Horace.

Several local news sources, including the excellent Bexley is Bonkers Blog have reported over the previous few months how Bexley Council have published a statement which is disputed by some, that they are one of the local councils within Greater London that has among the highest level of domestic rubbish recycling. Whilst the actual figures may be at variance with this ambitious statement, it has recently become clear that not just locally, but nationally the levels of recycling of domestic waste are reducing, which is an unwelcome and worrying phenomenon. In a recent survey conducted by professional survey consultancy Censuswide on behalf of waste management specialists Biffa, and published online, the results indicated that an increasing number of UK residents were recycling less than previously, and some had stopped almost completely. Almost 31% of respondents to the survey admitted that they only occasionally recycled, whilst 21% of people said that they had given up sorting their rubbish into the right bins because they didn't believe it actually got recycled, and 19% claimed that the rules in general were too confusing for them to understand. What was even more eye-opening was that 61% of all the respondents said that they threw recyclable materials into the general waste as they could not be bothered to separate it, and that they felt that the waste company should be doing the work as that's what they were being paid for. On top of this, 16% of those who took part in the survey did not know what day their bins were collected on. This may be due to the fact that they lived in a communal setting such as a block of flats, which has combined waste facilities. On a more positive note, 35% of the people involved in the survey said they would be more keen to recycle if there was some kind of reward system, and that they were not doing a job that the waste company should be doing under their local council contract. Nearly a third of the respondents also said they would be more enthusiastic about separating waste into different bins ready to be recycled if there was more clarity about exactly what kind of waste went into each bin, as quite often some kinds of plastics can be recycled and others cannot, and they felt confused. Comments as usual to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.

Following the then and now photos of Erith station that I published last week, I was contacted by local historian Ken Chamberlain who sent me the images that you see above - please click on either to see a larger version. They show Erith railway station at some time, not very long after it opened in July 1849, although the precise date is not recorded. I think one can see from the clothes and hats that people in the photographs are wearing that it must have been at some point in that time period. As I have previously written, the London Bridge to Greenwich line was one of the oldest commuter train lines in the world, and it was extended all the way down to Chatham and later Rainham, and up to Charing Cross. The actual primary reason for this was not to carry commuters, although this did actually pay for the service. It was to enable navy officers and men who were located at the Admiralty close to Charing Cross to be able to quickly travel to Chatham, which in Victorian times was the host to the world's largest naval dockyard in the days when the Royal Navy was the strongest military force on the planet. Nowadays, as I'm sure many people are aware, it is an excellent museum, and is also used as a filming location, most well-known for being the place for where much of the BBC historical drama series Call the Midwife is filmed. 

After my article on the history of my late great Uncle Horace last week, I have had feedback from several readers which has been extremely positive. They have asked me for more information about him and his fascinating history. I actually have written about him in the past, but it was quite a long time ago. Whilst he was a very quiet and private man, his best friend was at the time a global superstar - the stage and movie comic actor Will Hay. Again, I've written about their friendship in the past, and if anybody is interested I may cover this further at some point in the future. Although as I've written, Uncle Horace was bisexual, his relationship with Will Hay was purely platonic, and to some extent academic. Whilst Will Hay was the second highest paid entertainer in the UK just prior to World War II, second only to George Formby - he was also a serious academic, he was multilingual - speaking seven languages fluently, a pilot, and one of the leading astronomers in the UK, who presented lectures at both Oxford and Cambridge universities, and wrote several books on astronomy. I digress. Following World War II, And his work on Colossus, Uncle Horace returned to his career at the post office. He eventually became the chief engineer for the UK / US telephone exchange in Upper Thames Street in central London, which handled all UK phone lines to America. He was one of only two people who had the key to the international hotline that linked London, Moscow and Washington DC, which was in a room made to look like a store cupboard. When I was seven or eight years old, during a school holiday I got to spend the day with him at work. He showed me the hotline room, and actually it was not very impressive - no flashing lights as you would see in a cold war thriller. Instead it was very plain, and painted with what appeared to be war surplus battleship grey. There were a few panels with unlit lights, and a patch panel with some cords attached to it. There was also a small table and a matching chair, and that was about that. Reality did not match the fictional “James Bond” image, which was very disappointing for a small boy. In his office Uncle Horace had a big Victorian roll - top desk, and propped against it was a very tatty and battered looking cricket bat. I recall I was sat with a carton of Kia Ora drink whilst he made some phone calls whilst smoking a horrid roll - up cigarette. For some unknown reason he smoked roll – ups at work, but at home he smoked conventional boxed cigarettes; he had a large collection of vintage cigarette cards, some in albums, and others in large piles which he kept on top the fireplace in his back room. I would imagine that nowadays they would be worth a small fortune. A junior engineer came in and said that there was a problem with a relay rack (the City exchange was the last one in London to be converted to digital, and at this time was still electro - mechanical). Horace slowly got up, stubbed out his fag, then picked up the cricket bat, before winking at me as he said “come with me lad”. We went into the open relay floors, where tens of thousands of electro - mechanical relays were clattering as they made automatic phone connections. The junior engineer pointed to a rack where the relays were not moving - they appeared to be frozen or jammed. Uncle Horace said “Stand Back!” to me over the din. He then took a great swing with the cricket bat at the relay frame. There was a loud bang, and the  frozen relays all jumped back into life! He then fished around in the pocket of his waistcoat for a piece of chalk, and marked a cross on the side of the relay frame, before saying to his assistant “we’ll take this one out tonight - get it booked”. Now - this really impressed me! That was the only time I ever got to see what he did at work; he was extremely diffident about his past, and always managed to steer the conversation elsewhere if the subject came up. Ironically I am now sitting here typing this whilst wearing Horace’s Omega dress watch, which I inherited from him when he died. He was a real enigma, and a lovely man. Bearing in mind Horace never married, And lived in a Victorian house just off the Lee High Road whilst caring for his autistic brother Gordon for the rest of his life; his pay package was pretty generous for the time, as a very senior post office telecommunications engineering manager. His interest in all sorts of electronics and engineering never changed. He also smoked extremely strong Camel brand cigarettes - which eventually killed him. Unfortunately I don't have a photograph of Uncle Horace. I did once read a book that was a biography of Will Hay, and in the middle of the book there were a number of photographs including one of the work to dig the foundations of a new astronomical observatory in the gardens of Hay's house, and in the photo, leaning on a shovel was Uncle Horace dressed in a string vest and baggy trousers. Unfortunately the book is long out of print and I've never been able to locate a copy of it. As I wrote last week, Uncle Horace spent his wartime years working at the Post Office Research Centre at Dollis Hill, with lead engineer, Tommy Flowers. They ended up producing what was debatably the first programmable electronic computer in the form of Colossus, and later Colossus 2. This was used to to assist in the cracking of the Lorenz Cipher, which was several magnitudes more difficult to break than the better known Enigma Code. Colossus was an amazing feat of engineering - It occupied the size of a living room (7 ft high by 17 ft wide and 11 ft deep), weighed five tonnes, and used 8kW of power. It incorporated 2,500 valves, 501 of which are thyraton switches, about 100 logic gates and 10,000 resistors connected by 7 km of wiring. Reading 5000 characters per second (faster than anything ever produced commercially), Colossus found the start wheel positions of Lorenz-encrypted messages to enable the decryption of 63 million characters. Typically, it took Colossus up to four hours to establish the start wheel positions of messages. It is often surmised that the Allies might have been reading some of the decrypted messages even before they reached Nazi High Command. By the end of the war, 63 million characters of high-grade German messages had been decrypted by the 550 people working on the ten functioning Colossi at Bletchley Park. After the war, some of the Colossi were destroyed, and the remaining ones moved to GCHQ, where it is said they were in operation until the mid 1970’s. By the early 1980’s the story of Bletchley Park and the Colossus computer was finally coming out, after over thirty years of total secrecy. Great Uncle Horace never said a word. It is thought that the works of both Horace and Tommy Flowers and all of the other staff at Bletchley Park where the Colossus computers were located, once they had been built at Dollis Hill might have shortened the length of World War II by approximately 2 years, and in doing so saved countless lives. Their work was staggeringly confidential. It was classified as above top secret. Horace never talked, as people of his generation and background were incredibly circumspect about secret wartime activities. Anything he knew, he took to the grave. The family only found out after his death. I digress; Horace was of comfortable means, and he ensured that he and his brother had the best of any new technology, including an early Sony Trinitron colour television, which cost nearly a thousand pounds in the late 1970’s, but at the time was the best television available by quite a large margin. Dad would take us to visit on a Friday evening, and we would sit in the back room with the TV perched on the dinner table and watch “Pot Black” in colour. Whilst nobody could ever accuse me of being a sporty person, as a youngster I did like Judo, dinghy sailing and fencing and snooker, none of which I was very good at. I note that all the sports that I had an interest in were one on one or solo activities – I really detested team sports like football and rugby, mainly as 1) I was very bad at them, and 2) I never could work out who was meant to be doing what. I digress; Back when I watched snooker on Uncle Horace’s colour telly, it was a game played quite differently to today. Players chased around the table, potting balls at every opportunity – it was like a race to the finish. When I watched the snooker coverage last weekend, it was like a completely different game. The players spent more time trying to confound their opponent by clever ball placing, and employing far more strategy to snooker their adversary. The game seems to have become far more cerebral and strategic, and by extension a much better watch. Snooker does not have anything like the public exposure it did forty or so years ago; it used to be show on prime time BBC2, and the finals shown on BBC1. Now it is hidden away on Channel 5 and Freeview. I wonder whether the improvement in the spectator experience will eventually translate into higher viewing figures and a return to the mainstream? 

The end video this week is a full length feature film from back in 1937 that is widely regarded as a comedy classic, and Will Hay's finest work. Great Uncle Horace's best friend made numerous films, but this is generally regarded as the pinnacle, and it still stands up today. One lesser-known fact about it is that the three central characters in the film were the inspiration for Captain Mainwaring, Lance Corporal Jones And Private Pike from Dad's Army. In a further link with Dad's Army, Oh, Mister Porter! was based on the stage play The Ghost Train, which was written by actor and playwright Arnold Ridley, who went on to play the medic Private Godfrey in the classic TV comedy show. The film, Oh Mr. Porter! used to be shown regularly on TV, although that has not been the case for many years now. It is now freely available on YouTube to watch at no cost. I strongly recommend it. Comments to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.