wonder whether anyone else remembers the Marshall Parp. It’s ironic that Jim Marshall made millions with his amplifiers and received an OBE for his trouble. But that rather childish, ubiquitous, and amusing—well it amuses me— idiocy is entirely unrecorded. Well, I have recorded it now, and it remains for me the most enduring memory of Jim Marshall’s music shop in Hanwell.
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Mary Rayner, writer and illustrator of books has died. She was sufficiently notable, that she warranted an obituary in both The Guardian and Daily Telegraph. But we knew her because of her cottage.
It was the summer of 1982. The children were aged one and three, and we were just about keeping our heads above water. The mortgage accounted for more than 50% of the outgoings, and our 'new' house needed about a full year of my salary being spent upon it in order to bring it up to an acceptable level of repair. We decided that we needed a holiday. In those days we read The Guardian, and found there an advertisement for a cottage in Wiltshire available for a two week let. The owner was a Mrs M Rayner. The cottage was perfect. It was in the tiny village of West Overton, a few miles west of Marlborough. Stone built, fairly basic but entirely adequate, with a very attractive walled garden. And we were fortunate that that year we had a glorious English summer; we could sit in the garden and look at the grasses waving in the wind on the down opposite. Everything about that holiday was delightful even though at one point I had to make an emergency dash to a laundrette to wash the entirety of the children’s bed-linen after an ‘incident’. West Overton is very close to Avebury, a name that was familiar to me but a place that I had never seen. Then there was Stonehenge twenty miles down the road; several books in the cottage reignited my interest in it. But perhaps the most intriguing discovery was Silbury Hill, a mile or so from Avebury. Silbury Hill is a sort of English Pyramid, dating from the time of Stonehenge. It is conical and made of turf and timber. It was thought at one time to be the great burial chamber of the genius who built Stonehenge, but excavations have found absolutely nothing. It remains a real enigma. It was all a perfect salve for the stress of our lives at the time. I did a very minor running-repair to the plumbing in the cottage; I think it was a tap washer or something equally trivial. Mary Rayner sent us one of her books in appreciation; an illustrated story in which pigs were the main characters. It was intelligent, amusing, educational, and thoroughly charming. There was also in the cottage a novelette she had written called The Witchfinder; quite a dark story about a young girl’s obsession that her mother was a witch. It too was clever and thoughtful. Mary Rayner was a very talented writer, and ‘Mary Rayner’s Cottage’ became a family trope. Two years later, we went back, and I heard later on, when we again enquired about renting, that she had sold the cottage. But it remained, and remains, a wonderful memory; an idyllic summer of the type we think we remember from our childhood, and a very timely re-engaging of my interest in the prehistoric monuments of Wiltshire, land of my ancestors. RIP Mary Rayner!  Well, just a bit of exaggeration there... Some weeks ago there was a question on University Challenge about the building of Pentonville Prison in 1842; it went something like “To what design was the prison built—an idea suggested by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham?” The answer given, ‘The Panopticon’, was declared to be correct by Jeremy Paxman. In fact the design of Pentonville owes absolutely nothing to the Panopticon.
I spent some months researching the Victorian prison system for an article that was published last December--read it here—and wrote to the Beeb, citing the article and other reference material, and pointing out the error. After a few weeks they contacted me, thanking me etc., apologising that ‘I didn’t think’ that Pentonville was modelled on the Panopticon, and assuring me that the point had been included in their daily report. I replied that it was not a case of ‘thinking’ or conjecture. The proposition was just plain wrong, as the briefest reference to the contemporary documentation will show. Finally, today, they wrote back; the programme makers now ‘agree’ that the Panopticon was not the model for Pentonville, and a note to that effect has been placed on the appropriate iPlayer page—image attached. I’m surprised that a programme like UC, which I have always regarded as an absolute gold-standard for academic excellence and probity, should need a double-prodding to set the record straight. Anyway, it is another very small step in my crusade for truth in the public record. As an afterthought, the Panopticon was a fascinating idea, and there is a brief account of it in my article, accessible via the above link. For the first time this week, I travelled on the Elizabeth Line; a completely magnificent experience. The London Underground celebrates its 160th year this year, and there is still plenty of evidence on some lines of the original mid-Victorian infrastructure. In my youth I used to explore the network at weekends, the iconic Underground map making navigation very easy. Parts of the system in Central London are very deep, and some of the linking pedestrian tunnels were and are still quite claustrophobic—narrow, with low ceilings. Not infrequently, I used to find myself quite alone for minutes at a time. I would sometimes wonder if I had taken a wrong turning and ended up in the dungeons of some magic castle inhabited by the Nibelungs or some other race from the underworld.
The Elizabeth Line is the absolute antithesis of the early system, positively cathedral like in the scale of the stations and pedestrian access tunnels; in fact the tunnels are so wide and high that the word ‘tunnel’ hardly seems appropriate. For all that the Crossrail price tag was nearly £20 billion, the design drips premium quality and attention to detail. Of course it will irritate other parts of the country struggling to get any sort of train service. But despite the concerted efforts of successive recent governments to make visitors to this country quite unwelcome, London remains an enormous pull for tourists. The Underground network was operating at saturation point; the Elizabeth Line has increased the capacity of the London railway system by 10%. Even so, it was standing room only yesterday. But they still can’t get the escalators right! I remember the early escalators with their wooden steps, each one having multiple strips of wood, all individually screwed on. The parallel strips provided the grooves in which ran the prongs of metal forks at the top of the stairway designed to prevents shoes etc. becoming caught up in the mechanism. The new escalators are all metal; the grooves are smaller and greater in number and the forks are also quite small. The handrail moves at the same rate as the stairs, or is supposed to do so. In fact, even on the brand new and very long escalators at Liverpool Street and Tottenham Court Road, the handrails move slightly faster than the stairs—as they do on every escalator on the network that I have encountered. It is possible that the issue is one of gear ratios; gears do not yield to the decimal system. They are digital, or perhaps one ought to say dental, in that they must have an integral number of teeth... This means that only specific ratios can be achieved, thus making it impossible to match rotational speeds exactly; I presume this is the root of the problem. I have contacted an escalator manufacturer for an answer to this conundrum, but I am not holding my breath. Yesterday, to see a new production of Medea performed at the brand new @SohoPlace theatre opposite Centre Point. This was built as part of a massive regenerative project in Tottenham Court Road to accommodate the Crossrail project.
The play, with Sophie Okonedo as Medea and Ben Daniels in various roles, has attracted rave reviews. It is an adaptation of the work by Euripides, first performed in Athens in 431 BC. I’m not a great fan of theatre in modern dress, but this performance was sensational; the emotional overload at the end left me unable to speak for several minutes. It is astonishing that a play written two-and-a-half thousand years ago has the power to mesmerise in our cynical age. The theatre too was superb, designed for performance in the round with over 600 seats, each one with perfect eye-line view of the action. There were one or two niggles with the lobby, restaurant, and bar area—quite cramped and with lavatories with such obscure post-modern labels that specific directions as to which door was which were needed. Nevertheless, overall a wonderful experience. Yesterday’s In our Time was very disappointing, the more so since I had been looking forward to it all week. The subject was Tycho Brahe, the last great naked-eye astronomer. He was a Danish nobleman with a false nose (he lost the original in a duel) who built a magic castle on the island of Hven where he established a number of the most accurate instruments for making naked-eye observations; telescopes had not yet been invented. His observations of the position of the planet Mars over a period of twenty years were so accurate that Kepler was able to use them to show that the orbit was elliptical rather than circular. The difference between the two orbits was only 20 minutes of arc—a third of a degree—but Kepler knew that Tycho’s measurements were reliable, and was able to deduce his planetary laws. These enabled the positions of the planets to be calculated with a high degree of accuracy, and the true scale of the solar system to be determined for the first time.
Hardly any of this was mentioned in the programme. The three academics assembled to discuss Tycho produced a positive masterclass of how to make a truly fascinating subject as dull as ditch water. There was loads of tedious detail about the political and religious background—not unimportant, but background material nevertheless, and the wonderful uniqueness of Tycho’s magic castle of Uraniborg was demoted to that of an ‘observatory’. No mention of his observations of Mars. Most disappointing. Quotation of the month today on In our Time. They were discussing the Great Thames Stink of 1858, which resulted from the untreated sewage of millions of Londoners being dumped into the river. Stephen Halliday was describing how Joseph Bazalgette, who finally solved the problem by building the great system of sewers, got his job as chief engineer. Apparently he gave as his two referees Robert Stephenson and Isambard Kingdom Brunel which, Halliday commented, “Was rather like applying for a job as a clergyman, and giving as your referees Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John...”
When historians disagree, it is usually about the interpretation of facts rather than the facts themselves. The philosopher Nietzsche said: ‘There are no facts, only interpretations’, which is true, but only up to a point. No-one is going to argue with the fact that ‘Queen Elizabeth II died in 2022’. But they might argue with the ‘fact’ that the Duke of Wellington won the Battle of Waterloo; without Blücher’s Prussian army, the outcome may well have been different. Wellington himself commented that it was ‘the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life’.
Nevertheless I think that if a historian commits a narrative to print as a true record of events, it is essential that the facts are checked and not just hearsay. Otherwise history, historical fiction, and pure fantasy become confused and intertwined. A sloppy historian is worse than useless; if alleged ‘facts’ can be shown to be spurious, their work can never be viewed seriously. I have come across several instances of this in my own researches, but two stand out. Lady Celia Noble was the granddaughter of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. She wrote a biography of Isambard and his father Marc, mentioning briefly Isambard’s sister, Emma Joan Brunel. My interest in Emma is explained in the article Isambard’s Gift which can be found elsewhere on this website. Celia Nobel wrote that Emma had married a curate, Frank Harrison, from ‘Longdon near Tewkesbury’, and had died young. This account was copied and repeated in at least two subsequent publications about the Brunels by different authors. In fact a fairly simple investigation showed that Emma had married George Harrison, a curate of Langdon Hills near Basildon, and she lived to be eighty years old. Lucy Worsley is a quirky popular historian, who frequently does TV shows on historical events, and likes dressing up as her characters. The book accompanying her BBC TV series ‘A Very British Murder’ garnered unqualified praise from the broadsheet newspapers as well as that doyenne of experts of the genre Antonia Fraser. Worsley wrote a chapter on the Red Barn murder, and in the TV series she dressed up as the victim Maria ‘Marten’ (her name was actually Maria Martin). Maria was the victim of William Corder, her boyfriend and the father of her third illegitimate child. It is difficult not to conclude that this chapter in Worsley’s book was just an excuse to show some gruesome colour pictures of relics of the murder on show at the Moyse’s Hall Museum at Bury St Edmunds. These included a copy of an account of the murder bound in Corder’s skin, his scalp complete with an attached ear and a death mask. Worsley’s skimpy account of the affair seems to have been based purely on a conversation she had with the museum curator and is full of factual errors. The old canard about the barn seeming to be a ‘bloody and ominous red’ in the setting sun comes from a thoroughly discredited account of the affair by Donald McCormick. The barn was quite probably painted red as a preservative for the wood. Maria was ‘said’ to have gone to meet Corder disguised in a man’s clothing. She was dressed as a man, and this is clear from the trial transcript. Worsley tells us that Corder found a wife after advertising in The Times. Not true; he found his wife, Mary Moore, after advertising in the Morning Herald. A second advertisement did appear in the Sunday Times, but Corder never picked up the responses because he had already met Mary Moore and married her two days after the second advertisement was published. According to Worsley, Corder claimed in his confession that he just threatened Maria with the gun and only fired because of ‘trembling fingers’. Yet the confession, dictated to John Orridge, governor of Bury Gaol, just twelve hours before Corder was hanged there states quite clearly: ‘... a scuffle ensued, and during the scuffle, and at the time I think she had hold of me, I took the pistol from the side-pocket of my velveteen jacket and fired.’ “So what?” You might say, “These are minor details. What does it matter how the Red Barn got its name; one newspaper is as good as another, and whether Corder killed Maria accidentally or on purpose, he still killed her.” I would counter, “Yes, but with the exception of the way the barn got its name, these are not the actual facts, which are clear, well documented, and in the public domain.” This so-called ‘history’ is, therefore, a piece of cynical merchandising; a coffee-table potboiler. Furthermore, if the ‘facts’ in the chapter on the Red Barn affair are so sloppily assembled, what credence can be given to the accounts of the other murders described in the same book. History it isn’t. For a while in the 19th Century, British prisons operated an extraordinary and radical system of prison discipline known as the Separate System. Inmates were kept effectively in solitary confinement, although the cells in the new prison at Wandsworth were provided with heating, lighting, and en-suite facilities...
I first came across the separate system when I was researching material for my first book, Henry’s Trials, nearly twenty years ago. I have now produced a short article for Genealogists’ Magazine, which can be downloaded here. Modern technology provides us with portable ‘HiFi’ units capable of substantial quality and decibel capability. A downside of this, is that some of our wonderful quiet spaces can be polluted with the wailing cacophony and/or boom boom noise that seems to be popular among certain sections of the (younger) population.
I was nonplussed therefore while cycling through the park a few days ago, to hear very loud sounds coming from some distance ahead. My heart sank, but as I rounded a corner, the source came into view. It was a very senior citizen, parked up on a mobility scooter by the pathway, enjoying early 60s heavy metal rock music emanating from a bag secreted on his vehicle. From the look on his face he did not appear to be enjoying it very much. I wondered whether he was just very hard of hearing, or from his central position by the path, near some benches and a café, his grim visage indicated instead some sort of revenge against the perpetrators of what passes for modern tastes in ‘music’. Rock on granddad! |
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