The Old Un’s Notes
The Old Un was deeply saddened to hear of the death of the great Fats Domino, at the decent age of 89.
Not only was he a genius at the keyboard, with a lovely voice; not only was he one of the great progenitors of rock ’n’ roll, fusing rhythm and blues, zydeco, boogiewoogie and Dixieland.
He was also a thoroughly good egg, happiest in his home town of New Orleans, with his wife and eight children.
The Old Un was lucky enough to see him in concert in New Orleans in 2006, in his first big show after Hurricane Katrina had wiped out his home the year before.
For someone who’d lost all his possessions, he oozed contentment and bonhomie, launching into marvellous renditions of ‘Blueberry Hill’ and ‘Ain’t That A Shame’.
With his trademark sailor’s cap on, he also sang ‘Walking to New Orleans’. The number assumed a deep poignancy, given how recently the city had been submerged – when you didn’t stand a chance of walking anywhere much in post-katrina New Orleans.
The Old Un has been feasting on a gorgeous new book, The Illustrated Dust Jacket: 1920-1970, by Martin Salisbury (Thames & Hudson).
There are some inspired combinations of artists and books: John Minton’s cluttered rural kitchen on the cover of Elizabeth David’s French Country Cooking (1958); John Piper’s collage effect for the Murray’s Buckinghamshire Guide (1948), which he edited with John Betjeman.
Best of all are the Ronald Searle covers for the 1950s series of Molesworth books, for which Searle also illustrated Geoffrey Willans’s text. Dust jackets are an underrated art. To think some philistines throw them away!
Eighty years ago, Harold Davidson – aka the Rector of Stiffkey or ‘The Prostitutes’ Padre’ – met his sad end: savaged to death by a lion whose tail he’d accidentally stepped on.
He had lived a full life. The one-time actor, who later took up the cloth, was defrocked for his weekly commute to London’s Soho in search of fallen women.
His downfall came in a consistory court in 1932, when the prosecuting QC revealed this photograph of Davidson with Estelle Douglas, the 15-year-old daughter of one of his friends.
Davidson claimed the photo was taken as a publicity still to boost the girl’s acting career. He insisted he’d been set up; that he thought she’d be wearing a bathing costume under her towel, as she had in a previous shoot.
The desperate Davidson was reduced to spending his final years as a circus performer in Skegness, billed as ‘Daniel in a modern lion’s den’. It all went wrong when Daniel stepped on the lion’s tail.
In 1937, 3,000 people attended Davidson’s funeral in Stiffkey, Norfolk, where he is buried in the churchyard. When The Oldie’s art editor, John Bowling, visited the grave recently, it was welltended, with fresh flowers on the tomb.
The Rector of Stiffkey: gone – but not forgotten.
The Old Un was very excited to be invited to the party for the 60th anniversary of the Today programme, held in The Ned, the old City of London bank designed by the great Sir Edwin Lutyens.
The champagne and the gossip flowed. The Old Un was particularly thrilled to see the Today presenters there – John Humphrys et al – despite their day job, or early morning job.
The poor presenters have to get into the office at 4am. And yet here they were, getting stuck into the party spirit, even though the celebrations didn’t finish until 10pm.
Cheers, and happy birthday!
Oldie readers of the Bird of the Month page will not be surprised to learn that Carry Akroyd,
our bird illustrator, has won the inaugural Terravesta Prize.
The prize might be called the Man Booker of wildlife art, given by the Society of Wildlife Artists, at its recent annual exhibition, The Natural Eye, at the Mall Galleries in London.
Her picture, a serigraph print, ‘Flooded Washes’, is a panoramic landscape filled with distantly seen birds – a regatta of newly-arrived, winter-migrant whooper swans; busy flocks of peewits, starlings; a couple of questing coots; a predatory crow or two; patrolling buzzard; and passing plane.
It typifies Carry’s interest as, primarily, a landscape painter intent on showing what is described in the
citation ‘as the unlabelled countryside trying to survive alongside agribusiness’.
Illustration, not least of birds, is a sideline. But, like her hero and fellow Northamptonshire resident, the 19th-century poet John Clare (she is President of the John Clare Society), Carry has an unerring eye for birds of every kind.
Carry captures their character with graphic, abstract simplification – their plumage, movement, flight – and places them in correct habitats of unsentimental reality, making a design virtue, where suitable, of buildings, motorways, tankers, turbines, pylons, vapour trails, aircraft, container ships.
The Oldie is lucky indeed to have her monthly revelation.
At the Cliveden Literary Festival, the Old Un had a thrillingly high-minded time, listening to authors from Antonia Fraser to Robert Harris. The Old Un also indulged his regrettable, salacious side by strolling away from the Astors’ splendid palazzo down to the riverbank.
Here, ignored by the passing crowds, was the charming cottage once owned by Stephen Ward, the society osteopath who introduced Christine Keeler to glitzy life up at the big house. It was there, by the swimming pool in July 1961, that Keeler met the politician John Profumo. And so the Profumo Affair – and the Sixties, you might say – began.
The Old Un strolled back from Ward’s cottage up to the house, along the woodland walk Keeler took for her fatal swim. All very spine-tingling.
Returning to Cliveden, he glanced at the books and DVDS on display in the hall. Prominent among them was Scandal, the 1989 film starring Joanne Whalley as Keeler.
How refreshing that there is no longer any shame attached to the Profumo Affair; that it has become part of the historic fabric of Cliveden. Christine Keeler turned 75 in 2017; I do hope she’s happy.
A recent survey of top twenty favourite pleasures ranged from ‘A kiss
and a cuddle’ (56 per cent) to ‘Walk barefoot in the sand’ (10 per cent). ‘A kiss and a cuddle’ console at any age but, in the main, the survey showed how each of the seven ages has different priorities.
There was no mention of the oldie pleasure in memorial services, so much more friendly than weddings, where one knows only half the congregation, as Nigel Pullman wrote about so eloquently in the October issue of The Oldie.
Silence would rate high among oldie pleasures, since the biggest disadvantage of memorial services is the impossibility of hearing what anyone is shouting about.
Other prized oldie pleasures are the ability to bend (waists or fingers); personal rather than automatic service, especially in supermarkets and on the telephone; a lift rather than steps; a handrail; a waived security checkpoint; a bus driver who lets one in or out before or beyond the bus stop; an empty carriage; a freedom pass; a disabled badge; a loo when urgently required; grandchildren in their formative years.
None of these featured among the pleasures of the hale and hearty.
All suggestions for oldie pleasures will be gratefully received by the Old Un. Who said that chivalry is dead? The Oldie’s brilliant agony aunt, Virginia Ironside, has been in touch to sing the praises of the good, oldfashioned railway porter. But not so old-fashioned, it seems.
‘It was at King’s Cross that I realised the wheels on my suitcase had bust,’ Virginia told the Old Un. ‘I was left, dragging it along the ground, with only the flimsy, nylon casing left between all my possessions and the pavement.
‘I was convinced it would break before I even got to the platform.
‘This was exactly where I could do with a porter, I thought, but such chaps are now distant memories.’
And then a heavenly vision materialised. Out of the shadows appeared an official in a yellow jacket saying, very kindly, ‘You look as if you could do with some help? Can I assist you?’
‘This saint was apparently an employee of Virgin Trains, hired especially to come to the aid of passengers who looked desperate,’ says Virginia.
‘I was astonished. This man not only picked up my suitcase and led me to an even earlier train, but saw me into my seat with a cheery “Have a good journey!”
‘However, there was still King’s Lynn to worry about. How would I get my collapsing suitcase from the train to the taxi-rank without it exploding all over the station?’
‘I needn’t have worried because out of the shadows appeared a man in a yellow jacket from Virgin Trains who, like Jeeves, shimmered up, saying “May I help you?”. He picked up my suitcase and led me to the rank where I hopped into a taxi and arrived at my destination, marvelling.’
The Old Un has never been a fan of Richard Branson or his cramped trains, but he acknowledges that miracles sometimes happen on the London to Norfolk line.