The Flatulent Lap Dancer
To begin this epic tale we need a spot of local Broads history…
October 1958. Norfolk, England
The old coal barge Blackthorn made her way upriver on the Yare, heading for the coal fired power station at Thorpe in Norwich. Fully laden and low in the water she threw out quite a wash as she motored by, straining the ropes of pleasure craft moored on the main river in Brundall and in Thorpe. She was an ugly old barge, as dark and as dusty as her name and purpose imply.
Blackthorn’s crew was the traditional man and boy - Skipper ‘Johnnie’ Johnson and young Billy Clark. The trade of transporting coal by sea from Yorkshire to Norfolk has a long history and over the centuries many a fine sailor honed his skills in the shifty, shallow waters of the English east coast, including arguably one of the the finest, Captain James Cook who, like Billy, started as a lad working for a Whitby coal merchant. That Cook worked his way up through the ranks to become a revered seaman, navigator, cartographer and Fellow of the Royal Society was a remarkable achievement for the eighteenth century, or any era. Young Billy would not fly anywhere near as high.
Skipper Johnson was worried about the weather. Barometric pressure was low, it was coming up to springs and for the previous three days the wind had had some north in it. All the ingredients for a repeat of the great storm of early 1953, which the skipper remembered well. The ‘53 storm left a trail of devastation on the low lying English east coast with thousands of families made homeless and over three hundred deaths recorded including forty one in Felixstowe, fifty eight on Canvey Island at the northern mouth of the Thames and thirty seven in the small coastal village of Jaywick, at the northern edge of the Blackwater Estuary. Poor Jaywick was to remain an unlucky sort of place. Neither the skipper nor Billy will live long enough to register the fact but in 2010 the village will be assessed as the most deprived area in England.
Perhaps the skipper was over-worrying about the weather but he wanted the barge to be moored on the power station quay before the local high water point. That night he and Billy planned to visit The Ferry pub and he wanted to be sure the water level had started to go down again by the time they left for their evening’s entertainment. Should it come to a choice then, for the skipper, it was always ship first, fun second.
Time was pressing so for the last couple of miles before the power station they put on more throttle and the old barge gradually picked up speed. If they had a concern over river bank erosion then neither crew member gave voice to it and so the Blackthorn blundered on upriver, producing an even greater wash. There was (and still is) a small double dogleg as the river turned north before heading back west again along the short length of the southern side of Thorpe Island. At the start of this dogleg was a small cut, maybe a three hundred foot length of unnavigable water which didn’t go anywhere. The cut was tangled and overgrown, as if the land was in the process of mounting a successful takeover.
As she turned north to follow the dogleg the Blackthorn’s wash sent a perfectly angled mini tsunami into the cut, moving half sunken logs and other debris further in to become entangled once more in an even more inaccessible place. A sort of collateral damage perhaps - for every action there’s a reaction. Ashore, there was nobody around to see or to hear it but the three foot high tsunami made a swishing, whumphing sound as it careered up the cut. Nor was it heard by either crew member above the thumping of the barge’s engine.
At the western end of Thorpe Island they throttled back and started to slow, letting the barge’s momentum take them to the power station quay. They approached the point where the river divided into the Wensum which flowed through the city and the Yare which narrowed to flow around the city’s southern edge. They took the Wensum for the last few hundred feet to the quay. Skipper Johnson had been there many times before so the barge came to a standstill in just the right place, allowing Billy to step lightly ashore to secure their lines.
On the north bank of the Wensum the power station quay was only a couple of stone throws from the Carrow Road ground of Norwich City Football Club whose playing colours were, and still are, green and yellow leading to their nickname, The Canaries. It was still early in the 1958/9 season but in a few months it will become one of the club’s most celebrated times as they reach the semi-final of the FA Cup, a remarkable achievement for a third division club. In the semi-final they will lose to Luton Town, then of the first division, but not before they’ve taken their higher ranked opponents to a replay.
Even closer to the quay, definitely within a stone’s throw, stood a wooden hut, the humble beginnings of the recently formed Carrow Yacht Club whose members were all employees of Colmans of Norwich, a company based on the south side of the Wensum, opposite the power station. Colmans of Norwich, famed for their mustard and their enlightened attitude to employee well being. It was also a company with a strong boating link - in the early 1970s Timothy Colman will break the World Speed Sailing Record with his proa, Crossbow. And not many years later he’ll improve on it with the catamaran Crossbow 2. He will become Sir Timothy in 1996.
In a few year’s time the yacht club will move to a more prestigious site nearby, the triangle of land where the Yare and the Wensum converge to become the Yare down which, when unloaded, the barge Blackthorn will motor to Great Yarmouth (did the river gain an e or the town lose it?) before heading north back to Yorkshire, Skipper Johnson hoping that, by then, the northerly wind had become lighter otherwise it would be a wet and lumpy passage home.
It was just before 6pm and clear that the water level had started to go down. Time for the Blackthorn’s crew to head for the pub. They lowered the barge’s battered dinghy cum liferaft into the water and made themselves as presentable as folk living on a coal barge could. The Ferry pub was a another half mile up the Wensum. Most of the evening’s drinkers arrived at the pub on foot via King Street but the skipper and Billy did it the sailor’s way, rowing upriver to tie up at the pub quay and walking through the beer garden into the public bar.
Their evening was a jovial one. The skipper had a good voice and (unaccompanied) sung to much applause his party piece, a Yorkshire collier’s shanty. Later on, the two, unwisely, decided to finish their big night out with a walk down to the city end of King Street where £2 still bought a man a quick and fumbling encounter with a lady of the night in some dark place. Quick and fumbling it may have been for Billy but there would be a lasting legacy which he was to shamefacedly generalise as The Clap, or in more modern language, an STD, a sexually transmitted disease. In Billy’s case it was a bout of genital warts manifesting themselves at the outer tip of his penis.
It was good news in that the National Health Service (NHS) had been in operation for ten years by that time so Billy didn’t have to pay financially for his treatment but there was a high cost in embarrassment. When aboard, both the skipper and himself habitually leaned out to pee over the side of the barge (“wun ‘and fuh boat, wun ‘and fuh knob” as Billy was taught). Within the month the skipper was likening his crewman’s new urinary performance to water spraying from the rose of a watering can and Billy acquired the nickname which stayed with him for the rest of his life; Sprinkle.
So, what has this to do with lap dancers you ask? Well, Billy’s reproductive equipment still worked OK and he fathered a number of children. This book will be about his great grandson, Henry Herbert Hobson, who played rugby for Louth Second XV. Soon after he retired from playing he inherited a lap dancing club. He didn’t want to be associated with this sort of club so put it up for sale as soon as he could. Two years later, having had no serious enquiries, he decided to run the club down hoping that he’d be able to set its subsequent losses against tax demands on his other enterprises. The best way to do this, he decided, was to rename the club The Flatulent Lap Dancer. Yuk, who’d want to go there?
Ah, the best laid plans… by accident he’d found the nichest of markets. Within two weeks the police were harassing him about the hundreds of would-be customers queueing to get in. By week three club entry required booking some weeks in advance. By week five pre-bookings were commanding high prices in eBay auctions. Henry Haitch became a very rich man.
The eBook The Flatulent Lap Dancer is in writing, as they say.
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