Angel Pavement

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New Vaudeville Band, The The 1966 UK #1 single Winchester Cathedral was actually recorded by a group of studio musicians assembled by writer, producer and… Angel Pavement, like their fellow York renegades The Smoke, found their spiritual home as part of producer Monty Babson’s Morgan Blue Town stable of artists in the late 1960s.

The firm’s owner, Howard Dersingham, unfortunately, is oblivious to looming disaster. When he agrees to Golspie’s request for his commission to be paid before the customers have settled their bills, it is a recipe for the final disaster…yet he then wonders why the firm’s woes are suddenly compounded. “Golspie’s cleared out, he’s done us in,” he cries. “Oh, the rotten swine! God, I was a fool to trust that chap a yard. It’s damnably unfair, Smeeth. We’ve simply been swindled.” Resolutely middlebrow in tone (it flew off the shelf like hot cakes in the ‘tuppenny’ cornershop libraries of the time), the mood of Angel Pavement is notably grimmer than that of The Good Companions, registering the traumatic impact of 1929’s Great Depression. It retains a period charm.Edna Smeeth, their eighteen-year-old daughter. She lives for films and cannot hold a job because of her inability to resist complaining. Miss Verever, Mrs. Dersingham’s mother’s cousin, a forty-five-year-old, acid-tongued professional virgin. The fool in question is Howard Bromport Dersingham, the ineffective, conceited owner of Twigg & Dersingham, a man not really suited to the cut-and-thrust of business (he got into it almost by accident) and soon out of his depth in his dealings with an experienced swindler like Golspie. Lilian Matfield, the typist for the firm of Twigg & Dersingham. Aloof and cold to her fellow workers, she dominates them all, even though she is relatively new to the firm and only in her late twenties. She lives at the Burpenfield Club, a residence for working girls and women. Her relationships with her fellow boarders reveals much about her thinking. Incurably romantic, a dreamer of perfection, she is at first annoyed by Golspie, then fascinated by him. She dates him but refuses to spend a weekend at the coast with him. She later agrees to go, only to be left waiting in Victoria Station as he sails for South America. Plots and storylines are not his strong point. In a way this is a novel that hangs on a very flimsy plot. But character studies and reflections on human nature are his forte. I have rarely become more involved with or cared more about a group of folk who seemingly have very little to care about than in Angel Pavement. I even care about what happened to them after the book closes.

Band of Joy Band of Joy formed in 1966 in West Bromwich with Chris Brown (keyboards), Vernon Pereira (guitar) and singer Robert Plant… J. B. Priestley employs the arrival and departure of the mysterious Mr. Golspie as the frame in which to paint a panoramic portrait of London life in the midst of the Great Depression. When James Golspie, sole agent for a Balkan firm that cheaply produces veneers and inlays, arrives in London to find an outlet for his business, he is intrigued by the name Angel Pavement, a cul-de-sac in the heart of the business district of London called the City, and moves in on Twigg & Dersingham, a firm located there that is experiencing a sales decline which is only partly the result of the unfavorable economic climate. That Howard Dersingham, who fancies himself a gentleman, is not cut out for the business world enables Golspie to manipulate him with ease.At first appalled by the coarseness of Mr. Golspie, Lilian Matfield finds herself more and more attracted to him and fancies that he is responding to her in kind. Her life of quiet desperation, akin to those of the characters her Burpenfield neighbor has seen in a Chekhov play, continues its stultifying course once Mr. Golspie leaves her waiting at Victoria Station. He has forgotten the promised weekend on which she has pinned her hopes for romance. The extract under analysis is written by an English novelist, playwright and a broadcaster, John Boynton Priestly. “Angel Pavement” is his novel published in 1930. It brought him a great success. Some problems are touched in this novel, for example, a problem of upbringing, a generation gap. Generally, Priestly touches upon problems in the society, emphasizes its inconsistency. The extract dwells upon a common dinner of a family. Mr. Smeeth, the head of a family, compares the behaviour of his children, George and Edna, today and several years ago. Mrs. Pelumpton, Turgis’ landlady, who is short, broad, constantly busy, and much taken by her own sacrifices in an exasperating world. She is, however, kind to Turgis. Stanley Poole, a fifteen-year-old office boy at Twigg & Dersingham who fantasizes about aviation adventures and about becoming a detective.