It was after an unusually long pub lunch in the winter of 1956 that the editor of the Bath & Wilting Chronicle decided - almost on a whim - to abandon the paper's popular weekly feature on 'Stars of Stage And Screen Who Have Visited Our City' and have a 'Metaphysics Today' column instead. Exactly why he did so is one of those mysteries of the nineteen fifties which it seems impossible to explain. The fact that the column proved to be a great success - a year later it was being syndicated to metropolitan publications across the globe - seems even more baffling.
Without 'Metaphysics Today' the editor's famous line that "those who under-estimate the intellectual hunger of the Bath masses are treading a doom-laden path!"would never have found its way into the Cambridge Book of Quotations or had the impact it did on the cultural climate of the time. And the residents of our prefab estate might never have spent hours leaning over their garden fences and exchanging thoughts on a German philosopher called Walter Benjamin (1892-1940).
Although making "maps of one's own life" was not the first Benjaminesque theme to be highlighted in 'Metaphysics Today' it struck a special chord with the paper's readership. (The first Benjaminesque theme the column had mentioned was the idea of 'aura' - the distinctive atmosphere that surrounds a particular object. It made us realize that our prefabs were almost alone in contemporary mass society in being saturated with a unique 'aura'). 'Spinoza Dice' the pseudonym of the team of journalists given the daunting task of writing the 'Metaphysics Today' column - suggested that Bath & Wilting readers take a cue from Walter Benjamin and "have a go!" at making maps of their own lives.
(The "have a go!" phrase was of course inspired by Wilfred Pickles, the folksy chap from Yorkshire who was host in the highly successful "Have a go, Joe!" BBC radio quiz which was first broadcast in 1946 and inexplicably taken off air in 1967).
The Bath & Wilting promised that the five most intriguing 'life maps' compiled by readers would be published - along with photographs of themselves and their favourite pet - in a special souvenir 'Metaphysics Today' supplement. In Twiverton's two prefab estates the idea of drafting out 'life maps' took off like wildfire. Although the ones drawn up in the Redland Park prefabs have long since vanished into the Sargasso Sea of sitting-room drawers, a 'life map' made by residents of Newtin and Woodhedge Road (which, oddly enough, never made it into the Bath & Wilting's special supplement) has recently been discovered in the back room of the My Full Moon public house. Before we take a nostalgia-drenched look at it, here is Walter Benjamin's original effort at sketching out his own 'life-map'.

"I have evolved a system of signs, and on the grey background of such maps they would make a colourful show if I clearly marked in the houses of my friends and girl friends, the assembly halls of various collectives, from the 'debating chambers' of the Youth Movement to the gathering places of the Communist youth, the hotel and brothel rooms that I knew for one night, the decisive benches of the Tiergarten, the ways to different schools and the graves that I saw filled, the sites of prestigious cafes whose long-forgotten names daily crossed our lips, the tennis courts where empty apartment blocks stand today, and the halls emblazoned with gold and stucco that the terrors of dancing classes made almost the equal of gymnasiums."

That was Walter Benjamin's pre-war 'Berlin'.

Here is our post-war 'Twiverton'.

"We have evolved a system of signs, and on the green background of such maps (laid out on the baize of a subbuteo table football pitch) they make a colourful show. We have clearly marked in the prefabs of our friends and girl friends and key gathering places of Twiverton youth. These include the 'jug and bottle' entrance to the 'My Full Moon' public house, the fish and chip shop run by Mr and Mrs Tobin, the open bedroom window of prefab number thirteen through which - on one unforgetable occasion - a young lady dressed only in her swimming costume gave us a friendly wave, the kerbstone on the corner of Woodhedge Road on which we sat and pondered our futures, the tree branch benches in Pennyquick Wood, the not-over-prestigious cafe hut in the football ground, the playing field on top of the old coalmine which would have made a grand site for tennis courts, the secret pathways to the Gothic turrets of Brunel's railway tunnel in Silk-Farr wood, and the greens emblazoned with daisies and buttercups on which the dazzling prowess of our sporting skills was displayed evening after evening to an awestruck world.

The football results wireless rota lasted for almost two years. We would turn up at a designated
prefab, fill our glasses with orange squash (being back those innocent pre-cider days!), prepare a stack of pieces of toast and marmalade, and wait for the results to come on at five o'clock.
All of us were active members of the Prefab Philosophy Club. We soon noticed that the deliberations we were having over language, truth and logic began to spill over into our football discussions. People started asking questions like "Why should someone who supports Bristol Rovers have a claim to moral superiority over someone who supports Bristol City?") The brief encounters with the likes of Plato, Kant and Spinoza made us realise how perilously close we had come to getting over-obsessed -maybe even fixated - with sport. After all, kicking a ball around and/or watching other people kicking a ball around is just one small slice of life. Say this to some people and they look at you as if you have lost all control over your senses! But after the first ten fixtures of the 1958-59 football season had been played we found ourselves viewing the game in a completely new light. A mellow sensibility began to permeate our five o'clock football results listening experience.
Having a Philosophy Club in the prefabs created quite a stir. If it had been set up a few hundred yards further up the road in one of the plush council houses occupied by civil servants from the Admiralty no one would have noticed. It would have had a "dog bites man!" level of news interest. Socrates seminars in the prefabs, in contrast, created quite a stir. A few weeks after the Prefab Philosophy Club came into being the Bath & Wilting Chronicle was reporting that the number of people asking to be re-housed further away from the prefabs had fallen while the number who wanted to move into the prefabs had increased! Members of the Stanton-Bullingdon-Smith family who live in an Admiralty civil service house in Camelot Green (it is the one which has a terrapin - a freshwater turtle - in the back garden) doubled up with laughter when they heard the Philosophy Club news. It was only after they overheard the Pearce and Chapman sisters saying how impressed they had been with our Aristotle seminar that the turtle-like smirks began to vanish from their faces.
A quarter of an hour before the football results were broadcast there would be an impromptu quiz. We divided into two teams - the Newtin Road prefabs against the Woodhedge Road prefabs - and the utterly impartial Diane Pearce would be in the chair. She insisted from the start that no questions on either football or philosophy would be allowed. Quiz questions were
never easy, but one of the toughest ones was this one: "Which language was spoken in seventh century Edinburgh?" It was 'Tubby' Lard's hard luck to have to answer it (although if he had bothered to turn up at the Philosophy Club's Aristotle seminar he would have known that the Welsh-speaking Goddodin tribe had been living in Edinburgh at this time). Even though every single one of his favourite football clubs won by a margin of at least three goals 'Tubby' stayed in a sulky mood for the rest of the evening.
In the early days of the wireless rota there would be complete silence while the results from the Football League's first division, second division, and third division 'north' and 'south' were being broadcast. This iron-willed restraint ended as soon as the Scottish scores came in and a
club with a name like Falkirk hit the airwaves. Everyone would start yapping away. Some people would try and calm their nerves by going into the kitchen and refilling their glasses of orange squash, others would head for the bathroom and make all kinds of off-putting noises. There was one notorious occasion when 'Tubby' Lard started shouting out "Who the heck are Stenhousemuir!" and did an imitation Scottish jig around the sitting-room. What an insult this was to the valiant club which had won the Scottish Qualifying Cup in 1902!
Perhaps the dismal level of football maturity which existed on our prefab estate in the 'pre-Cannonball' days is not all that surprising when you remember that the nearest any of our group had ever been to Scotland was Wolverhampton. Scotland, like the past, felt like a foreign country. So who could have guessed that in the hey-day of the wireless rota it would be the results from the Scottish League that would be the fulcrum, the climax, the grand finale of the entire Saturday afternoon results listening experience! Gary Bollard - the dark horse who went on to become a future Vice-President of the Prefab History Society - put it this way in an interview he gave to the sports editor of the Bath & Wilting Chronicle and Herald: "Just as the results of wars fought in Scotland have often made or broken the British state, so the results of football matches in Scotland can make or break the morale of the football cognoscenti of this prefab (e)State."
During the dark pre-'Cannonball' days the evocative allure of Scottish football club names was something which completely passed us by. Leave out the Shakespearean Hotspurs of Tottenham and you are hard-pressedto find any English clubs which come anywhere near to rivalling the resonance of Hibernian or Hamilton Academicals. The Football League likes noting better than a prosaic sounding encounter between the likes of Southend and Preston North End. When a new club was set up in a northern steel-making city the founding committee was so stumped for a club name that all it managed to come up with was the day of the week when the matches were to be played. "At least it was a Wednesday and not a Monday!" says 'Tubby' Lard. Up in Scotland you will not find any Aberdeen Thursdays or Dundee Tuesdays. Instead of the engine-clanging sound of a Northampton Town playing Southampton Town you will hear a Partick Thistle brushing against the Heart of Midlothian!
The moment the 'Cannonball' era dawned in Twiverton there was a headlong rush to choose a club from Scotland to follow. If Diane Pearce, the quiz chairman, had not calmed everyone down it would have been like a scene from a horror movie. Most of the new devotees of Scottish football grabbed hold of one of the big glamour teams based in Glasgow and Edinburgh. 'Tubby' Lard went out of his way to try to make some amends for his earlier conduct by becoming a paid-up member of the Stenhousemuir supporters' club. In prefab number twenty-four we came within a whisker of putting our aluminium-walled weight behind Raith Rovers. The name just rolls off the lips. But we had second thoughts after realising that our affiliation with the Rovers of Bristol meant this would be a Rovers too far. When we finally decided to follow Queen of the South we were accused of jumping on their trophy-laden bandwagon as the club had been top of the second division in 1951. In fact it was the club's name which clinched our decision. This was as close as we were ever going to get to the Queen of Sheba F.C.
After the 'Cannonball' hit the prefabs there would not be so much as a murmur, let alone a noise-filled visit to the bathroom, when the results from the Scottish League were broadcast. The 'Cannonball' came like a meteorite out of the northern night sky. You could see why the Prefab Philosophy Club was soon organizing special conferences on the extraordinary role that chance can play in life. It is only when you take a retrospective look at the past that there seems to have been anything 'inevitable' or 'pre-determined' about this football genius turning up at Twerton Park and prompting us all to think again about the results from the Scottish League.
The odds against Charlie 'Cannonball' Fleming signing up for a non-league outfit like Bath City were formidable. This fellow, after all, had been a Scottish international! And if the former East Fife and Sunderland player had not put on one of our local club's black and white striped shirts then none of us would have given a second thought to the Scottish League. What an ambassador for his country this fellow was! Who else would ever score fifty goals a season for Bath City! No wonder we all went quiet when the Scottish League results were broadcast. The distant land in the north might be filled with other 'Cannonballs' as well! The football novices on our prefab estate had never seen the likes of Charlie 'Cannonball' Fleming before, and they knew for sure they would never see his like again.

Those who drank ginger beer on the stairs of public houses in nineteen fifties' Bath would sometimes hear the disjointed slivers of jokes echoing up from the saloon bar. They would often open with the frisson-loaded words "There was an Englishman, a Welshman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman." During the telling of this joke there always seemed to be an Englishman, a Welshman, and an Irishman present. But none of them ever appeared to take offence.
'Cracking Jokes in Public Houses' was the title of a celebrated article penned by Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic (resident of prefab number three) in the Twiverton Literary Supplement (TLS) in April 1955. The article began by disputing the claim that April is "the cruellest month." It then declared that every philosophically-inclined pub goer should always keep a copy of Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life in a handbag or back pocket. The article ends by inviting readers to mull over the significance of the following quotation that appears on page 161 of the 1938 Pelican edition of Professor Dr. Sigmund Freud's path-breaking book.

Goethe said of Lichtenberg:
"Where he cracks a joke, there lies a concealed problem."

In the "There was an Englishman, a Welshman..." joke it seems clear that the "concealed problem" is the national one. Drinkers who meet up in Bath public houses are not just saviours of the brewery industry. They are also citizens of a multi-national state. Tensions between its different national groups have sometimes taken on a lethal form. In the post-war calm of the nineteen fifties this "concealed problem" seemed to be at long last a manageable one. This meant it coud be joked about. That, at least, was how it seemed when viewed from the bucolic vantage point of the Cheddar Cheese Straws and ginger beer laden stairs.
An odd thing about the old man's drinking circles (and what odd characters they were) was that they included Englishmen, Welshmen, and Irishmen, but never any Scotsmen. Given the epic nature of the journey from Glasgow to Somerset this was not so surprising. A train ride and an overnight ferry would take you to Dublin by the next day. A train ride and a bus journey would take you to the South Wales valleys in a couple of hours.
So what would happen if a kilt-wearing Scotsman had been present in the saloon bar when the "There was an Englishman, a Welshman..." joke was being told? Would the "concealed problem" of the national question have suddenly reared its ugly head? This is what you wondered as you flicked through the pages of the TLS and sat on the public house stairs.