A FEW WORDS ABOUT JOHN

This morning I learned from his wife Jane that another of my oldest friends, John Holmfield, died yesterday in my old home town of Skipton. Here we are aged about 18 playing our guitars together in my bedroom in my parents’ house there. So I wrote this for him.  

Teenage boys learning to play guitars somehow find one another. It’s a secret society with its own curious customs, a bit like Masons except much more fun. You’ll find a plectrum among the loose change in their pockets, they listen to records more carefully than most people and never, ever, pass by a shop with a guitar in its window without stopping and staring. 

        John and I found one another through our guitars. It was 1963, the year The Beatles released their first LP, perfect timing because one of the first songs we learned to play together was ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, the first track on side one. When we formed our group, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ was always the opening song at our shows. “One, two, three, f…,” and we were away.

        There were four of us, John, Bob, Terry and myself, four Skipton friends, and we called ourselves The Pandas. John and Bob knew one another because they sang in Skipton Parish Church choir. Bob, Terry and myself all lived up the Raikes, and Bob and I went to the same primary school. John lived across town on Regent Crescent and played bass but didn’t have a real bass, not that it mattered. Bob played drums and he, John and Terry all sang. I was tone deaf, but John especially sang well, though he was a bit withdrawn, never one to push himself forward. I realise now that he was the most musical of all of us, and certainly had the best voice. All we had at first were acoustic guitars and even when we turned electric our equipment wasn’t much good but it was all we had and we made the best of it. When John eventually bought a 30 watt amp, twice as powerful as mine, I was very envious. 

        We used to meet and make plans for our group on Friday nights in the bar at the Midland, the hotel opposite Skipton railway station, now called Herriots, where no one seemed to care that we were under age. John and I soon became drinking buddies around Skipton and grew particularly close after Bob and Terry went to Leeds, Bob to the university there, Terry commuting to work in insurance. John worked in Keighley, in a lab at a school, and I worked in Skipton, on the Craven Herald, the local paper. John and I would bring our guitars to each other’s houses and play together, teaching ourselves songs by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Searchers. Then the four of us would get to together so we could all learn them. 

        The lifetime of The Pandas was about three years and in all that time I doubt we played more than 25 shows. Bob kept a tally in an exercise book with an orange cover, long since sadly lost. We played regularly at the RAF Club by the old swimming pool up Shortbank Road and at Skipton Rugby Club at Sandylands where, one night, we carried on until two in the morning. Angry parents arrived in pyjamas to ferry us home. One night at Gargrave Village Hall we supported a far more competent group from Barrow-in-Furness who played Gibson and Fender guitars. John and I begged them to let us have a go on them, which we did, briefly. We played a few private parties, making a terrible racket in the living rooms of houses where our teenage friends danced while we played. Our biggest show was at Aireville School, with about 100 pupils watching us. Our only ambition was to have fun – and in that we succeeded. 

        In 1967 John and I holidayed together in Scarborough, travelling by coach from Skipton bus station and staying at the St Nicholas hotel. We brought our guitars and I remember us playing them on a grassy hillside that overlooked the beach and sea. No one mistook us for buskers. 

        By this time John and I had moved on from the Midland and discovered the New Ship, a small, cosy pub on Mill Bridge, seen above. I can still remember the first night we went inside. It was full of ramblers, very noisy and very smoky. The bar was tiny, like a kiosk, and there was a back room behind it where regulars gathered for afters. The Ship grew in popularity during the second half of the 1960s, becoming one of the busiest pubs in town, at least among the under 25s. From around 1965 we drank nowhere else in Skipton, though when I got a car John and I would drive up the Dales, to the Devonshire Arms in Cracoe and the Old Hall in Threshfield. We talked about girls and guitars and records, and spent a good deal of time assessing the quality of the beer. John was always partial to Youngers IPA. 

        I introduced John to Alison, his first wife. She worked as a secretary in the advertising department at the Craven Herald, and, in fact, I’d made a feeble attempt at courting her myself, soon abandoned when I realised we had little in common. I came up from London for their wedding at Threshfield and visited John and Alison at the house where they lived in Embsay. It saddened me that the marriage didn’t last but I was somehow relieved when John told me they’d parted on good terms and remained so. Later he married Jane and I visited them too. By this time John had a white Strat and I had a sunburst one, Fenders at last but no audience to listen to us. 

        John was the only Panda to remain in Skipton. Bob settled near Hull where he became a solicitor and Terry’s subsequent whereabouts would always be a bit of a mystery. I went to live in London, then America, then London again, and by this time our lives had taken very diverse paths. Nevertheless, whenever I came up to Skipton to see my dad I generally looked in on John. Then, after my dad died in 1997, these visits more or less ceased. 

        Nevertheless, when you become a member of a pop group, even a group as insignificant as The Pandas, there’s a bond that remains always. It’s got something to do with being up there on a stage together without a safety net, knowing that you’re relying on each other to reach the end of the song without making a mistake, all for one and one for all. It’s a bit like playing together on a sports team, or working together on a successful project, a memory that stays with you, warm, nostalgic and comforting. Unforgettable, unbreakable.  

        In 2014, when John and I were told by his wife Yvonne that cancer was overtaking Bob and he wouldn’t last more than a few months, we spent an evening at their house near Hull, playing together again one last time. The first song we played was ‘I Saw Her Standing There’. “One, two, three, f…” and it was 1963 again. RIP John and Bob.  

CC, Bob - now playing bass - and John, at Bob's house in 2014.