Last Semi-Detached Suburban Mr Jones

A Rolling Stone from Cheltenham to Cotchford Farm
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-917458-16-0
Verlag: Unicorn
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 176 Seiten

The third and final volume of Kevin J. Last's books about Cotchford Farm, Hartfield, East Sussex in three different eras. Semi-Detached Suburban Mr Jones is set in the 1960s and tells the story of Brian Jones, the only middle class member of the Rolling Stones and how he came to purchase Cotchford Farm as a country retreat away from the Stones London life. Despite the fact that he was founder of the group, Jones's increasingly wild behaviour ensured that Mick Jagger eventually became the group's leader. Harking back to his roots, Jones saw himself as a Sussex country gentleman but it all went impossibly wrong due to a vicious East End builder, Frank Thorogood, who made life hell for him with Jones eventually drowning in his own swimming pool in suspicious circumstances. How and why this happened is examined in close detail.

Kevin J. Last has degrees in Film Studies and English Literature. Fascinated by the power of film, he has lectured widely and written, produced and acted in a series of educational/entertainment shows for the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre and elsewhere. Subjects have included the Music Hall, Alfred Hitchcock, John Betjeman and World War I. He has been published on a number of occasions. This includes the Daily Mail and two previous books for Unicorn on the history of Cotchford Farm in different time zones.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Last, Kevin J.

Leseproben

ISLAND IN THE STREAM

Lewis Brian Hopkin-Jones was born on the 28th February 1942, the son of a Welsh aero engineer also called Lewis and his wife Louisa, in the Park Nursing Home in Cheltenham. The house they lived in at that time was called Rosemead, situated in Eldorado Road in the Lansdown area of that town. This was a pleasant substantial house befitting of his father’s work and status, and it seems ironic that Eldorado suggests that golden place that Brian sought but never achieved.

Since it was 1942 when Brian was born, it is certain that Lewis’s skills were in substantial demand towards the war effort. Brian’s earliest years were spent in the fairly sheltered and buttoned up atmosphere of wartime Cheltenham suburbia extant at the time. Tragedy marked both the beginning and end of Brian’s life in that he lost his baby sister, Pamela, to leukaemia when he was just three and, even at this early age, this was the start of his troubles. His parents, locked in grief, kept their pain to themselves and excluded Brian from their mourning. This was to set the pattern for the years ahead. According to Geoffrey Giuliano:

Lost and alone, the little boy wandered round the hushed, strained house in terrified confusion, fearing his beloved sister had been given away and that he too might share the same fate. (3, 1994)

Since Giuliano wasn’t there and probably had no way of knowing, this might have seemed like a flight of fancy except that Jones himself confirms it.

I remember this awful feeling of doom and gloom. My poor sister. I had no idea what had happened to her. I was terribly afraid. Instead of drawing me closer my parents seemed to push me away. But why? What had I done to anyone? It still hurts terribly to this day. (3, 1994)

Outside things were somewhat easier, in that Brian was remembered by neighbours,

… contentedly roaming the pavements with his pet goat, and his inseparable feline companion, Rollader. (3, 1994)

However, Giuliano does get the name of Jones’ dead sister wrong, calling her Pauline when it should have been Pamela.

Brian was a sickly child suffering from croup, an inflammation of the larynx and trachea, otherwise known as the windpipe. It is associated with breathing difficulties which he was never able to throw off and became prone to chronic bronchitis and asthma which later influenced his performance as a musician and may have contributed to his demise. This undoubtedly prevented him at times from playing with other children, leaving him on the sidelines. It was only when he found music that he found a lifelong interest and this in turn gave him an entrée to other opportunities, his skill in picking up both instruments and tunes being remarkable. Geoffrey Giuliano says:

Young Jones was no longer alone. He found in music his one true companion. (4, 1994)

Brian went to Dean Close Preparatory School of good reputation, also in the Lansdown area of Cheltenham, and it was there that the staff first recognized his musical ability and where he learned to play the clarinet. This is very apt since for pretty much the rest of his life, music formed the mainstay. He was given an acoustic guitar for his 17th birthday, which he treasured. But Brian was let down by his own weaknesses and, surprisingly for a middle-class boy, a total failure to understand how to behave. Despite his interim associations with both his fellow band members and his girlfriends, Brian’s short life was relatively solitary in that, according to most contacts, he was quite hard to know. The general perception of his girlfriends was often that, in any relationship, both parties were in love with the same man. So, if he never gave much away, that would seem to have been a hangover from a lonely childhood and a sense of holding back. He did little for others and was prone from an early age to inappropriate and sometimes downright cruel practical jokes, as we shall see.

But, to start with, his parents were quite delighted that Brian had inherited their own keen appreciation of music. Louisa was a piano teacher and, in his spare time, Lewis was organist and choir director for St Mary’s Parish Church in Cheltenham. They were solid and sensible if unimaginative citizens. His parents hoped that Brian could become a classical pianist, given his remarkable ability to both quickly absorb musical theory and to sight read.

Revelling in his parents’ all too occasional display of approval he excelled at a rate which astonished his teachers. Before long, he picked up the recorder and clarinet with equal ease. (4, 1994)

Lewis had also, at one time, considered Brian might become a dentist but neither of these two accredited careers were ever realized, despite his remarkable musical ability and above average intelligence. Lewis wanted Brian to become a key player in an orchestra, something that would be an ongoing credit to a quite talented family. And let there be no doubt about it. Both Lewis and Brian were decidedly ambitious, the former in a quiet way. For Brian though, music was his new love and the loneliness he had experienced as a small child began to dissipate.

One of his schoolfriends at Pate’s Grammar School, Roger Gore, is able to provide a good deal of information about the young Brian. He lived outside Cheltenham in the village of Winchcombe and was a contemporary at this honourable establishment with a history going back to 1574.

We were born in February 1942 exactly three weeks apart, I being the older, and we spent the first year grouped alphabetically in separate forms. It wasn’t till 1954 that we became classmates, when we were both placed, according to our test results, in the A stream which was selected to take ‘O’ levels a year earlier than the other forms. He was obviously academically promising … Brian and I didn’t become good friends until probably the fifth form … when we were closely associated with another person, Barry Smith, in an increasing affinity regarding life as mid-teenagers; an interest in music and a decreasing willingness to abide by the stuffy old fashioned mores of the school. The three of us continued our friendship into the sixth form where Brian and Barry did two years at A level, which I also did … Brian and Barry took the harder discipline, Physics, Biology and Chemistry. (2019)

Regardless of his later attempts to kick over the traces, this account gives a previously unknown version of Brian working hard to achieve results, at least at the start of his time there. Gore also explains his early introduction to music:

The three of us were keen music buffs and record collectors and together often visiting a record shop off the High St (named Maxwell’s I think) in the lunch hour to talk music, sample records and purchase LPs. Musically our tastes were allied but with different nuances. Brian liked trad jazz at this stage … Brian became more and more blues orientated over time. (2019)

Gore goes on to confirm that:

Brian, like me, was in no way sports orientated regardless of his asthma, whereas music was second nature to him. Both of us increasingly skived off sport as much as possible. (2019)

However, when he did partake of it, he was no slouch and often proved very able, just as he did at everything else.

Amusingly, Roger Gore tells us of an incident which was prescient of what was to come.

There was an occasion when Brian was involved with a band in a community hall in Hatherley. I can’t recall now whether he had organized it or was actually playing in it, but he had invited me … No sooner than we [Gore with a friend] had gone into the lobby of the hall than I was approached by a group led by [a] Teddy Boy in Edwardian garb obviously looking for trouble. We immediately beat a hasty retreat and ran off down the road with the yobs in pursuit and I only escaped by hopping onto the deck of a moving double decker that was just leaving its stop. (2019)

Another quite extraordinary incident occurred which reminds one of Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Roger Gore takes up the story.

There is one infamous incident that stands out very vividly in my mind that was known to the school authorities as the ‘Protherough Affair’ which finally damned Brian in the eyes of the Head Master … I cannot recall if there was any specific reason for the antithesis between Brian and a final-year prefect named David Protherough, but Protherough exercised his official position as a prefect to excess and was generally a rather unpleasant abrasive individual … The prefect system in CGS selected those who would embrace authority and exercise discipline by proxy and they could set lines or even detention. By and large they were fascistic and generally disliked by the majority of students, but obviously preferred to teachers. Brian and Barry were the two people who elected to do something about the dictatorial Protherough and a third boy named Edwards was willing to engage in a fist fight with Protherough in an...