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LOCK-KEEPERS AT THE WICKET

By Keith Newbery - Friday, April 18, 2008
LOCK-KEEPERS AT THE WICKET
The victims are: back row (left to right) Vern Burt, Jock Cram, Kevin Pass, Chris Cheverton, Brian Humber, Keith Golding, Mick Blackman, Willy Creighton and Terry Kelsey. Front row: Alan Cooper, Richie Benfield, Tony Wray, Dale Young, Alan Gurney and Ivor Warlow.
THIS ISLAND LIFE
A COUPLE of weeks back I asked readers to send in pictures guaranteed to embarrass husbands, dads and even granddads from an era best called When We Had Hair.
I’m grateful to Vern Burt for getting the ball rolling with this splendidly shaggy representation of Newport Cricket Club taken well over 25 years ago.
Vern himself is seen bravely sporting the buccaneer look on the left of the back row, while his big mate, Terry Kelsey, is almost unrecognisable beneath that youthful thatch on the far end of the same row.
If you have any group pictures (sports teams, class photos, firms’ dinners etc) from the 60s, 70s or 80s, please e-mail them to editor@iwcp2.demon.co.uk, marked for the attention of Alan Marriott.
Alternatively, send a hard copy to The Editor, IW County Press, 123 Pyle St, Newport, PO30 1ST. It will then be scanned in and returned to you. Please include names wherever possible.

THE KNOTTY DILEMMA TIGHTENS
I’VE been knocking out these columns for well over 30 years and have long since given up trying to predict what subjects are likely to bring a response from readers.
Take ties, for example. What, I asked a couple of weeks ago, was the point of them? I believed it to be a throwaway subject inspired by the variety of neckwear (or absence of it) at a dinner party I had attended.
Not a bit of it. Letters of a slightly lofty tone began to appear on the County Press doormat almost immediately, and I began to wonder whether I had transgressed some little-known civil law involving the illegal exposure of the Adam’s apple.
One letter advised I should take advantage of a tie to hide my own scraggy neck at every opportunity (good point), while another was from an accountant, Ian Hampton by name, who automatically equated tie-wearing with professionalism.
This initially struck me as a dangerous assumption to make, because it placed bouncers and snooker referees in the same professional echelon as solicitors and estate agents. But come to think of it …
His letter, which showed every sign of having been written with buttocks firmly clenched, was countered by Simon Gibbs, a number-cruncher of the open-necked persuasion, who despaired at a conventional attitude he believed had disappeared from his line of work years ago.
However, the definitive contribution came from Peter Woodnutt, a career cravatologist, who made me want to tighten the knot around his own neck by suggesting I had completed 50 years in journalism. Steady on old chap, I don’t get my bus pass until this September.
Peter has just retired from the family’s menswear business in Ryde, which remains one of the few temples of good taste in what used to be the quality shopping thoroughfare of Union Street. Where are you now my Mainstones, my Shaplands and my Lightbowns?
But let us return to the matter in hand and focus on the fact that Peter brought a strangely Cartland-esque air to the subject. As far as he’s concerned, when you meet a tie-wearer, ‘one has eye contact and as your gaze lowers (oooh matron) he will hope you notice his well-knotted tie.’
That strikes me as being a fairly modest ambition for any lowered eye and with all due deference to Peter (he does design the blessed things after all) I can honestly say that in all my years of being brainwashed into wearing a tie I have never given a fig whether anybody noticed whether it was well-knotted. This is probably just as well, because invariably it wasn’t.
Neither do I subscribe to his theory that men who wear flashy ties are making some sort of statement. The only thing they are actually shrieking is: Please notice me! Please notice me!
Incidentally, Mr Woodnutt hoped I wore a tie when I went to Buckingham Palace. Of course I did. It came with the rest of the monkey suit I hired for the occasion from his emporium.
Because I am a creature of habit and a victim of the conformities of my generation, I shall continue to wear a tie when it is expected of me (funerals for example), but Peter Woodnutt and the rest of the pro-tie faction must accept that fashions will continue to evolve.
If they didn’t, we would all be walking around looking as ridiculous as sheriff Titchmarsh did in this newspaper last week.
Finally, Andrew Pellow wrote to say he never felt dressed unless he wore a tie. But he was always a stuffy kid when he lived a couple of doors down from us in St Michael’s Avenue, Ryde, 50 years ago.