The Old Un’s Notes
The Oldie of the Year awards at Simpson's-inthe-strand made for a deeply moving occasion. Virginia Lewis-jones accepted the principal Oldie of the Year award on behalf of her mother, the incomparable Dame Vera Lynn.
‘Ma was thrilled!' said Mrs Lewis-jones of Dame Vera's reaction to the honour.
Our other dazzling winners included Henry Blofeld (our Dear Oldie Thing of the Year), Alan Ayckbourn, Shirley Williams and April Ashley.
In a heart-stirring moment, Dame Judi Dench presented the Oldie Palmer d'or Award to her As Time Goes By co-star, Geoffrey Palmer, who's just turned ninety. Dame Judi said, as she handed over the award, ‘I wish, wish, wish that this was the award for “most promising newcomer” or maybe even “the naughtiest man I ever had the pleasure to work with”, but it's not. It's the Oldie awards.
‘I'm going to quote Bernard Shaw, as he said about Ellen Terry, “She never seemed old to me.” Well, nor you to me,' she said, addressing Geoffrey.
Shortly afterwards, Dame Judi was propositioned by Basil Brush, our 21st-century Fox of the Year.
‘When Daniel Craig steps down as James Bond, would you consider making me your Double O Three and a Half?' asked Basil.
Dame Judi graciously agreed.
We were honouring not just Basil and his current operator, who prefers to remain anonymous, as Gyles Brandreth says on page 46. We were also celebrating Peter Firmin, who made the original Basil Brush puppet and turns ninety this year. Firmin also created, with Oliver Postgate, Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, Clangers and Bagpuss.
The Oldie also honoured the late Ivan Owen, who
created Basil's character, modelled on Terry-thomas. He also named him, voiced him, gave him his persona and operated him until his death in 2000.
Only a week after Basil Brush won our Oldie award, he was named as the new presenter of The Generation Game.
There's plenty of life in the old fox yet. Boom! Boom!
The Old Un was delighted to chat to the ever-effervescent Jilly Cooper at the Oldie of the Year Awards.
All oldies will be delighted by her new discovery – lateflowering sex appeal.
‘Isn't Tony Blackburn gorgeous?' said Jilly, casting an appreciative eye across the room at the legendary 75-year-old DJ. ‘The older he gets, the lovelier he gets.'
The Old Un has been inspired by Jilly's words to compose The Oldie's new Latin motto: Senior pulchrior – 'The older, the lovelier.'
Always sit at the back row in a funeral. That's the advice of former Liberal leader David Steel, who the Old Un bumped into at the Oldie of the Year Awards.
He turned up at a funeral recently, only to learn that he was paying his respects to the wrong person.
‘I went along to the Borders Crematorium to attend a neighbour's funeral,' said Steel. ‘But, on looking at the order of service, I realised to my embarrassment that I'd got my the date wrong. Luckily, I was sitting in the back row; so I was able to slip out without too much fuss.'
Poetry is soothing to the soul, particularly when you're in prison.
That's the inspiration for Inside Poetry – Voices from Prison, a new collection of 250 poems, composed by 206 prisoners, prisoners' loved ones and prison staff. The poems originally appeared in Inside Time, the monthly national newspaper for prisoners. Here's a moving one by a prisoner called Denzil Davies:
'To all, so sorry I walked the wild side.
Oh, sober now, no, I don't drink today.
Free, but I'm not! And my family pay.'
The Old Un has always been a huge fan of Ivor Novello (18931951), the Welsh composer of the heart-stirring hits Keep the Home Fires Burning (1914) and We'll Gather Lilacs (1945).
The story of Keep The Home Fires Burning is enchanting. A 21-year-old Novello was working on the song with lyricist Lena Guilbert Ford, when a maid came into the room to stoke the fire. ‘That's it!' exclaimed Novello, watching her. ‘Home fires it is!'
The first performance was at a National Sunday League Concert at the Alhambra, Leicester Square, sung by Sybil Vane, with young Ivor accompanying her nervously at the pianoforte. The audience joined in as early as the second chorus, and a military band, ‘resting' between their items, improvised an additional accompaniment, as the roof of the Alhambra was raised by the massed voices and band. The publication of the sheet music the following day made Novello a small fortune (£18,000 in 1914).
Hats off to Oldie reader Ian Mcmillan, who is keeping Novello's home fires burning this spring. A devotee of Novello, and a musical theatre specialist, he will be appearing as the maestro in Tea with Ivor Novello.
Starring operetta soprano Marilyn Hill Smith, the show is at the Actors' Church, St Paul's, Covent Garden, London WC2, on Sunday 15th April at 2.30pm, in aid of the Actors' Benevolent Fund. Tickets from www. actorschurch.org or 020 7836 5221.
A national tour follows, reviving the legacy of one of Britain's finest writers of popular song.
Rosslyn St Clair's piece about meeting J Paul Getty at Renishaw Hall (March issue) revived further memories of the billionaire from Oldie contributor Michael Barber.
‘I never met Getty, but I did interview the man who ghosted his posthumously published autobiography,' Barber remembers. ‘The ghost described how, one day, Getty invited him to lunch at the Ritz. Arriving at the table, he found a third diner, Aristotle Onassis. The meal passed off without incident but, when the bill was presented, neither Getty nor Onassis stirred. So the ghost had to pick up the tab.'
The Old Un drops in on the artist and writer Ann Baer, the oldest (104 in April) of six centenarian women featured in Tessa Dunlop's new book, The Century Girls, about the 100th anniversary of women getting the vote.
Ann opens the door of her cottage in Richmond – approached via Worple Way – with the words, ‘Do you know what a worple is?' (It's a winding path between gardens.) Typical of her alert curiosity.
Active and upright, she travels by tube, dines out, lives alone with no television and reads voraciously. When Clive James launched his book of poems, one of which is dedicated to her, at Pembroke College, Cambridge, last year, Ann was his guest of honour.
Her father was Frank Sidgwick, of Sidgwick and Jackson, enriched by publishing the works of Rupert Brooke. He proposed to her mother when walking on Richmond Green, not knowing that she had a pet rat inside her muff at the time. The baby Ann's nursery was decorated with the Greek alphabet (it was a classics family, and uncle Henry co-founded Newnham College). Ann Sidgwick ended up pursuing art instead
of academe. At 49, she got married (she told Dunlop, ‘Yes, I suppose I was a spinster, but it didn't bother me') to her Ganymed Press colleague, Bernhard Baer, a widower with two children, who died in 1983.
Aged 82, she wrote a much-praised historical novel, The Medieval Woman, recently out in paperback. She reads new books as well as her favourite reread, Middlemarch (‘which Virginia Woolf called the only grownup novel'). She can recite masses of poetry and limericks and is forthright about her decided and commonsense opinions; such as simplifying life by excluding ‘four things I have no interest in: religion, sport, pets and music'.
She has no secret for living to a great age. ‘It's a complete fluke,' she says. ‘Life is not good or bad. It's patchy.'
John Bowling, the Oldie's art editor, sings the praises of the seaside resort of Withernsea, East Yorkshire.
You must head to the lighthouse museum and its Kay Kendall display. Star of the original road movie Genevieve (1953), Kay Kendall (1926-1959) was born only a few doors away from the lighthouse.
In her all too brief career, lovely Kay appeared in a series of charming films, including Doctor in the House, Les Girls and The Reluctant Debutante.
In 1957, she married Rex Harrison, her co-star in The Constant Husband. Harrison knew she was suffering from myeloid leukaemia, but mercifully kept it from Kendall, who thought she had an iron deficiency. She died aged only 32.
Harrison told the sad tale to Terence Rattigan who used it as inspiration for his 1973 play, In Praise of Love, starring Harrison.
Today, several rooms in the lighthouse are given over to the Kay Kendall display. On
show are her dresses (pictured), theatre playbills, a Kay Kendall manikin, a Rex Harrison cardboard cutout and a Genevieve video on a loop. The museum is open from Easter to October.
You might think Kenneth Clark, of Civilisation fame, got what he ordered when he commissioned artists. That wasn't always the case.
In 1932, he and his wife ordered a large dinner service from the Bloomsberries Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. The plates they received two years later, said Clark, ‘turned out differently to what we had expected. Instead of a gay cascade of decorative art, Duncan and Vanessa conscientiously produced 48 plates, each of which contained the portrait of a famous woman.' But one man was also included, as the two artists portrayed each other. Among the lovely pictures are Pocahontas, Greta Garbo and Helen of Troy. The plates, one-off works beautifully painted on Wedgwood creamware blanks, proved impractical to use, and were sold after Clark's death. Last seen in a 1990 auction in Hamburg, the Famous Women Dinner Service has been rediscovered by Robert and Martin Travers for their exhibition From Omega to Charleston at the Piano Nobile Gallery, in Holland Park, west London, on until 28th April.
Tanya Gold's feature on the joyous survival of independent libraries (March issue) jogged the Old Un's memory. He remembered a 1974 Woman's Hour on Radio 4 on the dearth of good bookshops, then closing at an alarming rate. Various reasons were given for this, the most persuasive of which fingered public libraries. If the British were reluctant to buy books, it was because, unlike the French, we had a comprehensive public library system. Why buy books when you could borrow them for nothing?
Fast forward to today and the boot is on the other foot. Cash-strapped councils are closing libraries all over the place, and for the first time in over twenty years, there has been a rise in the number of independent booksellers. A classic case of what the novelist Anthony Powell called ‘Time's Revenge'.