andymellettbrown.com

While in North London yesterday with my friend Janice, I paid a short visit to Vale Road N4. The northern end of this little road, is mostly terraced housing. When I was a kid, the houses were semi-derelict and, on one side, were eventually cleared and replaced by modern (and rather ugly), red-bricked council houses. On the other side, the old houses were retained – I’m not sure why. Perhaps the Council had a limited budget. The southern end of Vale Road is/was mostly industrial. Several well known manufacturers had their factories there including Maynards (the sweet people) and Accoson Limited (who make scientific instruments and who are now based in Harlow, Essex). I say ‘mostly’ because in between the Maynards sweet factory and the ‘Derby Works’, a large factory where The Power Flexible Tubing Company were based, was a special school at which my father was caretaker.

It is rare now to find a school with a resident caretaker – school estates management and maintenance was privatised long ago (more’s the pity), but in the days of my youth most schools had a ‘school keeper’ and often, like us, they had a house on site. In our case, it was a small cottage with three bedrooms – it didn’t gain an inside toilet until I was into my early teens, as I recall. I lived there from shortly after my birth until I was sixteen. Sometime after I left, the school was closed and the whole site cleared.

I have been back a few times since then and seeing the place is always a somewhat surreal and slightly unsettling experience. All of the buildings in Vale Road that I remember as being present when I was a child are still there, looking almost exactly as they were. Except my house and the site of the Vale School which is gone, completely. As though it has been erased, quite deliberately. Even the signs on the walls surrounding the site are still there, along with the strange, black water tank attached high up on one of the factory walls – it used to overlook my bedroom (nice!). And yet the house, the school buildings, the gardens, playgrounds, swimming pool – everything within the site’s perimeter, in fact – has vanished altogether. Very odd.

Anyway, for Janice’s benefit (I think she found it hard to believe that there was ever a house and gardens on the site – which, incidentally, is now a container storage yard and car park) here is a then (1977ish) and now picture: –

The lovely young lady on my left is Sandra (now Sandy), my girlfriend at the time. The chimneys in both pictures are the same.

And here is me standing in what was the drive up to the main school. In 1977, about ten feet in front of where I am standing, and about ten feet up, was my bedroom. Very weird.

(Photo by Janice Issitt)

“The archive was located on the first floor of a large concrete building at the centre of the Park. It was accessed via a flight of metal steps which, so far as Harry was concerned, made no sense at all.  Whenever equipment or documents were donated, they would be brought to the archive for investigation. Lugging boxes of paperwork and heavy equipment up the metal stairs was a distinctly perilous enterprise that Harry could have lived without.“

Here, for my amateur radio friends, is the full CW (Morse Code) message that is embedded in the promo video.

For my non-amateur radio friends, I cannot claim to have keyed this by hand. My CW skills are rudimentary at best. The clip is machine generated, I’m afraid. If you’d like to try decoding it and you are using a Mac (like me) try ‘Morse Decoder’ from the App Store. There will be similar apps for iPad, iPhones and other devices. Just play the clip while you have one running.

(if I’ve piqued your curiosity in Morse Code or amateur radio or both, check out www.mkars.org.uk)

The relevance of this to ‘The Shelter’ (if you are wondering) is that Martha Watts and Elsie Sidthorpe were both log readers, initially at Beaumanor in Leicestershire and then at Bletchley Park. The job of the log readers was to analyse radio communications received by the intercept operators, in an attempt to identify the patterns and networks used by the German forces in the field. German communications consisted of both ‘chat’ (in plain German) and the more important ciphered messages (for which the German’s used their Enigma machines). These messages were sent in Morse Code and would have sounded much like the message in the clip – albeit that on the air, there would have been a lot more background noise (static and interference), sometimes making accurate reception and logging very difficult work. The intercept operators recorded (in text) the received messages on log sheets which were passed to the log readers for analysis. There will be a much more detailed description of the work of the log readers in the post script to ‘Building 41’ (Book 3 in the series).

I have been particularly busy at work this week (the day job) with a long-haul trip to Exeter on Wednesday to deliver a training session to a group of staff, and then one thing after another today, leaving me too tired to write terribly coherently this evening. Exeter on Wednesday meant getting out of bed at 4.45am (I can’t remember the last time THAT happened) and onto the 5.45am from Leighton Buzzard into London Euston, a transfer to Paddington by Tube and then onto the fast train to Exeter which wasn’t that fast, to be perfectly honest. It arrived, in Exeter, just after ten.

I tried – I really did – to use my journey time constructively, but I find working on a packed train, with a Blackberry (which is the extent of the mobile technology provided by my employer to lowly individuals such as me) next to impossible. So I soon gave that up and attempted to finish Stephen Smith’s book, ‘Underground London – Travels Beneath The City Streets‘.

It is a fascinating book, though at times a little heavy going. Mr Smith is a journalist and the book reads, in places, a little like a very long newspaper article or a script for a television documentary. But, if you persist, it is full lots of fascinating details on the hidden wonders beneath London’s streets. Including, of course, the deep level air raid shelters, which was the reason I picked up the book in the first place. If you’re interested in such things then I recommend it.

I do have to report, however, a failure to finish it, even though I devoted both the outgoing and return legs of my journey to the task. This was in no way due to Mr Smith’s journalistic style, nor indeed to the content of Underground London. Rather, it was due to the fact that, like Harry Stammers, I can rarely survive longer than twenty minutes on a train, without falling asleep.

The trouble, I find, with sleeping on the train is that I always feel completely wrecked afterwards. Not at all refreshed. And I must therefore express thanks to my Exeter audience who endured my session with admirable (and quite miraculous) stoicism, given the subject matter and the fact that I was probably still half asleep for at least the first hour. Quite why they gave me a round of applause at the end was a mystery to me, but I was and am nonetheless grateful.

Incidentally, the venue for this miracle of endurance was the boardroom of Exeter’s cattle market (no connection with my work). It was a most unusual venue. Certainly the only place at which I have ever been asked to speak, with a sign on the wall stating “PIG PENNAGE, THIS WAY”.