Radio Valerie Grove

‘Urgh, I look like The Wreck of the Hesperus,’ said Jenny Eclair on Woman’s Hour.

‘Oh, I love The Wreck of the Hesperus,’ said Jane Garvey. ‘Where does it come from, I wonder?’ She appealed to listeners: ‘Can anyone help us out? Email us.’

Listeners obliged with the story behind Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous poem of 1840. Everyone who went to school in our day would know it. Later generations might not; and Google generations won’t ever have to bother. I remember tweed-suited Miss Goudie telling us that poems learnt by heart could always be useful to take our minds off pain, eg when having an injection at the dentist. ‘It was the schooner Hesperus / That sailed the wintry sea / And the skipper had taken his little daughter / To bear him companeee...’

Thanks to Miss Goudie I have often rattled through these words under my breath, at the dentist’s and in the labour ward. I told this to my youngest, Oliver, 35, and to my astonishment he

proceeded to recite The Wreck of the Hesperus from start to finish, with dramatic evocations of the proud sea captain’s scornful laugh and his tragic daughter lashed to the mast, both perishing on the reef of Norman’s Woe.

No, he did not learn it at birth. He got it from The Muppet Show. The wreck of the Hesperus is one of the tattoos on Groucho Marx’s Lydia the Tattooed Lady, as sung by Kermit the Frog. Oliver learnt it from Google.

A last word about that contentious Archive on 4, on the fiftieth anniversary of Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech. The hoo-ha was understandable, given Windrush injustices, Home Office immigration bunglings, and ongoing bloodshed from knife and gun. Lord Adonis’s objections notwithstanding, Powell’s speech was read in toto by Ian Mcdiarmid – whose uncanny performance as Enoch I saw last year in the play What Shadows.

But it is also 25 years since Radio 4’s Word of Mouth did a telephone poll of listeners, asking who is the best practitioner of the English language? Amazingly, the winner was J Enoch Powell, aged 81, with twice as many votes as the next contender, Alistair Cooke. I happened to deliver news of his victory to Powell, who had not heard the programme.

‘That’s typical,’ he confessed. ‘My lack of inquisitiveness as to what is said or divulged about me. It is a form of contempt.’

‘For the listeners who voted for him?’ I asked. ‘Contempt for public comment. Indifference to what is said or printed about me.’ Had he always felt like that? ‘Always is a long time. I would borrow the parliamentary draughtsman’s phrase, and say “at all material times”.’

Powell, sitting straight-backed in his Belgravia drawing room, armed with his 1925 Lewis and Short Latin dictionary from King Edward’s School, Birmingham, was mercilessly precise. Latin had given him ‘the ability to think with a particular kind of logic and severity’. And he added that, if only he had used, instead of ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’, the original Latin, the impact might have been non-existent. ‘I had written Et Tiberim multo spumantem sanguine cerno from Virgil in the Aeneid,’ he said. ‘But at the last minute, I thought, “I can’t be so pedantic.” ’

Which brings us to pig Latin. Eddie Mair on PM replayed the Sainsbury’s CEO singing We’re in the Money, from 42nd Street. Then he played Ginger Rogers singing it, in Gold Diggers of 1933. But what was that gobbledegook in the middle? It turned out that producer Darryl F Zanuck had heard Ginger rehearsing jokily in pig Latin. Zanuck said, ‘Keep it in.’ Being Eddie Mair, with his (sometimes tiresome) terrier-like sleuthing, he even brought in a prof of linguistics to explain how pig Latin became the schoolboys’ secret code.