Educating for the arts

I have been very fortunate in life. The greatest benefit of all was to have been born to two parents who loved each other and loved their children, and who were able to support their family to a decent and reliable standard of living. When I was a child, my mother worked as a shop assistant and later in a (pre-computer) clerical job. My father was a welder with Land Rover, first in Solihull and later at Garrison Street in Birmingham. Both were emphatic about the need for their two sons to be educated to the greatest extent of our ability. Many working-class families shared this drive for education and saw it as a way of ensuring that their children had a better life and more fulfilling work than they had experienced themselves. In my father’s case, an additional motive may have been his failure (at the final interview stage) to gain a scholarship for his local grammar school. He must have been keenly aware of how different his life would have been had the interview panel decided he was the ‘right kind of chap’.

This view of higher education as a means to a more prosperous life still predominates in England, both popularly and in government policy. The expansion in the number of university places is often presented as a means of improving the long-term productivity of the labour-force, while, at an individual level, enhancing the earning power of graduates. Neither argument is totally convincing. Productivity in the UK has been near-stagnant since 2008, despite the increase in the proportion of school-leavers going to university. Graduates do indeed earn about £100,000 more across their lifetime than non-graduates. However, this benefit varies greatly according to which course and which university people attend. There is also the possibility that some graduates would have boosted their earnings by a similar amount if they had chosen to take an apprenticeship or learn a trade rather than go to university.

Those actually doing the educating often have different ideas of what higher education is for. They usually love the subject they teach and have pleasure in seeing their students come to appreciate it. Students themselves often see going to university as the key stage in attaining adulthood, leaving home and often being based near the centre of a big city with all its cultural attractions. That was certainly my experience, moving from a dull suburb of Birmingham to a university in the very centre of London. For the first time, I saw a live ballet performance and attended a concert of classical music. I had already spent many hours in Birmingham Art Gallery on my way back home from school, but now I was able to visit the great art galleries and museums of London. In place of endless rows of detached and semi-detached houses, I could view the great sweep of Regents Street, and visit the Palace of Westminster, St Paul’s Cathedral and the surviving alleys of the City of London and the Temple. I had often gone to the local cinema with my parents, but now I could join the British Film Institute as a student member and see classic films from around the world.

You do not of course need to go to university to appreciate the arts. My father had a friend who worked with him on the Land Rover assembly line, who had a beautiful counter-tenor voice and performed in concerts. Another of my parents’ friend was an ardent follower of the Russian composer Scriabin. My wife’s father worked as a toolmaker and her mother as a hospital cleaner, but both had a deep love of music and ballet. Her father played the organ and attended the organ recitals by George Thalben-Ball in Birmingham Town Hall. Her mother took my wife to the Birmingham Hippodrome to see ballet performances. There is also widespread active participation in the arts. All round the country, there are many brass bands and other groups of amateur musicians, amateur choirs and amateur theatre groups. Most of these, however, are now in temporary abeyance because of coronavirus restrictions. People have been forced to drop participation in the arts for the passive receipt of mass culture via television and home computer. 

Public transport by air

When you hear the phrase ‘public transport’, what comes to mind? Probably a bus or train, often crowded, with time spent waiting on a platform or at a bus stop before you can board. Few people seem to regard air travel as ‘public transport’. But travel in modern scheduled airlines is often the most uncomfortable and sustained form of public transport most of us ever endure. We sit for hours in cramped seats, in close proximity with other passengers, whose airborne diseases are circulated round the cabin and shared among us. There may be a two-hour waiting-time before we can board, being patted down by security staff, as well as (in some cases) a walk over a windy and wet tarmac to and from a crowded shuttle bus.

Why then do many people exclude air travel from the concept of ‘public transport’? One reason may be snobbery. I remember a colleague at work turning her nose up when travel by bus was mentioned. “I don’t use public transport”, she said. This was just after she had returned from a distant conference travelling in economy class by air. Snobbery is a kind of social museum of things that once signified status. Once, air travel was confined to the wealthy, and airliners carried only a small number of passengers, each in the kind of spacious seats now only enjoyed in first class. The first jet liner, the de Havilland Comet carried only 36 passengers. I remember watching the film From Russia with Love in 1963, seeing James Bond flying to Istanbul in a Boeing 707. At that time, I had never travelled by air, and both James Bond’s destination and his means of travel seemed unimaginably out of reach for me.

But the Boeing 707, which could carry 189 passengers, really began mass public transport by air. In 1965, the first of over 10,000 Boeing 737 planes entered service, followed in 1970 by the Boeing 747, carrying over 400 passengers. Mass-produced planes with more fuel-efficient engines greatly reduced the cost of air travel, so that cheap pre-paid ‘package holidays’ in Spain became popular for people in Britain from the mid-1960s., followed by a massive growth of independent tourism to the furthest destinations. My experience is common in the UK: my wife, two children and I have, between us, been to over 40 countries, almost always by air. Air travel has become mass transit: astonishingly cheap but often crowded and unpleasant. Nevertheless, the snobbery lingers - almost as if we were still all James Bonds travelling in luxury.

A countryside murder in Worcestershire

 

Coronavirus means that we all spend much more time indoors watching television than ever before. What we need in times of misery and fear is escapism. Hollywood understood this well in the 1930s, and produced a wonderful series of musicals and comedies to entertain a depressed nation. UK television has responded by multiplying the number of travelogue programmes and game shows. But a large proportion of viewing hours is taken up by murder. The most entertaining of these are a sort of game show, in the sense of presenting a puzzle for the viewer to solve. They are often also travelogues: Death in Paradise in Guadeloupe; the Mallorca Files; and Midsomer Murders (and many others) which take place in beautiful English rural villages.

Needless to say, murder in the English countryside occurs much less frequently than in the fictional County of Midsomer, in which every village seems to harbour a serial killer. But we have recently had a real murder of a well-known figure from the next parish. On the night of the 12th to 13th of December 2020, West Mercia Police were called to a car on fire in a lay-by on the Ankerdine Road, about a mile from the birthplace of Edward Elgar in Broadheath. The car contained a body, identified as that of Neil Parkinson (66) from Clifton-upon-Teme. Three people were soon arrested. Mark Chilman (51) from Bromyard was charged with murder and also with stalking Juliet Adcock. A 30-year old man from Wichenford and a 28-year old man from Worcester were charged with conspiracy to murder. Chilman has pleaded not guilty, and the trial will take place in the Crown Court on the 2nd of August. Until then, as is usual with the English legal system, we shall learn little about the circumstances of the crime.

Ankerdine Road, Clifton-upon-Teme and Wichenford are pleasant places, though not as picturesque as the villages in Midsomer Murders. But the death of Mr Parkinson is much more real. A life cut short so suddenly and unjustly brings pain and suffering to family and friends that can persist for a lifetime. Murder is not entertaining at all.

Coronavirus: the winners

The main winner of the coronavirus pandemic is of course the virus itself, which has multiplied throughout the world at speed, helped by rapid and plentiful international transport. Countries which have avoided large numbers of deaths are those which, like the cities and ports of old, erected effective quarantine barriers to prevent infected people from arriving. This option was available to Britain and Ireland, but was not taken. Instead of keeping out sick people, these (and most other countries) have instructed non-infected people to quarantine themselves in their own homes.

The two main human winners in the pandemic are firms which deliver food and goods to people’s homes and the pharmaceutical industry. The latter, allied with universities and research laboratories, have produced anti-viral vaccines with extraordinary despatch, and have reminded us of how vaccinations have prolonged lives over the last century.

In a medical emergency, governments turn to medical science, and thereby sideline the false prophets of the management consultancy industry. But there have been opportunities for outsourcing firms. In the UK, Deloitte’s and Serco received a Government contract of over ten billion pounds to run a service to test people for the virus and then trace their contacts. After months of confusion and delay, this now tests very large numbers of people, although only 40% of tests are confirmed within 24 hours, while the tracing element has probably had limited impact on the course of the pandemic.

Much more successful has been the vaccination programme in the UK, which has been run by the NHS. This is now vaccinating almost half a million people each weekday, and has built up rapidly from a start in December. From the point of view of the outsourcing companies, vaccination has been a lost opportunity. They could have been paid a further ten billion pounds to run a less effective operation (no doubt supported by a failed computer system provided by Fujitsu), followed by further management consultancy contracts to solve the mess when failure became embarrassing to Government.

There have also been wins in our knowledge of public affairs. Apart from the gains made by medical science, we have learnt that many universities in Britain are venal institutions, run for profit and caring little for their students (except as a source of income). In September 2020, universities encouraged their students to register and fill up the halls of residence, and then locked them in when infection rates rose. Some universities even ordered their academic staff to be on campus to provide the ‘vibrant atmosphere’ promised in every university prospectus. They could have instead encouraged students to work online from home where possible, leaving attendance on campus for the smaller (and hence safer) number who need to study in laboratories or on placement.

Finally, there have been winners in language. Apart from the word ‘pandemic’ and associated public health terminology, we have become familiar with the imported word ‘furlough’. This was used by the British Government for its scheme to pay people laid off work because of the lockdowns from March 2020 onwards. ‘Lockdown’ is itself a new arrival from the same time, as well as the phrase ‘social distancing’. The recommended gap for social distancing in the UK is two metres and not six feet, signifying the triumph of the metric system. The winning dreary cliché of the pandemic is ‘the light at the end of the tunnel’. This is used in almost every press briefing to offer the hope that mass vaccination will eventually end our current nightmare. The real hope should be that when this pandemic is finally past, we learn how to better manage the ones that will succeed it.

Old and vaccinated

 On the 5th of January 2021, my wife and I were vaccinated against COVID-19. We were surprised to be invited because both of us are in Priority Group 4 (people between 70 and 75 years of age), and we therefore assumed that we would have to wait until all the people in England who are in Priority Groups 1 to 3 had received their vaccine. But that was not how it was organised. Instead, supplies of Pfizer vaccine seem to have been distributed to a limited number of locations, which vaccinated as many people as possible in the first four priority groups who were registered with the surrounding medical practices. The vaccine centre for our corner of Worcestershire is in the GP surgery at the nearby village of Ombersley. The process of vaccination was efficient. We waited for about two or three minutes, and then entered one of the treatment rooms in the clinic. We were met by a friendly team of two people who asked us to confirm our identity and whether we had any allergies. We were then given the injection, which was painless. We were told to wait for 15 minutes in the Practice waiting-room. The whole process took 20 minutes, with a new patient vaccinated every five minutes. There were several teams operating in parallel, so that several hundred people were vaccinated in Ombersley each day.

We have not yet had our second vaccination, and are by no means free of any risk of infection, but the odds of us getting COVID-19 are now much reduced. This seems such a obvious gain for minimum fuss that it is bewildering to learn that a substantial minority of people are hostile to vaccination. The most recent survey in the UK found that 76% would take the vaccine if advised by their GP or other health professional, while 8% were ‘very unlikely’ to do so. The rest were ‘unsure’. Those most unsure are those most at risk of contracting the illness, namely people from black and minority ethnic groups. But the ‘very unlikely’ group includes some who are hostile and alienated, believe that COVID-19 is a hoax (even to their last breath) or who do not see why they should suffer the inconvenience of wearing a mask merely to protect other people.  

Surveys in the UK have found that older people are more willing than the young to accept vaccination. This may be because the old are less exposed to the Internet, which has become the greatest engine in our society for spreading conspiratorial beliefs. But I think a more important factor is that older people were raised in a time when infectious diseases were a part of everyday life. In my primary school years, I contracted measles, German measles (rubella), mumps and whooping cough. I remember as a child one day looking down at my chest and seeing with dismay the spread of the rash indicating rubella. There was no MMR vaccination then, and so pregnant women were at risk of contracting this illness and giving birth to children who were blind, deaf and with severe learning disability. For the rest of us, however, infectious diseases were commonplace and an expected part of childhood. It was widely believed that it was better to contract these illnesses as a child than in later life.

Quite different were tuberculosis and polio, both of which were widely feared during my childhood. There were still over 50,000 cases of TB notified in England and Wales each year in the 1940s. One of my uncles contracted the disease when serving in the Army in the Second World War. People with TB were often treated in isolation hospitals, many of which were located in the countryside. These were distinctive buildings, designed to enable patients to be separated into single rooms, linked by an open verandah. One of these buildings survives at Sunningdale, near where I live in Worcestershire, although the hospital has been converted into a small housing estate. The incidence of TB began to decline in the 1950s, with the widespread introduction of the BCG vaccine, but also because of better living conditions for the great bulk of the population.  

Polio, unlike TB, was not a disease associated with poverty and seemed to strike adults and especially children at random. A child in my primary school (it was rumoured) had died from the illness. We were all aware of the many children crippled with withered limbs as a result of Polio. What made things worse was that the number of new cases of polio increased in England throughout the 1950s, arriving mainly in summer. This was reversed by the introduction of the Salk vaccine after 1955, named after Jonas Salk, who refused to patent his invention or profit from it, so that it could be distributed to as many people as possible.

COVID-19 resembles TB more than polio, in the sense that its cure will be a result of both scientific development and living circumstances. Also, like TB, COVID-19 will not disappear. It may cease to infect large numbers of people, but it will still be there and may require periodic re-vaccination. TB is still with us, and 4655 people were infected by the disease in England in 2018, with the highest rates among the poor and the homeless. Over 300 people a year die of TB. So we still need the vaccines against polio and TB, as well as the MMR and now the new COVID-19 vaccines to protect us.

My school days: Haslucks Green Primary School 1951-7

My first day at Haslucks Green Primary School was distressing. For a reason that is still unclear to me, the school year in 1951 began in the last week of August rather than the first week of September. My birthday is the 30th August, and so I was sent home, wearing my new school uniform, because I was too young to start school. I remember being very upset, and so a kindly neighbour, Mrs Wilcox, took me to Dudley Zoo for the day. I remember my excitement being on a diesel train rather than the usual boring steam trains. The old headmaster, who had inflicted this on me, soon retired and was replaced by a younger man, Mr Fox, who all the parents agreed was a great improvement.

When I did eventually begin a week later, I was the youngest child in the school, with some classmates a full year older than me. I remember being instructed how to sit cross-legged on the floor, but little else about two years in the infants’ classes. I did at some point have a starring role in the school nativity play as one of the three wise men. This required me to have my face blacked with charcoal since, by tradition, one of the three wise men was meant to be an African. Needless to say, we had no children in the school who looked remotely like an African.

Haslucks Green Primary School was a single-storey building with a large playground. It had not been built long, but was bursting at the seams when I attended. There had been a great increase in the number of children born just after the war, and the school’s catchment area was a rapidly-expanding suburb. Two large annexes had been built in the playground to accommodate four classes, and a new infants school was soon to open not far away.

After the two years in the infants’ classes, I moved to the first of four years in the junior classes. These were streamed by ability, and I was in the ‘A stream’. Classes were large by modern standards, and we sat two to a desk, in rows facing the teacher. Despite the size of each class, I do not remember any disobedience or misbehaviour. I remember the names of three of my teachers: Mr Baker in 2A, Mrs Evans in 3A and the formidable Mrs Alcott in 4A. We had one afternoon a week for sport, which usually meant football for the boys. This took place in a nearby park, to which we were led by our teachers in a long crocodile. I soon discovered, to my disappointment (and I suspect to the disappointment of my father)  that I had no talent for sport. There were also school trips. The only one I remember was a trip to Bristol Zoo, though I am not sure how we got there or what we saw.

Classes each morning were interrupted by drinking milk. This was brought in bottles of a third of a pint in a crate by two milk monitors. The School did serve dinners at lunchtime, but I would always go home each day for a full meal. As I got older, I would walk this journey unaccompanied. There was little traffic on the roads and no fear of assault. What did frighten us was polio, which came each summer until a vaccine was developed in 1955. I think one boy in the School died from the disease, and I remember sensing my parents’ fear. Other infections were common, and I caught measles, mumps, German measles and whooping cough. We all knew the names of these infections and we were expected to catch them at some point in our childhood.

My other memory of primary school was of aeroplanes. In the early 1950s, the RAF was still a substantial force and many of the planes which served in the Second World War were still flying. I remember being in the playground and seeing Spitfires, Ansons and Meteors flying overhead. Our understanding of the world was dominated by the War, which had had a deep effect on our parents, but which they rarely discussed with us. The results of the War were all around. There were still bomb sites in the centre of Birmingham and the Bull Ring was dominated by the ruined Market Hall.

I have no unhappy memories of Primary School. I enjoyed learning and playing. However, this all got more serious after I passed the 11-plus exam and went to Grammar School in Birmingham.

They’re all the same

Many years ago, I was an active member of a political party. Being active mainly involved listening to speakers and debating resolutions at monthly meetings. More exciting were the elections campaigns, local and national. The most time-consuming task in elections was to identify those people most likely to vote for your candidate so that they could be encouraged to go out and vote on election day. Voters varied from friendly to hostile with many indifferent. Some would offer opinions of the parties or the candidates. But one group puzzled me - the people who told me that they never voted because the parties were ‘all the same’. This was puzzling because in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I was politically-active, the two main political parties were further apart than ever before (or since). It is only now, with hindsight, that I realise that for some of these voters the parties were indeed the same: neither was explicitly racist.

The racist undercurrent in British politics has indeed been under-represented, and only bursts into the open on infrequent occasions. In April 1968, the MP Enoch Powell made a much-publicised speech calling for an end to non-white immigration and the repatriation of minority ethnic groups, and opposing anti-discrimination laws. The speech included many of the themes common to racist organisations before and since. There were the scary (and almost certainly invented) tales of elderly white people threatened by black neighbours, the absurd idea that white people would be ‘swamped’, and the paranoid idea that black people secretly wished to dominate the country. To his credit, the Conservative Party leader, Edward Heath, sacked Powell from his post as Shadow Defence Secretary. But public opinion polls at the time showed that Powell’s views were widely-supported and there were several short strikes as well as marches to Parliament by thousands of London dockers and porters.

None of the main political parties since that time has explicitly endorsed racism and both the Conservatives and Labour have promoted black and minority ethnic politicians to cabinet rank. Anti-racist laws were strengthened and racist views essentially banned from the broadcast media. As a result, racism was driven underground. If you are white, other white people would express racist views to you in confidence with a sort of illicit glee. Racism and discrimination could be practised in similarly disguised manner in recruiting and promoting staff. Nevertheless, public opinion polls show a steady decline in racist views, perhaps as a result of an older generation being replaced. But this progress was reversed with the vote on leaving the European Union.  

After the vote on our villages neighbourhood plan, I spent some time chatting to the polling clerks. They told me (without prompting) of their miserable experience at the EU referendum. Many voters had clearly never voted before and were paranoid about the vote. Some demanded to use a biro instead of a pencil “because the secret service will rub out our votes”. Some men insisted on directly supervising how their wives voted to make sure they voted to leave the EU. This group of undercover xenophobes,  who had previously dropped out of voting ‘because they’re all the same’, had now found a cause.