The Old Un’s Notes
Blistering barnacles! It’s hard to believe the wonderful Captain Pugwash cartoonist, John Ryan (1921-2009), would have celebrated his 100th birthday on 4th March this year.
Ryan came from an intriguing family. His father was the diplomat Sir Andrew Ryan, his mother was a granddaughter of one of Byron’s physicians and his aunt Mary was the first female university professor in Britain.
Captain Pugwash – fond of crying, ‘Dolloping doubloons!’, ‘Coddling catfish!’ and ‘Kipper me capstans!’ – first appeared in the launch issue of the Eagle on 14th April 1950 and was later adapted for television.
A pompous, portly figure with a goatee beard, Pugwash wore a skull-and-crossbones hat and a blue frockcoat over a red-and-black horizontally striped shirt, inspired by the colours of Ampleforth College’s rugby team. Ryan was at the school.
Ryan once said, ‘Pugwash has two qualities which I believe are present in all of us to some degree: cowardice and greed. It is the conflict between these opposing emotions that makes the stories work.
‘It may be that the Captain is popular because we all have something in common with him.’
The Old Un couldn’t agree more with the sentiment of Oldie contributor Quentin Letts’s new book, Stop Bloody Bossing Me About: How We Need to Stop Being Told What to Do.
In one sublime paragraph, he lists things that have been banned by busybodies over the years: ‘Carveries, Tiktok, blowing a trombone or trumpet, bedding your neighbour, cotton buds, drinks parties in Bolton…’
Steven Berkoff has called on London’s authorities to pull down the temporary ice-cream and cherry sculpture on the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square and replace it with a statue of acting legend Laurence Olivier.
‘Olivier was one of Britain’s greatest actors and played a big part in making London’s Theatreland what it is today – the pride of the world,’ says the 83-year-old actor. ‘And he’s all but ignored – it’s shocking! Acting and the theatre are so fundamental a part of British culture but they [the authorities] would rather put an ice-cream cone with a cherry on the fourth plinth. Are they dumb? They need to wake up.’
Oldie contributor Jonathan Meades is bringing out a collection of articles from 1988 t0 2020, Pedro and Ricky Come Again.
The Old Un particularly enjoyed Meades’s tribute to the great Sir Nikolaus Pevsner (1902-83), the peerless author of the Buildings of England guides to the counties.
Meades calls the guides ‘the most magnificent work of British popular scholarship of the past half-century’. He adds that ‘Pevsner changed this country’s attitude to
architecture more than any man since Ruskin, whose inspired earnestness he shared’. Sadly, though, Leipzig-born Pevsner ‘loved his adopted country more than it loved him’.
Three cheers for Pevsner! Three cheers for the new edition of his guide to County Durham (see page 84)! Three cheers for inspired earnestness!
By chance, the Old Un booked into the Prebendal Farm B&B in Bishopstone over 30 years ago and was befriended by Rob and Jo Selbourne.
In 1904, Rob’s great grandfather took on the tenancy of Prebendal Farm: a mixed 1,000 acres of sheep, dairy and wheat.
Four generations later, come Lady Day (25th March), rent won’t be paid to the Church Commissioners as usual. Rob and Jo are retiring.
One hundred years of farming and family memorabilia must be cleared out, including silver teapots and antique ‘brown furniture’. Down in the cellar, forgotten butter churns, meat-mincers and a cast-iron marmaladeshredder have surprising price tags.
Outbuildings contain an abundance of agricultural history: a binder for making sheaves of corn, spares for tractors long since discarded and galvanised buckets.
Rob admits to a momentary pang of grief as a precious reminder of the past is hauled into one of the numerous gigantic skips. Then it’s gone – and on to the next load. The end of an era indeed.
On 15th March 1961, Jaguar unveiled a car that mesmerised all visitors to the Geneva Motor Show.
The E-type was a sublime combination of the famed 3,781cc engine and coachwork.
And perhaps its most astounding aspect was the performance. Jaguar loaned a prototype coupé to the chaps at Autocar magazine – they achieved 150.4 mph and 0-60 mph in 6.9 seconds.
At a time when a Hillman Minx’s top speed was 82 mph, and a police Wolseley 6/99 could barely manage 98 mph, such figures were virtually science fiction. British Pathé’s archive contains 1961 footage of a Roadster on the speedlimit-free M1, with other traffic looking antediluvian by comparison.
Some journalists grumbled about the brakes, transmission and seating but such cavils could never detract from the E-type’s impact on British motoring. As William Boddy of Motor Sport wrote in 1962, ‘No car could be safer, more docile, instil greater confidence, than this stupendously clever 150-mph Jaguar.’
While we’re talking about Jaguars… Calling all owners of Jaguar SS cars, especially the SS100.
These cars were popular after the war with British servicemen. right up until the mid-1960s. A lot of them can still be found near military bases such as Aldershot, Andover, Middle Wallop, Burtonwood and Oakham.
Grahame Bull, a classic-car fan and Oldie reader, is keen to find out the survival rate of the SS100S, SS90S, SS1 tourers and coupés.
Contact grahamebull@ tiscali.co.uk if you’re a proud owner or former owner of one of these glorious Jags.
27th March marks the 90th anniversary of the death of writer and journalist Arnold Bennett (1867-1931).
Bennett was best known for his Potteries novels. They began with Anna of the Five Towns (1902), later a TV series, written while he was editor of Woman magazine.
He then lived for ten years in France, where he wrote The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) and Clayhanger (1910), both of which became TV series, and The Card (1911), later a film (1952) starring Alec Guinness.
Despite his success as a writer – or perhaps because of it – he was not well liked by the literary establishment.
In her diary, Virginia Woolf said he was ‘an old bore; an egotist’ and accused him of having ‘a shopkeeper’s view of literature’. Clive Bell, in Old Friends, said he was ‘an insignificant little man and ridiculous to boot’.
Somerset Maugham called him ‘cocksure and bumptious and … rather common’.
Bennett had an omelette named after him, created by the chef at the Savoy Grill.
According to the Oxford
English Dictionary, the first recorded use of the adjective ‘sexy’ was in a letter he wrote in 1896.
Bennett died of typhoid on 27th March 1931 after drinking tap water in a French hotel.
Anthony Powell enthusiasts will lap up The Ordeals of Captain Jenkins by Giles Jenkins – aka Uncle Giles in Powell’s sequence A Dance to the Music of Time.
Uncle Giles was, in theory, a fictional character – the unreliable uncle of Nick Jenkins, the sequence’s narrator. Who knows what hand Robin Bynoe, the editor of the new book, had in actually writing it?
But then Powell (19052000) was a master of the grey area that lies at the intersection of fiction and non-fiction, given that Dance mirrored but didn’t slavishly copy his own life.
As novelist and keen Powellite D J Taylor writes, ‘It’s as if Sebastian Flyte had written a commentary on Brideshead Revisited.’
The Old Un was much buoyed by the enthusiasm of Viscount Gage, 86, in his new memoir, My Life So Far.
Landowner Nicolas Gage, who lives at Firle Place, East Sussex, impressively fathered a son at 75.
He writes, ‘The late Alan Moorehead, author of Gallipoli, suffered a