Tom Johnson
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Tom Johnson

TOM JOHNSON

Reflections on ‘Harry’s Last Stand’.

22/2/2015

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Picture'Danny' by Tom Johnson
I recently read ‘Harry’s Last Stand: How the World My Generation Built is Falling Down, and What We Can Do to Save it’ by Harry Leslie Smith. This is a book I would highly recommend to anyone, particularly those who may feel, like myself, that there are gaps in their overview of recent British history.  Harry Leslie Smith was 91 at the time this book went to print.  He writes with the voice of authenticity, telling the story of his life from the 1920s up to the present day.  He focuses on the social and political changes that have taken place in Britain over almost a hundred years - the period of his life.

One period in particular that Harry touches upon with poignant detail is the era in which my grandparents grew up, the Great Depression of the 1930s.  The level of poverty and human suffering in this country during the Thirties makes shocking reading.  The Britain that Harry recalls is often a frightening and daunting place.  I felt unsettled, not by the grimness of Harry’s account, but by my own ignorance of a time still within living memory.

I feel I had a fairly well-rounded state education in the UK but I can’t remember touching upon this period in much detail.  I was aware of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 which signalled the Great Depression in the States, but mainly remember learning about the great droughts that occurred during the following decade, sometimes known as the “Dirty Thirties”, and the struggles of the Dust Bowl farmers from John Steinbeck novels which I loved reading from the age of about 15.  I certainly don’t remember being taught much about the implications of this economic disaster elsewhere in the world and in Britain, except from what I learnt about my family’s own history and by observing my grandparents’ thrifty and prudent ways, that no doubt had their roots in far more austere times than I or my own generation have ever known.

The revelation that I possessed such a blind spot in my understanding of our history has inspired me to read further and hopefully develop a broader picture for myself.  This book has highlighted for me some striking parallels between the current prevailing culture of big business, banks and corporations with those equally powerful institutions that dominated in the period immediately preceding the so called Depression of the Thirties.  The result of the Crash in 1929 signalled an economic catastrophe that gripped the world for the next decade and had far-reaching repercussions.  Learning more about the Crash of 1929 and its crippling effect on ordinary people across the globe, whilst reading recent news stories of corporate greed and high-level tax avoidance, makes me wonder whether lessons were learnt at all.

I couldn’t help but draw comparisons between Harry Leslie Smith’s descriptions of being a child in Britain during those destitute years of the Thirties, and my grandfather’s early life.  Born only a year apart, Danny Johnson and Harry Leslie Smith had similar experiences.  Both boys’ fathers were coal-miners, Harry’s in the coalfields of Yorkshire, Danny’s in the coal-pits of South Wales.  Like Harry’s father, my great-grandfather, also Thomas Johnson, found himself among the six million men who were unemployed in this country.  Danny, like Harry, experienced tragedy during his childhood, losing his mother at the age of thirteen.  He left school a year later and was fortunate to secure a printer’s apprenticeship for the next seven years.  Living with a younger brother and a father who remained unemployed for around 15 years, and with no welfare-state to speak of at that time, my grandfather must have felt a heavy burden of responsibility upon his young shoulders. 

He and his brother Elwyn joined the RAF during the Second World War, as did Harry Leslie Smith.  They too must have shared in the collective hope of a new start at the end of that war, improved standards of living and universal health care, even for the least fortunate in society.  It was the people of their generation that led the way towards the emergence of a National Health Service in 1948, the formation of the Welfare State as we today know it, based on ideas presented to Parliament in the early Forties by Liberal William Beveridge.  Most of us in this country were actually delivered into this world by NHS staff, and our families have enjoyed the safety and benefit of free health-care throughout our lives.  It is only through reflection and by developing some understanding of the precariousness of working-class existence in this country before World War Two, that we can grasp what Beveridge meant when he described their plight and the need for reform as an “overwhelming need”.  The NHS and the welfare state grew from an enlightened social and civil attitude of responsibility towards our fellow human beings in this country.  Harry Leslie Smith expresses this clearly:

“The creation of the NHS made us understand that we were in truth our brother’s keeper and that taxation benefits everyone through maintaining not just our roads and sewers but the health of our children, workers and elderly”.  

Reiterated throughout the book, are Harry’s misgivings that we should forget, or allow ourselves to remain ignorant of the fact that deprivation and poverty was the lot of so many in our land.  It is worth remembering that most of the rights we take for granted were gained after a long hard fight.  It was through the grit, determination, courage and conviction of thousands of families with histories like my own that brought about these fundamental changes.

Reading this book reminded me that we must not become complacent, that we must resist inequality and that we must work against the gross disparity of wealth and power.  In ‘Harry’s Last Stand’, Harry Leslie Smith has given us a powerful personal testimony.  

I’ll end with the words of the folk singer and songwriter Adam McNaughton; the lyrics are from his song ‘Thomas Muir of Huntershill’:

“When you're called for jury service, when your name is drawn by lot
When you vote in an election, when you freely voice your thought
Don't take these things for granted, for dearly were they bought  ...”

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The key to a long and happy working life: “Doing something you enjoy”

22/8/2013

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PictureRecent portrait of Vic
Interview with Vic Brooks, Carpenter and Maintenance Man

Vic Brooks was born and brought up on a family farm near the village of Horsmonden in Kent, once a well-known centre of the medieval Wealdon ironworking region.  Vic was the middle of six children.  His family ran a fruit-growing farm, surrounded by others growing hops and various different crops, as well as farms keeping livestock.  In the school holidays, particularly in September and at Christmas, he would get up at half-past five in the mornings and feed the “store cattle” at a nearby farm.  These were animals which had been kept indoors to be “fattened up” for six months over the autumn and winter period.  Vic also used to bring his family’s two work horses in at night during the summer, as well as their two cows.  He remembers that for about a quarter of a mile he would lead the horses along and the two cows would follow on behind.  He would feed the animals and wash down the cows so they would be ready for milking in the morning, a duty Vic remembers receiving threepence for.  Another job Vic had as a boy was picking up tobacco for the owner of one of the nearby farms:

“Every day he had an ounce of Golden Virginia and a pack of cigarette papers and I used to have to go and get his tobacco and find him on the farm, and he used to give me threepence a day for that”.


Vic was very athletic as a boy, representing his school when he was eight years old in both the 100 metres and high jump, and in the last year of secondary school, he competed against pupils from Tonbridge School and Judd Grammar and won the pole-vault for his age group in the West Kent Schools county championships.

When he started at secondary school he would take the steam engine from the station at Marden to Paddock Wood.  When the school rail service first started, he remembers not many children getting the train, but in later years as many as eighty to a hundred children used this service.  These stream trains were later replaced with diesel engines and then by electric.    

Vic took a five year apprenticeship as a carpenter with a company in Paddock Wood called Hall’s, and has stayed in the same profession for the whole of his working life up until the present day.  As a young man he had always wanted to work on the farm with the horses, but didn’t realise at the time that by around 1950, the working horses would all be replaced by motorised tractors:

“With a horse, you could only plough about one acre a day.  With a tractor, and especially nowadays, they do 6-8 furrows at a time, so they could do perhaps 20, 30 acres”.

Vic worked at Hall’s for exactly 30 years until he was made redundant in 1992.  He joined the maintenance team at Holmewood House school in 1997.  He actually first worked at the school while still with Hall’s, putting up some wooden buildings back in 1963, a year he remembers clearly for “the bad snow” that hit Britain.  Now in his sixteenth year at the school, he works alongside six other maintenance men on a semi-retired basis for two days a week.  He says of working in the team:

“They’re good guys to work with.  It’s fun, and we all get on; we don’t argue.  When you spend more time with your workers or work partners than you do with your own family, you’ve got to get on.  We get on well, and they all take the mickey out of me.”

This year Vic did a fine job bringing his knowledge and experience of carpentry to replace several large sash windows in the old part of the school. 

So, what is the key to enjoying a long working life?  Vic’s answer:

“Doing something you enjoy.  If I didn’t enjoy it then it wouldn’t be no good”.


   



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Mr Williams' Portrait

2/10/2012

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Picture
Six years ago I went into a local suit shop to buy one of the duffel coats I’d seen in the window display.  I’d never been into the store before, but I’d been thinking about getting a winter coat. It was the Friday before Remembrance weekend in November and I was served by an elderly gentleman called Mr Williams who I guessed must have been in his eighties.  He was the manager of the store, and was wearing a silver winged insignia which I assumed must have been from the RAF and he wore a red poppy pinned to the lapel of his suit jacket.  He struck me as a bit of a character with a cheeky sense of humour, but he also had a real integrity and calmness about him.  He had an accent which I later found out was German.

I asked him whether he would be up in London for the Remembrance service that Sunday and he told me he would be, and that he always took part in the procession through Whitehall to the Cenotaph.  He explained to me that he had been in the Parachute Regiment during the war, and that he had lied about his age to get into the force.  I remember being very impressed on hearing that for his eightieth birthday he had done a sky-dive for charity.  I only found out years later that he had in fact risen to the rank of Colonel.     

I was very happy with the duffel coat which was a sort of charcoal grey with a light grey tartan lining.  Before I left I told Mr Williams that I was a painter and asked him if he would mind if I paint his portrait.  He said he wouldn’t mind at all, and so I returned the next day to take some photographs and to make some quick sketches.

I was hoping to get the painting finished within a year, but it happened that I was just about to enter into a very busy part of my life, changing between jobs and careers while also being quite busy with commissioned work.  I took a PGCE in the next year and then immediately began working full-time running an art department in a local school.  Over the next six years I just couldn’t seem to make headway with the painting, either because I was working on a paid commission which had a deadline, or because the amount of school work prevented me from doing so.  His kind face spent some time over the next few years in the studio at school, where the pupils regularly asked who he was and why he had so many ties, and he also spent time at my parents' house before taking up residence in the studio/spare room at my flat.  Wherever he was, Mr Williams always had an effect on people; his kindly expression seemed to move everyone that saw the painting.  When my girlfriend moved in with me, she often commented on how much she liked Mr Williams and that the painting brought a warm presence to the flat.  Friends and colleagues frequently asked me: “And how is Mr Williams coming along?”

I finally finished the portrait this year.  I was understandably a little nervous about taking the picture to the store to see Mr Williams again.  I wondered to myself: “What if he doesn’t remember me and wonders why I have a painting of him?  What if he hates it?”  I went to the store with my girlfriend and was greatly relieved when Mr Williams said to me “So you have finished my portrait!” with a warm smile.  He was very pleased with the painting and asked if I would print off a photograph of it for him to show his wife.  I said I would of course.  He asked me how long this would take. “Not very long”, I told him, "I'll probably be able to get it done this afternoon." “Not in six years then?” he said with a cheeky grin.

Judith Johnson recently posted a blog interview with Ralph Williams.  To read the blog follow the link below:
http://www.judithjohnson.co.uk/

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Animation Interview

30/8/2012

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My father recently asked me if I would do an interview about working on the Niedermayer & Hart animations and the work I did for the cover of the paperback.  He's posted the interview as a blog on his site if you'd like to take a look:
www.mj-johnson.com
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August 19th, 2012

19/8/2012

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A Visit to the Gower

I recently spent a long weekend in South Wales with my father to visit my 88 year-old grandmother who lives close to the Gower peninsula, a very beautiful and rugged place. I spent many summer holidays in this area as a child, always looking forward with much anticipation to my long stay with "Gramma and Dycu".

On our visit we spent the afternoons and evenings with my grandmother, but got up early in the mornings to go for a good walk near to Cefn Bryn and a swim in the sea, which was very cold to say the least! Up in Penmaen where we parked our car, I took the photograph of the wild horses that live in the hills around this part of the coast. On our way back from our first swim we walked across Three-Cliffs Bay which has one of the most splendid views I’ve ever seen.

At dusk one evening, as we sat with my grandmother in the living room, enjoying cups of tea, I noticed a great number of crows gathering in a tree outside, hundreds of them all cooing and squawking. I was quite taken with the sound they were making, not a rough, unpleasant sound, but a sociable, contented sort of banter. I was able to capture a few shots of the birds bursting out from the tree and flying around the building.

The crows moving around the sky felt quite homely and reassuring in a way, and not as sinister as the image might seem. A few years ago I started reading a book called Corvus: A Life with Birds by Esther Woolfson, the story of her taking in a fledgling rook, and subsequently building a very special bond with the creature, as it became a part of the family. At the time I found it hard to get into (I think more to do with the fact that I'd just finished a hard-boiled John Steinbeck book and then struggled moving into such a different kind of style). My mother recently finished reading Corvus and highly recommended it to me as being a very beautiful book, so I think now after my crow experience I'll give it another bash. I still love Steinbeck.

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    Tom Johnson

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