A Platinum Jubilee

Hello, thank you for calling in.  Is all well?  I seem to be careering from one metaphorical punctuation mark to the next without taking time to sit down and read the whole paragraph and it's making me feel quite unsettled.  This time of year is all about birthdays in our family which is rather lovely, but we've also had two stress-inducing covid isolations and the hideous news of a terminal illness.  However, I am trying to be a glass-half-full kind of person so the good news is that there is plenty of supply teaching work for the Best Beloved so the coffers are filling and I might even be able to buy myself a new, hardback copy of Jane Eyre!

The news over the weekend was dominated by the revolving doors at 10 Downing Street but something significant happened on Sunday: the seventieth anniversary of our Queen's accession to the throne.  During my lifetime we have had ten Prime Ministers but only one Queen and no British monarch has reigned for as long as Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith (to give her her full title and yes, I did have to look it up).  Celebrations will come in June when, hopefully, the weather will be sunnier, warmer and drier than it is in February and anyway, I always feel a little bit sad for HM on this day because it is, after all, the anniversary of her father's death.  Here is the first paragraph of her message to the nation, published on Saturday:

Tomorrow, 6th February, marks the 70th anniversary of my Accession in 1952. It is a day that, even after 70 years, I still remember as much for the death of my father, King George VI, as for the start of my reign.

So, there was no great royalist celebration here on Sunday (or, perhaps, on any day) but I did ask my mother about her memories of 6th February 1952.

Ma was born and raised in London and was at primary school that day.  It was an ordinary Wednesday until just before lunchtime when the headmaster, Mr Kershaw, entered the classroom and told the children that the King was dead.  This was shocking news and after Ma had bolted down her lunch she ran home and relayed it to her parents; ordinarily, her father would have been at work but he had annual leave to use up and had taken a day off work so he was also at home to receive the news from his young daughter.  Isn't that funny, that he should have taken that particular day off?  Ma told me that her parents couldn't really believe it so they turned on the radio and heard the BBC announcement which confirmed that the King was indeed dead.  Although we now know that he had been ill for months with lung cancer, Ma says that the general public didn't know that at the time which was why the news came as such a shock. 

The King's body lay in the church at Sandringham until 11th February when the coffin travelled to London and was placed in Westminster Hall.  The King lay in state there for three days and my grandfather took Ma to pay their respects.  Apparently, at times that queue was four miles long because in all, more than 304,000 people passed through the Hall before the funeral on 15th February.    

There may be more family folklore to come later, perhaps next year, as both of my parents were on the London streets on Coronation Day in 1953 to watch Queen Elizabeth drive past in her golden carriage.  In the meantime, I raise my cup of tea to HM and thank her for seventy years of service.  If nothing else, she deserves admiration for enduring weekly meetings with those Prime Ministers and for wearing coats made heavy by the weights in their hems and hats with contraptions fitted inside to clamp them to her head and prevent them blowing off in the wind.  

I don't have any photographs of the Queen and her father to show you so instead I offer you this image of my mother with her father and younger sister, taken in the summer of 1952.

See you soon.

Love, Mrs Tiggywinkle x

A 1995 Weekend with the England Men's Football Team

Hello, thank you for popping in.  We're getting excited here about the Euro 2020 final this evening - I'd really like to be in my cousin's house because her husband is Italian and whatever the result, there will be a celebration!  I keep telling the Best Beloved that football is "only a game" but he doesn't believe me. 

In June 1995 my youngest sister got married and the day before the wedding we discovered that the England men's football team were staying in the same hotel while they were participating in a friendly international tournament at Wembley.  I wanted to share some of the stories from that weekend here so yesterday, I asked my family to send me their memories.  I'll begin with one of mine: we arrived at the hotel in the morning and it became apparent that the staff were so busy dancing attendance on the footballers that they were overlooking their other guests.  I ordered a pot of tea and had to wait for forty minutes before it appeared.  As my name means "grumpy until I have a cup of tea" this was tricky, even more so as I was ten weeks pregnant, full of hormones and had just spent almost three hours travelling so I really needed that soothing pot of tea and forty minutes felt like four days.

I was walking through the hotel with my sister, mother and grandmother, who was 83 years old and walked slowly and uneasily, when David James walked out of the gym and started following us.  When we reached the bottom of the stairs, three of us stood back to allow the sprightly Mr James to go up ahead of us as my grandmother's pace was so very slow but she was oblivious and began climbing them anyway.  Mr James was an absolute gentleman, he ushered us up behind her and brought up the rear at our snail's pace, waiving away our apologies.  I loved him for that and have held a fondness for him ever since.

One of my sisters took my 6 year-old daughter to the hotel's swimming pool and saw a young chap in the weights room as they walked past.  The Best Beloved joined them a little later, VERY excited because he had just seen Alan Shearer in the weights room.  "Who's he?" asked my sister.  After their swim, the Best Beloved went into the male changing room and found most of the team in there, half-naked, and was enjoying chatting with them until he realised that our daughter had followed her daddy in there.  He sent her out to join her aunt and carried on chatting.

Lots of our stories happened in the evening, after the ceremony and the wedding breakfast, when the team and their managers appeared in the hotel bar.  Some people were a bit starstruck and Terry Venables (Team Coach) and Bryan Robson (Assistant Coach) were gracious in signing autographs and having photographs taken but there were security staff there to ensure that we didn't take any photographs of the players, so this photograph of a card game shows only my sister and my cousin and omits the other players, David James (you can see his legs!), Jamie Redknapp and Steve McManaman, but her signed order of service proves that they were there. 

The page boy was ushered up to Bryan Robson by his grown-ups and held out his new football for an autograph.  "What's your name, son?" asked Mr Robson.  "Luke," mouthed the child as no sound came out of his mouth.  He was completely overawed.  The lovely Mr Robson signed the ball and then took it away so that the whole team could sign it, too.  The bride and groom later varnished that ball to preserve the signatures.  My 19 year-old cousin also wanted a signed football and about a fortnight later he received one in the post, also signed by the whole team.

During the evening the bride and groom quietly took themselves outside for a walk in the hotel gardens and some peace and quiet.  While they took a turn around the lawn, Paul Gascoigne joined them and chatted to them about the bad press he was receiving.  A minder followed them the whole time.  My sister recalls that Gazza was "sober and very pleasant" and when he congratulated the newlyweds, he shook the groom's hand, kissed the bride's cheek and asked them to ensure that the party didn't go on too late or too loud!  Gazza also had a quick, friendly word with my 85 year-old grandfather, a lifelong football fan, and made his day.

The team had a coach to transport them to and from Wembley and my daughter and the page boy were very excited to be invited onto it.  They were each given a chocolate bar from the fridge and a copy of the team's new official magazine, called "ENGLAND".  My sister couldn't resist the opportunity to sit in the driver's seat.

Our most memorable story involves Bryan Robson (again).  Here he is with two of my sisters and me, wearing a t-shirt bearing the name of the tournament sponsors.  

Later, he was bare-chested in the bar so I asked him what had happened and he replied that my aunt had his t-shirt!  She still has it - she sent me this photo yesterday.  

And I still have the ENGLAND magazine.

Understandably, I think my bridal sister was a bit disappointed when she learned that the England football team would be staying in the hotel for the weekend of her wedding because with so many football fans in the family, she was worried that they might be more interested in the team than in the wedding. However, twenty-six years later, although we have our stories and our souvenirs, when we think of that weekend and recall the anecdotes, we always refer to it as her wedding weekend and thoughts of her and her husband are always at the forefront of my mind.  She still has him, too.

The morning after the wedding the football team was training on the hotel lawn and one of my sisters leaned out of her bedroom window and took this photo (please don't tell anyone, it was strictly against the rules and we might get into terrible trouble!).  That afternoon, they boarded their coach, found two chocolate bars missing from the fridge and went to Wembley where Brazil beat them 3-1.

See you soon.

Love, Mrs Tiggywinkle x

A green girl, unsifted in such perilous circumstance

Hello, thank you for popping in.  I am still thrilled to bits that anyone is reading.  It's Easter holiday time here which means that The Mathematician is home for four weeks and the Best Beloved is off work for a fortnight.  I am still at work but I am off enforced kitchen duties, so that's a rest for me, too.  Everyone in our house is quite relaxed, the pace is slower, we are catching up on lost sleep, the days are sunnier, the evenings are lighter and the birds are building their nests.  Spring has sprung.
 

We spent Easter at my parents' home in South Wales and were thoroughly pampered, which was lovely because I was completely worn out by the time we got there.  There were no bunnies, chicks, pastels or artful table decorations; we had a birthday celebration, a traditional (old-fashioned?) church service, a roast lamb dinner, chocolate, nephews and a niece, family time, the Boat Race on television, a proper rest and a nostalgic peruse through old photographs and theatre programmes.  It was just about perfect.
 

One of the things I like about old theatre programmes is discovering a name in the cast list which has since become extremely well-known.  For example, when I was seventeen years old and saw a young, red-headed Leontes dancing with his son in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale I had no idea that Patrick Stewart would become internationally famous within a decade as the captain of the USS Enterprise.  In 1957/8, my father went on a school trip to the Old Vic in London and saw this production of Hamlet -
 

Now take a close look and see who was playing Ophelia in her London debut -

Yes, a young Dame Judi Dench, straight out of drama school then and now a "national treasure".  However, the reviews of her performance were not good: in The Observer, Kenneth Tynan praised the production but wrote that "The Ophelia, Judi Dench, is a pleasing but terribly sane little thing", a strong sign that something was amiss if you recall that Ophelia is supposed to lose her sanity during the course of the play.  Another well-respected theatre critic, Richard Findlater, wrote "The debut was, in my view, a debacle." 

 

 

In the long term I don't think those notices have impeded her career!

 

See you soon.

 

Love, Mrs Tiggywinkle x

Family Folklore - A Follow-Up

Hello, thank you for calling in, and thank you for your comments on my last post, I love to read them.  Today's post follows on from that one...My mother rang me after she had read my post about her evening in the theatre with Churchill and Monty.  "And I have to tell you that not only have I been in the same room as Churchill when he was alive, but I have also been in the same room as him when he was dead!" she said.  "Whaaaaat?!" was my astounded reply.  Here is the story...

Winston Churchill died on 24th January 1965 at the age of 90.  His funeral was held a week later, on 31st January, at St Paul's Cathedral and for three days beforehand, his body lay in state in Westminster Hall.  During those three days, the Hall was open for 23 hours a day for members of the public to come and pay their respects, and 321,360 people did so.  Imagine that, more than 100,000 people each day!  People of all ages queued up and then slowly walked around the Hall at shuffling pace, without stopping - if you have been to Anne Frank's house in Amsterdam or the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London you will know exactly what this was like.  Here is Alfred Egerton Cooper's painting, entitled Lying-in-State of Winston Churchill in Westminster Hall, to give you an idea of the scene.

My grandmother, who I called Granny, was very keen to go and pay her respects but since childhood she had had what we referred to as "a bad leg" and so she wasn't able to stand and queue, so it looked as if she wouldn't be able to go.  However, somebody told my mother that there was an unpublicised special arrangement for disabled people, who wouldn't have to queue.  Obviously, there was no internet to help her find out more details so what did she do?  She telephoned the news desk at the Daily Telegraph, of course!  Yes, if they arrived first thing in the morning, they would be able to go straight in and bypass the queue.

So, Ma and Granny set off on the train from Clapton to Westminster.  Although not a long journey, it was difficult and uncomfortable for Granny, who was 65 years old and not very agile, having to negotiate lots of steps and the jostling crowds of commuters travelling to work.  Fortunately, she was able to sit down on the train.  She was also anxious that the journey may be a fruitless one as she was not officially classed as "disabled".  However, when they got to Westminster Hall at the appointed time, they explained their situation and were directed straight to the viewing platform.  Having paid their respects to our great leader, they left and were back home by 10.30am.

So there you are, the time my mother was in the presence of the very late Winston Churchill.  Now then, gentle reader, this was notable because in those unenlightened times, there was a distinct lack of facilities for disabled people - no special seating areas in theatres and football grounds as there are now, no ramps or dedicated toilets anywhere.  If you were disabled, you had to accept that there were places you just couldn't access.  This special arrangement was made because at this time, twenty years after the end of the Second World War, there were still plenty of ex-servicemen alive who were disabled because of their wartime injuries and who would want to pay their respects to our great wartime leader.  In this country, we had to wait for another thirty years for the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 to make the provision of services and facilities for disabled people compulsory.  As we talked about the train journey there, Ma said that I should not pay any attention to the notion that people were friendlier and more considerate in those days than they are now: although somebody gave up a seat for Granny, nobody did the same for Ma, who had to stand for the entire journey...even though she was almost nine months pregnant!  After all, I was born less than a fortnight later.

See you soon.

Love, Mrs Tiggywinkle x



Family Folklore

Hello, thank you for calling in.  I hope you are all keeping safe, warm and dry enough - especially those of you affected by the extraordinary storms we are having on both sides of the Atlantic.  I am well aware that although the endless rain is getting me down, I have a great deal to be thankful for.

 

First of all, THANK YOU for your very kind comments on my last post, my own tribute to Alan Rickman - and Rosie, I am very jealous!    Even The Mathematician rang me to let me know that she understood why I had written it, although for her he will always be Severus Snape. 

 

This was supposed to be my January family history post but I'm afraid other things got in the way so as an alternative, I offer you a piece of what my cousin calls "family folklore" which I heard for the first time today.  We have been to Cardiff Bay to surprise my father by joining him for his birthday lunch and as fifteen of us sat around a table, relaxed and chatting, my mother told us this story.  She was born in London during the Second World War and grew up there.  Occasional visits to the theatre in the West End were part of that growing up (tickets were much cheaper then) and her parents liked to take their daughters to the Savoy Theatre to see the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company perform the works of Gilbert and Sullivan.  One evening, when she was about fourteen years old, they went to see The Gondoliers and the interval went on for rather longer than was usual.  Sitting at the back of the stalls, Ma and her sister became aware that a buzz of excitement was spreading through the theatre: a special guest was in the house.  They waited and eventually, a door opened at the front of the auditorium, beside the stage, and in walked...Winston Churchill AND Field Marshal Montgomery!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Now then, gentle reader, remember that this was only about eleven years after the end of the war and these men were national heroes.  The audience rose to its feet and applauded them before reluctantly settling down for the second half of the performance. 

 

Fancy that, my mother seeing Winston Churchill and Monty in the flesh!  And fancy her not having told us this story before!!  Winston Churchill, Hello!!!  I am almost giddy with excitement at learning that my Ma was in the same room as our great twentieth century leader.  (Mind you, Aunty Pat going to school with Marc Bolan is pretty good...)  I just had to share the story with you lovely lot.

 

  See you soon.

 

Love, Mrs Tiggywinkle x

Edit: my mother rang me after she read this.  Apparently, I got the date wrong - this incident didn't happen in 1956, as I had thought, but in the winter of 1958/9, almost fourteen years after the end of the war.  All other details have the maternal seal of approval. 

 

4th February 1959

Hello, thank you for calling in.  As in many other places in the UK, it seems that summer has properly arrived in Shropshire - and in Buckinghamshire, where our clan gathered yesterday to celebrate a 20th wedding anniversary.  My aunt told me this story which the Best Beloved says must be recorded somewhere, so I am going to record it here and share it with you.

 

There was a boy in her class at primary school who was really into music.  One day in February 1959 he came into school crying.  The teacher asked him why he was crying and tried to console him, but when the boy explained that he was crying because one of his favourite singers had died the previous day, the teacher was unimpressed and told him that in ten years time, the singer would be forgotten and nobody would remember his name.

 

I think the teacher was wrong: the singer was Buddy Holly.  The eleven-year-old boy would later change his name to Marc Bolan.  I remember both their names. 

 

So today, I would like to thank Aunty Pat for sharing this story and to wish her and Uncle Colin a very Happy 46th Wedding Anniversary with lots more to come.  This is them on 5th July 1969 and see that small, cute bridesmaid on the right?  That's me.

 

 

See you soon.

 

Love, Mrs Tiggywinkle x

Fourth of July - Independence Day

Hello, and Happy Independence Day to those of you who are celebrating the birth of the United States of America as an independent nation.  Today I am going to share with you my own 4th July story: it was 1985 and I need no prompt or prop to recall that day as it is burnt into my memory.

 

I went to Wembley Stadium to watch Bruce Springsteen And The E Street Band in concert.  I was twenty years old and, suffused with the memory of youth, friendship, optimism and summertime, it was the best concert I have ever been to. 

 

It was a hot, sunny day and I made my way there alone on the train to meet college friends who were travelling in from different parts of the home counties.  I was running a little late but I didn't think it mattered because in my experience, concerts never began at the stated time.  I was wrong: as I came out of the underground station and began walking up to the stadium I could hear The Boss singing Independence Day - well, what else would he open with on 4th July?  I hurried.

 

He was amazing.  The concert began at 6pm and ran for over four hours, finishing after the best version of Twist And Shout I have ever heard - it lasted for twenty minutes, he called and we responded, all 72,000 of us.  People edged towards the exits but nobody actually left because we were all under his spell.  For more than for hours he leapt and bounded across the stage, full of energy, making sure we got our money's worth, all £14.50 of it.  He was amazing.

 

See you soon.

 

Love, Mrs Tiggywinkle x