The Old Un’s Notes

With the Platinum

Jubilee upon us, it’s time to look forward to the 70th anniversary of the Young Elizabethan, too.

Founded in 1948 as Collins Magazine for Boys & Girls, it was renamed the Young Elizabethan to celebrate the Queen’s Coronation. In 1958, it changed its name again, to the Elizabethan – also the name of Westminster School’s magazine, named in honour of its founder, Elizabeth I.

Interested oldies should seek out an old copy, for proof of quite how dramatic a transformation our Queen’s reign has seen in the young.

The magazine epitomised the aspirations of 1950s childhood. It was called ‘the magazine to grow up with’.

‘I think you should make the puzzles harder,’ wrote one pious boy to the letters page. ‘I can do them much too easily.’

Readers of the Young Elizabethan (owned by John Grigg, the jovial Tory monarchist, who later wrote an incendiary article about Her Majesty, was thumped in the street and renounced his title of Lord Altrincham) were curious by nature. They collected fossils, and requested articles on Mozart, astronomy or ‘old ruins and caves and the legends connected with them’. They loved books. They pleaded for pen friends and a club they could join.

And, however studious, they found Molesworth and St Custard’s – created by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle – absolutely hilarious.

They entered daunting competitions – ‘Design a science lab’ or ‘Devise a way of keeping flies off a horse with a docked tail’. Prizes included a visit to the zoo, or to Peter Scott’s bird sanctuary. A challenge to ‘Write a poem in the manner of William Blake’s Tyger’ was won by young Jonathan Fenby, later to edit the Observer, with a poem about cricket: ‘Batsman, batsman, full of gall / As you face the bouncing ball.’

Another winning poet was budding playwright Alan Ayckbourn, 15, from Haileybury. William Feaver, future biographer of Lucian Freud, was writing book reviews for the magazine at 12.

Young Elizabethans ended up doing rather well. But, sadly, there was no market for the magazine after 1973. RASP! TWANG!

WALLOP!

Iain McLaughlin has just written a real chortlefest, The Unofficial History of the Beano (White Owl, £19.99).

One of the many joys of the great comic is its exclamations.

McLaughlin writes, ‘A comic isn’t complete without the funny sound effects that drag you into that crazy cartoon world. D C Thomson’s hand lettering was the best in the business at making the effects fit perfectly with the artwork.

‘The artists were called on to draw anything and everything for spot illustrations: slap-up feeds were very popular in post-Second World War austerity Britain.’

And what could be a better feed than bangers and mash (pictured), the staple diet of all great comic characters?

Prince Philip’s memorial service at Westminster Abbey was a grand do, but one disappointment was the absence, even with numerous politicians there, of hobgoblins.

Among this month’s contributors

Allegra Huston (p22) wrote Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found and A Stolen Summer, a novel. She is codirector of Imaginative Storm Writing Workshops. She lives in Taos, New Mexico.

Huon Mallalieu (p26) is The Oldie’s exhibitions correspondent and Country Life’s art-market correspondent. He is author of How to Buy Pictures and The Illustrated History of Antiques.

Michael Arditti (p29) has written 12 acclaimed novels and a collection of short stories. His novel Easter won the Waterstones Mardi Gras Award. He was the theatre critic of the Sunday Express.

Jenny Bardwell (p32) is semi-retired from the BBC. She volunteers at a bookshop and at Somerset House. She runs a City Lit volunteering course for retirees and is involved with amateur dramatics.

Slap-up feed at the Beano

Important stories you may have missed

Scaffolder says he does not usually hit people Manx Independent

Man found hiding behind tree East Kent Mercury

Esther the dog sleeps under man’s desk Great Titchfield Tittle-Tattle

£15 for published contributions

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‘This weekend, we’re staying in and binge-watching the whole wall’

The service included Bunyan’s hymn To Be a Pilgrim. It used a modern version of the words, which omitted not only the lions (‘no lion shall him fright, he’ll with a giant fight’) but also ‘hobgoblin nor foul fiend can daunt his spirit’.

Go-ahead types in the Church have for decades been twitchy about hobgoblins, and the Abbey substituted the lines with ‘since, Lord, thou dost defend us with thy spirit’. Boring!

The bias against hobgoblins is based on a belief that they are an old-fashioned concept and will mean nothing to ‘young people’. As in much else, the C of E is out of date. With fantasy fiction in vogue and the likes of Tolkien and Harry Potter in the bestseller lists, millennials are perfectly au fait with hobgoblins and their ilk.

The Warhammer Fantasy series has numerous hobgoblins. JK Rowling’s Potter books feature a creature called Dobby (dobby being a northernEnglish synonym for hobgoblin). Shakespeare’s Puck is a hobgoblin.

The noun has also had a revival in recent years thanks to that disputatious elf John Bercow, the former Commons Speaker who was often called a hobgoblin on social media and in newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph.

Prince Philip liked colourful language and had little time for political trimmers. What a pity the Abbey’s order of service did not stick with Bunyan’s original words.

The Old Un was sorry about the death at 86 of the witty writer Susanna Johnston, older sister of our much missed former editor, Alexander Chancellor.

But it was almost cheering to hear that, just five days later, her adored husband, Nicky, an architect who restored country houses for clients including Paul Getty and Mick Jagger, had also died, at 93. The coincidence of their deaths, in the same hospital, was just what the Johnstons had always hoped for: a fitting end to their 64-year marriage.

Among her many books, Susanna published in 2005 an upbeat anthology called Late Youth: An Anthology Celebrating the Joys of Being Over 50. In a preface, she said she’d like the organist at her funeral to play Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye, to be sung ‘very loudly’ by her four daughters and howevermany grandchildren (ten, in fact.)

‘I would like it even better,’ she added, ‘if my husband Nicholas and I were to die simultaneously and that they sing “Wish us luck…” instead of just “me”.’

The song duly rang out at Shellingford church, Oxfordshire, where the four lovely daughters told hilarious tales of their parents’ adventures in Italy and elsewhere. The pleasure of such a double funeral is in the absence of the usual sorrow for the one left behind.

‘Midtown uniform’ is the new watchword for professional young men in London. You can see it in the picture (below) taken in St James’s, London, by Terence Derbyshire, who writes about the joy of dropping out on page 21.

The demise of the suit and tie continues apace, given a shove by successive lockdowns. Now, when hedge-fund types do deign to come into the office, they’re invariably clad in midtown uniform, a smart-casual import from New York’s financial district.

Stray into the smarter parts of London on a weekday at lunchtime and you’ll spot hordes of them: fitted chinos (beige or dark blue), a dress shirt (white or pale blue) and – the signature item – a padded gilet, aka ‘finance vest’. Navy only, unless you’re over 60 and a zillionaire, in which case maroon is the rakish option. But the stitching must be sideways, if you please.

This import even boasts its own Instagram account: @ midtownuniform. The feed’s anonymous editor exults when two or three gilet jocks are gathered together.

Terence Derbyshire was delighted to catch these four specimens heading into Fortnum & Mason as the spring weather warmed up.

Like so much modern gilt-edged clothing, midtown uniform has a long British heritage.

Readers of the Times will recall that the late, great Philip Howard (1933-2014), a writer on the paper for half a century, pioneered this guise.

His take on the bodywarmer was rural green, combined with cords and a pullover – warm in winter and easily adaptable for spring and summer temperatures.

Midtown uniform must not be reclaimed exclusively by urban types, either. The look has long been favoured by country types, too. Long live mid-market-town uniform.

One silver lining to the horrors of the pandemic was that people read a lot more.

Everyman’s Library, which is celebrating the 30th anniversary of its revival, has seen an increase in sales of over 50 per cent over the last three years.

Everyman, which produces fine editions of classic writers, has now published 24 million copies of over 700 titles.

The books appearing this spring include a timely edition of Ukrainian author Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate, about the Battle of Stalingrad in the Second World War. It was first published in 1980, after a hidden manuscript had been smuggled out of the USSR.

Other Everyman gems published this spring are Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love.

Perfect reading for these lengthening spring evenings.

This year marks the 110th anniversary of the publication of ‘The Guardsman Who Dropped It’ (1st December 1922), the first cartoon in the famous ‘The Man Who…’ series of social gaffes drawn for the Tatler by one of Britain’s greatest cartoonists, HM Bateman (1887-1970).

Born in Australia, Bateman moved to England when he was 18 months old. After studying at art school, he quickly established himself as the chronicler of that perennial everyman figure ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’. Bateman lived in Clapham and a blue plaque was erected in 1997 on his house in the district. George Melly would later call him ‘the reluctant poet of Metroland, the Cassandra of Clapham’.

In the Victorian period, Clapham was acknowledged as ‘the capital of Suburbia’ – that commuter district ‘outside the four-mile radius’ of central London. Bateman even produced a book entitled Suburbia (1921).

He was also the first to call for a National Gallery of Humorous Art, in a lecture given in 1949 at the Royal Society of Arts. In his introduction to the talk, Osbert Lancaster referred to himself as being one ‘whose whole youth was tortured and haunted by the fearful fate of the boy who breathed on the glass in the British Museum’ (another famous Bateman cartoon).

In 1988, the Cartoon Art Trust, one of whose leading lights was Bateman’s daughter, Diana Willis, was launched to fulfil his dream.

Today, in Wells Street near Oxford Circus (and Oldie Towers), the Cartoon Museum has found a permanent home at last.

‘Guardsman Who Dropped It’

‘You look happy, dear – has something awful happened?’