Guitar and Girl

 

Hollow

"I was 17 and still playing the tiny Guyatone.

I also had a Burns Jazz solid guitar but stuck

with the Antoria guitar on this occasion."

— Steve Howe, All My Yesterdays 

(Omnibus Press, 2020, page 24)

Steve ought to fast forward back and recall that the 

Antoria was to become his first solid electric guitar; 

prior to which it had been mine for years. I loaned

it to Yoss when I was saxophonist in his band, before

he had in his possession a Gibson Les Paul Special.

Eventually, Steve acquired this guitar from me.

I am holding it in the picture of us together at 

the top of the page. He is holding his first guitar.

"Then there was Yosel [sic], who played a Gibson 

Les Paul Special, a great rock guitar if ever there 

was one. I used to watch him play at a youth club 

in Islington and would hang out at his place in 

Holloway, trying to pick anything up from him

that I could. He gave me a bit of an insight into

being a rock guitarist, for sure."

— Steve Howe, All My Yesterdays 

(Omnibus Press, 2020, page 24)

Absent is the fact that I played tenor saxophone 

alongside Yoss, when Steve stood at the front of the

stage and to one side, as we performed at full

blast before a jiving young audience at the scout

hall on Holloway Road (it was not a youth club).

The scout hall was loaned for Saturday night hops.

I had been Steve's best chum since junior school, 

and still was at the time he watched us perform.

Steve passes over mention of me as his friend 

with whom together we discovered Bill Haley,

Little Richard, Duane Eddy, The Shadows, etc. 

"We once entered a disused cinema and played

various games amid the dust and dead pigeons.

It got kind of scary and I eventually escaped

through a door that led nowhere, unless you 

could scale 10-feet walls topped with broken 

glass. As this was the only way out, that's what

I did. I just went at it, commando style, and

straddled the walls with my hands and feet,

then leaped down the other side to freedom."

— Steve Howe, All My Yesterdays 

(Omnibus Press, 2020, page 12)

In the context of how his account appears in the

autobiography one imagines he is still at junior

school. He follows the paragraph with the words:

"By the time I was 10 years old." But he was at

least three or so years older than that. I ought

to know because I was present during that eerie

incident at the Marlborough Theatre, as were a 

group of others whom I identify by name, along

with Steve, of course, in a concise guide on the

malign supernatural that was published in 1997. 

Roy (not present at the Marlborough Theatre incident), 

Michael, Dennis, and Steve (all of whom were present), 

in Widdenham Road outside where Steve lived. I was 

taking the photograph. This is how old Steve looked at

the time he entered the haunted Marlborough Theatre

The Marlborough Theatre as it appeared at the

time Steve Howe and a group of others, myself

included, entered the building to explore. Steve

was terrified by the experience, and took a very

long time to recover from it. Though he mentions

being there, he makes no mention of anyone else

who accompanied him (in his new autobiography).

________________________________________________________________________________

My old pal Yoss died two and a half months ago. He had been seriously ill for a significant amount of time, and his eldest son, Jonny, kept me updated until he finally gave up the ghost on 19 April 2020. I had known him as long as I had known Steve, and we managed to keep in touch for most of that time. I have painted Yoss, oil on canvas, twice; the first time depicting his early years, the second time very shortly after his death, depicting his late years. I also wrote and dedicated a eulogy in verse for Yoss.

Below is a picture of Yoss — sometimes called Yossel — and me during a rehearsal in the 1960s.

Below is an early picture I took of Steve at Loraine Mansions with my box camera in the 1950s.

Yet, despite that fact, I am not mentioned once in his autobiography.

Varinia

Varinia is an invented name (by novelist Howard Fast) for the wife of Spartacus (1960) in which film Jean Simmons was cast in the rôle. Her screen portrayal was my inspiration for Varinia on canvas. By a curious coincidence, Jean Simmons lived just up the road from my parents before she entered a career in acting. Her last home in Santa Monica, California, is just around the corner from my cousin, once removed. Jean died on the poet Byron's birthday, someone I am connected to by blood, and, moreover, she is interred at Highgate Cemetery West, which I have written about extensively, and spoken about many with regard to supernatural occurrences on radio. Notwithstanding an expressionistic approach, I have returned to my Pre-Raphaelite roots for this portrait of beautiful Varinia, as depicted by Jean Simmons. The more abstract I ventured, the more classical my oil painting seemingly became. It was completed on 8 May 2020, and can be seen at my private gallery.

Engaged

It sometimes happens that a man and a woman meet and instantly recognise the other half of themselves behind the eyes of each other. Such a meeting occurred between Sarah and I. From the first moment we met and gazed upon each other, our spirits rushed together joyfully, ignoring convention and custom, driven by an inner knowing ― too overwhelming to be denied. It is more than coincidence that, out of the whole world, Sarah and I should be drawn together at the appointed time. Through each other we found wholeness. For I did not know how empty was my life until it was filled.

Exactly thirty-three years ago, on Passion Sunday, April 1987, whilst staying at her parents’ rambling Wiltshire home, I asked Sarah to marry me. She accepted and the following week, on her birthday, I presented her with a solitaire engagement ring. We had spent the entire day at Avebury where ancient stones stand tall. Four months later we were married in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, at 11.15am. 

Sarah arrived in a vintage 1930s Roche-Talbot. On this thirty-third anniversary of our engagement, which also falls on Passion Sunday, we recall that special day of promising ourselves to each other.

Sarah made a beautiful bride. On the last evening together as single people we had walked in the moonlight at twilight in a wooded area close to her parents’ house. Bats suddenly filled the darkening sky, some swooping to touch us as we stopped to look at them. It was somehow fitting, symbolic of a last brush with a world we had both encountered from completely different perspectives.

Adieu

This book outsells all others I have written by at least one hundredfold; yet I refuse to be defined by it. Half a century ago on Friday 13th March seems permanently etched onto the nation's psyche, and to some degree the sensational nature of that historic occasion will have obvious and lasting public appeal. It marked, of course, my television debut, and events later that night at Highgate Cemetery.

A more meaningful and pivotal Friday 13th for me would occur three years later in April at Easter. This was my first ascent of Parliament Hill. It was attended by a crowd of hundreds, not unlike the crowd spontaneously triggered by my television transmission on 13 March 1970. I was not expecting such a vast number to assemble all over the hill on Hampstead Heath on Good Friday 1973, but it was nevertheless a pleasing sight. Before a makeshift altar with candles on a bench at the very top, I inaugurated the founding of Ordo Sancti Graal. Tapers, incense and food were handed out. This began a pilgrimage, concentrating on London and its environs over the Easter period, and eventually spreading further afield. A lay order of twelve was instituted from those who attended and followed.

There came a second ascent of Parliament Hill in 1984 which, while attracting a good few people, plus a radio station wanting to cover the occasion live, had also come to the attention of the self-proclaimed (since the age of eleven) atheist Leader of the Greater London Council, Ken Livingstone who ordered my arrest due to an obscure piece of legislation that forbade the utterance of religious words after dusk. I was thus arrested at nine minutes before nine o'clock, taken to Hampstead Police Station under police escort, and made to feel comfortable by all concerned. When I prepared to leave without charge some time later, after a cup of tea and a pleasant chat with the Chief Superintendent, the officers all lined up to shake my hand. The date was Friday the 13th of July. It was a full moon.

A third ascent of Parliament Hill occurred on Good Friday 1993 in a heavy downfall of rain and the odd rumble of thunder. We were soaked to the skin in our white robes, but spiritually vibrant. Bemused onlookers caught sight of us, as we made the procession for the final time up the rain-soaked hill, having begun this final pilgrimage in Hertfordshire on foot. My mother had slipped into God's safekeeping months earlier. I decided to depart from London, which I did the following year.

On the forty-first anniversary of a headline on 27 February 1970 that would catapult me into the limelight for an uncomfortably long period of time, I agreed to give my final television interview at home. It was recorded using three cameras for a Canadian production company. The edited film was first broadcast on 1 April 2011. Thereafter it was repeated in many countries throughout the world.

On Friday the 13th of December 2013, a statement containing a plea for privacy was published by me on social media where it was widely viewed, and occasionally paraphrased. I reiterate it with mild adjustment because seven years later some of the time periods would not make sense for 2020.

I find today's world, particularly the cyber-world, all too frenetic and reactive. This jars with my own desire for creative contemplation instead of the tumult I see around me which being a public figure only serves to exacerbate. This reflective approach to everyday existence is at odds with being under public scrutiny, somewhere I have found myself for the past half a century. What most brought me to public attention were the television and radio programmes I regularly appeared on, and also the books and documentary films associated with topics which hold the public imagination in thrall. It is for that reason I have not submitted a book for publication since the beginning of the 21st century. Likewise, I scaled back my broadcasts in the media to a point where I no longer make them. I ceased giving interviews to the print media decades ago and only then in quality magazines. Moreover, it is quite some time since I declared I am no longer prepared to provide interviews on matters relating to Highgate et al. What there was to say has been said many times over. I found myself answering the same questions over and over again; questions which invariably are already answered in my published accounts. One of the problems, I quickly came to realise many years ago, is that interviewers, regardless of the subject, simply do not know the right questions, and the questions are every bit as important as the answers. Another problem in the new century has been one of trust. Seldom have I encountered an interviewer in recent years who keeps his or her word. Consequently, any condition I might have set for providing a contribution was frequently and almost inevitably compromised. Without trust and a sense of honour there is nothing. I cannot interact in that way and would rather stay silent than witness yet another contract broken. I am still having to regularly turn down television and radio interview requests, along with a plethora of other invitations to partake in projects that would maintain a perception of me remaining on the public stage, which, I accept, is exactly what I have been for most of my life. What made me so, however, is very much in the past. The memoir I began to write some time back will not now see the light of day. This is for the best if I wish my privacy to be respected. The concomitants of being a public figure have slowly eroded over the last couple of decades to a point where I stand on the threshold of finally achieving meaningful privacy. Hence, I have now stepped over that threshold and become a private individual. This will not affect my episcopal duties, sacerdotal ministry, art and music etc, but involvement in secular preoccupations and the expression of views on same in the public hemisphere is now at an end.    

†Seán Manchester

Life

+

Disambiguation

Friday 13th March 2020, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the largest vampire hunt ever to take place in the British Isles. It occured at Highgate Cemetery on the evening of 13 March 1970, following reports in local and national newspapers, plus a television interview with various witnesses earlier on a programme called Today, Thames Television. I made an appeal on the Today programme at 6.00pm requesting the public not to get involved, nor put into jeopardy an investigation already in progress. Not everyone heeded my plea. On the Today programme, 13 March 1970, I warned one particular enthusiast, who had appeared on the same programme as one of several witnesses, to leave things he did not understand alone. Apparently he had received “a horrible fright” a few weeks earlier when he allegedly caught sight of something by the north gate of Highgate Cemetery and immediately wrote to his local newspaper about the experience, concluding with these words: “I have no knowledge in this field and I would be interested to hear if any other readers have seen anything of this nature.” (Letters to the Editor, Hampstead & Highgate Express, 6 February 1970). In the following month he revealed to the media that he had seen something at the north gate that was “evil” and that it “looked like it had been dead for a long time.” I warned that this man’s declared intention without the proper knowledge went “against my explicit wish for his own safety.”

The Hampstead & Highgate Express, 13 March 1970, under its title The Ghost Goes On TV, reported: "Cameras from Thames Television visited Highgate Cemetery this week to film a programme ... [Seán] Manchester [said] 'He goes against our explicit wish for his own safety we feel he does not possess sufficient knowledge to exorcise successfully something as powerful as a vampire, and may well fall victim as a result. We issue a similar warning to anyone with likewise intentions'."

The mass vampire hunt on the night itself was not attended by the man in question who spent his time in the Prince of Wales before repairing home to an Archway Road cellar provided by a friend.

The symbolism of Friday the thirteenth had taken on a momentum of its own, and the event itself, recorded comprehensively in my book The Highgate Vampire, was in many ways pivotal; especially as this was my television debut, and the end of any possibility of a private life thereafter. I had valued my privacy a great deal prior, and still did in many ways, but circumstances overtook me, as one television and radio interview, film documentary, public appearance after another crowded in.

The darkness of March 1970 would soon be eclipsed by the light of April 1973 when I ascended a hill on Hampstead Heath in white, along with twelve others, to found Ordo Sancti Graal before a large assembly of public onlookers. Once again, it was Friday the thirteenth, which that year happened to fall on Good Friday. The occasion is covered in detail in my book The Grail Church. This began a pilgrimage which would be marked by further ascents, more hills, and ultimately Glastonbury Tor.

People could be found who still believed in the miraculous and the supernatural back then. The expression of such beliefs all these years later renders me "unhinged." It is no longer fashionable to believe in anything outside of the material universe. It is no longer acceptable to be a spiritual person if that means anything beyond contemplation and prayer. I was, of course, active as an exorcist who cast out demons. Moreover, I was also an operative vampirologist/demonologist.

As well as entering holy orders, I was also an artist, musician, composer, photographer and poet. 

When they asked me when I was very young what I wanted to be when I grew up, I responded: 

"A child."

Hence many of the things I did appealed to a child, eg magician (conjurer), actor (theatre with a London Shakespeare troupe at the age of fifteen, later in my twenties and thirties to feature in art house films), performer (saxophonist and keyboards) in various bands. I was also a photographer. I began as a portraiturist with a London studio and a small staff. I photograph the sky these days.

Pablo Picasso's ambition was to paint as would a child, but he had long since lost his child-like innocence, and painted as a worldly, albeit technically adept, artist who never achieved that ambition.

What lay ahead for me in the wake of that initial Friday the thirteenth in March 1970 would unearth an external supernatural reality, albeit darkness personified. Its bright opposite grew ever close.

"His true teacher was nature, and he devoted himself to his own pursuit of poetry, music and painting. 'I've always been a bit of a bohemian, a bit of a poet, a bit of a wandering minstrel,' he said." (Rosemary Ellen Guiley, Vampires Among Us, page 113, Pocket Books, New York, 1991)

Either the miraculous and the supernatural exist, or they do not.

For those who see nothing, I suppose, there is nothing; or, at least, their vision holds nothing.

For young men will see visions, and old men will have dreams.