Moz Joins The Honorably Unemployed (23 September 1978)

When I was a boy of nine or ten I was playing with some other youngsters in one corner of a large pasture.  In the diagonally opposite corner cows were grazing.  We had been there for some time when one cow began making noises that told us something was amiss.  We trotted over and were just arriving when what turned out to be a calf fell from the cow.

I was astonished.  But one boy had a wit to run to the farmhouse about a quarter-mile away to tell the farmer.

While he was away we watched the cow clean up her offspring and my astonishment increased as the calf grew visibly before our eyes.  More than that, the little animal started getting to its feet and had managed to get up on two of them before the farmer arrived with a wheelbarrow bedded with straw.

As he lifted the calf into the barrow he berated us.  He said we must have been chasing the cows and that if he’d had time he would have given us “what for.”  As it was, he trundled off with calf and barrow, attended all the way by the cow.  We were indignant at being blamed for what we had not done.  Why, if we had not told him about it, he might not have known for hours.

I was sharply reminded of that incident many years later in Bletchley in a comical sort of way.  At that time and for years previously one of the best-known men in the district was Mr. Frank Hodgson, who farmed in the Shenley area.  He was a county alderman, a Winslow rural councillor, a stalwart of the National Farmers’ Union, etc, etc, and it was a big shock for the area when he was killed in a car crash on Wing hill.

Mr. Hodgson was broad of speech and manner, and I do not think I harm his memory by describing him as a rough diamond.

One day he came to our house at Water Eaton on some matter concerning the paper and seemed pleased to sit at ease and chat a while.  My wife was “expecting” shortly and had an intermittent pain in her back which made her look wan occasionally.  Mr. Hodgson must have noticed this and taken it as a sign of general apprehension, which it was not.  For on going out of the door he turned to her and told her not to worry.  Then he added: “It’s only like a cow dropping a cawf!”

Well, well.  “Our cawf” was duly “dropped” safe and sound at the Barratt, Northampton on February 28, 1949, and we had many a laugh about Mr. Hodgson’s remark afterwards.

Turning to other matters, older residents will remember Mr. E. Forbes Oldham, who for many years was the editorial representative of the now-defunct North Bucks Times in this neck of the woods.  Among other attributes, he was president of the working men’s club.  Either a bachelor or a widower, he lived at the old Wilberforce Temperance Hotel, though the late Mr. Joe Fennell told me how at times he had to steer him there and deposit him on the doorstep.  But of Mr. Oldham’s journalistic ability I have no doubt.  Rather like myself, he had a tit-bits mind and a chatty style, only he was better at it.

In 1907 and again 1908 he brought out a Fenny Stratford and District Year Book.  His prologues to these are still a joy to read.

I would like to have known him in his prime and he might even have inveigled me into take two drinks instead of one.

Among Mr. Oldham’s successors were Mr. Carl Moser for a few years before the war and myself for three years after it, when I too transferred to the up-and-coming Gazette under Mr. Moser’s editorship. We stayed together for the next 23 years – much of the time in the same room – and then he took the job with the Milton Keynes Development Corporation from which he has just recently retired.

I never called him “Carl,” just “Moz,” and he never called me “Harold,” but “Heppy,” or sometimes “Septimus,” which he averred was my second name, which it isn’t.

“Moz” had a remarkable capacity for not sitting still.  He was always either up on his feet or sitting down squirming.  Similarly, he was the picture of wrath one minute and the soul of geniality the next.  He thumped a typewriter like a riveter.

But he got through twice as much work as anybody else.

We also held identical views on what constituted a good local paper.

There was never a dull moment with him around.  He had a joke or what he called a “bon moser” for every occasion.

But I liked best to get him talking about his experiences as a prisoner of the Japanese, including the period spent on the construction of the notorious railway.  Not ??? the anecdotes were grim, ??? from it.

Just one sample.  One was a PoW was agog with news that they were all going to Formosa (now called Taiwan).  How did he know asked the officers?  Because a Japanese had told him he said.

But questioned more closely, it turned out that what the Japanese had said was “You for Moser go”.  Moser he went.

Anyway it is with pleasure that I welcome “Moz”, to the ranks of the honorary unemployed, and I sincerely hope that he and Mrs. Moz live long to enjoy it.