A celebration of British eccentricity

Sep 30 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

Throughout life, people leave us the clues and ideas behind their great works, as is revealed in a fascinating Liverpool archive about to be opened. David Charters reports

THE air is clean and the light glows sympathetically over a table in a hushed room at the heart of academe. As the door opens discreetly, the lady spreads documents across a polished table.

Lying among them are sheets of songs once performed by Frankie Vaughan, the high-kicking dandy, who crooned his way into the hearts of millions of women.

However, keen eyes leap a few feet down the table to sketches of a generously rounded young model, parading in under-garments designed to quicken the pulse and probably the fingers of any hot-blooded admirer.

“By Jove,” you think to yourself, “did these really belong to our Frankie?”

No, they didn’t. The answer is far more surprising than that. They are part of Basil Liddell Hart’s fashion collection, affording us a glimpse into another enthusiasm of the renowned military historian. When not considering German tank formations, he could cast an appreciative eye over the tight-lacing patterns on hour-glass corsets.

Well, each to his own – Jon Savage, chronicler of British punk rock in the late in 1970s, often read a short-lived fanzine called Sniffin’ Glue, devoted to the activities of spike-haired proto-musicians, inclined to decorate their pale and pimpled faces with ironmongery. An edition of the journal overlaps a birthday card from a fan called Shaz to Johnny Rotten, the former Sex Pistol and rebel, now regarded as an all-round good egg.

So, spread over this table, we have a rare celebration of eccentricity in British life – Sir Basil (1895-1970), clergyman’s son, World War One soldier and author of dozens of books and articles, including histories of both world wars; Jon Savage (born Jonathon Sage in 1953), the Cambridge-educated writer and broadcaster, best known for his punk history, England’s Dreaming, and, more recently, Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture 1875-1945; and the elegant Frankie Vaughan (1928-1999), master of the moonlight and one of the most popular singers and entertainers to emerge from Liverpool.

They are all part of the Special Collections and Archives department at Liverpool John Moores University, which has recently been modernised and extended. This £350,000 programme also involved the introduction of digital archiving, as well as highly-sensitive air conditioning, which controls the temperature and humidity for the protection of older documents and papers.

There will be an official opening of the new facilities at a date to be named in November, and members of the public can now examine items in the archive, if they have made a prior appointment.

In many ways, the collections reflect the university’s expertise in popular culture. There are posters of plays, such as Willie Russell’s Shirley Valentine, staged at the Everyman in 1986.

Thirty-six years before that, the same theatre was presenting a play called Brown Bitter, Wet Nellies and Scouse by Brian Jacques, a young Liverpool writer who would achieve international fame with his Redwall series of novels for children and adults.

The play’s manuscript is in the Everyman collection at the archive.

There is always a tingle in touching the typed papers on which a young writer’s early works were offered in hope and trepidation. The smudges, the crossings-out, the spelling mistakes, the cigarette burns, the tea-stains – all the signs of literary sweat never seen on a computer screen.

Sitting at the table is Emily Burningham, information officer for art and design and special collections and archives.

“In November, we will be launching our archive, having just had a refurbishment of the storage research area,” she says. “This is a joint venture between Learning and Information Services and the Faculty of Media, Arts and Social Sciences.