Just Not Making the Grade

On more than one occasion I’ve bought some of the merchandise from the wonderful people at The Caravan Gallery who specialise in memorabilia celebrating (or at least marking for public attention) the unsung Britain: one-eyed dogs, elderly couples having sandwiches next to an A-road, out-of-season funfairs, the obligatory dead fir tree in a pot almost all of us seem to have somewhere around provided there’s enough space. Jan Williams is one of the creative geniuses behind this vision, and, as it turns out, her uncle was a creative genius in his own way and she and partner Chris Teasdale have told all their subscribers about it.

Ron Gittins lived for most of his life in a flat in a Victorian house in Oxton near Liverpool. Over the course of decades he turned it into a fantasy which combined bits of Roman temple with Napoleonic-era Nelson shrine. He carted bags of cement back home to turn a fireplace into a colossal lion’s mouth, and had to take down the two Egyptian figures which flanked the outside door before they collapsed. He wouldn’t let his landlord in in case changes had to be made and he had to move out, which was why for the last couple of years of his life he had no heating, cooked on a camping stove and slept in a sleeping bag in the hall. Ron had violently Tory opinions, walked around Oxton in what appears to be a suit designed as a publicity prop for BP with a papier-mache figure of Cleopatra, which – as it appears covered up with a cloth in the photos in the Liverpool Echo – was probably not entirely decent, and filled his home not just with gloriously inept art but also piles of what to anyone else would be junk, but to him was the raw material of an imaginary world.

I am put in mind of other such wonderful defiers of reality:

Andrew Dracup, the Bridgnorth tunneller who extended his modest Railway Street cottage into an underground Roman temple;

William Lyttle, the ‘Mole Man of Hackney’, whose excavations beneath his house on Mortimer Street (now owned by Sue Webster) were stopped after the surrounding pavements began to collapse; and, of course,

Colin Armstrong, whose Forbidden Corner folly-park at Tupgill, Yorkshire, I have seen or I wouldn’t have believed it.

My modest folly-making pales into insignificance: I’m just too sensible to make a real contribution to the world, I fear.