"Coronation Scot" Tune

[Nickodell]

I've received a few PMs/emails saying that the link I gave to the Coronation Scot tune didn't work. Try this instead: http://www.last.fm/music/Vivian+Ellis/_/Coronation+Scot?autostart

Of course, most people will look at this and think we steam-engine fans are a bunch of nuts - kids who never really grew up. And they'd be right.

However, I make no apology for being such a nut. I was lucky to have had a father who was a similar steam enthusiast, and in the garden of our house when I was a preschooler we had a live steam layout. Some of my earliest memories are of watching with impatience while dad lit the spirit burner under the loco, and waiting for it to "brew up." Once it did, it pulled its train round the garden for 10 minutes or so, and near the station building there was a little lever by the track that when you pulled it, as the loco went over it operated a kind of monkey motion beneath it and sounded the whistle.

When I was 6 dad was posted overseas, but my brother (age 10) and I continued to operate the layout until, one day, we forgot to fill the loco's boiler and as a result melted the fusible plug that prevented explosions from that cause. When we moved to a new city soon after dad's return and discharge in 1946, the guy who bought the house wanted to keep the layout, so that was the end of my live steam model days.

Anyhow, back to the tune. The composer's name is Vivian Ellis. To me, it evokes a bygone era when the world, or most of it, was at peace, I was young and all seemed possible. I hear the train starting, accelerating, cruising across the English countryside at an effortless 70, with a plume of steam trailing back, then pulling hard up a steep incline - Shap Fell or Beattock Bank, perhaps - on the way to Scotland. Others will just hear a pleasant melody.

Yes, we steam buffs are nuts. Quite round the bend, harking back to a bygone era; restoring obsolete and inefficient modes of transportation.

Like ... um ... Sunbeam Alpine owners.

 

[saltykracker]

Being in Pa., I'm sure you have visited Steamtown in Scranton, one of my favorites.

 

[tony perrett]

Nick, You may remember that "Coronation Scot" was the signature tune for the radio serial "Paul Temple" by Francis Durbridge that ran for many years in UK.

 

[Nickodell]

Oh sure. We never missed an episode. That and "Dick Barton, special agent!"

Funny, thinking back to that pre-TV age. You didn't need video; your own mind made the pictures as you listened.

 

[lgurley]

Need for speed

In the great state of Montana in 1960 I don't remember any steam vehicles but I can understand how certain music can tie you to memorable events.
I can remember sitting in the drive in my '51 Ford Coupe with the A.M. radio cranked up all the way listening to The Ventures. Just the music still makes me feel like I'm on a two lane road with my hand on the Hurst shifter going 90 miles per hour. Here, see for yourself. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8__EwAT8VM

 

[Nickodell]

Just dug out a color slide of yours truly and the aforementioned steam layout, unfortunately without loco which is off shot to the right. "Sands" was the name of the local station, as it was a stop for the local beach.

This would be the summer of 1940, making me age four and unconcerned about the Battle of Britain going on overhead. For those interested, this is not one of the familiar color films like Kodachrome, which was not available to the public in WWII in the UK. It was a French system from the 1930s called Dufaycouleur, which actually consisted of three seperate layers of coating, the primary colors red, blue and green. It worked OK. The reason for the grainy appearance is that this was cut down from a 4" X 3" slide to fit a 35mm frame.

 

[Series6]

Off the track but...

Here, see for yourself. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8__EwAT8VM

The internet is pretty amazing with what you find if you follow a path from one link to another.... From the Ventures to Dick Dale and Stevie Ray Vaughn, to Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page playing Stairway together...

Anyway, I remember driving down California Hwy 1 one summer about sunset, and the only station I could get was an AM playing Nelson Riddle's Route 66.... Suddenly my Dad's Volvo wasn't so bad.... Now I have it on my ipod... for special occasions...

 

[Eleven]

Nic,
Where did you live at that time? Near London? Do you have much recall of the air battles or was that somewhere else? Where did you father get posted to? Sorry to be nosy, am interested in the folks who lived through that war. I called on an agent (am in insurance) last week and he had a sticker on his car "World War II, Merchant Marine", yikes, there was tough duty.

 

[Nickodell]

We lived near Plymouth, on the south coast of England. Although London received by far the most raids (at one period in late 1940, 60 nights running), as it was so huge in area some other cities actually got a greater concentration of bombs per sq. mile. E.g. Portsmouth, Southampton, Belfast, Manchester, Birmingham, Plymouth, Liverpool and, above all, Coventry which was virtually demolished.

Plymouth got it bad, on many nights. And, after it got too expensive to raid London and the other inland cities because the Brits had perfected AI (Airborn Interception) radar and the best two night fighters, the Beaufighter and Mosquito, in 1943-4 the Germans switched to "tip and run" daylight raids by FW 190 fighter-bombers who would sneak in at sea level, below the radar, lob a couple of bombs at a coastal target and then scoot back at 400 mph. This was only stopped by standing patrols of Hawker Tempest fighters, who would use a dive from altitude to reach nearly 500 mph to catch the FWs.

Just when we thought things had settled down, they resumed night raids on all the likely invasion ports, of which Plymouth was one. We also got a few V1 "Flying Bombs" (the world's first cruise missiles), but they all fell miles away. In school we were taught that if you heard the motor (a pulse jet) running you were OK and some other poor sod was going to get it, but if it cut out overhead you had about 15 seconds until it hit (an air mileage device was programmed to put the missile into a dive at a predetermined range. There was not supposed to be even a 15-second warning, but the Germans hadn't thought that with the fuel tanks almost empty, the dive would starve the motor and it would quit.)

I have only a hazy recollection of the earlier raids, mainly of sprinting for the garden shelter when the sirens went off, but I do have a permanent photograph in my mind of the vapor trails in the sky. And of picking up expended bullets and what we called "shrapnel," but was actually pieces of exploded antiaircraft shells, from the streets. I do remember the damp and smell of the shelter and once getting a shock from a damp light fixture. Also, our dog used to start running around and barking, before diving under the table, half a minute before the sirens went off. It could tell the different sounds of the German BMW and D-B engines from ours.

I can remember much more of later in the war, especially the tip and run raids, and the ironic cheers of the populace when the sirens went off after the plane had gone, and walking round AA gun sites. Also seeing servicemen from every nation involved (Poles, Czechs, S. Africans, Aussies, Kiwis, Canadians, Yanks, Free French, etc.) in the streets.

The first black people I ever saw were US servicemen. They had a neat story they told the local girls (who were short of male company, all the young Brits having been conscripted.) They said that they were really white, but had to wear black makeup paint because they were an elite night combat unit. Ever after they were known to the locals as the "Night Fighters," not without justification if one remembers the many half-caste babies born in 1945-6.

There was a viaduct spanning the village where we lived, and for weeks prior to D-Day there would often be a troop train stuck on it because of rail traffic jams. We urchins would stand in the field, 100' below the train, and yell "got any gum, chum?" and if it was a US unit the gum, Life Savers and Heshey bars would descend as manna from heaven (especially as our candy ration was 12 oz per month), leading to mad scrambles andscuffles in the dirt.

The whole area where we lived was commandeered for service personnel, as there were just not enough camps for the hundreds of thousands, and our house was temporarily given over to four ATS (woman's army) officers, so we went to live with my mother's father who was harbourmaster at Sunderland, on the NE coast. Then the bloody tip and run buggers started up there. Finally, we got back to our house in 1946, just in time for my dad to get home.

If you want to see "me" (not really me personally, but essentially so), if you haven't already seen it, rent or buy the movie Hope and Glory. It's a little kid's experiences in WWII and is very authentic.

Since I've bored other forum readers with my accounts of my dad in WWII, I will just say that, despite being in his 30s, in a reserved occupation and married with 3 kids, he volunteered for the RAF in 1941. After a couple of years in England he was posted to Burma at the time when the Jap advance was threatening to invade India. I refer you to: http://www.sunbeamalpine.org/forum/showthread.php?t=9277&page=2.

 

[Eleven]

You've seen a lot, that was interesting, thank you!

 

[Nickodell]

But no harm done. As kids we just knew that the "good guys" were going to win, just as they did in the westerns we watched at the Saturday morning matinee at the local village cinema (over the grocery store.) To us, the AA guns going off, the searchlights and the crump of bombs were rather exciting, something like July 4 to American kids. We all became experts at aircraft recognition; you could stop any 8-year-old and he could tell you the difference in appearance of a Heinkel 111 and a Dornier 17.

There was a Prisoner of War camp a few miles away for Italian POWs, but as they had no interest in escaping and rejoining the war, the fences were just chicken wire. A bunch of us kids would hop on our bikes and ride down there and tease them by lining up with our wooden rifles on our shoulders, then at the command "As Italians, advance!" would march off backwards in double-time before collapsing in mirth. They all took it in good spirit, and one once called me over to the fence and gave me a beautiful model of a Spitfire that he had made by filing down a copper penny (the penny at the time was 1.25" dia.) When Italy capitulated in 1943 they were all allowed out to work on local vegetable gardens, and many of them stayed behind at the end of the war and married. The German POWs, in contrast, were kept in high-security camps and quickly shipped off to Canada, and after the US came into the war, to the USA too.

After 1945, things got very boring, especially as peoples' expectation that things would immediately go back to pre-war status were dashed. Food rationing, for example, carried on until 1953 (1954 for candy, dammit!), you couldn't buy a car, and in any case the private petrol ration was about two gallons a week. But the only lasting effect, other than boring people to tears today, probably, comes from our proximity to the Limerick nuclear power station.

After the Three Mile Island incident, some 80 miles away, in 1979, the authorities mandated a detailed plan for evacuation in the event of a problem at Limerick. Large sirens are located high up on utility poles every two miles for a radius of eight miles from the station. They are tested, all together, at 2pm on the first Monday of every month. The tone is the exact warbling one we used to hear in WWII, called the "Alert," presaging a raid, and to this day when they go off the hair rises on the back of my head and my wife's, and a bit of adrenalin goes into the bloodstream - even now, nearly 70 years later. I have a friend, another ex-limey, who lives close and was a couple of years older in the war, and when the sirens go off, sometimes he finds himself about to bolt for the shelter.

 

[Eleven]

Sense memories seem to remain strong. Growing up in the '50's, my best buddy's father was somewhere not healthy during the war (would not say), he would not allow around him and couldn't stand the smell of Magic Markers. He would get very white and sweat. Haunted him. At a Fourth of July vintage race, my corner partner, an ex artillary observer, reacted badly to some fireworks across the valley. He stared for a minute then rattled off a set of coordinates and distance (probably to the foot), then chuckled. Said, "Charlie's in the tree line".
Was fortunate to do my service in a quiet part of Germany, some friends were not so lucky and I know that stuff is still with them.

 

[MikeH]

"to this day when they go off the hair rises on the back of my head and my wife's, and a bit of adrenalin goes into the bloodstream - even now, nearly 70 years later."

Nick,

I understand what you mean. While serving in the US Navy, on board the USS John F Kennedy, I experienced two collisions at sea. First with the USS Belknap, later with the USS Bordelon. In both cases the collision alarm was sounded. A few years later, I and a Kennedy shipmate served on the precomissioning crew on the USS Carl Vinson. On US Navy ships the general announcing system is called the 1MC. Well on the Vinson, when they keyed all-stations on the 1MC, the collision alarm would sound for a few seconds. I and my Kennedy shipmate would always jump when that happened. Just could never get used to it. Thankfully, it was eventually fixed. Others on the ship couldn't understand why that made us so jumpy.

 

[Nickodell]

A collision at sea must be one of the most terrifying experiences imaginable, especially in wartime in a U-Boat area when nobody could stop to pick up survivors. I'm sure you are familiar with the collision between the Queen Mary and the Curacao. Here's a first-hand account:

It was 1942 and I was 22 years old and a Seaman in the Merchant Navy on the Queen Mary. We were returning to Glasgow from New York, which was a four / five day journey. The Queen Mary was carrying about 20,000 American Troops to join the Allied Forces.

There were 2 of us on the poop deck on the aft of the ship and we were manning the 6 inch gun - incase we came under attack. What good we could have done with one gun, I've no idea!

A cruiser called HMS Curacao met us 200 miles off the coast to escort us into Greenock. I could see her clearly as I was on the aft.

We could see our escort zig-zagging in front of us - it was common for the ships and cruisers to zig-zag to confuse the U-boats. In this particular case however the escort was very, very close to us.

I said to my mate "You know she's zig-zigging all over the place in front of us, I'm sure we're going to hit her."

And sure enough, the Queen Mary sliced the cruiser in two like a piece of butter, straight through the six inch armoured plating. The Queen Mary just carried on going (we were doing about 25 knots). It was the policy not to stop and pick up survivors even if they were waving at you. It was too dangerous as the threat of U-Boats was always present.

My mate and I wanted to do something, so after the collision I said to my mate ' C'mon let's sling this over' and we released the cork life raft into the sea. Whether anyone from the Cruiser managed to climb aboard the raft I've no idea.

The Queen Mary continued her journey to Greenock, dropped anchor and discharged the American soldiers. In her wake a tragedy was unfolding behind her in the Atlantic. I estimate that about 600 men were aboard the cruiser, and I don't know if there were any survivors or not, as the collision was covered up and wasn't reported in the papers.

The case went to court many years later in 1949, and the Queen Mary was exonerated of blame and the whole event was forgotten.

I wonder what they told the families of those men on the cruiser?

I've just remembered another WWII bit [I'll go on like this until Christmas if you don't stop me.] On a multi-engined propeller plane, you have to juggle throttle and pitch settings so that the natural vibration on each engine cancels the other out, or you get a most annoying "beat frequency" vibration and noise. The Germans had a (mistaken) theory that desychronizing would fool the ground sound-locators, so they did this when they came over.

What it did do was produce a sound hard to describe, half way between a roar and a throbbing that almost sounded like a human voice, and everyone had their own idea what it "said." In our house we thought it was "It's for youu It's for youu It's for youu," which had a psychological effect the Hun probably hadn't thought of.