The Old Un’s Notes
Before his death in December, at the age of 80, Clive James had seen a copy of a new book about him – So Brightly at the Last: Clive James and the Passion for Poetry by Ian Shircore.
What really worried James, says Shircore, wasn’t death, but ‘the dread suspicion that the obituaries, when they eventually come, will fail to give him credit for any of his achievements in the fields of literature, music and cultural criticism’.
The obituaries paid attention, in fact, to all those things. Several of them mentioned one of his best poems, The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered, which appears in full in the new book.
In one bravura passage in the poem, James rejoices in the company the remaindered book will keep ‘in the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs’. Among the other remaindered books he mentions is Pertwee’s Promenades and Pierrots: One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment.
James continues:
‘His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor’s Book of Boobs!,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
“My boobs will give everyone hours of fun.” ’
The Old Un is delighted to see that the books actually exist and were both published in 1979. The Pertwee is Bill Pertwee, as in Hodges, the ARP Warden in Dad’s Army. And Barbara Windsor’s Book of Boobs! is available online for only a couple of quid. That’s the Old Un’s birthday present sorted out.
The Old Un loves a bit of history with his pint of bitter. So he’ll be racing down to a Devon pub that’s just had its exceptional ceiling restored.
The St George and Dragon in Clyst St George, near Exeter, was used by wartime airmen from the nearby airfield, now Exeter Airport. Before they were scrambled for take-off, they left their autographs on the ceiling – which was taken down in 1975.
Recovering and restoring the ceiling has been a labour of love for Robin and Suzannah Holwell. Parts of the old ceiling were found in a
storeroom at Exmouth’s Royal Air Forces Association.
‘Suzannah’s father served in the RAF as a Lancaster bomber tail-gunner,’ says Robin. ‘I’ve researched some of the 150 squiggles. The Polish crew of a Wellington bomber from 305 Squadron signed during 10th and 11th January 1943. Two nights later, they were all killed returning from a bombing mission over Brest.’
Another signature is from Sgt Albert Stilin, killed crashing his Hurricane into the pub’s roof in 1942. Others include ‘Blackie’ Williams, DFC, DSO (pictured), ‘Dixie’ Dean, the first pilot to down a V-1 Doodlebug, and Michael Shand, the last man from the Great Escape tunnel at Stalag Luft III.
The pub was once a dormitory for fliers. Aisla Cobb, 97 (second left in the picture above), was the landlord’s daughter. ‘When the boys got locked out, they climbed into my bedroom. I left the window open.’
It’s very much worth a visit – and several commemorative pints.
See Turner’s pictures in Turner’s house! That’s the mouthwatering prospect, from 10th January until 29th March, at J M W Turner’s house in Twickenham.
For the first time, his pictures, on loan from Tate Britain, will be on show at his home. Five paintings of the neighbouring Thames are in the exhibition, including this one (right), painted just down the road – or just down the river – from his house: Walton Reach (1805). Oxford University isn’t all gulls’ eggs, Lord Sebastian Flyte and teddy bears.
Tim Holman’s new book, An Oxford Diary – Three Surprising Years at Trinity College 1977-1980, gives a much more convincing account of real Oxford life than Brideshead Revisited.
During his time as a history undergraduate, Holman recorded his life in minuscule detail and has ended up with a minor masterpiece. Adrian Mole goes to Oxford, you might call it. 22nd June 1978: ‘Went shopping and bought a complete set of postage stamps showing all the kings and queens of England: hopefully this will be a suitable birthday present for Melanie.’
Melanie’s reaction is not recorded.
Occasionally, a little glamour intervenes, in the shape of Holman’s friend Michael
Crick, later the terrier-like TV political reporter. 29th September 1978: ‘Michael Crick put in an appearance, with his silly new curly hair style. For lunch, had fish and chips in Woolworth’s. Had an evening meal of chicken pie and chips in the White Horse. Spent the evening in my room; did a bit of reading on Napoleon III.’
And if anyone wanted an accurate picture of university life in 1970s Britain, they need only study the entry for 17th January 1979:
‘Went along to college and had breakfast there for the first time this term. Spent my W H Smith voucher on a blank cassette, a record-cleaning cloth and a single.’
Cleo Rocos writes movingly in this issue about working with – and being engaged to – Kenny Everett. The article includes a portrait of Everett’s alter ego, the bearded, glamorous superstar Cupid Stunt.
Cupid was invented by Barry Cryer, with co-writer
Ray Cameron. Cleo and Barry were recently reunited in the Oldie office (pictured).
‘I’d been watching TV,’ Barry says. ‘And there was an actress who came on an interview show, who’d been
starring in a nude axe-murder film. She said, deadly seriously, “But it’s all done in the best possible taste.” ’
The line became Cupid Stunt’s immortal catchphrase.
Now, thank God, the election is over, we can put away political things.
That doesn’t mean putting away The Sayings of Disraeli (Duckworth, £8.99), a new book edited by his biographer the late Robert Blake, with an introduction by Alistair Lexden.
Disraeli was that rare thing – a politician with a hinterland. And the slim volume is full of blessedly non-political bons mots.
Here is Dizzy to his wife: ‘Why, you are more like a mistress than a wife [when he returns to a supper of pie from Fortnum & Mason and a bottle of champagne].’
And here he is on anecdotes: ‘Be amusing. Never tell unkind stories; above all, never tell long ones.’
And – rejoice, rejoice! –
Disraeli was a fan of oldies. The final entry in the book reads, ‘The disappointed are always young.’
Oldie contributor John Ogden has published a memoir, Antique Drum (Thornton’s), about his time as a soldier in Kenya, Suez and Aden.
The book opens with a tantalising murder mystery in Kenya in the mid-1950s, when Ogden served in the Second Battalion of the Prince Regent’s Light Infantry, fighting in the Mau Mau emergency.
One night on the troopship over, his commanding officer, Colonel Dennis Parker Brown, went missing. At dawn, a lifebelt was spotted, floating, with a severed arm clutching on to it. On the little finger of the hand was the colonel’s signet ring.
The colonel wasn’t a popular man. Ogden says, ‘One minute, he was an educated, charming and understanding commanding officer, the next an hysterical, screaming tyrant.’
There were plenty of suspects in the supposed murder of D P Brown, or ‘Down Penis Brown’, as he was known, thanks to his reputation as a puritan and a spoilsport. As one officer, Burgo Howard, said, ‘Almost everyone felt like murdering him.’
No one was ever caught for the murder – and perhaps Brown threw himself overboard. But what a subject for Agatha Christie – The Mystery of the Severed Arm and the Colonel’s Signet Ring.
A new show – Bill Brandt/henry Moore – celebrates the meeting between Brandt the photographer (1904-1983) and Moore the sculptor and painter (1898-1986). More than 200 pictures and sculptures show how both men responded to the British landscape and people. The show is at the Hepworth Wakefield (7th February-31st May 2020); then at the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich (22nd November 202028th February 2021).
The two men met in 1942 when Brandt photographed Moore in his studio for a feature in Lilliput magazine, combining the two artists’ pictures of civilians sheltering in the London Underground during the Blitz. The issue was the first time the two artists’ work was shown side by side.
We’re not showing them quite side by side in this issue of The Oldie. Here is Brandt’s 1960 picture Nude, East Sussex Coast. And on page 61 you’ll find a lovely Henry Moore.
The Old Un is a fan of the useful word ‘Anglo-saxon’. And he can’t bring himself to agree with the Irish historian Dr Mary Rambaran-olm, who recently suggested that ‘Anglo-saxon’ has white supremacist implications.
All the same, the Old Un was struck, on a recent visit to Paris, by how popular the word was in France.
On his way to Les Deux Magots, the café in Saint-Germain-des-prés, he dropped into the bookshop next door, L’écume des Pages (The Foam of Pages).
There, he found English books grouped together under the section heading ‘Anglo-saxons’. The heading embraced Americans and English; so Charles Dickens was nestling next to F Scott Fitzgerald.
The bookshop wasn’t a white supremacist outlet; nor was it an arch, ironic shop that might take pleasure in odd nomenclature. Might a francophone reader throw some light on the matter?
This year marks the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower’s landing in America. But the hallowed ship very nearly didn’t make it across the Atlantic.
As Stephen Tomkins writes in his new book, The Journey to the Mayflower (Hodder & Stoughton), the pilgrims had terrible problems with finding a ship in good nick.
Another ship, the Speedwell, brought some of the pilgrims from Leiden in the Netherlands. In Southampton, the Speedwell joined the Mayflower – thought to be over a decade old in 1620, and originally from London or Harwich.
Within days of leaving Southampton in August, the Speedwell sprang a leak. ‘There was a board a man might have pulled off with his fingers, two foot long,’ said Robert Cushman, a Canterbury grocer who had moved to Leiden with his fellow pilgrims, ‘where the water came in as at a mole hole.’
So both ships had to sail back to Dartmouth for repairs to the Speedwell. It took workmen a week and a half to find the leaks and mend them.
Once more, both ships set sail. And then, 300 miles beyond Land’s End, the Speedwell started leaking again. And so back both ships went to Plymouth. The Speedwell was left behind, as its passengers piled aboard the Mayflower, leaving 20 people behind.
Never was a ship so badly named as the Speedwell. And thank God for the future of America that the Mayflower stayed afloat until they anchored off Cape Cod on 11th November 1620.