Having grown up during the Wilson years travel away from the White Cliffs of Dover seemed a once in a while luxury even crossing the Severn from South Wales towards the smoke was a rare occurrence, that was until the advent of the package holiday and cheap trips on Monarch or Cambrian Airways pastel liveried planes to the Balearic Islands on a BAC One Eleven.
The typical vacation was spent at a Barry Butlin holiday camp in Bognor with family friends or at a caravan park somewhere in Cornwall
Through a modest postage stamp collection inherited from my father I began to acquire a little knowledge of the world albeit the perspective was somewhat imperialist, covering the countries that Queen Victoria, Regina Imperata and her successors Edward VII, George V, Edward VII, George VI and other monarchs ruled or protected in some fashion until it was all handed back by our jubilee birthday girl in the first decade of her reign.
Britain being practically bankrupted by the second world war and with no resource or cash to glue together a crumbling empire that was hankering quite rightly for self governance. Just look how Singapore under Mr Lee’s PAP put its foot on the gas pedal post the Japanese occupation towards first world status after the Brits had departed taking their cucumber sandwiches with them.
Page after page of the old Lincoln stamp album was the same story albeit the imperialists were different :
The Dutch, French, Portuguese and Spanish had all retreated from their plundering ostensibly by the early 1960’s, the start of my stamp collecting days. It seemed from the Buena Vista of my box room bedroom that the Leviathan of today’s super powers the USA did not even figure much in this old world album save for a post Spanish flirtation with the Philippines.
There is a rose-tinted spectacle temptation to look back towards a time when the summers seemed longer and people were happier but we a fading superpower were still slugging it out in far-flung corners of the globe post World War II. We were having enough difficulty at home muffling the clarion calls of the British Union of Fascists after the leader of the Black Shirts Sir Oswald Mosley had been released from prison, his aristocratic pedigree had served him in good stead until he met the hoi polloi of London’s East End at the battle of Cable Street, why was this guy, husband to one the intellectual Mitford sisters allowed to shout at liberty “out with the Yids”? 6 million having already been murdered by the Nazi regime, what was the British government thinking in letting him out onto the streets that were still bomb ravaged and soaked in Londoners’ blood? Fortunately worker power won the day and the Fascists “did not pass”
The brave-hearts of the Arab Israel war were enmeshed in another British political nightmare coping with the demise of Palestine, this combined with the growing fear of communism and the rise of a distant Sir Galahad with his long sword tilted towards an ill-defined Holy Grail balanced the world on a knife’s edge. Not since the Tea Party had their been an opportunity for the clamouring of the US for their own brand of imperialism, a new crusade was underway until Mikhail Gorbachev managed the dissolution of the Soviet Union and we took our hammers out at the base of the Berlin Wall and collected our brightly coloured concrete souvenir shards of East German concrete.
The headers on the pages of my stamp album provided a very simplistic political map of the world, basically who claimed to own what and with it an unwritten account of the worldly troubles of which at the time was blissfully ignorant of.
Then Ian Fleming’s James Bond entered my life, the Pan editions with their fantastic graphics were stacked in sequence behind the glass sliding doors of the G Plan bookcase where I also kept my stamp albums, I was very attracted by the bullet holes of the cover of the novel Thunderball and it was not until Warhol’s Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers album sleeve did a graphic image have such a profound effect on me.
This must have been circa 1964, I had already missed the first 2 or 3 of the Broccoli and Saltzman EON Bond productions but I did get to see the next, Thunderball.
Cardiff’s Queen Street was not yet the pedestrianised mess it is today, cars, people and the odd trolley bus coexisted happily together. The Wimpy was conveniently located next door to the Odeon Cinema a stones throw away from the Top Rank Suite where I saw many of the Punk Rock bands of the late 1970’s.
Burgers with onions in a toasted bap were cooked on the grill, the smell was wonderful, this was also the first time I encountered ketchup in a tomato shaped dispenser one of the great understated non-design products of the 60’s.
Then it was off to the movie and transportation to the exotic, places that were extraordinary and unfamiliar yet I knew their names, capital cities and demographics from the Stanley Gibbons album issue circa 1954, I was in tune with Ian Fleming and humming along to the Ink Spots “Don’t get Around Much anymore”.
This was as good as being in space with John Glen, from the stirring opening bars of Monty Norman’s Bond theme, the locations and the production design of Ken Adam who had just designed the best movie set ever in Kubrick’s bomb film Dr Strangelove.
It was cinematic heaven, the door was now open and the stamp album shut, the limitation of travel by gummed stamps was exposed, I wanted more, and James Bond would be back in You Only Live Twice, Asia my future fascination was only 18 months away, it did not disappoint, “a new life for myself and one for my dreams” sang Nancy Sinatra.
The maps in my old stamp albums are only recognisable from their continental silhouettes, many countries have long since been absorbed or had their name changed by revolution and deed poll. New and old stamps sit cheek by jowl with one another, the country header slightly adjusted to “now called”.
Palestine became Israel along with many other traumatic world events that I might have missed if not for Mr Gibbons subtle style of education.
silverpylon 