The Old Un’s Notes
The great Jerome K Jerome would have turned 160 on 2 May.
What’s more, his masterpiece, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), celebrates its 130th birthday this year.
The story – about a fortnight’s boating on the Thames, from Kingston to Oxford and back – took place in real life, with three actual men in a boat. As Jerome says in his preface, ‘All that has been done is to colour them.’
The narrator (‘J’) is Jerome himself and the two others in the rowing-boat were his regular travelling companions. ‘George’ was George Wingrave, who worked for Barclays Bank, and ‘Harris’ was Carl Hentschel, who ran a successful printing company.
As for Montmorency the fox-terrier? Jerome confessed in his autobiography, ‘There wasn’t any dog. I did not possess a dog in those days. Neither did George. Nor did Harris. Montmorency I evolved out of my inner consciousness. There is something of the dog, I take it, in most Englishmen. Dog friends that I came to know later have told me he was true to life.’
A follow-up book, Three Men on the Bummel (1900), has the same three men (minus the dog) on a bicycle ride through Germany’s Black Forest. It doesn’t quite have the same charm as when they were in a boat together.
But how reassuring to find that the three men were such good chums in real life, too.
It’s one thing to conduct an opera; quite another to make sure all the musicians are there, fully rehearsed, when the curtain goes up. That’s the harrowing job of the orchestra fixer.
At Longborough Festival Opera in Moreton-in-marsh in the Cotswolds, the orchestra fixer is Phil Head, aged 83.
After retiring from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in 2000, Phil swapped his fiddle and bow for complicated spreadsheets involving musicians, budgets and the sourcing of scores.
Phil depends on meticulous planning during the preceding winter. He has learnt never to book a rehearsal on a Thursday because an unexpected election will turn the rehearsal space into a polling station. If a clarinetist calls in sick, a flick through his wellthumbed contacts file means a replacement is on the way.
He sets out the village hall ready for rehearsal, placing chairs and music stands appropriately, alongside the all-important tea urn. The players, especially the cello section, are a dab hand at baking – so he is also chiefslicer of the lemon drizzle.
When the 2019 season kicks off on 5 June with Wagner’s Das Rheingold, it’s thanks in part to Longborough’s own modest golden oldie who’s already preparing the draft schedule for next year – and the year after…
Just as Greece has its olive belt, where the olive trees flourish, so Britain now has its vine belt, spreading further north and west with the passing seasons.
This spring, a newly planted vineyard is flourishing at Painswick Rococo Garden in Gloucestershire.
Painswick is a charming throwback to 1740 – when the house was designed as an English country gentleman’s pleasure garden; a place for holding intimate parties.
Laid out in a hidden valley, it is now the country’s only complete surviving rococo garden. This summer will also be the time to see recent
restoration work in the Exedra Garden, as the newly replanted borders will have matured – near those blooming vines.
You can see all this at Painswick, from 26 May (until 8 September), when an exhibition brings together sculptors from across Britain, with viewing platforms around the gardens, down onto a series of parterres.
Among the sculptures are a troupe of Capuchin monkeys scampering over the garden walls, made by Sophie Dickens, great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens.
Wine, sculpture, classical architecture… You could just as well be in ancient, sylvan Italy as deepest Gloucestershire.
The Cricket World Cup, beginning on 30 May at the Oval, has reminded The Oldie’s Kitchen Garden correspondent, Simon Courtauld, of a previous series, in 1983.
That year, three of the Australian team, Allan Border (captain), Dennis Lillee and David Hookes, came to Berkshire, where Courtauld (and Kim, his son, aged ten, pictured) were holding their annual cricket match at Welford Park (now used for filming The Great British Bake-off).
The scorebook records that Hookes made 25 and the fearsome fast bowler Lillee took two wickets and broke a bail. He either hurled the ball down without a run-up, or else sprinted in from 20 yards Wizards from Oz: Hookes; Border; Lillee; Kim Courtauld
away and bowled an innocuous, slow full toss. Courtauld proudly remembers hitting Border for six.
Also playing that day were the political journalist Michael Cockerell, Courtauld’s opening bowler, and Jeremy Deedes, son of Bill, who made 68 not out.
The opposing captain, Charles Benson, one-time racing correspondent of the Daily Express, had assembled a motley team including two now very successful trainers (Nicky Henderson and William Haggas), the exjockey Jimmy Lindley, and Julian Holloway, Stanley’s actor son.
Courtauld’s XI won by 19 runs.
The three Aussies were playing truant between two matches which they lost, against West Indies and India, and were knocked out of the competition. No doubt they shouldn’t have been in Berkshire on that summer Sunday, but it was a memorable day.
Still on the subject of cricket, this June marks the centenary of the Invalids.
A wandering cricket club, it was founded in 1919 by J C Squire, poet, critic and editor of the London Mercury magazine. The name was given in honour of several players wounded in WWI.
Squire, no great cricketer himself but passionate about the game, led his motley group of literary acquaintances to do battle against village sides each weekend. Club colours were hospital blue and old gold (inspired by the army officers’ hospital pyjamas), with a crest representing a pair of crossed crutches.
Teams in the early days included writers, journalists and actors, whose thirst for refreshment and approach to cricket was immortalised in A G Macdonell’s England, Their England, which contains the funniest description of a cricket match ever written.
Since Squire’s reign, there have been only three other captains. The bohemian element has faded somewhat and the cricket is less rustic but Macdonell’s scenario of the frantic late recruitment and general conviviality still obtains.
The club’s fixture list is full: every weekend during the summer, the Invalids are playing in an idyllic village setting somewhere in Kent or Sussex, close to a favourite inn.
Still on a sporting theme, let’s hear it for athletic geriatrics. May 24 sees the opening of
the Summer Fair and Octogenarian Games at Spring Grove School in Wye, Kent.
Joining the school pupils at their summer fair will be a group of intrepid octogenarians competing in a range of Olympic sports.
It’s time to add an extra comparative adjective to the Olympics’ Latin motto: ‘Citius, altius, fortius et senius’ – ‘Faster, higher, stronger and older.’
When it comes to preserving Britain’s heritage, it is often small groups of enthusiasts who end up doing all the heavy lifting.
This certainly goes for the fine volunteers behind the Stretcher Railing Society, who are campaigning to save London’s railings made of unused wartime stretchers.
In the anticipation of enormous casualties during the Second World War, more than 600,000 steel stretchers were mass-produced by Steelway in Wolverhampton to be used by Air Raid Protection officers.
The stretchers consisted of a wire mesh and two steel poles, while two kinks at either end of each pole allowed the stretcher to be rested on the ground and picked up easily.
Despite high casualties, fortunately not all the stretchers were used and authorities were left with enormous stockpiles at the end of the war. As railings across the city
had been removed to aid the production of munitions and war materials, this seemed like the perfect opportunity and stretchers were turned into railings. Across London, particularly in the south-east and east, they were welded together and fixed into position.
Today, there are still many post-war estates that have surviving stretcher railings, although it’s fair to say that most have seen better days.
Now history enthusiasts are pooling their efforts to preserve them and have called for passers-by to send in pictures of railing sightings.
Go to stretcherrailings.com – their website – for details of how to contact them.
The Old Un was sad to hear of the death of an old friend, Charles Arnold, 75, founder and chairman of the Patrick Leigh Fermor Society (PLFS).
When Leigh Fermor died in 2011, his house in Greece passed by prior agreement to the Benaki Museum, Athens. The difficulties of the Greek economy intervening, Charles founded the PLFS to support the house, and bring together Philhellenes, romantics and lovers of good books.
He was also instrumental in helping The Oldie with our many Leigh Fermor-related contributions. See the moving letter on page 50 from Christine Isabelle Cole (née Stanley Moss), daughter of Billy Stanley Moss, who fought so heroically with Leigh Fermor and the Greek partisans in their kidnap of a German general – the ultimate in derring-do.
Charles was the youngest director at Kleinwort Benson and latterly worked in publishing. He expanded the PLFS membership into the hundreds, and despatched two tours to the Peloponnese and Crete.
At the PLFS ‘office’, a corner table in the restaurant of the Wallace Collection, Charles received scholars, friends and gossip from all quarters of the globe, gave out assignments for the furthering of the PLFS, and wondered when the Elgin Marbles would be returned to Greece.
His agents, noting his relish for useful information and the long campaign, affectionately dubbed him ‘C’, in the spirit of military intelligence. Charles, who liked a joke, took to signing his emails with this cipher.
It was also typical that Charles always stood the bill at the Wallace, just as he quietly subsidised the PLFS lecture series.
He will be much missed at Oldie Towers, now draped in funereal black.