Hugh Massingberd

I have a hazy memory of a 1950s television series on stately homes in which Richard Dimbleby (dubbed ‘Gold-Microphone-in-Waiting’ by Malcolm Muggeridge) would respectfully prompt their Wode- housian owners into trotting out seasoned anecdotes. ‘And this of course is the celebrated Red Drawing-room. Your Grace, I think, ahem, you have a story about that curious portrait over the fireplace?’ ‘Eh? What? Ah yes . . .’ Half a century on, his eldest son David adopts a different approach. We see him turning up in his Land-Rover at eerily empty houses, with no sign of the present proprietor or (more usually) the National Trust manager, and proceed to poke about.

Surely the most sought after among what Lord David Cecil described as ‘The Pleasures of Reading’ (a lecture title that lured John Betjeman in the expectation of a paean to the architectural delights of Berkshire’s county town) is the moment when an author articulates a feeling that you imagined was peculiar to yourself, expresses an emotion that you have carefully suppressed. In Michael Simkins’s extremely enjoyable memoir of his lifelong obsession with the ‘summer game’, this moment occurred on the very first page where he confesses to constantly making the evocative sound of a cricket ball hitting a bat.

J. B. Morton, a bluff Old Harrovian survivor of the Somme, succeeded his fellow Bellocian Roman Catholic convert D. B. Wyndham Lewis (‘the wrong Wyndham Lewis’, according to the tiresome Sitwells) as ‘Beachcomber’ in 1924 and wrote the ‘By the Way’ column in the Daily Express for more than 50 years. He eventually signed off in 1975, aged 82, and died four years later. To Morton and Wyndham Lewis (who later became ‘Timothy Shy’ on the lamented News Chronicle) we must give thanks for introducing to newspapers what Michael Frayn, editor of The Best of Beachcomber, described as ‘the superb anarchy of the English nonsense-writing tradition, the brief, devastating parody and the permanent stuff of characters’.

In more than half a century of television viewing nothing has haunted me so much as what was transmitted on the evening of 15 April 1984. ‘Thanks, love,’ said Tommy Cooper, in mid-turn, to the dancer who had fastened his cloak. Then he clutched his chest and, as if in slow motion, collapsed on to the stage; the famous fez remained on his craggy head, a little awry. Cutting through the raucous laughter of the audience, who were under the impression that this was all part of the act, came the terrible sound, magnified by his radio microphone, of the great comedian’s last gasps of breath. The curtain fell and the programme switched to a commercial break with a caption bearing the unfortunate legend Live from Her Majesty’s.

In one of P. G. Wodehouse’s stories the attempts made by Oliver Sipperley, editor of the Mayfair Gazette, to inject some pep into the mag are hampered by poor old Sippy’s inability to ward off unwelcome contributions from his formidable prep school headmaster on recondite classical topics. I experienced not dissimilar difficulties when editing the Telegraph’s obituaries page as I was constantly being assured by the 2nd Viscount Camrose, the paper’s erstwhile deputy chairman, that one of his old sailing chums would make ‘a jolly good obit’ (though his brother, Lord Hartwell, always maintained that obits were a waste of news space).

Listing page content here William Kent (1685-1748) was a Bridlington boy whose training as an artist in Italy was sponsored by squires from both sides of the River Humber including my kinsman Burrell Massingberd of Ormsby, Lincs. Kent’s correspondence with Massingberd is a significant source for any study of ‘the Signior’ and Timothy Mowl has made good use of it in this entertaining, provocative and stimulating biography which might be said to take the Cant (the architect’s real name) out of Kent. From the correspondence Massingberd comes across as a moaning minnie and fusspot (doubtless a family failing) and I fear Mowl has got his number. ‘Poor Massingberd,’ he writes, ‘a natural victim of life and of people like Kent.

In my ignorance, before reading this most instructive, entertaining and beautifully produced book, I had idly regarded sundials as agreeable garden ornaments with little or no practical purpose. To quote Hilaire Belloc, ‘I am a sundial and I make a botch / Of what is done much better by a watch’. Yet our expert guide to the subject, Sir Mark Lennox-Boyd, a former Tory politician who is now Patron of the British Sundial Society and a prolific designer of sundials, is having none of this. Echoing Professor Joad of The Brains Trust, he counters Belloc’s couplet with ‘it all depends on how you measure time’. He suggests that ‘you could just as easily say that sundials tell the right time but clocks do not’.

Although the Scottish Borders contain some of the most picturesque and unspoilt scenery in the British Isles, with the country houses along the Tweed putting up a fair show to rival the ch.

One of life’s longed-for little twists comes when the nice guy finally asserts himself and reveals a darker side to his personality. Alan Alda, celebrated for having played Hawkeye for 11 years in the television series M*A*S*H* and an actor who always seemed slightly too eager to ingratiate, had his moment of revelation as the creepy senator in The Aviator — a thrilling performance which was nominated for an Oscar last year. Significantly, the sea change occurred in what Alda desribes in this deft and witty memoir as ‘golden time’ following a life-threatening intestinal blockage in Chile in 2003. ‘Now, at last,’ he writes, ‘there was no pressure to succeed. There was nothing I needed to prove to anyone.

Until reading this stimulating and sumptuous study from the archives of Country Life I had only associated the name Edward Knoblock, an American-born dramatist, with one of the best-known anecdotes about John Gielgud’s gaffes. You remember the scene: Gielgud and Knoblock are lunching at the Ivy when Johnny absent-mindedly describes someone as ‘nearly as boring as Eddie Knoblock . . . no, no, not you, of course, I mean the other Eddie Knoblock’. Now I learn from the far from boring John Martin Robinson that poor old Eddie was actually a key figure in the Regency Revival (affectionately mocked by Osbert Lancaster as ‘Vogue Regency’) and rediscovered the significance of Thomas Hope of The Deepdene, nicknamed ‘the gentleman of sofas’ by Sydney Smith.

Like Groucho Marx I tend to be rather ambivalent about joining clubs, but last November — in fact, exactly 48 hours before Deborah Hutton, author of this brilliant book subtitled ‘75 Practical Ideas for Family and Friends from Cancer’s Frontline’ — I unexpectedly found myself a member of what Hutton calls the last club in the world anyone would ever choose to join: ‘The Cancer Club. The only club in the world I can think of that is both rigorously exclusive and has no waiting list.’ But hold your horses, don’t flip to another review; this isn’t going to be a ‘Me and My Cancer’ piece. (I remember a ghastly girl exclaiming when Bob Champion won the Grand National on Aldaniti, ‘Oh, no!

To my shame, back in the 1980s, I wrote a less than charitable obituary for the Daily Telegraph of the 13th Duke of St Albans, which dwelt unnecessarily on his unfortunate City directorships. This provoked a volley of letters from his grandson, Lord Vere of Hanworth, couched in intemperate terms. I seem to recall demands of satisfaction, challenges to a duel and the ominous question of whether my club had steps. Later this remarkable young man, by then styling himself Earl of Burford, caused a memorable scene in the House of Lords when he bounced on the Woolsack as if it were a trampoline — or, as he puts it himself, ‘an impromptu soapbox to defend the golden principle of sovereignty’.

Faced with a choice on election night of staying in to watch the results coming in on the box or heading out to The Anvil, Basingstoke, to catch a live show by The Manfreds — featuring my old school contemporary Michael d’Abo on vocals, as well as his apparently ageless predecessor, Paul Jones — it was, as Homer Simpson sometimes says, ‘a no-brainer’. In spite of a single, seemingly slighting reference (from Elvis Costello) to Manfred Mann in this stimulating study of Bob Dylan, I still believe the group to have been among the best interpreters of his songs and I’m sure I have read somewhere that Dylan himself has endorsed this view.

In this ingenious ‘double biography’, which covers not only her own life and that of her late husband, the peerless television actor John Thaw, but also their life together, the actress Sheila Hancock has achieved an impressive and affecting work of art. Unfort- unately, though, it is flawed by the author’s self-indulgence in ranting on about her tiresome Bel Littlejohnish political views by way of furnishing what her publishers (who really should have told her to chuck it) quaintly call ‘a study of Britain from the 1930s to the present’. It is as if a subtle and beautifully executed painting has been spoilt by being daubed with cheap political slogans. Here are a few samples of Hancock’s excruciating ‘takes’ on modern history.

Although the publishers assure us that this study of three sisters is ‘one of glamour, money and love in equal measure’, Fortune’s Daughters should not be confused with the new novel by The Spectator’s most decorative diarist, Joan Collins, entitled Misfortune’s Daughters. Elisabeth Kehoe’s book is non-fiction and covers, as the sub-title puts it, ‘The Extravagant Lives of the Jerome Sisters: Jennie Churchill, Clara Frewen and Leonie Leslie’.

To celebrate the centenary of Anthony Powell’s birth next year an exhibition is being planned at the Wallace Collection in Lon- don, which houses Poussin’s ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’, the work of art that inspired the novelist’s panoramic 12- volume sequence. The official biography, to be written by Hilary Spurling, a former literary editor of this magazine whose Handbook to Dance is an indispensable companion for all Powell fans, is still a long way off, but in the meantime we have this unauthorised life by Michael Barber, in which he sets out to try to ‘relate the man to his work’.

When asked why he was always so incredibly cheerful, David Niven (Stowe, Sandhurst and the Silver Screen) used to reply, ‘Well, old bean, life is really so bloody awful that I feel it’s my absolute duty to be chirpy and try and make everybody else happy too.’ Niven’s extraordinary charm and delightfully light touch made him the perfect choice for Bertie Wooster in Thank You, Jeeves (1936), his first leading role in Hollywood after he had risen from the ranks of Central Casting (‘Anglo-Saxon Type No. 2008’). John Mortimer, who gave the address at the actor’s memorial service 20 years ago, nicely summed up Niven’s life as ‘Wodehouse with tears’.

For some reason, almost every time I plunge into too hot a bath I find myself thinking of my days as a public schoolboy - presumably a 'tosh' must have been one's principal pleasure at an impressionable age - and more often than not a half-remembered line from Frederic Raphael's haunting School Play, shown on television many years ago, flickers across my mind. 'Are you trying to burn my ballocks off?' (or words to that effect), demands the rather Simon Ravenish senior boy (played by Denholm Elliott) of his junior (Michael Kitchen), who has drawn the bath as part of his fagging duties.