The opening chapter for a forthcoming writing project. WATCH THIS SPACE
Milton Keynes The City of Legend
There are more legends per square mile in Milton Keynes than there are in any other town, city or village anywhere in the country. Let me tell you about them.
David
Ashford writing under the pen-name of Max Robinson
Are you old enough to remember this famous year ? I am and can tell you it was a very, very special time.
Harold Wilson was the Labour Party Prime Minister and Resident of 10 Downing Street. I lived in the Royal Borough of Sutton Coldfield where nobody voted anything but Conservative. I wasn’t old enough to vote but when I reached the age of twenty-one (The age of majority back then was two decades plus one year) there was only one box in which I would place my cross. To do other would see my family and friends disowning me. I remember my mother saying that if the Conservative Party put a donkey up for election he would still win.
Folk were always cracking jokes about Harold Wilson, even if they were not funny you were obliged to laugh.
Still a Conservative voter (Ooooppps !) today I regard Harold Wilson to be one of the greatest Prime Ministers we have ever had.
1967 and the Summer of Love, a protest against the war in Vietnam. Harold Wilson kept our country out of this folly refusing to sacrifice a generation, my generation. Where my generation be today, where would I be today if Harold Wilson had not been our prime minister ?
1967
the year I left school. I look a bit different in this photograph than I do in
the one on an earlier page !
I can remember the day so clearly. I did not wait for the school ‘bus but walked the three miles home. I looked up at the clear blue sky where lay the rest of my life, a life without the monotony and irrelevance of school.
In January 1967 Harold Wilson’s government designated an area of North Buckinghamshire to build a new city. I do not remember that item of news and any new development in North Buckinghamshire wherever that was had no importance in the life of this arrogant teenager !
1967, black and white flickering television and Radio Boring aka BBC. Pop music was fantastic but the same could not be said about radio and television. It took an imagination far, far greater than anything I could ever comprehend to come up with an idea for a university which interacted with its students via television. Harold Wilson conceived a University on Air which became the world’s largest university by student numbers, the Open University. And where was this crazy idea to be located ? In the New City of Milton Keynes ! Harold Wilson was a special prime minister was he not ? His son went on to become a Professor of Mathematics at the Open University in Milton Keynes.
THANK YOU Harold Wilson.
1967,
my father drove a Ford Corsair.
Ford
as in Ford Motors as in Henry Ford. A famous quote from Henry Ford:
So it is ! History is BUNK. History belongs in a stuffy old museum. Forget history, HERITAGE is what is important. Heritage is the foundation stone on which society stands. Heritage from decades, centuries, millennia in the past influences life every day in our present time. Milton Keynes is packed with heritage, heritage of which we can be so proud.
Another quote, this time from Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain:
IT MAY BE HISTORY, IT MAY BE ONLY A LEGEND, A TRADITION. IT MAY HAVE
HAPPENED, IT MAY NOT HAVE HAPPENED: BUT IT COULD HAVE HAPPENED.
To those words of genius I add my own thought IT DOES’T MATTER, IT IS HERITAGE.
I am a prolific writer, I have something like one hundred and twenty-five books on my Amazon Bookshelf. Writing has been a hobby of mine since I was a teenager. I was approaching my sixteenth birthday when The Beatles released Paperback Writer. Not particularly back then a fan of The Beatles I could not get the song out of my head. It planted within me an ambition to become a paperback writer. Well now I am. I am a prolific paperback writer.
Within my proliferation of scribble I have written so much about Milton Keynes which in 1971 became my adopted home. I grew old as an Mkeneyan, I watched it grow from infancy through adolescence into older age. However, it never was awarded a city charter. On 5th September 2020 Amazon added to my bookshelf Milton Dreams The City That Never Was. Within this I set out to spark a dream that one day we would truly become a city.
The opening page of this book is a letter from Buckingham Palace dated 18th October 2021. I became aware of a Milton Keynes Councillor shouting his mouth off about Milton Keynes finally becoming a city and how an application to Her Majesty should be made. I wrote to this gentleman offering my writing about the heritage of Milton Keynes, writing as you will soon read covers decades including those before there was a Milton Keynes Council, asking if we could meet. I did not receive the favour of a reply but at the end of the day that is normal for members of Milton Keynes Council.
I, therefore, sat down and very carefully made my own presentation to Buckingham Palace. It was a very lengthy presentation running to several thousand words dipping into my writing. My presentation I know was placed before Her Majesty.
Unlike Milton Keynes councillors Her Majesty could read and write.
Dear Mr Ashford
The Queen has asked me to thank you for your recent letter, in which you expressed your wish for Milton Keynes to be granted City Status, and you told Her Majesty of your pride in your local area.
It was most kind of you to share your personal thoughts and experiences with the Queen, and I send you my best wishes.
Yours sincerely
Mrs Katherine House Senior Correspondence Officer
Did my presentation play any part in the wonderful gift within Her Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee of a city charter for Milton Keynes ? Perhaps it did, perhaps it did not. I am proud to have done what I did but way beyond that is my pride in being an Mkeneyan. Within my writing Milton Dreams The City That Never Was I speak of the people in our city, it is within them I set out to spark the dream and now that dream has come true.
In 1967 Prime Minister Harold Wilson gave us the plan for a new city, the new city of Milton Keynes.
In
2022 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth gave us a New City within her Platinum Jubilee
celebrations. That was but a short space of time before Her Majesty left us.
The moment I learned of our being awarded a city charter I again wrote to
Buckingham Palace expressing my personal thanks. I receive a reply thanking me
for my thanks !
When I published Not The Concrete Cows in 1994 I said it was a kaleidoscope through the adolescent New City of Milton Keynes. A kaleidoscope is a picture of beauty made up from many individual colours. This new book is also a kaleidoscope and a picture of beauty as I invite you to join with me to look at the heritage upon which our infant new city stands, the infant New City of Milton Keynes created within Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee in 2022.
One final thought. A kaleidoscope is random, as you turn the tube the beautiful colours fall into an order of their own making. This book is a kaleidoscope through Milton Keynes The New City. Therefore, there is no contents page. Dip in and out as you fancy and as you twist the kaleidoscope. Enjoy.
David J B Ashford – writing under
the pen name of Max Robinson
A proud Mkeneyan
Coming soon:
The first chapter: DIRTY OLD TOWN - DIRTY NEW CITY.
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