Chapter 3 1972

Thursday 1 August 2013 – with apologies for taking so long before writing the next chapter – firstly in the spring we weren’t very well and then the hot weather has been a bit much!

Going back to my ephemera collection for 1970 I found a copy of the Gazette dated Friday October 16 bearing the front page headline: “Petition Calls for Rejection of Road Plans”, which would lead to the Inner Relief Road Protest Movement.   This favoured a by-pass following the former railway line, which was led by the redoubtable Mr E. Jackson-Stevens, supported by Councillors Ian Tucker and Hugh Barker.

The Inner Relief Road plans were still in the Council plans the following year,  because in the newspaper dated 31 December 1971 the headline reads: “Traffic Study Favours the Inner Relief Road – conclusion of the County Surveyor”.   Aren’t we lucky that the Protest Movement won the day?

In the same edition on the back page. the Jack Blandiver Column features “Fantasy posters start new business”.   And Mr West’s Diary, Western Daily Press for Wednesday January 5 1972 has an article with photos of us both: “The boss presents his amazing imp poster circus”.

Thanks to Western Gazette and Mid Somerset Newspapers for these cuttings

In the box for 1971 there is a set of new decimal coins dated Monday 15 February and a Guide which states that it was delivered to every household, containing a message from Lord Fisk, Chairman of Decimal Currency Board:  “with a little practice, you will find that decimal currency is not difficult …”, explaining how the changeover will work.   Thank goodness decimilisation occurred before our business got going!   And there is a programme for the musical “Hair” which was being performed in Bristol Hippodrome – I took our youngest daughter, Ruth (aged 11) from Sidcot, telling her that there would be naughty words which she wouldn’t understand.  Later I learned that most of the scholars knew these off by heart.   Lastly, there is the prospectus for the Open University for 1971/72 and I sign on for a Foundation Year in Humanities, starting in 1972.

Our eldest son Rob is a steam buff.  On Thursday 6 January 1972 I take him up to the Kilmersdon Colliery near Radstock.   He is 17 years old and is already spending time on the Talyllyn Railway in North Wales, where he learns his engine driving skills.   My first cousin once removed was Tom Rolt, founder of the Talyllyn Railway Preservation Society in 1950, but unfortunately we didn’t realise this connection until Tom had died.  Now, Rob is one of the Trustees of the At Steam Locomotive Trust and has actually driven Tornado on the Grand Central Railway in 1999.   To return to Kilmersdon, here we spend a happy afternoon on the footplate with Mr Herbie Loader, taking the coal trucks from the head of the mine to the incline, where they were let down by the shunter to join the main railway line to Bath.   No health and safety regulations in those days.   I return home with a face black with soot.   That shunting engine, named “Kilmersdon”, is now at the S & D Museum at Williton.

Returning to Glastonbury Prints in 1972:  the West Country Gift Fair is held from a Sunday to Thursday in Torquay in January.  My step father, Bernard, said:  “Would you like to share my bedroom in the Palace Hotel?   So I was away for a couple of nights the following week, taking my turn on a stand for our first trade show.  The Palace Hotel bedrooms were taken over by small exhibitors and I laid out our pictures on the bed.   There were a couple of other small exhibitors sharing the room, but I can’t remember who they were now.   Our dentist and John’s fishing friend Frank Campbell, together with his wife Jean, had a holiday cottage nearby and they very kindly let me sleep there.   As you will see later, Frank then allows us to rent his attic room behind the dental surgery in Magdalene Street, Glastonbury, as our workshop for awhile.

Early in February I visit the International Gift Fair at Blackpool for a night, meeting several sales agents who had been introduced to us by Bernard – I can’t remember much about this time though.   Bernard and his colleagues could not have afforded their own stands at this show (renting a space at the West Country Gift Fair was less expensive), but they probably helped out on their principal’s stands during the exhibition, which lasted for 5 days from Sunday to Thursday.  

We paid our agents 10% commission on sales and each agent handled goods from several small producers and importers – Bernard represented The Russian Shop, Copco (up market kitchen ware) and Taunton Vale Industries among others.   The larger firms like Portmeirion and Royal Worcester (and Morlands in the clothing and footwear trades) employed full time representatives who visited customers.

The diary now shows when my projects (each month) for the Open University need to be completed;   I am listening to radio programmes, watching the occasional television programme and doing all the necessary reading.   After each section of the course we had to write an essay.   All that as well as managing Glastonbury Prints; fetching the frames from Worcester and collecting packing materials from Ashton Containers in Bristol;  processing the orders;  visiting our accountant in Surrey;  dealing with sales agents;  and packing children off to boarding school or collecting them at the end of term or putting them on a train to London to visit John’s parents, Deena and Bry, in Hampstead  In March, the wreck of the SS Great Britain comes to Bristol – we probably go and look at it during the Easter Holidays.

 Remember, John was still working full time as a Director at Morlands.   In our first year he was drawing the cartoon posters (one took him 40 hours to complete) in the evenings and at weekends.   By the second year of the business,  he had moved on to drawings of birds and flowers.   When a collection was complete, he would take the originals up to Radstock Reproductions, who produced the plates which were used in the printing process by Bigwood & Staple, our printers in Bridgwater.   Print unions were very powerful in those days, but John was privileged.  Gordon – against union rules – allowed him to watch the printing process and make suggestions about how much ink was being used.

All the printing was in black and white of course, in short runs.   However, after Bernard reported back that customers would prefer the birds and flowers to be coloured, this was done under John’s careful instructions;  I have already told you how my cleaning lady, Rose, became our first hand painter, working at her home – our first outworker.

On 12 April 1972 my diary entry reads “saw flycatcher at lunchtime” – this would have been from our kitchen window at Schehallion.   For several years, a flycatcher built its nest in the vigorous and vicious yellow rose (Mermaid?) growing at that time on the front of the house.   On the first occasion, when the gales blew and the branches of the rose moved, the eggs dropped out of the bottom of the nest.   Next spring when I groomed the ponies I brought handfuls of horsehair home, hanging it in a bag on the bird table.   This time, the flycatcher nest survived and the great tits went off with beaks full of hair, looking just like Jimmy Edwards.   When the bird table was visited by the lesser spotted woodpecker, the flycatchers would valiantly mob him.  

We are still cultivating a large garden, with vegetables and lots of fruit bushes as well as harvesting Bramley apples from our orchard.  There were lawns to be mown and trees to be pruned.   We did have some help from Salvadore Buccione, one of the Italian prisoners of war who stayed behind here after the war ended in 1945.    In 1956, the year after we moved into our new house, I started keeping records of bottling and jam making (unfortunately I did not record vegetables).   That year the list is as follows:

gooseberries         40 lbs

blackcurrants        25  “

raspberries              2  “

cherry plums        31  “

Victoria plums     10  “          total 108 lbs of bottled fruit plus 21 lbs of jam

However, fifteen years later my records are fragmentary, probably because of other interests and the acquisition of a freezer.

Returning to Glastonbury Prints:  the accountant, Mr Sayers (who had been recommended by Bernard), set up the first balance sheet with our year ending on 22 April and introduced us to the Kalamazoo accounting system – I am visited by their representative, Mr Maskell on April 10.   We used a version of this system until the late 80’s I think;  it consisted of hand written ledger cards bearing the names of customers or suppliers, using carbon paper to record the entries onto the appropriate cash or sales sheets.   No small computers or calculators in those days of course, nor mobile phones or internet or any of the other stuff with which I am not familiar (all I can do is use the computer as a word processor and get our older daughter, Julie, to put the results on the blog for me!   Please don’t send me emails as I shall never read them).

This book keeping system served us well for many years – later we employed Betty Abbott as our book keeper   She was so meticulous that she had the pleasure of correcting British Road Services when they issued an incorrect invoice and admitted that their accounts were in a muddle!   I think our end of year figures balanced within a few pennies.

In May, I write to Mr. Sayers with a list of our expenses for the previous year of trading, totalling around £464 including £268.73 purchase tax and £80 commission paid to the four agents.   (note the purchase tax).   I paid Clarks Printing Works (then off Magdalene Street, Glastonbury) £2.76, probably for our price list.   I didn’t realise until years later that they also called themselves “Glastonbury Prints” – but we had successfully registered our name with Companies House around 1971 I think.

John begins clearing the land.

John’s Great Uncle Oliver Morland had founded Kalamazoo before the War.  Uncle Humphrey Morland, managing director in the 60’s, was looking forward to becoming wealthy when Oliver Morland (who was childless) died.   We also had some shares in the company (probably given to us by John’s father) which we sold in 1953 in order to buy our acre of orchard at the top of Bushey Coombe from Uncle Humphrey, on which we built the first part of our house “Wick Beech”, with access from Bulwarks Lane.   He charged us £1,000, a lot of money in those days! 

The builders.

Under construction.

  In 1962/3 we built an extension and created a drive leading into Wick Hollow, changing our house name to “Schehallion”. 

The extension being built.

I must digress and tell you a story about Great Uncle Oliver.   He and his wife Eileen lived in a lovely big house at Chideock and we went several times in the early 50’s to visit them, travelling down on the motor bike and sidecar before our children were born.   We had noticed that there were often pheasants on the B3151 about a mile beyond the Somerton turning, so the next time we were poised and ready – I leaned from the pillion and whacked the pheasant on the head with the pump and we hastily stowed the body in the boot and went on our way.   After lunch Uncle Oliver saw us off.   “I see that you have been lucky with your pheasant” he commented with amusement – there was the tail sticking out of the boot which of course we hadn’t noticed!   Our first bit of road kill, well out of season.

Humphrey never inherited the Kalamazoo fortune because Eileen Morland spent a lot of money after her husband died, building an old people’s home in Bridport and putting copper domes on the roof.  Sadly, Kalamazoo had not kept up with modern developments and went into liquidation (in the 1990’s?);  we lost around £15,000 worth of shares, which we must have inherited from John’s father.

John and I had both been taking photos of people and events since before we were married.  John’s first camera was a prewar Kodak bellows camera which he had bought from a retired professional photographer in Hampstead -  together with a Parker pen - with his first wages earned at Columbia Fur Dressers (a Morlands subsidiary where he worked for a couple of years after leaving school in 1946).   This of course used black and white film (was it 410?) and which continued to be used until after we were married and moved to Glastonbury.   I took this photo of John around 1953, when we were still living in a flat at the eastern end of The Thatched Cottage, Bove Town, Glastonbury, as tenants of Uncle Harry and Aunt Elizabeth Scott-Stokes:-

Thatched Cottage

(photo of John with motor bike parked at the end of the barn, then part of the Ynyswytryn estate and now the home of Rory Weightman, Bushey Coombe Farm.)

 Later, John was using a more up to date camera with colour film to photograph his subjects, which he would later draw with Rotring pen;  sometimes he would use pencil for buildings.   He always drew and painted from photographs.   I have been taking colour slides since 1958  –  our older daughter, Julie, has digitised the early family pictures and I have hundreds of record shots of our business from about 1971 until we retired from the shop in 1998.   (You will hear about opening the shop in due course.)   We didn’t go digital until 2005. 

So with the Glastonbury Prints business building up, John was no longer able to continue to fulfil orders;  he had been putting pictures together in his free time in the garage at home and packing them in parcels to take to the Post Office.   Out fishing with Frank Campbell one weekend, they must have discussed this.   “Why don’t you rent our back room?” was Frank’s helpful suggestion.   After moving into the attic room up a steep staircase at the rear of the dental surgery at the end of May, we then took on our first employee, John Chaffey.   I think to begin with he must have worked in the evenings on a part-time basis, but on 14 August I record that he was “officially employed” at £2.35 an hour.   The back of a hand coloured and framed print of a wren bears the following inscription: “Made in attic 1972  J.Chaffey”.    

John’s wife Elizabeth was the receptionist at the dental surgery and had introduced him to us.   She was also studying the Open University at the same time as I was, so we sometimes compared notes;  she went on to complete the six year course and gain her degree, while I gave up after the Foundation Year because of increasing pressures from the business.  

By the middle of the summer we had four groups of agents covering the country – my stepfather Bernard;  the redoubtable Mona Russell, who covered Yorkshire and Lancashire and probably further afield;  Philip Smith from Rochester;  and “the boys” from Marlborough who were gradually taking over the West Country from Bernard.   Phil Turner and David Haines came to stay with us on one or two occasions.

On Wednesday 12 July John attends the British Leather Manufacturers Association, of which he is the Chairman, in order to receive the Queens Award to Industry.   But we were now beginning to discuss whether he should leave Morlands in order to concentrate on the business.   He must have given in his three months’ notice to his fellow Directors by September, though the official news would not have been released until much later.

In August I take Julie and Ruth to stay with John’s parents in  Hampstead (Rob is away working on the Talyllyn Railway), while I drive up to Norwich to attend the Open University Summer School.   What an experience!   I had left school at 17 and my only other experience of education had been Mrs Hoster’s Training College in London, where I learned shorthand and typing and office procedure (whatever that meant).   And for a term before that, in the autumn of 1948, I had attended a short housewife’s course at a Polytechnic.   Still rationing of course, so ingredients were rather limited.  (I have given the original cookery book to one of our children.)  

“I can’t cope with all the paperwork for Glastonbury Prints as well as the Open University any more,” I complain to John.   So we take on Vera Osmond on the 19 September at £2.29 an hour, probably for a couple of mornings a week.   She is seated at the dining room table, using an old adding machine that Rob had brought home in the holidays from Reading Dump.  Remember, he is a boarder at Leighton Park School – apparently they often raided the local rubbish heap.   This machine had been thrown out at the time of decimilisation, so Vera only logged figures in the “pound” places, leaving shillings and pence alone.   After the figures were printed onto the paper roll, it was simple to add decimal places.  Then these were recorded in the accounts in our hand written Kalamazoo system.   Turnover wasn’t very great and this served us well for a few months.  It had to be hand cranked of course.   In those days computers were only for the large firms (like Clarks and Morlands).  

A later investment would be a small Roneo machine.   Producing lots of copies of documents involved cutting a stencil on the typewriter, wrapping it round a drum which had been carefully inked by hand and using it to duplicate pricelists or “Dear Customer” letters.   All other letters were of course written on the typewriter with one (or perhaps two or three) carbon papers.

By now there were several hand painters, working in their own homes under John’s detailed instructions.   Over time the painting round grew to about 25 colourists, with a supervisor who visited them every week, inspected the work and paid them on a piecework basis.   In our prime, we produced 1,000 hand coloured pictures a week.

I take the Open University exam on Tuesday afternoon, 31 October 1972.   Can’t remember where though.   I did manage to pass the Foundation Year.  

And on the Friday we are visited by Dudley Tremaine of Cooper & Tanner Ltd., estate agents.   “I hear that you are considering moving the business into larger premises” he said.   “There are rooms available at 5A High Street, which you could rent from Mr. Trussler and which I think would suit you perfectly.”  This building was formerly the Health Clinic – I remembered going there to collect orange juice when the children were small.  When the surgery moved out into the new building in  Feversham Lane, Mr. Trussler of Western Relining Services took over.   It consists of a large two storey rectangular building at the back of what used to be Frisbys Shoe Shop (now a bookshop), with vehicular access from St John’s car park and a passageway from the High Street;  it is now called “Number 10 St John’s Square.”

Two rooms upstairs were ideal, with plenty of good daylight.   I remember spending a couple of hours cleaning the filthy staircase and suffering from a sore throat afterwards!

A month later, on Friday evening, November 24, John returns home and declares “I am leaving the factory at Christmas.”   Our adventure has begun.

Chapter 7 1974-75

Chapter 7

Before I move on to 1975, I have some more comments to make about 1974.

I see from notes dated a few years ago that we rented the Old Ciderhouse, Back Lane, Glastonbury from Leo Garvin for £1,000 a year, later increased to £2,000, and that we were introduced to this by Cyril Driver of IMCO, who had been the last tenant.   We were there making frames and cutting mounts for the next five years.   We didn’t use the cellars as they were inclined to flood.   On 3^rd June we took on John Grinter at £2.24/hour, and Yvonne Jones and Norma West for £1.13/hour.

The huge obsolete guillotine which we had first installed out at Baltonsborough in Roly Bisgrove’s barn was moved here, used for cutting up mount board, though the apertures had to be cut afterwards by hand.   Our daughter Ruth, who now runs Glastonbury Galleries, has a marvellous computerised machine which can be programmed to cut sophisticated shapes.   But remember we were in the early days of picture framing, still using the oval forma for our mounts.

I have found in my keeping box for that year a couple of booklets written by our landlord.   One is entitled “Garvin’s Gazette Oct-Dec 1974 (52^nd Year)” and the other is the Golden Jubilee of L.Garvin & Co. Ltd. 1920-1970, which is a fascinating story of how Leo Garvin came over to London from Denmark, and which contains a photo of an elderly gentleman outside his Victorian house, which I think we visited, somewhere up on the Mendips, and where perhaps he moved after the war.  

  

Their main business became the importing of honey from all over the world.   He describes his first few years of business “in a small, rather dark, one room office in Change Alley, off Cornhill … with one typist and the writer, Managing Director, Sales Manager, Advertising Manager, Cashier and office boy all rolled into one.”   Sounds familiar.   He also dealt in milk powder, which became an important part of the business during the war.   It was during the war that they became involved in producing cider and acquired the Cider House.   (I can remember going there to buy a bottle of cider in the early 50’s.)   He also tells a funny story of trying to dig peat on Dartmoor at Bridestowe, from which “we retired, wiser but considerably lighter of pocket.”

 Tony Osmond had became our full-time manager on 2 January at £3.62/hour – he would have worked at 5A High Street, where we expanded into 4 rooms including one tiny room as an office, shared by Tony, his wife Vera, and myself.  

The main room at 5A was where John Chaffey was in charge of putting together the orders for framed or mounted only prints, and somewhere along the corridor was a cupboard where Linda Garland would assemble the black and white prints ready for the hand painters to colour.   Natasha Smith became hand painting supervisor on 2 December at £1.68/hour – did she take over from John, or was there someone else before her?   John Chaffey (known as John Chaff, to distinguish from John Grint and John M) also supervised the packing and dispatching of parcels. 

We obtained specially designed packing boxes from Clifton Containers in Bristol into which framed and mounted only prints were placed for dispatch by Royal Mail Parcel Service – the lorry would call at 5A several times a week to collect the orders.   Glass of course is fragile and everything was wedged with newspaper, as bubble wrap and other materials had not yet been invented.   We consumed large quantities, so all our staff had to bring us their newspapers – how did we collect enough?   The parcel weight was limited to 10 kgs I think.  

There were breakages of course, in spite of the large “fragile” labels.  On one occasion, the customer provided us with evidence that the delivery lorry had actually run over the parcel – there were the tyre marks.

Another problem was naughty customers.   If a customer was known to be a late payer (the rule was within a month of invoice), they had a red sticker on their ledger card.   I don’t know what mark we used for the ones which never paid.  Certainly we would not let them have another order until they had done so.  And our agents were asked to chase these up.  No doubt there were occasions when we had to take someone to the Small Claims Court.

John and I went on photographic trips in the spring.   My notes describe how on May 7 we drove to Exeter, where John took photos of the cathedral and we visited The Blue Boy Gallery (one of our customers), driving on to Penzance before returning on May 10 via Dunster Castle.   We set off again on May 14 until Thursday 23 May, when we visited Chepstow Castle;  Cardiff Castle;  “bought stuffed birds at Machynlleth”;  Harlech Castle;  Conway Castle;  Chester Cathedral;  Rievaulx Abbey;  York Minster;  Fountains Abbey;  Harewood House and Peterborough Cathedral, where we were taken round the Palace garden by the gardeners Mr & Mrs Barnard.  

My grandfather Claude Martin Blagden was Bishop of Peterborough from 1927 – 1949 and was one of the senior bishops who sat in the House of Lords.   The express trains used to stop specially at Peterborough station to pick him up and drop him off from his trips to London.  Before the war, my father said, they had 25 staff!   This would have included gardeners and secretaries and a chauffeur as well as domestic servants.   During the war, when I stayed as a child (10 or 12 years old), there were land girls helping in the garden and Grandad the Bish was adept at laying and clearing away the table after meals, no doubt produced by Grannie Hester.   I remember bedrooms which were called “Cathedral 1” and “Cathedral 2” and Heaven’s Gate Bathroom. 

After the war when I was a teenager, he leaped on and off London buses in his gaiters and took me to see the House of Lords, which was at the time was occupied by the House of Commons, since that had been bombed.   I even typed much of his memoir “Well Remembered”, published in 1953, the year after he died, by his son in law Paul Hodder-Williams, who was MD of Hodder & Stoughton.

After the war when I was a teenager, he leaped on and off London buses in his gaiters and took me to see the House of Lords, which was at the time was occupied by the House of Commons, since that had been bombed.   I even typed much of his memoir “Well Remembered”, published in 1953, the year after he died, by his son in law Paul Hodder-Williams, who was MD of Hodder & Stoughton.

After visiting Peterborough, we went on to Cambridge and Woburn Abbey, calling on the RSPB at Sandy Lodge (who stocked our bird prints in their shop).   This is only some of the venues – there are lots of comments about buildings being no good – covered with scaffolding or because it was raining – visiting customers, difficulties with finding bed and breakfasts.   “Carlisle Castle and Holm Cutram Abbey – neither very attractive and wasted a whole morning.”   Altogether we travelled 1,500 miles in around 14 days.   John went on to draw many of these castles and cathedrals

And at the end of May we visited my sister and brother in law, Sal and Ben Lewers, and we all went to the opera at Glydebourne.   Next day we drove down to Canterbury and then, at Dover Castle  “John hurt his right foot by jumping off a bank into the road”.   Poor John was in great pain so I had to take over the driving, and he was obliged to sit on the grass while I walked over to Bodiam Castle.   After returning to Sal and Ben for the night, we visited our accountant Mr Sayers at Woking and came home “via Stonehenge”.

We must have become familiar with CoSIRA - Council for Small Industries in Rural Areas – an advisory and credit service, sponsored by the government with stipulation that “members should not employ more than 20 skilled persons and be situated in a rural area or country town with a population of 10,000 or less”.   Glastonbury Prints is listed as a craft workshop at 5A High Street, Glastonbury, not open to the general public, in their booklet “Craft Workshops in the Countryside – England and Wales 25p” which has my note saying that this pre-dates 1975 because of our address.

Here is the invitation to our stand at the Harrogate Gift Fair in the Crown Hotel, July 14-18 1974,  This was our first time at Harrogate, though Peter Dufour had displayed some of our prints on his stand the year before.   The Crown was a grouping of exhibitors who couldn’t fit into the other venues and our “passage” in this hotel provided us with adequate space, with nearby rooms occupied by Denby and other well known names, so that plenty of prospective buyers passed through.   John designed the layout of the prints beforehand – I have a copy of this particular exhibition carefully executed on graph paper with all the references, consisting of about 40 10 x 8” prints and 50 smaller framed pictures, so it was quite a spread.   Presumably we provided display boards onto which the pictures were hung, as I don’t think we would have been allowed to bang nails into the walls!   Somehow he fixed spotlights on a couple of beams balanced precariously across the passage.   One year, a beam came crashing down on Mona Russell’s head as we were erecting the stand, nearly knocking her out.   She was our agent for that area and must have been quite elderly (late sixties?) at the time, but she carried on bravely without complaint.

As soon as we had returned from Harrogate Gift Fair on Friday 19 July, we needed to get ready for our holiday in Scotland.   I see that on Saturday we need to drive to Castle Cary Station to meet Rob and Ruth off the London train – presumably Julie had accompanied us to Harrogate while the other two stayed with Deena and Bry (John’s parents) in Hampstead.

Anyway, we then board the motorail at Bristol, travelling with our Volvo estate car on the sleeper train to Stirling and driving to Edinburgh to stay for a couple of days, before making our way to Mr & Mrs Jack Cameron’s cottage, “Rockfield”, for the rest of the fortnight’s holiday.   The Camerons moved out of their home in the summer, sleeping in a caravan on the croft and spending most of the day in a large shed outside the back door.   We continued our exploration of the Ardnamurchan Peninsular, using this lovely folder entitled “Strontian – car tours and notes for the visitor” dated 1972 with leaflets covering Ardgour, Moidart, Ardamurchan and Morvern.   One of these sheets includes the Ardnamurchan Lighthouse:  “The road ends a short distance from the lighthouse.   Here you may clamber down the rocky shore and stand on the most westerly point of the mainland of Great Britain, over 20 miles further west than Lands End   The view to the Hebrides is magnificent, more so from the lighthouse, which may be visited at the discretion of the head lighthouse keeper.”  

 

The lighthouse was still run by a keeper at that time, and we climbed up to the balcony which runs round the light and watched the keeper taking weather records and also inspected the huge boilers which produced the energy for the fog warning system.   After that, we went to Sanna beach and some of us were brave enough to swim in the clear, cold sea before we enjoyed a picnic in the dunes – or “machair” as it is called in Scotland.   The coarse grasses were full of wild flowers and to begin with I thought the little yellow ones were cinquefoil.   But upon crouching down to spend a penny, I discovered what turned out to be a yellow pansy, which we called the “seaside pansy” – John drew this and a number of other flowers, sitting in the front porch of “Rockfield” where there was good light.

We must have packed up on Friday 9 August, driving back to Stirling across the Corran Ferry – we needed an early start and I think the first ferry ran at 8 am – in order to put the car on the train again and return to Bristol overnight.   On Sunday, we put Rob on a train to London.

Our business adhered to the tradition of the “factory fortnight” stipulated by both Clarks and Morlands, consisting of the last week in July and the first week in August, which made it more convenient for some of our part-time staff whose families worked for those factories.   This is not usually the best time to visit Scotland, but we seemed to be lucky with the weather;  one year when we stayed with the Camerons, she reported that the village stores had overheard some French visitors complaining of the heat.   When we returned home, the floods were out on the moors.

By this time we must have employed quite a few people, most of them part timers, though John Chaffey (in charge of the workroom at 5A), John Grinter (in the Old Ciderhouse, making frames) and Tony Osmond (our manager) were all full time.   Tony’s wife Vera kept our accounts in her meticulous beautiful script together with a typewriter for the invoices (quarto in those days), using the Kalamazoo system of ledger cards and carbon paper, which enabled everything to be recorded again on the ledger sheets.

Linda Garland must have been full time too, in charge of the painting round and preparing orders for the workroom to put together, plus running errands up to the Post Office, though the completed parcels were either collected from 5A by the Post Office service, or were wheeled up the High Street on a trolley by one of the men.   She was also involved with using the duplicating machine, which consisted of an inked roller round which the prepared stencil was stretched, which had previously been cut into a special foolscap sheet on the typewriter.   When the handle was turned, a printed page was produced – used for some pricelists and for the dear customer newsletter I used to write at Christmas.   Proper pricelists and other material were printed for us at Clarks Printing works and later by someone else in Street.   The office was a tiny sliver of a room with a bench each side – maybe Vera and I worked cox and box while Tony was able to use the other side.   John of course was at home, designing new ranges, taking the original drawings to Radstock Reproductions to be made into plates ready for Bigwood & Staple, Bridgwater, to print.

The ancient guillotine had been installed in the Ciderhouse, as I have already described, together with simple machinery for cutting and pinning the frames.   We could cut large pieces of mountboard into 10 x 8” and 4 ½ x 3 ½ “ sizes, then the oval apertures would be cut by hand using John’s metal forma – later perhaps we obtained a simple machine to do this.  

I think we invested in a little van so that John Grinter, or perhaps his assistant Ron Dunsmore, could bring the required frames and mounts up to 5A, no doubt using instructions provided by Tony after the current orders were analysed.   We offered 4 choices of frame – F1 etc – and around the same number of mount colours.   Agents were supplied with a box of loose mounts, frames and a large folder containing one of each hand coloured print in the range.   The various permutations of mount and frame could be demonstrated by putting these over the images.   The first set of agents sample boxes were made individually by John, lined with sheepskin of course, but later we invested in suitable suitcases – I still have three of these!

On Saturday 12 October, Julie and I fly from Gatwick to Los Angeles, Californjia, with a group of other Europeans on a subsided trip, celebrating the 300^th anniversary of American Independence under the banner “Meet the Americans”.   We must have been met at the airport by our hosts Bev and her husband driven to their home in San Diego, where they entertained us for over a week.   Somewhere I have a diary of this visit, together with masses of slides.   I do remember that we went across the border to Tihuana in Mexico one day, where I bought a huge heavy glass lampshade for 10 dollars and a kiss.   I still have it – now in a cupboard.   It had to be packed carefully in a large cardboard box and somehow we were allowed to secure it on an extra seat on the plane back home.   Years later, an American couple visited Glastonbury Galleries and bought a very large heavy framed and glazed painting from us, declaring that they would not have any problem getting it back.   They visited us again the following year and told us that it had been safely secured behind the pilot’s seat…

From my diary I see that I am still doing meals on wheels with Pam Bracher;  attending WEA English Classes;  taking Julie to Taunton College of Art, Rob to Plymouth Technical College and Ruth to Sidcot when the autumn term begins;  going out to supper with friends;  attending West Pennard WI (there was no Women’s Institute in Glastonbury in those days);  on top of helping to run the business.   John would visit the workrooms at 5A and the frame making department in the Old Ciderhouse nearly every day and then work at home.   But a couple of times a week he would be overtaken by migraines – he reckoned he lost each day a week because of this, poor John.   Maybe I have already said that these continued right up to about 1998 when he had an angioplasty.   It was a small hole in his heart, perhaps caused by conflict and tension at Morlands 30 years ago, when Uncle Humphrey Morland was keeping John back in order to make room for his own son.

In succession from the early sixties, for the next forty odd years I took my turn as secretary of the following organisations:-

West Pennard WI (just mentioned above);

National Federation of Small Businesses, Wells Branch - I will be coming to that organisation later; 

Glastonbury Chamber of Commerce - I don’t think this organisation is still alive – we must have joined when we bought the shop and John became chairman in 1976/7, while I did a stint as chairman in 1986/87;

Glastonbury in Bloom  - Bill Knight and I started this in 1982, though we didn’t hold it every year, then Alan Gloak took over a decade later and built it up to what it is today;

Glastonbury Conservation Society;

Mid Somerset Camera Club – I was also chairman for one year only, sometime in the late 90’s perhaps.

I have thrown away all the paper records of these organisations, but I must have some more recent material on this computer which I will investigate when I have the time!   In the early days I would have used shorthand, but I soon forgot how to do this and scribbled instead.   Fortunately I have never forgotten how to touch-type, because I continued to use this facility regularly.   Sadly I threw away my old Imperial typewriter when we moved a couple of years ago.   When did we have our first computer?   Our son Rob is an IT specialist and I have an invoice from Watford Electronics Ltd dated 29/5/96 totalling £1,693.19, so perhaps that is the one.