Finding America in Oxfordshire.

The pretty village of Stanton St. John lies in rolling countryside close to Oxford. We had intended a  family gathering in the city but there was a carnival in the suburb of Cowley and the Royal Henley Regatta was on the Thames not far away. Worse still, the British Formula1 Grand Prix was happening at Silverstone, right on our route to Oxford.

The Tour de France was happening in Yorkshire, maybe 180 miles away, but everyone who had a bike seemed to be out wobbling along the lanes. We abandoned any attempt to get into the city scanned the map and the Good Pub Guide for alternatives.

That's how we ended up at The Talkhouse in Stanton St. John. It took several trips around the village to find the abandoned Star Inn that lies at the end of a closed off lane where, tantalisingly, we could smell Sunday roasts from the empty car park. Sure enough, The Talkhouse was next door, but only accessible by driving a a mile around the village to the other side of the wall.

After a good lunch with seven of us sat around a big oak table, we needed tho stretch our legs. No-one fancied driving anywhere so we just strolled around the village, heading down-hill towards the church, past picture-postcard cottages made of Cotswold stone, all with pretty gardens that spilled out flowers in all directions.

The church-yard was obviously managed with wildlife in mind. Lime-loving flowers sprouted in every corner and in strips where the grass had been deliberately left long. Flowers attract insects, of course, especially bees, but I was pleased to see my first garden tiger moths for years. You can't miss them because they are big like butterflies. They fly in the day and are coloured red, black and white. We also saw marbled white butterflies that we know from the horse racing course above the city of Bath on the edge of the Cotswolds.

Looking across from the graveyard we saw an imposing stone house that we took to be the old vicarage. A plaque above the door stated that this was the birthplace of John White (1575 - 1648), Fellow of New College Oxford and chief founder of the Colony of Massachusetts.

Now, Mainers will tell you that founding Massachusetts is not a thing to be proud of.  For one thing, as the Bee-gees found out, it doesn't rhyme with anything.

The rivalry between the states in New England dates back to White's time, which was dominated by religious and political rivalries between Puritans and the established church what we remember as Roundheads versus Cavaliers,  Parliament versus Royalists or Cromwell versus King Charles the First, that climaxed in the English Civil Wars of 1642 to 1651. Troubled times in England, and a good time to head out for the New World.

My textbook knowledge of the period tells me that Parliament dominated in the East of England, and the Royalists held the West Country. It seems that the Puritans who settled in Massachusetts called their towns Boston, Cambridge, Ipswich and Haverhill after the East Anglian places they left behind. Your typical Puritan was not well suited to settling the land but they had good connections back home and soon carved up the rest of new England between themselves. The people who came and cut down the trees and made a living directly from the land were farmers and fishermen from the West Country; places like Gloucester, Wells, Exeter, Plymouth, Bath and Biddeford that are all place names on the New England coast, and they were largely not Puritans. The next wave came from Protestant Northern ireland and Lowland Scotland, hence Derry and Londonderry in New Hampshire and Belfast in Maine. It seems the Scot s came too late to name many places in New England.

All that is an over-simplification. The Civil War rampaged around England at an alarming rate and it seems that Royalists and Puritans could be found everywhere, even in the same village and possibly in the same house. Oxford, which is north-west of London, was at one time the King's HQ while the colleges were an academic centre for Puritanism.

Dorchester, Boston MA

After his university days, our man John White married a girl from Peterborough near Cambridge and settled down in Dorset where he became the Rector of Holy Trinity Church in the county town of Dorchester. He was not active politically but concerned himself with the reform of his church, but he had other fish to fry as well.

White set about founding a colony around a new settlement to be called Dorchester. It is now a sprawling suburb, just south of Boston. If you have landed at Logan Airport, you may well have flown over it. His son became a trader in Boston, but John White never visited the New World at all. Prince Rupert's cavalry raided his library and many of his papers were lost but, despite the wars he remained quite a wealthy man.

Terra Firma in Suffolk

Soft geology 

In a mummers' play version of "St George and the Turkish Knight" the (almost) slain villain says,

"I've been hurried, I've been scurried, I've been dragged from door to door, now here I lie on this squallid floor."

"Hit me a wallop, strike me a blow; where I'd have been if the ground had not caught me, I do not know!"

We used to talk about "solid ground" or terra firma, as though the land around us could always be relied upon to support us from the abyss below, but today we talk about continental drift and soft geology.

I came upon a fine illustration of the latter while walking on the Suffolk coast, north of Southwold where the road to the beach from the village of Covehithe simply leads you over a cliff. Thankfully that road is closed now, but I guess it is only a matter of time before the cliff erodes back to the village and the church.

This entire stretch of coast is sinking and has been for a long time. Where there is an inlet or an estuary the effect is like a slow rise in the tide, but on the exposed coast each new winter storm pounds ever higher up the beach, lapping at the foot of the soft cliffs and causing further collapse. Dunwich is the most famous local town to have disappeared beneath the waves and the heart of the village from the pub to the church would go under if the shingle bank was breached anywhere between them and Walberswick.


Most of the sand and gravel that falls from the cliffs is mobilised in the cloudy shallows close to the shore and carried southward by the current to be deposited in the lee of somewhere solid. That's how Orford Ness was formed.

Fishing is a characteristic industry of this coast but there is a shortage of accessible harbours. Most boats are pulled up onto the steep shingle beaches using static winches or aged, rusty tractors. The exception is at Southwold and Walberswick where the River Blythe runs deep enough to form a navigable channel that has been reinforced in various ways to form landing stages along a quayside.

On both sides of the river there are rows of black-tarred wooden huts that hold fishing gear for the boats that moor there.  Piles of nets, floats and ropes gather among clumps of white chamomile, sea campion and purple asters. A couple of larger premises are ships' chandlers and repair shops while some of the smaller sheds sell wet fish. There is also a grand old quayside pub called the Harbour Inn but it is getting some serious competition from some new ventures that include an excellent smokery and restaurant.

The Southwold harbour area still has a great deal of character and Walberswick has retained a lot of it's charm. Go there before it becomes almost too gentrified.

Vinyl Night

Wenhaston is a small Suffolk village that lies along the foot of a sandy ridge. Below the village there are old fields, hedges, marshes and woods. At least one local farm has gone over to catering for tourists and that is how we found ourselves in a cabin nearby.

On the edge of the village the Star Inn sits in a narrow wooded lane about 8 miles from the sea so it cannot rely purely on tourists like us for it's survival. The landlord has to take care of the locals too.

The tourists want meals and a bit of atmosphere, while the locals probably want a good pint at a reasonable price and the chance to socialise with neighbours. What everyone wants is a warm welcome. Happily the Star seems to please everyone and we certainly had a couple of memorable evenings in there. Small hand-bills proclaimed a "Bring Your Own Vinyl Night" and we vowed to return and join in.

We have quite a good collection of vinyl albums at home, but they are not the sort of thing you take on holiday. Luckily we had a means to get them to us through Dan's carers who travelling up to join us. Hanna ordered up her copy of Carole King's "Tapestry" and some Cat Stevens and I asked for the big brown gatefold double album "Deja Vu" by Crosby, Stills and Nash. Unfortunately the carers forgot to bring them, but the story didn't end there.

You can pick up vinyl records at a lot of charity shops and there are some really good ones in Southwold and in Aldeburgh, but we went one better by visiting "The Vinyl Frontier" in Westleton. Hanna and Dan waited in the car while I had the first look.  I fancied replacing long lost copies of singles such as "Sabre Dance" by Love Sculpture,  "America"  by the Nice, "Wheels on Fire" by Brian Auger and the Trinity or "On the Road Again" by Canned Heat.

This amazing musical emporium is situated in a garden shed along-side an innocent looking house in the main street. The owners literally led me up the garden path, bearing a big bunch of keys and beckoned me inside. It would have taken me a couple of hours to work over the collection properly, but by then I would be in big trouble within my family. Even when I concentrated on the boxes of "cheapies" I could not find what I was looking for so I plumped for a few classic singles: "She's Not There" by the Zombies, the Stones' "Ruby Tuesday" and Beatles' "Got to Get You Into My Life".  For Hanna I picked up albums by Simon and Garfunkel and James Taylor. The whole lot cost a tenner! I must go back to check-out the working American jukebox and so much more.


My Dad was an audiophile. He worked as an electrical engineer but would also describe himself as a musician.  Jazz was his thing; the jazz of the 40s and 50s, and he liked it LOUD. Our next door neighbours, the King family, complained about the noise all the time but he went ahead and built his own hi-fi system. Just before stereo arrived, he reconditioned an old gramophone unit; a beautifully veneered piece of furniture with a lid and a pair of opening doors. The deck, which was inset into the top, ran at multiple speeds which you controlled with a lever so you could speed up or slow down a track to suit your taste. If you wanted to play the speeds accurately you needed to calibrate it using a cardboard disk that you placed on the turntable. Concentric black and white "bar codes" were labelled 33 1/3, 45 and 78 rpm. As you ran the machine, the spinning bars would appear to stop and then spin backwards, like the waggon-wheels on old movies.  It was called a stroboscope.

I can't really remember the amplifier, but I think it was set vertically into the woodwork by the deck. It had 3 "Radio-Spares" Bakelite knobs on a brass plate and these simply controlled volume, bass and treble. The speaker was the big deal.

The problem with big speakers is that they cause the cabinet to vibrate. You need a solid case that does not resonate, but in those days there was only wood, or plywood or steel and they all vibrated. The answer was to build the speaker into the corner of the room so that two walls of the "cabinet" were made of brick. The front side of the triangular cabinet was made of two sheets of plywood set about an inch apart and you filled the gap with sand to stop the boards from resonating. The plywood front had to be cut to fit your speakers and we had a huge "woofer" and a smaller "tweeter".  The bass was incredible but the rest of it sounded very trebly to me. There was no middle ground so I played the albums a bit slower. Thankfully the walls we used were not shared with the people next door, although it probably made little difference. I loved the big noise we made.

Actually, I think that they made records with a lot of bass and treble and no middle in those days because most people's systems were rubbish. In fact I think that, as home hi-fis improved, the quality of LPs improved too, but singles were still designed to be played on Juke Boxes and cheap gramophones.

Dan and Hanna in a pub. 

I remembered all this on the night of the gig because we heard amazing jazz and funk on an old analogue system while my 45s sounded cheap and metallic. Technically, 45s could sound better than album tracks but they don't.

The two young men running the show were very reverential about our records and loaded each track carefully. I heard a bass-heavy "dunk"........ and then silence: no hiss or rumble before the music began. The effect was electric; like hearing everything for the first time and I vowed to use my own turntable more. Aided by the beer, we were all having a great party by simply listening to old records played as they were meant to be: loud, but undistorted.

This was our 31st Wedding Anniversary and, just to round the evening off, Hanna nipped outside and bought me a pair of tight blue jeans from a rack of retro clothing displayed under a spotlight in the garden. An enterprising young lady called Jane had brought her business to the pub and this only added to the fun. Hanna also bought a skirt for herself. (Yes, a skirt!) We are cool grandparents after all (Note this Thea and Jake).

Now that I am home, I have crawled around in the loft for bits and bobs, including my brother's old mono PA system. I think I can replace the speakers to make it sing again. I also have an old mixer up there but I need a better deck than the domestic one that I have. Then I will be available for Retro-Nites in the local pubs!!

Seriously, this is a great way to get people of all ages to party. It is reminiscent of the days when we only owned a couple of treasured and worn albums each and a lot of kids didn't have a gramophone. We always took our albums to friends' houses after school. Why not come round and bring your own vinyl!