Dad | >Re-PHOTO

Beekeepers Protest – and some graffiti – 2008

Beekeepers Protest – and some graffiti: On Tuesday 5 Nov, 2008 I went to a protest by bee-keepers outside Parliament calling for more to be spent into research into the threats that bees were facing across the world – and which threaten our food supply. On my way back for my train I took a slightly longer route through Leake Street, the graffiti tunnel under the lines into Waterloo Station. I wrote a more personal than usual piece related to the bees back in 2008, and here I’ll post a corrected and slightly enlarged version of this with a few of the pictures.

Beekeepers Protest – Spend More on Research

Old Palace Yard, Westminster

Beekeepers Protest - and some graffiti - 2008

Forget the birds, it was the bees that led to my existence. My father, then a young bachelor, signed up for a bee-keeping course at the newly founded Twickenham and Thames Valley Bee-Keepers Association and made friends with his similarly aged instructor. Both had younger sisters, and soon, thanks undoubtedly to the magical properties of honey, there were two engaged pairs – and, in the fullness of time, me. Though that was rather later as I was my parent’s fourth and final child.

Both Dad and Uncle Alf kept bees for money as well as honey, both gained certificates at various local and national honey shows. For Dad it was only one of the many small jobs as carpenter, plasterer, plumber, roofer, bricky, glazier, electrician, painter and decorator, gardener and more by which he scraped a living, but I think for Alf it was his only job.

Dad’s second war service involved getting on his bike to inspect hives across Middlesex for foul brood, and for a time he was paid to look after the T&TVBKA’s own bees at their apiary in Twickenham, as well as those of Mr Miller at Angelfield in Hounslow, and of course he had his own on several sites, while Uncle Alf had hives in west country orchards as well as locally.

So although I’ve never kept bees, I certainly learnt about them helping Dad as a young boy, and learnt to love honey. We used it liberally, as while for most people honey came in small glass jars, ours came in 28lb cans – and I had been the motive power to turn the handle of the extractor to spin it out of the combs.

I’d also help my dad when he went to open the hives, perhaps to add or take off a layer of combs or simply inspect them. I’d puff the smoker into which we had stuffed a roll of smouldering corrugated cardboard to pacify the workers inside and buzzing around, my head in a gauze veil to keep the bees out. But often – if not usually – I’d still get at least one sting. They hurt, but my father seemed immune, simply brushing the bees off his usually bare arms. And he certainly felt bee-stings were good for you.

The police got to know Dad well and any time there was a swarm in the area there would be a knock at our front door. Dad would get on his bike with a box and his bee gear on the rear rack and cycle off to deal with it, bringing the bees back to put in an empty hive.

For Dad honey was the cure for all ills. We gargled with it in warm water when we had colds and he smeared it on his toes when he had chilblains. Though I couldn’t bear having sticky toes.

Vegans criticise us for “stealing the honey from the bees” but of course we gave then candy in return, made from the extra sugar ration – stained with dye – that we got for the purpose, housed them well and ensured that they kept alive over cold winters. They owed their existence to us – and we of course all – not just me – in part owe our existence to them.

Bees aren’t just about honey, they are vital for pollination of crops, with around a third of what we eat depending on their work. The economic benefit from this in the UK is about ten times that from honey production at around £120-200 million a year.

But bees are under threat. Since the early 1990s, the Varroa mite has devastated many wild bee colonies. Bee-keepers have managed to control the mite, but now strains have developed which resist the treatments. A fungus, Nosema ceranae has added to the problems.

An even greater threat is colony collapse, a poorly understood disorder probably caused by a combination of factors including viruses, stress, pesticides, bad weather and various diseases. There have been huge loses of bees in the USA and parts of Europe but as yet is has not reached here.

Around 300 bee-keepers, organised by the British Bee-Keepers Association (BBKA) came to lobby parliament for greater research to combat the threats to bees and to deliver a petition with with over 140,000 signatures for increased funding for research into bee health to Downing St.

Most wore bee-keeping suits and hats with veils and some brought the bee-smokers that are used to calm the hives. Labour MP for Norwich North , Dr Ian Gibson, spoke briefly at the start of the protest. One of the few MPs with a scientific background, he was Dean of Biology at the University of East Anglia before being elected as an MP in 1997. The current president of the BBKA, Tim Lovett, who led the protesters, was a former student of his.

Every year the Animal and Plant Health Agency’s (APHA) National Bee Unit launches a Hive Count and the 2025 Hive count began on 1st November. Last year there were 252,647 over-wintering bee colonies in the UK and we seem so far to have avoided the catastrophic loss in bee numbers that seemed likely in 2008, though I think other pollinating insects – which are not protected by keepers – have declined.

More pictures on My London Diary at Beekeepers protest.

Leake St Grafitti

Leake St, Waterloo

The graffiti in my pictures from 2008 seem rather less impressive than those I’ve photographed in this official graffiti space in more recent years.

There are a few more on My London Dairy at Leake St Grafitti

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The 11th Hour of the 11th day

All pictures from Staines on 11th November 2007

I have mixed feelings about Remembrance Day. Of course we should remember those who have died in wars, but the events which take place on Remembrance Sunday often seem to glorify war, and rejoice in military victory. Remembrance Day – or Armistice Day as we used to call it – is a day for more sombre observance and reflection, though it often passes most people by. Gone are the days when traffic across the nation stopped and cars pulled to the side of the road to observe the two-minute silence on the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day“.

My father served in the Great War, though he only joined up at the start of 1918. Before he had worked in a munitions factory, but had been laid off, and was called to a medical around his 18th birthday in December 2017. He was examined and the medical officer, after finding he was deaf in one ear asked him if he really wanted to join the army – and only passed him as fit when he said he did.

“I was given the number 119377 and the rank of 3^rd Air Mechanic (called 3^rd Ack Emma), and awarded the magnificent wage of one shilling plus one penny a day, seven days a week – the extra penny because I was designated Clerk.”

Fortunately for him it wasn’t until July 1918 that he arrived in France, and the airfields had to be a little back from the front line, and they only once came under fire. Dad was impressed by the many nationalities working together – more from his short life story he wrote in his 80s:

“Chinese coolies prepared our sites and probably erected buildings; and of course they dug the petrol holes out. There was every nationality represented amongst the troops and auxiliaries. It was amazing how varied an organisation the armies were. There were lots of horses, mules and bullocks pressed in to do the work. Then there were the Tommies and the Frenchies and all the other fighting men, all colours, marching backwards and forwards – Colonials, Indians, Africans; we had an Empire then!”

And this is his account of the Armistice:

“We were up near Courtrai when the armistice was announced – cwas it alled Bissingham or something like that? We stayed there until after Christmas and a lot of the old hands went home from there. I don’t remember doing much there. I think we had an inkling that it was coming, and I was crossing over to the flight sheds which were old “Jerry” ones when I met a civilian who shouted “La guerre fini ; tres bon, monsieur”; I replied “tres bon, m’sieur”. On Christmas Day we had a concert, and all of us who did not usually do guard duty were detailed to take a two hourly turn throughout the night. I went over to do my turn at the appointed hour. I saw no one there and came away when I thought the time was up.”

As one of the latest to join the war effort, Dad stayed on in what was now the Royal Air Force, becoming a part of the occupying British Army on the Rhine (BAOR) . It was only at the very end of 1919 that he was finally returned to England and demobbed early in 1920 – with back pay of £75 – equivalent to over £3000 allowing for inflation.

Of course Dad had a very easy though not entirely uneventful war compared to most, and he had made his choice to serve, although under conscription. But many of those who went – in this and the Second World War – had little choice. Dad did his bit back at home in the Second World War in various ways too, and a younger member of my wider family was killed in action. But like many I think his experiences of the war left him convinced of its futility, and although at home we observed Remembrance Day respectfully, there was none of the militarism that seems to be a part of the Remembrance Sunday parades which often seem to encourage the anti-German spirit of “Two World Wars and one World Cup”. That Great War was supposed to be the war that ended all wars, but sadly only led to more.

As a Wolf Cub, and later a Boy Scout I had to go and march with the troop and to stand in short trousers in the cutting November wind while bugles sounded and soldiers marched. As a photographer I’ve more recently photographed some of these events, though always with a little reluctance. In quite a few years I’ve been in Paris in November and back in 2013 I was in Germany, where they do not celebrate the armistice, but instead have a more inclusive national day of mourning to remember members of the armed forces of all nations and civilians who died in armed conflicts, and now include victims of violent oppression. As here there are church services and parades to lay flowers at war memorials but it seemed a much healthier event than those in this country.

Remembrance Sunday in Staines 2007

120 years

My father, were he still alive would be 120 today, born in December 1899, just before the start of the 20th century (though for mathematicians that only started on 1st January 1901) and I often reflect on the changes he saw in his lifetime, and even more since his death 34 years ago.

Dad grew up in Hounslow, not far from the barracks of what was an important military town. The cavalary barracks there were the first of 40 new barracks built following the French revolution when there were strong fears both of the population here rising up in a similar manner and of a French invasion. Many of the buildings on the site, currently occupied by the Irish Guards, are listed and are expected to be retained when the site is redeveloped for housing in a few years time.

But Hounslow was also important as a coaching town, its High St allegedly lined by a hundred pubs, with the Bell junction being where the road from London to Bath and that to the Southwest diverged. Of course the coach traffic had gone by his birth, taken to rail, but these were still busy roads, though busy with horse and carts, with motorised vehicles only just begining to appear. Dad’s father had a business making horse-drawn carts, and the motor vehicles killed both his business and him when he turned right into the house gateway in front of a car whose driver pleaded he had been unable to stop.

As a two-year old he will have seen the new Electric tram which was extended to Hounslow, and later came to run past the house he lived in on the Staines Road. In 1935 the trams were replaced by trolley buses, and then these In a few years time the buses which now run there will again be electric.

At five he will have seen the building of a grand new Council House, Public Library and Swimming Baths in Treaty Road, and he lived long enough to see a new civic centre built in 1975, dying around the time the grand Edwardian buildings were demolished to build a rather undistinguished shopping centre. Now the civic centre is being redeveloped for housing and the council have moved into a rather snazzy new building on the Bath Road close to The Bell.

Just down the road from their house was Hounslow Heath, the site of one of London’s first airports. Dad and the other kids used to go down to watch the early aircraft take off and land, and always claimed to have seen Bleriot there and to have been told off by him for touching his plane. I doubt it was really Bleriot, but there were certainly other early aviators there in 1909 and later years.

Then came the war. At the start Dad was too young and worked in the drawing office of a munitions factory (women did the real work) and I think in a few other factories, but eventually when old enough decided army life would be easier. He wasn’t conscripted – I think because he was a skilled worker – but decided to volunteer. At the medical the officer who examined him told him his complete deafness in one ear (probably a result of factory work) meant he should fail him, but if he wanted to enlist he would ignore it.

After army training where he narrowly missed being court-martialled and probably shot for insuborordination the army got rid of him to the Royal Flying Corps and he went to France mending planes and finally running the stores in a camp in Germany (by now in the RAF) after the war had ended, again getting himself in a little trouble, this time for fraternising with the enemy.

I think he was probably back in Hounslow for when the first commercial flights took place from Hounslow Heath in 1919, and certainly for later in the year when the daily services began. In 1919 it was the only airport in the UK with customs facilities and there were regular flights to Paris, Amsterdam and Leeds.

By the time the BBC was established in 1922, Dad and his brother were listening-in on their crystal sets – and soon a primitive radio powered by a Daniell cell, which still I found in his workshop when I was young.

I doubt if Dad was there on 30th May 1925 when King George V cut the ceremonial ribbon to open the newly completed Great West Road, half a mile or so to the north of his home, the first of a number of new road schemes designed for motor vehicles – though also provided with separate cycle tracks in both directions, but he certainly rode on the cycle tracks and, on a motorbike, on the roads.

Dad cycled everywhere, except when he walked. West Middlesex still had plenty of country lanes in the 1930s, including those through the orchards of Heathrow, a small hamlet south of the Bath Road. When he had a young family he bolted a sidecar onto his push-bike to carry the kids, though by the time I was around the sidecar was rusting in the shed. The motorbike had long gone too, and he never owned a car. He had a hand-cart which he used to carry ladders, building materials, bee hives and other heavy goods for his various jobs.

He cycled all over Middlesex during the Second World War inspecting bee hives for foul brood; people were encouraged to take up bee-keeping as part of the campaign to grow more food at home, and had to be taught to keep their hives disease-free. We grew up self-sufficient for vegetables, from our own garden, his mother’s garden and an allotment, together with a wide range of fruit, apples, pears, plums, raspberries, blackberries, redcurrants, blackcurrants, gooseberries and more peaches than we could eat from a couple of trees he grew from stones. And of course honey. I took my turn at the handle of the extractor watching it flow into the 28lb tins. At home it often came with the odd bees leg or wing in it, doubtless adding to the flavour.

Heathrow Airport was established towards the end of the war with the industry telling the lie it was needed for military purposes, when all the time it was being established to be London’s civil airport. At first it was small, a few tents on the Bath Road, but in the fifties it grew and larger, heavier and noiser planes began to use it. Replacing the DC3s with large propellor aircraft was not too bad, and I stood in my back garden crossing off their numbers in my aircraft spotters book. But when the jets came in you needed ear protectors. More lies were told to get each stage of expansion. Terminal 4 would be the last terminal ever needed. Then came T5 and the ‘third runway’. But by around 1971 Dad had had enough of the noise and been driven away. Away from so many people and places he knew.

After the war (when he also did his bit fire-watching) came the welfare state – the NHS and free education which I and my siblings benefitted from. NHS dentistry came too late for Dad, who together with his bride had been given a “full set” as a wedding present back in 1932. I was born before the NHS, but did get regular visits to the clinic with free orange juice and cod liver oil once it began.

Things have of course continued to change since then. We got a washing machine to replace the old boiler and mangle. Dad put in a hot water system with an immersion heater, though in winter it was still heated by the coal fire in the living room – which now had to burn smokeless fuel. The old stone sink went, to be replaced by a stainless steel sink unit. A fridge – our first was gas powered. Finally we got a television though Dad still preferred the radio (and so do I – we don’t have TV at home now.) A record player (mainly for me and bought on HP).

Later came computers; the Internet and World Wide Web and mobile phones. But by then Dad was no longer with us.

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