Memories: My first job

I left the Queen Elizabeth grammar school in Penrith, Cumberland, in December 1964, having been offered a place at Queens' college Cambridge for the following September; and for the next six months I worked at the Cumberland county library in Carlisle. I served customers and also went on tours around the villages with the library van, and experience that I have desscribed in an earlier blog entry: 

https://petergshilstonsblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Memories%3A%20Library%20Van

The pay was about ten pounds a week, which sounds impossibly low nowdays, but a set lunch at the local Chinese restaurant cost only three shillings and sixpence (about 17 p.) and I was able to save money.

 I came across some odd people. There was a woman who had used a fish's backbone as a bookmark, and another who had had a book on architecture out for months, which she kept renewing. It transpired that this was because she had a table with a short leg, and the book was exactly thick enough to keep it level when placed underneath. The county librarian ordered her to return it. On the other hand, I could not but envy the son of the Earl of Carlisle who, filling in a membership form, crossed out all the boxes labelled surname, christian name and so forth, and instead wrote "Viscount Morpeth" with a flourish.

Old, unread and battered books were discarded from time to time, but in those days the library was not allowed to sell them, but had to send them for incineration. I thought this was a great shame, and asked if I might keep one or two. My collection soon grew to fill a cardboard box, and became the foundation of my own library.  

When I left, in the summer of 1965, the library staff presented me with a book token, which I used to buy a book about the works of James Gillray, the 18th century political cartoonist. It remains one of my favourite books. By this time, I had saved enough money buy myself a little Raleigh moped, and spent oart of the summer hitch-hiking round northern France witha schoolfriend before departing for Cambridge in September. 

I'm sure that today's students have far more adventurous gap years, but I thoroughly enjoyed my time at the county library.

Cricket: Women's T20 world cup team of the tournament

 

 Footnote: Since then, the four Australian women, plus Kapp, Prendergast and Carter, have remained in England to take part in the Hundred, and are dominating the tournament; but for the two English women who performed so well, Nat Sciver-Brunt has only played twice, and Danni Wyatt-Hodge is out of action because of a muscle tear. What a shame! Danni was having a splendid season, becoming the first woman ever to score 300 runs ina T20 tournament, and totalling 800 runs over all formats, with three centuries!

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Politics: Ministerial changes

 The resignation of Keir Starmer has led to comments about the very high turnover of Prime Ministers over the past decade. The only comparable period in British history was almost 200 years ago, in the decade beginning 1827, which witnessed the following changes at the top:-

Lord Liverpool (Tory): retired through ill health, 1827

George Canning (Tory): died in office, 1827

Lord Goderich (Tory): not up to the job; resigned, 1828

Duke of Wellington (Tory): defeated in a Parliamentary vote and lost subsequent general election, 1830

Lord Grey (Whig): retired, 1834

Lord Melbourne (Whig): government disintegrated, 1835

Robert Peel (Tory): lost general election, 1835

Lord Melbourne (Whig): returned, till 1841

The main difference with today is that those years saw a number of crucial reforms enacted, which no-one ever contemplated reversing: Catholic emancipation in Ireland, the great Parliamentary Reform Act, the Municipal Corporations Act, the Poor Law Amendment Act, the abolition of slavery throughout the empire, and so forth; plus, at the same time, a gigantic economic revolution under way in the building of the first railways. The only major change in the past ten years has been Brexit, which around half the country now considers to have been a serious mistake! 

England: Ironbridge

 The famous Iron Bridge over the Severn, that now gives its name to the town at the northern end.

 It was constructed in 1778 from iron girders cast at the Coalbrookdale iron works of Abraham Darby II, a few miles away. My father, who was a civil engineer especially interested in bridges, commented that it was, in its design, a wooden bridge made of cast iron! Because it was the first of its kind in the world, this was inevitable!

  Nobody knows precisely how it was erected, since the Severn is particularly fast-flowing between steep banks at this point. It remains a miracle of engineering.

American Gangsters Footnotes: Stephanie St Clair; the Black lady gangster

 Gang leaders of the Prohibition era are ususally seen as being White males, mostly Sicilian; which is perhaps why Stephanie St. Clair, the Black female gangster of Harlem, has been largely forgotten. But in her time she was able to rank with some of the most notorious organised crime leaders of New York.

  Details of Stephanie St. Clair's early life are obscure: she seems to have been born in 1897 in Guadaloupe, a French-speaking island in the West Indies, and to have come to Harlem, the Black district of Manhatten, around 1911. She first became noticed in the Prohibition era after the First World War, when organised crime flourished throughout New York and other cities.

 The "Numbers" racket, a kind of illegal lottery, was especially popular in the New York Black community. But even when honestly conducted it was a very dangerous game, involving collecting and distributing money under constant threat from thieves, while the immense profits to be made inevitably attracted both of the men of violence and the deeply corrupt New York police. 

By the late 1920s, St. Clair had acquired sufficient money and power to set up her own "policy shop": that is, her own Numbers operation, and emerged as a major force in Harlem. She used Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson as her enforcer and right-hand man, and they built up a team that was prepared to take on any challengers on their home turf. She was described as "arrogant, educated, sophisticated, with a fiery temper", and she was also completely without fear; but she knew that more than the threat of violence was needed. She understood the importance of "image", so she always appeared in public dressed in the height of elegance, with expensive furs and jewellery, as she paraded with her bodyguards round the streets of Harlem. She was nicknamed "Madam Stephanie" or even "Queen Stephanie". She also used local newspapers to boost her role as a spokesperson for the Black community, denouncing police corruption and racism. When in 1929 she was arrested, she complained about the unfairness of the proceedings, saying that she had always been careful to pay off the police!

After the ending of Prohibition in 1933, the gangsters looked around for alternative sources of income, and St.Clair's success in Harlem, making around a quarter of a million dollars a year, attracted the attention of Dutch Schultz. "The beer baron of the Bronx", as he was styled, was exceptionally violent even by New York crime standards, and headed a much-feared gang of Jewish gunmen. Schultz had his own Numbers racket, and now tried to muscle in on St. Clair's territory. Soon all-out war erupted on the streets of Harlem, with shootings and firebombings in which over 40 people were killed. Stephanie St. Clair stood her ground. "What kind of man would desert a lady in a fight?" she challenged her friends. She spread the slogan "Buy Black!" in the Harlem press and launched attacks on White-owned stores that traded with Schultz. The war only ended when the leaders of the New York crime combine (Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Lepke Buchalter and others) decided that Schultz was a dangerous loose cannon who must be eliminated. In October 1935 Schultz and his gang were gunned down in a Newark restaurant by two Jewish hitmen. As Schultz lay dying in hospital, St. Clair sent him a telegram reading, "As you sow, so shall you reap." But soon after this, St. Clair handed her operation over to Bumpy Johnson and retired from the rackets.

The rest of her life was less successful. She had a disastrous marriage with Eugene Brown, a flamboyant but unreliable Black activist who called himself "Sufi Abdul Hamid" and was nicknamed "the Black Hitler" for his violent antisemitic rants. After three years of marriage, St. Clair was so enraged by his infidelities that she shot and wounded him, for which she was convicted and imprisoned. 

After the war she lived in obscurity, and was thought to be seriously short of money. She was reunited with Bumpy Johnson, who lived with her until his death in 1968, and she herself died next year, aged 72. So, as with most leading gangsters, Stephanie St. Clair's career at the top was brief, but, unlike most of them, she died peacefully of old age at home. 

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Footnote: Most of these details are taken from "The world of Stephanie St. Clair", by Shirley Stewart.

The aged Black madwoman in the film "Come back, Charleston Blue" is loosely based on Stephanie St. Clair after the  Second World War

Security, and how to get past it

Tight security is a very serious matter nowadays, guards are everywhere, and sporting events, which are my chief interest, can be hard to penetrate. Nevertheless, I have had a few successes, mostly dating from the time when I followed gymnastics events.

The key to walking past security guards is an air of self-confidence, as if you had every right to be there. You might give the guards a friendly nod, as if you had already met them. Wearing a lanyard round your neck always helps, especially if it bears your photograph. I have a useful one that simply says, "Volunteer", and could mean anything. If the lanyard has no revelance to the situation in question, turn it back to front so that it displays the blank side. I remember an ingenious lady at a gymnastics tournament in France, who found that the official lanyard hung from a multicoloured piece of string. She bought an identical piece of string and stuck the ends of it down inside her blouse. She was never challenged to display it. At another tournament, a Belgian friend had a sort of tabard which admitted him to the press photographers' area. He lent it to me for the events that didn't interest him.

I once met a young RAF man who discovered that a pass at the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall bore a passing resemblance to an Embassy cigarette packet. He proceeded to employ this to get past several checkpoints at the Ministry, and then said to the officer in charge, "I've got this far on an Embassy packet. What are you going to do about it?" He cannot have been popular. 

The choice of clothing is important (also, see later). It is best to dress respectably, conservatively, if in doubt. A blazer with an official-looking badge would serve well. An old colleague of mine possessed an M.C.C. tie with the distictive stripes, which he had bought in a jumble sale. To my mind, he did not not make sufficient use of the opportunities it offered.

Rather than wait to be challenged by a guard, ask him for help. If you happen to know the name of some official who will be there, ask where to find him. It would help if you carry a bundle of  bundle of papers and look harrassed. As an alternative strategy, I once gained admission the the teams' hotel by asking to see a journalist who was staying there, and whom I hoped would remember me; which he did.   

But never argue with security guards. If challenged, apologise: say that you've never been there before and don't know your way around. At my time of life, I can plead old age and incompetence - or, for that matter, incontinence: begging the need to find a toilet sometimes works. I once gained early admission to the old Wembley Pool when several eminent press photographers had been turned away, by pleading the urgent need for a lavatory.

My father, who was a civil engineer, reckoned he could gain admission anywhere that building work or repairs were taking place if he carried a rolled-up blueprint. These days, wearing a high-viz jacket would probably work, especially if also wearing a safety helmet. A schoolfriend who became an accountant suggested that announcing, "I'm from Peat Marwick and I've come to audit the VAT." would admit him anywhere. Indeed, he said, early in his career he and another young accountant had spent an enire morning examining the books of a company in Birmingham before it dawned on them that they'd come to the wrong firm!

So, bluff you way in! You've nothing to lose, and it may work!  

Cricket: a day with the women cricketers at Edgbaston

Saturday April 11th marked the start of the Women's Metro One-Day Cup, with a match between Warwickshire and Surrey. Since I have been interested in the women's game ever since my (entirely unqualified, but most enjoyable) stint as master i/c girls' cricket at Wellington College, I decided to venture down to Edgbaston to see the day's play. There was hardly anyone else about, probably linked with the fact that it was Grand National day. 

It was always likely to be a hgh-scoring match, because there was a very short boundary square with the wicket, where building work was under way behind a low fence. A considerable number of balls were lost there during the course of the match. And it proved to be a real runfest, with over 700 runs scored and with 18 wickets falling during the day!

The visitors batted first, and soon found themselves in a tricky position at 95 for 4, with two of their England stars, Sophia Dunkley and Alice Capsey, both out; but at this point Danni Wyatt-Hodge, who had been held back to number 6, entered and proceeded to smash 124 off just 80 balls, including 8 sixes. She shared in a century partnership with Alice Davidson-Richards, and then another big stand with Jemima Spence, a teenage kid whom I didn't know but who looked very good scoring a half-century. The innings ended at 389 for 9. Since Danni Wyatt-Hodge has long been one of my great sporting heroines, I was thrilled to be there watching her.

When Warwickshire batted, Tilly Corteen-Coleman opened the bowling with slow left-arm spinners, and did very well, taking 3 wickets for 43 runs in ten overs. The home team never looked like winning, but an aggressive 90 late in the day from Em Arlott enabled them to reach the respectable score of 337 for 9

I was told I could sit wherever I liked, so I found myself a seat beside the steps where the teams came out onto the field, behind mid-off.  I listened to the teams chatting, and was able to congratulate Alice Davidson-Richards and Danni-Wyatt-Hodge on their performances. But I probably shouldn't have been there, because when I attempted to return after the mid-match break, a security guard shooed me away! 

Having arrived early, I enjoyed the bonus of watching the teams warm up. I was particularly interested in seeing Sophia Dunkley and Danni Wyatt-Hodge receiving one-to-one batting practice:-.

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"Some half-volleys, and then some waist-high full tosses!" BANG! BANG! BANG!: the crisp noise, so evocative of an English summer, of a cricket bat cleanly smiting a ball: a sound I have greatly missed over the last few years. After the session was over, the coach working with Danni, but clearly one of the Warwickshire staff, asked her, "Just don't score any runs today, okay?", a request that she completely ignored!

My final piece of good luck was that it was a bright spring day without a drop of rain, whereas elsewhere in the West Midlands there were gale-force winds and storms of hail!

Who could wish for more on a day out?

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From the Surrey website:-

Danni Wyatt-Hodge on the attack

Tilly Corteen-Coleman bowling. I cannot fault this action