Tuesday 25 February 2014

THE IVY LEAGUE

Back in pre-tablet days (electronic tablets, not medicinal), two subjects which appeared like clockwork in our newspaper's letters columns invariably provoked amusement among the staff because of the monotonous regularity of their arrival, and because there were no absolute answers to either: namely, do hedgerows cause snowdrifts? And, does ivy kill trees?
The first query, about hedges and snowdrifts, is particularly apt in rural Norfolk because of the maze of narrow, hedged lanes, some little more than farm approach roads, which jigsaw across the landscape and which, in winter, invariably seem to fill with snow, often leaving travel a pretty difficult prospect.
Many attempts were made by many people to answer the question (is it the hedgerows which create the drifting? and would there be drifting if the hedges were taken out?) to which the best available answer always seemed to be, 'Well, it depends.' On wind direction and snow intensity, the angle of the drifting flakes, the strength of the wind, the height of the hedges, and the orientation of the lane in question. That sort of thing. The question about ivy was just as complicated.
Ivy, some correspondents maintained, is invasive, it strangles trees and harbours nasty slugs and snails. Others underlined the point by indicating the high numbers of dead and dying trees in the county (which admittedly has many trees in late maturity) with ivy clinging to their crowns in what really looks like a deadly embrace. It was difficult to shake them from their ideas.
We only began to come across the works of the Ivy League commandos some time later. In the 1990s our office-based walking group, while on its yomps, increasingly came across trees supporting the tentacles of dead ivy. Further investigations showed that someone else was out and about evidently carrying a knife or a little saw, and that if they came across a tree with a good coating of ivy then they cut or sawed through the lowest strands, disconnecting it from its roots and thus leaving the mass of fronds and strands to die.
We never saw anyone actually doing it, but either there was a large number of dedicated commandos, carrying their little saws, or there was a small and very energetic elite corps.
Quite what they actually achieved, or hoped to achieve, is beyond me. If a young, healthy tree has become top heavy because of the size of its ivy bundle, then fine, cut it down. But the other complaints seemed to me to be utterly outweighed by the benefits of this vigorous and busy plant. Ivy protects its own soil and its resident insects from frost, gives spiders a home, provides nectar and protein via its flowers and berries, and shelters small birds. In fact, most mature ivy plants host entire communities of insects and spiders, which in turn help to feed the birds.
Does ivy kill trees? Only inadvertently, I'm sure. Ivy is just particularly good at taking advantage of rotting or weakened bark, or even the trunk of a dying or already dead tree.
I'm not a particular fan of ivy, which can sometimes exude a gloomy feeling, but it does annoy me when someone else tries to kill it. Live and let live, I say.
  



Sunday 23 February 2014

MIND THE GAP

The digital gap, that is.
Think I'm right in saying that I glimpsed a computer for the very first time in the mid-1970s. It was called a PAL (or was it PET?), had a tiny screen to run an accounting package, and was being demonstrated in a shop in Prince of Wales Road, Norwich. A decade later I assembled my first computer, a Commodore 64 keyboard with separate hard drive, floppy thingy, and a printer, and all the rest of the gubbins, which ran via a tangled mass of cables through a TV screen. You had to enter a code to do anything. But no matter, I wrote two books on it. Then came Amstrad (marvellous - writing software at last!) followed by Windows. And the rest was history, as they say.
In the early days there was much boastful talk of the Eldorado of a 'paper-free office,' something mentioned a lot less nowadays because (a) the amount of paper in general seems to have quadrupled, and (b) most people want anything important printed and stored on paper, anyway. Which brings me to the nub of the problem: the long-term storage of information and images.
Some years ago I was a member of a small group which set up an archive society to collect and keep safe as much as it could about the history of our village. It progressed significantly but slowly, many village people being understandably reluctant to relinquish their hold on old and treasured family photographs and ephemera.
So we started a secondary scheme: lend us your stuff and we will make copies of it and then return the originals, with grateful thanks. This was slightly more successful, but it promptly threw up a problem of its own. How do you store this sort of material?
No problem, said the technos (of which I was not one). We'll scan it and digitalise it and store it on floppies, or CD disks, or in the clouds, or whatever. Another group, including myself, went in the opposite direction by suggesting paper copies and filing cabinets. It became a difficult problem to resolve, and it led to prolonged debates. In the end the technos did their thing and the rest of us filed our piles of paper.
My reservations about digital storage centered then, and still do, around the speed at which technology changes and how quickly bits of kit go out of fashion or are replaced by something new. For example, anyone with important material still stored on floppy disks now faces a real problem in retrieving it. Yet this is after the passage of only a few decades. The same goes for laser disks and CDRs and hard drives and recording and video tapes. No doubt it will soon be a similar case with DVDs and suchlike. One day, perhaps, the shadow of progress may even disperse the clouds.
My point is that information technology, and thus the recording of information, changes so quickly that no one piece of kit can be taken for granted or trusted for any length of time. Not for more than a year or two, anyway. Thus in future years (or future centuries) historians and researchers may struggle to source the nitty-gritty of today's bits and pieces. After all, who writes letters any more, or keeps them? Will today's email exchanges be available to researchers in a hundred years' time? In 50 years' time, will anyone actually be able to see granny's photos, once so lovingly and carefully copied and thoughtfully stored on CDs? Will there be any CDs?
If we are not careful a yawning digital/techno archival gap may well open up, putting the history of our time at risk. So for the moment, I'm still advocating printed copies and filing cabinets. Unless someone comes up with a better idea, of course.

Wednesday 19 February 2014

LEAGUE DEBUT

I made my League debut, in a journalistic sense, on Boxing Day, 1959, having joined the EDP in Norwich four months' earlier. Football reporting was not new to me, for I had been sports editor of two weekly newspapers in south Lincolnshire for three years; but reporting League matches certainly was a fresh experience.
In a sense I was biding my time, having announced that I was interested in taking over the role of Norwich City soccer correspondent. But there were two experienced scribes ahead of me, and little sign of an imminent breakthrough. So I was stuck on the sports desk helping the evening paper with their racing coverage, a tedious desk-bound job which involved little more than subbing an endless stream of racecards and teleprinter slips of runners and riders. With no interest in or knowledge of racing, I hated it.
Then, with the Christmas period looming, the tentative question was asked whether I would like to cover the Mansfield v Norwich City Second Division match on Boxing Day. It would be a good experience, they said. I soon ascertained (a) that snow was forecast, and (b) that neither of the regular correspondents, with family commitments looming, wanted to go. So I said 'yes', and then started to worry about it.
In the end I went to my parents' home in south Lincolnshire to prepare for the trip. My brother-in-law volunteered to come with me to help with the navigating, sandwiches were packed and flasks of hot soup prepared. And after a long and occasionally difficult drive - there was more mud than snow in this particular neck of the woods - we arrived at the Mansfield ground in good time, warmed ourselves up as best we could, and found the Mansfield Press box. There were only a couple of other journalists there.
It was the practice in those days that when the Canaries had an away game at the same time as a reserve match at Carrow Road, then a booked telephone call would be made every 15 minutes or so to keep City's home crowd, watching the reserves, up-to-date with what the first team were doing.
I expect I was tense on my League debut. I don't know because I can't remember. Anyway, when a call did come through I heard the voice of the Canaries' then club secretary, Bert Westwood. 'How're they doing?' he asked. I said it was 0-0, and then looked up just in time to see Jimmy Hill slide the ball into the Mansfield net. 'No. Hill's just scored. Norwich leading 1-0,' I shouted excitedly. Bert slammed down the receiver. Then, seconds later, I watched in horror as the referee whistled for off-side and gave Mansfield a free-kick.
It took several minutes to get back in touch with Carrow Road, and when I did I explained the problem to Bert. He was very matter-of-fact about it. 'Well, its already gone out on the loudspeakers,' he said, 'so the crowd thinks City are winning and that Hill scored.' After a while, and because we couldn't think of anything else, we decided to do nothing.
My luck was in that day. Later on during the match Jimmy Hill did score, and although I can't remember the actual result, it seemed as though the gods had smiled. The drive back to an increasingly snowy Lincolnshire was tricky, though, but I dropped off my brother-in-law and then faced another long drive, to Norwich, where it was straight to the office to write up the match report.
It all worked out in the end, though it makes me smile to think of those fans at a Norwich City reserves game who received news of a Jimmy Hill goal long before it actually happened.




Sunday 16 February 2014

BOUDICA UPDATE

Archaeology evolves at breakneck speed these days. So I may have been playing catch-up, but I have only just finished reading two books which shed new light on the Boudican revolt - Later Iron Age Norfolk, by Natasha Hutcheson (BAR British Series 361, 2004), and The Roman Invasion of Britain, by Birgitta Hoffman (Pen & Sword, 2013). If the subject intrigues, both are important reads.
Natasha Hutcheson studied Late Iron Age metalwork from Norfolk and reached some fascinating conclusions. For example, she queries the usual assumption that, post-rebellion, the Legions moved into Iceni territory with retribution foremost in mind. Where is the evidence, she asks? So perhaps most of the anti-Roman elements were already dead, or most of the Iceni territory was already pro-Roman. Were there, in fact, more people against Boudica than in favour of her?
The landscape was embued with meaning, and from the 2nd century BC to the 1st century AD, and beyond, ritual/votive activity seems to have taken place. Fring may indicate a practice of depositing metalwork and coins in the landscape rather than reflect the burial of wealth in response to presumed threats.
Also, it seems that Late Iron Age society was not wiped out, because the material record suggests a continuing industry producing items, particularly horse equipment. Indeed, the production of native-style artefacts seems to have continued into the early Roman period, while the tradition of hoarding continued into the 2nd century AD and beyond. Perhaps Iron Age chariots were roaming the Norfolk countryside long after AD 60/61.
In a further blow to the traditional story, LIA society may have moved away from an 'old' material language based on torcs and gold to a new language expressed in coinage and horse equipment. In which case (Natasha suggests) it is unlikely that Boudica actually wore a torc. Torcs may have related to an earlier society, and by the AD 60s may have been familiar only in folklore.
Norfolk appears to have been richer than other parts of the country in metalwork and coins, and later concentrations of horse equipment indicate an ability to acquire wealth, potentially through agricultural and political links with the Roman world.
Birgitta Hoffman's book compares written sources with the archaeology, and she agrees there is little sign of post-battle destruction in the Iceni heartland, or for that matter at St Albans (Verulamium). There is destruction, however, at Putney, Brentford, Staines and Silchester.
By the time of the Claudian conquest the Iceni had merged into a single tribe, of which the most powerful lived in western Breckland. And there are now five suspected oppida (proto-towns), at Sedgeford (spread over eight square miles), Caistor St Edmund, Stonea/Chatteris, Thetford, and Saham Toney/Ashill, along with other smaller sites and forts.
Further, she points out that Boudica was not mentioned by Roman writers prior to the rebellion; Silchester may have rivalled Colchester and London in size; the counter-attack by elements of the 9th Legion may have happened at Colchester; while the site of the final battle could have been at Mancetter, High Cross, Staines or Silchester.
A postscript is that client treaties with Rome had to be renegotiated afresh with every change of ruler, and that only three client-rulers are known - Prasutagus, Cartimandua of the Brigantes, and Cogidubnus (Chichester/Fishbourne), who is referred to as the 'great king of the Britons.'

 



Thursday 13 February 2014

LUCILLA'S CANISTER

Lucilla Reeve was very much her own woman, and in a sense she had to be. The daughter of a parlour maid, who for a time flirted with the political philosophy of Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts, she nevertheless became land agent at Merton, a large Norfolk estate. A devout Christian, Lucilla was many other things, too. She was a water diviner, and she also had her hair cut short, like a man. No ordinary person, then.
In 1935 she came across Mosley in Swaffham and signed up as a member of his party, but the upsurge in fascism at this time never translated itself into local votes, and in 1937 the Blackshirts' constituency office in Swaffham was closed. With the outbreak of War in 1939, and with her previous political views a subject of public gossip, she remained a controversial figure and at one stage was taken in by the authorities for questioning. Perhaps her boldest move - in the Spring of 1938, however - came when, though lacking cash and actual farming experience, she decided to rent Bagmore Farm at Stanford and run it herself.
Lucilla was not to know, of course, but only three years' later the military authorities would evict the residents of several Breckland farms and five villages - including Stanford, and Bagmore Farm - to create a new troop training area. Lucilla was, in effect, left with nothing, and in 1950, on Remembrance Sunday, she committed suicide.
In her later years she had turned to writing, and her books, though not scarce, are nevertheless sought after. I have two of them (Farming on a Battle Ground, and The Earth No Longer Bare), both accounts of her agricultural struggles in the late 1930s and the early years of the War. Published anonymously, both had their royalties dedicated to charities for the blind. But it is page 59 of her 'Battle Ground' book which fascinates me. Because Lucilla saw something. In one of her fields. Something very odd.
She recounted how one evening she was 'caught' in Withy Holt and lay on the ground under a tree as 'Jerry planes' came over, machine-gunning as they swooped low. After they had gone she got to her feet, but was 'caught' again as another low-flying plane (Enemy? Friendly? She doesn't say) swooped over and she saw something that looked like a lighted cigar, or a torch, drop on to the clover ley across the road. She had been told many times, apparently, about canisters being dropped by aircraft and how important it was not to touch them, so she returned home and rang the police at West Tofts.
The constable said he would report the matter, and the following morning an Army staff car drove up. She told them what she had seen, and the 'brass hat' drove off to search the field. She supposed they picked up the canister and took it away.
But what was it, and who dropped it? Lucilla did not say, or perhaps did not know. People local to Stanford (she said in her book) were often puzzled by the presence of a nearby airfield (East Wretham, probably) pretty much staffed by 'foreign' airmen (mainly friendly Czechs, I believe), and thought there might be some connection. She also mentioned that her neighbouring farm was owned by Dutch people. But if she ever thought 'spies' were somehow woven into the incident, then she never wrote about it. Not in this book, anyway.
So we are left with an intriguing War-time mystery (illuminated canisters being dropped by low-flying aircraft over Breckland fields) which has not, to my knowledge, ever been solved. Perhaps there is a simple answer. Or perhaps not. Very little was simple where Lucilla was concerned.

 
   


Monday 10 February 2014

SANTON DOWNHAM

An interesting little place, this hamlet by the river surrounded by trees. Peaceful and comparatively isolated, and the seat of the Forestry Commission's regional HQ, which says much about it and the way it is today. Walkers and strollers know it well. So do nature lovers, who may use it as the hub of their day's activity. And so do lots of tree and timber people.
But it is Santon Downham's weather which catches the eyes and ears of most folk, for the name pops up regularly on TV meteorological programmes as the warmest place in the area. Or the coldest. Or perhaps the driest. An unusual place is Santon Downham.
It is located between Thetford and Brandon in the Norfolk/Suffolk Breckland region, and it has an unusual history. In 1668 a great storm moved huge amounts of sand some 10km from the Lakenheath area and dumped it on Santon Downham. The river was partially blocked and the village partially buried, and for many decades thereafter the place was known for its 'desert-like' appearance, featureless and sandy.
Then came experiments in Breckland shelter-belt planting, which made the area popular for large estates and shooting parties. And in the 1920s, who should come along, perhaps attracted by the crash in land prices following the Great War, but the Forestry Commission which promptly began planting the now flourishing Thetford Forest plantations.
I first came across Santon Downham in the 1970s when exploring the Brecks and forest districts, and later, when the annual 23-mile Forest Walk used it as its half-way resting point. It had (and may still have) a little shop, you see, and during a succession of blisteringly hot summers it sold ice cream and chilled drinks.
But Santon Downham's reputation as a sunlit, leafy and quiet backwater had already been sealed for a long time by its weather. It is mildly peculiar, you see. Or rather, the weather station there has recorded meteorological extremes so regularly that you can find its name in the index of most books about the weather in the Norfolk/Suffolk Brecklands written over the last 50 years.
It records low rainfall yet enjoys (if that is the right word) a higher prevalence of thunderstorms than is the case in neighbouring areas. And it produces more frosts that almost anywhere else in the two counties during any month of the year. And having camped in the vicinity on many occasions I can testify to some bitterly cold mornings and swelteringly hot afternoons. Indeed, it is in the hot and cold departments that Santon Downham comes into its own.
In terms of cold - and these figures may be out-of-date, I don't know - it notched up minus-11.7C in March, 1971, and an even colder minus-18.9C in January, 1963. And for hot, well, 25C in March, 1968, for starters.
The actual science escapes me, but I believe it is all to do with Breckland's gravelly valleys and sandy, chalky, acidic soils. It's the silica, or something like that.
Aside from the science, however, Santon Downham is a nice tucked-away sort of place adrift in an ocean of trees with a climate all of its own. I have always loved it, and the walking. 
 
 

Wednesday 5 February 2014

BUNCH OF FIVES

When I was at junior school our rather austere classroom had a series of small cards pinned in a line around the walls. Each card had a black dot, or dots, corresponding with numbers from one to ten, the idea being that they would help us 'visualise' the numbers during mental arithmatic exercises. Whether it worked or not I don't know, but I was rotten at numbers (and maths in general), anyway. What I do know is that I have always remembered those damned dots, and even now, seventy years on from junior school, the cards and their patterns still come to mind if I am trying to do sums in my head.
My favourite number was five. I don't know why. It just looked neat, I suppose. Four dots in a square with a fifth in the centre. Later, I found another way to count five. A football team forward-line. Matthews, Mortensen, Lawton, Mannion and Finney (England). Or possibly Delaney, Morris, Rowley, Pearson and Mitten (Manchester United). Or at a push, Waddell, Johnstone, Reilly, Steel and Liddell (Scotland).
Beautiful. The sum total of football, plus arithmatic of the highest order.
Closer to home were the two local teams: Paul, Cluroe, Jeffries, Ryder and Middlemass (Spalding United), and Hutchinson, Megginson, Sharman, Fox and Stamp (Holbeach United). The names and sequences roll off the tongue like sporting poetry. Two wingers, two inside-forwards, and a centre-forward. A tribute to precision and efficiency.
I can even slot some of these bunches of fives into a dating framework, like: Hurst, O'Linn, Vaughan, Kiernan and Duffy (Charlton Athletic, early 1950s), and: Griffin, Ryan, Allen, Nicholls and Lee (West Bromwich Albion, late 1950s), with dear old George Lee out there on the left-wing. He won an England cap and a Cup-winners' medal, and I used to watch him at the Hawthorns while doing my National Service. Later, he became trainer/coach with Norwich City and a friendly and football-wise travelling companion on the Canaries' team coach in the days when this journalist was allowed into the inner sanctum. George even had to give me first-aid on a couple of occasions when travel sickness threatened.
Also in the 1950s, of course, was: Budai, Kocsis, Hidegkuti, Puskas and Czibor. This was one of the great forward-lines of the famous Hungarian (mostly Honved) side which demolished England, pricked our bubble of complacency, and showed that the rest of the world could play football, too, and more, that they even trained harder and had better coaches. Later, in 1960, to emphasise the matter further, there was Real Madrid: Canario, Del Sol, Di Stefano, Pushas and Gento. Football heaven, it seemed at the time.
As long ago as 1954/55 the Playfair Annual editor was moved to lament: 'Never have so many countries stood above us in the world rankings, and our decline, gradual in recent years, has been hastened to conclusiveness by events of the past twelve months.' He was talking about the Hungarians, Germans and Uruguyans. By the late 1950s, however, another fine 'bunch of fives' had popped up ready to dominate my working life for the next decade or two: Crossan, Allcock, Bly, Hill and Brennan (Norwich City).
Not for another few years would mid-field control become the basis of the game, the famous fives gradually becoming four, and then three, then two, and now often one.
Mental arithmatic has never been the same. 


  

Sunday 2 February 2014

THE COLD WAR

At a very rough estimate I seem to have spent over forty years of my life under the shadow of the threat of war. Most recently, of course, nuclear war. But the forty-year figure includes the six or seven years of the Second World War, two years of National Service (and theoretically longer, as I was on the reserve list for Suez, but never called), and over thirty years under the wide and threatening cloud of the Cold War.
It has not always been pleasant. Though I was at quite a young age, the Second World War was still a time of tension for me because my parents were inevitably tense and worried, particularly during the early 'invasion alert' period. National Service, in contrast, was OK and even a bit of a lark at times. But the Cold War was a slow-burning, seemingly never-ending drumroll of political and nuclear complexity which culminated, again for me, in the writing of a sort of  'for and against' document addressing the question of whether we, as a family, should or should not go to the trouble and expense of building an underground shelter.
My document concluded that we probably should. And this, remember, was as comparatively recent as the 1980s.
It is not easy to forget these things. But time does pass and we do forget, and this is one reason why the University of East Anglia in Norwich is carrying out a regional research project into the effects of the complexities and anxieties of the Cold War on the general population at large. I have no doubt that in due course it will produce some fascinating documents, or perhaps a book, detailing those sometimes very dark days.
Therefore, and for the benefit of younger generations which, thankfully, have not been threatened by the possibility of war on UK soil, a little stocktaking. In Norfolk and Suffolk the Cold War was a time when:
politicians from East and West were constantly bickering; Eastern bloc aircraft regularly tested the UK's air defences; ground-to-air missiles (at North Pickenham) were starkly visible to motorists on the A47; nuclear-armed F-111 jets and RAF V-bombers, along with Jaguars and Tornados, prowled the skies; there were A-bombs at Sculthorpe, Marham and Lakenheath; Neatishead early warning radar screens watched regular incursions by Soviet planes into our airspace, and just as regularly ordered UK fighters into the air; the TA was training hard in Thetford Forest to combat possible civil disobedience, sabotage or agitators; County Hall had an emergency war room; the Royal Observer Corps had an underground bunker in Norwich and dozens of smaller bunkers throughout the area; a regional government centre was housed in another bunker at Bawburgh; American spy planes, including Blackbird (SR-71) were flying in and out of Mildenhall, despite US denials; and a time when all the future seemed to hold, and all there was to look forward to, was the possible arrival of Rapier, Tomahawk, Bloodhound, Thor and latterly Cruise missiles.
Meanwhile, local communities argued and bickered over whether to appoint emergency co-ordinating officers, and displayed a persistent air of total indifference at being urged to 'stay where you are' and hide under the table if the nuclear alarm was actually sounded.
It was a tense time, particularly when you sensed what was going on militarily. It was also a time when an officer at RAF Neatishead told me that if they detected 'incoming' missiles they would have four minutes in which to sound the alarm before facing total obliteration. And when some people did build for themselves an underground bunker (I visited one, in Whittington, so I recall), for whatever good it would have done anyone.
In the end my family didn't build one. But that's another story.