"Down Your Way" 1. Richard Knight

http://youtu.be/LzNB32uhQQc

At some time in the mid-seventies Brian Johnston brought his radio programme Down Your Way to Midhurst. The format of the show, which had been running since 1946, was an interview with a local person followed by a piece of music chosen by them, repeated six times. A set of mini Desert Island Discs for ordinary people.

This first interview was with Richard Knight who had lived all his life in Midhurst and had served as a page boy during the visit of King Edward VII in 1906.

As recounted in the book "Midhurst in Living Memory", Richard sadly died after the recording and before the programme was broadcast.

This recording of the broadcast was made on a reel-to-reel tape recorder (bought appropriately at one of G. Knight & Son's auctions) and the sound quality is quite poor due to the levels being set too high. This was luckily fixed during the first piece of music so the subsequent clips are much more audible. For this one a transcription has been made and I think it is accurate, but I still have some doubts about who or what is got in from the common (at 4:01) or exactly where the curfew is rung (4:14).

The exact date of the recording is not known but it must have been made in either 1974 or 1975.

Midhurst Grammar School Strike 1962

http://youtu.be/HIHaQ15f1ew

Mick Robertson was well known in the seventies as the presenter of the children's television programme Magpie, and following that Freetime. He was also a former pupil of Midhurst Grammar School and took part in the student demo of 1962 in protest at the UK government's "mute acquiescence" to the worsening situation in Cuba.

This clip is from the Noel Edmonds hosted BBC show The Time of Your Life from 1982 in which Mick talks about his experience of some twenty years earlier and his thoughts about the headmaster that permitted the protest, NBC "Luke" Lucas.

As is common with these recordings, the first few seconds are missing due to the time lag involved between realising the importance of the item and getting the recorder up and running with a blank tape in. What is missing is the newspaper articles being read (in the same way as the ones that conclude the clip). I have substituted a scan from the local paper as reproduced in the book "Midhurst Grammar School Remembered", which itself carries an item on the strike.

Contents

OK, so what is there here?

I started a few weeks ago by taking my old recordings, many of which have already been digitised, and uploading them to the internet where they can be seen at:  Midhurst Media Archive on YouTube

 “Midhurst Media Archive” is perhaps a little pretentious. It isn't the Midhurst media archive, it is just one of them - mine.  But I couldn't think of a better title so that’s what it is for now. Other archives are available.

If they are already on YouTube why have this blog? Well a couple of reasons. A blog has a much greater capacity for posting descriptions, comments and additional material such as pictures, than is available on YouTube. In addition, cross-linking two sites improves the search engine rankings.

At the time of writing the excellent Midhurst pages hosted by Violet Designs is still going strong. However it looks like some of the other Midhurst related websites are broken in some way. The forum on Midhurst.net has been disabled and the Midhurst Society’s website is currently an advert for retiring in Australia. Therefore it seems to me that I wouldn’t be stepping on anyone’s toes by starting this blog.

A notice about the material here: all the uploads adhere to YouTube’s  rules on copyright and it is not my intention to breach anybody’s rights. I have not provided anything that is commercially available and where appropriate music has been edited out. Nevertheless, if you find something that you think should not be here please let me know.

GH.

Introduction

Hello,

You don’t know me and I don’t know you… so a quick introduction.

Actually, of course, that might not be true. Perhaps we have met. If, like me, you have lived for any length of time in the town of Midhurst then our paths may well have crossed. I am assuming you have found this blog as the result of an internet search for Midhurst, or Easebourne or Cowdray; or maybe you clicked on a link on a related site. Either way, if we don’t know each other we at least share an interest in the town of Midhurst in West Sussex.

Recent years have seen a marked increase in awareness of  Midhurst’s past.  An impressive display of old documents, photographs and artefacts was mounted in St. Margaret’s Convent in 2007, followed by two smaller scale exhibitions at the Spread Eagle and Capron House.

The Midhurst Society published a series of excellent “Midhurst Heritage” magazines between 2004 and 2009. In 2010 the society launched the book “Midhurst in Living Memory” at the aforementioned Capron House event, the culmination of their oral history project. In the same year a group of past and present teachers published “Midhurst Grammar School Remembered”, a wonderful souvenir collection of reminiscences of the school.

I have been inspired by these efforts to share my own memories and material of growing up in Midhurst but sadly there are a couple of problems. Principally my memory isn’t very good, and add to that overzealous adherence to a minimalist lifestyle in my youth (not pointing fingers but not necessarily my own choice) means I don’t have much to jog it. What I do have, however, is a collection of old sound and video tapes of various formats and it is to these that this blog is dedicated.

I hope you find something of interest here. Maybe a recording you remember from the past and have forgotten about or (as in at least one case already) the voice of a relative long passed away that you didn’t know existed. If so, please feel free to comment.

Ok, so introductions over. On with the show…

GH (Dec 2011)