Off the Wall

Always prohibitively expensive to buy, vitreous enamel signs are the brilliantly colourful 'Street Jewellery' of the English scene. Most of my collection was levered off walls in the seventies from the top of precipitously-leaning ladders. With the express permission of shopkeepers, of course. All very well and typical of long-haired designer fads of the age, but these days I somehow prefer to see them still up on the wall where everyone can enjoy them. How untypically egalatarian is that of me? So I was very pleased to see these signs still in their original position on a shop wall in Bluntisham, Cambridgeshire. The Brooke Bond tea sign was once one of the most ubiquitous, but what I like here are the two sizes of Sunlight signs. It's as if the soap rep turned up, got out the sign catalogue and the shopkeeper said 'I'll have one of each'. They all bring back a painful memory. A little shop in the Highfields district of Leicester was closing, and outside was a Player's Cigarettes enamel sign, complete with the Hero sailor in glorious colour. I asked the little old lady if there was any chance I could have it when the shop finally shut. It was promised, I was over-joyed. Returning a couple of months later I saw that the sign was gone, just the empty frame staring blankly at me. On asking for it the lady said 'But you've already been in and had it'. Not me I said, gripping the counter. 'But he had a beard' was the only reply I heard as I went out.

Pump and Circumstance

An unmitigated disaster of a day out on the Fens. I should have believed the BBC forecast for once and stayed at home, instead of disconsolately driving around hoping that the milky haze would shift itself from in front of the sun. But then, you can imagine the length of my tyre marks as I braked in Somersham for this. Two very old pumps like this one, two sixties varieties (one with a Cleveland globe) an oil dispenser cabinet, an AA box peeping over a hedge. Not in the confines of a motoring museum, but at the side of the road as if business was not only as usual, but booming. It's called the West End Garage, with a little kiosky place with things like the Michelin man in the window driving a red pedal car. I expected at any minute for an overalled man to appear and start polishing my headlamps with a yellow duster. It all cheered me up no end, and I had to go to Ely for a cup of Rooibosh Vanilla tea and a toasted Norfolk ham and brie sandwich by the river. Oh! Look Janet, look John. That Castrol open and closed sign. Didn't the big green metal disc revolve in the wind?

http://www.westendclassics.co.uk/contactus.htm

Stars and Stripes

Staring at my Len Deighton collection this evening, as one does, I looked again at this superb Raymond Hawkey cover for the first Penguin edition (1965) of Horse Under Water. This was the second volume Deighton wrote after his debut The Ipcress File, and his Royal College of Art chum Hawkey was involved with the covers right from the start. The early hardbacks are now much sort after classics, with monochrome photography on white backgrounds and minimal typography, but Hawkey was presented with a particular problem here. The first novel had been made into what is now, quite rightly, a cult film, and Penguin wanted this cover, albeit for a different book, to be an all-singing, all-dancing reference to the movie. Frustrated at having his more discreet ideas turned down, Hawkey produced this in desparation. Yes, here's Michael Caine in big dot newsprint, with those thick-framed spectacles ensuring a passing resemblance to Deighton himself. But then the designer crossly caught the attention of the book-buying public with those big shouting stripes, just to make a point it seems. The first print run of 60,000 copies was sold out in 48 hours. To me, this is an essential item in the iconography of the sixties, the stripes immediately bringing to mind the security barriers at Cold War checkpoints. Hawkey continued the bold graphic theme with the original Penguin covers for Funeral in Berlin (orange and white) and Billion Dollar Brain (silver and black). Somehow you can't imagine tie-in covers ever being this good again. Horse Under Water, although optioned for production, was never made into a film.

Remembrance of Tins Past

I went on about this anachronistic shop in the Unmitigated England book, and illustrated my recollections with a selection of pictures taken in the late seventies in Billesdon, Leicestershire. This is one that escaped the net, turned-up today as I was rummaging for a photograph of a Fenland drainage pumping station. The shop was extraordinary, with contemporary brands jostling for position on the shelves with once memorable but now extinct household names. I think this photograph is of the front-of-shop 'display', not so much an example of the window dresser's art as a repository for tins and packets put there a year or so before and then forgotten. So much of this was once so familiar. I miss the Norfolk stuffing box (top shelf, right) with the smiley pig on it and the legend 'Highly Recommended' underneath, and that Nestle Ideal milk tin with the white stripes. Can you still get Mary Had mint sauce? I bet I go to the shops tomorrow and see if they do, depositing yet another unopened jar in the Ashley Archive, alongside all seven of those very clever variants of the Lyle's Golden Syrup cans they're doing to celebrate 125 sticky years.

Sunday Talk

How good to see a village chapel still in use for its original purpose, instead of converted into a conversation-piece residence or filled with giant multi-coloured plastic vehicles for a playgroup. This is the 1846 Great Dalby Methodist chapel in Leicestershire, with some kind of service most Sundays including one for 'All Ages' followed by an afternoon tea at four o'clock. I was brought up in and around non-conformist places of worship like this, gaslit Evangelical mausolea in terraced city backstreets, bare-boarded Strict Baptism in hidden Chiltern villages. And whatever my father could inflict on us on holiday, which once included a Salvation Army Citadel in Hythe and an isolated Primitive Methodist in cornfields near the Norfolk coast. Here we doubled the congregation on the two back rows, staring at fifty or so children gleaned from all over the countryside turning round in their seats and singing their Sunday School Anniversary hymns at us. As a twelve year old I remember squirming with embarrassment until it belatedly dawned on me that the girl immediately in front of me was in fact quite pretty and wearing pale blue gingham. A welcome distraction from Wide, Wide as the Ocean and a tedious sermon.

Hero of the Light Brigade

One of my all-time favourite directors of photography, David Watkin, has recently and sadly passed to that big film set in the sky. Hopefully he will bring even more heavenly illumination to paradise with his unique Wendy Light, his high overhead lamps on a cherry-picker that made night shots far more natural. Watkin shot for Ken Russell (on arguably Russell's best film The Devils) and Dick Lester (Help!, The Knack). But in my book Watkin's work will be best remembered for his breathtaking photography on the vastly underrated Charge of the Light Brigade and Joseph Andrews. Both were directed by Tony Richardson, not an easy director for cinematographers to work with because of his frequent habit of grabbing control of the camera himself. Watkin's superb efforts were such that if I saw his name in opening credits I would exclaim to myself, or to the long-suffering company I was with, "Oh good", or if put into end credits "Of course".

Blimey O' Riley

Well, alright, just one more. This Riley was a cut-above the average, the sort of car that could only be driven with Dents driving gloves and a Dunhill pipe emphatically-packed with Player's Medium Navy Cut. It was for the man who liked a little, but not too much, sportiness in his life. Something to impress the twin-set off a secretary down at the works office, but still striking the right note after Sunday service with church elders and Miss Primrose in the choir. This stunning air-brushed image is from a 1960 brochure, at the time when the Riley One-and-a-Half litre was being superceded by the Pathfinder so beloved of Scotland Yard police (we're gaining on them sir!). I find the choice of a trio of Kent oast houses in the background interesting; this was a time when these vernacular buildings in the landscape would have typified the country life being sort after by the post war newly well-off. Particularly out in the southern countryside, within easy reach of London Bridge or Charing Cross by train. The Riley getting admiring glances from Standard or Triumph drivers parking-up at Eridge and Paddock Wood. I had one of these beautiful cars in the 70s, all black, red leather seats, and after the original valve radio had warmed-up out came Educating Archie.