Banda machine?
Eighty years ago, the Battle of Britain changed the course of history, thanks to the Hurricane and the Spitfire, says Leo Mckinstry
When I started teaching in the late 1970s, photocopiers were unheard of in schools – so the only way we could produce worksheets for students was to use the Banda machine.
This device was invented by Wilhelm Ritzerfeld in 1923 and was commonly used in schools, youth clubs, churches and other small organisations. This ‘Teacher’s Friend’ used spirit (a mixture of alcohols) in its process. Health and Safety would have a field day with it today, the odour hitting your nostrils well before you entered the door to the room that housed it. It would be foolhardy to close the windows as the fumes were extraordinarily overpowering and could make you high even before your students had shown their appreciation for your efforts!
And what an effort it was! No simply shutting a cover over a sheet and pressing ‘copy’ or sending something from the net to print. No – this beast involved both creativity and strength in bucketfuls.
First, once you had your inspiration for your worksheet, you created it on a double sheet, the second sheet having a thin coat of wax. This was transferred by the pressure of a biro onto the top sheet; the more artistically inclined could swap in other back sheets to create a more colourful effort.
Once this was done, the top sheet was detached from the bottom and fastened to the drum of the Banda machine. Now the fun started! Using a handle on the side, you turned this round, the speed depending on how urgently you needed the finished product. As the drum rotated, the wax was transferred onto paper via the spirit – and out shot a copy of your original, slightly damp from the spirit. After about 20 rotations, the colour would start to fade as your arm started to ache.
You would then dash down to your classroom, cradling your precious reprographics, and distribute them among your students, who would immediately each pick one up and take a long, long sniff before putting it down and gleefully informing you that you’d made a spelling mistake!
Towards the end of the 1980s, the Banda started to fall out of fashion as photocopiers became more economical to run. So ended the era of this faithful machine – unless there’s still the odd one lurking in a forgotten corner deep inside some echelon of learning…
galliard’s usual triple time. This combination is known as a ‘hemiola’. These English galliards are often set to words; the rhythm conveniently accommodates an iambic pentameter. The dance became secondary. Probably the most famous English galliard is The Earl of Essex Galliard by Dowland, set to the words ‘Can she excuse my wrongs with virtue’s cloak?’
You can find people trying to dance galliards on Youtube. It looks like camp Morris dancing. With the entire court dancing – a sea of shimmering silk and flashing jewels – it would have looked amazing. But, still, there is something inescapably ridiculous about it.
As a musical form, the galliard continues to flourish. I’ve played them in consorts of viols; they can be transferred to recorders, lutes, harpsichords or combinations of these. They are not easy to get to grips with. Sight-reading something in two-time while others are playing across you in three-time is like rubbing your head and patting your tummy. What you really need to do is get a feel for the piece’s swing and how your part fits into the overall groove.
Dowland never saw Essex dance with Elizabeth. He was exiled from the English court for decades for being an ‘obstinate’ (and possibly disloyal) papist. His endless letters to Burleigh’s son and successor, Robert Cecil, begging for forgiveness and a job, fell on deaf ears.
My theory is that, despairing, he dedicated his great galliard to Essex to cock a snook at Cecil. Cecil (later the Earl of Salisbury) had been instrumental in getting Essex executed; so Dowland felt a great affinity with Elizabeth’s last favourite. Cecil had ruined them both: the greatest courtier and the greatest composer of the age.
Cecil was a politician of genius, but he was also a five-foot hunchback and would have looked uniquely silly trying to dance a galliard. Only years later, just after Cecil died, was Dowland finally given a job at court. I hope his little joke gave him plenty of laughs. It cost him.
After the Second World War, the former German army commander Gerd von Rundstedt was asked in a television interview if Stalingrad had been the turning point in the conflict.
‘On no, it was the Battle of Britain. That was the first time we realised that we could be beaten and we were beaten and we didn’t like it,’ he replied.
His verdict was sound. The Battle of Britain (10th July-31st October 1940), whose 80th anniversary falls this summer, changed the course of history. If the Luftwaffe had gained the mastery of the skies over southern England in 1940, Hitler would have been able to enact his plan, code-named Operation Sealion, to mount a seaborne onslaught across the Channel.
More than 2,000 vessels stood ready in the occupied Channel ports to carry the vast invading army. But, by midSeptember, thanks to the heroism of the RAF, the German dreams of conquest had ended in failure. Fighter Command’s resistance forced the Nazi war machine to look eastwards to the Soviet Union, with ultimately disastrous consequences.
The scale of the challenge that confronted the RAF at the start of the battle was daunting. Not only had Nazi Germany proved invincible in its brutal advance across much of Europe, but its air force was far larger than Britain’s.
By the summer of 1940, the Luftwaffe under Goering comprised over 2,600 operational aircraft, including 1,200 bombers, 280 dive bombers and 980 fighters. Among this aerial armada was the single-engined Messerschmitt 109, one of the deadliest fighters in the world because of its speed at over 350mph and the lethal firepower from its cannons.
Against this colossal instrument of war, RAF Fighter Command had only around 900 operational planes, many of which were obsolescent, such as the Gloster Gladiator biplane. But this imbalance was outweighed by three crucial factors: the quality of the RAF’S two main fighters; the efficiency of its organisation; and the courage of its airmen. With these assets, Fighter Command turned what could have been this country’s darkest hour into our finest.
At the heart of Britain’s defences were the Supermarine Spitfire and Hawker Hurricane. Both were advanced monoplanes that had entered service in the late 1930s and had transformed the capability of the Fighter Command. Both had eight .303 Browning guns in their
‘And now the Last of the Few are down to one: Group Captain Paddy Hemingway’
wings, capable of delivering 2,400 rounds, and were powered by the reliable, potent Rolls-royce Merlin engine with its distinctive throb.
Combining grace with aggression, the Spitfire was the faster of the two, with a top speed that matched that of the Messerschmitt 109. The plane’s manoeuvrability made her a delight to fly, as George Unwin of 19 Squadron recalled: ‘There was no pushing or pulling or kicking. You breathed on it. She really was the perfect flying machine.’
The genius behind the Spitfire was the chief designer of the Supermarine company, Reginald Mitchell. A former locomotive engineer from Stoke, he built his aeronautical reputation by creating a world-beating series of fast seaplanes in the late 1920s. Yet, for all his talent, his first monoplane fighter design for the RAF, the Supermarine Type 224, had been poor – ‘a dog’s breakfast’, in the words of one pilot. Mitchell transformed the design, particularly by installing the Merlin engine and adopting a curved, elliptical wing.
The radical new plane performed superbly on its maiden flight on 5th March 1936. By then, the production of the Spitfire was plagued by difficulties, partly because the plane was so revolutionary; partly because Supermarine was a small company, with little experience of big contracts.
An attempt by the Government to galvanise output by the construction of a huge factory at Castle Bromwich, Birmingham, with the aim of turning out 1,000 Spitfires by June 1940, led only to more disappointment owing to weak management and a recalcitrant workforce.
But the Hawker Hurricane compensated for the Spitfire’s early limited numbers. Although 30mph slower than the Spitfire in level flight, it was an excellent gun platform, extremely robust and much easier to build.
The plane was the brainchild of Hawker’s irascible designer Sir Sydney Camm, a carpenter’s son from Berkshire, whose fertile mind was responsible for 52 types during his long career, including the vertical take-off Harrier.
The Hurricane was his most important contribution to British history. Even when the Spitfire’s manufacturing problems had been overcome by July 1940, thanks to the arrival of dynamic press baron Lord Beaverbrook at the Ministry of Aircraft Production, the Hurricane still made up the bulk of Fighter Command’s resources. There were 29 Hurricane squadrons compared with 19 Spitfire squadrons. During the battle itself, for every two German planes shot down by Spitfires, the Hurricanes brought down three.
‘It was the aircraft for the right season. It literally saved the country,’ said the great test pilot Eric Brown.
The effectiveness of these two planes was enhanced by the highly sophisticated control system created by the austere Fighter Command chief Sir Hugh Dowding. By use of the latest radio and wireless technology, information was filtered from radar stations and the Observer Corps through a network of operations rooms, so that fighter squadrons could be targeted swiftly at incoming Luftwaffe raids.
Throughout the battle, the Germans were bewildered at how the RAF always seemed to know their location. ‘I had no idea how the British could evolve and operate so intricate, so scientific and so rapid an organisation,’ recorded the US military attaché Raymond Lee after witnessing the Dowding control system in action.
But technical sophistication would have meant nothing without raw bravery, and the RAF had plenty.
One Hurricane pilot, James Nicholson, won the Victoria Cross for a successful pursuit of a twin-engine Messerschmitt 1100, even when his own plane was hit by cannon fire and engulfed in flames. The near-indestructible New Zealander Al Deere destroyed 17 enemy aircraft from May to August 1940, during which period he was shot down seven times, bailed out three times, collided with a Messerschmitt 109, had a Spitfire of his blown 150 yards by a bomb and had another explode just seconds after he had scrambled clear from its wreckage.
Altogether, 544 Fighter Command airmen died in the battle, while the entire death toll for the RAF, including other Commands, reached 1,542.
And now the Last of the Few are down to one: Group Captain John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway, 100, the only survivor after the death of Terry Clark, a Blenheim air gunner, who died on the eve of the 75th anniversary of VE Day in May, aged 101.
This valour was displayed as the campaign unfolded over three stages. The first, lasting from 10th July until mid-august, saw the Germans focus their attacks on the south coast and Channel shipping. Then Hermann Goering, the erratic head of the Luftwaffe, switched tactics. From Eagle Day, 13th August, his force concentrated on pulverising Fighter Command in the air and on the ground.
The RAF put up a ferocious struggle but, by early September, German superiority in numbers had made itself felt. For the RAF, men and machines were running short. Between 24th August and 6th September, a quarter of Fighter Command pilots were lost in action, while 295 planes were destroyed. The strain was particularly heavy on the Command’s 11 Group, based in the south-east under Keith Park.
But then the Luftwaffe made a catastrophic error. Thinking that Fighter Command had been knocked out, Goering ordered his force on 7th September to embark on the bombing of London. This was the start of the Blitz, and, though devastating for parts of the capital, the Luftwaffe’s move gave Park and Dowding crucial breathing space in which to regroup.
When the Germans tried to resume the assault on the southern airfields, Fighter Command was waiting. On 15th September, which subsequently became known as Battle of Britain Day, 56 Luftwaffe planes were downed, more than double the total of RAF losses. Two days later, the Führer ordered the postponement of Operation Sealion.
‘Hitler knows he will have to break us in this island or lose the war,’ Winston Churchill said in his majestic ‘finest hour’ speech on the eve of the Battle of Britain.
The men of Fighter Command turned that prophecy into a reality.
Peter Sellers, who died 40 years ago, was like a tree filled with birds – all those accents and voices, sounds and imitations. He began his career in the dubbing booth, playing Mexican bandits, Churchill, Humphrey Bogart, parrots – anything extraneous that needed adding anonymously to movie soundtracks. In the fifties, when he first made his name, he was an indispensable character on radio, appearing alongside Ted Ray and doing spots on Workers’ Playtime, making jokes about corsets.
Sellers’s huge facility culminated in The Goon Show, which is still beloved. With its gunfire, explosions and army jokes, it is the Second World War re-enacted as comedy. Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe, his co-stars, were unnerved by Sellers’s almost sinister ability to switch between all his roles – quavering Henry Crun, crusty Denis Bloodnok, squeaky adolescent Bluebottle and the rest – and perhaps one of the reasons he was so good, and remains a household name, is that in being so convincing at turning himself into other people, Sellers also happened to be off his head.
Sellers’s origins were in the gaudy, slightly musty music halls. His (Bradford) father had a ukulele act; his (Portuguese Jewish) mother was a quick-change artiste. He spent his childhood touring round shabby theatres and end-of-the pier concert rooms, as his parents appeared in shows at out-ofseason resorts such as Ilfracombe or Southsea. He remained deeply nostalgic for this magical past. In his work, there is always the exuberance of the magician and Victorian actor-manager, fond of the make-up box, false noses, limelight and exaggerated, often preposterous effects.
Yet where most of us, having grown up, settle on a single personality, a fixed destiny and a real self that is consistent from day to day, Sellers never did. He was psychologically fluid, dissatisfied, his accent and bodily mannerisms altering, as if he was still doing his impressions act on the stage or before the microphone. Wives and offspring would find this bewildering and painful.
But it was a wonderful gift for the cinema – and it has always been my contention that Sellers was to the sound era what Chaplin was to silent pictures. The more I have looked at his output, the more certain I am of this estimation and – though Michael Sheen is a good mimic, Steve Coogan has inherited Sellers’s darker, less tractable traits and Sacha Baron Cohen rivals the audacity – still none touches him. None has quite that core of truth.
Certainly no other actor, in his period, shifted from radio stardom to films in the way Sellers did. Kenneth Williams, Frankie Howerd and Tony Hancock’s screen careers were never on a comparable scale. Sellers, as a heavy-set Teddy Boy, is in Alec Guinness’s gang in The Ladykillers, a classic. He flourished in Boulting brothers pictures.
He made crime capers. But then came Lolita and Dr Strangelove with Stanley Kubrick. This was material in a different league – unprovincial, polished and incisively shocking.
The elevation to international stardom, however, would never be replicated today, political correctness being what it is. For The Millionairess, with Sophia Loren, in 1960, Sellers blacked up to play an Indian. It was while making The Millionairess that he also first showed signs of dangerous lunacy, an inability or disinclination to disentangle fantasy from truth.
As, in the film, Loren’s character falls in love with Sellers’s character, the actor fully believed, and was not to be dissuaded from the idea, that the actress wanted to leave her husband Carlo Ponti and be with him in real life. Sellers divorced his wife, abandoned his children, sold the family home, moved into a penthouse flat and decided to parade about as an eligible bachelor.
Well, it was the sixties and, in their exuberance and colour, Sellers’s films do capture something of that bright, irresponsible decade – the continental comedies, with the Henry Mancini brash soundtracks and Blake Edwards’s high spirits. The Pink Panther and A Shot in the Dark are wonderful, elegant and poised. Sellers’s underplaying is immensely skilful. He has no trouble stealing scenes from David Niven or George Sanders. What’s New Pussycat? and Casino Royale are period masterpieces, as is There’s a Girl in My Soup, with Goldie Hawn.
Critical wisdom would have you believe he then went into something of
Sellers was to the sound era what Chaplin was to silent pictures
an eclipse. But I have been re-watching films like Soft Beds, Hard Battles, The Magic Christian and The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu. Yes, the scripts and the narratives are often flat and laboured; but Sellers, especially in his multiple roles, is full of delicate touches and detail.
There is a lightness to his playing, a springiness, that is seldom seen in other comic British actors. He is never coarse. There’s always more to what he was doing to explore, I find. d He was thoroughly instinctive, too, which is why he couldn’t bear repeated takes and rehearsals. Inspiration either came to him at once or it didn’t – the very opposite of, say, Laurence Olivier, who could duplicate his effects time after time, his techniques very conscious and deliberate.
Maybe, in this sense, and at the finish, Sellers wasn’t an actor, in the usual sense of the term. He simply became all those different people. His first wife told me that, when he played a Welsh librarian, in Only Two Can Play, based on the Kingsley Amis novel, she had to live with a Welsh librarian for several months. He remained in character at home, in the car, in restaurants.
For this reason, I think, Sellers always found other people hard to cope with. He couldn’t orientate himself – his preferred companions were his gadgets, cameras and cars, which he bought and swapped at whim. He was a devoted home-movie maker, always recording everybody, putting a distance between himself and whatever he looked at down the lens. Editing the footage later, he could construct what he wanted his history to look like.
As the decades pass, his glorious misbehaviour in his private life fades – the women, the wives. One of his wives died just the other day: Miranda Quarry, who went on to become the Countess of Stockton. She sounded rather trying, the sort of socialite who never did a day’s work in her life and who, after choosing a pair of sunglasses, had to go and have a lie-down.
There was Britt Ekland, of course, who was as beautiful as a blue sky. Sellers went off her when he overheard her talking Swedish, even though she was Swedish. I like the films they made, The Bobo and After the Fox.
Then there was Lynne Frederick, an evil little gold-digger, only 29 years his junior. Although they were legally separated p at his death as, owing to heart t trouble, Sellers couldn’t sustain an erection, Lynne still m managed to cop his e entire estate, which s she got through on c cocaine and vodka.
She died in 1994, ag aged 39. Which is in intensely sad – but th the greatness of S Sellers is the intensity of the melancholy, d despite the comicality.
Look at those little sh shuffling figures in the fifties films, which are somehow damp and bleak. Or The Optimists, Hoffman and Being There, which are ghostly, curiously elusive.
There is something about Sellers always that is like the rain beating against windows; also, an awareness that life will not last very long, like cut flowers. He was only 54 when he died, on 24th July 1980.