Nevin's Funny Old Things: a marvellous miscellany of past wit, wisdom and whimsical curiosities

May 4

On this date in 878 King Alfred the Great came out of Athelney to rally his forces at Egbert’s Stone before the great battle of Edington, by Westbury in Wiltshire. His decisive victory halted the relentless Viking western advance of the previous ten years and ushered in his enlightened reforms in law, governance and education; he argued that ‘without wisdom, there can be neither prosperity nor success’. He is the only English king to be deemed Great (Cnut also managed it, but he was a Dane, so it it doesn’t really count).

Those wishing to know more about him might enjoy this exclusive question and answer session recorded at Bath in 891.

Alfred

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May 3

Today, yes, an old joke!

This man wanted a budgerigar as a pet, but it had to be one that talked. The pet shop’s owner assured him that the one he’d selected was ‘a great little talker, can’t shut him up, you can’t’.

But when he got the bird home and put him in his brand new shiny cage, there was only silence.

After a week, losing patience, the man returned to the shop to complain. The pet shop owner was unperturbed, and asked him about the budgie’s living arrangements. ‘Ha!’ he exclaimed on learning that the cage though new was empty apart from a perch and bowl of water. ‘There’s your problem, sir - the little fellow’s bored! Just buy one of these mirrors so he can admire himself, a little ladder to climb up and this tiny bell to ring, and he’ll soon be chattering away like billy-o!’

So the man bought the recommended items and rushed home to install them. The bird showed some interest, but still didn’t talk. After another week, the man went back to the shop again. The owner remained sunnily sanguine: ‘Hmm…I’ve known cases like this before, rare, but it can happen. There’s a slightly drastic remedy, but I’ve never known it fail. Go home and take everything out of the cage - the budgie will be shocked into speaking, you’ll see!’

The man went home and did as he had been bidden. The next day he returned to the shop. ‘Hallo, sir,’ said the shopkeeper, as bright as ever, ‘How did that go? Little fellow’s driven you out with his non-stop chatter, has he?’

‘He’s dead,’ said the man.

‘Dead!’ cried the shopkeeper, ‘That’s terrible, I’m so sorry.’ Then, searching for any consolation, he asked, ‘Did he say anything before he died?’

‘Yes,’ the man replied. ‘He said, “Who moved the bloody ladder?”.’

Next!

May 2

The rigidity of the British - English, really - class structure has traditionally meant that only remarkable people with the hides of a repressed rhinoceros can break through. Oh, and lots of money really helps. (And you’re doing it for your grandchildren.)

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Thus Nancy Witcher of Danville, Virginia, who died on this date in 1964 at the age of 84. She was not particularly well-educated, nor considered a beauty. But she had wit, and the most tremendous energy. Oh, and her father was a railway baron (tick) and her second husband was an Astor (tick, squared). But as she said, ‘I married beneath me. All women do’.

Thus, remarkably, our first woman Member of Parliament, in 1919, elected after a typical bit of parliamentary bamboozling: Waldorf Astor, eldest son of the thoroughly anglicised branch of the ‘family that owned New York’, had been MP for Plymouth, but was forced to stand down when he inherited his father’s title. He encouraged Nancy to stand in his stead while he divested himself of his title; she won, and decided to stay.

Nancy was - code word alert - a ‘difficult’ woman. She disliked physical relationships: her four children were ‘conceived without pleasure and born without pain’. Motherly love was also a problem: ‘I suppose you all think you’re misunderstood,’ she told one of them. ‘All we want is a bit of civility,’ he replied.

Despite being at first the only woman member and then one of the few, she was the most formidable of hecklers in the Commons. Her political views seemed entirely personal and possibly contradictory. She was converted to Christian Science in 1914 and became a typically energetic proselytiser; in Moscow in 1931 she attempted to convert Stalin, who, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, ‘found her visit very disagreeable’.

You will probably recall her famous exchange with Winston Churchill, whose fierce resistance to women in Parliament must be added to his failings: at breakfast at the Astors’ home, Cliveden, where she acted as hostess to every possible person of influence, she told Churchill, ‘Winston, if I was married to you I’d put poison in your coffee’. He replied, ‘Nancy, if I was married to you, I’d drink it’. Less known is the Tory MP who said to her that he didn’t know what to make of Winston. Nancy was clear: ‘How about a nice rug?’.

Her finest hour was also during the Second World War, where all her qualities proved to have a fine effect on the morale of the heavily bombed city. Working with Waldorf, who liked Plymouth so much he became Lord Mayor for the duration of hostilities, she was splendidly unconventional, starting off public dancing on the Hoe - and turning cartwheels - amid the destruction.

Noël Coward, a friend, obviously, was there, too: ‘Nobody who saw Lady Astor, as I did when Plymouth was being bombed almost out of existence, could feel anything but profound and affectionate admiration. I remember in 1942 walking with her through the streets after a bad blitz. She dashed here, there and everywhere, encouraging, scolding, making little jokes.

‘In the sitting room of one pathetic house, the roof and kitchen of which had been demolished, she ordered a pale young man to take the cigarette out of his mouth, told him he would ruin his lungs and morals with nicotine, slapped him on the back, and on we went.’

Like many another, she lived beyond her time. And I like this friend’s warning: ‘If people borrow books from Lady Astor and forget to return them, they must not be surprised to read in the 'agony' column of newspapers advertisements asking for them back.’

May 1

The afterlife of British comics is short, in some cases mercifully, as you will surely agree if you’ve ever listened to what used mostly to pass on the halls or in early radio. As a rough guide, I would suggest about 40 years, even for the best.

As was Robb Wilton, who died on this date in 1956, so long faded. Wilton, from Liverpool but with the softer Lancashire accent, was about character, the slow build-up of an increasingly complicated and chaotic anecdote featuring some bumbling figure of slight authority, like the fire brigade station officer explaining to a distraught woman why the engines will take a seemingly less direct route to her blazing house: ‘It’s a prettier run’.

His Home Guardsman during the Second World War was an excellent forerunner to ‘Dad’s Army’: ‘The day war broke out, the wife said to me, “What are you going to do about it?”’. And to the same ever-unimpressed partner when she wanted to know how, come the invasion, he would know who Hitler was: ‘Well, I’ve got a tongue in my head, haven’t I?’

He was, like most of them, eccentric offstage. After a torrid week at the Glasgow Empire, the long-gone legendary graveyard of English comedians, he stayed on until the Monday to walk out onto the stage of the empty theatre, give an enormous shudder and walk off.

Morecambe and Wise, themselves now facing the fade, went equally badly. But on their last night the booing and worse was replaced by complete silence. A stage hand said to them afterwards: ‘I think they’re beginning to like you’.

Mike and Bernie Winters (indeed, who?) began their act with just Mike pattering; when a gurning Bernie poked his head out through the gap in the curtain, a Glaswegian voice rang out, ‘Christ, there’s two of them’.

Max Miller - last one, I promise - refused to play there: ‘I’m a comic, not a missionary’.

Thank you, I’m here every day.