Forfar 5 - East Fife 4
Is this familiar?
Were the undulating tones of the football results part of your weekend growing up? Are they still?
Big Sis writes
'Now, perhaps this is an idea for iPM? The memories evoked by watching Grandstand, listening to the football results, etc? I can't be the only one who has very vivid memories of that weekly moment.
It brings back memories of sitting with my Dad while he checked his pools coupon on Saturdays, early evening (around 5.45, am I correct?)
I'd love to go back there for one day, just to be with him.'
UPDATE: For those of you who miss the real thing, here's Len Martin reading the results. His editorialness Rupert notes that while we are a, "bit vague about the year - but Leyton Orient were in the top flight this year, so that dates it."
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So glad you've taken this up. Ever since the talk of football results that prompted my memory, I've been returning in my mind to those Saturday afternoons. In the days before the National Lottery, online betting, and the like, the Pools were an institution. My grandfather, too, used to fill in his weekly coupon, and my father would occasionally allow me to hazard the guesses.
But listening to the results was akin to an early evening lullaby for me as a youngster, and the nearest I can get to it today is if I happen to tune in to the late night shipping forecast. The football results, though, were in a class of their own.
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I'm surprised the mods let the word Scunthorpe appear on the blog.
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Even at 50, and female, I feel denied a weekend if I have not heard the intro music and dulcit tones of his nibs as he reads the results on Radio 5 live. Aaaah sports report... James Alexander Gordon and his up and downy voice....but being a Hamilton Academical fan it was always tinged with a certain doom...... as for the pools results - this was our ticket to Australia which sadly never arrived.
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Big sis,
Yep, my old man listened avidly to the football results too. However, my best memories of Grandstand were Kent Walton and the wrestling when we'd play out the bout with my dad 'pretend wrestling'. I remember, Jackie Pallo, Mick Mcmanus and the like. However my favorites were Burt Royal and his brother in tag bouts. We always used to "say do you think that they are really hurting each other or are they putting it on"? These days we all know better - of course they were wrestling for real ha ha.
Congratulations.
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My family didn't do the pools, but my earliest memories of Saturday nights contain the chanting of the football results, accompanied by the eating of pasties purchased from the bakers that morning (a weekly treat in the days before fast food) and followed by the ritual of watching Doctor Who. Well, I watched most of it - I did spend some time hiding behind the sofa!
Happy days.
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It was lovely being a footballer back in the sixties - you weren't a real man until you'd rendered five defenders quadroplegic.
PC and video-refereeing: it's spoiled evrything, hasn't it?
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Funny joe should mention that about the wrestling, as I also used to watch that with my Dad. And the racing (I was horse mad, and still love them - but had mixed feelings about steeplechasing .....).
Those were the days when I was too young to be allowed to roam with my friends around the shops or wherever, but I don't ever remember feeling resentful. And it was probably the only period in my life when I had regular time alone with my Dad, my mother and brother being busy with 'other' things. It gave us a sense of camaradie.
In later years, I used to watch the snooker with him. Funny, really, how watching sport on TV united a daughter and her father.
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What I enjoyed was that one could always tells when a result was a draw simply by the way the first team was pronounced.
My dad only ever won 3/6d - goodness knows how many five shilling postal orders he bought.
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This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
One wonders what was wrong with 9.
To express disagreement with the apparent sentiment of a projected programme item, does not of itself seem unreasonable.
To suggest that the suggestion behind the programme comes from an odd source seems to me to be kosher, too.
Are we instead to take it that although iPM listener contributors offer their views in exactly the same way as an other contributor to a radio programme, iPM will disallow any criticism of listener contributors?
If so, that is to take free speech to the realms of licence.
Anyway, one way of seeing the points I was making is this.
Even at 1d per line for fifty weeks of the year, a punter in, say, 1955, would be spending 4s 2d a year.
With wages as they were that is about 1/40 of the weekly council wage (say £8) around then.
That money saved on a weekly basis would do a great deal more good to the 'punter' than the chance to line the pockets of the pools industry owners and to have a chance of winning a low fraction of the money gambled. (The rest went to profit, not good works)
Charity workers i nwind and rain would have been pleased to get the coppers for their good causes
So the pools and the BBC conivance with them was bad, iPM (and 'contributor)
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If my father wasn't in the house to copy down the results for checking the coupon later in the evening, there was always somebody delegated to carry out the task. Nobody was allowed to speak whilst the results were being read out for fear of missing one.
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youllallguesswhoiam:
Since the disagreement was, in part, with me (the contributor), I'll make the following points:
(1) Football is/was never played all year round, indeed when I was a child (later than 1955, incidentally) I seem to remember that the football year was more in the order of six months a year or less.
(2) Then, as now, people used to regard their little flutter as a hook on which to hang a dream for a more affluent future. My grandfather used to say to me that, if he ever won the pools, he'd buy me something that I'd always wanted but could never have hoped to have. It's akin, I suppose, to the National Lottery, although with the pools you did have to know something about the form of particular clubs, so there was an element of knowledge involved.
But the main thrust of this thread is about listening to the football results, so your comments amount to a red herring anyway.
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Loon: Yes, I can remember doing that, too! :)
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Re: youllallguesswhoiam.
I have an idea who you are, but really wish you'd disappear into an abyss.
Surely you have more productive ways in spending your time?
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12
Thanks for pointing out my howler...
...there was me thinking the Aussie pools were in the summer....
....but you miss the point....
The BBC was conniving with the pools companies - telling us how many points would win the big prizes etc.
The whole grubby business of football pools was about telling ordinary people that the one in (several) million chance of £75,000 was the only chance for them to escape poverty, when.......
....their poverty was a direct consequence of the way they were exploited (underpaid) in the first place....
(I'd have thought a leftie like yourself would have said that)
The money went into the pockets of the owners, tax and prizes.
The dream, then, of escaping poverty, meant that working people became poorer and paid taxes they shouldn't have had to.
There was no charitable giving by the pools companies built into the arrangement.
People like my mother had to beg from the rich of Chiswick to fund decent facilities for old people. At Xmas there was a Xmas box for every old person in the Club.
The amount was what one line of the football pools done every week for a year, by one person paying 1d a line would raise.
People REALLY believed they would win. There was genuine despair on Saturday evenings and all day Sunday when they didn't. (Meanwhile a typical working class person would be spending about 10 percent of hteir income on the pools).
Premium bonds were fairer 'cos people who shouldn't have paid all that tax via the pools, now didn't have to, and they didn't lose the nominal value of their 'stake'.
The pools were central to the BBC's coverage of the results. The pools did ordinary working people no good nohow.
Nostalgia is too often about rosy spectacles looking at unpleasant pasts.
Equally today, we are not allowed 'righteous anger', its seen as bad form. But the pools were a pernicious nasty system.
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Re: youallguesswhoyouare :-?
What a shame your comments often appear to await moderation?
BigSis, and indeed others had a lovely 'off blog' chat this evening.
I do hope hope that one day you can 'temper' your views and join in?
Apologies to all the 'Off topic' stuff comments to regular bloggers.
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As to my memories - well yes there are some real ones.
Grandpa Perry always smoked a pipe. Balkan Sobrani I believe it was.
I always spent Saturdays with them at Number 75 Vaughan Gardens in Ilford on a Saturday.
The Televison was an old Philips, big glass front with a large knob on the side. BBC 1 was 1 and ITV in London was 9. = Some kind of fine tune ring was on the side - and a lot of controls on the back for keeping the picture steady.
I was always captivated with the scores - having no idea what they meant - as I was 5 in 65 etc.. but it seemed part of a Saturday.
Now looking back it all fits into place. No love of Football but a sense of warmth and security as the weekly ritual went on.
Years later at IRN - Independant Radio News. at Gough Sq in London where I worked - the buzz was eqaully fulfilled.
A row of telepriinters would print out realms of computer sheets with scores on them - ripped off and rushed into the on-air studio to be read by Dominic Allen - the then IRN (Independent Radio News Sports Correspondent)
His ability to comprehend what was text (for him to read) or what was comong through his headphones (to speak) still astounds me now!
However it was the early days - as BigSis - has reminded us, that has prompted some ovely memories.
:-)
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Re: - youllallguesswhoiam
Well I see that your point is now visible - and more than that - not abusive.
However, - why is it necessary to point out that BigSis may be a 'Leftie' ?
Is that not a little presumptious?
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This community is becoming incestuous. A little less cliquiness, and a bit more conversation, please.
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Jonnie, your point about the sense of warmth and security and - from the tone of what you've said about your own memories - love, is, I guess, the key to this cameo of childhood which is clearly familiar to many over the age of 40.
Everything you say, down to the Balkan Sobranie, rings true to me - though in a different part of London, it's true. Yes, I'd forgotten that - ITV was always 9, at least in the London area.
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jonnie and sis
Em, I think part of the problem is working out what we're supposed to be nostalgic about.
The pools, and it is true that the BBC connived in their implementation, were, to my mind indicative of and of themselves part of a pretty unpleasnt pattern of income distribution.
For me, if you were nostalgic about Billy Wright and hs 100 caps and his high profile marriage to that Beverley Sister, I'd join in.
'Cos Wright was on a not unreasonable income. More, it's true, perhaps £10 a week more, than a council worker, but not in Beck's league. And pop stars didn't get Madonna millions in those days.
But then, that wouldn't be nostalgia any more, more drawing lssons from the past.
And when you get nostalgic about bad things, and the pools and all they stood for were certainly that, drawing lessons rather than joining in the sentiment(ality) seems inevitable.
I'm not sure what people do who have fond memories of their parents, smelling of 'good' tobacco, a warm arm round them, whilst explaining to a friend that 'they' should send the immigrants home.
Probably just make sure our own grand/children don't wind up with similar 'double-bind' memories, I suppose.
Hey, jonnie, you know the one about how kissing a holy person is okey dokey but NEVER get into the habit?
Well, I think I've got a variant. 'Cos I feel as if I've just climbed out of an Abbess.
With apologies for any spelling atrocities, but I'm in Leics Library and can't get their system to give me a spell check. (Which has what effect on dyslexia and good and bad spellers?)
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Great to hear Len Martin again. Where did you get the idear from...?
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youllallguesswhoiam (15) - What a load of absolute twaddle.
I'm afraid your extreme desire to convert the world to your concept of some 'socialist utopia' has forced you to use ridiculous suppositions and quote rather dodgy numbers.
"People REALLY believed they would win." Tripe. But they might have believed they COULD win.
"There was genuine despair on Saturday evenings and all day Sunday when they didn't." More tripe. If you have any personal memories, don't cast them on the rest of the population.
". . people who shouldn't have paid all that tax via the pools." Another false claim. Sure, the Pools Companies paid tax. But so did washing machine manufacturers, brewers, car dealers, furnishers, etc. Do you think you have any right to specify how people should dispose of their own money.
"Meanwhile a typical working class person would be spending about 10 percent of hteir income on the pools." Biggest bit of tripe yet. Not everyone did the pools you know. And taking your figure of an average wage of 8 pounds that would be 16 shillings on the pools per week. That would buy you 196 lines at 1d a line. But very few people did the pools at 1d a line. 1/4d or 1/8d a line was much more common.
I would go on but I'm bored now.
Oh dear, you now have another lot of nonsense up on the thread, telling us what we are allowed to be nostalgic about.
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Dear iPM
23 posts on a single story?
This will surely be covered on Saturday's show.
However, one story is more popular than all of the others you have suggested in the last month put together:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ipm/2009/01/thought_for_the_day_a_genuinel.shtml
Your editor has already apologised online for the poor manner in which it was covered on the iPM show last week.
Please do the decent thing and dedicate this Saturday's show to covering this issue properly.
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23
QL
Thanks for all the corrections and comments.
An eight from eleven perm took 44 lines.
Thruppence a line was common.
The real problem was that an unrealisable dream was taking the place of real redistribution. The illusion that we would win was disconnecting us from our sense of the taxes we were and should be paying.
The BBC was conniving in marketing the false dream. I have no feelings of nostalgia for such times.
Hoping to win, then losing. Up, then down. Life had a bi - polar pattern of bubble and burst for many.
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23
The point is that I believe in people as a whole paying taxes they think they should and the money being spent in ways they decide it should be.
If you tie taxes into drug use or seductive compulsive fantasies then you devalue us, the people.
That is one of the reasons why killing the tobacco industry is so liberating.
And why it was such a good thing when the pools lost favour.
Let's not get nostalgic about lousy systems.
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youllallguesswhoiam (25) - You maths are as bad as your logic and your memory.
"An eight from eleven perm took 44 lines." - No it didn't.
An eight from eleven perm takes 165 lines.
"Thruppence a line was common" - Balderdash.
At 3d a line it would have cost over 2 pounds.
You debase your argument when you quote nonsense like that.
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This is all straying from the point. When I made my observation (and which was taken up by iPM) the issue of the rights and wrongs of doing the pools was nothing to do with the matter. I was simply recalling a ritual (as Jonnie accurately recalls) that was repeated in many, many households during the sixties and seventies and how evocative this memory is for me in relation to my childhood and my relationship with my father. When the matter came up on the PM blog, it was interesting that several others also remembered listening to the football results in a similar manner. It has clear resonances for others. The reason, historically, why so many took a particular interest in listening to (or, in this case, watching) the football results was largely (but not exclusively) due to the common practice of 'doing the pools'. But the memory for me, and for others of my generation, is not of the pools - it is of listening to the football results, as a child, often with a parent present. The memories revolve around the lilting voice of the presenter, the evocative names of the football clubs, the flickering television screen(in Black and White until 1969), David Coleman, etc. etc.
To debate the rights and wrongs of doing the pools is a red herring. There was, incidentally, plenty to criticise about '60s TV (Black and White Ministrels and Benny Hill coming to mind as programmes that regularly caused offence), but that is not the point of this strand.
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Big Sis - Having said earlier that we were always quiet when the football results were being given out so that they could be written down, I also remember that we used look away from the screen and try to guess the score of the away team from the tone of voice of the presenter. You could always tell if it was a home win, draw or away win.
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Loon, I seem to remember I used to do that too. ;o)
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27
Thank you for the further very necessary corrections. (Quite right eleven fac. divided by eight fac. and by three fac. IS 165!)
So eight from eleven at 1/8d would be 1s. 101/2p per week.(one and ten pence ha'p'nny)
Which for half the year would be over two pounds.
Which for eight pounds weekly is a quarter of the weekly wage per year.
At two hundred pound a week now, that means a cost of fifty pounds every year.
A lot to come out of the bank account.
A quarter of that (for 8 from 10 giving 45) still seems a lot to me for someone on the minimum wage.
Now include the sums that should have come back in prizes, and still, it's a lot just to buy into a chimera.
The 60 percent of that that didn't go on tax should interest us.
To the winners, 'cos they were more deserving???? To the pools company owners 'cos... they were more deserving???
Again, I say to you, the pools and the BBC's connivance in them, helped disconnect us from questions of redistribution and how taxes should be raised and spent.
It's no go the Welfare State, it's no go our culture
All we want is the Treble Chance
To give the profits to a vulture.
28
Bring on the contributors to this thread who have fond memories of their families during the Benny Hill Show and the Black and White Minstrels ('mum's wonderful laugh at Benny as a milkperson', the wonderful dancing of the show girls, the wonderful tenor and bass voices)
Personally I always thought the sharp English vowels of the under-pressure results announcer ruined the Scots lilt in 'Hibernian', 'Partick Thistle' etc.
I was glad when they switched the tele off and sang song and recited. In Gaelic.
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31 - I can't resist responding.
"I was glad when they switched the tele off and sang song and recited. In Gaelic."
In Chiswick? :o)
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youllallguesswhoiam
@(15) "Meanwhile a typical working class person would be spending about 10 percent of hteir income on the pools."
@(31)"So eight from eleven at 1/8d would be 1s. 101/2p per week.(one and ten pence ha'p'nny)
Which for half the year would be over two pounds.
Which for eight pounds weekly is a quarter of the weekly wage per year.
From 10% to less that 1.25% - just like that.
Just as well the footballers weren't allowed to move the goalposts.
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31
Ah, you just want to see your name in print again :-)) (Joke!!! Honestly!!!)
If you'd been there, when the last of them was dying the year before last, in a nursing home under the walls of West Middx Hospital, you'd have heard her entertaining the nurses with the Eriskay Love Lilt.
It turned out that song was also the last thing she ever uttered.
She used to sing it entirely in Gaelic.
None of this
'Tired am I
Of thee'
or however the English have it.
(Though my mistranslation would have amused her as a candidate for her own last words!!)
Incidentally, what's wrong with Chiswick as it's spoken, then? Didn't Stevie Marriot use the language well in Lazee Sunday Afternoon? Or have you got no time for ravers?
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Thanks for the item, Eddie and Jennifer. The music and the voices brought it all back. And I'm glad it struck a chord with so many others.
And I did have an (albeit brief) sense of being back there with my father. :o)
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Good, good - thanks for the idea.
James Alexander Gordon is, of course, always welcome.
In fact, I think there should be a statue of the great man outside the FA.
Rupert
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