On one of the coldest mornings in Canberra's recorded history, this blog was running hot. At 7.28am today, its page view counter turned over to the three million mark. I haven't been all that active in blogging since March, but the page views just keep on ticking over. The blog, now almost 6½-years-old, went from two million page views to three million in 20 months, the same time it took to go from one million to two million. It contains 2300 posts and has 170 followers - comments are approaching 8800.
I got back on Wednesday from Bombala in south-eastern New South Wales - where the koala "bear" soft toy craze started almost 90 years ago, in 1927 - to hear the sad news that Paddington Bear creator Michael Bond had passed away in London, at the age of 91. I guess one could argue that Paddington Bear is the late 1950s British manifestation of Australia's symbolic koala soft toy, though the koala - notwithstanding the overwrought opinions of Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory - is not a bear at all.
Karen Jankel, Michael Bond’s daughter, with Bond's Olympia typewriter.
Nor is the Olympia SM9 semi-portable typewriter upon which Bond is claimed to have created Paddington Bear the typewriter Bond actually used when he wrote his first Paddington Bear story, in 1954. Bond bought the Olympia in 1965, 11 years later.
Thomas Michael Bond was born in Newbury, Berkshire, on January 13, 1926. He served in Egypt with the Middlesex Regiment of the British Army in World War Two and while based outside Cairo was offered the use of a typewriter in the orderly's office. It was with this machine that Bond wrote his first short story, in a tent in 1945. He sold the story to the magazine London Opinion, for which he was was paid seven guineas, and thought he "wouldn't mind being a writer". In 1958, after producing a number of plays and short stories and while working as a BBC television cameraman, Bond's first book, A Bear Called Paddington, was published. By 1965, Bond was able to give up his BBC job, buy his Olympia typewriter, and work full-time as a writer. Over the next 52 years more than 35 million Paddington books were sold in more than 40 languages, and have inspired pop bands, race horses, plays, hot air balloons, a movie and a television series.
Bond married Brenda Mary Johnson in 1950 and in Selfridges on Oxford Street on Christmas Eve three years later, on a whim, he bought her a hand-puppet bear as a Christmas tree stocking filler. Bond remembered, "It was the last one on the shelf and looked rather forlorn, I felt sorry for it. I called it Paddington because I'd always wanted to use the name; I think it has a nice, safe, West Country sound." A few weeks afterwards, in early 1954, Bond sat in the couple's one-room flat off the Portobello Road, west London, staring at his then typewriter (not the Olympia) and a blank piece of paper. "Glancing round in search of inspiration, my gaze came to rest on Paddington, who gave me a hard stare from the mantelpiece, and the muse struck, along with what was destined to become the equivalent of a literary catchphrase. Suppose a real live bear ended up at Paddington station? Where might it have sprung from, and why? If it had any sense it would find a quiet spot near the Lost Property Office and hope for the best. I knew exactly how my own parents would react if they saw it, particularly if it had a label round its neck, like a refugee in the last war. There are few things sadder in life than a refugee." Bond typed, "Mr and Mrs Brown first met Paddington on a railway platform." Helater recalled, ''It was never intended as a book. I just wrote something to get my mind going. But it rather caught my fancy, so I carried on."
This was the start of Bond's series of books recounting the tales of
Paddington Bear, a bear from "darkest Peru", whose Aunt Lucy sends him to England carrying a jar of marmalade. In the first book the Brown family
find the bear at Paddington Station, and adopt him, naming the bear after the
railway station.Bond gave
Paddington the government-surplus duffel coat and bush hat that he himself wore.
And around his neck he hung a luggage label bearing the words, "Please look
after this bear. Thank you." Bond said, "Paddington was the first
character-driven story I’d ever written and for some reason he came alive."
Offered for immediate sale. Need to urgently sell these 14 very rare typewriters. Please make fair offers on any one or all to oz.typewriter@gmail.com Serious enquiries only. If you know typewriters you will know about the historical significance of these models and will also know what they are worth. Singapore OUT. Remington 2, first machine to have shift device. Oliver 5. Both in excellent working order.
First four-bank Bijou (Erika) portable and first model Remington portable. My two "go-to" machines.
Two Standard Foldings.
Two early Simplexes, first model and No 5.
Frolio 5 and Junior.
NZTC Blick 7 and Blick 6.
Salem Hall (pointer arm missing) and Blick Featherweight.
French-Jewish author and activist Marek Halter writing on his Olivetti Valentine portable typewriter in his studio in the Marais district of Paris on September 5, 1979, following the publication of his book The Uncertain Life of Marco
Mahler (La vie incertaine de Marco Mahler).
Halter is best known for his
historical novels, which have been translated into English, Polish, Hebrew and
many other languages. He was born in Warsaw on January 27, 1936. During
World War II, he and his parents escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto and fled to the
Soviet Union, spending the remainder of the war in Ukraine, Moscow and finally
in Kokand, in Uzbekistan. In 1945 he was chosen to travel to Moscow to present
flowers to Joseph Stalin. In 1946 the family returned to Poland and in 1950 they emigrated to France, taking up residence in Paris.
Halter studied pantomime under Marcel Marceau and was admitted to the École Nationale
des beaux-arts to study painting. In 1954, he received the Deauville
international prize, and was also awarded a prize at the Biennale d'Ancone. His
first international exhibit was in 1955 in Buenos Aires, and he remained in there for two years, returning to France in 1957, where he engaged in political
journalism and advocacy. In 1991 Halter organised the French College in
Moscow.
In 1968 he and his wife Clara Halter founded the magazine Élements, which published works by Israeli,
Palestinian and Arab writers. Halter's first book, the political autobiography Le Fou
et les Rois (The Jester and the Kings), was awarded the Prix Aujourd'hui in
1976.
Halter's other novels include The Messiah, The Mysteries of Jerusalem, The Book of
Abraham (1986) and its sequel The Children of Abraham (1990), The Wind of the
Khazars (2003), Sarah
(2004), Zipporah (2005), Lilah (2006), and Mary of Nazareth (2008). Non-fiction
works include Stories of
Deliverance: Speaking with Men And Women Who Rescued Jews from the Holocaust
(1998).
Inspector Morse creator Colin Dexter has died in Oxford, England, aged 86. Born Norman Colin Dexter at Stamford, Lincolnshire, Dexter was a crime fiction novelist who wrote the Inspector Morse series of books between 1975-99. He began writing mysteries
in 1972 during a family holiday: "We were in a little guest house halfway
between Caernarfon and Pwllheli [in Wales]. It was a Saturday and it was raining - it's not
unknown for it to rain in North Wales. The children were moaning ... I was
sitting at the kitchen table with nothing else to do, and I wrote the first few
paragraphs of a potential detective novel." Last Bus to Woodstock was
published in 1975 and introduced the character of Inspector Morse, an irascible
detective whose penchants for cryptic crosswords, English literature, cask ale and Wagner reflect Dexter's own enthusiasms.
TV series: John Thaw as Chief Inspector Morse (right)
Calling himself Elston Gunnn, Bob Dylan unsuccessfully auditioned as a piano player with Bobby Vee's group The Shadows. Dylan is seen here typing on an Olivetti Lettera 32 portable.
Hank B.Marvin's 1959 Fender Stratocaster.
A then 19-year-old Tony Meehan, left, was the original drummer (behind Hank B.Marvin) with Cliff Richard's band The Drifters, who later changed their name to The Shadows, causing Bobby Vee to change the name of his band to The Vees. Meehan, seen here with Jay and Tommy Scott and a Facit typewriter, as executive producer and chief A&R man for the Shadrich recording company, had, six months earlier, virtually dismissed The Beatles as a recording group. On January 1, 1962, The Beatles were auditioned at Decca by Meehan. Beatles manager Brian Epstein had paid Meehan to produce the recordings. Decca
rejected The Beatles, instead choosing The Tremeloes, who auditioned the same day. A month later, Meehan expressed
condescending comments about The Beatles’ audition and The Beatles moved on to George Martin at the Pharlphone (EMI) label.
Bobby Vee sadly fell victim to Alzheimer's disease in Rogers, Minnesota, on October 24 last year, aged 73. The last time I was talking to Bobby was in June 2006, when he told me the great story
about the time he stood in for Buddy Holly. It happened the night of "The Day
the Music Died". Holly, The Big Bopper and Richie Valens had died in a plane
crash outside Clear Lake, Iowa, at about 1.07am on February 3, 1959, and a
little more than 17 hours later Bobby and his school band were sharing the stage
with the like of Dion DiMucci and Waylon Jennings in the Winter Dance Party show
at Moorhead, Minnesota, determined not to perform That'll Be The Day (That I
Die), Blue Days, Black Nights or even, for that matter, Rock Around With Ollie
Vee.
Bobby Vee with The Shadows, who changed their name to The Vees after seeing the English Shadows perform.
Already knowing most of these details, what took me by surprise in my
chat with Bobby was when he told me the name of the Fargo high school band was The
Shadows. Around about the time of Holly’s death, the better known (to
Australians, at least) English group called The Shadows had had to change their
name from The Drifters, on receiving an injunction stating that that sobriquet
had already been taken by a well established (since 1954) doo wop vocal group
formed by Clyde McPhatter, one which had had a string of hits on the US
mainstream and R & B charts, including, notably, There Goes My Baby in
1959.
Hank B. Marvin, left, with Cliff Richard in the original English Drifters. Tony Meehan is peering out under Marvin's arm.
I asked Bobby if he was aware of the English instrumentalists. “Oh, yes,”
he said. “We changed our name the moment we saw them in a concert one night.”
That was in St Paul, Minnesota, in 1960, during a rare early US tour by Cliff
Richard, on which he and The Shadows shared the bill with Frankie Avalon, Bobby
Rydell and none other than the injunction-toting Clyde McPhatter. Avalon, by the
by, had taken the place of the Fargo high school band when the Winter Dance Party
continued on from Moorhead in February 1959. “We knew as soon as the ‘real
Shadows’ started playing and moving we weren’t in the same league as them, and
felt embarrassed we’d even temporarily stolen their name,” said Bobby. “On the
drive home to Fargo after the show that night, there was complete silence in the
car for a long while, and then one of us said, ‘Well, what are we going to have
to call ourselves then?’” They sensibly came up with The Vees.
The English Shadows, with Brian Bennett, left, replacing Meehan, but still with bassist Jet Harris, second left, arrive in Australia in 1961. Lead guitarist Hank B. Marvin is second from right, beside Bruce Welch. Memo Sheldon Cooper: You may think you are the smartest man alive, but a koala is NOT a bear.
That year, 1960, was momentous for the so-called “real” Shadows. They
had a monster worldwide hit with Jerry Lordan’s Apache. Worldwide, that is, as
in everywhere except where it really mattered - in the US. Stateside, the
version of Apache which went to the top of the charts was an intriguingly
intricate one played on a Gibson guitar by the Dane Jørgen Ingmann-Pedersen. On
The Shadows’ version, lead guitarist Hank B. Marvin (now 30 years resident in Western Australia, where he runs the Nivram recording studio on Tiverton Street, Perth) played a Fender Stratocaster using Joe Brown’s
cast-off Italian-built Binson Echorec chamber.
Jørgen Ingmann and his wife Grethe winning the 1963 Eurovision Song Contest with Dansevise.
Back then, as the mix-up with The Drifters name indicates, news of what was
happening in rock and pop on either side of the Atlantic was far from
free-flowing. The Shadows’ distinctive sound came about by mistake. They wanted
to emulate the sound of Ricky Nelson’s backing group, and found out James Burton used a
Fender. Richard ordered the guitars by mail order catalogue, and a Stratocaster
turned up. Burton used a Telecaster. Unlike Brown with his echo chamber,
however, Richard and The Shadows liked the Strat sound and kept it.
That simple twist of fate overIngmann's version of Apache meant The Shadows were
never able to achieve the same impact in the US as they did everywhere else in
the world. Marvin influenced few American guitarists the way he did English
guitar heroes, like Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Mark Knopfler, Pete
Townshend and so many more.
The original Ventures, never in the same league as The Shadows.
Thus the decision of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame foundation in February 2008 to induct The Ventures ahead of The Shadows was perhaps understandable, if
no doubt galling for the legends of Shadows fans across the world, including in
Australia. The foundation mentioned The Ventures’ Walk Don't Run and their cover of the Hawaii
Five-O theme tune, although, of course, the version of Hawaii Five-O which everyone and
their dog identifies with is the original TV series theme written and performed
by Mort Stevens. Most galling of all, however, was the foundation’s claim that
The Ventures provided the “defining instrumental guitar rock in the 1960s”. The Ventures simply do not stack up in this regard against The Shadows,
especially the original line-up of Marvin, Bruce Welch, Jet Harris and Tony
Meehan.
I must disclose at this point that the soundtrack of my early adolescence
was provided by The Shadows, and although my passion for their music has
gradually waned over the past half century, I still regard them as, tune for tune,
the greatest instrumental group ever, bar none. I know, too, I am far from alone
in this opinion. Yet having said all that, I must also confess the best piece of
guitar rock music I’ve ever heard is the intro to Richard’s Move It, which was
played not by Marvin but by session musician Ernie Shear, using a blond Hofner with a DeArmond
pick-up near the bridge and a Selmer amp. Unbeatable.
In an irresistible flight of absolute
fancy, I imagine Patricia Beddison Gray, just turned eight by a fortnight and being
baby sat at home at Westridge, Canberra, on the night of March 18, 1932,
quietly casting a curse on all journalists. Her parents, Australian Forestry
School lecturer Hugh Richard Gray and his wife Judy, had gone out for the
evening, to the Kurrajong Hotel for the first Press Gallery Ball held in the
nation’s new capital, and were waltzing the night away to the music of the
Roxy Dance Band. The reality, I gather, is that Patricia Gray was far too sensible,
even at eight, to try to put a hex on anyone, including journalists. Yet in
1980 Patricia and her husband, Frank Benson Horner, published a book, When Words Fail:A Casebook of Language Lapses in Australia, that had every
journalist in the country ducking for cover.
"For the purposes of this book," the Horners wrote,
"words fail to meet the user's needs in three ways. First, and most
obviously, they fail when they do not convey the intended meaning ... Secondly,
words fail when they convey the intended meaning, but at the expense of their
continued usefulness … The third way in which words fail to meet the user's
needs is by alienating the reader." It’s arguable whether truer words have
ever been written about the grammatically indifferent traditional content of
Australian newspapers.
A young Pat Horner at a Sydney University reunion in 1953
Pat Horner began compiling When Words Fail when she was teaching at Narrabundah College in
1968, adding to examples in text books. She was initially drawn to “really
exotic mixed metaphors”. Soon the Horners were leaving notepads around their
Deakin home to record the howlers they heard on radio and TV. When Frank
retired from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, he joined Pat in putting When Words Fail together. Happily, the
project didn’t end with the publication of the book, and the Horners’ service
to the English language continued for another 18 years, with a regular Saturday
column appearing under the same title in The
Age newspaper in Melbourne. Pat died in 2000 and Frank four years later.
In his Canberra Times
review of When Words Fail (“Propriety
and Elegance and a Bit of the Vernacular”), columnist Maurice Dunlevy jocularly referred
to the Horners as “picking on” journalists, since “Mixing metaphors is the
nearest most newspapers ever come to poetry.” Dunlevy said “the language of
Australian public life is often as clumsy as a duck in a ploughed paddock”. He believed
that “no attack on the press … has been so savage and yet so subtle as that by [these]
two Canberrans”. Their work was “wicked and seemingly dispassionate” … “Frank
Horner and Patricia Horner have attacked the freedom of the press by ridiculing
the freedom with which the press uses language.” Dunlevy added, “Who … cares if
the language of the news is as rough as a pig's breakfast? The Homers care,
that's who. And because they care they may deprive journalists of their freedom
not to care. Their documentary casebook collects examples of when words have
failed professional speakers and writers in Australia today and their notes
comment on the failures.”
Oh,
for such a couple of guardians of the English language “as she’s writ” today. What
appears online and in print from the fingers of modern journalists would
require not one slim work like When Words
Fail, but something of the four-volume, 510,000-word magnitude of Winston
Churchill’s opus, A History of the
English-Speaking Peoples. Thirty-seven years on from the appearance of When Words Fail, Dunlevy’s own words
have failed and, it’s clear, nobody cares any longer.
A week or so ago I was drawn to this book by its cover, adorned with a
wonderful illustration by Frank Horner’s brother,Arthur
Wellesley Horner (1916-1997), creator of the Colonel Pewter cartoon strip
(which sometimes featured Fleet Street reporter Wesley Upchat). Frank and
Arthur were members of an extraordinarily talented family, which also included
Aboriginal rights activist John Curwen (“Jack”) Horner (1922-2010). They were
the sons of Arthur Horner (1883-1969), a man who rose from being a
vice-telegraph messenger in his home town of Riverton in South Australia in
1902 to director of Posts and Telegraphs in the federal Postmaster-General’s
Department in 1948.
Jean and Jack Horner
The wives of the three Horner brothers were
equally accomplished Australians: Pat Horner was a teacher, scholar and writer,
Arthur’s wife Victoria Ethel Cowdroy (1908-97, also known as Vic Royston, illustration right) a screen
artist, graphic designer, cartoonist, illustrator, sculptor and painter, and
Jack’s wife Jean Leavitt Horner (1923-2006) worked closely with her husband in the cause of
Aboriginal rights. While the achievements of the Horner brothers were at least
in some ways recognised, it was a sign of the times that those of their
partners were almost never publicised. The angel observing modern events in Arthur
Horner’s satirical Uriel Report
would, I think, be more impressed by our willingness to salute female achievers
than by our ever increasing abuse of language.
Arthur Horner was said to have “had a seemingly
limitless imagination and amazing dexterity of vision and technique in the
comics medium”.
Born
at East Malvern in Victoria on October 28, 1917, Dr Frank Horner joined the New
South Wales Bureau of Statistics in 1935 and attended evening classes at Sydney
University to obtain a degree in economics. He was seconded to the Commonwealth
Treasury in 1940 but was eventually commissioned as a naval officer serving
mainly in New Guinea waters between 1943-46. Frank's wedding day with Pat in
January 1946 was put back a week because he had come down with malaria on the original date.
After post-graduate studies for his doctorate at the London School of
Economics, Frank returned to the bureau as assistant statistician and rose to
the position of assistant Government Statistician. In 1958 he joined the Commonwealth
Bureau of Census and Statistics in Canberra and was appointed deputy
Commonwealth Statistician in 1964. Frank was known for his pioneering work in
the introduction of social indicators to Australia and for his professional
rigour.
Frank
was also passionate about classical music and was on the committees of the
Canberra Youth Orchestra and the Canberra Symphony Orchestra.
This “Gang Gang” column about When Words
Fail appeared in The Canberra Times
in September 1980. Frank and Pat Horner might have been highly amused that when
the article appeared in print, it quoted Frank as using the word “badder”,
which a reader quickly pointed out in a letter to the editor. Frank replied
that he’d actually said “harder” and blamed the reporter’s tape recorder
(personally, I’d have blamed the reporter and the sub-editor and the check sub).
Pat Horner’s father, Dick Gray (1895-1979), was born
in Oxford in England and died there, but spent more than 30 years of his life
in Australia. After serving in World War I, he became inspector of forests on
the Nile in the Sudan and in July 1923 took up an appointment as a forester in
Western Australia. In 1927 he moved to Canberra to be one of the original
lecturers at the Australian Forestry School.
Dick Gray, circled, in
1935. Behind him, to his left, is one of his students, Lindsay Pryor,
ironically the son of a cartoonist, Oswald Pryor, and the father of a
well-known newspaper cartoonist, Geoff Pryor.
Patricia was born at Waverley Private Hospital on
Adelaide Terrace in Perth on March 4, 1924. Her parents moved to Canberra three
years later and Pat soon proved to be a brilliant student. She attended Telopea
Park School and at age 11 passed a high school entrance examination. Pat then
gained a Canberra scholarship from the Canberra High School on her leaving
certificate in 1940, aged 16. She did war work at Mount Stromlo Observatory in
1941. The next year Pat produced outstanding results in her first year Arts
course at Sydney University; she tied for first in English I and won the
MacCullum Prize and the Maud Stiles Prize for women students. She was third in
History. Pat graduated in 1946. Clearly possessed of a sharp intellect, in
later life she was unafraid to speak out on an extremely diverse range of
issues, from opening public libraries on Sundays to National Gallery entry
fees, banning casinos in Canberra and saving the city’s trees, building a
biological centre and providing better remand care.
Jack
Horner, like Frank, was educated at Sydney High School. He then studied art at
East Sydney Technical College before being called up to serve in the Australian
Army in 1943. In 1950, Jack and his wife Jean travelled to England, where they
found work designing and painting scenery for theatre productions. They
returned to Australia in 1953 – when Jack started work with the Law Book
Company. The couple became involved with the Workers’ Educational Association
and developed an awareness of discrimination against Aborigines, which led to
their involvement in campaigning for Aboriginal rights and taking an active
role in organisations supporting the cause. Jack and Jean joined the
newly-formed Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship in 1957 and campaigned for the
repeal of the New South Wales Aborigines Protection Act 1935. As the
fellowship’s secretary from 1958-66, Jack was responsible for campaigns to
remove discriminating clauses relating to Aboriginal people from New South
Wales laws and he was secretary of the “Vote Yes” Committee for the 1967
referendum to remove similar clauses from the Australian Constitution. Jack and
Jean were executive members of the Federal Council for the Advancement of
Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, Jack as vice-president and general secretary
and Jean as the treasurer. They were also members of the Australian Council of
Churches Commission on Aboriginal Development. Jack’s works include Seeking Racial Justice: An Insider's Memoir
for the Movement of Aboriginal Advancement, 1938-1978 and co-authorship of A Dictionary of Australian History.
* I acknowledge considerable assistance from Harriet Barry, daughter of Pat and Frank Horner.
A week or so ago I was drawn to this book by its cover, adorned with a wonderful illustration by Frank Horner’s brother, Arthur Wellesley Horner (1916-1997), creator of the Colonel Pewter cartoon strip (which sometimes featured Fleet Street reporter Wesley Upchat). Frank and Arthur were members of an extraordinarily talented family, which also included Aboriginal rights activist John Curwen (“Jack”) Horner (1922-2010). They were the sons of Arthur Horner (1883-1969), a man who rose from being a vice-telegraph messenger in his home town of Riverton in South Australia in 1902 to director of Posts and Telegraphs in the federal Postmaster-General’s Department in 1948.