I Once Met… James

I first met James Robertson Justice when I was 12 years old, a street urchin in the late 1940s in London’s austere, war-torn West End.

How delighted I was to discover, in a war-wrecked cobbled mews just off Baker Street, a thing of utter delight: a huge, green Bentley parked in a corner, opposite a mews house that had once been a stable.

In a moment, incorrigibly, my friends and I were on it and around it. We had pulled the great brake, climbed over the low, open doors into the capacious leather seats and turned the steering wheel. Then one of us blew the great brass trumpet horn by squeezing an attached, enormous black rubber ball.

We heard a first-floor window opening at the mews house – to reveal a red-bearded face I recognised from the pictures: James Robertson Justice, roaring at us with terrifying ferocity.

The face vanished! We heard the heavy clatter of heavy feet on wooden stairs. Then we bolted. As I jumped from the running board of the Bentley, I saw the mighty figure appearing through a door just ahead of me.

I took to my heels and ran as fast as possible. I glimpsed the figure in pursuit behind me. So I ran even faster, too terrified even to turn and look back, until I reached Marylebone Station about a mile away. James Robertson Justice had given up the chase long before.

Some years later, in 1960, one summer’s evening, having escaped my army camp, I went to the Grosvenor Hotel in nearby Stockbridge, Hampshire, for a pint of beer with some National Service army chums.

And there at the bar was a figure I recognised: the formidable frame and beard of the great film actor quietly drinking something from a tumbler glass. He was wearing a

Would you flee from Justice? white jacket and looking splendid. He seemed relaxed and in a good mood, so I bade him good evening – to which he replied warily. He appeared to give me a long, hard look. My imagination was working overtime; he could not possibly have recognised me! But it felt like it. So I did not ask him if he still had the racing Bentley or refer to it at all. I had no desire to be roared at and chased by him out of the charming old hotel, up the town’s high road towards the Stockbridge Downs. Once had been enough! How sad I was to learn later that this force of nature died penniless and broken in Hampshire in 1975, aged 68. Robert Sutherland Smith