The Old Un’s Notes

The late, great Lester Piggott was more sociable than some of his obituaries suggested.

The historian Lady Antonia Fraser remembers bumping into him with her late husband Harold Pinter. Lady Antonia says, ‘On our way to holiday in Mauritius – a long flight – Harold and I found ourselves on the same plane as Lester Piggott. We made cautious friends (I was a fan).

‘Then, bliss, we were at the same hotel! Several dinners were had together over the next few weeks – all merry and interesting. He was perfectly polite, if not wildly chatty – pleasant company.’

When they left, Lady Antonia asked Harold, ‘Well, what did you think of Lester Piggott?’

‘Great man. If only he played cricket,’ Pinter told her, referring to his (other) passion in life.

One rumour about Lester did turn out to be true. Lady Antonia adds, ‘Harold always paid the bill for dinner – but he enjoyed that and possibly the great man didn’t.’

The Old Un longs to change his name after a chance meeting with his new hero.

Enjoying a brief tincture at the bar at the Garrick Club recently, he got into conversation with the charming waiter, from Torre Annunziata, near Naples.

His name? Oldi – short for Olderigi, a rare, medieval French word.

Can there be a greater name anywhere on the planet? The Old Un promptly gave Oldi his copy of The Oldie – a match made in heaven.

It won’t surprise you that Winston Churchill appeared in Punch cartoons.

But you might not know that he appeared in more than 600 of them, lasting all the way from 1899 to 1988.

A new book, Churchill in Punch, by Gary Stiles, reveals them all, from the adulatory to the critical.

Pictured (right) is one by Oldie contributor Michael Heath, depicting the moment the artist Graham Sutherland died, in 1980, and was confronted in heaven by Churchill, who loathed the unflattering portrait Sutherland did in 1954. The painting was destroyed on the orders of Churchill’s wife, Clementine.

Mary Kenny’s reference to Deal’s ‘rum residents’ prompted the Old Un to recall two others, the novelist Simon Raven and the louche Carry On stalwart Charles Hawtrey.

Raven moved to Deal in 1960 at the insistence of his publisher, Anthony Blond, whose stipend of £15 a week was conditional on Raven’s living at least 50 miles from London – ‘the remittance man’s distance’. Raven liked Deal, a town once infamous for its wreckers. He said the inhabitants were ‘a salty, unregenerate lot with a taste for off-colour jokes, like the one about the famous local adulterer whose coffin turned out to be too small – “He was never happy in his own bed.’’ ’

As Roger Lewis writes on page 49 of this issue, Hawtrey was a very heavy drinker, who used to cruise the local pubs in search of pick-ups from the local barracks. He was outré enough to earn a blue plaque.

In 1987, he collapsed at the entry to the Royal Hotel (where Raven would dine most evenings) and was told in hospital that his life

The Oldie’s hero – Oldi

Among this month’s contributors

Mary Killen (p18) is The Oldie’s new fashion correspondent. She writes the Dear Mary problem page in the Spectator and appears on Gogglebox with our Country Mouse, Giles Wood, who is on page 39.

Robert Bathurst (p27) was in Cold Feet and Downton Abbey. He played Ed Howzer-Black in Toast of London. A National Hunt devotee, he wrote, directed and starred in The Fall, a film about racing.

Claire Cohen (p28) writes for the Telegraph, Grazia and the Evening Standard. She presents the Imposters podcast. Her book BFF?: The Truth About Female Friendship is out this summer.

Elinor Goodman (p31) was political editor of Channel 4 News. She has worked on the Financial Times and often presents The Week in Westminster on Radio 4. She was on the panel of the Leveson Inquiry.

‘Now, Sutherland, about that painting’

Important stories you may have missed

Man ‘nearly shot’ in gun drama Sidmouth Herald

British success at paper plane throwing contest East Anglian Daily Times

Man hid keys to stolen car up his bottom Press and Journal

£15 for published contributions

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‘Please mind the gap between the train timetable and reality’

‘And now you may be asking, “What do I do with all this leftover wine?’’ ’

now depended on both his legs being amputated.

He said he would rather die with his boots on – and did so three days later.

The Gladstone Umbrella is back!

This annual gathering at Gladstone’s Library (bedrooms and bistro attached), in Flintshire, attracts fans of the Grand Old Man and historians, professional and amateur.

Visitors get to see the Temple of Peace, Gladstone’s study in Hawarden Castle (rarely open, as the Gladstone family still live there).

The last Gladstone Umbrella was held, prepandemic, in 2019. Talks included a comparison of Disraeli’s and Gladstone’s libraries and a lecture on franchise reform.

There was a rollicking contribution by Jill Lamberton, Professor of English at Wabash College, Indiana. She told the audience about Gladstone’s youngest daughter, Helen Gladstone, one of the first women students at Cambridge, who was allowed in 1877 to attend Newnham College for one year – and stayed for 20. She became the Vice-Principal.

Another riveting contribution was on Gladstone as ‘early adopter’ of new technology: railways (he tried out every new line), telephones and phonographs. The Old Un’s reference (June issue) to the friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin (whose centenary falls on 9th August) reminded a reader of this compliment Amis paid his old chum: ‘I enjoy talking to you more than anyone else because I never feel I am giving myself away and so can admit to shady, dishonest, crawling, cowardly, brutal, unjust, arrogant, snobbish, lecherous, perverted and generally shameful things that I don’t want anyone to know about; but most of all because I am always on the verge of violent laughter when talking to you…’

Amis was also indebted to Larkin for suggestions he made after reading the rather tame first draft of Lucky Jim.

Larkin urged him to ‘sod up the romantic business actively’, meaning that Jim should have a real battle on his hands with regard to Christine, the girl he fancies. He also wanted ‘more faces – “Sex Life in Ancient Rome” and so on’ and less ‘unnatural’ dialogue. ‘This speech makes me twist about with boredom,’ he wrote beside one passage.

What a great editor to have!

The outing to Gladstone’s study is enthralling. You’ll see the bookshelves built to his design (also used for measuring his children’s heights), his collection of axes for chopping down trees, tankards, statuettes – and a bust of Disraeli.

Charades were performed by regular attendees. The topics were gripping – his work with ‘fallen women’, his collision with a cow. The Umbrella’s climax is the brain-stretching Gladstone Quiz.

The Gladstone Umbrella is from 15th to 17th July at Gladstone’s Library.

This year sees the centenary of the finest exploration book of the 20th century, Apsley CherryGarrard’s The Worst Journey in the World (1922).

Cherry-Garrard (18861959) was a member of Captain Scott’s expedition to the South Pole. He lost his two best friends, Edward Wilson and ‘Birdie’ Bowers, who died on the return journey from the Pole. Cherry-Garrard suffered enormous guilt as a result; he had set out to meet the returning party, but had been forced to turn back before encountering them.

He was 24 when he met Wilson, who had already been to Antarctica with Shackleton and was returning with Scott. The meeting fired Cherry-Garrard and, despite having no specialist skills, he secured a place as Wilson’s assistant.

During the first winter on the ice, he accompanied Wilson and Bowers to gather penguins’ eggs, an expedition that became the core of the book. The trio endured a five-week hike through the depths of the Antarctic winter, in 24-hour darkness. Their tent was blown away and they experienced unimaginable extremes of cold and deprivation.

But the journey is only part of the book. The voyage from England is described vividly, with great humour, and Cherry-Garrard’s accounts of the day’s routine on board make for fascinating reading.

Once they reach Antarctica, the book becomes about companionship and friendship, good humour, bravery under stress and selfless work. It is funny, terrifying, moving and inspirational – a record of an adventure that can never be repeated.

Hooray! The Oldie literary lunch has returned after a two-year break enforced by the pandemic.

We were at the National Liberal Club, where one of our speakers, Norman Scott, said he had dined several times before – with one Jeremy Thorpe. Thorpe’s portrait is still at the club, said Norman, but ‘it’s kept behind a pillar’.

Our other speakers were Andrew Roberts, defending the not so mad George III, and Julia Boyd on A Village in the Third Reich.

Norman Scott remembered the night Thorpe tried to have him killed. ‘I drove off that night with Gino Newton in all innocence. He’d said he was protecting me from someone from Canada who wanted to kill me. But the lucky thing was I brought my beautiful dog, Rinka. The bullet that killed her would have killed me.

‘Gino Newton is still on the loose but he changed his name. I discovered that he lived in Surrey. I felt not enough had been done. The police found him and they’ve done nothing about him.

‘There is another man, Dennis Meighan, who wanted to kill me. They’ve both got away with it. He was the first person that Thorpe’s best man, David Holmes, got to assassinate me. But, when he came to find me, he felt out of place with his Cockney accent in a Devon pub and backed out.’

Norman Scott brought along an unusual PR girl – Anne Robinson – for his talk about his book, An Accidental Icon: How I dodged a bullet, spoke truth to power and lived to tell the tale.

Anne Robinson has recently stepped down from Countdown – as she says, to make way for an older woman. She claims she’s stopped so she can see more of her grandchildren and visit her New York flat more often. In fact, The Oldie can reveal that she’s taken up a new job as Norman Scott’s full-time Rottweiler.

At the lunch, Anne recalled how she’d first met Norman Scott nearly 50 years ago: ‘I was a young reporter for the Sunday Times when the Jeremy Thorpe story had just begun to bubble. It became the biggest political scandal of the 20th century.’

Anne said of Norman, ‘He is one of my great friends. He’s the most honest person. He has a fantastic memory. He’s waited till now to write his life story.

‘He is the most important equine judge in the country. He qualifies but doesn’t take part in the Horse of the Year Show every year. It might seem that, after the Thorpe case, he disappeared. In the West Country and to horseowners, he certainly didn’t.’

Confronted by the po-faced reaction to jokes made by Ricky Gervais about transgender women, the Old Un recalled this observation made by the novelist Anthony Powell in his Notebook: ‘One of the basic human rights is to make fun of people. It is now threatened.’

‘My husband’s disappointed. He didn’t realise the cruise was called Pilates of the Caribbean’

Norman Scott with great friend Anne Robinson at the Oldie literary lunch, held at the National Liberal Club