Jake’s cenotaph

[mark sturdy]

Some of you might be familar with Jake’s great unreleased song ‘The Cenotaph’, which was recorded for ‘The Camera and the Song’ in the early ’70s and subsequently for a radio broadcast in the ’80s. On the radio broadcast, he talks about the inspiration to the song – growing up ‘haunted by the first world war’, and waiting for the village bus with his mother who would comment on the cenotaph near the bus stop – “they should have the names of the wives, those poor buggers are all dead”.

Well now. Jake grew up in the village of Clifford in Yorkshire, and a bit of Googling show that there is indeed a war memorial in the centre of the village, just as the song says on a slab of Yorkshire granite – although from the pictures I can’t make out whether there’s a Latin epitaph…

Flickr link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30120216@N07/8294085494/sizes/z/
Google Streetview: https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=willow+lane+clifford&ll=53.892883,-1.351447&spn=0.007587,0.01929&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&hnear=Willow+Ln,+Clifford,+Wetherby+LS23,+United+Kingdom&gl=uk&t=h&z=16&layer=c&cbll=53.892791,-1.351354&panoid=Ju03zLu56Jr6E1U9BkakZw&cbp=12,256.12,,0,5.6

Streetview also reveals that there’s still a bus stop nearby!

[Ian Burdon]

On the film version of the Camera and the Song, one of the memorials filmed is the one at Grassington. The names he uses at the beginning are not to be trusted – “Susan Haverley” for instance was the mother of Thomas Haverley. When I performed the song I used to have a look at the local war memorial where we were playing and use some names from it plus the only one of my family I know to have died in the Great War, Frank Weston of the Sherwood Foresters

[mark sturdy]

Thanks Ian.

And speaking of name-dropping – I’ve just chanced upon the fact that Ivy Armitage (of Personal Column fame, she who thanked all their friends for kindnesses when times were hard) happens to share a name with Jake’s mother.

[Paul]

This is very interesting. What is the source for the fact that Jake lived in Clifford? The documentary states that Jake was brought up on the outskirts of Leeds.

[mark sturdy]

I can’t remember how I know that, but I know I know it!

It probably comes from a talk I went to by Dr Peter Mills from Leeds Met, who is/was working on a book about Jake. He’d done some digging and established quite a bit about Jake’s early life – eg that his dad was a policeman and had to move around with work. Which fits with the fact that he later lived on Old Oak Drive in Leeds as that’s just down the road from Lawnswood Police Station (the main one in north Leeds), and also the fact that the constabulary come off quite badly in a few of his songs!

If you think about the material, it does make sense that Jake grew up, or at least spent a significant part of his early life, in the countryside. There’s one song in his whole back-catalogue (Kirkstall Road Girl) that’s definitively about Leeds, and a whole lot more that are about village or country life. I seem to remember Peter Mills saying something about young Jake regularly being packed off to relatives in the country during school holidays too.

[mark sturdy]

Ah – on this very forum!

http://www.jakethackray.com/forum/5-off-topic-threads/1560-jakes-birthplace.html

[Hugh Williams]

Just by way of a tenuous link to all this, does Jake have his own burial place ?
I’ve only ever been to Monmouth once and I drove through it on another occasion but if there is a grave for him there I’d certainly go to pay my respects.
On the other hand he may have had other arrangements (as, indeed, have I. My ashes are destined for the bank between the parade ring and the racecourse at Bangor on Dee ; hopefully, not any time too soon !!!!!)

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