User:Rjmghome/John "Joe" Waudby

John "Joe" Waudby is a well known story teller in the oral tradition based in the town of St Albans in Hertfordshire, the UK. His stories range across a life that started in war torn London, to the Cold War, motor racing's glory years of the 1950s and 1960s, capture the atmosphere of caravanning in the 1970s and give a rare insiders view of the Fleet Street of the 1980s. He is also a well known car collector and his annual trips to Beer Hackett in Dorset have spread his stories across the South of England and beyond.

Life and Stories
Early Years:  Waudby was born on 27th January 1930 near Alexandra Palace in North London. His war time childhood is captured in one of the earliest stories "Collecting Shrapnel from the Bomb Craters" (1975).

National Service:  After the war he was called up for national service "National Service Medical" (1979)and joined the British Army’s 2nd Royal Tank Regiment as a private. This period coincided with the early skirmishes of what became the Cold War and provided a fertile source of stories upon which Waudby has drawn ever since. His classic "How I turned back the Red Army" (originally 1982, revised 2000) is his best known story of this time, earning him the double-edged epitaph "No Story is too small or trivial for Joe to polish to a gem by endless repetition" from his St Albans contemporary, playwright Willis Hall, author of Billy Liar. His great love of all things mechanical, later to manifest itself in a vast repertoire of car and motoring based tales, is also believed to date from this period.

1950 and Early 1960s: On leaving the army in 1949, he began a 50 year career in printing. His first job, as told in "Four Groats for a Tout" (1978) was as a salesman. During this period he combined business with pleasure by regularly taking jobs that entailed delivering high performance cars across Europe, although paradoxically the most often requested story of the time regards the Ford GT40 he didn't deliver to the island of Malta ("The GT40 that got away" (1989)). Other stories of the time include "Pontiacs, Petrol and the Police"(1993) relating the early years of the M1 motorway before the introduction of the statutory speed limits and " Racing trains to Scotland" (1997) a story that inspired the BBC programme Top Gear to recreate a race between a Jaguar XK120 and a Steam train in 2009. There are conflicting versions of the origins of his long running dispute with Sir Stirling Moss, but it seems to have its roots in Sir Stirling's commercial management team, not on the track.

1960s and Early 1970s: His marriage to Pamela in [ref required] presaged a period of partying that included the infamous “Skinny Dipping in the Lake” (1984) amongst others. Following the birth of their two children, his narrative history would have his audience believe that life became a series of increasing complex caravanning disasters ("The caravan and sidecar series" (1989-1991)) punctuated with an unrequited lust for the Ferrari 246 Dino GT ("If I won the pools" (1997)). His 1969 cameo appearance in “All Gas and Gaiters” is his earliest documented association with Fishpool Street, an area that would later become synonymous with his performances. It was during the early 1970s that he first became known for having the dubious privilege of being understudy to John Hewer in the roll of Captain Birdseye.

Surprisingly, given his close association with The Farriers Arms, Joe was not among the founding members of CAMRA. It has been suggested that this reflects a dispute with Graham Lees, Bill Mellor, Michael Hardman, and Jim Makin about the relative merits of Oakham Ales Jeffrey Hudson Bitter, but at this distance memories are accepted to be unreliable and both sides have long ago resolved to put the matter behind them.

1980s: Joe found himself once more an observer of a small revolution during his time on Fleet Street in the 1980s. Tales of this period evoke a time when unions and pubs dominated the media landscape ("I play the Euphonium"(1994))

1990s to date: by the mid 90s Joe had become a fixture in the local story telling tradition, appearing with clockwork-like regularity at “The Lower Red Lion” on Fishpool Street and holding audiences captivated as his stories gained a life of their own and spread their wings in true flights of fancy. Few new stories emerged after 1990 as his attention focussed on perfecting his existing body of work.

His earlier style of interactive mime was increasingly inhibited by chronic hip illness and for some years in the early 2000s his performances of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves”(1981, revived 2006) only included the opening hat throwing scenes. A hip replacement in 2006 led to a triumphant return to form performing before a whole new generation unfamiliar with the genre.

Now into his eighth decade he continues to perform and is an honorary local president of the Society for Storytelling.