One of my few claims to fame is that I was born in the little Cumbrian town of Wigton at almost the same time as the novelist and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, aka Lord Bragg of Wigton.
Indeed Melvyn and I started at the primary school at the same time, passed our 11+ on the same day and spent almost our entire time at the Nelson Grammar School (later amalgamated with the Thomlinson girls’ school) in the same ‘A’ form.
We were even in the same scout patrol (Eagles) – Melvyn was patrol leader and I was his second in command.
As can be seen from the photo below, short trousers were the order of the day and I remember that Melvyn and I were the last two in our class to hide our knees from the world.
That would be when we entered the fourth form at the age of forteen.
We lost touch when left we left school in 1959 – Melvyn to study history at Oxford and me chemistry at Keele.
We were also part of the first cohort of children whose education took place entirely under the provisions of the 1944 Education Act.
This is an extract from a whole-school photograph taken in March 1951
The first form is seated in the front at the prefects’ feet and Melvyn is at the centre of this group of seven – I am the good looking chap first right.
So when I read that Melvyn had published Back in the Day – a memoir of his early days in Wigton – I willingly forked out 25 quid for a hardback copy expecting to wallow in nostalgia as I accompanied my old friend down memory lane.
However, the more I read the more I came to realise that Melvyn’s recollection of events in our home town was very different to mine.
Of course, at nearly 70 years distant it is not easy to prove whose version of events is accurate.
As Melvyn says in the foreword to Back in the Day: “There are misrememberings, I’m sure, and now and then a patch of embroidery to make sense of a scene.”
And I have to admit that I’m as capable of a bit of misremembering and embroidery as the next man.
As I said, all these different recollections could be just as much down to my faulty memory as his, but by the time I’d finished reading chapter 35, I knew for certain that factual accuracy wasn’t always the Oxford-educated historian’s first priority and that he had simply progressed from autobiographical fiction to fictionalised autobiography.
What is interesting is that all the stories in the book contain an element of truth, but it is the way that Melvyn has inserted himself into the action that gives rise to the problem.
In chapter 35, he covers the Nelson Thomlinson Grammar School’s outstanding rugby playing record which was largely down to our brilliant coach Jimmie Morton. Jimmie was an old boy of the school and had won an Engand schoolboy cap himself before going off to teachers’ training college and back to the Wigton to teach PT. There were five England schoolboy caps in my time at the school which was a remarkable record for a school in the middle of nowhere with just 200 boys.
Reading this chapter it would be easy to get the impression that Melvyn was something of a rugby player. As vice captain of the first team I can tell you nothing could be further from the truth – he was an occasional player at best
Melvyn recounts an away match with Workington – one of the few schools in Cumberland that could give us a game – in which he broke his collar bone.
This required Jimmie to take him to the local hospital to have the bone set which meant the team coach left without them and they had to fall back on the service bus for the 17 mile trip back to Wigton.
I’m no medical expert, but broken collar bones usually required no more than a sling to support your arm. On the rare occasions that the bone had to be reset an anesthetic would be needed. So a bus back to Wigton that same afternoon would have been out of the question.
But no need to nit pick because Melvyn’s tale has bigger flaws than that.
The bus station in those days was on Market Hill, just across the road from the Black-a-Moor – the pub run by Melvyn’s parents, Stan and Ethel.
When Jimmie and Melvyn arrived home late on Saturday afternoon, a grateful Ethel rustled up a quick bite to eat and Jimmie enjoyed a bottle of light ale provided by Stan before readying himself to catch the bus back to his home in Thursby – a village halfway between Wigton and Carlisle.
According to Melvyn’s memoir, just as Jimmie was leaving: Ethel asked “Is Edna well these days?” There was a note of apprehension in her question. Again he nodded. His manner was now brisk. He looked across the hill to where the Carlisle bus, which would call at his village of Thursby, was ready to leave.
“That was a lovely supper. Thank you.”
He walked quickly across to the bus.
He bought a ticket to Carlisle. He hadn’t been there for three weeks, too long. An incident on that evening led to his dismissal from the school.
This is all rather cryptic, so I’ll explain.
The “note of apprehension” hinted that Ethel knew that all was not well with Jimmie and Edna’s marriage.
His “manner was now brisk” because he had something on his mind, perhaps.
For some reason “he bought a ticket to Carlisle” which was six miles beyond his home in Thursby.
“He hadn’t been there for three weeks, too long” – so what was he missing in Carlisle?
The answer to that was his homosexual partner
And the “incident on that evening led to his dismissal from the school” was that he and his boyhfriend had been arrested after being caught in a compromising position on a park bench in Carlisle.
As this was before homosexuality was legalised, this incident led to his dismissal from the school.
But all this was long after we had all left school.
I can remember, as if it was yesterday, when I first heard about Jimmie’s downfall.
It was in 1966 when we were living in Stoke and I had travelled up to Keswick to play rugby for Staffordshire against my native Cumberland and Westmorland. Playing for C & W that day was my old school friend Jeff Edgar (Jeff was one of the schoolboy internationals mentioned earlier and we had been captain and vice-captain of the Nelson Thomlinson 1st XV back in 1959). After the game, over a pint in the Keswick clubhouse, he told me about Jimmie’s recent problems and his dismissal from the school.
We were both very upset because rugby, especially Jimmie’s encouragement and influence, had been such an important part of our young lives. I remember him giving up his lunch hour to coach us in the finer points of three-quarter play, and driving Jeff and me 50 miles through the Lakeland mountains to Kendal in his old Riley for a county schools’ game against Durham. We knew how much he loved coaching rugby and how much he would miss it.
So Melvyn’s minutely detailed account of Jimmie’s downfall on the day of a school rugby match in Workington was a complete fabrication..
And I don’t have to rely on memory for any of this because below is a photo of Jimmie (front left) with the 1965/66 Nelson Thomlinson school first team as proof that the incident that cost him his job didn’t coincide with Melvyn’s broken clavicle back in 1958/59.
Forgetting past events is, of course, something to which we are all prone, but remembering things that never happened requires a novelist’s imagination..
For further examples see Melvyn’s misremembereings
