It Was Fifty Years Ago.

When I got my invitation to re-join the recycling crew at this year’s Glastonbury it reminded me that it is now fifty years, half a century since my first ever music festival. The Great Western Festival. In 1972 I was twenty years old. If somebody had said that I would still be going to festivals at the age of seventy I would have thought they were bonkers. Old people didn’t go to festivals in those days when outdoor music events were still in their infancy.  How things have changed. This festival was held near the village of Bardney in Lincolnshire. The reason I wanted to go was that my favourite band The Beach Boys were on. I had been a fan since 1964 and this was the first chance I had to see them. My college friend Robin thought they were uncool but still reluctantly agreed to go. Five of us, me, Robin, Linda, Jacky, Bill, and Robin’s dog Dylan all piled into Bill’s old van and we set off. The organisers hoped it would be the biggest festival in Britain since Jimi Hendrix at the Isle Of Wight in 1970 and 100,000 people were expected, but It turned out to be a financial disaster. Only 30,000 turned up, mainly due to it being held on the last weekend of May which is much too early in the year for a festival. The fact that it rained all weekend didn’t help either. Also, although the line-up was strong in depth, it didn’t have a legendary headliner like Bob Dylan or The Rolling Stones who would pull in a vast crowd.

It was badly organised. They didn’t even have proper car-parks. We parked in a cornfield. A lot of crops must have been destroyed that weekend. Unlike today, not so many young people had cars in 1972, so thousands of people hitch-hiked to the site with just a sleeping bag slung over their shoulder. You don’t see many hitch hikers these days do you. Another change from festivals of today is that there weren’t any proper campsites. Hardly anybody brought a tent. You just found a spot in front of the stage and that is where you stayed for three days. We made a kind of shelter from hay bales, but it eventually disintegrated. A lot of people sheltered from the rain under plastic sheeting. 

Another difference these days is that festivals have lots of different stages and you can wander from stage to stage. I can only remember one stage at Lincoln. I think there was meant to be a Folk tent, but it blew down in a gale the night before it started, so they abandoned that idea. Also, at Glastonbury these days there are beer tents and cider tents everywhere. People always have a drink in their hand, but back in 72 I can’t even remember a beer tent, although I suppose there was one. Young hippies in those days thought alcohol was for idiots. The place stank of pot though and lots of people were tripping on acid. They even had a ‘bad trips’ tent for people who were freaking out. The police were running up cricket scores of people arrested for possession of a bit of dope. These days most of the time they just turn a blind eye to it.

When we arrived on Friday evening the headliner was the great Rory Gallagher. Rory said, "I'm sorry about the rain, but we'll pretend that it doesn’t exist at all!". It was the only time I ever got to see Rory perform live. We were drenched by the rain, but we didn't care as Rory's battered old fender wailed and Rory sang the blues..I scored a tab of acid on the second morning, a purple haze microdot and spent most of Saturday sat there tripping my head off. I remember Humble Pie with Steve Marriott played a great set, and Lindisfarne who were one of my favourite bands in the early 70s. Stone The Crows with Maggie Bell performed although their guitarist Les Harvey had died a few weeks before when he had been electrocuted. The Strawbs also played that afternoon, but I don’t remember anything of their set. Slade were on in the evening who the hippy audience didn’t like much because they were seen as more of a pop group. They were followed by Monty Pythons, it was surreal, with the whole team on stage doing things like the dead parrot sketch.

Roxy Music.

I was really mellowed out by the time The Beach Boys came on. They were great, even though Brian Wilson wasn't with them, but they had Rikki Fataar and Blondie Chaplin in the band. Even our dog Dylan pricked his ears up and listened when they performed Surfin’ USA because I was always playing Beach Boy records at home. They were so slick and professional they made a lot of the other bands sound like amateurs. When they finally left the stage I said to Robin,

"Weren't they brilliant!"

"Only just", he replied.

Genesis.

The highlight for me on the last day was Don McLean. When he sang Vincent a rainbow appeared in the sky behind the stage, which was a great moment. Other bands on that day were Genesis, Roxy Music and Status Quo. The last band on were Rod Stewart and the Faces. They were all obviously pretty drunk, but still entertaining. Rod was a great blues singer in the early days before he went all show-business. He said at the end,

"One more number and we'll knock it on the head".

They finished with Maggie May. We set off on the long journey home, and that was the end of my first ever festival.

Murder of Maria Marten

Murder In The Red Barn.

It is a dark and dirty Sunday afternoon, so I thought I would pass the time writing something because I have neglected my Blog page for the last few days. I went to the pub last evening to celebrate my team Peterborough United beating Queens Park Rangers 2-0 in the 4^th round of the FA Cup. The great news is that they have been drawn at home to Manchester City in the 5^th round. Man City are one of the best teams in Europe, if not the world, so it will be an awesome day for Posh. Anyway, because of being in the pub I fell asleep in my chair when I got home and did not awake until the witching hour.

Looking for something worth watching on the telly I stumbled across a film from 1953 called Turn The Key Softly. It was on the Talking Pictures channel. It wasn’t that great, but I watched it anyway. A young Joan Collins was in it. Whenever I watch old films like this, I always look on Wikipedia to learn about the cast. There was an actress in it called Kathleen Harrison and on Wiki it said that her first role was in 1931 in a film called Hobson’s Choice (Not to be confused with a later film of the same story starring Charles Laughton and John Mills) It said that the 1931 film is listed on the BFI (British Film Institute) list of the 75 Most Wanted missing films because no copy of it is now known to exist. This aroused my curiosity even further, so I looked up this list of missing films.

The first film on the list was from 1913 called Maria Marten, or the Mystery of the Red Barn. A silent film which used the actual location of the famous Red Barn murder of 1827. The plot thickened for me because I had never heard of the Red Barn murder, so I investigated further. That is the great thing about the internet because you can find out anything. Little did I realise the macabre tale that would unfold. The Red Barn murder took place in Polstead, Suffolk, England. A young woman called Maria Marten arranged to meet her lover William Corder at the Red Barn.. He had promised her that they would elope together, but she was never seen alive again. Corder wrote to her family assuring them that she was alive and well and they were living on the Isle Of Wight, but in reality he had started a new life in London and had married a lady called Mary Moore who he had met through a Lonely Hearts advert in The Times newspaper. It was then that things got eerie. Mary Marten’s stepmother Ann claimed to be having strange dreams in which Mary told her that she had been murdered and buried in the Red Barn.

Maria Marten Memorial.

On April 19^th, 1828, the stepmother persuaded her husband to start digging in the Red Barn and a corpse was soon discovered buried inside a sack. An inquest was held at the local pub The Cock (which still exists today) and Mary was identified by her sister. Corder was soon tracked down in London and brought back to Suffolk to face trial in the town of Bury St Edmunds. It took the jury only 35 minutes to find him guilty. The judge sentenced him to death with the words, “You be taken back to the prison from whence you came, and that you be taken from thence, on Monday next, to a place of Execution, and that you there be hanged by the Neck until you are Dead; and that your body shall afterwards be dissected and anatomized; and may the Lord God Almighty, of his infinite goodness, have mercy on your soul!”. 

Corder went to the gallows on August 28^th, 1828, in front of a crowd of 7,000 who had come to see the grisly spectacle. The hangman John Foxton cut him down after an hour and claimed Corder’s trousers and socks, as was his right. The next day his body was dissected in front of an audience of students from Cambridge University who carried out various electrical experiments on the body. His skin was tanned and used in the binding of a manuscript about the murder.

After the execution, rumours began to grow about the truth of what happened in the Red Barn on that fateful night. Many people didn’t believe the story about the stepmother’s ‘dreams’. She was only a year older than Mary. Corder was well known locally as a ‘ladies man’. Was the stepmother having an affair with Corder? And did she assist in the murder? Did she discover the body as an act of revenge against Corder because he married another woman? We shall never know what really happened at the Red Barn 195 years ago. There was a similar event in the USA in 1897 known as the mystery of The Greenbrier Ghost in which a man was convicted of the murder of his wife on the evidence of her ghost. I can’t be bothered telling you that story now though. I have written enough for one afternoon. If you google The Greenbrier Ghost, I am sure you will find it.