Gyles Brandreth’s Diary
The Great Royal Bake Off
I know why I’m so fat – I’ve been eating Camilla’s cakes I have put on three pounds this month and I know why. I have been going to a lot of tea parties and eating slice after slice of Victoria sponge. It’s all in a good cause, of course. I am the founder of a project called Poetry Together, which encourages schoolchildren and old people in care homes to learn a poem by heart and then get together to perform the poem and have tea and cake. Hundreds of schools and care homes across the country (and Commonwealth) take part and the poetry parties happen between National Poetry Day (7th October) and Christmas. You can find out more at the website www.poetrytogether.com. The website will also give you the recipe for the Victoria sponge, kindly supplied by the Duchess of Cornwall. (It’s a controversial recipe because Her Royal Highness suggests you can use Nutella as a filling if you fancy a change from strawberry jam.) Camilla is keen on cake – and poetry. At one of the tea parties, after some Chelsea Pensioners had recited a Siegfried Sassoon war poem with a group of teenage boys, the duchess performed Hilaire Belloc’s Matilda with a group of seven-year-olds. She has quite a few poems from her childhood still in her head. She can do most of W H Auden’s Night Mail without prompting. The Duchess has a special soft spot for Walter de la Mare. Thanks to a new edition of his poems from Faber (recommended in The Oldie), I am rediscovering him. He’s the best. And funny, too. In the 1920s, when he had been seriously ill and his daughter visited him in hospital, she asked as she was leaving, ‘Is there nothing I could get for you, father – fruit or flowers?’ ‘No, no, my dear,’ answered de la Mare in a thin voice from his sickbed. ‘Too late for fruit, too soon for flowers.’ Una Stubbs, who died in August aged 84, was lovely: beautiful, gifted and funny.
She started out as a teenage cover girl for Rowntree’s Dairy Box and ended up, internationally acclaimed, as Mrs Hudson to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes on TV. In between, she performed everything from Shakespeare to Shaw to Aunt Sally in Worzel Gummidge. I got to know her playing charades on Give Us a Clue with Lionel Blair in the 1980s. I first saw her on stage in 1972, in Cowardy Custard at the Mermaid Theatre. I remember Cliff Richard was there that night. We all thought that Cliff and Una were an item. For a while, I think Una thought they were, too. I last saw her a year or so ago, at her second ex-husband’s funeral. She wasn’t always lucky in love. About 20 years ago, interviewing her on a radio chat show, I asked her, ‘How’s the love life?’ ‘Funny you should ask,’ she replied, beaming. ‘I’ve got a new man and he’s rather special. He’s an architect, unattached, tall, slim, super-intelligent, a bit younger than me, doesn’t smoke, great sense of humour. We’re having fun. It’s early days, but I’m hopeful.’ After the broadcast, when I was showing her into her taxi and saying goodbye, I said, ‘Congratulations on the new man.’ ‘What new man?’ she said, looking at me blankly. Queen of Victoria sponges: Duchess of Cornwall
‘The architect,’ I said. ‘Your new fellow.’ ‘There’s no architect, stupid. I just invented him. I wasn’t going to have your listeners thinking I couldn’t get a man.’ Classy lady, Una. Sir Ian McKellen is currently marking his 60 years as a professional actor by taking the title role in Hamlet at the Theatre Royal, Windsor. It’s a dazzling, bravura performance in a clean, clear, swift production. I am glad I went to see it. A good number of Sir Ian’s contemporaries and friends wouldn’t. They simply refused, even though he telephoned them, hoping they might. One of them said to me, ‘Playing Hamlet at 82 – it’s ridiculous.’ Another said, ‘It’s obscene.’ It’s neither. ‘The play’s the thing’ and, in this instance, the age-, colour- and genderblind casting all work. I hear you harrumphing sceptically but, believe me, they really do. McKellen, of course, knows his Shakespeare. In Stratford a few years ago I hosted a Shakespeare quiz and, unsurprisingly, the McKellen team (which included the late Donald Sinden and the great Judi Dench) won hands down. As captain, Ian proved sharp as well as knowledgeable. When Donald Sinden got the question right about how much older Anne Hathaway was than Shakespeare (eight years), Ian said, ‘Of course, Donald had the advantage of knowing them both personally.’ Judi Dench told a story that day about being in a play with McKellen when they were both quite young and so nervous on the first night that she said to him, ‘I’m just going to concentrate on the front row, Ian – focus on the three seats in the centre of the front row and think that the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are sitting there.’ Said Ian, ‘They’d be sitting in the one seat, surely?’ Gyles’s childhood memoir, Odd Boy Out, has just been published by Michael Joseph The Oldie October 2021 9
