The Reivers Are Coming Virtually

Search for The Reivers! The challenge is issued, the risks are enormous, it is my name and my business reputation at stake. We don’t know what is to be done, the clients haven’t seen anything like it. Don’t you fret if you don’t know where we’re going, I’ll find a way and we will, I repeat, we will succeed!

So began The Search for The Border Reivers, without knowing who they were or where they were from or what to do about it – I like an adventurous challenge. I had developed from a teacher and advisor of educational computing into a database programmer doing what I thought were clever things with information but clients couldn’t understand the programmed intelligence and mostly made comments about the appearance, colours and pictures and occasional moving or noisy parts of my creations that manipulated information in databases.

My ex school friend and climbing companion Stuart Hepburn mentioned that he and Eric Robson of radio and TV were developing a themed historical trail to bring tourists to the English Scottish borders. The theme was In Search of The Border Reivers. Stuart was accumulating information about battle sites and fortified buildings associated with the region which would become an Ordnance Survey map and gazetteer containing text, images and OS grid coordinates. Eric was to be an inspirational voice, maybe if finance was available a film or documentary could develop? This was in 1998, could I do anything for the project with computers?

Well, an adventure only happens when a challenge is faced and the effort starts, even if you don’t know where you are going or what the challenges will be. “Yes”, I said, “of course we could do something.” In the back of my mind was the very competent programmer Tony who had helped with the clever behind the scenes programming, and the very talented designer Chris Tollworthy who had tried to develop his business with a surplus of kit that he bought when he was made redundant from a multimedia business that had failed. So I had in my team the brains, the creative talent, and my enthusiasm, so what could go wrong?

Then the bombshell, it is Tuesday in Dovenby and there is a meeting in Longtown on Friday of the heads of tourism of Carlisle, Dumfries and Galloway, Scottish Borders, Northumberland. They are all rivals and competing for the same economic development but, as in the Border Wars, their modern competition is for the spoils of tourism and it has taken careful persuasion to bring them together to seek a common peace and sharing of the potential prize. Border Reivers tourism will benefit you all, we hoped to persuade them.

The problem was that in 1998 I am supposed to sell them this idea of digital media when most did not even understand what the Internet was. For example I told the tourism officers of Carlisle and Cumbria that they had better register their domain names quick eg Carlisle.com – they said “huh” and Carlisle.com at that time was grabbed by the US city of Carlisle.

Back to the big rush. I had two and a half days to prepare a demonstration to people some of whom didn’t know … you get the drift. I didn’t know what the new fangled multimedia could do but trusted Chris to put some things together on a CD to show them, but first we needed some video and audio about Reivers. So I rushed to Cummersdale outside Carlisle where Eric Robson was involved in doing some voiceover on an archaeological dig and he would do an off the cuff audio explanation of what the Reivers were about for the demonstration CD and for my understanding.

Quickly I put the digital recorder on the car bonnet, Eric does a first verbal draft, says wait a few seconds to get composed, then gives the most clear, faultless concise description in his resonant confident voice. What a supreme professional. At last the adrenaline seemed to subside, success can happen if we have his level of ability on our side, perhaps we can pull it off – but by Friday, what about the video?

Eric said try Philip Howard who had recently inherited Naworth Castle – his brother received the title and Philip received the biggest millstone of an old cold money pit of a castle but intended to make it pay with some publicity. Aha! He wants publicity, no doubt wants marketing with audio and video and may give a bit of video and audio to add to the demo disk! In this game of adventurous chance a lot of confidence and seizing the moment is required. (I used to occasionally go rock climbing so maybe falling flat on my face in business is not too bad for risk taking!)

So a quick call on the mobile brick and off I went to Naworth at Brampton and found the most ordinary and extra-ordinary person of Philip Howard who later became my client. That’s another story but he is a worker first, cutting grass or shooting things or doing the organising of a new business and having the responsibility of keeping the knowledge, the way of life, the specialness that can only come from a family of ancient roots. Perhaps the family can be described by some actions; they gave away Castle Howard; they swapped a pub for a very nice house; they had a capon tree, not giving capons but where the reivers put their cap on the tree before they were hung.

At last, armed with audio and video I raced from Dovenby to Chris Tollworthy’s place at Pica, deposited the items, raced home, slept, back to Pica where Chris had not slept and where digitising video took hours and if there was a mistake then back to the digitising for more hours! Remember that this was the time of the 480z and single core and memory bytes measured in kilos not Gig(gles) or Ter(ribles). It is all a bad dream now, 22 years later but then …

Better late than never, more racing from Dovenby to Pica then raced to Longtown for this important meeting, praying that the CD had burned OK (no time to check it!) and all leads and bits were in the car and the borrowed digital projector would work (no spare bulb). Fortunately it all worked and the wonderful Nick Winterbotham Director of Tullie House Museum in Carlisle was impressed and could see the potential. The Internet was so new and slow that multimedia would not work on it until many years later but Tony and I had a clever workaround (another story). But we promised a website as well and I registered the reivers.com domain name for them.

Now it’s their turn to come up with the goods, the contract for something that was impossible to define in creative terms and a technology that none of them had experience of and a justification of a business plan with unknown effectiveness for a marketing initiative that had never been tried before. What’s to worry about, eh?

Eventually the The Hot Trod CD was made as part of the In Search of The Border Reivers and thousands of copies distributed to media and tourism connections. That was in 1998. Now we are in 2021 you know that multimedia CDs are dead, and were made a quarter of the screen size of modern displays, but you can still see it here, reivers.info or borderreivers.uk
http://reivers.info/the-hot-trod-book/#1553077671487-8401816b-2204

The Millennium 2000 commemorated Border Reivers in Scottish culture with the major work which I recently put on http://reivers.info/ which explains their time and place. These contracts led to Cumbria Archives requesting another Millennium project, Voices of Cumbria which led to some fascinating research with some uni students helping in their vacation. This led to http://thiswascumbria.uk/ illustrated oral history CD which I recently converted to an online Internet version and keep adding to it and adding video item that I upload to YouTube such as http://thiswascumbria.uk/steam-digger-from-the-deep-video/ which has been viewed by 957,000 people to date.

Viewers of my other videos and web sites take the total number of people who I have helped to well over a million. Someone asked why I didn’t publish a book but how could I reach and help so many people within the limits of distribution and access and cost of the printed book, and why should I when the pleasure of the modern integrated IT world community is to give for free if we can, and find our reward in our work being useful to someone.

“Panic produces products” could be the theme of my business developments. While driving the water-ski boat in Episkopi in Cyprus I dragged poor Ian through the water (the water skiing enema of learning – now stand up!), a dentist from my home town of Carlisle so when I returned from teaching in Cyprus we wondered in 1997/8 if computers could help the admin of his surgery by making the book of tortuous fee scale regulations into a computer program. All I needed was the fee scale so I could copy its codes and text and fees into a database that I would design and hey ho, the first on the market and money and … Hold on, how do I get the new fee scale that was published next month, Jan 1st?

So being cheeky I phoned round the Department of Health on the last day of our College term before the Christmas vacation and eventually found the person responsible for the very important document that stated how much money each dentist would get for that lovely filling you were once needing (sorry to remind you). Eventually I found a poor lady who was sounding stressed and when I said “Can I have a digital copy of the new fee scale when it is updated” she replied “I wish you could because I have to type it and it is Christmas and there has never been a digital copy, it has been done on manual typewriters, oh dear ohhh …” I could hear the despair in her voice as she started to put the phone down, so I bellowed just in time “I can do it for you!” and she just heard my shout and “Huh, before January 1st?” “Yes, all I need is a phoned approval from a purchase authorisation and I will do it money back guarantee for …” quick appraisal of her value for her Christmas being free from typing and an amount was agreed, quite small if I remember, but a big enough present that there was a perceptible mix of relief and trepidation in her voice.

Panic over for her, panic starting for me – how do I do it?! Fortunately Carlisle College, where I did some temporary part time lecturing, had a digital scanner and optical character reader program, the printed pages duly arrived, were scanned, optical character recognition done, text checked twice, disks sent, money paid, and I was the only person in the UK with a digital copy of the dentists’ fee scale!

Now the hard slog of making sense of it all with my dentist friend Ian and lots of challenge and reward with programming and database. I realised that the data tracked each tooth treatment over time so there was an audit project to record effectiveness of treatment. I realised that I was not a businessman when the product worked but I now had to sell it to others and found it boring and … so I need to find other one off projects and let this one go – it was a DOS black screen thing in those 1997 days so Windows killed it as well as my fecklessness.

Fortunately teaching IT was a good fall back and training Office products at James Walker introduced me to an opportunity to digitise part of their sales catalogue for hydraulic seals and similar high end specialist product that were use around the world – and under it. Eventually my CD that helped technicians to select the appropriate product was carried onboard HMSS submarines, a special reward because my father had been Chief Petty Officer Submarines in World War 2, see the World War Parents link.

When the clever algorithms of the seal selection CD were taken for granted and the pictures were the selling point, and when another client at a government training body could not understand how the program worked but paid when I changed the colour scheme, then I thought if you want the visual bits then I will give you everything with sound, lights, moving pictures the lot – so multimedia was born in my business and eventually Reivers and Naworth and other projects developed.

Oh I nearly forget, who was that chap who was panicking because he got a contract with the South West Consortium of job centres to create and update the available jobs in neighbouring counties. He was an artist who showed lots of pictures of what it would look like, got the job, oops “I can only do pictures, now what to do”. This was before the days of the Internet so remote online Internet was not invented. We had just done a job that updated an online jobs database by ODBC clever stuff, and he begged us to take it over, but it was still impossible so Tony and I invented a way of putting the core program on their remote computers then sending a floppy to update them so nobody had to travel to Cornwall!

But let us not forget the really old days since I am now 72 and before my memory fails even more. Having dropped out of Grammar school, trapped in “challenging” teaching jobs, and wanting to reinvent my future, I started an Open University course in maths and IT but this was 1977 when the IT course had a terminal that was a golf ball typewriter with a roll of paper, no screen, and you type a few words on the paper eg a line of code, then press enter and the code zoomed from Carlisle College to Newcastle computer then back a second later with the response. Time consuming and boring. I had heard that there was a game of shooting up the aliens but when I pressed the spacebar “shoot” it clattered the character “I” repeatedly on the paper until it … so boring that I can neither remember it nor even now be persuaded to play any computer games!

But I must be even more ancient because in 1969 – 1972 at Northern Counties College my teacher training included a community studies survey of Gosforth Parish near Sellafield West Cumbria and the tutors wanted to experiment with the data by putting it on a computer, but only had access to paper tape and punch cards to input the data, and the typewriter thing that was supposed to punch the holes wasn’t available so we were given knitting needles and told to punch the … hang on I said, no way, and didn’t touch the things for a few years.

Now, having built them from bits, programmed them in various languages and made databases culminating with multimedia displays online, I reckon I’ve gone from punch tapes to perfection (nearly) when I can even talk to this thing and it types my voice on the screen, though I find this touch typing by far the most convenient and quicker.

What next?

Peter Nicholson January 2021