Category Archives: history

history, personal

Characters One has Known

Those of you who have met me and know me at all well have probably heard me talk of the “old boy” who was our local builder when I was a kid. He was called Maurice Maxfield and to an average child seemed aged, although he would have been only a few years older than my parents. In fact I also remember Maurice’s father (Charles), although as he died when I was about 9 I doubt I ever spoke with him. Despite always looking fairly disreputable (well he was a builder) Maurice was a real gentleman and a confirmed bachelor; he would always tip his hat to my mother, even from the other side of the High Street!

A lot of this was brought back to me recently as I found a copy of a book** on the local characters of Cheshunt and Waltham Cross where I lived. What follows are some edited quotes about Maurice from the book; some of the things they relate I didn’t know.

Maurice Charles Maxfield was born in Trinity Lane (his father, Charles Maxfield, who came to Waltham Cross in 1888, was born in Yorkshire, in 1873). On the death of his father in 1960, Maurice carried on the family business in the building trade, first established in 1850. Maurice Maxfield owned around fifteen houses in ‘the lane’. His main hobby was his electric organ, which he had built in his home. ‘The Mighty Maxwell’ organ was an enormous construction, stretching from the ground floor to the attic.

Maurice hated television, but he took an interest in local affairs. He died on the 9th of March, 1995 at the age of eighty-four […]

From Ron Bunting (one of Maurice’s tenants):

He was a very sentimental man, who kept a low profile. But he looked after himself quite well, with the help of all his lady friends, who also took good care of him! He used to get Loganberry wine and Mince tarts from me. Yes! he was well liked and well loved in ‘the lane’ […]

Maurice loved skating and often went skating at Richmond ice rink [quite a trek across London even now!]. He was a great fan of Sonja Heini, whom he once met. And about twenty years ago we had a very severe winter with lots of snow and ice around, and Maurice, finding his old-fashioned ice skates, was to be seen boldly skating up and down Trinity Lane.

From John White, who I remember as one of Maurice’s workmen:

I come from a little village called Wyke near Bradford in Yorkshire. I came down to Cheshunt just before the war in June 1936 and I [worked] for Maurice […] from 1947 till 1995 […]

I remember Maurice s father, Charles, and his mother well. His mother was a Miss Storey before she married, and her mother and father ran a baker’s shop at the top of Windmill Lane.

Maurice had two cars, a Ford model ‘A’ and his father’s car, a 1927 Clyno. Maurice […] drove the old Ford around, with all his building ladders on board, he didn’t seem too bothered about its value or its age.

Maurice played in cricket matches and his father was president of the Cheshunt Cricket Club, with Maurice as the vice-president.

Maurice also sang with his father in the choir at Christ Church and later played the church organ there. He built an organ in his home […] the inner works of which has 200 valves in it. If it was taken out of the house, they would have to remove a window and half the wall with it. Maurice used to play the organ every Sunday night, until about two months before he died.

From Bryan Hewitt:

I knew Maurice Maxfield during the last ten years of his life […] His mind was quite extraordinary as was his house. His propensity for trotting out unsolicited vintage local scandal and historical fact was staggering […]

Maurice’s house was spooky. With its verandah and bell-pull, it reminded me of the time when I did a paper-round there in the early 1970s. I thought then that the house was a cross between Herman Munster’s and the Boo Radley House in To Kill a Mockingbird.

The gates to the yard on the left-hand side as you face the house consisted of the cast iron ends of a Victorian bedstead, complete with casters! Beyond his vegetable patch was his two storey workshop, built from corrugated iron.

At the opposite end of his massive garden stood his air-raid shelter. Dotted around the garden were bits of carved masonry mostly of an ecclesiastical nature. No doubt Maurice had saved them in the course of his building career. In his office at the front of the house, he had on the desk a candlestick telephone (still working). The room was panelled in dark oak which he had built. None of the rooms were large, but all suffered from insufficient light and the need of a jolly good dust! The kitchen was a health hazard, as was Maurice’s handkerchief. Bakelite electrical plugs hung precariously on their fabric-coated wires from the wall.

[…] Strangely there was a communication tube which connected the kitchen with the master’s bedroom. Sealing the tube was a whistle, which you blew, in order to catch the attention of the person at the other end.

Famously, there was the organ which Maurice Maxfield had built in the cluttered front room. He told me that he had started building it in 1947, and still had not finished it in 1982, because of small details yet to be added […]

When Maurice died, Peter Rooke [another local historian, who I also remember] and I gained permission from his family […] to remove anything of local interest and hand it over to the [local] Museum. It was an Aladdin’s Cave! There were masses of local photographs, some of which were of the Cheshunt cricket team, there were old programmes, local ephemera and his precious sign, all of which were saved […]

Of course we must not forget the two vintage cars that Maurice drove. Both cars were from the 1920s. One was a Clyno, which I am led to believe was one of only five left in the world; the other was a Ford model ‘A’ and it was not unusual to see him driving it about for work, with his ladders, and several feet of plank sticking out ungraciously from the rear of the car […] In his 70s and 80s, he was going to lots of vintage car rallies as far afield as the USA. Maurice Maxfield was also an expert skater and had once partnered the Norwegian film star, Sonja Heini (1910-1969).


Maurice Maxfield (right) with his father (Charles) and their cars in Trinity Lane. The left hand car is the Ford Model A and the one on the right the 1927 Clyno. The small gable roof (with 3 windows) just visible behind the Clyno is the front of Maurice’s house. This must have been taken in the mid-to-late ’50s as the road has clearly been well surfaced which it wasn’t when my parents moved there in 1950.
The cars were amazing. The Ford Model A, dating as I recall from 1920, was a deep polished blue, and was indeed always seen with ladders and planks protruding from the back of the soft top (which I never saw down).

The 1927 Clyno was an equally polished deep green (darker than British Racing Green) and always immaculate as it was only ever used on Sundays and special occasions. Again it was a soft top.

Maurice once gave me a lift home from the shopping centre in the Ford. We chugged the mile or so at a very stately pace even for the time (probably early ’70s); I could almost have walked it as quickly, but I wasn’t going to turn down the chance of such a ride. I noticed that the speedo had a top speed of 40mph; I don’t think we got up above 15mph! And Maurice used to regularly drive from north London to Yorkshire for the weekend in these cars! I also remember him saying that even in the ’60s and ’70s spares were not a problem: the c
ars were so simple if he couldn’t buy a part he could make it!

The picture above is typical of Maurice. It had to be really tropical before he dispensed with his grubby-looking overcoat and he was never without his trilby. I also remember him riding along the lane on his father’s old “sit up and beg” bicycle. He also had a hardcart which he trundled around carrying building materials. He would go anywhere for a vintage car rally or to hear or play a church organ.

My mother was another who, in a small way, looked after Maurice and benefited from his generosity. Every summer he’d say “Mrs Marshall there are more strawberries in the garden than I’ll eat. Just wander in any time and help yourself.” So we had a supply of strawberry jam and of course Maurice had a few pots as well. It was a similar story with the grapes on his vine and the quinces.

One final story. I remember him once telling me that he went to Hertford Grammar School in the 1920s (the best part of 15 miles away and the nearest grammar school). He had to walk across the fields and marsh to Cheshunt Station (a good 1½ miles), get the (slow) steam train to Hertford and then walk from the station to school (probably another 10 minutes). And he did this return journey, every day, 6 days a week (yes, grammar school on Saturday mornings in those days!) and in all weathers.

They don’t make them like that any more!

** Dave Field; Cheshunt: Its People, Past and Present; Gaillet Press (2000); pp 47-55

arts, current affairs, history, memes, personal, photography, topographical

[13/52] Magnolia

[13/52] Magnolia
Week 13 entry for 52 weeks challenge.

This is the magnificent magnolia in the churchyard outside St James’s, Piccadilly, London. Taken against the backdrop of the church, which was designed by Sir Christopher Wren but much restored.

The church also contains a small memorial to the poet, artist and mystic William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) who was baptised there on 11 December 1757.

The churchyard of St James’s hosts an Antiques Market on Tuesdays and an Arts & Crafts Market on Wednesday to Saturday. I’ve not been to the former, but the latter is definitely worth a visit if you’re present hunting and especially in the run-up to Christmas. There is also a coffee shop and the church itself is almost always open.

history, topographical

Coffee Houses

Now we all know the importance of coffee houses in the history of our society – Lloyds of London (the insurance market-makers) was started in a coffee house in 1774. By this time the coffee house had been in existence for well over 100 years having been started in London in 1652. Slightly surprisingly the Commonwealth government were in favour of coffee houses as they didn’t provide intoxicating liquor.

But like all good British institutions they had their rabbleous side. I came across this last evening:

There was a rabble going hither and thither, reminding me of a swarm of rats in a ruinous cheese-store. Some came, others went; some were scribbling, others were talking; some were drinking [coffee], some smoking, and some arguing; the whole place stank of tobacco like the cabin of a barge. On the corner of a long table, close by the armchair, was lying a Bible. Beside it were earthenware pitchers, long clay pipes, a little fire on the hearth, and over it the high coffee pot. Beneath a small bookshelf, on which were bottles, cups, and an advertisement for a beautifier to improve the complexion, was hanging a parliamentary ordinance against drinking and the use of bad language. The walls were decorated with gilt frames, much as a smithy is decorated with horseshoes. In the frames were rarities; phials of a yellowish elixir, favourite pills and hair tonics, packets of snuff, tooth powder made from coffee grounds, caramels and cough lozenges.

This is by one Ned Ward writing in the 1690s and quoted in Jonathan Bastable, Voices from the World of Samuel Pepys. Not so much different from your average Starbuck’s really.

books, current affairs, history, science

And the Managers are Still in Charge of the Loony Bin …

This is a long quote and deserves a post all of it’s own.

Sir Hartley Shawcross, after the Labour victory [1945], had announced: ‘We are the masters at the moment.’ But who were the ‘we’ in this sentence?

The most eloquent answer to this question in art is found in Anthony Powell’s comic masterpiece A Dance to the Music of Time, the first volume of which, A Question of Upbringing, was published in 1951. The story begins in the year 1911 at an unnamed boarding school, obviously Eton, as the hero, Nick Jenkins, ambles idly through the winter mist to have tea with his chums. As he makes his way back to the house he passes a very different sort of boy – it is Widmerpool, who forces himself to have a run each afternoon. Widmerpool appears to be no more than a figure of fun in the school section of the book, but even in this early glimpse of him, the narrator and his readers become aware that he is a figure who lives by the will, in some mysterious sense more in tune with his times than the languid, bohemian Nick, who wishes to live by the imagination.

Powell was a close friend of Malcolm Muggeridge at this date, and the two men would often walk round Regent’s Park together discussing the fundamental clash on which the emergent novel was to feed, namely the war between the will and the imagination. Power mania had been an obsession of Muggeridge’s since his Marxist days: what draws men and women to power, how they become addicted to it, how it takes over from other appetites. One of Muggeridge’s beliefs was that power addicts were often dyspeptic, and he rather cruelly attributed Stafford Cripps’s dyspepsia to power addiction. When Widmerpool grows up, he too is a dyspeptic. There is a memorably funny Sunday lunch when Widmerpool gives the narrator a meal in his club, washing down cold tongue with a glass of water. By the time the narrative has reached the postwar period, it is no surprise to find that Widmerpool, a fellow-traveller with the Communists, who has rather dubious associations in Eastern Europe, is an MP in the Labour interest. He has achieved what he wanted from the very beginning, on that run through the winter mists in the Thames Valley: the free exercise of power. Widmerpool is a manager, a wheeler-dealer. He judges people by how they have got on; he has no sense of England’s past, no feeling for people (at quite a late stage of the sequence, he forgets the narrator’s Christian name). Much of Powell’s somewhat peppery Toryism goes into the creation, no doubt, but the novel contains a really acute perception of what had happened to England during the war. It had not been taken over by Bolsheviks or by the working class. Widmerpool is an efficient, ruthless staff officer, a paper pusher. He could easily have said, after the 1945 election: ‘We are the masters.’ He would have meant that the managerial class, previously all but non-existent, had taken over. The growth of bureaucracy in Britain in the postwar years, the filling up of political, Civil Service and professional posts with colourless, pushing people controlling others for the sake of control, was to be a feature of life from then onwards. Widmerpool was a man of his time, and a man of the future.

[AN Wilson, After the Victorians]

Well, no change there then!

As so often in his two books, The Victorians and After the Victorians, AN Wilson gets his rapier right to the heart of the matter. Although both books are chunky paperbacks (both weigh in at some 500 pages) they are well worth reading – and eminently readable. AN Wilson gives a rather more perceptive, and admittedly slightly jaundiced, view of the history of Britain between the 1830s and 1950s than one finds in the standard texts. He delves under the political and economic covers, especially around the underlying reasons for both world wars and (at least for me) puts a completely new spin on modern British history.

amusements, books, history, quotes, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

OK, here’s this week’s selection of oddities encounter in the last few days …

‘Look at the bird.’ It was perched on a branch by a fork in the tree, next to what looked like a birdhouse, and nibbling at a piece of roughly round wood it held in one claw.
‘Must be an old nest they’re repairing,’ said Lu-Tze. ‘Can’t have got that advanced this early in the season.’
‘Looks like some kind of old box to me,’ said Lobsang. He squinted to see better. ‘Is it an old … clock?’ he added.
‘Look at what the bird is nibbling,’ suggested Lu-Tze.
‘Well, it looks like … a crude gearwheel? But why —’
‘Well spotted. That, lad, is a clock cuckoo.’
[Terry Pratchett; Thief of Time]

Hindsight, the historians’ parlour-game, can lead from false premise to false conclusion. Because we see the fateful consequences of our forebears’ actions, we can wrongly suppose that, had they done differently, things would have been better.
[AN Wilson, After the Victorians]

The clergy were seldom rich, but they were treated as if they were gentlemen: very often they were. Nearly all of them had degrees. High Church, Low Church, Broad Church, they were disseminated throughout the land. If they were even half good at their jobs, they and their wives and families mixed with everyone in their parish. They were extraordinary agents of social communication. It meant that almost everyone in England was within five miles of a man who could read ancient Greek.
[AN Wilson, After the Victorians]

Snow fell, east winds blew, pipes froze, the water main (located next door in a house bombed out and long deserted) passed beyond insulation or control. The public supply of electricity broke down. Baths became a fabled luxury of the past. Humps and cavities of frozen snow, superimposed on the pavement, formed an almost impassable barrier of sooty heaps at the gutters of every crossing, in the network of arctic rails.
[Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room]

In the highbrow world you “get on”, if you “get on” at all, not so much by your literary ability as by being the life and soul of cocktail parties and kissing the bums of verminous little lions.
[George Orwell]

In a mad world only the mad are sane.
[Akira Kurosawa]

amusements, beliefs, history, personal, quotes, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

This week’s selection …

There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.
[Denis Diderot]

Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.
[Dalai Lama]

[…] meeting at the College of Arms [with] Clarenceux King of Arms to discuss what might be appropriate [on a] coat of arms […] He suggests that though some people like to incorporate a play on their name in their Arms he was not sure a champagne bottle was on their approved list.
[Sir Stephen Bubb; http://bloggerbubb.blogspot.com/2011/01/arms-and-church.html]

In the movie Stardust Memories, Woody Allen meets some aliens and starts asking them all the Big Questions About Life. They tell him, “You’re asking the wrong questions. If you want to make the world a better place, tell funnier jokes!”
[Brad Warner; Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality]

The next two are quite deep philosophically, but absolutely right logically …

I don’t know what’s waiting at the end of our lives. No one does. But it’s not the future that matters. Right now is what counts. If you want to believe in reincarnation, you have to believe that this life, what you’re living through right now, is the afterlife.
[Brad Warner; Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality]

The present moment is eternal. It’s always there. It is unborn and it cannot die. And it does not reincarnate.
[Brad Warner; Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality]

A guy walks up to a Zen master and asks, “Is there life after death?
The Zen Master says, “How should I know?”
The guy replies indignantly, “Because you’re a Zen master!”
“Yes,” says the Zen master, “but not a dead one.”
[Brad Warner; Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality]

You cannot find reality inside a computer!
[Nishijima Roshi]

current affairs, history, memes, personal, photography

4/52 Katyn Memorial

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4/52 Katyn Memorial, originally uploaded by kcm76.

Week 4 of the 52 week challenge of a photo a week.

This is the memorial in Gunnersbury Cemetery, west London to the thousands of Poles murdered by the Russians at Katyn in 1940. I’ve inset the inscriptions as otherwise they are unreadable. Click on the picture to get a larger version.

The cemetery itself is rather interesting, if not a little OTT with competing acreages of black, white and brown polished marble. It is owned by the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, although it is actually in the LB of Ealing. Consequently it is the final resting place of many from the Polish and Armenian emigré communities. Many of the Armenian graves are written in Armenian script; and not all have a simultaneous translation. You will also find members of the Chinese community, at least one member of the French nobility and the expected English including architect Aston Webb. There is also a grave commemoration a number of members of the 24th Polish Lancers and a small group of twenty WWII war graves.

It is immaculately maintained and well worth a visit, even on a cold January day; it’ll look really pretty in the Spring when all the cherry blossom is out.

beliefs, current affairs, history, quotes

Quote of the Week

This week’s usual rag-bag of oddities which have crossed my path in the last 7 days or so …

*****

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you first must invent the Universe.
[Carl Sagan]

*****

I like your Christ. I don’t like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.
[Mohandas Gandhi]

*****

Journalists write to support democracy, sustain truth, salute justice, justify expenses, see the world and make a living, but to satisfactorily do any of these things you have to have readers. Fairness and accuracy are of course profoundly important. Without them, you aren’t in journalism proper: you are playing some other game. But above all, you have to be read, or you aren’t in journalism at all.
[Tim Radford at Guardian Science Blog]

*****

Trivial is a favourite insult administered by scholars. But even they became interested in their subject in the first place because they were attracted by something gleaming, flashy and – yes, trivial.
[Tim Radford at Guardian Science Blog]

*****

The Guardian used to have a special Muzzled Piranha Award, a kind of Oscar of incompetence, handed to an industrial relations reporter who warned the world that the Trades Union Congress wildcats were lurking in the undergrowth, ready to dart out like piranhas, unless they were muzzled. George Orwell reports on the case of an MP who claimed that the jackbooted fascist octopus had sung its swansong.
[Tim Radford at Guardian Science Blog]

*****

3 July 1679. Sending a piece of Venison to Mr. Pepys Sec: of the Admiralty, still a Prisoner, I went & dined with him.
[Guy de la Bédoyère; The Diary of John Evelyn]

*****

26 May 1703. This dyed Mr. Sam: Pepys, a very worthy, Industrious & curious person, none in England exceeding him in the Knowledge of the Navy, in which he had passed thro all the most Considerable Offices, Clerk of the Acts, & Secretary to the Admiralty, all which he performed with greate Integrity: when K: James the 2d went out of England he layed down his Office, & would serve no more: But withdrawing himselfe from all publique Affairs, lived at Clapham with his partner (formerly his Cleark) Mr. Hewer, in a very noble House & sweete place, where he injoyned the fruit of his labours in geate prosperity, was universaly beloved, Hospitable, Generous, Learned in many things, skill ‘d in Musick, a very greate Cherisher of Learned men, of whom he had the Conversation. His Library & other Collections of Curiositys was one of the most Considerable; The models of Ships especialy &c. […] Mr. Pepys had ben for neere 40 years, so my particular Friend, that he now sent me Compleat Mourning: desiring me to be one to hold up the Pall, at his magnificent Obsequies; but my present Indisposition, hindred me from doing him this last Office:…
[Guy de la Bédoyère; The Diary of John Evelyn]

*****

For more than forty Cold-War years the United Kingdom played the role, in the words of the eminent investigative journalist Duncan Campbell, of America’s Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier.
[Nick Catford; Cold War Bunkers]

*****

Spring Quarry near Corsham in Wiltshire became the Central Government War Headquarters – the alternate seat of government to which the Great and the Good would decamp in the event of a nuclear war. The very existence of the site was denied by the Government for decades. When its secrets were finally revealed in December 2005 it proved to be a grave disappointment. Starved of cash by successive administrations, its development had been halting and, despite its enormous size, the Spring Quarry site is bathed in a gloomy aura of half-hearted compromise.
[Nick Catford; Cold War Bunkers]

*****

Apropos this last quote, when you start reading about the UK’s WWII bunkers and the like (of which Corsham is a prime example) you seriously wonder how the country achieved anything, let along managed to win the war. But then reading Sam Pepys’s diaries and letters things were much the same in the 17th century – ministerial obfuscation at every turn and a serious lack of funding. Oh, what do you mean? It isn’t any better now? Surely not!

amusements, beliefs, books, history, sexuality

Quotes of the Week

Lots and lots to choose from this week, mainly because I’ve been reading Brad Warner’s books on Zen as well as his website and lots else besides …

Imagine, for a moment, what the world would be like if we took the same approach to money as we do to sex. Imagine trying to hide all evidence of money from children, telling them that it’s not something they should know about. Imagine shaming them for asking questions about it, for expressing an interest in it, and for wanting to experiment with it. Imagine that you never explained how budgets work, or how to balance a checkbook, or how to pay for anything. Then, imagine that when they turn 18, handing them a credit card and saying “good luck with that.”

In essence, that’s what we do with sex.

Would you be surprised if those young adults didn’t know how to responsibly handle money? Would you be shocked if they ended up in crisis because they didn’t have the skills to take care of themselves? Would you think that their parents and schools had done their job?

If you answered “no” to these questions, then maybe you can also ask yourself why it should be any different when it comes to sex.
[http://www.scarleteen.com/blog/scarleteen_guest_author/2010/10/22/why_we_need_scarleteen]

Albert R Shadle was the world’s foremost expert on the sexuality of small woodland creatures.
[This could easily be the opening of a Douglas Adams or a Terry Pratchett novel, but it’s actually from Mary Roach, Bonk: the Curious Coupling of Sex and Science]

Our life is just action at the present moment. The past is nothing more than memory, and the future is nothing but dreams. At best, past and future are no more than reference material for the eternal now. The only real facts are those at the present moment. You cannot go back and correct the mistakes you made in your past, so you better be very careful right now. You can dream about your future, but no matter how well you construct that dream, your future will not be precisely as you envisioned it. The world where we live is existence in the present moment.
[Brad Warner, Sit Down and Shut Up: Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha, God, Truth, Sex, Death, and Dogen’s Treasury of Right Dharma Eye]

The Paris Peace Conference [of 1919] dispensed recipes for war. The powerful nations dished out independence: which meant it was not independence. Something which has been given you through the benevolence of a higher power is not true independence: it is a sign that you are not strong enough to stand on your own.
[AN Wilson, After the Victorians]

Virginia Woolf’s prose was as beautiful as her face, but like many twentieth-century English writers, she had nothing to write about.
[AN Wilson, After the Victorians]

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.
[Andre Gide]

These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopaedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.
[Borges; Essay: “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”]

Action and its results are one and the same. Time, the thing which makes us see them as separate matters, is the illusion. Time is no more than a clever fiction we humans have invented to help organize stuff in our brains.
[Brad Warner; ]

Boredom is important. Most of your life is dull, tasteless and boring.
[Brad Warner; ]

I am where I am because I believe in all possibilities.
[Whoopi Goldberg]