Robb Johnson – Ordinary Giants: A Life and Times 1918-2018
Irregular Records – 9 November 2018
My Collins Dictionary describes ‘monument’ as “Anything that preserves the memory of a person or an event” usually a term directly referring to buildings, pillars and so on. It also offers amongst the 8 definitions, “A historic document or record”. Ordinary Giants by Robb Johnson meets both of these interpretations.
Robb Johnson’s previous work, Gentle Men, used the biographies of his grandfathers to explore the First World War and received much critical commendation. In many ways, Ordinary Giants is as important not least as we near the end of the commemoration of the War to End All Wars and look towards what life was like for the returning Tommy.
This extensive, three-CD work follows the life and times of Robb’s father, Ron. Starting appropriately with the Armistice and the now seemingly empty echo of A Land Fit For Heroes, these songs are as much about the social and political changes throughout the twentieth century as they are about individual people.
Ron, pictured on the back of the accompanying handbook looking 1930’s smart and suave together with the obligatory pipe, was born in 1922 in Fulham. As he grew up, so his family moved to the suburbs that were being built along the western travelling arteries to support the factories that were springing up. Whilst Ron had few childhood memories to pass on, two stories appear here. The Mysteries of Fulham takes the unexplained making of grottoes by the children as a launch into other mysterious things about the town including why the Conservative Unionist Vaughn-Morgan was voted in despite the notion that most of the population seem to be “workhouse penny plain”.
Some mysteries were explained quite easily though. Ernie, Ron’s elder brother, sings of life in the suburbs and despite their parents finding things in their new house a bit hard, the children, having discovered how to cope with the Hang of the Door. They sneak into the larder and enjoy sucking up the milk through a straw. A similar situation is to be found in Dad’s shed, where he keeps his brown ale.
These glimpses of growing up in the inter-war years illustrate the changing fortunes of the country. The burgeoning media-led society told you how you should be living, with smart girls bobbing their hair even though the majority of the women of the time were more concerned with meeting payments for rent, and noticing how the Slow Progress of their aspirations was mirrored in the inevitable consumption of the fields and orchards around them.
As the Second World War gets more and more inevitable, the Blackshirts are making their presence known supported by the ruling class and those media barons that own the newspapers. All others are expected to know their place – and stay there. One light for the future is lit when Here Comes Mr Gandhi on his tour of the northern mill towns to explain why the Indians were not buying the expensive cotton that Great Britain was pushing to sell in the jewel in the crown. His visit showed that the British millhand could understand the problem of bringing Indian cotton over to the mills of Lancashire and then selling it back to the Indians at inflated prices. His visit also clearly showed the divide between Churchill’s view of the world and that of the working man and woman.
This is a theme that gets developed more and more through the three albums. Even the middle one, when Ron became a navigator in the RAF, is driven as much by politics as it is by the personal life of a young man who volunteers to fly. Sent to Canada to train so that he may steer his pals Home By The Stars, he flies missions initially in Bermuda and then over Europe. In this war Bomber Command suffered a 44.4% death rate, a figure that was only exceeded by the loss of German U-Boat crews. Ron’s war came to an end in February 1945 when J Johnnie was attacked. The pilot and co-pilot stayed aboard so that they could keep the flaming plane in the air long enough for the rest of the crew to escape.
The important celebration at the end of the war was not for the cessation of hostilities. That was too near, too raw and for many too difficult to cope with. However, the election of Attlee For PM For Me was a great cause of cheer, elected to address the need for hospitals and schools, work and welfare, and to end poverty. Demobbed, Ron trained to be a teacher where being In Nobby’s Class in 1950 provided good memories for Antony Smith, one of 67 children sat in ‘nice neat rows’.
As the sixties moved into the seventies the memories become as much those of Robb Johnson as of his father. Football was important, especially Goalkeepers, but politics was even more of a force, as the two voices of father and son harmonise over the state of the nation and the oppressed.
Listening to the whole suite you will realise how themes recur, the subject may be different but the concern, the threat, the frustration, is still the same. As if we did not know it, we are clearly on a merry-go-round. Through the meetings of the fictional Lou with Gladys (based on Robb’s great aunt) we get a vignette of the issues of the period: Lou 1936, Hitler, Aryan supremacy, Jesse Owens, communism; Lou 1948, post-traumatic stress disorder (before it was so named), National Health Service and the Welfare State; Lou 1958, CND and the Aldermaston Marches; Lou 1988, Cruise Missiles, Greenham Common, Poll Tax. There is always the threat of war, the threat of personal freedom, the threat of oppression and the fact that whilst we might get the government we elected, we don’t always get the government we wanted.
The war is never very far away and for Ron’s generation it perhaps never went away at all, as it no doubt didn’t for their fathers and mothers. Ordinary Giants hits many personal notes for me. Of a similar age to Robb, I have snatches of my father’s childhood, quite privileged by some standards and definitely middle class but nonetheless he started working life as a boilermaker, rode a motorbike (on which, or rather off which he apparently lost his teeth) and read the Daily Mirror as mother was wont to remind him when I used to sit at the dining room table with Mao’s Little Red Book beside my plate of meat and two veg. His war had to wait for 1945 and then he went off to Palestine, a period of his life I know virtually nothing about, and he wanted to keep it that way.
But I lived through the Aldermaston Marches on the flickering black and white TV, had the advantages of a free National Health Service, saw the cruelty of the cessation of milk for schoolchildren and all that came after. My history is a version of this history. Ordinary Giants may be a personal story but it is also a story of a nation, of an ordinary person – you, me – going through life dealing with the knocks and the triumphs, shouting out against inequalities, against the wrong-doers and for those that do right. Yes, the parallels will be the same for many but it is lovingly condensed into 3 albums.
Having re-read what I have said so far, I feel I must do justice to the production. This is a radio drama, playing out in your head, as all good radio dramas do, and does it perfectly. The narrative unfolds; the characters become familiar; the strands drop off and get picked up later; repetition and familiarity are really important and are used to great effect.
And then there is the cast, contributing their voices, their idiom, and in some cases their words: Roy Bailey, Sam Decie, Boff Whalley, Tom Robinson, Claire Martin, Fae Simon, Tracey Curtis, Justin Sullivan, Miranda Sykes, Matthew Crampton, Phil Odgers, a long list, justified by the length of the work and one that still omits other contributors. It must have been a tremendous project to pull together, a personal mission that should be turned into a general history. How did we get to where we are today? Listen to Ordinary Giants and you will see that the view of the future is positive, as it is the Ordinary Giants that come “through the evening & the starlight & the dark before the dawn”.
My final word goes to the NHS. If there is anything in post-WWII Britain that sums up what we can do it has to be the National Health Service. This work is as much for all the nurses and doctors as it is for those that went to war. Buy this monumental work, listen and celebrate.
Photo by Hari Johnson