1322 7th 24 with Hannah Hauxwell and the Curse of Steptoe at Easter

12.00 The Bach Saint John Passion is being sung in German. The first receipt is for 20 copies of Guardian Newspaper which had printed my article explaining the general reasons why I had prematurely retired from my work, that the creation of generic social workers within social service department had been a major error as well as original way the departments became organised. This arose because so many unqualified men without any experience or ability to manage the child care services had been put in charge and I blame this for much of the criminal violence, physical and sexual which befell children in care between 1971 and 1991. These men did not understand the nature of public child care or the threats to the children within public care as well as within the community and the need for carefully selected dedicated and skilled officers, in practice, staff supervision and management.

It was over a decade before a subsequent a government adopted my recommendation for the recreation of child care departments but under the umbrella of Education Departments and for the social services concerned with adults to be brought under the health services or more closely allied to them.

14.00 Benianimo Gigli was the classical tenor of my childhood adored by my birth and care mothers and whose records were among the first she ever purchased when she was able to afford a wind up gramophone. It is one my regrets that it was sold along with the gramophone when I was a teenager. I managed to find a version of Schubert’s Ave Maria sung by a young chorister for the creation service of my mother, with a few bars for arrival and then a full rendition at the conclusion. I thought of that and of her and my childhood when listening to Gigli version this morning along with Caterine and Torna a Sorrento, where I was to visit and attend the Film Festival in 1965 along with other adventures as part of a tour through Belgium, Germany Austria, the Italy, Switzerland France and home within three weeks in my second car, a Morris Mini estate, the first was the Ford Prefect bought new for my 18th birthday by my care mother from the money she had received from the Industrial Injuries Tribunal, for the loss of an eye at the factory where she worked. There is also the Angus Dei and many other favourites on disk one, I decided on the Brendel before disk 2 as he plays Mozart’s Rondo in A the Sonata in major, in B Flat major and in C Major

14.15. I have completed a seven set first volume of the self employment receipts for 1992 and 1993 after I registered for self employment 9798 9803 and after a coffee commence work on the second.
15.00 A period of silence

17.00 The second volume of self employment records 1992 1993 had been completed 7804-7809 and I place an order for more blue lever arch files at the price of 69 pence plus VAT. There will now be deliveries on Tuesday and Wednesday so I will not be able to go out on either day until the orders have been delivered. I watch a WW2 1951 made film about the use of Frogmen which centres on the relationship between a special operations group who lose their commander officer and the man appointed to replace him, Richard Widmark, and the Chief, played by Dana Andrews, A young Richard Wagner also has a role in the film It is a conventionally told story of the time in which the new leader proves himself and justifies his disciplined and cool approach which puts their mission first but does not ignore the welfare of everyone involved. Afterwards I watch episode 15 of a series on the last six months of World War 2. In this hour long episode Lord Haw Haw is executed by hanging after capture, the battle for Okinawa continues to take it toll on both sides and the Japanese refuse to surrender despite the bombing of cities with the loss of over a quarter million lives of non combatants. The build up towards using the A bomb is also covered, My complaint has always been on the decision to use the bomb on cities and not on unpopulated area first. Before I had studied history, the events which led to First and second World wars and the nature of the regimes in Germany and Russia, I considered the decision to develop the Atomic and then Nuclear weaponry a disaster for humankind, until and then I understood that wanting to know, curiosity, experimentation, testing, problem solving were all inherent parts of the human experience, and that individually and collectively we had to first understand and then learn how to use the forces within the universe constructively and creatively, or perish prematurely by them. There is always no turning back to a different time, but we can and should study past times with the same objectivity and scientific method as we approach the future. Back in 1945 there was an inevitability about what happened, however awful the immediate and long tern consequences. There was no way the Japanese would voluntarily surrender. It was not within their psyche, and it is understandable the Generals and the Politicians feared that to break the Japanese spirit they would have to repeat Iwo Jima and Okinawa inch by inch over its Empire. I now accept that a warning explosion may not have worked, but it should have been tried. That remains my complaint. In its way it was an appropriate film to watch on this day.

19.00. The second meal of the day comprised two Salmon fishcakes of the quality where you can see large flakes of salmon as well as taste with baked beans and a banana.

20.00 The delight of the day was a programme which reminded of the life of Hannah Hauxwell and her present day life in a village in her eighties and with restricted walking ability. I was one of the millions who was first introduced into this simple but remarkable woman who managed a Dales hill farm after her parents died and who at 46 looked much older. In 1972 she was the subject of a documentary Too Long a Winter was designed to show the live of those who worked in the High Pennines. She lived in the house built by her grandfather, without electricity or running water. The impact of the programme was such that the phones of Yorkshire TV were jammed for several days with people making offers of help. A local factory put up the money so that electricity could be brought to the home and she received thousands of letters, from all over the world as the programme was shown. Then twenty years later the original producer Barry Cockcroft and camera man went back for A Winter too many, as she decided it was time to sell up and move into a cottage, but beforehand she was the guest of honour at the Women of the Year Gala. Books about her life were also produced and she was then taken by Cockcroft to Paris, Venice and Sorrento and on holiday to New York. This evening she was shown in her cottage which had become jammed packed with possessions which she admits she is unable to discard. What was evident is that the person who conquered the nation’s hearts several decades before had not changed, and hopefully would enjoy the renewed attention in her life.

21.00 There is a new USA glossy import, a kind of updated Dallas, set in New York. which merit’s no attention, the suicidal daughter who wants to be an actress but cannot act, the son full of angst who is into drugs and gambling, the state attorney general who has national political ambitions but is into his seventh different relationship with a transvestite, the preacher son who won’t recognise in public his illegitimate son, the wife who has tried hide a forty year relationship with the family’s legal adviser and fixer who has recently died in questionable circumstances, and the head of the family, the wealthy influential Man of America who brings in the son of the family Counsellor, now working as a lawyer for the poor and disenfranchised, after the death of his father, (the body is missing from the helicopter whose mechanism appears to have been tampered with). He is married and seduced by the offer of $10 million dollars a year to do his good works, keeping on his practice and staff while he attends to the needs of the family 24/7, and this possibly includes the needs of the daughter, not previously mentioned, who has a torch for the hero, but manages a succession of disastrous relationships with men only after her money and influence of her father. My thought was the he is the son of the family head in this incestuous mish mash designed to appeal to the jaded palettes of the Dallas and Dynasty soap. The hero is an idiot by the way. He seriously proposed that in exchange for becoming the best paid family counsellor fixer in the land he could work office hours, and remain his own master. If it was not Easter I would be inclined to summon a Biblical plague on them. Then at 22,00, the second brilliant find of the evening, a dramatization of the on stage relationship between Wilfred Brambell and Harry H Corbett and of their private lives. Steptoe and Son proved to be an extraordinary successful situation comedy about a Rag and Bone man and his son, watched by 22 million viewers in the UK alone written by Alan Simpson and Ray Galton of Hancock’s Half Hour, What made the programme essential viewing for a third of the nation was the relationship between the two men, touching the fundamentals of all love hate relationships where people have become interdependent but wish they were not. There were eight series of five to eight programmes between 1962 and 1974 plus a final Christmas special making 57 shows, and unusually a radio series followed from the television success, and also two feature films. The on screen relationship reflected something of the lives of the two men, Harry Corbett was born to a military father in Burma, old enough to serve at the end of World War 2, his mother died when he was three and he was raised by an aunt in Manchester. In one telling moment in tonight’s drama documentary the Curse of Steptoe, his first wife, the talented actress Sheila Steafel declares that for a marriage to work at least one of the couple has to be an adult, as their relationship came to an end when he commenced an affair with an actress met in a film which he hoped would enable him to return to serious acting, but where he was pressed into playing someone who had made it from the working class and still retained his roots, a la Michael Caine. From the second marriage he had two children one of whom became an actress. Harry H died of a major heart attack when only 57, 12 years younger than me, frustrated that he was never able to achieve the acting success forecast for him as the British Marlon Brando. While Harry started life with a void, Wilfred Brambell spent the greater part of his life hiding his homosexuality, and finding it difficult to come to terms with this aspect of his life, becoming an alcoholic with the latter affecting his ability to learn lines and keep to schedules. He was in fact only 13 years older than Corbett, but was able to play an older man several decades than his true age appearing in the Quatermass series on 1953 and 1955 and 1984 in between. He was married but separated after his wife had a son by their lodger, Roger,. Even though homosexuality between consenting adults became legalised he avoided the attention and publicity in the UK by becoming an early sex tourist holidaying in Far East, but established a long term relationship to whom he left a substantial sum when he also died within a couple of years of Corbet aged 73. He was given other opportunities including a Broadway Musical which closed after one night. The drama documentary was followed by an episode from the series, the holiday which emphasised the depth of the two acting performances, something which the two actors in the drama documentary did exceptionally well to match but also underlined the exceptional abilities and special interaction of the originals.

01.30 I go to bed concluding it had been a better Good Friday than anticipated, a day which I had become more focussed on the 101.75 work in translating the 200 boxes of material in cupboard store into sets and volumes before the cost of doing so becomes out of my reach.

09.30 For once I have no recollection of getting up during the night but of prolonged dreaming. I know I resisted getting up with light and went back to sleep again, but did I really pass a whole night without needing to rise? If so I will have to examine the ingredients of the day beforehand.

11.00 Just a coffee has helped me to this point. My mobile phone is being difficult and I will get myself up properly, have a brunch and try and find a new replacement phone. My priority of today. And so it was to be and not as I expected.

1310 About Livingston Stanley and Burton and about me

It is rare that what is planned lives up to expectation so I celebrated my birthday yesterday by drinking several glasses of bubbly and enjoying food when it was fancied, and writing until the early hours and delighting in the humiliation of Chelsea, and the Russian who came over here to prove that money can buy anything, forgetting that even if you buy bodies you will never reach souls. We liked Chelsea only with Murinho because he has soul so all who believe in the great game will join me in wishing further humiliations until he takes his money home and we can begin to regain our Premier league. Of course will not happen. I mean it is like Barnsley or Cardiff winning the FA Cup this year?

To day, getting up too late for breakfast and too early for lunch and feeling like neither, I dabbled in this, and that, for half an hour and then checked my expectation that English cricket was to be humiliated just as English Rugby had been, along with Newcastle Football, and then later in the afternoon the Boro.

Sunderland was not humiliated but just bored everyone for the first half in frustrating the more skilled opposition and put up a little show towards the end when it was evidently too late and we were past caring. Me thinks Roy, and the chairman and their financial backers have begun to lose the plot. You have to remember the soul of this club with its history of glorious defeats. I arrived at what has become my usual parking spot in time to walk into the city centre and obtain a book from Smiths about the basics of acrylic, so that although I had commenced to use the medium, I have progressed in my approach and now want to understand before using further. I want, for once, to be able to create what I feel and see, because the concept alone is not enough and getting others to make it real is cheating contemporary or any other form of art. You can do what you feel and think and call it art as long as you do it.

I say obtained the book because I used a gift card so technically someone else bought, as someone else bought, with another gift card at M and S, both from Christmas, a prawn sandwich and a custard tart for lunch followed by some chocolate covered peanuts kept in the car for the next time I went to the pictures and they had only lasted so long because I had forgotten they were there.

Earlier I experienced ghosts of my time and before. They were mostly good ghosts, some exceptional and engaging beings. I discovered that the film of the search in Africa by Henry Stanley for Dr Livingstone, Forbidden Territory, was being shown which along with a BBC film series decades ago, descriptively titled, the Search for the Nile is about the hold which an idea and an objective can have on the lives of human beings. It is all about what captured the imagination of the British public and their homeland was about to create the British Empire. This film is more about Henry Morton Stanley than Doctor Livingstone, and even though I had seen the film before, I had forgotten of its important chords.
Towards the end of the film when Stanley, having been made the heir to Livingstone's missions to find the source of the Nile and help to bring about the de facto end of slavery, he is reportedly shouted down and ridiculed by the men and some women of the Royal Geographical Society over his claims because he was a journalist and not one of them. I know that experience only too well when I was one of three who voted over the immediate amalgamation of the Association of Child Care Officers into the too quickly generic British Association of Social Workers and I still find it difficult to forgive all those who once they saw the disaster of forcing those dedicated to working with children, working with adults and vice versa, the refused or who then denied the extent to which those employed to care for children, committed acts of physical and sexual violence against them, with the BBC still calling what happened in Jersey abuse. I was once given the opportunity to address a fringe meetings of the Labour Party at its annual conference on subject of mental health along with Barbara Castle David Owen and David Ennals, and saw the chasm open in the faces of those sitting in audience, including some who became Ministers, as soon as I had pointed out there was not one reference to child care or welfare among the hundreds of resolutions submitted by constituencies for consideration (Child care was then a specific service covering children in care or being prevented from coming into care or appearing in the juvenile courts, and provided by social workers, and different from child welfare provided by health visitors and the parents and other relatives).

Stanley was born in the days when you were described as a bastard on the birth certificate (1841) and was placed in the workhouse after his grandfather died and after completing elementary education he was employed as pupil teacher in a national school, a similar situation to my mother half a century later. He is said to have been taken in by a local wealthy man assuming his surname and consequently pretended to be an American when the couple died, denying he was a foreigner. He was reluctantly called up to the Confederate Army and taken prisoner by the other side which he then joined, but did not begin fighting and then joined the navy where he quickly deserted. He took up the cause of Native Americans as a journalist had some adventures in the middle East went to jail but talked his way out of the situation. After publishing a book about his adventure he was taken up by the founder of the New York Herald. How much of his story was been checked by contemporaries is not stated.

Following the succession of the son of the founder of the paper Stanley was able to persuade his employers to fund an expedition to find Dr Livingston who had disappeared into the depths of Africa for a period of six years. He landed at Zanzibar hiring 200 porters, with one internet source mistyping this as 2000, and embarked on a 700 mile expedition during which many died from disease and fighting, and one source suggests that he exaggerated his stern treatment of his entourage to prevent desertion because this was favoured Victorian approach, among the reading public, as even Missionaries were known to flog those paid small sums to help them.

It was on November 10th 1871 then he met up with Dr Livingston, although here are disputes about this, and more so if the famous words, Dr Livingstone I presume was said, or just the make up of the paper's editorial, who to day the whole thing would be filmed on through a Satellite transmitting computer to 24/7 live Although the two men failed to establish the source of the Nile they did prove that it was not Lake Tanganyika. He published a book on this expedition which helped to make the image of Livingstone although the fame also brought to attention his own origins which contributed to his view of events being questioned by the 'establishment' until Livingston's family confirmed that the letters brought back by Stanley from Livingstone were authentic.

Three years later Stanley returned leading an expedition involving 356 people, and which traced the river Congo to the sea, after 999 days, with only 114 survivors including himself as the only European. He published Through the Dark Continent. He then embarked on a new expedition financed by the King of Belgium designed to acquired land under the front of scientific and philanthropic work. His later expeditions were also marked with controversy but he survived attacks and late in life he married, adopted a child and became a Liberal Unionist Member of Parliament. He was knighted and became a legend. Spencer Tracey and Sir Cedric Hardwicke starred in a film about his meeting with Livingston and their lives in 1939. His great grandson is a South African film maker.

I had known more about David Livingston having acquired a 1974 edition of the Tim Jeal Biography. He was a medical Missionary with the London Missionary Society rather than setting out to be an explorer of the African Continent and was the first European to see the Mosi-oa-0'Tunya which he named the Victoria Falls after his Queen.


In his childhood Livingston became an avid reader, which can be a dangerous occupation for a young person as it brings knowledge, curiosity and fires the imagination. His fundamentalist father attempted to stop this but David continued to examine the relationship between religion and science. His first work was in South Africa where as an abolitionist of the slave trade he hoped legitimate work opportunities would bring about its ending, He was badly mauled by a lion, partially disabling one arm and causing him a lifetime of pain. He married the eldest daughter of a missionary in 1845 who was born in Scotland but lived in Africa from the age of four.

He had little heart for traditional missionary work, quickly coming to understand and respect African cultures and his interest became more one of exploration, but whereas other European expeditions were armed with commercial and territorial ambitions, his were small with few porters and paying their way. He returned to Britain to publish a book about his experiences and approaches and this brought him to public attention. This led to British government sponsored Zambezi expedition which he was ill equipped to lead and where during its six years his wife died of malaria, leaving his children effectively orphaned. He then commenced his search for the source of the Nile following on work of Richard Burton, John Speak and others where their findings that the source was somewhere between Lake Tanganyika and Lake Victoria was roughly correct. Livingston's conclusion turned out to be the Upper Congo River, confirmed by Stanley subsequently.

Throughout his life he was a constant opponent of slavery but had little impact given the commercial and other interests involved in turning an open eye to the trade. However he became well known internationally and his disappearance aroused interest and led to the Stanley search. The disappearance was unintentional as only one of 44 letters reached Zanzibar. While his heart was physically buried in Africa, the rest of his body was carried 1000 miles by his close attendants so that it could he returned to Britain where he was buried in Westminster Abbey. Paradoxically his good relations with African leaders helped subsequent colonization. There are innumerable statues and memorials to him throughout Africa, Scotland, in London and Canada and the USA. The most interesting legacy in popular culture occurs in the Get Smart Again film where Max says Dr Hottentot I presume.

The Search for the Nile film led me to Alan Moorehead's book, the White Nile 1972 edition and a particular interest in the extraordinary explorer and man of letters and everything else, Richard Francis Burton where there is general agreement that he achieved success as a translator, linguist, poet and writer, as orientalist and ethnologist, and as a soldier and as hypnotist in addition to his exploring. Some know him more for bringing the Kama Sutra to the attention of Western Europeans and for his unexpurgated translation of the Book of One Thousands Nights and a Night! He is considered to be the first non Muslim European to make the Hajj to Mecca (in disguise) 1853. It was during the subsequent expedition with several British officers that his party was attacked and outnumbered with the consequence that he was impaled in the face with a javelin, one officer was killed and Lieutenant Speke who was to accompany him on subsequent expeditions, was captured and received eleven wounds but managed to escape with a weapon fixed to his head. In 1855 Burton rejoined the army to fight in the Crimea where it is said he was adversely mentioned in relation to the subsequent mutiny.

This did not prevent Royal Geological Society funding an expedition to find the source of the Nile. As with the other explorers of the Day it was only afterwards that the writing of their exploits brought their work to the wider public attention. It was after this expedition that the two men quarrelled and shortly before they were to debate issues at the British Association for the Advancement of Science Speke was killed in a hunting accident, although there is the suggestion that his wounds were self inflicted.

In 1861 Burton married a Catholic but did not adopt her faith and joined the Diplomatic Service serving in Equatorial Guinea, Brazil and Damascus, and after some problems to Trieste (Austria-Hungary) a post which required little work enabling him to write and travel. He was knighted in 1996 and when his travel books were not well received he then made his contributions to the Karma Shastra Society. Much of his work was scandalous and pro Muslim rather pro Jewish and which led claims and counter claims, He died at Trieste in 1890. After his death his wife burned many of his papers to protect his reputation, and action which some subsequently criticised her. Her actions does not surprise given his openness about his interests and reputation for aggressiveness, his drinking, drug taking and general love of shocking people. It could be argue that his placement by the government in a non job in Trieste for twenty years was a splendid way for the British government to try a sideline a problem individual who had become well established in the public eye.

My own interest in Africa and with Missionary work was fired up b the visit of a missionary priest to the John Fisher School which everyone attended around 1953/1954 and led to my requesting to study Latin which had been dropped when I dropped from the A stream to the B for the fifth form year as he had emphasised that before one could go adventuring saving souls, one had to go to university and to study Latin

After all this seriousness I ended my day starting to write by playing chess against the computer, and having some soup at six on return for them match, and then burning to a nice crisp surface a small shoulder of minted lamb with I eat with a glass of red wine, coca cola and a large glass of orange juice, but without vegetables, followed by a small custard tart and strong coffee without sugar. During this I enjoyed the first colour version of The 39 Steps with Kenneth Moore, although the film is inferior to the 1935 Hitchcock Black and White film, subsequently re-shown in a London Theatre (was it the 1980's or 1990's) and which is regarded as one of the great films of British Cinema, but I also liked the 1978 Robert Powell starring edition with John Mills, Timothy West, Eric Porter and David Warner and which is the most faithful to the John Buchan Book.

Yesterday I then became fully engaged with this week's Lewis which was another brilliantly crafted work which takes the relationship between Lewis and his Sergeant to a new and higher level. My only reservation is that as with the villages of Mid Summer's Murders, Oxford is becoming a very dangerous city as the body count from Morse and Lewis accumulates. The episodes concerns four connected deaths by someone who has disappeared and may have committed suicide. However the main focus is with the past of the Sergeant and his knowledge and involvement with those who perish and which brings him into the line of fire with spectacular consequences.