Inside Story Issue 7

inside story
ISSUE NO. 7
Our new title, Keeping Quiet - Visual Comedy
in the Age of Sound - has won praise from
Harry Hill, (pictured here) who calls it ‘a
brilliant history of modern slapstick’.
Find out more on page 2
A World Book Night special for Chaplin Books
Some 35 percent of t he UK
population never read for pleasure
- and don’t own books. That statistic
was the impetus behind World
Book Night, which this year takes
place on April 23. A committee
chooses 20 titles each year across
a variety of genres and volunteers
across t he countr y hand out
thousands of copies of these books
free of charge - a campaign funded
by publishing companies and by
The Reading Agency. As well as
encouraging people to discover
reading - and particularly to try out
authors they’ve never read before
(there are quite a few on the 2015
list which will be unfamiliar even to
ardent readers), World Book Night
stimulates visits to bookshops . This
is particularly important now that
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the UK is dominated by one single
bookchain - Waterstones - and now
that independent bookshops are
shrinking in number alarmingly. In
Chaplin Books’ home territory,
there are surprisingly few: who
would have thought that cities the
size of Portsmouth (no independent
bookshops) or Southampton (just
one - October Books), both of
which can boast a considerable
literar y heritage, would have
become so devoid of places for
people to discover the pleasure of
reading? Hayling Island, a small
holiday resort island near
Portsmouth, is the proud possessor
of the country’s smallest bookshop,
and just up the road from Chaplin
Books is The Book Shop at Lee-onthe-Solent. Both have
entrepreneurial owners and that’s
why, we would suggest, that they
are still thriving. At Lee, owner Rick
Barter is dedicating World Book
Night this year to Chaplin Books an opportunity for local people to
come and chat to a wide range of
authors about their work ... and to
taste a canape or two. Among the
authors attending are John Bull (I
Was Rupert Murdoch’s Figleaf),
John Green (Exploring the History
of Lee-on-the-Solent), James Christie
(Dear Miss Landau), Julian Dutton
(Keeping Quiet), Brian Musselwhite
(From Privett Park to Wembley
Park), Harriet Curtis-Lowe (Where
the Streams Meet), and Geoff
O’Neill (Memories of Ultra). In
fact, prayers for good weather are
in order because, with so many
authors present - and, we trust, lots
of guests - we will certainly fill and
bookshop and will need to spill out
onto the pavement. !
In this issue:
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Life at the ‘News of the Screws’ 6
A new Film Studies series
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Cream of the crop
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Keeping Quiet
KEEPING QUIET - Visual Comedy in the Age of Sound
Keeping Quiet is a love-letter to
the modern sight-gag on film and
television, tracing the history of
physical clowning since the advent
of sound. Taking up the story of
visual humour where Paul
Merton’s Silent Comedy leaves
off, Julian Dutton charts the lives
and work of all the great
comedians who chose to remain
silent, from Charlie Chaplin – who
was determined to resist the
‘talkies’ - right through to the
slapstick of modern-day
performers such as Rowan
Atkinson, Matt Lucas and Harry
Hill. This fascinating chronicle –
spanning nine decades - shows
how physical comedy, at first
overshadowed by dialogue-films
in the 1930s, reinvented itself and
how this revival was spearheaded
by a Frenchman: Jacques Tati.
Julian Dutton draws on his own
experience as a comedy writer
and performer to give an expert
analysis of the screen persona
and the comedy style of dozens of
the screen’s best-loved
performers.
2
An extract from the Introduction
On Easter Day in 1956 ageing
comic Buster Keaton was cruising
through the Hollywood hills in his
dark blue Cadillac. He passed
Charlie Chaplin’s old estate, wound
his way along the dry hot avenue
by Harold Lloyd’s mansion
‘Greenacres’, and headed along
Summit Drive in San Ysidro Canyon
towards Mary Pickford’s decaying
manor, ‘Pickfair.’ Pickford had been
one of the greatest stars of the
silent era and, now in her late
sixties, was throwing a reunion
party for everyone she’d known, on
and off-screen, from those lost
decades.
A c c o r d i n g t o Ke a t o n t h e
gathering was a melancholy affair a reunion of phantoms, a
regrouping of the old guard whose
careers had been brought to a
juddering halt when Al Jolson first
squeaked out ‘you ain’t heard
nothin’ yet!’ in The Jazz Singer.
Pickford’s mansion was full of
shadows and memories, drifting
butlers, a sense of lost time. But one
thing Mary said to Keaton that day
stuck in his mind. He recalls her
saying, ‘It would have been more
logical if silent pictures had grown
out of the talkie instead of the other
way round.’
It is a commonly held belief that
on October 6 1927 when Jolson
belted out those pioneering songs
in The Jazz Singer he was sounding
the death knell of silent film - and
with it, visual comedy.
This is a myth. Certainly the
careers of many silent comedians
were damaged, if not ruined, by
the microphone, and many had
completed their best work anyway
by the end of the 1920s and had
already hung up their comedy hats,
such as Harry Langdon. But just as
many continued to make films
throughout the 1930s and beyond,
including the Big Four – Charlie
Chaplin, Laurel & Hardy, Buster
Keaton, and Harold Lloyd - all of
whom released pictures throughout
the first decade of the sound era
but whose principal laughs still
came from purely visual routines. In
addition, new film comedians were
appearing on the scene who were
making talkies but whose schtick
was nevertheless firmly rooted in
the visual tradition of clowning,
mime, routine-building, sight-gag
and facial reaction – supreme
comics like the Marx Brothers, W C
F i e l d s a n d W i l l H a y. T h e s e
comedians didn’t abandon visual
comedy with the arrival of talkies;
they simply bent the sound picture
to their will. Later - in the 1940s
and beyond – they would be joined
by Jacques Tati, Norman Wisdom,
Jerry Lewis, Ernie Kovacs, Eric
Sykes and many more.
This book, then, is a history
and celebration of visual comedy
from after the appearance of sound
in 1927 to the present day - a
chronicle of non-verbal humour in
the age of dialogue. Its primary
raison d’être is to tell the stories of
the lives and work of the great
pantomimic clowns of the last
eighty years, but it also aims to
argue that visual comedy is a genre
in its own right. Of course, there is
one genre of TV and film that never
abandoned visual comedy at all,
and that is animation. Because of
the wealth of existing books and
s t u d i e s o n c a r t o o n h i s t o r y,
however, I have chosen in this book
to focus solely on live-action
humour.
Pickford’s observation that ‘It
would have been more logical if
silent pictures had grown out of the
talkie instead of the other way
round,’ was not simply that of an
unemployed actress bitter at having
been cast aside by her industry
af ter a seismic tec hnological
innovation - it was an astute
assessment of the aesthetic of film.
Sound technology was, despite
what we may think, not an advance
in the cinematic art – it was
actually a setback. It is only
“Slapstick has often
achieved a greater level
of satire than linguistic
humour”
because silent comedy predates
verbal comedy in the history of film
technology that we view spoken
comedy as a progression. The
coming of sound occurred at the
point where cinema was
approaching a peak of artistic
excellence: just as the aesthetic of
free-flowing cinematic drama and
comedy was exploding onscreen in
Buster Keaton and Dorothy
Sebastian in Spite Marriage: a
silent film made in 1929
the mid to late 20s, along came
dialogue - and suddenly both
camera and actor were bolted
ruthlessly to the floor. Comedy
became the static fast-talking twoshot, and the endlessly inventive
long-shot visual routines of the silent
decades - made possible by not
having to record any actor’s
dialogue - became suddenly ‘oldfashioned’.
Ever since, visual comedy has
been perceived as an act of
nostalgia, looked down on as a
childish, almost idiot cousin to its
more refined and literate elders,
satire and observational humour.
Indeed, the very word ‘slapstick’
conjures up images of crude
violence, t he comedy of t he
unsophisticated: the Three Stooges,
the Chuckle Brothers, Futtock’s End,
The Plank. We may have laughed
at that kind of stuff when were kids,
but well, we’ve grown out of it now
…
Yet in one of those recent
ubiquitous TV chart-shows, The
Greatest TV Comedy Moments of
all Time, many of the top clips
tur ned out to be sight-gags:
Cleese’s silly walks, Fawlty’s goosestep, Dawn French collapsing into a
puddle in The Vicar of Dibley, and the winner – David Jason’s Del Boy
falling through the bar in the sitcom
Only Fools and Horses. The latter
formed the target of a sustained
lampooning attack by Stewart Lee
in his BBC2 series Stewart Lee’s
Comedy Vehicle: ‘Is this what we
really think is the funniest TV
moment? Del Boy falling through a
bar, and Trigger making a face? Is
that really what we’ve come to,
Britain?’
Lee’s scorn for this comedy
visual moment is not surprising,
occupying as he does the position
of comedy’s enfant-terrible, an
intellectual stand-up with a
persistent distrust of the
mainstream. Lee is one of the few
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4
original rebel artists working in
c o m e d y t o d a y, o c c u py i n g a
position at the end of a long line of
Oxbridge satirists from Peter Cook
to Armando Iannucci whose
humour is verbal, intellectual,
satirical and reflective. Visual
comedy, slapstick - that’s what our
grandfathers laughed at: it belongs
to the old days.
But does it?
Certainly through the 1930s
and 40s, fast-talking comedy
ousted pantomime and threatened
to bury it for good - though Laurel
& Hardy and Chaplin valiantly
continued to produce visual musichall material. But in 1949 James
Agee wrote an article for Life
magazine, ‘Comedy’s Greatest
Era’, a hymn to the glories of silent
comedy and a lament for its sidelining. In this landmark piece Agee
recognised visual comedy as a
g e n r e i n i t s ow n r i g h t . C o incidentally, around the same time
as Agee’s article appeared, across
the Atlantic in France novelist
Colette was penning a paean to an
obscure vaudevillian named
Jacques Tati, a pantomimist who
had been per forming on the
European cabaret circuit for nearly
a decade. He knew visual comedy
had never gone away (a view
shared by Buster Keaton who,
though demoted to the position of a
hack gag-writer for M-G-M, was
given standing ovations in Paris
theatres after the war where he
performed his old silent routines).
Tati went on to make a sequence of
four comic, near-silent masterpieces
Playing with image: Mr Bean (Rowan
Atkinson) wraps up his entire room so he
can explode a paint-bomb and obtain
instant decoration. Post-explosion, he
clocks the result of a former party-guest
sneaking back to recover his hat.
between 1949 and 1967 – Jour de
Fête, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday,
Mon Oncle and Playtime – films
which reinvented visual comedy
and which set the bar of wordless
humour so high that it has been
scarcely reac hed since. The
richness of Tati’s gags – a traffic
r o u n d a b o u t b e h a v i n g l i ke a
fairground carousel; an inner tube
gathering leaves as it rolls into a
cemetery where, now covered in
foliage, it becomes a funeral
wreath – proved that purely visual
c o m e d y wa s f a r f ro m b e i n g
‘childish’. This was comedy of
poetry and metaphor: a surreal
playing with planes of vision.
Since Tati’s revival of silent film
comedy there have been periodic
flowerings of wonderfully inventive
pantomime – Norman Wisdom;
Er nie Kovacs exploding onto
American TV in the 50s with his
surreal and largely visual conceits,
including sketches containing only
household objects; Jerry Lewis;
Benny Hill’s early innovative work;
Pierre Etaix; Richard Hearne; Eric
Sykes; Ronnie Bar ker; Mar ty
Feldman’s brilliant work in the late
60s and early 70s including his
classic ‘Long Distance Golfer’ and
‘Coach Tour’; The Goodies; Reeves
& Mortimer; Harry Hill; Rowan
Atkinson.
This book c hronicle s and
celebrates this continuous but
hitherto neglected tradition. In so
doing, it sets out the argument that
far from being the unsophisticated
cousin of verbal comedy, slapstick
has often achieved a greater level
of satire and humanity t han
linguistic humour; and that it
persists as a dynamic creative
force, ripe for reinvention by
anyone with the creative will to do
so.
JULIAN DUTTON is a screenwriter
and actor whose work has won a
BAFTA, a British Comedy Award
and a Radio Academy Gold
Award. With Matt Lucas and
Ashley Blaker, he created and
wrote the BBC visual comedy series
Pompidou. He co-created, co-wrote
and guest-starred in The Big
Impression on BBC1, and his sitcom
for CBBC, Scoop, ran for three
series.!
If you enjoyed this extract then you’ll want to read the book: Keeping Quiet is a large-format paperback with 87 black-andwhite illustrations, priced at £15.99 and available direct from Chaplin Books and from all good bookshops and internet book
retailers including Amazon. It will also be available from July 2015, as an ebook for all platforms.
5
The Battle for the Soul of the News of the World
An extract from I Was Rupert Murdoch’s Figleaf by John Bull
“We didn’t know it, but everything
was about to change at the NoW and this is how I imagine it all
began …
Picture a delightful morning in
autumn, when Paris wears her
prettiest dresses, the glowing tints
of chestnut trees, of red and gold,
the streets full of parading
demoiselles, lovers and dreamers,
music from street singers filling les
boulevards …
In his spacious apartment with its
wonderful views of the City of Light,
Professor Derek Jackson is rubbing
the sleep from his eyes, preparing
to welcome the new day.
Then he remembers he is selling
his 25 percent family holding in
News of the World shares; lately
the income from this share has been
- to put it politely - not what it had
been.
He ponders: “How much could I
get for my shares on the open
market?”
And the answer comes in the
rotund shape of Mr Rober t
Maxwell, a print and publications
predator. With the grin of the
hunter around his hungry jaw, he
announces that he has offered a
mighty £26 million in a takeover
bid for the News of the World.
So, as the autumn of 1968 turns
to winter, began the Battle for the
Soul of the world’s biggest-selling
title - and the staff of the paper
feared they were facing a bleak
future.
Stafford Somerfield instructed me
to write a draft leader for Sunday’s
paper, the first of the New Year: it
would be an appeal to English
loyalties – a way of ‘wrapping’ the
Rupert Murdoch: first the News of
the World ... and then the Sun
6
paper in the Union Jack. With my
name, why wouldn’t I?
‘We’re as English as Roast Beef
and Yorkshire pudding,’ we said and so on, for our millions of
readers. The BBC rallied to the flag
but (much to the delight of our
competitors) reality pointed to
Maxwell winning the war.
“We can’t go wrong.
After all ... he’s just a
simple sheep-shearer”
“There’s just one way out,” said
the Carr faction. “We’ll have to sell
a slice to another rich bugger,
someone we can trust to see things
our way.”
They came up with a virtually
unknown Aussie, an ex-Oxford man
(where he is said to have displayed
left-wing leanings and joined the
Labour Party), son of a chap who
owned a group of newspapers
Down Under, a set-up regarded
(wrongly)
as
run
by
backwoodsmen compared with the
sophistication of London and Fleet
Street.
“Well he’s our man,“ said the
NoW owners, workers and
supporters. “We can’t go wrong the man’s got money and some
reputation in the financial world
and we can certainly keep him well
under control. After all he’s just a
simple sheep-shearer.”
When I think with hindsight of all
the sheepish media tycoons owning
n ew s p a p e r s a n d T V s t a t i o n s
worldwide who have wound up
being being shorn by Ruper t
Murdoch since that fateful day in
January 1969... it’s (as we often
say in the business) truly a story
you couldn’t make up.
7
In his book Rupert Murdoch – A
Business Biography, my one-time
apprentice reporter Simon Regan
has a racy account of the battle for
the Screws. He pictures Robert
Maxwell as a power-dr iven
financial manipulator, rich and
clever enough to get the best
wheeler-dealers in the City of
London on his side; and Sir William
Carr and the rest of his family and
longtime shareholders in an uneasy
alliance with Rupert Murdoch - an
unknown in the City.
In this big-time contest, seen as
the Champ Robert v the Novice
Rupert, the outcome was regarded
as a foregone conclusion: Maxwell
was pictured on the TV news, off to
the last most important meeting of
the money men, grinning
complacently, lips curling with
anticipation. The Carr-Murdoch
alliance was regarded as a touchand-go, long-odds bet.
But on the fateful day the
meeting hall was packed with a
new mob of shareholders. The
Carrs took the unprecedented move
of agreeing to give shares to
numbers of journalists and others
8
on the staff of the NoW in an
attempt to bloc k the sale to
Maxwell. They just had to give the
shares back later ...
When the dust of battle cleared,
As Rupert put the
records on for the staff
party, it occurred to us
that we would soon be
dancing to his tune
Rupert emerged as the winner.
He’d got his first Fleet Street
newspaper. Maxwell, the loser,
huffed and turned his back. He told
the BBC cameras that Murdoch had
used ‘the law of the jungle’ to win.
Rupert smiled sympathetically and
shrugged (“just the luck of the
game”).
Meanwhile we, the workers, were
down on our knees, thanking the
Almighty for our salvation.
Our new boss, Rupert, was an
enigma to Staf ford and his
suppor ters, including Mic hael
Gabbert and me.
He made little impact at first. In
fact considering his reputation, he
adopted a remarkably low profile.
It was uncannily as if we had a
mouse somewhere in the house that
we couldn’t find.
Early on we had a private party
for some of the editorial staff - a
retiring do for Joan, Stafford’s
super-ef ficient and angelic
secretary.
As he often did, Stafford put me
in charge of keeping the glasses
topped up, at a table in the Big
Room alongside the record player,
where the new Australian boss (a
few years older than me) happily
took over the chore of changing the
music.
It probably occurred to most of
us then that we would soon be
dancing to his tune; it certainly
crossed my mind.
It fitted his general approach to
the office - a quiet, easy-going
presence. We knew so little about
him that any slight rumour whistled
through the ranks disseminating
wild and eccentric info ....
“Rupert hates suede shoes, y’know.
Yes, can’t stand men in suede shoes
- been known to sack people there
and then if they showed up
wearing ’em to the office. S’ a
fact!”
“He’s terribly mean, Rupert. Yeah,
won’t spend a penny more than he
can help. Look at his shabby
suits ... that tells you a lot about
the man.”
And this one, which I heard from
several NoW executives at different
times:
“Murdoch - he’s mean all right. I
was walking down Fleet Street with
him when I noticed that the sole of
one of his shoes was flapping
loose. It made this awful flip-flap
noise all the way down the road. I
couldn’t stand the damned racket
and I kept fretting that we’d bump
into someone like Rees Mogg, or
Bernard Levin, and we’d wind up
as a diary item in The Times or,
God forbid, the Daily Express.
“So I suggested we pop into the
men’s footwear specialists in the
Strand to fix him up with a new
pair of shoes. He was having none
of it. And after lunch at the Savoy
we still had to put up with the slipslap from his shoe all the way back
to Bouverie Street.”
The first of Rupert’s changes was
hardly important in the scale of
great events - but it did send
shockwaves through the ranks of
the scribes and inkies.
At the start of our working week
we were told that the six-column
format of the broadsheet pages of
the great News of the World was in
future going to be seven columns.
For some it was a cause for a loud
wailing and gnashing of teeth and
breast-beating. It produced an
thunderous outcr y such as
Londoners might have raised if
authority tried to change the
numbers on the face of Big Ben
from Roman numerals to Arabic.
After all, the layout men had been
doing the six-column version for
years and could do it with their
eyes closed, so weren’t keen on
changing; and the new seven-
column layout would cram in more
stories, giving the compositors even
more to do.
In order to fit the new layout, the
type size of the text throughout
would shrink from eight point down
to seven point - just about enough
to give us another column on the
page. Quite how our new
managing director managed to get
that past our very militant inkies the guys who would have to do the
setting of the new type format - I
never discovered. But I’m pretty
sure that money must have dropped
chinking into the pockets of the
composing-room boys.
We editorial types feared that
this would mean a serious change
in the grand flagship Sunday paper
with its longtime proud boast:
ALL HUMAN LIFE IS THERE
The look of the old paper changed
overnight and Gabbert and I
couldn’t decide whether Rupert
judged it would seem a bigger
bargain to the reader - or was just
designed to demonstrate to us who
was really running the show.!
If you enjoyed reading this extract from I Was Rupert Murdoch’s
Figleaf then you’ll want to find out more about what it was like to
work for the News of the World in its heyday. I Was Rupert
Murdoch’s Figleaf by John Bull is an illustrated paperback priced at
£9.99 and is available direct from Chaplin Books, from all good
bookshops and from internet book
retailers, including Amazon. An
ebook version of the book is
available from your preferred
supplier, for all ereader formats.
Youl might also want to check out his
other books: The Night The Blitzed
The Ritz, about growing up in WWII,
and The Smile on the Face of the
Pig, about being a young reporter
in the 1950s.
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News Round-Up
Coming soon!
Dear Miss Landau - the
musical!
GEORGE PORTER
(book) and DAVID
P BAILEY (music)
are putting t he
finishing touches
to Dear Miss
Landau, a stage
play with music,
which is inspired
by James Christie’s
autobiographical
book of the same
name published by
Chaplin Books in
2 013 .
A
promotional CD is
c u r re n t l y b e i n g
produced which,
together with the script, will be used to send to
theatrical agents with a view to getting the musical
staged. In the meantime, a demonstration EP is
available with five songs from the show (some of these
will also be on Youtube - for more details of this and
other developments with the show, check out our
Chaplin Books Facebook page). The show is fastmoving, funny, zany and poignant - and although we
can’t give too much away at the moment, what we can
say is that it’s guaranteed to knock your socks off.
10
PETER BROADBENT has already written two highly
successful books about his time in the Royal Navy:
HMS Ganges Days and HMS Bermuda Days. Now
you can read about what happened to him after the
de-commissioning of Bermuda - and his travels to the
Far East. A Singapore Fling, like his previous books, is
an engaging read, full of humorous stories which will
ring a bell with matelots past and present. It’s
available as an ebook from your preferred supplier, or
direct from Chaplin Books.
What happens to those carefully researched essays or
papers that Film Studies students or academics spend
weeks or months preparing? If they are MA essays,
they probably never see the light of day again once
they have been marked. Or if they are conference
papers, they are given once - and then probably
languish in a cupboard while a busy academic just
never gets the time to turn them into an article for an
academic journal that probably only publishes two or
three times a year ... and takes twice as long as that to
make a decision.
Chaplin Books felt it was a great shame that this
valuable research (which has often received high
marks or excellent feedback) is usually unavailable to
other researchers in the field. We are therefore
launching a new series of Film Studies ebooks under
the ‘Short Takes’ banner that will bring completed
papers (ones that have already been marked or peerreviewed) to a much wider audience.
Each ebook in the series will be between 5,000
– 6,000 words and will be accompanied by up to six
colour or black-and-white illustrations. The ebooks will
be made available via internet booksellers’ websites
worldwide, on all e-reader platforms including Kindle,
iPad and Kobo. They will retail at £1.99.
The aim is to build the Short Takes series into an
invaluable resource for Film Studies.
One major advantage for authors published by
the Short Takes series is that they will still retain the
copyright in their book: all they will be doing is
licensing Chaplin Books to produce and market an
ebook of the work. Authors will therefore still be free
to submit the same piece of work to an academic
journal or to incorporate it in an academic book.
The main opportunity this series offers is to
enhance a student’s or researchers’ curriculum vitae
and to enable their work to reach a wider audience.
To submit a piece of work for the Short Takes
series, email us first: chaplinbooks@virginmedia.com
and we will send you a ‘style guide’ which outlines a
few basic guidelines about how to submit your paper
and any accompanying photographs. Submissions are
welcome from post-graduate students, researchers
(whether independent or affiliated to a university), or
university members of staff in any country.
The first titles in the Short Takes series will begin
to appear in summer 2015.
The Short Takes series front covers will have a distinctive
‘branding’ for easy recognition
11
12
Cream of the crop - an extract from
Britain’s Wartime Milkmen
At the time of the outbreak of war, the milk industry
employed some 70,200 workers including milkmen,
clerks, yardmen and managers. United Dairies had
1,000 men called up in the first week, while Express
Dairies had more than 2,800 men eventually leave for
active service. Again it was the womenfolk, young
boys and older men who kept the doorstep service
going. Some women took over their husband’s rounds
after they had been called up for duty. Often two
women were employed to do the extremely arduous
work of a large milk round. There were product
shortages too: in January 1940, the rationing of dairy
products was introduced and the milkman, often
considered a friend of the family, would help
customers to write up the names in their ration books.
Blackout regulations also had an immediate impact,
making it necessary to reorganise from two deliveries
a day to just one during the hours of daylight.
Households were given a choice of two milkmen
by the Government, one independent, and one from a
Co-operative Society, to reduce competition and make
more manpower available. Zoning agreements were
formally written up, with copies issued to each dairy
company in the area to ensure they all knew the
regulations and where their milkmen could serve. As
had happened in the Great War, the manpower
shortage meant many milk companies did not survive
and many were forced to merge or be taken over by
larger enterprises.
Alperton Park Dairies, serving in the Wembley
area, was taken over by Express Dairies, although the
owner, Viv Ferris, was a cousin to Leslie Ferris, a highranking director with United Dairies. Zoning dictated
that Alperton must go to Express territory while
When the bombs rained down and houses were reduced to piles of
rubble, the familiar figure of the milkman picking his way along the
street, jaunty cap on his head, was an immensely reassuring sight.
Sometimes he would place a
pint on the front step of a
house where the only part
of the building that had
survived was the doorstep
itself - knowing that
n e i g h b o u r s wo u l d f i n d
where the occupants were
sheltering and make sure
they got their milk. Often
the ‘milkman’ would actually
be a woman, or a young
boy, or a man too old for
active service, because the
regular roundsman had been
called up. Many of those
Author Tom Phelps, who
spent over 30 years in the
dairy industry working for
Unigate
roundsmen never came home.
Britain’s Wartime Milkmen is a fascinating book, packed with
photographs and anecdotes, charts how Britain’s milkmen played
a key role in the nation’s morale through the Great War and into
the Second World War. It also shows how the industry itself went
through many changes: from three deliveries a day made by ‘milk
pram’, a heavy handcart containing large churns from which the
milkman measured out the milk for customers, to the introduction of
bottled milk delivered by horse-drawn carts, and finally to the
electric milk-float.
nearby Vale Farm Dairies was taken over by United
Dairies as it was in a different zone. In 1944 Express
bought the Chatsworth Dairy Company of Sheffield
and The Manorcroft Dairy at Dewsbury, two more
companies that found it impossible to continue
independently. Trading in the Winchester and
Southampton area were two long-established milk
companies, Arthur Brown Ltd and Harrison’s Model
Dairies, but wartime difficulties meant that the
companies merged in 1940 and rounds staff found
themselves working for the newly named Brown &
Harrison’s.
One of many young boys who became milkmen
was 14-year-old Lenny Edwards who started work on
13
9 February 1942 with a glowing
reference from his headmaster.
No driving licence was needed
for a horse-drawn milk float,
unlike motorised vehicles, but
because he was underage, his
father had to act as guarantor in
case there were any cash
irregularities. His starting wage
was 19/6d a week and his first
horse was aptly named
‘Spitfire’. Lenny was asked to
serve the village of
Harmondsworth in Middlesex
where, in 1944, the Air Ministry
bought land near to the village
to build an airfield, enabling the
RAF to embark upon long-haul
flights to Japan: the war ended
before major work had started
but, in 1946, the site became
Heathrow Airport.
At Pinner in Middlesex,
young United Dairies milkman
Eric Avery, being only 16 in
1940, was one of a trio of
workers who stayed overnight in
the depot to look after the
horses during fire-watch duties.
During the night several bombs
fell in the area and in the
morning light he discovered one
that was unexploded in the
middle of the yard. Such a
dangerous situation did not
disrupt supplies, however: the
resourceful milkmen simply
sourced their milk from the
nearby Harrow Depot and
deliveries carried on as usual. Eric
later married Daphne Walesby who worked in the
depot office. She too had to take her turn on firewatch duty and recalled having to sleep on a camp
bed, terrified of the rats that scuttled around the
stables in the darkness.
In nearby Uxbridge, Yvonne Stagg, another 16year-old at the beginning of the war, who worked in
the office at the Express Depot, recalled:
Whatever happened – bombs, air raids, et
cetera – we carried on. It was quite an adventure
really. They took milk down to the Underground
stations, and delivered it to the houses that had been
bombed. People hadn’t got windows or doors
sometimes but they had their milk.
Despite the bombing, milk was regularly
delivered and not infrequently delivered to the front of
14
houses that had been completely demolished, in the
knowledge that neighbours would know if the
occupants were alive and would take the milk to them.
Bombing of railways often meant that milk trains failed
to get through and many processing and distribution
depots were hit.
To release labour, milk rounds were rationalised
and measures taken to cover the rounds of dairymen
whose premises had been blitzed. By the start of 1940
at least 700,000 children and mothers had been
evacuated to the countryside and milk sales fell as
much as 38 percent, while in some cities, rounds were
merged. This reduction meant horses became surplus
and were sold to the Army. Although milk rounds
became depleted in the cities, consumption became
much higher in those rural districts.
The Emergency War Budget introduced by Sir
John Simon included the rationing of petrol, which had
an effect on moving milk from processing plants to
distribution depots, but few milkmen used petrol
vehicles. Sir John also increased sugar duty, which led
to higher prices for sweetened milk in tin cans.
Rationing of foodstuffs, introduced in January
1940, included dairy favourites such as butter and
cheese. By March that year bacon, sugar and meat
were also rationed, followed by tea in July. In 1941
jam, cheese, canned food and other goods were
added. The introduction of the National Milk Scheme
gave an undertaking to deliver milk to every ‘priority
household’ where expectant mothers, children and
invalids were allowed a pint a day. The rest of the
population normally received two pints a week per
person, although that was not guaranteed. By March
1945 the weekly ration had increased to two-and-ahalf pints.
The yearly manufacturing output of milk bottles
was 122,000,000, requiring 70,000 tons of glass, but
The Milk Industry magazine reported that the wartime
answer lay in recycling. After an appeal to return
aluminium foil caps from milk bottles for conversion
into war material, The Milk Industry magazine
reported that 80,000,000 had been handed to
milkmen in the first few months. Many milk floats
carried posters reading ‘Aluminium bottle caps. Please
return to us.’ This was extra work for the milkman but
they cheerfully collected the bottle tops from their
customers and entered into friendly rivalry as to who
could collect the most. It was not until 1942 that
aluminium was once again released for bottle-capping.
Milk bottle caps bore slogans such as ‘raw material is
war material’.
By October 1942, 90 percent of the world’s
rubber production had been lost and there was a
shortage of motor-car tyres. The enterprising owner of
“No milkman would ever
leave his faithful horse - not
even in a bombing raid”
loss of milk bottles was running at 30 million per
annum caused mainly by non-return by customers,
although many bottles were destroyed in bombing
raids. A campaign was launched to get customers to
‘rinse and return’ to help the war effort. As was the
case with many dairies, Gordon Clifford, who was in
charge of the family business started by his
grandfather in 1874, had to ask his milkmen to return
to can deliveries when glass became scarce.
It wasn’t just glass that was a problem:
aluminium was a precious commodity needed for
aircraft construction, but some 2,270 tons of
aluminium a year was being used to make foil milkbottle tops. Rigid controls were introduced, supplies
for milk-bottle capping were only obtained with great
difficulty and experiments with other materials such as
zinc, zinc-with-tin, and lead-based caps were carried
out, but these were ill-fitting, easily came away when
being handled, and could cause health problems. The
Wren Davis Dairy, which had a motorised fleet
ser ving in the remote and rural par ts of
Buckinghamshire, had his milkmen fit motor-bike tyres
to their vans. At that time, with severe shortages of
raw materials, United Dairies instructed staff to save
everything. The directive even included notes on how
to sharpen a pencil just to put a point on it, and, if
using a sharpening machine, not to grind the pencil
unnecessarily.
On advice from the government, instructions
were issued to owners of horses about what to do
during bombing raids. Horses were to be unhitched
from their milk floats and tethered to lamp-posts or
some similar object to avoid them bolting and, if
nothing practicable was available, the horse was to be
tethered to the rear of the milk-float. Only when this
task was carried out, was the milkman to think of his
own personal safety and take refuge. These might
have been the instructions, but in reality no milkmen
would ever leave his frightened companion, his faithful
horse. !
If you have enjoyed reading this extract, then you’ll want to read
the book. Britain’s Wartime Milkmen is a large-format paperback
with 100 illustrations in colour and black-and-white, priced at
£9.99 and available direct from Chaplin Books and from all good
bookshops and internet book retailers including Amazon. You’ll
see Britain’s Wartime Milkmen featured in Best of British
magazine (April 2015); the BBC magazine Who Do You Think
You Are? (april 2015) and on offer from Dairy Crest’s ‘Milk and
More’ service and other dairy companies around the UK.
15
What makes a good book cover?
Pictured above are four of the winners in the Academy
of British Cover Design book-cover awards, announced
in March.
The Academy cites the difference between
graphic design and cover design, pointing out that
book covers need to incorporate a lot of information
in a small space - not just the title and author, but
quotes, prizes, authors’ previous works and so on. The
covers, often produced by agencies, then have to be
‘sold’ to the publishers (and sometimes to the
supermarkets too) in terms of their concept.
At Chaplin Books, we’d add to this by pointing
out two developments which have meant that front
covers have to work much harder than in the past. The
principal one of these is that, with the growth of
Amazon, covers are now most often seen in
‘thumbnail’ form, so bolder, simpler covers that still
have impact when viewed on a phone, tablet or as a
thumbnail on a laptop are the ones that work best.
The second development is that, with the shrinking
number of bookshops, each new title has to fight to
gain shelf space (for every new book that you will see
in a bookshop, 99 other new titles have been
squeezed out). Often, unless the publisher pays large
sums for the book to be displayed ‘face out’, it is
shelved ‘spine out’, so - no matter how striking the
cover - the likelihood is that the potential reader will
never see it. This method is fine for readers who know
exactly what they want: but it does take away that
delicious serendipity of discovering an unknown book
for the first time, just by glimpsing its intriguing or
attractive cover.
In an industry where publishers like to replicate
success, there is a tendency for ‘copycat’ front covers
to identify particular genres. We’re all familiar with
the ‘curly’ lettering that identifies a book as ‘chick-lit’;
the hand-coloured sepia photograph that signifies
nostalgia - or, indeed, the bleak black-and-white
16
photograph that indicates a ‘misery memoir’. The
implication is that if the reader enjoyed one particular
book, they can identify similar books simply by the
cover design.
In the early days of
the paperback, publishers
relied solely on typography
- Penguin fiction was bound
in an orange cover, with
nothing more than a
distinctive cream stripe
across it and the title/
author’s name in a plain
but distinctive type. This
‘type-only’ style of cover
was retained in France for
paperbacks for many years
after it was superseded here in the UK. But this was an
era during which the publisher’s name itself was the
‘brand’ and indicated a book worth reading.
We hope that innovative cover design will
continue to flourish and that publishers will find ways
to overcome the challenges of technology - though we
tend to share the view of vinyl record enthusiasts who
drool over the artwork for a classic gatefold LP and
complain that a CD offers much-diminished scope for
superlative graphic design. Perhaps, despite
‘thumbnail’ images, lack of shelf space in bookshops,
and the ‘virtual’ cover of the ebook, front-covers will
still attract the best design minds: after all, it’s often
the case that the more strict the parameters, the better
the design that emerges. !
Inside Story is published twice a year by Chaplin Books,
1 Eliza Place, Gosport PO12 4UN. Tel: 02392 529 020.
Email: chaplinbooks@virginmedia.com