The Old Un’s Notes
The Old Un, like the rest of the country, is much moved by the centenary of the end of the First World War.
Surely, though, he wondered, it only got called the First World War when the Second World War came along.
Not so, he discovered on watching an old episode of QI, the ignorance-bashing quiz show masterminded by John Lloyd, the Blackadder producer who writes about the ultra-moving closing scene of that series on page 16 of this issue.
In fact, the First World War got its name as early as 1918 – before it was even over. In September of that year, Lt Col Charles à Court Repington, in his diary, writes of a meeting with a Major Johnson from Harvard University. Discussing what the war should be called, the two struggled to find an answer.
‘The War’ wouldn’t last, due to the inevitability of another. ‘The German War’ would give too much credit to the Germans and there was already another Great War – the Napoleonic War. Repington suggested ‘The World War’ and, after more discussion, they both agreed on ‘The First World War’, to remind future generations that the history of the world was the history of war.
Two years later, Repington even wrote a book called The First World War, a full 19 years before the tragedy of the Second World War got going. Aren’t you irritated by those adverts for Gocompare, the financial services price comparison website – the ones where a plump opera singer keeps on singing, ‘Go compare’?
Well, at least the tune has a venerable history. In 1917, the Americans joined the First World War to the chorus of the same tune.
Called Over There, it was written by George M Cohan just after America joined the war, and it topped the charts four times.
The original lyrics are much better than the Go Compare version: Over there, over there, Send the word, send the word
over there That the Yanks are coming,
the Yanks are coming.
For his service to music, Cohan received the Congressional Gold Medal from Franklin D Roosevelt in 1936. James Cagney, playing Cohan, sings the song in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942).
The Old Un fears that Donald Trump nicked the song for his 2016 Presidential campaign, when three star-spangled cheerleaders sang about the ‘enemies of freedom’, to the backing of the cheery tune. Next time the Old Un hears that tune, he will blank out memories of Trump and fat opera singers, and think of brave Americans marching off to war.
At Gyles Brandreth’s celebration for Oscar Wilde’s 164th birthday at Grosvenor House, the Old Un spotted the vibrant 93-yearold Thelma Ruby, an Oldie of the Year laureate, floating into Grosvenor House in black parachute silk. (Gyles writes about Thelma on page 9 of this issue).
Earlier that day, she had also been spotted, wafting down the staircase into the Brasserie Zédel near Piccadilly Circus.
‘I was at the annual reunion,’ she explained, ‘of the six remaining gels from For Amusement Only, which ran at the Apollo for two years from 1956 to 1958.’
The six actresses of a certain age get together every year to be royally welcomed for lunch at Zédel.
Do any readers recall For Amusement Only, one of many ‘intimate revues’ that flourished in the late 1950s?
‘The audience was a sea of white – with hankies wiping tears of laughter from their eyes,’ says Thelma. ‘They really did fall into the aisles.’
In one of Thelma’s favourite sketches, written by the great Alan Melville, she and Hugh Paddick were in a repertory theatre where they performed Romeo and
Juliet and Macbeth on alternate nights.
‘Hugh came on as Romeo, and I thought I was doing Lady Macbeth. And when he tries to climb up to my balcony, I cry out, “I have given suck!” – and he falls off the balcony.’
The men in the revue, including Ron Moody, are no longer with us.
But the show’s success proved a watershed in the careers of Pat Lancaster (91), Barbara Young (88), Vivienne Martin (88), Audrey Nicholson (83) and Helen Cotterill (79) whose combined ages, with Thelma’s, come to 522.
Thelma is still working away. You might have caught her on ITV in October, in three episodes of the Jack Dee moving-to-the-country sitcom, Bad Move.
The village is up in arms about fracking, at which Thelma’s character says, ‘Well, if you’re going to use that language, I’m leaving’ and sweeps out. Ronald Searle is back! His deeply moving book, To the Kwai – and Back. War Drawings 1939-45, has just been reissued in paperback by Souvenir Press for £15.
In 1939, Searle volunteered for the army and, in 1941, he set out for Singapore. Within a month of his arrival, he was a prisoner of the Japanese.
After 14 months in a prisoner-of-war camp, he was sent to the infamous work camp on the Burma Railway. And then, in 1944, he went on to the horrific Changi Prison in Singapore. He was one of the few British soldiers to survive imprisonment.
The great creator of St Trinian’s and illustrator of Molesworth died in 2011, aged 91, but those dreaded years always left a mark on his darkly brilliant pictures.
He drew his fellow prisoners and his sadistic guards on scraps of smuggled paper, stained with dirt and sweat. The drawings capture the tragedy and despair of imprisonment, along with jaunty observations – as in the picture printed here.
Peter Brookes, the Times cartoonist, says of Searle’s war art, ‘It is a hugely moving indictment of man’s inhumanity to man that not even Goya’s The Disasters of War can surpass.’
Searle himself described his pictures during his imprisonment as ‘the graffiti of a condemned man, intending to leave a rough witness of his passing through, but who found himself – to his surprise and delight – among the reprieved’.
The sleuths of Literary London are whipping out their magnifying glasses and desperately dusting the streets of Belgravia for clues. They’re all trying to identify the author of a new anonymous website written by the self-styled ‘Pissed-off Toff’.
The ‘POT’ – to give him a less offensive name – fulminates amusingly against a London taken over by oligarchs; unbearable noises (leaf-blowers, police sirens); and annoying words such as ‘busy’ (‘Puritanical, selfrighteous and downright rude,’ says POT).
The Old Un used to think he was pretty irritable until he came across POT’S ruminations. The Old Un can actually feel his blood pressure subsiding at the comforting thought that someone somewhere is even angrier than he is.
But who is this inspirational figure? The Old Un will continue to make further investigations.
Christina Ratcliffe – half Vera Lynn, half James Bond – was a forgotten Ratcliffe – Valletta ferry, 1943
hero of the Second World War until now.
A musical about her life – Star of Strait Street – is on at the OSO Arts Centre in Barnes on 13th and 14th November. At the end of November, a new biography – Paul Mcdonald’s Ladies Of Lascaris – Christina Ratcliffe and the Forgotten Heroes of Malta’s War – will be published.
During the war, Ratcliffe came to entertain the troops in the barracks and gun sites of Valletta, Malta. When not singing with her troupe, she worked in the underground RAF operational headquarters beneath the city’s Lascaris Bastion, plotting the defence of the island.
Ratcliffe, decorated for her contributions to the war effort, planned to leave the island in 1940 to return to her fiancé in Tunis. But, while on Malta, she fell in love with Adrian Warburton, an RAF pilot. Warburton was killed in action over Germany on 12th April 1944, but Ratcliffe stayed on the island until her death in the late 1980s.
How good that Christina of George Cross Island – as she came to be known when Malta won the George Cross in 1942 – is back in the limelight.
Eagle-eyed Oldie readers will find some regular columnists in different locations in the magazine this issue.
The Old Un apologises for any irritation caused. The idea is to make the magazine an even more enjoyable read. The Travel section is now much bigger with the addition of Oldie stars Lucinda Lambton, Louise Flind and Patrick Barkham. John Mcewen’s Bird of the Month column and Brigid Keenan’s Getting Dressed column are now in Pursuits, along with Matthew Webster’s Digital Life and Margaret Dibben’s Money Matters. Rachel Johnson’s Golden Oldies column migrates to Arts. And Stephen Glover’s Media Matters, David Horspool’s History and Johnny Grimond’s Words and Stuff have found a cosy literary berth after the Books pages.
Rest assured, not a single columnist has gone. And the Old Un hopes that, in time, readers will enjoy the new, more logical order of things.
The cover price has also risen by 25p to £4.50 because of the increase in print and paper costs. But subscription rates remain completely unchanged.
Subscriptions now make for an £11.50 saving over the newsstand price for 12 issues – or a 27 per cent discount - and the Oldie will be keeping that rate until any cover price rise in the future.