27 replies to this topic

[Michael Ferner]

We all are guilty, I guess. To a degree, at the very least. I know I am.

Whenever something carries the title "official results" (or something of that ilk), I stand to attention (in my mind) - "Now, here comes..." - it's The Seal of Approval for the weary researcher, The Holy Grail for a restless soul. We habitually refer to "official entry lists", "official factory records" and so forth in our daily discussions, it becomes what we (in German) refer to as a Totschlagargument (literally a manslaughter argument) - it kills off any opposition to it. You can have five independent sources saying one thing, but the "official document" saying another, and it's a cinch who wins out in a situation like that. Too easy, mate.

By now I have had a lot of experience with "official information", not least thanks to the deluge provided by Don's gracious deed of scanning the AAA microfilms. I have browsed through hundreds, perhaps thousands of pages in the hope of finding the odd "tie breaker", where I can't decide which source is the more relevant, the more "truthful" - surely an official "AAA document" will tip the balance!!?

Sad to say, I am no wiser yet. "Official documents" are provided by humans, the same as every other source, be it newspapers or history books. Humans do make mistakes. One expects an "official" to be more diligent than a newspaper hack, and that's probably mostly true, but on balance, who am I going to believe? When a photograph shows the newspaper man to be right, and the "official document" to be, well, worthless!? When the "official information" about relief drivers shows one driver occupying two cars at the same time? When the "official point standings" show a massive deficit in arithmetic 101?

No doubt about it, it is GOOD to have official documentation - but one always needs to be wary

[Allen Brown]

Very true.  Recently I was sent the records of one F1 team that had been written by the team manager himself, and would therefore trump everything else.  It turned out they were written about 10-15 years after the events, evidently using published sources.  Even worse, they contained a key chassis identification that clashed with other records and was, chronologically, an impossibility.  

 

Whatever it is, you have to ask yourself how the writer of that document knew that information.  Had he seen it?  Did somebody tell him?  Was it written contemporaneously?  Could he have mistranscribed it?

 

I occasionally catch myself starting to say "well, that's definitive", and remind myself it might not be.

[ensign14]

I've had this with pop music.

 

According to the Official Charts Company, in the UK, The Beatles have had 17 no. 1 singles. 

 

"Please Please Me" is counted as a no. 2.

 

Yet the NME chart had it at no. 1.  So did the Melody Maker chart.  And the Record Mirror chart.  And the Disc Magazine chart.  And the BBC Pick of the Pops chart.

 

The one chart which had it at no. 2 was Record Retailer, which was a minor trade publication that took a small sample of shops to get its own chart sorted out; around 30 shops, whereas the NME had over 200.

 

But when Gambaccini collated the Guinness Book of Hit Singles in the mid-1970s, he used Record Retailer as his sixties source.  The reason being that Record Retailer published a top 50 from 1960 to 1969. 

 

And the Official Charts Company has chosen that as the "official" charts from the 1960s.

 

But at the time nobody used Record Retailer.  In fact, most people probably did not even know about it.  There was in fact no official 1960s chart.  The BBC one was averaged from the other charts.  The first attempt at a generally recognized chart was in early 1969, at the BBC's insistence, after they had a three-way tie at the top of their chart in August 1968. (Which only happened because the NME confused Tommy James with Tom Jones.)

 

So now every quiz asking the question "what was The Beatles' first no. 1 single?" ignores "Please Please Me", even though, if you asked anyone at the arse end of February 1963 what the number 1 single was, everyone would have said "Please Please Me".

 

Even worse, I've found out that Record Retailer actually had a tie at the top for two weeks between The Beatles and the yodeling Australian Frank Ifield.  They broke the tie in favour of Ifield for no explicable reason. 

 

So the "official" charts are not official and are demonstrably wrong.

 

I do intend to put all this down some day, as some genuine no. 1 hits are not counted as such.  "19th Nervous Breakdown" and "Stranger On The Shore" are the most notable examples.  The latter was a million-seller, a US number one, and a no. 1 in every chart bar Record Retailer - because the latter confused Acker Bilk with Kenny Ball...

[RA Historian]

Happens often. I am currently researching midwest US races for an upcoming book and yesterday looked at the 1961 Road America 500. No two sets of results agree! For example, the entry list showed that the Cunningham Maserati T-60 was to be driven by John Fitch and Briggs Cunningham while one of the team's Maserati T-63s was to be driven by Bill Kimberly and Dick Thompson. But as happens so often with the Cunningham Team, drivers were switched around. The T-60 finished third overall with  Thompson joining the previous two, while Briggs did some time in the T-63, which finished ninth. However, as so often happens, timing and scoring never went beyond the published entry list, and does not show the driver switches. These "official" results were duly picked up by periodicals of the day. Fortunately I was at that race and took photographs which show the affected drivers in their second rides. 

 

Heck of it all is that this is common, not uncommon.

 

Tom

[BRG]

Given that all the pop charts were based on ridiculously small samples of sales in a few record stores and were therefore open to, and subject to, dodgy dealings by the recording industry, you should treat any chart from those days (or later) with some degree of scepticism.

 

As for 'official' information, surely we have to treat that as the most accurate  - or at least, the least inaccurate - source.  Journalists did not necessarily have all the information and may have  got themselves confused or be prey to their own prejudices.  So might officials, whether race or team - but they should at least be the best placed to get things right.

[DCapps]

Welcome to the historians' world....

[Vitesse2]

Given that all the pop charts were based on ridiculously small samples of sales in a few record stores and were therefore open to, and subject to, dodgy dealings by the recording industry, you should treat any chart from those days (or later) with some degree of scepticism.

I once managed - in the dark days at the end of January, when nothing sells - to push an otherwise unsuccessful showbiz autobiography (the author of which now escapes me!) into the lower reaches of the Sunday Times bestseller list for one week on the strength of having sold eighteen copies (out of an initial order of twenty, which had been gathering dust since October) to the local county library service.

[Paul Parker]

I've had this with pop music.

 

According to the Official Charts Company, in the UK, The Beatles have had 17 no. 1 singles. 

 

"Please Please Me" is counted as a no. 2.

 

Yet the NME chart had it at no. 1.  So did the Melody Maker chart.  And the Record Mirror chart.  And the Disc Magazine chart.  And the BBC Pick of the Pops chart.

 

The one chart which had it at no. 2 was Record Retailer, which was a minor trade publication that took a small sample of shops to get its own chart sorted out; around 30 shops, whereas the NME had over 200.

 

But when Gambaccini collated the Guinness Book of Hit Singles in the mid-1970s, he used Record Retailer as his sixties source.  The reason being that Record Retailer published a top 50 from 1960 to 1969. 

 

And the Official Charts Company has chosen that as the "official" charts from the 1960s.

 

But at the time nobody used Record Retailer.  In fact, most people probably did not even know about it.  There was in fact no official 1960s chart.  The BBC one was averaged from the other charts.  The first attempt at a generally recognized chart was in early 1969, at the BBC's insistence, after they had a three-way tie at the top of their chart in August 1968. (Which only happened because the NME confused Tommy James with Tom Jones.)

 

So now every quiz asking the question "what was The Beatles' first no. 1 single?" ignores "Please Please Me", even though, if you asked anyone at the arse end of February 1963 what the number 1 single was, everyone would have said "Please Please Me".

 

Even worse, I've found out that Record Retailer actually had a tie at the top for two weeks between The Beatles and the yodeling Australian Frank Ifield.  They broke the tie in favour of Ifield for no explicable reason. 

 

So the "official" charts are not official and are demonstrably wrong.

 

I do intend to put all this down some day, as some genuine no. 1 hits are not counted as such.  "19th Nervous Breakdown" and "Stranger On The Shore" are the most notable examples.  The latter was a million-seller, a US number one, and a no. 1 in every chart bar Record Retailer - because the latter confused Acker Bilk with Kenny Ball...

 

So who was Record Retailer then, any names or is that verboten?

[Alexey Rogachev]

"Official documents" are provided by humans, the same as every other source, be it newspapers or history books. Humans do make mistakes. One expects an "official" to be more diligent than a newspaper hack, and that's probably mostly true, but on balance, who am I going to believe? When a photograph shows the newspaper man to be right, and the "official document" to be, well, worthless!? When the "official information" about relief drivers shows one driver occupying two cars at the same time? When the "official point standings" show a massive deficit in arithmetic 101?

No doubt about it, it is GOOD to have official documentation - but one always needs to be wary

Well said Michael, this is exactly the situation in which I'm up to my ears now. Compiling a table of all 38 Estonia 9 cars ever produced - not using official factory documentation, only my photo archive and some other unofficial sources, I came to a conclusion that there were approximately twice as many cars of the earlier version produced as cars of the latter version, the 9M. But my Estonian friends, who have the official TARK factory records, positively deny it saying that there were 14 Estonia 9's and 24 Estonia 9M's - i. e. all vice versa. They have seen my table, they have seen that in any way it includes more than 14 different Estonia 9's and much less than 24 9M's - if there were 24 of them indeed, where are eventually all the traces of those 'excess' cars? - but they keep holding their ground. The infallibility dogma in action?

Edited by Alexey Rogachev, 12 February 2018 - 18:20.

[ensign14]

So who was Record Retailer then, any names or is that verboten?

 

It doesn't really matter, one of the ironies of it being such an overlooked chart was that it was probably less hyped than the others.  It was a trade-only magazine with a small circulation.  In 1972 it became Music Week.  I think it is now online only.

 

But hyping only had a big impact on the lower positions of the chart.  That was the reason why Melody Maker, which had a top 50 for a while, cut it back to 30, because it could not be confident that 31-50 were not hyped into it.  Once you got to the top end it was too difficult.  The sampling was not by total number of sales, but by sales order.  They added up all the positions and lowest total "won".  

 

But a sample of around 30 stores meant Record Retailer had an unrepresentatively small sample.  At least compared to Melody Maker and NME, which were the real giants.

 

It works the other way as well; there are a number of singles that only topped the Record Retailer charts and are counted as no. 1s but almost certainly were not.  The most egregious being Elvis pianist Floyd Cramer's "On The Rebound" which didn't even get into the top 2 of anyone else's. 

 

And - and this is the real biggie - the biggest retailers of singles in the sixties were Woolworths, Boots and Smiths.  And none of them contributed to anyone's chart.  The effect of this is startling.  Woolies only started feeding into the official BMRB chart - and the first no. 1 that was thanks to Woolworths' sales was Brian & Michael's ode to LS Lowry "Matchstalk Men And Matchstick Cats And Dogs".  Didn't get anywhere near the NME chart, which still only got its figures from specialist record stores. 

 

So, there may have been a whole load of "number 1s" by the likes of Val Doonican and Des O'Connor that missed out because their superannuated fans would never be seen dead in a record store - but would have bought it with the pick & mix.

 

Incidentally, looking who made which charts, Record Mirror had more of a sample set in Scotland than anyone else...
 

[john winfield]

 

So, there may have been a whole load of "number 1s" by the likes of Val Doonican and Des O'Connor that missed out because their superannuated fans would never be seen dead in a record store - but would have bought it with the pick & mix.

 

 

 

Thank the Lord.

 

Interesting couple of posts, Ensign. I hadn't appreciated these aspects of the history of UK pop charts. I shall now move my Guinness book of British Hit Singles out of the non-fiction section and place it next to Grimm's Fairy Tales.

[ensign14]

It's not all bad - and extending the chart to a top 50 gave a brief moment of fame to the likes of Babbity Blue and Danny Storm who would otherwise be utterly forgotten.  (Although some others missed out by hitting the other charts - my favourite of those being Great Uncle Fred, and Beau Brummell & His Noble Men; the latter a South African lifeguard PJ Proby wannabe who returned home to be a photo book model and nudist campaigner, and whose b-side was a spoken word single because he was so bad at singing all the studio time was used for laying down the main track).

 

 

[DCapps]

Welcome to the historians' world....

 

This is the sort of stuff historians deal with all the time, pretty much across the spectrum of the various fields of history.

 

As a military historian, one tends to groan a bit whenever perusing the "official history" of a campaign, unit, war, what have you. Until fairly recently, there was usually good reason to do so, some of these being a mixture of what was often utter malarkey mixed with (un)healthy doses of propaganda. In recent years, there has been something of a change, a significant shift in this type of historical writing. The recent works by the U.S. Army Center of Military History on the Viet-Nam War are the very antitheses of earlier work cranked out on the war and the U.S. involvement. Actually, the majority of the books produced by the CMH on WW2 are quite good, some being quite blunt in their interpretations of leaders, performance, and capabilities of U.S. forces, even those written not long after the war ended. Overall, despite a blots on its copybook, such as some of what was produced in the 1970s, CMH has done excellent over the years, some the newer works being top notch. Other countries have mixed records on this, but as in the USA, the more recent the work, the better in terms of balance and developing the context they tend to be. A far cry from when I waded into the field in the 1970s.

 

Part of this is due to exactly the sort of discussion that is going on here, turning a more critical eye towards sources and developing more more nuanced and challenging interpretations than what earlier historians produced, in part by being more inclusive in their contextual analysis and in part by re-looking and rethinking source material.

 

The data dump of AAA Contest Board material I have dropped on several people (if others are interested and have a wad of space in their Dropbox accounts, contact me via PM) simply adds additional pieces to the puzzle; they do not solve the puzzle. The most interesting and useful parts of the archival material are, in my view, the Board minutes and then the bulletins, given that they provide at least some insight into actions and thoughts of the Board.

[Michael Ferner]

I think there's a general difference in how official documentation is being viewed in most fields of general history, and in motor racing (i.e. sports) history in particular. In the latter, we are used to work off journalist's accounts, their facts and figures, because in most cases it's all we got. And there's the usual loss through transcription errors, and "on-the-spot interpretation" by the journos, who are/were most definitely NOT trained historians, so that errors range from the mere carelessness to outward incompetence. One has to be aware that it was their job to report about nothing more than some sort of entertainment, a distraction to the masses, not matters of importance in the greater scheme. Thus, their reporting can never be judged by the same parameters that apply to political journalism, and it can only go so far in serving as a "journal of record". As such, official rercords (such as entry lists, results sheets, point tabulations) are a most welcome change from the usual diet of magazine and newspaper articles, warts and all. It's not propagating the "company's view", like in other fields!

Edited by Michael Ferner, 13 February 2018 - 08:58.

[Steve99]

Ensign, thanks for an amusing and informative read! 

[Stephen W]

The old computer adage GIGO is worth considering when looking at "official documents". Garbage In, Garbage Out is relevant as often the entry forms people filled out were riddled with inexactitudes some of which were genuine mistakes or typographical errors whilst others were due to a replacement car being used and the "officials" being too lazy to change the details. I have even spotted entry lists that do not tally with the results of the event.

[Alexey Rogachev]

And if all what you have is a wretched race programme compiled on preliminary entry lists, you sometimes feel the torments of Tantalus seeing unknown cars with unknown drivers at the photos and being unable to find them in the list...

[Ray Bell]

This talk about hit parade stuff is interesting...

I should ask my brother about how it works here. He's devoted a lot of his life to cataloguing all the stuff on the Top 40 lists back to the fifties.

From memory, it was one radio station which started it all and I think they only used figures from one major retailer. But I'll find out what he can tell me.

That more records were sold through outlets that were never counted really does crush the results into something only worth trashing, doesn't it?

[Sterzo]

As anyone who has tried to organise even a minor sporting event will know, most of the time you're panicking about what happens next. Leaving a historical record is entirely secondary.

 

Who said history is dull? This thread must be the most fun of any on the forum.

[Allen Brown]

 

Who said history is dull? This thread must be the most fun of any on the forum.

 

I completely agree.  TNF talking about record sales, and yet completely relevant and "on-thread".

[D-Type]

And to cap it all, the "Official" record of F1 produced by FOM deliberately falsifies the record in respect of GP racing prior to 1950.

 

Likewise, NASCAR is writing out the name "Winston" from the Winston Cup.

[ensign14]

This talk about hit parade stuff is interesting...

I should ask my brother about how it works here. He's devoted a lot of his life to cataloguing all the stuff on the Top 40 lists back to the fifties.

From memory, it was one radio station which started it all and I think they only used figures from one major retailer. But I'll find out what he can tell me.
 

 

In the sixties and seventies many radio stations had their own charts, but in the US and UK that was mostly based on airplay.  In Australia local radio would compile a chart in the same way as the UK magazines; ring up the record shops and ask what their best sellers were. 

 

A chap called David Kent took this to its logical conclusion and rang up the local radio stations, to compile an unofficial Australian chart.  But there was no official chart anyway so his became a de facto national chart.  His first published chart was in 1974 but he had the data for years before, which he retrospectively compiled into charts dating back to 1940.

 

Kent did it the way it was done in the UK before 1969.  So if Melbourne and Sydney stations reported Song X at no. 1, and Song Y at no. 2, but Perth, Adelaide, and Brisbane had them at 2 and 1 respectively, Song Y would be the overall number 1 (7 points) and X at no. 2 (8 points).  Even if Song X had sold more copies overall.  Nobody had the data to track that.

 

It was only in 1988 that the Australian record industry got involved and compiled their own chart.

 

And, to take it back to thread, making a chart from data in the 1960s is a bit Haresnape...after all, if a label had known that (say) Normie Rowe was at no. 2 and quite close to The Beatles at no. 1, they might put in a bit more promotional push; whereas when they're in the dark they wouldn't be that bothered.  They aren't tilting at a windmill they can't see.

[DCapps]

In the USA, Billboard apparently began covering music in the 1920s or 1930s and created its first charting of tunes at some point in the 1930s from what I can remember from the days I worked in the Capitol Newsstand. I never quite grasped exactly how Billboard determined its rankings (nor did I worry about it, to be honest), but they seem to have been the one accepted on a national level, at least. Of course, no end of local stations had their own Top-40 or whatever lists. Something that is not realized by many, but the older issues of Billboard provide some interesting information on motor sport, with promoters literally promoting events at their venues, especially those held in conjunction with fair events. I have stumbled across some IMCA information thanks to Billboard. Apparently, if it was entertainment, it was probably in billboard.

 

With, for example, what the AAA Contest Board archival material provides, along with what can be gleaned from the contemporary automotive journals and newspapers, one can begin to create a picture of a, say, a season. However, one needs to keep in mind macro events such as economic cycles and global events as well as micro issues at the local level to develop a more rounded and nuanced view of things. Plus, one should consider what is missing or emphasized in the material, as well as what cultural and social references or cues, often quite subtle, that someone living at the time would or might be aware of, historical empathy, if you will.

 

Then, as Duncan suggests, there is the issue of Official Amnesia or Official Revisionism, organizational historical "doublethink" in other words.

[Vitesse2]

As Don says, it's surprising what you can find in Billboard! It was very useful in my research on Fay Taylour's mid-50s career, for example. I also found a declaration of intent by a Los Angeles promoter to take over the bankrupt Roosevelt Raceway in 1938.

[ensign14]

Billboard used to have listings of sales by record label.  The first time they integrated all those into one single coherent chart was 27 July 1940.  The number 1 was "I'll Never Smile Again" by the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, with Frank Sinatra and the Pied Pipers on vocals.  It remained at the top for another 11 weeks.

 

Over time Billboard had a plethora of "singles" charts - sellers, jukebox orders, airplay - and amalgamated them all into a new single chart, the Hot 100, in 1959.  And that has been utterly rife for gerrymandering ever since.  In the 1970s for instance there was a bizarre rule that a record with a "bullet" (high rise in sales/airplay) could not fall the following week.  Which led to a logjam at the top of the charts with records spending 1 week at the summit and then dropping to about no. 14.  Donna Summer got a few number 1s because the chart compiler fancied her.  And Mariah Carey got something like 14 number 1s because Sony told record labels that it would not provide exclusives to stations unless they put Carey high on their airplay lists.  Total coincidence that Sony's head Tommy Mottola was Mr Carey at the time.

 

And when one goes back to revisionism there were other charts as well for a long time.  Cashbox was considered more reliable than Billboard for the 1960s and 1970s.  Variety only counted sales until about 1962 and then again from 1976 (although it only ever had a small sample).  Cashbox and Record World in the 1950s had a weird chart though.  They didn't list singles, but songs.  So for example in 1955 Cashbox listed as a number 1 "Melody Of Love" by Billy Vaughn, The Four Aces, and David Carroll, all of whom had competing versions, and all of which were lumped together.

[Doug Nye]

I often work with 'official' internal team documents, correspondence and reports.  As Allen knows so well from seeing some of this material it can occasionally provide crucial evidence which - if accepted at face value - positively resolves some factual debate or controversy in which we have been embroiled for a long period.

 

The cautionary tale, however, is that when considering an internal team report - or many items of team correspondence - one should always make an assessment of how much we would really want to trust the writer...?

 

Many engineers express themselves in a manner calculated to gain approval for what they consider to be a correct or desirable course of action - as do a team's bean counters - as do a team's directors - and absolutely as do a team's drivers.

 

So it makes all kinds of sense to evaluate any such 'official' documentation with an always sceptical and  questioning mind.  "What was in this for him?" is always a reasonable place to start...  And then work from there.

 

Then - of course - one's mind might turn to matters of current affairs, current politics...and current politicians.  Examine what 'official' sources are telling us - and apply the same rules...  My word.  

 

DCN

[DCapps]

Doug,

 

{Louis Renault consternation mode} I am shocked! I am utterly and completely shocked, at what you are suggesting!!!! Surely, Official Team Records & Communications are paragons of virtue and truth, are they not? {Louis Renault consternation mode}

 

Don

[Zmeej]

As Prof./Col. Capps points out, and ensign can confirm within another context close to his affections, this kind of thing has been going since Thucydides.

In the 19th century, there was a hearty debate between those who favoured chronicles of various sorts, versus those who preferred documents. It persisted into the 20th century, when additional layers of artefacts generated by novel technologies emerged, as the age of periodicals reached its heyday, and alongside the more frank and/or tactical and/or deliberately obfuscatory use of "propagandized records."

All of which serves to distinguish (if/when possible) history from historiography.

This applies equally well to political, military, cultural, and scientific history, & to that of applied science (engineering), sports, and on, and on...

Edited by Zmeej, 20 February 2018 - 02:38.