Lord Bragg goes back in time for tale of privations

He has a peerage to his name and lives in splendour in a £5million house in hampstead, the leafy enclave favoured by the north London intelligentsia.

But broadcasting and literary grandee Melvyn Bragg has never forgotten, still less attempted to disguise, his earliest years in Wigton, Cumbria, when he and his parents lived in a ‘one-up, one-down’ terrace house — with an outside toilet and outside taps.

Now I can disclose that those years are to be at the heart of the book which Bragg, 80, has embarked on during lockdown.

‘It will,’ says a friend, ‘be as much about the north-west of england in the years of austerity and rationing of the late 1940s and early 1950s as it will be a conventional memoir.’

Bragg, most popularly known as host of The south Bank show and, latterly, of Radio 4’s In Our Time, confirms he is hard at work.

‘I’m writing something about my early childhood, yes, that’s true,’ he tells me. ‘I don’t really think it’s a memoir — it’s a description of the town and the sort of people I grew up with.’

The Bragg family circumstances improved somewhat when his father became landlord of the Black-aMoor pub. But, even then, the town and the lives of its inhabitants would have seemed impoverished to those born in 21st-century Britain, Bragg reflected last year, shortly before he married for a third time.

‘It was still almost a Victorian society. a fairly battered society, almost like a foreign land. Nobody I knew had a telephone. Nobody I knew had a car. Very few people I knew had an indoor toilet. But there were qualities there.’

Bragg’s life soon became markedly more comfortable. after graduating from Oxford, he worked for the BBC and, later, London Weekend Television, in which he had a stake worth more than £2million when it was taken over in the 1990s.

he asks those eager to hear more about the privations of his youth to be patient.

‘It isn’t destined for anything but my desk for quite a long time,’ he assures me. ‘I got shingles at the start of lockdown which put paid to quite a bit of it. It lingers for quite a while. a nasty thing.’