If you are going to be ill it is important to pick the most convenient place. So I came over all queer in my local clinic, surrounded by the nurses who, three times a week, dress my Henry VIII ulcerous legs. They produced an oxygen cylinder and a doctor, took my house keys and rang a neighbour - because Celia, the Head Ferret was, of course, playing golf near Cambridge in the lovely Gog Magog hills.
The doctor was followed by a paramedic in green battle dress, festooned with stay-alive kit. A large man, who, in my confused state, I took to be the Jolly Green Giant. He was immediately joined by an ambulance crew, two delightful ladies still a little startled because the last patient they had gone to pick up had told them to F…. off.
These poor girls began the paperwork on my case as the ambulance left the surgery and had just completed it as we drew into Peterborough District Hospital half an hour later.
My neighbours meanwhile were slightly put out because, having gone to enormous trouble to find out where the Head Ferret was playing, they rang the club house to break the bad news and were told: “Could you ring back in ten minutes, she is just on the last hole?”
Peterborough District Hospital was a revelation. It shone with cleanliness and on every wall there was a hygienic hand spray with a notice to medical staff: “Do not pass this”. On the ward, constant hand washing. It was like kibitzing on a convention of Uriah Heeps but very comforting since I have lost two friends to MRSA.
I was disconcerted by a notice on the lift which said: “If you are not well, do not enter this ward.” I pointed out to the ambulance crew that this pretty well ruled me out but they said not to worry, it was for visitors, not patients. Incredibly, suffering from infectious diseases does not suggest to some visitors that their visit is unwise.
I had not been tucked up in bed long when the Head Ferret arrived, with the observation that it would have been much more convenient if I had gone to Addenbrookes which she could see from the 18th tee. It was reassuring to learn that she had dropped off at home to feed the dog.
Plainly this had exhausted her. Because when the first doctor arrived to assess me, Celia was relaxing on the bed and I was sitting in the visitor’s chair, where I should not have been, according to the notice, because I was not feeling well.
The process from admission to release took seven hours but this is in no way a criticism of the doctors and nurses. There were only two doctors to deal with sixteen patients, who were all emergencies, and in the wards a nurse to every sixteen beds. The two doctors on the assessment ward were also responsible for the other patients in the wards surrounding.
When I commiserated with the Registrar on being so short staffed, she put me right at once: “We are not short staffed,” she said, and she had a smile which lit the ward. “That is the establishment for the wards.”
So the next time you complain about the Health Service, remember the Registrar with the smile that lit the ward, the ambulance driver a patient told to F… off, the overworked nurses, cheerily washing their hands at every conceivable moment, rushed off their feet and still caring and kind.
We may have a lousy Health Service but, by God, we should be grateful for the people who staff it.
P.S. Friends will be relieved to hear I cannot die before next weekend: Celia, The Head Ferret, has a very full golf programme. But she has instructed me to be taken ill in the morning when, with luck, she will be at home. Being ill in the afternoon is the sort of thoughtless thing that husbands do
YOU THINK IT IS BAD HERE?
In Germany, a Volvo dealer has been ordered by the court to compensate a buyer around 20,000 euros because the man’s feet were too big to be able to use the new vehicle’s accelerator pedal properly. The money was to allow him to buy snug sports shoes and to compensate for him having to change in and out of them every time he drove the car.
In Sweden, they are proposing to install pedestrian walk control lights in the streets, which show both a man and a woman. This is to provide better gender equality. I’ve never really thought about it but I suppose women can walk across the intersections whenever they like as the red lights only show that men cannot walk – or am I being blonde?
In Sweden (again), they passed a law in 1999 that punishes the buyers of sexual favours with up to six months in jail, but they do not prosecute the prostitutes. When you think about it, it probably makes a lot of sense.
At the White House last week, President George Bush signed a proclamation declaring Malaria Awareness week. There was an awkward moment during the ceremony when Bush said: “This is a great day for all Malarians.”
BRUGES BEER CAPITOL OF THE WORLD
A friend has called Bruges the most boring city in Europe. Such sauce! What bacon is to the butty, MPs to mortgages and new kitchens, Bruges is to the beer house. If you gave up sleep, you could probably do a comprehensive pub crawl of the city in just over a year.
The oldest pub, the 16th century Vlissinghe on Blekersstraat, has a lovely garden in which customers are ignored. Burghers who went on opening night are probably still waiting to be served. L’estaminet, Park 5, has delicious food and great jazz. The tiny, elegant De Garre, off Breidelstraat, serves beer specially brewed for it, with generous saucers of cheese.
Then there is “t’Brugs Beertje” across the Kemelstraat from the Hobbit Bistro.
The “Little Bear” has furniture you would be stuck with at a boot sale, the walls are a delicate shade of nicotine, though rarely visible for brewery adverts, the seats are hard, the floors innocent of carpet. And I have got it backed as the top beer house of the Western world.
It serves 300 brands of beer, including a special ale brewed for Christmas. With 295 of them I have no quarrel, but there are five others you have to drink in the company of adults - and even then you would fail a test for walking upright.
The Fearsome Five are brewed by Trappist monks who live in perpetual silence. They will tell you it is a vow. Rubbish. Prolonged exposure to their beer has robbed them of the power of speech. Two sips and you arrive at that state where conversation is easy but pronunciation difficult. It is like being mugged with a velvet cosh. Your mind walks in ever diminishing circles, whimpering uneasily.
What can I tell you? The amiable landlord Jan de Bruyne and his wife Daisy run a Beer Academy in the back room, where they share their vast knowledge of beer and quantities of their stock with the customers. I think I went. I even have a certificate to prove it. But there is no name on it, nor is it signed. I do not know what “heeft deelgenomen aan een Seminarie Belgisch Bier” means and I cannot remember a thing I was taught.
If they had sprayed Iraq with Trappist beer Baghdad could have been taken by the Vienna Boys Choir. If you spilt any in the garden you would face green fly the size of horses and butterflies with bomb bays under their wings. In Beaumont and Fletcher’s wise words, here is ale would make a cat speak.
Alas, I missed the pub with 160 chamber pots but I hope to stay in Marian Degraeve’s Kazernevest guest house which offers “clean hot shower and musical toilet”.
DANGEROUS CUTTING
“Where we are most vulnerable at this moment is on the ground. To me, this is the most dangerous aspect of flying."
MARK V. ROSENKER, chairman of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. Quoted in the NY Herald Tribune.
And for two more good reads try
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
Friday, 30 May 2008
Sunday, 25 May 2008
LETTER FROM.....................................
LLANFAIRPWLLGWYNGYLLGOGERYCHWYRNDROBW
YLLLLANTYSILIOGOGOGOCH
Living in a village the name of which I could not pronounce played
havoc with my social life. Pub crawls were impossible. Imagine
ringing for a cab at closing time and trying to tell the driver where
to take you. I have had trouble in the past with Oswestry, and
Llanuwchllyn is out of the question. Dwygyfylchi is worse but at least it
is shorter than LLANFAIRPWLLGWYNGYLLGOGERYCHWYRNDROBW
YLLLLANTYSILIOGOGOGOCH, where we used to live during the happiest time in my life.
The name reminds me of the English writer at the Hay-on-Wye
Festival where the green room, where the artistes assemble, is an infants' school and the drawers are all labelled in Welsh. "Is that where they keep the vowels?" he asked, with persuasive innocence.
A great place to live but a constant humiliation.
I was reminded of this dilemma by the news just in of the death of my number one fan in Australia, Tony Shapley of Queensland, a splendid argumentative man with whom I enjoyed a long email friendship.
I used to do these broadcasts on Australian radio and always signed off
".....good night from Llanfairpwllgwyngyll............."
Shappers emails were warm and friendly but every week, without fail, after the broadcast went out, an expatriate Taff would ring me in a rage from Brisbane: "If yer caint pronounce the name why don't you move to f......... Rhyl?"
He was lucky to get through. Another Australian fan tried to write to me for nearly year but his letters all come back from the Australian post office marked "no such place". I know about this because he rang his sister in Derby to check with a friend in Mold if he had the address right and she rang me to find out.
It was not just the Australians who had trouble. The vicar of the
parish church in Upton Scudamore, in Wiltshire, sought a
contribution to the restoration of my ancestors' tomb. He sent the
letter to the Isle of Anglesey by air mail. It came by road from
Manchester airport across one of the two bridges which linked us to
the mainland.
The Post Office in Chester refused to put Isle of Anglesey on its database. Whenever I asked for a Welsh number a Query Page flashed up. "Do you mean Wales, Yeovil, or Wales, Sheffield?"
I used to drink for Wales so I was well known there. Bit surprising
when, at a Tandy shop in Wrexham, my application to buy a PC
on the drip was turned down. The manager was surprised too. He
rang his finance office in Leeds. They said: "It's the address.
There is no such place." The manager said: "There must be. He
has just come from there."
The trick is to make up a name. My credit card statement from the
Royal Bank of Scotland was always addressed to me at Virgin and
Child Cottage at Brymsitmoy, which, so far as I know, is the Welsh Brigadoon because it does not exist. But the bill arrived every month at my house in Brynsiencyn.
The whole name LlanfairPG is a con. I do not know a Welshman who
couldn't give Machiavelli six blacks and still beat him off the table. Most Welsh history pre-1800 is invented. Outsiders are not told that Owain Glyndwr was a general in the English army, married to an Englishwoman, or that his legitimate children married into the English aristocracy. Only his nine bastards had Welsh spouses.
Edward I invaded North Wales with an army of 15,000, of which 11,000 were Welsh. Even the ‘Welsh Not’ (the label said to have been tied round children’s necks if they dared to speak Welsh at school) is not. Though the English Not is widespread.
Our village was for centuries called Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, a lovely name which means the "Mary church by the white hazel pool". When Stevenson brought the railway to Anglesey there were no plans to build a station there. That meant the lucrative tourist trade would pass by and they weren't having that. A local cobbler simply added a description to the name and wrote it on slips of paper which he put in plain brown envelopes and sold as a cure for lock-jaw. It became overnight, and irrevocably, the
village with the longest name in the world:
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwryndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
The addition means "near the fierce whirlpool with the church of
St Tysilio by the red cave".
As a result, the village became so famous our local draper's shop was the size of a bus depot and we had coach-loads of visitors from all over the
world. So much so that the shop has a signpost which shows the
distance from Llanfairpwll to the North Pole and cities the world
over, including New York and Tokyo, all the homes of customers.
I just wonder how Japanese coach drivers cope when they get lost.
I suspect a lot of our oriental business ends up as day trips to
Bangor.
*************** ************************ **************
The cliché runs: “Journalists meet lots of interesting people but they are usually other journalists.”
It is my experience that clichés are truths in familiar clothing, but to this one there should be a caveat. It does not follow that other journalists are necessarily among the nicest people one meets. It’s a competitive trade and dog is usually on the table d’hote.
Vincent Mulchrone was the exception. I cannot remember a time when we were not friends - and that included the time when he was very famous as a columnist. Which, to say the least, was unusual.
He was on the Manchester City News when I met him. He got the job, like I did, because he could spell recommend and accommodate. That was the only test would be reporters were given by the proprietor, an illiterate called Harold Geldeard. The proprietor could not spell the words himself. Before every interview his secretary wrote them on a piece of paper.
Mulchrone moved to the Mirror and we all had a party. We had another party when he was sacked by the Mirror on a trumped up charge - because he liked having parties.
There was yet another party when he joined the Daily Mail but he was soon translated to London where he became the finest columnist that paper has discovered. It is a matter of chagrin that though it discovered three of my friends, Keith Waterhouse, John Edwards and Vincent, it never bothered to discover me.
I am sure the other two will agree that Vincent gave the lie to another cliché which is that “You may like the writing, but the chances are you will be disappointed by the writer“, a truth which is borne out by most of the literary biographies that poison our shelves.
Vincent was beloved by everyone who met him. He wrote what he was: witty, urbane, sensitive, funny and all the good things you could think of. He died tragically early of leukaemia because God is selfish and wants to keep all the good people to himself.
Happily you can meet him again. Another mutual friend, Revel Barker, has just republished a dazzling collection of his columns, “The Best of Vincent Mulchrone”, which is a lifetime of wit and observation of the folly and splendour of his fellow human beings by the Daily Mail’s finest reporter.
You can order a copy online from revelbarker@gmail.com. It will cost you £9.99, plus postage, and all royalties are going to research into the fight against leukaemia, the disease which robbed the world of a man it could ill afford to lose at the woefully early age of 54.
The last paragraph in this funny, loving book is: “When I go, give me a Basin St funeral band, Belgian black horses with plumes, a stop at the tap room of The Hermit, and lots of ham. It won’t bother me, mate. But it might just take the miserable look off your face.”
And if it doesn’t, his book certainly will.
FROM A CHRISTMAS CRACKER
“Melvin Buckhart, aged 94, was a fairground sideshow performer known as the Human Blockhead because of his ability to drive a five-inch nail or an ice pick into his head without flinching.
The Human Blockhead worked under a number of alternative titles, depending on which of his extraordinary repertoire of physical contortions he happened to be performing at the time.
As the Anatomical Wonder he could inflate one lung at a time and dislocate his shoulders; as the Man Without a Stomach, he could suck his stomach back into his spine; as the Two Faced Man, he could frown with half his face and smile with the other half. Among many accomplishments he swallowed swords, threw knives and ate fire.
He was universally admired by his fellow performers, one of whom observed: “Anyone who has ever hammered a five-inch nail into his nose owes a large debt of gratitude to Melvin Buckhart.”
Daily Telegraph, Novdmber 2001
YLLLLANTYSILIOGOGOGOCH
Living in a village the name of which I could not pronounce played
havoc with my social life. Pub crawls were impossible. Imagine
ringing for a cab at closing time and trying to tell the driver where
to take you. I have had trouble in the past with Oswestry, and
Llanuwchllyn is out of the question. Dwygyfylchi is worse but at least it
is shorter than LLANFAIRPWLLGWYNGYLLGOGERYCHWYRNDROBW
YLLLLANTYSILIOGOGOGOCH, where we used to live during the happiest time in my life.
The name reminds me of the English writer at the Hay-on-Wye
Festival where the green room, where the artistes assemble, is an infants' school and the drawers are all labelled in Welsh. "Is that where they keep the vowels?" he asked, with persuasive innocence.
A great place to live but a constant humiliation.
I was reminded of this dilemma by the news just in of the death of my number one fan in Australia, Tony Shapley of Queensland, a splendid argumentative man with whom I enjoyed a long email friendship.
I used to do these broadcasts on Australian radio and always signed off
".....good night from Llanfairpwllgwyngyll............."
Shappers emails were warm and friendly but every week, without fail, after the broadcast went out, an expatriate Taff would ring me in a rage from Brisbane: "If yer caint pronounce the name why don't you move to f......... Rhyl?"
He was lucky to get through. Another Australian fan tried to write to me for nearly year but his letters all come back from the Australian post office marked "no such place". I know about this because he rang his sister in Derby to check with a friend in Mold if he had the address right and she rang me to find out.
It was not just the Australians who had trouble. The vicar of the
parish church in Upton Scudamore, in Wiltshire, sought a
contribution to the restoration of my ancestors' tomb. He sent the
letter to the Isle of Anglesey by air mail. It came by road from
Manchester airport across one of the two bridges which linked us to
the mainland.
The Post Office in Chester refused to put Isle of Anglesey on its database. Whenever I asked for a Welsh number a Query Page flashed up. "Do you mean Wales, Yeovil, or Wales, Sheffield?"
I used to drink for Wales so I was well known there. Bit surprising
when, at a Tandy shop in Wrexham, my application to buy a PC
on the drip was turned down. The manager was surprised too. He
rang his finance office in Leeds. They said: "It's the address.
There is no such place." The manager said: "There must be. He
has just come from there."
The trick is to make up a name. My credit card statement from the
Royal Bank of Scotland was always addressed to me at Virgin and
Child Cottage at Brymsitmoy, which, so far as I know, is the Welsh Brigadoon because it does not exist. But the bill arrived every month at my house in Brynsiencyn.
The whole name LlanfairPG is a con. I do not know a Welshman who
couldn't give Machiavelli six blacks and still beat him off the table. Most Welsh history pre-1800 is invented. Outsiders are not told that Owain Glyndwr was a general in the English army, married to an Englishwoman, or that his legitimate children married into the English aristocracy. Only his nine bastards had Welsh spouses.
Edward I invaded North Wales with an army of 15,000, of which 11,000 were Welsh. Even the ‘Welsh Not’ (the label said to have been tied round children’s necks if they dared to speak Welsh at school) is not. Though the English Not is widespread.
Our village was for centuries called Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, a lovely name which means the "Mary church by the white hazel pool". When Stevenson brought the railway to Anglesey there were no plans to build a station there. That meant the lucrative tourist trade would pass by and they weren't having that. A local cobbler simply added a description to the name and wrote it on slips of paper which he put in plain brown envelopes and sold as a cure for lock-jaw. It became overnight, and irrevocably, the
village with the longest name in the world:
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwryndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
The addition means "near the fierce whirlpool with the church of
St Tysilio by the red cave".
As a result, the village became so famous our local draper's shop was the size of a bus depot and we had coach-loads of visitors from all over the
world. So much so that the shop has a signpost which shows the
distance from Llanfairpwll to the North Pole and cities the world
over, including New York and Tokyo, all the homes of customers.
I just wonder how Japanese coach drivers cope when they get lost.
I suspect a lot of our oriental business ends up as day trips to
Bangor.
*************** ************************ **************
The cliché runs: “Journalists meet lots of interesting people but they are usually other journalists.”
It is my experience that clichés are truths in familiar clothing, but to this one there should be a caveat. It does not follow that other journalists are necessarily among the nicest people one meets. It’s a competitive trade and dog is usually on the table d’hote.
Vincent Mulchrone was the exception. I cannot remember a time when we were not friends - and that included the time when he was very famous as a columnist. Which, to say the least, was unusual.
He was on the Manchester City News when I met him. He got the job, like I did, because he could spell recommend and accommodate. That was the only test would be reporters were given by the proprietor, an illiterate called Harold Geldeard. The proprietor could not spell the words himself. Before every interview his secretary wrote them on a piece of paper.
Mulchrone moved to the Mirror and we all had a party. We had another party when he was sacked by the Mirror on a trumped up charge - because he liked having parties.
There was yet another party when he joined the Daily Mail but he was soon translated to London where he became the finest columnist that paper has discovered. It is a matter of chagrin that though it discovered three of my friends, Keith Waterhouse, John Edwards and Vincent, it never bothered to discover me.
I am sure the other two will agree that Vincent gave the lie to another cliché which is that “You may like the writing, but the chances are you will be disappointed by the writer“, a truth which is borne out by most of the literary biographies that poison our shelves.
Vincent was beloved by everyone who met him. He wrote what he was: witty, urbane, sensitive, funny and all the good things you could think of. He died tragically early of leukaemia because God is selfish and wants to keep all the good people to himself.
Happily you can meet him again. Another mutual friend, Revel Barker, has just republished a dazzling collection of his columns, “The Best of Vincent Mulchrone”, which is a lifetime of wit and observation of the folly and splendour of his fellow human beings by the Daily Mail’s finest reporter.
You can order a copy online from revelbarker@gmail.com. It will cost you £9.99, plus postage, and all royalties are going to research into the fight against leukaemia, the disease which robbed the world of a man it could ill afford to lose at the woefully early age of 54.
The last paragraph in this funny, loving book is: “When I go, give me a Basin St funeral band, Belgian black horses with plumes, a stop at the tap room of The Hermit, and lots of ham. It won’t bother me, mate. But it might just take the miserable look off your face.”
And if it doesn’t, his book certainly will.
FROM A CHRISTMAS CRACKER
“Melvin Buckhart, aged 94, was a fairground sideshow performer known as the Human Blockhead because of his ability to drive a five-inch nail or an ice pick into his head without flinching.
The Human Blockhead worked under a number of alternative titles, depending on which of his extraordinary repertoire of physical contortions he happened to be performing at the time.
As the Anatomical Wonder he could inflate one lung at a time and dislocate his shoulders; as the Man Without a Stomach, he could suck his stomach back into his spine; as the Two Faced Man, he could frown with half his face and smile with the other half. Among many accomplishments he swallowed swords, threw knives and ate fire.
He was universally admired by his fellow performers, one of whom observed: “Anyone who has ever hammered a five-inch nail into his nose owes a large debt of gratitude to Melvin Buckhart.”
Daily Telegraph, Novdmber 2001
Saturday, 17 May 2008
It is a tonic...so far
A little late in life, two decades from my century in fact, I have discovered the pleasures of listening to music. I have always enjoyed music as a background to reading, and occasionally to writing, but was constitutionally incapable of listening when unoccupied.
Oddly enough, my wife’s polymath uncle Sidney had the same block, as he once confided to me.
Uncle Sidney was fortunate: he had two supremely musical friends, Arnold Haskell, the man who invented the word Balletomane and founded the Royal Ballet School and Harry Edwards, a languages master at Clifton College with a wide knowledge of music.
My teacher has been David Mellor, a former Minister for Culture who now has a Sunday programme on Classic FM, “If you liked that, you will like this”, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of music. Listening to him is costing me a fortune. My CD collection grows apace.
If there is a hierarchy in art, the crown must go to music. Both in creation and execution it leaves the other arts far behind.
The fine poet, and singularly unpleasant man, R.S. Thomas once observed to me that contemporary poetry was clever but it wasn’t poetry. He said it was copy writing. It plays with words in much the same way as a car ad. The painter Sir Kyffin Williams described the painting tradition as being like building a house. Each generation added a room but developed it from the rooms that had already been built by earlier generations. Alas, he said, modern painters were wreckers, not builders. My own trade of writing has long since run out of things to say. By far the best and most imaginative writing today is the detective novel. Music alone dazzles with its imagination and logic.
It was not always thus. Music acted on me like Mogadon. Especially opera. I have fallen asleep in every major opera house in Europe: in Rome during the overture to a particularly enervating production of “La Vestale”, to the dismay of other members of the audience.
“Don’t worry,” my wife reassured them, “he will wake up the moment the bar opens for the interval.”
My first experience of opera was a Carl Rosa 1950s' production of “Aida”, a story of war between Egypt and Ethiopia and the only occasion in military history when the Egyptian army won a battle.
By the fifties Carl Rosa was in decline. More your Carl Sinka. The Egyptian army in the production was down to platoon strength; the tomb in which hero and heroine are immured collapsed under the weight of a soprano. The company's scenery made the cardboard walls of Prisoner Cell Block 'H', that jewel among programmes, granite-like in comparison.
In “The Flying Dutchman” the eponymous tenor was instantly grounded
when the flies fell on him. So pinched were the productions that in “La Boheme” it was the audience's imagination and not Mimi's tiny hand that was frozen.
It is not that I did not try. I went to Birmingham to see my third production of "Aida" - the second in Bielefeld was memorable mostly for a tomb the size, and indeed the thickness, of a golf umbrella. This third production was in the Sports Arena, which holds fourteen thousand people and is the size of a large village. Massive cast, including an army, which had it been available to the Egyptians in the Six Day War would have got them a result; and a River Nile in which I swear I saw trout.
I was converted.
I do not claim I will ever become as attached to opera as my late Uncle Tommy, a road digger in Edinburgh who discovered grand opera late in life when my father played him a recording of Bjorling singing "None Shall Sleep", at which he could give Pavarotti three blacks. Uncle Tommy blew his life savings, amassed over the previous week because he was sadly improvident, on a radiogram and all the arias he could cram into a carrier bag.
I do have one musical connection. When I met the great baritone Geraint Evans I asked him how he created his famous stage make ups. He said he based them on people he had met.
" If I had known you at the time I would have based Falsaff on you"
I think it was the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.
DANGEROUS CUTTING FROM A CHRISTMAS CRACKER: Edinburgh Evening News, 18 August 1978:
While they were waiting at a bus stop in Clermiston, Mr and Mrs Daniel Thirsty were threatened by Me Robert Clear. “He demanded that I give him my wife’s purse,” said Mr Thirsty. “Telling him the purse was in her basket, I bent down, put my hands up her skirt, detached her artificial leg and hit him over the head with it. It was not my intention to do anything more than frighten him off, but, unhappily for us all, he died.”
And for two more good reads try
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
Oddly enough, my wife’s polymath uncle Sidney had the same block, as he once confided to me.
Uncle Sidney was fortunate: he had two supremely musical friends, Arnold Haskell, the man who invented the word Balletomane and founded the Royal Ballet School and Harry Edwards, a languages master at Clifton College with a wide knowledge of music.
My teacher has been David Mellor, a former Minister for Culture who now has a Sunday programme on Classic FM, “If you liked that, you will like this”, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of music. Listening to him is costing me a fortune. My CD collection grows apace.
If there is a hierarchy in art, the crown must go to music. Both in creation and execution it leaves the other arts far behind.
The fine poet, and singularly unpleasant man, R.S. Thomas once observed to me that contemporary poetry was clever but it wasn’t poetry. He said it was copy writing. It plays with words in much the same way as a car ad. The painter Sir Kyffin Williams described the painting tradition as being like building a house. Each generation added a room but developed it from the rooms that had already been built by earlier generations. Alas, he said, modern painters were wreckers, not builders. My own trade of writing has long since run out of things to say. By far the best and most imaginative writing today is the detective novel. Music alone dazzles with its imagination and logic.
It was not always thus. Music acted on me like Mogadon. Especially opera. I have fallen asleep in every major opera house in Europe: in Rome during the overture to a particularly enervating production of “La Vestale”, to the dismay of other members of the audience.
“Don’t worry,” my wife reassured them, “he will wake up the moment the bar opens for the interval.”
My first experience of opera was a Carl Rosa 1950s' production of “Aida”, a story of war between Egypt and Ethiopia and the only occasion in military history when the Egyptian army won a battle.
By the fifties Carl Rosa was in decline. More your Carl Sinka. The Egyptian army in the production was down to platoon strength; the tomb in which hero and heroine are immured collapsed under the weight of a soprano. The company's scenery made the cardboard walls of Prisoner Cell Block 'H', that jewel among programmes, granite-like in comparison.
In “The Flying Dutchman” the eponymous tenor was instantly grounded
when the flies fell on him. So pinched were the productions that in “La Boheme” it was the audience's imagination and not Mimi's tiny hand that was frozen.
It is not that I did not try. I went to Birmingham to see my third production of "Aida" - the second in Bielefeld was memorable mostly for a tomb the size, and indeed the thickness, of a golf umbrella. This third production was in the Sports Arena, which holds fourteen thousand people and is the size of a large village. Massive cast, including an army, which had it been available to the Egyptians in the Six Day War would have got them a result; and a River Nile in which I swear I saw trout.
I was converted.
I do not claim I will ever become as attached to opera as my late Uncle Tommy, a road digger in Edinburgh who discovered grand opera late in life when my father played him a recording of Bjorling singing "None Shall Sleep", at which he could give Pavarotti three blacks. Uncle Tommy blew his life savings, amassed over the previous week because he was sadly improvident, on a radiogram and all the arias he could cram into a carrier bag.
I do have one musical connection. When I met the great baritone Geraint Evans I asked him how he created his famous stage make ups. He said he based them on people he had met.
" If I had known you at the time I would have based Falsaff on you"
I think it was the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.
DANGEROUS CUTTING FROM A CHRISTMAS CRACKER: Edinburgh Evening News, 18 August 1978:
While they were waiting at a bus stop in Clermiston, Mr and Mrs Daniel Thirsty were threatened by Me Robert Clear. “He demanded that I give him my wife’s purse,” said Mr Thirsty. “Telling him the purse was in her basket, I bent down, put my hands up her skirt, detached her artificial leg and hit him over the head with it. It was not my intention to do anything more than frighten him off, but, unhappily for us all, he died.”
And for two more good reads try
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
Friday, 9 May 2008
SOME NECK……………………………………………………….
Churchill is accused of enjoying the war in “Human Smoke”, Nicholas Baker’s controversial history of World War 2 which was published this week. It would be surprising if he had not. His career until that date had consisted of a series of spectacular mistakes. To end it in a burst of martial glory which eclipsed that of his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough was a gift many a pensioner would envy.
It is some years since the historian Noble Frankland pointed out that Churchill believed air support on a battlefield would add a complication without conferring an advantage; that the Germans would be unable to break the French on the Western Front; the Japanese would be too cautious to enter the war and, if they did, Singapore would remain invulnerable.
According to Frankland, Churchill thought that neither submarines nor aircraft would pose a serious threat to battleships and that aerial mines would be better defence than radar. He was responsible for Gallipoli in 1915 and for the disastrous campaign in Norway in 1940. He sent the “Prince of Wales” and the “Repulse” to Singapore, ordered the bombing of Dresden and then condemned it. On the eve of Victory in Europe he summoned the Chiefs of Staff to prepare a plan for an alliance with the German Army for an attack on Russia. He famously agreed to a plan to bomb defenceless tribesmen and said he would not object to the use on them of poison gas.
Biographies of his mother show him to have been constantly urging her to further his career. Only her intervention saved him from involvement in a homosexual scandal in his regiment and his odious son recounted with glee how his father had slept with Ivor Novello in Leeds Castle when a fire necessitated guests sharing a bed. Asked how it was he replied, according to Randolph, “Very musical.”
Difficult not to believe that with him the pen was mightier than the sword when he got in first with his History of the War, making him his own most passionate advocate.
Another chum from broadcasting days is the Earl of Norwich, who every Christmas sends his friends “Christmas Cracker”, a collection of cuttings and quotations which have amused him during the year. On payment of a fiver to John Julius’s favourite charity ‘Venice in Peril’, for which he works tirelessly, I am allowed to reproduce them here. This one is worth every penny.
From an Exeter newspaper:
Donna Challice, a thirty-year-old single mother of three from Devon, has appeared in court accused of failing properly to recycle her household waste. Mrs Challice was being prosecuted for “contaminating recyclable rubbish” under the Environmental Protection Act. She has now been released on bail and will next appear on 5 June 2006 for a pre-trial review.
The Environmental Protection Act specifically states which types of recyclable items must be cleaned and placed in which containers on which days. Mrs Challice has been accused of putting items in the wrong bin on six separate occasions over the last year. She claims that the rules are confusing and that any offence that she may have committed was completely by accident.
Arthur Dimson, Director of Waste Disposal for the Exeter City Council, has dismissed Mrs Challice’s claim saying that:
“It’s quite simple really. On the second and fourth Monday of each month, plastics go in the red bins and aluminium in the blue bins. On the first and third Tuesdays of each month - providing there has already been a first Monday - paper goes in the red containers and other non-aluminium metals go in the blue containers. If there hasn’t been a first Monday, the schedule is pushed back a week. On alternating Wednesdays, glass goes into the red cans and miscellaneous recyclable refuse goes into the blue cans. On Thursdays, non-recyclable refuse may be put into either the red or the blue receptacles. All discards must be washed except clothing – which may be either washed or dry-cleaned depending on the fabric – and paper. Paper with coloured printing should only be placed in the red cans on the first Tuesday of each month. Paper with only black ink may be placed in the red containers on any other qualifying Tuesday. On weekends the bins are to remain empty for cleaning. These rules are all posted on the bottom of each recycling bin. So it’s not as if people have to memorise them.”
He added:
“Mrs Challice could wait until the weekend and look in the bottom of the empty bin to refresh her memory on the rules.”
MY OWN DANGEROUS CUTTING
It began as an April Fool’s joke. An online poll asked villagers of Audlem, Cheshire, whether they would like to break away from England and become Welsh. So far more than 66 per cent of the 333 respondents have registered support for the motion.
The village is nine miles from Wales and residents have long looked with envy at their neighbours’ free NHS prescriptions.
And for two more good reads try
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
ends
It is some years since the historian Noble Frankland pointed out that Churchill believed air support on a battlefield would add a complication without conferring an advantage; that the Germans would be unable to break the French on the Western Front; the Japanese would be too cautious to enter the war and, if they did, Singapore would remain invulnerable.
According to Frankland, Churchill thought that neither submarines nor aircraft would pose a serious threat to battleships and that aerial mines would be better defence than radar. He was responsible for Gallipoli in 1915 and for the disastrous campaign in Norway in 1940. He sent the “Prince of Wales” and the “Repulse” to Singapore, ordered the bombing of Dresden and then condemned it. On the eve of Victory in Europe he summoned the Chiefs of Staff to prepare a plan for an alliance with the German Army for an attack on Russia. He famously agreed to a plan to bomb defenceless tribesmen and said he would not object to the use on them of poison gas.
Biographies of his mother show him to have been constantly urging her to further his career. Only her intervention saved him from involvement in a homosexual scandal in his regiment and his odious son recounted with glee how his father had slept with Ivor Novello in Leeds Castle when a fire necessitated guests sharing a bed. Asked how it was he replied, according to Randolph, “Very musical.”
Difficult not to believe that with him the pen was mightier than the sword when he got in first with his History of the War, making him his own most passionate advocate.
Another chum from broadcasting days is the Earl of Norwich, who every Christmas sends his friends “Christmas Cracker”, a collection of cuttings and quotations which have amused him during the year. On payment of a fiver to John Julius’s favourite charity ‘Venice in Peril’, for which he works tirelessly, I am allowed to reproduce them here. This one is worth every penny.
From an Exeter newspaper:
Donna Challice, a thirty-year-old single mother of three from Devon, has appeared in court accused of failing properly to recycle her household waste. Mrs Challice was being prosecuted for “contaminating recyclable rubbish” under the Environmental Protection Act. She has now been released on bail and will next appear on 5 June 2006 for a pre-trial review.
The Environmental Protection Act specifically states which types of recyclable items must be cleaned and placed in which containers on which days. Mrs Challice has been accused of putting items in the wrong bin on six separate occasions over the last year. She claims that the rules are confusing and that any offence that she may have committed was completely by accident.
Arthur Dimson, Director of Waste Disposal for the Exeter City Council, has dismissed Mrs Challice’s claim saying that:
“It’s quite simple really. On the second and fourth Monday of each month, plastics go in the red bins and aluminium in the blue bins. On the first and third Tuesdays of each month - providing there has already been a first Monday - paper goes in the red containers and other non-aluminium metals go in the blue containers. If there hasn’t been a first Monday, the schedule is pushed back a week. On alternating Wednesdays, glass goes into the red cans and miscellaneous recyclable refuse goes into the blue cans. On Thursdays, non-recyclable refuse may be put into either the red or the blue receptacles. All discards must be washed except clothing – which may be either washed or dry-cleaned depending on the fabric – and paper. Paper with coloured printing should only be placed in the red cans on the first Tuesday of each month. Paper with only black ink may be placed in the red containers on any other qualifying Tuesday. On weekends the bins are to remain empty for cleaning. These rules are all posted on the bottom of each recycling bin. So it’s not as if people have to memorise them.”
He added:
“Mrs Challice could wait until the weekend and look in the bottom of the empty bin to refresh her memory on the rules.”
MY OWN DANGEROUS CUTTING
It began as an April Fool’s joke. An online poll asked villagers of Audlem, Cheshire, whether they would like to break away from England and become Welsh. So far more than 66 per cent of the 333 respondents have registered support for the motion.
The village is nine miles from Wales and residents have long looked with envy at their neighbours’ free NHS prescriptions.
And for two more good reads try
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
ends
Sunday, 4 May 2008
Huns,Guns and butttering up doctors
I do not go quite so far as George Orwell who in one of his wartime Tribune columns asserted that we did less harm to the Germans by dropping bombs on them than we did by calling them “ Huns”.
He insisted ;
“ Naturally one does not want to inflict death and wounds if it can be avoided, but I cannot think that mere killing is important. We shall all be dead in a hundred years, and most of us by the sordid horror known as ‘natural death’.
“The truly evil thing is to act in such a way that peaceful life becomes impossible. War damages the fabric of a civilisation not by the destruction it causes, nor even by the slaughter of human beings, but by stimulating hatred and dishonesty.
By shooting your enemy you are not in the deepest sense wronging him. But by hating him, by inventing lies about him and bringing up children to believe them, by clamouring for unfair peace terms which make a further war inevitable…………………...”,
In his manual of leadership “The Prince” Machiavelli suggested the best way to rally a people behind a leader, is to invent an enemy. . Clearly in trying to frighten us about anyone with a sun tan our Government has learned the lesson that it is in its interest to have a frightened public. It enables control,; validates the 3,000 new laws, including for the first time laws which limit the things one can say, words one can use, mindsets one can display. Political correctness is now part of the contaminated air we breathe. It is no accident that the first unnecessary legislation the Government brought in was the law which took firearms out of the hands of the ordinary folk. To-day it is announced the Govt is considering making it illegal for a parent to teach their child how to drive. Here on the Fens a church is having to spend £5,000 replacing iron railings destroyed by vandals. The Parish Council has been warned the new railings must not have spikes in case vandals hurt themselves climbing over them.,
I have personal experience of Government manipulation. When I was reporter in Chester there ws never more than one murder on each Assize Calendar. During the moratorium which preceded the abolition of the death penalty there were four murder charges on the calendar. I said to a friend who was the Court Administrator that here was certain proof hanging ws a deterrent.
He smiled at my innocence.
“We have had an instruction from the Lord Chancellor. All defendants charged with murder are to be invited to plead to a lesser charge. There will be no murder convictions on the list I prepare. “
Nor were there and the argument for hanging was lost, though the public was overwhelmingly in favour..
The Govt is like the Fat Boy in Pickwick. It wants to make our flesh creep,
The reason ? We are at war once removed. On the one side there are the Western Liberal Democracies on the other the growing Autocracies of China, Russia and the East.
Like befuddled Joans of Arc we bring the banners of democracy to countless millions who do not want them. In doing so we flout three hundred years of international law which forbade interference in sovereign states.
The dilemma comes to a head in the State of Israel. Heroic act or violent landgrab? Centuries of verbal abuse of these two septs of the same clan have brought about a situation where the Arab race which gave us so much , which preserved the treasures of the classical world, the roots of our own civilisation, has created the suicide bomber.
The Jews, a gifted people who have enriched the worlds of art and commerce and earned the world’s pity by the murderous sacrifice of sixteen million poor souls, drew the blueprint of post war terror with the Stern Gang and Irgun.
Neither can accept the simple solution of a shared land.. Both rely on ancient history. As the Welsh historian Gwyn Alf Williams wisely observed in his book “When Was Wales” it would be a bold man who relied on history pre-Tudor times,
Historically the war between East and West began in classic times when a Persian sea captain kidnapped a Princess of Io; but as Herodotus pointed out the girl ws pregnant by the captain and went quite willingly. Herodotus is the most gossipy of historians but he can sometimes be relied on. I once asked the Keeper of Classical Antiquities at the British Museum how reliable Herodotus was in his description of building the pyramids. He said the more we excavate the more likely Herodotus’ explanation sounds.
Nevetheless there is almost as much of Hans Christian Anderson in Herodotus as there is in the Bible.
Freud persuasively argued in his book “ Moses and Monotheism” that Moses the father of Israel who gave the Jews their laws was in fact an Egyptian subversive who took over the fringe tribe of Jews rather in the way that Hitler who had been sent to spy on it took over the National Socialist party.
It is risible that such an intellectual race as the Jew/Arab should base its title deeds on a book which might be seen as fanciful mythology.
################################
Sir Kyffin Williams R.A, Wales’s greatest painter is the subject of my latest book which came out this week;, “Kyffin; A figure in a Welsh Landscape”
I was lucky enough to trace childhood sweethearts, boys who hunted with him in the Ynysfor Hounds, a private pack of foxhounds in which the members walked about twenty miles a day UPHILL in Snowdonia,, fellow art students at the Slade, men he soldiered with and the people who knew and helped him in his days as an unknown art master at a London public school. Sadly some have died since I interviewed them. I am glad I was able to collect memories which might otherwise have been lost.
Kyffin was a forthright critic of the Arts Establishment in Wales during his lifetime and I suspect the inexplicable delays in publishing the book may owe something to Welsh politics. The book does not pull any punches. Quite rightly, because the Arts Establishment seemed to go out of its way to denigrate him during his lifetime and I know he was dreadfully hurt.
The mechanics of the book have been a nightmare. Kyffin asked me write it, then decided he didn’t want his private life picked over by the public. So he went round all the people he had asked me to interview and told them not to co-operate.
I wasn’t upset. He was odd but deeply lovable. The Marquess of Anglesey hosted a party for him on his 70th birthday. It was attended by the Great and Good. The only person who ws missing ws Kyffin who hated parties and refused to go until I was begged by the Marchioness to go and bring him..
Despite the contretemps of the book we remained friends and I have illustrated the book with cartoons he did of us both. He understood I was contracted to write the book but I ws happy to agree not to publish in his life time .
Nor did it stop him giving me material.. He used to come to supper once a week to our home in Llanfairpwll and afterwards my wife Celia and I would sit in the library, switch on a tape recorder and have the joy of hearing one of the finest raconteurs in Wales tell his hilarious life story.
It is my twenty-seventh book and the second one to be published this month. , “Forgive Us Our Press Passes” which I have extended (the original edition is listed at £70 online), is now one of the top buys on Amazon.
My biographies are all Welsh. Owain Glyndwr was a kinsman and the three other subjects were all good friends. Dick Evans, the Lifeboat cox who was awarded two V.Cs., Ken Williams, the Holyhead policeman/naturalist who married a millionairess and was the only police constable with a holiday home, staffed with servants, in Mombasa and a flat at the back of Harrods; Lord Langford, the Rhyl war hero, the story of whose wartime escape from Singapore was my first best seller.
It is my 79th birthday next week and I will spend it editing my biography of TV phenomenon Jess Yates, whose programme “Stars on Sunday” was watched each week by twenty million people.
I am also completing ten years’ research on Maria Stella, Lady Newborough, whom many believe was heir to the throne of France. I thought I had finished but I have just discovered a large amount of new material in a North Wales archive.
***************************************************
MY doctor’s note;
Dear Dr Winfrey,
I gather my name has been put forward for your “Fit for the Future” clinic.
Alas, I am not and do not really want to be. The future has already gone on far too long for my taste and I have no real wish to tread the road to Alzheimer's and an Old Folks’ Home.
As I told you when we met, I have had an exciting and glamorous life. The present, when the most exciting moments are the visits to your clinics and jaunts to Sainsbury’s, is far from that. The future threatens to be even worse.
I have already been robbed by age of most of the pleasures of life. Those that remain include fish and chips, cheese on toast, black pudding and roast potatoes once a week.
I do not propose to give any of them up and I am enough of a Buddhist to believe one should live in the present and that there is no such thing as death.
I do hope you and the good nurses will understand and I wish your new clinic every success. But, alas, its aims miss me by a wide margin.
Yours very sincerely,
Ian Skidmore
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
An old BBC Wales mate with an English accent - and for that reason no longer heard - is John Bilsborough, a poet who publishes his own books at the Elephant Press, Glyn Abbey, Llanelli. The title is a joke because the books are usually no more than 2 inches high. Bilsborough is an authentic genius. In my broadcasting days I would give him the subject of a poem at the beginning of a half hour programme of Radio Brynsiencyn. At the end of the programme he would read it. He is a mile better than the so-called impromptu poets R4 wheels out on Saturday mornings. This is his rewrite of nursery rhymes:
Little Bo-peep has lost her sheep and doesn’t know what to do
Try www.cd-ram,havewegotewesfor you.com
Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town
Upstairs and downstairs in his dressing gown
Peeping through the windows...a pity he got caught
Now he’s been remanded for a Medical report.
Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet
Ever so proud and prim
But when little Jack Horner came round the corner
She had her whey with him.
There was an old woman who lived in a shoe
Had so many children she didn’t know what to do.
If you indulge in such pursuits
You might find what you need in Boots*.
(*For the benefit of overseas readers Boots is a chemist which specialises in ‘something for the week-end, sir?’)
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
The Official Inquiry was ever so rushed
And people are saying he might have been pushed.
Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon,
The little dog laughed to see such fun,
“You’ve been smoking that all afternoon.”
end
and a reminder of further interesting reading;
http://www.northtrek.co.uk/
http://www.gentlemenranters.com/
He insisted ;
“ Naturally one does not want to inflict death and wounds if it can be avoided, but I cannot think that mere killing is important. We shall all be dead in a hundred years, and most of us by the sordid horror known as ‘natural death’.
“The truly evil thing is to act in such a way that peaceful life becomes impossible. War damages the fabric of a civilisation not by the destruction it causes, nor even by the slaughter of human beings, but by stimulating hatred and dishonesty.
By shooting your enemy you are not in the deepest sense wronging him. But by hating him, by inventing lies about him and bringing up children to believe them, by clamouring for unfair peace terms which make a further war inevitable…………………...”,
In his manual of leadership “The Prince” Machiavelli suggested the best way to rally a people behind a leader, is to invent an enemy. . Clearly in trying to frighten us about anyone with a sun tan our Government has learned the lesson that it is in its interest to have a frightened public. It enables control,; validates the 3,000 new laws, including for the first time laws which limit the things one can say, words one can use, mindsets one can display. Political correctness is now part of the contaminated air we breathe. It is no accident that the first unnecessary legislation the Government brought in was the law which took firearms out of the hands of the ordinary folk. To-day it is announced the Govt is considering making it illegal for a parent to teach their child how to drive. Here on the Fens a church is having to spend £5,000 replacing iron railings destroyed by vandals. The Parish Council has been warned the new railings must not have spikes in case vandals hurt themselves climbing over them.,
I have personal experience of Government manipulation. When I was reporter in Chester there ws never more than one murder on each Assize Calendar. During the moratorium which preceded the abolition of the death penalty there were four murder charges on the calendar. I said to a friend who was the Court Administrator that here was certain proof hanging ws a deterrent.
He smiled at my innocence.
“We have had an instruction from the Lord Chancellor. All defendants charged with murder are to be invited to plead to a lesser charge. There will be no murder convictions on the list I prepare. “
Nor were there and the argument for hanging was lost, though the public was overwhelmingly in favour..
The Govt is like the Fat Boy in Pickwick. It wants to make our flesh creep,
The reason ? We are at war once removed. On the one side there are the Western Liberal Democracies on the other the growing Autocracies of China, Russia and the East.
Like befuddled Joans of Arc we bring the banners of democracy to countless millions who do not want them. In doing so we flout three hundred years of international law which forbade interference in sovereign states.
The dilemma comes to a head in the State of Israel. Heroic act or violent landgrab? Centuries of verbal abuse of these two septs of the same clan have brought about a situation where the Arab race which gave us so much , which preserved the treasures of the classical world, the roots of our own civilisation, has created the suicide bomber.
The Jews, a gifted people who have enriched the worlds of art and commerce and earned the world’s pity by the murderous sacrifice of sixteen million poor souls, drew the blueprint of post war terror with the Stern Gang and Irgun.
Neither can accept the simple solution of a shared land.. Both rely on ancient history. As the Welsh historian Gwyn Alf Williams wisely observed in his book “When Was Wales” it would be a bold man who relied on history pre-Tudor times,
Historically the war between East and West began in classic times when a Persian sea captain kidnapped a Princess of Io; but as Herodotus pointed out the girl ws pregnant by the captain and went quite willingly. Herodotus is the most gossipy of historians but he can sometimes be relied on. I once asked the Keeper of Classical Antiquities at the British Museum how reliable Herodotus was in his description of building the pyramids. He said the more we excavate the more likely Herodotus’ explanation sounds.
Nevetheless there is almost as much of Hans Christian Anderson in Herodotus as there is in the Bible.
Freud persuasively argued in his book “ Moses and Monotheism” that Moses the father of Israel who gave the Jews their laws was in fact an Egyptian subversive who took over the fringe tribe of Jews rather in the way that Hitler who had been sent to spy on it took over the National Socialist party.
It is risible that such an intellectual race as the Jew/Arab should base its title deeds on a book which might be seen as fanciful mythology.
################################
Sir Kyffin Williams R.A, Wales’s greatest painter is the subject of my latest book which came out this week;, “Kyffin; A figure in a Welsh Landscape”
I was lucky enough to trace childhood sweethearts, boys who hunted with him in the Ynysfor Hounds, a private pack of foxhounds in which the members walked about twenty miles a day UPHILL in Snowdonia,, fellow art students at the Slade, men he soldiered with and the people who knew and helped him in his days as an unknown art master at a London public school. Sadly some have died since I interviewed them. I am glad I was able to collect memories which might otherwise have been lost.
Kyffin was a forthright critic of the Arts Establishment in Wales during his lifetime and I suspect the inexplicable delays in publishing the book may owe something to Welsh politics. The book does not pull any punches. Quite rightly, because the Arts Establishment seemed to go out of its way to denigrate him during his lifetime and I know he was dreadfully hurt.
The mechanics of the book have been a nightmare. Kyffin asked me write it, then decided he didn’t want his private life picked over by the public. So he went round all the people he had asked me to interview and told them not to co-operate.
I wasn’t upset. He was odd but deeply lovable. The Marquess of Anglesey hosted a party for him on his 70th birthday. It was attended by the Great and Good. The only person who ws missing ws Kyffin who hated parties and refused to go until I was begged by the Marchioness to go and bring him..
Despite the contretemps of the book we remained friends and I have illustrated the book with cartoons he did of us both. He understood I was contracted to write the book but I ws happy to agree not to publish in his life time .
Nor did it stop him giving me material.. He used to come to supper once a week to our home in Llanfairpwll and afterwards my wife Celia and I would sit in the library, switch on a tape recorder and have the joy of hearing one of the finest raconteurs in Wales tell his hilarious life story.
It is my twenty-seventh book and the second one to be published this month. , “Forgive Us Our Press Passes” which I have extended (the original edition is listed at £70 online), is now one of the top buys on Amazon.
My biographies are all Welsh. Owain Glyndwr was a kinsman and the three other subjects were all good friends. Dick Evans, the Lifeboat cox who was awarded two V.Cs., Ken Williams, the Holyhead policeman/naturalist who married a millionairess and was the only police constable with a holiday home, staffed with servants, in Mombasa and a flat at the back of Harrods; Lord Langford, the Rhyl war hero, the story of whose wartime escape from Singapore was my first best seller.
It is my 79th birthday next week and I will spend it editing my biography of TV phenomenon Jess Yates, whose programme “Stars on Sunday” was watched each week by twenty million people.
I am also completing ten years’ research on Maria Stella, Lady Newborough, whom many believe was heir to the throne of France. I thought I had finished but I have just discovered a large amount of new material in a North Wales archive.
***************************************************
MY doctor’s note;
Dear Dr Winfrey,
I gather my name has been put forward for your “Fit for the Future” clinic.
Alas, I am not and do not really want to be. The future has already gone on far too long for my taste and I have no real wish to tread the road to Alzheimer's and an Old Folks’ Home.
As I told you when we met, I have had an exciting and glamorous life. The present, when the most exciting moments are the visits to your clinics and jaunts to Sainsbury’s, is far from that. The future threatens to be even worse.
I have already been robbed by age of most of the pleasures of life. Those that remain include fish and chips, cheese on toast, black pudding and roast potatoes once a week.
I do not propose to give any of them up and I am enough of a Buddhist to believe one should live in the present and that there is no such thing as death.
I do hope you and the good nurses will understand and I wish your new clinic every success. But, alas, its aims miss me by a wide margin.
Yours very sincerely,
Ian Skidmore
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
An old BBC Wales mate with an English accent - and for that reason no longer heard - is John Bilsborough, a poet who publishes his own books at the Elephant Press, Glyn Abbey, Llanelli. The title is a joke because the books are usually no more than 2 inches high. Bilsborough is an authentic genius. In my broadcasting days I would give him the subject of a poem at the beginning of a half hour programme of Radio Brynsiencyn. At the end of the programme he would read it. He is a mile better than the so-called impromptu poets R4 wheels out on Saturday mornings. This is his rewrite of nursery rhymes:
Little Bo-peep has lost her sheep and doesn’t know what to do
Try www.cd-ram,havewegotewesfor you.com
Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town
Upstairs and downstairs in his dressing gown
Peeping through the windows...a pity he got caught
Now he’s been remanded for a Medical report.
Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet
Ever so proud and prim
But when little Jack Horner came round the corner
She had her whey with him.
There was an old woman who lived in a shoe
Had so many children she didn’t know what to do.
If you indulge in such pursuits
You might find what you need in Boots*.
(*For the benefit of overseas readers Boots is a chemist which specialises in ‘something for the week-end, sir?’)
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
The Official Inquiry was ever so rushed
And people are saying he might have been pushed.
Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon,
The little dog laughed to see such fun,
“You’ve been smoking that all afternoon.”
end
and a reminder of further interesting reading;
http://www.northtrek.co.uk/
http://www.gentlemenranters.com/
Sunday, 27 April 2008
A BLACK NARK
The latest nonsense we are asked to swallow is the revelation that black models are not used in catalogues because white people will not buy anything modelled by them.
Our feral young dance to black rhythms, ape black rappers, speak in an argot which they have copied from Negro communities. The human race has its origins in an African valley. We are literally brothers and sisters under the skin. I do wish our race relations experts could be made to realise that racial tensions have nothing to do with colour.
On the contrary, white people envy people who are brown. Every year they head in their pale battalions, like washed out lemmings, for a fortnight in the sun, clutching flasks of ambre solaire, to spend their days immobile in scraps of material being grilled like kippers and hoping to turn the same colour as those fortunate fish. Many will spend the winter under sun beds in the hope that they will not turn white.
The problem is a matter of tribe. Since Neanderthal man discovered the only true safety from dinosaurs and the like was to be found in the family unit we have hung out with people we know and with whom we share an identity. The Clan system was an extension of that. The notion that a Campbell was superior to a MacDonald led to a confrontation which did not speak well for either party.
As a young reporter I strayed into a Shebeen that had an all black membership. I was asked if I believed in the colour bar. ”Certainly not,” I said. “We do. P… off,” I was told.
At school my chum was black. I called him “Rastus” and he called me “Specky Four Eyes”.
I am fortunate enough to have a neighbour who is beautiful, kind, sophisticated, funny, hospitable, intelligent and caring. She has two children who are beyond peradventure the most charming and polite I have met in years. They are black. I wish there were more like them, If, however, I was the only white person in the neighbourhood I would feel uneasy because I came from a different tribe.
A DIFFERENT TRIBE? My family are a genetic cocktail: Jewish, Cambodian, German, Welsh, Scottish, English. I even have a son who was born in Yorkshire. I had my female genes investigated by an Oxford University department which has done pioneer work in DNA. Fifteen thousand years ago my family lived in the Pyrenees. A branch went to Lapland but the main stream moved to Spain, then Norway, and Normandy, before coming to England at the invitation of Edward the Confessor. I am a professional alien.
By trade I am an author and broadcaster but my early days were spent in newspapers. My closest friends are the newspapermen I met in the Forties and Fifties and with whom I now chat daily, thanks to the Internet.
And where would we be without our friends?
Forgive Us Our Press Passes (Paperback)
by Ian Skidmore (Author)
(3 customer reviews)
________________________________________
RRP: £9.95
Price: £9.45 & eligible for Free UK delivery on orders over £15 with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
You Save: £0.50 (5%)
Availability: In stock. Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk.
Want guaranteed delivery by 1pm Tuesday, April 29? Order it in the next 54 hours and 6 minutes, and choose Express Delivery at checkout. See Details
________________________________________
Customer Reviews
Now It Can Be Told, 23 April 2008
By Grassi Renee "Neil Marr" (South of France) - See all my reviews
When Fleet Street was demoted to a mere address, 'time, gentlemen, please' was called on a marathon binge that had produced some of the greatest stories in tabloid press history.
Stories that would never make the papers.
These unprinted legends circulated secretly among an elite handful of national newspaper reporters and photographers -- colourful characters whose own outrageous tales often eclipsed those in the headlines they created.
Now that well-paid jobs and bumper expense accounts are no longer at stake, vintage scribe and broadcaster Ian Skidmore blows the whistle on the jolly jape that was journalism in the 50s, 60s and 70s.
*Forgive Us Our Press Passes* is a surreal yarn of the slapstick and wit shared by a crackpot but talented crew of hacks who somehow produced the greatest newspaper circulation figures in the history of the world press ... between pub opening hours.
Only a Methodist, a tailor's dummy or a university journalism student could fail to split his sides at the anecdotes in this hilariously written, warts-n-all account of the media circus BEFORE they sent in the clowns.
I wonder how many old hands have bought this book ...and carefully hidden it from their wives.
Neil Marr
By S. Blenkinsop (Macclesfield, Cheshire, UK) - See all my reviews
It's the Great Comeback...Ian Skidmore's joyful account of the Golden Days of British national newspapers has been thoroughly revised and more than doubled in length since the first edition 25 years ago.
Effectively it is a new book -- twice as entertaining and informative as its predecessor. No one will regret buying it again.
For "Daily Mirror" journalist "Skiddy" muses on the changes in national journalism in recent years. His misgivings on the massive entry of university graduates are clear. And his erudition and sense of humour are apparent on every page.
Ian is truly a man of many parts and has worked as hard as he drank. He has now written 26 books -- histories, biographies, fiction, comedy. For many years he was a BBC broadcaster with many millions of listeners round the world. His regular talks to Australia drew record audiences "down under",
Stanley Blenkinsop, "Daily Express" news editor, 1969--86
By K. Ashton "Ken Ashton" (North Wales) - See all my reviews
The Scallywag is back - and twice as much of him. Ian Skidmore, doyen of national newspapers, radio and writing, relates his quirky anecdotes in his usual ebullient style in a new version of his original book. He doesn't pull punches as he talks about the Grand Old Days of Journalism as it was and should be. The cycle of fun and fact, hard news hunting and companionship come alive under the pen of Skidmore. Written from the perspective of a journalist who worked in the days of typewriters, phoned copy, notes on cheque book stubs, and when media studies was scanning the opposition for their takes on your story - if they had it! - 'Forgive us our Press Passes' should be required reading for all journalism students, and journalists - but not their wives or girlfriends. Brilliant.
________________________________________
************************************************
With quiet pride I offer this extra fan mail received from the bbc (these days, alas, it does not merit Capital Letters):
“Dear BBC Blog contributor,
Thank you for contributing to a BBC Blog. Unfortunately we've had to remove your content below.
Comments posted to BBC blogs will be removed if they are considered likely to provoke, attack or offend others; are racist, sexist, homophobic, sexually explicit, abusive or otherwise objectionable; are considered to have been posted with an intention to disrupt; contain swear words (including abbreviations or alternative spellings) or other language likely to offend.
If you can rewrite your contribution to remove the problem, we'd be happy for you to post it again.
Please note that anyone who seriously or repeatedly breaks the House Rules may have action taken against their account.
Regards,
The BBC Blog Team
URL of content (now removed):
:
AS A FAN IT PAINS ME TO WRITE THAT IN HIS INTERVIEW WITH BORIS ON PM, EDDY MAIR FELL A LONG WAY BELOW HIS USUAL STANDARDS. HE MADE HIS DISLIKE OBVIOUS.IT WAS NOT HELPFUL TO HARP ON ABOUT THE CLOWN IMAGE. PADDICK IS HOMOSEXUAL, LIVINGSTONE A DRUNKEN, OVER SEXED CORRUPT POLITICIAN ACCORDING TO THE SAME MEDIA SOURCES THAT HAVE LABELLED BORIS A CLOWN. I LOATHE LONDON, CANNOT STAND ETONIANS AND HAVE NO INTEREST IN POLITICS. BUT AS A PROFESSIONAL BROADCASTER I REVERE THE MEDIUM AND DO NOT LIKE TO SEE IT BESMIRCHED BY BAD INTERVIEWING.
The contents of this message may contain personal views which are not the views of the
BBC, unless specifically stated.
???????????????????????????
If they are not the views of the BBC, who sent it?
I did not make the allegations: I reported that the allegations had been made in the Media. By the BBC, among others.
**************************************************************************************************
KILLER BISCUITS WANTED FOR ATTEMPTED MURDER ........... (the actual AP Headline)
Linda Burnett, 23, a resident of San Diego, was visiting her in-laws and while there went to a nearby supermarket to pick up some groceries.
Several people noticed her sitting in her car with the windows rolled up and with her eyes closed, with both hands behind the back of her head.
One customer who had been at the store for a while became concerned and walked over to the car. He noticed that Linda's eyes were now open, and she looked very strange.
He asked her if she was okay, and Linda replied that she'd been shot in the back of the head, and had been holding her brains in for over an hour.
The man called the paramedics, who broke into the car because the doors were locked and Linda refused to remove her hands from her head.
When they finally got in, they found that Linda had a wad of bread dough on the back of her head.
A Pillsbury biscuit canister had exploded from the heat, making a loud noise that sounded like a gunshot, and the wad of dough hit her in the back of her head.
When she reached back to find out what it was, she felt the dough and thought it was her brains. She initially passed out, but quickly recovered.
*******************************************
And for two more good reads try:
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
ends
Our feral young dance to black rhythms, ape black rappers, speak in an argot which they have copied from Negro communities. The human race has its origins in an African valley. We are literally brothers and sisters under the skin. I do wish our race relations experts could be made to realise that racial tensions have nothing to do with colour.
On the contrary, white people envy people who are brown. Every year they head in their pale battalions, like washed out lemmings, for a fortnight in the sun, clutching flasks of ambre solaire, to spend their days immobile in scraps of material being grilled like kippers and hoping to turn the same colour as those fortunate fish. Many will spend the winter under sun beds in the hope that they will not turn white.
The problem is a matter of tribe. Since Neanderthal man discovered the only true safety from dinosaurs and the like was to be found in the family unit we have hung out with people we know and with whom we share an identity. The Clan system was an extension of that. The notion that a Campbell was superior to a MacDonald led to a confrontation which did not speak well for either party.
As a young reporter I strayed into a Shebeen that had an all black membership. I was asked if I believed in the colour bar. ”Certainly not,” I said. “We do. P… off,” I was told.
At school my chum was black. I called him “Rastus” and he called me “Specky Four Eyes”.
I am fortunate enough to have a neighbour who is beautiful, kind, sophisticated, funny, hospitable, intelligent and caring. She has two children who are beyond peradventure the most charming and polite I have met in years. They are black. I wish there were more like them, If, however, I was the only white person in the neighbourhood I would feel uneasy because I came from a different tribe.
A DIFFERENT TRIBE? My family are a genetic cocktail: Jewish, Cambodian, German, Welsh, Scottish, English. I even have a son who was born in Yorkshire. I had my female genes investigated by an Oxford University department which has done pioneer work in DNA. Fifteen thousand years ago my family lived in the Pyrenees. A branch went to Lapland but the main stream moved to Spain, then Norway, and Normandy, before coming to England at the invitation of Edward the Confessor. I am a professional alien.
By trade I am an author and broadcaster but my early days were spent in newspapers. My closest friends are the newspapermen I met in the Forties and Fifties and with whom I now chat daily, thanks to the Internet.
And where would we be without our friends?
Forgive Us Our Press Passes (Paperback)
by Ian Skidmore (Author)
(3 customer reviews)
________________________________________
RRP: £9.95
Price: £9.45 & eligible for Free UK delivery on orders over £15 with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
You Save: £0.50 (5%)
Availability: In stock. Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk.
Want guaranteed delivery by 1pm Tuesday, April 29? Order it in the next 54 hours and 6 minutes, and choose Express Delivery at checkout. See Details
________________________________________
Customer Reviews
Now It Can Be Told, 23 April 2008
By Grassi Renee "Neil Marr" (South of France) - See all my reviews
When Fleet Street was demoted to a mere address, 'time, gentlemen, please' was called on a marathon binge that had produced some of the greatest stories in tabloid press history.
Stories that would never make the papers.
These unprinted legends circulated secretly among an elite handful of national newspaper reporters and photographers -- colourful characters whose own outrageous tales often eclipsed those in the headlines they created.
Now that well-paid jobs and bumper expense accounts are no longer at stake, vintage scribe and broadcaster Ian Skidmore blows the whistle on the jolly jape that was journalism in the 50s, 60s and 70s.
*Forgive Us Our Press Passes* is a surreal yarn of the slapstick and wit shared by a crackpot but talented crew of hacks who somehow produced the greatest newspaper circulation figures in the history of the world press ... between pub opening hours.
Only a Methodist, a tailor's dummy or a university journalism student could fail to split his sides at the anecdotes in this hilariously written, warts-n-all account of the media circus BEFORE they sent in the clowns.
I wonder how many old hands have bought this book ...and carefully hidden it from their wives.
Neil Marr
By S. Blenkinsop (Macclesfield, Cheshire, UK) - See all my reviews
It's the Great Comeback...Ian Skidmore's joyful account of the Golden Days of British national newspapers has been thoroughly revised and more than doubled in length since the first edition 25 years ago.
Effectively it is a new book -- twice as entertaining and informative as its predecessor. No one will regret buying it again.
For "Daily Mirror" journalist "Skiddy" muses on the changes in national journalism in recent years. His misgivings on the massive entry of university graduates are clear. And his erudition and sense of humour are apparent on every page.
Ian is truly a man of many parts and has worked as hard as he drank. He has now written 26 books -- histories, biographies, fiction, comedy. For many years he was a BBC broadcaster with many millions of listeners round the world. His regular talks to Australia drew record audiences "down under",
Stanley Blenkinsop, "Daily Express" news editor, 1969--86
By K. Ashton "Ken Ashton" (North Wales) - See all my reviews
The Scallywag is back - and twice as much of him. Ian Skidmore, doyen of national newspapers, radio and writing, relates his quirky anecdotes in his usual ebullient style in a new version of his original book. He doesn't pull punches as he talks about the Grand Old Days of Journalism as it was and should be. The cycle of fun and fact, hard news hunting and companionship come alive under the pen of Skidmore. Written from the perspective of a journalist who worked in the days of typewriters, phoned copy, notes on cheque book stubs, and when media studies was scanning the opposition for their takes on your story - if they had it! - 'Forgive us our Press Passes' should be required reading for all journalism students, and journalists - but not their wives or girlfriends. Brilliant.
________________________________________
************************************************
With quiet pride I offer this extra fan mail received from the bbc (these days, alas, it does not merit Capital Letters):
“Dear BBC Blog contributor,
Thank you for contributing to a BBC Blog. Unfortunately we've had to remove your content below.
Comments posted to BBC blogs will be removed if they are considered likely to provoke, attack or offend others; are racist, sexist, homophobic, sexually explicit, abusive or otherwise objectionable; are considered to have been posted with an intention to disrupt; contain swear words (including abbreviations or alternative spellings) or other language likely to offend.
If you can rewrite your contribution to remove the problem, we'd be happy for you to post it again.
Please note that anyone who seriously or repeatedly breaks the House Rules may have action taken against their account.
Regards,
The BBC Blog Team
URL of content (now removed):
:
AS A FAN IT PAINS ME TO WRITE THAT IN HIS INTERVIEW WITH BORIS ON PM, EDDY MAIR FELL A LONG WAY BELOW HIS USUAL STANDARDS. HE MADE HIS DISLIKE OBVIOUS.IT WAS NOT HELPFUL TO HARP ON ABOUT THE CLOWN IMAGE. PADDICK IS HOMOSEXUAL, LIVINGSTONE A DRUNKEN, OVER SEXED CORRUPT POLITICIAN ACCORDING TO THE SAME MEDIA SOURCES THAT HAVE LABELLED BORIS A CLOWN. I LOATHE LONDON, CANNOT STAND ETONIANS AND HAVE NO INTEREST IN POLITICS. BUT AS A PROFESSIONAL BROADCASTER I REVERE THE MEDIUM AND DO NOT LIKE TO SEE IT BESMIRCHED BY BAD INTERVIEWING.
The contents of this message may contain personal views which are not the views of the
BBC, unless specifically stated.
???????????????????????????
If they are not the views of the BBC, who sent it?
I did not make the allegations: I reported that the allegations had been made in the Media. By the BBC, among others.
**************************************************************************************************
KILLER BISCUITS WANTED FOR ATTEMPTED MURDER ........... (the actual AP Headline)
Linda Burnett, 23, a resident of San Diego, was visiting her in-laws and while there went to a nearby supermarket to pick up some groceries.
Several people noticed her sitting in her car with the windows rolled up and with her eyes closed, with both hands behind the back of her head.
One customer who had been at the store for a while became concerned and walked over to the car. He noticed that Linda's eyes were now open, and she looked very strange.
He asked her if she was okay, and Linda replied that she'd been shot in the back of the head, and had been holding her brains in for over an hour.
The man called the paramedics, who broke into the car because the doors were locked and Linda refused to remove her hands from her head.
When they finally got in, they found that Linda had a wad of bread dough on the back of her head.
A Pillsbury biscuit canister had exploded from the heat, making a loud noise that sounded like a gunshot, and the wad of dough hit her in the back of her head.
When she reached back to find out what it was, she felt the dough and thought it was her brains. She initially passed out, but quickly recovered.
*******************************************
And for two more good reads try:
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
ends
Sunday, 20 April 2008
THE CINDERELLA SECRET
When I went to work in Wales in the Fifties I was told of an engine driver in Caernarfon whose father was Edward V11. His mother, a servant at a local stately home, had been pleasured by the king.
My colleague Reg Jones, who worked for the Daily Express, interviewed a Canadian in a Wrexham boarding house who claimed - and had the papers to prove it - that he was the grandson of the same libidinous king.
This week my biography of Sir Kyffin Williams R.A. will appear on the bookstalls. Whist I was writing it, Sir Kyffin told me that at an exhibition in South Wales he had met two highly respectable ladies from Cwmbran who insisted the Queen Mother was the daughter of one of Lord Strathmore’s servants. I tried to follow it up and found out that one of the things that Elizabeth hated about her brother- in-law the Duke of Windsor was the nickname he had given her, “Cookie”. Certainly a mystery surrounds her birth and there was no rebuttal when Kitty Kelley told the story in her book “Royalty”, which was banned in this country.
In one of his best selling gossipy diaries, my chum James Lees Milne reported he overheard the Queen telling the Queen Mother: “The difference between us is that I am Royal.” When I taxed him with it, he said, diplomatically, that he could not remember writing it.
Intriguing is the suggestion that the Queen herself is part Jewish. There was a rumour, when he married Queen Victoria, that Prince Albert was the son of a Jewish doctor at his supposed parents’ court. Another son of the same doctor, it was said, was the arms manufacturer Ernst Cassell, who showered thousands of pounds on Edward V11 and was so like him physically he was known as the Windsor Cassell.
One story I can vouch for, because I have spent ten years researching it for a book I may one day write,though so far it has been turned down by eight publishers. The rightful king of France is a backwoods Welsh farmer peer.
When, in 1843, she died penniless in Paris, a frail old lady of seventy-one under close police surveillance, Maria Stella, Baroness von Ungern Sternberg, Pretender to the Throne of France, had lived through a library of faery tales and become one of the sights of the city.
Maria Stella was born in the small Italian town of Modigliani in 1773.
Her father Lorenzo Chiappini, gaoler at the Pretorial Palace, exploited her good looks and ladylike manners. Her mother, Vincenia Viligenty, hated her, though she lavished affection on her other children. Luckier than Cinderella, whose life in many ways hers echoed, Maria Stella had a magic palace to which she could always escape. Countess Camilla Borghi Biancoli lived across the road from the gaol in a magnificent castle. In later life Maria recalled:
“Despite my father’s ignoble profession, she was very fond of me and showed me every kindness. I was admitted to her table and often shared her bed; she heaped presents upon me, and I lived almost entirely with her.”
A touring Welsh nobleman heard the 12-year-old Maria Stella sing and immediately fell in love with her. He was 56. He begged her to marry him.
Eventually the unhappy teenager gave in; though it took the nobleman six years to persuade her to return with him to Wales. When he died, she married Baron Ungern von Sternberg.
On his deathbed, the man she had always thought of as her father told her:
“The day you were born of a person I must not name and who has already passed into the next world, a boy was also born to me. I was requested to make an exchange and, in view of my circumstances at that time, I consented after reiterated and advantageous proposals; and it was then that I adopted you as my daughter, as in the same way my son was adopted by the other party.”
After years of investigation she traced her parents. They were the Duke and Duchess of Orleans. Both had died under the guillotine.
Maria Stella petitioned an Episcopal Tribunal sitting in Faenza for the proper rectification of her baptismal certificate. The tribunal, on May 29th 1824, declared her to be the daughter of the husband and wife M. le Comte Louis and Madame la Comtesse de Joinville, one of the titles held by the Duke of Orleans. His “son” Louis Philippe now occupied the Throne of France. After the Tribunal, his subjects, long puzzled by his swarthy Italianate looks, called him “Citizen Chiappini” until his forced abdication in 1848.
**********************************************************
It seems a kind of blasphemy that the current preoccupation with fly tipping should remind me of the late, gracious Anne, Duchess of Westminster, still lovely in her eighties, the owner of Arkle the wonder horse and one of several widows of the Golden Duke, Bend O’r. Fabulously wealthy, his investments were bringing him £2,500 an hour in the 1920s.
Anne, Duchess, often invited me to cocktail parties at her home Saighton Grange in Chester. At one of these I was fulminating about a man I had seen throwing a pile of rubbish out his car in a quiet country lane near my home Picton Hall.
Another guest said: “You should have chased him.”
“Most unwise, “said the Duchess, “you never know how it is going to end up.”
“As you know, we have some fishing in Sutherland,“ she continued. It was an understatement. What they had was most of the Scottish highland county of Sutherland which contained some of the best game fishing in Britain, but she was not a lady who liked to boast.
“I came off the river one day,” she went on, “to see a family in a car parked in a lay by. They had been enjoying a picnic and when they finished they screwed all the waste paper and cartons in a ball, threw them out of their car window and drove off.
“I was furious. I picked up the litter, got in my land rover and ordered my ghillie ‘follow that car’. We caught up with them a few miles on and brought them to a halt.”
The Duchess, a formidable lady when roused, marched to the car, rapped on the window and when the diminutive Glasgow driver opened it, thrust the litter at him. “I believe these belong to you,“ she said in her best affronted Duchess manner.
The driver looked up. “It’s all right, Hen,” he said, “we’ve finished wi’ em.“
And drove off.
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
THE Royal Navy, once the scourge of brigands on the high seas, has been told by the Foreign Office not to detain pirates because doing so may breach their human rights.
Warships patrolling pirate-infested waters, such as those off Somalia, have been warned that there is also a risk that captured pirates could claim asylum in Britain.
The Foreign Office has advised that pirates sent back to Somalia could have their human rights breached because, under Islamic law, they face beheading for murder or having a hand chopped off for theft.
In 2005 there were almost 40 attacks by pirates and 16 vessels were hijacked and held for ransom. Employing high-tech weaponry, they kill, steal and hold ships’ crews to ransom. This year alone pirates killed three people near the Philippines.
And for two more good reads try
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
My colleague Reg Jones, who worked for the Daily Express, interviewed a Canadian in a Wrexham boarding house who claimed - and had the papers to prove it - that he was the grandson of the same libidinous king.
This week my biography of Sir Kyffin Williams R.A. will appear on the bookstalls. Whist I was writing it, Sir Kyffin told me that at an exhibition in South Wales he had met two highly respectable ladies from Cwmbran who insisted the Queen Mother was the daughter of one of Lord Strathmore’s servants. I tried to follow it up and found out that one of the things that Elizabeth hated about her brother- in-law the Duke of Windsor was the nickname he had given her, “Cookie”. Certainly a mystery surrounds her birth and there was no rebuttal when Kitty Kelley told the story in her book “Royalty”, which was banned in this country.
In one of his best selling gossipy diaries, my chum James Lees Milne reported he overheard the Queen telling the Queen Mother: “The difference between us is that I am Royal.” When I taxed him with it, he said, diplomatically, that he could not remember writing it.
Intriguing is the suggestion that the Queen herself is part Jewish. There was a rumour, when he married Queen Victoria, that Prince Albert was the son of a Jewish doctor at his supposed parents’ court. Another son of the same doctor, it was said, was the arms manufacturer Ernst Cassell, who showered thousands of pounds on Edward V11 and was so like him physically he was known as the Windsor Cassell.
One story I can vouch for, because I have spent ten years researching it for a book I may one day write,though so far it has been turned down by eight publishers. The rightful king of France is a backwoods Welsh farmer peer.
When, in 1843, she died penniless in Paris, a frail old lady of seventy-one under close police surveillance, Maria Stella, Baroness von Ungern Sternberg, Pretender to the Throne of France, had lived through a library of faery tales and become one of the sights of the city.
Maria Stella was born in the small Italian town of Modigliani in 1773.
Her father Lorenzo Chiappini, gaoler at the Pretorial Palace, exploited her good looks and ladylike manners. Her mother, Vincenia Viligenty, hated her, though she lavished affection on her other children. Luckier than Cinderella, whose life in many ways hers echoed, Maria Stella had a magic palace to which she could always escape. Countess Camilla Borghi Biancoli lived across the road from the gaol in a magnificent castle. In later life Maria recalled:
“Despite my father’s ignoble profession, she was very fond of me and showed me every kindness. I was admitted to her table and often shared her bed; she heaped presents upon me, and I lived almost entirely with her.”
A touring Welsh nobleman heard the 12-year-old Maria Stella sing and immediately fell in love with her. He was 56. He begged her to marry him.
Eventually the unhappy teenager gave in; though it took the nobleman six years to persuade her to return with him to Wales. When he died, she married Baron Ungern von Sternberg.
On his deathbed, the man she had always thought of as her father told her:
“The day you were born of a person I must not name and who has already passed into the next world, a boy was also born to me. I was requested to make an exchange and, in view of my circumstances at that time, I consented after reiterated and advantageous proposals; and it was then that I adopted you as my daughter, as in the same way my son was adopted by the other party.”
After years of investigation she traced her parents. They were the Duke and Duchess of Orleans. Both had died under the guillotine.
Maria Stella petitioned an Episcopal Tribunal sitting in Faenza for the proper rectification of her baptismal certificate. The tribunal, on May 29th 1824, declared her to be the daughter of the husband and wife M. le Comte Louis and Madame la Comtesse de Joinville, one of the titles held by the Duke of Orleans. His “son” Louis Philippe now occupied the Throne of France. After the Tribunal, his subjects, long puzzled by his swarthy Italianate looks, called him “Citizen Chiappini” until his forced abdication in 1848.
**********************************************************
It seems a kind of blasphemy that the current preoccupation with fly tipping should remind me of the late, gracious Anne, Duchess of Westminster, still lovely in her eighties, the owner of Arkle the wonder horse and one of several widows of the Golden Duke, Bend O’r. Fabulously wealthy, his investments were bringing him £2,500 an hour in the 1920s.
Anne, Duchess, often invited me to cocktail parties at her home Saighton Grange in Chester. At one of these I was fulminating about a man I had seen throwing a pile of rubbish out his car in a quiet country lane near my home Picton Hall.
Another guest said: “You should have chased him.”
“Most unwise, “said the Duchess, “you never know how it is going to end up.”
“As you know, we have some fishing in Sutherland,“ she continued. It was an understatement. What they had was most of the Scottish highland county of Sutherland which contained some of the best game fishing in Britain, but she was not a lady who liked to boast.
“I came off the river one day,” she went on, “to see a family in a car parked in a lay by. They had been enjoying a picnic and when they finished they screwed all the waste paper and cartons in a ball, threw them out of their car window and drove off.
“I was furious. I picked up the litter, got in my land rover and ordered my ghillie ‘follow that car’. We caught up with them a few miles on and brought them to a halt.”
The Duchess, a formidable lady when roused, marched to the car, rapped on the window and when the diminutive Glasgow driver opened it, thrust the litter at him. “I believe these belong to you,“ she said in her best affronted Duchess manner.
The driver looked up. “It’s all right, Hen,” he said, “we’ve finished wi’ em.“
And drove off.
FROM MY DANGEROUS CUTTINGS BOOK
THE Royal Navy, once the scourge of brigands on the high seas, has been told by the Foreign Office not to detain pirates because doing so may breach their human rights.
Warships patrolling pirate-infested waters, such as those off Somalia, have been warned that there is also a risk that captured pirates could claim asylum in Britain.
The Foreign Office has advised that pirates sent back to Somalia could have their human rights breached because, under Islamic law, they face beheading for murder or having a hand chopped off for theft.
In 2005 there were almost 40 attacks by pirates and 16 vessels were hijacked and held for ransom. Employing high-tech weaponry, they kill, steal and hold ships’ crews to ransom. This year alone pirates killed three people near the Philippines.
And for two more good reads try
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
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