Dressing Properly In Yorkshire

People don't dress properly like they used to: thank goodness. We seem to have outgrown the need for men to wear a noose-like tie around their necks and women to wear a sober skirt for them to be taken seriously. Most restaurants no longer feel the need to keep a spare tie behind the reception desk in order to maintain customer standards and signs in pubs limiting customers in work clothes to certain bars would now be treated with the disrespect they deserve. The tendency to make judgements based upon styles of dress is, hopefully, in retreat, but it still exists and occasionally we all still need reminding to avoid such sartorial snobbery.

It is possible to visit many of the towns and cities of West Yorkshire with their large populations of citizens who come from an Asian background and spot styles of dress that might appear "foreign". The sight of women wearing the hijab - or headscarf - is now relatively common in these parts, but any lingering thoughts of cultural separateness are driven away by their rich Yorkshire accents. And their headscarves are not all that foreign to these stone-flagged Yorkshire streets. I remember seeing a clip from an early short film which was shot outside the gates of a Yorkshire mill in the early years of the twentieth century, just as the mill girls were leaving for the day. Almost every one of them was wrapped in a full headscarf. I was reminded of this only yesterday when I found this old photograph of my grandmother, Harriet Ellen Burnett, taken, I would guess, some time in the 1950s. She is wearing the same headscarf that she wore throughout her life in line with, what to her, was a grand old Yorkshire tradition.

Sepia Saturday 253 : Gone Fishing With The King

Our Sepia Saturday theme this week shows a group of Canadian miners on a fishing trip. I trawled my various family photographic archives for fish and the closest I could find was a picture of Auntie Miriam outside a fish and chip shop. I decided to keep this particular treat for our annual Auntie Miriam Day in January, and therefore the best I could come up with was a cigarette card from the W.D. & H.O. Wills 1937 series "Our King and Queen".  Card No. 29 is headed "Deep Sea Fishing, New Zealand, 1927. Somehow I have acquired the full set of 50 cigarette cards, inherited probably from my father. Produced long before the days when cigarettes were hidden behind closed cupboard doors, such cards were given away in packets of cigarettes and designed to appeal to adults and children alike.

The King and Queen in question are, of course, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. The King, we are told, was a keen fisherman and his "bag" on this particular fishing trip included a shark. Our Canadian miners probably didn't manage to "bag" a shark, but they were taking a few precious hours away from a life of toil hewing coal. His Majesty, by comparison, will have been carefully shepherded to the best fishing grounds and, no doubt, he didn't have to fillet the shark himself.

The little card - hardly larger than 1 inch by 2 inch - is packed with history. It tells of times when companies where "imperial", when tobacco was a harmless treat, and when happy citizens pasted pictures of their favourite kings and queens into little books.  Times have changed.

You can take a look at what others are doing for Sepia Saturday 253 by going over to the Sepia Saturday Blog and following the links. There again, you could go fishing instead.

Mindful Thoughts On The Victoria Theatre In Halifax

I was flipping through one of those free local magazines that these days drop through the letter box like 1960s pop stars falling from grace, when I came across a page full of horrendous banalities of the kind that seem to be the twenty first century equivalent of the cry of the snake oil salesman. "You can become mindful at any time you like just by paying attention to your immediate experience and situation", it would appear. "Research", it seems although the precise nature of the research is left to the imagination, "indicates that living in the moment can make people happier, because most negative thoughts concern the past of the future". The entire saccharine-fest is topped off with the following little jingle:

I do apologise if anyone has had to read that having just consumed their breakfast, the words are enough to make anyone feel a little nauseous. I have obviously been living my life all wrong for the past sixty-odd years (and some of those years were very odd), believing that we have a duty to learn from the past and plan for the future. But no, the past and the future are seeped in negativity - let us all live for today and to hell with the consequences.

My picture was taken way back in 1966 during a parade for the annual Halifax Gala. The building in the background is the Victoria Theatre which still stands, I am glad to say. Whether it will be standing tomorrow is a different question - but, who cares? Such thoughts are not mindful.

Naked On A Canadian Headland, Filling In Potholes On Google

People sometimes imagine that the information superhighway is flawless: as smooth as it is broad, with a perfect surface that could put a bowling green to shame. But it isn't: there are imperfections, there are gaps in its coverage, there are potholes on Google. And when we discover such a pothole, we all have a responsibility to fill it in, because the WWW has always been a do-it-yourself kind of enterprise; there are no state tar macadam machines filling potholes for our convenience, nor would any sane person want such things.

Which brings me to a conversation my old mate Arthur and I had on Saturday night.  We were out having a meal at a pub and catching up on over forty years of shared history. Our wives swapped stories of friends and relatives whilst Arthur and I engaged in one of those "remember that bloke who ..." types of conversation so loved by old men. The conversation snaked its way to an organisation we both belonged to back in the late 1960s and early 1970s which was called the Halifax 68 Club. The club met every Thursday night in a local pub and provided an opportunity for people of the left to get together and exchange ideas and enthusiasms. It was not confined to any one political party - some were Labour Party members, some were Communists, some were Anarchists and the odd Liberal would occasionally poke his or her head through the door. Nor was it confined just to politics: I remember discussions on music, art, literature, philosophy and science. It was an asteroid of an organisation - burning brightly in the cultural skies of Halifax for a few years and then fading into obscurity.

The discussion between Arthur and myself on Saturday night had none of the heady gravitas of those discussions of forty-five years ago: it was confined to trying to remember the name of the pub in King Cross where we would meet.  As we sipped out pints and salted our chips, we racked our brains; we recited an alphabet of pub names, we listed monarchs and we conjugated mythical creatures. Eventually I said "Not to worry, I will Google "Halifax 68 Club". And so I did, only to discover that the only match the all-powerful indexing monster could come up with was the address of a nudist club in Halifax, Nova Scotia! The thought of all those long gone revolutionaries being mistaken for a group of Canadian naturists was too much to bare, and salt tears dripped into a couple of beer glasses. We had discovered a pothole on Google. I promised Arthur that I would attempt to fill it in on my first opportunity and that is the purpose of this post. If, ever again, two old men try to remember anything about the Halifax 68 Club, Google should point them to this post rather than leaving them naked and cold on a Canadian headland.

Perhaps I should add, for the sake of completeness and for future searchers of information, that the name of the pub where we met was The Wellington. Looking through my old photographs, I don't seem to have any pictures taken during a meeting, but the one at the head of this post dates from the same period and features the inimitable Tim Enright, who was the moving spirit behind the creation of the 68 Club, delivering a speech to commemorate a Chartist march over the Yorkshire moors.

Pass The Port Please

As part of the great migration to the Mac, I am re-cataloguing some of my older digital photographs using the new version of Lightroom. In some ways the task is time-consuming, but it helps stimulate some of the memory synapses in my brain and I have little better to do with my time. I took this picture in June 2000 whilst I was attending a European Council meeting in Porto, Portugal as a press representative. At such gatherings, I usually managed to steal an hour or two away from the fascinating discussions of the Common Agricultural Policy or the European Regional Development Fund, to go in search of interesting photographs. Porto was a wonderful city through which port wine flowed like water. Indeed the memory is so strong it is making my thirsty. Pass the port please.

Sepia Saturday 252 : No Such Thing As A Free Big Mac

Christmas appears to have come early for one Sepia Saturday participant. Our theme image this week features a party where the participants are wearing name tags and my picture also shows a party where the participants are wearing name tags. I have a feeling that the cute little chap in the centre of the picture is me although it may be my brother Roger. The occasion is undoubtedly one of the Christmas parties hosted by the factory where my father worked - the Mackintosh Toffee factory in Halifax. If I do not feature on this photograph there are lots of other similar ones which include my smiling little face.  The interesting thing is not so much the picture or the identification of the sibling - it is the tortured process which has brought the picture to my blog.

It all started on Tuesday when I was walking through town feeling sorry for myself. My route took me passed the Apple Store and my legs took me reluctantly inside. One thing led to another, and one thought led to another. The wise words of some long-gone relative seemed to echo through the showroom : "there are no pockets in shrouds!". Within 10 minutes I was walking out of the store with a brand new iMac under my arm. Since then it has been a migration of epic proportions from the tired familiarity of a PC to the different world of the Mac Operating System (it is twenty years since I used a Mac - back in the days when they were boxy TV monitors).

It took me most of the first day to find the on/off switch (a mere dimple in the sculptured metal superstructure) and most of the second day was spent in a fruitless search for an optical drive (it would seem that such things have been consigned to the technological junk-heap).  Whilst most of my essential programmes and devices - such as my beloved scanner - have made the journey with me, they demand new approaches and new methodologies. The fact that I am (hopefully) able to publish something on my blog this week is little short of a miracle. The fact that it (hopefully) includes a scanned image is astonishing.

The new computer is, I suppose, an early Christmas present (Isobel was going to buy me a new vacuum cleaner so, hopefully, I have forestalled that). Like with the little lad in the photo, it is a present from Macintosh, although my recent experience has proved the truth of yet another family saying : "there's no such thing as a free lunch".

For more Sepia Saturday presents take a journey to the Sepia Saturday Blog

Down Where The Wurzburger Hofbrau Flows In Elland, West Yorkshire

With the help of a loan from the Steinway Piano Company, German immigrant August Luchow bought a beer hall on East 14th Street, New York in 1882. Over the years it became "Luchow's Famous Restaurant .... where "lunch, dinner and after theatre supper is served in a rich old atmosphere reminiscent of by-gone days". At one time or another most of the rich and famous of the twentieth century passed through the doors of Luchows. Theodore Roosevelt dined there. Rachmaninoff and Paderewski played the piano. Caruso, Marlene Dietricht and Jack Benny drank steins of imported German beer. And Gus Kahn composed "Yes Sir That's My Baby" on one of the restaurant's tablecloths. During the height of its fame, Luchow's would serve 24,000 litres of beer a day and it was proud to proclaim that it was "down where the Wurzburger Hofbrau and pilsner flows". With such a proud heritage it is surprising that 100 years after its' establishment, it closed its doors for the last time. And it is perhaps equally surprising that one of its' promotional postcards, dating from the first decade of the twentieth century, should end its' days for sale in a second-hand shop in West Yorkshire for just 20 pence.

Line Is Boss

Back Hope Hall Terrace from Union Street, Halifax : October 2014

Images can acquire a form of non-Euclidian logic where less equals more. Detail can be reduced to such an extent that, what remains, is sharp enough to cut your knee on. Shape drains meaning. Black becomes white. Line is boss.

Looking Back : Hope and Prosper And Never Despair

I must have taken this photograph back in the 1980s. I can't remember taking it but it was in my negative albums and it is the kind of photograph I take (it's a pub, after all). It is (was) the Earl of Arundel and Surrey on Queen's Road, Sheffield which is certainly no longer a pub and, at one stage, was due for demolition.

The part of the photograph that caught my attention was the large RAOB notice board. The RAOB were (are) the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes, one of the oldest Friendly and Burial Societies and one of the very few that have survived into the twenty-first century. I have always quite fancied being a Buff; they are my kind of organisation, they meet in pubs and seem to be dedicated to having a good time and a decent burial. My good friend and shipmate, H, used to be a Buff and he once showed me what he said was a secret Buff greeting. A few months later a group of local RAOB officials walked into my local pub - their coach had broken down - and I practiced the secret greeting on them. They looked at me as though I was barking mad, so I suspect that H was having me on, and my chances of ever being invited to become a Buff disappeared before my eyes.

At the beginning of the twentieth century there were over 50 RAOB Lodges in Sheffield with names like the Hope and Prosper Lodge, the Shakespearean Lodge, and the Nil Desperandum Lodge. I suspect that the Hope and Prosper Lodge is long gone, but, hopefully, the Nil Desperandum Lodge has not sunk into anonymous despair.

Overheard On A Huddersfield Bus

Scene: On a bus to town sat just behind two elderly ladies who are watching a young girl who is sat further down the bus and who is busy using her mobile phone.

Elderly Lady 1 (EL1) : Look at her. Tessing, or whatever they call it.
Elderly Lady 2 (EL2) : Texting, that's what it is, I think. Our Debbie does it all the time.
EL1 : What do they jabber on about? Why can't they write proper letters like we used to do?
EL2 : Our Arthur, he used to write me lovely letters.
EL1 : It's like that twerping. What's that all about?
EL2 : Twitting. Debbie does that an' all.
EL1 : If you have some'at to say, write it properly. Sentences, things that make sense. Like we did. Like our parents did.
EL2 : I can't imagine our Arthur twitting.

No News From Nowhere Is Good News From Nowhere

Isobel and I received an e-mail from my brother yesterday checking up on our recovery from the various ailments that have beset us over the last few months. Even though we live on other sides of the world we tend to keep up with each others' lives by reading the others' blog - Roger's excellent blog is Sculpture Studio - and referring to the absence of posts on my blog over the last couple of months he wrote, "I assume that no News From Nowhere is good News From Nowhere". And, generally speaking, he is right. Isobel continues to recover from her emergency surgery and is doing remarkably well considering the scale of the operation. The date by which she can resume a little light housework seems to be continuously pushed back, and the amount of shopping therapy she has to undertake seems to increase in inverse proportion, but other than that she is doing very well. In a few weeks she should be able to drive again which means that my services as a retail chauffeur will no longer be needed, and I will have to find some other way of spending my time. 

My eye was recovering very well but over the last few days it has flared up again so it looks like a further course of poking, prodding, dropping, cleaning and waiting will be called for. We did, however, manage to get away on holiday and we had a splendid time with calm seas, good company, fine food, and soothing drink. My picture was taken as we sailed past some of the lovely little islands off the coast of Montenegro.I will use my "Picture Post" blog to feature some of my other recent photographs over the next few months.

With the holiday over and things return to some kind of Autumnal normality, it is time to return to my usual pattern of blogging. It is time to set aside blog posts which are little more that health bulletins or bleating essays in studied self-pity. News from Nowhere can now return to being obsessed with the inconsequential and, as far as my personal well being is concerned, please assume that no news of it is good news of it.