The Old Un’s Notes
Four hundred issues ago, Richard Ingrams launched The Oldie – and edited the first issue.
Richard said in his first editorial, ‘ The Oldie began life as a joke. But, as soon as I announced it, I found that everyone was taking it seriously. Offers of help poured in. People rang up, wanting to invest.
‘Before I knew what was happening, I found I was leading a crusade.’
Deepest thanks to all readers, whether their first issue was the first ever or this, the 400th!
John Mcewen, our Bird of the Month columnist, helped found The Oldie.
‘Thirty years ago,’ he remembers, ‘I awoke convinced there should be a new magazine called Sage, a rival to Saga.
‘Talk of the “grey pound” promised success. Gaga Saga readers might even buy Sage by mistake. I told Alexander Chancellor, editorial saviour of the Spectator, creator of the Independent Magazine.’
For the 400th issue, Mcewen rang founding editor Richard Ingrams. Did he approach Alexander or was it vice versa, about starting an ‘oldie’ magazine?
He couldn’t remember, other than recalling that launching magazines was always a topic.
Mcewen says, ‘Eventually, The Oldie (the title Sage smelt of onions) was born, with Richard as editor and the late Naim Attallah as publisher. Like-minded spirits – Stephen Glover, Patrick Marnham and Auberon Waugh – invested £12,000 each to lend Naim token support.
Mcewen adds, ‘I too bought a place on the he board. Among non-board contributors were Lord Lambton, Alexander’s mother and a Maltese banker er friend of Richard’s, Godfrey Grima.’
The launch issue sold 100,000 copies, s, but soon The Oldie settled at a loss-making sub-20,000. Paul Getty proved its saviour, thanks, Richard thinks, to John Brown’s approach, h prompted by James Pembroke.
Mcewen adds, ‘Richard also said Godfrey Grima is the only person he has known to die of COVID – in Malta, one of the few places currently deemed safe to visit.’
Oldie literary lunches began in 1995. Since 2007, the Master of Ceremonies has been the immortal Barry Cryer, 86, a guest at lunches since 1998.
Barry doesn’t just tell the audience’s favourite parrot jokes. He also devotes a lot of time to writing poems to introduce each of the three speakers. The Oldie is deeply grateful to him.
‘I’m a peopleaholic,’ says Barry. ‘The Oldie chapter in my life is great for me.
‘I met people I would never otherwise have met.’
Barry’s favourite Oldie lunch memory is from 2017, when David Cameron’s mother, Mary Cameron, was our Oldie Mother-knows-best of the Year. She won the award after fighting the closure of a Berkshire children’s centre, which had been shut after a spending review instituted by her son. David Cameron had been invited to the ceremony to accompany his mother.
Barry says, ‘I tapped him on the shoulder, saying, “Keep the noise down. There’ve been complaints.” Mary Cameron laughed and he looked bewildered. That could only happen at an Oldie lunch.’
James Pembroke, The Oldie’s publisher, recalls the late, much-missed Alexander Chancellor (1940-2017):
‘Alexander and Richard came up with the idea for a “truly independent, freethinking, no-bullshit magazine” in 1991. He became the editor in June 2014, after Richard’s resignation a week earlier. Richard was startled by such dishonour among thieves, having resigned his TV column in the Spectator, in 1984, after Alexander was sacked as its editor.
‘Yet Alexander truly grabbed the baton, and gave the magazine the design we still have. He was the most visual of editors. His design for the Spectator has still not been tampered with.
‘As a former Guardian columnist, he was loved by journalists from right and left,
not least Ian Jack, who kindly looked after the magazine while Alexander was ill.
‘Alexander once said to Ian, after reading another evocation of the West Fife coalfield in 1955, “One of the good things about your stuff is that there’s never any danger of coming across the Mitfords.” ’
Richard Osborne has been The Oldie’s music critic since the first issue.
‘No concert or opera reviews, Richard [Ingrams] suggested; more a series of essays on whatever might take my fancy,’ Osborne remembers. ‘The first column contained some thoughts about the perilous business of driving and listening to music.
‘It was inconceivable that an Ingrams publication would not have music deep in its DNA or that Richard’s own musical interests would not provide a regular flow of ideas, modestly proffered on the back of one those trademark postcards we were always delighted to receive.’
The ‘no reviews’ idea was broken pretty well straight away, after Richard Ingrams mentioned the opera festival that his brother, Leonard, another Oldie investor, was operating from the terrace of Garsington Manor, his home near Oxford. Osborne’s book Garsington Opera: A Celebration has a chapter on the Ingrams family and its fine musical credentials.
Valerie Grove has been The Oldie’s radio correspondent since the first issue.
‘Richard wanted me to cover radio, which we agreed should be called Wireless, the word self-mockingly used by those wishing to vaunt their fogeyish tendencies,’ Valerie says. She was a mere 45 then. Ingrams was only 54.
‘Few thought the new mag would survive, but I confessed anyway to Simon Jenkins, the editor who had just lured me to the Times, that I had also promised a fortnightly piece for Ingrams.’
Simon frowned and said to Valerie, ‘I don’t like to think of you writing for something called The Oldie.’
Valerie says, ‘I was pleased to find his byline in The Oldie’s recent Spring issue.’
The Oldie of the Year Awards began in 1993, the brainchild of Oldie publisher James Pembroke.
The late, great Terry Wogan compèred the ceremony at Simpson’s in the Strand. And Oldie columnist Gyles Brandreth has been our magnificent MC since 2014.
In 2011, the late Prince Philip was our Oldie of the Year. And what a kind letter he sent us:
Sandringham House I much appreciate your invitation to receive an ‘Oldie of the Year’ award. There is
nothing like it for morale to be reminded that the years are passing – ever more quickly – and that bits are beginning to drop off the ancient frame. But it is nice to be remembered at all.
Philip
The second issue of The Oldie, in March 1992, had a prescient cover.
It shows two oldsters outside a multiplex cinema, wondering which film they might go in and see — Ectoplasmist II, Screaming Skulls, Disemboweller or Screwdriver Killer.
Have things improved, as cinemas reopen POST-COVID?
A London reader has just been leafing through the Observer’s arts pages: ‘I absolutely did not long to see any of the films reviewed — Antebellum (“queasily superficial horror film”) or Synchronic (“paramedics attending a series of odd fatalities linked to a psychedelic designer drug”).’
As The Oldie has been pleading for 400 issues, please bring back entertaining, jolly films!
In our first issue, Mary Kenny, The Oldie’s Postcards from the Edge columnist, interviewed an aged priest called Monsignor Francis Bartlett – uncle to Jennifer Patterson, half of the Two Fat Ladies cooking duo.
Monsignor Bartlett recalled growing up in Edwardian London. He said modern life brings us great ‘gadgets’. But is there anything nicer than a kind servant who brings you tea in the morning? He bore his Edwardian views with perfect Christian charity.
‘My mother had died in 1991,’ Mary remembers. ‘An event when you begin to realise that you are now in the front-line generation. I was heading for 50, too, and I had started to think that older people – since I’d soon join them – were often very interesting. They were a deposit of experiences that were receding: they were witnesses to history. It was a great idea when Richard Ingrams launched The Oldie and invited me to contribute.’
In other news...
‘How can anyone govern a nation that has 246 different kinds of cheese?’ said Charles de Gaulle.
Well, Britain now has 750 cheese varieties. And quite a few of them will soon be on sale at the new Chiswick Cheese Market, which opens on 16th May.
For Chiswick, it’s a lovely return to its origins. Chiswick was originally, in around 1000, called Ceswican, meaning Cheese Farm.
The Oldie is very sad to hear about the death of a much-loved contributor, Trader Faulkner, 93.
The Australian actor starred with Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier. A friend of Richard Ingrams since the 1950s, he wrote for The Oldie from 2004 until this year’s April issue, in an article about Peter Finch, whose biography he wrote.
Until this year, Trader turned up in the Oldie offices, copy in hand, in pink beret and cowboy boots. He would often stamp out a flamenco in the office before leaving.
Olé – and farewell, dear Trader!