The Old Un’s Notes
Happy 70th birthday, Dennis the Menace! The ultimate naughty schoolboy first appeared in the Beano on 17th March 1951, and he’s been creating joyful mayhem ever since.
The Beano – the world’s
longest-running comic – has been going since 1938.
Now the iconic Dundee publication is to disrupt the neoclassical splendour of Somerset House in London, with a major exhibition, Beano: The Art of Breaking the Rules, opening in October.
According to the show’s curator, Andy Holden, the inhabitants of Beanotown share a sense of rebellion – ‘the Beano spirit of breaking the rules’. Dennis is credited as a proto-punk (helped by the spiked dark hair), while Minnie the Minx attacks the establishment in the form of teachers, parents and policemen.
Work by similarly nonconformist Sarah Lucas and Fourth Plinth artist Heather Phillipson will be displayed alongside original comic drawings from more than 4,000 editions, many never seen before. The exhibition intends to be not only irreverent, but immersive. The organisers say visitors will feel ‘as if they’re stepping inside a page of the comic’ – hopefully without encountering catapults and stink bombs.
Who knew that Sir Arthur Bryant (18991985) was such a sexual athlete as well as a prolific historian, who wrote more than 40 books?
In a new book, Historic Affairs: The Muses of Sir Arthur Bryant, W Sydney Robinson tells the delicious tale of wicked Sir Arthur bed-hopping with six women into his 70s and 80s.
In old age, Sir Arthur managed to juggle his wife, the Duchess of Marlborough, Alwynne Bardsley (an old friend’s wife), one Lorelei Robinson, Barbara Longmate and novelist Pamela Street.
Sir Arthur romped away in London and his country house – the South Pavilion, Wotton Underwood, later home to Sir John Gielgud and, now, to Tony Blair.
Naughty Sir Arthur wasn’t only deeply unfaithful; he also got his mistresses to work for him, even while he was betraying them. Shortly after
finding a distressing love letter to Arthur from one of her rivals, poor Pamela sat down and began to type up his life of Ethelred the Unready.
Aged 82, he asked Pamela to wear blackcurrant- or coffee-coloured French knickers and a matching camisole. She had to confess he was wonderful at two things: ‘Writing books and going to bed.’
Pamela told him this ‘kind of reputation might be all right at ‘30, 40, 50, 60 or even 70’ but not at 80 – ‘unless you want to get into the Guinness Book of Records.’
After his death, Sir Arthur, the biographer of Wellington, Nelson and Pepys, was exposed by Andrew Roberts as a ‘Nazi sympathiser and fascist fellow traveller’.
Nothing to admire there but, my God, what energy!
The Reverend Jonathan Aitken, vicar, ex-mp and former jailbird, gave a moving address at the funeral of an old prison friend, Ron Groves – aka ‘Grovesy’ – who died in February aged 76.
‘The circumstances in which we met were not ideal,’ said Aitken at the South Essex Crematorium. ‘We both made our mistakes and as result were both guests of Her Majesty.
‘Grovesy kept me and others in stitches with his stories, his quick wit and his exuberant love of life.’
One day in prison, Grovesy introduced Aitken to a Mr Dipper. At the end of their chat, Mr Dipper gave Aitken an exceptionally warm handshake – ‘So warm that he removed my wristwatch without my feeling it or knowing it.’
Grovesy promptly gave Aitken the watch back, telling him to look out in future for ‘dippers’ – or pickpockets.
Jonno and Ronno, as they were nicknamed, became fast friends. One day, a paparazzo photographed them together on a bench.
Ronno loved it, saying to Aitken, ‘I haven’t led a perfect life but I never got my picture in the News of the Screws until I met you!’
Together, they won the prison quiz, with Ronno declaring, ‘Jonno had the education but I’ve got the brains!’
God willing, J M W Turner’s house, Sandycombe Lodge, Twickenham, will open after the end of lockdown.
From 22nd May until 5th September, Turner’s English Coasts will be on show – a fine collection of Turner’s maritime watercolours and prints, lent by Tate Britain. Pre-booking is essential.
Turner lived in the house between 1813 and 1826. Overlooking the Thames, it’s a fine spot to contemplate Turner’s mastery of pictures of the sea, a subject he painted more often than any other.
Kingsley Amis and The Oldie’s late deputy editor, Jeremy Lewis, star in an intoxicating new book, In Love with Hell: Drink in the Life and Works of Eleven Writers (published on 22nd April).
Some of our great boozy writers feature, from Jean Rhys to Dylan Thomas. Also included is Kingers, as recalled by Jeremy. In 1977, Amis was compiling The New Oxford Book of Light Verse in the Oxford University Press
offices, where Jeremy saw him in action:
‘On the dot of 11, Kingsley would look at his watch, peer thoughtfully over his spectacles and say in a surprised voice, as though it had struck him for the first time, “That’s an interestinglooking fridge you’ve got there, Peter [Janson-smith, of OUP].” The fridge turned out to be chock-a-block with bedewed bottles … and so the meeting would progress, with much popping of corks.’
Cheers!
Among Jeremy Lewis’s books was Tobias Smollett (2003).
This year marks the 300th anniversary of the writer’s birth (19th March 1721) and the 250th of his death (17th September 1771). As a novelist, he is best remembered for such picaresque works as The Adventures of Roderick
Random (1748), The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751) and The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771). When it was first published, anonymously, Roderick Random was believed to be by Fielding. Smollett later accused
Fielding of plagiarising parts of it in Tom Jones.
In Peregrine Pickle, he satirised Fielding as Mr Spondy, and the book gained considerable notoriety for including ‘Memoirs of a Lady of Quality’, widely recognised as the scandalous Frances, Lady Vane (1715–88). Samuel Richardson said that the memoirs were ‘part of a bad book which contains the very bad story of a wicked woman’ and Walter Scott added that they were ‘a tiresome and unnecessary excrescence’.
Smollett was called many names: ‘a profligate hireling’ (Horace Walpole); and ‘arrogant … stiff-necked, thin-skinned, scurrilous’ (W E Henley).
William Hazlitt said, ‘There is a tone of vulgarity about all his productions,’ and Laurence Sterne was so incensed by the xenophobic and prejudiced attitudes in Smollett’s Travels Through France and Italy (1766) that he lampooned him as Smelfungus – a traveller full of ‘spleen and jaundice’ – in his own A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768).
Still, Smollett’s works remain popular. In 1944, George Orwell wrote an article for Tribune, called ‘Tobias Smollett: Scotland’s best novelist’.
The Old Un wishes a happy 100th birthday to legendary TV producer Derek Granger on 23rd April.
He is best known for his peerless Granada production of Brideshead Revisited (1981). His TV career goes all the way back to his producing Coronation Street in 1961. Before that, he was a journalist and drama critic on the Financial Times, where he founded its arts pages.
What a packed century of a life!
Is there any more nostalgic sound – or sight – than the Wurlitzer, the organ invented by German immigrant (Franz) Rudolph Wurlitzer in Cincinnati in 1853?
In 1946, Wurlitzers were so popular that there were 250 cinema organists in Britain.
One of the most splendid Wurlitzers survives at the Musical Museum in
Brentford. It was originally installed in 1932 at the Regal Cinema in Kingston upon Thames.
And now a charming book has been written about it, The Mighty ‘Regal’ Wurlitzer from Kingston upon Thames.
The book’s foreword is written by Michael Ryder and Chris Barber – the great jazz musician, who sadly died in March aged 90.
‘Our Regal Wurlitzer can be found accompanying silent films, playing in concerts, providing prelude music before a film show,’ Barber and Ryder write.
Sadly Chris Barber is no more, but the Regal Wurlitzer plays on.
As our holiday calendars fill up, tour companies and hotels are providing lots of guarantees, from socially-distanced receptions to refunds on last-minute cancellations.
But a Stirlingshire hotel is offering the most attractive promise of all. Gartmore House, an 18th-century mansion in Loch Lomond National Park, guarantees that you and your loved one won’t argue.
‘It’s been estimated that when we’re on a break nearly half of us quarrel at least once a day, and one in ten couples is likely to break up afterwards,’ the hotel’s marketing department says.
How are cross words kept out of the estate? By keeping couples apart. You and your spouse might share an en suite, but during the day you separately go about your individual pursuits, including hillwalking, creative writing, drone photography, macramé and upcycling old furniture.
By the time cocktail hour looms, you’ll be too exhausted to bicker – or so the theory goes.