Category Archives: Cardiff

Remembering Jim Callaghan: an underrated PM

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Callaghan addresses the TUC, 1980

James Callaghan, who died 20 years ago this week, might have been Britain’s most forgotten postwar prime minister had it not been for the winter of discontent. The strike-dominated final months of his premiership, when bodies went unburied and rubbish piled up in the streets, ensured a convincing victory for Margaret Thatcher in the 1979 general election.

Yet Callaghan was a more successful prime ministers than critics allow, especially given his terrible inheritance. When he took over after Harold Wilson’s surprise resignation in 1976, inflation was running at almost 19 percent a year. He inherited a wafer-thin majority, which had disappeared within a year. The trade unions were pushing for ever-bigger pay increases to offset inflation, but which inevitably pushed prices higher still.

Callaghan was unfazed by it all – at least until the final, bleak winter. A man who had fought in the second world war, and been through a different kind of fire as chancellor, home secretary and foreign secretary, calmly faced whatever crisis came his way. This was one reason why he was more popular as PM than his party or his Conservative rival Margaret Thatcher. In troubled times, Sunny Jim was a reassuring captain even as the ship was at risk of sinking.

He led his cabinet with a rare skill. Those were the days of political ‘big beasts’ – Denis Healey, Tony Benn, Michael Foot, Roy Jenkins and Anthony Crossland were just some of the big names in his cabinet. (He sent the formidable Barbara Castle, once tipped to be Britain’s first woman PM, to the back benches.) Callaghan’s achievement in getting the Cabinet to agree to dramatic public spending cuts in the face of the sterling crisis months after he took over was striking. He used his diplomatic skills to get American president Ford to put pressure on the IMF to grant Britain a loan. And he called nine lengthy cabinet meetings to discuss and agree the cuts required by the International Monetary Fund for it to grant that loan. The born-again left winger Tony Benn pushed hard for an alternative economic policy based on import controls, rather than public spending cuts. Callaghan showed saintly patience in handling Benn, who in turn praised his leader as a much better PM than Wilson.

The historian Dominic Sandbrook has described Callaghan’s handling of the 1976 crisis as ‘a remarkable achievement’. Writing in Seasons in the Sun, his history of Britain 1974-76, Sandbrook noted that the new PM had worked miracles to mollify the markets, strike a deal with the IMF and keep the government united, despite the inescapable fact that having to ask for a loan was humiliating for Britain. Yet the great irony is that the crisis was based on typically flawed Treasury figures. Instead of borrowing £11 billion a year, Britain was actually borrowing £8.5 billion. Chancellor Denis Healey only needed half the IMF loan, and repaid it far sooner than anyone expected. But history had been made regardless: he and his PM had ended Britain’s postwar Keynesian economic policy, adopting monetarism three years before the arch monetarist Margaret Thatcher came to power.

By 1978, the dark economic clouds seem to be lifting. Inflation was down to 8 percent from the 1975 high of 24 percent; Britain was starting to enjoy the North Sea oil bonanza; and Chase Manhattan’s European economist proclaimed that ‘the outlook for Britain is better than at any time in the postwar years’. Consumers were buying new cars, fridges and washing machines. As a later generation would say, the feel good factor was returning. This seemed like the perfect time to call an election, and secure a Labour government into the 1980s.

Most people – including his advisers – thought Sunny Jim would go to the country. The Times reported on 3 September 1978 that an election was likely to be announced within a week. Union leaders urged an election, and so avoid a winter wage explosion. (How right they were…) Just two days after that Times story, Callaghan teased the TUC conference about calling an election, even singing an old song, Waiting at the Church, about a bridesmaid being jilted at the altar by her fiancé because his wife wouldn’t let him marry her. (He attributed the song to the music hall singer Marie Lloyd, but it was actually sung by her less well known rival Vesta Victoria.)

He ended by saying that he had ‘promised nobody that I shall be at the altar in October, Nobody at all.’ If he intended to end speculation about an election, his mock-serious approach failed completely. Callaghan broadcast to the nation saying there would be no early election.

Many cabinet ministers and advisers were shocked and disappointed. With hindsight – notably the searing memories of the winter of discontent – his decision to soldier on looks like a disastrous blunder. Yet that ignores a fundamental truth. Prime ministers rarely call elections before they need to unless they are sure they will win. With the exception of Rishi Sunak in 2024, they don’t want to lose their unique status as leader of the nation prematurely. Callaghan was a cautious politician and the polls in the late summer of 1978 suggested a hung parliament, with neither Labour or the Conservatives with a majority. The only certainty about his decision is that he condemned Labour to a heavier defeat that would have happened in October 1978, rather than turning victory into defeat. His great mistake was to allow the speculation to run out of control. It was a mistake repeated by Gordon Brown in 2007.

The real Jim Callaghan

The ignominious end to his premiership should not obscure Callaghan’s remarkable story in rising to the top. Like so many British prime ministers, James lost his father at a young age, nine. His mother got by on a naval widow’s pension granted by the first Labour government in 1924, but it was not enough to pay for him to go to university. He felt his lack of a degree keenly, although he made fun of it when interviewed by the BBC’s Desert Island Discs in 1987:

‘If people say I’m not clever at all, I’m quite prepared to accept that, except that I became prime minister and they didn’t, all these clever people!’

Callaghan was elected MP for Cardiff South in the Labour landslide of 1945. My late mother was covering one of his election rallies for the Penarth Times, and for years afterwards resented Callaghan’s disparaging public remarks about the paper when she questioned him.

He is the only prime minister to have held all the great offices of state: PM, chancellor of the exchequer, foreign secretary and home secretary. He observed that he didn’t find being PM harder than the other great offices. But he had the confidence in 1976 that came of his 30 years in politics, and 12 years of front bench experience. He was a good delegator, ‘preferring to sit back and let the others do the work’, and happily admitted he was never a workaholic. Today’s inexperienced premiers could learn from Callaghan’s example.

The Cardiff connection

My father Bob Skinner, left, with PM Jim Callaghan, right. Jim’s legendary agent Jack Brooks to the PM’s right

Amazingly, Callaghan was a Cardiff MP for 42 years, and continued as MP for eight years after his 1979 election defeat. That is unheard of today. He was a good constituency MP, as I discovered when, as a 22 year old graduate, I sought his help.

My father Bob Skinner was involved with the Cardiff Festival of Music. In 1985, Cardiff was due to host the world premiere of a work by a leading composer. On the eve of the concert, Dad discovered that two soloists from Hong Kong didn’t have the work permits needed to allow them to travel to Wales to perform. He thought that as the local MP and former PM Jim Callaghan could help. The two of us met Sunny Jim in his splendid House of Commons office (he was then ‘father’ of the House of Commons – the longest serving member), and he couriered a note to Conservative employment minister Alan Clark: “Come on Alan, as a Plymouth man make Drake’s drum beat again – for Cardiff!” The permits were issued within hours – the concert was saved, and proved a triumph. 

What I didn’t know at the time was that Callaghan and Clark got on well, a not unusual example of cross-party friendships. In his famous diaries, Clark revealed that Callaghan asked to see Clark privately in his room in the Commons during the Falklands crisis in 1982. Callaghan was due to speak in the second emergency Commons debate about the Argentinian invasion of the islands, and wanted Clark’s advice on what to say. Clark said, ‘I have a rapport with Jim’.

Just before we said goodbye, Callaghan asked me as a new graduate what I wanted to do for a living. ‘I’d like to work in PR or journalism,’ I replied. ‘They all want to do that now, don’t they?’ Jim replied, more to Dad than to me. Within two years, I had started my 37 year career in PR.

‘Works hard not always with success’ – The Guardian features my old school report comments

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The Guardian newspaper has been running an amusing correspondence about school reports in its letters column. My contribution appeared in today’s paper – quoting two of my Cardiff High School reports from the 1970s, the first from my third form (the modern year 9) maths teacher.

I have an almost complete set of my school reports from 1972 to 1982, just before I sat my A levels. Looking back, it is striking how brief primary school reports were in the early 1970s. Take this example from Lakeside Primary School, Cardiff:

(There was a brief summary by the class teacher as well.)

In those primary years, there was a section about handwriting, and few reports went by without a comment about my poor handwriting. ‘If only he could be neater!… Untidy! … Still lacking in shape… poor…’ My mother even bought me a copy of Teach Yourself Handwriting but my attempts to practise neater writing didn’t last long. To be fair, my handwriting had improved by the time I sat my A levels – I can still easily read my mock exam essays.

Rereading the old reports, I was surprised to see a glowing report from the primary teacher I liked least, when I was nine. Miss Lloyd was terrifying, and almost the first thing she said to me was, ‘What language is this – Chinese?’ on seeing my handwriting. One day she told me off for losing so many pens, and threatening dire consequences if I lost another. Needless to say I did, and I vividly remember lying in the bath that evening, stressed about going into school the next day. Nothing happened, but 52 years later I was amused to see her comments in the report: ‘At times he is possibly over-anxious and perhaps takes life rather too seriously’…

Curiously, my Welsh teacher Mrs Davies always praised me for working well or very good work even when giving me a C rating.

My worst ever school report, just before my O levels

I was well into my fifties when Dad gave me a stack of my school reports that he and Mum had kept. It was unusual for him to keep old school materials and books – as I blogged recently he tended to throw these away without telling me. I read the report above, issued just after my O level mocks, with some pain. I had done very badly in some of my subjects, especially chemistry and French, and my teachers stated bluntly that I needed to work much harder to do well in my O levels. (My mother had made a similar point when she found me day dreaming rather than revising over the Christmas holidays.) The warnings worked: I did reasonably well, especially in my favourite subjects, history, commerce and English language and literature, and didn’t disgrace myself in the others.

One postscript to that report. My O level chemistry teacher says that I would be better suited to CSE rather than O level. The Certificate of Secondary Education ran in parallel to O levels, and was designed for less academically able pupils. I was mortified at first to be told I couldn’t sit chemistry O level (although with 22 percent in the mock, it was clear I would fail) but loved my five months in the CSE chemistry class. It was clearly at my ability level, and I got the top CSE grade, 1, in the exam. Years later a school friend, Alison, recalled being surprised when I joined the CSE class: ‘We thought you were brainy!’ My experience showed the importance of adapting education to the needs of the child rather than a one size fits all approach. CSEs and O levels were replaced by GCSE eight years later.

Looking back, I can see that I didn’t work nearly as hard as I should have done especially at high school. My 16 year old son Owen is working far harder and achieving much more consistently high grades. In short, he’s much more conscientious than his father was…

Headlines from my 50 year old childhood scrapbook

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Do any children today keep a scrapbook? It seems very unlikely given almost every aspect of our lives has gone digital. So I was thrilled to rediscover my 50 year old childhood scrapbook, overflowing with yellowing newspaper cuttings. I wrote Scrapbook 1975 on the cover – I wonder whether it was a 1974 Christmas present? I seem to have written my Lakeside, Cardiff class, 4/1, there too.

I must have noticed that my scrapbook had 84 pages – one for every year of my beloved grandmother’s life at that point. (Nanny lived to within months of her 103rd birthday in 1994, as I blogged last year on the 130th anniversary of her birth.)

On the inside cover, I drew (badly) an impression of Concorde, the supersonic passenger plane that was to enter service the following year. These were the supersonic seventies, in the words of a 1970 Cadbury’s television advert… I never flew in Concorde, although I did walk through one in a Somerset museum in 1978. It wasn’t the same…

During the three day school half term, on Monday 10 February, Mum and Dad took me to Bristol for the day. If my scrapbook sketch is anything to go by, it was a foggy day. As a book lover, it was no surprise that my favourite part of the day was going to George’s bookshop, on Park Street. According to blogger Sue Purkiss, George’s dated back to 1847, so I was entering hallowed territory that foggy February day. At the time I was a big fan of Jackdaw children’s folders, a fascinating series of folders that illustrated historical topics with facsimiles of related documents. I received the Battle of Britain one Christmas, which included a wartime identity card and a 1940 Daily Mirror. I added my late grandfather’s real second world war identity card. I wouldn’t be surprised if I bought another Jackdaw at George’s. All I know for sure is that I took one of the bookshop’s bookmarks, as it’s in my scrapbook with the date on it. Sadly George’s is no more, like my old Cardiff spiritual home, Lear’s bookshop in Royal Arcade.

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The end of coal power in Britain

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The cooling towers at Ratcliffe on Soar power station. Photo: BBC

The coal age in Britain is over. The country’s last coal-powered power station closed yesterday, marking the end of 140 years of generating power from coal.

I have fond memories of that power station, Ratcliffe on Soar. On a canal holiday in 1988, we moored in the shadow of its eight cooling towers, toasting its mighty presence with a bottle of gin. It dominated the East Midlands landscape.

‘Salt and pepper’: Roath Power station, Cardiff

Over 50 years ago, my late father Bob Skinner played his part in the destruction of the cooling towers at the old Roath Power station in Cardiff. Dad told me that he pressed the button that blew up one of the two towers, nicknamed ‘salt and pepper’. Full of pride, I told my school friends about Dad’s starring role in the event that featured on the Welsh news the night before. “No he didn’t – the [lord] mayor did!’ my friend replied. Over half a century on, I will never know the truth.

Didcot Power station – the cathedral of the Vale

DPS
DPS from a Cardiff train, 2013

I was most familiar with Didcot power station in Oxfordshire. It was known as the cathedral of the Vale of the White Horse (though we called it DPS), as it could be seen for miles around, and was a milestone on rail journeys between London and Wales. The most striking views were from 18 miles away on the M40 motorway as it climbed the escarpment at Stokenchurch.

We mourned the loss of that iconic view after Didcot’s last three cooling towers were demolished in 2019. I hope calls to save at least one of the Ratcliffe on Soar towers are successful, so we can save part of this monument to the part coal played in powering Britain.

(Not) Hanging on the Telephone

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Rob and home telephone, London, 1989
Rob takes a work call, London, 1990

‘We’ll never forget the magic of a landline’, Viv Groskop wrote in The Guardian on Friday in a nostalgic article mourning the passing of the traditional telephone. It got me thinking about my relationship with the old fashioned landline. (Not that we ever called it that in the days before the mobile phone took over.)

During my 1970s childhood, our household phone sat on a table in the hall of our Cardiff house. That, and the cost, tended to keep calls short. As a 10 year old I’d developed a curious habit of answering calls with an awkward announcement: “Cardiff 755183, who’s speaking please?” On reflection, this was curious – why repeat a number that the person on the other end had just dialled? And they were about to tell me their identity.

As Groskop points out, we memorised numbers in those days. I still remember my aunt’s number: Cardiff 756796, even though I haven’t dialled that number for over 35 years. You can see my own first home phone in the 1989 photo of my Teddington flat at the top of this post. My number? 01 977 9115. (London’s old 01 code was so iconic that ITV named its London events show 01 for London.)

My London number (by then including the new 081 outer London code) even appeared on Nationwide Building Society news releases as an evening contact number in that pre-mobile era. Yet I cannot tell you my son’s mobile number, no doubt because there’s no need to memorise numbers now we just click on a contact name.

Yet I did have one curious teenage experience when my memory for a phone number went awry. During my O levels in 1980, I called my sister in Wiltshire. I couldn’t understand why I’d got that painful number unobtainable ring tone for a number I called every week. I tried again – only to realise I’d used my four digit WJEC candidate number instead of the Swindon code. One memory had temporarily overwritten another.

Back in the 1990s I’d have long conversations with friends on the phone, before one of us would call a halt by warning of the cost of the call. In time, we’d all sign up to BT’s Family and Friends scheme which offered discounted calls to a handful of numbers. It paid to work out whose number to honour in this way – your most frequently dialled number may not have been the most expensive to call.

Searching for a phone box

Foss Road South, Leicester, 1985
Walnut Street, Leicester, 1985

When I went to university in 1982, I suddenly became dependent on the street phone box. The traditional Giles Gilbert Scott kiosk was a design classic, but standing searching for one with a working phone was a dispiriting experience on a bitterly cold East Midlands winter night. When I found one, I’d usually discover someone already inside, in mid call. After 10 minutes, it was tempting to sigh loudly, or even tap on the door to ask how much longer they’d be. Yet when I finally got in and put in my 2p coins I had no idea if my the person I was calling was actually at home. If I was calling home, I’d give my Mum the phone number of the box, and wait for her to call me back. I remember a curious tone like birdsong for a few seconds when we were reconnected.

Student accommodation rarely had a phone, so we had to communicate in other ways. One exam season I sent a letter to my friends Kate and Helen to try to arrange to meet up (their student hovel was a few miles away from mine) and thinking even then there must be better ways to communicate! These days, we arrange our reunions by Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.

When I graduated, I took photos of the phone boxes I’d spent so much time in over the past few years. Another world…

999!

My letter in The Times about a broadcasting landline panic

When our son Owen was very little, we got a call one Sunday morning asking if all was well. It was the 999 operator, who explained that someone had dialled the emergency number from our phone. It was obviously Owen, playing with the keypad. We hid the landline in the airing cupboard to prevent it happening again. A few years later this caused a panic when I was about to appear live on Simon Mayo’s Radio 2 show. I’d been reassured that a cordless phone was fine, but just before going on air I was told it had to be a fixed line. I just had time to retrieve the old handset from its hiding place before the interview began. I recalled this panic in a letter to The Times in 2022.

Rob and father Bob, pictured, edit Bob’s Kindle book via Zoom, February 2021

By 2020 the only person I’d speak to on the home phone was my father, for a Sunday evening catch up. Dad would also sometimes call for advice on tech matters, announcing himself when I answered, ‘It’s Dad’. Yet after the pandemic struck we switched to Zoom calls, as he found it easier to hear me there than on the phone. We Zoomed as he lay in a Cardiff hospital bed with Covid in October 2020, and four months later we worked together via Zoom turning his Bob the Blogger web diary into a Kindle book, Pandemic! My care home diary. I was thrilled by the way my then 94 year old father was adapting to new technology – not for the first time!

Back in 1978, Blondie’s song Hanging on the Telephone reached number 5 in the British charts. The lyrics evoke that long-gone era in which making phone calls was an often frustrating experience, as I found in my student years. The irony is that today, when we carry a phone with us everywhere, the last thing we’re likely to do is to call someone on it!

A historic election and the humble act of voting

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Vote early, vote often, as BBC Radio 4’s Weekly Ending satirical show said of the first Zimbabwean election in 1980. I followed that mantra today, voting in the historic 2024 general election before 8am. I then placed two further votes – but it was all legal, as they were proxy ones for two British friends who live in Switzerland. We took our lovely dog with us: #DogsatPollingStations.

I always feel humble when I go to vote. I’m conscious of the long fight for democracy in Britain and around the world. My grandmothers would have been in their thirties when they got the right to vote in the 1920s. (I don’t know if they satisfied the property qualification that was applied when women of 30 and above got the vote in 1918; if so, they’d both have voted in the 1923 general election that led to Britain’s first Labour government.)

Chesham & Amersham: the start of a democratic revolution

Living in Buckinghamshire, unless you are a Conservative you rarely vote for a winning candidate. Our constituency of Chesham & Amersham was a true blue seat, with Ian Gilmour representing the area for 18 years, followed by Cheryl Gillan until her death in 2021. Sarah Green sensationally took the seat for the Liberal Democrats in the resulting by-election. It was the first sign that the ‘blue wall’ of traditional Tory seats in Southern England was under threat as a result of disgust at Brexit and at Boris Johnson’s behaviour. (This was six months before partygate revealed how Johnson’s Number 10 spent the pandemic breaking its own Covid rules.) Green was born in Wales, like her predecessor, and made part of her maiden speech in the Commons in Welsh.

Brexit: the disaster that didn’t feature

It’s poignant to reflect on this polling card, for the last European Parliament election that the UK took part in. We no longer have a voice in Europe because of the catastrophe of Brexit. It has posed painful extra costs and burdens on British businesses and people. Yet the Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem parties indulged in a conspiracy of silence about it during the campaign. (Credit to Plaid Cymru and the SNP for calliing out this conspiracy.)

Keir Starmer: Labour’s most consequential PM since Attlee?

Almost two years ago, I blogged that Keir Starmer was the quiet man would might transform British politics. If the polls are even remotely right, he is on track to secure Labour’s greatest ever election victory. It is an extraordinary achievement for a relatively inexperienced leader to replace a landslide defeat less than five years ago with a far bigger victory. (Though we should recognise that the Tories made the job far easier through lawbreaking and crashing the economy.) The Guardian’s Rafael Behr put it well in an election day column:

Nothing was inevitable. To make a Labour government look certain, to make so many people comfortable with the journey to Starmer’s Britain, to make it the obvious, natural destination at the end of the long-haul campaign is an achievement of rare political craft, not luck. 

In that 2022 blogpost on Starmer, I longed for him to take Britain back into the EU single market and customs union as a bold first step, echoing Blair and Brown’s move to make the Bank of England independent of the government. But Starmer has thrown away that golden opportunity. It’s hard to see how the new Labour government can seriously grow the economy without it.

A different Britain

If Labour does achieve a historic victory, it will come into office at a time when the people can hardly believe that things will get better quickly. The country’s public services are on their knees. Our village is just one of many that have endured raw sewage in its rivers, streets and fields. Sleazy Tory politicians have waged culture wars on the attitudes of the young, while depriving them of the homes their parents and grandparents could afford. And our governing party has treated the law as applying to others, not themselves. Small wonder that people are voting tactically in the hope of seeing #ToryWipeOut2024. (My bet is the Conservatives will get around 110 seats, but would love to see them punished more severely for the damage they have done to the country.)

Keir Starmer and his government will have a grim inheritance. But what a change it will be to have a government that treats running the country seriously, rather than a game to impress the frankly unhinged columnists of the Telegraph and Mail. I hope a side effect of a big progressive win is that those toxic papers, along with GB News, will find themselves talking to themselves. It may even encourage the BBC not to amplify their unrepresentative rants.

It was 50 years ago…

Half a century ago, Britain saw two general elections in a year. The February 1974 election was the first I remember, as a 10 year old, when Harold Wilson returned unexpectedly as PM. Eight months later he went to the country hoping to secure a decent majority, but ended up with a mere three seat buffer. My main memory of that 10 October poll was breaking the cord of the light in our Cardiff loft! I wonder how today’s poll will be remembered in 50 years’ time by Britain’s school children – if at all.

Learning Welsh, 30 years on

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Thirty years ago this week, I sat down in a classroom in an abandoned quarrying village to learn the Welsh language. I couldn’t have chosen a more idyllic spot: the National Language Centre, Canolfan yr Iaith Genedlaethol at Nant Gwrtheyrn on the Llŷn peninsula in North Wales.

Nant Gwrtheyrn, 1994
My final school report in Welsh, 1975

My journey to the Nant was a long one, literally and metaphorically. When I went to Cardiff High School in 1975, I gave up Welsh in favour of Latin. I didn’t enjoy Welsh at Lakeside primary school, and was not a fan of the teacher, who rightly gave me B- in my final report, yet described my work as very good. I regretted the decision immediately. Welsh teaching at Cardiff High was in a different league, and I’d have learned my national language far more quickly. But life is about making up for regrets rather than mourning them for ever.

I was living in Gloucestershire (Swydd Gaerloyw in Welsh) in May 1994, and found the long drive to Llŷn magical. I smiled at the name Woofferton as I drove through that village near Ludlow. Much later, long after crossing the border, I fell in love with the spectacular scenery as the A470 road carved its way from Mallwyd through Dinas Mawddwy before sweeping down to the handsome town of Dolgellau. I would come to know this route very well in the years to come.

Arafwch nawr – slow down! Descending to Nant Gwrtheyrn, October 1995

The final stage of the route to the Nant was sublime, crossing Llŷn with constant views of the mountains of Eryri (Snowdonia) and the whole of Llŷn before me, with the Irish sea cwtching the peninsula. After passing through the village of Llithfaen, I was soon navigating the twisting lane down the hillside to the Nant, with the hills called Yr Eifl dominating the view. As you can see, the descent is not for the faint hearted. Since my visits the road has been improved and coaches can now visit the site.

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Remembering my Nan, 30 years on

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Nan at her 100th birthday party, Cardiff, 1991

It’s hard to believe that my grandmother, Nan, died 30 years ago today. It’s seems like yesterday.

She was the perfect grandmother (and great grandmother) – a deeply caring person who loved the company of the younger generations. We in turn were thrilled to spend time with someone born during the reign of Queen Victoria, years before the first aeroplane flew.

I loved listening to her stories, which went back to the 1890s, including her memories of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897. More poignantly, Nan recalled fetching oxygen cylinders by hansom cab for her dying father in 1912. That was the year she turned 21, just days after the Titanic sank. Her life milestones seemed to coincide with historic events: Nan got married in 1919, the week Alcock and Brown became the first people to fly across the Atlantic, landing in a bog in Ireland. She herself took her only flight at the age of 92 in 1983 – the short hop from Cardiff to Bristol.

Nan delighted in telling me how her husband Frank, the grandfather I never knew, insisted that one day there would be radio with pictures. Frank almost certainly never saw his prediction come true as television, unless he happened to come across a rare demonstration set in a London store before the outbreak of war in 1939, when the BBC’s fledgling TV service closed for the duration.

With Nan at her centenary party

Nan is the only person I’ve known who lived to 100. Her centenary party in Cardiff in 1991 was a marvellous celebration of a special person, with everyone who loved her crowding the capital’s County Hall.

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No longer sharing my thoughts with my dad…

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When I started blogging 18 years ago I chose a tagline: ‘Rob Skinner shares his thoughts with the world’. Then I reflected that seemed rather boastful – the world wouldn’t care what I thought. So I added a tongue in cheek qualification. The final line read, ‘Rob Skinner shares his thoughts with the world – or his dad’.

It proved a fair reflection of my limited audience. Dad and I often discussed my blogposts, and I was delighted when he started his own blog as the first Covid-19 lockdown began in 2020. (We later turned that into a Kindle book, as the BBC reported.) One of his own last blogposts, the month before he died, about cinema, was prompted by my reflections on childhood cinemas.

After Dad died last February, I occasionally thought the old tagline was poignant rather than apt. But I was reluctant to remove it. But now, 11 months after Dad passed away, and a year after that father and son blogging double act, seems the right time to do so.

Dad (Bob Skinner) in 2005 outside the house he moved to when war broke out in 1939

Like most people who have lost a parent, I miss the chance to ask Dad a question about a hundred and one things. For example, when I blogged recently (Echoes of 1939) about his evacuation from London to stay with his aunt in Splott, Cardiff, at the outbreak of the second world war, I realised I had no idea how he got to Cardiff. Train? Coach? Alone or with his mother? Sadly, I will never know. But I have a lifetime of memories, not to mention Dad’s written memories and archives.

PS: for the record, a screenshot of this post with the old tagline, before I retire it.

Postscript

Ahzio’s lovely comment on this post – that I should keep the tagline mentioning my father – prompted me to change it to a dedication to both Dad and Mum, former journalists who inspired my love of writing.

Echoes of 1939

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Some years are associated with tragedy and the horror of war. For example,1914: the year the lamps went out all over Europe (in the poignant words of Sir Edward Grey) at the start of the Great War; 1916: the year of the cataclysmic battle of the Somme. And in Wales 1966: the year of the tragedy of Aberfan.

Nicholas Winton and the Kindertransport

Over the past few days, I have been reflecting on another of those ill-starred years: 1939. Yesterday, we went to the cinema to see One Life, the brilliant film about the life of Sir Nicholas Winton, who played a key role in saving 669 children from the murderous Nazis in Czechoslovakia. He helped arrange for them to be brought to Britain in the spring and summer of 1939. Tragically, the very last Kindertransport train was halted on 1 September 1939 after Hitler invaded neighbouring Poland. The 250 children on board, so close to salvation, were seized by Nazi thugs, and only two survived the war.

The film is heartbreaking and heartwarming in equal measure. Heartbreaking because it highlights the agonies that so many people, especially the Jewish people of Europe, suffered at the hands of the Nazis, and because we are so aware that similar hatred is causing misery once more, especially in the Middle East and Ukraine. But heartwarming because good people like Nicky Winton, his mother Barbara, Doreen Warriner, Marie Schmolka, Martin Blake, Beatrice Wellington and Trevor Chadwick went to extraordinary lengths and (for those in Prague) considerable personal danger to save others. It was especially poignant to see the recreated scenes at Prague’s railway station as parents waved off their children, knowing they themselves would probably never see them again.

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