Some passing waves

Byron in Italy

 

I wrote this article in 1983, and it was published (in English and Italian) in the second number of the first volume of the Sheraton Italia Magazine, with the following (slightly fanciful) by-line:

English-born Richard Gibbs has been living and working for the past seven years in Rome. He is a professor of English Literature, a free-lance journalist and one of the owners of a new English pub, located on Via della Madonna dei Monti (near Via Cavour) in the historical centre of Rome.

 

I had a particular interest in Noel, George Gordon, 6^th Baron Byron of Rochdale, as in 1980 I had named one of four new Houses at St George’s English School (where I taught) after him.  The then Headmaster, Hendrik Deelman, decreed that, among other criteria, the names (of the houses) should preferably be of people, probably historical figures, with whom pupils will be proud to be associated and about whom much of interest can be said......

 

When I proposed Byron for mine (the others were Drake, Livingstone and Newton) the Headmaster objected and attempted to block my choice.  I insisted, however, on the grounds that despite a physical handicap (he was born with a short Achilles’ tendon which made running difficult) Byron achieved great physical feats in swimming and riding in particular, and not only supported Italian liberty but died assisting the Greeks in their struggle for freedom.  You want a hero?  Find me a better example.....  Hendrik, to his grumpy credit, acquiesced.

 

Here is the article:

Byron in Italy

Portrait of Lord Byron by G Sanders (1807)
Courtesy of Sir Joseph Cheyne
The Keats-Shelley Memorial House, Rome

The literary links between Britain and Italy are many and various and deep-rooted.  Perhaps the earliest connection was Julius Caesar’s account of his invasion, which depicted the Britons in their true-blue glory.  However, it was not until the Middle Ages that the traffic of impressions and influence really began. Whether or not Chaucer met Boccaccio in Florence will never be known.  But the Italian influence on Chaucer was marked.  As ‘Pilgrimage’ became more popular – and safer – and as printing made literature more exchangeable the dissemination of ideas grew.

 

Italy has always been an attractive place of northerners.  The stabilisation of Europe under the Caesars and the popularisation of Greek drama in Latin form must have played many a part as did the immensely important role of Rome in the Christian Church, but not all pilgrims are saints, and many with pious hopes also had pedestrian appetites, and so the dissolution of cultures continued.

 

Civilisation, climate, Christianity and curiosity all played major parts in bringing artists and writers, ladies and gentlemen, to Italy.  From the seventeenth century on, with a snowballing increase in more recent years, the tourist trade has developed, and everyone with his sketch-pad or her note-book, or nowadays with the video-camera [smart-phone? Ed] tries to capture a little of the country for the folks back home.

 

Among the millions of visitors Italy has had have been some of the greatest figures of literature, as well as myriads of their acolytes. Certain of their books are still well-known and a few are still quite readable.  Dickens’ Pictures from Italy ranks high as a subjective piece of journalism, determinedly anti-Catholic and yet refreshingly enthusiastic (his appreciation of the effect of the Trevi Fountain contrasts markedly with his denigration of St Peter’s), while Henry James’ Italian Hours is pompously unapproachable, a weak moment in self-appreciation.

 

Direct responses to the country are less available than the influences to be found in novels and poetry, and drama, however.  Many of Shakespeare’s plays are set in  Italy for example, and the Petrarchan sonnet is a major form in English verse.  The Duchess of Malfi, Keats’s Isabella, Forster’s A Room with a View are three examples of works with obvious connections with Italy, but there are many more.

 

One of the most striking relationships between a British literary figure and the people and literature of Italy is that of Lord Byron.  It is now [November 1983, Ed]. Nearly two hundred years since his birth and short, stormy life, and countless books have been written about him, but there is still a great deal of prejudice in circulation against him and at least as much myth.

 

His great strength was activity: he was not content to stay at home and mop his brow in aesthetic ecstasy.  Byron did things like swim the Hellespont, the Tagus at Lisbon and the Lagoon at Venice.  He travelled extensively in Greece and Albania as a young man, helped the cause of Italian liberation in his maturity, and died at Missolonghi from a fever (doctors reported) contracted during the Greek campaign against the Turks [which he partly financed from his own purse, Ed].

 

A few years ago, in Genova, I was trying to locate the villa in which the Dickens family had lodged for almost a year in the mid-19^th century. I knew roughly where it was and thought I might have found it, though I also knew that it might have disappeared long ago.  Dickens had composed The Chimes, one of his popular Christmas Books, whilst living there, and years later, when he died, the bells of Genova had tolled for him, and the local newspapers had announced that Nostro Caro Carlo Dickens è Morto! I asked in an old, Dickensian haberdasher’s shoop whether the two old ladies (undoubtedly residents of the area since the mid-19^th century!) knew anything about this famous scrittore inglese?  They turned the name over a few times, shaking their wise old heads.  Eventually I got an answer: Charles Dickens – no....  But Byron, yes!  He lived over there.... And indeed, he had lived in that street briefly in 1823, prior to his fatal departure for Greece.

 

Byron holds people’s imaginations because he was generous and vigorous, outspoken and brave.  His life was distressing to himself and to some others but it was presided over by an energetic and essentially truth-loving spirit.  As Peter Quennell (a literary historian famous for his work on Bryon) has said, Three-quarters of Byron’s verse is, at any rate from the modern point of view, quite remarkably bad, yet, as a significant literary figure and as an exceptionally interesting and unusually ill-fated human being, Byron can never cease to command our attention, exhorting our sympathy even at moments when we are inclined to like him least.

 

Although he did not write much about Italy, apart from the famous lines in Childe Harold’s Pilgimage that describe Venice, Florence and:

 

Oh, Rome! My Country!  City of the Soul!

The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,

Lone mother of dead empires! And control

In their shut breasts their petty misery.

 

much of what he wrote was inspired by what he saw or read here.  Don Juan has precious little to do with Italy (and nothing to do with Mozart’s Don Giovanni) but it is written in a romping ottava rima that he had learnt from reading Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and it was nearly all written while living in Italy.

 

The prejudice that marks Byron as a licentious libertine, and which brands all romantic poetry as unreadable gush, is one of the main objects of Byron’s satire, and it is most often found in the mouths of those who have never read a line of his.  In fact his work is often witty, readable, and (even) moral, and often contains entertaining thoughts as well as amusing stories, though he never tried to overdo it, as he wrote at the end of the first Canto of Don Juan:

 

But for the present, gentle reader! And

Still gentler purchaser!  The Bard – that’s I –

Must, with permission, shake you by the hand,

And so – ‘your humble servant, and Good-bye!

We meet again, if we should understand

Each other; and if not, I shall not try

Your patience further than this short sample –

‘T’were well if others followed my example.’

 

*****

 

In case you are not persuaded, may I call on Kenneth Clark’s support?  On page 307 of Civilisation, he wrote: appearing when he did, the tide of disillusion carried him along, so that he became, after Napoleon, the most famous name in Europe.  From great poets like Goethe and Pushkin, or great men of action like Bismarck, down to the most brainless schoolgirl [careful, Ken!  ED] his works were read with an almost hysterical enthusiasm.....  Byron, who was very much a man of his time, wrote a poem about the opening of a prison – the dungeon of the Castle of Chillon. He begins with a sonnet in the old revolutionary vein – Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind! Brightest in dungeon’s, Liberty!  But when, after many horrors, the prisoner of Chillon is released, a new note is heard:

 

At last men come to set me free;

I ask’d not why, and reck’d not where;

It was at length the same to me,

Fetter’d or fetterless to be,

I learn’d to love despair.

 

Since that line was written how many intellectuals down to Beckett and Sartre have echoed its sentiment.....  [However] this negative conclusion was not the whole of Byron.  The prisoner of Chillon had looked from his castle wall onto the mountains and the lake, and felt himself to be a part of them.  This was the positive side of Byron’s genius, a self-identification with the great forces of nature: not Wordsworth’s daisies and daffodils, but crags, cataracts and colossal storms: in short, with the sublime.....

*****

 

I rest my case.  A final quote from Don Juan, Canto XV, stanza 99 [which, for the record, I read whilst wild camping on Corsica some 45 years ago]:

 

Between two worlds life hovers like a star

‘Twixt night and morn upon the horizon’s verge.

How little do we know that which we are!

How less what we may be! The eternal surge

Of time and tide rolls on and bears afar

Our bubbles. As the old burst, new emerge,

Lashed from the foam of ages; while the graves

Of empires heave but like some passing waves.

 

 

Byron House, 1994

 

Song Snatcher

 Love Minus Zero/No Limit

Performing for Amnesty International - Yes, that is Adrian Mitchell on the left.....

Last night I had a dream.  Somehow, I was to sing a song.  I think it was at an event at my wife, Amanda’s, Care Home, so there would be a small audience – maybe some twenty or thirty.  My son-in-law has recently loaned me his Martin acoustic guitar, though I have not practised for years.  

Thanks, Cam - I'll look after it

 

In the dream I had the guitar, and I had several books of words and chords.  These were the books that I had written out when a teenager (I had my first, cheap, guitar, when I was about twelve).  I can see them now, flimsy exercise books with my handwriting in royal blue ink underlined on the cover, then songs written out with the chords over the words in red biro.

 

Some of the first songs I learned were simple American songs, cowboy songs, copied from Alan Lomax’s American Songbook, and probably heard on Two-Way Family Favourites on the radio on Sundays.  

 

Then there was Peter, Paul and Mary and Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan with some more modern material – Blowin’ in the Wind, etc.  

 

My guitar playing was simplicity itself – three chords if I was lucky, and none of them with a barré (so B minor was a problem) and my sense of rhythm less than strict. I was no singer, either, though perhaps later on my voice pleased some.

 

Anyway, I was there with the guitar and my song books, but then, as I seemed to be on a stage now, with a gathering audience, I panicked a bit.  I couldn’t find the books, I had put them somewhere but I was now lost.  I was never good at remembering all the words, and, I had had a crib stuck on the shoulder of my guitar with the first words of lines or verses to help me.

 

But I get ahead of myself.

 

For many years I just played a bit with friends.  I was a very minor part of a group led by school mate ‘Niggles,’ with Nick on Bass, Ben as vocalist, and Roy Dodds (yes, THE Roy Dodds) on drums.  I remember we played at parties, but my contribution was minimal.  I don’t think anyone noticed.

 

Picture taken on Dunrobin Beach, Sutherland, for the local press

I made some progress however when another friend, Charlie Snoxall, gave me a better guitar, and it was with this that I went to Scotland before my eighteenth birthday.  There I met Paul and Derek and we formed The Dunrobiners (for more about this period you can see an earlier Blog, entitled “Highlands,” https://www.richardpgibbs.org/2014/06/highlands.html) quickly becoming sought after for Ceilidhs and pubs, and even making a record (long since disappeared, don’t even try to find it....)  I remember one evening when we drove up to Wick in Paul’s Rover 90 to perform at a folk club.  The headline act was Hamish Imlach (I think!) and we played with him – but that’s about all I recall..... 

Paul, Derek and me at The Stag's Head, Golspie in 1969
I loved that silk shirt (until I dropped hot cigarette ash on it!)

 

Later that summer we did a week in the front room of The Stag’s Head, Golspie, and I still smell the tables of Tennent’s Heavy that accumulated before us as we worked through our repertoire of traditional Scottish and Irish songs, including The Irish Rover (She had twenty-three masts and she stood several blasts....), Leaving of Liverpool (So fare thee well my own true love....), and my speciality, The Black Velvet Band (Her eyes they shone like diamonds/You’d think her the queen of the land/And her hair it hung over her shoulder/Tied up with a black velvet band), the whole room joining in for the chorus. Apart from that I spent time trying to impress the Assistant Matron (the gorgeous Marty Dearlove) by plucking my way through The Last Thing on my Mind, my eyes sticking to her like snails on a window pane, while she darned the boarders’ socks (Are you going away with no word of farewell/Will there be not a trace left behind?) 

 

Not a trace.....

 

Around the same time, I also spent holidays in Ireland and met Luke Kelly, in Dublin (for more on this see my Dublin 3 Blog https://www.richardpgibbs.org/2012/10/dublin-3_28.html).  I learned a little from singers and guitarists, but, to be honest, I wasn’t a very good musician.  I had a few party pieces – Season of the Witch (When I look out my window), being one, Mr Tambourine Man (Let me forget about today until tomorrow.....) another.

 

Several years later, in Rome, friends formed Roisin Dubh, the Celtic connection being strong at the time, and I bought a new (Echo) guitar, which stayed in tune a little better than my old one.  With a friend and colleague, Gerry, I set up a folk group at our school, and we practised and sang loud and happily for some years.  It was, interestingly, a very cosmopolitan group, including Palestinians and Israelis as well as British and Italians, and we performed at concerts that I set up for Amnesty International, headlined by the likes of Adrian Mitchell and Roger McGough, with songs like I shall be released (They say ev’rything can be replaced....)

One iteration of our folk group in Rome

 

On my return to the UK I tried to keep going, but family life and then, eventually, my wife’s illness withered the vine.

 

And so, to my dream.  I am now searching furiously for my word books, sweating and frightened, the enormous audience restless (we are in something like the Ryman Auditorium now), but I am lost, and my soft fingers are not practised.

 

I stand and there is a hush.  I decide to talk about memory, and memory loss, and try to illustrate this with snatches from some of the songs I used to sing, plucking hopefully at the guitar.  At my door the leaves are falling/The cold wild wind will come/Sweethearts walk by together/And I still miss someone..... (Johnny Cash).  I struggle to complete the song, and then talk some more about my personal history as I have told you, dressing up my encounters with musicians and singers, grasping at memories of lines.  Things begin to fall into place, I see my light come shining/from the west unto the east/Any day now, any day now/I shall be released....

Danny, Andrew and Clive

 

My confidence grows, my fingertips harden, I use a pick, Must be the season of the witch!  I talk a bit about dementia, about the way my wife has lost all language, I strum a chord, and begin Love minus zero: (My love, she speaks like silence....) I falter.....  I begin Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right, but muddle the verses:  Well it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why babe, If’n you don’t know by now.....

 

The audience is standing, No wait!  I say.  I just remembered.  One more.....

 

May God bless and keep you always, May your wishes all come true,

May you always do for others and let others do for you,

May you build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung,

May you stay for ever young

For ever young, for ever young, May you stay forever young.....

 

The auditorium is dark and empty.  The audience has gone.  The auditorium has gone.  I am in my wife’s Care Home, in the Dining Room; Amanda is asleep, head down on the table.  The cook brings me a cup of tea.  Very nice, she says.  You should go on Britain’s got talent......

 

Love Minus Zero/No Limit

 

My love she speaks like silence
Without ideals or violence
She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful
Yet she’s true, like ice, like fire
People carry roses
Make promises by the hours
My love she laughs like the flowers
Valentines can’t buy her

 

Bob Dylan

 

We few, we happy few.....

In Memoriam.... the good days

My Upper Fourth Registration Group.....

Yesterday, by happenstance, I met an acquaintance from way back - someone who had worked with my father, maybe 45 years ago, but who had once given me some excellent advice.  And he spends some of each year with his partner in Tenerife, where, small world that it is, his social circle included a certain Tom Jackson and his (second) wife.  Sadly, after some years of dementia (and some might unkindly say it was many years) Tom died recently, and this news brought my first meeting with him sharply back to my mind.

We met in the Waldorf Hotel in the Aldwych, then known as the Waldorf Astoria, after 1st Viscount Astor (who established it) but now humbly titled the Waldorf Hilton.....

I was there for an interview with the new Headmaster of St George's English School in Rome (aka Tom B Jackson), which had not long before moved to the ex-Jesuit Seminary at La Storta, on the Via Cassia, just out of Rome, the site, in fact (?sic), where in 1537 Ignatius of Loyola received a vision of God the Father and Christ holding the cross.....

As a result of this interview, in August of 1976, I boarded a train, with my trunk as passenger luggage in advance (as one did in those days) and set out for a new life in Italy.

The seminary building that became St George's

Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of Tom Jackson, and in fact I didn't even have a camera for the first year or so of my stay in Rome, but I have raided my archives and selected a few pictures that, despite some dust and scratches, may bring to life those fabulous early years as a member of the St George's community.....

We happy few.....

I will try and keep it brief..... Someday perhaps someone will write a book about it, but for now I'll stick to the highlights.

First off, we have to acknowledge that St George's was a private educational establishment, offering an English education in the heart of Italy.  It was both a business, and had to survive on fee income and nothing else, and it was governed by a board (including people from the British Embassy and Council) that inevitably had an interest in its standing as something of a cultural flagship.  I won't say there was interference from above, but to paraphrase John Donne, No school is an island..... and external influences played a part in St George's in more ways than one.

[In several ways, perhaps?  ndr]

Isobel Scott and Hilary Sides

But, hey, I was 25 and not yet interested in all that.  I was excited to be in Italy, and had an awful lot to learn.  The staff, many of whom became life-long friends, were an eclectic mix of individuals, some of whom had historical links with Rome (for example, Charles Forgione, Welsh/Italian blood, Latin teacher, erstwhile British Military Intelligence officer in Rome after the liberation, detailed - so we were told -  to drive Mrs Mussolini where're she would....) and others who, like me, had pitched up because of a mix of not having yet found a niche and still having a sense of adventure..... perhaps....?

Dr Nick Henson

But the real life blood of the school coursed through the pupils.  Over 800 boys and girls, from over 60 different nations.  Some native Italians, others who, owing to parental occupations, had lived in many different parts of the world before spending a few years in Rome. 

Jane Williams and Richard Edwards

And there really were all sorts (although, despite the fact that some of the children were sponsored, most families had to be quite well off).  This was a very far cry from my teaching experience on the outskirts of Manchester, but, as Eccles once said, Everybody gotta be somewhere..... 

On our way to Barcelona (or back from there)

Parents' evenings could be red carpet events. Stars of film and theatre, and music, such as Vittorio Gassman, Gigi Proietti, Aldo Giuffrè, Ursula Andress, Lucio Battisti, Michele Placido, Francesco Rosi and more. Politicians (Valerio Zanone for one, Eduard Shevardnadze, as a grandfather, for another); authors (Anthony Burgess before my time, Richard Mason and Robert Katz, during my time); journalists (such as Corrado Augias); academics, scientists, economists and friends of the pope - the list could go on (and apologies to anyone who feels left out!)

But all of these melded into a confusion of aspiring souls who laughed and played together and, occasionally, paid attention to teachers.  There was an idiolect at the school, part Italian and part English, which made it easier for newcomers to blend in.  My own daughters attended the primary school (later, ndr) with the step children of then Lazio superstar, Gazza, and, though none of them had secure Italian, they were all at one with each other. 

 

One of the features of the school then, impossible today methinks, was what we called "March Week," when the school closed down and teachers arranged trips or activities (some of them in school) for  self-selected groups of pupils. This was probably driven by the Italian tradition of having ski trips (not unknown in English schools, though these might more often be in 'holiday' time?)

My first of these involved taking a small party of teenagers, on my own, to stay in a villa on Capri.  I think it went quite well, though one of my recollections is that I had to share a room with a girl because otherwise she would have been sharing a room with her boyfriend.....

Later trips were to Barcelona:

The Aeolian Islands, where my pupils had to rescue me from an altercation with un uomo d'honore who I had caught prowling through our rooms:

and which involved a reenactment of a scene from Pasolini's Theorem (with Terence Stamp) where - if I remember correctly - a character runs naked through the sulphurous steaming fumaroles on the rim of Vulcano:

Maybe I misremember that, but on another occasion we went to Cairo and Luxor, where we found that the Franciscan Convent we had arranged to stay in would not accommodate females, so we had to rapidly find an alternative.  The girls were happy enough, I believe, though the flock of sheep and goats on the roof above their rooms displayed some bleating confusion.

We explored the remains of the Great Hypostyle Hall of Karnak and then, inspired by my friend and colleague Michael Hill, crossed the Nile and hired bicycles to ride to the Valley of the Kings.  It was 40 C in the shade and all might have been well had all the kids been adept at riding bikes.  Unfortunately, it turned out that one young lady could not.  Alas, it fell to me to transport this elegant but unfinished youth to the tomb of Tutankhamen on my cross bar..... In fact, despite the sweat, I nearly did well out of it as a local farmer offered me two camels for my burden.  

I hope I made the right decision.....

Nearer home there were hill walking expeditions - notably one to the summit of Monte Amiata in Tuscany:

But there were also theatrical performances, such as my production of The Playboy of the Western World, which ran for two nights, the second being twenty minutes shorter than the first as the cast skipped an entire scene and my friend, Bob Brecknell, as prompt, seemed to have been asleep at the time.  

The audience expressed gratitude, though I am still not sure exactly what they were grateful for....

Much more successful were the shows directed by my head of department, Mark Menhinick, with whom we took over the Goldoni Theatre in the back streets of Rome, and which had initially opened when Shakespeare was active.  A production of The Gondoliers was a treat:

Incidentally, this later led to me persuading Patrick Persichetti and his mother to let me and my friend Gino run a series of folk concerts there. Patrick, whose father was a hero of the defence of Rome, also wanted part of the action, so insisted on staging his own one-man show.... that ran for one night, with my wife-to-be, Amanda, and her friend, Hilary, as the only two in the audience.....

(The Goldoni subsequently became a music bar under the name of the Old Goldoni, but then was reclaimed by the Vatican and has since been closed to the public for decades......)

 

We also had concerts at the school, including some that we organised to support Amnesty International.  Roger McGough was one of my guest artists, as was Adrian Henri, and here is a shot of the late great Adrian Mitchell joining in the chorus of Bob Dylan's I Shall Be Released.....

The Folk Club in action

That was a great show, with Rob Hix directing the school choir and orchestra:

Rob Hix conducting, Martin Biggs on strings

And the Coro Ana (the choir of the famous Italian Alpine Regiment - with which both Mark Menhinick and Gerry Firth sang).....

All presided over by the then Headmaster, Frank Ruggiero, who, having heard Adrian Mitchell reciting his verses for the pupils in the morning, advised me that some of Adrian's poetry might be a little too left-wing for the evening performance and that he (Frank) would rather some pieces were cut.....

Needless to say, when I related this attempt at censorship to Adrian, it merely fuelled his performance.  [RIP Adrian].

Another Principle (I think I worked under six, or maybe it was seven?) who liked to air his own views, however unpopular, was Hendrik (Harry) Deelman.  Hendrik had come to us from a post in Buenos Aires, which conflicted somewhat when Argentina declared war on the Falkland Islands.  Despite the complications  (we had to abandon school uniform to avoid pupils being identified as attending an English establishment on their way to and from school, and staff were advised to check under their cars every day for bombs.....) one thing was clear.  On the map of the world behind his desk in his office, Hendrik had scored out Falkland Islands and clearly written Las Malvinas......

Harry was teetotal.  Not an attribute everyone understood.  He had a partiality for raspberry cordial and Coca Cola.  It was indicative of the spirit of our Parent Teacher Association when I overheard Audris telling him in her distinctly South African accent not to drink so much Coca Cola.  Her exact words were: Harry! it makes your arse sag!

What fun!

Kindred Souls - Hendrik and Gerry Firth on a Sponsored Walk

And there were parties, and discoes and lunches, and dinners.  I really don't know how we got any teaching done.  

And as for learning?  Well, that was up to the kids..... (as it always is, ndr)

Fancy dress was a regular feature - 

Or was it?  Maybe these were every day occurrences?  (Or was it my imagination?)

I won't identify anyone in these pictures here, but I am still in contact with many of them, and I am very proud to have known them. A number have become well known - does the name Frans Timmermans not fill you with admiration and awe?  Would you relax in an interview with Nathalie Tocci?  Wouldn't you love to study English Literature at the University of Cassino and Southern Lazio?  Can you ignore the writings of Reshma Ruia?  Do you not wonder at the quick and confident production of Radio 4's Loose Ends?

Ah, we had such times!  

And (most of) the staff were a laugh too.....  I do remember one woman scowling when I offered her a glass of Prosecco at break time on my birthday once, and there was a maths teacher who became known by his catchphrase: There's nowhere to hang yer jacket....  But others knew how to party:

I remember driving my 750 cc Triumph Trident out to Trevignano one night in the dark and discovering that I had maths teacher Sandy Oldham (above) on the back seat.  In pitch dark we went skinny dipping in Lake Bracciano and I can distinctly remember an extraordinary sensation of weightless directionless in the water - I neither knew which way was up nor down (though, I must add, that had nothing to do with Sandy....) 

But she did have an infectious laugh.....

So.....  Although this has been a superficial and very personal piece, sparked by the sad remembrance of the late TBJ, for those with the resources, some of these pictures may once have appeared in the annual school magazine, The Georgian, which I had something to do with for a few years, and there are many more therein.....

The Editorial Team

Those were the days....

And these were some of those who joined in:

In Memoriam Tom Jackson, Janey Alcock, Pat Antonini, Charles Forgione, Mike Wall, Martyn Hales, Geraldine Braithwaite, Barrie Spicer, Rob Hix, Gerry Phillips, Helen Conlon, Rita Venturini, Harry Fairtlough, and all those colleagues, pupils, friends and acquaintances who have gone before......

Thank you for the good times.....