Autobiographical items

Dannie Abse, the Welsh doctor, poet and occasional diarist, died ten years ago today, just two days before I got married (though I’d known my new wife, Hat, for seven years, and we have two children together). I never met Abse, but there are one or two rather amazing links between him, Hat and I. He was best mates with my father, Frederic, in the 1950s, before Frederic abandoned me and my mother to emigrate to the US. Decades later, long before I met Hat, Abse was friends with her father, Giles Gordon. Indeed, both our fathers, (Hat’s and mine) are mentioned in Abse’s first published book of ‘journals’ - journals, for him, being a collection of ‘autobiographical items’. In later life, Abse lived in the same road as my mother, and they would walk their dogs in Childs Hill Park, and nod ‘hello’, in some faint acknowledgement of their social connection half a century earlier.

Abse was born in Cardiff, youngest of four children in a Jewish family. His father part-owned and ran cinemas. He studied medicine, briefly at the University of Wales, and then, in London, at Westminster Hospital and King’s College, becoming a specialist chest physician. During the latter part of the war he volunteered with other medical students to help, but was not sent abroad. He published his first book of poetry in the late 1940s, and in 1951, he was called up for National Service. That same year, he married Joan Mercer, a librarian at the time for the Financial Times, and an art historian. They moved to live in Hodford Road, Golder’s Green, north London, and had three children.

By this time, Abse was part of the London poetry scene, giving poetry readings, and being likened to his fellow Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, though he soon brushed off the latter’s overwrought style. A second collection of poems followed, and then his first autobiographical novel Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve (1954) brought him some early literary success. Many other poems, readings, books followed, as he managed to live life as a celebrated poet at the same time as pursuing a medical career.

In 2005, Joan was killed in a car accident, and Abse himself suffered injuries. He continued to write, and, in 2012, he accepted a CBE for services to poetry and literature, saying, at the time, that many people more left-wing than he had taken the award. He died on 28 September 2014. Wikipedia has a short biography, but there are also several detailed obituaries online, at The Telegraph, for example, The Guardian, the BBC. There are several older articles by Gerald Isaaman, ex editor of the Ham and High, for Camden New Journal.

My mother, Barbara, who died in 2007, also lived on Hodford Road, and would often see Abse in Childs Hill Park as they walked their dogs. I don’t think they ever talked, but they would nod a greeting as they passed, in some vague way acknowledging that they had known each other in the 1950s. Indeed, according to my father, Frederic Goldsmith, Dannie was one of his best friends in those days. They were both part of a group of musicians, artists, writers, German refugees (Frederic had arrived in London as a child in the 30s, his family escaping from Hitler’s Nazi Germany) that would meet in The Cosmo, on Finchley Road. Also part of that group was Peter the Girl, who was a friend of my parents; Uncle Bondy, who took us on holiday to his primitive villa in Bandol, France, at least once; and Peter Vansittart who married my aunt, Johnnie.

Around the time Abse was getting married, Frederic met my mother, and I was born the following year. The marriage between my parents didn’t last long - in contrast to Abse’s which lasted a lifetime and very happily so, according to all reports. Frederic, the cad, ran off to the US, not to return for 20 years. And when he did return to London, he thought it would be funny, in an ‘old times’ sort of way, to show up at Abse’s house in the middle of the night. But Abse didn’t find it funny, and, effectively, rejected his old friend. Peter the Girl, out of loyalty to Frederic, never forgave Abse for that - indeed she called me the day after he died to remind me of the story. Ironically, I was out of the country when Frederic made that visit to London - ironic because every year through my childhood he had written to me saying he would come visit soon!

Fast forwarding, to the year 2007, Frederic long since dead, and my mother just gone too, I met and fell in love with Harriet Gordon (often known as Hat). Her parents, too, had died in recent years: Giles Gordon, literary agent, and Margaret Gordon, children’s book illustrator. It turned out that her father had been Dannie Abse’s agent, and friend, for many years. Hat and I moved in together, and have two children now. Along the way, we wrote to Abse, thinking he might be intrigued by the coincidence. He wrote back, saying that is one ‘helluva coincidence’, or rather ‘a heaven of a coincidence.’

I feel justified in contributing a piece on Abse here, to The Diary Review, because he published several books which were either compilations of diary extracts and/or were given the title ‘journals’. In fact, in his first collection of ‘journal’ pieces - Journals from the Ant-Heap (1986) - Abse mentions both my father and Hat’s father, but in very different contexts. The so-called journal entries, though, had been written to order, on Gerald Isaaman’s suggestion for a column in the Ham and High (see below), and are only dated by month. Similar kinds of later autobiographical notes were put together with Journals from the Ant-Heap in a single volume called Intermittent Journals.

Here is Abse’s explanation of how he came to publish Journals from the Ant-Heap.

‘Gerald Isaaman, the editor of a local newspaper in London, the Hampstead and Highgate Express, affectionately known as the Ham and High, is a great admirer of George Orwell. In December 1983, recalling Orwell’s once lively column for Tribune entitled ‘As I Please’, he decided that, during 1984, he would like a similar series to grace the pages of the Ham and High.

George Orwell, alas, was not available. So he cast around other writers, shortlisting a number of them, no doubt alphabetically, for soon he telephoned me. I could not mimic Orwell. I could only write my own kind of prose. Gerald did not seem to mind and I agreed to offer him a fortnightly autobiographical column for one year only. He was to call my non-Orwellian ‘As I Please’ ‘ABSE’s 1984’. He proved to be an ideal editor. He only occasionally made suggestions and never changed my copy.

In March 1985 it was suggested to me that I protract my journal so that it could be published in book form. I could continue writing it, of course, as I pleased, and more importantly, when I pleased. I cannot pretend that I have not enjoyed conjugating occasional autobiographical items while I have been based in London or in South Wales. And I hope they will amuse like-minded readers. They are not private diary entries but were written, as all journalism is, as a public secret.’

Abse dedicated Journals from the Ant-Heap ‘To Margaret and Giles Gordon’ (Hat’s parents); and here is one extract from the book, in which Abse reflects on the Cosmo days, and mentions Frederic/Fred, my father - approximately 20 years before Hat and I were to meet.

March-April 1986
‘We decided to dine out to celebrate the arrival of an advance copy of my new book of poems, As the Bloody Horse. We chose to eat at The Cosmo in Swiss Cottage. Joan and I had not visited that Viennese café for years but suddenly, in nostalgic mood, we wanted to make a return journey to 1949. In the post-war years, when I was a medical student, instead of studying in my ‘digs’ in Aberdare Gardens, NW6, [. . .] I often spent an evening gossiping and arguing with other Cosmo habitués.

Because of the refugees who had come to live in small rooms scattered across Swiss Cottage, this area had become a corner of Vienna with a distinct café life. Soon, young British writers, artists, musicians and burglars, joined the refugees and found the party-going, cigarette-smoking laden atmosphere of The Cosmo congenial. Generally Joan - then Joan Mercer - and I sat in the annexe over one cup of coffee all night but there were occasions when the annexe was too full and its occupants overflowed into the large main restaurant where they had laid white linen table-cloths over the tables in order to encourage their clientele to eat something!

It was to the main restaurant that we now repaired. It had hardly changed. There was something old-fashioned about the place, something outmoded, as if the clock had stopped not so much in 1949 but in pre-war Vienna. [. . .] It was odd to gaze around the restaurant and observe not one person known to us. Where were the novelists, youthful once more, Peter Brent, Bernice Rubens, Peter Vansittart? Where the sculptor, Bill Turnbull? Would not Emanuel Litvonoff, Cherry Marshall and Rudi Nassauer come in at any minute? Was Ivor M in jail again? Were Keith Sawbridge, Fred Goldsmith and Old Bondy next door in the annexe arguing the toss? I recalled Jack Ashman, somewhat manic, and Theodore Bikel with his guitar - and the prettier faces of Penny, Noa, Betty, Jacky, Peter the Girl, Nina Shelley. I looked out of the window. Across the road where once had stood the elegant facades of fire-blitzed houses reigned instead W. H. Smith and MacDonalds.

Soon Joan and I were talking about the most remarkable ghost of The Cosmo, Elias Canetti. Canetti, some twenty years older than us, used to insist we called him Canetti, not Elias, since he did not care for his first name.  [. . .] Canetti would sit in The Cosmo regularly, often with pen in hand. When questioned on what he was writing he made it clear that it was a masterpiece. He had been working, he told us, on a book about Crowds and Power for more than a decade. When asked when he would publish it he quite seriously commented that there was plenty of time, that he did not wish to make the mistake Freud had done - contradict himself. ‘I have to be sure,’ he would say passionately. If ever a man believed he would one day receive the Nobel Prize for Literature that man was Elias Canetti. And he was right.’

After Joan’s death, Abse’s output was, understandably, focused on his grief. Apart from poems, he also published a diary - The Presence (Hutchinson, 2007) - he had kept in the year after the tragedy, and this turned out to be more of a bona-fide kind of diary, kept day-by-day, than anything he had published hitherto. The blurb describes it as ‘both a record of present grief and a portrait of a marriage that lasted more than fifty years’. ‘It is an extraordinary document,’ the publisher says, ‘painful but celebratory, funny yet often tragic, bursting with joy as well as sorrow and full of a deep understanding of what it means to be human.’ Here are a few lines from the first extract.

22 September 2005
‘The past survives however much one tries to drive it down and away from one’s consciousness. It rears up provoked by something overheard or a scene, a place, an object, a tune, a scent even. It is inescapable. But I think how I must count my blessings, though it would have been better if Joan not I had been the one who had crawled out of that capsized car. She would have been much more self-sufficient. Count your blessings, son, my mother used to say. A cliché. At times of stress, clichés, family sayings, proverbs, are drawn to the mind like a magnet. I do count my blessings: at night, though I don’t sleep well, I am unable to lie on my right side now that the stress-fractures of the right thoracic cage have healed; the scar on my chin and neck are hardly visible; my left thumb, though oddly angled, is less troublesome and it is no bad thing that I’ve lost a stone in weight. Presumably the latter is due as much to my increased metabolic rate as it is to the lack of Joan’s tempting and nutritious cooking. At least I hope I haven’t developed an over-active thyroid. I take my pulse and note it is raised though not alarmingly so. Do I write all this down as an aide-mémoire for my future self?’

Finally, I turn to my own diaries and find but one significant mention of Abse - yet another synchronous connection.

30 May 1977
‘Who is Dannie Abse? Yesterday evening my mother showed me a book of his poems, an old friend  of Frederic, I was told, before I was born. A poem ‘Epithalamium’ was pointed out - ‘Today I married my white lady in a barley field’. This evening I walk in to Pentameters because I have nothing else to do. Astonishingly, the man himself is reading tonight. I am anxious to meet him.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 28 September 2014.

A fairly burdensome exercise

‘I decided that the Brussels years were likely to be a sharply isolated segment of my life, and that I might mark them by attempting this new exercise.’ This is the highly regarded British politician Roy Jenkins - who died 20 years ago today - explaining why he decided to keep a diary during the four years in which he was President of the European Commission. He concluded that he had found it ‘a fairly burdensome exercise’. One might wonder if it was worth it: evidence from my own diary suggests Jenkins’s diary efforts were no less dull and repetitive than my own as a teenager!

Jenkins was born in Abersychan, Wales, in 1920, the only son of a trade union official who went on to serve briefly as a minister in the 1945 Labour government. He was educated at a Cardiff grammar school and at Balliol College, Oxford. There he studied PPE, and became friends with Tony Crosland, Denis Healey and Edward Heath among others. During the war, he was trained as an officer, but was then posted to Bletchley Park to work as a codebreaker, and where he became friends with the historian Asa Briggs. In a 1948 by-election, he was elected as MP for Southwark Central (becoming the youngest MP in the House) until the constituency. When it was abolished, he stood for the new Birmingham Stechford constituency which he represented until 1977. In 1945 he married Jennifer Morris, and they later had two sons and a daughter.

In 1947, Jenkins edited a collection of Clement Attlee’s speeches, and then published a biography of Attlee. He would go on to write further political biographies (of Asquith, Baldwin, Gladstone, Churchill) but it was to politics that he was committed. He gradually became a leading figure in the shadow cabinet, and when Harold Wilson took power in 1964, he was appointed to the post of aviation minister. Soon, however, he was promoted to Home Secretary. In that position, he secured parliamentary time for private members’ bills to liberalise the abortion law and legalise homosexual practices between consenting adults. He also promoted a strengthening of race relations legislation and the abolition of theatre censorship. In 1967, following the devaluation crisis, Jenkins took over as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Although considered at the time to be one of the best post-war Chancellors, the deflationary measures he enacted are now considered as having been too cautious and too late.

Back in Opposition, Jenkins attracted a significant following among MPs and among the public. He was elected Deputy Leader of the Labour Party in 1970, but over the next two years he fell out of synch with the party as it moved further to the left and into opposing membership of the European Community. Nevertheless, when Wilson was re-elected in 1974, he returned, unhappily, to the Home Office. During the 1975 referendum on Britain’s membership of the EEC, he headed the successful Yes campaign. When Wilson resigned in 1976, the subsequent leadership ballot saw Jenkins lose to Callaghan. Leaving British politics, he took a four year post as President of the European Commission. 

Back in British politics, in 1981, Jenkins and other Labour Party dissidents formed a new party, the Social Democratic Party, of which he was briefly leader. In 1987 he accepted a life peerage (with the title Baron Jenkins of Hillhead) and moved from the House of Commons to the House of Lords, where he was a leader of the new Social and Liberal Democratic Party. In the late 1990s, he served as a close adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair for whom he also chaired a major commission on electoral reform. He served as chancellor of the University of Oxford from 1987 to 2003; and, in 1993, Jenkins was elected to the Order of Merit. He died on 5 January 2003. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, The Royal Society of Literature, and Liberal History.

In 1989, Collins published a diary Jenkins had kept while serving as President of the European Commission: European Diary 1977-1981. This can be previewed at Googlebooks, or freely borrowed digitally at Internet Archive. A Preface by Jenkins himself describes why and how he kept a diary.

‘The four years covered by this book are the only period of my life for which I have kept a narrative diary. I have fairly careful engagement diaries for the past forty years and from 1964 substantial chunks of unworked memoir raw material, dictated close to the event. But I had never previously (nor have I since) attempted a descriptive outline of each day in the calendar. However I decided that the Brussels years were likely to be a sharply isolated segment of my life, and that I might mark them by attempting this new exercise.

I found it fairly burdensome, for I am naturally a slow (and I like to think meticulous) manuscript writer and not a fluent dictater; and a slowly written manuscript diary was clearly not compatible with the scale of the task and the pattern of life which I was recording. However, I kept it up to the end, but was glad when it was done. I dictated to a machine, sometimes within forty-eight hours of the events, but more typically a week or so later. When there was this sort of gap I worked from a detailed schedule of engagements. The tapes were then typed up and corrected by me during my next period of semi-leisure. [. . .]

So for a variety of reasons I have greatly shortened the text, and any shortening of course is bound to be selective. But have I doctored it? I obviously do not think so. I have tidied up a good deal, but I have never consciously changed the sense, I have resisted (with some difficulty) esprit d’escalier, and where I have added, mainly but not exclusively in footnotes, it has been for purposes of clarity. The only exception has been where, seeking economy in words, I have suddenly seen that a new linking sentence could get one from A to B in fifteen words rather than five hundred.

I do not therefore claim complete textual integrity, as opposed to integrity of substance. But the original text exists, can be published in due course if anyone so desires, and is available in the meantime for inspection by anyone who feels they might have been maligned by ex post judgements.’

Here are several extracts from the published diary.

10 May 1977
‘Breakfast with David Owen at Carlton Gardens for the Foreign Ministers of the Little Five, nominally in order to debrief them on the Summit. Some discussion after two opening statements by David and me, in which K. B. Andersen asked the only interesting question, which was whether I thought that the arrangements in London had been compatible with the Rome compromise. I said ‘No’, but I nevertheless thought it had been worthwhile that we were there.

Left Carlton Gardens at 9.30 and was in the hotel in Strasbourg only two hours and five minutes later. Answered questions in the Parliament after lunch. Gave a dinner for Colombo - as President of the Parliament. An enjoyable discussion during which my morale improved, partly because I suddenly realized that I had made a French breakthrough. During my first three months in Brussels I thought it had definitely retrogressed, and even after that had not improved, but it has now jerked forward and I suddenly felt much more fluent and had no difficulty in leading the whole two-hour discussion in French.’

5 January 1979
‘I became extremely depressed on reading the newspapers, and decided that the French monkeying around on MCAs and holding up the start of the EMS meant that Europe was in danger of falling apart and that I had better try and do something about it. Therefore I did some vigorous telephoning to Brussels and set up a meeting for the Sunday morning in Paris with Barre with the intention at least of trying fully to understand the French point of view. The commercial planes being totally unreliable, I set up an avion taxi from Northolt to Brussels at 3.45.

In the meantime I had an early lunch with Harold Lever at Brooks’s and found him buoyant and very sensible on nearly everything. My agreement with him, as with Shirley, is now very close indeed. He is of course much more interested than Shirley in economic and monetary matters and remains a firm partisan of EMS. He is depressed about the Government, but not excessively so, and thinks it might easily win the election. He intends to stand himself again and is obviously quite keen to go on in the Cabinet if he can. But when I suggested to him at the end that if they were still in office after Nicko* and wanted to make a political appointment to Paris he and Diane would do it well, he responded rather enthusiastically.’

21 March 1980
‘I went to sec the King at Laeken from 9.45 to 10.30. He was looking much better after great back trouble all winter, with an operation and two months out of action. Today he seemed restored, although looking alone and isolated in the vast and rather dismal Palace of Laeken - redeemed only by its view. My state of health was not very good either, and a good third of the conversation was valetudinarian.

We also and inevitably talked about Europe. He was very keen to promote a budgetary solution acceptable to the British and made some very sensible remarks about how important it was to a country like Belgium that the basic European power matrix should be triangular rather than bipolar. We also discussed both British and Belgian internal politics a little and he claimed, though not in a dismissive or aggressive way, that the communal linguistic question was very much a matter of politicians rather than people. Whether he is right or not I do not know, but he is in a good position to judge.’

19 December 1980
‘Office at 9.15. A little signing before inner office Christmas drinks at 11.45, and then to London by the 12.45 plane, and on to East Hendred. The effective end of Brussels and the beginning of Christmas and, more significantly, of the return to British politics.’

***

A word search of my own diaries reveals that I have mentioned Roy Jenkins more than half-a-dozen times over the years. Here are three extracts, two of which are about, and rather critical of, European Diary 1977-1981.

1 April 1982
‘Roy Jenkins won the by-election at Hillhead and is now set to become the leader of the SDP. Despite the lack of definite policies and some declining popularity, it seems the new party is a force and is here to stay. I cannot comment on his personality, as I must confess I know nothing about him, but I don’t believe the existence of a strong centre party can be bad for the future of the country in the short term.’

30 December 1990
‘I am reading Roy Jenkins diary of the period when he was President of the European Commission. This was a Quick Choice from the library when I was there last week; but I am pleased to have it. Not only does it give me an added insight into the workings of the Commission at the highest level but it is a document of considerable importance - not so many diaries are published by such senior politicians. It has been likened to that of Anthony Crosland which, I remember, finding fascinating. I do not find Jenkins fascinating. Despite going to some lengths to tell us how much material he has cut out from the five years of diary entries, and how difficult it was, the diary is still weighed down by an extraordinary obsession with time-keeping, the length of meetings and speeches, and the weather. It reads like my teenager diary, but whereas I catalogued TV programmes, whether an evening was good or not, which teacher had been horrid or helpful, and what the food was like, his reads like a catalogue of visits, whether a meeting was good or not, whether other diplomats or politicians had been helpful or a hindrance, and what the food was like. There are occasional descriptions of places, and pithy character sketches and occasionally he goes into some detail about the issues. Most space seems to be given to the most important leaders, thus Jenkins devotes a page or two to meetings with Schmidt or Giscard, while most entries have been paired down to half a page or less. I think he is coming across as rather a snooty man (even though he goes out of his way to let us know that he doesn’t always dress to form).’

20 January 1991
‘I have finished Roy Jenkins diary. I must return it to the library today. Overall my impression remains the same as that recorded in December’s notes. The style of his diary reminds me exactly of that I used as a teenager. The content is occasionally interesting but far too concerned with lists of people, engagements, places; with general comments about whether a meeting was ‘good’ or whether people were ‘interesting’ or ‘dull’; and with travel arrangements. His tone is generally pompous and we never get any idea about the people who arrange his travel, his dinner, his paperwork; we never get an insight into any of the more minor issues or about the more mundane workings of the Commission.’

The Queen and I

I have never had a very close relationship with the Queen, who died yesterday, so no mourning for me. But I’m not a republican. I feel I’ve always appreciated the monarchy for what it is, a significant and colourful link to the past, one which enriches our cultural life. I often think of it as a first class tourist attraction. Absolutely, and like the rest of the country, I believe the Queen has been a fabulous force for good and for unifying of her people. She’s had a difficult and enduring job, and managed it exceptionally well. 

My mother was born in the same year as the Queen, and I was born in the year of her coronation. At the time, my soon-to-be-absent father bought all the new ‘definitive’ stamps (with the new monarch’s profile) to give me when I was older. Some he posted on the first day of issue, and I still have those First Day Covers as well as the mint definitives. 

The queen, I have to admit, has troubled my diary rather infrequently over the decades. Nevertheless, her death provides me with an opportunity to gather what few diary entries there are for a whistle stop personal memoir of her life - covering the last 50 years of her reign. If my diary entries are to be relied on, I only ever saw the Queen once in person, during my student days in Cardiff (though I don’t remember the event at all). The most recent of my diary entries mentioning the Queen was this year, when my family and I had a royal good time at a party hosted by the Symondsbury Estate in Dorset - my wife, Hattie, even posed with the Queen for a photo!

19 November 1971
‘Went in for 9 physics and pure maths skipped probability to see the Queen and Duke opening bypass.’

4 June 1977
‘Today England is celebrating everywhere the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. In London it is a magnificent festival and procession with the Queen and all her offspring. And what am I doing, sitting on the floor in the sitting room listening to Julie Felix, hoping the phone will ring. And yet, what is one of the most exciting things that can happen when one is travelling? To find a festival in process, to see the people celebrating - carnival in Brazil for instance. I enthuse exceedingly to find a festival, procession, and yet here I have my own most English celebration that can be, and I am completely disinterested.’

24 December 1985
‘The Pope wishes the world Happy Christmas in 51 languages. The Queen says everyone should add their bit, however small, to the goodness of the world. The UK PM says to the Falkland Islands people that their right is their democracy.’

6 August 1987
‘DREAM: I got the idea to interview the Queen and request her cooperation for a desert island discs programme. Much to my amazement she accepts. At first the full import of my achievement didn’t filter through but soon I realised that there were crowds of people interested (including many taxi drivers). I could see myself conducting the interview as if on TV. We were in a large room and seated quite far apart. The Queen was old and decrepit, and needed the advice and help of a small group of assistants behind her. She only came out with two or three records (one by Grieg) and when I asked her why she had chosen them she chastised me. The programme was about her discs not why she was choosing them.’

15 February 1992
‘THE QUEEN: I watch a documentary about the life of our Queen. It is well photographed and oh so very carefully judged. She comes across as a rather preposterous old woman, privileged beyond all realm of fantasy with wealth and high society - pandered too by the world’s most famous people yet with no higher intelligence than the hospital sick or dwellers in old peoples’ homes who she patronises with visits. Unlike Prince Charles who does show some spirit, some spontaneity, some depth of knowledge, Queenie appears vacuous and characterless. That documentary, I think, was an error of judgement - one kept on asking why bother, what is the point of her. She seems to sign countless documents but plays no part in their meaning; she talks to countless figures in public life (“one can call anyone in to have a chat”), but garners no intelligence. There is just ceremony without the slightest substance, formality without even the semblance of authority. The film only served to remind us of that.’

21 March 1992
‘CRISIS IN TWO INSTITUTIONS - ROYALTY AND MARRIAGE: Sarah Ferguson, dearly beloved of Prince Andrew and mother of Beatrice and Eugenie, direct descendants to the throne of Great Britain, has decided she can take no more. After a party lasting five years, after being a world star, she’s decided to quit. The Queen’s press secretary in talks with the palace correspondents quietly tried to blame Fergie but the tabloids called his bluff and ran headlines like - the Queen has the knives out for Fergie - and so on. Of course, the Queen couldn’t be seen to be saying such things, so the PR had to take it in the chin and apologise publicly to Queenie and Fergie. Of course, he only spoke what the palace believes, but the palace just couldn’t take all that stick. But there will be war now between Fergie and the Palace. She’ll demand lots and pots of lolly - after all if she’s to keep quiet and not accept $2m dollar for her story from an American publisher she’ll want reasonable compensation. Shame on her, I say, I’m with you Queenie; send her to Coventry; how dare she play around with the very history of our country as well as set such a poor example for the married folk of our society!’

21 November 1992
‘A terrible fire has consumed a third of Windsor Castle. It started in the Queen’s private chapel and raged for 10-12 hours. Hundreds of firemen worked to stop it but huge flames poured out of the building for most of yesterday. The media has reported variable facts about the castle such as that it contains the world’s most important private collection of art, that it is the most continuously lived in castle in the world, that with Westminster Abbey it is the most important building in the country.’

13 December 1992
‘DIANA LETS THE SIDE DOWN: I am upset by the news this week that Prince Charles and his wife Diana are to separate. The royal family has had a bitch of a year but this news is the worst of the lot. Charles is in line to be King and Diana to be Queen, therefore anything they do and say matters. The separation (and ultimate divorce) of Prince Andrew and Fergie does not matter half as much. By refusing to accept the strictures of royal family life, Diana has betrayed the trust and responsibility invested in her. We the people, do not shout and wave and adore Diana herself, we wave, shout, love and adore her because she is a symbol of the royal family, she has accepted the role and the responsibility that goes with it. She is sorely mistaken if she thinks she can carry on as a famous and important person, and be treated as such everywhere she goes, now that she has stabbed the whole system in the back. Royal families cannot expect to live like ordinary people; they have immense privileges and there are costs that go with them. Diana appears to want her cake and to eat it. And how on earth can she go on speaking for the marriage guidance charity Relate, when she doesn’t have the stamina for her own marriage. She and Charles, like many royal families, already live separate lives; what does Diana hope to gain by proving to the world that she is not living a dream happy marriage as shown in cornflake advertisements. In five or ten years time, Diana will realise what a terrible mistake she has made. She will not find whatever is missing in her relationship with Charles anywhere else, other than for a few moments, or hours or days - like everybody else. Life is about getting on with the business and making it as bearable as you can. Whatever she chooses to do, it will be the same in the end, yet as Queen she could have had the most fascinating and interesting of lives. 

And poor old Charlie must be in the very pits of depression - he has failed to provide the leadership to the people that he so desperately wants to give, he has failed personally to hold his marriage together, and he has failed the whole historic tradition of the royalty in this country by choosing the wrong wife.

The Annus Horribilis, as Queenie has called 1992, begins to sound like an understatement, a pathetic statement of personal frustration. Yet the tragedy is of historic proportions, and the Queen herself must take a huge chunk of the blame; all three of her children who married are now separated. The fact that one of them, Anne, remarried this weekend does nothing at all to mitigate the historic fall of the House of Windsor.’

28 December 1993
‘On Christmas Day, we did make one short call, across the road to see Alice and Dan. It was their 60th wedding anniversary - they married on Christmas day in 1933 at St Peters Church, down the road. And they have lived in that house opposite almost all that time. I do find it quite amazing. Dan has not been well, but the two of them were perky and holding court to many friends in the street who were popping in to see the telegram they had received from the Queen. Oh they were so proud, but they had not yet opened it. They were waiting to open it with some of their family on Boxing Day, even though Christmas Day was the day, but they forgot to take it with them and thus missed the pleasure they had been looking forward to. On Monday Alice popped over to show us the open telegram. It wasn’t signed (of course telegrams are never signed - why doesn’t she send cards with photos of Buck Palace and a reproduced signature?) but Alice was still as pleased as punch with it. Apparently, in order to get a telegram, someone has to send the details in good time to the Palace so they can be checked out. At least you don’t have to pay for them, yet.’

5 September 1997
‘Diana-mania has continued all week, and will culminate tomorrow with her funeral and mass crowds in London. Me and mine are all utterly cynical and find the whole thing amazing. In a chorus, which must have been coordinated in some way, the newspapers came out strongly against the Queen and the Royal Family on Wednesday for not speaking to the nation and by lunchtime she and they had reacted. This evening we had a five minute live broadcast by Queenie herself. A carefully crafted speech, full of the right words but not an ounce of feeling behind them. She did, though, say the Royal Family would learn from the lessons of Princess Diana. And she extended the route of the hearse to Westminster Abbey, thus allowing more people to line the roads. Millions are expected tomorrow - god help them all - just for a glimpse of the coffin. Even the excuse of wanting to be there for such a unique moment is pretty thin when you consider how much more of a real moment it would have been to see her alive. She attracted crowds when she was alive, but nothing like the crowds who are prepared to put up with horrendous conditions tomorrow just to see the car in which her coffin is riding!’

1 June 2002
‘All around is the Queen’s Jubilee. It means nothing to me, nothing at all. I’ve no problem with people finding an excuse to celebrate, but I see no reason to do so myself. The Prom at the Palace is probably under way by now - poor old Queenie she must be wondering what she’s done to deserve having her lawn and shrubs subjected to the tramplings and pickings and litterings of 12,000 commoners. It will only get worse on Monday, when the prom turns into a party, and the tramplers, pickers and litterers, all too genteel tonight, will be youthful and wild.’

4 June 2012
‘Yesterday was the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, though I don’t know why. She ascended the throne in February 1952, and her coronation was not until 1953, so how is June 1952 a proper anniversary of anything?

There has been, and continues to be, a lot of pomp and pageant. Yesterday saw a pretty amazing regatta on the Thames, with a 1,000 boats all joining an orderly procession with the Queen on ‘The Spirit of Chartwell’ and motoring/rowing from Wandsworth to Tower Bridge. Evidently, most of the TV coverage by the BBC was focused on the Queen and her entourage and any celebrities taking part, but I wanted to know a lot more about who was in all the hundreds of other boats and why they were there. Here at least is a list of the flotilla sections, which gives some idea of who took part: The Royal Jubilee Bells, Man-Powered Boats, Academy of Ancient Music, The Royal Squadron, The Band of Her Majesty’s Royal Marines Plymouth, Dunkirk Little Ships, Shree Muktajeevan Pipe Band and Dhol Ensemble, Historic Boats, The Jubilant Commonwealth Choir, Service, Steam and Working Vessels, Leisure Vessels, The New Water Music, Narrow Boats and Barges, The Mayor’s Jubilee Band, Passenger Boats, Rhythm on the River, Downriver Passenger Boats, London Philharmonic Orchestra. 

To be honest, I would have liked to be there . . . Unlike sports, where I usually feel the best seat is in the lounge, at least to watch the action, which to me is more important than the atmosphere, this regatta was something to be seen live, in the crowds on the banks of the river. Adam was due to come visit us yesterday, but I wrote him suggesting that surely he would want to see the regatta and that he could come down another day; and he decided to do just that. But, when I rang him yesterday afternoon, to get a first hand account, he wasn’t there, he was at home watching it on TV! He claimed the rain, and problems getting a viewing spot decided him against going.

Also yesterday there were Big Lunches up and down the country, and street parties carry on today and tomorrow (an extra public holiday) as well.’

31 August 2013
‘Adam has been to the Bank of England, and seen its gold, and held it in his hands. It’s very rare for anyone to get to do this, he tells me, and the last person was the Queen a few months ago. His minister has responsibility for the gold reserves, which is why he and Adam were there. In a few days, they go to Poland for a conference; then Adam goes to Spain for a week’s holiday. And then he starts his new job.’

20 June 2016
‘I watched some of the build up to the service at St Paul’s Cathedral this morning, and the service itself. Some 53 members of the royal family were there, along with British dignitaries and representatives of many organisations with whom the queen has had dealings with over the decades. She was dressed in sherbet yellow, from top to toe (well not her shoes), and tottered down the aisle with her hubby, also tottering, both some 15 minutes late (very unusual). David Attenborough read a piece of nostalgia by Michael Bond, author of the Paddington books (both also 90).’

5 April 2020
‘The Queen is giving a live broadcast tonight on TV. I wonder if this year is already turning out to be even more of an Annus Horribilis than 1992 was for her. I mean she’s lost her grandson from the royal family to someone who not only has coloured blood but is an American, and now her citizens are dying in their hundreds every day of some godawful disease.’

22 October 2021
‘The Queen was in hospital Wednesday afternoon (at least she didn’t have to wait many hours in an A&E queue - Cornwall apparently has only one emergency A&E and it declared a ‘critical incident’ because of the queues of ambulances waiting with patients). There appears no cause for alarm as she went home the following morning. But it was not many months ago that her husband was hospitalised for a few days, and then died not long after.’

2 June 2022
‘The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee - god bless her. 70 years on the throne, the longest in British history. We’ve been to a fete/party hosted by the Symondsbury Estate this lunchtime. It was pretty crowded out with families, enjoying the sun, the food, the drink. Red, white and blue bunting everywhere, not to mention cardboard cutouts and portraits of her majesty. Long trestle tables had been put out for picnicking, and if you’d pre-ordered a lunch box it was yours for the collecting, so long as you didn’t mind standing in a long queue. We, of course, brought our lunch, and took photos at the Jubilee party tables (as well as with the Queen, and while playing some of the fete games).’

Brighton Rock & Helter Skelter

Four decades ago I took part in a Brighton festival workshop on the famous novel Brighton Rock. It was an interesting experience, if a little disappointing. The workshop included entry to a short story competition with a £50 prize, and I duly entered. Exactly forty years ago today, I received notification that I’d won the competition and the £50 - it remains the only literary prize I’ve ever won. But, at the time, I was convinced - as my diary reveals - that I had been the only entrant. Many years later, after that particular diary entry had been published in my book Brighton in Diaries, one of the organisers of the competition emailed me to confirm that I had NOT been the only entrant - so I put that into my diary too. Here is the story of that prize - in three extracts from my diary

4 May 1992
‘Friday saw the opening of the Brighton festival with a splendid procession of children and their school-made dragons. For the whole of Saturday, I’d signed up for a Brighton Rock workshop but I had little idea what it would be like. I dutifully arrived on the Palace Pier a little before 10 and took a couple of pictures - the light was astonishingly bright and clear and the pier furbishings were looking as spanking new and clean as I’ve seen them; they must have had a coat of paint within the last few weeks and the glass in the windows had been spotlessly cleaned. The photos were similar to those I took ten years ago.

At 10 exactly, I approached the tiny group of people in the centre of the pavement at the entrance to the pier. The literature event organiser was there holding a wad of tickets; there was a large well-built man of around 50 introduced to me as Tony Masters who I didn’t know from Adam; otherwise there were two other punters like me - Jake, a dead ringer in character and pretensions for my old flatmate Andy, and Bob. Masters, who turned out to be quite a well known and prolific writer, never really recovered from the fact that so few people had signed up. I don’t know how many he was expecting - originally they had planned on a dozen or so but then thought a group of 4-6 would be better - but the organiser had twenty tickets or more. 

We removed to a banquet suite in the Albion Hotel where Tony talked a while about his working methods, about Brighton Rock (he had known Graham Greene) and about what we were going to do during the day - i.e. a walk in the morning and writing session in the afternoon. It turned out that Bob had never read the book Brighton Rock (he hadn’t even made an effort - I’ve been devouring it in the last few days, even though I read it a year ago) and had never penned a word of fiction in his life; while Jake who found it almost impossible to stop talking, never strayed from his favourite subject of films. However deprecatingly I might talk about these characters, there is no doubt in my mind that they added as much if not more to the day than I did.

I suppose I too was disappointed that the turnout was so small and that I was down on the level of an unemployed fantasist student and a computer programmer giving air to a slight whim. The walk was certainly a disappointment - we walked up and down the pier, passed the Forte’s cafe on the corner directly opposite the pier which was the setting for Snow’s. Tony insisted it would have been more sleazy in the time Greene researched the book but I thought otherwise - Rose says she couldn’t get another job as good and I suspect it was quite posh then, even more so than now. Tony said the same thing about the pier and the Albion hotel (where Greene stayed when in Brighton) but again I would have thought the pier would have been quite rich in those days given the amount of visitors it used to get. Our resident writer seemed determined to impose the sense of sleaze and squalidness that exudes out of the whole book on all the locations. We then walked up to Nelson Place which is where Pinkie grew up and where Rose’s parents live. Tony seemed to insist he could really feel “a sense of place” (the title of the workshop) in this location but I didn’t get anything from it all. 

For a while we sat in the pub Dr Brighton’s which in the book and formerly was the Star and Garter where Ida was often found. I suppose I knew Brighton too well already. There are dozens of locations around the city which have real character and feeling but, the pier apart, we didn’t go near any of them. After a short break for lunch we retired to the same room in the hotel. It became clear that Tony has a lot of experience of such workshops - he has worked a lot in schools it seems and written a lot for children - and was determined to maintain a highly positive attitude and wring something out of us. We had five minutes to write down the bone of an idea based on any inspiration we had had on the walk; then we were given a bit less than an hour to actually write up the idea.

Apart from general thoughts about the gaudiness of the attractions on the pier and the similarity perhaps with Brighton itself in some respects, three pictures on the pier had struck me: the sight of a lanky youth, standing silent and motionless staring at a video machine; a small boy who refused to walk over the slats of the pier because he could see water below and chose instead to walk along the boards laid down for pushchairs; and the colour of the sea - a translucent turquoise which seemed to have a light source of its own - as spotted between the slats when walking through a covered part of the pier.

Pressed into creating a story line and taking my cue from a simple example put forward by Tony himself, I turned the youth into a rather lonely character yet to leave home, addicted to the video machines, his only pleasure, and on the edge of making an important decision in his life. I have him watching the small boy choose the safe path over the boards and seeing himself. A group of lively youngsters enter the amusement arcade and stand near the youth. He starts thinking about how he has never met people like this and so on. I was surprised how much I actually wrote in the short space of time but I suppose that’s my experience as a journalist showing through. Although Tony insisted that one should enclose one’s characters into a finished plot and allow them room, I had sewn up my plot before I began writing. Tony said all one needs is to be able to see four or five scenes ahead (have a narrative thrust) and then one can write. Well, I couldn’t do this, I had already found the end to my story viz: the group of lively youngsters tease the youth and eventually nag him to come along with them for a bit. The first thing they do is go up the helter skelter. The youth, tied up in the imaginary world of the video games, has never actually been on any of the fairground rides and he is frightened sick of going to the top of the helter skelter and sliding down round virtually over the sea. Moreover, he has to spend his last coin of the day. The story finishes as he begins his slide down - a symbol really that he must begin his real life.

Pretty crass eh! Well, what can one do in 45 minutes. Jake wrote three sentences in Tom Wolfe style about a film star (Cher-like) who has come to Brighton to film a few scenes but falls over on the pier and is going to have an affair with a young street-wise lad. Bob also wrote just a few words about a tailor’s shop he’d seen. They were highly descriptive and emotive even and promised well.

We talked for an hour or so about these attempts. Jake found my writing Kafkaesque, Bob liked it and Tony explained that I wrote rather economically without much description, that I didn’t waste words. He said whereas from Bob’s contribution he could touch the scene, with mine he got a strong visual sense. I don’t think he made any judgement as to whether it was any good or not, nor can I think of anything he said that might actually help me write the story better. Oh yes, he said I was very observant.

 The cost of the workshop also includes the chance to send in a story (max 3,000 words) to the organisers who will then award a £50 price as well as provide some constructive criticism. I shall certainly take advantage of that offer. If just three people turn up at the second of the two workshops and every participant sends in a story, I would still have a 15% chance of winning the prize!

 I have to say that I liked Tony and found myself very much on his wavelength - I could tell in advance what pictures he might point out (at one point he was saying that one was unlikely to meet a Pinkie character these days but just at that moment two punks passed us in the street and we both acknowledged the irony of that) - and I could agree with much of what he said about other writers and films. At over 50, he has been a writer for thirty years he said, and is clearly much in demand, for films and television, and also pushes out a lot of books. I suppose if I were ever to be a writer, I would want to have as varied a portfolio as this man.’

5 August 1992
‘ “I am delighted,” Adrian Slack, organiser of the literature part of the Brighton Festival, writes, “to inform you that you have won first prize in the short story competition. I enclose a cheque for £50”. Well, well, well. My first ever literature success. Well, it would be if I wasn’t reasonably sure that I was probably the only entrant. Shame I didn’t get second and third prize as well. The story - Helter Skelter - was supposed to be read by several judges and a critique provided, that might have been more useful than the £50 prize.’

3 January 2014
‘Here we are three days into the new year. I’ve just received this message: “Hello Paul, Thoroughly enjoyed Brighton in Diaries and feel it was a brilliant idea well-executed. That was my opinion long before reaching Chapter 26. Loved your memory of Woodvale 1977 and then Brighton Festival Events! I’ve not thought of the Brighton Rock writing workshop & competition in many years and laughed at/with your snapshot of Tony’s disappointment. Adrian had hired me to show Tony around the landscape of the novel, but from your comments re Snow’s location, etc. it seems Tony did not take on my ideas. I disagree with everyone who tries to lather Brighton solely with the sleaze and squalidness brush. As the third judge in the writing competition, I can confirm you were not the sole entrant, but have absolutely no memory of whether Adrian required us to write a critique of the entries. With good wishes for a Happy New Year, Maire McQueeney’. I googled her to find she’s involved with literary stuff round Brighton, and probably lives round the corner in Warleigh Road. A few years ago, Hat and I did a walking tour around this area led by a woman who lived in Warleigh Road, and it may well be her.’

Rum in the Galapagos

Forty five years ago today, I celebrated my birthday - on the Galapagos Islands. I should have a diary entry for that day as well as for all the days in the two months that I’d been travelling in South America, only my journal was in a bag that was stolen some weeks later. This lost diary is, in fact, the only significant break in my adult diaries, otherwise running from 1974 to the present day. Nevertheless, I have a few diary-like letters (sent to family and friends) which go some way to filling in that gap. Here is one covering not only my rum-infused birthday on the Galapagos Islands (28 May 1976), but my being laid low by hepatitis.

10 June 1976
‘[Lima] I am laid up with hepatitis. To start at the beginning I had odd days on the Galapagos Islands when I felt completely wiped out for some reason. When I got back to Ecuador I took a long ride through the night to the mountain city where I had left some possessions. On the way I felt very tired, terrible sometimes. I was with friends who had had hepatitis but they weren’t sure about my symptoms. I decided to head for Lima in the night - two nights and a day of bussing constantly. I would normally have stopped at many places and probably hitchhiked and taken a week to get here, but I felt the need to be in a big city. When I got there, I went first to the British Embassy to get my letters. They told me of a hospital which was expensive but clean. It was a long way away, and once there I had to wait a long time. But a doctor confirmed I had hepatitis. He said I must stay in bed for at least two weeks. No walking, no alcohol, no chocolate, little grease, lots and lots of rest.

It was terribly depressing to walk out of that hospital in a completely strange city, having been told that I must not walk but must stay in bed for weeks or else it will get worse. What to do, where to go, I had no idea. I am not sure if my insurance will pay for the accommodation and food while I am laid up, but I have assumed so and am staying at a hotel three times more expensive than my norm. It has a little cafe where I can eat most of my meals, so I won’t have to walk too far.

So it is Thursday 10 June. I sit in the little cafe on the first morning of my self-imposed rest. Ironically, I feel very well, but I am pissed off beyond all measure. It would help if I a friend who could get me odd bits and pieces from the shops. My books are all read. I’m told hepatitis sometimes lasts for months, but, because I feel good, I am hoping that a week of rest will be sufficient. Even a week without reading material will drive me crazy.

I do know a young guy who lives in Lima. I met him for a few days in Panama. I will ring him today. Also I’m expecting other friends to be travelling through Lima soon. I just hope I can contact them. Any way there is no need to worry, I’m looking after myself and resting against my nature. And I have faith that it is only a mild attack - and in 10 days I’ll be fitter than a lion.

I did get to the Galapagos Islands which was something else. As I may have mentioned it is very expensive for foreigners to go there: the aeroplane ticket is more than twice as expensive than it is for Ecuadorians. There is also a cruise, but the cheapest is $250. I spent a restless night or two deciding that it was not worth it for that price; and then I decided to hassle around looking for a cheap way to get there. I went to the worst and largest city in Ecuador, Guayaquil, and investigated various possibilities: the navy, the air force, different cruises, cargo boats. Dejected and beaten I tried one last thing. I went to loads of different travel agent until I found one that didn’t seem to know about the tourist law. Keeping very cool and doing things very carefully I managed to get an Ecuadorian return air ticket for $65 as opposed to a tourist ticket for $145. Both going and returning I had frightening moments as my ticket was checked (thinking the mismatch between the ticket and my obvious appearance as a tourist would get me into trouble), but it was fine.

It’s expensive on the islands too. To get the best deal one has to hire a boat, to cruise round the island, and fill it with eight people. It is a very touristy scene, but nothing can be done about it. I spent one week in the main settlement (it’s full of characters from all over the world) waiting for people to fill a boat, and the other week travelling around the islands. They are all tips of volcanoes, sticking out of the sea, some old, and some new just 100 years old (a mass of cracked black lava). There is a lot of beautiful emptiness, but of course the main attraction is the wildlife that is not so wild.

Sitting in the little port of the main village I saw the following: a pelican or two sitting on a post fishing, a heron (a giant blue one) doing nothing, lots of 2-3ft long marine iguanas crawling around the rocks, thousands of little lizards, mocking birds that will land on you, lots of beautiful fish in the clear water, and a seal. Around the islands, I saw: thousands of sea lions and seals all without fear of humans (one can swim with them), penguins, fearless land iguanas up to 4ft long (landing on their island these enormous lizards come trundling down to meet you), hawks and doves that come within two feet of you, and flamingoes. On the boat trip we ate only fresh meat killed the same day: goat, tuna, durado (white fish), lobster and crab. And, of course there are the giant tortoises - enormous things. They are threatened by the introduced animals like the rat and goat, and are therefore being cared for and protected by the research stations where one can see them at all stages of their life.

Heh, I’m 24, how about that. I’ve never been 24 before. We had a little celebration in the Galapagos. The Islands had run out of beer so we got drunk on rum.’

The Stars Look Down

It is 40 years today since the death of the Scottish writer A. J. Cronin. One of his best books - The Stars Look Down - was turned into a great British movie, produced by Igee Goldsmith and directed by Carol Reed. As far as I know Cronin never kept a diary, but since Igee was my own grandfather and I am a great fan of the film and the book, I’d like to mark the anniversary with the only diary link to Cronin I can find - a couple of entries from my own diaries!

Cronin was born in 1896 in Cardross, the Scottish lowlands, but, after his father died, he grew up in Dumbarton. A first class sportsmen, he also excelled academically and - having served in the navy for a couple of years - graduated in medicine from Glasgow University in 1919. He married Agnes Mary Gibson in 1921, and they had three children.

Cronin’s first medical practice was in a Welsh mining town; and then, in 1924, he was appointed Medical Inspector of Mines for Great Britain. This work led him to publish reports on the links between coal dust inhalation and lung disease. He moved to a practice in Harley Street, London, before starting his own in Notting Hill. However, in 1930, illness forced him to take a break from work, and this allowed him time to write his first novel, Hatter’s Castle. It was such a publishing success that he never returned to medicine.

Subsequently, Cronin wrote about one novel each year in the 1930s; he then moved to the US, where he lived until the mid-1950s, with frequent visits to Europe, especially to Cap-d’Ail in southeast France. For the last 25 years of his life, though, he lived in Switzerland. He died in Montreux on 6 January 1981. More biographical details are available at Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica, and The Huffington Post has an article about Cronin’s move to Hollywood.

Cronin is probably best remembered today for creating Dr Finlay, the title character in a long-running TV series; and for his book The Citadel, also made into a film, which is said to have contributed to the establishment of the National Health Service in Great Britain by exposing the injustice and incompetence of medical practice at the time.

The Stars Look Down, published in 1935, is set in a fictional town in the northeast of England, and weaves a story around a coal mine and three men: a miner’s son who is studying to become a doctor; a miner who becomes a businessman; and the son of the mine owner. The film version was produced in 1940 by my grandfather Igee Goldsmith, who a few years earlier had fled from Germany having been placed on Hitler’s black list for importing socialist movies like All Quiet on the Western Front. Carol Reed, who went on to make The Third Man which is considered one of greatest British movies, directed The Stars Look Down; and the cast included several young actors who would go on to become famous: Michael Redgrave, Margaret Lockwood and Emlyn Williams.

Apart from being thoughtful and telling a great story, the film has thrilling scenes in which shaft constructions give way and the mine floods trapping a group of miners deep below the surface. There is a clear socialist message in the book and the film suggesting that such accidents were inevitable so long as the coal industry was run by a large number of small owners, rather than operated by the government within a nationalised industry. The famous American film critic Pauline Kael said of the film: ‘[It] has an understanding, an achieved beauty, that Carol Reed was never again able to sustain.’

Much as I would like to ramble on about Igee (and his second wife, Vera Caspary, who wrote the famous American novel Laura, also made into a film) I realise I have already strayed far enough from the main subject. Here, then, are the two entries in my own diary which refer to Cronin.

8 July 1987
‘. . . I should mention The Stars Look Down. I’m currently reading the novel and find a family called Todd (who do not appear in the film) which is of course my mother’s maiden name . . . And in this [fictional] family I find a Laura Todd and an Adam Todd - Laura and Adam being the very two names we are currently considering for our baby [to be born in the next couple of months]. A. J. Cronin’s book is divided into three books. Yesterday, as I approached the end of Book 1, an enormous thrill filled me for I realised the film was essentially only made from a fraction of the novel. The great disaster scene, which forms the film’s climax, so brilliantly done too, comes at the end of Book 1. A few sub-plots further on have been incorporated - David Fenwick’s discovery of his wife’s adultery, Joe Gowlan’s further rise in society, Fenwick’s dismissal from school. But with two-thirds of the book to go, I can look forward to considerable development and perhaps, just perhaps, a happy rather than a sad ending.’

19 December 1987
‘Cronin’s The Stars Look Down in many ways is a profoundly pessimistic novel. Satisfying in that it weaves the stories of many well drawn characters in and out of each other and in so doing creates a tapestry of the times, rich in colour and detail and action. But Cronin must have been deeply upset at the way British politics and society was moving. All the decent and upright characters find their life’s efforts rewarded by failure, while those who are greedy and even nasty do well. The heroes find some success in the world but Cronin tends to smash it down. The baddies are never more than incidental, but they succeed in the world. Cronin does not even make a very good job out of showing their nastiness and the consequences on the people around them. He has taken on a bitterness about the day’s politics and unleashes it through the novel. I remember discovering that the novel I’d had for years but never looked at contained two more parts than were filmed for the movie by my grandfather. How excited I felt to be able to learn more about the film’s characters, see them develop on and find some justice in the world. Clearly Goldsmith and director Carol Reed captured the mood of the entire book in the film even if they only used one-third of it.’

Happy days with Peggy

‘All day with Peggy Ashcroft reading through Happy Days. Magnificent play. It excited me to hear her read it.’ Today marks the 110th anniversary of Peggy Ashcroft, a grand dame of 20th century British theatre. Although not a diarist herself, cameos of her can be found in the diaries of others, not least the theatre director Peter Hall (writer of the above diary entry) and the film director Lindsay Anderson. I, also, have a brief diary entry about Ashcroft - on seeing her at a world premiere of a film with a screenplay by Harold Pinter.

Ashcroft was born on 22 December 1907 in Croydon, Surrey, the youngest child of a land agent who would die during WWI. She was educated locally, until, aged 16, she determined to become an actress and so she enrolled at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. She made her professional stage debut, while still a student, at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre playing opposite Ralph Richardson; and she graduated with a Diploma in Dramatic Art in 1927. She went to work for small touring companies, but in 1929 made a successful debut in the West End playing Naemi in Jew Süss. The same year, she married another actor (later a publisher) Rupert Hart-Davis, though the marriage was short-lived ending in divorce in 1933 (on the grounds of Ashcroft’s adultery with Theodore Komisarjevsky who, in 1934, she married).

In 1930, Ashcroft’s Desdemona in a production of Othello at the Savoy Theatre, starring Paul Robeson, brought her increased attention. Beginning in 1932, her appearances with the Old Vic Company (run by Lilian Baylis) established her reputation, in Shaw’s Cleopatra, for example, as Juliet in John Gielgud’s production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and as Cecily in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.  During the 1930s, she also starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Thirty-nine Steps, and she made her American stage debut as Lise in Maxwell Anderson’s High Tor (1937). After her marriage to Komisarjevsky failed, and during the war, she married a lawyer, Jeremy Hutchinson, with whom she had two children, returning, after a break, to the West End and Broadway in 1947.

Ashcroft continued to star in West End and touring productions throughout the 1950s, but in 1958 agreed to join Peter Hall’s newly-formed Royal Shakespeare Company for which she played many starring roles through the 1960s and 1970s. From 1973, she also appeared at the National Theatre where Hall had been appointed director. Although she retired from the stage in the early 1980s, Ashcroft appeared in several successful films and TV productions, notably The Jewel in the Crown and A Passage to India. She was garlanded with honours, at home and abroad, being made a CBE in 1951 and a DBE in 1956, as well as film and theatre industry awards including a special Laurence Olivier Award (1991), the year she died. Further information can be found at Wikipedia, Screen Online, Encyclopaedia Britannica, The Washington Post, The New York Times.

There is no obvious evidence that Ashcroft kept a diary, but she regularly crops up in other people’s diaries, notably those published by the theatre director Peter Hall and the film director
Lindsay Anderson. See below for extracts from both Hall’s and Anderson’s diaries, as well as one short extract from my own diary.

From Lindsay Anderson’s diaries:

22 January 1966
‘Call in on Jocelyn, who is drawn and shattered but in control. Peggy [Ashcroft] there: we greet with warmth. What is there to say, beyond that expression of sympathy which so exhausts, making one feel the emptiness of one’s heart. Am rather touched when she asks me to escort her to the funeral - and also by the pages which George [Devine] left of the start of his autobiography. ‘For me the theatre is a temple of ideas . . .’

25 January 1966
‘George’s funeral: Peggy had asked me to escort her . . . I get to her house in Frognal lane about 11.30. . . A cup of coffee first. . .  I like Peggy, but there is a sort of mannered constraint about her. . . As we drove she said how she’s thought about George - and been impelled to write it all down: she had been in twenty-five productions with him . . . The funeral: all woeful and treading on emotional glass. We are shepherded by a pale Julian Lousada round to a sort of porch at the side of the chapel, where we wait in a hush. It is sort of awkward because we find it difficult to be spontaneous about such solemnity.’

9 April 1970
‘Thursday. The Council Meeting of the English Stage Company, and the inevitable collapse before the Arts Council threat of withdrawal of subsidy if Hilary Spurling is not reinvited. I tried to propose a press statement first, simply making public the Arts Council’s blackmailing attempt. . . But only Jocelyn and Robin supported it. Interestingly, Oscar and John Osborne were both for immediate capitulation: Peggy Ashcroft’s worried, charming, stupid liberal face radiated desire for the relief and calm of appeasement from the other end of the table . . . Blacksell popped his eyes stupidly, and with incredibly obstinate persistence reiterated his belief that Hilary Spurling ’wasn’t worth it’, and his confidence (genuine or just an excuse or self-deception?) that the Arts Council would be willing to conduct the important discussions about dramatic criticism we’d asked for, after the tiresome difficulty had been disposed of . . . Bill veered erratically, but had abandoned his radical position of the week before.

So we are carried poshly from Le Moulin d’Or to the lawyer’s offices in Tony’s limousine . . . They are all gathered - Greville [Poke] in the chair, George Harewood making one of his rare, much appreciated appearances, John Osborne, careful to sit as far as possible away from Tony (they no longer speak), Peggy [Ashcroft] in a sort of white denim trouser suit, with cap, looking quite dashing and (if you know her) rather preposterous: as if playing Helene Weigel in the Gunter Grass Brecht play at the Aldwych has gone to her head. . .’

From Peter Hall's diaries:

14 April 1972
‘To supper at Peggy Ashcroft’s. She understands what is driving me to the National. Is glad that I am going back to running a theatre, as it is what she thinks I have to do. But she is very sad I am moving away from the RSC. Is this the end of fifteen years work together? It can’t be.’

21 April 1974
‘Peggy and I crept out of the Nunns’ house at quarter to ten, leaving Trevor and Janet still fast asleep. We collected Jenny and Christopher, who were staying with a friend, and then Peggy drove us back to Wallingford.

Peggy is one of those ladies who cannot talk and drive. She makes extravagant gestures and her hands disconcertingly leave the wheel. When I told her that she was a potato in Leicester - that the theatre bar there had a ‘Spud Ashcroft’ stuffed with prawns, she took both hands off the wheel and waved them about with pleasure and amazement. We nearly hit a lorry.

Jenny and Christopher got us lunch back at Wallingford, then we sat in the sun for the afternoon. Jenny talked a good deal to Peggy about Avoncliffe, for Peggy remembers the house well and lived in it for long periods before we did. I am still amazed by Jenny’s inaccuracies. She says, in the childhood memories section, that when Leslie and I split she did not see her mother for two years and didn’t recognise her when she met her. In fact it was two months.’

6 May 1974
‘The Old Vic’s Lilian Baylis celebration, Tribute to the Lady. I had viewed it with foreboding. In the event, it was a very good evening. By far the best item, the achievement, was Lilian Baylis herself, amazingly portrayed by Peggy Ashcroft. It was one of the finest performances I have seen her give. You can always tell when an actor is absolutely creating. Conventional timing, normality, is broken. The rhythm of speech, the rhythm of the body, become something different. This happened to Peggy tonight.

She presented that strange. Cockney, busybodying, straightlaced, crooked-mouthed eternal mother, bossing everybody about - and created a genuine eccentric. And what a mystery it all is. There would be no Royal Ballet, no National Theatre, and I shouldn’t think much Royal Opera, and certainly no Sadler’s Wells, without the dotty, single- minded, good works of Miss Lilian Baylis. Joan Littlewood, though less the do-gooder and more the revolutionary, is in the same tradition.’

16 August 1974
‘All day with Peggy Ashcroft reading through Happy Days. Magnificent play. It excited me to hear her read it. Hard to do well but quite evident what has to be done. A very funny, touching piece: I think one of the masterpieces of the last twenty years. My spirits rose and I longed to begin on it.’

From my own diaries:

25 June 1989
‘The heatwave continues. Cloudless blue skies. Warm languid evenings. Hot dusty days, watering-can days. Half the year nearly over.

B and I went up to Aldeburgh together for I’d bought two tickets for a film premiere at the quaint old cinema, one with a visit by some of the stars promised. The film we saw was another adaptation of an Elizabeth Bowen novel - The Heat of the Day. Dame Peggy Ashcroft has a cameo role, and it was she who graced the cinema with her presence. Though, seeing her there seated in front of us, we imagined her to have had a bigger role in the film. The main actors, Michael York, Patricia Hodge and Michael Gambon were not present. The little cinema was the fullest I’ve ever seen it, nine-tenths of the audience, however, were grey and white-haired old women. Calling the event a ‘world premiere’ was a little grand if understandable. In fact, the film has been made for the BBC, and is quite clearly a TV movie, many close-ups and small sets. It was well-made (screenplay by Harold Pinter).’

How I saved the Balfour papers!

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. This was, in effect, a statement of support by the UK government for the establishment in Palestine of a home for Jewish people. Such is the historical importance of the Declaration that an original autograph memorandum of the text was sold (along with other papers) in 2005 for the staggering sum of $884,000. Yet, had it not been for me - albeit unwittingly - these papers may never have come into the public domain. In hearsay evidence of this claim, I offer unedited extracts from my diaries.

The Balfour Declaration was contained in a letter, dated 2 November 1917, sent by the UK’s Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community. It read: ‘His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’ A week after Balfour sent the letter, it was published in newspapers around the world, and support from other nations followed. The Declaration had major long-term consequences, not least in the foundation of Israel.

In 2005, Sotheby’s, New York, put up a surprising lot for sale, Lot 217: ‘Two original drafts of the Balfour Declaration, part of the highly important Zionist Archive of Leon Simon, which also includes a signed letter from Chaim Weizmann asking his colleagues to review the draft, and further documents concerning the formulation of the Balfour Declaration, and of the British Mandate in Palestine.’ The lot also included many handwritten and typed letters, telegrams, essays and memoranda.

In a catalogue note, Sotheby’s explained the context: ‘Foundation documents for the State of Israel including the autograph memorandum of the text which would later be issued, with the war cabinet’s modifications, as the Balfour Declaration, made at the 17 July 1917 meeting of the Zionist Political Committee at the Imperial Hotel, on Hotel stationery, by Leon Simon, a key participant. This was the text sent to Balfour for his approval. If the Declaration of Independence can be viewed as the first formal political step in the foundation of the United States, then the Balfour Declaration can be so viewed in the history of Israel, and the present memorandum is the equivalent of an autograph draft of the text by Thomas Jefferson. Few documents can be owned that are more evocative of the hopes and dreams of the Jewish people for the formation of Israel, or that have had greater political impact on the present-day world.’ The auction house estimated the sale price as between $500,000 and $800,000 - it sold for $884,000.

The two key documents - the autographed memorandum drawn up by Leon Simon and the typed version with hand-written notes - were put on display for the first time earlier this year in a joint exhibition of the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS) in New York City and the National Museum of Jewish History (NMJH) in Philadelphia - 1917: How One Year Changed the World. ‘This little paragraph on a piece of paper,’ said Rachel Lithgow, director of AJHS in New York, gave ‘a downtrodden people hope after 2,000 years.’ See Smithsonian.com for more on the exhibition. Incidentally, the photographs included in the article of the two drafts are credited ‘courtesy of Martin Franklin’, presumably the current owner of the documents.

The provenance provided by Sotheby’s for lot 217 was that the papers had been ‘purchased from the estate of Miss Aviva Simons [sic]’ (daughter of Leon Simon) - a simple fact that was slightly elaborated in newspapers articles around the world describing the seller as ‘anonymous’. But, thanks to my diaries I can add significant details to that simple fact. This is because I was there, in Aviva Simon’s house sorting out the very books and papers to be sold. After her death, David, one of the trustees or executor (I’m not quite sure which) of her estate engaged Andrew to clear the house while realising as much money as he could from the contents. Andrew, who was a good friend of mine and of David’s daughter, had some considerable experience of dealing in second hand goods. I was at a loose end so volunteered to help him out. For the rest I must defer to my diary.

17 December 2003
‘I’ve been helping Andrew to sort out the mess in a house once owned by Aviva Simon, who died earlier this year. Aviva, a spinster, was the daughter of Sir Leon Simon and Lady Ellen Simon. Sir Simon was Postmaster General for 20 years, he was also a well-known zionist leader and he translated the works of the Zionist leader Ahad Haam. He also wrote a biography of the man. Lady Ellen Simon’s maiden name was Umanski. Her brother, Arthur Umanski, changed his name to Underwood. He was a chemical engineer and something of an academic in the subject too. As far as I can work out, Aviva inherited 154 Hanover Road (near Willesden Green) from her mother, who must have inherited it from her brother. The house, which is an unbelievable tip, contains personal effects belonging not only to Aviva, but also to Leon Simon, Ellen Simon and Underwood. But there is no order to any of the things in the house, and most of everything is hidden inside plastic bags, inside plastic bags, inside plastic bags.

Andrew has been employed by David, who is the father of Offra (who lives in Spain and who I know), who is an executor (although Andrew has been using the word trustee - so I must check on that) of Aviva’s estate. David is related to Aviva somehow, but I’m not clear on that either. Andrew is being paid £120 a day to clear out the house, plus he’ll get 10% of the income he raises from selling the effects. The idea is to try and raise some cash from the belongings, rather than just getting in a house clearance service. So, Andrew is determined to pick through every last plastic bag, every last matchbox, every last tin (there’s a lot of old tins), every last drawer in search of treasures. When he told me about the job, and the 1,000s of books, I volunteered to help.

I went up on Monday. Since he’d arranged for a book dealer friend to come in during the afternoon, our first priority was to try and expose all the books. There was one large room, which Andrew hadn’t yet touched, and so I set to on that one. Although the room, like the rest of the house, was a complete tip (imagine a rubbish dump with 200 plastic bags piled up around old furniture), there were no rats or live insects; and generally everything was clean rather than dirty - although very dusty. So, it was not such a trial to work through everything. Andrew kept hoping to find a holy grail, something worth a lot of money, but I only found things worth a modest amount - a few nice pieces of material, gold fillings, a few old coins. For me, the interest was in the books and the papers. There were so many papers, so many letters and correspondence; every suitcase, every handbag, every drawer, every sturdy file, was crammed with papers of one description or another, from bills to share certificates, to invitations to Simon’s 70th birthday, to discussions about what should be done with Simon’s books. Andrew has little interest in books, or in the papers, he likes the trinkets, the crockery and the paintings. 

Andrew’s friend Piers came and stayed a couple of hours. A day later he phoned through with an offer of £3,000, which was a lot more than I was expecting. Andrew said Piers had found three valuable books - but we don’t know whether that means they’re worth £500 a piece or triple that; nor do we know which books they are. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if Piers had invented the three books of value, I mean it might be two or four, and by telling us three he’s guarding against Andrew or I informing any other bookdealer to look for three gems (for if they’re are only two, another dealer might search to midnight and not find the third, or if they’re are four, he might stop looking at number three) - seems a bit paranoid though. I suggested we should get another quote, and I volunteered to organise that. But it was only once I got on the phone that I realised I didn’t have enough information about the collection, and so I wasn’t able to sell it sufficiently to prospective viewers. I have though, in the end, got two people coming. But now I feel I need to get the books into a better order than they are, which means I’ll have to spend the rest of the week there.

Part of the interest for me has been uncovering the family histories and connections, through the letters. It took a while, but I finally worked out that a library in Oxford had already received most of Leon Simon’s books, once in 1993, when his wife died, and more recently when Aviva’s sister, who had a separate lot of her father’s books, donated 600 volumes. I also discovered that Underwood lectured at University College and had an equation named after him!’

23 December 2003
‘I spent more time at the Simon house, on Friday and Saturday. I had arranged for two book dealers to come and offer for the books; but neither of them were interested in making a real effort. One offered £400, and the other didn’t even bother offering once I’d told him we’d had an offer in the thousands (he even assumed it was only £1,000). I realised that the dealers who advertise regularly in yellow pages and the Ham & High are those who are looking for a quick buck, to make a killing, not real dealers prepared to put the time and effort into handling a large quantity of moderately-priced books. I’ve also done some research on the internet, mostly on a site called Biblion, where dealers can advertise their antiquarian books. I found, for example, examples of Picturesque Palestine (four volumes) sells for around £700 in good condition (Piers had signalled that this was one of the valuable books in the collection); and that a couple of books I brought home with me (first editions of a P.G. Wodehouse novel and one of a Bertrand Russel book) might be worth £30-50. In fact, there’s probably 100 or more first editions which could be worth £20 apiece - not to a dealer, but sale price. And I’m sure there’s a dozen or more books that are worth more, plus several hundred more which might be a worth a fiver each. Following my failure to get any higher offers, I expect the books will be sold to Piers. But we still have the problem of what to do with the Judaica (a 1,000 or so books on Jewish history, Palestine, Zionism etc). I’ve contacted a couple of dealers, at least one of whom believes he may have seen the collection some years ago; and I’m also trying to persuade Andrew we should consider auctioning them, but it would cost money to get an auctioneer out to evaluate them. Andrew’s gone out to Spain for Christmas, so the clearance is on hold for a while; I may get back involved to follow through with trying to dispose of the Judaica.’

12 January 2004
‘Went to London yesterday. First to Kensal Rise, to the Simon/Underwood house, to join Andrew and a Jewish expert, Moshe Rosenfeld, to look over the Jewish books. Moshe spent a couple of hours in the house, but he seemed more interested in chatting about general Jewish things, than in really giving us much info on the books. He wasn’t very enthusiastic about the collection, largely because of its strong Zionist focus, but, later, when he went to have another look at the books, he kept looking at individual volumes and saying they might be valuable. I don’t think he knew that much. He said he would talk to a friend of his, a real book dealer, later that day and get back to Andrew. I expect I’ll hear him from him tonight.’

24 January 2004
‘Andrew’s finally decided what to do with the books. He’s selling them to a Jewish dealer for £3,000. This is the same price as his friend Piers offered right at the start, before I interfered and said we should get a Jewish dealer in to look at the Judaica. But Andrew’s happy because the Jewish dealer (Weisse somebody or other, a friend of the Moshe that Andrew and I met a couple of Sundays ago) will take all the books (thus clearing them from the house) and will take them himself, whereas Piers had asked Andrew to bring them up to Suffolk for him. The added benefit of this deal, so Andrew tells me, is that Weisse has not looked at the non-Judaica books, even though he’s included them in his offer of £3,000. Initially, he had offered only £1,700 for the Judaica, but, on being told about the existing bid, he upped his offer to £3,000 for all the books.’

There’s nothing further in my diary about the Simon estate until 18 months later.

30 June 2005
‘On the phone, Andrew told me about the saga of The Balfour Declaration. The package of papers put together for sale at Sothebys in New York on 16 June went for over $800.000. However, Aviva Simon’s estate, for whom Andrew and I did the clearance, has been heavily involved in trying to claw back some of the value. There was an attempt, as I understand it, to bring an injunction to stop the auction, but that didn’t succeed, and then Sotheby’s suggested a 50:50 split between the vendor (Weisman, I think) and the Aviva Simon estate, but the vendor was having none of that. And now there’s a legal battle under way, in which the Aviva Simon estate (relying heavily on Andrew’s testimony and paperwork) is trying to prove that Weisman only bought the Simon books, not the papers - and it’s the papers that made up the Balfour Declaration lot. There were apparently two receipts, one handwritten by Andrew which did not mention papers, and a second, months later asked for by Weisman, typed up and on headed notepaper. For this second receipt, Weisman asked for the list of contents to be changed to include ‘papers’. Or so the story goes. The Aviva Simon estate is concerned about the way Weisman obtained the second receipt. Although it does seem clear that Weisman did know of the Balfour Declaration papers by the time he asked for the second receipt, it’s not clear that he knew they were there when he bought them from us for £3,000. I’m not sure what will happen, but it may be a question of one side calling the bluff of the other. I mean David could ask for a police prosecution, and Weisman might prefer not to have to bother with dealing with that; on the other, David might be told by the police to bog off; or Weisman might be prepared to brazen it out.’

I don’t know how the dispute was ever resolved but, if the story in my diary is correct, it’s clear that a dealer of some description called Weisman (or similar name) bought the materials from the Aviva Simon estate for £3,000. He was astute enough at some point to recognise the importance of the Balfour Declaration papers, and subsequently clever enough to make a lot of money out of them. But, if I hadn’t stalled Andrew from selling them to the first book dealer as I did (with the aim of extracting more value from the books and Judaica in particular) those papers might never have seen the light of day. It’s all too easy to imagine the two scraps of paper in a recycling bin! Moreover - though, this is more speculative - if the estate had followed my suggestion to bring the books and papers to auction itself, it may have realised far more than £3,000, and my friend Andrew’s 10% might have looked like treasure after all.