The Old Un’s Notes
Which of these two oldie road signs do you prefer?
The Old Un loves the original one (on the left), which magically captures the posture, stick and grumpy outlook of him and his Old Lady.
He’s not so keen on the new one on the right – updated by design studio Swag Design in response to a competition run by the Centre for Ageing Better and Public Health England.
In the new version, the oldies break into a jolly dance, the stick transformed into a Fred Astaire cane.
It will be made publicly available for unlimited use by any individual or organisation. There’s no suggestion that the traditional, bent-over OAPS with their stick will be forcibly removed from our streets yet. Long may the grumpy oldies remain!
The Lady of the Lamp’s light flickers no longer. Florence Nightingale’s iconic lantern now sits alone on a pedestal, in the dark, at the Florence Nightingale Museum on London’s South Bank.
The spotlight that once highlighted an important piece of British nursing history has been turned off – possibly for ever. The museum has been put to bed.
Relying almost entirely on ticket and shop sales for income, this place of medical pilgrimage is another casualty of COVID-19. Officially, the museum has gone into ‘indefinite hibernation’. But the lantern may never be lit again.
There’s no magic pill to save it. The museum is in the grounds of St Thomas’ Hospital. A recent inhabitant of one of the hospital’s beds was the Prime Minister, when he was nursed through and recovered from coronavirus.
But the Government’s cultural recovery plan is concentrated on big, national museums, not self-financing, small ones. The new hangarlike temporary hospitals funded to alleviate COVID-19 wards may be named after the founder of modern nursing, but there’s no similar plan to cure this museum’s woes.
The Crimean War didn’t put out Nightingale’s light – but COVID might.
Elisabeth Basford’s charming new biography, Princess Mary: The First Modern Princess, has some lovely little nuggets.
It was Princess Mary, George V’s daughter, who began the tradition of placing a bridal bouquet on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey.
She did it in 1922 after her marriage to the Earl of Harewood. Kate Middleton did the same after her 2011 wedding to Prince William.
In his introduction to the book, Queen Mary’s biographer Hugo Vickers describes Princess Mary ‘waving with the circular hand wave of Queen Mary’.
Vickers tells the Old Un that Princess Alice (19012004), Princess Mary’s
sister-in-law, did a nice twist on the royal wave – she wiggled her fingers.
Today, that famous circular wave has sadly died out. The Queen goes for the more democratic, traditional wave, as do the rest of the Royal Family.
How sad to wave goodbye to the royal wave.
Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle is putting a stop to the relaxation of dress codes permitted by his go-ahead predecessor John Bercow.
Hoyle has in recent weeks upbraided former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, veteran Labour MP Kevin Brennan and a new Tory MP, Christian Wakeford, for not wearing ties when making virtual contributions to Commons debates.
Bercow – who has again, most tragically, missed out on a peerage – let male MPS enter the chamber without ties. His wife wasn’t much of a one for dress codes either. It was sometimes a job to get Sally Bercow to wear anything except a sheet.
The Old Un has been pondering other Parliamentary matters.
As if oldie peers did not already have enough problems with their hearing, further complications have been caused by the number of House of Lords members with similar-sounding names.
This was explained by Labour peer Lord Foulkes, who noted the presence of the Lib Dems’ Lord Fox.
He pronounced the name with great care, pointing out that there is also a Lady Fookes, a Lord Faulks, himself (Foulkes) and another Fox, the recently arrived former Claire Fox.
Too many effing Fs!
Messums Gallery will be showing an online exhibition of works by Henry Lamb (1883-1960), from 4th February until 13th March.
The doctor-turned-artist won an MC in the First World War and was a founder of the Camden Town Group and London Group of painters.
The exhibition highlights the decade following Lamb’s 1928 marriage to the writer Lady Pansy Pakenham, Lord Longford’s sister, and their move to the Wiltshire village of Coombe Bissett.
One highlight is this monumental 1930 painting (below left) of the Lambs as Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews. It was painted three years after the rediscovery and reappraisal of the Gainsborough picture, now in the National Gallery.
Gainsborough placed his couple in Suffolk. Lamb’s setting is the couple’s Wiltshire home, with the River Ebble, a water meadow and chalk downland beyond.
‘Wit is the ability to say entirely the wrong thing in precisely the right way.’
If that sounds suspiciously like an Oscar Wilde witticism to you, you’re not alone. The Oscar Wilde Society voted it the winner in the second Wilde Wit Competition, run together with The Oldie.
The winning entry above came from Darcy Alexander Corstorphine – who also won last year. Clearly, the lad has style to burn.
In second place, from Dr Ashley Robins in South Africa, came ‘Good friends come and go, but one’s enemies remain forever faithful.’
In third place came an entry from Bill Stevens in Canada, which feels right at
home in these pages: ‘Retirement must be dangerous; no one seems to survive it.’
The Society welcomes new members, witty or otherwise. Go to oscarwildesociety.co.uk to join.
Sex Pistols under lock and key: Matlock’s guitar, left
Number 1 Old Park Lane is best known today as the home of the Hard Rock Cafe, the music-themed burger restaurant.
But the handsome 1914 building was originally, in 1923, a branch of Coutts & Co, the grand bank.
That’s why, in the vaults below, there are strongboxes that once glistened with jewels belonging to smart Mayfair ladies.
Now, as the picture from The Buildings of Green Park by Andrew Jones (above) shows, the Chubb safe protects a guitar that once belonged to Glen Matlock, bass guitarist for the Sex Pistols.
The Old Un was delighted to receive this cartoon (above) from Francis Drake of Dublin.
Dear Wilfred De’ath, The Oldie’s resident gentleman of the road, died a year ago, on 19th February 2020, aged 82.
He is much missed at Oldie Towers. He’s also much missed by several callers to the Oldie office, from whom Wilfred ‘borrowed’ money. One of many Wilfred’s many attributes was an indifference to – and occasional pride in – criticism. He would have loved the bad taste of this fine cartoon.
As Charles Pasternak wrote in the January issue, the last men in Britain to do National Service were called up 60 years ago, on 31st December 1960.
You could in fact volunteer for National Service, which is what Oldie- reader Arthur Hearnden did, from 1955 to 1957 – and he loved it.
Hearnden was then teaching in Northern Ireland, where, he says, ‘National Service didn’t apply.’ So he presented himself to the Army Recruiting Office in Belfast, volunteering for National Service.
He was promptly shipped off to the Royal Signals base in
Richmond, North Yorkshire.
He started off working in the cookhouse, and then graduated to dusting books in the Education Centre.
He particularly loved Army humour:
‘Am I ’urting you?’ the sergeant said to him one day. ‘No, sarge,’ he replied. ‘Well, I should be,’ said the sergeant. ‘I’m standing on your ’air. Get it cut. Today. And again tomorrow.’
Hearnden had two happy years of National Service. The Old Un apologises for the error in Charles Pasternak’s piece – The Oldie’s mistake, not Pasternak’s. It suggested that National Service was 18 months long. Initially 18 months in 1949, it was increased to two years in 1950.
Former Arts Minister Grey Gowrie has published a new collection of poetry, From Primrose Hill.
In one poem, Reece Mews:
Conversation Piece, Lord Gowrie, 81, remembers his friend Francis Bacon, whose studio was in Reece Mews.
In the poem, Bacon talks about his fellow painter Lucian Freud:
‘I don’t enjoy betting on horses/ because they stop me breathing. Lucian loves them./ At his boarding school, he’d sneak out/ at night to sleep beside one. I’d be dead by morning.’
In the poem, Bacon goes on to say about Freud, ‘He cuts me too. I miss him./ I am 13 years older./ He finds me repetitive, boring. I suppose I am./ Of course I drink more than he does.’
Gowrie cheerfully mocks himself, too, referring to his childhood title, Lord Ruthven. He writes of ‘my family being, absurdly, associated with vampirism./ If, in the late-18th century, you wanted to write a vampire story, you called the vampire Lord Ruthven.’
Still, marginally better to be called Lord Ruthven than, say, Count Dracula.
How Goering hated Albert Speer! That’s one of the stories in Nuremberg, the republished memoir by Airey Neave, the Colditz escapee and Tory MP, murdered by the IRA in 1979.
In 1945, Neave served the indictments on Goering and Speer. Neave saw Goering call Speer a traitor for allying himself with the ‘enemy’, as Goering called the Allied prosecution.
Vain Goering was delighted, though, with the Allies’ IQ tests on 20 top Nazis. He came third. Speer was 12th.