SUNDAY JOINT, 10-6-2024: “RULE, BRITANNIA! SHALL TO THY HAPPY COAST REPAIR!” – EOS TRIBUTE TO CORNWALL
Hey All,
As full and rich and abounding as my three-score and four years have been, I am still looking at some real gaps here on the life-experience resume, and the biggest gap of all might be that I've never visited Great Britain. This isn't a fluke, exactly. In my hardcore wave-chasing past, the UK never made the cut as a destination. The pull was always west by southwest: Hawaii, Australia, Indonesia. Europe? Sure, why not, eventually, but let's at least go somewhere warm and sunny: France to start, then Spain and Portugal. For the last 15 or 20 years, though, I've stayed out of Britain due to nothing more than late-middle-age housebound inertia. This needs to change. It just seems rude at this late stage to have poured so much UK culture into my own fizzy worldview Highball—Roddy Doyle, Led Zeppelin, Flashman, Wodehouse, Judi Dench, Monty Python; I could fill the whole Joint with names and bands but let's stop with Nick Lowe because he just went full pop-rock Gandalf with his new LP, the man is 75 and pumping out records that sound tossed-off and Swiss-crafted at the same time—yet I have never made pilgrimage to what is essentially my cultural second home. But hear me now! I swear by mighty Taranis I shall someday cross yon Sea of Atlas and alight upon your fertile shores!
Meanwhile, here are six new EOS clips, all filmed in and around Newquay, Cornwall, surf capital of Great Britain and five easy hours by car from London, traffic permitting.
HOLYWELL BAY, 1929
This incredible Jazz Age cache of footage has been bouncing around online for 15 years, but I didn't see it until just last Monday. The fellow poking his face out of the train window, with the jutting chin, stand-up hair and huge wind-whipped smile—that's Lewis Rosenberg, 23, the East End son of a large Polish-Jew working-class immigrant family who had done well enough in their adopted homeland to learn tennis, take long camping vacations, and send their kids to Communist-affiliated summer camps. Rosenberg's upbringing is so much like that of my own extended family, in fact, that from now on I'll be saying Lewis is a distant cousin. After seeing a newsreel featuring Aussie lifeguard-surfers, Rosenberg built an eight-foot balsa surfboard, then rallied a group of friends, and set off from the Big Smoke to the coast for a sleep-on-the-beach coed Cornwall getaway. I did a light edit on the footage and banged in an appropriate English-made Roaring Twenties score. Could not let it go, however, so came back for a Bowie-Rosenberg remix, and this one will get a tearful standing ovation at Cannes '25, if I can just figure out the entry forms.
PORTHTOWAN CONTEST, 1967
The surf is not great, which is a theme with all the videos here today, but it is good enough for Hot Rod Sumpter (white shirt, end of the clip) to dance all over the competition in what I believe is the Cornish Open. It's a lo-fi event, but local gaffers will find a way. No air-horn, no problem—the event director brought his shotgun. Off you go, lads, and mind the pellets!
CHARLIE WILLIAMS, PORTHMEOR, 1968
A brief one-minute visual study of surfer-shaper Charlie Williams, but long enough to see that he makes a gorgeous first-gen shortboard, rides waves expertly, and looks like he should be onstage swinging a mic at the NME Awards instead of laboring away in a damp crumbly-walled one-room board factory.
PLYWOOD AT PERRANPORTH, 1969
Tom Parrish—Lightning Bolt immortal, "The Man with the Red-Hot Planer," shaper to the stars during the 1970s and present-day EOS aficionado—likes to check in now and then with his Sunday Joint thoughts and comments, and in Tom's considered view the Joint quality is inversely proportional to how much time we spend on surf contests. Surfing is first and foremost a thing of joy, and should be looked at as such, is Parrish's point. Surf contests are the opposite of joy. Less competition chatter, therefore, means a better Joint. Tom and I are not in full agreement here, but he's not wrong, and this Perranporth '69 video is certainly evidence in Tom's favor. No competition here. In fact, nobody even stands while surfing. But the the joy and fun and humor of wave-riding is dialed all the way up, and the bit at 2:00 where the DIY fella says to the geezer with the microphone, "If you haven't got a vice"—meaning a wood clamp—and the guy with the mic interrupts to point out the double entendre, and they lean into each other and chortle before moving on, it just makes me want to apply for British citizenship, Brexit be damned.
"THE SURFERS," 1973
A 23-minute documentary on the growing surf scene in and around Newquay. Beautifully filmed and edited. The whole thing moves along on a current of lowkey uplift and gratitude. If it wasn't for the fact that all those lovely coves in and around Newquay produce surf a cut below the underachieving beachbreak waves I grew with in South Bay, I'd be pushing the idea that we're looking at a minor cold-weather surfing paradise here. What am I saying, this is a kind of paradise, despite the surf. Our sport doesn't operate as much on a community level as it did in decades past, and that's what this little film is about, really—surfing as community. And in this case, the local group seems especially warm and earnest and supportive; everyone onscreen looks happy to be in Newquay, doing what they're doing, chasing those mediocre tide-dependent sandbar peaks hither and yon, and building out their own local surf culture. My jaw hit the desk during the Bilbo Surfboards factory tea-break scene, starting at 6:16, when I recognized one of the cigarette-smoking employees as Paul Holmes, my former boss at SURFER Magazine. The guy in the blue shirt hands Paul a cup of tea and says "Cheers, old chappo!" and Paul, offscreen, replies, "Thanks, old bean!" and my Bertie Wooster Signature Model heart swelled. Paul at that point was both a shaper and a magazine editor, as he was moonlighting at Surf Insight. That's Paul talking on the phone and doing the voice-over, starting at 8:46. The following year he moved to Australia to shape for Keyo Surfboards, and from there went on to edit Tracks magazine, before moving to California to take the SURFER editor job, which is where we met, in 1985. An erudite and cosmopolitan figure to this day.
NIGEL SEMMENS AND STEVE DANIEL, 1978
Two members of the British National Surf Team—Semmens with the Woody Harrelson underbite; Daniel with the mustache (above)—talk to an unseen reporter about their upcoming plans to compete in the 1978 World Amateur Surfing Championships, and as we're running out of space here, let's just take a moment to appreciate the incredible custom-made Union Jack team wetsuits complete with each surfer's name across the back and shoulders. The bare-chested fellow who speaks a bit later is Clive Rodell, Team Manager. (With apologies to Tom Parrish, it is only right to point out that Great Britain surprised all by taking 3rd in the team results, behind South Africa and Mainland USA, but ahead of Hawaii, France, and Puerto Rico. The Tommies feeling it in those posh wetsuits!)
"SPLASHDANCE," 1983
The WCT makes its British debut in this tidy 25-minute documentary. Again, the Newquay surf is nothing to get excited about, but there are at least three humor-adjacent curveball moments that you'll want to watch. 1) The Headland Hotel buffet, starting at 2:10, featuring the Newquay Mayor's welcome speech to a roomful of aggressively T-shirted competitors, and an opening stab at humor that lands flatter than Fistral Beach on a midsummer dry-reef low tide.
2) The Miss Euro Pro bikini contest begins at 17:24, and it is crushing to watch a 25-year-old Oxford entrant brought to the fore and asked, "Do you have any ambitions in life?" She thinks, smiles, shakes her head no. Just brutal. The voiceover, surprisingly, then jumps in to say that "Surfing is a feminist's nightmare." 3) Scroll back to 4:58, and we get another takedown, just as vicious. We see Euro Pro contestants heading out for a heat. Same voiceover guy as earlier: "Like pop stars, top surfers need people to do their thinking for them." Incredibly, this idea seems to come from contest director John Conway, who is "as much nanny as entrepreneur." The mini-rant Conway delivers is incredible, but a bit rushed and hard to follow, so here it is with subtitles.
You would hope that, at some point over the past 40-something years, Tom Parrish and John Conway together drained a half-dozen Newcastle Browns and laughed themselves sore over the beautiful, ridiculous sport they love.
Thanks, everybody, and see you next week!
Matt
[Photo grid, clockwise from top left: Lewis Rosenberg on his way to Cornwall, 1929; Newquay goofyfoot from "The Surfers," 1973; Steve Daniel and Nigel Semmens in their 1978 British Team wetsuits; WCT rookie Mark Occhilupo in the '83 Euro Pro, at Fistral, Newquay; vintage Newcastle Brown Ale ad; Cornwall bellyboarding, 1969. Lewis Rosenberg bellyboarding in '29. Rosenberg's friends dancing on the beach. Man with rifle at the '67 Cornish Open, and Rod Sumpter, same event, winning the finals. Three-shot sequence of 1969 Perranporth beach interview. Semmens and Daniel walking down the beach at Newquay. Daniel surfing. Daniel and his moustache. Four shots from the '83 Fosters Euro Pro, as seen in "Splashdance." This Joint would not have been possible without the help of Dan Jethwa.]