The Old Un’s Notes
A chill wind blows through Oldie Towers at the loss of our deputy editor, columnist and mainstay, Jeremy Lewis. Our publisher, James Pembroke, pays tribute to Jeremy on this page, as does Richard Ingrams on page 14. The tide of affection pouring into the office has been mighty but unsurprising. He was a unique man.
Jeremy was so selfdeprecating that he successfully concealed how extraordinary he was: a publisher for more than twenty years, a biographer of rare intellect and observational power, and a journalist who matchlessly combined the gifts of editing and writing.
All this is unusual enough. But there was even more to him. The mixed tribes of publishers, authors and journalists are often raging egomaniacs. Jeremy was the reverse. His modesty, kindness and curiosity sparked off that wave of tributes. Several appear in the following pages.
Jim Broadbent, 67, has been lamenting the lack of acting roles for older people. ‘Sometimes I’ll watch a TV programme, say Peaky Blinders, and I think, “Oh, this is really good. I’d love to be in it,”’ he says, ‘And then think, “Hang on, there’s nobody of my age in it. What would I play?” ’
Come off it! Every time you turn on the telly, Broadbent pops up. But his point still makes sense. There are pretty few jobs for older actors – and they all go to Ian Mckellen, Michael Caine or Jim Broadbent.
In Alex Renton’s new book about boarding schools, Stiff Upper Lip, it emerges that the expression is American in origin. The first recorded use of ‘stiff upper lip’ is in America in 1815. And Phoebe Cary (1824–71), the American poet and early women’s rights advocate, wrote a celebrated poem, ‘Keep a Stiff Upper Lip’: ‘Only yield when you must;/ Never “give up the ship”, /But fight on to the last /With a stiff upper lip.’ Renton describes how the British used to cry a lot before 1850: Pitt the
Younger, Charles James Fox and the Duke of Wellington wept buckets. It’s only when we imported stiff upper lips from the Americans in the mid-19th century that we became chillingly restrained and tearless.
The National Trust is renovating the grounds at Seaton Delaval Hall, Northumberland, the fantastic baroque castle built by Sir John Vanbrugh.
Here’s hoping they’ll also renovate the mausoleum in the grounds, built in 1776 by Lord Delaval for his only son. A 1923 edition of Country Life said, ‘This unfortunate youth perished in 1775, having been kicked in a vital organ by a laundry maid to whom he was paying addresses.’
What a way to go.
A new stained-glass window in memory of the SAS has just been installed in Hereford Cathedral.
‘Ascension’ is a handsome abstract design by John Maine, with 3,000 pieces of glass. There is an SAS badge carved into the stonework, as
well as the words, ‘Always a little further’, a popular SAS motto – taken from the poem ‘The Golden Road to Samarkand’ by James Elroy Flecker. The new window in Hereford Cathedral
Perhaps understandably, the design is an abstract one. It would be tricky to incorporate the SAS’S most famous exploits – like the storming of the Iranian Embassy in 1980 – in a cathedral window.
The SAS’S achievements are commemorated more graphically back at their base, just outside Hereford. In one
corner of the officers’ mess, there’s a glass case containing a pair of split new cowboy boots, trimmed with a great deal of shiny buckles and twirly fretwork. Beneath the case, a small metal tag reads, ‘Uday’s Boots’. Uday Hussein, that is – Saddam Hussein’s psychopathic elder son, killed by Allied special forces alongside his brother, Qusay, in Mosul in 2003.
Alan Judd, the Oldie’s Motoring Correspondent, first met Jeremy Lewis in the 1980s, when Jeremy wanted to interview him for the London Magazine.
‘He had a tight deadline, I was in the Foreign Office and travelling frequently,’ says Alan. ‘The only possible time to meet was that afternoon, when I had to travel to Heathrow on the Piccadilly line. After we had identified each other, Jeremy got on at South Kensington and, in a crowded and increasingly silent carriage, conducted the interview all the way to Heathrow. His voice was not always the quietest, while his questions – put with his unfailing good-nature – were always very much to the point. Distressingly so, as he didn’t like my most recent book. He was right.
‘We became friends and remained so thereafter.’
Britain’s most easterly point, Ness Point, near Lowestoft in Suffolk, is marketing itself as a tourist attraction. At the moment, you reach it through an industrial estate. One Tripadvisor visitor said, ‘Don’t bother. It’s a trip down Gas Works Road, past some old rusty gasometers, to a concrete sea wall.’
Now Suffolk County Council and Waveney District Council are hoping to spend £1 million, to turn it into an attraction to rival John O’groats and Land’s End.
But what about Britain’s most westerly mainland point? It, too, gets little coverage. The Old Un was amazed to find out where it is. Answer at the end of these notes.
Annabel Sampson, The Oldie’s editorial assistant, recalls Jeremy Lewis’s astonishing politeness. Whenever he rang the office, he would chat away with her. ‘I know Jeremy actually wanted to talk to someone else in the office, but he’d always ask me how I was, what books I’d been reading, before I put him through,’ says Annabel, ‘He’d often ring again several times on the same day. He was so polite; every time, he’d feel he would have to have another long chat.’
Maggs Bros, the oldest antiquarian booksellers in the country under continuous family ownership, reopens in May, in Bedford Square, London. Founded in 1853, it was in Berkeley Square for nearly eighty years.
The managing director is Ed Maggs. Ben, his son, is the sixth generation in the business. What good news that Maggs continues to thrive at a difficult time. Over the past decade, independent bookshops have fallen by a third. Maggs has sold some exceptional books, not least a Gutenberg Bible and the first book printed in England by William Caxton, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
Its business is not entirely highbrow. In 1916, it bought Napoleon’s mummified membrum virile from the descendants of Abbé Ange Paul Vignali. Vignali gave Napoleon the last rites and took away his little memento. Maggs later sold the object to Dr A S Rosenbach, who mounted it in a blue morocco and velvet case.
Eight lucky Oldie readers are invited by our Money Matters columnist, Margaret Dibben, to visit the archive of Barclays Bank in Wythenshawe, on the edge of Manchester. The two-hour free trip takes place on 16th June at 10.30am. You will visit the strong room and see gems dating back to 1567, including the original 1966 Barclaycard. Email editorial@theoldie.co. uk to apply, putting ‘Barclays’ in the subject line.
When Evgeny Lebedev, owner of the Evening Standard, appointed George Osborne as editor, the Old Un was reminded of Michael Foot. Foot was granted accelerated elevation to the same editorship in 1942 by Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian press baron. In his book Debts of Honour, Foot recalls his interview at Cherkley Court, Beaverbrook’s Surrey country house, in 1938. The 25-year-old Foot had failed to win the Monmouth seat for Labour three years earlier. That Beaverbrook was a Conservative didn’t concern either of them very much.
On Sunday morning, dressed in riding clothes, Beaverbrook asked Foot whether he had read all the newspapers. ‘Yes, a few,’ said Foot. ‘Read them all,’ said Beaverbrook, turning to his butler. ‘Albert, see that Mr Foot is supplied with all the newspapers in the library. I will return in an hour or two, Mr Foot, and perhaps you will be good enough to tell me then what is in the newspapers.’
Having memorised the papers – ‘as no one has felt required to do, before or since’ – Foot gave Beaverbrook and his weekend guests a brilliant summary of what they said. His reward was a featurewriting job (at £9 a week) on the Standard and then, in 1942, the editorship.
Deborah Maby, the Oldie’s sub-editor, remembers Jeremy Lewis’s idiosyncratic approach to editing.‘jeremy was very keen on the ampersand and wanted it to survive, particularly in the names of publishers,’ she says. ‘So it was always Chatto & Windus, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, etc. He was also a stickler for “whom”. He could never remember what a standfirst was called and would always say, “In that thing at the top, the stand fast or whatever it’s called.” ’
Deborah also remembers a joyful Oldie works outing to Bruges. ‘He kept saying, “Follow me, men, I’ll be right behind you,” which I think was a quote from Dad’s Army.’
How sad that Jeremy will no longer be there for us to follow.
* Britain’s most westerly spot on the mainland is Ardnamurchan Point, Lochaber, in the Scottish Highlands.