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Bob Copper was born on 6th January 1915 at Number One, Challoners Cottages, Northgate, Rottingdean. The event was the first of several notable changes that were to take place in the lives of his parents Jim and Daisy Copper all in quick succession that year.
Just four weeks after Bob's birth, Jim's mother Emily passed away at the graveside of her youngest son Charles in Rottingdean churchyard. Charles had died as a result of sports injury two years previously. A tall, muscular, fit man in his twenties, he had been the apple of his mother's eye. Emily had been visiting his graveside daily since the tragedy, and it was commonly held that she died of a broken heart.
Then, a month later, Jim's father James “Brasser” Copper, now in his seventieth year, decided to hand over to Jim the day-to-day running of the three-thousand-acre Rottingdean farm. The timing of this could not have been more of a challenge. There was a war on and both workers and horses on the farm had been systematically called-up and requisitioned by the military. This had put considerable pressures on those left behind. In actual fact the farm was never to fully recover from these losses. Even after the war ended the situation failed to significantly improve. Jim was to comment of the 1921 season, “It was a miracle to me that we ever got that harvest in”. Such was the scarcity of men and horses still, over three years after the end of the war.
So Bob was born into the family at a very critical time for Jim. But he was more than up to the task. Both he and Daisy were hard-working and resourceful and they somehow managed to doggedly plough through these difficult years. Much of their resilience clearly rubbed off on Bob. Dad's cheerful stoicism was legendary and he was a master of optimism. By way of illustration, when late in life he was afflicted with severe osteoporosis, having lost over five inches in height, he one day remarked cheerfully, with a twinkle in his eye, “You know, I've spent my whole life being a tall man and now it will be interesting to see what it is like to be short!”
Bob always maintained, somewhat implausibly, that he had been rather dull at school and that he found most subjects either incomprehensible or boring. He was later to write, “History was an insoluble mystery, arithmetic a series of impossible conundrums and geography as unintelligible as life itself.” (!) He enjoyed art classes though, and he most certainly had a flair for English composition. On leaving school just after Christmas 1928, aged 13, he started work for his father, flint-picking on the farm for just one shilling a day. The question of further education was not even considered. The daily bus-fare into Brighton itself was quite beyond the family's means. And attending Art College would have precluded the small but important contribution that he was now able to make to the family budget.
After a period of trying his hand at a wide variety of farm tasks, mostly light chores or “boys' jobs” - usually assisting the carters, stockmen and labourers - life suddenly gave Bob one of its periodic jolts, when both he and Jim were suddenly made redundant.
The Coppers, like many local families, had been working on the land in and around the village for hundreds of years. The family has been in the locality since the sixteenth century. But the massive farm sales of the late nineteen-twenties changed all this. Much of the farmland was to be developed for housing, and many of the old barns and other buildings down in the village itself were converted into high quality dwellings. So it was “all change” for the farming community, and Jim and Bob found employment on the sea-defence project that had started on the foreshore, along with many of their colleagues from the farm.
When the work, which of course was very much subject to the vagaries of climate, started to become too intermittent, Jim decided to set himself up as a handy-man and general carpenter, converting his garden shed into a workshop. Bob took a job as lather-boy in the barber's shop down in the high street. Being a cheery and convivial young man, he fitted in very well.
He often said that his time in the job was beneficial because it gave him a chance to get to know, and in many cases actually befriend, people who in some ways belonged to another world, a time gone by. Many had been contemporaries of his grandfather Brasser. Bob relished the tales and anecdotes that some of these old men told. He began to realize that he was witnessing something of a renaissance, after centuries during which, in rural communities at least, nothing much had changed in the pattern of life for the working people. They had been brought up to handle the tools and horse- and oxen-drawn farm implements that their Saxon forebears had used. Many of the local field names still in use were also from the Saxon period.
Being a lather-boy was not all plain sailing though. Some of the customers could be hard taskmasters. Many of the older men would come in for their once-weekly shave. This required a strong wrist and a sharp razor. One old boy was in the habit of commenting on the condition of the blade, “Wal, if I can keep from crying, that bugger 'll keep me from laughing!”
On one unforgettable day Dad was instructed to pay a house visit to shave one of the salon's elderly regulars whom had recently become bed-ridden. This would be a simple task for a keen young barber, it might be thought. Not so. He found himself in a creaky garret lit only by a guttering candle, shaving a corpse! “Just tidy him up a bit for the funeral, dearie,” croaks the bereaved wife. She had failed to mention, when arranging the appointment, that her husband had left this mortal coil the previous day.
By 1932 Bob had started to feel a restlessness coming upon him and, undoubtedly amid certain adolescent tensions at home, he decided to join the army. Boldly going in to the army recruiting office in Queens Road, Brighton, Bob was shown the current list of British regiments. When asked which one he would like to join he confidently pointed to the one at the top.
“That's the Life Guards,” the recruiting officer exclaimed, “the King's personal escort, they are nearly all titled, or at least well-connected!” Then he paused, “Just a minute though, I think they are enrolling troopers at the moment, do you know anything about horses?”
This marked the beginning of another very big change in the life of the young hopeful.
The Life Guards were fiercely proud of their long and illustrious history. Apart from battle training, duties included drilling at ceremonial parades in London as well as escorting the royal family on state occasions. Discipline was of the first order, the standards being amongst the highest in the world. All this was something of a challenge for a farm-boy from a downland village, but there were even greater challenges ahead.
The regiment quite clearly had far more than its fair share of gentlemen who prefer gentlemen. Having utterly no such tendencies himself, but being a particularly good-looking young man, he was forever fighting off propositions. Finally, having been informed by an officer that he simply could not afford to turn down the invitation to be personal assistant, or batman, to a very senior officer (who happened to be a duke), and having by now served two years, Bob bought out.
After this he worked in a barber shop in London's Tottenham Court Road for a while, but it was a mean and meagre city-dweller's existence, and home soon beckoned.
He was the first Copper in anyone's memory to have been in the army. This was to be expected in a family that had been engaged solely in farming, an industry which had been exempted from recruitment by virtue of the fact that it was recognised as the feeder of the nation. Jim was inordinately proud, and henceforth his son was invariably addressed as Trooper.
On returning to Rottingdean, Bob noticed that the village seemed to have shrunk. Many of the workforce were now unemployed. The Great Depression had reached out its strangling tentacles even to this quiet corner of the world. He spent a rather bleak period carrying out all manner of odd-jobs: paper rounds, milk deliveries, running errands for those who dwelt in the village's big houses, and even emptying their cesspits. This particular task was effected by a contraption that Jim had constructed utilising a wooden frame and an old semi-rotary hand-pump. The effluent was simply pumped out onto a nearby empty plot. It was therefore a operation that could only be carried out at night so as not to alarm the populace. Or the police.
It must have been with a great sigh of relief that Bob then landed a nice little summer job as another kind of lifeguard. Always having been a strong swimmer, and having an excellent knowledge of the foreshore, Bob was an ideal candidate as beach-lifeguard for the summer season. The long hot summer of 1936 was spent in this idyll. Photographs of the period show him with a wonderful mahogany tan, dressed in canvas ducks and a scanty shirt, the archetypal beach bum. And he was getting paid for it!
Apparently, on one notable occasion, this bronzed beach boy rather over-indulged in best bitter in the White Horse during a somewhat protracted lunch break. On returning to his place of duty on the beach, he launched his Brighton Borough Council wooden dinghy and soon drifted off to sleep in the warm afternoon sunshine. He awoke many miles out to sea just as the sun was setting. It transpired that he was by now out of sight of land and about twelve miles off the town of Eastbourne! It took half the night to row back to Rottingdean against the wind. This particular aberration was never repeated.
But sadly, the job held no future, so Bob decided to join the police, choosing the West Sussex force, after hearing some very favourable accounts from Ted Edlin, his old Rottingdean friend, similarly enrolled, who was now village bobby in the tiny village of Houghton, near Arundel in West Sussex. Whilst waiting to join up, Bob met his wife-to-be Marion “Joan” Deal. Seventeen years old, Joan was employed as a seamstress and sewing-machine operator at her father's establishment in nearby Peacehaven, then a recently begun new-town, high up on the windy cliffs two miles along the coast eastward from Rottingdean.
Bob and Joan had many interests in common including English literature, poetry and the new and exciting music from America. Modern technology allowed them to take portable wind-up gramophones with them on excursions to the Downs and beach. They were often accompanied on these trips by Louis Armstrong, the Andrews Sisters, the Deep River Boys and very often Bing Crosby whom Bob somewhat idolised.
Songs, in fact were never very far away. Jim and his family joyfully kept up the old tradition of harmony singing whenever the occasion allowed. Bob had a strong and tuneful voice which was a perfect complement to his father's resonant bass notes. For Christmas 1936 Jim presented Bob and older sister Joyce with a hand-written collection of the family repertoire, inscribed “To Topsy and Trooper”. Painstakingly scripted by Jim into an old surplus farm ledger book, it must have been many long hours in the making. It remains a treasured archive and useful source of reference.
Bob had already been subjected to the rigours of cavalry training. Incredibly, in the 1930s some of the methods which were still being used hadn't changed since Waterloo and still involved wielding a sabre whilst controlling a horse. One such exercise had the troopers charging full-tilt at a hessian and straw effigy of a man swinging by a rope, running it through with the sabre and quickly withdrawing and retaining the weapon. This was known by the ranks as “dummy-thrusting”.
By comparison basic training in the police force must have seemed a relatively benign affair. After picking up the rudiments of law enforcement at Maidstone and Hendon, Bob was ordered out on to the beat in Worthing, West Sussex. He sometimes recounted feeling terribly self-conscious walking down busy Chapel Street in his very formal blue uniform complete with high collar and tall helmet on that first afternoon. An early lesson and loss of poise occurred when he walked under a rather low shop-awning and suffered the indignity of having his hat knocked off!
There were many positive aspects to the job though, and by and large, Bob adapted to the new routine quite well. Day-shifts were more tolerable than those in the dead of night of course, not least because he was able to make friends with business people and shopkeepers in the town. Book-shops were of particular interest. There were several second-hand shops in Worthing and very often there arose an opportunity to pick up a second-hand book of local or literary interest for a few pence. Occasionally he heard of old farm tools or artefacts that were on sale for a small consideration, and a significant hoard of such gems was accrued.
A senior officer once caught a glimpse of his police note-book during a discussion on local criminals, spotting the legends SB and HB next to an address in West Worthing, and enquired on their significance. “Shop-breaking and house-breaking suspect, sir,” retorted Bob as quick as a flash. Actually the entry referred to a possible source of sheep-bells and horse-bells!
On duty on the sea-front one bank holiday Monday, a car pulled up, “Can you give us your name and number mate?” said the passenger. Apparently the occupants were engaged on a motor treasure-trove and had been instructed to log such verifiable details to prove that they had actually reached Worthing. “Bobby Copper, PC 48” came the reply. “Come on mate, they ain't going to believe that!” said the motorist, having now been shown Bob's warrant card, and rushing away to find a policeman with a more plausible name.
However, some of Bob's fellow officers were smitten with ambition and would stop at virtually nothing to secure a full note book. He was once advised by a fellow PC to hide in the bushes at dusk near a local factory as the shift turned out with the sole intention of booking the riders who had forgotten to turn on their bicycle lights. Bob found this particularly distasteful and preferred to give them a friendly reminder instead.
With this sort of attitude though, his monthly figures of arrests and cautions soon begun to fall behind, and some senior officers began to look askance. “Haven't you any ambition Copper?” said one in the canteen after a particularly bleak month. “Well, Sir, I wouldn't mind being the ferry-man at Bury.” replied Bob after a moment's thought.
This quip referred to a tiny village in the hinterland where an ancient yokel would row you across the river Arun for threepence – if you did not mind waiting, sometimes for a considerable time, until he had finished the job in hand. This lack of urgency was in complete contrast to Bob's busy world and it appealed to him immensely. Perhaps it was the deep-down affinity with the ploughmen and carters of Rottingdean, whose tempo of life had been dictated by the sedentary pace of the draught animals that they had managed.
The 1939 war brought a whole lot of complications to life in Southern England. From being in a quiet backwater, the inhabitants of the area gradually realised that they were sitting very close to something that bore a startling resemblance to the front line. Just across the narrow English Channel was apparently poised for invasion the most formidable armed force that the world had ever seen.
There were regular attacks from the air. Enemy bombers leaving the shores still laden would often dump any surplus ordinance on coastal towns, even though these were not targets of prime importance. It made more sense than taking it home. Into this rather hair-raising environment Bob brought his new wife, having married Joan on 10th May 1941; coincidently the date of the most intense air-raid ever mounted on London.
As the hostilities intensified, policemen as well as civilians were called up to join the combat forces. The higher ranking officers were not considered of course, and neither were those with special skills or duties. This provided an impetus to volunteer for further training. Also, having set up home in a comfortable police house in Broadwater, a Worthing suburb, and planning to start a family, it was unthinkable to be torn away to soldier abroad. So Bob volunteered to take up the newly vacant post of Coroner's Officer. This role entailed being the uniformed policeman in attendance to the Coroner. His job was to carry out post-mortem examinations on corpses that were subject to investigation to determine the exact cause of death. The job also required the officer to be present in any situation where human remains had been detected. Not surprisingly, there were not many applicants.
The Coroner at this time was much in demand. There were far more fatal incidents than usual as a consequence of the war, and not just through direct enemy action. There were more suicides, for example, often following some loss or bereavement. The old and frail were sometimes left to their own devices as a result of displacements, and this could lead to a lonely, ignominious end with often a prolonged delay before discovery.
The Coroner's added workload led him to instruct Bob as to how to carry out some of the rudimentary procedures in certain autopsies. So the young PC would don a surgical gown, glove-up and undertake these frightful tasks; such as circumcising the skull and removing the top of the cranium, removing the stomach and its contents or perhaps removing the heart for further examination. In his usual positive way, Bob said he found all this extremely interesting, and became engrossed, and in time gained a good deal of knowledge on the intricacies of the human body.
Whilst breakfasting one day at home in Goldsmith Road Bob and Joan witnessed a terrific air-battle being played out. A German fighter was involved in a prolonged dog-fight with an allied plane over the town and in-shore waters. It was obviously going to be a fight to the death. The two intrepid pilots kept disappearing over opposite horizons only to quickly re-appear flying straight at each other, all guns firing, and then swerving off at the last moment. This went on for a considerable time until finally the enemy plane was shot down.
There were no cheers in the breakfast room, only a sad realisation that one of these clearly equally brave men had to lose. Later that day it was Bob's task to retrieve the German airman's body from the beach where it had washed up. They had seen his parachute open when he bailed out, so his death had occurred outside the plane. It transpired that this young pilot had only suffered a very small wound to the leg and had probably bled to death having almost made it to the shore. Inside the flying jacket, amongst the ID papers, was a photo of his pretty sweetheart back home.
This incident struck a chord of sympathy with Bob, and pondering the futility of war during a long afternoon whilst he really should have been concentrating on a rather tedious lecture, he wrote this parody on There was a little girl, who had a little curl...
You surely wouldn't hurl
Your life if ' twere a pearl,
And it is! into flames fierce and torrid;
For when you are dead
You are very, very dead.
The finality of death is simply horrid.
He was once called to a flat where a young woman was thought to have committed suicide. A neighbour had gained access but found the bathroom door locked and no response from within. Bob found that by climbing on a chair and peering through the fan-light he could just make out the body in the blood-stained bath water. Taking a flying run at the door – he could yet be in time to save her life - he burst in. The woman in the bath jumped to her feet screaming at the top of her voice! She had fallen asleep while bathing, letting her vermilion-coloured library book slip beneath the water, effectively dyeing it blood-red. The same colour as Bob's face.
As the war effort deepened, the South Coast became base to a whole raft of reinforcements in the form of Allied military personnel. Many of these were Canadian. One morning Bob was sent out to Parham House, Storrington, a few miles north of Worthing. A shooting had been reported by the estate manager. The stately home had been requisitioned by the Government as a part of the war effort and was now occupied by the Canadian military. Magnificent in its parkland which included a sizeable lake, Parham, amongst many other treasures boasted one of the very few heronries in the county. The heron is of course, a protected bird. Bob interviewed a bemused Canadian soldier who, for the very life of him could not understand what was wrong with shooting, with his service rifle, a pesky bird that was clearly stealing fish from the ornamental lake.
Many of these Canadians were assembled to prepare for a top-secret operation known as Operation Jubilee. This was to be a surprise raid on the French port of Dieppe in August 1942. Its aim was to secure the fortifications and, with the help of air-cover by the RAF, to hold the town for an unspecified period and to gain intelligence and lure the Luftwaffe into an unwinnable air-battle. Sadly it all went wrong and over 3000 Allied servicemen were either killed or captured. Somehow the Germans had gained foreknowledge of the raid. The British Intelligence Service was persuaded that the information had been picked up by an agent in a private club on the south coast of England. The police were ordered to clamp down on such establishments to prevent any re-occurrence. Bob, by this time elevated to the rank of detective constable, was instructed to infiltrate as many of these local private clubs as possible and try to determine how they could be closed down using existing legal powers. As it transpired, the knowledge gained in this role was to prove invaluable to him after the war.
To allay suspicion when attempting to gain access to some of these institutions, Bob would attend as a prospective member accompanied by his young wife. Fellow officers would often use such a ploy, but almost invariably the female in question would be a stand-in and nearly always paid as an “escort”; Mother's services in this respect were not chargeable to expenses. And neither was it necessary to fake a level of mutual intimacy.
Having successfully infiltrated a prominent nearby country-club, Bob was so convinced that the place was handling contraband goods that he instigated a full-blown police raid. After an exhaustive search no illegal items had been detected, and the CID officers were assembled in the owner's office about to deliver a humiliating apology, when the floor board under Bob's feet gave a fortuitous lurch. The stash was thereby discovered, much to the aspiring Sexton Blake's relief.
One investigation for the CID led Bob to an expensive property in High Salvington, a select area of Worthing, to investigate a burglary. The lady of the house was Miss Erica Oxenham, middle-aged daughter of the poet John Oxenham. Bob admired her extensive library and for her part she discovered that, for a person from such a lowly calling, he was surprisingly well read. They discussed her father's work and Bob said that he had made a few attempts at verse himself. He later delivered some of these pieces for her to peruse. The result was the publication of one of the poems in an American magazine called Classmate produced in Cincinnati, Ohio. The poem, which was accompanied by a short biography and photo, was entitled Metropolis:-
I saw trees
Girt close about with paving stones,
With heads dejected, shrouded in a pall of fog.
Their maimed and tortured arms upheld
In protest 'gainst the hand that stemmed their glory.
(The trimmer's blade their splendour early checked.)I saw men
Existing in a dogma of convention.
Pruned, disfigured, faded men
Who walked and worked beneath a sunless sky,
Their vision bounded by a wall of self-security.I saw trees and I saw men
In London.
Joan had moved to Peacehaven with her parents Bert and Hannah in 1929 from Battersea in South London. Her father had taken the job of managing a café and bar. This property had been purchased for a knock-down price, due mainly to lack of trade, by the landlord of Bert's local pub in London. The bar was run as a club known as The Central. Within a year of Bert moving in, the unfortunate owner was tragically killed on his motorbike when someone suddenly opened a car door right in front of him on a busy London street. He had accrued several pubs in the capital as well as his Peacehaven investment. The beneficiaries of his estate put the Central Club and premises on the market.
For Bert, the prospect of having this uncertainty led him to raise a mortgage and purchase the freehold himself. It was a desperate move and the next decade was one of a perpetual struggle to service the loan and make ends meet in the middle of the Depression. He was compelled to re-mortgage at least three times, and as a consequence of a dwindling clientèle in the café he converted that side of the business into a drapers shop, renting it out to Brighton businessman and friend Bill Day. Joan was subsequently employed in the shop.
During the war, trade in the bar picked up. The club, in a former guise, had been known as the Kenya Club and still retained vestiges of its colonial theme. It particularly appealed to foreign servicemen billeted locally, especially Canadians. In fact one Canadian Army major halted his whole column of dozens of vehicles outside the Club en route to Newhaven harbour to say farewell to Bert and Hannah. The unit was taking part in Operation Jubilee. Many, including the Major, did not return.
Bert became a successful and popular landlord. All the officers and other ranks that attended the bar knew him as “Uncle Bert”, and the Central Club prospered. By the end of the war, with the mortgages cleared and even a little money in the bank, Bert was ready to take a back seat and enjoy semi-retirement. He asked Bob and Joan if they would care to come and manage the club for him.
Having now served ten years in the police force, and after a good deal of discussion, they considered it to be the right move. So Mr and Mrs Copper, now accompanied by their four-year-old daughter Jill, moved to Peacehaven.
“Neither begun nor finished,” was Jim Copper's disparaging assessment of the sprawl that was Peacehaven in the 1940s. “And they pinched all our best sheep-run!”
The community had always been the subject of mild derision both locally and on a wider basis. An Everyman's Guide of the 1930s stated haughtily, “The only positive thing that one can say of Peacehaven is that no such experiment has ever been repeated”. Some people liked it though. Some of us continue to do so.
In 1946, when Dad and Mother took up the position of landlord and landlady of the Club, the area was only partially developed. The coast road that it hugged was the most built-up feature of the community, but even here far less than half the building plots were occupied, and a few hundred yards into the hinterland it was very sparsely populated indeed. The “Dig for Victory” scheme during the Second World War had led to much of the undeveloped land, although formerly ear-marked for building, to be farmed again. It had the aura of an outback town, and with its grid-pattern street layout it was all somehow rather un-English.
This unusual dwelling place also had more than its fair share of eccentric residents. There was a proliferation of ex-military officer types for example, many of whom had clearly been affected psychologically by their war-time experiences. Also a good many erstwhile thespians, many of them spilled over from Brighton, with their flamboyant behaviour and garb, along with adventurers (retired) and quite a number of “black sheep” from the more colourful English middle class families. Many of these extraordinary people had, for one reason or another, taken to alcohol. In fact Peacehaven in the late 40s was an easy place to get a drink. At the time there were at least a dozen bars and clubs in the community, more than one for every 300 residents. In modern times, in the same but now much larger town, the proportion is one to every 2000 or so people.
The town had been planned and laid out by an entrepreneur called Charles Neville, originally from the North East of England, who had had a good deal of success in planning and development in Canada, where the grid-system street layout was the norm. He had, by the imposition of legal covenants, made it impossible to open any more public houses than those already established. Only the Dew Drop Inn and the Peacehaven Hotel were permitted to hold on-licences. So to get around the law, the wily settlers opened drinking clubs!
But the Great War had delayed the progress of the project at the outset, and then when it did start to take off in the 1920s, along came the Great Depression which set the scheme back for decades. Right up until about 1960 the area had almost no made-up roads and comprised a series of criss-crossing dirt tracks, some of which became impassable in winter. However, because there were so many empty plots in between the houses, it was always possible to find a way through, and meandering footpaths wended their way between the widely scattered buildings. The whole place had something of the Wild West about it.
There was still a vestige of the war-time spirit in the community in those days and a good deal of co-operation between residents. Sometimes on a quiet evening at the Club, Bob would telephone the owner of a similar establishment situated about a mile away to see how the land lay. If their club had more attendees at the time, then all at the Central would decamp to the other venue to save money on lighting and heating for the session, leaving a note on the door, “Meeting tonight at the Premier Club”. If Bob proved to have more patrons at the time of the call then, in due course there would be a sudden influx of customers from the other direction. The tactic of exaggerating the numbers involved for financial reasons was strictly forbidden.
The family used to enjoy bracing walks along the cliff-top and foreshore. On one occasion Bob came across a wooden beer-barrel on the beach, washed up after a storm. By a stroke of good luck it was un-broached and the beer inside in excellent condition. Bob duly hoisted it up on one shoulder and lugged it back to the Club. Having quite recently been a serving member of His Majesty's constabulary, he was acutely aware of the penalties that could be incurred for handling such contraband, so as a compromise he decided to throw a summer party for Club members and friends in the back garden, featuring the free beer. Halfway through this Bacchanalian romp the local bobby, PC Brookes, popped his head over the garden wall mildly enquiring as to the cause of the celebrations. Being new to the area, Bob had a sudden stomach-churning vision of himself in the dock on smuggling charges. But he need not have worried and it wasn't long before his erstwhile counterpart was in the thick of the festivities, dancing with the best of them! A long-lasting friendship developed between the two coppers, actual and nominative.
The annual Christmas Draw at the Club was a highlight of the calendar. In those frugal post-war days when food was still on ration, the prospect of fresh meat and poultry as prizes was a guarantee of bumper ticket sales and a busy Draw night a few days before Christmas. One of the Club's more flamboyant characters, who was something of a wheeler-dealer and an inveterate practical-joker, promised Bob half a dozen mallard ducks as a bonus prize one year, but said he would be rather late in delivering them through pressure of work. Bob duly saved a space on the prizes table for them with a label “Bonus Prize Six Oven-ready Ducklings”.
Just before the draw commenced, and the place packed with Club members, the front door was eased open and the unfortunate birds released to fly and waddle (and squirt) their way around the room accompanied by the squeals of alarmed customers and the attendant mayhem. The birds were finally cornered and the prize re-labelled “Six live ducks (under the snooker table).”
The same supplier brought in a fully grown farmyard goose, drawn but un-plucked, to the Club on another occasion and offered it for sale. The only taker was Bertie, a good-natured, but seldom completely sober, regular. Having had a rather privileged city upbringing he had never been faced with the prospect of preparing such a creature for the oven. As is often the case, in the assembled company there was no shortage of advice, and, loaded with both information and ale, the purchaser went home with the intention of laying on a nice surprise for his wife, who was working late.
She returned at midnight to find her husband, still fully dressed in bowler-hat and dinner jacket, singing at the top of his voice, himself immersed in a bath of tepid water whilst conscientiously engaged in plucking the goose.
Weekly visits were made to the family cottage at Northgate by Bob. On many of these occasions he was accompanied by Jill, and later myself. Some of my earliest memories are of tea-times at No. 1 with Jim (Pop) and Daisy (Grannie). Bob would inevitably have to hurry back to the Club to open up again at six o'clock for the evening session. Frequently late for the bus, he would hoist me on his shoulders and run down the High Street. In those days the buses had no passenger doors. Bob discovered that if he jumped on the rubber-covered road-switch just up the street from the junction, it would change the traffic lights to red on the Coast Road, thus enabling one to board the bus when it stopped at the lights. This ingenious expedient was quite often employed.
One day in 1950, whilst helping Bob with the cleaning at the Club, Jim said, “I 'eard one of our ol' songs on the wireless last week.”
“Did you, what sort of job did they make it?”
“Terrible, they 'ad the words all wrong f'r a start. They didn't know the tune and they 'ad some bloke tinkling away on a jo'anna (piano) in the background. I've a good mind to write in and complain!” This indignant response to the BBC broadcast transpired to have a positive effect on the progress of the coming Folk Revival.
Bob persuaded his father to ameliorate his sentiments somewhat and write to say that although the version differed from our own, it was clearly the same song and we had about fifty more like it. The response was instantaneous. A telegram arrived to announce that the Corporation was sending a reporter by train to Brighton station next day to talk about the song collection. Francis Frank Collinson became a friend and ally of the family singers and promoted their singing far and wide. The meeting led to a sound-broadcast in August 1950, which was repeated in October; an hour long documentary The Life of James Copper which was broadcast on the Home Service 11th September 1951; and in the following year an appearance on the stage of the Royal Albert Hall by Bob and Jim, Jim's older brother John, and John's son Ron.
These events marked a change in policy for the BBC. Until this time it was very rare to hear real country performers singing their own material on the air. The job had invariably been given to trained singers. This had imparted a formal, almost operatic quality to the music, and, by the same stroke had rendered the performances rather colourless. In reality many country singers were adding considerable depth and vitality to their songs with their natural singing styles.
Bob at this time was introduced to many BBC presenters and producers, including some rising stars, and he became keenly involved. Quite soon he had a staff number and “a corner of a desk” at the BBC's head office, Broadcasting House in Portland Place London W1.
Under the influence of Frank Collinson and a prominent BBC director, Jack Dillon, and perhaps partly inspired by the Copper family collection, the BBC started a programme of folk song collecting from the various regions of the British Isles. It was realised that many of the current generation of traditional folk singers (as opposed to revivalists) were fast ageing, and there was a real threat that much rich material was in danger of dying off with them. A team of collectors was sent forth, amongst them Bob who was to cover Sussex and Hampshire.
Some areas were so rich in material that it was decided to produce shows on site, featuring the folk artistes and making sound-recordings of the performances at local venues. One such event was held at the Central Club. Microphones were placed around the clubroom at strategic places, and in a rather informal way the show commenced. A good few locals had been invited to add authenticity and ambience. About half way through Jack Dillon sidled up to Bob and said, pressing a couple of five pound notes into his hand, “For goodness sake give them all a drink, everyone is so stiff!” This sum equalled a whole day's takings on a busy weekend and Bob quickly got to work.
Dillon called a break of half-an-hour to give the booze time to take effect and then launched into “Take two!” The second attempt was a huge improvement and Jack Dillon's generous gesture ensured that it wasn't only the extras that were loosened up, but the performers and presenters as well. The partying went on half the night. Bob said later that Jack was used to London prices and could not be expected to know that for the princely sum of ten pounds you could buy enough beer to float the fleet here in the provinces. Eighteen pints to the pound!
The BBC also offered generous expenses to travelling staff in those days and it made sense to run a car. Bob purchased a rather grand old Morris Major, a 1934 model with a long bonnet and running boards. To be perfectly truthful, it had seen better days, but it still had some life left in it, as well as a good deal of poise. During 1954 and 1955 many miles were covered in the Sussex and Hampshire countryside with The Major. These escapades were to be beautifully recounted in Bob's second book Songs and Southern Breezes.
Coming as he did from a rural village, Bob was ideal in the role of folk-song collector. A typical search would begin in a pub in the locality, where before long he would find himself in conversation with men of his father's ilk and generation. He found he could converse with them in a language that they could understand, but more than that, he had learnt how to be a good listener. Generally someone in the company would know a singer in the vicinity and by meticulously following-up these leads Bob would soon be making recordings on a portable machine of one of those survivors of a bye-gone age still singing the old songs.
He made some wonderful discoveries in Sussex, East and West, but the richest seam he found was in rural Hampshire. Here, it seemed time had stood still. Many farms for instance were still using draught horses for light chores around the villages. That some of these animals were kept as a sort of indulgence on the part of the landowners made no difference; the horses were still working, and the daily round was largely unchanged since the 1920s. Many of the grooms and stockmen had enjoyed continuous employment since the end of the First World War.
Working in this area made it impractical to return home each night, so Bob would put up in a likely-looking local hostelry. One such establishment became something of a favourite, the Bell Inn at Alresford. The landlord Billy Williams and his wife were about the same age as Bob and Joan and they became firm friends. It was while staying at the Bell that Bob heard of a nearby pub that was shortly becoming vacant, the H H Inn at Cheriton. This little jewel of a village straddled the upper reaches of the river Itchen and was rich in picturesque thatched cottages and towering deciduous trees. The village green was bordered by very attractive, and in many cases ancient dwellings many of which were accessed by their own private footbridges spanning the river, here only a dozen feet or so wide. “The Aitches” lay in the heart of this chocolate-box village.
Bob and Joan fell in love with the place, and by autumn 1955 Bob was landlord. With four other pubs in the village though, making a living here was a very much more difficult proposition than running the Central Club in Peacehaven. There were however, a great many compensations for the lack of cash. Several customers were able to supply provender, grown or caught locally (very often poached) in exchange for beer, and the pub had a very large vegetable garden of its own which Bob soon put to good use.
The family were also responsible for introducing ducks into the village, where they thrived in the brisk-running chalk streams. There were a few Aylesburys to start with, and then a breeding pair of Muscovys. The latter apparently led to a population explosion in the village and within a few years there were over seventy birds nesting in the area. Eventually they had to be rounded up and removed to a nearby park because of their unfortunate habit of nesting in people's thatches and causing all kinds of damage. Perhaps it was as well that by this time the Coppers had moved back to the Club in Peacehaven!
The couple who had been managing the Club in our absence had succeeded, in just two years to run it into the ground. The main beer supplier, based in Portsmouth, was owed over six hundred pounds, and trade levels were dismal. However, Bob and Joan soon got the business back on its feet, and friends old and new begun to flock to the Central. It was very hard work, but worthwhile, because Peacehaven was, at last starting to expand. Modern sanitation was installed in the form of main drains (instead of cesspits), and gradually most of the many avenues were made up with concrete. Several of the unused building plots were developed with new bungalows. The accompanying influx of settlers helped the business to once more become viable.
At this time Bob purchased a very small clinker-built dinghy called Kingfisher which was stored in the corner of a friend's yard down at Newhaven. Sometimes Bob and I would take the bus to the town and push the little craft, mounted on a light trailer, all the way down to the slipway at Sleeper's Hole in Newhaven Harbour, a distance of about half-a-mile, for launching. He acquired a few lobster pots and these would be dropped just outside the long West-Arm breakwater and left there for 24 hours, duly baited up. Occasionally we actually caught a lobster!
Keeping the boat in the centre of Newhaven wasn't exactly convenient, and after a couple of seasons of this rather rigorous regime Dad joined the Newhaven and Seaford Sailing Club which provided safe stowage for the little craft on the beach at Seaford. This new location proved to have its own shortcomings however. Its situation on a windswept shore did not provide many occasions in the year when one could easily launch a small craft. The sailing club, however, owned another venue at Piddinghoe Pond - actually a substantial lake - two miles inland. We had the craft transported to the new more sheltered location.
Now we were fully-fledged members of the sailing fraternity, Bob had thought it expedient to convert the little dinghy into a yacht. To serve as a mast a mighty oar from a long-boat was modified to fit, whilst the top and bottom jibs were fashioned from heavy duty bamboo cane. This gave the vessel something of the air of a Chinese junk. Lacking the wherewithal to purchase sail-cloth, we made do with second-hand calico. Mother spent much time sewing large plastic curtain rings on to the material to effect attachment to the jibs.
One gusty Spring day the whole family attended our maiden voyage at Piddinghoe. Bob and I were to launch the craft at the Clubhouse and to run down wind to join the other family members half a mile away on the eastern shore for a picnic. We set off at a cracking pace. The little Kingfisher was fairly scudding across the waves reaching formerly undreamt-of speeds. With the lug-sail set at a jaunty angle we were masters of our element. And then the curtain rings began to break. By the time we reached the picnic site, instead of a sail we were flying a huge off-white flag billowing forwards from the main-mast.
This was a rather inauspicious start to our sailing careers. The situation wasn't helped when a few weeks later, aided I'm certain by the overweight mast, we managed to capsize. Mother, who was present at the time, watching from the shore, was somewhat traumatised by this experience, and Bob's sailing days were thereby numbered.
About this time we acquired another car. It was an eight year old Morris Traveller, registered MNJ 213, complete with a wooden “shooting-brake” style back end. It served Bob well for many years. Although the vehicle was garaged overnight, it gradually succumbed to the damp. In fact the wood-work along the undersides of the long rear side-windows came to support an amazing abundance of flowering moss which, in season, gave the impression that the vehicle was equipped with window-boxes.
In 1962 Club member, Arthur Warrener, informed Bob that a property, Broom Cottage, was coming on the market in North Peacehaven (then known as the Peacehaven Annexe) which, although rather run down, was situated in its own very large garden of just under an acre. He was delighted to learn that it would be sold cheaply because it was being disposed of by the beneficiary of a will, Mrs Maton, and she was interested in a quick sell. North Peacehaven at this time was still semi-rural and very sparsely developed. Bob and Joan viewed the property and immediately decided to buy. Unfortunately, because the bungalow had been rather hastily constructed of breeze-blocks in a typical Peacehaven jerry-built fashion some 40 years before, no lender would provide a mortgage.
Joan's mother Hannah came to the rescue and advanced the requisite sum, two thousand one hundred and fifty pounds, which for an acre of potential building land was very inexpensive, even for that time. Mr and Mrs Copper were now the proud owners of their own country estate.
For about a year the property remained unoccupied. This included the bitterly cold winter of 1962 – 1963. With typical diligence Bob recorded the daily maximum temperature and for thirteen weeks it did not rise above freezing. Broom Cottage suffered seventeen burst water pipes. How well I remember that oft-quoted number!
Keen to move into the cottage, Bob employed a couple, Edna and Alan, to run the Club, and in the late summer of '63 we moved to the Annexe. We had been spending more and more time at the Cottage for many months, so it proved a pretty seamless transition .
Bob and Joan had worked very hard to restore the garden to order since the early spring, and we were now enjoying the fruits of their labours in the form of fresh fruit and vegetables. They also had ducks and chickens. The ducks had their own concrete-lined pond, which was kept hygienic by replenishing the water from our own surface-water cistern situated under the conservatory. According to Mrs Maton, who had known the property for years, this excellent water source had only run dry on one occasion and that was in the extraordinarily dry summer of 1947.
Bob used his newly-acquired spare time to very good purpose in a wide variety of ways. Already an accomplished line-drawer, he took up painting in acrylics. The subjects were mostly rural scenes that had been discovered on excursions in the Traveller. He composed poetry. He collected many records of Negro blues, folk and classical music. He made a study of botany through the works of Keble-Martin and others. He made his own beer, and then he started making home-made wine.
The situation at Broom Cottage differed from that in their previous two homes for Bob and Joan in one important respect. There was no bar.
Bob's wine-making became something of an industrial process. Every Friday he would make five gallons of white wine called Tamalier from a kit supplied by a local firm. Five gallons is thirty standard bottles. This pungent brew would be created in gallon glass jars called demijohns. It would happily ferment away for a month at room-temperature. At five weeks it would be filtered, bottled and drunk. Immediately.
All this meant that at any one time there were twenty-five demijohns of wine in various stages of fermentation scattered around the little bungalow. Everything smelled of yeast.
This somewhat excessive consumption of very young dry white wine - to say its taste was acerbic would be a gross understatement - turned out to have one very fruitful spin-off. Coming from a long line of lusty beer drinkers, Bob had developed a formidable tolerance to alcohol. Being a landlord had further enhanced this facility. However, the personal consumption of more than three bottles of vin nouveaux per day had started to make itself felt and he decided to give up drinking for a year. To mark this rather drastic adventure, Bob started a diary. For the whole of 1969 he wrote a comprehensive account of his activities and thoughts. Some entries are first class prose, and it became obvious that he had more than just an aptitude. Not content with going dry for a year, Bob extended his temperance for another twelve-month, and instead of keeping a journal he began the work which later was to become A Song for Every Season.
The main motivation for writing the book was to record, for future generations, the history of the family and its long association with the old ways, traditions and customs of Rottingdean. It was also a vehicle for Jim's writings of twenty years before. After the Second World War Bob had encouraged his father to set out some of the details of farming methods in use in the old days. At first Jim had demurred. How was he supposed to frame it? Dad had told him to write it as though he was telling the story to someone, such as himself, seated at the other end of the kitchen table. It worked. Jim's vivid accounts of farming practices, some unchanged from Saxon days, are the jewels in the crown of A Song for Every Season.
Although the album Bob and Ron Copper had been released in 1962, the family's folk singing in public had gone pretty much on the back burner. Joan had never taken to this style of music, and so Bob, always of the opinion that his relationship with her was of paramount importance, had, with a few exceptions, declined to take on singing engagements. Another reason for the lack of participation was that Ron's health had started to become troublesome. So throughout the sixties there were only a handful of engagements. I filled in for Ron at the Festival Hall in June 1965, launching my own path into folk music on my sixteenth birthday. We also journeyed to the West Country and performed at Plymouth Guildhall. Bob was keen to expand this side of his activities, and one way of doing that was to bring the audience to us, rather than the other way round. Anyway, Mother was not a particularly enthusiastic traveller.
So, impromptu folk-nights were commenced at the Club. We made a lot of new friends, many of whom were students at Sussex University, where there was a strong folk interest. Bob started to book guest performers to give the evenings a bit more depth. One of these groups was the Young Tradition, whom we had met at a folk festival in Southampton, and had shown a surprising knowledge and fondness for the family repertoire. They were also excellent harmony singers of much traditional material, including some of our own songs. Peter Bellamy in particular was a big fan of Bob's, and became a close friend. They shared many interests, notably Negro blues. Whenever the opportunity arose, Peter would visit us, with Royston and Heather, the other group members at first, and later on his own. He also particularly liked to visit Ron at the Queen Vic in Rottingdean and share a song or two in the Bottle and Jug bar.
On one of Peter's visits Bob let slip that he had written a good deal of material about the family history, and he was persuaded to lend the manuscript to Peter for perusal. Peter's reaction was fired with enthusiasm. He was adamant that Bob should seek publication, and offered to present it to Faber and Faber his own publishers. Fabers immediately turned it down. Bob said later that this irritated him so much that he was prompted to tidy up the work and offer it to a rival publishing house.
In Rottingdean lived Lady Burne-Jones, better known by her pen name Enid Bagnold. Lady Burne-Jones had attended one of our performances in the village, and been very encouraging in her reaction, as had her daughter Laurian. The subject of the family history had come up and the result was that Bob's book was taken up by William Heinemann, Lady B-J's publisher, after having been typed up by Laurian.
Having the book accepted was hugely encouraging for Bob, especially after the earlier rejection, and he set to with a will when his editor Rachael Monserrat at Heinemanns suggested rewriting much of the text so as to introduce the family songs. The book was finally published in October 1971 to much acclaim, largely by virtue of winning that year's Robert Pitman Award. This honour was bestowed annually on the author of the best first-published book in the opinion of an eminent panel. Bob at 56 was the oldest person ever to win it.
Heinemann's publicity machine ensured that the book was reviewed all over the English-speaking world. All but a couple of the many reviews were very favourable. A Song for Every Season became a best seller and Bob was asked to produce a follow-up while his name was in the public consciousness.
Fortunately, he had picked up the habit of making detailed notes while serving in the police force and there existed an obvious choice of material for him to draw on for the project: his folk-song collecting days for the BBC. The format was much the same, having the songs that he had collected being introduced in the narrative, and then being printed out, both words and music, in an appendix. This rich material was supplemented by a profile of an old acquaintance, Len Page of Falmer. Len's eccentric lifestyle and fund of anecdotes, although not songs, made him an ideal subject, and he subsequently became a close friend of all our family members. Songs and Southern Breezes was published in 1973.
Bob remembered Len Page from the nineteen-twenties. Based at nearby Falmer village, Len was at that time a contractor with his own traction engine and threshing machine. He had sometimes called at the family cottage at Northgate with objects for Jim to repair in the workshop. Len, by the 1970s, was semi-retired, but was still active and ran a small concern delivering logs. He was a cheery, quick-witted man and an enthusiastic beer drinker. He still lived in a somewhat dilapidated wooden showman's caravan parked in the corner of a meadow in Falmer, where it had stood since the early nineteen-twenties. The 'van was elaborately decorated with fluted ribs and etched and bevelled glass features and must have been a costly investment when new. But now it had fallen into a condition of considerable dilapidation. Heating and cooking were both catered for by a wood-burning stove. There was no electrical supply and lighting was provided by oil-lamp. There was a stand-pipe directly outside to facilitate the water supply and sanitation came in the form of an outside toilet termed an “earth-closet”.
Although his accommodation was so rudimentary, Len remained ever cheerful. He was great company and used to come out with deliberate and often hilarious misnomers to liven up the conversation. Some examples:- the Ford Zephyr became a Ford heifer, the island of Bermuda was termed “blue-murder” and the Cypriot primate Archbishop Makarios was “old Mike hairy-arse”! Len was certainly a colourful character.
Bob's third book Early to Rise (1976) is the story of his boyhood in Rottingdean. His easy prose and vivid descriptive style makes this literary effort, in the view of many, his best work. The book also contained a supplementary collection of the family songs.
Uncle Ron passed away in 1979 leaving an irreplaceable gap in the family singing line-up. His reverberating bass harmonies had been a perfect complement to Bob's strong tenor strains.
However, by this time we had been joined by my old motor-biking friend Jon Dudley, now married to Jill and an accomplished folk singer in his own right. Together with my wife Lynne, the five of us began to take on engagements singing the family songs in folk clubs and at the odd festival.
The folk evenings at the Club were now running monthly on every first Thursday. Over the eighteen years of its existence we hosted a wide cross-section of gifted folk artistes and groups. Bob was present at all these club meetings. He also attended Bob Lewis's Sussex Singaround every month. This was held in all sorts of (licensed) venues over the twenty or so years of its existence, including, in the early days, the Central Club.
Bob was involved with the media in a variety of ways over the years. He was interviewed and consulted by programme makers and journalists on a regular basis. Sadly, Mother's ill health by the early nineteen-eighties prevented much travelling. As a result most of Bob's connections with a wider public were somewhat constrained, but he was unflinching in his duty as Mum's constant companion and carer.
Very sadly, Mother, after years of being unwell, finally succumbed to cancer in the autumn of 1983. Bob was, of course, deeply affected at first; theirs had been an extremely intense relationship. It took the best part of a year for him to properly find his feet again.
Autumn 1984 saw the first of our walking holidays together. We were accompanied by Jon, as well as an old friend of Bob's, Mr Peter Mansfield, a retired Royal Marines officer. Bob planned the first of these walks to follow the path of the characters in one of his favourite books by Hillaire Belloc, The Four Men. Bob had in fact already walked most of this route solo on a brief holiday from the Club in January 1950. Fortuitously he had made copious notes on that trip, with the somewhat vague intention of one day writing them up. Now the opportunity to revive the project presented itself again and the outcome was Across Sussex with Belloc (1991). As in the case of his other published works, this book was laced with songs and poetry.
Bob enjoyed, happily, very good health well into old age. He planned and undertook a long series of major walks following up on our 1984 Across Sussex adventure. For six days every September the four of us undertook to walk all the river valleys of Sussex in three consecutive expeditions. We also traversed the Sussex border in two hits and likewise the Pilgrims Way. On the second of these Pilgrims Way walks in 1994 we were accompanied by our friend Piers Bishop, broadcaster and producer, Peter having sadly passed away earlier that year.
1994 also saw Bob's first excursion to America at the age of 79. For ten consecutive years he visited the USA several times each year singing and broadcasting, spreading the Rottingdean songs and stories to audiences that in Brasser's time would have been completely inaccessible. Jill, Jon and I accompanied him on most of these trips. On several occasions Bob received a standing ovation on introduction – especially if his age was mentioned! Possessing amazing stamina for an octogenarian, Bob sang in many American cities including Washington, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, San Diego, St Louis, Chicago, Boston, Memphis and Albuquerque. At an advanced age he became a seasoned world traveller.
In 1995 Jon produced The Copper Family Songbook, largely to meet demand from the American audiences. They also gobbled up any of Bob's existing publications and records. This prompted further recording sessions and the republication of A Song for Every Season. Our good friend Piers Bishop undertook the recordings and Jon Dudley produced them, as well as the book.
Bob Copper's Sussex was produced in 1997 and published by Sussex publisher Steve Benz. It contained a collection of stories and anecdotes with Rottingdean connections, as well as a selection of Bob's poems. Next year he contributed poems to caption the colour plates in a picture-book by local artist Mick Bensley, Watercolours of Sussex Past.
The new millennium saw Bob presented with an honorary MA at Sussex University by Sir Richard Attenborough. Sister Joyce, now in her ninetieth year, attended. In that esteemed company she blossomed!
At this time we prevailed on Bob to write a memoir. He had recently taken to writing on a computer. Having written about 30,000 words of the biography, it somehow disappeared from the machine. Before we could organise an engineer to take away the machine to be stripped down in order to retrieve the work, Bob announced that the service would not now be required as he had re-written the whole thing. He achieved this in just three weeks and claimed it had been much easier second time around!
Bob continued to be creative and productive right into the 21st century. In December 2001 he flew to New York again and made a programme with Pete Seeger the American folk-singer, himself a sprightly 82. The two got on together famously. The trips to America continued right up until August 2003.
Bob had made many contributions to broadcasting and was given a Lifetime Achievement award by the BBC.
A filmed documentary was conducted for much of the last year of Bob's life, entitled Coppersongs. It culminated with his investiture at Buckingham Palace with an MBE in the last week of March 2004. Three days later we had a Sunday luncheon gathering at Shelleys Hotel in Lewes to celebrate the award. All his extended family attended. He was on top form.
Next day he was taken ill and passed away in the afternoon, nine months short of his ninetieth birthday.
Bob's lifetime had spanned the transition of Rottingdean from a rural farming village into a bustling town-sized community. The local songs that he had heard his grandfather's generation singing in the field and parlour had become an historical curiosity, but by Bob's dedication to their preservation he had effected their journey into the modern era unchanged. This deed would have been roundly appreciated by both his Grandfather and Father.
I never met anyone with a more positive disposition than Dad. Like his father, Jim Copper, he had seen the destruction of a timeless way of life in a formerly idyllic rural corner of England. Jim's bleak observation, “Look at it! 'ouses, 'ouses, 'ouses on the land we used to plough. I don't like it. That makes me prostrate with dismal!” neatly summed up the thoughts of the majority of old Rottingdeaners. Bob's perspective was rather more practical.
“You never want to worry about a few more bungalows. Without them moving in, we would have had to move away to find work, most likely. And the old hills don't change!”
John Copper, July 2011
This page created on
21 July, 2011