Grandmother’s retro gramophone restored

It was a huge dark cabinet on legs, with part of the front cloth-covered to let out the sound from the loudspeaker inside.  The lid hinged back to reveal the metal turntable, the arm that swung across, and the huge metal disc at the end of it that could be rotated to place a metal needle onto the shellac record spinning below. Except that it was broken. As a child I had apparently overwound it to the point where the spring broke, and the handle had snapped back to injure my arm.  As a teenager I rediscovered it and found that a butcher’s double-ended hook could be used to hold the wound-up handle in place against one of the legs. Now my grandmother’s small record selection could be played again.

With my sister or friends, I’d play her old records that included early Bing Crosby, amongst others. We consciously appreciated it as retro stuff, much dating from the 1930s before the war. One of our favourites featured Arthur Tracy, known as the Street Singer, performing “Was It Rain.” 

“Skies were grey, that rainy day

We parted in the Lane.

Was it tears that fell

Or was it rain?”

Tracy had been Russian-born, but emigrated as a child to the US, where he achieved international fame and wealth, including several movies. He lived to be 98 years old, not quite making it into his 3rd century.

Sunset every day on Malory Dock

When I first went to spend some winter time in the Florida Keys, I discovered the evening ritual at Malory Dock in Key West. There's a party there every day of the year, with stalls laid out selling hand crafted produce, jugglers (which then included one with a performing acrobatic cat), kiosks selling food or ice-cream, and beer. People look out to sea at the boats plying their way past. Sometimes one of the big cruise liners will noisily set sail for its next port of call.

People are there to see the sunset. As the time nears, and it might be about 5.45 pm in late December, the sun is an orange ball, low in the sky, with long reflected rays streaking across the water. People watch as the lower perimeter of the sun enters the water.  Gradually the orb descends into the sea.  For several years as I watched it, a kilted piper would strike up "Amazing Grace" on his bagpipes.  Finally, the last gleam of the sun dips below the waves and a great cheer goes up from the watching crowd.

This happens every day of the year, and I still visit it for at least one sunset when I stay in the Keys over New Year.  The piper is gone, as is the Cookie Lady who plied her bicycle up and down the promenade calling "Get your cookies here" in a nasal New York accent. But new acts have taken their place.

Nine months in Washington after graduation

After I graduated with my PhD from St Andrews on a cold March morning, I went to Washington DC. I had no money, no job, and no prospects, but I wanted to become a professor at a US university. A friend let me surf his couch for a few weeks, and I lived on not much more than a dollar a week. Bread, eggs, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, gave a week's supply of salad sandwiches. The American Enterprise Institute gave me editing work that earned a little money.  Eventually I landed a job on the Hill with the Republican Study Committee.  Since the Vietnam War began, huge numbers of students had opted for PhDs instead of the draft and the risks of fighting in Vietnam, and there might be 600 applicants for a university job.  I applied to Conservative Colleges and hit it lucky with Hillsdale. They wanted to expand their Conservative outreach, and they thought a UK person with my background might be just the person to help them do that.

It was an amazing year for me, starting with my PhD, and employment in Washington that featured a Congressional fact-finding tour of Vietnam while the war was still on, and a trip to Israel on behalf of US Congressmen.  When I went back to St Andrews for the Christmas holidays, I had a job as a Professor of Philosophy to look forward to in January. More to the point, I had credit cards for the first time, and could afford to pay my way.  It was a life-changing year.

Times spent whale watching in different places

I was visiting Santa Barbara, and saw that whale-watching boats were available from the harbor, so I persuaded friends to accompany me on one.  It was gripping.  Santa Barbara is on the migratory route of Grey whales, and the boat was equipped with sonar to alert it when one was rising to the surface.  Suddenly a huge shape surfaced a hundred yards away, and disappeared with a giant splash, leaving the huge split tail, called a fluke, to follow it.  We saw several of them on that trip.  None seemed at all disturbed by the presence of the boat.  I was hooked.

I next chased Orcas (killer whales) off Victoria Island near Vancouver, then Humpback whales off Cape Cod, and Mincke whales off Iceland.  The most dramatic was off Cape Cod, when a Humpback surfaced right alongside our boat and splashed everyone.  I could see it, grey and gleaming, just yards away, and watched it plunge down, leaving that huge tail fin to follow it to the depths.  There is something awesomely thrilling to be so close to creatures so big and watch them go about their business, knowing about our presence, but apparently unperturbed by it.

The time I almost bought a Scottish Castle

I almost bought a castle.  A Scottish friend had bought a ruined castle and restored it so tastefully that it won prizes.  He’d used the profits from its sale to buy another ruin and do the same, but this time to live in.  He encouraged me to do the same.  Intrigued by the prospect of owning a castle, I investigated.  He pointed to Cardrona, a ruin near the Borders, so I went to look.  It was indeed a ruin, with scarce more than 3 broken walls.  It was reached up a steep track, well away from main roads.  Mediaeval Scots didn’t build castles near villages, but on lonely hills commanding views of marauding invaders.  This meant they were far from amenities.

I commissioned an architect who’d won awards for castle restorations, and loved the drawings he came up with.  I put in a bid for Cardrona.  The Scottish method of sale was to put in a bid blind to what others offer.  When the bids are opened, the highest wins, with no bargaining.  I lost out to someone who had bid over twice what I cautiously offered, taking into account the subsequent costs.  I did not acquire my castle.  The winner had vastly over-bid, and the sale fell through when he couldn’t raise the money that restoration would take.  By this time, though, I’d had second thoughts about living somewhere almost impossible to get to, and which had no running water, gas, electricity or telephone.  I did not enter a second bid.

Quango, quango, quango

It was one of the first publications we released at the Adam Smith Institute and a very influential one.  It was also one of the most fun.  Philip Holland, MP, had been tireless in asking ministers about the quangoes that came under their auspices.  The acronym stood for Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organizations, the bodies set up by ministers, but featuring non-elected members, which had powers over many areas, and yet which were not answerable to Parliament.  We identified 3,068 of them and decided to publish the list after a brief introduction describing the problems they presented.

We called it ‘Quango, Quango, Quango,’ after an old song ‘Quando, Quando, Quando.’  We published the list on a single page, 12 feet long.  Several pages had to be glued together by the printers in order to construct it.  When the report’s covers were opened, the page, folded like a concertina, opened out and dropped down.  It was designed to dramatize just how big the quango problem had grown. 

We had Philip Holland photographed on the House of Common terrace holding the publication with the opened-out page blowing in the wind. Machine-printed copies of the photo were sent to all media outlets with our press release.  We also helpfully identified some of the more bizarre and amusing quangoes for the press to seize on.  We guessed it would be big news when ITN filmed the printing of “the longest page in the world” for their evening news ahead of the next day's publication, and we dashed over to Victoria station at 11 pm to buy first copies of the next day’s papers.  We were elated to see that the story, complete with the photo, made the front page of most of them.

Crossing the Atlantic on the Stefan Batory

Returning to the UK after our time at Hillsdale College, Stuart Butler and I had so much luggage that we decided to cross the Atlantic by luxury liner, each taking a couple of cabin trunks with us.  The Stefan Batory was much smaller and less luxurious than the great Atlantic liners.  It was Polish, then a Communist state, and much less costly than ships like the QEII.  Its voyage took longer because it started in Montreal and took 5 days up the St Lawrence seaway before reaching the Atlantic, and took a further 5 days to cross it.  It was bizarre in many ways.  The ship's bar and shops took every currency except Polish zlotys.  It was a fine trip, with only one rough day, but there was little to do except watch dolphins swim parallel to us, and see the nightly movie after dinner.

After we docked at dawn at Tilbury, we occasionally saw the ship feature in the news.  When the QEII was requisitioned for the Falklands war, the Batory briefly became the only transatlantic liner.  She was news again in 1984 when 192 of her crew jumped ship at Hamburg to claim political asylum following the struggles between the Polish union, Solidarity, and the state's Communist rulers.  She was retired in 1988, and finally scrapped in Turkey in 2,000.  That was the only time I ever crossed the Atlantic by sea.

Novelty shop

In the late 1970s, one of the naffest of decades, I acquired a maroon velvet jacket and matching trousers. I thought it would make a good alternative dinner suit to the one I’d bought years before in St Andrews for £7, from the “previously worn” department of Fordyce’s, and was still wearing. But the new set lacked a cummerbund and bow tie. I went to Turnbull and Asser, a famous men’s outfitter in London’s Jermyn Street. I asked if they could make me a matching cummerbund and self-tie bow in grey velvet, which I thought would nicely offset the maroon outfit. The man looked shocked and finally shook his head and suggested I should maybe “try more of a novelty shop, Sir.”

I didn’t, but I did find success at another men’s outfitter nearby. They duly made me a matching set, one that did indeed look good with the maroon velvet suit. I was surprised a few weeks later to receive a letter from Turnbull and Asser, with whom I had left my details, telling me that they had “in error” made the matching grey cummerbund and bow tie I had asked for, and asking me if I wanted to buy it from them. I did so, and thus acquired two sets in differing shades of grey. Both looked good.

Winning a contest on the Himalayas course

On a very hilly piece of ground just off the West Sands at St. Andrews, near the Jubilee and Eden golf courses, some demented person had the crazy idea of creating a putting green.  Unlike conventional putting greens, perfectly flat so you can practise your strokes, this one had hills and valleys between every tee and hole.  Everyone called it the Himalayas.  You had to calculate how to use the hills to curve the ball as close as you could manage to the hole.  We played it often on sunny afternoons, and on windy ones which were more common.

There was a challenge match between teams from the political right and left, with the right represented by the Tory Club, and the left by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Putting.  We played for the ashes, burning our poster of Edward Heath and their one of Harold Wilson, and sealing the ashes into the base of a trophy cup.  We turned up in dinner jackets and gowns, while the left dressed as revolutionaries in Ché Guevara or red T-shirts and bandanas.  The right wingers won, aided by a superb round by Allen Stewart, later a Tory MP and Minister of State.  We drank the champagne we had brought along in anticipation. Three members of the winning team went on to found the Adam Smith Institute.

The boating lake monster

At Cleethorpes beyond the swimming pool was the boating lake where we used to play as children.  It featured rowing boats that could be hired by the hour, and had two small tree-covered islands in the middle. We would hire a boat and row it around the lake until our time was up. If we overstayed, a man would come alongside the edge with a loudhailer shouting the immortal "Come in number 15, your time is up."  It was actually quite hard work for small children since the boats were heavy, and so were the oars. We would usually put ashore at one or both of the islands at some stage, tying the boat carefully to some overhanging branches to prevent it drifting away and leaving us marooned.

There was a legendary monster in the lake.  The water was not deep, and one could see to the bottom.  Mostly there was only mud, reeds and slime to see, together with odd items of discarded litter, but there were fish in the lake, and there was the monster.  It was a giant grey eel, or at least it seemed that way to us.  Sometimes we'd see it gliding along the bottom as we looked over the side. Compared to the small fish it seemed huge, and we imagined that if we stepped into the water it might bite us. It added a frisson of adventure and excitement to every boating trip as we looked out for it.

Hidden in the midden

The student flat I shared in St Andrews had been built in 1904 and like many Scottish houses from that period was cold, damp and draughty.  There was a hall cupboard used as a store, where we would put unwanted items that we couldn't think of anywhere else to put.  As time went by it gradually filled up with rubbish.  One of our number christened it "the midden," a Scottish word for a rubbish pile or dunghill, though we never put the perishable debris into it that the word implies.  There were so many items stored in it that the door would burst open unless the key was turned in the lock.  Clearing it out was a major operation, rarely performed. It was like looking back in time as long-forgotten items surfaced briefly on their way to a more formal rubbish tip.

I suppose other people store unwanted rubbish in their garages or in their attics in the false roof, but I have seldom lived anywhere with a garage attached or a false roof attic, so I acquired the habit, from those St Andrews days, of storing unwanted, anomalous items on shelves inside a boiler room or utility room.  I still call it "the midden," and still find clearing it out occasionally to be a daunting task, rarely undertaken.

Birrell's El Grotto

Birrell's on South Street, St Andrews, sold fresh fruit and vegetables and delicatessen items.  Crucially, it also sold wines, and was the main supplier for student parties.  Of special interest were the fortified wines that it sold from huge barrels on high, with taps from which the staff would fill containers you took along.  They would sell these wines by the gallon.  We kept plastic flagons that had once held cider to fill with their sherry.  They sold good sherry by the bottle, but from their casks came a brown, sweet sherry, good enough for students and maybe elderly ladies, but not for much else, and the other was a paler and drier sherry, a little more expensive.  We called them BSU, which stood for Birrell's Special Unlabelled.

They came in those two varieties, the first of which we called "El Grotto" because it was grot, and the second we dubbed "El Goodo" because compared to the first one, it was relatively good.  At a party we held we served the first.  A student friend, Robert Jones, who later became a government minister, asked us next day what was the nice sherry we served.  We told him it was El Grotto from Birrell's.  It caused much merriment when he later told us that Birrell's had never heard of it.  He'd gone there and asked for some El Grotto, not realizing that this was our nickname for the grot stuff.

Willie Low's cheese ends saved many a day

William Low was the mini supermarket on Market Street in St Andrews, and the mainstay of impoverished students.  We affectionately called it Willie Low's.  On occasions when my flat-mate and I could not afford to eat, which happened more often than it should, there were potatoes and rhubarb from the garden to supplement the more long-lasting items we'd bought from Willie Low's when we could afford to.  These included sachets of dried vegetables that could be reconstituted in water, tinned tomatoes, plus pasta kept in the cupboard for harder times.

The pasta could turn into spaghetti Bolognese, using sausage meat instead of mince because it was much cheaper, combined with tinned tomatoes and an onion from the garden.  And it could make macaroni cheese.  This made a significant contribution to our diet because the cheese was free.  We'd go to the cheese counter at Willie Low's just before closing time and ask if they had any end cuts.  These were the pieces of cheese left over when sections cut from large cheeses had been sold.  They were sometimes a little hard, but that didn't matter if they were to be cooked into a cheese sauce.  The point was that they would be even harder next day, so the kindly staff gave them to us for nothing rather than throw them out.  They formed the mainstay of many a meal.

Cigars with my name on them

I actually smoked cigars when I was a teenager.  I took up cigarettes when I was 21, largely to calm me down when debating.  When I gave them up, I resumed cigars.  A key difference is that you don't inhale cigar smoke.  You take it into the mouth and blow it out, so it's not nearly as damaging to health.

A young friend from Trinity College, Cambridge, had tired of stocks and bonds after 2 years as a trader.  He wanted to set up a cigar business, so I became his sole investor when he set up a luxury brand, Regius Cigars, in Nicaragua.  By way of gratitude he made one to my specifications, a panatela of medium to mild taste with strong flavours of vanilla, plus a little coffee and chocolate.  Eight samples were made for me to try, with ten of each, making me very popular that summer as I invited friends to comment on the different versions.  I selected number three to be the one.  It is basically a beginner's or lady's cigar because of its size and comparative mildness.

He called it a Lord Madsen, and the brand is sold worldwide, including in top rank hotel restaurants.  It has won awards.  I am not a peer of the realm, but I am a laird, Lord Madsen of Lochaber and Glencoe, on account of my vast estates of 10 square metres of the former and one square metre of the latter.  It's a joke, but the cigar's name stuck.

How they recruited officers

A friend who was a lecturer at St Andrews was a keen member of the Territorial Army.  His regiment was the Black Watch, and he told me of how he came to obtain his commission.  Shown into the colonel's office for his interview, he was invited to pour himself a drink from the cabinet at the side.  He picked up the whisky decanter and sought the delicate balance between pouring too little and being thought a wimp, or pouring too much and being thought a soak.

As he was pouring, the colonel distracted him with a conversation, and my friend realized to his horror that he'd accidently filled his tumbler to the brim with neat whisky.  He carefully covered the glass with his hands, sipping occasionally as the interview went on.  Eventually he managed to get through all of it.  The interview was successful and he was awarded the commission.  He later learned that the colonel had called in his fellow officers and told them, "It's got to be Jackson.  Chap drinks like a fish!"  This was sometimes how officers were recruited.

Brandy glass request

My co-director and I used to take the young staff of the Adam Smith Institute out to an annual dinner, usually a posh one in black tie.  One year we opted for a restaurant called the Hispaniola, set aboard a boat floating on the Thames off Victoria Embankment near Westminster Pier.  It was, and still is, a reasonably upmarket Spanish restaurant, but its main appeal was the novelty of eating on a boat.

We enjoyed a good meal with adequate quantities of wine.  A pianist entertained with a selection of light music melodies, nothing too strident.  I thought it would be nice to request a song, and asked the waiter to bring me an empty brandy glass.  As we'd all recently watched Casablanca yet again, I wrote "As Time Goes By" on a slip of paper and dropped it into the glass.,  Crucially I put a £10 note beside it in the glass and asked the waiter to hand it to the pianist.

We watched it being delivered to the far end of the room, and saw the pianist read the note.  Immediately he struck up the melody sung in the movie by Sam in Rick's Bar. The words came into my mind, "You must remember this…" 

Yes, I do remember it, as did our young staff who thought the episode very stylishly done.

Building a house on Ramrod Key in Florida

When I escaped the big freeze back home and rented a house in the Florida Keys for 3 months, I was so enamoured with the place that I looked for land I might build on.  I figured if I could get a cheap enough plot near the water, I might be able to have a house built in stages, maybe taking 2 or 3 years to complete it.  I bought a plot on Ramrod Key, not the empty plot next to the water, but the next one.  I thought correctly that the seafront plot was too small to build a house that met current regulations about size and distance from the water.  So mine was effectively a waterfront plot, but at a much lower price.

When the plot was mine, I hired a local builder, Maco.  I modified a standard design to my specifications, customizing it to make efficient use of space.  It had to be on stilts to raise it above hurricane flood level.  I went once or twice a year to keep track of progress, and watched it being built.  I made payments to Maco as each stage was completed.  Then I went and found the builder had done a runner, shutting up shop and disappearing with his debts.  I was left with an unfinished house, but fortunately I had not paid for anything not done.

The solution was a neighbour across the canal, also a builder.  He offered to finish the job for a fixed sum, and made an excellent job of it.  It was about what I would have paid Maco to complete it anyway.  Thus on a January day, 33 months after I'd begun it, I moved into my own house in the Florida Keys.  I spent many happy times there over the years, and let friends use it when I wasn't there myself. 

I fled hurricane Andrew in 1995, and sold the house soon thereafter.  I looked at satellite images after hurricane Irma struck in 2017 and was pleased to see that although the area was ravaged and trees uprooted, my old house had stood up well to the storm.

Meeting philosophers

While doing my PhD at St Andrews I started a student philosophical society.  There already was a staff one, but its meetings featured largely technical papers, and I wanted something jazzier.  I invited all the famous philosophers I'd read, and invited them up to address us.  We didn't pay them a fee, but covered their travel and accommodation.  We did this by running a parallel Late Night Film Society, charging admission to students to watch classic movies, including the best of the “Carry On” series of saucy comedies.

The programme was amazing.  In a year and a half we entertained Karl Popper, Gilbert Ryle, R M Hare, P F Strawson, Isaiah Berlin, H L A Hart, W H Walsh, Hermann Bondi and others.  Not surprisingly, meetings were well attended, something we encouraged by passing round decanters of cheap port during the lectures.  I enjoyed the pleasure of the company of each of them for a few hours in addition, walking through St Andrews or on its beaches with them, eagerly discussing their work.

These were some of the giants of 20th Century philosophy, and it invariably surprises people when they learn that I met them all personally when I was a student at St Andrews, and that I still have signed copies of their books.

An academic fraud exposed

I knew Peter Witterly at St Andrews, and thought him a pompous, loud-mouthed and ill-mannered bore, a common opinion.  He went on to study at Oxford.  Later on, while I was working on the Hill in Washington DC, I commiserated with a friend who had for the second year in succession been beaten to a Stanford teaching scholarship by Witterly.  "Well, he is an Oxford DPhil," I was told, and replied "A likely story."  Intrigued, my friend wrote to the Master of his Oxford College to enquire about Witterly's degree, and showed me the legendary reply.

"MISTER Witterly did indeed matriculate at this college, but left without gaining a degree from this or any other college. Though I never tutored him personally, I spoke to those who did, and all agree that, while he speaks persuasively and at length concerning his own scholarship, he is unlikely ever to produce a serious piece of work. I hope this helps you in your enquiries."

A copy of the letter was sent to Russell Kirk, the distinguished US writer whom Witterly had publicly derided in reviews. He sent an express copy to Stanford, where Witterly was summoned and confronted with it.  "This is a lie," he declared. "I have documents to prove that."  He left to collect those documents and never returned.  I sent my friend a spoof of the letter saying that "while he was matriculated at the Sacred College of Cardinals, he left without becoming Pope of this or any other church, and though he spoke persuasively and at length concerning his own piety, he was unlikely ever to produce a serious ex cathedra pronouncement." 

Riding Fleetwood trams to Blackpool

As a child I spent a couple of years in Fleetwood, between the ages of 4 and 6.  One of those years was in wartime, and I remember taking my gas mask to school in its metal canister, and tossing it over the wall on my return, to play in the street until the adults returned. 

With my sister, one year older, we were allowed a degree of freedom that would surprise people today.  We would often go to Blackpool by ourselves for the day, to visit the seaside and the menagerie at the base of Blackpool Tower, and to ride the Big Dipper, a wooden roller coaster on the pleasure beach.  Sometimes we went up the Tower itself, ascended by means of a rickety lift open to the elements. We went there by tram, since Fleetwood was connected to it by an 11-mile tramway that ran through Cleveleys along the Fylde coast.  Although we made the journey quite often, it was always an adventure, sitting in the front seat upstairs whenever we could, to enjoy the scenic ride.

I've returned to Blackpool since, and ascended the Tower, though the zoo at its base is long gone.  I rode the trams a few times, too, though not to Fleetwood, and I was not tempted to ride the Big Dipper again.