Nevin's Funny Old Things: A marvellous miscellany of past wit, wisdom, and whimsical curiosities
- Charles Nevin
- Apr 2
- 38 min read
Updated: 15 hours ago
April 30
Today, as promised, cake!
The Battenberg cake tends to divide opinion between those with discerning palates and those of us who remember our childhood and the treat of this magical windowed marzipan and sponge combination with its unnaturally vigorous colouring.
It was first baked to celebrate the marriage on this date in 1884 of Prince Louis of Battenberg to Princess Victoria, Queen Victoria's granddaughter and the late Duke of Edinburgh’s grandmother.
Prince Louis (originally Ludwig), the father of Earl Mountbatten of Burma and a more than competent First Lord of the Admiralty, was forced from office in 1914 by the anti-German feeling that led, among other things, to the kicking of dachshunds.
He changed his family’s name for the same reason to the literal translation, Mountbatten, in 1917 at the same time as the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas became Windsors. (They thought about Plantagenet; the change produced a good joke from a surprising source, the Kaiser: ‘Now, I suppose we shall have performances of the Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.’)
Bonus facts to chew on the next time you spot an emergency vehicle: the high-visibility chequers are called, officially, Battenberg Markings.
They are a British invention, devised in the 1990s by the Police Scientific Development Branch.
They are in use in over 20 countries, including China.
They are sometimes spelled Battenburg.
Move yourselves along now, please!
April 29
Today, yes, vegetables! And some fruit! Did you know:
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In France you can go the pharmacy to get the identity of your mushrooms checked.
A pomegranate can hold up to 1400 seeds.
The ancient Greeks used parsnips as both an aphrodisiac and a toothache remedy. Actually, you will be hard-pressed to find a vegetable that hasn’t been recommended at some time or other as an aphrodisiac. I see it as an early marketing ploy to counter their strange unpopularity.
The popularity of canned spinach last century as a health food, fostered by the ‘Popeye the Sailor Man’ cartoon, was the result of a misplaced decimal point in the amount of iron spinach contains.
During the Second World War Mae Questel voiced both Popeye and Olive Oyl. Remarkable.
Weight for weight, the sprout contains three times the level of vitamin C of an orange.
The TAS2R38 gene, shared by about half the world’s population, allows carriers to enjoy the taste of sprouts because they are genetically incapable of tasting the highly bitter glucosinolates found in all cabbages, but more abundantly in sprouts.
Cranberries can bounce.
A cucumber, said Dr Johnson, ‘should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing’.
Pineapple: the Hawaiian pizza is not particularly popular in Hawaii. They prefer straight cheese and ham, particularly in the capital. Sorry? Honolulu? No, on a thin crust base.
Might I also recommend the World Carrot Museum - https://r.fibr.ai/4hztqkop - and particular its section, Carrots in Fine Art.
Tomorrow, though: cake!
April 28
Blossom blooming, mornings lightening, air almost effervescent: a fine time of the year. You may be familiar with the story of David Ogilvy, doyen of modern advertising, an Englishman in New York who encountered a man begging beside a sparsely filled bowl. His sign read, ‘I am blind. Please help’. Ogilvy rewrote the sign, ‘It is Spring and I am blind’. When he returned later, the bowl was full.
As it happens, Spring was also when the first traffic roundabout was introduced, in 1907. Could there be a finer mark of our civilisation than the basic etiquette and discipline that the roundabout assumes and achieves with such unfussy ingenuity? I think not (although I exclude those drivers who offer no signal).
It was invented by Eugene Henard, the city architect of Paris at the turn of the 19th century, in no less a place than the Place de l’Étoile, now the Place Charles De Gaulle, which means that, charmingly, the Arc de Triomphe is actually the world's first roundabout. But I would argue that the British took the idea and ran around it, adapting and evolving with both éclat and élan, to produce that modern marvel of concentrated courtesy, the mini-roundabout.
Which is ours: yes, indeed, invented here by Frank Blackmore, 1916-2008) traffic engineer and, fittingly, the son of a British missionary father and a Swiss-French mother. If you require a monument, go round Swindon's legendary Magic Roundabout, five mini roundabouts formed into a larger one, designed by Blackmore and opened, to continuing wonder, in 1972. What we roundabout buffs like best is that it permits both outer clockwise and inner anticlockwise navigation.
I would argue, too, that the British have pioneered roundabout art, including the ten foot high, two ton cockerel at Dorking, and The Rise in Belfast, two steel meshed spheres symbolising ‘the rising of the sun and new hope for Belfast's future’, or, as it's more popularly known, due to its location, The Balls in the Falls.
But, for reasons not yet satisfactorily explained, by far the most popular features are sheep, which appear in, to name a few, Shoreham-by-Sea in Sussex, Shepton Mallet in Somerset, Reighton in North Yorkshire, and Newport in Shropshire.
The Shoreham-by-Sea roundabout, by the flyover on the A283, illustrates some of the difficulties with pioneering a new art form. At first, drivers were worried they might be lost sheep even though they were green, and plastic. The addition of a fence failed to allay such concerns, which were finally settled by the arrival of a life-sized steel shepherd.
Sponsorship has also proved popular: Shoreham’s introduced a striking diversity, being sponsored by both the South Downs National Park and a local tandoori house.
Should you be eager to learn more (!), I strongly recommend ‘The Roundabouts of Britain’, Kevin Beresford’s sequel to his popular ‘The Roundabouts of Redditch’, both with copious illustrations.
Now give way!
April 27
On this date we celebrate John Whitaker, the eighteenth century Mancunian historian who first revealed to a startled world that the legendary Sir Lancelot of the Lake, fabled swordsman, jouster and poly-balladed heart-breaker, was from Lancashire.
Those of a cultural and geographic partiality might scoff at this, but bear with me, and John. Nenniusm the ninth century monkish chronicler, Nennius in the ninth, describes battles fought by the native Britons against the Saxons, naming the British leader as no less than King Arthur, who, he says, fought no fewer than four battles near Wigan.
Enter Whitaker, who pointed out that Nennius’s name for the battle area, Linuis, meaning lake, obviously referred to the large lake nearby, Martin Mere, and that linuis survived in its modern form as Ince, near Wigan. Thus, obviously, Lancelot’s home turf.
Should you require any more convincing, I can tell you that an article in the Wigan Evening Chronicle in 1927 by ‘Historian’ mentioned that the Martin in Martin Mere was another corruption, of Merlin. And that the famed second century geographer and polymath, Ptolemy of Alexandria, mentioned a place near the River Ribble called Camulodonum: yes, of course, come on, Camelot!
I myself made a field trip to Ince to see if I could uncover any more support for the Reverend Whitaker’s assertion. Nothing too concrete: ‘It doesn’t seem to ring any bells,’ they said at the Library; but the woman behind the counter at the post office was very willing to countenance it: ‘That would explain why they’re always fighting round here,’ she said.
Keen academic scruples do compel me to mention this, however, from Rev Whitaker’s entry in the Dictionary of National Biography: ‘He was a stout critic of the limitations and parochialism inherent in the “private and dull annals”of local history…The History received a mixed reception—some readers welcomed the wide range and accessible prose and recognised the substantial amount of erudition behind it; others cavilled at his extravagant generalizations, his unsubstantiated assertions, contrived reasoning, and the strongly tory flavour of his views’.
Well ahead of his time, I should have said.
Rex Quondam, Rexque Futurus, in Eebagum!
April 26
Should you wish to examine a particularly extinct type of Englishwoman, I give you Celia Johnson, who died on this date in 1982. Celia (I think she would forgive the informality) had those restrained good looks and manner which almost demanded sacrifice uncomplainingly undertaken.
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The voice was a marvel, a kind of keenly aspirated honey that achieved a charm generally missed by the terribly careful tones of other upper class women of her time, including the late Queen.
Her career was selective, designed to give her time with her family - she was married to Peter Fleming, elder brother and better writer than his brother, Ian - and uniformly successful from her first appearances on the London stage in the early 1930s, from when, in the words of the playwright, William Douglas-Home (another brother, of Alec, prime minister), ‘she became a star, admired by all and unscarred by adverse criticism’.
Her most famous role, of course, was Laura Jessop, the intelligent, unfulfilled Home Counties housewife and mother who finds herself in love after a chance meeting with an attractive doctor, but, in an oustanding performance as visual as vocal, conflict chasing across a face that somehow also remains as bland as her class, she sacrifices herself for her family and ends what turns out to be a Brief Encounter.
Noël Coward’s story, as interpreted by David Lean, music by Rachmaninov, has become a cypher for that noble sacrifice, seen then if not now as admirable and, dread phrase alert, ‘the right thing to do’.
But, this being Coward, it is a considerably more layered affair. It is also an examination of what EM Forster called disapprovingly ‘the undeveloped heart’ of the English, by which he meant the fearful resistance of the middle classes to emotion, blown away (mostly) by the liberating 1960s.
This being Coward, he also managed to subvert Laura’s sacrifice by having her ready to fling herself under a passing express à la Karenina, but making her fail through cowardice, not duty. And topped by a complacent husband who has barely noticed anything.
All this escaped Trevor Howard, who played the romantic doctor, Alec Harvey, and who failed to endear himself to his fellow players and production team when he demanded, ‘Why doesn’t he just go on and fuck her?’.
Moving on, quickly: it seems rather splendid and apt that Celia died in the middle of a rubber of Bridge, a game she loved.
April 25
Less quoted as the very ideal of the all-round sportsman in these less all-round sporting times, Charles Burgess Fry, CB Fry, was born on this date in 1872.
Elegant, effortless, every inch what used to be fondly thought of as a true Englishman, Fry was an international at both cricket and football, and a world long-jump record holder. He was also a gifted classicist at Oxford while winning blues in cricket, football and athletics, only robbed by injury of a rugby one as well. He was so successful at journalism that he was given his own magazine named after him.
The truth was, equally naturally, less simple. As the Dictionary of National Biography notes, he was a raconteur given to ‘embellishing’ his achievements, a practice enthusiastically taken up by others. Only a churl would cavil at his claim to have broken the world long jump record after a good lunch and a cigar, or that he had a party trick which involved leaping from a standing start backwards on to a mantelpiece after turning in mid air. And he wins sympathy for his little-discussed mental health problems, bravely borne.
But where I do take a little issue is with what we were told at school, that he was so admired for these essential English virtues throughout the entire word that the Albanians - the Albanians! - offered him their throne.
For it seems that the only authority for this is…CB Fry. Moreover, in the turmoils before and after the First World War, when Albania was trying to evade the attentions of any number of neighbouring states without any noticeable enticements, you were lucky not to be offered the throne: candidates, alleged or otherwise, included Prince Albert of Connaught, the diplomat Aubrey Herbert, and even a Bonaparte.
There was also the remarkable Rowland George Allanson-Winn, the fifth Baron Headley. Headley, an Irish peer, wrote books on pugilism and the use of the walking stick in self defence, and announced his conversion to Islam at Frascati’s restaurant in Oxford Street in 1913. The DNB has him receiving no fewer than three, key word alert, ‘informal’ offers of the Albanian throne which he ‘prudently declined’. It is silent on the further detail that his second wife left him and returned to Australia after he said no a third time. The throne was, of course, assumed ultimately by President Zog, who became King Zog and an exiled society figure for many years after Mussolini invaded in April, 1939, followed by the fearful Enver Hoxha after the war. Bonus fact for getting this far: his son, Crown Prince Leka, was six feet eight inches tall.
I will leave you with Lord Stanley, Victorian first son of the Earl of Derby, three times prime minster, who was offered, this time, the Greek throne. He turned it down, saying, ‘Don’t they know I’m going to be Earl of Derby?’
On!
April 24
Puns. Shakespeare, of whom we just treated, was very keen, as were Ben Jonson and Jonathan Swift. Others, including Dryden, have been sniffy, but as Swifty was probably the first to note, this is often because whoever it is hasn’t been able to think of one.
Whatever, the English language lends itself splendidly to them, as newspaper headlines still insist, although any sensible analysis of the marketing kind would question their use, and probably explains why they are dying digitally.
But there is one area where they remain triumphant: the British commercial classes still love them with a heartening relish the Elizabethans would surely recognise.
Here are some fine efforts:
Game of Scones, café, Crawley
Barber Streisand, hairdresser, Clerkenwell
Planet of the Crepes, café, Saffron Walden
Father Treads, tyres, Crosby
Re-Ink-Our-Nation, cartridge refills, Belfast
Tequila Mockingbird, bar, Wimbledon
Madame Batterfry, chip shop, London
The Vinyl Frontier, record shop, Croydon
The Batter of Bosworth, chip shop, Market Bosworth
Seymour Clearly, window cleaner, Uckfield
Puff Dad, vape shop, Essex
Parrbados, pizzas, Parr, St Helens
Jean Claude Van Man, removals, Southport
Some Fin Fishy, pet shop, Wirral
Thaitanic, restaurant, Belfast
Hairy Pop-Ins, pet sitters, Shetland
William the Concreter, Battle, Sussex
Jason Donervan, kebab van, Bristol
Bonnie Tiler, tiler, Llantwit Major
Apocalypse Cow, BBQ restaurant, Birmingham
Lino Richie, flooring contractor, Newcastle
You do have to be careful with these dull corporate types, though, as they are most protective of their more mundanely monikered employers.
My favourite among the thus and humourlessly ruled out: British Hairways.
Next!
April 23
Big Bill’s birthday today, and also that of some obscure Cappadocian soldier who seems to appeal most to the least delightful of our citizenry.
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Bill, though: I have already rehearsed for you the irrefutable claim that his so-called Lost Years were spent as a private tutor in deepest Lancashire, honing his gifts and leavening them with some of the famed local wit fostered by the gentle winds and sheltering Pennines that have also produced Les Dawson, Eric Morecambe and George Formby.
Other theories about WS abound, of course, including my young son’s most interesting suggestion that, given he died on his birthday, it might have been from shock at a surprise party.
But I wouldn’t tarry with the rest of it, particularly the endless authorship stuff, most of it based on the snobbish view that a literary genius could not possibly come from humble stock.
I remember Enoch Powell, another Black Country bloke, if not particularly balding, announcing during a lunch at the Daily Telegraph in the same portentous Black Country tones that predicted imminent rivers of a worryingly red hue, ‘I will tell you one thing: the Bard was not the Man of Stratford’. Where, he demanded to know, were the mentions of Shakespeare in diaries, at dinner or other engagements? It could not be, was not possible.
We all nodded gravely, in the way hacks do when confronted by Knowledge. And then Jeremy Deedes, the Telegraph’s managing editor, son of Lord Deedes, with some of the same style, said, ‘Well, I expect he was rather busy, writing all those plays’. I don’t think Enoch even noticed our happy sniggers.
This comic potential of the old boy rather appealed to me, though. Here is my entirely fictional account of an encounter of his with Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher:
Enochp
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April 22
I met Barry Humphries once. The meeting, somehow fitting the Humphries’ personas, took place for a publicity opportunity I can no longer remember, in one of those green London taxi drivers’ shelters, introduced in Victorian times after a newspaper editor was unable to get a Hansom because all the drivers were in the pub.
Barry was Dame Edna Everage. S/he was magnificent, as funny and driven and insistently funny as s/he would have been up in front of 2,000 people at the London Palladium. The cabbies loved it, I loved it, although I found it a little unsettling to look into those eyes behind the extravagant spectacles, as they seemed to combine that trademark twinkle with something of the look you might imagine from a ventriloquist’s dummy: penetrating, disturbing.
S/he sat down opposite me on one of the trestle tables, and devoted as much wit, pzazz, pop and crackle as s/he had been from the moment s/he arrived. No question was too routine, too obvious not to be taken up and minted into a fresh joke.
Finally, I asked him, in finest traditional fashion, if s/he had a message for the readers of The Sunday Telegraph.
For the first time, the flow halted, the Dame stiffened, and a different look came into her eyes. The silence seemed to last for ever, my poised pen frozen above my notebook. ‘Christ,’ he said, disturbingly in his own voice, ‘I’ve dried’.
So now, on the anniversary of the day he left us in 2023 along with the Dame, Sir Les Patterson and Sandy Stone, I would like to offer this belated apology on behalf of The Sunday Telegraph readers, who are all probably dead by now as well.
Here, though, is a bit of the Dame at her best, a Christmas special allegedly from the Alps in 1990. It is all bliss, but I would especially recommend the entrance of the equally late Madge Allsop on five minutes.
April 21
One of the other sort of American, the clever, witty and wise ones, discovered on this date in 1910 that reports of his death were not exaggerated.
Mark Twain, or Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was a printer, riverboat pilot, and writer of perhaps the finest accounts of growing up that has specialised in them.
He had an unparalleled gift for encapsulating truths without being unforgivably mimsy or sickeningly folksy.
Here are just a few:
Life is short. Break the rules. Forgive quickly, kiss slowly. Love truly, laugh uncontrollably, and never regret anything that makes you smile.
Never miss an opportunity to shut up.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
If we were meant to talk more than listen, we would have two mouths and one ear.
The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.
The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened.
Nothing spoils a good story like the arrival of an eyewitness.
God created war so that Americans would learn geography.
There is nothing to be learned from the second kick of a mule.
A pessimist is a well-informed optimist.
Comparison is the death of joy.
The inability to forget is far more devastating than the inability to remember.
Few things are more irritating than when someone who is wrong is also very effective in making his point.
And my favourite:
There is no tragedy so horrible as that of a beautiful myth being murdered by an ugly fact.
April 20
Oliver Cromwell: it’s fair to say that the late Lord Protector is not universally admired. Too many warts in every sense: regicide is always a tough one to get over, as is executing after surrender, massacring innocent civilians, murdering priests and burning churches, as Ireland clearly remembers yet.
But he also had one moment deemed magnificent: the dismissal on this date in 1653 of the Rump Parliament. The Rump was widely seen as a bunch of lawyers and City financiers clinging on to power for their own selfish ends. Cromwell decided that enough was enough, and made this speech, which has echoed down the ages:
‘It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.
Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter’d your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?
Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defil’d this sacred place, and turn’d the Lord’s temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress’d, are yourselves gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors. In the name of God, go!’
Thrilling stuff, you must concede. Ye have no more religion than my horse! Barter’d your conscience for bribes! Clever too: calling the Mace, the high symbol of parliamentary authority, a ‘bauble’ was a reference to the medieval jester’s stick which, as long as it was held, protected against punishment for excessive behaviour.
But history and humanity do tend to be inconvenient, and inconveniently complicated. Cromwell was overthrowing the closest thing to democracy in the Commonwealth, which was the successor to the forcibly purged Long Parliament. He replaced it with Barebone’s Parliament, 140 God- and Cromwell-fearing members nominated by him and his cronies. (It was called after a typically partial member, the remarkably named Praise-God Barebone, a London leather seller and Fifth Monarchist.) His assumption of supreme power would not be long delayed. You might recognise a familiar pattern.
And, oh yes, he didn’t make that speech. The earliest version of it found dates back to…1816.
And so our glorious Island History takes another wobble. Excellent work, though, whoever you were.
April 19
The 335 Years War, the longest in world history, finally came to an end on this date in 1986 when the Netherlands and the Scilly Isles formally agreed to cease hostilities. It is also known, perhaps inevitably, as The Scilly War.
It broke out in March, 1651, when the legendary Dutch Admiral, Maarten Tromp, briefly allied with the English Commonwealth for a change, appeared off St Mary’s to demand reparations from the last remnants of the Royalist Navy, based there, who had been taking a heavy toll on Dutch merchant shipping.
The Royalists, under Sir John Grenville, treated Tromp with their traditional haughtiness, and refused to cease these piratical activities. Tromp responded by declaring war on the Scillies and blockading the Royalist ships.
Two months later, more warships arrived, these under the command of Admiral Blake, commander of the Commonwealth Navy. No pussy-footing of a blockade for Blake: he sent in 40 boatloads of Marines and began to bombard the Garrison, which surrendered after two weeks, ending the need for any more action from Tromp.
But having informed the Commonwealth that he had declared war on the Scillies, neither he nor the Netherlands thereafter declared peace until 1986, when the Dutch ambassador to the United Kingdom, Rein Huydecoper, arrived to sign an official treaty declaring that it was all over at last.
Inevitably, scrupulous and letter-serving historians have sought to cast doubt on the war, claiming that Tromp did not have the authority to declare it. Thankfully, this is disputed. The churlish suggestion that everyone had forgotten all about it and that the rediscovery of hostilities was all a stunt by the Scilly Isles tourist board should be treated with a snook, even if the rediscovering historian was a leading member of the council there. Does integrity mean nothing?
Unlike most wars, there were no deaths, casualties, or even a shot fired (although Admiral Blake almost blew himself up with one of his own cannons in the Commonwealth companion action).
But that is not the point. As Mr Huydecoper commented at the time, it must have been a horrific strain on the islanders ‘to know we could have attacked at any time’.
Voorwaarts!
April 18
This date in 1930 was, famously, the day when the BBC announced on its 8.45 evening news broadcast that ‘there is no news’.
Derision or sighs for more of this kind of objective judgment should be tempered: the BBC in those days got its news by reading the national newspapers, and as this was Good Friday there were no national newspapers.
Still, as a service to readers, although admittedly a little late, I have been scanning some of the weekly publications of the time so as to keep you up to speed.
A reporter with the Chester Chronicle, alive to the now forgotten Spring custom which saw vacuum cleaner salesmen sweeping the suburbs and knocking on doors, tried his hand. It did not go very well: one woman who answered the door, said nothing, seized his elbow, marched him back down the front garden path, pointed to a sign reading ‘No Hawkers’ and thrust him out through the gate, all without uttering a word. The only time he was invited in was by a woman who wondered if he might demonstrate the vacuum on the front room carpet and then decided she was not interested. This was apparently a common tactic by people seeking a free clean; they were known as ‘joy riders’.
The Shetland Times, casting its net overseas, reported that a new Gas Manager had been appointed in Lerwick.
The Spalding Guardian reported on the case of two 16-year-old boys from Crowland who had been fined five shillings each for repeatedly knocking some bricks off a wall. A PC Kirk had ‘secreted himself’ nearby to observe the outrage. The magistrates were not persuaded by the boys’ defence that if even a bird had landed at the other end of the wall the bricks would have fallen off.
The Gloucester Journal carried the news that Walter Womersley, Conservative MP for Grimsby, had been declared champion hot cross bun maker of the House of Commons following a toss of the coin after a dead heat with Jack Hayes, Labour MP for Edge Hill, Liverpool.
The Evesham and West Midland Observer announced that Mr JT Caldicott, already driver of the Evesham fire engine, had also been appointed town hall caretaker, toll collector, and Evesham Town Crier.
The Edinburgh Evening News revealed that Germany, which controlled the mouth organ market, was producing 55 million of them a year. America was the best customer, followed by Britain, India, Argentina, Italy and Canada. The original mouth organ maker, the report also confided, was ‘a woodturner named Holz’.
I also looked at The Donegal Vindicator, which, I have to say, vindicated the BBC on this occasion.
And now, in tribute to how the Corporation filled the rest of the 15 minutes allotted to news, is some piano music:
April 17
On this date in 1397, we are told, Geoffrey Chaucer gave the first reading of the Canterbury Tales to the court of Richard II, setting off our ever-after fascination with these high, low, worthy, bawdy, pious and tremendously ill-matched pilgrims making their lengthy way from the Tabard Inn in Southwark to the shrine of the meddlesome martyr, Thomas Becket.
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Never have the English been so finely and beadily examined, sorted, weighed, admired, mocked and sympathised with (although it’s clear those sympathies tend more towards the Chaucer family’s beginnings in the wine trade). Now, 600 years later, he still makes us wonder and smile at how little this gadding, irritating but occasionally inspiring nation has changed.
So it would take the most remarkable effrontery to finish for him one of the stories of this genius, the father of our literature. So, of course, I have. Chaucer conceived that the work would feature some thirty pilgrims travelling to and from Southwark and telling two tales each way for a prize of supper at The Tabard Inn on their return. It is not clear why he abandoned this plan. In the work that survives, the tale of the Cook, named as Roger of Ware, breaks off after fifty-eight lines, similarly unexplained. This is a sample of my lèse-majesté:
Cookt
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To complete the frivolity, I must refer you to Brian Helgeland’s ‘A Knight’s Tale’, (2001). There is little of the original ‘Knight’s Tale’ in this, one of my favourite films, in some ways a historical romcom with lots of jousts. But Hegeland has a terrific time playing with anachronisms, particularly in setting the action to some great Bowie and Queen.
The Knight is played uncomplicatedly by Heath Ledger as the son of a humble thatcher pretending to be ‘Sir Ulrich of Liechenstein’, who changes his stars with the aid of several improbable characters, including the Black Prince, and triumphs over the baddie, Rufus Sewell out-rickmaning Alan Rickman.
Helgeland’s finest conceit, though, is introducing Chaucer as the feckless writer who becomes squire to the Knight. Heath might get the girl, but Paul Bettany as ‘Geoff’ gets the film.
What larks: have a look and try not to be entertained hugely:
April 16
I was reminded, when I strayed into the other St Peter’s, his vast cathedral in Bologna, that reverence has not always been quite so reverent.
There was a mass confirmation ceremony about to begin, the church was full of children, the noise and excitement absolutely tremendous. A man dressed as John the Baptist was ratcheting it further with a warm-up act for the presiding archbishop which included Mexican waves up and down the mighty nave.
Our forebears would have been at home. There was a worldly recognition that even the attractions of eternity require certain accommodations and enticements.
As we know, Christian churches are very often on the sites of earlier beliefs; and many argue that there are any number of nods to this, from gargoyles to the Green Men peering though their carved foliage.
As we also know, there’s nothing quite like religion for disputation. Because the Green Man was only so christened (sic) in the 1930s, there’s an academic distrust of these clearly pagan symbols in our churches. And fierce debate about whether they are a warning to the faithful, charms to ward off evil spirits, or early examples of an enlightened inclusion policy.
I have two other thoughts: they are there to keep some kind of attention on the spiritual rather than what’s for lunch in the face of the platitudes of droning parsons. And they are also there to cater for our love of a laugh, particularly, well, yes, an irreverent one.
The gargoyles, of course. And the marvellously named hunky-punks, to be found often hunkered on the tops of Somerset churches, distinguished from gargoyles for not having their practical purpose of water piping, and so termed grotesques.
And carvings on misericords, the seats that could be raised for a happier halfway of resting your bottom on the edge while still standing, almost. What a gallery of relishable rudery and ribaldry, allegedly permitted because they were so close to the fundament.
Things become even more complicated by the sheela na gigs, mostly Irish grotesques being just that with the female vulva: take your pick from fertility goddess, warning against lust, sheer misogyny, female empowerment, or just rude:
Elsewhere, you won’t get a clearer clue to the laughing thing than the jests of the stone masons, sometimes hidden away, sometimes not.
And then there are the putti, the fat baby angels seen throughout renaissance and later religious art and architecture, specialised in by Donatello, and there for no other reason, surely, than to give a smile.
Earlier in Bologna, I had been sitting in the chapel of St Dominic in his Basilica, taking a break after the super-bling of Nicolo Pisano’s Ark containing the remains of the great saint and founder of friars (the young Michelangelo given just the one candle-holding angel). And then I looked up idly, like so many must have done in so many churches over the centuries, and I saw this looking down at me (zoom in for a closer view):
Anyway, it warmed the heart of this miserable sinner.
April 15
Greta Garbo took her final curtain on this date in 1990, aged 84. Her remarkable looks and determined reclusiveness made her once the most famous film actress, if not woman, in the western world.
Her most-remembered moment is the ending of ‘Queen Cristina’ (1933), as the tragic Swedish monarch sails away from her throne, taking with her the lifeless body of the man for whom she has abandoned it, and who has just died in her arms, slain by the sword of her treacherous minister and jealous former lover. (The present lover was played by her former lover, John Gilbert.)
The shot, using 85 feet of film, gets closer and closer to Garbo’s face, which rewards it with a look that seems to express all of the above, and yet at the same time, nothing.
Clarence Brown, who directed seven of Garbo's pictures, told an interviewer, ‘Garbo has something behind the eyes that you couldn't see until you photographed it in close-up. You could see thought.’
Yes, well, but this is what Rouben Mamoulian, the director of this scene, told Garbo when she asked what should be expressing: ‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing. You must make your mind and your heart a complete blank. Make your face into a mask. Do not even blink your eyes while the camera is on you.’
Movies, eh? Particularly as Mamoulian had to talk the terrible MGM studio head, Louis B Mayer, out of his insistence that the film should have a happy ending.
There is much more about GG, as she insisted close friends call her. One of my favourites is Groucho Marx, approaching her on the studio lot, going into his famous crouch, looking up under one of her famously large and concealing floppy hats, and saying, ‘Pardon me, Ma’am, I thought you were a guy I knew in Pittsburgh’.
April 14
Nature notes: now that Spring is here, it might be helpful to point out some differences between various animals.
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Newts have smooth, moist skins, lizards are scaly. Additionally, newts have four toes on their front feet, whereas lizards generally have five.
A crow’s call is ‘caw-caw’, while a raven goes ‘gron-gronk’.
Alligators have broad snouts, while crocodiles have narrow ones. You may have different priorities if you are close to either, but crocodiles also show their bottom teeth when their mouths are closed. In the event you are too close, it might be helpful to recall that most victims drown before being dismembered and eaten. (Do NB that ‘most’.)
Black bears are smaller than brown (grizzly) bears. Polar bears are larger than both. There is a helpful saying if you encounter any of them: ‘Black, fight back; Brown, get down; White, good night’.
Black bears can be scared off, but the best course with the more aggressive grizzly is to lie down and play dead, when, with luck, you will be only lightly mauled. Fortunately, you are unlikely to encounter a polar bear unless you are in the Arctic, or at a zoo, where you would also be strongly advised to watch out for more than bears:
I should note, too, that black bears can be brown, brown bears can be black, and female grizzlies can be the same size as black bears. Playing dead also leaves you open to being carried off to the grizzly’s food store. Never try to outrun a bear, as they are very fast indeed; however, if there’s a convenient slope and you’re sufficiently desperate, you might try it, as a bear's front paws are considerably shorter than its back ones, so it will most likely go head over heels if it charges down after you.
Please note that I disclaim responsibility for any unfortunate outcomes that might result from following any of my helpful advice.
Finally, the difference between a buffalo and a bison is that you can’t wash your hands in a buffalo.
Thank you; more tips for the outdoors very soon!
April 13
Alan Clark, ‘politician, historian and sexual profligate’, as William Donaldson described him in his ‘Brewer’s Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics’, was born on this date in 1928.
To this ought to be added three further descriptions. The first is diarist: his are fascinating for their insights into the internal workings of politics, unmediated by the usual discretion and the slightest concern for the feelings of others.
The second comes from him: ‘I am not a Fascist. Fascists are shopkeepers, I am a Nazi’.
The third is, as you can see from the second, crashing snob. If you wish to know more about the risible nuances of English class barriers, might I suggest examining the relationship between Clark and the more talented Michael Heseltine?
Heseltine, to the uninitiated, might appear an exemplary example of an upper class Englishman: the voice, the carriage, the mien, the slight aloofness.
But for Clark, there was one crucial aspect that condemned his political rival to eternal inferiority: he had bought his own furniture.
Indeed. This is a sneaky reference to Heseltine being the grandson of a tea salesman on one side and a dock labourer on the other, while Clark was the son of Kenneth Clark, Lord Clark, the noted art historian, museum director and television lecturer.
However, for the earnest student, I regret that at this point I need to introduce a further complication: Kenneth Clark was himself considered an arriviste because his family had been in trade (Scottish textiles).
Whatever, there is also this remark attributed to Heseltine: ’Clark’s failure to achieve the success that he, if no one else, might have thought his gifts merit, arises from the fact that he inherited his father’s furniture but not his intellect.’
I will know sink back into my Parker Knoll.
April 12
Technology, as we know, can be a curse as well as a blessing. Timing for instance can be, as we say in Lancashire, a bit of a bugger. Peter Hesketh-Fleetwood, who died on this date in 1866, stands as an excellent example.
The second barrel of his surname is the clue: Sir Peter was the founder of Fleetwood, Lancashire, the town at the top of the Fylde Peninsula that contemplates the mighty Morecambe Bay, with its shrimps, broad expanses and wide skies.
Peter was, in that common but slightly strange obsession of the British male, very keen on steam trains. He was there at the Rainhill Trials of George Stephenson’s Rocket in 1828, became a close observer of the rapid development of the railway, and decided to join in.
Stephenson’s pioneering had a limit: he was convinced that trains would never be able to surmount the heights of Shap Fell in the Lake District, and, even if they did, no brakes could hold them on the descent. The way from England to Scotland was barred.
Thus Peter’s big idea: a railway line from the south to his land where Fleetwood now stands, there to take a steamer up to Ardrossan just below Glasgow.
He did not do things by halves. The architect of the day, Decimus Burton, designer of the Wellington Arch and the Palm House at Kew, was commissioned to build not one but two magnificent sandstone lighthouses and a wonderfully state-of-the-art hotel, with a name to match the terminus 250 miles away at the other end of the line: The North Euston Hotel.
By 1847, all was ready. Queen Victoria came down from Ardrossan to take the train to London. All the town’s lights were switched on as the royal yacht was sighted, and they all failed, including the lighthouses. In that same year, almost inevitably, trains began to whizz up Shap Fell.
As you see, indeed a bit of a bugger. And there is more. Founders have to be dreamers as well, and Peter was certainly that. He was MP for Preston on what was almost a socialist ticket, including abolishing the death penalty. He was a friend of the great social reformer Robert Owen. Fleetwood was not only to be a railway town but a Lancashire holiday resort to succour and salve the tired and huddled of the mills and mines. Burton called it ‘Peter’s Golden Dream’.
He underwrote it all, and lost it all, dying near penniless. But Fleetwood, the lighthouses and the North Euston are still there, even if the railway station was knocked down in 1966. The town has had to contend with the collapse of its trawler industry, and the tourist flight to the sun, but it’s still there, too.
And so is Fisherman’s Friend, the small lozenges first made in 1865, and described by their biggest fan, Emmanuel Macron, as the energy providers that ‘rip your throat out’: ‘When speaking publicly, he needs water, some slices of lemon and a small dish of Fisherman’s’.
Good, but not quite as good as one of my favourite facts: the annual production of lozenges would go five times round the world.
We say: Dream on!
April 11
‘Pygmalion', Shaw’s popular play, which made an even more popular musical, opened at His Majesty’s on this date in 1914, months before the First World War transformed it instantly into a nostalgic trip back to the Edwardian world of settled order and rank disturbed by the odd eccentric or foreigner.
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A reworking itself of the Greek legend of the sculptor who fell in love with his creation, brought to life as Galatea, it had, remarkably, its premiere in translation in Vienna. This is not quite as surprising coming from that odd eccentric, George Bernard Shaw, who did his best to further unsettle things by thereafter playing around with the ending, when Professor Higgins, the Pygmalion, doesn’t quite satisfactorily get Galatea, the flower girl, Eliza Doolittle.
Shaw later wrote an afterword insisting that Eliza had gone on to marry Freddy Eynsford-Hill, Eliza’s infatuated young suitor. He had them running a florists happily ever after, but that doesn’t sit quite right with many, including a presumptuous me. Still, leaving aside the cantankerous Professor Higgins, the idea of Eliza and Freddy as a couple is nevertheless an appealing one, so I decided to write a story featuring them on a sticky country house stay alongside another key guest, Edward VII, naturally.
The debt to PG Wodehouse in my story is as clear as that owed to Mr Shaw: my Freddy is an undisguised tribute to Bertie Wooster, who made his bow a year later, in 1915. Other borrowed characters include Sherlock Holmes.
There’s a flavour of it here: the king, who is staying with Lord Thornfield and his wife Elsie, a former paramour, is being blackmailed by none other than the dastardly Irene Adler, the only woman admired by S Holmes. In his search for a solution to this difficulty, he is perhaps unlucky to come across Freddy, also a guest:
Eynsford
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April 10
‘Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.’Macbeth, declaiming ruefully above, had a bit of trouble sleeping, which was not that surprising, and deserved. But it does seem unfair that insomnia also affects people who haven’t seized a throne after bloodily slaughtering the incumbent while he slept, a guest to boot (and stab).
I’m not sure how much consolation it is, either, that sleeplessness seems to trouble those with imagination the most. The remarkable mysteries of the unconscious tend to pall as an intriguing topic around three in the morning.
I have no cure, obviously, but I can pass on a few tips from the famous.
Dickens was severely afflicted. Irritatingly energetic as he was, though, he turned this to advantage by concocting his plots and fancies on endless nocturnal expeditions through the streets of London. He also thought creativity was best achieved by sleeping facing north; when travelling, he took a compass with him for the purpose.
An interesting contrast is with Emily Brontë, she of the fiercely concentrated emotions as opposed to the exuberance of Dickens. Rather than go for long walks, she walked round and round the dining table.
Besides the helicopter and the enigmatic smile, Leonardo is also credited with inventing polyphasic sleep, a fancy term for taking lots of naps, in his case a 20-minute kip every few hours. I do have doubt about the originality of this, as monks had been regularly interrupted in their sleep from much earlier (mostly to stop them freezing to death on cold nights). Tesla was the same, apparently.
Churchill was also an advocate and practitioner of the power nap, but the astonishing alcohol intake might also have had something to do with that.
Edison believed that the period between consciousness and sleep was the most creative, and also napped. Being an inventor there had of course to be a twist: he would hold a metal ball in each hand: when he fell asleep, the balls would drop and he would immediately leap to his notepad to jot down the ideas that had occurred. I tried this and gave myself the most tremendous shock, almost electric you might say, and was in no fit state to remember anything for quite some time.
Seeking to serve all, I am able to reassure good sleepers with Einstein’s solid ten hours a night, supplemented by daytime naps. But I would like to take this opportunity to nail the canard that the theory of special relativity came from a dream about cows being electrocuted: a misreading of an excitable commentator’s inelegant metaphor.
But, make of this what you will - and feel free to try your own experiment - the great man never wore socks.
Still awake?
April 9
Tom Lehrer, born on this day in 1928, is a very funny very old thing. For many of the post-war generation, in Britain at least, he was the first introduction to the pre-Victorian idea that you can be bitingly irreverent and insulting as long as it’s true, clever, and, above all, yes, funny.
Here are some funny things about Lehrer:
He performed for fewer than ten years, ending in 1960, and wrote only a handful of songs after that.
He has been mostly an university academic, teaching mathematics with the occasional diversion into musical comedy until his retirement in in 2001.
He paid $15 to record his first album.
He managed to get away in the US in the 1950s with lyrics like this, from ‘I Wanna Go Back to Dixie’:
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'I wanna start relaxin’
Down in Birmingham or Jackson.
When we're havin' fun, why, no one interferes.
I wanna talk with southern gentlemen
And put my white sheet on again.
I ain't seen one good lynchin' in years.'(Make what you will of the mini flutter when the nonagenarian barrister Nemone Lethbridge selected it recently on ‘Desert Island Discs’.)
His breakthrough in Britain came when Princess Margaret was given an honorary doctorate in music and it was revealed that she was ‘a connoisseur of music and a performer of skill and distinction, her taste being catholic, ranging from Mozart to the calypso, from opera to the songs of Miss Beatrice Lillie to Tom Lehrer.’
He said that performing was like going on stage and reading out a book you’d written again and again.
He rarely gives interviews, probably for the same reason.
His most famous quote is, ‘Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize’. That was in 1973, and he has made no pronouncement since, probably for that reason, or because this, from 1965, says it all:
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‘The poor folks hate the rich folks
And the rich folks hate the poor folks.
All of my folks hate all of your folks,
It’s American as apple pie.’In 2020, he took a step unprecedented in the copyright maximisation world of music, placing all his in the public domain. His statement ended, ‘Don’t send me any money’.
I’ll leave you with this classic, which in a way, he seems to be seeking to fulfil:
April 8
Margaret Thatcher died on this date in 2013. Admired, despised, endlessly analysed. Biographies, feature films still coming, she remains the best litmus for political stance, the view firmly settled, rarely nuanced, still raw after three decades.
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To the student of peripheries and minor detail, one of the most fascinating things about her is the lack of self-awareness allied to an obliviousness to conventional conduct.
Oliver Pritchett, my old friend and talented colleague, has summed this up marvellously:
‘I was reporting on Mrs Thatcher’s campaign for The Sunday Telegraph, as one of the journalists following her around the country in chartered coaches and planes. Those were the days when political leaders were not kept away from the public. I sometimes wondered if the public ought to be protected from Mrs Thatcher.
‘I remember one occasion, on a high street somewhere, a passer-by disagreed with her about something – probably prices – and she stopped to argue with him. He wouldn’t back down and she wouldn’t give in. The argument went on and on. She would step away and then turn back to make another point. Her minders were getting nervous; the schedule was tight. At last they managed to prise her away from the man. I imagined them to be like peacemakers in a late-night pub car park row, saying: “Leave it, Maggie, ’e’s not worth it.”
‘One of her election promises was that she would invite us all to a party in Downing Street when she became prime minister. To our amazement, she kept that promise. We were all there, including the coach drivers, pilots and protection officers. Some people arrived by taxi and got there a few minutes early and Mrs T came to the door of Number 10 to shoo them away till the proper time.’
Thank you, Oliver. I saw some of this myself. On a trip to the Shetland Islands, she advanced firmly on a baby, who at the sight of her launched into one of those terrible wail-and-shriek sequences only granted to babies of a certain age. Mrs Thatcher, completely unperturbed, dispensed some brisk words of advice to the mother and moved serenely on.
I was at the Whitehall Theatre when she attended, gamely it has to be said, John Wells’s very funny farce about her husband, ‘Anyone for Denis?’. I asked her what she had made of it. She responded neither artfully nor angrily, but with a slight puzzlement, ‘That’s not my Denis, that’s not my DT,’ when according to everyone else who knew him, it clearly was, with clever and not unaffectionate licence.
Interestingly, these kinds of oddity have been common to many another prime minister, and, in particular, the notable ones: Pitt the Younger, last encountered fighting an inept duel, famously awkward; Gladstone, the attempting nocturnal saviour of fallen women; Edward Heath, as apparently asexual as Pitt, and almost as devoid of a sense of humour (especially about himself) as Mrs Thatcher.
It was this last lack which made me think a short story taking a rather different approach to the relationship between Mrs Thatcher and Mr Heath might be rather fun:
April 7
‘Hello, Good Evening, and Welcome’. Once that would have been instantly recognisable and irritatingly often imitated, but there is no more telling indicator of the cruel transience of celebrity than the forgotten catch-phrase. Any ideas on ‘Hello, My Darlings’, ‘Say Goodnight Dick’, ‘You Lucky People’, ‘Oh, Calamity!’, ‘I’ll be leaving you now, Sir’, ‘TTFN’, ‘Swinging!’, ‘Oh, you are awful!’?
The opener belonged to David Frost, born on this date in 1939, once so pervasive and influential a television presence that his vanishing into the mists of short memory and shorter attention spans seems rather odder than the authors of those others.
He was, after all, as the nasal accent proclaimed, one of the first of the classless Sixties upmarket television personalities, forever caught by the sneer from Kitty Muggeridge, wife of Malcolm, as ‘rising without trace’. (And who were they again?)
I interviewed him in 1992 for the Independent on Sunday when there was one of those passing but violent television henhouse hoo-hahs involving the transfer of his current affairs programme, ‘Frost on Sunday’, to the BBC, where it ran for the next 12 years.
Dfrosty
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Oh, and those catchphrases: Charlie Drake, Dan Rowan, Tommy Trinder, Robertson Hare, Bill Fraser (of Bootsie and Snudge), Jimmy Young, Norman Vaughan and Dick Emery.
April 6
Today, with thanks, mostly, to John Gross, our leading anthologiser until his death in 2011, some thoughts from other mighty brains on what Yeats called the ‘casual comedy’ of Life:
‘To laugh is proper to Man.’ Rabelais
‘Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens, we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.’ André Gide
‘A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.’ Samuel Butler
‘I am not fond of expecting catastrophes, but there is a crack in the Universe.’ Sydney Smith (cf L Cohen)
‘Much will have more.’ Emerson
‘Don’t despair, not even over the fact you don’t despair.’ Kafka
‘Self-love seems so often unrequited.’ Anthony Powell
‘The sole cause of Man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.’ Pascal
‘Communism is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necesssity, individual and species. It is the riddle of history solved and knows itself as the solution.’ K Marx
‘I’m not crazy about reality but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.’ G Marx
April 5
You do have to be careful with certain legends. I believed, for example, until now, that Gene Pitney, the American singer, died 24 hours from Tulsa, in Cardiff, on this date in 2006.
Yet more evidence of the sort of research expected of the reputable miscellanarian, however, narrowly compels me to disclose that the journey from Cardiff Wales Airport to Tulsa International Airport takes a mere 18 hours.
Don’t mention it.
April 4
There is little to regret about our progress away from the fiercely guarded and preposterously minute delineations of Britain’s social classes. Only a committed nostalgic (yes, off he goes again) would mull over the collateral loss of the quaint language exceedingly exclusive to the lower and achingly respectable middle classes, from which I am happy to hail, and even more happy to have left.
When was the last time you heard any of these:
Excuse I
It really is the giddy limit
I’ve had an elegant sufficiency, thank you
Cooeee!
Thank you, I don’t mind if I do
Do you know, I think I’m a little bit tiddly
That’s quite enough of that, thank you
Aren’t people the end?
Mustn’t grumble
Not today, thank you
Too kind, I’m sure
Righty-ho
Well I never!
Mind your ps and qs!
That’s ample for me, thank you
Oh, dear, I’ve got the collywobbles
Well, I ask you!
Thank you kindly!
April 3
Graham Greene died on this date in 1991. The better-qualified have opined exhaustively on his life and letters, the Catholicism, the seedy gloom, the hopeless doom, and whether or not his work will survive.
I want to concentrate instead on a less-known aspect: his nipples. Did you know he had four?
It came to light when Auberon Waugh wrote in Private Eye in that way he had on the pressing matter of the supernumerary male nipple, claiming that a now-forgotten Tory MP but then minister, Patrick Jenkin, had three, an infallible sign that he was in fact a witch.
Greene then wrote to Waugh, confiding that he didn’t have three nipples; he had four. ‘A doctor when I was examined medically at the beginning of World War II made the same remark that in the Middle Ages I would have been regarded as a witch. I haven't addressed this letter to Private Eye because I would hate to think that 150,000 people who buy the paper might want to investigate my four nipples.’
Make of that what you will; I am proud to reveal that the prestigious Burns archive in Boston contains a letter to Greene from me, enquiring further about the nipples.
He didn’t reply, of course, but I wanted to show the kind of penetratingly painstaking research that contributes to this miscellany.
Coming soon: you think you know the Battenberg cake?
April 2
His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, the Negus, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of Judah, Elect of God, the Light of the World, Jah, Mighty Inspiration of the Faithful Followers of Rastafari, commenced his reign on this date in 1930. His coronation was an entrancing composition of ancient and modern, Europe and Africa, gorgeous caparisons and bedecked livery, uniforms tailored in London from lion skins, dancing priests, antiphons, canticles, plainsong, all in the sacred tongue of Ghiz; slumbering chiefs and dozing envoys, prostrating crowds, vigilant machine guns, vigorous three-plane flypast, a royal carriage that had belonged to the Kaiser, and a coachman who had driven Franz Joseph, which would have made him venerable at the least. The Duke of Gloucester brought a coronation cake said to weigh a ton. Even Evelyn Waugh was there, and wrote about it, a touch condescendingly and colonially, it has to be said.
I’ve also written about this extraordinary throwback of a man, around whom there still persists a strange, dreamlike magic. You can read an edited extract from my book, ‘Sometimes In Bath’, here:
Emperor
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April 1
There’s research needed on why April Fools are not what they were: someone else can do it. I prefer to remember that on this apt date ‘These Foolish Things’, that most evocative of standards, was published in 1935.
The music was by Jack Strachey, the words by Eric Maschwitz, an urbane, unshy graduate of Cambridge who is also responsible, in every sense, for establishing the BBC’s light entertainment offerings.
Nöel Coward was clear on the strange potency of cheap music. Philip Larkin was sniffy about the lyrics of ‘Foolish Things’ unless it was sung by Billy Holiday. Genre purists point out that the ‘things’ aren’t really foolish. But they do it for me.
The song has been much covered; Robert Cushman in the entertaining ‘Lives of the Great Songs’ makes the point that Sinatra’s version sounds surprisingly like the late Sid James.
Strachey also wrote ‘In Party Mood’, the jaunty theme of Housewives’ Choice on the BBC Light Programme, an instant time-travel device to the 1950s. Come on: ‘dum dee dum dee dum dee dum dee dum dee dum dee daaaa dum’.
Maschwitz wrote the lyrics to two other popular classics, ‘Goodnight Vienna’, in the 1920s, delivered with a charming wistfulness by Jack Buchanan (qv, naturally), and that other 1930s hymn to Mayfair, ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’, with the incomparable line featuring those angelic Ritz diners.
If I tell you that he wrote ‘Foolish Things’ one Sunday morning between sips of coffee and vodka, it will come as less of a surprise that he had a lively marriage with Hermione Gingold, the deeply eccentric actress and revue artist best remembered now for her duet with a less hard to take than usual Maurice Chevalier in ‘I Remember It Well’, from Lerner and Loewe’s severally dubious ‘Gigi’.
In her posthumously compiled memoir, ‘How to Grow Old Disgracefully’, Gingold describes dashing from a performance to catch the final curtain at the first night of one of Eric’s musicals, ‘Balalaika’. Eric was at the back of the stalls, shouting, ‘Author! Author!’ before rushing up to take a bow.
I once knew a similarly plaintive version, but sadly can remember no more than, ‘The tattered remnants of a late-night final, the sound of laughter from the men’s urinal’. Anyone?
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