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MATLOCK - revisited Summer 2004  The house I lived in in 1976. It used to be full of life and students. I was shocked to see a grey metal fence enclosing it. Maybe someone thought it might escape?  Rockside was one of the girls' halls of residence. It towered over Matlock like a Hammer Films castle. A young man on a motorbike would go a long way to visit a castle full of girls. Now almost every window is smashed. |
MATLOCK - reconsidered Spring 2007 Catching up with this page in 2007 I see there's a movie of Rockside here. The second half and maybe the beginning with the sheep portrays the holiday-flats functionality of Rockside. There's enough there to take you back though. What a big improvement from my previous pictures in 2004! That was a disaster. I don't know who was responsible for letting the vandals wreck the place but at least now, as the video shows, the interior is luxuriously refurbished. Now I can't tell you that I didn't prefer it when the students were giggling in the hallways in the early 70's. And I can't say I like the pink walls in the stairwells. I mainly remember running up the stairs to rather more basic rooms filled with posters, babes and Roxy Music on gramophones. For me it was better then. However, to be fair - I'm pleased that the old place is in such good order. It was always a magnificent building in a fabulous location and to see it getting the respect it deserves and for there to be life and purpose in it again is very gratifying. The thousands of students who went to Matlock College are gone now and that's a terrible shame and a loss to the town. Their youth and enthusiasm and their presence everywhere helped make a lovely place even better. The mix of locals and students gave Matlock tremendous vitality for decades.
Here's a song
I wrote about Matlock and those students and times now long gone. Save it to
your desktop if necessary.
I also found this lovely picture of Rockside in 1956
and the students, even then, knew how to rock.
Matlock College Derbyshire_The Early 1970s This is a beautifully made slideshow capturing some lovely people at a great time in their lives. A marvellous tribute. |
Matlock - recollections Spring 2009 ______________________________________________________ I first roared into Matlock in around 1972-73 to visit my friend who'd gone to the Teacher's Training College. It was a brilliantly sunny day and the A6 from Derby to Matlock was full of interesting towns with mills and shops. Birmingham was very different with a few isolated pockets of friends scattered over street-lit urban distances in which people didn't say, 'hello', and who might easily turn out to be violent. Matlock was the opposite - a kind of Postman Pat town in a Newsnight world. My first really significant memory of it was sitting on 'The Wishing Stone' with my friend and watching brightly T-shirted students climbing the hill from Drabbles Mill. Each one of them said 'Hello' to him as they went by. This amazed me. The college bar made a very distinct impression. So many young people together singing: Ai Ai Ai Ai! I found myself a girlfriend and didn't get home for a week. It was the most interesting social scene with the coolest and most fascinating people I'd ever met. Over the next few years I had a couple of other girlfriends and became so involved with Matlock that I moved there. I loved it. I absolutely and positively adored it. I lived in Malvern House on Smedley Street, a dilapidated property with the eccentric local furniture dealer, Mickey Morris, as my landlord. The door would knock and there'd be a cupboard in front of me and his voice saying, 'Pick it up. Yes, yes. Get your end.' Then, within minutes, I'd be in a convent, carrying 'my end' down a corridor and, do you know, I never wondered why. Another time, Mickey Morris got me to help him stack mattresses that he'd got stored in a church at Matlock Bath. 'Throw me over your shoulder!' he said and, ignoring that he was in his 80s, I pulled on his arm to chuck him headlong and he put a finger under my nose and lifted it. I couldn't throw him, of course. Just another day in the Matlock era... I played at the Crabtree Inn folk club frequently and found the gathered musicians and audience fascinating. Rosie Hardman, Downes and Beer and other guests took the roof off and yet there was always time for guests to do what would now be called 'open mike' spots. In those days we didn't need mikes and people were civilised enough to listen. In a large green van, I rumbled about in the hills delivering school meals for a living. There used to be an old, white barracks called Lynholmes Central Kitchens where the meals for the surrounding area were made and it was my job to distribute them. My boss, Nancy Farley, was the loveliest person and we must have chatted for hours every week. Her husband was very wise and his advice not to try to drive my van under some goalposts stopped me from doing some serious damage. At the same kitchens I worked with one Ernie Hawley whom I recall very fondly. His early morning tales (of fixing WWII aircraft carrier propellers with wood, for example) as he sat with a mug of steaming tea and his arm on the lagged pipe of the boiler, were always entertaining. To have been there singing with the crowd to John Gill's, 'I used to think I was Superman,' or to do an impromptu concert in the sun for the gathered cooks (who heckled and nicknamed me 'Our Else from Birminguuum') was to be in a good place at a good time. Frank Bithel of Wensely made exquisite cellos and violins. They'd be hanging on his washing line as the varnish dried. Always charming and friendly, he never minded me just strolling into his workshop to chat for an hour. That's how nice people were. When I had to leave those students and the lovely locals I worked with behind, it was the end of one of the happiest times of my life. Back in a Birmingham where my social circle is once again spread across street-lit dual carriageways of anonymous people, the value of those Matlock experiences grows in my mind with each passing decade. |
