Norman Duerden, FRSA, 1919 - 2013

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post about Norman Duerden after discovering some of his photographic books in a Lake District bookshop. He had been my primary school teacher 50 years ago and had been instrumental in encouraging the class to understand and enjoy the natural environment. In the way that the internet works, his family found the blog a couple of months later and made contact. We exchanged several emails and Norman was said to be"genuinely delighted to hear that you had remembered him and valued his input in your life." Norman sent me a note which was very touching:

"Thankyou indeed; golden days, eh? - a mere step from 92 years to wayward cricket balls and leg-breaks over the school roof. Please remember me to the glorious hills at your very back door, won't you? I hope that my little friend the dotterel still rides the June snow-storm on Drumochter."

Later, as he was beginning to have difficulty of recall, he wrote me a poignant note in what he described as 'my terrible scribbles'.
"That peerless Victorian naturalist, Richard Jefferies was never to experience the dubious delight of old age, but he lived long enough to realize the truth - that faces fade like flowers. Neither is there any recall. I listen to music, but can no longer hear the Willow Warbler. Computers are a complete mystery, I can no longer cut my own toe nails, but enjoy fish and chips. I am 92 next month. Thank you so much for remembering me. Norman"

A few weeks ago the family contacted me to say that Norman was in a nursing home and had not long to go. I attended his funeral on 11 January 2013 and reflected that he had made a difference in the way that teachers and others can, not by supervising and controlling children, but by giving them respect and imbuing their charges with a sense of wonder. The funeral was in the Overdale crematorium near Horwich, where he had stayed during his last year to receive care and support from his family. As always with people of his vintage, his peers and friends had mainly passed away but the minister conducted a reflective and reverent service for family and friends. This included moving tributes from two of his stepsons and an old friend.

Norman was indubitably linked with the Ribble Valley. After serving in the RAF as a radio operator and photographer, he played football with Preston North End and became a teacher in that remarkable tranche of post war teachers who were trained after the war and brought real life experiences into the classroom. He lived in Ribbleton in Preston and taught at Ribbleton Hall Primary School, he went on to become vice Principal of Alston Hall College of Education, which sat on a scarp slope overlooking the River Ribble.

He lived out his years further up the Ribble Valley where he was close to the Yorkshire Dales and the Trough of Bowland. He had been celebrated as a photographer for his slide shows that were primarily about bird and wildlife but also captured the geological splendours of the limestone country around Malham and Settle. An area that captivates the spirit and detonates a yearning to return. These are areas he captured in photographs, sketches and sound recordings which became the basis for his lectures, radio broadcasts and books.

His writing had an authentic quality that is reflected in his broadcasts and books. This extract from one of his books on the Dales provides an insight into his deep appreciation as a naturalist of the limestone country of the upper Ribble valley.

'Each of its many manifestations - pavement, scarp, pothole, scree and outcrop - provides a new array of species particularly exciting to the newcomer. Half a century on, one remembers above all the initial impact of its austere beauty and its infinite photographic possibilities. Its high places were more frequented by waders _ golden plover, lapwing, and dunlin _ than by humans. Foxes infrequently seen by day were revealed by an abundance of cat like prints after overnight snow; badgers had frolicked on the fell side..'

He corroborated in the publishing of books about the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales and the Birds of Scotland. These included publications with Denis Healey and Melvin Bragg as well as other  eminent photographers. Norman was not only a notable photographer but also an artist with a large portfolio of paintings, both oil and water-colour, that are to be shown in a retrospective collection later this year. He visited Scotland frequently and as his note indicates he was inspired by some of Britain's rarer species that breed in the Cairngorm mountains. The photographs below are taken from his published books.

Dotterel at  Drumochter

Peregrine Falcon

Although he was firmly grounded in the delights of the Ribble Valley he had a wider compass and was a regular visitor to Grindelwald in the Swiss Alps, which sits adjacent to the alpine meadows below the Eiger in the Jungfrau region. He also travelled wider to South Africa and the Middle East photographing the fauna and flora.

Norman opened the minds of many of his pupils to the environment around them and was recognised as an authoritative voice and authentic recorder of natural history by his peers. He did this with a modesty and style that showed his passion for the wildlife and natural environment of the Ribble Valley and the Dales. He is survived by his wife Maureen and daughter Pam.

Snow Fish

Basking Pike

Cushioned trail

Lochan Spling

Today was in monochrome, there had been an overnight dump of snow and the light was fully stopped down. The two inches of snow provided perfect cushioning for the morning run. I had seen an otter a couple of days ago and I searched for its tracks in the snow along the river bank but without success. The deer and foxes had left their trails in the virgin snow but the real surprise was a rare visit from the golden eagle which soared over the river.

The giant pike on Lochan Spling looked as if it was dancing on ice. 

HMV

HMV has a strong resonance in my life and its disappearance will not only severely damage our shopping centres but also leave a significant gap in their offer. My father was a DJ in the 1950's and early 1960's and he kept a large collection of 78rpm records in a box in the hall. Record labels were colourful items in the drab 50's with labels like Parlophone, Columbia, Brunswick, Regal and Capitol but it was His Master's Voice that captured my attention. Why was a dog listening to Joe Loss or Perry Como? HMV may have been barking then but now they have fallen over the retail cliff.

I still have the remaining collection of 78rpm records and they provide the soundtrack of my childhood from Guy Mitchell, Petula Clarke and Alma Cogan to Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Doris Day and Eddie Calvert. Only Ella Fitzgerald still gets played. Every Saturday evening a taxi arrived to collect my father and take him to some dance hall, hospital or event. I loaded the taxi whilst he searched for his playlist and overcoat. He would set up his twin Connoisseur record turntables, wire up his speakers, microphone and decks to the amplifier and organise the dancing. It brought in about £2 per week, a 20% increase in his weekly wage although 10/- was usually set aside for new or replacement records, shellac 78s broke easily. During the Christmas party season he would run company children's parties and I was usually taken along to be the stooge demonstrating the Hoola Hoop, the Twist or whatever the latest craze was. He displayed an advert for HMV below his record decks and a generation of youngsters probably wondered why a dog was barking into a funnel.

The collapse of high street retailing is now in full flood.  The early loss in the last month of Comet, Blockbuster and Jessops came as no great surprise, although Jessops will be missed and leaves a gap in photographic retail outlets. But the loss of HMV is a different matter, I had shopped here for years, more than 50% of my CDs, DVDs and the unrecyclable pile of VHS videos came from HMV. I had bought presents from HMV the week before Christmas. This was far worse than losing Woolworths or Habitat which had outlived their time. HMV on the other hand was at the epicentre of a fast changing industry. Their shops have always been one of the anchors in any major shopping mall and they are usually crowded. I suppose that like many others I was seduced into buying CDs and DVDs online but I stopped using Amazon three years ago when they transferred their media sales to the Channel Isles to avoid paying taxes. Too late, they had eaten into HMVs margins and one of the few chain shops on the high street worth visiting for browsing and buying had closed its doors.

The accelerating decline of British retailers is damaging the vitality of our towns and cities and seriously reducing jobs. They were always going to decline when the internet became a trusted means of shopping.  Who wants to tramp round the same set of chain shops, pay for parking and waste time when you could be doing something useful. Give me some distinctive indigenous shops which help the customer and do repairs any time.  The chain stores became guilty of frisking the credit card set by importing cheap goods, marking up prices and cashing the difference. Britain may once have been a nation of shopkeepers but the internet global players have cut out the middleman (retail businesses) as well as the taxman.

An analysis of retailers going bust carried out by the British Retail Consortium reveals that the collapse is accelerating again after a recovery in 2009 and 2010. Recovery from the recession of 2008 seemed to be well underway until 2010 but with stagnant wages, rising inflation, higher unemployment and less secure and often part time jobs; people have reeled in their spending. At least one in ten shops are now empty, the Specials will soon be re-releasing 'This town is coming like a Ghost Town', although you will need to download it because almost all the record shops have been closed down.

Retailers going out of business
Year             Companies     Stores    Employees

2007            23                    2600      14083
2008            54                    5793      74579
2009            37                    6536      26688
2010            26                      944      10930
2011            31                    2469      24025
2012            54                    3951      48142

2011 was the year when the coalition government's austerity measures began to kick in and if shopping is a measure of our economic prosperity then we are in deep shit. There are more than 40,000 shops which are empty and that is not including all the charity shops and pawnbrokers that are now squatting in our town centres. Some serious thinking is required, not on how to relet the shops, but on how to redevelop our town centres so that they provide more housing, community run services and small business spaces that generate footfall and create the sense of place.

A sense of place was the last thing in the minds of the property speculators over the past decade as they bullied planning authorities to give permission for the demolition of traditional properties to create space for pumped up retail developments. They may have temporarily hiked their rental streams but in so doing they wiped out the small independent shops that gave a place its identity. Whatever happens next I hope that HMV is resurrected perhaps with a more politically correct name.

Monemanach

Glenshee hills to north

North east to Mayar and Dreish

Upper Glen Isla with Druim Mor prominent

Tuesday, 8 January, 2013

Ascent:       470 metres
Distance:    4 kilometres
Time:         1 hour 14 minutes

Monemanach        807m      42mins

I had gained a free afternoon after completing two days work in Forfar by lunchtime. Rather than returning down the A90, a road even less inviting than the A9, I figured that I had time to take in Monemanach, a lonely Corbett at the head of Glen Isla. The early morning rain had finally stopped and the odd patch of blue was infiltrating the skyline to the west. I drove through Kirriemuir in the early afternoon without seeing a single soul and then followed the road less travelled across to Glen Isla. The final 4 miles from the castle at Forter brought me to the road end at Auchaven where I parked at the foot of the track.

I had thrown a pair of boots and waterproofs into the car just in case I could manage a walk. I changed out of my suit into some old trousers and a fleece jacket before starting the walk up a land rover track which zig- zagged its way up to 600 metres. It continued further but I had spotted a faint path which followed a line of fence posts more directly to the summit. I followed it for the last couple of hundred metres of ascent through the heather and mosses on a never ending convex slope. It was a hard slog in a fresh westerly wind although it was relatively warm for January. There was very little snow remaining on the Glenshee hills that became visible to the north.

Solitude was guaranteed although several red grouse squawked at me as I invaded their territory. The summit is spectacularly disappointing, a tiny cairn at the end of the fence posts. The hills of the north rejoiced even in their sombre winter colours but in the foreground the fickle sun was reflected in the heathers to give a bright umber glow. I was able to identify the route I had once climbed from Auchaven to Mayer and Dreish and then over miles of peat hags to Druim Mor, which was my penultimate Munro top in 1997. The trek over to Druim Mor provided one of the most tedious traverses. It was not appreciated by my then 13 year old son, who declared that he would not be doing any more tops. Nevertheless the descent down Glen Isla on that occasion had produced an enjoyable finale to a long day.

The descent from Monemanach was a doddle as I found a track down from the summit and it was a lot easier than the climb up by the fence posts. I was back at the car in double quick time, it was mid afternoon. Unfortunately, this was the last Corbett or Munro that I had not climbed in this part of the Eastern Highlands, an area I have begun to enjoy for the vast open views and abundant wildlife.

By travelling back via Blairgowrie I was able to miss the A90 and get through Perth before the evening rush, if such a thing exists in Perth. As always the Broxden roundabout provided a good proxy for city traffic congestion - if ever a roundabout would benefit by traffic lights then this is it - it is like jumping into a fast turning skipping rope, something I was occasionally invited to try by the girls at my primary school in return for inviting some of them to join the boys in a mass game of Den Relievo. How they managed to do it with two ropes and going pepper made football and cricket seem like simple pursuits.

Blue Skies and Green Futures

January Skies

Grey turns to Blue horizons

Green foundations

After 2 weeks of grey, wet days to bid farewell to 2012, we were exposed to the sun as 2013 dawned. The skies were blue, the mosses and lichens, drunk on the abundant rainfall of 2012, were oases of the brightest green. The soundtrack from the burn had a soothing rhythm. My optimism was alive as each year is a venture into the unknown.

If only Danny Boyle was the prime minister; 2013 could be the year that we stop taking George's medicine and released the potential of a more savvy, green and ethical Britain.