Eagle News Jan 2012 - Bedford Modern School

BOOK REVIEWS
Bedford Then & Now in
Colour by Richard
Wildman.
Colour photography by
Alan Crawley. The
History Press (2011) ,
hardback in dust-jacket,
95 pp, ISBN 9 780752
463216, RRP £12.99.
Reviewed by Alan Cox
(1955-64), formerly a
senior editor of The
Survey of London.
Nobody knows more about Bedford’s past, especially from
Victorian times until the present day, than Richard Wildman.
He has a positively encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject,
so any book by him on the town’s history is to be warmly
welcomed. His latest offering consists of a fascinating
selection of double-page spreads, with a larger old sepia
photograph (or, in a very few cases, an old drawing or
watercolour) and a smaller up-to-date colour photograph.
Here I must pay tribute to Alan Crawley’s sparkling modern
images. They reflect tremendous patience on his part, not only
to wait for a suitably sunny day, but also to stand until a rare
gap occurred in the incessant stream of traffic. As you turn
the pages, Richard takes you on a leisurely guided tour
around Bedford, as it was and is now.
For OBMs of my era, two buildings, now gone but illustrated
in the book, are reminders of that period. One is the Liberal
Club, which stood in Midland Road next to the BMS Junior
School, which held its morning assemblies in the Club’s large
upstairs room. For the rest of the day it served as an extra
classroom for the main school. Smelling of stale cigarette
smoke and beer, it was a most incongruous setting for such
functions. The other building is the Star public house, which
stood where the Harpur Street extension to Marks and
Spencer is now. At the end of lunchtime, one would often
encounter a group of BMS staff wandering out, usually led by
Mollie Kingston, cigarette dangling from the corner of her
mouth.
In his short introduction Richard bemoans the wholesale
clearance and redevelopment which took place in the town
after 1945, and which reached a crescendo in the 1960s.
Many of the photographs in his book illustrate the bitter fruits
of those times, and show very clearly how all too often
characterful old buildings have been demolished, to be
replaced with the modern buildings which at best are boringly
banal and at worst positively ugly. Thus, where the former
George Hotel (later Murketts car showroom) stood in the
High Street, next to the Swan Hotel, there stands Swan Court
(built 1959-60), its ‘vacuous façade’, as Richard rightly calls
it, now looking positively tawdry. For me the saddest loss is
Dust’s drapers, ladies’ hats and clothing shop at No. 75 High
Book Reviews
Street. As the old image in the book shows it was a gloriously
idiosyncratic, over-ornamented Victorian confection. As a boy
I was always fascinated by the busts of three famous
architects – Palladio, Wren and Inigo Jones – which, for some
reason, adorned the ground floor, beside the shop windows.
On a happier note, Alan Crawley’s present day photographs
show in vibrant colour just how attractive are those old
buildings that survive. There are still plenty of older façades
above modern shop-fronts. This is particularly true of the High
Street, where the Borough Council has plans to improve the
current run-down state of many of the buildings, with the help
of Heritage Lottery funding. It is to be hoped that these plans
come to fruition and that gradually more appropriate shopfronts
can also be introduced, restoring what was Bedford’s
premier shopping street to its former glory.
My one criticism of this book is the fact that many of the old
sepia photographs are spread across the centrefold – an
irritating practice which breaks up the unity, and spoils the
integrity, of the image. Despite this, I really enjoyed looking at
the photographs and reading Richard’s always informative
captions, and I warmly commend it.
Up Before Dawn by Edward
Kent, edited by Susan
Payetta.
Published in Grenada by
Sail Rock Publishing
(2011).
sailrockpublishing@gmail.com
Paperback, 179 pp., illustrated.
Dr Edward Kent, CBE (1936-39) who was known as ‘George’
at BMS, possibly because that was the name of the then
Duke of Kent, died in 2009, aged 88. He had been working
on his memoirs, which have now been published. The story
chronicles the author’s adventures, beginning with his
childhood on the family cocoa estate in Grenada, and
including his years as a boarder in School House, when Mr
Liddle (Headmaster) was the house master. Edward lost the
sight in his left eye as the result of an accident when he was
aged 9 or 10. This prevented him from serving in the war,
during which time he managed a cocoa plantation. He later
organised estates growing nutmegs, sugar cane, limes and
bananas, and rearing livestock. In 1962 he was invited by the
Duke of Edinburgh to attend the Second Commonwealth
Study Conference in Canada, on the human effects of
industrialisation. Awarded the CBE for services to
agriculture in 1992, Edward was made an honorary Doctor of
Laws by the University of the West Indies in 2007. His book
shows that he had total recall of many interesting incidents,
and is full of information about his eventful life in the
Windward Islands throughout most of the last century.
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