Norman Crankshaw, who died aged 86 after a lifelong battle with what we suspect might have been Tourette’s, was in many ways a remarkable man, and in other, more accurate ways an unsuccessful one. He was also my great-uncle, and since his passing I have been unable to find the words, or the time, to articulate just what he meant to me.
My lasting memory of my great-uncle Norman was of him on holiday in the summer of 1985. I remember him sitting on the edge of Weston pier, wearing that palm tree patterned shirt he always loved, facing out to sea, begging the loan sharks to spare him. He had borrowed enormous sums of cash from the mob to finance his one-man production of 12 Angry Men, in which he played the Ed Begley part. But the show fell flat on its face, inducing a walkout from its audience of one. The bigger-budget revival Norman staged a year later fared even worse, and in a panic he fled his enraged creditors, heading for the coast and bringing us family members along as human shields.
For my great-uncle Norman, life was a tightrope walk. He was a born hustler, perpetually in motion, forever devising new and occasionally ingenious ways to make a living. His schemes were maverick and myriad, and always bankrolled by shady, powerful figures. His vaulting ambition would often back him into a dangerous corner and consequently our family would move frequently, with Norman burning through a carousel of aliases, accents and mustaches.
Given how things ended, it’s surprising to think that Norman once had legitimate aspirations. After graduating from Mersey River Polytechnic in 1955 with a Diploma in Chicanery, he set his sights on the business world, successfully marketing a homemade invention, a cross between a microscope and a wave-machine he called the “Microwave”. He made a steady living through his twenties and even enjoyed a moment in the spotlight when, aged 29, he was named one of Forbes’ 30 oldest people under 30. Yet, according to Sir Isaac Newton anyway, what goes up must unfortunately come down, and in Norman’s early thirties his business suffered a great financial crash. In more ways than one it was much like another famous Financial Crash that you might have heard of - Norman even spent much of his thirties in a Great Depression, a crisis which ended only when he sailed off to Europe to kill some Germans. It was 1968.
Things went on shakily for Norman, never quite catching the major break he so sought. His marriage to his first wife, Shelly, ended abruptly, shortly after his 40th birthday. The marriage had begun when he offered her a green card, and ended when she met someone with a full Nero stamp card. Norman was devastated and inconvenienced, and in 1974 renounced society altogether, disappearing to join a revolutionary luddite group. Inevitably the group fell well short of their stated goals and Norman, ever the corner cutter, was expelled for using an electric hammer to smash looms. His life falling apart, he briefly found solace in a fleeting courtship with the starlet Catherine Zeta-Jones, but she left him to marry someone younger.
Throughout his fifties, Norman’s efforts to scrabble together a living became increasingly desperate. For a time he accrued a decent income selling another popular invention, a cross between a sandal and a fork called a “Spork”, but quickly blew all of his newly acquired wealth hanging around with unsavoury characters in the sorts of bars where, male or female, everybody looked like Sharon Osborne.
Time was increasingly unkind to Norman, and with late-middle age came a staggering and unprecedented phase of decrepitness. He tried to move back in with his parents, only to find that they had long since died, and his boyhood home had been converted back into an adult store. He moved in nonetheless, occupying the room in the back. It was around his sixtieth birthday that Norman first began getting into leeches, buying them in bulk from some of the shadier, smellier kids at the local school. His devotion to these medieval bloodsuckers quickly became legendary, evangelical even. He seldom passed an acquaintance on the street without delivering an enraptured sales pitch. In time, his use of leeches extended far further than simply draining the swelling from his numerous bodily abnormalities; he would use them for patching up cracks in the tiling, removing staples and, in his later years, to hold up his trousers.
After he died and his body was used in medical experiments (but not in that order), my great-uncle Norman was laid to rest last week in some cemetery. In accordance with what his final wishes might well have been, his funeral was short, and took place on a day which none of his surviving family could make. Michael Portillo, the only attendee at the service, tearfully eulogised him as a “connoisseur of contention, a fortuitous bystander to so many of our century’s contretemps”, before privately dubbing him “a sort of scummy Forrest Gump” at the wake, and telling everyone he had only come to reclaim some pairs of trousers my great-uncle had stolen. So, in lieu of a proper goodbye for my late, dead great-uncle, I ask you, reader, to please take a moment, if you’re not too busy this evening, to quietly think of this man’s life - for better or worse, a unique 20th Century life. And if his loss leaves too great a cavity, please remember, as Norman would always say, it’s nothing a leech or two can’t fix.
For my great-uncle Norman, life was a tightrope walk. He was a born hustler, perpetually in motion, forever devising new and occasionally ingenious ways to make a living. His schemes were maverick and myriad, and always bankrolled by shady, powerful figures. His vaulting ambition would often back him into a dangerous corner and consequently our family would move frequently, with Norman burning through a carousel of aliases, accents and mustaches.
Given how things ended, it’s surprising to think that Norman once had legitimate aspirations. After graduating from Mersey River Polytechnic in 1955 with a Diploma in Chicanery, he set his sights on the business world, successfully marketing a homemade invention, a cross between a microscope and a wave-machine he called the “Microwave”. He made a steady living through his twenties and even enjoyed a moment in the spotlight when, aged 29, he was named one of Forbes’ 30 oldest people under 30. Yet, according to Sir Isaac Newton anyway, what goes up must unfortunately come down, and in Norman’s early thirties his business suffered a great financial crash. In more ways than one it was much like another famous Financial Crash that you might have heard of - Norman even spent much of his thirties in a Great Depression, a crisis which ended only when he sailed off to Europe to kill some Germans. It was 1968.
Things went on shakily for Norman, never quite catching the major break he so sought. His marriage to his first wife, Shelly, ended abruptly, shortly after his 40th birthday. The marriage had begun when he offered her a green card, and ended when she met someone with a full Nero stamp card. Norman was devastated and inconvenienced, and in 1974 renounced society altogether, disappearing to join a revolutionary luddite group. Inevitably the group fell well short of their stated goals and Norman, ever the corner cutter, was expelled for using an electric hammer to smash looms. His life falling apart, he briefly found solace in a fleeting courtship with the starlet Catherine Zeta-Jones, but she left him to marry someone younger.
Throughout his fifties, Norman’s efforts to scrabble together a living became increasingly desperate. For a time he accrued a decent income selling another popular invention, a cross between a sandal and a fork called a “Spork”, but quickly blew all of his newly acquired wealth hanging around with unsavoury characters in the sorts of bars where, male or female, everybody looked like Sharon Osborne.
Time was increasingly unkind to Norman, and with late-middle age came a staggering and unprecedented phase of decrepitness. He tried to move back in with his parents, only to find that they had long since died, and his boyhood home had been converted back into an adult store. He moved in nonetheless, occupying the room in the back. It was around his sixtieth birthday that Norman first began getting into leeches, buying them in bulk from some of the shadier, smellier kids at the local school. His devotion to these medieval bloodsuckers quickly became legendary, evangelical even. He seldom passed an acquaintance on the street without delivering an enraptured sales pitch. In time, his use of leeches extended far further than simply draining the swelling from his numerous bodily abnormalities; he would use them for patching up cracks in the tiling, removing staples and, in his later years, to hold up his trousers.
After he died and his body was used in medical experiments (but not in that order), my great-uncle Norman was laid to rest last week in some cemetery. In accordance with what his final wishes might well have been, his funeral was short, and took place on a day which none of his surviving family could make. Michael Portillo, the only attendee at the service, tearfully eulogised him as a “connoisseur of contention, a fortuitous bystander to so many of our century’s contretemps”, before privately dubbing him “a sort of scummy Forrest Gump” at the wake, and telling everyone he had only come to reclaim some pairs of trousers my great-uncle had stolen. So, in lieu of a proper goodbye for my late, dead great-uncle, I ask you, reader, to please take a moment, if you’re not too busy this evening, to quietly think of this man’s life - for better or worse, a unique 20th Century life. And if his loss leaves too great a cavity, please remember, as Norman would always say, it’s nothing a leech or two can’t fix.