Author: MumblingNerd
Love, equality and tolerance; reject hate.
Humour, social media, politics, humanism, cats, chocolate and Nottingham.
I’m Roy Manterfield by the way, or MumblingNerd online, and I live in Nottingham in the UK.
Black Jacks and Penny Falls.
Spent some time and money in a seaside amusement arcade recently, mainly on Penny Falls, which are no longer pennies and with some machines you just win tickets.
Penny Falls haven’t really worked for me since decimalisation in 1971; the old penny was ideal in size and weight, and with care and attention I could usually come out with a modest profit.
Anyway, I won 78 tickets and having checked the prizes available, the 78 equated to 7 Black Jacks…
Black Jacks in the 1960s were four for an old penny (1d), so that would be almost 10 Black Jacks for a new penny (1p). Although with time and inflation you would be hard pressed to buy even one Black Jack for one new penny.
So, my 78 ‘winning’ tickets, even at their present Black Jack value, would only amount to about 7p…
Just 66 Years
I recently saw a social media post indicating that the two photographs featured here were taken just 66 years apart.
(By John T. Daniels – File:Wright_first_flight.tif, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75148383)
(By NASA / Neil A. Armstrong – Apollo 11 Image Library (image link), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=137926)
It prompted me to think about my granddad, Harold Manterfield, who was a child at the time of 1903 photograph, showing the first powered, controlled, sustained airplane flight, which occurred on 17 December that year.
Harold enlisted in the armed forces during the First World War and learnt to fly, firstly for the Royal Flying Corps and later for the Royal Air Force. The photograph shown here, of him wearing his flying gear, was taken in about 1918.
Possibly because of that experience, my granddad was very interested in the Soviet and US space flights in the 1960s, but sadly he didn’t get to see the first Moon landing, as he died on 8 February 1968, the year before the Apollo 11 mission.
1000 Photographs
These are miscellaneous photos that I have a habit of taking all the time. I thought I’d post them on social media as ‘one of a thousand’ and just see where it goes. I tend to post one every day or so.
There’s no particular reason or subject matter. I take photos continually, almost entirely with my phone now, so they’re not especially high quality, although still brilliant compared to the first digital camera I bought in the 1990s.
I like to capture random items and record moments or personal things, just for my entertainment or satisfaction.
So there you are; these are the first two hundred images:
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Souvenir newspaper cuttings
Various newspaper cuttings of my comments and mentions, mostly in the Nottingham Post.
Click on a cutting to read it.
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Souvenir newspapers
I’ve been trawling through some old newspapers that I kept for various reasons.
The first two are from Leeds; this one is my last copy of the Leeds Evening Post before I left Leeds in 1974.
The other is a 1972 Leeds Student article about the sad demise of Bradford trolleybuses.
The next three newspapers were my souvenirs of the Moon landing in July 1969.
This one is the Centenary Souvenir Issue of the Leicester Mercury from 31 January 1974.
These last two are about the assassination of Robert Kennedy in June 1968 and the Sunday Times Magazine review of 1989; the year the Berlin wall came down.
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A tiny time capsule
A very small family history find today; a tiny time capsule from fifty years ago.
Sue is using some of my Aunt Joyce’s embroidery cotton, from a couple of tins of reels and skeins we inherited after Joyce died in February 2000. We found a receipt dated 27 November 1971, with a note of the skein colour in Joyce’s handwriting and, to also place it fifty years ago, a mere five digit phone number for the store in Hove.
The receipt is in decimal currency as the old imperial £sd was taken out of circulation in the February of that year. We don’t know what Joyce bought the skeins for, but they don’t seem to have been used, well, not until now anyway.
Perception of time
There’s an odd disconnect with time perception as you age. I recently watched tennis from the Nitto ATP Finals and it was the fifty year anniversary of the competition; 1970 to 2020.
Now fifty years is a fair amount of time, but in 1970 I was at art college and have very vibrant memories of the people, places and events of then, it was a period of huge change in my life.
In 1970 we had people visiting and returning from the Moon, there were enormous jet passenger aircraft, supersonic Concorde, motorways, huge office blocks, colour TVs and most people had access to telephones; in many ways it wasn’t that different.
Therefore fifty years seems, to me, to be a ‘relatively’ short period; something in very clear memory. But if I place my mind back to 1970 and think of a period fifty years before, that would have placed it in 1920.
1920 seems to be an altogether different age. The appalling disaster of the first world war had recently ended and much of the world was still struggling to recover from the deadly influenza pandemic that had infected 500 million people. My mother and father were yet to be born and my grandparents were young people in their twenties, also recovering from war.
There were relatively few motor vehicles on the roads, cities and most larger towns were served by electic trams, and almost the whole country could be accessed by steam powered railways. Assuming of course that you had both the money and the time to do so, which most people didn’t.
I’m not sure what point I’m trying to make; except that living through a period gives you a very different perception of how that time appears when you look back. Personal experience, feeling and living through something, colours your knowledge of it, makes it familiar and brings it back into sharp focus, in a markedly different way to knowledge gained through reading and studying.
Here’s to the next fifty years…
Every story tells a picture
We’re moving house sometime in the next few weeks, or months, so I’ve been sorting out all the stuff we’ve (okay, I’ve) collected over the last 32 years, and before that if I’m honest. There’s rather a lot.
The last few days I’ve been sorting out some old picture frames, keeping some, sending some to a charity shop and dismantling old, damaged and unwanted ones.
When I mounted pictures I used to pad the frames with old newspapers and behind one I found a pre-decimalisation Leicester Mercury, dated 26 January 1970. Fascinating reading, especially the letters page; correspondence from people who were then in the age group that I am now in, wanting the reintroduction of National Service (conscription into the armed forces) to sort out the undisciplined young hooligans of the time.
Nothing changes does it; many in our older generations decrying the actions and attitudes of the youth of today. Perhaps conveniently forgetting that we, the older ones, are the people responsible for whatever dire situation society is presently suffering through, and so leaving to the next generation to sort out or wrestle with. While, as with every generation before, we censure them for being feckless, lazy and entitled. “It wasn’t like this in my day!” No, perhaps it wasn’t, things change, but, for some inter-generational attitudes, probably not so much.
Anyway, returning to picture frames; dismantling another, I discovered the next packing material was a first edition of the Nottingham News, dated 4 February 1979. An interesting read again; there was an article about the splendid actor Don Warrington, appearing at the Nottingham Playhouse as Mark Anthony in Julius Caesar. Sue and I saw that production and thought it was excellent, although I slightly disbelieve that it was really 40 years ago.
There were many other framed pictures and photographs that hadn’t seen the light of day for a long time. I came across a ‘Shirts’ linocut that I made at art college about 1971 and a framed photograph of A A Milne, his son Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh, where I’d written on the back ‘To Pooh and Jurgend, 11th May 1991, Roy Manterfield.’
Something we’re definitely keeping is one of the most special of our wedding presents from 1982; matching reliefs of Sue and I, made by Michael Wright, one of my oldest, dearest and most talented friends.
There were also two framed collections of public transport tickets from the early to mid 1970s. I did use a lot of buses, trams and trains in quite a few places; I loved travelling around, visiting places that I’d not been to before. There are tickets from all sorts of cities and destinations in Scotland, Wales and England, and many from France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Anyway, that’s enough rambling on about picture frames.
Remembrance Day 2018; remembering my grandfathers and remembering who profits from war
Last weekend, Remembrance Sunday, 11th November 2018, was the 100th anniversary of the armistice and the end of fighting in the First World War, and I spent time thinking about my lovely grandfathers, Ernest Swinard and Harold Manterfield. Both of them, thankfully, and unlike many, returned home after military service in that appalling conflagration.
During the Remembrance ceremonies on the TV and radio, I heard ‘Rule Britannia’ being played, and some of the words stuck in my mind;
“Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves. And Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.”
But we are slaves. We are all slaves, like most of the world, to the vast corporations and the obscenely wealthy and powerful who set the agenda, who promote wars and profit from them, who set us against each other to distract us from their activities, who own and direct the majority of our media to spread lies and misinformation in furtherance of their own greedy, self-serving schemes, schemes that are to the detriment of the majority and that add to the destruction of our environment.
Those of us who are fortunate, through accident of birth, to live in relatively wealthy countries and to have a certain amount of personal freedom, must take more care in choosing who to vote for. We must look carefully at our choices and try to select candidates who are independent of the rich and the corporations, or of those who are stoking the flames of nationalism, xenophobia and false patriotism for their own personal gain.
Remember who profits from war, and remember who suffers from it, because they are not the same people.
‘The Old Soldier’, shown above, is a moving poem by Harry Fellows that I posted on social media for Remembrance Day. The poem was written in 1987 by Harry Fellows about his friend Walter Smith; they were both living at the Willows Elderly Persons Home where my wife Sue worked at the time.
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