The Old Un’s Notes
The Oldie is finally beginning to justify its name, for it is no longer a young magazine. To our bemusement, we find that it has now been around for a full 25 years. That may not make it immensely old, but it makes it at least mature; and its founding editor, Richard Ingrams, who was only in his sprightly mid-fifties when he launched it as an antidote to youth culture in 1992, has now reached the venerable age of 79.
The story of The Oldie, with its ups and downs, is told by Stephen Glover in this 345th issue, which also contains, reprinted, the column that Auberon Waugh wrote in the first issue of February 1992. In this he pointed out that people over fifty would soon comprise a majority of the British electorate and that The
Oldie’s purpose would be ‘to assert the power, restore the pride and exercise the muscle of Britain’s better half’. We may not have quite got there yet, but we are on our way.
Waugh, alas, has died, like some of the other early contributors to the magazine; but two who wrote columns in the first issue are still writing them a quarter-century later: Richard Osborne on music and Valerie Grove on radio. They are examples of the enduring stamina and vitality among old people that we celebrate in every issue. The next issue of The Oldie will report on our 2017 ‘Oldie of the Year’ awards, which not only now compete with the Oscars in their glamour but also have evident influence on the British government’s Honours and Appointments committee. The 2015 ‘Oldie of the Year’, Kenneth Arthur Dodd, better known as the King of the Diddymen, was made a Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honours ‘for services to entertainment and charity’, and the ‘Oldie Witness of the Year’, Donald Mccullin, the famous war photographer, was also made a Knight Bachelor for ‘services to photography’. Particularly pleasing to us was the recognition accorded to Naim Attallah, who generously funded this magazine from its start and kept it going in difficult times. He received a CBE for ‘services to literature and the arts’.
The honours for these three worthy oldies have been vastly overdue, but the same honours for sport and other television celebrities are conferred with such unseemly haste that the embarrassed newly knighted Andy Murray has already begged the All England Tennis Club not to introduce him as ‘Sir Andrew Murray’ when he walks onto the Centre Court to defend his Wimbledon title. In the 89-year-old Ken Dodd’s case the delay was probably due to the way in which the Inland Revenue once disapproved of his tax return. He explained that he had been unaware he owed them anything because he lived by the seaside. Tony Snowdon, who died in January, was an inveterate tease, as his biographer Anne de Courcy wrote. ‘Teasing’ summed up his impish slipperiness. It made him impossible to interview – he preferred asking questions to answering them, and was not remotely introspective – but always diverting, with anecdotes and mimicry. His Kensington house was like that of a mad inventor, so full of clocks that a clock-winder came every Monday. As he scooted restlessly round its tiny basement on the castors of his chair, he would point to pictures or curiosities and say things like ‘What century? What country?’ or ‘Have you seen the Gothic dog kennel I made?’
He could show you the rudder he designed for the Cambridge boat that he coxed to victory on All Fools’ Day 1950. (He’d got down to 8 stone 8lbs by shovelling hot malt grain in a Cambridge brewery, losing a stone in a morning.) With a boredom threshold ‘so low as to be invisible’ he would pause at exactly 11am with ‘Now what about a glass of white wine?’ served in a heavy glass, designed for him by Harrods.
No wonder that members of the royal family enjoyed his company so much that, even after the divorce, they implored him to join them for Christmas. Of all his photographs put on sale the most popular was of Princess Margaret in her bath, wearing the priceless Poltimore tiara (her idea). The Queen, he said approvingly, would arrive to be photographed ‘in a little car, with no fuss’.
Lest we forget, he remained a champion of the old, lonely and disabled. His lightweight ‘chairmobile’ was designed originally for his disabled friend Quentin Crewe, based on two horses-on-wheels belonging to his children.
But as a photographer, he always did just as he pleased – photographing Barry Humphries on a commode, and Mary Archer holding Jeffrey’s head in a vice-like grip under her arm. A photograph, he said, was not a portrait. ‘A portrait is something in oils. Portrait is too pompous.’ The self-elected Jockey Club’s announcement of its intention to bulldoze