Grace’s poetic stage return
QUESTION Is it true that Grace Kelly performed at the Edinburgh Festival?
GRACE Kelly’s light shone brightly and briefly in Hollywood. She made 11 films in five years before retiring at age 26 to marry Prince Rainier of Monaco.
In that time she won an Oscar for best actress for her role in The Country Girl (1954) and became world famous for her roles in three Alfred Hitchcock films: Dial M For Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954) and To Catch A Thief (1955).
Despite repeated offers, she steadfastly refused to return to Hollywood. In 1976, writer/director John Carroll was asked to create a programme for the Edinburgh Festival to celebrate America’s Bicentennial. He was delighted when Gwen Robyns, the princess’s biographer, recommended the princess.
Robyns explained that she had a deep love of literature – poetry in particular.
Princess Grace was, in August 1976, one of three performers in a poetry recital. The audience in Edinburgh’s St Cecilia’s Hall gave an enthusiastic reception to readings from poets such as Anne Bradstreet, a Quaker immigrant born in England in 1612, through to 20th-century luminaries Ogden Nash, TS Eliot and Robert Frost. Princess Grace’s fellow performers were US stage star and singer Richard Kiley and mellifluously voiced UK actor Richard Pasco, but there was little doubt who was the main attraction.
These performances were followed by a BBC2 special on September 9, at Edinburgh’s Signet Library. The special featured other acts from the festival, including the English tenor Peter Pears, the Welsh harpist Osian Ellis, the American Brass Quintet and the Scottish Baroque Ensemble. The princess was praised in particular for her rendition of Elinor Wylie’s poem Wild Peaches.
Grace was tragically killed in 1982 in a car crash in the hills above Monaco, aged just 52. Jayne Britten, Thorpeness, Suffolk.
QUESTION What was the reason Nicholas Wood was dubbed the Great Eater of Kent?
NICHOLAS Wood was given the nickname in the 1630 book The Great Eater Of Kent, or Part Of The Admirable Teeth And Stomach Exploits Of Nicholas Wood.
It describes his voracious appetite and how, in the early 1600s, he left his work as a farmer in Kent and travelled around the UK, amazing visitors at local fairs by consuming the likes of 60 eggs, mutton, large pies and a black pudding at a single sitting. His favourite food was cow’s liver but he wasn’t overly fussy.
His biography recounts how he ‘did eat a whole sheep, of 16 shillings price, and raw at that, at one meal’. It adds: ‘Another time he eat [sic] 30 dozen of pigeons. At Sir William Sedley’s he eat as much as would have sufficed 30 men. At the Lord Wotton’s in Kent he eat at one meal fourscore and four rabbits... He made an end of a whole hog at once and after it swallowed three pecks of damsons’.
Wood’s performances were promoted by the poet John Taylor, who referred to him as Duke AllPaunch and the Kentish Tenterbelly, and encouraged onlookers to make wagers on how much he could consume.
Wagers were not normally lost unless skulduggery was involved, such as when Wood was fed 12 loaves of ale-soaked bread and fell asleep. He died in poverty, having sold his Kent farmland to pay for his touring expenses and eating exhibitions.
He was one of many showmen in the 17th and 18th centuries who made a living in this way. Some thought nothing of eating tortoises, bats, moles and owls – or even stones, corks and candles – to please their audiences.
Ian MacDonald, Billericay, Essex.
QUESTION Did Princess Anne write to Elvis asking him to perform in Britain?
IN the early 1960s, music fans were desperate to see Elvis perform in Britain and teen magazine Serenade went as far as suggesting that 11-year-old Princess Anne should write to the king of rock ’n’ roll.
The publication ran an If Elvis Came To London feature, with a series of mock-up photos showing the singer as a Piccadilly Circus traffic bobby, in a bearskin performing sentry duty outside Buckingham palace, as a Beefeater, and as himself outside the London Palladium.
On September 25, 1962, Elvis was invited by the Crown to attend the 1962 Royal Variety Performance. However, this was declined. Elvis was forbidden to work abroad by his manager, Colonel Tom Parker. This was because the colonel was an illegal immigrant from the Netherlands; he had no passport and feared leaving the United States and being unable to return.
That year, Elvis could have joined Bob Hope, Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Eartha Kitt and Cleo Laine for a show at the London Palladium.
Michael Thorne, London.
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