PORNOGRAPHIC LITERATURE

[Stanley]

PORNOGRAPHIC LITERATURE

(18 May 2004)

No, you can stop the heavy breathing at the back of the room, this isn’t quite what you might think. One of the delights about the oneguyinbarlick site that is taking up so much of my time recently is that we have a wonderful system that logs all sorts of information about the people who visit the site. One of the interesting sections of the analysis is what keywords people put into the search engine that brought them to our site. I looked at this mornings list and did a double-take when I saw ‘My daughter caught me...’
I had to find out how this could work so I logged on to Google and put exactly the same search criteria in. Sure enough it threw up a link to an article on oneguy. I opened it and found it was one of my Barlick and Earby Times articles written last year in the aftermath of the death of my Jack Russell, Eigg. I was describing how my daughter caught me on my hands and knees, wearing Marigolds and cleaning Eigg hairs off the carpet! I had a good laugh about some sad person somewhere not getting quite what they were looking for.
I was telling Doc, who runs the site, about this and it struck me I had another good story about pornographic literature which is definitely an LKF (Little Known Fact.) It needs recording and sharing so here goes.
During the 1980s, my mate David Moore, principal of Nelson and Colne College, had Gawthorpe Hall under the care of the College. This was ostensibly part of the College’s outreach into the community but I used to pull David’s leg that what was actually going on was that the working class lad from Wigan wanted his own Stately Home to play with. Whatever, David was certainly a good man for the Hall as he was one of the driving forces behind the fund-raising needed to renovate the Great Barn and make it into an exhibition space. Another use he found for the Hall was to give his catering students practical experience of cooking for and serving at very high class dinner parties. In order to maximise this opportunity he used to invite some very high profile guests to these dinners and use them unmercifully to further the aims of the college.
One night in the early 1980s I found myself sitting at the same table as Lord Asa Briggs and Richard Hogarth, author of ‘The Uses of Literacy’. It was a wonderful meal and brilliant conversation and at one point I found myself sitting next to Richard Hogarth so I talked to him about his book,'The Uses of Literacy'. At one point he had examined the use of pornographic literature and as part of the chapter he had chosen some extracts from erotic and pornographic novels. I asked him whether he was aware that if you went in any college library, got his book out and dropped it on the table it always opened at the same page, where the extracts were printed. It was evidently one of the most popular chapters.
He was quite amused by this but then told me the LKF. He said that the last stage of publishing the book was to send it to the lawyers for them to read and comment on any possible problems. They came back at the last minute saying that the extracts Richard had chosen couldn’t possibly be used as it would leave the publishers liable to action in the courts from the original authors. Richard went home and had a bit of a think about this. Eventually he decided to write the pornographic extracts himself. He said it was remarkably easy and very enjoyable, he began to suspect he might have missed his true vocation! I checked with Richard years afterwards and he sent me a nice handwritten postcard confirming the story and saying that he too remembered the evening and had happy memories of Gawthorpe and David Moore. All right I’m name-dropping but it’s a good story and definitely an LKF of note. (18 May 2004)