The two Highland Soldiers who stand guard over this column are at attention with arms reversed. On the columnar battlements a lone piper plays the poignant lament "The Flowers of the Forest", the computer is metaphorically draped in black velvet. Even the typeface is in mourning.
We do not believe in death. It is not a buddhist concept; but we still mourn the passing of three merry souls. They, more than anyone else I know, merit Dr Johnson's tribute at the passing of his friend Davy Garrick: "I am disappointed by that stroke of death, which has eclipsed the gaiety of nations and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure."
Stanley Blenkinsop was certainly a purveyor of harmless pleasure. A news editor in the great days of the Daily Express, which he believed was the only reason for the invention of printing, he was grouchy, loyal, lovable, pedantic, funny and colourful in a quiet, English way. On his retirement he became a student, pedalling to the university every day on his cycle and being rewarded with a degree in history. Stanley, like me a tamer of teddy bears, was the only newspaperman I have ever met who wore a monocle and erected a flagpole in his garden from which the union jack flew every day he was in residence. He was an indefatigable writer of letters to the Times which were always used. Once in Paris, where he went every year to celebrate Bastille Day, he had his wallet stolen.
"What did it contain?" a gendarme asked.
"My monocle," replied Stanley, and was immediately treated with the fawning courtesy reserved for English Milords.
Stanley's closest friends were Gordon and Beatrice Amory, a couple who enjoyed the happy marriage to which we all aspire. They were the party givers from Heaven; never happier than when they were dispensing hospitality by the ladleful. Gordon organised an annual party in Newcastle for "Geordie" newspapermen which was legendary. I have known him for half a century and can never remember a time when he wasn't smiling. The smile was still there, the emails still supportive and cheery, though since Beatrice died earlier this year, the smile must have been harder to summon. I imagine it came back this week when he was reunited with her.
I thought of an inscription I once saw on a gravestone in Winchester for a widower:
"Tried a little to live without her,
Liked it not
and died."
One of their greatest blessings was Denise, a loving daughter. One's heart goes out to her in what must be a terrible time beyond imagining. Perhaps she can take some consolation now the three of them, in Sir Thomas More's words, "meet merrily in heaven". I will know at the end of the month whether I will be making it a foursome.
THE WELSH WAY OF DEATH
Dying is in its infancy in England. They take it much more seriously in rural Wales where a funeral is not considered well done if there are fewer than three services. It was a Welshman who invented cremation. When I first went there sin eaters were occasionally employed to take on the corpse's sins by eating a meal off the coffin lid. Into the coffin went a tiny ladder with which to climb to heaven.
No one tried harder to vanquish death than Sir John Pryce, 5th baronet (sheriff, 1748), of Newtown, Powys. He was a well-known eccentric, who married three times. His last lady having to insist on the removal of the embalmed corpses of her two predecessors from his bed before her marriage.
SirJohn had already, after the death of his second wife, written to the curate of Newtown, then on his deathbed, to ask him to deliver messages of affection to both his wives in Heaven and to request the second to appear to him. After the death of the third Lady Pryce, he invited a well-known faith-healer, Bridget Bostock, 'the Cheshire Pythoness’, to bring her back to life. The Pythoness undertook to heal all diseases by prayer, faith, and an embrocation of fasting spittle, which she supplied. Sir John requested her prayers for the restoration to him of his third wife, recently deceased. In a letter he asked her: ".... to offer up prayers to the throne of Grace on my behalf that He would graciously vouchsafe to raise up my dear wife, Dame Eleanor Pryce, from the Dead. If your immediate presence is indispensably necessary, pray let me know by return of the Post, that I may send you a Coach & Six & Servants to attend you here, with orders to defray your expences in a manner most suitable to your own desires. If your prayers will be as effectual at the distance you'r from me, pray signify the same in a letter directed by way of London, to, good Madam,
" Your unfortunate afflicted petitioner & humble Servant,
John Pryce.
Miss Bostock is said to have visited him, and to have exerted all her miracle-working powers, but without effect. Sir John died in somewhat straitened circumstances at Haverfordwest on 28 October 1761, whilst meditating a fourth marriage to a lady whom he described as "that dearest object of my lawful and best and purest Wordly affections..."
ODDS ENDS
My own view of death owes a great deal to the professional gamblers I used to run with in Chester. Notably Lol Shone, a character who owed much to Damon Runyon.
Another friend Tony Vyse, landlord of the Bowling Green Inn, had three fixations: Tia Maria, the first favourite on the card and a statuesque blonde receptionist at the Grovesnor Hotel of the sex whom Lol christened 'The Longhaired Bandits'.
We were in the bottom bar of the Grosvenor when. having downed a Tia Maria and backed the first favourite, he surprisingly collapsed at our feet. He died being given the Kiss of Life by the statuesque Long Haired Bandit.
"Lucky bugger," said Lol enviously. Seeing our shocked faces, he explained: "Only two weeks into the flat racing season and he's already got a treble up."
Friday, 27 August 2010
Friday, 20 August 2010
A PLEA TO BAR " COLOUR" ALTOGETHER
There is no time in my life when I have been without a close friend whose pigmentation differs from mine. At school, in the Army and through my working and retirement life, some of my best friends have been coloured and I would certainly let my children marry one. I had a coloured
uncle and much preferred him to my aunt, his wife. My first wife and our children were mostly Jewish. My father didn't mind what you were, so long as you weren't a Catholic. It ran in the family. My uncle was furious when I introduced his daughter to a friend who was Catholic. A chum, who is a Catholic priest, has to hide his occupation in the Middle East.
My Cambodian sister-in-law is a charmer and has two delightful and brainy sons. Our neighbour is coloured and her two girls are the best mannered and most delightful children I know. My problem is that after a lifetime I suddenly do not know how to describe them. I am white; they are black. But I must not say so. I value them for their qualities and I hope their judgement of me is not based on my lack of colour. I wouldn't mind having friends who are candy striped yet, here I am, victim of a verbal colour bar. It is puzzling. Negro is a corruption of the Latin word for black; black people call each other "niggers" in "The Wire". It would be impolite for me to do so. "Black" in my youth was the favoured nomenclature and gave no offence. Reading the Sunday papers last week, I found that it is no longer acceptable nor, surpringly, is "coloured".
In Liverpol in the Fifties where the argot owed much to American slang, coloured people were called, shockingly but without offence, "Spades". The Spade Clubs were amongst the scariest shebeens. I was in one once when an African the size of the St George's Hall loomed over me and demanded to know whether I believed in the colour bar. "Certainly not," I told him. He gestured towards the door and said: "We do. P...... OFF."
Much store was set by repartee, which in those days by the River Mersey took little account of sensibilities. Queuing for the last tram from Lime Street, the conductress ordered us, "F.... off. The tram is full." A voice from the front of the queue cried out against her obscene language. "I am a Rabbi," he informed her. She was unmoved. "I don't care if you are f....... Popeye. The f...... tram is still full."
In polite society it is considred bad form to stare at people who are in some way different. An RAF chum if mine doing flying training in New York told me that such behaviour attracts cries of "rubber neck" or merely" rubber". On the subway he had been transfixed by a baby so fat it was spherical. "Rubber," spat out the mother, incensed. "Thank God," said my chum, "I thought it was real."
Fortunately I am too short-sighted to stare, even to see; and colour is never part of my conversation. But it does worry me that I haven't an acceptable word to define pigmentation. As to acceptance of differently coloured people, that means nothing to anyone who, like me, lived happily for thirty years in Wales and only left when BBC Wales "sacked" me for being English; only marginally less welcome in the North than South Walians. Conversely, I knew the editor of a South Wales evening paper who offered me a column but refused to employ any Welshman from the North. Mancunians are not immediately welcomed in parts of Liverpool. A Lancastrian in Yorkshire is not universally admired.
The truth is that we are all tribal. Knowing this, it should not worry me that a section of the Muslim population want Bradford to be reclassified as a Caliphate where Sharia law will prevail. It does. It is a betrayal of hospitality, a tradition as old as the tribe. I would go further. A culture which rules that its daughters must marry unknown men at the behest of their fathers is abhorrent. Girls who have been educated in Western standards and, however limited, have enjoyed the relaxed lifestyle of their British peers are sent back to the Indian continent to live in perpetual servitude. Britain
has abandoned the death penalty as inhuman. At the very least, every member of the families which are involved in passing the death sentence for domestic crime should be deported.
A minority, we are told, support these practices. Certainly it is minority who are lost to terrorism. Unfortunately the law abiding majority are held to blame. A new superbug is discovered. It might have come from anywhere. It comes from India. More grist to the anti-Muslim mob. Perhaps it isn't surprising there has been a slow response to calls for help for the victims of the Pakistni floods.
My own family strives to understand the ways of the East. Auntie Jeannie was the widow of my Uncle Tommy, a Scottish Nationalist so incandescent that, ten years after his death, his wife was still afraid to visit England. Her son-in-law, Jackie, who looked after the boats of the Emir of Kuwait, invited Auntie Jeannie to visit.
"It's no in England, is it?" she inquired fearfully.
In the event, she had a great time, including supper with the Emir in his palace. She was not impressed.
"Does he aye get his dinner on tin plates?" she asked Jackie.
"They're no tin," whispered Jackie, "they're real gold."
"Maks nae difference," said my Auntie Jeannie. "Puir man, ye cannae keep food hot on tin plates."
The day she got home, she went to an Edinburgh market and bought the Emir a six-piece china dinner service.
Alas, we have lost the charming letter of thanks the Emir sent.
And finally ...
Media empire Time Warner owner of Warner Bros and CNN has become the latest New York tenant to fall victim to bedbugs. A plague of the blood-sucking menaces has hit Manhattan, affecting high-profile companies such as Abercombie and Fitch. Headline writers have duly dubbed it Abercrombie & Itch. The Guardian, P15
uncle and much preferred him to my aunt, his wife. My first wife and our children were mostly Jewish. My father didn't mind what you were, so long as you weren't a Catholic. It ran in the family. My uncle was furious when I introduced his daughter to a friend who was Catholic. A chum, who is a Catholic priest, has to hide his occupation in the Middle East.
My Cambodian sister-in-law is a charmer and has two delightful and brainy sons. Our neighbour is coloured and her two girls are the best mannered and most delightful children I know. My problem is that after a lifetime I suddenly do not know how to describe them. I am white; they are black. But I must not say so. I value them for their qualities and I hope their judgement of me is not based on my lack of colour. I wouldn't mind having friends who are candy striped yet, here I am, victim of a verbal colour bar. It is puzzling. Negro is a corruption of the Latin word for black; black people call each other "niggers" in "The Wire". It would be impolite for me to do so. "Black" in my youth was the favoured nomenclature and gave no offence. Reading the Sunday papers last week, I found that it is no longer acceptable nor, surpringly, is "coloured".
In Liverpol in the Fifties where the argot owed much to American slang, coloured people were called, shockingly but without offence, "Spades". The Spade Clubs were amongst the scariest shebeens. I was in one once when an African the size of the St George's Hall loomed over me and demanded to know whether I believed in the colour bar. "Certainly not," I told him. He gestured towards the door and said: "We do. P...... OFF."
Much store was set by repartee, which in those days by the River Mersey took little account of sensibilities. Queuing for the last tram from Lime Street, the conductress ordered us, "F.... off. The tram is full." A voice from the front of the queue cried out against her obscene language. "I am a Rabbi," he informed her. She was unmoved. "I don't care if you are f....... Popeye. The f...... tram is still full."
In polite society it is considred bad form to stare at people who are in some way different. An RAF chum if mine doing flying training in New York told me that such behaviour attracts cries of "rubber neck" or merely" rubber". On the subway he had been transfixed by a baby so fat it was spherical. "Rubber," spat out the mother, incensed. "Thank God," said my chum, "I thought it was real."
Fortunately I am too short-sighted to stare, even to see; and colour is never part of my conversation. But it does worry me that I haven't an acceptable word to define pigmentation. As to acceptance of differently coloured people, that means nothing to anyone who, like me, lived happily for thirty years in Wales and only left when BBC Wales "sacked" me for being English; only marginally less welcome in the North than South Walians. Conversely, I knew the editor of a South Wales evening paper who offered me a column but refused to employ any Welshman from the North. Mancunians are not immediately welcomed in parts of Liverpool. A Lancastrian in Yorkshire is not universally admired.
The truth is that we are all tribal. Knowing this, it should not worry me that a section of the Muslim population want Bradford to be reclassified as a Caliphate where Sharia law will prevail. It does. It is a betrayal of hospitality, a tradition as old as the tribe. I would go further. A culture which rules that its daughters must marry unknown men at the behest of their fathers is abhorrent. Girls who have been educated in Western standards and, however limited, have enjoyed the relaxed lifestyle of their British peers are sent back to the Indian continent to live in perpetual servitude. Britain
has abandoned the death penalty as inhuman. At the very least, every member of the families which are involved in passing the death sentence for domestic crime should be deported.
A minority, we are told, support these practices. Certainly it is minority who are lost to terrorism. Unfortunately the law abiding majority are held to blame. A new superbug is discovered. It might have come from anywhere. It comes from India. More grist to the anti-Muslim mob. Perhaps it isn't surprising there has been a slow response to calls for help for the victims of the Pakistni floods.
My own family strives to understand the ways of the East. Auntie Jeannie was the widow of my Uncle Tommy, a Scottish Nationalist so incandescent that, ten years after his death, his wife was still afraid to visit England. Her son-in-law, Jackie, who looked after the boats of the Emir of Kuwait, invited Auntie Jeannie to visit.
"It's no in England, is it?" she inquired fearfully.
In the event, she had a great time, including supper with the Emir in his palace. She was not impressed.
"Does he aye get his dinner on tin plates?" she asked Jackie.
"They're no tin," whispered Jackie, "they're real gold."
"Maks nae difference," said my Auntie Jeannie. "Puir man, ye cannae keep food hot on tin plates."
The day she got home, she went to an Edinburgh market and bought the Emir a six-piece china dinner service.
Alas, we have lost the charming letter of thanks the Emir sent.
And finally ...
Media empire Time Warner owner of Warner Bros and CNN has become the latest New York tenant to fall victim to bedbugs. A plague of the blood-sucking menaces has hit Manhattan, affecting high-profile companies such as Abercombie and Fitch. Headline writers have duly dubbed it Abercrombie & Itch. The Guardian, P15
Saturday, 14 August 2010
JAMES IS NEVER GOING TO BELIEVE I DIDN'T MAKE THIS UP
Observers are anxious at the emergence of a neo-Nazi movement in Mongolia - news item.
Roman Fyodorovich von Sternberg (1886 to 1921) was a Major General in the White Russian army which fought against the Bolsheviks in the Carpathian mountains. His spiritual home would be a hospital for the criminally insane
When the White Russians were beaten, von Sternberg resolved to invade Mongolia, destroy the Chinese administration and forge a Pan-Asiatic empire including Manchuria and Tibet. He could then invade Russia, dismantle Moscow, replace it with a city of tents and crown himself Czar.
Financed by the Japanese Government, he led his “Army of Military Buddhists" - three hundred Tibetans, Cossacks, Mongols and Japanese - and captured Mongolia, of which he became king in all but name. Buddhists do not believe in death. To them, life is an endless path. Von Sternberg consoled himself for the mass murders his troops committed with the belief the victims would be born again to a better life.
He baptised his soldiers with vodka and hashish and ruled them with two aides. The first, Count Sepailoff, suffered from a form of Tourette's Syndrome. Always shaking, he sang wordless songs as he indulged in his favourite pastime of strangling. The other had forgotten his name on the long ride across Mongolia but he was nicknamed “Teapot” and he too was an eager strangler.
Von Sternberg's dazed army entered Mongolia in 1920 and in February 1921 occupied the capital, Urga, now Ulan Batan. His rule of Mongolia was bloody. His drug and vodka fuelled army was defeated by the Bolsheviks. Von Sternberg was captured, locked in a cage and, after swift trial in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, was shot.
A cousin of his, the 5th Baron Newborough, a Welsh peer, married three times. One of his wives who I knew, Denista, was a beautiful Yugoslav who after their divorce was charged, though found not guilty on appeal, with running a brothel in her flat, 6 Davies Street, Shepherd’s Market. Shortly before their divorce in 1946, a receiving order was made against her for debts of £951, which she attributed to losses at bridge whilst her skill had been impaired by unhappiness. She recovered her finances by designing outrageous hats, including the “Nicotine Hat” which was covered with cigarettes.
In her obituary in the Daily Telegraph when she died at the age of 79, it was written that she “¼was many things; wire walker, night club girl, nude dancer, air pilot. She was also a milliner, a perfumier and an antique dealer. She only refused to be two things - a whore or a spy.”
She spoke 14 languages and was beyond question one of the great adventuresses of the 20th century who has never really been given her due. Friends noticed that however bizarre her claims - including once having been a nurse - she was able to substantiate them all. In 1958 she published a best-selling autobiography "The Fire in My Blood", a cryptic phrase she used to describe her nymphomania. By her own account, she was sexually awakened by a Roumanian gypsy boy at the age of six when she became his “little wife”. She never ceased to be grateful to him and besides aristocratic lovers admitted to countless sexual encounters with waiters, footmen and chauffeurs. But she also included kings amongst her grateful lovers.
She was 28 when she met the 61-year-old Lord Newborough and she fell for him at once. She recalled: “He was the handsomest man I had ever seen, towering and strong and robust. He looked forty and had the springy timeless walk of a man in his twenties.
“He had been a captain in the merchant marine, surely the most masterful master mariner ever. He was the Pretender to the throne of France, he had a daughter about my age and I thought he was too good for me and said so...”
The 7th Baron, a hero of St Nazaire, was once fined for firing a cannon at holidaymakers. The cannon belonged to the 1st Lord who built two forts to repel a French invasion of Gwynedd. He also raised a private army but its main parade was a birthday banquet for George II. During a Grand Tour undertaken to avoid creditors, he met and married Maria Stella, apparently an Italian carabiniere’s daughter. In fact she was the child of the Duke and Duchess of Orleans. Whilst on an Italian tour, the Duchess was pregnant. They hoped for a boy who would have been directly in line for the throne of France. They reached the little town of Modiliano in Tuscany and there the Duchess was brought to bed. The chief carabiniere was a man called Sergeant Carpini whose wife was also having a baby. The Duchess had a girl, whom she immediately exchanged for the boy. Some years later, Newborough heard the girl, Maria Stella Carpini, singing at a theatre in Florence.
They married and she spent the rest of her life - and a great deal of his money - proving she was a Bourbon. She died in Calais. The sergeant’s son succeeded to the throne as Louis Philippe, the bourgeois monarch who looked like a carabiniere. In her portraits, the girl looks like the Duchess of Orleans and her other daughter. The Bourbon Arms are on her memorial in the village church just below Glynllifon (the only Grade A building in Wales). Her claim was authenticated by a French court of inquiry.
YOU SEE, YOU DON'T HAVE TO MAKE UP THE BEST STORIES.
FOOTNOTE
We’ve all dreamed of launching into space at one moment or another, but writer Mary Roach is perhaps the first science journalist to explore the psychological impact of getting there, and the human desire to leap into the stars. In her new book, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, the author of other notable pop-science books like Stiffand Bonk brings us tales of astronauts, both raunchy and enlightening. She explores the stories that don’t get told about space travel: Spacecraft smell, crafting chimp spacesuits, and early exploits in disgusting zero-gravity cuisine. Packing for Mars will make you think twice about your Buzz Aldrin dreams, but it also gives a more realistic view of life in space than we have ever gotten from a NASA broadcast.
Roman Fyodorovich von Sternberg (1886 to 1921) was a Major General in the White Russian army which fought against the Bolsheviks in the Carpathian mountains. His spiritual home would be a hospital for the criminally insane
When the White Russians were beaten, von Sternberg resolved to invade Mongolia, destroy the Chinese administration and forge a Pan-Asiatic empire including Manchuria and Tibet. He could then invade Russia, dismantle Moscow, replace it with a city of tents and crown himself Czar.
Financed by the Japanese Government, he led his “Army of Military Buddhists" - three hundred Tibetans, Cossacks, Mongols and Japanese - and captured Mongolia, of which he became king in all but name. Buddhists do not believe in death. To them, life is an endless path. Von Sternberg consoled himself for the mass murders his troops committed with the belief the victims would be born again to a better life.
He baptised his soldiers with vodka and hashish and ruled them with two aides. The first, Count Sepailoff, suffered from a form of Tourette's Syndrome. Always shaking, he sang wordless songs as he indulged in his favourite pastime of strangling. The other had forgotten his name on the long ride across Mongolia but he was nicknamed “Teapot” and he too was an eager strangler.
Von Sternberg's dazed army entered Mongolia in 1920 and in February 1921 occupied the capital, Urga, now Ulan Batan. His rule of Mongolia was bloody. His drug and vodka fuelled army was defeated by the Bolsheviks. Von Sternberg was captured, locked in a cage and, after swift trial in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, was shot.
A cousin of his, the 5th Baron Newborough, a Welsh peer, married three times. One of his wives who I knew, Denista, was a beautiful Yugoslav who after their divorce was charged, though found not guilty on appeal, with running a brothel in her flat, 6 Davies Street, Shepherd’s Market. Shortly before their divorce in 1946, a receiving order was made against her for debts of £951, which she attributed to losses at bridge whilst her skill had been impaired by unhappiness. She recovered her finances by designing outrageous hats, including the “Nicotine Hat” which was covered with cigarettes.
In her obituary in the Daily Telegraph when she died at the age of 79, it was written that she “¼was many things; wire walker, night club girl, nude dancer, air pilot. She was also a milliner, a perfumier and an antique dealer. She only refused to be two things - a whore or a spy.”
She spoke 14 languages and was beyond question one of the great adventuresses of the 20th century who has never really been given her due. Friends noticed that however bizarre her claims - including once having been a nurse - she was able to substantiate them all. In 1958 she published a best-selling autobiography "The Fire in My Blood", a cryptic phrase she used to describe her nymphomania. By her own account, she was sexually awakened by a Roumanian gypsy boy at the age of six when she became his “little wife”. She never ceased to be grateful to him and besides aristocratic lovers admitted to countless sexual encounters with waiters, footmen and chauffeurs. But she also included kings amongst her grateful lovers.
She was 28 when she met the 61-year-old Lord Newborough and she fell for him at once. She recalled: “He was the handsomest man I had ever seen, towering and strong and robust. He looked forty and had the springy timeless walk of a man in his twenties.
“He had been a captain in the merchant marine, surely the most masterful master mariner ever. He was the Pretender to the throne of France, he had a daughter about my age and I thought he was too good for me and said so...”
The 7th Baron, a hero of St Nazaire, was once fined for firing a cannon at holidaymakers. The cannon belonged to the 1st Lord who built two forts to repel a French invasion of Gwynedd. He also raised a private army but its main parade was a birthday banquet for George II. During a Grand Tour undertaken to avoid creditors, he met and married Maria Stella, apparently an Italian carabiniere’s daughter. In fact she was the child of the Duke and Duchess of Orleans. Whilst on an Italian tour, the Duchess was pregnant. They hoped for a boy who would have been directly in line for the throne of France. They reached the little town of Modiliano in Tuscany and there the Duchess was brought to bed. The chief carabiniere was a man called Sergeant Carpini whose wife was also having a baby. The Duchess had a girl, whom she immediately exchanged for the boy. Some years later, Newborough heard the girl, Maria Stella Carpini, singing at a theatre in Florence.
They married and she spent the rest of her life - and a great deal of his money - proving she was a Bourbon. She died in Calais. The sergeant’s son succeeded to the throne as Louis Philippe, the bourgeois monarch who looked like a carabiniere. In her portraits, the girl looks like the Duchess of Orleans and her other daughter. The Bourbon Arms are on her memorial in the village church just below Glynllifon (the only Grade A building in Wales). Her claim was authenticated by a French court of inquiry.
YOU SEE, YOU DON'T HAVE TO MAKE UP THE BEST STORIES.
FOOTNOTE
We’ve all dreamed of launching into space at one moment or another, but writer Mary Roach is perhaps the first science journalist to explore the psychological impact of getting there, and the human desire to leap into the stars. In her new book, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, the author of other notable pop-science books like Stiffand Bonk brings us tales of astronauts, both raunchy and enlightening. She explores the stories that don’t get told about space travel: Spacecraft smell, crafting chimp spacesuits, and early exploits in disgusting zero-gravity cuisine. Packing for Mars will make you think twice about your Buzz Aldrin dreams, but it also gives a more realistic view of life in space than we have ever gotten from a NASA broadcast.
Saturday, 7 August 2010
OF LEEKS AND KINGS
The Welsh were invented by an ancestor of mine, a Pictish chieftain called Cunedda. Nothing very grand about that. He is only an ancestor by marriage and I share him with most North Walians. Wales is not so much a country as a family. If they took the trouble, most Welsh people could claim similar nobility. It is said of the Welsh that anyone who can take his ancestry back to the sixteenth century can prove a personal flow of princely blood, so avid were national forebears in matters of descent.There is another reason my claim is tenuous. Some time in the 17th century a female Skidmore ancestor got in the wrong bed and there is a blip in my DNA.
In Wales I had three neighbours. One, my landlord the Marquess of Anglesey, claimed King Lear as an ancestor; the vicar's wife Adam's son Seth - a less modest woman would have claimed Adam - whilst Sir Kyffin Williams, the painter, carried the blood of every Welsh prince you could shake a stick at. My chum the rugby legend Ray Gravell was another modest Welshman. When we did a programme with Mike Harding I claimed Owain Glyndwr. Ray only claimed "one of his followers".
What is more, most Welshmen could show you family trees to prove it. The Skidmore tree begins triumphantly with a sister of the Virgin Mary. Had there been a Booker Prize for fiction in the Middle Ages it would certainly have been won by the genealagists.
Alas, I am a professional alien. I shuffle through life with the yellow patch of the stateless trusty sewn on my soul's tunic. My name is pure Viking and the first recorded Skidmore was brought from Normandy by Edward the Confessor to build castles on the Welsh border. His name was Ralph the Knight. Since then, more or less equal portions of Scots, English and Welsh have gone in to mixing the substantial soup which is me. The fairies at my christening wore tall Welsh hats, tartan shawls and Lancshire clogs.
I can always feel this mixed ancestry jostling me. Pushing me into dimly remembered loyalties; making me sing words I do not know to tunes I only remember by the curling of my toes. Wherever I go, I am a stranger. It is the proper condition of a writer, of course, but the fact remains I can call no country home; no patron saint mine.
Living in my body is like driving a vehicle with three quarrelsome passengers, each of whom wants a different programme on the radio. I am not Welsh by accident of birth but by choice. I was a volunteer. I chose to be Welsh because I detected in the Welsh those human qualities which I believe are important. They are: a dizzy infatuation with life and with words; exuberance; an ability to be dazzlingly bright and desperately dull, sometimes within the same hour. Wit. The generosity of a drunken sailor with eight arms, full pockets and only fifteen minutes left of his shore leave. A strong, sometimes crippling, sense of family. A respect for scholarship. But above all, an indefinable quality which I can only describe as a sense of warm embrace. Going to Wales as I did seventy years ago was like slipping into a pair of old slippers after a long day wearing tight shoes. I do not think it an accident that so many Italians settled in Wales, which Rene Cutforth called the Mediterranean in the rain. I believe this happy, talented, tempestuous race settled here because they found total compatability.
I suspect this description of the Welsh might come as a surprise to readers on the other side of Offa's Dyke. The caricature of the Welshman printed on many Saxon minds is of a narrow faced, foxy hypocrite, dressed in a suit made from the covers of old prayer books, leaping from cottage to cottage, flaming torch in hand. Or coming up from the netherworld in a cage after a pit disaster singing Cwm Rhondda. Useless to explain that in Wales hypocrisy is an art form, lovingly practised, and you get points for it on a sliding scale.
A friend of mine, the distinguished consultant psychiatrist Dr Dafydd Alun Jones, has a theory. He is a specialist in drink and drug addiction and he claims it is precisely the Welsh love of a party that informs national behaviour. They need a religious revival every so often to sober them up. I reckon that is why when the hunt was on they chose a narrow-minded, teetotal bigot as their patron saint. St David was chosen to keep an eye on the Welsh. May he keep an eye on you too.
ANOTHER MOMENTOUS EPISODE IN MY HISTORY
Today, in the three years since 'skidmores island' was colonised, we have our first complaint. It is from 'james' who takes issue with my friendship with Bert Balmer, the Assistant Chief Constable of Liverpool and a notable thief taker. He writes:
"So Balmer was your Chum? And as you say, he led the Cameo murder investigation. You then say witness statements bore signs of police coaching. So, ipso-facto, your "Chum" must have done the coaching! Are you sure you met Dickson and Northam with a gun in Manchester and that they confessed to perjury? Or is that just one of your stories you, your friends and Balmer delighted in making up in the Press Club?"
ME: I think more perceptive newspaper readers have realised that it is the function of a newspaper to inform and entertain. News is information and sacrosant. I was once sent thirty miles at midnight by the Daily Mirror to check the spelling of a name. The amusing "human interest" stories we call fillers are entertainment. The kernel of truth which they must contain is stretched to its limits
James has not done with me.
"If you did meet this evil pair, you are as amoral as them. Instead of hawking them around newspaper offices trying to make money, you should have reported them to an "un-bent" policeman for the hellish perjury which destroyed two innocent men's and their families lives."
ME: Two examples from my past (not made up, James) spring to mind. When during the war the Channel Islands were occupied by the Germans a pal of mine, Colonel "Cocky" Warren, was ordered to land two agents. The first part of the journey was easily accomplished. The navy loaned him a submarine. A very old submarine which would only do one knot submerged. The collapsible dinghy in which he would row the agents ashore presented difficulties. The Special Forces he contacted refused a loan in case he got captured and could not bring it back. He was forced to go to the Sports Department at Harrods and buy one.
"For what does sir require it?" the salesman asked.
"A little light coastal jaunt," Warren told him, and was surprised when the salesman handed him a bag containing the struts. Warren took the collapsed boat and spread it on the floor. He told me it looked like a swan's nest. The salesman showed him how to assemble it.
The sub surfaced just off the islands and the skipper, whose name was Martell, watched with amusement as Warren tried to assemble the dinghy. Exasperated, Warren told Martell: "You are a matelot, give us a hand."
"Sorry," said Martell, "the Navy has this understanding with Cunard. We don't build our own ships and they don't sail them!"
ME: The short answer to your curious suggestion that I should have reported them to a policeman who was unbent (I would love to know how I would recognise an "unbent" copper. The "bent" ones don't wear black masks and striped jerseys) is that sixty-five years ago I joined the National Union of Journalists not the Police Federation, most of whose members can read. As a matter of course, had a newspaper taken the story they would have kept the pair in the office whilst they contacted the police.
The second story demonstrates - what you seem to doubt - the power of the press at getting things done. In the middle of the crossroads between Chester Assize Courts and The Roodee there was a grassy island where a war hero was buried. His inscription told of his service with The Buffs in the Peninsula Wars and the Waterloo Campaign. He was a private soldier and had many medals.
When the new police headquarters was built, the road was re-laid and the grassy island replaced. There were no plans for moving the tomb. I thought the soldier deserved better treatment. By this time The Buffs were disbanded. I contacted the War Office, Western Command, the Civic Trust, the War Graves Commission, in the hope that someone would protect the old soldier. No one was interested. I even buttonholed the GOC Western Command General Sir Howard Wyse when we were out hunting. In desperation, I got a few ex-army friends to get up a petition and wrote about their "protest campaign" for the Daily Telegraph. Within forty-eight hours the grave had been moved with a Guard of Honour. If you think I made that up, James, you can see the tomb itself on its own lawn next to what was the Monastery opposite Police HQ.
In Wales I had three neighbours. One, my landlord the Marquess of Anglesey, claimed King Lear as an ancestor; the vicar's wife Adam's son Seth - a less modest woman would have claimed Adam - whilst Sir Kyffin Williams, the painter, carried the blood of every Welsh prince you could shake a stick at. My chum the rugby legend Ray Gravell was another modest Welshman. When we did a programme with Mike Harding I claimed Owain Glyndwr. Ray only claimed "one of his followers".
What is more, most Welshmen could show you family trees to prove it. The Skidmore tree begins triumphantly with a sister of the Virgin Mary. Had there been a Booker Prize for fiction in the Middle Ages it would certainly have been won by the genealagists.
Alas, I am a professional alien. I shuffle through life with the yellow patch of the stateless trusty sewn on my soul's tunic. My name is pure Viking and the first recorded Skidmore was brought from Normandy by Edward the Confessor to build castles on the Welsh border. His name was Ralph the Knight. Since then, more or less equal portions of Scots, English and Welsh have gone in to mixing the substantial soup which is me. The fairies at my christening wore tall Welsh hats, tartan shawls and Lancshire clogs.
I can always feel this mixed ancestry jostling me. Pushing me into dimly remembered loyalties; making me sing words I do not know to tunes I only remember by the curling of my toes. Wherever I go, I am a stranger. It is the proper condition of a writer, of course, but the fact remains I can call no country home; no patron saint mine.
Living in my body is like driving a vehicle with three quarrelsome passengers, each of whom wants a different programme on the radio. I am not Welsh by accident of birth but by choice. I was a volunteer. I chose to be Welsh because I detected in the Welsh those human qualities which I believe are important. They are: a dizzy infatuation with life and with words; exuberance; an ability to be dazzlingly bright and desperately dull, sometimes within the same hour. Wit. The generosity of a drunken sailor with eight arms, full pockets and only fifteen minutes left of his shore leave. A strong, sometimes crippling, sense of family. A respect for scholarship. But above all, an indefinable quality which I can only describe as a sense of warm embrace. Going to Wales as I did seventy years ago was like slipping into a pair of old slippers after a long day wearing tight shoes. I do not think it an accident that so many Italians settled in Wales, which Rene Cutforth called the Mediterranean in the rain. I believe this happy, talented, tempestuous race settled here because they found total compatability.
I suspect this description of the Welsh might come as a surprise to readers on the other side of Offa's Dyke. The caricature of the Welshman printed on many Saxon minds is of a narrow faced, foxy hypocrite, dressed in a suit made from the covers of old prayer books, leaping from cottage to cottage, flaming torch in hand. Or coming up from the netherworld in a cage after a pit disaster singing Cwm Rhondda. Useless to explain that in Wales hypocrisy is an art form, lovingly practised, and you get points for it on a sliding scale.
A friend of mine, the distinguished consultant psychiatrist Dr Dafydd Alun Jones, has a theory. He is a specialist in drink and drug addiction and he claims it is precisely the Welsh love of a party that informs national behaviour. They need a religious revival every so often to sober them up. I reckon that is why when the hunt was on they chose a narrow-minded, teetotal bigot as their patron saint. St David was chosen to keep an eye on the Welsh. May he keep an eye on you too.
ANOTHER MOMENTOUS EPISODE IN MY HISTORY
Today, in the three years since 'skidmores island' was colonised, we have our first complaint. It is from 'james' who takes issue with my friendship with Bert Balmer, the Assistant Chief Constable of Liverpool and a notable thief taker. He writes:
"So Balmer was your Chum? And as you say, he led the Cameo murder investigation. You then say witness statements bore signs of police coaching. So, ipso-facto, your "Chum" must have done the coaching! Are you sure you met Dickson and Northam with a gun in Manchester and that they confessed to perjury? Or is that just one of your stories you, your friends and Balmer delighted in making up in the Press Club?"
ME: I think more perceptive newspaper readers have realised that it is the function of a newspaper to inform and entertain. News is information and sacrosant. I was once sent thirty miles at midnight by the Daily Mirror to check the spelling of a name. The amusing "human interest" stories we call fillers are entertainment. The kernel of truth which they must contain is stretched to its limits
James has not done with me.
"If you did meet this evil pair, you are as amoral as them. Instead of hawking them around newspaper offices trying to make money, you should have reported them to an "un-bent" policeman for the hellish perjury which destroyed two innocent men's and their families lives."
ME: Two examples from my past (not made up, James) spring to mind. When during the war the Channel Islands were occupied by the Germans a pal of mine, Colonel "Cocky" Warren, was ordered to land two agents. The first part of the journey was easily accomplished. The navy loaned him a submarine. A very old submarine which would only do one knot submerged. The collapsible dinghy in which he would row the agents ashore presented difficulties. The Special Forces he contacted refused a loan in case he got captured and could not bring it back. He was forced to go to the Sports Department at Harrods and buy one.
"For what does sir require it?" the salesman asked.
"A little light coastal jaunt," Warren told him, and was surprised when the salesman handed him a bag containing the struts. Warren took the collapsed boat and spread it on the floor. He told me it looked like a swan's nest. The salesman showed him how to assemble it.
The sub surfaced just off the islands and the skipper, whose name was Martell, watched with amusement as Warren tried to assemble the dinghy. Exasperated, Warren told Martell: "You are a matelot, give us a hand."
"Sorry," said Martell, "the Navy has this understanding with Cunard. We don't build our own ships and they don't sail them!"
ME: The short answer to your curious suggestion that I should have reported them to a policeman who was unbent (I would love to know how I would recognise an "unbent" copper. The "bent" ones don't wear black masks and striped jerseys) is that sixty-five years ago I joined the National Union of Journalists not the Police Federation, most of whose members can read. As a matter of course, had a newspaper taken the story they would have kept the pair in the office whilst they contacted the police.
The second story demonstrates - what you seem to doubt - the power of the press at getting things done. In the middle of the crossroads between Chester Assize Courts and The Roodee there was a grassy island where a war hero was buried. His inscription told of his service with The Buffs in the Peninsula Wars and the Waterloo Campaign. He was a private soldier and had many medals.
When the new police headquarters was built, the road was re-laid and the grassy island replaced. There were no plans for moving the tomb. I thought the soldier deserved better treatment. By this time The Buffs were disbanded. I contacted the War Office, Western Command, the Civic Trust, the War Graves Commission, in the hope that someone would protect the old soldier. No one was interested. I even buttonholed the GOC Western Command General Sir Howard Wyse when we were out hunting. In desperation, I got a few ex-army friends to get up a petition and wrote about their "protest campaign" for the Daily Telegraph. Within forty-eight hours the grave had been moved with a Guard of Honour. If you think I made that up, James, you can see the tomb itself on its own lawn next to what was the Monastery opposite Police HQ.
Saturday, 31 July 2010
CROWNING GORY
Oscar Wilde insisted that nature mirrored art. What he didn't say was the art was created by Gilbert and Sullivan.
Our Queen "opens" Her parliament over which she has no control, wearing a glass hat, an evening gown, though it is midday, dripping with real jewels so vulgar they look like costume gems. She arrives in a horse and cart guarded by men on horses carrying swords and other men in fancy dress wearing tea cosies. She shows her authority by reading a speech written by her audience, some of whom are wearing sexy silk stockings held up by suspender belts and girdles, which they borrow from their wives or shop for surreptitiuosly.
I was struck by this image watching the most nauseating moment of my year. What a patter song could have been rendered by the "warlike" Prince Edward, a failed Lloyd Webber tea boy who bottled out of the Royal Marines, wearing a colonel's uniform, dripping with unearned medals, boasting about his brief visit to the frontline in Afghanistan. With the rousing chorus "It enables me to look fighting soldiers in the eye,"
He was bragging to the unctuous Alan Titchmarsh who is tailor-made for sycophantic duets. It reminded me of George IV talking about his bravery at Waterloo, where he did not serve, and being answered by the Duke of Wellington: "So your majesty has always said."
An odd lot our Royals. Dark characters who might have dripped from the pens of the authors of The Sorcerer:
George I, who murdered his wife's lover, was said to have baked him in an oven. George II promised his wife on her deathbed he would not marry again - only take mistresses. He had two said to be the ugliest women in Germany. He was so afraid of assassination he ruled from Germany and only ventured to England after dark. Georges III and IV and William IV were all bigamists. During the French Revolution, the Prince Regent and at least one of his brothers engaged to look after the fortunes of French aristos but when those few who escaped to England asked for the money they denied taking it.
Queen Victoria took the thousands raised for a hospital to commemorate her jubilee and spent it on gems. During her first years on the throne she was terrified her uncle Cumberland, King of the Rhine, would murder her. George V abandoned his cousin the Czar to the Bolsheviks but it did not stop Queen Mary, a kleptomaniac, from buying the Czarina's jewels at a bargain price. In World War 2, Edward VIII deserted his post and fled to Biarritz when France fell. Ever after, his C.O., Major General Howard Wyse, refused to allow his name to be mentioned. As Duke of Windsor, he arranged with the Nazis that he would return as puppet king.
The Queen Mother is said to be the daughter of a Welsh serving girl, seduced by the Earl of Strathmore (the family were known for making love to servants - his son married one who later killed herself). Our Queen sacked her trainer and kicked him out of his house when he caught a crippling disease which affected his ability to train all the Queen's horses.
There has been an outbreak of commonsense, it must be said, in the Houses of Parliament, which we have already been told by G & S includes members who are half fairies.
How they chorused their horror when Mr Cameron said what everyone knows. Gaza is a prison camp, the result of the infantile policies of both Israel and Palestine, though most of the ordinary people there want a peaceful settlement. He was right, too, in claiming that Pakistan, that unneccesary country created by tired old men who were no longer thinking straight, should not look both ways at the Taliban.
In America, President Obama has wisely agreed that his country, which owes trillions of dollars to the Mikado, should spend no more borrowed money for the next two years on Climate Change chimera.
At this point we move to the art of Disney. Our head of environment secretary Chris Huhne has a surname that sounds like a Winnie the Pooh soundbite. Fitting for one of nature's Pooh-Bahs. He inherited from Labour a £100 billion scheme to erect two monster turbines every day for the next ten years. Alas, it is hardly value for money. This vast concrete forest will supply less than a tenth of our needs.
Huhne wants to plant 6,000 wind turbines in the sea and thousands more to pollute the countryside. Alas, those feet that in ancient times walked upon England's pastures green will scarcely find room to place the feet in the future.Just a thought but has anyone measured the giant carbon footprints that are grinding the face of our planet in consequence of the recurring wars which governments undertake for frivolous reasons
And to what purpose are we to suffer this defacement of England's pleasant land?
Huhne claims the 3,000 wind turbines we have already built have the 'capacity' to generate 4.5 gigawatts of electricity. Alas, wind blows only intermittently. The actual production is barely a quarter of that, roughly the equivalent of one power station. That will be two per cent of the electricity we need and be twice as expensive as a power station. Offshore turbines are three times as costly.
BEYOND COMMENT
Sixty cinemas around the country will pioneer book tours by satellite in a link to the Royal Festival Hall where Stephen Fry will read from his autobiography, The Fry Chronicles. Audiences will submit questions via Twitter, which has made Fry one of the most avidly followed celebrities in the world. Can there be anything more damning?
Our Queen "opens" Her parliament over which she has no control, wearing a glass hat, an evening gown, though it is midday, dripping with real jewels so vulgar they look like costume gems. She arrives in a horse and cart guarded by men on horses carrying swords and other men in fancy dress wearing tea cosies. She shows her authority by reading a speech written by her audience, some of whom are wearing sexy silk stockings held up by suspender belts and girdles, which they borrow from their wives or shop for surreptitiuosly.
I was struck by this image watching the most nauseating moment of my year. What a patter song could have been rendered by the "warlike" Prince Edward, a failed Lloyd Webber tea boy who bottled out of the Royal Marines, wearing a colonel's uniform, dripping with unearned medals, boasting about his brief visit to the frontline in Afghanistan. With the rousing chorus "It enables me to look fighting soldiers in the eye,"
He was bragging to the unctuous Alan Titchmarsh who is tailor-made for sycophantic duets. It reminded me of George IV talking about his bravery at Waterloo, where he did not serve, and being answered by the Duke of Wellington: "So your majesty has always said."
An odd lot our Royals. Dark characters who might have dripped from the pens of the authors of The Sorcerer:
George I, who murdered his wife's lover, was said to have baked him in an oven. George II promised his wife on her deathbed he would not marry again - only take mistresses. He had two said to be the ugliest women in Germany. He was so afraid of assassination he ruled from Germany and only ventured to England after dark. Georges III and IV and William IV were all bigamists. During the French Revolution, the Prince Regent and at least one of his brothers engaged to look after the fortunes of French aristos but when those few who escaped to England asked for the money they denied taking it.
Queen Victoria took the thousands raised for a hospital to commemorate her jubilee and spent it on gems. During her first years on the throne she was terrified her uncle Cumberland, King of the Rhine, would murder her. George V abandoned his cousin the Czar to the Bolsheviks but it did not stop Queen Mary, a kleptomaniac, from buying the Czarina's jewels at a bargain price. In World War 2, Edward VIII deserted his post and fled to Biarritz when France fell. Ever after, his C.O., Major General Howard Wyse, refused to allow his name to be mentioned. As Duke of Windsor, he arranged with the Nazis that he would return as puppet king.
The Queen Mother is said to be the daughter of a Welsh serving girl, seduced by the Earl of Strathmore (the family were known for making love to servants - his son married one who later killed herself). Our Queen sacked her trainer and kicked him out of his house when he caught a crippling disease which affected his ability to train all the Queen's horses.
There has been an outbreak of commonsense, it must be said, in the Houses of Parliament, which we have already been told by G & S includes members who are half fairies.
How they chorused their horror when Mr Cameron said what everyone knows. Gaza is a prison camp, the result of the infantile policies of both Israel and Palestine, though most of the ordinary people there want a peaceful settlement. He was right, too, in claiming that Pakistan, that unneccesary country created by tired old men who were no longer thinking straight, should not look both ways at the Taliban.
In America, President Obama has wisely agreed that his country, which owes trillions of dollars to the Mikado, should spend no more borrowed money for the next two years on Climate Change chimera.
At this point we move to the art of Disney. Our head of environment secretary Chris Huhne has a surname that sounds like a Winnie the Pooh soundbite. Fitting for one of nature's Pooh-Bahs. He inherited from Labour a £100 billion scheme to erect two monster turbines every day for the next ten years. Alas, it is hardly value for money. This vast concrete forest will supply less than a tenth of our needs.
Huhne wants to plant 6,000 wind turbines in the sea and thousands more to pollute the countryside. Alas, those feet that in ancient times walked upon England's pastures green will scarcely find room to place the feet in the future.Just a thought but has anyone measured the giant carbon footprints that are grinding the face of our planet in consequence of the recurring wars which governments undertake for frivolous reasons
And to what purpose are we to suffer this defacement of England's pleasant land?
Huhne claims the 3,000 wind turbines we have already built have the 'capacity' to generate 4.5 gigawatts of electricity. Alas, wind blows only intermittently. The actual production is barely a quarter of that, roughly the equivalent of one power station. That will be two per cent of the electricity we need and be twice as expensive as a power station. Offshore turbines are three times as costly.
BEYOND COMMENT
Sixty cinemas around the country will pioneer book tours by satellite in a link to the Royal Festival Hall where Stephen Fry will read from his autobiography, The Fry Chronicles. Audiences will submit questions via Twitter, which has made Fry one of the most avidly followed celebrities in the world. Can there be anything more damning?
Saturday, 24 July 2010
LOTS IN A NAME
Lord Mandelusion commits the ultimate self exposure by giving himself nicknames. A nickname is not something we can give to ourselves. It must be conferred by others since, in order to "take", it must be accurate. Pernicious Peter calls his autobiography "The Third Man".
Does his Grossness really see himself as a man who preens, cheats the sick and ends up in a sewer - admittedly an exact metaphor for parliament? Prince of Darkness? The symbol of ultimate evil. A curious label to hang on one's own neck, though perhaps understandable in one whose chosen public trait is the dark art of the devious; who apparently relishes his ability to inspire fear and loathing.
Priapic Pete? He was proud to be known as the Bobby Kennedy to Blair's Jack. Kennedy Pere was in league with the Mafia which helped his sons to power and was cheated by them. I have always thought their assassinations were contract killings.
Preening Peter has always puzzled me. Why is he surrounded by this steel bubble which makes him ultimately invulnerable? Policy Wonk Pete is said to be a political genius. Why? His only succcessful trick was simple enough. He got Labour elected by persuading its adherents to abandon bedrock Socialist policies and turning it into the Conservative Party. The Apostolic Peter's puppets even announced there were Thatcherite policies they would maintain. Which is a bit like that trick one teaches dogs, not to eat a treat you have balanced on its nose.
Big Deal. I have been pointing out for years that, whatever party they elect, the English vote Conservative. It is the Scots and the Welsh who are the socialists in religion, as in politics.
What, that apart, is Lord Meddlesome most famous for? He was the Midwife of the Millennium Dome, that costly failure, most famously the scene of a Hollywood style smash and grab of millions of fake gems. A Freudian symbol? He was heavily implicated in the Devolution Bill - which we are still paying. His party brought "Peace" to Ireland by freeing IRA murderers, giving their bloodstained leaders top jobs in mis-Government and only failing by the narrowest of margins to pay every terrorist £12,000.
He was twice thrown out of the Cabinet for acts that in Trollope would have been capital crimes. The party he invented ruined Britain with its Health and Safety obsession, its financial profligacy and its record of a new law every three quarters of an hour. Parliament presided over its own financial scandals by making illegal expenses lawful and endorsed by party leaders as a compensation for failng to award pay rises.
His financial trickery is hair raising. He was the architect of the most disastrous election campaign in history. He revels in his ability to inspire fear and loathing and he crowns it all by admitting he created a Cabinet of bitter factions, headed first by a political chancer who was succeeded without an election by a bully and apparent loon.
His only real success has been unwittingly to make a Coalition Government and deeply needed election reform attainable. It's just our luck it is headed by a Nowhere Man who thinks that in 1940 Britain was the junior partner of America. Those of us who remember 1940 do so as the year America bankrupted Britain by making us pay up front for the tools we needed "to finish the job".
It is as well for him that we are dying off with little sighs of relief.
BEARING FALSE WITNESSES
A 'skidmoreislander' I know only as James responds to my panegeric about Bert Balmer by wondering whether he might have made up witness evidence in the Cameo cinema and Cranbourne Grove murders. I know nothing of the Cranbourne Grove affair. But by a strange accident I do have vital knowledge that in the Cameo cinema murder, the main prosecution evidence was false.
In 1949, the Liverpool cinema was the scene of a brutal double murder which led to a miscarriage of justice. The evidence of a prostitute and her pimp, Jacqueline Dickson and James Northam, resulted in life imprisonment for Charles Connolly, 26, and George Kelly, 27, being hanged.
Northam alleged that he and Dickson had been with the two when they plotted the crime; had seen Kelly loading a pistol. Kelly, they claimed, had borrowed Northam's overcoat for use as a disguise during the robbery.
Many witnesses confirmed that Kelly was clearly half drunk on the day. Cinema staff, however, were adamant the man who threatened them outside the manager's office was not somebody who had been drinking. My chum, Chief Superintendent Herbert Balmer who led the investigation, had difficulty in corroborating much of the prosecution evidence and many witness statements bore the sign of police coaching. Statements that favoured the accused men were held back by the police. Scant attention was paid to the fact that another Liverpool criminal, Donald Johnson, had demonstrated an intimate knowledge of the crime. Arrested for a street robbery in Birkenhead, Johnson had been charged with complicity in the murders. He admitted being in the vicinity of the cinema at the time of the murders. In fact he had been stopped by a police constable, suspicious of his loitering, who had demanded to see his identity card and then taken his name. Johnson, during police interrogation, referred to the murder weapon as being an automatic - which was correct but a fact known only to the police, the gunman and his accomplices, if any. He further stated that one of the dead men had been shot whilst on his hands and knees - again, a fact that only the police knew . Unaccountably, Johnson's entire statement was ruled inadmissible, and he was freed. Reputations and careers were in jeopardy and fresh suspects were needed.
At a retrial after the first, a jury failed to agree. Connolly pleaded guilty to charges of being an accessory. His plea destroyed Kelly's assertions of his own innocence and, despite an appeal against his conviction, Kelly was executed at Walton Prison on 28 March 1950. He continued to assert his innocence, even on the scaffold. Connolly was released from prison in 1957 and died in 1997. Shortly before his death, he took part in an interview on BBC Radio Merseyside, during which he reaffirmed both his and Kelly's innocence.
In February 2001 and in June 2003, Kelly's and Connolly's convictions were judged to be unsafe and were duly quashed.
Some months after the hanging, I was having a coffee in the early hours at a mobile snack bar in Piccadilly, Manchester. A young girl asked me to buy a sandwich for her and her boyfriend. She said they had not eaten for days.
The girl was Jacqueline Dickson and the boyfriend James Northam. He showed me the handgun he said he had bought after the trial after being threatened by associates of the two men. They had gone on the run and were desperate. They admitted they had made up their evidence and when I pointed out that if they confessed to a newspaper there was a few quid in it they jumped at the chance. I agreed to introduce them to some newspapermen and there followed a bizarre traipse round all the newspapers offering my sacrificial lambs. In turn the Express, the Mail, the News Chron and the Daily Dispatch turned them down. Some months later I read that the girl had gone to prison for demanding money with menaces from clients and thought I was lucky to get away with a Java and a sarnie.
So my answer, James, is that I don't know if Bert was bent. I think it more likely he was seizing at straws. Though I am never surprised when, as frequently happens, the police are shown to have charged the wrong culprit.
Does his Grossness really see himself as a man who preens, cheats the sick and ends up in a sewer - admittedly an exact metaphor for parliament? Prince of Darkness? The symbol of ultimate evil. A curious label to hang on one's own neck, though perhaps understandable in one whose chosen public trait is the dark art of the devious; who apparently relishes his ability to inspire fear and loathing.
Priapic Pete? He was proud to be known as the Bobby Kennedy to Blair's Jack. Kennedy Pere was in league with the Mafia which helped his sons to power and was cheated by them. I have always thought their assassinations were contract killings.
Preening Peter has always puzzled me. Why is he surrounded by this steel bubble which makes him ultimately invulnerable? Policy Wonk Pete is said to be a political genius. Why? His only succcessful trick was simple enough. He got Labour elected by persuading its adherents to abandon bedrock Socialist policies and turning it into the Conservative Party. The Apostolic Peter's puppets even announced there were Thatcherite policies they would maintain. Which is a bit like that trick one teaches dogs, not to eat a treat you have balanced on its nose.
Big Deal. I have been pointing out for years that, whatever party they elect, the English vote Conservative. It is the Scots and the Welsh who are the socialists in religion, as in politics.
What, that apart, is Lord Meddlesome most famous for? He was the Midwife of the Millennium Dome, that costly failure, most famously the scene of a Hollywood style smash and grab of millions of fake gems. A Freudian symbol? He was heavily implicated in the Devolution Bill - which we are still paying. His party brought "Peace" to Ireland by freeing IRA murderers, giving their bloodstained leaders top jobs in mis-Government and only failing by the narrowest of margins to pay every terrorist £12,000.
He was twice thrown out of the Cabinet for acts that in Trollope would have been capital crimes. The party he invented ruined Britain with its Health and Safety obsession, its financial profligacy and its record of a new law every three quarters of an hour. Parliament presided over its own financial scandals by making illegal expenses lawful and endorsed by party leaders as a compensation for failng to award pay rises.
His financial trickery is hair raising. He was the architect of the most disastrous election campaign in history. He revels in his ability to inspire fear and loathing and he crowns it all by admitting he created a Cabinet of bitter factions, headed first by a political chancer who was succeeded without an election by a bully and apparent loon.
His only real success has been unwittingly to make a Coalition Government and deeply needed election reform attainable. It's just our luck it is headed by a Nowhere Man who thinks that in 1940 Britain was the junior partner of America. Those of us who remember 1940 do so as the year America bankrupted Britain by making us pay up front for the tools we needed "to finish the job".
It is as well for him that we are dying off with little sighs of relief.
BEARING FALSE WITNESSES
A 'skidmoreislander' I know only as James responds to my panegeric about Bert Balmer by wondering whether he might have made up witness evidence in the Cameo cinema and Cranbourne Grove murders. I know nothing of the Cranbourne Grove affair. But by a strange accident I do have vital knowledge that in the Cameo cinema murder, the main prosecution evidence was false.
In 1949, the Liverpool cinema was the scene of a brutal double murder which led to a miscarriage of justice. The evidence of a prostitute and her pimp, Jacqueline Dickson and James Northam, resulted in life imprisonment for Charles Connolly, 26, and George Kelly, 27, being hanged.
Northam alleged that he and Dickson had been with the two when they plotted the crime; had seen Kelly loading a pistol. Kelly, they claimed, had borrowed Northam's overcoat for use as a disguise during the robbery.
Many witnesses confirmed that Kelly was clearly half drunk on the day. Cinema staff, however, were adamant the man who threatened them outside the manager's office was not somebody who had been drinking. My chum, Chief Superintendent Herbert Balmer who led the investigation, had difficulty in corroborating much of the prosecution evidence and many witness statements bore the sign of police coaching. Statements that favoured the accused men were held back by the police. Scant attention was paid to the fact that another Liverpool criminal, Donald Johnson, had demonstrated an intimate knowledge of the crime. Arrested for a street robbery in Birkenhead, Johnson had been charged with complicity in the murders. He admitted being in the vicinity of the cinema at the time of the murders. In fact he had been stopped by a police constable, suspicious of his loitering, who had demanded to see his identity card and then taken his name. Johnson, during police interrogation, referred to the murder weapon as being an automatic - which was correct but a fact known only to the police, the gunman and his accomplices, if any. He further stated that one of the dead men had been shot whilst on his hands and knees - again, a fact that only the police knew . Unaccountably, Johnson's entire statement was ruled inadmissible, and he was freed. Reputations and careers were in jeopardy and fresh suspects were needed.
At a retrial after the first, a jury failed to agree. Connolly pleaded guilty to charges of being an accessory. His plea destroyed Kelly's assertions of his own innocence and, despite an appeal against his conviction, Kelly was executed at Walton Prison on 28 March 1950. He continued to assert his innocence, even on the scaffold. Connolly was released from prison in 1957 and died in 1997. Shortly before his death, he took part in an interview on BBC Radio Merseyside, during which he reaffirmed both his and Kelly's innocence.
In February 2001 and in June 2003, Kelly's and Connolly's convictions were judged to be unsafe and were duly quashed.
Some months after the hanging, I was having a coffee in the early hours at a mobile snack bar in Piccadilly, Manchester. A young girl asked me to buy a sandwich for her and her boyfriend. She said they had not eaten for days.
The girl was Jacqueline Dickson and the boyfriend James Northam. He showed me the handgun he said he had bought after the trial after being threatened by associates of the two men. They had gone on the run and were desperate. They admitted they had made up their evidence and when I pointed out that if they confessed to a newspaper there was a few quid in it they jumped at the chance. I agreed to introduce them to some newspapermen and there followed a bizarre traipse round all the newspapers offering my sacrificial lambs. In turn the Express, the Mail, the News Chron and the Daily Dispatch turned them down. Some months later I read that the girl had gone to prison for demanding money with menaces from clients and thought I was lucky to get away with a Java and a sarnie.
So my answer, James, is that I don't know if Bert was bent. I think it more likely he was seizing at straws. Though I am never surprised when, as frequently happens, the police are shown to have charged the wrong culprit.
Saturday, 17 July 2010
MY FOOTBALL LEAVES NO CARBON FOOTPRINT
My brief moment of glory happened immediately our new pupils' class assembled at Didsbury Central School. By an overwhelming majority I was voted form captain, which carried with it the much prized office of Captain of The Form Football Team. Not bad, I thought, since I had never played football.
After our first game there was another overwhelming majority vote after which I was no longer form captain and especially NOT Captain of Football.
It was shortly afterwards that I devoted myself to the arduous cause of serial truancy. As a result, my next appearance on the football field was as sports reporter of The Bielefeld Bugle, the army newspaper of a Rhine Army holding unit in, surprisingly, Bielefeld. I was tasked with reporting a game between a team of Polish refugees and a team of Czech refugees. Both countries, as grammarians are aware, suffer from a paucity of vowels. To attempt a colourful account of how Czwrrd dispossesed Brwnjwn was beyond my prentice pen. Even player identification was beyond me.
Thankfully many years went by before the Daily Mirror sent me to write a colour piece as Manchester United battled some hereditary enemy whose name I did not catch. The News Editor was rather harsh when I returned. "Finished early?" "Dunno about early but they're all sitting round sucking lemons," I told him.
I only went to one other football match. A crooner called Andy Williams was the guest of the M.U. chairman, a boorish butcher. Oddly enough, his brother was a chum of mine, a fellow member of a dining club, as couth a chap as you could wish for.
The interview was not a success. Williams was monosyllabic and I couldn't think of a thing to ask him. Alas, though age has withered him and the years are unanimous in their condemnation, he still wails in public. So I have recurring reminders of that disastrous outing.
My family do not share my view. Indeed a much loved grandson, on his way to the States for a job interview in Wall Street, went via South Africa so that he could watch some games in a pub.
I can only assume it was a brief spasm of schizophrenia which led me to switch on the final.
Not a good choice. The Dutch team was given nine yellow cards, plus a red card - a record for a World Cup Final. What can I tell you?
I noticed an odd thing. The natives were dressed in smart casual. It was the white supporters who were plastered in war paint. And I played better than either team when I was thrown off the team at Didsbury Central.
No wonder Richard Williams wrote in the Guardian: "No more all-European finals, thank you very much." He remembered the defining moment of the previous World Cup final when Frenchman Zinedine Zidane headbutted an Italian player. Raphael Honigstein bemoaned the Dutch team's "downright cynical fouling."
All in all, I am not surprised the "Beautiful" (???????) game is played in short trousers and the ultimate prize is a school cap.
NEVER WAS SO MUCH OWED BY SO MANY TO SO EVEN FEWER
I was incensed when the Commemoration of the Battle of Britain, which ranks with Crecy, Agincourt, Waterloo and Trafalgar, was third item in the running order on TV bulletins and some newspapers did not mention it at all. Parenthetically, more enemy planes were shot down by the Polish Squadron than the rest of the RAF. You might wish to remember that when there are more complaints about Poles taking the jobs in the strawberry fields here about from Britons too lazy to do them. No arduous ad Astra for them.
POPE AND CIRCUMSTANCES
The news I was waiting for was an announcement that the Pope would find time to canonise the murderous Raoul Moat so great have been the media attempts to celebritise him.
Internet news reported: "After six hours of negotiations and a good Tasering, the cornered man shot himself. As he lay dying the police jumped on him screaming like banshees. A more ignominious conclusion to the most high profile police manhunt since the search for police killer Harry Roberts in 1966 would be hard to imagine."
A Shrine on Facebook, more of the same erected round his house, and an abundance of votive offerings and prayers. His brother, a tax inspector who claimed to have had little to do with him, complained that his death was like watching a public execution. He called for a second autopsy. That was a view not shared by his mother who said he would be better off dead. It is difficult to disagree. According to the Daily Mirror, he dressed in mini-skirts, kicked a dog and left it to die for two days, and wore lipstick.
He is still in with a chance. Saints have done stranger things. St Dwynwen successfully prayed for her fiancee to become impotent and not even that disqualified her for the job of the Welsh St Valentine. St Wilgefortis was a bearded lady who "disencumbered" female pilgrims from abusive husbands. St Edmund came back from the dead; St Fraidd turned the Mayor of Cork into a horse; St David, who levitated in the most disturbing way, was the son of a raped nun. His monks had to pull the plough themselves without draught animals; to drink only water; to eat only bread with salt and herbs; and to spend the evenings in prayer, reading and writing. No personal possessions were allowed; to say "my book" was an offence. Not surprisingly, two of his monks tried to murder him. And you don't want to know about St Augustine's wild youth.
The policemen who had spent anxious days hunting St Moat, a self-confessed police killer, are themselves the subject of a disciplinary inquiry. I hope the policeman who has been blinded by this thug will be invited to give evidence.
When a nation is transfixed by the tapes of a murderer which show him as a "man under pressure" and the "peace" in Northern Ireland is threatened by eight-year-olds, I do not think Western civilisation has much of a future. There is so little one can do but I am unsubscribing from Facebook as a small but determined step.
One bright spot. Scientists have spent a million quid setting up electronic equipment of mind boggling complexity in order to measure the earth. Alas, it doesn't work. Rabbits have nibbled the power cables. Gaia is striking back.
After our first game there was another overwhelming majority vote after which I was no longer form captain and especially NOT Captain of Football.
It was shortly afterwards that I devoted myself to the arduous cause of serial truancy. As a result, my next appearance on the football field was as sports reporter of The Bielefeld Bugle, the army newspaper of a Rhine Army holding unit in, surprisingly, Bielefeld. I was tasked with reporting a game between a team of Polish refugees and a team of Czech refugees. Both countries, as grammarians are aware, suffer from a paucity of vowels. To attempt a colourful account of how Czwrrd dispossesed Brwnjwn was beyond my prentice pen. Even player identification was beyond me.
Thankfully many years went by before the Daily Mirror sent me to write a colour piece as Manchester United battled some hereditary enemy whose name I did not catch. The News Editor was rather harsh when I returned. "Finished early?" "Dunno about early but they're all sitting round sucking lemons," I told him.
I only went to one other football match. A crooner called Andy Williams was the guest of the M.U. chairman, a boorish butcher. Oddly enough, his brother was a chum of mine, a fellow member of a dining club, as couth a chap as you could wish for.
The interview was not a success. Williams was monosyllabic and I couldn't think of a thing to ask him. Alas, though age has withered him and the years are unanimous in their condemnation, he still wails in public. So I have recurring reminders of that disastrous outing.
My family do not share my view. Indeed a much loved grandson, on his way to the States for a job interview in Wall Street, went via South Africa so that he could watch some games in a pub.
I can only assume it was a brief spasm of schizophrenia which led me to switch on the final.
Not a good choice. The Dutch team was given nine yellow cards, plus a red card - a record for a World Cup Final. What can I tell you?
I noticed an odd thing. The natives were dressed in smart casual. It was the white supporters who were plastered in war paint. And I played better than either team when I was thrown off the team at Didsbury Central.
No wonder Richard Williams wrote in the Guardian: "No more all-European finals, thank you very much." He remembered the defining moment of the previous World Cup final when Frenchman Zinedine Zidane headbutted an Italian player. Raphael Honigstein bemoaned the Dutch team's "downright cynical fouling."
All in all, I am not surprised the "Beautiful" (???????) game is played in short trousers and the ultimate prize is a school cap.
NEVER WAS SO MUCH OWED BY SO MANY TO SO EVEN FEWER
I was incensed when the Commemoration of the Battle of Britain, which ranks with Crecy, Agincourt, Waterloo and Trafalgar, was third item in the running order on TV bulletins and some newspapers did not mention it at all. Parenthetically, more enemy planes were shot down by the Polish Squadron than the rest of the RAF. You might wish to remember that when there are more complaints about Poles taking the jobs in the strawberry fields here about from Britons too lazy to do them. No arduous ad Astra for them.
POPE AND CIRCUMSTANCES
The news I was waiting for was an announcement that the Pope would find time to canonise the murderous Raoul Moat so great have been the media attempts to celebritise him.
Internet news reported: "After six hours of negotiations and a good Tasering, the cornered man shot himself. As he lay dying the police jumped on him screaming like banshees. A more ignominious conclusion to the most high profile police manhunt since the search for police killer Harry Roberts in 1966 would be hard to imagine."
A Shrine on Facebook, more of the same erected round his house, and an abundance of votive offerings and prayers. His brother, a tax inspector who claimed to have had little to do with him, complained that his death was like watching a public execution. He called for a second autopsy. That was a view not shared by his mother who said he would be better off dead. It is difficult to disagree. According to the Daily Mirror, he dressed in mini-skirts, kicked a dog and left it to die for two days, and wore lipstick.
He is still in with a chance. Saints have done stranger things. St Dwynwen successfully prayed for her fiancee to become impotent and not even that disqualified her for the job of the Welsh St Valentine. St Wilgefortis was a bearded lady who "disencumbered" female pilgrims from abusive husbands. St Edmund came back from the dead; St Fraidd turned the Mayor of Cork into a horse; St David, who levitated in the most disturbing way, was the son of a raped nun. His monks had to pull the plough themselves without draught animals; to drink only water; to eat only bread with salt and herbs; and to spend the evenings in prayer, reading and writing. No personal possessions were allowed; to say "my book" was an offence. Not surprisingly, two of his monks tried to murder him. And you don't want to know about St Augustine's wild youth.
The policemen who had spent anxious days hunting St Moat, a self-confessed police killer, are themselves the subject of a disciplinary inquiry. I hope the policeman who has been blinded by this thug will be invited to give evidence.
When a nation is transfixed by the tapes of a murderer which show him as a "man under pressure" and the "peace" in Northern Ireland is threatened by eight-year-olds, I do not think Western civilisation has much of a future. There is so little one can do but I am unsubscribing from Facebook as a small but determined step.
One bright spot. Scientists have spent a million quid setting up electronic equipment of mind boggling complexity in order to measure the earth. Alas, it doesn't work. Rabbits have nibbled the power cables. Gaia is striking back.
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