Why Isn't There an Airline Called Cunard?

News at the start of this week that two of the biggest remaining high-street brands - HMV and Jessops - have gone into liquidation. At the end of the week, they were followed by Blockbusters.

Jessops sold cameras, telescopes and binoculars; HMV was a music store and Blockbusters was video and games rental. All three are victims of a changing market and of that market moving online.

It’s an issue that also affects publishing and when I was regional director for Northcliffe Electronic Publishing, I used to give a talk to newspaper editors and advertising executives entitled Why Isn’t There an Airline Called Cunard?

The message I wanted to get across was that the nature of markets may change, but needs change less so. Cunard was a key player in transporting people around the world. When my Great Aunt Annie went to California to visit friends in 1963, she went by Cunard liner from Southampton. Back then, that was the way to do it, but people still need to cross the Atlantic (more than ever, in fact) and if Aunt Annie went today, she’d fly with Virgin or British Airways.

Why didn’t Cunard see that the market was moving from ships to aeroplanes and start investing in air travel? Perhaps it saw itself as a ship-owner (which it was) but should have seen itself as a service provider and concentrated on providing the service - travel - in the way that people wanted to consume it. If it had, it could have levered its brand trust and value into an airline and become the leading player in an expanded travel market.

Newspapers were (and some still are) in the same mind-set as Cunard. Bosses thought they were newspaper publishers but didn’t realise that they were really information providers and that the newspaper was simply a good way for people to consume that information at a point in time. So the focus remained on printing and selling newspapers far longer than it should have done. If all the money spent on presses and promotion in the past 15 years had been spent on IT, then mainstream media (the traditional newspaper publishers) would be in a healthier state than they are now.

I once said to the MD at Bristol that rather than installing new presses, he should buy everyone in Bristol a PC and internet access. he thought I was joking, but we could easily have done a deal with Hewlett-Packard (based in Bristol) plus Telewest, the cable company, and Bristol would have become the digital capital of the UK. Instead, he spent millions on new presses, which were scrapped 10 years later and the paper is now printed in Swindon, 50 miles away.

It’s somewhat ironic therefore that Simon Fox, former chief executive of HMV and the man charged with turning that business around, was appointed chief executive of Trinity-Mirror (one of the UK’s biggest regional newspaper groups) last August. Let’s hope that his current strategic thinking has been enriched by his experience at HMV.

It would have been so easy for HMV to do what Amazon or iTunes have done and I should now be buying my music through their online store. What online store, you ask - exactly! I’ve been buying music all my life and I’m buying more music now than ever before and I suspect other people are too. It’s almost criminal that HMV should fail as a music seller in a market where more and more music is being consumed.

It’s an interesting (or perhaps not) journey through technology to look at how I’ve consumed music over the past 50-odd years. The first record I bought was a 78rpm disc of A Slow Boat to China by Emile Ford and the Checkmates. I bought it from Dawsons, which was next to the library in High Street, Northwich, and it was very exciting. It must have been around 1960 and we’d been given a second-hand radio and record player, which I soon claimed pretty much as my own. Before then, we’d had a wind-up gramophone which came from my grandfather and had never been used. It was in a wooden cabinet with a lid that lifted to reveal a turntable operated by a wind-up spring. This would once have driven a large paper speaker which sat in the cabinet below. When you wanted to listen to music, you wound it up put a record on and opened the doors. A diaphragm in the pick-up would have transferred sound waves to the main speaker and you’d have been able to dance around the room. At some stage, my grandfather had replaced the old acoustic pick-up with an electric one and installed an electric amplifier and speaker in the space where the paper speaker had been. By the time we got it, this had all been removed; it was used as a TV stand and, because the TV sat on top, it was only years later that I discovered the turntable and grandad’s Heath Robinson conversion. We still have it today. It is in my hall by the front door with a china washing bowl on the top. Two bits of redundant technology put to ornamental use. If only grandad had kept the gramophone intact, we might have had a valuable antique.

The new (new to us) device was a radiogram - a radio and gramophone combined. It was electric and in perfect working order, but it only played 78rpm records and I guess someone had given it to my dad because they were upgrading to a new record player with a multi-speed turntable. It was a nice piece in a strong wooden case and came with a radio which had LW, MW and SW settings.

To play a record, you switched on the turntable and placed the pick-up arm onto the record by hand. When it finished playing, you had to jump up and switch it off, otherwise it made a dreadful din as it ran into the centre groove and just ‘looped’. The sound was fingernails scratched across a blackboard! The needles were like thick sewing needles with no eye and I guess they were made of brass. You bought them in a tin containing 50 or more and you had to change them about every 10 records because they became blunt and sound quality suffered.

I used my pocket money to buy records regularly, always 78s, and there was a seminal event when my sister got a free Cliff Richard record with her teen-mag (Boyfriend, or something). It was much smaller than the standard record and also made from flexible plastic. We were baffled and had to wait until dad came in to sort it out. I think he must have been just as baffled, but he put it on the record player, put the needle down and suddenly Cliff Richard sounded like Pinky and Perky or Alvin and the Chipmunks on speed.

The free record was a 45rpm disc and we’d got a 78rpm turntable! My sister got a Dansette record player later that year and the old radiogram was mine. I listened to Children’s Favourites on the Light Programme on Saturday morning and when Peter Roberts and I were playing space explorers, twisting the tuning dial on SW provided a realistic sound-effect for crossing deep space.

In Northwich, Dawson’s was where people bought their records and when I first went in, it sold a combination of instruments, lots of sheet music and a section for records, which gradually took more and more space from the sheet music. Almost every Saturday, I’d go to the library to change my books, then the pocket money was blown either on a record or a new Airfix model.

Later, 78s were less and less available and I got an HMV record player with multi-change. You could stack up to 10 records in the middle on a long spindle and set it to play. When it finished the record, the arm automatically lifted and retracted; a toggle allowed the next record to drop and it set off again. It was a mechanical marvel, but wasn’t foolproof. Sometimes two records dropped instead of one, sometimes the record stuck and didn’t drop properly, sometimes when there was a full stack, the arm couldn’t quite go high enough to play the last record.

Theoretically, it would work with LPs as well as singles, but that was even more unreliable. You could also lift the arm on top of the stack and push it to one side so it would keep playing the same record over and over. The HMV had a great tone and would play 75, 45 and 33rpm records. It also had a diamond stylus, which lasted for a year or more before quality went off.

My record buying extended into LPs as I got older and instead of Dawson’s, we moved to a new record shop, White and Swales, further along the high street. This had more choice and also listening booths where you could ask an assistant to play you a record while you stood in the sound booth. For a 14-year-old, this presented a world of wonder and embarrassment. Imagine me in my croaking, breaking voice asking the 18-year-old shop-girl, all back-combed hair and heavy eye make-up to play You Were Made For Me by Freddie and The Dreamers. Imagine the bored nonchelance, the scornful look (I should have asked for the latest Stones’ record), the self-conscious walk to the appointed booth, the record which seemed to last for 30 minutes (should I have a little dance, tap my feet, nod my head) then the walk back to the counter. The assistant would be talking to an older boy, smiling ... laughing and I had to say that I’d like the Freddie and The Dreamers record please (cue sniggers all round).



Sometimes it would be too much and you just had to run for it. Alan Bennett would have savoured the moment, knowing there was material for a scene in a book or a play in years to come. I had no such pay-back - just Freddie and a dream or two.

Sometimes there were bargains to be had in Woolworth’s (another defunct high street brand). They sold cheap records under their own brand - Embassy - that were either by less popular bands and artists or cover versions by session musicians. Some are probably collectors’ items now. I didn’t really appreciate a proper, dedicated record shop until I moved to Peterborough and there was Andy’s Records in Bridge Street.

The HMV record player lasted over 10 years until I was married and living in Warrington when Margaret and I bought a second-hand radiogram for about £20. This was my first stereophonic experience. I think it was made by Fidelity and it was a real piece of furniture - as big as a sideboard and with a radio, record player and room to store some records. It was a revelation. I was hearing parts of records that I’d never heard before; new chimes appeared on Tubular Bells and subtle chords on Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s Variations that had been missing previously. It was as if I’d been deaf and now I could hear. The radiogram stayed with us until we moved to Thorney and I replaced it with separate pieces - a Sansui deck (no autoplay!), Hitachi 30watt amp and Hitachi tape deck and two massive, brilliant Celestion speakers. Later I added a CD player, ditched the tape deck, upgraded the amp and replaced those brilliant speakers with some tiny Kef speakers and a bass bin to stop Margaret’s carping. Small speakers is one of the compromises you have to make in marriage.

I replaced, replicated and added to my record collection with CD versions; then, when broadband arrived and iTunes was launched, I did it all over again with MP3 files. Now, I spend more on music than ever before and I never touch the stereo. We run everything through my old iPod or Margaret’s iPod Touch. I’ll probably move on to Spotify eventually.

I’m particularly sorry to see Jessop’s go because I’ve bought three cameras and a pair of binoculars from them and I’ve always had a good experience. They sold me a really nice Nikon compact which had a brilliant little lens. When that was stolen while travelling Europe in the care of Tom and Sam, they sold me an Olympus Miu and when film became redundant, that was replaced with a digital version. Staff were knowledgeable and prepared to spend time with you and let you be hands-on with the products.

We used Blockbusters for a short period of time. We were introduced to video recorders/players in around 1985 when we went to stay with Margaret’s brother Phil and his then wife Carmen in Weymouth. Phil had a Betamax format video player and later we bought a VHS.

We started using a video rental store in Whittlesey and later, when the children were older, we’d go to Lincoln Road in Peterborough. Saturday night treat was pizza and a video rental, we’d order the pizza and then go to Blockbusters to choose a video while the pizza was cooking. There was always a heated debate about what we’d have!

I find it hard to mourn the passing of HMV. They were focused on shops when they should have moved online and their high street retailer mindset also prevented them from going niche and specialist with expert staff to serve a smaller market. Why isn’t there a Spotify-type app called HMV?

Jessops haven’t done much wrong. They’ve been hit by the fact that almost every phone and all smart-phones now have very good cameras; also online retailing and comparison sites where you can read recommendations and then find the best price. It’s made a commodity out of a luxury, highly engineered product, but what could they have done to survive? Perhaps they could be a brand under the Amazon umbrella, perhaps you could talk to someone online and still benefit from genuine advice and recommendation rather than a slew of unqualified opinion some to be trusted, some not.

Blockbuster boomed on a shift in technology and they should have realised that was going to be short-lived. They have tried to move their business online, but they’ve been up against powerful multinationals such as Apple, where the maker of the “VCR” has also become a retailer of the video and the device is geared up to steer users towards its own products. It’s sad, but Blockbusters could never have a future as a high-street retailer. However, the pizza and video experience on a Saturday night wouldn’t be the same scrolling through the Netflix catalogue while waiting for dial-a-pizza to arrive.

Who’s next? Newsagents are under threat as newspaper sales shrink and magazines move towards tablet apps, Booksellers have already been hit by the growth of e-readers and are likely to be hit further.

I buy lots of things online and I’ve got a Kindle. I’d probably use Netflix if I had more time to watch TV and a half-decent broadband connection. I would miss the high street though, I enjoy browsing and actually physically buying something. There are already so many empty shops, even in busy cities. There will be lots more in years to come and definitely not enough charity and pound shops to fill the gap. Rather than building over the green belt, perhaps it’s time to knock down a few shops and build houses and flats in the high street?

Cars I have owned - No 5: Citroen GS Club

After the sturdy, workmanlike Viva, the Citroen GS was a technological marvel - a masterpiece of innovative engineering. It won the title of European Car of the Year in 1974; it was also the singular most unreliable, troublesome car I have ever owned.

I’m sad that these days Citroen is just another manufacturer of vanilla-coloured cars. Back then, they were really pushing the boundaries of technology and design and often they pushed them just a little too far.

The GS was front-wheel drive (most were still RWD) but that was just the start:

• The enine was an air-cooled flat four
• Brakes were inboard discs
• Brakes were power assisted, but no ABS
• Suspension was hydraulic and self-levelling
• It had class-leading aerodynamics

I bought the car with my heart, rather than my head. It had metallic green paintwork and green fabric seats. Most cars were faux-leather and fabric seats were a hallmark of luxury. It also had head restraints - one of the things I’d dreamed about - and it was a four-door.

The Citroen was M-reg and the first car I paid more than £1,000 for - I even treated myself to a radio.

Compared to other cars on the market, the GS’s aerodynamic design really set it apart. I thought I’d got a bargain and I even bought it with a scrape on the rear offside bodywork on the basis that the car was marked down and it would only cost me £100 to get it repaired.

That was my first mistake. The paintwork had faded and so, when the car was resprayed on the rear wing with the same factory paint, it was a different shade. I ended up getting the whole of the side of the car resprayed - a much bigger bill than I’d expected.

Starting the car was always a dark art. It was a flat-four, air-cooled with a single carburettor and a choke, so not unlike a VW Beetle. Unlike the Beetle, it revved willingly and wasn’t strangled by its own exhaust, but it didn’t like cold, it didn’t like damp and it didn’t seem to like me some mornings. I eventually developed a knack and an understanding of how to get it to start (full choke, three slow pumps of the accelerator and then foot off the throttle when you crank the engine), but I was never confident. Even with my honed technique, sometimes it would give a Gallic shrug and there would be nothing you could do except wait a few minutes and try again.

When I’d had the car a few weeks, I decided I’d take the spark plugs out to give then a clean and check the gaps. This was an incredibly difficult job. On the Viva, the engine stood high and proud with a foot and a half of space each side. Removing spark plugs couldn’t have been easier! On the Citroen, the engine sat low and flat and because it was air-cooled, it had a large fan at the front (driven off the crankshaft) to pull in lots of air, which was directed around the engine via a large metal cowl. Opening the bonnet of the GS revealed a hidden, alien world for anyone used to standard motor car engineering.

I worked out where the spark plugs were and managed to get the first one out. It looked fine, biscuit brown and the correct gap. I decided the others would be OK too and abandoned my DIY, but when I put the spark plug back in, it wouldn’t tighten, it just kept turning. I put the cap back on and the engine started but as soon as the cylinder got some compression applied, the plug popped out. I lodged it back in and the engine ran quite well on three cylinders (well enough to get me to the garage on Monday).

I’d overtightened the plug and stripped the thread. The Citroen had an aluminium cylinder head (most cars were iron) and aluminium being softer, it was relatively easy to do. I’d feared a big bill, but the garage had done a few of these before and they just put in a helicoil insert (basically a plug with a new spark plug hole. I kept clear of the spark plugs after that.

The GS has a 1050cc engine, but being a flat-four configuration, it had good torque characteristics and it revved much more freely than the Vauxhall. These days (and even then) it would be considered seriously under-powered, but I felt it was an improvement on the Viva and, remember, these were the days when there were plenty of VW Beetles, Fiat Cinquecentoes (which actually were 500cc back then), Mini 850s and also plenty of Citroen Ami, Dyane and 2CVs with engines ranging from 600cc to 800cc.

The really odd thing was the suspension. The hydraulic pressure was provided by a pump so that when the engine wasn’t running the car settled down on its stops and pumped itself up again once the engine started. You had to be careful where you parked it because if you put the front over a kerb, when it settled down it would ground itself and damage the bodywork. The suspension had three settings - standard (for normal use), high (for greater ground clearance if you were driving across a field, which I never did, but which the French do all the time apparently) and a setting which jacked it right up, used only when you were changing wheels.

I liked the feeling when the engine started and the car came into life. It would haul itself up at the front at first and then the back of the car would rise before it made a few final adjustments. It only took 10 seconds or so, but it felt like an animal stretching itself after a snooze. The suspension never gave me any trouble, it was a superb ride and would also mitigate against dive when braking.

The pump that provided the suspension pressure also provided power for the brakes. These were the best brakes I’d ever experienced and at first it was hard not to stand the car on its nose by braking too hard. There was hardly any travel in the pedal and it operated more like a switch than anything else.

The discs were inboard rather than being within the wheel, the idea being to have bigger discs while also keeping the unsprung weight down to help handling. Downside was that because the discs were inside the car body, they didn’t get as much air flowing around them to keep them cool. Brake overheating and fade was a reported problem, but I never experienced any difficulty, except with the handbrake. This was typically French. It was applied by pulling out a lever from under the dashboard and it must have clamped a couple of calipers against the disc. It would never hold on anything but the lightest slope despite being adjusted again and again by the garage.

I’d gone from rod-and-cable brakes (Ford Popular) where you have to brace yourself in the seat and push as hard as you could to get the car to stop to the power discs of the Citroen where the lightest touch was all you needed in eight years of motoring. One grumble about the GS was the steering. Considering everything else was power assisted/operated, the steering was not. It was excessively heavy at parking speed and the steering wheel was fashionably small - no dustbin lid like the FWD Mini.

Our longest trip in the car was to Falmouth in Cornwall to visit our friends Andy Butcher and his girlfriend (later wife) Mandy. After a week in Cornwall, we headed up to Helpston, near Peterborough, where my sister Margaret and husband Mick were living. In those days the M5 was only two lanes and would back up in numerous places. Also the A30 through Okehampton, Launceston and Bodmin was single carriageway, so there were massive hold-ups on summer weekends. We drove down overnight and arrived about 7am on a bright summer morning and I had ice-cream for breakfast. We were so early we had to hang around for a while until our friends were awake.

It was a good holiday and we drove all around Cornwall in the car, including Land’s End, The Lizard, Mousehole and Helston.

The journey to my sister’s the following Saturday was another long one. I think we went A303 and A34, then across to Northampton on the A43. I was pushing the car hard to try to get there in a decent time and I noticed a grinding, whine coming from the front wheel. I’d had the wheel bearing replaced just before going on holiday and thought they’d put a duff bearing in. When I checked it out at Helpston, the wheel was physically loose; I jacked it up and took the wheel off and the main nut that holds on the wheel assembly was within a turn of coming off (and the wheel with it). The nut was castellated, so it had bumps around it. Once it was tightened, a locking pin was inserted through a hole in the spindle and it rested within the bumps so the nut couldn’t unscrew. The garage had failed to insert the locking pin when they changed the wheel bearing!

I called the RAC and they came to collect it. The car was driven onto a low loader and we got caught out with the suspension, the car settling onto the winch by the bulkhead when the engine was switched off. I had to jump in quickly and start the engine before too much damage was done to the front valance. The car was soon fixed, it just needed a new locking pin.

We liked Peterborough, Stamford and the villages and that holiday was probably what persuaded us to move to Peterborough the following spring, so the Citroen had another couple of trips when I went for an interview to the Peterborough Standard and then when we moved to Bretton.

In spite of its reliability issues, I liked the GS. It was a supremely comfortable car, but it was also suffering from the start of corrosion, with a line of bubbles appearing in the paintwork around the rear wing where the internal mudguard was attached to the bodywork.

I sold it for about £800 when I got my next car (my first company car) an S-reg Morris Marina 1.3GL.

Thanks to Joost Bakker for the image.


Also see:

Ford Popular - click

Bedford HA Van - click

Morris Mini - click

Vauxhall Viva HC - click

Cars I have owned - No 4: Vauxhall Viva HC

My Vauxhall Viva was a J-reg and I’m pretty sure it was a 1971 model. After the Mini it felt slow and very cumbersome, although if you really put your foot down there was a little band of torque in the middle of the rev range where you could almost feel acceleration. It wasn’t nearly so much fun to drive as the Mini.

It was four-speed and rear-wheel drive. Compared with modern cars and compared with the Mini, there was a massive amount of space under the bonnet. The engine, which was 1159cc, was really tall and thin and it sat longitudinally, with the crankshaft in line with the gearbox and drive-shaft. You could have got three engines side by side under the bonnet.

Our car was a two-door model and there was plenty of room inside, although not massively more than the Mini. It was dark blue and I bought it from a chap at work (a compositor at the Warrington Guardian). It had started life as a company car belonging to Les Senescall, chief sub at the newspaper.

Our time together didn’t get off to a great start: as soon as I bought it, I got landed with a massive (for the time) bill for work on the brakes and a few other jobs. I was working on the sports desk and I told the sports editor, who told the bloke who sold it to me and he gave me £100 back (I think his workmates shamed him into it). I’d paid about £600 for the car originally.

At the time, around 1977, the cars that dominated the UK market were the Ford Escort, Vauxhall Viva and the Austin/Morris 1100, which had just been replaced by the Austin Allegro. The Morris Marina would have appeared around this time too (but more of that later).

Ford and Vauxhall had traded blow for blow as they tried to be top seller and I’d always favoured a Vauxhall. The Viva HA was a lovely little car, although very boxy (three boxes in fact), but its replacement (the Viva HB) had gone all curvy and had the Coke-bottle design cues along its rear waistline (just like the Mk I Escort).

The second Escort had gone back to more angular lines, while the Viva HC had taken a more imaginative route. It seemed almost art deco in some of the design cues - strong bold lines, which looked almost as if they’d been sculpted. The front wings had a real edge to them and the bonnet, which had a bold ridge down the centre, was turned up at each side to mould with the wings. The grille had a strong centre feature which matched the ridge on the bonnet.

Other lines were smooth, with a prominent waistline and a rounded boot. I really liked the style of the car, although it always seemed to sit very high on its thin tyres so that, from the rear, it looked a bit out of proportion. The Viva models with bigger engines had fatter tyres and they looked really good; in fact, the later Magnum versions of the Viva were considered to be real muscle cars, a step above the old Viva GT or Escort GT.

Inside, the car was basic as all cars were. Instrumentation comprised a letterbox-style speedometer with a big red needle which wasn’t that easy to read, but then the speed camera was well over the horizon. Interior designers had a bit of a field day in the ’70s and ’80s when round dials were considered old-fashioned and form took a higher priority than function. There were other weird things like oval steering wheels (Austin Allegro), U-shaped handbrakes (Alfa Romeo), non-cancelling rocker switch for the flashing indicators rather than a stalk (Citroen) and a strange cow-horn-shaped indicator switch/stalk from SEAT.

The Viva didn’t have a radio and it didn’t have front head-rests (my two great ambitions for a car at the time. It did have windscreen washers, which had to be pumped by pushing a big black button under the dashboard, but that was about it. Wind your windows up and down and lock the doors and boor separately. There was no ABS, no servo and the brakes were drums all round.

It was a fairly reliable car, although I seem to remember always being worried that something would go wrong. Nothing did go wrong apart from it needing a new exhaust, but it was rusting away quite quickly. The driver’s seat also partially collapsed when part of the frame broke. I never did anything about that. The seats were quite wide and, although it lacked a bit of support on the right-hand side, it was still useable and made getting out of the car quite easy. you just opened the door, leaned a bit to the right and out you fell.

Rust was the great issue with all cars at this time. The Viva HC was quite solidly built with good thick steel, but it was prone to rust. Mine would have been about six years old when I got it and there was the tell-tale bubbling of paintwork along the top of the offside wing. Corrosion was eating through the untreated steel from the inside and no amount of polish would help with that.

Eventually, both wings had rust as well as bubbled paint and the two front inner mudguards rotted completely. I remember spending a couple of hours just pulling rusted metal from inside the front wing. It was quite worrying, but also quite addictive and pleasurable, feeling the metal just crumbling like a dry Weetabix. The car was on its way out and I sold it for about £200 before it became scrap value only.

We did one long journey in the car, driving from Warrington where we lived to Ipswich and back one day. I’d been unsettled at work and keen to progress, so I was looking for a new job. I went to interviews at Widnes (what a dump!) and Bolton, but pay for journalists was awful and I desperately wanted a company car. I’d seen a job as editor of Pig Farmer and thought that might be quite interesting. It also came with a much better salary and a company car - a Triumph Toledo no less.

Winston Churchill said that a cat looks down on you, a dog looks up to you but a pig is the only animal on earth who looks you in the eye as an equal. They were nice people and I was offered the job, but decided it was a cul-de-sac that I shouldn’t drive my career down and stayed put in Warrington for a bit longer. The journey to Ipswich in 1977 was much different to today. We took the M6 to junction 1 and got off at Lutterworth to Market Harborough, then it was A-roads to Kettering, Thrapston, Huntingdon, Cambridge, Bury St Edmunds and Ipswich. I was staggered how small Ipswich seemed compared to Warrington. The size of the Marks & Spencer store and Woolworths was always a good guide and those in Ipswich were tiny! It’s a bit bigger these days and the journey would be much easier - M6 and A14, motorway and dual carriageway all the way.

The Viva was also remarkable for the fact that Margaret took her first driving lessons in the car. She had some starter lessons from a lecherous driving instructor in Warrington and then I took her out. I was frightened to death, she wouldn’t be told anything (no surprise there!) and we ended up having a massive row and me driving back. I never gave her another lesson.

This is what Wikipedia has to say about the Viva HC:

The Viva HC (1970–1979) was mechanically the same as the HB but had more modern styling and greater interior space due to redesigned seating and positioning of bulkheads. It offered 2- and 4-door saloons and a fastback estate with the choice of either standard 1159 cc, 90 tuned 1159 cc or 1600 cc overhead cam power.

The American influence was still obvious on the design, with narrow horizontal rear lamp clusters, flat dashboard with a "letterbox" style speedometer, and a pronounced mid bonnet hump that was echoed in the front bumper.

The passing of the Viva marked a significant moment for Vauxhall, as it was the last car to be completely designed by the Luton-based company. All future Vauxhalls would be simply badge-engineered Opels, or in the case of the 2004 Vauxhall Monaro, a rebadged Holden.

The domestic market launch of the Viva HC coincided with one of the UK's periodic surges of debt-fuelled economic growth, and the latest Viva became Vauxhall's fastest-selling new model of all time, chalking up its first 100,000 units in under eight months months. Total HC sales ran to about 640,000 units, making combined Viva production top the 1.5 million mark. The millionth Viva, a gold HC, was driven off the production line amid much celebration on 20 July 1971. Although most Vivas were produced at Vauxhall's Ellesmere Port plant near Liverpool, the company's production lines were, by the standards of the time, flexible, and the millionth car was a product of the Luton factory. However, within seconds of the millionth Viva's completion at Luton, Ellesmere Port celebrated what was described - over-optimistically as matters turned out - as the first Viva of the second million.

The HC Viva has been less popular with classic car enthusiasts, as until recently 1970s cars weren't really sought after or considered true classics. This attitude is changing, with the best low-mileage examples of HC Vivas changing hands for a couple of thousand pounds on sites such as eBay.

I changed the Viva on a bit of a whim. I was driving past a used car showroom in Padgate and saw a Citroen GS on the forecourt. It was M-reg, they wanted just over £1,000 for it and it had front head restraints ...

Also see:

Ford Popular - click

Bedford HA Van - click

Morris Mini - click

Books Read in 2012

2012 was the year I got a Kindle. It’s just the basic one, no super white or tablet versions for me, although if I’d waited a few months the Kindle Fire does look really good value at £150 (isn’t that always the way with technology?).

I think it was the Tom Holland In the Shadow of the Sword that really persuaded me to get an e-reader. It was a hard-back and weighed a good  few pounds. Carrying it with me on the train every day really weighed me down.

So the Kindle is very light and I really like the online dictionary which means you can look up the meaning of words just by highlighting them on the screen. It’s amazing how many words have slightly different meanings to what you thought - a great way to improve your vocabulary while reading.

What I don’t like about the Kindle is the fact that you can’t buy a book and then pass it on to a friend or member of your family. One of the pleasures of reading a book is the element of sharing and this is completely removed with the Kindle. It wouldn’t be so bad if the price of e-books wasn’t so high. They are not sufficiently cheaper so that you might gift a book that you’ve enjoyed to a friend.

The other major drawback is that maps and images render very badly. I read a lot of history books and maps are often a key aid in understanding what’s going on. It’s almost impossible to use maps properly on a Kindle. So when I’m not commuting, I’ll probably go back to paper; but this year the Kindle had allowed me to read more easily.

These are the books I’ve read during 2012:

In The Shadow Of The Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient Word by Tom Holland:

Historian Tom Holland has caused some controversy with his new book In the Shadow of the Sword, which looks at the rise of Islam and (to a certain extent) the rise of Christianity as the great empires of Rome and Persia fell apart during the first half of the first millenium. I suspect he’d liked to have caused a bit more controversy in order to sell books, but when you’re writing about Islam, the pro of being named in a fatwa (lots of free publicity) is often outweighed by the con - being beheaded by a religious fanatic.

Holland is a popular, but serious historian, and I think he’s deliberately set out to be controversial (or at least to advertise the potential for controversy) in order to sell more copies. Even his choice of title is interesting - In The Shadow of the Sword is taken from “the gates to heaven lie in the shadow of the sword” which is a quote from the Koran and suggests that an essential part of Islam is conquest. It is, of course, but muslims rarely like to have this pointed out and it’s something of an inconvenient anachronism for the religion in the modern world. History shows that Islam has been used by many empire builders from Tamerlaine to Sulieman to justify conquest, enslavement and genocide (or ethnic cleansing as we call it today). Of course, it’s not only Islam that has been used in such a way; the history of Europe is littered with despots (large and small) who conquered in the name if Christianity and the Crusaders didn’t exactly go to Jerusalem to hold a few rallies and hand out pamphlets.

One theme of Holland’s book is how monotheistic religions were used politically to unite peoples and to give a greater mass of people a common purpose for any task (but mainly conquest and empire building).

Holland’s, or his marketing team’s, attempt to court controversy in the book title was something of a failure. No-one seemed to notice, but a Channel 4 documentary, based on the book (the most contentious bits) exposed the author to a wider audience and there have been around 1,500 complaints to Ofcom (the broadcasting regulator) but so far no Salman Rushdie-style fatwa.

Holland approaches Islam with a historian’s eye, looking for contemporary accounts and evidence (of which there’s next to none) around the creation of the faith. It’s pretty clear that Mohammed didn’t sit in a cave and have the Koran dictated to him by an angel, but that’s hardly controversial in my view. What I found most interesting was the account of the fall of the Roman empire (Christian) and the Persian empire (Zoroastrian) both brought about chiefly by the arrival of what Holland says was bubonic plague, which so depopulated major cities and the surrounding countryside that it was no longer possible to adequately defend them. Rather than bubonic plague, the pestilence may have been smallpox, but whatever people were dying from, they were certainly dying.

Islam grew into the vacuum as the religion that united the Arabs (the children of Ishmael). Early Christians come under Holland’s historic analysis even more than Islam does, mainly because (being on the Roman side of the fence) there’s a lot more evidence. It’s extraordinary the various Christian factions that existed so early in the religion’s existence, amazing the compromises they made and beyond belief the petty things they found to argue and bicker about.

Islam also had its divisions (and quite early) being split into what we now call Shia and Sunni, but essentially Arab and Persian. The book talks about the influence that Jewish scholars and the Torah had on the development of Islamic laws. I’d have thought that would have been highly controversial, but because it’s in the book and not in the Channel 4 documentary, it escapes.

Chris Bonington Mountaineer: Thirty Years of Climbing on the World's Great Peaks by Sir Chris Bonington:

Chris Bonington Mountaineer is a difficult book to read and I confess that I haven’t yet finished it. The difficulty is nothing to do with the writing or content, it’s just the size. When I bought it secondhand on Amazon, I expected a normal paperback, but it’s actually way over A4 and virtually impossible to carry to work and back. My normal, indeed my only serious reading time, is on the train, so that’s why Chris Bonington’s account of his climbing career is taking me so long. I bought it in 2011 when I had a spell of reading mountaineering books (see Books Read in 2011) and it’s easy reading, amazing stories and brilliant pictures. It’s just too big to take out of the house. I dip in and out when I have some spare time at home (which is rare) but I haven’t finished it, so really it’s here under false pretences - another project for retirement.

A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright

This is one of those “get you thinking” books and one of those you don’t quite trust because the author clearly has a massive agenda. In this case, I agree entirely with his sentiments and wish that I didn’t agree with his conclusion (which is that mankind is basically racing towards a brick wall of over-consumption and over-population).

To illustrate our current situation, Wright looks at societies such as the Easter Islanders or the Mayans, examining how overpopulation pushed their resources to and over the limit. In that situation, minor changes to weather patterns (a few dry summers) caused population collapse. In Easter Island, the solution was to carve more and more sacred heads, bigger and bigger sacred heads. It didn’t work. In South America, what was left of the Mayan population probably just walked back into the jungle.

We are increasing our population and over consuming on a grand scale, but what can we do about it? It needs a political will or mandate that can’t be secured in a democracy, where people will always vote for short-term objectives. All we can do is watch the news as China and India industrialise and increase their populations (as we did 200 years ago); while Britain’s population, boosted by uncontrolled immigration pushes towards 70 million. The simple truth is that there are too many people in the world and there’s precious little we can do about it but wait until the shit hits the fan.

Wright could be alarmist, many others have predicted famine as populations rose in the past and we’ve always been able to increase production and find new sources of food. There are improvements in technique and technology that can help still further, but we’re doing just what the Easter islanders did - push things to the limit and, at the limit, it doesn’t take much for it all to go wrong.

That Near Death Thing: Inside the Most Dangerous Race in the World by Rick Broadbent

Tom and I went to the TT this year (my first time and his third). We’re planning to go again in May/June of 2013. See: http://ericsdailydiary.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/taking-in-tt.html

It’s an extraordinary sports event that completely defies modern standards of health and safety and what constitutes reasonable risk in today’s society.

Broadbent is a sports journalist, currently working for the Times, and has a particular interest in motorcycle racing. He wrote Ring of Fire about grand prix racing and it was a terrific book. That Near Death Thing is good, but not nearly so good and I can’t help thinking that he decided to do it on the back of the success of Closer to the Edge, the film about the TT.

There’s some evidence, if any was needed, that Guy Martin is a bit crazy, there’s some interesting stuff about John McGuinness and some real insights into the Dunlop racing clan. I don’t want to criticise Broadbent - it’s a very good book for anyone interested in bike racing - but he has rather followed the trail blazed by the film and so a lot of the stuff he writes about is already well exposed.

Being a book, it also suffers from having taken a snapshot of events in time. One of the characters he writes about was killed in the Ulster Grand Prix this year and there have been developments in the story around Ian Hutchinson which are worth a chapter in the book on their own (see my blog: Ian Hutchinson: Closer to the Edge - see even I can attempt to cash in on the success of the film).

It’s a shame Broadbent didn’t expand the subject to cover Irish road racing, the TT is just the biggest event in the Irish road racing calendar, and add another 100 pages.

The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling

So, after reading Rick Broadbent’s book, I switched from paper to Kindle and my first foray was The Jungle Book which was available free from one of the many sites offering books which are out of copyright.

I read this for the first time when I was about 22 and I’ve since read it to the children, so this was a nostalgic trip down memory lane for me. It’s easy reading and got me into using the Kindle.

Constantinople: The Last Great Siege 1453 by Roger Crowley.

The fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans is one of the pivotal events in modern/European history. It meant that Islam gained a base which enabled it to advance well into Europe and north Africa and it marked the final end of the Roman (Byzantine) empire.

Constantinople, like Rome and Athens, is one of the great ancient cities of western civilisation. It shouldn’t have survived as long as it did being the main city of a bankrupt and tired empire and having been sacked and pillaged by Norman crusaders a few hundred years previously. Then again, it should never have fallen. Despite a serious lack of men and money, the defenders almost managed to hang on. If Christian Europe had stopped squabbling long enough to provide only a couple of thousand men and a few more relief ships, then Constantinople might have remained a bastion, the front line, of Christianity.

It was technology which allowed the Ottomans, under Mehmed, to take the city. They showed an ability to organise and mobilise resources as only an absolute dictatorship/monarchy can do and what they did was extraordinary. They built the biggest cannon cast (pushing bronze metallurgy technology to the limit), they built opposing fortresses to throttle the Byzantine empire (what was left of it) and they transported a naval force overland for 20 miles or more in order to outflank the defenders.

In the end, the massive Theodosian walls almost kept out the attackers. The huge cannon knocked chunks out of them, but the breeches kept being filled and the ladders kept being cast down. It was a knife edge between victory and defeat, between survival and murder.

Had Constantinople held out, then the Ottoman empire might not have survived. The Sultan might have lost control and the Hapsbergs or the Russians filled the gap as the Byzantines slowly collapsed. Persia and the Shia branch of Islam may have been more dominant and the western Mediterranean saved from centuries of raids by Barbary pirates who captured many thousands of Italian, Greek and Spanish people and sold them in the slave markets of Africa. Slavery was still an integral part of the Ottoman empire well into the 19th Century (as it was in America, of course).

As it was, Constantinople became Istanbul, capital of the Ottoman empire, which expanded through Greece, the Balkans and into western Europe as far as Vienna before the tide turned. The Ottomans were a little disappointed in their prize; they were surprised how poor and run down the place was. To their credit, they didn’t murder the entire population and they converted the great churches into mosques rather than destroy them, but many of the remaining treasures were destroyed including the famous bronze statue of Justinian.

Roger Crowley is a serious historian, but he writes in an easy style which is very digestible.

The Cloudspotter’s Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney

A book on clouds? Doesn’t sound a great read, but Gavin Pretor-Pinney is one of those great British eccentrics; he wanted to write a book about clouds (not a serious textbook) and write it he did.

He loves his subject and this comes through in the writing. There are anecdotes, interesting trivia and serious facts. If you want to know how hail is formed or what’s causing it to rain; or if you just want to impress your friends by remarking that you’d better hurry your picnic as that Cumulus Congestus looks threatening then this book is great.

I now know why clouds are white and why some are black; annoyingly, when Margaret remarks that it’s a beautiful day with not a cloud in the sky, I can’t help but point out that a plain blue sky is a bit boring and then find a wisp or two of high cirrus just to prove her wrong.

This is a great book and it needs to be a book, it wouldn’t work on Kindle as you really need the pictures and diagrams to work to get maximum enjoyment from it.

Empires of the Sea: The Final Battle for the Mediterranean, 1521-1580 by Roger Crowley.

After the fall of Constantinople, I wanted a bit more Ottoman history and this is history starring Russell Crowe. It has everything - cruel Turks, evil Pirates, swashbuckling heroes, great battles on land and sea, people skinned alive, treacherous French ...

This all happened more than 400 years ago, but it’s hard not to sympathise with the hard-pressed Christian kingdoms of the Mediterranean, constantly attacked by the Saracens. Well, it is if you’re from a Christian background and I kind of feel that Roger Crowley is there at the head of a galley next to Don Juan cheering the Christian fleet at Lepanto or urging the Knights of St John to hold fast at Malta.

It’s a serious history book and analyses a period where the Mediterranean was the theatre for a power struggle between the Islamic empire of the Ottomans and the Christian kingdoms of Spain, Austria and the various Italian city states. Control of the Mediterranean would allow the Islamic conquest of Europe from the bottom up. Venice would fall, followed by Rome and all Italy; and Spain and the Iberian peninsula would be recolonised from North Africa.

The book starts with the siege of Rhodes and the eventual expulsion of the Knights of St John from this forward base, established after the fall of Acre in 1291, some 250 years earlier. From Rhodes the Knights retreated to Malta, a key strategic point between Italy and North Africa. The Christian island withstood a massive siege by the Ottomans, but the Turks seized Cyprus from Venice after a bloody siege and dreadful atrocities. Eventually, the squabbling Christian rulers managed to hold an alliance together long enough to raise a fleet, which destroyed the Ottoman navy at Lepanto in the Peloponnese.

It brought an end to Ottoman hopes of controlling the Mediterranean and forced further attacks on European countries to go by land rather than by sea. It was bad news for Budapest, but good news for Italy, France and Spain. The Turks got as far as Vienna, but their failure to take the capital of the Holy Roman Empire was the turning point. had they controlled the seas, conquest would have been easier and Europe would have looked very different today.

Osman's Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1923 by Caroline Finkel

I’ve finished the year 65 per cent through Caroline Finkel’s history of the Ottoman Empire. After looking at the Ottomans through Christian eyes (from the opposite trenches, as it were), I thought I should have some redress.

Finkel likes her Ottomans and the book has taught me a great deal, although here’s a case where the Kindle’s inability to render maps in a readable format has meant that I’ve found it much more difficult to follow what’s happening or the scale of achievements.

The book is long and it’s rather heavy going, not helped by names being unfamiliar and difficult to pronounce, so that the temptation is to bleep over them. I’m looking for more summary and trends, but the book plods on chronologically, so I have to summarise myself.

It’s fascinating how the Ottomans were quick to harness the cutting-edge technology of warfare - particularly cannon and crack troops (the janissaries), but failed to maintain that technological advantage. In particular, they failed to build a dominant naval force, preferring to franchise that role to a bunch of able, but violent pirates. They came unstuck at Lepanto when floating Venetian gun platforms devastated their rowed galleys, but didn’t learn the lesson.

Their land advantage lasted longer than it should have done mainly due to the divisions and rivalries among their enemies, with Christian kings happy to use the Ottomans to defeat their Christian rivals. When the tide did turn and Ottoman rulers tried to reform the military, they were blocked by vested interests. It didn’t take much to prompt a janissary revolt and as the corps developed from a force comprising Christians converted to Islam to a force where converts were not allowed, which allowed the janissaries to use religious excuses for opposing reform.

The empire’s economic structure meant it was almost always bankrupt, especially when they ran out of rich neighbours to conquer. What is interesting is that many Christians (especially those at the bottom of the heap) were happier to live under an Islamic absolute ruler than they were as virtual serfs under a Christian regime.

Also see: Books Read in 2011

Trains run again on the Thorney Railway

I took this picture yesterday, 5 Jan 2013 (Thanks to Tom Rayner for blowing it up in Photoshop - the original is posted at the bottom of this blog). I was working in the garden and when I looked up there was a steam engine sitting on the embankment two fields away.

It was on the back of a low-loader transporter lorry parked up in a lay-by on the A47 Thorney bypass. What struck me as interesting was that the bypass at this point is built partly on the trackbed/route of the old Midland and Great Northern (M+GN) railway line which ran from Birmingham to Cromer and was closed by British Rail in 1963.

When we came to Thorney in about 1979, the railway track was removed, but large parts of the line were still clearly visible and a good chunk of the railway was walkable. It was a favourite walk with Jack, our collie-cross.

This engine is a J15 0-6-0 and has been given its old number of 7564, but was British Rail engine 65462. It's owned now by the North Norfolk Railway and runs on the line between Sheringham and Weybourne, which is remaining track from the old M+GN line.

So here it was, 50 years after Beeching's report brought about the closure of the railway, parked up within feet of the track it would once have steamed along, taking holidaymakers to the Norfolk coast and farm produce back to the city.

The M+GN line never made money. It was christened Muddle and Get Nowhere by people who used it regularly and the Crab and Winkle line by holidaymakers who perhaps had a better "user experience".

You can read a bit more about the engine here:

The J15 is the M+GN Joint Railway Society's "other" ex-BR steam locomotive.  Built by the Great Eastern Railway at Stratford in 1912, it was numbered 564.  A total of 189 were built for light to medium goods trains, but it was not  uncommon to see a J15 on a local passenger working. 65462 spent most of its  life in East Anglia, and was often found working on the "Waveney Valley" line,  between Tivetshall and Beccles in Suffolk. 65462 was purchased in 1963 along with B12 61572 by the Society, and  went into storage at March before being moved in 1966 to the North Norfolk  Railway. The engine first returned to steam in 1977, and worked for many years  between Sheringham and Weybourne. The J15 also hauled the first train from  Weybourne to Holt, when the line was reopened in 1989. It was withdrawn  from service shortly after. The J15 returned to steam in 2002 after a 12 year restoration, and completed  the "Steam Dream", when the B12 and J15 ran together for the first time in  preservation on 30th August 2002.