The Oldie Annual 2025

Annual 2025 Introduction

By Harry Mount, Editor, The Oldie

As I read the pages of this pleasure-packed annual, I’m constantly amazed by the cast list. This volume, masterfully edited by Charlotte Metcalf, doesn’t just contain the best writers in The Oldie since our founding father, Richard Ingrams, dreamt it up in 1992. It contains the best writers in Britain since that year.

Many of the contributors have been gathered, among them Muriel Spark, Kingsley Amis and our sainted cofounder and columnist Auberon Waugh.

But many are still with us and they are brought together in delicious collisions with legendary Oldie pin-ups.

Here you will find Craig Brown, the funniest writer alive, on Kenneth Williams, the greatest comic actor of the 20th century. Here is Giles Coren on his boyhood –and adulthood – hero, Asterix the Gaul.

There is literally nothing like The Oldie in Fleet Street. Although newspaper readers tend to be over 50 on average, newspaper commissioning editors, with some exceptions, tend to be younger. And so there’s a gap between the older readers’ Olympian knowledge and the limited experience of the callow editors.

live, untold anecdotes of somebody who would be more than 130 years old today.

Another pleasure of editing The Oldie is how willing the greats are to write for it now. I put that down to the hallowed position occupied by Richard Ingrams and his much-lamented late successor, Alexander Chancellor, among writers. Together, they forged professional and social links, going back to the 1960s, with the funniest and cleverest people in the business.

‘I got him from the pet shop. He was half price’

Young editors may not have heard of the Oldie legends who stalk these pages – Leslie Phillips, Tommy Cooper, the trouser press. But they are all alive and kicking in our minds, here at Oldie Towers.

One of the pleasures of editing The Oldie is that you can leap generations. So here you will read the moving tale of a young Nicky Haslam, meeting an elderly Cole Porter. Porter was born in 1891. And so Nicky is recounting gripping, fresh,

I was astonished when I rang up the late, very great Barry Humphries, during COVID, to ask if he might ask his mortal frenemy Dame Edna Everage to write a piece for us – and both Barry and Dame Edna graciously said yes.

Word spread and Barry’s other enemy, Sir Les Patterson, got in on the act, too. Even Barry McKenzie, the greatest living Australian, came out of retirement, to write for The Oldie

The four of them between them then wrote a column for two years before Barry’s sad death in 2023. How moving that, despite their differences, Barry’s old enemies felt they couldn’t continue the column after he died.

I’m sure Barry and his colleagues agreed to write for The Oldie – or ‘The Old Fella’, as Sir Les called it – because of their reverence for Richard Ingrams.

Whatever the reason, it is a constant joy in Oldie Towers to ring up the living writers you’ll read in this Annual and to receive their spirit-lifting contributions. And what a nostalgic mixture of pleasure and sweet mournfulness to read those fine Oldie writers who have now hit their final deadline.

6 In the beginning:

Muriel Spark on her grandmother’s

8 Stump Cross Roundabout: Germaine Greer on her au pair 10 Hello, Possums! By Dame Edna Everage 12 The Oldie ‘Quotient’ Quiz 14 Naim Attallah meets Wilfred Thesiger 17 Agony Column Ursula Wyndham

22 Unwrecked England: Candida Lycett Green on Fortnum & Mason 24 Oldie Poll on the BBC 26 Video by Larry Adler

Press by John Sweeney 28 Quiz egos by Miles Kington 29 Paperback wastrel by Wilfred De’Ath

30 Ned Sherrin on Princess Margaret’s memorial service

Jennifer Paterson cooks grouse in

Nell Dunn on marriage

32 Mavis Nicholson meets Elizabeth Jane Howard 34 Jeremy Lewis on corduroy suits 36 Marcus Berkmann reviews Love Actually

37 The world according to Enfield Snr 38 Alice Pitman meets Leslie Phillips 40 Modern life by Alan White

Richard Ingrams

43 Theatre: Beryl Bainbridge reviews Spamalot

44 Rosie Boycott sleeps rough

45 World’s Worst Dumps: Alice Pitman on Madame Tussauds

48 Claire Daly talks to L’Etoile’s Elena Salvoni

50 Peter Corby on the Corby trouser press

52 Jeremy Hornsby reassesses Michael Parkinson

54 Ben Mallalieu takes a dislike to Colin Welland

56 Beryl Bainbridge the painter by Paul Bailey

58 Dr Stuttaford’s surgery: beware of ‘healthy obesity’

59 I once met... John Major by Edward Mirzoeff

60 Editor’s Letter by Alexander Chancellor

62 Miles Goslett on the Jimmy Savile cover-up

65 Old age is a gift by Ronald Blythe

66 Barry Norman still adores Sophia Loren at 80

68 We’re doomed! Ian Jack on Private Frazer

70 Patrick Marnham on the Lord Lucan mystery

74 Lewis Jones seeks a top hat

76 Ferdinand Mount finds David Cameron underrated

78 Geoffrey Wheatcroft on the aristocracy’s decline

79 Notes from the sofa Raymond Briggs

80 John Julius Norwich on downsizing and moving on

82 JFK at 100: Antonia Fraser and Inigo Thomas recall meeting the president

84 Virginia Ironside on fear

86 Nicky Haslam pays tribute to his idol Cole Porter

88 Britain’s cleverest street by Valerie Grove

90 Money can’t buy the rich love by Mary Killen

91 Short Cuts: Anne Robinson hates Oprah Winfrey

92 Craig Brown examines the troubled, private Kenneth Williams

94 John Lloyd on Blackadder and that famous last episode

98 D-Day through the soldiers’ eyes by Giles Milton

101 Grumpy Oldie Man: Matthew Norman bemoans his son’s dismal prospects

102 Troy Story by Hannah Betts

104 Giles Coren hails Asterix at 60

106 Gyles Brandreth on Rupert Bear in his Diary

108 Harry Mount on the usefulness of royal etiquette

109 My husband slept with Christine Keeler by Elisabeth Luard

110 Loverly Wilfrid Hyde-White by friend and co-star Simon Williams

112 Dominic West is too lazy for country life

114 Barry Cryer celebrates Tommy Cooper’s centenary

116 Thank heaven for Leslie Caron by Hugo Vickers

120 End of the Sloane age by Peter York

122 Nicky Haslam on Francis Bacon

123 Mary Killen’s fashion tips

124 Cut! Overlong films by Bruce Beresford

125 Gill Johnson on Nancy Mitford, Queen of the Adriatic

In the beginning...

Richard Ingrams on The Oldie’s origins – written in a promotional brochure before the first issue

Many claim to have thought of the idea for The Oldie, including Alexander Chancellor and John McEwen ( two of our backers). Another claimant is Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye. He is certainly one of the keenest enthusiasts, partly, I suspect, because if the magazine is successful, it will stop me hanging around in the Private Eye offices.

What is certain is that since the idea was first mooted, it has been greeted with great excitement and enthusiasm by all kinds of people (young and old alike). This suggests to me not only that it is time for a new magazine but also that the idea of a new magazine which deliberately turns its back on the youth cult is one which will be welcomed by the public.

Led by marketing men, a campaign has successfully taken over Fleet Street promoting the idea that young people alone are worth ‘targeting’.

This has meant an undue emphasis on peripheral matters like pop music, health, sex and money-making. In the process, oldie journalists have been put on the scrapheap, oldie issues have been ignored and the oldies in general have been left experiencing what our patron saint Bill Deedes (78) has memorably called a ‘sense of cultural isolation’.

Despite the widespread publicity we have already received both here and abroad (I have already spoken to the New York Observer, the Sydney Morning Herald and Canadian Broadcasting), many people are still under the impression that The Oldie is

some sort of enormous practical joke perpetrated by an inveterate hoaxer (myself ). That is partly why I have prepared this pamphlet to assure you all that The Oldie means business.

What will be in The Oldie?

I do not want to give any hostages to fortune and the contents list should be taken only as a rough guide.

I have been bombarded by offers of help from all quarters. But I would still like to hear from anyone who has ideas or suggestions or who would like to contribute in any way.

RICHARD INGRAMS

ALSO IN THE BROCHURE WERE VARIOUS LETTERS...

From Auberon Waugh

Dear Richard and Alexander,

Having brooded about the editorial content of The Oldie since our luncheon yesterday, I have concluded that my own role would be to write a regular fortnightly column called ‘Over 50’. I would propose that the column would occupy itself in the following fields:

1 Inveighing against the ignorance, idleness, stupidity, dishonesty and sexual incompetence of the young.

2 Insulting the young in any and every manifestation.

3 Insulting the old who seem to be deferring or otherwise sucking up to the young.

4 Promoting the idea of ‘age fascism’ whereby the young are automatically seen as inferior.

5 Denouncing new things, new ideas, modernism in any form, especially anything proposed in the name of youth or by someone under the age of 40.

Yours, Bron

A swingeing attack

Dear Mr Ingrams, What a ghastly name for a magazine The Oldie Sounds like old fogeys, white hair and obvious dentures. Please why not DIGNITY, SENIORITY, MATURITY (I’m going through my Roget’s Thesuarus now) or ELDERSHIP but not OLDIE! I feel I should (at 70) rush out and buy a shawl and fluffy slippers.

Joan Swinge, Bournemouth

This is only one of many such letters– Ed.

A joke by Barry Cryer (1935-2022)

A man walks into a pub with a toad and a frog.

The toad starts to play the piano – and the barman is astonished.

Then the frog starts to sing along, accompanied by the toad on the piano.

‘That’s amazing,’ says the barman. ‘I tell you what. I’ll pay you £100 for the singing frog.’

‘Forget it,’ says the man. ‘It isn’t worth that much.’

‘Why on earth did you turn down £100 for a singing frog?’ says the barman. ‘It’s worth a lot more.’

‘No, it isn’t – the frog’s useless,’ says the man. ‘The toad’s a ventriloquist.’

Oldie Founding Father: Richard Ingrams

In an extract from her autobiography, Muriel Spark recalled her grandmother and the splendours of Victorian

underwear Pockets and petticoats

My grandmother shut up her shop that summer. We went all four to fetch her – to live with us in Edinburgh for the last four years of her life. My mother and I helped her pack. What fascinated me most about this operation was the vast difference between her clothes and ours.

To begin with there were flannel garments worn against the skin winter and summer, which my grandmother called ‘my chemises’. Then came frilly tops, ‘my bodices’ and ‘my stays’ which were flexible corsets inset with whalebone and laced, criss-cross, with tape to pull in the waist-line.

Next, ‘my drawers’ with long legs to below the knees and no gusset, so that the ‘private regions’ had no covering at all. These drawers were frilly with elaborate hand-made tucks and palecoloured ribbons tying them together under the knees and at the waist. ‘My petticoats’ were voluminous; one in each set was cream-coloured or grey flannel, one was white linen edged with lace and one was black.

My grandmother’s stockings were black wool, kept up by pink elastic garters. ‘My night-shifts’ were white flannel for winter, cotton for summer, spacious, with high necks and long sleeves, very frilly. I had the impression, which I believe is correct, that all these garments had been in use for a very long time, perhaps 20 or 30 years or since her marriage. They were well cared for, the cotton starched and ironed. Here and there were neat little patches and darns that were works of art in themselves.

One group of objects puzzled me. They were cotton bags about six inches square, attached to long tapes. These were pockets that my grandmother tied round her waist between the top petticoat (the black one) and the skirt of her dress. This meant that to get anything out of her pocket my grandmother had to heave up her skirt to the knees and thrust her hand into this mysterious bag (from which she often produced a piece of chocolate for us).

Among the garments we helped to pack was an intriguing item of underwear

which my grandmother wore seldom, and only in deep winter. It was called ‘combinations’. It was an all-in-one wool suit with knee-length leggings and wrist-length sleeves, and, like the drawers, it had no gusset. These were very ‘modern’ to my grandmother. They belonged to that generation of young ladies one of whom is described by T S Eliot in The Waste Land, as drying her combinations on the window sill.

During the time my grandmother stayed with us she never acquired any new clothes. Her outer wear was far less abundant than her underwear. She had four dresses. They all came in two pieces, a bodice and a skirt. The bodice hooked together with a strong but invisible hook-and-eye arrangement. The skirt hooked at the side. It was gathered at the waist and went over at least two of the petticoats, depending on the season.

Also depending on the time of year was the colour of the dress. For everyday wear, my grandmother wore a silver-grey dress in summer, a black woollen dress in winter. Her skirts reached to just above the ankles, a concession to the times when young women were already wearing knee-length skirts. For any evening parties or special occasions she were a black satin dress, heavily beaded with jet. Glittering black jet formed my

grandmother’s favourite jewellery though she also wore a gold chain and locket with a picture of my grandfather in it.

In her clothes-trunk she had slippers, house shoes and black ankle boots for walking abroad. The other items of personal use were largely embroidered handkerchiefs, a case to hold them, and various pincushions.

But I have kept Bluebell to the last. Bluebell was what I called my grandmother’s lovely blue silk brocade going-away dress, the colour of cornflowers. I have never seen anything quite so beautiful, nor touched anything so sensuous before or since. When she came to us, Adelaide had no thought of ever wearing it again. She must have had her small, plump, Queen Victoria-like figure when she was married, about 1876, for it was still her right size.

I called this magnificent garment Bluebell because a few years earlier, around 1923, she had written to tell my mother that she had been to a fancy-dress party at the Watford Church Union. She had gone dressed as ‘Bluebell’ in her blue brocade gown, having arranged for a hat to be made with imitation bluebells on the brim, and a basket on her arm to be filled with the same fabric flowers.

Adelaide Uezzell won a prize for the ensuing appearance, consisting of a jar of fig jam and a cherry cake. And so, when we packed the famous Bluebell dress in my grandmother’s chest, and unpacked it again in Edinburgh, I felt as if I were handling a real historic museum piece. Of course I tried it on, and although it was far too big, I swept around in it, thinking of all the parts I could take in period plays. Alas, after the death of my grandmother, when I was 13, I succumbed to the current fashion and, with my mother’s approval, cut up the Bluebell gown to make cushion covers. They looked wonderful, but the dress itself should never have been touched. It glowed with its deep and heavy brocaded blueness. It was sewn by hand, with a minutely stitched lining.

From Muriel Spark’s Curriculum Vitae, published in the same week as this article

Adelaide Uezzell, Muriel Spark’s grandmother

EThe pros and cons of having an au pair Germaine Greer Stump Cross Roundabout

very now and then, I begin nursing a delusion that life at the Mills would be easier if I took on an au pair. The hens need to be shut up at dusk and the goose enclosure closed and I am no better at being in two places at once than the next one-woman-band. I tend to have forgotten that au pairs need rather more looking after than hens or geese do. They eat, some of them hugely, three or even five times a day, and need cups of coffee and orange juice at regular intervals besides. Though they conduct their lives on the telephone they are incapable of taking sensible telephone messages. Worst of all, they are virtually all depressed to some extent.

The classic au pair is usually to be found sitting on her bed, strumming her guitar or lost to the world under her Walkman, softly crying.

The simplest task involves mournfully dragging one foot after another, doggedly refusing to notice any situation that requires intervention: cat sick on the carpet, water coming through the ceiling, plant parching on the windowsill, the au pair moves amongst it cocooned in her own thoughts.

Unless she is alone in the house at night, when she is, as often as not, utterly terrified. So much for holding the fort when one is obliged to be away; hours are spent on the telephone trying to find someone to keep the au pair company.

Expensive EFL classes being the scam that they are, the average au pair seldom understands more than one word in 20 of colloquial English. Still, if one has room for an au pair, it does seem silly not to try to establish some kind of a modus vivendi, and so generally I have tried.

And the system has worked as well as it can, with better results for my French, German, Spanish and Italian than for the young women’s English. But my latest au pair was a Turk, and she, in the best tradition of Turkish-English relations, was my undoing.

The most obvious attribute of the Turk was that, though conventionally womanshaped, she was tiny, standing at under five foot, which in common with her clothing, were very much too big. When she had seated herself correctly for her interview, one of her Minnie Mouse shoes fell off. I told her to kick the other one off and tuck her feet under her.

Hidden within the cuffs of her enormous homemade cardigan, her tiny fingers were formally interlaced. She gazed at me earnestly through a pair of misty plastic spectacles twice as wide across the top as her small, pale face, and proceeded to tell me what she had found out about me in the local library, being the first au pair to prepare for the job in this fashion. Yes, she could drive; no, she wasn’t afraid to be in the house alone; no, she wasn’t afraid of geese. She got the job. Alas.

That she prayed five times a day was no problem at all. That she was required

to purify herself after menstruation by what seemed an hour of aquatic mayhem, after which she emerged from the bathroom skinned pink as a shrimp and completely exhausted, was not the problem either, though the rigmarole seemed to take place rather too frequently, I suppose, because she was never very sure when her interminable periods had actually ended.

For her lunch, she took one round of cheese on toast and one small glass of orange juice, every single day. She seemed to have no desire whatever to try anything else. She spent most of her time ‘studying’, i.e. filling in the gaps in her atrociously expensive book of EFL exercises, and watching Australian soap operas.

At breakfast she read the Independent, beginning at the top left hand corner of the front page and soldiering on through elaborate explanations of banking theory and interest rates, until it was time to go to school. The next day she would start on the front page of the next day’s paper.

One day, when the tiny Turk was apparently engrossed in an arcane tale of floating base rates, I protested. The Turk, as scrupulously obedient as she was unhelpful, turned to the op ed page to an article headed ‘When oafs kick ass in Eden’, and arranging her features in an expression of intense interest, began to read aloud. Dr Greer, pedagogue as ever, barked from the Aga, where she was stirring the marmalade the Turk was too short to reach, ‘OK. What’s Eden?’ Ten minutes later, we had established that Eden was the same as Paradise and that both Muslims and Christians believed that our first parents lived there. Weirdly, strangely, the Turk had zero

idea of Islamic doctrine; she washed herself and prayed five times a day to avoid bad luck.

She looked up ‘oafs’ in her (printed in Turkey and wildly inaccurate) dictionary. Then, holding up forefinger and thumb pinched together, she said, ‘Ass. A very small animal. Oh, I am mixing with ant.’

Another dictionary hunt elicited ‘Dunkie’. She did not know what the Turkish word meant. There were no dunkies in Turkey, she said. Oh yes there were, I said, though not perhaps in the dreary town of Adana, where the Turk’s father is a janitor in a small block of flats. ‘Oh dear,’ said I silently cursing the Independent’s sub-editors. ‘ “Kick ass” is an Americanism. Look up “arse”.’

Obediently the Turk looked up ‘arse’. ‘Botox’ she said brightly. I looked unimpressed. ‘Bhuttox’ she amended. I touched her bottom. What do you call this?’ ‘Hips?’ she answered. Then, ‘Bottom? Louts kick bottom in Paradise?’

There was a picture of boats. They are touching the bottom?’ I touched her bottom lightly with my slippered foot.

‘Like this,’ said I. She stared uncomprehending. I realised with a feeling of panic that I had been stared at in just that fashion for six months.

‘What price a flamingo in a no-fly zone?’ ran the subhead. Somehow ‘how much could you buy or sell a flamingo for?’ didn’t seem to render this. I concentrated on the ‘no-fly zone’ part. ‘There are no flies there?’ she said, staring some more. The Turk had watched hundreds of hours of television and made a show of reading the paper every day.

How could she not know and never have asked what the no-fly zone was? ‘It’s Iraq, not Maoist China!’ I snapped.

‘Why do I have to understand? Why can’t I just read it for enjoyment?’ she asked. ‘Turks read about genocide for enjoyment, do they?’ I shrieked. To abate the feeling of utter pointlessness that swept over me, I devoted myself to my marmalade, while the Turk kept her black eyes fixed on me, conveying unmistakeably though subtly that she was convinced I was insane.

Anyone want a minute, noiseless, obsequious, abstemious, incurious, almost motionless au pair? With a Turkish driving licence.

Stump Cross, Germaine’s column, was named after the Essex village where she lived

‘Patience, gentlemen – it’s breathing’

‘Don’t

‘For heaven’s sake, David. Stop being such a victim’

be crazy, Icarus – take a travel pillow!’

Dame Edna Everage

Hello, Possums!

In a recent issue of this delightful periodical there was a letter from a bewildered old woman in Oxford saying that she had cancelled her subscription in disgust when she saw that I was writing my caring column: ‘We dislike her intensely and to be addressed as “possums” is really too much.’

I found out about this letter by accident since my staff cut bits out of newspapers and magazines which they think might hurt my famous feelings. More often than not, the reading materials that slither across my morning duvet have more windows in them than Canary Wharf.

A Royal friend of mine has the same trouble with over-protective staff and tells me her copies of the Times, the Sun and the News of the World always arrive looking like square doilies.

When I noticed that Madge Allsop, my bridesmaid and dependent, had done a crude origami job on my Oldie, I smelt a rat as I usually do when Madge is in the room. Nipping around the corner to my little ethnic newsagents, I read the letter from the troubled crone, and quite frankly readers, I laughed like a kookaburra in a Christian Lacroix tracksuit.

Here, at last, was someone who didn’t adore me! The relief was incredible. What a spooky old world it would be if everyone on the planet got the point of me, and what a spoilt old Megastar I might become. My theatres would not be big enough to hold the adoring zillions and rival TV networks would have to go off the air when my shows were being transmitted. Besides, I always think of that tiny minority of humourless and, let’s face it, stupid droobs* who can’t stand me, as a challenge.

One night I was on stage and I noticed a really sulky little number sitting in the front row and not even looking at me for heaven’s sake! Everyone around her rocked with laughter and looked up at me with shining eyes and faces grotesque with gratitude. Who was this unsmiling minx I wondered?

Was she perhaps ‘aurally challenged’, as the deaf now prefer to almost hear themselves described? I peered harder at this rather pretty, though sullen little madam. Perhaps she was a recently bereaved Swiss Air hostess or an alternative comedienne jealous of my effortless artistry.

Well possums, I worked on her all night, but try as I might she never once cracked a smile. In the end I took a quick Polaroid of her at the curtain-call and to this day I have that snap framed on my dressing-table with the caption ‘The One That Got Away’.

‘You can’t win them all, Edna,’ our Minister said to me once for some reason or other, and it is one of the spooky old home truths that really stuck in my little street-wise, wisteria topknot. I only hope and pray that foolish Oxford hag doesn’t have a ghastly accident and phone me reverse charge from intensive care (as they usually do), asking me to overlook her uncalled for letter to The Oldie and begging me to call her possum before she drops off the twig.

I notice most other columnists fill their columns with dismal whingeing about the State of England and how

nothing is as nice as it used to be. To which I say, come off it, leave it out! If I have any complaints they’re usually about the stupid words and expressions that people pick up because they’re fashionable and can’t leave alone. For instance, I’m sick of people saying ‘Hi!’ to me. This embarrassing habit only began a few years ago and now everyone seems to be fluttering their fingers at each other and uttering this absurd Doris Day-ism. Good old ‘hello’ is becoming as antiquated as ‘prithee’ and ‘zounds’.

Again, I’m sick to death of people telling me to ‘take care’. What’s wrong with ‘goodbye’, for heaven’s sake?

Or even ‘ciao’? Most people who tell you to take care look as though they couldn’t care less, and the woman who said it to me this morning had a face you could strike a match on.

On the subject of my most unfavourite expressions, I have to mention that yukky word ‘exciting’. It crops up everywhere, doesn’t it readers? And it has been used to describe everything from fluorescent lightfittings to maisonettes and ‘concepts’, whatever they might be. A reader sent me a cutting from a recent paper illustrating an exciting new use for the word exciting. It was an ad for the post of ‘Volunteer Co-ordinator (HIV/AIDS) Part Time’.

The advertisement said: ‘In this exciting new post you will work closely with the Specialist Nurse HIV/AIDS in planning and co-ordinating the work of the volunteer work force.’

If I had the unlikely misfortune to contract this yukky virus, the last thing I would want would be an ‘excited’ co-ordinator. And I think I speak for all my readers, not forgetting that Oxford grump.

A joyous heart always, and don’t take care, EDNA

*Droob (noun) - West Australian slang for a dill or drongo. A pathetic, dullwitted person. (Rare.)

Barry Humphries (1934-2023) was an Oldie columnist

This was the first Oldie quiz to assess readers’ ‘Oldieness Quotient’, or ‘OQ’. It aimed to find out how much of an oldie readers were, in terms of manners, taste and discernment. Were readers ‘venerable’, ‘long in the tooth’ or merely ‘no spring chickens’?

GREY POWER

What’s your oldie quotient?

PART ONE

Which of the following statements most closely matches your thoughts at this moment?

a) Oh dear. This is precisely the sort of nonsense I hoped to avoid by buying this magazine in the first place.

b) Why can you never find a pen when you want one?

c) This should be fun. Here we go then.

If you answered a) then you need go no further. You are a supreme oldie. Congratulations. We hope you enjoy the rest of the magazine. b) is encouragingly cantankerous, and c) is pleasantly flattering. Thank you. Now, having sorted out the sheep from the old goats, as it were, we can proceed with our test proper.

PART TWO

1 What do you call the device which converts electromagnetic radiation into sound?

a) a tranny

b) the radio

c) the wireless

d) the crystal set

e) Mr Edison’s latest invention

f) an infernal nuisance

2 Which do you consider poses the greatest threat on your generation?

a) HIV

b) HGV

c) HMV

d) HTV

3 In your opinion, the last halfdecent Disney cartoon was?

a) Beauty and the Beast

b) The Jungle Book

c) Fantasia

d) Snow White

e) Steamboat Willie

4 In winter, which of the following are you most likely to wear under your blouse or shirt?

a) A T-shirt

b) A cellular vest

c) Woollen combinations

d) Brown paper and goose-fat

5 Your regular day-wear shoes fasten with the aid of?

a) Velcro

b) Laces

c) Buckles

d) A buttonhook

e) Nursing staff

6 The last time you bought a Mars bar it cost?

a) Do you mean the regular Mars, king-size, the fun-size, or one the one that had nuts nuts in it?

b) About 30p

c) A ridiculous amount in old money

d) 2d

e) A week’s wages

7 Which of the following would you most like to see return?

a) The GLC

b) Rutland, Somerset, Flint and the Ridings

c) Middlesex

d) The Empire

e) Danelaw

8 Warmth in your bed in the winter months is afforded by (score one point for each applicable option)?

a) An electric device

b) A rubber or ceramic hot-water bottle

c) A warming pan

d) A heated stone wrapped in a cloth

e) One or more pets

If, in addition, you sleep between sheets rather than under a duvet, then double your total marks for this question

9 With which of the following do you most often write?

a) Dip-pen

b) Fountain pen

c) Ballpoint pen

d) Felt-tip or marker pen

e) Aerosol can

10 Which fever would you rather experience?

a) Swamp

b) Disco

11 Your favourite biscuits fall into which of the following categories?

a) Plain, and eaten with cheese, eg crackers or Bath Olivers

b) Sweet, but simple, eg plain Digestives, Rich Tea, Nice

c) Sweet, but fancy, and often involving icing, eg Custard Creams, Bourbon creams

d) Contain real chocolate but in low proportion to biscuit, eg coated Digestives, Hobnobs, Maryland cookies

e) Are an excuse for eating chocolate, eg Club, Trio, Penguin

f) Are only available in the United States (yawn)

12 Of what – if anything – are you most likely to smell?

a) Mothballs, slight mustiness, or nothing

b) Perfume or aftershave, up to a radius of one foot

c) Perfume or aftershave, beyond a one foot radius

d) Chips

13 With which of the following do you smear your bread?

a) Dripping

b) Butter

c) Standard, fish-industry by-product margarine

d) Soya or sunflower margarine

e) Low-fat spread

Score one extra point if you pronounce margarine as ‘mar-gar-een’

To score for Part Two, give yourself one point for each a) answer, two points for b), three for c) and so on, for questions 1-7. (Question 8 has its own scoring system.) For questions 9-13, there is one point for the lowest possible option, eg d), e) or f), increasing by one point until you reach a), which scores highest.

PART THREE

And now it gets serious... sort of. Score one point for each question to which you can honestly answer ‘yes’: Do you

● Thank bus drivers?

● Send postal orders?

SCORE

● Buy sweets loose from the jar?

● Own a bottle of Camp coffee, even if unused?

● Use the phrase ‘Up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire’?

● Find the smell of TCP comforting?

● Hang up rather than speak to answering machines?

● Know a tailor or a dressmaker?

● Tut?

● Pick up other people’s litter?

● Own a camera or torch for which the size of film or batteries are no longer available?

● Use book-plates?

● Own a decanter?

● Cook from recipe books that call for suet, glycerin and evaporated milk?

● Immediately state your number when you answer the phone?

Now score one point for each of the following questions to which you can answer ‘no’:

Do you

● Refer to both women and men as ‘guys’?

● Own any pets named after boxers or weapons?

● Chew gum?

● Purposefully wear hats the wrong way round?

● Know how to use hair gel?

● Think of the countryside as an ‘amenity’?

And now to see where your total score places you on our ‘Scale of Oldieness’

20 or under ‘Still youthful’. Barely an oldie at all, in fact. Are you sure you haven’t confused this magazine with Smash Hits? Perhaps the bright colours on the cover attracted you.

21-40 ‘No spring chicken’. A promising start. Possibly still labouring under the illusion that ‘young people have a lot to teach the old’ and ‘this pop music is no worse than what we used to dance to, really’.

41-60 ‘Long in the tooth’. And not short on points either. Well done. But be careful. You might find yourself one day watching One Foot in the Grave and momentarily mistaking it for a real-life documentary.

61-84 ‘Venerable’. We are proud of you. You are wise and sane, skilled and experienced. You have much to offer the world but you know full well that no one pays any attention to people of your advanced years. Sorry.

85 or more Hello, Mr Ingrams.

Interview Wilfred Thesiger

One of the greatest adventurers and finest travel writers of all time, Wilfred Thesiger (1910-2003) talks to Naim Attallah about his love of wild places and disenchantment with the ‘civilised world’

Your life has been defined in terms of travelling but where is home to you?

I suppose Maralal, in Kenya. I’ve been in Kenya on and off for over 30 years, and now that I’m older and have stopped travelling seriously, I’m based there.

How important is Englishness to you? All important. I wouldn’t want for a moment to be anything but English and I have a profound admiration for the English. I never entertain any running down of the British Empire. When people – whether English, Americans or foreigners – criticise the Empire, they are quite unable to give one instance of brutality or oppression, apart from Amritsar which was General Dyer’s personal error of judgement. That aside, there were no other examples of real oppression, which is an extraordinary tribute to the British.

Given you probably feel as much at home in Kenya as it is possible for a nonKenyan, do you think a dimension of ‘otherness’, of the outsider looking in, has made it possible for you to value their way of life in your unique way?

I am less involved in Kenya than I was with the Bedu from the Rashid in Southern Arabia, for example, or indeed with the Marsh Arabs. I’m happy in Kenya, I like the people, but I have not studied them or done any anthropological work among them. I just live with them.

Your autobiography is called ‘The Life of My Choice’. Do you consider it to have been a very privileged life?

I haven’t thought of it in those terms. It’s been exactly what I wanted to do, and if something ever went wrong, it invariably led to something better. I don’t think it’s been privileged, because when I travelled with the Bedu in Southern Arabia, in and around the Empty Quarter, it was probably as hard a life as any humans lived, including

even the bushmen. I was determined to live on equal terms with them with no concessions, facing the challenge of the desert as they did. If ever they tried to ease things for me, I tended to react rather badly, and this earned me their respect and their loyalty.

But you must accept that if you hadn’t had private resources this way of life would not have been possible for you?

I never had anything in the way of private resources. My uncle paid for me at Oxford and we were a poorish family until my grandmother died. Then my four brothers and I got about £300 a year. When I joined the Sudan Defence Force they paid me another £400, and since there was nothing to spend it on, it accumulated. But it’s never been wealth.

You were born in Abyssinia and your early experiences in Addis Ababa seem to hold the key to your adventures in later life. But were you never deflected by your public schooling at Eton and then Oxford?

No. From the start, it was what I was determined to do. The event which had the most profound influence on me was when the Shoan army came back after the big battle of Segale. I still remember in detail the army’s triumphal re-entry into town: the drummers’ embroidered hats, a man falling off his horse as he charged by, a small boy, who seemed no older than me but who’d killed two men, lifted high on shoulders. At that time there was nothing Western or European about Africa; it was barbaric and colourful, and that made a great impression. Then in India there was all

Portrait of Wilfred Thesiger, c. 1990, by Jane Bown

the pomp and ceremony of the Viceregal court. We stayed with Maharajahs, we were taken on a tiger shoot. So at school in England I rather longed to get back to the adventurous life. Later, in 1924, Haile Selassie, then the Regent Ras Tafari, visited England. He’d been very close to my father who’d helped him during the revolution, so asked my mother and me to meet him. We had tea and spoke in French, and he expressed sorrow at my father’s death. As I left, I told him how I longed to return to his country. He gave me that very sweet, gentle smile of his and said: ‘You will always be very welcome. One day you shall come as my guest.’

Four years later at Oxford, I received his personal invitation to attend his coronation. I was to be attached to the Royal party, the Duke of Gloucester’s. I was the only person with a private invitation. Haile Selassie had remembered the 14-year old boy and that touched me greatly.

Did you come across the colonial attitude in your compatriots, or anything which smacked of superiority?

I was very lucky because in the Sudan I was under a very remarkable District Commissioner who had travelled and lived with the Arabs. His overriding consideration, and that of his men, was the welfare of the people they were ruling. There were no British businesses or settlers other than the governing administration. It would have been different in Kenya where the colonists had settled.

Between 1930 and 1940 you did a great deal of big game hunting before any threat of extinction. Do you still believe that men have an inborn desire to hunt and kill?

Yes, and it goes even to the extent of killing other men. It’s well submerged in our civilisation but during war it emerges at once. When I was in the Sudan, I suppose I shot far more lion than almost anybody has ever shot –70 in four years, all on foot or ridden down on a horse. I was charged 16 times and knocked down once, and every time I wondered whether I’d get away with it again. I believed they’d kill me in the end, but I had the same sort of urge as Grand National jockeys – they feel they’ll break their necks sooner or later but they can’t stop doing it.

But why did you kill these poor lions?

Poor lions? You wait till you’ve been charged by one! Also lions were very numerous and regarded as vermin by the Sudan government. You could shoot as many as you liked. Besides, if a lion raided an encampment and killed a cow, it was a matter of honour that you gathered men, went out next morning on horses and rode the lion down. The lion was brought to bay in a patch of thick bush and the men went in after it shoulder to shoulder. They had no shields, just spears, and inevitably they were charged. Generally while the lion was killing one of them, they killed the lion, but I remember one time when there were seven casualties, four of them fatal.

Your travels in the Empty Quarter with a handful of Bedu companions were

among the most dangerous you undertook. Yet you regard this as the supreme years of your life. Why?

The Bedu were the only society to which I could apply the term ‘noble’. They had a nobility which was almost universal among them. Of course some of the British were noble – Auchinleck for instance – but you wouldn’t call them a noble race, at least I wouldn’t. The ordinary man in the street has no nobility about him at all. But the Bedu were different; they were always anxious to excel, to be known as more generous, braver than anybody else.

In your autobiography you write: ‘I have no belief in the sanctity of human life.’ But isn’t that at the basis of what we might call civilised values? It probably is. But then I don’t

Samburu women and children, South Horr, Kenya, by Wilfred Thesiger

think I have what one might call civilised values.

You’ve always held Haile Selassie in great regard, and helped restore him to power after the Italian occupation of Abyssinia. Yet in The Emperor, Kapuscinski portrays him as a ruthless autocrat Absolute balls! I’d challenge that view very strongly. Back in 1932, for instance, there was an attempted coup by Ras Hailu, the hereditary ruler of Gojjam, who was jealous of Haile Selassie and wanted to reinstate his son-in-law Lij Yasu as Emperor. The plot failed and Ras Hailu was arrested. Any other ruler would have confirmed the death sentence for treason passed by the high court, but Haile Selassie merely fined and imprisoned him.

Later when Italy invaded Abyssinia, Ras Hailu collaborated with the Italians and endlessly plotted against Haile Selassie. In every other European country collaborators were imprisoned or executed by their countrymen, many for offences less grave than Ras Hailu’s. But Halie Selassie proclaimed that past offences must be forgiven, and merely sentenced him to house arrest.

A propos the UN’s censure of human rights in the Middle East, you are reported to have said: ‘Who the hell are they to judge how other countries should behave? Why should America impose its values on the rest of the world?’ Obviously, different countries have different cultures,

shouldn’t there be basic standards of humanity?

I don’t think you can impose them. What would the Americans have said 60 years ago if the British had threatened to break off relations unless the blacks were given the vote? They would have answered – as Moi in Kenya answered – this is an internal affair, nothing to do with you.

But if something is morally wrong, shouldn’t it be deemed so everywhere? I don’t think you can apply it like that. If other people in other countries do not have our moral standards, I don’t see that you can impose them. Just as it is no good trying to force Christian ethics on pagans.

You say you’re ‘reconciled’ to the modern world, but isn’t it resignation you feel in the face of ununstoppable change? I suppose it is. I deplore all the material manifestations of our civilisation. Radio and television are extremely pernicious. I remember the moment when I heard the Americans were walking about on the moon, I had a feeling of desecration and despair; despair at the deadly technical ingenuity of man.

But as an explorer, wouldn’t you like to know what is beyond our planet? No. It’s right out of my world. One of the things I liked to think when I went to live with the Rashid and others was that nothing in their lives would be altered by my coming. Even though they benefited from maps which I made, I did not want to change these people. When I travelled

among the Danakil, they were killing each other and castrating each other, but as far as I was concerned they were perfectly entitled to do so. I shot lion, they killed other human beings, and I didn’t feel, ‘By God, it’s about time somebody civilised them.’

At the end of your autobiography you say that you have needed human company all your life, and wherever possible have avoided solitude. Why do you think you have found the deepest friendships in races other than your own?

Possibly as a result of my childhood. A psychiatrist would say it was because I was rejected by my contemporaries when I was a boy. When I went to prep school I was pitchforked into an alien environment from an extraordinary life and had no idea of the conventions that were so rigorously observed by small boys in England. When they asked me about myself I started telling them about tiger shoots or travelling with camels. I found myself ostracised as the most appalling little liar. I was driven in on myself, and I longed to get back to Abyssinnia.

Have you regretted not having married? No. I’ve had some very close women friends, but I have had very little sexual interest in women.

Even when you were a young man?

Yes. I did meet a girl when I was 19 or 20 and felt that I really could have become very attached to her. But then I thought, this will wreck my life. My whole life has been with men and boys – of course I’m not talking sexually. When I was travelling I didn’t often see a woman. Perhaps when arriving at a camp there would be some women there, but then we’d be off again into the desert leading an entirely masculine life. Marriage would have crippled me. There’d have been children who’d need educating at Eton or wherever, and there’d have been no money left for me. Also, I spend only three months a year in this country – no wife would have tolerated it.

You haven’t had much time for orthodox religion. Has there been a religious dimension to your life?

No. I find it very difficult to believe in a God or in an after life. I can’t see why we’re any more important than the ants. I think man has created God in his own image.

Mount Kenya, seen from the Teleki Valley, with giant groundsel in the foreground, by Wilfred Thesiger

Agony Column

Ursula Wyndham (1913-1995) was a columnist for The Oldie until her death

Q How do you cope when someone to whom you’ve just been introduced immediately lunges in, without bothering with social niceties, and interrogates you relentlessly on something to which you don’t know the answer, and which you don’t consider important anyway?

A In my younger days I found such people very disconcerting. I now realise they are unhappy and unfulfilled and I doubt if they know they are doing it. They only have room in their minds for one idea at a time. It is all too easy to send them up by encouraging them and then mocking their single-minded bigotry. Kinder to stoutly maintain your ignorance while suggesting the names of other people to consult if an answer is of such importance to them. Either way, escape as soon as possible. If they do not get the answer they are after, they are not always very nice about it.

Q There is this shop that I need to use, although it is a little on the pricey side. The management is very snooty, refuses to listen to justified complaints and plays the ‘customer is always wrong’ act. The assistants are nice, but what can they do?

A A lot more than you think. A management which doesn’t listen to its customers is unlikely to bother to supervise its staff. Make friends with one of these. Explain your problem; bend over backwards to see it from their angle too, while pleading the difficulties the situation is causing you. An intelligent operative will co-operate and a satisfactory bargain will be struck, as well as a warm sense of friendship.

Q My husband and I have been married for more than 40 years and I’m sure he cares more for his dog than he does for me, although I do more for him than the dog does.

When I’ve pointed this out to him, he replies that the dog doesn’t argue with him. How can I make him see how much his rudeness upsets me?

A By following the dog’s example. This is not an uncommon factor in a long married life. The dog gives him undiluted love and asks nothing in return. What more could an old man want! I never tried to compete with a dog during my love life. Other women were, by comparison, less competitive. Women will make a wrong move. Dogs won’t.

Q My husband never had a close relationship with his parents. His father is now dead and he ignores his mother unless she sends for him, when he is all passive obedience. Though I’ve nothing in common with his mother, I think this hole in family togetherness is wrong. Is there anything I can do about it?

‘My straighteners are broken’

A Yes. You have one important thing in common: her son and your husband. Work at this. If she lives locally, invite her for a meal now and then. If at a distance have her to stay for a couple of nights. Question her lightheartedly about her son before you knew him. Do not intervene if he contradicts her version of events. From these exchanges you can learn a great deal about your husband’s moods and in which areas he particularly needs your love. Whatever front she is putting up, she is probably lonely. If, or where, there are grandchildren, they will assist the bonding process. Encourage this.

Q My girlfriend has not only left me, but taken several of my possessions with her. Legal proceedings are protracted and I need what is mine. How I can get them back? My efforts have failed so far.

A Finesse is a useful practice. Tell her you are deeply touched by how much your things mean to her. You have explained the depth of her emotion to your solicitor and asked him to place the return of your belongings as the last item in the settlement under discussion. You could find the items descending on your head like hail.

Q I, a woman, have several male homosexual friends whose company I enjoy for their intelligence and sympathy. On the other hand, the thought of lesbianism revolts me. Can you explain why I should feel this way?

A I think I can. You don’t identify with male homosexuals. With your own sex you do. An older woman once made a sexual approach to me. I was filled with such utter disgust that I refused to ever see her again. Yet I, too, enjoy the company of intelligent male homosexuals.

It is a terrible responsibility to be asked to appoint an Oldie of the Year. If physical activity is to be the deciding factor, I feel the prize should go to William Deedes, the 81-year-old Telegraph journalist, who in the course of 1994 was parachuted twice into Bosnia, inspected starving Somalis in war-torn Mogadishu, and single-handedly refloated a school of sperm whales beached by a freak tide in the north of England. But physical activity is not enough to win this glittering award.

Sir John Gielgud and the Queen Mother are nearer the mark except for a growing suspicion that over the years they may have become one and the same person. It would not be fair to award it to either while these suspicions remain. No, one old man stands out for his service to the cause this year. Will Mr Ted Newbery, of Ilkeston, Derbyshire, please step forward to take a bow?

Mr Newbery, a retired miner of 81, is an active gardener. Like 60 per cent of Britain’s allotment owners, he found that his allotment was repeatedly being raided and his carefully tended vegetables were being stolen. Neighbours complained that their sheds were broken into. Spades and hoes were removed, doors and windows broken. As a CID spokesman in Oxford explained: ‘Allotments are easy targets, especially at night. We don’t have the manpower to provide protection.’

This is a permanent refrain from the police, of course. They do not have the manpower to provide protection for public car parks, either, despite the fact that crime against parked cars has increased sevenfold in the last two years.

All they would appear to be able to provide with existing manpower is nocturnal protection for birds’ nests (on overtime) and illegal roadblocks to harass and terrify motorists over Christmas. Anything else will require extra funding, more recruitment. If you are burgled, they advise you to lock up your house more carefully. If you have an allotment shed, they advise you to leave it empty and unlocked.

So it would appear that the law of the land no longer applies in garden allotments any more than it applies in

Rage Auberon Waugh

public car parks. While the rest of the country whinged about this, urged that the government should do something about it, give the police more money (as if police funding had not already been tripled in real terms), Mr Ted Newbery bought himself a shot-gun and cartridges and settled down to sleep in his allotment shed. After several nights, he succeeded in surprising two would-be burglars and shot one of them badly – but not fatally – by pushing his shotgun through a hole in the wall and pulling the trigger.

Mr Newbery was immediately arrested, charged with deliberately injuring 28-year-old Mark Revill, the burglar, in the course of his burgling activities. Cleared of this charge by Derby Crown Court at the end of November, Mr Newbery found himself hauled before the High Court in a civil action for damages brought by the burglar.

Mr Justice Rougier (who turned out to be the son of Georgette Heyer, the novelist remembered chiefly for her novels of the Regency period) awarded the burglar £4,003 for his injuries.

Oldies must take it in turns to go on a rampage and shoot anyone under 30 they meet

Trying to explain his extraordinary behaviour in a letter to the Daily Telegraph, the judge (who revealed he had been tipped off by the defendant’s counsel that Mr Newbery was insured) asked what obviously seemed to him a rhetorical question: ‘Is the farmer entitled to shoot with impunity the boy scrumping apples in his orchard?’

I suppose the answer must be that it depends how old the farmer is. Boys used to be hanged for stealing an apple, as Macaulay reminds us, and it would have been the earlier equivalents of Sir Richard Rougier who sent them to the gallows. We the oldies’ lobby cannot concern ourselves about farmers, but where there is no police protection for the property of old people, we must plainly agitate for a right to protect it ourselves.

The question is whether, confronted by those young people who are all demented by vegetarian greed, we oldies must wait until they start stealing our vegetables before we are allowed to shoot them. Should not the old have an absolute right to shoot the young, at any rate until such time as the police and the judiciary get their act together?

In recent weeks we have seen the government’s ruinous Disabled Persons Act concede practically every demand put before it by the disability lobby We have also seen the Chancellor drop plans to increase VAT on domestic fuel in deference to the destitute oldies’ lobby. They are terrified of being upstaged by people who can pose as poor or unfortunate. Taking Mr Newbery as our example, it is time to agitate for an absolute right to protect our property against Shirley’s children, as the generation of thieves and vegetarians is known.

If that is not granted, individual oldies must take it in turns to go on a rampage and shoot anyone under 30 they meet. No respectable jury would convict them. Some of their ‘victims’ may be innocent, but prevention is always better than cure.

Auberon Waugh (1939-2001) was one of our directors and shareholder-investors

‘Why do they call you ‘iceberg’?’

‘We’re cutting out the middleman’

‘This one is a husband doll. You wind it up and it runs off with a younger doll’

RESTAURANTS KINGSLEY AMIS

The Ritz Hotel, named after the illustrious Swiss hotelier, César Ritz, first opened in 1906. Ritz had a hand in the design, including the Piccadilly façade, supposed to be purposely reminiscent of the Rue de Rivoli in Paris. The ground-floor interior, with its long gallery and extensive marble, is in the style of Louis XVI. All very ritzy, both luxurious and ostentatiously grand or posh.

Both senses were certainly going strong in the 1960s, when I was becoming rich and brave enough to pass through these grand portals. It used to be said that you lunched at the Ritz to see and be seen and to enjoy the surroundings, especially the restaurant with its opulent ceiling and fine view over the park. The food was supposed to be patchy and the service leisurely and, here and there, snooty. Nowadays the visual attractions are unimpaired, while food and service have improved almost out of recognition. (The restaurant is thinly attended at midday, fuller in the evening.)

We passed over the substantial snacks on offer in the cocktail bar or palm court – steak and chips at £12.50, corned beef hash or fishcakes at £12 – though a few people were eating them. The restaurant

menu had an excellent choice of three courses for £26.

The wine-list concentrated on French vintages with a few samples from other countries, from Germany by way of Australia down to England. The seriously rich can treat themselves to a Château Lafite 1961 at £850; the comparatively needy must pick their way – there’s not much under £20. Guest and I settled for the third cheapest red Graves, a nice light Château Smith 1988 at £38, expertly kept and served.

Our first courses were splendid: in my case a lobster and langoustine bisque that was everything a thick crustacean soup should be and more, delicious but rather a lot in quantity, too much for me, and guest did no worse with fried scallops and langoustine.

My main dish was a coronaryinviting pan-fried foie gras on fried bread, hard to get importantly wrong. Guest chose venison, a dish not so often got right in restaurants or anywhere else but triumphant here. After this lot neither of us much fancied the sweet trolley, which nevertheless was full of goodies old and new

The total cost for two, including drinks, VAT and service, was £173.85, not appropriate to a quick midday mouthful but these days not exorbitant. After all, this is still the Ritz.

This was one of Kingsley Amis’s cheaper restaurant bills – and therefore the last of three restaurant reviews he wrote for us

Jeffrey Bernard is well The old toper turns teetotaller

Max Glatt, who runs the drug and alcohol addiction unit at Ealing’s St Bernard’s Hospital, is recognised as the world’s leading authority on alcoholism. He wrote a book called The Alcoholic and the Help He Needs. What he should have done was written a book called ‘The Abstainer and the Help He Needs’. My three-month spell in his ward was as unpleasant as anything I have experienced – with the possible exception of the company of drunks when on the wagon – and I have been on it now for three months.

food shop to another. Imagine a celibate Errol Flynn. How odd that sex has never had a bad name for being addictive...

FOOD

JENNIFER PATERSON

The penalty for this good behaviour is isolation, the absence of friends and the lack of conversation with almost everyone I know since they appear always to be drunk. Can I have been so awful and boring myself? Yes. What is as bad is the fact that when I’m not drinking I bore myself. I feel non-functional – tea bag without hot water, bacon minus egg.

I’ve never intended to get drunk. It’s always been the inevitable accident at the end of the day. Most drugs either have side effects or don’t work efficiently. I used to start drinking at 11am, pub opening time, and reach a peak of wellbeing at lunch time. Unfortunately that peak only lasts for up to two hours and then the wheels fall off, memory evaporates, repetitiveness sets in alongside aggression or melancholy or both. The only unpleasantness I now miss is telling people home truths.

If I didn’t find moderation so tedious I would say that it was the perfect state, but I must plump for being either poacher or gamekeeper. How did it all start with me, I often wonder, and when?

Hollywood and writers, nearly all American, glamorised and even romanticised drinkers, but we made the mistake of seeing Hemingway, for example, as a hero and not the ham that he was. Mind you, I can’t think of anything more ghastly than the fact that were the Faulkners and O’Neills alive today, they’d be jogging from one health

Glatt’s book is a bundle of unintentional laughs. In a chart mapping the alcoholic’s downhill progress, he marks one station of the descent as ‘Starts drinking with social inferiors’. People like Bron Waugh do that every time they walk into a pub. But though drunks may be among the world’s most boring people, one does meet some extraordinarily interesting ones during the downhill struggle. (I still can’t decide whether my never-to-be-written autobiography should be called ‘A Downhill Struggle’ or ‘Reach for the Ground’.)

At the end of our therapy with Max Glatt, we all had to read out our life stories, which we had written during that time. I shall always remember, and it’s 23 years ago now, that one idiot listened to mine and remarked, ‘It seems to me, Jeff, that you’re always reaching for the moon.’ What else is worth reaching for?

Glatt never cured me. No one could. The only prerequisite to stopping drinking is to really want to. All I managed to do was to control my alcoholism to a certain extent and there is no virtue in my hitching a temporary ride on this wagon of mine. I have been forced on it by my pancreas which has become so enraged with me recently that it decided to haemorrhage.

It is a racing certainty that I shall drink again, probably quite soon. The likes of Glatt will put that down to what they call a ‘personality defect’. They may be right but it is my way of blocking out this ghastly world. I had hoped that my current addiction to tea might have turned me into a workaholic, but no such luck. I remain idle. It’s a tiresome business to be addicted to addiction. But I don’t think I would change much –except for my pancreas.

Jeffrey Bernard (1932-1997) wrote the famous Low Life column in The

I finally made it to the House of Lords, albeit mostly in the kitchens – but what kitchens, like those in a large ocean-going liner, I imagine. I was with Leslie Forbes, who has been doing a series for the BBC on Great British Dishes and this visit to the Lords was in the quest for the good old suet pudding, which is served quite a lot in the venerable place, as you might guess. We had a tasting and a talk with the affable Lord Quinton, a great devotee of all things containing suet, who waxed lovingly on the essential pallor of the real suet pudding, which earned it the name of Dead Baby when I was young.

The head chef, a nice young man with the organisation of Alexander within him (he’s called Mark Thatcher, how about that!) showed us the method they’ve used for generations, mixing the dough in a sort of Kenwood mixer – but his was the size of a grown man.

We were allowed to see the great Puginesque dining rooms which were being set out for dainty teas and cakes; it all looked splendid, like the Ritz. Lucky old Lords.

My grandest meal of the month was given in the Penthouse Suite of the Dorchester by Pavilion Books. The lunch was cooked by the Executive Chef of the Dorchester, Willi Elsener as a preview to his cookbook, A World of Flavours. If the lunch is anything to go by it should be a wiz. Stuffed chicken breast wrapped in Parma ham, sea bass with Chinese greens, medallions of lamb of such taste and tenderness to bring tears to the eyes, and a cinnamon and fig gratin which was hot figs on the very hot plates but with a cinnamon ice-cream on top –marvellous. I wish him well.

Grouse is upon us, and though I love it plainly roasted, here is a curious method from Jean-Christophe Novelli.

GROUSE COOKED WITH HAY

1 well hung grouse with the liver

1 celeriac

8 very small baby turnips

2oz of risotto rice

½oz each of chopped garlic, onion and chives

½oz black trumpet mushrooms or similar

9oz of hay (available from pet shops or farms)

2oz each of sliced celery, shallots, and mushrooms mixed with fresh herbs (thyme, tarragon, bay leaves)

A tbsp of white wine, port & madeira

2¼ pints of chicken stock

½oz of unsalted butter

Salt and pepper

Blanch the hay in boiling water for 5 to 10 minutes. Drain, cool and dry Remove offal from the grouse and fill with the mixed herbs and some of the hay. Wrap the bird in the remaining hay and place in a roasting pan. Season and add 1¾ pints of stock, place in a low oven for 30 minutes (Gas 3, 325°F, I should think). Remove all hay and herbs. Take the legs and breasts off the bone and fry in a little butter until

golden brown but still pink inside. Meanwhile peel and slice the celeriac very thinly. Deep fry for 2 minutes, drain and season. Boil the turnips in salted water with a little sugar for 6 minutes, peel and reheat with a little butter. Slice the mushrooms, toss and season in butter. Thinly chop half an onion, sweat in olive oil, add rice, stir, then add enough stock to cover the rice. Cook for 15-20 minutes, add the chopped liver and chives, cook 2 more minutes. Season. Sauté the grouse bones, add mushrooms, celery and shallots, sweat until golden brown. Add the madeira, port and wine, reduce by half, add the remaining stock and reduce again, stir in the butter, season and pass through a sieve. Serve the grouse on the risotto and serve with the celeriac crisps and turnips. Pour the sauce over and around the grouse.

Sounds a bit tricky but isn’t really if you get everything ready before starting.

Jennifer Paterson (1928-1999) was one of the Two Fat Ladies with Clarissa Dickson Wright

‘Push

Marriage, according to Nell Dunn

Ido believe in committed love affairs. I even believe in asking God to bless my union and wish me luck. I believe in faithfulness, at least the idea of it. I think it is right fathers and mothers should be partners in bringing up their children and should sacrifice equally time and money to that cause. ‘With my body I thee worship’.

I like that very much. I even like the idea that, through love, you are prepared to go through thick and thin together, and I even see the richness of facing thick and thin with another person by my side. All this is fine, and therefore have a service if you wish to make public all your private wishes.

BUT, and this is where my question lies, why bring the law into it? None of us likes the law meddling in our affairs. It makes me nervous and it certainly frightens me when they have the right to tell me what to do with my own money. Why do we therefore bind ourselves up in legal chains? The most dastardly aspect of this whole business of marriage is that no lawyer will state in black and white exactly what the contract is.

Your husband can run off with the milkman after five years of marriage and then when he is broke the DHSS can force you – good, hard-working little you – to support him. Did you know this? Well it’s true, even if you gave him the house. Ask the DHSS to deny it. As we all know there are hundreds of other stories like this.

As for being called Miss, I like it. I think it sounds quite Hollywood and glamorous... Miss Vivien Leigh etc. So, I’m all for love, I’m all for commitment and I’m all for being constant in the support and care of your children. But I’m against marriage and want to hear what other Oldie readers think.

me back to the cave. I have an idea’

The Fourth Floor at Fortnum & Mason Candida Lycett Green

If there was a war, this is where I’d go. I don’t think anything could go wrong here. You get the feeling that whatever was going on outside, the waitresses would go on serving afternoon tea.

Although in Piccadilly, London, it is a corner of quiet, undisturbed England and is deeply comfortable. There is an air of everything being just right, as though royalty is just about to arrive or has just left. Like the dining room at Sandringham House, the paint work is in that favourite Edwardian colour, eau de nil, and the wallpaper is swathed in Regency swags.

The tablecloths and napkins are of pale lemon linen, and when you sit down, you get tucked in by smiling waitresses in white aprons. If you are sitting on one of the banquettes against the wall it is almost like being tucked up in bed.

There are olive coloured velour curtains along the windows of Duke Street, where the traffic roars below like a far-away river in a gorge. The giltframed oil paintings around the walls glow with over restoration and include surprisingly dramatic seascapes by Henry Scott – The Glory of the Sea, Dashing Wave and Trafalgar, 1805, by Leslie Wilcox, the latter depicting the rescue of Jeanette, who had stowed away on a French ship to be near her husband.

The tables are so spaciously set that you don’t have a chance to listen to anyone else’s conversations and anyway there is always a hallowed hush in here; you never get any booming voices or guffawing laughter, you get polite chit-chat and gentle glances. At least that is how it appears. I have often thought that very important spies meet here. It is such an unlikely place that it seems

blindingly obvious. At lunch-time there are regulars whose privacy and identity are closely guarded by the staff. I tried asking once, ‘Who is that distinguished looking gentleman in the corner wearing the Savile Row suit?’

‘Oh madam, we would never reveal our customers’ names.’

So I was left surmising that he was the world’s greatest code breaker and he had walked from his discreet sett in Albany across the road, an equally hushed establishment. (A few months later I saw him sitting at his usual table with Jilly Cooper, but I still don’t know his name.)

At tea-time, when the strains of a string quartet or a piano waft over the brown pile carpet, there are whispering gaggles of Japanese tourists who flutter in and out, and well-groomed American women in camel coloured cashmere bring their sad looking husbands, who would probably rather be playing golf at Sunningdale. Quite often there are beautifully mannered couples who have come up from the country; most of the older women wear hats.

You can eat clotted cream and scones, crumpets, teacakes, gentleman’s relish on thin toast, cucumber sandwiches, pastries

and cakes and any number of the nice waitresses will come up to you and ask:

‘Everything all right madam?’ They know their business. Miss Cassidy has been working here for 27 years, Frances McNamara, sometimes called The Headmistress, for 23, Miss Barreiro for 13 and Miss Alvarado for 11. Mr Maatouk, the manager, runs a steady, settled ship. Perhaps this steady feeling has something to do with the fact that Fortnum & Mason has been around for two decades short of 300 years. Mr Fortnum, who came from Oxfordshire originally, rented a room off Mr Mason, who had a small shop in St James’s market. He became a footman in Queen Anne’s household.

One of his jobs was to refill the candlesticks every night and, as one of his perks, he was allowed to keep the old candle ends. These he re-sold to other members of the household and in his spare time he gradually built up a little grocery business.

As private establishments sprang up around St James’s Palace, so the grocery business grew. After two generations, Fortnum & Mason had taken the lead in luxury trade. By the 19th century, they had become a household name. Luxury is still as thick as ever – the lemon yellow ladies’ powder room on the fourth floor has Crabtree & Evelyn soap. On your way down the red-carpeted oak stairs, call in at the perfumery department on the first floor, which is groaning with Lalique.

In the plush Guerlain-scented air, a glass-topped cactus table forms the centrepiece, made by Marc Lalique in 1951. (It is for sale for £41,860).

Candida Lycett Green (1942-2014) was our Unwrecked England correspondent

LIVE-IN CARE VS. RESIDENTIAL CARE: CHOOSING THE RIGHT FIT

FOR YOU

Finding care for your loved one – someone who has always been there for you but now needs extra support – is no easy task.

You want your loved one to feel safe, respected and comfortable, but navigating the world of care can be daunting. We know firsthand the difficulties of making these sorts of choices and the whirlwind of emotions they generate – so where do you start?

In the UK, there are two main options for care: live-in care and residential care. Both offer valuable assistance, but understanding the key differences is crucial for making the best choice for your unique situation.

Here at Eximius, we are committed to empowering you to make an informed decision that prioritises you or your loved one’s wellbeing and happiness.

Live-in care offers a host of benefits such as familiarity and personalised care, while also encouraging ongoing social participation and independence. But how does it compare to residential care?

RESIDENTIAL CARE

Residential care, aka care homes or nursing homes, is where people live and receive care in a semi-communal setting.

It’s a fantastic option that can help them stay social, as there are other residents to swap stories and share experiences with. It’s also great if they require a more stimulating environment as residential care homes will have a regular events and activities schedule for residents.

Residential care homes have multiple members of staff to assist but, of course, this support is shared between several residents. Families and friends of those needing extra support may find this comforting, especially in specialist care settings, as all members of staff will be trained in the home’s specialism.

It’s also an option for those needing a change of scenery – for example, after the passing of a spouse or moving to a home closer to other family members.

However, a move to residential care can be challenging for some people. In 2020, it was found that 80% of older people would prefer to remain in their own homes. Moving to a new environment can exacerbate feelings of loss of independence

and control over routines as well as having less privacy due to communal spaces.

LIVE-IN CARE

Live-in care allows older people to stay in the comfort of their own homes with the help of a dedicated carer. This person – or companion – lives in the client’s home and is on hand for all their care needs.

Investing in live-in care means that your loved one can continue living their usual life, with the benefit of increased safety. They can be surrounded by their keepsakes and memories and free to enjoy their creature comforts – from keeping their pets or vegetable gardens, to socialising with friends from the local community.

It also allows for more individualised care that’s tailored to specific needs, as well as more contact time with a carer with one-toone support (or one-to-two in the case of couples remaining at home together.)

Once thought to be ‘the expensive choice’, live-in care is more affordable than ever and can help maintain independence and identity for those who need extra support.

FINDING THE RIGHT CHOICE

So now you know a little bit about the main types of care, here’s what else you need to consider when choosing between residential and live-in care:

The specific level and type of care required (for example, basic assistance vs. complex medical)

Mobility and level of independence: How sociable does the environment need

to be? Do they want a quiet environment or would it be beneficial for them to be around more people? Are they interested in having activities organised for them?

Financial implications: Individual preference as well as the input of loved ones

EXIMIUS: LIVE-IN

CARE SPECIALISTS

Eximius Live-In Care was founded by Kate in 2016, inspired by her own fiercely independent mother. We aim for our clients to enjoy a full, safe and happy life, and for their families to enjoy peace of mind that their loved ones are well cared for.

All our carers and companions are fully vetted and trained. They work directly for us, so friends and family do not have the stress of hiring an external carer. Carers are matched with clients based on experience, training and personality to ensure that they are the best companion for them.

Ultimately, the decision between live-in care and residential care depends on your loved one’s needs and preferences. We encourage you to have open conversations with them, involve them in the decisionmaking process as much as possible, and seek professional guidance if needed.

If you or a loved-one would like to understand more about the different care options available, please contact us for further information. We’d love to help.

0203 794 9933

info@eximiussupport.uk eximiussupport.uk

An Oldie Poll in 1997

What’s wrong with the BBC?

Even 28 years ago, our readers were moaning about

‘What’s gone wrong with the BBC?’

We sent this six-word question to a number of Oldie friends and contributors who would have a particular interest. It was a genuine inquiry and not an invitation to a Birt-baiting, even if that is how many responded. Because some former BBC employees requested anonymity, and to avoid tiresome repetition, we have run together certain recurring arguments while retaining individual voices as often as possible.

It became rapidly clear that John Birt is held almost wholly responsible both for the drastic nature of the endless reorganisations over the past few years and for the ‘arrogant’, ‘ruthless’ or ‘rigid’ manner in which they have been enforced. Only the management consultants McKinsey’s, who advised on the restructuring, share in the opprobrium. Marmaduke Hussey, the former BBC chairman and king-maker, who browbeat the governors into accepting Birt as Director-General long before the post was vacant, gets a bit of stick, though Mark Tully thinks that even he eventually ran up against the iron will of his protégé.

That some change had become necessary is conceded. ‘The BBC was always going to face difficulties as two generations of public service broadcasting came under pressure from deregulation and the mass provision of new channels,’ says one of the ex-BBC men. ‘The BBC was always going to have to restructure itself to face these challenges. It is the BBC’s misfortune –some would say tragedy – that these processes should have fallen into the hands of a D-G and a firm of management consultants totally out of sympathy with the institution they were trying to run. His [Birt’s)] instinct for

precision and belief in his own total correctness have made him impermeable to persuasion that an institution like the BBC is successful because of its imprecision. Out of this flows creativity. Birt wants it all trammelled and channelled. What can’t be managed cannot be permitted.’

Brian Wenham, once Director of Programmes at the Television Centre, then in charge of Radio, revived the BBC’s old ‘Auntie’ image to frame his version of what happened.

Once she reached 70, he says, he was expecting the old girl’s nerves to get the better of her, and they did. ‘She developed a distressing tendency to raise a leg and pee on her past. She has filled her house with Bright Young Things in Red Braces to advise her on how to spend her money. She forgets all those years when she managed her budget herself with much less fuss, and to better effect.’

Mark Tully, who famously quit as the Beeb’s India correspondent, is particularly incensed by slurs on the past

What’s

the BBC

to justify the present. Was the public taken in too easily by the myth John Birt created when he took over, that he inherited a BBC in terminal decline, dominated by Oxbridge graduates who thought the licence fee was theirs to do as they wished with?

‘They seem to have forgotten that one of Birt’s predecessors, Ian Trethowan, rose from the rank of tea-boy... or that Alasdair Milne regularly brought the annual television budget in within £20,000 of the estimate. Bill Cotton, not exactly a typical Oxbridge man himself, summed it up: “If we were so bad, why were the programmes so good?”’

But equally, have they got so noticeably worse? For all the tears over Radio 4’s wavelengths, Radio 3’s brow level or the demise of Mastermind, can the everyday viewer or listener be aware of deterioration?

Alas, only Ludovic Kennedy admitted that he still found many outstanding programmes on BBC-TV, and even more on radio, reserving his rage rather

gone wrong with the BBC?

‘People with long experience are being made redundant and replaced by people with little or no experience of the nature of broadcasting, its problems and their solution’

BARRY TOOK

‘No hesitation and no anonymity! John Birt is the answer, known to me as Pol Pot’

ALASDAIR MILNE

Former Director-General of the

BBC 1982-87

quixotically – considering the hostility met by his own brave venture as an independent 35 years ago – for Mrs Thatcher’s decree that the networks must farm out 25 per cent of production to independent producers.

The veteran critic Philip Purser agreed that the BBC has plenty of fine old favourites. Timewatch, The Antiques Roadshow and Letter from America continue to flourish. But they are inherited assets. No comparable institutions are being hatched, few innovations tried out, not much new programming attempted at all outside such safe areas as wildlife, costume drama and crime fiction.

The much-mocked bureaucracy of the old BBC harboured individuals who were allowed to whizz off on wild projects of their own. An outside broadcasts producer normally assigned to Racing from Plumpton or Trooping the Colour would make on the side funny, subversive programmes about fishing, birdwatching or Highland concert parties. Dennis Potter, commissioned to deliver some boring adaptation, posted off an original, undiscussed screenplay instead. His producer had a production in train the next afternoon. It was Blue Remembered Hills

‘Today’s new hi-tech bureaucracy,’ Purser says, ‘appears to have no provision for the wayward. Everything is planned long in advance, marketed in advance, revised in committees.

‘I am still sent occasional press releases about production starting on some dire epic of lesbian women and/or male serial-killers. Perhaps a year later comes the invitation to a screening, closely followed by a cancellation because the release date cannot be agreed with Station WANK, Arkansas, or the satellite channel UK Crud. The only individuals still able to call their own tune are motor-cycling lady cooks and anyone based in Bristol.’

Barry Took continued this line of thought. ‘The problem is exacerbated by people with long experience being made redundant and being replaced by people with little or no experience of the nature of broadcasting, its problems and their solution. Friends at the Television Centre or Broadcasting House tell me how they have to wait until eternity for a decision that in the old days would have

What’s gone wrong with the BBC?

‘To answer your question, I can only say it became a sadder place to work when the people making the programmes were put in smaller offices than the people selling them, and another blow came when the tea bars were removed and replaced by a “deli”

called “Strollers” which somehow looked exactly the same but worse’

VICTORIA WOOD

‘They stopped using ME’

SPIKE MILLIGAN

been given at once, after a single phone call or meeting.’

In fact, the BBC seems to have forgotten what it exists for, according to a former senior BBC (and ITV) executive who, unfortunately, wants his name kept off a detailed and cogent indictment.

‘Instead of concentrating on the provision of national television and radio services at a level of quality and ambition which match that regularly achieved in the past, too much attention is focused on attempting to turn the Corporation into a large, multi-national pseudocommercial business...’

Like other critics, he is scornful of the part played by McKinsey’s. ‘They have set up a completely farcical internal market (or a whole set of them) in areas where such disciplines are at best irrelevant and at worst positively destructive. We now have the “logical” conclusion that the BBC “cannot afford” a design department, is about “not to be able to afford” a filmcrewing department, and is only a short distance away from “proving” that it

could operate much more satisfactorily without its inhouse production staff.

‘All of this ignores the fact that one of the assets of the BBC was its integrated production operation built up over five decades, and now in sad repair. The current separation of “Broadcasting” from “Production” bears all the hallmarks of another McKinsey-inspired disaster, with those at the head of each separate unit completely at a loss to work out what to do next.’ He winds up with a scathing attack on the debasement of language which has accompanied, and is used to try and explain, the BBC’s change of role. ‘We have a Director-General who speaks in a language which is difficult to equate with English. We have management-speak and assertion instead of argument, we have endless “explanatory” glossies emanating from the thought-police of corporate strategy – a contradiction in terms if ever there was one.’

Or, as Philip Purser puts it, ‘Good organisations deliver the goods; only lousy ones have to promise to.’

The Silence of the Lambs,1990

You like scary pictures? Boy, have I got a scary picture for you! In this film Anthony Hopkins makes Bela Lugosi look like a Ziegfeld chorus boy. Hopkins is especially frightening because he understates, and that quiet, almost cosy understatement makes his performance that much more menacing.

Jodie Foster plays an FBI criminologist, Clarice Starling, assigned to do a series of interviews with Hopkins’s Dr Hannibal Lecter, a psychopathic maniac who not only murders but eats his victims. He is also an intellectual, enjoying the risk of taunting his Captors. He is smarter than they are: he knows it and they know it.

Maybe Lecter has influenced me, or maybe my mind was as evil as his in the first place. The name given to the chief protagonist fascinated me. Hannibal, that’s too easy. He eats people. But Lecter? Lecter, in Yiddish slang, applies to oral sex. Hannibal Lecter means, in that argot, that Hannibal had oral sex with her. Remember, you read it here first.

Jodie Foster matches Hopkins, no easy task. She doesn’t play on her gender, doesn’t try to look sexy. She looks and acts like an FBI criminologist doing the best job she can. Lecter can temporarily frighten her, but not to the point of giving up her assigned task – which is to get the interviews from Lecter that no other agent has been able to get.

At the film’s end, Agent Starling is

VIDEO LARRY ADLER

getting a special FBI award. Later she takes a phone call from Lecter, who has escaped from his cell, killed a police officer and gruesomely maimed another. He tells her she has nothing to fear from him, that he thinks the world a better place for her being in it. ‘And I hope you will extend the same courtesy to me.’

‘Dr Lecter,’ she replies. ‘You know that I can’t promise that.’ Lecter is unabashed and tells her, ‘I’m having an old friend for dinner.’ Corny but, in this context, it’s chilling.

The final shot shows Lecter, out of prison uniform, in a normal suit, walking casually down a street. There is one exchange I’ve overlooked. A fellow-agent asks if Starling isn’t afraid that Lecter will come after her.

‘No,’ she says, ‘he would consider that rude.’

Gone With the Wind, 1939

Call me a dewy-eyed optimist, but I think this is going to be a hit. I know films about the Civil War never work, but this is the exception to prove that there never should have been a rule. Also, this one has a fellow, Clark Something, and the female lead is

some English broad.

The moral of the film is that slavery is good for you. The slaves, called ‘darkies’, are the only truly virtuous characters. Also, they know their place.

Pardon me, I forgot Melanie. Melanie is married to Ashley, who is not all that secretly adored by the English broad, named Scarlett. Where was I? Oh yes, Melanie is an all-star pain-in-the-ass. Boy, is she virtuous! I shouted ‘All right, already, stop with the virtue.’ Then I realised, Melanie couldn’t hear me. Melanie’s not only virtuous, she’s deaf.

Ashley is played by Leslie Howard and he’s twice as virtuous as Melanie, making him a bit 0f a double pain-in-the-ass.

All of these characters, slaves included, are Noble Southerners. Anyone else is a Damyankee and a schmuck to boot, except they’re winning. The film is too goddamned long, the Civil War scenes are excessive and interminable except for the burning of Atlanta which is truly terrific.

There’s also a theme by Max Steiner, played whenever Clark, Vivien (the English broad) or the main house, called Tara, are shown. Thus you get to hear that theme an awful lot. You also hear ‘Dixie’, ‘Swanee River’, ‘Old Folks at Home’ and a bit of Dvořák’s New World Symphony.

Eventually Scarlett and Clark, called Rhett in the film, marry and produce an adorable baby called Bonnie, so adorable that I wanted to kill her. Rhett loves his daughter excessively; it seems embarrassingly like paedophilia. However, Bonnie gets killed jumping a fence so that’s the end of that romance.

Rhett’s historic line, when he’s leaving Scarlett and she wails ‘ What will become of me?’ is ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.’ This, in its day, like a glimpse of stocking, was looked on as something shocking.

The film won eight Oscars and is probably the all-time big money winner. My favourite character was Hattie McDaniel, who plays a darkie and who keeps saying ‘Mmmm-mmm’. Eddie Anderson, who is more famous as Rochester in Jack Benny’s programmes, is another darkie.

Larry Adler (1914-2001) was a famous harmonica player and our video critic. He fled America in 1949 after refusing to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee

The agony of novel writing

Making up stories is like breaking rocks, finds John Sweeney

The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was Saddam Hussein smoking a fat cigar. I closed them again, experimentally. Saddam was still there. Shut. Open. The Antarctic stare, the smudged tattoo of two crossed scimitars on his right hand, the epaulettes in gold of the Iraqi eagle. No mistaking the Father of the Nation. How had I ended up in bed with the President of Iraq? Had I had that much to drink? A lot, yes. Enough to kill a small horse. But that much?

Oh, all right then, I made that up. Indonesia is aflame, Suharto’s janissaries are gunning down helpless students, the ‘overseas Chinese’ are being victimised wholesale, and all to the long withdrawing roar of the sea of money. I am in the wrong place – on sabbatical in a cottage on Dartmoor, writing a novel, Baghdad Zoo, the first paragraph of which started this column – and I don’t care.

Well, no, that’s not true: my heart is with the students of Jakarta and their struggle to overthrow a monster the West has backed for too long, through too much blood, but one can’t do every foreign story on earth, else one would go mad, or, as my enemies might say, madder. And the story is being very well covered by reporters such as Richard Lloyd Parry in the Independent and Andrew Higgins in the Observer. Writing a novel is like breaking rocks. I’ve done 35,000 words in two weeks so I’m halfway through. I try and get up every morning at six, fail, listen to the Today programme – they had an absolutely perfect piece of Monty Pythonesque nonsense one morning, with someone purporting to be Countess Machiavelli droning on about what a good bloke her ancestor was – and then I put on my green writing cords and sit at the computer.

I try to bash out 5,000 to 6,000 words a day. Set in Baghdad during the peace negotiations between Saddam and the UN, the novel is about hacks falling in

and out of love, making up absurd practical jokes and, in the middle of all this, trying to find out who is responsible for the children dying in Iraq. It’s partly an attack on the TV majors soft-soaping of Saddam in return for visas, partly an attempt to rewrite Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop for the nineties, swapping cleft sticks for satellite phones, and, in this respect, is therefore doomed to fail. Scoop is so good, so wonderfully true, that no one will ever get near it.

I try to get up every morning at six, fail, listen to Today, then I put on my green writing cords and sit at the computer

At the end of the writing day, I step outside and launch myself on to the moors or to the nearest pub, an hour’s walk away. The pub conversation is not as sophisticated as you get in the Coach and Horses, local to the Observer’s offices, but it has its charms. I haven’t told the lads what I’m up to, but one night a daft English sheepdog puppy followed me all the way there and I

‘Well, you should have gone before we came’

couldn’t shake it off – now every time I go in they cry out, ‘Brought your dog again, have you?’

This particular corner of Devon is, this month, more beautiful than the singing of it. As April was wet, the grass is green and fresh and deep. It is so lovely that it has an effect on the soul, or at least on mine: I skim read the nasty bits in the newspapers, and love to wallow in the nice bits. My favourite was the Daily Telegraph’s report of the release of the MI5 suspect Michael Bettaney, and the reaction of his neighbours. They were utterly delightful. One said sensibly that he had done his time, and should be left alone, and the second, a pensioner, shouted into her house to alert her husband: ‘ ’Ere, Sid, we’ve got that MFI spy living next door to us.’

And there’s no doubting the most intriguing story of recent weeks: the visit of the President of the United States to a pub in Birmingham. There’s something absolutely surreal about the most powerful man in the world doing something as normal as having a pint in a pub in – let’s face it – not the most visually attractive of our cities.

And the killer detail: the President’s security man returning to the pub to smash the President’s glass, lest anyone want to lift his fingerprints. That to me was far more wonderful reporting than any amount of ‘investigative’ journalism; what really gives you an insight into the lives of the powerful, and the restraints on their lives, is close observation.

The neighbour mistaking Britain’s security service for a cut-price furniture store puts into context the crime of a traitor whose treachery is old and stale. That Bill Clinton cannot drink a pint without fear of someone taking his fingerprints from the glass speaks of the cage of power that he is trapped in.

Only observe…

John Sweeney wrote the Press column for The Oldie

Miles Kington Quiz egos

Poor Miles Kington,’ said a letter in the Radio Times the other day. ‘He looked as if he wished he were somewhere else.’ The letter was referring to The Book Quiz, which appeared on BBC2 on 23rd April –National Book Day – and the letterwriter was quite right. I hated being on the quiz, and I think I have now learnt my lesson: don’t be flattered into doing quizzes, especially if they sound as if they might be ‘fun’.

The funny thing is that I always thought I’d be quite good at quizzes. As a child I had the guileless curiosity that leads you into strange corners of knowledge, and my memory was a wildlife sanctuary for useless thoughts and unwanted facts and fancies.

When I arrived at senior school, there was a general knowledge test for the whole school in which everyone, from 13- to 18-year-olds, answered the same questions, and I came tenth because I knew silly things like the names of the five Classic horse-races.

What riled me at the time was that when they put up everyone’s score on the board, mine alone was omitted. Nobody knew about my startling achievement. It didn’t occur to me till years later that if I had been up there with the 18-year-old swots I would have been mercilessly teased, or worse, by my contemporaries.

I can still hold my own, sort of, in general knowledge – I do quite well at Trivial Pursuit, and I would do pretty well in pub quizzes, I think, were it not for my antipathy to pop music – but somewhere along the line my pool of knowledge must have started to dry up.

Stephen Fry, for instance, who was also on this TV quiz, is much more knowledgeable about literature than I am, even though I’ve got a 20-year or more start on him. But of course it wasn’t really a book quiz at all, as the letterwriter to the Radio Times pointed out, any more than They Think It’s All Over is a sports quiz.

These are examples of that new breed of quiz which are comedy programmes in thin disguise. There’s one on pop music, and there’s one on sport, and another

about television itself, and they all have the same revolving band of comics who come on and do their jokes.

On our programme we had David Baddiel and Phil Jupitus, both adept at making cracks about books and writers and adjacent subjects, which I can’t do at all. Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint came up in one question and Baddiel went off on a three-minute monologue about masturbation which, although quite funny, wasn’t really what book quizzes are about, so I wasn’t surprised that it didn’t make the broadcast version.

But of straight question-and-answer routines about books and the business of writing there was very little.

Looking back into the dim mists of time, I think I can see the point at which this all started to happen. Once, quizzes were either serious (Animal, Vegetable, Mineral) or not about anything at all, or nothing that mattered (What’s My Line, Call My Bluff).

It was probably on Call My Bluff that the comic personality began to take over. Although Frank Muir and Patrick Campbell actually did care who won, and what the words really meant, the important thing was the care and maintenance of their comic personas: the

bow-tie, the mannerisms, the wonderful stammer, the raised eyebrows and so on.

To begin with, on Call My Bluff, the guest actors and actresses were allowed to make up their own fake definitions, but they proved to be so bad at it that the producer supplied them with ready-made and ready scripted ones.

And there we have the beginning of the two things that permeate today’s quizzes – the jokes, and the pre-planning that allows the jokes. People have recently wondered out loud just how much preplanning goes into Have I Got News For You, but I don’t think it really matters. It’s how well it’s done.

Sometimes you can tell that most of a show is carefully planned, as with I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue – after all, you can’t ask someone to sing the words of one song to the tune of another if he is ignorant of tune or words, or both. Sometimes you know that something can’t be done in advance, as with Just a Minute. Sometimes you’re not sure, as with Radio 4’s News Quiz, but having been on that once or twice I can testify that the questions are not fed to panellists in advance – you have to cover almost every eventuality in advance.

In fact, you can tell that the panellists don’t know what’s coming because sometimes Alan Coren will say ‘Is this Tuesday’s story about the parrot and the wig?’ and Simon Hoggart will say no, there’s no question in the programme about that story, and Coren will insist on telling the story. He and Jeremy Hardy are genuinely funny and fast on their feet, which I think is why the News Quiz is far funnier than Have I Got News For You, which, even when Hislop and Merton are on form, is much less inventive.

So I don’t think I’ll be doing any more quizzes. I only did The Book Quiz because someone had pulled out at the last moment. Brian Sewell, I think. They told me he was ill and couldn’t do it. That may well be true. But my theory is that he suddenly saw the light about quizzes today and ran for safety.

Miles Kington (1941-2008) was a regular Oldie columnist

Common thief Wilfred De’Ath spent the winter with cap in hand Paperback wastrel

Just when you think you can’t sink any lower, then you do. At present, my monthly pittance not having arrived, I’m reduced to begging for my bread on the merde du chien-encrusted French streets. I fell into this, as I have fallen into so many things in France, by chance.

I was standing outside a church in Limoges in the rain (no big deal because it always rains in Limoges), my hat in my hand – a rather natty little fedora, if you must know – when someone put 36 francs (about £3.60) into it. Enough for four lunches at La Bonne Assiette, Limoges’ restaurant sociale. Since then, I haven’t looked back.

Here in Avignon, a rich town, it seems even easier, although I’ve learnt from bitter experience that it is the poor, not the rich, who give. You stand outside the snotty little Cathedral after Sunday Mass, hat in hand, and score about 50 francs (£5) in as many minutes. I always thought I’d be too ashamed and embarrassed to beg, but it seems that I’m not. Hunger, as Charlie Chaplin said, has no conscience.

The French public are generous and take it for granted, especially at Christmas, that they must give to the poor. On Christmas Eve, I took 63 francs and a single luncheon voucher. Nothing daunted, I returned to the fray on Christmas Day and cleaned up 450 francs (£45) in four hours.

I went into a very chic hotel, the Palais des Papes, to turn all the change into notes and the girl cashier, who recognised me, since I’ve often stayed there, looked a bit surprised: ‘Anyone would think you’d been begging on the streets,’ she said.

It is not quite so easy at my own church, the Orthodox Church of St Cosmo and St Damian, because having once been their concierge non salarié (unpaid janitor) I know almost everybody there and it really is a shade embarrassing to have to ask them for money. So I’ve taken to stealing the candle money instead. The Orthodox Church lights candles exclusively for the dead, and since I don’t really believe in a life after death, it seems sensible to me to use the money that

would otherwise just go up in smoke to keep my ageing carcass on the road. I doubt whether Père Henri, our somewhat authoritarian parish priest, would agree. (Last Sunday I took 100 francs.)

The fact is, morale is very low just at present. It must be, because I found myself taking a Jeffrey Archer novel (The Fourth Estate) out of the library’s English section – invariably, along with Frederick Forsyth, a sign of severe demoralisation with me. I put it back pretty quickly, however, and retreated to Shakespeare, Avignon’s English bookshop. Shakespeare is the best English bookshop in France. I will go further. It is the best English bookshop in Europe, and that includes England. It has all the books I have ever wanted to own – and some.

To begin with, it doesn’t seem very promising. It always looks shut and the owner, a 74-year-old named Wolfgang Zuckermann, is not particularly friendly. This must be a kind of sales pitch in reverse because I found myself buying up Brideshead Revisited, Howards End and a life of F Scott Fitzgerald in order to impress him with my literary taste. It seemed to work because he suddenly became more approachable.

Now I go in there every Saturday morning to drink coffee, read the International Herald Tribune, listen to Haydn and Mozart on the radio, and generally bask in the sweet, decaying aroma of good second-hand books.

I chew the fat with Wolfgang, who hates the modern world, cars, TV, the internet, cell-phones, personal stereos, piped music, shopping malls, baseball caps, whether worn straight or reversed, almost as much as I do.

Wolfgang is an atheist, otherwise he’d probably agree with the American priest I met recently at the Orthodox monastery in Tolleshunt Knights, Essex, that all these things, but most especially anything to do with computers, are actually the work of the Devil. As one who has not even properly graduated from the pen to the typewriter, let alone the word processor, I find myself in total agreement.

The one thing Wolfgang does not dislike, apart from books, is young girls. Or perhaps I should say young women. (I haven’t been able to bring myself to tell him that he is known as the Humbert Humbert of Avignon – Nabokov’s Lolita is one of our favourite books of all time.)

No pretty girl, whether English, French or American, enters his shop without being deftly chatted up. To put it bluntly, it is a girl trap. The stupid ones, however attractive, are either rejected out of hand or passed on to his friends, so this Christmas I have had my hands full with Sandrine, Marie, Deborah, Stéphanie, Anna, Louise, Agnès and goodness knows who else. Wolfgang sets his standards so high that even the stupid ones are, by my reckoning, extremely bright.

Shakespeare, to sum up, is a little oasis of genuine civilisation away from the horror of the streets and from the rather artificially cultural atmosphere of Avignon, which is, basically, a small Provençal market town posing as the cultural centre of the universe. As a bookshop, even if it is not precisely ‘where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios’, it is not far removed from it. It is impressive evidence, to quote Orwell, of books as ‘a humane trade which is not capable of being vulgarised beyond a certain point’. It has been my salvation through the past lean month and I’m extremely grateful.

Wilfred De’Ath (1937-2020) was our Gentleman-of-the-Road correspondent

Memorial Service

HRH The Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, 1930-2002

Westminster Abbey

The Royal Family turned out in force for this service of Thanksgiving. The mood, serious but celebratory, accommodated the Abbey’s accustomed grandeur. Its choir, joined by King’s Cambridge and St George’s Chapel Windsor, was backed up by the Academy of St Martin’s-in-theFields and Andrew Reid at the organ.

Princess Margaret wished the service be set around Fauré’s Requiem. Dame Felicity Lott sang Pie Jesu and Bryn Terfel Libera Me. Viscount Linley read from I Corinthians 15, ‘...this mortal must put on immortality’, and a member of the extended family, Felicity Kendal (her agent is Lady Sarah Chatto’s mother-inlaw), read The Union of Friends from William Penn’s Some Fruits of Solitude: ‘They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it...’ It came up a great deal fresher than popping into poor Henry Holland’s ‘next room’.

The princess rejected a eulogy –usually my text. The Dean suggested we recall our own memories of her – mine all happy

Meeting her in 1963 with David Frost at a party. ‘Why don’t you “satirise” the reverential way the BBC report us?’ she asked. Frost remembered Ian Lang’s

Footlights monologue, The Sinking of the Queen’s Barge, which shocked the nation the next week.

Years later, taking her home from a Laine/Dankworth evening at Ronnie Scott’s, we passed a boarded-up shop on Fulham Road. ‘They used to sell clothes in there. They called it The Countess of Snowdon. People thought I was selling off my old dresses.’ Rashly I suggested, ‘It must be difficult for you, Ma’am. You’ve got that restaurant at the back of your house called Maggie Jones.’ ‘Ned! I am the Countess of Snowdon. I have never been called Maggie Jones.’

Off to Los Angeles. Which hotel?

In the last one the beds had been uncomfortable. She and her lady-inwaiting piled the sofa cushions high on the mattress. ‘I felt like the Princess and the pea.’

‘Do you know Starsky and Hutch? I want to meet Starsky – not Hutch. Can you arrange it?’ Robert Stigwood did.

At the Ivy, deftly sidestepping an egregious, hobnobbing night-club owner. At Lacy’s after The Mitford Girls, bringing joy to Margaret Costa, whose husband was cooking. At Sadler’s Wells at a very early AIDS charity performance of an 18th-century, doggerel, burlesque version of Hamlet, shouting to me, ‘My God, it’s Vera!’ as Vera Lynn picked her way through the bodies at the end singing We’ll Meet Again.

Greeting Maurice Denham (First Gravedigger) with ‘Oh! It’s the lift man!’ In the 1930s Maurice installed the lifts at 145 Piccadilly and gave the little Princesses rides up and down.

Good idea to cut the eulogies. In future your critic will measure his memories against them.

Written by the author and broadcaster, Ned Sherrin (1931-2007)

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Mavis Nicholson knew the eminent novelist when she was married to Kingsley Amis, and caught up with her again

Elizabeth Jane Howard

Elizabeth Jane Howard, CBE, was born in 1923, and is the author of 12 novels and many other books, including her autobiography Slipstream. However much she denies her beauty, she quotes plenty of men who praise it in this frank account of her life. I met her at Simpson’s after last month’s Oldie literary lunch, when she was one of the speakers. I also know her of old, from when she was married to Kingsley Amis.

In your autobiography, you mention the desperate love you had for your mother that you felt was unrequited Yes, it took me a long time to realise how much it affected my life and relationships. I spent a lot of time pursuing perfection without expecting it.

Feeling unloved, do you think your demeanour was that of a victim, and was that why you were bullied at school? I think it had something to do with it. But being bullied was a circumstantial series of pieces of bad luck. After a couple of weeks at school, they moved me up a year and some of the older girls resented this terribly. There happened to be two notorious bullies in the school – one of whom got expelled for bullying. And my grandfather was one of the music examiners, and the snobby headmistress kept referring to that. So they took it out on me. I was bright when I arrived but when I left I could barely read or write and couldn’t stand anybody my own age except my cousins. The bullying was a daily nightmare and I feel very sorry for children who have to endure that.

Your mother undermining your confidence must have affected that Even after she died, my mother continued undermining me. She kept all my brothers’ letters and not one of mine. My younger brother remembers saying to our mother, ‘Jane does write books rather well,’ and she said, ‘But she has nothing to write about.’

My mother was my grandmother’s

least favourite child. So maybe that sort of thing gets handed on and on, but no! My daughter has broken it with her daughter, definitely. Well done her.

You left your very young daughter. Was that partly because you were worried you wouldn’t know how to mother her? I felt very guilty about it. I felt I couldn’t give her the lifestyle that she was used to. I left with ten bob and a half-written novel that no one would publish. I was earning £2 10s a week and couldn’t pay anyone to look after her. I ate when people took me to restaurants. I felt she was better off with her father and stepmother. I had her when I was very young, so I was also frightened of her.

Yet in her old age you took your mother into your house and looked after her till she died – not her beloved sons but you!

Yes, and I was also trying desperately to be a good stepmother to Kingsley’s children, as I hadn’t been a good mother to my child. I made one grave error. I should have confronted Hilly, their mother and said, ‘Look, if we want what’s good for the children, we have got to bury the animosity.’

You don’t seem to attach much blame, if any, to your father, who made a sexual pass at you when you were 15 Oh yes, I did blame him for a long time, and avoided ever being on my own with him. I say in the book that it affected me. It took me a long time to realise he never grew up. The messages I got from my parents were lethal: my mother was frigid, didn’t like sex at all. My father made it clear that if you felt sexually attracted to someone you showed it. The night before I married Peter Scott at 19,

Elizabeth Jane Howard, pictured at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, 2003

my mother asked me if I knew about the nasty side of married life. I said I did, not to hear any more from her. By the time my mother died I was terribly sorry for her. It was a no-win situation, because Kingsley kept accusing me of spending all my time with her, and she accused me of spending all my time with Kingsley.

I visited you a lot at that time, and ‘liberated’ me thought you were an incredibly willing slave. You gave up your writing completely, didn’t you? I did. When we were thinking of moving to Lemmons, it was such a big house to run and I warned them all that I didn’t think we had enough money to live there properly. We’d have to do a lot of things for ourselves and everyone said they’d do anything they were asked. My brother might have used the lawnmower but Kingsley and his two sons did nothing. Not even the washing-up. And Kingsley didn’t drive, so had to be driven everywhere. He – and I understood this – wanted to get on with his work and have the rest of his life as nice as possible.

Just as long as you were going to be full-time mother, driver, head cook and bottle-washer, social secretary... I knew he was being unreasonable, but people who drink a lot are. I was desperately trying to keep the marriage going. I thought if I could hang on, it would get better. I had always hoped I could be first in someone’s life. I have never, ever been. I thought I might have this with Kingsley. And when things were very bad between us I still thought they’d get better if I never answered back.

He didn’t really have an awful lot of time for women, did he?

He disliked them, I think. He was very badly brought up. He had a cruel childhood. His father didn’t take any notice of him. He was a very lonely only child. And his mother absolutely cosseted him. I remember him telling me how he was terribly looking forward to going away from home to his first camp but because he had a small spot on his face his mother stopped him from going at the last minute His mother was hopeless with him. So I think he hated women because of her and then he found out he enjoyed sex with them but very little else.

When your marriage broke down, you joined a women’s group and there was a terrific change in you It was marvellously helpful. I went when my self-esteem was nil. I remember one of the group asking me to name one thing that was good about me and I could not think of a single thing. Then I said I was loved. Going home I thought, that’s a lie, you aren’t even loved.

I think the great thing about a group is that you are listened to. People generally don’t listen to each other. So when you are being listened to, you start to listen to others and learn a lot from other people.

You did go for psychotherapy too? Yes, for a curious reason. Kingsley had started to go for sexual behaviour, and after his therapist saw him for a few times, she asked to see me. She was a curious mixture of shrewdness and naïvety. After a few minutes, she said to me, ‘I thought you were going to be perfectly vile but you aren’t, are you?’ That’s not a good therapist. So I found someone else.

What did you learn about yourself that was helpful?

That you don’t grow up if you go on wanting your mother’s love. I think I tended to have rather grandiose feelings about what I should be like. I learnt that I didn’t have to be the greatest person in the world, nor was I the worst. I was much like other people. In the end I was OK, really.

It is a fact that if you don’t feel good about yourself you don’t function very well

You don’t. People think psychotherapy is self-indulgence, but until you feel all right with yourself you can’t do anything right for other people, which I have always wanted to do. I am better at it now, I think.

Were you still seeking the love of your life in your seventies when you fell under the sway of that spooky con man you wrote about in Falling?

Yes I was. He died the other day, which was an enormous relief to me. He wanted to marry me and he would probably have killed me. I’ve discovered he probably killed his second wife. He was a very wicked man. But he was frightfully intelligent and a good lover.

One thing I did know at that time was that I did not want to marry him.

But you ignored warnings about him from your friends and relatives and you took him into your bed. That is leaving yourself vulnerable, to say the least! Yes, but not quite the same as contracting to marry someone, is it? I was short of sex. I know people think that as you get older you don’t mind about that but you do. I have had very little in my life.

What, even with all your affairs?

A lot of them were very brief.

A lot were with married men. You write honourably and morally about things in your books, but how did you square your conscience?

One rich lover’s wife was also having affairs, so that didn’t matter. Laurie Lee had a lot of affairs and I think Cathy, his wife, was very grown-up about them. I felt very guilty over Cecil Day Lewis because of Jill, so I stopped it almost straight away.

You’ve said you think you can learn to be old

Yes, I think you can. For instance, arthritic pain that goes on pretty well all the time: you can complain about it, say you can’t do anything because of it, or you can say, ‘It is a fact of my life and I must adapt to it.’ You have to learn to use your dwindling energy carefully. You’ll find unless you plan that you only do the washing-up and don’t have energy for any fun. For instance, when I have people to stay at weekends, I plan carefully. I do bits at a time. One dish a day until I have done all the preparation. I have also taken to reading more seriously. And I take a nap if I feel tired. I never used to.

You are approaching 80, Jane. Do you think about dying?

A lot.

I still can’t get it into my nut that I am going to die

No, I know what you mean. One dreads it so much. I would like to make the best of it and cause little trouble. Now, with increasing difficulties about life, you think perhaps it will be nice to stop one day. The last few months I have found I can think about death with more equanimity

Confessions of a mail order man

The Oldie’s Jeremy Lewis comes clean about his addiction to baggy corduroy suits

Clothes are the outward expression of how we like to see ourselves, a silent language that may tell us more about the wearer than he or she could ever imagine or desire. I love those novelists – Smollett, Surtees, Dickens – who use clothes as a shorthand to introduce or sum up a character. My only complaint about the incomparable Trollope is that he is sartorially unobservant.

Unlike the Puritans of New Labour, I like uniforms, whether formal or informal, not only because they lend colour and variety to a standardised world, but because they make it easier for judges, postmen, soldiers, nuns, vicars and commissionaires to act out the parts assigned them, and for the rest of us to recognise them for who they are, and interact with them accordingly.

I relish the vegetarian’s socks and sandals, the City man’s chalk-striped suit, the old-style socialist’s lettucecoloured shirt and orange tie, the barrister’s gown and 18th-century wig, and hope that they will survive in an age of featureless executive suits and shapeless T-shirts.

As someone who has spent his working life in the literary world, I happily don the costume of the tribe, shambling from pub to literary party in the house uniform of drooping corduroy suit, preferably in an artistic shade of blue.

When summer comes I clamber into an equally shapeless lightweight suit, pink trousers, seersucker jacket and all the other gear that goes with a way of life that is as orthodox as any other. T S Eliot was a disconcerting presence in the literary world because – unlike the bardic Yeats with his cloak and floppy bow tie – he looked and dressed like a bank manager; and when City firms introduced the absurd custom of Friday ‘dressing down’, and brokers and

bankers appeared in the office looking like spruced-up telly-men, I felt a spasm of resentment on the grounds that they were not only invading our patch, but disregarding the elementary rule of dressing the part you want to play.

Judging by the chinos and buttondown shirts on evidence, the overpaid brokers are enthusiastic readers of clothing catalogues, and buy their casual clothes by mail order. For those of us who loathe trailing round the shops, buying by mail order has much to recommend it.

My baggy corduroy suit and blue cotton summer equivalent both come from Boden, the fruity-sounding founder who can be heard in person on the recorded message when you ring through, and uses his friends as models in his catalogue, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne among them.

Most of my lightweight trousers and American-style shirts were bought from Orvis or Land’s End, two of the American firms that have set up shop on this side of the Atlantic, peddling preppylooking chinos, button-down shirts and seersucker jackets to those of us who abandoned Marks and Sparks when the mail-order boom began some ten or 15 years ago.

Buying clothes by mail order is big business. Farmers and the suburban green-welly brigade may well turn first to Brocklehurst, a Bakewell firm with a sturdy line in weather-defying garments in khaki and brown, or Hogg, whose manly looking shoes have soles like tractor tyres. Hawkshead and

are strong on the sporting, open-air look; hooray Henrys can find relief from the prevailing tide of sludge and black in the multicoloured cords on offer from Pakenham, Catto & Carter of Cirencester. One of the drawbacks of buying by mail order is returning the stuff which doesn’t suit: some firms insist on recorded delivery, some seem happy with the ordinary post, and the old-fashioned folk in Cirencester provide prepaid return postage for their mustard-coloured trousers and iridescent socks.

Some mail order businesses, Orvis among them, have shops as well: the most picturesque of these is Denny Andrews, who operates out of a converted stable block at Coleshill, near Lechlade, and keeps my wife supplied with baggy Indian trousers and kurtas. Whereas men tend to choose an item and then head off to mow the lawn while their wives do the paperwork, women often become addicted to mail order life, pushing Dostoyevsky aside in favour of the latest polythenewrapped catalogue and eagerly discussing their finds with fellow junkies. All the major mailorder companies supply clothes for both sexes; of the women-only firms, Toast is for the super-trendy, Peruvian Connection caters for the elegant and wellheeled, while Penny Plain makes allowances for the

Fellow mail-orderites sometimes all too recognisable: years back, Craig Brown and I came face-to-face in identical Boden blue corduroy suits, and reeled back with a start of recognition. But as a way of stocking up with socks and shirts it recommend it.

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Marcus

Berkmann visits ‘Richard Curtis Land’

Is Love Actually rubbish?

Love Actually (15) is rubbish, allegedly. The film has had some brutal reviews, particularly in the US, and for the first 20 minutes or so you can see why.

When Bill Nighy as a raddled old rock ’n’ roller spurts out a stream of expletives in a way that no real person swears at all, you know you’re in Richard Curtis Land, where everyone is middle-class and essentially benevolent and floppy-haired and a little bit diffident but charming with it.

had my hair cut. I loved it, and millions of people who aren’t film critics will too.

If we temporarily discount Bean and Bridget Jones from his CV because on those jobs he was essentially a writer for hire, we can see a very clear pattern in the Curtis career. Four Weddings was a cleaned-up version of The Tall Guy Notting Hill was a cleaned-up version of Four Weddings, with a major star. Love Actually is a cleaned-up, souped-up version of Notting Hill with nine storylines and go-faster stripes.

For those crucial first 20 minutes not only do you feel you have seen this film before, several times, but you really don’t want to see it again. The cuteness is close to intolerable; the slightly self-satisfied, bourgeois dinner party feel to it may make you wish you’d seen something with blood and gore and explosions in it instead.

But Curtis is a clever man, and now extremely rich. Cute and sentimental his films may be, but they are full of good jokes and tug all but the most untuggable heartstrings. True, you need to be in the right mood for them. Fortunately I was feeling quite benevolent when I saw Love Actually, as well as charmingly diffident and middle-class, and I’d just

The nine stories are essentially separate, although one or two rub shoulders in ways that need not concern us here. Hugh Grant is the bachelor Prime Minister who falls for his Eliza Doolittle tea lady, Martine McCutcheon. Colin Firth (yes, his shirt does get wet) is cuckolded by his younger brother, runs off to his sickeningly well-appointed second home in the south of France and falls for his Portuguese cleaner. Alan Rickman, who works in one of those offices that everyone now has to in films, has a flirtation with his secretary. Laura Linney, the token American, is madly in love with the office hunk but too scared to do anything about it. Andrew Lincoln is crackers about his best friend’s wife. Kris Marshall, as a young idiot, wants to

The cuteness is close to intolerable... but Curtis is a clever man and now extremely rich

go to America to find beautiful girls. They all sound rather similar, but it’s astounding how much variety Curtis can spin out of the same old raw material.

One of the best stories involves two rather shy, slightly formal people who are actually stand-ins for porn stars, and so only ever meet when simulating sex on a film set.

Refreshingly, other stories have a serious undertow.

I thought Liam Neeson mourning his dead wife was a particularly felicitous segment, and part of the pleasure is that you don’t quite know where it’s going.

Of course it helps that there are some tremendous actors here. Hugh Grant, as we have come to expect, is pitch perfect. I think I’d vote for him. Emma Thompson stands out, even in this company. Point a camera at her and she wins an Oscar.

Even Martine McCutcheon, with her glorious swimmer’s shoulders, isn’t bad. Rowan Atkinson has a deliciously oily cameo, and so on and so on.

There are too many scenes at airports. Too many characters race off at the last minute to tell someone they love them. All the characters sound rather similar. No school has its nativity play on Christmas Eve, and don’t even try to pretend it does. But the midafternoon cinema audience of 15 cheered when the PM stood up to the Americans – and I understand that this is happening all over the place. It certainly explains some of the brutal reviews in the US. More cash for Curtis, then: he may very nearly deserve it.

Marcus Berkmann was a regular film critic for The Oldie

Billy Nighy performing his fictional Number One hit in Love Actually

The world according to Enfield Snr

Born in a Pre-Cholesterol Era

If I could have the whole of history from which to choose my birthday, I would choose 2nd September 1929.

I was actually born a day later, but now the benevolent government has said that those born on or before 2nd September 1929 shall have their passports renewed for nothing.

If I had arrived a day earlier I would be deemed to have made such a noble contribution to the defeat of Japan and Germany that I ought to be rewarded with a free passport, but I am not.

My current passport expires in 2011, and even if I’m spared till then, I shall be 81, so it may be doubted whether I shall be capable of going anywhere, let alone out of the country. Still, the concession is worth having and it is a pity to have missed it by a couple of hours.

That little imperfection apart, 3/9/29 was pretty well the perfect date for my entrance to the world. If I had made it much earlier I might well be dead or have no legs.

When I was 14 I got a dangerous disease in both legs and was operated on by a surgeon who had only one leg as he’d lost the other from the same disease. Luckily for me they had just released, for civilian use, a substance of the consistency of golden syrup which they pumped into me with a thing like a garden syringe. It was called penicillin and helped to do the trick.

The act of being born when I was made me old enough to see something of the war, but too young to get killed in the fighting; an ideal arrangement.

I was whisked off to Canada out of harm’s way in 1940, but the war was still going strong when I came back, and though I do not think I ever heard the whine of a doodlebug, I remember the thump of a V2. The actor, Colley Cibber, in his recollection of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, says ‘To have seen all

England of one Mind, is to have liv’d at a very particular Juncture’. Between, say, D Day and VE Day, all England was certainly of one mind, and it is something to have liv’d at that particular Juncture. I grew up in relatively carefree days, a time which might be called the AnteAdrenaline Period, Pre-Cholesterol Era or Non-Testosterone Epoch. I suppose that these three substances must have existed, and perhaps were discussed in the discreet pages of the Lancet, but the ordinary papers were not full of them and certainly people did not talk about them all the time.

People used to get over-excited, whereas now they get rushes of adrenaline

People used to get over-excited, whereas now they get rushes of adrenaline, but the effect is the same. I have never taken any notice of testosterone, and cholesterol is a bore, with cholesterol bores at ten a penny. Cholesterol may get me in the end, but

‘It’s a bill’

I’ve ignored it successfully for the past 75 years and don’t mean to start worrying about it now.

Then there’s salt. I feel sorry for salt. It used to be thoroughly good stuff, and if it lost its savour, wherewith should it be salted? Now it has become a sort of poison in fast foods, and I suppose that to call someone the salt of the earth is a shocking insult, the sort that Ken Livingstone would use on a Mail reporter who caught him at the end of a party.

But I’m not complaining; in the twilight of my years I am finding plenty to enjoy. I liked those Ugandans who marched about with placards saying ‘Geldof, sober up and shut up’. Had I been Lord Provost of Athens I might have invited them to come and do a bit of that in the Athens of the North. Not that I am unsympathetic to the plight of the poor people of Africa – quite the reverse, because as well as being in the pickle that they are, they have to endure the lectures of Sir Bob.

Also I am happy for all those people who were pleased with the outcome of the General Election. The return of Labour with a reduced majority was apparently just what many wanted.

I like to think of them basking in a cosy glow of contentment as they contemplate a further period with Mr Blair as titular head of affairs, while the strings are pulled by Lord Birt, Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and others of that sort. It shows a generous spirit to have taken Gordon Brown at his own valuation as the finest Chancellor since the reign of Queen Anne, and to have overlooked the havoc he has wrought in their pension prospects. Do not believe what you read in the press – the British people still have many fine qualities.

Edward Enfield (1929-2019) was a regular Oldie columnist

Alice Pitman meets veteran actor Leslie Phillips, whose colourful and varied 70-year career has been so much more than a few ‘ding dongs’...

This last year has been the busiest of my life. Enjoyably busy, as there is nothing worse than not being busy if you’re an actor.’

I am having quite possibly the worst cup of coffee of my life in the bar at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand with the remarkable Leslie Phillips, just prior to his appearance at an Oldie lunch.

He takes a sip from his cup and pulls a face. ‘Sorry about the coffee,’ he murmurs, as though it is his fault.

Leslie Phillips is now 82, though he looks ten years younger. He is nattily be-suited, an added touch of jauntiness provided by a pink comb protruding from his inside jacket pocket. I decide that his well-preserved appearance must be due in part to the fact that his mind has been kept active, for apart from a spell in the army during the war, he has not stopped acting since he took to the stage as a child actor in 1935.

His career has seen him in over a hundred films and two hundred theatrical roles. He has appeared alongside a roll call of stars, from Dame Anna Neagle to John Malkovich and, more recently, Peter O’Toole, in the much-acclaimed film Venus

The latter recently garnered him a BIFA for Best Supporting Actor: a far cry from his impoverished working-class Tottenham origins, the third and last child of Frederick (whose work in a filthy gas cooker factory contributed to his premature death at the age of 44) and Cecilia, to whom he dedicated the award.

‘I was so surprised, I hadn’t prepared a speech. When I got up to the microphone, all I could think of was my mother.’

The acceptance speech created quite a stir. After commencing with his trademark comic lecherous catchphrase

Behind the catchphrase

‘Hello!’, he continued: ‘In 1993, at the age of 92…’ The audience laughed approvingly, thinking he was about to launch into an amusing story about himself. He went on, ‘...my mother was mugged in the street and killed.

‘She would have been very proud of me tonight.’ He held up the trophy and walked off to a stunned silence.

‘It went from absolute high comedy to tragedy, but life’s like that, don’t you think?’ Leslie says. ‘My sister was so shaken by my mother’s death she only outlived her by six months. You never get over something like that.’

His mother first introduced 11-year-

old Leslie to the theatre by taking him along to an audition for the Italia Conti Stage School.

He received elocution lessons to rid him of his broad Cockney accent, seen in those days as a major impediment to an aspiring actor. ‘All my friends and family were Londoners, real Cockneys, my brother is still a Cockney. They found it hard to recognise the new me, though my voice has without doubt played an enormous part in my success.’

By the age of 14 Leslie was working in West End plays alongside such luminaries as Vivien Leigh, Lilli Palmer (on whom he had a tremendous crush),

and Rex Harrison (‘something of a role model for me, though I could never have reached anything like his heights in the philandering department’).

What was Vivien Leigh like?

‘Oh, she was wonderful. She had a special way of saying my name…

‘She would draw out the last syllable: “Les-liee, daarling…” ’ Laurence Olivier would come to the theatre in his Fleet Air Arm uniform. ‘He was delightful. I bumped into him again years later when I was acting in The Cherry Orchard. He would come to the rehearsals, sidle up to me, and say, “Leslie, a few tips…” ’

During the war, Leslie was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Durham Light Infantry, but was declared unfit for service just before D-Day. ‘I had a nervous illness which caused paralysis if I undertook any sudden or violent movement.’

His pal Johnny Mould took over his platoon, and was one of the first to be killed in France. The burden Leslie felt at being left behind was compounded by the news that his brother had been badly injured in Italy. ‘I still feel tremendous

guilt, although there was nothing I could do about it. I suppose it was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me.’

After the war he resumed his theatrical career, also becoming a familiar voice on radio, with 250 episodes of The Navy Lark. His big film break came with Les Girls (1957), a Gene Kelly musical.

The three early Carry Ons, followed by the Doctor series of films, established his reputation for playing upper-class silly asses and womanising smoothies.

In Carry On Nurse (1959), we first heard him utter the words, ‘Ding dong’. Catchphrases such as ‘Lumme’ and ‘Well, hello’ soon followed. ‘Even today, I am regularly ding-donged as I walk around London,’ he says, seeming both pleased and slightly annoyed.

I wonder if, despite success in more serious roles in the latter half of his career (Falstaff at the RSC, Empire of the Sun, Out of Africa), it bothers him that he will be forever associated with English stereotype comic roles of the 1950s and 60s?

‘It did at one time, as it was only a very small part of my career – and we never got any money from them. They exported these films all around the world – Carry On Nurse went on to become the biggest grossing British film ever in the US –but not one penny went to the poor bloody actors.’

His private life has been suitably colourful. He married Penelope Bartley

‘I like to play villains best... Bastards... I don’t look like a villain, you see – so it’s quite fun’

in 1948, producing four children. As his career took off, long absences away from home meant they inevitably grew apart.

‘I was guilty of neglecting the family a little, but she made no objection to the money coming in…’ He began an affair with Caroline Mortimer, stepdaughter of John Mortimer, and Bartley divorced him in 1965. He and Mortimer split after nine years as she wanted children and he didn’t. ‘I already had all the children I thought I could reasonably handle.’ He kept in close contact with Penny Bartley until her death in a fire in 1982.

Shortly after, Leslie married Angela Scoular, a former Bond girl, whom he had met while working on a play in 1976.

We discuss his recent autobiography Hello, part show-business gossip, part confessional, interspersed with endearing domestic details about much-loved dogs, cats and motorcars. There’s also the occasional smattering of sex, the more explicit passages sitting oddly alongside prosaic accounts of films and West End plays.

When I ask him about the famous people he has worked with and liked, Leslie worries that he might come across as a bit of a name-dropper.

Kay Kendall, Kenneth Williams, Ronnie Barker, Joan Plowright, Denholm Elliott and Terry-Thomas.

And those he disliked? Roy Boulting – ‘The only man I have ever physically hit’ – and Sir Seymour Hicks: ‘An overbearing shit.’

What film has he enjoyed working on the most?

‘Venus, I think. I had some wonderful lines. I’m very proud of that film.’

Was Peter O’Toole fun to work with?

He hesitates. ‘I wouldn’t say fun. Powerful. He’s a great actor, with a very strong personality and a sense of humour. If I was doing a scene oncamera and he was off camera, he’d choose that moment to send me up.’

He hopes Venus might open a few doors for him. He’ll consider anything as long as it’s good: comedy or drama, he doesn’t mind.

‘I like to play villains best… Bastards,’ he says, with a mock-wicked leer. ‘I don’t look like a villain, you see, so it’s quite nice.’

So no plans to retire then?

‘I don’t consider it a word in my vocabulary.

Leslie Phillips died in 2022, aged 98

Leslie Phillips and Peter O’Toole in Venus

Modern life What is Size Double Zero?

Models are thin; it’s nothing new. Twiggy didn’t get her name by accident. But today it’s size 00 or, well, nothing. Size 00 is a US dress size equivalent to a UK size 4. If you’re this small, you are most likely ill or a child. But that’s not what the fashion industry wants you to believe.

In August 2006, a Uruguayan model, Luisel Ramos, dropped dead of heart failure. She’d been eating nothing but lettuce leaves and drinking nothing but Diet Coke for months. In response, the organisers of Madrid Fashion Week set a Body Mass Index – a calculation based on height and weight – of 18 for all models. UN health experts recommend a person should be between 18.5 and 25.

So the Madrid organisers imposed a limit that still allowed the models to be unhealthy. But it nonetheless gave rise to a debate about whether size 00 models should be allowed in the show. It may seem slightly odd that there was a debate at all – who on earth would fancy opposing the notion that the trend was dangerous, encouraging young girls towards ill health, other than those who stood to make money from marketing it?

Despite government pressure, the reprehensible British Fashion Organisation wouldn’t follow Madrid’s lead for London Fashion Week. ‘It’s not our role to interfere in any designer’s aesthetic,’ they said, not seeing the need to specify who else’s role it might be.

Meet Rachel Zoe. Rachel is the queen of size 00. She’s a celebrity stylist, which means she’s paid by celebrities to design their physical appearance. Here’s how she describes her look: ‘It’s very 60s to 70s glamour. It’s Mod meets Grecian. A lot of gold and a lot of bronze, shimmer and glamour, but relaxed glamour, very unstructured.’ ‘Mod meets Grecian’ does not mean Paul Weller dying his hair: this splendid collection of gnomic nouns amounts to dressing your clients up as Jackie Onassis.

Oh, the other thing. Rachel’s ‘girls’

always have scrawny arms, protruding chest and hip bones and sagging breasts. Now how do you go about looking like that? You could stop eating – or another method is to take a drug called Clenbuterol. You may know it, if you happen to be a farmer. It’s an asthma drug for horses. It increases the body’s heart rate and temperature to help it burn fat, and it’s as safe as it sounds.

Sadly for Rachel, she is so last year’s designer. This is because one of her clients, Nicole Richie (you won’t have heard of her – she’s a vacuous brunette, sometimes blonde, who is famous for reasons unspecified, except her father is Lionel Richie, of whom you may have heard), sacked Zoe and wrote in her online diary: ‘Which 35-year-old raisin face… hides her deathly disorder by pointing the finger at me, and used the

Above: Nicole ‘count my ribs’ Richie in August 2006, when she was still a client of ‘celebrity stylist’ Rachel Zoe (middle). Far right: Victoria ‘style icon’ Beckham

last paycheck I wrote her to pay for a publicist instead of a nutritionist?’

Well done, Nicole, who during her relationship with Zoe had begun to resemble a conflagration of pipe cleaners. She’s better now, though still no less pointless. Anyway, don’t doubt how influential a thin celebrity can be.

A doctor from an eating disorder clinic recently cited Victoria Beckham’s body as the top influence on her patients because, ‘As far as they can see, she gets invited everywhere, she’s got plenty of money and a handsome husband’. They are so ill they don’t notice the vacuous personality, voice like an albatross in its death throes and husband who, according to scurrilous press reports, can’t keep it in his pants when other (less skinny?) women around…

Still, things can only get better, can’t they?

New York designer Michael Kors recently said the culpability lies with the stylists; they are the ones asking him for size 00 samples. But recently, he’s been getting requests for Negative 00. Two months after the death of Luisel Ramos, Ana Macan, a Brazilian model, died of a kidney infection. She weighed 40 kilograms. She was, like most size 00 women, suffering from a combination of anorexia and bulimia. And that’s what size 00 represents – sickness, marketed as style to insecure women by some very nasty people.

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Richard Ingrams pens his last respects to a faithful contributor and friend

Miles Kington

13th May 1941–30th January 2008

We had known for some time that Miles was very ill, but he was the last person to make any kind of drama about it. He seemed determined to carry on writing until the end and that is what he did.

It was typical of Miles. He had written for The Oldie from the very beginning and in all that time I can’t remember a single occasion when he missed a deadline, complained about misprints or cuts, demanded more money or did any of those things that have been known to vex me over the years. In other words, Miles was an editor’s dream.

He wrote quite effortlessly, so that a monthly column for The Oldie seemed like a doddle when he was writing a daily column for the Independent. Other journalists would have been reduced to repeating themselves, or merely waffling if given an assignment like that, but Miles had not just an extraordinary memory but a ceaseless curiosity about his fellow humans which meant that he was never short of original subject matter.

He was always getting into conversations with taxi drivers or strangers on a train and would always come across some strange coincidence or curious piece of information which would inspire a column.

He thrived on out-of-the-way characters and books, forgotten jazz musicians, cartoonists (a special love) and railway journeys. But there wasn’t much nostalgia involved. Everything he wrote was as fresh and tasty as the loaves he used to bake.

Looking through his Oldie columns – which incidentally would furnish more than enough stuff for a most entertaining book – I came across a piece that seemed to epitomise the Kington world.

It began by relating how he had tried

Above: Willie Rushton’s illustration for Miles’s Oldie page Below: Miles with travel editor Rosie Boycott on an Oldie cruise

Above: With friends at the 1999 ‘Oldie of the Year’ ceremony. Clockwise, from top left: Jeremy Lewis, Ned Sherrin, Richard Ingrams, Jennifer Paterson, Roy Hattersley, Larry Adler, Mavis Nicholson, Deborah Kellaway, Edward Enfield and Miles Kington

to discover if a book by Byron Rogers called An Audience with an Elephant was still in print, only to be told by Rogers’s publisher that they were about to bring out a new book of his about J L Carr.

It was typical of Miles to get very excited about a book by one obscure writer about another one, equally obscure.

But what he went on to write about Byron Rogers could just as well be applied to himself: ‘He writes very plainly but evocatively about the odd things and odd people in life. The small oddities that is. He would never write about the Leaning Tower of Pisa or Stephen Hawking…’

It is tempting to follow the Independent’s example and reprint, month-by-month, a number of Miles’s Oldie columns, but I don’t think he would have approved.

There would still be so many things in the world that weren’t the Leaning Tower of Pisa or Stephen Hawking. Now it would be up to someone else to write about them all.

THEATRE BERYL BAINBRIDGE

Spamalot, a show now running –and hopefully for years to come –at the Palace Theatre, Cambridge Circus, is a musical rip-off (in a good way) by Eric Idle, the writer who, along with John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Graham Chapman, Terry Jones and Michael Palin, was responsible for the motion picture it’s based on: Monty Python and The Holy Grail

If, like me, you didn’t see the film, the plot could be a little hard to follow, but it hardly matters. Mostly, sort of, it’s about King Arthur recruiting his trusty knights, fighting the French, encountering the Lady in the Lake and setting off in search of the Grail. Spamalot, is, of course, a code name for Camelot, that ‘boring kingdom they went on about at school’.

Spamalot, bizarrely, begins in Finland, with a Cheese Council production of something ‘based on an idea by Sid, Coco and Edith Piaf’, the action taking place in a sauna. After ten minutes, we proceed to Mud Castle, outside which King Arthur and his faithful servant Patsy appear.

Arthur is brilliantly played by Peter Davidson, he who was the main prop of the television series All Creatures Great and Small. Patsy, I should point out, is a chap. I forget what he and Arthur sang about, but the next scene was in a village struck by the plague, and here a cart full of dead bodies came on to pick up another, who kept jumping up and singing ‘I am not dead yet’.

The scene when Arthur and his Knights arrive at the lake and scoff at the idea of a Lady, in particular, is fantastic, for up she comes in a glorious surge of colour.

Hannah Waddington, as the Lady, is quite exceptional: she looks beautiful, her voice is sublime, her range magical, her reception at curtain call fully deserved. A year or

so ago, she was in a television series called William and Mary, which was about a midwife and a man who owned a funeral parlour.

Sir Lancelot is played, totally convincingly, by Bill Ward, who was once that disturbed love-rat in Coronation Street. It’s truly astonishing to see actors, who usually just talk, tap-dancing and singing with such professional expertise. And then God appeared for a moment, or at least his legs did; apparently they belonged to John Cleese.

There were a couple of scenes in the second half (the programme warns there will be three intervals, one every two and a half hours, but take no notice) which made me feel uncomfortable. They had to do with a song which said there couldn’t be a successful West End Musical unless it was written by a Jew. The word kept coming up, because it rhymes with others… true, blue,

new, few, but I’ve since been told that, when Spamalot opened on Broadway, there was an outbreak of thunderous applause when this number was performed, so that’s all right, I suppose.

The sets, lighting effects and costumes are outstanding. At the end, a man in the audience was called on stage to hand over the Holy Grail, which was a gold cup. Then we all sang Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, after which there was an almighty explosion from somewhere up above, followed by a cascade of snowflakes, or possibly confetti.

My grandchildren, aged seven and 11, laughed a lot. So did I. My grandson, aged 14, however, said it wasn’t as good as the film.

Tim Curry, as King Arthur, from the original Spamalot cast

In the winter of 2008, the BBC threw a small group of celebrities on to the London streets to see how they would cope. Rosie Boycott bedded down behind the bins near an underground carpark

Cider with Rosie

For nine days at the end of November and into December –during one of the vicious cold snaps last winter – I took part in a homelessness project for the BBC. It involved five of us (one chickened out at the very start) being chucked on to the streets of London: no money, no phones, no credit cards, and with the agreement that we wouldn’t contact anyone we knew while we tried to discover what being homeless felt like.

Even though I knew I would be going home in just over a week, I found the experience shattering. Going from a world that has certainties into one in which time stretches endlessly around you – worrying where to sleep, what to eat, how to beg or earn money – made me so exhausted that, even at minus three degrees, I would finally fall asleep in my sleeping bag in various doorways.

Our nine-day stint was divided in three. For the first three days we were on our own, the next three were spent with a buddy – someone who was either homeless or had been homeless recently – and the last three were spent in a hostel.

I was lucky with my buddy – Donna, a wonderful young woman who’d endured a horrific childhood followed by an abusive marriage, and had found herself alone in London with nowhere to lay her head. She lived on the streets for nore than a year before our sluggish system moved her to a hostel. Bravely, she agreed to sleep rough again as she feels passionately that no one understands how and why people end up on the streets, and how grim their life is.

For our first night together she’d found us somewhere to sleep under the Brunswick Centre in central London, in a storage compartment near the underground car park. It was full of rubbish bins which we pushed around to create a

sleeping space. It was dark but relatively warm, and buoyed up by our success, we went off to find something to eat, leaving our sleeping bags behind.

When we returned, disaster had struck: the gates of the unit had been closed. It was late, it was freezing. I did, however, have a bit of money. Not much, but I’d been begging in Covent Garden and had almost £30.

Our options were limited: either we walked the streets of London all night to prevent hypothermia, or we sat up all night in St Pancras (they throw you out if you lie down). Or, I suggested, we try and blag our way into a hotel.

I tried the tackiest hotel I could find, but the cheapest room on offer was £60 and it was clear that the man behind the desk didn’t like the look of us.

‘Try the hostel down the road,’ a bloke in the lobby suggested.

So off we went and for £17 each, we found ourselves in a female-only dormitory in the Generator Hostel in Compton Place, off 37 Tavistock Place, WC1, which has no fewer than 800 beds. It’s a rabbit warren of a place, but they

throw in breakfast, the beds are clean, the bathrooms spotless and the atmosphere decidedly jolly. We slept likes logs under pristine white duvets, Donna on the top bunk, me underneath; it was certainly an unusual night out. The luxury – and privacy – of a room for two people would have cost a bit more (around £30), but our dorm was the cheapest option.

At breakfast, while most guests were students backpacking round the UK, I did spot a few old ’uns tucking into their cereal. I’d far rather have spent the night there than in the snotty £60-a-night hostelry down the street.

This wasn’t our only night in the Generator, as it turned out. Next morning I went with Donna to a day centre where she acts as a kind of unofficial counsellor to those still on the streets. Many come in having spent the night walking, and doze uncomfortably on upright chairs.

The centre, in Camden, is concealed from the world by a shiny blue door.

Inside, as the day wore on and drink and drugs were imbibed, it came to resemble a sort of hell: noise levels rose, fights broke out and an ambulance screeched up to take away someone who’d collapsed from pneumonia.

We spent our second night curled up next to a basement. The temperature plummeted to minus three and by dawn it was raining. When we struggled back to the centre, a middleaged man was outraged that two ‘girls’ should have spent the night on the freezing streets.

He vanished and returned a few hours later to thrust £30 into Donna’s hand. ‘I don’t want to see you two sleeping out tonight,’ he said, as we protested about taking the (presumably stolen) money. But to refuse, Donna felt, would have been cruel. So, that night we went back to the Generator and shared with noisy Swedish students on holiday in London. Once again, the clean sheets felt brilliant!

World’s Worst Dumps

Welcome to London’s most pointless tourist destination, says Alice Pitman Madame Tussauds

One of the mysteries of the modern age, up there with crop circles and the trend for men’s three-quarter-length trousers, is the continuing popularity of Madame Tussauds. Like many things that originate in France, this legendary waxworks emporium is vastly overrated. The old bat herself started out by making death masks of guillotined victims during the French Revolution. This typically Gallic practice of cashing in on people’s misery and misfortune survives to this day, in what is, bizarrely, one of London’s premier tourist attractions.

Those who pass its location in Marylebone Road will be familiar with the long queues of tourists in all weathers. What they may not realise is that the relentless queueing does not end even once you are inside the building (unless you had the foresight to purchase a priority access ticket for a whopping £27.50). Is it worth the long wait? Unless you enjoy shuffling along slowly from one tacky celebritythemed area to another, the answer is a resounding no.

The journey starts at an ‘exclusive A-List party’, where you ‘mingle and interact’ with Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, and a preponderance of current female celebs who are pretty much indistinguishable from each other (i.e. blonde and anorexic).

On past a replica of Jonathan Ross’s chat show studio (why?), through to ‘Bollywood and Hollywood’ much is made of the entirely forgettable Incredible Hulk Stephen Spielberg’s Park. The misery continues in the interactive Sport Zone, and beyond you’ll find a weirdly disparate sprinkling of famous characters past and

present (Stephen Hawking, Van Gogh…). Then it’s Royals and rock legends, where The Beatles look as much like their real-life counterparts as my dog (not good enough when you consider they have had over 40 years to get them right). Inexplicably, an entire floor is devoted to Andy Warhol, an excuse to make more money by offering visitors the chance to have their photo taken in Pop Art style and printed on a soup can.

On to World Leaders, where George Bush looks more like the Six Million Dollar Man and where for another £9 you can have your photo taken at the Oval Office with President Obama.

Is it worth the long wait in the queues? Unless you enjoy shuffling along slowly from one tacky celebrity themed area to another, the answer is no

The tour ends with new ride called Spirit of London, which charts the development of the city from the reign of Elizabeth I (‘Bring out yer dead!’ etc) to the present day. Last stop, The Chamber of Horrors, where only a handful of 20th-century criminals are left standing. Crippen was conspicuous by his absence (had they morphed him into

Freddie Mercury?). DNA evidence may recently have determined that it wasn’t in fact his wife under the cellar floor, but that doesn’t make him innocent.

And why is Dennis ‘Dyno-Rod’ Nilsen the only murderer represented from the last 50 years, when Harold Shipman doesn’t get a look in? If there is some sort of serial killers committee that decides who goes in, what is the criteria? Body count? Method? Likeability factor?

Apart from the actual guillotine used to chop off Marie Antoinette’s head, anything remotely interesting, like the bath George Joseph Smith used to drown his wives, Crippen’s medicine box, or the letter Jack the Ripper sent to the police, has been consigned to the archives to make room for Scream, a piss-poor new attraction where ‘live actors’ (as opposed to dead ones), done up as lunatic inmates of a highsecurity prison, jump out at you as you walk through a semi-lit replica of a cell-block. Lovely.

Before the advent of photography, Madame Tussauds served a purpose in allowing people the opportunity of seeing what celebrities of the day actually looked like. But now that we are bulldozed with their images wherever we go, the whole waxwork thing strikes me as exceedingly pointless. If the dummy is an accurate likeness then so what? For £25, you would not expect anything less.

But, more often than not, the likeness is merely vague, and sometimes plain awful. They’d be better off melting the lot of them down into candles.

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Just desserts?

Claire Daly talked to Elena Salvoni, London’s best-loved maître d’, who had just been forced to retire after nearly 70 years in the business

Elena Salvoni OBE, the most famous maître d’ in England, who since 1992 has worked at the restaurant that was named in her honour, Elena’s L’Etoile in Charlotte Street, London, has just been made redundant at the age of 90.

Just as this issue of The Oldie was due to go to press, Elena called me to say that she’d been asked to leave L’Etoile. ‘I’m not bitter,’ she tried to assure me. But it was obvious that she was not happy.

‘I don’t want to leave,’ she tells me. ‘People should be able to work for as long as they like. If we’re doing a good job why should we be pushed out? They said that at my age they can’t get insurance for me if I had an accident. But this is all doubleDutch to me. It’s a good excuse, isn’t it? They’ve got my name up on the front of the restaurant. Doesn’t that mean anything? Come on, get rid of her,’ she says, flicking her hand away.

L’Etoile will be an odd place without its star. ‘Gutted,’ she says, slamming her fist into her other hand, ‘that’s how I truly feel. I feel as though my name’s been up there for nothing. The staff now don’t know anybody. They want me to come back occasionally to entertain celebrities, but I don’t like the idea of it.’

The 300-odd photographs which adorn the walls of L’Etoile, making it the star-studded restaurant it is, were given to Elena by her famous friends. They are her ‘treasures’. ‘They want me to leave my pictures because they reckon they paid for the framing. They will pay me so much a

Elena at L’Etoile, Charlotte Street

month for the pictures. I haven’t got the heart to say I’ll take them all down. But I don’t want to leave them here.’ She has already left them to her family in her will.

Elena has worked in restaurants nearly all her life. After leaving school at 14, she had a brief spell as a trainee seamstress before taking a job at Café Bleu in Old Compton Street, moving to Bianchi’s in 1951 and L’Escargot in 1981.

She’ll miss the routine of going to work the most. ‘I’m lost in the morning now and I think, why am I rushing?’ But she remains cheerful. ‘It’s no good being miserable. I love being with people.’

Elena has always been very discreet, expert at keeping secrets. But her retirement was not something she wanted to keep from anyone. ‘I thought I should tell them myself so I wrote to Cameron Mackintosh and Peter O’Toole and many more. They were so loyal that I didn’t want them to read it in the papers.’

She had no idea that her career was about to be brought to an end. She had been thrilled still to be working at 90. ‘I was at reception when people came in, and I made sure they sat at the right table. I went round and chatted with the customers, as I’ve always done. If they came in on their own I’d chat until their guest arrived, to make them feel comfortable. If their guests didn’t come, I’d sit down and talk to them.’

The beautiful Islington house, where she has lived since 1933, is filled with family photographs. ‘We’ve got six grandsons, a great-grandson and a great-granddaughter – every month’s a birthday,’ she said. Above the fireplace hangs an enormous portrait of Elena by Kay Gallwey, which used to be in L’Escargot. Awards, including Manager of the Year 2009, are dotted around the room.

‘There’s no one else like you,’ she was told at this year’s awards ceremony. What qualities were most important in her job?

‘I don’t want to leave. People should be able to work for as long as they want. If we’re doing a good job, why should we be pushed out?’

‘Patience and understanding,’ she said, ‘Listening, and not shouting at staff.’

On 20th April 1941, Elena married her childhood sweetheart, Aldo. When she looked at the paper that day, she was horrified to find it was Hitler’s birthday. At least he won’t drop bombs on his birthday, she thought. But he did. When she went to collect her wedding cake, the bakery had been bombed. Luckily she discovered the staff and her cake safe in the back. There was heavy bombing during the wedding reception and everyone ran to the basement where the party continued.

Elena and Aldo are still happily together. When I visited, Aldo had broken three toes and sat at a desk in the living room: ‘You don’t mind if I play solitaire, do you?’ But he was as engrossed in his wife’s stories as I was, and he watched her, captivated, throughout the interview. Occasionally he reminded her of something she should tell me, and Elena affectionately said, ‘Yes, but let me tell my story first.’

Elena is a collector – of photographs, mementoes, letters, but most of all of people, many of them famous, and many now her friends. She proudly showed me pictures of herself with members of the Royal Family, and told me about the time a journalist had spread rumours about Princess Diana crying in L’Etoile. Ever the protector of the great and the good, she refused to corroborate the story.

She has taken very good care of all her guests over the years. ‘Robert De Niro was very sweet. He spoke very good Italian. This man came in and sat down with him. So I went over and asked him if he’d like something to eat. “No”, he said. De Niro looked at him and said, “Have something.” And I said, “It’s bitter out there. Have a bowl of soup.” De Niro said, “She reminds me of Scorsese’s mother.

As soon as you go to Scorsese’s house his mother comes in and asks if you want a bowl of soup?” So he did have a bowl of soup.’

Despite her sweet nature, Elena is a tough nonna. When a journalist she threw out for bad behaviour threatened to ruin her, she said, ‘You do that.’ But Elena has always had far too many allies for anyone to try. She has a loyal band of patrons who have followed her from Bianchi’s, to L’Escargot, and then to L’Etoile.

And wherever she goes next, they will follow.

Elena Salvoni died in 2016, aged 95

When John Corby designed a wooden trouser press in the 1930s, little did he know that his son, Peter Corby (below), would later improve the design and make the Corby trouser press a household name

Cor blimey trousers!

When my father, John Corby, retired in 1930 there were 14 manufacturers of trouser presses in the UK. The trousers were dampened and laid horizontally between wooden boards which were then clamped together with four large thumbscrews.

My father had made his money designing Riley cars. An engineer, he designed and made a trouser press for himself which accommodated the extra thickness of turn-ups and seams, gave a slight stretching action and was closed by a single lever action. When his friend Austin Reed saw it he said, ‘If you made free-standing models I could sell them in my shops.’

Father found himself back in business: by 1939 he was producing about 5,000 units per annum, and there were only two manufacturers of thumbscrew presses left. During the war the business was shut down, but in 1946 he restarted the firm, and when he appointed the son of a friend to run it, I decided to stay in the RAF.

In October 1948 I got a telegram from my step-mother to say that my father was on his death bed: he had sacked the manager because the manager had sacked the bookkeeper, and nobody knew how to pay the wages of the seven employees. I applied for a compassionate transfer to the RAF Volunteer Reserve, and took over management of the business.

I soon realised that wooden trouser presses had become a thing of the past due to the introduction of synthetic materials such as nylon and Terylene, and sales were negligible. We continued to make a few trouser presses, but to keep the mill going I made wooden dashboards for Citroën cars, cots for Mothercare and garden furniture for Suttons Seeds, among other things.

But in 1959 I met George Harris, who was developing a flexible heating mat to

deal with a possible de-icing problem in a project known as Concorde, and I saw a way to bring the trouser press back to life. We developed a pad which would, within 30 minutes at a certain temperature, not damage the most delicate material, and efficiently press the most obstinate cloth.

We made 300 electric presses, 100 in each of three wood finishes, and I took a stand at the 1960 Men’s and Boys’ Trade Fair in London to introduce the product. More than

In December 1960, Harrods put the Corby trouser press in its Christmas catalogue and sold more than 1,500

400 buyers signed our visitors’ book and I sold a total of 33 presses – nine of them to Harrods. But Austin Reed would not buy it, telling me that trouser presses were a thing of the past – so when I got back to the office I rang Barry Reed and got permission to send one of each finish to each of their shops on a sale-or-return basis.

We would send each manager a reply-paid postcard once a month on which he would tick the ones he had sold, if any, and I would send and invoice replacements. By December 1960, they had sold more than 600. Harrods put them in its Christmas catalogue and sold more than 1,500.

I expanded the factory to 20,000 square feet, and when I sold out to a conglomerate in 1974, we had 65 employees making up to 400 presses a day. George Harris had set up his own firm making heating pads for Corby, and he retired in due course as a millionaire. In the late 1960s introduced the press to hotels. Watney Hotels gave me permission to instal six presses in nine of their hotels. Guests were invited to tick boxes to indicate whether they had used the press, and whether it was a worthwhile service. Within three months, we received more than 1,000 responses, asking for details of where press could be purchased. There are now several million Corby trouser presses in hotels all over the world.

BY

What went wrong with PARKY?

As Michael Parkinson prepares to relaunch his career on the Sky Arts channel, Jeremy Hornsby remembers the man he used to admire – and no longer does

Michael Parkinson was the first person to befriend me in journalism. In 1959 I had gone straight from university to the Daily Express in Manchester on a month’s trial. In those days, you were supposed to have done a couple of years of Births, Deaths and Marriages on something like the Sheffield Telegraph before you could hope to graduate to a national paper –I can’t say I was greeted with open arms by the hard men of the newsroom.

One Sunday I was sitting in the Red Lion in Didsbury, and this chap came up and said I looked a bit unhappy. I told him the situation, and he said his name was Michael Parkinson and he worked on the Guardian. I’d better come home to have lunch with him and his wife Mary, he said. Which I did, with gratitude. And on many, many other Sundays to follow.

The two things I most remember about him in those days were his scathing views on working for a popular newspaper, and his insistence that the North was the backbone of the nation, insisting he’d never abandon it. But within two years he had taken the Beaverbrook shilling and become a feature writer on the Daily Express in London.

We had kept in touch, and in 1968 the ‘D’Oliveira Affair’ had blown up.

Basil D’Oliveira was a South African born cricketer of Indian/Portuguese extraction, who could not play for South Africa because of its vicious apartheid rules. So he came to England and became a regular member of the England Test team.

However, when England was due to tour, South Africa made it clear that no England team including D’Oliveira could play in their country; so, on a fragile excuse,the team dropped him. Most British journalists were outraged, and none more so than

Michael, a cricket fanatic and good sports reporter, whose articles on the subject I greatly admired. (In the event, a member of the team had to drop out, D’Oliveira was reinstated, and the team was refused permission to enter South Africa, leading to more than two decades of sporting ostracism for that country.)

In 1969, I decided to leave the paper, and was asked to join the David Frost team for his autumn ‘serious’ series. That was at London Weekend Television in a godforsaken concrete edifice on the North Circular.

David had made his name as an occasional hard-hitting journalist with the notorious ‘Trial by Television’ of the fraudster Emil Savundra; but he was now combining a talk show in America with two series in Britain – the ‘serious’ one in the autumn, but light entertainment in the spring. That didn’t interest me, and I left that Christmas.

A year or so later I got a call from Michael Parkinson, who invited me to lunch at his favourite Greek restaurant in Charlotte Street.

‘I’ve been given a chat show,’ he said. ‘You’ve been working with Frosty –would you come on board and show us how it works?’ I agreed, thinking Michael could front a really tough, journalistic talk show

They wanted to do it like Frost, with loads of audience participation, and we decided the first show would be about the monarchy.

We duly loaded the audience with the Duke of Plaza Toro, the Earl of Ermine, the Count of Monte Cristo, a gang of republicans and so on.

All the while, Parkinson and his producer, Richard Drewett, kept banging on about how we needed to be on the front page of every paper after our first show.

So, I said that from Fleet Street days I knew Ray Bellisario, the king of the paparazzi, and I’d see if he would come on and provide a headline.

I drove out to Ray’s house near the airport. I knew about the pictures he’d taken of some recently married royals on their honeymoon (in the woods and flagrante) and asked how he’d got them. Everyone in Fleet Street had seen them but they were obviously never used.

From a cupboard he produced a lens almost as tall as a man. I asked if he’d

bring it on to the show and he agreed.

We talked some more, and then at the end I said, ‘Ray, when the Royal Family are at Windsor you know which bit of the park they’re going riding in; when they’re at Sandringham you know which bit of the estate they’ll be shooting on; when they’re at Balmoral you know which stretch of river they’re fishing in.’ He nodded.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘that suggests to me that you’ve got someone “fixed” in every royal household.’ He said yes he had.

I asked if he would say that on the show. ‘Sure. If he asks me.’

I couldn’t wait to get back to White City. I shot into the office. ‘You want to be on the front of every paper? You’ve got it!’ I told them what had happened. That first show came and went, and Parkinson never asked the question.

Parkinson told me he had been given a chat show. ‘You’ve been working with Frosty,’ he said.

‘Would you show us how it works?’

When I asked him why, he said he had forgotten.

Well, had he? Or was it just because he’d already forsaken journalism for show business?

They never tried the audience participation again – Michael couldn’t hack it – and after three or four shows I realised I couldn’t wait for the series to end.

As luck would have it for me, the end of that first Parkinson coincided with the BBC’s James Burke being offered a new kind of series, the one that was to become The Burke Special. He asked me to come over and I couldn’t wait.

That series was a phenomenal success – at one point we were getting 13 million viewers.

Soon afterwards, there was a party at the Hurlingham Club for a retiring head of Science and Features. Paul Fox, then head of BBC One, got me in a corner and asked why I’d left Michael Parkinson for James Burke.

‘Easy,’ I said. ‘When I first knew Parky he was a bloody good journalist, and I think all the stuff he did with D’Oliveira was great. So I’d thought, and been told, that the show would have a lot of journalism in it. It didn’t. And I was very disappointed.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ said Fox. ‘Parkinson was, is, and always will be Light Entertainment.’ And he was right.

David Frost demonstrates his assertive interviewing style with Emil Savundra on his ground-breaking show The Frost Programme (1967)

IAnd the award for the most cringe-making acceptance speech goes to...

Chariots of Fire was re-released in a blaze of publicity, but Ben Mallalieu didn’t think much of Colin Welland

never met the actor and dramatist

Colin Welland, but I did once get an opportunity to speak to his agent.

I was working in the Hollywood Reporter’s London office, which sounds a lot more exciting than it was. In fact, in my long and undistinguished career as a journalist, it was a low point.

I shared a small office in Bloomsbury with the London bureau of the American music paper Variety. The best part of the day was a leisurely hour or so with the veteran rock journalist Peter Jones in the Windmill or the University Tavern in Store Street, where we were often joined by heroic but forgotten figures from the Sixties music industry.

After lunch we’d walk back towards London University’s Senate House, on which Orwell based the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four – I felt a certain affinity with Winston Smith, who spent time in the Chestnut Café, where most of the clientele were also disgraced non-people.

I was responsible for an improbable group of European correspondents recruited by a distant predecessor. Throughout the day they sent me news stories, badly scrambled by a primitive email system called Lotus Express – but even unscrambled, their writing did not always make sense. I’d edit it and send it to the LA office, undoubtedly scrambled by Lotus Express all over again.

In my spare moments between editing incomprehensible rubbish and returning from lunch, I wrote about anything happening in the British film and television industries that might be of interest in Los Angeles.

Unfortunately, Americans are not easy people to work for, even at a distance. The trick, I found, was to leave the office before anyone in LA got into work. But one or two of them were showing signs of becoming horribly keen, and when I got

home I’d find my answer machine bombarded with messages: ‘You say that this film is being shot in the Netherlands, but you don’t say which Netherlands country it is! You really have to be more precise if you want to write for us!’

One afternoon I found myself writing an article about Rugby League. You may wonder why anyone in Hollywood could have any interest in Rugby League, and the answer was, of course, ‘money’.

Money was the answer to all questions in LA – it was the only thing that mattered, the sole criterion by which everything else was judged.

That morning, Rupert Murdoch had shown an interest in buying the worldwide television rights to Rugby League, and anything Murdoch did might eventually have financial implications in Los Angeles.

Explaining in fewer than 500 words the entire history and social significance of Rugby League, its effectiveness as a TV sport and its worldwide potential (or otherwise) was an interesting challenge, certainly more interesting than most of the articles I wrote for them.

By the end of the afternoon the article was written, with a bit of space left over for a quote (they liked quotes in LA). Unfortunately a Venn diagram of ‘people

who are interested in Rugby League’ and ‘people who LA money men have heard of’ doesn’t leave a lot of names in the common sector, which is why I found myself on the phone to Colin Welland’s agent.

Welland had been a competent jobbing actor and hadn’t disgraced himself in the likes of Blue Remembered Hills and Kes. Unfortunately, he later took up writing television plays which were, without exception, dreadful.

A few years earlier he had also written the screenplay for an otherwise rather good film called Chariots of Fire. It was beautifully acted and prettily photographed with an inappropriate if surprisingly effective musical score. The only truly duff element was the simplistic and embarrassing screenplay.

As luck would have it, Welland ended up winning an Oscar for it – a ludicrous choice, of course, but then most things that happen in Hollywood are ludicrous.

At the ceremony, Welland disgraced himself even further by making what was possibly the most cringe-making acceptance speech of all time – ‘The British are coming!’ he announced triumphantly, waving the trophy aloft.

The British film industry was then in a state of almost terminal decline, which was why a few years later I was reduced to writing about the television rights to Rugby League.

Welland himself hadn’t done much since then so I guessed he might be pleased to get a mention. I explained to the agent who I was and what I was writing. There followed a long silence from the other end of the phone, the kind that usually has the words ‘stunned’ or ‘shocked’ attached to it. ‘I don’t know what you mean, son,’ he said eventually in a suitably broad northern accent. ‘Colin Welland doesn’t give quotes to journalists!’

Top: Welland. Above: Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross), Chariots of Fire (1981)

EVERY THREE MINUTES SOMEONE IN THE UK DEVELOPS DEMENTIA.

BUT WITH YOUR SUPPORT, RESEARCH WILL FIND A CURE.

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Get your free guide to gifts in Wills today and find out how your gift could help make the heartbreak of dementia a thing of the past.

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The other side of Beryl Bainbridge

Author Beryl Bainbridge was an extraordinarily talented artist. Her great friend Paul Bailey explains what painting meant to her

It is not generally known that Dr Johnson was a survivor of the disaster that struck the Titanic, but for Beryl Bainbridge (19322010) it was an imaginative fact. There he is in a rescue boat on the choppy sea in one of her paintings, the only bewigged presence in the composition.

Beryl was a painstaking novelist who liked to get every sentence right. ‘Why do we do it?’ she would ask me whenever she was stuck in the middle of a book. The question was as painful as it was rhetorical, since she already knew the answer. The writing had to be done.

Her publisher, Colin Haycraft at Duckworth, despised fiction and often said he would never read it, but Beryl’s books kept his firm from bankruptcy because she was one of the very few authors on his list who ever made any money. He got into the habit of putting pressure on her to produce another novel, and she invariably obliged, staying up all night with a bottle of whisky and a packet of her cherished ‘ciggies’. But when the last words were written, she picked up her brushes and started painting.

It was an activity she enjoyed. She wasn’t in competition with other painters. There were no reviews to face and no criticism to cope with. She drew and painted her children, her best friends and her lovers with a carefree abandon she never experienced at her desk.

Napoleon, in various guises, features in much of her work. Captain and Mrs Scott, barely described in The Birthday Boys, are revealed in a portrait as a strangely discontented pair. Her influences are varied, from the early Renaissance to Marc Chagall.

A photomontage, made in 2000, the year Beryl became Dame, is indicative of her surrealist view of things, with Beryl and the Queen grinning at one another like old friends. At the real event the sovereign asked her if she was still publishing before offering her gloved hand to the next recipient of a gong. The ceremony was over in seconds. But in the montage they are two pals, sharing a naughty joke perhaps, as they never did in life.

In Beryl’s historical novels, she sticks as close to the truth as she can, rarely allowing herself the luxury of fantasy. It’s in her art that fantasy reigns supreme.

She drew and painted her children, her best friends and her lovers with a carefree abandon she never experienced at her desk. Her influences are varied, from the early Renaissance to Marc Chagall

Facing page: The Titanic and Lifeboat (late 1990s)

Above: portrait of Lili Loebl, Beryl’s neighbour in the 1960s

Right: Boarding the Titanic (late 1990s)

Dr Stuttaford’s surgery

The myth of the healthy fattypuff

Your medical queries answered by our resident doctor

The champagne drunk at Christmas parties as well as the turkey, parsnips, roast potatoes and puddings eaten at family gatherings, have erased many a hard-earned silhouette achieved by weeks of stringent dieting last year. Christmas excesses would have been long forgotten were it not for bathroom scales, which, months later, remind gourmands every morning of their earlier gluttony. Does it matter? Surely the doctor’s pills protect someone from the consequences of a few extra pounds? Not always, disappointingly, for healthy obesity is rare. Some lucky people are surprisingly svelte despite an indifference to standard dietary advice, whereas others are unlucky enough to be obese despite eating sparingly. Some are overweight because they eat with abandon and have persuaded themselves that they are obese but healthy and needn’t give a damn about the bathroom scales.

A growing number of the overindulgent are convinced that their statins, hypotensive agents, miniaspirins and, if their blood sugar is on the high side, hypoglycaemic tablets, will deter the grim reaper. But while medication may delay the obese person’s confrontation with him, they should remember that not many octogenarians are ‘healthily obese’.

To achieve a healthy old age, obese people have to navigate high blood pressure, heart disease, renal failure, diabetes, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis and possibly a greater chance of developing some malignancies. Preventive medicine is excellent for this journey, but even the best pilot can’t guarantee safe harbour.

Recent studies have confirmed that optimism over ‘healthy obesity’ is too often misplaced. Dr Ravi Retnakaran of Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital has investigated the medical history of 60,000 people. His study showed that

obesity when younger can remain a negative factor in predicting health in middle age and beyond, even when it has been detected and effectively treated.

Encouragingly, there is also evidence from this study that in formerly obese patients, correct treatment with medication and change of lifestyle greatly improve a patient’s chances of making old bones. Modern medicine has contributed hugely to an ever increasing lifespan. However it won’t ensure that all previously or currently obese people will escape the well-known complications of obesity.

Scales and a tape measure are excellent devices for assessing the risk that flab occasions. Thankfully there is no pressing need to master the confusing formula for assessing BMI (body mass index). BMI was introduced by a Belgian mathematician and sociologist in the early 19th century to assess someone’s build by dividing their weight in kilograms with the square of their height in metres. It has confused the general public ever since.

It has now been shown that patients can achieve quicker, easier and equally valuable statistics by measuring their waist with a tape measure and their weight on the bathroom scales. This is especially true in older

people where changes in their metabolism, muscle mass, bone density and height can give a distorted picture if they rely on the BMI.

Beside every bathroom scales there should be a tape measure. Use it once a week to measure the abdomen at its greatest girth. Even laissez faire doctors suggest that a man’s should be under 40 inches – less than the girth of his bottom. A woman’s should be under 34 inches.

Dr David Katz of Yale University has recently published a paper in the Annals of Internal Medicine suggesting that even if obese people appear healthy it is an illusion. Excess weight may later result in fatty livers that interfere with a patient’s metabolism. These metabolic changes can contribute to high blood sugar levels, increased insulin resistance in the tissues and hence diabetes, or other troubles with the pancreas.

Apparently ‘healthy obesity’ may also account, directly or indirectly, for an increased vulnerability to heart attacks, strokes and high blood pressure. Dr Katz reminds us that alongside medical treatment and weight loss, obese patients must review their whole lifestyle.

I usually recommend that everyone capable of it should take 40 minutes a day of brisk but not violent exercise. We should all, when involved in sedentary work, move around regularly and take a wander every half hour or so. Rest is as important as exercise. Six to eight hours sleep a night is ideal but more than ten hours of sleep a night is, paradoxically, a risk factor. I have always maintained that alcohol in moderation is usually beneficial and now happily many well conducted studies have come to the same conclusion.

Overweight patients need to reduce their waistline and collar size and take the pills prescribed by their doctors. Even so, doctors and patients should remain vigilant about possible health hazards.

When Edward Mirzoeff was filming the PM’s private meeting with the Queen, a calamity occurred that put him in a tricky position

I once met John Major

Every one of us was nervous. We were about to be present at the notoriously private meeting between the Queen and her Prime Minister. Only once before had it been filmed, for Richard Cawston’s Royal Family in 1969 – and then for only a few seconds. I was determined that we would show more.

It was August 1991, and I was making Elizabeth R, a documentary to mark the 40th anniversary of the Queen’s accession to the throne. The Prime Minister was John Major. He had held office for no more than a few months, and had not visited Balmoral for an audience before. Greysuited and grey-faced, he seemed ill at ease as he arrived in his limousine.

The only one unaffected was the Queen, as imperturbable as ever. After all, she had seen eight previous Prime Ministers, from Winston to Mrs Thatcher, come – and go.

It went better than expected. John Major seemed to relax as he described his recent visit to Moscow, the talk was lively and amusing, and we succeeded in filming for more than ten minutes. Relief all round.

But not for long. I had arranged next to film the Queen showing John Major round Balmoral’s gardens. I asked him if we could attach an unobtrusive radio microphone to his suit. A small, petulant explosion followed. Under no circumstances would he agree to such an outrageous idea. I pointed out that if he did not wear a radio mic we would be listening to a very one-sided conversation. ‘You don’t mean to say that the Queen would wear a such a device?’ ‘Of course she does – how else could we

changed his mind.

The Sovereign and her Prime Minister walked around the garden, a blaze of colour on this cloudless late summer day. And they made conversation. But Major must still have been nervous. Why else would he say ‘I suppose this must all have been laid out by Calamity Brown’?

He had held office for no more than a few months and had not visited Balmoral for an audience. Greysuited and grey-faced, he seemed ill at ease as he arrived

The Queen, who notices everything, smoothly described Capability Brown’s landscaping contribution, and all went well after that.

Except that soon afterwards I was approached by one of the Prime Minister’s senior aides, demanding a copy of our recording. I refused – there had been no prior agreement to hand over tapes, and it went against all practice of BBC editorial control. This denial went down badly. I heard silkily whispered threats of unpleasant consequences to the Corporation. Here was a problem above my pay grade. I followed the classic BBC routine of ‘referring up’. A message quickly came down, from the very top of the pyramid, to stand firm.

Suddenly the pressure ceased. I wondered why. A little while later I discovered that the official went from me to the sound recordist, who cheerfully handed over a copy of the conversation. He was a freelance, regularly employed at Tory party conferences; possibly he knew which side his bread was buttered on. To be fair, there was no subsequent request from a Whitehall ‘Sir Humphrey’ to delete any mention of ‘Calamity Brown’.

But I was left with a dilemma. Should we include the gaffe in our edited film, at the risk of making the Prime Minister something of a laughing stock? After weeks of uncertainty, I decided against.

The poor, nice, man was palpably on edge, having to cope simultaneously with the Queen and a BBC crew. It seemed cruel and unfair to poke fun at him for a slip of the tongue. Jeremy Paxman told me later that I had made the wrong journalistic decision. More than 20 years on I’m still not sure.

film and record her at a distance?’ He

Iam well aware that to succeed Richard Ingrams as editor of The Oldie, a magazine he founded 22 years ago and which he has stamped ever since with his own unique personality, is no easy task and one demanding the utmost humility. I will be as humble as I can

and will do my best to keep the magazine worthy of its devoted and growing readership.

I am making one little change, however. This is to call Valerie Grove’s column not ‘Wireless’ but ‘Radio’.

I am sure some readers will be offended by this, regarding it as a

craven capitulation to youth, but since my mother died in the 1990s, I don’t think I have ever heard anybody use the word wireless except in reference to computer connections. We may not be young, but we mustn’t get stuck in the past.

ALEXANDER CHANCELLOR

In 2013, Miles Goslett won the London Press Club Scoop of the Year award for an Oldie article. He was the first to expose the reality behind the axed Newsnight report into Jimmy Savile. After a new book about Savile, Goslett says the BBC is still concealing the truth

Jimmy Savile: the multiple cover-up

Dan Davies’s chilling new book about the life of Jimmy Savile, In Plain Sight, is not so much a labour of love as a labour of hate – a project that the author felt compelled to tackle in order to get this thorniest of subjects out of his system.

Davies first became aware of Savile in 1980 when, aged nine, he was taken to a recording of Jim’ll Fix It

He took an instant dislike to the Yorkshireman, forgot about him for years, but in adolescence rediscovered him and became gripped by the dark side of his character long before anyone else was prepared to admit to having suspicions about him. He compiled a ‘Savile dossier’ of press cuttings of his ‘increasingly odd pronouncements’, convinced he would one day use it to bring down the BBC star.

It’s amazing to reflect now that Davies was conscious of Savile’s warped mind, only thanks to things Savile himself said publicly and the various books he published in the 1970s and 80s in which he aired his disturbing opinions on a range of matters, notably sex.

After becoming a journalist in the 90s, Davies’s semiobsession prompted him to interview Savile several times over seven years, so he is probably one of the few people who can claim to have known this notoriously tricky man in any depth – insofar as anybody could really know him, of course.

Yet even if he wasn’t able to use the dossier to bring Savile down during his lifetime, he has certainly nailed any lingering doubts about him post-death with this well-crafted, if horrifying, account of how Savile so casually ruined lives through sexual abuse and duped a nation with his undoubted mental agility.

The stories Davies tells of Savile’s foul deeds are so relentless that no sane individual would find it easy to get through this book. For those who manage it, though, a fascinating account awaits.

If one is seeking anything positive from the Savile scandal it is that his death was the trigger for other abusers being brought to justice. In recent months Rolf Harris, Stuart Hall and Max Clifford have all been convicted of sexually assaulting young women and girls, their victims emboldened, perhaps, by the media and Crown Prosecution Service’s reactions to the Savile case.

Some people believe that other well-known men are destined for the dock for the same reason. We shall see.

Meanwhile, the Government has felt it necessary to launch a public inquiry into historical child abuse and the latest BBC inquiry on the same subject, chaired by Dame Janet Smith, is scheduled to report this autumn.

This sea change in the public’s attitude is ultimately attributable to one person: Meirion Jones. He is the BBC producer who mounted the six-week Newsnight investigation into Savile,which informed the world of who the DJ really was – even though, ironically,

Jones’s film was never broadcast. His investigation, in which he was brilliantly helped by Liz MacKean, a reporter, and Hannah Livingston, a researcher, was ready to begin on the day Savile died in October 2011.

Jones’s aunt had been the headmistress at Duncroft School, an all-girls approved school in Surrey. When Jones visited the school as a child four decades ago, he recalled seeing Savile there and was instinctively doubtful of his motives. He tucked the memory away, prepared to react if he ever had reason to do so.

Sure enough, in 2010 he received confirmation from an ex-Duncroft pupil that Savile had abused children.

And so I return to Jones’s abandoned Newsnight investigation. Even though Savile is dead, the BBC continues to be silent about who within its ranks was aware of what it unearthed and what they did about it.

Despite recent promises to restore public trust in the wake of the Savile scandal, and having spent millions of pounds of public money on various inquiries, which have so far shone only a dim light on its secretive workings, the BBC has chosen to become enmeshed in a spider’s web of half-truths and nondenial denials, best described as a cover-up of a cover-up of a cover-up. If this sounds complicated, it is not.

In February 2012 Richard Ingrams published my article in The Oldie describing Newsnight’s investigation of Savile’s unhealthy interest in children. Ingrams was the only editor in the national media who was prepared to run this piece.

Although essentially complete, Newsnight’s film had been axed in what remain mysterious circumstances in December 2011. I was tipped off about its contents. I was also made aware that BBC executives had agreed that, having cancelled the Newsnight project, tribute programmes praising Savile should be shown over the Christmas period. Abandoning Newsnight’s film was cover-up number one.

In the Oldie article – published in the March 2012 issue and still available online – I named the then BBC directorgeneral Mark Thompson as one executive who, I believed, knew all about Newsnight’s investigation.

At the time, I wrote: ‘When asked if BBC director-general Mark Thompson knew of the Newsnight report, the BBC refused to comment. But a source has told me that Thompson was tackled about the axing of the report at a pre-Christmas

drinks party, so he cannot claim to be ignorant of it.’

The Daily Telegraph and the political website Guido Fawkes both repeated my assertion within 48 hours. On the day my piece was published, a Telegraph journalist called Tim Walker also emailed

In the meantime, ITV had been working on its own explosive Savile exposé. When it was broadcast, gaining national attention, the BBC was forced to act

Thompson, asking him if the Oldie story was true.Thompson did not reply.

At that time he was busy lining up his present job as chief executive of The New York Times. Even the slightest connection with a paedophile scandal could have scuppered his chances of securing this lucrative American post.

Proving just how different the climate was only two years ago, The Oldie’s story about Savile never caught fire among the mass media at the time of publication.

Thompson escaped scrutiny.

Nevertheless, I carried on asking the BBC press office about his knowledge of Newsnight’s investigation right up until September 2012 – the month Thompson left the BBC.

Although I never got an answer, I pursued this line because it struck me that the head of any organisation sets its tone.

If Thompson, as BBC editor-in-chief, didn’t know about Newsnight’s investigation of Savile, I thought he should know; but if he did know about it, and was content to pretend that he did not, his colleagues would probably be happy to follow his lead and also bury the inconvenience of Savile’s alleged abuse. Either way, the licence fee-paying public would be interested.

It is worth repeating that Newsnight had interviewed women who claimed Savile had abused children on BBC premises and heard evidence of which Surrey Police, who had previously investigated Savile, were unaware. By any standards, the BBC surely had a duty to inform the authorities of Newsnight’s findings and Thompson, as the BBC’s most senior employee, should have done this personally.

I submitted a Freedom of Information request to the BBC in April 2012 asking what Thompson knew of Newsnight’s film. The BBC refused to answer.

I rang Thompson’s office in May 2012 and told his secretary that I wanted to speak to her boss about Savile’s abuse of children on BBC premises in the 1970s. She said Thompson was away and later claimed to have forgotten to pass on my message to him.

And in August 2012, while working on a separate story about Savile’s abuse for The Sunday Times Magazine, I put a series of questions to the BBC asking what Thompson knew of Newsnight’s project. I also asked what Helen Boaden, then head of BBC news, knew of it.

Jimmy Savile: his now well-known sexual abuses were repeatedly covered up

The BBC’s response, on 6th September 2012, was to spend £803 of licence fee money asking the law firm Mills & Reeve to write a letter to the Sunday Times, threatening to sue if it published any story stating that Thompson or Boaden had been involved in suppressing Newsnight’s Savile/sex abuse investigation.

The law firm therefore acknowledged, on its clients’ behalf, that such an investigation had taken place, but it was careful to keep Thompson’s and Boaden’s fingerprints away from this acknowledgement.

Even though I had never intended to write that Thompson personally had suppressed Newsnight’s investigation, the Sunday Times decided the project was too problematic and my piece was jettisoned.

In the meantime, ITV had been working on its own explosive Savile exposé. When it was broadcast later in September, gaining national attention, the BBC was forced to act.

In particular, questions were asked about why it had axed its Newsnight report nine months previously.

The corporation’s response was to set up the Pollard Review, an independent inquiry chaired by a former Sky News boss Nick Pollard.

This £3 million inquiry was conducted over eight weeks. When published it was presented by Chris Patten, at the time the head of the BBC Trust, as a brilliant example of truth-telling and swamp-draining.

Yet Patten overlooked the fact that Pollard had failed to identify in his report which BBC executive had decided to axe the Newsnight investigation – for no individual was prepared to take responsibility for that.

And, having interviewed Thompson during his inquiry and considered all of the evidence detailed above, including my Oldie article, Pollard used his report to clear Thompson unequivocally of having had any knowledge of any allegation against Savile during the eight years that he ran the BBC.

Pollard’s clearing of Thompson was the second cover-up – something I can state with confidence because of what happened next.

In February 2013 Pollard rang me up and, in a conversation which I taped, admitted that he had excluded key evidence about Thompson from his

In February 2013, Pollard rang me up and, in a conversation which I taped, admitted that he had excluded key evidence about Thompson from his report

report. Pollard volunteered to me that Helen Boaden’s lawyer had written to him during his inquiry, saying that Boaden had personally informed Thompson of Newsnight’s Savile investigation and its contents a day or two before Christmas Day 2011.

According to Boaden, she was in London when Thompson, visiting the BBC’s new offices in Salford, rang her to ask about it, having been tackled about Newsnight’s investigation at a drinks party – exactly as I had written in The Oldie. Boaden says she told Thompson all about Newsnight’s investigation.

This means, according to Boaden, that Thompson allowed the BBC to air the tributes to Savile even though he also knew that two Newsnight journalists had heard claims about his abuse.

No mention of this was made in Pollard’s report. Instead, Pollard wrote that he had ‘no reason’ to disbelieve Thompson’s pleas of ignorance. A misleading statement if ever there was one.

In what sounded like a crisis of conscience, Pollard told me during our phone call: ‘It is clear that it is Helen Boaden’s view that she told Mark Thompson [in December 2011 about Newsnight’s investigation]’.

He added: ‘I overlooked that… If I had thought about it I would have included it in my report... It was a mistake of mine not to have picked up on this and recorded it in my report.’

Pollard encouraged me to write a news story about this shocking oversight, but asked me not to name him as the source. I complied and the story appeared in the Sunday Times in February 2013.

But when I asked him about it a few days later, he closed down the conversation. Our relationship, such as it was, had ended.

I was angry that Pollard had put me in a situation where I was being used to slip out a key failing of his report – but with no consequences for Pollard or Thompson. So, when the Tory MP Rob Wilson asked me about this development, I gave him chapter and verse, for public interest reasons.

Over the following months, Wilson wrote to Chris Patten, whose job was to represent the interests of licence fee payers, several times explaining Pollard’s woeful error.

Patten stonewalled tediously. So, on 19th November 2013, Wilson sent him the tape recording of Pollard’s damning confession to me. Patten initially sent Wilson a veiled threat, suggesting legal action might ensue if he gave the tape to anybody else.

On 11th December 2013, he held a meeting attended by three other BBC trustees. Between them they concluded, implausibly, that Pollard’s confession did not change the outcome of the Pollard Review. Patten declared that the ‘independent’ Pollard report could not be altered and so, to date, it remains a misleading document. Patten is therefore responsible for cover-up number three.

Taken to its logical conclusion, does this mean that the BBC Trust regards Boaden – now the £350,000 head of BBC Radio – as an unreliable witness?

For if the Trust is siding with its ex-employee Thompson, it must be rejecting Boaden’s account.

What is particularly interesting is that Thompson has never asked The Oldie or The Daily Telegraph or the Guido Fawkes website to remove references dating from February 2012 which state that he knew about Newsnight’s investigation of Savile but did nothing.

I emailed Thompson and several of his New York Times colleagues for the purposes of this article. Since he is so convinced he never heard any allegations about Savile until after he quit the BBC, and has been cleared by the Pollard Review, I asked why he has not asked for a total retraction from each publication.

He didn’t reply – just as he had not replied when asked about the original Oldie article.

‘I’ve always thought of old age as a gift’

At an Oldie Literary Lunch, the 92-year-old writer Ronald Blythe spoke movingly of the pleasures of the third age

When I was in my twenties, one of my duties was to look after a 17th-century library that belonged to the Archbishop of York. It contained all sorts of treasures, including a Caxton, one of the first books to be printed at Westminster in this country.

Like our grandparents and our great-grandparents, Caxton lived at a time when white hair was rare. People didn’t live very long – even in the 1930s the average age of death was the late fifties. Nowadays the great gift of life is that so many of us live a long time, in a very healthy and delightful way, with lots of entertainment, endless friends, voyages to foreign parts – and, of course, great literature.

I’ve always thought of old age as a gift, and nothing whatever to do with the common idea of being old. It’s simply about a phase of life which we didn’t experience when we were young, or couldn’t experience in middle age when we were working at some job.

Nor do I believe in retirement. I was brought up with artists and writers in East Anglia, and most of them don’t retire: they just go on working. And they’re fortunate: in many careers, you have to go at a certain age, but artists and writers don’t. They have this extension of life, and it keeps them going, in a way.

I have no recipe for living a long life: I just think it’s a normal thing to do – to garden, have friends, celebrate good health, travel, read (particularly valuable), not watch too much television. And be grateful for what would have been a very unusual thing for our ancestors, to live into old age.

Coming to events like this is a form of celebration, not looking back all the time but existing in the present, which we should do as much as we possibly can. The present is the most exciting part of life – not the past. You should know about the past, you don’t know about the future, but the present is the enormous

gift we possess these days. I’ve written about this, as have many poets and novelists. Jane Austen – who died when she was only 44, which was not a bad age in those days – wrote about it, as did Shakespeare, who died in his fifties. They got through their lives in a fairly short time, but we go on.

Every day I see people whose ages I know by looking at them, yet they don’t look old in the way that people once looked old – like my grandmother, who sat in a chair in a long skirt for 20 years and told stories. Nobody looks like that any more. Nor are we worn out by our previous work, as people used to be in factories and on the fields, crippled by work. All this has passed us by.

We are fortunate indeed to be alive in the early 21st century. And we’re kept alive by faith, by intelligence, by culture, by travel and, most of all, by love and friendship, because these things don’t cease when we retire: they exist all the time. People die, but they stay with us.

I met the poet James Turner in my

twenties: nobody reads him now, yet to me he is always alive. He was a difficult man, and he and his wife moved between Suffolk and Cornwall. He died aged 67, but because of his spirit, his inner strength, he remains both old and new to me.

You too must have people like that in your lives, people who are not alive in a physical sense, but remain alive in some spiritual way, which you retain in your head, in your whole personality.

Gatherings like this remind us of both the brevity of life and its lasting effects – and the fact that it’s marvellous, from beginning to end, and often better at the end than at the beginning, where things might have been complicated and difficult, because we’ve become wise and philosophical and intelligent.

As we go on living we become more generous-minded, and it may be that we read better books. And being old is not to be thought about in terms of pensions, or cruises, or all those kind of things, but as a great gift, a great pleasure – and a great happiness.

Ronald Blythe (1922-2023) at home in Wormingford on the Essex-Suffolk border. The house was once the home of landscape painter John Nash

La grande bellezza

On

Sophia Loren’s eightieth birthday, Barry Norman saluted Italy’s most renowned, honoured and famous actress

Ifirst met Sophia Loren at a BAFTA awards dinner in the 1960s. She arrived late but not for her the grand entrance – ‘Upstage everyone, I’m on.’ She crept into the room as unobtrusively and apologetically as possible but even so several hundred forks paused halfway to mouths as we all turned to stare at her.

Flash forward a couple of years to a clinic in Switzerland where she had just given birth to her first child, Carlo Ponti Jnr. She met me at the door of her room, devoid of make-up, hair scraped back and wearing a shapeless dressing-gown.

I can think of no other renowned beauty who would have agreed to see me in such circumstances. But one of the enchanting things about Loren is that she displays no vanity.

In 1976 I interviewed her in a railway carriage at Bern station, where she was filming The Cassandra Crossing with Richard Harris and Ava Gardner.

‘Where are the lights?’ she asked, as we were setting up.

‘We don’t have any,’ said my cameraman, ‘but we do have a sheet of white paper.’

She shrugged. ‘OK.’ So we filmed her in that confined space, the only light being that which bounced off the paper. She looked gorgeous. But how could she not, with those eyes and cheekbones?

Now she is 80, still beautiful and a screen legend – the first performer ever to win an Academy Award (the Oscar for best actress) in a non-English language role for her performance in Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women in 1961.

Hers is a remarkable story: born Sofia Villani Scicolone out of wedlock in Rome, a finalist in the Miss Italia beauty contest at 14, an extra in Quo Vadis at 17 and two years later a breakthrough role in Gold of Naples

Enter now Vittorio De Sica, one of two men who played vital roles in her career. He cast her in Too Bad She’s Bad, the first of 11 films in which she

acted alongside the Italian heartthrob Marcello Mastroianni.

Inevitably Hollywood, ever on the lookout for sexy leading ladies, came calling. She played opposite John Wayne in Legend of the Lost and Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra in The Pride and the Passion, then signed a five-year contract with Paramount Pictures.

She made some decent films for them including Desire Under the Elms, based on Eugene O’Neill’s play and co-starring Anthony Perkins, and the romantic comedy Houseboat with Cary Grant.

But it was De Sica who made her a world star with Two Women, the dark story of a mother (Loren) trying to protect her 12-year-old daughter in war-torn Italy. For this she won 22 international awards.

The second – and most important – man in her life was the producer Carlo Ponti, or Charlie Bridges as Peter Ustinov always called him. Loren married him in 1950 when she was 15 and Ponti, then 37, was two years older than her mother.

The marriage was complicated since Ponti was still married to someone else. But they sorted that out with a Mexican divorce from Ponti’s

first wife in 1957 and later a remarriage to Loren by proxy, she being in Hollywood at the time and he being elsewhere.

Surprisingly perhaps, given the gap in ages, the marriage lasted happily until Ponti’s death in 2007, though it might not have done had Peter Sellers had his way. In 1960 she and Sellers, with whom she also recorded the song Goodness Gracious Me, filmed The Millionairess. Sellers fell in love with her and left his first wife saying he was going to live with Loren. Unfortunately he hadn’t consulted Loren, who wasn’t remotely interested.

So it was Ponti who guided her career throughout the 1960s and 70s, when she was one of the most popular actresses in the world, sometimes known as ‘the Italian Marilyn Monroe’, which probably didn’t impress her.

Nor, I think, would she have been much impressed in 1991 when she was given an honorary Oscar for the body of her work and was described as ‘one of world cinema’s greatest treasures’.

Loren has always been selfdeprecating. She thinks her nose is too big and says of her looks: ‘I’m lucky; I had a very beautiful mother’, and of her voluptuous figure: ‘Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.’

Her career began to taper off in the 1980s, very much of her own accord, when she decided to devote most of her time to her two sons, but she made the occasional film, switching between Italy and Hollywood, and in 2007, aged 72, she posed scantily clad for the Pirelli Calendar and still looked marvellous.

Now, at 80, what to say of her? Well, simply that she is Italy’s most renowned, most honoured and most famous actress and, whether she likes it or not, ‘one of world cinema’s greatest treasures’.

Barry Norman (1933-2017) was a film critic and television presenter

Sophia Loren in June 2014. Left: with her husband, Carlo Ponti, in 1959

Private Frazer gave Dad’s Army its most memorable – and eerily accurate – line. Ian Jack celebrates the wild-eyed miserabilist

Doomed, I tell ye

The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland wrote recently that Nigel Farage was the ‘Captain Mainwaring of our time’, an arresting image rooted in the columnist’s belief that the foundations of modern Euroscepticism lay in the last war, particularly in 1940 when Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany. ‘With his pint and his froggy grin,’ Freedland wrote, ‘the Ukip leader could almost be a creation of TV comedy.’

Like Mainwaring, he dreams of defeating a powerful enemy with a ragtag army that, like the Home Guard volunteers of Walmington-on-Sea, sees the conflict in terms of plucky little England versus the world. ‘Those opening Dad’s Army titles, showing this sceptred isle beating back the invading arrows of the Continent, could be an animated version of the UKIP manifesto. The essential message: keep away, Europe, we’re better off alone.

I can’t remember when I first saw Dad’s Army – perhaps as early as summer 1968 – when the BBC broadcast the first of what turned out to be 80 episodes. Who could have foreseen that it would be so loved that it now stands to television as The Pickwick Papers and Mr Pooter stand to literature? Who could have predicted the spin-offs, films, stage adaptations, Christmas specials and repeats that continue nearly 40 years after the series ended in 1977? Who could have predicted the new film version, which is being shot with a starry cast in Bridlington?

Who could have imagined it as a metaphor for 21st-century British politics and Nigel Farage? Who could have imagined Nigel Farage?

Not me, for sure. I have a hopeless record on these things. I once lived with a woman who’d once worked with John Cleese, who in 1975 came to supper with his then wife, Connie Booth, and mentioned – quite casually – that they were working on a comedy set in a little seaside hotel and what did we think? I said something like, ‘Isn’t that a little

old-fashioned – you know, the seaside boarding house with the peculiar guests?’, not understanding that his question wasn’t really a question but a piece of news and that the only decent response to it was an affirming, ‘Sounds great fun’.

Twenty-five years after this conversation, a poll of television professionals, commissioned by the British Film Institute, chose Fawlty Towers, which ran to only 12 episodes, as the greatest British television programme of any genre ever to have been screened.

In a list of the 100 best, Monty Python came fifth and Yes, Minister ninth. Dad’s Army was placed at number 13, just after I, Claudius, which may or may not be unjust. Are ‘great’ programmes the same as ‘much-loved’ programmes?

The comedy in Fawlty Towers is sharper and more original than in Dad’s Army, and John Cleese was a physical comic as none of Walmington’s Home Guard could ever hope to be. Fawlty Towers took more risks – most memorably in the don’t-mention-the-war episode – and generated more violent laughter than any scene in Dad’s Army

The appeal of Dad’s Army was more sentimental and perhaps more profound: it mocked aspects of British history – the old social hierarchy, notions of how Britain liked to see itself, British ineptitude – but so fondly that it never became satire. Similar to the wartime films of directors such as Humphrey Jennings or Michael Powell, it could even be seen as lightly camouflaged patriotism.

Mainly, though, it was funny. People of my parents’ generation liked it from the

Of all the characters in Dad’s Army, the one equipped with the genuine foresight turns out to be Private James Frazer

beginning, partly because they’d lived through the time it described and (for example) loathed officious ARP wardens and their call of ‘Put that light out’ just as much as Mainwaring and his volunteers. The script had an authenticity that hadn’t been put there by researchers.

The writers, David Croft and Jimmy Perry, were in their late teens when war broke out and both later served in the Royal Artillery, though not before Perry had done a two-year stint in the Home Guard (his retrospective view of himself was an inspiration for the mummy’s boy Private Pike). Most of the principal cast had also fought in the world wars –Arthur Lowe, John Le Mesurier and Clive Dunn in the second, John Laurie in the first, and Arnold Ridley in both.

A middle-aged audience in 1970 watched a show that reminded it of its own youth, acted by a cast that the audience knew through their previous appearances on film, radio and television.

People remembered Lowe as Mr Swindley, the shopkeeper in Coronation Street (or in the case of my cinephile brother as the newspaper reporter who appears at the end of Kind Hearts and Coronets); or Dunn as the doddering old gent in Bootsie and Snudge; or Ridley as the author of The Ghost Train, which was a hit play in 1923.

Ridley and Laurie were the oldest, born respectively in 1896 and 1897, and their characters, Privates Godfrey and Frazer, offered an interesting contrast in light and shade, sweet and sour.

Not much was known about the innocent, mild-mannered Godfrey, other than that he was long retired – possibly from a job in a shop – and lived in a cottage with his cake-baking sister Dolly. I don’t believe he even had a catchphrase, merely the recurring need to reach a lavatory in good time.

Frazer, on the other hand, appeared like a wild-eyed villain in a Victorian melodrama, and with his often-repeated ‘We’re doomed, I tell ye’ gave the series its most memorable line, only rivalled by Lance-Corporal Jones’s ‘Don’t panic!’

According to The Complete A–Z of Dad’s Army, compiled by Croft and Perry in 1980, Frazer hails from the Hebrides and went to sea as a young man – references in the script suggest some time c. 1890 – but left the merchant service for the Royal Navy in time for the First World War to be a cook at the Battle of Jutland. He is a crack but unorthodox rifleman: having learned to shoot mines from the heaving deck of a minesweeper, he waves his gun up and down to get the aim right.

He tells chilling stories from his days in the South Seas – Heart of Darkness pales by comparison. A tattoo on his arm proclaims ‘Scotland Forever’. Home from the sea, he opened a philately shop in Walmington, from which he did a little funeral-arranging on the side, though by the third series he was a full-time undertaker.

In a Scottish household as ours was, Frazer’s intemperate gloom could easily have been resented as a Scottish stereotype; it was a saying of my father’s that Harry Lauder ‘had made a fool out o’ Scotsmen’ with his kilt and his curly stick and jokes about thriftiness. But we liked Frazer because he was so good at over-acting.

Croft and Perry gave him some lovely lines – in The Miser’s Hoard, episode he gleefully counts his piles of gold sovereigns and promises himself ‘a small herring tomorrow as a wee treat’.

Perhaps, too, we recognised that his kind of Scottish character was vanishing on the screen – we’d seen Laurie play similarly dour characters in Dr Finlay’s Casebook, and whenever Hitchcock’s 1935 version of The 39 Steps was revived, there he was again, just as dour as Flora Robson’s distrustful crofter husband as he was as the undertaker in Walmingtonon-Sea. But the record suggests he was a fine stage actor, taking on Shakespeare roles at Stratford and the Old Vic.

In 2013, Ian Lavender (Private Pike) remembered Laurie saying: ‘I’ve played every part in Shakespeare, I was considered to be the finest Hamlet of the twenties… and now I’m famous for doing this crap.’ But Lavender hadn’t thought he was serious – it was Laurie being ‘impish’ and Frazer-like.

As the 1970s wore on, Frazer’s accent as well as his character began to belong to another age. Born in Dumfries, he spoke with the clear consonants and fluting vowels of rural Scotland, or at least of those parts of it that lie to either side of the industrialised central belt.

But after Billy Connolly’s success, more and more stage voices started sounding Glaswegian, flat and laconic. Just as much as Mainwaring’s England, Frazer’s Scotland had ,by the 1970s, become a thing of the past.

Laurie died in 1980 at Chalfont St Peter in Buckinghamshire. He wasn’t the first to go: James Beck, who played the

spivvy Private Walker, went in 1973 and Edward Sinclair, the verger, in 1977. (‘With the loss of Teddy, it is now quite clear that there will be no more Dad’s Army’, said Arthur Lowe at his funeral.)

But after Laurie’s death, the leaves fell thick and fast: Lowe in 1982, Le Mesurier in 1983, Ridley in 1984.

Today – December, 2014 – only three of the named cast survive: Ian Lavender, Frank Williams (the vicar) and Pamela Cundell (Mrs Fox, once enamoured of Lance-Corporal Jones).

Are we all doomed? A year or two ago that was always the last question in the New Statesman’s question-and-answer interviews with writers, politicians and other public figures. Nearly every interviewee – not just the few who believed in an afterlife – contrived to say no we were not, but the sound I heard was whistling in the dark. As a prognosis for humanity, it has taken on a reality that wasn’t there when Frazer was saying it in the 1970s.

It seems perfectly possible, even likely. Nigel Farage may well be the Captain Mainwaring de nos jours, but this is small beer. Of all the characters in Dad’s Army, the one equipped with genuine foresight turns out to be Private James Frazer, philatelist, undertaker, miser, miserabilist and seer. Happy New Year!

Ian Jack (1945-2022) was a writer and editor of The Independent on Sunday

Lord Lucan: the mystery lives on

It is the whodunnit that never goes away. Patrick Marnham examines a fresh theory and looks back at his own involvement

In 1974 the IRA carried out a bombing campaign on the British mainland that killed 40 people and injured 147 others. On the night of 7th November they bombed a pub in Woolwich, killing two. On the same night the body of a young woman was discovered in a basement in Belgravia, London.

Forty years later the IRA bombings have receded into history, but the murder of Sandra Rivett, a live-in nanny to three children, continues to fascinate us. It remains unsolved, there was no salacious angle, there have been no significant new developments, and yet it has grown into a national whodunnit, like Jack the Ripper. The reason for this is, of course, that the chief suspect, who disappeared on the night of the crime never to be seen again, happened to be an earl.

Since his disappearance, John Bingham, Earl of Lucan, has been spotted all over the world. He drinks in a seedy bar in Mozambique and is sometimes disguised as a policeman in Hove. Scotland Yard still receives regular updates on his whereabouts from alert members of the public, and files them all. In ten years’ time, for the 50th anniversary of the murder, we can confidently expect another flurry of interest – as long as he hasn’t been found, which would spoil everything.

For the current anniversary we have A Different Class of Murder: The Story of Lord Lucan by Laura Thompson, which lists six previous works on the same subject, one by me, the new work being the longest of all by some way.

The story starts at about 10pm on the evening of 7th November 1974, when the doors of a Belgravia pub, The Plumbers Arms, burst open and a young woman, covered in blood and still bleeding from

serious head wounds, staggers in. ‘Murder, murder!’ she cries. ‘He’s in the house! He’s murdered the nanny!’ She then identifies herself as Veronica, Countess of Lucan, of 46 Lower Belgrave Street, London W1.

When police entered No 46 it was to find three small children in their night clothes in bedrooms upstairs and a corpse with severe head wounds in a sack in the basement. There was blood everywhere, spattered over the walls and ceiling, with pools of it on the carpet, and there was a length of blood-stained lead piping on the basement stairs.

The police interviewed Lady Lucan in hospital. She said that on going downstairs to look for her children’s nanny she had been attacked in the dark by the man who had committed the murder, and that this man was her husband.

Their elder daughter, Frances, aged nine, confirmed that she had seen her father in the house following the attack on her mother. Lady Lucan said that she was the intended victim as her husband – from whom she was separated – had been told that it was the nanny’s night off.

In June 1975 there was an inquest into Rivett’s death and Lord Lucan was named as the murderer, although his counsel had been prevented from offering any significant evidence in his defence.

Thompson quotes Muriel Spark, who, in her very funny novel Aiding and Abetting, wrote: ‘The calling of a gambler is madness... Being an Earl, full stop, is madness.’ Thompson suggests that Lucan regarded himself above all as ‘an earl’.

In 1974 this was not a common point of view, even among other earls. It was the year of two general elections, both won by Harold Wilson. It was a time of 98 per cent marginal income tax, MI5

was circulating documents suggesting that the Prime Minister was a KGB agent, and under the Labour government the UK was going bankrupt and about to ask for an IMF loan. IRA bombers were running loose from Kilburn to Glasgow and several wealthy men were funding a private army led by a former SAS officer who was preparing a military coup. All over the country mere ‘earls’ were taking cover.

The basic text for all subsequent Lucan studies is the brilliant article by James Fox in the Sunday Times Magazine, published just before the inquest. It identified members of a ‘Clermont set’, allocating their roles. The general public was introduced to Lord Lucan’s bizarre world. The cast included John Aspinall, who had founded a fashionable gambling club, the Clermont, in Berkeley Square, assorted regular gamblers such as Daniel Meinertzhagen,

Ian Maxwell-Scott, Greville Howard and Charles Benson, and a witty but unsuccessful painter called Dominick Elwes. There were also the Anglo-French millionaire Jimmy Goldsmith (later knighted by Harold Wilson) and his mistress, Lady Annabel Birley – with her husband Mark, who owned the nightclub Annabel’s, situated in the basement of the Clermont.

Aspinall, revealed Fox, had held a lunch on the day after the murder for various members of the Clermont set and they had discussed ways in which they might help ‘Lucky’ Lucan, if he surfaced. As a result of this article, members of ‘the set’ came to be seen as a bunch of privileged idlers with extreme right-wing views, who wasted their wealth in gambling, considered themselves to be above the law, did little to assist police inquiries, regarded the brutal murder of a member of the lower orders as an inconvenience at worst, and who loathed Veronica Lucan and treated her with contempt. These views were generally supported off the record by the police officers in charge of the case.

The Sunday Times article caused an outbreak of fear and loathing in SW1. It was illustrated with holiday snaps that showed Lucan and Annabel Birley chatting together in their swimsuits.

On seeing these photographs, Goldsmith had one of his volcanic eruptions and identified Elwes, quite wrongly, as the source of the snaps. Elwes, who had no money, was then ostracised, barred from Annabel’s and pursued by bailiffs. He committed suicide in September 1975. At his memorial service, Aspinall, one of his persecutors, made a vainglorious and absurd speech which led to Tremayne Rodd, a cousin of Elwes, punching Aspinall in the face outside the church.

This incident attracted the attention of Private Eye, which was already taking a close interest in Goldsmith’s complex business affairs. Taking advantage of an error in the Eye article about the Elwes memorial service (which I had written), Goldsmith then tried to close the magazine down and jail its editor, Richard Ingrams, either for contempt of court or criminal libel.

Over the following 18 months Goldsmith issued 80 writs and launched three additional civil libel actions and numerous injunctions. 24 judges became involved, with two cases reaching the House of Lords (Supreme Court).

During the battle, Goldsmith, who was trying to buy a national newspaper, beat up a press photographer and threatened to take over the Times if it did not become more supportive. By the end, Private Eye’s circulation had doubled, and a Labour prime minister who was being bugged by MI5 as a suspected KGB agent had knighted Goldsmith, a multimillionaire who was funding a private army that was plotting a military coup. In British politics and journalism it does not get much better than that.

Thompson brings much of this saga back to life, but her stated purpose is to destroy ‘the Lucan myth’ and replace it with ‘the Lucan story’. She has set out to see the members of the Clermont set for what they were rather than for what they appeared to be in the weeks following the murder of Rivett. In fact, she objects to the whole concept of a ‘Clermont set’, which she says never actually

existed. She also sets out to examine the defence case for Lord Lucan.

In sorting through the original cast she succeeds in showing that many of those involved, notably Lucan’s mother, Kaitilin, his sister, Jane Griffin, his sister-in-law Christina with her husband Bill Shand Kydd, Daniel Meinertzhagen and Charles Benson, were admirable people with normal human reactions to a family tragedy.

The surviving list of rotters is headed by Aspinall and Goldsmith, both now dead, and in the case of Aspinall, a man who had made his fortune by fleecing his friends, it is made clear that several members of the so-called ‘set’ regarded him as more or less repulsive.

Aspinall, the tiger keeper, and Goldsmith dominate much of the story. Goldsmith frightened people. ‘He was very, very scary,’ says one of the exClermont girls. Aspinall, who was not frightened of tigers, was very wary of Goldsmith – who funded him for years.

After one of the interminable High Court hearings, Aspinall was invited to share a taxi with the writer Taki [then the editor of this magazine] and me. Aspinall climbed in with a beaming smile. Goldsmith, standing nearby, was furious. He stormed across the pavement, ordereding ‘Aspers’ out of the cab. ‘Filth, Aspers!’ he shouted. ‘Pus! Human scum! You can’t travel with them… You’ll get eczema!’ Aspinall, looking rather sheepish, scrambled out. He presumably jumped back on to his stool, in the corner of Goldsmith’s Rolls-Royce.

Lucan himself is remembered as a shy and rather sensitive man who played Bach on the piano. He had exquisite manners, cared about his friends and spoke some German, although – as Thompson reminds us – he also took a

keen interest in the speeches of Adolf Hitler. His life had been ruined by his decision to support his family from his earnings as a professional gambler.

He ended up as one of Aspinall’s ‘house players’, employed to enjoy the food and wine and encourage far richer men to gamble. He fell deeper and deeper into debt, fell out with Veronica, left the house in Lower Belgrave Street, failed to get his wife committed to a mental asylum and, finally, lost custody of his children.

Thompson also sets out to undermine the police case against Lucan, in so far as it has been disclosed, and shows it to be surprisingly thin.

Sandra Rivett’s private life was complicated and there were several men involved, but the police apparently did little to investigate them. Furthermore, the forensic evidence was inconclusive. It was mostly based on blood groups (there was no DNA evidence at the time). Rivett and Veronica Lucan had different blood groups and for those who support the police case against Lucan there were traces of the wrong group in the wrong part of the house.

The principal prosecution witness is, of course, Veronica Lucan, who narrowly escaped with her life. Although she was originally quite adamant that the man who attacked her was her husband, she has since considered the possibility that Rivett was killed by a different man, who then attacked her – and that in the dark she mistook him for her husband.

But in the end Thompson decides that the case for Lord Lucan is also hard to prove and – with several of Lucan’s friends and family – she finally settles on the ‘hired hitman’ theory, which I first advanced in Trail of Havoc in 1987, as the least unlikely explanation.

‘If I had my time again, I wouldn’t change a thing’

As a hired hand it has to be said that the man who murdered Rivett was less than satisfactory. He had lost all selfcontrol and was the very opposite of a professional killer. He was beside himself with blood lust. Veronica Lucan was very nearly killed in the less-determined second attack, possibly by someone who had just realised that in the dark they had managed to kill the wrong woman. In other words, by someone who knew what Veronica looked like. Both attacks were carried out with the same weapon and Lucan could not have carried out the first attack.

Lucan had a reasonably strong alibi, partly on the word of the linkman outside the Clermont Club, an encounter which he seems to have organised with some care, but this timetable was unexpectedly and unpredictably confirmed by the statement of his nine-year-old daughter. Apart from which, Lucan would never have mistaken Rivett for his wife, even in the dark.

And he had a notorious horror of blood and visible injuries so would have been incapable of murdering anyone in such a brutal fashion. The presence of an amateur hitman seems increasingly plausible.

Thompson considers that a strong objection to the hitman theory is Lucan’s presence in the house. But on the contrary, it is surely obvious that Lucan would have considered his own return to the house after a murder that he had planned but not carried out, to be essential. He was obsessed with his children and he had to be there to prevent them from realising what had happened.

The only adult supposed to be in the house was also supposed to be dead. The nanny might return early from her evening off. He himself was the only person who could be trusted to clean up after the crime, and had to organise and execute the tricky bit – the disposal of the body.

When his wife ran out of the house screaming ‘Murder!’ Lucan could have stood his ground and insisted on his story – that he had interrupted a fight between Veronica and a stranger. But he had a guilty conscience. He panicked and fled, deciding to ‘lie doggo’ for a while.

Shortly afterwards, a fugitive from justice, he almost certainly committed suicide, possibly disposing of his own body where he had intended to commit his wife’s – in the English Channel.

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Putting on my top hat

Lewis Jones tracks down the perfect example

The first time I went to Royal Ascot the dress code had somehow escaped my notice. Clad in my customary racing kit of suit and brown trilby, I felt as if I had stepped into a Bateman cartoon, and as I watched the horses parade in the paddock I became uncomfortably aware that I was being inspected by two glamorous young women nearby.

In a voice that seemed meant to be overheard, which I can still hear some 40 years later, one said to the other, ‘I expect he comes here all the time.’

So on my return this summer, when I was invited to ride to the course on a coach-and-four – a splendidly restored ‘park drag’, a sort of sports car among coaches, by the grand old firm of Holland & Holland – I was determined to be properly turned out.

I own a presentable morning suit, as my wife refused to marry me in my old one, which she said made me look like Charlie Chaplin, but I lacked the requisite top hat. Judging that I was unlikely ever to wear one again, I thought I would rent one for the day.

I duly visited Moss Bros on Regent Street, where I was offered a dispiriting article that brought to mind Bob Dylan’s Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat: ‘You know it balances on your head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine.’

An assistant suggested its fit might be improved by adding some toilet paper to its well sweated sweat band, but it turned out to be already packed with the stuff. I resolved to look elsewhere.

To find the beau idéal, I visited London’s most venerable hatter, Lock & Co in St James’s Street, where I was offered two fine examples in rabbit-fur felt, a short one at £400 and a tall one at £600, both perfectly handsome but strangely lacking in glamour.

Then I was shown a vintage silk hat, made in 1915. An object of sublime beauty and grace, it fitted me admirably and made me want to dance. Why, I wondered, was it so much better than the new ones? The answer, I felt, was surely to be found in history.

The invention of the top hat is generally credited to a haberdasher called John Hetherington, who when he

wore one on the Strand in 1797, was arrested and fined for disturbing the peace.

The Times reported that the spectacle of his hat, ‘a tall structure, having a shiny lustre and calculated to frighten timid people’, occasioned a general panic: ‘Women fainted, children screamed, dogs yelped, and an errand boy’s arm was broken when he was trampled by the mob.’

In the National Portrait Gallery, though, there is a 1794 painting by Karl Anton Hickel of Charles James Fox in a top hat. A dedicated follower of fashion, Fox must have abandoned his gold-laced tricorn only recently (he is still wearing knee-breeches) but the date makes Hetherington a less likely candidate than his rival claimant, George Dunnage, of Middlesex, who is said to have created the first top hat in 1793.

In any event, the top hat was initially made of beaver fur – its growing popularity practically wiped out the North American beaver – but in the next century beaver was supplanted by ‘hatter’s plush’, a silk weave with a

They’re the tops (from left): Charles James Fox, Abraham Lincoln, Fred Astaire... and Lewis Jones

longnap, manufactured of Chinese silk in France.

After Prince Albert adopted it in 1850 it became unassailably fashionable, worn by all classes, crossing-sweepers and old clothes men as well as dukes and stockbrokers; the Artful Dodger wears one in Cruikshank’s illustrations for Oliver Twist. Policemen wore them until it was decided that they would look more frightening in helmets.

In the mid-Victorian period the topper grew inordinately tall; the ‘stovepipe’ stood at seven inches, and the ‘chimney pot’ at seven-and-a-half. In 1840 Antoine Gibus invented a spring-loaded collapsible version – the opera hat, the Gibus or, for the sound it made, the chapeau claque

In the United States Abraham Lincoln popularised the top hat. Richard Nixon was the last president to be inaugurated wearing a top hat; JFK had put his to one side for his swearing in, and LBJ dispensed with it entirely.

In The Top Hat (1940), Max Beerbohm wrote of it nostalgically, as he did of most things, as a ‘black but shining old monument’. ‘One hunted in it’, he wrote, ‘fished, skated and played cricket in it, and kept it on one’s head ‘even while

eating luncheon in one’s club’. A ‘natural phenomenon’, it was ‘a creature of many moods’, which ‘seemed to be even a part of the human body’. ‘It alone among hats had a sort of soul. If one treated it well, one wasn’t sure it didn’t love one.’

Beerbohm’s essay was written in the spirit of an obituary, which happily turned out to be premature. But in the 1960s the two brothers who owned the last silk plush factory, at Lyon, had a terrible fight, and destroyed their irreplaceable looms. So the proper old hats are no longer made, and have become horribly expensive.

The masterpiece that so enchanted me at Lock’s was priced at £1,400, far beyond my means. I searched online for a silk hat to rent, but only rabbit felt ones are available. I thought I might buy the Lock’s hat and then sell it on – the market is evidently lively – but then I remembered, somewhat belatedly, that a few years ago at Daniel’s, a Welsh dining club, I sat next to Martin Ellis Jones, a charming man who has a business specialising in silk top hats. I rang him up, and he agreed to lend me one for the occasion.

Hetherington Hats (toffs-r-us.com) operates from Ellis Jones’s basement flat

off London’s King’s Road, with a front room stacked with hundreds of beautiful old hats. Assisted by Alexandra Shanahan, his delightful partner, he introduced me to the tools of his trade: the conformateur, which measures the head and looks a like a cross between a hat and a typewriter, and the formillion, which translates that shape on to a card, the ‘conform’. My head, he informed me, is elegant but the wrong way round, shaped like a reversed wedge.

Unerringly picking a hat that nearly fitted, with a crown that was, crucially, taller than my face. He used another machine to soften its glue, emitting the fumes that used to send hatters mad, and shaped the hat to a perfect fit. Then he wetted it from a tap, and showed me how to dry and shine it with a velvet pad called a ‘mouse’. I had read that the silk may be polished with Guinness or champagne, but apparently this ruins the nap.

The great day arrived, and though it was quite gusty atop our coach, my hat remained immovable until, in Windsor Great Park, I had the honour of doffing it to the Duke of Edinburgh as he passed in front of us, driving a carriage of his own design.

High fashion: Lord Chesterfield (centre) and friends attend the 1910 Derby at Epsom

Ferdinand Mount on an underrated prime minister, and how the Eurosceptics finished him off

Beaten by the ‘bastards’

They got him in the end. Those implacable ironsides finally bagged their first sitting prime minister. We must salute their stamina, if nothing else. Iain Duncan Smith, Bernard Jenkin and Liam Fox started their jihad against the EU in general and the Maastricht Treaty in particular within months of being elected to Parliament in 1992. Within three years, they had launched their first coup: ‘Redwood versus Deadwood’ (the Sun, 25th June, 1995).

It didn’t come off, although it came closer than polite opinion liked to admit. But John Major was mortally wounded by ‘the bastards’, and the electorate put him out of his misery only two years later.

The bastards cannot have expected then that it would all take so long. Cobden and Bright needed only eight years for their Anti-Corn Law League to

gain its objectives. John Bright’s descendant, Bill Cash, has spent 30 years on his crusade.

The Bruges Group, the Referendum Party and the UK Independence Party have never missed an opportunity to badmouth Brussels, egged on by the Daily Telegraph’s inventive young EC correspondent, B Johnson (Brussels 1989–94).

If the Left were not so absorbed by its own writhings, it would recognise the slow saturation of the Conservative Party by the Europhobes as a classic example of Gramsci’s ‘long march through the institutions’.

They did not need every Tory MP to come out as an Outer. To achieve hegemony, it was enough that upcoming young thrusters, such as David Cameron, should feel compelled to talk the language of Euroscepticism to get selected. By contrast, the believers in the European

ideal lost their voices, and by the time the referendum came along, it was too late to recover them.

By any reasonable standard, Cameron has been as successful a party leader as most that we have had in peacetime. He came out top in two general elections, surpassing Churchill (won one, lost two), Asquith (never won an overall majority) and Lloyd George (won one, lost a bunch). He led the Conservatives for 11 years, second only to Churchill and Thatcher since the Great War.

He managed the coalition with the Lib Dems with dexterity and charm, against repeated predictions that this unnatural thing would break up in months. Unlike almost every other prime minister, he remained a close friend and unbreakable ally of his chancellor right to the end. He had throughout to cope with the loathing of the press lords and their attack dogs.

As he had promised, it was a one-

nation government, set on a mission to cure the toxic reputation of the Tory Party. Cameron was the first Tory leader since Macmillan to declare himself, quite unabashedly, as a liberal Conservative. On the whole, his record reflects that.

Not only did he stabilise the economy after the worst crash since the Great Depression, he and George Osborne reduced the deficit by two-thirds, and he came as close to achieving full employment as any government since the 1960s.

He also created the national living wage, took the poor out of income tax and started three million apprenticeships. Most remarkable of all, he defied his party by bringing in same-sex marriage and by sticking to the commitment to devote 0.7 per cent of GDP to overseas aid – both as unpopular in the constituencies today as they ever were.

The fact that his mother happens to be my first cousin does not blind me (or her for that matter) to his faults: a readiness to shoot from the hip, a weakness for gimmicks (hugging huskies and hoodies) and an unwillingness to forgive those who have crossed him (but that is a fault common to most prime ministers, good and bad).

Some never warmed to his cocky self-assurance. Yet he could rise to high occasions with eloquence, as in his response to the Bloody Sunday Inquiry. And he departed with swift, rueful grace. ‘After all, I was the future once,’ is hard to better as an exit line.

Margaret Thatcher once remarked that her greatest legacy was New Labour. In the same way, Theresa May is Cameron’s bequest to the nation. I can’t think of another politician who would have had the nerve to tell her own party conference that they were regarded as ‘the nasty party’. Her inaugural speech outside No 10 was the most Left-wing of any incoming PM in half a century.

For all the talk about the grammarschool oiks taking over from Bullingdon poshos, it is hard to see much difference in her proposed direction of travel from his. The top jobs are all occupied by Tories in the Cameronian tradition –including the Foreign Secretary, if you can pin him down long enough to stick to anything resembling a principle.

Which brings us back to Brexit. The big indictment against Cameron is that calling the referendum was a reckless and needless gamble. Why didn’t he live with

the grumbling of the Europhobes and kick the whole subject into the long grass? Well, he did, as far as he could and for as long as he could. In fact, he told me that this was more or less his intention, whenI asked him shortly after the 2010 election why he did not confront the issue head on. Whatever he did probably wouldn’t have made much difference.

The pressure to promise a referendum was becoming irresistible. Tory voters were deserting to UKIP in droves (it wasn’t yet obvious that Labour voters would soon be following). After 40 years, there was a genuine case for another vote to secure democratic assent.

Even if a referendum, sooner or later, was unavoidable, we do need to be clear about the underlying reason for the shattering result. No, it was not a vote against ‘austerian neo-liberalism’, as the Left pretends.

The nation had a chance to vote on that question at the general election, and they preferred the Tory version of events, throwing out nine out of ten Lib Dems and seeping away from Ed Miliband’s Labour. Was it a vote against inequality and the elites? I don’t think so.

By most measures, such as the Gini coefficient, inequality has been reducing over the past decade. And a large number of prosperous and successful citizens in the South-East outside London voted Leave; indeed, it is part of the Brexiteers’ case that go-ahead entrepreneurs tend to be Leavers. Was it a vote against the

corrupt and interfering bureaucrats of the EU? Well perhaps, but parts of the country which have most to thank Brussels for, like Cornwall and Sunderland, voted emphatically Out. A vote by the backwoods against the metropolis? Look at the overwhelming votes for Remain in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

As for ‘Let’s take our country back’, that seems to me the biggest humbug of all. Our country never went away, nor did our power to govern ourselves in everything that matters most. Was there a squeal out of Brussels when Norman Tebbit transformed our trade union laws, or when Nigel Lawson introduced his great reform of income tax, or when Michael Gove completed the radical reshaping of state schools?

Yet these feisty Brexiteers go on about the monstrous interference from the EU, when in reality the EU’s powers are more like those of the Royal and Ancient or the Lawn Tennis Association, setting standards for their affiliated clubs, which remain entirely independent and self-governing.

Are cleaner beaches, lower emissions and safer banks really the beginning of the Fourth Reich? Despite all the flimflam about ‘ever closer union’, the EU is in reality a Europe des Patries and increasingly likely to stay that way.

The thumping vote for Brexit has one simple underlying explanation: the rough, prickly vigour of English nationalism. The itch to be free of foreign entanglements and, as far as possible, of foreigners, breaks out every century or so in our history (see Sir Thomas More’s plea to the rioters to show mercy to the ‘wretched strangers’ in the play by Shakespeare, et al.).

If you want to point to a single trigger for this latest eruption, it was the Blair government’s reckless decision to slacken controls on immigration and so provoke those feelings of hopelessness and indignation which stirred the grumbling background discontent into an unstoppable surge.

For distraught Remainers like me, the scant consolation is that this state of indignation usually doesn’t last long. In the next crisis, what we think of as common sense returns, and we fumble for closer relations with those strange people across the Channel again. When we do, perhaps we shall learn to revalue the Cameron years as they deserve.

Opposite: Cameron on 8th May 2015, the day after winning the election Above: with Osborne, his great ally

A spent force

Geoffrey Wheatcroft on the decline of the aristocracy

‘The aristocracy is a spent force.’

Or so, at least, Andrew

Devonshire used to say. The last Duke of Devonshire was a generous and likeable man who had won the Military Cross in the Italian campaign before devoting himself to retaining and restoring his family seat at Chatsworth. He had a brief political career when Harold Macmillan, married to his aunt Lady Dorothy Cavendish, made him a junior minister in the Commonwealth Office, but then Devonshire called that ‛the greatest act of nepotism of modern times’.

And while he made few claims for his brief ministerial career, no one else could say that even that was typical of the higher aristocracy, not in our lifetimes. The death of the sixth Duke of Westminster is one more reminder of how, while the nobility continue to exist, and continue in some cases to be remarkably rich, they have dropped out of public life.

When the ninth Duke of Marlborough died in 1934, his friend and cousin Winston Churchill wrote a tribute to him that was also an elegy for a whole class. The tribute now sounds a little unconvincing if it was intended to show that the duke was in any way an eminent public servant. Throughout the 19th century, the Spencer-Churchill family had spent much of their time getting rid of the riches their forebears had accumulated: land, paintings, jewels, books. The ninth Duke still boasted that he owned ‛about 19,685 acres’, but he had enjoyed what might at best be called a second-division political career, culminating in a brief stint as

parliamentary secretary at the Board of Agriculture during the First World War.

As Churchill rather melodramatically wrote, over the 42 years that he was Duke, ‛the organism of English society underwent a revolution. The three or four hundred families who had for three or four hundred years guided the fortunes of the nation from a small, struggling community to the headship of a vast and still unconquered Empire lost their authority and control... The class to which the Duke belonged were not only almost entirely relieved of their political responsibilities, but they were to a very large extent stripped of their property

and in many cases driven from their homes.’ That was really too lurid. Taxation had grown much heavier with the First World War, though nothing like as heavy as it would with the war in which Churchill led his country.

When Lloyd George was engaged in his Peers versus the People campaign, trying to raise taxes, very slightly by today’s standards, to pay for a modest old-age pension as well as new warships, he said: ‛A fully equipped Duke costs as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts, and Dukes are just as great a terror, and they last longer.’

Most dukes remained in action, if not on quite the same financially magnificent scale as of yore. One exception was ‛Bendor’, the second Duke of Westminster, a contemporary and friend of Churchill, whom he entertained munificently.

But it was true that they lost their authority and control. No member of the House of Lords has been prime minister since Lord Salisbury resigned in 1902, and both Lord Curzon in 1923 and Lord Halifax in 1940 found that a peerage was an almost insuperable obstacle to 10 Downing Street, although there were other reasons in either case.

Apart from the House of Lords, the benches of the Commons had been littered with titles in Victorian times. There were the simple squires on the ‛Baronets’ Bench’, there were elder sons of peers such as the Lord Hartington of his day, later the Duke of Devonshire, who might have become prime minister on three occasions, and then those titled MPs who did become prime minister, Lord Palmerston (an Irish peer) or Lord

The late Duke of Westminster (1951-2016)

John Russell (a younger son of a duke).

Later came the change. More telling almost than Salisbury’s own career, prime minister from 1886 to 1902 with a brief Liberal interlude, were the careers of his children, five sons and two daughters, who all inherited, as a biographer put it, ‛an attachment to the Church of England, together with their father’s sophisticated Conservative politics and elevated conception of aristocratic responsibilities’. Lady Beatrix Cecil married Lord Selborne and lived to be 92; her unmarried sister Lady Gwendolen lived to a mere 85, though, very sadly, she never finished her wonderful life of her father, one of the great biographies.

Lord Cranborne, the eldest son and heir, inherited the marquessate, having first sat as an MP. Two of his brothers,

No member of the House of Lords has been prime minister since Lord Salisbury resigned in 1902

Lord Robert (later Viscount Cecil of Chelwood) and Lord Hugh (later Lord Quickswood), also entered politics, the latter a peculiarly fanatical High Tory, the only true High Tory he had ever known, said Churchill, whose best man Lord Hugh was. Of the other two brothers, Lord Edward joined the Grenadiers and then became an administrator in Egypt and the author of The Leisure of an Egyptian Official, while Lord William entered the Church and ended as Bishop of Exeter.

And there you have it. How many sons of great territorial magnates nowadays become clergymen or politicians or soldiers? They more likely aspire to be photographers or pop singers. The last Duke of Westminster didn’t do that, but nor did he do great things in the way of public service. As to the sixth Earl of Kilmorey, who was a Tory MP in the 1980s and 1990s (as he could be, like Palmerston, thanks to an Irish peerage) and held junior office, he was so bashful about his title that he called himself Richard Needham. Yes, one or two rule-proving exceptions apart, ‛spent force’ sounds about right.

Raymond Briggs Notes from the Sofa

When you are old everything takes so long, doesn’t it? Even something as simple as getting dressed in the morning takes ages. Compared with the Golden Years of Yoof, anyway; I haven’t timed it yet, it seems so daft, but I’m going to do it one day soon, when there is time.

Stage One: Put On Socks. First, can I find them? Took them off last night just here at the end of the bed – only one visible now. Never mind, it’s bound to turn up before long. Put the one and only sock on – aagh! Won’t go on, caught on corner of sharp toenail!

Take sock off, look for nail file ... where is it? Used it only the other day ... Uncomfortable bending knees nowadays, can cause spasm of cramp in thighs. Consequently, tend to cut short the time spent filing toenails. At last, find nail file, half-hidden under bed, file sharp corner of little toe. Draw sock on, nice and smoothly. Well done. Well, one anyway. Halfway house.

Stage Two: Put Pants On. Not too difficult when avoiding kneebending by sitting on corner of bed and leaning forwards.

Next, Long Sleeve Thermal Vest, ‘The Old are always Cold’. Who said that? Me probably. Important: check which is front and back, it’s often difficult to tell with these things. Get it on back to front and of course, you’ve got to take it off and start again. Sometimes there is a badge on it which helps, as remember whether it is on the front or the back. the badge on the back.

Stage Three: The Shirt. Buttons, buttons, buttons ... all up the front the button holes are vertical, but the last one, at the neck is horizontal. Why? Needs a different technique for the stiffening, aged fingers. Then, the buttons on the cuff seem to be always as far away as possible, not

just on the inside where they should be, surely?

Stage Four: The Trousers. The biggest job of all. First, a leather belt which takes a slip-on leather loop with a brass hook for the Key Chain. KEYS! Vital for sanity. No Keys = no Car, no House – The End. Make sure the belt passes easily through all the trouser loops. Don’t even mention Braces! That way lunacy lies. Mobile phone and handkerchief in right-hand trouser pocket, wallet, reassuringly heavy, in left-hand pocket, nearest the heart. Got to the checkout at Waitrose recently – No wallet! No cards! No cash! Had put on clean trousers that morning and forgot to transfer the wallet. So, hand in my trolley load to the management and dash off to the bank. Luckily had cheque book (such old-fashioned useless things, aren’t they?) in my bag and got cash. Saved by the Bag!

Finally, gave up searching for the missing sock. Got a clean pair from the sock drawer. Drew them both on perfectly, at last. Success!

But No! Remembered the Annoying Toe Spacer. Doc says I have a burgeoning bunion, another of the joys of old age. This is where the joint at the base of the big toe swells up and pushes it towards the others. You have to insert this rubbery wedge between the toes. And of course, in the midst of all this again. ‘If at first you

Still, not to worry. will not be long before you are

socks on for the very

Someone else will

Raymond Briggs (1934-2022)

After 56 years in the same house, John Julius Norwich and his wife downsized to a flat. It was a traumatic experience

Moving on Ω a survivor’s tale

If you are seriously considering moving house, my advice is simple enough: don’t. If on the other hand there is no escape, the following account by a survivor may be of interest. I had lived in our house in Little Venice for 56 years, Mollie very nearly as long; but its four storeys were getting far too much for the two of us, the stairs steeper every day. What we needed was a three-bedroom flat – grandchildren come to stay – all on one level with, if possible, a porter to help with the luggage. It nearly killed us, but we’ve got it.

The first point to bear in mind is that there is an incredible amount of paperwork to be done: informing the council, the police, the water, electricity and gas, the Royal Mail (for forwarding of mail, an extremely efficient service) and probably several other offices I have forgotten. Then there are the change-ofaddress cards to be printed – in our case maddeningly delayed because British Telecom refused to reveal our new telephone number.

The next job was to buy hundreds of little coloured labels, for every stick of furniture and a very large number of books. We were dramatically downsizing; a lot would have to go. But where?

With the furniture and various objects, the first thing to do was to mark everything that was accompanying us to the new home; then our offspring came round and marked everything they wanted; the rest we subsequently sold by auction, and surprisingly successfully too. Books were a different problem. I knew I should have to get rid of perhaps two-thirds of them. The remainder –which of course included any with authors’ or other people’s dedications – were given a little yellow sticker, then

they were safe. What of the rest? Once again it was first choice to the offspring, and then of course the London Library. I had spent some 50 years in the reading room, where I had written every word of nearly all my books and had become part of the furniture; the Library must have first pick, it was the least I could do to repay them. They did not, however, clear the shelves; far from it.

I then telephoned John Saumarez Smith, who after spending a roughly equivalent length of time at the Heywood Hill bookshop knows a good deal more than most people about books, and one or two other friends, and together they bought quite a few more – and gave me a good price for them, too.

And then of course there was Oxfam. I’ve long lost count of the number of journeys we made to the St John’s Wood branch, where parking is impossible but we somehow managed to unload binliner after binliner, not only of books but of miscellaneous items which they always welcomed. Finally I telephoned Brimstones Books at Ringmer in Sussex. The owner arrived in a large white van and took the rest, sending me what seemed a very handsome cheque a few days later.

Do I miss all those books? Certainly not yet. Many of them were on high shelves, where I could neither reach them nor even read what they were.

We had to shave half an inch off every door in the flat to accommodate the new carpets

They hadn’t been touched for 20 years or more, and it would be sheer hypocrisy to mourn their loss.

Now every book I possess is one I know and love; and, what is more, I actually have for the first time since I can remember empty space for new arrivals. Having spent years unable to fit a postcard into those bursting shelves, I find it hard to describe the relief. Our move was really two moves. Our new flat was lying empty, but we couldn’t get the builders in till we owned it – the ‘don’t squeeze me till I’m yours’ principle beloved of fruiterers – and we didn’t own it till the day we had to leave the old house. The consequence was another flat, furnished, in which we lived for two months and which looked out on to a vast and utterly unexpected communal garden, the size of several football pitches, enclosed by four streets just to the north of Warwick Avenue Tube station.

On Guy Fawkes night we had a huge bonfire and superb fireworks, and there was the perfect Pakistani post office and general store – to say nothing of four restaurants – all 100 yards away. During those two months we felt at the still centre of the hurricane; Mollie went daily to the new flat to discuss progress with my son Jason, architect and projectmanager, and to collect the mail; I remained at home – if you could call it that – trying to forget the whole thing. We grew very fond of that flat, and left it with a tiny pang of regret.

But leave it we did. The new flat was finished at last, and we were there – or at least Mollie was – to welcome our possessions after two months in store. I had been worried about the Steinway; we were on the fifth floor and the lift was the size of a sentry box. But all was well:

three elderly men in shorts cut well below the knee manhandled it up ten rather narrow flights of stairs as if it were an everyday job – which to them it probably was. Then the packers became unpackers, and there once again was all the old stuff, but lying higgledy-piggledy on the floor.

This was the moment we moved in, and spent our first night under our new roof. There was no feeling of relief, only depression; the flat, which when devoid of furniture had looked happily inviting, now resembled a second-rate junk shop. Fortunately we had planned in advance where the main items of furniture were to go; within a day or two things were looking rather more hopeful. Beds, tables and chairs were carefully placed in position; it was only then that the men came to lay the fitted carpets, so out came all the furniture again. My heart

sank – and descended still further when it was revealed that we now had to shave half an inch off the bottom of every door in the flat to accommodate the new carpets. But one must never underestimate professionals, who, apart from anything else, always have all the right tools. Our Serbian builders took about five minutes a door – a minute with the electric screwdriver removing the hinges, two minutes with the portable circular saw in the hall, another minute or so replacing the hinges, and Bob was your uncle.

Then, the Monday before Christmas, the pictures went up. We already knew where most of them were to go, but once again we called in the pros; we two octogenarians could never have managed by ourselves. The pros had everything, including spirit levels, and achieved in three hours what even 20 years ago

would probably have taken us a week. And with the pictures came the transformation. Suddenly we were at home; the anguish of the past five months faded away. Well, perhaps it hasn’t quite faded yet; but fade it will.

The job is not quite over: there are the new contacts to be made – newsagents, chemist, laundry, dry-cleaners, local restaurants, etc – and it will probably be some time before we are as familiar with Westbourne Grove and Queensway as we were with Clifton Road and Formosa Street. But we’re getting there; and it may well be that we shall find that in the end the shake-up – and shake-up it certainly was – did us good and, as the French like to put it, changed our ideas. Hope so.

John Julius Norwich died in 2018, aged 89

Paradise lost and found: John Julius Norwich and his wife, Mollie, in their new flat

John F Kennedy was born on 29th May 1917.

Antonia Fraser remembers a dip in the White House pool in 1962

JFK at 100

Washington DC, March 1962

Hugh Fraser, my first husband, MP for Stafford and Stone since 1945, was an old friend of Jack Kennedy’s. They were exact contemporaries and first knew each other

In my album, I wrote beneath the photo: Probably the most worthwhile photograph I have ever taken. First and foremost, Hugh bathing in the White House pool. Also

when Joe Kennedy was ambassador to London in 1938.

In 1962, Hugh was Under-secretary of State for the Colonies. On his way back from an official visit to British Guiana, he

present the President of the United States. I actually took this photograph myself, never believing it would come out (it was the last one on the reel).

Our bathe in the White House

joined me at the British Embassy in Washington, as guests of another contemporary, David Ormsby-Gore, the new ambassador. We were invited to swim in the White House pool by the president.

pool was really the high point of our stay in Washington – and indeed of my stay in America. I managed to squeeze into Jackie Kennedy’s bathing dress and

cavorted in the boiling pool [warmed up to help JFK’s back problems], hoping to catch the presidential eye, while Hugh buttonholed him about British Guiana.

The night Jackie Kennedy came to dinner, my brother and I were given the job of handing round the first two courses at our parents’ home in Notting Hill.

We were both in pyjamas and dark-blue dressing gowns, with red piping at the cuffs and lapels. I wasn’t then tall enough for my eyes to be at the same level as a grown-up, sitting in a chair. But, when I got to Jackie – as guest of honour, she was served first –she turned and helped herself, looked me in the eye, said, ‘Thank you’, and I moved on round the table.

It was the summer of 1975, when I was 12, and Jackie was 46, and I knew nothing about her other than that her husband had been president of the United States and been assassinated.

In 1970s London, talking about the Kennedy assassination was what the grown-ups did. They talked about Watergate and the disgrace of Richard Nixon too, but that was different.

My family spent many hours talking about whether Oswald was the only gunman, or whether there had been a broader conspiracy. When American friends of my parents came to London, some of whom had known Kennedy or worked in the White House, they chatted animatedly about the plot to hide the people who organised the assassination.

A few months after the dinner, the IRA planted a bomb, just down the road from us, under the Jaguar of the Tory MP Hugh Fraser [pictured with John F Kennedy in the adjoining article].

Fraser was unharmed but a neighbour, Gordon Hamilton Fairley, a cancer specialist, was killed by the explosion; one of his dogs found the bomb.

Fraser had become a friend of Kennedy’s before the war, when Kennedy’s father, Joe Kennedy, was American ambassador to Britain. His daughter, Caroline Kennedy, was staying at Fraser’s house on the day of the bomb. The possibility of assassination had migrated from Dallas to west London.

Years later, in the summer of 1992, when the Democratic National Convention was held in New York, I went to a party in Manhattan. The hosts were Alexandra and Arthur Schlesinger, JFK’s special assistant. It was their convention party, and many of the guests were characters from the books I’d read about the Kennedy

Dinner with Jackie O in my pyjamas

Inigo Thomas recalls being allowed to stay up for a grown-up soirée in 1975

administration and the aftermath of the assassination. The person who opened the door that evening to let me in was, of all people, Jackie Kennedy. She looked exactly the same; on this occasion, I thanked her, and walked in. It seemed impossible to say anything more.

I went to live in New York and

The British connection

worked for John F Kennedy Junior, on his magazine, George. On one memorable occasion, in 1997, he took me to meet his father’s rival, Fidel Castro, in Cuba, on the 35th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

JFK Junior died at sea in 1999, aged 38, when his plane crashed into the waters off Martha’s Vineyard. Before the commencement of the 1962 America’s Cup yacht races, his father gave a speech, one with the sparkle and flair that made people listen to what he had to say.

‘I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except… we all came from the sea. And all of us have… salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it, we are going back from whence we came.’

That passage seems to me as uncanny now as it was when I read it after his son’s death in the summer of 1999.

An 18-year-old JFK first came to Britain in 1935 to study at the London School of Economics under Harold Laski, later chairman of the Labour Party.

In 1938, he returned to London after his father, Joe Kennedy, became American ambassador to Britain. His father’s job meant JFK was at the heart of British politics at the beginning of the war. He was in the House of Commons on 3rd September 1939, when MPs backed Neville Chamberlain’s declaration of war on Germany.

In 1940, building on his time in Britain, Kennedy wrote his Harvard thesis about the Munich Agreement of 1938, ‘Appeasement in Munich’. Retitled Why England Slept, it became a bestseller.

In June 1963, only five months before he was assassinated, President Kennedy made his last trip to Britain. He visited Chatsworth, the stately home in Derbyshire, to visit the grave of Kathleen Kennedy, his sister. She was the widow of the Marquess of Hartington, the heir to Chatsworth, killed in the war in 1944. She died in a plane crash in France in 1948, aged 28, alongside her lover, Lord Fitzwilliam.

John F Kennedy, right, with his father, Joe, in 1938

Inigo Thomas, left, with John Kennedy Junior and Fidel Castro in 1997

Virginia Ironside

The taxman cometh and I’m terrified

It all started before Christmas. A very nice lady called Flo rang me from the tax office. She was worried she hadn’t received the £10,000 that I owed them. ‘Was there a problem?’

I said, no, there wasn’t a problem because I had already, like the good girl I am, paid it on the dot. On the 31st of July last year to be precise. It turned out that, although I had paid it, I’d paid it into the wrong account – my VAT account.

‘Not to worry, dear,’ she said. ‘We’ll find it and transfer it. A very common mistake.’

A few weeks later, I got another call from another old dear, this time called Annie. ‘Just checking – we can’t find your payment, dear,’ she said. ‘Now, not to worry. We’ll find it. But could we have a copy of your bank statement?’

‘Of course,’ I said obligingly, preparing to send her a scan. I also furnished her with the references for the payment, sort code and account number, and described the birthmark on its right thigh, just to make sure it was identified correctly.

‘That’s lovely, dear,’ she said, when she’d received it and had rung me again to reassure me. ‘There’s nothing to worry about.’

‘Are you sure there’s nothing to worry about?’ I asked. I wasn’t so sure this time.

‘Nothing at all. Happens all the time. Don’t you lose a wink of sleep, dear. Take care.’

There were a few more calls from puzzled tax people unable to track it down until, finally, starting to feel ever so slightly anxious, I put my accountant onto the case.

He chuckled reassuringly. ‘Not to worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll take care of that. They’ll find it. Just send me a scan of your bank statement, a reference number, the bank account sort code it was going to, your bank account sort code, their bank account number, your bank account number, your national insurance number and your

mother’s maiden name and the date of your first cat’s death.’ Or something like that.

I duly provided the gen.

‘And by the way,’ he said. ‘There’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Everything’s under control.’

So imagine my horror when, a few weeks later, I got this letter from the debt management team of my bank.

‘Our records show,’ I read, ‘that you have an amount of self-assessment tax that’s overdue. If you don’t pay or contact us, we can take action to recover the amount you owe … in certain circumstances, taking money directly from your bank account or by seizing your goods and selling them at public

I’m a little old lady, living on my own... I can’t sleep for fear of the Alsatians slavering at my door

auction. We can charge fees for seizing your goods; so, if you don’t act now, it could cost you more money … We will be checking to see how long it takes for you to respond to this letter.’

Worry? Well, I couldn’t stop worrying. It was the word ‘seizing’ that got to me. My accountant was now away, of course. So I rang the tax office who said that, although they sympathised, there was nothing they could do. I should ring the debt management team.

‘Why should I?’ I said. ‘You know the situation. You’re looking for the money. You know I’ve paid it – just into the wrong account. You’re the ones who put these tattooed thugs on to me; you call them off.’

‘Only you can do that,’ said the tax woman. ‘We can’t ring them directly.’

‘But you put them on to me!’ I squawked.

‘We have no way of contacting them. It can only be done through another outside line.’

‘Well, I’ve got an idea,’ I said, icily. ‘You’ve got a mobile, right? You walk out of the office, nip down to the street and ring them yourself. I can give you the number. And you tell them to lay off.’

She laughed, in an understanding way as if I’d made a joke.

So I said, ‘Look, it’s all very well for me – I’m a confident woman, but what if I were a little old lady…?’ Then I changed my tack. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I’m a little old lady living on my own. I’m absolutely petrified. I can’t sleep for fear of the snarling Alsatians slavering at my door. I have had to go to my doctor. I am a wreck.’

In the end, I rang the debt management people and they said that they’d lay off the heavies for a month. And my accountant, now back from his hols, continues to tell me, ‘Don’t worry, Virginia. Everything will be all right.’

Oh, really? What’s that sound of howling and barking outside my door, then?

Nicky Haslam befriended Cole Porter in 1960s New York. Today, he performs his songs, in tribute to a childhood idol

I’ve got you under my skin

Saint-Germain-des-Prés, summer 1958. The Chinese statues in Les Deux Magots nod sagely at the existential epigrams of Simone de Beauvoir; the jukeboxes blare Dalida’s Garde-Moi la Dernière Danse, les yé-yés writhe to Le Twist.

And, almost subliminally, everyone, young or old, in the streets, on the boulevards, in bistros and boudoirs, is singing I Love Paris, Cole Porter’s newest and most haunting of tributes to the city he adored above all others. We heard it constantly, night and day.

I’d known it for a year or two already. Friends brought back from New York the new-fangled LPs – vinyl, not easily shattered shellac. Among them was the soundtrack to Can-Can, Cole’s latest Broadway triumph, and its subject was… well, Paris, in the 1880s. I’d even been taken to see the London production, hypnotised by its Lautrec-inspired sets, colours and sans-culottes. The leading lady sang ‘I love Paris…’ – against a scrim, 19th-century map of the city, dark streets defined by pinpoints of lamplight that gently faded to a lilac, dawn sky, encircling Eiffel’s newly-built tower –‘…because my love is near’. Now I was in Paris, too.

Jaded youth that I was, I knew many of Cole’s famous songs long before Can-Can: Night and Day, Begin the Beguine, I Get a Kick Out of You, I’ve Got You Under My Skin… The songs were grist to my mother’s mill of rolling up the carpet – in the bedroom, where I lay immobile with polio – and, as Cole neatly put it, ‘punishing the parquet’ with a quick foxtrot.

Bedbound and able only to listen, I realised quite early on the immense

subtlety of words and music this rich, spoiled, well-educated farmer’s son from Peru, Indiana, could conjure. Later, I notice the in-jokes of Ridin’ High – ‘What do I care if Countess Barbara Hutton has a Rolls Royce built for each gown?’ – the historical references, and the shaded sexuality of, say, Love for Sale.

I’d been told about Cole, and his famously beautiful wife Linda, their costume balls at the Ca’ Rezzonico each Venetian season, their house in the Rue Monsieur, her clothes, his clothes, their style. I read Kenneth Tynan’s essay in Persona Grata, beside Beaton’s portrait of Cole, of how, at the Ritz bar, someone had given – to the man who has everything – a pair of gold sock-suspenders.

Thanking them effusively, Cole surreptitiously slipped off the gold sock-suspenders he was already wearing and gave them to the barman. I knew of his band of friends – les Coleporteurs. And, of course, I read about his fall in 1937, riding at the Piping Rock Club, when the weight of his fallen horse crushed his legs to smithereens.

For many years to come, Cole Porter was the only person I really wanted to meet. So, it appears, did Khrushchev. When the old Soviet blocker paid his one and only visit to Hollywood, he insisted on being taken on the set of the filming of Can-Can, where he was bussed on the mouth by its bright young star, Shirley MacLaine.

Cole was by now living largely in California, adapting his songs for the movies. But he often came to New York, to stay in his Billy Baldwindecorated apartment on the 33rd

floor of the Waldorf Towers. We had a mutual friend.

Jean Howard was a Texan beauty, born and bred with all the generosity of that state’s natives. I’d met her in London, and now saw much of her in Manhattan. Her history is remarkable: ex-Follies girl, occasional film star, Marlene’s lover, obsession of Louis B Mayer, wife of the leading agent Charles Feldman, and a brilliant photographer.

But this is Cole’s story, not Jean’s; though Cole was, I feel, always a little in love with her, as indeed was I. I badgered her endlessly about him. So, one day, she said, ‘Well, you better meet him.’ She arranged for me to be asked to dinner in the Waldorf Towers.

On the way, she prepped me. ‘We will be shown into the library. Cole won’t be in the room. He will be carried in…’ –both legs useless now – ‘So turn away, don’t watch…’.

I sneaked the occasional peek, and saw this Mandarin-like figure, carried in burly arms, being arranged on a sofa, razor-sharp creases tugged perfectly, the tiny feet crossed, the carnation placed just-so. And then the voice, the signal to turn. ‘My dears, would you like a Gibson?’

I was to hear that voice, and see the neat obsidian head, fairly often over the next year. His secretary Madeleine Smith would call me at Vogue.

‘The Little Man [her code name for him] wants to know if you’re free tomorrow evening?’

Was I ever? and always. Sometimes, there would be one or two old friends – more, too tiring – more often, we would be alone; the same ritual, the initial Gibson, before an elegant dinner

He happened to like New York: Cole Porter, rehearsing Du Barry Was A Lady, in Manhattan, 1st December, 1939

on his Capodimonte porcelain. He’d want to hear about the Fonteyn/Nureyev season, about my friendship with Andy Warhol, about any of the friends he so rarely saw, that I’d run into. He’d encourage me to sing his – and other writers’ – songs, now and then humming or, faintly, joining in.

There was a deep subtlety to his work that I’d imbued all those years ago, its grace and charm ever more

compelling. Of all the great writers of the American songbook, only he – and his rival and friend Irving Berlin –needed no collaborator to create these masterpieces. There was no feeling about him of being world-weary or disillusioned by the passing of that world. Though, one evening, we sang something, perhaps significant, from his final creation, a television musical of Aladdin starring Sal Mineo.

‘Wouldn’t it be fun not to be famous? Wouldn’t it be fun not to be rich? Wouldn’t it be pleasant to be a simple peasant

And spend a happy day digging a ditch?’

Cole asked me for a weekend at his house in Williamsburg. I never saw him again. A few days later, he was taken to hospital, and then to California, where he died a year later, in 1964, aged 73.

Britain’s cleverest street

Residents have included Jonathan Miller, George Melly and Michael Frayn. Now Alan Bennett is selling up. Valerie Grove recalls the planet-brained history of a London crescent

They say it’s the End of an Era. Alan Bennett is selling his house, the one in whose front yard the genteel but homeless Miss Shepherd, The Lady in the Van, parked her malodorous campervan for 15 years.

It’s always the End of an Era when another famous resident bows out of Gloucester Crescent in Camden. Has there ever been such a clustering of media darlings, tele-dons, brainboxes and members of the chattering classes as gathered in this north London enclave in the 1960s? It was just a terrace of Victorian villas, mostly down-at-heel

lodging-houses: dirt-cheap when discovered by the canny cognoscenti, whose combined IQ was stratospheric. Their arrival turned it into not just an address but a way of life, labelled (by the journalist Nicholas Tomalin in 1964) ‘trendy NW1’.

Gloucester Crescent, with its Greek corner shops, sad old Co-op, railway goods yard, old-fashioned street market and hostel for homeless men, sat cheek by jowl with the stuccoed Nash terraces of Regent’s Park, where the newly affluent Harold Pinter and his first wife, Vivien Merchant, settled in chilly grandeur in 1964. Yet houses in the

Crescent, not yet Grade II-listed, cost as little then as a humdrum semi in suburban Harrow – about £4,000.

Among the first to discover this, in 1960, were the Haycrafts. The bow-tied Colin Haycraft, Oxford classics scholar and publisher, and his wife, Anna (the novelist Alice Thomas Ellis), spied number 22, a rundown five-storey Victorian villa. There were 14 rooms, each with a Baby Belling and basin, and only a single shared lavatory. But it became a family home for them and their six surviving children. The poet Louis MacNeice already lived in the Crescent, as did Ursula, widow of the composer

Smart street… the 1840s Italianate villas of Gloucester Crescent

Ralph Vaughan Williams: ‘a wonderfully kind friend to us all’, says Claire Tomalin. Nearby in Regent’s Park Terrace lived V S Pritchett, man of letters. A N Wilson was a later arrival in the Terrace.

In 1961, Dr Jonathan Miller, one of the four stars of the hit show Beyond the Fringe, bought 63 Gloucester Crescent with his pregnant GP wife, Rachel. ‘Having a place like this takes all the edge off one’s ambition,’ Miller wrote to his old schoolfriend Oliver Sacks, as he gazed out at ‘tree-filled gardens, swimming with cats and children’. Lodging in the Millers’ basement was Miller’s fellow Fringe star Alan Bennett.

When Bennett and the Millers took Beyond the Fringe to Broadway in 1962, the house was let to the Roeber family with their baby triplets, Bruno, James and Nicholas. One day, Nicholas (future Sunday Times war reporter) and Claire Tomalin (future biographer) went there to lunch, saw number 57 for sale and moved in in 1963 with their first two children – they planned to have six.

Nicholas and Claire had met at Cambridge, where she got a double first and he was editor of Granta and president of the union. Claire saw Gloucester Crescent as ‘border country’: Nash terraces abutting rough Dostoyevsky territory.

‘I saw two men fighting with knives outside Camden Town Underground station,’ she writes in her memoirs.

Next, in 1964, the raffish jazz singer George Melly and his wife, Diana, had lunch at the Tomalins’, and seized upon the house next door. With their open marriage, three children at the local comp, and Soho connections, the Mellys brought a new raunchiness to the Crescent. Intellectually, it was a community of souls, mostly aged around 30. Everyone read Private Eye, the New Statesman, and the posh Sundays (Melly was Observer TV critic); they reviewed one another’s books, and shared public triumphs and private tragedies.

Years later, writing her biography of Dickens, Claire Tomalin was astonished to discover that it was at 70 Gloucester Crescent that Dickens dumped his wife Catherine (mother of his 10 children) when he fell for Nelly Ternan.

Like Huguenot silk-weavers gravitating to Spitalfields in the 18th century, media dons and their graduate wives descended on 20th-century NW1. You might encounter Professor A J Ayer

and his witty American wife, Dee Wells, Sir Claus Moser and his wife, Mary, the artist David Gentleman and wife, Sue, novelists Sir Angus Wilson, Deborah Moggach and Julia O’Faolain, theatre director Max Stafford-Clark, and Sir Terence Conran, whose cheerful kitchen utensils so transformed everyone’s lives.

When I interviewed Alan Bennett in 1968 (as winner of an Evening Standard special award for his first play, Forty Years On), we talked about all the knocking-through of ground-floor walls going on. ‘Yes,’ he said Eeyorishly. ‘There is rather more Habitat round here than is good for anyone, I think.’ Not until that year – when Forty Years On, starring Gielgud, was a huge hit – did Bennett, alerted by Rachel Miller, leave his donnish £10-a-week attic room in Chalcot Square to buy number 23, whose driveway was to accommodate poor Miss Shepherd’s decrepit old van.

The vast Old Piano Factory on the corner became Colin Haycraft’s publishing company, Duckworth’s head office, paces from his home, where Anna edited her friend Beryl Bainbridge’s novels from nearby Albert Street.

At lunchtime, fellows of All Souls would flock to the Haycrafts’ bibulous parties, where Anna, in a floor-length apron, stood in her quarry-tiled kitchen, placidly stirring a cauldron of Mrs Beeton stew on an ancient stove.

All Crescent kitchens adopted the farmhouse mode, with squashy sofas and pine tables, made by Fay Weldon’s husband Ron on Regent’s Park Road. Ron’s stripped pine was de rigueur, along

with William Morris wallpaper, high brass beds, bright Casa Pupo rugs and art nouveau pieces from Reg’s stall in Camden Market.

No wonder Gloucester Crescent, eminently satirisable, has been immortalised so often. Bennett wrote a TV soap opera, Life and Times in NW1, in the 1960s. Then, in his The Lady in the Van, on stage and screen, Dame Maggie Smith made a heroine of Miss Shepherd. Lately there was Love, Nina, by Nina Stibbe, au pair to Mary-Kay Wilmers, owner and editor of the London Review of Books (who, with her husband, film director Stephen Frears, bought the Mellys’ house in 1971).

But the sharpest satire remains Mark Boxer’s 1960s strip The String-Alongs in the Listener (in book form, The Trendy Ape). How gleefully Boxer, a Cambridge contemporary of the Tomalins/ Stringalongs, caricatured the Crescent’s glitterati, their Oxbridge pretensions, Left-leaning politics, TV polemics and colour-supplement lifestyles:

‘Darling, the Touch-Paceys have invited us to cocktails at six.’

‘How inconsiderate! They must know I’m appearing with Bernard on Three After Six tonight.’ The parody was almost too close to reality.

In the past two decades, the original Crescent-dwellers have dwindled. In 2001, the widowed Anna Haycraft sold her empty nest at 22 and decamped to Wales with Basil the cat. Advertising film-maker Malcolm Veneville bought it for £1.5 million. In 2003, Claire Tomalin and her second husband, Michael Frayn, moved to Petersham on the Thames. Alan Bennett’s pushbike has been leaning on the railings of another nearby house for a decade, so number 23 is available for £3 million to a passing hedge-funder – who as Bennett fears, will cover up its shabby-chic ancient palazzo look (lovingly achieved by Bennett himself, lime-plastering the walls) and replace it with ‘white and modish minimalism’.

Only a few stalwarts and their wives, including David Gentleman, 87, and Sir Jonathan Miller, 83, remain in situ. Miller’s lugubrious features have become an appropriate symbol for Britain’s cleverest street in what he refers to as ‘the last days of the Haute Bohème’.

Valerie Grove is The Oldie’s radio columnist

Mark Boxer’s String-Alongs, 1967

Money can’t buy them love

They have private jets, better teeth and easier lives. But, says Mary Killen, the rich have few friends and much less fun on their summer holidays

In The Rich Boy (1926), F Scott Fitzgerald wrote, ‘Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me … They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are.’

Fitzgerald got that wrong – I think, deep down, it was Fitzgerald who believed the rich were better than him.

He felt guilty because he knew that he, too, could have achieved stratospheric levels of wealth, had he spent less time partying and more time slaving over his typewriter. When we conceive an illogical hatred, it’s always projection.

Yes, the rich are different; not because they despise the non-rich, but for other reasons.

This summer, they will be in the Hamptons, rather than Cornwall or Norfolk. They like Cornwall and Norfolk but they need to holiday in billionaire playgrounds. They need bigger houses to accommodate their drivers, nannies and bodyguards – but also because they need playmates with matching purse power.

Living is easier for the rich, if they don’t have to hang about, waiting for people to pack. They travel light because they’ve found they can always buy what they need when on arrival. Things are even easier if you have your own jet, too. Did you know it’s a breach of etiquette to ask someone for a lift on their jet – even if you’re going from the same city to stay with the same people?

‘Having your own plane is the bliss of not having to worry,’ a billionairess told me. ‘Once you have to think about other people being flaky or late or forgetting their passports, you might as well take a normal flight.’

If you do make the mistake of having impoverished house guests, what happens when you get a better invitation? Your guests were expecting a week in the Hamptons. Now you’re forcing them and their hefty luggage on to your jet to fly them down to a party in Mexico. They’re looking anxious about how they’ll get back to the Hamptons and then their jobs in London, because they

heard you talking about stopping off in the Caymans on the way back. Best if people have their own transport.

The rich are different because they look so much better than the non-rich. It’s not just the clothes; it’s the infrastructure – the dentistry, laser surgery, non-surgical facelifts, rolfing and the lymphatic drainage. And then, for the men, the light permatan. The skin is always slightly olive – from globally sourced, year-round sunshine. It makes the teeth look whiter.

The rich are as lazy as you and me but fit. Their bodies are taut because they have a paid bully putting them through their paces every morning. And they don’t have to carry coats, bags, briefcases or rucksacks. Their driver has everything they might need in the car.

They are well rested and un-tense; not just after their summer break, but all year round. They haven’t had to drive, clean up, spend a day looking for mislaid keys or hanging on to speak to someone in India about being overcharged by BT.

Their bodies are taut because they have a paid bully to put them through their paces

Then take nutrition. I know twin sisters. One works for her living and eats a metropolitan daily diet of granola, Pret Caesar salad, steamed fish with vegetables and adrenalising caffeine, to keep faintness at bay in her fluorescent strip-lit office. After work, she drinks Prosecco and Pinot Grigio.

Sister Two, married to a billionaire, has pawpaw with lime, grilled Dover sole and six oysters with seakale, sluiced down with vintage champagne. She follows Madame de Pompadour’s line – ‘The only wine a woman can drink and still look beautiful afterwards is champagne.’ One twin is thickset, pouty and irritable;

the other a veritable flower of a woman. The rich are angry with their partners, like the rest of us. But they complain to their therapist rather than a friend who may disloyally use the data against them.

The rich are enraged by their servants; and, other than sacking them, there is little they can do about that. Barbara Black, wife of Conrad, the former Telegraph proprietor, owned four houses. She was maddened by the idea that the three sets of servants in the houses they weren’t using might be putting their feet up.

The rich are different because they have less fun. Yes, it’s true. Fun (not hell) is other people. We can pay £100 a week each to rent a Landmark Trust property sleeping 20. We’ll have to cook and clean all day, but we’ll be laughing all day, too.

But the rich can’t even get other billionaires to come and stay (unless a deal is in the offing), because they have their own sprawling holiday homes they haven’t been to for months. For the reasons stated earlier, they can’t invite non-rich friends; so the house party ends up consisting of tennis coaches, security men, art dealers, decorators and children’s tutors.

And they’re lonely. Does their partner love them or their money? It’s hard to tell – especially if they haven’t been loved themselves as children. A teacher at a private prep school in London, who raised the subject of various children’s unhappiness with their rich, often absent parents, was constantly told by them, ‘But how could he be unhappy? He has every toy that money can buy.’

The rich have forgotten that all a child wants is his parents’ love and attention. Instead, they’re abroad, making use of one of their other houses or partying with alphas at some recherché spot on the globe, accessible by private jet only.

When Scott Fitzgerald said, ‘The rich are different from you and me,’ Ernest Hemingway supposedly responded, ‘Yes, they have more money.’

They also have less love.

Anne Robinson – Short Cuts

President Oprah? You must be joking

When I appeared on her show, it was cheap, dingy and disturbing

I am an adoring fan of Alan Bennett, Fiona Shaw, Nicola Walker, the Royal Ballet Company and many more.

But I wouldn’t think to engage any of the above to rewire my house, build me a conservatory or assist with a tricky plumbing problem.

As for Oprah, I’d firmly warn against hiring her as a shoulder to cry on. Never mind consider her suitable to be the next President of the United States.

Personally, I loathe Oprah.

Here’s why.

At the height of its popularity, Emma and I were invited to Chicago to appear on a mother-and-daughter edition of her famous chatshow. We were the so-called star turn, to be followed by other similar pairings of ‘ordinary folk’.

Arriving at the studio was worrying. A company, owned by a woman whose fortune and popularity had been made off the back of it, was a depressingly cheapskate operation. No dressing rooms or make-up artist available for guests. Only a small box of lipsticks and powder in the corner of a dingy green room.

The producer herded us in and left to deal with a more pressing problem: another mother and daughter who were intent on making a bolt for it.

As Emma observed, the producer’s job was to keep these two hamsters on the wheel by whatever means. In between his clumsy attempts to cajole, the mother and daughter rowed, screamed and even spat at each other.

We left to take our seats on the Oprah sofa while the disturbing scenario continued. The daughter, it turned out, had convictions for driving under the influence and the mother feared for her grandchildren’s safety.

But never mind; in a matter of minutes, Oprah had expertly knitted the two together and they left the set smiling, to ecstatic applause from the studio audience.

Shortly after, Emma and I were bundled out, while being told, because of the budget, we’d have to share a taxi with the same mother and daughter to be dropped at our hotel. We did so huddled in a corner, while the pair, now openly weeping, exchanged body blows.

Where was Oprah now? Busy recording another hit show.

Television is a confidence trick.

Its performers are there to entertain. Not to trouble themselves with aftercare for disturbed guests.

I rest my case.

The shooting season is over. A disappointment to Hattie, my working cocker puppy.

An estate whose owner provides a generous amount of private shoots surrounds my barn. Partridge and pheasant abound.

The beaters’ advice is to prevent a young dog, that you hope to work, getting a taste of a bird. This explains how a combination of Hattie on a lead, heading one way and me heading the other, ended up in a pile on a slippery slab of stone.

Later, my left ankle had grown to the size of a tree trunk.

The only useful lesson I’ve learnt from this is to listen carefully to how the family describe your tumble.

If they say, ‘My mother fell over and hurt herself,’ that is good.

If they say, ‘My mother has had a fall,’ beware.

They are already using care home language.

The hobbling around in reasonable discomfort would not have bothered me, except I was due to fly to Spain.

I then have the genius idea of ringing my travel agent to ask him to organise ‘airport assistance’.

In my days of commuting to Los Angeles, I’ve warm memories of an electric, white go-cart ride from the First Class BA lounge at Heathrow to the gate, otherwise a 20-minute walk.

The vehicle was actually for Mr Jerry Bruckheimer, who is to movies and TV (Pearl Harbor, Pirates of the Caribbean, CSI) what God is to religion.

After the unsmiling, able-bodied Mr Bruckheimer turned up, we sat silently on the journey, while the driver beep-beeped passengers on foot in our way.

‘I feel a bit guilty seeing old people struggling with hand baggage while we sail past,’ I said to Mr Bruckheimer.

‘Just look at me hard in the eyes,’ he advised.

Unfortunately, airport assistance has now been outsourced. This time, I’m casually directed to a desk surrounded by elderly passengers in wheelchairs, who look to have been dumped and left.

Put off by the chaos, I opt to walk through security and wait for transport on the other side.

The vehicle I’m loaded into has locked glass doors; so when I, too, am dumped in a corridor, I can’t escape or even get to my phone.

No one tells me the flight has been delayed; so I remain trapped for the next 20 minutes, thinking I’ve been forgotten. The sense of powerlessness is humiliating.

And I now think fondly of the charmless Mr Bruckheimer.

Kenneth Williams died in 1988 but remains a vivid presence – a combination of the prim, the lewd and the menacing. Craig Brown recalls the loner with a rare comic gift

Rebel who craved applause

There is an edition of Just a Minute from 1979 that kicks off with Nicholas Parsons asking Kenneth Williams to speak on the subject of ‘My Other Self’.

‘Kenneth, can you tell us about “My Other Self ” in 60 seconds, starting from now.’

‘It is the side of me few people ever see,’ begins Williams. ‘I closely guard this private person because all of us do cherish some secret feeling which we feel, if it were to be betrayed...’

At this point, Barry Took presses his buzzer, on the grounds of deviation: ‘I thought he was going on alarmingly I mean, there was feel and feeling. He was getting all emotional about himself.’

Parsons disallows the objection and tells Williams to continue.

‘It was Emerson, I believe, who said we have as many personalities as we have friends. Mine consequently are varied and extraordinary. Many times, people say, “Well, we saw a side of you we didn’t know existed! How WON-derful it was to have the curtain or the veil, as it were, lifted on your pro-CLIV-ities! [audience laughter].

‘We do like to see this sort of thing. And, of course, it is true that, when we do see something which we didn’t…’

Now it is Peter Cook who presses the buzzer: ‘There’s a constant stream of we-we’s,’ he says, to much laughter from the audience. And so Williams’s

51 seconds of self-revelation are brought to an end.

It’s the fate of most TV and radio personalities to disappear into the ether. Even though we may have spent years of our lives in their company, once they are dead we struggle to remember who they were.

But, 30 years after his sudden death on 15th April 1988, aged 62, Kenneth Williams remains a vivid character, like something out of a fairy tale, with his richly enunciated and fabulously extended vowels, his monstrously flared nostrils and his contrary combination of the prim and the lewd, with nothing in-between. However gregarious he is, however much the entertainer, he always remains a solitary presence, and strangely menacing. Rarely has comedy been so clearly fuelled by neurosis.

‘Sexually, he really is a horrible mess,’ observed his friend Joe Orton in his diary, after being in his company. ‘He mentions “guilt” a lot in conversation. His only outlet is exhibiting his extremely funny personality in front of an audience and, when he isn’t doing this, he’s a very sad man indeed.’

In his entry for 5th July 1967, Orton goes to Williams’s flat. Kenneth’s beloved mother, Louie, arrives a little later, and has a sherry.

‘She said she’d had a letter from Kenneth’s sister. “She’s touring,” Mrs Williams said.

“Getting all those big Greek sailors,”

Kenneth said.

‘Mrs Williams gave a squawk. “I bet you wish you were there, don’t you, Lou?” Kenneth said to his mother. “No, I don’t!” Mrs Williams said. “She’ll be getting the dick,” Kenneth said.’

Even Orton was taken aback by their dialogue. ‘I was a little surprised,’ he writes, ‘to hear someone talk so freely in front of their mother.’

Kenneth Williams was born in a slum area off the Caledonian Road, just north of King’s Cross, London, in 1926. His father, Charlie, was a God-fearing hairdresser, who possessed a particular hatred of homosexuals.

Kenneth remembered a man coming into his father’s barber shop and asking for a blow wave.

‘You’ll get no blow waves from me!’ he thundered.

Charlie then accused his would-be customer of being a queer, and kicked him out of the shop. Charlie – described by Kenneth’s sister, Pat, as ‘a real old-fashioned Victorian bully’ – paired his hatred of homosexuals with a hatred of actors. Years later, Kenneth imitated

his cockney rants on the Russell Harty chat show: ‘I’ve had them in the shop with their la-di-da voices… they haven’t got two ha’pennies to rub together.’

It was never going to be easy between father and son, particularly once the nine-year-old Kenneth had taken to the boards in the role of Princess Angelica in his school production of The Rose and the Ring

His father may have disapproved (‘The stage is for nancies’), but the critic from the St Pancras Gazette had nothing but praise. ‘Kenneth Williams, with his mincing step and comical demeanour, as Princess Angelica, was a firm favourite with the audience, to whom his snobbishness and pert vivacity made great appeal.’

During the war, the teenage Kenneth was evacuated to Bicester, where he was put up by a retired vet in a large, glamorous house, complete with fourposter beds and an enormous library. It was, he recalled, ‘a magical abode’:

he liked to copy the posh vowels of his host, who would recite poems by Byron and Shelley, and to sing old ballads very loudly.

Kenneth returned to London with a new voice, and a refreshed spirit of rebellion.

‘My father was a cockney: he didn’t talk like me at all. He hated my kind of talking. He said, “What d’you go round with a plum in your mouth for? Putting it on, giving yourself airs.” ’

His sister remembered Kenneth’s uncompromising approach: ‘Ken used to look at our father with utter contempt.’

Charlie Williams committed suicide in 1962, downing a bottle of a poison called Thawpit from a cough mixture bottle.

‘Show went OK. Audience good,’ reads the entry in Kenneth’s diary for that day. At the end of the year, he concluded, ‘It was a good year, really. Charlie’s death released Louie from that rat trap of a marriage, and now she’s happy.’

Up to the time of Kenneth’s death – he predeceased her – Louie would always sit somewhere in the front two rows for his appearances on chat shows, quiz

programmes and comedy shows.

‘All his most salacious lines would be directed straight at his mother,’ recalled Hugh Paddick, who played Julian to Kenneth’s equally outrageous Sandy on Round the Horne. ‘She just lapped it up.’

At one of these recordings, on 23rd November 1958, the scriptwriter Alan Simpson thought to himself that Williams was the happiest man he’d ever seen, both adored by the audience, and the life and soul of the party after the show.

But when Williams’s diaries were published 35 years later, they contained a quite different impression.

‘Did the Hancock show from the Piccadilly. It was a general disaster. Really terrible. The team is so dreary to me now... this crowd are so listless and disinterested and their conversation is real pleb stuff. I don’t care for any of them at all.’

Simpson read this entry with amazement: ‘I’ve never been so astounded in my life.’

This was Kenneth’s Other Self, the self so briefly alluded to in that Just a Minute speech, ‘The side of me few people ever see.’

He craved laughter, but despised himself for craving it, often worrying that an audience were laughing at him rather than with him. Watching his chat-show appearances today, it is notable how often his confessions of loneliness and alienation are greeted with uproarious laughter.

‘How is your love life?’ asks Joan Rivers.

‘I’m asexual,’ he replies. ‘I should regard any type of relationship as deeply intrusive. Privacy is the most important thing in my life. Everything which invaded it would be a threat... so, consequently I live a life of celibacy. I’m not interested in the other.’

These might be the words from the casebook of a patient suffering from clinical depression, but the audience hoots with laughter, and so does Rivers.

His delivery was at odds with his message. There was something innately comical about Kenneth Williams; and perhaps this was his tragedy.

The last words in his diary were: ‘Oh, what’s the bloody point?’ If he had spoken them to an audience, no doubt they would have howled with laughter.

Shortly after he wrote them, he took an overdose, had a heart attack and died.

Stop messing about: Kenneth Williams in 1967 – he turned neurosis into comedy

The saddest comedy ever made

A century after the Armistice, Blackadder’s producer, John Lloyd, recalls the final, heart-rending scene – and mourns his military ancestors who inspired it

When Richard Curtis and Ben Elton told me they wanted to set the fourth series of Blackadder in the trenches of the First World War, I thought they had lost their minds – and certainly all sense of taste and decorum. Watching the first episode in 1989, Ben’s Uncle Geoffrey (the distinguished

Tudor historian G R Elton) was appalled. He wrote Ben a stiff letter saying that, while he’d enjoyed the second series, the portrayal of the British Army was simplistic and insulting, reminding him that the entire Elton family (émigrés from Nazi Germany) owed their very existence to it.

I’m from a service family. My father

was in the Royal Navy, man and boy, for almost 40 years. In the Second World War, he commanded a flotilla of motor torpedo boats in the Dover Patrol and his breezy approach to the job is referenced in Hugh Laurie’s line in the last series, when the gang joins the Royal Flying Corps: ‘Up-tiddly-up, down-tiddly-down, and back home for tea and medals.’

Colchester Garrison, 1989, from left: Captain Kevin Darling (Tim McInnerny), General Sir Anthony Melchett (Stephen Fry), Private S Baldrick (Tony Robinson), Captain Edmund Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson), Lt The Hon George St Barleigh (Hugh Laurie)

As a Navy kid, I knew how to navigate and could name all the parts of a gaff-rigged clipper. At school, I was cadet petty officer and head of the Naval Section in the Combined Cadet Force, and very nearly joined the Navy myself. I still get a lump in my throat if I see a trim warship, lined with sailors, leaving or entering a port.

But most of my family was in the Army. My full name is John Hardress Wilfred Lloyd – John Hardress after my great-uncle, Brigadier-General John Hardress-Lloyd DSO and bar, and Wilfred after my grandfather Major Wilfred Medhop Lloyd.

Before the war, grandpa had been in the Indian Army, but something went wrong and he bought himself out and legged it to California. He arrived in San Francisco the week after the 1906 earthquake, worked as a docker humping sacks of sugar, and was a hobo in the Yukon for a while, panning for gold.

once did he mention his time in the trenches. As he was dying, my mother tried in vain to give him one last hug and he growled, ‘I hope I don’t have to go back to the trenches again.’

When war broke out, he patriotically returned to England and joined the Royal Naval Balloon Corps as a pilot observer. Aficionados of Blackadder will remember that Captain Darling was also in the fictional ‘Women’s Balloon Corps’.

Wilfred would fly his balloon across the Channel to France and report back on enemy troop movements. One day, he flew too high and, like a diver who ascends too fast, got an attack of ‘the bends’ and was invalided out of the Navy. He was a lot luckier than most.

My maternal grandfather, Sid Turnpenny, was in the Territorial Army. He had joined the East Kent Yeomanry, known as ‘the Buffs’ – as in ‘Steady the Buffs!’ – and was one of 62,000 men sent to Gallipoli by the then Secretary of War, Winston Churchill, along with 62,000 horses – which they rode to pull the guns. Unlike many, Sid survived the experience and often talked about it.

‘My horse was shot from under me at Gallipoli,’ he used to say, ‘but at least we had something to eat!’ (They made the dead horses into rissoles, apparently.)

Afterwards, he was sent to the trenches where he was badly wounded. They decided they’d have to cut off his leg, but had run out of morphine. The medics offered him champagne to ease the pain, then found they’d run out of that too. So he was shipped back to Blighty, where the hospital decided he

Top: John Lloyd’s great-uncle, Brigadier-General John Hardress-Lloyd. Below: John Lloyd’s father, Captain Hardress L ‘Harpy’ Lloyd

could keep his leg after all.

But it was never the same – he never played golf again – and nor was he. Before the war, he was a cheerful, outgoing sort, but shellshock made him withdrawn and surly. In his whole marriage, he never once kissed my grandmother, nor was he ever even seen to put his arm round her.

While he often spoke about his time on horseback in the Dardanelles, only

If Sid was a galloping blend of Baldrick and Lieutenant George, General Melchett was – partly –inspired by my great-uncle. Like Stephen Fry, he was tall and charming but, unlike Melchett, he knew what he was doing. A brilliant polo player with the maximum 10 handicap, he was captain of the Irish team that took silver at the 1908 Olympics. He had fought with distinction on the North West Frontier and in the First Boer War, becoming one of the founders of the Tank Corps and a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur. He was never heard to go, ‘Baaaah!’

Blackadder has always been popular in the British armed services. The opening titles of Blackadder Goes Forth were shot at Colchester Garrison, with real squaddies from the Royal Anglian regiment, dressed in First World War uniforms, marching alongside the cast.

As a result, many military positions in the first Gulf War in 1991 were officially named after its characters –the Blackadder Lines and the Melchett Lines, for example, and, at one point in the 1990s, more than half the regimental goats in the British Army were called Baldrick.

Silly though much of the humour in Blackadder Goes Forth, the seriousness of what we were doing was ever-present during the making of it. Just to stand in the trench set looking up at the blue studio cyclorama was chilling experience.

Rowan Atkinson’s overriding memory of the last episode was the knot in his stomach during rehearsals.

‘It was the first time’, he told me recently, ‘I had experienced a visceral empathy to a character’s dilemma: I really did feel something awful was going to happen to me at the end of the week. As, fictionally, it did. Perhaps serious actors get that sort of thing all the time, but to me it was a new experience…’

His grandfather had fought in Palestine during the First World War, and his father missed the boat at Dunkirk, to spend, as Rowan puts it, ‘five years as a guest of the Reich’.

The last episode of Blackadder Goes Forth is an extraordinary piece of writing by Ben and Richard, and it was key to the whole series. Richard says that if they hadn’t been able to end it that way, they wouldn’t have written it.

It starts larky and optimistic with everyone recalling their time before the war and their enthusiasm for joining up. But, as the story develops, it slowly darkens. The jokes get sparser, the humour drains away, and it ends with one of the most poignant scenes in television; certainly in sitcom.

But the final scene, where Blackadder and his men finally go ‘over the top’, began as a card-carrying disaster. The recording of the episode had gone well but, as so often, we ran short of time, and the 10 o’clock deadline where the crew could legitimately ‘pull the plugs’ was fast approaching.

The No Man’s Land set was so huge that it had had to be built in another studio, remote from the audience and out of sight of the control room. The actors were rushed round there with only a few minutes of recording time left.

Because we’d not had time to

rehearse the scene, when the lights were dimmed and the director, Richard Boden, called ‘action’, chaos ensued. It was pitch dark; there were unfamiliar ladders to climb; and no one had expected the pyrotechnics.

Through blinding flashes and deafening bangs, the cast struggled towards the battleground, which was pitted with bomb craters and strands of barbed wire. Between explosions, they could clearly be heard cursing and grumbling as they banged knees and elbows.

The audience watching on the studio monitors sat in bewildered embarrassment at this lame conclusion and the take was a complete write-off. As the hands of the studio clock crept up to ten, the director and I agreed there

My head was in my hands. There was no way out of this. And then something miraculous happened

was just time for another go. But it was not to be. In the darkness, Rowan, shaking with fury, grabbed the studio manager’s walkie-talkie and tore into the production team.

‘That was an utter disgrace,’ we heard him say over the loudspeaker. ‘It was incredibly dangerous and frightening, and there’s no way we’re going through it again.’

And that was that. It was a deeply dispiriting end to what had been a great beginning.

That sinking feeling returned when we got to the edit. The programme had cut together extremely well and we could see we had something wonderful on our hands. But then we were faced with the utterly unbroadcastable two minutes of grumpy actors going ‘Ow!’ and ‘Bloody hell!’ as they ambled gingerly (they were meant to be running) across the artificial mud.

My head was in my hands. There was no way out of this. And then something miraculous happened. Bit by bit, the crew in the edit suite began to transform the most leaden of lead into pure gold.

A combination of extreme slowmotion and mixes, fading to sepia, a still shot of poppies hastily borrowed from the BBC picture library and slowing down the sound track to invest Howard Goodall’s signature tune with an eerie plangency, produced something astonishing.

We were awestruck. And the overwhelming emotion was not, as you might expect, pride – or even relief –but humility. Somehow, we had touched the numinous.

After the episode aired, G R Elton wrote his nephew a second letter, grudgingly admitting that he’d got it wrong and expressing his approval. And Rowan had dozens of moving letters from elderly ladies whose husbands or fiancés had not returned from the war, just saying thank you for the respect we had shown them.

On Sunday 11th November, I will be in Shinrone, Co Offaly, the little village where my father’s Anglo-Irish family comes from, attending a Remembrance Service with my brother Andrew at St Mary’s Church. We will be there to commemorate the 38 men of the parish who made the ultimate sacrifice, and to give thanks for the five who returned alive. One of the latter is listed simply as Lloyd, John H.

John Lloyd’s grandfather, Major Wilfred Lloyd of the Royal Naval Balloon Corps

The fight on the beaches

The greatest seaborne invasion in history took place in June 1944. Giles Milton tells the story of D-Day, hour by hour, through the soldiers’ eyes

It had been raining for much of the day and the air was still damp when Wally Parr, 21, clambered into the glider that would take him to Normandy. It was 10.35pm on 5th June 1944, and Parr’s nerves were on edge – with good reason. He had been selected for an audacious airborne operation that was to take place some six hours before the D-Day beach landings in Normandy.

Parr, serving with the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry, and his 181 comrades had to seize two strategically vital bridges at the villages of Ranville and Bénouville. If they failed, D-Day itself would be at risk of failure. Hitler’s SS panzer divisions would be able to sweep across the two bridges and drive the newly landed troops back into the sea.

‘Link arms!’ shouted the pilot as the Horsa glider swooped through the clouds towards Normandy. Parr felt a hideous crash as the plane hit the ground: the landing was so rough that he was knocked unconscious, along with all his comrades. It was several minutes before they came to and glimpsed the bridge through the glider’s portholes. The German defenders were still in bed, unaware the gliders had just landed.

‘Charlie, get out!’ shouted Parr to his buddy, Charles Gardner.

‘Charge!’ roared John Howard, their leader.

Parr and Gardner were the first to reach the bridge and they did so in a welter of machine-gun fire. ‘Come out and fight, you square-headed bastards!’ shouted Parr. He and Gardner worked as a highly dangerous double act, pitching grenades into the German

dugouts. Both knew that it was kill-orbe-killed.

There was one British fatality during that nocturnal operation: young Den Brotheridge was gunned down on the bridge. But there was good news to accompany the bad. As Parr and company reached the far side of the bridge, the German defenders ran for their lives. Bénouville Bridge – later renamed Pegasus – was in Allied hands. There was soon further good news. Ranville Bridge had also been captured. Now Howard’s men had to hold on to these bridges until noon, when British commandos were due to relieve them.

Those commandos were among the 156,000 soldiers crossing the English Channel that night, destined for the five designated landing beaches: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword. The Channel crossing was not for the faint-hearted. The sea was so choppy that men vomited up the meat stew they’d eaten before leaving England.

The commandos landed at 8.40am, led by flamboyant Scottish aristocrat Lord Lovat, who had the chutzpah to go into battle with Bill Millin, his personal bagpiper, at his side.

Men bellowed orders – ‘Stand by the ramps! Lower away there!’ – as the landing craft crunched into the gravel at Sword beach. Lovat led the commandos ashore under withering machinegun fire from the German defenders.

Lovat’s piper blasted out Road to the Isles as his men advanced through shellfire and shrapnel. ‘They moved like

a knife through enemy butter,’ Lovat said with relish.

Among those in the vanguard were Stan ‘Scotty’ Scott, a chippy London bruiser, and his No 3 Troop; they were

Lovat’s piper blasted out Road to the Isles as his men advanced through shellfire

determined to be first to reach Howard’s beleaguered men at the bridges. They advanced inland on bicycles, passing a wounded British paratrooper en route. ‘Where the f*** have you been?’ he asked. He knew that the men at the bridges had been engaged in a desperate six-hour struggle against the Germans.

As Scott and his men approached Bénouville, the firefight intensified. ‘Rounds hitting from all sides,’ said Scott. ‘Campbell was the unlucky one.

He got hit through the neck and fell down in one big lump – him, the bike, and all that.’ It was just after midday when Lord Lovat arrived with the main body of commandos. He was so cool under pressure that the scene would later be immortalised in the Hollywood movie The Longest Day (1962). Lovat shook Howard warmly by the hand and apologised for being two and a half minutes late.

All along the Normandy coast, men had been charging ashore since

Omaha beach – a six-mile-long beach the Nazis turned into a bloodbath

dawn. On Utah beach, American troops had moved swiftly inland and linked up with airborne troops dropped into Sainte-Mère-Église. On Gold and Juno, British and Canadian forces were also thrusting inland.

Omaha alone hung in the balance. The German defenders were both tenacious and well-organised and had turned the six-mile stretch of beach into a

bloodbath. Hundreds of young men were gunned down before they even reached the shoreline.

Gold beach was witness to a particularly remarkable feat of arms that morning. Stanley Hollis was a 6ft 2in bruiser, built of sinew and muscle. His men were charged with capturing Mont Fleury battery, a near-impregnable stack of concrete casements. Mont Fleury was soon in Allied hands and Hollis had just won the first of his two nominations that day for the Victoria Cross.

By late afternoon, troops were advancing inland from all five beaches. Even bloody Omaha was eventually captured and the weary survivors began pushing their way through the clifftop villages.

The military objectives for D-Day were incredibly ambitious. If all had gone

to plan, the liberated zone would have covered 50 miles of Normandy coast and included four of the landing beaches (Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword).

The cities of Bayeux and Caen were also meant to have been captured. A further liberated zone was to have stretched inland from Utah beach, encompassing Sainte-Mère-Église and nearby villages.

The reality was somewhat different: the Allies clung to four separate beachheads that were both isolated and

The Allies clung to four beachheads that were isolated and vulnerable

vulnerable. They were surrounded by enemy positions, and had failed to dislodge the Germans from either Bayeux or Caen. On the plus side, Allied casualties were lighter than expected: they numbered some 11,000. The German toll of dead and injured remains unknown.

Although the beachhead was small, it enabled the Allies to pour in huge quantities of men and machines over the following days. By the end of June, 850,000 men, 148,000 vehicles and 570,000 tons of supplies had been landed in Normandy. Five days after that, the number of troops would top one million.

Normandy is bracing itself for a new invasion for the 75th anniversary. This time, it will be tourists and veterans arriving in huge numbers. D-Day left its mark on the landscape and there is a lot to see: not just the shattered strongpoints and coastal defences, but dozens of excellent museums.

The exploits of Wally Parr and his men can be relived at the Pegasus Bridge museum, while Utah beach has a superbly appointed museum dedicated to the American landings. Another draw is the ever-expanding Airborne Museum at Sainte-Mère-Église.

Among the key British objectives on D-Day was the Merville battery, a veritable time capsule of a museum in which special lighting, smell-diffusers and dramatic sound effects are used to recreate the terrifying experience of the assault on the battery.

Another must-see sight is the D-Day Museum in Arromanches, which tells the story of the two floating Mulberry harbours that were towed across the channel from England.

Soon there will be a new monument to visit. On an imposing site overlooking Gold beach, a large memorial is being constructed to honour the 22,000 British soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen who lost their lives between D-Day and 31st August 1944, when the Normandy campaign officially concluded.

It will be a fitting memorial to those who served – and fell – in the greatest seaborne invasion in the history of warfare.

Giles Milton is the author of D-Day: The Soldiers’ Story (John Murray)

Scotland the Brave: Bill Millin played the pipes under fire, landing on Sword Beach

Grumpy Oldie Man

University of Life has failed my son

Even though he’s just got a First, he faces an anxious future of drudgery, low wages and unaffordable housing matthew norman

Novel experiences being sparse at this dismal stage of existence, I’d have been content with one on a sunny Edinburgh morning last week. But within a matter of minutes, there came two.

‘Is this your first?’ asked the Uber driver, of the graduation ceremony to which he was taking us. Our son being an only child, it was both the first and last.

But his mother (our son’s mother –the driver’s mother wasn’t present; distinct as he was, his uniqueness didn’t stretch to that) chose deliberately to mishear the question. ‘Did he get a First?’ she mis-reiterated. ‘As it happens, yes.’

‘Ah,’ said Stanislas. ‘My congratulations. You must be very proud.’

I was. In the abstract, I’m not keen on beastly little swots. But, being fond of the boy, I couldn’t deny it.

Our reciprocal congrats sidestepped academic success to focus on Stanislas’s fecundity – he had eight children.

Yet what impressed us was less his surfeit of offspring than his deficit of limbs.

‘I hope you won’t think me rude for mentioning it,’ I said, ‘But you appear to have only the one arm.’

With no hint of umbrage, he said that he’d lost the other in an industrial accident at a waste-recycling plant 15 years ago, and finds the prosthetic too cumbersome to use.

I asked if he’d taken legal action. He had, and was awarded more than a million. He bought a house and three shops, which he rents out. He drives people purely to get out of the house.

Perhaps what ensued was indelicate. But I heard myself wondering aloud whether, given the choice, I’d swap an

arm for a million quid. On balance, I heard myself answering, ‘I believe I would.’ Typing would be a challenge. Then again, I wouldn’t need to type.

Speaking with the wisdom of personal experience, again without umbrage, Stanislas politely disagreed. He was stuck at home for a decade after the accident and still suffers phantom limb pain.

‘That’s awful,’ I said. ‘Even so…’ A kick to the left ankle from my son’s mother ended the sentence there. I hobbled out of the car and into the McEwan Hall, where some 500 graduates were gathered in rows, waiting to receive their degrees.

About 1,000 of their loved ones were arrayed around the room’s outskirts, beaming as their children took to the stage to be tapped on the side of the head with a hat by the Vice-Chancellor.

Formal ceremonies tend to be gruelling affairs, laced with vacuous hypocrisies. But freed from religious cant about the afterlife’s wonderment, be it in this life in the chains of holy matrimony or at the right hand of the Lord in the next, a graduation is a splendid sight to behold and I was grinning.

It was so uplifting, in fact, that the grin survived the Vice-Chancellor’s reference to the university’s global pre-eminence in the field of MOOCs (Massive Open

‘It will be all your fault’

Online Courses) almost intact. What eventually removed it was the massively unoriginal reflection on how incomparably harder adult life will be for my son’s generation than it was for mine.

I can’t recall much about my graduation, other than that it was literally the only recorded day in this family’s existence on which my mother admitted to being other than tired. But I do remember how effortless it was afterwards for the graduate, even one as indolent and feckless as this one, to earn a living, and buy a property.

These young people are infinitely more mature, industrious, sober, undruggy and responsible than we were. Thanks to the intervening decades of free-market capitalitism, their expectations of a decent income are minimal, and of buying a home virtually zero. And they of course are the privileged.

After the ceremony, we went to lunch with our son and a brilliant friend of his, whose first taste of disappointment has been a so far fruitless search for a job serving coffee.

Our boy is about to embark on a similar quest as he enters a world in which the sense of freedom and infinite possibilities we enjoyed has been replaced by drudgery and anxiety.

Not wishing to be a Debbie Downer, I delayed the paternal advice for as long as possible, and when it could be delayed no longer, I offered it as tentatively as I could.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve thought,’ I said, when it was time for his mother and me to take our leave of him, ‘about applying for a job at a wasterecycling plant? I gather the opportunities, so far as property ownership go, can be excellent.’

Troy Story

As a British Museum show opens, Hannah Betts visits the birthplace of classical legend and the cradle of a thousand heroes

Question: what is the most incredible archaeological site in the world, least frequented by marauding culture vultures?

Answer: Hisarlik (Place of Fortresses), a windswept hillock amid the fields of Çanakkale province, north-western Turkey.

Why? Because Hisarlik Hill conceals a city – the city – Troy, the fall of which Homer recounts in the 8th-century-BC Iliad, charting events from the Late Bronze Age, some 400 years earlier. Forget women wielding apples or species-eradicating floods. The toppled towers of Ilium form Western culture’s great ur-story, the devastated cradle from which its cities claimed origin, its celebrities their ancestry.

The British, Italians, Franks, Germans and Scandinavians all claimed Trojan roots, as did London, Rome, Paris, Toulouse, Béarn, Barcelona, Bonn and Cologne. Julius Caesar, the Emperor Augustus and multiple European dynasties traced their lineage back to Ilium.

I get this. I’m Trojan myself. From the moment I first heard the legend, its constituents felt more familiar than tales of Yahweh and his plagues, or hippie, sandal-wearing Jesus.

Homer’s heroes may be pelted figures from 3,000 years ago (the 1180s BC being archaeology’s best guess for the city’s Late Bronze Age conflagration –i.e. the Trojan War). But we know them more intimately than we know many of our contemporaries.

There’s iron-jawed automaton Agamemnon, still rigid with posttraumatic stress from the events at Aulis. Or ghastly, closeted jock Achilles, brought up transgender and epically overcompensating. And, of course, Helen of Sparta, latterly Troy, with her terrible beauty, tormenting her abductor, making

eyes at Hector; screeching Bacchically along Troy’s battlements as the city burns (as we learn later in the Odyssey and the Aeneid).

Back when I was single, my dealbreaker enquiry was ‘Who are you in the Troy narrative?’ No individual of character ever lacked a response.

In one fell swoop, one learnt everything there was to know about

someone; not least from the chaps who responded ‘Paris’, imagining that this conveyed ‘dashing’, thus revealing themselves to be weak, cowardly and a hick Johnny-come-lately despised by one and all.

Where the Odyssey gives us a shaghappy, marital gap year (OK, decade), the Iliad teaches us everything we need to know about the human condition: namely, we’re all doomed and we’re the ones who caused said doom, whichever deity we choose to take the rap. In it is

the seed of all the other myths that haunt us: the savagery of the gods, beauty as a spur, heroic hubris, the beleaguered fate of women and every subsequent tale in which east meets west.

This winter, the British Museum will look at Troy as the sum of such narratives, through its depiction on pots and in paintings, via ancient sculpture and contemporary works. At the same time, it will consider Troy’s status as a reality, transporting us to Hisarlik. This may come as something of a surprise to exhibition-goers – classicists included –as many still consider Troy a Homeric fiction rather than a historical fact.

Professor Rüstem Aslan, chief archaeologist at Troy since 2013, continues to be on the receiving end of such prejudice. When asked, ‘Did the Trojan War take place?’, he exclaims, ‘Of course! We’ll never be able to prove it 100 per cent, but all the archaeological, philological, paleogeographical and scientific evidence confirms it, such that I can say, “I believe the Trojan War happened – and happened here.” ’

He isn’t just battling the notion that there was no truth behind Homer’s tale. Professor Aslan is also forced to confront a certain Orientalism that remains blind to the eastern aspect of the story –despite the confrontation between east and west being the narrative’s premise.

‘I’m in Troy – in Greece,’ he has heard more than one visitor announce into his or her mobile, when not being in Greece

Above: Achilles kills Penthesilea on an Athenian amphora, c530BC, in the British Museum. Below: Dragging the Trojan Horse into Troy, Roman sarcophagus lid, cAD200

is rather the point. And these are the people who’ve bothered to make the four-hour drive from Istanbul.

This notion – that it’s all fictional –and the Orientalism both have their origin in the one part of the Hisarlik narrative people do tend to have heard of: the excavations by the German archaeologist-cum-looter Heinrich Schliemann, beginning in 1870.

Schliemann may have put Troy back on the map. But his heavy-handed, self-aggrandising approach involved trashing, misinterpreting and then stealing much of what he found. Among his finds was ‘Priam’s Treasure’, which Schliemann claimed had been owned by the King of Troy. In fact, the discoveries were far too old to be from Priam’s era.

Later investigations have demonstrated that there are at least ten Troys, one on top of the other, which can be arranged in a diagram that resembles a series of flying biscuits. The Troy of Homer’s epic comprises Bronze Age biscuits (numbered VI and VII). This was a period when the city has been proven to have been far closer to the sea; mighty defence walls were constructed; a ditch was built against chariot attack; the vulnerable west gate was closed; and a treaty was signed with the Hittites to the east, suggesting strategic uncertainty.

Even if Hisarlik Hill didn’t contain Homer’s Ilium, it would still be one of the most astonishing archaeological sites in the world, having been in almost continuous occupation since 3,600BC (the earliest layer now known as Troy O). Homer’s possible visit to Troy VIII in the 8th century BC boosted a tourist industry that flourished into the Roman period and beyond. Celebrated visitors included Xerxes (in 480BC), Alexander the Great, Augustus, Hadrian, Constantine and Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror (AD 1462).

The rise of Christianity meant that the place was increasingly regarded as a

pagan shrine, and then gradually forgotten. That said, as Professor Aslan points out, ‘The memory of the geography didn’t stop. Stories of the Trojan War never left the region.’ Witness (the daughter of Priam and Hecuba) Polyxena’s sarcophagus, discovered 60 miles from the site in 1994, buried in an area known for centuries before as ‘Dead girl’s hills’.

Twentieth- and 21st-century tourists

Where the Odyssey gives us a shag-happy, marital gap year (OK, decade), the Iliad teaches us everything we need to know about the human condition

have been divided between finding today’s Ilium a sublime revelation and seeing it as an inscrutable pile of rubble. Professor Aslan says, ‘People expect it to look like Ephesus without realising that it’s 2,000 years older.’ His £7.5-million Troy Museum, opened this year, only five minutes’ drive from the site, should improve matters for those who find the site unyielding.

With the help of the BM exhibition, the reopening of Istanbul’s archaeology museum and next year’s launch of Schliemann’s Hisarlik home as a ‘visitor experience’, the professor is hoping that 2020’s visitor figures will increase from 700,000 to a million, with Britons up from their current 20 per cent.

Climate-wise, autumn and spring are the best times to go. One could do worse than stay at Çanakkale’s Büyük Truva Hotel: around £40 a night, with terrific food, plus the opportunity to buy reproduction Trojan bling. Return flights from the UK with Pegasus Airlines are available from £79.

Even without Troy’s cracking new museum, I’d be back, because nothing will ever compare to gazing out from its west gate – declared weak by Athena in Homer’s poem and walled up in 1300 BC – to where Priam would have watched his son being slaughtered.

‘Is it OK to think that?’ I ask the professor, mindful of the years of caveats and caution. He smiles: ‘If you have no feelings about the Iliad, then you’re not allowed to work in Troy.’

Professor Rüstem Aslan, Troy’s Director of Excavations, and Hannah Betts, by the ramp supposedly used by the Trojan Horse. Priam’s Treasure was found to the left

As Asterix turns 60 and stars in a new book, Giles Coren hails the comic equal of Chaucer, Shakespeare and P G Wodehouse

Happy LXth birthday, Asterix!

Imade some very poor, very timid cultural choices as a child.

A bourgeois propensity to cleave to what was safest and least challenging led me to choose the lantern-jawed dorks of DC Comics (Superman, Batman) over the darker, more interesting Marvel guys (SpiderMan, Iron Man, Hulk); the woollyjumpered chumminess of MultiColoured Swap Shop over the sex-and-custard-pies anarchy of Tiswas; the ocean-going squareness of Blue Peter over whatever the hell ITV’s Magpie thought it was, and so on.

And, as for choosing the cosy, unthreatening uselessness of Queens Park Rangers over, well, practically any other football team on earth, what a fool I was!

But as adults, we are the choices we made as children. They form our identities and we can never escape them. And I regret all of mine.

All? No, one small choice still holds out against the Roman invaders … because I was bang right to choose the Asterix books of Goscinny and Uderzo over Hergé’s miserable Tintin, about that meddling Belgian twerp with his Charlie Brown haircut and his talking dog and the pissed old sea captain and all those words – so many words; such convoluted plots; such dreary colours.

Asterix was much more cleverly conceived: a tight political satire of indomitable independent spirit versus clodhopping imperial power. They say it was about French resistance to the Nazis but we can read it any way we like – I have no doubt Boris Johnson would see himself as both Asterix, with his cunning, and Obelix, with his strength, pitted against the soulless bureaucratic might

of Juncker’s Ancient Rome – with a vast geographical and temporal sweep, a huge and colourful cast of characters, dense with classical allusion and full of humour from the knockabout to the incredibly sophisticated.

Asterix was everything to me as a child: my sickbed solace (with hot lemon and honey and all 27 then-extant albums piled up beside me, to be reread in publication order); my bulwark against loneliness at boarding school; my route into literature, humour, language and the classics and my chosen specialised subject on Celebrity Mastermind (18 points, all correct and no passes, thank you very much).

And, to this day, I would place the little Gaul at one of the four corners of the English humour canon, the other three propped up by the only slightly lesser lights of Chaucer, Shakespeare and P G Wodehouse.

I’m talking about the English versions, of course, translated from René Goscinny’s French by the towering genius of the late Anthea Bell (Derek Hockridge has always been co-credited but the bulk of the work was Anthea’s).

The French books are rubbish. I speak the language fluently and have read them all. In the original, they are as dull as Racine, as unfunny as Molière, as drab and racist as Charlie Hebdo and about as gripping as a Michelin guide.

To be honest, they are better in Flemish, of which I have the complete set, as I do in German, Latin and Polish. Because when you know every frame of every book as well as I do, you can read and enjoy them in any language, and each tongue offers fresh joy to familiar

jokes. Only last night, for example, I was up late with a mug of cocoa and Asteriks na Igrzyskach Olimpijskich

But with Anthea’s rare genius – she is more celebrated for her editions of W G Sebald and Stefan Zweig, but her lasting contribution to the representation of foreign literature in English will always be Asterix – the books take on a new level of comic depth.

At her hand, the French druid Panoramix (no pun, no relevance) becomes the English druid Getafix. The talentless bard Assurancetouristix (travel insurance) becomes Cacofonix (oh joy!). And, best of all, Obelix’s little dog, Idéfix, becomes … Dogmatix!

Yes, Shakespeare could do an illustrative comic name (one thinks of Mistress Quickly, of Bardolph, Pistol and Bottom), sure; Dickens had Pumblechook, Honeythunder, Pecksniff and Squeers. I will always reserve a titter for Gussie Fink-Nottle and Roderick Spode – but Anthea has given us Asterix’s English cousin Anticlimax, the Gaulish quisling Chief Whosemoralsarelastix, the athletic legionary Gluteus Maximus, the bumptious young architect Squareonthehypotenus, the Spanish chief Huevos y Bacon, the English chieftain Mykingdomforanos…

And if those are but simple puns, then relish the complexity of a scene in which Asterix, sneaking into a town-hall back office in Roman-occupied Condatum (Rennes) to enquire after the whereabouts of his kidnapped compatriot Tragicomix, is asked by

A bad Asterix book is

always better than no Asterix book at all

a sanctimonious scribe, from high on his ladder atop a pile of carved marble tablets, ‘Is that Tragicomix with a “T” as in Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes?’

Truly, Sir Pelham himself could not have done better.

And so none will celebrate more vigorously than I the publication this month of Asterix and the Chieftain’s Daughter, even though it will be rubbish. Because a bad Asterix book, like a bad Woody Allen film or a bad cheeseburger, is always better than no Asterix book at all.

And it will be rubbish, I’m afraid. Because the stories have all been rubbish since Goscinny died, aged 51, in 1977.

Uderzo, the illustrator, now 92, struggled on alone for 40 years, drawing less well as he aged, tending to the Disneyish, and offering increasingly hackneyed plots dependent on deus-exmachina outcomes, rank sexism and such incidental abominations as dragons and aliens from outer space – although Black Gold (1981) was a solid effort and Magic Carpet (1987) has a handful of frames to recommend it – and then in 2013 handed over to a new artist-andwriter team, Jean-Yves Ferrer and Didier Conrad, who started well enough with Asterix and the Picts but went rather backwards with Missing Scroll

Artistically, they modelled themselves

on late, cutesy Uderzo, which is a mistake, rather than on the glorious 1960s golden age of Normans, Cleopatra and Britain.

At the time of writing, Asterix and the Chieftain’s Daughter is still under strict embargo (the security situation is like Harry Potter squared), but a sighting of Chief Vercingetorix on the cover of Paris Match last month makes it very clear to me that the daughter of the defeated Gaulish chief who laid his arms at the feet of Caesar at Alesia (or directly on them, as the very first frame of the very first book had it, back in 1959, leading to a mighty ‘Ouch!’ from old Julius) will be

either threatened or kidnapped by the Romans, and Asterix and Obelix will have either to protect her or to rescue her and then return her to safety, as with little Pepe in Asterix in Spain, Chief Boneywasawarriorwayayix in Corsica, the baby boy Caesarion in Asterix and Son, Tragicomix in Legionary, Quaestor Vexatius Sinusitis in Switzerland

Along the way, Obelix will fall unsuitably in love with her, fall out with Asterix over it, they will be reunited, there will be a banquet, Cacofonix will offer to sing and the blacksmith Fulliautomatix will hammer him into the ground.

And we will dance and sing and celebrate with them. Not for the same reason as our friends across the Mare Britannicum who, because Asterix first appeared in French in 1959, seem to think this year is his 60th anniversary, but rather because Asterix the Gaul having been published in English for the first time by the Brockhampton Press in 1969, we know it is really his 50th.

The 40th and latest book Asterix and the White Iris, was published in 2023

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

A hundred bear hugs for my hero

Rupert Bear, born a century ago, is bizarre, reassuring and heavenly

When I die, I hope to go to Nutwood. It is my idea of heaven.

Nutwood, as every oldie surely knows, is the idyllic village where Rupert Bear has been living for the past 100 years. Rupert, for me, ranks alongside Winniethe-Pooh, Paddington, Peter Pan and Harry Potter as one of the iconic creations of British childhood but, while A A Milne, Michael Bond, J M Barrie and J K Rowling are universally celebrated, most people I meet don’t seem even to have heard of Mary Tourtel.

Mrs Tourtel was 46, and an established children’s book illustrator, when she created Rupert in 1920 as a direct result of a newspaper circulation war. In 1915, the Daily Mail had introduced its readers to a strip cartoon featuring a mouse called Teddy Tail. In 1919, the Daily Mirror followed suit with a dog, penguin and rabbit named Pip, Squeak and Wilfred. The Daily Express, then the country’s best-selling newspaper, knew it had to follow suit. Herbert Tourtel, the news editor, thought his wife might be able to come up with something suitable. She did and, on 8th November 1920, two cartoons featuring the first adventure of Little Lost Bear appeared in the pages of the Daily Express.

Initially, Rupert was a furry brown bear who wore a blue jumper and grey trousers. To save money on ink costs, he quickly became white-faced and, over time, with the advent of full-colour Rupert Annuals, he acquired his trademark red and yellow livery. Tourtel wrote the stories (in verse and prose) and drew the illustrations for 15 years, until failing eyesight forced her to retire in 1935. She handed her creation to Alfred Bestall, a Punch artist who had illustrated stories for Enid Blyton and for the next 40 years Rupert was Bestall’s baby.

Because those-who-know reckon Bestall the superior artist, because he

Mary Tourtel created Rupert, with blue jumper, in 1920. His red and yellow outfit came later

Rupert and his best friend Badger Bill waiting to greet me at the pearly gates, and I have no doubt at all that God, when I meet Him, will look like the Wise Old Goat, the kindly sage of Nutwood.

was the author of the Rupert Annuals from the mid-1930s, and especially because of a beguiling 1982 television documentary about him made by the late Terry Jones (a lifelong Rupert groupie), Bestall is often wrongly credited with being the genius who gave us Rupert. Certainly, Bestall enriched and broadened Rupert’s world, but Tourtel is the bear’s begetter and the one we need to honour in this centennial year. The above picture is by Tourtel.

She created a unique character in Rupert (decent, heroic and endearing) and a world for him to inhabit that is both totally bizarre and wonderfully reassuring. It’s a world where the anthropomorphic animals, whether dogs (P C Growler), mice (Willie) or elephants (Edward Trunk), are all roughly the same size, where diversity is the order of the day (oh, yes: there is a mermaid who identifies as a merboy, and a raft of Chinese characters, from Pong-Ping the Pekingese to Tiger Lily, the conjuror’s daughter, who are in no sense caricatures), and where there is fantasy of the most dramatic and fantastical kind but nothing fundamentally to fear. In every story, Rupert sets off from home and has an adventure. At every story’s end, he comes home, where Mr and Mrs Bear are waiting for him as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened.

If I get to heaven, I expect to find

In 1940, in the darkest days of the Second World War, when a German invasion seemed a real possibility, the question arose: if the Nazis land at Dover, what do we do with the Royal Family? Several courtiers and not a few politicians suggested that Canada would be the best safe haven for the King and Queen and their two young daughters – specifically, Vancouver Island, where, 80 years on, Harry and Meghan have sought their non-royal refuge.

Of course, George VI and Queen Elizabeth were having none of it. Pressed to suggest a safe house away from London and Windsor, they proposed Newby Hall, near Ripon in Yorkshire, the home of their good friends the Comptons. The house (designed by Wren) was readied for the royal guests; the grounds were fortified. Happily, the German invaders didn’t make it – but my bears did.

The Compton family have built a Bear House in the celebrated gardens of their stately home and it now houses my collection of more than 1,000 teddy bears, including not a few German ones.

Though the teddy bear gets his name from the 26th US president, Teddy Roosevelt, the stuffed toy bear as we know it was pioneered by a German company, Steiff. My hug (the collective noun for a group of teddies) includes a Paddington given to me by Michael Bond, the original Fozzie Bear presented to me by Jim Henson, a Winnie-thePooh blessed by the real Christopher Robin and (behind reinforced glass) Tony Blair’s bear, Lynton. Now I’m saving up to buy the Steiff Centenary Edition Rupert. He’s a snip at £225.

Goodbye and good luck

Harry Mount has seen how useful royal etiquette was for Prince Harry and Prince Charles. The Sussexes face an exposed life without it

Evelyn Waugh said Americans use good manners to get closer to one another – and the British use them to keep one another at arm’s reach.

There’s a similar clash between the social etiquette of celebs and royals. Sometimes it’s a literal clash.

In October, at the Albert Hall, the Duchess of Sussex tried to hug Kate Robertson, a founder of One Young World, a youth leadership organisation. Robertson, though, was mid-curtsy, and found herself staring at Meghan’s chest.

This sounds trivial. In fact, etiquette is a subtle way of dealing with the awkwardness that comes from being in the company of royalty – those rictus grins and rabbit-in-the-headlights stares you see on TV on the faces of guests at Buckingham Palace receptions.

An adviser to Prince Charles once told me of an encounter the prince had with young people being helped out by the Prince’s Trust. When they first met him, they didn’t bow and tried to have a normal conversation – which turned out to be extremely awkward.

Prince Charles suggested to the adviser that, before he met them again, the youths should be taught to bow, curtsy and call him Your Royal Highness – a mode of address the Sussexes will no longer use.

This adviser told him all the flummery would only increase the awkwardness, but agreed. When they met again, the youths bowed and – hey presto! – the occasion went much more smoothly.

There’s also a system in place to stop the Royal Family from getting trapped by a bore. I know because I once was that bore. At a St James’s Palace party for an architectural charity, I was corralled into a group of four people to meet Prince Charles. These pre-vetted groups of four were dotted round the room so that Prince Charles could be introduced to them by an aide for five minutes’ chat before he moved on to the next group.

I had had several glasses of wine and so tried to engage Prince Charles in too

long and sycophantic a conversation about his watercolours. I kept on talking to him as his aide gestured him over towards the next little group. I eventually realised my time was over as the aide began introducing the next group to him.

It sounds like a ludicrously stagemanaged charade but it works. I once watched the process in action at a Spencer House charity auction. A series of mega-rich tycoons – used to giving the orders – queued up to talk to Prince Charles. One of them was visibly sweating at the prospect of meeting him. Again, an aide took Charles round the room, sweeping him away from any gazillionaire in danger of trapping him.

Prince Harry, like his father, absorbed all these rules in his childhood, and deployed them effortlessly. I met him in April 2015 at Gallipoli, Turkey, for the centenary of the Dardanelles campaign (my great-grandfather was killed at Gallipoli). He followed the same

Take away all the hierarchy and rules and you’re in deep, uncontrolled waters

etiquette as his father, who was also meeting descendants of Gallipoli combatants on the flight deck of HMS Bulwark

Again, we were divided into little groups to meet the princes; again, the princes were moved on seamlessly from group to group by aides. Harry had read his brief closely and knew the Gallipoli stories of our ancestors.

Dressed in his dashing uniform, Harry was helped, too, by military etiquette –he was then two months away from retiring from the Army. The Armed Forces, like the Royal Family, provide a hierarchy and rules that allow a complicated operation to work smoothly.

Take away all that hierarchy and all those rules – rules that Meghan, understandably, found so oppressive –and you’re in deep, uncontrolled waters.

Thus the embarrassing scene when Prince Harry promoted his wife to Bob Iger, head of Disney, last July at the première of The Lion King. Both with Iger and Jon Favreau, the film’s director, Harry acted as Meghan’s agent, saying she was available for voice-overs.

Meghan has duly agreed to do a Disney voice-over in return for a donation to Elephants Without Borders, an anti-poaching organisation.

That exchange – with a prince touting for jobs from business – is unappetising. It also breaks down the sophisticated barriers royal and military etiquette create: the barriers of formality that help keep the monarchy and the Army separate from commercial interests.

As the Queen realised in her deal with the Sussexes, those etiquette barriers, with their deep layers of protection built up over centuries, must stay completely in place; or be removed altogether.

The Sussexes will rightly maintain their security protection. It’s yet to be revealed who will pay for it.

But they have lost the protection afforded by royal etiquette and the HRH forcefield. Their lives won’t necessarily be easier without them.

Royal wave goodbye

Elisabeth Luard

My husband slept with Christine Keeler

Christine Keeler came into my life in 1963.

It was shortly after I was married in St Margaret’s, Westminster, wearing Hartnell white and my grandmother’s mink, to Nicholas Luard. He was co-owner, with Peter Cook, of The Establishment, London’s first and only satirical nightclub, and proprietor at the time of Private Eye, where I’d taken employment as typist and general dogsbody before romance got in the way.

Well before the Profumo scandal broke in Parliament, the Eye and Nicholas were aware of the shenanigans at Cliveden through social connections with the Astors and, among others, the society portrait-painter Dominick Elwes. Links between the satirists and those they satirised were close.

Dom and Nicholas found each other at the Clermont Club, where both were honorary members charged with – how to put it delicately? – attracting the richer kind of punter. Dom was a friend of Stephen Ward, osteopath and supplier of uppers and downers to those in the know, as lifestyle drugs.

Some of us associated women –

Don’t grin and bare it. Keeler in 1963

girlfriends and wives – were more aware of these goings-on than others; not I. Just turned 21 and in the throwing-up stage of pregnancy, I wasn’t interested in chemical interventions; just as well, since Thalidomide was the go-to for morning sickness.

So when Nicholas announced that he and Dom had persuaded Christine Keeler

to sign up to make a movie, The Keeler Affair, with Keeler in the title role, it seemed to me perfectly logical that he and Dom should take her to the Cannes Film Festival to drum up support.

Meanwhile, photographer Lewis Morley took publicity shots for the movie in his studio above The Establishment –including the famous photo of Christine ostensibly naked (actually wearing her undies), seated on a heart-shaped chair.

Many years later, at the launch of Wendy Cook’s memoir of life with her husband, Peter, Lewis told me that he’d never made a penny out of the iconic image and suspected Nicholas of keeping the copyright.

Whoever made the money, I assured Lewis, it certainly wasn’t my husband, or I’d have known.

What I also didn’t know until I discovered the hotel receipt in his pocket was that Nicholas had shared a double room with Miss Keeler. Double rooms were essential, he assured me soothingly, for reasons of economy. Dom had had to share with their canny producer, John Nasht, the only one of the three whose name is in the final credits.

Wilfrid Hyde-White was as charming and mischievous in real life as he was in My Fair Lady, remembers Simon Williams, his friend and co-star

Wasn’t he so loverly?

Ahundred years ago, two would-be actors – my father, Hugh Williams (1904-69), hotfoot from Haileybury, and Wilfrid Hyde-White (1903-91), just out of Marlborough, were new boys at RADA. They became flatmates – and lifelong friends.

Forty-nine years later, when I rang Wilfrid to ask him if he’d do the address at my father’s memorial service, he answered wistfully, ‘Oh, my dear boy, I simply can’t – we shared a dinner jacket for three years at RADA’ (they had to take it in turns to go nightclubbing.)

Thereafter, he’d always send me a telegram on the anniversary of Dad’s death – sometimes with a racing tip.

As RADA students, during an elocution class they were made endlessly to repeat ‘hip-bath’ – a short sound and then a long one. Wilfrid dared Dad to substitute ‘toilet roll’, and they were both sent out of the room for giggling. Wilfrid claimed RADA taught him two things: ‘That I can’t act and it doesn’t matter.’

In any event, voice production was wasted on Wilfrid – he was famously inaudible, choosing to perfect a mumbling naturalistic delivery. His

performance as Colonel Pickering in the film of My Fair Lady (1965) is a masterclass of muttering nonchalance. When he was doing The Reluctant Debutante with Celia Johnson, she told him, ‘The only time I can actually hear you, Wilfrid, is when I’m on stage and you’re chatting in the wings.’

The last thing he ever wanted was to be seen to be trying too hard. Naturalism was everything. I once heard him telling a director, ‘I’ve only got one performance, dear – two suits and one performance.’

He was part of the golden years of drawing-room comedy, whose purpose was to reassure the middle classes that all was right with the world. Theatregoers loved his aura of complicity and mischief. Whenever Wilfrid made an entrance on stage as a West End star, he would acknowledge his round of applause with the genial smile of a host welcoming friends to a whist drive.

At one performance in the final days of a box-office flop, Wilfrid, sitting downstage, leant towards a woman in the front stalls and whispered, ‘Isn’t it an awful play?’

On stage, as in life, he was amazingly unhurried. Legend has it that it was in his

contract that he wouldn’t do matinées during Goodwood week.

Dad and he both went to Hollywood. Dad came home because he refused to get his teeth capped. Wilfrid stayed because he loved the climate. In New York he was twice nominated for a Tony.

Through their careers, my father and Wilfrid took it in turns to be stony broke. They were both declared bankrupt by the Inland Revenue; Dad in the 1950s and Wilfrid in 1979. During Ascot week in 1940, Wilfrid wrote my father a poem:

‘He looked a million dollars and he had precisely one/ The jockeys’ names were in the frame and betting had begun.’

They were both blessed with longsuffering second wives who surrendered their careers to support them. Wilfrid married Ethel Drew in 1957. She was forever at his side as nanny-cum-roadie, always allowing him his eccentricities, if not actually encouraging them.

When I worked with him in 1977 in a production of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, he was the age I am now and getting more mischievous. We were playing father and son, he as Lord Caversham and I as Lord Goring, a renowned dandy.

During one of our scenes together, he took to picking imaginary bits of stuff off my lapel as I delivered Wilde’s bons mots; it became increasingly irritating. I asked him if it was quite necessary – surely my valet would have brushed me down.

‘It annoys you, does it, dear boy?’ he asked.

‘Well … yes, frankly – a bit.’

He continued dusting me off with an added twinkle in his eyes. The remedy was clear. I threaded a short length of cotton from a reel in my inside pocket onto my lapel. As expected, Wilfrid took the bait: with his eyes aglow, he began to pull. I felt the cotton reel revolving against my chest as his fingers became entangled with the unspooling thread.

I smiled – and he smiled back, whispering, ‘You’re learning, my boy; you’re learning.’ He never did it again.

He made a great many films, including Let’s Make Love (1960) with Marilyn Monroe. ‘She was a poppet,’ he chuckled.

He was quite unflappable and a dab hand with put-downs when required. While he was making a film with Michael Winner, the irascible director threw one of his customary hissy fits. Wilfrid muttered to him, ‘For God’s sake, calm down, man, or you’ll have a heart attack before your balls drop.’

I adored him. Like so many of my father’s friends, he was a quasigodfather. A vicar’s son, he didn’t seem to have a ‘belief system’ but he was extremely superstitious.

He took me aside once, saying, ‘Promise me you’ll never wear green.’

Wilfrid wrote, ‘He looked a million dollars and he had precisely one’

I asked him why and he answered, with ominous gravity, ‘Just don’t.’ And I never have since.

When I visited him during the half-hour before a show, I’d find him sitting Zen-like at his dressing table; laid out before him were his mascots, a much-travelled menagerie of tiny animals. Before every performance, he gave each one a gentle tap, in what looked like a benediction.

Occasionally he’d mutter something to one of them, but he didn’t seem to care whether they heard him. What I took to be a glass of whisky on the dressing table in front of him turned out to be Listerine mouthwash. He told me, ‘It tastes just as good, really.’

Wilfrid suffered badly from the cold – in my memory, he is wearing an overcoat at all times. Later in life, he developed narcolepsy. Sleeping

was his hobby, he said. On one of his last visits to London from his home in ‘Palm Springs Eternal’, he told me he had fallen asleep the previous evening while coming down the stairs at the Savoy – quite a feat.

During his latter performances on stage, he took to dozing off on comfortable sofas and it became the duty of his fellow actors to give him a subtle nudge to warn him of an upcoming cue.

We always say of our departed friends, rest in peace. In Wilfrid’s case, when he died in 1991, aged 87, a peaceful rest was a given.

From left: Hugh Williams, c1932; Hyde-White with Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady (1964); on the set of Let’s Make Love (1960) with Marilyn Monroe

I’m far too lazy for country life

Living in the countryside is an exhausting life of constant labour, discovers Dominic West

No one has ever worked me so hard as Tom Hodgkinson, The Oldie’s Town Mouse columnist and co-founder of the Idler magazine. His exhortations to be idle are relentless. His challenges to fill every spare second of our time with useful pursuits have run me ragged over the years.

I was a happily inert strolling player, lounging in my trailer, dressed as a cop and practising how to pronounce ‘daughter’ in American when I was first drawn to Tom’s promise of the idle life.

‘What a good idea!’ I thought. ‘Something to take a load off...’

There followed days at a beekeeping course and weeks of hoping to catch a swarm on a London rooftop, moments away from the honey pots of a local Co-op. I spent hours struggling through Hesiod and murdering the ukulele.

Twice, Tom hauled me onstage at the Idler Academy, his London version of

Plato’s school, and made me explain myself. What was I up to? Where was my philosophy? What had my idling achieved?

As the famous loafer published yet more books and articles on the simple life, I sold up in London and moved to the country, to live according to the seasons and grow my own veg, just as Tom used to in Devon. I laboured in the strawberry patch and among the kale and courgettes, seeking in vain to make a cooked marrow appealing to children.

I raised chickens, rushing out in the middle of the night, barefoot in the mud, when we’d forgotten to lock them away.

I even took up hunting to avenge their mauling by the fox; charging terrified at fences, in the manner of Merrie Olde England.

It was exhausting. I longed to be back at work, just to get some rest. My potbelly was filling with real ale and home-made sourdough. Trying to keep

up with Idle Tom, the sluggish old lazybones who runs an academy, a magazine and an Airbnb; who lectures on bohemian business planning, calligraphy and foraging and has published dozens of books, some of them twice a month… seemed increasingly futile.

Then suddenly came the pandemic and the world, like Tom, got medieval: locking down and working from home. We were reminded of the fragility of our health and of our food supply; reminded too of our need for nature and the inequity and inanity of much of our work.

The householder’s calendar and ‘the fine art of looking after yourself’ seemed to have a new significance. I thanked St Drogo of Sebourg that I now lived in the country, a disciple of Thomas, a prophet and a radical in a long tradition. Wake up, strivers! Grab your almanacs! Let’s get idle again!

Bob Wilson

Barry Cryer celebrates the centenary of his friend – a sadistic, fiendish, brilliant one-off

Tommy Cooper’s surreal magic

The first time I met Tommy was when I wrote for one of his Thames Television shows in the early 1970s.

We were rehearsing in a church hall in Hammersmith. One afternoon, we nipped out for a drink in the Britannia pub nearby. If there were just the two of you, he’d buy you a drink. But he never bought a round. He’d say, ‘I’m not buying drinks for strangers.’

There were only three people in the pub. One of them looked up and said, ‘Oh, it’s Tommy Cooper. Can I tell you a joke?’

So he started telling the joke: ‘ Two men walk into a pub…’

Tommy suddenly interrupted and said, ‘Hold it.’ He turned to the barman and asked, ‘Have you got a bit of paper?’

He got the bit of paper and the man continued: ‘Two men walk into a pub…’

Tommy interrupted again and said to the barman: ‘Have you got a pen?’

Then the man went on: ‘Two men walk into a pub…’

‘Is the name of the pub important?’ Tommy asked.

By this time, the pub was filling up and everyone was noticing what was going on. The man was now red and embarrassed and still trying to tell the joke. At this point, a cameraman from the show came in.

‘Harry, you’ve got to hear this joke,’ Tommy said. Then he turned to the man and said, ‘Would you mind starting again?’

Tommy had this sadistic side to him. He did a similar thing in a pub with a horseshoe bar – where you could look

across to the other side of the bar. Here, again, a man started trying to tell Tommy a joke. Tommy, on the other side of the bar, dropped his trousers – so everyone on his side of the bar was falling about with laughter. And the poor man was thinking his joke had never gone so well.

When Tommy was on tour, he couldn’t walk down the street without someone asking for an autograph.

In London, funnily enough, he didn’t get much trouble. So he could go on the Tube. Once, when he was on the Underground, a poor old beggar with a dog started walking up and down the carriage, saying, ‘I need some food.’

Tommy looked up and said, ‘Eat your dog.’

I wrote for him for around five years. He had a fiendish quality – which could also be very funny. One time at a Water Rats charity lunch, Dean Martin came along. Tommy stood up to speak. ‘It would have been great if Jerry Lewis had been here,’ he said. ‘Along with that one he works with. That Italian.’

Everyone was laughing – including Dean Martin. Now why

Just like that! He played the fool to perfection

would Dean, who had no idea who he was, laugh?

Tommy had a quirky quality. He had funny bones – that indefinable element. He was tall and gangly and played up his clumsiness. But he wasn’t remotely clumsy.

His magic act was apparently chaos. He would be trying to loosen up three interlinked metal rings and then he’d just throw them away.

In fact, he was a brilliant magician –but there are 100 brilliant magicians in this country. He’d say, ‘I’m the fool’ – and that’s what made him unique. It was an extraordinary feat – the audience would realise what a gifted magician he really was and laugh at his mistakes.

It was all meticulously planned. I walked past his table of props once. And it was all written out: ‘Bottles bottom right’; ‘Bowl centre of table’.

Tommy loved props – even off-stage. I was once in the pub next to Thames TV in Teddington. I was chatting to a couple of friends who told me they were meeting Tommy; he was late. And then he suddenly turned up, in dressing gown and pyjamas. ‘I’m so sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘I overslept.’

He had gone to all the bother of

visiting the wardrobe at Thames TV just for this one gag with friends.

His most famous prop was his fez. He used to wear a pith helmet. Then, one day in Cairo in the war, working as a NAAFI entertainer, he forgot the pith helmet. He was in a restaurant, where the waiters wore fezzes. So he just borrowed one from a waiter and it got a huge laugh.

That shows how eccentric – surreal, even – his comedy was. In one act, there was a pedal bin on stage. A few minutes in, he’d suddenly notice it and say, ‘What’s that?’ He’d beam with delight, like a kid with a new toy. He’d turn his back to the bin and work it with his heel.

He was a complete one-off. You can’t say of any other comedian he’s ‘a sort of Tommy Cooper’. One or two comedians tried to copy his clumsy magic act and the audience just thought, ‘Oh, he’s doing a Tommy Cooper act.’

He could say quite ordinary things and they were still funny. Eric Morecambe once went with a young Des O’Connor to see Tommy at the Golden Garter club in Manchester. The club was full. Tommy turned up late as usual, started his act and got lots of laughs.

At one point, a waiter walked in

front of Tommy and, purely by accident, dropped a tray full of glasses.

Tommy leant forward. Everyone was waiting for him to say something – and he just said, ‘That’s nice.’

He got an enormous laugh. Eric said to me, ‘It was brilliant. He wasn’t thinking of doing a funny line. He did a Tommy Cooper line.’

I was once working on a show with Tommy when he suddenly said, ‘Eric and Ernie are downstairs. Come on.’

So we walked down to the studio and I slid in with Tommy. Eric and Ernie were doing their warm-up.

Tommy walked on to the stage and got a big laugh.

Dick Emery was all over the tabloids then. He’d been married several times and had a very active love life.

‘What is it, Tom?’ Eric asked. Tommy, who could cry to order, started sobbing. He then leant on Eric. It was very hard to get rid of Tommy if he was leaning on you. ‘Oh, Eric,’ he said, weeping. Eric in desperation said, ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Dick Emery’s left me,’ Tommy said. Eric Morecambe, to his credit, said, ‘I could have murdered him – but he was very funny.’

Still, it was a breach of protocol. Things had to be about Tommy. If you were in company, talking about current affairs, say, he’d get a pack of cards out and start saying, ‘Pick a card, any card.’ He had to be the centre of attention. There was a formidable ego.

That didn’t mean he was confident. I’ve stood in the wings with him and he was almost trembling. It’s no coincidence that, very sadly, he died on stage, aged 63, in 1984, at Her Majesty’s Theatre, London.

I was watching Tommy that night on TV. When he suddenly sank to his knees, the audience innocently laughed. But I knew something was wrong – varicose veins were a problem – and so did the director, who cued the commercials and got the band playing. Yes, there had been health difficulties and too much drinking. But he was still very good.

Towards the end of his life, an interviewer said it was amazing how Tommy could just walk on stage and people would start laughing.

‘You don’t know how much it takes just to walk on,’ Tommy said.

Barry Cryer (1935-2022) was the MC at Oldie lunches

She starred in Gigi, danced with Fred Astaire and acted opposite Cary Grant. Hugo Vickers meets the great actress as she turns 90

Thank heaven for Leslie Caron

Leslie Caron turns 90 on 1st July. On a spring afternoon, I talked to her from the very room in Wiltshire, where, in the 1950s, the songs of Gigi (in particular The Night They Invented Champagne) were regularly played on my parents’ gramophone, long before I ever had a sip.

Cecil Beaton dressed Leslie in Gigi (1958).

‘I was so fond of him and have such admiration for his behaviour, his huge talent and his discernment – he liked everything new, he was like a young person,’ she says. ‘He was the only designer I ever met who was there in the make-up room, saying “No, no. Take off that rouge.”

‘He just would not forgive any bad taste or vulgarity – would sit with the girls to stop them putting on too many eyelashes. He knew the girls never knew how to wear a hat! The hat was way back [to get seen] when it should be forward. Whenever people talk to me about Gigi, I always say that one of the most important actors in it is Cecil Beaton.’

When filming Gigi, she was a 26-year-old mother with an infant son, yet she carried off the part as a gamine 14-year-old. The costumes were made by Madame Karinska:

‘All the good theatre plays and films were being dressed by her. She had so much talent in interpreting sketches that Cecil trusted her. He went off on holiday with Greta Garbo. I was still feeding my little Christopher. My bosom was a little too voluptuous for a girl of 14 and I said to Madame Karinska, “Why don’t we have braids to keep this little gilet?” Otherwise I looked too maternal. We had military braids. I tried to explain to Cecil. He just clammed up – I had the feeling that he didn’t quite know about the details.’

Alan Jay Lerner thought Gigi greater than My Fair Lady because it was filmed in Paris – in locations such as Maxim’s, the Palais de Glace and the Musée Jacquemart-André. When we were in the studio, ‘a little bit of Paris crept under the studio door’.

‘We did all the most important scenes outdoors. I remember being probably the only person in the world who walked on those red velvet banquettes [in Maxim’s] in my boots to reach my place, as it was so crowded.’

There was a scene with a cat, when she sang Say a Prayer for Me Tonight: ‘Poor cat – actually he hated being in the movie,’ she says. ‘They had to sedate him to the point that I had to keep his mouth closed. I gave the whole song holding his jaw, which was kind of upsetting for someone who loves cats. He was almost comatose.’

Leslie never met Colette, who wrote Gigi, but years later she converted – into an auberge − a mill in Villeneuve-surYonne, quite close to Colette’s village. ‘I used to send the customers to see her birth house.’

When Colette was a child, she begged for money for girls, pregnant out of wedlock, from the owners of the château at Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye. They were so mean that they turned Colette away. ‘Now every room has memorabilia about Colette. Her voice can be heard in recordings. I thought, “ Well done, Colette. You got the château now. Justice has been done.” ’

‘In a good mood, Cary was an entertainer. In a bad mood, there was thunder’

Leslie has had a diverse career in films. She was whisked to Hollywood in 1950 to play in An American in Paris (1951), through to films such as Is Paris Burning? (1966). Il padre di famiglia (1967) won the Prix de Rome, the Italian equivalent of an Academy Award: ‘I was very proud to be in that film. It was exactly the sort of thing I wanted to do. Once you’ve been a Hollywood star, it’s very difficult to move into something else.’

She was brought up in Paris during the German occupation. The scene when she tries to rescue her husband in Is Paris Burning? is what she had lived through:

‘Yes, there were real survivors with numbers written on their skin, looking the worse for wear, and I must admit I was profoundly upset by playing that scene. I wasn’t acting. I think I stayed in my hotel room for several days after that, trying to recuperate for having lived through this drama.

‘The director was very good. There were barking dogs and German soldiers dressed exactly like the ones I remembered. It revived the period in my mind. The actor who played my husband [Tony Taffin] wasn’t healthy – he was well known as an alcoholic –and he looked as though he had been tortured. He was well-cast.’

She was steeped in that fascinating post-war phase of Paris artistic life, training as a dancer with Russians such as Madame Olga Preobrajenska –‘Madame Préo’:

‘Yes it really was a renaissance in everything: music, design, theatre costumes, sets and choreography. Every ballet had four different sets, which was ridiculous. Nobody ever does that any more – even for plays. All that was so luscious, generous and magnificent.

‘In those days, there was a little

nucleus of artists who were very close to each other. And the same people came to every dress rehearsal and gave their advice. Cocteau was one. Boris Kochno was artistic director. I had such admiration for him that I wore the same perfume for 30 years – Fracas by Robert Piguet. Very voluptuous – maybe too voluptuous for me. But I just adored the scent.’

And the great dancer Jean Babilée?

‘Well, Babilée – I never said this for all these years. But I fell madly in love with him, and I think he fell madly in love with me. But of course he had just been married the year before – so this is why I went to America. I was grateful to have this offer – I didn’t know who Gene Kelly was and I had no intention of going into films, but my love for Babilée – I was very Catholic – it had to be broken. So [it was] Hollywood instead. Babilée was the greatest. He was a more remarkable dancer than Baryshnikov or Nureyev.’

Did she like Hollywood?

‘No. I did not. I thought Hollywood was unbelievably boring, if you want my real opinion. After you had visited the tar pits, there was nothing else to look at. There were no museums, no theatres. I had to go 20 kilometres to see films by Bergman or French films, and the only person who went there from Hollywood was Marlon Brando. It took a long time for foreign films to get into the Academy Awards. Eventually, Cannes became important and Hollywood realised there was an enormous public in Europe.’

It must have been a joy to know Christopher Isherwood:

‘Yes, it was our saving. Cecil [Beaton] introduced me to him. Christopher became one of my fathers, the other one being Jean Renoir. Christopher was very down-to-earth and simple. He had no sense of his own importance as a writer – very democratic.’

It must also have been a joy for Fred

‘Dancing was fabulous with both Gene [Kelly] and Fred because they were both fabulous dancers. The style was very different. I was perfectly thrilled to be doing modern dancing and to dance to jazz. That amused me. But, in a way, I thought that Fred was closer to my personality – Gene had something a little more athletic and I didn’t go for athletic quality in dancing. Fred’s style was closer to what I understood.’

Later, she took part in The L-Shaped Room (1962).

‘Romulus Films decided to have a French girl play the part. The producer, Jimmy Woolf, was asked why he had chosen a French girl when the book was written for an English girl.

“Well, I think she’ll be more sexy.” In those days, I think the general consensus was that French girls were sexy and English girls were not.’

Astaire to have such a trained dancing partner for Daddy Long Legs (1955):

She played opposite Tom Bell, who fell from grace at the Baftas, which were being presented by Prince Philip. Bell repeatedly shouted, ‘Give us a joke, Philip!’

‘Prince Philip, very à propos, said, “If you wanted a joke, you should have hired a comedian.” Which had a thunder of applause. And poor Tom Bell never worked in films again. In those days, you simply couldn’t fool around. He was totally banished from films –because of that.’

I ventured four particular qualities that I thought made her a great star –‘dancing, acting, being beautiful and then this wonderful voice…’

‘Voice?’

‘Yes. Unique, special, unusual… Maybe that sounds silly to you?’

‘I have one friend who says that. But of course I cannot sing and I wish I could. I thought singing was the most thrilling thing you could possibly do. Once you have danced for ten or 20 years, you think, “I know something about that.” But singing is something that I could never conquer. I’m a thwarted opera singer. Not even modern; not even jazz singing. I couldn’t really. And you know why? It’s because the breathing is quite wrong. As a dancer, you have to hold your abdomen in, and so I was totally trained that way, and that’s why I couldn’t.’

She played opposite Cary Grant in Father Goose (1964).

‘Cary was fabulous. He was an entertainer when he was in a good mood, telling stories about his beginnings. In a bad mood, there was a thunder.’

Evidently he liked to make her laugh during scenes, which wasted quite a bit of film. ‘In those days, I couldn’t keep a straight face. It was quite painful. He didn’t like his

actresses to be caked with pancake or greasepaint. You can’t see emotion. The lights were so strong – the whole thing was quite artificial. It was difficult to show quick emotions. To this day, I don’t wear any at all and I think it’s the way to keep a good skin.’

Peter Hall was her second husband, having seen her as the Sphinx in the ballet La Rencontre. ‘It was as if a Renoir waif had strayed on to the stage and surprised us with her animal ferocity,’ he said. ‘Then I saw her films. I was half in love with her before I met her.’

He wrote, too, of the excitement of having a son and daughter, contrasting with the anxiety of ‘two hyperactive people leading diverse and demanding lives’.

Leslie explains, ‘He was quite possessive and did not want me to work – even though I was asked to do films. He didn’t want to offer me plays and he broke a contract I had with Stratford, Ontario, and I was very eager to do a season because I thought this would be a good way for me to learn to play Shakespeare and to play classics, and to strengthen my voice.

‘Mind you, I had the children then. It would have been difficult, for three months in Stratford, Ontario, but, having been on the stage since the age of 14, I really could not just be a lady of the manor and prepare the flowers for the dinner. I was passionate about acting, and eventually that’s what broke us up.

‘I’m not sure I can act any more because I am so upset by strong emotions’

But every time I would see him, I had the same feeling of great interest for his intelligence, his talents, his charm. I never stopped loving him in a way.’

A later film was Damage (1992) with Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche, in which she played the dark heroine’s perceptive mother. She does not like playing hard women:

‘It upset me quite a bit. I’m not sure I can act any more because I am so upset by scenes that demand strong emotions or meanness. I get all vulnerable. I can’t see the news in the evening. I can’t see drama in the evening. I actually played my mother, who was in some ways a remarkable woman – in some ways, very difficult – and she had aspects like this character. But I did adore acting with Louis Malle. Louis Malle is so perceptive, a very finely tuned brain.’

I said I liked the scene in the car when she confronts Jeremy Irons.

‘Yes, I thought you would say that. There I was, sitting next to Jeremy, with this blinding yellow suit by Dior, and the cameraman said, “Listen, something has to be done. Jeremy is turning yellow.” So for the close-ups, I had to wear something not colourful. The colour bleeds. I played with a sort of scarf. The technical details are quite amusing.’

And what next?

‘Something really quite interesting. Dame Myra Hess, the great pianist, during the war was quite remarkable, giving free concerts, and the Nash Ensemble with Amelia Freedman wants me to introduce it. I thought at first she was going to give me a script but no – she wants my souvenirs of Paris during the Occupation. I have recited poetry with orchestras for her, about four times, with great pleasure.

‘That’s something I can do.’

Left: with Louis Jourdan in Gigi (1958). Right: with Jeremy Irons in Damage (1992)

End of the Sloane Age

Forty years after writing the Sloane Ranger Handbook, Peter York found the tribe had been exiled from Sloane Square to the country

The idea of Sloane Rangers –the native population of the bestselling Official Sloane Ranger Handbook (Ebury Press, 1982) – started with what I call a Martian moment, a ‘Have you seen it?’ sensation.

Back then sci-fi film writers –rather like David Icke today – used to trade in the idea of strange creatures, like Martians who’d taken human form. In their films, brave, observant, strong-chinned heroes would talk about that little something they’d noticed – such as green blood – that wasn’t 100 per cent familiar.

My Martian moment came with the late Ann Barr (1929-2015), deputy editor of Harpers & Queen in the 1970s, and it was about recognising those girls: uncannily similar upper-middle class girls working in smart London.

You’d see them on the Tube – all in the same Gucci and Hermès kit – and fantasise about introducing them to each other: ‘Caroline, meet Caroline.’ I was

working with girls like that in my proper job as a Boy Executive in Belgravia too.

My first writing about Sloanes –massively edited and improved by Ann, in Harpers & Queen magazine as was (it’s now called Harper’s Bazaar) – was a huge hit in a relatively small pond: Sloane Land itself and among London media types. It wasn’t Big in Barnsley or Bolton then.

But we’d get letters from Army wives in BAOR 40 in Germany, saying their husbands’ muckers or their Hampshire cousins were just like that. Absolutely. That we’d got it spot-on.

I got the credit for the brilliant anecdotes and details Ann had extracted from her own early low-tech version of Facebook – writing to everybody in Sloaneshire, asking for Sloane stories.

By 1981, the Sloane was a fairly famous idea, an easy word for a posh bird (and men too – we’d done Sloane Ranger Man in Harpers & Queen the following year, explaining their secret language, ‘Wa-Wa’). And that Sloane Ranger credit had helped me get my first book published, in 1980.

In 1981, Harpers & Queen’s charming Irish leftie publisher, Stephen Quinn (later the legendarily suave publisher of Vogue) told me proudly that Harpers & Queen was getting its own sub-imprint with Ebury Press, the UK Hearst Group’s book business.

He asked me what books we should do. I wrote a list of four can’t-miss titles. The one at the top – I’ve forgotten the rest, of course – in huge letters was THE SLOANE RANGER HANDBOOK. It was, obvs, because of Diana. Princess Diana, who married Charles in 1981, meant just such a Sloane was the most famous girl in the world. And everyone wanted to know everything about her. I said we had to do it. And quickly.

As a massive bestseller, with two follow-up books, SRH took Sloane culture from a secure and secret thing to being a very public one. For the newly aspirant world of the ’80s, Sloane

became part of the dressing-up box –something to pick and mix. And part of the fashion cycle. The clothes, the interiors, the events, the posh brands were what people wanted, rather than deeply-held beliefs.

Sloanes were widely confused with aristocrats, whereas they were really a sub-set of the upper middles. They seemed then to be an important, settled layer – arguably the marzipan one – in our national cake, with the monarchy at the top and the toffs providing the icing.

If the Sloanes became suddenly, unwittingly, fashionable in the early 1980s, by the end of the decade – after the Big Bang (1986) – they couldn’t have been more out, more wrong. The go-for-it, free-market era did more to undermine Sloane culture than all the various post-war Labour governments, high taxation and the three-day week.

During the later 1980s, the Sloane world started to split and then to fragment under the new pressures of money, ambition and globalisation.

The first big split was between London and the country. The new City investment banks, owned by people from New York, Tokyo and Hamburg, rather than PLU, culled the Sloanes.

Queen of the Sloanes – Lady Di in 1981

Tribal Bible: Sloane Ranger Handbook (1982) by Ann Barr and Peter York

But then they massively rewarded the ones who remained. A huge gulf emerged between younger, rich City and media Sloanes in London, who lived an increasingly shiny, luxurybrand life, and their identically reared country cousins. The country cousins were stuck in the old Sloane jobs, running toffs’ estates or being partners in nice, countytown law firms.

‘Rich Caroline, poor Caroline’ – an acute Harpers & Queen article of 1986 – pointed up the divide between Rich City George and his Caroline (George is on £300K a year – in 1986!) and Poor Julian who’s on something more like £25,000 (about £75K now, and actually not so dusty when the national average was £8.5K-ish). That meant massive belt-tightening and ingenuous little jobs for Poor Caroline: selling tiny antiques, making spinach roulade in industrial quantities for sale, taking in PGs – in order to maintain their grip on What Really Matters In Life.

Rise. This meant meeting completely new kinds of people as neighbours.

Sloanes felt it intensely, keeping up in the big law firms and the smarter PR companies. There was also the whole UnSloane business of self-expression. Self-expression meant Sloane women getting into every kind of therapy as practitioners. Reading your chakras in SW3. Psychotherapists in SW10!

By the noughties, commentators were complaining that the acting trade – a ‘being profession’ – was dominated by people such as Benedict Cumberbatch, Eddie Redmayne and Dominic West. Would there ever be another generation of Michael Caines and Terence Stamps, they asked?

By 2021, there seemed to be every possible shade of Sloane around in London. But were they really Sloanes at all? It looked as if the only way for a Sloane to succeed was to UnSloane themselves. (Made in Chelsea was a positive festival of international rich kids, not Sloanes).

What mattered then was having a place in London and a foot in the country; a house, however battered, in an OK county. And private education – which meant elaborate, impoverishing saving schemes and tapping up kindly old parents. And buying some equally battered 18th-century portraits for the drawing room at the bin end of an auction so the house could look the part.

By the end of the decade, smart Sloane survivors in London were consciously drabbing down the vowel sounds but smartening up the dress codes, avoiding anything that said old-world amateur. Going modern.

And the Sloanes moved. In London, they had to, as New People, many of them from Other Lands, took over those nice central London postcodes – SW1, SW3, SW7 – Sloanes had thought of as theirs. As London became the World City, the smartest bits were taken over by Russian oligarchs and Indian and Chinese billionaires, and South Ken fell to smart young European City types.

Sloanes migrated south and north, from Battersea down to Wandsworth, Balham and the very borders of Tooting. And up north to Queen’s Park and Kensal

At the same time, the most delicious front-of-Country Life old houses in nice counties, in good nick and accessible from London, began to command a hefty premium as these new global people cherry-picked them, too. In fact, the international rich cherry-picked everything delicious in the old Sloane world. There were scary reports of Eastern European plutocrats’ children in famous British schools carrying on their parents’ vendettas in brutal ways!

Money, education – especially for girls – and globalisation of practically everything tore that very homogenous Sloane culture apart. It wasn’t just ’80s greed-is-good ambition, though London

Diana was a major cautionary tale. Sloanes had loved her at the beginning (her ‘Shy Di’ portrait in that three-row pearl choker on the cover of our book said it all!). But Her Own Story as it developed had them confused and disapproving. From 1981 to 1997, it became clear that Shy Di wasn’t a Muddling Through Sloane at all, but a headstrong aristocrat. Slimmed-down, she’d become a fashion plate and knocked about with an international set of gay fashion designers and pop stars – rather than the people who’d shyly hoped they were her own folk.

And then there was Tim – Tim Nice-But-Dim, the brilliant comic creation of Private Eye’s Ian Hislop and his school friend co-writer Nick Newman for Harry Enfield. All three knew the second-tier life from the inside.

Tim, first seen in Harry Enfield’s Television Programme in 1990, is an affectionate portrait of a born loser: a trusting amateur with no saleable skills, but with a touching faith in the toff Establishment (‘bloody nice bloke’ is his favourite endorsement), City slickers and media smarties who dismiss him as a bumbling idiot.

Things end really badly for Tim. Conned out of everything he’s got (shades of the disastrous Sloanedecimating Lloyd’s Names disaster of 1997), he ends up sleeping in a cardboard box outside the Lloyd’s building.

Tim Nice-But-Dim (Harry Enfield)

Bloody nice blokes – plus totty –at Ascot, 1986

Nicky Haslam remembers meeting Francis Bacon, the eminence mauve of the Colony Room Club, in 1950s Soho

Queen of Camp

The Royal Academy has posted trigger warnings of – deep breath – ‘adult content’ on paintings in its new Francis Bacon show.

But just how ‘adult’ are they? They are anything but. Instead, Bacon depicts sophisticated but infantile images of bad dreams and worse memories, decked out on modish furniture – which, in an earlier career as an interior decorator, he designed – and they’re imprisoned by linear structures to impart a Giacomettiish, hard-edged modernism.

The sheer grotesqueness of Bacon’s images was once considered the acme of Freudian night sweats. Now they seem more like storyboards for some Squid Game spin-off – the very thing, these days; the stuff of a five-year-old’s yearnings.

Dear old Francis is beginning to look dated – quite apart from the fact that much of his work is really rather bad. While the major works are (along with, say, Basquiat) apples in collections of those who have precious little eye or taste, the impact of their flaunted frightmarishness can somehow seem merely decorative.

Isn’t Bacon’s work the epitome of high camp? There’s nothing wrong with that. Many breathtakingly innovative artists produced profoundly camp paintings: Parmigianino, Caravaggio, Fragonard, Beardsley, Dalí and let’s not forget Warhol.

Bacon was an accomplished enough draughtsman to bring high camp to a new low. Those isolated, twirling, multi-faceted figures bring to mind Gustave Moreau’s Sirens – vampiresque brides stripped bare of their rococo rockery surroundings, or the contorted, bleached flesh of his dying Apparition But Moreau was a far happier camper than Bacon, for whom melancholy is outstripped by angst.

I do not mean to use the c word pejoratively. Many people’s lives –including Francis’s – were led on the high-camp wire in a kind of postwar

euphoria. In the late ’50s, eager from school, I was taken to the Colony Room Club, known as Muriel’s, in Soho. Up the wonky, viridian-green-painted stairway of a tumbledown Georgian house, past a landing – and lav of indescribable chaos – the door opened to Muriel. Large-featured and solid, she perched surprisingly elegantly on a bar stool, delivering her famous greeting, ‘Hello, Cunty,’ in a smoke-ridden and alcoholperfumed room.

There the cleverest, most waspish and campest (in its humorous, rather than sexual, sense) artists, writers, journalists of the time gathered, drunker and drunker, to bitch about all others outside its grimy windows and, more remorselessly, those inside.

Francis, with his piercing eyes and jerky smile in a face that looked as if it had had ‘work’ long before such a thing seemed possible, was the Colony’s eminence mauve, and a great friend of my first lover, the artist Michael Wishart (1928-96). I was quickly swept into his galère – the painters Colquhoun and MacBryde, John Minton and some ravishingly beautiful girls, Henrietta Moraes and Diana Melly, George Melly’s wife.

The photographer John Deakin was a former passion of the exotic American moneybags Arthur Jeffress. Deakin hurried me, soon after our first meeting, to his ramshackle flat off Edgware Road for a portrait session. The result became

the cover of my autobiography, Redeeming Features

A plethora of books on Lucian Freud, both hagiographic and chatty, tumbles off the presses, thick and vast. There have been fewer about Bacon, once the closest of Lucian’s friends but, by the time I was around, his bitter rival.

I can’t recall ever seeing Lucian at Muriel’s. Initially married to Michael Wishart’s cousin Kitty Epstein, Lucian had an almost daemonic allure. It shot him into a social stratosphere alien to Francis’s more earthly delights. Beyond mutual denigration, both had drawn a veil over their shared past.

Neither had much truck with nostalgia, which shows in the early, surreal work of both artists. They both fought – and eventually won – a war against the soft realism of living British painters, and the self-proclaimed art lordship of the École de Paris with its Tachiste canvases.

Both deeply private with their personal emotions, not for many decades to come would Lucian sometimes, and Francis rarely, let a little limelight into their creative dual monarchy.

Now the art dealer James Birch, whose parents were among Bacon’s intimate friends, has published a fascinating account of his friendship with the Francis he knew from childhood. It centres on his cherished quest to take the first-ever exhibition of Bacon’s work, and Bacon himself, to Moscow in 1988.

The tangled process involves dodgy Russian entrepreneurs and beautiful lady spies, Grayson Perry, the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, Francis’s long-term love object (and heir) John Edwards and, not unnaturally, Francis himself.

The twists and turns, vagaries of plots and promises, the letters and loopholes and Francis’s changes of mind about attending the opening – he eventually agreed but was prevented by his acute asthma – make for fascinating reading, like some latter-day mix of Kafka and Firbank. Like Bacon’s work, perhaps.

Francis Bacon strikes camp. Soho, 1970

Mary Killen’s Fashion Tips

Don’t worry – and don’t be happy Steer clear of frowning, smiling and ‘spalling’. Repetitive use of facial muscles produces wrinkles

It’s an inconvenient truth that complexion quality is 70 per cent down to genetics and only 30 per cent down to the effort we put into careful curation.

Still, there is absolutely no excuse for throwing in the towel if your mother looked a wreck. The mothers of today’s oldies simply didn’t know how damaging sunbathing was, nor how dehydrating to wash their faces roughly with soap and water.

Today, we know that sunbathing is ageing and we cleanse our faces with special unguents before gently patting in moisturiser.

In South Korea, where beauty culture is so important, a demanding skincare regime – involving double cleansing, toning, masks, sun protection and moisturisers – begins in early girlhood.

But there is more to looking good than skin curation. Wrinkles are hovering, longing to be formed. To tackle these pre-emptively, we need to correct certain bad personal habits. Chief among these is what is known in the north of England as spalling.

Pause for a while on any high street and sit quietly, watching the passers-by. You will soon observe that most pedestrians, walking alone, are doing so with their faces ‘screwed up’ – spalling. They are either squinting or wearing a rictus grin – the default facial expressions we adopt when walking outside unaccompanied.

There was some truth in that old wives’ warning to children, ‘If the wind changes, your face will be stuck like that.’

Any repetitive contraction of the underlying facial muscles will eventually lead to wrinkle formation and our faces will indeed be stuck like that.

Some of us are also in the habit of constantly raising our eyebrows – not always to denote scepticism.

Then there is lip-pursing and scowling. Turn that frown upside down! Actually, don’t – because repetitive smiling will also leave its imprint around the eyes.

Any facial contortion, if held habitually, will leave its legacy. When going to sleep, do not squash your face into a heap of comfy pillows. The result in the morning will be facial quilting, which, yes, will disappear as the morning wears on … until one day it won’t.

Nature wants you to use all the facial expressions in the repertoire you were born with – not just one set-in-stone gargoyle face you have got into the bad habit of wearing continuously.

Ten tips for preventative action:

1. Wear mascara only for special occasions. Even when done gently, the action of taking off the mascara does cumulative damage to the super delicate skin around the eyes.

2. Never rub your eyes: even if you have a really bad itch, just resist the urge. Dampen a cotton pad and place it carefully on your shut eyelids until the itch goes away.

3. Always wear sunglasses when out and about – even when it’s not particularly sunny. Otherwise you’ll find yourself squinting, and fine lines will form.

4. Wear sunscreen on your face and hands all year round, even inside the house, because the ‘blue light’ coming off your computer screen is now suspected of inflicting the same skin damage as sunlight.

5. Try to limit alcohol intake. It’s dehydrating, and crêpiness will set in if you don’t give your body some days to rehydrate. But we are only human and the rush of exhilaration seems worth it at the time. And it often is worth it – just don’t do it too often.

6. Try not to smoke or vape: pursing the lips is wrinkle-forming. Use nicotine-replacement lozenges or mini pellets instead.

7. In winter, wear a snood or some kind of cashmere scarf all around the face. Cold air and, worse, wind are just as damaging as hot sun.

8. Avoid tech neck: a double chin will form – even if you’re young – if you constantly look down into your screen. These days, Hollywood stars keep their screens on eye-level stands, and beautyconscious younger women send each other voice notes rather than texts. They can listen to and dictate messages with heads upright rather than constantly looking down and growing a double chin as they do so.

9. Train yourself out of pulling silly faces when walking along a street. At home, avoid eyebrow-raising, lip-pursing and scowling. Remember that if you screw up your face, you screw up your face.

10. Nature granted you a full repertoire of facial expressions for communication purposes – so don’t have Botox. If the object of Botox is to make more people think you are unwrinkled and therefore attractive, then it backfires.

If others can’t ‘read’ you, they will find your company unnerving and want to see less – not more – of you.

Watch out, Joker! Jack Nicholson’s grin is in the wrinkle danger zone

CUT!

Films are now too long – and boring. Bruce Beresford, Hollywood director, explains why movies broke through the three-hour mark

Martin Scorsese’s new film Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, is running at three hours 20 minutes. The Cannes festival officials are asking, no doubt cautiously and respectfully, if it could be trimmed before the May festival.

During the past 20 years, a considerable number of films have hovered around the three-hour mark. It’s a striking shift from the previous 70 years, when a film of even two hours was considered too long for its content. Silent films were generally under 90 minutes; many were around 60 minutes. Exceptions were rare, the most notable being those of pioneer director D W Griffith: Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1917) were both over three hours. Neither film started a trend. Griffith’s career petered out through the 1920s and ended with his inability to handle dialogue scenes in the sound era.

During the early sound era – from 1930 – few films were as long as 90 minutes. Even the 1932 version of A Farewell to Arms managed to squash the Hemingway novel into 89 minutes. Before I’m challenged by film buffs, I should point out that the 1934 French version of Les Misérables ran for nearly five hours and remains easily the best of the many adaptations of Hugo’s epic.

In 1939, producer David Selznick ignored the standard belief that a two-hour film was probably half an hour too long. His adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind ran at three hours 40 minutes and was a huge success. Even today, despite charges of political incorrectness, it has retained its popularity. Unlike so many of the three-hour-plus epics of the modern era, the story and characters are complex enough to sustain the viewer’s attention.

I’ve worked out, or stumbled across, the two key reasons that so many very long films have been made since 1990.

First, home theatres can now have huge screens and high-quality sound systems. People are happy to stay at

home and watch projects made for TV, which can easily run to 40 and 50 episodes of at least an hour each.

The COVID epidemic almost guaranteed captive audiences, which gave producers carte blanche to slow up the pace – often to a standstill. Their audience wasn’t going anywhere. Viewers were happy to spend an entire weekend in front of the screen with a few drinks and snacks.

Now, post-COVID, audiences who are trickling back into cinemas are subjected to many films running over three hours. A few are popular – Avatar and Elvis, notably – but many are rejected. A three-hour film with no toilet-break interval is a daunting prospect.

Another key factor in the rise of epic-length films is the ascendancy of superstar directors, allied to the breakdown of the studio system and the end of close supervision of ‘product’ by production executives.

The most celebrated example of interference is the RKO studio’s removal of at least an hour of Orson Welles’s second film, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).

The released version, a failure, was a disjointed mess. Worst of all, the negative of the removed scenes was destroyed. Any hope of a more complete version –a ‘director’s cut’ – was eliminated.

Similarly, Darryl Zanuck had no hesitation in altering the work of legendary director John Ford. He recut scenes in Ford’s superb western

My Darling Clementine (1946), and even brought in another director to add close-up shots of the actors in Ford’s superb final scene, which destroyed the delicate mood Ford had created.

By the time of Heaven’s Gate (1980), Michael Cimino’s three-and-a-half-hour western, the situation had changed. Led by the French critics, the director as auteur was placed on a pedestal. Studio interference in the editing process was vehemently disparaged and minimised.

This led to some remarkable films but ignored the fact that some directors –perhaps all of them – need to listen to, and sometimes take, advice. And so Heaven’s Gate was a tedious film which bankrupted the production company.

There has been a tsunami of overlength films since 1980 – as well as many films that are overlong even though their running time is two hours or less.

Audiences have struggled with Magnolia (1999 – three hours, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson), Ken Branagh’s 1996 Hamlet (four hours), Christopher Nolan’s incomprehensible Interstellar (three hours, 2014) and two epics from Quentin Tarantino – The Hateful Eight (2015; hateful) and the inventive but protracted Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

This year, as well as Avatar and Elvis, Bardo (159 minutes, 2022) by the gifted Mexican director Alejandro Iñárritu is stylish and technically superb but plotless and burdened with impenetrable philosophising. Still, an audience watching it at home with slices of pizza and some soothing drinks could find it engaging, or at least tolerable.

Rather than making films for cinemas – and being aware of the vast home audience – producers today favour series, often detective or fantasy stories, with innumerable episodes. The pacing of feature films is no longer given high priority.

Bruce Beresford directed Oscar-winning Driving Miss Daisy (1989). The film is just one hour and 39 minutes long

Orson Welles: cut down by RKO

Nancy Mitford, Queen of the Adriatic

In 1957, Gill Johnson, 25, left London for a Venetian palazzo to teach English to the children of the Brandolini family. One day, at the Venice Lido, she spotted a familiar figure…

She seemed unattached, sitting in pointed isolation, as if the tide had brought her in and plonked her on the beach. She clearly wasn’t Italian.

It was mid-morning, pre-season. No Italian woman would be seen dead on the beach before 12.30, even in high season.

I walked past her a couple of times. I recognised her but couldn’t put my finger on why. She was about my mother’s age, early fifties: clear, smooth, pale skin, high forehead, sad emerald eyes with eyelids that draped like curtains, making her look intelligent and difficult.

Her scimitar-shaped eyebrows and elegantly angular bone structure fashioned a face that seemed both of its day and timeless. She looked like an eternal type of beauty that I’d seen in paintings. She wore a tight pearl necklace, a pale blue, sleeveless, knee-length dress and a narrow-brimmed straw hat.

The next day, she was there again, this time talking to an overweight man.

Instead of the short Os and As of Italian, I picked up the elongated and elevated eewhs and urrhs of cut-glass gold-standard upper-class receivedpronunciation English, the accent of the ruling classes, the intonation of my parents’ era, such as a female cherecter in an Oscar Wilde play might have.

‘So we ended up winning the waaaar,’ she was saying to her companion, ‘but losing the Empiiiire and finding ourselves in hock to Ameeeerica. That’s civilisation for you! So never mind the Bright Young Thiiiings. This is a time of pulling in, dressing down and not looking rich…’ She spoke with an up-and-down cadence, as if singing a recitative.

It was then that I realised I was

eavesdropping on Nancy Mitford. I walked a few paces out on to the beach and called to the two boys I was looking after and happened to turn.

Nancy was eyeing me. ‘Are you the new girl, or are you [my predecessor as nanny] Miss Payne’s understudy?’ she said, from her deckchair.

‘I’m the new girl. Miss Payne has left.’

‘Good for you. So you’re superintending Ruy and Leonello, are you?’

‘If you can call it that. My official job is to teach them English, but they already speak it perfectly.’

Nancy raised a hand in a slightly dismissive gesture. ‘Clearly your real job is not to teach them English but to do something else,’ she said, sitting still like a graven image. ‘Have you worked out what that something is yet?’

‘Erm, no. Keep them company while the Contessa is away? Raise their game?

Solve the riddle to unlocking their potential? Turn them into young gentlemen of the world?’

Nancy gave me a shrewd look that I could have sworn meant, ‘Really? Why have they employed you, then?’

‘Or perhaps just add the common touch,’ I added pre-emptively.

Nancy smiled. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Teach them to organise state occasions, that sort of thing. I’m surprised they haven’t gone to boarding school in England, somewhere cherecter-building. I’m Nancy.’ She made no indication she wanted to shake hands, but simply sat back and stretched out her legs.

Her accent! Her intonation! Her speech had a singsong, high-low pitch, but the final word of each sentence came out as a long, slow drawl. There had been no vowel shift in her diction since I should think the early-19th century

‘I’m Giulietta or Gill. My job

Deb in Venice: Nancy Mitford at the Hotel Cipriani, 1957

description seems to be understood but not spelt out or even stated.’

‘Keeping things as vague as possible is precisely how they should be,’ she said. She hung her hands limply over the armrests of her deckchair, her fingertips pointing towards the beach. Far from using her hands to articulate her speech, Nancy made only the occasional cavilling gesture.

As I sat down, her eyes fixed on the Georgette Heyer novel that I held, still bookmarked with a finger.

‘What do you like about her?’

‘I’m hoping that someone can tell me! That’s why I keep reading them – to try to find out. I was introduced to her novels in 1949, my last year at school. I’ve been addicted ever since.’

‘How marvellous.’ Nancy laughed, her shoulders shaking. Her laugh took 15 years off her. It was also, I thought, a nervous laugh.

‘I think every woman should read Georgette Heyer before being allowed to vote, marry or open a bank account,’ Nancy continued.

‘Or look after other people’s children,’ I chimed in.

Nancy’s emerald gaze rested on me briefly. ‘How did you get the job?’ she asked.

‘I was working at the National Gallery when my fiancé decided to move to Paris.’

A wariness stole into Nancy’s eyes. ‘Odd thing for a fiancé to do. Trying to escape?’

‘No, no.’ I laughed. ‘We weren’t engaged then. We are now, I think. Instead of festering in London,’ I said, turning my body slightly towards Nancy, ‘I thought I’d better show some initiative and go abroad too.’

‘Where in Paris?’

‘Rue Jacob. Hôtel Danube.’

Once again, I felt emeralds X-raying me. Nancy had been living in Paris for 11 years. Her address, rue Monsieur, was a ten-minute walk from rue Jacob. I suspect that as soon as she learnt that ‘my fiancé’ was living in Paris, she became cautious. ‘What were you doing at the National Gallery?’

‘Selling postcards, posters, calendars, things like that.’

‘Endless Hay Wains and Fighting Temeraires.’

‘Ha! Yes. I think a lot of people went

to the gallery just to say they’d seen The Hay Wain.’

Her emerald eyes gave nothing away. I realised this wasn’t a friendly chat but a trial of strength. ‘Promotion meant I had to behave,’ I said, ‘be responsible and try to take things seriously.’

‘Frightful thought!’

‘It wasn’t me. I didn’t want to risk becoming part of the furniture. But obviously I’ve no idea what I really want to do, except…’ I tailed off, unsure of what to say

‘So you took a different turning in the labyrinth of life,’ said Nancy, helping me along. ‘Understandable. Delusional happiness and confidence based on almost complete ignorance are far more useful, effective and persuasive forces, and have achieved far more in history, than doubt based on knowledge ever will. Congratulations.’

‘I saw you yesterday,’ I said. ‘Do you spend much time on the Lido?’

Nancy stared down at the beach for slightly longer than seemed comfortable. ‘Only most of the time, but not intentionally so. I come here every year for a holiday. It’s lovely to see friends, swim, drift about, take in the architecture, that sort of thing. But this is pre-season.

Her laugh took 15 years off her. It was a nervous laugh

‘The stampeding hordes arrive in late August. Not me at all. Know-nothing tourists over for the party. “Supersewerage and a ball every night,” as my father [Lord Redesdale, aka “Farve”] would say. But I love the place to bits at other times of the year. It’s a better class of gutter, slightly falling to pieces – but aren’t we all?’

A blue-shirted waiter, who was doing the rounds with a silver tray, stopped and asked us if we would like iced water with lemon.

‘Thenk you.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I expect you know Venice quite well,’ said Nancy, holding a glass of iced water to her lips.

‘A little. I like the churches and the art.’

‘Hate Titian and loathe Tintoretto,’ she said, taking a sip, putting her glass down, sitting back and crossing her feet.

‘Palette scrapings and paint samples. Just can’t get interested. It’s probably a psychological defect. I’ll bet that a lot of Venetian painting was a way of promoting Venetian merchandise. All those gorgeous silks, brocades and damasks were early soft-furnishings catalogues with a bit of fashion show thrown in. Clever, really. By the time Canaletto arrived, the perspective broadened out to Venice itself, rather than what Venice sold.’

‘I’m with you on Titian.’ I felt relieved to be able to talk about something I knew.

‘Although Titian was head, shoulders

Very Grand Canal: Gill Johnson on the balcony of Palazzo Brandolini, 1957

and torso above Tintoretto,’ said Nancy. I ate into my stock of small talk simply to prolong the conversation, while trying not to bore her or sound over-curious. The food here is awfully good, isn’t it? … How do you find Venetian coffee?

‘You mentioned “school”,’ said Nancy, clutching her hands at chest height.

‘Yes. St Mary’s Calne,’ I said. ‘Before that I was herded around, dodging bombs and doodlebugs.’

‘You obviously survived those, but what about school? President of the debating society? Captain of hockey?’

‘Strangely, I wasn’t picked for the hockey team,’ I said. I sensed a Mitford tease. In The Pursuit of Love, Uncle Matthew, a portrayal of Nancy’s father, dismissed hockey girls as having ‘legs like gateposts’. ‘Anyway,’ I continued, crossing my legs, ‘I was too busy being naughty –and I haven’t finished yet.’

Nancy’s body shook with laughter, which seemed genuine as well as nervous, as if laughing to relieve tension. She rested her forearms on the armrests of her chair. ‘Thet sounds promising.’

‘The most important things I learnt at school,’ I added, ‘were strategic thinking and resourcefulness, not what I was taught.’

‘Quite. Quite,’ said Nancy. ‘Why bother to be good at something when you can pretend?’ She closed her eyes and held her face towards the sun. ‘Still, it probably doesn’t pay to show too much strategic thinking and resourcefulness. People might get strange ideas, especially in Italy. La bella figura means playing dumb, to an extent. They don’t have the same freedoms here as in England.

Without artists, Venice would be a fishing village on stilts

‘Venice,’ she continued, ‘is bewildering enough even in broad daylight. Didn’t Shakespeare write something about indirections and misdirections in The Merchant of Venice? You need a prayer book to get around, not a map.

‘Whose barmy idea was it to build palaces and churches in a lagoon? Close your eyes a moment and imagine the planning meetings that came up with the idea of building palazzi on wooden piles driven into the sand. The more one thinks about it, the madder Venice seems.’

Not an iota of Parisian-ness seemed to have rubbed off on Nancy. Besides her habit of occasionally dropping French words for that mot juste, her dress, speech and attitude came across as a satire of an Englishwoman abroad.

Take her attitude to seaside holidays. She regarded a seaside holiday as literally a holiday by the sea. She wanted to get to the beach early, not to beat the crowds (there weren’t any) but because getting to the beach early was what any sensible English person would do on a seaside holiday. Why stay in bed when there were beaches to be sat on? Mitford genes would never have tolerated dolce far niente

Neither highbrow nor voluptuous, Nancy came across as vereh well-bred and intelligent. Women then were naïve by default, suppressed into a state

of emotional and intellectual deprivation. We weren’t supposed to talk about anything worth talking about. Of course, I didn’t fully grasp the extent of this syndrome. But I sensed it, and so did Nancy

At the Lido, I said to her, ‘You mentioned that the Venetian aversion to self- aggrandisement and personality cults was built into the political system, but the opposite applied in the world of art…’

‘Yes, thank goodness!’ she said. ‘They built a political system that was so complicated that only a Venetian would be able to understand it, but the brilliance of Venetian art was immediately obvious to everyone who saw it. Artists were celebrated and venerated, as Emperor Charles V did when Titian allowed him to pick up his paintbrush. Dynasties of artists reigned supreme, Bellini, Vivarini, Tintoretto, Bassano, Longhi, Tiepolo, Palma Vecchia, Palma Giovane, Canaletto … complete inverse to the political system.

‘Without that lot, Venice would be a fishing village on stilts. So the moral of my story is... Actually – haha – I forgot.’ Once again, laughter took years off her. ‘But I still prefer the Florentines, Raphael, Botticelli and especially Andrea del Sarto.’

The waiter handed round bowls full of mint ice cream.

‘Ah, the ultimate toothpaste,’ said Nancy. Turning to me, she asked, ‘How long are you staying in Venice?’

‘At least until the end of the year.’

‘How do you find the palazzo?’

‘It’s so beautiful, especially the Palma Vecchio frescos.’

‘It’s beyond reach of any estate agent’s glossary, isn’t it? But one could never accuse it of being troppo cosy,’ Nancy said.

‘You wouldn’t want to pass out in there, not with all that marble.’

‘The palazzo needs about 20 years of being lived in. I do like a bit of shabbiness.’

As the sun dipped, the shadows lozenged. It was time to go.

‘Thank you for letting me join you,’ said Nancy.

‘It’s not my beach to prevent you.’ I smiled. ‘Same time tomorrow?’

Once again, a wistful look filled her eyes. ‘I should be delighted. Thenk you.’

Love from Venice: A Golden Summer on the Grand Canal by Gill Johnson was published in 2024

Maria Poppins: Ruy Brandolini d’Adda and Gill Johnson at the Venice Lido

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