World Book Day. A inspired way of getting children to read books, or an annual chore for parents whose children need a Gruffalo outfit for school?
I’ll leave you to decide. But I’ve been thinking about reading, and my own changing ways of enjoying books. From an early age, I’ve loved reading, although mostly non-fiction. I enjoy a good novel, but as a history fan I’m usually drawn to volumes on the past, especially military history and politics.
As my latest letter in The Timesthis week showed, I’m increasingly listening to books. Back in the analogue era, I had a few books on audio cassette, including Tony Benn’s diaries and Douglas Hurd’s memoirs. (I’m eclectic in my political interests!) In 2012 I discovered Audible’s range of audio books, and have been hooked ever since. They’re perfect for car journeys, bike rides and dog walks.
But, as my Times letter admitted, I often read the print or Kindle version of the audio book to catch up on what I missed – it’s important to pay more attention to the road than to the latest twist in Starmer’s battle against the Corbynite left in Get In, Maguire and Pogrund’s exhaustive book about the Labour leader’s road to 10 Downing Street.
An adult World Book Day?
The Times today asked whether adults needed their own World Book Day – presumably without the need to dress up. The paper noted that 40 per cent of British adults haven’t read or listened to a book in the past year, according to YouGov research. But, looking on the bright side, half of Britons say they read or listen to a book at least once a week. That’s more encouraging, especially given the distractions of social media, and the flood of podcasts and video available online.
Hardback reader
Over the past few years, I’ve started buying hardback non-fiction books. They’re often easier to read, with larger type than paperbacks, while also looking rather nice on the bookshelf. As the photo above shows, I’m working my way through James Holland’s magisterial account of the battle for Italy during the second world war. This is one of the less well known aspects of the war, which deserves a wider audience.
Distractions abound
Despite being addicted to books, I can’t deny that I find it far harder to concentrate on reading these days. I have an urge to Google people and events featured in the book. Worse still, I find my attention wandering to tasks to be completed, or the route of that afternoon’s bike ride. I try to focus on the book, but too often put it down to tackle that other activity. Distractions: the curse of our online age…
It was the most mocked rebrand in years. In 2021, when most companies were worrying about the pandemic, the Aberdeen investment company decided vowels were so yesterday, and renamed itself Abrdn. It claimed the change reflected a ‘modern, agile, digitally-enabled brand’. The move was almost universally mocked, with the group accused of suffering from irritable vowel syndrome. It didn’t help that the new Abrdn had to explain that the name was still pronounced … Aberdeen.
Last year, in a cringeworthy cry of pain, Abrdn’s chief investment officer Peter Branner complained that the mockery amounted to corporate bullying, saying such abuse wouldn’t be allowed if Abrdn was an individual. He told Financial News:
‘I understand that corporate bullying to some extent is part of the game with the press, even though it’s a little childish to keep hammering the missing vowels in our name.’
Branner’s pitiful outcry was equally mocked. City AM had fun with a headline reading ‘Abrdn: an apology – sry we kp tkng th pss ot of yr mssng vwls”.
This week, Abrdn threw in the towel, and conceded that vowels weren’t so bad after all. It will now be branded aberdeen group. Yes, without a capital A. Think of it as a matter of pride – a go-ahead brand can’t be expected to go all conventional overnight.
‘We will deliver by looking forward with confidence and removing distractions. To that end, we are changing our name to aberdeen group plc. This is a pragmatic decision marking a new phase for the organisation, as we focus on delivering for our customers, people and shareholders.’
This kind of corporate gobbledegook is sadly common. It means nothing. Is Windsor really admitted that Abrdn – sorry, aberdeen group – hasn’t been focusing on its customers, people and shareholder during its four year campaign against innocent vowels? And talk of removing ‘distractions’ ignores the fact that it was Aberdeen that caused the distraction in the first place.
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.
Everyone’s heard of the loss of Titanic in April 1912, the world’s most famous peacetime shipping disaster. It lives on thanks to the scale of the human tragedy and a sense of hubris: the supposedly unsinkable ship that ended up at the bottom of the Atlantic.
One man’s reputation was ruined on that deadly night. J Bruce Ismay was on board as the chief executive of Titanic’s owner, the White Star Line. As the great ship set out on its maiden voyage he seemed to have it all: wealth, power and prestige. He had succeeded his late father in 1899 as head of White Star but within three years sold the company to JP Morgan’s new shipping conglomerate, International Merchant Marine (IMM). Ismay became president of IMM and masterminded the building of Titanic and its sister leviathans Olympic and Britannic, believing that these giant luxury ships would give White Star a competitive advantage over rival lines such as Cunard. (Their size also made them ideal for the thousands of people emigrating from Europe to the United States; those travelling steerage did so in greater comfort than on most rival liners.)
There are countless books and online stories about the Titanic’s fatal encounter with the iceberg, so here I’ll focus on Bruce Ismay’s dramatic fall from grace.
Titanic’s collapsible D lifeboat, similar to Ismay’s collapsible C
In the early hours of Monday 15 April 1912, Ismay stepped into starboard collapsible lifeboat C, and into infamy. He made it clear to the American Senate inquiry into the disaster that no one ordered him into the lifeboat, giving the following reason for his entering the boat:
‘Because there was room in the boat. She was being lowered away. I felt the ship was going down, and I got into the boat.’
According to most of the accounts of that tragic night, Ismay helped load the lifeboats, calling out for any remaining women to get in. He himself recalled complete calmness: no panic and no crowds of desperate passengers fearing for their lives as the last lifeboats were lowered. In reality, Titanic’s final hour was chaotic. The crew were nervous about filling the boats to capacity. So, although Titanic’s boats could carry 1,100 or the 2,340 people on board, only 705 were actually saved. Ismay’s own lifeboat had room for a few more to board, so he wasn’t condemning anyone to a freezing cold death by getting in. The White Star line boss couldn’t look as his great ship sank below the waves, accompanied by the shocking screams of those condemned to freeze to death in the ice-cold waters of the April ocean.
Over 40 years ago, I bought a wonderful book called The Complete Plain Words by Sir Ernest Gowers. It has guided me throughout my 37 year career in communication. Today, it featured in my latest letter in The Times – my sixth this year.
Ernest Gowers had an illustrious career in the civil service. He was Lloyd George’s principal private secretary as chancellor of the exchequer, and wrote the original Plain Words as a guide for civil servants in 1948. The edition I bought in 1984 was revised by another distinguished public servant, Sir Hugh Fraser. Both knights recognised that communication with the public should be clear and free from jargon that may baffle and annoy them. As the book says, the idea is to get an idea as exactly as possible out of one person’s mind into another’s.
James Marriott, whose article about jargon inspired my letter, was railing especially against the way jargon creates an exclusive club. Those who do not understand it are excluded. It also places a more subtle barrier, as recipients struggle to decode the meaning. As a result, jargon users are likely to spend more time dealing with an enquiry than if they’d explained themselves clearly in the first place.
I have spent almost 40 years in the financial services industry, and the past 16 years in the world of fintech – a buzz word that simply means companies that apply technology to provide financial services in a different way. (Think app-based banks rather than high street lenders.) Fintech also means combining the jargon from two industries (technology and finance) that thrive on gobbledegook.
I wrote in more detail about the fight against jargon and cliche in this 2012 blogpost.
It’s always a thrill to get a letter published by The Times. I’ve had a few appear over the past 12 months, and my son Owen made his own epistolary debut in February.
My latest letter, above, was inspired by earlier letters about dreams. I particularly liked Dr Peter Cooper’s contribution. He recounted how he decided one night to note the key points of his latest dream so he could relive it in the morning. He said he didn’t bother trying again after reading back, “The banana is tougher than the skin”. It reminded me of a similar disappointment reading back a note I’d made during the television coverage of the 1997 general election. I hoped to find a thrilling, witty account of a dramatic, historic election. Instead I found a barely legible, barely interesting scribble.
The dream I mentioned in The Times was recounted to me in 1984 by my university friend, Richard Attewell. I couldn’t compete with that one – but I remember at the time dreaming of searching for a plastic tray on which to bury a dead fish I had found (in the dream) on a beach. I didn’t think Times readers would find that as amusing.
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.
‘Going viral’ is such a feature of the 21st century’s online world that it’s hard to believe that a century ago a broadcast from a Surrey garden had the same impact on a country still recovering from the Great War.
On 19 May 1924, a talented cellist, Beatrice Harrison, sat on a bench in her garden to play her cello, accompanied by the magical sounds of nightingales singing. She had persuaded a sceptical John Reith, the general manager of the BBC, to broadcast the performance live.
BBC engineers prepare for the 1924 broadcast
Engineers set up microphones in her Oxted garden, with leads trailing into the house to the phone socket. This very first outside broadcast was made possible by a new microphone, the Marconi-Sykes magnetophone, which was far more sensitive than earlier devices. The family donkey and wild rabbits threatened to disrupt the pioneering outside broadcast, but it went so well that the BBC repeated the performance the following month and for the next 12 years. Harrison became internationally famous, receiving 50,000 fan letters, some just addressed to ‘the lady of the nightingales, England’. Visitors from around the world flocked to her home.
Over the past few years, doubt has been cast on whether the birdsong on that first broadcast in 1924 was actually faked, with a bird impressionist stepping in when the real birds failed to appear. But a BBC Radio 3 documentary marking the centenary, The Cello and the Nightingale, sets the record straight. No recording exists of that 1924 performance and the doubters seem to rest their case on a later, commercial recording of another occasion.
I first heard the story of the cello and the nightingale a few years ago, and found it truly poignant. So many of those listening 100 years ago – in Britain and around the world – would have been traumatised by their experiences in the Great War, or by grief at the loss of loved ones during the conflict. Radio was in its infancy, and the BBC, then just two years old, used the power of the new medium to bring the beauty of music and wildlife into thousands of homes. Who can say how many troubled souls were soothed by Beatrice Harrison and her avian visitors?
There is a poignant postscript. Exactly 18 years after the first nightingale broadcast, the BBC was preparing another transmission from Oxted when Britain was once again at war. A quick witted BBC sound engineer noticed the rumble of distant aircraft. Realising that this was likely to be a bomber force heading for Germany, he stopped the broadcast for fear of alerting German spies to the incoming 197 bomber raid on Mannheim. It’s hard to imagine a greater contrast than between the natural beauty of the nightingale’s song and the destruction about to unfold in a distant German city – and the loss of 11 RAF aircraft and their crews.
There is an unexpected twist. When researching for this post, I found that Beatrice Harrison had performed in a wartime British film called The Demi-Paradise. The plot involved a Soviet inventor played by Laurence Olivier who brought his design for a revolutionary propeller to Britain. The butler laconically asks whether Miss Harrison and the BBC staff should sleep under the staircase or under the billiard table if an air raid were to take place. She is later seen playing the cello in the garden accompanied by the sound of distant explosions and with a backdrop of anti-aircraft searchlights sweeping the night sky.
Edward Elgar and Beatrice Harrison record Elgar’s cello concerto, HMV, 1920
The BBC’s centenary documentary about the cello and nightingale broadcasts suggests that Beatrice Harrison’s reputation was distorted by the fame they bestowed on her. She was already a renowned cellist before 1924; she was Edward Elgar’s chosen performer to revive the reputation of his cello concerto after a disastrous premiere by the London Symphony Orchestra in 1919. Elgar conducted the work in a 1928 recording with Harrison, using two turntables. The dual recordings were subsequently combined to create a stereo version.
One last royal word on Beatrice Harrison’s viral fame. King George V once told her, ‘Nightingale, nightingale, you have done what I have not yet been able to do. You have encircled the empire with the song of the nightingale with your cello.’
Note: I published this blogpost a year ago, but accidentally unpublished it a couple of months later.
‘Don’t tell him, Pike!’ It’s the most famous line associated with Private Pike in Dad’s Army. Yet it was the officious Captain Mainwaring, played by Arthur Lowe, who uttered it. Mainwaring also regularly called Pike a ‘stupid boy’. Such is the enduring fame and appeal of the classic comedy series that many people born long after the last episode was shown in 1977 are familiar with these timeless catch phrases.
Ian Lavender, who has died aged 77, was the last survivor of the golden cast of Dad’s Army. He was 22 when he joined Dad’s Army – almost 50 years younger than Arnold Ridley (Private Godfrey) and John Laurie (Private Frazer). He played the immature Pike to perfection. It is poignant to reflect that Ian Lavender died over half a century after the passing of James Beck in 1973, who played the black market ‘spiv’ Private Walker. (Spivs were people who traded in black market goods, bypassing the strict wartime rationing system for food and other goods.)
The 1971 film version of Dad’s Army was largely filmed in our village, Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire. Walmington on Sea has rarely been so far inland! The old Crown pub took on the guise of Martin’s Bank (manager, Captain Mainwaring), as seen below. In real life, the building is now empty after brief stints as Crown Coffee, and before that Costa Coffee as I blogged in 2014. It is due to reopen as Durans Bistro later this year.
My father Bob Skinner with Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, 1977
I was delighted to discover this photo of my late father with Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, one of the most illustrious Welshmen of the twentieth century.
Wynford was a wonderful broadcaster and writer. His first prominent role was as the BBC’s Welsh language commentator at the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) in 1937.
His most famous broadcast was from a Lancaster bomber on a raid on Berlin in 1943, an experience he told Michael Parkinson in 1981 was “the most terrifying eight hours I’ve spent in my life”. Like his BBC contemporary John Arlott, Vaughan-Thomas had an almost poetic way with words, which isn’t surprising given he was taught by Dylan Thomas’s father. He recalled that burning Berlin was “the most beautifully horrible sight I’ve ever seen, like watching someone throwing jewellery on black velvet, winking rubies, sparkling diamonds, all coming up at you.” He went on to compare the Berlin searchlights with the tentacles of an octopus.
The BBC radio programme Archive on 4 devoted an intriguing episode in 2013 to the raid with audio from the original 1943 broadcast, Vaughan-Thomas’s recollections and most movingly the memories of a survivor of the raid who was a Berlin schoolgirl in 1943. She tells how her mother risked death by going back into their collapsing home to rescue her teddy bear. Her interview brought to mind the terrible human cost of the Allied – and German – bombing raids of the second world war.
When I rediscovered the photo that opens this blogpost amongst Dad’s photo collection. I assumed that it was taken at an Institute of Public Relations dinner during the time Bob was chairman pf the IPR (now CIPR) Wales group in the 1970s. Sure enough, I found confirmation in a box file of Dad’s speeches and articles: the notes of the speech he gave that night:
“The champagne voice of Wales” – how apt!
Bob wrote a short history of the IPR in Wales in 1995, which was launched at an event in (I think) Newport. It includes this photo, which shows that my mother Rosemary also attended, and that the dinner with Wynford Vaughan-Thomas took place in November 1977, a day before Dad’s 51st birthday. Arwyn Owen, seen in the photo above, who ran PR for Welsh Brewers, kindly supported my application to join the IPR in 1990.
Wynford Vaughan-Thomas was a leading figure in Welsh broadcasting, and was one of the founders of Harlech Television (HTV, now ITV Wales). Not long before he died in 1987 he co-presented a wonderful television history of Wales, The Dragon Has Two Tongues. His sparring partner was the equally loquacious Gwyn A Williams, and over 13 episodes the two Welshmen argued passionately about the interpretation of the past. By common consent Williams won the debate, and Vaughan-Thomas was reduced at one point to dismiss his fellow presenter as “a Marxist magpie”.
Sadly this entertaining series has never been repeated in Wales for copyright reasons, although it has been broadcast in Ireland. It was accompanied by two contrasting histories, Wales: a History by Wynford, and When Was Wales? by Alf.
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