'He could, from time to time, also be enormously touchy and grumpy: as our contributor Alan Brien remarked, he was a manic-depressive without the manic bit.'
For more than two decades, Miles Kington's daily musings on culture, politics and modern life were cherished by readers of The Independent. His death this week robs Britain of one its most original humorists. Here, friends reflect on the man they loved, while over the page are extracts from some of his finest columns
Friday, 1 February 2008 The Independent
Laughing all the way: Miles Kington pictured in 2006 © Geraint Lewis
There was only one occasion when my father, a retiring Cambridge academic, actually picked up the phone and dialled my number to congratulate me. It was after he'd read a piece I had written for Punch magazine – in collaboration with Miles Kington. The idea for the feature had been mine – "A history of demolition", prompted by the fact that half of London was being demolished to make way for the building boom of the early Seventies – but the fine touches, needless to say, had all belonged to Miles.
When we were preparing that article, some of the bits of work that we threw out for reasons of space were more imaginative than the efforts that other contributors to Punch would come up with in an entire year. "A history of demolition" was our only joint byline in my 17 years on the magazine, and by far the best thing I ever put my name to. On other weeks, it would have been me who phoned my old man.
Many people are so-called humorous journalists. Give us (or, to be precise, give me) a sandwich board inscribed "The End Of The World Is At Hand" and we (I) can turn out a jolly 1,500 words about what Japanese tourists said to us as we strapped it on and paraded up and down Oxford Street. Miles, however, was that rarity, a real humorist. He wouldn't have had to do that stunt – because he would have been able to come up with something far, far better.
Other journalists might write about sex. Miles wrote a wonderful spread on "How To Write a Sex Manual", which was illustrated with explicit photographs of the author engaged in foreplay with a typewriter and stroking the keyboard in a post-coital sort of way.
As a literary editor and writer, Miles was the best of colleagues and the worst of colleagues. He was my closest friend, and biggest pain in the neck. He was senior enough to "OK" my ideas, and junior enough for me not to be in trouble when I admitted that I had boobed. We were the only cyclists at Punch, in an office where the other blokes were always making pretentious remarks about their over-the-top motors.
He could, from time to time, also be enormously touchy and grumpy: as our contributor Alan Brien remarked, he was a manic-depressive without the manic bit. He could be pointlessly rude, but democratically so: he would be offhand to someone in the post-room (which was not admirable) and to the editor (which was foolhardy). He could mooch off early, leaving the rest of us to drown in a flood of page proofs.
One editor wanted to have him locked up. This was allegedly so that Miles could write an article about a night in the cells. More seriously, the same editor, Bill Davis, finally had enough and asked the rest of us if Miles was worth his keep. I protested that he was worth his weight in new typewriter ribbons (a judgement I later began to revise somewhat) and was pleased when no more was said about throwing the book at the then literary editor.
The feeling between editor and employee was clearly mutual. After a Punch works outing, in which as usual the drink had flowed even faster than the bons mots, a loud crashing was heard from the editor's office. This turned out to be Miles, expressing his feelings towards that editor by kicking hell out of his desk. He clearly felt better about getting this off his chest, and boot, and we put the desk together again – and expressed elaborate surprise when bits fell off it during the next editorial meeting.
My patience was tested after the next Punch works outing, when again the drinks flowed like printer's ink. Afterwards, Miles retired to the editor's office and yelled: "Hey, do you remember when I kicked the desk in?" In case I'd forgotten, he proceeded to wallop it again. I was reassembling the unoffending piece of furniture when Lord Barnetson, the chairman of the entire newspaper group, wandered in to see who was trashing his premises. I persuaded him that desks often fell to bits, thanks to shoddy modern manufacturing techniques.
"Kington works hard at his eccentricity," wrote Michael Parkinson in a piece about passing the Kingtons' flat while on the top deck of a bus and seeing Miles dreamily playing his double bass while his children ran round him and other people got ready to go to work. (This was back in the days when Kington rented a flat in Notting Hill and Parkinson travelled on buses.) Maybe there was an element of artifice in his demeanour; but certainly Kington cared less than most about appearances – his own appearance, anyway.
Tidying my office in a burst of keenness during my first month, I burrowed down through archaeological layers of dusty correspondence to long-gone members of staff. Round about the Pleistocene age, I discovered a pair of trousers. "Ah," said Miles, "I wondered what had happened to them." They were probably his best pair. He tended to wear old jeans, as he went everywhere on an old sit-up-and-beg bicycle, stopping occasionally to pull The Times out of the basket and fill in a crossword clue.
He dressed, said a cartoonist, as if someone had given him a 20-quid Millets voucher. Yet he always seemed more elegant and handsome, in a raffish sort of way, than anyone else. You would never have guessed it, but there seemed to be money in the background. While the rest of the staff were scraping around for mortgages, he quietly mentioned that he would buy his house outright. But in his family in general, he saw himself as being of the church mouse persuasion; there was or had been a castle somewhere in the family tree but it had gone to another branch.
When Alan Coren, the new editor, took over, Miles would have expected to move up to become deputy editor, but maybe his CV – the desk-bashing etc – stood in his way. Alan announced nervously that there would not be a deputy editor as such. In fact there was, but it wasn't Miles. This may have been the safe decision but it didn't please Miles, then literary editor, who became somewhat less reliable. During one of his unexplained absences from the office, Coren was forced to ring around various BBC recording studios to see if anyone had seen him playing there with his band, Instant Sunshine.
Miles always said that he didn't realise he had been sacked. He left when he was asked to present a programme about a train journey in the Andes. This involved, clearly, going to the Andes, which would make it hard to pull his weight around the office for a while. He asked if Coren minded. Coren didn't mind at all, but said that he would have to hire another literary editor to fill the enormous gap left by Miles, as indeed he did. That was much nicer than saying: "On your bike."
Monday 30 June 2008
Posy Simmonds
Posy was shipwrecked on Desert Island Discs, yesterday, Sunday 29th June 2008 (repeated this coming Friday). Posy lodged with Jill before either of them worked on The Guardian and part of the arrangement was that she collect Luke from nursery school.
Posy went to the Central School for Art and Design and the Sunday Times cartoonist Mel Calman, who spotted her work at her degree show, introduced her to Jill.
One of Posy's strips caricatured Alan. Jane Andromache knows which one.
See NPG 6247 Women's Page Contributors to The Guardian by Sarah Raphael. oil on paper laid on board, 1994. The sitters are:
Dame Elizabeth Anne Lucy Forgan Show (1944-), Journalist and media director.
Posy Simmonds Show (1945-), Cartoonist.
Mary Stott Show (1907-2002), Journalist.
Polly Toynbee Show (1946-), Journalist.
Jill Sheila Tweedie Show (1936-1993), Journalist.
Posy went to the Central School for Art and Design and the Sunday Times cartoonist Mel Calman, who spotted her work at her degree show, introduced her to Jill.
One of Posy's strips caricatured Alan. Jane Andromache knows which one.
See NPG 6247 Women's Page Contributors to The Guardian by Sarah Raphael. oil on paper laid on board, 1994. The sitters are:
Dame Elizabeth Anne Lucy Forgan Show (1944-), Journalist and media director.
Posy Simmonds Show (1945-), Cartoonist.
Mary Stott Show (1907-2002), Journalist.
Polly Toynbee Show (1946-), Journalist.
Jill Sheila Tweedie Show (1936-1993), Journalist.
Monday 23 June 2008
Memories of Alan from Jo Simon
Visiting your Dad in hospital, I was daydreaming in the cafeteria gathering strength for the long journey to the ward when I heard someone say very softly 'it's der Teufel'.
It was Alan and Jane who had come down from the ward. Alan was quoting from his schooldays when he was indoctrinating a Jewish contemporary into Marxism.
The boy eventually invited Alan home for tea. The door was opened by his mother, who was possibly a rare breed of Sunderland Tory. Leaving Alan on the doorstep she shouted up the stairs 'It's der Teufel'.
It was Alan and Jane who had come down from the ward. Alan was quoting from his schooldays when he was indoctrinating a Jewish contemporary into Marxism.
The boy eventually invited Alan home for tea. The door was opened by his mother, who was possibly a rare breed of Sunderland Tory. Leaving Alan on the doorstep she shouted up the stairs 'It's der Teufel'.
Sunday 22 June 2008
Game Shows
Take It or Leave It
Host
Alan Brien
Co-hosts
Adjudicator and question-setter: Brigid Brophy
Broadcast
BBC2, 7 November 1964 to 8 January 1971
A television literary quiz, with four writers and critics discussing books and poetry. A paragraph or verse would be read out, and the contestants asked to name the work and author. Contemporary writers suggested the enjoyment came not from instant recall, but the literary detective work employed.
Host
Alan Brien
Co-hosts
Adjudicator and question-setter: Brigid Brophy
Broadcast
BBC2, 7 November 1964 to 8 January 1971
A television literary quiz, with four writers and critics discussing books and poetry. A paragraph or verse would be read out, and the contestants asked to name the work and author. Contemporary writers suggested the enjoyment came not from instant recall, but the literary detective work employed.
Feliks Topolski R.A.
Feliks Topolski's 'Memoir of the Twentieth Century'
Alan Brien, Punch
"... his giant Memoir, in colour and on a grandiose old masterly scale, quartered in a brick dungeon like a Piranesi engraving, manages to distil the essence and apotheosis of his genius. Reworked and magnified from the thousands of sketches he has created hour by hour during an amazingly eventful career, they are for me one of our Century's great solid achievements."
Alan Brien, Punch
"... his giant Memoir, in colour and on a grandiose old masterly scale, quartered in a brick dungeon like a Piranesi engraving, manages to distil the essence and apotheosis of his genius. Reworked and magnified from the thousands of sketches he has created hour by hour during an amazingly eventful career, they are for me one of our Century's great solid achievements."
EVELYN WAUGH
EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER
Volume 7 Number 1 - Spring 1973
David Lodge, "The Arrogance of Evelyn Waugh," The Critic, 30 (May-June, 1972), 62-70, also a defense and explanation of the man, will interest casual readers but not Waugh scholars. His sources are principally Mr. Pinfold and Frances Donaldson, and though one of these is critically acceptable it has been exploited previously. He retells the standoff at White's between Waugh and Alan Brien, courtesy of Randolph Churchill - who really should have known better than to introduce anyone suffering from boredom to Mr. Brien, of all people. He quotes Harold Acton's "prancing faun" flourish, explains that Wormwood Scrubs is a prison, and concludes that Waugh's public image was the mask of a bored but decent man who valued his privacy. There is nothing at all wrong with this essay, but there is nothing at all new in it either.
TWO NEW BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ITEMS
D.S. Gallagher of James Cook University of North Queensland, who is well-known to EWN readers for some brilliant bibliographic investigations, has discovered a hitherto unrecorded Waugh letter to the editor by following up a clue in Alan Brien's "Permission to Speak..."
Evelyn Waugh, "Self-denial," Truth, October 15, 1954, p. 1729. Response to anonymous Profile: "Waugh Among the Ruins," Truth, October 8, 1954, pp. 1242-1243.
Gallagher observes that the author of the anonymous "Profile" appears to have been Alan Brien. His "Permission to Speak, Captain?" Spectator, CCXVI (April 15, 1966), 463 contains the following sentence: "My mind was packed with information I had laid in for my profile."
Gallagher notes that Truth was a London journal of comment which ceased publication around 1957. In his letter Waugh asserts that, contrary to the statement made in the "Profile," his home is not open to visits by the paying public.
Volume 7 Number 1 - Spring 1973
David Lodge, "The Arrogance of Evelyn Waugh," The Critic, 30 (May-June, 1972), 62-70, also a defense and explanation of the man, will interest casual readers but not Waugh scholars. His sources are principally Mr. Pinfold and Frances Donaldson, and though one of these is critically acceptable it has been exploited previously. He retells the standoff at White's between Waugh and Alan Brien, courtesy of Randolph Churchill - who really should have known better than to introduce anyone suffering from boredom to Mr. Brien, of all people. He quotes Harold Acton's "prancing faun" flourish, explains that Wormwood Scrubs is a prison, and concludes that Waugh's public image was the mask of a bored but decent man who valued his privacy. There is nothing at all wrong with this essay, but there is nothing at all new in it either.
TWO NEW BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ITEMS
D.S. Gallagher of James Cook University of North Queensland, who is well-known to EWN readers for some brilliant bibliographic investigations, has discovered a hitherto unrecorded Waugh letter to the editor by following up a clue in Alan Brien's "Permission to Speak..."
Evelyn Waugh, "Self-denial," Truth, October 15, 1954, p. 1729. Response to anonymous Profile: "Waugh Among the Ruins," Truth, October 8, 1954, pp. 1242-1243.
Gallagher observes that the author of the anonymous "Profile" appears to have been Alan Brien. His "Permission to Speak, Captain?" Spectator, CCXVI (April 15, 1966), 463 contains the following sentence: "My mind was packed with information I had laid in for my profile."
Gallagher notes that Truth was a London journal of comment which ceased publication around 1957. In his letter Waugh asserts that, contrary to the statement made in the "Profile," his home is not open to visits by the paying public.
Footlights
from The Mausoleum Club Forum
Tangocow
posted on 21-5-2007 at 11:25 AM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
26/10/79 - Alan Brian - Russell Davies, Harold Evans, Sponooch, Jilly Cooper, Prof Peter Townsend, Lord Melchett, Peter York, Lynda Hayes, Will Elsworth-Jones, and Jeremy Child, Norman Bird, Ronnie Brody in a sketch.
16/11/79 - Cambridge Footlights - Martin Bergman, Hugh Laurie, Robert Bathurst, Emma Thompson, Peter Cook.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Who's Alan Brian? I can't find anything on him anywhere. (Maybe it was journalist Alan Brien?)
And is that a list of the Footlights members, or were they the guests?
andrew martin. posted on 21-5-2007 at 03:22 PM
Yes, it's Alan Brien.
Martin Bergman sat at the desk for the Footlights show, presenting - the others did sketches, Cook was a guest.
Tangocow
posted on 21-5-2007 at 11:25 AM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
26/10/79 - Alan Brian - Russell Davies, Harold Evans, Sponooch, Jilly Cooper, Prof Peter Townsend, Lord Melchett, Peter York, Lynda Hayes, Will Elsworth-Jones, and Jeremy Child, Norman Bird, Ronnie Brody in a sketch.
16/11/79 - Cambridge Footlights - Martin Bergman, Hugh Laurie, Robert Bathurst, Emma Thompson, Peter Cook.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Who's Alan Brian? I can't find anything on him anywhere. (Maybe it was journalist Alan Brien?)
And is that a list of the Footlights members, or were they the guests?
andrew martin. posted on 21-5-2007 at 03:22 PM
Yes, it's Alan Brien.
Martin Bergman sat at the desk for the Footlights show, presenting - the others did sketches, Cook was a guest.
Saturday 21 June 2008
Sunderland, circa 1940
The following is a transcription of a tape sent to Alan by Gladys Glascoe (maiden name unknown) in 2005 after coming to Alan's 80th birthday celebrations at The Spaniards.
I hope someone will recognise, and correct, names and places which I transcribed phonetically.* See Comment.
Dear Alan,
I'm afraid it's proving too difficult to pay a visit and arrange a meeting for the time being but Joan [sic] tellls me you're busy writing your memoirs. It occurred to me it might amuse you to hear my recollections from the far past. So here goes.
I was in the winter of 40, back from evacuation, in the lower sixth form, and getting ready for A levels, when my brother, Randal, made a friend Tom McNichol [spelling], whom I quite liked because he had red hair, and his family had a flat that was for the time unoccupied, and unheated I may say, and he and Randal used to go and sit there and talk and have the odd cigarette and Randal persauded me to join them and we used to sit there and talk and I heard Tom mention someone called Adam. And when I said 'who is that?' I didn't get a very clear answer except this was someone who was a person of distinction. One of a kind. But I still wasn't clear in what way.
Now later I met Nancy and Eric Clavering and became involved in the YCO and frequented the old rooms in Coronation street. Do you remember? I don't know if it was there that I met you or at the Claverings, in their ...top floor flat I think it was. I know we had parties there and meetings. Trying to think when I heard of you next. I can't remember when I first met you. I just can't. I remember having the impression, because of course you were two years younger than me, but that didn't seem to weigh in your reputation. My recollections of seeing you, whenever that was, was that you were tall and thin, and shabby, as many of us were in those days.
Now, you were friendly with Lesley Jolly [spelling], of whom I was greatly enamoured for a long time, and I remember Lesley Jolly and you having a conversation about the fact you used to get up early and since you passed the library on your way to school, you would stop in there and read all the newspapers, now this impressed me, I must say, and it obviously impressed Lesley.
A story I have in connection with Lesley Jolly is that he persuaded you to take part in an apprentices' strike in the ship yards. My clearest memory was of you reporting back to Les - he was coaching you, what you have to do and what you have to say - he said now keep your hands in your pockets, cos your hands are obviously not those of someone who has done manual work. Taking a rest now because my voice gives out easily.
PAUSE
Don't expect these impressions to be connected or organised at all....
You told me your father went over to Ireland with the black and tans and came back on the other side, because of his experiences. I once met your father while you were away in the airforce. I called because I hadn't heard from you for a while. I found him a lovely person. I really liked him very much.
Now what else...? We smoked, and how we smoked, whatever we could lay our hands on. There was a kiosk near the station and when shortages were most severe we found this girl who sold us cigarettes that no one else had ever heard of. There was one particularly throat searing brand called Robin. You remember? When she sold it to us she was really quite triumphant she'd be able to supply our needs. I haven't smoked for twenty years but I still.. . I've dreamnt ocassionally that I was smoking, and after a good meal I get that sensation in the chest, that I would love a cigarette or better still a cigar, but I don't, not worth it....
After we took to - they call it hanging out together these days - but I think the expression we would have used was knocking about together, in a desultory way. We went to the Havelock once to see 'Stormy Weather' with Lena Horne, singing of course, looking absolutely gorgeous. You said 'I wouldn't mind marrying her', to which I replied 'Chance would be a fine thing, wouldn't it?' You said 'well some people would object because she is black', and I was really surprised that you should even jokingly allow the existance of that sort of prejudice.
Another thing that comes to my mind is that you, and I, and a third party, whom I don't recall except in a vague and shadowy way, took to - you may disbelieve this but it's true - took to breaking into unoccupied houses. I think only three times at most. God knows why we did it... On one ocassion the three of us were crossing a sort of conservatory and suddenly you disappeared up to your knees. You'd stumbled into... I think it must have been a pond originally, dry fortunately, full of leaves and rubbish... we were very luck we weren't caught...
What else did we do? Sit about in each other's homes. On one occasion I recall we were in an icecream bar, sitting either side of one of those cubicles. On the side opposite to me a woman appeared over the top of the barrier waving for, requesting a light.....which I, I reached across and asked you to pass to her. You expressed great surprise that I'd been so observant as to notice her. I'm prepared to accept that I was a horrid and really quite stupid girl but I wasn't that stupid I couldn't see someone waving, climbing over a barrier and waving.
Every now and then I have to stop because my voice gives out.
PAUSE
Do you remember going to socialist summer school at Malham? Do you remember that? I remember one character who was staying there telling us about his visit to the pub the night before, saying I came back, on the way I bent down, I could hear the sound of someone being sick and it was me. I don't think either you or I drank to that extent, certainly not then...
I remember when we arrived, going for a walk along a stream where there were swans, it was a lovely setting, beautiful fresh clean air. You took the train part of the way and biked for the rest. I remember on the way back, seeing you out of the window, where the road rang alongside the railway track, peddling furiously to keep up, which you did, and you managed to get into the train at the next stop.
Do you remember we had a spell - I don't know who the third party was - of pretending to talk common? 'tack and common' [spelling]. The character, alderman Chalk [spelling] and we put about to each other scurrilous reports of alderman Chalk and the council. I can't remember who we played these games with. It may have been David Maccaby. I often wonder what happened to David. An amazing family that. There was Lorna and there was HZ. HZ was a formidable character. I gathered ... I think I met him once briefly. We didn't know him as well as David. I once heard an argument reported, an argument with him, reported, that you had had. You told him Marxists don't believe in formal logic. The only way you could half way win the argument.
PAUSE
I remember when my unrequited passion for Lesley Jolly reached a point where he was...when we were engaged, after a fashion. I mean I didn't realise... It took me a long time to realise his problems, or his cast of temperament. It wasn't until he and I had split up and he was involved with Julian Meckelfeld [spelling] that I fully realised the strength of the passions that could be aroused. I remember walking down the street between the two of them and it was as if I wasn't present at all. They sort of gravitated together. I remember when I told you Lesley Jolly had told his mother he was engaged to me. You said you weren't surprised. You know I expected her to be surpirsed. You said, 'Well it's better than getting engaged to Colin and Brighton [spelling].'
These recollections are very scrappy I'm afraid but I do ask if you want amplification on any of them, say so, I may not be able to give it but I'll try.
PAUSE
I remember quite vividly a happy week that we had when you suddenly turned up on the doorstep, home on leave, and in airforce uniform, and if I may say so looking very good in it,... towards the end of the school summer holidays. We spent the time going about, just sitting and talking, and when you went back, I understood - I don't know how true this was - that you had overstayed your leave and that you were in trouble when you got back. I remember you writing your ambition was to be a columnist like Alexander Woolcott. God forgive me, I wrote back and said 'wanting's one thing, being's another.' I like to think this spurred you on. ...You were a rear gunner and when your plane was damaged, or landed badly, the rear gunner's pod broke away and bounced you across the air field. A shocking experience.
PAUSE
Well Alan these reminiscences are proving very scrappy and uncoordinated but I'll give you two or three more and then post this off and see what you think of them.
I seem to remember... you coached my brother, Colby [spelling], in maths... I'm not very well acquainted with that period as for some reason you and I weren't speaking to each other. I can't remember why and I cant imagine why.
There was a time when... I think it was the party held a dance in the lake, or it may have been the soviet committee, something progressive or we wouldn't have been there and I turned up in my one and only evening dress, which I rather loved, it was cyclamen, it fitted to the waist and flared out to full length and I was very pleased with myself. I tried to get you to dance and you claimed not to dance. At that time I didn't realise that there are lots of reasons why young men didn't want to go onto the dance floor. But you did say that I had a nice waist. No longer I'm afraid.
Oh yes... Another flattering bit. You and Lesley Jolly were discussing knowledge of marxism and one of you asked what I'd read? 'Only Tommy Jackson's [spelling] Dialiectics'. And one of you said 'You've made it go a long way.' How far that was a polite rejoinder and really concealed a contempt for my ignorance. I don't know.
I think I shall close now and say look after yourself. Love to Joan [sic]. And I will either tape something more if I remember anything more or I'll write.
I hope someone will recognise, and correct, names and places which I transcribed phonetically.* See Comment.
Dear Alan,
I'm afraid it's proving too difficult to pay a visit and arrange a meeting for the time being but Joan [sic] tellls me you're busy writing your memoirs. It occurred to me it might amuse you to hear my recollections from the far past. So here goes.
I was in the winter of 40, back from evacuation, in the lower sixth form, and getting ready for A levels, when my brother, Randal, made a friend Tom McNichol [spelling], whom I quite liked because he had red hair, and his family had a flat that was for the time unoccupied, and unheated I may say, and he and Randal used to go and sit there and talk and have the odd cigarette and Randal persauded me to join them and we used to sit there and talk and I heard Tom mention someone called Adam. And when I said 'who is that?' I didn't get a very clear answer except this was someone who was a person of distinction. One of a kind. But I still wasn't clear in what way.
Now later I met Nancy and Eric Clavering and became involved in the YCO and frequented the old rooms in Coronation street. Do you remember? I don't know if it was there that I met you or at the Claverings, in their ...top floor flat I think it was. I know we had parties there and meetings. Trying to think when I heard of you next. I can't remember when I first met you. I just can't. I remember having the impression, because of course you were two years younger than me, but that didn't seem to weigh in your reputation. My recollections of seeing you, whenever that was, was that you were tall and thin, and shabby, as many of us were in those days.
Now, you were friendly with Lesley Jolly [spelling], of whom I was greatly enamoured for a long time, and I remember Lesley Jolly and you having a conversation about the fact you used to get up early and since you passed the library on your way to school, you would stop in there and read all the newspapers, now this impressed me, I must say, and it obviously impressed Lesley.
A story I have in connection with Lesley Jolly is that he persuaded you to take part in an apprentices' strike in the ship yards. My clearest memory was of you reporting back to Les - he was coaching you, what you have to do and what you have to say - he said now keep your hands in your pockets, cos your hands are obviously not those of someone who has done manual work. Taking a rest now because my voice gives out easily.
PAUSE
Don't expect these impressions to be connected or organised at all....
You told me your father went over to Ireland with the black and tans and came back on the other side, because of his experiences. I once met your father while you were away in the airforce. I called because I hadn't heard from you for a while. I found him a lovely person. I really liked him very much.
Now what else...? We smoked, and how we smoked, whatever we could lay our hands on. There was a kiosk near the station and when shortages were most severe we found this girl who sold us cigarettes that no one else had ever heard of. There was one particularly throat searing brand called Robin. You remember? When she sold it to us she was really quite triumphant she'd be able to supply our needs. I haven't smoked for twenty years but I still.. . I've dreamnt ocassionally that I was smoking, and after a good meal I get that sensation in the chest, that I would love a cigarette or better still a cigar, but I don't, not worth it....
After we took to - they call it hanging out together these days - but I think the expression we would have used was knocking about together, in a desultory way. We went to the Havelock once to see 'Stormy Weather' with Lena Horne, singing of course, looking absolutely gorgeous. You said 'I wouldn't mind marrying her', to which I replied 'Chance would be a fine thing, wouldn't it?' You said 'well some people would object because she is black', and I was really surprised that you should even jokingly allow the existance of that sort of prejudice.
Another thing that comes to my mind is that you, and I, and a third party, whom I don't recall except in a vague and shadowy way, took to - you may disbelieve this but it's true - took to breaking into unoccupied houses. I think only three times at most. God knows why we did it... On one ocassion the three of us were crossing a sort of conservatory and suddenly you disappeared up to your knees. You'd stumbled into... I think it must have been a pond originally, dry fortunately, full of leaves and rubbish... we were very luck we weren't caught...
What else did we do? Sit about in each other's homes. On one occasion I recall we were in an icecream bar, sitting either side of one of those cubicles. On the side opposite to me a woman appeared over the top of the barrier waving for, requesting a light.....which I, I reached across and asked you to pass to her. You expressed great surprise that I'd been so observant as to notice her. I'm prepared to accept that I was a horrid and really quite stupid girl but I wasn't that stupid I couldn't see someone waving, climbing over a barrier and waving.
Every now and then I have to stop because my voice gives out.
PAUSE
Do you remember going to socialist summer school at Malham? Do you remember that? I remember one character who was staying there telling us about his visit to the pub the night before, saying I came back, on the way I bent down, I could hear the sound of someone being sick and it was me. I don't think either you or I drank to that extent, certainly not then...
I remember when we arrived, going for a walk along a stream where there were swans, it was a lovely setting, beautiful fresh clean air. You took the train part of the way and biked for the rest. I remember on the way back, seeing you out of the window, where the road rang alongside the railway track, peddling furiously to keep up, which you did, and you managed to get into the train at the next stop.
Do you remember we had a spell - I don't know who the third party was - of pretending to talk common? 'tack and common' [spelling]. The character, alderman Chalk [spelling] and we put about to each other scurrilous reports of alderman Chalk and the council. I can't remember who we played these games with. It may have been David Maccaby. I often wonder what happened to David. An amazing family that. There was Lorna and there was HZ. HZ was a formidable character. I gathered ... I think I met him once briefly. We didn't know him as well as David. I once heard an argument reported, an argument with him, reported, that you had had. You told him Marxists don't believe in formal logic. The only way you could half way win the argument.
PAUSE
I remember when my unrequited passion for Lesley Jolly reached a point where he was...when we were engaged, after a fashion. I mean I didn't realise... It took me a long time to realise his problems, or his cast of temperament. It wasn't until he and I had split up and he was involved with Julian Meckelfeld [spelling] that I fully realised the strength of the passions that could be aroused. I remember walking down the street between the two of them and it was as if I wasn't present at all. They sort of gravitated together. I remember when I told you Lesley Jolly had told his mother he was engaged to me. You said you weren't surprised. You know I expected her to be surpirsed. You said, 'Well it's better than getting engaged to Colin and Brighton [spelling].'
These recollections are very scrappy I'm afraid but I do ask if you want amplification on any of them, say so, I may not be able to give it but I'll try.
PAUSE
I remember quite vividly a happy week that we had when you suddenly turned up on the doorstep, home on leave, and in airforce uniform, and if I may say so looking very good in it,... towards the end of the school summer holidays. We spent the time going about, just sitting and talking, and when you went back, I understood - I don't know how true this was - that you had overstayed your leave and that you were in trouble when you got back. I remember you writing your ambition was to be a columnist like Alexander Woolcott. God forgive me, I wrote back and said 'wanting's one thing, being's another.' I like to think this spurred you on. ...You were a rear gunner and when your plane was damaged, or landed badly, the rear gunner's pod broke away and bounced you across the air field. A shocking experience.
PAUSE
Well Alan these reminiscences are proving very scrappy and uncoordinated but I'll give you two or three more and then post this off and see what you think of them.
I seem to remember... you coached my brother, Colby [spelling], in maths... I'm not very well acquainted with that period as for some reason you and I weren't speaking to each other. I can't remember why and I cant imagine why.
There was a time when... I think it was the party held a dance in the lake, or it may have been the soviet committee, something progressive or we wouldn't have been there and I turned up in my one and only evening dress, which I rather loved, it was cyclamen, it fitted to the waist and flared out to full length and I was very pleased with myself. I tried to get you to dance and you claimed not to dance. At that time I didn't realise that there are lots of reasons why young men didn't want to go onto the dance floor. But you did say that I had a nice waist. No longer I'm afraid.
Oh yes... Another flattering bit. You and Lesley Jolly were discussing knowledge of marxism and one of you asked what I'd read? 'Only Tommy Jackson's [spelling] Dialiectics'. And one of you said 'You've made it go a long way.' How far that was a polite rejoinder and really concealed a contempt for my ignorance. I don't know.
I think I shall close now and say look after yourself. Love to Joan [sic]. And I will either tape something more if I remember anything more or I'll write.
Paul Cezanne
Could Megan describe how it was the clay figure she made of Alan - from memory - for his 80th birthday, was so much like Alan whilst also being the image of Cezanne?
'IT’S APPROACHING BERNARD SHAW...'
The“Quote...Unquote”
NEWSLETTER
Publisher&Editor:NigelReesVol.17,No3,July2008
When Alan’s wife, Jane Hill, told me about the ‘memorial blog’ that had been launched to enable friends and colleagues to post tributes on his death, I was delighted to see that ‘Violence is the repartee of the illiterate’ was duly accorded a place among the top ten quotations on the website set up by his son, Adam.
The number of guests who have appeared on Quote ... Unquote over the years and who have, in modern parlance, recently ‘left the building’ is very sad. I would mention in particular Ned Sherrin and Richard Boston who were on the very first edition and returned several times in the early days. But then we have also recently lost George Melly, Miles Kington, Humphrey Lyttelton, Alan Coren, Gerry Fitt, Bill Deedes, John Rae, Dick Vosburgh, Anton Rodgers and, a relative latecomer to the show, Jeremy Beadle. We will miss them all but the death of one in particular brought back a very happy memory from 1985. The last time I encountered the writer and journalist Alan Brien was a year or two ago at a book launch. He asked why he had not been invited back to appear on Quote ... Unquote. I no doubt fudged some answer but the real reason was that there was no way we could repeat a wonderful moment from one of the four editions he had appeared in back then.
One of the quotations I asked him to provide a source for was, ‘Violence is the repartee of the illiterate.’ In his light, lilting voice he set about it: ‘I don’t think I’ve heard it before. Modernish, I think. Can’t be very old. Bernard Shaw would be too good for it, but it’s approaching Bernard Shaw. Perhaps it’s Chesterton, is it?’ Well, this is not a trick I can play very often on panellists – indeed, I don’t think I have ever done it to anyone else – and I was able to say, ‘Shaw, Chesterton ... Alan Brien, you wrote it in an article on corporal punishment in schools in Punch in 1973 ... ’ Oh, how we laughed. What I sometimes do – when I know who is taking part in the programme – is to see if indeed they do have any quotations attributed to them in the dictionaries but then usually feed these to other panellists. I had found ‘Violence is the repartee ... ’ in Frank S. Pepper’s Handbook of 20th-century Quotations. When I told Alan this, he said he would immediately go and buy a dozen copies and give them to his friends for Christmas. ‘Not quite Shaw, not quite Chesterton, but very good Alan Brien,’ I said. He responded: ‘That describes it very well. That’s what I was trying to be!’ It was a good joke to play on him but, as I say, it was absolutely unrepeatable.
NEWSLETTER
Publisher&Editor:NigelReesVol.17,No3,July2008
When Alan’s wife, Jane Hill, told me about the ‘memorial blog’ that had been launched to enable friends and colleagues to post tributes on his death, I was delighted to see that ‘Violence is the repartee of the illiterate’ was duly accorded a place among the top ten quotations on the website set up by his son, Adam.
The number of guests who have appeared on Quote ... Unquote over the years and who have, in modern parlance, recently ‘left the building’ is very sad. I would mention in particular Ned Sherrin and Richard Boston who were on the very first edition and returned several times in the early days. But then we have also recently lost George Melly, Miles Kington, Humphrey Lyttelton, Alan Coren, Gerry Fitt, Bill Deedes, John Rae, Dick Vosburgh, Anton Rodgers and, a relative latecomer to the show, Jeremy Beadle. We will miss them all but the death of one in particular brought back a very happy memory from 1985. The last time I encountered the writer and journalist Alan Brien was a year or two ago at a book launch. He asked why he had not been invited back to appear on Quote ... Unquote. I no doubt fudged some answer but the real reason was that there was no way we could repeat a wonderful moment from one of the four editions he had appeared in back then.
One of the quotations I asked him to provide a source for was, ‘Violence is the repartee of the illiterate.’ In his light, lilting voice he set about it: ‘I don’t think I’ve heard it before. Modernish, I think. Can’t be very old. Bernard Shaw would be too good for it, but it’s approaching Bernard Shaw. Perhaps it’s Chesterton, is it?’ Well, this is not a trick I can play very often on panellists – indeed, I don’t think I have ever done it to anyone else – and I was able to say, ‘Shaw, Chesterton ... Alan Brien, you wrote it in an article on corporal punishment in schools in Punch in 1973 ... ’ Oh, how we laughed. What I sometimes do – when I know who is taking part in the programme – is to see if indeed they do have any quotations attributed to them in the dictionaries but then usually feed these to other panellists. I had found ‘Violence is the repartee ... ’ in Frank S. Pepper’s Handbook of 20th-century Quotations. When I told Alan this, he said he would immediately go and buy a dozen copies and give them to his friends for Christmas. ‘Not quite Shaw, not quite Chesterton, but very good Alan Brien,’ I said. He responded: ‘That describes it very well. That’s what I was trying to be!’ It was a good joke to play on him but, as I say, it was absolutely unrepeatable.
Wednesday 18 June 2008
Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889-1951
Alan noticed everything. He had a remembrance of meeting Wittgenstein. I have an idea it was to do with lodgings in Oxford. Might it have been Beaumont Street? Can anybody add to this?
Monday 16 June 2008
On Dylan Thomas in Oxford. 'staggering along loaded down with string bags, behind his striding, empty-handed Viking Irish wife...'
Writing in the Sunday Times in 1973, Alan Brien (Jesus) recalled the familiar figure of Thomas in the Cornmarket on Saturday afternoons, 'staggering along loaded down with string bags, behind his striding, empty-handed Viking Irish wife - the very seaside postcard of a booze-flushed snub-nosed, ox-eyed, hen-pecked slave husband, aching to slide off into a pub and lose wife, shopping and consciousness'.
Thomas untutored
Volume 16 Number 2, Hilary 2004
Oxford Today
A fascination for Oxford briefly held the Welsh poet enthralled, says his biographer Andrew Lycett.
A jotted reminder in a notebook - 'Find exact modern duties of Proctors and Bulldogs compared with 19th century' - is hardly the sort of penny-plain line we might expect from a major lyrical poet. But in late 1946 Dylan Thomas was researching a radio talk about Oxford. He was living in the grounds of Magdalen College. And he was fascinated by the University, which played a background role in the unfolding of his career.
Most of his notebooks were crammed with his own poems. The State University of New York at Buffalo possesses four exercise books with fair copies of all Thomas's teenage verse. Later, he would draw on this early material, which provided models for half his published output.
Thomas's youthful creativity held him back from the undergraduate career that his schoolmaster father wanted for him. Thomas père was a prickly alumnus of the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth. Having gained a first-class degree, he would have liked to proceed to Oxford. Instead, he ended up teaching English at Swansea Grammar School. His son Dylan, born in 1914, went to the same establishment. But clever though he was, his temperament was unsuited to sustained academic effort and, at the age of 15, he rejected the classroom for the 'craft or sullen art' of poetry.
Nevertheless, for Dylan Thomas Oxford was always a chimera. In the 1930s, he is said to have visited the city to talk about James Joyce, although I have found no evidence of this. In 1937 he wrote an enthusiastic review of Djuna Barnes's novel Nightwood for a short-lived undergraduate publication, Light and Dark. He clearly had admirers in Oxford, for he suggested the English don, Lord David Cecil, as a subscriber to a 1938 edition of his poems.
At the start of the Second World War, Oxford poets such as Sidney Keyes regarded Dylan Thomas as a welcome antidote to Auden and his circle. They invited him to address the University English Club, an undergraduate society, in November 1941. Thomas had been working with John Davenport on a novel, The Death of the King's Canary, which interwove an unlikely story about the murder of the poet laureate with brilliant parodies of contemporary poets. Philip Larkin (St John's) noted appreciatively: 'Hell of a fine man: little, snubby, hopelessly pissed bloke who made hundreds of cracks and read parodies of everybody in appropriate voices. He remarked, "I'd like to have talked about a book of poems I've been given to review, a young poet called Rupert Brooke - it's surprising how he has been influenced by Stephen Spender ...". There was a moment of delighted surprise, then a roar of laughter. Then he read a parody of Spender entitled The Parachutist which had people rolling on the floor.'
Later in the war, Thomas and his wife Caitlin were back in Oxford, staying with the historian A J P Taylor and his wife Margaret. It was an unexpected encounter, unwittingly engineered by pianist Natasha Litvin. She used to play at lunchtime concerts in Oxford organised by Margaret Taylor, who one day asked her to bring some guests along for the weekend. In all innocence, Litvin and her husband Stephen Spender invited the Thomases.
They did not know that Thomas had already met the Taylors, and had not endeared himself to them. That was in April 1935, six months after reaching London from Swansea. During that short time, Thomas had befriended the poet Norman Cameron, an Oriel graduate who had been a key figure in Oxford's English Society in the late 1920s. Anxious because the sparkling young poet was over-indulging in the pubs of Fitzrovia and Soho, Cameron arranged for him to take time off for what was essentially a rest cure with his former Oriel friend A J P Taylor, then teaching history at Manchester University.
Recently married, Taylor was not impressed by the poet who, invited for a week, contrived to stay a month. In his memoir, A Personal History, Taylor recorded how he had to ration access to his beer barrel, since his guest drank 'fifteen or twenty pints' each day. As Thomas was leaving, he announced he had lost his return ticket and asked to borrow two pounds. The historian reluctantly agreed, hoping never again to see a man whom he described as 'cruel' and 'a sponger'.
A decade later, the dynamics of the Taylor marriage had changed and Margaret, bored with academic life, was ready to be impressed by the romantic young poet. After Thomas advised her on her own verse, she took pity when in March 1946 he was having difficulty finding accommodation for his young family. She invited them to stay at Holywell Ford, the house where she and her husband lived in the grounds of Magdalen, where Thomas slept in a one-room summerhouse beside the river Cherwell or in a gypsy caravan. So began one of the great acts of modern literary patronage. For eight years, until his death in New York in November 1953, Thomas looked to Margaret Taylor to bail him out of financial difficulties. She was besotted by him and he exploited her. After allowing him to stay at Holywell Ford, she bought him a series of dwellings in South Leigh, Oxfordshire (1947-9), Laugharne, South Wales (from 1949) and in Camden Town, London (a short-lived bolt-hole in 1951-2). She also arranged for his son, Llewelyn, to attend Magdalen College School.
Taylor's biographer Adam Sisman described Margaret as 'a sort of middle-class Lady Ottoline Morrell'. At her Holywell Ford salon one might meet authors Louis MacNeice and Graham Greene or the composer Elisabeth Lutyens. Dylan Thomas would appear as a poetic turn; John Betjeman, then secretary of the Oxford Preservation Trust, expressed delight at his reading of Thomas Hardy's 'To Lizbee Brown'.
But all too often the Welshman was tired and emotional after a day at the BBC in London. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper recalled how Thomas 'overturned a full decanter of claret - good claret too - drenching the fastidious Lord David (Cecil). That dinner party was not a success.' And Thomas could be embarrassingly rude about his patroness: after she had laboured over a dish of jugged hare, he wavered before condescending to 'eat the hare of the bitch that dogs me.'
Nevertheless, Thomas enjoyed life in Oxford. Undergraduates used to see him in the Turf, Gloucester Arms or White's, a club near St Aldate's. With Caitlin or Margaret Taylor in tow, he drank with friends, such as John Veale, a young composer whose father was University Registrar; Ernest Stahl, a German don at Christ Church; Dan Davin, an energetic New Zealander at the University Press; and Enid Starkie, who taught French at Somerville and with whom he discussed Rimbaud. Although dismissive of his education, she loved his conversation, declaring she would have been happy if he 'had read the telephone directory'.
Writing in the Sunday Times in 1973, Alan Brien (Jesus) recalled the familiar figure of Thomas in the Cornmarket on Saturday afternoons, 'staggering along loaded down with string bags, behind his striding, empty-handed Viking Irish wife - the very seaside postcard of a booze-flushed snub-nosed, ox-eyed, hen-pecked slave husband, aching to slide off into a pub and lose wife, shopping and consciousness'.
Intrigued by the University, Thomas adopted it as a subject for his radio talk in late 1946. This was part of an exchange with an American station, which provided a piece about Princeton, but sadly neither Thomas's script nor the tape survives.
Along with the memo about proctors and bulldogs, Thomas inscribed gobbets about the University and its lore - potted biographies of luminaries including Benjamin Jowett and Charles Dodgson; a list of quotations about the place from Wordsworth, Swinburne and others; even a section devoted to 'Eccentric Figures' such as Martin Routh, President of Magdalen, described as the last man in Oxford to wear a wig, who died in 1854 in his 100th year. Although not formally involved in the University, he did participate in literary events, particularly at the Poetry Society.
After moving to South Leigh, near Witney, in August 1947, Thomas became less prominent, but whenever he returned to Oxford, he made up for lost time. As he informed the Scots writer Hector McIver in February 1949, '[Hugh] MacDiarmid is coming to lecture to the Oxford Poetry Society next month. A party is being arranged.' Seeing Thomas swaying down the High Street, Kenneth Tynan (Magdalen) asked if he could help. 'Get me some more bloody crème de menthe', Thomas screamed.
The poet Michael Hamburger (Christ Church) welcomed Thomas's authentic Bohemianism in grim post-war Oxford and novelist Francis King (Balliol) wrote of the Welshman's 'voluble, dangerous charm'. However, younger undergraduates were sceptical of his wordy lyricism in an age of austerity and the atom bomb. John Wain and Kingsley Amis (both St John's), for example, wanted a more robust, ironic style, as was later associated with the Movement group of poets.
By this time, Thomas was experiencing a difficult, even barren, period as a poet. His recognition of this change of mood spurred him into looking, during his last few years, for new artistic challenges in radio and in America. In South Leigh in 1948, he first began to knock some shape into his 'play for voices', Under Milk Wood.
Soon his Welsh yearning for home, or hiraeth, began to tug at him. A year later, he went to live in Laugharne, though another longing - for academic respectability - remained evident in the contract he signed with the Oxford University Press in early 1953 for a book about Welsh fairy tales. Although these two desires struggled within him, there was no doubting which was the stronger. Walking along Broad Street, Martin Starkie once asked him if he would like to have been at the University. Thomas replied: 'In some ways, yes; in most ways, no.'
Thomas untutored
Volume 16 Number 2, Hilary 2004
Oxford Today
A fascination for Oxford briefly held the Welsh poet enthralled, says his biographer Andrew Lycett.
A jotted reminder in a notebook - 'Find exact modern duties of Proctors and Bulldogs compared with 19th century' - is hardly the sort of penny-plain line we might expect from a major lyrical poet. But in late 1946 Dylan Thomas was researching a radio talk about Oxford. He was living in the grounds of Magdalen College. And he was fascinated by the University, which played a background role in the unfolding of his career.
Most of his notebooks were crammed with his own poems. The State University of New York at Buffalo possesses four exercise books with fair copies of all Thomas's teenage verse. Later, he would draw on this early material, which provided models for half his published output.
Thomas's youthful creativity held him back from the undergraduate career that his schoolmaster father wanted for him. Thomas père was a prickly alumnus of the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth. Having gained a first-class degree, he would have liked to proceed to Oxford. Instead, he ended up teaching English at Swansea Grammar School. His son Dylan, born in 1914, went to the same establishment. But clever though he was, his temperament was unsuited to sustained academic effort and, at the age of 15, he rejected the classroom for the 'craft or sullen art' of poetry.
Nevertheless, for Dylan Thomas Oxford was always a chimera. In the 1930s, he is said to have visited the city to talk about James Joyce, although I have found no evidence of this. In 1937 he wrote an enthusiastic review of Djuna Barnes's novel Nightwood for a short-lived undergraduate publication, Light and Dark. He clearly had admirers in Oxford, for he suggested the English don, Lord David Cecil, as a subscriber to a 1938 edition of his poems.
At the start of the Second World War, Oxford poets such as Sidney Keyes regarded Dylan Thomas as a welcome antidote to Auden and his circle. They invited him to address the University English Club, an undergraduate society, in November 1941. Thomas had been working with John Davenport on a novel, The Death of the King's Canary, which interwove an unlikely story about the murder of the poet laureate with brilliant parodies of contemporary poets. Philip Larkin (St John's) noted appreciatively: 'Hell of a fine man: little, snubby, hopelessly pissed bloke who made hundreds of cracks and read parodies of everybody in appropriate voices. He remarked, "I'd like to have talked about a book of poems I've been given to review, a young poet called Rupert Brooke - it's surprising how he has been influenced by Stephen Spender ...". There was a moment of delighted surprise, then a roar of laughter. Then he read a parody of Spender entitled The Parachutist which had people rolling on the floor.'
Later in the war, Thomas and his wife Caitlin were back in Oxford, staying with the historian A J P Taylor and his wife Margaret. It was an unexpected encounter, unwittingly engineered by pianist Natasha Litvin. She used to play at lunchtime concerts in Oxford organised by Margaret Taylor, who one day asked her to bring some guests along for the weekend. In all innocence, Litvin and her husband Stephen Spender invited the Thomases.
They did not know that Thomas had already met the Taylors, and had not endeared himself to them. That was in April 1935, six months after reaching London from Swansea. During that short time, Thomas had befriended the poet Norman Cameron, an Oriel graduate who had been a key figure in Oxford's English Society in the late 1920s. Anxious because the sparkling young poet was over-indulging in the pubs of Fitzrovia and Soho, Cameron arranged for him to take time off for what was essentially a rest cure with his former Oriel friend A J P Taylor, then teaching history at Manchester University.
Recently married, Taylor was not impressed by the poet who, invited for a week, contrived to stay a month. In his memoir, A Personal History, Taylor recorded how he had to ration access to his beer barrel, since his guest drank 'fifteen or twenty pints' each day. As Thomas was leaving, he announced he had lost his return ticket and asked to borrow two pounds. The historian reluctantly agreed, hoping never again to see a man whom he described as 'cruel' and 'a sponger'.
A decade later, the dynamics of the Taylor marriage had changed and Margaret, bored with academic life, was ready to be impressed by the romantic young poet. After Thomas advised her on her own verse, she took pity when in March 1946 he was having difficulty finding accommodation for his young family. She invited them to stay at Holywell Ford, the house where she and her husband lived in the grounds of Magdalen, where Thomas slept in a one-room summerhouse beside the river Cherwell or in a gypsy caravan. So began one of the great acts of modern literary patronage. For eight years, until his death in New York in November 1953, Thomas looked to Margaret Taylor to bail him out of financial difficulties. She was besotted by him and he exploited her. After allowing him to stay at Holywell Ford, she bought him a series of dwellings in South Leigh, Oxfordshire (1947-9), Laugharne, South Wales (from 1949) and in Camden Town, London (a short-lived bolt-hole in 1951-2). She also arranged for his son, Llewelyn, to attend Magdalen College School.
Taylor's biographer Adam Sisman described Margaret as 'a sort of middle-class Lady Ottoline Morrell'. At her Holywell Ford salon one might meet authors Louis MacNeice and Graham Greene or the composer Elisabeth Lutyens. Dylan Thomas would appear as a poetic turn; John Betjeman, then secretary of the Oxford Preservation Trust, expressed delight at his reading of Thomas Hardy's 'To Lizbee Brown'.
But all too often the Welshman was tired and emotional after a day at the BBC in London. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper recalled how Thomas 'overturned a full decanter of claret - good claret too - drenching the fastidious Lord David (Cecil). That dinner party was not a success.' And Thomas could be embarrassingly rude about his patroness: after she had laboured over a dish of jugged hare, he wavered before condescending to 'eat the hare of the bitch that dogs me.'
Nevertheless, Thomas enjoyed life in Oxford. Undergraduates used to see him in the Turf, Gloucester Arms or White's, a club near St Aldate's. With Caitlin or Margaret Taylor in tow, he drank with friends, such as John Veale, a young composer whose father was University Registrar; Ernest Stahl, a German don at Christ Church; Dan Davin, an energetic New Zealander at the University Press; and Enid Starkie, who taught French at Somerville and with whom he discussed Rimbaud. Although dismissive of his education, she loved his conversation, declaring she would have been happy if he 'had read the telephone directory'.
Writing in the Sunday Times in 1973, Alan Brien (Jesus) recalled the familiar figure of Thomas in the Cornmarket on Saturday afternoons, 'staggering along loaded down with string bags, behind his striding, empty-handed Viking Irish wife - the very seaside postcard of a booze-flushed snub-nosed, ox-eyed, hen-pecked slave husband, aching to slide off into a pub and lose wife, shopping and consciousness'.
Intrigued by the University, Thomas adopted it as a subject for his radio talk in late 1946. This was part of an exchange with an American station, which provided a piece about Princeton, but sadly neither Thomas's script nor the tape survives.
Along with the memo about proctors and bulldogs, Thomas inscribed gobbets about the University and its lore - potted biographies of luminaries including Benjamin Jowett and Charles Dodgson; a list of quotations about the place from Wordsworth, Swinburne and others; even a section devoted to 'Eccentric Figures' such as Martin Routh, President of Magdalen, described as the last man in Oxford to wear a wig, who died in 1854 in his 100th year. Although not formally involved in the University, he did participate in literary events, particularly at the Poetry Society.
After moving to South Leigh, near Witney, in August 1947, Thomas became less prominent, but whenever he returned to Oxford, he made up for lost time. As he informed the Scots writer Hector McIver in February 1949, '[Hugh] MacDiarmid is coming to lecture to the Oxford Poetry Society next month. A party is being arranged.' Seeing Thomas swaying down the High Street, Kenneth Tynan (Magdalen) asked if he could help. 'Get me some more bloody crème de menthe', Thomas screamed.
The poet Michael Hamburger (Christ Church) welcomed Thomas's authentic Bohemianism in grim post-war Oxford and novelist Francis King (Balliol) wrote of the Welshman's 'voluble, dangerous charm'. However, younger undergraduates were sceptical of his wordy lyricism in an age of austerity and the atom bomb. John Wain and Kingsley Amis (both St John's), for example, wanted a more robust, ironic style, as was later associated with the Movement group of poets.
By this time, Thomas was experiencing a difficult, even barren, period as a poet. His recognition of this change of mood spurred him into looking, during his last few years, for new artistic challenges in radio and in America. In South Leigh in 1948, he first began to knock some shape into his 'play for voices', Under Milk Wood.
Soon his Welsh yearning for home, or hiraeth, began to tug at him. A year later, he went to live in Laugharne, though another longing - for academic respectability - remained evident in the contract he signed with the Oxford University Press in early 1953 for a book about Welsh fairy tales. Although these two desires struggled within him, there was no doubting which was the stronger. Walking along Broad Street, Martin Starkie once asked him if he would like to have been at the University. Thomas replied: 'In some ways, yes; in most ways, no.'
Sally Belfrage for The Crack
Obituary: Sally Belfrage
Independent, The (London), Mar 16, 1994 by JESSICA MITFORD
Sally Mary Caroline Belfrage, writer: born Hollywood, California 4 October 1936; married 1965 Bernard Pomerance (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1983); died London 14 March 1994.
IN 1955, we were all more or less on the lam. My husband Bob and I arrived in London using revoked American passports; our friend Cedric Belfrage had just been deported from the United States to his native England as a subversive alien. America was going through the convulsions of McCarthyism. Cedric, a long-time US resident and editor of a left-wing national weekly published in New York, had fallen afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Birds of a feather, Bob and I often visited the Belfrage household in London. As we sat plotting the overthrow of the US government by force and violence - or, more accurately, discussing what London plays might be worth seeing - a stunningly beautiful creature would dash into the sitting-room, give her Dad a kiss, and be off quick as a wink to a party. This was 19- year-old Sally, long of leg, blonde of hair, blue of eye.
We were in London again when Sally, then aged 21, once more darted into view. She was writing A Room in Moscow. A vivid memory: Cedric told us, 'Sally has got no idea what it takes to be a writer. She's too damn popular, out every night until Lord knows what hour, and then of course she sleeps until noon. I keep explaining to her that she'll never get the book done that way, one has to be disciplined to write . . .'
A year or so later the book was published to great critical acclaim in England and the United States. Sally was feted everywhere, brought by her publisher to New York for interviews. I remember reading an article in Reynolds News - I think that was it - in which the writer interviewed father and daughter. He thought that the daughter had surpassed her paternal mentor.
Sally, who adored her father, might have disputed that. But to me, the writer did have a point, as evidenced in her next book. In 1964 she joined the intrepid band of civil-rights volunteers from all over America to make the dangerous journey into Mississippi as part of a bold, and ultimately historic, challenge to the most murderously racist state in America.
Out of this brave effort at least a dozen worthy books emerged. Of these, only Sally's Freedom Summer (1965) has the authentic ring of an enduring classic.
Leafing through it today, I still feel the chills and thrills of first reading, as each character springs alive from the page. In a typical Sally-ism, she describes fear as 'a condition, like heat or night or blue eyes. You had to arrange your fear as a parallel element in the day and night, to exist beside it and to function without its interference.'
Over the years, Bob and I got to know Sally Belfrage better and better - first as a contemporary of my daughter Constancia Romilly, when they would wheel their respective babies in prams around New York together, and later as an indispensable London friend whose welcome was always unalloyed joy.
My last letter from Sally came just a few weeks before she died. We'd been corresponding about the possibility of a book tour for her forthcoming autobiography, UnAmerican Activities. She had been diagnosed some months before with incurable cancer, but 'What the hell?' was her attitude.
Well - I can just see her wowing them with this on the chat shows.
It just so happens that Un-American Activities is the best, the most profound and the most amusing account ever written by a former Red Diaper Baby. Stay tuned for reviews this August.
Independent, The (London), Mar 16, 1994 by JESSICA MITFORD
Sally Mary Caroline Belfrage, writer: born Hollywood, California 4 October 1936; married 1965 Bernard Pomerance (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1983); died London 14 March 1994.
IN 1955, we were all more or less on the lam. My husband Bob and I arrived in London using revoked American passports; our friend Cedric Belfrage had just been deported from the United States to his native England as a subversive alien. America was going through the convulsions of McCarthyism. Cedric, a long-time US resident and editor of a left-wing national weekly published in New York, had fallen afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Birds of a feather, Bob and I often visited the Belfrage household in London. As we sat plotting the overthrow of the US government by force and violence - or, more accurately, discussing what London plays might be worth seeing - a stunningly beautiful creature would dash into the sitting-room, give her Dad a kiss, and be off quick as a wink to a party. This was 19- year-old Sally, long of leg, blonde of hair, blue of eye.
We were in London again when Sally, then aged 21, once more darted into view. She was writing A Room in Moscow. A vivid memory: Cedric told us, 'Sally has got no idea what it takes to be a writer. She's too damn popular, out every night until Lord knows what hour, and then of course she sleeps until noon. I keep explaining to her that she'll never get the book done that way, one has to be disciplined to write . . .'
A year or so later the book was published to great critical acclaim in England and the United States. Sally was feted everywhere, brought by her publisher to New York for interviews. I remember reading an article in Reynolds News - I think that was it - in which the writer interviewed father and daughter. He thought that the daughter had surpassed her paternal mentor.
Sally, who adored her father, might have disputed that. But to me, the writer did have a point, as evidenced in her next book. In 1964 she joined the intrepid band of civil-rights volunteers from all over America to make the dangerous journey into Mississippi as part of a bold, and ultimately historic, challenge to the most murderously racist state in America.
Out of this brave effort at least a dozen worthy books emerged. Of these, only Sally's Freedom Summer (1965) has the authentic ring of an enduring classic.
Leafing through it today, I still feel the chills and thrills of first reading, as each character springs alive from the page. In a typical Sally-ism, she describes fear as 'a condition, like heat or night or blue eyes. You had to arrange your fear as a parallel element in the day and night, to exist beside it and to function without its interference.'
Over the years, Bob and I got to know Sally Belfrage better and better - first as a contemporary of my daughter Constancia Romilly, when they would wheel their respective babies in prams around New York together, and later as an indispensable London friend whose welcome was always unalloyed joy.
My last letter from Sally came just a few weeks before she died. We'd been corresponding about the possibility of a book tour for her forthcoming autobiography, UnAmerican Activities. She had been diagnosed some months before with incurable cancer, but 'What the hell?' was her attitude.
Well - I can just see her wowing them with this on the chat shows.
It just so happens that Un-American Activities is the best, the most profound and the most amusing account ever written by a former Red Diaper Baby. Stay tuned for reviews this August.
Film maker Midge Mckenzie
Alan had given Jill a cameo of Shakespeare. He then gave it to Midge, after Jill died. Midge was a great party giver. We went to her memorial in Highbury.
Shoulder to Shoulder with Midge MacKenzie
Ellen Shub a freelance photojournalist, and friend of Midge MacKenzie's, whose work over the past three decades has focused on social justice issues and activism in the US.
Filmmaker Midge McKenzie at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline, MA in April 2000 after a screening of John Houston: War Stories
Photo © Ellen Shub
MacKenzie, an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose life's work focused on feminism, peace, human rights, and social justice, died in January. She was 65 and died at home in London of cardiac arrest after a lengthy battle with cancer.
A crusading social activist with flaming red hair, characteristic wide-brimmed Stetson hats, turquoise bracelets and rings, and cowboy boots, she campaigned with relentless tenacity and insight to document women's history in the United States, Great Britain, and the world. She was tirelessly dedicated to creating a more just, peaceful world that respected the human rights of women and the value of authentic community.
She is perhaps best known for her 1975 Masterpiece Theatre television series and book, Shoulder to Shoulder, enlivening the history of the British women's struggle for suffrage.
For me personally, that series and book, with images of women being force-fed while on hunger strikes in prison, made feminism real to me. It has inspired me to photograph women's issues in America for over 30 years.
Mackenzie documented the women's movement, and allied social justice movements, in film. Women Talking Betty Friedan and Kate Millet talking about raising consciousness. She filmed Jane Fonda testifying about her trip to Hanoi, and created the film As I Stand Here Ironing on the stories of Tillie Olsen. She also threw tomatoes at Bob Hope at the Miss World contest in London, and as an ardent anti-apartheid activist, staged a reenactment of the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre on London's Lyceum stage.
Mackenzie collaborated with Amnesty International to create The Sky: A Silent Witness human rights abuses seen through the eyes of women. It follows the journey of Guatemalans to reclaim the remains of 180 massacre victims and features women from across the globe, including a Tibetan Buddhist nun, a Tiananmen Square demonstrator, and an African-American civil rights worker, testifying about human rights abuses in their own countries.
She created a strong anti-war film, John Huston: War Stories, in 1999, which centered on an interview with director John Huston and the footage, banned by the US War Department at the time, he shot in World War II in Italy,
She was a founding member of the New England Chapter of Women in Film and Video, taught film history at the Carpenter Center for the Study of Visual Arts at Harvard, created multimedia events with the Joffrey Ballet, Prisoners of Childhood based on the work of psychologist Alice Miller, and films on remote communities in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.
A memorial attended by friends from London, New York, and Massachusetts was held April 17th at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, where clips of her films and personal remembrances were shared.
Shoulder to Shoulder with Midge MacKenzie
Ellen Shub a freelance photojournalist, and friend of Midge MacKenzie's, whose work over the past three decades has focused on social justice issues and activism in the US.
Filmmaker Midge McKenzie at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline, MA in April 2000 after a screening of John Houston: War Stories
Photo © Ellen Shub
MacKenzie, an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose life's work focused on feminism, peace, human rights, and social justice, died in January. She was 65 and died at home in London of cardiac arrest after a lengthy battle with cancer.
A crusading social activist with flaming red hair, characteristic wide-brimmed Stetson hats, turquoise bracelets and rings, and cowboy boots, she campaigned with relentless tenacity and insight to document women's history in the United States, Great Britain, and the world. She was tirelessly dedicated to creating a more just, peaceful world that respected the human rights of women and the value of authentic community.
She is perhaps best known for her 1975 Masterpiece Theatre television series and book, Shoulder to Shoulder, enlivening the history of the British women's struggle for suffrage.
For me personally, that series and book, with images of women being force-fed while on hunger strikes in prison, made feminism real to me. It has inspired me to photograph women's issues in America for over 30 years.
Mackenzie documented the women's movement, and allied social justice movements, in film. Women Talking Betty Friedan and Kate Millet talking about raising consciousness. She filmed Jane Fonda testifying about her trip to Hanoi, and created the film As I Stand Here Ironing on the stories of Tillie Olsen. She also threw tomatoes at Bob Hope at the Miss World contest in London, and as an ardent anti-apartheid activist, staged a reenactment of the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre on London's Lyceum stage.
Mackenzie collaborated with Amnesty International to create The Sky: A Silent Witness human rights abuses seen through the eyes of women. It follows the journey of Guatemalans to reclaim the remains of 180 massacre victims and features women from across the globe, including a Tibetan Buddhist nun, a Tiananmen Square demonstrator, and an African-American civil rights worker, testifying about human rights abuses in their own countries.
She created a strong anti-war film, John Huston: War Stories, in 1999, which centered on an interview with director John Huston and the footage, banned by the US War Department at the time, he shot in World War II in Italy,
She was a founding member of the New England Chapter of Women in Film and Video, taught film history at the Carpenter Center for the Study of Visual Arts at Harvard, created multimedia events with the Joffrey Ballet, Prisoners of Childhood based on the work of psychologist Alice Miller, and films on remote communities in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.
A memorial attended by friends from London, New York, and Massachusetts was held April 17th at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, where clips of her films and personal remembrances were shared.
Oxford days, Mike Hill, Isis & Deal, Kent
Alan didn't know Mike had died.
From The Times April 9, 2008
Mike Hill
BBC writer and producer who remained fiercely anti-Establishment
Mike Hill was a much-liked and sometimes quirky presence at BBC television in a golden period of its satirical - and serious talk show - heyday.
He was the deputy to Rowan Ayers for the groundbreaking Late-Night Line-up presented by Joan Bakewell and Michael Dean, and went on to be executive producer of a late-night discussion programme Up Sunday in 1972-73 which featured a glittering array of talkers and performers, including John Wells, John Bird, John Fortune, Eleanor Bron, Barry Humpries, Clive James, Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers. The initial format of the show was to discuss the week's news critically and entertainingly, with a regular slot featuring James Cameron and Willie Rushton. Up Sunday was, in the words of a former BBC executive, so successful that “naturally, the corporation took it off”.
Hill subsequently became executive producer of The End of the Pier Show, transmitted in 1974-75, which was a mixture of satire and musical, with guests John Wells, John Fortune, Carl Davis and Madeline Smith, Peter Sellers, John Laurie, Ivor Cutler and John Bird. This was the first TV programme to mix cartoons with live performances and was thought of as pioneering in its time.
During the 1970s and 1980s Hill continued to be involved with subsequent programmes of a similar genre, mixing satire, current affairs and music, including In the Looking Glass, Rutland Weekend Television, and fantasy programmes such as The Snow Queen, The Light Princess - which won the Royal Television Society's Most Original Programme Award in 1978, Jane of the Mirror (a strip cartoon which won a Bafta for artwork), and two hour-long Angela Brazil-type schoolgirl films, Schoolgirl Chums in 1982 and St Ursula's in Danger in 1983.
Hill had an unlikely background for a media man, having been in the Fleet Air Arm during the Second World War - he flew Spitfires in a reconnaissance task over the beaches at Normandy on D-Day, and was a brave and sometimes reckless pilot. He had also seen service on Russian convoys during the war.
He was born in Yorkshire and, originally called Denys Michael Ryshworth-Hill, was the second of two sons. He first attended school in Ripon, Yorkshire, and then went to King's School, Canterbury. While at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, from 1945-48, he wrote the sports column for Isis. He never completed his Oxford degree as he was rusticated for insufficient attention to studies, or, as a contemporary remembers, for being a “general drunk and layabout”.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s Hill lived the kind of Bohemian life in London that was possible in those days when there were cheap lodgings in Chelsea and a man could survive somehow on the small fees paid by a series of fringe magazines. He was pleased to wangle a job as editor of Flight Deck magazine, for the Fleet Air Arm - especially, he told a friend, because the publication only came out four times a year. In this capacity Hill was employed by the Admiralty. He was subsequently employed as a journalist by Amalgamated Press.
In the 1960s Hill was introduced to the BBC by his wartime friend Rowan Ayers. He did some research work on The Great War, written by Correlli Barnett, which was broadcast in 1964. He worked on the Tonight programme and went on to become Ayers's deputy on Late-Night Line-up, a legendary live discussion programme which mixed the serious with the provocative, and was finally taken off the air in 1973 after 3,000 memorable transmissions. He also worked with Ned Sherrin on That Was the Week that Was.
Hill's naval background earned him the nickname “The Commander” at the BBC. Joan Bakewell considered him a warm and encouraging presence in the Late-Night Line-up studio, as did many colleagues. A BBC colleague, Ian Keill, remembers Mike Hill as “optimistic, witty and cheerful - even when everything about us seemed to be falling apart at the seams”. Those with a more corporate view of BBC structures were more inclined to judge Hill as genial but irresponsible: yet the presenters and performers felt he protected them somewhat from “the less encouraging noises emanating from the sixth floor at TV Centre”.
Hill certainly had his eccentricities. Despite, or perhaps because of, his background he was chronically anti-Establishment, and all but concealed his family's double-barrelled name (or his own true given name, Denys). He had an obsessive hostility against Wykehamists, whom he considered snobbish, Civil-Service-minded and having an insufferably superior air. This may have derived from an adversarial view of Alasdair Milne, sometime Director-General.
In his bohemian days Hill had been an habitué of such Soho shebeens as the Colony Room and the Gargoyle drinking club, but in his middle years he curbed his drinking habits and latterly he eschewed alcohol altogether.
Hill retired to Deal, Kent, in the 1980s, prompted by the presence there of his friends Alan Brien and Jill Tweedie, and where his sometime neighbours included Simon Raven and Charles Hawtrey. He retired from the BBC mainly to care for his wife, Patricia Montague-Brooks (neé Ferguson), who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis. Despite - or perhaps again, because of - a reputation in earlier days as a ladies' man, Hill was devoted to his wife and her two daughters from a previous marriage, whom he came to regard as his own family. He was devastated when Patricia died in 1984, from a bout of pneumonia.
In retirement he maintained a cheerful friendship with pals from his BBC days, and particularly with Ned Sherrin - a loyal friend from Oxford days. He had always wanted to be a writer, and privately he wrote poetry as well as several unpublished novels. He published three books, including Duty Free: Fleet Air Arm Days, drawn from his diaries kept during the Second World War, and a word-of-mouth success with military veterans; Right Royal Remarks - 1066 to 1996, from research done with Ned Sherrin on strange quotations from royalty through the centuries; and A Little Local Difficulty, a roman à clef about life at the BBC, which he self-published, and which featured, barely disguised, characters such as Malcolm Muggeridge and Grace Wyndham Goldie.
Michael Hill, BBC producer and writer, was born on June 17, 1923. He died on March 16, 2008, aged 84
From The Times April 9, 2008
Mike Hill
BBC writer and producer who remained fiercely anti-Establishment
Mike Hill was a much-liked and sometimes quirky presence at BBC television in a golden period of its satirical - and serious talk show - heyday.
He was the deputy to Rowan Ayers for the groundbreaking Late-Night Line-up presented by Joan Bakewell and Michael Dean, and went on to be executive producer of a late-night discussion programme Up Sunday in 1972-73 which featured a glittering array of talkers and performers, including John Wells, John Bird, John Fortune, Eleanor Bron, Barry Humpries, Clive James, Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers. The initial format of the show was to discuss the week's news critically and entertainingly, with a regular slot featuring James Cameron and Willie Rushton. Up Sunday was, in the words of a former BBC executive, so successful that “naturally, the corporation took it off”.
Hill subsequently became executive producer of The End of the Pier Show, transmitted in 1974-75, which was a mixture of satire and musical, with guests John Wells, John Fortune, Carl Davis and Madeline Smith, Peter Sellers, John Laurie, Ivor Cutler and John Bird. This was the first TV programme to mix cartoons with live performances and was thought of as pioneering in its time.
During the 1970s and 1980s Hill continued to be involved with subsequent programmes of a similar genre, mixing satire, current affairs and music, including In the Looking Glass, Rutland Weekend Television, and fantasy programmes such as The Snow Queen, The Light Princess - which won the Royal Television Society's Most Original Programme Award in 1978, Jane of the Mirror (a strip cartoon which won a Bafta for artwork), and two hour-long Angela Brazil-type schoolgirl films, Schoolgirl Chums in 1982 and St Ursula's in Danger in 1983.
Hill had an unlikely background for a media man, having been in the Fleet Air Arm during the Second World War - he flew Spitfires in a reconnaissance task over the beaches at Normandy on D-Day, and was a brave and sometimes reckless pilot. He had also seen service on Russian convoys during the war.
He was born in Yorkshire and, originally called Denys Michael Ryshworth-Hill, was the second of two sons. He first attended school in Ripon, Yorkshire, and then went to King's School, Canterbury. While at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, from 1945-48, he wrote the sports column for Isis. He never completed his Oxford degree as he was rusticated for insufficient attention to studies, or, as a contemporary remembers, for being a “general drunk and layabout”.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s Hill lived the kind of Bohemian life in London that was possible in those days when there were cheap lodgings in Chelsea and a man could survive somehow on the small fees paid by a series of fringe magazines. He was pleased to wangle a job as editor of Flight Deck magazine, for the Fleet Air Arm - especially, he told a friend, because the publication only came out four times a year. In this capacity Hill was employed by the Admiralty. He was subsequently employed as a journalist by Amalgamated Press.
In the 1960s Hill was introduced to the BBC by his wartime friend Rowan Ayers. He did some research work on The Great War, written by Correlli Barnett, which was broadcast in 1964. He worked on the Tonight programme and went on to become Ayers's deputy on Late-Night Line-up, a legendary live discussion programme which mixed the serious with the provocative, and was finally taken off the air in 1973 after 3,000 memorable transmissions. He also worked with Ned Sherrin on That Was the Week that Was.
Hill's naval background earned him the nickname “The Commander” at the BBC. Joan Bakewell considered him a warm and encouraging presence in the Late-Night Line-up studio, as did many colleagues. A BBC colleague, Ian Keill, remembers Mike Hill as “optimistic, witty and cheerful - even when everything about us seemed to be falling apart at the seams”. Those with a more corporate view of BBC structures were more inclined to judge Hill as genial but irresponsible: yet the presenters and performers felt he protected them somewhat from “the less encouraging noises emanating from the sixth floor at TV Centre”.
Hill certainly had his eccentricities. Despite, or perhaps because of, his background he was chronically anti-Establishment, and all but concealed his family's double-barrelled name (or his own true given name, Denys). He had an obsessive hostility against Wykehamists, whom he considered snobbish, Civil-Service-minded and having an insufferably superior air. This may have derived from an adversarial view of Alasdair Milne, sometime Director-General.
In his bohemian days Hill had been an habitué of such Soho shebeens as the Colony Room and the Gargoyle drinking club, but in his middle years he curbed his drinking habits and latterly he eschewed alcohol altogether.
Hill retired to Deal, Kent, in the 1980s, prompted by the presence there of his friends Alan Brien and Jill Tweedie, and where his sometime neighbours included Simon Raven and Charles Hawtrey. He retired from the BBC mainly to care for his wife, Patricia Montague-Brooks (neé Ferguson), who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis. Despite - or perhaps again, because of - a reputation in earlier days as a ladies' man, Hill was devoted to his wife and her two daughters from a previous marriage, whom he came to regard as his own family. He was devastated when Patricia died in 1984, from a bout of pneumonia.
In retirement he maintained a cheerful friendship with pals from his BBC days, and particularly with Ned Sherrin - a loyal friend from Oxford days. He had always wanted to be a writer, and privately he wrote poetry as well as several unpublished novels. He published three books, including Duty Free: Fleet Air Arm Days, drawn from his diaries kept during the Second World War, and a word-of-mouth success with military veterans; Right Royal Remarks - 1066 to 1996, from research done with Ned Sherrin on strange quotations from royalty through the centuries; and A Little Local Difficulty, a roman à clef about life at the BBC, which he self-published, and which featured, barely disguised, characters such as Malcolm Muggeridge and Grace Wyndham Goldie.
Michael Hill, BBC producer and writer, was born on June 17, 1923. He died on March 16, 2008, aged 84
Friday 13 June 2008
Austen Kark
Austen was one of Alan's oldest friends and with him in Holloway on the day we first met in 1993. He was also the influence behind Alan getting one of his first jobs, on his father's magazine, as associate editor, Mini-Cinema 1950-52.
obituaries
Austen Kark
BBC mandarin who successfully defended the world service
Dennis Barker The Guardian, Monday May 13 2002
Austen Kark, who died in the Potters Bar rail crash aged 75, secured a place in broadcasting history as one of the three former managing directors of the BBC World Service to oppose the plans of John Birt, after he became director general in 1992, to end the service's independent status at Bush House, in central London, and absorb it within the rest of the corporation.
With Gerard Mansell and John Tusa, the other two of the "three wise men", Kark opposed the plan in speeches, letters, newspaper articles and behind-the-scenes lobbying. While they campaigned, plans were drawn up to sell the lease of Bush House, only to be reversed. Nearly a decade later, victory went to the trio by default, and today the world service remains at Bush House, with its own management structure substantially in place.
Coming into office as managing director in 1984, exactly 30 years after he joined the corporation, Kark was the man-in-the-middle of another great BBC controversy - the launching of the world television service to complement its radio counterpart. The idea was first mooted by Kark's predecessor, Douglas Muggeridge, who had a certain protective public profile as the nephew of the broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge.
Douglas leaked the idea to a Guardian journalist, and made a speech in the United States implicitly urging the Thatcher government to supply the funds for a scheme to keep British broadcasting ahead of other nations. He was rapped over the knuckles for his pains, and told by Mrs Thatcher that if ITV could run the beginnings of an external television service without government funding - as it was then doing - the BBC should not expect feather-bedding.
After Muggeridge's retirement, Kark kept the idea of world service television alive but, being a man of lesser public profile and more reticence, did not stick his neck out with any public announcements. It was his successor, the former news presenter John Tusa, who finally got the service launched.
Tall, reserved, and with a hesitant manner that concealed an incisive mind - and a generous awareness of the qualities of his staff - Kark had a chequered career before joining the BBC. He was born in London, the son of an army major who became a publisher. He went to the Upper Canada College in Toronto, to the Nautical College, Pangbourne, the Royal Naval College, and Magdalen College, Oxford. He joined the Royal Navy as a midshipman in 1944, and served for two years with the East Indies fleet, aboard HMS Nelson and HMS London.
At Oxford in 1948, Kark directed the first production of Jean-Paul Sartre's play The Flies, before going into the family magazine business, Norman Kark Publications, among whose products was the glossy literary magazine Courier, which flouted the austerity of wartime and postwar publications. Kark worked on one of the less ambitious magazines, Bandwagon, and became associate editor (1950-52) before editing the London Mystery Magazine for two years.
From 1954, he was a BBC reporter, and, 10 years later, became head of the South European service at Bush House. This fostered his already existing interest in countries of the region, especially Greece, about which he later wrote guidebooks.
In 1972, he switched to the East European and Russian service, and became editor of the world service the following year. He was adviser to Lord Soames, the last governor of Rhodesia, on election broadcasting in the colony, and, in 1980, chaired, for Robert Mugabe, the Harare government report on radio and television in Zimbabwe.
In 1974, he became controller of engineering services, but moved back into the broadcasting mainstream in 1981 with his appointment as deputy managing director of external broadcasting. After two years as deputy, he became managing director, retiring in 1986.
Kark was a man of broad interests, especially involving southern Europe and the Commonwealth. He was made a trustee of the Commonwealth Journalists' Association in 1993.
In retirement, he wrote Attic In Greece (1994); his spy thriller, set in the Middle East, The Forwarding Agent (1999), was praised by the crime writer PD James, an old friend. Most of it was written at his home in Nauplion, a port in the Aegean, where he and his wife, the novelist Nina Bawden, spent much of their time. In London, the couple lived in Islington, in a house backing on to the Grand Union canal. His hobbies included real tennis, travelling and studying mosaics. He was a member of the Oriental Club and the MCC, and was appointed CBE in 1987.
In 1949, Kark married Margaret Solomon, a relationship that produced two daughters but ended in divorce in 1954. That same year he married Nina Bawden; they had one daughter, and he was stepfather to her two sons, one of whom predeceased him.
Dennis Barker
Antonio de Figueiredo writes: I was in close professional contact with Austen Kark during the cold war years, when Bush House was like a mini-United Nations, bypassing the curtains of censorship and dictatorial rule that smothered many countries of the world. At that time, hundreds of foreign refugees, including myself, congregated daily in the canteen, hoping for the day British freedom and democracy, for all its shortcomings, would be extended to our homelands.
Kark had the right combination of cosmopolitan open-mindedness and dedication to British democratic toler ance to ensure that the much admired English-language world service was the model for more than 46 foreign language services that broadcast objective news and comment not available to hundreds of millions of people then deprived of freedom.
Once, when I praised the world service for the role it played on behalf of demo-cratic rights and values, he replied with what struck me as typically English laconic objectivity: "Well, let us try and keep it that way."
Austen Steven Kark, journalist and broadcasting executive, born October 20 1926; died May 10 2002.
This article appeared in the Guardian on Monday May 13 2002 . It was last updated at 00:19 on January 11 2008.
obituaries
Austen Kark
BBC mandarin who successfully defended the world service
Dennis Barker The Guardian, Monday May 13 2002
Austen Kark, who died in the Potters Bar rail crash aged 75, secured a place in broadcasting history as one of the three former managing directors of the BBC World Service to oppose the plans of John Birt, after he became director general in 1992, to end the service's independent status at Bush House, in central London, and absorb it within the rest of the corporation.
With Gerard Mansell and John Tusa, the other two of the "three wise men", Kark opposed the plan in speeches, letters, newspaper articles and behind-the-scenes lobbying. While they campaigned, plans were drawn up to sell the lease of Bush House, only to be reversed. Nearly a decade later, victory went to the trio by default, and today the world service remains at Bush House, with its own management structure substantially in place.
Coming into office as managing director in 1984, exactly 30 years after he joined the corporation, Kark was the man-in-the-middle of another great BBC controversy - the launching of the world television service to complement its radio counterpart. The idea was first mooted by Kark's predecessor, Douglas Muggeridge, who had a certain protective public profile as the nephew of the broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge.
Douglas leaked the idea to a Guardian journalist, and made a speech in the United States implicitly urging the Thatcher government to supply the funds for a scheme to keep British broadcasting ahead of other nations. He was rapped over the knuckles for his pains, and told by Mrs Thatcher that if ITV could run the beginnings of an external television service without government funding - as it was then doing - the BBC should not expect feather-bedding.
After Muggeridge's retirement, Kark kept the idea of world service television alive but, being a man of lesser public profile and more reticence, did not stick his neck out with any public announcements. It was his successor, the former news presenter John Tusa, who finally got the service launched.
Tall, reserved, and with a hesitant manner that concealed an incisive mind - and a generous awareness of the qualities of his staff - Kark had a chequered career before joining the BBC. He was born in London, the son of an army major who became a publisher. He went to the Upper Canada College in Toronto, to the Nautical College, Pangbourne, the Royal Naval College, and Magdalen College, Oxford. He joined the Royal Navy as a midshipman in 1944, and served for two years with the East Indies fleet, aboard HMS Nelson and HMS London.
At Oxford in 1948, Kark directed the first production of Jean-Paul Sartre's play The Flies, before going into the family magazine business, Norman Kark Publications, among whose products was the glossy literary magazine Courier, which flouted the austerity of wartime and postwar publications. Kark worked on one of the less ambitious magazines, Bandwagon, and became associate editor (1950-52) before editing the London Mystery Magazine for two years.
From 1954, he was a BBC reporter, and, 10 years later, became head of the South European service at Bush House. This fostered his already existing interest in countries of the region, especially Greece, about which he later wrote guidebooks.
In 1972, he switched to the East European and Russian service, and became editor of the world service the following year. He was adviser to Lord Soames, the last governor of Rhodesia, on election broadcasting in the colony, and, in 1980, chaired, for Robert Mugabe, the Harare government report on radio and television in Zimbabwe.
In 1974, he became controller of engineering services, but moved back into the broadcasting mainstream in 1981 with his appointment as deputy managing director of external broadcasting. After two years as deputy, he became managing director, retiring in 1986.
Kark was a man of broad interests, especially involving southern Europe and the Commonwealth. He was made a trustee of the Commonwealth Journalists' Association in 1993.
In retirement, he wrote Attic In Greece (1994); his spy thriller, set in the Middle East, The Forwarding Agent (1999), was praised by the crime writer PD James, an old friend. Most of it was written at his home in Nauplion, a port in the Aegean, where he and his wife, the novelist Nina Bawden, spent much of their time. In London, the couple lived in Islington, in a house backing on to the Grand Union canal. His hobbies included real tennis, travelling and studying mosaics. He was a member of the Oriental Club and the MCC, and was appointed CBE in 1987.
In 1949, Kark married Margaret Solomon, a relationship that produced two daughters but ended in divorce in 1954. That same year he married Nina Bawden; they had one daughter, and he was stepfather to her two sons, one of whom predeceased him.
Dennis Barker
Antonio de Figueiredo writes: I was in close professional contact with Austen Kark during the cold war years, when Bush House was like a mini-United Nations, bypassing the curtains of censorship and dictatorial rule that smothered many countries of the world. At that time, hundreds of foreign refugees, including myself, congregated daily in the canteen, hoping for the day British freedom and democracy, for all its shortcomings, would be extended to our homelands.
Kark had the right combination of cosmopolitan open-mindedness and dedication to British democratic toler ance to ensure that the much admired English-language world service was the model for more than 46 foreign language services that broadcast objective news and comment not available to hundreds of millions of people then deprived of freedom.
Once, when I praised the world service for the role it played on behalf of demo-cratic rights and values, he replied with what struck me as typically English laconic objectivity: "Well, let us try and keep it that way."
Austen Steven Kark, journalist and broadcasting executive, born October 20 1926; died May 10 2002.
This article appeared in the Guardian on Monday May 13 2002 . It was last updated at 00:19 on January 11 2008.
Astrakhan hat
left on the train to Deal when visiting Michael Hill, only a few years ago, and not recovered.
Astrakhan' was originally called As-Tarkhan, which is another name for Ras Tarkhan (meaning "Lord of the Alans", a Scythian tribe.)
Astrakhan' was originally called As-Tarkhan, which is another name for Ras Tarkhan (meaning "Lord of the Alans", a Scythian tribe.)
Surrealist Jonathan Routh has died
Jonathan rang Alan from Jamaica maybe a year or so ago, because a journalist had referred to Alan, in print, as the 'late' theatre critic of the Telegraph.
From The Times June 6, 2008
Jonathan Routh: Candid Camera prankster
Prankster who was one of the leading spirits behind the immensely successful television hoax programme Candid Camera
Jonathan Routh
Jonathan Routh was a supreme practical joker and hoaxer whose star reached its zenith with Candid Camera, the hugely successful Sixties television series in which unsuspecting members of the public were duped into making fools of themselves while filmed with a hidden camera, to the delight of viewers. It was one of the earliest examples of television voyeurism.
Routh was also a primitive artist and an author who led a charmed, eccentric, bohemian life in which, by his own admission, he relied heavily on the kindness of wealthy friends, living in a succession of smart addresses and eating at the best restaurants. “I have never had any money. Never,” he once confessed.
Candid Camera — a concept imported from America and the forerunner of Game for a Laugh and Beadle’s About — was presented by Bob Monkhouse, with the lugubrious, beetle-browed Routh and Arthur Atkins as the pranksters who would spook hapless participants with talking pillar boxes and cars without engines. Jennifer Paterson, who later found success in the cookery show Two Fat Ladies, would sometimes nudge victims into shot while disguised as a cleaner.
A tailor was persuaded to make a suit for a chimpanzee. Tourists were coerced into propping up a “leaning” Nelson’s Column. Once Routh dressed up as a tree, stood at a bus stop and asked: “Does this bus go to Sherwood Forest?” On another occasion, he stuck his head out of a coal hole and told passers-by that he was looking for Baker Street Underground station. It was innocent stuff by today’s standards, but considered frightfully daring at the time.
Related Internet Links
Watch Jonathan Routh on Candid Camera
Among his most celebrated hoaxes was posing as a driving instructor and demonstrating to a nervous woman pupil the proper way to drive. He crashed four times in five minutes. On another occasion he dumbfounded an airline receptionist by removing the wheels of her car, painting the windows and taking out the seats when she called at a garage for two gallons of petrol.
Routh once organised a “silent recital” by “an unknown Hungarian pianist” at the Wigmore Hall. “Tomas Blod” performed “Transmogrifications, Opus 37, by Sandal” in which he sat at the piano and played not a note. Routh thought it “a quiet success”.
On another occasion he posted himself from Sheepwash, Devon, to the offices of the Daily Mail in Fleet Street, claiming that he was too scared to go to London on his own. As “livestock”, parcels had to be accompanied at all times, he was put in a postman’s care for the duration of the journey and delivered for £2. The postman was silent throughout. Routh thought this episode demonstrated the height of English tolerance and good manners.
John Reginald Surdeval Routh was born in 1927 and spent part of his childhood in Palestine where his father was a colonial governor. He was educated at Uppingham School, from which he was expelled for putting up a banner in the chapel which read: “Vote Routh, Communist”, while campaigning in a mock election. He read history at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, revived the moribund Footlights Dramatic Society and edited Granta, one edition of which was described by a chaplain as “the most obscene item I have ever seen in print”. As an indication of things to come, Routh took a group of undergraduates off to “measure” Bletchley for a bypass, and then collected signatures condemning the fake proposal. After 18 months or so he was invited to leave Cambridge.
Finding himself at a loose end, Routh, who by this time had changed his first name to Jonathan, invented Jeremy Feeble, an 18th-century poet whom he contrived to get mentioned in the Times Literary Supplement and on the BBC Third Programme.
His first job was as showbusiness editor of the now-defunct Everybody’s Magazine, which published a piece he filed from India in 1951 while on location with Jean Renoir, who was filming The River. He wrote that shooting had to be suspended when the cast was struck down by “dhoti rash, a virulent infection contracted from low-caste washerwomen”.
This job was followed by a spell as “Candid Mike” on Radio Luxembourg. In one broadcast he conducted a bizarre conversation with a London Transport inspector who had caught him travelling with a grand piano on the Underground.
Candid Camera was launched on an unsuspecting public in 1960 and became an instant success with viewers, who relished the misfortunes of Routh’s hapless victims. In the first programme he pushed an engineless car into a garage and told the mechanic that it had just broken down. The garage man opened the bonnet to find nothing there. Routh played dumb. Utterly bewildered, the mechanic then looked under the car and in the boot before summoning his mates to see if he’d missed something. Eventually, one of them pronounced to general astonishment that, indeed, there was no engine.
From The Times June 6, 2008
Jonathan Routh: Candid Camera prankster
Prankster who was one of the leading spirits behind the immensely successful television hoax programme Candid Camera
Jonathan Routh
Jonathan Routh was a supreme practical joker and hoaxer whose star reached its zenith with Candid Camera, the hugely successful Sixties television series in which unsuspecting members of the public were duped into making fools of themselves while filmed with a hidden camera, to the delight of viewers. It was one of the earliest examples of television voyeurism.
Routh was also a primitive artist and an author who led a charmed, eccentric, bohemian life in which, by his own admission, he relied heavily on the kindness of wealthy friends, living in a succession of smart addresses and eating at the best restaurants. “I have never had any money. Never,” he once confessed.
Candid Camera — a concept imported from America and the forerunner of Game for a Laugh and Beadle’s About — was presented by Bob Monkhouse, with the lugubrious, beetle-browed Routh and Arthur Atkins as the pranksters who would spook hapless participants with talking pillar boxes and cars without engines. Jennifer Paterson, who later found success in the cookery show Two Fat Ladies, would sometimes nudge victims into shot while disguised as a cleaner.
A tailor was persuaded to make a suit for a chimpanzee. Tourists were coerced into propping up a “leaning” Nelson’s Column. Once Routh dressed up as a tree, stood at a bus stop and asked: “Does this bus go to Sherwood Forest?” On another occasion, he stuck his head out of a coal hole and told passers-by that he was looking for Baker Street Underground station. It was innocent stuff by today’s standards, but considered frightfully daring at the time.
Related Internet Links
Watch Jonathan Routh on Candid Camera
Among his most celebrated hoaxes was posing as a driving instructor and demonstrating to a nervous woman pupil the proper way to drive. He crashed four times in five minutes. On another occasion he dumbfounded an airline receptionist by removing the wheels of her car, painting the windows and taking out the seats when she called at a garage for two gallons of petrol.
Routh once organised a “silent recital” by “an unknown Hungarian pianist” at the Wigmore Hall. “Tomas Blod” performed “Transmogrifications, Opus 37, by Sandal” in which he sat at the piano and played not a note. Routh thought it “a quiet success”.
On another occasion he posted himself from Sheepwash, Devon, to the offices of the Daily Mail in Fleet Street, claiming that he was too scared to go to London on his own. As “livestock”, parcels had to be accompanied at all times, he was put in a postman’s care for the duration of the journey and delivered for £2. The postman was silent throughout. Routh thought this episode demonstrated the height of English tolerance and good manners.
John Reginald Surdeval Routh was born in 1927 and spent part of his childhood in Palestine where his father was a colonial governor. He was educated at Uppingham School, from which he was expelled for putting up a banner in the chapel which read: “Vote Routh, Communist”, while campaigning in a mock election. He read history at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, revived the moribund Footlights Dramatic Society and edited Granta, one edition of which was described by a chaplain as “the most obscene item I have ever seen in print”. As an indication of things to come, Routh took a group of undergraduates off to “measure” Bletchley for a bypass, and then collected signatures condemning the fake proposal. After 18 months or so he was invited to leave Cambridge.
Finding himself at a loose end, Routh, who by this time had changed his first name to Jonathan, invented Jeremy Feeble, an 18th-century poet whom he contrived to get mentioned in the Times Literary Supplement and on the BBC Third Programme.
His first job was as showbusiness editor of the now-defunct Everybody’s Magazine, which published a piece he filed from India in 1951 while on location with Jean Renoir, who was filming The River. He wrote that shooting had to be suspended when the cast was struck down by “dhoti rash, a virulent infection contracted from low-caste washerwomen”.
This job was followed by a spell as “Candid Mike” on Radio Luxembourg. In one broadcast he conducted a bizarre conversation with a London Transport inspector who had caught him travelling with a grand piano on the Underground.
Candid Camera was launched on an unsuspecting public in 1960 and became an instant success with viewers, who relished the misfortunes of Routh’s hapless victims. In the first programme he pushed an engineless car into a garage and told the mechanic that it had just broken down. The garage man opened the bonnet to find nothing there. Routh played dumb. Utterly bewildered, the mechanic then looked under the car and in the boot before summoning his mates to see if he’d missed something. Eventually, one of them pronounced to general astonishment that, indeed, there was no engine.
Among those I met....
ADVENTURES OF A LANGUAGE TRAVELLER
An autobiography
JOHN HAYCRAFT
Edited by Michael Woosnam-Mills
Constable • London
1998
Fabled City
Our first speaker was Doctor Joad, reserved as ever except on the platform. We
organised fund-raising dances and a debate between the economist Graham Hutton
and the historian AJP Taylor. I got a lead article on world government into Isis
and a short story I had written in India into Viewpoint magazine. Being published
at Oxford was a triumph. Everyone felt Oxford and Cambridge were cradles for
success, particularly at this time when undergraduates were older, eager to fill
the vacuum left by the war. It was an amazingly élitist group. Among those I met
at Oxford between 1948 and 1951 were Robert Runcie, journalists John Ardagh,
Alan Brien, William Rees-Mogg, Anthony Sampson, Godfrey Smith and Ken
Tynan, politicians Tony Benn, Margaret Thatcher, Jeremy Thorpe and Shirley
Williams, the poet Philip Larkin, novelists Kingsley Amis, Nina Bawden, Sue
Chitty, Thomas Hinde and my cousin Francis King, the critic Martin Seymour-
Smith, John Schlesinger, William Russell, Michael Codron, Alan Cooke, Charles
Hodgson, Michael Croft, Tony Richardson, Peter Parker, Robin Day, Robert
Robinson and Magnus Magnusson. Government grants for those who had done
national service meant there were more non-public-school students. Of 250 Jesus
College undergraduates, only five came from public schools.
It was a fantasy world, perhaps because undergraduates were consciously
making the most of this euphoric period between the circumscriptions of school
and the forces, and the exigencies of a career. One morning Rodney, Rebecca,
Janet and I were walking in the Corn, when Rodney suddenly exclaimed, 'It's as
sunny as a wedding day! Let's get married!' We bought cakes and wine and told
the registration office clerk we wanted to get married at once. I'm sure we would
have gone through with it, but the clerk talked firmly about identity papers and
giving notice. 'It seems unfair people can't get married when they want!'
objected Rodney. The clerk took this seriously and suggested Rodney put it in
writing. We
[p115]
An autobiography
JOHN HAYCRAFT
Edited by Michael Woosnam-Mills
Constable • London
1998
Fabled City
Our first speaker was Doctor Joad, reserved as ever except on the platform. We
organised fund-raising dances and a debate between the economist Graham Hutton
and the historian AJP Taylor. I got a lead article on world government into Isis
and a short story I had written in India into Viewpoint magazine. Being published
at Oxford was a triumph. Everyone felt Oxford and Cambridge were cradles for
success, particularly at this time when undergraduates were older, eager to fill
the vacuum left by the war. It was an amazingly élitist group. Among those I met
at Oxford between 1948 and 1951 were Robert Runcie, journalists John Ardagh,
Alan Brien, William Rees-Mogg, Anthony Sampson, Godfrey Smith and Ken
Tynan, politicians Tony Benn, Margaret Thatcher, Jeremy Thorpe and Shirley
Williams, the poet Philip Larkin, novelists Kingsley Amis, Nina Bawden, Sue
Chitty, Thomas Hinde and my cousin Francis King, the critic Martin Seymour-
Smith, John Schlesinger, William Russell, Michael Codron, Alan Cooke, Charles
Hodgson, Michael Croft, Tony Richardson, Peter Parker, Robin Day, Robert
Robinson and Magnus Magnusson. Government grants for those who had done
national service meant there were more non-public-school students. Of 250 Jesus
College undergraduates, only five came from public schools.
It was a fantasy world, perhaps because undergraduates were consciously
making the most of this euphoric period between the circumscriptions of school
and the forces, and the exigencies of a career. One morning Rodney, Rebecca,
Janet and I were walking in the Corn, when Rodney suddenly exclaimed, 'It's as
sunny as a wedding day! Let's get married!' We bought cakes and wine and told
the registration office clerk we wanted to get married at once. I'm sure we would
have gone through with it, but the clerk talked firmly about identity papers and
giving notice. 'It seems unfair people can't get married when they want!'
objected Rodney. The clerk took this seriously and suggested Rodney put it in
writing. We
[p115]
books on Book 'em
Alan Brien
Lenin the Novel
Corners slightly bumped. DJ has chipping on corners, edges & top & bottom of spine, but cover illustration intact.
William Morrow.
www.bookembooks.com/ap_alan_brien.html
Lenin the Novel
Corners slightly bumped. DJ has chipping on corners, edges & top & bottom of spine, but cover illustration intact.
William Morrow.
www.bookembooks.com/ap_alan_brien.html
In 1965 I suggested to Alan Brien...that he choose for discussion Mailer's first novel for 10 years, The American Dream.
Philip French
Latest blog posts
A life in film
Norman Mailer and me
My 10 favourite summer films
Show all articles
Philip French is the Observer's film critic.
All Philip French articles
About Webfeeds Norman Mailer and me
Over the years the American author had my BBC career on the line more than once
November 21, 2007 10:00 AM
The head of the Third Programme thought Norman Mailer's ideas were half-baked, even mad, but eventually became a fan.
The death of Norman Mailer brings back memories of three odd and related incidents at the BBC. As a newly arrived producer at Broadcasting House in 1961 I proposed that Norman Mailer be invited to discuss his new book Advertisements for Myself for the Third Programme (now Radio Three). It was accepted with a certain reluctance as Mailer, then on bail for the attempted murder of his wife, was out of favour. My chosen interviewer was another maverick social observer, Colin MacInnes - I thought the result splendid and so did they. I called the talk A Cruel Soil for Talent, which was Mailer's description of the prevailing cultural climate in the US, and sent a billing to the Radio Times. Then early one evening the head of the Third, PH Newby, the novelist and first winner of the Booker prize, phoned to say he'd heard the programme, thought Mailer's ideas about God, Satan, politics, existentialism and modern sexuality half-baked, even mad, and he'd withdrawn it from the schedules. When I suggested I wouldn't work for him again if it wasn't broadcast, he took the unprecedented step of arranging a playback for all Third Programme producers who'd then be asked to vote. Around 30 people attended, there was a vote and I won by a fairly decent margin. The programme went out (though it was cut by 10 minutes to show official disapproval) and the press reception was excellent. Newby became a Mailer fan, and I worked at the BBC for another 30 years.
In 1965 I suggested to Alan Brien (theatre critic and Spectator columnist), the then book reviewer on the Home Service's Sunday lunchtime programme, The Critics, that he choose for discussion Mailer's first novel for 10 years, The American Dream. Two days later he told me the producers had dropped the book because it featured anal sex. So he'd resigned and was taking the story to Fleet Street. Some minutes later I had a call from the assistant head of radio publicity to say that, to refute Brien's claim, the BBC was putting out a press release saying The American Dream had been withdrawn from The Critics to avoid duplication with my Third Programme magazine, New Comment. I immediately phoned my boss, the legendary radio pioneer and friend of Ezra Pound, DG Bridson. "Geoffrey," I said, "I've just had a call from a stupid bitch in publicity called Joyce Rowe and they're going to put out a lying statement that will make us all look like fucking idiots." There was a pause. Bridson said: "Joyce Rowe is my wife." In his 1971 memoir Prospero and Ariel, Bridson wrote of this affair: "I was intrigued to find myself pilloried as another Pastor Manders. But though I have no objection to sodomitical practices (among consenting adults) I still think they might have proved unacceptable to the old ladies of Cheltenham if the book had been recommended to them over lunch one Sunday morning."
Three years later, in 1968, the novelist and historian David Caute was invited to review Mailer's Armies of the Night, his book on the anti-war march in Washington, for the Third Programme. In the course of the talk he quoted from another Mailer book, the novel Why Are We In Vietnam?, a long, scatological monologue on the theme of machismo. A couple of days before transmission the head of the talks department saw the script and demanded that the quotation be cut and the talk rerecorded. Caute refused and the talk was withdrawn. The novelist and playwright Julian Mitchell, a friend of Caute's, got up a letter of protest to the Listener, the BBC's prestigious weekly journal (it was closed down in 1989 for reasons of economy) signed by a couple of dozen writers, John Updike and Angus Wilson among them.
The following year I launched a new programme, The Arts This Week, to go out live on the Third Programme every Wednesday evening. My co-producer was Russell Harty and the programme was presented by Bryan Magee, the philosopher, broadcaster and future MP. One of the items for discussion was Why Are We In Vietnam? and the speakers were Eric Mottram, lecturer in American literature at London University, and Julian Mitchell. In retrospect I'm not sure just what we expected, but a few minutes into the discussion, Mitchell said something to the effect that it was impossible to get a sense of the book's tone without quoting from it, and after telling listeners that they had 20 seconds to get over to their radio sets and switch off, he quoted a passage from the book that contained more than half-a-dozen four letter words.
I don't recall how many people phoned in to complain - not many, I think. I do remember that immediately after the programme ended Howard Newby, still head of the Third Programme, called the studio to say how much he'd liked it, and there were a number of calls from people who'd enjoyed it. The following morning the weekly Third Programme talks meeting began with a brief review of the previous seven days' broadcasting. But before the discussion got going, George Camacho, the head of talks and previously the controller of the Light Programme (the future Radios 1 and 2), said to Howard Newby, who was in the chair: "I think we've got something to discuss". "What's that George?" said Newby. "I think you know perfectly well," said Camacho. "We'd banned Caute six months ago, and this is going to make us appear to say the least a little inconsistent." "But George," said Newby, with quiet reasonableness, "'Caute was quoting a book that hadn't yet been published. Last night's discussion was specifically centred on the published book. It's a very different situation."
Such Jesuitical argumentation was very characteristic of the BBC at the time. Camacho's response was what is usually conveyed in print by 'hrummffph', and the meeting went on to other business. In the early 1970s, in an article in the quarterly magazine Encounter on changing tastes and values in broadcasting, Camacho vigorously defended his decision. I had gone into the meeting wondering if my career was on the line again, but The Arts This Week went out live for another 97 editions.
Comments
Latest blog posts
A life in film
Norman Mailer and me
My 10 favourite summer films
Show all articles
Philip French is the Observer's film critic.
All Philip French articles
About Webfeeds Norman Mailer and me
Over the years the American author had my BBC career on the line more than once
November 21, 2007 10:00 AM
The head of the Third Programme thought Norman Mailer's ideas were half-baked, even mad, but eventually became a fan.
The death of Norman Mailer brings back memories of three odd and related incidents at the BBC. As a newly arrived producer at Broadcasting House in 1961 I proposed that Norman Mailer be invited to discuss his new book Advertisements for Myself for the Third Programme (now Radio Three). It was accepted with a certain reluctance as Mailer, then on bail for the attempted murder of his wife, was out of favour. My chosen interviewer was another maverick social observer, Colin MacInnes - I thought the result splendid and so did they. I called the talk A Cruel Soil for Talent, which was Mailer's description of the prevailing cultural climate in the US, and sent a billing to the Radio Times. Then early one evening the head of the Third, PH Newby, the novelist and first winner of the Booker prize, phoned to say he'd heard the programme, thought Mailer's ideas about God, Satan, politics, existentialism and modern sexuality half-baked, even mad, and he'd withdrawn it from the schedules. When I suggested I wouldn't work for him again if it wasn't broadcast, he took the unprecedented step of arranging a playback for all Third Programme producers who'd then be asked to vote. Around 30 people attended, there was a vote and I won by a fairly decent margin. The programme went out (though it was cut by 10 minutes to show official disapproval) and the press reception was excellent. Newby became a Mailer fan, and I worked at the BBC for another 30 years.
In 1965 I suggested to Alan Brien (theatre critic and Spectator columnist), the then book reviewer on the Home Service's Sunday lunchtime programme, The Critics, that he choose for discussion Mailer's first novel for 10 years, The American Dream. Two days later he told me the producers had dropped the book because it featured anal sex. So he'd resigned and was taking the story to Fleet Street. Some minutes later I had a call from the assistant head of radio publicity to say that, to refute Brien's claim, the BBC was putting out a press release saying The American Dream had been withdrawn from The Critics to avoid duplication with my Third Programme magazine, New Comment. I immediately phoned my boss, the legendary radio pioneer and friend of Ezra Pound, DG Bridson. "Geoffrey," I said, "I've just had a call from a stupid bitch in publicity called Joyce Rowe and they're going to put out a lying statement that will make us all look like fucking idiots." There was a pause. Bridson said: "Joyce Rowe is my wife." In his 1971 memoir Prospero and Ariel, Bridson wrote of this affair: "I was intrigued to find myself pilloried as another Pastor Manders. But though I have no objection to sodomitical practices (among consenting adults) I still think they might have proved unacceptable to the old ladies of Cheltenham if the book had been recommended to them over lunch one Sunday morning."
Three years later, in 1968, the novelist and historian David Caute was invited to review Mailer's Armies of the Night, his book on the anti-war march in Washington, for the Third Programme. In the course of the talk he quoted from another Mailer book, the novel Why Are We In Vietnam?, a long, scatological monologue on the theme of machismo. A couple of days before transmission the head of the talks department saw the script and demanded that the quotation be cut and the talk rerecorded. Caute refused and the talk was withdrawn. The novelist and playwright Julian Mitchell, a friend of Caute's, got up a letter of protest to the Listener, the BBC's prestigious weekly journal (it was closed down in 1989 for reasons of economy) signed by a couple of dozen writers, John Updike and Angus Wilson among them.
The following year I launched a new programme, The Arts This Week, to go out live on the Third Programme every Wednesday evening. My co-producer was Russell Harty and the programme was presented by Bryan Magee, the philosopher, broadcaster and future MP. One of the items for discussion was Why Are We In Vietnam? and the speakers were Eric Mottram, lecturer in American literature at London University, and Julian Mitchell. In retrospect I'm not sure just what we expected, but a few minutes into the discussion, Mitchell said something to the effect that it was impossible to get a sense of the book's tone without quoting from it, and after telling listeners that they had 20 seconds to get over to their radio sets and switch off, he quoted a passage from the book that contained more than half-a-dozen four letter words.
I don't recall how many people phoned in to complain - not many, I think. I do remember that immediately after the programme ended Howard Newby, still head of the Third Programme, called the studio to say how much he'd liked it, and there were a number of calls from people who'd enjoyed it. The following morning the weekly Third Programme talks meeting began with a brief review of the previous seven days' broadcasting. But before the discussion got going, George Camacho, the head of talks and previously the controller of the Light Programme (the future Radios 1 and 2), said to Howard Newby, who was in the chair: "I think we've got something to discuss". "What's that George?" said Newby. "I think you know perfectly well," said Camacho. "We'd banned Caute six months ago, and this is going to make us appear to say the least a little inconsistent." "But George," said Newby, with quiet reasonableness, "'Caute was quoting a book that hadn't yet been published. Last night's discussion was specifically centred on the published book. It's a very different situation."
Such Jesuitical argumentation was very characteristic of the BBC at the time. Camacho's response was what is usually conveyed in print by 'hrummffph', and the meeting went on to other business. In the early 1970s, in an article in the quarterly magazine Encounter on changing tastes and values in broadcasting, Camacho vigorously defended his decision. I had gone into the meeting wondering if my career was on the line again, but The Arts This Week went out live for another 97 editions.
Comments
Selective Memory...her column on the Spectator because she bumped into one of its stalwarts, Alan Brien, at a party.
The original Bridget Jones
Joan Bakewell revels in Selective Memory, a delightfully self-effacing memoir from frontline feminist Katharine Whitehorn
Joan Bakewell
Saturday October 6, 2007
Guardian
Selective Memory
by Katharine Whitehorn
320pp, Virago, £18.99
It is the aspirin in the suspender I recall most vividly. Along with black ink to disguise laddered stockings, it featured as a slut's remedy in a landmark 1963 Observer article in which Katharine Whitehorn led the charge for women journalists to write as themselves rather than as pale shadows of the men who dominated the field. And here she is setting out how that battle was fought and well-nigh won, long before the shock troops of Germaine Greer and co came surging up with their heavy reinforcements. In her autobiography, her light wit is as delightful as ever, her honesty as unflinching.
Katharine Whitehorn was no "child of the 60s", and that giddy, glamorous era overshadows the decade that went before it, which is often characterised as grim and monotonous. It was no such thing. Rather, it was full of the excitement of positive change. "We had the heady sense that everything was getting better," recalls Whitehorn of the 1950s, and she was where the fun was to be had - in the journalism of the time. She arrived full of confidence and good sense, from an enlightened, left-leaning background. Father was a housemaster at Mill Hill School, later at Marlborough, mother came from a family of Christian socialists, and there was a grandfather who was a founder of both the Peace Pledge Union and the Marriage Guidance Council. She would go on to marry a Quaker novelist and send her sons to Westminster School. Good middle-class professionals all.
But her childhood had not been easy: father dubbed her "pudding", she was bullied at school and ran away from Roedean, showing spirit in the face of rigid and unfeeling treatment. Her self-reliance was remarkable at a time when women were mostly being schooled for home and children. She hitchhiked alone for two months around Europe, took a British Council job in Finland, and drove across America with one of a series of smitten boyfriends. She makes it all sound languidly easy, but only someone of her determination and staying power could have done so much. She would eventually be one of the first and most distinguished of women columnists, writing for the Observer for 30 years.
Her first job was on Home Notes, a trite little publication where she subbed real-life love stories. But it put her into the swim of Fleet Street activity and friendships. Picture Post's legendary photographer Bert Hardy used her as a model for a feature called "Lonely in London", sitting before a gas fire surrounded by milk bottles and drying laundry. The photograph found its way into the Hulton library and was used everywhere. It also got her a job as a cub reporter on Picture Post, where she went out an assignments with photographers, honing her skills writing their captions.
As she tells it, the opportunities came out of sheer luck: Home Notes because she just happened to be in the office when the job came up; covering the Paris fashion collections for Picture Post because an editor had run off with the only other girl on the paper; her column on the Spectator because she bumped into one of its stalwarts, Alan Brien, at a party. It all sounds a bit too light-hearted and Bridget Jones. The record speaks for something more resolute: a lifetime's dedication to a craft of which she became master - the sly, informative, witty and important personal column.
An agenda soon emerged. Her first column for the Observer was about Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, one of the ur-texts of 1960s feminism. "I think my feminism must have been of a pre-war kind," she explains, as she praises a string of strong single women, while acknowledging that at the same time her desire to find the right man for herself. Cooking in a Bedsitter was her practical contribution to women's freedom. She wrote it in three-and-a-half months and it stayed in print for 40 years, sitting not only on my shelf but on Delia Smith's too. This was a time when there were few fridges and no supermarkets, when single girls lived with two gas rings and a saucepan, and 38% of women cooked (cooked!) three meals a day. A series of mini-books followed: How to Survive in Hospital ... in the Kitchen ... Children ... Money Problems. In her mature years she was, not surprisingly, asked to sit on company boards and became rector of the University of St Andrews, while supporting the International Women's Forum. Now, in her 70s, she is Saga magazine's agony aunt.
But Selective Memory is her personal story, too. She did marry the right man, and lived with and loved him for 45 years. Gavin Lyall was a thriller writer, who in later years battled alcoholism. She talks of it with her usual robust good humour, but the pain shows through. It's good that in writing this book she conjures up again their many happy days together, not least on their boat on the Thames, and she talks of her widowhood with a gentle melancholy. Those who knew and loved her columns will enjoy her company all over again, and newcomers will learn of a stalwart, serious feminism that predates the 1960s.
· Joan Bakewell's The View from Here: Life at Seventy is published by Guardian Books
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
Joan Bakewell revels in Selective Memory, a delightfully self-effacing memoir from frontline feminist Katharine Whitehorn
Joan Bakewell
Saturday October 6, 2007
Guardian
Selective Memory
by Katharine Whitehorn
320pp, Virago, £18.99
It is the aspirin in the suspender I recall most vividly. Along with black ink to disguise laddered stockings, it featured as a slut's remedy in a landmark 1963 Observer article in which Katharine Whitehorn led the charge for women journalists to write as themselves rather than as pale shadows of the men who dominated the field. And here she is setting out how that battle was fought and well-nigh won, long before the shock troops of Germaine Greer and co came surging up with their heavy reinforcements. In her autobiography, her light wit is as delightful as ever, her honesty as unflinching.
Katharine Whitehorn was no "child of the 60s", and that giddy, glamorous era overshadows the decade that went before it, which is often characterised as grim and monotonous. It was no such thing. Rather, it was full of the excitement of positive change. "We had the heady sense that everything was getting better," recalls Whitehorn of the 1950s, and she was where the fun was to be had - in the journalism of the time. She arrived full of confidence and good sense, from an enlightened, left-leaning background. Father was a housemaster at Mill Hill School, later at Marlborough, mother came from a family of Christian socialists, and there was a grandfather who was a founder of both the Peace Pledge Union and the Marriage Guidance Council. She would go on to marry a Quaker novelist and send her sons to Westminster School. Good middle-class professionals all.
But her childhood had not been easy: father dubbed her "pudding", she was bullied at school and ran away from Roedean, showing spirit in the face of rigid and unfeeling treatment. Her self-reliance was remarkable at a time when women were mostly being schooled for home and children. She hitchhiked alone for two months around Europe, took a British Council job in Finland, and drove across America with one of a series of smitten boyfriends. She makes it all sound languidly easy, but only someone of her determination and staying power could have done so much. She would eventually be one of the first and most distinguished of women columnists, writing for the Observer for 30 years.
Her first job was on Home Notes, a trite little publication where she subbed real-life love stories. But it put her into the swim of Fleet Street activity and friendships. Picture Post's legendary photographer Bert Hardy used her as a model for a feature called "Lonely in London", sitting before a gas fire surrounded by milk bottles and drying laundry. The photograph found its way into the Hulton library and was used everywhere. It also got her a job as a cub reporter on Picture Post, where she went out an assignments with photographers, honing her skills writing their captions.
As she tells it, the opportunities came out of sheer luck: Home Notes because she just happened to be in the office when the job came up; covering the Paris fashion collections for Picture Post because an editor had run off with the only other girl on the paper; her column on the Spectator because she bumped into one of its stalwarts, Alan Brien, at a party. It all sounds a bit too light-hearted and Bridget Jones. The record speaks for something more resolute: a lifetime's dedication to a craft of which she became master - the sly, informative, witty and important personal column.
An agenda soon emerged. Her first column for the Observer was about Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, one of the ur-texts of 1960s feminism. "I think my feminism must have been of a pre-war kind," she explains, as she praises a string of strong single women, while acknowledging that at the same time her desire to find the right man for herself. Cooking in a Bedsitter was her practical contribution to women's freedom. She wrote it in three-and-a-half months and it stayed in print for 40 years, sitting not only on my shelf but on Delia Smith's too. This was a time when there were few fridges and no supermarkets, when single girls lived with two gas rings and a saucepan, and 38% of women cooked (cooked!) three meals a day. A series of mini-books followed: How to Survive in Hospital ... in the Kitchen ... Children ... Money Problems. In her mature years she was, not surprisingly, asked to sit on company boards and became rector of the University of St Andrews, while supporting the International Women's Forum. Now, in her 70s, she is Saga magazine's agony aunt.
But Selective Memory is her personal story, too. She did marry the right man, and lived with and loved him for 45 years. Gavin Lyall was a thriller writer, who in later years battled alcoholism. She talks of it with her usual robust good humour, but the pain shows through. It's good that in writing this book she conjures up again their many happy days together, not least on their boat on the Thames, and she talks of her widowhood with a gentle melancholy. Those who knew and loved her columns will enjoy her company all over again, and newcomers will learn of a stalwart, serious feminism that predates the 1960s.
· Joan Bakewell's The View from Here: Life at Seventy is published by Guardian Books
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
Mr Partridge … completely omits from his index “spirit” as a euphemism for “semen”. The twelve volume Oxford English Dictionary also fails to include
Sexual Symbolism, Religious Language, and the Ambiguity of the Spirit: Associative Themes in Anglican Poetry and Philosophy.
Abstract by Ralph Norman (Canterbury University)quoting from a piece Alan wrote in The Spectator, 17th April, 1964 - a review of Patridge's SHAKESPEARE'S BAWDY. (grateful thanks to Ralph Norman for providing a pre-editorial draft-version of his article.)
Unfortunately, one euphemism Partridge should have included with these is missing from the original list as published in the first (1947) and second (1955) editions of Shakespeare’s Bawdy. These early editions of Partridge’s book drew the following critical remarks from Alan Brien in The Spectator on the 17th April, 1964, pointing out the missing medical – and theological – euphemism:
Mr Partridge … completely omits from his index “spirit” as a euphemism for “semen”. The twelve volume Oxford English Dictionary also fails to include the meaning. Yet the evidence for claiming that it carried this extra sense in Elizabethan times (compare “spunk” today) is undeniable … I see that Leslie Fiedler, in a volume published in 1962, makes the same point. This gives edge and bite to the famous “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action”, especially if “waste” can also be read as “waist”.
And I have a clinching quotation to help Mr Fiedler along – in Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum (1627), he writes, “It hath been observed by the ancients that much use of Venus doth dim the sight … The cause of dimness of sight is the expense of spirits.”
The reference to Shakespeare – ‘Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ – is, of course, to Sonnet 129, ll. 1-2; the reference to the critical scholarship – to Fiedler and his remarks on dirty puns and double entendre – is to The Riddle of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. To put his omission right, Partridge included an extract from Brien’s article – spelling Fiedler’s name (alas!) incorrectly – in the subsequent, third (1968) edition of his book. But in the quoted article from The Spectator, Brien had neglected to state that, before Fiedler, Patrick Cruttwell had already noted the connection of ‘spirit’ and ‘sperm’.
Abstract by Ralph Norman (Canterbury University)quoting from a piece Alan wrote in The Spectator, 17th April, 1964 - a review of Patridge's SHAKESPEARE'S BAWDY. (grateful thanks to Ralph Norman for providing a pre-editorial draft-version of his article.)
Unfortunately, one euphemism Partridge should have included with these is missing from the original list as published in the first (1947) and second (1955) editions of Shakespeare’s Bawdy. These early editions of Partridge’s book drew the following critical remarks from Alan Brien in The Spectator on the 17th April, 1964, pointing out the missing medical – and theological – euphemism:
Mr Partridge … completely omits from his index “spirit” as a euphemism for “semen”. The twelve volume Oxford English Dictionary also fails to include the meaning. Yet the evidence for claiming that it carried this extra sense in Elizabethan times (compare “spunk” today) is undeniable … I see that Leslie Fiedler, in a volume published in 1962, makes the same point. This gives edge and bite to the famous “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action”, especially if “waste” can also be read as “waist”.
And I have a clinching quotation to help Mr Fiedler along – in Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum (1627), he writes, “It hath been observed by the ancients that much use of Venus doth dim the sight … The cause of dimness of sight is the expense of spirits.”
The reference to Shakespeare – ‘Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ – is, of course, to Sonnet 129, ll. 1-2; the reference to the critical scholarship – to Fiedler and his remarks on dirty puns and double entendre – is to The Riddle of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. To put his omission right, Partridge included an extract from Brien’s article – spelling Fiedler’s name (alas!) incorrectly – in the subsequent, third (1968) edition of his book. But in the quoted article from The Spectator, Brien had neglected to state that, before Fiedler, Patrick Cruttwell had already noted the connection of ‘spirit’ and ‘sperm’.
Lord Beaverbrook
Evelyn Waugh remarked of Beaverbrook, “Of course, I believe in the
Devil. How otherwise would I account for the existence of Lord Beaverbrook?”
Alan Brien, The Proprietor, in THE BEAVERBROOK I KNEW 178, 186
(Logan Gourlay ed., 1984).
Devil. How otherwise would I account for the existence of Lord Beaverbrook?”
Alan Brien, The Proprietor, in THE BEAVERBROOK I KNEW 178, 186
(Logan Gourlay ed., 1984).
Reprinted in The Gargoyle 2007
Born in 1925, Alan Brien is a novelist,
journalist and critic of distinction. Serving as
an air-gunner in the RAF in the War, he
enjoyed a long and successful career in Fleet
Street, writing variously for the Daily Mail,
the Sunday Dispatch, Sunday Pictorial,
Sunday Telegraph, Spectator, New Statesman,
Sunday Times, Evening Standard, Punch, as
well as being a regular broadcaster on radio
and television. In 1987, his novel on Lenin
was published. Now retired, Alan lives in
North London.
Bless My Soul
by Alan Brien
(“Sacred Cows”, Sunday Times Magazine, 3rd April 1977)
If there is any creature I find less
sympathetic than a sacred cow, it is the
sacred cowherd. And this, it seems to me, is
Malcolm Muggeridge’s true role.
Our sacred cows in the West, like living
goddesses of Nepal, are quite often more to be
pitied than resented. It can be very lonely, rather
tiring and frustrating, above all, being above all,
not much fun up there on the pedestal. Yon are
never allowed to be fallible, gullible, irritable or
wrong. But the cowherd, working on his
percentage, can always plead that he is only
human. He is just the front man for a mystery that
cannot be approached direct. So every guru has
his chila, every champ his manager, every star his
agent, every freak his barker, every gangster his
mouthpiece and the perennial aim of the power
behind the throne is to outlast the power behind
the throne. Our hero, MM, has survived in the
same way by herding many a sacred beast to the
sacrifice without singeing even much more than
his own eyebrows.
The voice is the voice of Malcolm, the
mug is the mug of the Mugg, but the message
must always be the message of the Lord. Now it is
the Lord God, but it has been the Lord Camrose,
also General-Secretary Joseph Stalin, also the
Manchester Guardian, also Mr Punch, also the
BBC. Malcolm Muggeridge is a cowherd for all
seasons – he must never be blamed personally for
where his sacred cow of the decade leaves its
sacred cow pats.
There is no problem charting
Muggeridge’s succession of causes. Indeed, he
has documented the primrose path in his own
volumes of autobiography. He likes to identify his
own part in life’s soap opera as increasingly that
of “a displaced person”. I would substitute instead
“a born defector”, or perhaps “the natural doubleagent”.
The difference is not always easy to detect
as Muggeridge, who also occasionally likes to
present himself as a sometime secret-service man,
has good reason to know.
The pattern, as I see it, is of an eloquent
advocate – a word spinner and jest-juggler
without peer among advertising copywriters –
who too easily becomes imprinted by the allembracing
gospel he is asked to preach, then
equally suddenly rejects the imprint, only to
emboss upon his psyche another monolithic creed.
After each failure the revulsion is dramatic,
permanent, possibly near hysterical.
For example, as a young man he wrote
leaders for the Manchester Guardian, full of
simple faith in progress, the classic doctrine of
liberalism. Even 40 years later he is still
denouncing that innocent idealism in terms of
manic hyperbole: “Liberalism [he wrote in 1965]
will be seen as the great destructive force of our
time: much more so than Communism, Fascism,
Nazism or any other lunatic creeds .... Compared
to the long-term consequences of Gilbert Murray,
Bertrand Russell and Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt,
Hitler was an ineffective dreamer, Stalin a Father
Christmas and Mussolini an Arcadian shepherd.”
He went to Moscow in the mid-1930’s,
anticipating the foundation of Utopia, and
prepared to sell up and settle there forever.
Disillusioned, he has never ceased denouncing
everyone on the Left, even those who never
shared his naive expectations, as dupes of the
Kremlin. After the war he wrote leaders for the
Telegraph as assistant editor, and it is the Tory
leaders he supported then he now places in the
pillory. He came to fame as a combative, critical
Editor of Punch – a magazine he has since rarely
missed an opportunity of denigrating. And he
finally established himself as a household image
on television, with his knobkerrie face and that
strangulated voice which, next to Edward Heath’s,
must be the most extraordinary and artificial of
any public man. Yet his favourite topic is a
denunciation of TV as a medium fit only for
hucksters and charlatans, guaranteed to process
reality into trivia.
For an intellectual of his repute, many of
his essays are curiously ill-informed, selfcontradictory
or just plain silly, better fitted for
the Sunday Express than the Guardian or the
Statesman, or even the Telegraph, despite a
surface glitter of sequinned rhetoric. The
quotation on liberalism is one standing for many.
Muggeridge on contraception and abortion, with
he loathes with a virulence which seems barely
rational, will seize any stick, however feeble and
rotten.
________________________________________________________________________________
journalist and critic of distinction. Serving as
an air-gunner in the RAF in the War, he
enjoyed a long and successful career in Fleet
Street, writing variously for the Daily Mail,
the Sunday Dispatch, Sunday Pictorial,
Sunday Telegraph, Spectator, New Statesman,
Sunday Times, Evening Standard, Punch, as
well as being a regular broadcaster on radio
and television. In 1987, his novel on Lenin
was published. Now retired, Alan lives in
North London.
Bless My Soul
by Alan Brien
(“Sacred Cows”, Sunday Times Magazine, 3rd April 1977)
If there is any creature I find less
sympathetic than a sacred cow, it is the
sacred cowherd. And this, it seems to me, is
Malcolm Muggeridge’s true role.
Our sacred cows in the West, like living
goddesses of Nepal, are quite often more to be
pitied than resented. It can be very lonely, rather
tiring and frustrating, above all, being above all,
not much fun up there on the pedestal. Yon are
never allowed to be fallible, gullible, irritable or
wrong. But the cowherd, working on his
percentage, can always plead that he is only
human. He is just the front man for a mystery that
cannot be approached direct. So every guru has
his chila, every champ his manager, every star his
agent, every freak his barker, every gangster his
mouthpiece and the perennial aim of the power
behind the throne is to outlast the power behind
the throne. Our hero, MM, has survived in the
same way by herding many a sacred beast to the
sacrifice without singeing even much more than
his own eyebrows.
The voice is the voice of Malcolm, the
mug is the mug of the Mugg, but the message
must always be the message of the Lord. Now it is
the Lord God, but it has been the Lord Camrose,
also General-Secretary Joseph Stalin, also the
Manchester Guardian, also Mr Punch, also the
BBC. Malcolm Muggeridge is a cowherd for all
seasons – he must never be blamed personally for
where his sacred cow of the decade leaves its
sacred cow pats.
There is no problem charting
Muggeridge’s succession of causes. Indeed, he
has documented the primrose path in his own
volumes of autobiography. He likes to identify his
own part in life’s soap opera as increasingly that
of “a displaced person”. I would substitute instead
“a born defector”, or perhaps “the natural doubleagent”.
The difference is not always easy to detect
as Muggeridge, who also occasionally likes to
present himself as a sometime secret-service man,
has good reason to know.
The pattern, as I see it, is of an eloquent
advocate – a word spinner and jest-juggler
without peer among advertising copywriters –
who too easily becomes imprinted by the allembracing
gospel he is asked to preach, then
equally suddenly rejects the imprint, only to
emboss upon his psyche another monolithic creed.
After each failure the revulsion is dramatic,
permanent, possibly near hysterical.
For example, as a young man he wrote
leaders for the Manchester Guardian, full of
simple faith in progress, the classic doctrine of
liberalism. Even 40 years later he is still
denouncing that innocent idealism in terms of
manic hyperbole: “Liberalism [he wrote in 1965]
will be seen as the great destructive force of our
time: much more so than Communism, Fascism,
Nazism or any other lunatic creeds .... Compared
to the long-term consequences of Gilbert Murray,
Bertrand Russell and Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt,
Hitler was an ineffective dreamer, Stalin a Father
Christmas and Mussolini an Arcadian shepherd.”
He went to Moscow in the mid-1930’s,
anticipating the foundation of Utopia, and
prepared to sell up and settle there forever.
Disillusioned, he has never ceased denouncing
everyone on the Left, even those who never
shared his naive expectations, as dupes of the
Kremlin. After the war he wrote leaders for the
Telegraph as assistant editor, and it is the Tory
leaders he supported then he now places in the
pillory. He came to fame as a combative, critical
Editor of Punch – a magazine he has since rarely
missed an opportunity of denigrating. And he
finally established himself as a household image
on television, with his knobkerrie face and that
strangulated voice which, next to Edward Heath’s,
must be the most extraordinary and artificial of
any public man. Yet his favourite topic is a
denunciation of TV as a medium fit only for
hucksters and charlatans, guaranteed to process
reality into trivia.
For an intellectual of his repute, many of
his essays are curiously ill-informed, selfcontradictory
or just plain silly, better fitted for
the Sunday Express than the Guardian or the
Statesman, or even the Telegraph, despite a
surface glitter of sequinned rhetoric. The
quotation on liberalism is one standing for many.
Muggeridge on contraception and abortion, with
he loathes with a virulence which seems barely
rational, will seize any stick, however feeble and
rotten.
________________________________________________________________________________
'Narcissus revisited' grooming by Alan Brien
Alan was fitted for a suit in Savile Row in the Sixties (the date appears inside the jacket)which he was still wearing fifty years on, the last time was at Becky's wedding.
Men in Vogue
Condé Nast. November 1965-1970?
Associate editors were Robert Harling and Beatrix Miller of this fashion and lifestyle men's magazine. The cover of the first issue showed actor Edward Fox in a fur coat photographed by Norman Parkinson. It had 126 pages plus cover. Size: 12.25" x 9.125" (31cm x 23cm). It lasted at least until the winter of 1969.
Condé Nast drew back from launching Men in Vogue as an autonomous publication again in 1985, when Cosmopolitan, Elle and Harpers & Queen all had dedicated sections for men. It was not until 2005 that Men's Vogue appeared.
Contents of the first issue of Men in Vogue in 1965:
'A reference for Mellors': author Anthony Powell considered what happened to Lady Chatterley and her lover
extract from jazz man George Melly's biography, Owning Up
'The Englishman: the best dressed man in the world?' Featured James Astor, Cecil Beaton, Brinsley Black, Gay Kindersley, Nigel Lawson (BBC economics adviser and FT columnist), Jocelyn Stevens (editor-in-chief of Queen), Sir Fitzroy Maclean (a Scot), Christopher Gibbs, Lord Gormanston, Julian Ormsby-Gore
'The heroes of St Moritz': Tony Nash and Robin Dixon had won the world bobsleigh championship. Photographs by Terence Donovan
'The most Bailey girls in the world.' David Bailey on women he finds 'different, mysterious and interesting': Catherine Deneuve (his wife); Jean Shrimpton; Monica Vitti; Francoise Dorleac; Jeanne Moreau; Sue Murray
'Men and their cars': racing driver Jim Clark in a Lotus Elan; photographer Terence Donovan in a Silver Cloud II; Mark Boxer, editorial director of London Life, in a Rover 2000; Kevin Powell, Granada traines (Mini Moke); Peter Sheridan (Invicta 1930); Lord Snowdon (Mini and Aston Martin DB5);
'But you can get a girl with a gun' by Antonia Fraser
special report on winter clothes (cover feature). The models were all actors: Corin Redgrave, Edward Fox and Gilles Milinaire
'Ski and after'
Paris
'Narcissus revisited' grooming by Alan Brien
'What is travelling?': adventure, sport, business and travelling's sake
Christopher Gibbs' shopping guide to London
fashion award for 1965: worst-dressed man award for prime minister Harold Wilson
Men in Vogue
Condé Nast. November 1965-1970?
Associate editors were Robert Harling and Beatrix Miller of this fashion and lifestyle men's magazine. The cover of the first issue showed actor Edward Fox in a fur coat photographed by Norman Parkinson. It had 126 pages plus cover. Size: 12.25" x 9.125" (31cm x 23cm). It lasted at least until the winter of 1969.
Condé Nast drew back from launching Men in Vogue as an autonomous publication again in 1985, when Cosmopolitan, Elle and Harpers & Queen all had dedicated sections for men. It was not until 2005 that Men's Vogue appeared.
Contents of the first issue of Men in Vogue in 1965:
'A reference for Mellors': author Anthony Powell considered what happened to Lady Chatterley and her lover
extract from jazz man George Melly's biography, Owning Up
'The Englishman: the best dressed man in the world?' Featured James Astor, Cecil Beaton, Brinsley Black, Gay Kindersley, Nigel Lawson (BBC economics adviser and FT columnist), Jocelyn Stevens (editor-in-chief of Queen), Sir Fitzroy Maclean (a Scot), Christopher Gibbs, Lord Gormanston, Julian Ormsby-Gore
'The heroes of St Moritz': Tony Nash and Robin Dixon had won the world bobsleigh championship. Photographs by Terence Donovan
'The most Bailey girls in the world.' David Bailey on women he finds 'different, mysterious and interesting': Catherine Deneuve (his wife); Jean Shrimpton; Monica Vitti; Francoise Dorleac; Jeanne Moreau; Sue Murray
'Men and their cars': racing driver Jim Clark in a Lotus Elan; photographer Terence Donovan in a Silver Cloud II; Mark Boxer, editorial director of London Life, in a Rover 2000; Kevin Powell, Granada traines (Mini Moke); Peter Sheridan (Invicta 1930); Lord Snowdon (Mini and Aston Martin DB5);
'But you can get a girl with a gun' by Antonia Fraser
special report on winter clothes (cover feature). The models were all actors: Corin Redgrave, Edward Fox and Gilles Milinaire
'Ski and after'
Paris
'Narcissus revisited' grooming by Alan Brien
'What is travelling?': adventure, sport, business and travelling's sake
Christopher Gibbs' shopping guide to London
fashion award for 1965: worst-dressed man award for prime minister Harold Wilson
Bryn Mawr Classical Review 03.05.24
Alan's second novel, working title, 'And When Rome Falls', was based on reading around the life of Cicero and commissioned by David Godwin when an Editor at Jonathan Cape. It was very close to completion.
Alan was a member of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies.
Bryn Mawr Classical Review 03.05.24
Letter: More New Books with Ancient Settings
For some previous titles, cf. BMCR 3.4 (1992), 338. The most gorgeous new item is Roman Nights (St Martin's Press, NY, 1991), a novel by one Ron Burns, billed in the blurb as a UPI editor, Philadelphia Bulletin columnist, Los Angeles Herald Examiner crime reporter, and (now) novelist. His story is set between the last days of Marcus Aurelius and the murders of Commodus, then Pertinax. The protagonist functioning as privatus dickus is Livinius Severus, a minor noble, lawyer, and Stoic. His job is to solve a series of gruesome murders of Stoics, a nice thought (the murders, that is, not the solving). Lucan and Thrasea turn up as Stoics. So do characters with odd names, e.g., Cinna Catalus (sic). Most deliciously for devotees of the Petronian question, so do Trimalchio (as mine host, with some pastiche and filchings from the Cena) and 'his whore' Fortunata, with whom our hero has some jolly times, including one night of five couplings -- penile servitude, indeed! There is much quoting of Marcus Aurelius' 'just published' Meditations, and at one stage 8 rolls of papyrus are found containing Juvenal's Satires, with copious 'dirty' quotation from the sixth.
In France, Pierre Grimal has just brought out Les Memoires d'Agrippine (de Fallois, Paris, 1992), a fictional recreation of one of the most regrettably lost ancient documents of them all, the Memoirs of Nero's mum, whose doings would eclipse those of Fergie and Diana. So far, I've only seen the review in Le Canard Enchaine (5/8/92), but it sounds yummy. Incidentally, anyone visiting England in the near future might still be able to see a rare performance of Handel's early (1709) opera, Agrippina, with American soprana Susan Roberts in the title role -- one reviewer compared her to Bette Davis.
Falco is back, in Lindsey Davis' The Iron Hand of Mars (Hutchinson, London, 1992: I imagine there is an American edition), this time sleuthing in Germany, sent by Vespasian to look into the fates of Civilis and the XIVth Legion, with flashbacks to the hapless Quintilius Varus. Women play a big role in this new adventure.
Those more attracted to Greek settings may like A Choice of Murder (Owen, London, 1992) by Peter Vansittart, a reworking of Plutarch's account of Timoleon, suitably embellished to make a proper novel.
A mammoth new novel on Augustus is scheduled to appear later this year by Alan Brien. This author is a British journalist and humorist who (I suspect) may not be well known in North America, but Calgary libraries (not likely to be unique in this) contain his earlier titan, a novel about Lenin.
I've saved the bad news until last. The ineffable Colleen McCullough has recently inflicted volume two (The Grass Crown) of her threatened multi-volume saga on the late Republic on to a suffering world. I did my best to kill the thing off while reviewing the inaugural The First Man in Rome in The World & I (March, 1991), 406-12, but who am I to repel this march of Thornbirds in Togas?
Barry Baldwin University of Calgary
Ed.'s note:
As I read this letter, it seemed to me that we got to the bad news pretty early on. Would it be fair to ask whether any of these exercises do more than use Roman costumes to provide cheap thrills, with lashings (painfully evident in this account) of sexism? This series started because I called attention to Saylor's Roman Blood, which seemed to me both a decent murder mystery and a serious attempt to do justice to Cicero's Pro Sexto Roscio Amerino, and though it is a light enough sort of book, I still think it has merit. (Saylor has a new one in the bookstores called Arms of Nemesis, with a Spartacan theme but less closely tied, it would appear, to any specific text, but I've not yet had time to look at it.) Rather like the south central LA murder mysteries of Walter Mosley, who puts a lot of social history between the lines, or the early Tony Hillermans, while he still had fresh things to say about the Navajo.
JO'D 26 September 1992
Alan was a member of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies.
Bryn Mawr Classical Review 03.05.24
Letter: More New Books with Ancient Settings
For some previous titles, cf. BMCR 3.4 (1992), 338. The most gorgeous new item is Roman Nights (St Martin's Press, NY, 1991), a novel by one Ron Burns, billed in the blurb as a UPI editor, Philadelphia Bulletin columnist, Los Angeles Herald Examiner crime reporter, and (now) novelist. His story is set between the last days of Marcus Aurelius and the murders of Commodus, then Pertinax. The protagonist functioning as privatus dickus is Livinius Severus, a minor noble, lawyer, and Stoic. His job is to solve a series of gruesome murders of Stoics, a nice thought (the murders, that is, not the solving). Lucan and Thrasea turn up as Stoics. So do characters with odd names, e.g., Cinna Catalus (sic). Most deliciously for devotees of the Petronian question, so do Trimalchio (as mine host, with some pastiche and filchings from the Cena) and 'his whore' Fortunata, with whom our hero has some jolly times, including one night of five couplings -- penile servitude, indeed! There is much quoting of Marcus Aurelius' 'just published' Meditations, and at one stage 8 rolls of papyrus are found containing Juvenal's Satires, with copious 'dirty' quotation from the sixth.
In France, Pierre Grimal has just brought out Les Memoires d'Agrippine (de Fallois, Paris, 1992), a fictional recreation of one of the most regrettably lost ancient documents of them all, the Memoirs of Nero's mum, whose doings would eclipse those of Fergie and Diana. So far, I've only seen the review in Le Canard Enchaine (5/8/92), but it sounds yummy. Incidentally, anyone visiting England in the near future might still be able to see a rare performance of Handel's early (1709) opera, Agrippina, with American soprana Susan Roberts in the title role -- one reviewer compared her to Bette Davis.
Falco is back, in Lindsey Davis' The Iron Hand of Mars (Hutchinson, London, 1992: I imagine there is an American edition), this time sleuthing in Germany, sent by Vespasian to look into the fates of Civilis and the XIVth Legion, with flashbacks to the hapless Quintilius Varus. Women play a big role in this new adventure.
Those more attracted to Greek settings may like A Choice of Murder (Owen, London, 1992) by Peter Vansittart, a reworking of Plutarch's account of Timoleon, suitably embellished to make a proper novel.
A mammoth new novel on Augustus is scheduled to appear later this year by Alan Brien. This author is a British journalist and humorist who (I suspect) may not be well known in North America, but Calgary libraries (not likely to be unique in this) contain his earlier titan, a novel about Lenin.
I've saved the bad news until last. The ineffable Colleen McCullough has recently inflicted volume two (The Grass Crown) of her threatened multi-volume saga on the late Republic on to a suffering world. I did my best to kill the thing off while reviewing the inaugural The First Man in Rome in The World & I (March, 1991), 406-12, but who am I to repel this march of Thornbirds in Togas?
Barry Baldwin University of Calgary
Ed.'s note:
As I read this letter, it seemed to me that we got to the bad news pretty early on. Would it be fair to ask whether any of these exercises do more than use Roman costumes to provide cheap thrills, with lashings (painfully evident in this account) of sexism? This series started because I called attention to Saylor's Roman Blood, which seemed to me both a decent murder mystery and a serious attempt to do justice to Cicero's Pro Sexto Roscio Amerino, and though it is a light enough sort of book, I still think it has merit. (Saylor has a new one in the bookstores called Arms of Nemesis, with a Spartacan theme but less closely tied, it would appear, to any specific text, but I've not yet had time to look at it.) Rather like the south central LA murder mysteries of Walter Mosley, who puts a lot of social history between the lines, or the early Tony Hillermans, while he still had fresh things to say about the Navajo.
JO'D 26 September 1992
Oxford Journals.org Essays in Criticism
You need a subscription to access this but it brings to mind how well read Alan was and the ways in which he disseminated his reading. Who is John?
W. J. HARVEY Editorial CommentaryEssays in Criticism, 1968; XVIII: 1 - 14. ......University College (it was John's) to whom I had recently been introduced by one of my own undergraduate-pupils (was it Alan Brien?), who had also lent me a slim volume of the young man's very promising and elegant poems. John and I chatted briefly......
W. J. HARVEY Editorial CommentaryEssays in Criticism, 1968; XVIII: 1 - 14. ......University College (it was John's) to whom I had recently been introduced by one of my own undergraduate-pupils (was it Alan Brien?), who had also lent me a slim volume of the young man's very promising and elegant poems. John and I chatted briefly......
Thursday 12 June 2008
Ruskin School of Art, Oxford
Clarifications and amendments will be made. But placing the suggestion, in the first instance, that Alan was a life model at the Ruskin School of Art, when at Oxford, and believed his form appeared in a sculpture commissioned for Westminster Cathedral (can't have been the Abbey, can it?). Clearly he modelled and we did once visit the Conway Library to see if we could find him, to no avail.
http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/research/photographic/conway/index.shtml
http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/research/photographic/conway/index.shtml
Wednesday 11 June 2008
Peter Wilby The Guardian, Monday June 2 2008 Article history
Remembering Alan Brien
Last week's obituaries of Alan Brien, I thought, didn't quite pinpoint his place in the history of journalism. Brien, as one obituarist said, was a critic and essayist in the tradition of Belloc and Chesterton. He reviewed film, theatre and books when reviewers were among the biggest newspaper stars. Now, the stars are general columnists, writing about life, the universe and everything, but mainly about themselves and their families.
Brien, who died at 83, straddled those two eras, being not only among the last of the old, but also among the first of the new. Harold Evans, when Sunday Times editor, said Brien could get more interesting copy from the fluff in his navel than some hacks could get from a month on the road. Once, when he was driving up the motorway with his wife, the Guardian's Jill Tweedie, a tiny pebble shattered the car windscreen. Between them, I swear, they got six columns out of it. The record probably stands to this day.
Contact the Media editor
editor@mediaguardian.co.uk Report errors or inaccuracies: reader@guardian.co.uk
Letters for publication should be sent to: letters@guardian.co.uk
Last week's obituaries of Alan Brien, I thought, didn't quite pinpoint his place in the history of journalism. Brien, as one obituarist said, was a critic and essayist in the tradition of Belloc and Chesterton. He reviewed film, theatre and books when reviewers were among the biggest newspaper stars. Now, the stars are general columnists, writing about life, the universe and everything, but mainly about themselves and their families.
Brien, who died at 83, straddled those two eras, being not only among the last of the old, but also among the first of the new. Harold Evans, when Sunday Times editor, said Brien could get more interesting copy from the fluff in his navel than some hacks could get from a month on the road. Once, when he was driving up the motorway with his wife, the Guardian's Jill Tweedie, a tiny pebble shattered the car windscreen. Between them, I swear, they got six columns out of it. The record probably stands to this day.
Contact the Media editor
editor@mediaguardian.co.uk Report errors or inaccuracies: reader@guardian.co.uk
Letters for publication should be sent to: letters@guardian.co.uk
Der Teufel
When Alan's boyhood friend, David Maccaby, who became a painter and later blind, took Alan home for the first time, his mother, on opening the front door, reeled back with 'Der Teufel', Satan. The Hebrew term for Satan has a decidely different meaning than in Christianity. It is the title of a Prosecutor at the Divine Court.
Satan, the Devil, Pan....
A link to John Milton's 'Paradise Lost', the book Alan carried with him when flying as a rear air gunner in the Lancaster.
Satan, the Devil, Pan....
A link to John Milton's 'Paradise Lost', the book Alan carried with him when flying as a rear air gunner in the Lancaster.
A Film Impression of Jesus College, Oxford in 1948: 'Our College'
Administration by Alan Brien, Peter Broadhurst also Geoffrey Hunter, Peter Davis, Derick Grigs.
Reissued 2006. Jesus College, Oxford.
Reissued 2006. Jesus College, Oxford.
Tuesday 10 June 2008
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