The Old Un’s Notes
Twenty years ago, the late Dr Angus Macintyre, a don at Magdalen College, Oxford, planted a golden gag in the college’s list of alumni that has only just come to light. Buried in the list, in the Magdalen College Register, is a spoof biography of Sir Humphrey Appleby, the omniscient civil servant in Yes Minister. Stitching together details from the television show, Macintyre came up with a fake CV for Sir Humphrey, who would now be 87. A clue to the joke is his birthday – 1st April.
Sir Humphrey scooped up all the Oxford prizes: a first in classics and the Chancellor’s Prize for Latin Verse; he even became principal of Hacker College, named after his old boss and prime minister, Jim Hacker.
Another clue was hidden in Sir Humphrey’s supposed phone number, which is, in fact, the telephone number for Magdalen College.
In Yes Minister, Appleby is said to have gone to Baillie College, a fictional institution. Macintyre was convinced Baillie College was based on Magdalen, a popular breeding ground for top civil servants. Sadly, Macintyre was killed in a car crash in 1994, when he was about to take up his post as Principal of Hertford College, Oxford. He was also cruelly robbed of his plan to include another fictional undergraduate in the Magdalen College Record – one Bertie Wooster.
Tristram Hunt is in for a treat as he settles into his new job as director of the Victoria and Albert Museum. In this exalted position, he will have access to the inner secrets of the V&A. One historical file reveals the condition of the ‘Three Graces’, Canova’s sublime sculpture of the Greek goddesses of Youth, Mirth and Elegance. It was commissioned by the Duke of Bedford in 1814 and installed in a temple on a revolving platform at his country seat of Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire. When the V&A bought it, together with the National Galleries of Scotland, in 1994, it examined the sculpture and realised it had got more than it had bargained for. The ‘Three Graces’ were so lifelike that they had been cruelly taken advantage of, like real flesh and blood. Nineteenthcentury stains were found – what you might call Monica Lewinsky stains – in their intimate areas. A conservator who worked on a copy of the statue, sadly destroyed in the fire at Clandon Park, the Surrey stately home, in 2015, says they could be food splashes. The statue was for a while in the Duke of Bedford’s restaurant at Woburn. But the shapes in the photographs suggest otherwise because similar marks are on all three curving bottoms. Time to call in the boys from forensics.
In altogether more salubrious and uplifting statue news, a Victorian bust of Sir Robert Peel, founder of the bobbies, the original police force, has been discovered. For decades, it had been hidden away in this box under a staircase at the Metropolitan Police’s New Scotland Yard building.
The marble bust was carved in 1851, a year after Peel’s death, by Matthew Noble. A sculptor popular in political
circles, Noble also sculpted the Duke of Wellington. The bust will take pride of place at the Met’s new headquarters, opened by the Queen in March.
You have to be a Sherlock Holmes to understand the force’s various house moves. Its original home was chosen by Peel when he set up the police in 1829. It was on Whitehall Place, which backed onto Great Scotland Yard – thus the nickname. In 1890, the police moved to New Scotland Yard on the Embankment, where they stayed until 1967. Until this year, New Scotland Yard was in a hideous tower block opposite St James’s Park station. And now it’s moving back to the Embankment, to a building called Curtis Green – nicknamed the New New Scotland Yard.
‘The bust has some basic scuffs and scratches, and some stains formed by residues of prior treatments like detergents, soaps and coatings,’ says Kimberly Reczek, the bust’s restorer. ‘And the nose has a brownish tinge, which is most likely to be “handling grease”. People love touching noses. Even when I was conserving it, all the passing policemen kept grabbing his nose.’ Good to hear that modern bobbies still hold their founding father in such affection. But why was Peel’s statue dumped in a cupboard in the first place? Time to call back the boys from forensics.
Driving along the M40, the Old Un noticed a disturbing phenomenon. The car in front had a pair of Babygros – one blue, one pink – dangling in the rear window.
They are clearly a development of the old ‘Baby on Board’ signs. Those were annoying enough – with their implication that you
shouldn’t crash into the back of them because the occupants were so young, whereas older passengers were dispensable. The Old Un has placed a thornproof tweed jacket and tie in his rear window. He is expecting a major rear-end collision some time soon.
The Oldie’s Johnny Grimond is not just a language pundit. He also saved the Kyle of Lochalsh railway line in the Highlands from Dr Beeching’s scythe. In 1963, Dr Beeching published The Reshaping of British Railways – aka ‘The Beeching Report’ – which proposed closing 2,363 British stations. The year before, he addressed the political society at Eton College, where Grimond was a schoolboy. According to another schoolboy there –
James Hughes-onslow, The Oldie’s Memorial Service correspondent – Grimond (whose powers of recall feebly cannot confirm the event) took a heroic stand against Beeching. ‘What are you going to do about the line to Kyle of Lochalsh?’ chirped a sixteenyear-old Grimond. Beeching confessed he had never heard of it. But he probably had heard of Johnny’s father, Jo Grimond, then leader of the Liberal Party. The Kyle of Lochalsh railway, then under imminent threat, was saved – and it continues to this day. ‘I told Johnny this at the Oldie of the Year lunch but he didn’t remember it,’ says Hughes-onslow, ‘He did remember Christopher Soames [the robustly-built agriculture minister, later British ambassador to France]
coming to talk to us. When he sat down, his chair splintered into a thousand pieces.’
On the recent Oldie tour of Greece, eighteen readers doggedly climbed Mount Parnassus in the driving rain to see the Temple of Apollo, where the Sybil, the Oracle, inhaled noxious gases, released from the earth’s core by earthquakes, and dispensed questionable prophecies. These days, even crisis-hit Greece has fallen prey to the modern twin gods of Health and Safety – the Delphi stadium was closed because of the weather. One Oldie traveller remembered a more carefree time in Delphi in the 1960s, when locals, short of building stone, referred to the ancient ruins as ‘the quarry’. Another Oldie traveller, Professor Tom Cain, recalled a trip to the sacred Castalian spring at Delphi, which gave the gift of poetry to Romans and absolved the ancient Greeks of crimes. You could get off a murder charge if you dunked your whole body in the gushing water.
When Professor Cain visited the site in 1986, there was a killjoy sign above it, saying, ‘Do not wash your car in the Castalian spring’. No need for third-party insurance when you’ve dipped your car in the holiest water in Greece.
Filling in a form at his local health centre to have his feet checked, the Old Un was surprised by the first question: ‘Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual/straight Homosexual/gay Man Gay Woman/lesbian Bisexual Other Rather not Disclose’ What can ‘Other’ possibly be? Hermaphrodite? If so, why the insulting prudery? And the imagination runs riot at ‘Rather not Disclose’. What about ‘Asexual’?
But the most disturbing thought is, what has all this got to do with feet?
Alexander Chancellor, our late editor of blessed memory, died just before the publication of his sister’s book, out this month.
In Hugh Honour and John Fleming: Remembered, Susanna Johnston tells of her time in Italy in 1957, when she was 21. While there, she became friends with Honour and Fleming, the art historians best known for their joint book, A World History of Art. They introduced her to the aesthete Harold Acton at La Pietra, his huge villa outside Florence. Acton had known Johnston’s parents before the war in Shanghai, where her father, Sir Christopher Chancellor, worked for Reuters.
‘Your dear mother bubbled over but, oh dear, your father was rather glum,’ Acton told her. ‘John and Hugh tell me that you, like your mother, bubble over.’
As they drove away down the long, cypress-lined avenue, Hugh Honour said, ‘That went very well. Harold enjoyed the Shanghai connection.’ John Fleming said, ‘For a moment, I almost believed that he was going to tell you how much he had admired the slippery little ivory bodies of the oriental boys out there.’
Honour added, ‘Yes, the slippery little ivory bodies got him into trouble with the foreign service at the time.’
The book is also revealing about the perils of being famous Englishmen on the Tuscan tour – as Acton, Fleming and Honour all were. Grand ladies in chauffeur-driven cars descended on them in droves. Honour used to ask, over and over, ‘But WHY? Why do they want to meet us? Can’t they just read our books?’ He also took to imitating the ladies and their tide of compliments. ‘Oh! The lotus pond – the croaking of the frogs – the books – sheer heaven.’
You’d have thought writing about art in the Tuscan sunshine would be good for the soul. In fact, it gets the malice glands working overtime. Eighteenth-century aesthetes weren’t much nicer. In Jeremy Musson’s new book, Robert Adam: Country House Design, Decoration and the Art of Elegance, he lists the critics’ onslaughts on the neoclassical architect.
Horace Walpole attacked Adam’s elegant, slim plasterwork as ‘gingerbread and sippets [sic] of embroidery’. Walpole went on to blast Adam’s style – ‘tawdry … larded, embroidered and pom-ponned [sic] with shreds and remnants … clinquant harlequinades, which never let the eye repose for an instant’.
Other critics launched into poor Adam for buildings that were ‘no better than models for the Twelfth-night decoration of a pastry cook’ with the ‘flutter of a courtesan’. My God, the Georgians knew how to deliver insults – and do it with style.
Latinists will note that The Oldie’s Learn Latin column has come to an end. ‘ O tempora, o mores,’ you may be muttering.
Fear not! The Oldie’s Latin master has decreed that – mirabile dictu! – you have all passed your Latin A-level with flying colours.
Latin-lovers will still find a natural haven at The Oldie, which will continue to run Rome-inspired features, such as this month’s piece by our new contributor, Cicero. We will stay true to our rallying cry. Learn Latin – the only way forwards is backwards!
The Oldie is now sharing an office with a new magazine, The Amorist, edited by Rowan Pelling, who launched the Erotic Review in 1997. The Amorist is a romantic and witty erotic magazine – and a delightful neighbour. Our office-share has led to an unusual breed of chit-chat by the watercooler. Prize for the best overheard comment so far goes to a visitor who said politely to one colleague, ‘I didn’t recognise you without your chains.’