Oulton Broad

Monday 19 August 2002. Having left Lowestoft, we travelled round about two miles to Oulton Broad where our first job was to have a spot of lunch.

Oulton Broad is one of the famous Norfolk Broads - though really it is more correct to call it a Suffolk Broad. The Broads (a neat way of getting around the county problem) were thought to be natural features until the 1960s when it was proved that they were the result of peat workings in medieval times. Local monasteries had excavated them, selling the peat for fuel - for burning on fires basically - to local communities. Norwich Cathedral alone took 320,000 tonnes a year.

At some point sea levels rose and flooded the excavations. Bad news for Pete and Doug, who were shovelling in the pit that day, but at least their names were and will be remembered... Windpumps, often mistaken by visitors as windmills and dykes were hastily constructed but the flooding continued until the area looked like that of today with broad lakes, reed beds, marshes and groups of young men falling overboard from boats whilst totally bladdered.

The area became known for boating holidays quite early. Small yachts were available for hire from 1878, Harry Blake opened an agency for yachting holidays in 1908 and the familiar firm Hoseasons made an appearance shortly after World War II. Boats on the Broads these days vary from preserved old trading wherries, to small day-hire boats like those pictured in the foreground, all the way to modern electric cruisers as the Broads Authority is continually adding charging points at mooring places.

At the east end of Oulton Broad is Mutford Lock which links the freshwater Broad to the saltwater Lake Lothing. The lake stretches through Lowestoft and then opens to the sea.

Looking across the lock gates to the Wherry Inn, named after the large sailed trading vessels. All other boats on the Broads must give way to sailing vessels as they don't have accelerators or brakes and whether they can dodge you depends almost exclusively on the whims of the wind and your skill or stupidity whichever applies.

Depending on the direction the wind is blowing it is often the case that sailing boats can only progress along the rivers by tacking to zig-zag across the width of the river. We had booked a boat ourselves, but not for this day - that joy was still to come. For now we sat and relaxed waiting for the afternoon opening of a nearby transport museum. Which we will see in the next article!

Great Yarmouth 2002 Index

Down the Road to Lowestoft

Monday 19 August 2002. We are staying in Great Yarmouth for a week and after a relaxing day in the town yesterday, we wake on Monday morning ready for a bit of exploring.

So we set off after our customary trip to the beach hut for coffee and make our first stop of the day at Lowestoft just down the coast. It is the most easterly town in the United Kingdom and consequently the first town to see the sunrise every day. Well... on the days when the sun isn't blocked by clouds, rain, fog, snow, and vast alien space ships... The photo shows the East Point Pavilion from where you can sit in complete dry and strain to see the sunrise through the clouds, rain, fog, snow... (I may have exaggerated about the vast alien spaceships...)

As with many seaside fishing villages, the harbour has turned more into a marina for pleasure craft owned by people who rarely visit and even more rarely actually take them out to sea.

The Norfolk and Suffolk Yacht Club. Founded in 1859, the clubhouse of 1902-3 superceded an earlier one of 1866 that the club quickly outgrew. Meetings and races are held both at sea and on the easily reached Suffolk and Norfolk Broads, the nearest of which - Oulton Broad - we shall see in the next article.

Me, wistfully wishing I could afford to buy a boat and moor it and ignore it here... The yacht club does advertise its membership and mooring rates as competative, so I really should look wistfully at more exclusive marinas, perhaps in Monte Carlo or Portofino. At least I've now grown out of looking wistfully at the Marina in Stingray...

Lowestoft railway station. Opened as Lowestoft Central Station by the Great Eastern Railway in 1847, it was the eastern terminus for lines from Ipswich to the south and Norwich to the north west. A second station, Lowestoft North, was closed along with the direct line from Lowestoft to Great Yarmouth in 1970. It is now a residential site - Beeching Drive.

The station is half a mile from the main centre of town and they were originally separated by green fields along a cliff top. We walked through today's streets to the main shopping street.

In fact we walked up the shopping street further into the town than we had on previous visits and found the old part of the town. Here we found the old High Street with buildings kept in the character of the old town.

Narrow alleyways known as "scores" led from the High Street to where the fishermen had their huts in the old days. The name here suggests the brewing of beer may have taken place somwhere near! Malsters Score twists and turns - turning to the left at the far end of this photograph. In the past because of these blind turns, it was known as a dangerous place to walk at night and there were instances of robbery particularly of sailors using the score to return to their ships.

Spurgeons Score has no such twists and turns, but starts as a stepped alley and continues today down a long straight street. In the past dwellings would be much more crowded than they are today...

South Flint House is faced with knapped flints, a feature of many older buildings in this part of the UK. This one goes back to the 1500s.

Here and there what is obviously a building of greater age sits amongst the more modern box-shaped shops and whilst this is no different to almost every town in the country the sight of a more attractive and less severe building does make you wish that modern architects could apply a little more creativity into their work these days.

Inside the old pharmacy. The old shelving had been retained and preserved but had, of course, modern-day products on the shelves. I suppose most of us buy liquid soap these days, but I can still get nostalgic about a sudden whiff of Cusson's Imperial Leather soap bars and was amazed once in a "living museum" at the familiarity of cakes of pink carbolic soap that I wouldn't have smelt since early childhood in the 1950s at my grandparents' house. Not that I'd particularly like to go back to living like that, but it brought back memories of Mum scraping a cake of dark green Fairy soap on collars and cuffs before putting shirts in the washing machine.

Great Yarmouth 2002 Index

Sunday Rest in Great Yarmouth

Sunday 18 August 2002. It's a day of rest because that's what Sundays on holiday in Great Yarmouth were all about when I was a kid. Admittedly journeys down from (at the time) Rochdale took a lot longer in the early to mid 1960s than they do now, but even so, we left Blackpool the previous day early in the morning and had got here in the afternoon.

The lack of motorways in the 60s was one factor and the other was Dad's Ford Popular 100E which had windscreen wipers that were driven not by electrics but by the vacuum caused by the downstroke of the pistons. Fine when the car was at rest, but as the accelerator was depressed to make the car move, air got through the carburettor and there was little or no vacuum and therefore no moving windscreen wipers. Driving through pouring rain was something of an adventure... A very slow and long adventure if you wanted to see where you were going.

Trips to Great Yarmouth in those days started around 11:00pm or midnight. We would stop at Newark for breakfast and carry on to get to Great Yarmouth late morning.

First thing every morning Mum and Dad would get us up early in the morning to go for a morning coffee at the tea huts on the Promenade walk before breakfast. We would be there somewhere between 6:00am-6:30am every day. Now they don't open until later so there's no chance of a visit before breakfast, but even so it was our first point of call every morning straight after leaving the B&B.

A mug of coffee both then and now meant a heaped teaspoon of Nescafe in the mug with steam-heated milk near boiling point poured over. No water. Sheer bliss. How the coffee shops have got away with making coffee take so long and requiring vendors to be called Baristas is totally beyond me. As is the ridiculous strength that many people drink coffee these days.

As kids we would be dragged by the hand to the huts, still half asleep and suffering slightly from shock at having been got out of bed so early. But once there (admittedly probably with a glass of milk rather than coffee in the days before adolescence) we would look eagerly through the ever-present magazine racks that were filled with American comics, Batman and Superman had been going for a while but my own favourites were Marvel Comics, whose own super heroes were just starting to appear - The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Iron-Man, Hulk and Thor... Walking up Regents Road almost every second shop had racks of these outside. We would spend a fortune on them...

First thing in the morning you would see greenkeepers pushing manual lawn mowers to cut the grass on bowling greens every single day, each micron of new growth disappearing daily to leave a velvet surface, carefully done corner to corner to leave stripes of different shades of green. There were so many bowling greens and putting greens in the sixties. There were still a few bowling greens now, but sadly the putting greens, as we were to find, had gone.

The cinema was showing Men In Black II, Spider-Man and Austin Powers Goldmember. So at least Spidey still had a presence! In the past this had been a theatre. We had seen Cilla Black there one year almost at the start of her career and also one year Rolf Harris at the height of his popularity, well before scandal ruined his career.

This is where we were staying - the Shemara on Wellesley Road. The same family owned one of the tea huts on the Promenade so it became natural for us to frequent their hut for our coffees and perhaps a sandwhich at lunchtime. This was Sunday though, so the hotel served dinner at one o'clock. We had limited time to do much that morning.

Also staying at the Shemara were a family from Bedford or somewhere round there - two brothers and two sisters, three of whom looked late 60s or 70s and they had brought their mother on holiday with them. One of the brothers had his daughter with him. Phyllis, one of the sisters had a wicked laugh and no teeth... We used to see her and sometimes the two brothers at the beach hut in the mornings.

There was also a family with two sons from Lincolnshire who were very nice. The father and oldest son were always at the beach hut in the mornings and we used to sit with them. Then there was another family with two boys who, in everything they said and did, came across as gormless people raising gormless kids... I don't think they were all that unintelligent - they just chose not to use it... Favourite phrases included "Oh yeah... never thought of that..."

Sundays in Great Yarmouth normally included a walk to look at the docks on the River Yare, but for some reason Miss Franny wanted to go looking for the Scholl sandal shop if it was still there. Given that it was every husband's favourite shopping day - Sunday at a time when most shops would be shut - I went along with it. It was still there. It was shut...

In the afternoon we wandered up the Promenade to the Model Village, but there was the odd rumble of thunder every now and then so we thought we'd leave a proper visit for another day as the buildings within the village were a bit too small to shelter in. Sure enough, by mid to late afternoon it started to pelt it down with rain and we made for Regents Road and somewhere for an evening meal.

Great Yarmouth 2002 Index

All Set For a Week in Great Yarmouth, 2002

Saturday 17 August 2002. We had booked a week's stay in a B&B in Great Yarmouth, a well remembered childhood holiday town for both myself and Miss Franny, though if we ever caught a glimpse of each other during those childhood years, it passed us by completely...

Apart from its own attractions, Great Yarmouth is a convenient spot to do a bit of touring around Norfolk and Suffolk in a car with many activities and places of interest, some of which we'll visit during the week. The first thing we did on arrival though was book front row seats for a couple of shows.

Next, a nostalgic look at Joyland which is just next to the Britannia Pier. It seems amazing, but all those rides were them same when I was a little lad. They are just a tad more expensive per ride than they were then but I suppose wages are a tad more than they were back then too. The sight and sound of the snails in particular took me right back to the late 1950s...

Quite a lot of everything else had changed. There were still bowling greens but they were by far fewer in number. The putting greens had gone in favour of a large scale crazy golf course themed on pirates. Er... Miss Franny, why have I got a crow's nest coming out of my head...?

The Wellington Theatre wasn't presenting any shows. In fact the big difference between Great Yarmouth of the 1950s-60s and the 21st century is the unbelievable loss of live shows. This isn't unique to Great Yarmouth, but the town had a huge number of theatres as I remember it, now either disappeared or turned into cinemas or just plain derelict and empty. The Britannia Pier was alone in presenting shows and these were mainly short-runs, not a summer season as such.

A reverse bungee ride occupied what I think was another putting green. At twenty five pounds a go (what???) it would have taken far more money at a quarter of the price as it was unsurprisingly standing empty for most of the time.

Had it been twenty five pence a go I still don't think I would have been tempted somehow...

Up at Botton Bros Pleasure Beach (or down at - to me, living on the west coast it was easy to mix up north and south on the east coast) the Roller Coaster has a brakeman and the quality of the ride depends on his skill. It can be a thrilling ride, but I had in distant past years seen riders having to get out and push from the bottom of a dip due to the brakes being applied a bit too much.

Heading back down north (huh?) we passed the Winter Gardens at the side of Wellington Pier and thought we would come back for a spot of evening's refined drinkies.

There were a couple of girls singing to backing tracks and they were quite pleasing to the ear, though the P.A. system required you to be more or less opposite them to hear without some form of distortion. It was a promising start to a week's holiday.

Great Yarmouth 2002 Index

London and Wembley Record Fair, 2002

This series of articles covers a short weekend break in London over 30 November - 1 December 2002. We had a look around London on the Saturday and visited a record and film fair in Wembley on the Sunday, catching up aith a few celebrities.

Click each of the photographs below to read the articles. A link at the bottom of each one will bring you back to this Index.

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Wembley Record and Film Fair, 1 December 2002

Sunday 1 December 2002. We had chosen this particular weekend to come to London especially for this event. We were staying in the Premier Inn at Wembley and it was a short walk to the exhibition hall where the Record and Film Fair was being held.

There were far more records than films, sad to say. But at the time I was collecting records from the 1930s up to the late 1950s on 78 rpm 10-inch shellac discs. Again, sadly, only one stall had any of those in the entire place.

I found a familiar face on one stall though - Ian MacLagan of The Small Faces! So we chatted for a while and then I moved on, aware that there were a couple of other people I wanted to catch up with. One was the actress Ingrid Pitt who was sitting quietly behind her sets of photos. I didn't know Ingrid then as well as I would in later years, but I knew she could be very witty, but had also had quite a traumatic early life. I think there were more people there for the records than there were for film-related photographs or pre-recorded film.

In the UK this still meant VHS tape as 2002 was the first year in which DVDs started to outsell VHS tapes and for a fair like this they would have to wait a bit before second-hand DVDs turned up in the UK.

Anyway I digress. Ingrid was sitting on her own and her eyebrows lifted in recognition as I went upto her stall. "You look fabulous!" I said and was rewarded with a broad smile as her face lit up. "Do I?" she asked, and we fell into a conversation.

Then I went off to meet another of my favourite actresses. I had been a keen photographer since teenage years and had always looked for photos of the then model, Caroline Munro, in the pages of Practical Photography and Amateur Photographer. Then, following a long contract as the Lambs Navy Rum Girl, she broke into films and starred in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and a few Hammer horror films before (as far as I was concerned) totally stealing the limelight from Barbara Bach as a Bond Baddie in The Spy Who Loved Me. An absolutely lovely lady to meet and know.

She was there with the equally delightful Jayne Crimin, both of whom I have had the pleasure to know for over a quarter of a century. Neither of them look today like that could even be possible...

Star Wars Imperial Troopers. I was in no danger - I was right in front of them and their weapons don't work if pointed at people. Mind you, one of them nicked a doughnut off Miss Franny once - she was very indignant...

A few records from the 78s stall found their way into my possession. Elvis's early hit Heartbreak Hotel was in near mint condition and plays superbly. If you get a shellac record in this good a state it sounds much better than the easily-scratched vinyl of a 45 rpm record. Unfortunately it cost just a bit more than three shillings and sixpence as written on the cover. That would have been just seventeen and a half pence!

I bought Ron Goodwin's version of the Theme from "Limelight" as much for the original cover, which was a design I didn't have in my collection at the time.

Laurie London's "He's Got The Whole World In His Hands". Give me a bit of time - I still haven't worked out why I bought this yet - it's horrible...

And so we returned to the car for our journey home, passing the doomed twin towers of the old Wembley Stadium, seeing them for the first and last time.

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Fleet St., St Pauls and Golden Tableware

Saturday 30 November 2002. In my revious article we finished on The Strand with a look at St Clement Danes. We'll start in more or less the same spot then walk along Fleet Street to St Pauls, across the river to Shakespeare's Globe and then take a bus to the West End shops.

From St Clement Danes, we turn to admire the facade of the Royal Courts of Justice or as they are more usually known: The Law Courts. This is the home of the UK's High Court and Court of Appeal, although it also tours the circuit to sit in major cities around the UK. For most of England's history such courts were held at Westminster Hall - they are not called "Royal" for nothing.

Creating a purpose-built home for the Justices required two Acts of Parliament to be written and passed into Law and the displacement of families from 450 houses which had to be demolished to make way for the building which commenced in 1873 with the building being officially opened by Queen Victoria in 1882.

Standing opposite the Royal Courts of Justice is the venerable survivor of the Great Fire of London, The Wig and Pen. Named for the tools of the legal profession it was one of no doubt many such establishments catering for the lawyers, judges and clerks in the area. Dating from 1625 it was set up by the Gatekeeper of Temple Bar - then the western gateway into the City of London - as a handy place to buy food and drink from the curious who paused to view the severed heads on poles above the Temple Bar gateway. It lost a lot of regular thirsty customers when Fleet Street ceased to be the centre of newspaper publishing and since the mid 2000s has traded as Thai Square providing flavours probably unknown in the 17th century! Talking of which... Oliver Cromwell is said to haunt the place.

The old gate of the City was a wooden arched wall across the roadway but unsurprisingly that didn't survive the Great Fire of 1666. A new stone archway with three arches was built 1669-72. Once again the good folks visiting London could look upon heads on poles but by the late 1800s the gate was creating a barrier to the vastly increased amount of horse-drawn traffic.

It was dismantled in 1878, each of the 2,700 pieces of stone catalogued and stored and in 1880 it was bought and taken to Hertfordshire to be re-erected as the gatehouse at Theobalds Park. It stayed there until 2003. The following year it was returned to London stone by stone on 500 pallets, the most travelled gatehouse surely in all England. (I haven't researched that - just watch all the comments prove me wrong in the coming weeks...) It now stands just north of St Pauls Cathedral in Paternoster Square. I must go again to see and photograph it sometime.

Nowadays a tall column stands dividing the carriageways of the road and is decorated by the statue of a dragon rather than heads on poles. It marks the meeting point of The Strand to the west and Fleet Street to the east and is halfway between the former royal residences of the Tower of London and Westminster Palace.

Now on Fleet Street we find The Punch Tavern, formerly the Crown and Sugar Loaf it was renamed in the 1840s in honour of Punch magazine, which was published at nearby Fleet Street premises.

St Pauls Cathedral is one of the great visitor attractions of London. Built to the designs of Christopher Wren (who had long wanted to replace the previous incarnation, luckily for him the Great Fire of London gave him an opening). We were not allowed to take photos in St Pauls - which is a bit annoying as there are few postcards on sale. It would have been better to ban flash and tripod photography and let people get on with it as long as there were no services taking place. So no photos of the interior I'm afraid, but we went to see the tombs of both Christopher Wren and Lord Nelson.

Nelson, having travelled back from the site of his death at Trafalgar in a barrel of brandy, camphor and Myrrh, laid in state for three days at Greenwich, was transferred on a State Barge used originally by King Charles II, the coffin transferred to the Admiralty to rest overnight before being taken by funeral procession made up of 32 admirals, 100 captains and 10,000 soldiers to St Pauls.

At St Pauls there was a four-hour funeral service following which his coffin was lowered through the floor of the nave and placed in a sarcophagus originally supposed to have been Cardinal Wolseley's from Tudor times. King Henry VIII had planned to be buried in it himself in a grand monument, but this was never completed and Henry today rests in a coffin in St George's Chapel, at Windsor.

Coming out of St Pauls Cathedral we had our first viewing of the Millenium Bridge. This was after it had been cured of wriggling about of its own accord and before (just!) the spells of dark wizards chasing Harry Potter made it wriggle all over again... So we walked over with confidence, part of a quite large number of people doing exactly the same, but only half of whom were doing it in the same direction!

On the southern bank of the River Thames is the recreation of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. The original was built in 1599 using materials from an earlier theatre which had been demolished elsewhere in London. It burned down during a performance of Henry VIII when a cannon used as a prop, misfired and set fire to the thatch and wooden beams. No one was hurt, although one man had his pants catch fire. The flames were put out with a bottle of ale. (I wonder if he was a liar...?)

We had a look, found we couldn't go in, breathed a sigh of relief - I'd had more than enough of Shakespeare at school - and walked back over the Millenium Bridge and caught a Routemaster red bus back towards the West End. Miss Franny, for some strange reason, seemed to want to look around the shops...

I'm not 100% sure where we saw these but it was either Selfridges or John Lewis and I think the latter - a set of 23 carat gold on silver plate full cutlery service. A bargain at the knock down price of £5,675 from the original price of £11,359. A salesman asked if he could help. "I don't really think so..." I said with a note of sympathy for his lost commission. He shrugged, "You never know!" he said.

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