The Old Un’s Notes
How to buy The Oldie during the lockdown
The Old Un is afraid that many W H Smith shops and some independent newsagents have closed – so buying individual copies of The Oldie may not be as easy as usual at the moment. There are three simple ways of getting round this: 1. Order a print edition for £4.75 (free p & p within the UK) at:
www.magsdirect.co.uk.
2. Order a digital edition at www.pocketmags.com for £2.99.Then scroll down to the Special Issues section.
3. Buy a 12-issue print subscription for just £24 and receive two free books – see page 38.
Sign up for The Oldie e-newsletter and Barry Cryer’s jokes
During the lockdown, the Old Un is producing extra pieces every day on The Oldie website, including Barry
Cryer’s jokes. Every Friday, we send a newsletter with the best pieces. Go to www.theoldie.co.uk and, at the top right of the home page, enter your email address in the white box, above which is written ‘Sign up to our weekly e-newsletter’.
Sixty years ago, on Saturday 22nd October 1960 at 8.35pm, Associated Television proudly introduced their prestigious new comedy programme – which they
eventually banished to a graveyard slot.
How surreal it was: the hero of The Strange World of Gurney Slade spoke to inanimate objects, engaged in debate with a cow voiced by Fenella Fielding and ruminated on the nature of identity.
The show’s credited writers were Sid Hills and Dick Green, but the vision it represented was that of its star, Anthony Newley – who was also its co-director. He informed the press, ‘People will either love it or hate it. There’s no middle way’. It
seems they hated it. The show lasted only until 26th November 1960.
However, it was a concept that much appealed to one David Jones, a 13-year-old viewer from Bromley. In 1973, the renamed David Bowie reflected, ‘I was Anthony Newley for a year. Remember the Gurney Slade series?’
Unusually for the period, ATV shot the programme on 35mm film, which resulted in the survival of all six episodes. Gurney Slade continues to fascinate and beguile, while the conclusion anticipates The Prisoner by seven years.
And any enterprise in which Anthony Newley and Una Stubbs dance with a vacuum cleaner has to be worth the price of a DVD box set.
Calling all Oldie readers who like to visit London and stay the night.
The charming Penn Club in Bloomsbury provides bed and breakfast for just over £100. It is celebrating its centenary year – but is in trouble.
‘The club is now in very serious risk of having to close permanently,’ says a
spokesman. ‘Visitor numbers have dropped significantly and, if we find that we are unable to bounce back financially in the coming months, we may be forced to consider closing.’
The club was founded by members of the Friends Ambulance Unit after the
First World War. It was home to John Wyndham, author of The Day of the Triffids, who was a long-time member. The club often had long-term residents then – Wyndham lived and wrote all his most famous works there.
Now the Eat Out to Help Out scheme has ended,
it’s time to Sleep Out to Help Out.
After last month’s Oldie article by Damian Thompson on Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes, the Old Un is looking forward to taking a virtual, online walk in the footsteps of Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle.
The Old Un will find out all sorts of secrets: the hidden mystery behind 221B Baker Street; Conan Doyle’s inspiration for Holmes; and where in London Sherlock Holmes was nearly killed by his archenemy Moriarty.
The one-hour virtual Zoom walk is led by Blue Badge Tourist Guide Janice Liverseidge. The walk around Marylebone takes place on 1st October at 4pm.
Tickets cost £10 per household (www.eventbrite. co.uk/e/walking-in-thefootsteps-of-sherlockholmes-and-his-creatortickets-117371486275).
The Old Un is enchanted by a new book on the beauties of marble and stone.
Fabio Barry, an art history professor at Stanford University, uncovers some delicious treasures in Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Yale University Press, £50).
The Old Un’s favourite is the 1268 Cosmati Pavement in Westminster Abbey (pictured). Just the list of the stones used in the Pavement is pure poetry: Egyptian alabaster, porphyry, Spartan green porphyry, and
yellowish limestone with red, turquoise, cobalt-blue and bluish white glass in a Purbeck marble matrix.
The 25-square-foot Pavement was created by craftsmen from Rome. An inscription around the central circle reveals its meaning: ‘The sphere shows the archetype; this globe shows the macrocosm.’
In other words, the central circle represents the idea of the world in God’s mind before he created it. And the circles around it show the world as formed from the four elements, earth, water, air and fire.
The science is of course nonsense but, still, what a beauty the Pavement is. It was a royal commission by
Henry III, and was unique in Britain.
Even Tony Blair, that old moneybags, couldn’t afford to buy a Rembrandt these days.
Sir Robert Peel, his antecedent as Prime Minister, didn’t buy just a Rembrandt
(a portrait of Philip Lucasz, for which he paid 59 guineas). He bought, as well, several Rubenses, several pictures by David Teniers, a couple of van Dycks and Pieter de Hooches, and three Albert Cuyps.
He also commissioned no fewer than 18 portraits by Sir Thomas Lawrence, including one (opposite page, bottom right) of Peel’s wife, Julia Peel. That in turn was inspired by one of his Rubenses (for which Peel paid £2,725 in 1824), Le Chapeau de Paille (The Straw Hat), (opposite page, bottom left).
The pictures were paid for with Peel’s cotton fortune.
All this is revealed in a new publication by the Peel Society, Sir Robert Peel – Statesman and Art Collector, by Nigel Morris.
The pictures were dispersed after the death of Sir Robert Peel, 170 years ago, in 1850. His son, also Sir Robert Peel, was keen on slow horses and fast women, and 77 of the pictures were sold to the National Gallery in 1871.
The Prime Minister’s great-grandson, also Sir Robert Peel, went bankrupt seven times and sold some real gems, including the picture of Julia Peel, now in the Frick Collection in New York.
Inland is a new solo exhibition by The Oldie’s Bird of the Month artist, Carry Akroyd. Carry’s interest in the landscape, she says, ‘draws on many levels of fascination, producing a soft yet vibrant colour palette depicting landscape and nature’.
The show is at the Jerram Gallery in Sherborne, Dorset (10th-24th October 2020). Prices range from £350 upwards.
The Old Un is much enjoying Clubland’s Hidden Treasures, a new book by Sam Aldred.
He’s now longing to be invited to Brooks’s, the St James’s club that’s home to the Society of Dilettanti and its marvellous pictures.
In the early years of the Society, founded in 1734, members conducted an alluring ritual which the Old Un longs to take part in.
Whenever someone became a member, the President donned a toga and admitted the postulant while sitting on a throne of crimson velvet. A vote was taken on each new member. Still today the club’s treasures include a ballot box carved like a Greek temple, with the ballot balls deposited between the open legs of the female figure of Justice.
Who knows how many double entendres the object has inspired over the years?
Bluebottle Goes to War by P J Brownsword tells the story of Peter Sellers’s time in the RAF Gang Shows.
Sellers arrived in Bombay in August 1944 (pictured) and raced around India, Ceylon
and Burma. He did over 100 shows in ten months – crucial training for a comic genius.