Month: August 2023

An official description of writing is “a cognitive  and social activity involving involving neuropsychological and physical processes and the use of writing systems to structure and translate human thoughts into persistent representations of human language”. A system of writing relies on many of the same semantic structures as the language it represents, such as lexicon and syntax, with the added dependency of a system of symbols representing that language’s phonology and morphology. Nevertheless, a written language may take on characteristics distinctive from any available in spoken language. The outcome of this activity, sometimes referred to as ‘text’, is a series of physically inscribed, mechanically transferred or digitally represented linguistic symbols. The interpreter or activator of a text is called a ‘reader’. Writing systems do not themselves constitute languages, with the debatable exception of computer languages, they are a means of rendering language into a form that can be read and reconstructed by other humans separated by time and/or space. Whilst not all languages use a writing system, those that do can complement and extend the capacities of spoken language by creating durable forms of language that can be transmitted across space, for example written correspondence, and stored over time in such places as libraries or other public records. Writing can also have knowledge-transforming effects, since it allows humans to externalise their thinking in forms that are easier to reflect on, elaborate on, reconsider, and revise. Any instance of writing involves a complex interaction amongst available tools, intentions, cultural customs, cognitive routines, genres, tacit and explicit knowledge, and the constraints and limitations of the writing system(s) deployed. Over time, inscriptions have been made with fingers, styluses, quills, ink brushes, pencils, pens and many styles of lithography. The surfaces used for these inscriptions have included stone tablets, clay tablets, bamboo slats, papyrus, wax tablets, vellum, parchment, paper, copperplate, slate, porcelain and other enamelled surfaces. The Incas used knotted cords known as quipu (or khipu) for keeping records. Writing tools and surfaces have been countlessly improvised throughout history, as the cases of graffiti, tattooing and impromptu aides-memoire illustrate. In fact I believe tattoos were put on sailors so that they could be identified more easily after their deaths.

The typewriter and subsequently various digital word processors have recently become widespread writing tools, and studies have compared the ways in which writers have framed the experience of writing with such tools as compared with the pen or pencil. Advancements in technology have allowed certain tools in the form of software to produce better and better text editing, although human input is vital to prevent simple errors from creeping in! However, writing technologies from different eras coexist easily in many homes and workplaces. During the course of a day or even a single episode of writing, for example, a writer might instinctively switch between a pencil, a touchscreen, a text-editor, a whiteboard, a legal pad, and adhesive notes as different purposes arise. Nowadays so many of us learn to read and write as part of our upbringing and schooling, but it wasn’t always so. As human societies emerged, collective motivations for the development of writing were driven by pragmatic exigencies like keeping track of produce and other wealth, recording history, maintaining culture, codifying knowledge through curricula and lists of texts deemed to contain foundational knowledge, organising and governing societies through the formation of legal systems, census records, contracts, deeds of ownership, taxation, trade agreements, treaties, and so on. Around the fourth millennium BC, the complexity of trade and administration in Mesopotamia outgrew human memory and writing became a more dependable method for the permanent recording and presentation of transactions. Writing may have also evolved through calendric and political necessities for recording historical and environmental events. Further innovations included more uniform, predictable, and widely dispersed legal systems, the distribution of accessible versions of sacred texts and furthering practices of scientific inquiry and knowledge consolidation, all of which were largely reliant on portable and easily reproducible forms of inscribed language. In addition, the nearly global spread of digital communication systems such as e-mail and social media has made writing an increasingly important feature of daily life, where these systems mix with older technologies like paper, pencils, whiteboards, printers, and copiers. Substantial amounts of everyday writing characterise most workplaces in developed countries and in many occupations written documentation is not only the main deliverable but also the mode of work itself. Even in occupations not typically associated with writing, routine workflows have most employees writing at least some of the time.

Some professions are typically associated with writing, such as literary authors, journalists, and technical writers, but writing is pervasive in most modern forms of work, civic participation, household management, and leisure activities. Whether it be through business and finance, governance and law, the production and sharing of scientific and scholarly knowledge, journalism, technical and medical writing, literature and the leisure book market or writing within education and educational institutions, formal education is the social context most strongly associated with the learning of writing, and students may carry these particular associations long after leaving school. Alongside the writing that students read in the forms of textbooks, assigned books, and other instructional materials as well as self-selected books, students do much writing within schools at all levels, on subject exams, in essays, in taking notes, in doing homework, and in formative as well as summative assessments.  Some of this is explicitly directed toward the learning of writing, but much is focused more on subject learning. Students receive much writing from their teachers as well in the forms of assignments and syllabi, directions for activities, worksheets, corrections on work, or information about subjects or exams. Students also receive institutional notices and regulations, sometimes to be shared with families. Students may also write teacher evaluations for use by teachers to improve instruction or by others reviewing quality of teacher instruction, particularly within higher education. Writing also pervades schools and educational institutions in less visible and memorable ways. Since schools are typically hierarchically arranged bureaucracies, writing also circulates in the forms of notices and regulations that teachers receive from their supervisors and arrange their instruction according to district and state syllabi and regulations.  Teachers must often produce and submit lesson plans or other information about their teaching. In primary and secondary education teachers may need to write notices or letters to parents about matters relating to their children’s learning, school activities, or regulations. Within school hierarchies many memos, notices, or other documents may flow. National policies and regulations as elaborated by ministries or departments of education may also be of consequence. Additionally, research in the various subject areas and in educational studies may be attended to by educators in the classroom and higher bureaucratic levels.

With the onset of computers has come computer programming in different languages and over the years these have become easier to follow. I myself learned simple computer language back in the 1980’s and used the knowledge quite effectively whilst at work. One language I learned is called BASIC, standing for Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Quite clever, I think. Because software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks or other software components. And bugs do develop, most especially when several people are writing the programs. There is a great quote from Star Trek, where ’Scotty’ says “The more they overtake the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain!”. It is true, because software development involves writing and maintaining the source code, but in a broader sense, it includes all processes from the conception of the desired software through the final manifestation, typically in a planned and structured process often overlapping with software engineering. Software development also includes research, new development, prototyping, modification, reuse, re-engineering, maintenance, or any other activities that result in software products. But it had to start somewhere and one way was using an alphabet, which is a set of written symbols that represent consonants and vowels. In a perfectly phonological alphabet, the letters would correspond perfectly to the language’s ‘phonemes’, these being any of the perceptually distinct units of sound in a specified language that distinguish one word from another, for example p, b, d, and t in the English words pad, pat, bad and bat. So a writer could predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation, and a speaker could predict the pronunciation of a word given its spelling. However, as languages often evolve independently of their writing systems, and writing systems have been borrowed for languages they were not designed for, the degree to which letters of an alphabet correspond to phonemes of a language vary greatly from one language to another and even within a single language. Sometimes the term ‘alphabet’ is restricted to systems with separate letters for consonants and vowels, such as the Latin alphabet and because of this use, Greek is often considered to be the first language with an alphabet. In most of the alphabets of the Middle East, it is usually only the consonants of a word that are written, although vowels may be indicated by the addition of various diacritical marks. Writing systems based primarily on writing just consonants phonemes date back to the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. Such systems are called ‘abjads’, derived from the Arabic word for alphabet. But in most of the alphabets of India and south-east Asia, vowels are indicated through diacritics or modification of the shape of the consonant and these are called ‘abugidas’. Some abugidas, such as Ethiopic and Cree, are learned by children as syllabaries, and so are often called ‘syllabics’. However, unlike true syllabaries, there is not an independent glyph for each syllable. There are also ‘Featural’ scripts, which represent the features of the phonemes of the language in consistent ways and an example of such a system is Korean hangul For instance, all labial sounds, ones pronounced with the lips, may have some element in common. In the Latin alphabet, this is accidentally the case with the letters “b” and “p”; however, labial “m” is completely dissimilar, and the similar-looking “q” and “d” are not labial. In the Korean hangul however, all four labial consonants are based on the same basic element, but in practice, Korean is learned by children as an ordinary alphabet, and the featural elements tend to pass unnoticed. Another featural script is SignWriting, the most popular writing system for many sign languages, where the shapes and movements of the hands and face are represented iconically. Such scripts are also common in fictional or invented systems.

The origins of writing are older than perhaps some may think though. For example, a stone slab with 3,000-year-old writing, known as the Cascajal Block, was discovered in the Mexican state of Veracruz and is an example of the oldest script in the Western Hemisphere, preceding the oldest Zapotec writing by approximately 500 years and  is thought to be Olmec who are the earliest known major Mesosmerican civilisation. Of the several pre-Columbian scripts that have been found in Mesoamerica, the one that appears to have been best developed and to be really deciphered is the Maya script. The earliest inscription identified as Maya dates to the third century BC. This writing used logograms complemented by a set of syllabic glyphs, somewhat similar in function to modern Japanese writing. In 2001, archaeologists discovered that there was a civilisation in Central Asia that used writing c. 2000 BC. An excavation near Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, revealed an inscription on a piece of stone that was used as a stamp seal. Meanwhile the earliest surviving examples of writing in China, inscriptions on so-called ‘oracle bones’, tortoise plastrons (the bony plate forming the ventral part of the shell of a tortoise or turtle) and ox scapulae, both used for divination, date from around 1200 BC in the late Shang dynasty. A small number of bronze inscriptions from the same period have also survived. In 2003, archaeologists reported discoveries of isolated tortoise-shell carvings dating back to the seventh millennium BC, but whether or not these symbols are related to the characters of the later oracle-bone script is disputed. This The Narmer Palette, also known as the Great Hierakonpolis Palette or the Palette of Narmer, is a significant Egyptian archaeological find, dating from about 3100 BC, belonging, at least nominally, to the category of cosmetic palettes. It contains some of the earliest hieroglyphic inscriptions ever found. These hieroglyphs date back to the clay labels of a Predynastic ruler called ‘Scorpion I’ and were recovered at Abydos (modern Umm el-Qa’ab) in 1998. There are also several recent discoveries that may be slightly older, though these glyphs were based on a much older artistic rather than written tradition. The hieroglyphic script was logographic with phonetic adjuncts that included an effective alphabet. The world’s oldest deciphered sentence was found on a seal impression found in the tomb of Seth-Peribsen at Umm el-Qa’ab, which dates from the Second Dynasty, 28th or 27th century BC. There are around 800 hieroglyphs dating back to the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom Eras. By the Greco-Roman period, there were apparently more than 5,000. Writing was very important in maintaining the Egyptian empire, and literacy was concentrated among an educated elite of scribes. Only people from certain backgrounds were allowed to train to become scribes, in the service of temple, pharaonic, and military authorities. The hieroglyph system was always difficult to learn, but in later centuries was purposely made even more so, as this apparently preserved the scribes’ status. The world’s oldest known alphabet appears to have been developed by Canaanite turquoise miners in the Sinai desert around the mid-nineteenth century BC. Around thirty crude inscriptions have been found at a mountainous Egyptian mining site known as Serabit el-Khadem. This site was also home to a temple of Hathor, the ‘Mistress of turquoise’. A later, two line inscription has also been found at Wadi el-Hol in Central Egypt. Based on hieroglyphic prototypes, but also including entirely new symbols, each sign apparently stood for a consonant rather than a word; the basis of an alphabetic system. It seems that it was not until the twelfth to ninth centuries, however, that the alphabet took hold and became widely used.

Over the centuries in Iran, three distinct Elamite scripts developed. Proto-Elamite is the oldest known writing system from there. In use only for a brief time (c. 3200–2900 BC), clay tablets with Proto-Elamite writing have been found at different sites across Iran, with the majority having been excavated at Susa, an ancient city located east of the Tigris and between the Karkheh and Dez Rivers. This Proto-Elamite script consists of more than 1,000 signs and is thought to be partly logographic. Meanwhile in Europe, notational signs from 37,000 years ago in caves, apparently convey calendaric meaning about the behaviour of animal species drawn next to them, and are considered the first known proto-writing in history. Hieroglyphs are found on artefacts of Crete from the early to mid-second millennium BC, and whilst the writing system of the Mycenaean Greeks has been deciphered, others have yet to be deciphered. In the Indus Valley, there is Indus script which refers to short strings of symbols associated with a civilisation there and which spanned modern-day Pakistan and North India used between 2600 and 1900 BC. In spite of many attempts at decipherments and claims, it is as yet undeciphered. The term ‘Indus script’ is mainly applied to that used in the mature Harappan phase, which perhaps evolved from a few signs found in early Harappa after 3500 BC, and was followed by the mature Harappan script. So, whilst research into the development of writing during the late Stone Age is ongoing, the current consensus is that it first evolved from economic necessity in the ancient Near East. Writing most likely began as a consequence of political expansion in ancient cultures, which needed reliable means for transmitting information, maintaining financial accounts, keeping historical records, and similar activities. Around the fourth millennium BC, the complexity of trade and administration outgrew the power of memory, and writing became a more dependable method of recording and presenting transactions in a permanent form so the invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age of the late fourth millennium BC. It is generally agreed that Sumerian writing was an independent invention, however it is debated whether Egyptian writing was developed completely independently of Sumerian, or was a case of cultural diffusion.

In approximately 8000 BC, the Mesopotamians began using clay tokens to count their agricultural and manufactured goods. Later they began placing these tokens inside large, hollow clay containers (bulla, or globular envelopes) which were then sealed. The quantity of tokens in each container came to be expressed by impressing, on the container’s surface, one picture for each instance of the token inside. They next dispensed with the tokens, relying solely on symbols for the tokens, drawn on clay surfaces. To avoid making a picture for each instance of the same object (for example: 100 pictures of a hat to represent 100 hats), they ‘counted’ the objects by using various small marks. In this way the Sumerians added “a system for enumerating objects to their incipient system of symbols”. The original Mesopotamian writing system was derived around 3200 BC from this method of keeping accounts and by the end of the fourth millennium BC the Mesopotamians were using a triangular-shaped stylus pressed into soft clay to record numbers. This system was gradually augmented with using a sharp stylus to indicate what was being counted by means of pictographs. Round-stylus and sharp-stylus writing was gradually replaced by writing using a wedge-shaped stylus, at first only for logograms but later also for phonetic elements. Around 2700 BC, cuneiform began to represent syllables of spoken Sumerian. About that time, Mesopotamian cuneiform became a general purpose writing system for logograms, syllables, and numbers. This script was adapted to another Mesopotamian language, the East Semitic around 2600 BC, and then to others. With the adoption of Aramaic as the ‘lingua franca’ of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911–609 BC), Old Aramaic was also adapted to Mesopotamian cuneiform. The Phoenician writing system was adapted from the Proto-Canaanite script sometime before the fourteenth century BC, which in turn borrowed principles of representing phonetic information from Egyptian hieroglyphs. This writing system was an odd sort of syllabary in which only consonants are represented. This script was adapted by the Greeks, who adapted certain consonantal signs to represent their vowels. The Cumae alphabet, a variant of the early Greek alphabet, gave rise to the Etruscan alphabet and its own descendants, such as the Latin alphabet and Runes. Other descendants from the Greek alphabet include Cyrillic, used to write Bulgarian, Russian and Serbian, amongst others. The Phoenician system was also adapted into the Aramaic script, from which both Hebrew and Arabic scripts are descended.

But, in the history of writing, religious texts or writings have played a special role. For example, some religious text compilations have been some of the earliest popular texts, or even the only written texts in some languages, and in some cases are still highly popular around the world. The first books printed widely using the printing press were bibles. Such texts enabled rapid spread and maintenance of societal cohesion, collective identity, motivations, justifications and beliefs. Nowadays there are numerous programmes in place to aid both children and adults in improving their literacy skills. These resources, and many more, span across different age groups in order to offer each individual a better understanding of their language and how to express themselves via writing in order to perhaps improve their socio-economic status. One quote I like is “Did you ever notice that, when people become serious about communication, they want it in writing?”

This week… A few Yorkshire medical terms.

Artery – The study of paintings
Bacteria – Back door to cafeteria
Cauterise – Made eye contact with her

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This week I write a little about Attleborough in Norfolk, where one of my older brothers lived with his wife and family for some years. It is also where my parents retired to until they passed away and whose ashes are now adjacent in the local churchyard. Attleborough is a market town and civil parish located on the A11 between Norwich and Thetford in Norfolk. The parish is in the district of Breckland and has an area of 8.5 square miles, ( 21.9 square kilometres). The 2001 Census recorded the town as having a population of 9,702 which was distributed between 4,185 households, increasing to a population of 10,482 in 4,481 households in the 2011 Census. Attleborough is in the Mid-Norfolk constituency of the UK Parliament, represented since the 2010 general election by a Conservative MP. Attleborough railway station provides a main line rail service to both Norwich and Cambridge. As to the town’s history, the Anglo-Saxon foundation of the settlement is unrecorded. A popular theory of the town’s origin makes it a foundation of an ‘Atlinge’, and certainly ‘burgh’ indicates that it was fortified at an early date. According to the mid-twelfth century ‘hagiographer’ of Saint Edmund, Geoffrey of Wells, Athla was the founder of the Ancient and royal town of Attleborough in Norfolk. Incidentally, this taught me a new word, ‘hagiography’ which it seems comes from Ancient Greek  ‘hagios’ or ‘holy’, and ‘graphia’ or ‘writing’, which is a biography of a saint or an ecclesiastical leader, as well as, by extension, an adulatory and idealised biography of a preacher, priest, founder, saint, monk, nun or icon in any of the world’s religions. Early Christian hagiographies might consist of a biography or ‘vita’, a description of the saint’s deeds or miracles (from Latin ‘vita, meaning life, which begins the title of most medieval biographies), an account of the saint’s martyrdom (called a ‘passio’), or be a combination of these. Christian hagiographies focus on the lives, and notably the miracles, ascribed to men and women canonised by the Roman Catholic church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox churches and the Church of the East. Other religious traditions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Islam, Sikhism  and Jainism also create and maintain hagiographical texts concerning saints, gurus and other individuals believed to be imbued with sacred power. Hagiographic works, especially those of the Middle Ages, can incorporate a record of institutional and local history, and evidence of popular cults, customs, and traditions.

In the Domesday Book of 1086, the town is referred to as ‘Attleburc’, but after the Danes swept across Norfolk and seized Thetford, it is believed that the Saxons rallied their forces at Attleborough and probably threw up some form of protection. Although the Saxons put up a vigorous resistance, they eventually capitulated to the Danes and during the time of King Edward the Confessor, powerful Danish families like Toradre and Turkill controlled local manors. If local records are correct, nothing but disaster was brought to Attleborough by the Danes, and it took the coming of King William the Conqueror to restore some sense of well-being to the area. Turkill relinquished his hold on the area to the Mortimer family towards the end of King William’s reign, and they governed Attleborough for more than three centuries. In the fourteenth century the Mortimer family founded the Chapel of the Holy Cross (being the south transept of Attleborough Church) and about a century later, Sir Robert de Mortimer founded the College of the Holy Cross, then the nave and aisles were added to accommodate the congregation. Then, following King Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries, the building was virtually destroyed by Robert Radcliffe, Lord Fitz Walter, Earl of Sussex, and material from the building was used for making up the road between Attleborough and Old Buckenham. However, this left Attleborough Church with a tower at the east end. A great part of the town was destroyed by fire in 1559 and it was during that period that the Griffin Hotel was then built. It was in the cellars of the Griffin hotel that prisoners on their way to the March Assizes in Thetford were confined overnight, tethered by chains to rings in the wall. The arrival of the prisoners aroused a great deal of public interest, and eventually traders set up a fair whenever they came. This became known as the ‘Attleborough Rogues Fair’ and was held on the market place on the last Thursday in March. Also on the market place, festivities took place on Midsummer Day when the annual guild was held. It appears that there has been the right to hold a weekly Thursday market in the town since 1285. A weekly market is still held and has recently (in 2004) returned to Queen’s Square where it is presumed the market was originally held. The first toll or turnpike road in England is reputed to have been created here at the end of the seventeenth century as Acts of Parliament were passed in 1696 and 1709, “For the repairing of the highway between Wymondham and Attleborough, in the County of Norfolk, and for including therein the road from Wymondham to Hethersett”. The first national census of 1801 listed the population of Attleborough as 1,333. By 1845 Attleborough certainly dominated the surrounding parishes with a population of nearly 2,000, and in that year the Norwich to Brandon railway arrived. The town supported six hostelries, these being The Griffin (the oldest), the Angel, the Bear, the Cock, the Crown and the White Horse. The Griffin, the Bear and the Cock still operate but the Crown is now a youth centre and the Angel is a building society branch office. Nothing is known of the fate of the White Horse after 1904, although the White Horse building still exists as a private house. There are currently two more public houses, these being The London Tavern and the Mulberry Tree, which is also a restaurant. At the centre of the town is Queens Square, at one time referred to as Market Hill. In 1863 a corn exchange owned by a company of local farmers was built in the High Street and in 1896 the Gaymer’s cider-making plant was built on the south side of the railway and soon became established as the largest employer in the town. The factory has now closed for cider-making, which has moved to Shepton Mallet in Somerset, but it has since re-opened as a chicken processing plant, and the corn exchange is now a local Indian restaurant. The First World War affected Attleborough probably no better or worse than many similar small towns. Five hundred and fifty men joined the armed forces and ninety-six did not return. The 1920s saw continuing growth as a market centre, held on a Thursday, with the stalls spread along the pavements of Church Street and in an open area by the Angel Hotel opposite the Griffin Inn. It was the turkey sales which made the town a thriving market centre in the 1930s, and thousands were sold each year on Michaelmas Day. Local employment still largely revolved round Gaymer’s cider works. Well into the 1930s lighting was by oil lamps, then came the building of the gas works in Queens Road (since demolished, although the Gas Keeper’s House is still there). Gradually gas was piped into homes, but it was a slow process. In the early 1930s the Corn Hall was sold and became a cinema, reaching its heyday in the early 1940s. During 1939 the old post office was sold and it became the Doric Restaurant in Queens Square and it is now the town hall. The new post office was built in Exchange Street. There were two local airfields during World War II, one at Deopham Green (Station 142) and one at Old Buckenham (Station 144). Structurally the town changed little during the 1950s and there were no great leaps in population growth, other than the arrival of the notorious London gangsters, the Kray twins, who took over a local hostelry. The 1960s were different, the overspill programme and new town development brought new families into south Norfolk. Attleborough had to make decisions for the future and new development zones were designated. The first estate programme began with the building of the council-owned Cyprus Estate, which has since been complemented by other private housing schemes such as Fairfields and Ollands built mainly in the 1970s, and a large estate on the south side of the town in the 1990s. The traditional traffic route along the A11 trunk road became a bottleneck as it ran both ways along High Street and Church Street, so in the 1970s a one-way system was opened and this channelled traffic around the natural ring road surrounding the church. The volume of traffic continued to increase making that change obsolete so the Attleborough bypass was opened in 1984. The bypass was widened and completed in 2007, removing the only single-lane section of the A11 between Thetford and Norwich.

The parish church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary is partly Norman and partly fourteenth century. The east end of the church is Norman and the nave is late fourteenth century. In 1368 the College of Holy Cross was founded in the Norman part and at that time the nave was built for the use of the parish. The remarkable rood screen has the loft intact for its full width but has often been restored. It is one of the finest rood screens in Norfolk and above are frescoes of c. 1500, since much-mutilated. Meanwhile the Eastern Baptist Association meets at the Baptist church in Leys Lane and the Methodist church in London Road has stopped holding normal services but still provides rooms to hire for community use. This building was designed by the architect Augustus Scott in Gothic Revival style, and in 1913 replaced the Primitive Methodist building in Chapel Road, since demolished. As for the educational facilities in the town there are three schools, these being Attleborough Academy on Norwich Road, Rosecroft Primary School on London Road and Attleborough Primary School on Besthorpe Road. Wymondham College, a large state boarding school, is located just outside of the town. Industrially, Banham Poultry  is based on Station road and has an annual turnover of £100 million. Its chairman was Michael Foulger, who is also deputy chairman of Norwich City football club. There have been a few notable residents of the town, namely the composer Malcolm Arnold who lived in the town from the late 1980s until his death in September 2006, the professional footballers John Fashanu and his brother Justin Fashanu who lived in and went to school in Attleborough, the racing driver Ayrton Senna (1960-1994) who lived in Attleborough during his early years in international motorsport through to his time in Formula One and Brandon Francis, (born Justin Christopher Davis),an actor and writer who lived in and went to school in Attleborough.

This week… a quote.

“Some people drink deeply from the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.”

~ Grant M. Bright

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Although not too many may know it, I am from London, as was my father and his father before him. My paternal grandfather was in the light infantry during World War I and caught, but was injured so at the end of the war his return to England was delayed. As a result he survived when others did not. My father was born in 1919 in London and he sadly passed away this day in 1989. I understand that he first got a job in W.H. Smith’s in London, my estimate would be around 1935. He was in the army during the World War II but was injured during his training, so he stayed in England and was involved with munitions, that much I knew though he never talked about his work apart from the odd funny stories. He did say that he was taught to drive, that he went to  (I think) Stranraer for a short while and also from what little he did say about that place, I don’t think he enjoyed his visit. After the war, on leaving the army he would have returned to W.H.Smith’s in London. In the meantime my mother was born in 1921, also in London, but my research shows her family, including her older brothers, came from Cornwall, probably working in the tin mines but they then moved for a while to South Wales, then Suffolk and finally London. My mother was determined to work in an office rather than in a local factory, so she got herself a job in W.H. Smith’s, which is where my parents met. Knowing more than a bit about munitions, my father told my mother about the different bombs, but sadly she was badly injured when a delayed-action bomb exploded nearby to where she and her mother were. My mother managed to protect her Mum, except the explosion damaged my mother’s back and she was initially told she would never walk again. At that time, my parents weren’t yet married so my mother told my father to leave her as “he wouldn’t want to be married to a cripple”. My father then said “I’m not going to marry a cripple, I’m going to marry ‘you’. At which my mother said “In that case, I will walk down the aisle”. Which she did. Quite a determined character, my mother. She bore three children, all boys. My two elder brothers were born in 1942 and 1944, then I arrived a while later in 1953. Mum told me later she had hoped for a girl, but when I turned up they decided that was enough!

But it seems that my dad had wanted to be a teacher and thinking about it now it must have been quite a challenge for both Mum and Dad to be bringing up young children during and after the war, but they managed. Then in 1952 they learned that l was on the way, but the Great Smog of that year gave my mother health problems and later she had a stroke. This meant that I was born prematurely. So, knowing they had to get out of London my Dad applied for a few teaching jobs outside of the city and one came up in Whittlesey, near Peterborough. This one came with use of the School House, so at less than a year old I, my two brothers and my parents all moved. But it nearly went wrong as Dad, having travelled up to Peterborough by train for a job interview, then headed over to  Whittlesey and he almost mistook Kings Dyke for Whittlesey, which he did not like the look of! It is quite fortunate that the bus conductress corrected him and kept him on the bus. Soon afterwards my Dad’s parents were approaching retirement age and I am told that, much to Dad’s surprise, his parents moved to Whittlesey! There they became housekeepers for the local vicar, whose eyesight was failing, I never did know how they managed that. But with his parents now in Whittlesey, it did mean that my Mum and Dad felt they had to stay there. I have an idea that Dad had at first seen Whittlesey as a ’stepping stone’ to other places, but it did not happen. Back then, the town had several small schools, like Station Road, Broad Street, West End and Queen Street. Then the junior school was built, this being the Alderman Jacobs Primary School in Drybread Road, Whittlesey, which opened its school gates in September 1960, when the Beatles were just starting out and John F Kennedy was being elected to the White House. So I went to a few of the infant schools, then went to the Alderman Jacobs school in 1961. My two elder brothers were taught by my Dad, but I never was as I was in a different ‘stream’ at that school. I did not pass my eleven-plus, so went to the secondary modern school nearby, whilst those who passed went to the grammar school in March. At school I then learned much, some things I enjoyed better than others, I got on with some teachers much better than others too. I sang, I learned to play the trumpet, I played chess – I even became a ‘chess monitor’ for a while! I stayed on for an extra year at school, leaving at sixteen. As the years passed a few smaller schools closed as one new one opened, Park Lane, and then the Sir Harry Smith school became a Community College. In 1980 New Road Primary School was opened as a co-educational day school for children aged 4 to 11 years and in 2014 the school then became an academy in partnership with Park Lane Primary School. Both schools joined with Sir Harry Smith Community College to form the Aspire Learning Trust in July 2016.

In our early years at the School House in Whittlesey we were living just across the road from the local St. Mary’s church, so we became involved there. To begin with, the sound of the loud church bells scared me as I did not know what they were. But my father sat me down, quietly and calmly explained the sound, also told me that he himself was a bellringer and I was fine with that. I think it is almost a fear of the unknown that can scare us. When in church, my father and one of my elder brothers sang in the choir, so I wanted to do the same. It seems I was a bit young to join, and as my father was choirmaster, not wanting to show favouritism he asked the other members of the choir their opinion. They all said “Give the boy a voice test and the reading test – if he passes, he’s in!”. I did so and I was in. At the time of course I knew nothing of this, but it makes me smile to think of how it must have been. So I began singing, and as I grew older many of my fellow choristers stopped as their voices ‘broke’. Interestingly my voice didn’t, it simply ‘slid’ as I found I could no longer reach the high notes. So I went from treble to alto to tenor and finally bass! Meanwhile at school there were a few folk beginning to play musical instruments but because of my physical disability, namely using my right hand, I could not manage things like a recorder. I managed a harmonica, but then at secondary school found I could play a cornet. Admittedly I played it ‘incorrectly’, by pressing the valves left-handed, but it worked. This enabled me to join a band, Nassington Brass, which I did for a while, playing a trumpet, but then I was almost ‘ordered’ that I needed to give up singing and play only in the band. But I found I was enjoying singing in a choir far more and I was better at that, so I gave up band work. In the next few years I joined a couple of other choirs, including a male voice choir but I was also picked up by another choir after impromptu voice test by Henk Kamminga, the master of a quite small choir. That really was hard work, but I now sang in various cathedrals around England, where we led the Saturday and Sunday services. Hard work, but rewarding.

I was still working for British Telecom in the Sales department in Peterborough, but as I have said previously my face did not ‘fit’ there, so to gain promotion I got a transfer to Leicester. It meant travelling by train for a few months and during that time I met a lovely lady and we were married for a while. Further transfers and relocations within BT brought me to office work in Nottingham, up to Sheffield, down to Birmingham but eventually I found the travelling simply too much, so agreed a transfer back up to Sheffield. Each move was good, as it expanded my knowledge and the move up to Sheffield gave me the opportunity to go on a Trainer’s course, which I enjoyed. The only side to that was a year later when the department got relocated to Manchester, as the people who were still in Sheffield were given alternative work, which I do not think they enjoyed as much and they perhaps saw me as being part of the unwanted change, even though I had no choice in the decision. Also, the relocation meant I got to help train the new folk on their work in Manchester, so I was not appreciated in Sheffield! I got a transfer to Leicester, where I found I was back working with people I knew from years ago. But time passed, and after 38 years with BT I was shown the door and I left, along with a few others. After a while I then started my own business, teaching people mainly my age and above how to take basic photographs as well as sharing them on the internet with family and friends. But my health deteriorated still further, I also caught Covid-19 and am now residing in a lovely Care home in Leicester, which suits me nicely. Both my parents have passed away, I’ve lost touch with one brother but still have intermittent contact with the other. I have regular contact with good friends and I am content with the research and writing I now do.

This week… a quote I like.

“Do the right thing, because it’s the right thing to do.”

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