The Old Un’s Notes

Will Boris Johnson finally fall from office – thanks to the Case of the Three Sirloin Steaks at the Garrick Club?

As Stephen Glover wrote in his Oldie media column, he co-hosted a dinner at the Garrick for the Prime Minister and his old Telegraph colleagues last year. The Prime Minister’s three police bodyguards ‘wolfed sirloin steak at [Glover’s] expense’.

And now a retired police sergeant has written to Met Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick, before her resignation, asking for an explanation.

The retired sergeant said to her, ‘Thousands of public pounds have been wasted on non-existent police expenses, called “refreshers”, and I daresay that a Garrick sirloin steak with the trimmings and a drink goes well into £40 plus.’

The Commissioner’s office has passed on the letter to a Chief Superintendent in the Royalty and Specialist Protection squad.

There is no suggestion the bodyguards claimed expenses for the steaks. But surely someone should pay poor Stephen Glover back!

‘This boy is not suitable for university,’ declared the Dean of King’s College, Cambridge, after interviewing the lad who grew up to become the first presenter of University Challenge.

Bamber Gascoigne, who died in February, aged 87, won a scholarship to Eton at 13.

Once there, he was daunted by the intellects of fellow scholars (two of them used to play chess at meals without a board). Consequently he became merely ‘the sort of chap who played games’.

At 16, the unsuitable boy, asked about his interests by the Dean, gave a highly disappointing reply: ‘Shooting and fishing.’ He hastily and untruthfully added ‘reading’ – but was stumped when asked what he was reading at the time.

Finally, he remembered his grandmother was halfway through The Cruel Sea. What did he think about this gung-ho wartime yarn which wasn’t exactly on the A-level syllabus? Er, ‘It’s about convoys crossing the Atlantic.’

Chastened by the Dean’s verdict, and tutored by more academic fellow Etonians, he worked so hard that he won an exhibition to Magdalene, where he achieved a First in his first year.

In his second year he informed Arthur Sale, his supervisor later described by his pupil John Simpson as the best English teacher in Cambridge, that he wouldn’t be handing in any essays for a bit. He was writing and directing the college revue, Share My Lettuce. It transferred to the West End. Gascoigne pulled off Firsts in not only his second but also his third year.

Not bad for someone who wasn’t university material.

This year is the 80th anniversary of Desert Island Discs, first broadcast on the BBC Forces Programme on 29th January 1942.

But how do you qualify to get on the show?

Bruce Beresford, Oldie contributor and director of Oscar-winning Driving Miss Daisy (1989), cheerfully admits that he’s tried to appear – without success.

‘Anxious to broadcast my music choices and book and luxury selection, I’ve often wondered how to become a guest on the programme,’ says Beresford. ‘The BBC website offers no advice on the matter – so I assume an invitation from the producer is the only method. Despite this and despite my innate reticence, I have made a number of attempts, over many

Triple first: Bamber Gascoigne

Among this month’s contributors

Tom Ward (p16) played Dr Harry Cunningham in Silent Witness. He was also in Doctor Who, Death Comes to Pemberley, Vanity Fair and The Infinite Worlds of HG Wells.

Jonathan Meades (p20) wrote Pedro and Ricky Come Again and An Encyclopaedia of Myself. His latest BBC film is Franco Building with Jonathan Meades. The cartoon of him (left) is by Mark Boxer.

Duncan Campbell (p31) was a senior reporter and correspondent at the Guardian from 1987 to 2010. He wrote The Underworld: the Inside Story of Britain’s Professional and Organised Crime.

Daisy Dunn (p34) is a classicist and the author of Not Far from Brideshead: Oxford Between the Wars. She also wrote In the Shadow of Vesuvius and Catullus’s Bedspread.

Important stories you may have missed

‘Reckless’ drivers exchange sandwich on M90 Dundee Courier

Delayed opening as leak discovered at new Ripon pool Harrogate Advertiser

Mum ‘overwhelmed’ with response to new hairthickening clinic Lancashire Telegraph

£15 for published contributions

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‘They still haven’t solved this one’

years, no doubt establishing myself as an eccentric, persistent menace.’

In 1980, Beresford’s film Breaker Morant was shown in London. ‘Perhaps overemphasising its impact, I called the BBC to express my enthusiasm in being a Desert Island Discs guest,’ he says. ‘There was no response.’

In 1982, he was nominated for an Oscar for directing the film Tender Mercies.

He says, ‘I didn’t win. Perhaps if I had, I’d have made it onto the programme.’

Then, in 1989, he directed Driving Miss Daisy which actually won the Academy Award for Best Film.

‘I thought I was now a Desert Island Discs certainty,’ he says. ‘I was not.’

Now, at the age of 81, Beresford is in England, directing a film about Isaac Newton. Might this be his big chance?

He says, ‘I’m not as celebrated as the two most recent guests I’ve heard on the show – Sophia Loren and Garry Kasparov – but who knows?’

Henry Lamb (18831960) was rare among war artists in also being a war hero – as well as being a doctor. He won an MC in the First World War.

In 1915, Lamb (pictured in Daisy Dunn’s feature on page 34) tended to the wounded Allied soldiers in Fécamp, Normandy. He also drew the nurses, doctors and patients.

A Henry Lamb show, including the Fécamp pictures, is at Messums Gallery, London, until 18th March. Proceeds go to the Longford Trust for ex-offenders, set up in memory of Lord Longford, Lamb’s brother-in-law.

Trevor Lyttleton, an

Oldie-reader, was intrigued by the article about Rose Heilbron KC, the first Old Bailey female judge (January issue).

In 1958, as an articled clerk at Bromley & Walker, he attended the trial at Leeds Assizes of the infamous serial killer Mary Elizabeth Wilson. Rose Heilbron KC was defence counsel.

Known as the Merry Widow of Windy Nook, Wilson was convicted and sentenced to death for murdering her last two husbands with phosphorus poison. She had in fact lost four husbands in three years. All four were found to have died of phosphorous poisoning after her death, following the exhumation of her first two husbands’ bodies.

At the start of the trial, Rose Heilbron KC was interrupted during her defence submission by a juror who rose to address Mr Justice Hinchcliffe in the following unforgettable terms:

Juror: Please, m’lud, I wish to be excused.

Judge: And on what grounds do you wish to be excused?

Juror: Because my wife is about to conceive.

Judge: Surely you mean she is about to be confined – but either way I think you ought to be there! (Laughter in court)

Judge: Silence in court!

Mr Justice Hinchcliffe then placed the black cap on his wig and imposed one of the last death penalties in Britain as he sentenced the Merry Widow of Windy Nook to death by hanging.

The sentence was tempered by mercy: she was later reprieved owing to her advanced age. She died in Holloway Prison in 1963.

Scotsman Lord Foulkes recently made a parliamentary speech, pleading the case for peers who live, as he does, far from the capital.

London-based lords, argues Foulkes, can eat breakfast at home, sleep in their own beds and easily accept second jobs because they don’t have to travel so much. And they can slip into Parliament at weekends when no one else is about in order to ‘run off documents’.

Using the office printer for free when the clerks aren’t looking? Oops. Has George just betrayed one of the secret perks of being a peer?

The Oscar Wilde Society’s third Wilde Wit

Fécamp soldier – Henry Lamb