Category Archives: Humour

by | May 23, 2023 · 6:17 am

My Dad’s cars (3)

I have already told you about the love of my Dad’s motoring life, his Hillman Minx De Luxe, Registration Number BLT 141B. He gave it to me after he retired, and I had it for about two or  three years. Here is a picture of it in the car park of the old Savoy Hotel in 1980, on our wedding day. That’s why the picture’s so shaky:

Here I am driving this 1964 car, as it gradually began to get rustier and rustier :photo 4

It was in this Hillman Minx that, back in 1968, Fred was returning from Wigan down the M6, when, because the motorway was still in the throes of construction, he failed to see the tiny hand-painted direction signs, and finished up in a building site in Birmingham, having missed his turn off in Stoke-on-Trent. That sounds incredible, but he’d never been on  a motorway before. Wigan is a town in Lancashire and is indicated by the Orange Arrow. My Mum’s parents lived there. The other towns and cities are in capital letters. Fred was aiming at Burton-on-Trent near Derby, which is south east of Stoke:

He was driving the same car in Leicester (south east of Derby) when he got lost and was forced to ask a policeman the way. Realising that he was dealing with somebody from out-of-town, this eminently sensible officer told Fred to avoid a rather horrific one-way system by driving fifty yards the wrong way down a one way street, while he promised to turn a blind eye to the whole thing.

It was again in this very same Hillman Minx that, three years later, Fred again missed his way in that very same city of Leicester, and went the wrong way up another one way street. Instead of being able to solve the problem by the previous method, however, Fred was forced on this second occasion to extricate himself from the situation by executing a three point turn in the face of a rapidly advancing four lanes of densely packed vehicles.

I have vague memories too, of getting lost as we went on holiday for the first time to the Yorkshire coast at either Bridlington or Scarborough. We stopped at, I think, Pontefract, somewhere near a power station, to ask the way.

The man that Fred approached spoke with an accent which was completely incomprehensible, and after a few frustrated minutes, Fred just drove off at top speed, angrily spinning the wheels on his rather sedate family saloon. At the time, he insisted that, against all the apparent mathematical odds, he had managed to find the local village idiot at his very first attempt.

Incidentally, above, you can see the Britain’s Lead Soldier version of the village idiot which usually reaches £200 at auction.

Nowadays, I think, in calm retrospect, that the man’s Yorkshire accent may well have been beyond us. It is difficult, though, even to best guess the location of these events. Perhaps it was near the huge power station at Ferrybridge where the A64 to the east coast Yorkshire holiday resorts left the main A1 trunk road, as it would have been at that time. The power station was demolished a long time ago:

Whenever Fred left his car anywhere unfamiliar, such as when he was away on holiday, or for any length of time in his own local area, he would always immobilise it by removing part of the carburettor . On occasion, Fred would even immobilize the car when he parked it on his own drive. It was years after his death that I realized that in this apparently bizarre zeal for crime prevention, Fred was only carrying out the orders that he would have been given in the early part of World War Two, in 1939-1940, when it was a serious criminal offence to leave a vehicle without totally immobilising it. There was a very real fear of imminent invasion, and the arrival of Nazi paratroopers, many of them disguised as nuns. And even in 1975, the Soviet Spetsnaz forces would have drunk a bottle of vodka each in celebration to have found such a fast and classy vehicle as a 1964 Hillman Minx. Here’s their badge in case your car is ever stolen. Spetsnaz are everywhere:

This Hillman Minx was THE car of Fred’s life. He had it for more than sixteen years, before, around 1980, he passed it on to me as a newly qualified driver. I in my turn used the car until it failed its MOT test by a very wide margin, some £300 when my annual salary was £500. I then duly drove it back from Nottingham to Woodville, where my family lived. Fred was then able to drive “that Hillman” as he always called it, on its last ever journey, the short distance from 9 Hartshorne Road to Donald Ward’s scrapyard in Moira Road. Here it is, complete with Victorian bottle kiln:

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by | May 5, 2023 · 6:16 am

My Dad’s cars (2)

My Dad’s first car was an Austin A40 Devon, in Connaught green, with the registration leters of LXJ 701…..

After the Austin A40 Devon, Fred had a 1959 Ford Anglia, registration number SNR 863, which he bought from a garage in nearby Ashby-de-la-Zouch. It was exactly like this:

I can still remember how the milometer on the Ford Anglia spun round as Fred drove sedately along, recording three or four miles for every mile travelled. This, of course, was because the seller had wound back the mileage clock to make the car seem less used than it really was. Here’s the crooked garage today. It has been replaced by an award winning architect’s supermarket:
When I was around eleven or twelve we used to go and visit a nearby toy shop, “Shellbrook Motors” which used to sell Dinky and Corgi die-cast models of cars and larger vehicles, Airfix and Frog aircraft kits, and Hornby model electric railways. By 2017, they had changed a little and were selling artists’ materials, although they did refuse to pay the signwriter’s bill on this occasion:
There were no Ford Anglia type problems of low level criminality and cheap plastic with Fred’s next car, an English Hillman Minx De Luxe, BLT 141B. This beautiful blue car with the metallic chrome side stripe was “the one” as far as Fred’s motoring career was concerned.
He had taken me to Derby one day, and we visited Peveril Garage, on Friar Gate, near the headquarters of the Derby County Supporters’ Club:

Fred told me not to mention anything whatsoever about the day to my mother, under any circumstances. Without consulting her at all, therefore, he bought the car, priced at £510, which was, in those days, a princely sum. Indeed, the price was such a total royal that, when my mother did eventually find out how much the car had cost, she would have had Fred beheaded if she could have organised it. The car was a rich pale blue, half way between sky blue and navy blue. Here is one today:

In later years, when he had problems with rust on one of the wings, Fred was to opt for a total respray, which allowed him to retain the same colour blue for the body, but to incorporate a black roof which added that extra, unique, little detail. Here it is, with James Bond driving it, back in the days when I was 28. I had always wanted a personalised number plate, and this was the time when I changed my name to “BLT 141B”:

This was also the day that I caught both Francisco Scaramanga and Auric Goldfinger hiding together on a building site:

It was in this car that Fred had what were probably the most outstanding motoring experiences of his life. I can still recall, for example, just how scared he was, and indeed, we all were, when he drove a circuit of the Alpine like road which ran around the Great Orme near Llandudno in North Wales.

Indeed, some thirty years later, I returned to look at this road for myself, to see whether it was quite the challenge that it had seemed in the late 1960s. And, of course, the circuit had been considerably watered down since then. All the sheer drops down to the sea had now been fenced off, and, most significant of all, perhaps, a narrow road which I remember as having been two way, had been limited nowadays to just one way traffic. Gentrified, I think the word is:

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by | April 17, 2023 · 6:17 am

My Dad’s cars (1)

My Dad, Fred’s, first car was a Connaught green Austin A40 Devon, registration number “LXJ 701” (“seven-nought-one”). This car had been acquired in the early 1950s with the help of his in-laws, as a bargain for the newlyweds. It had previously belonged to the owner of a cement factory near Manchester, and for this reason, it proved almost impossible ever to get a good shine on the vehicle, as the painted surface had absorbed such a huge quantity of cement dust through being parked all day long in the office car park at the works. Here is a car of the correct colour, although it has been modified for use as a taxi:

I really wish my Dad had bought an A40 of this revolting bright blue. And I’m an absolute sucker for white wall tyres:

Fred never seemed to use the car an enormous amount, but, like so many people during this era, we often went out for a drive as a family on a nice Sunday afternoon. I remember that on occasion we used to go out on trips towards Repton, but I cannot really recollect anywhere else that we went, although Fred assured me in later years that we had visited destinations as far afield as the church at Breedon-on-the-Hill, Calke, Staunton Harold and Swarkestone Bridge:

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The one thing I do recall about these trips, though, was parking the car one day in a sunlit grassy field, and leaving all the doors wide open to let in the fresh air. The car had rich brown all leather upholstery, sewn lengthways in distinctive style:

I must have been a very small boy indeed, when Fred had a crash in this car. We were out somewhere in the lanes around the village of Smisby, perhaps somewhere towards Pistern Hills, and I remember that at a T-junction, we failed to turn, but just drove straight on, ploughing into the bank below the hedge at the far side of the road. The Orange Arrow points at Pistern Hills where this accident may have taken place:

In the days before seat belts, I was projected forward, and the ignition key somehow smashed into my forehead between my eyes. I certainly was not taken to hospital with what in the 1950s was just a minor injury, but instead, I was transported to the nearest country cottage at the side of the road. All that I can recall now is sitting at a wooden table in an almost bare kitchen. A woman came in. She was wearing a white blouse and a voluminous long skirt. She was plump and reached up to the wooden shelf which ran all the way around the room, some six feet off the ground, because she had to stretch to reach the tin she was after. She passed it to me. It was a tin of biscuits and she let me eat a few. I do not remember any more. I still have the scar on my forehead.

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by | March 29, 2023 · 6:16 am

My best friend, Widdle (5)

Last time,we were looking at what Widdle the Friendly Fox would eat and what he would turn his nose up at. Over time, we gradually built up a list of his likes and dislikes.

Physically, he was very thin and very wiry, but he was extremely strong for his size. If he pulled one end of a stick and you pulled the other, you could feel his muscles and his strength. Most of this came, in our opinion, because he wouldn’t eat bread or cakes. He wouldn’t eat curry or anything flavoured. He wouldn’t eat pizza. Even our local magpies wouldn’t eat pizza, incidentally. Widdle wouldn’t eat hamburgers, although we didn’t quite understand this. Perhaps he had his culinary standards. After all, the bar was set pretty high by our sausages (42% meat).

This photograph appears to show the biggest object Widdle ever managed to carry away. I have no idea what it was, but may have been a big bone or maybe some cut of meat that had gone past its sell-by date:

Raw bacon rind appears to be a delicacy in the fox world. Firstly, sniff what it is…

Don’t let it escape under any circumstances:

 

“A second piece? Don’t mind if I do!”

In the next picture, note the first piece of rind safely stashed on the floor. He didn’t find getting both in his mouth at the same time too easy!

 

“Cheese is different. You have so many dreadful flavours in cheese. So make sure you sniff it first….”

 

“Take hold of it carefully. It may crumble and you might lose some.”

“Sniff the next piece carefully. Just because the first piece was cheddar, that doesn’t mean they all will be.”

“Yes, it’s OK. I’ll take it, please. It’s good for the teeth, cheese!”

Not that Widdle would turn down proper meat.

“Would I like a bit of steak? You bet I would!”

“Mmm. Lovely!”

“Watch what you’re doing. Fingers at your own risk!!”

Widdle usually took all the food that was offered to him. He filled his mouth up with sausages, bits of meat and so on, and took them back to Mrs Widdle in the den. She would eat some and share the rest with her cubs. The largest litter I ever saw in our garden was four, with No 4, the smallest one, perhaps only two thirds the size of the others. Mum and Dad taught them their table manners. Any transgression got a sharp nip on the backside to emphasise the point.

Notice how, in the last three photographs, Widdle has a great gaping wound on his chest. As I mentioned, male foxes frequently fight each other, and they bite their opponent’s muzzle and fore-limbs. I don’t know how Widdle acquired this particular wound, but it didn’t take long to heal up.

On four occasions, Widdle had bad injuries to one of his front legs and he could barely walk. In a wilder world, he would not have managed to hunt and he would have died, but his friends stepped in with Sausage-Aid and he got over it. That gave him five lives instead of the usual one, a minimum of four or five years of life compared to the usual two or three, and as many as fifteen cubs produced, instead of the usual figure of between none and four.

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by | March 23, 2023 · 6:16 am

My best friend, Widdle (4)

Between approximately 2007-2010, our family had a completely wild fox as a friend. When Widdle came to you like this, you knew that he had only one thought on his mind. Sausages!!

These are the brand he preferred. We used to buy them at a frozen food supermarket called Iceland. We wanted a cheap, but nourishing, sausage for our furry friend, so we looked round most of the butcher-type shops in our suburb of Nottingham and finally made the decision to buy at Iceland where the budget sausages were 42% meat, easily the highest percentage in the world for the budget sausage. Dog food was even more unbelievable. All of the cheaper ones I looked at were full of “ash”. I’d really like to know why!

And what type of ash was it, that was included in so many dogfoods? Surely not the ashes of former dog owners? :

Sometimes Widdle was extremely polite, putting a fore-paw on each knee, showing you his pale brown eyes, and staring with a mixture of wistfulness and plain hunger:

On other occasions, he was a lot more forthright, explaining with his pointy teeth, that he was pressed for time, so could you crack on with it, please? After all, we both know how it’s going to end:

I wasn’t the only person who could feed him, but that perfect lunge was always his favourite method. Keep still and you were perfectly safe:

On occasion he was over excited and perhaps got some sausage stuck on his teeth. He would always want to clean it off straightaway:

He made several trips back to “The Den” to feed the family. On his last trip, the sausage or sausages were always for him, and he would get over excited and lick his lips in anticipation:

He was happy enough to eat leftovers. Here he has the carcass of a chicken, I think it is. Just look how, in this view, the early stages of his moult are easily visible:

This next picture comes seconds after the previous one. It catches Widdle in a strange pose. He has just heard a noise behind him and looks over to where the noise has come from. The angle makes it look as if he is being aggressive and snarling. But he isn’t. In actual fact, I never heard him make any noise of any kind. That pointy, sharp tooth is there though:

The noise came from next door’s cat, an old bruiser called Yin-Yang.  He was taken, as far as I know, as a young kitten, from a feral cat’s nest and brought up in a normal home. People always seem to think that foxes eat cats but Widdle and Yin-Yang didn’t ever take any notice of each other. Foxes are always extremely wary of a cat’s claws and the possibility of losing an eye in any fight with one.

Anyway, here they are, both sharing the same bits of the same chicken. Yin-Yang lived to be around seventeen or eighteen years old. He died in my daughter’s arms after some macho hero deliberately drove his car over him in front of our house. Yin-Yang was deaf, so he didn’t hear the car horn.

 

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by | January 5, 2023 · 6:16 am

Phonetic Alphabets (2)

Last time we looked at a number of phonetic alphabets. There was the British Army in 1904, the  British Post Office in 1914 , the  Royal Navy in 1917 and the  Western Union in 1918. Then came the good sense of the US Army and the US Navy in 1941 to have the same alphabet (for both) in contrast with the four different alphabets used by the RAF in different periods of World War II.

But what about the foreigners?

Here’s the Luftwaffe alphabet  in 1940. The very same one was used by the Wehrmacht, the German army:

Anton, Ärger, Bertha, Cäsar, Charlotte, Dora, Emil, Friedrich, Gustav, Heinrich, Ida, Julius, Konrad,

Ludwig, Martha, Nordpol, Otto, Ödipus, Paula, Quelle, Richard, Siegfried, Schule, Theodor, Ulrich, Viktor,

Wilhelm, Xanthippe, Ypsilon, Zeppilon

It is obviously different from the Allies’ alphabet, being based on names, but that must surely have made it quite easy to learn. Incidentally, “Ärger” and “Ödipus” were used for any words which contained either ” ä ” or ” ö “. Notice too how they have a code word for Ä and Ö. There is also a quick way of doing ‘c’ and ‘ch’ with Cäsar and China along with ‘s’ and ‘sch’ with Siegfried and Schule.

The most frequent marks of the Messerschmitt Bf109 such as the 109D, the 109E, the 109F and the 109G were frequently known by their phonetic letters, the Dora, the Emil, the Friedrich and the Gustav.

Here’s a young man and an old man who are the one and the same man. He was a Luftwaffe radio operator in WW2. The shape of his ears is a giveaway. Age yourself by seventy years but you’ll never change your ears.

And here is the cloth badge to be sewed on the uniform of a crewmember that the Luftwaffe called a “bordfunker”:

The German Navy, the Kriegsmarine, had a very slightly different alphabet, but , again, it was based on names:

Anton, Ärger, Bruno, Cäsar, China, Dora, Emil, Friedrich, Gustav, Heinrich, Ida, Julius, Konrad,

Ludwig, Martha, Nordpol, Otto, Ödipus, Paula, Quelle, Richard, Siegfried, Schule, Theodor, Ulrich, Viktor,

Wilhelm, Xanthippe, Ypsilon,  Zeppilon

The Wehrmacht used pretty much the  same alphabet with:

Anton, Ärger, Berta, Cäsar, Charlotte, Dora, Emil, Friedrich, Gustav, Heinrich, Ida, Julius, Konrad,

Ludwig, Martha, Nordpol, Otto, Ödipus, Paula, Quelle, Richard, Siegfried, Schule, Theodor, Ulrich, Übel, Viktor,

Wilhelm, Xanthippe, Ypsilon, Zeppelin 

 I couldn’t find a guaranteed French phonetic alphabet for World War II, but I did find this one, which is obviously based on first names:

Anatole, Berthe, Célestin, Désiré, Eugène, François, Gaston, Henri, Irma, Joseph, Kléber,

Louis, Marcel, Nicolas, Oscar, Pierre, Quintal, Raoul, Suzanne, Thérèse, Ursule, Victor, William, Xavier,

Yvonne, Zoé

That was a real list of sex bombs for French soldiers of every sexual persuasion to drool over. I don’t know what a “Quintal” is, but this happy curly haired chap is Ryan Quintal:

Actually I did look up “quintal” and one website said “a hundredweight  or a weight equal to 100 kilograms”. Another website said “backyard”. I often confuse the two.

The Italians, like many other nations, base their alphabet on towns and cities:

Ancona, Bologna, Como, Domodossola, Empoli, Firenze, Genova, Hotel, Imola, Jolly, Kursaal,

Livorno, Milano, Napoli, Otranto, Padova, Quarto,Roma, Savona, Torino,

Udine, Venezia, Washington, Xeres, Yacht, Zara.

Surely we all know the telegram sent by the humourist Robert Benchley to the New Yorker magazine:

“Have arrived Venice. Streets full of water. Please advise.”

I did find a Soviet spelling alphabet. The Russian alphabet, though, uses 33 letters, so it was quite complicated.  I decided to transcribe only the words for our Western letters. That came to:

Anna, Boris, Konstantin, Dmitri, Yelena, Fyodor, Grigory,

Khariton, Ivan, Zhenya, Leonid, Mikhail,

Nikolai, Olga, Pavel, Roman, Semyon,

Tatyana, Ulyana, Vasiliy, Zinaida.

Some letters such as ‘k’, ‘q’,  ‘w’, ‘x’ and ‘y’ do not really exist in Russian. Here’s a link to some of the letters of their alphabet.

Here are some Soviet signallers, giving a report to Headquarters in an unknown German town that has just been captured:

Two final points. If you can understand this, you’re a better man than me. This is perhaps 20% of a very large presentation of the Japanese phonetic alphabet. My best guess is that a word stands for a syllable, so that “suzume” stands for the syllable “su” and so on:

And finally, here’s the weirdest phonetic alphabet I found, taken from Tasmania in 1908:

Authority, Bills, Capture, Destroy, Englishmen, Fractious,

Galloping, High, Invariably, Juggling, Knights, Loose,

Managing, Never, Owners, Play, Queen, Remarks,

Support, The, Unless, Vindictive, When, Xpeditiously,

Your,  Zigzag

 

 

 

 

 

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by | December 23, 2022 · 6:16 am

Phonetic Alphabets (1)

Signalling by one group of soldiers to another, or by one ship to another, has gone on for centuries. Signalling flags were used on ships in the time of Admiral Nelson:

And there was always semaphore. As used by the Beatles:

The advent of radio, however, made things a lot more difficult, because when men spoke to each other, interference was a frequent problem. Sometimes words, especially place names, had to be spelt out, and merely giving out a list of letters, such as L-O-N-D-O-N did not always work, especially if the interference was intermittent.

In 1904, British Army signallers started to use a partial spelling alphabet, where only the more problematic letters had their own code word. This produced:

ACK, BEER/BAR, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L ,  EMMA, N,O, PIP, Q, R, ESSES, TOC, U, VIC, W, X, Y, Z

Only seven letters needed! By 1918, the problems of using the 1904 alphabet had added  a few words:

CORK,   DON.   EDDY.    INK.    JUG.   QUAD.   TALK

Here’s a war artist’s rendition of a signaller:

Things got better once for the British army when they adapted horse drawn radios:

Overall, it is crucial to have only ONE spelling alphabet, otherwise the situation becomes downright confusing. There used to be different alphabets for:

the 1914 British Post Office with Apple, Brother, Charlie, Dover, Eastern,

the 1917 Royal Navy with Apples, Butter, Charlie, Duff, Edward

the 1918 Western Union with Adams, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Edward

Much more sensibly, during World War II, the US Army and Navy used the same alphabet. It is familiar from so many war films and so many comics:

Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, Easy, Fox, George, How, Item, Jig, King, Love, Mike,

Nan, Oboe, Peter, Queen, Roger, Sugar, Tare, Uncle, Victor, William, X-ray, Yoke

These men were some of the members of the real “Easy Company” :

What is important here is to have no words whatsoever that sound like any of the others. In this alphabet maybe jig and king, or able and baker, or dog and fox might cause problems.

Here’s the RAF spelling alphabet until 1942:

Apple, Beer, Charlie, Don, Edward, Freddie, George, Harry, Ink, Johnnie, King, London, Monkey,

Nuts,  Orange, Pip, Queen, Robert, Sugar, Toc, Uncle Vic,  William, Yorker, Zebra

And here’s the RAF alphabet after 1942

Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, Easy, Fox, George, How, Item, Jig, King, Love, Mike, Nan, Oboe,

Peter, Queen, Roger, Sugar, Tare, Uncle, Victor, William, X-ray, Yoke, Zebra.

Smart people will have noticed how close it is to the US Army and Navy alphabet. How sensible!

In actual fact, the RAF was already using quite a few other alphabets anyway, such as this one noted in 1942-1943 :

Apple, Beer, Charlie, Dog, Edward, Freddy, George, Harry, In, Jug/Johnny, King, Love, Mother,

Nuts, Orange, Peter, Queen, Roger/Robert, Sugar, Tommy, Uncle, Vic, William, X-ray, Yoke/Yorker, Zebra

And there was a further alphabet for the squadron letters on the side of the aircraft in the Dambusting 617 Squadron:

A-Apple, B-Baker, C-Charlie, E-Easy, F-Freddie, G-George, H-Harry, J-Johnny, K-King,

L-Leather, M-Mother, N-Nuts, O-Orange, P-Popsie, S-Sugar, T-Tommy, W-Willie, Y-York, Z-Zebra.

I presume that the missing letters were non-existent aircraft. Here is 617 Squadron and these are B-Baker, G-George and M-Mother:

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I wrote a number of blog posts about my wife’s friend, Len, who flew in 617 Squadron, in G-George. His full name was Len Dorricott, and this link will take you to the first of the three posts. If you copy and paste the surname “Dorricott” into “Search”, then finding Blog Posts No 2 and No 3 about Len becomes a doddle.

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by | October 5, 2022 · 6:16 am

Madame Lionnet, the High School’s French mistress

Madame Marie Lionnet was one of the very few women to work at Nottingham High School during the Victorian era. She may even have been the second-ever woman to be employed by the school. Regrettably, I have found out relatively little about her, with only a series of mere snapshots of her fascinating and colourful life available at various intervals.

Marie Lionnet was born in middle to late 1835 or early 1836, although I have failed abjectly to discover either her maiden name or her place of birth, beyond “France” and probably “Paris”. We have no pictures of Madame Lionnet either. When she worked at the High School she seems to have slipped between the staff photographs of 1883 and those of 1895. The only woman we have on a staff photograph of that era is Mrs Bowman Hart, the music teacher. Here is the staff of 1883-1884:

As far as we know, they are :

back row:

Mr H Lupton ?, the Reverend EAT Clarke ?, Mr C “Carey” Trafford, unknown

middle row:

Mr JA Crawley, Mr WE “Jumbo” Ryles, Mr W Jackson, Mr S “Sammy” Corner, Mr S “Cheesy” Chester, Mr J Russell, Mr B “Benny” Townson.

front row:

Monsieur JLE Durand, Mr C “Donkey” Bray, the Reverend JG “Jiggerty” Easton, Dr. R Dixon (Headmaster) Mrs Bowman Hart (of whom, more later), Mr H “Donkeys” Seymour

Here is the High School at that time:

Notice that the school’s enormous coal fire chimneys have not yet been added. That was something that happened around 1890. There were originally two crosses on the roof, but clearly, one has been taken down, or more likely, blown down in some long-forgotten storm. In front of the school, the bushes are beginning to grow out of control but eventually they would all join up to form one enormous shrubbery, home to foxes and sixth formers with cigarettes.

Madame Lionnet is known to have married an engineer called Lionnet and they spent a good few years travelling with his work around the United States, Canada and various European countries. They went back to Paris, France, however, in early 1870 and were present in the capital during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871. Here is a single soldier from each side:

On the left is a member of the famous “Grenadiers de Bretagne” who would express their reluctance to retreat by tying their beards or moustaches to the beard or moustaches of the man next to them, often forming defensive lines up to two or three miles long.  On the right is a member of the famous Prussian “Bismarcken Shocken Troopen” who would always fight so bravely in Germany’s many wars that in late 1939 the Führer designated them the first ever “Sacred Regiment of Adolf Hitler Impersonators”.

We presume that in 1870 Madame Lionnet must have been visiting her family, who hailed from the capital, because we know that she was present at home in Paris when her father was killed in combat. He had been fighting in one of the battles around the city’s fortifications during the siege. Shortly afterwards Madame Lionnet’s husband was killed and, with hardly any family left,  when the siege was lifted, she came to England to work as a teacher of French, possibly a little like this one:

On the French version of Google, I did find a rough fit for somebody who may well have been Madame Lionnet’s husband. This was Étienne Napoléon Lionnet, who was born on April 13th 1815. He began his studies at the “Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées (School of Bridges and Roadways) in 1837 at the age of 22. Here is a postcard from that era. Even then, the notorious Parisian traffic was absolutely ferocious:

Monsieur Lionnet died on December 15th 1870 which would have been in the very middle of the Siege of Paris which lasted from September 19th 1870 to January 28th 1871.  I also found mention of the Lionnet brothers who ran an ambulance service during the Siege of Paris in 1870-1871. People were really hungry during the siege, and some rather queer markets soon sprang up, Rat is very obvious, but “viande canine et féline” means “dog and cat meat”. Tastes a little like chicken, apparently:

The whereabouts of Madame Lionnet in the 1870s are unknown, other than just generally, “in England”.

The first exact piece of news came from Nottingham. Madame Lionnet became the University College’s first ever lecturer in French, having started her employment there in the college’s opening year of 1881:

Before that, she had worked at the High School for Girls as “A French Mistress”:

Madame Lionnet started her career at the High School in, probably, the academic year of 1885-1886. She died on March 9th 1895, so she worked there for nine years.

She had her own house, which seems to have had the name “Esplanade”. It was at 5 Dryden Street. Dryden Street, indicated by “La flèche orange”, runs north from Shakespeare Street and ultimately, via Addison Street, finishes at Forest Road East. If you turn left out of Addison Street, and walk along Forest Road East, you will soon come to the High School, which is the white rectangle near the corner with Waverley Street:

Madame Lionnet seems to have bought her house from John Hudson, a machinist, and after her death, it passed into the hands of Mrs Betsy Stevens. Nowadays, every single square inch of Dryden Street has been used to build new buildings for Nottingham Trent University. This is where Dryden Street joins Shakespeare Street. No 5 would have been near to the junction. Perhaps Madame Lionnet would recognise those mature plane trees on the left:

In her obituary in the school magazine, “The Forester”, Madame Lionnet is described as

“a woman of wide culture and well read in the literatures of several languages, and was a most capable and energetic teacher who spared no pains with her pupils. It will ever be a sincere regret to her many friends that her last years were embittered with heavy losses; for she lost the savings of many years through the failure of the Liberator Society.”

The Liberator Society crashed in 1892 when £3,500,000 of investors’ money was lost after the closure of the London and General Bank which, along with the House and Land Investment Trust, was investing money in “gigantic building speculations”.

“Madame Lionnet was remarkable for open handed generosity, and those who knew her well could speak of many deeds of charitable kindness, and pay a tribute to the courageous industry and independence of character which enabled her to work so successfully in a foreign land.”

Madame Lionnet was killed by a bout of pneumonia which “supervened on influenza”. Pneumonia was the commonest killer in Victorian England, and just before the First World War, Sir William Osler would call pneumonia the “Captain of the Men of Death” as it was by then the most widespread and dangerous of all acute diseases. As we have seen, Madame Lionnet died on Saturday March 9th 1895 and she was buried in the Church Cemetery on Mansfield Road on the following Wednesday, the Reverend Peck, a teacher at the High School, conducting the service.

The Forester said that the interment took place:

“in the presence of many friends and pupils and of representatives from the School, the University College and the High School for Girls. Numerous beautiful wreaths, with which the coffin was entirely covered, testified to the respect in which the deceased lady was held.”

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by | September 17, 2022 · 6:16 am

Stories about my Dad (3)

In 1946, my Dad, Fred,  gave up his exciting job as a Brylcreem Boy of Bomber Command and signed up to be for what was called at the time “emergency training” as a teacher. It has always intrigued me as to how many veterans of Bomber Command became teachers. And I have my own ideas about that! Fred finished up getting a job quite near to his home, at a school in Hastings Road in Church Gresley. The school was built in 1898 for 420 children. Fred taught there until the mid-1950s.

Here’s a modern map of the area. The Orange Arrow points to where Hastings Road School used to stand before it had to be demolished in the late 1950s, lest the subsidence problems made it collapse completely with the teachers and children inside :

When my Dad, Fred, worked there, the vast majority of the children were the sons and daughters of miners, both of coal and of clay. They were all what you would call “rough diamonds”.

Most of them, therefore, were far from sophisticated, either in their knowledge or their behaviour or, indeed, their hygiene. Fred used to tell the story of having a boy in his class called “Stinky Roberts” . At the beginning of the school year, Fred was given the helpful advice by his colleagues never to let this particular boy sit next to a hot radiator under any circumstances. If he sits next to a radiator, then make him move!

Whether it was because Fred did not believe the other teachers, or whether it was because, in the absence of any particularly obvious hygiene problem, he quite simply forgot their advice, remains unclear.  But on one unfortunate day, when “Stinky” did get to sit by that scorching radiator, the wisdom of his colleagues became manifest, as the unbelievable stench of long unwashed filth and ancient, uncontrolled urine wafted inescapably around the room. In this way, Fred learnt one of the most important basics of teaching, namely that no boy is ever given a nickname without very good reason.

At one point, Fred had a bet with another teacher that he could leave his class working quietly while he went down to Lloyds Bank in Swadlincote to draw out some money. The pupils were told to behave themselves properly while he was away, and to continue with their work. This they duly did, and Fred won the bet.

In another variation of what was obviously the same story, Fred did not go down to the bank in Swadlincote, but instead, went to post a letter at the Church Gresley Post Office, a destination considerably nearer to Hastings Road School, and, from the point of view of unsupervised children, a much shorter, and therefore, perhaps, a more plausible time to be away.

One of Fred’s more pleasant jobs was the fact that he ran the school football team. He was partnered in this by his young friend, Vernon Langford. We do actually have a misty photograph of the staff at Hastings Road. Here it is :

The teachers are (back row), Mr Morris, Mr Roberts, Mr Baker, Mr Picker, Mr Goodall and Mr Knifton. The front row comprises Miss Rowe, Miss Smith, Mr Handford, Mrs Errington and Mrs P Middleton.

Fred’s teaching career at Hastings Road reached its pinnacle when he was conducting a lesson in Physics. At this time all secondary school teachers, even those who were trained to teach Geography, were expected to be able to turn their hand to more or less anything.

Fred’s brief was to demonstrate the effects of air pressure, so he took a pint glass, filled it with water, and then put a sheet of card over the top. He then explained that in a moment, when he turned the glass upside down, the contents would not spill out, because the air pressure on the card, which was equal to hundreds of pounds, was pressing down and keeping it in place. This news was received by the children, of course, with immense scepticism.

When Fred turned the glass over, however, perhaps as much to his surprise as anybody else’s, the rather unlikely result was that the card did actually stay in place, and the water did not spill out. The children’s reaction was astonishing. They were all totally amazed. One boy stood up, and shouted at the top of his voice, “A miracle ! A miracle ! Mester Knifton’s worked a miracle ! ” And then he ran out of the room and around the school, still shouting

“A miracle ! A miracle ! Mester Knifton’s worked a miracle ! ”

I believe that this incident was the closest that Fred ever came to being regarded as divine. Here’s a video of a mere mortal man trying out this trick:

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by | August 29, 2022 · 6:16 am

What would you do ? (15) The Solution

“What would you do ?” used to figure on the cover of a boys’ comic called “Boys’ World”. This was a publication, obviously, aimed at boys, and first appeared on January 26th 1963. There were 89 issues before the comic was merged with Eagle in 1964. The last issue of “Boys’ World” came out on October 3rd 1964.

I used to buy the comic every week, mainly for its front cover which always featured a kind of puzzle. It was called “What would you do ?” and was based on somebody being in what Ned Flanders would call “A dilly of a pickle”. Here’s the situation:

The blue square carries the following text:

“Shoulder to shoulder the Roman soldiers stand tensed to face the thundering might of Hannibal’s elephants. But the Romans’ spears are of little use against the living battering-ram that sweeps down on them. Great gaps are torn in the tightly packed Roman ranks. Now Hannibal’s soldiers can follow through and rout the enemy. The Roman general, Scipio, knows that if he is to win future battles he must stop the elephants breaking his shield wall. What can he do?”

And the correct solution given on page 9 of the comic is:

And in case you are reading the extract from “Boys’ World” on a 1962 b/w television set, here is the text given above:

“In future battles, Scipio formed his ranks not as a solid mass, but with a soldier in every other space. When the elephants charged, the soldiers had room to move aside. This left clear lanes through which the elephants stormed harmlessly. When they had passed, the soldiers merely returned to their original positions.”

And as a very brief trip down memory lane, here is the advertisement right next to the problem solution on page 9. It is for the two latest Matchbox toys :

Nowadays, even the 24 page Matchbox catalogue is valuable, and certainly worth more than the original threepence, which was, theoretically, two pence in today’s money.

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