Hiding Under Covers

In 2009, a script for A Talent for Loving was auctioned at Bonhams . It was a treatment for a movie and was signed by all four Beatles. It apparently sold for a little under £8,000. I hadn’t heard of this movie before and was curious. What was it and why was it signed by the Beatles? It turns out that the Beatles’ involvement with A Talent for Loving goes back to early 1965, some months before their second feature film Help! was released. It was adapted for the screen by Evelyn and Richard Condon, from Richard Condon’s 1961 offbeat novel of the same name.  According to Wikipedia,  A Talent for Loving  tells the tale of a sixteenth-century Aztec priest who cut off his own hand and used the bloody stump to lay a curse upon a blasphemous Spanish conquistador and all his direct descendants. Three centuries on, in 1871, the beautiful young virginal daughter of a fabulously wealthy Texas rancher and gambler is its latest victim. The action centres around a cowboy race, ru...

We all know the song… When I get older losing my hair Many years from now Will you still be sending me a Valentine Birthday greetings bottle of wine Will you still need me, will you still feed me, w hen I'm sixty-four? But how about when I get to 108? I love reading contemporary journalism about the Beatles, so trawling through the newspaper archives recently, this one caught my eye in the Daily Mail , from 16 June 1964. The headline itself is unusual but is made all the more so when you think that this is 1964 and John Turner was born in 1856. The Beatles were a by-word for the modern age. How was it possible someone born the year the Crimean War ended was still alive, let alone could appreciate Beatlemania?  Even in 1964, 1856 was an absurdly long time ago, well before the advent of recorded sound or even the general use of electricity, and certainly long before anything resembling popular youth culture as we knew it in the twentieth century. Yet John Turne...

One hundred years ago, in 1919, a small bookshop opened at 73 Bridge Street, Cambridge. Webb & Brown was started by my grandfather, Frederick Webb and his partner Bill Brown. Most details of the business are lost in the mists of time but I have been able to find out a bit about the shop – short lived and now long forgotten even in this city of booksellers. Frederick George Henry Webb was born in 1889, the eldest son of a Romsey Town railway man. From the early 1900s my grandfather’s family lived in at 82 Ainsworth Street, a terrace of railway cottages off Mill Road. After leaving school, probably in about 1903, Fred worked for George Peck, chemists, in Trumpington Street. I’m not sure why he entered bookselling. Fred was certainly working as a bookseller’s assistant when the 1911 census was taken and he put down Bowes & Bowes bookshop in Trinity Street as his employer when he enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1914. Fred Webb, 1920s Bowes and Bowes b...

Back in the early Seventies I was a willing participant in a ubiquitous teenage ritual. Every Sunday afternoon, like countless other pop fans, I’d retreat into my bedroom with the family’s portable transistor (a sturdy Roberts) to record the Top 20. I’d set up my equipment and twiddle the radio dial down from Radio 4 to find Pick of the Pops, on Wonderful Radio 1. My nail-bitten fingers hovered over the record button and I waited while the swinging cymbal theme played out, ready to pounce. The skill was to hit pause at the right moment, and thus excise any talking between the records. Most things got taped. I drew the line at what I considered to be “not proper music” (country & western, juvenile singers who I’d first seen on TV talent shows and anything involving bagpipes). But otherwise – armed with that week’s charts, hastily scribbled down at school during lunchtime the previous Tuesday – all new entries were duly captured on compact, red and grey Philips C60s. ...