Retiring

I think I mentioned a while ago that I was planning to retire at the end of March and here it is. Already!

On 17 March I attended my last Planning Meeting with Jisc infoNet and the team gathered at the Castle Green hotel in Kendal for the event, which included a bit of a marathon presentation to me...

The above image is the cover of a little booklet containing photos and messages from colleagues not only from infoNet but from lots of colleagues at partner services which was really nice and quite humbling. I'm glad I didn't read it on the spot - I'd have been going all emotional!

On Wednesday this week I went over to Newcastle to hand in my work phone etc and had a last lunch with the team, this time without Steve, but with Kath who hadn't been able to get over to Kendal. Then a sad farewell and I drove home, slightly thankful for the heavy sleet which made me concentrate on the driving.

My career started as a self-employed photographer with a list of publications in magazines such as "She", "Weekend", "The National Enquirer" and many more, followed by a spell in a family owned department store that I think the TV programme Are You Being Served was based on... I started working in Education in 1984 before moving to Further Education at Fleetwood Nautical College in 1985, Blackpool College, Preston College, Myerscough College and finally joining Jisc infoNet and the University of Northumbria in 2003.

At Preston College from the early 1990s I started to get involved at a national level, helping start and run the National CMIS Board, The National Information and Learning Technologies Association (NILTA) for which I was a Director, Deputy CIS Operations Committee Chair and North West Representative, and as a member of one or two working groups for the Further Education Funding Council. In 1999 I was awarded a national award for "outstanding contribution to the development of College Information Systems in Further Education in the UK".

In 2002 I was involved for Myerscough College in a joint bid to run a new JISC service covering information systems in both Further and Higher Education. This would be hosted by the University of Northumbria and was provisionally to be called SysInfoNet. The consortium won the bidding process and the new service, now named JISC infoNet, came into being and I joined them as a full time employee. Before long I found myself teaching university and college managers things like Project Management, Change Management, Process Review, Strategy, Risk Management and more.

I've had the opportunity to lead workshops in universities across the UK, including Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Stirling, Belfast, Cardiff, Swansea, Royal Holloway, LSE, Lincoln, Brighton, Manchester, Newcastle and a host of others and at Further Education Colleges in most counties as well as speaking at conferences both in the UK and elsewhere in Europe.

As news of my pending retirement became known I've been amazed at messages referring to work I'd almost forgotten. Thank you all. It has been wonderful working with such dedicated colleagues over the years. I'll still be doing the odd workshop for a bit, but I know that even though there are all sorts of plans for new directions, books, gigs with the band, etc - I am going to miss you all!

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An Hour In Ambleside

I know I went quiet for a bit there! But a lot was going on in March, so here's the first of a few articles to let you know what was happening.

We'll start with the second week in March which saw us heading up into the Lake District for a day with Gill and Grace to celebrate Fran's birthday. We stopped off for a quick coffee at Lakeland in Windermere before heading up the side of the lake to Ambleside.

The weather was being very kind for March - not warm, but very sunny. We left the pram in the car and Grace walked, stepping out very proudly with Mum holding onto her reins for safety. She must have been exhausted with all the walking we did but I only had to pick her up once when she decided it had just got too much as we were about to cross the road. The cars stopped, the green man lit up and Grace sat down...

So we went into the Apple Pie Bakery for some lunch and a rest and the prospect of a proper glass with a straw had her wide awake and ready for something to munch. I had a sausage and egg on a brown barm and I'll be back for another as soon as I can! Absolutely yummy!

The Apple Pie Bakery is the first shop you come to walking into town once past Ambleside's most famous sight...

...which is The Bridge House, a tiny two storey building built over the River Stock. Fran went to look round the pottery shop and came back with another little cottage to add to the sprawling conurbation that her collection has grown into. Happy Birthday Miss Franny!

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Mixed Nostalgia

A bit of an assortment again for this entry. I've been going through a few of my old web pages from the Freeserve days, long before the blog started. Over the years 2002-2004 I featured the following items.

The first one is the old Space Tower from Blackpool Pleasure Beach. It had ended its days in Morecambe at the short-lived incarnation of Morecambe Pleasure Beach as Frontierland.

Frontierland was a mid-1980s attempt to "theme" the park as a wild west town. We may not be as grim up north as the jokes make out, but the average worker does in fact feel just a little self-concious I expect, wearing western garb and yelling "Yeehaw!" every now and then. As I remember, they didn't smile or enter into the spirit of the thing as much as their Disney counterparts over in Florida might have done. Frontierland closed down in 1999 although a few portable rides remained in use for a further year.

By the end of 2000 only the Polo Tower and the Log Flume remained. These photos were taken in 2004 and the Polo Tower remained only because it was in use as a telephone mast. It was to remain a while longer as the contract was in force until 2013.

A 1960s Fidelity tape recorder taking seven inch reels of a quarter inch wide magnetic tape and recording at a speed of three and three quarter inches of tape per second. This is a four-track machine. That means that a bit of sound quality was sacrificed in order to record along the tape twice in each direction. Imagine four stripes along the tape - stripe 1 along one edge of the tape is recorded on as the tape passes from its own spool to the spare. Then the spools are turned over and the now full spare spool is transferred to the left hand spindle. On the next pass, stripe 4 on the other edge of the tape now occupies the same position as stripe one had done.

Next the Track 2-3 switch at the bottom centre of the tape deck is depressed and the two middle tracks can be recorded on over the next two passes. On some models both stripes 1 and 3 could be recorded on during the same pass, allowing a stereo signal to be recorded. On turning the tape over the next pass would record on stripes 4 and 2. On this machine that wasn't possible but you could record twice the amount of music on a tape.

I used to have a similar Fidelity Playmaster but it was only a twin track machine - one stripe being recorded in each direction. No stereo and no push button 1-4 and 2-3 buttons in the middle. In fact the space taken by those buttons on the machine shown held a magic-eye light which acted like a sound level meter when recording.

I'm sure many of you will recognise this little optical piece of equipment. It's a View-Master - it was used for viewing a stereo (see the clever link with the previous item? What? Oh, yes the Polo thing was just a red herring...) Ahem! It was used for viewing a stereo pair of images to give the illusion of a picture in 3D, 3 dimensions with a feeling of depth. They were really popular in the 1950s and very early 1960s which is when this bakelite version dates from. Later they were plastic and bright red and the View-Master reels you could buy changed from photos of the world to naff subjects like Scooby Doo and other cartoon figures.

In other words, they changed from being aimed at adults to being a child's toy. In the mid 1960s I had quite a collection of reels showing scenes of the Bernese Oberland in Switzerland and a set that showed the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

What I always wanted in my early teens - but never actually managed to get - was a View-Master stereo camera which let you take your own 3D photos. Taking 3D photos is not hard. You can do it with a normal camera just by taking a photo, moving the camera six inches to one side and taking another - providing the subject does not move in the meantime... The hard bit is in viewing them so that one eye only sees one of the photos and the other eye only sees the other. They have to be lined up just so. It is possible for the eyes to actually move apart a bit too much - which is why watching 3D films in the days of green and red glasses made your eyes so tired. All my View-Master reels got thrown away long ago in some great Mum-induced tidy-up. Shame...

Blackpool's Night Time Postcard Fantasies

This week I received an email from that good friend of this blog, Jim Exley. Jim has sent images from postcards for use on the blog before and was good enough to send me one through the post where I had several other postcards, from the same source.

This week Jim sent me two images which had originated from the same photograph. As near as I can tell, this would have been taken from a point between Central and South piers and probably from close to the junction of Lytham Road with the Promenade at Manchester Square.

It's hard to take anything on trust with these postcards. I admit I am going off the size of the Tower as much as anything - the terraced rows of guest houses and hotels along the Promenade were very similar to each other. But there's no guarantee that the Tower was not added into the photo by the company artist...

Take a look at the illuminated tram on the left. The photo was taken in broad daylight - you can clearly see the shadows of the parked cars on the left. So the tram must have been added at the "artistic" stage. In fact if you look closely you can see it appears to be somewhat more narrow than the rails it is supposed to be travelling along...

Actually this postcard looked very familiar and a quick look through my own collection turned up another very similar version. Yes the colours are a bit different, but after a hundred years they are probably both faded anyway. But the paintwork on the globes on top of the arch is slightly different also, so the company artist must have had another shot at it at some point!

And then in Jim's other image, the artist has gone just a little bit berserk, removing the arch for a far more ambitious piece of frippery and adding a toastrack bus adorned with some rather spectacular illuminations of its own which may well have taxed the batteries and generator of a bus of that vintage...

But harking back to my comment about wondering if the size of the Tower was a definitive way to gauge the location of the photographer... Ah... it's gone... Interesting too that this version betrays a bit more of the photo's daylight origins. Right at the left hand edge is the staircase rail of one of the huge Dreadnought tramcars. But it is still being followed by the not-quite-true-to-scale lifeboat tram!

Here's the same photo of that lifeboat tram, from another postcard in my collection, but again it doesn't look as though it really belongs in this photo. I like this for a number of reasons. The laburnum tree illuminations were actually real - I can just (only just!) remember them from my very early childhood. Painted on plywood, they were a regular feature of the illuminations for years. The artist has actually created shadows for one on the left and one on the right to make it appear as though they were cast by the moon (which in my experience never appears quite so far north). Unfortunately, having done that for the two illuminations pieces he decided it was too much like hard work and didn't bother with a shadow for the lamp post in the centre or, for that matter, for the tram... The cars seem to have a more realistic shadow coming from the sun which would have been over the sea. But the direction of their headlights seems to suggest they were a touring group from the Continent. Dipped headlights should point left in this country!

At least I can say fairly confidently that this photo was taken just south of Waterloo Road, which joins on the right opposite the windmill which survived until quite recently. Thankfully this doesn't require me to rely on the size of the Tower, which has been drawn in by the artist after he celebrated (with a few too many tots) his success with the shadows. The Tower itself leans drunkenly to the right and the zig-zag line was added by the artist's 3-year-old daughter as her daddy snored in a drunken stupor on the floor...

And lastly, a closer look at the illuminated lifeboat tram, which was real and was one of two illuminated special trams, the other being a Gondola. Many thanks for the postcard images, Jim!

Blackpool Showtime Ephemera

Last weekend I was having a root through my "stuff" and came across an old box which had once contained 10"x8" photographic paper. I used to get through quite a lot of these sheets as I used to freelance to local and the odd national magazines.

In the 1980s I must have kept this particular box to store leaflets and pamphlets and posters from Blackpool's theatres. I'll add a few of these latter from 1983 to this article, but apart from shows there were posters from bus companies and advertisements.

Around this time some theatres were finding that the traditional and well established summer season show started to slow down as the summer season progressed. The Central Pier (top photo) for their 1983 show split the season into four and staged different shows for each. We went to see the Bachelors if I remember rightly.

We used to go to the Tower Circus pretty much every year too, but I gave wrestling a miss ever since going with a few mates in Margate around 1972. From our front row seats (that we were pretty excited about) we were able to see easily just how much wind there was between a forearm smash and a chin and also were sadly able to hear one wrestler saying to the other "Corner!" before he grabbed their arm and whizzed them off into the corner post. Sort of put me off wrestling, that. The main bout had been Les Kellett and Jackie Pallo and I'm willing to believe theirs had been a professional bout, but the icing on the cake of disillusionment was after laughing at the little old lady who came down to the ring to wave her umbrella at bad man Pallo, on our way out we saw the promoter paying her...

The Russ Abbott show was hilarious. By this time Russ was already an established household name and we had seen and enjoyed him several times with the comedy group The Black Abbotts.

Over at the Winter Gardens, Paul Daniels was doing his comedy show in the Opera House for the season. I can't remember going to this one - we must have missed at least one of the shows that year...

We did go to this one though! And before anyone scoffs, I have to say that this was in Keith Harris's heyday, but even years after he had hung up his duck we saw him come back to stand in for someone who was ill and that night he was absolutely superb. He was brilliant on stage. Also in the cast of the show was Bobby Crush who had written Orville's Song which went way up the charts and the gorgeous Jacqui Scott who married Keith Harris just before the season began.

I can't remember going to this particular show either, but we certainly saw Bernie Clifton on stage a few times and he was brilliant as well.

And I'll finish this time with the Sunday show from the North Pier. Again we didn't see this show, but Candlewick Green were another comedy group - there were several around this time, along with the Black Abbotts there were the Grumbleweeds, Barron Knights, etc. Anyway I do remember another year when we were sitting on the front row at a Candlewick Green show on the South Pier, being somewhat resigned to find the lead singer, in drag, sitting on my knee as part of the act...

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Welsh Postcards

January's a quiet month for photographers so that sort of leads to a quietish month on the blog as well. I can't let 78rpm records dominate the blog to the exclusions of all else, so here's a quick (and somewhat lazy) series of postcards from the Hayley Easthope collection. As they came from not too far from the Welsh border, I'll pick out a few postcards of that part of the United Kingdom and hope that the recent problems with weather particularly around Aberystwyth abate soon!

Hayley gave me a massive collection of postcards - I'm not halfway through them yet, but there's 260 of them scanned so far covering all sorts of places from the Wirral and Southend to Arab states and China! It'll keep me going for a bit!

78 rpm Shop Record Covers

A second look at 78 rpm record sleeves provided (sold!) by record shops. (If you missed the first one then it can be viewed here: Record Shops to 1960)

I have 78s from all over the place. Although I started out with a fair collection inherited from my parents, a few of which were bought with me and/or my brother in mind, I have bought quite a lot from collectors and antiques shops and warehouses and a very few by mail order. I have also been given some collections by people who knew they would be going to a good home.

So there's quite a few shops and towns represented on the sleeves of some of the records in my collection which is currently heading towards 700 in number. The above sleeve is an early thick cardboard sleeve, stitched on both sides and on the base. This method provided a very robust sleeve and although these tend to be quite early - 1930s-40s mainly - there are as many of these still surviving as the thinner card that was folded and then glued to form a sleeve. Many of these latter bear signs of wear and repair. This example was bought originally from Kenneth Gardner's shop on Penny Street, Lancaster.

In those early days records were sold by musical instruments shops, who diversified into selling gramophones. Specialist records shops would not come along until later. Even so most towns had a choice of establishments who sold records and in Lancaster, over on Rosemary Lane, Albert Shaw was in competition with Mr Gardner's business. This is another stitched thick cardboard sleeve which has survived well. A little bit of staining but no rips or tears as that is exactly what the stitching technique was designed to prevent.

We'll digress a little bit here, because it's interesting to look at some of the record label names listed down the left hand side. There's no way to prove that the record that the sleeve now contains is the one bought with it and it is probably very unlikely that it was anyway. The record is After The Ball Is Over with a B side on the reverse of Two Little Girls In Blue by Gerald Adams and The Variety Singers and it was released in 1930. Both songs are quite well remembered songs even today, especially the former. They are, in fact, so similar that you could be forgiven for thinking that they were written by the same person, but no - though both composers were named Charles, being Charles K. Harris and Charles Graham respectively.

Regal merged with Zonophone to become er... Regal Zonophone... Odeon must have merged with Parlophone and became Parlophone Odeon with the same design label as before.

Winner was an early label, appearing in 1911. It was owned by a syndicate and that may have inspired the name and label illustration perhaps. It lasted until 1933. No one wanted to buy it and most of the properties were taken over by Decca. The record illustrated - Old Tennessee and Me coupled with Palm Tree Island by The Elliotts - was released in 1919 and we can see from the stamp pasted onto the label that the proud new owner paid three farthings tax on it!

Carlisles shop on Darwen Street, Blackburn, sold a rather vivid colour don't you think? Most card sleeves were a plain brown colour - the colour of the card in fact, as to colour them would only cost money. So coloured sleeves are not as common as brown card, though there are a few to be found. The card here has started to fray and come apart where repeated insertions of the record have snagged it top centre. It is made of two pieces of card bound together by tape which must have at some point split and the repair is a somewhat rare technique - I'm glad to say... It's been sewn by hand by someone unused to wielding needle and thread by the looks of things!

It's probably fair to say that Crane's of Deansgate in Manchester were probably not first and foremost a record shop! Their head offices in Liverpool is described as having a concert hall attached and branches existed in Bangor, Belfast, Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow, Manchester, Seacombe, Sheffield and Wrexham. A well-established firm, they started in 1850 and the record sleeve does not mention all their branches! There's a nice 46-page catalogue dating from 1910 available to read for free from The Internet Archive which has many photos of their piano and organ models. They are of superb quality with even the upright pianos having little hinged candelabra sconces that swing out to illuminate the player's music score!

Incidentally, the record is from 1916 by the comedian and Music Hall artist Tom Foy. I listened to it for the first time last night - a sort of stage patter tale of the style adopted by many of today's self-proclaimed comedians. It's a bit like listening to George Formby telling an anecdote but right at the end it turns into what today can only be thought of as a racist joke which spoils it completely for anything other than a historical interest.

Now here's a sleeve dear to my heart. We used to live in Rochdale, I was born there and I well remember Shorrock and Shorrock's huge shop filled with pianos on Drake Street, just up from the Odeon cinema. My Dad used to go there to buy records and I have quite a number of these distinctive green sleeves containing both 10" and 12" 78 rpm records. I remember they used to display records in the window, hung on wires inserted into the holes in a hardboard stand.

Dad would ask which one we wanted and - not knowing one from the other at age 3 or 4 - I would point in the general direction and Dad would say "Good choice!" and go in to buy something he knew we would enjoy. Where's the joy in downloading something off the Internet and not having the bus ride home to anticipate listening to it? Music has become wallpaper. I find that incredibly sad. Go to a concert now and people stand watching their tiny phone screen that is busy turning the exciting performance into pap.

My final sleeve for this time is from the legendary Mazel's in Manchester. "Legendary" may be a bit of an exaggeration, but I have such memories of this shop that is certainly legendary in my mind. A quick search online will convince you lots of other people think the same. It wasn't just a record shop. Certainly by the 1970s when I was a teenage rocker in a local band, trying to get sophisticated sounds out of 6 and 12-string acoustic guitars and a basic electric guitar without the aid of FX pedals, Mazel's was the place to spend Saturday mornings. They sold second hand everything connected to the music business. Records, musical instruments, amps and microphones...

I remember drooling over a dirty great 15" speaker labelled "Victor" that my Dad owned the match to. Dad always used to say it had come out of a cinema from the sound system there... We had a very imbalanced stereo system during my early teens. The left channel came out of the afore-mentioned cinema speaker from a mono Stevns amp (there was no second 'e' before you write in to complain) and the right channel came out of Mum and Dad's 1950s wireless set...

Happy New Year and Celebrating The Year Just Past

Happy New Year to all my readers! According to the stats, on average the blog is read 200 times a day, that's a bit awesome from my point of view, so a very huge thank you to all of you for helping make it a success and for allowing me to think it's worthwhile!

Whilst it's a time for looking forward - and there are some great things to look forward to in 2014, of which more later - it's also a time to look back over 2013 and celebrate all the things we got up to.

The year started with the release of my book, Blackpool Then And Now and I spent an afternoon in Waterstones, signing copies and enjoying meeting a few people from various Blackpool-related websites and Facebook pages.

I was also getting to grips with a new guitar - looks great, sounds.... well... let's say it had a few peculiarities about it that has since caused me to revert to the red Stratocaster! This was taken down in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, at the "Remembering Sunnyside" event in March and we are looking forward to going down this year too to meet up with our Billy Fury friends.

Later in March we had a great day up in the Lake District, with snow on the hills and a wonderful meal waiting for us in Kendal at the home of David's sister and brother-in-law, Elaine and Dave. A great night and a very cold and icy getaway around half past midnight, slithering down the roads!

The cold spell lasted ages. The year before at the Northampton do we had walked to the venue from our hotel in shirt sleeves. This time it snowed all the time we were down there. This photo is from Witton Park in May, usually a warm family day out, yet we were layered up and the proceedings came to an end in the late afternoon with a downpour. British weather!

Luckily the weather just a week later was absolutely fine on the Mediterranean as we went off for a week's cruise with Jeannie and David, taking the band on tour to visit Corsica, Italy, France and Spain and sample a few cocktails along the way! This was a glorious week - just don't mention olives to Fran...

June is always the band's busiest month and 2013 was no different. We were featured in this newspaper report of Myerscough's open event, which was just one of several events which drew large audiences for us.

Miss Franny kept up the pressure until I eventually cracked and we added a conservatory to the house. It's a nice quiet place to sit and read and we left things like computers and televisions out of it. The only time it gets noisy is when it rains... oh... it is now in fact...

In August we took a trip to Norway and although the dreaded rain came with us for half of our time there, the other days were glorious and more than made up for the wet days with some beautiful scenery of mountains, fjords and waterfalls. We loved it and a return trip will have to be done at some time or other!

Of course we enjoyed our home town of Blackpool also and there was lots going on this year as always. The Air Show was spectacular and changes in the town centre gave us plenty to watch and photograph. We went to a few shows and continue to delight in the good food and atmosphere in Quilligan's thanks to Sean and his team.

We had an extra trip this year and what a trip it was, taking us to the Holy Land for some unforgettable sights and tours. This really was an experience to remember. The detail of all the travels can be found on the blog, by looking at the navigation in the left hand panel, so you can join us to see more of our time on the Med, in Norway and to the Aegean and Holy Land.

The Holy Land trip also gave us a chance to meet up with our friends, Tomas and Maris who perform in the Horizons Bar onboard Thomson Celebration. This was our third meeting and we look forward to seeing them again in 2014.

Creeping Bentgrass continued to go from strength to strength - we have had strangers recognising us all over the place and have been told were are folks' "favourite band". All very pleasing and ego boosting - we think it must be the way we laugh off mistakes... lol. Christmas 2013 saw us rack up 13 years as a band and we have no intention of giving up yet!

Miss Franny embarked on a massive craft project, to make a quilt for our granddaughter's bed. This took ages and she press-ganged me into helping cut straight lines in material. In the end it all came together after we had to make up a few bits due to some incomprehensible or missing bits from a pattern translated from some obscure dialect of a tribe in the wilds of a hidden forest on top of a plateau somewhere... Grace seemed to like it anyway.

Fran and daughter Gill along with Miss Jeannie have taken stalls at several craft fairs and Gill's "Little EGG Craft Company" (named for her immediate family Edward, Gillian, Grace) has gone online and started to attract a following.

For the second year running we went to see Andre Rieu on his tour of the UK and had a great night just before Christmas, bouncing up and down, swaying and clapping and singing along in half made-up German and Italian that the natives of those countries definitely would not have understood!

Fran's brother Bob turned the big 6-0 on Christmas Eve and we had a surprise party in Blackpool which went off very successfully considering people came from Swindon, Bristol, Belfast, Warrington and Manchester to get there. My niece Sarah claimed to need rescuing and against all expectations he got there all unsuspecting, even to the extent of arriving in the restaurant where she was waiting and seeing our name in the bookings list and thinking "Now that's a coincidence!" before seeing everyone waiting to cheer him!

It will be my turn in 2014 to turn 60 myself. I've taken the decision to retire from my work with Jisc and the University of Northumbria at that time and have more projects lined up, including more books and more gigs and just spending more time with my beautiful granddaughter and family. A few health niggles have proved taxing for the last couple of years. I worried for ages before one was proved not to be too serious and have occasion to grit my teeth more than I used to, so it will be nice to work at my own pace on things I want to do. If they want to call me back every now and then, that will be ok too!

At an engagement party just before Christmas, Grace saw us perform for the first time and we had to try to keep a straight face as she looked, ran away to hide and then kept coming out to peep at us! 2014 will be good!