Scrap Book Project – I-Spy Books

I-Spy books were small paperback volumes that were popular in the 1950s and 1960s.  Each book covered a subject such as I-SPY Cars, I-SPY on the Pavement, I-SPY on a Train Journey, and so on and so on.

The object was to be vigilant and spot objects such as animals, trees, policemen, fire engines, sea shells etc. etc.  and they were recorded in the relevant book, and this gained points.  More points were available for the more difficult spots.  Once you had spotted everything and the book was complete, it could be sent to Big Chief I-SPY for a feather and order of merit.

No, I kid you not! 

The books was supposedly written by a Red Indian chief called Big Chief I-Spy who turned out to be a man called Charles Warrell who was a former school teacher and headmaster who created I-Spy in 1948. He retired in 1956, but lived on until 26th November 1995 when he died at the age of 106.  For part of this time he also worked as an antiques dealer in Islington.

Those who played the I-Spy game became members of the I-Spy Tribe and were called Redskins.  The head office was variously known as the Wigwam by the Water or the Wigwam-by-the-Green.  Neither of these exotic sounding places were situated on the American Plains or in the Black Hills of Dakota, the former was located next to the Mermaid Theatre at Blackfriars and the latter was in London’s Edgware Road.

I had quite a collection of I-Spy books but to be honest I never finished any of them because some of the items were absurdly difficult to track down (how, for example, do you I-Spy fish unless you are a deep sea fisherman working on a trawler or a scuba diver?) and I never got a single feather although I did join the club and had an I-Spy badge that I used to wear on the lapel of my school blazer.

The original first thirty-two I-Spy books were in black and white only and cost sixpence each and the titles were:

At the Seaside	The Army
On the Farm	The Wheel
History	Sport
On a Train Journey	People and Places
Dogs	Musical Instruments
In the Country	Men at Work
At the Zoo- Animals	Antique Furniture
At the Zoo – Birds and Reptiles	The Universe
In the Street	Road Transport
On the Road	Town Crafts
The Sights of London	Country Crafts
Horses and Ponies	The Sky
Ships and Harbours	People in Uniform
Boats and Waterways	Motorcycles and Cycles
Aircraft	Bridges
Cars	Sports Cars

Some of these books were extremely useful for parents, especially on long jouneys.  For a small investment there would be short periods of peace while children were preoccupied with spotting things –  ‘On a Train Journey’, ‘Road Transport’ and ‘Cars’ were good for this sort of thing.

On a long car journey my dad would invent his own I-spy games and challenge us to spot a red lorry, spot a black cow, spot a petrol station, in fact spot pretty much anything he could think of if it successfully kept us all quiet.  This didn’t last very long of course and when he got desperate he would tell us to look out for the sea and when we were on the way to Cornwall or Wales he usually started this little distraction roughly at about Oxford which is of course just about as far from the sea as you can possibly get!  That was very optimistic.

‘At the Seaside’ was also useful for parents because they could send you off for hours at a time staring into rock pools and poking around at the shoreline to find things while they sat and enjoyed the sunshine.  I suppose some would be frowned upon today because they encouraged kids to go off to places that parents today would consider dangerous, ‘In the Street’, ‘Boats and Waterways’, ‘Bridges’ and especially, probably the most dangerous of all, ‘Wild Fruits and Funghi’!

Some were useless of course and we didn’t buy them, I mean what chance was there of completing ‘The Army’ I-Spy book unless your dad was a squaddie? And how were most normal kids supposed to spot ‘Aircraft’?  I never went near an airport until I was twenty-two and neither did most of my mates.

Some people took this all a bit too seriously and here is an entry that I have found on www.doyouremember.co.uk : “Glad to know that others remember the I-SPY Books. I used the books regularly as a child in the 1950s and 1960s (and beyond), was a member of the I-SPY Tribe and won various prizes, including a wigwam (or tent!) I led my own local “patrol” and we met the second Big Chief I-SPY, Arnold Cawthrow, on a number of occasions. He visited my home in Barking twice and mentioned me and my Red Arrow Patrol in a number of his Daily Mail columns. I kept in touch until he retired in 1978 and remember the whole I-SPY experience with much affection.”

I-Spy a sad man!

Favourite Blogs of 2012!

CHEERS!  – ¡SALUD! –  YIAMAS

I have had a really good year at the keyboard and posting my blogs but I have also enjoyed reading other work just as much.  Some catch the eye straight away, some can be found indirectly through others, some are like shooting stars and disappear without a trace whilst some continue to get better and better.

I thought it would be nice to share with you my favourite blogs of 2012.

They are in no particular order except this one, which is my favourite.  We have fallen out with each other a couple of times but I still keep going back for more of this post about ex-pat life in Gibraltar:

http://roughseasinthemed.wordpress.com/

Author Richard Tulloch writes about his travels:

http://richardtulloch.wordpress.com/

Adrian shares his excellent pictures:

http://adrianharveyphotography.com/

I like this one – there are a lot of stag parties involved in the overseas travel:

http://abitofculture.net/

Great pictures here from Gunta in the USA:

http://gusgus64.wordpress.com/

A lovely recollections and memories blog:

http://opobs.wordpress.com/

A travel blog with a great sense of humour:

http://blondebrunettetravel.com/

A nice blog from Patrecia about ex-pat life in Bulgaria

http://misswhiplash.wordpress.com/

Great posts about one of my favourite countries – Portugal – and more besides

http://restlessjo.wordpress.com/

and finally a gentle pot-pourri of good stories:

http://shipscooksstuff.wordpress.com/

Apologies if I didn’t include you in my top ten this year – I will review the list at the same time next year!

Learning To Read

I have always had a love of reading and books, even as a child.  Some of the early books that I had were an eleven part junior encyclopaedia, a book called ‘Picture Stories From The Bible’ and a collection of children’s Ladybird books. Ladybird Books closed on 30^th November 1998 and this memory has prompted to think about learning to read.

Until I was five we lived in a variety of houses in Leicester and in 1958 we had moved home from Ledwell Drive in Glenfield to Chislehurst Avenue in Braunstone and in September 1959 it was time in life to go to school.  The Ravenhurst Primary School was about a five hundred-metre stroll across rough land waiting for houses to be built on it and I used to walk there with my friends John and Michael Sparks who lived on the other side of the road.  The teacher’s name was Miss Bird and her classroom had alphabet pictures on the wall, ‘A’ for alcohol, ‘B’ for beer, ‘C’ for cider and so on and it was here that I started to learn to read using the ‘Dick and Dora books’.

In the 1950s, Dick and Dora were supposed to be average kids, living a typical English life with their parents and their pets, Nip the dog and Fluff the cat. (I have written on this blog about my dislike of dogs and you will notice here that even in a children’s book the dog has a name that implies that it will bite you.)  Their unexceptional and almost idyllic middle-class existence of playing in the garden and once a year going to the seaside was the basis of a series of books designed to teach children to read.

I liked Dick and Dora but I didn’t get long at Ravenhurst School because after only a couple of terms we moved to Hinckley where I went to the Grove Road Church of England Primary School and very soon after that moved to Rugby and went to the Hillmorton County Junior and Infants school where they had ‘Janet and John’ books instead which were very similar and taught four to seven year old children how to read by progressively incorporating and repeating key words in the development of reading skills.

With three schools in the first year I wasn’t get a good chance to settle in and I blame this for holding me back and making me a disappointing pupil for the first ten years or so of school.

 

What am I reading now?

Big Chief I-SPY

I-Spy books were small paperback volumes that were popular in the 1950s and 1960s.  Each book covered a subject such as I-SPY Cars, I-SPY on the Pavement, I-SPY on a Train Journey, and so on and so on.  The object was to be vigilant and spot objects such as animals, trees, policemen, fire engines, sea shells etc. etc.  and they were recorded in the relevant book, and this gained points.  More points were available for the more difficult spots.  Once you had spotted everything and the book was complete, it could be sent to Big Chief I-SPY for a feather and order of merit.

No, I kid you not! 

The books was supposedly written by a Red Indian chief called Big Chief I-Spy who turned out to be a man called Charles Warrell who was a former school teacher and headmaster who created I-Spy in 1948. He retired in 1956, but lived on until 26th November 1995 when he died at the age of 106.  For part of this time he also worked as an antiques dealer in Islington.

Those who played the I-Spy game became members of the I-Spy Tribe and were called Redskins.  The head office was variously known as the Wigwam by the Water or the Wigwam-by-the-Green.  Neither of these exotic sounding places were situated on the American Plains or in the Black Hills of Dakota, the former was located next to the Mermaid Theatre at Blackfriars and the latter was in London’s Edgware Road.

I had quite a collection of I-Spy books but to be honest I never finished any of them because some of the items were absurdly difficult to track down (how, for example, do you I-Spy fish unless you are a deep sea fisherman working on a trawler or a scuba diver?) and I never got a single feather although I did join the club and had an I-Spy badge that I used to wear on the lapel of my school blazer.

The original first thirty-two I-Spy books were in black and white only and cost sixpence each and the titles were:

At the Seaside	The Army
On the Farm	The Wheel
History	Sport
On a Train Journey	People and Places
Dogs	Musical Instruments
In the Country	Men at Work
At the Zoo- Animals	Antique Furniture
At the Zoo – Birds and Reptiles	The Universe
In the Street	Road Transport
On the Road	Town Crafts
The Sights of London	Country Crafts
Horses and Ponies	The Sky
Ships and Harbours	People in Uniform
Boats and Waterways	Motorcycles and Cycles
Aircraft	Bridges
Cars	Sports Cars

Some of these books were extremely useful for parents, especially on long jouneys.  For a small investment there would be short periods of peace while children were preoccupied with spotting things –  ‘On a Train Journey’, ‘Road Transport’ and ‘Cars’ were good for this sort of thing.  On a long car journey my dad would invent his own I-spy games and challenge us to spot a red lorry, spot a black cow, spot a petrol station, in fact spot pretty much anything he could think of if it successfully kept us all quiet.  When he got desperate he would tell us to look out for the sea and when we were on the way to Cornwall or Wales he usually started this little distraction roughly at about Oxford which is of course just about as far from the sea as you can possibly get!  That was very optimistic.

‘At the Seaside’ was also useful for parents because they could send you off for hours at a time staring into rock pools and poking around at the shoreline to find things while they sat and enjoyed the sunshine.  I suppose some would be frowned upon today because they encouraged kids to go off to places that parents today would consider dangerous, ‘In the Street’, ‘Boats and Waterways’, ‘Bridges’ and especially, probably the most dangerous of all, ‘Wild Fruits and Funghi’!   Some were useless of course and we didn’t buy them, I mean what chance was there of completing ‘The Army’ I-Spy book unless your dad was a squaddie? And how were most normal kids supposed to spot ‘Aircraft’?  I never went near an airport until I was twenty-two and neither did most of my mates.

Some people took this all a bit too seriously and here is an entry that I have found on www.doyouremember.co.uk : “Glad to know that others remember the I-SPY Books. I used the books regularly as a child in the 1950s and 1960s (and beyond), was a member of the I-SPY Tribe and won various prizes, including a wigwam (or tent!) I led my own local “patrol” and we met the second Big Chief I-SPY, Arnold Cawthrow, on a number of occasions. He visited my home in Barking twice and mentioned me and my Red Arrow Patrol in a number of his Daily Mail columns. I kept in touch until he retired in 1978 and remember the whole I-SPY experience with much affection.”

I-Spy a sad man!

Sex Education and Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Parents who had grown up in the 1930s and 1940s were a bit coy and rather shy about the difficult subject of sex and this certainly went for my mum and dad neither of whom ever provided me with any useful sex education lessons –  except for dad carelessly leaving his copy of  ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ lying about that is.  ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ is a novel by D. H. Lawrence that was written in 1928 and because of British obscenity laws was printed at that time privately in Italy.

With parental and school teacher reluctance to address the issue we had to find out about sex for ourselves through smutty playground talk with better informed school pals, watching the girls in their navy blue knickers in P.E. lessons and putting two and two together for ourselves after looking up the dirty words in a dictionary.

There were some hard lessons to be learned and I can remember one friend fell out with us all because he refused to believe that his parents could ever have conceived him through the sex act and thinking about his mum now I can fully understand the difficulty he must have had in coming to terms with this piece of information.

1960 was a big year for literature when the book ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ was published, ‘complete and unexpurgated‘, by Penguin books and promptly whipped up a legal storm.    The publication of the book caused a scandal due to its explicit sex scenes, including the use of previously banned four letter words.  When it was published the trial of the publishers, Penguin Books, under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, was a major public event and a test of the new obscenity law.

The 1959 Act had made it possible for publishers to escape conviction if they could demonstrate that a work was of literary merit and Penguin books took up the challenge.  At the trial which opened on October 20^th various academic critics, were called as witnesses, and the verdict, delivered on 2^nd November was not guilty.  This resulted in a far greater degree of freedom for publishing explicit material in the United Kingdom and soon newsagent’s top shelves were straining under the weight of glamour magazines with pictures of pretty ladies with no clothes on.

A nice story about the trial which illustrates just how big a watershed 1960 was in terms of changing social attitudes was when the chief prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asked the jury if it were the kind of book “you would wish your wife or servants to read“.

Much later than 1960 I found a copy of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ on the top of my dad’s wardrobe and was able to go immediately to the offending passage because the book fell naturally open at exactly the right spot.  It’s a boring book and I suspect most of it had not been read at all but the few pages of dirty words were well thumbed and dog-eared and over the next few weeks I contributed to this by sharing it with all of my mates whenever they came around to the house when my parents were out.  This all stopped when one day when the book had gone from the top of the wardrobe and although nothing was ever said I think I’d been rumbled.

Cervantes and Don Quixote

Don Quixote is a novel written by the seventeenth century Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra who was born 29th September 1547 and is regarded as the most influential work of literature to emerge from the Spanish Golden Age.

It is the story of a man who believes that he is a knight, and recounts his adventures as he rights wrongs, mistakes peasants for princesses, and  “tilts at windmills,” mistakenly believing them to be evil giants.  As one of the earliest works of modern western literature, it regularly appears high on lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published.

In 2002 a panel of one hundred leading world authors declared Don Quixote to be the best work of fiction ever written, ahead even of works by Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.  Cervantes has also been credited with shaping modern literary style, and Don Quixote has been acclaimed as “the first great novel of world literature”.  Since publication in 1605 it is reputed to be the most widely read and translated book on the planet after the Bible. I tried to read it once but found it a bit heavy going so gave up quite quickly but as we drove through Castilla-La Mancha along the Ruta de Don Quixote I resolved to give it another go upon returning home.

I did as I promised and bought a copy of Cervantes’ Don Quixote.  I found it on Amazon for the bargain price of £1.99, I ordered it together with a book on the history of Spain and it arrived three days later.

I opened the package and then I remembered why I didn’t finish it at the last attempt.  The book has nearly eight hundred pages and I estimate about four hundred and forty thousand words long and it has that tiny squashed up typeface that makes a book sometimes difficult to read.

So, just in case I start it and abandon it again I have decided to carry out some research and do some preparation to try and understand exactly why this is such a good book and why I should enjoy reading it.

According to one reviewer Don Quixote is “so conspicuous and void of difficulty that children may handle him, youths may read him, men may understand him and old men may celebrate him”.  I hope that I am at that “men may understand him” part of life whereas previously I was only at the “youths may read him” stage and that this might make a difference.  I think it will also help that I have now visited La Mancha and have some small understanding of the place and the people and this will explain the book when I begin to read it.

The novel begins with :

 ”Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing…

…His fantasy filled with everything he had read in his books, enchantments as well as combats, battles, challenges, wounds, courtings, loves, torments, and other impossible foolishness, and he became so convinced in his imagination of the truth of all the countless grandiloquent and false inventions he read that for him no history in the world was truer.”

I have read that first page a couple of times but have not yet felt completely ready to carry on so perhaps I will keep it for a holiday read?  I am determined to do it soon and I will let you know how I get on but for now I have got to finish my Bill Bryson book, which isn’t quite such an important work in the history of World literature but has the advantage of being very easy to read.