30Sep
Well, when I was growing-up in the early Sixties, I lived in Yarmouth for a while - renting a cottage in South Street in the winter, and living aboard a lovely gaff cutter in Yarmouth Harbour during the summer months. Jenny and I had a new baby daughter - must have been 1966. We were newcomers - me from Freshwater, Jenny from Portsmouth - I'd met her at Art College there. And Yarmouth society - apart from the ever-present locals - then seemed to consist of two main types: retired ex-military and naval officers - the Old Colonels - I called them - and for me a much more glamorous and much smaller group of Bohemians. In the Sixties this was the Lewis family at Westport and the Taylor family at the Mill.
It was the Lewises I got to know first - I went to Grammar School with Kevin Lewis, the eldest son, and was befriended by his mum Judy - the lovely eccentric 1950s bohemian then about fifty I guess - and I was terrifically impressed by the painterly talent of Michael Lewis - the veterinary and wit. They lived in a large Victorian house called Westport - itself in an acre of so of gardens, orchards, and old stable blocks. the other Bohemians - the Taylors, lived in a tidal Mill alongside Mill Creek - this was at the southern tip of Yarmouth, and used to be addressed by a branch line railway detouring off the Freshwater-Yarmouth railway line.
The Mill was owned by the historian and socialist AJP Taylor and his wife Margaret (Mary) who was a painter and took-over the entire attic floor as her studio.
In the late 1940s Mary had had a brief passion for Dylan Thomas, and had loaned him some money to buy their coastaL house at Laugharne on the Taf Estuary. When Thomas paid her back in the early Fifties, Mary used some of the money to buy the Mill (about 600 pounds sterling in 1956)...
In the 1990s and after, the family used to let the Mill out to friends for parties and weekend breaks.Me and my mates rented this lovely 18th century building several times for parties, weekend breaks and as a holiday-home on the Island, so people like Ray Foulk, Roger Sewell and John Humphries were regular visitors there, and I had several large parties for my 50th - 60th birthdays. It was just great for parties - the dozen or so bedrooms and the attic studio rooms meant you could easily accommodate 50-60 people there - more if they bunked-up. It had a full-size billiard and snooker table on the first floor - three huge kitchen-come-dining rooms on the ground floor, and several other lounge-rooms for party spin-offs, music and film-viewing.
And with its bohemian owners and guests the Mill became a repository and kind of museum for personal artefacts, posters, books and cultural paraphernalia (guitars, huge valve-short-wave multi-band radios, statuettes, fag packets, guttered candles, - a first edition of Finnegans Wake I remember...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejmLQiMMRVA
And later it was my two mates the singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock, and the playwright Julia Darling who were both to live next door to me at Plevna House, then later frequent the Mill for holidays and weekends...
The playwright and wonderful intellectual Julia Darling c1980 - Julia and her friend Jan brought beauty and wit to Yarmouth.
The Mill was and is I guess - a living multi-dimensional cultural museum, studded with posters, books, artefacts, memorabilia and most of all memories of lovely men and beautiful women - and a bit of sex and drugs and rock'n'roll too if the truth were to be known.
As you can see. the Mill is a microcosm of Bohemian Yarmouth. Long may it remain so...
Comments