As you all know. Phil and Pip Pyle had been friends since early childhood. Phil’s family moved to Sawbridgeworth shortly after Phil’s birth but Pip’s family had long lived there. Pip’s grandfather was a builder and was responsible for building many of the houses in Sawbridgeworth. The very early ones are identifiable by the use of flint in their construction. I was told that, back in the day, a flint wall that used to surround the nearby Church of St Mary had suffered considerable collapse over time and that Pip’s grandfather had gathered this material and used it in the construction of his early buildings. These were not plain little houses but each one was built to a unique, eccentric, slightly mock-tudor design, featuring these flints. He went on to built loads of houses, not as eccentric as his earliest attempts, complete with streets, into a sizeable village, which was known as The Forebury Estate, surrounding Forebury House which was the Pyle family residence. After Grandfather’s death Pip’s father, who was also named Philip, inherited all of this and moved into Forebury House.The house that Phil Miller’s father bought was on Station Rd just outside the Forebury estate but the end part of their long back garden was adjacent to the long garden of Forebury House. When we say that Phil and Pip were next door neighbours, we really should say that they were next garden neighbours as their houses were nowhere near each other. Phil and Pip got to know each other when they were sent to the same primary school. At birth they were both named Philip but were called Pip by their families. At some point Phil Miller told his family that he wanted to be called Phil. As we all know, they became best friends forever and, as they grew older, they formed a band with Phil’s brother Steve and Jack Monck called Delivery. Although Phil was briefly in Matching Mole with Robert Wyatt and Pip had a spell in Gong, they more or less played in the same bands together for the rest of their lives through Hatfield & The North and National Health. They also lived in the same house together in East Sheen. They were pretty inseparable.
In the late 1970s, when Phil and I were at the start of our relationship, he and I spent inordinate amounts of time at the home of Pip, Pam, Sam, Alice, JoJo and Kizzy in Rose Cottage,Hatfield Heath, near Sawbridgeworth, given to Pip by his father. It was a lovely, fun place to spend time in. The atmosphere was very loving and Pip was always a great host.
Rose Cottage was a bit of a mess. Pip was such a carefree and careless person that it seemed he have managed to break everything in the cottage. Even the fireplace and surround were chipped. Everything was bashed, cracked, chipped, bent or broken but nobody made a fuss about it. Apparently it was normal life. The thing I remember most about those times was laughter. Pip was always very funny, always seeing or inventing the funny side of everything. He really touched a nerve in Phil. He made Phil laugh so much and so hard that he had trouble finding a gap in which to breathe. He would often be gasping for breath with tears rolling down his face. Sometimes I thought he would die laughing. These were the times when Phil was at the happiest I ever knew him.
You will all probably know The Rotter’s Club as the title of Hatfield & The North’s 1975 album – or alternatively Jonathan Coe’s 2001 novel of the same name. What I am writing about now is the original Rotter’s Club of which Pip Pyle was the founder. The badge shows Billy Bunter, a fictional schoolboy created by Charles Hamilton using the pen name Frank Richards. Billy Bunter features in stories set at Greyfriars School where Billy Bunter, a fat boy who was rather over fond of his food and was picked on and bullied by the other boys in the school whom Billy used to call the Rotters.
In the 1970’s Pip and his pals took on the name The Rotter’s Club to play rotten tricks on each other as a joke. For instance Pip might urinate somebody’s wellington boots so that when this somebody went to put on their boots they would find themselves with their feet in his urine – hysterical laughter from Pip! Having been rotted, the Rotter’s Club rules allowed that person to retaliate by performing a similar “Rot” back. Some people thought it was funny – others not.
Under the rules of the Rotter’s Club, nobody was allowed to take serious offence “because it was The Rotter’s Club and they should simply retaliate”. This wasn’t the end of the matter of course because then they would get rotted again (and again and again)
The Rotter’s Club also had a cricket team called The Rotter’s Club Cricket Team. The regular members of the team included Pip, Elton Dean, Phil, the well-known pyromaniac Bernie Holland and his bother Chris, and Monty from Ronnie Scott’s and others. All this was a long time ago and although other team members came and went, I cannot recollect all their names.
The team had regular fixtures with other teams and had their own scoring book which contained proper records of each match – I was enlisted as the scorer and was coached in how to keep a score of the batting order, how many runs each player made etc etc and entered them in the official Rotter’s Cricket Club Book which Pip had somehow got hold of . It was an official cricket scoring book which had columns for all these statistics which I filled in as the matches progressed. This book presumably still exists somewhere.
Phil never really participated in the Rotting activities, basically because he just wasn’t a Rotter. He was always a very kindly soul and I never knew him to behave badly to anyone.
But The Rotter’s Club really appealed to the crueller side of Elton’s personality and its activities brought him and Pip closer together in rottery.
…..to be continued