Christopher Balfour, the former Chairman of Christie’s, has written an enthralling book about the ups – and downs – of life with the Royal Family.
In Balfour’s A Memoir, he recalls the time in 1997, just before Princess Diana’s death, when he arranged a charity sale of her dresses at Christie’s in New York (pictured, right).
He remembers, too, how, in 1972, he was invited to a house party at Windsor Castle for Ascot Week.
One morning, before the races began, Prince Philip took Balfour carriage-riding on the private side of the castle.
All went well until they approached a stream in full spate.
Balfour writes, ‘HRH kept flicking his whip to make them go on, when suddenly the horses took off, not over the bridge, but down the bank and up to their haunches in the fast-flowing stream.
‘The carriage, perhaps not designed for this sort of activity, turned on its side and we were thrown into the water.’
The grooms rushed to Prince Philip to make sure he was all right and pulled him on to the bank.
‘I’m perfectly all right,’ Prince Philip said to the grooms. ‘For goodness’ sake, can’t you see that Mr Balfour’s floating towards the Thames?’
By this stage, Balfour was 20 yards downstream. He was rescued from the river by the grooms in the nick of time – and just in time to get
changed by 11.45am into his morning coat for Ascot.
Moments later, Balfour was put in carriage four for the procession to Ascot, with the Queen in carriage one. Because he and Lady Victoria Percy were younger than the other occupants of carriage four, Larch and Joanna Lloyd, Balfour suggested they should sit – with their backs to the horses – in the smaller, less comfortable jump seats.
On their return from the races, the Queen’s equerry, Patrick Plunket, rang Balfour to say the Queen was rather upset. Plunket said, ‘The Queen asked me, “Don’t
Among this month’s contributors
Chris Jagger (p16) is a musician. In this issue, he talks to his brother, Mick, about (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, which came out 60 years ago. His memoir, Talking to Myself, is out now.
Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran (p18) are two of our greatest screenwriters. They wrote Shine On Harvey Moon, The New Statesman, Birds of a Feather and Goodnight Sweetheart.
Nicky Haslam (p57) is a writer, singer and interior designer. He performs songs by his friend Cole Porter. He created the Common Things tea towel and wrote Redeeming Features: A Memoir
Annabel Venning (p82) is author of To War With the Walkers: One Family’s Extraordinary Story of the Second World War. She writes for the Daily Mail and many other publications.
people know how to sit in the carriage? Could you please make sure they do it properly tomorrow?”’
The rule was that ladies sit facing the front and the gentlemen face backwards.
More delicious stories abound in this rare gem of a memoir.
Fifty years ago, on 30th April 1975, North Vietnamese Army tanks rolled through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon.
The NVA forces had claimed the capital, and their conflict with the South Vietnamese government and the US was effectively won.
The 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War summons up images of American soldiers with thousand-yard stares – The Deer Hunter or Platoon.
Princess Diana and Christopher Balfour, Christie’s, 1997
Important
stories you may have missed
Four uninsured cars all sat on same Stoke-on-Trent street
Theme park offering chance to win part of famous snail Eastern Daily Press
‘Several’ drivers warned as police carry out speed checks East Lothian Courier
£15 for published contributions
NEW! Tune into Radio Oldie
Every Tuesday, you can find the latest weekly interview by Harry Mount or Charlotte Metcalf with some of our Oldie friends, such as Stephen Fry, Craig Brown and A N Wilson. And we release three more podcasts on Top of the Pods, our selection of the best podcasts and comedy clips on the internet. Just sign up for the newsletter on the homepage of the website.
Sign up to our weekly e-newsletter Email
You don’t tend to think of British troops as having any involvement. But they did, even if it was a shadowy affair.
Harold Wilson refused publicly to deploy troops to the conflict – something of a rebuff to America. He broadly supported the US’s policy in Vietnam, but sending soldiers to help would have gone down badly with anti-war Labour backbenchers and large swathes of voters.
Secret documents later revealed, though, that the British Advisory Administrative Mission provided military training in countersubversion and intelligence.
British boots were very much on the ground, too, according to foreign policy historian Mark Curtis, co-founder of investigation website Declassified UK.
In 1962, Colonel Lee, a military attaché in Saigon, told the government that the US troops in Vietnam were ‘crying out for expert assistance’. Lee quoted an adviser, whose name was censored, who suggested an SAS unit should be sent over.
Lee said the personnel could be ‘given temporary civilian status, or attached to the American Special Forces in such a manner that their British military identity is lost in the US Unit’.
The covert operation began soon after. It may have been involved in surveillance and perhaps even direct action.
It was known cryptically as the ‘Noone mission’ after its probable leader – the mysterious, redacted adviser whom Mark Curtis names as Richard Noone.
The No One Mission –what a name for a John le Carré novel!
An enchanting new book, Alice’s Oxford by Peter Hunt, takes you behind the looking glass and into the Oxford of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865).
So, not surprisingly, the university city features prominently as an undercurrent in the book.
The Norman arch of the door to Christ Church Cathedral’s Chapter House inspired this door (pictured) in Through the LookingGlass (1871).
As Alice knocks on the door, she’s joined by a very old frog.
Alice confronts the frog.
‘“Where’s the servant whose business it is to answer the door?” she began angrily.
‘“To answer the door?” the Frog said. “What’s it been asking…?”’
Paris was the place to be a century ago, in the spring and summer of 1925.
The city played host to an International Exposition of Design – the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, which gave the world the expression Art Deco.
Futuristic towers and pavilions contained a wealth of arresting modern art. The show was also a mecca for expatriate painters, writers and musicians, including Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso and Igor Stravinsky.
Lurking in their midst was a 35-year-old itinerant con artist from Austria-Hungary, who called himself ‘Count’ Victor Lustig (1890-1947).
He was in Paris not so much as part of any artistic movement, but to pose as a salesman of the city’s most iconic building. Installing himself in an office furnished with a tricolour flag and a portrait of the state president, Lustig persuaded a local scrap-metal dealer, André Poisson (or ‘Fish’), that he had been authorised to sell him the Eiffel Tower.
The building had become too expensive to maintain, Lustig explained, and ofTop the P ds
Lewis Carroll was, as Charles Dodgson, a don at Christ Church, Oxford, for 26 years.
‘My husband said I should learn to embrace my mistakes – so I hugged him’
Alice goes to Oxford: with the frog at Christ Church Cathedral
demolishing it for scrap was the best outcome for all parties.
Completely swallowing the tale, Monsieur Poisson parted with a million francs in cash, worth about £80 million today. Moments later, Lustig thought it best to leave the country and adopt another identity.
Ten years later, Lustig was arrested by the American authorities while in the process of printing a large number of counterfeit dollars. He was sent to the notorious Alcatraz penitentiary.
He died while in custody in March 1947 and was buried under the alias of Robert Miller.
Rather modestly, his death certificate lists his occupation as ‘Apprentice salesman’.
If you were wondering why parliamentary debate about the assisteddying bill has not had a more Roman Catholic flavour, the Vatican maybe has only itself to blame.
It transpires that Rome has blocked peerages for its cardinals in Britain. Former Cabinet Minister Lord Strathclyde disclosed, during a parliamentary discussion, that ‘over the last few years, the Roman Catholic cardinal archbishops have been offered places in the House of Lords, and often have wanted them, but have been denied the opportunity because of an issue with the Pope in Rome’.
Strathclyde added that he had ‘no idea’ what that reason was for this Vatican veto.
It was known that in 2009 Cardinal Cormac MurphyO’Connor was offered a peerage by Gordon Brown, but the reasons for that never coming to anything were not known. Murphy-O’Connor was said to be hot for a lordship but was firmly told by Rome that he must not accept one.
If Strathclyde is correct in his claim, Cardinals Vincent Nichols, Michael Fitzgerald, Arthur Roche and Timothy Radcliffe have also had to
obey Rome’s guidance and decline the chance of adding ermine to their scarlet robes Jolly annoying for the cardinals. The daily Lords allowance of £371 a day would have paid for more than a few votive candles.
What’s in a name? Quite a lot when it comes to book titles.
Would we be celebrating the 100th anniversary of the publication of Trimalchio at West Egg or Gold-Hatted Gatsby, to name two of the titles F Scott Fitzgerald rejected in favour of The Great Gatsby, which came out on 10th April 1925? I doubt it.
And how about First Impressions rather than Pride and Prejudice – or The Last Man in Europe, rather than Nineteen Eighty-Four?
Astonishing to think what Dickens planned to call Bleak House: Tom-All-Alone’s Factory That Got into Chancery And Never Got Out
And would Dixon and Christine or The Man of
Feeling have enjoyed the same success as Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim?
It’s 50 years since film audiences first thrilled to the thudding theme music and bared teeth of the original Jaws.
Under the young Steven Spielberg’s direction, the film isn’t just a masterclass in Hitchcockian suspense.
There’s also a compelling – and perhaps timely – morality story at work about the competing demands of making a dollar, on one hand, and public safety, on the other.
local businessmen not to upset the area’s economy by closing the beaches.
The chief initially agrees, and mayhem ensues. At that point, he sees the error of his ways and goes in search of the shark with an Ahab-like sea captain and an oceanographer, played by Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss respectively.
Scheider’s immortal quip ‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat’, spoken after he sees the man-eater up close for the first time, has become one of Hollywood’s most iconic lines.
The actor told The Old Un it was improvised. There were continual problems on the set of Jaws, filmed off Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts.
The crew complained the support boat carrying them was too small.
‘I must have heard them say it a hundred times, so I didn’t exactly pull it out of thin air,’ Scheider admitted.
After the film’s first shark attack, in which a young girl is chewed in half while swimming at night, the police chief, played by Roy Scheider (1932-2008), is persuaded by
P G Wodehouse’s Plum Lines
To salute the 50th anniversary of P G Wodehouse’s death in 1975, at the age of 93, The Oldie remembers his great quotes.
Who is the man over there? The fellow whose face ought to be shuffled and dealt again
A Damsel in Distress (1919)
‘But, yes, I knew when to use it.’
Scheider’s partial ad-lib helped contribute to a creature-feature that has grossed some $480 million internationally, against its $9 million budget. It still remains a classic of its genre.
Just don’t mention the film’s three sequels.
Our Fogey of the Month Award goes to Opposition Culture Spokesman Lord Parkinson.
In a Lords debate on football regulation, he said he was ‘always bemused how a truncated icosahedron kicked around a pitch for 90 minutes can arouse such passion’.
Lord Parkinson, since you were wondering, is 41. The
Hasn’t lost its bite: Jaws, 1975
My love affair with Donna Tartt
I can’t stop whispering sweet nothings to the American novelist
Donna Tartt. It’s quite a name. She’s quite a lady.
American, petite (five foot tall), fun and absurdly young for 61, she became famous when she published her first novel, The Secret History, in 1992. Her third, The Goldfinch, won her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2014. She spends around ten years working on each book.
I find her look irresistible: dark hair, near central parting, boyish clothes. (She has featured on the Vanity Fair international ‘best-dressed’ list.). I find her company compelling. Given that she is regularly described as a ‘literary genius’ and ‘notorious recluse’, I am lucky to know her.
I am luckier still because, between us, we have a special arrangement. When we meet, we only say three words to each other: ‘I love you.’ Nothing else.
You may find this hard to believe, but it’s true. We don’t need any other small talk. ‘I love you’ cuts to the chase.
At a party or in the street, if Donna and I come face to face, all we say is ‘I love you.’ We might say it consecutively or in unison; we might repeat it several times. We say it as we meet and as we part. We don’t say anything else in between. It’s wonderful. And what’s interesting is that, in the moment, I think we mean it.
The last time I saw Donna was in London, in the street outside Clarence House. We had both been guests at a gala gathering hosted by Queen Camilla to celebrate The Queen’s Reading Room, Her Majesty’s charity to encourage and spread the simple joy of reading.
The King was there, too: whenever he can, he turns up unheralded to support his wife’s endeavours.
It was a brilliant bash with a serious purpose. The charity works at several levels, organising starry literary festivals open to all (the next is at Chatsworth House in September) and providing free books in
hostels for people who may be homeless or sheltering from domestic abuse.
During the evening, the Queen made a speech announcing the launch of The Queen’s Reading Room Medal, a prize to be given each year to a community reading champion.
If you know someone – a teacher, a librarian, a friend – who does something special to encourage reading, do nominate them. You will find the details here: thequeensreadingroom.co.uk/nomination.
This summer, I am marking a personal anniversary. It is exactly 60 years since I began interviewing interesting people.
My very first interview was with the local vicar for the school magazine. My opening question was ‘Why do you believe in God?’ ‘Because He is ultimately unavoidable’ was the Reverend Snelgar’s concise reply.
My second interview for the school magazine was with the then President of Switzerland. Maurice Chaudet was his name and I had met him by chance on a Swiss summer holiday. It was, as you might expect, my first interview with a head of state.
Over the years since, I have been lucky enough to interview an assortment of presidents, princes and prime ministers, but I don’t think any of them has ever given me such straightforward answers as Monsieur Chaudet did for the Bedales Chronicle
In Switzerland, women did not get the vote in federal elections until 1973. This interview was in the mid-sixties – so I asked the President why it was that women weren’t yet enfranchised. ‘Because men and women are not equal,’ he replied. ‘The sexes may be complementary, but
We only say three words to each other: ‘I love you’
they are certainly not equal. Man is absorbed in his professional, political, social and military life, while the woman’s place is in the home.’
‘When there was last a national referendum on the matter and the referendum was open to all, how did your own wife vote?’ I asked.
‘Oh, she didn’t,’ he said amiably. ‘She couldn’t. I locked her in the bathroom for the day.’
Nowadays, for my podcast Rosebud, I am interviewing at least two interesting people a week. My guests have ranged from Dame Judi Dench to Sir Keir Starmer, but none has been more exciting than the actress Rachael Stirling.
Twenty-five years ago I interviewed Rachael’s mother, Dame Diana Rigg. She was exciting, too: intelligent, funny, sexy. As I remember, we talked quite a bit about sex. Not as much as I would have liked, but the interview was for the Sunday Telegraph.
For the Rosebud podcast, Rachael and I also talked about sex. At length and con brio. Rachael, as tall and beautiful as her mum, is gloriously uninhibited and ready to go into sensational anatomical detail.
A woman of experience, now happily married to singer-songwriter and Elbow front man Guy Garvey, she told me that she and Guy freely discuss the fun they had with other people before they got together. They find it quite a turn-on.
I found her quite a turn-on. If you listen to our conversation, I suspect you will, too. It’s hilarious, but not for the faint-hearted. When we had finished the recording, we fed each other strawberries and said ‘I love you.’ We said it again in our post-podcast emails.
With Donna, three words are just enough. With Rachael, I’m telling you, there is so much more to say.
The Gyles Brandreth Can’t Stop Talking Tour is on the road until June
The art of the racing certainty
The going is good – when I have inside information matthew norman
To the best of my knowledge, which in this sphere as in most others flirts coquettishly with the non-existent, I hold a prized academic record.
Unless it has since been sat by a terrapin, a JCB digger or a patient in early recovery from a full-frontal lobotomy, my performance in the 1987 Solicitors’ Final Examination remains the worst in Law Society history.
Although one takes pride in this, I mention it not to brag, but to make a point. Whatever follows will inevitably be inaccurate, if not active drivel, in any technical legal sense.
Nonetheless, I ask the question: why in the name of all the saints have 15 people been charged under Section 42 of the Gambling Act 2005 for betting on the date of the 2024 general election?
You will recall this demi-scandal from last summer, when it dominated the gloriously fiascoid start of the Tory election campaign.
It isn’t a question of natural sympathy for the alleged punters, all of whom (including a former MP) are professional Conservatives.
Nor do I comment on their guilt or innocence under Section 42, which refers to ‘cheating’ without defining what exactly that means in the context.
The sub-judice rules dictate the matter be left to the Westminster magistrates, who will consider it in June.
My question is one of morality rather than law. Can it ever be considered wrong to use inside information when making a bet?
I have been on both ends of vaguely similar incidents.
Once, I was tipped off an hour ahead of the announcement that a friend had won the Booker Prize, and duly headed to Betfair. Regardless that it was a pitifully small bet, should I have done time in Belmarsh for that?
Although Clare Balding would not be
sent to that elegant nick, for obvious reasons, should the law punish her for what she did to me?
The facts, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, are these. One night, around the turn of the millennium, when we both wrote sports columns for the now sadly defunct Evening Standard, we met at a greyhound meeting sponsored by the paper at the even more sadly defunct Wimbledon dog track.
A relatively new father, I bored her monstrously about the delights of small children until her eyelids began to droop. I attempted to rouse her by asking if she thought she’d ever have a baby.
‘Absolutely not,’ she said. She had zero interest in that.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ I drawled with that tone of pompous condescension for which men are so widely admired. ‘Women in their late twenties often say that – and the moment they hit 30, they’re snatching toddlers from pushchairs outside Tesco.’
‘Not me,’ insisted Clare.
‘In that case, what odds will you give on your having a child within ten years?’
She offered 6-4 against. I had £4,000 to her £6,000. It’s easier to be a big-shot gambler, I find, when you won’t have to settle up for a decade.
We shook on it, and I thought little more about our wager for some nine years – until the Mail on Sunday charmingly outed her on its front page.
Before noon that Sabbath, she had sheepishly emailed to ask whether, in light of this revelation, our bet stood.
I assured her that it did. For one thing, as this freshly minted slogan wisely insists, you don’t have to be straight to procreate. Far more significantly, the whole art of betting is knowing that weeny bit more than the other guy.
On the tenth anniversary of the dog
meeting, she graciously accepted a grand in full settlement.
For that, I ask you, should Clare, a fully fledged national treasure, be denied the future damehood, and obliged to put in a shift hosting punditry on catfights in the HMP Holloway laundry?
Or should she be lauded for monetising information to which only she and a select group of intimates had access at the time?
Every hour, we may safely assume, coke-fuelled horrors are making fortunes from insider trading on stocks. When did you last read about one of them going on trial?
Is it now a crime to bet on a football match because you heard from your cousin that her dentist had the team’s
I was tipped off that a friend had won the Booker Prize and duly headed to Betfair
star striker in for root-canal work, and noticed he was limping?
Should you come up before the beak for betting on a horse race after overhearing a stable lad blabbing in a Newmarket pub about the favourite for the big Saturday handicap having a cough?
With the criminal justice system in crisis, courts already crushed beneath the weight of untried cases are further clogged up with people who may have made a few bob by acting as any decent punter would.
The lesson that comes to mind is taken from the only legal teacher, a Mr Bumble, who ever taught me anything.
In equine terms, the law is not the kind of thoroughbred on which you’d have a farthing in a donkey derby with a single entrant.
what was Call My Bluff ?
Call My Bluff started out on BBC2 in 1965 and ran for more than 500 30-minute episodes until 1988, with a one-off special in 1994. It was relaunched on BBC1 in 1996 until 2004, chalking up 469 episodes.
The idea was simple enough. The game comprised two teams of three, a captain and two guests. There was a referee in the chair. In turn, each team read out three definitions of an obscure word, one true and two bluffs. Points were earned when a team identified the correct definition.
The format was devised by American entertainment-show supremos Mark Goodson (1915-92) and Bill Todman (1916-79) inventors of radio and TV shows such as The Price Is Right, Beat the Clock and What’s My Line?
The first UK-version referee was Robin Ray (1934-98), son of comedian Ted, who presided over the fun for 53 episodes.
The first team captains were comedy writer Frank Muir (1920-98) and posh actor Robert Morley (1908-92). After
Morley, Irish-born aristocrat Patrick Campbell (1913-80), 3rd Baron Glenavy, became a captain and sparred beautifully with Muir for over 200 episodes. While Muir had to manage a pronounced lisp, Campbell had to contend with a rather severe stammer, which he battled through. Neither speech impediment spoiled the enjoyment of the show.
Ray’s successor in the chair was actor Joe Melia (1935-2012) who appeared in 18 episodes, followed by broadcaster Peter Wheeler (1934-2010) chairing six.
Then it was off to what many consider to be the golden age of the show, as presenter, journalist and author Robert Robinson (1927-2011) stepped in, eventually anchoring nearly half of all the Call My Bluff episodes (from 1967 to 1988).
Robinson was mildly authoritarian, but relaxed enough to contribute to the humour, first with Muir and Campbell and then with Muir and one-time publicschool master turned humorous columnist Arthur Marshall (1910-89). With the latter duo, the witty banter levels were raised more than a few notches.
Over the years, stand-in captains included Kenneth Williams, Kenneth Horne, Alan Melville, Lady Antonia
what is a bop?
A bop is a sexually promiscuous young woman. It is not to be confused with bop as in ‘catchy song’, nor bop as in ‘embarrassing Oxbridge disco’, nor the avant-garde jazz style pioneered by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in the 1940s. If only.
No, this kind of bop is an acronym for ‘baddie on point’. It refers to women who use their bodies to make money online. The opportunities to do so have hugely increased owing to online platforms such as OnlyFans, which allows ‘creators’ to charge customers for exclusive ‘content’. In other words, it empowers anyone with an internet connection to become a freelance pornographer.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Apparently. OnlyFans creators often credit the site with transforming their personal finances. In November 2024, Sophie Rain, 20, a self-professed
Christian virgin from Florida, claimed to have made $43 million in her first year on OnlyFans – including $4.7 million from a single user.
She has since further capitalised by setting up Bop House, a sort of rolling sleepover/convent/reality-TV show in Florida, currently home to eight OnlyFans creators. The members of Bop House make videos of themselves doing innocent social-media things, such as dancing to viral TikTok hits. But, really, it’s all there to drum up business for their less than innocent OnlyFans channels.
The cultural commentator Poppy Sowerby describes it as a ‘panopticon … in which you are required to be not only constantly sexy but also constantly entertaining and likeable, given your dual role as porn star and influencer’.
It will not astonish you that bop culture has been criticised for glamorising sex work, pandering to deep misogyny, representing the logical end point of sexual permissiveness and
Fraser and Isobel, Lady Barnett. Team guests in the show’s first incarnation featured Celia Johnson, Marjorie Proops, Thora Hird, June Whitfield, Cliff Michelmore, Sam Kydd, Edward Woodward, Graham Hill, Katharine Whitehorn and dozens more personalities from theatre, screen, literature and media.
Call My Bluff’s first life ended after Marshall’s death. But it was resurrected in 1996, with Bob Holness (1928-2012) as referee, and team captains Alan Coren (1938-2007) and Sandi Toksvig. Holness was subsequently replaced by Fiona Bruce, and Toksvig by Rod Liddle.
A final Comic Relief special aired in 2011, chaired by Angus Deayton. Devoid of Robinson, Muir and Marshall, it had lost its charm.
Here are some of the words featured: rumpty, numms, trollibobs, incony, toggy. Definitions proposed on the show for these five words were: stockbroker slang for money, a false shirt front, inedible animal entrails, something fine and delicate, and an Arctic overcoat.
True or bluff? See the bottom of page 53 for the answers.
Joe Cushnan
basically creating a new form of algorithmic hell.
OnlyFans is now almost mainstream. Lily Allen claims to make more money selling pictures of her feet on OnlyFans than she ever did from the music industry.
You may have heard of the British OnlyFans creator Lily Phillips, who found notoriety by having sex with 100 men in 24 hours, only to have her record broken by another OnlyFans model named Bonnie Blue.
Phillips recently announced a new stunt in her bid for viral fame – she plans to visit US care homes to find her oldest ever customer. ‘I let anyone have a go – even including guys who could be my grandad or my little brother,’ she announced in a recent TikTok video.
‘What pornography does, it does in the real world; not only in the mind,’ warned the feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon in her critique of porn, Only Words, in 1993. Maybe worth revisiting. Richard Godwin
Iam a modern British soldier, yet daily I feel the weight of a war that ended 80 years ago. Not in traditions, uniform, or battle-honours, although they are an important connection to our heritage. Nor in our weapons and equipment, even if many would be recognisable to Monty’s men.
It is in something deeper – our purpose, instincts and identity. The Second World War is still with us every day; not as history, but as a lodestone, its pull both guiding light and drag anchor.
This may appear a contradiction; it is in fact a continuity.
While I didn’t join the Army to re-fight the battles of 1939-45, as a child born in 1973 I believe the war shaped my imagination of service.
Nearly three decades later, a Warwickshire schoolyard raged with skirmishes between British and Germans; for some forgotten reason, I always wanted to be a stormtrooper!
I read of Douglas Bader’s fortitude in Reach for the Sky and I listened endlessly to an LP of Geoff Love and His Orchestra, Big War Movie Themes.
I am not from a strongly military family, but we were nonetheless shaped by war. My maternal grandparents lived through the Blitz and emerged from their Anderson shelter to find the street obliterated. My paternal grandfather escaped Poland knowing he would never see his family and friends again.
I became a cadet at school, fired the Lee-Enfield rifle and donned much of the battledress of the Desert Rats. I was commissioned aged 24 in the afterglow of the Cold War into an Army that still lived where it had fought in 1945.
For those in uniform, VE Day means something quite different from Remembrance Day. In remembrance, we bow our heads as the bugle sounds; we recall people and sacrifice. My two minutes begin in Flanders Fields, but quickly there appear the smiling faces of comrades lost in Helmand or Basra.
VE Day is a celebration of a defining moment in the foundational narrative of the modern armed forces.
Victory in Europe affirmed the
Victory at last: VE Day in Piccadilly Circus, 8th May 1945
use of force in the war; political, moral, decisive and competent. Of course, the truth is much more complicated.
It matters – more than many realise. At its most essential, we turn to the Second World War because it was the last time we were called to arms in defence of the nation. We do this not out of nostalgia for what we wish we were, but out of a sense for a duty that may call.
Throughout my career, that war has been my teacher: of strategy, homeland defence and national mobilisation. I have studied the operational and tactical successes and failures of Montgomery, Tedder, Ramsay; and so too Gamelin, Bradley, Patton, von Manstein and Rommel.
With my comrades, I have undertaken studies of their battlefields, known as staff rides. On exercise, we have crawled through the bocage of Normandy and scaled the slopes of Monte Cassino. In
A day to remember
The British Army is still shaped by WWII, 80 years after VE Day. By Julian Buczacki
my days as a young officer, regimental veterans would join us, bringing the landscape alive with their first-hand accounts.
The very few survivors of this brave generation
of British and Commonwealth soldiers are now almost all centenarians.
The war defines not only what we are, but also how we are. I recently visited the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. The Army has transformed the commissioning course to attract and inspire the best future leaders from around the world. It draws on cutting-edge leadership theory and example – military and from other sectors of society.
It is more self-critical than in my day; the course is no longer a hagiography of Alan Brooke and Bill Slim. Cadets also
Major General Julian Buczacki
explore leadership in barracks and more of the world after 1945 – Gerald Templer, Rupert Smith and leaders still serving. Even some of the old company names are gone; Salerno and Arnhem have been retired; in their stead are Borneo and Falklands.
For all the change, the Army’s culture of leadership and command, the bedrock of its fighting power, is rooted in the past.
The Academy’s motto, ‘Serve to Lead’, was coined in 1947 after nearly three and a half decades of wars and economic privations. This maxim of servant leadership captures not just the relationship between leader and follower, but a bond between soldier and society. Our command philosophy is also a legacy of the war, albeit a complicated one.
In the 1970s, we adopted the German concept of Auftragstaktik, or mission command: decentralised decisionmaking, initiative and trust. This wasn’t merely an exercise in imitation. It signalled a broader shift: towards adaptability over rigidity, responsibility over control and individual judgment over blind obedience.
But the long shadow cast by the Second World War also constrains us. Victory invests it in popular
consciousness as an ideal type for war. VE Day events fête the liberators – the Few, the Dambusters, the Desert Rats; and events – Dunkirk, D-Day and Arnhem. As the living connection to those veterans and their feats fades, so too fades their purpose and meaning. The risk is that they become caricatures against which society compares us.
This ideal has also become a yardstick against which we measure ourselves. We defined the missions of recent decades by their distinction – counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency and peace support are ‘non-conventional’ operations; aberrations from our raison d’être – an imagined clarity of national will and moral purpose.
This prejudice makes it difficult to follow the dictum of the Prussian soldier theorist Carl von Clausewitz: ‘To understand correctly the kind of war [we] are undertaking, and not to take it for something that, by the nature of circumstances, it cannot be.’
Seen in reflection, VE Day appears instrumental; a turning point heralding a modern world order and a Western consensus for social and political transformation. Sellar and Yeatman
would probably have described it as ‘a good thing’.
Scholars argue over the end of the ‘post-war’ period. Some place it at the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union; others 9/11.
For the Western militaries, I would argue that, until 2022 and Ukraine, we were perhaps still in post-war mode.
It is patent that any post-war dispensation is over. The patterns of state behaviour are no longer predictable or in balance. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine bears many hallmarks of the war of 1939-45; fronts, artillery, tanks and trenches.
But we should check ourselves before assuming we are back to the future. The past is precedent, not dogma.
Equally, the pervasive use of drones, cyber and electronic warfare must not delude us that this is the future. In the arc of history, 1945 is only yesterday. It reminds us that we and our Allies now have a collective responsibility to be prepared for war as nations.
So what does that mean for VE Day? We must honour the past, but not be trapped by it. VE Day must not become a pageant. In such military theatre, we risk losing sight of what it took to be victorious: national unity of purpose.
Armies may win the battles, but it takes a whole country to win a war.
Churchill at the Ministry of Health Building, Whitehall, on VE Day
VE Day celebrations should remind us of that common endeavour connecting people, service and society. They can be a call to arms – not for war, but for a national conversation about who we are and what we’re willing to stand for.
Major General Julian Buczacki CBE was Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff, 2022-25
His talk on the 80th anniversary of VE Day is at Merrion Camp, Castlemartin, Pembrokeshire, 14th May, 7pm
Sixty years of Satisfaction
Mick Jagger tells his brother Chris Jagger how, in 1965, the Rolling Stones recorded a new song that rocked the world
Sixty years ago, I received a small record through the post at the Jagger family home in Dartford, Kent.
It was the US release of ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’. The 45rpm was blue and white and had no centre. So I searched for a plastic insert and put the record on the Dansette player. Hey, that’s different. The guitar had a fuzz-box sound – and what the hell was Mick banging on about?
It was a quantum leap from the previous singles, though I fondly remember ‘Little Red Rooster’, as I happened to be present in the tiny studio in Denmark Street when it was cut.
I was still at school, but somehow
connected to the events playing out across the USA, where Sunset Strip and Los Angeles looked light years away from dim and dreary Dartford.
I never would have imagined that the same track would continue to close most Rolling Stones shows to this day – a testament to its longevity musically and lyrically.
As Mark Ellen writes on page 70, Keith Richards had woken up in the night, reached for a trusty acoustic guitar and phrased the riff into a cassette recorder, and then returned to the Land of Nod.
In the morning, or probably afternoon, he came to and saw the cassette tape was at the end of the spool. So he rewound it and, to his surprise,
the riff was on there, followed by 40 minutes of snoring. As Allen Ginsberg once said, ‘Be a good secretary to your own consciousness.’
Plus he had a tag on the lyric, taken from a Chuck Berry song called ‘Forty Days’, with the line ‘can’t get no satisfaction from the judge…’ If you haven’t nicked from Chuck Berry, you haven’t nicked from anyone.
‘It just came out as youthful frustration, ’ Mick says
‘We had a first go at recording it, but it wasn’t right,’ Mick tells me down the phone. ‘Then we went into RCA Studios in Los Angeles with this new-fangled guitar fuzz box and very quickly had it down. We were on tour and the lines just came out as youthful frustration with everything that’s thrown at you from the radio and TV.’
Their then manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, wanted it released as a single. Keith didn’t agree, but Andrew went ahead, giving the band their first number-one single in the USA.
Earlier that year, 1965, we had ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, released by Mr Dylan – also a streamof-consciousness tirade, born from earlier influences such as Jack Kerouac. So things were moving on from the days of syrupy lyrics about eternal love and heartbreak.
I recall a paperback, The Naked Society (1964), on the consumer society, by Vance Packard, that Mick left at home.
I read it with interest, taking in such novel notions as ‘built-in obsolescence’ and how our thoughts are moulded by advertising men and corporations, and was surprised at the cynicism.
Or perhaps this record is a nod to Buddhist thought – that desire just breeds further desire?
Whatever the case, it has a good beat.
Chris Jagger’s lastest album is Mixing Up the Medicine
Brotherly love: Chris and Mick Jagger in the recording studio, 1995
When Hitler met Freud
Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran have written a new play about a monster meeting a genius
Eighty years have passed since the end of the Second World War – yet we writers can’t keep our hands off it.
Why? Because there always seems to be something new to say.
Let me flash back to the late 1990s, when my writing partner, Laurence Marks, and I were mere whippersnappers (though I didn’t actually snap my whipper until years later, chasing a tennis ball).
Laurence was reading Alan Bullock’s biography of Hitler, A Study in Tyranny; he does enjoy a proper book. Bullock recounted how Adolf was the anxious child of a brutish father and an abused mother.
The latter consulted their family doctor for ‘a cure’ for the boy’s nightmares. Dr Bloch explained that that sort of thing was beyond him. However, a new clinic had opened in Vienna for children with nervous disorders – did Frau Hitler want a letter of introduction? She did not – presumably she was scared of what her husband would do.
Then the gods of coincidence intervened. Having finished with Bullock, Laurence launched into Peter Gay’s biography of Sigmund Freud, A Life For Our Times, and discovered that it was Freud who had opened that clinic. If Adolf had been taken to Vienna, aged seven, in 1896, he might have been treated by the great man himself.
Hitler came to Vienna in 1907, where we imagine him seeking out Freud. In 1918, after the Armistice, he was in a military hospital with hysterical blindness. At that time, Freud was an inspector of military hospitals – so… And, in 1938, Hitler came to a Vienna Freud was desperate to leave.
The notion that two such oppositional characters as Hitler and Freud might have been in the same place at the same time tweaked our imaginations.
What was the child who became Führer really like? He claimed Mein Kampf that he knew from an early age that he was marked for greatness. But he would say that, wouldn’t he? Two other books caught our joint eye. One was The Young Hitler I Knew: The Memoirs of Hitler’s Childhood by August Kubizek. He and Hitler shared a passion for Wagner. When their schooldays ended, they moved to Vienna, where Kubizek studied at the Conservatoire of Music.
the 1920s
The second book was Hitler’s by Franz Jetzinger, a member of the post-Second World War Austrian government. As Hitler advanced towards power in Germany, Jetzinger used his position to obtain and hide Hitler’s military file, in case one day he might use it to embarrass the Führer. It revealed the shameful fact that in 1914 Hitler evaded military call-up to avoid fighting for the decadent Habsburg Empire, which he despised for the people’s ‘mongrel nature’.
We built a picture of Hitler’s life in Vienna; how, while Kubizek attended the Conservatoire, Adolf failed to get into the Academy of Fine Arts, failed to persuade his friend to co-write an opera, and developed his aversion towards the Viennese Jews.
Meanwhile, in a smarter part of the city, Sigmund Freud practised, preached and taught the new science of psychoanalysis. He had reached the peak of his intellectual powers and been appointed a full professor at the university, despite the anti-Semitism of many fellow academics.
The chances of Hitler and Freud bumping into each other were slim to non-existent, especially after Hitler lost touch with Kubizek and drifted into vagrancy, barely supporting himself by
selling hand-drawn postcards of Vienna. But what if Hitler already knew Freud?
Decades later, Germany annexed Austria and the SS ransacked Vienna for that embarrassing army file. But what if they were also searching for Freud’s case notes on the young Hitler?
We had the elements of a script, but weren’t confident we could ever know enough of Freud to dramatise him with confidence. Then we met the late John Forrester, Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University. What he didn’t know about Sigmund Freud could be written on the back of a very small Oedipus complex.
With John’s input, we wrote a film script that morphed into a stage play, and then a radio drama, Dr Freud Will See You Now, Mrs Hitler, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2007.
We staged a reading of the play at the Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn, in support of the Freud Museum. We were relieved at how kindly the work was received by an audience of psychoanalysts and patients.
And that might have been that, until last year, when Laurence went to the Gatehouse Theatre, Highgate. There he was introduced to a trustee of the theatre who had been at the Tricycle reading, loved it, and wondered whether there had ever been a full production.
There hadn’t. But now there will be:
Will See You Now, Mrs Hitler will receive its world première at the Gatehouse Theatre on 4th September.
At last. We can’t wait.
Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran wrote Shine On Harvey Moon Goodnight Sweetheart New Statesman
Oh, Vienna... Adolf Hitler in
Sigmund Freud
Manhattan was bought from the Red Indians by Peter Minuit, a Dutchman, for 25 dollars’ worth of beads and trinkets.
‘Well,’ says Groucho Marx, who played Minuit in a film called The Story of Mankind (1957), ‘it’s only an island.’ He then adds, as if reassuring the chief and his squaw on the terms of the deal, ‘Be glad it’s not three hundred years later. You’d be wiped out in the stock market.’
New York is now 400 years old, and to me it’s the city of the movies – the bars and hotel lobbies jostling, in fantasy if not actuality, with the likes of Marlene Dietrich, Dorothy Lamour, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Johnny Weissmuller, Gene Autry and Donald Duck.
When I first visited, in the eighties, flush with the advance for my first (instantly remaindered) book, I wanted to plunge into the world of Elizabeth Taylor’s BUtterfield 8 (1960) or Bernstein’s brash West Side Story (1961).
I was not disappointed. New York was a movie set, transporting me back in time. The hotel doormen wore greatcoats with brass buttons. They blew whistles to hail yellow cabs. Policemen wore white gloves and twirled their truncheons.
Bars were lit with a dark orange glow, like interiors in The Godfather (1972). Looking in Tiffany’s window, I was Holly Golightly. I was there when it was snowing, at night the buildings twinkling like boxes of jewels.
I stayed at the Algonquin, needless to say. My room had recently been vacated by Yves Montand. The man working the lift asked me if I knew Charles Laughton, who’d died when I was two.
I visited the obligatory tourist spots –the Empire State Building, the Metropolitan Museum, the Statue of Liberty, the Hall of North American Mammals in the Museum of Natural History – but it wasn’t until the following decade that I fell in love with the place and became semi-resident.
When my Peter Sellers and Laurence Olivier biographies were published, I was flown over for the publicity tours –dozens of television, radio and newspaper interviews. (Today, by the way, it’s all done by Zoom from my back bedroom in Hastings.) I stayed at the Gramercy Park Hotel, an atmospherically shabby institution, once home to S J Perelman (1904-79). I instantly retained a suite, and went back every six weeks or so, aiming straight for the Russian Tea Room, with its ice sculptures, blue walls and rotating bear-shaped aquarium.
One of the big draws was the Players
Club – players as in actors, not sports –which was situated in a Stanford White mansion across the way, a Gothic edifice of gas lamps and Sargent paintings.
The Players Club was founded in 1888 by actor Edwin Booth, whose brother, John Wilkes Booth, another actor, killed Abraham Lincoln 160 years ago, in April 1865.
Here dwelt ancient thespians, who’d managed to remain strangers to fame.
One chap was Rex Harrison’s understudy, who claimed he’d ‘been
through 11 Eliza Doolittles’. Another had appeared in a mustard commercial. It was rumoured that the plump fellow in the corner was once Babe LeRoy, W C Fields’s nemesis. Somebody knew somebody who’d dated the woman who voiced Betty Boop. Gregory Peck was put out that, on the occasion he paid a visit, people tried to press their duff scripts on him in the gents.
These were happy days for me: drinking dry martinis; dinner in Sardi’s
So long, old New York
On the city’s 400th anniversary, Roger Lewis recalls the last glory days of Manhattan
with Vincent Sardi; cocktails in the King Cole Bar at the St Regis. I saw a lot of Barry Humphries, who was surprised New Yorkers had taken to his act, as they’d ‘only vaguely’ heard of Australia. Plus ‘They assume Edna is Jewish.’
I was to be seen with my son Sébastien in the background of an interview Edna gave in the Boathouse, a café in Central Park. Edna also summoned Sébastien up on stage, during her Broadway show.
Crouching in the stalls, I became the butt of the dame’s ridicule. ‘Oh, it’s Mr Lewis. Have you written any more books lately?’ Her tone suggested she rather wished I hadn’t.
Then, after the terrorist attacks on 11th September 2001, I stopped going. The surveillance and baggage checks at airports became a bind. And I’d been a fan of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, the swooping stairways carpeted in purple, the observation deck
F Scott Fitzgerald wrote about Roaring Twenties New York in The Great Gatsby (1925)
and Windows on the World restaurant. Suddenly what struck me – struck everybody – was the fragility of the city.
The fragility intensified. Nothing was safe, particularly not from the New Yorkers themselves. The Gramercy Park changed hands, underwent refurbishment and had its ambience obliterated, before closing down completely in 2020.
That any of this architecture survives is due to the vigilance of the Committee for the Preservation of Structures of Historic and Aesthetic Importance, which evolved into the Landmark Preservation Commission.
The Plaza has been turned into condos. The Oak Room, where Cary Grant is to be found at the start of North by Northwest (1959), is shuttered. The Waldorf Astoria, where the Duke and Duchess of Windsor lived, is also shuttered, its contents dispersed. The Chelsea Hotel closed in 2011. Though it reopened in 2022, the prices are beyond the means of artists and poets, its traditional clientele. Dylan Thomas was staying at the Chelsea when he set off on his terminal bender.
I never liked the allegedly vibrant squalor of New York, the graffiti, honks, shouts and screeches and Greenwich Village bohemia. My taste ran more towards Upper West Side neighbourhood stoops and stores, dry cleaners and shoe-repair shops, and quaint cafés called Sloppy Louie’s. I liked the Flatiron – ‘Like the bow of a monster ocean steamer,’ said Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer.
I relished the BeauxArts galleries, Vanderbilt houses and department stores along Fifth Avenue – the wealth and grandeur celebrated (and eulogised) in The Great Gatsby, which was published exactly a century ago, on 10th April 1925. Barry Humphries’s first edition was signed by Scott Fitzgerald.
It was quite a year: a few weeks earlier, on 21st February 1925, the first issue came out.
Back in the sixties, they weren’t in time to save Penn Station, unfortunately – a soaring cathedral of glass, steel and granite, a masterpiece, with 84 Doric columns. It took three years to pulverise – and had been standing for only 53 years. But they did save Carnegie Hall, which was proposed for demolition.
Then there’s Trump Tower, built on the site of the Bonwit Teller department store, a beautiful, elegant art deco structure – a tragic loss. Museum-quality limestone relief panels and metal grilles were jackhammered and chucked on the skip. There was something Vegas about the ornamentation that replaced it –though I can’t help saying I enjoyed sailing up and down the vast escalators, everything reflected in bronze-effect panels. Trump and his Tower are proof of Oscar Wilde’s line, that to the brazen all is brass.
My friends at the Players Club, subsisting on their Equity pensions, are dead. The club has been in the financial doldrums, its artworks sold off.
Up and down Manhattan, much that I appreciated and cherished (Lüchow’s, Rumpelmayer’s, La Côte Basque) has gone, or been turned into the minimalist boutique affair I find repellent. Italian delis have been replaced by vegans selling cupcakes. Irish cab drivers have been replaced by Somalian refugees. Times Square belongs to Disney.
‘Don’t you see, the rest of the country looks upon New York like we’re left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers,’ wails Woody Allen in Annie Hall. Would they today, I wonder? I’ll not go back. I’m glad I saw it before it disappeared for ever.
Roger Lewis is author of Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor
John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln 160 years ago. In 1888, his brother and fellow actor, Edwin Booth, founded the Players Club in New York
Cream of café society
Everyone, from the Beatles to Celia
Johnson, patronised Kardomah Cafés. David Wheeler visits the last branch, in Swansea
Kardomah Cafés were immensely popular from the early 1900s until the late 1960s.
But they began life much earlier – in Liverpool’s Pudsey Street in 1844, set up by the grocers and tea-trading Vey Brothers.
Widespread in England and Wales and, briefly, in Paris, the chain featured live entertainment provided by string quartets.
Today, just one Kardomah survives, in Swansea, sans music.
The business was acquired in 1868 by the newly created Liverpool China and India Tea Company.
The Kardomah brand of tea was first served at the Liverpool Colonial Exhibition of 1887 and was later applied to a range of teas, coffees and, eventually, the coffee houses themselves. The brand was acquired by Trust House Forte in 1962 and sold to Cadbury/Schweppes/ Typhoo in 1971, later becoming part of Premier Brands. The brand still exists, selling such commodities as instant coffee and whitener.
The London and Manchester Kardomah Cafés were designed between 1936 and 1950 by Sir Misha Black (1910-77). He was famous for his many still-extant London black-and-red street signs (think Carnaby Street), as well as his extensive stock and property schemes for British Rail.
Liverpool’s Kardomah was patronised by the Beatles and many other Merseybeat groups of the 1960s who played in the nearby Cavern Club. A Kardomah branch in the fictional town of Milford was created as a studio set for one of the meeting places used by Alec and Laura in the 1945 film Brief Encounter
The last remaining Kardomah is in Portland Street, Swansea. The original branch, the Kardomah Exhibition Café & Tea Rooms, was in the High Street and moved to Castle Street in the early 1900s.
During the 1930s, it hosted the Kardomah Gang, an assembly of ‘bohemian’ poets, writers, artists and musicians. They included the likes of Dylan Thomas, poet Vernon Watkins and the painter Alfred Janes, whose canvases can be seen at the nearby Glynn Vivian Art Gallery.
The building housing that particular café was destroyed during the Second World War, when Swansea was severely blitzed in February 1941.
The last-surviving Kardomah retains its intact, original interior. Still there are the Formica-topped tables (with their distinctive black-and-white coffee-bean design), Sputnik-style coat racks, mosaic-tiled columns and dark wood
panelling. It has been run by the Luporini family since 1970 and remains a beloved Swansea institution.
I recently sat down with co-owner and manager Louise Luporini after the day’s lunchtime crowd had left, leaving the bustling waitresses in their black-andwhite uniforms to tidy up.
Swansea-born Louise, a former primary-school teacher, came to the Kardomah through marriage.
She and her husband, Marcus, son of the previous owners, maintain its much-valued characteristics: personal service, a seldom-changing traditional menu and sensible pricing.
Earwigging us from an adjoining table was a long-term regular customer. He butted in to tell me that he first came here as a small child and remembers being taken upstairs for a pee by his mother, as he was too young to go to the lavatory on his own. He will be 60 next year.
Kardomah fans:
Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, Brief Encounter
Secured now by ownership of the freehold, Louise and Marcus are set to take this treasured establishment far into the future. Iechyd da!
David Wheeler is The Oldie’s gardening correspondent
Something in the way they brew: the Beatles loved the Liverpool Kardomah
A very English traitor
At Guy Burgess’s last
birthday, in Moscow, the drunk spy was obsessed with Eton, Cambridge and the British newspapers. By
Iain Pears
In 1963, the Cambridge art historian Francis Haskell (19282000), later Professor of Art History at Oxford, attended the 52nd – and last – birthday of the Russian spy Guy Burgess (1911-63).
They had both been at Eton and Cambridge and had been members of the Cambridge Apostles society, a university club.
Haskell was often in Russia with his wife, Larissa Salmina (1931-2024), a curator at the Hermitage Museum in what was then Leningrad.
Francis Haskell’s account of Guy Burgess’s 52nd birthday party in Moscow is curious, to say the least:
At 7 we went to dinner with Guy Burgess.
He has a very comfortable flat, several rooms lined with books and pictures –Cézanne reproduction, El Greco copy, Henry Moore drawing etc.
He was slightly drunk (it was his birthday and he had been given a huge Russian lunch, but it is apparently not true that he is always drunk – he has an ulcer) and was wearing a white shirt, loose at the bottom to reveal a very fat paunch, and an OE [Old Etonian] tie.
He has great charm, was extremely genial and was anxious to talk about English friends and acquaintances –Anthony Blunt, Ellis Waterhouse, Dadie (Rylands), Victor Rothschild etc – and the past; very often scandalous and highly uncommunist; ie the time that so-and-so got drunk in Monte Carlo and picked up a sailor.
Only very rarely did he get serious: he talked a lot, and obviously felt a great sense of guilt about ‘sending Julian Bell to his death in Spain’. [Bell (1908-37), a poet and Virginia Woolf’s nephew, was killed fighting for the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War].
Of all the people he knew, it was Morgan [E M Forster] who he said would most alarm him to meet now – his ‘integrity’ (he is trying to get him translated, but said the Russians don’t approve of the religious elements in A Passage to India).
He said repeatedly, ‘I’m not a Russian Communist,’ and obviously
doesn’t care much for the Russians or Russian life.
It was memories and old-time gossip that he really enjoyed – he is obsessed with the past and with England, reads everything in the Times every day, New Statesman, New Yorker (‘Did you see Wystan’s [Auden] article on Wilde?’), Literary Supplement etc.
We had an excellent dinner – he ate nothing – prepared by his housekeeper: soup, grouse, ice cream with hot chocolate sauce, Georgian wine…
After dinner, his boyfriend (Russianspeaking only) came in – genial, broad shoulders, stolid, a factory worker – very unlike the usual type (Angus’s [Wilson], Anthony’s [Blunt]), though Mark said he was very much on best behaviour and can be flirtatious.
We also talked a lot about the [Apostles] Society; he was all for keeping out Catholics.
‘What about Communists?’ I asked.
‘What he enjoyed more than anything else was going to bed with boys. Dirty, filthy fingernails etc, a Soviet agent, betrayed his country and his friends, but in some ways the Society was at the centre of his life.’
Dennis Proctor spoke next – had been one of his closest friends etc. Guy went over because he wanted to warn Russia about danger of war – Korea, MacArthur and so on. Had never been a Soviet agent. His deep admiration for Morgan Forster (who was there and purred).
It was rather an inspiring occasion, the thing I love best about England –a certain moral courage required, as all these people were members of the ‘Establishment’.
The evening was a huge success and we stayed until 11.30; he implored me to come again if I ever return to Moscow.
I think he is bored and lonely. Haskell’s diary, 20th April 1963
This account is possibly the last view of Burgess, who died four months later of arteriosclerosis and liver failure. The following year, Haskell wrote about the annual Apostles dinner, where speakers delivered affectionate eulogies:
And last night the Society dinner at Bertorelli’s … interesting mainly because of Noel’s [Annan, Provost of King’s College, Cambridge] speech – excellent; humane, humorous, v sympathetic about Guy Burgess (so much nicer than Guy himself, who I remember in Moscow was rather bitchy about Noel):
Guy Burgess (Alan Bates) in Moscow, in Old Etonian tie, in Alan Bennett’s An Englishman Abroad (1983)
I’m sure it was the obituary that would have meant most to Guy.
Haskell’s diary, June 1964
The uproar over the Cambridge spies in the outside world was long-lasting and profound in its effects but, in Haskell’s circle, it meant remarkably little.
According to his wife, Larissa, ‘everybody knew’ that Anthony Blunt –who had helped Burgess escape in the 1950s and was made to confess to MI6 in 1964, only a few weeks before this dinner took place – was a Soviet agent.
Francis terrified Blunt – when not yet unmasked but aware that he was under suspicion, with his telephone tapped –by ringing him up when he returned to England from Moscow and cheerfully telling him, ‘Guy sends his love.’
Iain Pears’s Parallel Lives: A Love Story from a Lost Continent is out on 8th May
Alex is axed
The cartoon rogue of the City has been sacked by the Telegraph. Robert Bathurst, who played him on stage, talks to his creators
The Alex cartoon strip, which has been satirising the City financial world five times a week for 38 years, has been axed by the Daily Telegraph. With an archive of more than 8,500
strips created by Charles Peattie and Russell Taylor, Alex has poked fun at, and in many cases anticipated, every Big Bang, Boom, Crash and Crunch in these last four seismic decades, through the eyes of Alex Masterley: a materialistic, status-obsessed, Boomer banker, wholly unreconstructed by change and progressive opinion.
The strip, right to the end of their time in the Telegraph, has retained its bite. Charles Peattie, who draws the cartoons, as well as writing the jokes with Russell Taylor, tells me, ‘I’d say our faces didn’t initially fit at the Telegraph,’ which published Alex for 33 years, ‘but we developed a good relationship with the readers.’
Taylor said, ‘I always like the fact that no one knows whether we’re from the right or the left. That sums up Alex, because we don’t know either. We’re just taking examples of
ridiculous behaviour and pointing them out to people.’
Not being City people (‘If you drive a Porsche, you can’t laugh at people who drive Porsches’), Peattie and Taylor have relied on informants to tell them about the latest scams – secret Deep Throat sources who met the writers, as often as not, over a long lunch.
One of these is former broker Malcolm Graham-Brown, who emerged from the shadows for me and paints a Bacchanalian picture of City life in the 1980s: ‘Lunch was a proper part of the business day. You’d slide away from your desk at about 11.30 or 12. At James Capel, we had ten magnificent dining rooms and a butler. Everybody had to have a Kümmel after lunch and I know someone who got up from a long lunch and went straight out to dinner. The fun has gone out of the City.’
The Alex strip, he says, was ‘an
Alex on the Crash – 13th August 2007
Alas, poor Alex: Robert Bathurst as Alex
absolute legend – the first thing you turned to in the paper’.
The City may have changed, but Peattie and Taylor have remained consistent.
Peattie: ‘We’re sceptical about a lot of stuff.’ From the start, they have been iconoclasts, resistant to any orthodoxy. ‘When we started, we were slightly mocking what would now be called liberal sensibilities.’
Taylor: ‘In the mid-80s, it was quite shocking to be obsessed with money and status. It was all Greenham Common and the miners’ strike. The fact that Alex was materialism personified was weird, and that was what was funny about him.’
Peattie: ‘People started copying behaviour in the cartoon and we thought, “We’re not satirising; we’re just giving them ideas.”’
The cartoon strip has, literally, been on the money, presaging spectacular downturns which rocked the financial world.
Peattie: ‘ We were doing jokes about subprime mortgages for about a year before the crash in 2008. It was what people were telling us. They were saying “it’s all going to go wrong but there’s nothing we can do about it”.’
Taylor: ‘They thought no one else heard about it but they were all saying the same thing.’
Peattie: ‘It feels, currently, the same with the American debt.’
The archive of Alex strips stands as a social document of the past four decades.
Taylor: ‘Back when Alex started, the City was a mixture of public-school boys, ex-military and East End traders.’
Peattie: ‘The traders have been replaced by machines.’
Taylor: ‘And nowadays it’s just quants
Alex has poked fun at every Big Bang, Boom, Crash and Crunch
[analysts]; everyone has to have at least two degrees.’
Their targets can unsettle.
Taylor: ‘Everybody hates Compliance. Everybody hates HR, but they’re too terrified to speak out.’
Peattie: ‘There’s a lot of double standards, which is where the humour comes from. I wouldn’t say that’s why they got rid of us. I’d say part of it is that we have a sensibility which is not really like that of a big tech company, which is what most people aspire to now. They like things that are safe, that they’ll be comfortable with. We do Boomer humour, I suppose, and they don’t like Boomers.’
I ask how Peattie defines Boomer humour: ‘The opposite of jokes that promote an agenda, which is what people like at the moment.
‘Everybody’s taking sides and they like jokes that quite clearly take a particular line, which is approved by whoever’s paying for it.
‘There have been complaints about Alex over the years, but our editors have mostly supported us and ignored them.
‘We’ve never said the right things but now, with corporate progressiveness, if they think you’re being a bit off-colour, they’ll take against it more than they did back in the day. The Telegraph wouldn’t like jokes about HR, because they’d think we were mocking something which they uphold. I don’t think the current management likes our sort of humour, which is subversive and it’s not safe.
‘If you’re going to make a joke that’s slightly subversive, you want people to think about whether they approve or not.
‘As a satirist, it’s better to be like that than just crowd-pleasing. Otherwise, what’s the point?’
Robert Bathurst played Alex in a solo stage show with cartoon animation
The Alex archive is at www.alexcartoon.com
A bloody good City lunch – 18 June 2024
Farewell, Alex – the last Telegraph column, 4th April 2025
What a Dumbo! I lied about Walt Disney
Why oh why did I tell a journalist I was writing his biography?
a n wilson
Not long ago, our kind editor asked me to address an Oldie Literary Luncheon in the august setting of the National Liberal Club.
These are merry occasions for everyone, except for those speakers, such as me, who feel nerves, which both precede and follow the in-all-senses dreaded speech.
This is not an excuse for what I am about to confess, but it might set my bad behaviour in some kind of context – since I find it increasingly frightening to make speeches in public, and I’m not entirely ‘myself’, whoever that may be, for hours before and after.
As well as the guests, and the speakers, on these occasions, there is a small huddle of gossip columnists, hoping for a ‘story’.
During this lunch, one of them approached me. The inevitable question came up – ‘What are you writing at the moment?’
This is a perfectly natural question to ask someone known for writing books but, for some reason, it makes me feel ‘got at’. You can tell at once if the enquirer has read any of your books, and if they have, then – of course – it is easy to give an honest answer.
But, in most cases, the question really means – ‘I know you write books, but I haven’t the foggiest what they are about, nor do I know what to say to you. So – er – what’s the next book?’
For the last few years – when asked what I was writing – the truthful answer would have been ‘I am writing a book about Goethe.’ Most people look a bit put out by this confession. So it is easier to tell fibs, to avoid boring or baffling the enquirer.
Now the Goethe book is actually out – so how do I answer the question ‘What next?’ The simplest answer is to say that I am very old and have given up writing altogether. On this occasion, however, at the Oldie lunch, I heard myself spinning a yarn.
‘Walt Disney’s family have reached the brave and difficult decision that the time has come to tell the truth about old Walt.
‘They approached me and asked if I will write a “warts and all” biography of the great man,’ I said. ‘It turns out he was someone who particularly hated mice –so there was a real irony in his having created Mickey Mouse. He was actually known to be cruel to animals. He was a little bit of an anti-Semite…’
I have forgotten what other fibs poured out. Marital problems, alcohol problems… In fact, I know next to nothing about Walt Disney. I begged the gossip columnist to keep it under wraps, since at the moment it was all a bit hush-hush, and I should not really have blurted it out.
Only one thing I said was true. That is that while church-crawling once in (I think) Gloucestershire, I came across a series of memorials to the Disney family – hatchments, escutcheons, elements of grandeur – and wondered whether they were Walt’s forebears.
Having lied about my next book, I forgot all about the conversation. I ate my lunch, made my speech, had the usual few hours of wishing I had not made such a charlie of myself, and then – on to another day!
As it happens, during that week, the new Snow White film was released, in which the wokery of the current Disney Company was widely mocked. The Seven Dwarfs have been replaced by Seven Computer-Generated Creatures of the same height as Snow White.
Those of us who enjoyed the old
I begged the gossip columnist to keep it under wraps, since it was all a bit hush-hush
cartoon version are now firmly put in our place, realising that ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’ does not foster an aspiration we should be encouraging in our daughters.
In the new version, someone explains to Snow White that she was so called because she was born during a snowstorm – not, repeat NOT, because of the colour of her face. You get the idea.
‘Just because he’s called Dopey doesn’t mean he’s a dope’ is another line in the film. Then why on earth is he called Dopey?
Clearly the new film is drivel, whereas the old Disney films were works of genius, albeit a genius flawed by the casual racism and sexism of the 1930s and 1940s.
I had totally forgotten lying to the gossip columnist, when, to my amazement, a friend said she was fascinated to hear I was ‘tackling’ – her word – Disney as my next project.
Guilt crept over me, as I read the story. In good Fleet Street tradition, the journalist had mangled the garbage I had told her, claiming not that I had discovered Disney’s ancestors. (In fact, Disney was half-Irish and half-Canadian – according to Google.)
Instead, the piece said I had ‘tracked down Walt Disney’s descendants’.
The story in the paper greatly neutered what I’d said to my fellow hack, omitting Disney’s cruelty to animals and not mentioning the anti-Semitism. But they had added that I had been paid an enormous sum of money to write the tell-all story.
My daughter (glass-half-full sort of person) said, ‘Great! Maybe now a publisher will really offer you money you can’t refuse!’
And my wife (glass so empty as to be dry) said, ‘That’s all we need: everyone will hate you now for making so much – and you’ll probably be sued by the Disney Company.’
My rubbery day’s work
Hugo Vickers hated his career at a merchant bank – except for his trip to investigate a condom factory
Many of the letters written to my parents when I was born took the predictable line: ‘Welcome to the newest member of the firm.’
My father was senior partner of Vickers, da Costa, a good stockbroking firm in the City in the days before boom and bust. It had been founded by my grandfather in 1917, when the German members were evicted from the Stock Exchange as aliens.
One of his partners was Jack Churchill. Winston was a client. After the Second World War, my father took it on.
He was one of the first to advance into the Japanese market and was once asked if he was not nervous about having his money invested in Japan. He replied that he liked living in London with his money invested in Tokyo. ‘Sometimes this did well – perhaps led to a good dinner; even a cognac after dinner. In turn, a restless night, even a nightmare, in which I find myself living in Tokyo with my money invested in London.’
imprecation: ‘Third generation, they look to you.’
Betjeman still felt guilty at letting the side down in late life, but thought his desertion worthwhile whenever a new book of his came off the press.
somewhat denting their condom business. It was not yet the age of AIDS. I asked someone what I should be finding out. ‘Ask them if it is a growth industry,’ he said.
Suit you, sir? Testing condoms at the London Rubber Company, Chingford, 1950s
There were lunches in the boardroom, the partners enjoying a game of cards. There was none of the American intensity. On one occasion, my father was called before the Stock Exchange Council to explain why he had suddenly sold a raft of shares. He explained, ‘I got the company report and I saw that the chairman had grown a beard. I don’t trust men with beards.’
My mother was the person who made it clear I did not have to join the firm. I am not alone in wishing to take a different path. Johnny Churchill, Jack’s son, left Vickers, da Costa to be an artist. The only time he came back was when my father invited him to paint the murals in the boardroom.
Still, I felt like John Betjeman deserting the family business, which made the Tantalus drinks cabinets, lockable to keep the servants from the brandy. He was haunted by his father’s
I thought I should at least try. So I was sent to Singer & Friedlander, the merchant bank, to spend weeks of intolerable boredom in the back office. In one department, the manager showed me how to pin three dockets together: the pin right through, right back and then only partly through so that fingers were not scuffed. I spent a week doing that.
Eventually I escaped into the dealing room. I was completely at sea. One day I was put on the dealing desk as a stopgap. Dealers rang figures through. One clearly thought I was his friend. His figures baffled me. He was giving me the Test match score!
The only fun I had was a company visit to the London Rubber Company. This was October 1973. The Pill had come in,
Ping! The phalli would swing up into the air
The analysts were addressed by the company chairman, a former Lord Mayor of London, Sir Edmund Howard. He stressed the merits of the condom. ‘Play safe,’ was his wise motto.
Then we were taken on to the factory floor to see the products being made.
Enormous metal phalli (with the bobble at the end), on a conveyor belt, were dipped into molten rubber and then cooled down.
The rubbers were then carried across to the next bank of metal phalli. Ladies transferred the condoms on to the new phalli with a proficiency that would have impressed Madame Claude in Paris.
Then came the electronic testing. The phalli would shake and vibrate and if there was the slightest deficiency – ping! They would swing up into the air and leave the production line. It was hilarious to watch.
Someone asked if the company got complaints. Our guide told us there was indeed a complaints department.
‘Usually it is fingernails,’ he told us, ‘or, dare I say it, teeth.’
I returned to the office, scattering on to the desks the free samples from the goodie bag. A popular new line was the Black Shadow. I submitted an admiring report, pointing out that so zealous was the testing that only 93 per cent of the condoms made reached the active man.
I didn’t go into the City.
Hugo Vickers has written biographies of the Duchess of Windsor, the Queen Mother and Queen Mary
French polish
The Huguenots, expelled from France 340 years ago, had a huge influence on British history, from banking to weaving. By Tessa Murdoch
Did you know that one in six of us has a drop of Huguenot blood in our veins?
Do you have Huguenot ancestors? Well, the Huguenot Museum in Rochester, Kent, can help you discover your Huguenot family history.
It’s the only museum of Huguenot history in the UK, marking its tenth anniversary this year. The displays celebrate the contribution of generations of skilled Protestant refugees to Britain from l’ancien régime France.
The first French Protestant church was established in Threadneedle Street, London, in 1550.
A century and a half later, members of that Huguenot community dominated the Bank of England, founded by Huguenot Sir John Houblon in 1694 to raise funds for the war effort against France. Huguenot soldiers supported William III at the Battle of the Boyne and fought under the Duke of Marlborough at Blenheim.
The Rochester Museum cares for the collections of the French Hospital, established in 1708 to provide shelter for Huguenots who could not earn a living.
It catered for those with mental illness, often resulting from abuse suffered during the persecution of Protestants in Louis XIV’s France.
This Huguenot charity moved to Victoria Park, Hackney, in the 1860s, where its spectacular purpose-built ‘hospital’, resembling the Château de Chambord in the Loire Valley, catered for 40 women and 20 men. The male day room contained a loom where dress silk was woven for Queen Victoria.
In the 1950s, the French Hospital moved into its present home, a converted Regency square in Rochester, where 62 apartments accommodate 47 single residents and nine married couples.
Established by the French Hospital in 2013, with a substantial grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the museum was opened by Princess Alexandra in July 2015. The current exhibition, of Sarah Lethieullier’s 1730s doll’s house, is on loan from the National Trust’s Uppark, West Sussex. It shows how a Huguenot
family, established as London merchants from the early-17th century, were by the mid-18th century assimilated into the English landed gentry.
The doll’s house (pictured) was given to teenage Sarah by her father, Christopher Lethieullier, a director of the Bank of England.
This Neo-Palladian ‘baby house’ is a miniature of the homes Sarah would create in London and Sussex, after her marriage in 1746 to wealthy Sir Matthew Fetherstonhaugh.
With 700 fixtures and fittings, the house shows the contrast between the below-stairs life led by wooden dolls, representing the cook, footmen, housekeeper and wet nurse, and the gracious living enjoyed by the family of wax dolls –
refugees settled in the British Isles, including talented Huguenot women.
Among them were the goldsmiths Anne Tanqueray (whose great-grandson invented Tanqueray gin) and Eliza Godfrey, both daughters of firstgeneration Huguenot goldsmiths. They carried on their husbands’ workshops as widows, registering their own maker’s marks at Goldsmiths’ Hall.
The recently acquired miniature sculpture Susanna and the Elders exemplifies the work of David Le Marchand (1674-1726), a refugee from Dieppe, who moved to London and later died in the French Hospital.
including the lady of the house lying in bed after childbirth, her healthy son in a wicker cradle at her feet.
The rich textiles that furnish the doll’s house reflect the Huguenot contribution to the design, manufacture and marketing of silks. Weavers were particularly associated with Canterbury and Spitalfields, where Huguenots settled from the late 17th century.
Although Huguenot refugees were supported by Royal Bounty and charitable giving particularly from the Dukes of Bedford and Montagu, they established their own schools and friendly societies.
Designs by James Leman – whose family settled first in Canterbury – and the Lincolnshire-born Anna Maria Garthwaite, are in the V&A. The Huguenot Museum has Spitalfields silk on display
This year marks the 340th anniversary anniversary of the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, when Louis XIV outlawed Protestantism in France. It reversed the Edict of Nantes in 1598, when Henry IV of France granted civil and religious rights to the Huguenots.
As a result of the Revocation, descendants of 50,000 Huguenot
Sixty years after the Revocation, clockmaker David Hubert, whose family was from Rouen, established the Westminster French Protestant Charity School, providing education for orphans.
This flourished as a girls’ school until 1924; a 19th-century doll in the school uniform greets visitors to the museum.
The Huguenots introduced the word ‘refugee’ to the English language. Their resilience, perseverance and assimilation are particularly relevant today.
Tessa Murdoch is Chair of Trustees at the Huguenot Museum, Rochester
Sarah Lethieullier’s 1730s doll’s house
Rupert Thomas salutes Christopher Gibbs, the charming aesthete and antiquarian
The Hip History Man
Though he will be remembered for the originality of his eye, the pieces Christopher Gibbs (1938-2018) wrote for books and magazines are just as memorable.
‘Buy the beautiful, the grotesque, the evocative, the insane,’ he told Vogue-readers in 1967. ‘Just please don’t buy what everyone else does.’
Born to tread his own path, Christopher had a seemingly innate aesthetic confidence, and it was underpinned by a scholar’s passion for history and social context. Wit and intoxicating charm were characteristic assets, too.
‘I want to help people create places
where they can live beautiful lives,’ he once told me. Over 60 years of doing just that, he set the benchmark for a maverick grandeur that has been copied but never equalled. As an antiques dealer, collector, decorator and mentor, he had an impact that is unmatched.
Inevitably Christopher is compared to other great English collectors, most notably William Beckford. But if there was something sepulchral about Beckford’s towering taste, Christopher’s was the opposite. He loved the charming as much as the grand, the uplifting as ardently as the serious.
In terms of décor, his homes distilled
Gibbs and his kouros, found by Bruce Chatwin at Palladio’s Villa Malcontenta. Below right: Nicolette Meeres, William Burroughs and Gibbs in Tangier
the mellow comfort of the English country houses he’d dreamed of since boyhood, and also expressed his affection for antiquarian libraries and cabinets of curiosity. The addition of Moroccan antiques and textiles added a hautebohemian air that felt excitingly fresh.
Left: Marianne Faithfull, Gibbs, Mick Jagger, Ireland, 1967. Below: Loulou de la Falaise, Christopher Sykes, Christopher Thynne, Valerie and Thomas Pakenham, Dromore Castle, 1967
Scale was key and Christopher deployed large – sometimes mammoth – objects to maximum decorative effect: over-life-size portraits; vast tables; a 13ft medieval lance. Entire branches of foliage often took the place of polite posies. In his refined hands, objects came together unexpectedly to make ‘fresh connections, new music’. ‘A merry muddle’ was his never-bettered description.
The pursuit of perfection was relentless and tweaking never ended. There could be tensions and furies. Fortunately he could rely on his soulmate
Peter Hinwood (‘my friend Pete’) to help fine-tune and tinker.
One thing, however, never changed: the conviction that objects were to be lived with and enjoyed as much as revered. So the inevitable signs of wear were welcomed – provided they looked nice. No one captured carefree ancestral splendour as readily: a look whereby an old tweed cap – Christopher had many – might be chucked on the grandest marble-top table, or 16th-century Chinese porcelain perch on a fireplace amidst invitations and family photographs. Glass display cabinets and picture lights were anathema.
There was much serious majesty, yet curtains patchworked from remnants of old William Morris fabric and garden columns made of smashed, 19th-century plates pointed to cool insouciance. It’s what his imitators never seemed to understand: perfection lies precisely in not making everything perfect.
When it came to objects, what mattered most to Christopher was provenance. The miraculous twists and turns of a certain piece’s journey from, say, ancient Rome or Ottoman Turkey gripped and fascinated him. They were portals to vanished worlds and cultures.
His resulting almost-encyclopedic knowledge meant he was able to buy things auction houses misattributed.
He remembered everything. Seriously unwell, the last time I saw him at his set in Albany, he asked if I knew which stately pile the chair I was sitting on had come from. Shamefully, I’d forgotten. He hadn’t.
As easy shopping in the souk as he was pottering round St James’s, he seemed somehow both a pillar of the Establishment and a complete outsider. He got on as happily with the housekeepers, cooks and gardeners who made his homes so agreeable as he did with the dealers, collectors, rock stars and royalty who more famously made up his orbit.
Jokes helped, and Christopher could never resist them. So the bottom half of a Greek marble kouros figure (pictured) was cheekily nicknamed Bruce’s Bum after its previous owner, travel writer Bruce Chatwin.
Hamdulillah (Praise to God), the Arabic phrase he used as a greeting, quickly became Ham Diddly Doo Dah.... Hamdulillah indeed. Blessings upon him.
Rupert Thomas was Editor of The World of Interiors, 2000-22. This piece is from the introduction to Lucy Moore’s Christopher Gibbs: His World (Clearview Books, £50), out now
Above: Brian Jones, Nicki Browne, Bill Willis, Anita Pallenberg, Paul Getty, Talitha Getty, Luggala, 1966 (Gibbs out of shot)
Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips
The big squeezy
Corsets
are back – and they have a magical
Feminists dislike the corset, but you would be hard-pressed to find another item of clothing with the same potential for dramatic enhancement of your look.
Yes, there are health risks attached to being hardly able to breathe for the sake of looking good. And the corset has historic cultural links with misogyny and oppression.
In the days of Victorian ‘fainting culture’, when frailty was considered a hallmark of beauty, it was deemed feminine and appropriate, even, for young women to collapse – ideally onto a chaise longue – in direct response to being over-tightly corseted.
The chaise longue had its heyday in the 1890s, offering a conveniently shaped soft landing for the multiple fainters at parties. Fainting certainly ensured that the woman became the centre of attention, something she often secretly desired.
But let’s look past the dark and fetishistic connotations of corsets and consider instead what a well-made, well-fitting, modern version can do for its wearer.
Although not widely available in mainstream shops, corsets are making a quiet comeback. Even we oldies can achieve a variation on the hourglass figure if we apply ourselves to the undeniably tricky task of lacing ourselves up without the help of a maidservant. And if we are aware that our décolletage, squashed upwards, may not be ideal in those women suffering from ‘quilting’.
I became interested in corsets when Emily, a junior friend, with whom I had lunch, turned up again that evening at a drinks party.
At lunch, she had been hunched over in a baggy jumper and tracksuit bottoms, and looked rather bulky.
She walked into the drinks party wearing a floor-length velvet coat, which I saw her carefully take off, fold and place in a paper carrier bag behind a sofa. As she stood up, her silhouette was outlined against the blue-grey of the summer street through a window behind her and the transformation was staggering.
The shoulders were no longer hunched as she crossed the room. She seemed taller, more erect, her head held high as if she were carrying a book on it. And the cleavage!
As I breached the cluster of admirers around her, the mystery was revealed. She was wearing a highly laced, black leather corset, not under a top but as the top.
I had never seen her look more beguiling. The tiny waist, the strong but feminine shoulders. The bosom –suddenly ample. Emily smiled seraphically as she fed off the attention from men and women alike.
effect on your figure
obsessed. Within a year, I was the proud owner of no fewer than 15 corsets and I wear them to every semi-smart event I am invited to.’
Storage is a problem. They are bulky, unwieldy garments and not designed to hang in a wardrobe. They must lie flat on a shelf, ideally with nothing on top of them, to prevent the metal bones from warping.
Moreover, Emily admits, this alchemy comes at a price. ‘You can tie your corset too tight and find yourself prostrate at a party while someone else is forced to pick at the tangle of ribbon in the small of your back.’
As well as the physical advantages of wearing a corset, such as the gradual improvement of posture and incremental reduction of waist size through waisttraining, there are apparently other –psychological – benefits.
Tight fit: Madonna in 1990
In my day, one went to corsetière Rigby & Peller, once the Royal Warrant holder –‘Corsetières to H M The Queen’. Rigby & Peller prided itself on fitting women with the correct-size cup. So many were in wrongly sized, off-the-peg bras. They did long-line bras in cream satin with pointy cups, and these looked fabulous under gauze dresses. But they never stocked saucy lace-ups.
Emily told me how her ‘corset journey’ had begun. ‘I came across an Instagram ad for Corset Story and soon became
The corset provides an element of deep pressure therapy. It feels like a secure, constant hug, which is naturally comforting and grounding to many people (the way that being swaddled is comforting to a child).
One neurotic Gen Z member tells me that the corset’s stability has helped her to feel more in control of and less vulnerable to the unpredictable stresses of daily life.
I now own a lace-up corset myself. It is a uniquely powerful garment. My carriage is instantly improved, my chest high, my shoulders back. The poise afforded by this posture silently commands respect from others.
The oldie woman can also give herself a taut and shapely waist-cinching outline – under a top. It would be unseemly to wear one as the top, as Emily does.
Or, if your décolletage is quilt-free, you can wear it with a light cardigan or pashmina to mask the horrors of your upper arms, as I must.
A calm descends when you are confident that your whole trunk runs in a seamless line. The boning keeps any rolls of fat out of the picture.
Prue’s News
Soaring cost of top doctors
Have you recently tried getting your usual medicine by the age-old method of ringing your local practice, which has known you for 50 years and, until recently, has divvied up the pills, no problem?
Now, at my health centre, they don’t answer the phone. I must go online. And, as of last week, I must prove I’m who I say I am, by taking a selfie with my passport open at the photo that makes me look like Myra Hindley.
That’s irritating – as is the well-known problem of doctors changing so often there’s no hope of knowing who your GP is. And does anyone really think that a phone appointment with the practice nurse in two months’ time constitutes healthcare?
We are now signed up to Concierge. It’s a fast-growing private practice, made up of disenchanted escapee doctors from the NHS who could no longer stand the form-filling, the abuse from patients and not having time to do a half-decent job.
So now we have a lovely GP, who comes when you need her. You pay an annual fee, and that covers countless home visits and a sympathetic ear.
In 2024, on Christmas Day, I woke up with cystitis, which I knew from experience is not fixed by old wives’ cures like cranberry juice. I needed antibiotics.
I was staying in London and thought there was nothing for it but to grin and bear it until the holidays were over.
Nonetheless, with little hope, I rang Concierge. I got a recording: ‘If the matter is urgent, our duty doctor will ring back.’ Blow me down – 20 minutes later, he did. He questioned me, then googled pharmacists open in London, found one in the Earl’s Court Rd (one of only three open anywhere), emailed them a prescription and told me what he’d done – and half an hour later my son fetched the pills.
King of consultants: Sir Lancelot Spratt, Doctor in Distress (1963)
All good. But if you need more than a GP, you could find yourself in the greedy maw of Harley Street.
Say you are referred to a surgeon, inevitably ‘the best oncologist [or knee person/ shoulder person/ heart person/ whatever] in the country’.
He or she will be charming, urbane and relaxed – and will explain the need
for some X-rays, scans, MRIs. These cost a small fortune but, hey-ho, it’s better that everyone knows what they’re dealing with, isn’t it. Then the radiologist will advise you to see the excellent phlebotomist down the street, which seems sensible. Then the blood doctor will get the nurse to take some bloods and suggest you consult a neurosurgeon, a specialist in just the problem you have, and undoubtedly the best in the business.
After you’ve had an eye-wateringly expensive operation, spent a few days in a hospital that costs twice the price of a suite at the Savoy, and had your pocket picked by half the consultants in Harley Street, you are seriously skint.
And possibly glad you didn’t give up your health insurance last year when your premiums shot up as you turned 70.
Prue Leith’s Life’s Too Short to Stuff a Mushroom is out now
Sponsored by
Hepworth
Lucy Moore
Christopher Gibbs: His World
Philippa Langley
Tower
Town Mouse
Why can’t my son talk proper?
tom hodgkinson
When Young Mouse was growing up, we attempted to teach him good grammar and pronunciation. My plan was that he would one day speak with the same eloquence as Oscar Wilde or Mr Darcy.
In this aim, I was to be disappointed. The other day, I heard him chatting to a friend on his mobile phone.
‘Wagwan, my boy? Swear down! Nah, I’m cooked. Gonna lock in, man. What are the mandem saying? Say less, say less. Oh, I’m gassed – free yard on Saturday; maybe motive. Have I seen Joe? Nah, we’re beefing. Ye. Let’s cut. All right. Inabit, love.’
This strange and incomprehensible argot, I was to learn, has a name. It’s called Multicultural London English, or MLE for short. It’s an evolution from the so-called Jafaican (or ‘fake Jamaican’) dialect, satirised by Ali G many years ago.
It was first observed by the rapper Smiley Culture in his 1985 recording, Cockney Translation. What seems to have happened is that London Cockney
and Jamaican slang collided in the playground to form a new hybrid.
MLE has become phenomenally popular and is used by everyone in London, from Sikhs to Somalis to middle-class white boys and girls.
It’s on telly; it’s used in ads. Because I’m an old-fashioned mouse, my initial reaction was to find MLE – at least in the mouths of my own mice – slightly comical and a bit affected.
After further reflection, I think it’s very positive. With MLE, everyone is equal, whether they’re a Lebanese girl in a burqa, a Nigerian boy or an Old Etonian.
MLE is the chosen language of UK rappers, too – people such as Stormzy and Dizzee Rascal, who both have Ghanaian roots. With its admirable directness and wit, MLE is well-suited to rap.
MLE has not gone unnoticed by academic linguists. The Department of Language and Linguistics at the
University of York has carried out an MLE research project.
‘MLE has many other ancestors, too,’ writes Dr Paul Kerswill. ‘This is obvious if you consider the very large number of other languages immigrants brought with them, ranging from Punjabi, Bengali and Tamil to Yoruba, Akan, Arabic and Turkish – and many more besides. Researchers have counted more than 300 languages spoken in London.’
They note that, in MLE, the word ‘man’ has become a pronoun and can be used for ‘he’, as in this lyric from Stormzy: ‘Man talk greaze but I bet that’s fake.’
To me, by the way, the ‘greaze’ is an archaic Shrove Tuesday custom at Westminster School, my alma mater, where a giant pancake is flipped over a metal bar hoisted high ‘Up School’ – the school hall. A ruckus of boys leaps on to the falling pancake and the boy who emerges with the biggest piece is given a gold sovereign by the Dean of Westminster, who then ‘begs a play’ –a half-day holiday for the whole school.
This is not, I think, the ‘greaze’ referred to by Stormzy. ‘Man talk greaze’ means ‘He has a tendency to exaggerate his own accomplishments.’
Let’s attempt a translation of Young Mouse’s phone call. Put into more formal, old-fashioned English, it would go something like this:
‘My dear friend, what is happening in your life? Oh, is that so? I am glad to hear it! No, I’m afraid that for my part I’m in rather a bad way. I fear I need to spend a few days at home to focus on my university work. How are the other fellows? Yes, I understand.
‘One thing – I am quite excited because my parents are going away on Saturday, leaving me with an empty house. So I am considering throwing a party. And no, I have not seen Joe. I’m afraid that there was something of a contretemps between us. Harsh words were spoken. Well, must dash. I’ll see you very soon. Goodbye.’
The historian David Starkey is not a fan of MLE. On Newsnight in 2011, he complained about ‘this language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has been intruded in England, and that is why so many of us have this sense of, literally, a foreign country’.
Professor Starkey is blind to its beauty. The original passage, as spoken by Young Mouse, has the blessed advantage of economy. MLE is succinct, rhythmic, poetic even. It has wit and it’s inventive. It’s Chaucerian. It’s democratic.
And it ain’t going away, innit? So learn to love it. Peace.
Country Mouse
Free at last – from waiting in Waitrose for Mary
giles wood
How has our marriage survived these 37 years?
On the face of it, Mary and I have little in common. She likes parties, spending money and promoting village harmony, whereas I like gardening, living off ‘rations’ and maintaining petty feuds.
Perhaps it is because we are utterly co-dependent. I don’t own a mobile phone or a computer – so Mary manages the business side of things.
I drive, cook, buttle and do various menial jobs such as splitting logs and relocating errant slugs who have breached the porous battlements of our cottage.
Mary bought me a mobile phone after an unfortunate incident in which she was left stranded outside Waitrose for 25 minutes, laden with seven bulging bags for life.
The misunderstanding had arisen from her mistaken belief that I would be circling the high street ready to scoop her up. I had in fact found a very nifty parking spot only ten yards away and had naturally expected her to use her initiative to find me.
Thinking ahead into the not-toodistant future, honing her orienteering skills will prove invaluable in the event of a hostile attack on our GPS systems.
But this initiative test proved to be the last straw, particularly as the previous week Mary and I had waited for 35 minutes on opposite sides of the local railway station, wondering why the other hadn’t appeared and with no means of contact.
A trip to Vodafone on Marlborough High Street resulted in the purchase of the most rudimentary mobile phone on offer – a so-called burner or dumb phone, as educationalists are currently urging onto parents of under-16-year-olds in place of the
smartphones that have been so disruptive to junior progress.
Yet I was still baffled by it, and my ‘sausage fingers’ (as my daughters call them) struggled to manipulate the tiny buttons. After a few months of abortive efforts at remembering to carry it with me on shopping trips or butterfly walks, I gave it up as a lost cause.
The hope that I should not only be able to locate the mobile’s charger, within the chaos of our cottage, but also remember to charge it was deluded.
What’s more, I can’t deny I enjoy the freedom of being uncontactable. Those who wish to tell me something should know by now that I will be beyond reach from 11am to dusk, at which point they may attempt contact on a landline placed conveniently on the occasional table, where I put my beer and salt-based snacks, ready to watch Atrocities at 7 (the Channel 4 nightly news).
Despite being intermittently unreachable – a source of continual exasperation to my family – I at least enjoyed the elevated status of being the sole possessor of a driving licence. In this arena, at any rate, I was indispensable.
A recent unforeseen event has rocked my status within the family – and indeed my whole identity. My elder daughter passed her driving test. I was left feeling nonplussed as, with a screech of wheels, she disappeared into the distance with Mary, intent on a shopping trip for provisions – just as I was starting to feel a real sense of purpose at eking out the contents of my ‘nuclear-war bunker’ supply of cold canned goods, and digging up vegetables I had spent a year coaxing from the recalcitrant soil.
My life felt strangely robbed of meaning as they returned triumphantly and emptied their spoils over the kitchen table. I channelled my
disapprobation by criticising various food items as incorrectly chosen, out of season or overpriced.
Months have passed and my daughter still does not own her own car, a quandary perpetuated by the discrepancy between her means and her desires – she wants a Land Rover Disco (Discovery).
Accordingly, she now ‘borrows’ my flagship Skoda Yeti on a regular basis. I am ambivalent about this arrangement.
On the one hand, I am stripped of my importance as sole driver and sustenance-provider. On the other, I find myself regularly liberated from the chore of making piddling little journeys into local towns, a habit that William Cobbett, a champion of the cottage economy and self-sufficiency, derided. The idea of daily supplies having to be ‘got in’ he found detestable.
In theory, therefore, I can conclude only that my life must have changed for the better. No more do the disquieting, disembodied cries of ‘GYE – ULS’ echo across the swaying treetops of our garden. No longer are my peaceful mulching, raking or furtive bonfirebuilding activities frustrated by the appearance of one of my exasperated womenfolk requesting I immediately drive them to the nearest shopping outlet for a Piriton.
The sound of the engine’s roar, followed by silence, now instils a sense of deep mental peace. I sigh in exquisite relief as I can now focus single-mindedly on the task at hand, primarily that of ‘letting nature lead’ within the environs of my acre of landholding.
Yes, I may have relinquished my superior status – my family are no longer trapped and at my mercy for food and medical assistance.
But surely a session of watering thickets of nettles and yellow archangel, the ecosystem warrior, so as to encourage the growth of a comfortable habitat for overwintering invertebrates, beats waiting for Mary in Waitrose car park any day.
‘Oh – he’s re-wilding the garden
School Days
I’m a teacher – not a prison guard sophia waugh
Here are some alarming facts.
Forty-two per cent of prison inmates (figures from 2016) have been permanently excluded from school.
Fifty-nine per cent have truanted school. Fifty per cent are functionally illiterate, with a reading age of below 11 years. And an excluded child is twice as likely to commit
serious violence within a year of being permanently excluded than a child with a similar track record who is only suspended.
QED children should not be excluded from school, and it is the fault of the education system that the prisons are full to bursting.
Or is it? This summary
Wine lunch featuring Château L’Eperon
At Boisdale in Belgravia, Tuesday, 3rd June 2025
Lunch at 1pm – and do have a drink at the Negroni Bar
La Brise 2024 RRP £15.00
Orkney pickled herrings
Château L'Eperon White, 2020 RRP £16.99
100% Sémillon
Madame L'Eperon Rosé 2024 RRP £17.50
85% Cabernet Sauvignon / 15% Merlot
Roast Gloucestershire Old Spot pork fillet
Château L'Eperon 2019 & 2022 RRP £16.99
Bordeaux Supérieur AOC limestone-clay terroir aged in used oak
Chocolate tart
Scottish raspberry, vanilla Chantilly
L'Éclat du Château L’Eperon 2020 RRP £35
£85 ticket includes tutored tasting, three-course lunch and five stunning wines. To reserve, go to https://boisdaletickets.co.uk/p/11228 or call 020 7730 6922
makes me feel like poor old Henry V before Agincourt: ‘Upon the king! Let us our lives, our souls, our debts, our careful wives, our children and our sins lay on the king! We must bear all.’
Why should we be the ones to ‘bear all’? Have these young people no parents? No families to steer them the right way? If they come to us as little criminals in the making, can we really undo the habits and attitudes they have imbibed at their mother’s breasts (or at the Tommee Tippee bottle)?
If, as is true in some cases, generation after generation in one family ends up in the clink, can it really be the fault of the many schools they have attended?
Of course we have responsibility for these young people while they are in our care. But remember we are also responsible for the other children, endlessly striving to achieve, sometimes with overwhelming difficulties in their way.
I always feel most sorry for those children who, not academically gifted but determined to succeed, spend lesson after lesson with the disruptive, disengaged ‘students’.
In our school, we have an area designed specifically for those older children who find school incredibly difficult and kick out at the system by disrupting. We are doing our very best not to exclude them, and to give them a tailormade curriculum that might help them after they leave us.
Some of the other pupils, particularly those at risk of being excluded or sent to that department, call it the ‘colouring club’ or the ‘last chance saloon’. The first nickname is derogatory, and the second pretty much hits the nail on the head, but what goes on there?
Recently we had an extra curriculum day, when most children were sent on geography field days or to historical sites.
The teacher in charge of the last chancers took them to prison. Literally. He filled a minibus with those children most at risk of offending and took them on a prison tour. They were shown prison cells, given an idea of a prison day, heard those gates clang behind them and heard the keys turn in the locks. They were even taken to the (no longer used) execution room.
And how did they respond? They were, I was told by the teacher, most worried about the execution room, even though they were told it was no longer in service. Perhaps the very fact that it is still there, even if it has been mothballed, gave them a frisson of panic.
Did they, I asked, make any connections between their present behaviour and their potential future place of residence. He shook his head mournfully. Not really.
Perhaps they needed the statistics to be pointed out. Perhaps they really don’t care. Perhaps any place seems better than school.
Small World
Hot dogs, the and grief
Mother’s right – I can’t survive on my daily diet
jem clarke
Jem Clarke is in his mid-fifties, is five foot zero inches tall and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he shares with his parents…
As a five-foot overweight man with artificial joints, rampaging male-pattern baldness and only two working pairs of trousers, I have found comparing myself with my peers is a mug’s game.
But Mother compares me with anyone and everyone, and finds me forever wanting. Having watched a documentary on a high-tech high-flyer, she explains:
‘There’s a man in Silly-con [sic] valley who’s worked out how to do only the things that will stop his body ageing, and to stop doing all the things that will age him.’
‘And why are you telling me this?’ I said.
‘I bet he doesn’t live with his mother.’
‘I bet it’s the first thing he stopped to decrease his bloody stress,’ I muttered.
‘It’s like you’re the polar opposite of him. You’re charging through your life doing all the things that age you. A podgy Peter Pan can’t fly for ever, you know.
‘You don’t have to be a scientist to know that no one’s lived past 70 on hot dogs and Beano comics.’
‘I don’t eat the comics. And I do lots of healthy things…’ I paused for reflection. ‘I avoid sunlight.’
‘You avoid daylight,’ she snorted.
‘You’re the one who doesn’t like me going swimming.’
‘I’m not having the lifeguard bringing you home with your trunks in a plastic bag again.’
‘That was decades ago – I was 26,’ I said. ‘And my IBS was undiagnosed.’
‘Mrs Maynard still calls you “Duncan Good-Poo”.’
‘Well, she should just let it go,’ I snapped.
I stormed off to the corner café. My head was full of sad thoughts. The last thing I want to do is bump into the ONE person I can be directly compared with – my five-foot junior-school classmate and accidentally longest-serving friend, Mikey Walburn.
‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you,’ he announces in a loud stagey voice, as if
we’re in a care-in-the-community Les Misérables revival.
Mikey is painfully thin but taut with muscle – like a whippet on steroids.
His physique is honed from years of combining unsuccessful bricklaying with unsuccessful DJ-ing. Mikey has teeth in only single figures. But still I compare us, and I envy him. He lives the bachelor lifestyle with his own flat, albeit over a tanning shop, and accessible only once the frozen-food shop has moved its delivery boxes from his doorway.
‘My mam has died,’ he announces, putting an arm on my elbow to bring us closer, for fear that the news may be too much for me to take.
‘Oh, I know,’ I say a little too calmly. ‘I saw it in the paper.’
I realise he’s staring at me and judging me for not having been in touch.
‘Mother and Father sent a card,’ I explain. ‘It said “…and family”. That’s me – I’m “and family”.’
He doesn’t look too convinced, and I feel bad. My lack of sentiment is derived from Mother. It’s not that we don’t care. It’s that we process grief more quickly than most.
To prove I care, I share: ‘Mother mentioned that your mum did her hair for Mother’s wedding. Came round to her house, October 1961, and did her hair.
Isn’t it fascinating? The links, the roots ... not the hair roots – the historical roots.’
Much as I was unmoved by his mum’s death, he was unmoved by my anecdote. He said, ‘Yeah, Jem. My mum was a hairdresser.’
He slightly stiffens, pulling away, getting ready to end the conversation, disappointed. I try to reach for something to acknowledge his needs.
‘It’s hard, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘We know we’re at an age where our older family members will one day pass. But we don’t know how it will feel till that one day.’
‘Jem. I’m in bits.’
I touch his arm – the slightest tap between two men who barely get touched.
He says, ‘The mind can get prepared for it, but it’s the heart. It always comes as a surprise to the heart.’
It’s a piece of raw philosophy and –now that something has been said out loud – it is enough. We part ways.
Back to Mother’s side via the shop. I present Mother with a peace offering, a bag of small, rabbit-shaped chocolates.
‘I bet these were discounted,’ she correctly deduces. She smiles, saying, ‘Good lad.’
The ‘Good lad’ and the smile mean everything. Compared with every other 55-year-old male on this planet, today I am rich.
Cheapside Hoard wasn’t so cheap
A new book reveals the secrets behind a treasure trove of Tudor jewellery
david horspool
Hoarding has a bad name in the 21st century, which prizes ‘de-cluttering’ and minimalism over collecting and keeping.
But archaeologists and historians have good reason to thank the hoarders.
Take the recent revelation of the largest collection of Iron Age metalwork ever discovered in the UK, the Melsonby Hoard. This ancient breaker’s yard of wagons and chariots, harnesses for at least 14 horses, ceremonial spears, ornate cauldrons, an iron mirror and ‘personal adornments’ seems to have been deliberately destroyed, for reasons that may never become clear.
It was buried more than 2,000 years ago in the kingdom of the Brigantes, in North Yorkshire.
The Brigantes’ most famous figure was Queen Cartimandua. Tacitus said she was ‘seen’ to have shored up her position by betraying Caratacus to the Romans, in 51 AD. Tacitus further alleged that, as a consequence of her betrayal, Cartimandua enjoyed ‘wealth and the self-indulgence of prosperity’.
The hoard comes from about the same time. Archaeologists have compared it to another hoard, found close by in the 19th century, at Cartimandua’s royal fort of Stanwick. It’s tempting to see all this Iron Age swag as evidence of what Tacitus was writing about, the spoils of a shady deal with the conquerors. We should be careful about relating archaeological discoveries to the bits of history we already know, but it’s plausible.
To see the evidence for yourself, you can visit Yorkshire Museum in York, where a selection of the items has gone on display. The museum is also trying to raise funds to keep the Brigantes’ treasure in Brigantia, rather than its being broken up and sold. A quarter of a million quid should do it.
The Cheapside Hoard, a trove of Tudor and Jacobean jewellery discovered in London in 1912, is not currently on display. Its home for the
past century or so, the London Museum, is being finished in its latest premises, in Smithfield.
A forthcoming book by Victoria Shepherd, Stony Jack and the Lost Jewels of Cheapside, whets the appetite to see the objects when they re-emerge.
Considering that the Cheapside Hoard was identified by its first cataloguer as ‘in bulk alone … exceed[ing] any other collection of the kind in Great Britain; and … equally distinguished by the comprehensiveness of its range both in type and in material’, it’s surprising that it has so rarely been displayed.
Ten years ago, an exhibition and accompanying catalogue unveiled the hoard to a contemporary audience for the first time in more than a century. But it did not go on permanent display afterwards. Here’s hoping that will change in the new surroundings.
Shepherd’s book tells the stories of the discovery of the hoard beneath a former jeweller’s workshop just east of St Paul’s, and the origins of the objects themselves.
She details the shady dealings of those who took possession of the hoard. Not everything that was dug out of the chalk floor of the Cheapside cellar ended up in the collection of the London Museum.
Stony Jack was the nickname of the man to whom the navvies who found the treasure took their discoveries: G F Lawrence, a dealer in antiques and ‘inspector of excavations’ for the London Museum, founded a year before.
Shepherd concentrates on the 20th-century process by which the jewels were ferreted across London in workers’ handkerchiefs, cleaned up and collected on Lawrence’s premises, and the swirl of concealment and even ghostly rumour
The jewels were concealed before the Great Fire
that attended the finds. The tale of the original jewels themselves is if anything even more dramatic.
The curators who originally studied the jewels missed a crucial clue to their origins. A heraldic badge was engraved on a carnelian seal that connected it with William Howard, Viscount Stafford, the only ever holder of that exact title.
This means the hoard could not have been buried before 1640, when he received the honour. The building under which the find was made had been consumed in the Great Fire of London. It was reconstructed on top of the intact cellar. So the jewels were probably concealed and forgotten before the fire, rather than buried, like Pepys’s Parmesan, as it raged.
That 26-year window leads researchers to a specific jeweller, who was evicted from the premises during the Civil War, and thereby back to the original cache. Thrillingly, it belonged to a Dutch gem merchant, who was murdered for it as he hitched a lift on an East India Company ship. Shepherd explains the probable path of part of this man’s collection to a Cheapside jeweller named Francis Simpson.
The historical detective story is intriguing enough. But, like the Iron Age Melsonby Hoard, Cheapside tells us much about the age in which it was collected and concealed.
It shows a world in which the royal habit of jewel display had been taken up by the upper and middle classes; one in which a London artisan could be trusted with work gathered from the furthest reaches of the globe. This glimpse of early modern luxury was revealed by a 20th-century pickaxe as the city was rebuilt at its imperial zenith.
Thank heavens for the hoarders.
Victoria Shepherd’s Stony Jack and the Lost Jewels of Cheapside is published on 5th June
Who wants to drive for ever? Oldies do
When Mary Kenny lost her nerve behind the wheel, a brilliant guru got her back on the road
When should oldies quit driving?
That’s a theme many of us have pondered. So I was cheered to speak to an optimistic Irishman whose mission is to keep older drivers on the road as long as possible.
Tomás O’Callaghan is an assessment and tuition specialist in County Cork, who advises the Irish College of General Practitioners about fitness to drive.
When I wrote about having to stop driving – losing confidence with age, and facing mounting insurance costs – he sent me a message, saying I should review my options before stopping altogether.
cognitive challenge to the human brain’, he says. Driving can prevent cognitive decline – because social isolation often follows when the car goes.
Tomás, 57, who has been advising drivers since 1997, says, ‘Age is not a barrier – ageism is prejudice.’
He has kept drivers on the road at 95, 97 and 98. He has motorists still driving safely after a stroke and an appropriate assessment.
Yes, there are red lines. Your eyesight must be good enough to read a registration number at 22 yards (about five cars away). Hearing is tested, but that can be helped. ‘Topographical orientation’ can be an issue – getting confused about location and distances –but that can often be addressed, he says, by self-awareness and tuition about focus.
Tomás gives older drivers refresher courses in motoring skills, so they can renew their confidence. He advises people simply to recognise limitations.
Just drive locally. Don’t embark on motorway driving. Be aware of the stress of night-time driving, noting the dazzling effect of the lights on modern cars. Concentrate ahead, but be conscious of the traffic behind you.
‘Driving a vehicle is the highest
An assessment for safe driving can also diagnose mental decline.
But drivers with some mental impairment can drive safely –especially if they have someone accompanying them.
Sure, a time may come when it’s advisable to ‘retire’ from driving. But he has never encountered an older driver who texted or phoned at the wheel.
It’s younger drivers who have driven on the wrong side of the road, misguided by GPS. And older drivers are less likely to have a distracting, computerised dashboard in their vehicles.
Tomás’s company, Southern Mobility, won an Irish road safety award. He believes we need an older drivers’ forum, which could help, advise and support older drivers. Driverless cars are still a long way off.
He has persuaded me: keep going as long as possible, and hang the expense!
Communism hasn’t been very successful in practice, but its poster art was often beautiful.
The Marx Memorial Library in London’s Clerkenwell – where an Oldie event about journalism was held recently – is full of stunning wall posters embracing the workers’ cause.
The Spanish Civil War in the 1930s especially inspired some fabulous artworks displayed like murals. Some have a quasi-religious tone, with saintly Reds descending from the clouds.
A prominent heroine depicted at the
library is ‘La Pasionaria’, Dolores Ibárruri (1895-1989), who was a fiery presence in the Spanish conflict. She was unstinting in her devotion to the cause.
Her speciality was executing Catholic priests by biting them in the neck. After Franco’s victory, she escaped to Moscow where she spent most of her life, though she returned in triumph to Spain after it became a democracy.
Communism also had some great songs. My late husband, Richard West, favoured the Italian Communist anthem, Bandiera Rossa, a rousing tune which he learned as a teenager in 1948. ‘Bandiera Rossa/ colore del vino/ Viva Stalino! Viva Stalino!’
The Marx Memorial Library is a delightful architectural venue, housing 60,000 books, open to visitors and researchers, and staffed by some very sweet young people.
Just £2 for a Marx memorial biro – well below the usual capitalist price.
Oldies have always grumbled about the inflation of prices. I remember my mother exclaiming, ‘Ten shillings for a cup of coffee!’ in the Champs-Élysées in 1960.
As a teenage know-all, I said, ‘You’re not paying for a coffee, Ma. You’re paying for a seat in a posh Parisian boulevard.’
Now I am being repaid in my own coin, as it were – constantly appalled at the price of everything. £99.70 to take a train from Deal in Kent to London, if arriving before 10am!
A dear friend of mine was impressed by the reviews Australian screen actress Cate Blanchett received for Chekhov’s The Seagull. So he telephoned the Barbican Theatre and enquired if, by chance, there might be a single seat available.
Yes, he was told, they could let him have a single seat – for £911!
The laws of supply and demand are immutable. If a great thespian is playing Chekhov, the sky’s the limit for this seagull.
sister teresa
Beware the green-eyed, deadly sin
All seven of the seven deadly sins are nasty, but some are much nastier than others.
Several are travesties of fundamental goodness. Gluttony is an appetite for food and drink that has gone mad. Lust is a crazy and dangerous strain of sexuality. And sloth is a hideous caricature of that God-given bliss, rest. These are all a lot less nasty than envy.
Envy has no redeeming features and no respectable antecedents. It is resentment or sadness at another’s good fortune or personal excellence. It carries with it an often insatiable desire to have what that other has. And also an urge to destroy not just another’s good fortune, but also the person.
Envy has been around for a very long time, as is shown in the story of Cain and Abel (Genesis 4:1-18).
The Bible is full of portrayals of jealousy and the lethal revenge that so often goes with it. One of the most unattractive characters in the Gospels is the elder brother in the parable of the
prodigal son (Luke 15: 11-32).
Alas, it is not only in the Bible that brother fights brother, or indeed sister fights sister. Without going as far as murder, one of the worst aspects of envy is the corrosive effect it has on the person suffering from it. And I really do mean suffering – because envy destroys the natural goodness of character that we all have to a greater or lesser degree, and this can lead only to sourness and unhappiness.
There are occasions when young people who have got into serious trouble with drugs and/or violence are taken to prisons to talk to much older offenders who are serving long sentences for their crimes.
The hope is that these encounters may act as a deterrent, especially if the prisoners are articulate in expressing their regrets at what they have done and how their lives have been ruined.
Might a jealous brother or sister be introduced to an old lag – someone who is known for his obsessive resentment towards his own nearest and dearest? It would be wonderful if such a meeting could change their way of thinking.
The Rev Eleanor LaundersBrown and the Rev Lady Sentamu conducted the memorial service at York Minster for James Fawcett.
Envy can take over all the sufferer’s thoughts to such an extent that he or she never leaves it alone. Carried to extremes, and if allowed to persist until the end of someone’s life, it results in insanity.
It is very difficult for those looking on to do anything about it.
Funeral Service
Nanny’s old adage – ‘Don’t make such a terrible face, because the wind will change and you’ll stay like that’ – applies equally well to envy. It is terrible to be stuck with it. And horrible to be on the receiving end of it.
Better by far to concentrate on envy’s opposite: the heavenly virtue of gratitude.
James Fawcett (1964-2025)
James Fawcett was the seventhgeneration head of the Yorkshire family business Thomas Fawcett & Sons, maltsters and malt roasters, which has served the brewing industry since 1809. The business almost doubled in size under his control and today works with many brewers across Britain, America, Australia and New Zealand.
Lara Fawcett, his widow and sister of Bear Grylls, TV presenter and former Chief Scout, led the congregation.
The Rev Lady Sentamu, wife of Lord Sentamu, former Archbishop of York, said in her address, ‘There is a vastness to grief that overwhelms our minuscule selves. But our sadness is not one of loss but of parting from the one we love –James Fawcett.’
Sir Christopher Legard, an old schoolfriend, said in his tribute, ‘Some might be a little embarrassed by the sheer scale of this occasion, but I suspect that the “Duke of Aberford”, as I call him, would consider it entirely fitting!’
Sir Christopher recalled James’s time at Radley, the University of North Carolina and Hambros Bank before he
joined his father, Percy Fawcett, in the family business in 1993.
Tallulah Fawcett, James’s daughter, read ‘I am with you’, a poem by her grandfather, Sir Michael Grylls, the late Conservative MP. Mungo Fawcett, his son, read Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, ‘ To every thing there is a season’. Bevan Fawcett, son, read ‘ The Mentor’, a poem by his father. Cousin Tom Fawcett read John 14:1-6.
The hymns were ‘I vow to thee, my country’, ‘I would be true’ and ‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord’. The Ebor Singers sang Psalm 23, ‘ The Lord is my shepherd’. Music included Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’. Lachlan Chapman, an Australian cousin, sang ‘My Way’.
The closing music was Harold Faltermeyer’s Top Gun Anthem. JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW
Cain smites Abel
The Doctor’s Surgery
Lifetime risk of death? 100 per cent
You can’t avoid all risks but bone scans might guard against fractures dr theodore dalrymple
The only fractures that I have so far sustained were of my tibia when I was eight, and of my nose when I was in my thirties.
I sustained the former when I stumbled while chasing a boy in the school playground. I thought he’d unfairly taken the tyre I wanted to play with. Of that episode, I remember only my self-importance as I was carried to a chaise longue and given orange squash to drink, an unheard-of luxury at the time, the hothouse warmth inside my plaster cast and the terrible itching to which it gave rise.
My broken nose was the result of a head-on crash into a wall as I drove recklessly to a restaurant in Scotland before it closed. A passer-by, thinking that the main assistance I required at the time was instructional, said lugubriously, ‘You were driving far too fast,’ and walked on. He was quite right, of course.
But fractures in old age are a serious matter. They take a long time to heal, and those who suffer them have an increased death rate even after they have been properly treated.
About one in three women and one in five men will have a fracture after the age of 50. Of those who do, a half of women’s fractures and a fifth of men’s are attributable to osteoporosis.
Osteoporosis – loss of bone mineralisation – is a very common condition. A drug called zoledronate, given at longish intervals of 12 to 18 months, greatly reduces the likelihood of women with osteoporosis having fractures.
An interesting study from New Zealand found that if healthy women aged 50 to 60, who were without osteoporosis, were given this drug either once, or twice – the second time after an interval of five years – with each infusion taking 15 minutes and causing very few side effects, they had fewer fractures ten years after the first infusion.
To prevent one fracture, it was necessary to treat 22 women in this way.
The commonest fracture prevented was that of a vertebra. The authors did not provide any clinical description of the clinical symptoms of these fractures, but it is known that about half of such fractures are symptomless.
Once you have had one, however, you are more susceptible to another, and suffering will eventually result.
The question arises as to whether these results can be extrapolated to other groups, such as, say, men over the age of 60 or 70, and if so at what age, and how often, the drug should be given them to have a worthwhile effect. There can be no definitive answer to this question, even assuming a beneficial effect. For what is worthwhile is not measurable in the simple way that the length of a car or the breadth of a room is measurable.
I recently read an article in The
Hedgehog Review, warning against the dangers of a medicine that increasingly treats risk rather than actual disease.
We are all at risk all the time; our lifetime risk of death is 100 per cent.
The danger of treating risk of disease rather than disease itself is that it creates a risk of endless medical interference in our lives, turning all that we do into a quasi-medical procedure, and making us hypochondriacs. The avoidance of risk is the avoidance of life, in the sense of lived life rather than of life expectancy.
On the other hand, there are surely some risks worth avoiding. Is the risk of fracture one of them? All I can say is that I had a bone scan recently because I was taking corticosteroids, which can cause osteoporosis, for a certain condition.
Luckily, I don’t have osteoporosis, but that doesn’t mean I won’t have a fracture in the future. Would I have zoledronate if offered it? I’d think about it.
‘...and stop me if you’ve heard this story before...’
Seeking a new interest, I signed on with a casting agency and very shortly thereafter found myself working with Derek Fowlds.
Somehow his time as Mr Derek, sidekick to Basil Brush, had passed me by, but I very much admired the way he made the role of Bernard Woolley his own in Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister.
Heartbeat (1992-2010) saw him first as irascible but conscientious rural police sergeant Oscar Blaketon. Later on, during an enforced retirement, his character ran a local pub but still took an active interest in police matters.
As an extra, I was on set with Derek many times; three episodes stand out particularly in my memory. On one occasion, as a villager about to help the police with their inquiries, I was required to open my cottage door to Derek’s knock.
He, with his back to the camera, would show me some photographs and I was supposed merely to shake my head. All went to plan during rehearsals – but when we were doing the first take, he threw me completely, saying,‘That’s not what you said last time.’
I Once Met Derek Fowlds
I must have looked like a rabbit caught in the headlights. An audible reply would have gone down very badly – extras speak rarely, and only when specifically told to do so. So I just mouthed something and closed the door.
‘Cut! Reset!’ bawled one of the assistant directors. Derek, who loved practical jokes, was still grinning when
I nervously opened my door for the next take.
One late summer’s day, we were filming in a remote part of the North York moors when the crew surprised Derek during the tea break with a big chocolate cake for his birthday.
Just then, a family of walkers appeared from nowhere and came across to ask for an autograph. Not only did Derek offer them cake, but he slipped back into his role and chatted to their young son, a big fan of Oscar Blaketon, for a good half-hour.
One rainy day, Derek saved me from a nasty accident. A group of us were required to cram into the back of an old van prior to a wild chase across the moors. Clambering in and out during umpteen takes was a tricky business and my shoes, supplied as part of my 1960s costume, were not only ill-fitting but also soaked through. I slipped – and would have ended up face down on the gravel if Derek had not grabbed me.
I mourned Derek’s passing in January 2020 and shall always remember with great affection our shared days on Heartbeat. Maggie Cobbett
Deadly VE Day in Tunbridge Wells
boy, I might go missing in the collective merriment.
There was great excitement in our Kent cottage 80 years ago, on 8th May 1945, with news of victory over the wireless.
My mother and father, who were barely on speaking terms, decided there had to be some sort of family celebration.
But what? Feasting on the powdered egg that rationing allowed was clearly not enough. They decided against a drive or train ride to London, a far-off place in those days. Besides, we might have got caught up in the throngs filling the streets.
At five, a nervous small
So we decided to find our merriment in Tunbridge Wells, where my father had his estate agency. Tunbridge Wells was as merry as Tunbridge Wells could get. The odd firework went off in the High Street.
There was a scattering of people looking happier than usual. The odd cheer could be heard. And … what was that?
‘That’ was a couple of legs and the lower part of a man sticking out from beneath a car, his feet turned up and motionless. My mother saw it and tried quickly to make me look elsewhere.
But I had seen it and I was mightily disturbed. What was half a corpse doing supine on a Tunbridge Wells street?
In the days that followed – lots of powdered egg and Ma and Pa not really speaking again – I couldn’t get it out of my mind.
Modern children might have been unmoved, after seeing plenty of death on TV and social media. But this was my first dead person, a sickening introduction to a frightening mystery.
Why hadn’t an ambulance arrived to help him? Or a hearse to carry him off?
Where were the police? Why were people continuing to celebrate in their sedate Tunbridge Wells way, ignoring the terrible sight under their eyes?
Finally, I talked to my mother, who couldn’t understand why I was so
silent, about what I’d seen and how I felt. Why was everyone ignoring the poor dead man on Tunbridge Wells High Street? She laughed, which I remember thinking unseemly. ‘He wasn’t dead,’ she said. ‘He was drunk.’
That was a relief – but I wasn’t satisfied. What was ‘drunk’? It didn’t sound very comfortable. And why would it impel someone to lie on his back under a car?
Don’t you wish you were as innocent now as we were then?
By
Benedict Nightingale, former Times theatre critic, who receives £50
Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past
Derek Fowlds (1937-2020) in Heartbeat
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
Bamber’s gas coin
SIR: I am not sure if it’s Joseph Connolly’s memory or mine that’s playing tricks (‘You can’t say that!’, Spring issue), but I am fairly certain that Oxo gave a meal (not a man) man appeal. I wonder what Katie did next?
In the same article Mr Connolly refers to a coin for a meter. A friend of mine used to refer to a shilling as a Bamber –’cos it’s a gas coin.
And, finally, on the names of drinks, did you know what mixture constitutes a ‘mother-in-law’? Stout and bitter of course. Les Dawson lives!
Regards, Paul Barker, Brampton, Cumbria
Preposterous presents
Pointless: spoon rest
SIR: My response to Piers Pottinger’s article ‘Preposterous Presents’ (Spring issue) is to nominate my all-time favourite. I cannot understand exactly why a spoon rest was ever created, manufactured, sold, bought and given as a gift.
SIR: Ranting Mr Norman (Grumpy Oldie Man, Spring issue) may have a point in respect of Alexander Armstrong, but the vast majority of parents who put their children through private education are decidedly not millionaires. They just want the best for their children and strive desperately to do so while at the same time saving the public sector large sums.
Regards, Roderic Mather, Wigglesworth, Skipton
‘Actually, that one’s for Hoovering the living room without being asked to’
Patrick Moore spins in grave
SIR: Oh dear. I fear Tom Hodgkinson would have aroused the wrath of the late Patrick Moore in his piece about the joys of stargazing (Town Mouse, Spring issue).
Surely, when he describes his friend as ‘an amateur astrologer’, he really meant ‘astronomer’? There’s quite a big difference between the two!
Sincerely,
Tony Purcell, Sheffield
‘Your extended warranty covers everything that’s not wrong with your car’
Dissolution of the Rectories
SIR: A N Wilson might note the other effect of the Dissolution of the Rectories (April issue): the loss of the rectory as a hub for community activities. This distanced the church from communities as surely as the introduction of modern hymns distanced parents from the ability to sing with their children.
Yours sincerely,
Jack Stone, Wimbledon
Lockdown NHS saved me
SIR: I was moved by Quentin Letts’s article on the death of his brother (‘My brotherly love’, Spring issue), but sorry that he took a pop at ‘the lockdownobsessed NHS’.
In 2021, I was diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma (five-year survival rate 18 to 23 per cent with surgery, 2 to 3 per cent without). I was operated on and had a six-month course of chemotherapy – all during Covid restrictions and provided by the NHS. If my doctors, surgeon, ward nurses, pharmacists, technicians and oncology nurses were
‘lockdown-obsessed’, it made no difference to my treatment.
Yes, I had to wear a mask on site, couldn’t have visitors in hospital and had to have my day-long chemotherapy sessions in the clinic on my own, but it was very far from an indifferent service.
Yours faithfully, Prudence Sinclair, London NW10
Cary Grant in Cornwall
SIR: I was very pleased to see the front cover of the Spring Oldie
In 1960, in the middle of winter, a friend and his wife stayed at the Land’s End Hotel for their honeymoon.
There was only one other person staying there, a man who dined every evening wearing immaculate black tie and carpet slippers. It was Cary Grant and he was delightful.
David Greenway, Anna Valley, Hampshire
Travelling light
SIR: In response to David Rimmer in your April issue (Readers’ Letters), I was reminiscing with my sister Jeannie recently when she ran down a list of what her son had taken as ‘essentials’ to the Shambala Festival in 2015: 120 cans of beer, 1 bottle Jack Daniels, 1 bottle Amaretto, sleeping bag, camping
As an aside, she gave me her essential list for the Isle of Wight Festival she attended in 1971: bin bag, fags, jumper, plastic mac.
I will let Oldie-readers have their own thoughts!
Hugh Hutchison, Ealing, London W13
‘How do I look on a scale of 9-10?’
Finger-stingin’ good
SIR: In ‘A handy tip for arthritic fingers’ (The Doctor’s Surgery, Spring issue), the merits of various remedies were compared. Several years ago I read, with interest, that Romans, suffering from arthritis in our cold and damp country, used to roll naked down nettle-covered hills to ease their aching hips.
Now, every time I go for a countryside walk, I sting my affected fingers with nettles and the pain disappears.
Placebo or cure – who cares? There is also the added bonus of my remaining fully clothed.
Mary Bradley, Mold, North Wales
Canadian Trump fan
SIR: Re: ‘Just relax’ by Garry White (Growing Old Disgracefully, April issue).
How naive can you be? The US Republican government is
demolishing the corrupt, woke, leftist regime in Washington at lightning speed; correcting mass illegal immigration; and challenging decades of trade imbalances. The reworking of the USA back to common-sense policies is happening at a rate never before seen in a democratic government.
The applecart is not only being upset; it is being broken up and replaced by something better.
Orange
alert
Lefties don’t like it, but it were the lefties who made the mess. And if you think it’s just Trump, it’s not. It’s a national democratic revolution, and it’s just beginning. The left is fighting back, of course, in the only way they know how, through the justice system and lies. But they won’t win. They are in chaotic retreat.
Sorry, Garry White, but you’re backing a loser. Stand back and watch. It’s been a long time coming, but it’s marvellous to behold.
Cheers!
Geoffrey Corfield, London, Canada
Olden Life answers
All the Call My Bluff definitions in Olden Life on page 13 were .... TRUE
I was in Cary Grant’s
Boy from the West Country
Carry On Crying
ROGER LEWIS
When the Carry On Stopped
By Dave Ainsworth Pen and Sword £22
The Carry Ons – 31 feature films, four Christmas specials and stage shows in London, Scarborough and Blackpool –were so cheap, so cheerful, so very tragic.
Sid James died on stage in Sunderland. Peter Butterworth died doing Widow Twankey in Coventry.
Bernard Bresslaw died in his dressingroom at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park. Kenneth Williams killed himself. Hattie Jacques, morbidly obese, died aged 58. Joan Sims died broke, as did Charles Hawtrey, who couldn’t afford photographs to sign for fans. Dany Robin, from Don’t Lose Your Head, died in a fire at her Paris apartment.
Terry Scott was stung by a bee, though on a happier note ‘was fit to appear for the following night’s performance’, in a Whitehall farce about a Moscow sanatorium.
Dave Ainsworth puts much of the blame on the venal impresario Peter Rogers. ‘Everyone in the business knew he was as tight as a camel’s arse in a sandstorm.’ To play the vampish Valeria in Carry On Screaming! (1966), Fenella Fielding had to buy her own costume jewellery.
Even though the films constituted ‘the greatest and most successful comedy series that British cinema produced’ – and Carry On Nurse ‘made more money than any other film shown at British cinemas in 1959’ – Rogers sadistically doled out ‘paltry salaries’. He refused to pay his actors and actresses ‘a proper fee that reflected their true worth’. The cast never received a percentage of the box-office receipts. There were
neither repeat fees nor residuals, when films were broadcast on television.
When compilations of clips turned up regularly in the schedules, Rogers and the director Gerald Thomas ‘cheerfully filled their pockets with more cash, denying any request’ to share their windfalls. Further huge income was derived from merchandise, videos and DVD boxed sets.
Challenged as to why he wouldn’t
allow profit participation, Rogers snarled, ‘Why the hell should I? The cast could all be replaced. No one was indispensable.’
When Hawtrey, pointing out he’d worked for Will Hay and Hitchcock, requested better billing, the role of the
Left to right: Sid James, Joan Sims, Charles Hawtrey, Barbara Windsor and Kenneth Williams
ship’s cook in Carry On Cruising (1962), which had been written with him in mind, was recast with Lance Percival, who was paid £600 and was crap.
Hawtrey was also not meant to be in Carry On Screaming! – until the American distributors objected. ‘Peter Rogers hated being overruled.’
Overheard moaning about the shabby conditions, and joking that they ought to go on strike, Jim Dale and Norman Mitchell were hauled before Rogers, who demanded formal apologies. Mitchell, a stalwart character actor, didn’t appear in another Carry On for 12 years. Nicholas Parsons was ‘judged to be too difficult’, when he wanted to redo a scene, and ‘was never invited back to the Carry On set’.
Incidentally, the ban on retakes ensured the films are rife with continuity errors, exacerbating the tawdriness.
Gerald Thomas had an Aston Martin, and Rogers changed his Rolls every year. Bresslaw had a Ford Zodiac, Joan Sims drove a Morris 1100 and Hawtrey caught the bus. He filled a carrier bag with left-overs from the studio buffet to take home, and pilfered Pinewood’s toilet rolls.
All this said, and as much as I concur with Ainsworth over Rogers’s cruelty –he refused to offer any assistance to Sims in her last days, even though ‘the hard work she had invested was a major factor in Rogers’s success’ – it is nevertheless the case that no one did anything of real importance outside of the franchise.
Kenneth Connor went on provincial tours with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Sid James, whose ‘old-fashioned’ treatment of the female sex today looks creepy, was in end-ofthe-pier summer shows.
Kenneth Williams, who ‘had a quick, merciless tongue and once unleashed, he would find it difficult to retract and apologise’, did innumerable demoralising spots on radio and television game shows and chat shows. Bernard Bresslaw had a poem published in Jewish Life.
Joan Sims, who was burgled three times, ‘had her own demons that caused her to decline into alcoholism’, chiefly a domineering mother and abusive boyfriends. She mainly found work as a nag or a shrew in cancelled sitcoms. Her happiest moment was when she went to the Cartagena International Film
Hawtrey filled a carrier bag with leftovers and pilfered Pinewood’s toilet rolls
Festival, in Colombia, where she was fêted – so stayed for five weeks.
Hawtrey was another gripped by the grog, becoming ‘more isolated and more reliant on alcohol’. Playing panto in ever-smaller venues, he babbled about being gentry. ‘He said his mother would drive the Rolls-Royce while his father was having his mistress in the back.’ Hawtrey’s father was actually a garage mechanic.
Hattie Jacques had high hopes of The Bobo, shot at Cinecittà, in which she co-starred with Peter Sellers. It flopped, leaving her ‘without much of a career to speak of’, and ‘running out of options’ she agreed to play Eric Sykes’s sister – the long-running Sykes is immensely tedious. Why wasn’t Hattie Juliet’s nurse or Mistress Quickly at the National? Yet, as Ainsworth says, ‘Her wish to play more serious roles never materialised.’
At least Barbara Windsor became a dame but, until EastEnders and Peggy Mitchell, she, too, was in the doldrums, with the disastrous Lionel Bart Robin Hood musical, Twang!! She was also in a play called Come Spy with Me, in which the lead actor ‘complained he wasn’t very well’, and died. Babs’s thousands of cameos as giggly, busty blondes were rather beneath her.
Melancholy, but essential reading, When the Carry On Stopped suggests a curse had been placed on all concerned. Stuart Levy, the head of Anglo-Amalgamated (Export) Ltd, the distributors, had more than his share of calamity. His wife died young, and then his 13-year-old daughter mysteriously fell to her death from a sixth-floor window.
And then there was Peter Rogers, who lived to be 95 and left behind £3.5 million. He’d lived with wife Betty Box in a Buckinghamshire mansion, which boasted 15 acres of paddocks and was once the residence of Dirk Bogarde.
Unlike Ebenezer Scrooge, Rogers never saw the need to change his ways.
‘Somewhere along the line,’ writes Ainsworth, ‘he had misplaced his heart.’
Roger Lewis wrote The Man Who Was Private Widdle, a portrait of Charles Hawtrey
First Lady of Fleet St
NICKY HASLAM
Lady Pamela Berry: Passion, Politics and Power
By Harriet Cullen Unicorn £25
I vividly remember the first time I saw Pamela Berry (1914-82). It was around the time of the Queen’s Coronation in 1953 – when I was 13.
She and her husband had come to look over my parents’ house in Buckinghamshire. She was wearing blue tweed with a gleam of white; a hat, perhaps; gloves, I’m sure. As illustrated on this book’s cover portrait, the freshly set hair framed severe brows above dark, evaluating, sussing-out eyes.
And, while her famed female wiles were even then evident, she had an aura of some young warlord, determined on action and victory; not niceties or affection.
The house got short shrift. Lady Pamela did not warm to our mellow William and Mary manor. No –something with columns or a pediment was required; something firmer, more masculine; somewhere to marshal her forceful views and political sharpness.
The author of this supremely elegantly-written and fondly presented biography is Harriet Cullen, one of Lady Pamela’s two remaining children.
Unlike a conventional biography, it has the lightest touch, often seeming – as Cullen has a masterful memory for situations and conversation – to read like her diary. Nor does she shy away from the masculine side of her mother’s character, with its ruthless preoccupation with, and influence over, what was an almost exclusively male sphere – Fleet Street. Her husband, Lord Hartwell (1911-2001), was Chairman and Editorin-Chief of the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph
Miss Pamela Smith was born in 1914 – at the very moment the world morphed from a carefree past into a militaristic future. She was the adored and adoring child of F E Smith, soon, by dint of his legal brilliance, created Earl of Birkenhead. Post-war, the now Lady Pamela’s tomboyish look and a (much admired in those days) downy upper lip were a far cry from the silvery chimeras and the Vaselined lids of Beatonmania.
Lady Pamela Smith gravitated with unbounded vigour and gaiety towards the spirited circles of press baron Lord Beaverbrook, Chips Channon and young politicians, Diana Cooper and Rex
Whistler, Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh and ‘the lecherous fawn’ – treacherous perhaps more apt – Victor Rothschild. A few romances? Of course. But, although it was pretty well predestined, the shy handsome Michael Berry (later Lord Hartwell), whose brother Lord Camrose owned the two Telegraphs, was to be her own man.
From a higgledy-piggledy house in Westminster – it was always rumoured the designer, Felix Harbord, forgot to put in a front staircase – flowed children being rusticated, orders, the crème of the diplomatic and press corps, backbenchers, maybe ministers, young columnists, old hacks and parties, parties, parties. People flew across the globe for her election nights at the Savoy.
Thanks to her consistently chic appearance, she became President of the Incorporated Society of Fashion Designers. The appointment led to some hilarious argy-bargy with her on-off friends Randolph Churchill and Anne Fleming, brilliantly evoked by the author.
She wielded influence with the Board of Trade and frequently flew to America for presidential conventions, all the while maintaining her press networking, political dinners and passionate parliamentary power.
Pamela’s energy was tireless, her mind razor-stropped, her looks more magnificently mature, although cattier girlfriends noticed a by-now darkerdowned upper lip. Evelyn Waugh named her the Bearded Wonder and Ali Forbes, a habitué of her houses, had his wit withdrawn for greeting a too-early cocktail guest with ‘Have a drink. The old horse has just gone up to shave.’
Having found a country seat – with a pediment – Pamela had Felix Harbord create astonishingly beautiful interiors, the antithesis of prevailing Colefaxery. Baroque white plasterwork, pale marble and the least hackneyed of continental furniture became the setting for Lady Pamela’s new passion – museum work, and at the V&A and BM, no less.
Her dining table now fed such learned gurus as Sir John Pope-Hennessy (Dame Dull, a rival named him), the perky young Roy Strong, and not-sofaun-like Rothschilds.
Soon the Metropolitan’s and Louvre’s titans became new grist, trailing their set of annoyingly rich, self-cultured, gossip-ignoring, ‘Divine!’-whispering American widows, who surely admired Pamela’s incisive, and more manly, strong views. Hers was a strength that, incidentally, scotched any plans for a third London Airport near her house.
‘Can you set the rooster for 6am?’
What a life! With little time or aptitude for motherhood, it cannot have been easy for her four children. Harriet Cullen writes candidly yet affectionately that, for much of their youth, they actively disliked her.
But Pamela was born in a time when parenting was a different animal. Her heritage was enterprise. From the start, she knew her own powers; was her own zeitgeist – her own man.
And, I remember, just as vividly, the last time I saw Lady Pamela. Her not deeply beloved sister-in-law, Princess Joan Aly Khan, by now Lady Camrose, had insisted the Berrys ask me to their Daily Telegraph balcony on Fleet Street for the Charles-Diana wedding in 1981.
With a cursory narrowing of those dark, still sussing-out eyes, Lady Pamela gave me a fleeting once-over, and then turned to resume her famed role as host at yet another passing parade.
Nicky Haslam is author of Redeeming Features: A Memoir
Hedge fun
PATRICK BARKHAM
Of Thorn & Briar: A Year with the West Country Hedgelayer
By Paul Lamb
Simon & Schuster £20
What does it mean to lay a hedge?
I can just about explain that it is a traditional way of half-cutting the stems of a hedge and laying them on their sides to rejuvenate the greenery. But I didn’t realise that a few people still make a living from it.
Paul Lamb is one of those special people and he has written a gentle, evocative and compelling account of his hedgelaying year.
Poor old hedges. It’s amazing that Britain still has a trove of them when half were grubbed out in the second half of the 20th century. Today, many survivors are in a sorry state, gappy, bedraggled or brutalised by a bloke on a tractor
with a mechanical flail. We learn from Lamb that this crude mechanised maintenance won’t maintain a hedge in peak condition like a traditional lay, which should occur every 15 or 20 years.
In recent decades, hedges have made a bit of a comeback, valued as linear woodlands, vital habitat for nesting birds, with money available to replant them. But the idea of the hedge as an essential country item – to keep livestock where they should be – has continued to fade from consciousness.
Nevertheless, Lamb makes a living as a hedger and, following his success on Instagram, where 195,000 people follow his idyllic-looking pictures of his craft, here is the book about his working life.
Lamb begins his year in September, with a big job on a blackthorn hedge in Dorset. As he explains the ‘pleaching’ and his use of stakes and traditional regional styles – from the Midland hedge to the South of England style – we learn that a good hedger should be able to achieve a ‘chain’ of 66 feet in length in a day. It is slow, painstaking work.
His Instagram photos look lush, but the written word enables him to reveal harsher realities. Blackthorn and hawthorn easily penetrate leather work gloves –especially in the wet – and a hedger’s hands become progressively more splintered, swollen and sore as the winter working season becomes wetter and colder.
A technical account of hedgelaying would have limited appeal; Lamb’s story is also one of the changing seasons, the goldfinches, rooks and rural life he encounters.
It’s particularly appealing to romantics. He lives frugally in an old truck, with a woodburner, bed, sink, armchair and dresser in the back. He nurses his ancient vehicle from hedging contract to contract, living off-grid on the land where he works, an itinerant seasonal labourer without a permanent home.
We are drawn into this intriguing, enduring rural economy based around woods and woodwork. Today it is a cottage affair, but still suckering and shooting in its own way.
When the hedging season ends, Lamb works with a charcoal-producer, and then makes beautiful traditional fences with hazel he harvests from a coppice.
We are warmed by hot cups of tea, stews, cosy fires and brief, approving encounters with old-fashioned country characters in the mould of Lamb’s hedging mentor, Bill Bugler.
There is an occasionally mournful note about the changing nature of rural England: the decline of small family farms and the rise of horsey hobbyists and others with money from the cities.
Ironically, these nouveau ruralists are probably more likely to employ Lamb. Many want to revive their hedgerows in his wildlife-friendly way.
Sharing the long, dark nights with Lamb, we, the readers, begin to worry. His life is very solitary. Some weeks, he hardly sees another soul. At times, working in the mud and chill, in his late 40s, he becomes gloomy, and he admits to stresses in the past.
Is he lonely? Is he OK? He has grown-up daughters – but what’s
happened to his wife? There’s a little reassurance towards the end when we meet his daughters, and his ex-wife pops in for a friendly chat.
For all the intimacy of his portrait of his relationship with the land, Lamb keeps prying eyes at bay. Much remains private.
I long to hear more about his personal finances; how much his hedging ‘contracts’ pay; how he uses tech; whether he is single; what he does for a day off.
Thankfully, checking his Insta gives me a happy ending: Lamb is all smiles with a new partner. I’m sure his book will be a big success, too.
Barkham is The Oldie’s Taking a Walk columnist
And did those feet...
CHRISTOPHER HOWSE
God Is an Englishman: Christianity and the Creation of England
By Bijan Omrani Forum £25
Hymn-writers did for the English what opera did for the Italians, says Bijan Omrani, picking up an idea from the music historian Andrew Gant: ‘They filled a hole not just in British religion, but in British life.’
Yet when the author belted out O God, Our Help in Ages Past in a happy crowd outside Exeter Cathedral on the day of the King’s accession to the throne, no one seemed to join in. His daughter looked at him quizzically.
Parents knowing the words of hymns has long been an embarrassment – and now reflects the evaporation of the Christian side of national culture. But Bijan Omrani’s title is upside down, really. His book is about how God made the English what they are or, as his subtitle puts it, Christianity and the creation of England. Omrani, a classicist, half of whose family came from Iran, is no Little Englander. He wrote an admired guide to Afghanistan with the late Matthew Leeming. His approach is celebratory, historical and argumentative. For example, kingship was a scanty thing in England, he maintains, at the time Augustine and his companions arrived in 597 to make the English Christian. The people who had settled in England had gone for a century without an elite class or kings in the familiar sense, he says, until the late-sixth century.
He attributes the great change to a series of climatic disasters, with a
30th April 2020 – David Hockney’s Normandy home, ‘the Seven Dwarfs House’, from David Hockney, edited by Norman Rosenthal, published for the exhibition David Hockney 25 at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (until 31st August)
Patrick
huge volcano in Iceland erupting in 536 AD, and then again in 540 AD and 547 AD. Famine was followed by plague and smallpox.
It was then that strongmen began to project their power; even the English word ‘lord’ – deriving from hlafweard, ‘bread warder’ – owes its origin to the pressures of hunger. I find that detail hard to swallow.
The advent of Christianity, Omrani argues, transformed warlordism in England into a kingship that saw its ideals in the emperors of Rome, at least since Constantine. For it was from Rome and the letters of Pope Gregory that they received their brand of Christianity. The first cathedral at Canterbury was in the form of a Roman basilica.
That may be – yet not only English kings were urged to follow the virtues of kings in the Bible. So were King Clovis of the Franks (baptised around 500 AD) and the Visigothic kings of Spain. I’d also think a later reimportation of kingly ideals to England was made before 900 AD by King Alfred, following the pattern of Charlemagne, who took care to go to Rome to be crowned Emperor on Christmas Day 800 AD.
Anyway, whatever the pattern abroad, the English centuries rolled away, with Christianity embedded in the rhythms of the day and year, the emergence of the universities and the survival of church music, the mysticism of Julian of Norwich and The Cloud of Unknowing, the poetic daring of George Herbert and the pointed wit of Sydney Smith. Omrani has an eye for eccentricities such as Bishop Lloyd of Worcester telling Queen Anne in 1712 that Christ would return in 1716 and Rome be consumed by fire, or R S Hawker sitting in the moonlight, impersonating a mermaid.
Omrani spends the last third of the book on the question ‘Why is English Christianity in decline?’ In part, he sees the drift as a product of the sixties. ‘The 1973 slogan for the new Access credit card summed up the spirit of a new age: “It takes the waiting out of wanting.” ’ That was already 12 years after the female contraceptive pill.
Omrani does not quite buy the secularisation hypothesis of the past two generations. He sees an appetite for the spiritual today, despite neglect of formal religion. He cleaves to the vision of Thomas Traherne of the ordinary world bursting with the transcendent: ‘The Corn was Orient and Immortal Wheat… I thought it had stood from Everlasting to Everlasting. The Dust and the Stones of the Street were as precious as Gold.’
Certainly the poets can tell the truth about the world, but that need not be in England. It could be the Armenia of Parajanov’s film The Colour of Pomegranates or the Russia of Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, the New Mexico of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop or the Pas-de-Calais of Bernanos’s The Diary of a Country Priest.
Yet if you go for a swim in the river of English history, you always come out covered with the waterweed of Christian culture. Our fellow citizens who are unaware of this have probably forgotten how to swim.
Christopher Howse is author of AD: 2,000 Years of Christianity
Sacred monster
DAVID EKSERDJIAN
Irascible: The Combative Life of Douglas Cooper, Collector and Friend of Picasso
By Adrian Clark and Richard Calvocoressi
Yale University Press £45 Douglas Cooper (1911-84), if he is remembered at all outside the world of art, owes his immortality to John Richardson’s immensely entertaining but by no means wholly reliable The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Picasso, Provence and Douglas Cooper (1999).
Richardson (1924-2019) spent the years from 1949 to 1960 as Cooper’s trophy boyfriend – from 1952 on in the Château de Castille in the south of France – but their parting was by no means a friendly one.
In his memoir, Richardson wreaked a terrible revenge on his former benefactor, whom he presents as a monstre sacré, though perhaps unwittingly his self-portrait does not leave him covered in glory either.
In just short of 600 lavishly illustrated pages, Adrian Clark and Richard Calvocoressi do an exemplary job of setting the record straight. The former offers a 400-page biography of their subject. The latter adds a far shorter hundred-page examination of what he calls his ‘art-historical interests’.
However, as is immediately apparent from their book’s title, this is no whitewash job. Indeed, at times, especially when reading Clark’s part of it, I began almost to feel sorry for Cooper: ‘Douglas exhibited the characteristics of a sociopath, perhaps even a psychopath.’
In fact, when it came to actual violence,
their hero was more sinned against than sinning. Notoriously, in 1954 Sir John Rothenstein, the Director of the Tate Gallery, punched him in the face, and then in 1961 an unsuccessful pick-up of a French soldier led to a stabbing that left him in a coma and near death.
On his 21st birthday on 20th February 1932, Cooper inherited £100,000 (about £7 million today, according to Clark). He was soon set on the professional course he would pursue for the rest of his life. It involved him in the indissolubly linked but decidedly separate universes of art and art history.
He was a close friend of many artists and a voracious collector of modern art. But in his early years – when he was a director of the Mayor Gallery – he was also an art dealer.
Moreover, he was the author of numerous scholarly books and articles, and the organiser of an impressive array of exhibitions in museums and galleries both public and private.
Last but not least, he was a prolific reviewer and critic, above all for weeklies such as the Listener and the Times Literary Supplement, and also for newspapers, and even enjoyed considerable success on radio and television.
I cannot claim to be the world expert on Cooper, but am sure I am not alone in tending to think of him as a narrowly focused specialist on Cubism. In fact, he ranged far further and wider.
His magnum opus was a catalogue raisonné of Juan Gris (1977). He was a big collector of what he termed the four ‘true’ Cubists – Picasso, Braque, Gris and Léger – and the organiser of groundbreaking shows such as The Cubist Epoch (1970-71, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and, with Gary Tinterow, The Essential Cubism at the Tate in 1983.
Yet he also collected and wrote
about artists as diverse as Paul Klee, Graham Sutherland, Renato Guttuso and many, many others.
A different and considerably greater kind of surprise was discovering that –in the company of a friend called C Denis Freeman – the monocular Cooper was a fearless and heroic ambulance driver for the French army at the start of the Second World War. Shortly thereafter, they wrote a book about their experiences called The Road to Bordeaux, published in 1942 with illustrations by Edward Ardizzone.
Often, the art world brought to life here seems almost alarmingly similar to its contemporary equivalent, but not always.
The prices Cooper paid for the numerous masterpieces he acquired for his collection are bound to seem envyinducingly modest, yet there is much more to it than that.
It was also incomparably less of a struggle to borrow major works of art for exhibitions. In 1948-49, the fledgling Institute of Contemporary Arts managed to secure the loan from New York of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, without question his most important painting, for an exhibition in its temporary venue in the basement of the bomb-damaged Academy Cinema in Oxford Street.
Conversely, by the time of The Essential Cubism in 1983, the canvas failed to cross the Atlantic, and indeed for no very good reason is now never lent.
Professor David Ekserdjian is author of The Italian Renaissance Altarpiece: Between Icon and Narrative
Shakespeare’s King
PAUL LAY
The Sun Rising: James I and the Dawn of a Global Britain
By Anna Whitelock Bloomsbury £30
It was fashionable for the wealthy of 17th-century Europe to carry pocketsized graters.
They were used, ostentatiously, to grate nutmeg, the kernel of the tree Myristica fragrans, highly coveted for its culinary and medicinal properties. It was used to treat everything from flatulence to the plague.
Nutmeg was abundant in the Spice Islands, particularly those of the Banda Sea off what is now Indonesia, where it was sold cheaply to European
Ethelred’s Unready Meals
‘adventurers’: Dutch, Portuguese and, increasingly, English. By the time it reached Europe, its value had increased by 32,000 per cent – some mark-up.
This was the new world of commerce, luxury and enterprise coveted by the descendants of England’s first buccaneering age of Drake, Hawkins and Raleigh. They were playing catch-up with the Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch and their claims to goods and land in both the New World and the old.
Great Britain was a name encouraged by James I of England, who continued to be James VI of Scotland when he united the crowns of the two former enemies at his coronation in 1603, bringing an end to the febrile question of succession to the childless Elizabeth I, which had led to stasis and rebellion.
The architect of James’s ascendancy was Robert Cecil, Elizabeth’s secretary, who had long sought to bring Scotland into the fold, for security reasons. There would no longer be a northern back door from which enemies might threaten England.
Stability was the hallmark of the early years of the reign. James was explicit in his desire for a peaceful Europe, and the need to dampen sectarian ardour. Peace with Spain – the Black Spain of Puritan myth, routed in the muchmythologised Armada of 1588 – was his number-one priority.
The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, the first great drama of his reign – which Anna Whitelock, taking the cue of contemporaries, calls the Powder Plot –put paid to James’s peaceful intentions. It was an act of terror that brought wrath down on Catholics for generations.
Sectarianism on the Continent, which James did everything to avert – not least because his daughter Elizabeth was married to the imperilled Protestant Frederick V of the Rhine Palatinate –would be shattered by the outbreak in 1618 of the Thirty Years War.
The war saw up to eight million Europeans die, carnage unparalleled till the industrial slaughter of the 20th century. The untimely death in 1612 of James’s dashing eldest son, Prince
Henry, had robbed Europe of one of Protestantism’s most eloquent champions. His younger brother, the future Charles I, though a fine aesthete, lacked his swank and swagger.
And yet James’s reign was one of considerable achievement. Culturally, it saw the maturity of the English language. Most of Shakespeare is Jacobean. And the King James Bible, which gave us phrases such as ‘salt of the earth’, ‘skin of their teeth’, and ‘apple of his eye’, is a monumental achievement that resonates still.
Just as important was the way in which James encouraged commercial enterprises, such as the Virginia Company and the East India Company, pioneers of what became the British Empire. It seems that young Britons, often those of a troublesome bent, were keen to focus their energies abroad.
That may explain why Britain, despite the Civil War caused by Charles I’s stubborn belligerence, never endured a revolution like France or Russia, whose radicals festered and failed at home.
The roots of the United States are found here, in the settlements of Jamestown and New England, as are Britain’s first tentative steps in India.
One notices that the union of the crowns is crucial to this expansion, as the Scots and Irish proved themselves to be far more effective imperialists than the English ever were.
Anna Whitelock, Professor of History at City, University of London, and a noted commentator on monarchy, proves a sure-footed and eloquent guide to James’s reign. If one were to find fault with this highly readable study, it would be that it is too short. The Gunpowder Plot is glossed over in a single chapter, while Prince Charles’s fruitless pursuit of the Spanish Infanta – a barely believable, picaresque tale, worthy of a Netflix series – deserves much more space (do read Glyn Redworth’s amusing The Prince and the Infanta). But that is nit-picking.
What is striking when one reads this primer is that, exactly four centuries on from James’s death, Britain finds itself once again playing catch-up, uncertain of its place in the world, and lacking the kind of identity that was forged in the 17th century.
Whether modern Britain has the energy and invention – and ruthlessness – to bend the world to its will as its forefathers did is a moot question. But it requires an ever more urgent answer.
Paul Lay is author of Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell’s Protectorate
As I grow older and older, And totter toward the tomb, I find that I care less and less, Who goes to bed with whom.
Dorothy L Sayers
I’ve become a captive of my own ambitions.
Patsy Cline
In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different.
Coco Chanel
I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells.
Dr Seuss
There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.
Henri Matisse
It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.
Marcus Aurelius
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
Eleanor Roosevelt
I shut my eyes in order to see.
Paul Gauguin
Commonplace Corner
Never interrupt someone doing what you said couldn’t be done.
Amelia Earhart
Exercise is bunk. If you are healthy, you don’t need it; if you are sick, you should not take it.
Henry Ford
Times and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future.
Walt Disney
Good character is not formed in a week or a month. It is created little by little, day
for a while, you will find some Zen. After all, nobody has died, there is trouble the world over, and all that’s happened to you is a lost case. Very true.
Consumer helplines
We have all drunk the ghastly cocktail of adrenalin, panic and rage when the snaking luggage conveyor belt ceases to snake – and all hope is extinguished.
Your suitcase has failed to arrive – as mine did after a recent United Airlines flight from New York to Paris.
There is nobody on hand to help – the airline presumably hoping that, being left to stew
Consumer let-downs come in many shapes and forms. But it’s not only the guilty company in the dock: you too are being tested each time you battle to speak to someone – anyone – who will take an interest in your micro-tragedy. You need to calculate: is the corporate misdemeanour serious enough to justify your losing your cool? Mostly not. But even if your rational self knows that as disasters go, this is not in Divisions One to Four, can you manage the trick of staying calm
by day. Protracted and patient effort is needed to develop good character.
Herodotus
The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.
Charlie Chaplin
People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.
Thomas Sowell
Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.
Virginia Woolf
My mother said to me, ‘If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.’ Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.
Pablo Picasso
As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.
Andrew Carnegie
I would have been a much more popular World Champion if I had always said what people wanted to hear. I might have been dead, but definitely more popular.
Jackie Stewart
Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself.
Golda Meir
while bucketfuls of corporate nonsense are poured into your ears or dropped into your inbox?
It’s a doleful business. The long-suffering employees answering your irate calls are paid, not very much, to be stoically evasive. Those responsible for the miserable pro-forma emails, and the
SMALL DELIGHTS
Lying in bed, listening to someone else unload the dishwasher. MICHAEL
STREET, TELFORD
Email small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk
weasel words crafted for the call-handlers, are the well-heeled corporate lawyers and PR merchants. And you never, ever get to communicate with them. These transactions do not end up with good karma. As for the airline, I refused the travel voucher they finally coughed up – I would pay never to fly with these people again. But I scored nowhere near ten out of ten for good behaviour towards the oppressed employees in Mumbai I’d been speaking to. I shall try harder next time – and in return it would be nice if the deadening, crass prose of most customercomplaints departments were given a thorough makeover. I hereby offer my services.
MARK DAMAZER, former Controller of Radio 4
Amelia Earhart (1897-c 1937)
FILM HARRY MOUNT
THE RETURN (15)
This year’s Oscar for Stupidest Comment by a Director goes to Uberto Pasolini. Pasolini – director of The Return, a version of The Odyssey, starring a super-fit Ralph Fiennes, 62 – said of Fiennes’s ripped body, ‘I was slightly suspicious that … we would have a body that looked exercised... There is no gym in ancient Greece.’
Erm, Uberto, the Greeks invented the gymnasium. The word comes from the Greek gymnos, meaning ‘naked’ – a state in which we observe a full-frontal Fiennes at one point.
There are lots of blunders in The Return – which concentrates on Odysseus’s return to Ithaca after 20 years fighting the Trojan War and crisscrossing the Mediterranean.
Odysseus wasn’t shipwrecked on Ithaca, as he is in this film. He was delivered there in first-class comfort by the Phaeacians from what is thought to be Corfu (where much of The Return was filmed). And in Homer’s epic, Odysseus’s father, Laertes, doesn’t die before he fights the suitors.
But, still, The Iliad and The Odyssey are protean – their stories are so primal and so well-known that they can bear infinite re-invention.
And they are Procrustean, too: they are so crammed with incident that, like Procrustes’s victims for his bed, they can be chopped down, like this 116-minute film, into shorter episodes.
The Odyssey is having a big revival at the moment. Next year, Christopher Nolan brings out his film of the story, starring Matt Damon as Odysseus.
Last year, Stephen Fry’s inspired, loose translation came out. And, in 2017, Emily Wilson (daughter of The Oldie’s A N Wilson) published the best translation yet of The Odyssey.
Arts
You can see why writers and directors keep returning to it – all those enchanting mini-stories wrapped up in the overarching epic.
However many times you read or see them, they work, as they do in The Return: the death of Odysseus’s dog, Argos, in shock at seeing him after 20 years; the heart-stopping joy when Eurycleia, his old nurse, recognises her disguised old master, Odysseus, from the boar tusk wound in his leg she first saw in his youth.
Some of the stories are slightly mangled. In The Odyssey, Penelope recognised Odysseus only once he’d identified the bed he’d made out of an olive tree. In the film, you see the olive-tree-bed scene but Penelope has recognised him before – so that recognition moment is lost.
But Penelope’s repeated unravelling of the shroud at night – she had promised to remarry once it was finished –becomes a clever plot-control device. Every time she unravels the shroud, it’s a kind of break, opening a new chapter.
The dialogue – by Pasolini, John Collee and Edward Bond – is a bit wooden and simplistic, with none of Homer’s majesty. And there’s the backwards-speak that dud writers use to denote olden-days posh talk: ‘Ten long years, the heroes fought.’
Craig Brown spotted the phenomenon in royal commentators in his biography of Elizabeth II, A Voyage Around the Queen. ‘Never safer, better-guarded lay a sleeping King than this,’ Richard Dimbleby said in 1952 of George VI’s lying-in-state. Brown calls it ‘the curious back-to-front phraseology standard on royal occasions’.
Some of the acting by the supporting cast is straight out of SPADA – The School Play Academy of Dramatic Art. Where. Actors. Say. Every. Word. Separately. And. Too. Clearly. As. If. They. Are. Reading. A. Script. Out. Loud.
The film is saved by Ralph Fiennes’s Odysseus and Juliette Binoche’s Penelope – both actors know how to speak naturally on screen. Where in Conclave Fiennes was so understated as a cardinal as to be boring, here his quiet calm is pregnant with the rage and duty of an avenging king. Even though – or specially because – you know what’s going to happen, the thrill is magnified when Odysseus, after long days of plotting, finally strings his bow, fires the arrow through the axe handles and slaughters the suitors with clinical, supreme aim.
Binoche underplays her semibereaved longing for a long-lost husband she suspects is dead – and so the deep sadness in her eyes is magnified, too.
Matt Damon should take note in Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey next year. When you’re playing the greatest heroes in Greek mythology, less is more.
Harry Mount is author of Odyssey: Ancient Greece in the Footsteps of Odysseus (Bloomsbury)
Grecian 1200 BC: Odysseus (Fiennes)
THEATRE
WILLIAM COOK
NORTH BY NORTHWEST
Touring nationwide, until 22nd June
‘What’s your favourite Alfred Hitchcock film? Rear Window? Dial M for Murder?
If I had to pick just one, I’d choose North by Northwest – which is why I was so curious to see this new theatrical adaptation, performed by just six actors on an almost bare stage.
This jovial 1959 thriller is widely regarded as the quintessential Hitchcock movie, and no wonder. Whereas many of his greatest hits were adaptations of successful novels (Rebecca, The ThirtyNine Steps, Strangers on a Train…), North by Northwest was devised from scratch by the brilliant screenwriter Ernest Lehman, tasked by Hitch to write a story starting with a murder at the United Nations and ending with a chase across Mount Rushmore.
‘I want to make the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures,’ Lehman told the great British director. ‘Something that has wit, sophistication, glamour, action and lots of changes of location.’
He filled the film with so many Hitchcockian tricks and stunts that it became almost a self-parody. Without Cary Grant to hold it together, it might have descended into farce.
With spectacular set pieces ranging across much of North America, I’d always thought North by Northwest would be impossible to stage.
So, on a technical level, Emma Rice’s adaptation and direction is a triumph. From grand hotels to sleeper trains, from taxis to biplanes, she needs only a few basic props to conjure up each iconic setting. The (literal) cliff-hanging finale on Mount Rushmore is played out on a pile of suitcases.
This cast rise to her exacting challenge. The show is full of knockabout and slapstick, all executed perfectly, and the fifties dance numbers are delightful.
Ewan Wardrop has big shoes to fill as Roger Thornhill, the suave, emptyheaded advertising executive who’s mistaken for a spy – and he’s enchanting from start to finish.
Wardrop is much younger than Cary Grant (who was in his mid-fifties when he played the role) and, wisely, he doesn’t try to imitate the smoothest leading man in Hollywood history.
While Grant sauntered through the film with an air of world-weary sangfroid, Wardrop bounds through this play like a bewildered, precocious teenager. He’s
not as debonair as Grant (who is?) but he plays the part with a lot more bounce.
All the supporting players match him blow for blow and gag for gag, in particular Patrycja Kujawska as the ice-cool double agent. Rod Howell’s stylish set – an intricate cluster of revolving doors – is a visual treat.
So it’s especially frustrating that a show with so much to commend it should be marred by some eccentric casting and bizarre rewriting.
First, the casting. Why is the theatre suddenly so obsessed with cross-gender or gender-neutral casting (or whatever you want to call it)? I’ve lost count of all the plays I’ve seen these last few years with men playing women and/or women playing men. It hardly ever brings any benefit. Usually, it’s merely a superfluous distraction. Here, it simply made it far harder for me to suspend my disbelief.
Katy Owen is a talented, charismatic young performer, but to cast her as an elderly man adds another layer of unreality to a show that already teeters on the edge
of implausibility. Karl Queensborough is deliciously creepy as the villain, Phillip Vandamm (the role played in the film by James Mason). So why get him to drag up as Thornhill’s mother?
Secondly, the rewriting. For the most part, Rice’s script sticks fairly closely to Lehman’s screenplay, and when it does, it can do little wrong.
But Rice severely undercuts the climax of the play when she puts soliloquies into the mouths of several characters, as they emote about their private travails.
This feels completely out of keeping with the tongue-in-cheek tenor of the play. It made me feel confused and awkward, at the point when this playful show should be racing to its conclusion.
A few sharp cuts, especially in the final act, would improve her play enormously.
‘This mathematical masterpiece,’ writes Rice in the programme, ‘is no empty vessel of cleverness.’
On the contrary, that’s exactly what it is, and that’s what makes it so sublime North by Northwest is no Psycho,
The Man in the Grey Suit: Roger Thornhill (Ewan Wardrop)
Vertigo or Marnie. It’s a flippant, escapist fantasy, as harmless and pointless as The Lady Vanishes. If Rice could bear to trim her own writing, and cast every part according to age and gender, she’d have a smash hit on her hands.
RADIO VALERIE GROVE
My Luddite leanings, as I had often been forewarned by The Oldie’s Matthew Webster, finally wreaked havoc. My computer died.
So, for this column, I had only pencilled jottings in a notebook –covered in William Morris’s Strawberry Thief, bought in the V&A gift shop. My study is adorned with Morris’s most recognisable wallpaper, Willow – as seen chez Giles and Mary on Gogglebox
But when ‘Morris Mania: How Britain’s g reatest designer went viral’ was shoehorned into the arts end of the Today programme, how did we all feel? A bit queasy.
Hadrian Garrard, curator of the Morris Museum at Walthamstow, noted how infinitely reproducible WM designs have become, on phone cases, shower curtains, wellies, trowels, Nike trainers and collapsible walking sticks.
Ubiquitous Morris is today so commercial – miserably machine-made in faraway lands. It’s a million miles from Morris’s Utopian ideals of loving craftsmanship and smock-clad, contented labourers, creating beauty and usefulness for idle capitalists to enjoy.
What would Morris make of the exhibition’s ‘iconic waving cat, made in Japan’? A hideous moggy, embodying the ‘unbearably cute’.
‘Jeffrey Archer rang up,’ Garrard claimed, ‘and asked if he could buy it.’ The original, I assume, as it’s £3 in the gift shop. ‘He’s quite a generous supporter of the arts,’ said Nick Robinson, encouragingly.
Listeners of Today – dwindling in number, we are told – also heard Michael Buerk trailing The Moral Maze, on elitism.
He quoted the Times’s resident vacuousness-spotter, James Marriott: ‘I would rather toast my eyeballs on a fork than acknowledge that it’s poetry at all,’ referring to Insta-drivel poetry that goes viral. ‘I really love poetry, and it depresses me.’ Me, too.
The BBC’s attempts to please everyone, carelessly jostling high art with mass tastes, leads us through impossibly misleading byways: a maze indeed. On
the programme, Ash Sarkar said, ‘I wrote my master’s thesis on Kendrick Lamar the rapper, and he won a Pulitzer Prize.’
Like the Morris exhibition, these subjects divide us. The erudite classicalmusic fan may have recoiled at the Music & Meditation slot on Radio 3 Unwind, offering ‘some gorgeous music’ –Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 23.
‘Let it wash over you,’ said Izzy Judd, a baby-voiced violinist. ‘I’ll stay right here with you.’
Still, Michael Berkeley’s Private Passions can bridge the gulf. Don’t miss his Terry Gilliam episode, with original and vintage choices and much giggling.
I’m glad that Radio 4’s drama hangs in there. Martin Jarvis and Rosalind Ayres gave us their tenth Bond – Ian Fleming’s first, Casino Royale (1953), squeezed into an hour, with a fine cast: Hugh Bonneville as Le Chiffre; Toby Stephens as just-qualified 007; John Standing as M, giving Bond the mission and the millions to bankrupt Le Chiffre at baccarat.
It was clever stuff, conveying the drama and tension of the baccarat table on the airwaves through Bond’s inner thoughts. Also, it’s here that James gives Felix Leiter the dry Martini recipe: three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet, shaken till ice-cold in a deep champagne goblet –and don’t forget the thin slice of lemon. Finally, we bade farewell to A Point of View. But Sounds can retrieve favourites. I have binged nostalgically on Clive James – a much-missed voice of laughing scepticism.
TELEVISION
FRANCES WILSON
The Brontës: Sisters of Disruption (Sky Arts) is a low point in documentary film-making.
It’s less about the three weird sisters of Haworth parsonage than about their ‘empowering’ effect on the TV and radio presenter Anita Rani.
Rani, who was raised in Bradford, spent the nineties listening to her Sony Walkman on the Yorkshire moors and so knows what it was like to be a Brontë. Returning to the moors now with a film crew, she puts her Walkman back on and pounds away to the rhythm.
In the first 60 seconds, we learn that Charlotte, Emily and Anne had as much influence on Rani as Nirvana and Neneh Cherry. We are also told that Charlotte once made a ‘knob gag’; that if Anne had been on Instagram or Twitter, abused women would have messaged her; and that Heathcliff was both a ‘misogynist’ and ‘brown-skinned’.
The Brontës, Rani insists, had ‘a punk agenda’ and foresaw the #MeToo era, which is why they matter to us today. This is the dystopian future of English Literature degrees.
Having come to praise the Brontës, Rani buries them. It is fitting that she visits the graveyard next to the family parsonage. Here she interviews Dr Claire O’Callaghan who tells us that the Brontës lived in a world where ‘the streets were literally running with blood’.
‘So they were surrounded with death?’ Rani asks.
Indeed, explains Dr O’Callaghan: ‘In the 19th century, there was a huge amount of death.’ Students should note down this information.
Rani then visits the window through which Lockwood apparently grabbed Cathy’s tiny frozen hand in Wuthering Heights.
‘Obviously Kate Bush is in my head right now,’ Rani tells us, stroking the window frame. ‘I mean, if there is an iconic window in literary history, that’s it.
Wuthering lows: Anita Rani communes with the Brontës
And not just literary history. I mean, how many times have I danced to Wuthering Heights?’
A portable TV set sitting on a rock in the middle of the moors shows us Rani swirling around in a white sheet while Bush wails, ‘It’s me. I’m Cathy. I’ve come home. Let me in-a-your windowow-ow-ow…’
The effect of this so-called documentary was to send me rushing back to Villette, Charlotte’s Brontë’s masterpiece (not mentioned by Rani) and the first deep study of depression in Western literature. I needed to remind myself that there was more to Charlotte’s talent than ‘calling out toxic masculinity’.
I then reopened Wuthering Heights to confirm that Emily was a mystic rather than a woke activist. On YouTube, I found the footage of Muriel Spark among the same gravestones by Haworth parsonage, also talking about death.
‘Life, death, and eternity – these are Emily Brontë’s great themes,’ says Spark in her Celia Johnson voice. ‘All the harsh grandeur of the novel takes life from the eye of Emily’s imagination. She was a woman with a vision of a dark, essential world, hidden within the world of appearances.’
This three-minute celebration is worth the full hour of Rani’s ramblings.
Meanwhile, Families Like Ours (BBC 4), the ambitious miniseries written and directed by the BAFTA award-winning Thomas Vinterberg, gathers momentum.
The events begin in a Denmark set in the near future, with water levels rapidly rising. The classified information that the country is about to be shut down is leaked by Nik, a government worker, to his brother-in-law, Jacob.
Nik, drinking the cellar dry, sells his newly refurbished mansion for cash, which he keeps in two leather cases.
Jacob, he suggests, should do the same before the economy collapses. Vinterberg is interested in the choices we make when faced with the inconceivable.
We behave, in his showing, selfishly, offloading our worthless properties onto some other family so that we have enough to live on.
Should Henrik, Nik’s husband, warn his homophobic brother? He decides not to.
At the heart of the series are the choices available to Laura, Jacob’s 18-year-old daughter (played by Amaryllis August). She could go to Paris with her father and his second wife, where she might get a place at the Sorbonne. But what about her mother, whose only option is a flat share, with eight others, in Bucharest?
Oliver (Jack Philpott) and Fagin (Simon Lipkin) in Lionel Bart’s Oliver!
Meanwhile, her boyfriend, who plays the cowbell, wants her to join him and his band in Finland. Nik and Henrik have a place waiting for them in Reading, where they plan to start a family.
Homes are abandoned, friends dispersed and families separated. Refugees flee to the borders, their lives in suitcases, their dogs on leads. Poland is now dealing with an influx of Danes as well as Ukrainians, and vigilantes are beating up the refugees.
It’s Scandi noir at its best – all terrifyingly real.
Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson is out on 5th June
MUSIC
RICHARD OSBORNE
OLIVER!
Lionel Bart’s Oliver! is back for its third London revival since it first astonished and delighted the world in 1960.
It’s one of the great musicals, a lonely outlier in British musical theatre between G&S’s The Gondoliers in 1889 and the arrival in the early 1970s of two new kids on the block, Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, for whom Oliver! had been a primary inspiration.
I, too, saw the original 1960 production, when a fellow called Barry Humphries was playing Mr Sowerberry the undertaker, and Baldrick-to-be, Tony Robinson, was one of Fagin’s teenage tearaways.
I thrilled to it then and thrilled to this production even more, astonished by the sleight of hand of Oliver! veterans
Cameron Mackintosh and directorchoreographer Matthew Bourne, who’ve managed to go back to that original production while making the whole thing seem new-minted.
I think of Lez Brotherston’s fresh take on the great Sean Kenny’s gamechanging sets, of the continuing refining and deepening of Eric Rogers’s original orchestrations (he of Carry On film fame), and Mackintosh’s own cheeky additions to his great friend Lionel Bart’s incomparable lyrics.
Above all, there’s Fagin reimagined as a younger, kindlier rogue, with a whole new box of tricks at his command, all gloriously realised by Simon Lipkin.
When I first saw Oliver!, I knew nothing of the compartmentalisation of music. The circus, the opera house and the municipal bandstand all had their individual allure. I’d worn out my original cast recording of Oklahoma! almost as quickly as my highlights disc of Verdi’s Il trovatore
Why? Because there’s isn’t a dull number in either piece and because –though both shows are incredibly dark –both, in the end, are strangely lifeenhancing. After I’d seen Oliver!, my duology became a trilogy.
Bart’s talents were multi-dimensional, as one would expect of a protégé of the great Joan Littlewood. Astonishingly, everything in Oliver! is by him. People talk of instantly memorable music tied to unforgettable lyrics by Britain’s greatest rhymester between Coward and Rice.
What’s often overlooked is the brilliance of the book.
Oliver Twist is Dickens’s most depressing novel and, in places, his most ill-written. But it’s also his first statement piece about the evils of social oppression. As G K Chesterton memorably put it, Dickens attacks the modern workhouse with the inspired simplicity of a boy in a fairy tale wandering about, sword in hand, looking for ogres.
Bart, too, knew where the soul of the novel lay, which is why Oliver! both distils the novel and improves it – not least the end, with Fagin and Dodger now trudging off into the sunset to consider their situation.
As Peter Conrad points out in his roistering new study, Dickens the Enchanter, Oliver is ‘improbably unbesmeared by his squalid environment’ – nature rather than nurture perhaps. Chesterton goes deeper. The boy’s enduring appeal, he argues, lies in the fact that, like most of us, he doesn’t expect the universe to be kind to him. He does, however, believe that he’s living in a just world. ‘He comes with gloomy experiences, but he comes with a happy philosophy.’
That, I suspect, was Lionel Bart’s world, too. It explains why Oliver, properly played, will always cast his spell over the show. The original Oliver, Keith Hamshere, was a piping baa-lamb of a boy. Not so Jack Philpott, the new production’s principal Oliver, seen first in last summer’s Chichester staging and again at the Royal Variety performance. Here’s an Oliver possessed of rare presence and vocal adaptability, complementing to perfection Lipkin’s Fagin and Shanay Holmes’s Nancy.
Hers is an unforgettable Nancy, the tragic heroine whose love is as deep for Sikes as it is for the beleaguered Oliver.
‘As long as he needs me’, with its signature long-held notes on ‘he needs me’, was thrillingly delivered, with that command of words-with-music rubato that’s the mark of all great singing actresses.
The casting is strong throughout. At one end of the human spectrum, we have Philip Franks’s Mr Brownlow; at the other, Aaron Sidwell’s Bill Sikes. Dickens grew tired of readers complaining that Sikes was an improbable figure, bereft of any vestige of humanity. But he remained unapologetic. ‘Of one thing I am certain: there are such men as Sikes.’
How right he was, and how superbly the role is played by Sidwell.
The show is currently booking through to March 2026. Near the start of
the matinée I attended, the little boy next to me whispered to his mother, ‘Mummy, what’s an undertaker?’
He may not have known what an undertaker is but, as we queued to leave the theatre, he was giving his own quiet rendering of ‘I’d do anything’.
If that doesn’t help sum up the genius of Lionel Bart, I don’t know what does.
GOLDEN OLDIES MARK ELLEN FAST TRACKS
After one marathon session, and wearing only his underpants, he ended up banging his head repeatedly on his hotel-room floor, wailing, ‘I can’t finish this song!’
Leonard Cohen took five years to write his masterpiece, ‘Hallelujah’. He tinkered with it endlessly, chiselling at its intricate rhymes and phrases. He was a devout believer in painstaking craft and meticulous polish. But he was haunted by the fact that others could knock out their finest work in seconds.
When Bob Dylan wondered how long ‘Hallelujah’ had taken him, Cohen couldn’t bear to tell the truth and said, ‘Two years.’ He asked about one of Bob’s and got a mortifying response: ‘Fifteen minutes.’
You can only hope he never heard about Keith Richards and ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ (see Chris Jagger’s piece on page 16). Composed 60 years ago this month, it set a high bar for lack of creative effort that’s never really been surpassed.
Keeping a tape recorder by his bed in case of spontaneous inspiration, he awoke on the night of 6th May 1965 in a hotel in Clearwater, Florida, with a riff running through his head, pressed ‘Record’, sang it twice wheezily and slumped back to sleep. In the morning, he found the three-note
superstructure that would help immortalise him, followed by 40 minutes’ snoring.
Lady Gaga came close to this strengthsaving work ethic when bashing out ‘Just Dance’ in five minutes through the fog of a hangover.
Stevie Nicks returned Fleetwood Mac to the top of the singles chart with ‘Dreams’, cobbled together in ten minutes.
Incensed by a red-headed bank clerk who’d flirted with her newly acquired husband, Carl Dean (who sadly has just died after 59 years of marriage), Dolly Parton raced home to bang out ‘Jolene’ in half an hour. And then wrote ‘I Will Always Love You’ the same day.
Posh white rappers the Beastie Boys left Happy Hour in New York’s Palladium cocktail lounge with their anthem ‘(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party!)’ scrawled on a paper napkin.
James Brown improvised the classic ‘What I’d Say’ live on-stage after running out of songs – and it was so warmly received that he recorded it.
And ‘Seven Nation Army’, by blues anarchists the White Stripes, was cooked up at a Melbourne pub soundcheck. Its now ubiquitous six-note signature was soon fashioned into football chants the world over. It was even pressed into service at Glastonbury in 2017, where a speech by the briefly beloved then Labour leader was met with 100,000 singing ‘Oh Jer-em-ee Coooor-byn!’
But my favourite is the deliberately slapdash and lumpy ‘Song 2’ by bumptious pop stadium-fillers Blur.
It was written and taped in 30 minutes as a joke to alarm a record company desperate for a hit. Ironically, the label loved it. Rightly so. It’s just passed one billion streams on Spotify. The fastidious, pencil-chewing Leonard Cohen could only dream of such
spontaneity. How it must have hurt. His famous song ‘Anthem’ is even a celebration of the value of flaws and imperfection. ‘Forget your perfect offering,’ it advises. ‘There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.’
On the clock: Leonard Cohen and Stevie Nicks
EXHIBITIONS
HUON MALLALIEU
MAINIE JELLETT AND EVIE HONE: THE ART OF FRIENDSHIP
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, until 10th August
The artist Evie Hone (1894-1955) was born in a south Dublin suburb, and Mainie Jellett (1897-1944) in the city centre.
Both came of Protestant families with marked artistic traditions, and were strongly religious, Evie eventually converting to Roman Catholicism. They were not quite the first Irish modernists, nor even the first Irish female modernists, but they were the most influential.
Almost everything worthwhile in European art during the 20th century either emerged or was prefigured between about 1905 and 1916. Hone and Jellett first met in 1917, studying under Sickert in London.
They went to Paris together in 1920, where they came under the influence of Albert Gleizes. He introduced them to the Parisian avant-garde and directed them towards colour and abstractionism.
Unlike many writers and artists of the time, they returned home afterwards. The new Irish Free State was in cultural matters deeply conservative and inwardlooking. Their first Cubist works, shown at the Society of Dublin Painters in 1923, were derided as ‘freak pictures’, ‘artistic malaria’ and ‘subhuman art’.
However, while evangelising for the new ideas and maintaining career-long links to the Parisian art world, they did not turn their backs entirely on figurative styles, which made Jellett’s teaching the more effective – and eventually won her a major commission from the Government.
She could even forgive the critics, encouraging the young James White, a future Director of the National Gallery of Ireland, to become one.
Despite their continuing friendship, their careers diverged during the 1930s.
Hone largely gave up Cubism and oil painting and concentrated on stained glass, working with the co-operative
An Túr Gloine (the Glass Tower), before setting up her own studio.
One of her most important works will be well-known to generations of Etonians (who may not recall her name): the East Window depicting the Last Supper and Crucifixion in College Chapel.
Despite everything, the two are still not as wellremembered as they deserve. This exhibition of about 90 works, including preparatory drawings, paintings and glass panels, will reaffirm their importance.
There are also examples by the French artists who inspired them.
As the curators Brendan Rooney and Niamh MacNally note, Hone and Jellett are often spoken of in inseparable terms. This show ‘provides visitors with an opportunity to consider not only what connected these immensely gifted figures, but what set them apart from one another’.
The Oldie
Above: Achill Horses by Mainie Jellett, 1941. Right: The Cock and Pot (also known as The Betrayal) by Evie Hone, c 1947
GARDENING
DAVID WHEELER
RHODY SICKNESS
Too little pocket money is my excuse for not amassing rhododendrons. They’re expensive. But a lack of funds isn’t the sole reason. For years, I’ve had the space to accommodate rhodos and the right kind of (acidic) soil and suitable woodland setting where they’d prosper.
There is about them, though, a trait that unsettles me. Two traits, actually.
Many of them can be too blowsy at flowering time. And aren’t they just a touch too graceless, dour and funereal during the rest of the year?
The late and much-missed Arthur Marshall aptly entitled one of his books Whimpering in the Rhododendrons. Yes, in their long flowerless months, I too am inclined to whimper among them.
Yet … there are many I like and grow pleasurably. But, first, the nasty one. Rhododendron ponticum is wickedly invasive and otherwise undesirable because it hosts a Phytophthora fungus that causes sudden oak death.
When we came to our present garden, we cleared vast thickets of the thug, leaving a few as an effective windbreak –proving, if nothing else, that there’s a streak of goodness in every villain.
I first fell in love with the not-quitetrue-blue-flowered, upright-growing Rhododendron augustinii in the Dell at Bodnant, a National Trust property in north Wales. It emanates from the Chinese provinces of Hubei and Sichuan, and commemorates the great Irish botanist Augustine Henry, who first found it. The flowers are small, which gives the whole shrub a rare elegance among the genus.
I’ve acquired some of its named cultivars – ‘Electra’, ‘Bowood Blue’, ‘Werrington’ and the subspecies
chasmanthum, which leans towards a more lavender complexion.
If you can’t find them in the local garden centre, try Millais at Churt in Surrey or Glendoick in Perthshire. Both offer a mail order service, which I have found hugely satisfactory.
My evergreen blues are planted in semi-shade among some of the smaller-flowered yellows, notably Rhododendron lutescens (not to be confused with R luteum, which is the common, fragrant, deciduous azalea).
Lutescens is rangy but controllable, with funnel-shaped, primrose-yellow flowers. The variety ‘Bagshot Sands’ has larger but nonetheless lissom flowers, while ‘Exbury’ has a deeper, more lemony countenance. And, talking of Exbury … this 2,000-acre Hampshire estate is rhodo heaven, where thousands of long-established specimens have been encouraged and mollycoddled by several generations of Rothschilds.
In my long-ago bedsit days, I haunted the Isabella Plantation in Richmond Park at this time of the year. Its forty-odd acres of azaleas (yes, they are rhododendrons), established in the 1830s, also attract magnolia and camellia-lovers. And, before that, as a young, garden-minded teenager, I occasionally played truant during school hours at Mayfield Park in Southampton. Other outstanding rhododendron collections are found at the Savill Garden in Windsor Great Park; Kew Gardens; Wakehurst (‘Kew in the country’), High Beeches and Leonardslee in Sussex; Scotney Castle and Reuthe’s in Kent; Heligan, Caerhays Estate and Trebah in Cornwall; Westonbirt Arboretum in
Gloucestershire; Ness Botanic Garden on the Wirral peninsula; the Himalayan Garden in Yorkshire; Muncaster Castle, Cumbria; Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh; Rowallane in Northern Ireland. So, whimper ye not. Get out there now while the rhodos are trumpeting, find the ones you like, man up at the till and carry home your trophies triumphantly and plant them proudly for many years of floriferous flamboyance.
Rhododendron lutescens
David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal
KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD COURGETTES
I expect to have a better crop of courgettes this summer. Owing to the wet weather of last year, very few grew beyond a few inches before the ends became soft; and only one matured to marrow size.
Marrows and courgettes, also known as zucchini, are varieties of summer squash, an American term embracing similar vegetables of different shapes and colours. They are all of the same family as cucumbers. The curious, scallop-shaped pattypan is known as a summer squash and becoming more popular.
I sowed some courgette seeds in the greenhouse in the last week of March – one seed to each pot, planted on edge to avoid the risk of the seed’s rotting if it’s placed flat in the compost. There is a green ridged variety, Romanesco, another called Zucchini and the yellow Golden Butterstick.
The pots should be covered with polythene until the seeds germinate, and mine won’t be planted outside until mid-May. They should be at least three feet apart. I shall then sow some more in the ground and, with plenty of watering, hope for a prolific crop. There are trailing varieties of courgette or marrow, which can be grown up fences or wooden tripods to save space on the ground.
After being cut from the plant, ideally when about four inches long, courgettes should be cooked and eaten as soon as possible. Slicing and frying is recommended, or ‘spiralising’ to make the courgette strips resemble spaghetti.
In past years, when growing conditions have been good, the courgettes have needed almost daily attention; otherwise they soon become marrows. Their skin will have hardened, and they will keep for several weeks if hung in string bags in a shed.
I remember being given marrow stuffed with minced lamb in my childhood, and can think of it only as nursery food. But every year I follow a most delicious recipe from the chef Simon Hopkinson, which involves slow cooking of marrow chunks in the oven, with onions, garlic, lots of cherry tomatoes and curry paste.
COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD SPRING SPEARS
Make the most of our glorious homegrown asparagus while it lasts. The season runs from March to June and the crop needs nothing but a jug of melted butter.
Europeans have distinct preferences for how they like theirs. Madame Traverse of Villes-sur-Auzon, a little village on the slopes of Mont Ventoux in Provence, grows asparagus for the export market as a cash crop, a replacement for vines affected by phylloxera.
The Germans like theirs gathered before dawn with a special long knife cut deep into the earthed-up crowns, so the spears remain perfectly white.
The French like theirs delicately tipped with purple, when the tips have just emerged into the light.
The English like their asparagus green, the last gathering of the morning, when the overnight growth has enjoyed a happy blast of sunshine.
Cassolette d’asperges
Madame Traverse cooks the broken and misshapen spears that cannot be sold –
white, purple-tipped or green – in a creamy gratin with hard-boiled eggs. Serves 4 as a main course
Snap off the tender parts of the asparagus and chop into short lengths. Cook until just tender in boiling, salted water, drain thoroughly and arrange in a gratin dish. Melt the butter in a saucepan, stir in the flour and fry for a minute or two, till it looks sandy. Whisk in the broth gradually and simmer gently till the sauce thickens. Stir in the rest of the ingredients and remove from the heat.
Taste and season with salt, pepper and nutmeg. Spoon over the asparagus in the gratin dish, top with grated cheese and blitz in a high oven or under the grill for 10 to 15 minutes, till brown and bubbling.
Asparagus au beurre blanc
Asparagus spears served with a simple emulsion of melted butter and wine vinegar, as they like them in northern France, where butter traditionally replaces olive oil.
Serves 4
1kg asparagus, rinsed and trimmed
Salt
The sauce
2 shallots or 1 small onion, skinned and finely chopped
6 tbsps white wine vinegar
250g unsalted butter, chilled and chopped into small pieces
Tie the asparagus spears in a neat bundle. Bring a large boiling-pan of salted water to a rapid bubble, and lower in the bundle so the stalks are in the water, the tips uncovered. Cover loosely, lower the heat and cook the asparagus gently for 10 to 20 minutes, depending on the thickness of the stalks, till stalks are tender but the tips are still firm. Drain thoroughly and wrap in a napkin to keep them dry and warm.
Meanwhile, make the sauce. In a small pan, simmer the vinegar with the onion till the liquid is reduced by half – about 4 tablespoons. Strain out the onion.
Whisk in the butter slowly in small pieces over a very low flame so the butter melts into a thick sauce – don’t let it boil.
If, in spite of your best efforts, the emulsion separates and splits, let the sauce cool and start again with a tablespoon of boiling water. Serve separately with the asparagus, and be prepared to make more if necessary.
RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE FLOWERS OF SCOTLAND
‘Why don’t we sell Scotland to Donald Trump? We know he is keen to expand US territory, and Scotland is surely more attractive than Greenland. It has many things he likes: golf courses, nuclear submarine bases, some of his relatives.’
So wrote S J Disley of Ketton, Rutland, to the Times
Until my recent visit to Edinburgh in February, I would have agreed with SJ. All those craggy mountains and the out-of-control heather, not to mention the forlorn emptiness of the place.
But Edinburgh is a city transformed. While my son was at the university five years ago, he spent most of his time navigating roadworks. Leith Walk finally has a tram, and the city sparkles.
We stayed with Angus and Annie. Annie is a hugely talented architect, who was rightly desperate for us to visit the ancient Rosslyn Chapel en route to lunch in Auld Reekie. Angus, holding it in the same disdain he reserves for a Dan Brown novel, managed to shrink our visit to ten minutes. He knew what to expect: herds of Da Vinci Code fans scratching moss from the outside walls as souvenirs.
We sped to the tranquillity of a Neapolitan lunch at La Locanda dei Gusti, in Haymarket. There were nine of us, all thrilled to have three courses for £28 and wine for £31 a bottle. Like you, I am not a little tired of the ubiquitous burrata –something about its Dulux whiteness – but the Puglian manager concealed it in a molto piccante anchovy-and-aubergine sauce.
Then came delicious rare-breed pig cheeks, which I had always imagined were the size of chicken supremes, until my son returned from the butcher recently with two sides of a face that could have been carved off the late MP Cyril ‘Two Chairs’ Smith.
That evening, after a wander round the National Monument and Royal Observatory, where sidereal time was unveiled, our other Scottish friends, James and Emma, took us for a night down George Street.
The Scots are not just great financiers; they were also brilliant at building colossal banks, now all converted into bars and restaurants. We started with cocktails at Dome, on the site of the Old Physicians’ Hall, built by James Craig in 1775, which went over budget, leaving the physicians £1,000 in debt.
After 70 years, the Commercial Bank of Scotland bought and demolished it, commissioning David Rhind to follow Playfair’s original design for the Surgeons’ Hall. Its Corinthian columns are more suited to a national parliament than to a purveyor of Sex-on-the-Beach.
We then fell into 62-66 George Street, designed by David Bryce in 1878 as a branch of the Union Bank of Scotland. It is now a branch of Wetherspoons, cheekily called The Standing Order, whose cheap beer attracts hordes of students.
Finally, we arrived at Contini, 103 George Street, built in 1883 for the Bank of Scotland and reopened 20 years ago as a very grand Italian restaurant by the eponymous family behind Valvona and Crolla, the best deli in the UK –reason alone for extracting the city from any deal with Trump.
Tacking down the street through crowds of bare-legged girls in miniskirts, I couldn’t help thinking that if it’s true that nearly half of 18-34-year-olds don’t drink, none of them is Scottish. No easier group for Trump to target when he takes over – if they can find a polling station.
DRINK
BILL KNOTT
VIVA ESPAŇA!
I have always had a soft spot for Rioja. As an impecunious student in the early 1980s, I found the region’s reds always seemed to offer great value, especially the younger – crianza – wines, with bags of cherry-like Tempranillo fruit and soft tannins. Navajas was a particular favourite.
At around a tenner (£9.95 from the Wine Society), it is still a bargain.
More recently, I have been lucky enough to visit some of the grander bodegas – Marqués de Murrieta, La Rioja Alta, López de Heredia, Marqués de Riscal, to name but a few.
I sampled some of their venerable Reserva and Gran Reserva wines, savouring the complexity that comes from long years in both barrel and bottle.
There was one style of Rioja about which I knew nothing: the young, unoaked red wine, often labelled tinto joven, made every year by independent cosecheros (growers), mostly in the Rioja Alta and Alavesa sub-regions.
According to my old friend Tim Atkin MW, a prolific wine writer and a Rioja expert, most of the cosechero wines are made (à la Beaujolais nouveau) by carbonic maceration. The grapes are trodden by foot and drunk young.
With no need for elaborate equipment, expensive oak barrels or huge ageing cellars, it is a style wellsuited to small, family-run bodegas.
The wines have also rarely made it as far as these shores, which might explain why I had never heard of them, but that may be changing. At a tasting hosted by Tim and Carte Blanche Wines at Bar Rioja, near King’s Cross, there were a dozen or so wines that now have UK stockists.
I was especially taken with the brightly fruity yet surprisingly serious Artuke 2023 (leaandsandeman.co.uk, £14.95, or £13.50 by the case) and the balanced and savoury Mitarte Rioja Tinto Carbonica 2024 (fieldandfawcett.co.uk, £10.95).
An online search for tinto joven rioja will reveal several more. Because cosechero wines are often made in small quantities and released in one batch, supplies can be irregular.
These are slightly unusual and hugely rewarding. Also, dare I say, they offer more interest to oenophiles than Beaujolais nouveau. They are perfect for drinking in summer – assuming we are blessed with one.
But, in Tim’s view, the best place to drink them is in Logroño, the capital of La Rioja – specifically, along the Calle del Laurel and the surrounding side streets, where the tapas are some of the best in Spain.
The bars – the most authentic of which offer just a single, speciality tapa – are happy for you to take your glass with you to the next watering hole.
Magically, all the glasses are restored to their owners at the end of the night –which, this being Spain, is often shortly before breakfast.
This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines: a weighty Cabernet from Mendoza in Argentina; a lively Chardonnay from Chile’s Casablanca Valley; and an Italian Vernaccia that makes a perfect springtime aperitif. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.
Vernaccia DOCG ‘Borgo Alla Terra’, Tuscany 2023, offer price £10.50, case price £126.00
A classic, light, applescented Vernaccia from the excellent Geografico co-operative.
Ventisquero Reserva Chardonnay, Casablanca Valley, Chile 2022, offer price £12.50, case price £150.00 Tropical fruit balanced with gentle acidity and a touch of oak. Very well made.
Gouguenheim Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve, Valle de Uco 2019, offer price £12.95, case price £155.40
Well-structured with hints of leather, chocolate and spice: a wine that demands roast beef.
Mixed case price £143.80 – a saving of £31.59 (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 24th June 2025
SPORT
JIM WHITE
HARRY POTTER’S OXFORD BLUES
One of the crucibles of British sporting history is near my house.
At the Oxford University Parks for nigh on 150 years, you can pass springtime watching first-class cricket for free. The county sides come here to warm up for the season by thrashing student bowlers to all parts. I once saw Kevin Pietersen hit a six of such steepling enormity, the ball may well still be orbiting the earth at the tail end of one of Elon Musk’s satellite trains.
In the summer, you can watch gentlemen and ladies in pristine white playing leisurely tennis on the dozen or so grass courts, or become absorbed in a croquet match on the immaculate lawns. Just past the croquet field is an American football pitch, where the university side plays gridiron fixtures every Sunday in a whirl of grunt and smash. There are football pitches, rugby fields, lacrosse and hockey. Every Saturday morning in term time, as the park runners wheeze by, the university frisbee team arc plastic discs over improbable distances.
In the Parks the other day, I saw something that marks it out as a laboratory of sporting invention.
Undergraduates were throwing balls at each other, trying to throw another ball through hoops placed at each end of the playing area, while at the same time chasing after a bloke with a tennis ball in a sock tucked into his belt.
The competitors were doing this with a three-foot-long pole held between their legs. It looked, to the untrained eye, like a sophisticated undergraduate prank.
Except, to judge from the intensity of the challenges and the excitement of a crowd of several dozen, this sport was taken rather seriously.
There was even, at one point, an off-the-ball scuffle over claims of a breach of rules so arcane as to be entirely incomprehensible to the uninitiated.
Not that there are many of the uninitiated. This is a game based on the one played by the hero at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books. This was the annual Varsity Quidditch match, a contest between Oxford and Cambridge that dates back to 2013. Because none of the participants is a wizard, it is properly known as muggle quidditch, to differentiate it from the sport played on flying broomsticks in the books.
Or at least it used to be called that. In 2020, the sport’s international governing body (it’s played in the US, Canada and
Germany) changed its name to quadball. This was done, apparently, to distance participants from J K Rowling’s views on transgender issues.
This is all very laudable – except the game that was being played with such gusto in the Parks was invented by Rowling to the last detail. The terminology is all hers. The players were throwing around ‘quaffles’ and ‘bludgers’ and chasing after ‘the snitch’.
The rules, albeit with the marginal adjustment that participants were running around on grass rather than flying on broomsticks, are exactly those laid down in her books. If the governing body find her opinions to be so distasteful, the only way they can properly distance themselves from her is by not playing the sport at all and taking up frisbee.
But then, baffling as it may be to us oldies, these are the complicated times we live in.
So good luck to those young lads and lasses and those somewhere in between, who were enjoying themselves playing what looked like Quidditch, sounded like Quidditch, but is actually – and we must all be strict on this – called quadball.
MOTORING ALAN JUDD TAXING TIMES
An RAC member of more than 40 years’ standing recently noticed his automatic renewal leap from £402 to £553.
He checked the RAC website and saw that if he resigned and rejoined, he would pay £110. The RAC tried fobbing him off with excuses such as postcode, number of claims, RAC excellence etc.
They then said the £110 offer was a 40-per-cent discounted introductory rate for newcomers. They eventually offered a ‘special discounted rate’ of £277.
It’s always worth challenging breakdown service and insurance renewals. This year, I got £100 off my AA renewal and £200 off my insurance by adding my wife to the policy. It seems counterintuitive, but presumably it’s because my wife is 15 years younger and they assume this doddering old fool won’t be doing all the driving. Meanwhile, the lust of governments to tax us whenever we move is unceasing. Local-authority parking charges are rising well beyond the rate of inflation –not just for parking on your street or when you go into town, but also for when you’ve driven to work.
The Workplace Parking Levy (not tax, note – weasel words such as ‘levy’ sound less grasping) was introduced in 2000 to
enable councils to charge businesses for providing staff parking. An early adopter was Nottingham, which in 2022 was charging businesses £428 per year per parking place. Newer schemes elsewhere are charging more than £500, with fourfifths of employers passing costs onto staff.
Health premises, emergency services, Blue Badge places and businesses with fewer than ten places are mostly exempt.
Justification for these measures is usually presented as environmental –reducing congestion, pollution and rush-hour journey times. The money raised is supposed to be invested in improved local public transport.
Fair enough: we all welcome cleaner air and less congestion, and many, though by no means all, would benefit from better public transport.
But fining vehicles or their owners isn’t the best way of reducing emissions. We are approaching critical mass of electric vehicles (EVs), and improvements in battery range and charging provision are encouraging take-up.
We’re due a flood of cheap Chinese imports, and most drivers will prefer EVs once they have them.
Yet it’s still government policy to ban new combustion engines by 2030 (previously 2035) – figures plucked from the air by politicians ignorant of the consequences – and to insist on crippling percentages of EV production. Both measures are unnecessary because the shift to EVs is happening anyway.
The other justification is to raise money for local authorities struggling with welfare bills. Some 85 per cent of the funds of my local authority are spent on 15 per cent of the population, largely on social care (hence more potholes).
But imposing punitive motoring taxes isn’t the answer. One nearby town has increased parking charges while the other, in another authority, offers free parking. One is dying on its feet, with empty premises and charity shops on reduced rates, while the other flourishes.
The nearest large town and significant employer are 12 miles away. Wages are generally low and if you work there, you’re compelled to drive, since we have limited public transport. And if, in addition, you’re clobbered for £500 for workplace parking, you might decide you’re better off not working at all.
Movement creates wealth, and it’s nonsense to overtax the moving part of the population to subsidise non-movers, if that means there’s less tax to go round. More cars equal more movement equals more wealth equals more tax income.
Simple, innit?
Matthew Webster: Digital Life
Watch out, there’s a troll about
Throughout this country, there are thousands, if not millions, of very small websites that serve local communities, sports clubs, model-train enthusiasts and the like. They are often operated by volunteers as a service or a pastime.
I run a couple myself: one for a small charity, and one as a repository for village information, minutes of meetings and so on.
Since 17th March, these (and all other websites in the UK) have become subject to the Online Safety Act (OSA), which has some fairly terrifying teeth.
The websites especially at risk are those that allow users to post unmoderated comments or discussions.
Without the website-owner’s noticing, these can be used for nefarious purposes
Webwatch
For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk
birdfood.co.uk/webcams/barn-owlwebcam
Watch a pair of barn owls raise their brood.
historichouses.org
Visit many privately owned houses, castles and gardens.
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
– even criminal activity – and could expose children to harm.
So, from now on, all such UK-based websites need to have conducted an appropriate risk assessment (dread phrase) and show they can quickly remove such unpleasantness.
Websites that fail to comply can face fines of up to £18m or 10 per cent of their global annual turnover.
Clearly the main targets are the big sites – Facebook, Instagram and others – but every site, however small, is subject to the OSA.
The intentions of the Act are unimpeachable, although it’s clumsily drawn. It refers to ‘users’ and ‘significant number of UK users’, without defining those terms. It also probably applies to private groups within WhatsApp – even though, as an encrypted service, WhatsApp can’t see what’s being posted on its own system.
In the face of this, it’s not surprising that many small websites, and some large ones, have taken the safe route and closed down their open forums. Some sites that are only discussion groups have shut down completely.
An example is LFGSS.com, which exists simply to provide a forum for enthusiastic racing cyclists to share views. The chap who runs it (at a personal financial loss) has decided not to take the risk of a fine – and who can blame him?
I find myself in two minds about all this. One of the benefits of the internet is the opportunity to engage with like-
minded people from all over the world, who might help you solve a problem or point you in the right direction. The trouble is that means an online forum is also open to disagreeable types and trolls.
We have had some experience of this at The Oldie. Many years ago, when the internet and The Oldie were both young, a section of the website encouraged readers to interact with one another. If you’ve ever been to an Oldie event, you’ll know what a charming and civilised crowd they are. What could go wrong?
Very soon, however, it was colonised by an unpleasant group of outsiders, who were not just rude, but unwelcoming and aggressive. The magazine quickly and quite properly shut down the whole section. It was a shame, but it shows how difficult it is to control these things.
Websites with open forums need to realise that they are publishers, whether they like it or not, and accept the liabilities that come with that status.
This means monitoring and approving all submissions to these forums before publication, just as our Editor publishes letters from readers only if they are legal and proper.
My instinct is that if you run a website that has a forum that allows the users a free hand, you are laying yourself open to trouble.
If you have the resources to monitor every post before it is published, all well and good. If not, you should perhaps consider closing down the forum until the situation becomes plainer and the law is clarified by the courts.
Neil Collins: Money Matters
Trump’s nemesis? The stock market
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has these big, friendly letters on the cover: DON’T PANIC.
Panic is nearly always the worst thing to do in investment, as in life. By the time you have decided to try to retrieve something from the wreckage of your portfolio, it will be too late. Worse, you risk selling at the bottom, just as the clever money is deciding that the fall has been overdone and prices are about to bounce.
Had you reacted to the dire
commentaries as share prices round the world were poleaxed by Donald Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs, you would have risked this classic mistake.
At such moments, when all around are screaming ‘sell’, you should be buying, or at the very least, sitting it out. The world is not coming to an end. Market plunges provide opportunities for the brave.
The biggest three-day fall in recent history was the 26-per-cent slump after Black Wednesday in 1987. In 2008, the
S&P 500, America’s leading index, lost 14 per cent in the banking crisis. Five years ago, Covid knocked off 12 per cent.
On a long-run chart of share prices, none of these is more than a blip.
‘Liberation Day’ cost 11 per cent.
Ah, but it’s different this time. Prices are still going down. Trump is not so much changing the rules as ripping up the rulebook. He seems to be able to do whatever he wants, and nobody can stop him.
This is what one J P Morgan analyst
said: ‘Here’s the interesting thing about the stock market: it cannot be indicted, arrested or deported; it cannot be intimidated, threatened or bullied; it has no gender, ethnicity or religion; it cannot be fired, furloughed or defunded; it cannot be primaried before the next midterm elections; and it cannot be seized, nationalised or invaded.
‘It’s the ultimate voting machine, reflecting prospects for earnings growth,
stability, liquidity, inflation, taxation and predictable rule of law.’
The President is probably at the peak of his powers now. He believes he can rewrite the rule of law for his own ends, but his strategy also depends on being able to borrow from the market in US Treasury debt. At some point, if the tariff wars continue to rage, the price demanded by investors will be too painful for the administration to contemplate –and the policy becomes unsustainable.
Politicians may propose, but the markets decide. The Ancient Greeks defined hubris as an act that disrupted the balance of society or nature. It was invariably followed by Nemesis, the goddess of divine retribution, exacting vengeance on the individual. Not much change in 2,000 years, after all.
Neil Collins was the Daily Telegraph’s City Editor
The palaces and gardens of Granada and Malaga
30th October to 5th November 2025 With Jo Wivell of Insider’s
In 1828, Washington Irving visited magical Granada. At first sight, he described it as ‘a most picturesque and beautiful city, situated in one of the loveliest landscapes that I have ever seen’. He subsequently wrote Tales of the Alhambra. The final resting place for King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, Granada can rightly claim to be the most romantic of Spain’s cities.
As well as visiting Malaga, we’ll go to Antequera and the Alpujarra region. We will stay at the central NH Granada and the 18th-century mansion house, the Palacio Solecio, in Malaga. This trip is a feast for the senses: breathtaking Moorish settlements, lavish gardens, fountains and waterways, rugged vines cooled by the Mediterranean breeze, excellent food and wine. And we have a true insider in Jo Wivell of Insider’s Travel.
ITINERARY – please go to www. theoldie.co.uk/courses-tours
Thursday 30th October – arrival Depart Gatwick at 9.50am on EasyJet flight EJU8079; arrive Malaga at 1.45pm. Transfer to Granada, where we check into the hotel and take our walking tour of the ‘new’ city. We visit the city’s 16th-century cathedral and the Royal Chapel, which houses Isabella’s impressive collection of paintings. Dinner at Cuchara de Carmela.
Above: Alhambra Palace
Right: Malaga
Friday 31st October – the Alhambra and flamenco
A guided visit to the Alhambra Palace, one of the greatest expressions of Islamic art and science in the world. We continue to García Lorca Park where we visit its small museum. In the evening, we enjoy flamenco with dinner, on the San Cristóbal hill looking straight across to the Alhambra.
Travel
Sunday 2nd November – wine in the Sierra de Malaga
We head straight for the Sierra de Malaga to visit Bodegas Bentomiz, where we taste new wines from ancient local grapes. It’s known for its excellent cuisine as well as its wines, and we have lunch here before driving to our next hotel. Free afternoon before dinner at the classic Bodegas Pimpi.
Monday 3rd Nov – Malaga
Saturday 1st November – All Saints Day in the Alpujarras
We head south to the Nasrid Garden, one of the finest examples of Hispano-Muslim Gardens in Spain, then up to the Alpujarras region, renowned for its landscapes and charming whitewashed villages. We visit Pampaneira, nestled in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and the village of Capileira, before returning to Granada.
This morning, we are guided through Malaga old town where the Phoenicians, Romans, Moors and Christians have all left their mark. After lunch, we visit the Picasso museum. Dinner at the Buenavista Gastrobar. Tuesday 4th November – Antequera North to Antequera, the ‘crossroads’ of Andalucia. We visit the UNESCO World Heritage Antequera Dolmens Site, the 14th-century Moorish fortress, the Alcazaba and the Museo de la Ciudad de Antequera. Back to Malaga for our superb farewell dinner at Los Patios de Beatas.
Wednesday 5th November – Museo Carmen Thyssen and home
We visit the Museo Carmen Thyssen. After lunch, on to the airport for our 4.55pm flight from Malaga to Gatwick with Easyjet, EZY807, arriving at 6.45pm.
HOW TO BOOK: Call 01225 427311 or please email Katherine at reservations@theoldie.co.uk. Price per person: £2,995, which includes all accommodation with breakfast, all meals and drinks with meals, all entrance fees and gratuities and the services of the tour guide. Single supplement: £700. A non-refundable deposit of £630 will be required, with the full balance due on 30th June 2025.
Reed bunting
by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd
In the lockdown in early May, five years ago, I chatted with a patrolling Hyde Park policeman as we stood by the reedbed near the Serpentine Lido.
The summer migration of birds from Africa was at its height. We were listening to the newly arrived reed warblers and watching swallows, martins and swifts hawking for insects over the water beyond.
Having failed to spot a sand martin, the policeman went on his way, with the parting advice that he had seen a reed bunting (Emberiza schoeniclus) in the reedbed and hoped I would do the same. I later did, to my delight.
It was a male, conspicuous for its black-and-white head in the breeding season. When the breeding season is over, the black disappears, the white collar diminishes and the throat turns grey. Reed buntings are resident in Britain and Ireland, but there is a summer and winter migration, most visible in Norfolk, these birds arriving from the Continent.
Those of us old enough to remember the now rare calls of cuckoos and turtle doves as inseparable from a country day in May will not be surprised to learn that in 1972 there were more than twice the number of reed buntings as in today’s estimated 250,000 territories.
This makes them the second most populous of UK buntings after the yellowhammer (700,000 territories).
That they have burgeoned comparatively in eastern and northeastern England and southern Scotland, and have declined in southern England, chimes with personal experience.
Brought up in the Scottish Borders, I saw them for the first time in the 1970s on visits to my parents-in-law in Kent.
As their name suggests, marshland is their habitat; drainage to increase farmland has been to their detriment.
This began in the 17th century and has continued remorselessly. The deleterious
effect of drainage on nature is highlighted by the fate of the once ubiquitous and wet-loving black poplar tree, now threatened with extinction – male black poplars outnumbering females by 7,000 to 600. As black poplars dominate Constable’s emblematic Hay Wain, their possible demise is rightly seen as a national SOS.
Reed buntings have proved more adaptable. Like similar seed-eating species, their chicks are dependent on the protein of insects. They forage and nest in oilseed-rape fields, popular since the 1970s, rather than in cereal crops.
They can also nest in conifer plantations and will visit bird tables, to feed on white millet (their favourite), niger and sunflower seed.
The result is that, unlike the yellowhammer, red-listed because of a declining population, the reed bunting has been promoted to amber since 2009, thanks to its modest northern increase.
May is the month of the dawn chorus. Singing is not the reed bunting’s forte. Its monotonous ditty – ‘Well, well, never’ –is described by Mark Cocker (Birds Britannica) as ‘among the least worthy’ of a songbird.
Travel
Acouple sit together, sunglasses on in the bright sunshine, evident even in the black-and-white photograph. He is handsome and beaming beneath his smartly clipped moustache. She has a cigarette dangling from the fingers of one graceful hand, smiling too as she looks into the camera.
They look as glamorous as a pair of Hollywood actors – he has the look of a young David Niven, she of Ava Gardner.
They are Walter Walker, then a young lieutenant in 1/8th Gurkhas, and Beryl Johnston, and they were my maternal grandparents. The year is 1938 and they have just become engaged.
They aren’t in California but in Shillong, Assam, where my greatgrandparents, Edward ‘Ted’ Johnston, a jovial Irishman, and his wife, Madeleine, lived, on a tea estate called Pabhoi. Ted was the manager.
I had always longed to see Assam. Not just because of the family tea connections but because it is one of the less-travelled areas of India. More remote than Rajasthan, it’s lushly beautiful with rice fields, ornate Hindu temples, wildliferich national parks and, on clear days, the distant Himalayas.
This year, I finally got there, travelling by luxury riverboat up the Brahmaputra
River which flows through Assam. After two nights in Kolkata – Calcutta back in 1938, when my grandparents got married in its cathedral, St John’s – we flew to Jorhat, Assam.
The boat, the ABN (Assam Bengal Navigation company) Sukapha, has 12 double cabins and a sundeck of gleaming wood, with a bar serving every cocktail you could shake a cocktail stick at.
For seven days, we travelled upstream, visiting colourful villages that were so unused to tourists that we became the attraction. In Kaziranga National Park, we saw dozens of one-horned Indian rhinos thrillingly close, as well as elephants, deer, turtles, wild boar and brilliant bird life.
The highlight was a visit to Haroocharai tea plantation near Jorhat. The owner, Mr J P S Bhamra, showed us the rows of glossy green tea bushes where jungle had once flourished.
In 1823, Robert Bruce of the East India Company was given a hot leafy brew when visiting the Singpho tribe of Upper Assam. It tasted similar to the tea drunk in Britain, which came – as all tea did then – from China.
Bruce learned that these leaves came from trees that grew freely in Assam’s fertile soil. Excitedly, he sent a sample to his brother, Charles, a herbalist in
Tea for two hundred years
Annbel Venning went to Assam for ancestral research – and the perfect cuppa
Calcutta. A laboratory test confirmed that it was indeed tea. This new plant was named Camellia sinensis var assamica, differentiating it from Camellia sinensis (sinensis meaning from China).
Assam tea produces larger leaves and a stronger flavour, making Assam tea the
Annabel’s grandparents, Walter Walker and Beryl Johnston, Assam, 1938
finest in the world. Drinking a cup made from Haroocharai leaves, brewed by Mr Bhamra himself, I could only agree. It is both aromatic and full-bodied. The Mouton Rothschild of tea.
In the 1820s, Britain was importing 7,000 tons of tea from China every year. If tea could be grown within its own empire, this was good news for the balance of trade with China. The Opium Wars had been another – somewhat problematic – attempt to balance it.
A tea-plant nursery was established, the bushes thriving in Assam’s fertile soil and humid climate. In 1838, the first shipment of Assam tea was auctioned in London, and labourers were set to work hacking more tea gardens out of the jungle.
By 1885, there were 115,000 hectares under cultivation. Today, there are more than 300,000 producing 680 million kg of tea a year. Camellia assamica was transplanted to Kenya, Uganda, and Sri Lanka. Its stronger taste meant it proved more popular with the British working classes than Chinese tea.
Tea-planting became another colonial
career. My other great-grandfather, Walter’s father, Arthur, began as a junior planter in the 1890s, graduating to manage a tea garden called Tara near Dibrugarh in the east of Assam – still the centre of Indian tea today – until ill health forced him to return to England 1913 with his wife and their three children. They settled in Tiverton, Devon, had three more children, and named their suburban villa Tara after their Assam home.
While their two older sons, Edward and Walter, joined the Indian Army, Peter, their fourth child, followed his father’s footsteps to Assam, becoming a junior planter in 1933. Then war intervened; he joined up and was captured by the Japanese in February 1942.
When writing a book about the Walker family’s fortunes and travails in the Second World War, I tried to discover whether the Tara and Pabhoi tea gardens still existed – but drew a blank.
When I mentioned the names of these tea estates to Mr Bhamra and showed him photographs of my family in Assam, he was delighted, informing me that Tara and Pabhoi are still working tea estates, albeit now owned by big tea conglomerates. His is one of the few remaining independent tea gardens.
Mr Bhamra and his fellow planters face some of the same problems as their predecessors: flies eating the leaves, leopards and tigers ‘invading’ what was their jungle home. One of Mr Bhamra’s dogs had recently been killed by a leopard. It reminded me of the family story of Peter shooting a tiger that had sprung from the bushes and scalped a picker.
A tea-picker’s life was hard and ill-paid then, and remains so today. In the 1920s and 1930s, there were strikes and riots by pickers struggling to survive on wages that were pitifully low and often late or withheld. Sometimes planters were murdered in their bungalows.
Today, wages remain low – although accommodation, hospitals and schools are provided – resulting in riots and strikes. Managers must also contend with the catastrophic effects of extreme weather and a declining global thirst for tea, as coffee edges out the cuppa.
With increasing literacy, few young people want to follow their picker parents into the tea rows. They want office jobs. Bangladeshi immigrants, working for lower pay, are steadily replacing the ‘tea tribes’ who picked Assam tea for generations.
British planters remained in Assam
following Indian independence in 1947, playing polo and getting drunk at the club, just as before the war. Some bachelor planters maintained the abusive ‘custom’ of choosing a young female picker to live in their bungalow as their ‘old woman’ – in reality often a teenager – and having children with her, only to abandon her when he married a British wife or retired to England.
The retiring managers were replaced
by Indians until just a few planters lingered, like characters in Paul Scott’s Booker Prize-winning novel Staying On (1977). By the 1970s, they had all gone from Assam.
But they left their mark. I have photographs of Walter and Beryl at Shillong Golf Course and the Jorhat Racecourse. These places still exist. So does Dibrugarh Club, from where my Uncle Peter would be sent home late at night, draped over his pony if he had overdone the whisky.
Peter returned to Assam after the war, keen to ‘stay on’ too – but his mental and physical health had been destroyed in the Japanese camps. So he returned to Britain.
Having had a taste of Assam and its tea, I am eager to return, to visit the family tea gardens, and see more of the beguiling beauty of north-east India.
Seeing it by boat made it relaxing and peaceful. No packing or unpacking. No long road trips. Just excellent food, great company, sunsets on the sundeck, picnics on sandbanks and being pampered like maharajahs and maharanis by the crew. It was a wrench to return to dry land.
I went home with a bag of tea from Haroocharai. And now, back home, each time I brew a cup of chai, I am transported back to the jade-green tea gardens of Assam and the tranquillity of the broad Brahmaputra.
Annabel Venning wrote To War With the Walkers: One Family’s Extraordinary Story of the Second World War (Hodder). She travelled with Sampan Travel
Harvesters on a tea plantation in Jorhat, Assam
Overlooked Britain
John Evelyn’s menagerie
Wotton House, Surrey, home to the famous diarist –and the delightful Tortoise House
lucinda lambton
A temple for tortoises, no less, was built in a small garden in Surrey in the 19th century. It was designed by William John Evelyn, kinsman to John Evelyn, the famed writer, horticulturalist and diarist.
It has an Ionic portico of four bays on the ground floor. From the open upper floor, once embellished with Corinthian pilasters, you could ‘view’ the tiny creatures disporting themselves in the pool below.
By the late-19th century, the Tortoise House had become a rotting ruin. In the 20th, it was to be transformed into the most refined spot for taking tea. By the late-20th, it had become a ruin once again.
The wrecked temple was well and truly wrecked, living on in a somewhat parlous state. For a time, it was leased to the Home Office as the Fire Service College.
When I saw it in 1984, niches had survived, housing fragments of statuary, along with a black-and-white marble floor. It was still known as the Tortoise House.
Then, at the turn of the 21st century, it was restored to its original temple state, although at only half its original height.
This was all thanks to Hayley
Conference Centres, who leased the place in 2000. The house is now a hotel.
Wotton House, next to the Terrapin Temple, was built by the Evelyns in the early-17th century and extended and altered over the next 250 years.
The great polymath John Evelyn (1620-1706) was born at Wotton and lived here throughout his childhood. He was a scholar, connoisseur, bibliophile and town-planner, even writing of air pollution in the 16th century.
All was not straightforward in his childhood. He wrote in the first volume
Left: Wotton House, engraved by M J Starling in 1860.
Below: Tortoise House, 1830
of his famed diary that, ‘in regard of my mother’s weakness or rather custom of persons of quality’, he had been sent to live with a wet nurse until he was 14 months old.
In 1694, as his ageing elder brother had no heirs, the septuagenarian John Evelyn moved into his beloved birthplace, and he lived there until he died in 1706. The house, he wrote in his diary, ‘is so large and ancient and so sweetly environed with those delicious streams and venerable woods, as in the judgement of strangers as well as Englishmen, it may be compared to one of the most pleasant seats in the nation and most tempting for a great person and a wanton purse to render it conspicuous’.
Of his library of some 4,000 books, he wrote that he looked upon it ‘with the reverence of a temple’. His watchwords were from 1 Thessalonians 5:21: ‘Omnia explorate; meliora retinete’ – ‘Explore all things; retain the better ones.’
He had applied his gardening genius to deal with Wotton. At one point, he laid down instructions for ‘digging down a mountain’. He created an artificially terraced hill which survives to this day.
Then there was the pool, later used by the tortoises, fed by one of the tributaries of the River Tillingbourne.
It was all part of Wotton’s ‘water in abundance’, in a garden thought to be the first in England to be designed in the Italian style.
Evelyn’s pride in the place knew no bounds. In his diary, he wrote, ‘I should speak much of the gardens, fountains and groves that adorn it, were they not as generally known to be among the most natural, and the most magnificent that England afforded; and which indeed gave one of the first examples of that elegancy, since so much in vogue, and followed in the managing of their waters, and other elegancies of that nature.’
In 1830, Evelyn’s kinsman George Evelyn died from a wound received years before at the Battle of Waterloo. He left his 26-year-old wife a widow, with six boys aged between six years and six weeks to raise by herself at Wotton.
The eldest, William John, was to live there all his life. An idealistic, poetical and painfully shy figure who delighted in natural history, he assembled animals by the score, as he recorded in Helen Evelyn’s History of the Evelyn Family:
‘There were wild boars, Indian cattle, kangaroos, a zebra, a vulture, chameleons, a seagull and various tortoises.’ This is the first surviving mention of the inhabitants of the Tortoise House. Hurray!
The kangaroos, we further read, were let loose on Leith Hill, where they flourished for years ‘until gradually exterminated by ruthless individuals’.
There was a delightful account of an escaped kangaroo in a 2003 lecture by Angus Trumble, most suitably in the National Library of Australia.
William John raised the alarm to catch the creature. Trumble reported:
‘Evelyn called out the local hunt, replete with huntsmen, a pack of beagles, whippers-in and so forth. The kangaroo
sought refuge in a place called the Duke of Norfolk’s Copse, but was flushed out and cornered at Abinger Rectory.’
An anonymous contemporary report of the incident declared:
‘The animal’s peculiar mode of progression was exhibited in a style which astonished the field – a singular succession of leaps carrying it over the ground at a rate perfectly startling.
‘Those who were well-mounted alone were enabled to go the pace and they speedily found themselves at the top of
‘There were wild boars, Indian cattle, kangaroos, a zebra’
Leith Hill, where the kangaroo took to the road, and for about a mile and a half they all dashed along, “the field” rapidly augmenting in numbers as they proceeded in their novel chase.’
In 1856, Nathaniel Hawthorne went to Wotton. An extract from his English Notebooks records his curious impression of William John Evelyn as he was showing off his bloodstained prayer book, used by Charles I at his execution. What a ghastly possession!
The Evelyns should be credited for building what is unique the world over, his Tortoise House.
What a transformation – from the looming ruin to the pretty-as-a-picture little neoclassical temple with a garden of its own. What more enchanting ornamentation could be found in England’s Home Counties?
Lucinda Lambton is author of Palaces for Pigs: Animal Architecture and Other Beastly Buildings
Wotton House, built by the Evelyns in the 17th century, and its Italianate gardens
On the Road
Lord of the Dance
Wayne Sleep has been dancing for over 70 years. He tells Louise Flind about witchy Princess Diana and what Nureyev called the hardest dance move
Is there anything you can’t leave home without?
Definitely music – anything classical. I need to go to sleep.
Do you travel light?
If my husband could get four suitcases on a plane, he would. I’m minimal because I’ve toured the world.
What’s your favourite destination?
Performing in Japan, and India, when I did The Real Marigold Hotel.
What are your earliest childhood holiday memories?
I used to eat raw potatoes when we went camping on Dartmoor.
Did you dance as a child?
I entertained when I was still crawling. When I was three, at my auntie’s wedding, I found a stage for the first time in my life. My cousin Barry and I found a basket full of props and wigs and I put on a plaited wig and sang A Mother’s Lament (Your Baby Has Gone Down the Plughole).
When I was five, I joined lots of girls and two boys in a dance class. Then we moved up to the North East, and I continued my classes there. And I saw my first film with Gene Kelly, Singin’ in the Rain.
Were any of your family dancers?
My mother had a wonderful soprano voice.
Did you always want to do ballet?
I wanted to be Gene Kelly.
Did anyone try and put you off, saying you weren’t tall enough?
My mother tried to put me off! ‘We don’t mind a song-and-dance man, but a ballet dancer – no way for a boy.’ I was the same size as everybody else when I was eight.
And later on?
None of their f***ing business…
What was your first big break?
Getting a scholarship to the Royal Ballet School when I was 12.
Which company did you most enjoy working with?
The Royal Ballet. Sir Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan choreographed parts for me –what a thrill.
What was Princess Diana like when you danced with her?
Witchy, fun, furious, shy… but, when on, she just lit up like a spotlight.
What’s the hardest move to do in ballet? Mikhail Baryshnikov had just defected from Russia, and came to London to guest artist at the Royal Ballet. I befriended him and, as a thank-you, he taught me a step. It was double the amount of the air you do when you split your legs going round the stage, but he added to go up in the air, and rise even higher to flip again and do another turn. A lot of people can do it now but nobody except me and him could do it then. Rudolph Nureyev named it a double motherf***er.
Who was the greatest dancer you ever saw or danced with?
Baryshnikov could do any style. Rudolph was a spectacle in himself.
Who was your favourite dance partner? Diana, and Lesley Collier with the Royal Ballet.
How have you coped with injuries? If you’re rehearsing a new ballet, you get a repetitive strain and that’s what does it. I had a total hip replacement. I went on tour with Cabaret, where I didn’t have to dance much, but it got so bad, I was arrested when I was walking to the matinée. This Black Maria stopped, and
the policemen said, ‘Are you all right, sir?’ and tried to smell my breath [he cackles]. When they knew who I was, they gave me a police escort to the stage door.
What have been the highlights of your career?
I just thank God every day that I’m still here, and I’ve got so much to give still. I’m going to do a one-man show at some small theatres in London, which I’m putting together at the moment.
And the lowlights?
When my mum got separated from me because she became a Jehovah’s Witness and wanted me to join and I wouldn’t.
You’ve danced, acted and choreographed. What do you see yourself as?
An entertainer.
At 76, do you still dance?
I do tap at the end of An Audience with Wayne Sleep
Do you miss ballet?
No. I was in the Royal Ballet 18 years.
Do you identify with Billy Elliot?
Yes, very much so. Lee Hall said that he’d read my first biography to get ideas for Billy Elliot
Where did you go on your honeymoon?
I was on tour with Cabaret. But we go to Spain a lot to see José’s family. I love Granada. I love flamenco.
Are you brave with different food?
I’ll eat anything except kidneys and liver – that’s probably why I didn’t grow…
Strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?
Sea slugs in Hong Kong.
Do you have a go at the local language?
I’ve been married 39 years [to José] and all I can say is Hola…
The Wayne Sleep Foundation supports young people in the performing arts
1 How Trump perhaps was officially installed exhausted, surrounded by depravity (5,2)
5 One’s chasing one’s inheritance for a start (7)
9 Gather it’s good without fat (5)
10 Poem about variety actor’s first drink (9)
11 Sorry seeing a good quote withdrawn after game (10)
12 A slight speech defect (4)
14 Christening present from pope – a lost son reformed? (7,5)
18 Conservative coalition’s organised 100, attacking established beliefs (12)
21 Perfect sweetener – almost (4)
22 To flee current 27 is permitted (10)
25 Flirtatious woman eating right food (9)
26 Bought on the way back when seeing such garments (5)
27 Pressure unusually errant husband? (7)
28 Positive hospital X-ray developed about new part of body (7)
Down
Genius crossword 452 EL SERENO
1 Important communication (6)
2 Church group attached to old cat (6)
3 Idiot might see new pay cut work both ways (10)
4 Stoned female lifting popular award (5)
5 Pleased America imports refined oil flower (9)
6 Nearly dark, having lost time (4)
7 Horse from stable number one rearing (8)
8 Channelling energy repeatedly found in racehorses, perhaps (8)
13 Sanctimonious inspectors cutting a Vauxhall plant (10)
15 Maybe Stallone’s new style incorporates underwear range initially (9)
16 Drink that’s better after dark? (8)
17 Private parking needed in serious deluge (8)
19 Spoil playful cat (6)
20 Welsh county that was Alfred’s domain (6)
23 Standing to support island church, freeze (3,2)
24 Pull a face seeing piece about Republican (4)
How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk Deadline: 30th May 2025 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.
Runners-up: Sue Dyson, Stockport; Brian Bailey, Sheffield
Declarer was very proud of his avoidance technique on this month’s deal, kindly shown to me by Shireen Mohandes of RealBridge. Plan the play in 4
on ♦ K lead.
Dealer South Neither Vunerable
bidding
(1) Very marginal.
Declarer won the ace of diamonds, drew trumps in two rounds finishing in hand, then led up his second diamond. West naturally hopped up with the queen and switched to a heart. If declarer had finessed, he would have gone two down, East winning the king and promptly switching to the queen of clubs to secure three tricks in the suit, with declarer’s king squashed. However, declarer did not need to risk the heart finesse – in fact his game was now 100-per-cent secure, regardless of the position of the king of hearts. He rose with dummy’s ace, shed his second heart on the promoted knave of diamonds, then led the queen of hearts. If East had played a low heart, declarer planned to discard a club from hand. Even if this lost to West’s king, the defence could win no more than the ace of clubs (with declarer poised to discard a second club on dummy’s promoted knave of hearts).
Actually, East covered the queen of hearts with the king, so declarer could ruff, cross to dummy in spades and drop a club on the knave of hearts. He led a club towards the king for his overtrick and was relaxed when this lost to West’s ace. Ten tricks made. But here’s the twist. West would have defeated by the unnatural play of ducking the second diamond. Declarer is welcome to score dummy’s knave but he cannot drop a heart, so must lose a heart and three clubs. ANDREW ROBSON
Competition TESSA CASTRO
IN COMPETITION No 318 you were invited to write a poem called The Fair Con Connell began with Michael Henchard’s sale of his wife for five guineas in The Mayor of Casterbridge. David Thompson enjoyed the Frankfurt Book Fair despite everything. Robert Best celebrated the millions who came to the Chicago World Fair ‘to ride the first Ferris Wheel, the first travelator;/ See Columbus and General Davis, two alligators.’ Alan Clews deliberately defied orthography: ‘Last knight I took a taxi, you won’t believe the fair./ The numbers on the metre, I had to sit and stair…’. Commiserations to them and to Alan Bradwell, Anthony Young, Roger Farrance, Rob McMahon, Denise Norman, Stefan Badham, Jenny Jones, Bob Morrow, Mary Leedham-Green, D A Prince, Daphne Lester and Ian Nalder, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Caroline Davis.
They always make a fuss about the fair. One day it’s there – a lot of fun –And then it’s gone. All right – the grass is brown
And worn where dodgems spun but then It does grow back again. I just don’t care. The planning applications that I fear Are for things permanent: brick, stone. The Council’s own – a blockhouse on the Green:
Substation, café, loo (just one). ‘Don’t worry, it’ll never happen here.’
The campaign and inquiry took a year: The press, the sleepless nights, despair, The paperwork! We won. And then I hear ‘I said they’d never build it, dear.
Again we must complain about the fair!’
Caroline Davis
A town cathedralled into city, Chichester has gentle charm: The Georgian streets are sternly pretty, And all’s serenity and calm.
But wait, one night a rumbling sound Comes thundering through that settled air, As monster trailers gather round
To bring – for just one day – Sloe Fair. Then showmen, with an ancient right To clear a fair-sized piece of ground, Will fill the site deep into night With blazing lights and pounding sound. Revels ended, cars re-fill This space in silent ordered rows; And Chichester again is still: Wild poetry replaced by prose.
Bill Webster
We showed our strength, Hooped a tin of soup, If lucky, won a fish.
But I could not win for you That giant teddy bear, Nor shake the sense Of being duped.
But why expect to win at pitch and toss? Why expect a profit, not a loss? Why have anything to show After the ice cream and candyfloss?
Now it’s all been put away, The tents, collapsed, Are pitched elsewhere.
Let’s say, at least, We had fun while we were there.
Adam Wattam
So, there’s Joseph Taylor, a-singing of his song,
When the young Percy Grainger, he happens along, Toting his new-fangled phonographic machine.
‘Nice little ditty,’ he thinks and waxes so keen,
He turns it into a lovely concert chorus, Which his composer mate, Frederick Delius,
Soon gets to hear – and blow me if it don’t inspire
‘An English Rhapsody’ to dear old Lincolnshire!
Who’d have thought it? Not him, not Joe Taylor –
Not his party piece, played by a full orchestra! But I heard it, meself, uptown – no words, maybe,
But the notes said it all: some young chap, full of glee, Rises with the lark (that was the flute, singing sweet)
And sets off – his dear one, expecting for to meet.
And meet her, he duly does, when he spies her, there –
His own true love, a-tripping down to him, at Brigg Fair!
I White
COMPETITION No 320 Despite everything, summer is coming. A poem, please, with the title Ripe, in any sense. Maximum 16 lines. We cannot accept any 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 320’, by Thursday 29th May.
Taking a Walk
Elegy for the Hadrian’s Wall sycamore
patrick barkham
It was supposedly spring when I set out for a walk to an absent monument.
The only seasonal hint was a lark, singing. Otherwise, the cold westerly and spitting rain gave it the flavour of a generic winter’s day.
Emperor Hadrian knew exactly where to begin his wall in 122AD, at the northern edge of his kingdom: along the natural ridge of the Whin Sill. Much of the time, these pointy cliffs running through Northumberland are a superb natural fortification. The implausibly neat and square Roman stone blocks are just the cherry on top.
I’m a fair-weather walker. Most of us who walk for pleasure are – it makes sense to pick and choose our conditions. But I was surprised to find it was so enjoyable to be out in inclement conditions, buffeted by gloriously fresh air.
I turned east to pick up the well-paved Hadrian’s Wall path, and climbed a steep bluff. ‘Jack-jack,’ cried 30 jackdaws circling above the rocks. It looked as if they were playing jackdaw football, circling and challenging each other, racing and rising into the westerly and then folding their wings and sailing to the back of the pack again.
A stroll along Hadrian’s Wall is a lovely ridge walk with expansive views across the countryside, low hills rolling away towards dark blocks of Kielder Forest to the north. Milecastle 39 was a neat square of stone foundations on the south side of the wall. Another brief, steep climb and suddenly, below me, was the Gap.
The path descended straight to a pale stump, all that was left of the Sycamore Gap tree after vandals, for reasons still unknown, took a chainsaw to it one stormy September night in 2023.
Over its 150-plus years growing as the sole tree in this conspicuous, U-shaped gap in the hills, the sycamore accumulated celebrity. Robin Hood, in the form of Kevin Costner, was in a famous scene here in the 1991 Hollywood film. In the Instagram era, the tree’s fame grew. Lovers proposed under its boughs, families picnicked here, and everyone got
their photo with the tree. It looks particularly photogenic silhouetted against dark, starry skies.
Its destruction caused an outpouring of grief. Next to the stump, now protected with a modest wooden fence, were small, painted stones. One showed the tree inside a heart. ‘Thanks for the memories,’ wrote Olivia, aged 11.
When I visited, the stump looked wet and forlorn, mottled with dirty cream and orange mould. But sycamore is a notoriously resilient tree, as anyone who has hacked back unwanted saplings in their garden knows. Since then, the stump has sprouted new shoots. If they come back this year, the tree will rapidly shoot up again – bushy, and not quite as photogenic, but defiantly alive.
The missing monument will return, laden with more meaning than ever.
I continued east, to the crump of distant gunfire from a military range. Below me was Crag Lough, a small lake of black water and white swans, which shone like jewels. Further along the ridge, among the rocks where sheep
couldn’t reach, grew dozens of trees: ash, holly, hawthorn and more sycamore, offspring of the Sycamore Gap tree.
As I reached Milecastle 38 and headed north to Hotbank Farm, the rain intensified. When I turned back west, facing the weather, the rain stung my face. It felt austerely good. I was soaked because I’d forgotten my waterproof trousers. My jacket had had one of those wash-in waterproof treatments – but they don’t work, do they.
Jumping floods, dodging a stream, I rejoined the lane and reached the Twice Brewed Inn. A sodden stroll is merely a momentary excursion into discomfort. It makes a pub at the finish even more pleasurable. Paradise is a warm bar after a cold, wet walk.
Start/finish at the Twice Brewed Inn, Bardon Mill, Hexham NE47 7AN. Turn north opposite the Sill Visitor Centre to join Hadrian’s Wall Path. Head east, turning north off path at Hotbank, before returning west on field paths to the north of the wall
19th to 21st September 2025
Set in one of the most beautiful towns on the south coast, a place rich in the history of maritime explorers, merchants –and the odd privateer!
All our events take place at the Flavel Arts Centre.
This year, we are presenting a wide range of speakers, genres and workshops to interest and delight festival-goers.
This year’s highlights
• A N Wilson (Goethe: His Faustian Life; Victoria) in conversation with Harry Mount
• John Suchet (The Last Waltz: The Strauss Dynasty and Vienna
• Rachel Joyce (The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry; Maureen Fry and the Angel of the North)
• Raynor Winn (The Salt Path; Landlines)
• And many more.
For the full programme, go to www.theflavel.org.uk
The Flavel, Flavel Place, Dartmouth, TQ6 9ND
Inner harbour, Dartmouth, South Devon
John Suchet
To advertise, contact Monty on 0203 8597093 or via email MontyZakheim@theoldie.co.uk scc rate £48+vat. The copy deadline for our next issue is 12th May 2025
To advertise, contact Monty on 0203 8597093 or via email MontyZakheim@theoldie.co.uk scc rate £48+vat. The copy deadline for our next issue is 12th May 2025
Sister’s ugly behaviour
QMy sister is in her mid-60s; I am 77. She clearly has mental-health problems, topped off with what can only be described as intermittent alcoholism. When sober, she is reclusive and unpredictable, other than loving dogs and hating her husband. When drunk, she’s aggressive and often violent. She has avoided prosecution, but only just. She will phone me when drunk, initially to slander her husband, inevitably leading to abusing me and my family. He avoids her by going out every night and fishing most weekends. He is a saint. Recently, I underwent an operation that necessitated taking very strong painkillers. Knowing I was likely to be in considerable discomfort, I asked her not to call me for a few days.
The day after my operation, she phoned at 1.30am, telling me she was in A&E after being beaten up. I panicked, tried to get out of bed and fell, injuring myself. I later found out she was lying.
This followed years of abuse and lies. I have now cut off all contact with her. She phones my friends, telling them how horrid I am to her. She lies about me in the vilest ways. I worry that if I confront her, I may lose my temper. Some people advise me to seek some form of relationship. I feel this would play into her hands.
I would welcome independent advice. Name and address supplied
AI hate suggesting cutting off from family members but, in this case, although there might be some vulnerable and unhappy person at the bottom of her personality, you can’t put up with this any more. It is too harmful for you. Just continue as you are – cutting off completely. I’m a sentimentalist, believing in the goodness of all of us
Ask Virginia
virginia ironside
‘underneath’ but, here, ‘underneath’ is too far down to access and you’d harm yourself if you were to try to sink an emotional lift shaft to access it. Keep in touch with her husband intermittently, if you can. Then he’ll know that if the worst comes to the worst, he can always contact you but I feel you’ve already been saintly enough. We’re not saints. We’re human beings. If we’re cut, we bleed.
Inheritance tactics
QMy mother was the eldest of eight children, all living in different parts of the country. When she died, all of them and all their offspring turned up for her funeral – the only time we were all in one place. Nothing had been moved from the house, everyone wanted something and most of them all wanted the same things. One of her sons-in-law proposed that an auction be held between the seven surviving siblings immediately after the wake, since they were unlikely all to come together again.
This was done. An auctioneer was appointed from the assembled in-laws, and a treasurer to note the bids and keep the book. Whatever anyone wanted, they bid for – pence if they were the only bidder; good sums of money if there were several bidders. At the end of the auction, the money ‘in the pot’ was divided equally between them all and no one could complain about not having got their hands on whatever it was they coveted.
I have never heard of a better way to divvy things up. One or two of the siblings came away with quite goodly sums, not having bid for much themselves.
G S, by email
AThe only problem is, of course, that the richer members of the family would have an advantage
Distribution Ltd, 2 East Poultry Avenue, London EC1A 9PT; www.seymour.co.uk
ISSN 0965-2507. Printed in England by
To order a print subscription, email theoldie@subscription.co.uk, or call 01858 438791, or write to The Oldie, Tower House, Sovereign Park, Market Harborough LE16 9EF. Print subscription rates for 12 issues: UK £51.50; Europe/Eire £58; USA/Canada £70; rest of world £69.
over the poorer ones. Still, it’s one way of divvying things up and couldn’t involve too much blame or resentment because the transaction would be purely financial.
The other way to divide things up would be by a roll of the dice. Feelings are irrational and can be incredibly strong. This might be a good way to try to lessen the impact and take some of the emotion out of the process.
But sadly it wouldn’t stop some people still feeling put out and upset if they didn’t get what they wanted.
My jury trial
QI have been asked to be on a jury. I have tried to get out of it, but it seems I can’t. My question is: what right have I to judge other people? It is tormenting me.
I feel so strongly that I’m almost prepared to go to prison for refusing.
J T, by email
AWho do you think you are? St Peter at the pearly gates? You are one of the people deciding whether a person is guilty not generally, but specifically. Did they steal the jewellery or not? Did they defraud the old lady or not? Yes or no. If you’re not sure, then you can’t find them guilty beyond reasonable doubt. A hung jury is quite a rare thing. You’ll probably find that the answer is pretty obvious.
And, if you find the prisoner guilty, this one verdict doesn’t necessarily say anything about them as a person – just about the particular crime they’ve been accused of. Try to relax.
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.
To buy a digital subscription for £29.99 or a single issue for £2.99, go to the App Store on your tablet or mobile and search for ‘The Oldie’.
All rights of reproduction are reserved in respect of all articles, drawings, sketches etc published in The Oldie in all parts of the world. Reproduction or imitation of any of these without the express prior written consent of the publisher is forbidden.
The Oldie is available in audio and e-text format for the benefit of blind and partially sighted readers through RNIB Newsagent. Telephone 0303 123 9999 or visit www.rnib. org.uk/newsagent for further details.
The Oldie is published by Oldie Publications Ltd, Moray House, 23/31 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PA
