Bourne Diary - June 2000
by
Rex Needle
Saturday 3rd June 2000 We take the telephone for granted today and not only do most homes have one but millions of people also carry a mobile in their pocket or handbag. The ubiquity of this communications facility is part of our way of life but it was not always so. During my boyhood in the 1930s, most people depended on the public call box, sometimes a mile or more away, to summon the doctor or the fire brigade in times of emergency, or to make that important call for business or domestic reasons. The sight of someone huddled inside the telephone box with a pile of pennies and a bundle of documents while others waited impatiently outside for their turn was a common one and lengthy queues often built up to use what was probably the only telephone in the locality.The traditional red telephone boxes, made of cast iron and individually date stamped, were the property of the Crown and embossed with a crown motif on each side below the domed roof. Their popularity and usefulness was such that they soon became one of the instantly recognisable symbols of Britain but unfortunately they are less numerous in our towns and villages these days since thousands were replaced by the plain Perspex payphone booths in the 1980s and early 1990s.
The familiar red kiosk known as the K6 was introduced to commemorate the Silver Jubilee of King George V in May 1935 and it soon became known as the Jubilee Kiosk. It was designed by the architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (1880-1960) whose work on Liverpool's Anglican Cathedral, Cambridge University Library and Battersea Power Station, was already well known. Scott is thought to have been inspired for his design by the tomb of Sir John Soane (1753-1837), one of the greatest British architects of all time who was responsible for the Bank of England and Dulwich Picture Gallery. The tomb in St Pancras churchyard, London, which he originally designed for his wife, is itself a remarkable monument and one of only two in the city which is listed as of Grade I architectural importance but despite this, it is at present in a dismal state of overgrowth and neglect.
There had been previous versions of the telephone box but the Jubilee model became the first genuinely standard kiosk to be installed all over the country. Under the Jubilee Concession, introduced as part of that year's celebrations, kiosks were to be provided in every town or village with a post office regardless of cost and as a result of this scheme, over 8,000 new kiosks were installed, adding impetus to the spread of K6. In the following year, a Tercentenary Concession was introduced under which the Post Office undertook to install a kiosk on request almost anywhere provided the local authority agreed to pay the normal subscription of £4 a year for a period of five years and this scheme remained in force until 1949 and led to another 1,000 K6 boxes being introduced. A further arrangement known as the Rural Allocation Scheme was then introduced and this brought more kiosks to country areas whether they were likely to be profitable or not and so the telephone was brought within reach of everyone.
The red kiosk became extremely popular, especially in the countryside where villagers took pride in its appearance, cleaning it out every week, polishing the windows and in some cases, even adding curtains and vases of flowers to delight the occasional callers who stopped to use it while the "Press Button A and Button B" mechanism needed to make a call became the butt of music hall jokes and eventually part of the language.
The example I show here is in the High Street at Castle Bytham, near Bourne, beautifully preserved with a fresh coat of red paint and roses growing round the door, with the Old Bakehouse in Heathcote Road in the background, and perfectly in tune with its surroundings in this ancient village.
The Jubilee Kiosk is perhaps the best remembered of Giles Gilbert Scott's work, even though he supervised the rebuilding of the House of Commons after World War II, and to this day it is fondly regarded as a typical British landmark. The K6 survived the introduction of Numbers 7 and 8 until the KX 100-400 series of payphone booths arrived and thousands of the old K6 models were sold off, many fetching £200 and £300 each. Some were scrapped but many more were put to a variety of imaginative and bizarre uses by their new private owners. Millionaires in Hong Kong had them shipped out and installed in their homes as showers, producers acquired them to add authenticity to their film sets, a night club in Mexico City installed several and some have also found a home in Dubai, the second largest of the seven United Arab Emirates. There are also one of two to be found in the gardens around Bourne while the Baytree Garden Centre at Weston, near Spalding, has half a dozen because the owner discovered that they were the perfect place to grow geraniums. Others went to the United States and businessmen at Cape Cod, Massachusetts, snapped up several as features for a shopping mall.
The affection of many Americans for these telephone boxes is quite apparent. John Hughes, who lives at Forth Worth in Texas, has fond memories of serving over here with the United States Air Force as a young man during the Second World War and he remembers them as one of the most endearing features of our street scene. He has emailed me to say: "Walking through Leicester on my first leave in town, I noticed this bright red, box-like structure and wondered what it could be. Curious, I ambled closer, looked up and saw the word 'Telephone' near the top and some kind of symbol engraved below it. I peeked inside, walked around it and rubbed my hands over the paint. There must have been fifteen coats at least on it and I thought that the British must really like red! At that moment I wished I could have stepped inside and telephoned home but I walked away and looked back thinking that red paint was not such a bad idea after all. It sticks out like a sore thumb but least people can see it."
The Americans were among the many people who complained about the decision by British Telecom to phase out the old kiosks saying that they missed them when visiting this country. In fact, there were so many protests from at home and abroad that the programme of replacing them was revised and the policy changed to retain and even reintroduce the red boxes and they have since been put back in several places including Central London, down the Mall and around the back of Buckingham Palace. The K6 is now a registered design of British Telecom and from November 1997, the kiosks have also been licensed for use by competitors.
Nevertheless, many have been permanently lost but despite this, British Telecom reported in 1999 that there were still over 15,000 of these old style telephone boxes in heritage sites and, working with the Department of the Environment and English Heritage, more than 1,000 K6 kiosks were identified as being of special architectural and historical interest, mainly because they were near existing listed buildings or in attractive town and country locations. British Telecom has now pledged that the vast majority of these telephone boxes will be maintained until they are no longer viable and so another little slice of our heritage has been preserved by the will of the people.
There has been a lively exchange in the forum discussion group on the Bourne web site in recent weeks about U F O sightings in this locality. Much of the content is sceptical and light hearted, as indeed it should be, but there have also been several sufficiently serious contributions to make one realise that there are people out there who actually believe in them. It is genuinely accepted that these strange spacecraft have been seen above the electricity power station near the Well Head gardens and over Rippingale village and one contributor has even left a message asking for details of further sightings. Saturday 10th June 2000
I have therefore been investigating this subject in recent weeks and it has occupied a great deal of my thinking time and while tapping away at my P C one day, I swear that I saw a U F O from my study window, hovering out there over the fen towards Dyke village, which demonstrates that if you look long enough for something that is on your mind you will surely find it.
But to serious matters. An unidentified flying object or U F O is any light or object seen in the sky whose immediate identity is not apparent and it is at this point that flights of fancy take over in the over-active imagination. A rational person would look for a rational explanation because, despite unsubstantiated claims, there is not a shred of evidence that U F O s are alien space craft. On investigation, the majority of sightings turn out to have been of natural or identifiable objects, notably bright stars and planets, meteors, aircraft and satellites, or to have been perpetrated by pranksters.
U F O is a comparatively recent term for such phenomena and has almost replaced flying saucer that was coined in 1947 and has been in use ever since for an unidentified disc-shaped flying object alleged to come from outer space. Man can only give names and identities to what he thinks he has seen from his own experience and as stories of flying saucers and U F O s have only been with us for the past half a century and much dramatised by books, films and television, we should ask ourselves what strange sightings in the sky were called before that. Ever since the dawn of time, man has looked to the heavens for the unexpected and in those days before advanced technology and a knowledge of outer space, religion in some form was the bulwark of most societies and so bright lights and unusual sights were interpreted through biblical illusion and identified as angels or saints or of some other sign of the existence of a Supreme Deity.
These beliefs are evident from the religious paintings by the masters of past centuries, particularly the Renaissance artists such as Botticelli, Giotto, Michelangelo and Van Eyck, all of whom depicted God and his angels as emerging from the clouds to either look down upon us with benevolence and kindness or even visit us here on earth to give us good tidings because the word angel comes from the Greek angelos meaning messenger. This belief in a supernatural being intermediate between God and humans is part of the Christian, Muslim and Jewish faiths and therefore has a mutual origin in those times when any strange light in the sky was awesome and interpreted within the confines of their immediate knowledge which was mainly based on faith. Had there been space travel at that time, those who witnessed these occurrences would have been in no doubt that they were seeing evidence of an alien visitation from another planet but as it is we have angels and the like. Similarly, the sun-burst that we see on the horizon at dawn in many countries, particularly in the Mediterranean and the Iberian Peninsula, was interpreted first as the sun god, a deity in heaven revered by the great civilisations of ancient Europe and Asia, and then as Christ himself, hence the halo that appears over his head in early religious paintings.
Our culture is not one that puts reason and truth above all else but is predominated by Christianity and the other major religions that demand unswerving faith and an acceptance of the paranormal and we should be aware that the baggage of belief is filled with fable and fantasy, legend and myth that have been absorbed from past civilisations. The story of the Star of Bethlehem, for instance, is still read as though it were a fact and although it is referred to in the bible as a sign from God to show the three wise men with their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh the way to the stable where the infant Jesus had been born, astronomers anxious to give some credence to the tale now acknowledge that if there is any basis of truth in it then their guiding light was most probably a comet, a perfectly natural phenomenon which appeared at that time but of which the magi were totally ignorant
Fanciful supernatural ideas that have no basis in fact are not merely confined to religion and are believed by the most intelligent among us for why else would Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), creator of the world's most famous amateur detective, believe firstly in the ability of the séance to conjure up spirits from the past and secondly fairies at the bottom of the garden. The stories of Sherlock Holmes are masterpieces relating the use of deduction, logic and common sense to solve crime and yet two young girls hoodwinked the author into accepting the existence of fairies by photographing cardboard cut outs pinned on sticks. The ruse fooled Sir Arthur and many other eminent thinkers of the day and the deception was not revealed until one of the girls confessed to their prank on television over half a century later.
The list of similar misplaced beliefs is endless. The Loch Ness Monster is among the most famous and although it is known to have been invented by a journalist on a dull news day in 1934, the possibility of a huge aquatic creature inhabiting the depths of this great Scottish lake still attracts scientists and film makers and as its reputation has entered the realms of legend, it will not go away. The Tibetan Yeti or Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas and the Sasquatch or Bigfoot of North America have also been given similar credibility and there are thousands more such legends scattered around the world which have absolutely no foundation in fact.
Most people want to believe and so common sense and sound judgement take a back seat when an occurrence that defies explanation presents itself and U F O s from outer space therefore join the long list of man's spurious convictions. It is so much simpler to accept things at their face value than to question their authenticity. Blind faith is an easier and less arduous path than questioning knowledge supported by observation and evidence. The mysterious light in the sky on a dark night, the sudden creaking on the landing after going to bed, or a shaft of light through the curtains that looks so much like a lady in white, are so easily identified as supernatural manifestations, images enhanced by memories often buried deep in the subconscious, although a little thought and investigation, and above all common sense, will reveal such phenomena for what they are and put these happenings into their proper context without surrounding them with bizarre and unreal explanations.
The Bourne web site now contains over 400 photographs and in excess of 150,000 words of text, the latter figure an estimate that I am unable to determine exactly but after writing between 1,000 and 1,500 words each week for more than two years, I think that we can equal Tolstoy's literary epic War and Peace for length if not quality. The web site has therefore become the most definitive guide and history to the Bourne locality available and furthermore it is free. Saturday 17th June 2000
But we do not satisfy everyone because there are still gaps in this local knowledge that I attempt to fill as the weeks go by and it is such requests for further information that make me realise that there is still a task ahead to provide a definitive account of this area and one that will keep me going until the green fields beckon. This is an ongoing project and I am unable to include everything at once and so I add a little each week but someone will always find something that has been left out.
Sharon Lake has emailed me from Langtoft to remind me that her small village straddling the A15 five miles south of Bourne is not mentioned. "Do not think that Langtoft has no history", she writes, "because it does. We have many old buildings and Roman sites too and I would be grateful to see us represented on the web site soon." I am therefore suitably admonished and have rectified this omission today with a substantial entry about this delightful village and will add to it as the months go by. Meanwhile, here is a picture of the village church that is described in the new village entry on Langtoft.
I have also received a message from Katie Bent of Boston who likes the web site but thinks that it contains too much history and "not about what is happening now". Katie left her remarks in the Guest Book but there was no email address otherwise I would have replied to her direct. She seems to have misunderstood our objectives which are well defined: that the web site is not about news and current events but about our history and heritage and I have no intention of running a news service for the locality. My advice to Katie then is: buy a copy of the Local if you want to know what is happening in Bourne but stick with us if you want to learn about its past and its traditions.
A new link has been added to the web site this week and after writing about silver surfers in the past, I am pleased to report that it is our very youngest citizens who will benefit most from this new technology. The site has been launched by the Bourne Abbey Primary School, a large, mixed nursery, infant and junior school in the town which was the first primary school in Britain to become grant maintained and received a surprise visit from the then Secretary of State for Education Mr. Kenneth Clarke in April 1991. The buildings date from 1877 but have been extended and improved over the years and places here are much sought after while the teaching facilities are superb and the current computer equipment among the best in Lincolnshire.
The surprising thing about this web site is the interest taken by pupils, all of them under 11 years old and who will be growing up with information technology as part of their education as much as the three Rs were in my day. When the web site was launched earlier this month, head teacher Mark Gray asked the 400 children at morning assembly how many had access to the Internet at home and around 300 indicated that they had and when he asked how many could surf the net by themselves, the number was almost as great. I find these figures quite astounding but a sign of the times and an indication of what we can expect in the future. Senior boys and girls are soon to visit the Continent, having formed Internet links with a similar school in France and they are currently making contact in the same way with a school in the United States and so we have an immediacy in forging friendships which could only be done in my schooldays as pen pals. Such friendships half a century ago involved writing letters and then depending on the postal delivery services to deliver them, a most restrictive method of getting to know someone but the Internet is helping these children cross continents with both words and pictures at the click of a mouse.
The school's web site was launched by the Mayor of Bourne, Councillor John Kirkman, who also happens to be chairman of the governors and coincidentally, he has also recently gone online, mainly because of his work in local government as a member of the town council, South Kesteven District Council, Lincolnshire County Council and the county police authority. "The Internet really must be the way forward for almost all organisations", he told me, "and this is particularly true as far as local councils are concerned. From a councillor's point of view, the sheer inefficiency, not to mention the cost, of mailing mountains of paper to every member is simply ridiculous and the combined cost of postage from these for organisations is regularly in the region of £20 a week. It would be so much simpler to email this information or place it on an official web site with confidential papers being accessed by means of a password."
Councillor Kirkman says that the Internet web site is the way forward for councils in providing information for the people they represent. "The public is entitled to this information and if they cannot obtain it in person or by telephone, for whatever reason, then we are duty bound to provide it in other ways. Before long, the vast majority of households will have access to the Internet or email and I believe that councils have a duty to make full use of such facilities.
"In theory, a better informed public should make for more efficient and effective councils and local government. The days are long gone when councils and councillors can simply bury their heads in the sand and believe that they know best. We should be there to serve the public, to try to carry out their wishes. Indeed, it is now mandatory for councils to consult the public far more than in the past and what better way than by the use of interactive information technology. The sooner we have computer terminals with links to all relevant agencies, the better. We should also be able to call up the information we require from the library or the bank of even the high street shop. Such a development must come and as far as I am concerned, the sooner the better."
We are into a period of warm sunny days that make our excursions into the countryside so much more pleasant. The fields are green with corn that is now so high that the surface undulates like the ocean with every passing breeze, a veritable sea of grass, and from my study window I can see a hundred or more acres of wheat ebbing and flowing in the light winds that waft across the fen on these balmy days. Green corn under a blue sky full of white puffy cumulus cloud is one of the delights of early summer and I could sit and watch it for hours on end because the pattern changes every few seconds and no new image is like the last. Saturday 24th June 2000
We also found a field of poppies near the village of Toft, growing among the last vestiges of yellow blossom from a crop of oil seed with clumps of white ox-eye daisies for good measure. Poppies have long been the scourge of farmers and they are kept under control annually by the liberal use of agro-chemicals but the seeds are difficult to destroy and they lie dormant for decades and germinate when conditions are more favourable. They have become a common sight where the earth has been disturbed and they proliferated after the digging of trenches in the fields of Flanders during the First World War which is why the poppy has become a symbol of the conflict and is worn on the anniversary of the armistice every November in remembrance of those who died. We now see them where the soil has been turned alongside new road and river developments and on building sites where they bring a glorious splash of colour to a dull and drab location although their life span there is invariably a short one.
The common poppy (Papavar rhoeas) is an annual with four overlapping petals and nodding buds and can be seen in flower from June until August. They were once thought to cause thunderstorms but they were also used to treat headaches and although slightly poisonous with a peculiar and heavy odour, the red poppy does not, as is popularly thought, contain the narcotic of the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum). When the petals have withered and fallen, tiny holes open up just below the flat top of the cup-shaped poppy head and when the breeze blows and shakes it, seeds are sprinkled out like pepper from a pepper pot and they land on the soil ready to germinate another year. The petals can be collected to make a syrup and in some parts of Europe the poppy is cultivated for the sake of its seeds which are used in cakes and for the production of an oil which is used as a substitute for olive oil. Attempts have also been made to utilise the brilliant red of the petals as a dye but experiments have failed to capture the colour for such use.
The fields were full of poppies during the early years of this century and perhaps these potent images of childhood are one of the reasons why I pursue them today, seeking them out for a nostalgic glimpse to remind me of the countryside of yesteryear when wild flowers were everywhere and if you missed seeing one species one year, you could be sure they would be back the next. Not so today when most of our flora is under threat but the poppy retreats stubbornly. My affection for this flower defies reason, but then so do many of the memories that we cling to as the years pass.
This is certainly the best time to be in England, when the countryside is still fresh and new after its winter hibernation, and out here in the secluded lanes of Lincolnshire there is a delight around every turn that makes you want to stop and take in the scene and so even a short trip of around twenty miles is likely to occupy an hour or even more if you pass an interesting village, a church or manor house, the sight of which commands you to pause and take some interest.
It is of course is the England that few tourists see because they arrive at Heathrow Airport or Southampton docks and then board a coach that whizzes them around the usual spots such as London and Stratford-upon-Avon, Windsor and Woburn, all places geared to part them from their money, and then they are funnelled back on board their transport thinking they have seen the country but of course they have not because it is the quiet and tranquil places that still abound that are the essence of our land and the tourist traps on their itinerary are the same the world over and have become little more than theme parks with cash registers.
Bourne is becoming well known around the world because of the web site even though it is sometimes a case of mistaken identity. This week I received an email from Micke Jägerbrand in Stockholm, Sweden, a journalist on the Aftonbladet, the biggest daily newspaper in Scandinavia, who was inquiring about the locations for the new spear and sandal film saga Gladiator which is set during the time of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius during the second century A D. Micke had latched on to the word Bourne as one of the outdoor locations and had keyed it into his Internet search engine which took him to our web site and photographs of Bourne Woods. "Was the movie filmed here?" he asked.
I have reluctantly disillusioned him. The film was made in two or three different countries but some scenes were shot at a place called The Bourne at Farnham in Surrey, a site over 100 miles to the south of us that includes an old quarry. Director Ridley Scott decided that he had no need to re-create an ancient Europe overrun by Visigoths when a computer and 300 extras in a stretch of waste land in the Home Counties could do the job just as well. I am told that he digitally cut and pasted his cluster of raucous Romans until they became a seething mass in a largely computer-generated landscape, the kind of technology that could revolutionise the location business and even do away with it.
Bourne Woods would not have been a suitable venue anyway because it is managed for conservation and an influx of technicians and extras with their cameras, wires, vehicles and as many camp followers as a Roman army might have attracted, would not be welcome even if it were chosen as a film location. However, these woods that cover over 400 acres, do have a colourful history. The area was once part of the primeval forest of Brunswald and oak, ash, beech and elm trees have covered this site for over 800 years and possibly as far back as 117A D which is well before Marcus Aurelius became Emperor of Rome. By way of compensation however, I have told Micke of the legend of our Saxon hero Hereward the Wake who is reputed to have defended Bourne against William the Conqueror's invading army in the 11th century, and met his death at the hands of the Normans in these woods but I have also warned him that like much of the film Gladiator, both his life and death are more myth than fact.
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