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Issue 320

April 2015

The death of old Soho The ‘millionaire’ Major: did he really cheat? In praise of Flook Learn Latin with Mr Gwynne

ISSUE 320 • APRIL

Editor’s letter 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG www.theoldie.co.uk Editor Alexander Chancellor Deputy editor Jeremy Lewis Sub-editor Deborah Maby Art editor John Bowling Assistant editor Sonali Chapman Supplements editor Anna Lethbridge Books editor Claudia FitzHerbert Events co-ordinator Frankie McCoy Advertising sales manager Lisa Martin Senior sales executive Monique Cherry Classifieds Maisie Bone Publisher James Pembroke At large Richard Beatty Our quiet American David Kowitz Sir Alan John Brown EDITORIAL Tel: 020 7436 8801 e-mail: editorial@theoldie.co.uk ADVERTISING For display contact Lisa Martin or Monique Cherry on 020 7079 9361 or 020 7079 9362 For classified contact Maisie Bone on 020 7079 9363 e-mail: advertising@theoldie.co.uk Subscriptions Call: 01795 592 893 e-mail: subscriptions@theoldie.co.uk All subscription queries please write to: Oldie Subs, c/o Dovetail Services 800 Guillat Ave, Kent Science Park, Sittingbourne, Kent ME9 8GU LITERARY lunch bookings Call Katherine on: 01225 427 311 Monday to Friday 9.30am to 3pm e-mail: reservations@theoldie.co.uk

Few will have forgotten the humiliations heaped on Major Charles Ingram, who in 2003 was tried and found guilty of deception when a court decided that he had won the ITV quiz show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? because an accomplice in the studio audience had ‘coughed’ him the right answers. He was ruined as a result. But now Bob Woffinden, who has investigated the case, concludes in The Oldie that the coughs were random and that Ingram was dealt a grave injustice. If true, he should be restored his million

pounds. Also in this issue, Cosmo Landesman rants against the use of ‘No problem’ as a substitute for ‘Thank you’, Raymond Briggs warns that crisps can draw blood and Ferdinand Mount finds to my relief that 300 pages are quite enough to do justice to the great economist John Maynard Keynes, whose last biography ran to three volumes. As for wicked old Soho, whose demise Jonathan Fryer laments, I can’t say I will personally miss it much. Alexander Chancellor

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HIGHLIGHTS

13 THE CHEATING MAJOR

26 WHAT A FLOOK!

Bob Woffinden reveals the truth

Michael Barber in praise of the furry star

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37 MY KITCHEN GODDESS

Paul Bailey remembers Jane Grigson

10 HANDS OFF SOHO: WE NEED ITS SINFUL WAYS Jonathan Fryer bemoans the demise into respectability of the onceseedy locale

18 THE KING AND I Valerie Knight on her unlikely Iraqi love affair

42 WHY LEARN LATIN?

Find the answer with Mr Gwynne

28 THE SAGE OF SUMMERHILL Elizabeth Grice remembers meeting the legendary headmaster A S Neill

READER 45 modern life Steve Jones explains the three-parent baby TRIP E TH N: SPAI GLORIES OF 79 BIRD OF THE MONTH John McEwen loves the lapwing CASTILE page 84 April 2015 – THE OLDIE 3

A E TO Y COM LITERAR H LUNC60 e pag

CONTENTS

FEATURES & REGULARS 7 The Old Un’s Diary 10 Hands off Soho: we need its sinful ways Jonathan Fryer 13 The case of the cheating major Bob Woffinden 17 Life in the bear pit Tim Walker 18 The King and I Valerie Knight 21 Res Publica Simon Carr 22 Media Matters Stephen Glover 24 Whiteboard Jungle Kate Sawyer 26 What a Flook! Michael Barber 28 The sage of Summerhill Elizabeth Grice 30 Never too old to dance Mia Nadasi 31 The other truce Charles Keen 33 God Sister Teresa 33 Mammon Margaret Dibben 34 Getting the sack Edward Mirzoeff 35 Memorial Service James Hughes-Onslow 35 Set in Stone Harry Mount 36 Too big to handle Stanley Price 37 My kitchen goddess Paul Bailey 39 Living Hell Jeremy Lewis 40 Granny Annexe Virginia Ironside 41 I Once Met Anthony Holden 42 Why learn Latin? N M Gwynne 44 Olden Life Keith Giles 44 Modern Life Steve Jones

45 I hate modern life Wilfred De’Ath 46 House Husbandry Giles Wood 47 The Bard of Berkhamsted Ed Reardon 47 Memory Lane Jane de Falbe 48 Notes from the Sofa Raymond Briggs 48 Rant Cosmo Landesman 49 Readers’ Letters 60 Oldie literary lunches 63 Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond 63 Pedants’ Revolt 74 Motoring Alan Judd 74 Home Front Alice Pitman 75 Sport Jim White 77 The Doctor’s Surgery Tom Stuttaford 79 Bird of the Month John McEwen 80 Travel Deborah Maby, Mark Mason 84 Oldie reader trip 85 Travel Tips Paris Franz, Deborah Nash, Robert Harland 87 Profitable Wonders James Le Fanu 89 Superbyways Webster 89 Learn Latin N M Gwynne 98 Ask Mary Mary Kenny

BOOKS 53

Ferdinand Mount on Richard Davenport-Hines; Christian Wolmar on Steven Parissien; Michael Barber on Esther Menell; Laura Beatty on Ruth Scurr; William Palmer on

AMONG THIS MONTH’S CONTRIBUTORS

Robert Crawford; Mark Ellen on Norman Jopling; and Paul Keegan on audiobooks

ARTS ETC 65 Music Richard Osborne 66 Radio Valerie Grove 66 Television Roger Lewis 67 DVD Jeremy Lewis 68 Film Marcus Berkmann 69 Theatre Paul Bailey 70 Overlooked Britain Lucinda Lambton 71 Gardening David Wheeler 72 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 72 Restaurants James Pembroke 73 Wine Bill Knott

PLUS 91 Crosswords Antico 92 Competition Tessa Castro 92 The Oldie Quiz

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Jonathan Fryer

CHARLES KEEN

has been on the move most of her life. Her first twenty years (the 1950s and 1960s) were spent in Iraq, Iran and Libya. Subsequently she lived in Italy and various parts of Australia (with spells in Devon, Dorset and London). She has published articles, short stories and a novel and now shares her seaside flat in Cyprus with a one-eyed cat called Chloe. On page 18 she writes about her love for King Faisal.

is a writer, lecturer and broadcaster often heard on Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent. A frequent traveller to far-flung parts of the world, he writes books both on the modern history of the Middle East and on UK literary life and culture, the latter including Soho in the Fifties and Sixties and Dylan: The Nine Lives of Dylan Thomas. On page 10 he laments the plastification of Soho.

has no literary track record, but has a lettered family. His wife is a writer about gardens; one daughter writes novels; one is a poet; one, the brainiest, is a human rights activist, and his son, an actor, can currently be seen as Cranmer in Wolf Hall. Keen writes rhyming verse for family consumption, and preaches sermons, but without a dog collar. He loves dogs. On page 31 he writes about Aubrey Herbert.

Next issue on sale Wednesday 1st April 2015

SEE PAGE 41 FOR DETAILS call 01795 592 893 or visit www.theoldie.co.uk April 2015 – THE OLDIE 5

The Old Un’s diary What’s so awful about Bromley that makes Alison Rigby, 35, think she would rather go to live and die on Mars than stay on working peacefully as a lab technician in her home town? I’ve never actually been to Bromley, but it doesn’t sound too bad. The market square, at any rate, looks quite agreeable in photographs, and some prominent people hail from there, including H G Wells and Enid Blyton. Mars, by contrast, seems to have almost nothing to recommend it. Nobody hails from there at all, and while it may appear potentially more habitable than some other planets, it still looks extremely unwelcoming. I don’t want to be depressing about it, but Ms Rigby’s chances of survival there don’t look good. Nevertheless, Ms Rigby is eager to go. She is one of five Britons (and the only Londoner, if you count Bromley as part of London) to have been shortlisted out of 202,586 applicants to the Dutch foundation Mars One to make the first human trip to Mars in 2024 and never come back. But there are 100 finalists and only four of them will go, so there is a good chance she will stay in Bromley. Still, she wants to go and says she will only miss

Bromley ‘a bit’. She also says that her boyfriend is ‘fine’ about her going away. Not very sentimental, are they?

I have received a moving lament from a pathologist. He says that when people ask him what he does, and he gives them the answer, they reply in one of two ways. The first is ‘Gosh! How fascinating! I bet you see a lot of things...’; the other is ‘Oh? Oh really?’ Both responses, he says, are predicated on a fundamental misapprehension of what a pathologist actually does. ‘A pathologist does not study death, or even dying,’ he writes. ‘A pathologist studies disease, and the most important aspect of that is not what

disease someone has died from (although it is a small part of it), but what disease a living person is suffering. ‘I perform approximately 200 post mortem examinations a year, but each one only takes thirty minutes. Thus I spend 100 hours a year in the post mortem room, or about two weeks,’ he goes on. ‘The rest of the year is spent attending to the living. It is much more important, but boring to the uninitiated. I make what is called a “tissue diagnosis” on bits of patients, from biopsies of skin to entire colons. Without me, the doctors you actually see won’t proceed. They often have a good idea what’s wrong with the patient, but until I (or any other pathologist) confirm it by looking

down the microscope, they’ll hold fire on the treatment.’ Where pathologists excel, he says, is in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. ‘When you have a cancer treated, a pathologist will be the one who determines what type of cancer it is (and there is a huge number of different types of cancer), whether it has all been removed, whether it has got into blood vessels or glands, what the prognosis is, and whether it needs more treatment. There must always be a pathologist – along with a surgeon, an oncologist and a nurse – at the meeting that determines how best to treat the patient. You’ll never see a pathologist, but you’ll be glad one was there.’ I must admit to having been among the ignorant. I always thought that pathologists spent their time messing around with dead bodies. Not so. They don’t do death. ‘If you want that, you want a thanatologist.’ Remember that word. If you’re dead, call for a thanatologist.

Steve Smith, aged 51, a former market trader’s son who founded Poundland, is now a multi-millionaire and lives in a colossal country house in Shropshire. In 1990 he had ‘I’ve heard the new chairman’s a down-to-earth sort of guy’

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the simple idea of establishing shops in which no item cost more than a pound coin, and they were immediately popular. Twenty-five years later he has a fortune in property and a website called Estates Direct, an online house-selling service that cuts out the estate agent middleman. This, according to Smith, saves buyers about £3,000 per home. Poundland, too, has expanded, announcing in February that it is buying 99p Stores, a chain started in 2001 in the vain hope of threatening its supremacy. Smith’s son Ashley, 19, is meanwhile developing, with his father’s help, an online discount business called poundshop.com. On a recent edition of the

‘We’ve reached the stage where we can do this through social media’

The Mousetrap I have achieved most of my ambitions in life. But one I have now resigned myself to not achieving. And that is to outlive The Mousetrap. We both entered the world a little over six decades ago and I will surely leave it before the Mouse does. The first performance of Agatha Christie’s play was on 6th October 1952. I was in my late mother’s womb at the time. When I arrived the play was five months into its run and, in the author’s reckoning, it probably had another three months or

THE OLDIE – April 2015

Today programme on Radio 4, Smith was interviewed about these developments by the business reporter Simon Jack. ‘Do tell us,’ said Jack, ‘what is Poundland’s biggest online seller?’, doubtless expecting the answer Cadbury’s Creme Eggs or giant Toblerones. ‘The biggest seller, which you won’t believe,’ replied Smith, ‘is pregnancy testing kits.’ That is indeed difficult to believe, but I suppose we must learn not to be surprised by anything.

Harvey McGregor QC has just published the 19th edition of McGregor on Damages. It is 2,138 pages long, in two volumes, and costs £435; but it’s an essential reference work for any lawyer seeking damages for a victim of, say, a fraud or an accident. And every one of those 2,138 pages has been proofread by McGregor himself, and without spectacles – not bad for a man in his ninetieth year. Damages are no longer what they were in the 1980s, the era of mad libel payouts, when a blemished reputation would be awarded far

more than a life ruined by brain injury or tetraplegia, and when, in the words of the late Lord Bingham, juries were ‘like sheep loosed on an unfenced common with no shepherd’. Since 2013 defamation cases are no longer heard by juries. The launch party at the Ritz was awash with lawyers, including the former Lord Chancellor, Derry Irvine. McGregor, who has loved to perform since his Oxford days, stood in a pink jacket in front of the fireplace and gave, without the aid of a

so to go before the last rites were read. This proved unduly pessimistic. Three years ago the Mouse celebrated its sixtieth birthday and 25,000 performances. They had a special one-off performance for charity to mark the event with Hugh Bonneville, Miranda Hart, Patrick Stewart and Julie Walters. Roughly 500 people have been in the cast, which changes every year, and the longest run was by David Raven who gave it up in 1968 after more than 4,500 performances as Major Metcalf. He earned himself

a mention in the Guinness Book of Records and a regular salary but not a great deal else. The Mouse is not a starmaker. The original cast included the late Dickie Attenborough, who was the ‘policeman’, and his wife Sheila Sim. They negotiated a good deal, which gave them an income long after they left the production, only for him to eventually sell if off to help keep his Gandhi film afloat. Since then it has been a rare haven of security in an uncertain profession. Edwin Lerner

‘Let’s face it, Gerald. A late flowering is the best you can hope for’

stick or notes, a justifiably self-congratulatory speech. ‘I think I can say with due immodesty,’ he said, ‘that a book which was once described as “little loved and seldom cited” is now “much loved and often cited”.’ McGregor still shows up at his chambers in the Temple, but these days most of his briefs come from abroad. One hundred pages in Mandarin Chinese (which he once learnt in the army) have just arrived on a memory stick from Hong Kong, requesting an opinion. As he points out, the wonderful thing about being a barrister is that nobody can sack you.

The readers who contribute so eagerly to The Oldie’s Pedants’ Revolt column are slackers by comparison with Bryan Henderson, a man on a mission to rid Wikipedia of one single phrase. The phrase is ‘comprised of’, and Mr. Henderson has already altered more than 47,000 Wikipedia entries in which it has appeared. This has made him a lot of enemies, to whom he has responded with a 6,000-word essay on Wikipedia explaining his loathing of the phrase. And even now he does

not let up. It is reported that every Sunday night before he goes to bed, Henderson is on his computer tracking down and expunging the seventy or eighty new instances of ‘comprised of’ that have appeared on Wikipedia during the previous seven days. He is the arch-pedant, the hero of the tribe.

Important stories you may have missed

Man retrieved from roof after ladders fall Western Morning News

no longer afford them. And these are going, as you might expect, to the newly moneyed global elite. The occupant of your nearest castle is now less likely to be an Italian prince than a Chinese or Russian oligarch. Lionard, an exclusive real estate company based in Florence, which has about seventy castles on its books, has told the New York Times that fifty per cent of its clients come from Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union, with the rest mainly coming from the United States. Other luxury estate agents, like Sotheby’s Italian branch, have Arab and Chinese customers as well. And so it goes on. Is there no limit

to the Sino-Russian takeover of the world?

In the past decade we have come to accept that whenever a high street shop closes, a coffee shop springs up in its place. They are everywhere – Starbucks, Costa, Caffè Nero, Pret a Manger, and many independents. And all day long they are packed with customers using the free WiFi. Amazing to find, therefore, that as recently as 1978 the following letter appeared in the London Evening Standard: ‘Where have all the espresso machines gone? In the 1950s no high street failed to boast a coffee bar, with natty glass cups and a hissing Gaggia on the counter. In London, they began to challenge pubs as meeting places, at least for the young. Now you can hardly find a decent espresso anywhere in the capital, except in an Italian restaurant. Italian snack-bar owners shrug when you ask why they have rejected their heritage. “There is no call for espresso,” they say. “It takes too long to make.” ’ I wonder what made us change our minds again?

The World Pie Eating Championship was declared null and void after the contestants were given pies that were too big. The Times At 37, former football star Phil Neville has made his first cup of instant coffee Daily Telegraph A police van was damaged while attempting to turn round in a street in Norwich Eastern Daily Press Rail delays because of kitchen sink on the line near Netley Southern Daily Echo Police pulled over a man riding a spacehopper through a Dundee underpass Dundee Evening Telegraph £25 for published contributions

THE OLDIE APP The Oldie is now available in a digital format for iPhone or iPad. See: http://bit.ly/OldieApp Or for Android via Exactly at: http://bit.ly/exactlyandroid April 2015 – THE OLDIE 9

kathryn Lamb

The bit of Tuscany between Florence and Siena was once christened ‘Chiantishire’ by the British press after hundreds of abandoned farmhouses were snapped up in the Sixties and Seventies by middle-class Britons seeking cheap holidays in the sun and easy access to Renaissance culture. But that description, never a very appropriate one, is now entirely redundant. Not only are countless British owners selling up in the face of rocketing property taxes and ever more burdensome bureaucracy, there are very few new Britons taking their place. Insofar as any foreigners are buying anything, they come from countries other than ours. The most active section of the market is the top end, in which many old noble Italian families are selling their villas, palaces and castles, some of which they have owned for hundreds of years, because they can

Not many dead

Hands off Soho: we need its sinful ways The plastification of what used to be London’s bohemia continues apace – to great detriment, warns Jonathan Fryer When a score of actors and other performing artists, including Benedict Cumberbatch and Stephen Fry, penned a letter to the Times decrying the closure of Madame JoJo’s club in Soho, it was more than just a gripe from luvvies out to lunch. Theirs was an alarm call: a warning that the beating heart of London’s bohemia needs life support or else it will die. ‘SOS: Save Our Soho!’ is their rallying cry, and they are not the only ones pointing the finger of blame at Westminster council and the greed of commercial developers. The fracas with the doorman in October last year, when a rowdy customer got into a dispute and bouncers allegedly attacked him with baseball bats, was the pretext for Westminster’s refusing to renew Madame Jojo’s licence. The incident was unforgivable, but did it really justify closing down a venue that had helped launch new musical talents, from the Sex Pistols to Adele? True, on some nights there would be several bad acts, but that was half the fun: among the dross you’d suddenly strike pure gold. Bad behaviour has always gone handin-hand with creativity in Soho, from the time that Oscar Wilde ‘feasted with panthers’ in private rooms at Kettner’s to the era when the self-styled rudest publican in England, Norman Balon, berated the Spectator’s Low Life columnist Jeffrey Bernard and other regulars at the Coach and Horses. Wit was the passport to that world, though to outsiders the wit could sometimes appear cruel. Contributors to Private Eye and later the Oldie naturally gravitated to Soho, not only because of the editorial lunches held there. There was something about the ambience of the place that encouraged people to find their inner selves and then parade them for all to see, free of the constraints of polite society. The grey years of post-war England were really Soho’s heyday, when newly

THE OLDIE – April 2015

arrived immigrants from the West Indies and Africa hung around the entrances of jazz clubs and dance halls and the working girls based up flights of rickety stairs offered ‘French lessons’. There were so many pubs – each with its distinctive character – that serious drinkers like Dylan Thomas could sidle from one to the other until they ground to a halt. One of the greatest things about Soho in the Fifties and Sixties was that it was egalitarian because most of it was cheap. At a time when English cuisine was limited and largely tasteless, in Soho there were French and Italian and other Continental restaurants where you could eat well for comparatively little. For those too poor to travel abroad, going to Soho was almost like going on holiday, with the added spice that you would see sights not available anywhere else in England, whether it was the jazz musician George Melly in an outrageous zoot suit falling out of Ronnie Scott’s or the men in dirty raincoats peering into the windows of naughty bookshops. The Colony Room in Dean Street, presided over like a hawk by the Jewish lesbian Muriel Belcher, was a drinking den that enabled artists like Francis

Muriel Belcher and Francis Bacon in the Colony Room, in about 1960

Bacon and Lucian Freud to fill in the afternoon hours with banter when the pubs and restaurants were shut. It survived Muriel’s death under the management of a former barman before closing in 2008. The Groucho Club, located just a few doors away, is no replacement, whatever some of the trendy media types there might think. It’s true that, by the 1980s, sex-shops had proliferated like measles and parts of Soho were uncomfortably sleazy. So Westminster’s Conservative council was right to do a bit of cleaning up. But that cosmetic exercise has gone too far, as Soho is being steadily sanitised. Property developers and commercial companies have realised that the area’s location, slap bang in the city centre, makes it a goldmine – and it’s money, rather than creativity, that makes the place buzz these days, whether it’s the strip of gay bars and businesses along Old Compton Street or the chic and expensive restaurants in the area. Every month some new scheme is proposed that will add to Soho’s plastification, one of the latest being the suggestion that the concrete bomb shelter under the mock Tudor gardener’s shed in the middle of Soho Square should be turned into a smart restaurant or nightclub. The idea is that such ventures will attract yet more visitors and foreign tourists, flush with cash. But it’s character-full regulars that Soho needs, not tourists. And that is made all the harder as many of Soho’s residents are themselves being priced out of the area. A few old bastions, like the Bar Italia in Frith Street and the Algerian Coffee Stores, remain. But each year, more iconic venues close down. The soul of Soho is leaving its physical body, and once it has flown it can never be retrieved. l Jonathan Fryer is the author of Soho in the Fifties and Sixties and Dylan: The Nine Lives of Dylan Thomas.

DANIEL FARSON

April 2015 – THE OLDIE

The case of the cheating Major

REX FEATURES

In 2001 Charles Ingram won the jackpot on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? Two years later he was convicted of being a cheat – but was he? By BOB WOFFINDEN On 10th September 2001, Major Charles Ingram became the third winner of the top prize on ITV’s highly successful quiz show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? The next day, with Al-Qaeda’s attacks on New York and Washington, the world changed. A few days later, Charles’s world changed, too, though not as he had anticipated. He was accused by ITV of having cheated to win the million-pound prize. This was straight away leaked to the press. It instantly became a top news story and soon replaced even the Twin Towers reports in the headlines. There was intense public speculation about how a criminal gang had managed to pull off such a spectacular heist. Concealed cameras? Hidden microphones? What was the technical brilliance that enabled them to link the man in the centre of the studio to an outside accomplice with access to, presumably, reference books or a computer? Actually, none of the above. The story as it emerged – firstly in the Sun and ultimately as the prosecution case at a criminal trial in April 2003 – was that a fellow contestant, Tecwen Whittock, had helpfully ‘coughed’ the correct answers to Ingram. Long before the case reached trial, the media had ensured that this affair was embedded in the national consciousness. Ingram was portrayed as bumbling and dim-witted – ‘military intelligence is a contradiction in terms,’ the Daily Mirror reminded its readers. He was not just incapable of answering the quiz questions unaided – he was so incompetent he couldn’t even think up a credible plot to win the prize by cheating! The received view of the case was that it was so ridiculous and absurd, it must be true. Charles, his wife, Diana, and Whittock, the head of business studies at Pontypridd College, were all prosecuted and, at trial in 2003, found guilty. They

Nearly there: Charles Ingram deliberates over the million-pound question

were ordered to pay fines and costs. The verdicts were swiftly followed by ITV’s triumphal broadcast of Tonight With Trevor McDonald, a documentary about the case that achieved the highest audience for a non-fiction programme since the funeral of the Princess of Wales. Both the prosecution and the documentary used a programme soundtrack in which the coughs that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) wished to focus on were artificially exaggerated while all other ambient sound was faded down. Similarly, a critical feature of the case made both in court and on television was that when Ingram was briefly tempted to go for the wrong answer on the penultimate half-a-million-pound question, a spluttered ‘No!’ succeeded in diverting him to the right course. The barrage of media obloquy that Charles suffered completely obscured the kind of person he actually was. He almost belonged to an earlier era, when rules and conventions were not just

obeyed but were unquestioned. In all respects, he was assiduous in conforming; he would never, even momentarily, park on double yellow lines. A family man with three daughters, he had enjoyed a fairly successful Army career which included a tour of duty as part of the UN peacekeeping force in Bosnia. Academically, he had a degree in civil engineering and a master’s from Cranfield. He was also a member of Mensa. After his conviction he had to resign his commission – it was imperative, he knew, that the military should not be tainted by any scandal – and his life was in ruins. The career he’d loved was now lost to him. Neither had he other means of making a living. He turned up on a few demeaning television shows; the appearance fees got the family through a couple of sticky periods. But the media persecution went on and on. The Daily Mail told its readers that ‘the name Charles Ingram provokes the kind of response usually

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reserved for mass murderers’. In their desperation, Diana started designing jewellery and selling it at craft fairs. That is still how they still scrape a living today. But if Charles’s character was never examined properly, neither were the events themselves. Probably no one realised just how thin the prosecution case actually was. The first point that might have aroused public bewilderment is that there was a studio full of cameras and microphones, and hence a complete audio-visual record of everything that occurred; so why, if Ingram and Whittock were as culpable as the media asserted, did it take eighteen months to cobble a prosecution case together? The CPS logic was that Ingram, after a poor first day performance, panicked overnight and sought emergency aid from Whittock to help him through the rest of the questions. But if this was a conspiracy, then it was unique in English criminal history; Ingram and Whittock had never met or spoken to or communicated with each other at any time. At the time when they were supposedly hatching this plot, they were actually driving in opposite directions on the M4 – Whittock to turn up at the studio in good time for his own hoped-for appearance, and Ingram to return to his Army work at the Headquarters Adjutant General in Wiltshire. The police, of course, had full access to their mobile phones and their home and office computers; and analysis of these confirmed that there had been no communication between them. As programme enthusiasts, Diana Ingram and Tecwen Whittock – who also had never met – exchanged three mobile phone calls in the relevant period, but these lasted only eight minutes in total. They said they were chatting about studio arrangements and wishing each other luck. If the prosecution case were correct, it seemed remarkable that Diana was able to recruit the very first person she turned to, that Whittock agreed to assist without demur, and that the details of their scheme could have been ironed out so speedily. There was also no reason why one should have wanted to be involved with the other. Whittock would have had no interest in prolonging the performance of a fellow contestant, which as a result might have precluded his own participation. Neither was there any reason why Ingram would have wished to recruit Whittock, a competent but by no means infallible quizzer.

THE OLDIE – April 2015

Not only were Ingram and Whittock not in contact prior to the performance, they were not in contact after it. If Whittock had risked all to help a stranger win a million-pound prize, wouldn’t he have been interested to know when he would be receiving his own cut? Today one can see, on YouTube, the winning performances of the two previous million-pound winners, Judith Keppel and David Edwards, and hear coughs that, had the CPS been putting together a case, they would have deemed leading. But of course they weren’t. They were merely accidental, as they also were during Ingram’s performance. In any event, up-to-date computer analysis of the coughs attributed to Whittock at the trial now shows they were not all made by the same person. There was also a vital eighteen-minute section of Ingram’s performance during which the prosecution could find no suspect coughs at all. That was something else the UK media didn’t tell the public. The TV production team expected Ingram to do badly because they knew that rollover contestants (i.e. someone who was still playing when the previous show finished), being not so much inhibited as petrified by the well-meant advice from home not to lose the money they had already accumulated, generally underperformed on their return to the studio. Ingram, like Keppel before him, did not adhere to this stereotype. He attributed his own poor first-day performance to timidity and, as he straight away told Chris Tarrant, the programme host, reckoned a bolder approach might pay off. In reaching the £32,000 level he had already lost all his lifelines, so the producers didn’t expect him to recover. Yet one of the three subsequent millionpound winners (who was again an Ingram, Ingram Wilcox) also escaped from that same precarious position. The key part of the case at trial concerned the ‘No!’ which, jurors were told, represented a flagrant and desperate attempt to influence the contestant. Prior to the case going to the CPS, it had been handled by Goodman Derrick, ITV’s highly reputable lawyers. Over a year before the court case, they had assiduously gone through the tape and assembled a court transcript. They weren’t quite satisfied and so asked the judge’s permission, as they had to, to go through it all again. They then presented their revised evidence. At this stage, there is no ‘No!’ Whether or not there ever was a ‘No!’ is irrelevant. If some of the most

Charles Ingram and his wife, Diana

meticulous lawyers in the country, after a rigorous examination of the programme tape, were completely unaware of it, then Ingram would similarly have been unaware of it when he was playing the game. Ingram and Tarrant were at the centre of the studio with the waiting contestants around them. Excluding Ingram himself and Whittock, there were ten objective witnesses in this inner circle. Of these, one thought he heard something suspicious; the other nine did not. So, in taking the case to trial, the CPS ignored the evidence of the ninety per cent majority and recruited the solitary witness whose testimony would chime with their script. Other astonishing aspects of the trial were unreported. For example, jurors were not allowed to visit the television studio, the supposed crime scene. All defence lawyers had anticipated that this would happen, at which point jurors would see how compact the studio was and if someone had been signalling to the person in the chair, how unlikely it was that almost no one in the 200-strong audience would have been aware of it. The contaminating effects of relentless media antipathy on criminal trial processes are even today not understood. A judge will blithely tell jurors that they must put all they may have read or heard about a case out of their minds. There is, of course, no evidence that this can be done. More importantly, it should be remembered that during the trial defence lawyers are taking legal decisions that, but for the hostile atmosphere created by the media, they would not be taking. For example, the jury were not told that Ingram was a member of Mensa. This was obviously a highly relevant evidential point. However, who knew how this, too, might have been turned to Charles’s disadvantage? After all, it was the UK tabloid press that turned ‘dogooder’ into a term of abuse. Certainly, Ingram had been concerned when the production team first indicated there were problems with his winning performance. He knew that he and his family had worked the system to their advantage. Like others in the country, they’d realised that if the telephone calls applying to get on the programme were made at certain times – in a block of twenty or thirty calls together, at the very start of the application period, and in the early hours of the morning – your chances of being

and Anne Diamond, all people of entirely unblemished reputations; but declined to hear evidence from many, like Charles, whom the media had seriously traduced. In the light of all the evidence now available, he has applied to the Criminal Cases Review Commission for the case to be heard again at appeal. However, the judicial processes are notoriously slow, and I would suggest that ITV sets up a Pollard-style inquiry (like the BBC’s into Newsnight) to enable it to examine the case more quickly.

I had at first been reluctant to write a book about all this. After all, it wasn’t the Birmingham Six. Then I realised that it is of inestimable importance. The affair has destroyed the lives of Ingram and his family, who were simply conscientious, decent and hard-working members of society. It is also one of the greatest media deceptions of modern times. So ridiculous it must be true? No, just ridiculous. l Bad Show by Bob Woffinden and James Plaskett, Bojangles Books £20. April 2015 – THE OLDIE

Niki Nikolova/FilmMagic/GETTY

selected were greatly enhanced. If you waited until ITV continuity announcers were encouraging viewers to phone in, your chances were negligible. But that was hardly Ingram’s fault. Today, from his meagre income, Ingram is still paying the fine imposed by the court in 2003. For some years, all avenues appeared closed to him. The Leveson Inquiry was set up ostensibly to examine the persecution of individuals by the UK media. The inquiry heard evidence from J K Rowling, Sienna Miller

Life in the bear pit Tim Walker looks back on his twelve years as a theatre critic Twelve years as the Sunday Telegraph’s theatre critic have made me all but inured to intemperate language, blood-letting and gratuitous nudity. And I don’t mean what I actually witnessed on the stage: I had to contend with all of this – and more – simply from my colleagues. ‘Don’t go native,’ editor Dominic Lawson had counselled when he appointed me to the post. ‘And try to get a reaction with every review – that’s what it should always be about.’ A reaction I certainly got when I took my seat in the stalls. A little like the Incas, the critics were at that time racked by feuds and jealousies. Outsiders were regarded as uncultured and unwelcome: it was bad enough for Quentin Letts of the Daily Mail to ‘multi-task’ his theatre column with his parliamentary sketchwriting; much worse for me to have the effrontery to do it with the Telegraph’s Mandrake diary. The Stage and Theatre Record – the latter publication presided over by Ian Shuttleworth of the Financial Times – were both fond of describing me as ‘a sometime gossip columnist’. I did little to endear myself to the old guard when I spurned an invitation to join the Critics’ Circle, and, more provocatively still, challenged the prevailing orthodoxy: plays

Alastair Muir/REX

And then came the fateful night that a humongous tummy intruded into my allotted space with a Left-wing agenda, good; plays with a Right-wing agenda, bad. And then came the fateful night that a humongous tummy intruded into my allotted space as I watched a play called Pains of Youth. I innocently suggested in my review that now we are all getting so much bigger, the size of theatre seats needed to be re-thought. Awkwardly, the protuberance turned out to belong to Shuttleworth. Incandescent, he fired off two complaints to the Press Complaints Commission about ‘fattism’. Both were rejected, but this incident

Director Indhu Rubasingham

established me as the terror of theatreland. Mark Shenton, the chairman of the Critics’ Circle, warned me that I was ‘marching out of step’, and Mark Lawson – then of Front Row – called me ‘the Simon Cowell of the reviewers’. Sir Nicholas Hytner, the boss of the National Theatre, took a pop at me at a press conference. And half a dozen fellow critics – including the Independent’s Paul Taylor – wrote to my boss to demand my dismissal. I didn’t wish to relinquish my night job, but I thought it only fair to tell Ian MacGregor, by now taking his turn in the editor’s chair at the Sunday Telegraph, that I was willing to fall upon my pen if he felt it expedient. Hearteningly, he told me it was no time for a pointless sacrifice. The Independent’s critic then gave me an opportunity for a counter-offensive: he fell asleep during a production of Cause Célèbre at the Old Vic, snoring cacophonously. It was Taylor’s misfortune to have been sitting beside James McAvoy, the husband of the play’s star, Anne-Marie Duff. Somehow a report of their ensuing

row managed to find its way into the Telegraph’s Mandrake diary. Still, my heart wasn’t really in the terror any more. True, I had a Campaign for Real Actors in Plays (the acronym was lost on Baroness Wheatcroft during her short innings as editor) and I sneaked on Sir Peter Hall for not so much talking in his sleep during a production of Uncle Vanya as shouting out loud, but, for all that, I was secretly starting to enjoy the job. The work of two directors thrilled me – Michael Grandage and Indhu Rubasingham – and I loved the showmanship and enthusiasm of characters like director Dominic Dromgoole and producer Bill Kenwright. More than enough blood, too, had by now been spilt among the critics for me to thirst for any more: I had seen Michael Portillo, Libby Purves, Nicholas de Jongh and Kate Bassett, among many others, defenestrated. Then one morning I received an anonymous email that had attached to it a photograph of the chairman of the Critics’ Circle, stark naked. It was a monocle-popping sight, for sure, but I had no wish to involve myself with what was obviously a case of ‘revenge porn’. I alerted Shenton, but he told me that the powers-that-be on his newspaper, the Sunday Express, had, alas, also been sent the image. Richard Desmond, its proprietor, was hardly unfamiliar with the naked form, but the decision was taken all the same to sack Shenton. At the industrial tribunal that followed, Martin Townsend, Shenton’s editor, talked about the ‘strangeness’ of the theatre critics’ world. I suppose the phrase amounted to something of an understatement, but when I, too, was required to make my exit from that world just before Christmas in yet another round of newspaper redundancies, I realised I was going to miss it, a lot. A little late in the day, it occurred to me that perhaps Dominic Lawson’s worst fears had finally come to pass: yes, I, too, had gone native. April 2015 – THE OLDIE

The King and I Almost SIXTY years ago and in the space of two short weeks I not only lost my first love to a hail of bullets but also outsmarted one of those I deemed responsible for his murder. I was seven years old. It was July 1958 and the setting was Baghdad, capital of the then Kingdom of Iraq. My beloved’s name was Faisal, the 23-year-old king of this land which I had been assured was the site of the original Garden of Eden. I’d never actually met him of course but that didn’t matter. At the convent school I attended and where I felt permanently frightened and out of my depth, his face gazed out at me from the cover of every one of my school exercise books. His eyes were kind, his expression strong and serene and, no matter that the paper was cheap and the portraits grainy, they clearly said, ‘It’s OK, I’m here…’ I had frequently prayed to be released from that spooky convent, and so it was with great rejoicing that one morning out of the blue my parents received a mysterious phone call and I was told I could stay home because nobody would be going to school that day. My parents remained tight-lipped and I was given no explanation other than that ‘Something had happened’. Had I realised earlier what the price of my liberation would be, I wouldn’t have welcomed this ‘miracle’ with such enthusiasm, for it proved to be my first lesson in being careful what you ask for. After a few days, during which there was a palpable sense of unease in the house, I was sent to a little makeshift school hastily set up in the front room of one of my mother’s friends, Mrs Tarrant – a cosy setting for what proved to be the biggest trauma of my life thus far. There were a dozen of us present that fateful morning but I can’t remember whether we were doing sums or listening to a story. What I do remember is Mrs Tarrant’s pallor as she looked over our heads and out through the window as a vehicle of some description roared up the gravel drive and came noisily to a halt outside. The vehicle’s doors slammed and there was the sound of two pairs of

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King Faisal and Valerie Knight’s exercise books, one with the soldier’s ink stamp

heavy boots jumping to the ground and marching into the house. I didn’t dare turn round. There were thumping sounds coming from behind me as the two soldiers – for that is what they were – progressed forwards down the rows of wooden desks. Sensing something unspeakably awful, I resorted to what I always did when I felt alarmed – I fixed all my attention on Faisal’s comforting picture on my pile of exercise books. All too soon the footsteps and thumping sounds had reached the front row where I sat, and I found my eyes riveted on a pair of enormous black boots planted on the floor beside me. Above each boot was a long khaki-clad leg and above

that a massive torso studded with insignia, and at the very top a bulbous head with the ubiquitous moustache, black beret and dark glasses of an Iraqi soldier. In a flash he leant over my desk and slid the first of my exercise books towards him. Then, turning to his sidekick, he grabbed something big and flat which he brought crashing down with malicious force on the book cover. And when he removed it (in reality it was a giantsized ink-stamp), my Faisal’s face had been obliterated and all that remained was a round, wet blob glistening with what I took to be black blood. He reached for the second book, then the third and the fourth, and don’t ask me how I managed it but I slid the fifth one under the desk and on to my trembling knees, out of sight and out of range. I understood nothing other than the certainty that my young king was dead and that these paunchy men had killed him and I was damned if they were going to have it all their own way. I had to have one unsullied portrait of him to treasure. And indeed I have it to this day. It was later explained to me that he had been murdered on the day I’d been unexpectedly kept back from school, the 14th of July – one month after my seventh birthday and two months after his 23rd. His temporary palace had been overrun by disgruntled soldiers like the ones I had seen at Mrs Tarrant’s. And, although he had ordered the royal guard to offer no resistance and had surrendered himself, he was put up against a wall with a handful of close relatives and shot in cold blood. So that was it, the death of one era and the birth of another which would ultimately set a certain young hothead called Saddam Hussein on the road to power. Thirty-three years later, in January 1991, I watched the news in despair as Desert Storm unfolded on our screens, ‘smart bombs’ raining down and desecrating my Garden of Eden. And, all politics aside, I still find it disturbingly significant that the petroleum we so prize bears an uncanny resemblance to black blood.

Howard Sochurek/LIFE/Getty

Valerie Knight on her Iraqi love affair

Re s Public a

Watch out Kev, Zac is after your job Not quite forty years ago, when Fleet Street was still publishing, I was taken down into the print room of the Telegraph by one of their young leader writers. We had dined well and Bill Deedes, or the Berrys had paid for it without a murmur. After the crème brûlée and a belt of brandy my friend took me to see the paper off. What romance there was in newspapers! There on the very premises where the paper was written, the words were sent down in the lower parts of the building to be typeset by hereditary guild workers. Then the formes, or whatever they were called, of hot metal type were sent into the machine room and the edition was printed in the thunder of antique presses. The papers were bundled onto trucks which roared off into the night, to be distributed throughout the country. How amazingly practical, physical, how real it felt. The young leader writer fell into conversation with the man who ran the print room. Was he a charge hand, or something grander? He made a handsome living, I was told, earning much more than the leader writers. He lived in Watford and made his way in about noon, on the days he worked. He also seemed to have a veto on what the leader writers said, and was responsible for occasional white space on the leader page. But that’s another story My friend engaged him in a teasing conversation on the matter of his hours, his work, his benefits, holidays and fabulous salary. He took it in good part. ‘All that is very true, sir, I grant you,’ he said. ‘But let me ask you this. What time this morning did you arrive? And after your lunch, when you returned to the office, how long was it before you wrote your article, assuming you decided to write one today?’ My friend hesitated to answer, but there was no need. ‘You see, sir, you’ve got a good lurk going. And we have our lurk

The way we were: a linotype machine

likewise. Gentlemen get a lot of lurks in this life and the working man has very few. But when we get one, we make the most of it. It’s human nature, isn’t it?’ He seemed to be around retirement age; he may have got away with it, before everything came crashing down around him. All his fraternity lost their jobs in

Middle-class boys and girls didn’t suck their teeth and say it was a big job to re-set a page the Wapping revolution. And who took them? The sons and daughters of leader writers. Middle-class boys and girls, fingers flying over keyboards. They didn’t suck their teeth and say it was a big job to re-set a page and change it from justified to ragged right. It took three keystrokes and less than a second.

Print room work, which had been a hereditary right of the working class, was taken over in a few short years – or months, in some cases. And the new generation who drove the working class out of the occupation had also driven them out of their houses. We – I say ‘we’ – were living in Hammersmith, or Kew, or some of us were moving a little too early to Bow. We were remodelling houses originally built for 19th-century clerks, policemen, or even plumbers. So when ‘progressives’ (high-minded Primrose Hill liberals) tell us how important it is for vocational qualifications to have ‘parity of esteem’ with academic qualifications, it is possible to reproach them. They are the unwitting enemy of the class they affect to help, and an agent of the privileged, educated middle class. They are setting the scene for an absolute rollover of the working class and the work they do. For the trend started by middleclass print rooms is about to accelerate sharply. Wages for ordinary work will continue to be squeezed until the pips squeak. Academic qualifications will qualify graduates for minimum-wage work. But when it passes a certain point, the middle class will leap to a solution. Sophie and Zac will take over real working-class jobs. Plumbers, mechanics, electricians, decorators. Within a decade there’ll be clever, well-educated, nicely mannered sons and daughters of accountants, managers and journalists fitting your boiler. And owning companies that employ other middle-class non-graduates to fit your boiler. They’ll be making a very good living, almost entirely at the expense of the traditional working class. Not for the first time, middle-class liberals and progressives will have led the people they want to promote and encourage and boost – to slaughter. April 2015 – THE OLDIE

Hulton Archive/Getty

The middle classes have already taken over in the print room and soon they’ll be fitting your boiler, too, says SIMON CARR

Media Matters

A paper that has lost its punch The Daily Telegraph’s rivals and enemies gleefully reported the allegations of its former columnist Peter Oborne about the newspaper and HSBC, with the BBC, Guardian and Times leading the pack. I found myself desperately sorry to see the Telegraph brought so low – not out of sympathy for its present ownership and management but out of affection for the paper that gave me my first job in Fleet Street more than 35 years ago. One’s grief was all the greater because the allegations appeared to be well-founded, save perhaps for some footling details. A week before Oborne’s resignation, the Telegraph had conspicuously failed to report revelations about HSBC’s private Swiss bank that were convulsing the rest of Fleet Street. There could be no respectable explanation for this lapse. Indeed, the Telegraph did not try to produce one when it eventually ran a full-length leader in a vain attempt to justify itself. The wonder is that the paper could have ever thought that such a blatant dereliction of duty would not be noticed. The allegations went further. In his rather magisterial and highly effective J’accuse, Oborne listed several examples of the Telegraph refusing to run critical pieces about HSBC, as well as providing other instances of the paper apparently favouring its advertisers. The Guardian reported that HSBC had made a £250 million loan in 2012 to a lossmaking parcel company owned by the Barclay Brothers, proprietors of the Telegraph Media Group. Of course, the connection may be accidental, but very many people will have assumed it wasn’t. I was struck that at no time during hostilities did an editor of the Daily Telegraph, or even a deputy, step forward to defend the paper. The reason is that the paper does not have such a person. There is someone called Jason Seiken, an

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American ludicrously described as ‘head of content’, but he was nowhere to be seen. Neither was Murdoch MacLennan, chief executive of the Telegraph Media Group since 2004, who had sacked four editors before alighting on the unsatisfactory Seiken, dignified neither with the title nor the powers of a conventional editor. The poor man is now rumoured to have fallen out of favour. Mr MacLennan is the Robespierre of the Daily Telegraph’s reign of terror, the difference being that he has survived rather longer. His origins, like the French revolutionary’s, are relatively obscure. In his previous job he was an expert on presses at the Daily Mail group, not quite at the top of the executive ladder. He then found himself elevated to running the Telegraph titles, with little interference from the Barclay Brothers, who live in tax exile in Monaco and the Channel Islands. MacLennan has delivered good profits, largely by persistently cutting costs (which mostly means sacking people). He also promoted ‘sponsored advertising’ – articles paid for by advertisers whose role is far from clear, which were a feature of the paper by the time Oborne joined it in 2010. At the Daily Mail the editor-in-chief, Paul Dacre, is supreme. MacLennan has created an alternative universe in which he is supreme, and editors and journalists genuflect before him. One can only speculate as to what the Barclay brothers (actually twins) think about MacLennan as they view turbulent events from their island fortress of Brec-

qhou. They must appreciate continuing profits, though they are perhaps alarmed by the Telegraph’s steadily declining circulation. They admittedly have other commercial fish to fry. (Sir David’s son, Aidan, oversees their businesses in Britain, including the Telegraph Media Group.) But they must be very relaxed people if they are not a little worried. Moreover, they are reputedly eighty (neither man gives a date of birth in Who’s Who) and will not live for ever. They surely do not wish to pass on to the next world with the reputation of having needlessly ruined a pearl they fought so hard to acquire. A man such as Murdoch MacLennan cannot be allowed to determine the fate of a great newspaper (which, it should be said, retains some fine qualities despite all the depredations). The Daily Telegraph cries out for a strong editor of established integrity to restore its damaged reputation. The odd thing is that it has just such a person in Charles Moore, by far its best columnist, and from 1995 until 2003 its distinguished editor until he jumped ship (or was pushed) in the dying days of Conrad Black’s proprietorship. The Barclay brothers have no need to employ headhunters to scour the world in search of a saviour. They already have one on the payroll who knows and understands the Daily Telegraph better than any man alive. At the age of 58 he is several years younger than Bill Deedes when appointed the paper’s editor in 1974. He is also perfectly commercial, and recognises that newspapers have to make profits to survive unless, like the Guardian, they rely on some huge trust fund. My heartfelt advice to the Barclays is to pay off MacLennan, or at least restrict him to what he understands, and save the Daily Telegraph by re-installing Charles Moore. Frederick Barclay, left, and David Barclay, owners of the Telegraph

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What the debacle at the Daily Telegraph shows is that the paper needs a new, strong and untarnished editor, says STEPHEN GLOVER

Whiteboard Jungle

My poor little heathens The children’s ignorance about religion knows no bounds, says KATE SAWYER When I was at school, RE was called Scripture; we studied only Christianity, and it was not compulsory as an O-level. At some point it became RK (religious knowledge) and is now firmly Religious Education, a compulsory GCSE, and seems to focus on what are rather bizarrely called ‘world religions’ (as though all religions aren’t). I have mixed feelings about this: I am constantly depressed at the lack of general knowledge our children have, not only about Bible stories, but about feasts of the Church. It is no exaggeration to say that the majority of children do not even really know the story of the Nativity. Last Christmas I found myself putting on a cartoon retelling of the Nativity when I discovered that over half my class of 13-year-olds had a hazy grasp of the Christmas story – one was convinced that the baby was put in a basket and sent down a river (which meant I suppose that he had at least heard some stories from the Bible). Easter is all about chocolate, Christmas about presents, and Jehovah’s Witness children are mercilessly mocked for not celebrating Christmas by children who have no idea who John the Baptist might be. Their lack of general know ledge often makes teaching literature (and presumably art and music) hard, as they have no cultural understanding of so many of the reference points. On the other hand, it is absolutely right that they should have some understanding of other faiths, now more so than ever. The more Muslim extremists carry out their horrific attacks in the name of Allah, the more important it is that our children are made to see that the Koran does not encourage murder and that Islam is in many ways more like than unlike Christianity. Our school is in a market town and boasts only a variety of Christian churches. It is only in very recent memory that there have been noticeable

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numbers of ethnic minorities, let alone other religions. So for some years we have taken the children on tours of places of worship – a mosque, a synagogue, a gurdwara, a wat. They are given a guided tour and a talk; the plan is to educate, not to convert (we have to reassure some of the parents of this). Each place of worship has its own flavour: the Sikhs are always popular, with their warmth and hospitality, their book in a bed, their daggers and chocolate biscuits; I have to button my lip when a Buddhist convert tells the children that only converts from the West truly understand the Buddhist Path to Enlightenment; our nearest synagogue is one of the oldest in England, an elegant 18th-century building with carvings and treasures. Until recently, we have had no problems with these trips at all. The children, little heathens though the majority of them are, behave with good manners and respect, ask intelligent questions and even appear to enjoy the day. But sadly things have changed. More often children’s parents ring the school refusing permission to go. And these are the children who most need to go. Alas, it is the visit to the mosque which

causes the most problems. The most recent of these trips was organised before the Charlie Hebdo attacks, but we still received the emails, letters and calls, or the child stubbornly saying, ‘My mum doesn’t want me to go’. And then, the week before the visit, we had Charlie Hebdo. And it became apparent that in this corner of the world not enough people were thinking je suis Charlie at all. A few of the slightly more politically aware parents assured me that it was not the mosque itself that was the problem, it was sending their child to a city (and we’re not talking Birmingham here). As much as I pointed out that the last place that would be attacked was a mosque, they retaliated with ‘I don’t want him being shot in a coffee shop’. I promised I had no intention of taking the children to a coffee shop, swore I’d take the bullet myself, but in most cases once the parents’ minds were made up that was it. It was not until one mother said: ‘I don’t mind them going to places of worship, but I don’t see why it can’t be somewhere Christian, like Stonehenge,’ that I fully understood the depth of ignorance about religion in this country. They think Roman Catholicism is not Christian, but Stonehenge is. It makes you weep.

‘I thought I knew Venice quite well, but I don’t recognise any of this at all.’

What a Flook! Michael Barber pays homage to a long-lost social star

I first came across Flook in my mother’s Daily Mail. He and his young pal Rufus fought a series of battles with a scheming old villain called Moses Maggot and his oafish sidekick, Bodger. But unlike the comics I read as a boy, Flook remained on my radar for years to come. For although Rufus didn’t grow up, Flook did. He still resembled a cross between a koala bear and a pygmy hippo, but he now drank Pernod, belonged to the Colony Room Club in Soho and made blasé remarks like ‘How reproachful the milk and papers look when you get home after them’. His fans ranged from debs and their delights to the historian Eric Hobsbawm – not your typical Mail reader – who described the strip as ‘a satirical and socially perceptive’ commentary on the way we lived then. Flook came about because in 1949 the Mail’s owner, Lord Rothermere, impressed by a zany American comic strip called Barnaby, thought the Mail should run something similar. Tasked with drawing this was a young illustrator on the staff called Wally Fawkes, who signed his drawings ‘Trog’, short for ‘Troglodyte’, a nod to the hours he spent in air raid shelters during the war. Canadian by birth, Fawkes had more than his fair share of cheek, essential in a cartoonist, but risky in an employee. When, early on in Flook’s career, Lady Rothermere buttonholed Fawkes at a staff party and asked after ‘your lovely little furry thing’, he replied without thinking, ‘Mine’s fine, thanks. How’s yours?’ Conscious that he had pushed his luck, Fawkes swiftly melted into the crowd and out of the door. Perhaps Flook was always destined to become an adult entertainment. Rereading some of the earliest stories, I came across words like ‘prevaricate’, ‘sanguine’ and ‘contrite’, which as a small boy I’d have struggled with.

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The writers who worked with Fawkes included Humphrey Lyttelton, in whose band Fawkes played the clarinet, and Sir Compton Mackenzie, who was hired to raise the paper’s profile in Scotland . George Melly, who succeeded Lyttelton, joined Fawkes in 1956, the year that saw the blossoming of the Chelsea Set – hence new characters like Scoop, the well-connected PR man, his Sloaney wife Prudence, and Caroline ToppeDraw, the heiress, who claimed to have coined the term ‘little man’ to describe her social inferiors. Melly used the strip’s cast to explore what was happening as the country discarded its shabby post-war threads and began to live a little. So when Flook becomes a photographer on the glossy mag Tat, he is told what to wear by young ‘Mr Jostle’, a caricature of Jocelyn Stevens, the dapper boss of Queen. In a riff on the Profumo Affair, he snaps an elderly nob entertaining an obvious tart. It’s not being seen with the tart that the nob objects to, but the

fact that he’s wearing a clip-on bow tie. When Flook gets too full of himself, Rufus calls him to order by demanding an ice cream in a smart restaurant or posing some guileless but unanswerable question. Fawkes played a similar role with Melly, whose subversive side needed to be reined in. ‘Don’t overdo the satire, George,’ he would say. ‘The best way of jumping on a target is to appear to be walking past it.’ But Fawkes, by now a full-time cartoonist, was aware that his rackety colleague ‘knew more about what was going on than I did’. Whether on the road with Mick Mulligan’s band or hobnobbing with the more raffish elements of society, Melly accumulated what Fawkes described as ‘Flook meat’. The blend of Melly’s social scavenging and Fawkes’s consummate draughtsmanship was a great way to start the day. Melly quit in 1971, saying he thought a fresh eye was needed. The Mail then went tabloid and acquired a new editor, David English, whose constituency was the saloon bar and the suburban golf club. Within a few years Flook had become an endangered species, though it was not until 1984 that English dispensed with him. Briefly resurrected in the Daily Mirror because Robert Maxwell’s wife was a fan, the strip ended in 1986. Wally Fawkes is still with us. Venerated by younger colleagues of his like Nick Garland and Steve Bell, he and Flook deserve a blue plaque in Fleet Street, though this would probably baffle the money men who work there now. And given how few of the stories were reprinted, a case can surely be made for ‘The Best of Flook’ in a collected edition. Publishers, take note! Still with us: the consummate draughtsman and Flook creator Wally Fawkes, aka Trog

April 2015 – THE OLDIE

The sage of Summerhill On a dank, dripping day in the late autumn of 1969, I squelched up to the main entrance of Summerhill School in Leiston, Suffolk, to meet its founder, the reputedly irascible old Scot, A S Neill. He had gone off with his dog and no one knew when he’d be back. There was time to look around. Names and hieroglyphics had been chiselled into the porch bricks. The children were making bonfires or tending horses and the classrooms were empty. The first notice that met my eye was: ‘Please do not take pictures of the children when they are eating. They hate it.’ Summerhill was, and is, a school that celebrated personal freedom and always attracted the adjective ‘controversial’. Children could learn as and when they liked (i.e. ‘ran wild’) and had a system of self-government that was considered dubious by the educational establishment. Coach-loads of casual visitors would turn up unannounced. Recently, intruders had been found wandering into the children’s rooms with bribes, asking them about their sex lives and treating them like zoo animals. A second notice read: ‘Please do not offer the children money, alcohol or sweets.’ As a reporter on the local paper, the East Anglian Daily Times, I was to see what the old man made of all this. As I waited, several pupils interrogated me to make sure I should be allowed in and one showed me the blade of his knife in a mock threat. I did not mention this to Neill and neither did it appear in my copy, an omission unimaginable in journalistic practice now. After two hours in his pipe-fugged little study, listening to him talk as much about Wagner and literature as his educational principles or the criticisms of his school, I was eating out of the old dominie’s hand. Long fingers probed the depths of his tobacco pouch, filled and tamped his pipe. He looked translucently frail, with Forsterian jowls and tufts of white hair. I think I wanted to spare him anxiety.

THE OLDIE – April 2015

A S Neill, who founded Summerhill in 1924. He died in 1973 but the school lives on

Even though Neill had been running Summerhill – or its anti-authoritarian forerunners – along the same lines for 49 years, it was still called ‘experimental’. Mischief-makers liked to caricature it as a place of licence and low educational achievement. Neill couldn’t have cared less. He was as indifferent to being called a genius as a corrupter of youth. ‘If the emotions are free, the intellect will look after itself,’ he said. ‘I think we have abolished fear here. I am the children’s equal. Today they were singing: “Neill, Neill, orange peel!”, entirely without rudeness, you understand.’ The chant became the title of his autobiography, published just before he died. Actually Neill was not a believer in complete freedom. He advocated personal freedom providing it did not interfere with the freedom of others. Anyone who let a child get all its own way was a dangerous person, he said. He had two regrets. One was that Summerhill was inevitably a ‘class school’ because parents had to pay fees. A grant would have meant compromises. ‘We don’t get a grant and don’t want one.’

The other was that it attracted problem children from America who were not declared to be so. ‘What do you do? You can’t send them all the way back across the Atlantic. At my age I want normal happy children.’ Perhaps what he really wanted by this stage – he was 86 – was to listen to Tristan and Isolde or Der Rosenkavalier and re-read his favourite book, George Douglas Brown’s The House with the Green Shutters. This harsh story of patriarchal neglect in a small Scottish community (not unlike the one in which he had grown up in Forfar) was almost an obsession. When in Edinburgh, Neill would call at the National Library of Scotland and read the original manuscript in penny exercise books. He reached for the small cloth-bound volume and gave it to me to borrow. Knowing what it meant to him, it was like receiving the Book of Kells. How could he part with it? Only later, I found out that he knew it almost by heart. He had once posted it to Henry Miller with the words: ‘The only Scottish novel I consider of any merit.’ ‘When I want to feel humble,’ he said, ‘I read it.’ He turned the tissue-thin pages and read croakily: ‘The thumb mark of his Maker was wet in the clay of him.’ Then he turned to the description of John Gourlay that he particularly liked. Gourlay had a chest ‘like the heave of a hill’ and his anger ‘struck life like a black frost’. A few months after my visit, an announcement went out in the New Statesman: No More Visitors at Summerhill. The pupils had voted on this and it became Summerhill law. Neill said he was too tired to give any more interviews. He handed the running of the school to his daughter Zoe soon after and died in Aldeburgh in September 1973. There was a copy of the much-travelled House with the Green Shutters by his bedside at the cottage hospital.

Sunday Dispatch/REX

In 1969 Elizabeth Grice was despatched by her local paper to interview the legendary headmaster A S Neill. She was soon eating out of his hand

Never too old to dance Trained as a ballerina in her youth, Mia Nadasi has taken it up again in later life Just off the busy A316 at the edge of the Old Deer Park is the Richmond swimming pool. In that ugly edifice – a protected building for its architecture, God knows why – there is a big dance studio, where four times a week a ballet class takes place. This is no ordinary class. Those of us who take part regularly love it with a passion. You could not come up with a more diverse crowd. The participants’ ages range from teenagers to ladies in their mid-eighties. We have active dancers, retired dancers, women who have never danced before, actors from West End musicals (principals and chorus), a stage designer, a doctor of philosophy, at least two painters, an acrobat who works in the circus (she has a great jump), a physiotherapist and a psychotherapist, also a Marks & Spencer store manager, just to mention a few. I belong to the ex-dancers group as I trained as a classical ballerina fifty years ago in Budapest. I graduated in the ornate Budapest Opera House, then promptly decided to join a drama company. My

father was the artistic director of the Hungarian State Ballet and I felt if I chose acting nobody could attribute my successes to nepotism. When five years later I came to England to marry, I was sorry I had given up ballet. Instead of just putting on my pointe shoes I had to learn to speak English. My training was useful, though, for musicals, of which I did quite a few (Fiddler on the Roof in the West End, the title role in Irma la Douce, to name a few). I stopped doing classical ballet classes for 25 years and only started again when I heard about these Richmond classes, taught by the exquisite ex-principal of the Royal Ballet, Marguerite Porter (who received an MBE in this year’s New Year Honours). We all loved her classes, especially watching her showing the exercises in her inimitable way. I realised that first love was always the best and I was hooked on ballet again. A few years ago Marguerite handed over the class to a male teacher. Brian Loftus is an internationally renowned ballet master and it is his enthusiasm that makes us such devotees. In all the

That was then: Mia Nadasi in 1960, left, and now

THE OLDIE – April 2015

years, I have never seen Brian off form, depressed or not giving a hundred per cent. Brian has wonderful sayings: ‘Make heads turn, not stomachs’, ‘Chin up, both of them!’, ‘Bottom in, don’t stick it out to the Old Deer Park’, and his double entendres keep us in stitches. He also says, ‘Quiet please, this class is not an extension of your social life’. But it is! We all love it and the general consensus is that while we are in the studio we forget everything else, our daily problems are suspended and we concentrate on the exercises. When I was a young dancer I was a terrible snob. If somebody did not have a perfect figure or talent for ballet I would sneer at them. ‘What’s the point of them trying?’ I thought. Now I am a changed person. I see week after week the joy dancing can give everybody. Who would have thought that in my eighth decade I’d still go to the barre and go through the exercises? As an exprofessional I have quite a responsibility. I am often required to lead a group – how could I stop and let them down? Of course my legs don’t go as high as they used to, not nearly that high, but I can still do a double pirouette. And those who can’t do pirouettes can put their arms in a pretty shape, enjoy the music and moving in rhythm. We all have good posture and if you see us, ladies of certain age from the back, you’d think we were years younger. Fair enough, when we turn around it becomes obvious that we have passed the first flush of youth but hey, we are having a good time. I recommend dancing to everyone. As long as you can move something, move it. l There are several ballet schools around the country that host adult classes: the Northern Ballet Academy, Leeds; the Manor School of Ballet, Edinburgh; Jason Thomas Performing Arts, Truro; Arabesque School of Dance, West Midlands; the Expression School, Oxford; The Point, Eastleigh; and the Central School of Ballet, London.

The Gallipoli campaign memorial statue in Anzac Cove, Turkey

The other truce

incamerastock/Alamy

In spring 1915, the Turks and the Allies ceased hostilities for a day. CHARLES KEEN tells the story We got through the centenary of 1914 with dignity and without an excess of triumphalism or mawkishness. We ended the year admiring the insubordination of the front-line troops, who fraternised in no-man’s-land on Christmas Day. Encouraged by the Queen and the Archbishop, we rejoiced in reconciliation. The following year, 100 years ago come Whitsun, saw another more formal but not less remarkable truce; it was arranged at what later became known as Anzac Beach, between the Allies and the Turks, to allow the dead to be buried. It lasted eight hours, and was largely orchestrated by one man, Aubrey Herbert, a middle-ranking officer, MP, landowner and Turkophile. He was a very unusual man, whose life was well written up by his grand-daughter, Margaret FitzHerbert, in her excellent book

The Man who was Greenmantle (John Murray, 1983). Herbert was too shortsighted for the Army, so he had his tailor run him up a uniform, and he smuggled himself onto a troopship, along with his friends in the Irish Guards. At Mons, he was wounded and captured by the Germans, but later recaptured by the French when they counter-attacked. Having thus gatecrashed the Army, he was next posted to Egypt and the Dardanelles as a liaison officer in the disastrous Gallipoli campaign. By the spring of 1915, the two sides were deadlocked at Anzac Beach, unable to make headway. The shelling was intense, and neither side could bury their dead; the stench had become appalling under the baking Turkish sun. In the end, the commanders on both sides were persuaded (by Herbert

mostly) to agree a truce, so that the dead could be buried, but on the condition in both cases that the request came from the other side: this was somehow engineered. At 7.30am on 24th May, Herbert and another officer, with a party carrying white flags, met the Turks and proceeded into no-man’s-land, where burial commenced. It was a gruesome scene, ‘ghastly to the point of nightmare’ in Herbert’s words, with an overpowering stench of decay and literally acres of dead. The Turkish captain said to him: ‘At this spectacle even the most gentle must feel savage, and the most savage must weep.’ But the job was done. ‘At four o’clock,’ Herbert says in his diary, ‘the Turks came to me for orders. This couldn’t happen anywhere else. I retired their troops and ours, walking along the line. At 4.07 I retired the white flag men, making them shake hands.’ The Australian contingent came up to him and said: ‘Goodbye, old chap. Good luck.’ The Turks came up and said (in Turkish): ‘Smiling may you go and smiling come again.’ Then he told them all to get into their trenches, and ‘I unthinkingly went up to the Turkish trench, and got a deep salaam from it. I told them that neither side would fire for 25 minutes after they had got into their trenches...’ He sounds like a referee at a football match. Talk about the playing fields of Eton! He was indeed a most remarkable man. Younger son of an earl, he had travelled extensively in the Middle East, spoke every language you can think of, had campaigned with the Young Turks, was offered (twice) the throne of Albania, and was the model of John Buchan’s Sandy Arbuthnot in his novel Greenmantle. Herbert had many old friends in Turkey, and he made new friends on the day of the truce. Like so many of his generation, he plunged with ardour into the war at its outset, but grew sickened by it. By the end, he was siding in Parliament with those who favoured a negotiated peace. Looking back, the stories of those two truces of 1914 and 1915, the informal and the formal, are a reassuring reminder of the decency of people and their chivalry in times of war. Chivalry was not dead then, and perhaps there’s a bit of it about even now. April 2015 – THE OLDIE

God

by Sister Teresa Saint Teresa of Avila was born on 28th March 1515, and the Carmelite world is in a flutter of excitement as the 500th anniversary of her birth approaches. Many people will have heard of her in association with one of the great sculptural masterpieces of the Baroque period, Bernini’s ‘Ecstasy of Saint Teresa’ (completed in 1652), and this is a pity. Masterpiece it unquestionably is, but it is far too high-flown for my taste and doesn’t represent with any accuracy any Carmelite nun I have ever met. Teresa might not have been all that pleased by Bernini: she was undoubtedly a mystic, but for much of the time she had her feet firmly on the ground, was full of practical advice on a variety of topics and her letters remain a primary source for those studying 16th-century business methods. Teresa’s brothers valued her intelligence and input. Teresa was a quarter Jewish, a fact that wasn’t

Mammon by Margaret Dibben The stampede for National Savings’ pensioners bonds has highlighted the pathetic rates of interest paid by banks and building societies. NS&I’s 65+ Guaranteed Growth Bonds, to give them their proper title, pay more than nearly every bank and building society account, although you can find a few acceptable rates if you search. Oddly, some current accounts pay higher interest than savings accounts. Santander’s 123 current account pays three per cent plus cashback on household bills; TSB’s pays five per cent. Nationwide, Lloyds and Bank of Scotland also have well-paying current accounts but make sure you comply with the strict conditions otherwise you lose the good rate and can suffer hefty overdraft charges. Banks and building societies decide how much interest they will pay you depending partly on what their competitors are doing, but mainly on how much money they want to take in. When, in August 2012, the Government allowed banks cheap funding to encourage them to lend, they did not need

publicly acknowledged until the 1930s, and whether she knew this or not is still debated. Surely she must have done, in that her paternal grandfather, a Marrano (Jewish convert to Christianity), was obliged, on his conversion, to perform a number of public acts of penance. The shame of this caused the family to move from Toledo to Avila, where they were less well known. Teresa was five at the time, and must have been aware of something being radically and frighteningly wrong. Her writings, which have been considered spiritual classics for centuries (she was made a Doctor of the Church in 1970),

Teresa was undoubtedly a mystic but for much of the time she had her feet firmly on the ground were investigated by the Inquisition, and this constant background of threat may account in part for the apologetic nature of her style: there are numerous references to her being only a humble little woman longing to be corrected by learned men. Some of these may be tongue-in-cheek

so much money from savers and slashed interest rates even further. Savings rates take no account of what is happening to the Bank of England base rate. This has remained stuck at 0.5 per cent for the past six years and the latest predictions expect it to stay there even longer than last year’s optimists were forecasting. Savingschampion.co.uk is an independent website that researches the entire UK savings market. Director Sue Hannums says that, with inflation falling to 0.5 per cent, there is even less pressure on the Bank of England to raise rates, possibly not until early next year. Even then she is not hopeful that savings rates will improve greatly: ‘There seems little reason to believe that, when rates do start to rise,

With inflation falling to 0.5 per cent there is even less pressure on the Bank of England to raise rates all savers will reap the full benefit.’ The financial watchdog, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), has published an in-depth report into the savings market that concluded it is not working in customers’ best interests. Well over a quarter of all the money in savings accounts earns

and she can be very funny, even at a distance of roughly 450 years, but she lived in highly dangerous times. The Way of Perfection, written specifically for the instruction of her novices, is the most approachable of her books, but probably the best known is The Interior Castle, which features a crystal building with seven mansions (or rooms) as a metaphor for the development of the soul. I find almost all of it very difficult to understand, with the exception of the reptiles infesting the outer courtyard or moat: these disgusting creatures come and go throughout the book and I know exactly where I am with them. Teresa explains the various stages that must be gone through before the soul is united with God. On the way there she emphasises that love is vital. Most people have experienced periods of calm and delightful solitude being rudely interrupted. For Teresa what matters is responding with love: ‘It would be a distressing thing if God were clearly telling us to go after something that matters to Him and we would not want to do so but want to remain looking at Him because that is more pleasing to us.’

0.5 per cent or less and older accounts earn less than those opened more recently. The FCA found that it can be difficult for customers to understand what interest rate their accounts pay, that banks make it difficult to switch between providers and that they trick customers with misleading names that suggest an account pays a high rate when it no longer does. Consumers’ Association’s magazine Which? recently complained about financial accounts labelled for the over-50s which imply they give better terms to older people. They do not. Which? says that, apart from Saga, the savings accounts pay a diabolical 0.1 per cent rate of interest. Fortunately there are not many around. Fixed-rate bonds often pay more but should you lock up your money for a number of years with the possibility of a rate rise next year? Hannums recommends spreading your money between a mix of current accounts, fixed-rate bonds and accessible variable-rate accounts. For tax-free savings, you have until the end of the tax year, 5th April, to use your 2014/15 Isa allowance. Hannums reckons new competitive rates should appear to tempt savers into using their allowances. It is time to take a close look at your savings. April 2015 – THE OLDIE 33

GE T TING THE SACK

Once, twice, three times a failure by EDWARD MIRZOEFF It took as long as a pregnancy for employers to suss me out. Three times I was fired, always nine months after my first hopeful day in the job. Idling at the University, toying with a D Phil, I gave little thought to the future. I asked an undergraduate to marry me when she finished her degree. Wellmeaning friends demurred. How could I even think of wedlock without any income? I must forget the days of wine and roses, leave Oxford, get a proper job. Foolishly I bowed to the pressure. My first job was at Gallup Poll, a market research company. I assisted a research executive without ever understanding what I was doing. One day I was given my own baby survey to run. Would customers be in favour of newfangled Green Shield Stamps (to be collected, for awards)? I devised a questionnaire, got 96 replies. There were no calculators then. Slide-rules were a mystery. The only way I could work out the percentages was to make up four further questionnaires, so that I had 100. (My semi-fictional survey told Green Shield that they would be successful – and so they were.) It came as no surprise when, after nine months, the boss gently suggested that my talents lay elsewhere.

THE OLDIE – April 2015

Next I found a grand-sounding public relations firm – actually one man and a secretary. We had two tiny garret rooms in an old building in Fleet Street. I was alone in the tinier one. The job was to write handouts for the technical press promoting pitch fibre pipes and a housebuilders’ registration scheme. Oddly, the little firm prospered. A new assistant was hired and installed opposite me. For some weeks Derek and I were wary of each other, and worked away, heads down. Then, to our relief, we discovered that we were both bored, indolent layabouts. We devised a complicated Test series of desk cricket, played with rulers and a rubber. I was just striking a matchwinning six when the door opened – and the boss failed to take the catch. Spluttering, he ordered me out by the end of the week, nine months after I first climbed the steep stairs. My wedding was arranged for the following day. Only my closest friends knew I had been sacked. They sniggered when the clergyman praised the bridegroom as a bread-winner. There was nothing for it but the labour exchange. One bright morning three recent Oxford graduates set out to sign on at Lisson Grove. Neither of the other two – now Lord Hoffmann, the

former Law Lord, and Sir Jeremy Isaacs, of Channel 4 and the Opera House – stayed on the books for long. A technical article I had written while at the PR firm languished for months, but was eventually published on an obscure page of the Guardian. It appeared on the day of my job interview with a consumer magazine called Shoppers’ Guide. Impressed by my prominent role

Then, to our relief, we discovered that we were both bored, indolent layabouts in the national press, they appointed me assistant editor. The job was to write up the results of tests on items like steam irons and ladies’ cardigans. Shoppers’ Guide was owned by the British Standards Institution, then a quasi-governmental bureaucracy. All the other staff were women. It was a quiet life. One morning I received an unexpected phone call. Would I meet two young entrepreneurs for lunch at a discreetly expensive restaurant? They were Clive Labovitch and Michael Heseltine, whose thrusting Cornmarket Press acquired dull magazines and transformed them with sexy articles, trendy photographs and state-of-the-art graphics. They thought to do the same with Shoppers’ Guide. It sounded exciting. Soon it became clear they had miscalculated. Our readership of middleaged ladies in the Home Counties couldn’t understand the new format and whizzy graphics. They began to drift away. The writing was plainly on the wall and I said so. Heseltine summoned me to his office. My boss had complained that I was spreading disaffection and lowering morale. Nine months into the job, I had to go. Four weeks later the magazine folded. I didn’t care. I’d discovered somewhere much more thrilling – the BBC. Once in, I somehow vaulted over the nine months hurdle – and stayed 37 years.

Memorial Service

MORNING dress was optional, we were told, for the thanksgiving service for John George Vanderbilt Henry Spencer-Churchill DL JP, the 11th Duke of Marlborough, at the Guards Chapel in Wellington Barracks. One person who did opt for tails was his son the former Jamie Blandford, now looking very much the 12th Duke and accompanied by his wife and two children. He read the lesson from Ephesians 3, 14–21, which praised family life: ‘For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith…’ Everyone agreed that, after a rocky early life in which he served two prison sentences and was threatened with disinheritance, the inner being of the 12th Duke is now fully restored to respectability. The Rev Dowell Conning praised the late Duke for his steady handling of a multitude of crises: ‘We give thanks for his wise judgement and clear insight,

which enabled him to understand the attitudes and problems of people and business; for his astute management and dedication, which inspired others to tackle tasks which seemed insuperable.’ Then Tory MP Sir Nicholas Soames, grandson of Sir Winston Churchill and a cousin of the late Duke, took to the pulpit looking and sounding more and more like the wartime prime minister, pointing out that Winston had been Sunny (as the Duke was known from his days as Earl of Sunderland) Marlborough’s godfather. Soames said the late Duke was cautious but not afraid of new ideas in running Sir John Vanbrugh’s great masterpiece, Blenheim Palace, where Churchill was born. He told how it took seven years to repaint the inside of the palace but the Duke always saw his projects through to fruition. ‘He had a highly developed sense of beauty and was a great believer in tradition.’ He told how Sunny served with the Life Guards 1946–53 and later as a councillor and magistrate, taking his seat in the Lords on the death of his father in 1972. Soames used a cricketing metaphor to explain how Sunny didn’t often speak in

the Lords, saying that ‘He didn’t trouble the scorer greatly’. ‘His latter-day moustache was slightly disappointing. A farmer told him on looking at his upper lip, “I’d plough that one back if I were you”. ‘Jamie has continued his father’s tradition of hospitality,’ said Soames, who told how the late Duke was supportive but not uncritical of his MP David Cameron, who missed the service because of Prime Minister’s Questions, although his mother-inlaw, Viscountess Astor, was there. The Duchess of Cornwall, the Duke of Kent, Prince Michael and the Duke of Gloucester represented the royal family. Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles and his son Tom were also there. Grandson Dr David Gelber read his own poem illustrating the Duke’s fight to keep Blenheim going. ‘It was his battle, he would sometimes say,/To hold that place together which had cost/The blood and hard won treasure of the state.’ The Rev Canon Roger Humphreys led the prayers. Trumpeters of the Household Cavalry sounded the Last Post and the Reveille. James Hughes-Onslow

Se t in S tone

Lieutenant William Forster You can forgive the bad tombstone grammar. In the face of such a tragically young death, ‘i before e, except after c’ doesn’t seem to matter much. Nor does ‘His Majesty’ instead of ‘His Majesty’s’. Most of the dead at the Battle of Trafalgar were buried at sea. But Lieutenant William Forster wasn’t killed immediately when HMS Colossus was attacked by the French ships Swiftsure and Argonaute and the Spanish ship Bahama. Forster was badly wounded and died later that day. As a result, he was buried in the Trafalgar Cemetery in Gibraltar, just the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar from Cape Trafalgar. Gibraltar was the closest British safe haven after the battle. It was also where Nelson was taken after his death. His

body was first put in a cask of brandy, myrrh and camphor. The cask was tied to Victory’s mainmast, under guard, as Victory was towed to Gibraltar.

Once in Gibraltar, Nelson’s corpse was placed in a sealed, lead-lined coffin, filled with wine spirits for preservation, before the journey back to London and his funeral in St Paul’s Cathedral. Poor Lieutenant Forster was left behind in Gibraltar, but he couldn’t have found a more charming resting place. The Trafalgar Cemetery – originally Southport Ditch Cemetery – sits in the shadow of the city walls, with sinuous paths snaking around the gravestones, flanked by tropical greenery. Consecrated in 1798, the cemetery closed in 1814. It fell into disrepair but was restored in the 1980s. It now hosts an annual commemoration ceremony on Trafalgar Day, the Sunday closest to the anniversary of the battle. Harry Mount April 2015 – THE OLDIE

Geraint Lewis/REX

John Spencer-Churchill, 11th Duke of Marlborough 1926–2014

Too big to handle Donna Tartt, Wolf Hall: Stanley Price laments the rise of the mega-book

THE OLDIE – April 2015

500 pages, especially in hardback, can cause bruising or even tooth loss. Recently, and foolhardily, I took Neil MacGregor’s brilliant Germany, Memories of a Nation (598 pages) to bed, and frankly I’m lucky not to have concussion . Isn’t this where Kindle comes in? Not in our house it doesn’t. I can see the advantages of it while travelling, particularly on economy airlines. but not in the comforts of home and bed. Also, if you put 500 or more pages into a Kindle and enlarge the print slightly, you get finger fatigue from sliding over the pages. Anyway, nowadays one spends so much time staring at screens, computers, mobiles and iPads, there is something wonderfully reassuring about having a proper book in one’s hands. But, thanks to Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, my wife and I have now solved our problem. I was in bed reading One Leg Too Few, William Cook’s funny but tragic biography of the pair. It was genuinely hard to put down, but I had to. At 566 pages, it is heavy even in paperback. I moaned to my wife, ‘Why can’t they

publish books like this in two volumes?’ I fell asleep before I heard her answer. Next morning, I was having breakfast, my book propped up on the marmalade jar, when my wife arrived brandishing a Stanley knife. ‘I’ve got the solution,’ she said. I didn’t catch on. ‘Our marriage?’ ‘No, those books.’ She took my book, closed it, and opened it exactly in the middle of the binding. ‘After all it’s only a paperback,’ she said and, ever practical, sliced it carefully down the middle. I now had Pete and Dud in two volumes – and very comfortable reading they were too. Maybe this is sacrilege to a true booklover, but to a practical reader it is a great blessing. After all, one couldn’t do it to a hardback, or a library book, and what paperbacks were first designed for was to fit neatly in your pocket or read easily in bed. Shortly after this, my wife came back from the bookstore with two novels she had always meant to read. She took them out of the bag and the Stanley knife out of the drawer. She now has four volumes of Hilary Mantel to look forward to.

Alamy

I won’t generalise and say ‘all’ or ‘most’, but certainly a great number of books these days, both fiction and nonfiction, are too long – hugely too long. Go into any bookshop, if you can find one, and look round. For some of the books on the higher shelves there should be a health and safely warning. If I could do my own illustrations I would draw, in the first box, an elderly woman reaching up for a book on the third shelf. In the second box, she is lying prostrate on the floor under the weight of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch – all 864 pages of it. My wife, however, wanted to read it – until she saw it. She was particularly incensed by a quote on the cover: ‘A book that’s impossible to put down.’ ‘And impossible to pick up,’ she said. The 2013 Man Booker Prize winner, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, weighs in at 832 pages, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall at 559 pages, and her Bringing Up the Bodies at a modest 407. Is there some deep cultural reason for this obesity? Do publishers really believe their readers want these mammoth reads? A lot of writers lay the blame on editors who ‘ain’t what they used to be’. Some critics think that in building up best-selling novelists, publishers have created their own Frankenstein monster. Sam Jordison, reviewing The Goldfinch in the Guardian, writes, ‘Editing Donna Tartt must be a daunting task. It would take an editor with steel cojones to ask her to trim down some of her 864 pages.’ I suspect that if less succesful writers were to send in anything over 300 or so pages they’d be told to do something very unhygienic with them. One thing editors don’t seem to have asked themselves is where can you comfortably a read a book like that – certainly not in bed, even when it’s in paperback. Unless you do regular press-ups in a gym, after half-a-dozen pages your arms ache, unless of course you buy one of those book-support things they slide over your bed in good hospitals. There is another more serious problem, if you’ve had a hard day. Doze off while you’re reading and, by the law of gravity, there’s only one place for the book to drop. Over

Pile ’em up: a lot of books published today are too long

My kitchen goddess I met Jane Grigson in the summer of 1975, as the result of a review I wrote of her husband Geoffrey’s book Britain Observed in the New Statesman. Geoffrey was, and remains, one of my literary heroes, not least for his fiercely independent spirit and his talent for expressing considered opinions that went against the fashionable grain. It would become apparent in the years to come that Jane loved him for those very same qualities. He said things, she confided in me once, she would never dare to say, however much she wanted to. Jane was Geoffrey’s third, and last, wife. He was her senior by almost 23 years, but the age difference didn’t matter to her. In her late twenties she had fallen for the art critic and curator Bryan Robertson, with whom she worked in a London gallery, but she soon realised it was a hopeless infatuation when she discovered he was gay. (In the last year of her life I reunited Jane and Bryan at a lunch I prepared for them. It was a joyous occasion, enlivened by gossip and laughter. I have seldom been such a happy listener.) Bryan had hoped that Jane would find her ideal older man one day, and so it was to be. Jane, who had admired Geoffrey’s work – his study of Samuel Palmer and his Shell guides to birds and flowers, especially – when she was a schoolgirl, thought she was the luckiest woman in the world after meeting him and learning that her feelings for him were reciprocated. The Grigson family was in something close to disarray when Jane and Geoffrey married. If anyone knew how to soothe the famous curmudgeon’s savage breast, it was the bright young woman from Sunderland. She moved into the house he owned at Broad Town in Wiltshire and transformed it into a loving place. It seemed that she would be content for ever with her early married life, as she typed and corrected Geoffrey’s manuscripts. Everything was to change in the 1960s when one of their neighbours in Trôo, in Loir-et-Cher, in France, asked Jane to be his secretary and researcher. Adey Horton was late delivering a book on

Jane Grigson and her daughter Sophie

charcuterie and French pork cookery for a London publisher. His agreed delivery date was already history when Jane agreed to come to his assistance. Horton was so impressed with her skills that he eventually handed the entire project over to her. And that is how her career as a food writer began – accidentally. If Horton had been more diligent, Jane would have merited nothing grander than finding her name in the Acknowledgements. That first of her scholarly and approachable books was reviewed glowingly by Elizabeth David in the Sunday Times and achieved the rare distinction of being translated into French. It has become the standard work on the subject. Good Things, which came out in 1971, is my own favourite, not least because of the recipe for the wonderful curried parsnip soup she invented. For my mother’s 87th birthday I cooked Honeycomb Mould, the pudding she rescued from the Victorian nursery. It is made with the juice and rind of lemons, with eggs, gelatine, sugar, cream and Guernsey milk. It has a cap of lemon jelly and beneath that a band of opaque cream jelly, and a honeycombed spongy base. My mother, who had worked in service from the age

of thirteen, remembered the cook preparing it for the children of her employer in the grand house in Hampshire where she was first employed. That was before the First World War. She had not seen or eaten it since then. Jane was touched by this story. She liked it when food had a human and historical significance in people’s lives. Her books and weekly articles for the Observer brought in the kind of money that Geoffrey, who had scraped together a living as a reviewer and anthologist for decades, had never dreamed of earning. He basked in her success. The meals I had with the two of them in Geoffrey’s beautifully designed garden at Broad Town are among my happiest memories. After Geoffrey’s death in November 1985, Jane lost some of her sparkle, though she put on a show of cheerfulness in public. She still used the word ‘daft’, which she pronounced with a flat Geordie ‘a’, whenever she found something to laugh at. In the spring of 1989, I went with her on an eating tour of Scotland, to the Highlands and Lowlands. These were days of unalloyed pleasure, as we met chefs and restaurateurs and growers. I remember a picnic we shared at Loch Ness. The monster was in absentia, but there was a seabird that gobbled bread, cheese and salami as it perched on the bonnet of the car. ‘Geoffrey would have identified it immediately,’ she said. She opened a bottle of nonalcoholic wine someone had given her and poured us a glass each. After a couple of sips, she remarked ‘It’s disgusting, isn’t it? Let’s have the real thing.’ So we did. Jane died on 12th March 1990, the eve of her 62nd birthday, She had been anticipating death from cervical cancer for at least two years. In those final months, her chosen expression was ‘Sod it all’, with or without an accompanying laugh. Waking from a coma, she saw her beloved sister Mary weeping at her bedside. ‘Oh, you silly cow’ were her last words. She was my best and dearest friend for a precious time. I think of her every day. How could I not? Her generous heart and soul are there in my kitchen, permanent tenants. April 2015 – THE OLDIE

REX/Martyn Goddard

PAUL BAILEY remembers his great friend Jane Grigson, who died 25 years ago

Living Hell

The apparel oft proclaims the man JEREMY LEWIS on clothes, the viciousness of animal-lovers and Radio 3 windbags The great Indian sage and writer Nirad Chaudhuri believed, very strongly, that clothing and diet have a huge influence on the way we think and behave, and unlike many theoreticians he put his beliefs into practice: when writing in Bengali he wore a dhoti, looked like a reincarnation of Gandhi adrift in North Oxford, and ate only Indian food; when writing in English he climbed into a three-piece tweed suit and treated his guests to a three-course English meal, cooked, served up and washed up by his long-suffering wife. (Not surprisingly, she predeceased him: Chaudhuri lived on to celebrate his 100th birthday with a grand lunch in Trinity, Oxford, during the course of which he repeatedly interrupted the reading of a tribute in Latin in order to correct the speaker’s pronunciation.) I don’t know about the food and drink,

but I share to the full Chaudhuri’s determinist views on clothing, and his belief that uniforms, formal or informal, are social lubricants that make it easier for us to play the parts assigned to us in life, and for others to react to us; and I have a soft spot for novelists like Smollett and Surtees, who describe in great detail the clothes worn by their characters on the grounds that they reveal, very accurately, how we try to present ourselves to the world at large. Since he spent the last fifty years of his life in this country, Chaudhuri had a keen eye for symptoms of our national decline, and I’m sure he would attribute the infantilism of modern life – the endless shrieking on telly, the cries of ‘Wow!’, the widespread inability to string two sentences together, the voices on the Tube urging us to carry bottles of water at all times – to the prevalence of T-

‘Must be one of those corporate bonding retreats’

shirts, trainers, elasticated trousers with white stripes running down the side, and pensioners who ought to know better tottering around in outsize Babygros and baseball caps. I have a soft spot for the animal kingdom in general, and have doted over the various cats who have lived with us over the past 48 years, but those who represent its interests in public are a very different kettle of fish, and not remotely cuddly or lovable. My sister, who wrote about dangerous dogs in the last issue of The Oldie, tells me that the internet is ablaze with death threats and the most venomous vituperation emanating from dog-lovers who feel outraged or insulted; animal rights campaigners are feared and loathed by the civilised world; the RSPCA, once the pet charity of kind old ladies, has apparently become an increasingly intolerant and vindictive body. Why do animals bring out the worst in us, I wonder? Maybe it’s because they can’t answer back, and so present a kind of tabula rasa for fanatics who dislike, or can’t cope with, the messy compromises of everyday life. The Breakfast programme on Radio 3 continues to attract bores and windbags eager to ventilate their views. In recent weeks they have been encouraged to let us know which pieces of music they found ‘mind-blowing’ on first acquaintance. One man rang in to say how on first hearing a particular piece of music his spine tingled, his hair stood on end and his tear ducts brimmed over. I couldn’t wait to discover what had brought him to the verge of apoplexy, only to discover that it was some frightful piece by Percy Grainger, a dismal and very English combination of dirge and sea shanty. Very occasionally one of the windbags has something interesting to say, but more music and less talking would come as a great relief. April 2015 – THE OLDIE 39

Gr anny Anne xe

Call me a nerd, but... ... if something in a film doesn’t ring true I lose interest, says Virginia IRONSIDE

THE OLDIE – April 2015

the early 1960s, nor is it dirty enough (most people washed their hair only once a week in those days, if that), I was undone when, after a May Ball, Hawking’s future wife thrust a piece of paper into Stephen’s hand with her telephone number on it. It started with the numbers 01223. But area STD codes didn’t come in until much later. If the telephone number was wrong, then how could I believe anything after that? Did Hawking really discover new things about black holes? Did he really fall for his nurse? I couldn’t relax at all. This nerdiness, if that is what it is, extends to other areas of life. If a brilliant politician is caught cheating on the Underground or sneaking a bottle of gin out of a supermarket, then can he really be a good politician? I had thought his judgement was good, but clearly it is absolutely hopeless. He may have claimed to have brokered some major peace deal, but suddenly his achievements seem like mere accidents. Basically, he’s a cheat. Two boyfriends, in my youth, seemed perfect and I thought they might be Mr Right until, on two separate occasions, they each handed me a book that they said I must read because it was brilliant. It was The Snow Ball by Brigid Brophy, a writer very popular among pretentious young men at the time. After a

couple of pages, any thoughts of settling down with either of these two chaps and having their children flew out of the window. I was trying to describe my unfortunate trait to a friend the other day and said it was as if you had sat next to a sparkling guest at a dinner party and were being captivated by their wit and intelligence and then they suddenly removed a silver spoon from the table and, with a wink, popped it into their pocket. Nothing would be the same afterwards. But my friend had a better image. He said no, it was more like sitting next to a sparkling, intelligent stranger you thought you could make a lifelong friend. His glass is empty. Your glass is empty. His neighbour’s glass is empty. The wine bottle is in front of him. He lifts it, fills his own glass, and continues with his conversation without offering either of you a drop. Oh dear. It’s all very well being so sensitive and critical. But I can’t help wondering how many potential friends I might have put off by my own occasional (I hope) thoughtless behaviour. As always – planks; eyes. Virginia’s latest book Yes! I Can Manage Thank you! is published by Quercus (£16.99).

Arthur Robins

I was recently watching Downton Abbey (under considerable pressure, I may say – my friends begged me to give it ‘just one more go – it’s brilliant!’) and after about five minutes in, the cook downstairs said to some under-maid: ‘Hurry up there, it’s the Lord’s 34th wedding anniversary so we have to do a special dinner tonight.’ Or words to that effect. My eyes bulged. Surely no one in their right minds ever celebrated their 34th wedding anniversary? And also, surely the celebration of anniversaries was anathema to the upper classes in the days of Downton? When I was small even a birthday was barely marked unless you were under ten, and we weren’t top drawer by any means. But when I pointed this out, my two friends turned on me: ‘Shh!’ they hissed angrily. ‘If you can’t watch this without criticising it, go upstairs and don’t watch it!’ I gulped, and went upstairs. My problem is that I am hypersensitive to inaccuracies in films or plays. Before the first ten minutes had passed of the recently produced Accolade, by Emlyn Williams, I was chafing because the central character, a writer, had walked into the sitting room early on a winter’s morning without doing up his dressing gown (this was in the Fifties when central heating would have been scarce) and sat under a lamp to read his cuttings without turning the lamp on. When, in a production of Rope set in the late Twenties, the actors turned on a fake log gas fire, my night was ruined. They had fake coal electric fires in those days, gas fires with ceramic columns, but no fake log gas fires. You could call me a nerd, but I think there’s more to it than that. I feel that if a director can’t get the small details right, then how can I trust him or her to get the big ones right? Recently I saw The Theory of Everything and although I could just about cope with the fact that no one’s hair is ever short enough for

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I Once Met

Stanley Matthews by ANTHONY HOLDEN

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Stanley Matthews on his 70th birthday

In the summer of 1953, when I turned six, the Queen’s Coronation was way down the priority list of the otherwise loyal middle-class Holden family in the Lancashire seaside town of Southport. That summer my father had abandoned a steady if dull job to launch a sports shop in the town centre. The official opening ceremony was performed by the most famous footballer alive, Stanley Matthews, accompanied by the England captain Billy Wright. All this was down to my maternal grandfather, Ivan Sharpe, himself a sometime England footballer-turned-sports writer. Ivan often took me with him to the press box of the top-flight matches he covered around the North-West. To keep me quiet, he gave me pencil and pad to make note of the fouls and corner-kicks for him. The fifth son of a St Albans bootmaker, Ivan had won the league title with Derby County and was a member of the Great Britain team that won the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. He went on to become football correspondent of the Empire News, then the Sunday Times, and life president of the Football Writers’ Association. In 1936 he was the first man to give a live commentary on the FA Cup Final. Stanley Matthews, who lived in nearby Blackpool, was one of Ivan’s football pals. That summer had just seen what

became known as the ‘Matthews Cup Final’, won by Blackpool in 1953 after traumatic defeats in 1948 and 1951. There is a celebrated photo of Matthews holding his medal aloft at Wembley, as his teammates carried him on a lap of honour, so that his father Jack (a boxer) could see it from the crowd. Now, only weeks later, in my father’s new shop, Matthews was shaking my hand and asking if I too planned to be a footballer. ‘Oooh yes, Mr Matthews,’ I cooed, thrilled by the approving nod over the great man’s shoulder from my grandpa Ivan. The following month I met him again, when my elder brother Robin played his son, Stanley Jr, in a local tennis tournament. Luckily, my grandfather was with me again, making it easier for Matthews to boost my budding ego with a warm: ‘Hello, young Anthony, how nice to see you again!’ He even mimed passing me a football, which I duly despatched into an imaginary net. Matthews was 38 at the time but still only, as it turned out, in mid-career. A lifelong teetotaller and vegetarian, he was still playing at the top level (for his native Stoke) at the age of fifty, a record that remains unequalled. In 1965 he became the only footballer to be knighted while still playing the game. My grandfather was long dead by the time Matthews’ autobiography appeared in 2000, also the year of his own death, aged 85. In it he recalls meeting Ivan in 1938 in Zurich. On the lawn outside the team’s hotel, Ivan threw Matthews a football, and asked: ‘How do you do it?’ ‘I can’t do it, not in cold blood,’ he replied. ‘There has to be the pressure to perform, someone to pit my wits and skills against.’ This from the supremely skilled player described by Pele as ‘the man who taught us the way football should be played’. Ivan’s England caps and Olympic gold medal hang on the wall of my London home, where pride of place also goes to a copy of his own autobiography, Forty Years in Football. On its front jacket is the supreme compliment: ‘This is the book we’ve all been waiting for – Stanley Matthews.’

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April 2015 – THE OLDIE 41

Why learn Latin? N M Gwynne explains the thinking behind his new monthly column ‘Latin is a language/As dead as dead can be./It killed the ancient Romans/ And now it’s killing me.’ So I remember us chanting outside the classroom at the age of seven or eight, more than sixty years ago. And in those days, Latin had plenty of time in which to do that fateful job. Up until the age of about fifteen, we spent much more time on that ‘dead’ language than on any of the other academic subjects. Why? Why was Latin learnt at all, let alone given such high priority? Here are the most usual answers. It improves and enriches our command of English, because it is the best way of learning English grammar; more than half of the English vocabulary is derived from Latin; and, for instance, it shows us why the plurals of memorandum and appendix are memoranda and appendices respectively and why the symbols for gold and silver are ‘au’ and ‘ag’ respectively. Knowledge of Latin makes it easier to learn French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and other languages derived directly from Latin. The technical terminology of many of the sciences, most obviously biology and medicine, is in untranslated Latin, as are some of our words and phrases, such as et cetera and ad hoc. And Latin is so much ‘part of us’ that most mottoes of counties, towns, institutions and noble families are in Latin; and the Latin ‘Deo Gratias’ appears on all coins immediately after the name of our sovereign. Finally, it gives us access to a wonderful culture of the past. But no. True though all that is, it does not serve. It could justify a day or two a week spent learning Latin, but it does not even begin to justify its being the primary and foundational part of education that it used to be. Still less could it justify the extent to which Latin featured in all leading schools until the mid-19th century when Latin and Greek were, literally, the only subjects taught during the eleven or twelve years spent at school. The real reason that, until recently, Latin had such extraordinary promi-

THE OLDIE – April 2015

nence throughout a child’s education was that the recognised purpose of education always used to be far less about imparting knowledge of practical usefulness than about taking the tabula rasa (‘empty page’) that all of us are born as and training our minds and characters so that we enter adulthood with the ability to lead lives that are as satisfactory, satisfying and enjoyable as our circumstances make possible. Latin brings this about much more effectively than does any other academic subject. Even though learning it is easy enough at the early stages for even those with modest intellectual gifts, it quickly moves on to making demands which force a person’s mind and character to develop well. Specifically, learning Latin trains us to focus our attention, to attend to small details, to memorise extensively, to think logically, to analyse closely and exactly, to deduce and to solve problems, to be diligent, conscientious, self-disciplined, painstaking, thorough, persevering, responsible and much else

Latin and Greek were until about 150 years ago the only subjects taught in leading schools that is desirable, and for all of which anyone who possesses them has reason to be abidingly grateful. Thus it was that, as I have said, Latin and its sister-language Greek were until about 150 years ago the only subjects taught in leading schools. Indeed in some of those schools, for instance Harrow, the pupils were not allowed to speak any language other than Latin even outside the classroom, not even on the playing fields. And even as late as the turn of the 20th century, more than fifty per cent of classroom time was spent on classics, and at Eton, for instance, fifty per cent of the schoolmasters were classics masters. Were children, as a result of this The Latin Class, 1869, by Ludwig Passini

exclusive concentration on the classical languages, deprived and stunted? Pity them not. As a generality, they emerged far better educated in all the other subjects than we, their descendants, are today. It was, moreover, during this period that the British brought about the Industrial Revolution and spread it worldwide; that they were responsible

subjects and understand and master their contents relatively effortlessly. In modern times it is often asserted that studying other subjects could achieve the same thing – for instance, one or more foreign languages or, best of all, mathematics . To my certain knowledge, however, no other subject of any kind can come close to matching Latin in the advantages I have been outlining, least of all mathematics. If you doubt me, perhaps you will respect the richest man and greatest money-maker of his day, Jean Paul Getty, who controlled much of the oil industry. When asked why he employed only classicists to run his many companies worldwide, rather than specialists in any other subjects or, even more obviously, graduates of business schools, his suc-

cinct answer was: ‘They sell more oil.’ They made him more money. I stress, too, that Latin is not a subject mainly for the intellectual elite. It is for everybody, from brilliant to the very dopiest. Nor should the decision to learn it be influenced by whether any particular person finds doing so enjoyable or not. There have always been people who have disliked the process of learning Latin, but it is safe to say that none of those of us who have studied Latin has ever, ever wished that we knew less Latin than we do. The beneficial effects, what is more, are remarkably immediate. I do not exaggerate when I tell my own Latin pupils that they will be genuinely different people by the end of a single one of my lessons than they were at the beginning of it. l Turn to page 89 for Learn Latin Lesson 1.

bridgeman images

for almost every 19th-century technological invention from the steam engine onwards; that they produced one of the three greatest literatures in history; and that, for better or for worse, they ruled all the oceans and a greater part of the world than any empire had before or ever will again. As this shows, it should not be supposed for a moment that the other academic subjects were not thought necessary. It was simply that, by comparison, they were recognised as being so easy to grasp that it was not worth spending valuable schoolroom time on them. Rather, so effective was the training provided by the learning of the classical languages that, during school holidays and other spare time, children could simply pick up textbooks on new

April 2015 – THE OLDIE

What were Watch Committees? At the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial in 1960, chief prosecutor Mervyn Griffith-Jones famously asked if it were the kind of book ‘you would wish your wife or servants to read’ – implying that although he could read it unscathed, it would surely deprave or corrupt the rest of the population, whose defences were not so well developed. That his remark was received with hilarity suggested that the public no longer needed superior bodies to tell them what they could read, or watch, or do on Sundays. Among these elevated custodians of public morality were the much despised watch committees. Boroughs were required, from 1835, to establish watch committees to appoint constables to ‘preserve the peace’. Composed of magistrates and representatives of the county borough councils, their initial responsibility – for police discipline and law and order in general – seemed innocuous enough. But they soon assumed other functions, without anyone seeming to notice. These eventually included censoring films and library books, with especial vigilance paid to material deemed unsuitable in terms of religion, politics and sex. The committees also pronounced on whether cinemas could open on Sundays, a wide

THE OLDIE – March 2015

range of licensing matters and the suitability of street names. The opportunities to infuriate the public were endless. Members of watch committees were universally regarded as pompous busybodies, even among their fellow councillors. In 1950s Manchester they were known as ‘The Naughty Pictures Committees’. A group of about eight would gather on a Thursday morning, muffled against the chill of an otherwise empty cinema, to pass judgement on Call Girls, Naked as Nature Intended, Blood of the Vampire, War of the Worlds and even Rock Around the Clock. No doubt Manchester’s Town Clerk had his tongue firmly in his cheek when he advised the watch committee that it shouldn’t ban a film without seeing it first. Plays and comedy acts also attracted their attention. Kenneth Williams recalls in his diaries that: ‘They made us take out “stopcock” and the rumba gag ’cos the watch committee have objected to it.’ Later, in mid-Sixties Manchester, Joe Orton’s play Loot was savaged. Williams reports that the script was ‘further gouged and cut by the city’s watch committee. The cast performed with a real policeman in the wings, ready to close the theatre if the actors dared speak lines that had been forbidden.’ The watch committee members combined self-esteem with a rock-bottom disregard for the opinions and tastes of everybody else – to the extreme annoyance of many a cinema-goer, playwright, stand-up comedian, actor and reader. The formal demise of the watch committee occurred in 1964 with the introduction of the Police Act, which stripped away many local powers and introduced police authorities accountable to the Home Office. But they are still with us, albeit in altered form, and still protecting us from dangerous material that could otherwise cause irreparable damage. The Monty Python film Life of Brian was refused a licence by 39 UK councils after its release in 1979. One of these councils was Truro. A self-appointed arbiter of taste decided that one glance at this nefarious film would ensure eternal damnation for his fellow-citizens, so he banned it. The cinéastes of today’s Truro are clearly made of sterner stuff and have overturned this interdiction. The Life of Brian is now deemed suitable for people aged fifteen or over. Give it another decade and it will be on the national curriculum. Keith Giles

Modern life

What is a threeparent baby?

Many people (not, of course, the sturdy readers of The Oldie) are repelled by sex but even more so by the possibility of replacing it with test tubes. For them, the choice of in vitro rather than in utero is invidious indeed, but cloning – asexual reproduction – is worse. The recent fuss about ‘three-parent babies’ causes particular unease for it is a mix of testtube sex with a form of reproduction that involves women alone. If that is not ‘playing God’, what is? I speak as a clone myself; but so does every reader of this magazine, for they consist of trillions of identical copies of the fertilised egg that made them. I can, though, claim some further expertise for my mother was an identical twin, an exact copy of her sister. In fact everyone inherits, twin or not, a solid dose of DNA without bothering with fathers at all. It is in the mitochondria, distant descendants of the bacteria which invaded primitive cells a billion and a half years ago. They act as furnaces, burning fuel and pumping out useful energy. Each has only 37 genes, coded for by a closed circle of DNA, which makes up no more than one part in a hundred of the body’s total dose of that chemical. They live not in the cell nucleus but in the mass of material that surrounds it. The egg is the largest cell in the body and contains about a hundred thousand of the things and passes them on to the next generation, although only about thirty make it that far.

I hate modern life Wilfred De’Ath has a miserable morning Our lives these days, it seems to me, are increasingly controlled by computers. That would be fine if the computers were always working, but quite often they are ‘down’. Here is an account of a morning I spent in Portsmouth (Boris Johnson’s least favourite city) not long ago. I arrived in Portsmouth very early in the morning and decided to book into a hotel. But the hotel manager, a temperamental Italian, told me that his computer would not allow me to do so before 10.30am. I pointed out that this was ridiculous: what did he do about future bookings? In the end he agreed with me and admitted that he himself

‘Lost cat...’

hated all computers. I left to the sight of him kicking his, quite hard. I decided to use the time available to book my return rail journey. But the ‘jobsworth’ female railway clerk told me that her computer would not take an SRC (Senior Rail Card) booking before 8.30am. So I was left to kick my heels again. I thought I might as well use the time to book my ferry crossing. This time, the problem wasn’t the computer itself but the Brittany Ferries trainee (female again, I’m afraid) who hadn’t been taught how to use it. She tried to telephone a ‘mentor’ but there was none available. By now, I confess, I was feeling paranoid, but I told myself: ‘Hold your nerve, Wilfred, don’t let modern life get to you. Go to the bank and see if you have any money left.’ Of course, at the Co-op bank, the computer wasn’t working either. They couldn’t give me a balance and they certainly wouldn’t give me any cash. So I was left to wander the streets of Portsmouth – it was still quite early – listening to the students (it is now a university town like Cambridge, where I live) discussing their previous night’s experience on social media. That was their exclusive topic of conversation. Well, silly students, you are welcome to social media. You are welcome to modern life. All aspects of it. Personally, I hate and can’t wait to leave it. April 2015 – THE OLDIE 45

STEVE WAY

They often go wrong, with a mutation rate ten times that in the rest of the double helix. Three out of four families have errors in mitochondria; and in about one person in eight the altered form has the potential to cause disease. As for most people it makes up no more than one in a hundred or so of the total that does no obvious harm. However, such errors are also implicated in hundreds of diseases, some common, such as diabetes or Alzheimer’s, and some very rare. Almost all do their damage in the most active parts of the body, the brain and the muscles included. Their importance emerged twenty years ago when new pedigrees for inherited blindness and muscle weakness showed inheritance through mothers alone. Some women pass on lots of damaged mitochondria, either because they have very many in their egg cells, or because through random chance the small sample passed on includes several faulty versions even when the latter are in a minority. Great sections may be missing from the DNA. That can give severe and distressing symptoms and, worse, the mutated mitochondria may multiply more quickly because they are shorter and begin to take over, making the effects worse with age. The ‘three-parent’ technique involves taking the fertilised egg of a mother at risk, and removing the nucleus with its DNA, leaving the cytoplasm behind. That nucleus is then inserted into a donor egg from a woman with normal mitochondria, to give a mixture of the nuclear genes of the biological parents, together with working mitochondria from the donor. The technique has proved safe in mice, and was first tried in humans a decade ago, with no apparent problems. If the House of Lords approves, it will become legal in the UK. The Catholic Church is, needless to say, against it. Its scholars once even worried about twins: if an embryo splits, what happens to the soul – does each twin get half, or does God keep spares? There is no sign of the soul in mitochondrial DNA, but that pesky organelle does spill over into the realm of theology, for Judaism, like mitochondria, is inherited down the female line. What, one asks, will be the identity of an infant born to Christian mitochondria but Jewish nuclear genes, or vice versa? Now there’s a real problem for the bishops on the cross-benches to get their teeth into. steve jones

House Husbandry

Green and loony by GILES WOOD Having taken some months off the local dinner party circuit, I was pleasantly surprised on rejoining it to find the conversation had moved on to more stimulating themes. Rather than what items are edible or inedible at Lidl, a fertile source of fresh topics has been triggered by the so-called ‘manifesto of madness’ issued by the Green Party. In this rural area, stiff with toffs and robber barons, I had expected my neighbours to be alarmed by the Greens’ proposed outright ban on hunting, together with the ban on the seven-year tax dodge to pass wealth on to heirs. But unfortunately, since so many other Green policies are plainly preposterous – the Queen in a council house, for example, stray sheep to be used as trafficcalming measures – there is laughter

I admire Natalie for rejecting the advances of the sex-crazed nincompoop Russell Brand round the dinner table rather than dread. However, since I am the only ‘Green in the village’ it’s disappointing for me to think that others who might have been part of the Greens’ natural constituency have been alienated by their loony-Left, Alice-inWonderland quota of policies. And yet this is the party that has hijacked the environmental agenda, leaving us with no one to vote for. If only the Conservatives would do what their name suggests instead of sabotaging cultural and religious traditions and selling England by the pound. Green leader Natalie Bennett says: ‘We will work to create a world of global inter-responsibility in which the concept of a British national is irrelevant and outdated.’ She wants controls against over-stocking of sheep on our downlands for the commonsensical reason that the delicate balance of nature is disrupted by over-grazing. Can’t she make the connection with ‘human’ over-grazing on our already overcrowded island and see that we need effective border controls as

THE OLDIE – April 2015

well? As an Australian she must know how effective her home country’s border controls are. To make a culinary analogy: put too many ingredients into the pot and it boils over and life becomes one long mopping-up operation. But there are some good ideas in the nonsense. Natalie is pro-cottage industries, for the revival of which William Morris has already given us a blueprint. She also suggests turning military bases into wildlife reserves. Five miles from us we already have a de facto example of the success of this with the military training area of Salisbury Plain, which, by virtue of not being farmed, has become a haven for wildlife. And Wiltshire having more than its fair share of top military brass, there are dozens of retired generals on bicycles chasing the rare marsh fritillary butterflies up and down the rutted tracks. And then there is the £73 per week national wage. That idea appeals to me, partly because it’s more than I earn at the moment, but also because it would be bound to generate legions of Gilbert Whites making do and mending, growing their own vegetables, composting their weeds, lolling under apple trees and letting their imaginations roam, Isaac Newton-style, creating exactly the right conditions for eureka moments. One of my own inventions came to me this way. ‘Wood’s kettle method’, a chemical-free alternative to spot-weeding troublesome plants rooted between paving stones – just pour on boiling water. I admire Natalie for rejecting the advances of the sex-crazed nincompoop Russell Brand when he angled for a position in her putative Cabinet. But I would admire her even more if she could attract Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall as environment minister, Robin Page as minister for agriculture, Charles Clover as fisheries minister and George Monbiot as chancellor. And, sorry Natalie, but why not make a noble sacrifice and offer your own position to Zac Goldsmith? That would really swing it for me and the millions of other voters with no one to vote for.

The Bard of Berkhams ted

Memory Lane

Won’t love my neighbour by ED REARDON With the ineluctable rise of social media, it has increasingly become a dog-tweet-dog world out there, and … actually I have no real interest in developing this argument further, I merely wanted to register the neat and witty (I’m sure everyone will agree) phrase ‘dog-tweet-dog’, in the confident expectation that someone will seize on it and use it without credit, triggering some irritable though (it must be said) enjoyable correspondence with the plagiariser in question. A related theme worth pursuing, though, is that of being a prophet without honour in one’s own time, and I was reminded of this quite late the other night with the realisation that however much tinfoil you put round a piece of cheese to keep it fresh a day or two longer, the foil never quite fits. And if you’ve suffered this setback before and pull a longer strip off the roll to ensure full coverage? The same outcome. This is an example of what the late humorist Paul Jennings called ‘Resistentialism’, a cod-Sartrean philosophical theory (‘Les choses sont contre nous’), which featured in his ‘Oddly Enough’ collections and were much appreciated by this teenaged disciple in the local library. In his piece ‘Ware, Wye, Watford’, Jennings was also the first person to see the comic potential in using English

‘But Africa is still called Africa, right?’

place names as dictionary definitions, so he must have found it particularly galling – or ‘Grimsby’ as he might have described it – to see a gaggle of Oxbridge comedians some thirty years later making commercial hay out of a book called The Meaning of Liff. If the printed word still exists around 2045 (a dangerous assumption, to be sure), my hope is that some young reader will happen upon ‘dog-tweet-dog’ attributed to some more celebrated wiseacre and murmur, or preferably say in a carrying voice, ‘Ah, but Ed Reardon got there first.’ I have been invited to join a ‘neighbourly social network’ that will apparently improve my life under one or more of the following headings: ‘Book Club starts on Monday’… ’Sofa free to a good home’ … ‘Farmers’ market on Sunday’ and so forth. I might have shown a glimmer of interest (one suggested category was ‘Anyone seen my cat?’) but for the form of address on the flyer which landed on my mat with an ingratiating simper: ‘To the Lovely Person who lives at…’ Gagh! as the 12-years say. I have been described as many things during a long life literary, but ‘lovely’ has never been one of them. Nor I’m afraid am I the sort of person who would pass on details after discovering a trusty plumber; ‘someone who keeps himself to himself’ fairly sums me up, although I realise this is now largely the province of mass murderers and suburban jihadis. I can recall the precise moment I decided to stop offering a helping hand to my fellow man – or boy as it was then. On the school noticeboard I had put up a poster, cleverly designed with an attractive border of question marks. ‘Can you Play Chess?’ it read, beneath which somebody had scrawled in large letters ‘NO’. ‘Would You Like To Learn?’ the invitation went on. Again ‘NO’ had been added, in the same uncouth hand. The futility of my gesture hit me like a snowball on the back of the head in the school yard – thrown I suspect by the poster-defacer, who is now I gather a high-ranking official at Unesco or Unicef or some such bastion of do-goodery.

years ago we came to live in central London. My young bank manager father took us to watch the Lord Mayor’s show from a box in the City, then to the Lord Mayor’s charity fancy dress party where I proudly wore a Parsee child’s brown satin outfit, velvet, pearls and sequins, a Colonial Service godfather’s present. At the King’s Silver Jubilee in May we saw the procession, the King and Queen waving graciously from their open landau. We were taken back to our old home in the country for an ox-roast on the village green, with fireworks. But the nice King got ill and died, so black armbands were sewn around the sleeves of our best velvet-collared tweed coats. We lived close to Sloane Square and had a nanny we loved who walked us for miles. I could bowl my wooden hoop all the way up Sloane Street to Hyde Park where you crossed Rotten Row to run along the Daisy Walk, jumping to and fro across the single low iron rail lining the tarmac paths. Proper high railings surrounded the clearings where benches offered grown-ups somewhere to rest and gossip. We would go up to the Achilles statue by Hyde Park Corner to watch the old man in his battered Homburg feed flocks of sparrows and starlings. He sold you a small paper bag’s worth of crumbs for a penny so you could join in the fun and watch the birds peck his hat and beard. Round by the bandstand when the band played, all the way sometimes to Kensington Gardens where we could run down to the Peter Pan statue and stroke the bronze rabbit and robin – or dash up and down the steps of the Albert Memorial, which got us a scolding. Close by our home was Cadogan Square where another old man often sat surrounded by children and told stories about Pinocchio. We played hide-and-seek in and out of the shrubberies or French and English or Grandmother’s Footsteps. In the winter we watched the lamplighter with his long pole touch up the gas lights as he passed. The muffin man rang his bell, the rag-and-bone-man yelled as he went by. A pavement artist drew portraits and elaborate chalk landscapes of another magic land. The gypsy organ grinder’s monkey made faces, best of all. By Jane de Falbe, who receives this month’s £50 prize. April 2015 – THE OLDIE 47

NOTES FROM THE SOFA

Are crisps the new grapes? RAYMOND BRIGGS Recently, a casual acquaintance introduced me to the corruption of Crisps. It was only about a week ago, yet already I am an addict. They have evening classes for Alcoholics Anonymous, don’t they? So why are there no classes for Covert Crisp Crunchers? There should be, because like alcohol, they ease the burden of the struggles in life such as cooking: that tiresome business of having to heat up all those Waitrose ready-meal packets. This is always relieved by a glass or three of wine and now can be further enhanced by Crisps. They are the perfect accompaniment to the wine: dry, crunchy and salty. And of course, the saltiness makes you need to drink more wine, which is an added bonus. However, I’ve already discovered that they do have serious disadvantages and that they are possibly in league with Grapes, working against the common good of humanity. Obviously, Grapes can break bones as mentioned in TCOIO (The Cussedness of Inanimate Objects, March issue) but Crisps can draw blood. They have already drawn some of mine and we have only just met. They must have been recruited into the COIO, as only last night they teamed up with the Brigade of Grapes and launched a full frontal assault. In my innocence I was happily crunching a couple of crisps with a nice Chilean white wine, when I felt a needle-like prick on my upper lip. I thought nothing of it and poured another glass. Then I felt a stickiness on my lips and saw red marks on the rim of the glass. What on earth? Next I felt a warm trickle down my chin, so I went to the kitchen mirror and there was Frankenstein’s monster gazing, wide-eyed at me – bloody lips,

THE OLDIE – April 2015

bloody teeth, trickle of blood about to drop off his chin. Having rinsed and tissued, I examined these infernal crisps. They are very large, two or three inches across, with very sharp edges. When snapped, they often decide to create a needle point at one corner. Who has trained them to do this? You have to be highly skilled; as an experiment, I tried to do it myself, with no success. It can only be undercover agents of the COIO. This decided me to look deeper into the lurking danger of Crisps in our community. So this morning I went into Waitrose to investigate. There I found that one side of an entire aisle is devoted solely to Crisps! Umpteen different makes, umpteen different flavours: Tortillas, Roasted Red Chilli, Indonesian Cracker, Louisiana Sweet & Smoky, Thai Sweet Chilli, Jalapeno ... on and on it goes. This reminded me of the grandchildren’s Crisp-Free School, which recently put out a list of Class A and Class B drugs: Coke, Charlie, Crack, Rock, Stone, E, Brownies, Burgers, Smack, Horse, Gear, Scag... Surely Waitrose could make all this into a nice family outing? The two addictions together in a single aisle? Grannie and Grandad on one side absorbed in Crisps, while the grandchildren go trotting along all the Uppers, Jellies, Moggies, Mazzles, et cetera. All this might help to ease the Generation Gap. Gap? Is that Class A or Class B? I must ask the grandchildren. Hi Kids! Got any Gap? l The new book Notes From the Sofa collects a decade of Raymond Briggs’s writings and illustrations from The Oldie. Readers can find first editions and signed copies at unbound.co.uk/books/notes-from-the-sofa.

Life used to be simple. You said ‘Thank you’ and the thanked said ‘You’re welcome’. End of story. But then something happened: ‘You’re welcome’ wasn’t welcome any more. Instead, a new and breezy American import took its place. And so when you said ‘Thank you’ the thanked said ‘No problem’. And you thought: what problem? At first it was young shop assistants. Now it’s everyone. So what’s my problem with ‘No problem’? I don’t have a problem. That’s my point. Why say ‘no problem’ when there’s no hint of a problem? When the young person behind the shop counter says ‘No problem’ they’re suggesting that thanks to them, some demanding task has been successfully executed. You’d think they had just given you a heart transplant, not a cup of tea. There was a nice linguistic and symmetric civility to ‘Thank you’ and ‘You’re welcome’ – it was a way that strangers recognised their service to each other. But ‘no problem’ dismisses the courtesy of the person doing the thanking. It’s a form of one-upmanship, a way of having the last word. All today’s alternatives to ‘You’re welcome’ have critical connotations. ‘No worries’ suggests that I’ve been worried and ‘No biggie’ is even worse for it suggests that I’ve been making a big deal out of something trifling. But what really drives me mad is when you’re talking to someone on the phone and you spend nearly an hour sorting out some banking or computer problem and you thank the person you’ve been talking to and they sign off with ‘No problem’. The last time this happened I said, ‘Actually, there has been a problem – that’s why I’ve been talking to you for nearly an hour! So don’t say to me “No problem”, especially since your company created the problem in the first place, thank you very much!!’ ‘No problem,’ he said.

COSMO LANDESMAN

TOM PLANT

R ANT

Readers’ letters The serious side of dementia

SIR: I was extremely distressed to read the article by Prue Leith in the March issue, ‘Dementia is not all doom and gloom’. This irresponsible article illustrates very clearly that the attempts by government, the NHS and other organisations to educate the public in the seriousness of this incurable disease, which is increasing in our ageing population, has singularly failed. The lack of understanding of the difficulties of someone in the early stages of dementia is unbelievable. My wife and I are both 91. She has been diagnosed for six years and we have recently moved into a home as I can no longer cope. Her twin sister died in a home recently with dementia. My brother’s wife has been in a home for many years and no longer recognises her husband. My cousin’s husband has also been in a care home with dementia for years and is now unconscious most of the time. My wife’s mother died with dementia some years ago. I could list more cases within the family without including any of the cases among our contemporary friends, and not one person we know has found any humour in the situation. I suggest that Prue Leith sticks to cooking and that you cease to publish any further articles on the subject unless the authors know what they are talking about. John A. Cox, Shropshire

‘You only want her because she’s unobtainable’

‘For goodness sake – relax’

SIR: Perhaps my sense of humour is fading with age but I failed to find anything amusing in Prue Leith’s artcicle about her mother’s dementia. In relation to this, and not being in a position to defend herself, would she really not mind being referred to as ‘a dotty old mother’? I am also horrified at the frequency in which close relatives publish articles in the press detailing the descent of their parents or spouse into dementia. Sue Clitherow, North East Scotland

Another Bannister best

SIR: In your tribute to Sir Roger Bannister in the March edition you say that after he had run the historic 3 minutes 59.4, as far as his athletics career was concerned ‘that was it’. It certainly wasn’t! Shortly afterwards the Australian John Landy broke Bannister’s record, running 3 minutes 58 seconds at Turku, Finland, to become the second sub four minute miler. The scene was set for the greatest mile race ever run, between the only two men to have broken four minutes, at the British Empire and Commonwealth games held in Vancouver. The race was a classic, with Landy setting the pace for the first three and three-quarter laps. At one time his lead had stretched to more than ten yards but Bannister slowly reduced this. On the final bend, Landy snatched a quick look back over his left shoulder as Bannister accelerated to overtake him on the right. Not only did Bannister win the

gold medal with a fine tactical victory, he also improved his time to 3 minutes 58.8 to set a new personal best. His second major gold medal of the season was won a few weeks later in the European Athletics Championship in Berne. He won the gold medal in the 1500 metres, the ‘metric mile’. Afterwards, as far as athletics was concerned, that was it. Michael Cooper, Gloucestershire

Time for the Rev to find God

SIR: My sympathies go out to the Rev Peter Mullen – no longer a ‘Pope in his own parish’ and now having to fend for himself as an ordinary person wishing desperately for a Silicon Valley billionaire or a tobacco baron to be his patron (‘Out of service’, March issue). But cheer up, Revd Peter! Retirement is a great opportunity to find God as the centre of the universe rather than your own clerical ego. But hurry… there may not be much time left. It sounds like a pretty impenetrable fortress. Revd Anne Rowley, York SIR: Is the Rev Dr Mullen real? I was in two minds as I read his plaint but ‘pagan fantasy of global warming’ was the decider: he is another brilliant creation of the ever-brilliant Craig Brown. Perhaps Brown can invent a friendly and devout arms dealer to offer him sanctuary. Jim Trimmer, Kingston

☞ continues over the page April 2015 – THE OLDIE

Poetry pays

SIR: The Old Un’s Diary (March issue) talks about ‘the insulting invitations to speak at proliferating literary festivals that charge audiences £8.50 per lecture but “cannot offer” fees to the lecturers’. There may be some such festivals but I do know from my own experience that it is far from true of all of them. Nor is it by any means the case that all festivals are coining money at the expense of their speakers. The (independent) Cheltenham Poetry Festival, of which I am a co-director – not to be confused with its betterknown cousin the Cheltenham Festival of Literature – has only a tiny minority of events that cost as much as £8.50 but pays the majority of those who read or speak. These fees are not eye-wateringly high, it’s true, but ticket sales can seldom cover them (let alone the overheads of printing, publicity, etc); many events run at a loss. Some poets and speakers (especially local ones, who have no expenses to meet) very generously offer their services for nothing, and we hugely appreciate this, but most are paid. We also run an outreach programme for the benefit of young people and the disadvantaged. Robin Gilbert, Cheltenham

Balls in the borscht

SIR: John Miller’s hilarious account of his press trip to Donetsk (‘Men behaving badly’, February issue) brought back memories for me. In the early 1970s I went on a trades council visit to the Soviet Union during which we, too, were subjected to the booze-fuelled, good oldfashioned hospitality that he described. Everywhere we went, we were wined and dined to excess. Every meal, which nearly always involved borscht, was preceded

FAt t y pu ffs

by toasts demanded of all of us, each one accompanied by a shot of neat vodka. On one occasion, at a trade union health spa near what is now Lviv in Ukraine, I noticed that our bowls of beet and vegetable soup were accompanied by side plates with meat balls on them. Emboldened, I suppose, by my excessive alcohol intake, I asked our host publicly if we should dip our balls in the borscht? ‘Only if you’re kneeling on the table!’ came his instant reply. Mike Blick, London

Region shall speak unto region SIR: Valerie Grove’s well-reasoned article (Radio, March issue) highlighted the BBC’s obsession with demonstrating its egalitarianism by encouraging regional accents on the wireless. Unfortunately most BBC producers wouldn’t know a dialect from a dialectic and tend to end up with regional yob-speak. Surely the whole point of broadcasting is to communicate. The whole point of received pronunciation is to facilitate communication and not to promote some elitist ideal. BBC radio used to be the worldwide benchmark for learning English but that has been overtaken by Russia Today of all things. So much for ‘Nation shall speak unto Nation’. C R Hall, Manchester

My fortuitous way

‘You’re always bringing up things that happened a month ago! Why can’t we let bygones be bygones?’

SIR: I enjoyed Nick Jackman’s Rant about hating the song ‘My Way’ (March issue). It was fascinating to discover that even Sinatra didn’t like singing it although the song was written for him. I too have good reason for disliking ‘My Way’, but it was a song that proved quite lucky for me. As a freelance hack back in the 1980s I was being considered for a job on the

Evening Standard. One evening I attended a Standard farewell party. Large amounts of alcohol were consumed and journalists were being dragooned into singing. As a potential new boy I was expected to participate in the so-called entertainment and, thinking on my shaky feet, I launched into ‘My Way’. It was by all accounts absolutely dreadful – a caterwaul of noise made worse because I was nervous and didn’t know the words. However, the song went down a storm with the highly inebriated hacks. ‘Give the bloke a job,’ they roared. The following morning I was called into the news editor’s office and offered a job. Peter ‘Crooner’ Gruner, London SIR: Nick Jackman rants about ‘My Way’ and the fact that it does not figure highly on hospital radio playlists. It did, however, until recently rate as the most requested song at funerals. Nick will no doubt be pleased to know that it has now been replaced in the funerary charts by ‘Always look on the bright side of life’. Pat Ladd, Wilts SIR: Is Nick Jackman’s Rant on ‘My Way’ and Frank Sinatra to be your only word on this great singer in his centenary year? Mr Jackman is wrong in several respects anyway. ‘My Way’ was not featured in every concert after 1969, and neither did his audiences try to insist on it. In his later years he usually ended them with ‘New York, New York’. I attended one at the London Arena in 1990, when neither song was included. Brian Darwent, Saddleworth

A great – and fat – man

SIR: So Churchill was a ‘great man’ (The Old Un’s diary, March issue). He was

☞ continues over the page April 2015 – THE OLDIE

certainly a fat man. Not for him the rations that the rest of us enjoyed during the war. If he hadn’t been booted out in the 1945 election I doubt that I could have received the education which has enabled me to afford The Oldie. Dorothy Sellars, Sheffield

Resistentialism and sod’s law

SIR: The piece by Raymond Briggs on ‘The cussedness of inanimate objects’ (March issue) recalled the writings of Paul Jennings in the Observer more than sixty years ago. He codified the malignity of the inanimate world in his theory of resistentialism, a counter to the fashionable existentialism of the day. As an undergraduate at Oxford, I invited him to give a paper on the subject to the Brasenose Philosophical Society. He recounted some of the experiments he had performed to substantiate his theory that les choses sont contre nous. One involved dropping a hundred pieces of toast and marmalade onto his kitchen floor. He claimed that in 83 instances it fell marmalade side down. The meeting attracted the largest attendance that the Brasenose Philosophical Society had ever had. Jeremy Mitchell, Edinburgh

The wonder boy Bevan

SIR: As a Warringtonian and regular childhood visitor to Wilderspool Stadium I really enjoyed Brian Darwent’s article on the first Billy Whizz of rugby league, Brian Bevan. Sadly I was born just a little too late to see the great man play, but my father used to regale me with stories of the incredible tries the great Australian winger scored. It seemed to me that he scored every try from at least 75 yards and by leaving at least half a dozen, if not all, of the opposition players in his wake. He was indeed a god in post-war Warrington, and is still fondly remembered there today. Contrary to Mr Darwent’s otherwise fine article there is a rather magnificent statue of Bevan, cleverly combining his slightly awkward gait with a set of rugby posts, outside the Halliwell Jones stadium. The sculpture had been previously sited on the roundabout mentioned in the article. Mike Bryan, Cheshire.

It’s no business of yours

SIR: Am I the only person driven mad by receiving emails from all and sundry beginning: ‘I hope you are well’? When did this start and when will it end? David Steel, House of Lords

THE OLDIE – April 2015

‘The universe is vast ... and has surprisingly little parking’

Not nearly old enough

SIR: If Mark Mason was really older than ‘the PM – and the entire England cricket team’ (‘I’m still younger than the Time Lord’, February issue), he would be well over 300 years old and his article would unquestionably have been worthy of publication. However, in reality he is ten times younger than that and, quite simply, I found it impossible to empathise with the repetitive, introspective lament of a thirty-something that ‘God I’m reaching middle age but still haven’t made it’. At the risk of being branded an ageing ageist, I feel that Mason should appreciate that while he may be concerned that he is older than Ed Miliband, his readers probably won’t give a damn, not least because the vast majority of them are also older. In fact most are old enough to have been one of Miliband’s parents – if not his grandparents. John Bowden, Somerset

Killer plot

SIR: I see from your theatre review of Assassins (February issue) that the much-praised man of song Stephen

Sondheim continues with the myth that Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F Kennedy. He did not. He was watching the motorcade from the foyer when the president was shot from gunmen behind the grassy knoll. There are photos that verify both these points. The Warren Commission doctored one and rejected the other. It is gross that a musical should be performed, dancing on a dead man’s grave, when the killers are still to be brought to justice. Clearly Sondheim’s second act would be a tad short had truth and accuracy been added to his score. There are campaigns in the US to ‘retry’ Oswald. I have put my name to them. Professor Barry Fantoni, France

Horrors of hyphenation

SIR: I am tempted to subscribe to The Oldie, but I have a problem. This is that in the set-left setting there should be no split words. Charities working with blind and partially sighted people will tell you that they strongly recommend it to make it easier to read. It is easy to arrange correctly so please do it! I can’t bear to see the split words where they should not be, and paying to try to read it is not an option. Tricia Hobbs, Cambridgeshire

Two fingers to Farrell

SIR: I fear you slipped up in your selection of a title for Nicholas Farrell’s article, ‘The wife who won’t stop breeding’. You meant, surely, ‘The twerp who won’t stop f****ng?’ Fiona Cameron, Kirkcudbrightshire

B OO K S Sex and money Ferdinand Mount

Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes by Richard Davenport-Hines William Collins £18.99

CSU Archv/Everett/REX

Oldie price £14.99 (+p&p). Call 01326 555 762 to order

It seems only yesterday that Richard Davenport-Hines was raising the Titanic. Scarcely had his laptop cooled before he was resurrecting the Profumo affair with his typical mélange of dash and acid. Now, after the briefest of twirls around the block, he accomplishes a task which took Sir Roy Harrod five years and Lord Skidelsky twenty years and three volumes, and, as they say on Classic FM, here comes John Maynard Keynes. It is breathtaking but is it biography? Can a breezy 300-odd pages do justice to the man widely regarded as the greatest economist of the 20th century? Yes, they can. To catch Keynes on the hoof, the gallop is the pace to go at. As Davenport-Hines points out, all his life Keynes reached rapid conclusions and revised them just as rapidly. Nor was he ashamed of what others called his inconsistency. The perfectly consistent fellow was ‘the man who has his umbrella up whether it rains or not’. No scholarly scruple slowed him down. ‘Words ought to be a little wild, for they are assaults of thoughts upon the unthinking.’ Nervous readers may worry that of the seven lives Davenport-Hines attributes to Keynes – ‘Apostle’, ‘Lover’, ‘Connoisseur’ and so on – he finds no room for ‘Economist’. This puckish tactic is designed to give us a jolt. Keynes had only eight weeks’ training in economics (though from the great Alfred Marshall), he never sat an exam in the subject, and he embarked on his theoretical work only after years of experience in managing real-world crises. He thought economics a queer sort of science: ‘If economists could

manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people, on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.’ The irony is that his own dazzling career was instrumental in raising the profession’s status to that of modern rainmaker and all-purpose wizard. For the fiendishly complex arguments between Keynes and his critics you will need to go to Robert Skidelsky’s middle volume. And marvellous though that book is, even then you may end up a little bemused. At times, you get the feeling that everyone is a Keynesian at heart (public works and printing money are not exactly novel remedies for unemployment). At other times, you feel that nobody is, not even Keynes himself, for the Master has already moved on from his first thoughts. What Davenport-Hines makes vividly clear is that Keynes’s indisputable greatness was as a public servant. For thirty years, from the outbreak of the Great War to his death in 1946, he was at the elbow of power, indefatigable, ingenious and dazzlingly quick, in Virginia Woolf’s words, ‘like quicksilver on a sloping board – a little inhuman but very kindly, as inhuman people are’. For a prime minister or governor of a central bank who wanted advice on how to stop a panic half an hour before the markets

opened, Maynard was your man. As a junior Treasury staffer in the terrible liquidity crisis of July–August 1914, he guided Lloyd George to reduce the bank rate, guarantee outstanding bills and pump money into the capital markets – the sort of thing which we now call quantitative easing and which then enabled the Allies to pay for the war. He more or less repeated the advice in the Great Crash of 1929. There is never much new about great financial crises, and not much mystery about how to solve them. Keynes’s detractors, envious of the influence he had gained with so little apparent effort, denounced him as showy and unsound, even a little sinister. John Buchan cast him as the shifty stockbroker Joseph Barralty in The Island of Sheep (1936). D H Lawrence was typically more visceral: ‘Why is there this horrible sense of frowstiness, so repulsive, as if it came from deep inward dirt – a sort of sewer – deep in men like K?’ When Keynes’s tract against the Treaty of Versailles, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), had its worldwide success, H G Wells described him as ‘a man who believes himself to have been brilliant, but was really only opportune’. Like many economists who achieve fame outside their profession, Keynes possessed enormous charm, both in person and in print, just as Walter Bagehot and John Kenneth Galbraith did. Every page of his contains a fetching wisecrack or a vivid character sketch. And he was a relentless persuader. Looking back on his Cambridge days, he wrote of the Apostles who moulded him: ‘Victory was to those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and could best use the accents of infallibility.’ He could charm the trousers off a guardsman as easily as he charmed money for the ballet out of the Treasury. When he showed off the statistics of his sexual conquests to his fellow Apostles, he became known as ‘Maynard, the iron copulating machine’.

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And when in middle age, to the horror of the Apostles, he married the ballerina Lydia Lopokova, he went at hetero sex with the same vigour and curiosity (in that respect not unlike Jeremy Thorpe). Unlike Harrod, who was constrained by the law, and Skidelsky, constrained I think by delicacy, Davenport-Hines gives us the sex life, hot and strong, blow by blow. It is worth noting that Keynes also used the language of flirtation and seduction to describe his negotiations with bankers and politicians. Some critics have attempted to elide his sexual practice and his economic theory. Both were, after all, promiscuous, a series of one-night stands. Was Keynes not famous for saying that ‘in the long run we are all dead’? For all the density of his theoretical writings, was he ultimately anything more than the maestro of the quick fix? Certainly it is easy to point to the things he got wrong: his belief in the 1930s that there was not going to be another world war or another world slump, his forecast of ‘the euthanasia of the rentier’, his fervent belief that by the 21st century we would have overcome the problems of scarcity and would all be free to pursue the lives of civilised pleasure then available only to the fortunate few of Bloomsbury. He not only lacked any religious sense, his sunny nature blinded him to the tragic possibilities of life and made him slow to grasp the menace of the Nazis. On the other hand, his forceful advice to governments of all parties for so many years did, literally, do a power of good. At the end of the Second World War, already

desperately ill with then incurable heart disease, he drove himself to the grave by crossing and recrossing the Atlantic to nail down the American loans which saved millions in Europe from starvation. It was a hero’s end to a hero’s career. Keynes’s most dubious legacy is the enhanced prestige that economists have come to enjoy, despite their repeated failure to predict the next crisis, so acutely pointed out by HM The Queen. Keynes famously claimed that ‘practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist’. Recent experience would tend to suggest something like the reverse. These days you find economists spinning theories in support of the conventional wisdom of businessmen, for example, the Efficient Market Hypothesis which declares that the market always prices things correctly. This hypothesis took a purler in 2008–09, as did the notion of ‘the Great Moderation’, which convinced Ben Bernanke and Gordon Brown that there would be no more boom and bust. It could be argued that Keynes’s inexhaustible ingenuity helped to imbue governments with an unjustified confidence in their own ability to ‘steer the economy’ and to find overnight solutions to deep-seated problems. Perhaps it is not Keynesian economic theory that has done the damage but the Keynesian political style. This is an entrancing book, always light but never weightless, and I am sure that John Maynard Keynes would have enjoyed it.

Tetbury Station in 1955. It was demolished in 1964 to make way for a car park

THE OLDIE – April 2015

Stopping all stations Christian Wolmar

The English Railway Station by Steven Parissien English Heritage £25 Oldie price £22.50 (+p&p). Call 01326 555 762 to order

Railway books tend to fall into two categories: those that provide too much extraneous detail (as in: ‘The first sod of the Dorset Central was cut at Blandford by Lady Smith of the Down House … the expenses of the ceremony amounted to £224 13s 2d including £71 for wine…’), and at the other extreme, those aimed at the presents-for-my-trainspotter-uncle type, which are often little more than train porn with a few poorly researched captions and a general history from Brunel to Beeching. A few, like this sympathetic and accessible account of a much-neglected part of railway history, get it just right, balancing the pictures with the detail and sufficient context. The station was something of an afterthought in railway development. The first passenger-carrying railway, the Stockton & Darlington, did not bother to provide stations at all when it opened, merely stopping at pre-set points to allow passengers to get on or off, not an easy task given the lack of a platform. But the Stockton & Darlington was, in any case, a rather crude affair, mostly horse drawn and used for freight; it was therefore hardly surprising that it was the world’s first double-tracked fully steam-hauled railway, the Liverpool & Manchester, opened in 1830, that realised its passengers needed a station where they could buy tickets and shelter from the elements. This was the railway’s Crown Street terminus in Liverpool, which set the tone for many of its successors as it was designed by an established architect who was asked to provide a building that was ‘both solidly familiar and warmly reassuring’. It took a bit of time for railway companies to understand that passengers, rather than freight, were going to be their most lucrative market. Thus while many of the early efforts were ‘an assortment of sheds, huts and barns, invariably scruffy, draughty and uncomfortable’, a tradition soon built up of well-appointed buildings that adapted a range of styles to the needs of a railway station. Soon, the companies produced comfortable facilities for their passengers and

then, by the middle of the 19th century, they went much further, creating the ‘Cathedrals of Steam’ that announced their status as the biggest enterprises of their day, most of which have, fortunately, survived. There is almost no architectural style that has not been deployed in station building. This book provides examples of every one, enabling the reader to choose his or her favourite. There is, though, an element of sadness that railway stations per se have never been recognised for their architectural achievements. Thus far too many examples have been lost to supermarkets, car parks or simply neglect. The most famous example is, of course, the destruction in the 1960s of Euston, its Great Hall and its famous arch (though frankly in my view there are enough Doric temples surviving on the planet), but there are countless other stations that are genuine losses where a more sympathetic understanding from the very publishers of this book might have saved them. Most of this damage was wrought by the Beeching Axe, but there have been a few more recent losses such as the modernist Southern Railway station at Hastings in 2004. However, thankfully, as the author points out, many railway buildings have belatedly been given statutory protection and just as the railway has enjoyed a fantastic renaissance in the past couple of decades, so have its structures. From St Pancras to Birmingham New Street, Blackfriars to Reading, stations have been skilfully rebuilt to provide new cathedrals, a recognition that this 19thcentury invention has a major role to play in the 21st.

Seen and now heard Michael Barber

Loose Connections by Esther Menell West Hill Books £13.95

‘What are editors for?’ responded an unregenerate old friend of mine when I pointed out that the shape of his heroine’s nose had altered in the space of a few pages. This was more than twenty years ago, when ‘handson’ editors like Esther Menell were still, just, in business. Now, with the takeover of publishing by the conglomerates, they have gone the way of the governesses they resembled, and

Henry Smith’s memorial in All Saints Church, Wandsworth. From Henry Smith: His Life & Legacy by Lucy Lethbridge and Tim Wales (The Henry Smith Charity £20)

Ms Menell’s belief that ‘it was better to miss out on lunches than on attention to the text’ would surely strike a modern editor – are they still called that? – as bizarre. In fairness, it would also have astonished her second employer, Anthony Blond, for whom a day without a ‘proper’ lunch was unthinkable. But her next boss, the notoriously miserly André Deutsch, would certainly have approved. Deutsch was one of two monsters Ms Menell had the misfortune to work for, the other being his vainglorious successor, Tom Rosenthal, the inspiration for Snipcock in the Private Eye strip Snipcock and Tweed. She preferred Deutsch, because although two-faced – a prominent Left-winger, he threatened to close the firm down if any of his staff joined a

union – he did not, like Rosenthal, affect opera cloaks or a huge desk the size of Mussolini’s. He also had charm, which Rosenthal did not waste on his subordinates. But both bosses exploited her shamelessly. When, in 1993, after more than thirty years there, she left the firm of André Deutsch, she was earning just £300 a week before tax. So why did she stay? Because as a single mother whose only other income came from lodgers, she couldn’t afford to leave. Also, her colleagues, among them Diana Athill, were congenial, and she could work from home, essential when her son was growing up. Another reason for staying put was that she expected to receive a decent pension. But someone must have been cooking the

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Audiobooks Paul Keegan Our new audio book correspondent, Paul Keegan, begins with a manifesto on the genre. His recommendations start next month The world of audiobooks is odd, partly because it is not odd enough. First as to the range of what is offered: so little that is off-centre or minor – no Beerbohm, no Firbank, no Ackerley, no Isherwood (to take a random branch line); so little that is foreign and stubbornly itself (sticking with Italians: no Italo Svevo, no Calvino). Second, its conventions are oddly closed – a rota system of familiar but not quite placeable voices: narration artists, voice-over actors, diction prizewinners. With sometimes a famous voice (Cumberbatch’s William Golding, Firth’s Graham Greene), meant to reassure but likely to distract, like a big fish introduced into the aquarium. And then there are the entrenched reading habits of audio, which seem inevitable but should not be. Being read to by someone else is (or was) a face-to-face activity, with an unwritten social history. Husbands who read to wives were once so ubiquitous as to have a name: uxoralectors. Being read to, like sitting for a portrait, involves two characters. Above all, domestic reading aloud has a physiognomy: the grain of the voice, its stumblings, even, or especially, its lack of expression. Noises off are admitted free. No audiobook does this, though there are moments in the Naxos version of books because the sum on offer was derisory. Once before, when Camden council had proposed demolishing her street to make way for a thirty-storey office block, this rather diffident woman had gone to war and saved the day. Now, despite being diagnosed with cancer, she took up arms again and eventually, with the help of a pro bono lawyer, won her case. But notwithstanding these and other vicissitudes, like learning when three months pregnant that her first husband had fallen in love with her best friend, Esther Menell would always be conscious that the dramas in which she had been involved were domestic. Her grandmother and several other relatives were

THE OLDIE – April 2015

Aubrey’s Brief Lives when Brian Cox is heard silently cackling to himself – a shock, like hearing Glenn Gould moan while recording Bach. We are accustomed to audio as a laboratory of the unexceptional, a smooth ride, exact voices adhering to carefully projected norms, modulated, animating what they read, often beautifully so. But sometimes the design on the listener is too palpable – too closely recorded, too solicitous or conspiratorial: an ancient mariner gripping the wedding guest. In the case of acknowledged national treasures (Dickens and the rest) we are more likely to be left alone while the narrators have a field day doing the police in different voices. Audio is equally busy hiding its fears – of pauses, of gaps. These cannot be voiced, and the audible world is the enemy of every silence except background silence. Music is resorted to, something apt for the time and place, to mark a transition or an ending. But the thought of music standing in for silence is itself an odd one. It’s not surprising that, faced with the devious words on the page whose printed voice can accommodate plural meanings that a recorded version must decide between, audio’s single-take on the tone to be adopted can seem limiting and toneless. What may get lost in commercial audio is the speaking voice, which can pick its way unsteadily through such things, as distinct from the acting voice, which needs to be confidently in the lead. not so fortunate. Part of Estonia’s tiny Jewish population, they either perished within a few days of the Nazi invasion in 1941 or paid an extortionate price for survival, typified by a cousin whose education at Bedford School offered scant preparation for the ordeals to follow. Poor Jefim, recalls a schoolmate of the cousin. On the wrong side of the 20th century at every turn: despised by the Nazis for being a Jew, by the Russians for being Estonian, by the Communists for being bourgeois, by the Estonian nationalists for having fought in the Red Army… Had Esther’s father, who had been born in England, not decided to return there from Estonia with his wife and

daughter in 1939, this elegiac memoir would never have been written. Some readers may have difficulty in reconciling the portrait of her polyglot family, in which a Randlord rubs shoulders with Norman Mailer, with the wry reminiscence of publishing folk that follows. But as she reminds us, we have only one life story to tell, and this, however loosely connected some of it seems, is hers.

Too true Laura Beatty

John Aubrey: My Own Life by Ruth Scurr Chatto & Windus £25 Oldie price £20 (+p&p). Call 01326 555 762 to order

John Aubrey was born ‘longaevous’ in 1626. He had very, very famous friends – Christopher Wren, Isaac Newton, Hobbes, Locke, Hooke, William Penn to name but a few – and he lived through the Civil War, the Protectorate, the Restoration, the Great Fire and the Glorious Revolution. He also survived bankruptcy, several arrests, many falls at the gallop and a couple of drunken attempts at murder by complete strangers. Everything about him was vivid, coloured, and done at (or on) the run. There have been lives of Aubrey before, although at least two of them have his friends and contemporaries in the title, as though he couldn’t be separated, as though he didn’t exist, or couldn’t be considered alone. His friends were one of his problems. They stimulated and inspired him, but their achievements made him feel inadequate and this tetchy combination of thrilled excite-

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ment and private anxiety is Aubrey’s fingerprint. Ruth Scurr is an outstanding and imaginative biographer who likes the challenge of a shadowy subject. In her first book she conjured Robespierre out of a ‘blood-red mist’, a small and fanatical man in a sky blue coat. For Aubrey, she has had the idea of writing his life as a diary. Aubrey was himself biographically innovative, so this seems apt. It solves the problem of the fragmentary nature of the biographical evidence available and forces its subject centre stage. ‘No one,’ as she points out in her introduction, ‘gets crowded out of his or her own diary.’ This is a wonderful idea and Scurr is a wonderful writer, but it may be that her decision not to invent anything has restricted her scope unduly. Instead, she fillets the writings Aubrey left, the lives, the several histories, the autobiographical fragments, and arranges the extracts chronologically. This makes the sequence of his life very clear. There are lovely entries – the man who believed his perspiration turned into flies or bees, Robert Hooke, the great scientist, cutting his hair short to relieve headache and dreaming of riding and eating cream, or the apparition at Cirencester that disdained speech, disappearing in a scented cloud with a ‘most melodious twang’. We have a good picture of what England was like at the time. We have a good picture of his famous contemporaries. Aubrey himself is more problematic. In the interest of fluency and clarity Scurr has modernised Aubrey’s spelling and tidied his writing style. Aubrey’s style is highly idiosyncratic. Many of his notes and sketches were made on horseback and he was on horseback a lot. So he writes rest-

‘It’s lovely, darling, but you’re not allowed to draw the prophet Mohammed’

THE OLDIE – April 2015

‘The First Wounded, The London Hospital, August 1914’ by John Lavery. Taken from A Chasm in Time: Scottish War Art and Artists in the Twentieth Century by Patricia R Andrew (Birlinn £30)

lessly, at the rush, and like a man thinking aloud. His sentences, full of omissions, and sometimes unfinished, often tail into silence with a series of dots, as though he had broken off, distracted by another idea or a new view. Like many whose ideas come too thick and fast for articulation, Aubrey suffered from a stammer. This stuttering to a stop, as if the stammer had somehow invaded his writing, is deeply characterful. The excitability, the interest in the world and its workings, the quickness, the scattiness, are all aspects of the man himself. Cleaning his style risks depriving us of his voice. An imaginative project demands imagination. Hilary Mantel has shown that there are compelling emotional and psychological truths available to us if we free ourselves from too anxious a tethering to fact. Still, it seems, biography hangs back. I wanted Scurr to storm the barricades. She has biographical verve and daring and with one more leap she could have set us all free. Maybe next time.

Poet on the edge William Palmer

Young Eliot: From St Louis to The Waste Land by Robert Crawford Jonathan Cape £25 Oldie price £20 (+p&p). Call 01326 555 762 to order

A young T S Eliot? The poems he wrote as a young man are obsessed with ageing, decay and death; at 31 he was complaining that he had become an old man, and on a recording of ‘The Waste Land’ made in his forties he sounds already ancient. Photographs in the first volume of this new biography by Robert Crawford show a smiling boy and then a tall and handsome young man, but they conceal a fragility that marked much of his early life. Eliot was born in 1888 in St Louis, Missouri, an industrial city where the ‘scenery was ... seedily, drably urban’. In

the summer he holidayed with relatives on the New England coast. His father was a businessman who read in Latin and Greek for pleasure, his mother a thoroughly conventional amateur poet. Following the precepts of their Puritan ancestors, the children were, as Eliot wrote, ‘drilled in rectitude’. The young Tom was often ill, a quiet boy, reading incessantly everything from adventure stories to Shakespeare. In his teens he attended a dancing academy and rather unexpectedly became a good dancer, attracted to the respectable girls he met there. It was all very innocent; his father’s view of sex as ‘nastiness’ had a repressive effect that lasted for a very long time. At the age of eighteen, Eliot entered Harvard. Robert Crawford writes, in an unintentionally comic sentence: ‘By today’s standards, it is surprising that Thomas Stearns Eliot was admitted to Harvard.’ A bit rich, that. After all, Eliot had had the usual rigorous classical secondary education of his time; now ‘standards’ have relaxed sufficiently to admit students unwilling to read and unable to write coherently. Eliot admitted that he ‘loafed for two years’, but he became a fine scholar in a series of subjects almost mind-boggling to us: Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, French, advanced mathematics and philosophy among others. A university club introduced him to a life-long love of drink, particularly gin, and he wrote outrageously bawdy ballads for his friends. As always his reading was huge and in several languages; his discovery of the French poet Laforgue showed him the way ahead as a serious poet. Studies continued at the Sorbonne and he travelled widely in Europe; his first major poem, ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’, being written in Munich in 1911. Back in Harvard, he studied for a doctorate in philosophy. In 1914 he came to England, intending to spend a year in Oxford, then to seek a job as a university lecturer. But in 1915 his life changed mo-

‘But do you want to fetch?’

mentously. Impressed by Eliot’s work, the poet Ezra Pound introduced him to literary London and found him reviewing work. And he met Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a highly strung young woman on the rebound from an unhappy affair. They were quickly married and Eliot entered a form of hell. Eliot was still a virgin and marriage was an attempt to solve his sexual problems. It didn’t: erotic fixation and sexual disgust are not a good combination. Money was short. Eliot exhausted himself by teaching. Bertrand Russell, helped them out financially, and at the same time helped himself to Eliot’s wife. The details of the seduction in Russell’s letters to Ottoline Morrell read as coldly as those in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Vivienne was increasingly unstable, and Eliot on the verge of a breakdown. He dealt with his problems by taking a job in the colonial and foreign department of Lloyds Bank. He was not, as is sometimes said, a bank clerk; he quickly took on a demanding senior position and performed it ably. And, through everything, he was composing ‘The Waste Land’. Crawford’s biography incorporates much new material and the book is so thoroughly – sometimes overly – detailed that it seems unlikely anyone will have to do the job again. One irritation: why can’t academic writers use the word ‘gender’ correctly? It’s not hard – words have gender; people have sex.

It was a riot Mark Ellen

Shake It Up Baby! by Norman Jopling RockHistory £12.99 Oldie price £11.69 (+p&p). Call 01326 555 762 to order

Is Liverpool the rockingest part of the British Isles?’ asks the Record Mirror in 1962. They very much hope so as the charts have been awash with dismal contributions from Chubby Checker, Acker Bilk and Connie Francis, so the arrival of new-fangled beat groups like the Beatles seems a brave new dawn. The man posing this probing enquiry is 18-year-old cub reporter Norman Jopling, who had stumbled into the best job imaginable at precisely the right moment, an early-Sixties musical explosion so vast and contagious that Radio Luxembourg was its country’s second-biggest earner, beaten only by its steel industry. This detailed and illuminating memoir of his decade at the pop-press coal face is fired by the frantic and understandable feeling that no one – musicians, managers, hacks, fans, record labels – had the faintest idea that any of this was going to last. Every new development was assumed to be the latest short-lived fad – like rockabilly before it, or trad jazz. Only when the book ends in 1972 can its author

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Literary Lunches

In association with

AT SIMPSON’S-IN-THE-STRAND and the BUXTON FESTIVAL ★ Recordings now online at www.theoldie.co.uk/the-oldie-recordings★

TUESDAY 14th april 2015

★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★ Lady Antonia Fraser in conversation with Mark Lawson. Lady Antonia Fraser, biographer of Cromwell, Mary Queen of Scots, James I and Charles II, will be talking about her two recent books, her childhood memoir My History and Must You Go?: My Life with Harold Pinter, with broadcaster Mark Lawson.

TUESDAY 19th MAY 2015

★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★

Wendy Cope on Life, Love and The Archers. Poet Wendy Cope, author of Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis and Family Values, is also an accomplished prose writer. She will be speaking about her latest book, a collection of recollections, reviews and other writings – and may be persuaded to read a few short poems as well.

TUESDAY 16th JUNE 2015

★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★ Fay Weldon on Mischief. Fay Weldon began writing fiction in 1966 and has never stopped. She estimates she has written ‘100-odd’ short stories, never mind her novels. In Mischief, she has picked 21 short stories, from the funny to the wise.

Ferdinand Mount on The Tears of the Rajas: Mutiny, Money and Marriage in India. Writer and politician Ferdinand Mount’s

BUXTON FESTIVAL 26th JULY 2015

Virginia Ironside on Yes! I Can Manage Thank You! After the success of No! I Don’t Want to Join a Bookclub and No! I Don’t Need Reading Glasses, Virginia Ironside’s ‘Groovy Granny’ Marie Sharp is back with yet more age-related mishaps. As we know, Virginia prides herself on growing old disgracefully.

anthony sattin on The Young T E Lawrence. The author of several books on Egypt, including A Winter on the Nile and The Pharaoh’s Shadow, Anthony Sattin here turns a biographer’s eye on the tumultuous early life of a shy archaeology student who became the legendary Lawrence of Arabia.

Andy McNab on the latest Tom Buckingham thriller. The author first adopted the literary ‘codename’ Andy McNab in Bravo Two Zero, his account of his time in the SAS, and has continued to use it for his popular fiction. He will be talking about his life, writing and the latest in his series about SAS trooper Tom Buckingham.

Terry Waite on The Voyage of the Golden Handshake. Waite has previously recounted his experience of being held hostage in Lebanon from 1987 to 1991 in Taken on Trust and Footfalls in Memory. His latest work is in a rather different vein: a comic novel set aboard a cruise liner.

previous work includes his studies of class and power Mind the Gap and The New Few. In Tears of the Rajas, he turns his eye on Britons in 19th-century colonial India, as viewed through the experiences of his own ancestors, the Lows of Clatto.

Helen Lederer on Losing It. Actress and comedian Helen Lederer has been amusing audiences with her stand-up routines since the Eighties as well as winning plaudits for more serious roles in productions including The Vagina Monologues. Now her wit works its way onto the page in her debut comic novel Losing It.

Kate Mosse on The Taxidermist’s Daughter. Kate Mosse – author of Labyrinth and The

LUNCH at THE Old Hall Hotel, BUXTON Accommodation: Old Hall Hotel Tel: 01298 22841; www.old-

Winter Ghosts – makes her Oldie literary lunch debut to tell us about The Taxidermist’s Daughter, a gothic psychological thriller set on the flooded marshlands of the author’s native West Sussex on the Eve of St Mark, 1912.

hallhotelbuxton.co.uk, Roseleigh Guest-House Tel: 01298 24904; www.roseleighhotel.co.uk

Jonathan Fryer on Soho in the Fifties. As

★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★

Prue Leith on a culinary life. Restaurateur, founder of Leith’s Cookery School and author of a dozen cookery books, Prue Leith is a glutton for life, as detailed in her memoir Relish. Not content to stay in the kitchen, she has turned her hand to novel-writing and will talk about her most recent fiction, as well as a life immersed in food.

a foreign reporter, Fryer’s voice will be familiar from BBC Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent. As a historian, he has published a dozen books focusing on particularly debauched figures, including Oscar Wilde, Dylan Thomas and the inhabitants of Soho in its hedonistic heyday of the Fifties and Sixties.

To BooK ALL LUNCH tICKETS CALL 01225 427 311 9.30am–3pm Monday to Friday and ask for Katherine or Jenny, or email reservations@theoldie.co.uk

Ticket price: £62 for a three-course lunch including wine or soft drinks ★ Fish and vegetarian options available on advance request ★ Meet the speakers from 12 noon; lunch at 1pm

acknowledge that he was at the core of something momentous. So life is fast and furious in the Record Mirror office. He jots down the promotional ‘bons mots’ of every chart act he interviews and then piles off to watch the Rolling Stones at the Station Hotel, Richmond, or heads Up West to the Scene Club in Great Windmill Street to drink Dubonnet cocktails and give the teenage Eric Clapton a lift home on the back of his scooter. He reprints some of his encounters complete with their delightfully gauche headlines – ‘I Never Wore Blue Suede Shoes,’ Carl Perkins Confesses. Tina Turner flirts with him. Cilla Black confides that she wants a career in light entertainment. He watches a comically seasick Jerry Lee Lewis perform on a cross-Channel showboat. Such proximity to the superstars would be unimaginable these days. One fascinating on-tour report reveals that the Beatles – imprisoned by screaming fans – have invented a new form of home entertainment: they’ve bought a 16mm movie

ost opera buffs know and love Puccini’s opera Gianni Schicchi. The music is excellent and it has an enjoyable story, the work of his librettist, Giovacchino Forzano. The name Gianni Schicchi is borrowed from Dante, but the story closely resembles one told by the Irish novelist Charles Lever. It is the first chapter of his novel The Confessions of Con Cregan (1849) and it is a delightful tale. A young urchin lives with his father, both called Con Cregan, in a cabin on an Irish bog, and the father is the lookalike of a well-to-do farmer nearby. The farmer dies intestate, and his son rushes to the lookalike, asking him to come and impersonate his dying father, so as to bequeath all his property to him, not his brother, who is abroad. This is accomplished, with copious tots of whiskey, in the presence of witnesses from the village. The last bequest is to Con himself of two acres of land, which makes him a man of property. The chapter ends: ‘ “Con”, says he, “sure that was a joke about the two acres?” “Sure, it was all a joke. Won’t I make the neighbours laugh hearty when I tell them!” “Ye wouldn’t betray me?” “Ye wouldn’t go against your father’s

‘If you don’t behave, James, I may have to consider telling you off’

projector and turned their hotel suite into ‘a cinema’. Ever curious, they order the most exotic food in every city. ‘Owls Legs’ get the thumbs-up from Paul McCartney, ‘though we wouldn’t have known if they hadn’t been Owls Legs’. As the brash mid-Sixties pop boom melts into the complex textures of psychdying wishes?” “Very well, Con. Yer a deep fellow, that’s all...” ’ My father slipped home over the bog, well pleased with the legacy he had left himself... It is an excellent story, told by Lever, and an even more excellent opera, composed by Puccini. Did Puccini get his idea from Con Cregan? Puccini was fourteen when Lever died in 1872; Forzano, the librettist, was unborn. But Lever was living in Florence

World of Books A N Other

when he wrote his story. Puccini lived near Lucca. Forzano lived near Florence. Lever may well have discussed his story, or left his book, with his Florentine friends, and perhaps that way an opera was born? Lever, not much read these days except by elderly Anglo-Irish eccentrics, wrote a number of sparky novels, notably Harry Lorrequer, and Charles O’Malley. They are full of Irish pursuits, hunting, drinking, duelling, flirting and, well, drinking. Con Cregan, not his best novel, and a far-fetched tale of the adventurous rise of that same urchin to wealth and status, has another unusual feature. It

edelia, Norman and his Record Mirror pals begin to feel left behind. He’s honest enough to admit that he shouldn’t have missed the Sgt Pepper launch party or Pink Floyd’s game-changing 14 Hour Technicolor Dream concert at Alexandra Palace. His stock-in-trade, slightly breathless prose, now feels creaky and superficial though his tabloid training highlights aspects of the evolving world that the hippie press overlooked: at the supposedly unifying 1969 Isle Of Wight Festival, for example, he notes that Bob Dylan has a personally hired hovercraft and is ferried about in a Rolls-Royce while his band slum it in Daimlers and an Austin Princess. It’s a charming time-capsule of the Sixties and its attitudes and hard lessons (almost) learnt. After a night out with a mini-skirted model called Miki, Norman ends up at a sauce-filled bash off the King’s Road and crashes his Mini-Cooper on the way home. ‘I resolved never to drink and drive again,’ he says solemnly. ‘And I never did ... well, not to the extent that I had been doing.’ was first published anonymously, so as to be in competition with another novel he was writing, The Daltons (1852), hoping that competition would drive up sales. This was in imitation of another Irishman, who ran a taxi service with a coach and pair, and invested in a second such taxi so as to generate business by competition. This went all right until one coachman engineered the death of his rival’s horses. In the case of Lever, The Daltons flopped, but Con Cregan did so well that one critic said of the anonymous book: ‘Mr Lever must look to his laurels’. Lever’s novels were illustrated with steel engravings by ‘Phiz’, the illustrator of most of Dickens. He and Phiz were friends, and used to meet and go ‘rough riding’, as they called it, over the Irish countryside, with its walls and banks and bogs. Phiz was considered by John Leech, the illustrator of Surtees’s Jorrocks books, the best man of his time for drawing thoroughbred horses. He was pretty good, too, at depicting drinking and flirting. One might wish that Lever and Puccini had been closer in age, and speculate what delightful operas might have been the result. But perhaps they would have gone rough riding, and perhaps Puccini would have broken his neck? Better the way it is.

April 2015 – THE OLDIE 61

Words and S tuff

Please don’t go that extra mile The worst thing about the election campaign is the clichés we will have to endure, says Johnny Grimond Oh, the tedium of an election campaign – and it’s not just the lies and nonsense that offend. Whenever politicians join battle at the hustings, any voters with an ear for language cringe before the bombardment of clichés, euphemisms and political correctness. People often resort to clichés when they want to impress. Perhaps they want to sound technocratic. Then they speak of ‘paradigm shifts’, ‘supply-side solutions’ and ‘targeted interventions’. Perhaps they are in caring mode, so they vow to ‘go the extra mile’, ‘give 110 per cent’ or ‘make a difference’ (as though Hitler or Stalin didn’t want to make a difference). Perhaps they want to show they are green (count the number of times they speak of ‘sustainability’ without ever saying what it means), or tech-savvy (‘rolling out new platforms’ and ‘pressing the reset button’), or businesslike (following ‘results-oriented strategies’ or

At the end of the day, when all’s said and done, and dusted, no one is listening ‘growing the economy’ – as though it were a tomato). At the end of the day, when all’s said and done, and dusted, no one is listening because everyone knows such utterances are meaningless. That does not mean they are always benign. Sometimes, as George Orwell pointed out in ‘Politics and the English Language’, politicians use clichés merely to disguise bad news. Tax increases are ‘revenue enhancements’, expanding the money supply is ‘quantitative easing’ and crimes are ‘offending behaviour’. The language suffers even more in times of war, and has for centuries. Calgalus, a British chief whose lands had been devastated by the Romans, was quoted by Tacitus nearly 2,000 years ago as saying: ‘They make a wilderness and call it peace.’ The word ‘war’ itself is now almost unsayable within officialdom. It is ‘conflict’, ‘insurgency’, ‘military action’ or, even more blandly, ‘boots on the ground’.

The War Office has become the Ministry of Defence. Nuclear bombs are now nuclear ‘deterrents’. Torture is ‘enhanced interrogation’, kidnapping is ‘rendition’, a military attack on Iran is the ‘kinetic option’. George Carlin, an American comedian, used to point out that the ‘shell shock’ of the First World War became ‘battle fatigue’ in the Second World War and ‘operational exhaustion’ (something so sterile it ‘could happen to your car’) in Korea, to be replaced in Vietnam by ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’. Thus are our senses deadened to reality. It is in the matter of political correctness, though, that politicians excel. You will not find even a Ukip candidate getting away with the term ‘cripple’, a plain, short word now always rejected in favour of ‘physically handicapped’ or ‘disabled’. As for ‘cretin’, derived from the Latin word for Christian and long used in Alpine valleys where inbreeding led to deformity and mental incapacity, it is utterly taboo. Yet cretin came into use as a way of acknowledging the essential humanity of such people. We need a word for them. We also need a word for ‘he or she’, or at least politicians do. They cannot endlessly repeat that clumsy phrase – neither, when they want a generic term, can they bring themselves to say just ‘he’, since this supposedly offends half the human race. The result is often some formulation like the one Tony Blair adopted in 1996, when promising a society in which ‘every person [is] given the chance to fulfil their potential’. I cite this because it occurred in the very speech in which he also said his three priorities were ‘education, education and education’. It is now a commonplace to read such sentences as, ‘A man who knocked a cyclist off their bike, injuring them, has had his sentence deferred.’ If you’re stumped on 7th May, cast your vote for the candidate who speaks the plainest English, uses the fewest clichés, eschews ‘passion’, mentions ‘community’ and ‘challenges’ no more than once per sentence, and never speaks of ‘our’ NHS or ‘our United Kingdom’.

Pedants’ Revolt This month’s irritants I deplore the current confusion of ‘around’ and ‘round’. People seem to have forgotten the distinction, which is still useful. ‘He looked round’ used not to mean the same as ‘he looked around’ and ‘she came around from the anaesthetic’ is ludicrous, though frequently met with nowadays. ANDREW WILTON Reese Witherspoon, reading her autocue at the Baftas: ‘It would be difficult to under-estimate the contribution of...’. Of course she meant the precise opposite of that. You hear this solecism frequently on the radio too. EDWARD MIRZOEFF Why does everybody nowadays have to apologise ‘unreservedly’, e.g. Cumberbatch for saying ‘coloured’ instead of ‘black’. Why not just apologise and be done with it? SIR HAROLD WALKER ‘Come on you R’s’ does not contain an ‘aberrant greengrocer’s apostrophe’. Many style guides accept the use of an apostrophe in the plurals of abbreviations. In his Practical English Usage, Michael Swan gives as an example: ‘I know two MP’s personally (or MPs)’. JOHN PARKER In movies and on TV we often get the comment ‘I’ll see myself out’. In real life does anyone use this phrase? I’ve certainly never heard it. PAUL GILBERT ‘Three different people told me’: if ‘different’ was omitted, would anyone suppose the people were an original and two clones? TIM WEAKLEY Email your grammatical errors, clichés, moballs and other bugbears to editorial@ theoldie.co.uk with ‘Pedant’ in the subject line, or send by post to Oldie Pedants, 65 Newman St, London W1T 3EG

April 2015 – THE OLDIE 63

ARTS ETC

SIR SIMON RATTLE AND PIERRE MONTEUX The mistral had been doing its worst and the performance hadn’t started until 10pm. The opera was Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila staged in the open-air Théâtre Antique in Orange with Placido Domingo and Elena Obraztsova in the title roles, Daniel Barenboim conducting. Most of musical Europe had turned up and Deutsche Grammophon, which was recording the opera, had thrown a particularly fine after-show party. ‘Look there,’ I remember Edinburgh Festival’s director-elect John Drummond exclaiming as dawn broke. ‘Our country’s finest young conducting talent dressed like a lout.’ The lad seemed tidy enough in his striped rugger shirt. (A late invitee surely.) What did strike me, as he stood watching keen-eyed beneath a mop of curly dark hair, was that he might be casing the joint. Since there were no jewel heists in Avignon that week, or in any of the other festival venues he was seen at during the summer, it must have been the musical real estate he was interested in, not the bangles of its well-heeled hangers-on. That was 1978 and 37 years on, that keen-eyed young man has morphed into Sir Simon Rattle, OM, CBE. Britain surrendered to his talent in the mid1980s and significant swathes of Europe were soon to follow. Rattle is not the first conductor to have planned his career like a military campaign, but his success has been spectacular: knighted at 39, chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic at 47, admitted to the Order of Merit at 59. Sixty in January, and with the end of his Berlin tenure coming into view, the question arises ‘Where now?’ Word is that he will take on the LSO. Unless he’s prepared to re-invent himself as a fully functioning opera conductor, this is just about the only position his native land can plausibly offer.

the Germans play it too heavily,’ the great man announced. Monteux loved Brahms as much as he loved his great French contemporaries – Saint-Saëns, César Franck, Massenet. But it was Monteux’s work for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, not least his famously imperturbable direction of the riotous first night of Le Sacre du printemps, which secured the trust of Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel and others. For those of us old-fashioned enough to maintain a proper record library, Sony has recently released a 39-CD box entitled Pierre Monteux: The Complete RCA Collection. Mainly devoted to Monteux’s San Francisco and Boston recordings (1941–60), it’s fascinating for its exploration of the highways and byways of the French and Russian repertoires, in which Monteux excelled, and for its evocation of that pre-1960 world when orchestras had their own distinctive styles – much as European and American cities smelled and sounded differently before multinationalism made clones of us all. Frustratingly, the set lacks the superb last recordings Monteux made for RCA with the LSO. Their ownership has passed elsewhere, as has Monteux’s late great recording of Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette. It was after one such LSO session that leader Hugh Maguire thanked Monteux for finishing early. ‘My wife will be pleasantly surprised.’ ‘Let uz ’ope it is your wife who is surprised and not you!’ was the Frenchman’s twinkling rejoinder.

ANDREW BIRCH

MUSIC

RICHARD OSBORNE

Sixty is no age for a conductor. Pierre Monteux was 61 when in 1936 he helped re-form the San Francisco Symphony. He directed the orchestra until 1952, before moving to Boston, and then to London where he was elected chief conductor of the LSO at the age of 86. The contract, famously, was for 25 years, with an option to renew. Monteux’s conducting was a miracle of clarity and fluid motion. I remember a Wagner concert broadcast live by the BBC Third Programme from the Holland Festival in 1963 where the final pages of the Tannhäuser overture flowed like molten gold. One of my university tutors had been there. ‘What on earth was the old boy doing?’ I asked. ‘He barely moved! All we saw were 100 sturdy Dutch burghers bowing, blowing and drumming like men possessed.’ There’s a letter from Carlos Kleiber in which he describes seeing Monteux on film for the first time. ‘I just can’t get over it. Guess I’ll drink some Schnapps and wish I’d been a violin virtuoso and was 86 years old today and had a walrus moustache and a clear beat and some idea of what I conduct.’ Monteux began his career as a viola player with the legendary Concerts Colonne in Paris (as well as earning money on the side playing in the pit of the Folies Bergères). He was also a member of a string quartet that played for Brahms. ‘It takes the French to understand my music;

April 2015 – THE OLDIE 65

WICKEDNESS and wise words Ooh that wicked Eddie Mair. One Monday recently, just before PM began, there had been yet another plug for Just a Minute. Perhaps it was that much-milked story of David Tennant’s triumph – even though he said ‘stage’ twice – in talking for sixty seconds about ‘Exit pursued by a Bear’. So when that was followed by the weather forecast, just before the 5pm pips, Eddie murmured in his soft deadpan undertone: ‘Repetition of “cloud”.’ Then a few days later, introducing PM’s running order, he announced: ‘WiFi on trains! Join us for another pointless live radio experiment.’ I love it when he mocks his editors’ daft ideas. Running against Eddie not only in the same 5pm air-slot but also for this year’s Broadcaster of the Year title is Sean Rafferty of In Tune on Radio 3. Radio reviewers (a dwindling breed, who get pitifully few perks) were invited to attend a recording of In Tune at an alluring venue: the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, within Shakespeare’s Globe. And it was sublime. You can’t listen again because it’s already consigned to the Digital Dustbin with so much else. What listeners couldn’t see was the architectural splendour of the Wanamaker auditorium, already the cynosure of all eyes: carved oakwood gleaming in the glow of beeswax candles, rather like the sets for Wolf Hall. And what we heard during that recording proves that the Wanamaker acoustics too are perfect. In such a small auditorium, all you get is the primary sound, ideal for instruments ancient and modern, and for the human voice – especially the thrilling countertenor Iestyn Davies, who is now playing the castrato Farinelli (sold out, alas) in a new piece by Claire Van Kampen (Mrs Mark Rylance) whom Rafferty also interviewed. An ensemble of Royal Academy of Music students played Vivaldi and the music of Henry VIII: never has the recorder been played with such vivacity. Then there was John Williams on guitar playing a Venezuelan piece, ‘Cuando lloran las palomas’. ‘If Julian Bream is emperor,’ said Rafferty, ‘John Williams is king.’ In his Shanghai Tang jacket and with his twinkling Irish charm, Rafferty can get away with that. Worth another listen: the series produced by Julia Johnson called Letter from Europe. On day five, speaking from wintry

THE OLDIE – April 2015

A Swede in Antibes: Henning Mankell

TE L EVISI O N ROGER LEWIS

WOLF HALL inside the commons Everyone has been giving Wolf Hall top marks. I found it slow and boring in the extreme, enlivened now and then only by the anachronistic Talbot Rothwell dialogue: ‘By the thrice beshitten Shroud of Lazarus!’ or ‘Cor blimey, one more word out of you and I’ll bite your bollocks off.’ Mark Rylance, with his wizened apple face and olive black eyes, does a lot of stern staring, and Damian Lewis, as the king, is moody and bombastic – you never know if you are in for a hug or a thump. The drama could be a colour supplement advertisement for National Trust castles and gardens. Interiors are candlelit and spotless, exteriors are invariably sunny – no rain or drizzle or mud. Henry’s breach with the papacy and Cromwell’s political ambitions unfold so sluggishly that entire episodes are given over to nothing more dramatic than disgraced clerics in the Tower shrugging and sighing. We have hours on end of ladies-in-waiting beavering away at their embroidery hoops. I longed in vain for a few tortures and bloody executions. In fairness, Rylance was very good at whisking off his hat without dislodging his wig. No doubt he’ll win a Bafta for accomplishing that. But how can he eclipse memories of Kenneth Williams’s Thomas Cromwell in Carry On Henry? It cannot be done. Nor can Lewis improve on Sid James, who wore the costume made originally for Richard Burton in Anne of the Thousand Days – a film, incidentally, which covers exactly the same ground as Wolf Hall and is a thousand times more exciting. I also felt sad for Jonathan Pryce, whose Cardinal Wolsey was never going to supersede Terry Scott, an actor who always looked as if he had the mumps. Michael Cockerell’s Inside the Commons suggested that England is still run along Tudor lines – whispering and muttering in palace corridors, tunnels and turrets; bills signed in medieval French, bound in green ribbon and carried to the Lords; door-keepers and clerks in wigs and ruffs. I adore the ceremony and theatricality – what the snuff-taking Sir Robert Rogers called ‘the dignified framework within which the rough and

Geraint Lewis/REX

RADI O

VALERIE GROVE

Antibes, the Swedish novelist Henning Mankell of Wallander fame stopped me in my tracks with his wisdom. He observes the idle Brit expats around him, who ‘start drinking red wine too early in the day’, then await the arrival of the Times, ‘say bad things about their homeland’, drink more wine at lunch and disappear till dinner. He analysed the Charlie Hebdo shootings ‘in the home of Voltaire, Diderot and the enlightenment movement’, but said he did not see the value in insulting people with certain beliefs, ‘even in a satirical magazine’. And he is disturbed by the threat to Scandinavia (soon fulfilled, tragically) which he perceives as ‘a terrifying shadow of what happened in the 1930s’. I won’t attempt to react to readers who responded to my thoughts about women’s piping voices on radio. My plaint was about babyish and immature voices, even of women graduates, who say ‘buck’ (or ‘berk’) for book, and ‘cuckbuck’ for cook book, and ‘I’m like’ for ‘I said.’ Some of you, I’m sorry to say, railed about the ‘domination’ of women on radio, and one cried ‘Bring back Alvar Lidell!’ Sigh. That is not what I meant, at all. But apologies to Kathy Clugston and Caroline Wyatt for not including them among my favourite voices. Especially Caroline Wyatt. As Robert Fox once wrote, ‘Radio is the cleanest and quickest medium of serious journalism’, and Wyatt – ace correspondent, late of defence and now of religious affairs – is serious but also reassuring, modulated, sensible and a mature female voice. We heard her speaking from Auschwitz not long ago, where her grandparents ended up. Happy to hear Paul Gambaccini back on the air with And the Academy Award Goes To... Most interestingly to Mrs Miniver – a film that bore scant resemblance to its source, as Jan Struther’s grand-daughter Ysenda Maxtone Graham pointed out.

DVD

Jeremy Lewis Rome, Open City Dir Roberto Rossellini, 1945 Arrow Films, 103 minutes, £19.99 To order for £8.99 including free UK p&p call 0844 376 0009 and quote The Oldie and product code 139092

‘He’s had nightmares over planning permission’

tumble takes place.’ But needless to say there is now a ‘new breed of politician’ – women in Cecil Gee suits or persons with provincial accents – who prefer to spend all day gazing at their mobile phones while sitting in the atrium of Portcullis House, the thoroughly disgusting modern annexe that has all the charm of the service station on the M40 near Northampton. In the episode about the State Opening of Parliament, Her Majesty put on her best crown and traipsed to Westminster in a bumpy coach to recite some gibberish about the way ‘my government will ban the use of plastic bags’. If she bursts into hysterical sobbing laughter about this backstage, the cameras didn’t show any of it. I did like the shots of the Beefeaters searching the cellars for barrels of gunpowder. Instead of Guy Fawkes or Islamic terrorists, what they came across down there was a room crammed with idle Ealing Comedy builders, drinking tea and watching telly. If the funniest line of the month was a nun on Call the Midwife saying using a condom was like ‘wearing socks when going for a paddle’, funniest sight of the month was Dame Edna baking a cake in the shape of the Sydney Opera House for Comic Relief. The circus and the panto used to have what is called the ‘splosh act’, where the clowns chucked buckets of wallpaper paste over each other. Edna managed to cover herself with wisteria icing, glutinous pastry and blobs of whipped cream. Mary Berry didn’t look alarmed when she confronted Edna – it was as if she was gazing with love at a long-lost sister.

Filmed shortly after the liberation of Rome by the Allies, Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City is set in 1944, during the German occupation of the city. Those involved in the resistance are growing in confidence, but it remains a hazardous and terrifying business; and Rome itself is battered and broken, far removed from the urbane and elegant dolce vita evoked some fifteen years later by Federico Fellini, who worked on the script of Rome, Open City. Food is in wretchedly short supply, bombed and ruined buildings are all around, bribery is common currency and no one can be sure whom to trust. Tense, fast-moving and grimly atmospheric, the film describes the activities of a group of resistance fighters: central

to their activities is a priest, brilliantly played by Aldo Fabrizi, who seems at first to be an amiable buffoon but proves to be a truly heroic figure; the enemy is personified in a suave Gestapo officer, helped by a beautiful but deeply sinister female collaborator, who corrupts the corruptible with jewels and fur coats (hastily withdrawn and recycled once they have served their purpose). The climax of the film is brutal, shocking and unexpected – and would be even more depressing than it is were it not for the possibility of liberation. The other starring roles are played by Marcello Pagliero as the Communist resistance leader, forever on the run, and the forceful Anna Magnani, but – true to Rossellini’s role as a pioneer of Italian neorealism – many of the parts are played by members of the public rather than professional actors, and are quite as convincing as a result. Rome, Open City is the first part of a trilogy, which went on to include Paisà and Germany, Year Zero, which was set in the ruins of Berlin in 1945; like Vittorio De Sica’s magnificent (and equally tragic) The Bicycle Thieves, it is both a masterpiece of Italian cinema and a haunting evocation of post-war Rome.

Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City was the first in a celebrated post-war trilogy April 2015 – THE OLDIE

FILM

marcus berkmann whiplash the imitation game I have seen a few films recently, but nothing has had the impact, the resonance if you prefer, of a pair I saw more than a month ago, during Oscar-bait season. Both were nominated for several awards, and may even have won some by the time you read this. I can now see why. Whiplash (15) is the one about the young jazz drummer Andrew, played by Miles Teller, and his borderline-psychotic teacher, J K Simmons. We are in a New York music school, in the present day, and the young drummer is practising hard. One is forcibly reminded of the ancient joke in which a passer-by asks a policeman, ‘How do you get to Carnegie Hall?’ ‘Practise, practise, practise,’ says the policeman, and this film is essentially that joke with every vestige of humour extracted. Simmons clearly sees something in the young drummer. He encourages him with one breath, humiliates him with the next. The ‘studio band’, which Simmons runs, is the one you want to be in, playing big band jazz with admirable verve and precision, but anyone who plays at microscopically less than the highest standard is ejected in shame. Many scenes take place in a subterranean rehearsal room in a permanent late-night gloom. Simmons is literally terrifying: bald, baggy-featured, always dressed in black, with a striking repertoire of abuse and invective. The musicians quail under his glare. Teller thinks he has joined the studio band full-time,

The beat goes on: Miles Teller as Andrew, left, and J K Simmons as Fletcher in Whiplash

but Simmons continues to test him and his drumming rivals, most notably with a brutal piece of music called ‘Caravan’, which involves such fast and violent drumming that you start to fear for these poor boys’ health. There’s a lot of sweat, more blood than you’d expect, and as much swearing as in a Scorsese film. Rather like Birdman, which I also loved, Whiplash is intense and occasionally painful to watch: more than once I found myself hiding behind my own knees to try and avoid the next scene. (If you’re watching it on DVD, I recommend having a large glass of something agreeable to hand.) There’s a slightly awkward subplot in which young Teller

‘I’m telling you, there’s wholesale slaughter out there! What do you want me to do – draw you a picture?’

THE OLDIE – April 2015

finds himself a girlfriend, Melissa Benoist, sweet and lovely, and then dumps her in a diner because he thinks she will distract him from his musical destiny. I think this is supposed to show us that he is becoming dehumanised by his obsession, but it just makes him look like a prawn. But given the fact that virtually nothing happens in the film other than people playing music and talking – barely anyone ever goes outdoors, for instance – the marvel of Damien Chazelle’s script is just how much story he packs into it. Meanwhile, J K Simmons grabs his career-defining role with both hands, as though he has been waiting his 63 years for this precise moment. The Imitation Game (12A) has been out for ever, but I only ended up seeing it on the insistence of my teenage daughter, who urged me to overcome my pathological dislike of Ikea Knightley and all her works. Benedict Cumberbatch’s Alan Turing is a slightly more fey variant of his Sherlock, Charles Dance is a panto villain as his disbelieving boss, and Ikea herself puts in her best performance ever, in that she’s not bad at all. What I loved about the film, though, was the realisation that this story, of Enigma, Bletchley and Turing, is a legend of the future, a narrative so unlikely and yet so perfect that people will still be retelling it in hundreds of years’ time. Screenwriter Graham Moore and director Morten Tyldum don’t bugger it up, which is all that we require.

T H E AT R E Paul Bailey

THE CHANGELING THE RULING CLASS thE HARD PROBLEM TAKEN AT MIDNIGHT It is difficult to imagine Dominic Dromgoole’s production of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre ever being bettered. He has made the brave decision to keep the scenes set in Alibius’s lunatic asylum (attributed to Rowley, and usually cut entirely or either severely truncated) more or less intact. He has been wise to do so, for this is a play concerned with disease and ugliness as much as it is with physical beauty. The two down-to-earth playwrights maintain a fine balance between the intrigue and corruption of high society and the desolate way of life of the sick and dispossessed. Jacobean drama is not for the squeamish, and Middleton and Rowley’s gleamingly nasty masterpiece is a continuous excursion into the human sewer. It will never seem out of date or irrelevant. Dromgoole has assembled a superb group of actors, who relish the nastiness without hamming it up. They have faith in the lines they have been given and speak them naturally. At the centre of the proceedings is the angelically beautiful Beatrice-Joanna, the object of three men’s loving or lustful attentions: there

is Alsemero, whose love she reciprocates; Alonzo, her fiancé, and De Flores, her father’s servant, whom she persuades to murder Alonzo. The subplot, which takes place in the madhouse, is too convoluted to account for in a few words, but enough to say that it mirrors in an absurd fashion the principal story. Hattie Morahan, so brilliant as Nora in A Doll’s House last year, informs Beatrice-Joanna with a beguiling, innocent charm that inevitably turns to something infinitely more dangerous and exciting when De Flores makes his claim on her. The scene in which she succumbs to his repellent charm is thrillingly acted by Morahan and Trystan Gravelle as the hired assassin. Gravelle plays this evil individual with a lilting Welsh accent that is as melodious as it is sinister. The Changeling is performed by candlelight, as befits its immortal murkiness. Peter Barnes’s satirical play The Ruling Class, which was first performed in 1968, has been revived by Jamie Lloyd at the Trafalgar Studios. As its title suggests, it’s an attack on the role the privileged play in British culture and politics. In this age of Old Etonians occupying the Cabinet and securing plum parts in films and theatre, it ought to resonate with meaning, but somehow it doesn’t. The notion that aristocrats are inbred loonies is hardly original, and Barnes is too slapdash a writer to focus for long on the telling detail that exposes the cynicism that lurks beneath the outward show of grandeur and responsibility. James McAvoy, playing the deluded Jack, 14th Earl of Gurney, who

Penelope Wilton as the lawyer Hans Litten’s mother in Taken at Midnight

‘Of course he’s guilty – all men are guilty!’

progresses from seeing himself as the son of God to Jack the Ripper, is commendably resourceful, and he is ably supported by Ron Cook, as his sane brother, and Anthony O’Donnell, emulating the great Arthur Lowe as the drunken Marxist butler who pees in the soup he serves at dinner. But the jokes are of the sledgehammer variety, and the satire never takes flight or hits home to any purpose. And it lasts for three wearying hours. Tom Stoppard is the cleverest dramatist alive and his new play, The Hard Problem, at the Dorfman Theatre is full of ideas. There is a plot of sorts, of a rather corny kind, that occupies the last ten minutes or so of the action, but otherwise it’s argument and counter-argument with a tiny number of gags thrown in to lighten the heady atmosphere. Of what we might call human interest there is precious little, for the characters are mouthpieces who say things like ‘Ursula, I need to ask you something. Could the cosmos be teleological?’ The ‘hard problem’ is that of consciousness, but there is a harder problem in its exposition, which Pirandello would have made theatrical and resonant. Stoppard is just a show-off by comparison with the revolutionary Italian playwright. I was looking forward to Mark Hayhurst’s Taken at Midnight at the Haymarket because it stars Penelope Wilton, whom I admire inordinately. It is based on the tragic life of a distinguished lawyer, Hans Litten, who at the age of 29 subjected Hitler to a hostile crossexamination in court in 1931. He was not forgiven for his impudence and was seized by the Nazis and not released. It makes for a worthy experience, but it is more of a documentary than a play, with Wilton, as his unhappy mother, speaking directly to the audience and telling them things that should have been dramatised. Worthiness is not enough. April 2015 – THE OLDIE 69

O V E RLOO K E D B RI TA IN Lucinda LambtoN Fyling Hall Pigsty A rousingly successful restoration if ever there was one: the transformation of a 19th-century Grecian temple for pigs into an elegant 20th-century house for humans. The pigsty was built in 1883 by Squire John Warren Barry of Fyling Hall, near Robin Hood’s Bay, North Yorkshire; 105 years later, having fallen into a state of near ruinous decay, it was taken over and restored by the Landmark Trust. On an undated scrap of local newspaper, I found it praised as ‘the most elegant home for porkers in Britain ... A pigsty that looks like the Temple of Diana standing sentinel on the Yorkshire coast’. It was built high on a hill over the Bay, from where the sea sweeps off to the horizon. Squire Barry was a figure of some consequence. Photographed as a child by Lewis Carroll, he lived in a stately pile of 1810, which is now Fyling Hall School. He was a Justice of the Peace and an inveterate traveller, often returning to Yorkshire with some new plant, tree or architectural plan. In 1893 he wrote Studies in Corsica Sylvan and Social,

THE OLDIE – April 2015

which has been digitalised for the British Library’s Historical Print Editions, while AbeBooks sells jaw-droppingly costly first editions. Nearly forty years later he was described as ‘a very courteous old man who used to wear what was called a Daily Mail Hat – a top hat cut short – that was very popular at the time’. It is thought that his porkers were so splendidly housed as a result of his Mediterranean travels, though he was rather damning about the uniformity of southern Europe’s vernacular – whereas because ‘many a Briton builds his house

after the design of his own sweet will, taking a model either from the distant past, or else one from a foreign country, or else composing a mixture of his own, most English towns, and a considerable number of English villages exhibit a wonderful variety of styles’. How delightfully he added to that variety. Squire Barry built his tiny temple with an Ionic columned portico, supporting an anthemion-topped pediment; it also has a fluted frieze and acanthus-leaf drainpipe heads. The pillars and their capitals are made of wood; its base is

stone, cut from the estate quarry and hauled forth by horse and sledge. All of this was concocted for two Large White Yorkshire pigs, who had the added pleasure of poking their snouts through small tapered ‘Egyptian’ windows at the back of the building. In 1948, Mathew Hart, a ninety-yearold stonemason from Scunthorpe, recalled how Squire Barry forever changed his mind about his classical variations. So relieved was Hart when it was finished that he danced a jig for joy on the roof but fell off and broke his nose. It had taken three men two years to build the sty. What a difference it would make if a fraction of the sensibility that Squire Barry put into the design of his little sty was applied to today’s agricultural buildings, which so often brutalise rather than beautify the countryside. Historically, farm buildings were often fine buildings that enhanced their surroundings; why can’t they be so again? And at a time when the pig’s lot has become so particularly grim, how pleasing it is to think of the Squire’s Large White Yorkshire porkers wallowing, for some fifty years, in the luxury of their classical temple. Today, thanks to the Landmark Trust, we humans can also wallow in the luxury of this porcine palace; three grateful cheers for Squire John Warren Barry. w

Porcine palace: Fyling Hall pigsty, above left, and, left, with its view of Robin Hood’s Bay in the background. Above: one of the small, tapered ‘Egyptian’ windows at the back of the sty

GA R D E N I NG DAVID WHEELER CORNISH CREAM Just as I was thinking it was time to re-acquaint myself with some great Cornish gardens, there comes along a pocket-sized book, a tad larger than a CD case, with 176 brimful pages, covering everything from the horticultural and architectural to the obscurely genealogical. April is no bad month to explore gardens in this far South-West peninsula, largely blessed, of course, with a plant-friendly maritime climate but one that can kick hard when you least expect it – shorthand for reminding you to put warm weatherproof clothing on your packing list, whenever you choose to go. My new vade mecum is Cornwall’s Great Houses and Gardens by Barry Gamble (Alison Hodge £6.95). Gamble entered the specialist field of heritage interpretation in the 1990s after a career in industry and what appears to have been a lifelong interest in Cornish mines and mining families – several of which have bankrolled the county’s many outstanding estates and botanically important collections. By April most of the county’s renowned camellias are fading, making way for thickets of rhododendrons and exquisite magnolias, their waxy blooms unbesmirched by the kind of damaging late-season frost that buggers us noncoastal gardeners. Later in the year these bountiful beauties give way to ceanothus (California lilac) in their many shades of blue, and some of the incredible floral wonders from Australasia and South America. Nor does it take much effort to unearth impressive collections of hydrangeas and bamboo or, on a smaller scale, the delights of primroses, Clematis viticella cultivars, dahlias and day-lilies (hemerocallis), not to mention the many diverse echeverias, succulents that thrive out of doors in frost-free areas but are grown with great affection by the likes of me in a winter-heated greenhouse. Properties such as Heligan, Glendurgan, Lanhydrock, Trebah, Caerhays and Trewithen are well documented and much visited, so it was to Gamble’s pages dealing with less-familiar places that I turned when making plans for my next Cornish foray. Catchfrench, with its Repton Red Book landscape, a few miles from St Germans, attracts me by

its name alone – although I’m told not to confuse the ‘new’ house with the ‘romantic ruin of the old adjacent manor’. Pentillie, on a great bend of the Tamar, with splendid Chusan palms from central China and towering sequoias (California redwoods) also beckons like a siren, as does Killiow, near Truro, occupied over several centuries by members of the Daubuz family, one of whom ‘introduced exotic conifers, together with Kew rhododendron seedlings grown from Joseph Hooker’s original seed from his 1847–51 Himalayan expeditions’. I must test my sea legs, too. While St Michael’s Mount can be approached on foot by a causeway at low tide, nothing beats the high-water excitement of a ride in the Falmouth-made ‘amphicraft’ that zips out from Marazion. Once islanded you must walk round to the south-facing cliff to discover the sequence of little bandbox gardens, bright with bloom all year round. A bigger vessel (from Penzance) ferries passengers to St Mary’s before they must transfer to a small open boat heading for the magnificence of the sub-tropical Abbey gardens on Tresco, one of the five inhabited Scilly Isles among a cluster of outcrops battered by Atlantic surf. Its miscellany of plants, sheltered by high walls, is unique, as too are Tresco’s dunes, inundated now by escapee lapis-blue agapanthus that in July suggest the wild sandy reaches of the South African Cape. Gamble’s book is a small treasure, augmented by numerous aerial photographs of whole estates (with Ordnance Survey co-ordinates instead of a map), costing less than a fresh-baked pasty and a pint of Cornish Knocker.

The lapis-blue agapanthus April 2015 – THE OLDIE 71

COOKERY Go ecumenical this Easter and take your culinary lead from the Zoroastrian festival of Norooz, ancient Persia’s celebration of spring, still observed by modern Iranians of every religious stripe. A festival of resurrection and renewal, the twelve-day holiday starts on 25th March and marks the spring equinox. The recipe appropriate to Norooz is Sabzi Polow, a rice pilau cooked in a closed pot with butter and herbs and eaten with fish. The traditional cooking of Persia has a reputation for complicated recipes and hard-to-obtain ingredients but in her sumptuous Persiana (Mitchell Beazley £25), Iranian-born Londoner Sabrina Ghayour provides a de-mystification of classic recipes adapted to ingredients available in our shops. Always remembering, she points out, there’s no need to follow recipes slavishly – generosity of spirit I have taken as permission to shorten Ms Ghayour’s excellently detailed instructions. Sabzi Polow Long-grain rice is cooked with fresh spring herbs in a closed pot with butter. Serves 4–6 500g long-grain rice sea salt 125g spring onions, sliced 100g leaf-coriander 100g flat-leaf parsley, de-stalked 50g chives, snipped 50g dill, de-stalked 3 tbsp seed or vegetable oil 150g unsalted butter Rinse the rice in cold water, draining and replacing the water until it runs clear. Cover with cold water and a fistful of sea salt and leave to soak for at least 30 minutes. Finely chop the herbs. Bring a pan of salted water to the boil. Drain the rice, tip into the boiling water and stir in the herbs. Return the pan to the boil, stir well, and cook for 6–8 minutes, till the grains have softened and turned white. Drain in a colander and reserve. Reheat the pan with the oil, about a third of the butter and a tablespoon of crushed sea salt. Scatter in the rice (don’t pack it down). Dot with the remaining butter, cover tightly with a lid wrapped in a tea towel and cook for 8 minutes over a high-ish heat. Turn the heat right down and leave for another 25–30 minutes,

THE OLDIE – April 2015

ELISABETH LUARD

ELISABETH LUARD EASTER FEAST

when the base of the rice may (or may not) have formed a crisp crust. Tip the rice out onto a warm plate, loosening the crust so it falls on the top. If your rice lacks crust, no matter – practice makes perfect. Serve with smoked salmon or gravlax. Leg of lamb cooked mechouia-style Lamb roasted slowly with Persian spicing makes the perfect Easter feast. The dryspice rubbing mix works well on chicken, burgers and kebabs. Leftovers make the best shepherd’s pie you’ll ever taste. Serves 8 for Easter lunch Leg of lamb (about 2.5k/5lbs) 2 tbsp softened butter 2 tbsp each ground coriander, ground cumin, cumin seeds 2 tsp paprika 1 tsp each cayenne pepper and thyme 4 garlic cloves, skinned and crushed 1 tsp crushed sea salt Freshly crushed black peppercorns Dipping salt to serve 2 tbsp cumin seeds 2 tsp crushed sea salt Pinch ground cinnamon Preheat the oven to 150C/300F/Gas2. Line a large roasting tin with non-stick baking paper. Make deep incisions in the lamb. Mash the butter with the dry spices, thyme and garlic and rub it all over the meat, pushing it into the incisions. Roast the lamb for 5 hours, basting regularly, till the lamb is nearly falling off the bone. Remove from the oven, cover with clingfilm and leave to rest for 15 minutes or so. Meanwhile, toast the cumin seeds in a dry pan over a medium-high heat till they release their fragrance, then tip them into a mortar and grind to a powder. Mix with the salt and cinnamon and transfer to a small bowl. Serve the lamb with the dipping salt on the side, accompanied by potatoes roasted with cumin and turmeric.

R E S TA U R A N T S JAMES PEMBROKe

Wild Rabbit, Kingham, Oxfordshire Spring, Somerset House, London WC2 ‘You’re in Hedgehog’, beamed the Barbadian receptionist, brandishing our room key. We had just arrived at the Wild Rabbit, the flagship of Lady Bamford’s Daylesford Organic fleet. The sat nav showed that we were in the heart of the Cotswolds, former home of muck-spreaders and moody mole-catchers, but it seemed to have dropped us in a Scandinavian colony of bleached linen, bleached floors and bleached children. Somewhere, there’s a driftwood millionaire laughing his head off, as he bangs together another wonky bench. The countryside has never been cleaner: only the most attractive locals were allowed in the bar; I believe the rest of the village is subject to a curfew during opening hours, and are only allowed time off ironing Lady B’s linen sheets between 2am and 6am. The rebranding of our countryside, which began at Babington House and Tresanton in the Nineties, is now complete. Vanished is the chintzy country hotel of yore with its sticky carpets, season-denying menus in Franglais, sweet trolleys, seedy saloon bar, electric fires and belligerent teenage staff, inexpertly wielding canteens of carrots and peas. The bar has a central fireplace open on both sides, which acts as a buttress against the pint-swillers. After we’d slurped our gin sours with the other new locals, home-workers and house husbands one and all, we headed for

the dining room. At its entrance, there was a sign up announcing ‘It’s all an illusion’. But the food and service certainly weren’t. Gorgeous staff (imported from Models One) with the most beautiful manners predicted our every need. Sweetbreads and crab and scallop ravioli were followed by venison and perfectly roasted cod. This was food to slow right down for. And the cheeseboard, fast becoming my litmus test for restaurants, could well have found its way into my bed. The next morning, my breakfast kippers were sloshed down with beetroot juice, in front of the wood-burning stove. Perfection has its good points. A few days later, our Scandimaniacal sat nav took us to Spring, Skye Gyngell’s new restaurant in Somerset House, which must have an underground tunnel to the Wild Rabbit, down which the hidden folk drag the bleached floorboards and pressed linen. This is no straight continuation of her time at Petersham Nurseries, where Ms Gyngell won a Michelin star, not least for having a name that can only be the result of that game in which you create your Hollywood starlet name by combining your first pet’s name with the name of the first street you lived in (mine is Victoria Porchester). The menu and restaurant have an elegance of their own, only dented by the man at the table next to us, who spent the entire dinner on his dazzling iPhone 6. It was the size of a small telly. Why aren’t they made to stand outside with the smokers? Nothing could impair the strength of Skye’s flavours. Every ingredient dances on the plate; the salad starter of celeriac with toasted walnuts, chickweed and radicchio was practically a Broadway chorus line. Her vegetables, too often secondclass citizens in their new life as ’sides’, would have made for a perfect lunch on their own, and she should be given a peerage for her slow-cooked pork shoulder. Think what fun she could have choosing the town for her full title. Baroness Gyngell of … suggestions on a postcard, please. l Wild Rabbit, Church St, Kingham, Oxfordshire; 01608 658389. Double rooms from £135 per night; £60 a head for three courses and wine. l Spring, Somerset House, Lancaster Place, Strand, London WC2; 020 3011 0115; £80 a head for three courses and wine.

WINE

BILL KNOTT chardonnay returns When I used to rattle pans for a living, many years ago, one cupboard in my kitchen was dedicated to alcohol. There was a bottle of calvados, handy for Normandy-inspired dishes with pork or boudin noir; Noilly Prat vermouth, a splash of which went into fish sauces, as – occasionally – did a slug of Pernod or Ricard; marsala, for a Sicilian recipe of scaloppine of pork with onions; and bottles of both red and white wine, for all kinds of other dishes. Beer, cider, brandy and whisky could be drafted into service as necessary; but not all the contents of this battalion of bottles, I admit, ended up in the sauce. Perversely, the most important rule when cooking with alcohol is to boil away the alcohol, which always seems a shame. The idea is to leave behind the essence of the drink’s flavour, rather than its potency: should you have a big hunk of beef or venison to marinate for a couple of days in red wine (for a daube, perhaps), it is worth boiling away the alcohol before you start, to avoid the meat soaking up raw wine and leaving an unattractively strong, winey taste in the finished dish. Another oft-quoted precept counsels against cooking with anything you would not happily drink yourself... but

not invariably: I remember the calvados being pretty rough before it was tamed with cream and mustard. And your boeuf bourguignon will be only marginally improved by sacrificing a decent vintage of Gevrey-Chambertin instead of a basic Pinot Noir; indeed, the eponymous Burgundian peasant woman would no doubt use whatever table wine was to hand, quite possibly Beaujolais. Bright, fruity reds and dry, unoaked whites are usually the best wines for the pot, although I will often pour in a glass or two of whatever happens to be open, drinking the remainder as a time-honoured ‘cook’s perk’. Alcohol has only a fleeting role in savoury dishes, but puddings are allowed to be boozy. Sherry trifle, of course, or my favourite dinner party pudding cheat: decent-quality vanilla ice cream, a generous splash of Pedro Ximénez sherry, fresh fruit (raspberries are especially good) and crumbled all-butter shortbread. And the same marsala that is burned off in the sauce for scaloppine is used in its natural state for both tiramisu and zabaglione, so it definitely merits a place in your kitchen cupboard; happily, this month’s mixed case from Waitrose includes a bottle of this versatile stuff, a medium-dry version that is lovely to sip chilled with cheese and nuts, as well as to flavour sauces and puddings. Thanks to its sherry-like method of production – it is deliberately oxidised and aged in oak barrels for five years – it will keep for several weeks in the fridge, although I doubt it will get the chance.

This month’s mixed case from waitrosecellar.com The offer comprises a bottle of the first wine, a half-bottle of the second and two bottles each of the remainder

RRP: £132.20; offer price £102.72; saving £29.48 Marsala Superiore Secco NV, Vito Curatolo Arini, Sicily, RRP £11.29 Nutty, figgy, delicious: don’t waste it all in the tiramisu. Seriously Peachy Pacherenc du Vic Bilh NV, France, RRP £10.99 (37.5 cl) Sweet but beautifully balanced pudding wine. Viña Esmeralda, Torres, Catalunya, Spain 2013, RRP £8.49 Dry but flowery white: drink it on the first day of spring. Clos de los Siete, Michel Rolland, Mendoza, Argentina 2011, RRP £15.00 Smooth, gutsy red from the benignly ubiquitous M. Rolland.

Journey’s End ‘Sir Lowry’ Cabernet Sauvignon, Stellenbosch, South Africa 2012, RRP £14.99 The best SA red I’ve tasted in ages: complex and meaty. Waitrose Soave Classico, Italy 2013, RRP £7.49 A splash in the sauce and the rest for the chef: easy-quaffing white. ‘Vendanges Nocturnes’ Viognier, Laurent Miquel, Sud de France 2013, RRP £8.99 ‘Vendanges Nocturnes\ Viognier, Laurent Miquel, Sud de France 2013, RRP £8.99.

How to Order

Order online at www.waitrosecellar.com (enter ‘Oldie issue 320’ in search box). Or call 0800 188 881 (quoting ‘Oldie issue 320’). Lines open Monday–Sunday. Standard delivery is free to nearly all UK postcodes. You can now also pick up your Waitrose Cellar order from you local Waitrose using click & collect.

Offer closes 30th March 2015

April 2015 – THE OLDIE 73

MOTORING ALAN JUDD BABY BENTLEY

A hazard of motoring correspondency is that you are invited to car launches and put up in hotels that spoil you for anything else. You may also be confronted with the kind of technological assault course that, a couple of years ago in Munich’s palatial Bayerischer Hof, left me naked before a plate-glass window with electric curtains I couldn’t close, lights I couldn’t turn off and a television that kept demanding money for a porn channel I didn’t want. The car, by comparison, was simplicity itself. Actually, it was highly complex beneath the skin but, being a Bentley, was too well mannered to show it. It was the latest version of their 2.3 tonne ‘baby’, the two-door Continental Speed. VW, Bentley’s owners since 1998, have proved good stewards, imposing manufacturing standards that mean their products – still made at Crewe – are more reliable than ever. Prototypes are left in deserts or on icecaps to see whether veneers peel, glues melt, leather warps or windscreens crack. This particular model was subjected to bench tests of 4,000 hours at full throttle, along with gearbox, suspension and aerodynamic adjustments to make it safe at very high speeds. That’s necessary because the 6-litre W12 engine offers 616 horsepower, 590 lb-ft torque and a top speed of 205mph – at least. Bentley is famously conservative in its published figures and the 21-inch Pirelli tyres are rated to 218mph. The physics of making a car go that fast are awesome: every second at 200mph you’re putting 4,000 litres of air through the radiator and using eighty per cent of your energy just to push the rest of the air away, which means that every extra mph requires an exponential increase in power. You have to remember The two-door Bentley Continental Speed

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to stop, too, and the expensive carbon ceramic brakes, an option guaranteed for the lifetime of the car, were reassuringly willing, with no fade. Since launch in 2003, the Continental has proved a marque-saving brand for Bentley, selling more than 26,000 in its first decade to a wider, younger and more female market demographic. Seventy-nine per cent of these buyers were new to the brand, including – at first – Manchester United players and their Wags. Too heavy to be a true sports car, it is a very fast grand tourer with a sumptuous yet uncluttered interior that cossets and comforts you, and – importantly – beautifully finished switches and dials that everyone can understand. Unlike some other supercars, it can be used as an everyday car, as reliable and unruffled in town as at speed. It’s attractive but not quite beautiful. The rear – usually the most difficult bit to get right – has been softened since the early editions but it still bulks large. In profile, though, those muscular rear haunches convey an alluring impression of contained power, a big cat waiting to spring. But it looks – and is – wellbehaved, with nothing flash. If anything, it’s slightly understated. It has long been my ambition to drive at 200mph but the autobahn between Munich and the tourist-thronged Führer’s lair at Berchtesgaden (curious choice for a German-owned car company) was a little crowded, so we crawled along in our diamond-quilted seats at a modest 140mph. At that speed it’s uncannily quiet and the faster you go the more solidly planted it feels. Who buys them? Mostly foreigners – Americans, Russians and Chinese, with new dealerships opened last year in Mexico, Canada and Australia – but we austerity-ridden Brits can still manage the odd ten per cent annual increase. Latest price is £156,700, a nanosecond’s worth of government borrowing. If it’s all right for them, it must be all right for us. Mustn’t it?

HOME FRONT ALICE PITMAN my screen debut

THERE is a famous Charles Addams New Yorker cartoon depicting roaring caged lions about to be released onto the set of a Roman colosseum. Behind the scenes, a movie extra dressed as a Christian slave looks up from reading and enquires of his similarly attired colleagues, ‘Holy smoke, have you guys seen this script?’ Those words came into my head when I read my son Fred’s first short film screenplay (starring the Home Fronts). Fred had arrived back from university clutching a copy of Truffaut’s book on Alfred Hitchcock and announcing he wanted to be a director. He pestered Mr Home Front to bring back a camera from work and they both disappeared to his bedroom for many hours. Eventually they emerged – looking a bit shifty – with a ten-page treatment. Fred bossily informed us that it would feature the whole family (including Lupin the dog) and that he would film and direct. The synopsis of this modern gothic suburban horror is as follows: Man (played with disconcerting enthusiasm by Mr Home Front) comes home on Christmas Eve and murders his wife (me). The End. Fred smiled uncertainly as I read it, then said: ‘So are you all right with that then, Mummy?’ The script directions were uncomfortably close to home (The Woman helps herself to another large glass of wine); the dialogue all too familiar (Woman to Man: You make me sick. I’m going to bed). So I decided to channel my inner Bette Davis to invest the role with an additional layer of pathos. Fred turned out to be quite a formidable director, unafraid to confront both parents when he felt we were over-acting (which seemed to be the entire time). As Mr HF and I kept trying to outdo each other like a couple of spiteful old hams in rep, Fred would stop filming, cry ‘Cut!’; then, after a devastating pause: ‘You’re telling him what you did with your day, not delivering the Gettysburg Address.’ Then there was the matter of the murder weapon. Mr Home Front favoured a hatchet. I pointed out that not only was this disturbing and extremely unpleasant, it was too unsubtle. People are sick of blood and gore, I told him.

SPORT jim white RACING

Wendy Hiller and Roger Livesey in I Know Where I’m Going

Stick to subtlety and suggestion. Besides, where were we going to get such a weapon from – the neighbours? (‘Oh hello Steve, have you got a hatchet I can borrow? I’m going to murder my wife and my son is going to film it.’) The perfect murder weapon, I suggested, was the dog’s slip lead. A seemingly innocuous object which works on the same principle as a hangman’s noose. I also stipulated that there should be no depiction of Mr Home Front actually carrying out the deed (a faint possibility fiction and reality could become blurred). No, I said, the camera should merely pan in on Mr HF, alone in the hallway late at night, practising the strangulation on his wrist. Or even better, simply focus on the murderer’s face as he stares thoughtfully at Lupin’s lead hanging from the door. Father and son conferred in lowered voices for some moments before reluctantly agreeing to change the hatchet to the dog’s lead. We then wondered what music should be used for the soundtrack. The final decision rested with Fred, who opted for Peggy Lee’s ‘Christmas Waltz’, to be played over shots of the neighbour’s festive lights (we didn’t have any). When filming was over, I reflected how much nicer to have played Wendy Hiller’s part in a remake of I Know Where I’m Going!, rather than Woman (Victim) in a five-minute horror film. As for Mr HF, I am slightly concerned about his resemblance to Alfred Hitchcock. When I asked whether my screen death by dog’s lead had given him ideas, he replied in his best Bermondsey accent, ‘It’s only a movie, Ingrid.’ The film is currently being edited before its screen debut on YouTube. If this column fails to appear in the next issue can someone call the police?

In March there is no better place to be than at the Cheltenham racecourse as the Festival gets under way. There is no sporting venue as bracing, as stirring, as romantic. Nowhere else are you confronted by the giddying view from the main stand across to the snowcapped hills beyond. Nowhere else can you savour the sight of twenty steaming thoroughbreds charging up a precipitous slope spurred on by the guttural roar of 50,000 voices. Nowhere else can you share the lavatories with an inebriated race-goer dressed as St Patrick, struggling to find the appropriate gap in his ecclesiastical robes. Even if you don’t have any affection for racing and wouldn’t know a handicapper’s weight if it struck you round the head, Cheltenham represents the finest people-watching in world sport. Redfaced squires in pastel-shaded tweeds, ladies beneath hats the circumference of a satellite dish, over-excited Irishmen in once-a-year suits way too thin to protect against the razor-wire wind blowing across the Cotswolds: the entire gathering appears to have been scooped from the pages of P G Wodehouse. Here, too, in the tented shopping village that blooms on the course, you will find the finest market of goods no rational person would ever need. Dozens of stalls filled with specialist hunting gear, dizzyingly pricey artwork and home furnishings at eye-watering prices jostle in the effort to relieve the racegoer of their winnings. Every year there must be conversations across the land

‘Our next speaker asks the question “Is anything certain?’’ ’

involving those returning from a good day at Cheltenham. ‘Darling, I won big on the Champion Hurdle.’ ‘And what did you buy this time?’ ‘Just an eight thousand quid rocking horse.’ Which brings us to the drink. I once went to the Festival with someone who had recently declared himself an alcoholic. This was his first outing since forswearing the booze and as we walked onto the course, every hint of blood drained from his face. Here he was battling temptation, confronted by a Guinness outlet every ten yards, by stalls dispensing champagne on tap, by 50,000 people seemingly united in their determination to vacate planet sensible. For him, this wasn’t a race meeting. It was the fourth circle of hell. He went home immediately. He thus missed the grandest day out known to man. And this year it will be even more significant. This year there will be a sense of eulogy in the air. Because this year will be the last opportunity to see A P McCoy belting up that hill. The greatest jockey who ever lived has been racing at Cheltenham for so long you would be forgiven for thinking his green- and gold-hooped riding silks were as much a part of the furniture as the St Patrick fancy dress. He has won 36 times at the Festival, including the Gold Cup twice and the Champion Hurdle three times. But after this year no more will he be persuading one-and-a-half tons of horse flesh to leap over those 15ft fences, no more will he be risking a body that has been battered in tumble and pile-up, no more will he be obliged to spend his down-time in the sauna, trying to shed recalcitrant pounds. And no more will we race-goers share the privilege of watching a true sporting giant in action. For a man with his love of competition, a life without the pain, the grind and the graft that precedes victory, will be an odd thing. Indeed there are those who wonder how a man so addicted to triumph will cope without the adrenaline rush of coming up the Cheltenham hill in first place. I have encouraging news for him. Next year he should simply take himself to the other side of the rail and watch it all unfold from the punter’s point of view, appreciate that for the spectator, too, there is nowhere as exciting as this to be in March. As long as you haven’t recently taken the pledge, that is. April 2015 – THE OLDIE 75

The Do c tor ’s surgery

Make friends and save lives A good chat with a patient can lead to early diagnosis, says Tom Stuttaford The greater the difficulty in making an appointment to consult a GP, the greater the likelihood that there will be an unhappy outcome for any patient unfortunate enough to have a problem in which early diagnosis is essential. NHS policies and regulations have reduced the scope of a GP consultation to such a basic level that young doctors are spurning life in general practice, yet the NHS has launched a campaign to persuade patients to visit their doctor if they are suffering from what appear to be trivial but persistent symptoms. Over the past few years patients who have followed this path have been dismissed as ‘the worried well’ or the ‘doctor’s time wasters’. In some practices patients are discouraged from discussing more that one clinical sign or symptom at a time – a

Persuade them to relax and the conversation will provide the clue to what’s really worrying them disgraceful tendency that disregards the formerly accepted belief that many patients will present a simple, everyday problem to the doctor as the alleged reason for their visit and conceal the real anxiety until the consultation is well under way. The traditional teaching was that an important foundation of the art of diagnosis was to get the patient talking. Once talking it didn’t matter much if he or she only opened up by discussing the potato harvest or their relationship with their in-laws. Persuade them to relax and chatter and sooner or later the conversation would provide the clues to what was really worrying them. Time-consuming but life-saving. Nevertheless, it is good news that doctors are going to be taught that if we are to improve our cancer survival figures to anything like those achieved by other Western countries patients will have to have the confidence in their doc-

Measuring blood pressure is a useful procedure – but not sufficient on its own

tors to discuss with them the warning symptoms and signs of a cancer that are initially too easily dismissed as being unimportant and inconsequential. Persistent heartburn may be no more than something induced by dietary indiscretion and an expanding waistline but it could be the first sign of an oesophageal tumour, a cancer that if it isn’t diagnosed early has a poor outlook. To wait until a patient has noticed that the food ‘is sticking on the way down’ may be, if the cause is a malignancy, to wait too long. Any difficulty in swallowing needs investigation and happy is the person who finds that there is a simple if tiresome non-life-threatening explanation for it. The NHS and Cancer Research UK have drawn attention to the other redflag warning signs, including a change

‘I tell myself it’s the journey not the destination’

in the appearance of a mole. There are now clinics that will take photographs of every mole a patient has so that they may be compared year by year. Even though diagnostic methods of detecting malignant moles have improved enormously and there is increased awareness of the factors that induce melanomas (malignant moles), I was always surprised by the number that were missed. Other warning signs and symptoms that are becoming better known are persistent changes in bowel habit and any rectal bleeding; unexplained weight loss, trouble or bleeding when urinating and of course a cough that does not disappear once the flu or cold is no more than a memory – weeks rather than months. Any tendency the NHS and the Treasury have to curtail investigations and early intervention on the grounds that a tumour is likely to be of low malignancy so can be watched for a time, and that watchful waiting is cheaper for the NHS and less distressing for the patient, should also be subjected to critical analysis. The first step to improve diagnosis in this country is to get patients into the surgery and more doctors into general practice. A scarcity of GPs also means that many of the basic simple tests, such as blood pressure estimation, blood taking or a routine review, are being done by nurses. They may be terrific at carrying out these tests, but their medical education and experience will not be great beyond the types of procedures connected with asthma, diabetes or high blood pressure. A patient’s throwaway line during a general, casual conversation can be a clue to some quite different problem from which they may be suffering, with the result that it may be missed and with it the opportunity of an early diagnosis. Using nurses may be cheaper than using doctors for routine surveillance but what is the cost in lives lost? April 2015 – THE OLDIE 77

Bird of the Month

The lapwing JOHN McEWEN on the haunting harbinger of spring

Illustrated by CARRY AKROYD No bird captures the zest of spring so flamboyantly as the lapwing (Vanellus – little fan – vanellus), when the males sculpt the air on humming wings with an ecstatic, tumbling display over the nesting grounds, whether new-sown fields or upland pasture and moorland, uttering that thin, wheezy call by day and night, perhaps best mimicked by its east Scottish name, ‘peasiwheep’. ‘Lapwing’ describes its normal flight, as it flops along on those fan-shaped wings, their black and white contrasts lending a flicker to a travelling flock. Yet one derivation is from an Anglo-Saxon word that does not describe the flight, but rather the long, black, curving crest, the bird’s most singular feature. In flight, lapwings look black and white, but close up the secondary name of green plover does scant justice to the olive mantle and wing coverts, shot through with emerald, iridescent bronze, purple and pink, and apricot tail coverts. The collective noun for lapwings is a ‘deceit’. The ‘false lapwynge, ful of treachery’ wrote Chaucer in ‘The Parlement of Foules’. And Shakespeare’s womanising Lucio boasts in Measure for Measure: …’tis my familiar sin With maids to seem the Lapwing, and to jest, Tongue far from heart… The reputation unfairly comes from the bird’s defence of its young, when it lures away a predator by hirpling off, dragging a wing to appear wounded and therefore easy prey. The chicks precociously run at birth and Ben Jonson (The Staple of News) described rash people as ‘lapwings with a shell upon their heads’. Lapwings were prized for their meat and eggs. Hunting for the eggs was customary until forty years ago; the clutch was left if it pointed inwards, meaning incubation. More refined in every sense than black-headed gulls’ eggs and similarly camouflaged to resemble stones, they can still be collected on licence until

15th April – but not for sale. As for the meat, it is a protected bird. This reflects a grave fall in numbers – a two-thirds decline since 1970. Lapwings remain our most familiar and widespread breeding wader but have ceased to nest in most of south-west England, west Wales and the west of mainland Scotland, while in Ireland the number has halved. Nesting pairs remain most numerous in northwest England, the Outer Hebrides, Orkney and Shetland. Modern farming, notably autumn sowing, appears the principal cause of this headlong decline. Winter sees lapwings congregate in flocks, the numbers bolstered, subject to the weather, by influxes from the

Continent. Sometimes winter flocks are peppered with golden plover, which, grounded, look contrastingly brown and thrush-like. In recent years lapwings have shown a preference for wintering on or near Britain’s eastern estuaries, and rooftop flocks can now be seen in towns. Lapwings are haunting. From faraway Samoa R L Stevenson remembered them, in his poem ‘To S R Crockett’: Be it granted me to behold you again in dying, Hills of home! And to hear again the call; Hear about the graves of the martyrs the peewees crying, And hear no more at all. April 2015 – THE OLDIE 79

TRAVEL

Escape to China With her daughter studying in Wuhan for a year, Deborah MaBY decided to forgo the presents and cooking and spend Christmas in the People’s Republic In 1956, WHEN I was two, my father was posted to Peking, where we lived for the next three years. Family lore has it that by the time we left I spoke fluent Chinese – but forgot every word during the six-week journey home by ship from Hong Kong. Fifty-eight years later, my younger daughter is studying Chinese in a city called Wuhan, a couple of hundred miles inland from Shanghai, and my partner and I decided to use the chance to escape the usual Christmas ordeal by paying her a visit, tacking on a few days in Beijing at the beginning and four in Shanghai at the end. We flew into Beijing wearing fur-lined boots and ski jackets, having been prewarned by the guidebook that the weather in December would be ‘laceratingly cold’. Our hotel, Courtyard 7, recommended by a friend, couldn’t have been better: comfortable, luxurious even, but not at all Westernised, with rooms arranged in the traditional north Chinese manner around

THE OLDIE – April 2015

two inner courtyards. It was also just off a buzzing hutong (alley) full of shops and restaurants. We did the usual Beijing things: the Forbidden City, bitingly cold but with the advantage of being almost devoid of tourists; Tiananmen Square and the National Museum of China the following day and, on the last, the highlight, a 10km hike along the Great Wall arranged through a backpacker hostel in the hutong. We were the oldest by at least thirty years but just about fit enough to keep up, although my legs ached for days afterwards as it is perilously steep in places and there was no time for loitering. The following day we took the highspeed train to Wuhan, where my daughter met us. She and her friends use cabs all the time as they’re so cheap and plentiful. The driving in China is terrifying but she assured us that a taxi is the safest car to be in. Being a pedestrian is frightening

enough: scooters and buses don’t have to stop at red and don’t feel the need to do so, even if there is a throng of people crossing the road. All the scooters are electric so you don’t hear them – until they hoot very loudly just behind you, quite often on the pavement. Taxi drivers consider it a huge insult if you put a seatbelt on and will lean across angrily and unclip it. My daughter says what she loves most about the Chinese is their utter shamelessness. They cut their nails on the bus, they march into restaurants, sit down and take out their own food, and in the Wuhan Ikea she found them curled up on the sofas and even asleep in the beds. That first evening we took her and a group of her friends, all international students studying Chinese, out for dinner. They all pick up bits of work, too: my daughter teaches English at an afterschool club, and two of the girls were off the following day to do some modelling

ALAMY

TR AVEL

Above: the Great Wall; far left: the Old China Hand Reading Room in Shanghai; left, street food in Wuhan

in a department store. They eat lunch in a tiny restaurant where you can get delicious and filling fried and steamed dumplings for about a pound a head. In the evenings they quite often go to a Muslim restaurant of which there are several in every city, run by the Uigher minority: big plates of steaming noodles, meat and vegetables in different guises, again for about a pound a head. A man stands in the window at a formica table making the noodles by hand out of a massive lump of dough, while an old couple cook everything at a tiny stove curtained off in a corner of the room. Wuhan is not a city graced by many tourists and you can see why. It is certainly not pretty, despite being on the Yangtze, and is very polluted, enveloped in a permanent grey haze from a massive steelworks. It has a couple of tourist attractions: the Yellow Crane Tower,

set in lovely gardens, and the 1911 museum, supposedly commemorating the bourgeois revolution of that year, which emanated from Wuhan itself, though mainly marking Mao’s visit in 1923. It also has a wonderful snack-food street called Hubu Alley, where we ate two Wuhan specialities, a type of sticky rice pancake and Re Gan Mian, hot-dry noodles with peanut sauce. From Wuhan we took the train to Shanghai, which feels very European, and could not be more different from Beijing. We stayed very close to the Bund, in the historic Astor House Hotel, opened in the mid-19th century, very colonial feeling, all dark polished wood and grand, highceilinged rooms redolent of its treaty port heyday. The French concession area of Shanghai feels almost Parisian, with wide boulevards planted with plane trees. Highlights were the Old China Hand Reading

Room, where you can sit within booklined walls drinking jasmine tea leafing through volumes published by the Old China Hand Press, and the former home of Zhou Enlai in a lovely Arts and Crafts villa. Not very far away is the old Chinese City – and here you are back in Beijing, with narrow, crowded alleyways full of bicycles transporting all manner of things from copper wire to cardboard packaging, and food stalls everywhere. A framed black-and-white photograph on the landing outside our hotel room showed a middle-aged European man with a handlebar moustache being transported by rickshaw along the Nanjing Road in the 1930s – roughly the same time and place that my father was first in China. The Bund, with its skyscraper skyline, is testimony to the city’s transformation but the old is still there in spirit, alongside the new.

April 2015 – THE OLDIE 81

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Cairo without the crowds There has never been a better time to visit the Egyptian sights, says Mark Mason

Deserted desert: the Pyramids are all yours as tourist numbers have fallen

‘Four years, no business,’ comes the repeated comment from the man leading my camel towards the Pyramids. ‘Four years, no business.’ It’s a new weapon in his armoury of tip-inducing lines, but it also happens to be true – since the 2011 revolution which overthrew President Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s tourist trade has collapsed. ‘It has been so quiet,’ says Hala, my guide to Cairo. ‘People have stayed away because of all the political upheavals.’ A reminder of those ‘upheavals’ is there as she accompanies me to the city’s legendary museum: right next door is Mubarak’s old party HQ, the huge building now a burned-out shell. The memento-hawkers outside the museum rival Camel Man in their persistence, though any who overdo it receive a mumbled instruction from Hala. I don’t speak Arabic, but I’d lay money on it that one of the words is ‘off’. The benefit for those who do visit Egypt at the moment is that the famous sights are so much less crowded. My experience of the Cairo Museum ten years ago made the January sales at Dixons look dignified and restrained, but this time there’s elbow room, indeed

THE OLDIE – April 2015

some ‘stretch your arms out full length’ room. Hala shows me the mummies, explaining that the word derives from ‘mamia’, the Persian for tar: the substance was used in the mummification process. (Another element was the insertion into the nostril of a small hook to mash up and withdraw the brain.) The notice next to one body explains that it is ‘an obese female with bad teeth who died between the ages of 45 and 60’. The woman in question became queen. In this country she’d have become the subject of a Channel 5 documentary. Egyptian statues, Hala explains, always had their ears sticking out to show the importance of listening to the pharaoh. The ruler who enjoyed the longest reign was Pepi II – having inherited the crown at six, he lived to be 100. We see walking sticks whose curved handles depicted the owner’s enemy so he could crush them in his grip, while the base bore the owner’s symbol so he could leave his mark wherever he walked. Perhaps modern manufacturers are missing a trick here. The museum is to be replaced by a larger one, although no one knows when – after 26 years of construction

work it’s still nowhere near finished. This makes it even more astounding that the Great Pyramid took just twenty years to build. As we stand in its shadow, admiring the two-ton blocks of stone at its apex (the ones at the bottom weigh fifteen), I am informed that the pyramid shape was chosen because it mimics the sun’s rays as they’re dispersed by a cloud. The rulers wanted to join the sun god in the afterlife, so built their tombs accordingly. My hotel in Cairo was the Mena House, an 1869 gem right next door to the Pyramids. President Anwar Sadat used it for his 1977 peace conference with Israel, while his wife hosted a reception for her charity there, publicising it by flying in Frank Sinatra to sing ‘Strangers on the Nile’. Her successor as First Lady, Suzanne Mubarak, also visited, and as guests were not allowed to leave the room once she’d entered it the evening saw bladders tested to the limit. The Mena House puts on a reassuring display of security, as does everywhere else in the city, our driver having to stop at checkpoints near the airport, the museum, the hotel and so on. This combined with the increased space at the sights means that now is a great time to visit Egypt – visitor numbers are on the way up again, so you might not have the Sphinx to yourself for much longer. Cairo’s streets, meanwhile, are as packed as they always were, the traffic entertainingly chaotic. At first you think the driving is terrible, but then you realise that actually it’s brilliant: the skill with which everyone leaves their braking until the very last millisecond would put Lewis Hamilton to shame. The motto here, I learn, is ‘Good brakes, good horn, good luck’. l Mark Mason went to Cairo courtesy of Abercrombie & Kent, which offers threenight breaks in Cairo starting at £1,035pp, including flights, private transfers, a deluxe garden room at the Mena House hotel and two days with a guide (www.abercrombiekent.co.uk).

Come on

reader trip to

with Simon Courtauld

Spain: the glories of Castile Thursday 3rd September to Thursday 10th September 2015

lim

For our first five days we will be based at the magnificent parador in Avila (www.paradoresofspain.com), which is set in the former Piedras Albas Palace, backing onto the city’s famous medieval walls. From there we will visit Segovia, Toledo, Salamanca, Valladolid and El Escorial, the former royal palace. Then we will

transfer back to central Madrid for two nights to stay at the Hotel Wellington, which has its own swimming pool. itinerary Thursday 3rd September 12.15pm depart Gatwick on easyJet; arrive Madrid at 3.45pm. Transfer (75 mins)

SPACES STILL AVAILABLE ON THESE 2015 OLDIE TRIPS

The trip is priced at £1,795 per person including everything apart from flights and predinner drinks. THERE ARE NO SINGLE SUPPLEMENTS. TO BOOK: email KATHERINE at reservations@theoldie.co.uk with your credit card details, We will need a deposit of £750 per person at the time of booking, with the balance due three months before the trip

N We have been asked about travel insurance so many times that we have decided to team up with International Travel and Healthcare to offer a relevant and comprehensive travel insurance for our readers. There are always conditions with insurance but we hope this will help those of you who find there are too many obstacles. We have done our best to overcome three of them:

1. Specialist cover for travellers with extensive pre-existing medical conditions, subject to acceptance following a medical screening 2. No upper age limit on single trips 3. Travellers under 75 years are covered to do up to three bungee jumps and pay no extra premium The Policy has an excess applicable to some sections, max £65, which you can waive for a small additional premium, leaving you with no costs if you need to make a claim.

visit www.theoldie.co.uk/travelinsurance Call: 0800 848 8833 or 01689 892 221 The Oldie Travel Insurance is a trading name of Oldie Publications Limited with Co Reg No. 02649845. An Appointed Representative of International Travel and Healthcare Limited. Registered Office: c/o Mackrell Turner Garrett, Savoy Hill House, Savoy Hill, London. WC2R 0BU. The Oldie Travel Insurance is managed and administered by International Travel and Healthcare Limited. International Travel and Healthcare Limited are authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (No. 433367).

THE OLDIE – April 2015

ues ts Friday 4th September - Segovia Saturday 5th September - Toledo Sunday 6th September - Salamanca Monday 7th September - Valladolid Tuesday 8th September - Madrid Wednesday 9th September - Madrid Thursday 10th September 11.35am depart Madrid; arrive Gatwick at 1pm.

HOW TO BOOK: Call 01225 427311

6th–13th June – The Gardens of the Côte d’Azur with David Wheeler 13th–17th July – Bruges and Waterloo with Huon Mallalieu 30th September–7th October – Normandy and Agincourt with Robert Fox and Huon Mallalieu Visit: www.theoldie.co.uk/oldie-reader-tours

20 Gited to

TR AVEL TIPS

Dolphins and hot cross buns Into the deep in Hong Kong

Ecotourism and Hong Kong are an unlikely combination. Although the outlying islands are green and lush and home to some spectacular beaches and walking trails, people don’t tend to think of Hong Kong as a ‘getting back to nature’ kind of place. And yet it is here, right in the middle of one of the world’s busiest ports, that you can find the city’s prime ecotourism attraction. Endangered but tenacious in the face of the region’s rampant development, the Chinese white dolphin lives in the waters of the Pearl River Delta. There are thought to be about 100 dolphins in Hong Kong waters, where they spend much of their time chasing fishing boats, dodging container ships and ferries, and negotiating all manner of land reclamation projects. The city’s airport and the much-vaunted bridge from Hong Kong to Macau cut right through their habitat. From the dolphins’ point of view, one can’t help but think the neighbourhood has gone downhill. Hong Kong Dolphin Watch organises trips to see the dolphins in the waters off north Lantau. Such trips can be exhilarating experiences. Far from the smog that intermittently clogs the city, it is possible to see the dolphins surge through the water, their skins glowing a rosy pink. The colour is thought to arise from blood being flushed to the outer layers of the skin as they exert themselves in the water. I like to think they were blushing from all the attention they were receiving, as cameras clicked and children clapped their hands. The dolphins may be few in number, but they know how to work a crowd. Paris Franz

Readers’ contributions wanted Send your travel tips or stories by post to Out and About, The Oldie, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG,or by email to editorial@theoldie.co.uk with ‘Out and About’ in the subject line. Maximum 300 words £50 paid for all contributions printed

Endangered but tenacious: the dolphin

An East End Easter

The Widow’s Son, an East End pub a spit’s throw from the River Lea, which curves into East India Docks, has a unique Good Friday tradition that dates back a century but may not survive the next decade. The story goes that on this site there used to be a cottage belonging to the eponymous widow who lived here with her sailor son. One Easter she baked him a bun for his return from the high seas, but the sailor drowned and the widow, refusing to give up hope, continued each year to offer a bun to his memory by sticking a fresh one to the rafters of her cottage. The Widow’s Son upholds the custom by inviting a sailor from the Royal Navy to toss a hot cross bun into a net slung across the beams. Although it is usually the youngest marine who performs the duty, last Good Friday it was Fitz, a constantly affable and long-serving seaman, stout as a pint glass and with forty years in the forces. He was given a fireman’s lift to the net,

and a jumbo-sized and dated hot cross bun was lobbed in to join 25 or so dusty precursors. ‘Touch ’em and you get a shower of ash’, a friend of the publican told me, referring to a fire that destroyed a good number of this crusty archive. Afterwards, Fitz downed a glass of dark rum while the karaoke machine was switched on and sailors from HMS President and HMS Edinburgh belted out a rendering of ‘Sailing’, accompanied by East End drinkers, pearly kings and queens and outsiders like myself, as trays of crab sticks, jellied eels and shots of spirits to toast the Queen wove in and out, and sandwiches, sausage rolls and enough hot cross buns to flatten Germany were delivered to the buffet table. But things are not well at The Widow’s Son. The ailing publican told me that two years remain on the lease, after which the new owner plans to make changes, putting a custom he described as ‘for the people’ under threat. It is difficult to imagine what improvements might be made to match a tradition as valuable as this, and which gathers a crowd so cheerfully and so cohesively. Deborah Nash

Don’t do it, PAL

If anyone is planning a trip to the Philippines, I cannot recommend the fifteenhour direct flight from London to Manila on Philippines Airlines (PAL, or ‘Plane Always Late’ as the locals say), which was launched last summer. It’s cheap but definitely not cheerful. The seats are worse than Ryanair sizewise and extremely uncomfortable for any oldie. As for the food, I wish I had brought my own. The breakfast ham came from an animal that possibly died of old age. Fortunately I had dental floss with me. And a magnifying glass would have been helpful to see the chicken at dinner. The worst food in my fifty years of flying. You get what you pay for but I think life is a bit too short to have to put up with this carrier. Robert Harland APRIL 2015 – THE OLDIE 85

Profitable Wonders

The grey squirrel by JAMES LE FANU The squirrel is so named in deference to its great glory, the most lavish and magnificent tail possessed by any furry quadruped; the precise etymology, derived from the Greek, being skia (shadow) and oura (tail) – that which makes a shade with its tail. And not just a sun shade, for the tail serves also as a warm blanket in cold and stormy weather, an aerial rudder when leaping from branch to branch and a parachute to soften its impact on landing. This multi-purpose appendage epitomises the versatility and adaptability by which the squirrel more successfully than any other creature has colonised our woods and the urban landscape of parks and gardens. The rhythms of its daily life are, by human standards, commendably well ordered and free of care. Rising at dawn, it devotes some time to grooming and buffing its tail before setting out in search of food. By the time most people sit down to breakfast squirrels have already had theirs and it is time to party. These ‘made arboreal kittens’, as they have been described, are motion incarnate, chasing each other round the trunks of trees in exhilarating games of tag, sprinting along their boughs, leaping through the air to land with astonishing precision on the slenderest of branches that one would scarcely suppose could bear their weight, ‘Each movement a ripple of sleek agility,’ as squirrel fancier Eugene Kinkead writes, ‘the whole an example of precise perfection.’ And then one by one they

‘Isn’t science wonderful – people will live forever soon’

slip back to their nest or hide-out for a well-deserved siesta, sleeping through the day before re-emerging in late afternoon for a further round of food and play. For tens of millions of years grey squirrels refined their arboreal skills in the Edenic playground of their natural home, the vast forest of deciduous beech, birch, maple and oak of North East America – which stretched without interruption for 1,000 miles down the Atlantic coast and inland for another 1,000 miles to the great Mississippi river. Through this soaring canopy of ancient trees stretching upwards for 400 feet or more – as high as a 40-storey building – a squirrel could, if it so wished, travel from present day New York to Chicago without once touching the ground. And beyond, for periodically, if inexplicably, tidal waves of squirrels ‘obeying some great and universal impulse’ would sweep through their timbered stronghold out onto the plain – as witnessed in 1811 by naturalist Charles Latrobe: ‘A vast multitude of squirrels pressing forward in their tens of thousands in a deep and sober phalanx… no obstacles seemed to check this extraordinary and concerted movement… ordinarily averse to water they take to it boldly, swimming across the broad Ohio river – though many are drowned in the attempt.’ In 1876 the grey squirrel made it across the Atlantic to begin its colonisa-

tion of Britain after a Mr Brocklehurst released an imported pair into the woods of his Cheshire estate. A survey fifty years later revealed their offspring had conquered an area of almost 10,000 square miles, driving their more timid indigenous red cousins almost to the point of extinction. There is no simple explanation for how the grey should in so short a time have become the most ubiquitous non-domesticated animal in Britain. Three factors however seem particularly relevant, starting with their effortless athleticism deriving from the synergistic action of their short powerful legs, the unique anatomical structure of their ankles – and that glorious tail. The squirrel is not a fast mover but more than makes up for this when evading potential predators by being a superlative dodger, deftly using its tail as a counter-balance, whipping it from one side to another. The same mechanism permits it to maintain its centre of gravity when bouncing along branches, while the technically difficult head-first descent down the trunk of a tree is facilitated by swivelling its ankles to an angle of 180 degrees, permitting it to hang vertically downwards secured by the sharp claws on its now backwardfacing feet. Next, the squirrel need never go hungry, for being blessed with an ironclad digestive tract it can eat virtually anything – not just every kind of nut and berry the forest might provide, but birds’ eggs, the bones of dead animals, lethal Amanita mushrooms and, notoriously, a garden full of recently planted (and often poisonous) flower bulbs. Then, the grey squirrel is determined, imaginative and clever – as any bird-lover who has tried to build a squirrel-proof feed dispenser knows only too well. The antipathy towards squirrels felt by the many victims of its predatory activities should, one might think, be tempered with respect for its talent for survival despite the destruction by human agency of that ‘ocean of woods’ of its original natural habitat. April 2015 – THE OLDIE

BOB WILSON

‘Who’s a pretty boy, then?’ 88

THE OLDIE – April 2015

Superby ways

Windows on a new world Microsoft has been listening to us, says Webster The power of The Oldie should never be underestimated. In December I wrote that Microsoft should accept that Windows 8 has been a horrible experience for many, even though, under the bonnet, it is safe and fast. I said that disgruntled customers were owed an apology but I felt they would settle for a free upgrade to Windows 10 when it’s released. Now oldie Bill Gates’s company has announced it will be doing exactly as I advised: for the first year of Windows 10’s life, Windows 7 and 8.1 users can have their upgrade for nothing. It’s not a small gesture: a new version of Windows 8.1 Pro costs £190. I’m glad they listened to me, but in truth it must have been an easy decision. The revenue cost to Microsoft will be modest and while its return on the cost of developing Windows 10 will be delayed a little, the goodwill generated will be priceless. More than half the PCs in the world run on Windows 7 or 8. In fact, Microsoft is currently making

Webster’s webwatch For Webster’s latest top tips, visit his blog at www.theoldie.co.uk http://election2015.ifs.org.uk With election confusion growing, this site offers some clarity from the Institute for Financial Studies, funded by the Nuffield Foundation. Serious analysis of what has happened to the public finances, public spending and more over the past five years, plus, upcoming, studies of the main parties’ claims and possible effects of their policies. www.lifehacker.co.uk Hints and tips to make the world a slightly easier place to manage. Opening a beer bottle with a spoon, how to prospect for gold. Worth browsing. I will happily try to solve your basic computer and internet problems. Go to www.webstersblog.co.uk/ask or email me at webster@theoldie.co.uk

some pretty solid moves to make us feel good about it. It has declared firmly that we are its customers, not its products; this is aimed at the likes of Google, which gives you a free service so that it can use what it knows about you to sell adverts. The new way of buying Microsoft software (Word, Excel and the like) by subscription is much cheaper and more efficient than the old way. It has also started serious legal action against some of the firms that ring you up and imply that they are from ‘Microsoft Support’ or similar. Windows 10 comes out later this year and while I would normally advise waiting for the second version before taking the plunge, Windows 10 is already being extensively tested by millions of enthusiasts, so when it is released, it will, effectively, already be the second version. The Start menu will return (it vanished in Windows 8), and there will be significantly enhanced security and privacy controls. There will be a new browser (called Spartan) to replace Internet Explorer; this may give Google’s Chrome a run for its money, especially as Chrome seems to be becoming more sluggish and inclined to crash. It will also be introducing Cortana, which it says is a ‘Personal Assistant’; it’s a system that is intended to be a single, unified way to search for anything on your computer or on the internet. In trials, that looks good, too. We do not yet know what sort of computing power you will need to run Windows 10. You should be all right if your computer runs Windows 8.1 without difficulty, but if your machine is a very elderly Windows 7, it might struggle. If Windows 10 works as well as some are predicting, Microsoft will hang on to enormous numbers of users and Mr Gates’s wallet will continue to fill. What does this mean for us? Mainly, that Microsoft is moving heaven and earth to keep us as customers. More practically, it means there is no need to delay buying a new Windows computer because you want to wait for Windows 10. It also confirms that The Oldie’s influence is wide and its power boundless, just as we thought.

LEARN LATIN LESSON 1 Welcome to those who would like to acquire a good grasp of Latin. To encourage you: if you do what I am inviting you to do in what follows, you will already know more Latin than almost anyone today who has studied Latin for several years at school and even passed public examinations. I shall explain in future articles how this extraordinary situation has come about. Here are the first two facts you need to know. 1. Nouns (‘a noun is the name of a person, place or thing’ – Gwynne’s Latin) and verbs (‘a verb is a doing or being word’– ibid) are words with variable endings. These endings indicate how the words are being used in any particular sentence. In Latin a noun normally has twelve endings, some of them overlapping, and a verb can have about two hundred different endings, by contrast with a typical English verb which has four (as in love, loves, loved and loving). 2. Because what a word is doing in its sentence tends to be easily identifiable by its ending, word order is less important in Latin than in English; but an important general rule is that a verb goes at the end of its sentence, rather than in the middle as in English. Nouns are divided into five groups called declensions, each declension having similar endings. Similarly, verbs are divided into four groups called conjugations. Your first task is to learn by heart the firstdeclension noun mensa (= a table) and the present tense of the first conjugation verb amo (= I love). You will find these at www.theoldie. co.uk/learn-latin or you will need to buy a copy of Kennedy’s Revised Latin Primer or Gwynne’s Latin. You will find the traditional pronunciations and reciting-rhythms demonstrated in my gwynneteaching.com website. What you learn must include the meanings that the different endings convey. I strongly recommend that you stop reading this column until you have done this… You have now completed that task? Here is the vocabulary you need for your very first test: Girl = puella. Queen = regina. Woman = femina. Daughter = filia. I love = amo. The test: translate 1. We love the girls. 2. The girls love the Queen. 3. The woman loves the daughter of the Queen. 4. Reginam amas. 5. Puellam regina amat. 6. Reginae filias amatis. Answers on page 92. N M Gwynne April 2015 – THE OLDIE 89

Genius crossword 320 by Antico In fifteen clues, cryptic indications omit reference to parts of the answers to be entered in the grid; these parts should be shaded in, to reveal the name of a 1 38 opened fifty years ago. Two clues are without definitions; the answer to one is the name of the place where the 38 begins (diagonally adjacent to the start of it in the grid), and the answer to the other is the name of the place in which the 38 ends.

Across

2 Anger with spirit endlessly restrained by airline (4,7) 10 Bend inside near cockpit (3) 12 About to follow tips for eluding bore (5) 13 Trucks left wrecked are so old (3-7) 15 Energy put into turning plug, I thought (4) 17 Pair missing university party (2) 18 Defects following decrees (5) 21 Ten is round number (3) 23 Pay attention to alien acceptable to the west (4) 24 Beekeepers since securing capital beginning to thrive (9) 26 Called artist grand (4) 27 Criticised, ignoring bishop, carried on (6) 30 Part of flower lifeless in tin (6) 33 Agreement youth reversed (4) 35 Groups of bones end in desert in wild America (9) 37 Revolutionary faced second arrest (4) 39 Father, engaging old pro (3) 40 Moth partly eating garment (5) 41 Odd bits of info provided (2) 44 Variable poet giving up old tale (4) 45 New account in a newspaper article with mass about basis of justice (5,5) 49 Stop losing heart and drink (5) 50 Large appeal settled (3) 51 Is nomad ever prepared for factors in frugal spells? (6,5)

Down

3 Bad stuff without force (3) 4 Range excluding north London area (3) 5 University learner (4) 6 Self-esteem coming from eastern work (3) 7 Jazz? King put in small amount (4) 8 Crime involving academic playboy? (8) 9 Tip about your player (6) 11 Split second for action gone (5) 14 Nothing pulled up ahead (6) 16 Warning modified later (5) 19 Quarrel, having no time for resort (3) 20 Worry upset Georgia (3) 22 Key perhaps lies abandoned (4) 25 Artist’s second secret (5) 28 Before noon, short time to get shells? (4) 29 Material cut up and studied (8) 30 Insult cast, dropping name (6) 31 Test arsenic with authority (5) 32 Propose changing an item after refusal (8) 33 Barrier round the bend raised (3) 34 Take off top mark (3) 36 Period occupied by informer making mistakes (6) 42 Fashion house’s last decline (4) 43 Husband, look, holding a ring (4) 46 Container in attic analysed (3) 47 Against following on, increase running speed (3) 48 One in middle of hearty tune (3)

Entries to: ‘Crossword 320’ by post (The Oldie, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG), email (editorial@theoldie.co.uk) by Friday 17th April. First prize is the latest edition of the Chambers Dictionary and a cheque for £25. Two runners-up will receive cheques for £15.

Name Address

Moron crossword 320 Across

5 Rocky height (3) 6 Christian festival (6) 10 Path (5) 11 Excelled (5) 12 Low (3) 13 Spirited (6) 14 Urban area (4) 15 Requite (6) 17 Belief (5) 19 Brisk (5) 21 Maximum (6) 23 Assist (4) 25 Relate (6) 28 Impress (3) 29 Proverb (5) 30 Tropical fruit (5) 31 Flag (6) 32 Gleam (3)

Genius 318 – solution

Down

1 Bunting (7) 2 Printed sheet (7) 3 Expecting (6) 4 Joke (4) 5 Weighty book (4) 7 Brilliant (3) 8 Patterns of recurrence (7) 9 Solution (6) 16 Trace (7) 18 Typify (6) 19 Cassock (7) 20 Transversely (7) 22 Extremely sad (6) 24 Move to and fro (4) 26 Repair (4) 27 Floor covering (3)

Moron 318 solution Across: 1 Soar, 4 Sir, 6 Err [Sorcerer], 8 Staffs, 9 Marvel, 10 Torrential, 12 Right-thinking, 15 Creditable, 19 Inform, 20 Rarity, 21 Wry, 22 Ram, 23 Hero. Down: 2 Outstrip, 3 Refer, 4 Suspect, 5 Remit, 6 Earmark, 7 Reel, 11 Ancestor, 13 Harmony, 14 Interim, 16 Demur, 17 Berth, 18 Know.

The puzzle marked the centenary of the birth, at HANLEY on 1st February 1915, of STANLEY MATTHEWS. Nicknamed the Wizard of Dribble, he played football for STOKE CITY, BLACKPOOL and ENGLAND.

Prizewinners First prize: Raymond Nolan, Manchester. Runners-up: Peter Davies, Boreham Wood; C Y Abbess, Woodford Green.

April 2015 – THE OLDIE

Competition by TESSA CASTRO IN COMPETITION No 186 you were invited to write a song for a forthcoming musical on the collapse of Royal Mail, called ‘Last Post’. You entered into the spirit of the thing with worrying gusto.Congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins wins £30, with the bonus prize of a Chambers Biographical Dictionary going post-haste to John Whitworth. (To ‘The Slow Train’, Flanders and Swann) No letters to send to Appleby Parva or Primrose Hill, No postcards to scribble to Sawley-on Ribble or Martin Mill, No brown paper parcels tied up with string For Tintagel Castle, Tredegar or Tring. Our hiking and biking are toast. It’s the Last Post. Alas and alack! There’s no shadow of doubt That we’re not coming back. All the money ran out. No telegrams terse for Merton or Burton or Buttermere, No postal packets for Drumnadrochit or Durisdeer, No stamping or franking or sealing wax, They’ve all been remaindered by email and fax. There’s nobody here but a ghost. It’s the Last Post. John Whitworth (To Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are AChangin’ ’) Once we sent letters on Basildon Bond

SUD|OLD|KU Each row, column and box must contain the numbers 1 to 9. Each number can only appear once in a row, column or box. (Solution next month.) Last month’s solution:

To friends and relations of whom we were fond  And with pen and real ink they all used to respond  Via a system as slow as a snail.  Now refinement is gone and we've nothing beyond  Just illiterate texting and email.  Screw the cap on your Quink and your Stephens Blue Black,  For calligraphy’s dead and there’s no going back.  When the man with the little red van gets the sack  There’ll be no more collecting or sending.  And your dog will be left with one less to attack  For the whole postal service is ending.  Martin Parker (To ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’) Our eyes have seen the peril of the ending of the Mail, We can feel the competition and we’re fairly sure to fail, But a national institution is the subject of our tale, The Royal Mail must go on! Refrain: Boo to ceaseless innovation, Boo to piecemeal amputation, Boo to private exploitation, The Royal Mail must go on! We will organise petitions, we will boycott TNT,

The Oldie quiz

sponsored by waitrosecellar.com Win £50 of Waitrose Cellar vouchers The first question in Marcus Berkmann’s April quiz is printed below; the other 19 questions can be found on our website (www.theoldie.co.uk/oldie-quiz). The first person whose name is drawn out of a hat and has answered all twenty questions correctly will be sent a free bottle of champagne by waitrosecellar.com. The answers will be announced on our website on Monday 23rd March. Question 1. At 18 years of age, in 1866, he hit 224 not out for England against Surrey at The Oval. His captain, pleased by his performance, let him leave the ground for the National Olympian Association meeting at Crystal Palace, where he won the hurdles over a quarter-mile. Who?

We will sabotage your email, we will give you stamps for free, You may cheer for market forces, we will beg to disagree, The Royal Mail must go on! There were ponies, there were post vans, there will very soon be drones, There were letters, there were postcards, now we’re all on bleeping phones, But we’re on a road to nowhere, we can feel it in our bones, The Royal Mail must go on! Sheena Phillips COMPETITION No 188 Wheelie bins have become a dominant element of life in a way that dustbins never managed. So a poem, please, dramatic, lyrical or what you will, called ‘Wheelie Bins’. Maximum 16 lines. Entries, by post (The Oldie, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG) or email (comps@theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your postal address), to ‘Competition No 188’ by 3rd April.

LEARN LATIN LESSON 1 Answers 1. Puellas amamus. 2. Puellae reginam amant. 3. Femina filiam reginae amat. 4. You (singular) love the Queen. 5. The Queen loves the girl. 6. You (plural) love the daughters of the Queens.

THE OLDIE – April 2015

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The Oldie – April 2015

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Retired school inspector, Cambridge history graduate, genealogist for 40 years, researches and writes your family’s history. No task too big or small. Phone 01730 812232 for brochure, sample report and free estimate.

April 2015 – The Oldie

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AUTHORS PLEASE SUBMIT:

A synopsis plus sample chapters (3)for consideration.

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The Oldie – April 2015

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April 2015 – The Oldie

Mary Kenny

Ask Mary Wills, lending to friends and more on the mature wardrobe

My elderly relative (aged 86) was taken into hospital for a minor complaint, and her next of kin suddenly appeared from abroad, bringing a solicitor with her, in an attempt to persuade the old lady to make a will, which she has always resisted doing. This has upset the old dear terribly, and the hospital put her on Prozac to calm her – which she’s never needed before. I have no interest in her estate, and since she has no other living relatives, the next of kin will inherit anyway, so it seems an unnecessary exercise. But I felt I should do something to take the pressure off this elderly cousin of my mother’s. The visit of the foreign next of kin was carefully heralded to me, but not the advent of the legal eagle. The subterfuge made me even more uncomfortable.

lawyer breathing down her neck while in hospital (or out of it), she shouldn’t have to have one? Perhaps the inheriting relative has acted with good intention (benefit of doubt) but if advice on this matter was required, it should have been done before the age of 86. All you can do is show kindness, but human nature and deathbed disposal of estates often seem to involve a Balzacian element of avarice.

Old Polonius told Hamlet ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be’. Wise advice only seems to be appreciated after errors. In the era of sub-prime mortgages and loan sharks, we know how disastrous debt can be. But I feel people should be warned about lending money to friends. It can sour a relationship. A few years ago, when a friend was facing a bridging loan while selling one house and buying another, I mentioned that I had suddenly had exactly the necessary sum in the bank, having just qualified for my pension pot. The loan was only a matter of weeks and was repaid with interest on the due date. This should have brought happiness all round, but now, a decade later, I realise it affected our friendship. Both our

We are all repeatedly told that we should be sure to make a will: and Angela Clayton-Turner from Beckenham (who represents carers on the Prime Minister’s dementia task force) has written to remind me that: ‘It’s important that we all make wills, and especially, whatever our age, a Lasting Power of Attorney’ in case of mental disability. This is all right and proper, and yet, if liberty means anything, individuals are surely free not to make a will if they don’t want to do so. If your 86-year-old relative has always chosen not to make a will, why should she be pressured to do so as she moves towards the last phase of life? Is there any way you can ginger up a support group for the old girl, and explain to her that if she doesn’t want a

THE OLDIE – April 2015

‘I’m entering a 10k goose step for intolerance, care to sponsor me?’

husbands disapproved of the transaction, and now whenever we meet there is an underlying unease. I wish money had never played any part in our acquaintance. It can cause awful rifts within families too. I wonder what readers’ experience are? LMB, Marlow

I think your gesture reflects generously on your kind nature. A friend offered me money a few years ago in a budget crisis: I didn’t take it, but his offer has enhanced our friendship. I personally think you did the right thing, and I feel you shouldn’t have this sense of unease – and yet, it highlights how emotionally complicated financial transactions between friends can be, and I’m glad you’ve flagged it up. PS: On decent clothes for women over sixty, Lynne Collins of Hadleigh in Essex writes: ‘Don’t be put off by the “Yummy Mummy” models on the Boden website and catalogue – its styles are flattering on the mature woman and have lots of zing. Mint Velvet (also at John Lewis and online) have smart but casual pieces…T K Maxx has splendid high-end street brands at low-cost prices – all my cashmere sweaters came from there this past winter. And I recommend Phase Eight. And Marks & Spencer’s Per Una range.’ Gwyn Clayton in Kinross also says she has difficulty getting ‘age-appropriate’ fashionable stuff, though she thinks Jacques Vert ‘makes lovely stream-lined clothes for our age-group’. She hates animal prints or leggings for oldies. But Angela Potter of Tetbury wittily remarks that ‘There’s only one thing worse than mutton dressed as lamb, and that’s mutton dressed as mutton!’ Write to Mary Kenny with your problems, comments, dilemmas or general complaints about life c/o The Oldie, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG or email her on marykenny@theoldie.co.uk. She also has a website: www.mary-kenny.com.

PHOTO: Liz Mott

Ah, money! Death and taxes follow us all our lives and money remains a concern even unto the grave. The Irish writer Daniel Corkery reported an experienced priest saying that he had never attended a deathbed but that the last thoughts weren’t of money, or estates. Here comes Fred of Stockport’s experience: