March 23
Ignorance, I’m not the first to notice, has its compensations. Take Donald Swann, for instance, who left us on this date in 1994. Double acts are never equal, and Swann took the lesser role in his association with Michael Flanders, an exuberant bearded figure who in the cautious conformist 1950s appeared in a wheelchair without, remarkably, deferring to it.
Flanders was the front man, Swann was on the piano, beaming behind his spectacles, owlish, amiable and still effacing in his most vigorous passages. Even his attractive, distinctive light tenor played, er, second fiddle to the deep, confident tones of Flanders from the wheelchair, under a plaid rug (polio was responsible).
And yet, as journalists used to write, his parents had fled the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1919; his father came from a family that had emigrated there; his mother was an Azerbaijani Muslim, which explained his middle name, Ibrahim.
His name is forever linked with a very funny light comedy of observation that celebrated the oddities of the 1950s without the scornful skewering of the satire that was to take over from them. But this was also a man of questing intellect and enormously wide musical interest.
He explored many religions, including Greek Orthodoxy, before returning to the Quakerism that led him to object conscientiously during the Second World War, when he served in the Quaker ambulance unit in Egypt, Palestine and Greece.
He wrote prolifically and diversely, musicals, operas, song cycles, choral music, Cretan songs, and settings to Blake, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Hardy, Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Hermann Hesse, Tolkien, CS Lewis and Betjeman, for a few.
Should you want simply to remember the, dread word, quintessence of a lost, better and worse time, try this:
Or, instead, listen to something from the other side of Swann:
March 22
‘My, but March in the year eighteen hundred and twenty five
Was indeed a very good time to come alive
For that was when, as if you didn’t know it,
The world welcomed that most wonderful poet,
McGonagall, William, possessor of a gift so generous
The greatest rhymester ever to come among us.
No subject too great, no subject too small ever to be
Beyond the silvery pen of this man from Dundee.
They say he couldna scan and was ignorant of metaphor
But that’s what fancy poets who can’t rhyme are for.
Touching hearts, giving a smile, that was the thing for Will
And that’s why he is remembered so very well still.
Declaiming from stage, street or circus, how he suffered for his art,
Taking the scorn of the ignorant in marvellous good part
Even when they thought it an extremely good wheeze
To pelt him mercilessly with eggs, cabbages and peas.
So to all you jeerers of no taste, you conveyors of sneer and side
Let me tell you he wrote to the Queen, and she replied.
And while you were throwing things with all your might and spite
The circus was paying him 15 shillings a night.
I see they now say he must have been on the spectrum
But you know experts, they’re really not much fun.
And I myself for one am given strongly to believe
That all the time old Will was laughing up his sleeve.’
I will leave you with a link to McGonagall’s most famous poem, adding only that the poor fellow died penniless, which seems very cruel for a man so dedicated to his art that once, appearing on stage as he sometimes did, playing Macbeth, he was so offended by Macduff’s performance he refused to die in the final act.
March 21
Politicians and artists are not only argumentative: they also seem to need their self-belief and amour-propre bolstering rather more than the rest of us. It must be something to do with performing.
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Scarcely surprising, then, that they area always falling out and inclined to settle differences flamboyantly. Today that involves being rude on social media; once, the duel was available.
What is surprising, to me at least, is the number of British prime ministers who have taken part in one: no fewer than three: Wellington, Pitt, and Canning, the last against a foreign secretary, Castlereagh.
The causes were various and wouldn’t necessarily seem to us demanding of the need to inflict or suffer death, particularly of a country’s leader.
But on this date in 1829, the Duke of Wellington travelled to Battersea at around seven o’clock in the morning to fight George Finch-Hatton, the Earl of Winchilsea, who had written a letter to a newspaper following the Catholic Emancipation Act, accusing the Prime Minister of seeking to introduce rampant Romanism into every area of government.
This had been too much for the Duke: when Winchilsea refused to retract, the challenge to a duel had been issued. Winchilsea thought he could not in honour refuse, and so travelled over the river to take a pistol against the his prime minister, the Hero of Waterloo. The complete illegality of the activity is somehow less astonishing.
Winchilsea took the wrong bridge and arrived late. Wellington fired first and missed. Winchilsea had waited: honour satisfied by facing fire, he shot into the air. A dispute on the spot over his written apology not actually using the word ‘apology’ was resolved, and that was that. The pair became firm friends and Winchilsea took Wellington’s great-niece for his second wife.
Putney Heath was the change of venue for William Pitt against George Tierney in 1798. Pitt had accused Tierney in the House of Commons of wishing to obstruct the defence of the country against Napoleon; Tierney challenged him, Pitt accepted. Both men missed, then the Prime Minister fired his shot into the air. There was more amusement at the cackhandedness of the pair than outrage.
Castlereagh versus Canning was of a different order: the two men cordially detested each other. Both were Irish, but of the protestant ascendancy. Castlereagh was the reserved and cautious aristocrat, Canning the brilliant son of a disinherited landowner and an actress, a man who could dictate letters on two different topics to two different scribes by alternate paragraphs. They boxed and coxed in ministerial posts, Canning, fiercely ambitious for the prime position, plotted against Castlereagh, who challenged him to a duel when he found out.
This contest took place again on Putney Heath, in 1809 at six o’clock in the morning. Castlereagh was a master with the pistol, Canning had never fired one. They failed to hit one another the first time; Castlereagh shot Canning though the thigh on his second attempt. Canning recovered to become prime minister and died of tuberculosis at the age of 57. Castlereagh, prime architect of the Treaty of Vienna, developed acute paranoia and killed himself. Sic transit.
Elsewhere, everyone now knows about Alexander Hamilton. Handel and Proust fought over romantic affections, Manet over a bad review, all survived. Ben Jonson’s was over a woman or plagiarism, probably both: he killed another playwright, Gabriel Spenser, but escaped full punishment by using the Benefit of Clergy loophole, available to the educated as well as clerics and involving branding on a thumb to prevent it being pleaded again.
Pushkin fought a French officer, his brother-in-law, who was pressing attentions on his wife, and, rather unfairly, was killed, probably accidentally (the brother-in-law was expelled from Russia; Natalia, his flighty wife, married again and had three more children to add to her four with Pushkin).
Tycho Brahe lost part of his nose in a duel, famously wearing a false one, brass for every day, silver or gold for best. It seem apt, if a little foolish, that the renowned astronomer chose to fight in the dark.
And while we’re looking upwards and contemplating folly: 1808, Paris, two Frenchmen, same woman, two hot air balloons, blunderbusses, entirely predictable result.
March 20
An era ended on March 20, 1925, with the death of George Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, Viceroy of India, Foreign Secretary, Titan of Empire, caught for ever by the impertinent rhyme composed by his anonymous Balliol peers:
‘My name is George Nathaniel Curzon,
I am a most superior person.
My face is pink, my hair is sleek,
I dine at Blenheim once a week.’
I
t would take more space than I have, and possibly your attention, to describe Curzon’s successes and ultimate failure to achieve the highest office; I want to concentrate on the remarkable episode at the Lausanne Conference of 1922-23, called to resolve Turkish dissatisfaction with the outcome of an earlier treaty after the end of the First World War. Curzon was the Co-ordinator of the Conference, and, naturally, in every sense, dominated it through every twist and turn, which included impossibly grandiose interventions by Benito Mussolini and the obdurate attitude of the Turkish representative, who simply turned off his hearing aid when not speaking. Suffice to say Curzon achieved resolution after dramatically breaking off and leaving for Britain on the Orient Express.
This was accomplished despite the attentions and behaviour of his valet, who had been engaged in a hurry after his Lordship’s previous personal servant had been dismissed after placing the personal above his duties (an ill-timed affair of the heart).
Frying pan, fire. Although he had excellent references, the new valet was the most tremendous drinker, and exhibited all the behaviour one might therefore expect as he attended closely to Lord Curzon, often in the company of the other high-ranking international representatives, when he wasn’t hiccoughing loudly in the next room.
This is related incomparably in ‘Some People’, a book of elegantly oblique biographical sketches by one of the junior British diplomats present, Harold Nicolson, gifted diarist and husband of Vita Sackville West. Here is the valet, Arketall, standing just behind his lordship, ‘very rigid as to the feet, but swaying slightly with the upper part of the body, bending slowly forwards and then straightening himself with a jerk.’
Curzon eventually accused Arketall of being either very drunk or very ill and the valet replied, ‘Both, m’lud.’
The scurrilous verse above does Curzon a disfavour: he was far more complicated than that. He was so pleased with the response ‘that his affection for Arketall became unassailable,’ writes Nicolson, even when the Italian ambassador to Turkey mistook the valet for a British admiral and thanked him profusely for his heroism during the war.
But there are limits. Arketall’s were reached when Curzon witnessed him dancing rather well in full and suspicious evening dress with an imposing American lady refulgent with diamonds. Arketall saw he had been spotted, and, panicking, slipped and fell between the distinguished American’s legs, bringing her crashing down on top of him in the middle of the dance floor. Curzon turned on his heel and the valet was cooked. He was instantly sent packing, during which three bottles of Benedictine and one of Grand Marnier were discovered under his bed.
That wasn’t quite the end of it. The next morning, Lord Curzon discovered all his trousers had vanished. As there was but an hour before the Conference resumed, this caused even diplomats some panic, but they were eventually discovered in the same trouser press under Arketall’s bedspread.
When Curzon was brought the good news, he laughed. That night he gave a select audience his celebrated rendition of Tennyson’s ‘Tears, Idle Tears’, became a little melancholy for his lost youth, sighed, and then grinned. ‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘ for Arketall, I liked that man’.
How true is it? Nicolson freely admitted to a little embellishment of his subjects. The valet’s name was in fact Chippendale, and Lord Curzon did not in fact witness his dramatic fall. The rest, delightfully, happened: this is Nicolson’s annotation on his copy: ‘It is true about the trousers’.
March 19
On this date in 1940, Christopher Chavasse was made Bishop of Rochester. Chavasse was the twin brother of Noel Chavasse, one of only three men to be awarded the Victoria Cross twice and the most decorated British officer in the First World War. Chavasse himself, who was ordained in 1911, was awarded the Military Cross in 1917 for his bravery as a chaplain in searching for and bringing in the wounded.
He and Noel had also competed in the 1908 London Olympic Games; and he was a Lacrosse international. After the war he became Master of St Peter’s Hall, Oxford, succeeding his father, its founder, a former Bishop of Liverpool, before taking up his position in Rochester.
But he has another significant claim to fame: he is the only bishop ever to have played rugby league, and moreover, the only bishop ever to have been sent off in any sport for ungentlemanly conduct.
It was on January 21, 1911, when he was but a curate, against Wakefield Trinity, and this is his account: ‘The whole thing was a frightful mull on my part and I accept full responsibility for it. I had been up the previous night preparing a sermon and after lunch I sat in my chair in front of the fire running through it when I dozed off.’ He raced to the ground, ran onto the pitch and was promptly sent off for not having permission to do so.
Interesting to speculate, if the sermon sent him to sleep, about its effect on the congregation.
Wake up at the back!
March 18
Ah, National Black Pudding Day. I like black pudding, but I’m more intrigued by its social aspects. Very big in the Midlands and the Hebrides, but at its prime in Lancashire, which has turned it into an inescapably comic item.
Lancashire may well presently boast the finest cuisine and restaurants in the country (a veritable shower of Monsieur Michelin’s stars) but this is in marked contrast to former times, where the harshnesses of industrial life promoted other priorities.
Lancashire gave the world its first fast food, fish and chips, introduced because women working in the mills didn’t always have the time or the inclination to continue labouring, this time over a hot stove. The black pudding, too, despite an ancient lineage - Homer tells of Agamemnon feasting on them with his comrades outside Troy - was popular because it used up all of the pig, the blood and the intestines.
Hard times present simple choices, and Lancastrians went for laughing over crying, mostly at themselves. This is why the black pudding - and tripe of course - are jokes, and why we still have – to the recorded outrage of at least one French haut-gourmet – the World Black Pudding Throwing Championship in Ramsbottom, not to mention the World Gravy Wrestling Championship in Rossendale.
Our other top traditional fast food is the pie, most notably the meat and potato variety, which commands legendary devotion, particularly among Wiganers, known to the rest of the county as the Pie Eaters.
As one not from Wigan once memorably had it, ‘There is nothing a Wiganer won’t put in pastry and eat at a bus stop’. The pie has been promoted in the gyms and fitness centres of Wigan as ‘energy food’. They laugh at it, too: not so long ago I saw a sticker in the back window of a Wigan car which read: ‘No pies left in this vehicle overnight’.
But the epitome of this, with a healthy helping of north-south and posh-prole chips, comes in an old George Formby – who else? – film, where our hero is dining at the Ritz. ‘Might I suggest the salmon, Sir?’ says the deeply condescending head waiter. ‘Go on then,’ replies George, with his trademark cheery artlessness, ‘if you’re opening a tin’.
March 17
St Patrick’s Day. Enough has been written: please enjoy the native gift for meaningful melancholy never better achieved than by the combination of James Joyce, the adopted family Huston, the face of Donal McCann and the extraordinary tenor of Frank Patterson, so affecting it surely excuses his occasional terrible taste in knitwear:
March 16
More interesting international proverbs and sayings from around the world with which you might fill those inevitable but awkward gaps in conversation:
‘A fallen tree makes no friends.’ Turkish
‘Never poke a jaguar with a short stick.’ Brazil
‘An estimate is the brother of a lie.’ Sami
‘Without reason, no cat comes out.’ Uzbek
‘Even monkeys fall from trees.’ Korean
‘You don’t water a camel with a spoon.’ Armenian
‘There is nothing as eloquent as a rattlesnake’s tail.’ Navajo
‘Don’t sail out farther than you can row back.’ Danish
‘If you go to a donkey’s house, don’t talk about ears.’ Jamaican
‘Speak the truth, but leave immediately after.’ Slovenian
‘When the great lord passes the wise peasant bows deeply and silently farts.’ Ethiopian
All the same, I would advise using them sparingly, as there is only one reaction available to your partners in conversation: solemn nods with eyes closed and downturned mouth followed by a murmured, ‘So true’. This become repetitious and may lead to acquaintances pleading pressing engagements at your approach.
Coming soon: sound advice on detailed accounts of the plots of films, short cuts employing numbered B roads, and minor but complex medical conditions.
Next, very quickly!
March 15
One of the more noticeable social changes this century is the large variety of first names to be found after the long period of monotonous conformity that followed the decline in popularity of biblical choices, and the slightly odd Victorian vogue of taking the family names of leading noble families: Stanley, Percy, Howard, etc.
Only an unbalanced nostalgic wouldn’t welcome the new inventions and introductions, often two together. But it has meant that the old nicknames which came to replace the boring Tom, Dicks and Harrys have now all but disappeared.
Some have left because they breezily stressed racial origin and physical characteristics in a way now unacceptable in a properly more sensitive age:
Jock, Taffy, Paddy and Mick, for example; and it was long thought amusing to call tall people Titch, short people Lofty, bald people Curly, and weightier people Tubby or Jumbo.
Others, though, trailed less likely offence and came from plays on the surname:
Dusty Rhodes; Dusty Miller; Ali Barber; Dicky Bird; Jack Frost; Windy Gale; Dinger Bell; Sweeney Todd; Todd Sweeney;
Some now require more explanation:
Smudger Smith came from the blacksmith’s smutty face.
Nobby Clark from Victorian clerks being considered snobby and uppity.
Tug Wilson from First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Arthur Knyvet Wilson, VC, who you can see was need of a something snappy, after he became exasperated with a warship’s attempts to come alongside his flagship and offered the captain a tug to help.
Most have died out with the last of their bearers, days of heavier but more amiable humour gone with them, echoes of the services, collars, ties, pubs without blackboards and all those iffy Majors. Others have disappeared with their genesis: once, for example, all Browns were called Hovis, from the slogan, ‘Don’t say Brown, say Hovis’.
What is required is a new wave of nicknames, bold innovations taking the form well beyond the cosy all male hegemony of before. I propose, for beginners:
Niceday (Front-facing service staff)
Clicker (office staff)
Higuys (waiters and waitresses)
Sacker (human resources)
Eyebrows (influencer)
Enveloper (lower grade celebrity)
Privet (hedge fund manager)
Puffer (public relations executive)
Thumbsucker (creative)
Fingers (accountant)
Exemptions (insurance)
Charger (lawyers)
Cox (scientist)
Heil (tech bro)
Flush (water company executive)
Thank you.
March 14
Do you ever worry about too much good luck? This thought probably didn’t occur to Admiral John Byng as he knelt on a cushion on the quarterdeck of HMS Monarch in the Solent on this date in 1757, awaiting execution by firing squad.
But until what proved to be his last days, Byng had led a charmed life, ascending to high rank in the Royal Navy mostly by dint of a heroic admiral of a father and a judicious habit of avoiding too much action. But, finally, when he could begin to contemplate an uneventful and honoured retirement in his new home in Hertfordshire, it all went horribly wrong in a conspiracy of circumstance.
The Seven Years War had just begun. The Navy was in its first flush of meritocratic reform and was looking askance at nepo-tars like Byng. Not enough money had been spent by Government. King George II, not a bright man, was intent in the Hanoverian way of proving himself more British than the British, and fancied himself a man of action (he was the last king to fight a battle, at Dettingen in 1743, an undistinguished victory in another of the endless eighteenth century European squabbles).
With all this as backcloth, Byng was ordered to thwart the French attack on Minorca, headquarters of the Navy’s Mediterranean fleet, resource-starved in contrast to the Channel protectors. He set off from Spithead in 1756 already dismayed by an inadequate and decrepit task force and so unenthusiastic about his prospects that he dallied in his preparations. Think of Nelson, and then think the exact opposite.
And thus he arrived late, failed to re-supply and reinforce the garrison at Port Mahon, and fought an inconclusive engagement with the French marked by his present pessimism and past practice of avoiding risk if at all possible. Minorca fell. Byng was court-martialled
The summary there of his approach to and during the mission is unimprovable: ‘placid despondency’.
The question, though, was whether this warranted his death. The court, implementing a new article of war introduced to put equal responsibility on commanding officers for disasters, found him guilty of failing to do his utmost against the enemy in battle or pursuit, and sentenced him to death.
There was an outcry against the sentence. Many thought it should not be carried out, citing the contributory failures of the naval and civil authorities to provide him with the fighting chance he deserved.
Sadly for Byng, those who wanted him dead were in the ascendancy, including the retired warrior king, who thought him a coward and said so. When William Pitt, then leader of the Commons, told the king that the House was inclined to mercy, George, who disliked Pitt mightily, replied, ‘You have taught me to look for the sense of my people elsewhere than in the House of Commons.’ He did not exercise his prerogative to grant clemency.
Nor was the admiral’s cause helped by further intervening defeats in the War, nor, particularly, by the support of Voltaire, not only a Frenchman and the enemy, but the worst kind, a very clever one.
‘We know of no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality,’ wrote Macaulay, famously; its periodical pursuits of vengeance are equally dismaying: Byng was doomed, and remains so despite the continuing attempts of his family to gain him a pardon.
The affair provided Voltaire with the beady critique of British polity and psyche that has resounded down the centuries: Candide, witnessing an execution in Portsmouth, is told, ‘Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres (In this country, it is good to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others)’.
Byng died a courageous death, dropping his handkerchief as a signal for the detachment of Marines to fire. A reserved man, to his disadvantage, he nevertheless made a good joke at the end, calling to his cousin, ‘God bless you my friend, don’t stay here, they may shoot you too.’
Oh, and Voltaire made, if you’ll excuse the indelicacy, a killing out of betting on French success at Minorca.
March 13
Today, 2006: An interesting piece of research into what people were talking about at the bus stop.
You might not be surprised, given the location, that more than 60 per cent of the conversations seem to be about the weather. Sadly, there was no breakdown of whether bad or good weather excited more comment, or what percentage went beyond the two traditional openers, ‘Lovely weather for ducks!’, and ‘Warm enough for you?’.
Some 15 per cent of queuers were happy discussing rising crime, ten per cent preferred to discuss sports results, and nine per cent wanted to talk politics. You might feel a contrast with current times in that only two per cent wanted to swop notes on celebrities, while ten per cent were happy to talk about global warming.
But perhaps the most significant figure was the 47 per cent who did not want to talk at all, closely followed by the Putin-worthy 98.4 per cent who said they would not even respond to an opening conversational gambit on cultural matters (I myself have discovered the truth of this, which tends to start some shuffling away, even if ‘Foucault?’ might have been a little too direct).
Again, a survey in the same year on outdoor sex in Britain revealed that six per cent of respondents had indulged at a bus stop, which seems either a pretty damning verdict on bus punctuality, British manhood or both.
I note, too, a later survey in 2023 discovered that punctuality is three times more important than any other factor, which prompts me to share that old Lancashire saying, ‘Well, I’ll go to the foot of our stairs.’
And it is a mathematical certainty that, eventually, yes, buses will all arrive at once.
Finally, you must remember this one: ‘Move farther up the bus, please!’ ‘It’s not my father, it’s my grandfather!’
Oi!
March 12
Today, some memorable lines from the movies.
A little overused:
‘There's still one thing I don't quite understand.’
‘But this could alter the entire course of the war!’
‘There, under the lamp post!’
‘What are you going to do when this is all over?’
‘He will never play again!’
‘I don't think I've ever been as happy as I am at this moment!’
‘Darling! No!’
‘They’re coming again, Sir - only more of them!’
Once probably enough:
‘Sire, the Hundred Years War has started!’
‘War, war! That's all you ever think about, Dick Plantagenet!’
‘Flash! I love you but we only have 14 hours to save the earth!’
‘Life's a bitch. And she's back in heat.’
‘I must bid you good morning, gentlemen – I have a space station to run.’
‘Bees! Millions of bees! And they’re headed this way!’
Requiring context:
‘They will, but there’s a backlog at the moment.’ A priest replying to El Greco’s fear that the Inquisition will come for him.
‘But Dorian, you haven’t changed!’ Dorian Gray still in his dressing gown approaching dinner time.
‘There go the medical supplies!’ An explorer after a native bearer has plunged to his death down a ravine.
‘Discontinue that so-called Polonaise jumble you've been playing for days.’ Georges Sand to Frederic Chopin.
Samson has killed the lion, Delilah flings herself at him:
‘Samson, you killed him with your hands, oh Samson!’
Samson: ‘Hey! One cat at a time!’
(Thanks for some of these are owed to the late Ronald Bergan, writing in The Guardian.)
March 11
Ken Dodd - Sir Kenneth Arthur Dodd, no less, as he was very tickled to become - died on this date at the age of 90. Definitely not to all tastes, Ken, but unique all the same, a triumphant throwback to the grotesques of the old music hall - Dan Leno, Joey Grimaldi and the rest - with all their unrecognised touches of the surreal and with jokes nearly the same age, but told with all the wiles and skills needed to win and hold audiences in those more demanding times and settings.
Yes, all the trappings to go with it, wild hair, the goofy teeth and the suits as loud as the laughter, and even, going back much further, the jester’s stick (he played Feste to acclaim, and Yorick, in brief, silent flashback). But there was also a deep study of what makes us laugh, and the intrigue with words that comes up with, for one random example, this: ‘The Prime Minister has made me a special adviser: he told me when he wanted my advice he’d ask for it.’
Fascinated, as you might tell, I wrote something for the Guardian about him. But, as I say, aware that he is not universally appreciated, I will supply a link rather than impose it on you directly. And it is, like Ken’s performances, a touch long:
March 10
Bbrrbnngg! Alexander Graham Bell made the first telephone call on this date in 1876 - ‘Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you’ - and I am delighted to tell you it is also National Landline Telephone Day, a celebration of that quaint artefact.
Might I suggest that you issue a cheery ‘Merry National Landline Day!’ to all your callers today, whether they be people attempting to sell you something you have already told them you don’t want or callously trying to defraud you while also insulting your intelligence.
You will have your own usual responses. Depending on mood, I offer one of these:
‘Hello, this is Jack Reacher.’
‘What an extraordinary coincidence! I’m in your area: would you like to some solar panels?’
‘Hello, can you describe in intimate detail what you’re wearing today?’
‘Golden Dawn Takeaway, numbers!’
‘What is your mother’s maiden name?’
‘Superintendent Ted Hastings, Serious Fraud Squad.’
‘Tell me about your childhood.’
‘On your knees when you speak to the emperor!’
‘You voted for Brexit, didn’t you?’
‘Hello, burglar here.’
‘Tell me, has God spoken to you today?’
Heavy breathing is also effective, as is putting your hand partly over the receiver and saying, ‘I’ll keep them talking while you trace the call, Moriarty.’
Oh, for the days when it was only Miss Partridge in the village shop listening to your call. The days, too, of named telephone exchanges, as full of nostalgia and numinousness as the shipping forecast, but, alas, gone for ever. Here are just a few. They preceded the numbers; the first three letters appeared on the later telephone dials (dials!). Their history is cloudy; the names were chosen by the GPO, but only for selective exchanges, and the reasons that seem often lost (unless you know differently).
Elgar (Harlesden); Keats (Enfield); Vigilant (Sutton); Renown (Fulham); Ivanhoe (Woodford & Buckhurst Hill); Kipling (Mottingham); Liberty (Merton); Museum (Bloomsbury); Dickens (Highbury); Virginia (Finchley); Skyport (! Heathrow and Harlington); Spartan (Dalston); Dreadnought (Earl’s Court); and, brave new world, Skyport (Heathrow and Harlington).
I’ve mentioned before Imperial, for Chislehurst, named for the exiled Napoleon III; I also like Grimsdyke, for Harrow Weald, called after WS Gilbert’s house there, Grim’s Dyke. Manchester had Mercury and Pyramid, and I became most excited about Lagoon for Croydon, until I discovered it was in Australia.
Roger and out!
March 9
Amerigo Vespucci, whose name was given to the continent of the Americas, was born on this date in 1454. Fittingly, perhaps, there are alternative truths involved, most notably that Vespucci knew or didn’t know that he had come across Asia or a new continent, and how much he made up about his voyages of discovery, including their number. Some of the booklets and letters on which Italian cartographers based their decision to grant him this great honour are now considered forgeries.
Much is unknown about Vespucci. He was in Seville, from where the voyages left, but it is not clear why, or what was his exact role, although it is known he supplied the ships with provisions, working for a relative. This led Ralph Waldo Emerson, the nineteenth century American writer and polymath, who preferred the claim of Columbus, to call him a thief and pickle dealer who had managed to get ‘half the world baptised with his dishonest name’.
It’s probably unwise at this stage to point out that Columbus seems to have died thinking he had reached India.
Nor is Vespucci even accepted categorically as the source of the name. There is a reasonably persuasive contention that it comes from a meeting between Columbus and some Mayans in Nicaragua on his fourth voyage from 1502 to 1504. They supposedly told him that he was in Amerrique, the Land of Wind and Spirit, which also seems apt.
A supporting theory is that this is what the Italian cartographers were relying on, and explains why they broke so markedly from precedent by naming a new land after a commoner. But I fear this is as far-fetched as another suggestion, that it’s named after an Anglo-Welsh merchant of Bristol, Richard ap Meryk, or Amerike.
In recent years, too, there have been adoptions of other names for the continent by some groups seeking to go back beyond the European arrival. Turtle Island, after the native legend that the land is supported on the back of a turtle, suffers from there not appearing to be a native word for it, while Abiayala, the mature land, doesn’t seem likely to achieve widespread traction in current conditions.
However, the original European discoverer has an aptly familiar name which could well prompt one of the currently fashionable rebrandings: Leif Erikson.
March 8
Certain British, and particularly English, soldiers, including the poet Siegfried Sassoon, have earned the nickname ‘Mad Jack’ on account of their eccentricities, which have always included a startling disregard for safety during battle.
Lieutenant-Colonel Jack Malcolm Thorpe Flemington Churchill, DSO and Bar, MC and Bar, who died on this date in 1996, began halfway there, already having part of the name, but his astounding exploits make him possibly the nonpareil.
There have been soldiers as brave, but none last century accustomed to fighting with a bow, arrows and a sword. You can imagine the effect of this on the enemy, especially when dead comrades were discovered with an arrow sticking out of them (Churchill had shot for England before the war). Although English (and no relation to Winston), he was also a great lover of the bagpipes, and was accustomed to playing them as he led Commando raids throughout the Second World War, often dressed in nothing more than a kilt.
In 1941, at Vågsøy, Norway, he stood in the lead landing-craft playing ‘The March of the Cameron Men’; in 1944, the last commando alive holding a position on the Adriatic island of Brac, he took up his pipes and began to play ‘Will Ye No Come Back Again’ until knocked unconscious by a grenade explosion.
In between, he had led an attack at Salerno screaming ‘Commando’, going on to capture nearly fifty Germans with the help of one corporal. He escaped from German confinement twice, and was disappointed to arrive in Burma just after Hiroshima and Nagasaki: ‘If it hadn’t been for those damned Yanks we could have kept the war going for another ten years’.
After the war, and after appearing as an archer in the film ‘Ivanhoe’, he faced down a group of Arab terrorists in Jerusalem: ‘I grinned like mad from side to side,’ he said afterwards, ‘as people are less likely to shoot at you if you smile at them.’
He died in his bed nearly 50 years later, having spent the remainder of his time war-instructing, building model ships, running a steam-launch business on the Thames, surfing the Severn Bore and startling rail passengers by flinging his briefcase out of the window before getting off at the next station and walking home, where it would be lying at the bottom of the garden.
Commando!
March 7
On this date in 1881, the Empress of Austria rode out with the Cheshire Hunt. This is not quite so surprising as it might seem: Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie, mostly called Sisi, is a legendary figure of eccentricity, romance and almost operatic tragedy who has, not surprisingly, proved irresistible to writers and film makers since she was the victim of a bizarre and random assassination in 1898.
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She was obsessive about most things, principally her beauty, which led to a baleful regime of fasting to preserve an 18-inch waist, three hours to dress her long hair, which was so heavy it gave her headaches, and beauty treatments which including a veal face mask. Even when hunting, another grand passion, she was sewn into her outfit to accentuate her figure yet more.
Cheshire was one of her many travels, which seemed to be a futile attempt to escape herself and the oppressions of imperial life, as constricting as her undergarments. It was on a trip to Geneva that she was stabbed by an Italian anarchist looking to kill any handy sovereign. His weapon was a sharpened needle of a file; Sisi’s extremely tight corsetry fatally delayed its detection and effect, as bathetic an irony as you will come across even in this world. And almost as lurid as the more famous murder and suicide carried out by her only son, the syphilitic crown prince, Rudolf, in the hunting lodge at Mayerling in 1889. (We will leave aside the fate of her brother-in-law, the Archduke Maximilan, Emperor of Mexico before he was executed by firing squad.)
Given all this, and the forced extension of the platform at Wrenbury station to accommodate the many carriages of her train, you might think this an event unparalleled for the Cheshire Hunt.
But no: I give you the day in 1858 when Karl Marx joined Frederick Engels, a keen member, possibly on the same occasion, gloriously recorded in song, that the Hunt was joined by 24 Manchester chimney sweeps on donkeys.
I acknowledge that ‘possibly’ is working very hard there, but I did get partial confirmation when I visited the Hunt’s historian, Captain Gordon Fergusson; sadly, the Captain couldn’t trace the source in his extensive archive in his outhouse near Tarporley.
Actually, while we’re on the hunt, you might recall that Lord Halifax, government minister, misjudged appeaser and Master of the Middleton Hunt, rode out with Herman Göering in Pomerania in 1937 prior to a meeting with Hitler which did not get off to the best of starts when he mistook the Führer for a footman and handed him his coat.
Tally-ho!
March 6
Ernst Lubitsch’s masterpiece, ‘To Be Or Not To Be’, was released on this date in 1942, to outrage and acclaim. Lubitsch’s films, comedies with extras, were marked by something that came to be called The Lubitsch Touch; impossible to define, even by the man himself, you know it when you see it.
Lubitsch said of ‘To Be Or Not To Be’: ‘One might call it a tragical farce or a farcical tragedy — I do not care and neither do the audiences’. It is set in wartime Warsaw and features a slightly rackety troupe of actors displaying every actorly trope in the script and somehow but gloriously taking on and impersonating the Nazi oppressors, ridiculing them in a way unmatched until Mel Brooks made them dance in ‘The Producers’.
But this was far too much for some then: not only had the film been made before the US entered the War, but its female star, the clever and beautiful Carole Lombard, married to Clark Gable, had died in a plane crash. Bosley Crowther, the influential New York Times critic, was one of many who found poking fun at mass exterminators offensive, including The Times here, which is odd given the British delight in teasing Hitler, particularly in the testicular area.
But Lubitsch, a Jewish tailor’s son from Berlin, knew exactly what he was doing. ‘To Be Or Not To Be’ has been hailed as the first black comedy, which is a touch rich when it parodies and plays on ‘Hamlet’, written by the finest exponent of black comedy of them all.
So we have delicious jokes, which I will mention sparingly in case you have this delight ahead of you. Jack Benny plays the leading actor in the company and in the conspiracy against the invaders, a role literally written for him to play by Lubitsch, and achieving a success he could never match again. A Nazi describes his Hamlet as doing to Shakespeare what they were doing to Poland; he is also accused of putting the ham into Hamlet. Another fine pre-Brooks gag is the imposter’s ‘Heil Myself!’. (Brooks remade ‘To Be Or Not To Be’, but it is not one of his best, although I do recommend his song and dance with Anne Bancroft.)
Austin Tichenor, writing for the Folger Library, has pointed out the current resonances of another Jewish actor comedian taking on a dictator. Peter Cook famously referred to ‘those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War’, but laughing at tyrants is as necessary as fighting them, surely?
Here is my favourite bit from the film: keep your eyes open for the prompter:
March5
Punning is often sniffed at, usually by those who find it hard, or have just been to anything by W Shakespeare. But who could resist Dorothy Parker - ‘If all the girls at the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised’ - or Margot Asquith responding to Jean Harlow pronouncing the t at the end of her first name - ‘No, dear, the t is silent, as in Harlow’.
Wilde was the master of course. He claimed he could pun on any subject; challenged to make one about Queen Victoria, he replied that she was not a subject.
Oscar also claimed that nothing succeeds like excess. But, leaving aside the mottos in Christmas crackers, it could perhaps be thought that there is one area where things went quite far enough some time ago: the titles of memoirs by popular sportsmen.
I submit, in no particular order:
‘Tosh’, John Toshack, footballer
‘Frame and Fortune’, Steve Davis, snooker player
‘Ure’s Truly’, Ian Ure, footballer
‘While the Iron is Hot,’ Bernhard Langer, golfer
‘The Gloves are Off’, Godfrey Evans, wicket keeper
‘Centre of Excellence’, Jim Renwick, rugby three-quarter
‘Spinner’s Yarn’, Ian Peebles, cricketer
‘The Rough with the Smooth’, Nick Faldo, golfer
‘I Declare’, Mike Denness, England cricket captain
‘In the Long Run’, Jim Peters, distance runner
‘My Bleeding Business’, Terry Downes, boxer
Thanks to Tom Fort, Jonathan Baker, and mostly to Magnus Bowles of Sportspages.
March 4
I should start by pointing out that it’s remarkable how few errors are made by newspapers in print and online. Nevertheless, some have been very funny.
One of my distinguished former newspapers, the Liverpool Echo, for example, once referred to the mother of the Kray twins, Mrs Violet Kray, as Mrs Violent Kray.
Elsewhere:
‘On 9 May we published a picture of a candidate for Uxbridge and South Ruislip, and identified him as Lord Toby Jug, leader of the Eccentric Party of Great Britain. In fact, it was Howling Laud Hope, leader of the Monster Raving Loony Party.’ The Sun.
‘This article has been amended since publication. Prime Minister Morarji Desai drank his own urine and not cow urine.’ Financial Times
‘Karol Wojtyla was referred to in Saturday’s Credo column as “the first non-Catholic pope for 450 years”. This should, of course, have read “non-Italian”. We apologise for the error.’ The Times
This sort of thing is not, of course, an exclusively British habit. I’ve always liked this, from the land of the fact checker, in American Vogue: ‘In the September profile of Chelsea Clinton, “Waiting in the Wings”, Dan Baer was mistakenly identified as an interior designer. He is a deputy assistant secretary for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at the the U.S. Department of State.’
But, it is another of my former homes, The Guardian, which has an unchallengeable record in this field, not entirely deserved, and deserving praise for turning the correction into its own entertainment. It’s hard to imagine any other newspaper listing its most famous errors as part of its bicentennial celebrations, as the Graun did in 2021.
Mind you, there have been some crackers:
The president of the European Central Bank, Wim Duisenberg, for example, was misnamed Dim Wuisenberg
The Scots band Frightened Rabbit became Frightened Rabbi.
Admiral Peter Hill-Norton was said to have gone ‘a little quiet’ on a subject when he had died three months earlier.
The 1950s musical ‘Grab me a Gondola’ was described in an obituary as ‘Grab me a Gondolier’.
I also like this: ‘In our Cryptic Crossword No 22,707, page 32, 19 December, we gave the clue to 8 across as “As in pavilion”, presenting the solution as “misspelt”. ‘Pavilion’, in fact, is spelt perfectly correctly.’
And this takes it up to the meta: ‘We misspelled the word misspelled twice, as mispelled, in the Corrections and Clarifications column on September 26.’
The final words, though, must go to the great Ian Mayes, its first Readers’ Editor and original Correction Artist, in 1999: ‘The absence of corrections yesterday was due to a technical hitch rather than any sudden onset of accuracy’.
Nxet!
March 3
Wordle follows an ancient line of word games stretching back to antiquity which lend a cloak of respectability to the intense enjoyment of wasting time. The French, being intellectuals, have awarded the practice a deeper significance by spending even more time discussing it, often over black coffee.
And writing a lot as well, of course. Georges Perec, who died on this date in 1982, is a fine example, perhaps most remembered for writing a 300-page novel, ‘La Disparition’ (Disappearance), which avoided employing the letter ‘e’, followed by one, ‘Les Revenentes’ (Revenants), with ‘e’ as the only vowel.
I’m told both are good; I know that ‘A Void’, the translation of ‘La Disparition’, by Gilbert Adair, managing the same trick in English, is a marvel of fluency and flair, right from the typically witty Adair touch with the title.
I knew Gilbert, and a remarkable man he was, a delight of contradictory characteristics, with a gift for people as strong as for writing across the broadest of ranges, from essays mirroring Roland Barthes to follow-ons from children’s classics to spoofish Agatha Christie whodunnits.
It’s clear this was no average post-modernist: the wit was as important as the gravitas. ‘The Post Modernist Always Rings Twice’ is another peerless title; it’s also hard to think of anyone else’s detective crying, ‘Great Scott Moncrieff!’, after the weighty translator of French classics.
Or his acclaimed reimagining of ‘Death in Venice,’ ‘Love and Death on Long Island,’ where the protagonist finds himself watching the wrong film and cries, ‘This isn’t EM Forster!” at the cinema screen. Definitely not: it is ‘Hotpants College II’, and he will become infatuated with its star.
I have now to tell you that I have avoided using ‘u’ in the above, and rather than triggering ideas and inspiration as ‘constrained writing’ is supposed to do, it was more irritating, which only increases my admiration for Gilbert.
It also allows me to give you another of his top titles, ‘On First Looking into Chaplin’s Humour,’ and to pass on something that gives an excellent flavour of Gilbert, who splendidly bucked the postmodernist and structuralist tendency by refusing to take himself too seriously, readily if ruefully acknowledging the regrettable failure of the popular mind to be gripped by quite as much enthusiasm for Long Island as Love Island.
He once rang his American publishers and was asked by an excited secretary if he was Red Adair, the then legendary American oilfield firefighter. ‘No,’ said Gilbert. ‘I’m unread Adair’.
On!
March 2
John Wesley died on this date in1791, as he rather aptly tried, but failed, to sing, ‘I’ll Praise My Maker While I’ve Breath’.
The amount written about the founder of Methodism is more than matched by the amount he wrote, including a history of England, a best seller on herbal medicine and a Christian Library in 50 volumes.
Should you wish to know more about his positions on perfectionism, justification by faith, predestination, Calvinism (against), Catholicism (against), slavery (against), John Wilkes and Liberty (against), American independence (against), you will have no difficulty.
It’s rather more tricky, though, to understand why he had such an extraordinary impact as he travelled his estimated 250,000 miles on horseback, leaving as evidence the chapels that still leave you shaking your head in wonder at their number, achieved in so short a time (more than 5,000 registered in 1867). There are suggestions that he wasn’t that great a speaker. Surely it cannot all be explained by the rise of the newly educated but neglected artisan classes?
The answer would be obvious to believers; the solution for the rest of us, as with so many other historical figures, is wonderfully impossible: to watch him on tape, or at least hear him..
So I’ll leave with a story I rather like, of one of several encounters Wesley had on his travels with Beau Nash, the Bath master of ceremonies who didn’t take kindly to his sway being challenged by someone with God on his side.
They met in Bath coming, suitably, from opposite directions. Nash kept on coming forward, saying, ‘I never give way to fools’. Wesley stepped aside, saying, ‘I always do’.
Next!
March 1
Charm is hard to define but easy to see. David Niven, born on this date in 1910, is an excellent example. What, exactly, did he have? He was a better actor than generally allowed, but that doesn’t explain why he was a star. He was a splendid raconteur, in person or on page, but that ability is elusive, too. Altogether, he was somehow able to season attractiveness with the exact amount of wit, diffidence and interest in other people, pretended or not.
That used to be claimed for the English gentleman, of which Niven was supposed the non-pareil (with slight Scots complications), but it was always nonsense: charm, like bad behaviour, is indifferent to class. ‘The Gentleman’ is a similarly elusive concept. James I had it right when he said he could create lords but not gentlemen. Cardinal Newman thought a gentleman never caused pain, but he was a saint, and we must also consider Bertie Wooster’s tailoring choices and their effect on poor Jeeves. The only certainty is that he who claims to be a gentleman is not.
To assist the pondering, here is Niven telling Michael Parkinson a joke:
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