The Old Un’s Notes
Forget Antiques Roadshow! If you want to turf out a priceless hidden gem, come on an Oldie holiday. That’s what happened to reader Arline Fisher on a recent Oldie trip to Rome.
A collector of antique jewellery, she’d just bought a Georgian ring at auction before the trip. The ring held an anonymous portrait of a cardinal, in all his scarlet finery. Arline got caught up in a hot bidding war, and ended up paying what she thought was too much for it.
Less than a week later, on the first afternoon of the Oldie visit to Rome, the group went into Santa Maria in Trastevere. There they were shown the monument to Henry Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie’s brother, the Duke of York, and Cardinal of Santa Maria from 1759 to 1761. The monument shows the Duke of York’s royal arms topped with a cardinal’s hat.
‘I had never heard of him,’ says Arline. ‘Once at home, I set about researching him online and found lots of portraits of him that bear no relationship to the one on the ring but, eventually, came across the portrait of him in the National Gallery of Scotland. In that portrait, he is in armour but the face is identical, and it is clearly the source used by the miniaturist for the ring. Whoever that was simply changed the armour for the scarlet of Rome.
‘I now knew why someone else had been so keen to bid for it. I felt it was probably a little too valuable for me to keep and so I sold it through a well-known London gallery. I was over a thousand pounds better off.’
‘So, if I had not gone to Rome with The Oldie, that ring would still be in my drawer, as an example of my recklessness at auctions.’
Encouraging news for literary oldies – and romantic ones, too. At 88, Tom Stacey, publisher and former Sunday Times foreign correspondent, has written A Dark and Stormy Night, a gripping novel inspired by Dante. Publishers’ publicity bumf is normally very dull. Not in Stacey’s case. His PR’S material proudly proclaims, ‘Tom Stacey is a zealous promoter of love amongst the over-sixties.’ Just up The Oldie’s street! Who now remembers our Anglo-saxon royal family? Well, St Editha’s Church in Tamworth, Staffordshire, does. On 12th June, a National Service of Commemoration will be held for the 1,100th anniversary of the death of Aethelflaed.
Aethelflaed, also known as Ethelfleda, Lady of the Mercians, was the warrior daughter of King Alfred the Great of Wessex. She rebuilt and fortified Tamworth in 913, and made it her capital when she kicked the Danes out of Mercia. Aethelflaed was the aunt of St Editha of Tamworth, the parish church’s patron saint; and the aunt, too, of Athelstan, King of the English from 927 to 939 AD, said to have been raised in Tamworth.
The historian Michael Wood has said that, without Aethelflaed, there would be no England as we know it. We would all be speaking Danish!
Tamworth is a rare British powerhouse; it’s also where Robert Peel’s constituency was, and close to his country seat and burial spot in Drayton Bassett.
Descendants of Robert Peel will be at the church service to salute Ethelfleda – and to salute Tamworth, home to monarchs and prime ministers.
Yes, Minister and Heartbeat star Derek Fowlds is to return to the stage at the age of eighty. This July, the actor
will appear in a new production of Giles Cole’s The Weatherman in the south of France, aimed at expats. The play is at the Théâtre le Colombier in the village of Les Cabannes, next to Cordes-surCiel in the Tarn.
‘I know it’s more than sixteen years since I last trod the boards, and appearing on stage at my age is bonkers, but the play – which is about two old friends who meet up in the pub and discuss life, love, sex and death – made me laugh so much that I had to do it,’ says Fowlds, the much-loved Bernard in Yes, Minister. ‘I suspect it will either be a great success or I’ll have a heart attack on stage and meet my maker!’
We are quietly confident it will be the former, Bernard.
The Windrush generation have had a hard time of it in recent weeks. How heart-lifting, then, to see the pictures from Windrush: Portrait of a Generation at the Oxo gallery on London’s South Bank (24th May-10th June). The show is being held to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the arrival in Tilbury of the ship Empire Windrush on 22nd June 1948. It brought 492 migrants, mostly Jamaican men, to the UK and was the start of the wave of migration from the West Indies that changed the face of Britain. The exhibition consists of eight photostories, some in colour and some in black and white, which tell the south London stories of these first Caribbean migrants. A Caribbean dance, Clapham
The Oldie was instrumental in gaining Sir Ken Dodd his longoverdue knighthood by naming him Oldie of the Year – despite the unfair stain of suspicion left by his acquittal for tax evasion.
With the Derby upon us, can’t we do the same for Lester Piggott? He was found guilty of the same offence and served a prison sentence, but that was a quarter of a century ago.
Jeffrey Archer was imprisoned for perjury, a far more shameful crime, and continues to be a peer and member of the House of Lords, albeit voluntarily non-participatory.
It takes an Act of Parliament to strip a peer of a title. Piggott was stripped of his OBE. That at least could surely be restored. But, as he’s the winner of nine Derbys, is it not time we forgave and forgot – and recognised this supreme horseman, and recommended him for a knighthood, as the monarch has done in the case of Sir Anthony Mccoy?
Regarding the Derby, both versions, for horses at Epsom and greyhounds at Towcester, will be run on the same day this year, Saturday 2nd June.
As the Greyhound Derby is in the evening and Towcester’s nearest station, Milton Keynes, is thirty minutes from London by train, even punters without the convenience of a helicopter will consecutively be able to attend the blue ribands of turf and track.
After years in the doldrums, greyhound racing is enjoying a renaissance. The quicker turnover of races, three to every horse race, fits the new age of instant global communication and shortattention spans. Punters internationally, not least in China, have re-awoken to the sport’s potential.
As Jonathan Kay wrote recently in the Racing Post, of Towcester’s inaugural 2017 hosting of the Derby (founded 1927), ‘My own best memory was the roar in the very first race… That was the moment you knew the Derby had truly arrived in the Northamptonshire countryside.’
On 10th June (until 8th July), Asthall Manor, once home to the Mitford family, will open its doors to On Form, the biennial exhibition of contemporary stone sculpture that has become one of England’s favourite summer fixtures.
Four hundred works by forty sculptors will be on display in the ballroom and throughout the landscape – along the river, in the tall grass, deep in the woods, among the daisies, cornflowers and poppies in the wildflower meadows, and by the church, as well as in the more formal gardens.
‘There is no trail or path,’ explains Rosie Pearson,
Asthall Manor’s owner. ‘The idea is that the exhibition flows. It’s about exploration and joy – we have a unique please do touch policy.’
Mitford obsessives can make the short pilgrimage to nearby St Mary’s, Swinbrook, where four of the Mitford sisters are buried. If that isn’t enough, the local pub, the Swan Inn, Swinbrook, is lined with Mitfordiana.
Also at St Mary’s are the marvellous Fettiplace tombs: six reclining knights laid out on a series of shallow stone shelves: a ‘sepulchral couchette’, as that great church-crawler Alan Bennett put it.
The Old Un would like to think his mention of John Cage’s Four Minutes, Thirty-three Seconds –a large dollop of silence – being available on itunes inspired a group of young Quakers in Nottingham.
They have released a thirty-minute podcast called Silence Special, a recording of one of their ‘meetings of worship’, in which people get together and remain completely quiet for half an hour.
As with live performances of Four Minutes, ThirtyThree Seconds, there is the occasional cough, and, unlike with Cage’s piece, there is somewhere in the distance the ticking of a clock. But otherwise, nothing.
Podcast presenter Jessica Hubbard-bailey says, ‘Meeting for worship is rarely perfect silence. There are little shuffles, the creaking of chairs… But in this circle of quiet contemplation and breathing, the stillness opens up a space in which we can listen and wait, and which is both comfortable and uncomfortable, holy and ordinary, still and dynamic.’
She and her group say they hope Silence Special will make what they do more accessible to non-quakers and ‘the Quaker-curious’.
If that’s you, go to http:// youngquakerpodcast.libsyn. com
The Old Un was delighted to bump into Julie Felix, the songstress who became a household name in the 1960s after a chance meeting in a lift with David Frost led to her residency on The Frost Report, singing protest songs and folk ditties. Julie (pictured then and now) was at London’s Regent Street Cinema for a round-table women’s discussion on how the hippie counterculture was as sexist as the establishment it sought to overthrow. ‘Back then, I did just go to bed with some men because they were so persistent,’ she confessed. ‘It was a means of defence because they might have gotten rough. I’ve never been so inspired as I am now by the Metoo movement.’
And drugs? ‘A friend went to Texas and came back with some cactus. Someone said, “Take this.” I thought they were stupid. It’s just cactus – it won’t do anything. Then a dandelion said hello to me – and I got into the whole experience. We were taking peyote.
‘We said we were going to live fast and die young, but it didn’t happen. I’ll be eighty in June!’
Still looking amazing and in good voice, Julie will play a birthday concert at Charing Cross Theatre on 17th June, three days after her eightieth.
That evocative phrase ‘speed the plough’ conjures up the cart-horse, not its nemesis, the increasingly gigantic tractor.
Now these noble animals, particularly the Suffolk Punch, could be extinct in a decade, for want of £10 million, according to the Rare Breeds Survival Trust. As annual agricultural subsidies amount to £3 billion, this is a trifling sum. Other cart-horses, such as the Shire and the Clydesdale, are also at risk, but not so critically. Cart-horses were hugely depleted in the First World War, when they were used at the front to haul heavy artillery. Their numbers increased steadily thereafter, until tractors became affordable.
The appeal to find additional funds for the National Livestock Gene Bank, the only hope for the threatened breeds, stands at about £25,000. It’s a cause which would surely have been supported by philanthropist Paul Getty, once owner of this magazine. In his absence, it’s up to Mr Gove to spend our money to rescue the Suffolk Punch and its fellow cart-horses.
Wise words from the great Willie Nelson in his new song Bad Breath: ‘Bad breath is better than no breath at all.’