Blog

Before email, people would communicate with one another using semaphore flags.   Luckily for me, in the late 60s (just before the invention of email) one of the badges available for attainment within the 3^rd/14^th Balham & Tooting Cub Group was a Signaller’s Badge.   There was an option of learning how to work an Aldis lamp, but we were poor and couldn’t afford the giant light bulb.

Having created two flags out of an old pair of red and yellow pants (they were never going to become fashionable) and a couple of Mivvi lolly sticks I was sent by Akela (the she-wolf who ran the Cubs) to a house in Holdernesse Road, Tooting, to learn how to spell out H-E-L-P-M-Y-B-O-A-T-I-S-S-I-N-K-I-N-G.

The house was owned by the father of a fellow pupil at St Mary’s, Balham, and the dad’s ability to send messages using flags meant there was no ostensible need for a telephone (there were, however, several discarded yoghurt pots and bits of string strewn around the house – in case of emergencies, the father would say).

The badges available these days for Cubs are manifold: Entertainer (I’ve done 50 stand-up gigs, so feel over-qualified); Home Help (I bought a duster on the doorstep last week and have almost mastered how to use it) and Local Knowledge (I pointed out where the Gents was on Ewell East Station the other day). If I were a Cub today I’d have an armful; as a Cub in the 60s, I achieved two badges – Signaller and Collector (dad was a prolific smoker and acquired boxes of matches which I would collect and stick in a scrapbook).  It was the smelliest submission ever, said Bagheera (Akela’s deputy).

I never graduated to the Scouts as cooking was introduced towards the end of my Cub career and this looked potentially quite dangerous with sausages clearly having a mind of their own.

As you get older, you hark back to the “good old days” and I sit in my office praying for the Internet to go down, because I never need an excuse to get my semaphore flags out. This is not a euphemism.

It was after the 1964 Farnborough Air Show that I decided not to a pursue a career as a professional photographer.  I was seven in 1964 and had been given a second-hand Box Brownie camera by my parents.

A Brownie camera was a cumbersome device which was operated nearer your groin than your eye. Unlike cameras of today, where the resulting images are immediate, in 1964 you were beholden to the local chemists (to the tune of about three weeks) on the outcome.  

In 1964 a selfie wasn’t a photograph, it was something your parents warned you would eventually make you go blind. 

By 1964 the Box Brownie had been around for sixty-four years, so wasn’t exactly in the forefront of camera technology. Lord Lichfield used his to prop up a wonky table.

At the time of the 1964 Farnborough Air Show I was invited by a fellow classmate at St Mary’s Balham, who lived in Streathbourne Road in Tooting, to join him and his parents in his parents’ Austin Cambridge to travel to the Hampshire village which hosted, every other year since 1948, the world famous air show. Packed off with Kwells and thermos flask full of chicken soup, I was allowed to take my camera.

If George Eastman had known how I was about to crucify his industry, he’d have never have invented Kodak. 

We travelled to Farnborough; I took my full reel of twenty-four pictures; I wound it on after every shot; I never exposed the film; I’d not covered the lens with my hand (or penis – not that I was doing this naked); I’d carefully removed the film; proudly presented the film to the man in Boot’s on Balham High Road and prepared to wait the mandatory three weeks (waiting for my O-level results was not as excruciating – although the results equally horrific).

At the end of the three weeks I walked from my flats the other side of Balham Station to Boot’s on the High Road to collect and revel in the fruits of my labours of recording one the world’s greatest air shows. 

I paid my money and looked at my twenty-four individual efforts. I saw twenty-four minuscule black specks on a grey background. My attempts to capture the beauty of the then new VC10 had failed miserably. I’d have had a better definition on a photograph if I’d having been standing in Farnborough photographing an ant walking along Streathbourne Road.

A year later, David Bailey released his iconic picture of the Krays; it was this harsh reality which decreed I was never going to make it as a professional photographer. I have never picked up a camera since and am only grateful I never watched Tony Curtis’s portrayal of Houdini.  

We were late getting a colour TV. I was nearly twenty before I realised snooker didn’t involve varying shades of grey balls.

In 1970, when I was 13, colour TVs were the domain of the rich – or if you had relatives working for Radio Rentals.

In the sixties and seventies, when I was growing up, very few people owned their own set.

We rented a series of black & white sets from Mr John in Balham Station Road. Although I never ran our family finances, we never seem to pay for any of the sets’ rental or maintenance.  Saying that, my mother’s way with most of the traders in Balham & Tooting ensured we never paid for that much.  It would appear, with Mr John, that payment enough was simply listening to him talk.  And he could talk.  He knew 1,001 things to do with a burned valve.  He would regale you with these uses during most visits.

On 11^th April 1970, my dad and I were invited to watch the FA Cup Final pitting together the Lionel Messi-esque players of Ron Harris of Chelsea against Billy Bremer of Leeds in colour. We knew the owners of the colour TV, they ran the hardware shop, HH Thomas & Son on Balham High Road.  The owner wasn’t a massive sports fan, but knew of dad’s Stamford Bridge allegiance, hence the invite.

Despite having a senior job in advertising and being well-read, dad was staggeringly vituperative. He made Roy “Chubby” Brown sound like Mother Teresa.

Chelsea went 0-1 and 1-2 down and as Jack Charlton’s mis-timed header went in, and Mick Jones’ quick reaction follow up to Allan Clarke’s assist, my dad was clearly having some mental Davina McCall moment as someone somewhere was imploring him not to swear.

(Dad was bright enough to be accepted to have an audition for “Fifteen to One”. Sadly, because of this massive swearing vocabulary, he failed the audition).

18-days later we watched David Webb, in his Royal Grey shirt, bundle the ball over the line to win the replay for Chelsea, in the comfort of our own flat, together with dad’s mandatory 40 Senior Service. It was better for dad’s health that he could eff and blind at home, rather than teaching the children who lived above the hardware shop to learn words they never knew could be used as verb, adjective and adverb all one sentence and so many times over 120-minutes.

I can’t remember when we finally got a colour TV, but this didn’t matter as mum’s favourite programme was The Black and White Minstrel Show, so it was academic how sophisticated our TV was.

I was never going to be Balham’s answer to Jessica Ennis; although I did enjoy the annual sports day during my final year at St Mary’s, primary school, Balham. It was our chance to become the next David Hemery, Bob Beamon or Mary Peters if you were big-boned (I enjoyed her singing duo with Lee).

Reports of my ever-decreasing sporting career has already been written about here: https://mikerichards.blog/2017/02/26/odd-shaped-balls/

Our school sports day was not within Beijing’s Bird’s Nest or under the record-breaking sheets of Perspex construction which is the Olympic Stadium, Munich. No, we walked to what is now called Tooting Bec Athletics Track & Gym.  In 1968, the year of our sports day, it was a dilapidated cinder running track where the caretaker was called Jim.

It was the only year and only activity when we were divided into houses, a foretaste of being in Delta House the next year for my first year at Bec. I look back and wonder why we weren’t named after famous people who’d lived in Tooting: Hardy; Lloyd George; Gibbon; Harriott? (OK, I get why).

We undertook all the normal races: 100 yards (the only meters in SW17 in 1968 were the ones you’d put half a crown in for the heating); 200 yards; the relay race (with a sherbet fountain being used as a relay stick) and, because we were only 11, the three-legged race.

There were fifteen boys and fifteen girls in our final year, the three-legged combinations was quite egalitarian. I was partnered to a girl (soppy though that may seem to any eleven-year-old reading this).

I’d been taken several times to my dad’s place of work (an advertising agency in Gloucester Place) a consequence of which was that, when I grew up, I wanted to be part of this Mad Men world. My three-legged race partner wanted to be a golden retriever!

Ostensibly this is a major advantage: faster over 100 yards, more desire for running and a wet nose (handy extra moisture if there’s a photo-finish). Sadly, there were disadvantages too – she wasn’t a bloody golden retriever being the most obvious (ironically she was prone to puppy fat).  Also, I was 11, theoretically, my partner, mentally, was 77 years old. Not a good age for sprinting.

The prizes were bars of chocolate for first and packets of Spangles for second and third. Sadly, my partner was not incentivised as she was after some Winalot or a tin of PAL (Paired with A Looney).

Ironically my three-legged race partner craved a career in advertising but failed to get in the Andrex ads as she had a fear of quilted paper. I believe she is doing stunt work in the backs of cars selling insurance.

If you have a sports day coming up, don’t partner with someone who wants to be a golden retriever when they grow up – get someone who has aspirations of being a whippet or a greyhound and get one of their parents to throw a pretend rabbit at the finishing line.

As a teenager, and because we didn’t own a car, I would spend many a Sunday afternoon in a coach, destined to a variety of stately homes in Surrey, Sussex and Kent.

We would travel with Orange Luxury Coaches from Eaton Garage, at the bottom of Marius and Balham High Roads.

I was, by the time I was 13, the only person in my class who knew that the main resident of Penshurst Place (a popular venue) was Sir Philip Sidney; several of my classmates, when talking about “what did you do at the weekend?”, thought he may have played for Red Star Belgrade.  (He didn’t, as he had a career-ending knee injury whilst writing Astrophel and Stella)

I assume the reasoning behind my dad’s thinking was that these journeys would improve me? In my opinion, watching the John Player League on the TV would have improved my leg-breaks.

The destination was always known in advance; we never ventured on mystery coach tours. One mystery to me, given, in my humble opinion, most of my fellow-travellers must be over 200, if they were a day, was how no-one ever died en route.

The coach driver would always count everyone back onto the coach. It still puzzles me to this day how we’d still not be on a 99% full coach waiting for a double centurion not to have made it back due to collapsing amongst Anne Boleyn’s begonias at Hever Castle!

Another abiding mystery also remains: wherever the destination, in any of the southern-eastern Home Counties, the journey home was always broken by stopping off at The Black Eagle pub. This pub was situated near the vaguely amusing (if you were a teenager and had borrowed his mate’s Boys and Sex book) Badger’s Mount; and near, which I always, in a child-like way thought even funnier, Pratt’s Bottom.  We could have travelled to Whitby Abbey, we’d have still visited The Black Eagle!

I believe, in the days before Sat Navs, that all Orange Luxury coach drivers were descendants of King Arthur and The Black Eagle lay, like a series of Neanderthal burial mounds in SW England, on a ley-line linking Balham High Road and Ightham Mote.

The Black Eagle no longer exists, but if there had been an eighth ancient wonder of the world, this would have been it. Should have been in the top seven as you never got chicken ‘n’ chips in a basket at the Hanging Gardens of Babylon!

When I was a kid, recycling meant taking your bike on a journey you’d made before.

Nowadays, courtesy of Al Gore (one of few celebrities never to have lived in Balham), we’re asked to save the planet; one way, other than using less deodorant, is to have different receptacles for differing items of rubbish.

In Du Cane Court on Balham High Road, on every floor, there was a room, inside which was housed the “dust chute”. You gathered up every item of rubbish – be it Spangles wrappers or old spaniels –opened the lid of the dust chute and chucked everything through one hole into a ground floor giant dustbin, from which the idea of the Daleks came.  Whilst the dustbins within Du Cane Court never wanted to master the universe, they did have more brain cells than most of the porters.

I left SW17 and the communal dust chutes of Du Cane Court to live in the oxymoronic London Borough of Sutton. Sutton is not in London.  I have since emigrated further under the remit of Epsom and Ewell Council and my bin count from my youth has tripled.  Just in case there is another war I have be-friended poeple who still live in the London Borough of Sutton.  A new recycling system has recently been imposed and, as one Suttonian friend and fellow cross-trainer tells me, they have sixteen bins! They are all different colours.

There is a two-week amnesty where the residents of Sutton can make mistakes. However, there is a cloud of fear which now lurks over the town.  If you’ve recently had a row with your neighbour, you can claim an extra two-weeks grace by applying to: Stasi@sutton.gov.uk/wheresyoubinisbinputtinthebinsoutwheresyoubin

For anyone moving into the area, here is the colour guide:

If you’re colour-blind and live in Sutton – get yourself an estate agent!