Ephraim Hardcastle
WAS the Duke of Edinburgh popular in Edinburgh? As university Chancellor Philip gave a speech to students in the central courtyard in 1957, recalled in the TLS by former US student Jeffrey Meyers: ‘As he began I was astonished to see the students throw tomatoes and vegetables at him. Neither his equerries nor the police tried to stop them. The Duke, using his mortarboard as a shield, fended off the missiles until the end of the barrage.’ Adds Meyers: ‘I was impressed by his good nature, his coolness and his deft response.’
FORMER wine merchant Simon Berry has written an audio play, The Dame and the Showgirl, about daft poet Edith Sitwell’s Hollywood meeting with Marilyn Monroe in 1953. Edith and Marilyn, pictured, got on swimmingly with Sitwell concluding: ‘She was quiet, with great natural dignity and extremely intelligent.’ Was it a case of beauty meeting the beast? As a child Edith was forced to wear a nose truss held in place by a leather belt buckled around her forehead to correct what was termed a ‘cartilaginous deformity’.
HOTELIER Sir Rocco Forte rages against Boris’s £160,000 salary compared with academy heads paid £300,000, urging the establishment of a trust fund to pay for Downing Street refurbishments. ‘I would be one of the first to contribute,’ he adds. Despite his late father Charles being interned during WW2 as an Italian alien, he subsequently made a substantial financial contribution to Winston Churchill’s postwar accommodation. Deja vu?
RECALLING his jeering at Tory sleaze in 1994, former Labour minister Denis MacShane was told to shut up by fellow Labourite Chris Mullin saying: ‘It will be our turn soon Denis and we will be just as bad.’ Mystic Meg Mullin should take a bow. Nineteen years later MacShane was jailed for six months for expenses fraud.
CLASSICIST Mary Beard, extolling the superiority of Rome over Boris’s Athens in a 2015 debate, tells the Financial Times how she defeated the classics graduate PM. ‘I did my prep on fourth century BC Athenian orator Demosthenes, reading Johnson’s books and correctly reckoning he would pull out the same rhetoric. I think he thought he would win because he usually wins.’ She adds: ‘I shouldn’t say this because it’s awful – but I felt really pleased with myself.’
DISTRACTED by voting, Hartlepool residents might miss history repeating itself as naval gunboats patrol Jersey’s shore to repel French invaders. In the Napoleonic Wars, when French warships threatened England, one sank off Hartlepool with only one survivor, the ship’s monkey. Hartlepudlians had never a seen a monkey nor a Frenchman before. Concluding that the monkey was a French spy they hanged him, just to be on the safe side.