Words are important to a writer in precisely the way screws and nails are vital ingredients in the vocabulary of a carpenter. So it follows that I am distressed at efforts to make certain assemblies of innocent letters illegal.
We must not describe what, to many, is unnatural behaviour in brief and vivid words. Equerry is permissible; queer, which is little different, isn’t. Three letters permit its entry into polite society.
At times like this we must remember that we are ruled by an Establishment made for the pen of Dean Swift. With not a trace of humour, our extraordinary Home Secretary has put an end to terrorism. Now, she has ruled, we must call it Anti-Islamic Activity. You can sense the chill that must bring to the hearts of Mad Mullahs everywhere. But I suppose if you cannot govern a country, you can comfort yourself that you are a Canute of the waves of words.
Personally I am offended by obscenities in plays and on radio and TV. Irrational, I know. Copulation in its daily dress describes moments of deep love and heightened sensitivity. More than that, it provides vernacular architecture for people with limited vocabulary.
I had a friend who ascribed to the limited vocabulary of the young the breakdown of so many marriages. On the grounds that once a young swain has said, “Do you come here often?” the only other expression of devotion his vocabulary permits is, “Will you marry me?” A compliment rather than a commitment.
In the workplace, the news room or the barrack room the copulatory verb is probably used more often than “the”. I used to wonder why that was, until I realised what a portmanteau of a word it is. A chameleon, too. The addition of three letters, another verbal trinity, turns it into a noun or an adjective. It can express the extreme of surprise, delight, or revulsion. Preceding a command or any one of a thousand responses it acts like a flourish of trumpets.
I swear in order to add colour to a sentence. Yet I am offended by the use of bad language in newspapers or in the presence of women, even though my wife gave up football because of the foul language of the other lady players.
When I met her, the only swear word my convent-reared wife used was “Horrors” or in extreme cases “Multiple Horrors”. Why not make that assembly of letters illegal?
Wise old Montaigne wondered why when he sneezed people said, ”God Bless you” yet if he expelled air from another part of his body he was shunned. Why should words which describe procreation and pleasure be taboo? Yet massacre and genocide be on everyone’s lips?
Nothing about our government suggests that words are suppressed out of sensitivity. There is no benevolence in the 3,000 or more new laws which have appeared on the Statute Book under New Labour. But they do show in the clearest possible terms that we must do as we are told.
Our freedom, which for centuries defined us as British citizens, is no longer fit for purpose. Restrictions on gun ownership, imposed in the hysteria which followed Dunblane, had no effect on gun crime. Rather the opposite. The “dangerous dogs” laws, which sprang from hysteria following several savagings, have not affected dog behaviour. Hunting was never as popular as it became after the recent legislation.
At one level this restricton of freedom is irritating, but at another it is profoundly worrying. Like the legislation which prohibits smoking and driving on the grounds that if you smoke and drive there is a remote chance of your having an accident. You could, of course, ban the act of driving on the same premise. They are all instruments of control and encourage a mindset which accepts restriction of liberty.
Age has produced in me an increasing tendency to break wind. An American magazine bluntly advertised “Fartypants”, which contain an absorbent charcoal pad.
I hastened to order two pairs. Hearing of it, my friend Geoff Mather, former features editor of the Daily Express, sent this:
” I was told by friends from Mexico that there is a creature known as a garrapata which has an inlet and no outlet. It blows up, they said. Be that as it may, here is a curious explanation of the garrapata, translated from the Spanish:
‘The garrapatas often are in the high grass, where they hope in the end of a leaf to try to enlist to any animal or person that happens. A very common false idea is to think that the garrapata is able to jump off the plant to the guest, but the only method of transmission is the physical contact. The garrapata is ended up loosen of the animal when it fills, but this can take several days. In their mouth, the garrapatas have a structure that allows them to enlist firmly to the place of which they are absorbing blood. To throw off a garrapata to the force can often make that parts of the garrapata are given off and they remain in the mordedura, whole the apparatus buccal, which can produce infection. Between the methods to extract the garrapata without leaving within the skin the head or the mouth, they are for example anestesiar to the garrapata with a substance like the ether.’”
Another friend, John Julius Norwich, produces an anthology every Christmas and I thought this explanation might merit a place. Almost by return, the Earl produced the following gem:
“Though I myself am no mean farter
I'm glad I'm not a garrapata;
As for my apparatus buccal,
It seems a trifle near the knuckle -
And though my movements can't be purer,
I think I'll stick to the mordedura.”
………………………………………………………….
In his delicious “Brief Lives”, John Aubrey recalls the unfortunate Earl of Oxford who was so nervous at being presented to the Tudor Queen Elizabeth that, as he performed his bow, he broke wind. Aubrey says the Earl was so embarrassed he immediately left court and exiled himself abroad.
Years later he returned and once more was presented to Her Majesty. “Ah ,Oxford,” she called out when he entered the Presence Chamber, “we have quite forgot the fart.”
Acker Bilk’s brother David told me of a time when he and his brother were playing in the band at a Hunt Ball. As they queued for supper, David broke wind. “Mr Bilk,” roared the Master, “are you aware that your brother has broken wind before my wife?” “Oh well,” said Acker, “I don’t suppose ‘e knew it were her turn.”
And I cannot resist the story of the young couple who were out riding one day when the man’s horse broke wind. He apologised profusely. “Please do not worry,” said the girl, “I thought it was the horse.”
And that, I am sure, concludes a case for the prosecution.
DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
From Peterborough, Daily Telegraph:
“More humorous animal names have been sent to me. This time a tale of two cats called Castor and Pollux. They belonged to an astronomer who late at night, I am told, found himself unable to call the latter’s name in a deserted suburban street.
“My favourite of the last batch of cats’ names came from a lady in Norwich whose daughter had named her cat Ceremony. Whenever visitors arrived, she warned them not to stand on it.
“A reader in Surrey also tells me of a neighbour who bought a pair of Siamese kittens – one of which was excessively greedy and other addicted to long periods of sleep. They were christened Chew and Lie.”
………………………………………………………………
P.S. Since I may well find myself in durance vile for this blog, why not try for a really good read, Mather’s blog: www.northtrek.co.uk?
Saturday, 19 January 2008
Saturday, 12 January 2008
Tam Divvy
I did not realise how much I hated work until retirement gave me the precious gift of idleness. Old age has many disadvantages; though to date I have experienced few of them. Only one sedentary pleasure is diminishing. I can no longer obey the advice of the Book of Common Prayer “to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest”.
If I open a book, it is not long before the eyelids droop and I fall asleep. If I stay awake, I cannot remember what I have read. This is a great sadness. Although totally uneducated, I believe I may have read more books than most people from my background. It is certainly true that I have come to all life’s activities, from love making to gardening, by way of a book.
My unfashionable fondness for fox hunting is a result of reading the little-known comic novels of Surtees, himself a hunting squire and the creator of a Cockney grocer called Mr Jorrocks who is obsessed with the sport. He gave him the utterance on which I based my life’s modus operandi: “Pick me up, tie me to my chair and fill up my glass.”
I took the sport up when I was working on the Daily Mirror, a paper violently opposed to hunting. I did not wear hunting pink, only rat catcher, a black jacket, riding breeches, top boots and a bowler. The season begins with cub hunting; a distasteful activity, no longer practised, which trains the young entry of hounds. Because it must be carried out before the dew lifts, it takes place in the early morning. I worked nights so I changed into my rat catcher in the office lavatory, to the chagrin of the editor. I didn’t have a car so I had to go to the stables on the all-night bus where, in bowler, breeches and top boots, I was the butt of tired humour from other night workers.
Captain Milton, my hunting companion and the manager of the stables, lived off the land. Anyone’s land. He would only eat an egg if it had been poached. He was an enormous snob who at one meet watched the multi-millionaire chairman of Unilever, Lord Leverhulme, tip-tipping by, a tribute to Lobb and Pink, on a thoroughbred that must have cost several thousand. “See Soapy is out,” said Captain Milton dismissively.
He used to take me from the stables to the meet in a horse box and I was so in awe of him that, when the back wheel caught fire as we passed through Altrincham one morning, I didn’t dare tell him until we reached the kennels.
The wife of the Hon. Sec. was even more terrifying. It was claimed that when she returned from one morning’s cubbing, a groom had observed.
“T’owd ‘oss is sweating, Ma’am.”
“So would you be,” she is said to have replied, “if you had been between my legs since six o clock this morning.”
I haven't hunted for half a century and the older I get the less inclined I am to kill anything but...
Most hunts have an inner circle of Toffs; in our pack they formed the Tarporley Hunt Club, to which no one outside their circle was admitted. Only they were invited by the Master to wear pink coats.
The greater part of the Hunt wore rat catcher and was made up of farmers, tradesmen and young girls. It is they who are affected by the recent anti-hunting legislation, not the Toffs.
Tarporley Hunt Club members regularly helicoptered to Ireland, whither their hunters had already been exported the night before to await their arrival. That in itself is cruel because horses cannot vomit and therefore suffer badly in rough weather.
Since helicopters are noisy and would spook the hounds, visiting followers have to land five miles from the meet. So cars were sent from their homes in Cheshire to drive the members from the landing strip to the meet. So they can continue to hunt in the old manner as often as they like.
Little wonder that enthusiasm is not being shown in carrying out the anti- hunting legislation. It is the poorer subscribers who suffer, and the hunt servants - the smiths, the vets and the providers of fodder.
There is a further complication. Hunts collect dead stock. European legislation has made it difficult to dispose of such carcasses. Worse, foxes carry rabies and are increasingly invading urban areas where the pickings are easy. Pet cats and dogs are at risk. A baby has been bitten by one. It is only a question of time before a helpless child is savaged.
Attlee's Government set up an inquiry into fox hunting. It decided that hunting with hounds was the least cruel method of fox disposal. The agony of poisoning was indescribable. The problem with shooting was that you could not be sure of a clean kill. Unlike dogs, a fox's spittle does not have antiseptic qualities. It is unable to cure wounds by licking them and they often become gangrenous.
Hounds are bred to be slower than their quarry; otherwise there would be no chase. It follows that only old and infirm foxes are killed; an accelerated form of natural selection.
Bans on cockfighting, badger and bear baiting were NOT introduced for humane reasons. They were part of legislation passed at a time of industrial unrest to prevent riotous assemblies. Like the present legislation, a political device.
8888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888
My friend Curly Beard was always ready to help when a hunt servant had a problem. Inevitable the huntsman of the Cheshire should come to him when the Master complained he was not showing enough sport. Hunt Committees are ruthless in getting rid of huntsmen who don’t show sport. The neighbouring Wynnstay Hunt had a huntsman called Wilkin who had been with them for years. One bad season and he was out. And that meant not only out of a job, but out of a house too.
He should have gone to Curly.
“Cat’s piss, that’s the answer,“ he told the Cheshire huntsman.
“And how am I going to collect that?“ the huntsman wanted to know. “I cannot go behind them with a test tube.”
“Leave it to me,” said Curly. “Next meet is at Huxley. Meet me in the Farmer’s Arms at 8 am.”
Now I don’t know - and there was no way Curly would have told me - whether he had a vet straightened or whether he milked the cats himself. All I do know is that when we met in the car park of the Farmer’s Arms he had a cough mixture bottle which was filled with pungent liquid.
He and the huntsman walked over to the first cover and laid a trail from its centre across the fields, on either bank of a stream, and over several walls. Then we went home for breakfast and were back in the Farmer’s Arms by opening time.
The hounds met at 11 am and, watched by a scowling master, were shepherded off by the hunt staff. They were scarcely in the first field before they started to give tongue, Then they were off like lamplighters, leaving the field to catch up as best they might. Only the thrusters were up with hounds.
“That’ll do me,” said Curly. We had a few pints, then went home and were back at opening time that evening when the huntsman joined us.
“Decent day?” asked Curly.
“Decent? Never had a day like it,” said the huntsman. ”We had a four mile point and it took me all I could muster to keep up with the pack.”
“Never fails,” said Curly. “Cat’s piss.”
“Worth a guinea a gallon,” said the huntsman.
“Cost thee more than that,” said Curly. “Not easy stuff to get hold of.”
“I’ll not begrudge you,” the huntsman assured him. “Master were right chuffed. Bugger swore blind he’d seen a fox.”
ends
* * * * * * * * * * *
A reader from the U.S. of A, emails that I was lucky to have such an epic father. That is as maybe but from the Chief Constable’s point of view he was an epic disaster from the day he joined the force.
He was paraded with the other PCs on night duty, and patrol instructions were read out by the desk sergeant. As he finished, the station door opened and a head popped round. It introduced itself as the dentist from Parkside and begged to speak to the constable whose beat took him past the surgery.
It was my father.
“I’m very troubled with rats,” the dentist told him. “On your beat tonight, if you come across a stray cat, can you lift the lid of my coal cellar and drop it through? There’s a bright shilling for you if you do.”
My old man pocketed the coin and rejoined the other policemen. They asked what the civilian wanted and foolishly my father told them. As a result, the entire night shift went on a cat hunt.
The next night they paraded again. Once again the door opened and once again the dentist popped his head round. My old man was startled to see it was covered in sticking plaster. Once again the dentist asked to speak to him.
“When I opened my cellar door this morning I was knocked flat on my back by dozens of cats,“ he told my old man. “I’m scratched and bitten all over my body. But they killed a dozen rats. So here’s another shilling. However, if you find the bugger who put the dog in, I will make it half a crown.”
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
Answering a demand to “follow that man”, Mr Jack Jones allowed two policemen to climb into the bucket of his articulated shovel and lumbered them, pointing and shouting, after a suspected thief who was making off along the Swansea foreshore.
Hardly had they reached down and lifted the suspect into the bucket than the excavator began to sink into the sand. Five minutes later it vanished from view - and so had the police. The repair bill will be £6,000.
If I open a book, it is not long before the eyelids droop and I fall asleep. If I stay awake, I cannot remember what I have read. This is a great sadness. Although totally uneducated, I believe I may have read more books than most people from my background. It is certainly true that I have come to all life’s activities, from love making to gardening, by way of a book.
My unfashionable fondness for fox hunting is a result of reading the little-known comic novels of Surtees, himself a hunting squire and the creator of a Cockney grocer called Mr Jorrocks who is obsessed with the sport. He gave him the utterance on which I based my life’s modus operandi: “Pick me up, tie me to my chair and fill up my glass.”
I took the sport up when I was working on the Daily Mirror, a paper violently opposed to hunting. I did not wear hunting pink, only rat catcher, a black jacket, riding breeches, top boots and a bowler. The season begins with cub hunting; a distasteful activity, no longer practised, which trains the young entry of hounds. Because it must be carried out before the dew lifts, it takes place in the early morning. I worked nights so I changed into my rat catcher in the office lavatory, to the chagrin of the editor. I didn’t have a car so I had to go to the stables on the all-night bus where, in bowler, breeches and top boots, I was the butt of tired humour from other night workers.
Captain Milton, my hunting companion and the manager of the stables, lived off the land. Anyone’s land. He would only eat an egg if it had been poached. He was an enormous snob who at one meet watched the multi-millionaire chairman of Unilever, Lord Leverhulme, tip-tipping by, a tribute to Lobb and Pink, on a thoroughbred that must have cost several thousand. “See Soapy is out,” said Captain Milton dismissively.
He used to take me from the stables to the meet in a horse box and I was so in awe of him that, when the back wheel caught fire as we passed through Altrincham one morning, I didn’t dare tell him until we reached the kennels.
The wife of the Hon. Sec. was even more terrifying. It was claimed that when she returned from one morning’s cubbing, a groom had observed.
“T’owd ‘oss is sweating, Ma’am.”
“So would you be,” she is said to have replied, “if you had been between my legs since six o clock this morning.”
I haven't hunted for half a century and the older I get the less inclined I am to kill anything but...
Most hunts have an inner circle of Toffs; in our pack they formed the Tarporley Hunt Club, to which no one outside their circle was admitted. Only they were invited by the Master to wear pink coats.
The greater part of the Hunt wore rat catcher and was made up of farmers, tradesmen and young girls. It is they who are affected by the recent anti-hunting legislation, not the Toffs.
Tarporley Hunt Club members regularly helicoptered to Ireland, whither their hunters had already been exported the night before to await their arrival. That in itself is cruel because horses cannot vomit and therefore suffer badly in rough weather.
Since helicopters are noisy and would spook the hounds, visiting followers have to land five miles from the meet. So cars were sent from their homes in Cheshire to drive the members from the landing strip to the meet. So they can continue to hunt in the old manner as often as they like.
Little wonder that enthusiasm is not being shown in carrying out the anti- hunting legislation. It is the poorer subscribers who suffer, and the hunt servants - the smiths, the vets and the providers of fodder.
There is a further complication. Hunts collect dead stock. European legislation has made it difficult to dispose of such carcasses. Worse, foxes carry rabies and are increasingly invading urban areas where the pickings are easy. Pet cats and dogs are at risk. A baby has been bitten by one. It is only a question of time before a helpless child is savaged.
Attlee's Government set up an inquiry into fox hunting. It decided that hunting with hounds was the least cruel method of fox disposal. The agony of poisoning was indescribable. The problem with shooting was that you could not be sure of a clean kill. Unlike dogs, a fox's spittle does not have antiseptic qualities. It is unable to cure wounds by licking them and they often become gangrenous.
Hounds are bred to be slower than their quarry; otherwise there would be no chase. It follows that only old and infirm foxes are killed; an accelerated form of natural selection.
Bans on cockfighting, badger and bear baiting were NOT introduced for humane reasons. They were part of legislation passed at a time of industrial unrest to prevent riotous assemblies. Like the present legislation, a political device.
8888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888
My friend Curly Beard was always ready to help when a hunt servant had a problem. Inevitable the huntsman of the Cheshire should come to him when the Master complained he was not showing enough sport. Hunt Committees are ruthless in getting rid of huntsmen who don’t show sport. The neighbouring Wynnstay Hunt had a huntsman called Wilkin who had been with them for years. One bad season and he was out. And that meant not only out of a job, but out of a house too.
He should have gone to Curly.
“Cat’s piss, that’s the answer,“ he told the Cheshire huntsman.
“And how am I going to collect that?“ the huntsman wanted to know. “I cannot go behind them with a test tube.”
“Leave it to me,” said Curly. “Next meet is at Huxley. Meet me in the Farmer’s Arms at 8 am.”
Now I don’t know - and there was no way Curly would have told me - whether he had a vet straightened or whether he milked the cats himself. All I do know is that when we met in the car park of the Farmer’s Arms he had a cough mixture bottle which was filled with pungent liquid.
He and the huntsman walked over to the first cover and laid a trail from its centre across the fields, on either bank of a stream, and over several walls. Then we went home for breakfast and were back in the Farmer’s Arms by opening time.
The hounds met at 11 am and, watched by a scowling master, were shepherded off by the hunt staff. They were scarcely in the first field before they started to give tongue, Then they were off like lamplighters, leaving the field to catch up as best they might. Only the thrusters were up with hounds.
“That’ll do me,” said Curly. We had a few pints, then went home and were back at opening time that evening when the huntsman joined us.
“Decent day?” asked Curly.
“Decent? Never had a day like it,” said the huntsman. ”We had a four mile point and it took me all I could muster to keep up with the pack.”
“Never fails,” said Curly. “Cat’s piss.”
“Worth a guinea a gallon,” said the huntsman.
“Cost thee more than that,” said Curly. “Not easy stuff to get hold of.”
“I’ll not begrudge you,” the huntsman assured him. “Master were right chuffed. Bugger swore blind he’d seen a fox.”
ends
* * * * * * * * * * *
A reader from the U.S. of A, emails that I was lucky to have such an epic father. That is as maybe but from the Chief Constable’s point of view he was an epic disaster from the day he joined the force.
He was paraded with the other PCs on night duty, and patrol instructions were read out by the desk sergeant. As he finished, the station door opened and a head popped round. It introduced itself as the dentist from Parkside and begged to speak to the constable whose beat took him past the surgery.
It was my father.
“I’m very troubled with rats,” the dentist told him. “On your beat tonight, if you come across a stray cat, can you lift the lid of my coal cellar and drop it through? There’s a bright shilling for you if you do.”
My old man pocketed the coin and rejoined the other policemen. They asked what the civilian wanted and foolishly my father told them. As a result, the entire night shift went on a cat hunt.
The next night they paraded again. Once again the door opened and once again the dentist popped his head round. My old man was startled to see it was covered in sticking plaster. Once again the dentist asked to speak to him.
“When I opened my cellar door this morning I was knocked flat on my back by dozens of cats,“ he told my old man. “I’m scratched and bitten all over my body. But they killed a dozen rats. So here’s another shilling. However, if you find the bugger who put the dog in, I will make it half a crown.”
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
Answering a demand to “follow that man”, Mr Jack Jones allowed two policemen to climb into the bucket of his articulated shovel and lumbered them, pointing and shouting, after a suspected thief who was making off along the Swansea foreshore.
Hardly had they reached down and lifted the suspect into the bucket than the excavator began to sink into the sand. Five minutes later it vanished from view - and so had the police. The repair bill will be £6,000.
Saturday, 5 January 2008
Bobbies aren't always dazzlers
“Our Policemen are Wonderful.”
There was a time when that mantra was on everyone’s lips. Except mine.
My father was a policeman and came a little short in the wonderful line. He had been in the trenches with the Royal Scots at the age of 15 in World War One and the experience had scarred him. He was a drunk, a wife beater, a bully, but a total charmer to the world outside our house. He was as brave as a lion, always went on his own in areas where policemen went in twos for mutual protection, and was shot in the head by the IRA when he stormed a house in which they were besieged. I was still sewing his ripped trousers, the relics of fights, during most of his sixties.
During the war he was the driver in a dedicated unit set up to fight the black market. As a direct result, our house was so full of sides of bacon, eggs, legs of lamb and crates of whisky that I thought I was the son of a uniformed grocer.
Trench warfare had freed him of any moral sense. He would steal sweets from Woolworths under the noses of the shop girls. When he was on night duty he would come home with hauls of antiques he swore he had found in dustbins. If he was late for work he would steal a car from his local pub and report it stolen when he arrived at the police station. We used a carving knife at home, not knowing he had taken it from a house where a luckless man had used it to cut his throat.
He certainly did not subscribe to the wonderful policeman syndrome, and how much less he would have supported it now when our policemen will only go on a crime scene when it has been made safe. If one reports a theft or an act of hooliganism one might as well shout it down a wet sock for all the reaction. In this house we have a sophisticated burglar alarm system to which the police will not respond because it is not on their approved list. My cousin apprehended one of a legion of thieves who had stolen eight thousand pounds’ worth of garden statuary by brandishing a golf club at him. When the police arrived they threatened to arrest my cousin for possession of a weapon.
Their own use of deadly weapons has resulted in the deaths of a number of innocent people, for which none has been prosecuted. A Chief Constable retires and draws a handsome pension. He later takes another job as Chief Constable but goes to law to defend his right to keep the pension from his other job. Other senior policemen resign hurriedly to secure their pension against possible future disciplinary action.
An innocent Brazilian is shot by police gunmen. No successful prosecution follows. The Omagh massacre has found no culprit. The only man charged was released amid criticism of the police by the judge. A worrying number of people convicted of murder have later been pardoned because the evidence was faulty. A number of very senior policemen have taken hurried retirement rather than face an inquiry into their behaviour.
When I was reporting on the Richardson Crime Family in the Sixties, the evidence against them was assembled in a rural police station because so many members of the Metropolitan police were in their pockets.
Sir Ian Blair, The Teflon Commissioner, and Richard Brunstrom, the North Wales Chief Constable, dubbed the Mad Mullah by the Daily Mail, a list of whose eccentricities makes entertaining reading on the Association of British Drivers website. Which of the two, I wonder, has done most to make a mockery of the proposition that our policemen are wonderful?
Some years ago, Dr Howard Taylor, an historian at Nottingham University, published the results of a four-year study into policing in the Economic History Review. It showed that the police have been manipulating crime figures to appease politicians, protect their budgets and increase manpower for 140 years, since the days of Jack the Ripper.
Nevertheless, when the police force was denied a promised rise of salary I was on their side. Not because they deserved it, but because I believe government should honour its promises. Indeed I am less sure that it has been earned.
I have known glorious exceptions because I have been lucky enough to live most of my life in villages, and village policemen ARE universally wonderful. Sadly they are a dying breed. Today’s meritocratic Chief Constables would never approve the personal fiefs which village bobbies made of their patrol areas.
The supreme example was my much mourned friend Ken Williams who doubled being a police constable in Bala, North Wales, and Treaddur Bay, on Anglesey, with a career as a TV personality whose HTV wildlife programmes were some of the best I have ever seen.
When Anglesey Aluminium bought a great swathe of the island to build a smelter, the land included a country estate in Ken’s bailiwick, Penrhos, which was teeming with wildlife.
He lay in wait for the managing director of the new project until he caught him speeding. The M.D. asked, as they do, if there was anything he could do to prevent the mark on his licence. Ken said there was, and told him about a plan he had to turn the Penrhos Estate into a wildlife reserve. The M.D. suggested he draw up a plan, no doubt hoping that it would be the last he would hear of the idea.
Ken stayed up all that night drawing it, and presented it to the startled manager before he left for work the next morning.
The M.D. sent it to his bosses, with the result that Ken, who had the tongue of angels, was called to London and so bedazzled the company’s parent Board that they gave him the estate. It is now the most successful wild life centre in Britain and respected throughout the conservation world.
Ken retired after marrying a millionairess and becoming the only serving PC in Wales to have a holiday home staffed with servants in Mombasa.
When they were married I said, “I suppose you will leave the police now you have married into money?”
“And lose my full pension?” he said. “Not on your life.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
You could have given my old man leprosy, just so long as it was free. When I was a toddler there was an outbreak of psittacosis, the parrot disease, and birds were being given away on every corner. So far as I know, my old man was the only person to have accepted one. And since he was on point duty directing traffic at the time, his action should attract extra marks.
When he was offered this great white bird with a beak like Fagin, he immediately deserted his post and marched home with it on his wrist.
We were living with my granny at the time, whose hatred of him reached white heat when he appeared in our lobby with his trophy.
He placed it on the back of the sofa, instructed my mother to feed it and returned to duty.
My granny’s cat had been watching the new arrival with great interest. No sooner had the front door closed on my father than it pounced, and what had once been an imposing bird became a cloud of feathers, fluttering onto the lino.
My mother was terrified of my father.
“What are we going to do? He’ll be furious,” she moaned.
My granny, who could have given Machiavelli three blacks and still beaten him off the table, said: “We’ll tell him it died and we were so afraid of that disease that’s going round we buried it in the back yard.”
Worked like a charm.
“Psittacosis!“ exclaimed my father.
Before he could be stopped, he took all the furniture into the back yard, even the leather bound cover of the Radio Times which was our only concession to gracious living, piled it in a heap and burned it.
At the time I spent most of my days comfortably contemplating the world from a dresser drawer which served as a cot. Though nearly two years old, it had not occurred to me to speak. There were two reasons for this. I could not think of anything witty to say and I was waiting until I encountered a grown up who spoke recognisible English. “Who’s a booful baby, then?” and ticking noises seemed the extent of the vocabulary of the people who bent over me.
However, the last hours had been full of incident and I felt they deserved comment. I spoke for the first time.
“Naughty pussy,“ I said with admirable clarity, “naughty pussy ate the parrot.”
Within two weeks my father had found us a council house and he never spoke another word to my granny to the day she died.
Me? I had seen the power of the spoken word. I could not wait to become a broadcaster.
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
Mr Ivor White, a road sweeper, found an unwanted extra at the bottom of his rubbish cart... an overweight policeman.
The episode started when two drunken holiday makers stopped Mr White to ask the way to St David’s station in Exeter, Devon. As he gave directions a police car drew up. The driver thought the men were causing trouble and got out of the car.
Mr White said; “We were in a very narrow part of the street. A bus went past. The two men moved to avoid it and the copper was accidentally knocked backwards into the barrow.
“He was a rather chubby chap and he got jammed in with his legs waving. The men, both Welsh, disappeared and try as I might I could not get the policeman out.”
A burly passerby gave a hand, but even with Mr White pulling the policeman’s legs and the helper hauling his arm pits, he was still stuck fast. By then his knees were touching his chin and he was “absolutely helpless” Mr White said.
“Then two youngsters said they could get him out. They lit a match setting fire to the rubbish underneath and promptly ran off. This did the trick. Somehow the policeman got hold of the side of the cart and heaved himself out.
“I have never seen anyone move so fast.”
There was a time when that mantra was on everyone’s lips. Except mine.
My father was a policeman and came a little short in the wonderful line. He had been in the trenches with the Royal Scots at the age of 15 in World War One and the experience had scarred him. He was a drunk, a wife beater, a bully, but a total charmer to the world outside our house. He was as brave as a lion, always went on his own in areas where policemen went in twos for mutual protection, and was shot in the head by the IRA when he stormed a house in which they were besieged. I was still sewing his ripped trousers, the relics of fights, during most of his sixties.
During the war he was the driver in a dedicated unit set up to fight the black market. As a direct result, our house was so full of sides of bacon, eggs, legs of lamb and crates of whisky that I thought I was the son of a uniformed grocer.
Trench warfare had freed him of any moral sense. He would steal sweets from Woolworths under the noses of the shop girls. When he was on night duty he would come home with hauls of antiques he swore he had found in dustbins. If he was late for work he would steal a car from his local pub and report it stolen when he arrived at the police station. We used a carving knife at home, not knowing he had taken it from a house where a luckless man had used it to cut his throat.
He certainly did not subscribe to the wonderful policeman syndrome, and how much less he would have supported it now when our policemen will only go on a crime scene when it has been made safe. If one reports a theft or an act of hooliganism one might as well shout it down a wet sock for all the reaction. In this house we have a sophisticated burglar alarm system to which the police will not respond because it is not on their approved list. My cousin apprehended one of a legion of thieves who had stolen eight thousand pounds’ worth of garden statuary by brandishing a golf club at him. When the police arrived they threatened to arrest my cousin for possession of a weapon.
Their own use of deadly weapons has resulted in the deaths of a number of innocent people, for which none has been prosecuted. A Chief Constable retires and draws a handsome pension. He later takes another job as Chief Constable but goes to law to defend his right to keep the pension from his other job. Other senior policemen resign hurriedly to secure their pension against possible future disciplinary action.
An innocent Brazilian is shot by police gunmen. No successful prosecution follows. The Omagh massacre has found no culprit. The only man charged was released amid criticism of the police by the judge. A worrying number of people convicted of murder have later been pardoned because the evidence was faulty. A number of very senior policemen have taken hurried retirement rather than face an inquiry into their behaviour.
When I was reporting on the Richardson Crime Family in the Sixties, the evidence against them was assembled in a rural police station because so many members of the Metropolitan police were in their pockets.
Sir Ian Blair, The Teflon Commissioner, and Richard Brunstrom, the North Wales Chief Constable, dubbed the Mad Mullah by the Daily Mail, a list of whose eccentricities makes entertaining reading on the Association of British Drivers website. Which of the two, I wonder, has done most to make a mockery of the proposition that our policemen are wonderful?
Some years ago, Dr Howard Taylor, an historian at Nottingham University, published the results of a four-year study into policing in the Economic History Review. It showed that the police have been manipulating crime figures to appease politicians, protect their budgets and increase manpower for 140 years, since the days of Jack the Ripper.
Nevertheless, when the police force was denied a promised rise of salary I was on their side. Not because they deserved it, but because I believe government should honour its promises. Indeed I am less sure that it has been earned.
I have known glorious exceptions because I have been lucky enough to live most of my life in villages, and village policemen ARE universally wonderful. Sadly they are a dying breed. Today’s meritocratic Chief Constables would never approve the personal fiefs which village bobbies made of their patrol areas.
The supreme example was my much mourned friend Ken Williams who doubled being a police constable in Bala, North Wales, and Treaddur Bay, on Anglesey, with a career as a TV personality whose HTV wildlife programmes were some of the best I have ever seen.
When Anglesey Aluminium bought a great swathe of the island to build a smelter, the land included a country estate in Ken’s bailiwick, Penrhos, which was teeming with wildlife.
He lay in wait for the managing director of the new project until he caught him speeding. The M.D. asked, as they do, if there was anything he could do to prevent the mark on his licence. Ken said there was, and told him about a plan he had to turn the Penrhos Estate into a wildlife reserve. The M.D. suggested he draw up a plan, no doubt hoping that it would be the last he would hear of the idea.
Ken stayed up all that night drawing it, and presented it to the startled manager before he left for work the next morning.
The M.D. sent it to his bosses, with the result that Ken, who had the tongue of angels, was called to London and so bedazzled the company’s parent Board that they gave him the estate. It is now the most successful wild life centre in Britain and respected throughout the conservation world.
Ken retired after marrying a millionairess and becoming the only serving PC in Wales to have a holiday home staffed with servants in Mombasa.
When they were married I said, “I suppose you will leave the police now you have married into money?”
“And lose my full pension?” he said. “Not on your life.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
You could have given my old man leprosy, just so long as it was free. When I was a toddler there was an outbreak of psittacosis, the parrot disease, and birds were being given away on every corner. So far as I know, my old man was the only person to have accepted one. And since he was on point duty directing traffic at the time, his action should attract extra marks.
When he was offered this great white bird with a beak like Fagin, he immediately deserted his post and marched home with it on his wrist.
We were living with my granny at the time, whose hatred of him reached white heat when he appeared in our lobby with his trophy.
He placed it on the back of the sofa, instructed my mother to feed it and returned to duty.
My granny’s cat had been watching the new arrival with great interest. No sooner had the front door closed on my father than it pounced, and what had once been an imposing bird became a cloud of feathers, fluttering onto the lino.
My mother was terrified of my father.
“What are we going to do? He’ll be furious,” she moaned.
My granny, who could have given Machiavelli three blacks and still beaten him off the table, said: “We’ll tell him it died and we were so afraid of that disease that’s going round we buried it in the back yard.”
Worked like a charm.
“Psittacosis!“ exclaimed my father.
Before he could be stopped, he took all the furniture into the back yard, even the leather bound cover of the Radio Times which was our only concession to gracious living, piled it in a heap and burned it.
At the time I spent most of my days comfortably contemplating the world from a dresser drawer which served as a cot. Though nearly two years old, it had not occurred to me to speak. There were two reasons for this. I could not think of anything witty to say and I was waiting until I encountered a grown up who spoke recognisible English. “Who’s a booful baby, then?” and ticking noises seemed the extent of the vocabulary of the people who bent over me.
However, the last hours had been full of incident and I felt they deserved comment. I spoke for the first time.
“Naughty pussy,“ I said with admirable clarity, “naughty pussy ate the parrot.”
Within two weeks my father had found us a council house and he never spoke another word to my granny to the day she died.
Me? I had seen the power of the spoken word. I could not wait to become a broadcaster.
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
Mr Ivor White, a road sweeper, found an unwanted extra at the bottom of his rubbish cart... an overweight policeman.
The episode started when two drunken holiday makers stopped Mr White to ask the way to St David’s station in Exeter, Devon. As he gave directions a police car drew up. The driver thought the men were causing trouble and got out of the car.
Mr White said; “We were in a very narrow part of the street. A bus went past. The two men moved to avoid it and the copper was accidentally knocked backwards into the barrow.
“He was a rather chubby chap and he got jammed in with his legs waving. The men, both Welsh, disappeared and try as I might I could not get the policeman out.”
A burly passerby gave a hand, but even with Mr White pulling the policeman’s legs and the helper hauling his arm pits, he was still stuck fast. By then his knees were touching his chin and he was “absolutely helpless” Mr White said.
“Then two youngsters said they could get him out. They lit a match setting fire to the rubbish underneath and promptly ran off. This did the trick. Somehow the policeman got hold of the side of the cart and heaved himself out.
“I have never seen anyone move so fast.”
Sunday, 30 December 2007
A PACKET OF HUMBUG
Merry Xmas was it?
Me?
My ex-SAS doctor, who until this time I had looked on as a friend, put me on antibiotics which ruled out drink. Not only was I dragged back on the wagon. I was tied to the wheels with a grim-visaged Head Ferret driving the team.
I didn’t really mind. Drinking at Xmas is no fun. It is when teetotallers crowd into pubs and get us drunks a bad name. I shudder at the way they follow a sweet sherry with a milk stout, a whisky and ginger and a Tia Maria, then ask their friend, “What was that we had in Majorca, Blod?” and finish up with Sangria and an Alka Seltzer rub down.
I was tempted to ignore the blood pressure problem like my good friend Jimmy Godwin, head waiter at the Blossoms in Chester who was told by his doctor to give up gin and tonic after his first heart attack.
Jimmy did exactly what the doctor ordered. He gave up gin and tonic. Switched to whisky and tonic. He was much relieved after his second heart attack. He told me he had found the common denominator.
“It’s the tonic,“ he said, and not another drop passed his lips.
“Great waiter,” said Lol at his funeral some months later. “Lousy diagnostician.”
Teetotalism comes a bit hard, though I once lasted five years. Came a cropper when the Ferret took me on a coach trip to the Loire Valley. One of the excursions was to a vineyard.
The Ferret said I could drink on French Territory but not at home, which was OK for a bit. Then an American cousin and family historian, Warren Skidmore, discovered that our first ancestor, Ralph, was a Norman who came to this country after the Battle of Hastings.
Norman, I thought? That means I AM French Territory, and it was off at all meetings. Alas, not for the first time, France has been occupied by Fascists.
The Ferret claims that by May the drinking money I save will pay for a holiday in Moscow and St Petersburg, a city for some reason she is desperate to visit. Though she knows I do not do abroad, or even the next town, unless pushed. She reckons that when we have paid for a holiday for two there will even be enough left over to buy the Kremlin. But she always had an exaggerated notion of how much I spend on drink. I doubt if there will be enough to buy Lenin’s Tomb, which, the way things are, will be just the place to hold my 79th birthday party.
But don’t worry about me. Just make sure you have a Happy New Year.
The tenor Stuart Burroughs was a great one for New Year parties. Nice fellow. Never had a singing lesson, just began singing when he was in the RAF and never looked back. I know a story which puts him in a very good light.
Pal of mine’s wife had motor neurone disease. She was a big fan of the tenor who was coming to Bangor, North Wales, to give a concert.
She was too ill to attend a performance but my pal was determined she would be present at the rehearsal. We pulled a few strings and a place was kept for her.
Alas, traffic was heavy, manoeuvring a wheel chair is a slow job, and when they arrived at the venue the rehearsal was ending. As he walked out, Burroughs spotted the wheel chair and came over to have a word with my pal’s wife. She told him how sorry she was to have missed his rehearsal.
“Did you?” he said. “We can’t have that.”
He called back his accompanist and together they did the whole programme, just for her.
I was telling you about my friend George Thomas and his debut in the paddling pool world of light entertainment.
He was fortunate enough to do his air crew training in America. Before visiting New York on leave, he and his pilot were warned not to stare at people. To do so would be to elicit snarls of “Rubberneck”.
George recalled they were on the subway when a Puerto Rican mother settled in their carriage, accompanied by the fattest baby they had ever seen. “It was spherical,” George said, and you could see he was moved. So unusual was its shape that the pilot’s eyes were drawn to it, however hard he tried to look away.
“RUBBER,” snarled the mother.
“Thank God,” said the pilot, “I thought it was real.”
End
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
Seven people were injured on Thursday when Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests came to blows in a dispute over how to clean the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
Following the Christmas celebrations, Greek Orthodox priests set up ladders to clean the walls and ceilings of their part of the church, which is built over the site where Jesus Christ is believed to have been born.
But the ladders encroached on space controlled by Armenian priests, according to photographers who said angry words ensued and blows quickly followed.
For a quarter of an hour bearded and robed priests laid into each other with fists, brooms and iron rods while the photographers who had come to take pictures of the annual cleaning ceremony recorded the whole event.
A dozen unarmed Palestinian policemen were sent to try to separate the priests, but two of them were also injured in the unholy melee.
"As usual the cleaning of the church after Christmas is a cause of problems," Bethlehem Mayor Victor Batarseh told AFP, adding that he has offered to help ease tensions.
"For the two years that I have been here everything went more or less calmly," he said. "It's all finished now."
The Church of the Nativity, like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem's Old City, is shared by various branches of Christianity, each of which controls and jealously guards a part of the holy site.
The Church of the Nativity is built on the site where Christians believe Jesus was born in a stable more than 2,000 years ago after Mary and Joseph were turned away by an inn.
Me?
My ex-SAS doctor, who until this time I had looked on as a friend, put me on antibiotics which ruled out drink. Not only was I dragged back on the wagon. I was tied to the wheels with a grim-visaged Head Ferret driving the team.
I didn’t really mind. Drinking at Xmas is no fun. It is when teetotallers crowd into pubs and get us drunks a bad name. I shudder at the way they follow a sweet sherry with a milk stout, a whisky and ginger and a Tia Maria, then ask their friend, “What was that we had in Majorca, Blod?” and finish up with Sangria and an Alka Seltzer rub down.
I was tempted to ignore the blood pressure problem like my good friend Jimmy Godwin, head waiter at the Blossoms in Chester who was told by his doctor to give up gin and tonic after his first heart attack.
Jimmy did exactly what the doctor ordered. He gave up gin and tonic. Switched to whisky and tonic. He was much relieved after his second heart attack. He told me he had found the common denominator.
“It’s the tonic,“ he said, and not another drop passed his lips.
“Great waiter,” said Lol at his funeral some months later. “Lousy diagnostician.”
Teetotalism comes a bit hard, though I once lasted five years. Came a cropper when the Ferret took me on a coach trip to the Loire Valley. One of the excursions was to a vineyard.
The Ferret said I could drink on French Territory but not at home, which was OK for a bit. Then an American cousin and family historian, Warren Skidmore, discovered that our first ancestor, Ralph, was a Norman who came to this country after the Battle of Hastings.
Norman, I thought? That means I AM French Territory, and it was off at all meetings. Alas, not for the first time, France has been occupied by Fascists.
The Ferret claims that by May the drinking money I save will pay for a holiday in Moscow and St Petersburg, a city for some reason she is desperate to visit. Though she knows I do not do abroad, or even the next town, unless pushed. She reckons that when we have paid for a holiday for two there will even be enough left over to buy the Kremlin. But she always had an exaggerated notion of how much I spend on drink. I doubt if there will be enough to buy Lenin’s Tomb, which, the way things are, will be just the place to hold my 79th birthday party.
But don’t worry about me. Just make sure you have a Happy New Year.
The tenor Stuart Burroughs was a great one for New Year parties. Nice fellow. Never had a singing lesson, just began singing when he was in the RAF and never looked back. I know a story which puts him in a very good light.
Pal of mine’s wife had motor neurone disease. She was a big fan of the tenor who was coming to Bangor, North Wales, to give a concert.
She was too ill to attend a performance but my pal was determined she would be present at the rehearsal. We pulled a few strings and a place was kept for her.
Alas, traffic was heavy, manoeuvring a wheel chair is a slow job, and when they arrived at the venue the rehearsal was ending. As he walked out, Burroughs spotted the wheel chair and came over to have a word with my pal’s wife. She told him how sorry she was to have missed his rehearsal.
“Did you?” he said. “We can’t have that.”
He called back his accompanist and together they did the whole programme, just for her.
I was telling you about my friend George Thomas and his debut in the paddling pool world of light entertainment.
He was fortunate enough to do his air crew training in America. Before visiting New York on leave, he and his pilot were warned not to stare at people. To do so would be to elicit snarls of “Rubberneck”.
George recalled they were on the subway when a Puerto Rican mother settled in their carriage, accompanied by the fattest baby they had ever seen. “It was spherical,” George said, and you could see he was moved. So unusual was its shape that the pilot’s eyes were drawn to it, however hard he tried to look away.
“RUBBER,” snarled the mother.
“Thank God,” said the pilot, “I thought it was real.”
End
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
Seven people were injured on Thursday when Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests came to blows in a dispute over how to clean the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
Following the Christmas celebrations, Greek Orthodox priests set up ladders to clean the walls and ceilings of their part of the church, which is built over the site where Jesus Christ is believed to have been born.
But the ladders encroached on space controlled by Armenian priests, according to photographers who said angry words ensued and blows quickly followed.
For a quarter of an hour bearded and robed priests laid into each other with fists, brooms and iron rods while the photographers who had come to take pictures of the annual cleaning ceremony recorded the whole event.
A dozen unarmed Palestinian policemen were sent to try to separate the priests, but two of them were also injured in the unholy melee.
"As usual the cleaning of the church after Christmas is a cause of problems," Bethlehem Mayor Victor Batarseh told AFP, adding that he has offered to help ease tensions.
"For the two years that I have been here everything went more or less calmly," he said. "It's all finished now."
The Church of the Nativity, like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem's Old City, is shared by various branches of Christianity, each of which controls and jealously guards a part of the holy site.
The Church of the Nativity is built on the site where Christians believe Jesus was born in a stable more than 2,000 years ago after Mary and Joseph were turned away by an inn.
Saturday, 22 December 2007
RELIGIO DE JOURNO
Oh dear. My recent rants about religion have led at least one reader to conclude I am an atheist. Far from it. I am descended from a long line of Methodist lay preachers. One of whom was so friendly with John Wesley that when he came to preach in my family home at Stourbridge in Staffordshire so many people wanted to hear him they could not all fit in the ground floor of the house.
My ancestor hit upon a typically Skidmorean solution. He carved a hole in the kitchen ceiling, stood Wesley on the table so that his head peeped through into the bedroom above and directed the overflow to listen to him there. Another ancestor held towpath services for bargees, which led to him being called the Bargeman’s Bishop.
My favourite ancestral story concerns the more exalted branch of the family who held the living of Abbey Dore in the Golden Valley. One of them appointed a vicar who was only five foot tall and could not be seen over the rim of the pulpit. My ancestor, disturbed by being sermonised by a disembodied voice, tried to persuade him to stand on a box. The tiny vicar refused because it was not consonant with his dignity.
The ancestor was Charles II’s ambassador to France at the time but that did not prevent him from giving most of his attention to the pulpit dispute. His refusal to learn French obviously reduced the time he had to spend on official duties.
Far from being anti-religious, I have worried about religion for most of my life and have only recently come to a conclusion that satisfies me. I have never shared the belief that the more science discovers about life, the more difficult it becomes to believe in a creator. Quite the opposite. I read in the Daily Telegraph of new mathematical theories which suggest that, in the very beginning, there was a void that possessed energy but was devoid of substance. “Then the void changed, converting energy into the hot matter of the big bang. But the team suggests that the void did not convert as much energy to matter as it could, retaining some, in the form of what we now call dark energy, which now accelerates the expansion of the cosmos.”
The story (DT 22.11.07) described a basic tenet of religion. The doctrine of my old friend Hermes Trignegustus, who said in the 2nd century “God is a sphere whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”
Or of Zen Buddhism. Witness Huang Po’s description of Zen in the 9th century: ”All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind beside which nothing exists. This Mind, which is without beginning, is unborn and indestructible. It has neither form nor appearance. It does
not belong to the categories of things which exist or do not exist; nor can it be thought of in terms of new or old. It is neither long nor short, big nor small, for it transcends all limits, measures, names, traces and comparisons. It is what you see before you. Begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error. It is like the boundless void which cannot be fathomed or measured.“
In the 17th century Sir Thomas Browne wrote in his “Religion of a
Doctor”: “I believe that a common spirit infuses all mankind. It is the spirit of God. It is the spirit which lay on the waters and by its heat generated the world and all creation... the Holy Spirit. The Universal Spirit of the Pagan.”
Another thing I learned recently was that we all carry two strands of genes, the purpose of one strand being to repair any malfunctions in the other. It is difficult, given those facts, to subscribe to the philosophical assertion, the incorrigible proposition “there is no plan, no scenario, no libretto”.
The simple truth, as I see it, is contained in the four fundamental doctrines at the core of Aldous Huxley’s ‘Perennial Philosophy’, which he says all religions share. The first is that the phenomenal world of matter and individual consciousness is a Manifestation of Divine Ground. The second is that human beings are not only capable of knowing the Divine Ground: they realise it by direct intuition. Thirdly, man possesses a double nature, the phenomenal ego and an Eternal Self, the spark of Divinity within the soul. Fourthly, man’s life on earth has one purpose: to identify himself with his Eternal Self and so come to intuitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.
I don’t believe in God as Father Christmas, presiding over a Celestial Eisteddfod where everyone, clad in Druidical nightshirts, incessantly plays harps and you can’t get a drink. I don’t believe in miracles, biblical assertions. And if there is a Day of Judgement, I will stuff my fingers in my ears so that I cannot hear the heavenly trumpet and refuse to take part.
Like Oscar Wilde said to Robert Ross, “When the Last Trumpet sounds, Robbie, let us pretend we do not hear it.”
I hope I make myself clear?
A DROP IN THE OCEAN …………………………………………………………
During World War 2, my friend George Thomas was a wireless operator in a bomber. He told me that on one occasion his aircraft was returning from a raid with so many holes in the fuselage that the pilot suggested, as they approached the coast, they should all jump out before they fell out.
George, who had a great talent in these matters, parachuted into the paddling pool of a holiday camp. The moment he touched water, the rubber dinghy he carried strapped to his back inflated, upending him so that he was floating like an upturned tortoise.
That wasn’t the worse thing, George told me. He said the dinghy contained a large capsule of purple dye which was designed to explode and mark the position of the evicted airman in a vast sea. In the confined area of a paddling pool it emitted a dye of such intensity, George said, he felt like a DFC on a purple velvet cushion.
And there was worse to come. At that stage of the war, he told me, scientists had perfected a small radio beacon which was strapped to the chest of air crew and was so sensitive that on impact an aerial shot up and the equipment issued a loud intermittent bleep.
So there he was, up-ended, circling a tiny azure paddling pool, with his chest making rude noises.
But not even that was the worse thing, he told me (and at this point his voice always shook with suppressed emotion). Over the sound of the radio bleeping he could hear cheering and a ripple of applause. Turning his head, he saw that the pool was ringed by excited children, some of whom were waving paper flags, which he said was very touching.
This went on for some time before a large Yorkshireman in a red coat waded into the pool and pulled George to the safety of the bank. He introduced himself as the camp manager and said, “I dunno know oo tha art, but I’ll tell thee what. If tha can come and do that every Saturday there’s a fiver in it for you.”
…………………………………………………….
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
A Vicar wrote to the News Chronicle:
“If golf is allowed on Sunday, then cricket and football, tennis, bowls and darts must also be sanctioned and Sunday in Aberystwyth will outdo Paris.”
Sending me this cutting from his Oxford college, the late Professor E. M. Hugh-Jones wrote of the occasion when ... “Gerard Fiennes was walking with the station master along the front at Aberystwyth and an RAF plane flew over on parachute exercise. The first failed to open and the poor man plummeted into the sea. ‘Eh indeed,” remarked the stationmaster, ‘nothing opens in Aberystwyth on a Sunday.’”
May I take the opportunity of hoping, against all the odds, that my readers will have a Happy Christmas and a Prosperous and Healthy New Year? Just don’t bet on it.
My ancestor hit upon a typically Skidmorean solution. He carved a hole in the kitchen ceiling, stood Wesley on the table so that his head peeped through into the bedroom above and directed the overflow to listen to him there. Another ancestor held towpath services for bargees, which led to him being called the Bargeman’s Bishop.
My favourite ancestral story concerns the more exalted branch of the family who held the living of Abbey Dore in the Golden Valley. One of them appointed a vicar who was only five foot tall and could not be seen over the rim of the pulpit. My ancestor, disturbed by being sermonised by a disembodied voice, tried to persuade him to stand on a box. The tiny vicar refused because it was not consonant with his dignity.
The ancestor was Charles II’s ambassador to France at the time but that did not prevent him from giving most of his attention to the pulpit dispute. His refusal to learn French obviously reduced the time he had to spend on official duties.
Far from being anti-religious, I have worried about religion for most of my life and have only recently come to a conclusion that satisfies me. I have never shared the belief that the more science discovers about life, the more difficult it becomes to believe in a creator. Quite the opposite. I read in the Daily Telegraph of new mathematical theories which suggest that, in the very beginning, there was a void that possessed energy but was devoid of substance. “Then the void changed, converting energy into the hot matter of the big bang. But the team suggests that the void did not convert as much energy to matter as it could, retaining some, in the form of what we now call dark energy, which now accelerates the expansion of the cosmos.”
The story (DT 22.11.07) described a basic tenet of religion. The doctrine of my old friend Hermes Trignegustus, who said in the 2nd century “God is a sphere whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”
Or of Zen Buddhism. Witness Huang Po’s description of Zen in the 9th century: ”All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind beside which nothing exists. This Mind, which is without beginning, is unborn and indestructible. It has neither form nor appearance. It does
not belong to the categories of things which exist or do not exist; nor can it be thought of in terms of new or old. It is neither long nor short, big nor small, for it transcends all limits, measures, names, traces and comparisons. It is what you see before you. Begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error. It is like the boundless void which cannot be fathomed or measured.“
In the 17th century Sir Thomas Browne wrote in his “Religion of a
Doctor”: “I believe that a common spirit infuses all mankind. It is the spirit of God. It is the spirit which lay on the waters and by its heat generated the world and all creation... the Holy Spirit. The Universal Spirit of the Pagan.”
Another thing I learned recently was that we all carry two strands of genes, the purpose of one strand being to repair any malfunctions in the other. It is difficult, given those facts, to subscribe to the philosophical assertion, the incorrigible proposition “there is no plan, no scenario, no libretto”.
The simple truth, as I see it, is contained in the four fundamental doctrines at the core of Aldous Huxley’s ‘Perennial Philosophy’, which he says all religions share. The first is that the phenomenal world of matter and individual consciousness is a Manifestation of Divine Ground. The second is that human beings are not only capable of knowing the Divine Ground: they realise it by direct intuition. Thirdly, man possesses a double nature, the phenomenal ego and an Eternal Self, the spark of Divinity within the soul. Fourthly, man’s life on earth has one purpose: to identify himself with his Eternal Self and so come to intuitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.
I don’t believe in God as Father Christmas, presiding over a Celestial Eisteddfod where everyone, clad in Druidical nightshirts, incessantly plays harps and you can’t get a drink. I don’t believe in miracles, biblical assertions. And if there is a Day of Judgement, I will stuff my fingers in my ears so that I cannot hear the heavenly trumpet and refuse to take part.
Like Oscar Wilde said to Robert Ross, “When the Last Trumpet sounds, Robbie, let us pretend we do not hear it.”
I hope I make myself clear?
A DROP IN THE OCEAN …………………………………………………………
During World War 2, my friend George Thomas was a wireless operator in a bomber. He told me that on one occasion his aircraft was returning from a raid with so many holes in the fuselage that the pilot suggested, as they approached the coast, they should all jump out before they fell out.
George, who had a great talent in these matters, parachuted into the paddling pool of a holiday camp. The moment he touched water, the rubber dinghy he carried strapped to his back inflated, upending him so that he was floating like an upturned tortoise.
That wasn’t the worse thing, George told me. He said the dinghy contained a large capsule of purple dye which was designed to explode and mark the position of the evicted airman in a vast sea. In the confined area of a paddling pool it emitted a dye of such intensity, George said, he felt like a DFC on a purple velvet cushion.
And there was worse to come. At that stage of the war, he told me, scientists had perfected a small radio beacon which was strapped to the chest of air crew and was so sensitive that on impact an aerial shot up and the equipment issued a loud intermittent bleep.
So there he was, up-ended, circling a tiny azure paddling pool, with his chest making rude noises.
But not even that was the worse thing, he told me (and at this point his voice always shook with suppressed emotion). Over the sound of the radio bleeping he could hear cheering and a ripple of applause. Turning his head, he saw that the pool was ringed by excited children, some of whom were waving paper flags, which he said was very touching.
This went on for some time before a large Yorkshireman in a red coat waded into the pool and pulled George to the safety of the bank. He introduced himself as the camp manager and said, “I dunno know oo tha art, but I’ll tell thee what. If tha can come and do that every Saturday there’s a fiver in it for you.”
…………………………………………………….
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
A Vicar wrote to the News Chronicle:
“If golf is allowed on Sunday, then cricket and football, tennis, bowls and darts must also be sanctioned and Sunday in Aberystwyth will outdo Paris.”
Sending me this cutting from his Oxford college, the late Professor E. M. Hugh-Jones wrote of the occasion when ... “Gerard Fiennes was walking with the station master along the front at Aberystwyth and an RAF plane flew over on parachute exercise. The first failed to open and the poor man plummeted into the sea. ‘Eh indeed,” remarked the stationmaster, ‘nothing opens in Aberystwyth on a Sunday.’”
May I take the opportunity of hoping, against all the odds, that my readers will have a Happy Christmas and a Prosperous and Healthy New Year? Just don’t bet on it.
Saturday, 15 December 2007
Panto of Mine..................................
I am not a fan of Stephen Fry, the only writer I know who can make an advertisement for tea sexually ambiguous; and I find his novels unimpressive. He is ubiquitous, I know, an hygienic Geldorf with attitude, who appears in many roles but always acts himself and generously shares his wide knowledge of almost everything, whether we want it or not. So I was not surprised to read in the Radio Times that when he wrote a pantomime this year he had to rewrite it because it was too raunchy.
I have a special love of pantomime, perhaps because of its long and distinguished history. The great names in pantomime include John Rich, David Garrick, Joe Grimaldi, Dan Leno, William Beverley, E.L. Blanchard, Herbert Campbell, Nat Jackley, Florrie Ford, Dorothy Ward, Pat Kirkwood, Wyn Calvin, King Charles II, the Emperor Augustus and my mum.
Every year Augustus gave the Roman Empire the elbow so that he could be a pantomime - the word is Greek for dumb show performer - in the mimes to music with which his court entertained itself when it was not throwing Christians to the lions. The Christians got their own back when they came to power by banning those first pantomimes. An act of cultural savagery that was only paralleled by the Puritans, who banned Christmas, and New Labour which made T Bone steaks illegal and tried to do the same with turkey.
Happily, pantomime, the most magical theatrical event, survived down the centuries with groups of players putting on “Commedia dell’ Arte”. They toured Italy acting simple stories about an old man Pantaloon who tries to guard his pretty daughter Columbine from the dashing Harlequin. Harlequin bribes Pantaloon’s servant Polcinella to perform teases and tricks to prevent his master catching the lovers.
Charles II brought “Commedia” to London where it split into separate theatrical traditions; Polcinella fathered Punch and Judy, and Harlequin pantomime. The first musical play was put on by John Weaver, a Shrewsbury dancing master, at Drury Lane in 1702. It was his boss, an actor called John Rich, who first used the word pantomime and introduced the magical tricks which are at the heart of it. The truth is that he had to invent a new entertainment because, though he was a brilliant mime, he could not speak properly and his company were such lousy actors.
Rich invented Harlequin’s costume of many colours for a very good practical reason. Each colour, the audience were told, represented an emotion: yellow for jealousy, blue for truth, scarlet for love. When Harlequin wanted to express an emotion he would strike an attitude and point to a colour. He could even make himself invisible by pointing at black. Even his scenes were inventive. He represented rough seas by getting small boys to jump up and down under a canvas sheet.
Rich also invented many of the pantomime traditions, beautiful scenery and mechanical monsters among them. When, by 1789, people tired of the Harlequin tales, he adapted Robinson Crusoe, the first of the traditional pantomimes. But when a critic suggested it might be a good idea to adapt Cinderella, Babes in the Wood and Puss in Boots as pantomime, everyone thought he was crazy.
Pantomimes were such a success under Rich at his theatre, Covent Garden, that his rival, the great tragedian David Garrick, was forced against his will to put one on at Drury Lane. For the first time his Harlequin had a speaking role because, although he had a wonderful voice, Garrick was a lousy mime.
William Beverley invented the transformation scene when he and E.T. Smith, the lessee of Drury Lane, watched a leg of mutton roasting on a spit.
“Wouldn’t it be a good idea to have a stage that revolved like that mutton,” said Smith, “changing colour as it is doing under the flame?”
“I will paint you one,” said Beverley, and in 1859 a wondering audience gasped at its first transformation scene.
Clowns are always called Joey in tribute to Joe Grimaldi who began life as a ballet dancer but soon became the greatest clown of any age. His father, an Italian actor, thrashed him incessantly. When he was two, he was on stage dressed as a monkey. Attached to a chain, he was whirled round his father’s head. One night the chain broke and he was hurled into the pit. When he was four, he fell through a trap door forty feet down to the cellar below.
His first experience as an actor came when his father shammed death to find out what his children thought of him. Joey, suspecting a trick, cried loudly but his brother danced with joy. It was the brother who got the beating. Sickness and sadness forced him off the stage before he was fifty. He went to a doctor for a cure of his depression. The doctor advised him to go to the theatre and see Grimaldi, who could cheer anyone up.
“But doctor,” he said, “I am Grimaldi.”
I think that is one of the saddest stories I know.
Charles Dickens was in the audience when Grimaldi had to be carried on stage in an armchair, from which he gave his last Clown performance on 27 June 1828. Dickens, incidentally, as a struggling young author had ghosted Grimaldi’s biography. Later when he was famous he did his best to suppress it and it does not appear in any of his collected works.
I am delighted it was a brilliant newspaperman E.L. Blanchard who invented the modern panto and brought in the first man to play dame. She was called Widow Twankey after the china tea Twankay which was popular at the time. It was Blanchard who decided the Principal Boy should be a girl. The first, a Miss Ellington, appeared in his first pantomime in 1852. He wrote every Drury Lane pantomime and many more from then until 1888.
My mum? She was Dandini, Second Boy in Cinderella, at the Theatre Royal, Salford, in 1917. The breathtakingly beautiful Pat Kirkwood, one of the most sophisticated West End leading ladies, was the most glamorous of Principal Boys. We were both born on the same Manchester council estate.
Could be Stephen Fry talking………………………………………..
* * * *
It would take more than one life to get as wizened as Curly Beard so he must have been reincarnated.
He was born in a slum in Derby but went on to be one of Britain’s finest show jumpers, establishing a world record for the height he jumped a horse.
He even survived being employed by Dorothy Paget, an eccentric whose horses were not allowed to leave a showground in the evening until Miss Paget had given the order. It was not uncommon for all the horses to be unloaded again in the near dark so that the great lady could spend a penny in the privacy of the horsebox before they were reloaded and sent on their way.
She slept all day and, like Ludwig of Bavaria, came to life at dusk.
I can never set a foot on the calendula escalator that leads to
Christmas without remembering Curly and the free Christmas tree.
I used to ride work for him in the days when I could be carried by a single horse. He spent much of his time in the Sportsman, up on the Welsh border at Tattenhall. I was in the bar there one day with Curly and my old man when I said, "I will have to go after this. Going to buy a Christmas tree from the Clocaenog forest."
Curly said, "You don't have to buy one. I'll get you one free. But we will have to wait until dark."
So I said, "What will you have while we are waiting?"
Curly said he would have a large gin and my old man said, while I was ordering, would I call him up a large scotch? By the time I had added mine, my free Christmas tree had cost me £6 (it was a long time ago). By the time it was dark it had cost me another ten quid and we were in no state to go digging up Christmas trees.
We arranged to meet at opening time the next day. We were just going to have one and then collect a free tree from a friend of Curly's. We would have done, too, if the Wynnstay Hounds hadn't been meeting at the Cock at Barton.
In those days hunt followers of standing - or in our case barely standing - shared the stirrup cup, a potent mixture of port and brandy which reconciled people to falling off horses. It tasted so good we stayed on after the hounds had moved off. Let's be honest, we were still on it, at my considerable expense, when the huntsman blew kennels somewhere over by Overton.
We kept meeting like that for about a week and I had lost count of how much the free tree had cost me in drinks. But it was well over fifty quid, 70s prices.
To be fair, though, the next night we borrowed the landlord's spade and went off to dig up the tree. I do not know how we managed to break the spade, which I later replaced at the cost of £11.50.
I know how I broke the tree. I remember falling on it. And even if I hadn't remembered, my wife of the time kept reminding me of it for years.
ends.
SHELLEY ROHDE
Shelley was so full of life I am surprised her body contained the mechanism for dying. She had the looks and air of a Grand Duchess, clothed in the shimmering silk of merriment. She was, endearingly, a dedicated luncher, though she drank little.
The last time she came to us for lunch (from Yorkshire!) she was full of her new project, typically innovative, a series of illustrated biographies of artists. It followed the success of her first book, a best selling biography of the Salford artist L S Lowry, which was turned into a ballet.
Her most recent “The A to Z on Rembrandt” was published last week.
We near as dammit shared a birthday. One time she took me and her other kids to the theatre to see the ballet “Copelia”. We had just lunched, and in those days the last course for my lunch was always oblivion. I fell asleep during the overture, and, awaking to see a bunch of mechanical dolls dancing before my eyes, was convinced it was DTs, let out a scream of horror, leapt up and charged out of the theatre, to the delight of her tribe.
She was a terrific reporter, for whom every story was the reason Caxton invented printing. Her pal Liz Smith recalls a typical night in 1977:
“We were waiting outside the Daily Mirror, Manchester, for the first edition. She wanted to see if she’d got the splash with her article on the effects of parental drinking on children. Not only did she get a full page splash but pages 2 and 3 as well. The only place to celebrate at that time of night/morning was the Press Club. She managed to get quite high on glasses of water!”
She also recalled the sad time: “Three weeks ago I lunched with her and Wendy and Mike Cuerden. She could hardly get down the stairs when we arrived to collect her but was determined to go for the meal at her favourite local restaurant, and what a lovely time we had sharing memories and stories. I saw her again two weeks ago in hospital; she was on oxygen and pumped full of steroids but looking so good that I thought she might, as she was planning, return home to finish the job she was doing for the Lowry exhibition.“
She probably had a pen and notebook in her hand when she was born. Certainly she was in no doubt where the future lay.
Mike Cuerden writes:
“Shelley, an authority on L S Lowry, had battled with cancer for ten years. Typically, she told no-one when it was first diagnosed.
“Born in London, she grew up in Nottinghamshire, leaving school at 16 with few qualifications but an insatiable curiosity. She began working on the weekly Notts Free Press in Sutton in Ashfield. From there she moved to The Star in London, before it merged with the Evening News. Soon she joined the Daily Express, then the headiest place to work in Fleet Street…
“She was the first girl staffer in Moscow at the age of 21. Slim, chic, and young, she was noticed by the then Russian premier Nikolai Bulganin and Communist Party chief Nikita Khrushchev. When they visited Britain in the late 1950s Shelley acted as unofficial interpreter for the press pack.
“While covering the Hungarian revolution she and other reporters were waiting at a bridge to interview refugees fleeing to Austria. They heard a baby cry and Shelley, risking being shot by Russian guards in watchtowers, crossed the bridge and brought the baby and her family to safety.”
Shelley, though virtually teetotal, was a legendary party giver, Queen of Fleet Street. A foe to be feared on jobs in the North, she even invented and marketed a card game. She helped organise the Lowry exhibition in the Lowry Gallery at Salford, her first project as a curator. It opened the day after she died.
She was a splendid TV chat show host and the most generous part of a double act in the history of that medium. I was looking at a series we did for Granada in which she made me look witty and all wise. She was a heaven sent audience. A rare gift in people of talent.
But above all she was a good and true friend and a terrific loving mother to Michele, Christian, Gavin and Daniel. Her marriage to TV presenter John Weaver ended in divorce.
She had only one flaw. She preferred some bloody Irishman to me.
Stanley Blenkinsop who knew her for fifty years remembers:
After she left the DE I was going through the small ads in the MEN when I saw an advert for a nanny needed who "must be a Man City fan"
I rang up the number - only to find the mother was Shelley! She said the qualification was vital because her kids were City supporters and (quite rightly in my opinion) hated United.
She was tireless in her efforts on behalf of her friends. When my first book was published she brought a crew from Granada TV to Anglesey to interview me and publicise the book.
In those days every member of a TV crew had a “shadow”. They would only work eight hours at a stretch and they required a two hour lunch break with meals of four courses of which three had to be hot.
Since it took two hours to get from Manchester and would take another two hours to get back, the crew insisted on lunch when they arrived and half way through the filming decided it was time to go back. I would have contemplated mass murder: Shelley remained imperturbable and determined that my book should get an airing. She arranged for Jim Parry, a freelance, to make the film on a hand held camera.
At sad times like these I get a great deal of comfort from a poem I found in Nicholas Evans’ book, “The Smoke Jumper”:
,
Each giving and each taking,
These are not flowers that fade,
Nor trees that fall and crumble,
Nor are they stone.
For even stone cannot the wind and rain withstand
And mighty mountain peaks in time reduce to sand.
What we were, we are.
What we had, we have.
A conjoined past imperishably present.
So when you walk the woods where once we walked together
And scan in vain the dappled bank beside you for my shadow,
Or pause where we always did upon the hill to gaze across the land,
And spotting something, reach by habit for my hand,
And finding none, feel sorrow start to steal upon you,
Be still.
Close your eyes.
Breathe.
Listen for my footfall in your heart.
I am not gone but merely walk within you.
My wife, Celia Lucas, who worked with her on the Daily Mail, says it is OK to say I loved her, because she did too.
Celia writes;
I met Shelley in 1968 when I joined the Daily Mail in Manchester. She came into the office with Mish, then about two or three years old, and typed out a story while Mish played happily on the floor at her feet. The nanny must have been off sick and I was amazed how anyone could concentrate in such circumstances.
I needn’t have been. As I came to learn, Shelley was equal to anything. She was so good – and so thoroughly nice with it – that no one could even be jealous of her, quite an achievement in such a competitive world.
Her parties were amazing. It was when preparing for one of these (I’d got there early, supposedly to help) that I saw, for the first and only time in a domestic setting, a potato peeling machine. Like its owner, it did its job quietly and efficiently with no fuss, and it never broke down.
There were three female reporters in the office (the fourth didn’t stay long and left to get married) and Shelley helped us all with advice and sympathy, both professional and personal. When I met Ian she was an enthusiastic supporter of the romance! Later on, when my children’s books came out, she backed them with articles and a TV slot. She was a true friend and I will miss her.
The funeral will take place on Tuesday 18 December at 1.00 pm at St Philip with St Stephen Church, St Philips Place, (off Chapel Street), Salford, M3 6FJ, followed by a private committal.
A reception will be held at Studio 1, The Lowry, Salford Quays, M50 3AZ (see www.thelowry.com ) from 3.00pm. (Friends and colleagues may like to visit the new exhibition at The Lowry,"Exploding Paintings", which Shelley curated with others shortly before she died.)
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
Welsh Graffiti;
“The views expressed on this wall are not necessarily those held by Aberystwyth Urban District Council.”
“Self igniting cottages. Come home to a real fire - buy a cottage in Wales!”
“English capitalists out… Wales has been sold ( subject to contract)”
I have a special love of pantomime, perhaps because of its long and distinguished history. The great names in pantomime include John Rich, David Garrick, Joe Grimaldi, Dan Leno, William Beverley, E.L. Blanchard, Herbert Campbell, Nat Jackley, Florrie Ford, Dorothy Ward, Pat Kirkwood, Wyn Calvin, King Charles II, the Emperor Augustus and my mum.
Every year Augustus gave the Roman Empire the elbow so that he could be a pantomime - the word is Greek for dumb show performer - in the mimes to music with which his court entertained itself when it was not throwing Christians to the lions. The Christians got their own back when they came to power by banning those first pantomimes. An act of cultural savagery that was only paralleled by the Puritans, who banned Christmas, and New Labour which made T Bone steaks illegal and tried to do the same with turkey.
Happily, pantomime, the most magical theatrical event, survived down the centuries with groups of players putting on “Commedia dell’ Arte”. They toured Italy acting simple stories about an old man Pantaloon who tries to guard his pretty daughter Columbine from the dashing Harlequin. Harlequin bribes Pantaloon’s servant Polcinella to perform teases and tricks to prevent his master catching the lovers.
Charles II brought “Commedia” to London where it split into separate theatrical traditions; Polcinella fathered Punch and Judy, and Harlequin pantomime. The first musical play was put on by John Weaver, a Shrewsbury dancing master, at Drury Lane in 1702. It was his boss, an actor called John Rich, who first used the word pantomime and introduced the magical tricks which are at the heart of it. The truth is that he had to invent a new entertainment because, though he was a brilliant mime, he could not speak properly and his company were such lousy actors.
Rich invented Harlequin’s costume of many colours for a very good practical reason. Each colour, the audience were told, represented an emotion: yellow for jealousy, blue for truth, scarlet for love. When Harlequin wanted to express an emotion he would strike an attitude and point to a colour. He could even make himself invisible by pointing at black. Even his scenes were inventive. He represented rough seas by getting small boys to jump up and down under a canvas sheet.
Rich also invented many of the pantomime traditions, beautiful scenery and mechanical monsters among them. When, by 1789, people tired of the Harlequin tales, he adapted Robinson Crusoe, the first of the traditional pantomimes. But when a critic suggested it might be a good idea to adapt Cinderella, Babes in the Wood and Puss in Boots as pantomime, everyone thought he was crazy.
Pantomimes were such a success under Rich at his theatre, Covent Garden, that his rival, the great tragedian David Garrick, was forced against his will to put one on at Drury Lane. For the first time his Harlequin had a speaking role because, although he had a wonderful voice, Garrick was a lousy mime.
William Beverley invented the transformation scene when he and E.T. Smith, the lessee of Drury Lane, watched a leg of mutton roasting on a spit.
“Wouldn’t it be a good idea to have a stage that revolved like that mutton,” said Smith, “changing colour as it is doing under the flame?”
“I will paint you one,” said Beverley, and in 1859 a wondering audience gasped at its first transformation scene.
Clowns are always called Joey in tribute to Joe Grimaldi who began life as a ballet dancer but soon became the greatest clown of any age. His father, an Italian actor, thrashed him incessantly. When he was two, he was on stage dressed as a monkey. Attached to a chain, he was whirled round his father’s head. One night the chain broke and he was hurled into the pit. When he was four, he fell through a trap door forty feet down to the cellar below.
His first experience as an actor came when his father shammed death to find out what his children thought of him. Joey, suspecting a trick, cried loudly but his brother danced with joy. It was the brother who got the beating. Sickness and sadness forced him off the stage before he was fifty. He went to a doctor for a cure of his depression. The doctor advised him to go to the theatre and see Grimaldi, who could cheer anyone up.
“But doctor,” he said, “I am Grimaldi.”
I think that is one of the saddest stories I know.
Charles Dickens was in the audience when Grimaldi had to be carried on stage in an armchair, from which he gave his last Clown performance on 27 June 1828. Dickens, incidentally, as a struggling young author had ghosted Grimaldi’s biography. Later when he was famous he did his best to suppress it and it does not appear in any of his collected works.
I am delighted it was a brilliant newspaperman E.L. Blanchard who invented the modern panto and brought in the first man to play dame. She was called Widow Twankey after the china tea Twankay which was popular at the time. It was Blanchard who decided the Principal Boy should be a girl. The first, a Miss Ellington, appeared in his first pantomime in 1852. He wrote every Drury Lane pantomime and many more from then until 1888.
My mum? She was Dandini, Second Boy in Cinderella, at the Theatre Royal, Salford, in 1917. The breathtakingly beautiful Pat Kirkwood, one of the most sophisticated West End leading ladies, was the most glamorous of Principal Boys. We were both born on the same Manchester council estate.
Could be Stephen Fry talking………………………………………..
* * * *
It would take more than one life to get as wizened as Curly Beard so he must have been reincarnated.
He was born in a slum in Derby but went on to be one of Britain’s finest show jumpers, establishing a world record for the height he jumped a horse.
He even survived being employed by Dorothy Paget, an eccentric whose horses were not allowed to leave a showground in the evening until Miss Paget had given the order. It was not uncommon for all the horses to be unloaded again in the near dark so that the great lady could spend a penny in the privacy of the horsebox before they were reloaded and sent on their way.
She slept all day and, like Ludwig of Bavaria, came to life at dusk.
I can never set a foot on the calendula escalator that leads to
Christmas without remembering Curly and the free Christmas tree.
I used to ride work for him in the days when I could be carried by a single horse. He spent much of his time in the Sportsman, up on the Welsh border at Tattenhall. I was in the bar there one day with Curly and my old man when I said, "I will have to go after this. Going to buy a Christmas tree from the Clocaenog forest."
Curly said, "You don't have to buy one. I'll get you one free. But we will have to wait until dark."
So I said, "What will you have while we are waiting?"
Curly said he would have a large gin and my old man said, while I was ordering, would I call him up a large scotch? By the time I had added mine, my free Christmas tree had cost me £6 (it was a long time ago). By the time it was dark it had cost me another ten quid and we were in no state to go digging up Christmas trees.
We arranged to meet at opening time the next day. We were just going to have one and then collect a free tree from a friend of Curly's. We would have done, too, if the Wynnstay Hounds hadn't been meeting at the Cock at Barton.
In those days hunt followers of standing - or in our case barely standing - shared the stirrup cup, a potent mixture of port and brandy which reconciled people to falling off horses. It tasted so good we stayed on after the hounds had moved off. Let's be honest, we were still on it, at my considerable expense, when the huntsman blew kennels somewhere over by Overton.
We kept meeting like that for about a week and I had lost count of how much the free tree had cost me in drinks. But it was well over fifty quid, 70s prices.
To be fair, though, the next night we borrowed the landlord's spade and went off to dig up the tree. I do not know how we managed to break the spade, which I later replaced at the cost of £11.50.
I know how I broke the tree. I remember falling on it. And even if I hadn't remembered, my wife of the time kept reminding me of it for years.
ends.
SHELLEY ROHDE
Shelley was so full of life I am surprised her body contained the mechanism for dying. She had the looks and air of a Grand Duchess, clothed in the shimmering silk of merriment. She was, endearingly, a dedicated luncher, though she drank little.
The last time she came to us for lunch (from Yorkshire!) she was full of her new project, typically innovative, a series of illustrated biographies of artists. It followed the success of her first book, a best selling biography of the Salford artist L S Lowry, which was turned into a ballet.
Her most recent “The A to Z on Rembrandt” was published last week.
We near as dammit shared a birthday. One time she took me and her other kids to the theatre to see the ballet “Copelia”. We had just lunched, and in those days the last course for my lunch was always oblivion. I fell asleep during the overture, and, awaking to see a bunch of mechanical dolls dancing before my eyes, was convinced it was DTs, let out a scream of horror, leapt up and charged out of the theatre, to the delight of her tribe.
She was a terrific reporter, for whom every story was the reason Caxton invented printing. Her pal Liz Smith recalls a typical night in 1977:
“We were waiting outside the Daily Mirror, Manchester, for the first edition. She wanted to see if she’d got the splash with her article on the effects of parental drinking on children. Not only did she get a full page splash but pages 2 and 3 as well. The only place to celebrate at that time of night/morning was the Press Club. She managed to get quite high on glasses of water!”
She also recalled the sad time: “Three weeks ago I lunched with her and Wendy and Mike Cuerden. She could hardly get down the stairs when we arrived to collect her but was determined to go for the meal at her favourite local restaurant, and what a lovely time we had sharing memories and stories. I saw her again two weeks ago in hospital; she was on oxygen and pumped full of steroids but looking so good that I thought she might, as she was planning, return home to finish the job she was doing for the Lowry exhibition.“
She probably had a pen and notebook in her hand when she was born. Certainly she was in no doubt where the future lay.
Mike Cuerden writes:
“Shelley, an authority on L S Lowry, had battled with cancer for ten years. Typically, she told no-one when it was first diagnosed.
“Born in London, she grew up in Nottinghamshire, leaving school at 16 with few qualifications but an insatiable curiosity. She began working on the weekly Notts Free Press in Sutton in Ashfield. From there she moved to The Star in London, before it merged with the Evening News. Soon she joined the Daily Express, then the headiest place to work in Fleet Street…
“She was the first girl staffer in Moscow at the age of 21. Slim, chic, and young, she was noticed by the then Russian premier Nikolai Bulganin and Communist Party chief Nikita Khrushchev. When they visited Britain in the late 1950s Shelley acted as unofficial interpreter for the press pack.
“While covering the Hungarian revolution she and other reporters were waiting at a bridge to interview refugees fleeing to Austria. They heard a baby cry and Shelley, risking being shot by Russian guards in watchtowers, crossed the bridge and brought the baby and her family to safety.”
Shelley, though virtually teetotal, was a legendary party giver, Queen of Fleet Street. A foe to be feared on jobs in the North, she even invented and marketed a card game. She helped organise the Lowry exhibition in the Lowry Gallery at Salford, her first project as a curator. It opened the day after she died.
She was a splendid TV chat show host and the most generous part of a double act in the history of that medium. I was looking at a series we did for Granada in which she made me look witty and all wise. She was a heaven sent audience. A rare gift in people of talent.
But above all she was a good and true friend and a terrific loving mother to Michele, Christian, Gavin and Daniel. Her marriage to TV presenter John Weaver ended in divorce.
She had only one flaw. She preferred some bloody Irishman to me.
Stanley Blenkinsop who knew her for fifty years remembers:
After she left the DE I was going through the small ads in the MEN when I saw an advert for a nanny needed who "must be a Man City fan"
I rang up the number - only to find the mother was Shelley! She said the qualification was vital because her kids were City supporters and (quite rightly in my opinion) hated United.
She was tireless in her efforts on behalf of her friends. When my first book was published she brought a crew from Granada TV to Anglesey to interview me and publicise the book.
In those days every member of a TV crew had a “shadow”. They would only work eight hours at a stretch and they required a two hour lunch break with meals of four courses of which three had to be hot.
Since it took two hours to get from Manchester and would take another two hours to get back, the crew insisted on lunch when they arrived and half way through the filming decided it was time to go back. I would have contemplated mass murder: Shelley remained imperturbable and determined that my book should get an airing. She arranged for Jim Parry, a freelance, to make the film on a hand held camera.
At sad times like these I get a great deal of comfort from a poem I found in Nicholas Evans’ book, “The Smoke Jumper”:
,
Each giving and each taking,
These are not flowers that fade,
Nor trees that fall and crumble,
Nor are they stone.
For even stone cannot the wind and rain withstand
And mighty mountain peaks in time reduce to sand.
What we were, we are.
What we had, we have.
A conjoined past imperishably present.
So when you walk the woods where once we walked together
And scan in vain the dappled bank beside you for my shadow,
Or pause where we always did upon the hill to gaze across the land,
And spotting something, reach by habit for my hand,
And finding none, feel sorrow start to steal upon you,
Be still.
Close your eyes.
Breathe.
Listen for my footfall in your heart.
I am not gone but merely walk within you.
My wife, Celia Lucas, who worked with her on the Daily Mail, says it is OK to say I loved her, because she did too.
Celia writes;
I met Shelley in 1968 when I joined the Daily Mail in Manchester. She came into the office with Mish, then about two or three years old, and typed out a story while Mish played happily on the floor at her feet. The nanny must have been off sick and I was amazed how anyone could concentrate in such circumstances.
I needn’t have been. As I came to learn, Shelley was equal to anything. She was so good – and so thoroughly nice with it – that no one could even be jealous of her, quite an achievement in such a competitive world.
Her parties were amazing. It was when preparing for one of these (I’d got there early, supposedly to help) that I saw, for the first and only time in a domestic setting, a potato peeling machine. Like its owner, it did its job quietly and efficiently with no fuss, and it never broke down.
There were three female reporters in the office (the fourth didn’t stay long and left to get married) and Shelley helped us all with advice and sympathy, both professional and personal. When I met Ian she was an enthusiastic supporter of the romance! Later on, when my children’s books came out, she backed them with articles and a TV slot. She was a true friend and I will miss her.
The funeral will take place on Tuesday 18 December at 1.00 pm at St Philip with St Stephen Church, St Philips Place, (off Chapel Street), Salford, M3 6FJ, followed by a private committal.
A reception will be held at Studio 1, The Lowry, Salford Quays, M50 3AZ (see www.thelowry.com ) from 3.00pm. (Friends and colleagues may like to visit the new exhibition at The Lowry,"Exploding Paintings", which Shelley curated with others shortly before she died.)
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
Welsh Graffiti;
“The views expressed on this wall are not necessarily those held by Aberystwyth Urban District Council.”
“Self igniting cottages. Come home to a real fire - buy a cottage in Wales!”
“English capitalists out… Wales has been sold ( subject to contract)”
Sunday, 9 December 2007
A CHRISTMAS HEAVE
Christmas, the ultimate spinning time, approaches. It is time to remind ourselves that in the early days of the Church the nativity was not celebrated. For the very good reason that the date of Christ’s birth is unknown.
St Clement of Alexandria claimed the Egyptians of his time celebrated the Lord's birth on 20 May; at the end of the 3rd century, the Western Churches celebrated it in the winter; churches all over the world united in the 4th century to celebrate the nativity on 25 December. Like other Christian festivals, it was grafted onto a pagan feast, this one celebrating the god Mithras.
People say Christmas is not what it was; that nowadays it is just an excuse for gluttony and drunkenness. Traditionally that is exactly what it was. Only then it was called Saturnalia.
Pope Gregory XIII muddied the waters in A.D. 1582 when he messed about with the calendar. If there had been no realignment, Christmas would not only be coming, it would have been coming twice that year.
My own view is that it was a tremendous error to spin and pin Christian festivals on the old Pagan holy days. When you look at an aerial photograph of a field, the Neolithic ring houses show through the grass. More and more, the old Saturnalia, the binge drinkers’ annual outing on which Christmas was draped like a crepe paper garland, shows through.
Frankly, it has become a celebration for the under tens who still live in that happy world where Father Christmas rules, there are angels round their beds and we celebrate the unlikeliest paternity suit in history.
Benjamin Franklin said it for me when he prophesied a time would come when the Immaculate Conception would have as few believers as the older story of Minerva being born from the head of Jupiter. The Romans believed, you will recall, that Jupiter had a horrible headache and out of his scalp came Minerva, fully grown and dressed in armour, a long trailing robe, a helmet, a shield and a spear.
Bet his missus Juno gave him some old fashioned looks when he tried that one on her.
I have far too much respect for God to believe he does conjuring tricks.
Besides, wherever you look, the wicked eye of Pan is peeping at you through the Festive greenery.
Any day now a giant Christmas tree will be erected in Ely Cathedral and our local church will be thronged. Not for the services but for the admittedly magical Christmas tree festival. Ignoring the awkward truth that the Christmas tree is a very powerful pagan survival, like the effigies of the Green man and the fecund woman carved into stone gargoyles on churches. That old pagan W. C. Fields read the bible avidly as he lay dying. His friends said it was hypocritical. “Not so”, he told them, “I am looking for loopholes.” So, I believe, were those medieval stone carvers. They placed an each way stone betting slip on the drain spouts of their churches. Just in case.
Look in the journals of the distant past. Even Parson Woodruffe, whose diaries read like a menu, didn’t make a great deal of what was then a holy day. Nor Kilvert either. I seem to remember Pepys made much of the feast, but that was in Restoration England which was the mirror of today in all its noisy vulgarity.
Dickens brought the new all purpose Christmas to Britain, a sales gimmick he eagerly took up as a story telling device during his visits to America.
Do not misunderstand me, there is a benevolent Spirit of Christmas which brings gifts to children and is something much more mysterious and lovely than that vulgar old man in the colours of Coca Cola who was invented in America in the 1930s as a sales gimmick for that alarming drink.
I do not understand this new Father Christmas tradition. 364 days of the year you warn your children not to accept gifts from strangers, then on the 365th day you persuade them that it is a good thing that an old man they have never met is going to creep into their bedrooms and load them down with costly gifts. A DRUNKEN old man, I remind you.
You leave him beakers of sherry, pints of beer, bumpers of port. Are you mad? He is not only driving; he is driving six reindeer. In a sky overpopulated with satellites and, according to Norse myth, a wild horde of ravening beasts harnessed by Odin, who is not famous for sobriety.
I wouldn’t travel by air on Christmas Eve, not if Hell had me.
And what about Christmas cards? How many forests do you reckon we will lose supplying wood pulp for the millions of Christmas cards that give postmen yuletide hernias?
From Skidmore Prava we are sending our cards by email, glowing with self righteousness, however mean our friends think we are.
* * * * * *
Freddy Brabin was a wealthy chemist with a shop on a prime site at The Cross in Chester. It was his misfortune to look like Freddy Frinton, the comedian who pretended to be a drunk. Freddy wasn’t pretending. When it came to being a drunk, Freddy was very serious indeed.
He was tiny but drove an enormous Cadillac. When it ran out of petrol he left it where it was and went home by taxi. But not always. Once he was so far gone in the little club we used that I had to drive him home, where he plied me with so much drink he had to get out his Cadillac and drive me back to Chester. But for timely intervention by a third party we might still have been going to and fro.
He was a kindly man. He told me one day how worried he was about the starving children in Africa. He said he had been reading about something called War on Want where people gave public dinners and wondered if I could fill him in with the specifics.
I explained you invited all your friends to dinner, gave them dry bread and water and sent the money a good dinner would have cost to the starving children.
He said, “You must have got it wrong.” He said he wouldn’t dream of asking his friends, or for that matter any enemies he might have, to drink water when it was his round. “Besides,” he said, “I thought I would have it at the Country Club and I have never seen bread and water on the menu there.”
So I suggested a compromise. “Give them a decent meal,” I said, “and, whatever it costs, give the equivalent to War on Want.”
Accordingly, about 40 of us sat down to a four course dinner, which followed a champagne reception and ended with vintage port. After the meal, Freddie spent a few hours and about a thousand quid downstairs in the Casino.
He didn’t fancy driving home, because he kept falling over, so he stayed the night.
The next morning he woke up around six a.m. with a mouth like the floor of a budgie’s cage. In his nightshirt, he wandered down to the kitchens where the early morning chef was still scratching himself and said, “Make us a cup o tea.”
The chef said he didn’t start work, not till seven, so Freddy could …… off.
At seven o’clock Dennis Ewan, the manager, came in and the chef complained to him about drunken guests invading his kitchen. “Just a minute,” said Dennis, “can you smell burning?”
They rushed to the dining room where they saw a crescent made of blazing dining chairs. In the centre stood Freddy, haloed in flames. “Now will you make us a bloody cup of tea?“ he said.
He was quite proud of the fact that he was the only member barred from the Chester Country Club the night after he had spent around two grand there. But, good as gold, he sent the starving kids a cheque for the same amount.
FROM JOHN JULIUS’ S CHRISTMAS CRACKER
From the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: “In 1867 Rossetti decided to put Swinburne (the shy flagellating poet) in the hands of “some sensible young woman who would make a man of him”. He solicited the aid of Adah Isaacs Menken, a stage performer, to seduce him. Needless to say, the attempt failed, and Miss Menken returned the £10 fee to Rossetti as unearned. “I can’t make him understand,” she explained, “that biting’s no use!”
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
On May 25 1975 the Irish Press reported that a Mr Brian Dicer, a member of the Welsh International Football team, had been arrested and charged with indecent exposure in the middle of Lenin Square in Kiev.
In his defence, Mr Dicer said: ”Walking round the square was a real eye opener. People rushed up and offered to buy things I was wearing for fantastic sums. My tie went for a fiver, I got £45 for my jacket and £30 for my trousers. Before I knew where I was I was down to my pants and socks.”
Mr Dicer told the police that the man to whom he sold his trousers assured him that he could buy another pair round the corner for a quarter of the price. “But when I got there the shop was closed,” he said.
St Clement of Alexandria claimed the Egyptians of his time celebrated the Lord's birth on 20 May; at the end of the 3rd century, the Western Churches celebrated it in the winter; churches all over the world united in the 4th century to celebrate the nativity on 25 December. Like other Christian festivals, it was grafted onto a pagan feast, this one celebrating the god Mithras.
People say Christmas is not what it was; that nowadays it is just an excuse for gluttony and drunkenness. Traditionally that is exactly what it was. Only then it was called Saturnalia.
Pope Gregory XIII muddied the waters in A.D. 1582 when he messed about with the calendar. If there had been no realignment, Christmas would not only be coming, it would have been coming twice that year.
My own view is that it was a tremendous error to spin and pin Christian festivals on the old Pagan holy days. When you look at an aerial photograph of a field, the Neolithic ring houses show through the grass. More and more, the old Saturnalia, the binge drinkers’ annual outing on which Christmas was draped like a crepe paper garland, shows through.
Frankly, it has become a celebration for the under tens who still live in that happy world where Father Christmas rules, there are angels round their beds and we celebrate the unlikeliest paternity suit in history.
Benjamin Franklin said it for me when he prophesied a time would come when the Immaculate Conception would have as few believers as the older story of Minerva being born from the head of Jupiter. The Romans believed, you will recall, that Jupiter had a horrible headache and out of his scalp came Minerva, fully grown and dressed in armour, a long trailing robe, a helmet, a shield and a spear.
Bet his missus Juno gave him some old fashioned looks when he tried that one on her.
I have far too much respect for God to believe he does conjuring tricks.
Besides, wherever you look, the wicked eye of Pan is peeping at you through the Festive greenery.
Any day now a giant Christmas tree will be erected in Ely Cathedral and our local church will be thronged. Not for the services but for the admittedly magical Christmas tree festival. Ignoring the awkward truth that the Christmas tree is a very powerful pagan survival, like the effigies of the Green man and the fecund woman carved into stone gargoyles on churches. That old pagan W. C. Fields read the bible avidly as he lay dying. His friends said it was hypocritical. “Not so”, he told them, “I am looking for loopholes.” So, I believe, were those medieval stone carvers. They placed an each way stone betting slip on the drain spouts of their churches. Just in case.
Look in the journals of the distant past. Even Parson Woodruffe, whose diaries read like a menu, didn’t make a great deal of what was then a holy day. Nor Kilvert either. I seem to remember Pepys made much of the feast, but that was in Restoration England which was the mirror of today in all its noisy vulgarity.
Dickens brought the new all purpose Christmas to Britain, a sales gimmick he eagerly took up as a story telling device during his visits to America.
Do not misunderstand me, there is a benevolent Spirit of Christmas which brings gifts to children and is something much more mysterious and lovely than that vulgar old man in the colours of Coca Cola who was invented in America in the 1930s as a sales gimmick for that alarming drink.
I do not understand this new Father Christmas tradition. 364 days of the year you warn your children not to accept gifts from strangers, then on the 365th day you persuade them that it is a good thing that an old man they have never met is going to creep into their bedrooms and load them down with costly gifts. A DRUNKEN old man, I remind you.
You leave him beakers of sherry, pints of beer, bumpers of port. Are you mad? He is not only driving; he is driving six reindeer. In a sky overpopulated with satellites and, according to Norse myth, a wild horde of ravening beasts harnessed by Odin, who is not famous for sobriety.
I wouldn’t travel by air on Christmas Eve, not if Hell had me.
And what about Christmas cards? How many forests do you reckon we will lose supplying wood pulp for the millions of Christmas cards that give postmen yuletide hernias?
From Skidmore Prava we are sending our cards by email, glowing with self righteousness, however mean our friends think we are.
* * * * * *
Freddy Brabin was a wealthy chemist with a shop on a prime site at The Cross in Chester. It was his misfortune to look like Freddy Frinton, the comedian who pretended to be a drunk. Freddy wasn’t pretending. When it came to being a drunk, Freddy was very serious indeed.
He was tiny but drove an enormous Cadillac. When it ran out of petrol he left it where it was and went home by taxi. But not always. Once he was so far gone in the little club we used that I had to drive him home, where he plied me with so much drink he had to get out his Cadillac and drive me back to Chester. But for timely intervention by a third party we might still have been going to and fro.
He was a kindly man. He told me one day how worried he was about the starving children in Africa. He said he had been reading about something called War on Want where people gave public dinners and wondered if I could fill him in with the specifics.
I explained you invited all your friends to dinner, gave them dry bread and water and sent the money a good dinner would have cost to the starving children.
He said, “You must have got it wrong.” He said he wouldn’t dream of asking his friends, or for that matter any enemies he might have, to drink water when it was his round. “Besides,” he said, “I thought I would have it at the Country Club and I have never seen bread and water on the menu there.”
So I suggested a compromise. “Give them a decent meal,” I said, “and, whatever it costs, give the equivalent to War on Want.”
Accordingly, about 40 of us sat down to a four course dinner, which followed a champagne reception and ended with vintage port. After the meal, Freddie spent a few hours and about a thousand quid downstairs in the Casino.
He didn’t fancy driving home, because he kept falling over, so he stayed the night.
The next morning he woke up around six a.m. with a mouth like the floor of a budgie’s cage. In his nightshirt, he wandered down to the kitchens where the early morning chef was still scratching himself and said, “Make us a cup o tea.”
The chef said he didn’t start work, not till seven, so Freddy could …… off.
At seven o’clock Dennis Ewan, the manager, came in and the chef complained to him about drunken guests invading his kitchen. “Just a minute,” said Dennis, “can you smell burning?”
They rushed to the dining room where they saw a crescent made of blazing dining chairs. In the centre stood Freddy, haloed in flames. “Now will you make us a bloody cup of tea?“ he said.
He was quite proud of the fact that he was the only member barred from the Chester Country Club the night after he had spent around two grand there. But, good as gold, he sent the starving kids a cheque for the same amount.
FROM JOHN JULIUS’ S CHRISTMAS CRACKER
From the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: “In 1867 Rossetti decided to put Swinburne (the shy flagellating poet) in the hands of “some sensible young woman who would make a man of him”. He solicited the aid of Adah Isaacs Menken, a stage performer, to seduce him. Needless to say, the attempt failed, and Miss Menken returned the £10 fee to Rossetti as unearned. “I can’t make him understand,” she explained, “that biting’s no use!”
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
On May 25 1975 the Irish Press reported that a Mr Brian Dicer, a member of the Welsh International Football team, had been arrested and charged with indecent exposure in the middle of Lenin Square in Kiev.
In his defence, Mr Dicer said: ”Walking round the square was a real eye opener. People rushed up and offered to buy things I was wearing for fantastic sums. My tie went for a fiver, I got £45 for my jacket and £30 for my trousers. Before I knew where I was I was down to my pants and socks.”
Mr Dicer told the police that the man to whom he sold his trousers assured him that he could buy another pair round the corner for a quarter of the price. “But when I got there the shop was closed,” he said.
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