Ken Campbell C466/35/F4805-A/Page 1 IMPORTANT Every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript, however no transcript is an exact translation of the spoken word, and this document is intended to be a guide to the original recording, not replace it. KEN CAMPBELL INTERVIEWED BY CATHY COURTNEY F4805 Side A [Interview with Ken Campbell, January the 17th 1995 at his London studio.] .....me where and when you were born? I was born in November 1939. Where is a slight mystery to me. You will find that any stories from my family change violently all the time. I believe I was born in Edgware, Middlesex. They change depending on who you talk to, or they change depending on what mood you're in? Both, but most exclusively who I was talking to, because it's usually my mother, and she is now dead. [BREAK IN RECORDING] .....an adenoidal but never mind. You are referring to yourself rather than your mother. Well I certainly wasn't referring to you. To me. And, why might you not have been born in Edgware, where else might you have been born? Well, because my mother did...on my mother's side there were story-tellers, and they enjoyed telling stories and they enjoyed their language, despite their lack of education, and the enjoyment I think came well in front of anything we call in your middle classes fact. So my mother moved it around for her own purposes. She told me that I was conceived in Epping Forest, which if you work it out must have been achieved on a very desperate February morning or February day, and I think I was, I think I was born in Edgware, Middlesex, Ken Campbell C466/35/F4805-A/Page 2 because we were...when were discussing such things it was discussing the Blitz, the moving around, my father going away, my mother moving from one burning house to another, and where she was at different times is not at all clear to me. I think I was born, I was actually born in Edgware. Do you think you were born in a hospital? I think I was born in a hospital, in Edgware. And did you know your mother's parents? How far back can you go? I knew my mother's father, who was a huge, in personality a huge and roguish man. I didn't know her mother very much, because she left him when my mother was about 12, because he mistreated her, the story goes, and set up with another woman - no she set up with another man called Brookman; interestingly not a common name but a name you will find on, I think you will find on either St. George's in the East, the Hawksmoor Church, or, the one in Spitalfields, I can't remember. There were a lot of, Brookman sounds like a German translation, a name that's moved from the German, and there are a lot of Germans, a big German community in the East End; they rapidly changed their names at the First World War, but they were in baking and bricklaying and things like that, or brick-making. And I think on my grandfather's side there was some German blood, also Flemish weavers, Huguenots. But the mother I can remember very very very vaguely, the grandmother, but interestingly enough they were apart for forty or fifty years and they died within about ten days of each other; when one died the other one hurt and the other one passed on. What was your mother's maiden name? York. I suspect that was an acquired name, because if they were Huguenots they may well have gone to York first to pick the name up, but in this area and this street my grandfather was born in, or the one just there. Can we just say for the tape which street we're in? It's in Gibraltar Walk, London E2 7LH. There are other Yorks around here, again not a common name, so they might be part of the same tribe. And do you know anything about your maternal grandfather or grandmother's growing up, do you know what their life had been? Ken Campbell C466/35/F4805-A/Page 3 Well, part of the...my family being East End had a very kind of Dickensian imagination, I mean they actually read a lot of Dickens; my grandfather, my mother's father read a great deal. As she put it, he would read himself sober every morning after a night's drinking, that's in his eighties, he would actually, he lay in bed in the suburbs reading Dickens and Trollope, and then go off to the library, i.e. the library in the pub, the following morning. So, what was the question? I've forgotten it. Whether you know anything about his background and upbringing and... Yes. So they tended to spin stories, and they had this...there are certain models in 19th century story-telling or novels that keep coming up. One is `lost and found' of course, the other is the poor child born of rich parents. Then there's the bastard son and all of that. Now, my grandfather on my mother's side was supposed to have been, first of all he was a rogue, secondly he was.....[BREAK IN RECORDING] .....someone in Waring & Gillow, but this is the story, this is the story. And so there was money, he once had money, you know, with a capital M, which could have been anything, you know, it could have been £400, but he once had money and drank it away. If you see all these capital letters, you know, at the top of a Dickens period chapter, it was all spelt out in those ways. It's interesting if you listen to music-hall songs and, in many ways the working class of course are more conservative than anybody and they do hang on to their folk roots if you like, or they hang on to the models that are passed down to them, and you can hear this coming through in the stories that my mother used to tell. So, maybe life's sorted itself out that way, I don't know. Before him came, his father was supposed to be somebody called `the Butcher of Aldgate' with a huge red beard, this is where it gets into fantasy, a huge red beard, and he had three daughters, one of whom was my great-aunt, and grandmother, and they all had flaming red hair, wouldn't they just? And coal heavers were known to sweep the streets, the pavements, the coal away from their dresses so that they could pass, and he is supposed to have put up, put the three girls up on a bar in one of the darkest pubs in the docks where people were, sailors would go in, `indulge themselves' my mother would say with her rolling eye, and they would come out of the top into the river with their throats cut, you know, after their money. [LAUGHS] So my mother, these three daughters were put on the counter and it's rumoured that my father would say, `Nobody fucking swears while my daughters are in the pub'. And it's rumoured [INAUDIBLE] even peed himself rather than move while my father... You know, it was all cowboy stuff. While your grandfather... Ken Campbell C466/35/F4805-A/Page 4 While my grandfather was in the pub, right. And he, now Dad[??]... It was either he or somebody else, went to America and was deported from New York in about 1902, which I think you've got to be going some to be deported from America for misbehaviour, came back to England and mysteriously, again it falls into these kind of novella stories, went to the country, you know, capital C, went to the country to look at the fine air, met a vicar's daughter, and seduced her and brought her back to England, right? So it's that kind of, those kind of stories. No way of checking up any of this, none at all, fortunately. And as far back as the stories go they are Londoners? Yes, but they, my mother said that they were called Yorkshire Yellowbellies, which is a strange term but it's supposed to mean that they had slightly Latin skin, as indeed I have were I to show you my belly, it's kind of dark. But I don't know what that means, Yorkshire Yellowbellies, and with the name York, who knows. They're supposed to go back to Huguenot weavers, but a lot of people in the East End claimed that, but in fact perhaps that's true too, because a great many people, there were a great many Huguenot weavers here. And, what was he like as a grandfather as far as you were concerned? I think he was wonderful. He smelt, he smelt of old man, and he smelt of tobacco, and he cackled and wheezed, and he had a stick, and he had a twinkly eye. Ruth, my wife, does not like the sound of him at all, she thinks I'm going to grow up into him, or grow down into him, or grow sideways into him, but he had, at 84 he had a 48-inch chest and he was called over at 82 to the doctor because he wasn't feeling well and the doctor saw my mother and said, `Well, I'm afraid Mr York will have to from now on, if he wishes to survive six months, live on steamed fish, milk liquids, and not touch alcohol.' And my mother said, `You're completely wasting your time, I will never be able to persuade him of this.' And he lived on for another two, three, four years after that.