Despite the best efforts of politicians over the past half century England will always be for me a land of hope and glory. Unfortunately, these days, she only lives in my heart; in the music of Elgar and Butterworth, Vaughan Williams and Novello; in books and in the paintings of Constable; in cartoons and gardens and the memories of old folk like me.
I glory in being politically incorrect. I always laughed at Bernard Manning. I enjoy Music Hall, Gilbert and Sullivan, Oratorios and fish and chips, despite their Italian origin. I also like tripe and onions, red beef, Bury black puddings, George Orwell and Game (birds, definitely not sport). I admired Enoch Powell, like Manning, in private life, the least racist of men.
England no longer lives in the feral young; in what used to be the country pub, in the media or the slum village of Westminster, where I believe there has been a deliberate Government policy to reduce the liberty of the private individual. I would be prepared to go to prison with Shirley Williams rather than participate in the identity card scandal.
Patently the Freedom Restricters’ legislation only affects the law-abiding majority. The gun law after Dunblane limited the rights of responsible citizens to bear arms; yet there has been a vast increase in gun crimes and I knew of several pubs where I could buy a handgun as easily as a packet of cigarettes. The Dangerous Dogs Act doesn't work, the anti-hunting bill isn't, the smoking legislation is built on a lie since there is no reputable scientific evidence that second-hand smoke harms. The World Health Organisation spent six years trying to prove it did and then had to admit it couldn't.
Now we are not allowed to smoke and drive and Christmas is discouraged. Climate change is down to nature and only marginally to us. The same Government which is telling us not to set foot in an aeroplane has just cut £75 million from the conservation budget. We are like those curious Russians who have walled themselves up in a cave because they think the world is going to end next year. They threaten to commit mass suicide if anyone tries to rescue them. What’s the hurry when we are all going to die anyway next year when the world ends?
Commercial organisations boast of their customer services. It took me longer to buy Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G from Virgin stores than it took him to write it. First Virgin refused my credit card because it claimed I had given the wrong security number. It passed me to an HSBC website which gave me a number to ring. The number was unobtainable. I found a second number, rang that and my call was answered by the only English girl whose speech was so incomprehensible as to make one wish for an Indian call centre. She gave me an email number to register for MasterCard secure code. I have spent literally thousands on the Internet on antiquarian books, bronzes, wines, furniture, but no one has ever asked for this number. Dutifully I typed it in and a message came up to say the service was unobtainable. Alas, I got the same girl when I rang back and she wisely put me on to a technical adviser. All these calls were of course linked by long passages of music, which whatever it was had not been written by human hand.
The technical adviser was a man from the Indian continent. He was convinced that he had a senile idiot on the other end of the line and not only told me how to fill in the form but insisted on spelling every word. Eventually I got a security number but when I rang back the record had been sold.
How different things were in the old days when your fitness to have an overdraft was decided by the bank manager and not by some acne ridden child with an economics degree!
I was always in trouble with the various banks to whom I entrusted my overdraft, in the days when I believed that beyond my means was the only place to live. For some years I lived alone in a council-owned manor house in Cheshire called Picton Hall, my wants supplied by my housekeeper Mrs Higgs, a woman of great discretion who if she saw high heels in the hall always brought two cups of tea to the bedside.
One day when she brought the post up to my bedroom, the first letter I opened was a bill for the livery of my hunter, the second a brochure from a builder of cabin cruisers and the third an invitation to the Regimental Ball of the Duke of Lancaster's Yeomanry at Houghton Towers. Tickets 20 guineas. Under all these was a pitiful letter from Mr Miln, the manager of the Midland Bank in Commutation Row in Liverpool. It read: “If you would even try to live within your means, we might come to some accommodation.”
I bundled up my post and sent it to Mr Miln with a covering letter in which I explained: “I enclose this so that you can set the Hamlet's ghost of my overdraft against the Elsinore of events.”
Almost by return Mr Miln wrote: “Thank you for your full and frank disclosures. May I remind you that Hamlet was one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies as you are one of the Midland Bank’s?”
Years later I told another bank manager of this. He said “If I had written that to a customer, I would have been sacked on the spot.”
This bank manager answered my complaints about the treatment I had received from the Trustee Savings Bank by saying, “If you think the bank treats you badly, you should see the way it treats its staff. When I arrived at this branch the manager had not been told that I was relieving him.”
Take back your Ipods, your mobile phones that take photographs, your credit cards that allow our feckless to run up astronomical debts, your PCs and your PC regulations. I will settle for the England you have destroyed.
OF CAPS AND COUPS
Joe Minogue was a giant cloth cap, a cigarette and a pronounced Manchester accent. It was possible to know him for several weeks before realising that beneath the cap lived a face like an angry nut and the body of an apprehensive leprechaun. He was translated from being a penny a line municipal correspondent at Manchester town hall to Foreign Editor of the Manchester Guardian. He said there was little difference in the two jobs, except that as foreign editor he was much bothered by coups in parts of the world you had to look up in an atlas. Though he said the politics in Manchester Town Hall were often much bloodier. When he was appointed, the cap toured the world visiting the Guardian's distinguished foreign correspondents. Alistair Cooke - which he pronounced with three ‘o’s, as he did coups - was particularly fond of him.
I worked for him for nearly three weeks in the Fifties before he was forced to sack me. He didn't like to tell me, so he gave me a letter for my wife asking her to tell me but to be sure to add there was nothing personal in it
He did feel a little out of place in the rarefied Oxbridge atmosphere of The Manchester Guardian (never the Guardian despite what the masthead said). He was surprised when he took office to find his telephone was kept on the floor near the door. He never moved it in case it was a tradition. An earlier news editor had refused to allow a telephone in the news room at all because it disturbed his writers, and a reporter called into the subs room to answer one was heard to say, “The Manchester Guardian does not take murders over the telephone.”
If you went to his office, the desk would, like as not, be unoccupied but you would find him curled up the floor, settling a coup on the telephone.
A later news editor kept a pet canary in the news room. He was carrying it through the landing bay and explained to a curious machine minder that he was taking it home for Christmas. “Are you?” replied that man of the people, “we’re ‘avin turkey.”
Ever subversive Minogue formed an Anti Culture group at the paper, which he invited me to join when I was a very senior reporter on the Mirror. Alas, the editor Alastair Hetherington refused to have me anywhere near the paper when he learned I hunted foxes, although I had a pretty impressive cuttings book.
It must be admitted that Joe and I were among nature’s subversives. When we could not work together we set out to undermine the industry with a series of improbable “Letters to the Editor”.
I wrote to the editor of the Manchester Evening News recalling how, as a boy, I had hunted my uncle’s pack of Rochdale Flock Hounds over the Lancashire moors and wondered what had happened to the breed.
Minogue responded by saying that, although he remembered the breed well he was never convinced they had the true nose which one only found in the Doffcocker Dandy Dinmont, though for tongue he had always preferred the Chowbent terrier.
What was very odd was the spirited correspondence this produced from other readers until we began to believe in the breed we thought we had invented.
Tiring of this subject into which others had introduced an acrimonious note, Minogue wrote to the Oldham Chronicle to enquire whether there were any photographs of his uncle, a Sioux chieftain who had come to the town in the mid 19th century as part of a delegation of American Indians to examine the cotton industry.
I wrote to say that I couldn’t help with a photograph but I did have a fragment of a war bonnet picked up in the eighties in Ashton under Lyne market by a relative of mine. Though it was a much treasured relic in our family, I offered to pass it on if the writer could give some proof of ownership.
Watching a TV broadcast of the “Antiques Road Show” last week, I learned Lancashire was afloat with Indian chiefs in the mid 19th century and my daughter tells me that many districts in Lancashire have their own strain of dogs, such as the Ormskirk terrier. So Oscar Wilde had it right. Nature does imitate art.
Readers Letters once ruined an Editorial power lunch. Hugh Cudlipp, who ruined the Mirror, was in my day a foul-mouthed bully of little talent who did irreparable harm to the paper. From time to time he would descend on Manchester and inflict lunch on his executives. The better to enjoy tearing them apart, he always invited two reporters. It was not a pretty sight. The Mirror also owned the Glasgow based Daily Record. So when Cudlipp invited his executives for ideas to increase circulation, the executive who suggested we do more Scottish stories was unwise. “Isn’t that a bit like Mr Marks out-voting Mr Spencer?” rasped Cudlipp.
Gerry McGee, the sports editor, was not falling in any traps. When Cudlipp said, “I now call on Mr McGee to give a short address”, he replied, “21 Washaway Road, Sale.”
It was not original but, my God, it was brave.
Cudlipp was bested only once and that was by my friend Bill Barton, who sadly has just gone on his lunch break in the sky. (For Bill, a lunch break that only lasts for eternity will seem sadly curtailed).
Besting executives was what Bill did best.
Cudlipp had been saying that everything in the Mirror was true. “Nay, nay, Mr Cudlipp,” roared Bill, whose “nay, nay” had the illuminating force of the Edison Light, “what about readers’ letters?”
“The readers’ letters are genuine despatches from the good people who buy our great newspapers,” answered Cudlipp.
“Nay, nay, Mr Cudlipp” said Bill, “I had to write three before I could come here this morning.”
ends
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
“Convinced that the addition of public plaques advertising famous local people and events would encourage visitors to the Potteries, the members of Stoke on Trent’s Committee for Economic Development and Tourism have called for a list of subjects worthy of commemoration.
“The type of thing that would interest visitors, said Mr Ted Smith, was the story of Thomas Holland. On the 12th of December 1903 while Mr Holland was singing “When the Roll is called up yonder, I will be there” in John street, the ground suddenly opened under his feet and he fell 120 ft down a pit shaft to his death.”
Sunday, 18 November 2007
Sunday, 11 November 2007
In Praise Of Misanthropy
I am only likeable on the outside. Inside I am a misanthropist. My best days are the ones when I wake up safe in the knowledge I am not going to leave the house all day. My worst are when we entertain. Apart from family and trusted chums, I am one with the old Maori who said, “Eat up, guests may arrive.”
To be quite frank, I think the worse diseases on the planet are AIDS, cancer and Homo sapiens. I blame it on being labelled, quite early in life, as a “character”. It is a sad truth that, generally speaking, you only meet characters on the lower rung of professional ladders. They are rarely promoted. There are other disadvantages. Not only am I the subject of a vast anecdotage. If people have a scurrilous story that lacks a leading player I get the starring role. Perversely, it is equally annoying when, as happened this week, someone else was credited with one of my stories and prompted these thoughts.
My secret scenario is less amusing. At my Banquo’s Feast all the places are taken by people, mostly women, I have let down over the past three quarters of a century. Though the top of the table is reserved for my bloodhound Amy, who I had to give away at a time of extreme poverty and who shortly died, as I believe, from a broken heart and who I think and dream of constantly.
In the outside world, I am fondly described as “Pickwickian” or “Falstaffian”, depending on what people have been reading at the time.
I once foolishly asked the Welsh baritone Sir Geraint Evans what his inspiration was for the magnificent make ups he created for his operatic roles. He said: “If I had known you when I was doing Falstaff, I would have based it on you.”
I cannot spend five minutes in the company of an artist before he is drawing a caricature of me. My book on the Welsh painter Sir Kyffin Williams is coming out in February. It will contain a selection of the twenty or so cartoons he did of me during a long friendship. They are worth far more than I am.
I suppose I am easy to draw. Hand-knitted whiskers, belly like a spinnaker, literally an all round reporter as broad as I am long. 5ft 8ins and twenty one stone are not the ingredients of Adonis. Nor is there any escape. I do not believe in death and fear I am going to keep coming back as a tired joke.
Search hard enough and there is always one word which exactly describes a person. In the case of Bill Marshall that word was outrageous. I did not know what trouble was until I met Marshall, the Daily Mirror district man in Liverpool. He was a library of opposites. Lanky without being tall. A Lincolnshire lad with an American accent. Immaculate blazer worn with stained trousers, cowboy boots without socks, wild hair and an occasional beard. That was the picture I had when I saw him for the first time in the Liverpool Press Club a week after I joined the Daily Dispatch. Though we kept in touch until the weeks before his death and I loved him like a brother, we did not see each other for 30 years. Which may explain why I was able to have a successful career as an author and broadcaster. Had Bill still been around there would not have been time and I could well have been in prison.
I should have been warned when his wife invited me to a party in his flat at Formby and said, “Don’t bring Bill.” Getting barred from your own house takes dedication and a lot of effort.
There was the time he sold my passport and used the money to buy drugs for re-sale. But he wanted to be sure they were genuine. In those days Bert Balmer was Head of the CID in Liverpool and his deputy was a man called Jimmy Morris. They were both members of the Press Club. This night he passed me the drugs and said, “Go and ask Bert what it is.” So in his thrall was I that I went to the head of CID and said, “Bert, what are these?” passing him some curled-up leaves. “Bill sent you?” asked that excellent man, and then passed them to Jimmy. “What do you think, Jimmy? Rhododendron or Azalea?”
There was the time he bought a roulette wheel and made me go out and buy a black shirt and white tie and be the croupier. I thought they looked silly with a sports jacket but I always did what he said. Even when he got me to shave off half the News Chronicle reporter Jackie Yeadon’s beard as he slept drunkenly on the club sofa and prop him up still asleep on a parapet whilst Bill shouted: “Roll Up and see the midget with half a beard“ at the Saturday shoppers below in Lime St. Yeadon was small and majestic with it. During the war he had got extra meat by telling the butcher he was the captain of a midget submarine.
Anyway, I stood behind the wheel of a game I did not understand in the Press Club annexe and lost £45 in ten minutes and that was in 1953 when I was paid £15 a week.
He made up stories for the Mirror that nowadays would have got him an overnight declaration in the Booker Prize. Like the one about the girl who couldn’t afford the cruise her doctor ordered so she bought (or to be more truthful Bill did) 45 round-trip tickets on the New Brighton ferry.
Then there was the dog he tied to the railings of the Bridewell with a note attached to its collar which read “My daddy says he is going to shoot my dog when he comes home because we cannot afford to feed him, though I have given him my tea every night. Please give him a home.”
The story he wrote produced so many offers of a home the Daily Mirror phones were blocked for three hours.
It was catching. Even Balmer, the Head of CID, caught it. Every Saturday he would make up a story for us so we could claim a shift from the Sunday papers in our group. My favourite was a spin off from a fashion among criminals who had been in prison to have a swallow tattooed on the joint between thumb and forefinger. Bert told us the CID was worried the fad was being copied by juveniles. They showed they had been to reformatories by having a sparrow tattoo, Bert claimed, and all our offices fell for it.
Marshall struck when you weren’t watching. Years later when I lived in Chester, he rang me from Liverpool to say another of his many wives would be coming through Chester. Would I meet her off the train and give her dinner. “She is pretty upset,” he confided.
I met her and we had a jolly meal. Over coffee she admitted she needed cheering up and I said, “Yes, that’s why Bill suggested I meet you,”
I thought she was going to explode.
“Do you know why I am upset?” she said. “We were divorced this morning and that ******* turned up in his oldest clothes, pleaded poverty and I have got peanuts for maintenance.”
When I heard some days later that Bill had turned left at a level crossing and driven several miles along the Liverpool- Formby railway line I felt a pang of regret he hadn’t shared the experience with an oncoming express. But the feeling didn’t last. You could only dislike him for about five minutes.
There was this time when I was sleeping on the newspaper files in the Daily Dispatch office, where I worked, because I had no money for digs. He rang to tell me that Hoagy Carmichael was in town and we should go and pay him homage at the Adelphi where Hoagy (who for some reason he called Hoagland) had a suite.
Hoagy could not have been kinder. He invited us in and although it was a little after 10am poured us both giant Scotches. Inevitably Bill asked him to play the piano. Characteristically this very nice man agreed: but he wouldn’t play his signature tune “Stardust”. He said he couldn’t stand the damn thing and he wrote it. So for an hour or so he plied us with Scotch and entertained us on the piano with tunes, for which, he said, he had not been able to find a publisher.
A yelp from Bill brought the performance to an abrupt end. He had remembered that he should have been across the city covering an Assize trial.
“Anything I can do?” asked Hoagy, before I had a chance to warn him.
Bill said, yes, there was. He knew Hoagy didn’t like Stardust but he asked could he ring his news editor Roly Watkins and, when he came to the phone, hold the instrument over the piano keyboard while Hoagy played a few bars of “Stardust” and then said, “Hello Roly, this is Hoagy Carmichael. I am afraid I have detained your reporter Bill Marshall.”
Good as gold, Hoagy did as Bill told him. He played the opening bars down the phone and said his piece. There was a pause and then a suddenly angry Hoagy said, “No, this is not Bill Marshall, I am not pissed at half past eleven in the morning and I have no idea what is on at the Assizes.”
After the show that night, one of only two he did in Britain, he came over to the Press Club and once again at Bill’s command (by his time Bill saw him as his property) he played for the members.
After an hour or so he wanted to stop but Bill commanded him to play on. “Look Bill,” he said, “I get a thousand pounds for a concert.” ”Oh, it’s money you want?” sneered Bill, and promptly wrote a cheque for £1,000, which Hoagy pocketed and played on.
The next morning there was another call from Bill who wanted to know if he had cashed any cheques because one had gone from his book and his bank manager had warned him if he cashed any more cheques he would close his account.
I said, “Only the thousand pounds you paid Hoagy,” and enjoyed the panic I could feel down the phone. “We have to get it back,” he said, and off we went to the Adelphi.
Hoagy was full of apologies. “I cashed it with the hotel half an hour ago,” he said. In the minutes that followed I was repaid for all the indignities Marshall had heaped on me. And then Hoagy relented. “I haven’t cashed it,” he said, “but you cannot have it back. I am going to have it framed in my den to remember a great night.”
From my Dangerous Cuttings book
John Ambrose of Hemel Hempstead, Herts, was holidaying near Sydney when he found a spectacle case carrying the name of Keith Nursery of Bungay, Suffolk. When Ambrose returned to Britain he went to Bungay to return the case personally, only to discover its owner had emigrated to Australia.
To be quite frank, I think the worse diseases on the planet are AIDS, cancer and Homo sapiens. I blame it on being labelled, quite early in life, as a “character”. It is a sad truth that, generally speaking, you only meet characters on the lower rung of professional ladders. They are rarely promoted. There are other disadvantages. Not only am I the subject of a vast anecdotage. If people have a scurrilous story that lacks a leading player I get the starring role. Perversely, it is equally annoying when, as happened this week, someone else was credited with one of my stories and prompted these thoughts.
My secret scenario is less amusing. At my Banquo’s Feast all the places are taken by people, mostly women, I have let down over the past three quarters of a century. Though the top of the table is reserved for my bloodhound Amy, who I had to give away at a time of extreme poverty and who shortly died, as I believe, from a broken heart and who I think and dream of constantly.
In the outside world, I am fondly described as “Pickwickian” or “Falstaffian”, depending on what people have been reading at the time.
I once foolishly asked the Welsh baritone Sir Geraint Evans what his inspiration was for the magnificent make ups he created for his operatic roles. He said: “If I had known you when I was doing Falstaff, I would have based it on you.”
I cannot spend five minutes in the company of an artist before he is drawing a caricature of me. My book on the Welsh painter Sir Kyffin Williams is coming out in February. It will contain a selection of the twenty or so cartoons he did of me during a long friendship. They are worth far more than I am.
I suppose I am easy to draw. Hand-knitted whiskers, belly like a spinnaker, literally an all round reporter as broad as I am long. 5ft 8ins and twenty one stone are not the ingredients of Adonis. Nor is there any escape. I do not believe in death and fear I am going to keep coming back as a tired joke.
Search hard enough and there is always one word which exactly describes a person. In the case of Bill Marshall that word was outrageous. I did not know what trouble was until I met Marshall, the Daily Mirror district man in Liverpool. He was a library of opposites. Lanky without being tall. A Lincolnshire lad with an American accent. Immaculate blazer worn with stained trousers, cowboy boots without socks, wild hair and an occasional beard. That was the picture I had when I saw him for the first time in the Liverpool Press Club a week after I joined the Daily Dispatch. Though we kept in touch until the weeks before his death and I loved him like a brother, we did not see each other for 30 years. Which may explain why I was able to have a successful career as an author and broadcaster. Had Bill still been around there would not have been time and I could well have been in prison.
I should have been warned when his wife invited me to a party in his flat at Formby and said, “Don’t bring Bill.” Getting barred from your own house takes dedication and a lot of effort.
There was the time he sold my passport and used the money to buy drugs for re-sale. But he wanted to be sure they were genuine. In those days Bert Balmer was Head of the CID in Liverpool and his deputy was a man called Jimmy Morris. They were both members of the Press Club. This night he passed me the drugs and said, “Go and ask Bert what it is.” So in his thrall was I that I went to the head of CID and said, “Bert, what are these?” passing him some curled-up leaves. “Bill sent you?” asked that excellent man, and then passed them to Jimmy. “What do you think, Jimmy? Rhododendron or Azalea?”
There was the time he bought a roulette wheel and made me go out and buy a black shirt and white tie and be the croupier. I thought they looked silly with a sports jacket but I always did what he said. Even when he got me to shave off half the News Chronicle reporter Jackie Yeadon’s beard as he slept drunkenly on the club sofa and prop him up still asleep on a parapet whilst Bill shouted: “Roll Up and see the midget with half a beard“ at the Saturday shoppers below in Lime St. Yeadon was small and majestic with it. During the war he had got extra meat by telling the butcher he was the captain of a midget submarine.
Anyway, I stood behind the wheel of a game I did not understand in the Press Club annexe and lost £45 in ten minutes and that was in 1953 when I was paid £15 a week.
He made up stories for the Mirror that nowadays would have got him an overnight declaration in the Booker Prize. Like the one about the girl who couldn’t afford the cruise her doctor ordered so she bought (or to be more truthful Bill did) 45 round-trip tickets on the New Brighton ferry.
Then there was the dog he tied to the railings of the Bridewell with a note attached to its collar which read “My daddy says he is going to shoot my dog when he comes home because we cannot afford to feed him, though I have given him my tea every night. Please give him a home.”
The story he wrote produced so many offers of a home the Daily Mirror phones were blocked for three hours.
It was catching. Even Balmer, the Head of CID, caught it. Every Saturday he would make up a story for us so we could claim a shift from the Sunday papers in our group. My favourite was a spin off from a fashion among criminals who had been in prison to have a swallow tattooed on the joint between thumb and forefinger. Bert told us the CID was worried the fad was being copied by juveniles. They showed they had been to reformatories by having a sparrow tattoo, Bert claimed, and all our offices fell for it.
Marshall struck when you weren’t watching. Years later when I lived in Chester, he rang me from Liverpool to say another of his many wives would be coming through Chester. Would I meet her off the train and give her dinner. “She is pretty upset,” he confided.
I met her and we had a jolly meal. Over coffee she admitted she needed cheering up and I said, “Yes, that’s why Bill suggested I meet you,”
I thought she was going to explode.
“Do you know why I am upset?” she said. “We were divorced this morning and that ******* turned up in his oldest clothes, pleaded poverty and I have got peanuts for maintenance.”
When I heard some days later that Bill had turned left at a level crossing and driven several miles along the Liverpool- Formby railway line I felt a pang of regret he hadn’t shared the experience with an oncoming express. But the feeling didn’t last. You could only dislike him for about five minutes.
There was this time when I was sleeping on the newspaper files in the Daily Dispatch office, where I worked, because I had no money for digs. He rang to tell me that Hoagy Carmichael was in town and we should go and pay him homage at the Adelphi where Hoagy (who for some reason he called Hoagland) had a suite.
Hoagy could not have been kinder. He invited us in and although it was a little after 10am poured us both giant Scotches. Inevitably Bill asked him to play the piano. Characteristically this very nice man agreed: but he wouldn’t play his signature tune “Stardust”. He said he couldn’t stand the damn thing and he wrote it. So for an hour or so he plied us with Scotch and entertained us on the piano with tunes, for which, he said, he had not been able to find a publisher.
A yelp from Bill brought the performance to an abrupt end. He had remembered that he should have been across the city covering an Assize trial.
“Anything I can do?” asked Hoagy, before I had a chance to warn him.
Bill said, yes, there was. He knew Hoagy didn’t like Stardust but he asked could he ring his news editor Roly Watkins and, when he came to the phone, hold the instrument over the piano keyboard while Hoagy played a few bars of “Stardust” and then said, “Hello Roly, this is Hoagy Carmichael. I am afraid I have detained your reporter Bill Marshall.”
Good as gold, Hoagy did as Bill told him. He played the opening bars down the phone and said his piece. There was a pause and then a suddenly angry Hoagy said, “No, this is not Bill Marshall, I am not pissed at half past eleven in the morning and I have no idea what is on at the Assizes.”
After the show that night, one of only two he did in Britain, he came over to the Press Club and once again at Bill’s command (by his time Bill saw him as his property) he played for the members.
After an hour or so he wanted to stop but Bill commanded him to play on. “Look Bill,” he said, “I get a thousand pounds for a concert.” ”Oh, it’s money you want?” sneered Bill, and promptly wrote a cheque for £1,000, which Hoagy pocketed and played on.
The next morning there was another call from Bill who wanted to know if he had cashed any cheques because one had gone from his book and his bank manager had warned him if he cashed any more cheques he would close his account.
I said, “Only the thousand pounds you paid Hoagy,” and enjoyed the panic I could feel down the phone. “We have to get it back,” he said, and off we went to the Adelphi.
Hoagy was full of apologies. “I cashed it with the hotel half an hour ago,” he said. In the minutes that followed I was repaid for all the indignities Marshall had heaped on me. And then Hoagy relented. “I haven’t cashed it,” he said, “but you cannot have it back. I am going to have it framed in my den to remember a great night.”
From my Dangerous Cuttings book
John Ambrose of Hemel Hempstead, Herts, was holidaying near Sydney when he found a spectacle case carrying the name of Keith Nursery of Bungay, Suffolk. When Ambrose returned to Britain he went to Bungay to return the case personally, only to discover its owner had emigrated to Australia.
Saturday, 3 November 2007
Week moment
.How soon the future becomes the past when you get older. Christopher Fry complained: “When you are old you seem to eat breakfast every half hour.” Or as my jungly friend Lord Langford who bought himself a quad bike on his 90th birthday puts it: “Growin old is not for Cissies.”
To me Xmas comes but once a week and it always seems to be Friday.
Not that I am against the sere and yellow. My only serious ambition in life was to retire. I had an agreeable picture of myself in an alpaca jacket, leaning on a walking stick and pottering through my rose garden.
So carried away by this vision was I that I left the Daily Mirror when I was thirty, moved to Chester and retired whilst I was still young enough to enjoy it. Alas, I fell in with a group of racing men, book makers and professional gamblers and, as a result, the next ten years were passed, in the words of Lord Rochester, “in a mist of perpetual revelry”.
The swinging Sixties swung right over my head and I cannot remember a single thing about my retirement.
It ended abruptly when I was forty and met my wife and her family of High Achievers. In self defence, I became an author and broadcaster.
Which is how I came to meet Jess Yates, who was born in a cave in Llandudno and grew up to be a brilliant organist, a legendary television performer, the most innovative programme maker in the history of the medium and a total disaster as a human being.
After World War II, West End cinema openings were spectacular occasions which all the stars attended. It was Jess who created the spectacles. For Cockleshell Heroes, a war film, he recreated a Commando landing in the cinema foyer with all the noises of war. He organised circuses, mini Hollywood musicals, Arabian nights…
Inevitably he was snapped up by TV where his great achievement was a star studded show watched by millions called “Stars on Sunday”. Gielguid, Kitt, Olivier, a constellation of Hollywood and Ealing Studio stars not only appeared: they kept coming back. Which was a mystery because the show had a minute budget.
The secret was the contacts book Yates had made during his days producing West End Spectaculars. He would ring a star and invite him or her to spend a day with him on a free Sunday. He offered a car to collect them, a slap up lunch, dinner and a night in a top class hotel.
And in return? “Sing me three songs or read me three extracts from the bible.”
Fee? “No fee. But,hey, what are you doing on Sunday anyway?”
Amazing the number of stars who accepted his invitation. They would sing their songs, without rehearsal, Yates would tape them and drop a song in each of the next three programmes.
Yates’s fall from grace is a tragedy for another day. When I knew him, though, he lived in a mansion at Rowen in North Wales. He was a penniless recluse, unable to write the biography for which he had taken the publisher’s gold. I was hired to ease it out of him. It was an eerie experience. He would take you from the front door along a corridor and into a wardrobe which opened out into a palatial flat where he hid with his girl friend Anita.
The stars did not desert him. Eartha Kitt rang one day and invited him to take her for lunch at Porth Meirion, the smartest hotel in North Wales.
Unable to admit he was broke, he agreed, but warned Anita to say they were on a diet and to order only cheese biscuits and water.
Eartha innocently went through the card and, as Yates watched in agony, ordered champagne, oysters, fine wine and the house speciality. He knew the bill was going to be far more than the few pounds he had in his pocket. After the meal, during which he had nibbled at a biscuit and sipped at the house water, ravished with hunger he excused himself and went to the lavatory to count out his few pounds.
On the way he was stopped by the Maitre d’. Yates sensed everything was over. He would be disgraced; the paper which had hounded him would have a field day. He was about to confess he couldn’t pay the bill when the manager interrupted him.
“Mr Yates, we are so grateful to you for introducing Miss Kitt to our hotel. OF COURSE THERE WILL BE NO CHARGE FOR THE MEAL.”
* * * * * * * * * * *
I was an expert on being poor. When I came out of the army I took a job with a news agency, got married and was sacked the week after we returned from honeymoon.
The only work I could get was a casual Saturday shift on the News of the World, which paid £4 and 10 shillings in real money. My rent for two rooms in a very smart house was £2. I had married a Jewish princess who knew nothing about laundry, even if we had hot water. So we had to pay 2/6 a week to get the washing done. Didn’t cost a lot because I only had two shirts. We could do what we liked with the remaining £2 7s. 6d. which meant we ate every other day.
I had to keep half a crown back to buy myself into a lunchtime drinking school every Thursday at the Waldorf, in Cooper Street, Manchester, where John Milligan, the News of the World Editor, drank with the news editor, Graham Haslam.
At some time during the hour that followed the news editor would say, “Doin’ anyting on Saturday, Skiddy?” “Don’t think so, Graham. Why?”
“Wonder if you would do the late shift for us?”
It meant a ten mile round walk to the News of the World but for a year that was our only income.
We were in the house one day sharing a cigarette we had made from the week’s collected dimps. The front door bell rang. I was wearing my good suit and my one clean shirt ready to go to the Waldorf, so I went down.
There was a tramp at the door.
He said he had just come out of prison and did I have the price of a cup of tea. I said I was broke, and saw him look at the smart house in which I lived, the well cut navy suit and polished shoes I was wearing and then he looked back down the long drive to the road.
The look he gave me, utterly defeated and totally disbelieving, went straight to the heart. Halfway back upstairs I remembered the half crown I had put on one side to buy my way into the round. I ran after him.
He looked terribly guilty but I pressed the half crown into his hand and returned home rejoicing.
My wife asked, while I was at the front door, why didn’t I pick up the washing from the front step?
I went back.
No wonder the tramp had looked guilty. He had stolen it. For the next six months I had to sit in my vest whilst my shirt was washed under a cold tap so I could go to the Waldorf and get my Saturday shift.
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
The highest penalty for urinating in public was dealt to Pierre Pinoncelli, a Frenchman who was fined 45,122 euros (£31,400) in 1998 for relieving himself into artist Marcel Duchamp's modern art urinal, called Fountain — said to be worth £1.9 million.
He described his "attack" as a surrealist act.
Now, however, authorities believe they may have come up with the answer: le mur anti-pipi.
This brilliant, yet simple invention is an undulating wall that fires urine back in the direction of the offender.
"The jet of pee is rather oblique. If it meets a sloping surface it is sent back to the trousers," said Etienne Vanderpooten, a municipal architect who has been working on the problem for the past 25 years.
"It is the case of the arroseur arrosé [the sprinkler sprinkled]," he told the Nouvel Observateur magazine.
SAD NOTE; You can count on three fingers the truly fine people I met as a broadcaster. Two now that Ray Gravell has died. He was a legend as a rugby player and one of the few human beings I have met who was without an ounce of vice. The BBC has archived the last job we did together, a film about his hero Owain Glyndwr. I treasure the walking stick he gave me as a memento,
Although he had a massive cohort of fans, including the film star Peter O’Toole and used to terrify opposing rugby teams by singing Welsh warrior songs in the dressing room and although he had less cause than any man to be humble, he was humble,sweet and generous. And you don’t get many of them to the pound.
To me Xmas comes but once a week and it always seems to be Friday.
Not that I am against the sere and yellow. My only serious ambition in life was to retire. I had an agreeable picture of myself in an alpaca jacket, leaning on a walking stick and pottering through my rose garden.
So carried away by this vision was I that I left the Daily Mirror when I was thirty, moved to Chester and retired whilst I was still young enough to enjoy it. Alas, I fell in with a group of racing men, book makers and professional gamblers and, as a result, the next ten years were passed, in the words of Lord Rochester, “in a mist of perpetual revelry”.
The swinging Sixties swung right over my head and I cannot remember a single thing about my retirement.
It ended abruptly when I was forty and met my wife and her family of High Achievers. In self defence, I became an author and broadcaster.
Which is how I came to meet Jess Yates, who was born in a cave in Llandudno and grew up to be a brilliant organist, a legendary television performer, the most innovative programme maker in the history of the medium and a total disaster as a human being.
After World War II, West End cinema openings were spectacular occasions which all the stars attended. It was Jess who created the spectacles. For Cockleshell Heroes, a war film, he recreated a Commando landing in the cinema foyer with all the noises of war. He organised circuses, mini Hollywood musicals, Arabian nights…
Inevitably he was snapped up by TV where his great achievement was a star studded show watched by millions called “Stars on Sunday”. Gielguid, Kitt, Olivier, a constellation of Hollywood and Ealing Studio stars not only appeared: they kept coming back. Which was a mystery because the show had a minute budget.
The secret was the contacts book Yates had made during his days producing West End Spectaculars. He would ring a star and invite him or her to spend a day with him on a free Sunday. He offered a car to collect them, a slap up lunch, dinner and a night in a top class hotel.
And in return? “Sing me three songs or read me three extracts from the bible.”
Fee? “No fee. But,hey, what are you doing on Sunday anyway?”
Amazing the number of stars who accepted his invitation. They would sing their songs, without rehearsal, Yates would tape them and drop a song in each of the next three programmes.
Yates’s fall from grace is a tragedy for another day. When I knew him, though, he lived in a mansion at Rowen in North Wales. He was a penniless recluse, unable to write the biography for which he had taken the publisher’s gold. I was hired to ease it out of him. It was an eerie experience. He would take you from the front door along a corridor and into a wardrobe which opened out into a palatial flat where he hid with his girl friend Anita.
The stars did not desert him. Eartha Kitt rang one day and invited him to take her for lunch at Porth Meirion, the smartest hotel in North Wales.
Unable to admit he was broke, he agreed, but warned Anita to say they were on a diet and to order only cheese biscuits and water.
Eartha innocently went through the card and, as Yates watched in agony, ordered champagne, oysters, fine wine and the house speciality. He knew the bill was going to be far more than the few pounds he had in his pocket. After the meal, during which he had nibbled at a biscuit and sipped at the house water, ravished with hunger he excused himself and went to the lavatory to count out his few pounds.
On the way he was stopped by the Maitre d’. Yates sensed everything was over. He would be disgraced; the paper which had hounded him would have a field day. He was about to confess he couldn’t pay the bill when the manager interrupted him.
“Mr Yates, we are so grateful to you for introducing Miss Kitt to our hotel. OF COURSE THERE WILL BE NO CHARGE FOR THE MEAL.”
* * * * * * * * * * *
I was an expert on being poor. When I came out of the army I took a job with a news agency, got married and was sacked the week after we returned from honeymoon.
The only work I could get was a casual Saturday shift on the News of the World, which paid £4 and 10 shillings in real money. My rent for two rooms in a very smart house was £2. I had married a Jewish princess who knew nothing about laundry, even if we had hot water. So we had to pay 2/6 a week to get the washing done. Didn’t cost a lot because I only had two shirts. We could do what we liked with the remaining £2 7s. 6d. which meant we ate every other day.
I had to keep half a crown back to buy myself into a lunchtime drinking school every Thursday at the Waldorf, in Cooper Street, Manchester, where John Milligan, the News of the World Editor, drank with the news editor, Graham Haslam.
At some time during the hour that followed the news editor would say, “Doin’ anyting on Saturday, Skiddy?” “Don’t think so, Graham. Why?”
“Wonder if you would do the late shift for us?”
It meant a ten mile round walk to the News of the World but for a year that was our only income.
We were in the house one day sharing a cigarette we had made from the week’s collected dimps. The front door bell rang. I was wearing my good suit and my one clean shirt ready to go to the Waldorf, so I went down.
There was a tramp at the door.
He said he had just come out of prison and did I have the price of a cup of tea. I said I was broke, and saw him look at the smart house in which I lived, the well cut navy suit and polished shoes I was wearing and then he looked back down the long drive to the road.
The look he gave me, utterly defeated and totally disbelieving, went straight to the heart. Halfway back upstairs I remembered the half crown I had put on one side to buy my way into the round. I ran after him.
He looked terribly guilty but I pressed the half crown into his hand and returned home rejoicing.
My wife asked, while I was at the front door, why didn’t I pick up the washing from the front step?
I went back.
No wonder the tramp had looked guilty. He had stolen it. For the next six months I had to sit in my vest whilst my shirt was washed under a cold tap so I could go to the Waldorf and get my Saturday shift.
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
The highest penalty for urinating in public was dealt to Pierre Pinoncelli, a Frenchman who was fined 45,122 euros (£31,400) in 1998 for relieving himself into artist Marcel Duchamp's modern art urinal, called Fountain — said to be worth £1.9 million.
He described his "attack" as a surrealist act.
Now, however, authorities believe they may have come up with the answer: le mur anti-pipi.
This brilliant, yet simple invention is an undulating wall that fires urine back in the direction of the offender.
"The jet of pee is rather oblique. If it meets a sloping surface it is sent back to the trousers," said Etienne Vanderpooten, a municipal architect who has been working on the problem for the past 25 years.
"It is the case of the arroseur arrosé [the sprinkler sprinkled]," he told the Nouvel Observateur magazine.
SAD NOTE; You can count on three fingers the truly fine people I met as a broadcaster. Two now that Ray Gravell has died. He was a legend as a rugby player and one of the few human beings I have met who was without an ounce of vice. The BBC has archived the last job we did together, a film about his hero Owain Glyndwr. I treasure the walking stick he gave me as a memento,
Although he had a massive cohort of fans, including the film star Peter O’Toole and used to terrify opposing rugby teams by singing Welsh warrior songs in the dressing room and although he had less cause than any man to be humble, he was humble,sweet and generous. And you don’t get many of them to the pound.
Saturday, 27 October 2007
Pooter Poo
When my wife and I became engaged, I was trooped a tattered colour round her grand relations.
One dining room was hung with a Canaletto, several Gainsboroughs and the odd Alan Ramsay. Reflected in the 18th century glass and the glassily polished Chippendale table was an array of cutlery that looked like Mappin and Webb’s window.
Over all flew Mr Pooter, the family’s pet and presumably house-trained pigeon.
Except that it wasn’t.
As I nervously muttered the “start at the outside and work inwards” mantra, it landed on my head and crapped down the back of my neck.
“Can’t be much wrong with you,” my host, the knighted chairman of multi-national Albright and Wilson boomed. “Mr Pooter has obviously taken to you.”
Uncle Sydney and I became great friends. I once asked him whether being chairman of an international company was difficult. “On the contrary,” he told me, “it’s always an each way bet. By the time a development reaches my desk the work has already been done by my staff. I just have to say yes or no.”
So the talk of the difficulties which earn tycoons their high salaries is just so much spin. Like the rest of life.
I discovered this in childhood. We were told that night fighter pilots could see in the dark because they ate masses of carrots. In my innocence, I had a double helping of the loathsome vegetable, then went out into the yard in the black-out and banged my knee on the dustbin. Had I known it, that was my epiphany in the evils of spin, though it was many years later that I learned it was a governmental device to ease a glut of carrots.
Democracy is a summit of spin. The classic democracy on which it is based was undemocratic. Indeed racist .Only citizens of Athens and Rome had a vote. Democracy was not even popular. Thucydides points out that none of Athens’ achievements happened under a democracy.
H. L. Mencken had it sussed: “Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.”
That touching tale of 400 Spartans fighting the entire Persian army at Thermopylae is rubbish. The classicist Mary Beard points out they were assisted by a thousand Helots and other tribes. There was no room in the Pass for Persians.
The ultimate spin, surely, is the notion that God created the world in six days. Not that He would be unable to do so. But would He really need a day off? In my view that Sabbath business throws the entire Creation scenario into doubt, and when in the ‘30s the Immaculate Conception was introduced in a contested divorce, the Judge wisely ruled it was inadmissible.
At times of stress young creatures turn for succour to their parent. Parents have no-one so they invent a spectral parent, Freud suggests. The Ionian philosophers postulate a god which could create but not direct. Sir Thomas Browne quotes Hermes, The Thrice Great: “God is a circle the centre of which is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.”
My chum Syd Wignall, a Himalayan climber, would go with that. He was hired by the Indian army to spy in Tibet on the Chinese, who captured him and imprisoned him in Takalot. Freed in the depths of winter, he had to traverse the Himalayas on foot to reach India. In his fine book “Spy on the Roof of the World” Syd tells of a presence which guided him safely down an ice cliff.
Another chum, Douggie Brand, a much decorated Royal Marine and veteran of the SBS, spent the best part of a year in one of Saddam Hussein’s most notorious torture chambers. Every day he talked with a palpable ‘presence’ which came into his cell.
I talk to God all the time. He is a Great Listener. Like these men, I have no truck with religion which, to me, is just crowd control.
The Crusades, we are told, were fought to safeguard the pilgrim routes to Jerusalem, at that time occupied by Arabs. More spin. Arabs did not interfere with pilgrims. The Koran forbids it, or indeed any hindrance of the People of the Book. The purpose of the Crusades was to enable Western monarchs to give their mutinous nobles someone else to fight. And those noble warriors sacked Constantinople en route, raping and pillaging, at the request of the Venetians who controlled the cruellest and most repressive empire on earth.
It wasn’t Drake who beat the Armada. It was the weather. And the fact that Spanish arms dealers supplied King Philip with duff ammunition, as Wignall demonstrated in another book. After he had climbed across the Himalayas, he was so fed up with mountains that he invented marine archaeology and went round the world diving and discovering Armada galleons.
More recently, the Establishment would have us believe the world is about to stop spinning and burst into flame. I share the view of David Bellamy: “The last peak global temperatures were in 1998 and 1934 and the troughs of low temperature were around 1910 and 1970. The second dip caused pop science and the media to cry wolf about an impending, devastating Ice Age. Our end was nigh! Then, when temperatures took an upward swing in the 1980s, the scaremongers changed their tune. Global warming was the new imminent catastrophe.
“But the computer model - called “hockey stick” - that predicted the catastrophe of a frying planet proved to be so bent that it “disappeared” from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s armory of argument in 2007. It was bent because the historical data it used to predict the future dated from only the 1850s, when the world was emerging from the Little Ice Age. Little wonder that temperatures showed an upward trend.
“In the Sixties I used to discuss climate change with my undergraduates at Durham University. I would point to the plethora of published scientific evidence that showed the cyclical nature of change – and how, for instance, the latest of a string of ice ages had affected the climate, sea levels and tree lines around the world. Thank goodness the latest crop of glaciers and ice sheets began to wane in earnest about 12,000 years ago; this gave Britain a window of opportunity to lead the industrial revolution. Despite the $50 billion spent on greenwashing propaganda, the sceptics and their inconvenient questions are beginning to make their presence felt.
“A recent survey by Klaus-Martin Schulte, of King’s College Hospital, of all papers on the subject of climate change that were published between 2004 and February of 2007 found that only 7 per cent explicitly endorsed a ‘so-called consensus’ position that man-made carbon dioxide is causing catastrophic global warming.”
Like Mark Twain’s death, reports of the demise of the polar bear are exaggerated.
According to Bellamy, their population is increasing.
The most successful spin in our times has been the Mafia. In fact they did not launch an Empire of organised crime. According to the Pulitzer Prize winning author Jimmy Breslin, that was the work of a mill worker’s son from Wigan, Owney Madden, who learned the gangster’s trade in Liverpool.
He emigrated to the US where Prohibition made him powerful enough to call, on the advice of Damon Runyon, a meeting of other major gangsters in Atlantic City in May 1929. The subject was Al Capone whose antics were getting respectable killers a bad name. Capone was shovelled off to prison, Madden spread out street maps of New York and the bootlegging territories were defined. Rules for murder were established. Nobody could be killed unless a local commission agreed.
After the re-districting, which was copied by gangsters in other cities, a banquet was held to honour Madden. A gangster called Frenchy deMange was chosen to present him with a watch for “services to the American underworld”.
The truth is always more interesting than the spin.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I ALWAYS WORRY…when people, usually mothers, ask me how I got my start in journalism. And not only because the question carries a sub text: ‘If a prat like you can do it, it will be a doddle for a bright child like mine.’
Mostly I hesitate, because everything that has happened to me in my career has stemmed from an embarrassing accident.
In this case, going to prison. Only an army prison and I was guilty of nothing - but then they all say that, don’t they?
I suppose I could explain the issue by saying, ‘It was because my greatcoat was unbuttoned, coming out of a pub in Thetford.’
We were a night away from a draft to Palestine and were celebrating in a last chance saloon called the Green Man.
I was a lance corporal in the Black Watch (RHR) who had somehow got mixed up with an RASC unit in the days when Englishmen dominated the Highland Division while the canny Scots all joined corps and learnt a trade. In my unit all the Scots came from Glasgow. None of them much more than five feet high. If you were any taller in Glasgow, you got posted to Edinburgh.
Because I was still fastening my greatcoat on the street, I was pounced on by the Town Patrol of burly corporals for being improperly dressed. A minute Glaswegian ran up to one of the corporals and smacked him in the mouth for being impertinent to ‘a Highlander’ (from Manchester, as it happened).
In consequence, we were all charged with assault, taken off the draft to Palestine and sent to Germany. My charge - ‘in that he did assault six regimental policemen’ - preceded me to my new unit, where I was summoned by the CO. He said, ‘I am a very bewildered officer; you don’t look violent to me.’
I didn’t. Indeed, in the kilt, I looked like an undernourished reading lamp
I explained what happened, but he said there was nothing he could do about it. It was a court martial offence and he would have to remand me. ‘But,’ he said, ‘a word of advice: plead guilty. Otherwise they will have to adjourn the court and you will have wasted the officers’ morning. They will have to bring the witnesses over from the UK and they will be very cross with you. Plead guilty and your Prisoner’s Friend will explain the situation.’
I did. He didn’t. And I spent the next 56 days in 3 Military Corrective Establishment at Bielefeld.
When I was released and posted to Bad Oenhausen, I decided to desert. On my way to the Bahnhof to get a train to the Hook of Holland I was pounced on by the garrison RSM, a Scots Guard called Graham. He was very rude to me, suggesting that if I didn’t smarten myself up he would take the red hackle out of my bonnet, stick it up my arse and have me clucking like a Rhode Island Red.
I was very glad when he dismissed me.
To my horror, I saw him again five minutes later in the next street. Rather than face him, I dodged into the first door I could open. As it happens, it was the office of Army PR.
A CSM, Paddy Seaman, asked me what I wanted. I didn’t know what to say, so I asked him if he had any jobs going. I thought I might sweep the floor or make some tea.
He said, ‘Have you any experience of newspapers?’
I thought, ‘That’s a funny question’ - because, as a matter of fact, I had: I had been a printer’s apprentice at Allied Newspapers at Withy Grove.
I said I had worked on the Manchester Evening Chronicle and Paddy said, ‘Blimey, we haven’t had a newspaper reporter before. Come in and see Kenneth.’
Kenneth, it turned out, was the CO. At the time I didn’t know officers had first names, so I was a little surprised. I was even more surprised when I met Major Kenneth Harvey. He was a touch fey. I later learnt he had transferred to the Royal Armoured Corps because its black beret brought out the blue of his eyes. What with one thing and another, I was very relieved when he asked me to sit down.
All I remember of the interview was the bit where he said, ‘Here’s a chit. Go to the QM and draw your three stripes.’
‘?????’
‘You will join as a sergeant, of course.’
‘A SERGEANT?’
He bridled, and his little shoulders shivered. ‘You cannot expect to be an officer straight away,’ he said.
That afternoon, with not the slightest idea what I was doing, I was on my way to cover the Berlin Airlift. Still the biggest story I have ever covered on my own.
But the army always did the unexpected. Some months later when I was ‘Returned To Unit’ because of persistent drunkenness, another Guards RSM - Irish this time and called Kenny - thought PR was short for ‘provost’ and appointed me Provost Sgt of HQ 7th Armoured Division.
So if your child wants a career in journalism, tell him to try unbuttoning his overcoat in Thetford
* * * * * * * * * *
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK…………………….
“The Royal Portraits is a collection of snaps by the late Cecil Beaton. In the course of taking these he met the old Duke of Gloucester who, when told Beaton was coming, said: ‘That’s the fella in the floppy hat, aint it? Can’t stand the man. Never stops talking in a funny voice. Bloody suspicious, I think.’
“On an Egyptian tour being introduced to a belly dancer he kicked off affably with the question “Ever been to Tidworth?”
Is there a biography of this remarkable man?”
ends
One dining room was hung with a Canaletto, several Gainsboroughs and the odd Alan Ramsay. Reflected in the 18th century glass and the glassily polished Chippendale table was an array of cutlery that looked like Mappin and Webb’s window.
Over all flew Mr Pooter, the family’s pet and presumably house-trained pigeon.
Except that it wasn’t.
As I nervously muttered the “start at the outside and work inwards” mantra, it landed on my head and crapped down the back of my neck.
“Can’t be much wrong with you,” my host, the knighted chairman of multi-national Albright and Wilson boomed. “Mr Pooter has obviously taken to you.”
Uncle Sydney and I became great friends. I once asked him whether being chairman of an international company was difficult. “On the contrary,” he told me, “it’s always an each way bet. By the time a development reaches my desk the work has already been done by my staff. I just have to say yes or no.”
So the talk of the difficulties which earn tycoons their high salaries is just so much spin. Like the rest of life.
I discovered this in childhood. We were told that night fighter pilots could see in the dark because they ate masses of carrots. In my innocence, I had a double helping of the loathsome vegetable, then went out into the yard in the black-out and banged my knee on the dustbin. Had I known it, that was my epiphany in the evils of spin, though it was many years later that I learned it was a governmental device to ease a glut of carrots.
Democracy is a summit of spin. The classic democracy on which it is based was undemocratic. Indeed racist .Only citizens of Athens and Rome had a vote. Democracy was not even popular. Thucydides points out that none of Athens’ achievements happened under a democracy.
H. L. Mencken had it sussed: “Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.”
That touching tale of 400 Spartans fighting the entire Persian army at Thermopylae is rubbish. The classicist Mary Beard points out they were assisted by a thousand Helots and other tribes. There was no room in the Pass for Persians.
The ultimate spin, surely, is the notion that God created the world in six days. Not that He would be unable to do so. But would He really need a day off? In my view that Sabbath business throws the entire Creation scenario into doubt, and when in the ‘30s the Immaculate Conception was introduced in a contested divorce, the Judge wisely ruled it was inadmissible.
At times of stress young creatures turn for succour to their parent. Parents have no-one so they invent a spectral parent, Freud suggests. The Ionian philosophers postulate a god which could create but not direct. Sir Thomas Browne quotes Hermes, The Thrice Great: “God is a circle the centre of which is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.”
My chum Syd Wignall, a Himalayan climber, would go with that. He was hired by the Indian army to spy in Tibet on the Chinese, who captured him and imprisoned him in Takalot. Freed in the depths of winter, he had to traverse the Himalayas on foot to reach India. In his fine book “Spy on the Roof of the World” Syd tells of a presence which guided him safely down an ice cliff.
Another chum, Douggie Brand, a much decorated Royal Marine and veteran of the SBS, spent the best part of a year in one of Saddam Hussein’s most notorious torture chambers. Every day he talked with a palpable ‘presence’ which came into his cell.
I talk to God all the time. He is a Great Listener. Like these men, I have no truck with religion which, to me, is just crowd control.
The Crusades, we are told, were fought to safeguard the pilgrim routes to Jerusalem, at that time occupied by Arabs. More spin. Arabs did not interfere with pilgrims. The Koran forbids it, or indeed any hindrance of the People of the Book. The purpose of the Crusades was to enable Western monarchs to give their mutinous nobles someone else to fight. And those noble warriors sacked Constantinople en route, raping and pillaging, at the request of the Venetians who controlled the cruellest and most repressive empire on earth.
It wasn’t Drake who beat the Armada. It was the weather. And the fact that Spanish arms dealers supplied King Philip with duff ammunition, as Wignall demonstrated in another book. After he had climbed across the Himalayas, he was so fed up with mountains that he invented marine archaeology and went round the world diving and discovering Armada galleons.
More recently, the Establishment would have us believe the world is about to stop spinning and burst into flame. I share the view of David Bellamy: “The last peak global temperatures were in 1998 and 1934 and the troughs of low temperature were around 1910 and 1970. The second dip caused pop science and the media to cry wolf about an impending, devastating Ice Age. Our end was nigh! Then, when temperatures took an upward swing in the 1980s, the scaremongers changed their tune. Global warming was the new imminent catastrophe.
“But the computer model - called “hockey stick” - that predicted the catastrophe of a frying planet proved to be so bent that it “disappeared” from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s armory of argument in 2007. It was bent because the historical data it used to predict the future dated from only the 1850s, when the world was emerging from the Little Ice Age. Little wonder that temperatures showed an upward trend.
“In the Sixties I used to discuss climate change with my undergraduates at Durham University. I would point to the plethora of published scientific evidence that showed the cyclical nature of change – and how, for instance, the latest of a string of ice ages had affected the climate, sea levels and tree lines around the world. Thank goodness the latest crop of glaciers and ice sheets began to wane in earnest about 12,000 years ago; this gave Britain a window of opportunity to lead the industrial revolution. Despite the $50 billion spent on greenwashing propaganda, the sceptics and their inconvenient questions are beginning to make their presence felt.
“A recent survey by Klaus-Martin Schulte, of King’s College Hospital, of all papers on the subject of climate change that were published between 2004 and February of 2007 found that only 7 per cent explicitly endorsed a ‘so-called consensus’ position that man-made carbon dioxide is causing catastrophic global warming.”
Like Mark Twain’s death, reports of the demise of the polar bear are exaggerated.
According to Bellamy, their population is increasing.
The most successful spin in our times has been the Mafia. In fact they did not launch an Empire of organised crime. According to the Pulitzer Prize winning author Jimmy Breslin, that was the work of a mill worker’s son from Wigan, Owney Madden, who learned the gangster’s trade in Liverpool.
He emigrated to the US where Prohibition made him powerful enough to call, on the advice of Damon Runyon, a meeting of other major gangsters in Atlantic City in May 1929. The subject was Al Capone whose antics were getting respectable killers a bad name. Capone was shovelled off to prison, Madden spread out street maps of New York and the bootlegging territories were defined. Rules for murder were established. Nobody could be killed unless a local commission agreed.
After the re-districting, which was copied by gangsters in other cities, a banquet was held to honour Madden. A gangster called Frenchy deMange was chosen to present him with a watch for “services to the American underworld”.
The truth is always more interesting than the spin.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I ALWAYS WORRY…when people, usually mothers, ask me how I got my start in journalism. And not only because the question carries a sub text: ‘If a prat like you can do it, it will be a doddle for a bright child like mine.’
Mostly I hesitate, because everything that has happened to me in my career has stemmed from an embarrassing accident.
In this case, going to prison. Only an army prison and I was guilty of nothing - but then they all say that, don’t they?
I suppose I could explain the issue by saying, ‘It was because my greatcoat was unbuttoned, coming out of a pub in Thetford.’
We were a night away from a draft to Palestine and were celebrating in a last chance saloon called the Green Man.
I was a lance corporal in the Black Watch (RHR) who had somehow got mixed up with an RASC unit in the days when Englishmen dominated the Highland Division while the canny Scots all joined corps and learnt a trade. In my unit all the Scots came from Glasgow. None of them much more than five feet high. If you were any taller in Glasgow, you got posted to Edinburgh.
Because I was still fastening my greatcoat on the street, I was pounced on by the Town Patrol of burly corporals for being improperly dressed. A minute Glaswegian ran up to one of the corporals and smacked him in the mouth for being impertinent to ‘a Highlander’ (from Manchester, as it happened).
In consequence, we were all charged with assault, taken off the draft to Palestine and sent to Germany. My charge - ‘in that he did assault six regimental policemen’ - preceded me to my new unit, where I was summoned by the CO. He said, ‘I am a very bewildered officer; you don’t look violent to me.’
I didn’t. Indeed, in the kilt, I looked like an undernourished reading lamp
I explained what happened, but he said there was nothing he could do about it. It was a court martial offence and he would have to remand me. ‘But,’ he said, ‘a word of advice: plead guilty. Otherwise they will have to adjourn the court and you will have wasted the officers’ morning. They will have to bring the witnesses over from the UK and they will be very cross with you. Plead guilty and your Prisoner’s Friend will explain the situation.’
I did. He didn’t. And I spent the next 56 days in 3 Military Corrective Establishment at Bielefeld.
When I was released and posted to Bad Oenhausen, I decided to desert. On my way to the Bahnhof to get a train to the Hook of Holland I was pounced on by the garrison RSM, a Scots Guard called Graham. He was very rude to me, suggesting that if I didn’t smarten myself up he would take the red hackle out of my bonnet, stick it up my arse and have me clucking like a Rhode Island Red.
I was very glad when he dismissed me.
To my horror, I saw him again five minutes later in the next street. Rather than face him, I dodged into the first door I could open. As it happens, it was the office of Army PR.
A CSM, Paddy Seaman, asked me what I wanted. I didn’t know what to say, so I asked him if he had any jobs going. I thought I might sweep the floor or make some tea.
He said, ‘Have you any experience of newspapers?’
I thought, ‘That’s a funny question’ - because, as a matter of fact, I had: I had been a printer’s apprentice at Allied Newspapers at Withy Grove.
I said I had worked on the Manchester Evening Chronicle and Paddy said, ‘Blimey, we haven’t had a newspaper reporter before. Come in and see Kenneth.’
Kenneth, it turned out, was the CO. At the time I didn’t know officers had first names, so I was a little surprised. I was even more surprised when I met Major Kenneth Harvey. He was a touch fey. I later learnt he had transferred to the Royal Armoured Corps because its black beret brought out the blue of his eyes. What with one thing and another, I was very relieved when he asked me to sit down.
All I remember of the interview was the bit where he said, ‘Here’s a chit. Go to the QM and draw your three stripes.’
‘?????’
‘You will join as a sergeant, of course.’
‘A SERGEANT?’
He bridled, and his little shoulders shivered. ‘You cannot expect to be an officer straight away,’ he said.
That afternoon, with not the slightest idea what I was doing, I was on my way to cover the Berlin Airlift. Still the biggest story I have ever covered on my own.
But the army always did the unexpected. Some months later when I was ‘Returned To Unit’ because of persistent drunkenness, another Guards RSM - Irish this time and called Kenny - thought PR was short for ‘provost’ and appointed me Provost Sgt of HQ 7th Armoured Division.
So if your child wants a career in journalism, tell him to try unbuttoning his overcoat in Thetford
* * * * * * * * * *
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK…………………….
“The Royal Portraits is a collection of snaps by the late Cecil Beaton. In the course of taking these he met the old Duke of Gloucester who, when told Beaton was coming, said: ‘That’s the fella in the floppy hat, aint it? Can’t stand the man. Never stops talking in a funny voice. Bloody suspicious, I think.’
“On an Egyptian tour being introduced to a belly dancer he kicked off affably with the question “Ever been to Tidworth?”
Is there a biography of this remarkable man?”
ends
Saturday, 20 October 2007
postal disorder
Strike action has all the relevance of the blunderbuss and most of its shortcomings. Its effects are felt over a wide area but it frequently misses its target and does more harm to the man who pulls its trigger than to those at which it is aimed.
Union officials and employers continue to draw their salaries. Only the workers suffer. When my union went on one of its ineffectual strikes, I was the father of a young family. We won nothing like the figure for which we were striking and it took many months to recover from the loss of wages incurred by our industrial inaction.
Neither side seems to regard the needs of its customers yet postmen are part of the furniture of our day. A pal of mine who used to own Snowdon Mountain admitted that he did most of his farming through the letter box, harvesting the subsidy cheques.
In the far off days of fatherhood when my post contained more bills than a flock of starlings I remember the dread with which I awaited the crash of final demands on the mat.
It is true occasional eccentricities added to the charm of the Office. I lived in a Cheshire village where the postman was a tireless poacher. His sack was the perfect hiding place for assorted dead game. Few things concentrate the mind so swiftly as getting a letter from the Inland Revenue in a bloodstained envelope.
When I moved to Chester I used to get LPs through the post and on one occasion the postman folded the LP neatly in half to make it easier to post it through the letter box. When I complained compensation was reluctantly awarded but I was required to promise I would not attempt to play the LP. I agreed since it could only ever have been played on a crescent-shaped turntable.
Print workers were the most imaginative strikers. At the height of the IRA mainland bombing campaign printers on the Daily Mirror struck for danger money on the grounds that coming to work on a paper which attacked the IRA was dangerous. It was pointed out in vain that English reporters working in Ireland did not get danger money; that the printers were working three floors underground in what was virtually a nuclear bomb proof shelter. The printers were obdurate. Only directors running round with bundles of cash got the paper out.
In the brave new world of instant re-location there are few strikes in private industry. Only our public servants still enjoy that dubious luxury.
The rest of us are often baffled by their reasons’
When Tom Ellis, the Wrexham MP, left the Labour Party to become a social democrat I accused him of treachery. He denied the charge. He said he was leaving because socialism had achieved all its aims, and it is certainly true that we are living in a golden age. We live longer and are healthier and more prosperous than ever before in the history of man. But we are still unhappy.
Oddly, unhappiness seems only to affect the “First” World. In a recent TV series, a young man lived in turn with tribes of primitive people who die young and live hard. The most abiding quality they showed was happiness and content with their way of life. In another series, a tribe from Borneo was brought to the West and shown its glories. They were baffled by a society that had so many empty buildings yet allowed its people to sleep on the streets.
In the tribal world man helps his neighbour. Here we are perpetually at war with someone. A friend points out that our unions and employers are greedy in turn and that we are living in the directors’ cut.
Pay received by directors at leading FTSE companies grew at double the rate of the average workforce. In the past five years they have earned an average £850, 000, which does not include bonuses and shares. The typical salary increase of executive directors was seven per cent last year, against the UK average of 3.7 per cent.
Nevertheless Post Office workers are on a kamikaze track. I do business with two of the mail order firms which turned its losses into huge profit. Both are deserting it for private firms. Yet one can see the postmen’s dilemma: their boss takes home a million pounds a year. Perhaps it is understandable that there are 92 “Spanish practices" through which postal workers are alleged to wring overtime and expenses. The Union claims its members work flexibly and they are entitled to go home early if they finish a task.
Why not? The Government urges flexible working and few workers are as flexible as our over-paid MPs.
* * * *
RENTING THE MOUTH FOR MONEY ...carries with it the burden of celebrity. I found my brush with celebrity very worrying. It usually consisted of perfect strangers doing double takes when they saw me. For a long time I thought it meant that my fly buttons were undone.
My first major TV engagement was a series of Welsh Sheepdog trials. I was stopped by a man in Llandudno.
“Saw the show last night,” he said. “Terrific.”
“Oh, you like sheepdog trials, then?”
“Most boring things ever seen on TV,” he told me.
“You liked me, then?”
“You? You were crap.”
“Well, what was so good about it?”
“Your waistcoats. Fabulous,” he said. “Where do you get them?”
Once in Bangor a man barred my path. “Don’t tell me,” he said, “I’ll have you in a minute.”
“It’s on the tip of my tongue,” he went on, and then, “Gotcha! You are the Town Crier of Llandrindod Wells. Know you anywhere.”
I wear a Hapsburg moustache in honour of my favourite city, Vienna. My late landlord and supposed friend, the cavalry historian, the Marquess of Anglesey, claimed it made me look like a junior officer in a third rate Prussian cavalry regiment.
The attendant in the Schonbrunn Palace in Vienna was more flattering.
“Welcome home, Your Majesty,” he said, with a low bow and not a hint of satire.
And a waiter in a restaurant in the Fleischmarkt asked if I was related to the Royal family. It was the waistcoat again
On the same holiday, I was buying gluhwein at a street stall when my voice was recognised by a girl from my home village in Anglesey. She was spending a DAY in Vienna on leave from Australia.
In a bar in Barcelona it struck a chord with a group of well endowed ladies with TITS embroidered on their T-shirts. They said it stood for Team of Independent Travelling Sisters. Years later I discovered it was the first case of Boob plagiarism. The last S stood for Swansea. It is the logo of the city’s football supporters club.
It was not only the audience which had me banjaxed. The BBC itself was a great leveller. My producer got a first class travel warrant: I travelled second class.
In the early days of TV there was a children’s show which the Corporation thought ought to be transmitted from Manchester. Unfortunately, on the morning of the show, the producer discovered that the toys, which were part of the set design, had been left in London. He ordered a researcher to collect the toys and bring them to Manchester by taxi. As she was loading them she was spotted by a BBC “suit”. When he heard what she was planning to do he hit roof.
“Researchers are not allowed to use taxis,” he stormed.
So the toys went by taxi to Manchester and the researcher followed later by train.
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
“Henry Rees, 17, set off from his farm home near Rhayader, taking the first train ride in his life alone to the Army Centre at Sutton Coldfield, near Birmingham.
“He arrived at Birmingham and then got lost. On Saturday, after four police forces had been alerted, he was found walking along a road near Wimbourne in Staffordshire. He told the policeman who picked him up he was trying to find the Army Centre. He said he could not find the right train from Birmingham to Sutton Coldfield.
His mother said: “It seems that after a while he gave up and decided to get back home and start all over again. But it took him three days to get out of Birmingham. Even when he was found he was walking in the wrong direction. Accompanied by relatives he will report to the Centre to-day HOPING TO START A CAREER IN THE ARMY’S ADMINISTRATION SERVICE.”
Union officials and employers continue to draw their salaries. Only the workers suffer. When my union went on one of its ineffectual strikes, I was the father of a young family. We won nothing like the figure for which we were striking and it took many months to recover from the loss of wages incurred by our industrial inaction.
Neither side seems to regard the needs of its customers yet postmen are part of the furniture of our day. A pal of mine who used to own Snowdon Mountain admitted that he did most of his farming through the letter box, harvesting the subsidy cheques.
In the far off days of fatherhood when my post contained more bills than a flock of starlings I remember the dread with which I awaited the crash of final demands on the mat.
It is true occasional eccentricities added to the charm of the Office. I lived in a Cheshire village where the postman was a tireless poacher. His sack was the perfect hiding place for assorted dead game. Few things concentrate the mind so swiftly as getting a letter from the Inland Revenue in a bloodstained envelope.
When I moved to Chester I used to get LPs through the post and on one occasion the postman folded the LP neatly in half to make it easier to post it through the letter box. When I complained compensation was reluctantly awarded but I was required to promise I would not attempt to play the LP. I agreed since it could only ever have been played on a crescent-shaped turntable.
Print workers were the most imaginative strikers. At the height of the IRA mainland bombing campaign printers on the Daily Mirror struck for danger money on the grounds that coming to work on a paper which attacked the IRA was dangerous. It was pointed out in vain that English reporters working in Ireland did not get danger money; that the printers were working three floors underground in what was virtually a nuclear bomb proof shelter. The printers were obdurate. Only directors running round with bundles of cash got the paper out.
In the brave new world of instant re-location there are few strikes in private industry. Only our public servants still enjoy that dubious luxury.
The rest of us are often baffled by their reasons’
When Tom Ellis, the Wrexham MP, left the Labour Party to become a social democrat I accused him of treachery. He denied the charge. He said he was leaving because socialism had achieved all its aims, and it is certainly true that we are living in a golden age. We live longer and are healthier and more prosperous than ever before in the history of man. But we are still unhappy.
Oddly, unhappiness seems only to affect the “First” World. In a recent TV series, a young man lived in turn with tribes of primitive people who die young and live hard. The most abiding quality they showed was happiness and content with their way of life. In another series, a tribe from Borneo was brought to the West and shown its glories. They were baffled by a society that had so many empty buildings yet allowed its people to sleep on the streets.
In the tribal world man helps his neighbour. Here we are perpetually at war with someone. A friend points out that our unions and employers are greedy in turn and that we are living in the directors’ cut.
Pay received by directors at leading FTSE companies grew at double the rate of the average workforce. In the past five years they have earned an average £850, 000, which does not include bonuses and shares. The typical salary increase of executive directors was seven per cent last year, against the UK average of 3.7 per cent.
Nevertheless Post Office workers are on a kamikaze track. I do business with two of the mail order firms which turned its losses into huge profit. Both are deserting it for private firms. Yet one can see the postmen’s dilemma: their boss takes home a million pounds a year. Perhaps it is understandable that there are 92 “Spanish practices" through which postal workers are alleged to wring overtime and expenses. The Union claims its members work flexibly and they are entitled to go home early if they finish a task.
Why not? The Government urges flexible working and few workers are as flexible as our over-paid MPs.
* * * *
RENTING THE MOUTH FOR MONEY ...carries with it the burden of celebrity. I found my brush with celebrity very worrying. It usually consisted of perfect strangers doing double takes when they saw me. For a long time I thought it meant that my fly buttons were undone.
My first major TV engagement was a series of Welsh Sheepdog trials. I was stopped by a man in Llandudno.
“Saw the show last night,” he said. “Terrific.”
“Oh, you like sheepdog trials, then?”
“Most boring things ever seen on TV,” he told me.
“You liked me, then?”
“You? You were crap.”
“Well, what was so good about it?”
“Your waistcoats. Fabulous,” he said. “Where do you get them?”
Once in Bangor a man barred my path. “Don’t tell me,” he said, “I’ll have you in a minute.”
“It’s on the tip of my tongue,” he went on, and then, “Gotcha! You are the Town Crier of Llandrindod Wells. Know you anywhere.”
I wear a Hapsburg moustache in honour of my favourite city, Vienna. My late landlord and supposed friend, the cavalry historian, the Marquess of Anglesey, claimed it made me look like a junior officer in a third rate Prussian cavalry regiment.
The attendant in the Schonbrunn Palace in Vienna was more flattering.
“Welcome home, Your Majesty,” he said, with a low bow and not a hint of satire.
And a waiter in a restaurant in the Fleischmarkt asked if I was related to the Royal family. It was the waistcoat again
On the same holiday, I was buying gluhwein at a street stall when my voice was recognised by a girl from my home village in Anglesey. She was spending a DAY in Vienna on leave from Australia.
In a bar in Barcelona it struck a chord with a group of well endowed ladies with TITS embroidered on their T-shirts. They said it stood for Team of Independent Travelling Sisters. Years later I discovered it was the first case of Boob plagiarism. The last S stood for Swansea. It is the logo of the city’s football supporters club.
It was not only the audience which had me banjaxed. The BBC itself was a great leveller. My producer got a first class travel warrant: I travelled second class.
In the early days of TV there was a children’s show which the Corporation thought ought to be transmitted from Manchester. Unfortunately, on the morning of the show, the producer discovered that the toys, which were part of the set design, had been left in London. He ordered a researcher to collect the toys and bring them to Manchester by taxi. As she was loading them she was spotted by a BBC “suit”. When he heard what she was planning to do he hit roof.
“Researchers are not allowed to use taxis,” he stormed.
So the toys went by taxi to Manchester and the researcher followed later by train.
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
“Henry Rees, 17, set off from his farm home near Rhayader, taking the first train ride in his life alone to the Army Centre at Sutton Coldfield, near Birmingham.
“He arrived at Birmingham and then got lost. On Saturday, after four police forces had been alerted, he was found walking along a road near Wimbourne in Staffordshire. He told the policeman who picked him up he was trying to find the Army Centre. He said he could not find the right train from Birmingham to Sutton Coldfield.
His mother said: “It seems that after a while he gave up and decided to get back home and start all over again. But it took him three days to get out of Birmingham. Even when he was found he was walking in the wrong direction. Accompanied by relatives he will report to the Centre to-day HOPING TO START A CAREER IN THE ARMY’S ADMINISTRATION SERVICE.”
Saturday, 13 October 2007
GORE ?????? BLIMEY!
We are told that we are diminished by the number of species the world is losing. Certainly, nightingales no longer sing in Berkeley Square, or almost anywhere else in the UK for that matter. The boom in bitterns is over and I cannot remember when I last saw a worm glow.
The anguished publicity these losses generate speaks much for our love of wild creatures. They are not new. I expect that when the cave man came shuffling back to the cave at night, dragging his club behind him, he complained he had not seen a dinosaur all day. And no doubt told his mate it was the fault of global warming.
He would doubtless envy Al Gore, who gets a Nobel Peace Prize this week for making us aware of its dangers. In the same week, he was criticised by a High Court judge for claims he made in his film, which is riddled with errors and can only be shown in schools with a disclaimer. This followed disclosures that his own carbon footprint is Yeti-sized. Which makes him a fitting recipient of a prize for peace awarded by the son of an arms dealer who refined nitro-glycerine to make it safe to use in bombs.
I console myself with the thought - in my view the only original contribution to philosophy our century can boast – that ‘Stuff happens’.
I am much more concerned with the loss of the smile. Look at the people in the background of any photograph taken up to the Sixties and the chances are that one or more of them are smiling. You do not see that in the photographs we take today. Plenty of laughter, but it is possible to laugh and be angry at the same time. The grin is the response to humiliation, but smiling is impossible unless one is completely at ease with oneself.
I am fortunate: I live in Cambridgeshire, where the smile survives.
‘Amiable’ is the mot juste for this multi-coloured, colonised corner of the Fens. The original dwellers might have been sullen swamp people but they had a good deal to be sullen about. For centuries they lived outside the law and lived well. The Fens provided plentiful game and fish; transport was by boat, stilt and ice skate, than which there can be no more pleasant locomotion. Fruit and green stuff were to be had for the picking, wood for the fire and the buildings. Above all, the outside world rarely bothered you. True, you died young, but no younger than the people in the Outside, where Fenmen scarcely ventured from their Wind in the Willows world.
Then along came the Duke of Bedford and his land-hungry friends. They hired a team of interfering Dutchmen and the great drainage began. The labourers were starving Scottish prisoners of war and the great ditches they dug were named for the amount they dug in day. Thus we have the Forty Foot and the Hundred Foot drains, which are in fact war graves. When these forerunners of the navvies died, as they frequently did, they were buried in holes dug in the banks.
The Fenmen lost their freedom; but the inner content remains, like the vestigial tail we all carry at the foot of our spines.
Gangmasters, the 21st century equivalent of the Press Gang, have imported field workers from China and all over Eastern Europe. Like dolly mixtures, the pupils of the school near me come in all colours and great harmony, and the people I meet seem at ease with themselves and not remotely curious about others.
When I went to live in a Cheshire village, the grocer, Geoff Salt, told me not to worry if people asked me about myself and my business: it was the village equivalent of a weekly newspaper.
In Wales, dislike of the English is endemic. They dislike the English almost as much as the North Walian dislikes people from South Wales and vice versa. I thought ‘Gog’ and ‘Hontu’ were swear words, but they merely define geographical location, north and south.
The Welsh still blame us for Edward I’s invasion of North Wales, though his army of 15,000 included 12,000 South Walians. We are criticised for forcing our language on them. Yet it was a Welsh king, Henry VIII, who tried to kill their language, and Welsh parents in Gwynedd who, a century and a half ago, started a movement which aimed to have a thousand English speaking children by 1952.
An historical oddity decrees the most fervent nationalists should be aliens.
Catherine the Great was a German; Hitler was an Austrian, determined to give the lie to a natural truth that an Austrian is an unsuccessful attempt to turn an Italian into a German. Napoleon was a Corsican. Our Royal Family is German and Greek. The Arab nationalism which threatens the west was formulated by American missionaries who ran a literary society in Beirut in the 19th century; the IRA was manned, and often led, by English men and women. Of the two iconic Welshmen, R.S.Thomas, the poet, only became Welsh late in life, and the founder of Welsh nationalism, Saunders Lewis, was born in Liverpool. The first meeting of the Gorsedd of Welsh Bards was held in the 18th century on Primrose Hill in London; the first modern Eisteddfodd took place in Liverpool.
I blame the scenery. So bold and demanding is the landscape, so tempestuous are the seas in Wales that they take a great deal of living up to. One has to make grand gestures to be noticed. In the Fens there is no scenery to speak of, merely horizons and sensational skyscapes. It is easy to be placid and to concentrate on enjoyment and architecture. Our noblest churches and cathedrals, our diverse vernacular buildings, are our defence against nihilist surroundings. Christmas in the Fens is ablaze with light. Every village explodes in a carnival of faery lights. On the river Nene in March even the barges are illuminated. Only Vienna does it better. And possibly Bruges.
Long may it continue, if the Health and Safety restrictions which have banished them from some towns permit them.
The one loss I cannot bear is a little bird called freedom
End
When Oscar Levant was conscripted, the recruiting sergeant asked him if he would be able to kill the enemy. Levant replied, ‘The enemy? No. A friend? Yes.’
His friends felt much the same about George Harrop, the subject of the caricature above by my talented friend Ed Rawlinson.
George was Night Picture Editor of the Daily Mirror in Manchester when I ran the night news desk, a job I would have held much longer had someone else run the picture desk. A former cinema manager, wartime Chindit and PR man, he had the fastest tongue in the West - and also the loosest. Predictably so, since he incessantly lubricated it with whisky. He was even shaped like a Dimple Haigh bottle.
The telephone was his straight man, and his conversations with it were endless. On one occasion, the Sports Editor Peter Thomas tweaked his phone line out of its socket.
George went on talking for a full five minutes.
His tongue frequently got him into trouble, but it feared no man. Not even an editor, a wartime Commando major whose nickname was ‘Strangler’ and who had once held a junior executive by his ankles out of a fourth floor window.
‘George, get off the bloody phone,’ he raged one night.
‘Have to go,’ said George, in a voice everybody in the room heard, ‘the editor wants permission to change a crosshead.’
A photographer who fell foul of him was ‘a panchromatic Judas Iscariot’. Describing the foremen’s Christmas lunch at a smart hotel, he said: ‘They rushed through the swing doors in their suede clogs shouting, “Where is the foremen’s lavatory?”’
Once, returning home, he could not find his front gate. He hacked a great hole in the hedge, assuming he was back in the Chindits. It would be dishonourable to him to call him predictable.
I was not the only man to suffer from his friendship. Another martyr, the Night News Editor of the Daily Express, was on his way to a Christmas party when he discovered George asleep in the back of his car. Something which quite often happened to many of us.
Good sense dictated dumping him at the earliest - or nearest – convenience, but foolishly he took him to the party. In quite a short time, the host was so keen that my friend should take George home that he gave him the keys of his car.
The years have not diminished the horror of that drive. Distracted by George’s seamless monologue down some imagined phone, my friend drove over the bumpy flowerbeds of a roundabout. This startled George, who demanded to know where he was and how he could open the steamed-up passenger window.
A few moments later, my friend felt a breeze and assumed George had opened the window. But his seat was empty and in the rear mirror my friend saw a bundle of rags rolling down the road. George had opened the door and fallen out.
Numb with fright, my friend knelt in the road beside the rags, fearing the worst. To his relief, George`s head emerged. He got to his feet, dusted himself down and insisted on being taken to a pub 500 yards down the road. The pub was in darkness, but George hammered on the door until the bedroom lights went on and the landlady appeared in her dressing gown and curlers.
‘Madam, said George at his most courtly, ‘I am sorry to have awakened you but there has been a terrible accident. The victim is in shock: a large medicinal brandy would help.’
Still half asleep, she only began screaming for the police when George explained that he was the victim and that he preferred his brandy without ice or soda…
My friend eventually shook George off, which was never easy, and got home on Boxing Day to find his wife had left him. The party host subsequently attacked him with his crutch when my friend told him he could not remember where he had left his car.
Alas, George has long ago gone to the Great Saloon Bar in the Sky. Somehow R.I.P seems inappropriate.
End
From my Book of Dangerous Cuttings:-
Zimbabwe’s Minister of Finance, Bernard Chinzero, upset a number of Harare luminaries the other day when he failed to turn up after agreeing to be the guest of honour at a business luncheon.
When the organiser phoned Chidzero’s office for an explanation, the Minister’s secretary replied: ‘He was not hungry.’
.
The anguished publicity these losses generate speaks much for our love of wild creatures. They are not new. I expect that when the cave man came shuffling back to the cave at night, dragging his club behind him, he complained he had not seen a dinosaur all day. And no doubt told his mate it was the fault of global warming.
He would doubtless envy Al Gore, who gets a Nobel Peace Prize this week for making us aware of its dangers. In the same week, he was criticised by a High Court judge for claims he made in his film, which is riddled with errors and can only be shown in schools with a disclaimer. This followed disclosures that his own carbon footprint is Yeti-sized. Which makes him a fitting recipient of a prize for peace awarded by the son of an arms dealer who refined nitro-glycerine to make it safe to use in bombs.
I console myself with the thought - in my view the only original contribution to philosophy our century can boast – that ‘Stuff happens’.
I am much more concerned with the loss of the smile. Look at the people in the background of any photograph taken up to the Sixties and the chances are that one or more of them are smiling. You do not see that in the photographs we take today. Plenty of laughter, but it is possible to laugh and be angry at the same time. The grin is the response to humiliation, but smiling is impossible unless one is completely at ease with oneself.
I am fortunate: I live in Cambridgeshire, where the smile survives.
‘Amiable’ is the mot juste for this multi-coloured, colonised corner of the Fens. The original dwellers might have been sullen swamp people but they had a good deal to be sullen about. For centuries they lived outside the law and lived well. The Fens provided plentiful game and fish; transport was by boat, stilt and ice skate, than which there can be no more pleasant locomotion. Fruit and green stuff were to be had for the picking, wood for the fire and the buildings. Above all, the outside world rarely bothered you. True, you died young, but no younger than the people in the Outside, where Fenmen scarcely ventured from their Wind in the Willows world.
Then along came the Duke of Bedford and his land-hungry friends. They hired a team of interfering Dutchmen and the great drainage began. The labourers were starving Scottish prisoners of war and the great ditches they dug were named for the amount they dug in day. Thus we have the Forty Foot and the Hundred Foot drains, which are in fact war graves. When these forerunners of the navvies died, as they frequently did, they were buried in holes dug in the banks.
The Fenmen lost their freedom; but the inner content remains, like the vestigial tail we all carry at the foot of our spines.
Gangmasters, the 21st century equivalent of the Press Gang, have imported field workers from China and all over Eastern Europe. Like dolly mixtures, the pupils of the school near me come in all colours and great harmony, and the people I meet seem at ease with themselves and not remotely curious about others.
When I went to live in a Cheshire village, the grocer, Geoff Salt, told me not to worry if people asked me about myself and my business: it was the village equivalent of a weekly newspaper.
In Wales, dislike of the English is endemic. They dislike the English almost as much as the North Walian dislikes people from South Wales and vice versa. I thought ‘Gog’ and ‘Hontu’ were swear words, but they merely define geographical location, north and south.
The Welsh still blame us for Edward I’s invasion of North Wales, though his army of 15,000 included 12,000 South Walians. We are criticised for forcing our language on them. Yet it was a Welsh king, Henry VIII, who tried to kill their language, and Welsh parents in Gwynedd who, a century and a half ago, started a movement which aimed to have a thousand English speaking children by 1952.
An historical oddity decrees the most fervent nationalists should be aliens.
Catherine the Great was a German; Hitler was an Austrian, determined to give the lie to a natural truth that an Austrian is an unsuccessful attempt to turn an Italian into a German. Napoleon was a Corsican. Our Royal Family is German and Greek. The Arab nationalism which threatens the west was formulated by American missionaries who ran a literary society in Beirut in the 19th century; the IRA was manned, and often led, by English men and women. Of the two iconic Welshmen, R.S.Thomas, the poet, only became Welsh late in life, and the founder of Welsh nationalism, Saunders Lewis, was born in Liverpool. The first meeting of the Gorsedd of Welsh Bards was held in the 18th century on Primrose Hill in London; the first modern Eisteddfodd took place in Liverpool.
I blame the scenery. So bold and demanding is the landscape, so tempestuous are the seas in Wales that they take a great deal of living up to. One has to make grand gestures to be noticed. In the Fens there is no scenery to speak of, merely horizons and sensational skyscapes. It is easy to be placid and to concentrate on enjoyment and architecture. Our noblest churches and cathedrals, our diverse vernacular buildings, are our defence against nihilist surroundings. Christmas in the Fens is ablaze with light. Every village explodes in a carnival of faery lights. On the river Nene in March even the barges are illuminated. Only Vienna does it better. And possibly Bruges.
Long may it continue, if the Health and Safety restrictions which have banished them from some towns permit them.
The one loss I cannot bear is a little bird called freedom
End
When Oscar Levant was conscripted, the recruiting sergeant asked him if he would be able to kill the enemy. Levant replied, ‘The enemy? No. A friend? Yes.’
His friends felt much the same about George Harrop, the subject of the caricature above by my talented friend Ed Rawlinson.
George was Night Picture Editor of the Daily Mirror in Manchester when I ran the night news desk, a job I would have held much longer had someone else run the picture desk. A former cinema manager, wartime Chindit and PR man, he had the fastest tongue in the West - and also the loosest. Predictably so, since he incessantly lubricated it with whisky. He was even shaped like a Dimple Haigh bottle.
The telephone was his straight man, and his conversations with it were endless. On one occasion, the Sports Editor Peter Thomas tweaked his phone line out of its socket.
George went on talking for a full five minutes.
His tongue frequently got him into trouble, but it feared no man. Not even an editor, a wartime Commando major whose nickname was ‘Strangler’ and who had once held a junior executive by his ankles out of a fourth floor window.
‘George, get off the bloody phone,’ he raged one night.
‘Have to go,’ said George, in a voice everybody in the room heard, ‘the editor wants permission to change a crosshead.’
A photographer who fell foul of him was ‘a panchromatic Judas Iscariot’. Describing the foremen’s Christmas lunch at a smart hotel, he said: ‘They rushed through the swing doors in their suede clogs shouting, “Where is the foremen’s lavatory?”’
Once, returning home, he could not find his front gate. He hacked a great hole in the hedge, assuming he was back in the Chindits. It would be dishonourable to him to call him predictable.
I was not the only man to suffer from his friendship. Another martyr, the Night News Editor of the Daily Express, was on his way to a Christmas party when he discovered George asleep in the back of his car. Something which quite often happened to many of us.
Good sense dictated dumping him at the earliest - or nearest – convenience, but foolishly he took him to the party. In quite a short time, the host was so keen that my friend should take George home that he gave him the keys of his car.
The years have not diminished the horror of that drive. Distracted by George’s seamless monologue down some imagined phone, my friend drove over the bumpy flowerbeds of a roundabout. This startled George, who demanded to know where he was and how he could open the steamed-up passenger window.
A few moments later, my friend felt a breeze and assumed George had opened the window. But his seat was empty and in the rear mirror my friend saw a bundle of rags rolling down the road. George had opened the door and fallen out.
Numb with fright, my friend knelt in the road beside the rags, fearing the worst. To his relief, George`s head emerged. He got to his feet, dusted himself down and insisted on being taken to a pub 500 yards down the road. The pub was in darkness, but George hammered on the door until the bedroom lights went on and the landlady appeared in her dressing gown and curlers.
‘Madam, said George at his most courtly, ‘I am sorry to have awakened you but there has been a terrible accident. The victim is in shock: a large medicinal brandy would help.’
Still half asleep, she only began screaming for the police when George explained that he was the victim and that he preferred his brandy without ice or soda…
My friend eventually shook George off, which was never easy, and got home on Boxing Day to find his wife had left him. The party host subsequently attacked him with his crutch when my friend told him he could not remember where he had left his car.
Alas, George has long ago gone to the Great Saloon Bar in the Sky. Somehow R.I.P seems inappropriate.
End
From my Book of Dangerous Cuttings:-
Zimbabwe’s Minister of Finance, Bernard Chinzero, upset a number of Harare luminaries the other day when he failed to turn up after agreeing to be the guest of honour at a business luncheon.
When the organiser phoned Chidzero’s office for an explanation, the Minister’s secretary replied: ‘He was not hungry.’
.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)