FELICITY KENDAL AT 75 SUPER MINI COOPER TURNS 60
August 2021 | £4.95 | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 403
Guinness was good for me Sir Alec’s genius – by his co-star Madeline Smith Last orders – Barry Humphries on giving up drink What a goodfella! Elisabeth Leigh’s Mafia pal I love moving house – Roy Strong
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Queen Victoria’s favourite train page 16
Features 11 Felicity Kendal, still living the good life at 75 Simon Hemelryk 13 The super Mini Cooper turns 60 Garry Dickens 14 My last drink Barry Humphries 16 The dream age of the train Christopher Valkoinen 19 My gossip days are over Rachel Johnson 22 Bob, the gallant, Scottish Mafioso Elisabeth Leigh 25 Woollen swimming costumes Valerie Crossley 25 Joy of smoking – occasionally Mark Palmer 26 The genius of Alec Guinness Madeline Smith 28 Autograph obsessive Adam Andrusier 32 I hate fussy food Ray Connolly
Regulars 5 The Old Un’s Notes 7 Bliss on Toast Prue Leith 9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary 10 Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman 12 Olden Life: What was speedway? Roddy McDougall 12 Modern Life: What is a dryrobe? Harry Mount
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Groggy Barry Humphries page 14
Roy Strong moves house page 84
20 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 30 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson 31 Country Mouse Giles Wood 35 Small World Jem Clarke 36 School Days Sophia Waugh 36 Quite Interesting Things about ... August John Lloyd 38 God Sister Teresa 38 Funeral Service: François Richli James Hughes-Onslow 39 The Doctor’s Surgery Theodore Dalrymple 42 Readers’ Letters 43 I Once Guarded… Rudolf Hess Valentine Cecil 43 Memory Lane 57 Media Matters Stephen Glover 58 Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond 58 Rant: Chucking out books Nicholas Owen 61 History David Horspool 89 Crossword 91 Bridge Andrew Robson 91 Competition Tessa Castro
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Editor Harry Mount Sub-editor Penny Phillips Art editor John Bowling Books editor Claudia FitzHerbert Supplements editor Liz Anderson Editorial assistant Donna Freed Publisher James Pembroke Patron saint Jeremy Lewis At large Richard Beatty Our Old Master David Kowitz
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Books 45 The Making of Oliver Cromwell, by Ronald Hutton David Horspool 47 The Year of the End: A Memoir of Marriage, Truth and Fiction, by Anne Theroux Frances Wilson 47 Writing in the Dark: Bloomsbury, the Blitz, and Horizon Magazine, by Will Loxley Paul Bailey 49 Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse, by Dave Goulson Richard Davenport-Hines 51 Borges and Me: An Encounter, by Jay Parini Maureen Freely 53 Prisoners of Time: Prussians, Germans and Other Humans, by Christopher Clark Hamish Robinson 55 The Paper Palace, by Miranda Cowley Heller Alex Clark
Travel 80 The Middle Kingdom: the splendours of Meath Valerie Pakenham 82 Overlooked Britain: The New House, near Tunbridge Wells, Kent Lucinda Lambton
85 Taking a Walk: Strolling by Old Father Thames Patrick Barkham 86 On the Road: Roy Strong Louise Flind
Arts 62 Film: Now, Voyager Harry Mount 63 Theatre: Constellations William Cook 63 Radio Valerie Grove 64 Television Roger Lewis 65 Music Richard Osborne 66 Golden Oldies John Stoker 67 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu
Pursuits 69 Gardening David Wheeler 69 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld 70 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 70 Restaurants James Pembroke 71 Drink Bill Knott 72 Sport Jim White 72 Motoring Alan Judd 74 Digital Life Matthew Webster 74 Money Matters Margaret Dibben
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Oldie book orders ● Please email bookorders@theoldie.co.uk Advertising For display, contact: Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or Kami Jogee on 07983 097477 For classified, contact: Jamil Popat on 020 3859 7096 News-stand enquiries mark.jones@newstrademarketing.co.uk Front cover Alec Guinness in The Man in the White Suit (1951). Film poster
The Oldie August 2021 3
The Old Un’s Notes
Made in Solihull: the original 1948 Land Rover
Arthur Goddard, chief engineer of the original 1948 Land Rover, has revealed how it was originally made – from parts pilfered from Rover’s Solihull factory. In an interview with Australian magazine Engage 4x4, Goddard, now 100, says he bowdlerised bits to meet his brief – to create a vehicle that could go anywhere, driven by anyone. ‘It had to meet all the army requirements, and it had to be a useful vehicle on the farm where you could go off road, or do a bit of shopping, or you could take a bale of hay across a snowbound field, or whatever,’ Goddard says. The original Series 1 Land Rover was light green, as Goddard used surplus supplies from aircraft cockpit paint. It was also a stand-alone power unit. Early advertisements showed it attached to working pieces of farm machinery. The idea was born a year earlier in 1947 when Maurice Wilks, Rover’s chief designer, drew a sketch – on the sands of Red Wharf Bay by his Anglesey farm – of a car that looked like a bit like a Jeep.
He handed the design over to his chief engineer, saying he wanted a prototype within a year. In ten months, the iconic Land Rover was being launched at Amsterdam Motor Show, with a £450 price tag. Over two million were sold and the Land Rover has been rightly named a car classic. Goddard calls it ‘a bloody miracle.’ In his tribute (July issue) to Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, A N Wilson mentions Madame Verdurin, the crass, social-climbing hostess
who eventually becomes a Duchess. This reminded the Old Un of an anecdote told by Gore Vidal. Piqued at the British reception of his book of essays Pink Triangle and Yellow Star, Vidal delivered a caustic riposte in the New Statesman, called ‘Chez Madame Verdurin: the view from Chester Square’. It concluded by recalling that Madame Verdurin had ‘never much liked books anyway’. Shortly afterwards, the New Statesman got a call from a breathless young woman at one of the glossies – another version says she worked for a TV company –
Among this month’s contributors Madeline Smith (p26) played Miss Caruso, the Bond Girl in Live and Let Die who had her dress unzipped by Roger Moore with a magnetic watch. A Hammer horror star, she was also in Up Pompeii. John McEwen (p79) writes our Bird of the Month column, illustrated by Carry Akroyd. He was art critic of the Spectator and the Sunday Telegraph and is a regular contributor to Country Life. Elisabeth Leigh (p22), a documentary director and producer, writes for the Sunday Times. Her novels include Greed. She is now writing a collection of short stories. Mark Palmer (p25) has worked in Fleet Street for over 50 years. He is Travel & Property Editor at the Daily Mail and the author of two books – about football and Clarks shoes.
asking for Madame Verdurin’s phone number. The Old Un appreciates that we Brits are perhaps not the most popular visitors to the Parthenon in Athens, following that spot of
Playing with marbles: the Parthenon’s east pediment
bother in the early-19th century involving some marbles and a chap called Elgin. But now things really have gone too far. The Parthenon marbles that the Greeks did manage to hang on to are beautifully displayed in the nearby Acropolis Museum. It’ll cost you €10 to see them – or €5 if you’re a senior citizen. But British pensioner readers of The Oldie who visited this summer were asked to show their passports to get their discount – then told that, since Brexit, a UK passport didn’t cut the mustard: they would have to pay full price. ‘Even if we didn’t vote for it?’ they asked hopefully. ‘Yes. For all of you, it’s €10,’ said the unapologetic ticket-seller. No need to worry about Greeks bearing gifts, then. The Oldie August 2021 5
Important stories you may have missed Plan to turn public toilets into ‘vibrant’ café Sunderland Echo Toothless man had knife to cut up food Blackpool Gazette
‘No prizes for guessing this guy’s problem’
Bus services delayed following reports of yacht in tree Eastern Daily Press
The Old Un sympathises with all readers who haven’t been able to get to Greece – or anywhere else – and have had to cancel their foreign holidays, thanks to COVID restrictions. If they’re looking for some
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Joy of missing out: Billy Collins, USA poet laureate
consolation, they can turn to a marvellous poem by America’s former poet laureate Billy Collins, who’s just turned 80. In the poem, called appropriately Consolation, Collins, a New Yorker, ponders on the silver lining of the cancellation of his trip to Italy. He writes about being able to go to his local café and not do the strange things we do on holiday: ‘And after breakfast, I will not have to find someone/ willing to photograph me with my arm around the owner./ I will not puzzle over the bill or
record in a journal/ what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window.’ Collins’s poem is part of a growing school of literature – what you might call The Joy of Missing Out. Sophie Hannah, the British poet, composed a masterly poem called The Cancellation after her poetry reading was cancelled: What ballet or play or reading, What movie creates a buzz Or boosts the morale of the nation As a cancellation does? No play, is the simple answer. No film that was ever shown.
I submit that the cancellation Is an art form all of its own. And now poet Roger McGough, 83, presenter of Radio 4’s Poetry Please, has written a new collection, called Safety in Numbers. Among the poems is one called This summer, we will not be taking a holiday abroad. The Old Un completely agrees with Roger McGough when he writes, ‘How good to avoid the frenzy of boarding. The boredom of the inexplicable delay. The pain of feigning nonchalance, the practised pretence of being engrossed in a novel.’ For any reader who has ever felt the sheer exhilaration of hearing that an upcoming dinner party has been called off, cancellation poetry is for you.
Fans of beautiful books, rejoice! The Hammersmith home of Sir Emery Walker (18511933), master engraver, photographer and printer, is to have its first show, starting on 12th August. A new exhibition space in the Arts and Crafts
‘Angela! Come quick! The Johnsons are on National Geographic and you’ll never guess what they’re doing!’
house has been built for the show. The exhibition includes lovely private-press books, revealing Walker’s revolutionary book-printing techniques. He was one of the first printers to create plates from photographs, rather than using the laborious handcarving processes that dated back to the 15th century. Highlights of the show include a double-page spread from The Kelmscott Chaucer and pages from The Odyssey, translated by Lawrence of Arabia, a close friend of the Walker family. The Odyssey was Walker’s final achievement, printed just a year before his death. Lawrence worked on his translation of The Odyssey from 1928 to 1931, while serving with the RAF. He continued working on it wherever he served – first in a mud-brick fort in Afghanistan, then in a flying-boat station at Cattewater in Plymouth.
Lawrence of Arabia – also Lawrence of Ancient Greece
He never got any closer to cracking the Homeric question – whether there was a single Homer or lots of different composers of The Odyssey and The Iliad. ‘He is baffling,’ Lawrence said of Homer. ‘Not simple, in education; not primitive, socially. Rather a William Morris of his day, I fancy.’ William Morris was, incidentally, a great friend of Emery Walker’s. Lord Byron is back! Not the wild, romantic, early-19th-century poet but his descendant, the 13th Lord Byron.
prue leith
Bliss on Toast
Quick, easy, comforting and delicious suppers Lord Byron in Albanian dress by Thomas Phillips, 1813
Robin Byron, 71, a lawyer, has written Echoes of a Life, a novel about assisted dying. He says, ‘It is the first time that a Lord Byron has published anything since the poet Lord Byron died at Missolonghi, Greece, nearly 200 years ago.’ Good for Robin Byron for following in his ancestor’s footsteps. As the poet wrote: But words are things, and a small drop of ink, Falling, like dew, upon a thought produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions think. In his item about Ernest Hemingway (July issue), the Old Un cast doubt on the author’s ‘hairy-chested machismo’. This was also exposed by the British novelist and travel writer Norman Lewis. In 1957, he was commissioned to interview Hemingway at his Cuban finca by Ian Fleming, then editing the Atticus column in the Sunday Times. Lewis knew that Hemingway had been challenged to a duel by the editor of the Havana Post, a pugnacious New Zealander called Edward Scott. It was after an incident at a British
Avocado with toasted pine nuts, spring onion, chopped tomatoes, olive oil and basil on grilled sundried-tomato bread
Embassy party when Hemingway’s companion, Ava Gardner, the worse for drink, had removed her knickers and waved them at her fellow guests. Lewis asked Hemingway, a lumbering figure dressed in pyjamas and gulping down
tumblers of neat Dubonnet, what he proposed to do. By way of reply, Hemingway showed Lewis the letter he’d written to the Havana Post, declining Scott’s challenge ‘in the belief that he owed it to his readers not to jeopardise his life’.
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Gyles Brandreth’s Diary
I’m appalled – and gripped – by nudity Like Tom Jones and Maureen Lipman, I’m a reluctant voyeur
When I am watching TV with my wife, we’re often torn between a new episode of Location, Location, Location and a rerun of our absolute favourite, Bargain Hunt. When I am watching TV with my friend Maureen Lipman (and hidden cameras are filming us in the process for Celebrity Gogglebox), it’s a toss-up between Channel 4’s Naked Attraction and Netflix’s latest ratings winner, Sex/Life. Both are utterly appalling and completely gripping. In a nutshell, Naked Attraction is a dating show where people pick potential partners entirely on the basis of what they look like starkers. And there are a lot of close-ups – so you don’t miss a thing. For me, the star of Series 5 (Series 6 is already in the making) was Ian – at 75, the programme’s oldest contestant to date; trim, toned and sporting a fine Prince Albert on his todger – or winky, as lovely Lorraine Kelly (a fellow Celebrity Goggleboxer) termed it. Ian is partial to genital jewellery, explaining that, once upon a time, he boasted 17 piercings on his private parts. ‘He’s still got a load of bollocks on his bollocks,’ observed the great Sir Tom Jones, another Goggleboxer, chuckling in disbelief as Ian set out his stall for us. Ian was for 30 years a happily married man, he told us, and straight. In his widowerhood, however, he wanted to explore his sexuality and was interested to discover in his eighth decade that men seemed to fancy him even more than women did. Ever eager to oblige, the Naked Attraction production team provided the old boy with a choice of male and female potential partners. To Maureen’s and my (and I think his own) surprise, Ian eventually plumped for one of the women on offer, a wellendowed lady of riper years. He chose her, he confided, not just because he liked the look of her ample breasts but also, and mainly, because, during the show’s unexpected craft section, she had
modelled her piece of clay into the shape of a huge heart instead of a huge phallus… Which brings me to Sex/Life, a bonkbusting global hit for Netflix, a glossy drama about a married woman who loves her husband dearly but lusts after a former lover who has got something to offer that hubby hasn’t. ‘It isn’t acting ability,’ murmured Dame Maureen, ‘so it must be…’ And it was. Only minutes into the episode, the lover dropped his towel to reveal a preposterously pendulous penis that hung right down to his knees. ‘It must be a prosthetic,’ said Maureen, edging closer to the screen, ‘or CGI. Extraordinary what they can do these days.’ Beyond belief. Late-life randiness may be something Oldie readers want to embrace – or be wary of. In senescence, it can afflict even the greatest. Rereading Noël Coward’s diaries this month, I came across his account of a memorable lunch in the south of France in the mid-1950s where the guest of honour was Winston Churchill, who had recently retired as Prime Minister but was still an MP and would remain one until 1964. Coward and Churchill were guests of Emery Reves, Hungarian-born publisher, financier and art collector. Before lunch, they stood admiring a Toulouse-Lautrec
‘Royal small talk updated’
painting of a girl with a naked bottom. ‘Very appetising!’ exclaimed Churchill appreciatively. The great statesman, Coward noted, was ‘absolutely obsessed’ with their host’s mistress, Wendy Russell, a former model just turned 40, twice married and by all accounts completely gorgeous. Her former boyfriends included Cary Grant and Errol Flynn. According to Coward, Churchill ‘followed her around the room with his brimming eyes and wobbled after her across the terrace, staggering like a vast baby of two who is just learning to walk’. Oh dear. Is this what the future has in store? ‘Are there any good things about getting older?’ I wondered aloud at a friend’s 85th-birthday party the other day. ‘Oh, yes,’ piped up a fellow guest, cheerfully, ‘There is the pleasure of reminiscence.’ Christabel Gairdner’s point was proved when we started chatting and realised that we had first met when she had worked at the London publisher Michael Joseph, back in the 1970s. It was fun talking about the old days – the offices in Bedford Square, the lunches in Charlotte Street and the encounters with authors of all kinds. Christabel had especially fond memories of Mandy Rice-Davies, incidental star of the Profumo affair and witness at the trial of Stephen Ward. When Michael Joseph published her autobiography, Mandy gave Christabel a lovely present: a bottle of Fendi eau de toilette. When Christabel thanked her for her generosity, Mandy said it was nothing and admitted that she had stolen it from Harrods. Christabel has the bottle to this day, with a little of the perfume still unused. Gyles’s childhood memoir, Odd Boy Out, will be published by Michael Joseph in September The Oldie August 2021 9
Grumpy Oldie Man
The cleaning lady says I’m a genius One word of Portuguese and she thinks I’m fluent matthew norman
Not for years, if not decades, has any sentient being shown a slither of faith in my ability regarding any known sphere of human endeavour. This makes sense. If the traditional male-ranking system runs from alpha to omega, for me the Greeks are gonna need a bigger alphabet. A prangless two-minute car ride elicits shocked gratitude in the unharmed passenger’s eye. The successful exchange of one light bulb for another inspires pangs of disbelief. Loved ones react to the smooth transportation of a tray from one room to another with the awe once lavished on the conquering of Everest or the first footstep on the moon. You will picture my bemusement, then, at finding myself taken for a man of staggering talent by Erasima, my parents’ septuagenarian cleaning lady. This splendid Brazilian concluded a while ago that I am fluent in her native Portuguese, and nothing will disabuse her of this. How she reckons I came to master her lingua franca – whether through osmosis, or quasi-Mozartian, natural-born genius – feels like a futile area of speculation. What can be stated is this. Erasima is irrevocably sure that I speak her language as well as, if not better than, she does herself. For several minutes at sporadic intervals each Wednesday and Saturday, she talks to me in rapid-fire Portuguese, in the unquenchable – if as yet unrewarded – belief that I will reply in kind. Before we go on, let it be officially noted that – and not to overdo the self-deprecation – I speak one word of Portuguese. That lone word, the residue of Algarve childhood holidays, is obrigada, which of course translates as ‘thank you’. Reflecting on the origins of this confusion, I blame my deployment of the word some ten years ago. One afternoon, as she departed my parents’ home, I bade 10 The Oldie August 2021
Erasima a cheery ‘Obrigada.’ From that deceptively modest display of Lusophone know-how, she appears to have extrapolated to and beyond the nth degree. Until recently, the problem flared up only very occasionally. For the last few months, however, since I took up residence owing to my beloved parents’ immobility, it has represented a continual challenge. In this household, I flatter myself that I am the senior domestic servant; that, in The Remains of the Day terms, I am Mr Stevens, Anthony Hopkins’s butler, to Erasima’s Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson’s housekeeper). Our working relationship, though by and large bereft of the crackling sexual tension that fuelled Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel and the film adaptation, is equally cordial and prey to turf warfare. Erasima and I smile at each other continually, and communicate amicably through gestures. Since she has twice as much English as I have Portuguese (her brace of words: ‘OK’ and ‘Mister’), it is through the art form of mime that we swap thoughts. She will squeeze her middle finger in an upward direction, for instance, while circling her hand, to requisition fresh supplies of toilet-cleaner. I will sweep a flattened hand from side to side, much like an umpire signalling a four, to guide her gently towards the iron. It is over ultimate control of the washing that the strife creeps in. She has repeatedly accused me of inadequate tumble-drying by miming the wringing of clothes with interlocking fists, and then
I’m bemused at finding myself taken for a man of staggering talent
waggling her fingers in a downward motion to convey the drippage of water. In a tough, no-nonsense counterstrike, I have taken to locking the washroom door, to prevent her removing the clothes from the dryer before I’ve had a chance to give them the extra hour’s spin they so palpably need. This rumbling dispute apart, we are the friendliest of below-stairs colleagues – until the moment when, at random intervals, and never for a discernible reason, she jettisons the miming in favour of the verbals. At first, I would patiently listen to 20-30 seconds of quickfire Portuguese before offering the ritual pidgin ‘No comprende, Erasima’ that would entice a knowing nod before the barrage resumed. After several dozen reiterations, I resorted to the Google translation software, politely interrupting her with ‘Erasima, eu não falo Português. Nem duas palavras. Obrigada.’ (‘Erasima, I do not speak Portuguese. Not two words of it. Obrigada.’) At this, she clasped her hands together in triumphal ‘Aha, the penny’s dropped’ recognition, before resuming, a shade faster than before, in Portuguese. Perhaps it was my awful accent, or some small but crucial dialectic distinction between her mother tongue and its Brazilian variant, that caused the misunderstanding. Whatever the explanation, the twice-weekly one-way conversation, punctuated by protests that go ignored, persists to this day. And yet, despite any mild frustration, I am honoured by the thought that there is something about me – some dazzling intelligence in the eyes – that she alone of all humans can discern; and that deters her from entertaining the idea that Portuguese and I are not on speaking terms. Blind faith being in scant supply in this godless age, I offer Erasima a rousing obrigada from the bottom of my heart.
Still living the good life…
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he remains an icon of wholesome sexiness. How extraordinary that Felicity Kendal, loved – and fancied – by millions as Barbara Good from The Good Life, turns 75 on 25th September. Still very active on stage, she’s currently starring in her first West End musical, Anything Goes. She remains as glamorous, lithe and youthful as ever. Kendal’s parents, Geoffrey and Laura, had a repertory company that toured India. Though the young Felicity was able to learn about stagecraft and occasionally appear on stage, it was a life of little security. But it gave her her first big acting role, in Shakespeare Wallah – a 1965 Merchant Ivory film about the troupe – and the resilience to return to the UK to take on the acting profession. In 1967 she made her London stage debut in Minor Murder, and followed up with television roles in the likes of the 1975 mini-series Edward the Seventh. But it was as Barbara that she became a household name. The Good Life’s charming portrayal of a middle-class couple’s attempts to live off the land in deepest Surbiton ran between 1975 and 1978. It was a huge hit with the dream cast: Kendal and Richard Briers played Barbara and Tom Good; Paul Eddington and Penelope Keith played the upwardlymobile Jerry and Margo Leadbetter. Barbara was bright, pretty and funny, with a go-for-it attitude to everything from pig-rearing to making clothes. She was also a loving wife to the often frustrating Tom. It was a very attractive mixture. ‘I think what people really reacted to was that it wasn’t Page Three,’ Kendal says. ‘Back then, the glamorous women were very obviously glamorous – fullon eyelashes, hair. Barbara’s was a less threatening sexiness.’ It was an appeal that endured, with Kendal winning Rear of the Year in 1981 and making FHM’s list of the world’s sexiest women in 1995, when she was 49. Kendal went on to have a very
successful TV career, starring in Solo, Channel 4’s 1992 drama The Camomile Lawn and Rosemary and Thyme. Her West End theatre work has included Relatively Speaking and Noël Coward’s The Vortex. She won a 1989 Evening Standard Theatre Award for her roles in Ivanov and Much Ado About Nothing. She’s been married twice and has had a number of high-profile relationships – including with Sir Tom Stoppard, who cast her in several of his plays, such as The Real Thing and Indian Ink. ‘I didn’t have affairs,’ she says. ‘I just went from one to the next, with a bit of overlapping.’ She struggled with her temper during her marriage to theatre director Michael Rudman. They divorced in 1990, but later reunited and are still together – though they have no intention of marrying again. Kendal has retained Barbara’s spirit of adventure and pluck. She appeared on Strictly Come Dancing in 2010, aged 64, and has taken on her new role as Evangeline Harcourt in Anything Goes despite, she claims, not being able to sing. She keeps fit through yoga and is happy to have made the transition from 1970s sweetheart to the consummate older actress. ‘I’ve been very lucky at playing very young women, to the strong women in the middle and then the mother,’ she says. ‘I love the transition.’ Anything Goes is at the Barbican (until 17th October) Nature girl: with Richard Briers, The Good Life, 1975
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what was speedway? Speedway – four riders on motorbikes racing four laps without any brakes around an oval circuit at up to 70mph – was once the second-most popular spectator sport in Britain. It’s thought to have begun in Australia in the 1920s and was first staged in Britain in 1928 at High Beech in Essex. Immediately after the Second World War, meetings were often held in front of 90,000 spectators at Wembley and, in the early 1950s, total annual attendances peaked at 11 million. Its appeal faded in the mid-1950s but revived in the following decade, backed by coverage on ITV’s World of Sport. Riders Ivan Mauger and Barry Briggs were household names. Briggs twice finished runner-up in the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award. BBC radio and newspapers carried league results daily. Unlike other motorsports, whose teams have affiliations with engine manufacturers, speedway clubs were often based in working-class towns, which didn’t normally get much national prominence – such as Boston, Ellesmere Port, Long Eaton and Weymouth. That gave the sport a real sense of belonging to its community, something that continues today. Since 1981 – the year Wembley staged its last world final – speedway in Britain
PA IMAGES/ALAMY
what is a dryrobe? A dryrobe is essentially a great big waterproof poncho with a towel lining. It is the outdoor, marine cousin of the slanket – the wraparound blanket with sleeves, popular with couch potatoes. Early incarnations of dryrobes existed in the 1970s, when you’d see the odd person on the beach in a sort of towelcape wrapped round the neck, to get changed under. But the official dryrobe was invented in 2010 by Devon surfer Gideon Bright. When he was a boy, his mother sewed a 12 The Oldie August 2021
has declined. Some people even wonder if the sport still exists. Some of the top-name venues in the sport – Coventry, Cradley Heath, Reading and Wimbledon – have closed, their tracks sold off for housing developments or supermarkets. Crowds, once numbered in the tens of thousands, are now in the hundreds. British speedway has failed to attract younger fans. Redcar recently surveyed their supporters and found that over half had been going to speedway for at least 41 years, suggesting they were in their 50s at least. In contrast, in Poland speedway is thriving. Because TV contracts are far more lucrative and there’s financial support from councils who see the sport as a way to raise their town’s national profile, riders can earn far more there. Tai Woffinden, Britain’s three-time world champion, hasn’t raced here since 2016.
Barry Briggs, World Speedway Champion in 1957, 1958, 1964 and 1966
waterproof cape and hood onto a towel lining. Much as he loved the garment, it wasn’t until years later that he made his official prototype – with a front zip to the robe that combined the inner towel with a waterproof, windproof, protective outer layer. There are now dozens of imitation dryrobes, ranging in price from over £100 to the very cheap: I got mine for £24.99 and it’s never let me down. Over the last few years, the market has exploded. The British triathlon team wore dryrobes at the 2013 World Championships; the British swimming team sported them at the 2016 Rio Olympics. Keep a lookout this year on
This season has been delayed and disrupted by COVID. Somerset announced their closure a few weeks ago and there are question marks over Swindon, which decided to sit out 2021. In addition, other clubs have suspended fixtures, as government-imposed restrictions on their crowds mean some tracks are losing money every time they stage a meeting. There are some positives. Eurosport have begun a five-year contract covering British league meetings. The British international team has genuine hopes of winning its first world team title since 1989. And the emergence of women riders could give the sport the same kind of publicity boost that boxing, darts and horse-racing have recently enjoyed. On its day, speedway remains one of the most exciting sports around. Races last about a minute and the riders display skill and bravery in equal measure. Watch a closely contested race on a well-prepared track, and it’s a heady mix of the visual – riders spinning around in a mad blur – and the aural – angry, revving engines – with an intoxicating scent of burnt methanol, the fuel used for the bikes. If you’ve never been, find a track near you and head along. You might be surprised at how much you enjoy it. Roddy McDougall Roddy McDougall is author of No Breaks: A Lost Season in British Speedway (Pitch Publishing)
Britain’s beaches – packed because of the COVID travel restrictions – and you’ll see dryrobes everywhere. There’s also been a backlash against dryrobes: partly because they look so cumbersome and silly; partly because
‘Before we proceed with sounds of the ocean – please confirm your bank details’
they are, to hardy swimmers, a giveaway that you’re a fairweather swimmer. Last year, a sign was put up at Sandycove, Dublin, saying, ‘No Dryrobe or Dryrobe types!!!’, with a suitably unflattering picture of three awkward figures in their dryrobes. I would have been with the anti-dryrobe brigade – until I bought one two summers ago. It was a godsend in many ways. First, it revolutionises the technique of changing into your swimming costume without
having to do the towel-clutching dance. NB: withdraw your arms from the dryrobe sleeves and place them within the tented robe area for maximum changing efficiency. The dryrobe is also a most comforting, warm refuge after you’ve had your dip in the not-socomforting British seas. You may not need a dryrobe in the Caribbean or the Med; in Pembrokeshire waters, where I swim most often, I now depend on mine. On a beach near you this summer
What’s more, the dryrobe dries very quickly once you’re wearing it. So there’s no need to take it off for your journey home from the beach. Sensitive readers might want to look away here: all you need to do is whip off your costume and drive home commando-style, with only the dryrobe between the world and your body as nature intended. And there’s no need to carry home a sopping wet towel with you. This summer, I’m planning on even driving to the beach with my dryrobe already on. Yes, I will look ridiculous; but I will also be ridiculously comfortable. Harry Mount
GP LIBRARY/ALAMY
The super Mini Cooper turns 60 Happy 60th birthday to the Mini Cooper, which first came off the production line in September 1961. The original Mini was designed in 1959 by Sir Alec Issigonis (1906-88). The brief delivered to Issigonis by Leonard Lord in March 1957, then head of the British Motor Corporation (BMC), was to create a miniature, four-seat, economical saloon car, capable of big-car performance. This was in response to increasing popularity of the ‘bubble car’, boosted by post-Suez petrol rationing. To Lord, they were not ‘proper’ cars; he detested them. The car was designed, a prototype built by July 1958, with production beginning in 1959 for the August launch that year. Meanwhile, John Cooper, a worldchampion racing-car constructor, had been attempting for a while to create a small, four-seat, fast road car. His attempts in modifying a Renault Dauphine failed owing to the car’s poor handling. When the Mini was launched, it was exactly the car Cooper was looking for. With modifications to the engine and gearbox and the fitting of front disc brakes, Cooper transformed it into a ‘mini sports car’. Cooper and BMC finalised a financial agreement and plans to put the car into production. It received interior and exterior trimming embellishments, with Cooper’s name added to the badging. And so the ‘Mini Cooper’ was launched 60 years ago. The car became a runaway success. A further developed and higherperforming Cooper ‘S’ would win lots of international race and rally awards throughout the 1960s.
The Mini Cooper not only enjoyed worldwide motor sport success; it also became the car to be ‘seen in’. Celebrities, pop stars and royalty owned them – usually custom-built. Traditional coach-building companies, such as Radford, Hooper and Wood & Pickett, normally associated with building Rolls-Royce bodies, were commissioned to create bespoke luxury Minis for the good and the great. From the early 1960s, Minis were seen on roads worldwide. They have become iconic – more than any previous car. Generation after generation enjoy these little cars. But it’s the Cooper that’s still most wanted, 60 years on. Something that’s kept the original Mini Cooper alive is the film The Italian Job (1969), itself an icon. In the caper film, about a bank robbery in Turin, the British gang makes its escape through the city in three Mini Coopers, the boot of each filled with stolen bullion. The escapade takes the Minis through traffic, shopping malls and sewers. They cross
rivers and jump rooftops, all at high speed. The carabinieri are in hot pursuit! The film has a star-studded cast – not least Noël Coward – but the real stars are the Mini Coopers. In 2001, a brand-new car replaced the original Mini. The company, then BMW-owned, launched the new car as a brand in its own right: MINI. Traditionalists damned the new MINI. Much rivalry followed between owners of the original Mini Cooper and the new MINI Cooper. It is a very good car, though. Although not revolutionary like the original, it has many of its good qualities: it is a compact four-seater and has extremely good handling capabilities. Built at Cowley, Oxford, it has been extensively raced. Early MINIs are a sought-after collector’s item, just like the original. Although a truce now exists between owners of Mini Coopers and MINIs, the new car can never replace the original in the hearts of the public. Garry Dickens
Mini sports car with maximum oomph – an early brochure
The Oldie August 2021 13
Last orders Fifty years ago, Barry Humphries stopped drinking and said goodbye to embarrassment, misery – and putting his hand on the wrong knee
M
ount Disappointment is about 50 miles north of Melbourne. It is aptly named. On its sere foothills, I performed my first act of gross immodesty with a compliant, young, exotic dancer. It was on a Good Friday, long whiles agone. Boxing Day is another important landmark in my youthful education. Perhaps the most important – for it was on that day, 50 years ago, that I put the cork in the bottle. It was half a century ago, but I can still remember that remarkable day. I woke up in a small private hospital in my home town of Melbourne – a place that an American friend describes as a hospital for thirsty people – and I couldn’t remember why I was there. A nice nurse or, should one say, a non-binary healthcare professional, asked me if I wanted anything. I managed to articulate the word ‘Brandy.’ It arrived, in a tall water-glass filled to the brim. With both hands, I managed to quaff it straight down without spilling much, and then lay back waiting for the effect. But nothing happened. Alcohol, which had promised me so much over 15 years of service, had finally broken its promise. Somehow I knew that that long brandy had been my last. I had always known that the day would come when I would stop drinking, but had always hoped it wouldn’t be today. I asked my friend Brian, a used-car salesman, who knew me at this time, how I looked. ‘Not in showroom condition, mate.’ Now my poor readers are dreading yet another showbiz self-congratulatory 14 The Oldie August 2021
‘How I beat the grog’ horror story. It seems that every celebrity or almostcelebrity who abjures his drug of choice has to share his story of courage and sacrifice with the world after ten minutes of sobriety. Yet it is true that we old addicts experience an ineffable sense of gratitude when we discover that we can live happily for an entire day without stimulants and accelerants. If there are no rooftops from which we can shout, then there’s always the Mail on Sunday. In the 1960s, when on a daily basis I was dedicated to habits of intemperance, the BBC Television Centre in Shepherd’s Bush was a drunks’ paradise. My career was gaining momentum, in spite of the fact that the handbrake was firmly engaged, and I found myself working in a perfect environment. The BBC Club on the fifth floor closed at 3pm – a sad moment announced by the metallic clatter of a grille descending between the drinkers and their drink. This enabled writers and producers to return to their offices in a sufficiently coherent state to make TV programmes. Not seldom I would stray into the club after hours, in search of an ‘approachable’ bartender. A generous tip could sometimes guarantee a large Teacher’s – and alkies always enjoy paying more.
I asked my friend Brian how I looked. ‘Not in showroom condition, mate’
Once or twice on such clandestine visits, I saw a famous television producer with his face pressed against the grille, and Clifford, a popular and wellremunerated barman, pouring whisky into his mouth through the brass lattice. Of course I was appalled. How degrading! How could a man stoop to such indignities in search of a tipple? And was it the producer of Z-Cars, Till Death Do Us Part, Marty Feldman, Crossroads and Steptoe and Son whom I saw, late one afternoon, with chunderflecked lips, peacefully slumbering on the terrazzo floor of main reception at the headquarters of the nation’s venerable broadcaster? Yes, it was. I wondered if he would ever sober up enough to feel embarrassed. Probably not; it would be too painful. Embarrassment – creeping, cringing, crippling, crushing and inevitable – is one of the worst side effects of chronic alcoholism. It is almost as bad as cirrhosis, heart disease, fatal reflux, divorce, suicide and death; and inexcusably putting your hand on the wrong knee. ‘You were on good form last night!’ says your friend with a rather hard look. Or ‘How are YOU feeling this morning?’ But you don’t remember last night. You were there, palpably, but you weren’t there. You were functioning in a blackout. And what was this in your pocket? A book of matches. The Blue Lamp Club! Where’s that? And where was the car you must have driven? It was like that time last week when you woke up in a strange bedroom with a shawl over the lamp and the odour of patchouli, and two little kids burst into
Groggy: Barry Humphries before he went on the wagon, 1966
the room and addressed the lump in the bed beside you and said, ‘Mummy! Who’s the funny man?’ You were the funny man – and you had to be funny again tonight! And twice on Wednesdays and Saturdays. I hadn’t been in the Clinic for Thirsty People for more than a few days when a carer told me there was someone to visit me. I knew it wouldn’t be a family member because they had all (wisely) dropped me. It was someone called Mr Fiddess, and he’d been waiting two hours for me to wake up. ‘I’m too busy today to see anyone!’ I snapped, a little implausibly. But Buster Fiddess appeared in the doorway. He was a famous old vaudeville comedian who had lapsed into alcoholism and taken to sleeping in parks and railway sidings with a three-cornered bottle (meths) for company. I had heard, God knows how, that he had sought the help of Alcoholics Anonymous and was a changed man. He was working, too, in Australian soap operas and police dramas, playing derelicts sleeping in parks and railway
sidings, with a three-cornered bottle for company. They were roles to which he brought a particular insight. Buster sat by my bed for about 60 minutes while I dozed. When the man who had waited two hours to see me finally left, he said only a few words. ‘I reckon you’ll make it, mate.’ Was it then that I first felt the first glimmer of hope? Two years later, when I had finally taken Buster’s path to recovery, I was in London to make a film about alcoholism called The Adventures of Barry McKenzie. I strolled past the Coach and Horses in Soho. Norman Balon, the famous publican, spotted me through the window and invited me into the bar. Now Buster had given me a piece of advice. ‘If you get out of the lion’s den, mate,’ he besought me, ‘never go back for your hat!’ I sipped my ginger beer (on the house) and noticed, at the far end of the bar, a few old cronies, frozen in time. Among them was Jeff Bernard, whom I hadn’t seen for two years. He had long
lost his rather spivvy good looks and now his face resembled a worrying lung. ‘I haven’t seen you for a couple of weeks!’ was all he said. These were the people I had once believed were my friends. A sobering thought. I had a good friend in Sydney, Vincent, who inherited half a billion dollars. He liked a drink, but only the best. No alkie he. After he’d made a few bad investments and shaved a few mill off his fortune, I sensed the impending catastrophe. His clothes got cleaner, his cologne got stronger and his overseas trips got a lot longer. With great trepidation, I suggested a thing he might try that would only occupy a few hours of his time every week and cost nothing. ‘Oh, that!’ he exploded. ‘I hope I’m not as bad as that!’ One morning, he told me he’d complained to the council about a noisy gathering across the street that had percolated through to his $14-million mansion. It was the sound of loud laughter and applause from an adjacent hall, every Thursday night. It was the local AA meeting, five minutes’ walk from the house in which Vincent was soon to die – with a Baccarat glass of Krug in his trembling hand. In San Francisco, at the start of my triumphant conquest of America, the stage door-keeper appeared at curtain fall. ‘There’s a young woman to see you.’ I had a reservation at Postrio and I was hungry. ‘I don’t think...’ Eddie interrupted me. ‘A very attractive young woman.’ And she was certainly an acceptable looking member of the opposite-sex community. ‘You don’t know me,’ she said, ‘but my mother talks about you all the time. Whenever the family gets together, I say, “Mum, tell us another Barry story.” You guys must have had a wild time!’ Total recall was eluding me but I was smiling, painfully. ‘Please remind me of her name. My memory these days is…’ The girl said a name which was like the Danish word for ‘wildly promiscuous au pair’. It meant absolutely nothing to me. ‘Roughly when was this?’ I ventured cautiously. ‘Oh,’ she exclaimed, ‘sometime in the sixties. OMG, you guys were cool!’ The sixties, I thought. Ah, the sixties! I don’t remember the sixties. Only later in that decade did I pick up the gift of life. The Oldie August 2021 15
In a new book, Christopher Valkoinen tells the story of British railways, from Stephenson’s Rocket to Dr Beeching’s cuts
The dream age of the train
Queen Victoria’s London & North Western Railway Saloon, built by Wolverton Works, 1869. It was her favourite carriage 16 The Oldie August 2021
NATIONAL RAILWAY MUSEUM/SCIENCE & SOCIETY PICTURE LIBRARY
Above: Beeching’s proposed cuts, 1963, and Stephenson’s Rocket, 1829. Right: Flying Scotsman poster, 1932. Below left: children at Swindon locomotive works, 1926. Below right: Chipperfield’s Circus elephants at Colchester Station, 1961. They’re off to Rome to star in Cleopatra (1963)
Christopher Valkoinen’s Railways: A History in Drawings (Thames & Hudson) is out on 19th August The Oldie August 2021 17
Retiring gossip girl Rachel Johnson was once known as Radio Rachel for her loose lips. Now her brother is the Prime Minister, those lips are sealed
I
n the first few minutes of GB News, Mr Andrew Neil broadcast something as if it was intimately tailored to his intended audience, all of whose inside-leg measurements he knew already. His channel would not be peddling ‘gossip from inside the Westminster bubble’, he boasted. ‘Well, that’s a mistake, Brillo, old bean,’ I said out loud. After all, what is news, if not gossip? They are conjoined twins, the Gemini of the media constellation, as indissoluble as me and my iPhone (‘There are three of us in this marriage,’ as my husband says). Who’s up, who’s down, who’s in, who’s out of Downing Street, who’s had their jowls lifted in lockdown, who’s getting married, who’s getting divorced, who’s having an affair with whom… Don’t tell me you’re not interested in these newsworthy matters of national importance. When I was in my twenties, if a gobbet of gossip was especially delectable, my girlfriends and I would shriek, ‘Rivets!!’ at one another to denote the intel was particularly riveting. If I ever want someone to call me back within five seconds, I simply ping them a text, with one word: ‘Goss’. It always works. My chum Camilla Long, telly critic of the Sunday Times, calls me for an information exchange – ie gossip – about five times a day. So I hit her up for a quote. ‘Can you give me one of your classic Camilla lines – like gossip is your love gravy or something?’ I demanded. ‘Gossip is like London,’ she came up with. ‘If you are tired of goss, you are tired of life.’ The other day I was told a piece of gossip (concerning a senior royal) so thermonuclear that it scorched the inside of my eyelids. It made me realise how much I’ve missed a good old chinwag during the pandemic – and how little I
rate Eleanor Roosevelt’s apophthegm ‘Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.’ Gosh, I’m glad I never had to sit through a four-hour webinar hosted by the former First Lady, let alone a state dinner. Gossip is the lifeblood of the body social – as well as the body politic. I’ve been to more parties than I’ve had hot dinners. I gloomily had to change ‘going to parties’ to ‘throwing things away’ in my list of hobbies in Who’s Who this year, as there haven’t been any. And I’ve often worked in and around Westminster. Both parties and the so-called ‘bubble’ of the Palace of Westminster are a happy souk, where gossip is bartered in exchange for favourable coverage, meals, access and even sex. But there are rules to observe. Only an amateur would march up to someone at a drinks party, or open a telephone conversation, and demand, ‘What’s the gossip?’ That kind of démarche guarantees nobody will ever tell you a secret again. (Oh yes, and my definition of a secret? ‘Something you tell only one other person’.) My party piece is the ability to silence the entire table at a noisy dinner party with the quiet dog-whistle, ‘Have you heard the gossip about…’ and then pause. Everyone’s heads will swivel without their knowing they’re doing it. ‘Get on with it,’ grown men bellow in desperation. ‘Spit it out!’ Nobody can concentrate until I drop my latest bombshell. The definition of gossip is something you will never read in MailOnline, or in
‘Gossip is like London. If you are tired of goss, you are tired of life’
a gossip column or diary, as diarists scrape social media and cut and paste Instagram posts, which is, like gathering samphire, a dreadful trade. It would have the original William Hickey, Chips Channon and Alan Clark turning in their graves. No – gossip is by definition something you won’t read in the gossip columns. It is insider, and when it does leak into print, it’s often wrong. The exception these days – as well as trusted trader Private Eye, of course – is Popbitch, a website which has flourished in these strange, long, antisocial months. As the editor, Ian Hislop, told me, ‘The social scene took an immediate thumping, with the most fruitful gossip opportunities being among the first to dry up. Workplaces were dispersed – so no one got smashed and indiscreet at Friday drinks…’ However, it was precisely because nobody had anywhere else to be that a lot of the people who are stuffed to the gills with good stories – but rarely get time to tell them – became very prolific with emailing and WhatsApping. With their usual lines of communication all gummed up, and no outlet for their normal tittle-tattle, they spilt the beans online. I used to be a terrific gossip, but – wanna hear a secret? – I am no more. From having been called ‘Radio Rachel’ in my younger days, I am now a buttoned-up bore, terrified that my loose lips will sink ships. I have had a road-to-Damascus conversion to stupefying dullness because I don’t want to be blamed for anything that appears in the Sun or even the Times. Given the circs – and you know what they are – it’s now easier simply to follow the principle of never saying anything to anybody. No, you won’t get a sausage from me if you dare to ask, ‘So what’s the gossip, then?’ And I will take the saucy secret of the senior royal to my grave. The Oldie August 2021 19
Postcards from the Edge
Tuck into the burgers of Calais
The French port is relaunching itself as a seaside resort. Mary Kenny can’t wait to swim – and eat – there
TOBY MORISON
Calais is anxious to counteract its image as a sad port with depressed migrants trying to cross the Channel. It’s ‘relaunching itself as an attractive seaside resort’, with a €46m (£39.4m) renovation of the seafront and the leisure facilities. The municipality is hoping that British motoring tourists crossing to France will stop off for a visit, rather than just rushing off southwards. Calais already has a stunning, sandy beach, with civilised facilities such as shower areas and public changing huts, seldom provided at the British seaside. It’s well worth a stop-over. Calais has some excellent restaurants, a decent bookshop in the Espace Culturel on the Boulevard Jacquard, and an old Notre-Dame church where General de Gaulle was married. It also has a fine Rodin statue, The Burghers of Calais, in front of the Town Hall. The Burgers of Calais might be a handy name for a hamburger joint, but gastronomic friends recommend Au Côte d’Argent by the docks for an exceptional dining experience. I’ve enjoyed staying at a fine old hotel, the Meurice, with 18th-century adornments and an air of charming tranquillity; and it’s near a small Beaux-Arts museum. The Calais municipality is seeking to give the town ‘a Californian flavour’, with wooded boardwalk, skatepark and solarium, from where you can view the White Cliffs of Dover. Calais is never going to be Meghan and Harry’s Santa Barbara, but it’s good to see it promoting its attractions. I hope to get a swim on golden Calais beach over the summer season. We live in an age that often favours women rather than men – to compensate for past patriarchal dominance. So it’s little surprise that the famed Scottish explorer David Livingstone may have to share his place in history with his wife, Mary Moffat. 20 The Oldie August 2021
The importance of Mrs Livingstone is being highlighted in the David Livingstone Birthplace Museum in Glasgow, reopened at the end of July after renovation. Mary was an ace African linguist and experienced traveller who provided the crucial context for hubby’s achievements. She is now seen as deeply significant in increasing his renown. I see this as part of a movement seeking to rescue wives from obscurity. Feminists have tended to ignore wives, regarding marriage as patriarchal oppression: women should be seen as independent achievers, not mere spouses. Paradoxically, the status of ‘wife’ has been revived by the LGBT movement. While the role of ‘partner’ gained currency among straights, lesbians are most insistent on calling a spouse ‘my wife’. Mrs Livingstone may be the first of many historic wives to be given the credit they deserve. The Rev Ian Paisley often claimed the European Union was a Papist plot – and now the Vatican has put Robert Schuman, ‘the father of Europe’ on the road to Catholic sainthood. Schuman, an Alsatian who died in 1963, launched the embryonic EU by reconciling France and Germany in 1950. He has been made a Venerable by Pope Francis, on the grounds that he lived a life of ‘heroic virtue’.
If he can deliver a couple of miracles, he will be the first politician to be canonised since Thomas More, made a saint in 1935. Schuman was by all accounts a pious man and generous to the poor. There are currently five British candidates for sainthood, including City financier and humanitarian Andrew Bertie; Elizabeth Prout, a Victorian nun who cared for destitute women in the Manchester slums; John Bradbourne, who ran a leper colony in what was Rhodesia; Margaret Sinclair, an Edinburgh lass who worked in the McVitie’s biscuit factory; and Cornelia Connelly, who had five children before becoming a nun and establishing a teaching order in Sussex. Brexiteers may wish to champion the UK contenders! The Irish Free State, launched in 1922, established a Senate which was packed with old Southern Unionists, distressed by Eire’s exit from the United Kingdom (some having been burned out of their stately homes by the IRA). But many of these senators were knowledgeable, and some were colourful, contributors to the new state, such as the whiskey magnate Andrew Jameson; the Sligo landlord and Old Etonian Shakespearean boffin Bryan Cooper (daringly, for the time, divorced, and remarried to a divorcée); Sir Henry Greer, who knew everything about horses; the Countess of Desart, a Jewish philanthropist; Henry Guinness, the brewer; Sir Horace Plunkett, agricultural expert; the Earls of Kerry, Granard and Mayo; and the poet W B Yeats. A fascinating assemblage, and I’ll be talking about their part in the foundation of the Irish state at the West Cork History Festival on 6th-8th August. Many other, more distinguished contributors – Roy Foster, Fergal Keane and Paul Bew – will be speaking; all accessible via Zoom.
Elisabeth Leigh’s friend was a Scottish bagman for the Philadelphia mob
What a goodfella! My McMafia mate
B
ob Dick was given an impressive funeral Mass at the Brompton Oratory in the mid-1990s, even though he wasn’t a Catholic. A priest he’d befriended at the church was full of admiration for him. He mesmerised everyone he met. I couldn’t believe he was gone in his mid-60s. Over the years, Bob helped me during my three different careers as documentary-film-maker, freelance journalist and novelist. Born in 1929 in a poverty-stricken tenement slum in Glasgow, he contracted polio which left him with a limp. He worked his way to London, was involved in the property market and then took to money-smuggling. Married twice, Bob had a son, Scott, who ran a carpet-cleaning business. He cleaned Princess Margaret’s carpets – they were disgusting, Scott said. In the 60s, Bob ran a London casino, backed by the American Mafia. From here, he became part of the Philadelphia Cosa Nostra, headed by Angelo Bruno (1910-80). Bob was their trusted bag man, carrying blocks of gold in a body belt around the world to offload into obscure banks. In October 1968, he was arrested in Philadelphia, together with other members of the gang; he was later freed, settling in London. In 1985, he wrote his memoir, The Bagman. It took a while before I learned Bob’s secret because I sensed that he didn’t like being questioned. We first met 22 The Oldie August 2021
in a cutting room in Soho, where he was supervising the editing of a documentary on boxing. When he heard I was doing research for a producer for a fictional story based on Lloyd’s of London, he immediately offered to help. He scribbled down the name of a syndicate contact on an old envelope. When I asked the Lloyd’s press representative if it would be worth interviewing the person Bob had mentioned, he immediately said I’d be wasting my time. The name Bob had written down was Timothy Sasse. Some months later, the scandal of the corrupt Sasse syndicate – which collapsed, in part thanks to fraudulent claims – surfaced in the press. I didn’t hear from Bob for a while, but
Bob Dick outside court with mob boss Angelo Bruno, Philadelphia, 1968
he was always there in the background, checking in with the occasional phone call: ‘How you doing, dolly?’ There was certainly no hint of any sexual interest in me. He was somebody who just liked to help and he was unable to resist a good story, especially if it meant exposing ‘skulduggery’. Making money seemed to come naturally to him. As he occasionally mentioned his involvement in hotel construction, I assumed he was a successful property-developer. Having learned that I was to direct a documentary about an English artist living in Sicily for Channel 4 television, Bob made one phone call. He then gave me a name and address in Italy on the back of the usual envelope. I later turned up at a leading theatre in Rome and was ushered up the back stairs to the top of the building. I took my turn in a long queue until somebody noticed me. I was immediately ushered into a huge office. Behind a large, gilded mahogany desk sat a small, rather undistinguished man. ‘I understand you will be shooting a film in Sicily,’ he said quietly. ‘Right,’ I answered. ‘Momento.’ He picked up the phone, said a few brief words in dialect, then put it down and smiled. ‘Everything will be OK. There will be no problems for you or your film crew.’ We shook hands. This was my first face-to-face experience of the Mafia and I began to suspect that Bob had powerful ‘connections’. Once I’d arrived in Sicily and started filming, everything seemed to go very smoothly. Only when a crew member approached a local girl was there a furore. He had unwittingly gone against the ‘code of honour’. I was summoned to a full-scale meeting with the local Cosa Nostra branch in the brand-new hotel at a coastal resort they’d recently constructed. I sat on the terrace with four dark-suited, overweight men while the crew sat on the beach below, anxiously wondering whether their director would return. The rules were explained to me. Local customs were to be respected. None of our crew would be allowed anywhere near Sicilian women. ‘You are the mamma,’ the chief speaker said, in a steely tone which implied I’d better take heed. I later heard Bob adopt this particular tone – but never with me. ‘It’s your job to control your film crew.’
Scotland the knave: Philadelphia cops arrested Bob Dick, the only Glaswegian at a 1968 meeting of Italian-American hoods
I promised to sort it out and repeat what had been said to me. The four men smiled, flashing their gold teeth, rose from their chairs and made it clear the interview was over. I made my debut as a food correspondent for the Sunday Times and was given a regular column to write about food, restaurants and chefs. Bob thought it was a waste of time. I should write about crime; he’d teach me all I needed to know. He strongly believed that most women were brighter and better than men. By now, he had confided in me that he was part of the American ‘family’ in Philadelphia, who were branching out into film development. Whenever he had an idea for a script, he’d summon me round for my opinion. Once he invited me to his spacious Knightsbridge flat to meet a top Mafia lawyer who had managed mob affairs
from a fully equipped office inside a high-security prison in America. I was asked to have tea with him and his associates and to give advice on a film treatment. This was a full-scale ‘meet’ held in Bob’s sitting room, elaborately furnished with highly glossed and gilded antiques. I was introduced to the lawyer who towered over his smaller, equally sun-tanned ‘associates’. ‘This is Lis, my script advisor,’ said Bob. ‘She’s got a degree from Oxford.’ The lawyer gave a respectful nod and scripts were handed out to everyone. After going through some possible libel areas with the expert, Bob suddenly turned to me and said, ‘In this scene, a Jewish gangster eats a prawn cocktail. Would this be correct? Would a Jewish man eat a prawn cocktail?’ ‘Not if he ate kosher,’ I replied. ‘He eats kosher,’ said Bob. ‘So cut it out, then.’
The prawn cocktail was duly redpencilled out of the script. I didn’t go to Bob’s funeral. I wanted to remember him as he was, bursting with ideas for projects, with his own peculiar strong sense of justice. He had a bizarre notion that the old days of the Mafia were over and that it would be reborn as an organisation ruled by compassion. I used to wonder how he could possibly have believed such an idea when extortion, intimidation, violence and murder were its everyday tools. Yet Bob went his own way, perfecting his own vision of the New Mafia Man. The last time I heard from him, he was helping some nuns raise money for their convent by showing them how to run a stall at a local fête. ‘I’m teaching them all about pricing,’ he told me proudly, chuckling at the idea. A unique man – I miss him. The Oldie August 2021 23
Swimming costume drama Woollen 1940s swimsuits left little to the imagination, recalls Valerie Crossley
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hen I tell my grandchildren that I learnt to swim in the 1940s, when mums used to knit their children’s swimming costumes, they look at me as if I am mad. They don’t really believe me until I show them some old knitting patterns. In 1944, my first swimming costume was red, with what was known as a ‘bib front’ and had cross-over straps at the back. I was six years old and I loved it. Mum and I would go on the bus (a treat in itself) to the local swimming pool. Then we would stay in the shallow end and Mum would walk up and down across the width, supporting me by holding on to the straps at the back of my costume. As I dangled there, she would tell me how to move my arms and legs in an effort to do the breaststroke. And it worked. Eventually I was able to swim on my own, un-dangled! This was the start of my
lifelong love of swimming. Thanks, Mum. It wasn’t only children who had knitted swimwear. Men and women also had them, in varying designs. At first they were not lined. These were fine for young children, but left little to the imagination when worn by adults. The wool tended to cling to the body, accentuating all lumps, bumps and curves, especially when wet. And, when you emerged from the pool, the weight of the water would drag your costume down in a most embarrassing way. What had previously clung to your posterior was now down near your knees. But some swift, and hopefully unseen, manoeuvres soon got one looking reasonably decent again. Fortunately, knitted swimwear was later lined,
Joy of smoking – occasionally Twenty years after quitting, Mark Palmer rejoices in the odd cigarette
A
rafat, the young man at my local paper shop, was surprised when I asked for a bag of Golden Virginia and some Rizla papers. ‘I didn’t know you smoked,’ he said. ‘I don’t.’ Which is true, more or less. It’s just that, suddenly, 20 years or so after quitting, I had an urge to smoke again – and that urge has not gone away. In fact, having ‘just the one’ after supper on a Friday night with a glass of
Redbreast Irish malt has become something of a tradition – and a profoundly pleasant one, despite the picture of a dead person’s leg on the front of the packet and a warning that ‘smoking clogs your arteries’. I’m not an advocate of smoking per se, but there’s something offensive about the scare tactics employed to stop me. Oxfordshire Council plans to ban smoking outdoors and some MPs want to raise the smoking age to 21. This heavy-
which helped to preserve the swimmer’s dignity to a large extent. The first swimming pool I went to with Mum was the Manor Street Baths in Clapham, south London. These were opened in 1932 and they still exist. Later, at secondary school, I and my classmates were taken to Latchmere Road Baths in Battersea. These were opened in 1899 by the then famous Little Ada of diving and swimming fame. They, also, are still going. Sadly a lot of my friends hated these sessions and would stand, shivering, at the side of the pool wishing their mums had sent a letter to the school saying they had a bad cold and should be excused from swimming that day. I have been fortunate enough to take part in ten swimathons over the years, all raising money for various cancer charities. I feel it is my small way of giving something back. So, again, thank you, Mum.
handedness has the reverse effect on those of us suspicious of authority. I am not addicted to nicotine. It’s the association of ciggies that I enjoy. I was reminded of this while watching the BBC’s The Serpent (set in the ’70s), during which everyone smoked, and Channel 4’s It’s a Sin (set in the ’80s), when almost everyone smoked. Smoking the occasional roll-up in the garden brings back memories of carefree days. I think of my now sadly departed school friend Chris, with whom I hitchhiked across North America in 1974. He used to blow the most perfect smoke rings and deployed this party trick as a last resort to catch the eye of Heidi, Jackie or Debbie. I think of my mother, whose silver cigarette box I would raid every now and again when my supplies were low, and I think of my now 30-something son who told me on a ski lift, aged 15, ‘Dad, I smoke, so get over it.’ Everything in moderation, we are told – and for me that now includes a defiant roll-up from time to time. The Oldie August 2021 25
Alec Guinness was gossipy, nervous and greedy – and ticked off Madeline Smith for drinking on the job. But he was a genius
Guinness was good for me P
inewood Film Studios, 1973 I was cuddled up in bed with the new James Bond, Roger Moore, filming Live and Let Die. He whispered in my ear, ‘This job is nothing compared with your next one.’ This next job was in a new play, Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus. Starring Sir Alec Guinness, it was an end-of-the-pier, black-humoured pantomime written partly in verse, with plangent fairground musical interludes composed by Carl Davis. Recorded on a Wurlitzer, the music set the tone of the play each night at exactly 8.10pm. That’s when I knew it was time for me to scamper down the concrete stairs to make my first entrance. On the first night, I did the unforgivable and glugged a full glass of red wine before curtain-up. My knees locked and so did my brain. Afterwards, Sir Alec told me that I was a very foolish girl, and I never drank a drop before the show again. Roger Moore was in awe of Alec
Guinness – and his modesty was no act. It set Roger apart in my estimation, then as now. Sir Alec’s body was quite portly for his mere 59 years. An actor’s vanity would not allow him to expose it to the audience – so he wore a corset underneath his sharp suit, in his role as Dr Wicksteed, a GP from Hove. He also sported a wig which made him resemble Peter Cushing in Baron Frankenstein mode. Food was Alec’s god, and he was a regular frequenter of Fortnum & Mason and many other favourite haunts between theatreland and his second home in Smith Square, Westminster. My role as pert ingénue Felicity Rumpers was a device to represent temptation. Dr Wicksteed, riddled with unresolved desires, conjures visions of himself entwined in her arms, sampling the forbidden fruit. Alan had me wear a floating pink dress and beads, reminiscent of an era long past. For a month, our assorted crew of
Alec Guinness (Dr Wicksteed) and family; Patricia Hayes as Mrs Swabb 26 The Oldie August 2021
writer, director, actors and stage management occupied the Brass Rubbing Centre in the former Crypt of St James’s Church, Piccadilly. Alan Bennett lay asleep atop the old honky-tonk piano. On the piano stool each day, there was an assortment of cream cakes for sustenance. While Alan snored, director Ronald Eyre was busy tearing apart the unwieldy script – politely termed ‘pruning’. There was never any complaint from the author. The only problem was Patricia Hayes, the second lead. Patricia had just broken everybody’s heart with her recent TV performance as Edna the tramp in Edna, the Inebriate Woman. I adored her. From day one, Alan Bennett wanted her to play the cleaning lady, Mrs Swabb, with a northern accent. Pat could not master it. After many days, and to her great relief, she was allowed to revert to Cockney and her endless lines, moves, entrances and exits all fell into place. Patricia was unique. A true character in every sense. As Mrs Swabb, she wore a small, dark hat – scarcely noticeable. One night, well into the run at the Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, a phosphorescent, green hat lit up the stage. Patricia had seen no reason to reveal it to Alec before the show, and he was incandescent. She never wore that hat again. Each night, Patricia arrived just in time to catch the closing of Berwick Street Market, where she picked up the fruit, fish and meat at knocked-down prices. Her basement dressing room was filled with strange, stray objects gleaned from local dustbins, including a bright red broken telephone.
Alec Guinness and Madeline Smith in Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus, 1973
PA IMAGES/ALAMY
Pat had a seeming frailty and wistfulness that hid a very independent and determined lady who had suffered much in her 60 years. One day, in conversation over tea, she told me that when her husband walked out for good, she caught sight of herself in the mirror and said out loud, ‘So that’s how somebody looks when her husband leaves her!’ Pat lived quietly on Putney Hill. A black tracksuit was her daily uniform, and her companions were an assortment of much cosseted and noisy dachshunds. As an actor, Sir Alec was a genius; he was equally faultless as a company leader, but Patricia’s occasionally gauche
behaviour was irksome to this detailed perfectionist. Her bohemian lifestyle and wayward eccentricities were not to his well-honed, sophisticated tastes. For Alec, image was everything. Each night, backstage, I heard him gossip with his stage wife, Margaret Courtenay. I sensed his frustrations with Patricia. I knew also that Alec, in particular, needed these gossipy intimacies to rid him of the ennui that a long run in the theatre can induce. Maggie was a past master at buttering up her leading men, and thrived on these precious moments with him. Our one stop en route to the West End was a brief try-out in the Playhouse
Theatre, Oxford. Audiences were lean but not hungry, and reviews were less than glowing. Alec nearly walked. It was a very depressing time. Bigwigs stayed at the Randolph, and my choice of the rundown Eastgate Hotel was a mistake. A police car picked up my scent each night and its occupants kept me in their sights until I had reached my dismal destination. Did they think I was on the game? Alec honed and fine-tuned his performance, underplaying his part to perfection. You could honestly never take your eyes off him. Nerves caused him to ask the management to remove distracting programmes being waved about by members of the audience or placed in his eyeline on the plush box sills. The cardinal sin was an actor’s watching from the wings. After we had run for a month in London, Sir Alec peered through his customary spyhole in the curtain when ‘Beginners’ had been called, and said, ‘They’re all Japanese.’ Tradition has it that, after four weeks, anybody who is anybody has seen the show, and now it’s only tourists – who won’t understand it anyway. Things were so bad in the afternoons that we were given freebie tickets to pad the theatre. He and Maggie Courtenay would time the sadly deserted Wednesday matinée to see how fast they could play it. He had a short fuse with the constant announcements coming through the ancient Tannoy in his dressing room. William, Alec’s personal dresser, held his breath one night when ‘Sir’ took aim and threw his shoe at the Tannoy, shouting, ‘OH DO SHUT UP!’ The masterstroke was the finale of the show, when Alec, alone on stage, performed a macabre dance of death of his own devising. Dressed in top hat and tails, Alec then utters his last lines before the spotlight is cut: ‘This is my prescription: grab any chance you get; because if you take it or you leave it, you end up with regret. Put it this way: whatever right or wrong is, he whose lust lasts, lasts longest.’ CURTAIN
Each night, backstage, I heard him gossip with his stage wife. Alec needed these gossipy intimacies to rid him of the ennui that a long run in the theatre can induce The Oldie August 2021 27
Autograph-dealer Adam Andrusier tracked down some of the most valuable signatures on earth – and a lot of fakes
Confessions of a celebrity addict
Marilyn Monroe I answered my office phone to the sound of gargling. ‘Catarrh,’ explained a small voice. ‘This is Ray from the postcard fair. Friend of your dad’s.’ I remembered him now from my teenage years: a short dealer with a white mullet. He fished around inside cardboard boxes to retrieve his wares – old theatre programmes, posters, somebody’s wartime schoolbooks – before spreading them out in a six-inch wedge across his stall. ‘I’ve got an autograph book with Marilyn Monroe in. Thought you might be interested.’ Interested? Monroe was on every autograph-collector’s want list. ‘But has she signed in red ink?’ Red ink meant fake. You usually saw it on photos; the neat, curly hand – ‘Love and kisses, Marilyn Monroe’. The real thing was another story: an intelligent, 28 The Oldie August 2021
illegible scrawl, written at breakneck speed, the pen changing direction at least twice. ‘Nah, don’t think it’s red. Hang on, I’ll have a look. Soon tell you.’ I waited. ‘Here we go,’ said Ray. ‘It’s in black.’ ‘Right – well, that’s good news. And how much were you hoping to sell it for?’ An almighty exhalation of air. ‘Come see it, then. I’d have thought it’s worth a couple hundred at least,’ suggested Ray. Not bad. Her signatures were worth a thousand. At Ray’s Penge house, a 1950s autograph album sat on the table beside an ornate antique tea set. I flicked past a couple of Adam Faiths, a Tommy Trinder, a Dickie Henderson – none of them worth a thing. I flicked and flicked until I got to the page in question. In sloppy black ballpoint pen,
it said, ‘TO JACKIE, YOUR’S SINCERLEY, MARLYIN MONROE’. Ray’s handiwork? I couldn’t be sure, but I had my suspicions. ‘No good?’ asked Ray, smiling coyly at the expression on my face. ‘Looks nothing like her autograph,’ I grumbled. ‘Her name isn’t even spelt correctly.’ ‘Aw, sorry,’ said Ray. ‘Thought it was the real thing.’
Princess Diana After the tragic death of the Princess of Wales in 1997, the phone rang off the hook with requests. It was Diana the Americans wanted now, not Marilyn. I’d had a phone call from one of Diana’s old chauffeurs. He had a signed Christmas card he’d consider selling for £1,000. The deal was done. I sold it for £3,000; worth just £300 days earlier.
Elvis Presley I bought a signed photo of Elvis Presley on eBay from a Swedish guy – very reasonable. He had a trove of other signed items, all bought from the same woman in Germany, a Mrs Schneider. Elvis had stayed at this woman’s house during his time in the army, and they’d become lifelong friends. The provenance was rock solid. One of the items on offer was a page of handwritten lyrics for a song never recorded called I’ll Remember. £2,000. I bought it, plus a dozen other items, all reasonably priced. They arrived in
Red ink meant fake, with the neat, curly ‘Love and kisses, Marilyn Monroe’ Washington, DC. Again, I had a good selection of Elvis in tow, courtesy of my Swedish source. While I was setting up my stall, the American dealer I’d sold Elvis items to came over and shook my hand. ‘Adam, we have to talk about the Elvis
would agree to sign alongside the president’s signature, so I cunningly created a cardboard slip that completely covered it, leaving just a small white box. I made a large space above where I inserted a picture of Monica. So what it looked like was a photo of Lewinsky with a white blank space below, ready to be signed. Not one of my finest moments. Lewinsky entered, stage left, looking pretty and breezy. All eyes were on her.
Monica Lewinsky When a colleague mentioned he’d be attending a book-signing by Monica Lewinsky, it piqued my interest. I remembered a signed card by Bill Clinton lurking somewhere in my cupboard. It was worth $200. What if I could get Lewinsky to sign the same card? That could be worth thousands. I found the autograph, and to my delight Clinton’s signature was written quite far up on the card, which left a large space underneath it, just for Monica. I couldn’t resist the opportunity. I told the expert I would meet him at Harrods. It was highly unlikely Lewinsky
Elvis’s signature on his letter to President Richard Nixon, December 1970
A woman behind me tutted and muttered, ‘Look at that. Not a flicker of shame.’ Monica started signing books, smiling up at each person in turn. Her eyes were sparkly. I felt uneasy as I neared the front of the queue, the obligatory copy of Monica’s Story under my right arm, the ridiculous Lewinsky tribute under my left. ‘I’d really like you to sign here, if possible,’ I said to Monica, standing at her desk and pointing down to the white space I’d manufactured beneath her image. She took in the weird object before her and narrowed her eyes suspiciously. Then she offered me a look of apology. ‘Sorry, but I’m really only able to sign the books,’ she said. I nodded vociferously that I completely understood; understood her position entirely, understood she was too canny for a cheap trick like mine. I intuited that only one of us truly needed to feel ashamed at that moment, and it wasn’t her. I’d objectified her, commodified her – just as everyone else had. Heading home with my signed book, I had a further realisation: this would probably be the last autograph I would ever ask for. Two Hitlers and a Marilyn: An Autograph Hunter’s Escape from Suburbia by Adam Andrusier is out now (Headline, £16.99) The Oldie August 2021 29
NATIONAL ARCHIVES
perfect condition. The lyrics were written in blue fountain-pen ink, with a few crossings-out, all in the King’s hand. His recognisable loopy signature appeared at the bottom. I took all the Elvis stuff to a trade fair in New York and stormed it. The very first item I sold was the set of lyrics. An American dealer paid me $8,000 just 30 seconds after walking in through the door. Good; I could now pay off the last part of my grandfather’s loan. I exhibited at another trade show in
autographs – those lyrics you sold me.’ ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Is there a problem?’ ‘Well, yes. The problem is they’re fake.’ The dealer locked eyes with me. My stomach descended to my feet. ‘Fake? How do you mean?’ ‘They’re forged. I’ve looked into it with some other dealers. It seems there’s a forgery ring operating in Europe. Someone’s doing these Elvises really well. They bake them in the oven to make the paper look old and use other tricks too. But it’s all baloney. This Mrs Schneider – the woman Elvis was meant to have stayed with – she never existed.’ The refunds totalled £30,000. I felt humiliated. My authentication skills had let me down. It hadn’t been Elvis at all. It had been a greedy Austrian. Maybe I’d been greedy, too. I called to mind those times seasoned autograph-dealers had said to me, ‘If it seems too good to be true, then it’s probably not true.’
Town Mouse
Today’s new is tomorrow’s old tom hodgkinson
When I was a country mouse, I loved old things. My favourite quote – almost a maxim for living – was that lovely line from Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer: ‘I love everything that’s old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine.’ These wise words are spoken by the irascible country mouse Mr Hardcastle. He also complains that London ways are corrupting the countryside: ‘I wonder why London cannot keep its own fools at home! In my time, the follies of the town crept slowly among us, but now they travel faster than a stagecoach. Its fopperies come down not only as inside passengers, but in the very basket.’ Well, the follies and fopperies of the town have severely infected this town mouse lately. In the country, in addition to Mr Hardcastle’s excellent list, I had old cars, old clothes and old kitchen units and was perfectly happy. So often, I noticed, old, cheap things were repackaged as new, expensive things. Victorian gruel has now been revamped as oatmeal-based Oatly – what was once food for the poor is now marketed as a trendy milk substitute, costing £2 a pint. 30 The Oldie August 2021
But something has happened. Something has shifted. I’ve started to covet new things, like the other fools of London town. Take cars. Till recently, we bought an old banger every two or three years. To my mind, the difference between a car costing £1,000 and £30,000 is minimal. The modern car has more screens and is a tiny bit shinier. Apart from that, I doubt whether a Martian would be able to tell the difference between my old Vauxhall Vectra from 2006 and a brand-new Tesla. They both have four wheels and bomb along at the same speed. Imagine my surprise, therefore, last month to find myself buying a new car. OK, it’s not actually new; it’s five years old. But that’s new to me. It cost ten times the price of the Vauxhall Vectra. To buy it, I went deep into debt – a habit I avoided as a frugal country mouse. I justified this decision thus: old cars are apparently toxic and virtually illegal in London. To drive them into central London – now called the Ultra Low Emission Zone, or ULEZ – you have to pay £12.50 every trip. New cars have lower tax, and are supposedly less ecologically damaging than old cars. So there are arguments in favour of
the new. But I feel corrupted a little bit, as if I have been seduced by the vanities and affectations of town living. The same is true of clothes. In the country, I would wear any old secondhand clothes that were lying around. A tweed jacket from a charity shop. Ancient jumpers. Jeans with holes in them. Old boots. Sometimes I looked hip by accident: I quite liked the country look of flat cap and tweeds. Weirdly, this style migrated from country to town and I remember coming to London in a flat cap and feeling quite trendy as all the DJs in Soho were wearing them. It’s the same with that young Kaleb Cooper, Jeremy Clarkson’s brilliant 22-year-old farmhand in his new TV show, Clarkson’s Farm. Kaleb went to London once and didn’t like it. He wears country clothes and looks a lot better than his foppish contemporaries in town. Anyway, in London I’ve found myself hanging round emporiums such as Uniqlo, buying black drainpipe trousers and cardigans. I bought a shirt from Harvie & Hudson. I bought not one but two new pairs of trainers, one by Nike and the other by Converse. I bought a new velvet jacket, new T-shirts, new tennis clothes and a new tennis racket. Our backyard boasts a new bench and we put in a new kitchen with a new oven and a new fridge. I’ve even been buying new books: back on the farm, all the books I bought were second-hand. After 12 years of resisting the cult of newness, I find I am being seduced by its siren strains. The next thing to go, I suppose, will be the old phone. I am still clinging on to my rubbish Samsung dumbphone, which is singularly unintelligent. It cannot connect to the internet. It has no camera. It does nothing except make calls and send texts. And I really like it. It’s cheap and, after all, it was the latest thing 15 years ago. But I feel as if I am practically the only person in the world without a smartphone. Doubtless, the authorities will soon make it illegal not to have one of these computerised tracking devices in your pocket at all times. It’s all vanity, of course. Today’s new is tomorrow’s old. I used to say that I lived like a millionaire, just like a millionaire from 1969, or even 1989. Go backwards and you’ll feel rich. The new is a tyranny. G K Chesterton said, ‘We must go back to freedom or forward to slavery.’ But maybe there is a third way and it’s the one recommended by Ovid. In the Fasti, he wrote, ‘We praise the old ways, but use the present years. And both are customs worthy to be kept.’
Country Mouse
When I find hidden gems, I destroy them giles wood
Three people may keep a secret if two of them are dead, said Benjamin Franklin. The sickening truth about travel writers is that they reveal secret locations in exchange for a free trip. It’s a Faustian pact and I must admit I bear some guilt in this respect. I once wrote about self-rewilding Covehithe near Southwold, our fastesteroding piece of coastline, painted by John Sell Cotman and England’s answer to the Namibian Skeleton Coast. The ghostly emptiness was its main charm, but the piece triggered such a stampede that the emptiness itself was also eroded. Gerald Durrell let the cat out of the bag about the delights of Corfu. Peter Mayle ruined Provence. But I forgive South Tyneside Council, who briefly turned the area into Catherine Cookson Country, encouraging group travel in the spirit of pilgrimage to climax in a visit to her eponymous museum, since the region was never on my bucket list of 100 things to see before I die. The National Trust Book of Long Walks (1981) by Adam Nicolson included classic hikes such as the Ridgeway, the Pilgrims’ Way and Offa’s Dyke Path, to name the more familiar. Hardly secret knowledge, but it was hard-won knowledge in those days before Google Earth and Wikipedia. On hearing about the book our American friend Lesley, a caffeine addict, exclaimed, ‘Oh no. Why has he written a book about long walks? Now creeps will go on long walks!’ The wife and I have been pondering Lesley’s definition of creeps ever since. Perhaps by creeps she meant those who don’t follow the Countryside Code and believe, for example, that their dogs have rights to run off the lead, rounding up sheep. Or did she just mean the ‘wrong’ sort of people from an elitist point of view?
Walking or rambling in this country is meant to be a classless activity. But when I asked an aristocrat on a fishing holiday in Scotland if he wanted to go outside to ‘look at the crescent moon’ at two in the morning, he chortled, ‘What on earth for? The only reason I would step outside at this hour is to be sick.’ It was funny at the time. The working classes are very good at mass trespassing – such as the infamous Kinder Scout protest of 1932– but on the whole they are too busy actually working in the countryside to have time to go for walks. No – walking is, in the main, a middle-class occupation, like so-called wild swimming. Ever since Roger Deakin wrote Waterlog, the middle classes have developed an aversion to swimming pools in general and chlorine in particular. My daughter suffers from this affliction. So there I was in Anglesey to visit her grandmother and to satisfy her desire for sea bathing, which involved
‘You’re popping up on everyone’s contact-tracing list’
an ambitious plan to explore several remote locations and ‘secret’ coves, in order to hand down knowledge to the next generation. At the risk of sounding elitist myself, I had timed the visit so as not to coincide with school summer holidays in an attempt to reduce the chances of finding the hidden lay-bys (where I park my car) full to bursting with other solitude-seekers. One of the abiding themes that helps Mary and me to buck the trend towards silver-splitting is a shared sense of humour and an abiding love of Mike Leigh’s comedy classic TV play Nuts in May (1976). Our favourite scene is when eco-bore Keith lets himself down after being tormented by Finger and Honky, a motorcycling couple from Birmingham determined to have a good time, regardless of by-laws at the same campsite. Keith shouts, ‘Get back to your tenements.’ The line still shocks after all these years. It gets to the heart of the access-to-the-countryside debate. Ignorance of Arthur Ransome and unfamiliarity with poohsticks should not be a hindrance to anyone’s accessing our countryside. We cannot gloss over that minority of thrill-seekers who deliberately start wildfires on heath and moor and 4x4 drivers who turn bridleways into rutted quagmires. Creeps indeed. Moreover, progressive landowners are fighting moves to extend England’s right-to-roam laws. In Wiltshire, I’ve noticed landowners pulling up their drawbridges, as unfamiliar folk surge into the countryside for recreation and respite and inadvertently sabotage stewardship schemes. In the grot shops of gentrifying Beaumaris on Anglesey, we wondered why folk would pay a king’s ransom for a puffin cushion in the shape of a heart, or a painted driftwood herring gull. But what truly shocked me was the Wild Guide to Wales, an ‘off-the-beaten track’ compendium. Here were all my secret places in one book. A quick glance at the book’s Slow Food section revealed the target audience: ‘Pick up the freshest oysters and mussels along with a bottle of champagne direct from the Menai Farm HQ.’ Not a book for those who aren’t well-heeled, haven’t read Robert Macfarlane, or can’t distinguish a porpoise from a dolphin. I could hear Keith’s voice ringing in my ears. ‘Go back to your luxury tenements.’ The Oldie August 2021 31
Why all the fuss? From smart restaurants to burger bars, they’re all at it, pouring poncy sauces on strange creations. Ray Connolly longs for meat and two veg
W
hat do Robespierre, the late Duke of Westminster and I have in common? Probably not much, other than that none of us ever liked fancy food. Robespierre sent hundreds of French aristocrats to the guillotine while reportedly living on a bowl of gruel a day. The Duke of Westminster, despite his billions, never wanted much more than an omelette in the evening. And me? I was a war baby, and a war baby’s tastes were and are mine. Plain is best. But if I go out to eat, where will I find anything plain these days? The restaurant world is flooded with funny foods. There I sit, balefully studying the menu, searching for something I recognise. Yet whenever my eyes alight on a dish I fancy, I find that it comes with some kind of alien sauce. I hate sauces. Sauces are disguises created by self-aggrandising establishments to hide what they are serving and we are eating. I like to see, and know, what I’m eating. What, for instance, is ‘taïnori chocolate with hazelnut voatsiperifery pepper’? Foodies might know that taïnori chocolate comes from the Dominican Republic, and that voatsiperifery is a relative of black pepper, its berries being used in a spice, its name coming from voa, the Malagasy word for fruit. But I didn’t. And, to be honest, it doesn’t sound much like a dessert of chocolate mousse with a hazelnut on top that I could safely eat – because I hate anything peppery. If I ate it, I’d need a Gaviscon on the side. The blessed time was when I could go into a restaurant and ask for meat and two veg – and get meat and two veg. Simple and perfect. These days, we’ve elevated cooks with big hats into chefs and made them as famous as footballers. They are all superstars now, gastronomic maestros, forever outdoing each other with their condiments and seasonings until we have no idea what we’re eating. 32 The Oldie August 2021
A good meal spoiled: I blame Fanny and Johnnie Cradock
Even burger bars are at it, with their garnishings of ketchup or brown sauce, cemented together with cheese and onions and who knows what else, when all I want is a plain burger in a bun. It wouldn’t be so bad if fancy food hadn’t become a status symbol, but now it is often served in the most humble of homes. There I go, looking forward to a good natter with my old mates, when a plate of what looks like something unmentionable in polite society appears before me. What should I do? Insult my dearest friends, ruin everyone’s evening and risk killing our friendship by refusing to eat whatever it is? Or groan, rub my tummy, claim a sudden attack of diverticulitis and say, ‘I’m terribly sorry, but…’? I haven’t the nerve. So I close my eyes, open my mouth and pray to God that the meal doesn’t taste as horrible as it looks. I blame foreign holidays, Fanny Cradock and her husband, Johnnie, back in the fifties. She might only have been
I close my eyes, open my mouth and pray to God it doesn’t taste as horrible as it looks
showing us how to make an omelette, but that hand on her whisk was bewitching. If just a sprinkling of parsley or thyme could completely change the taste of egg and cheese, what could a pinch of cayenne do to a Welsh rarebit? She and Johnnie became stars, and television discovered the cheapest way to mesmerise the nation: cookery programmes. No evening on BBC1 is now complete without a hold-your-breath, anxious, phoney wait at the end of a knockout competition to find out which of the tearful, trembling contestants has baked the best pie. Baked a pie! Humans have been baking pies since they learned how to light a fire. It’s hardly a new achievement. But The Great British Bake Off now has millions of fans, some still mooning over the lovely Nadiya, while others wonder why Mary Berry left the show. Who needs soap operas when we have bake-offs? We might have thought lockdown would have returned us to old-fashioned home cooking. But what chance does tradition have when commercials bring floods of custard and orgies of eating … all available, with a few keyboard clicks, from a takeaway? There they go, night and day, food couriers on motorbikes, zipping past our house with their varied cargoes of curried, vegan, vegetarian, organic, ethically sourced pizzas, pastas and stir-fried everything. Come on, it’s only food – the stuff that every living organism shovels into itself on a daily basis in order to survive. But, in its ever more diversified forms, it’s become a national obsession. And I just don’t get it. How did funny-tasting food ever get so exalted? How did exotic eating become so fashionable? And how do restaurant critics manage to write a thousand words a week without repeating themselves? Ray Connolly is author of Being John Lennon (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Small World
Superhead destroyed my teaching dream I was all set for a glorious third act in life – until I had a row about parking spaces with the headmaster jem clarke
STEVE WAY
Jem Clarke is in his very, very early fifties, is five foot zero inches tall and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he still shares with his parents… As I reassure my parents, constantly, an unsuccessful job interview is always a useful experience – if you learn something. After having my worst-ever job interview on the hottest day of the year, I learnt that my summer-interview wardrobe isn’t climate-emergency ready. I also learnt that an entry-level job in education – as a teaching assistant – is hard to come by if the superhead interviewing you is a rotter. In my search for a new vocation for my ‘third act’ in life, I’ve met two superheads. I’m thinking a job with ‘super’ in its title may attract a very specific sort of alpha male. Both of them looked like Gareth Southgate’s head transplanted onto the body of the Hulk. This one, all polo shirts and push-ups, looked me up and down, with some level of suspicion. To be fair, he was probably expecting the interviewee for this lowly position to be a school-leaver named after a season, rather than a very slightly balding, short man in a white, crumpled foreign correspondent’s suit that Martin Bell would probably dismiss as too try-hard. Thank goodness, in this time of COVID, that the handshake has gone the way of the waved kerchief. I don’t think my hand would reach that far up, or his that far down. Like the time I dislocated my shoulder at a school dance. I took pity on the overly tall and hirsute viola-player from the year below. It was a bold move, attempting to do the underarm turn. But my best mate, Kevin, had intimated she would ‘put out’. The only thing put out was my clavicle. The chaperone who accompanied me to the hospital said, ‘Underarm turn? She couldn’t get under a bridge!’ If Meredith is reading this, I am still
available, and perhaps we could linedance on our next date. Anyway, this superhead was droning on about how he had created a chain of pupil-referral units on industrial estates off dual carriageways, accessible only by car. They had the lowest truancy rates in the north, because there was no way a pupil could find anywhere to escape to. He asked why I wanted to work with maladjusted, pre-teen delinquents. I couldn’t tell him the only reason I wanted the job was that the only other two options in Grimsby were being a carer or the twilight shift at the fish-finger factory. I had already ruled out being a carer when Mother let me practise bathing her, to see if I could cope. ‘Unacceptably brusque, with cold, shifty eyes’ was the unsolicited feedback she gave me on a hastily designed report card she made. So I told the superhead that, after working on telephone helplines, I wanted a role where I actually helped people. Craig seemed frustrated with my entire life, furrowing his brow and saying, ‘I’ve changed the lives of 1,700 kids. What’s taken you so long to come on board?’ Pointing out of the window, I
gibbered, ‘I didn’t even know this place existed. You’re obscured from the dual carriageway by a cardboard-box factory, and surrounded by a … forest.’ He shook his head, muttering, ‘It’s a grove – possibly woodland.’ He grumpily turned my CV over, as if scrutinising it for answers, even though it had printing on only one side. He then asked the killer question: ‘If I employ someone else and don’t employ you, what am I losing out on by not employing you?’ Initially I struggled, but then I sparked to life. ‘An additional parking space, because I’m a pedestrian! That’s what you’d be missing out on!’ I exclaimed, like a pint-sized Perry Mason, as smug as my seven-year-old self when I solved the Rubik’s Snake within an hour or two. The superhead lost it, yelling like a full-on games teacher, ‘How do you expect to work at a school with no pedestrian access, if you’re a pedestrian? How the hell did you even get here?’ We had both drawn ourselves to our feet, our ruddy faces separated by several vertical feet. After months of COVID sluggishness, I felt alive again as I roared, ‘I came via the forest – grove … woody woodland, didn’t I?’ I pointed to my crumpled jacket and my slightly bleeding forehead and wrist, where the thorns had got me. The superhead said he’d send me some feedback via email and I treated myself to a taxi home to Cleethorpes. My parents, sitting expectantly by the back door, looked alarmed. I’d been picking at my wounds throughout the taxi journey, and now had five-o’clock shadow, a suit in a shade of Turin Shroud Off-White and patches of poppy-red blood on my crown and wrists. Spotting my stigmata, my mother said, ‘Oh, it’s the second coming.’ Father added, ‘Second coming? He’s never gone yet.’ I headed upstairs – the Jesus Christ of Cleethorpes – with a glass of cooling Ribena. I’m still awaiting the superhead’s feedback. The Oldie August 2021 35
Sophia Waugh: School Days
Don’t kill off To Kill a Mockingbird They are coming for the books now. I recently met a just-retired head of diversity at one of the largest international companies in the world. She had retired early because, in her words, ‘it was all becoming too woke’. This from a woman whose entire career had been spent successfully fighting against discrimination. Our job as teachers is of course slightly different. The curriculum’s response to diversity has been interesting to watch over the past 20 years of my career. There was a point where part of the GCSE exam was on ‘Poems from Other Cultures’. Some of them were good; some of them less so. But, hey, they were from another culture – so worth including. Were I from a minority of any kind, I might be offended by ‘Other’ cultures, as though I were some kind of side order. And that was what people eventually thought – so it was ditched. Now our anthology of poetry for GCSE includes diverse poets. Dead white men are no longer excluded. But how long before Wordsworth is deemed irrelevant? How long before his statue is removed from Cockermouth because there are no daffodils in Ghana? Or because daffodils originate in Spain and Portugal and he was culturally appropriating them in his poem? Recently, a ‘top’ school in Scotland announced that it is ‘decolonising’ its curriculum. This means removing,
among other books, Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird. In a controversial move, Michael Gove removed these from the set-text list for GCSE because they were American rather than British, but the Edinburgh school’s reason is different. It says that the representation of people of colour in the classic books is dated, and criticises ‘the use of the N-word’ and the whitesaviour motif in the Harper Lee novel. I was recently listening to a podcast (The Rest Is History) which was discussing what you should or should not include in history books written for children. If writing a book about the Second World War, can you include the holocaust? If writing about Henry VIII, can you mention that he cut off his wives’ heads? Of course you can and should. Similarly, books that are obviously outdated in their attitudes to black people, women or one-legged lesbians should still be allowed to be taught. You can tell children a million times that killing Jews and treating black people as subservient is wrong, but only by reading about such subjects can the children really feel the wrong. Yes, Atticus Finch is a ‘white saviour’, but is he not also one of the greatest characters in fiction? Isn’t it better, too, for children to see that some people did stand up against social injustice – and, at that stage, it had
to be the white people because the black people were so squashed down they could not speak? What will be banned next? Trollope, because not many people go to church any more, so attitudes to religion are ‘outdated’? Moby-Dick, because we are anti-whaling? (I don’t mind if I never read Moby-Dick again, but I don’t want to stop anyone else reading it.) Peter Rabbit, because vegetarians object to his father having been put in a pie and eaten by Mr McGregor? Many of the children I teach will probably never leave Somerset. If their lives are for ever bound to these green fields and this red earth, should their imaginations not be set free to roam other fields, other times? When another ‘issue’ raises its head, should they not have had some encouragement to ponder the wrongs, as well as the rights, of life? And only by understanding the context in which a book was written and set can they really be free to ponder. In censoring what a generation reads, we are also infantilising it. Literature – any good book – should make us respond emotionally, and also intellectually. In teaching books like Mockingbird, we cannot help but teach about the past – the bloody side as well as the pretty stories. It’s a bit Fahrenheit 451 at the moment. A reference that the next generation probably won’t understand.
Quite Interesting Things about … August The Anglo-Saxon for August was Weod monath, ‘Weed month’. The only Shakespeare plays that mention August are Henry VI, Part I and The Tempest. In August 2017, Hurricane Harvey dumped more water out of the sky than any storm in US history: more than a 36 The Oldie August 2021
million gallons for every person in Texas. On 1st August 1774, Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen. On 3rd August 1492, Christopher Columbus set sail for the Far East. Just over nine weeks later he landed in the Bahamas, thinking he had reached Japan.
Louis Armstrong, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Louis Vuitton, the Queen Mother, Billy Bob Thornton and Barack Obama were all born on 4th August. At 5am on 6th August 1762, the Earl of Sandwich ordered the first sandwich. On 20th August 1949, time appeared to stand still for
several minutes, when hundreds of starlings roosted on the long hand of Big Ben. JOHN LLOYD For more on QI, visit qi.com and, on Twitter, @qikipedia
sister teresa
CHRONICLE/ALAMY
Prayer – a nun’s main job A few months ago, I received an unexpected invitation to take part in the radio programme Private Passions and greatly enjoyed the interview. Towards the end of the conversation, Michael Berkeley, a consummate presenter if ever there was one, asked, with just the slightest hint of awkwardness, what he called a difficult question: ‘There will be many people listening who find it hard to accept the existence of God. Are you troubled by the question?’ On the spur of the moment, I answered that I shared this reservation. Now, with time for extra thought, I realise that I ought to have been more positive and also more explicit. I should have added, ‘Those of us with a tiny spark of faith need to stop being embarrassed by it. There is nothing stupid nor naïve about believing in God. Some of the finest minds, both past and present, have had no difficulty about acknowledging their faith – so why should I (or indeed we)?’ The question itself didn’t trouble me, because it is obvious that there is
At prayer, Église Saint-Roch, Paris, c 1835
something dreadfully wrong with the world. Some of this injury is clearly of human fashioning, but not all of it. And yet it was always thus. St Paul says this very specifically: ‘From the beginning till now, the entire creation, as we know, has been groaning in one great act of giving birth; and not only creation, but all of us who possess the first fruits of the Spirit, we too groan inwardly as we wait for our bodies to be set free.’ (Romans 8:22-3) Much has been written about evil and suffering, and much of it is not helpful. I
have on occasion been left wondering whether those who theorise about suffering have ever, themselves, known the agony of personal grief, the terror of war on their doorstep, or the stress caused by watching their children taking a wrong turning in their lives. All I feel I can do is to treat the whole issue as a mystery – something beyond understanding – and then pray for its resolution, which is entirely in God’s hands. As prayer is the main job of contemplative nuns, they have to learn to develop their inner lives. But they are not the only ones, or shouldn’t be. Some children, without knowing it, have a distinctive bent for meditation. Rather than playing hearty outdoor sports on a muddy games field, they prefer sitting quietly by a stream, just listening to birdsong and the gentle sounds of water. As adults, we all need inner lives. We need peace of mind, which in turn helps to give us a glimpse of the meaning of what is taking place around us, and the beauty of the earth on which we live.
Funeral Service
François Richli (1957-2021) François Richli, manager of the Aman boutique hotel in Java, died after a heart operation in Dubai. He was given a multi-faith farewell with a Hindu cremation in Dubai, a Buddhist wake with four venerable monks at the Yatagala Temple near Galle in Sri Lanka and another one in Java. There were Zoom tributes from London, Toronto, New York and Phnom Penh. Family friend Hen Tatham was the celebrant, introducing the proceedings from Sri Lanka. Tatham said Richli was a true gentleman with impeccable style who ran through life with all flags flying. Daughter Bronte described his final days in Dubai. Son Ivo said that at the end of his life, his father was the happiest he had ever seen him. 38 The Oldie August 2021
Richli, from an Anglo-Swiss family, conceptualised, opened and ran stylish resorts, with hotels in Indonesia, India, Europe, Caithness, the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. He was voted ‘No 1 – Best General Manager – Worldwide’ by the Gallivanter’s Guide. According to his CV, his philosophy rested in ‘management by walking about’. In the tributes, he was described as sophisticated, eccentric, an amazing listener, strong and fragile. But it wasn’t all plain sailing. In Haiti, where he ran Le Relais de L’Empereur, he feared for
his life when revolutionaries overran the hotel. He wrote in a memoir, ‘By the time I had finished half the magnum of d’Yquem ’59, I was severely pissed off but in a rather pleasant, mellow kind of a way, and decided that enough was enough. ‘I stared benignly at the macheted, self-wounded, rara-dancing demonstrators and their delirious priests; they stared back so astounded that they ground to a blank, silent halt. ‘In my most charming but firm, public school, manner, I told them to ‘f**k off’ – I was having dinner, and they were ruining both my meal and my peace, and – bugger me – they did, never to disturb Le Relais or myself again.’ JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW
The Doctor’s Surgery
The best diet? It’s a fishy question Fish is good for you – but not in great amounts theodore dalrymple
Flesh is, in the last analysis, grass. But increasingly enlightened medical opinion believes that more of it ought to be, at least in the intermediate phases, fish. Fish is said to be good for you, even if it is a myth that it does for your mind what we were once told that carrots did for our eyesight. Fish is often thought to stave off heart attack and stroke. I first realised that diet was more than a matter of taste when a (much older) cousin of mine tried to impress upon me that we inevitably took on the psychological characteristics of the animals whose flesh we ate. He had recently converted from gangsterism to vegetarianism, and being a disrespectful, sly little boy, I asked him what we became (mentally) if we ate cabbage. Many years later, by the way, quite a number of my patients complained to me, ‘My ’ead’s cabbaged, doctor.’ Fortunately, I always liked fish. My brother, brought up on the same diet as I and sharing half my genes, detested it.
Perhaps one day the vagaries of personal taste will be fully explicable, though I certainly hope not. Explanation would lead inevitably to abuse and manipulation. It is not easy conclusively to demonstrate the benefits of a diet of fish. Populations rarely differ only by their consumption of this commodity. It would be difficult to perform prospective trials in which the participants were unaware of whether they were in the experimental or the control arm of the study. Still, an attempt at answering the question must be made. A paper published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) tried to compare the rate of heart attack and stroke in
Those who ate at least 175g of fish a week had a lower rate of heart attack or stroke
‘...and here’s one of us sitting in our mother’s garden...’
191,558 people in 58 countries (pooled from four separate studies) who ate less than 50 grams, up to 175 grams and more than 175 grams of fish a week. After what must have been immensely complex calculations, an answer resulted that might at first sight please some and disappoint others. Those who ate at least 175 grams of fish a week had a roughly 10 per cent lower rate of heart attack or stroke than those who ate hardly any. Still, eating more than 175 grams conferred no additional protective effect among those who had cardiovascular disease in the first place. Oily fish was more protective than white fish, which conferred little or no benefit. No protective effect was found among those who had no disease at the outset of the studies. The deficiencies of this research are obvious. Fish is expensive in most countries, and so those who eat it tend to be better off than those who do not, and we know that people who are better off are less susceptible to disease. The paper gives an average body mass index (BMI: weight in kilos divided by height in metres squared) for the various subgroups of the 191,558 people, but it is not credible that this could be known for more than a small proportion of them. Since a high BMI is a known risk factor for cardiovascular disease, this means that the results are simply not trustworthy. Uncertain data cannot lead to certain conclusions. Fish is not medicine. If it were eaten as such, the effect of its consumption would have to be compared with that of its consumption for pleasure, for the difference between the two types of consumer might affect the results. Incidentally, I notice that JAMA considers 175 grams of fish to be two portions. Not for me, it isn’t – but then I’m slightly overweight, so I’m told. There is a lot to worry about in this world. The Oldie August 2021 39
The Oldie, 23–31 Great Titchfield Street, London, W1W 7PA letters@theoldie.co.uk To sign up for our e-newsletter, go to www.theoldie.co.uk
Anne Robinson’s knickers SIR: I too was at school with Anne Robinson, a year below her, and wonder why her recollection of reading to the school while standing on a chair with her knickers showing is so often repeated in interviews (Getting Dressed, July issue). As I remember it, the chair was like that of a tennis umpire and was sat on. Our skirts were below the knee and we wore big green over-knickers, known as passion-killers, which wouldn’t have alarmed a visiting bishop. Still, I suppose it makes a good story. Julia Ashenden (née Ross Williamson), Woodbridge, Suffolk
Sergeant Wilson’s farewell SIR: Ken Pyne’s cartoon (June issue) – a ‘NOT DEAD, JUST RESTING’ gravestone prompting a passer-by to say, ‘He was a great actor’ – put me in mind of John Le Mesurier’s grave in Ramsgate, shown in this photo [below]. Yours faithfully, James Pringle, Broadstairs, Kent
‘Lets face it. No one uses cash any more’
My most vivid memory is of being taught to cast a trout rod with my left hand by the ghillie, so that I could sit in the other end of the boat from my father when fishing on Loch Shin. He put a matchbox on the lawn and I was expected to land the fly on it. Fortunately I proved an apt pupil, and I enjoyed some happy fishing trips with my father. Thank you for the memories! Yours, Grizel Care, Fishguard, Pembrokeshire
Peter Cook v Ted Dexter Le Mesurier’s last words were allegedly ‘It’s all been rather lovely’
Fishing at Skibo Castle SIR: The photograph of Skibo Castle and the article (Overlooked Britain, June issue) brought back happy memories of several holidays spent there with my parents in the late 1940s. My grandfather, Dr James Simpson of Golspie, was the Carnegies’ doctor, and his daughter Margaret and my mother were lifelong friends. My mother played the organ in the magnificent hallway! I remember the piper walking up and down the terrace while we were at breakfast. 40 The Oldie August 2021
SIR: Ted Dexter may not remember Peter Cook (On the Road, July issue), but Cook is on record knowing Dexter – though not with affection. They were contemporaries at Radley when I was there. Paul Chaudoir, Bath, Somerset
Barry’s dream dinner party SIR: Reading Barry Humphries’s thespian dinner-party guest list (July issue), I could not help myself, so here are my ten – more A than B list: Eileen Atkins Michael Kitchen Maureen Lipman Ruth Wilson Toby Stephens Harriet Sansom Harris Sophie Okonedo Nina Conti Joan Plowright Michele Riondino And, if it were possible: Thora Hird Colin Blakely Terry-Thomas Robert Shaw Frank Finlay James Stewart Hermione Gingold If Barry wished to join us, he would be most welcome as honorary guest. Sincerely, Oliver Wells, London SW1
Bazza strains the potatoes ‘Want to play midlife crises?’
SIR: What happy memories Dame Edna brings (July issue), of my
The Happiest Days of Your Life – Your School Reports James Thellusson (July issue) asked for your school reports... SIR: In 1986, my 12-year-old daughter produced a hideous, sludge-green pot in her pottery class. In her report, the art master said, ‘We must look to James Elroy Flecker to describe Annabel’s pot. Dragon-green, luminous, dark, serpenthaunted.’ We have the pot to this day, with his comments stuck on the bottom. A family heirloom! Best wishes, Alice Cleland CBE, Devizes, Wiltshire
Could do lots better SIR: The two best comments I know of are set out below. 1. ‘The dawn of legibility reveals a total inability to spell.’ 2. ‘Andrew and I have both failed. But at least I tried.’ P J Walter, Wellington, Somerset
A successful failure SIR: My English and Latin master Monsieur Boret wrote, around 1953 when I was ten,‘If this boy spent half as much time doing work, instead of finding ways of avoiding the task, he could do well.’ I failed all exams throughout my school life, except the O Levels: I passed them all, plus two further subjects not taught at that school.
visiting the Odeon Leicester Square, and being given an Aussie/pom phrasebook for the Barry McKenzie première, and witnessing the first urination on cinema as Bazza and friends put out a BBC studio fire. If the person I lent the phrase book to would return it, I would be most grateful. John Zimnoch, York
I had decided M Boret was right after all and spent a year following the axiom of doing. I went on to do A levels, earned a county major scholarship, went to university and was MD of a small international company at 27. I bought the company and from the ashes formed my own company, which I ran for 28 years. The word ‘doing’ echoed in my mind for all that time. Thank goodness for school reports and may they long continue. Rod Davis, Jávea, Spain
A teacher writes... SIR: I was a schoolmaster who began teaching physics in 1962. Unlike my final years, in those days one handwrote – and signed – a report on each pupil at the end of each term. My reports were factual and, I hoped, helpful, but some colleagues would give free rein to their wit. Two reports from that time I have not forgotten. The first was ‘He can do this subject standing on his head, and often does.’ That report was read to the boy before being submitted and he pleaded, ‘Please, Sir, do not send that or my father will beat me!’ Such a report today would probably bring the father to the school to attack the teacher. More memorable was ‘I would hesitate to breed from this boy.’ Tim Hickson, Pershore, Worcestershire
spectacles, states, ‘In a sermon at Santa Maria Novella church, given between 1303 and 1306, Friar Giordano da Pisa…’ I am baffled as to whether this was the world’s shortest sermon (of only three minutes between 1303 and 1306) or the longest (of three years between 1303 and 1306). Yours in admiration, Mac Greenwood, Bramhall, Cheshire
Aspirin – a bitter pill
Bazza’s wonderful world
The longest sermon? SIR: The Old Un’s opening item in the July issue, concerning the history of
SIR: Theodore Dalrymple writes (July issue) that he detests the taste of aspirin. If my memory serves me at all, it is not aspirin that has the distinctive taste but Bitrex, an artificial flavouring added to aspirin to deter people, particularly children, from taking too much, or even any at all. I believe this because, during the
Will Hay, 1941
Bad at sports SIR: The following was on my son’s report (submitted with his permission) after his first term at Handcross Park School in 1977, when he was eight years old. ‘He is like a fish out of water on the football field, and conveys the impression that football is rather beneath him.’ After the summer term in 1979, when he was 11, a different teacher reported on his cricket: ‘He has enjoyed his time in the Colts game and, once he discovered his glasses, actually managed to stop or hit a moving ball. The mystery of throwing a ball still lies beyond some distant horizon.’ I felt that these were proof that he was my son. Yours sincerely, Tim Neville, Silverstone, Northamptonshire
1980s, when I worked in advertising at Metro Radio, our team of creatives was tasked with advertising this additive. One of the team – Martyn Healy, I think – came up with the idea of a taste test: he would offer other staff a glass of cola laced with Bitrex (the bitterest taste on the planet) and record their extreme and outraged reaction. Even funnier was when some wag dipped the blunt end of every pencil and biro in the radio station in Bitrex, then replaced them on people’s desks. For weeks after, musing salespeople, DJs and secretaries could be heard gasping, spluttering and swearing as they absent-mindedly let their writing tools stray between their lips. This is how I remember it, anyway – perhaps another reader might be able to confirm, expand or otherwise? Yours, Mike Bersin, Gresham, Norfolk The Oldie August 2021 41
I Once Guarded
Rudolf Hess My paternal grandmother advised me always to take the opportunity to meet prominent people, however briefly. She started me off by sitting me on a sofa to talk to Winston Churchill. I was prompted by Adrian Greaves’s memories (July issue) of guarding Albert Speer to remember another meeting. My regiment, the Grenadier Guards, was stationed in Berlin from 1979 to 1981. The wall was still up; our task was to defend the British sector under the command of the British Military Government. One of our tasks was providing the guard for Spandau Prison, a gloomy 19th-century jail with one inmate, Rudolf Hess (1894-1987): Prisoner No 7, as he was known. The Russians turned down numerous requests for his release; his presence allowed them continued access to the British sector. It fell to me several times to command the Spandau guard – a rotation between the Russians, French and Americans. The prison was very run down, except for where the warders, guards and No 7 were accommodated. It had a large area that No 7 had made into an attractive garden, but, as he aged, he lost interest.
One winter morning, making my morning rounds I saw No 7 in the garden making a snowman. He had built the head separately from the body and I saw that he was unable to lift it onto the main structure. I did wonder if this mode of snowman-building had some Nazi link, as No 7 remained a committed Nazi. The military guard were not allowed to talk directly to the prisoner. Thinking of my grandmother, I thought I would never have the chance to talk to the Deputy Führer again and that any disciplinary consequences could not be severe. I offered to help him finish the snowman. I introduced myself by saying that he had met my grandfather in 1935 at a dinner given by Hitler – the invitation and the place à table are in the family archives. He was grumpy and taciturn but we finished the snowman. When I suggested that we finish it with a nose, eyes, eyebrows and Prisoner No 7: Hess in Spandau Prison
mouth, he assisted – but he was enraged when I suggested, using my fingers, that we put on a small toothbrush moustache. The Allied powers each designated a doctor to provide medical care for No 7. This was increasingly required as he developed prostate cancer. The British doctor, who felt a little sorry for No 7, thought his life would be more comfortable if he had a glass of wine with his lunch and dinner. The doctor sent a memo to his fellow doctors. The French replied, ‘C’est normale.’ The Americans said they didn’t care. And the Russians would consider it if it could be shown to be beneficial to his health. Our doctor circulated some research and, finally, all the parties agreed. The doctor went to Spandau to inform No 7, who although not teetotal hadn’t had any alcohol for 40 years. On hearing he was getting red wine at lunch and dinner, he said he liked only white wine. No compromises from the Deputy Führer. Valentine Cecil
Weeley Festival – the Essex Woodstock
Fifty years ago, in August 1971, the Clacton Round Table wanted to better their previous year’s hugely successful donkey derby – what to do? The Isle of Wight pop festival had done well the year before – as had Woodstock. Why not have a concert to raise money for good causes, four miles from Clacton and an hour from London – perfect! We schoolfriends bought our tickets (£1.50 each) and got the bus from Chelmsford. The line-up looked good: T Rex, Rod Stewart and the Faces, Curved Air, Mungo Jerry, Caravan – some
of the biggest names in rock. Music started, after some delays, on Friday 27th August 1971 with a band called Hackensack and continued non-stop. If you fell asleep, you could miss King Crimson or Barclay James Harvest. We camped, like everyone else – a tent, Wonderloaf and a few tins of baked beans (but no can-opener). At night, there were the
random chants of ‘Wally, where’s Wally?’ ‘He’s in my sleeping bag!’ – believed to have begun at a previous year’s festival. Spotlights were used to focus on people having bad trips who needed help – we knew nothing about this. Later on, Hells Angels took over security and were fighting. Free food was brought
down from London, dished out from plastic dustbins. There were agricultural latrines (a curtained-off trench with a plank to sit over). Most of those in need wandered off into the surrounding wheatfields – where I found a ban-thebomb medallion on a leather thong, which I still have. On Sunday, we left early by bus to avoid the rush – so we didn’t see T Rex or Rod Stewart and the Faces – in time for school the next day. Ten thousand were expected. Over 100,000 turned up and raised a lot of money for good causes. By John Bowling, who receives £50
Essex boy: John Bowling, 17, and the Weeley Festival
Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past The Oldie August 2021 43
Books O lucky man! DAVID HORSPOOL The Making of Oliver Cromwell By Ronald Hutton
GARY WING
Yale University Press £25 He was a dependable, inspirational commander yet capable of disloyalty and double-dealing. A cold, ruthless opponent on and off the battlefield, who could be driven to tears when making a speech or display restraint and mercy when it was asked of him. Above all, he was a man of God – God’s Englishman, as the great radical historian Christopher Hill called him. Yet, in both his public and private dealings, he could be singularly devoid of some of the Christian virtues. It is no wonder that, as Ronald Hutton remarks in the splendid first volume of his new biography, Oliver Cromwell ‘seems to be the most heavily studied ruler in the whole story of these islands’. Cromwell’s is a personality that never quite yields itself up to the scrutiniser. Nowhere is this difficulty more apparent than with his faith. Cromwell displayed the zeal of a convert to Puritanism, the most uncompromising version of Protestantism driving the rupture with Charles I that led to Civil War. Yet he appears to have had no problem in pursuing vendettas against ostensible allies, which could include telling complete lies with a straight face. Of course, even if Cromwell had been a much more straightforward, readable character, he would still be worthy of serial historical investigation. His is a unique story of personal achievement in British history: the rise from obscure country gentleman to head of state. No one – not even Oliver’s distant ancestor Thomas, who rose from Putney publican’s son to Henry VIII’s right-hand man – ever made it as far.
Hutton’s book concentrates on the years before this final leap was made. We follow Cromwell from his birth as the only son (of seven surviving children) of Robert and Elizabeth in 1599 in Huntingdon – ‘urban gentry’ – through a truncated education, marriage, a difficult loss of status and direction, before conversion and a seat in Parliament began to alter his fortunes. At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642, Cromwell was still a relatively obscure MP, though an energetic opponent of the king, particularly when it came to religion. Simply put, Charles’s parliamentary opponents objected to the king’s promotion of a more ceremonial interpretation of Protestantism, which they equated with crypto-Catholicism. It was the fortunes of war that transformed Oliver into a figure of national importance. Hutton follows the evidence as far as it will take him and no further. Even allowing for the great gaps in the story left by the absence of a
personal archive for Cromwell, and his starting point as a minor cavalry commander, it is hard to believe that any missing document could answer the great question. Exactly how did a man of no military experience, without even the conventional training and martial expectations of his aristocratic comrades (and enemies), turn out to be such a brilliant soldier? Cromwell himself knew: victory was ‘obtained by the Lord’s blessing upon the Godly party’. Hutton soberly goes through more prosaic reasons. First, though Cromwell made mistakes, he learned from them. He never, for example, repeated the error of pursuing an apparently vanquished opponent from the battlefield. Secondly, while he could be argumentative and obstructive, when he found a superior in Sir Thomas Fairfax, whom he trusted, he was totally reliable and followed strategy meticulously. Thirdly, he was lucky, not just in his personal preservation from harm –
The Oldie August 2021 45
including the cannon shot that killed his horse at Winceby or the wound in his neck that could have been so much more serious at Marston Moor. It was also his good fortune (Providence, he would have called it) that he usually faced the enemy with superior numbers, that the Royalists made cardinal strategic and tactical mistakes, and that on the occasions when he did fail – at Newbury in 1644, for example, where his cavalry were routed by his opposite number – it was not fatal. To this luck, Oliver added quite a lot of spin. Hutton cannot tell us whether Cromwell directed the phalanx of journalists who, from early in his career, elevated his own part in engagements and played down those of his fellow officers. But he certainly didn’t obstruct them, and Hutton shows how Cromwell’s habit of giving all the credit to God in his own dispatches, and mentioning only subordinates, obviated the need to itemise the contribution of the Lord’s other earthly instruments in Parliament’s victories – ie Cromwell’s superiors. Hutton leaves Cromwell triumphant, as the Commander of Horse in the New Model Army that had won the Civil War and captured Charles I. Throughout the book, Hutton quietly avoids the temptation to look too far forward, allowing the surprises and tergiversations of Oliver’s formative years to emerge afresh. But we can permit ourselves the luxury of knowing that the Civil War had a course to run yet, and that Oliver Cromwell would play an even bigger part in the sequel. If Ronald Hutton is half as discerning, clear, and even-handed a guide to these years as he is to his subject’s making, we have another treat in store.
Deserted wife’s tale FRANCES WILSON The Year of the End: A Memoir of Marriage, Truth and Fiction By Anne Theroux Icon £12.99 In Sir Vidia’s Shadow (1998), Paul Theroux described the breakdown of his 30-year friendship with V S Naipaul, which had reached, he tells us in the subtitle, ‘across five continents’. So blinded was he by Naipaul’s talent that Theroux had failed to notice his mentor was a monster. It was only when Naipaul, recently remarried, dropped him that Theroux realised he ‘had freed me, he had opened my eyes, he had given me a subject’. Sir Vidia’s Shadow tells us a good deal about Naipaul’s dismal treatment of his first wife and about Theroux’s sense of his own sexual and moral superiority, but
‘Wow! Looking hot!’
nothing at all about Anne, Theroux’s own first wife, whom he met in 1967, the year after befriending Naipaul. All we are told about the Theroux marriage is that their separation was ‘by mutual consent’ and that Paul then, as he put it, ‘seemed to evaporate. I died. I disappeared.’ He was in fact very much present and alive, enjoying an affair with a woman in Hawaii. It was Anne who now evaporated. In The Year of the End, Anne Theroux describes the breakdown of her 22-year marriage to Paul Theroux – a relationship that had spanned, the book’s blurb tells us, four continents. So blinded was Anne by Paul’s talent that she missed the fact that her husband was a monster, even though he had proved it in a thousand ways, not least by painting insulting portraits of her in his fiction. ‘I had married a pretty girl,’ he wrote in his autobiographical novel, My Secret History, ‘but she had quickly become a discontented woman.’ Only when he dumped her did Anne see that she was now free and had a subject of her own to write about. It is telling that the husband and wife wrote memoirs about the most important relationships in their lives. This book is composed of diary entries for 1990, beginning with 18th January. ‘Paul left today at 8am, the beginning of a six-month separation.’ Each entry is followed by reflections – what Wordsworth called ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ – written later in the decade, when Anne’s feelings were less raw but her memory of events still fresh. ‘The previous evening we had gone out to eat at a local restaurant,’ she recalls of the last night she spent with Paul. They drank champagne and reminisced about all their au pairs. ‘I’ll be back,’ he said the next morning as he opened the door to their southLondon home. She believed him. Anne now discovers what the world offers to middle-aged women whose children have left home (her sons, writer Marcel and TV documentary-maker
Louis, are both at university) and who no longer have influential husbands. ‘Take away the family life’, she realises, ‘and the work alone is insubstantial.’ The work itself soon disappears. She loses her job as a BBC arts-programme presenter; she fails to get a posting with VSO; a new job in the World Service doesn’t work out. Meanwhile, Paul’s family, to whom she has been close, distance themselves from her. ‘Why did I feel such a failure? When I told people what I had done in my life, they found it interesting. It was interesting. But it didn’t add up to much. And the future was so uncertain.’ She joins a charity that helps the poor. She starts training to be a couples counsellor. She interviews Barbara Cartland and Kingsley Amis. She goes on holidays to Crete and the Lake District, makes new friends, enjoys one or two dates, smokes joints and drinks a good deal of wine. And she longs for the return of Paul, who is all the while stringing her along. At one point, he suggests that, rather than get back together in any formal sense, they share a first-class trip round the world, using his air miles. There is no mention of the Hawaii woman, currently living in Theroux’s holiday house in Cape Cod – whose existence Anne now discovers. Her last entry of the year reads, ‘Saw in 1991 then, totally pissed, rang Paul and screamed abuse.’ ‘I didn’t enjoy writing it,’ she says of the diary which was then put in a drawer. Thirty years later, having retired from a career as a relationship counsellor, Anne feels ready to share her story. ‘I was trying to write truth,’ she says pointedly, ‘not fiction.’ And she has succeeded: The Year of the End feels horribly true. The rage, the rants, the loneliness and the indignity of it all. Everyone who has ever been left by a person they revere will recognise the erasure described in these pages, and the need to step out from the shadow. Just ask Paul Theroux.
Bloomsberries at war PAUL BAILEY Writing in the Dark: Bloomsbury, the Blitz, and Horizon Magazine By Will Loxley Bloomsbury £20 The subtitle of Will Loxley’s first book does not sound especially adventurous or challenging. Haven’t we, both readers and writers, been here before? It’s not entirely The Oldie August 2021 47
fanciful to imagine a bookshop that sells nothing but biographies, critical studies and essays on the subject of the Bloomsbury Group alone. Then there’s the work they wrote and painted themselves – some of it lastingly important, like the best novels of Virginia Woolf, or little more than decorative, as is the case with the art of Duncan Grant. The Blitz has been written about by Angus Calder in his magisterial The People’s War, while the literary aspects of life in London during the German invasion have been accounted for recently in Lara Feigel’s highly original The Love-charm of Bombs. And D J Taylor’s Lost Girls tells the stories of the young women who did the typing and made the tea – among other, more emotionally draining, activities – in the Bedford Square offices of the magazine Horizon, edited by the mercurial Cyril Connolly. Connolly is just one of the familiar (some might say over-familiar) figures of the 1940s who come under Loxley’s inspection in Writing in the Dark. He is, as always, a welcome presence, with his helter-skelter love life and gluttonous appetite for French cuisine. How was he able to feast on truffles and lobster at a time when even the rich were making do with powdered milk and eggs and, if fortunate, tinned sardines? He somehow managed to, courtesy of an obliging restaurateur. Good food and wine could always be relied on to stave off the fits of melancholy that seized him regularly, if only for a few happy hours. Loxley offers as an example of Connolly’s gloomy disposition the observation that English public schoolboys, like Connolly himself, were ‘created sick, commanded to be sound’. But he doesn’t acknowledge that the extremely well-read editor, bookreviewer and pseudonymous author of The Unquiet Grave was quoting from Chorus Sacerdotum by the great Elizabethan poet Fulke Greville. Writing in the Dark opens in January 1939 with W H Auden and Christopher Isherwood departing for America, where they were to spend the greater part of their lives. In a hastily organised parliamentary debate regarding the behaviour of the ‘traitors’, the poet’s name was changed to that of H W (‘Bunny’) Austin, the famous tennis player, as Loxley gleefully recounts. As the book proceeds, it becomes clear that both men knew more about the nature of the fascist beast that was threatening Europe than their friends and detractors. Isherwood, in particular, had witnessed Jews being rounded up and taken in for questioning on a daily
basis in Berlin. He’d seen the rallies, too, in which the smirking Chancellor lauded the superiority of the Aryan race to roars of approval from the ecstatic crowds. The apt word to describe Loxley’s method is ‘panoramic’. He tries to give an overview of the different ways in which writers and intellectuals reacted to the extraordinary events that were taking place in and out of their midst. Most of the substantial players in this surreal charade are here – the essentially optimistic Stephen Spender, still enamoured of the Soviet Union, while his personal life became more complicated; Leonard and Virginia Woolf, of course. Then there’s John Lehmann, with his troubles at the Hogarth Press, attempting to persuade Leonard to publish young and politically engaged poets instead of the likes of Joan Easdale, who was once ludicrously compared to Emily Dickinson. And the dandyish Julian Maclaren-Ross, author of several fine wartime stories, whose work appeared in both Horizon and Lehmann’s New Writing. The booze-ridden Dylan Thomas played the role of the dissolute and doomed poet, complete with booming voice, until his predictably ugly death. Yet it’s those on the periphery – those waiting in the wings, as it were – who deserve more attention. Henry Green’s novel Caught captures the eeriness of everyday existence during the Blitz better than any other work of fiction of the period. He is treated respectfully, as is Arthur Koestler, recently arrived from Paris, where his masterpiece Darkness at Noon was completed. Others, like Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, were to write about the war with the advantage of hindsight, in the 1950s and 1960s. The novelist X Trapnel, who features in the later volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time, is based on the unlucky Maclaren-Ross, whose bohemian life came to a distressing close in 1964. But the star of Writing in the Dark is
‘You trained him to fetch your slippers. I trained him to fetch your credit cards’
undoubtedly George Orwell, who toiled over the seminal Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four – which presaged what would happen when Stalin, for so long a hero of the Left, tightened his grip on Eastern Europe. Orwell’s plain style, that of an ever-wary sceptic, remains pertinent as nationalism is asserting itself again in too many parts of the world. Will Loxley reminds us of Orwell’s hard-earned authority in this otherwise uneven survey of already well-charted literary territory.
Waspish history RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse By Dave Goulson Jonathan Cape £20 One evening in 1899, Thomas Hardy was working by the light of his desk lamp. A longlegs, a moth, a bumblebee and a fly were drawn to his desk by the bright beams. My guests besmear my new-penned line, Or bang at the lamp and fall supine. ‘God’s humblest, they!’ I muse. Yet why? They know Earth-secrets that know not I. That’s what Dave Goulson thinks, too. Bumblebees are his specialty. The most endearing of insects, he calls them: smart at navigation and memory, and socially complex. But then Goulson finds beauty, mystery and wonder throughout the insect world. His mission is to persuade humans to respect insect life, even if they can’t love insects. One million species have so far been identified. He estimates that another four million species are yet to be discovered. Although insects are indispensable to the planet’s ecosystem, little is known of their biology, distribution and abundance. What is clear, however, is that unsustainable exploitation of Earth’s finite resources has led to a frightening collapse of insect density and species richness. Earth is speeding towards a new geological era of destructive change. Central to this is the decimation of the insect population as a result of habitat loss, pesticides, climate change, light pollution and perhaps other, as yet unidentified, human-made agents. As one example, the geographical area of Britain in which the great yellow bumblebee can be found has decreased by 95 per cent. Reliable The Oldie August 2021 49
estimates indicate that because of the loss of insects on which they feed, the UK had 44 million fewer wild birds in 2012 than in 1970. Domestic poultry now accounts for 70 per cent of global bird biomass. In other words, if the total weight of birds on the planet is totted up, only 30 per cent of that figure is represented by wildlife. The jauntiness with which this campaign of destruction was launched is heartbreaking. The Swiss chemist who invented DDT was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1948. American advertising featured smiley cartoon animals singing ‘DDT is good for me-e-e!’ A propaganda film shown to East Africans, who were doubtful about the safety of the chemical, showed a British colonialist dousing his porridge in DDT and eating it with gusto. The blitzkrieg of change has ensured that most wild species subsist in degraded and fragmented habitats, and have fallen to a fraction of their former abundance. Potentially catastrophic climate change is under way. A mass extinction event has been unleashed. Goulson is dismayed by the blind ignorance of natural history among schoolchildren, teachers, and educationalists. The compilers of the Oxford Junior Dictionary have done their part in normalising the extinction process by removing such words as acorn, fern, moss, conker, bluebell, clover, otter, magpie and cauliflower. Worse still are our legislators. Goulson was invited to give a 20-minute talk at the House of Commons. One or two MPs listened attentively. Another 70 came to be photographed in front of a large poster of a bee, so as to show their Green credentials to their constituents, all the while talking disruptively among themselves and not listening to Goulson. Goulson has thin hopes that Conservative politicians will discover that a function of conservatism is to conserve the diversity of life. What wastrels, in the most deadly sense, our MPs seem to be. Silent Earth is studded with engaging descriptions of such insects as the emerald cockroach wasp and bagworm moth. Goulson also gives a plenitude of practical suggestions for greening cities, creating ecologically enriching gardens and balcony pots, and providing pollinators. This is a crusading but not a preachy book. It will make excellent reading for retired people who, as Goulson notes, volunteer so much time and effort to ecological good causes. It will also make a welcome present for thoughtful adolescents who want to understand the planet and their place in it.
‘Don’t do it! You’re the only one who knows how the printer works!’
I was charmed, enthused, dismayed and grieved by Silent Earth. It recalled to me the 17th-century divine Thomas Fuller picturing the emblem of charity as a child feeding honey to a wingless bee, while brandishing in the other hand a whip to drive off the drones. We need Fuller’s charity to cherish the insects and scourge the polluters.
Homage to Caledonia MAUREEN FREELY Borges and Me: An Encounter By Jay Parini Canongate £14.99 When Jorge Luis Borges went to St Andrews to visit Alastair Reid, his friend and translator, in the icy early spring of 1971, he’d been blind for almost 20 years. But having dreamed of seeing Scotland all his life, he was not to be deterred by a worldly impediment. Especially when under the influence of his host’s hash brownies, he welcomed every patch of the St Andrews waterfront with open arms, quoting verse to the waves and sweet nothings to the sea breeze until a ditch or a pot-hole felled him. All this must have made him a rather difficult house guest. That may explain why Reid suddenly took himself off on an urgent errand, leaving Borges in the care of a lost and lonely American graduate student who had never read him. Jay Parini had crossed the ocean to escape his mother and the draft. Neither had left him in peace. His mother was still after him to apply to law school. And just to look at the teetering pile of unopened letters from the draft board was to invite nightmares of Vietnam, where his best friend was already serving. It was almost worse, though, to ponder what he might do instead. He was a virgin who wrote poetry. He had no idea if it was any good. He was hopelessly
in love with a fellow student who saw him only as a friend. When he wasn’t thinking about her, he was thinking about death. This may explain why, when Borges suggested a wild goose chase across the Highlands, he jumped at the opportunity. Off they drive in Jay’s rusty Morris Minor, which Borges has soon named after Don Quixote’s horse Rocinante. They are bound for Inverness to surprise a Mr Singleton, with whom Borges has been enjoying a long correspondence on Anglo-Saxon riddles. His mother has written out the man’s phone number on a scrap of paper he keeps in his pocket. ‘You brought that from Argentina?’ asks Jay. ‘It was not so heavy,’ Borges replies. Alas, it turns out that Mr Singleton lives in Inverness, New Zealand. But even this disappointment does not dampen Borges’s enthusiasm for the grand vistas he cannot see. It is Jay’s job to describe them. This is easier envisaged than executed. Once, after pulling Rocinante to the side of the road so that Borges can pee on its front wheel for the umpteenth time, Jay is so foolish as to mention that the sea looks quite dark. ‘That is not specific enough!’ Borges cries. ‘Talk about the running waves, the white horses on the water. Dark is not detailed. What are the colours? Find metaphors, images. I want to see what you see. Description is revelation!’ So Jay tries harder. Standing before the Carnegie Library in Dunfermline, he speaks of its heavy-lidded windows, and of the roof’s sagging brow, which reeks of disapproval. The master, approving, sails inside for a ‘wee peep’. After introducing himself to a Mr Dunne as the former director of Argentina’s National Library, he modestly concedes that, when all is said and done, ‘God is the one and only librarian.’ Without missing a beat, Mr Dunne replies, ‘The first librarian here was Mr Peebles.’ The locals they meet further down the road show similarly clipped forbearance. There is the widowed Mrs Braid, who rents them a room in Killiecrankie, on condition that they finish their ablutions before ten, as the only way to her only loo is through her bedroom. But Borges, who has downed three pints with supper, is unable to keep to the agreement. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asks. ‘It’s not an hour since he’s done his duty.’ ‘He’s old,’ Jay explains. ‘His bladder’s weak.’ ‘I’m older,’ she harrumphs, ‘and my bladder’s fine.’ But her late husband’s bladder was otherwise, as she goes on to recall at some length. So she makes allowances. As does the doctor who The Oldie August 2021 51
cares for Borges after he falls off the side of a mountain near Aviemore while impersonating King Lear for a storm that has called to him. As do the father and daughter who fish him out of Loch Ness after he capsizes a rowing boat while reciting the Song of Creation from Beowulf. In his afterword, Parini admits to having dined out on his Borges tales for almost half a century. He retells them here with a nice light touch. They make the perfect comic pair, these two: ‘the callow, overly serious, shy, and often terrified’ Jay, and the blind bard who takes time between pratfalls and literary disquisitions to ponder madly on his young guide’s dreams and terrors. But for all his talk of labyrinths, mirrors and fictitious selves, Borges is striving desperately to give the boy courage. By the time Rocinante stalls just outside the city limits of St Andrews, he has somehow succeeded, ‘forcing a shift’ in Jay, ‘a change in perspective’ that must, he later decides, ‘have hit me at just the right time’. Parini went on to become one of the most admired and American original writers of his generation. This is his tribute to the man who opened the door.
Germans in the dock HAMISH ROBINSON Prisoners of Time: Prussians, Germans and Other Humans By Christopher Clark
BRITISH LIBRARY
Allen Lane £25 Prisoners of Time shares common ground with the two superb books that brought Christopher Clark to prominence. Iron Kingdom was a comprehensive history of the rise and fall of Prussia. The Sleepwalkers was his brilliant unravelling of the diplomatic entanglements that led to the First World War. It also hints, with mild provocation, at a philosophical stance: the historian will view all things, even Prussians and Germans, humanely. This humanity is evident in the two detailed historical papers included in the collection. There’s a study of the ambivalent career of Colonel General Blaskowitz, a senior Wehrmacht officer who threw himself down a stairwell on the eve of a likely acquittal at the Nuremburg Trials in 1948. And there’s ‘From Prussia with Love’ – an account of a sex scandal involving the prosecution of two charismatic preachers in Königsberg in the 1830s. In the former, Clark teases out the Christian ethos of a professional soldier.
Calendar of a Book of Hours, August. From Going to Church in Medieval England by Nicholas Orme, Yale University Press, £20
In 1939, he blighted his career by repeatedly filing reports complaining of atrocities in Poland, but continued doggedly to serve the regime in subordinate capacities throughout the war. In the latter, he highlights the real consolation provided by eccentric religious groups persecuted by an ‘enlightened’ administration. The same capacity for empathy is on show in his assessment of John Röhl’s three-volume biography of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Röhl, he argues, like many biographers, came to despise his subject, and his contempt unbalances an otherwise unrivalled scholarly achievement. It is only in not seeing the Kaiser as the hateful caricature of bombast and bluster that one can come to a more
balanced view of his role in the diplomatic escalation leading up to the First World War. There was a cautious, even cowardly Kaiser, whom readers of The Sleepwalkers will recognise, who was not all hothead and fool. In a more speculative essay advertised as the centrepiece of the book, ‘The Dream of Nebuchadnezzar’, Clark sketches the shifting, cyclical morphing of power through history as it concentrates or disperses, often deceptively, in different types of regime. There is a pair of Festschrift-style tributes to two pioneers of world history, Jürgen Osterhammel and Chris Bayley. Clark praises the former for the bird-like freedom with which he surveys his vast historical panoramas, swooping down on instructive detail. He praises the latter for the untrammelled curiosity and The Oldie August 2021 53
eclecticism with which he pursued far-flung research. Both are exemplary of the historian’s open, investigative, non-doctrinaire mission. Yet empathy can easily be mistaken for sympathy and arouse consternation. In ‘Brexiteers, Revisionists and Sleepwalkers’, he records the hostile reception The Sleepwalkers received at the hands of left-wing German historians who saw the bestseller as loosening the chains of German war guilt. They dubbed this perceived influence the ‘Clark effect’. They mocked his notion of ‘sleepwalking’ as a revamped version of Lloyd George’s disingenuous claim that Europe had ‘slithered’ into the war accidentally. On the defensive, Clark asserts that the war was ‘the consequence of hugely complex chains of decisions made in full consciousness of the risks involved’. However, a few pages later, he aligns himself with those who observed that ‘phases of détente’ could mute ‘the key actors’ awareness of the dangers attendant upon their decisions’. He can’t have it both ways. Surely his sleepwalking metaphor does imply a degree of obliviousness. Rightly: no one has ever made completely informed decisions except in theoretical models. They were fully awake – not fully aware.
OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH
American Gothic ALEX CLARK The Paper Palace By Miranda Cowley Heller Viking £14.99 The Cape Cod summer home that gives Miranda Cowley Heller’s debut novel its title is, quite deliberately, a world away from the temporary thrills of a stylish Airbnb or the grandeur of a longestablished luxury hotel. It signifies the class of permanent ownership and the unshowiness of a certain type of wealth; the confidence to be shabby and uncomfortable. The family of the narrator, Elle, delight in the new generations of mice they discover in the drawers of splintered furniture, the bug attacks and the cold water into which they daily plunge. They return to the clapboard camp her grandfather built year after year, with no need of vulgar novelty or convenience. In a narrative filled with dreadful transgressions that are either absorbed into the flow of bad behaviour or kept precariously secret, perhaps the most egregious sin is that of a neighbour who rips out her antique floral
‘Helping me to pack my bags was the nicest thing you’ve done in years, Norman’
wallpaper and replaces it with tastefully neutral paint. There is, of course, far worse going on. Cowley Heller is adept at controlling the pace of revelation through this densely plotted novel, served by her twin time frame. In the 24 hours of the story’s present, Elle must decide how to proceed after a passionate sexual encounter with her oldest friend, while her husband and three children and her mother plan outings and bicker. Interspersed with this strand, there are dispatches from her fragmented childhood, themselves studded with recollections of the generations before. We open with the morning after the night before. The emptied bottles, encrusted candle wax and sore heads suggest conviviality that has perhaps gone on a drink too many. A picnic at the scorching beach beckons, including Jonas, Elle’s friend-turned-lover, and his wife, whom – there must be one in every holiday party – nobody likes quite enough. But amid all these social set pieces come the one-on-one moments that run through family gatherings: shifting alliances, irritable flash points and hastily cobbled-together bits of saving face and smoothing over that allow the show to rumble on in relative harmony. Considering whether or not to leave your husband is a bigger fly in the ointment than a quarrel over hanging up wet towels and making sure there’s ice for the cocktails. That’s particularly the case if, as in Elle and Jonas’s position, there exists a shared past made as much of concealed trauma as of love and desire. The gradual teasing out of the events of a momentous teenage summer is in itself juicy enough bait for the reader to keep turning the pages. But what really gives the novel its heft is a skilful portrait
of the damage Elle’s parents have inflicted on their two daughters, one of whom is conspicuous by her absence. ‘In my mother’s family,’ explains Elle, ‘divorce is just a seven-letter word. Letters that could easily be replaced by I’m bored or Bad luck.’ Her mother Wallace’s parents were each married three times, and Wallace and Elle’s father use their break-up as a springboard into a series of similarly fraught relationships. It is Wallace’s marriage to Leo, who brought with him two children, that most cataclysmically marked Elle’s childhood and makes her profoundly conscious of her responsibilities to her own offspring. Wallace, the model of motherhood and marriage she is reacting to and against, provides the novel’s most charismatic and energetic presence. Her advice to Elle, when she meets her husband Peter – himself possessed of a pair of gothically posh British parents – is to ‘keep your mouth closed and look mysterious. Think Botticelli.’ She is grimly awful and awfully attractive at the same time – which, one registers, explains quite a lot about her romantic life. Cowley Heller has spent much of her working life in television, including developing dramas for HBO. Consequently, she brings to fiction an understanding of how to layer storylines, as well as an assured feel for dialogue and visual description. It’s not hard to see The Paper Palace making the transition to a gorgeously filmed mini-series. She undercuts the sense of reading about the travails of a bunch of rich people who are not terribly interested in the travails of anyone else with an impressive commitment to the characters’ backstories. And she suggests that making peace with the past is so very much harder than shutting up and thinking of Botticelli. The Oldie August 2021 55
Media Matters
The last great press dynasty
Lord Rothermere wants to take full control of his Mail empire stephen glover The Fleet Street into which I first wandered more than 40 years ago was still partly ruled by dynasties. But in a world of new conglomerates, they were most of them struggling to retain their newspapers. At the Daily Telegraph, where I found a berth, the Berry family were just about hanging on, with Michael Berry (Lord Hartwell) as chairman and editor-in-chief. Beaverbrook’s son, Max Aitken, had sold the Express titles in 1977 to a British property company, and David Astor had recently persuaded an American oil company to take the Observer off his hands. Vere Rothermere still reigned at the Daily Mail, which his great-uncle, Lord Northcliffe, had launched. It has been a similar story in America, where the Washington Post has been bought by the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, and the Wall Street Journal has been acquired by Rupert Murdoch. Among the grand titles, only the New York Times has resisted the trend, and is still controlled by Sulzbergers, who acquired the paper in 1896. Generational family newspaper ownership would appear largely to be a thing of the past, which is why most people assume that when Rupert Murdoch eventually dies, the media empire he has built up will not long survive him. The only notable exceptions in this country are the Mail titles, still controlled by Jonathan Rothermere and the Harmsworth family. The recent announcement that the family hopes to turn control into outright ownership is therefore extraordinary. Since the 1930s, the Harmsworths have owned a minority stake in the papers while owning all the voting shares. This gave them control. The obvious question is why the family should now feel the need to buy out all the other shareholders, and turn Daily
Mail and General Trust (DMGT) into a private company. Here I should issue a health warning. As I write a column for the Daily Mail, readers might assume that I am speaking on behalf of a particular faction or have privileged inside information. I’m not, and I don’t. All I can offer are my own insights. Control is not the same as ownership. As a publicly quoted company, DMGT must observe all kinds of rules, such as issuing profit warnings and publishing regular financial updates. Apart from everything else, this is very expensive, since lawyers, PR honchos and financial advisers have to be fed and watered. There is a board of directors, whose opinions are taken into account. If DMGT goes private – as I write, it is not certain the deal will come off – all such restrictions fall away. Lord Rothermere becomes supreme. He can be confident that his eldest son will succeed him at a time and in a manner of his own choosing. He can dispose of whatever assets he wishes, and buy whatever businesses he wants, provided he has the financial resources to do so. All of which invites the question: does he have any plans that he is unable to fulfil so long as DMGT remains a public company? He surely must have, or should have, though I don’t know what they are. One obvious challenge concerns the relationship of MailOnline to the Daily Mail. The former is at last becoming seriously profitable. It is said to be the biggest newspaper website in the world. Meanwhile, the Mail, though
How can the Mail continue to prosper in an increasingly digital world?
it still makes more money than its digital sibling and has the highest circulation of any British newspaper, is ineluctably losing print sales in common with all titles. There’s little doubt that the fantastic success of MailOnline, which is free, has been partly at the expense of the Mail. Newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph and the Times have secured their long-term futures by building up large, paid-for digital readerships. The Mail hasn’t so far managed to do the same, and the main reason is the existence of MailOnline. The interesting thing is that although MailOnline has drained readers from the Daily Mail, the two publications are increasingly dissimilar beasts. MailOnline now generates 90 per cent of its own content. It is more downmarket, less socially conservative and much racier. Its readers are younger. Unlike the Mail, it doesn’t try to reflect the preoccupations of middle Britain. Its worldview is strikingly different. And yet these two fundamentally unalike publications are yoked together, at any rate in the public mind. A family-owned company run by Lord Rothermere could simply allow the Daily Mail to wither very slowly over the next decade or two while building up MailOnline to become an unstoppable global force. But is this the legacy he wants to hand over to his eldest son? DMGT may no longer be dominated by media businesses, but at its heart is the newspaper that started it all – the Daily Mail. I suspect it is what matters most to Jonathan Rothermere, however profitable MailOnline may become. How can the Mail continue to prosper in an increasingly digital world in which MailOnline is free? That is the conundrum a family-owned DMGT will have to crack. The Oldie August 2021 57
Johnny Grimond: Words and Stuff
Terms set in ancient stone
ALAMY/TOM PLANT
Almost every human activity has its jargon, and much of it is dreadful. My pursuit, journalism, is not a profession – no qualifications are necessary – but it has a few words and expressions not widely used outside the world of hackery. Most are dull. Terms such as ‘filing copy’, ‘overmatter’ (the part of an article too long for the allocated space), ‘undermatter’ (the opposite), ‘subs’ (sub-editors) and ‘stringers’ (correspondents) do little to lift the spirits. ‘Deadline’ (originally a line round a military prison, beyond which a prisoner could be shot) is slightly more interesting and ‘the stone’, a table on which pages of type were ‘imposed’ by ‘compositors’, brings to mind an inky smear of hot-metal history. But many of these words are forgotten. I do not complain at their passing, even though they have been overtaken by the techno-bilge of computer nerds, digitisers, podcasters and social mediacrats. They held no magic for me. How agreeable, I sometimes think, work must be for those whose professions are blessed with a rich and satisfying vocabulary. I like, in particular, the language of architecture, much of which derives from the ancient temples of Greece and Rome, when ‘columns’ adorned buildings, not monthly magazines. Whether Doric, Ionic, Corinthian or Tuscan, those columns somehow convey the elegance and orderliness of the
Chucking out books In the age of Zoom, in the background one’s bookshelves must look well filled, the titles evidence of wide and wise reading. In my house, they are a source of tension. ‘You can’t keep accumulating books,’ my wife said. ‘You’ve got to sort them out.’ Which meant chucking a lot out. 58 The Oldie April 2021
Classical world. They have inspired many buildings over the centuries, from the Parthenon in Athens and the Tholos of Delphi to numberless Romanesque churches, Palladian villas, the Banqueting House in London and the great civic buildings of Washington, DC. Along with those buildings have come many words still used today. A random selection of architectural terms with Greek or Roman origins might include ‘plinth’, ‘gargoyle’, ‘finial’, ‘rotunda’, ‘apse’, ‘balustrade’, ‘cornice’, ‘portico’ or ‘fluting’. These words have a ring to them. They evoke images. I do not ask you to consider calling your son Astragal or Parapet, or your daughter Caryatid or Niche. But Triglyph might suit someone. And wouldn’t Frieze work for a dog? Of course, words can be pleasing even if they’re not quite right for your offspring. ‘Vomitorium’, I was surprised to learn, is not the small room in which Romans made themselves sick in order to create space for more feasting, but a passage in an amphitheatre, through which the audience would spew in or out. ‘Bargeboard’ (a board along the edge of a gable) is another surprise. This has more to do with rafters than with boaters, and perhaps derives from bargus, the Latin for ‘gallows’. Plenty of architectural terms have their origins outside the Classical world. We have Bengal to thank for ‘bungalow’ and other countries for ‘quoin’, ‘mullion’ ‘spandrel’, ‘tracery’,
As we picked among the titles, a lively discussion ensued. ’Why on earth do you want to keep that one?’ she said. I made a spirited argument for clinging on to a Bible, splitting at the seams and covered in tatty paper. We have quite a few Bibles around, the others in much better condition. I wanted to keep this relic, presented to me 60 years ago when I started at my last (state secondary modern) school. ‘Herein,’ says a note pasted on the first page, ‘is wisdom which will lead you to all truth.’ Realising only too well that I lack not only all wisdom but even a reasonable quantity, I think perhaps I should have studied it more closely.
‘transom’, ‘wainscot’ and – two of my favourites – ‘skew’ and ‘squinch’. They combine well, too. Would you like your pediment ‘scrolled’ or ‘swannecked’, your architrave ‘lobed’ or ‘banded’? You can have your frieze ‘pulvinated’ (with cushion-like bulges), or your ‘pinnacle crocketed’ (spire garlanded with carved leaves and buds). You may even have your ‘aedicule vermiculated’ (your fancy window frame given an appearance of worm tracks). Anything goes, it seems. And often a dash of poetry is thrown in. Bring me my ‘flying buttress’, my ‘hammerbeam’ and my ‘splayed embrasure’. In Scotland, you may have a ‘bartisan’ (battlement), ‘crow steps’ (steps on a gable) or a ‘but and ben’ (two-roomed cottage). Sometimes an oddity makes an appearance – an oeil-de-boeuf, some ‘egg and dart’ moulding or a selection of ‘pepper pots’. All this may not be quite the stuff of burning Sappho or sweet Catullus, but it’s not bad. Unfortunately, things turned ‘Brutal’ in the middle of the 20th century, when concrete became king and architecture’s new terms – all ‘positive space’, ‘CAD/ CAM’ and ‘PVC’ – came without romance. True, concrete is not a modern word, or material: the Romans roofed the Pantheon with it. But modern Brutalist architects chose their name deliberately and delighted in it, even though some then thought ‘Heroic’ rather better. Poor fools – poor us.
Even though my wife frowned at its dilapidated state, it retained its place. So how to judge the rejects? Why did we accumulate so many Stieg Larsson novels? Scandi noir is all very well on the TV, with subtitles and great scenery. Not a chance
SMALL DELIGHTS Getting my motorbike to start first kick on a cold morning. DAVE TULK, WIMBORNE Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk
of the chunky paperbacks being reread, though. More troubling to my literary conscience were the scholarly works. I felt guilty heaving out a heavy volume on the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley. All 547 pages of it. The guilt comes welling up. Did I actually ever read it? There were other massive doorstoppers. I realised that most political memoirs and biographies just clutter the place up. Off they went. And ranks of cookbooks were now deemed redundant. A dozen or more were on the trek to a charity shop, joining the Great Chuck. NICHOLAS OWEN
History
The greatest, unfinished show on earth
Six million people, including the Queen, visited the Great Exhibition david horspool In the summer of 1851, 170 years ago, there was only one destination for the holidaymaker: London, and in particular Hyde Park, where the Great Exhibition was in full swing. Joseph Paxton’s astonishing Crystal Palace – doodled on a blotter when the original design was failing to inspire confidence – was opened by the Queen and Prince Albert on 1st May. For ten days, admission cost £1; from then on, it went steadily down until, by June, you could get in for a shilling Monday to Thursday, half a crown on Friday and 5s on Saturdays. Many visitors (including the Queen) came back, and 25,000 of them bought season tickets. What did they come to see? It was an ‘Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations’, including, but not limited to, those of Britain’s empire. In fact, all was not quiet on the imperial front: the British had fought wars in Afghanistan, Punjab and other parts of India in the 1840s, and had faced unrest in South Africa, Ceylon, Jamaica and even Canada. But if the 1840s had seen the iron fist of the likes of Charles Napier (‘I have Sind’) and the doomed incompetence of the Afghan campaigns, the Great Exhibition was a chance to show the benefits of soft power. So under Paxton’s glass were carvings from Bengal, and the contents of packing cases from Sydney and Nova Scotia, from Malta and the Bahamas. The Exhibition was a more or less explicit expression of the glories of free trade, some of which were lost on imperial markets. So it was also open to the manufactures (and raw materials, machinery and mechanical inventions, and sculpture and plastic art) of continental Europe (including Russia) and the Americas. And if it seemed in bad taste to mention Britain’s difficulties in her colonies, the same went for continental cousins’ political troubles of 1848. As the Illustrated London News put it,
The Crystal Palace, home to the Great Exhibition (1st May to 15th October 1851)
‘the revolutions, incipient or halfextinguished, in Germany, Italy and France, awake no echoes in the popular mind’. The whole thing was the brainchild of Henry Cole, one of those dynamos of Victorian ingenuity who deserve to be better known. As well as being the driving force behind the Great Exhibition, he was a civil servant, children’s author and inventor of a new type of teapot – and he patented the first commercial Christmas card. His was the kind of forward-looking energy that appealed to the Queen’s consort and, sure enough, with Prince Albert’s backing, the project received official support, though it was a wholly private enterprise. That is not the only way in which the Exhibition differed markedly from modern imitators. To us, more used to project timescales that would be familiar to the constructors of medieval cathedrals, the idea that the Great Exhibition commission was formed only in January 1850, less than a year and a half before its opening, seems inconceivable. Naturally, there was scepticism. The initial building plan, which would have landed London with a brick dome larger than St Paul’s in a park, and a vast building like a railway station without a track, was tolerated rather than welcomed. That was why Paxton’s last-minute reimagining of the glass house he had
made for his patron, the Duke of Devonshire, proved so popular. And no one quite believed it would be ready in time, the workmen furiously painting and chasing away (or poisoning) nesting birds up to the last minute. In fact, strictly speaking, it wasn’t complete. Victoria remarked to her diary, amid general gushing about her husband’s triumph, that ‘Many things in the French section, are (strange to say) not ready.’ Not every nation embraced the opportunity to show off its achievements with equal vigour. The most tragic contribution must have been the Dutch one. A Dutch poet was moved to describe his country’s contribution as a ‘dark wasteland’, and the commissioner charged with overseeing this embarrassment actually killed himself. Joseph Nash, who painted scenes from the exhibition, has one showing the contribution of Holland, next to Belgium, with painted screens, jewels and metalwork. It is hard to see that the commissioner had much to be ashamed of. What was it all for? Any hopes that it might foster a new spirit of co-operation among nations seem to have been scotched early. Thomas Carlyle was not alone in lamenting the ‘bearded, foreign people’ the event encouraged. But Victoria’s hopes that ‘It ought to do wonders in enlightening people & opening the eyes of many ignorant young people’ must surely have been met to some degree, as up to six million visitors passed along its aisles. It also made money, enough to finance the establishment of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the rest of what became known as Albertopolis. Paxton’s wonder house was taken down and moved to Sydenham, where it continued to dazzle until it was burned down in 1936, a grimly apposite extinction of Victorian optimism by the coming age of barbarism. The Oldie August 2021 61
Arts FILM HARRY MOUNT NOW, VOYAGER From 6th August Don’t see Now, Voyager (1942) if you’ve got mummy problems. Bette Davis gives a masterclass as Charlotte Vale, the ugly duckling repressed by her horrible, Boston Brahmin mother. Helped by a doctor (Claude Rains) and her love interest on a South American cruise, Jerry Durrance (Paul Henreid), Vale blossoms into a confident swan. What a marvellous actress Davis is! And here she’s at the height of her powers – nominated for an Oscar for this performance, as she was for Dark Victory (1939), The Letter (1940) and The Little Foxes (1941), and winning an Oscar for Jezebel (1938). Davis was 34 at the time but she convincingly plays the lovely teenage Vale before she’s turned by Mummy into a prematurely middle-aged, fat, monobrowed frump and then magically becomes the dazzling glamourpuss you see in the film poster (pictured above). With her enormous eyes nervously darting all over the place and that voice – acid irony laced with weariness – she comes across as entirely natural and extremely modern. Many of the cast look pretty creaky by comparison. Only 15 years after the first talkie, The Jazz Singer (1927), they still move and talk in a wooden way. Even Henreid, despite his charming Austrian accent and distinguished but unflashy looks, is a bit am-dram. The only actor who comes close to Davis’s heights is Rains as the sardonic, understated Dr Jaquith, who saves Vale from her tyrannical mother. Rains is highly reminiscent of his role as Captain Renault in Casablanca (1942) – not 62 The Oldie August 2021
‘Oh, Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon’: Bette Davis in Now, Voyager (1942)
surprising since he started filming Casablanca the day after finishing Now, Voyager. Some of the same furniture and jewellery was used for both films. The movie has its faults. At just under two hours, it’s too long – but then attention spans were longer in 1942. There are some schmaltzy scenes when Vale helps Jerry’s daughter go through the same ugly-duckling-toconfident-swan transformation she herself went through. And the supposedly comic scene where Davis and Henreid talk to an idiot cab driver in broken English produces zero laughs. The chemistry between Davis and Henreid never really comes alive, either, even in the famous scenes when Henreid lights two cigarettes and gives her one – XXX-rated these days for promoting tobacco and breaking COVID rules. Casablanca’s romance crackled more because Humphrey Bogart sizzled with
Ingrid Bergman whereas Henreid never really warmed up in either film. The script, too, by Casey Robinson, is sometimes a little flat and highfalutin literary – taken as it is from Olive Higgins Prouty’s novel Now, Voyager (1941). But then again, it is Prouty’s novel that provides the pleasing, twisting, turning plot – and the clever Walt Whitman lines Dr Jaquith gives to Vale: ‘The untold want, by life and land ne’er granted/Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.’ This becomes Vale’s credo, as she breaks out from her mother’s grotesque grip to become interested in everything and everybody. You can see why the critics turned their noses up at the film. But you can also see why wartime audiences loved its escapist high romance – it was Davis’s biggest box-office hit. The film’s last – and most famous – scene was lampooned in The History Boys (2006). Alan Bennett’s schoolboys, smoking like chimneys, wrongly put on Celia Johnson cut-glass English accents to imitate Davis saying, ‘Oh, Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.’ With most other actresses, that would sound unbearably corny. When Davis says it, you melt.
‘You can be honest – this bag doesn’t go with this dress, does it?’
THEATRE WILLIAM COOK CONSTELLATIONS
GARY SMITH
VAUDEVILLE THEATRE, LONDON, Until 12th September ‘Do you know why it’s impossible to lick the tips of your elbows? They hold the secret to immortality – so if you could lick them, there’s a chance you’d be able to live for ever.’ That’s the tantalising opening line of Nick Payne’s clever, moving play, first staged at the Royal Court in 2012. What follows is one of the most intriguing dramas I’ve seen in a long while – a meditation on the role of time, and the way it seems to shift throughout our lives. Constellations is about the multiverse – the mind-boggling theory that there’s an infinite number of universes, in which every possible permutation of our existence is continually re-enacted, in an endless series of alternative versions of the lives we could have led. I can never quite work out whether this concept is enchanting or absolutely terrifying, but either way it’s a fascinating subject for a play. Rather than grappling with big historical questions, Payne focuses on two people who fall in love, and imagines what might have happened if events had unfolded in a variety of other ways. This topic has been tackled numerous times in the cinema, in films such as Run Lola Run and Sliding Doors. However, unlike the big screen, which needs to paint big pictures, the theatre allows us to examine these cosmic conundrums in miniature. Constellations makes you realise it’s not just our actions that shape our destinies. By replaying each scene several times, with minor variations that lead to dramatically divergent outcomes, Payne demonstrates that the things we say – even the way we say them – can send our lives shooting off on completely different courses. Marianne is a quantum physicist; Roland is a beekeeper. When they meet, it seems they have nothing in common but, after several false starts, their relationship begins to grow. Payne shows us how love affairs can turn on a few key moments, depending on our choice of words. Tom Scutt’s surreal set, a sea of white balloons, is a metaphor for this infinity of rival outcomes. It makes you wonder whether you chose the right path yourself. And in one of those curious cases of life imitating drama, when I went to see this ingenuous two-hander I had a minor
Constellations: Peter Capaldi and Zoe Wanamaker mix it up with three other couples
multiverse experience of my own. Expecting to see Peter Capaldi and Zoe Wanamaker onstage, I found Ivanno Jeremiah and Sheila Atim playing Roland and Marianne instead. The cock-up was entirely mine, of course. Turns out director Michael Longhurst (who directed the play’s first run, in 2012) has decided to mix it up this time by casting four contrasting couples, of different ages and ethnicities, in the roles. Capaldi and Wanamaker have been alternating with Atim and Jeremiah during July. Then Omari Douglas and Russell Tovey are alternating with Chris O’Dowd and Anna Maxwell Martin until September. Douglas and Tovey are both male, which is bound to make a big difference. Atim and Jeremiah are both black, which I thought might make a difference, but it doesn’t. These are roles that any two people could play. I’d never seen either of them onstage before – their relationship was a revelation. It was fascinating to watch them playing all these different versions of themselves: Jeremiah alternates abruptly between kindness and brutality; Atim switches suddenly between tender and sassy. You start to think about all the different versions of yourself that you might become, or could have been. I would have liked to see Peter Capaldi and Zoe Wanamaker as well (though they will have departed by the time you read this), but as I watched Atim and Jeremiah onstage, a rather odd thing
happened. Because I’m so familiar with Capaldi and Wanamaker, and Anna Maxwell Martin and Chris O’Dowd, I started to hear their voices, too. It was just my imagination, the sort of thing that sometimes happens in the theatre, but it felt like a fleeting glimpse of the parallel worlds of Payne’s play. Constellations is brief – only 75 minutes with no interval – but it lingers in your mind’s eye for a long time, like the memory of a lucid dream. It’s a sign of what a fine play it is that I’m already eager to revisit it, re-enacted by one of the couples I’ve yet to see.
RADIO VALERIE GROVE I was wrong to mock Dr Michael Mosley’s Just One Thing, in which the good doctor gave us a simple, health-improving idea every day. Standing on one leg was the most memorable, and cold showers the least appealing. Warm baths at bedtime were preferable, and ‘learning new skills’ the most time-consuming. But it certainly qualified as the most passed-on wordof-mouth recommendation of the Plague Year. Everybody I’ve met lately (a modest but significant group) excitedly told me it had revolutionised their lives – even the exercise-phobic Lynn Barber. So I’ve tried about half the ideas. I’ve been standing on one leg while cleaning my teeth. I kept (briefly) a gratitude The Oldie August 2021 63
diary and embraced green spaces (my rain-sodden July garden). As for my new skill (revived from schooldays), it is singing Il était une bergère at the top of my voice. This radio therapy continued by replicating Dr Mosley’s advice in Book of the Week – Richard Mabey’s Nature Cure, his memoir about how he vanquished a severe bout of depression by reflecting, inspired by a fledgling swift, on the natural scene once more. Good advice has been much needed in lockdown, even if radio stations seemed over-keen on labelling our justifiable mood dip as ‘mental-health issues’. Even sensible Virginia Ironside acknowledged in The Oldie that a lot of us are ‘in a dreadful state just now’. I commend Horatio Clare’s excellent memoir Heavy Light, extracted in The Oldie, in which he is sectioned in a Wakefield asylum with mania and psychosis – escaping not with pills, but by reconnecting with the outdoors: ‘All my life, I have watched birds and stared at views. Did I not realise how rich and necessary that was – did I forget?’ The podcast now dominates audio coverage in papers and weeklies. When someone lately referred to ‘the doyenne of indie podcasting, Helen Zaltzman’, I was sceptical. How can podcasting have so quickly acquired a doyenne? But in fact, Helen, sister of Andy of The News Quiz, won a Sony Award for podcasting long ago, in 2010. The British Podcast Awards this year gave the top prize to Vent Documentaries, featuring presenters aged between 16 and 20. With podcasts, I steer clear of anything foodie, such as Jay Rayner’s Out to Lunch, disgustingly subtitled ‘Where famous people learn to talk with their mouth full’. The most successful are the ones that most resemble professional broadcasting, being articulate, informative and structured. Private Eye’s Page 94 arrives monthly, underscoring one’s mounting rage at cronyism and corruption in high places. And Something Rhymes with Purple, Gyles Brandreth’s weekly podcast with Susie Dent, is a vastly enjoyable ramble through the lexicon: about words, their meanings and etymology. It has anecdotes and anachronisms and anagrams. It won the award for Best Entertainment Podcast 2020 and I suspect our readers, keen players of jeux d’esprit, are among its millions of subscribers. Greg James is having fun with Rewinder, a Saturday-morning plunge into the BBC archives. Recently, he 64 The Oldie August 2021
played some truly haunting old London street cries by lavender-sellers. He also sang the praises of the late Carrie Fisher, who ‘never responded to an interviewer with a banality’. The example he played was from Hard News on TV: ‘You married Paul Simon.’ ‘Did I? Oh my god.’ ‘And Bryan Lourd. Why didn’t that one work?’ ‘Well, he’s gay. He forgot to mention it.’ From the new-look I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, check out the brilliant Rachel Parris singing My Old Man’s a Dustman to the tune of The Power of Love (staggering), and Miles Jupp’s response to ‘I shop at Waitrose because’ … ‘I might bump into my pool-cleaner in Tesco.’
TELEVISION ROGER LEWIS Growing up on a farm, I learned to detest the outdoors as a place of pain and boredom. That boiling summer of 1976, when there was no water and lavatories were not to be flushed – I was heaving hay bales about; then corn stooks. This was Glamorganshire, but it was like southern Italy. The weather was always against you, with droughts ensuring nothing grew or non-stop rain meaning wheat and barley rotted in the fields. Lambing invariably took place in mud and drizzle. Stock had to be counted daily, wormed, sheared and selected for the slaughterhouse. The sheep were always escaping and had to be rounded up – a job taking hours. Cattle broke through fences and destroyed gardens, trampling wishing wells. Gates were left open by ramblers,
Top rural gear: Jeremy Clarkson in Clarkson’s Farm
and we’d sit in the Land Rover with shotguns ready to shoot any dog that ‘worried’ pregnant ewes. It was a soul-destroying life, I felt, and monotonous. In adult life, I’ve only ever wanted to be somewhere hemmed in with nice restaurants, theatres, libraries, opera houses and other signs of civilisation. Nevertheless, such can be the call of the wild that Jeremy Clarkson, who already happened to own a thousand acres of the Cotswolds, decided in 2019 to take over from his manager and have a go at actual farming himself, ploughing and being bucolic. The result, in the eight episodes of Clarkson’s Farm, is delightfulness, beautifully filmed. On the one hand, Clarkson fully discovers for himself the ghastly thanklessness of an agricultural existence – the sheep less keen on staying in their fields than POWs content to stay put in Colditz; the baffling extent of government red tape; the vagaries of the Oxfordshire climate. But, on the other hand, he can smile with genuine joy when he sees an owl. Such is the personality the burly, rumpled Clarkson projects – irritable, bashful, oddly lovable – he seemed to me to be turning frame by frame into Stephen Fry, and the documentary soon became a brilliantly assembled unselfconscious comedy drama. His sidekick, Kaleb Cooper, a young man so happy driving a tractor he has never felt the need to travel further in his life than Chipping Norton, was as funny as Kurtan Mucklowe in This Country – another, similar masterpiece about empty meadows and traffic chaos at the village fête. I had high hopes for GB News, if it was to make a stand against wokery. But it was Acorn Antiques, with inadvertent freeze frames, failing microphones and presenters mumbling incomprehensibly in provincial accents: ‘Rowena? From Kuwait? Hello? Hello?’ The set, a blacked-out basement room, had the glamour of a garage, and I expected Mrs Overall to be in the background Hoovering and for Cousin Jerez to materialise from Spain (‘Planes are very quick these days’). Most peculiar was the way Andrew Neil, a man not slow to tell people to think on and look sharp, immediately went ‘on leave’ – unless that was code for the way he simply ran out of stomach lining and is in intensive care. But I was reminded of the character in the soap who went out for a spanner and was never heard from again. When I look at other people, I never understand why they choose to live together. Solitude is surely the most
Ed McLachlan
‘Great carpet, Godfather!’ blissful state. Couples always seem to be nagging and niggling and bickering – parents, in particular, worn down by parental responsibility and worry, are always getting under each other’s skin, sullen silences alternating with false jollity. Thus Together, with James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan, about a man and wife – and their child – during the year of lockdown. I kept thinking, look, just get divorced, the pair of you! It was very chopsy, with frequent asides and lengthy monologues, as if the characters were on a stage, giving a paying crowd their money’s worth. McAvoy and Horgan expressed their apparent need for each other through insult and accusation – arias of hatred shifting abruptly into panting, tearful expressions of love and remorse. Jabbering away, the actor and the actress seemed to be there only to demonstrate histrionic facility – and the result was artificial, stilted and non-real. Coronavirus was the pretext for diatribes
about conflicting government advice, the miracle of the vaccine, and how appalling it was that all those old folk died in care homes – but what do old folks expect will happen to them in a care home? As far as I’m concerned, a quick death from COVID was (is) surely preferable to yet more years drooling from Alzheimer’s. I am a farmer’s son – so I know about being cruel to be kind.
MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE ALAN AND ISABEL RAWSTHORNE MUSIC MEETS ART Half a century has passed since the death in July 1971 of Alan Rawsthorne, one of the best-liked and best-regarded composers of his time, not least by Proms audiences and organisers. The relationship began in 1942 with the première of his scintillating First Piano Concerto. ‘A work I would gladly
listen to daily until Christmas,’ wrote one contemporary critic. It quickly became a Proms favourite, chalking up nine outings in 25 years, three of them on the popular Last Night. There were also several recordings, including one by Moura Lympany, a gramophone classic. Nor was it alone. The richly imagined Second Piano Concerto, a Festival of Britain commission, appeared in eight Proms seasons between 1952 and 2005, with a Last Night outing of its own in 1970. Clifford Curzon gave the 1951 première, which produced another much-collected recording. Like his good friend and fellow Lancastrian William Walton, Rawsthorne stood at something of an angle to the English musical tradition, closer to the French and Russian neoclassicists of the period. Walton admired the impeccable technique and instantly recognisable style of this quiet, watchful, wryly amusing man, much as he enjoyed his company: ‘gay and genial’, with his ‘unexpected quips’ and views on all manner of subjects. Between 1942 and the last of Rawsthorne’s Proms commissions in 1968, many of his works were showcased there. No more, alas. Despite the 50th anniversary, none of his music has been advertised for the 2021 Proms, not even for the evening of 20th-century British film music of which he was a revered exponent. Should we be surprised? The fact is that space is at a premium in the brave new world of diversity-driven programme-making that has so skewed the Radio 3 listening experience since 2018. Happily, those classic recordings remain, as well as a small treasure-trove of Rawsthorne CDs on the Naxos label. One disc includes his international breakthrough work, Symphonic Studies, and the Oboe Concerto, written for Evelyn Rothwell at much the same time as Richard Strauss was completing his better-known (and to mind rather less involving) piece. Rawsthorne’s second wife was the artist Isabel Rawsthorne. Where Isabel was passionate and expansive, a force of nature who had run the gauntlet of youthful experience in 1930s London, Paris, and Civil War Spain, he was a more rooted character. It was a good match. She needed her freedom; he provided the frame that freedom needed in the famously companionable Essex farmhouse they shared in the 1950s and ’60s. Both, I imagine, would be mildly amused by this year’s events. Alan The Oldie August 2021 65
Simon meets Julia Child – not a bad combination in an otherwise entirely undomesticated woman. Rawsthorne was a pacifist who set his pacifism aside for what he believed was a necessary war. Which is how, in 1944, this serving soldier was invited to cheer up the troops with a merry overture. Street Corner was the result; an evocation of what it would be like, once the blackouts and lockdowns were over, to be out on the razzle on a busy Saturday night. Just the ticket, you might have thought, as the curtain-raiser for this year’s Last Night of the Proms.
GOLDEN OLDIES JOHN STOKER
Alan Rawsthorne c 1942, when his First Piano Concerto enjoyed critical success
HUGHIE WAS GREEN WITH ENVY
continues to be quietly ignored. Isabel finally appears in plain sight, thanks to a meticulously researched, superblywritten and beautifully produced new biography by Carol Jacobi, Out of the Cage: The Art of Isabel Rawsthorne. Isabel’s disappearance from 20th-century art history, Jacobi suggests, has little to do with her artistic achievement; more to do with the fact that, as a woman, she has generally been remembered for her husbands, lovers and male associates. And what a list it is: artists Jacob Epstein, André Derain, Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon; musicians René Leibowitz and Constant Lambert (Isabel had an inborn love and understanding of music). Not to mention her first husband, the legendary foreign correspondent Sefton Delmer, mastermind of Britain’s wartime black propaganda. The war changed both their lives: Isabel, hidden from view, working as an illustrator for Delmer’s top-secret Political Warfare Executive; Alan nearly blown to bits when the Bristol house he was sharing was bombed in November 1940. He survived but he lost his manuscripts, his music books and an early draft of his first fiddle concerto – one of the great 20th-century English violin concertos, which he recomposed, to telling effect, for the 1948 Cheltenham Festival. Walton thought the war left a heavy mark, causing him to join Lambert, Bacon, Dylan Thomas and others in an all-too-ready resort to alcohol. Isabel was different. A seasoned drinker in the French style, she had a knowledge of French wines, matched by her knowledge of French gastronomy. André
In 1978, I was a fairly regular traveller on the line between Norwich and London, as I had to attend meetings in the capital with my colleague Harry. One afternoon, we arrived late at Norwich station; luckily, our train hadn’t left and we set about looking for a compartment. Eventually we stumbled into one already occupied by two men. They turned to look at us and one of them said, ‘Hello, Harry. Haven’t seen you in a long time. The train’s late as usual – but what do you expect?’ The mid-Atlantic twang was as familiar as the face – which belonged to Hughie Green (1920-97). He’d been in Norwich for the press launch of a film he’d been appearing in. ‘It’s the kind of film that Britain does best,’ he enthused. ‘It’s a comedy and, boy, does this country need a good laugh. We should be supporting our film industry and that’s the reason I’m in this movie.’ The film was called What’s Up Superdoc!, starring Harry H Corbett and Bill Pertwee. Hughie didn’t mention the plot. Neither did Derek Ford, its writer and director, who was sitting next to him. But as Hughie played a character called Bob Scratchit, you can surmise that it didn’t spark a British comedy revival. Harry had known Hughie for many years and sympathised with him over the loss of his talent show, Opportunity Knocks, which had been axed by Thames Television. This sparked a rant against the company’s head of light entertainment. ‘He killed a programme that millions of people loved. I got an investigator to collect the dirt on him, but the guy couldn’t find any. That programme supported British talent – but television doesn’t want new talent. It’s afraid of it.’
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Hughie then gave us his views on the state of Britain and how socialism was killing the country. Harold Wilson had been in league with the Russians and he’d been glad to see him go. But the Labour Party was still sapping the British spirit and Russia was the enemy. Hughie leaned forward. ‘You know who’s going to save us?’ Harry and I drew closer to him. ‘It’s the young men of the RAF. They saved us in the last war and they’ve got pride in being British. How many people believe in Britain today?’ We nodded in agreement. It seemed the sensible thing to do. Perhaps Hughie saw us as kindred spirits: he invited us back to his Baker Street flat for a drink. It was immaculate and beautifully maintained by his housekeeper. Harry happened to mention that I was interested in model trains and Hughie beckoned me into another room, which housed one of the largest model railways I had ever seen. ‘I come here to relax,’ he told me, and indeed he seemed to be a lot calmer and far less bitter as he watched the engines ploughing their way through the miniature landscape. ‘I don’t usually bring people in here. You know why? They ask me to crash the locomotives. That’s the kind of sick world we’re living in.’ As we left the flat, I couldn’t help thinking that, as his influence had decreased with the demise of his television show, he was happier in this model world where he could control everything and, at long last, the trains ran on time. Rachel Johnson is away
Hughie Green, star of Opportunity Knocks and father of Paula Yates
Grinling Gibbons’s life-size wooden cravat, carved in limewood in imitation of Venetian needlepoint lace, c 1690, V&A
EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU GRINLING GIBBONS TERCENTENARY EXHIBITIONS AND EVENTS Grinling Gibbons, the great Anglo-Dutch wood-carver, died 300 years ago, on 3rd August 1721, aged 73. In our Spring issue, Loyd Grossman saluted him, and flagged up the exhibition Centuries in the Making, which opens the superlative carver’s tercentennial celebrations. That show will be at the Bonhams rooms in Bond Street from 3rd to 27th August, before travelling to Compton Verney in Warwickshire, from 25th September to January 2022. A new Grinling Gibbons Society has been set up under the patronage of the Prince of Wales, with Tristram Hunt as president. Gibbons’s patron John Evelyn described him as ‘the most excellent in his profession, not only in England but in the whole world’, and his influence and inspiration have continued through the
centuries. This longevity is an important strand in both the opening exhibitions. It is intended that the shows produce a lasting legacy highlighting living modern crafts in a permanent setting, preferably in the City of London. Original works by Gibbons and his workshop in the Bonhams show include the font cover from All Hallows by the Tower, and two heads for effigies from
‘They never seem to be having much fun, do they?’
the Royal Armouries at the Tower itself. The lively Gibbons horse from the Tower will be seen only at Compton Verney. Perhaps the best-known piece by the master is the life-size wooden cravat, carved in imitation of Venetian lace, once owned by Horace Walpole and now at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Drawings and designs come from Sir John Soane’s Museum. Representing the continuing legacy are carvings by Thomas Wilkinson Wallis (1821-1903), rather forgotten now, but once considered ‘undoubtedly the Grinling Gibbons of the 19th century’. Art & Ornament, an exhibition of current practice inspired by Gibbons’s legacy, is organised by the Master Carvers’ Association. Working in wood, stone and lettering, the Master Carvers are themselves a living legacy. Their show runs until 22nd August at St Mary Abchurch, with its Gibbons reredos, and at the Dutch Church, Austin Friars (23rd August to 5th September). As well as carvings, there are watercolours by Hugh Buchanan and paintings by Tim Wright inspired by Gibbons, and Hugh Wedderburn will be carving on site. Further events include poetry and recitals. The Oldie August 2021 67
Pursuits GARDENING DAVID WHEELER COMING UP ROSES Don’t lament the passing of June and July’s cavalcade of roses. Many will continue flowering all summer and into autumn. I’ve been chatting to Michael Marriott. Until his retirement last year, he was David Austin’s head rosarian. A multitasker, he wrote descriptive and historical paragraphs for the firm’s catalogues about the nursery’s worldfamous English Roses and the many long-established classics raised by a host of nurserymen in other temperate regions over the past several centuries. Alongside his deskbound nursery duties over a 35-year spell at Albrighton near Wolverhampton as Austin’s ‘all-purpose expert’, Marriott also found time to design rose gardens in this country and abroad and to lecture worldwide about roses. Nearer home, with panache and oracular skills, he dispensed muchvalued hands-on information about the cultivation of roses to visitors welcomed at the nursery and its display gardens. I asked the oracle to suggest roses for August and late-summer flowers. He began with three Austin-bred English Roses, to which I’ve added notes cribbed from their catalogues. Lady of Shalott is highly disease-resistant and one of the firm’s most robust creations, with chalice-shaped blooms bearing petals of salmon-pink upper sides which contrast with a golden-yellow reverse. Mortimer Sackler, a ‘rather unusual climber’, produces 12ft stems, sporting fragrant, medium-sized, semi-double flowers of a soft blush colour. The lovely Desdemona (‘best for flowering, best for fragrance’) has peachy pink buds that open to beautiful pinkish-hued, white blooms with in-curved petals which throw an arresting interplay of light and shadow.
Two bushy, ground-covering roses from German breeder Kordes, with names anticipating the oncoming game season, are Grouse, well-endowed with a profusion of blush-pink single flowers, and similar-looking (but white) Partridge – both new to me but placed high on my wants list, now I’ve learned about their extended and versatile strut. Try them on a low wall, where their lax-bloom-laden stems will tumble prettily to the ground. A personal favourite, and one I’ve grown for many years, also appears on Michael’s list: Rosa virginiana. This American ‘wild’ or ‘prairie’ species is sought less for its conservative midsummer flowering (akin to that of our native dog rose, R canina) than for its spectacular fiery foliage, set further aglow by clusters of glossy ruby hips, as colder nights approach. Easy from cuttings, too. American Pillar – yes, also from that side of the pond and treasured since its first appearance in 1909 – is a determined rambler (rosarian Peter Beales slights it as ‘almost coarse’) which will in two seasons cover a high fence or pergola or climb athletically into nearby trees. Its bright reddish-pink flowers pale to deep pink as they age but continue abundantly in large trusses. My final Marriott selection is a musk
Rosa virginiana, a prairie species
rose, R moschata ‘Princesse de Nassau’, thought to be of unknown origin and parentage but probably grown by aficionados since the 19th century. With flowers of a ‘yellowish-straw’ colour and smelling ‘very sweet’, it’s said to have been ‘rediscovered’ by the late Graham Stuart Thomas, who sent budwood to Peter Beales in 1982 – Beales vouches for its hardiness after its surviving the severe winter of 1984/5. You can see it for yourself at GST’s supreme collection of roses within two adjoining walled gardens at Mottisfont Abbey in Hampshire. And I too will head to Mottisfont this month, and to Austin’s rosy acres in September, for there’s no substitute for assessing these roses in real life, however good the myriad rose books and catalogues. David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal
KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD CHERVIL Chervil is a herb more popular in France, where it is sometimes known as French parsley. Its leaves are delicate and lacy in appearance, more like herb Robert than parsley. The small, white flowers of chervil are attractive but, once it has reached that stage, the leaves are not worth having. The seed catalogues tell you to sow chervil any time between March and August, but I don’t think that is good advice. I have made the mistake of sowing the seed in spring, then not giving the plants enough water in dry weather. They ran quickly to flower and the leaves turned a russet colour. Now is the best time to start growing chervil. An early-August sowing – ideally just before a full moon, according to gardening lore – will provide leaves to be picked after about eight weeks. If the The Oldie August 2021 69
leaves are cut before any risk of autumn flowering, they may provide a second cutting in late October if the weather stays mild. Chervil is listed as a hardy annual, but you may leave the plants in the ground during winter, with some protection, in order to pick leaves again in early spring. It is known as one of the traditional Lenten herbs. If chervil is to survive the winter, it will benefit from full sun. But if it is grown through the summer, it will need a half-shaded position to minimise the risk of bolting. You can achieve this by sowing the seed between rows of taller herbs and vegetables, or beneath fruit bushes. The leaves should be used as soon as they are cut, and there is little point in drying chervil, as it quickly loses its aromatic, aniseed-like flavour. I have never come across chervil root, also known as turnip-rooted chervil, which is grown in France but little known here. Apparently, the seed may take months to germinate, the plants can grow up to six feet, and the flavour of the root is said to be reminiscent of chestnuts. However, it is unrelated to the herb chervil and I think best ignored.
ELISABETH LUARD
COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD MEALS FROM THE MED Tabbouleh is a Lebanese chopped salad in which the dominant element must always be parsley. When you order tea in any café in the village of Sidi Bou Said outside Tunis, expect it to come topped with slivers of toasted almonds. Salsa romescu, a fiery Catalan sauce of olive oil and chilli emulsified with garlic and nuts, is traditionally eaten with rabbit and delicious with mashed potato. All this and more can be found in the great Arabella Boxer’s Mediterranean Cookbook. First published in 1981 when she was food editor of Vogue, it’s back in print with Grub Street as a sturdy little hardback, suitable for tucking into the picnic basket on a damp day on the Skegness seafront. The cooking, as you’d expect from the supremely stylish author of First Slice Your Cookbook and The Book of English Food, is simple, straightforward and free from fuss. You’ll find elegant thumbnail sketches, detailing how and where the recipes were gathered, together with essays on markets, ingredients and regional preferences in the lands that lie between the olive tree and the palm grove. Anticipate a distinct leaning towards 70 The Oldie August 2021
with crushed macaroons, chopped almonds, a scrap of candied lemon peel and the pulp of a spare peach; arrange all in a buttered baking dish and leave to soften in white wine in the oven, while you sip a Negroni in the piazza where Federico filmed Anita in the fountain just before Marcello kissed her. Happy days!
RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE WHINE LIST
Italy and Turkey, and a preference for butter over olive oil, appropriate to a woman of Scots descent. Lovely. Cypriot eggs with purslane (or chard) Purslane, this year’s most fashionable greenery, grows like a weed wherever it finds a foothold. The Greeks love it, as does most of the Middle East and India. If substituting chard, shred the leaves and save the stalks for a different dish. To serve two as a light lunch, pinch the top two inches from a bunch of purslane (or substitute a couple of handfuls of shredded chard and a squeeze of lemon), rinse and pat dry. Melt a knob of butter (or olive oil) in a frying pan and cook the leaves briefly till wilted. Meanwhile, beat 4-5 eggs with sea salt and black pepper, then pour over the greens. Cook as you would an omelette till just set (don’t try to fold) and slip it out onto a flat plate. Turkish lamb pilav For this and other Turkish rice dishes, advises Ms Boxer, choose a risotto-type short-grain and wash carefully, or the pilav will be sticky. This is an easy dish that reheats well. Serves 4 350g diced lamb shoulder or leg meat 1 medium onion, finely chopped 25g butter 2 tbsps shelled pistachios 2 tbsps currants ½ tsp ground allspice 225g risotto rice, washed 600ml light stock (or water) Sea salt and black pepper Trim the lamb pieces to the size of a walnut. Cook the onion in the butter for a couple of minutes, add the lamb and fry, stirring, till browned all over. Continue to cook gently, uncovered, till the lamb is nearly done – about 20 minutes. Add the nuts, currants, allspice and rice and stir round for a few minutes. Add hot stock (or water), season, cover the pan and simmer till the rice is cooked and the liquid absorbed – about 15 minutes. Pesche ripiene When in Rome, stuff your peach halves
The Editor of The Oldie has not been himself lately. No longer the affable cove, he has become a worldly cynic, secondguessing foul play at every stage. I can date the origins to one terrible restaurant experience which he now recites to any casual passer-by, like his own rosary. It goes like this: ‘Maison François, the much-praised new restaurant on Duke Street, pulled a real fast one on a friend and me. Having had a bottle of their cheaper red wine for around £45, we asked for a carafe with half a bottle. They said they didn’t do a half-bottle of that wine. So I asked for something similar. [HEAVY PAUSE] Only when the bill came did it emerge they’d charged … £80 for the half-bottle. [VISCERAL WAIL] In other words, they’d given us wine that was almost four times as expensive.’ At this point he is fully frothing at the mouth, legs in the air etc… He would never have got over it had the same thing not happened to me at a lunch at J Sheekey, part of Richard Caring’s empire. Now, he no longer wails alone. On their first day of reopening, three of us sat down at 1.45pm. At around 2pm, I asked for the wine list – but was told there wasn’t one. Very odd. Had Mr Caring sold off their cellar to pay for the Stansted-style extension of Annabel’s? ‘Chardonnay or Sauvignon blanc?’ the waiter asked, implying there were only two whites available. So we opted for a half-carafe of the Chardonnay. It was so good, we ordered another. Yet when the bill came, we were charged for two half-bottles of Chablis at £42 each. Miraculously, a wine list with 50-odd wines was produced to prove the price was correct. I said we’d just wanted something simple and asked why we hadn’t been shown the list. His first try: ‘It was only printed at 1.30pm.’ But we asked for it at 2pm. His second try, delivered huffily: ‘It’s up to you. It will take ten minutes to change the bill.’ If this had been an opera or Greek tragedy, it would have made for the perfect deus ex machina moment. Forsooth, the Oldie Editor would have
descended through the ceiling, wielding a double-headed axe. As it was, we were begrudgingly refunded £42. Top tip: always ask for the Atlantic Bar wine list, even if you sit in the restaurant. It has cheaper wines. There are some desperate tactics being deployed out there. Caveat emptor! Things cheered up at Nopi, a welcome addition to the Ottolenghi stable. He can do no wrong. We had raw courgettes and charred leeks, followed by beef and beetroot rendang and octopus with sag aloo. I had my first ever glass of Czech wine, a large Karmazin, for just £10.50. Then off to the paradise that is Petersham Nurseries, the very best place for lunch in the summer. And certainly the most bucolic. The walk from Richmond station through Petersham Meadows is the warm-up for the scented glasshouses where tables are strewn on an earth floor, as if in a rapidly assembled Bedouin tent. We had two salads: a tomato-andstrawberry one and another of zucchini with pomelo and pecorino. Then we shared beef with caponata and a spicy lamb dish. Disappointingly, their cheapest red was £46. It’s £55 for two courses, and worth every penny to escape to Arcadia. Nopi, 21-22 Warwick Street, London W1B 5NE; www.ottolenghi.co.uk; tel: 020 7494 9584. Small plates from £9 to £15.50 Petersham Nurseries; Church Lane, off Petersham Road, Richmond, Surrey TW10 7AB; tel: 020 8940 5230; www. petershamnurseries.com
DRINK BILL KNOTT MY BEST LOUISIANA PURCHASE An intriguing premise in Danish director Thomas Vinterberg’s Oscar-winning film Another Round is that humans are born with a deficit of 0.05 per cent alcohol in their bloodstreams. The theory comes from Norwegian psychiatrist Finn Skårderud. Correcting this imbalance with an occasional slug of vodka allows four childhood friends, teachers at the same school, to become more creative and relaxed both professionally and personally. Until it doesn’t, of course. But I shan’t spoil the plot for you, other than to say that one particular cocktail features at an important juncture in the narrative: the Sazerac. A heady blend of rye whiskey, absinthe, bitters and sugar, it has the distinction of being the official cocktail of New Orleans, where it was invented
some time in the middle of the 19th century. It also has a strong claim to being America’s first branded cocktail. Originally, however, it was made with cognac, not whiskey – specifically the cognac from Sazerac de Forge et Fils, founded in 1782 and imported by a New Orleans ex-bar owner. At the same time, a Creole apothecary, Antoine Peychaud, was making his own bitters, and Aaron Bird opened the Sazerac Coffee House, where the Sazerac was the house cocktail. A few years later, Thomas H Handy bought both the bar and the recipe for Peychaud’s bitters, but he had a problem: in the 1870s, phylloxera swept through France, destroying vineyards, and exports of brandy more or less ceased. Handy replaced the cognac with rye whiskey and, before his death in 1889, vouchsafed his Sazerac recipe to William T ‘Cocktail Bill’ Boothby, whose seminal manual, The World’s Drinks and How to Mix Them, was published in 1907. Handy’s recipe calls for ‘¾ jigger [about 35 ml] of whiskey, 2 dashes of Peychaud, absinthe to wet glass, ½ spoon sugar syrup, 1 slice lemon peel’. The liquids are stirred with ice, strained into the absinthe-rinsed glass and garnished with the lemon. It is a recipe that – despite the banning of absinthe and the dark years of Prohibition – survives to this day, although many New Orleans bars use Herbsaint, a wormwood-free absinthe substitute. It is a drink that can easily be tweaked. Some bars have reinstated the cognac. And Handy’s Sazerac Company, now owned by billionaire William Goldring, has recently started distilling and marketing a Sazerac de Forge cognac. Others use a dash of Angostura as well as Peychaud’s bitters. And some bartenders shake rather than stir. I first sampled the Sazerac at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky, during a particularly riotous day at the Kentucky Derby. It was made with Sazerac Straight Rye Whiskey – also made by the Sazerac Company. I barely remember the day’s penultimate race, except that it was won by a horse called British Attitude, a 25-1 long shot on which I could not resist placing my few remaining dollars. It romped home and I won a packet. I proceeded to spend it on several more Sazeracs, sending my blood alcohol level considerably higher than a Norwegian psychiatrist might consider prudent. Should you feel the level of blood in your alcohol stream creeping dangerously high, the Sazerac is a fine way to correct it. And I urge you to go and see Another Round, preferably with a flask full of chilled Sazerac to hand.
Wine This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of: a classic Muscadet from the Loire, extra complex for being matured on its lees; a spicy St Nicolas de Bourgueil, from further upstream; and a fresh, lightly oaked Chardonnay from France’s deep south. However, if you wish, you can buy cases of each individual wine. Château du Jaunay, Muscadet de Sèvre et Maine sur Lie, 2020, offer price £12.49, case price £149.88 Crisp and bone-dry, but with a pleasing richness on the palate. Perfect with a plâteau de fruits de mer. St Nicolas de Bourgueil “La Martinière”, Domaine Bougrier, Loire 2019, offer price £13.99, case price £167.88 Classy Cabernet Franc: supple tannins, bright, raspberry-like fruit and a long, smooth finish. Montsablé Chardonnay, Pays d’Oc 2019, offer price £9.99, case price £119.88 Chardonnay in the Mâconnais style, but from Limoux, south of Carcassonne: clean and bright, with a hint of vanilla.
Mixed case price £145.88 – a saving of £20.99 (including free delivery) HOW TO ORDER
Call 0117 370 9930
Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm; or email info@dbmwines.co.uk Quote OLDIE to get your special price. Free delivery to UK mainland. For details visit www.dbmwines. co.uk/promo_OLD NB Offer closes 6th September 2021.
The Oldie August 2021 71
SPORT JIM WHITE VICTORY FROM DEFEAT Sometimes in sport, defeat can be as valuable as victory. Not as celebratory, uplifting or glorious, maybe. But as an educational resource, there is little to beat it. When the England players were presented with their runners’-up medals at Wembley after faltering at the last in the European Championships, to a man they immediately took them off. As they did so, the knowledge that the nation’s hurt, already 55 years in the making, was to continue was etched deep into their forlorn faces. Gareth Southgate demonstrated, as he steered his team closer to silverware than any England side since 1966, that he is a manager of resolve, intelligence and appreciation. Dignified and diplomatic, as always he struck the perfect note in his graceful acknowledgement of defeat. This is not the Donald Trump of football. But he has also shown he is a manager who learns. Nor did he get where he is today without an inbuilt ruthlessness. What he wants is victory, not honourable defeat. He will have seen what pain the loss to those wily old Italians inflicted and will use it as the starting point for collective advance. This is what champions do. Alex Ferguson was a master of it. Whenever his Manchester United side lost out on trophies, he would tell his players to confront their feelings of disappointment and desolation to ensure they were never in a position to feel like that again. When Mo Farah failed to make the 10,000-metres final in Beijing in 2008, he refined his training, changed his coach and repurposed his approach. Defeat empowered him and he ended up, across the next two Olympic cycles, winning more gold medals than several sizeable nations. Andy Murray likewise replayed moments of defeat on his mental cinema to encourage himself through the most torturous of training sessions. Even Roger Federer still smarts at the memory of his early failures at Wimbledon. Every champion knows what it is like to lose. And the spur it delivers. Southgate has already changed much of the culture around the international set-up. Weary experience has taught us over the years that England teams can horribly underperform. Apparently weighed down by the shirt, the players sink in a morass of trepidation. Southgate made the young men under his charge relish their moment, encourage one another and subsume their ego into the group effort. He allowed them to enjoy themselves. And what a difference he wrought. He steered his side first to the semifinal of the 72 The Oldie August 2021
2018 World Cup and then to the delayed final of the 2020 Euros. He has given a vivid demonstration that English players are good enough to be within grasping distance of glory. And, in the process, he has cheered up the nation, proud at having their players become proper contenders. But still they didn’t win. And Southgate will tell them to use what happened at the end at Wembley as fuel to propel them to the summit which is now within genuine reach. He knows from personal experience what missing a penalty in a shoot-out does. He knows they can recover and return to the international fray better, sharper and more attuned to what is required. Faltering at the last, he might have learned other things, too – questioning his own aversion to risk, perhaps. But his players will have learned something more valuable: if you want to be a champion, then close is not near enough. In sport, the shortest route to redemption is victory.
MOTORING ALAN JUDD ELECTRIC DREAMS One friend has long had an electric BMW i3, another has just bought a VW ID.3, a third a Kia E-Niro (pronounced as in Robert De) and my brother-in-law a second-hand Tesla. Is it time to go electric? EVs account for only 6.6 per cent of new car sales. But interest is growing – despite their being more expensive than petrol or diesel equivalents, despite the inadequate charging infrastructure and despite the fact that you have to drive one about 50,000 miles before the environmental cost of producing it comes down to that of combustion vehicles. After price, the most commonly asked questions are about range. This depends on battery capacity. Lithium-ion batteries start at about 30 kilowatt hours (kWh) capacity and go up to 100 kWh, giving a range of roughly 100 to 300 miles. That’s more than enough for most people’s daily driving. However, cold weather will reduce it by about a third, as will cruising the motorway at 70mph. Heaters and air-con also reduce it. A VW ID.3, with a theoretical range of 261 miles, was recently tested over varied routes with all systems on and yielded 180 miles. There are currently about 14,000 public recharging sites, reportedly increasing by
700 a month. Absurdly, there are three different kinds of charger, plus Tesla’s dedicated plug. Most sites will have one to fit your vehicle, provided no one else is using it, but for supermarket or on-street charging you may have to use your own cable. Charging rates are slow, fast, rapid and ultra-rapid. The more expensive your car, the more rapidly it will charge – but reckon on its taking anything from 20 to 90 minutes. If you can add 150 miles in range from a 30-minute charge, you’re doing pretty well. Tariffs vary but, on the ID.3 test, it cost about £17 to fill from 20 to 100 per cent. Most EVs charge to about 80 per cent, as after that the rate slows dramatically. It costs about half that to charge at home. If you buy a new EV you may, as part of the deal, negotiate the installation of a fast-charge wall box. Otherwise, it costs £500-£1,000 to install one, minus a government grant of up to £350. If you don’t do that, you can recharge via a household three-pin plug, but it would probably take all night. EV batteries cost thousands to replace, which is why most manufacturers guarantee them for eight to ten years. Worth noting, though, that there are ten-year-old Nissan Leafs on sale from about £4,000 still running their original batteries. Servicing costs should be much lower, and you should be less likely to break down in an EV than in a petrol or diesel. Combustion engines have hundreds if not thousands of moving parts. EVs have very few, apart from suspension, wheels, brakes, steering, doors, windows etc. If, however, you run out of battery, you can’t bump-start the car by being towed. You might be able to jump-start it via its subsidiary 12-volt battery – not the main lithium-ion one – provided the donor car is not another EV, but it’s best to seek advice. The RAC has booster vans capable of giving you a ten-mile roadside top-up. You should also seek manufacturer’s advice before attempting to tow with an EV. Some will, some won’t – and, in all, range will be greatly reduced. The ease and quiet of EVs will win over most drivers; they make combustion cars seem clunky and noisy. But would I buy one? Not yet – not until the price comes down and the infrastructure gets up. And, by then, cleaner, greener hydrogen, using fewer rare earth minerals, might be a practical option. Recharging can take from 20 minutes to an hour and a half
T O LEF TW ES AC PL
Join tour Come and stay in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s house at Kardamyli, in the Mani 18th–23rd September 2021
In 1996, Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor bequeathed the beautiful house they had built in the 1960s to the Benaki museum. It has recently been restored, and our group of ten readers will be one of the first to stay there. The house is right on the sea and there are plenty of terraces to which people can escape. Dominic Green will be our tour guide and leader; Harry Mount is also joining us. This is an extraordinary opportunity to have the house to ourselves and to be able to tour the area with such expertise. The house is available to rent for only 90 days a year. There is space for only ten guests; if this trip is full, please express an interest in a subsequent tour. Have a look at www.ariahotels.gr/en/pages/ house_patrick_joan_leigh_fermor.
For the full itinerary: www.theoldie.co.uk/courses-tours Saturday 18th September – arrival
Depart Heathrow on BA flight at 1200; arrive Kalamata at 1800 (two-hour time difference). Dinner at PLF house.
Sunday 19th September – Kardamyli and the villa Morning tour of the medieval village of Kardamyli followed by lunch in the village. Free afternoon to relax and enjoy the villa. Dinner at PLF house.
Monday 20th September – Upper Mani tour
Easy walk around Kendro, as described by PLF in Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, followed by lunch in a mountain village. Free afternoon. Dinner in Kardamyli.
Tuesday 21st September– Messini, Methoni and Pylos Bay Tour of the ancient city of Messini. Lunch at the Venetian port of Methoni and visit to the bay of Pylos, where British and French ships defeated the Ottoman navy in 1827. Dinner at PLF house.
HOW TO BOOK: doubles/twins only. Price per person: £2,950 including all meals (with wine), transport, entrances – everything except flights. Please email Katherine at reservations@theoldie.co.uk. FULL REFUND IF DATES CHANGE OWING TO COVID
Patrick Leigh Fermor at home in Kardamyli Wednesday 22nd September – day tour of the Mani Explore the tower houses of Areopolis, visit Tigane (the salt pan in Mani) and the ‘ghost’ village of Vatheia. Lunch in the harbour at Gerolimenas (where PLF stays in Mani). Dinner at PLF house.
Thursday 23rd September – Back to Blighty
Leave Kardamyli after breakfast. 12pm depart Kalamata with easyJet (flights TBC).
‘Just plumping his pillow’ The Oldie August 2021 73
Matthew Webster: Digital Life
The day I nearly lost my family I am hoist by my own petard. I offer myself to you as skilled in internet matters. Yet I have almost been caught out by one of the most easily foreseen and old-fashioned of online pitfalls. One of the online services I have recommended for years has closed because it couldn’t make enough money. Fair enough – that’s life. But I almost didn’t notice, and so almost lost everything I had there. For years, I have been growing what became a very substantial family tree, with hundreds of people, photos and documents, using an online family-tree
Webwatch For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk
www.otter.ai The best audio transcriber I have found. Speak or play a radio programme and it makes a pretty good stab at transcribing. Not perfect – none is – but the basic version is free. www.secondhandsongs.com A huge database of original songs and long lists of later versions (‘covers’) of them. Only on the internet… I will happily try to solve your basic computer and internet problems. Go to www.askwebster.co.uk or email me at webster@theoldie.co.uk
template called Genoom. Other family members could see and edit it. My son managed to trace his mother’s family back to several – probably mythical – Norse semi-gods and established that she is the 19-times-great-granddaughter of a – genuine – 14th-century Iberian king called Pedro the Cruel. Happily, she doesn’t take much after that ancestor. It cost only £15 a year, and that must have been its undoing. I logged in recently to be met with a single page announcing that the website was not ‘viable economically’ and was shutting up shop in two weeks. To be fair, they did enable me to download everything, which I hastened to do; otherwise it would all be gone. Helpfully, it came as a Genealogical Data Communication (GEDCOM) file – a system designed for family trees. You just need appropriate software to open the file and there’s your family tree, reconstructed. The question is, however, which software? I have failed, so far, to find a replacement online service that costs less than £130 per year. Perhaps that’s the right price, but it feels like a lot. After some research, I bought Family Historian 7 for a single payment of £60. It’s British and works very well. In fact, it does far more than my old system did. However, it feels like a step backwards for my family. The programme lives in my computer, not online – so I alone can see it, which makes collaboration impossible. I suppose it will do until I find an online system I can afford, but there is a wider lesson here. Online services like Genoom, and better-known ones like
Spotify, Netflix or, for that matter, Zoom, eBay, Amazon and so many more, are not immortal. They will exist only if they make enough money or while some philanthropist keeps coughing up. That means we should take steps to protect our online information; in the jargon, to back up. We are used to making backup copies of what we store on our computers (or we should be) because Webster’s first rule of computing is ‘All hard drives fail eventually’. But how many of us back up what we store online? This might include your email, if you use Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook or Hotmail, or your photos. Everything there is stored for you only by the good grace of the site-owner, especially if you aren’t paying them anything. They could easily suddenly decide to get out of the email business. Google not long ago summarily closed its Facebook equivalent. So, if you have anything stored online that you don’t want to lose, I suggest you consider arranging regular backups – or, more accurately, downloads – and store that downloaded information safely in one or two other places. The respectable online services make it quite easy; some even automate it. And it’s very reassuring. As one expert put it to me, if data is in only one place – online or offline – it’s not backed up. I can’t imagine how annoyed I would be if our family tree were uprooted, especially the branch with Pedro the Cruel. And just think how fractious his shade might become if he were deleted.
Margaret Dibben: Money Matters
Don’t fall under the inf luence Who is not aghast at the concept of influencers? They’re the people who blag free stuff – holidays, meals, clothes and make-up – by promising to commend it to thousands of others who believe them simply because they think the influencers look attractive. Even so, ‘influencing’ has become a recognised form of advertising, earning its practitioners thousands of pounds. 74 The Oldie August 2021
Perhaps not surprisingly, influencers are now moving into the world of personal finance. They call themselves ‘finfluencers’. There is a vast amount of social-media information available on finances, starting with bloggers who give basic but sensible advice on managing your money and promote financial literacy to young people. That is good. Then there are influencers who boast
about their lifestyles with photos of Porsches, Rolexes and holidays in Dubai, and try to sound as though they know what they are talking about. Yet more dangerous are outright thieves with fake get-rich-quick schemes. Indeed, the Government is so worried about the volume of pension scams around at the moment that it has been consulting on ways to prevent people from being
conned into handing over their pension funds to scammers. New rules should be in place by the end of the year. Influencers use social platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok to target a young audience. They have to attract attention within a few seconds – so information must be immediate and quirky, with no room or appetite for pointing out pros and cons. They do not charge you for looking at their posts but instead earn money in several ways: taking a percentage of
anything you buy after clicking on a link; sponsored content; selling their own-brand merchandise (known as ‘merch’), which is typically clothing; and from advertisers. By law, influencers must identify advertisements. They must make it clear when they have received payment for mentioning a product, whether the payment is money, a free product or free loan of a product. The advertising regulator, the Advertising Standards Authority, has even published a guide to
help them. Despite that, it found a ‘disappointing’ rate of compliance and is now publicly naming influencers who repeatedly break the rules. Influencers pushing investments are dangerous. Despite their claims of being so rich, they are bothering to sell their secrets because in reality they themselves earn money not from their high-risk investment schemes but instead through advertisements and from charging customers fees to join courses, allegedly teaching them how to make a fast buck. Beware of any social-media promotion for share-tipping, day trading (buying and selling shares within one day), foreign-currency trading (so risky it is no more than gambling) and contracts for difference (CFDs), which are too complicated to explain. Some of these websites are no more than scams which steal the money you believe you are investing. There is no consumer protection if you get stung, whether from bad investment or from theft. The Financial Conduct Authority warns that anyone who finds investments through a search engine or influencer’s recommendation will have no protection unless the person is FCA-authorised. It is safer to find investments elsewhere. Anyone can spout nonsense online.
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The Oldie August 2021 75
Getting Dressed
Our man in Washington – and his suits Kim Darroch was the dapper ambassador who took on Trump brigid keenan
DAFYDD JONES
Kim Darroch has just published Collateral Damage: Britain, America and Europe in the Age of Trump. I hope someone has bought the film rights. Lord Darroch, 67, was the British Ambassador to Washington from 2016 to 2019. His confidential diplomatic cables to London – which included some unflattering remarks about President Trump – were leaked to the Mail on Sunday. Trump took umbrage and announced he would not work with the ambassador. Darroch resigned from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. The tale has everything: a handsome hero (at six-foot-four, Darroch was one of the few who could look Melania, wearing high heels, in the eye), a powerful and unpredictable enemy (Donald Trump) and a disloyal boss, Boris Johnson, then Foreign Secretary. Then there was the mysterious figure who leaked the secrets to the newspaper. Darroch arrived in Washington after working as British Ambassador to the EU and National Security Adviser. He presented his credentials to Barack Obama and then, ten months later, witnessed the election that brought Trump to power against all predictions. Darroch was one of the few who had suggested a Trump win was on the cards. He was quick to find a way to connect with Trump’s team of unknowns. As a result, Theresa May became the first foreign leader to meet the new American President at the White House. Darroch later worked on Trump’s state visit to Britain in 2019. Shirt, jacket and trousers from Darroch’s favourite tailor, Volpe; shoes from Paul Smith 76 The Oldie August 2021
It seemed to be plain sailing for the remainder of his Washington posting. But a month after Trump’s British visit, Darroch’s chief of staff greeted him one morning with news of the Mail leak and he became the subject of a media frenzy. Within days, he had resigned and was on a plane home to his shocked wife, who happened to be in England visiting her elderly mother. A scholarship boy from a council house, Darroch met his wife, Vanessa, at Durham University. She has been a hard-working trailing spouse, as diplomatic wives are known. She taught in most of their postings, including Washington. Darroch and his wife hosted around 800 events every year, including an annual open day, where British goods were shown to some 10,000 guests. Once, at the wheel of a new model Jaguar, Darroch was photographed by enthusiastic visitors who thought he was Jeremy Clarkson. Darroch needed two dinner jackets in Washington as well as five suits, used in strict rotation. ‘I wore British-made clothes, just in case anyone asked me. It wasn’t difficult. I bought them from Volpe in Pimlico, a shop I have been going to since I was introduced to it by a friend, 25 or 30 years ago. Their tailor-made suits cost way less than on Savile Row and they do great off-duty stuff as well.’ Darroch has found other classy, British-made, casual clothes at Orlebar Brown – ‘very good for shorts and swimwear’ – and at Sunspel, the T-shirt specialists. Shoes are more of a problem. ‘My feet are huge, like flippers. I have to buy bigger shoes to get the width – 11 instead of 10½.’ He likes Paul Smith (the
With Vanessa on their wedding day, 1978
shoes in the picture are 15 years old), Barkers or Hugo Boss. How does an ambassador stay trim, with multiple lunch and dinner invitations? ‘I like wine, but I held back because there’d usually be a speech to be made – just in case! I never drink at lunch, and the team at the residence were instructed not to refill my wine glass. We had a wonderful chef in Washington who made the most fantastic, sweet concoctions, but Vanessa brought in a rule that meant I was given a bowl of fruit instead.’ Did it help in diplomacy to have a degree in zoology? Darroch laughed. ‘The useful thing about learning a science is that it teaches you to make sense and to be precise in explaining things – good training for writing those diplomatic cables.’ The Darrochs live in Kew and Cornwall which, as a keen sailor, he particularly loves. What are his future plans? ‘Mostly, I never want to set foot in the office again.’ Kim Darroch’s Collateral Damage: Britain, America and Europe in the Age of Trump is out now (William Collins, £9.99)
The Linnet by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd In The Penguin Book of Bird Poetry the nightingale rates most poems, followed by the skylark, robin, cuckoo, song thrush and wren. The finches, for all their beauty, are also-rans, the linnet (Carduelis cannabina) pipping the goldfinch for the longest entry. Yet it is prominent in one of the best-known songs and one of the best-known poems in English. Don’t Dilly Dally on the Way was also billed as The Cock Linnet from the line ‘I walked behind with me old cock linnet’. It was written by Fred Leigh and Charles Collins in 1919 and, through Marie Lloyd, became a music-hall hit – a reminder that linnets were popular cagebirds not so very long ago. W B Yeats’s The Lake Isle of Innisfree has the lines There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings. Robert Bridges noticed the same, but in winter: And now, if the night shall be cold, across the sky Linnets and twites, in small flocks helter-skelter, All the afternoon to the gardens fly, From thistle-pastures hurrying to gain the shelter Of American rhododendron or cherry-laurel From November My boyhood memories include linnet flypasts down Ayrshire’s Stinchar valley. These early-autumn flocks probably included other songbirds which then flourished. Silhouetted – and sometimes numbering 50 and more at roosting time – they proved an irresistible target with skimming stones to hand. But exuberance went unrewarded – for all our throwing, not a single bird so much as flinched. Herbicides, hedge, scrub clearance and an end to winter stubble fields have seen linnet numbers plummet, along with those of other ‘farmland’ birds. Between 1968 and 1991, the UK population fell by
56 per cent and in Europe (1980-2009) by 62 per cent. Gains in north-west Scotland and in Ireland have been offset by continuing losses in southern Scotland, England and Wales. The present British population is 560,000. Gorse is a favourite linnet habitat, for sheltering, roosting and nesting. In spring, the cock bird – his buff forehead and breast now tinged red – will often sing from the tallest sprig. And all the throbbing world Of dew and sun and air By this small parcel of life Is made more fair Walter de la Mare, from The Linnet
As a cagebird, it extended the range of its normal song by mimicry, falsely encouraged by its being made blind – a practice often inflicted on caged birds in the mistaken belief it improved performance. Ulex is commonly called gorse or furze, and whin in northern counties, Scotland and Ireland. Hence the name whin lintie, north of the Border. Linnet is from French linette, derived from Linum (flax), one of the seeds it likes, along with those of mugwort, thistle, charlock, knot grass, saltwort, sea rocket and other finch food – the exceptional stuff these days of dereliction, set-aside and rewilding. The Oldie August 2021 79
Travel The Middle Kingdom After 55 years living in an Irish castle, Valerie Pakenham has written a book on the ancient splendours of Meath
I
reland once had five provinces. The smallest was the kingdom of Meath – or Midhe – meaning the Middle Kingdom. The story, as told by Gerald of Wales (1146-1223), was that, sometime in the Dark Ages, four brothers divided Ireland between them and then allotted their youngest brother, Slanius (or Slaine), a small portion of each their share so he would not feel hard done by. Slanius is said to have gratefully received these allotments. He soon expanded his little kingdom and in due course became the first High King. The original sharing-out is believed to have taken place on the Hill of Uisneach, the mystic centre of Ireland. There is a huge boulder there called the Stone of the Divisions, said to mark the exact spot. Fifty-five years ago, I was lucky enough to be brought to live not far away. My husband, the writer Thomas Pakenham, had recently inherited Tullynally, a family castle in County Westmeath, and badly needed a wife to keep him company. The castle was huge, damp, semi-ruinous and probably not to most people’s taste. ‘It’s not a pretty house, darling,’ said my mother with her usual frankness. But its surroundings were stunning – its romantic parkland was ringed with
80 The Oldie August 2021
beautiful hills, and just beyond them lay an eight-mile-long limestone lake. This was Lough Derravaragh, the setting for an Irish legend about the Children of Lir, who were turned into swans by their jealous stepmother, but kept their human voices and lived here for 300 years. And all around were yet more lakes, hills topped with mysterious raths or ringforts. Four miles away, at Fore, there was a 14th-century abbey, and ten miles away were the Loughcrew hills, crowned with a string of passage graves, said to be Europe’s largest neolithic cemetery. Over the years, I have explored these places many times, and enjoyed wonderful swimming in assorted Westmeath lakes. In the meantime, we have restored our enormous castle (it now houses eight families, as well as us) and rescued the gardens from their previous jungle of laurels and rhododendron. Replanted by Thomas with exotic trees and flowers, they now, I am glad to say, attract hordes of visitors in summer. But our beautiful surrounding landscape remains largely unknown. Tourists still speed through the Irish midlands to the west of Ireland, in search of the mountains and sea. So, after many years of trying to promote Westmeath, I have had a brainwave: I must reconnect
it to its earlier self, as part of the Middle Kingdom, which for more than a thousand years stretched from the Shannon to the Irish Sea. For most of these years, it was ruled by the O’Neill kings, who had their main stronghold beside Lough Ennell, guarding the royal road from Tara to Clonmacnoise, and extracted tribute from as far away as Viking Dublin. After the Norman invasion in the 1170s, Henry II claimed the kingdom as his personal possession and declared it the Royal Province of Meath. He appointed as his deputy, or justiciar, Hugh de Lacy, a man of demonic energy and drive. De Lacy built defensive castles all over the place and made Drogheda on the Boyne estuary his port of entry. He made his central power base 30 miles upriver at Trim, where his magnificent castle still stands. But much of Western Meath was never fully subdued, and Norman outposts such as the abbey at Fore were under constant attack. You can still see the stone in the cloister where the monks were said to sharpen their swords. In 1545, Henry VIII split the royal province into two – abandoning Western Meath to the ‘unruly Irish’. His daughter Elizabeth continued the process, splitting Western Meath into two counties,
THOMAS PAKENHAM/HECTOR MCDONNELL
Above left: Tullynally Castle. Right: Ardglasson 19th-century model village. Left: St Patrick by Boris Anrep, Mullingar Cathedral, 1954. Below: Jealous Wall, Belvedere, by Hector McDonnell
Longford and Westmeath. Meath’s eastern seaboard, north and south of Drogheda, had already been divided off as County Louth. So my guidebook would cover these four counties, plus one or two exceptions, such as the royal burial ground at Clonmacnoise. Lockdown provided the perfect opportunity for writing, though I soon found there were many gaps to fill, not least in my grasp of early Irish history. Luckily, Hector McDonnell had kindly agreed to illustrate the book. Hector is not only a distinguished artist but also an archaeologist who has himself written several books on Ireland’s history. He has filled me in on some of the newest discoveries about the three great neolithic mounds of Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth – now known as Brú na Bóinne – and has helped me disentangle the Bronze Age from the Iron Age. Hector has also reassured me that St Patrick really did exist (much to my relief, as St Patrick appears in so many stories), and explained why Irish monks built round towers instead of square ones. And, above all, he has filled the book with the most delightful drawings, as I had hoped. Another invaluable friend has been Robert O’Byrne, who writes a fascinating twice-weekly blog under the heading The
Irish Aesthete, about Irish buildings and heritage issues of all kinds. Robert has helped me discover exciting places I had not visited before, and lent me some of his excellent photographs for the book. Thomas has loyally provided more photographs of places nearer to home. For further colour, I have added some charming prints and watercolours from the 18th and early-19th centuries, produced when the passion for discovering Ireland’s ancient history had just begun. The eastern parts of the old Middle Kingdom were always the richest, and most densely populated, and have many of the best surviving monuments. There are superb high crosses (Monasterboice and Kells), round towers (Duleek and Donaghmore), ruined abbeys (Mellifont and Bective) and splendid castles, some still owned by the families who built them. Further west, most castles and grand houses have been abandoned to become ivy-clad ruins or have vanished altogether – leaving only a quirky gate lodge or triumphal entrance arch to mark where they once stood. Too many ruins can be depressing but, around us, there have been some cheering developments. Belvedere on Lough Ennell, with its wonderful 18th-century follies, is now preserved by Westmeath County Council,
and has a useful café tucked behind the Jealous Wall – a folly built by the Earl of Belvedere to blot out the view of his brother’s grander house. Outside Oldcastle, beside St Oliver Plunkett’s church, Emily Naper has recreated the original gardens at Loughcrew with a beautiful, 17th-century gateway and wonderful views of the famous Loughcrew cairns. The most recent and exciting story is that of Killua Castle, just beside Clonmellon. It was built in 1780 by the Chapman family; in the 1890s, Sir Thomas Chapman ran away with his daughters’ governess, and set up house in Oxford under another name. His wife never granted him a divorce. One son, Lawrence of Arabia, visited Clonmellon incognito, and is said to have dreamed of returning there to live. The castle was eventually sold to a local farmer. When I first came here in the 1960s, it had no roof and large trees were growing up inside. Then, 20 years ago, an Austrian banker and his wife bought the ruin, dried it out and rebuilt it stone by stone. Castle, gardens, lake and gate lodges have now all been perfectly restored – and there is a handsome deer park in front of the house. A garden café is said to be on the cards. So there are exciting places to discover all across the Middle Kingdom. I have begun at Drogheda and ended by the Shannon and Lough Ree, and I have grouped them around the principal towns, providing each with a useful map. The places I have chosen largely reflect my own tastes and interests. If you tire of cairns, castles, tombs, high crosses or ruined abbeys, may I suggest you try my greatest pleasure: swimming with swans and grebes for company in a sparkling Westmeath lake. Valerie Pakenham’s Exploring Ireland’s Middle Kingdom: A Guide to the Ancient Kingdom of Meath (Somerville Press) is out now The Oldie August 2021 81
Overlooked Britain
The house that Tetra Pak built
lucinda lambton The Swedish packaging king commissioned John Outram to build him a post-modernist house in Kent in ‘blitzcrete’ Here’s a surprise. The New House near Tunbridge Wells in Kent is inspired by the architecture of an industrial warehouse between Heathrow and Slough. It’s a rare and exquisite example of an English country house in the post-modernist style. I write ‘exquisite’ because, despite there being barely a single window on its marble façade, every inch of the building is quite beautifully executed. It is a startlingly original design for a dwelling, incorporating a glorious use of materials with their variety of textures and colours – yes, colours. Reigning supreme is its most satisfying attention to detail, applied both inside and out. It was designed between 1983 and 1986 by John Outram, my particular hero of the post-modernist movement. He also created the dazzlingly polychromatic Temple of Storms pumping station on the Isle of Dogs between 1982 and 1988. He was responsible too for the brilliantwith-many-hues Egyptian House – Sphinx Hill – on the Thames at Moulsford in Oxfordshire; as festive a house as you are ever likely to see! Why has post-modernism been so often damned, mocked and derided? It is true that a good deal of pure copying has many a time been rampant. With its determined reaction against the austerity of modernism, it has often turned out to be uncomfortably giddy in its eclecticism. You could even say that it sometimes cheapened the noble art of architecture. Mies van der Rohe declared, ‘Less is more.’ Architect and urban planner Denise Scott Brown rightly responded, ‘Less is a bore.’ Generally, though, recognition of the style has gained acceptance, in that these buildings have all been listed Grade I* or Grade II by Historic England. HURRAY! The New House was commissioned to produce a house that was not a historical pastiche. It was created for an industrialist who was concerned that industry had had a bad name. He was particularly pleased to be able to build a dwelling made of industrial components, 82 The Oldie August 2021
Good at packing: Hans and Märit Rausing
such as steel framing, concrete cladding and, for good measure, asbestos roof. The plans took five years to develop, going through all manner of construction systems and designs. Hans and Märit Rausing were the discerning pair who commissioned the building. He had been the co-developer, along with his brother Gad, of the food-packaging company Tetra Pak, founded by their father Ruben, which was eventually to become the most successful food-carton company in the world. Far from being a monster marketing man – Hans Rausing’s family fortune was worth $12 billion when he died, aged 93, in August 2019 – he was also as sensitive a character as you could ever wish to meet. For good measure, he was the gentlest and most loving of husbands; hence the delicacy of his decorative vision. Heritage England described the design as being built in ‘highly creative and idiosyncratic architectural language, executed with absolute consistency of vision and meticulous quality of detail; an exceptionally unusual example of a post-modern country house’. And so it most certainly is, with Outram’s innovative ‘fancy concrete’. He calls it his blitzcrete of crushed brick and
rubble, ground up and polished to expose great chips of terracotta. He also designed three other coloured concretes. What with an abundance of marquetry and polished plasterwork, creativity and craftsmanship running through the very fabric of the building, it was, as Outram says, ‘built like a factory and finished like a palace’. Inside, the hall shines brightest of all, with polished walls of stucco lustro banded with burr elm and aluminium. There is inlaid trelliswork on the doors and a travertine floor laid as the footprint of a gigantic column. Stucco lustro is crushed marble and lime put on with a hot trowel, mottled with a sponge, left to dry and then, some months later, beeswaxed to a lustrous shine. The doors are of avodire wood, inlaid with trelliswork of 2,500 strips of pale and dark grey-dyed sycamore, all giving the strangely soft effect of moleskin. There are splendid views outside of a deer park stocked with over 1,000 creatures. The New House has an atmosphere through which you float with delight. Strange to say, considering its grandeur, there is an air of considerable cosiness. The Orangery – big, bold and built of red brick – was the last vestige – albeit a gargantuan vestige – of Wadhurst Park, a house of 1884 that had become ruinous in the early-20th century. An early plan had been to build the house within this shell, but Outram successfully suggested that the old building should stand alone as a splendid ruin. So it remained until, to mark their 50th wedding anniversary, as well as to celebrate the millennium, the Rausings transformed it into a quite beautiful ballroom with a spectacularly domed and glazed rectangle of a roof and a further wealth of coloured blitzcrete. The Millennium Pavilion, as it is called, is a triumphant addition to The New House. Opposite: the hall. Below left: ornate floor. Below right: the façade
LUCINDA LAMBTON
The Oldie August 2021 83
Taking a Walk
A stroll alongside Old Father Thames
GARY WING
patrick barkham
Traffic roars away from London. Planes lower themselves gingerly towards the horizon. The river flows past. Brentford supplies a sensation of being the still point in a turning world. I walked from the railway station and took the Great West Road. Despite the M4 snaking through buildings to the north, the old Staines road was still six lanes wide and full of cars. This was office land and, post-COVID, it sang with abandonment. Every plate-glass building was adorned with ‘OFFICE TO LET’. Estate agents did not hide their desperation: ‘Attractive riverside setting. Excellent car parking. Available immediately.’ I hope the poor agents have a sideline in flogging sheds for home offices. As I turned down the steps onto the Grand Union Canal, the road noise vanished – and I was transported into the wonderful parallel world that is our network of navigable waterways. Up there was noise and bustle. Down here, all was tranquil. The boats were a shock, though. Having not spent much time in London recently, I’m stunned by the speed of change in the capital – such as the fact that everyone who isn’t riding a motorised scooter is now walking a dog. And, since I last looked, narrowboats have been gentrified. Here they were prettified with solar panels, gleaming sack barrows, bikes, aluminium planters, inflatable kayaks and ‘BABY ON BOARD’ signs. It was a relief when an old-school boat appeared with a ragged plastic tarp for a door. Seven baby coots cheeped in turbid water beneath the shell of an old warehouse before the shiny new flats of Brentford Lock West, followed by a canal-side building that I assumed was a cool, new university campus but turned out to be the nicest Holiday Inn I’ve ever seen. Beyond the High Street, the canal path was dramatically flooded – so I took a diversion down back streets past
Goddards of Brentford, who seem to own all the interesting corners of the neighbourhood, and run a fleet of removal lorries with a pale blue livery. Over a car bodywork garage, I glimpsed the lush trees of Kew but no sign of the Thames between us. Across a dinky footbridge and onto the other side of the canal, where the sunny waterside was as warm and wet as the tropics. Goosegrass grew as tall as a man, and swarms of midges hovered above a Canada goose cadging food from a canal-boat resident. This strange edgeland was both supremely peaceful and stimulating, and in a time of its own. At Brentford’s Thames Lock, a proper canal-keeper wearing a sunhat popped out of his booth to help some boomers tie up their boat while a couple of lads smoked sweet weed under the bridge. It felt like the years 1821 and 2021 churned together. The canal-side path abruptly ended and I was forced away from some fabulous working boatyards to the mundanity of a Morrisons, McDonald’s and a main road, before relocating the Thames Path where it should be – beside the Thames. Now luxury flats loomed
large, but the waterside continued to add a small dose of the wild, with thistle, bramble and ash springing up through the fancy formal gardens. Derelict boats slumped in the water’s edge, where buddleia grew as an aquatic plant. One of the dead boats was covered in a tarp, as if respectfully drawn over someone recently deceased. Out on the water, the Thames appeared to have split around a long sinuous island of trees, which I later learned was Brentford Ait. Before Kew Bridge was a Millionaire’s Row of grand Thames barge homes. Admiral Tromp, Heron’s Rest, Legend and the like came with cats, buggies and riverside gardens, complete with gates and even brick walls. More Canada geese fettled themselves on a slipway, and I crossed Kew Bridge to finish in clean, prim Kew. If Kew had a smell, it would be wisteria. Give me Brentford’s intoxicating blend of mud, water and weeds any day. Head north from Brentford railway station, west along the A4, before dropping down onto the Grand Union Canal. Follow Thames Path signs to Kew Bridge The Oldie August 2021 85
On the Road
The joy of moving house Sir Roy Strong sings the praises of Gianni Versace, Margaret Thatcher and downsizing. By Louise Flind
How are you? Still here… I had a bad fall in 2019 and lost three years – I shall be 86 this year and can’t really afford to scatter years around. You don’t need to weep into your pillow tonight about me – I’ve moved house, which has given me energy and excitement at putting something new together. Is there anything you can’t leave home without? The necessary pills. Something you really miss? There’s nothing like one’s own bed. What’s your approach to luggage? Our marriage [to the theatrical designer Julia Trevelyan Oman (1930-2003)] was one of total equality – we both had to carry our own luggage. Earliest childhood holiday memories? I never had any – there was no money. My father was bringing up a family of five on £5 a week. What’s your new house like? I’m restoring what was once a very beautiful Regency house in Ledbury. It’s five minutes’ walk from the station and the ever-blessed Tesco. I want this house not to be cluttered up too much with oneself. I stood in the hall and thought, I’m not hanging one more bloody picture of myself. I love the fact that I’ve got a kitchen that actually works, and after about a week I knew what was in every drawer. What’s happened to your Herefordshire home and garden, the Laskett? After a very torturous history with the National Trust, I gave it to Perennial, the Royal Benevolent Fund for gardeners. Were you sad to leave it? Not when the moment came. 86 The Oldie August 2021
What was it like designing gardens for Gianni Versace? Oh yes, I loved him. What I did was send him lots of drawings and photos and he waved a wand. What’s your favourite building in Herefordshire? I’m very fond of Hereford Cathedral. I’m a loyal Anglican. Which is England’s most beautiful county? Jean Muir was a great friend and I stayed with her up beyond Newcastle, and that whole border area is stunning. What’s the best church in Herefordshire? I have an enormous affection for Dore Abbey. What were your favourite shows when you were in charge of the National Portrait Gallery and the V&A? At the National Portrait Gallery, Cecil Beaton’s photography. At the V&A with John Harris and Marcus Binney, The Destruction of the Country House, held in 1974. Are English country houses in better shape than when you did the famous Country House exhibition? Oh yes – because of the shift in the economy with Thatcher. When did the British dress best? What’s your own favourite style of dress and era to borrow from? The renaissance of Mary Quant and Jean Muir. And men’s Indian clothes. At birthday parties, I often appeared as an Indian bridegroom – so elegant, so practical and so masculine. How will galleries and museums recover from lockdown? They’ll have to rethink themselves. I love
Tristram Hunt at the V&A, even if I don’t agree with him. What do you think of statue-toppling? Why’s everybody going crazy about it now? It’s ridiculous and completely out of proportion. Are you a traveller? No, I’m not. My wife was a great traveller, from Nordic stock. My most exciting discovery was suddenly being asked to take people to India in my 70s. Where did you go on your honeymoon? Italy, in January, because Julia was doing Othello at Stratford. Do you have a daily routine? I get up at 6.15, feed the cat, come down, prepare my breakfast, have a shower, then exercise on my bike, have breakfast and look through the Times online, then go straight to my large library workroom. I always have lunch at 1pm and Jonty, my keep-fit man, said I really mustn’t eat later than 6. I have a gin and tonic at 5.30. At 7, I look at Channel 4 News. After that, I put in a video of a ballet or opera and go to bed at about 9.30 and sleep incredibly well. What is the strangest place you’ve ever slept in – while being away? In my early 20s, I went with a group of friends to Trebizond and we drove across Europe – that was when I could drive a bit. There was a great spirit of hospitality and generosity as we went through Asia Minor. We slept wherever we could and sometimes that would be extremely primitive. What is your latest book? Types and Shadows: The Roy Strong Diaries 2004-2015. If I live to 95, there might be another volume of diaries…
Genius crossword 403 el sereno Across 1 Bags of pasta with no topping (6) 5 Rebuke from doctor when going in behind schedule (8) 9 Laid-back approach to date with personal defeat (8) 10 Apple runs American group (6) 11 Much admired character making both rather confused (10) 12 Cut back end of term test (4) 13 Film of events of senior European in post (8) 16 Due for a change, employing fool – agreed! (6) 17 Hooligan in Paris may see primate outside a church (6) 19 Desperate to survive when visiting doctor (4,4) 21 A short holiday going west for a drink (4) 22 Help people elected to cover area plans, showing highs and lows (6,4) 25 Keeping quiet, as is head of psychology (6) 26 Millions resist changing to follow a group of stars (8) 27 Recognise food unknown in part of the USA (8) 28 Frustrated and numb on the way back, keeping quiet (6)
Down 2 Gas found in Australia once carbon is extracted (5) 3 Hang around with no good way of going overseas (5) 4 Staff’s secret moves to hold onto power (7) 5 Unimaginative side recruiting international for area (7) 6 Spoil a session, finishing early to get a flyer (7) 7 Responding to a call after fresh news (9) 8 Young people – not dim in disagreement, possibly (9) 14 Stress European rate in the existing circumstances beginning to ease (9) 15 State capital losing love for religious ritual (9) 18 Unpredictable rodent trapped in shifting rice (7) 19 Song from quiet period with infant dropping head (7) 20 Got wind of South American money suppressing editor (7) 23 Additional source of security for customs (5) 24 One way into exercise – that’s a slippery slope (5)
How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. With regret, owing to the current coronavirus epidemic we are temporarily unable to accept postal entries. Normal procedure will be restored as soon as possible. Deadline: 25th August 2021. We do not sell or share your data with third parties. First prize is The Chambers Dictionary and £25. Two runners-up will receive £15. NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.
Moron crossword 403 Across 1 Group (political) (5) 4 Part of flower (5) 10 Assuage (7) 11 Chassis; set up (5) 12 Leg bone (5) 13 Irritated (7) 15 Spanish artist (b.1746) (4) 17 Shrink (5) 19 Layabout (5) 22 Competently (4) 25 Adorable (7) 27 Low point (5) 29 Trunk; body (5) 30 Term; period (7) 31 Fringe benefits (5) 32 Kinds, sorts (5)
Genius 401 solution Down 2 Off-the-cuff (2-3) 3 Adolescent (7) 5 Small and delicate (5) 6 Examine; break down (7) 7 Veracity (5) 8 To rot (5) 9 Prepared (5) 14 Pin down (4) 16 Spoken (4) 18 Head side of coin (7) 20 Ruling family (7) 21 The select few (5) 23 Monster (5) 24 Incorrect (5) 26 Stream; endure (5) 28 Motivation (5)
Winner: Gerald Usher, Woodcote, Reading, Berkshire Runners-up: Pauline Harkness, Cockermouth, Cumbria; Michael Hands, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire
Moron 401 solution Across: 1 Reversed, 7 Hicks (River Styx), 8 Hot potato, 9 Rye, 10 Byre, 11 Deploy, 13 Tannoy, 14 En bloc, 17 Adages, 18 Jabs, 20 Dim, 22 Cast aside, 23 Crepe, 24 Triangle. Down: 1 Rehab, 2 Veteran, 3 Riot, 4 Enamel, 5 Scary, 6 Ascetic, 7 Howling, 12 Romance, 13 Traduce, 15 Leading, 16 Geyser, 17 Amber, 19 Suede, 21 Cava. The Oldie August 2021 89
Competition TESSA CASTRO My friend Richard Cumming-Bruce showed me this Seven Notrumps he had declared the other day. It was a beautifully played hand, and it would have been churlish of me to point out that Seven Hearts would have been somewhat easier. Dealer North North-South Vulnerable
West ♠ 10 7 2 ♥752 ♦ 10 8 6 5 ♣7 5 4
North ♠ AKJ3 ♥A943 ♦KJ3 ♣A K
East
♠ Q654 ♥86
South ♠ 98 ♥ K Q J 10 ♦AQ74 ♣10 6 2
♦92
♣Q J 9 8 3
The bidding South West North East 2♣(1) Pass 2NT (2) Pass 6NT(3) Pass 7NT (4) end (1) Any hand with 23 or more points. (2) Positive (eight or more points) without a decent five-card suit. (3) This seems a tad precipitate. Wouldn’t Three Notrumps show the hand – after all, North has nothing more than originally promised? (4) Could South try Seven Hearts on the way to Seven Notrumps? His hearts could hardly be better for his Two Notrump (rather than two Heart) response. Declarer won West’s diamond lead with the king and proceeded to cash four rounds of diamonds, East discarding a spade, then a club; dummy a spade. Declarer crossed to the ace of spades (on the very off-chance the queen fell singleton), then cashed the ace-king of clubs. Next came the heart winners, starting with dummy’s ace. After following to two rounds of hearts, East had as his last four cards the queen-six of spades and the queen-jack of clubs. On the third heart he discarded the jack of clubs, and on the fourth he discarded the queen. East was – reasonably – hoping his partner held the ten of clubs. However, declarer flashed the promoted ten of clubs and scored the last trick with dummy’s king of spades. Grand slam made – very nicely played. Perhaps East should bare his queen of spades, discarding the jack of clubs but not the queen. However, unless East is retaining a small club, declarer can presume East’s last two cards are the queen of clubs and one spade. He may play to drop East’s queen anyway – knowing East began with four spades to East’s three. Probably East is sunk whatever he does. ANDREW ROBSON
IN COMPETITION No 269, you were invited to write a poem with the title Laundry. Bill Holloway economically made laundry stand for violence in an Upstairs, Downstairs house. Allen Tyce impressively prefaced his poem with a quotation, ‘How beautiful it is to see all sorts of cloaks or blankets kept separate,’ from Xenophon’s Oeconomicus (8, 19). Adrian Fry told of Uncle Charlie, dodgy bookie, laundering money. E Gibson was very good on the embarrassing ignorance of making launderette machinery work. Jennifer Willis gave a picture of joy: ‘Sheets billowing like galleons fill the washing line in the orchard … I sit in my rocking chair with the crossword and a cup of tea/ And think to myself,/ There is nowhere else on earth that I would rather be.’ Commiserations to them and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Peter Hollindale. Don’t slam that door! It’s late. Where have you been? Look at your clothes, you’re not fit to be seen. Filthy, and that knee’s torn, too: every stitch That’s washable goes straight in the machine. What do you mean, they threw you in the ditch? I’ll run the bath, quite hot, and in you get. They chased you, didn’t they? You reek of sweat. There’s blood as well as mud: that knee’s a mess, It’s badly cut. Cheer up, we’ll raise you yet: A soldier’s wound for me to clean and dress! No, they don’t hate you, it was just a game That went too far. No, Dad won’t lay the blame On you. He’ll say, ‘It happened once to me.’ I promise you that knee won’t leave you lame: You’ll win the long jump with that leg, you’ll see. There’s beans and chips and chocolate cake for tea. Peter Hollindale ‘The place has closed, it’s safe to bet, But, at our college launderette, Your mother and your father met…’ This story makes our children wince… ‘She asked me to exchange a pound For fifties; as our clothes spun round
We soon established common ground. We’ve been an item ever since.’ Now students don’t exist on beans, But live in flats with smart machines That wash and dry designer jeans, And so our kids will never suss The romance of a spinning tub. That sudsy spot was like a club, Without the drinks, without the grub, But altogether marvellous! C P Evans I am a washerwoman, and a-laundering is my trade; By man and water kept alive, from man and water made; For every tenth of man it’s six are water pure and plain And every drop of water drunk by man becomes a stain. Chorus: Water in, water out, full many a stain I’ve seen; What goes into the wash-tub goes in soiled, comes out clean. But with man it is the opposite, of that there is no doubt: Man needs laundering for ever, water in and water out. O’er twenty ways that water leaves a body I could name And all can be a source of sorrow, sickness, sin or shame And were they to be gathered up and all brought unto me, Of man’s eternal stain the world it never would be free. (Chorus) Now I’ve heard tell of famous stains that never a-laundered be, Of Saint Veronica’s handkerchief and a shroud in Italy, Of proof of evil murders, bloodied garments locked in store – Oh what kind of world is this where stains are kept for evermore? (Chorus) Jane Bower COMPETITION No 271 About the time that corner shops became ‘convenience stores’, they closed most public conveniences entirely. A poem, please, called Convenience, in any sense. Maximum 16 lines. We still cannot accept entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by email (comps@theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 271’, by 26th August. The Oldie August 2021 91
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Ask Virginia
virginia ironside My ex is freezing me out
Q
I was married for 30 years and, for all that time, my wife and I spent wonderful holidays together with her family. I got on with all her relations – particularly my brothers and sisters-in-law – and they got on with my family, too. We’d all get together at Christmas. I honestly thought of her nieces and nephews almost as our own children. However, ten years ago we split up – a long story, but my wife was the one who walked out, as it happens. Not long after we divorced, one of her sisters had a 50th-birthday party and asked me – but then wrote, saying she was very sorry but she had to retract the invitation because my ex-wife objected. She said she wouldn’t come if I came. She also said she’d stop our own children from attending. (They’re all adults, by the way.) With every event since, it’s been the same. I’m invited and my wife refuses to come if I’m there. To be honest, I miss my extended family. Though they send photographs, showing them drinking my toast – they often add ‘Wish you’d been here’ or something – I hate to miss these get-togethers. I have no idea what we’ll do when our own children get married. Is there anything I can do now, though? Name and address supplied Could you not organise a meeting with your wife and ask why she’s behaving like this? After all, she left you. If you’d been dreadfully cruel and beaten her up regularly, I could understand it but if it was just your wife tiring of the marriage or falling for someone else, then I can see no reason at all, except to exert power. If she refuses to meet, ask one of the
A
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amiable ex-brothers- or sisters-in-law to meet instead and see if they can give some explanation. Remember, it must be just as difficult for them to have their lives, in part, ruled by their sister. They must miss you, too – and plenty of ex-husbands and -wives can remain on very friendly terms or, at the very least, attend events together without talking to each other – though that’s a shame. Meeting up would be for the sake of those old relationships and the children, not just you.
Driving was my lifeline
Q
I’m so depressed because my daughter-in-law has insisted I give up driving. My eyesight’s not as good as it used to be, true, but I drove only short distances and then not very far – and very, very carefully. I’m certain I can’t be any danger to anyone. Driving made such a difference to my life, enabling me to visit friends who didn’t live within walking distance. I’m not very mobile and I live in the country, where there’s very little public transport. I feel a whole chunk of my life – the part that, to be quite honest, made life worth living – has been taken away at a stroke. Name and address supplied Work out exactly how much running a car costs you, petrol and all, and then estimate how much taxi rides a year would cost. I bet it wouldn’t be a huge amount more. And plan to take as much advantage as you can of lifts and offers to collect you. I know – it’s not the same, is it? But I don’t think you’ll find in the end that it’ll be quite as bad as you think it’ll be. And keep reminding yourself of the consequences of having an accident –
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or, worse, killing someone or leaving a child severely disabled for life – and it then being revealed that your eyes aren’t up to scratch. Even if it wasn’t your fault, you’d never forgive yourself and would be seen as a pariah among your friends.
Don’t ignore prostate signs
Q
Might I suggest that the lady who wrote about her husband’s ‘erectile dysfunction’, as it’s called, should encourage him to go to the doctor? I was reluctantly pushed there by my wife, because I had a similar problem – and I also had to get up in the night frequently to go to the loo – and it turned out the cause was an enlarged prostate. I was diagnosed with prostate cancer and thank goodness, having caught it early, I’m now having radiotherapy. Now the future looks bright. KB, by email That’s such good news – because the earlier you get a diagnosis, the better are your prospects of getting it cured. So well done you, unlike so many men, for listening to your wife. I wish you the best of luck and fingers crossed!
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Kiss lowdown I enjoyed the joke about kissing! I was under the impression that a kiss was ‘an application at head office for a job at a much lower level’. Mike Langmead, by email Please email me your problems at problempage@theoldie.co.uk; I will answer every email – and let me know if you’d like your dilemma to be confidential.
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