Britain is no country for hundred year old Second World War veteran, Alec Penstone

When interviewed on TV by Kate Garraway on 'Good Morning Britain', Alec, a 100-year-old veteran of the Second World War was asked what his message was at this time when Britain remembers the service men and women who had died in War. He then stunned her and her fellow host, Adil Ray and 700,000 viewers when he replied :

“My message is, I can see in my mind's eye those rows and rows of white stones and all the hundreds of my friends who gave their lives, for what? The country of today? No, I'm sorry, but the sacrifice wasn't worth the result of what it is now. What we fought for was our freedom, but now it's a darn sight worse than when I fought for it".(link)

Since the interview his words continue to fuel debate online and Alec himself has not elaborated on what he meant and merely said : "It was my own personal opinion but evidently it touched a chord with very many people. My daughter has had so many messages from all over the world".

Alec, who was born in Hackney in Lindon in the spring of 1925, was 15 years old when  Germany began the bombing of London a year after the outbreak of the Second World War. He recalled : “As the Blitz started in London, I volunteered as a part time as a Air Raid Precautions messenger and served all the way throughout the Blitz in 1940- 41 as a messenger. The moments at 15 years of age, pulling bodies out of bombed buildings you grow up very quickly”.

He was called up for national service in the Royal Navy when he was 18 in 1943. He finished his training in December and was assigned on board a submarine and served on submarines before being moved to HMS Campania, an escort aircraft carrier and took part in protecting cargo ships from submarines in the Arctic Convoys to Russia. Alec recalled :

"The ASDIC cabinet where I worked, listening out for torpedoes was just above the bilges, right down underneath the recreation space, two decks down. So, we're about 27 feet beneath the water line in there. So, we all agreed that rather than die in the freezing water, we'd sooner go off with a bang. So, the three of us all had an agreement that we'd stay down there. And that was it".

The ship played a vital role in the D-Day landings as it was used to sweep for mines and search for U Boats. Then, after a week in the Normandy area, Alec and HMS Campania returned to their duties in the Arctic Convoy and made a total of 10 crossings.

After VE Day and the end of the War against Germany in Europe, Alec returned home to his fiancé Gladys, but it wasn’t long before he was drafted to help in the war effort still waging in the Far East. After securing a few extra days leave, the couple married on 21 July 1945 and then two days later Alec returned to duty.

Alec served for a further 14 months after the war ended before he was finally demobbed in September 1946. When he returned home much had changed including his relationship with his wife, but despite some initial setbacks Alec and Gladys went on to enjoy a marriage of 75 years until her death in 2020.

Perhaps we will never know what exactly Alec meant when in pain and anguish he remembered and asked the question : 

     "The hundreds of my friends who gave their lives, for what? "

Britain is a country which has failed to say "Goodbye" and pay tribute to its erstwhile 'Queen of Costume Design', Anne Gainsford

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Anne, who is listed in IMBD as the 'costume designer' for the ground-breaking television series 'The Avengers', which ran for 161 episodes from 1961 to 1967, died in March this year. During that time she worked closely with the director, producers and other key creatives to see to it that the costumes enhanced aura of modern espionage in Britain in the 'Swinging Sixties'. 

This was particularly evident in the costumes of the character Emma Peel, played by Diana Rigg, whose wardrobe of mini skirts and leather catsuits resonated with the times and turned show into a prominent fashion icon. (link) Yet despite this, Anne's passing in March this year went unheralded, save a brief obituary written by her goddaughter, Georgina Palffy in the Guardian newspaper.  

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Anne was born in Lincolnshire in the district of Horncastle in the winter of 1934, the daughter of Helen and Alfred John Gainsford who was Managing Director of Birley Collieries in Sheffield, South Yorkshire and was the cousin of William Dunn Gainsford, the owner of the collieries. Consequently, Anne and her younger brother John had a privileged childhood, witness by the fact that Somersby House, where she was born, had been the rectory where Alfred, Lord Tennyson had been born seventy-five years before.

Anne was five years old when the Second World War broke out and she was evacuated to the to the Presentation Sisters Convent School in Matlock, Derbyshire run by a Roman Catholic order of nuns founded in Ireland, which had established the school and had been involved in educational and charitable work in the area for many years. She stayed there as a boarder until 1945 when, at the age of eleven, she moved to the Roman Catholic St Mary’s School, Ascot. It had around 200 pupils and a religious community of 60, by the mid-1950s, under the leadership of Reverend Mother Cecilia Marshall as Provincial Superior. 

At the age of eighteen Anne gained a place at Oxford University and in 1952 started her history undergraduate degree course at Lady Margaret Hall. It was an all-women's college founded in 1878 that played a significant role in women's education at a time when women were still breaking barriers in accessing higher education and were certainly, still breaking barriers in the 1950s. 

It was a paper she read on the Italian Renaissance that captured her interest and led Anne to Perugia after she graduated in 1955 where she, no doubt visited the Collegio del Cambio. Here she followed her next great passion, 'opera' and perhaps more importantly, learnt to speak Italian. This certainly helped her greatly a decade later when she worked for the Italian film director, Franco Zeffirelli. No doubt the thirteen years she had spent in the tightly organised world of  private, boarding school education in the hands of catholic nuns helped to provide her for the future the disciplined and highly organised worlds of theatre and film.

On her return to England and still in he early twenties  she joined The Slade School of Fine Art as a student where she explored various artistic disciplines, including stage design, often within a broader context of theatre design studies. 

While the Slade didn't specialize in stage design, it provided a foundation for students who later worked in theatre, like Kenneth MacMillan, who saw a connection between colour, music, rhythm, and choreography. In fact, Anne herself was part of an extraordinary generation of young designers emerging from the Slade in the 1950s.

 Having graduated from the Slade in the late 1950s, she worked as a scene painter for Disley Jones at the Lyric Hammersmith on 'The Demon Barber' in 1959. He was described by The Guardian on his death in 2005 as : 'A theatrical polymath, bursting with informed and idiosyncratic ideas on text, performance and direction; moreover, at any moment he would unhesitatingly take up a hammer or paintbrush and work through the night to put the show on'.

In the 1960s she moved to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon and work in repertory theatre. Then in 1961 she got her big career break when she became the costume designer for ABC Weekend TV, a contractor within the ITV network and worked on the espionage series, 'The Avengers'. 

She benefited from the fact that, as a free lancer it was possible for her to work in TV, film and theatre for different clients concurrently. This meant that in 1964 she worked 'Design Assistant' on Franco Zeffirelli's Italian production of Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet', performed at the Teatro Romano in Verona which featured his innovative staging and visual approach that had been presented in his 1960 Old Vic production. 

Juggling multiple demands bore testimony to Anne's strong organisational and time-management skills because, as Zeffirelli's Design Assistant, she would have been involved in anything from set design to costume design and because he was known for his elaborate and visually stunning productions she would have played a crucial role in bringing his artistic vision to life. This involved tasks like researching historical clothing, creating clothing sketches and co-ordinating with costume makers.

When she just turned thirty in 1967 she worked on her first film, Zeffirelli's 'The Taming of the Shrew', starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. In this she supervised the design of the costumes by Danilo Donati, with those of Kate and Petruchio portraying wealth and power through their rich fabrics and detailed embellishments. (link)

It was in 1967 that Anne, with fellow designer, Patti Pope, who specialised as a theatrical hatter set up her own company, the Richmond Studio. Here Patti or  'Patricia', designed the helmet, now in the V & A, used by an actor in the production, 'The Twelfth Rose' Ballet for All in the Swan Theatre, Worcester in 1969. While Anne carved out a niche making headgear for opera and ballet as demonstrated by her work in 'Aida' in 1968 at the Royal Opera House. Here she produced the headdresses for the character of A Priestess in Act I of the Covent Garden Opera Company production of 'Aida' in 1968 at the Royal Opera House and also for the character Amneris in Acts III and IV.

In 1968 she undertook her second film as Costume Designer for 'Inadmissible Evidence', a 1968 British drama film directed by Anthony Page and starring Nicol Williamson and Jill Bennett. John Osborne had written the screenplay, adapting his own 1964 play. The film portrays the collapse of an angry but sad man who cannot maintain decent standards in his life and antagonises everybody. 

In 1971 Anne was the Costume Designer in 'Murphy's War' directed by Peter Yates, with Disley Jones as Production Designer. It starred Peter O'Toole and was set in Venezuela during Second World War, a crewman survivor of a sunken merchant ship. O'Toole was consumed in his quest for revenge and retribution against the Nazi German submarine that sank his ship and slaughtered the survivors. Anne's costume skills were set to work on the attire of O'Toole and period naval attire of Horst Janson as the U-Boat captain. 

In 1978 she was the Costume Designer on the film 'Absolution', a British thriller directed by Anthony Page and written by playwright Anthony Shaffer. Anne worked alongside other crew members like Freddie Williamson for makeup and Betty Glasow for hairstyling. It starred Richard Burton as a priest who taught at a boys' school and found one of his favourite students was playing a nasty practical joke on him and also featured Billy Connolly. Burton set out to investigate the prank and stumbled upon a dead body, leading to his life spiralling out of control. (link)

From 1983 onwards her work was mainly in connection with the internationally recognised Period Costume House, 'Cosprop', founded in 1965 by John Bright.

In her private life Anne had some tempestuous relationships, the most notable was and affair with the author, Sybille Bedford who she met at PEN international. 

In her book about Sybille, 'An Appetite for Life' Selina Hastings wrote : 'Sybille embarked on another affair, with Anne Gainsford, a talented costume designer for films and theatre'. After one of their first nights together, Sybille confided to Lesley Black that "I had again that sense of tenderness and lovingness … an immense feeling not only towards that woman here and now whom I have unaccountably come to love so much, but love tout court". Lesley was Sybille's confidant in the affair who said that after a fortnight in Ireland, Sybille remained infatuated, like ‘a crazy, obsessed teenager’. On one occasion Sybille accompanied Anne to the Theatre Royal in the Haymarket, where Anne was delivering some costumes, Sybille enthralled by her first sight of an auditorium from the wings, amazed by the steep rake of the stage. Not long after they met Sybille gave Anne a gold brooch, but when the affair ended she asked for it to be returned.  

From the 1990s onwards Anne became renowned for her accurate creation of historical top hats and she insisted on using period techniques and materials, sewing black on black, even as her sight deteriorated. In 1996 she made top hats for the Die Meistersinger at the Royal Danish Opera and the wearers can be seen holding her creations in front of them.

In 1992 in the American superhero film 'Batman Returns', Danny DeVito played Oswald Cobblepot, also known as 'The Penguin', a deformed orphan abandoned by his wealthy parents and raised by penguins in the Gotham City sewers. The Penguin wore the top hat which Anne designed in numerous scenes as part of his ‘respectable’ guise as the mayoral candidate for Gotham. Made from black felt and finished with a black silk hatband and bow, the hat featured a cream-coloured silk lining with a chamois leather protective strip around the lower portion. 'Danny DeVito' was written in black marker on a name tag at the back, beneath which was printed 'Anne Gainsford at the Richmond Studio'. (link)

Seven years later she was commissioned to create a topper for Ralph Fiennes who played Onegin in the 1999 British-American romantic drama film based on Alexander Pushkin's 1833 novel in verse 'Eugene Onegin'. She had to make sure that Ralph's topper was accurate for Russia in the 1820s. (link)

In 2004 it was time to produce a top hat for Johnny Depp in 'Finding Neverland'. Set in 1903, following the dismal reception of his latest play Sir James Barrie meets the widowed Sylvia and her four young sons in Kensington Gardens. A strong friendship develops among them and Barrie proves to be a great playmate and surrogate father figure for the boys, and their imaginative antics give him ideas that he incorporates into a play about boys who do not want to grow up, in particular one named after troubled young Peter Llewelyn Davies. In his persona as a circus ringmaster his costume, was designed by Alexandra Byrne, with a period-accurate ensemble with a pink/red velvet tailcoat, a gold waistcoat and star-motif trousers. Anne's top hat was made of black plush. (link)

As a girl, having been born in Lord Tennyson's house, she was captivated by his poem, 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' and when troops were stationed near St Mary’s School, Ascot where she was a boarder in the Second World War, her lifelong interest soldiers' dress was ignited. In 1952, when she was eighteen, she staked out the Musée de l'Armée and was thrilled by Napoleon's chapeaux and Revolution and Empire uniforms. That being the case, she was no doubt delighted to be given the commission to make the bicorne hats for 'Master and Commander' the film which starred Russell Crowe as Aubrey, a captain in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars. (link)

According to her goddaughter, Georgina Palffy, although she never retired, when work dried up Anne learned to restore furniture, devoted herself to her very English garden in Richmond upon Thames, and enjoyed visiting historical houses with a string of eager acolytes.

Britain is still a country for the Creator of the 'Glastonbury Music Festival ' called Michael Eavis

 

Yesterday, the 80 year old rocker, Rod Stewart, welcomed the 90 year old, Michael to the Pyramid Stage on what was the Glastonbury Music Festival's 55th Birthday and orchestrated the huge audience to sing 'Happy Birthday' to Michael.(link) 

Rather than work on the family farm at Piton in Somerset, Michael had left home at the age of seventeen in 1952 and opted for a career at sea in the Merchant Navy. 

He recalled : "My mother thought going to sea would be good for me, but I don't think she imagined what I would witness. I'll never forget the time we docked in Mombasa. The Chief Officer came up to me and said : "Eavis, we haven't got any crew, go and find them." I said : "Where do I go?" and he said : "The brothels and jails." I was only 17. So he gave me all this money and I wandered through the streets of Mombasa with a nice, fairly smart uniform on. A little girl came up to me and flighted her dress up at me and asked : "Would I lie with her ?" I don't know how old she was, probably about 13, so I said : "Thanks very much for the offer, but no thank you. But can you tell me where you would lie?", which of course was the brothel. So she took me into the brothel. They were all in there and I hauled them out".

His life at sea only lasted for two years and he said : "When I was 19, my father died of stomach cancer and I had to come home and run the farm. The farm had always been a love of mine. The bank manager said : "Look, are you going to get stuck in because otherwise we'll sell the farm." I said : "No, you can't do that. I'll get stuck in and see what I can do". 

Sixteen years were to pass before the seed of the idea of the farm being used to accommodate an 'al fresco' music festival was planted in 1969 on the day that Michael sneaked through a hedge with his future wife, Jean, to enter the 'Bath Festival of Blues'.  (link) He was inspired, in particular, by the performance of Led Zeppelin to host a free festival on his farm the following year. He said : "Something flashes down and you suddenly change. Bit like St Paul; do you know what I mean? There's a change of attitude, a change of purpose". (link) 

Michael recalled : "I'd been into pop music all my life. I started with Pee Wee Hunt, Elvis Presley and Bill Haley but by the late 60s it was Dylan and Van Morrison and I was very anti the Vietnam war. Anyway, I had such a good time at the Bath Blues Festival in 1969 that when I got home I thought, 'We've got a good site here in Pilton. Why don't we do something similar?' The first problem was that I knew nothing about the music business. I started by ringing up the Colston Hall in Bristol to ask how I could get in touch with pop groups. A chap there gave me the name of an agent, and the agent put me in touch with the Kinks, who agreed to appear for £500, which was a lot of money for me to pull out of a milk churn". In addition, there was local opposition and he said : "I knew I was in for a fight, but my background has always been nonconformist. Our whole family down the years have been Quakers, Methodists, very anti-establishment, always looking dubiously at central government".

Right from the start Michael was conscious that the future spirit of Glastonbury was shaped as a reflection of the Eavis family life . He said : "The thing about the Glastonbury attitude was that the ethos came from the dining-room table at Worthy farm. The whole thing has always been very homegrown, so it does have an appeal and it is a family affair". Witness the fact that Emily, his youngest daughter, is now his co-organiser of the Festival. "They're all involved and everybody knows who we are and what we stand for, and we're not ripping people off. I like to think that I have passed that social conscience on to subsequent generations".

"Once I was sure I was going to do it, I realised we needed a stage. I got a local house-builder to put something together out of scaffolding and plywood. I asked him : "What would happen if a high wind came along, would it blow away?" He shook his head and said he didn't really know. None of us knew. So I got him to lash it to two apple trees with some hefty ropes. Another problem was accommodation. Where, on a farm, were we going to put up all these bands and their crews? Luckily, I got a couple of my neighbours to agree to let us use their cottages for the weekend. 

"A week or so before the big day, I had a call from this fellow with a rich local Somerset accent. He sounded very genuine, offering to do security for the festival at two pounds per hour per person. That seemed very reasonable, so I agreed. When the day dawned, he and his mates turned up and they were the ugliest lot of Hell's Angels you've ever seen. What a fright I got. But I had agreed, so I had to take them on. When the fans started to arrive I immediately felt a lot better. These were softly spoken, middle-class hippies. Nice, attractive, interestingly dressed people. I found them very appealing. I felt right away that this was the beginning of something that would change our way of life".

For that first festival in the Autumn of 1970, 'The Kinks', were booked to top the bill, but dropped out after 'Melody Maker' printed a piece describing it as a 'mini-festival' and they were replaced at the last minute by Marc Bolan (link). Michael also had Al Stewart and 'Quintessence' on the bill (link) and said : 

" I regarded the whole event as kind of a cross between a harvest festival and a pop festival, so I had some bales of hay up on the stage and Marc Bolan perched on one of them when he was singing 'Deborah'. Despite my first encounter with him, I have to say that he was wonderful, easily the highlight of the Festival. The sun was going down behind the stage, a red sun. There were only 1,500 people there to see it, but you knew this was music that was going to last. To this day, I reckon it's one of the best things that ever happened here". (link)

Those 1,500 people had paid £1 for a ticket, including free milk from the farm and Michael made a loss of £1,500. During the rest of the 1970s, each meeting consisted of a series of informal events, culminating in the "impromptu" festival of 1978, when travellers flushed out from Stonehenge sought spontaneous entertainment. 

In 1981, the now, properly named 'Glastonbury Festival', gained a political edge as the first Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Festival and Michael raised around £20,000, which was his first of 10 annual donations to CND. During this decade his Festival lived on a knife edge from year to year. Michael had to fight off district council charges that he had breached licence conditions and one year it was overshadowed by a confrontation between security teams and travellers who were looting the emptying site. This resulted in 235 arrests and £50,000 of damage. However, after a 'gap year', it returned with Tom Jones as surprise guest and now in the post-Cold War, with the threat of nuclear war lifted, Michael donated £250,000 raised to Greenpeace, Oxfam and local causes. 

Michael told the New Statesman that his hero in adult life had been the historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner, E.P. Thompson and : "His speech from the Pyramid Stage in 1983 is still the best speech ever at Glastonbury". The late historian and peace campaigner likened the crowd to a medieval army and argued : “With its tents, all over the fields this has not only been a nation of money-makers and imperialists, it has been a nation of inventors, of writers of activists, artists, theatres and musicians". Looking directly at the assembled crowds he told them : “It is this alternative nation which I can see in front of me now”.

The 1990s, saw the Festival moved into the consumer-savvy age of cash machines, retail outlets, restaurants and flush lavatories. Channel 4 televised it, attendances topped 100,000 and the likes of Oasis, Blur and Robbie Williams headlined. Perhaps the defining image of the Festival for many was fixed in 1997, when torrential rain brought the 'Year of the Mud'.

After recovering from stomach cancer, Michael stood as a parliamentary candidate for the Labour Party in the 1997 General Election and polled over 10,000 votes. He then suggested that disillusioned Labour voters should switch their vote to the Green Party to protest at the Iraq War. In 2009, he was nominated by 'Time Magazine'  as one of the 'Top 100 Most Influential People in the World' and in 2010, at the Festival's 40th anniversary, appeared on the main stage with headline artist Stevie Wonder to sing the chorus of  "Happy Birthday". (link)

He started the Festival with a £5,000 overdraft and by 2013 it was up to £1.3m and when asked : "Could he pay it off?" he said : "I'd feel guilty if I did. Isn't it funny? Why? We give away £2m a year to Greenpeace, Water Aid, Oxfam, we do local stuff at schools and housing. It's really important to keep that going. I can't just pay off my overdraft and say, 'Sod that".

He still continued to see himself as a farmer first and foremost and easier to reconcile with his Methodism : "Being a farmer is more authentic than organising Glastonbury. You're rearing cattle, you're feeding people. There's no branding, no sales pitch, it's just a natural way of living. There's no contamination, no transport, trains or planes. The festival has got a lot of other stuff – drugs, drinking, branding. It's a different thing. I love the Festival. That's why it's so successful – because I love it so much. But you offered me a preference, and I'm just telling you why I prefer the farm."

In 2013 it was the turn of the Rolling Stones opening with 'Jumpin' Jack Flash', with Mick Jagger prowling the stage in a green sequinned jacket and after 'It's Only Rock 'N' Roll (But I Like It)', joked that the organisers had "finally got round to asking us to play." He then belted out a total of 20 songs on the two hour set. After 'Satisfaction' he said : "We've been doing this for 50 years or something. And if this is the first time you've seen a band, please come again". Michael's comment was : "They finally did it, and it was fantastic. My God, did they deliver." Speaking immediately after the band came off stage, he called it "the high spot of 43 years of Glastonbury".(link)

Michael said : 

"I'm a bit of a Puritan, but I do enjoy myself immensely. I have a hell of a good time. I've got the best life anyone could possibly have. I'm not moaning. This whole Festival thing is better than alcohol, better than drugs. It's marvellous".