Ride a White Horse
Educational transitions into an Assassin
i
As I walked through the Wrekin College school gates for the last time, I already sensed I wasn't on course for University. I had made a half-hearted visit to a Bangor University open day with a vague and somewhat randomly romantic notion that I could study Marine Biology. My dad had offered leaflets about hotel management or options in the food and hospitality sector. But, neither deep sea fish nor deep fried fish were to be my path. My pessimistic A-level exam result prediction proved to come true. A combination of uninspired teaching input, unfocussed studies, boredom with rote learning of abstract scientific data and overriding interests in rock and pop music, and the school sixth form bar, guaranteed academic failure. I wasn't to attain a university degree for another thirty years, by which time I knew clearly that I wanted to pursue the arts and was in a position to make the most of it.
In the meanwhile it was back to Wem, to face my parents, who held a mixture of bafflement and forgiveness regarding my exam failures. I'm sure they were disappointed in my educational sixth-form collapse, but I have always been grateful that they never gave me a hard time about it. Despite my academic shortcomings, I took one thing from Wrekin College, that has always stood me in good stead. It was an extra-curricular, but ever since then, consistent factor in my life - a love of music. Learning to play guitar, performing a couple of live gigs and rehearsing at weekends in the school gym with my school rock band, are experiences that have continued to inspire and motivate me. Learning recently that our band rehearsal space, in the school Memorial Hall, was the same one that Beatles manager, Brian Epstein, had once acted in, only adds to the pleasure and significance for me.
(For more on Epstein at Wrekin see my posts: Palimpsests of Place and Bastilles, Anthems, Individualism).
Back from my ten year boarding school sojourn, it didn't take long to reintegrate with my local friends. There were only a limited number pubs to frequent in such a small town. Rock music, rather than educational background, was the overriding common denominator. The White Horse, once a place of adult mystery, visible from my bedroom on Noble Street, was now my regular de-mystified, down to earth, Wem Best Bitter drinking, social focus.
It feels strange to recall, as an eight year old, lying in bed, at night, hearing the pulsing of music from the upstairs function room transmitting to me across the pub cark park. It was a source of pleasure for me. If I was still awake I could hear people's animated voices leaving the pub and stumbling out onto the street below my window. To me the sounds were an echo of the future I knew could be exciting but couldn't yet understand. From the bubble of my childhood body, it was oddly reassuring, disturbing and mysterious all at the same time. That boy, dreaming and uncertain, wasn't to know how the threads of his life were to unspool. He was yet to know that he would lose his virginity to the daughter of the landlord of the White Horse; that he will dance his first awkward discos in that very same function room he could hear as a child; that he would then meet his first proper girlfriend and have his first taste of falling in love. His rock band will play a disastrous gig there. The band will survive and enjoy a bit of local minor success. The White Horse will become his social base for a couple years. It will be the place where he can grow his hair long, drink beer, join the darts and pool teams and make the transition from reluctant public schoolboy to regular late adolescent lad. He will reconnect with his friends, who rejected him when he was packed off to boarding school aged eight and they all stayed to attend the local Adam's Secondary Modern school. He will be forgiven his seeming privilege. He will come to feel less divided, more accepted, and more stoned.
Having no clear route in terms of either further education or employment, the obvious thing to do was to drink beer and form a band. There was enough talent in our local circle to find the necessary musicians. Coming up with band names is no easy task, you can spend hours throwing out random ideas and all of them are either taken, objectionable to someone in the band or plain silly. Turtle Z, anyone? Pretentious. We took the lazy route. I picked out a book I had recently read from my bedroom bookshelf: Assassin, a 1969 Central European political thriller by James Anderson. Sounds edgy and simple enough for a young rock band.
It will do, we agreed. Assassin played various North Shropshire pubs and venues over the next couple of years. Our White Horse gig was probably the low point. We had acquired a hunk of a mixing desk handed down from the Welsh heavy rock trio Budgie. A friend from Leicester, Tim Myers, had agreed to sound engineer our first gig using our own 'proper' mixer. It belonged to Budgie, it must be good, right? Well, bands, if they are on the up will get rid of their cheap quality gear, having battered it to death on the road, as soon as they can, for obvious reasons. Steve's vocal channel kept cutting out; everything else was too loud; the whole audience pinned themselves to the bar, as far away from the stage as possible; Steve walked off stage at some point, furious; I ploughed on regardless: wearing a woman's heavy fur coat over a blue rugby shirt, and in a fit of lead guitar ego, I attempted a guitar solo. It wasn't Eddie Van Halen. We cut the set short. Tim was sheepishly apologetic. We drowned our sorrows. I dumped the mixer in my parents' attic, ignoring it for years, until my Dad rang me up wanting to know what to do with it. In the end, I think he just got someone to take it away for free, to get rid of the thing. Thanks Budgie. I forgive them as they were the first band I ever saw, at the Liverpool Empire, in February 1978, the night before I saw Rush at the same venue.
ii
Shropshire, being a notably conservative county, inevitably had its elders and counsellors on high alert for any potentially unsettling, untamed, youthful energies. Any slight hint of loud music or adolescent high hormonal excitement would be met with concerns and calls for containment. Our upcoming Wem Town Hall gig attracted some concern and press responses. 'Assassin' say 'leather ban could kill rock concerts': a headline in a local newspaper that still makes me laugh. 'The ban, by Wem Town Council, is one of several conditions they want to impose on the six-months-old rock group.' The professed concern was that damage could be done to 'upholstery and furniture by studs and other metal worn with leathers.' I responded to a journalist, who rang me up: 'Leather is the thing with people who like rock,' said Roger. 'It's like a uniform, you might say.' Youngsters thought a ban on them was ridiculous and Roger said he didn't accept that leathers and studs did that much damage. The well attended gig went ahead, without a single upholstery pinprick, fracture in the furniture or moment of minor violence.
In 1981 we played what were probably our most enjoyable gigs, one of which was at the Whitchurch Civic Centre as part of the Whitchurch Festival. The Whitchurch Civic Centre is a few miles down the road from Wem. The modern Civic Centre was built on the same site as the original Whitchurch Town Hall which was designed in 1872 by Thomas Meakin Lockwood, the Cheshire architect who also designed Forncet, the family house my great grandfather built in Wem in 1878. So, Lockwood designed the building that the Beatles played in in 1963 and also the house that my father was brought up in. (See my Bearded Man of Barton post). I stayed in that house with my Gran when I was a child. She tucked me up in bed tight, having warmed the bed with a brass bed-warmer heated with embers from the fire. A safe shelter. Lockwood's uncle, Philip Causton Lockwood, was the 19th century town planner and designer who was responsible for the ornate aesthetic of the Brighton seafront with its bandstands, piers and promenade shelters. As a naive young man I once spent an uncomfortable, freezing night, trying to sleep in the promenade shelter in front of the Grand Hotel. I had turned up in Brighton late at night for some event the next day and hadn't realised that it was a bank holiday and therefore - no room at any of the inns. Warm shelter, cold shelter: praise to those who create any form of shelter, and to those who build venues for community gatherings, meetings and music.
In the build up to our appearance in Whitchurch, there was again plenty of local 'concern' and reserve. More dramatic headlines: Festival Rock Show 'flashpoint' warning. Inspector Greg Watson told the organising committee, It could become the flashpoint of the week. We want to avoid having to keep rushing up to settle fights. The determined Inspector also voiced concerns for the proposed carnival street procession and emergency vehicle access, saying it was likely to cause 'holy chaos' and 'we can't stand and watch the civic centre burn down.' Apart from being given a black eye by someone who had a fit of jealous rage when I went out with his ex-girlfriend, and a brief scuff with some out of town skinheads looking for trouble in Wem, I couldn't think of any serious contenders for fighting or town hall burning. Though, just for information, we did do songs called 'The Flame Still Burns', 'Smoke on the Water' and 'Flaming Youth,' and Wem Town Hall did burn down in 1995. But that was a long time after we played there.
iii
A significant section of Wem burnt down on 3rd March 1677. According to 19th century historian Samuel Garbet, Jane Churm, a fourteen year old girl, in a house opposite from where the Town Hall is located now,
went up stairs to fetch some fuel kept under a bed, in order to make a good fire against the return of her sister, Catherine Morris, of the New Street, who was washing linen at Oliver's Well. The inconsiderate girl whilst she was gathering the sticks together, stuck her candle in a twig that encompassed a spar, when catching the thatch, it set the house in flames; which being agitated by a violent tempestuous wind, soon defied all human means to extinguish them[1].
Over 500 properties were destroyed. After the 1995 fire, a notorious photograph, taken by local resident and sewage worker, Tony O'Rahilly, was in wide press circulation. It claimed to show the ghost of a girl looking through a doorway with the flames of the Town Hall roaring around her. It looked pretty convincing. People wondered if she was the ghost of Jane Churm, drawn back by the trauma of her terrible accident. Photographic analysis was inconclusive and right up until his death of heart attack in 2005 O'Rahilly claimed the image was not doctored. Then in 2010, Brian Lear, a retired taxi driver from Shrewsbury, spotted a reproduction of a 1920s postcard of Wem in the Shropshire Star. The card showed a girl, seemingly identical to the one in the ghost photo, standing in the doorway of The White Horse inn[2]. For me the mystery is not so much the 'ghost', but the fact that no one knows the cause of the Town Hall fire. Any searches to find out, online, are dominated by the ghost photo story. Then, who is the girl outside the White Horse, in her big mop cap, pinafore and black boots? Did she work at The White Horse; was she a maid or a schoolgirl?
The grade II listed White Horse Hotel closed in 2007 and became derelict. Despite going to auction in 2022 it has proved hard to sell and sadly remains in a decaying state.
[1] The History of Wem by Samuel Garbet. Wem 1818.
[2] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/has-the-mystery-of-the-wem-ghost-photograph-finally-been-solved-w26mqcltk59 (accessed 16 April 2021)