Time can’t slow down this traveller

ROGER TANNER . . . mills, music and globetrotting

Martyn meets...Roger Tanner, a true character and rattling good company.


EVERYONE, and I mean just everyone, said I had to go and see Roger Tanner, which was easier said than done.

Roger celebrated his 90th birthday in January, but is he slowing down? You must be joking...

Pinning him down for an interview was the main challenge, he is just so busy.

When I finally got a date out of him the heavens opened, the snow fell and nobody was going anywhere in Greenfield.

So there we were, back to square one, for here is a man of relentless energy and drive. When I first tried to get in touch he was on holiday in Taiwan.

“Well; it was somewhere I hadn’t been...”

Which must just about be the only place on the planet, then.

As I waited in his quixotically quaint kitchen at his fairy-tale “cottage” overlooking the hills of Saddleworth while he had his photograph taken, my curiosity got the better of me and I cheekily began studying the photographs which adorned the cupboards.

And what a tale unfolded. There was Roger with a huge, and I mean humungously huge, python around his shoulders and there was another with Roger serenely smoking a hookah water pipe.

“I didn’t inhale of course, I don’t do drugs, never have. I just pretended for the picture.”

But he does do bungee jumping. Yep, that’s right, he leapt off a bridge in New Zealand, where the commercial side of this sport began on the Kawarau Bridge in Queenstown, in 1986.

You can jump just about anywhere nowadays but this is Roger Tanner we’re talking about, so he went to where it all began.

“I took along a couple of friends, as I didn’t think people would believe I had done it and I wanted witnesses.”

Roger ascended to the now world-famous Hackett Platform and duly signed in: “When they saw I was 74 they gave it me for free!”

Roger waved cheerily at his companions in that aristocratic way of his, doubtless accompanied by his infectious grin, and looked at his companions to see the taxi driver making the sign of the cross and bowing his head...

He sat across the kitchen table from me, laughing out loud at the recollection. “It was a rather silly idea but I’ve had lots of those, all my life...”

And he laughed out loud rather a lot during our time together, for he is a clearly a man who enjoys life. And what a life.

Born in 1922 at his parents’ home in Greenfield — he moved next door at the age of 29 — he was educated at a private boarding school in Uppingham, Rutland. What else would you expect of the youngest son of Tanners of Greenfield, the archetypal mill-owning family.

On leaving full-time education he chose to pursue his love of music and was accepted at the Royal College in London where he played piano to his heart’s content. Except that by now the Second World War was raging and London wasn’t that safe.

“Mum wanted me to come home, but I was rather enjoying London and wasn’t too keen. I shared digs with Malcolm Arnold, who went on to become one of this country’s leading composers. It was a great time.”

Mum, as mums always do in my experience, had the last word — one day the rent failed to arrive.

Back home young Mr Roger threw himself into the family business, cotton spinning at four mills employing more than 900 people.

He also joined up, becoming a trainee pilot in the RAF but they wouldn’t give him wings. “They said I was colour blind, but I didn’t believe them.

“Anyway, I joined the Fleet Air Arm, they didn’t care and were happy to take me.”

Young Roger was dispatched to the Far East, a posting in India, and en route his transport put down in Cairo. The ever curious Roger promptly took off to see the Pyramids and missed his onward flight to India.

Eventually arriving he was chastened to discover the war in Burma against the Japanese had been won and he ended up flying out of Pakistan with the stern warning: “Don’t put down in Afghanistan whatever you do.”

It’s a warning that holds good to this day.

He was also keen on cricket and joined Greenfield, where the Tanner family has had a huge influence for generations. “But I wasn’t very good and didn’t play too much, unless it was Wakes and they were short and needed to take people to an away game.

“Getting to Friarmere wasn’t that easy in those days and I had a large open-top car which could easily carry six players, so that’s when | usually got a game.”

Cricket afficianidoes will be aware that the Tanner family donated the cup which has been played for by generations of local cricketers in the Saddleworth and District League, and which have led to some of the most riotous sporting days ever witnessed in the valley. Roger remains president of the league.

Back home after the war he followed his love of music and founded Saddleworth Museum, using his own money to purchase a derelict mill alongside the Huddersfield Narrow Canal and with a group of volunteers set about establishing the institution so expertly run these days by curator Peter Fox.

Roger remains chairman and hosted a 50th anniversary celebration lunch in late May.

I inquired about his love of travel, and he was — surprisingly — stuck for answer.

“I recall my parents taking me to Switzerland and placing me in the train’s luggage rack, so I must have been rather small, I suppose.”

He has since travelled just about everywhere — “Where there was something to see” —– including Machu Pincu in Peru and, of course, China.

He and a friend decided to drive the 12,000 miles from Saddleworth to the land of ying and yang and chose Roger’s ageing Bentley as their rather glorious preferred mode of transport.

“Then we decided it wasn’t perhaps such a good idea. Not the decision to drive, the idea of taking the Bentley.

“What if we had a problem in the middle of the Gobi Desert? Where we would we get spare parts?

“So we took a Land Rover instead and had no problems at all. It was quite an adventure.”

The Land Rover returned home by boat and the intrepid pair flew back to Greenfield in rather more comfort than they had endured on the 12-week overland marathon.

I didn’t ask his age when he undertook this epic journey — it was probably just last week...

Then again, it couldn’t have been. He drove to Cardiff to watch an opera. That’s right, he took his Skoda —– and again he laughed out loud at the thought — and five hours later without a break was at the concert.

Enthralling

“All the cars have gone now, apart from the Skoda and mum’s old Daimler which I keep for sentimental reasons.”

This is one remarkable man. He is charm personified and rattling good company. I suspect I have only scratched at the surface of a true Saddleworth character, a man who will pass into legend.

It would be a serious challenge to pen the book of his life. It would be fascinating and enthralling at the same time, but what a journey he has travelled — is still travelling with some gusto — spanning decades and millenniums.

But where to start?

Always at the beginning, dear boy, always at the beginning. But some stories have no end and we haven’t heard the last of this one. Not by a long chalk.