Hunter under fire
SIR: I read Hunter Davies’s flimsy piece ‘I once met Robert Robinson’ with a weary sense of both déjà vu and upset.
Never one to let the truth get in the way of an anecdote demonstrating envy and spite, Hunter has been trotting out his tales of injustice and sense of inferiority to my late father since 1962, when my father was his senior on Atticus.
His outrage, nearly 50 years later, that my father was the one to buy a Lowry from the artist; his annoyance that a mere Liverpool-born hack could afford a house in Cheyne Row; and the hilarious (to us Robinsons) notion that we had a butler have all been told ad nauseam by Hunter, both in private and in the tribute programme that Laurie Taylor presented for Radio 4 just after my father died.
His evident lifelong envy of my father’s talent, success and public profile is perhaps to be pitied and excused. To name my mother and quote from a personal letter she wrote to Margaret, his late wife, however, is not so excusable.
Funnily enough, my mother still has the extraordinary letter that Hunter’s wife sent, and which provoked her uncharacteristically direct reply, but she would never dream of quoting from it or brandishing it; Hunter has squirrelled away this correspondence out of longheld resentment. Besides the discourtesy and invasion of privacy, Hunter’s quote from a personal letter from my mother, and your publication of it, is a breach of copyright.
My now 91-year-old mother has not been shown this example of grudge and rudeness from Hunter Davies and will not be, since to be traduced publicly by someone she invited into her home would be deeply upsetting and humiliating. Kind regards, Suzy Robinson, London NW1