Bourne Diary - February 2000
by
Rex Needle
Saturday 5th February 2000
One man who has devoted more than his fair share of time and energy to this town is Dr Michael McGregor who has served the community for the past forty years, first as a general practitioner and then as a local historian. His latest contribution is a book of old photographs that reflect the changing face of Bourne over the past century and give a glimpse of life as it was. Historic Pictures of Bourne, Lincolnshire has taken a year to compile, although its gestation was far longer because collecting these images has been a part-time preoccupation for almost three decades. The result is a book that takes us back to the early days of photography and his dedication to the task of recording these images for posterity is such that he has financed the printing of the book himself and the profits will go to the Heritage Centre at Baldock's Mill in which he is keenly interested.
Dr McGregor is a Yorkshireman, born in Leeds on 20th September 1933 and was educated at St Olave's School and Bootham's School, York, before studying medicine at Leeds University. He graduated in 1957 and two years later was called up for National Service which he served with the Royal Army Medical Corps as a medical officer attached to the Royal Signals Depot at Catterick Camp in Yorkshire where he attained the rank of captain. At the end of his compulsory two years in the army, he returned to civilian life and entered general practice and this brought him to Bourne in 1961.
He joined the Brooke Lodge practice then run by Dr George Holloway, a step-brother of the actor, the late Stanley Holloway, from the former 18th century vicarage in South Street, now converted into flats. In those days, the waiting room was a tiny lean-to at the rear of the building and the surgery hours were listed on a notice by the door over a message box where medicines and prescriptions were put out for collection. The practice moved to St Gilbert's Road in 1971 where Dr McGregor worked until retirement in October 1993, and in 1998 it transferred to the new Hereward Group Practice clinic in Exeter Street.
Soon after moving to Bourne, local history became his interest and by the mid 1970s he had learned to copy postcards and other photographs from the past and soon he was showing slides of his work to local groups with a commentary on how times had changed. Those who attended his lectures, together with friends and patients, loaned him more old photographs to copy and soon he had a sizeable collection and a book became inevitable in order that the wealth of material could be enjoyed by a wider audience and this publication is the result.
It is the second he has produced recalling the past times of Bourne and its people. The first, Raymond Mays of Bourne was compiled in 1994 and is now in its second edition. It comprises over 200 early photographs illustrating the career of the pioneer of British motor racing who brought prestige to Bourne and took this country to the forefront of international competition on the track. The photographs were found in a trunk in the attic of Eastgate House, the family home, after Raymond Mays died in 1980 and over 1,700 copies of the book have been sold raising more than £10,000 for the Heritage Centre where a room has been devoted to his life's work as a leading racing motorist and inspiration behind the world famous BRM, the first all-British car to win the world championship in 1962.
The new publication contains more than 250 photographs showing how Bourne has evolved since the mid-19th century, its people at work and at play, the street scenes of past decades, celebrations and disasters, buildings that have long ago been demolished, the development of business and industry, trades that have disappeared, and a look at some of the characters who made their home here. There will be many who remember these pictures from past times, in particularly the evocative images from the age of the steam railway, when the Red Hall was the passenger booking office and South Street was frequently closed by the level crossing gates. Changes in the appearance of our streets are among the most dramatic and although many old buildings of character have been demolished, it is still possible to recognise those thoroughfares, which run through our town centre.
This book will be of particular interest to those who have lived in Bourne for many years because they will be able to relate to the pictures, which depict the town as it was in their younger days. We have been here a mere seventeen years yet still recognise that much has changed in that time while one picture was particularly nostalgic, that of the civic reception given by Bourne Urban District Council in the Corn Exchange in March 1963 (the date is not given in the book) for world champion racing driver Graham Hill and Sir Alfred Owen, whose organisation saved the BRM project from financial ruin, because I attended this event as a BBC television reporter and interviewed many of those involved.
For those who recollect the places remembered by these old photographs, it will be one long wallow in nostalgia. Dr McGregor says: "It has been my philosophy that these pictures are not my collection. It has always been my aim to share them with everyone and this book will enable me to do that."
This objective has been achieved. Although he had a sizeable collection of slides, Dr McGregor had few original prints and so there has been some loss of definition in the copying and reproduction and the book therefore lacks the quality and clarity of Raymond Mays of Bourne. An index would have been helpful and the text would have benefited from the services of an experienced proof reader, e g the Red Hall dates from circa 1610 and not 1695 (P 57). The usual fiction about Hereward the Wake is repeated (P 5) while there are many annoying anomalies in layout style and errors of grammar and spelling, such as aerial which has a middle "e" (P 20) while lightning (P 136) does not. But these are minor quibbles which will no doubt be corrected in the next edition and overall the book reflects the enthusiasm and dedication of its compiler and will bring untold delight to those people who know Bourne well and take the time to dip into its pages.
Saturday 12th February 2000
Daffodils growing along the grass verges of country roads around Bourne in springtime often puzzle visitors who ask why they should be there because, unlike the Lake District, this is not a locality that is known for the wild variety. The answer however, is a simple one, because these are what a gardener would call self-setters, bulbs that have been dropped during loading and left to take root. Small colonies have thus become established in the most unlikely places, around the farm gate and in small sections of carriageway that have become isolated lay-bys, created when road improvements have been made. These chance plantings are not of recent years but took place when the agricultural land in this locality was used for bulb production, sometimes tulips but more often daffodils. Now, for economic reasons, it is mainly devoted to intensive cereal production because this land has become part of the Lincolnshire corn belt.
Bulb and flower production however continues in the fens where the rich, black soil makes it one of the most fertile spots on earth but the industry is now confined to the area around Spalding, thirteen miles to the east along the main A151, where tulips, daffodils, narcissi and hyacinths bloom each spring in a vast carpet of breath-taking colour that attracts visitors from all over the world.
Tulips have become less popular in recent years because they are no longer so economical and much acreage has been returned to the production of wheat, potatoes and sugar beet. Swathes of brilliant hues can still be seen here during early spring while the culminating glory is the annual Spalding Flower Parade, held on the first Saturday in May, when over eight million tulip blooms are used to decorate the floats. These are a by-product of the growing cycle because they are cut off at this time to stimulate bulb growth and so this magnificent flower festival was devised to make use of and display the discarded tulip heads and at the same time to promote the horticultural industry. Fewer tulips have meant that other flowers and foliage are now used to complete the floats and on some occasions when the weather has retarded growth, hyacinths have been flown in from Holland to finish the job.
The flower industry however continues to thrive in a new form and intensive cultivation in controlled conditions under glass and large greenhouse complexes are becoming a familiar sight where computers monitor heat, light and moisture and ensure a sustained growth hitherto unknown. These developments have brought production line techniques to spring flowers and where once the bulbs were left to flourish in the fields at nature's will, their growth is now forced. We therefore have the phenomenon of flowers in bloom in months where they were once unknown and there is fierce competition among growers to find new strains that can be raised in even more intense conditions for an even earlier appearance. Very soon we may have spring flowers all year round.
The latest varieties went on display last week at the Springfields Gardens in Spalding with an entire indoor show devoted to forced flowers. They looked beautiful and the scent was overpowering, a touch of spring in the depths of winter. Daffodils have now replaced tulips as the most popular flower from this part of South Lincolnshire and blooms grown in such fashion are exported by air overnight around the world. The bunch my wife bought at our weekly market for £1 will be exactly the same as that gracing a penthouse flat in Manhattan although the prices will be considerably more in New York.
My flowers wilted and died very quickly once exposed to the true light of day and I am sure that those on the other side of the Atlantic must have suffered the same fate. There is much talk these days of genetically modified crops and fears that such techniques are altering the balance of nature but is not the practice of forcing a flower into bloom before its time a similar manipulation of nature's order? The flowers look beautiful when they appear and give delight to all who see them, but their time span is short. The daffodils that flower in the waste places where they fell around Bourne in years past will last much longer and are a cautionary reminder that what is new is not always enduring.
The Internet has brought instant communication between nations and as a result new friendships have been forged by email, thus bringing about a greater understanding of the way people in other countries live and it this exchange of ideas that makes us realise that there is very little difference in the hopes and desires of those in Havana or Hoboken, Bali or Birmingham, Nova Scotia or New Zealand. Talking to people from other countries that we have met through cyberspace is far more enlightening than any textbook on the social life of nations in which we are interested because the voice we hear is unsullied by the siren of official propaganda that is beamed around the globe by countries that try to appear better than they really are.
I have just heard that one of the friends I met in this way has now gone. His name was Alan Needle, no relation however, and I have known him since the summer of 1997. Soon after I bought my computer, I started tracing my family tree and searched the Internet for anyone named Needle and was presented with Alan's email address in the United States and so I sent a message to him at his home in Germantown near Memphis in Tennessee, wondering if we were related. He had a vague idea that his ancestors had originated in England although we could find no connection between our two families but he was so surprised at receiving a message from across the Atlantic that he asked me if I would keep in touch and so started a correspondence that lasted for two and a half years, exchanging emails practically every day, not lengthy messages, sometimes merely few words "just to touch bases" as he would put it in one of his sporting terms.
We swapped computer ideas and discussed a whole range of subjects, relatives and friends, war and politics, religion, food and gardening, work and occasionally sport, though not one of my strong points, and soon I began to know him and his family as though they lived next door and similarly he with mine. He talked about his wife Katie, their ageing and arthritic dog Ginger, his mother in law Mrs Zempe, a redoubtable lady now in her nineties who lived with them, and the general topics of the day. He told me about life in Memphis and the southern states and in return, I wrote to him about England, a country he had never visited, and sent him pictures of our countryside in springtime and summer to dispel the Hollywood images he had in his mind of a land that consisted entirely of windswept moors, Gothic mansions and foggy streets and it was these photographs that I took of our town and the surrounding villages that became the inspiration for the Bourne web site. Alan was a regular visitor and after a while he wrote that he knew the locality as well as he did his own.
Needle(1938-2000)
Alan was a loyal and patriotic American, intensely proud of his country. He served as a soldier in Korea and joined the police force when he left the army and after a distinguished career, became a court official in Memphis until he was overtaken by illness last summer. Soon he was unable to use his keyboard and my messages were read to him at his bedside and he would dictate a reply, but this too became an impossible task for him and so we had no exchanges in his final weeks although relatives sent me regular progress reports of his condition. A few days ago, I received a message saying that he had died. He was 61. Our relationship had been lived out entirely over the Internet but it was just as rewarding as if I had met him every day and he once wrote me a touching message that he regarded me as one of his best friends, even as a brother. Alan taught me more about America, the country he loved, than I could ever have found in books and I think that he learned just as much about England from me. I shall miss him greatly and his passing is a reminder of the feeble grasp we all have on life.
Saturday 19th February 2000
A new organisation has been formed to shape the future development of Bourne town centre. Its members come from both the public and private sectors including the Chamber of Trade, retailers, employers, the police, voluntary and leisure organisations, the Civic Society and from the local councils. A chairman has been appointed and he is full of enthusiasm for the project. Mr Norman Stroud, director of a local cleaning company, says: "We want to look at Bourne in a new light, encourage tourism, more facilities and shoppers and to keep trade in the town. We also want to make more people aware of our heritage and to make the economy of the town more vibrant."
These enthusiastic representatives have given themselves the grand title of the Bourne Town Centre Management Partnership, a most worthy name, but its powers are absolutely nil and have we not heard all of this optimism before? I fear that what we have here is yet another talking shop.
Constant chatter about our problems behind closed doors is the last thing we need. The main requirement in Bourne at the present time is action to stop the rot in the town centre where business premises are closing down at an alarming rate and many are left to become eyesores through disuse. Five properties are currently standing empty in a short stretch of South Street alone while a section of North Street, our main thoroughfare, is a disgrace and dilapidated shop fronts have for many years been an eyesore that has deterred shoppers and visitors and yet our local authorities do nothing. The last time I published a picture of this graffiti covered façade (Bourne Diary, 7th August 1999) it provoked much comment from around the world, even in the United States and Japan, and yet it is still there, deteriorating daily and bringing disgrace to this town.
If the town and district councils are totally inactive on this front, what can a quasi-official organisation such as this do to remedy the situation? The inaugural meeting was told that it will have the power to lobby and to exert influence on the way the town is run and will be committed to turning Bourne into a thriving and competitive centre for the 21st century. Surely this is the job of our local councillors. Are they at last being relieved of their responsibilities? Not a hope. Some of them have even joined the new organisation, a dire reminder of the way it is likely to go.
The people of Bourne should be under no illusions. The formation of a new group such as this may make rousing headlines and the aims and objectives it proclaims raise our expectations but only time will tell whether it will really make any difference. While its members sit in session and feel important, we the public are being asked to contact the town centre development manager at South Kesteven District Council if we have any views about how Bourne can be improved or made more accessible. My goodness, how many times do they need telling? Here is my contribution yet again: go down North Street and take a look for yourself.
Farmers have for long been under attack for destroying this country's hedgerows but the local council has now joined in this desecration of the landscape. Here in Bourne, a long stretch of hedgerow and trees has been systematically cut back and so a well-trodden route through an urban area has been turned into a tragic eyesore that is unlikely to grow again.
The hedgerow stood alongside a path and stream which ran through a housing estate between Beech Avenue and Hazelwood Drive, built by private developers within the last 20 years. This has become a favourite walk for local residents, especially in the spring and summer, and despite its close proximity to the houses, it soon became a significant wildlife habitat and a rich ecology developed with a variety of birds, insects and mammals. But during the past few weeks, the chain saw has been brought in to cut the hedge to ground level along most of its length and it is now unlikely to produce any further greenery for several years, if at all.
The tragedy is that this damage to our heritage is official vandalism because it has been endorsed by South Kesteven District Council, the local authority we pay to serve us. Last year, rats were seen along the stream and reported to the environmental health department. Residents sent in a petition complaining that the vermin had been tunnelling into their back gardens and were becoming a nuisance and pest control experts suggested that grass cuttings and other garden waste were being thrown into the waterway and creating conditions in which they would thrive. It was therefore recommended that the dyke be cleaned and the hedges cut back to reduce rat activity and it is here that the council made its mistake.
By all means clean out the stream, block up the holes and lay poison to exterminate the pests. But what possible solution could be achieved by cutting down the hedgerow? I must tell the council that rats do not live in trees. The offence has also been compounded by its timing. This is the start of the nesting season and birds attracted by this dense vegetation to raise their young have now lost a most important habitat. The link between town and country that has been provided by this flora and fauna to those living hereabouts has gone, perhaps for good.
Where are our local councillors while this is happening? Do they not care about our environment? It would appear that as usual, whenever anything controversial comes their way, they are nowhere to be found. It is at times like this that we should ask ourselves whether we really need them at all.
The publication last month of Dr Michael McGregor's book of historic photographs of Bourne is a reminder that the accepted definitive history of the town appeared in 1970 and was written by Douglas Birkbeck who was then deputy headmaster of Bourne Grammar School. He is now 78 and living in retirement in Cumbria. The school's present head teacher Dr Stuart Miles kindly supplied me with his address and I wrote to him and after an exchange of letters I have compiled a new item on the author and his book A History of Bourne which appears this week in Bourne Focus. The book was a three year labour of love for Mr. Birkbeck and is now out of print although there are copies in the public library and it occasionally comes up for sale in second hand book shops although the usual price is £15-£20 according to condition. It is, however, well worth the investment for anyone interested in the history of our town.
There has been a deafening silence in recent weeks over the controversial Elsea Wood development to the south of Bourne that will bring 2,000 new homes to the town and I had begun to think that our community had accepted this unwanted housing without further question. The local newspapers have not mentioned it and there have been no recent contributions to the Bourne Forum. But on Wednesday, Jim Bruce, who lives locally, submitted an admirable argument against the project and questioned the conduct of all those involved with the scheme and highlighted the rise in vandalism that has resulted from previous increases in our population. I commend this item to all who are interested in the welfare of our town, not least our elected councillors.
The scarecrow has an established place in English folklore and fiction because it was once a familiar sight in the countryside, a crude figure made of sticks and straw, old ragged clothes and often a large turnip or a mangel-wurzel for a head, assembled to look like a human being and set up in a field to frighten the birds away from growing crops. The term dates back to 1592 and other ideas associated with it, such as someone whose dress and appearance is gaunt, ridiculous or unkempt, also stem from the late 16th century. Saturday 26th February 2000
They are a rare sight today having been displaced by other apparatus for scaring off birds such as gas guns which go off automatically at intervals, by high flying kites and similar wind-powered contrivances, but they can occasionally be seen in the fields, standing like silent sentinels guarding rows of green shoots just breaking the surface in the hope of deterring marauders from flying in to feed off them.
It was then a delight to spot several of them this week in a green field of forage rape alongside the B1176 a few miles south of Little Bytham, near Bourne, all hastily put together from lengths of wood, old overalls and white plastic chemical containers for their heads with coloured streamers attached to their arms, fluttering wildly in the breeze to give added movement in an attempt to keep the birds at bay.
Those birds which belong to the corvidae or crow family were their original target in years past and these include the raven, the rook and the jackdaw, the jay and the magpie, because these birds are omnivorous and will eat animal, fish and vegetable food indifferently, showing themselves very adaptable to circumstances and will devour almost anything edible. Crow is regarded by many naturalists as the highest family of birds, possessed with a great intelligence, and innumerable stories are told of their craft and cunning to ensure that they get a good meal and they are particularly partial to new green shoots. In past times, especially during the 19th century, children played truant from school to earn a few pennies from local farmers by scaring the crows away from their crops in the sensitive seasons of the year and the only weapons they had were their loud voices, sometimes wooden rattles, but mostly the stones they picked up in the fields to throw at them, hence the saying that is still with us today: stone the crows.
Although crows were once the main pest, wood pigeons are now regarded as the archenemies of the farmer and with some justification. The pigeon will eat practically anything he grows in his fields at any time of the year and consequently the bird is a recognised pest. The latest count suggests that the population in this country is in excess of 18 million and so farmers mount Pigeon Days every year when they turn out with their shotguns to shoot as many as they can and so reduce the damage to their crops, although in recent years they have also been killing magpies and jays, much to the dismay of bird lovers and animal welfare organisations such as the Royal Society for the Preservation of Birds.
Myth and legend have grown up around these rustic, makeshift dummies, often because of the discarded clothes used to make them because many people, especially in country areas, had a half-forgotten fear of witchcraft and one of its beliefs was that old clothes could be used to influence the original owner, for good or more usually evil, if they had been given away or used for another purpose, even from a distance and when the physical contact had been completely broken. Superstition was such that old clothes, a dress, a coat or even an old glove, might be used for malicious spells, and so owners were reluctant to have them used for scarecrows.
Nevertheless, they have remained a popular method of scaring the birds through the centuries and although now fast disappearing from our fields, the scarecrow still has a place in our affection. An annual scarecrow festival is held every August in the village of Kettlewell in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales where over 100 life-size models go on display to celebrate this traditional country skill. Similar festivals are held in America but usually coincide with Halloween while in Kansas, the Topeka Scarecrows is one of the top ice hockey teams in the American Central Hockey League.
The scarecrow has also had an attraction for writers and film makers for many years, among the earliest being The Scarecrow, a play written by the American Percy MacKaye in 1908 about a scarecrow being brought to life which was made into a silent film Puritan Passions and was successfully revived on Broadway in 1953. Who cannot forget the scene in the 1933 Hollywood version of The Invisible Man, the film that made Claude Rains a star, in which the unseen fugitive is pursued across the moors by the police in cold weather and eventually seeks warmth from the clothes he steals from the scarecrow he finds in a field, one of the great moments in screen history? There have been many film references to scarecrows since, including Dr Syn Alias the Scarecrow, the 1962 version of Russell Thorndike's novel about the smuggling Vicar of Dymchurch who disguises himself as a scarecrow to protect his identity, while the latest is the 1998 slice of horror hokum called Scarecrows directed by William Wesley in which robbers holding a farmer and his teenage daughter hostage in a remote farmhouse are killed off one by one by a group of living scarecrows.
They also have a great appeal to children and one of the most memorable appearances came in the well-loved 1939 film The Wizard of Oz when Ray Bolger as the Scarecrow joins Judy Garland and her assorted friends on their journey down the yellow brick road. The use of the mangel-wurzel for the head of a scarecrow was also the inspiration for one of the most famous scarecrows in fiction, Worzel Gummidge, created by the American writer Barbara Euphan Todd (1890-1976) and immortalised by the actor, the late Jon Pertwee, and which delighted television audiences in England from 1979-1982 and later in Australia.
Scarecrows, it would seem, are now far more in evidence on the screen and in the realms of the imagination than in the fields they have occupied since they first appeared in the rural landscape of 400 years ago. Modern devices may have taken their place but for someone who remembers the customary scarecrows from England's past, the sight of one standing incongruously in the middle of a field today is sufficient to make me stop and stay awhile, to think of man's ingenuity and to remember the way our countryside once was.
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