Introduction
"Gambolling Baby Boomers", the first of a series of seventies-themed pieces, tells how I came to be conditioned by my environment in the early 1970s after leaving Pangbourne College, a traditional British public school of military kind situated near the little Thameside village of Pangbourne in Berkshire. I'd been a boarder there between about the 9th of September 1968 and the last day of the summer term of 1972. Initially known as "Genesis of a Gentleman", a much modified version was prepared for definitive publication at Blogster in September 2008.
The Nautical College, Pangbourne
Pangbourne was founded in 1917 as Pangbourne Nautical College, originally preparing boys aged ca. 13 to 18 to be officers in the Merchant Navy, and then the Royal Navy.
I joined in September 1968 as Cadet Carl Halling RNR. I was only 12 years old, making me probably the youngest serving officer in the entire Royal Navy at the time. The college was still known by its original title of the Nautical College Pangbourne, but by 1969 this had been abbreviated to Pangbourne College. However, the boys retained their officer status and spent much of their time in full naval officers' uniform. What's more, naval discipline continued to be enforced, with Pangbourne providing the hardships both of a military college and a traditional English boarding school. In 1996, she became fully co-educational.
The Pangbourne I knew had strong links to the Church of England, and so was marked by regular if not daily classes in what was known as Divinity, morning parade ground prayers, evening prayers, and compulsory chapel on Sunday morning. If you missed any of these you would have been seriously punished, although not necessarily with the cane. I was however beaten on numerous occasions although with never more than four cuts, or swishes of the cane. I was heavily disciplined from my very first term in fact; but I'd like to go on record as saying that I'm indebted to Pangbourne for the values it instilled in me if only unconsciously. They were after all the same values that once made Britain strong and great; and yet, by the time I joined Pangbourne, they were under siege as never before by the so-called counterculture. While failing to fully understand the implications of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, I passionately celebrated its consequences, and took to my heart many of its icons both artistic and political, Che Guevara being my hero for a good long time. Needless to say, he no longer is.
This Glam Rock Nation
My parents, brother and I had moved to a little working class suburb about a dozen miles from the centre of London in 1970, which made me something of a fish out of water once I finally left Pangbourne in the summer of '72, after a decision had been made involving my poor dad and those directly responsible for me at the college. After all, I was no longer either in west London where I grew up, nor at the school that'd been my whole world for four long years and where I'd formed some of the deepest friendships of my life.
1972 could be said to be the year in which the seventies really began as the excitement surrounding the alternative society and its happenings and be-ins and love-ins and free festivals and so on started to fade into recent history. For my part I couldn't wait to get to grips with the dismal new decade even if for the first two years, I'd despised the rise of the new commercial chart Pop and its teenybop idols. I was of the school of Hard and Progressive Rock...Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Yes and so on. But I was changing. For better or worse, this was going to be my era.
"Gambolling Baby Boomers", the first of a series of seventies-themed pieces, tells how I came to be conditioned by my environment in the early 1970s after leaving Pangbourne College, a traditional British public school of military kind situated near the little Thameside village of Pangbourne in Berkshire. I'd been a boarder there between about the 9th of September 1968 and the last day of the summer term of 1972. Initially known as "Genesis of a Gentleman", a much modified version was prepared for definitive publication at Blogster in September 2008.
The Nautical College, Pangbourne
Pangbourne was founded in 1917 as Pangbourne Nautical College, originally preparing boys aged ca. 13 to 18 to be officers in the Merchant Navy, and then the Royal Navy.
I joined in September 1968 as Cadet Carl Halling RNR. I was only 12 years old, making me probably the youngest serving officer in the entire Royal Navy at the time. The college was still known by its original title of the Nautical College Pangbourne, but by 1969 this had been abbreviated to Pangbourne College. However, the boys retained their officer status and spent much of their time in full naval officers' uniform. What's more, naval discipline continued to be enforced, with Pangbourne providing the hardships both of a military college and a traditional English boarding school. In 1996, she became fully co-educational.
The Pangbourne I knew had strong links to the Church of England, and so was marked by regular if not daily classes in what was known as Divinity, morning parade ground prayers, evening prayers, and compulsory chapel on Sunday morning. If you missed any of these you would have been seriously punished, although not necessarily with the cane. I was however beaten on numerous occasions although with never more than four cuts, or swishes of the cane. I was heavily disciplined from my very first term in fact; but I'd like to go on record as saying that I'm indebted to Pangbourne for the values it instilled in me if only unconsciously. They were after all the same values that once made Britain strong and great; and yet, by the time I joined Pangbourne, they were under siege as never before by the so-called counterculture. While failing to fully understand the implications of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, I passionately celebrated its consequences, and took to my heart many of its icons both artistic and political, Che Guevara being my hero for a good long time. Needless to say, he no longer is.
This Glam Rock Nation
My parents, brother and I had moved to a little working class suburb about a dozen miles from the centre of London in 1970, which made me something of a fish out of water once I finally left Pangbourne in the summer of '72, after a decision had been made involving my poor dad and those directly responsible for me at the college. After all, I was no longer either in west London where I grew up, nor at the school that'd been my whole world for four long years and where I'd formed some of the deepest friendships of my life.
1972 could be said to be the year in which the seventies really began as the excitement surrounding the alternative society and its happenings and be-ins and love-ins and free festivals and so on started to fade into recent history. For my part I couldn't wait to get to grips with the dismal new decade even if for the first two years, I'd despised the rise of the new commercial chart Pop and its teenybop idols. I was of the school of Hard and Progressive Rock...Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Yes and so on. But I was changing. For better or worse, this was going to be my era.
In late '72, I saw former Bubblegum band the Sweet on a long-forgotten teenage programme called "Lift off with Ayesha", and with all the passion of a former enemy I fell in love with their new tacky camp image, all eye-shadow and silver stack-heeled boots. Several months later a certain Rock chameleon appeared on the chat show Russell Harty Plus in January 1973 with his eyebrows shaved off and my devotion to the strange culture taking over the land making even former skinheads want to look like Charlie George or some other flash dressing hard man became total.
So many of the popular songs of the era were like football chants set to a stomping Glam Rock beat. It was was the golden age of the long-haired boot boy and every street seemed to me to be pregnant with menace in this Glam Rock nation, as if the spirit of Weimar Berlin with its unholy mix of violence and decadence had been resurrected in stuffy old England. It was a terrible time to be young; but I of course loved it, lapped it up.
In late '72 I was launched by my dad on an intensive hothouse programme of self-improvement. I studied various martial arts at the Judokan in Hammersmith, west London. Among my fellow students were shaggy-haired hard cases who may have been influenced by the prevailing fashion for all things Eastern, what with the cult of Bruce Lee and so on. Some of them had feather cuts as I remember. Perhaps they'd seen Rod Stewart strutting on Top of the Pops with one singing "Maggie May" or "You Wear it Well".
In late '72 I was launched by my dad on an intensive hothouse programme of self-improvement. I studied various martial arts at the Judokan in Hammersmith, west London. Among my fellow students were shaggy-haired hard cases who may have been influenced by the prevailing fashion for all things Eastern, what with the cult of Bruce Lee and so on. Some of them had feather cuts as I remember. Perhaps they'd seen Rod Stewart strutting on Top of the Pops with one singing "Maggie May" or "You Wear it Well".
I also went to swimming classes at a local baths. I had a fierce crush on one of my fellow swimmers. She looked a little like a skinhead girl with her cute short haircut; but my heart wasn't in the swimming, and one of the teachers told me so, wondering why I was wasting my time even turning up. She had a point.
I learned how to play basic Rock guitar from Gary Verth, a kindly soft-spoken man who taught Rock guitar from his little house near the Thames in suburban Surrey, and who looked so square with his short back and sides and baggy dad-style trousers; but he loved his Rock'n'Roll. He taught me the basis of the Rock solo, which involved going up and down the Blues scale in whatever key you chose. I was a lazy pupil in this as in all things, but I probably learned more from that man about the guitar than anyone, with the possible exception of a Pangbourne friend called Steve, whose songs I stole with their simple chord progressions...C, A minor, F, G and back again to C and so on. And then there was Deep Purple's "Black Night", whose simple bluesy riff I'd once played to a pal at Pangbourne, at which point the kid turned to whoever else was present and announced something: "Hey guys, we've got a natural here!".
Also through home study and with the help of local private tutors I set about making up for the fact that I'd left school early at 16 with only two GCE (General Certificate of Education) exams to my name; at ordinary level, of course, which is why they were called "O" levels. Then in late '72 I joined the London Division of the Royal Naval Reserve as an Ordinary Seaman, attending classes once a week on HMS President on the Embankment. At some point soon after this, some of the older ratings, Able Seamen perhaps, or Killicks (Leading Seamen) made some remarks about my looks, implying that I was the new shipboard pretty boy or something. I think this came as a surprise to me, but I was flattered rather than offended, as if a seed of narcissism had somehow become implanted within me in late adolescence. The effect this had on my healthy development as a normal male human being must surely have been disastrous.
The Innocence of pre-Movida Spain
The dreamy, introspective side of me became increasingly marked in the Glam Rock era, and I fantasised about fame and adulation as a Rock or movie star as never before, and so throughout '73 built an image based on Bowie, spiking my hair like him, and then even peroxiding it at some point. But I didn't really fit in in my new home town, unlike my brother who was far more suited to the area than me with his strong London acccent and laddish ways, and he wasted little time in becoming part of a local youth scene centred mainly around soccer.
The Innocence of pre-Movida Spain
The dreamy, introspective side of me became increasingly marked in the Glam Rock era, and I fantasised about fame and adulation as a Rock or movie star as never before, and so throughout '73 built an image based on Bowie, spiking my hair like him, and then even peroxiding it at some point. But I didn't really fit in in my new home town, unlike my brother who was far more suited to the area than me with his strong London acccent and laddish ways, and he wasted little time in becoming part of a local youth scene centred mainly around soccer.
For my part, I came into my own in Spain, or rather Santiago de la Ribera on the Mar Menor near Murcia, where the family had been vacationing since about 1968. I think it was towards the end of my summer '73 holiday that I finally started to be noticed in a big way by the local youth, most from either Murcia or Madrid, and so la Ribera became vital to me in terms of my becoming a social being among members of both sexes. A large variable group of us became very close and remained so for four summers running.
Spain was such a sweet and friendly nation back then in the relatively innocent early seventies, and the youth of La Ribera as happy and carefree as I imagine southern Californians would have been in the pre-Beatles sixties. It was really a great time, and probably signalled the start for me of a lifelong love affair with the Spain and the Spanish people, indeed with Latin and continental Europe as a whole.
In the early 1970s, everything seemed to be mine for the knowing, for the tasting, for the taking. It was a time of constant, frenetic change and I greedily eyed the fruits of a social revolution that had been all but bloodlessly waged on my behalf in the sixties. I was soon to feast on them...never once considering the welfare of those fated to follow in my wake, to come to maturity in a world in which baby-boomers like me had lately gambolled like so many senseless, sensuous fauns. Pity their poor souls.
In the early 1970s, everything seemed to be mine for the knowing, for the tasting, for the taking. It was a time of constant, frenetic change and I greedily eyed the fruits of a social revolution that had been all but bloodlessly waged on my behalf in the sixties. I was soon to feast on them...never once considering the welfare of those fated to follow in my wake, to come to maturity in a world in which baby-boomers like me had lately gambolled like so many senseless, sensuous fauns. Pity their poor souls.
Photo by Peter Kingsford: Pangbourne, Summer 1972
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