1966-1968 Southampton

Ken, me, James Penny and Stuart at Bowden House

University

Nuffield Theatre

University

My family arrived back from Jamaica in July and Ros was shocked to notice that Penny was pregnant.  My parents had not thought to inform her.
Penny and I were married in the local church in Stokenham on 23rd July.  Mike was best man.  The stage night was held in the local pub the night before.  I drove the younger ones down to Torcross beach and was persuaded to strip off for a skinny dip.  They planned to drive off and leave me to walk the mile back stark naked.  Fortunately the car got stuck in the sand and I was able to prevent them leaving me.
Aunt Judith treated us to a night in a nearby hotel and then we went to Southampton.  We found a flat but it wasn’t great as we had to walk through their lounge to go to the bathroom.  I took a job at the local Calor Gas factory and worked 7 days a week for the next six weeks to try to save up enough to finance our year.  Penny managed to get a job teaching art as well.I did not receive a grant towards my MSc in Oceanography, although the Sir Richard Stapeley Educational Trust did pay my fees. So I went to Southampton as soon as the wedding was over. I found a flat but it wasn’t very satisfactory. Although we had our own space and kitchen there was only one bathroom and to get to it we had to pass through the landlord’s lounge, between the seating and their TV. It was a difficult time with Penny pregnant and me working all the time. I got a job at the Calor gas factory and took as many hours as I could get. I started off working in the Camping Gaz section which was very small but later took jobs on the production line. It all seemed very antiquated with one person filling the cylinders, another screwing a black plastic cap over the filling hole and a third stapling an anti-tamper paper cover over the cap. People who’d been there for years found no trouble keeping up but, as a newcomer, it was hard. The worst job was “the rack” where partially filled bottles were emptied. They were inverted before being connected up. The smell was dreadful and it was hard exercise. We were allowed 5 minutes”smoke time” every hour – in a sealed room away from the potentially explosive atmosphere. One incident I won’t forget: one of the men was boastful that he had endless women begging him to fuck them because he was endowed with such an enormous member. We took a ruler and challenged him to reveal all. It was huge, a full 12 inches in length. Although we now believed him his continued boasting made him few (male) friends. We were jealous I suppose.

I made some furniture that summer, a chair, a settee and a record rack.   I sent pictures to Terence Conran in case he was interested!

My chair

My record rack with my old radiogram

At last the MSc course started. There were 8 of us doing it of which only 4 of us had come straight from university. Decent accommodation was in short supply so another lad on the course and I resolved to find something better. The result was Bowden House, a 5-bedroom 60’s house built in part of an old country estate in Bursledon. Four of the oceanography students, me, Stuart White, Ken Massie, Dave Cram and a fifth student reading something else, Frank, shared the place with Penny and later, my eldest son, James.The course was excellent, far better than the degree course I’d done at Bristol.  Most of the 7 fellow students were mature students.  I palled up with Stuart White who was not happy in his digs and we found alternative accommodation in a 5-bedroom house in Bursledon, Bowden House.  We managed to get 2 other Oceanography students, David Cram, and Ken Massie to join us and, a 5th guy, Frank took the last bedroom. We lived harmoniously, several of us eating together each evening, with Penny doing the cooking and the rest of us taking turns with the clearing up. I did a bit in the garden which had some lovely trees and bushes and did some restoration on my prized 2 1/2 litre Riley. We had a few successful parties.
Stuart and I did a life painting class and became friendly with the model and the assistant teacher.
Penny was quite overdue and tried digging the garden and other ruses to try to bring on the birth.  Eventually I took her to Southampton General Hospital on 27th November.  There was no provision for fathers to stay and I ended up at a University bop while she was in her 28 hours labour.  Our son was born, the heaviest baby recorded at the hospital at 10 pounds 10 ounces and Penny did not have the nerve to tell the other mothers the name we had chosen, instead saying we hadn’t decided.  So they christened him James and we never changed it as it seemed right.  We employed one of the secretaries at the Oceanography Department as a baby minder while Penny was teaching.

James at Pilgrims 1968

We had a great time there. Four of us eat together every evening with Penny doing the cooking and the men taking it in turns to clear up. At the weekends we often had a roast with everyone, including girlfriends sharing. We had some great parties there too and there was often someone to go to the pub, play a game or whatever if that was what you wanted to do. The experience gave me a lifelong interest in communal living. Stuart and I started art classes together and quickly became friends with two gilrs who were helping run them. I remember the 4 of us walking to the pub through the woods in the dark, flirting heavily and being very tempted to go further. So even at that early stage in my marriage I wasn’t immune to wanting more. We enjoyed the classes and learned a lot. The MSc was mainly lectures and practicals with a dissertation in the summer – it was a 12-month course. We did physical oceanography, with ocean currents, wave motion, geological oceanography, with plate tectonics (a fairly new theory), longshore drift, chemical oceanography and biological oceanography. It was really exciting after the boredom of the Bristol Zoology course. I still found the exams difficult and only just scraped through them. I’ve not believed that exams were a good method of testing abilities other than an ability to memorise facts and put them in exams answers and was not able to motivate myself to revise like other students. I did my thesis on the Productivity of Southampton Water. Penny got a job as an art teacher at a school in a poor area of Southampton. She came back most weeks with amazing stories – one of her pupils started a fire in the classroom, another lay on the floor so he could get a better view up her skirt. She made friends with another teacher also called Penny, who wore even shorter skirts than her. It wasn’t long before she and Ken started a relationship that later lead to their marriage. Our child was due early in November but gave no sign of wanting to come into the world. After a week or so Penny started digging the garden to try to induce it. She eventually gave birth in Southampton general hospital after 28 hours of labour – on her own as husbands weren’t allowed there in those days – to a 12 pound 12 ounce little lad. We’d chosen some trendy 60’s name for him but Penny didn’t have the nerve to let the other mothers round her know what it was so they said he had to have a name and called him James. It seemed to suit him so well that became his registered name.

We had a day research boat, clinker boat with a Captain, a lovely chap who had worked on Motor Torpedo Boats in the 2nd world war. We went out quite frequently and learned how to fix one’s position using a compass, how to use a sextant and how to use various oceanographic instruments. It was a really interesting time to be out on Southampton water and we saw both the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth leaving the UK for the last time. The banana boats also sailed here to the West Indies and I remember going down to the docks with my mother and Penny, presumably to send or collect some goods to or from my father, who was still working in Jamaica. We found a stick (not sure if this is the correct word) with 30 or 40 bananas on lying around and the two of them carried it to the car – I was having nothing to do with this as it could be considered theft. We also had a day out on a much larger research vessel, RV Sarsia from Plymouth. We dredged some scallops up and Penny prepared them as a wonderful starter. We also visited the diving centre at Portsmouth where they had large decompression chambers. I found the whole experience very edifying and uplifting, appealing to my polyglot approach to life. I felt I had stumbled on something in life that I would really like to do.

Me in the garden of Bowden House

At the end of the academic year Frank left Bowden House and we replaced him with another couple, a young lecturer and his wife. The whole atmosphere of the place changed and they tried to impose rules on the rest of that we didn’t feel we needed. When the course finished, at the end of September, I found I hadn’t got a job but Dr Lockwood, one of the Oceanography lecturers, offered me a post as his research assistant. He worked on the salinity tolerance of various local species and my job was to do the experiment on a species of Gammarus. Although I thought the whole exercise was dull and a bit futile the offer allowed me to look for a more rewarding position meanwhile and to leave if one came up. Meanwhile I was paid very little. Penny, James and I moved into a freezing 1930’s semi and lived a very frugal existence. I remember the rent was £8 8s a week and I think I was paid £500/year. I remember going to the pub and sharing half a pint of bitter between us. Jobs were scarce in the UK, it was unwise to go to the States or you might get drafted and end up in Vietnam.

Eventually I became fed up with our way of life and gave up my position of research assistant as the Oceanography Department of Southampton University and applied for posts abroad. Dr Lockwood very generously wrote up the results of my efforts and gave me joint authorship. We went to stay at Pilgrims and lived on National Assistance. Patricia, Penny’s mother was not happy about this and after a couple of weeks threw me out. I went up to London and felt as if I’d been released from prison.  USA was out of the question as I was likely to be drafted to fight in Vietnam.  There were two posts of interest, one in Port Moresby, New Guinea,  the other at the Department of Sea Fisheries in Cape Town.  David Cram, who had studied Oceanography at Southampton with me, landed a job at Cape Town University told me about the latter one which appealed more as a better place to bring up a family.  There were the pluses of the family connection and the negative of the apartheid politics.

Before we left I took the family to stay with my parents in Eltham

James and me in the garden at Eltham

and sold my 1951 2 1/2 litre Riley and purchased instead a 4+4 4-seater Morgan which went with us to Cape Town.

Ken Massie, Penny, me and James in Staines 1968