Manx Heritage Foundation: TIME TO REMEMBER: Peter Farrant
MANX HERITAGE FOUNDATION ORAL HISTORY PROJECT ORAL HISTORY TRANSCRIPT
‘TIME TO REMEMBER’
Interviewee: Mr Peter Farrant
Date of birth: 31st October 1924
Place of birth:
Interviewer: David Callister
Recorded by: David Callister
Date recorded: 7th March 2001
Topic(s): Early school days Royal visit of King George V1 and Queen Elizabeth King Williams College Officer’s Training Corp WWII and internment camps Shropshire and Manx Home Guard Agricultural training camp in Isle of Man Volunteering for Army and Officer training VI Doodlebug bomb attacks over Maidstone, Kent Commission and passing out parades Career as lawyer Getting married and living at Bishopscourt Appointment as Vicar-General The Bishopscourt saga The Bishop’s vote in Tynwald Chairman of Douglas 2000 Partnership Douglas Retail Association
Peter Farrant - Mr F David Callister - DC
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Manx Heritage Foundation: TIME TO REMEMBER: Peter Farrant
DC Peter Farrant, born on 31st October 1924 at 4 Albert Terrace in Douglas. Where do you want start, Peter, do you want to start with early childhood memories, perhaps?
Mr F Well, yes, my father of course was High Bailiff of Douglas when I was born, he subsequently became Second Deemster and First Deemster, as you know. My first school, I think, was the little Redcoat school, it was run by the Stancliffes, I think it was and then subsequently I went to the famous Miss Cowin’s school and I expect you know that there were a number of distinguished pupils there, there was Eunice Salmond and there was Peter Downward, now Major General Downward, and a number of others. I well remember Miss Cowin’s school because there used to be a picture on the wall and it showed the progression of two students from their early days in school, one would be talking and throwing chalk at the others and the other would be working very hard. And it went through their whole career and the one who threw chalk ended up in jail and the one who worked hard, of course, was shown with a picture with a wife and children, happy and prosperous and underneath were the words, ‘Which road will you take?’ And my mother, who had quite a sense of humour, used to pull my leg about this – ‘Which road will you take, Peter?’ You know you never forget these things.
DC You haven’t finished up in jail anyway …
Mr F No, no, not yet anyway.
DC … so you must have taken the right road.
Mr F Yes, I think I’ve taken the right road all right. So I then – when I was 8½, in accordance with a rather brutal custom of those days, I was sent to board at Junior House in King William’s College, and I remember that first night very well. You know the fog horn down there and the bell in the bay, well, I was put to bed early, as a new boy, and I remember lying in bed and listening to the rattling windows and the fog horn and the bell and thinking that the end had come, it was most depressing. However it didn’t remain like that and we were very happy there, it was quite a rough life and the climate is pretty rough down there, you know, and I remember the 1935 snow, I think it was, and we had to go home by train, you know. We were allowed home every fortnight and of course the great joy then was to have a lovely Sunday lunch, you know, roast 2
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beef and – oh, boy, I can remember it now because the food was fairly spartan and sparse.
DC At the College?
Mr F At the College, yes.
DC What activities were you involved in? Did you get into the various organisations within the College?
Mr F Oh, yes, we all joined the Scouts, of course, and lit fires on the beach, you know, and of course we played rugger in the winter, we played hockey in the Easter term and in the summer cricket, and Canon Stenning used to take us swimming in the bay. You know Hango Hill …
DC Yes.
Mr F … where Illiam Dhone was shot, well, we used to go into the water there and I can see now this huge man, he was a very big fellow, and about twenty or thirty little boys all rushing about and jumping in the water, and of course it was icy cold, but we didn’t seem to mind, I’m sure – I suppose it did us a lot of good. I don’t think they do anything like that now. Then the other thing of course was, in 1933 when I went, I was the youngest boy in the school. That was the centenary year and the foundation stone for the improvements of College was laid – my first term. The oldest boy then was Archdeacon Kewley, an enormous man with a tremendous pot and spats, you know.
DC And massive beard.
Mr F And massive red beard, you know, and he and I, as the youngest boy, laid the foundation stone.
DC Really?
Mr F Yes, and you’ll see it there now and that of course was the start of the renaissance of King William’s. It was a pretty run down and depressed place in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s, the Depression had meant that many parents couldn’t afford the fees. But what saved College then was the great 3
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philanthropist Mr Arthur Hughes-Games, a retired tutor from Dartmouth and a real character, I think he was the son of Archdeacon Joshua Hughes-Games, very well-known church people over here, and he devoted his life to raising money for College and he raised a very considerable sum and out of that money the Barrovian Hall was created, the quadrangle, which was just mud when I was there, was paved over and a lot of other improvements were made. We had a new headmaster then, of course. When I first went it was the Reverend Harris, one of the old parson headmasters and he was followed by Sidney Ernest Wilson, who was a real live wire and I’m sure many people in the Island will remember him and his very talented wife, and he really galvanised King William’s College into activity. But he was helped by the money that was being expended on it and as you probably know, in 1945, when the King came over for the wartime Tynwald, just after the end of the European war, but before VJ day, July 5th 1945, one of his engagements was to open the King’s Court at King William’s College. And as I think I mentioned to you on another occasion, Archdeacon Stenning, although he of course was the Reverend Stenning when I knew him, he was one of the few people in those days who had a cine camera, he took a lot of camera film at College, those films are now in the hands of the Museum, as you know, but they do contain a film of the 1945 Tynwald, showing the King looking very worn, you could see the strain of the war on his face. As we know he didn’t live very much longer, and the only person still living, the Queen Mother – wonderful shots of her, of course.
DC And boys from the College, as the OTC [Officers’ Training Corps], were almost a guard of honour as such at Tynwald, were they?
Mr F Not at the 1945 Tynwald, that of course was the Navy, as you can imagine, because the Governor then was Admiral Granville and he arranged for the Navy – the Isle of Man, you see, had a big naval contingent here, as you know, under various forms of training. Some of them, as we now know, were very secret – and of course there was the RAF here too. But in pre-war Tynwalds’ King William’s College OTC [Officers’ Training Corps] actually provided the guard of honour, and if I remember rightly they used to get up at 6 o’clock in the morning and – senior boys, of course, sixth form boys and you have to remember boys, in those days, stayed at public school for a very long time. The head of school might be a boy of nineteen, nearly twenty, which isn’t the case today, so we did have some very big fellows. And they marched from King William’s to St. John’s and provided the guard, and you’ll see the photographs. 4
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DC Marched all the way?
Mr F Marched all the way, yes, yes, so – it was a much more homespun affair, Tynwald, in those days, of course.
DC And did you get a few beatings at the College? Were they going on all the time?
Mr F Oh, yes, yes, the cane was supreme in those days, if you made a noise in the bedroom or anything like that you’d get three or four, you know, and if it was more serious it would be six. Oh, yes, it was an accepted form of punishment and no-one complained or thought anything about it. And Mr Wilson, I remember after the war, him saying to me, ‘Oh, Peter, I’m not the man I was when you knew me. On Saturday mornings now there’s nobody outside the door.’ Pre-war days there were six or eight waiting to be beaten.
DC Waiting to be caned?
Mr F Oh, yes, we thought nothing of it, really.
DC Of course you were a teenager when the Second World War was taking place?
Mr F Yes, yes. My father decided that I should complete my education in England and so in ’38 I went to Shrewsbury School, in Shropshire, it’s a very old traditional public school, so that when the war broke out I was actually spending most of the year – it’s amazing to think that literally nine months of the year I didn’t live at home and that was the life of a public school boy, you only spent three months of the year at home. Well, my father was obviously a bit worried in ’39 as to what was going to happen and he arranged for me to go by air, and I used my – I remember after the war broke out I went over on the little Rapide, the pilot was Captain Higgins …
DC Whom you would have heard about.
Mr F Yes … who my father said was a first rate chap and a very nice character, I thought he was too, we all liked him, you know, and they were very small crews for the aircraft. The windows would be blacked out, of course, and he thought that would be safer than going by boat, because my father had been in the Navy in the First World War and he remembered the 1917 submarine campaign. But I 5
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well remember the day war broke out, I’ll never forget it, we were on holiday in Ramsey and we were staying in a little house, which is still there – when you look at the Mooragh Lake you’ll see those two houses, old houses on the right – we were in one of those, we had the upper floor, you know, and we went to Jurby Church, I remember, and listened to the sermon and then we came back and we listened to Chamberlain’s speech and the first report of the RAF attack, you know, on the Kiel Canal and in the afternoon we went for a walk – my father loved walking. And I can just remember when we got down on the beach he turned to me and he said, he said, ‘You know, Peter, you’re going to be in this.’ I said, ‘Surely not, it’ll all be over by Christmas, won’t it? ‘Oh, no,’ he said, ‘it won’t, it’ll be like the First War, it’ll be five long years and you will be in it.’ And I said, ‘Oh.’ So he made sure I realised what was to come, I always remember that. He also told me, too, incidentally, later on, that we were going to have to have a war with the Japanese and not many people thought that, but I remember him saying so, yes, ‘We’re going to have to fight them.’
DC And you’d then be what, fifteen or sixteen?
Mr F I was fourteen when the war broke out.
DC Right. What ... did you go back to England then?
Mr F Yes, I continued at school, my parents were quite tough about it, they said, ‘No, you’re not to stay at home, you must go,’ and I continued going by air. I remember on one occasion we were delayed, this would be 1940, and amongst the passengers was Sir Ralph Stevenson, whom you know subsequently became a member of the Legislative Council, a very old Manx family, and we were delayed. So we went to the George Hotel in Castletown and Ralph was there and he was a very charming man who knew my father pretty well, and I remember him saying – we asked him about Churchill, you see – and I remember his face darkening and he said, ‘Oh, he can be a very cruel man.’ I think Sir Ralph was then Ambassador to, I think, King Peter of Yugoslavia. But he was very charming, I do remember that. And then we didn’t experience any bombing in the Isle of Man, as you know, I think there were two bombs dropped and one rabbit killed, but of course other parts of Britain, as you know, suffered very severely. And I remember, I think when they stopped the flying, we weren’t allowed to fly and we had to go by boat. I left Shrewsbury at the end of – I think – it would be the winter term – and I got on the train. You had to get 6
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up fairly early to catch the boat at 9 o’clock and when I got to Lime Street with my little bit of luggage and a straw hat on – you know, we used to have to wear straw hats, would you believe it – and I got off the train and the whole place was full of smoke and I talked to one of the rail people and they said, ‘Oh, my word, we got it last night, we really did.’ And I went out to the front of the station and I walked down the road and you know where John Lewis’[shop] is? – there was just a hole in the ground.
DC Really?
Mr F Oh, yes, the whole place was smoke and they’d had a really heavy bombing that night. So that was my first introduction into what could be done from the air. And the only other thing I can remember about bombing is when Belfast was bombed – I suppose this would be late 1940, ’41, I’m not quite sure of the date. I went to bed, I was on holiday in 4 Albert Terrace, and it would be about 11 o’clock at night, and I suddenly heard this throbbing above and I thought that must be German planes. So I went downstairs to my parents’ bedroom, my father got up and he said, ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think it is but,’ he said, ‘don’t worry, you go back to bed.’ But I know he didn’t go back to bed, I think he was quite worried because I suppose he realised that although they were not going to bomb us they might well jettison bombs on the way back and of course that’s one of the – when you’ve been on a raid, you know, if you haven’t used all your bombs you just drop it on the nearest field that you can see, afterwards. And in fact that, of course, did happen, but fortunately it only killed one rabbit and knocked a barn down.
DC But everything was very secretive during the war, wasn’t it?
Mr F Well, yes it was, I mean the Island, from 1940 onwards, was full of troops of all kinds, RAF and every part of the services, of course the promenade was cut off, there were – the Island was an internment camp. We had all these internees on the front, if you look carefully I think you can still see, towards the end of the promenade, the square marks, that’s of the poles, and they’re still there today, 2001, it’s amazing if you think of it. Anyway – and then there was Peel and Ramsey, but we knew – we knew very little of what went on in these camps.
DC Did you know about one of the prisoners of war, a big sort of fight took place and someone got shot I believe, didn’t they? 7
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Mr F We never heard a single thing and nor did we hear about anything that went on in the internment camps, nor were we told of the casualties in the bombing in London and Bristol. They just – the security was tremendous and they certainly had regard for morale, they didn’t believe in depressing people the way that we do in peacetime.
DC Did you have any experience of the Home Guard during the war years?
Mr F Yes, I did. When I was sixteen I had to join the Shropshire Home Guard, of course, we had our uniforms in the JTC, just as they had at King William’s, and we had to go on Home Guard parade, we were the reserves, I suppose, in Shropshire. But when I came home on holiday I had to attend Home Guard parades in Douglas and I remember going down to the Drill Hall and receiving a lecture on hand grenades by the late Sidney James Kneale, then Attorney General and then CO of the Manx Home Guard, I can remember that. But when I was in the Home Guard I was taught to ride a motor bike, I became a DR and I remember ...
DC Despatch rider, yes.
Mr F ... despatch rider – and I remember going down to Quiggin’s yard and being given instruction on a 350 Norton and I’ve never forgotten it – I’ve never ridden a motor bike since, by the way, but I mean that twist grip, you know, and I think I could just get the feel of the clutch, you know, and the rush forward, and so on, and they had an assault course. Now you know the houses in Pulrose, by the Golf Course, it’s still there – if you go along you’ll see there’s a bank with trees in, well, at the top of that bank there’s a path and that was the motor bike assault course, and you used to be taken up this and of course at sixteen, I suppose, I wasn’t terribly strong and a 350 motor bike was extremely heavy on the arms, you know, anyway we went up there and when you go along there – I wonder if it’s still there, I’ve never looked – there were two manhole covers. Well, the point was – did you go over them or did you go between them. Well of course I made a mistake and went between them, and the under-hang of the motor bike caught between these two, oh, the struggle I had to get it out, you know. But I did love it and afterwards, when I joined the army and I was in the Rifle Brigade, which is a motorised infantry, part of our course, of course, was riding motor bikes, again 350, but I had a bit of an advantage in that I had already learned to do it in the Isle of Man for the Home Guard, but that was 8
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very exciting going along the roads in Yorkshire.
DC What was a typical session of Home Guard in the Isle of Man when you were younger, then?
Mr F Well, I can only remember going down to Tromode, I don’t think I remember ever taking part in any parade, but the other thing I do remember is going out to Balnahowe to shoot on the range, in 1941. We used to get on the train at the railway station with our rifles, and the rifles they gave us were Ross rifles, which were part of lease-lend from Canada …
DC Oh, really.
Mr F … and they were rather awkward because when you pulled the bolt back, unlike the Lee Enfield, the bolt would then stick on a little projection from the magazine underneath and you had to put your finger in to get the bolt back, so it was a bit of an awkward thing. Anyway we’d get out at the little halt at Balnahowe, which is still there, walk up the field and then we used to shoot out to sea. That’s all I can – the only other thing I can remember about the Manx Home Guard was, my father told me that the first CO of the Home Guard was Lieutenant Colonel G C Scott, ex Indian Army, a real, you know, very fine fellow really, but a typical Indian Army officer, and he came up to my father and he said, ‘Look, I’d like you to be Number 1 recruit.’ So my father said, ‘Well, I’m rather old for it, aren’t I? You won’t expect me to do anything?’ ‘Oh, no,’ he said, ‘we won’t expect you to do anything, but for publicity purposes we would like you as Number 1 recruit.’ So he had his uniform, his steel helmet and his respirator, and in our family album we’ve got a photograph which my mother took of my father, aged 64, in full uniform, and myself aged 16 with my rifle and helmet and so on, and underneath in the album I must have written at the time – ‘Hitler beware!’ – which amused my children in subsequent days very much. And then of course another thing we had to do was farming, compulsory farming.
DC Oh.
Mr F Yes, when I was in Shropshire we used to have to go, once a week, to help the farmers with beet singling. Well, beet singling is the most horrible torture you can imagine. 9
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DC Tell me about it.
Mr F Well, you have to – you stand and you have to lean down, I know we were young, but still it was very uncomfortable, and you have to single the beet and you leave, I think, just one leaf, and these beet fields are huge in Shropshire and …
DC So this is similar to docking turnips?
Mr F Absolutely, yes, and we had to do it. The only good thing about it was that we did get a jolly good tea and I think we got sixpence or a shilling or something for this slave labour. Well, they then said, ‘You must go to agricultural camp.’ So my father said, ‘Well, you know, he can do his farming in the Isle of Man,’ you see, so they agreed. So I so well remember going up to Taggart’s, at Cronk- y-Berry – you know where the new estate is?
DC Yes.
Mr F Well, the field there where they have the golf is where I went to reap the harvest.
DC Oh, really.
Mr F We had the old binder, you know, going round and we had to pick up the stooks – it was fascinating but very hard work, my word, and in those days of course they had big staffs, you know, the farm workers, and some of them who’d been in it all their lives, the stories they told, you know, and it was another world. And then we used to have a huge lunch and the farmer, Mr Taggart, was a sort of pater familias, you know, sitting at the head of the table, and his son, who was, I think a little big younger than I was, fifteen, who drove the tractor, he would be there; and his wife, and all the farm workers and we would be stuffing ourselves with these huge jam sandwiches. Anyway it gives you an idea of the mobilisation of Britain for war.
DC Yes, so then you went into the services, presumably for a relatively short time, towards the end of the war, was it?
Mr F I joined the army, I volunteered for the army on the 7th January 1943 and I well 10
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remember that morning. It was pitch black, the wind was howling and we went, you know what it’s like on a January morning in Douglas, to catch the 9 o’clock boat, you know, and you can imagine I wasn’t feeling terribly cheerful. And my father came with me and we got on the boat, and it was a dreadful passage, dreadful, and we got to York, and then I joined up at Fulford Barracks, and I was trained in England. I did all sorts of things. I was in the motor battalion and then we did our sort of mountaineering course in Scotland which was extremely strenuous. And then I went to Italy in November of that year and I was in Italy until not long before D Day – and I came back home for a commission and I think we landed at Gourock a week before D Day and we knew what was going to happen. The Clyde was full of battleships, it was so obvious it was amazing, and we sailed up the Clyde, I’ll never forget this day, rather euphoric I might say, having left a war zone ...
DC Yes, of course.
Mr F ... and on board there were three year men, men who’d been in the desert in ’39, you know, and they were coming back on leave, and as we sailed up the Clyde you could see the ships being built and there were a lot of women workers of course, in those days, and they were sending up balloons, you see, or they appeared to be balloons, and then all of a sudden we all realised what they were, they weren’t balloons, but they were things which could blow up like a balloon – I don’t think I need tell you what they were. So the troops were cheering at this, can you imagine it, it was all good natured humour, it wasn’t in anyway obscene, you know, the whole thing was a lot of young men, you know, it was fun. And then after that I went down to Kent for pre-OCTU training and of course we got – the only experience I ever had of bombing in Britain itself, apart from the Liverpool episode, was the V1 attack because when we went down to Ruton, in Kent, we occupied a camp which had been an invasion camp, and of course by that time it was July, August, and the campaign in France was well on the way. But the whole time we were there, we were there for six weeks at Ruton, the whole time we were there the V1s were coming over.
DC Tell me about V1s, I mean listeners won’t know ...
Mr F Well, the V1s were the Doodlebugs, they were the original jet bomb, rocket bomb, no not rocket, no V2s were the rockets, of course we never saw those, but the V1s were a terrible weapon and they made a terrible noise, you would see 11
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them coming over and I watched one of them being shot down by the RAF, I was in Maidstone on Saturday afternoon, we were in the pub and we could hear this thing coming over and we went out and we saw an RAF fighter plane shooting at it, we could see the flashes of the machine gun, it was pretty high, and he blew it up, which I understand was a very difficult thing to do. But on one occasion when we were outside our barrack hut cleaning our belts and things we suddenly heard one of these things, because they didn’t always fall – once the engine stopped you rushed for the shelter because three seconds later or four seconds later they would be down, they simply dived down ...
DC Really?
Mr F Yes. But some of them didn’t do that, some of them faded out slowly and we had one over our hut, it was about 30 feet in the air, well you can imagine the scare.
DC Of course.
Mr F In actual fact it flew on for about a quarter of a mile, but they had a lot of explosive in them and they mostly fell around the railway line between London – the Southern Railway, along there, you could see the wrecked houses all along. And I saw one – when I was in London – I saw one when I was standing in Trafalgar Square, dropping – again it was about a mile away – but it was a very serious threat.
DC And it was called the Doodlebug, was it?
Mr F Yes. If Hitler had had it in time, he could have seriously disrupted the invasion, but he didn’t. The campaign didn’t start until about a month after D Day.
DC What happened to you after these incidents then, did you get back into action again, into a war zone?
Mr F No, I got my commission – actually I was here at 166 OCTU [Officer Cadet Training Unit].
DC Oh, were you?
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Mr F Yes, yes, I was a lucky man, out of about – hundreds of men – I think there were six or seven who were sent here …
DC Back to the Isle of Man?
Mr F Yes.
DC To train officers in fact.
Mr F To train, yes, yes, I got my commission here and in the film that I’ve got there is a film of a passing out parade, not of mine, but of a Manx passing out parade, it’s very interesting, it was on the bus station, where the bus station is now.
DC Oh, right.
Mr F That’s where we used to drill, and the old fire tower used to be there and they used to make us go up the fire tower, and we had to jump down, and do you know the only man who refused was a chap who had the DCM which is a medal next door to the VC, so they couldn’t say anything to him …
DC And he wouldn’t do it?
Mr F … he wouldn’t do it.
DC Well, I mean, how high was this jump then?
Mr F Well, I can’t remember, but it seemed an awful long way, I can tell you, going down into the – but the other thing …
DC What did you jump into then?
Mr F Oh, they had the sheet.
DC The old blanket.
Mr F The blanket, yes. But the other thing I can very well remember is we had one run, and we were stationed in The Villiers, you see, the old Villiers, and we were turned out and we were told we were going to go for a run. And we ran up 13
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Victoria Street, turned into Athol Street, we ran along Athol Street down to the station and then along Peel Road right along until we got to the bottom of Bray Hill, you know, The Nook Café, there, and we all thought oh, well, of course we will be breaking into quick step soon, won’t we, you know, all the time we were thinking – we’re going to stop now. We never did …
DC Kept running?
Mr F We kept running right up past the Bishop’s House – and I’ll never forget one fellow collapsed and he went into the entrance to the Bishop’s House, just there, and do you know it turned out he had a heart complaint, so how he survived I don’t know. Anyway we ran to the bottom of Bray Hill and I thought well we must stop now – we didn’t – we were made to run up to the top and of course as you can imagine ranks had broken by then, people were helping each other, and eventually when we got to the top, St. Ninian’s, the PT sergeant, you know, one of these absolute sadists, that they were, said, ‘Right, now, I want to see the first man back at The Villiers Hotel,’ so we then ran down the hill in an absolute daze – I can remember it now – and when we got to the bottom I thought, ‘God, we’re nearly there,’ and then we had to double along the flat bit to The Villiers Hotel and then – collapse! But you know, it was quite tough that, quite tough.
DC I should think so.
Mr F But after that I trained in Yorkshire and then, of course, we were sent to India and VE Day actually took place when we were in the Red Sea.
DC Oh, really.
Mr F On the way to India – for the Japanese war, you see, it was too late for Europe so they said, ‘Right, you’re for Japan.’
DC Ah, yes, but you didn’t get much of that either.
Mr F No, I didn’t, we were very lucky, we landed and I was sent to Calcutta to the garrison battalion there, the 2nd Battalion York and Lancaster Regiment, and of course the bomb was dropped in August and that was the end of the war.
DC And you would be keen to get out of the forces or were you even considering 14
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maybe a military career, or not?
Mr F No, I never considered a military career, I enjoyed my time in the army very much, but I knew that things would be very different by the time you were forty, you know, it was great when you were a young man, it was good fun.
Break in recording
DC We got to the stage where, at the end of the second tape, we’d come to the end of war service and here you are then, presumably, Peter, back after the war in the Isle of Man, with a career almost charted for you from birth, was it?
Mr F Well, I wouldn’t exactly say that but certainly I never thought of being anything other than a lawyer and I don’t regret that decision, it was a profession for which I was, I think, well suited and which I enjoyed, I don’t regret it.
DC When did you commence then?
Mr F Well, I was articled to Deemster Bruce White McPherson, who afterwards became Second Deemster, in the firm of Kneale & Co., on the 12th August 1951, I became a partner in that firm in 1955 and I served as a partner there in partnership with Mr McPherson, as he then was, and Eric Kneale, and subsequently with Eric’s nephew, Peter Kneale, until 31st December 1969 when I left that firm to join Frank Johnson. He’d offered to sell his business, Gelling, Johnson & Co., to me, as he wished to retire. During my time in Kneale & Co, I did a lot of local authority work, Onchan Commissioners, Port Erin Commissioners, Port St. Mary, conveyancing, probate work, a certain amount of criminal work, of course the criminal work was pretty minor in those days, compared with what it is now. Crime did increase after the Second World War from the very peaceful set up that we had in the Island before the war. I think I told you the story about the theft which we suffered in the middle thirties when the doorbell at 4 Albert Terrace rang and there was a very tall policeman there, they used to be very tall in those days or perhaps I was very small, I don’t know which, and he had in his hand our front door mat, and a very elderly chap, who I think must have been a tramp because there were tramps in those days. And it appears that this poor old chap had stolen our front door mat, but he only got as far as the front door of the Museum where the policeman was standing, who arrested him and brought them all back to 4 Albert Terrace – innocent days, 15
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how different from what goes on today.
DC Yes. But in the ‘50s, I mean we think of lawyers today as earning vast fortunes, don’t we, I suppose, but were you earning huge amounts of money after the war?
Mr F No, there was a small conveyancing boom and I suppose the senior lawyers, for about ten years, enjoyed a modest level of prosperity. There were only twenty- three Advocates when I qualified and now I believe, with students, there’s well over a hundred which gives you an idea of how the profession has expanded. No, our incomes, even the one or two really senior men, were very modest. To give you an idea of the sort of fee that we got, I had to appear as plaintiff in a suit for recovery of ploughing fields in the parish of Marown. I think I spent the whole day – it was in the High Bailiff’s Court – I got one and a half guineas, you see. It was very modest and of course by 1957 the little post war boom had run itself out, the Island’s population had declined and I well remember the day when the managing clerk in our firm came up and reported to the senior partner, who told me about it, that our profits had declined by a third.
DC Were you paid on the basis of profits and turnover then or salaried, or I mean what was it?
Mr F Before I became a partner I received a salary, I think my first year was £350 and I suppose I slowly rose to about £500 a year by the time I was made a partner. It was all very, very small and when you became a partner of course you got a share. But the share might not prove to be very much more than the salary you’d been getting so it was fairly hard, but there was the opportunity, the more business you did, the more business you brought in, the more you got. But of course the problem was that business was so poor in the late ‘50s. The population had declined, it really was a very serious situation and it was only when John Brown Bolton abolished super tax that the climate began to change and we slowly began to feel, as the ‘60s proceeded, things began to improve. The population began to rise and of course the new resident influx was a great blessing for professional men and by the time I left Kneale & Co. we were definitely on the up and salaries were rising.
DC You told me, I think you told me, anyway, that when you were first married you actually lived at Bishopscourt. 16
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Mr F Yes, I was married in 1961 and I remember going into the Ellan Vannin Club, of which I was a member then, and Bishop Pollard used to go there and he said, ‘I hear you’re getting married, Peter,’ and I said, ‘yes,’ and he said, ‘have you got anywhere to live?’ And I said, ‘No,’ and he said, ‘would you like to take one of my flats at Bishopscourt? They’re empty, you can have it for thirty shillings a week,’ I think. So I said, ‘Yes,’ and we lived there for two and a half years. It was a delightful interlude really because Bishopscourt was lovely, but of course it was pretty tough living conditions, I mean coal fires, no central heating. We had no central heating at 4 Albert Terrace, I wasn’t used to central heating.
DC No, of course, well very few people were.
Mr F Very few people were, but it was lovely, but during that time Bishop Pollard made me church warden of the chapel, Bishopscourt Chapel, and it was during that time that the famous Convocation of the Clergy took place when Bishop Pollard, in his charge to the clergy and to the Governor, who was present, Governor Garvey, he complained bitterly that he’d not been able to appoint the archdeacon of his choice, the late Reverend Fred Cubbon. The reason for that was, of course, in this diocese the archdeacon is appointed by the Crown and not by the bishop. In all other dioceses in Britain, Church of England dioceses, the appointment of archdeacon is made by the bishop. Well, Bishop Pollard was very angry about this and it was a very embarrassing situation because he didn’t mince his words about what he felt about it. And I looked at Governor Garvey’s face, and I wondered what he was thinking. And when I got back home to my flat, I said to my wife – I told her what had happened – and I said I can just imagine Governor Garvey saying to Lady Garvey, ‘Who will rid me of this turbulent priest.’ It was quite a moment and it caused …
DC I mean the appointment had been made – was it Archdeacon Glass?
Mr F Yes, yes, a friend of mine, I was very fond of Archdeacon Glass, and of course I knew Fred Cubbon too, he was a very fine fellow. It was an embarrassing episode but of course these things happen in every profession.
DC Well, then of course you got much, much more involvement with the Church of England later, didn’t you, and into the Bishopscourt argument?
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Mr F Well, yes, you see what happened was, when I took over Frank Johnson’s business he told me that he wanted to retire from all his church appointments. And I took over the treasurership and the secretaryship of all the main Church Boards; the Church Commissioners, the DBF [Diocesan Board of Finance], and various other standing committees, legislative committees and so on. And then, in 1973, Frank indicated that he was not prepared to go on with the Vicar- Generalship any more, or any of his other offices. And I was sent for by Bishop Gordon, who offered me the job, and we spoke generally about church work. And then he said to me, somewhat to my surprise, that when he came to retire, which he indicated might only be in a few years, there would be a crisis about Bishopscourt, because recently his only gardener had given him notice that he expected to be paid on full trade union rates. Bishop Gordon said that this would mean it would make it almost impossible for any new bishop to live there, he simply wouldn’t be able to afford to do it. He explained to me that in England, in English dioceses, the Bishop’s house is maintained and provided by the Church authorities, whereas in the Isle of Man the Church itself provides and maintains Bishopscourt. Well, Church finances were already getting difficult by the early ‘70s and it was quite plain that the expenditure which would be required to maintain Bishopscourt and bring it up to standard would be horrendous. And of course that’s what it proved to be when we subsequently found out what we were faced with. And Bishop Gordon was really prepared to camp at Bishopscourt – he loved it.
DC Conditions were pretty grim then, were they?
Mr F Grim, the kitchen was terrible, the roof leaked and the sort of conditions that most modern people would never put up with, particularly the housewife, and you see before the war the bishop had a whole fleet of servants but after the war there was nobody. So that gave an indication of what was going to happen. Well, quite soon afterwards Bishop Gordon strained his heart and stated that he wished to retire. He duly did and Bishop Nicholls was offered the bishopric. Well, I well remember when he first came over I asked him to lunch in my house in Quarterbridge Road, and arranged for him and Mrs Nicholls to go out to Bishopscourt to see it, because under the protocol of those days the prospective bishop didn’t see his residence before he accepted the appointment. So Nicholls had already accepted the appointment but he hadn’t seen the house. So he came back and he had a look of horror on his face. He said to me, ‘Peter, no way can I accept the diocese if I have to live in that house. It’s huge, it’s 18
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rambling, a great deal of money will need to be spent on it, my wife certainly wouldn’t wish to live in conditions like that and you’ve got no income to maintain it, you’ve just got a few hundreds a year, it’s quite out of the question, something will have to be done about it.’ So it wasn’t a very cheerful lunch, as you can imagine, because I wondered what I was going to do.
DC Was it really your responsibility then, as Vicar-General?
Mr F No, but it was my responsibility, of course, to transmit what he had said to me to the Archdeacon, to the Chairman of the Diocesan Board of Finance, Stuart Collister, and to senior clergy, to the Church Commissioners and the people responsible for the diocese and arranging for the bishop’s residence.
DC What was their initial reaction to that, do you remember?
Mr F Well, their initial reaction, the initial reaction of Stuart Collister, the Chairman of the Diocesan Board of Finance, of people like the former Deemster Ramsey Johnson and others, was that it was inevitable that this was going to happen. Deemster Johnson, particularly, had always said and advised that the bishop must leave Bishopscourt, the Church cannot afford to keep him there, it was quite unsuitable, he should live in Douglas. And he arranged for the Church Act 1948 to be passed and in that Act leave was given to sell Bishopscourt with the consent of Tynwald, the Bishop, the Diocesan Synod, the Patron and so on, so the legal machinery was there. But it was never exercised because Bishop Pollard and Tynwald were very traditionally minded and they did not wish the bishop to live anywhere else other than he had always done at Bishopscourt and, in fact, the Keys – Tynwald – gave a grant of £10,000 in the ‘60s to repair, particularly, the tower of Bishopscourt. I think the majority feeling amongst the church authorities in the Isle of Man was that we would have to find a temporary residence for him and that Bishopscourt would have to be replaced. But there were those within the Church itself and in the Legislature and in the general public who were very much opposed to this change. Archdeacon Glass, for example, was much opposed to it. So we had to meet privately and we arranged for the Bishop to live temporarily in a rented house in Coburg Road. We then arranged for a meeting of the Diocesan Synod and after a heated debate, by a majority, I think it was 17 to 7, something like that, we agreed that Bishopscourt should be replaced.
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DC Or sold, in fact, then?
Mr F Yes, and that we would have to approach Tynwald for their consent. We did approach Tynwald and they gave their consent. I think the figures I previously gave were the Keys, by a majority of 17 to 7. The Diocesan Synod majority, I think, was certainly more that 50%, something like 60/40; and the upshot of it all was that the Government Property Trustees were instructed to offer £70,000 for Bishopscourt. At the same time we knew that we could purchase the present Bishop’s House on Quarterbridge Road for the same sum. The Church had no surplus funds to enable us to spend any more – we were absolutely dependent on the sale proceeds of Bishopscourt.
DC Bishopscourt, then – the decision is that it should be sold and another house is found for Bishop Vernon Nicholls.
Mr F Bishop Nicholls had seen the house in Quarterbridge Road, was very pleased with it, so accordingly we went ahead with the sale of Bishopscourt and the purchase of the Quarterbridge Road house. I may say that the whole Bishopscourt saga is rather longer than I have given it to you. There were various attempts made, on our part and on the part of the Government, to put forward a scheme whereunder the bishop could continue to live at Bishopscourt. There was one housing scheme, for example, which was put up. Then there was a suggestion that the Government itself should purchase Bishopscourt but retain it and keep the bishop there. Now the view of the majority, I think, there, was that the Government should not provide the bishop’s house, nor should they control us, and we had visions of the bishop out at Bishopscourt, divorced from the people. We felt that the modern generation did not have the same feeling about the bishop that the traditionalists did, both in the Legislature and amongst the general public. We didn’t think that the ordinary people would appreciate large sums of taxpayers’ money being spent on maintaining the bishop in Bishopscourt and I think that that view was valid, today. The only difference is that possibly if Bishopscourt had been retained it could perhaps have made a Diocesan Centre for a lot of different activities apart from the bishop’s residence there.
DC But the finance would have been a problem, wouldn’t it?
Mr F It would, and you have to remember that in the early 1970s the Manx 20
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Government was not the comparatively rich organization that it is today, you can’t judge the situation as things are today by what they were then. And you have to remember, of course, the grave financial crisis which the Church of England suffered in the early ‘80s when some £700m of capital was lost, for various reasons, by the Church Commissioners for England. The subsidies which we received from London, some £80,000, have now been removed altogether so we’re entirely on our own. And when you realise that one very senior civil servant spoke to me after the sale of Bishopscourt and he said to me, ‘You know, you’ve sold us a pup.’ So I said, ‘What do you mean by that?’ He said, ‘Well, we’ve had to spend £40,000 on the drains,’ so I just replied, ‘caveat emptor! You have rows of Government surveyors who looked at it, so don’t complain that you didn’t know what you were buying.’
DC Yes.
Mr F But that gives you an indication of what we would have been faced with, which we could not, in any way, have met.
DC And of course subsequent owners spent millions, I think, after that, didn’t they?
Mr F Exactly. I mean the Nunnery saga, if you like, was the same. I don’t think the Government were prepared to spend the money required to bring these places, particularly Bishopscourt, up to standard.
DC And here they are now hoping to get it back again.
Mr F Well, I know, I know.
DC It goes round in circles.
Mr F But you have to look at the circumstances at the time, don’t you?
DC And also of course I think you were still Vicar-General when the issue of the bishop’s vote arose in Tynwald.
Mr F Yes, well of course this is something that had been bubbling on the hob for long years, but finally, whilst I was still Vicar-General, in Bishop Attwell’s time, he was the bishop that followed Bishop Nicholls, there was a suggestion, as you 21
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know, that the bishop’s vote, even place on the Legislative Council, should be removed and all the usual arguments were rehearsed. And as I think you personally are aware, I appeared in Tynwald to oppose the Act and in fact we won the battle and the bishop’s position and vote was preserved, not simply because of love of the Church of England, I think, but also because conservatives in the Upper House don’t wish any alterations to be made and the bishop’s position is part of that, a perfectly legitimate stand to take. Apart from the other good arguments that there are, that the head of the Church of England should represent all shades of religious opinion in government. But one of the advantages, of course, of that victory then was that when I became a member of General Synod, which I did in the late ‘80s, I was there for three years, I found out from various senior clerics in that august body, that the position of the Diocese of Sodor and Man was under threat. There were many up there who felt it was too expensive and that it should be amalgamated with another English diocese. But they said that the reason why they’d agreed to the continuation of the Diocese was mostly because the Bishop of Sodor and Man formed part of the Manx Government and they felt that that was a tradition which should continue and that they wouldn’t wish to interrupt it. So I read with a certain amount of interest the recent debates wherein these questions were debated, because I knew very well that if the bishop did lose his place and vote that might be the end of the Diocese.
DC What would that mean to the Isle of Man?
Mr F Well, it would mean that we would become part of, probably, the Diocese of Liverpool. We might get an assistant bishop, there are such people, or we might simply be an archdeaconry, after all the Channel Islands is, they don’t have their own bishop. That’s what it would mean, and that, of course, I think, would be a great blow to traditional opinion in the Island and indeed a tragedy for the Island as a whole. But it looks as if that danger has now been mitigated, particularly when you consider that Bishop Jones will be retiring in two years’ time when he attains the age of 70. So the question as to the succession will soon come up again.
DC Another position you found yourself in after you retired was the Chairman of what was called Douglas 2000.
Mr F Yes, Douglas 2000 Partnership was formed in 1992, but for various reasons the 22
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then development manager resigned and there was a certain amount of friction within the Partnership itself and for, I think, at least at year Douglas 2000 didn’t operate. However the two sides, the Government side, the Corporation, and the private sector met together and they decided to re-form the Partnership, but for that purpose they felt they should have an independent chairman outside the Partnership. I was approached and asked if I would undertake this task. I realised that it was going to be quite a difficult one in view of what had gone on before, and of the feelings which had been aroused at the time of Mr Harris’ retirement …
DC It certainly hadn’t run smoothly before.
Mr F No. Anyway I took on the appointment and since then I like to think, and I think the general public would agree, that we’ve done some quite good work. The management body of the Partnership has met every month, under my chairmanship, we appointed a new development manager, a Mr Guy Wiltshire, we created a new business plan and I think during that time we have achieved quite a little. You might ask me well …
DC Well, what have you achieved – exactly, yes.
Mr F … what have you achieved.
DC What is there to be seen?
Mr F Exactly, well, I have the list here. There’s the public arts strategy, there was the Duke Street/Strand Street streetscape there, there was the Kewaigue School, the nature reserve, the Summerhill Glen wetlands scheme, the church towers and spires lighting – and this is on-going, of course – the hanging baskets in Douglas, litter awareness, the retail crime unit in conjunction with the Douglas Retail Association. Might I say that when I started as Chairman, the Douglas Retail Association was almost moribund. I think it only had a very few members, but with the help of our then development manager and our secretary, the Retail Association is now – I believe it has a membership of about seventy – it regularly meets and is a living and important organization once again and I think that the Partnership can claim some of the credit for that.
END OF INTERVIEW 23