Mick Aston and Martin Elliott

Our very own Roving Reporter Dennis revisits the Black Country to find out what's still there and what has changed.

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Mick Aston and Martin Elliott

Postby Dennis » Sun Jul 21, 2013 1:48 pm

My apologies for a long silence. As you may have seen elsewhere, I was writing a novel between last October and May which I put up on Kindle last week, The German Girl. It's about May 1968 in Paris, but that's another story... :wink:

When you reach your mid-60s like me, it's a disconcerting fact of life that your contemporaries start dying, and quite a few of them have unfortunately done so lately. Two of them I knew when I was growing up in Oldbury in the early 1960s, both went to Oldbury Grammar School. I'll start with the photographer Martin Elliott (1946-2010), whose moment of fame followed his taking a photograph of his girlfriend Fiona Butler in 1976 in a tennis dress and no knickers, The Tennis Girl. As an Athena poster it became a bestseller and graced many a student's wall. When I knew him, Martin had real dash and charisma about him, he was very droll and was a pleasure to be with, not least because he tended to be a magnet for girls. I got to know Martin through my friend Ian Davies, and also Mick Aston, the four of us used to go swimming together, sometimes at Thimblemill Baths in Smethwick. Later Martin went to Loughborough College of Art and took up photography. When Mick Aston published Mick's Archeology in 2000, the cover photograph of Mick in a multi-coloured sweater was taken by Martin, who had also moved to the West Country by then.

I got to know Mick - or Micky, as we always called him then - in about 1962 through Ian Davies, who was the same age as Mick. It turned out that my father Bernard Wood had once known Mick’s father, Harold Aston, who was a gifted cabinet maker. I had always been interested in history and archaeology and in 1963-4 Mick and I often went out on Saturdays on expeditions to historical sites. I remember that, apart from the obvious local ones of Dudley Castle and Wychbury Hill Fort at Hagley, we tramped over Beaudesert Castle at Henley-in-Arden and Castle Bromwich Castle, which were Norman motte-and-baileys, and went on a particularly cold visit to Sutton Coldfield Park in the snow to look at the Roman road which crosses it and some possible hut circles. On another occasion we went out on the train to the site of the Roman town of Salinae at Droitwich, and then on from there to view the finds in Worcester Museum.

Mick lived in Birch Road, Quinton, just inside Oldbury, and was excellent company - witty, erudite and essentially the ‘good bloke’ you saw on The Time Team. He could be amusingly cantankerous and always had ‘views’ on things, broadly left-wing or slightly anarchistic ones. He would never travel on a Midland Red 'bus, for example, if he could help it, which made our expeditions a bit tricky sometimes. He objected generally to the Midland Red being a profit-making capitalist organization, so it had to be Birmingham City buses or British Railways. He was also a vegetarian from an early age. I remember a long discussion about religion with him one evening. He could never accept Christianity, although in later life he devoted a great deal of his time to studying monasticism. He was always quite cross about Oldbury Grammar School’s failure to notice or to foster his interest in archeology. The eye-catching stripy jumpers which became Mick’s trade mark later were very far from his earlier sartorial style, which usually consisted of a dull brown or grey loose sweater and jeans. Mick was an excellent draughtsman and could do almost professional standard artist’s impressions of, say, an Iron Age village or a fortress, rather like the famous Alan Sorrell. He loved Ray Charles's music, as did Martin Elliott, and many a time we listened to his tape recordings, especially of ‘What’d I Say’, in his front room. He and his parents, Harold and Gladys, went for many years to Cornwall for their annual holidays, so Mick’s knowledge of, say, Chysauster, St Michael’s Mount or fougous was impressive by the time I knew him. They were keen cine photographers and had many spools of silent colour film of their Cornish holidays, some of which Mick showed me on a projector. He always suffered from asthma, something which he had until his death according to the obituaries I’ve read, and may even have been a contributory factor in it. He used to say that some days it was as if his ‘lungs were in a box, and the box was getting smaller.’

I went on my one and only archeological dig with Mick in the summer of 1964 to Wall, the Roman mansio of Letocetum, near Lichfield. For several Saturdays running we caught the train out to Shenstone from, I think, Snow Hill and spent the day on our knees with a brush and trowel. It may possibly have been Mick’s first dig. We worked at the intersection of two Roman roads. We found a hearth, a well, various post holes, jewellery and at least one Roman coin. They were long days with a very early start, but I think our team did a useful job under the direction of Jim Gould, who published a report on the dig and, much later, a book, Letocetum: The Rise and Decline of a Roman Posting Station (1998). In the summer of 1964 Mick was expecting to go to Ormskirk to train as a teacher but, to his great surprise, when his A-level results came through he was offered a place at Birmingham University to read geography. It was while on that degree course that he developed his knowledge of historical geography. I went off to London to read French the following year, but we saw each other during vacations from time to time. Eventually Mick settled in Somerset. The last time I saw him was shortly before his Time Team fame, he rang me to say that he was in Birmingham for an archeological conference. I was flattered to get a mention in his book Mick’s Archeology (2000). I shall always miss Mick and Martin.
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Re: Mick Aston and Martin Elliott

Postby mallosa » Sun Jul 21, 2013 6:18 pm

Thanks for those memories Dennis - Just found this on Wiki...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mick_Aston
If you would like to have your ancestors photo's included in our Gallery, please send me a pm.

Researching: Evans, Rollason, Henley/Hendley, Brookes, Taylor (Wilson - Birmingham)
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