It Just Occurred to Me..

The reminiscences Of Humphrey Lyttelton.
ROBSON BOOKS

First published in the United Kingdom in 2006 by
Robson Books
151 Freston Road
London
W10 6TH
An imprint ofAnova Books Company Ltd
Copyright © Humphrey Lyttelton, 2006

The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any
form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of
the copyright owner.

ISBN 1 86105 901 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library.

All photographs and illustrations are from the authors private
collection.

10987654321

Reproduction by Anorax Imaging Ltd, Leeds.

Typeset by SX Composing DTP, Rayleigh, Essex

Printed and bound by Creative Print & Design, Ebbw Vale, Wales

This book can be ordered direct from the publisher.
Contact the marketing department, but try your bookshop first.
www.anovabooks.com

1
In memory ofJill.



INTRODUCTION

As someone who is often called upon to present concerts or
similar events, I have many times uttered the words 'our guest
tonight needs no introduction . . .'

So far as this book is concerned, its not just that it doesn't need
one. Its almost impossible to write one. What's it about? How did
I come to write it? Why that title? You might as well ask, when I've
just played five choruses of the St Louis Blues on the trumpet,
"What have you just played, and why?' It's not for nothing that I
have, for nigh on thirty years, been chairman of a BBC radio show
called I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue. (Actually it very nearly is for
nothing, but that's between me and the Corporation).

It just occurred to me that writing this book has been very
similar to blowing an extended solo on the trumpet. Really, it's
just been a matter of following thoughts wherever they've led,
through a jungle of ideas and memories, quotations and cliches,
high notes, blue notes and, no doubt, a few wrong notes, for
which I apologise in advance. On second thoughts, no, I don't.
You'll get precious few right notes if you worry about hitting
wrong notes.

There will be quite frequent interruptions by someone who
calls himself Chairman Humph. Why do I allow this? Because it's
nice to know that there is someone else, if only an alter ego, to
blame if things go wrong.

Humphrey Lyttelton

P.S. If you're from the BBC, I was only joking. Well, you have
to, don't you?

Does the average man get enough sleep? What is 'the
average man'? What is 'enough sleep'? What is 'does'?

Robert Benchley, opening one of his humorous articles in the
New Yorker

And what an opening! It's one of many things in print and in
conversation that I wish I had thought of myself. But, as the
neglectful picnicker so rightly says when berated for leaving the
tin-opener out of the hamper, you can't think of everything.

It is, nevertheless, just the sort of opening I need to get this
book off the launching pad. When I say to people that I'm
working on a book, the first question that comes back at me like
a Federer return of service is 'Oh, really - what's it about?' If I tell
the truth and say that it's a random hotchpotch of thoughts and
experiences that have occurred to me over the years, they tend to
utter that meaningful syllable 'Mmmm ...' and turn away with a
thought-bubble appearing above their heads saying: 'I'm not sure
I want to read a hotchpotch - give me a book that's got a
beginning, a middle and an end.' It's hardly more enticing if I
adopt a cunning expression and say, Ah, you'll have to read it and
see,' suggesting as it does that they must plough through two
hundred or so pages in the hope that the answer will be revealed
at the very end, like the denouement in a whodunnit.

^     Nevertheless, a hotchpotch of thought and memories it is. If
that sounds vague, then I must ask, what else but vague are
random thoughts and memories? There's no butler of the mind to
usher them in - A thought to see you, sir - it wishes to discuss
existentialism.' No, mostly they just wander in and out of the
room uninvited, like children, cats or hospital cleaners. For
instance, it just occurred to me as I read these paragraphs through,
that in the last few minutes I've written the word 'nevertheless'
twice without having the slightest idea what it means. So I've
taken the dictionary off the shelf and it says, 'for all that,
notwithstanding'. I'm sorry, but I haven't the faintest idea what
they mean either, now I come to look at it. How easy it is for
thoughts to run away with you, and you do have to be careful.
One doesn't want to incur the charge of 'piling Pelion on Ossa. I
first heard that quotation when I was working on the Daily Mail
as a cartoonist in the late forties.

The job came about through what I suppose could be termed
the Young Pals' Act. In the band known as George Webb's
Dixielanders, wherein I made my debut as an ensemble member
(or, as we say in the trade, 'sideman'), the clarinettist was Wally
Fawkes, who doubled as an illustrator on the Daily Mail under the
pen-name ofTrog. When I formed my own band in 1948, Wally
came in as a founder member. To compound the association,
during those years we were both students at the Camberwell
School of Arts and Crafts. At one point in these events, Wally
tipped me off that he was about to start a daily strip-cartoon on
the Mail, (it became the long-running 'Flook' saga) and that his
job livening up the columns with little pen-and-ink drawings
would fall vacant. His words were on the lines of, 'Get some
samples of your stuff together and go in to see the Features editor.
I've already primed him.' He had indeed. The man barely glanced
at my work before saying, 'You start tomorrow.' And that led to
eight years on the Daily Mail during which I graduated to pocket
cartoonist and, for a year or two, librettist for 'Flook'.

It was during my stint on the Mail that I absorbed one of the
prime rules of journalism, which I will promote here to a
position among the thoughts of Chairman Humph that pepper
this book:

It Just Occurred to Me ...

Whatever assignment you are offered, say yes' first and
learn about it afterwards.

Chairman Humph in advisory mode

There was a one-off concert held in London that brought together
the Ted Heath Orchestra and the classical French horn virtuoso,
Dennis Braine. Knowing of my jazz association, the deputy editor
of the paper sent me off to review it for the Features page. I have
little recollection of the music or what I said about it. But it led to
my being offered a regular column in the paper writing reviews of
gramophone records of all kinds.

Years later, following the above precept, I found myself writing
restaurant reviews in Harpers d" Queen magazine. In a moment of
self-doubt, I said to George Melly, who had been doing the film
reviews for the Observer, 'I'm sure they're going to find out one
day that I know nothing about it.' His answer was convoluted but
true: 'Yes, but in my experience, by the time they find out you
know nothing about it, you will know something about it.'

My method of acquiring belated knowledge about the
classical music which I was given to review in the Mail was to
plunder any articles I could find in specialist magazines -
predominantly the Gramophone — and rewrite them in my own
authoritative words. Although I was in my mid-twenties when I
came out of the wartime army, I was in the first flush of youth
so far as writing was concerned and, with the arrogance of
youth, I picked on all the contentious bits and exaggerated
them, lambasting conductors and recording companies alike.
After two or three columns, I was sent for by the deputy editor
and rebuked for, as he said, 'piling Pelion on Ossa'. I had never
come across that phrase before but I got the gist and was duly
humbled. When, years later, I looked it up in the Oxford
Dictionary of Quotations, I found out that the man had got the
quotation upside down.
Three times they endeavoured to pile Ossa on Pelion, no
less, and to roll leafy Olympus on top of Ossa: three times
our Father scattered the heaped-up mountains with a
thunderbolt.

Virgil, writing about mountains in his fanciful way

Had I known that my little column had, albeit unwittingly, been
compared to the cataclysmic events that Virgil was describing, I
would have been quite flattered. As it was, the deputy editors
rebuke rumbled on, changing the subject and teaching me, in the
process, another ground-rule of popular journalism.

He reminded me that my column took up about eight column-
inches on the Features page of the paper, an area designed as an
oasis of light, entertaining relief for our readers amidst the
weightier matters discussed on the news and comment pages.
The last thing those readers want,' he said, 'is someone taking up
precious space fulminating over some conductor who has taken
the Scherzo movement of Beethovens Seventh too fast. All that is
for the specialist magazines.' (Little did he know that that was
where it came from.) 'You'd do better to aim your piece at
someone who hates classical music and doesn't own a 
gramophone. If you can get HIM to read your column, you're doing
something useful.'

It was advice that I readily embraced when that letter came
from Queen magazine asking if I would write a one-off 'guest'
restaurant review. Their regular writer, the outspoken Linda
Blandford, had spoken out once too often about some lofty
establishment whose owners were threatening to sue, so she had
been hastily transferred to a safer department of the magazine. In
accordance with the advice about journalistic assignments stated
earlier by Chairman Humph, I said yes' to the offer and set about
cobbling together a piece that used up the handful of restaurants
I knew well from family outings.

It led, rather alarmingly, to eight years as restaurant reviewer for
what became Harpers e^ Queen. At the end of it I left, feeling
rather sick. I had picked up a couple of Food-writer of the Year
Awards along the way, so I must have done something right. But
if anything, that reinforced the uneasy feeling that I was, in fact,
a fraud. But food-writing - the very terminology looks more and
more absurd the longer you stare at it - was altogether less
ponderous then than it is today. The journalist, novelist and
historian Raymond Postgate had founded the Good Food Club in
the mid-fifties to be a focal point for lovers of food and drink
across the nation. Their amateur reports were invited and
published in the Good Food Guide, the pages of which exuded a
kind of fraternal enthusiasm. It was not called the Good Food
Guide for nothing. It was Postgate s idea that it would indeed be a
guide to let readers know where, in whatever benighted city or
town they found themselves, they could find the best food. Here's
a thought in passing:

Nowadays, it's still possible to find oneself in an Indian
restaurant the very interior of which arouses deep
foreboding. To establish peace of mind, be sure to order up
poppadams first before committing yourself to other
dishes. If, when they arrive, the first nibble suggests they
have been deep-fried in rancid badger-fat, make your
excuses and leave. Cooked in the same pan, the rest of the
meal will shuttle you into intensive care quicker than you
can say 'murghee mossala'.

Chairman Humph, the former food-writer in cautionary mode

Though my Harper's articles were largely concerned with
restaurants in London or the Home Counties, I wrote them in
much the same helpful spirit as the early Good Food Guide, always
bearing in mind the reader in Carlisle, in the dentist's waiting
room or under the hairdryer, who travels south perhaps once in a
decade and is on a permanent diet. In the process, I found myself
enjoying the writing more and more — the food less and less.
George Melly told me that he and his band used to buy the
magazine to read my pieces on their band bus, taking bets as to
how many columns I would cover each week before actually
getting round to mentioning a restaurant.

And that leads me to another reason why I began to recoil from
the whole bon viveur nonsense in which I was becoming
embroiled:

'Fifty Thousand Flies Can't Be Wrong.'

The late Ronnie Scott's generic term for the roadside transport
cafes in which touring musicians took their sustenance before
motorways arrived

The fact is that any touring musician, then and now, who adopts
a high-minded attitude to gastronomy will starve to death. My
experiences travelling around with a band at all hours of the day
and night instilled in me, early on, a principle which, as a food-
writer, I had to suppress in my Harpers d" Queen days.

The term 'good food' is not an absolute, it depends on
circumstances.

Chairman Humph in argumentative mode

An interviewer once asked me, licking his lips in expectation,
where I would choose to go and what I would eat, to unwind after
a concert or a long day in front of a microphone. When I
answered, 'Home, to a bowl of cornflakes and a Kit Kat', his
expression ping-ponged rapidly between shock-horror and the
realisation that he might have stumbled on a minor scoop. I could
have gone further, recalling that while driving home down the M1
in its early days, I had often drooled in anticipation of the
splendid egg, sausage, beans and chips dispensed through the
night at the Granada Service Area, Toddington; the team of West
Indian ladies there knew just when to rescue the eggs from the
sizzling hell of the griddle.

In later years, I have avoided night driving, staying over in
roadside hotels - most of which have been crushed by the onward
march of takeovers and mergers into a dire uniformity.

There's no doubt about it - food is one of the pillars ofjoie
de vivre. It's true - why talk about it?
Albert Rizk, Lebanese restaurateur who entertained my band to
bursting point at lunch in his little Tivoli Restaurant outside
Beirut. At a rough estimate, he himself tipped the scales in the
region of twenty stone

There is, it must be said, very little joie de vivre to be gleaned
nowadays from the fare available in hotels when the weary
musician returns from work at dead of night. Room-service
menus, if they exist, will usually offer dishes that can be ordered
after 11 p.m. But most of them seem to have been specially
selected to sabotage the subsequent night s sleep, consisting of a
choice between curry or a 'pasta bake' that arrives steaming under
a duvet of molten cheese. I can only think that this lethal choice
was devised by a deranged insomniac, offering as it does a night
of life-threatening reflux in the first instance and ghastly
nightmares in the second. But I didn't come here to become a
food-writer all over again, especially as we seem to have reached,
by reductio ad absurdum, the topic of sandwiches.

Once, in recent times, finding myself in a hotel that offered no
room service of any kind, I rang Reception. A girl, young in voice,
answered and I asked if sandwiches were available. They were, and
the following dialogue ensued:

'What sandwiches do you have?'

Ham, roast beef or cheena.'

What was that last one?'

'Cheena.'
'I don't know what that is.'

'You know, CHEENA.'

At this point I began to feel my age. She was clearly offering
some fashionable product that the whole world knew about
except me. I became testy.

'But I don't know what cheena is!'

She wasn't sounding too relaxed herself.

'It's a fish!'

'WHAT SORT OF FISH?'

'CHEENA!!!'

It was very late at night, and I was not at my brightest. But the
sinking pebble did eventually hit the river bed and, since tuna is
more digestible than the other options, I did indeed order a
round. The episode does raise a serious point about contemporary
speech. I have a family friend of long standing, Caroline Cole,
who in mid-life is studying for a degree in Medieval English at
Oxford, a discipline which spills over into the English language in
general. It's a subject about which we often argue over a friendly
meal. We belong to opposing camps, with myself upholding
principles about grammar and pronunciation learned at my
fathers knee (George Lyttelton having been a schoolmaster who,
in his time, numbered among the pupils in his literature classes
George Orwell, Aldous and Julian Huxley, Christopher Hollis and
other literary lions who passed through Eton College).

Caroline belongs to the school which insists that English, as a
living language, is constantly developing and should not be
inhibited by pedantic rules. We once clashed over the 
contemporary habit, which has spread across barriers of class and generation and even nationality, of dropping the letter 't' in favour of
a weak glottal stop that converts the word 'Saturday' into
'Sa'urday. (With a name like Lyttelton, I have had to respond to
its translation into Lew'on - to rhyme with Isaac New'on - or face
excommunication from a large section of the English-speaking
world). In our argument, I cited the word 'charity', and she put up
a stout defence of 'chari'y'. With malice aforethought I asked her
to apply the 'new' pronunciation to the word 'chastity'. For the
rest of the evening she kept returning to 'chas'i'y' but eventually
got the giggles and had to concede the point. I held in reserve a
story that might have clinched it earlier. Another friend, a retired
deputy head teacher, told me that a colleague others, crossing the
school playground, came on some small boys who had split into
teams and were shying stones at a tin can. As she passed, one of the
boys pointed excitedly at a successful teammate and claimed
loudly, "EE it i'!'

If one makes the not far-fetched assumption that the primary
purpose of language is to communicate, then it's surely not
pedantry to suggest that words should be pronounced in a way that
is comprehensible. If I am careering along a motorway hoping that
my car radio will warn me of any impending disruption, it's not
helpful to be told by a traffic reporter that there are 'keys on the raid
ahead'. In the split second that it takes to translate that into 'queues
on the road ahead' I could be straight up the back end of a lorry.

Some people lay at the door of Australian soap operas the blame
for the widespread demotion of the noble syllable 'oo' into
something squeezed out of the front of the mouth, turning 'news'
into 'knees' and 'views' into 'vees'. But the ailment once described
by a wit as 'Irritating Vowel Syndrome' is not confined to any
social class. As a corrective to any unseemly rush of pedantry to
the head, there is plenty of archive material in the form of old
films and newsreels to remind us that it was once 'standard'
among judges, Pathe News commentators, film actors and other
educated people to pronounce, for instance, the word 'adversary'
as 'edversary'. Flashbacks to the Nuremburg trial in 1945-6 reveal
the then Sir Geoffrey Lawrence QC (later Lord Oaksey), the
senior presiding judge at the Nuremburg Trial, sentencing the
Nazi war criminals, not once but repeatedly, to 'death by henging'.

That was, and rarely still is, just one of several upper-class
aberrations. The quacking, silly-ass accent assumed by actors and
comedians to portray 'toffs' is in real life a rarity. Among a variety
of public school accents, there is one that restores the balance in
favour of the 'oo' sound by using it to the almost total exclusion
of all others, turning words such 'Wimbledon' and 'Bristol* into
'Woombledon' and 'Broostle'. I remember Prime Minister
Anthony Eden, at the time of the Suez crisis, telling an anxious
nation in an orgy of vowel mangling, 'We will do oovrythoong
we cairn to protect our vah-ital oonterests.' I must leave to others
to judge whether I speak with a recognisable Old Etonian accent.
I deny it, but I would, wouldn't I? Without consciously trying, I
seem to have shed, at some stage along the way, the usage of 'orf
(in place of 'off') with which I was brought up. Indeed, I once,
in my argumentative youth, scored a rare, if not unique, victory
over my father in the matter of language.

It was in the early fifties, a stroppy period in my life. I was then at
art school, bearded and dressed in the style that in more recent times
has been designated as Grunge. My father was clearly destabilised
when I first appeared thus at what had become the family home in
Suffolk. One morning at the breakfast table, when I had aired some
no doubt half-baked left-wing ideas, he said, 'I hope you're not
turning into one of those French Socialists — all beard and belly.' (He
himself was conservative with a small 'c'. I once asked him why he
took the New Statesman on a regular subscription. His answer was,
'Because it's good to keep hatred alive.')

One of his pupils and a contemporary of mine at school, Simon
Phipps, had become an eminent cleric frequently seen on
television. When, in another encounter over the porridge, I
declared myself irritated by his frequent references to 'the Crorss',
my father leapt to his defence, claiming that the staccato 'Cross'
was no better. With a thrust as effective as my subsequent
wielding of the word 'chastity', I challenged him with the line
from a poem by one Caroline Norton in the seventeenth century,
which so often does service as an epitaph. Understandably
unwilling to mouth the words 'Not Lorst But Gorn Before', my
father got up from the table and left the room, clearing his throat
loudly as if to renounce the whole conversation.

I must temper the foregoing by emphasising here the enormous
benefit I derived from being the son of a schoolmaster who
specialised in English. It was at his knee that I learned many of the
principles of language, spelling and pronunciation that have since
been blown away by the winds of populism, bringing confusion
where there should be clarity.

I remember him demonstrating the tricky question as to what
should follow the word 'different' by putting two pencils on the
table parallel to each other, saying 'different FROM' as he moved
them apart, 'similar TO' as he moved them closer together. It was
a useful visual aide-memoire.

Nowadays, encouraged by lexicographers who have
surrendered to the theory that they have a duty to follow
popular usage rather than inform it, 'different to' has almost
universally triumphed over logic. Happily, we pedants are
still free to differ to it. I beg your pardon, from it.

Chairman Humph in didactic mode

To my great delight, I found, not very long ago, a paragraph in a
so-called quality newspaper that exemplifies perfectly the
corrosive effect of mispronunciation. It was written at the time of
a notorious sleaze scandal. I quote now from the cutting, which I
took eagerly and pasted in a notebook:

The new disclosure puts the suitability of Mr Hamilton's
candidature back on top of the political agenda only days
after ministers were beginning to succeed in diffusing the
issue after the Tatton Tories had readopted him.

Had the reporter observed the difference in pronunciation between
diffuse' and 'defuse', he would not have written a sentence that
conveyed a meaning diametrically opposed to that which he
intended. There was a time when the latter word would have been
spelt 'de-fuse', and I question whether the frequent banishment of
the hyphen by editors and literary pundits, presumably in the
interests of simplification, is altogether wise. It would serve today as
a bastion against the invasive and intensely irritating pronunciation
of the word 'research* as 're-search', and subsequently 're-course',
're-source', 're-spite', 're-lapse' and other now familiar aberrations
that set alarm bells clanging in the brain of a pedant.

The disease has become epidemic. I have an old 1969 edition
of the Pocket Oxford Dictionary which makes a clear distinction
between the prefix 're' with a short accent, and the longer 'ree', the
latter generally meaning 'again. Current dictionaries give both as
an option, which defies common sense for two reasons. One is
that separating 'to research' from 'to ree-search' unequivocally
makes it easier for someone learning the language, whether child
or adult, to deduce the meaning of an unfamiliar word from the
way its component parts are spoken. The other is that to juggle
arbitrarily with pronunciation can play havoc with poetry. The six
opening lines from Philip Larkin's poem, 'Last Will And
Testament', contain a stark warning of what will happen if the
'ree' virus spreads further.

Anxious to publicise and pay our dues
Contracted here, we, Bernard Noel Hughes
And Philip Arthur Larkin, do desire
To requite and to reward those whom we choose;
To thank our friends, before our time expire,
And those whom, if not friends, we yet admire.
Now try 'ree-quite' and 'ree-ward'.

QED: Quod erat demonstrandum - a useful way to clinch the
argument. At Eton, I learnt Latin and Greek. Though it took no
more than an eventful decade for the details to slip through the
floorboards of my mind, I have never regarded those years of
construing great chunks of them (construe - there's a quaint old
word) as a waste of time. Some French sage once said, when asked
if it was necessary to know Latin and Greek, 'No, but it's necessary
to have forgotten them.' Pourquoi? Let's turn to a higher authority.

The survival of the 'dead' languages, Latin and Greek, in
the framework of contemporary English offers the only
positive proof of life after death.

Chairman Humph, in provocative mode

It follows that in dredging back through memories of old
schooldays to recognise the Latin or Greek components of
current words, you can avoid making a prat of yourself on
The Weakest Link.

I seem to be getting heated, so while I go and run my head
under a cold tap, here are two pedant-disarming aberrations of
speech that I cherish.

In concert hall foyers or jazz festival compounds, people
sometimes dash up to make hasty comments as the band leaves.
They have no time to collect their thoughts and, as they hurry
away, their step often falters as they realise they have just uttered
complete gibberish. In the circumstances I warm to them for it.

A lady rushed up as I crossed a theatre foyer to leave after a
band concert. She stood in front of me and said breathlessly, 'Mr
Lyttelton, if you look as good as you play, you're doing jolly
well!'

Again, a shy young man approached me at an open-air festival
to get a CD signed. As I scribbled, he gushed, 'I listen to all your
radio shows - this is the first time I've seen you in the flesh and
your voice is much more recognisable now that I've heard it.'
I spent, now I come to think of it, most of my formative years in
the doghouse. The memory is reinforced by a photograph which
has survived of myself in my mid-teens wearing the Eton school
uniform. Top hat, tailcoat, waistcoat and a rather ridiculous neck-
piece (a horizontal strip of folded starched paper that doesn't merit
the description of a tie) did little to flatter a youth growing unsymmetrically to an eventual six-foot-three. We had to look after
our top hats, using a sort of velvet pad to maintain the sheen, which
if neglected, tended to become coarse and unruly, like the coat of
an ailing cat. It doesn't take a forensic expert to detect, in the
photograph, that my top hat has a large dent on the left-hand side.

Footnote (literally): Around my eightieth birthday, I had a
problem with my feet. The orthopaedist (I refuse to use the new
term podiatrist. It suggests that one's feet are wrong in the head,
a concept that only Picasso could have entertained) used a 
sophisticated camera that, as I strode across a sheet of plate glass
embedded in the consulting-room floor, took 250 snaps of myself
in motion. Subsequently a report came back from the analyst to say,
'Mr Lyttelton is seriously asymmetrical.' I bow to the judgement.

The Eton College curriculum involved regular end-of-term
examinations known as Trials, the results of which were received
by parents through the post just as an offspring was beginning to
enjoy the escapism that holidays afforded. I can still re-enact in
my mind one breakfast-time scene. My father had just opened the
letter from my housemaster, Cyril Butterwick, which contained
the information that I had scored two marks out of a possible
hundred for my Maths paper. I and my older sister Diana had by
then graduated from the upper regions of the house to breakfast
with the grown-ups, leaving the three younger sisters in the care
of Nanny and nursery-maids upstairs. I had, on this occasion,
arrived late at the table, and saw with some dread that the
envelope bearing Cyril Butterwick's neat scrawl had been opened.
When I came into the room, my mother and sister, acting I
assume upon premonition, got up and left.
As soon as I sat down, my father, who had up till then been hidden
behind The Times (a broadsheet then, of course) brought the paper
down and crumpled it explosively in his massive hands as if it were
tissue-paper. It was a theatrical gesture that so startled me that the
subsequent tongue-lashing seemed almost an anti-climax. I remain
unsure to this day whether the rage was wholly genuine or stoked-up
to suit the occasion. My later experience as a father, often called on to
react suitably to an offence committed while I was away on tour (the
'Just Wait Till Your Father Gets Back' syndrome) admits that as a
possibility. But it fulfilled its purpose and added to my belief at that
time that I was a scruffy and bone-idle waste of space.

If my memory of Latin and Greek rapidly became vestigial when
I left school, a vast swathe of my learning of mathematics was totally
expunged. I must have known once what a logarithm is, since hours
were devoted to installing it in my head. The what, why and
wherefore, however, have vanished, leaving a void. Everything about
algebra has long gone. I can derive more coherent meaning from a
stanza of wordless scat-singing by Louis Armstrong or Ella
Fitzgerald than a line of algebraic equation. Of geometry, some
useful stuff about angles and shapes hangs about, though I've had
to reach for the dictionary to spell 'hypotenuse'. I'm glad that I have
retained some rudimentary knowledge of trigonometry. It's nice to
know that when the night winds are howling outside, my
neighbours pine tree is not going to crash through the ceiling of my
bedroom while I sleep.

Enter, unbidden and perhaps surprisingly, another thought,
this one expressed by Lord Acton in a letter in 1887:

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts
absolutely.
Lord Acton, writing to Bishop Mandell Crichton

the words 'tends to' are usually omitted when this quotation
^ called into use. I am happy to restore them since they allow
for exceptions - my wise, tolerant and scrupulous father
among them. Stretching the word 'corrupt' to embrace going
completely barmy, it has not been difficult to find
confirmation of his lordship's judgment in the world around
us. Starting at the apex of barminess, the posturing of Hitler
on his podium and Mussolini on his balcony gave clear
evidence that 'absolute' power had sent them 'absolutely' off
their respective trolleys.

Lodged in my mind is a small incident in a gents' lavatory in
Italy during World War II. It must have been during a lull in the
Salerno landing of 1943 in which I was involved. I found myself
in the lavatory standing, as one does, next to an Italian civilian
similarly engaged. He spoke no English, I no Italian. Yet somehow,
on the way out, we got into an argument about the relative merits
of our respective leaders, Mussolini and Winston Churchill. At the
mention of the name 'Churchill', he cried 'No, no, no!'
vehemendy, then puffed out his chest, jutted his chin and strutted
around shouting 'Mussolini!' - rather overdoing it - I thought.
The next moment, his posture slumped, shoulders sagging,
stomach protruding, one hand waving an imaginary cigar, the
other pointing to himself as he repeated with an elaborate sneer
'Churchill, Churchill!' Unable to convey in mime the response that
there was more to our prime minister than bodybuilding, I
conceded defeat with a shrug, adjusted my clothing and left.

But I digress. Absolute power has shown itself, in the behaviour
of persons from High Court judges to drill sergeants, bandleaders
and schoolmasters, capable of inducing what, to the impartial
observer, comes close to insanity. The late Wilfrid Blunt, painter
and for over twenty years the Art Master at Eton College, wrote
this in his autobiography. Soft On The Feather (Michael Russell
(Publishing) Ltd, 1986):

Housemasters at Eton were virtual rulers of their little
kingdoms; more like heads of colleges at a university
whose students were boys rather than young men. Thus,
though the good housemasters were very good indeed, the
few tyrants, fearing nobody, could almost get away with
murder.

Wilfrid Blunt came into Eton from outside and took a more
dramatic view of the disciplinary life than I, who was born there
and had got used to it by the time it affected me directly. Where
he was appalled, I tend to recall with amusement the plentiful
examples of the destabilising effect that absolute power can have
on those who wield it. I'll focus on just one, the man designated
by Wilfrid Blunt as an 'unsuppressed sadist', and by one of his
pupils, the philosopher A J (Freddy) Ayer, as 'a sadist and a
repressed homosexual'.

H K Marsden was known to the boys as 'Bloody Bill'. He was
not my housemaster and I was only taught by him for a short
period, but I have a vivid memory of one exchange which typified
his method. The subject of the lesson was maths, and my efforts to
solve a mathematical problem had reached an impasse. In Blunts
words, 'a tall, gangling man with a weary, drooping moustache, the
remainder of whose face looked as though it had been gone over
two days before with a Flymo', Marsden walked over from his desk
to stand over me and asked, 'What is 83 by 208 divided by 17 to
the power of 3?' or some such gobbledegook, which he had chalked
up on the blackboard. He waited, twitching all over with
suppressed anger, for an answer that never came. He repeated the
question in a now strangulated voice, with the same result. Then,
closing his eyes and with a long-suffering sigh, he took us back to
basics. 'What is one?' If the first question had sent my brain
reeling, this one flattened it with its elusive simplicity, so I could
only say 'I don't know, sir', whereupon he lashed out. It wasn't just
knuckles with Bloody Bill. He wore a large gold signet ring that
assumed the role of a knuckle-duster and took a divot out of the
victims head.
Both Blunt and Ayer recalled H K Marsden with undisguised
hatred. I drew a caricature of him at the time which shows no
trace of vitriol, so it's clear that, with me, the assault went no
further than skin deep. Some aspects of his behaviour as a
housemaster were perhaps more sinister, yet paradoxically he was
extremely popular with most of the boys in his house. My father,
kept on after his retirement as a housemaster until younger 'beaks'
returned from the war, willingly accepted his hospitality, his only
complaint being that it didn't extend to lighting more than a two-
bar gas-fire in the hearth during the freezing winter, a
circumstance which I chronicled with another drawing.

In one further story about the misanthropic and misogynistic
Marsden, even Wilfrid Blunt hints at a grudging admiration for
the old curmudgeon:

A boy in his house returned late from dining at Windsor
Castle and asked his host whether he would be kind
enough to give him a line of excuse to his housemaster.
The King (George VI) graciously wrote a brief word of
apology. Marsden read it, observed that the chap hadn't
even bothered to date it, crumpled it up and threw it in the
waste-paper basket.

PS: When my father died in 1962, he was buried in the little
church in the village of Grundisburgh, near Ipswich, whither my
parents had moved after his retirement from Eton. As relatives and
friends assembled on the green outside the church, I saw a gaunt
figure standing alone some distance away. It was Bloody Bill, who
had made the journey to Suffolk to pay his respects.
Characteristically, he vanished after the service without at any
time saying a word to anyone. It was rather sad.

In the habit of administering ad hoc corporal punishment,
Bloody Bill was not alone. Another enthusiastic whacker was the
puce and pear-shaped Timothy Huson, who likewise targeted the
head with what he jovially referred to as 'love taps'. With his wry
sense of humour he was generally regarded as a good egg. The fact
is, we took in our stride minor assaults upon the person that today
would keep the tabloid press in a lather of indignation for weeks
and inflate the already bursting coffers of the legal profession. I
feel some heavy pronouncement on the subject of ritual corporal
punishment coming on, so here is a reminiscence to restore a bit
of balance. It's a reproof that I treasure.

At Eton, I was taught what little schoolboy French I know by a
benignly eccentric master, Monty Evans. He was born, we all
believed, of Franco-Welsh parentage, a mixture that guarantees a
high degree of theatricality. I remember him as a handsome man
with grey hair brushed in wings above his ears to give an air of
flamboyant distinction. The academic gown, a garment that
drooped limply from the shoulders of most colleagues, positively
billowed when he swept into the classroom. One day he was going
from desk to desk, returning work that he had marked overnight
- praising some, criticising others in varying degree, always in an
extravagant turn of phrase. When he reached my desk, he stood
for a moment in dramatic silence, then spoke. 'Lyttelton,' he said
in a voice resonant with doom, 'if this was Russia, you would be
found in the river in the morning, headless and flo-o-o-oating
downstream.'

I was brought up, almost from the cradle, with the belief that
corporal punishment of one kind or another was 'all part of life's
rich pageant'.

(I borrow those words from the late Arthur Marshall, himself a
schoolmaster at Oundle and, later, the plump, giggling team-
captain opposite Frank Muir on the TV panel show Call My Bluff.
For a short time, while still teaching, he made some recordings
involving what used to be called 'female impersonation. Starting
^ a party piece to entertain friends, his hearty schoolmistress,
inspired by the girls'-school novels of Angela Brazil, became a
national figure. My father loved those records, revelling in such
phrases as, on a nature outing, 'Oh dear, Myrtles turned turtle
and crushed her cocoon,' and in the chemistry lab, 'Hmmrn, yes
- that's enough marsh gas, Mona,' all uttered in a plummy
falsetto. 'We're molecules, dear, hurled hugger-mugger into life's
foaming crucible,' was a variation of the 'rich pageant' phrase that
side-tracked me into this lengthy parenthesis.)

Corporal punishment was not practised by either of my
parents, though my father did once aim a kick at my backside
when I and others who were expected to know better kept one of
my young sisters out late at a funfair in Harlech, causing my
mother great anxiety. From as far back as I can remember, he
suffered from Paget's disease, an enlargement of the bones. It
caused him to list heavily to one side with a limp that, as others
observed, was curiously graceful for a man of his large build. The
kick was therefore symbolic, missing its target and coming close
to giving literal meaning to the cliche, 'This will hurt me more
than it hurts you.' When I say that corporal punishment was not
practised by my parents, it is no more than the truth. They
delegated it. And that's a cue to bring onstage for a brief cameo
appearance the redoubtable Nanny Viggers.

My sisters and I grew up under the rule of a succession of
nannies. Though I do dimly recall a predecessor called Nanny
Gosling, it was Nanny Viggers who played the major part in my
early upbringing. (Nannies, as they exist in my memory, had no first
names, being known, like army sergeants, solely by their rank. It
was a surprise when many years later, after I had mentioned Nanny
Viggers on a broadcast, I received a letter from a listener who
declared herself to be her niece and referred to her as 'my Auntie
Louisa. (As a child, and indeed through life until that letter arrived,
I had no notion that she had any first name other than Nanny (let
alone Louisa), nor that she could possibly be anyone's auntie.)

I remember Nanny Viggers as a small woman of indeterminate
age, shaped like a cottage loaf with a stern coiffure similar to that
of our present monarch. Rolled over a velvet pad in the front and
with a 'bun at its apex, it seemed to echo the cottage loaf motif.
Strict but kindly, she would take us into her bedroom if we were
ill or frightened at night. On one such occasion I caught a
glimpse, shocking at the time, of her sitting at her dressing table,
preparing for bed, with that seemingly indestructible edifice
straggling over her shoulders in a chaos of hairpins and curlers.

I have no reason to suppose that Nanny Viggers was anything
but a benign influence on her charges, and we were all distressed
when the time came for her to move on. But it was she who
instilled in me the belief, long since rejected, that corporal
punishment was as normal a part of life as eating or sleeping. Even
in the nursery it had its ritual, for she was not one for the casual
slap. Her chosen weapon, with which we would be threatened or
chastised if we were unruly, was the Slipper (I give it the capital
initials to bring it in line with the Stocks and the Guillotine). As I
recall, it was more of a house-shoe with a hard sole - it certainly
felt like it. I was ushered more than once into the bathroom to be,
as the euphemistic and misleading saying went, 'given the Slipper'.
Thus was established in my head the notion that the Creator, ever
a stickler for detail, had designed the human backside to be, among
other functions, the normal target of retribution.

That was my introduction to ritual corporal punishment. The
spontaneous violence such as that used by the likes of Bloody Bill
and Timothy Huson was extracurricular. Built into the system at
Eton in the thirties were birchings and canings. The former were
administered on rare occasions by either the Headmaster or the
Lower Master (head of the lower school) for offences calling for
punishment just short of outright expulsion. The canings were
delegated by housemasters to the senior boy, or captain, of the
house. These canings were at the apex, so to speak, of the fagging
astern, whereby the most junior boys were, for a while, at the
beck and call of the most senior.
At one time, I was allocated as fag to Peter Carrington. Later, as
Lord Carrington, he became Foreign Secretary in the pre-Falklands
era, resigning when his tolerance, wisdom and impish sense of
humour, all expressed in a languid aristocratic drawl, put him at odds
with Mrs Thatcher, who regarded those attributes collectively as wet'.
I met him again in 2005 on Breakfast With Frost, the now-defunct
BBC TV show hosted by David Frost. After a lapse of sixty-five years
during which we went our very separate ways, I was delighted to
find him unchanged from the benign fag-master of my memory.

We had a giggling reunion in the green room at the BBC TV
Centre, and I regretted that we were not teamed in the subsequent
show as a double act, instead of delivering separate and, in my
case, well-worn recollections of VE Day. The only thing that
disappointed me was that he stoutly denied that I had ever been
his fag at Eton. With the greatest respect I back my memory
against his. I have always attributed my exceptional prowess in the
art of scrambling eggs to the experience of making his supper.

At this point, I feel I owe it to my readers to outline my current
recipe for scrambled egg that, with the advance of domestic
science and technology, has now reached the peak of refinement.

Ingredients

Two or three eggs, depending on how concerned you are about your
cholesterol.
Milk.
Smoked salmon, if you live in the southern half of England where it is
not regarded as a symptom of elitism, snobbery or decadence. (I once
asked for it in a small supermarket in Crosby, Lanes. The shop assistant's
response, a high-pitched shriek of disbelief and derision, attracted a small
crowd of shoppers and some passers-by who dashed in from the street
thinking that some free professional entertainment had been laid on.)

Pepper.

Garlic Salt.

Tarragon.

The Method
Break the eggs into a bowl, which must be deep enough to
avoid splashing. Add a dollop of milk. Using a fork (or one
of those ingenious wire gadgets, if you can find it in the
chaos of your kitchen drawer), whisk the mixture
enthusiastically until it has blended to the colour and
consistency of anaemic custard. Add a generous sprinkling
of dried tarragon, and pepper and salt to taste. Whisk
again with the manic vigour of one who senses that
something rather hazardous is about to take place.

Put the bowl into the microwave and set it at three
minutes on full power. Start the microwave, but do not go
off to watch a bit of television till it bleeps. You will only
get involved in a gripping episode of The Bill and return,
fifty minutes later, to find that you have made something
black and crumbling that will offer no pleasing visual
contrast to the slice of toast that you are going to burn
later. Stay by the microwave and, when you begin to feel a
bit edgy, open the door and peer into the bowl. Microwave
ovens rather pride themselves on being unpredictable, so
you must repeat this inspection at frequent intervals,
ignoring the urgent warnings of friends who still believe
that if you expose your hands too often to the electro-
magnetic waves, your fingers will drop off. They may, but
not for sixty years, when most of us are past caring.

The principle of the M-wave (let's start using trendy
abbreviations - everybody else does) is that it cooks from
the outside inward. Thus, before your very eyes the egg
mixture will soon start to show some creeping
solidification round the rim of the bowl, leaving a liquid
lake in the middle. And this is where the process demands
acute concentration. With each inspection, the lake will
be seen to have shrunk. It is important not to allow it to
disappear altogether — if that happens the egg will have
overcooked and fragmented into bits that will bounce
about uncontrollably on the toast, evading capture like so
many hyperactive grasshoppers on amphetamines. (If we
never get around to actually scrambling the egg, we're
learning the heck of a lot about biophysics on the
journey.)

At some stage round about now, you should tip the
chopped smoked salmon into the mix so that it will not
have long enough to cook, but can be evenly dispersed
when we come to agitate or, as we say, 'scramble' the egg.
But I've forgotten to tell you about the chopping bit, and
things are moving so fast that it's too late to do so now. So,
quickly smooth back the cover that you have ripped off the
pack of smoked salmon, replace the fish and put the whole
caboodle back in the fridge for another occasion. That
way, you will avoid finding yourself, when you come to eat
the egg, chewing on the squares of invisible plastic film
that separate the salmon slices. By the time all that's done,
the lake, as I have described it, will have dwindled to the
size of, say, a two-pound coin. Quickly remove the bowl
from the microwave, go at it with a fork like one possessed,
blending the still-liquid egg with the rest. When the
mixture is poured on to the slice of toast, it will look soft,
shiny and appetising.

I have assumed that the reader who has got thus far will
have known how to make the slice of toast; if not, a few
words of advice. Few households nowadays have the sort of
roaring open fire before which one used to be able to toast
the bread on a fork, achieving a wonderful golden-brown
finish that spread evenly over the slice and up the hand,
wrist and forearm as far as the elbow. Nowadays the
popular alternative is the electric toaster, which is indeed a
boon. But be sure the machine is fully run-in before use.
If not, it is likely to fling the finished slice up to the ceiling
and thence into some distant corner of the room, where it
will be pounced upon and devoured by a dog, a cat or even
perhaps a swan that has entered the house unannounced.
Swans will eat anything, which is why I hope you haven't
thrown away those charred remains of the overcooked egg.
BonAppetit!

Chairman Humph, in Ainsley Harriott mode

Now, if I describe the details of the Eton fagging procedure in
the thirties in too much detail, it will be assumed that I have
strayed into the realms of wild fantasy, where Ossa and Pelion
jostle for supremacy. (The talk of 'fags' may mislead American
readers even more, but I can't help that. We're talking history
here, not semantics.) In the hierarchy of a house, the very senior
boys were members of the 'Library', a sort of common room
with privileges attached. The very junior boys belonged to a pool
of 'fags' who, as well as serving a specific 'fag-master', could be
summoned at any time of the day by a member of the Library to
run random errands.

All the senior boy had to do was go out into a corridor and
shout, 'BOY!!!' at the top of his voice, usually more than once and
with the syllable prolonged. Every 'fag' within earshot would have
to drop whatever he was doing and scamper in the direction of
the voice. The last one to arrive would then be ordered to perform
the required errand, whether it was taking an essay to a masters
house or picking up a bag of doughnuts from Rowland's, the
school 'tuck shop'. The official justification for this primitive rite
was that it was a great 'leveller', as every boy, whether the son of a
duke or a dustman, had to go through it. Leaving aside the low
statistical rating of dustmen among Eton parents, it has been my
observation that dukes, even royalty, who were cut down to size
by the process, have had little difficulty in reverting, within a few
short years, to the manner to which they were born.
I know this is sounding crazier with every sentence but I can't
help it, so let the farrago continue.

There was one period in the day — after supper, I recall — when
the procedure took a more sinister turn, and the cry of
'BO-0-O-O-O-OY!' would set butterflies flapping frenetically
in the stomach of every junior boy who heard it. At that time of
day, it signified that the errand would be to fetch a miscreant to the
Library for a brief reprimand and a swift caning, usually consisting
of what was euphemistically termed 'six of the best'. The offences
that attracted this retribution were usually quite trivial — the noisy
mayhem termed 'ragging' being the commonest. I was caned
twice. I won't linger on the first occasion since it involved a house-
captain who was clearly a candidate for psychiatric treatment.
Charging across the room and grunting loudly with every blow in
a way now familiar at Wimbledon during a hard-fought match, he
eventually drew blood. I squealed loudly under the assault, but boy,
was I proud of those weals afterwards!

The second episode was altogether more civilised, the wielder
of the cane being a shy, soft-spoken and, on the occasion,
seemingly reluctant house-captain called George Mann, who
subsequently became nationally known as captain of the English
cricket team. Years later, when I was in a theatre foyer signing my
recordings, he came up to the table with his wife, who, before we
had a chance to renew our acquaintance, said in a voice loud
enough to encompass the whole room, 'D'you remember my
husband George? I believe he beat you at school!'

There is no limit to the average upper-class female's
capacity to embarrass her menfolk in public!

Chairman Humph in mysogynistic mode

Since I am the very personification of fair-mindedness, I will
balance that comment with a recent memory that encapsulates the
principle ofWomens' Lib. The scene is the Brent Cross Shopping
Centre in Hendon. A woman and her small daughter are standing
in the spot on the upper floor designated as a meeting place. The
daughter appears distressed.

Daughter: 'Oh, Mummy, we're lost!'

Mother: 'No, we're not, darling, we're here. It's Daddy who's lost.'
Apropos caning, I was once interviewed on the erstwhile BBC
TV Breakfast Show by Selena Scott, a lady of beauty and charm
but not spectacular powers of comprehension. I told her that at
Eton, it was discovered that the best way to protect one's person
in the event of a caning was to go down the road to Rowlands and
buy several large slices of cooked ham. She looked puzzled. 'You
mean, as a bribe?' When I told her that it was actually to stuff
hastily down the back of one's trousers if and when a summons to
the Library occurred, she hurried on to the next question. There
was, in fact, method in the madness, it having been scientifically
established in the Laboratory of Hard Knocks that the thwack of
cane on buttock could be simulated better by ham, with its animal
affiliations, than by an exercise book or stiff-backed envelope.

It's time to move on, and not a moment too soon, if you ask me.
My time doing military service in World War II offered much
opportunity to confirm Lord Acton's dictum on power. A lot of it
was spent on parade grounds - as a recruit, officer cadet and
eventually, a Guards officer at the same Caterham depot where I
had suffered my own initiation. In each capacity, I had the
opportunity to study in the field that fascinating but dangerously
unstable species, the drill sergeant. It is not strictly true to say that
on the barrack square, drill sergeants had absolute power. Indeed,
"ly function as an officer - when I strolled about during parades
with a stick under my arm, looking lofty but wrapped in my own
thoughts — was to deter them from excess. But their remit was so
broad, stopping just short of grievous bodily harm or murder, that
they were, in fact, dictators on the tarmac.
One clear sign that drill sergeants were becoming unhinged was
the eccentric way in which they uttered the words of command.
Regimental Sergeant-Major Britton, who was the major-domo
among drill sergeants when I was at Sandhurst Military College in
the early forties, became quite famous for the power of his voice
on parade. After retirement, he was often booked to appear on
television programmes, shouting. When, on a mass parade, he
called the assembled squads to attention with the command
'Parade ... 'Shun!' he lingered tantalisingly on the first word and
then, after a pause, uttered the second in a piercing altissimo
shriek that loosened the putty on the windows of the main
building and brought birds thudding, stunned, from the trees.

The resourcefulness of drill sergeants in pursuit of absolute
power over their victims was, in my experience, limidess. There is
no need here to recall those tyrants whose methods, often obscene,
crossed the boundary of zeal into overt sadism. There was plenty of
creative humour about. I recall a wry Glaswegian who, if a rival
squad was in the vicinity, would halt us, stand us at ease and invite
us to watch as they passed. This short dialogue would ensue:

Sergeant, derisively: 'Look at 'em! Tumble, aren't they?'
Squad, mumbling and stumbling into an ambush: 'Yes,
Sar'nt.' Sergeant, rounding on us: 'WELL, THEY'RE A
DARM SIGHT BETTER THAN YEW HEAP!!!'


A nuisance examined.


At Sandhurst, at any given time of the day, the large barrack square
was alive with the diverse movement of squads stamping, marching
or jogging in all directions. During these parades, the adjutant would
often appear on a horse, to saunter about looking authoritative.
periodically, the horse would lift its tail and casually deposit on the
tarmac, while still on the move, what in the rules of golf is designated
as a 'loose hazard'. One sergeant who, for a while, controlled my
destiny, seized these events to galvanise his recalcitrant squad into
action, steering us at the double over the steaming pile and back
again while gleefully reciting our shortcomings.

One of the less eminent NCOs whose challenge it was to turn
me from a recruit into an automaton was, off duty, what one
would describe as a 'pussycat' — soft-spoken, gentle and humorous.
It was all the more alarming therefore when, having patiently
demonstrated to us the intricate rifle-slapping and foot-stamping
routine of presenting arms, he would first ask us, in a voice of sweet
reasonableness, 'Do you understand?' and then, in response to our
mumbled 'Yes, Sar'nt,' suddenly take leave of his senses. Making a
meal of every word, he repeated the question at the top of his voice
- 'DO ... YOU.. . . UNDERSTAND?' shuffling his feet so fast
with the effort that his hat flew off and he briefly levitated.

One might think that jazz music, born of rebellion and
iconoclasm, would prove a safe haven from the corrupting
influence of power. It might have been so but for the arrival of the
phenomenon later dubbed the Swing Era. A flavour of that period
can be gleaned from this observation by Whitney Balliett, for
many years jazz columnist, and another erstwhile star in the New
Yorker, who wrote about the drummer Gene Krupa:

Short, handsome, dark-haired, and smiling, he established the
image of the drummer as madman. It was an image —
calculated or not — that hypnotised the eye and stopped the
ears. When he played, his hair fell over his eyes; he chewed
gum; he hunched over his drums or reared back, arms straight
in the air, like a politician at a rally; he sweated; in his 
climactic moments he converted his arms and hands and drum-
sticks into sculptured blurs. The mania for speed had begun
to take hold in the late thirties, and Krupa was its epitome.

That observation might well have seen the word mania used for
the very first time in music criticism. It was not out of place.
Though not on such a global scale as 'Beatlemania' in the sixties,
the adulation accorded to the leaders of the big Swing orchestras
came to attract the same manic fervour.

The French do not call the modern multi-functional drum kit la
batterie for nothing. Krupa, flailing about on a rostrum above the
rest of the band, became a star to the Swing Eras youthful following.
He took full advantage of the power that the adulation bestowed and
in the process went, to Mr Balliett's critical eye, seemingly bonkers.
But when Whitney Balliett wrote those words, Krupa was a
member of Benny Goodmans orchestra and, as such, did not
wield absolute power. That resided in his eccentric bandleader.

Benny Goodman, like most of the bandleaders in those heady
days, had started his career in the late twenties as 'one of the boys'
in a group of young musicians bitten by the jazz bug. The birth of
the Swing Band, through a marriage of big commercial dance-
bands and small, improvising jazz groups, converted the most
business-orientated of these enthusiasts into all-powerful
dictators, holding, in an insecure and fickle profession, economic
as well as musical power. Anecdotes abound, mostly from those
who worked with him, concerning Benny Goodmans increasingly
eccentric methods of maintaining his power.

Tenor saxophonist Zoot Sims was once asked, in the sixties,
what it was like touring in Communist Russia with the Goodman
band. His answer was, 'When you're with Benny Goodman, every
day is like touring in Russia.'


In the mid-thirties, the Paramount Theatre in New York was
foremost among cinemas in booking the big Swing attractions to
play tour or five sets a day in between the movies. When the
practice started in the late thirties. Swing was the thing and the
bands came to outstrip the feature films as an attraction. To
simplify the logistics of getting a band on and off stage, the
Paramount installed a rising orchestra pit on which the band,
fully set up, would rise like Botticelli's Venus to the rowdy
acclaim of young audiences. The system was still in force in
1945, when Benny Goodman was booked after a long absence.
The band was then on the wane - and Goodmans eccentricity
was rising correspondingly. Baritone saxist Danny Banks was a
member:

'We had to sit on hard stools for four or five shows a day,
which made it awfully tough on your rear end. My friend
Al Epstein, a darling guy who played tenor in the band,
had bleeding piles, and to get some relief, he went into the
drug store and bought an inflatable rubber ring to use as a
cushion. Well, Benny came out to the pit early while the
coming attractions were still on, and he saw this thing on
top of Epsteins stool. It wasn't orderly - everybody had a
white-painted stool and there's this one red rubber ring -
so Benny reached into his pocket, pulled out a safety-pin
and punctured a hole in it. When Epstein sat down and
the ring collapsed, he realised that there had been some
foul play, so after the show, he bought a tyre repair kit and
patched it up. But Benny still had the safety pin and
punctured it again. And it went on that way until Epstein
ran out of patches. Benny never said a word to him about
it. I think he saw it as a game.'

Described in Swing, Swing, Swing: The Life and Times of Benny
Goodman by Ross Fierstone (Hodder & Stoughton, 1993)

Bandleader and trombonist Tommy Dorseywas, during the Swing
Era, one of Benny Goodmans chief rivals - and not only in the
realms of musical prowess. One of his musicians recalled an
incident involving that most polite and gentle of men, clarinettist
Buddy de Franco:

Tommy insisted that the soloists played the solos note for
note as on the records. One night, fed up. Buddy changed
the clarinet solo on 'Opus One'. Tommy lunged after him
offstage and demanded to know what he thought he had
been doing. 'Its not artistic to play the same solo every
night, Tommy,' said Buddy Dorsey exploded. 'Artistic?
Artistic? Who d' you think you are, you stale shit-heel?
Art Tatum? Go and be artistic on somebody else's band.
You're fired.'

These stories were passed on to me through the grapevine by my
good friend, the jazz writer and, for a long time, broadcaster
Steve Voce. The first time he was with Dorsey, Buddy de Franco
got fed up with being on the road and decided to leave the band.
De Franco recalled:

I'd made a few connections in Los Angeles. Andre Previn
was making a film in which Kieron Moore played a clarinet
player. I was to teach him fingering and dub the soundtrack.
I'd got a few club dates lined up. So I went to Tommy and
told him I wanted to leave. Now, you don't leave Tommy.
'Where are you going?' Dorsey demanded.
'I've got a few gigs lined up in Los Angeles,' I told him.
'You ain't got nothing. You leave my band, you don't
work,' said Tommy. I left. Suddenly the club dates
vanished. I asked Andre about the film and he said the job
had evaporated. Apart from a couple of Sunday afternoon
jam sessions, I didn't work for eighteen months. At the end
of that time Tommy phoned me. 'You got enough wrinkles
in your bag?' he asked (like 'stale shit-heel', another of his
fanciful expressions).

Steve Voces informant takes up the story:

Although he was broke and had no work. Buddy said 'I'm
doing real good. I've got plenty of regular work.' Tommy
brushed this aside.

'What the hell, we need a clarinet player in this band.
Will you come back?' Buddy stipulated what he wanted
paying and particularly mentioned 'everything extra',
which meant all travelling expenses. If you didn't mention
that at the outset, you didn't get them. Dorsey said, 'OK,
you got it and everything extra.'

'Then wire me a thousand dollars right away,' said
Buddy. Dorsey whooped with triumph.

'You're broke! You stale shit-heel, I knew it! You're
broke!'

But he wired Buddy the money and Buddy rejoined the
band.

The nickname 'Buddy is ubiquitous in jazz and can give
misleading information as to the character of its recipient. I have
described Buddy de Franco as 'polite and gentle'. As a bandleader,
the virtuoso drummer Buddy Rich was neither polite nor gentle.
Tales of his irascibility multiplied as he grew older. This is a story
told to me and others by the American drummer, Jake Hanna. I
have put it in my own words from memory.

The band was once booked into a small Midwest club, not
blessed with state-of-the-art equipment. Buddy Rich arrived a day
early to look over the place and state his requirements. The show
was to start with the room pitch-black, except for a pin-spot
focussed on a black curtain in front of the bandstand. A voice
would announce, 'Now, ladies and gentlemen, we proudly present
the worlds greatest drummer, Mr BUDDY RICH!', at which
point the tiny spot would expand and the curtain would part to
reveal Mr Rich seated behind his impressive array of drums and
cymbals on a rostrum in the middle of his band.

Now, the club had no curtain, no spotlight, no rostrum and no
facility for suddenly damping all the lights. However, frantic
activity by the management procured them all, after a fashion, in
time for the opening, including a black sheet to act as a makeshift
curtain. Prior information about the elaborate routine did not, for
some reason, reach Sam Most, a saxophonist in the band. He was
seated at the small bar, chatting to a customer and ready to go on
stage at the last minute, as musicians do, when the room was
suddenly plunged into darkness and the booming voice started to
make the opening announcement.

With scant knowledge of the rooms geography, Sam Most
made a panic-stricken dash for the stage, blundering into tables
and knocking over customers. He got there, but tripped on an
unforeseen step. For support, he grabbed the first thing that
came to hand, which happened to be the black curtain. Parting
company with its hastily assembled and fragile fittings, this
collapsed on to the stage, engulfing the world's greatest
drummer. Simultaneously, the pin-spot expanded, to reveal an
amorphous black heap in mid-stage from which, after a
pregnant pause, came a muffled shout: 'WHOEVER YOU
ARE, YOU'RE FIRED!!'

Glenn Miller was by nature a strict disciplinarian. The tenor
saxophonist Tex Beneke, who served with Miller in both his
civilian and Army band, bore witness in an interview:

Glenn was strict. Everybody knew that. He was tough on
musicians, all right. He used to insist on proper haircuts,
proper shines, both feet on the floor and the same
amount of white showing in every mans breast-pocket
handkerchief.
When, at his own request. Miller enlisted in the US Army to
revolutionise its military music, his promotion to the rank of
Major in charge of the Army Air Force Band seemed to lift both
his feet off the floor and launch him in the direction of cloud-
cuckoo land. In one dictatorial move, he ordered all musicians
with moustaches to shave them off. Describing the incident,
Miller s biographer, George T Simon wrote, in Glenn Miller And
His Orchestra (W H Alien):

For some, who had nursed their growths for years, it
became a traumatic experience. And for others, like some
brass players, whose very blowing of their instruments had
become dependent upon those mustaches (sic), the loss
was indeed serious.

Simon concludes:

... of all the moves that Glenn ever made, this always
seemed to me to have been the most senseless and least
sensitive. According to erstwhile Miller trumpeter Bernie
Privin, 'The only explanation he ever gave us was that we
looked too much like gangsters.'

I like the 'too much'! Readers wondering what essential role facial
hair could possibly play in the production of sound from an
instrument should know that, once established, a moustache
forms one component of a players embouchure, a sensitive
structure which reacts unfavourably if altered by a fraction of a
millimetre. I once wore a moustache, sometimes with or without
an accompanying beard. Judging from pictures of me in my
wartime Army days, its style was not so much gangster, more Lord
^tchener. When I eventually became more or less clean-shaven, I
Stained for some years a little vestigial shrub below the lower lip,
too small to be flattered by the term 'goatee'. I got rid of it when
it became a bore, having to be trimmed regularly to a consistent
size so as not to disturb the sacred embouchure.

The population of the world is divided equally between
those who are nature's prefects and those who are forever
snotty-nosed kids.

Chairman Humph, in demographic mode

I hope and believe that I belong in the second category and that as a
disciplinarian I fit into the Duke Ellington model. Apropos leading
one of the greatest ever jazz orchestras in the world, Ellington once
said, 'No musicians are going to put me in the nuthouse. If we go
there, we'll go together - and I'll be driving the coach.' His method
of dealing with indiscipline was either to ignore it, or to punish the
wrongdoer in a subde way by, for instance, calling up all his taxing
solo features one after the other. I was witness to a striking example
of the first method at a concert in Leeds in 1958.

In his programme at the time, Ellington would announce a
composition by the high-note specialist William 'Cat' Anderson
entitled 'El Gato'. Four of the five trumpeters - Anderson himself,
Harold 'Shorty' Baker, Clark Terry and Ray Nance - would come
to the front of the stage to play the ensemble theme, a Spanish bull-
fight motif, and to take solos in turn. At Leeds, Shorty Baker was
still nursing a severe hangover from an all-night party at the Cavern
in Liverpool the previous evening and declined to come onstage.
The absence of one trumpet threatened to throw the whole
orchestration into disarray, so when the Duke began to introduce
'El Gato' in his customary way, the musicians behind him waved
and hissed to draw his attention to the empty seat in the trumpet
section which he appeared not to have noticed. No one gesticulated
and stage-whispered more urgently than the drummer, Sam
Woodyard, who was nearest to him. Ellington ploughed on
regardless, right up to the point at which he customarily introduced
the trumpet players. On this occasion he said, in his most urbane
manner, 'Usually, this number features four of our trumpeters,' at
which point he turned, looked straight at the empty chair and went
on, 'but Sam Woodyard is playing drums tonight.' He then
launched the number with a wild cry and an energetic downbeat,
leaving the three remaining trumpeters to sort things out for
themselves, which of course they did with aplomb.

I can remember only one occasion on which I meted out
Ellington-style retribution to one of my musicians.

In 1990, we went for a few days to Hong Kong. Adrian
Macintosh, my drummer of long-standing and a valued member
of the Lyttelton band 'family', is an inveterate sightseer. It's a
wholly admirable trait except when a performance of three one-
hour sets is in prospect in the evening. One day, he booked himself
and his wife Sheila on a boat excursion round the neighbouring
islands, which set off at 6.30 a.m. Before the gig that night, a dance
in our hotel, he was full of all the wonderful places they had visited
and sights they had seen. I listened with the mounting
vindictiveness of one who had spent the day, perhaps wisely but
certainly boringly, doing little that involved getting off my hotel
bed. By the end of the third set, Adrian was visibly wilting. Our
finale at that time was an up-tempo version of the tune 'Avalon',
which included a couple of choruses of drum solo, at the end of
which he would customarily glance over to me to cue in the final
ensemble. That night I signalled for another thirty-two bars — and
then another. It was only when I noticed that a sort of living rigor mortis was creeping from his wrists up towards his shoulders that
I relented and brought the proceedings to a close. No words were
spoken, but since then, the single word 'Avalon' has been enough
to induce caution when mountains or nature trails beckon.

PS: There is symmetry to the story. I learned from Adrian much
later that the house in which he was born was called Avalon. In
2005, he and Sheila went on holiday in California, untrammelled
by any musical responsibilities. One of the excursions advertised
was a visit to the island of Avalon. Adrian felt compelled to take it
^ in order to complete the circle of coincidence.

There was a certain method in the madness of the dictator
•bandleaders. As in many other areas of human endeavour,
controlling a work force of disparate and often wildly eccentric
characters is better done by an acknowledged leader than by a
committee, or even shared leadership. I once interviewed the great
jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli in the later years of his life. He
was often asked about his erstwhile association, at the head of Le
Quintet du Hot Club de France, with the wayward gypsy guitarist
Django Reinhardt. Stephane rated Django as his superior in
musical talent but an impossible business partner, but that was the
role that Django coveted.

Although a musician for whom the word 'genius' was
appropriate, Django Reinhardt could neither read nor write.
Nevertheless, when business matters were to be discussed in the
office of a promoter or agent, he always insisted on being present.
Usually he would sit quietly while Grappelli did all the talking.
Once in a while, he felt that, as co-leader, he should make his
presence felt. Thus, when a bulky contract was handed across the
desk for signature, he would snatch it from Grappelli s hand and
make as if to read it diligently clause by clause. At some random
point he would select a section and, stabbing at it with a forefinger,
pronounce emphatically 'Non! Non, non, non, non, NON!' More
often than not, it was the clause stating that the band's food,
accommodation and travel would be paid for by the management!

Louis Armstrong was never a baton-waggler. On the odd - and
I mean odd - film clips which show him conducting a big band,
he is to be seen out front beating the air with both arms
simultaneously on the first and third beats of the bar in
movements remarkably stilted and awkward for one to whom  »
every other aspect of the music came with such easy grace. He was
happiest with a small group, once telling an interviewer proudly,
'When that curtain goes up and you hear "When It's Sleepy Time
Down South" (his theme tune), you see me up there blowin'.'

As a disciplinarian, Armstrong was easy-going, having in the
mid-thirties handed over to his agent and manager, Joe Glaser, the
business of hiring and firing musicians. There exist recordings of 
his band in rehearsal in which he is heard leading primarily by
example, demonstrating what he wanted by playing the passage
on his trumpet. However short that passage was, he would blow it
with the same energy and passion that he would invest in a
finished performance. It would be a very obtuse sideman who
failed to get the message.

Outside the music itself, his sternest rules concerned his
relationship with his audience. Those who worked under him
would often declare that, if the curtain went up on a show to
reveal only a handful of customers in the house, their hearts would
sink. They knew that he was about to work them twice as hard.

I was once present at a press conference in which Louis
Armstrong was asked about the performances which the top
bands gave at the Paramount Theatre in the thirties, in between
the movie shows. He described how they would start at 10.30
a.m. and go on intermittently through the day till the screenings
finished at night. When he said that the curtain would often go
up to show no more than three sleepy people in the house, the
reporter who raised the subject said, in effect, 'Oh well, at least
you could take it easy then.' Armstrongs reply was indignant:

'You don't take it easy, never! One of those guys might have hitch-
hiked three hundred miles to hear your band for the first time. He
don't do that to see you take it easy!'

Similarly, one of his musicians told me that, one night in a club,
the attendance was so low that the owner came backstage before the
show to suggest that his staff, the musicians, Louis and, no doubt,
he himself could curtail the performance and go home early. The
man was asked sternly, 'Did those people out there pay a hundred
per cent at the box office?' When the manager nodded and
shrugged as if the subject was of no importance, Louis Armstrong
came back with, 'Then they get a hundred per cent of the show.'

It has to be said that Louis Armstrongs relaxed attitude to life
owed much to a long relationship with what has been known over
the years as tea, grass, reefer, muggles, gage, joint, muta, shuzzit, pot
and goodness knows what other affectionate nicknames. Ironically,
there was a medical dimension to the start of the affair. Though no
teetotaller (when he was in London in the mid-fifties, he would,
when asked, request what he called B&B, a daunting mix of brandy
and Benedictine), Armstrong was always stern about those musicians
who ruined their health with alcohol — and there were plenty in his
generation. When somebody in an interview mentioned the
premature death of the trumpeter Bunny Berigan in 1942 at the age
of 34 his first response was, 'He had no business dying that young.'
In a long letter to British Jazz writer the late Max Jones, quoted
in the biography enrided Louis by Max and trumpeter-historian
John Chilton, Armstrong described his and his friends' conversion
from alcohol to cannabis in terms resembling present-day health
freakery.

Speaking of 1931 - we did call ourselves Vipers, which
could have been anybody from all walks of life that smoked
and respected gage. That was our cute little name for
marijoana (sic), and it was a misdemeanor (sic) in those
days. . . . We always looked at pot as a sort of medicine, a

cheap drunk and one with much better thoughts than one
that's full of liquor ...

Later in the letter, he described a defining moment in his life:

I've always been physic minded . . . every time I'd light up
with a cat (viper) I'd mention laxatives and was happy to
know that everybody got the message ... Then here comes
this book — a health book written by Gaylord Hauser. When
I read down to the part where he recommended some herbs
- herbal laxatives - I said to myself, 'Hmmm, these herbs
reminds of the same as what my mother picked down by the
tracks in New Orleans ...' Right away I went to the Health
Store and bought myself a box of Swiss Kriss and took a
great big tablespoonful. . . [the prescribed dose being one
teaspoonful, I will leave the result to the readers
imagination] Wow! I said to myself, yessindeed (sic), this is
what I need from now on - and forsake all others.'

Few who came into contact with Louis Armstrong in his later life
will be unaware of the existence of Swiss Kriss. From the moment
he began touring the world as a superstar in the fifties onwards, he
appointed himself an unofficial promoter of the substance,
bestowing upon friends and acquaintances alike information and,
in special instances, free samples. On one European visit, he and
his wife Lucille had an audience with the Pope. It would not
surprise me to learn that the bejewelled hand that bestowed the
Papal blessing withdrew holding, tp its owners surprise, several
packets of Swiss Kriss. Had the pontiff taken on board Louis
Armstrongs prescription of one tablespoonful', the outcome
might have shaken the Catholic Church to its foundations.

Duggie Tbbutt, a road manager who escorted Louis on a British
tour, in the sixties, made the mistake of telling his famous charge
that he had suffered a heart attack a few years before. He was
subjected to a stern pep talk about neglecting his internal
plumbing and given a packet of Swiss Kriss to be taken that night
in the hotel when he went to bed. Without reading the label to
confirm the correct dose, Duggie took a tablespoonful as Louis
directed. At noon next day, the phone rang in Louis Armstrong's
room. After a certain amount of heavy breathing a voice, hardly
daring to raise itself above a whisper, said, 'Duggie here... is there
any antidote to that stuff?'

Louis Armstrong averred, in his letter to Max Jones, that he
gave up smoking marijuana in 1931 after spending nine days in
Jail on a charge of possession. Indeed, the letter includes a
touching open message of farewell:

Mary Warner, honey, you sure was good and I enjoyed
you 'heep much'. But the price got a little too high to pay
(law wise). At first you was a 'misdemeanor'. But as the
years rolled on you lost your misdo and got meaner and
meanor...

The evidence from many sources is that Louis Armstrong
deviated in this matter from his intention to 'tell it like it wuz,
that the touching farewell to 'Mary Warner was, in fact, a short-
term au revoir, and that the resumed affair continued without
loss of ardour until his dying day. I can contribute a small jot of
evidence to this.

One day during one of the Armstrong tours in the sixties, I was
approached by an emissary from his camp and given an envelope
containing three neatly rolled cigarettes, with a request to pass
them on to Max Jones, who was known to be a friend of mine.
I was no stranger to 'pot', having been persuaded years before
to sample it by fellow musician, Jimmy Skidmore, of whom I have
written affectionately elsewhere in this book. Jimmy was so
persistent in his efforts to enrol me in the club that, in a hotel on
tour, I agreed, though nervous of a step into the unknown that
might send me careering into the hotel corridors out of control
and laughing uproariously.

It was not an auspicious initiation. In his hotel room, he produced
a matchbox that appeared to contain, at first sight, some sort of
squashed insect. It turned out to be a 'roach' (I was not ignorant of
the jargon) - a damp, dark brown fag-end which he removed with the
reverent care of a priest dispensing a sacred wafer at Communion.

Seeing that I was threatening to throw up at the sight of it, he
volunteered to demonstrate the technique that would transport
me into Elysium. The problem was, that having lit up and inhaled
deeply, he was overtaken by a fit of coughing. The sight of him
heaving with cheeks blown out, lips tight shut and eyes popping,
desperately trying to retain the precious smoke while a barrage of
bronchial spasms threatened to release it prematurely, seemed to
confirm my direst forebodings. But I took my turn like a man.
The result was total anticlimax. Apart from an instant sore throat
and a slight light-headedness probably caused by hyper-
ventilation, I experienced nothing.

However, when I received the package intended for Max Jones,
I was unable to resist the temptation to try again with one of the
more promising 'joints'. Again the result was negative, so I put the
rest in a drawer along with the dozen or so unopened packets of
Swiss Kriss that I had acquired after several encounters with the
Master. Months later, when it was too late to pass them on to
Max, I took them outside and burnt them in the incinerator. For
several hours, the squirrels in my garden looked euphoric, so I
must have missed something.

P.S., told to me at some time along the way:

When Louis Armstrong toured in the latter years of his life, his
entourage included one Doc Pugh, who was designated his 'valet',
though the modern term 'gopher' (go for) is more accurate. One
of Docs many and varied functions was to marshal and assist the
stream of fans who would find their way backstage to see their
idol. As such he made many friends of all nationalities. One was
a young fan in Germany who never missed an Armstrong visit. An
occasion arose when he turned up backstage to find no Doc Pugh
to greet him. He got in to see Louis nonetheless, and asked him,
Vere iss Doc Pugh?' to be told, 'He died two months ago.'
Shocked, the young man — whose mastery of English grammar
had not progressed beyond the present tense — asked, 'But vot iss
wrong viss him?' Louis Armstrong replied genially, 'When you're
dead, pretty well everything's wrong with you!'

I can't take the spotlight off the idiosyncrasies of big
bandleaders without a word of sympathy. Unlike army sergeants,
they are not presented with nervous and pliable recruits to deal
with. To pursue the analogy, most of the 'sidemen in the big
dance or swing bands were, and still are, 'old soldiers' of a
rebellious or hard-bitten nature.

The trombonist Bill Harris, for some years a star of the
Woody Herman Orchestra, was an inveterate practical
joker. The orchestra was once booked to do a stage show
that involved dancers who, at a certain point, made their
entrance down a wide ramp that effectively split the band
down the middle. Finding himself seated right next to the
ramp, Harris was presented with irresistible temptation.
The show ran for several nights. By the time it came to the
final night. Bill Harris had equipped himself with one of
those wooden toy ducks with loose legs that enable it to
waddle down a slope.

In every show. Woody Herman would play his own
special feature, a slow, sentimental ballad on alto saxophone.
On this night, when the solo reached its most sensitive
moment, Bill put the duck on the slope and gave it a gentle
shove. It duly waddled into the spotlight, quacking loudly.

Another story told to me by Steve Voce

In my experience, which has involved leading a big band on
limited occasions, some of the hardest men in the business are
trumpet players. Its not hard to understand. Those who do
'sessions' — for recording, broadcasting or in theatre pits — spend
much of their working lives banging themselves in the mouth with
a chunk of brass, a practice not conducive to patience or docility.
The renowned British dance-band leader, Geraldo - ne Gerald
Bright — had a long-running band show on BBC radio. He signed
off at the end, in his somewhat lugubrious voice, with the words,
'Well, the clock on the wall says "Geraldo, that's all."' One night,
inevitably, he mistakenly spoonerised it. He got as far as, 'Well,
the wall on the clock says "Geraldo . . ."' when a voice loud
enough for the entire listening nation to hear called out from the
trumpet section '... You schmock!'

To those with ambitions to stand on a rostrum, balcony or barrack
square ordering the rest of us about in grandiose fashion, I
commend this thought:

As we journey through life, discarding baggage along the
way, we should keep an iron grip, to the very end, on the
capacity for silliness. It preserves the soul from desiccation.

Chairman Humph in introspective mode

It was in March 2001 that my band and Elkie Brooks, a dear
friend and occasional musical colleague of many years standing,
recorded an album together devoted to the Blues - of which she
is, to me, the best exponent outside of America, and superior to
quite a few inside. Having achieved fourteen successful tracks in
two-and-a-half days, we assembled in the hotel where the band
was staying for a celebratory dinner.

The mood was one of euphoria bordering on hysteria. In the
middle of much laughter and joking, Elkie turned to me and said,
'You know, you can be quite silly at times.' I accepted the
comment gratefully in the spirit in which it was given, as a
compliment. In this elevated context, we are not talking about

silly as synonymous with 'stupid', 'fatuous' or 'inane'. Of all the
options offered by the Concise Oxford Dictionary, perhaps

innocent' comes nearest. It's that ability to regress temporarily to
that period in childhood when one did or said things
spontaneously, solely for the fun they produced. As this book
unfolds, I am becoming more and more aware that the part of my
brain that involves memory is just one vast repository of silliness.
On the whole, I am quite pleased about this. It has enabled me to
look back with some equanimity over a life that has had its fair
share of downs as well as ups. The redeeming quality of silliness
should not be scorned.

For all I know, both sets of'famous last words' attributed to King
George V may belong in the realms of myth. 'How goes it with
the Empire?' always seemed to me an improbable and, if true,
sententious line on which to expend his last remaining breath. I
prefer to believe, as evidence of the survival of silliness to the end,
his reported reply to his wife Queen Marys assurance that, on his
recovery, they would go once again to Bognor for his convalescence.
'Bugger Bognor!' has the true ring of silliness, suggesting that he
may have shuffled off this mortal coil chuckling to himself.

My father died on 1 May 1962, so this letter, dictated to my
mother, could well stand as his official last words. They are,
indeed, intensely moving, not least in the evidence that, even in
extremis, his feel for the literary phrase didn't desert him.

Grundisburgh
25 April 1962

There is nothing in anything except my gratitude and the
wonderfulness of Pamela (she mustn't cross that out). So
what then? I am not even a chaos — I am a vast infinity. She
will write you any more, if there is anything. Love to Ruth
and bless you both. Oh the boredom!

A letter to Rupert Hart-Davis, the last entry in the six-volume
Lyttelton—Hart-Davis Letters (published by John Murray)

I have some alternative last words to set beside it.
When my father became terminally ill with liver cancer, my
mother s sisters rallied to her support. Sibell (Fulford) came to stay
in the house, and my Aunt Madeline (Wigan), who lived not far
away in Suffolk, visited regularly. It was she who, to give practical
help, put at my mother's disposal the services of a lady known
affectionately as Buffy. She was one of those erstwhile retainers,
not unusual in big country houses, who had stayed on in their
own accommodation to become virtually a member of the family.

One day, near the end, Buffy was busying herself around the
ground-floor room to which my father had been moved. He had
never, in life, welcomed fuss of any sort - his study had for
decades resisted the invasion of anyone carrying so much as a
feather duster with intent to tidy it. But since he had reached the
stage of slipping in and out of consciousness, it was thought that
he would barely notice the presence in the room of anyone but my
mother, who was constantly at his bedside. I cannot tell it first-
hand, since Sibell urged me and my sisters not to go in and see
him. He would not have been aware of it and my mother's
presence was enough. So it was from Sibell that I learned that, as
Buffy bustled about her business, he tried to speak. When my
mother leant close to hear the painfully whispered words, they
were, 'Tell Buffy to get her vast bum out of here.'

This seems an appropriate place to record that I was born on 23
May 1921, a birthday shared by bandleader Artie Shaw and
actress Joan Collins, a fact to which I can attach no significance at
all, since I have no belief in horoscopes or star-signs. So I don't
really know why I've raised the subject, except as an excuse to put
my first reported words on the record.

I was told, and sometimes I imagine I can vaguely remember it,
that I was with my father at a bus stop in front of a row of houses
when a cat came out of a garden gate and walked lazily towards
us, no doubt with the friendliest of intentions. Peering
apprehensively from behind my father's leg, which must have
denied to me like a tree-trunk at that age, I uttered words that I
will enshrine here as a precocious example of wisdom and
perception:

Lets dead that cat before it eats us!

The first recorded words of Chairman Humph, circa 1923

Eighty-three years later, I still regard that as good advice, though
I would perhaps word it differently. It's never wise to trust a cat.
My wife Jill used to adopt them in large numbers. One visitor
showed such aggressive tendencies that it had to stay in a box in
the courtyard, from which point it terrorised all comers. Twice in
one day I had to rush the double-glazing man from Thermastore
down to Accident and Emergency in Barnet Hospital. If things
had turned out for the worst, his last words would have been,
*Dont worry - cats like me.'

The difference between an exhibitionist and an eccentric is
that the exhibitionist demands an audience; the eccentric
is oblivious to it.

Chairman Humph, probably in eccentric mode

It's fortunate that I was no stranger to eccentricity when, in
1953, Bruce Turner joined my band on alto saxophone and
clarinet. It's difficult to explain to those unacquainted with the
internal politics of post-war British jazz just what a furore his
arrival caused. A deep schism existed between the Revivalists (later
revised to Traditionalists), who favoured a reconstruction of the
New Orleans-style jazz recorded in the twenties, and the 
Modernists, who followed so-called beboppers Charlie Parker and
Dizzy Gillespie into uncharted territory.

One of the most stubbornly held canons of Revivalism was that
there was no place in genuine New Orleans-style jazz for a
saxophone of any denomination. This was later revealed as a myth,
but died hard and is still upheld in some quarters. When Bruce
appeared with the band at the Birmingham Town Hall and stepped
forward to play his first solo on the dreaded instrument, the students
from the nearby universities who thronged the hall unfurled a
banner reading: 'GO HOME, DIRTY BOPPER'. In most matters,
Bruce was highly sensitive, and from then until the end of his life he
remained deeply suspicious of Birmingham and its jazz population.

It was some time earlier that we first discovered that we had
imported serious eccentricity into our ranks. Onstage at the
Picton Hall in Liverpool, Bruce's debut with us in a major venue,
we were disturbed throughout the first half of the concert by an
intermittent high-pitched squeak. At first we suspected the piano
pedals, but our pianist Johnny Parker declared them innocent. In
the interval, drummer George Hopkinson went on stage and
checked the pedals of his bass drum and high-hat cymbals. They
were in smooth working order. Halfway through the second half,
with the mystery unsolved, I happened to turn round in time to
see Bruce, mouth open like some great seabird, producing the dry
creaking from somewhere in the depths of his oesophagus. Since
it was his first gig with us, I decided to make no mention of it,
especially as musically, he was performing at full, majestic throttle.
After one of his high-flying solos, I went over to him and
muttered 'Great, Bruce!' His answer was 'Nimrod!'

Over the eighteen years he was with me, in two stints between
1953 and 1988, I became quite well-versed in his idiosyncratic
language and behaviour, stories of which have become the stuff of
jazz legend and would alone fill a book of this size. His habit of
uttering words and sentences in duplicate, of using outdated
terminology in Billy Bunterish idiom - 'Some fun, I'd say!' "This
is the life for a chap!' (later abbreviated to 'Life for a chap, life for
a chap!' and, eventually, just 'Chap, chap!') - his habit of calling
all and sundry 'Dad' regardless of generation or gender and his
strange, codified vocabulary that substituted 'Strawberry' for
extraordinary' and enrolled 'Nimrod!' as an all-purpose
exclamation - they have all seeped into the jazz language and
ensured him some degree of immortality. As with many
eccentrics, crazy happenings swarmed around him like flies round
a donkeys eye.

Acker Bilk, with whom he worked in the sixties, remembers a
day in Germany when he and other members of the band escorted
Bruce to a shopping centre to help him buy a pair of shoes. Once
assured that he was in the safe hands of an assistant who spoke
English, they went off to do some shopping of their own. When
they returned, they found the floor around Bruce strewn with
discarded shoes and the salesman on the verge of suicide. It
appeared that Bruce had tried on every shoe in the store, and not
one would fit. Then a sharp-eyed member of the band spotted
paper still in the toe of one shoe: 'Bruce, you haven't taken the
paper out of the shoes!'

'Yeah!' cried Bruce to the bewildered salesman, 'Paper in the
toe. Dad, paper in the toe!' When the musicians around him
spontaneously broke into the familiar musical intro that, in tonic
sol-fa, can be written SOH - SOH - soh - LA - LE - TE, the
man must have concluded that his shop had been invaded by
unfortunates on an outing from a secure institution.

In a band-room before one of our concerts, Bruce was talking
about jazz to a fan who had found his way backstage. He crossed
the room to ask me who had succeeded Peanuts Hucko as
clarinettist in Louis Armstrong s All Stars. Neither he nor the fan
could remember. Bruce said he thought the musician's name
began with 'S' and contained the letter 'i'. I couldn't help and he
was still puzzling when we went on stage.

All through the first half of the concert, he kept coming
across to me when someone else was soloing, muttering
possibilities into my ear. 'Sykes . . . Spike . . . Styles . . . Shine
. . .' All drew a blank.

In the interval, he came over to say 'Think it might have started
with a "P", started with a "P".' All through the second half, it was
'Price ... Pike ... Pyne ... Pile ...' in my ear, still with no result.
Then, as we were preparing to leave after the show, he darted
across the band-room to announce triumphantly, 'Got it. Dad,
got it... it was Bob McCracken!'

Bruce was a lifelong teetotaller, one reason for which was his
failure to find in the gamut of alcoholic refreshment anything that
conformed to the demands of a sweet tooth of legendary
proportion. I only saw him touch alcohol twice. When we were
travelling in a coach on the Continent during a tour, he bought
himself a bottle ofAdvocaat and almost drained it at one sitting,
in the avowed belief that it was egg custard. When we reached our
destination, he had to be walked round the block several times
before he was fit to resume his career.

On another occasion, we were all relaxing in our hotel after a
concert. Somebody ordered for him a Mackeson's Sweet Stout
in the mistaken belief that the name would entice him to join in
the fun. When it arrived he took one sip, crumpled his face
in disgust and then, when he thought no one was looking, took a
spoonful of brown sugar from a left-over coffee tray and tipped it
into his glass.

For some reason that only a biochemist can explain, the
drink instantly erupted, hissing, bubbling and steaming like a
tropical geyser. It was a scene reminiscent of the dramatic
moment in the old Jekyll and Hyde movie when Spencer
Tracey, as Dr Jekyll, mixed the potion that was to transform
him into Mr Hyde — except that Bruce, stopping short of
metamorphosis, let out the squawk of a startled heron and then
rounded on the donor of the sweet stout as if the poor man had
done it on purpose.

Bruce died on 28 November 1993. His funeral in Milton
Keynes was organised and conducted by his wife Sandra, and was
a gloriously apt and joyful farewell. His love of music of every
denomination, of theatre and literature and comedy, was
celebrated along with his many idiosyncrasies. He was renowned
for that sweet tooth, which prompted obsessive consumption of
chocolate and cake. (We once played at a wedding and just in time
prevented him from sampling the wedding cake before bride and
bridegroom had even seen it.)

When at the start of his funeral the curtains went back to reveal
his coffin, it was surmounted not with the customary pile of
flowers, but by a large chocolate cake which Sandra had made for
him. Into it, she had stuck a pennant bearing the initials BT.
Bruces ego manifested itself in mysterious ways. Coming across a
drawerful of the pennants in some office or other, he had nicked
a fistful of them. After his death, they were found by Sandra in a
wardrobe. The initials stood for British Telecom.

I visited Bruce at their home in Newport Pagnell shortly before
he died. As I left, Sandra handed me an envelope. It contained a
letter that he wanted me to have. It was not addressed to anyone
in particular, but it was clear when I read it that he wished it to
be seen by his musical colleagues. Non-musicians need to know
that the brief tremolo which instrumentalists employ at the end
of a sustained note, to soften it or give it character, is called a
'terminal vibrato*. It is comforting to know that Bruce's love of
humorous wordplay — silliness, perhaps — did not desert him even
in his last days.

The letter read:

Just to let you know that I am feeling pretty well, and in
good spirits. I often wondered what it would be like to
suffer from terminal vibrato, but it isn't bad really.

Suddenly everyone is making me great stacks of cream
pudding. I'm sure this can't be right, but I'm just letting it
happen.

Well, it is a bit of a nuisance about January. I thought I
was going to do a few nice sessions round about that time,
before calling it a day.

Never mind, eh?

Just want to say thanks for all the visits and kind
greetings when I was laid up — it made me feel really
good. I loved 'Swinging Sounds for Sick Saxists', to
which I have now added your earlier (Monday)
programme and also the Steve Voce review [the reference
is to broadcasts in tribute to him while he was in
hospital, which he had put on tape]. Overgenerous, but
still very nice to have.

I started out to write a longer letter than this, and to say
how much I have valued all the friendships and good times
I had while working with all you lot. But there is a danger
of becoming treacly, so I'll stop here.

Bruce

Bruce Turner had been told by his Macmillan nurses that it was
most unlikely that he would be able to get out and play in January.
He died only a week or two after writing this letter, and it stands
as an extraordinary act of bravery and selflessness.

To exemplify further the redeeming virtue of silliness, I summon
some memories of my maternal grandfather.

Colonel Charles Adeane (like many of his generation he
retained his military title after he retired from the army) was at
various times a soldier, landowner, big-game hunter and, when I
knew him. Lord Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire. In my eyes as a
child, he was a terrifying tyrant prone to outbursts of impatience
and appalling rudeness. In this respect, my grandmother was the
perfect foil. In her young days, as Madeline Wyndham, she had
been a noted beauty, as can be seen in a portrait of her with her
two sisters painted by John Sargent and entitled The Wyndham
Sisters. From the time we first knew her as small children, we
regarded her as old, as children do. In that elongated old age, she
was still remarkably handsome, with dignity enhanced by the sort
of imposing and seemingly armour-plated bosom presented by
her more famous contemporary, Queen Mary. She had grace and
patience and we loved her. She entertained us in the evenings with
card games — 'Snap' when we were small; the more complicated
'Bezique' when we were old enough. It is tempting to say that, in
dealing with my grandfather's outbursts of rage and, on occasion,
stubborn rudeness, her way with children stood her in good stead.

One evening when, as a teenager, I was staying at Babraham
Hall, my grandparents' stately home in Cambridgeshire, two
bachelor dons from Cambridge came to dinner. They had been
invited by my grandmother, who took more seriously than her
husband his duty, as Lord Lieutenant of the county, to maintain
contact with nearby Cambridge University. As the meal
progressed and the intellectual conversation rumbled on, I was
aware of mounting restiveness at my grandfathers end of the
table. When we stood up at the end, he said to me abruptly,
Come on, Humphrey, we'll go and play billiards.'

It was a command to which there was no gainsaying, but as we
went down to the billiard room in the basement, I thought it odd
that he left his wife to entertain the two academics in the drawing
room on her own. I felt even more uncomfortable when after an
hour or so, Mr Fuller, the butler, came down to give the message
from Mrs Adeane that the two gentlemen were leaving. We were
in the middle of a game and, without turning from the table, he
grunted, 'Mrs Adeane will say goodbye to them,' and played his
shot. When we rejoined her after the two gentlemen had gone, she
seemed quite unruffled. But I imagine that, in the privacy of the
bedroom, he received at least a scolding.

I base that belief on a story that my father told, not without
relish at its inherent humour.

The vicar of Babraham, whose church was in the grounds of
Babraham Hall, was, as I remember, a blond, weedy little man
of Uriah Heep-ish obsequiousness. In a moment of recklessness,
he wrote to my grandfather complaining about the quality of the
milk supplied by the Home Farm. My grandfather went straight
to the bureau in the library and penned an outraged reply,
berating the man for his impertinence. The letter ended with, 'I
must ask you to get your milk elsewhere!' He showed it to my
grandmother, who told him that he really could not post it - after
all, they had to see the man in church every Sunday, not to
mention discussing parish affairs with him at other times.
Grudgingly, my grandfather tore up the letter and wrote another,
only marginally less heated than the first. Once again, he ended,
'I must ask you to get your milk elsewhere!' And once again, my
grandmother vetoed it.

The to-ing and fro-ing went on for a while until eventually my
grandfather capitulated, writing a restrained letter expressing
regret that the milk had been below standard and promising that
the matter would be looked into and would never happen again.
Testily, he signed it 'Yours sincerely, Charles Adeane' and handed
it over. My grandmother read it and gave it back, saying, 'That's
good - I'm sure it's best to do it that way.'

As my grandmother turned away, my grandfather hastily
scrawled, 'I must ask you to get your milk elsewhere!' across the
bottom, before sealing the letter in the envelope.

(There is a sequel to this story. The vicar concerned achieved
widespread notoriety a few years later when the News Of The World
reported that he had been found in bed with a Wall's Ice Cream
man, thus giving an entirely new slant to the famous slogan 'Stop
Me And Buy One.')

One further recollection of Charles Adeane underlines the
power of silliness to redeem.

In stark contrast to the frightening image he presented to us
children. Grandpapa, as we called him, had a party piece for
which, at Christmas lunch, everyone clamoured, some
indulgently, others enthusiastically, according to age and the
number of times they had sat through the performance.

It told the story of a choppy cross-Channel voyage by a lady
curiously named 'Mrs Yellowlily', an episode that required a few
props and some preparation. He would first of all take a large Jaffa
orange from the fruit bowl in the centre of the dining-room table
and, with a sharp knife, prise out eyes and a gaping mouth. The
latter he crammed with an assortment of raisins, sultanas, grapes
and anything else that came to hand, finally furnishing it with
teeth in the form of peeled almonds.

Draping a table napkin over a large wineglass, he put the effigy
on top of it, and Mrs Yellowlilys journey began. As he intoned a
running commentary, he gently manipulated the napkin so that
the orange began to roll, gently at first, then grotesquely as the
'boat* moved into rougher seas. The climax came when the napkin
was suddenly whisked away and the orange was squeezed into the
glass, disgorging its assorted contents to the accompaniment of
gleeful hawking and gagging sound effects from the Lord
Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire.

Apart from the seasonal silliness described above, my
grandfather had a gentle side that revealed itself to me in later
years. He played the "cello as a hobby, and I remember being
encouraged by my mother more than once to go with her into the
library at Babraham Hall to listen to him play. He played 'The
Dying Swan' by Saint Saens with great feeling but he was not very
expert, and there were moments when the thought occurred that a
cow might have been a more appropriate subject. But as he sawed
away, he adopted a dreamy, almost tragic expression, closing his
eyes and flaring his nostrils with every groaning cadence. It was a
sad look that, away from music, became more familiar in the years
after my grandmother died and softens my memory of him.

It was many years after my father died that I discovered that
he, too, had once played the 'cello. I could never imagine him
handling a musical instrument, though given the choice, the
voice and the talent, I think he would have made an impressive
singer. Paul Robeson would have been his model. For a long
time the choir in the Upper Chapel at Eton, which came from
outside the school, boasted two formidable basso projundi
known to boys and masters alike as Rumblebelly and
Thunderguts. My father once canvassed their views on Robeson
and was disappointed to learn that, notwithstanding the singer's
cavernous and subterranean o' Man River', they judged him to
be a bass/baritone rather than a true bass. The revelation didn't
stop my father coming on like Paul Robeson in church,
booming rather than singing the harmony parts of hymns or
carols, while we glanced nervously around to see if anyone else
was listening.

On one occasion, George Lyttelton was at an MCC dinner
sitting with a friend and relative. Father Ted Talbot of the Mirfield
Brotherhood of the Resurrection. One of them commented on
the extraordinary volume of male bellowing around them that
made normal conversation difficult. They decided to find out how
loudly they could sing before anyone noticed. Thus, in a steady
crescendo, the distinguished schoolmaster and the reverend cleric
sang several verses of '0 God Our Help In Ages Past' before
abandoning the fruitless exercise.

The surprising information about my father s flirtation with the
'cello came from a profile of him written for a university
publication at the time he was up at Cambridge:

When George Lyttelton practices the 'cello, all the cats in
the district converge upon his rooms in the belief that one
of their number is in distress.

I must say the sentence served to eradicate any vestigial sensitivity
I might have retained about his views on my music, of which he
once said, 'I understand it marginally less than I do Chinese.'

It occurs to me that, in discussing silliness, I may be blundering
about in predominantly male territory. The historian Roger
Fulford, who married my mothers sister Sibell and became a
much-loved member of the family, believed that my mother was
in fact funnier than my father in that her humour was less
contrived.
Roger, small, pear-shaped and with the look of a quizzical mole,
was himself delightfully droll company. It was he who jolted my
father out of a deeply pessimistic mood at the outset of World War
II. He responded to the wail of the first air-raid alarm to be heard
in the Home Counties (a false alarm, as it turned out) with the
pronouncement, in his fluting voice and with a twinkling eye, 'I
regard it as the final fling of a desperate foe.' My father would still
quote the knowingly absurd comment long after the war ended,
six years later.

I saw much of Roger Fulford in those years through my close
friendship with my cousin Anthony, of whom I wrote this in 1954:

Anthony was really more of a brother-once-removed than
a cousin to me, because our mothers are sisters and our
fathers were brothers. We first met when I was eight and I
disliked him so intensely that it was clear that we were
either going to be deadly enemies or close friends. It
turned out to be close friends. Our lives ran parallel -
Sunningdale School, Eton, Wales and the Grenadiers
- until he was killed on the Anzio beachhead in 1944.

Anthony was more of a Lyttelton than I am. He was a
sound, hard-working scholar (at Sunningdale he was
always above me in class, which was humiliating because I
was Lyttelton major and he was Lyttelton minor by a space
of two months). He played cricket for Eton at Lords and
held strong but conservative tastes in music and the arts. If
he had lived, I think he would have been the one to follow
in my fathers footsteps and maintain the Eton tradition
on the staff at Eton.

From my first book, I Play As I Please (McGibbon and Kee,
1954)

Looking back on it now, I would describe our relationship as
something more akin to brotherly love. I was in bed at home in
Eton when, early one morning, my father came up to tell me that
Anthony had been killed during what has since been revealed as
the criminally futile invasion of Anzio in 1944. Delivering the
news, he was too full of emotion to do more than blurt out the
information in a choked voice before giving me a rough,
consolatory shake of the shoulder and hurrying from the room.

I had not long been back from Italy on sick leave after my own
dehumanising experiences of death on the beachhead at Salerno.
In the dark moments of the night, I'm sometimes disturbed by the
absence of any great surge of grief in my recollection of that early
morning, but rather a numb feeling of, 'Well, that's that.'

Not much of an epitaph for someone who was a brother in all
respects other than actual joint parenthood. But war is destructive
in ways that reach far beyond the obvious. As things turned out, our
lives would probably have veered off in quite different directions
after the war. But the fact is that he played the brotherly role, with
all its companionship and petty vicissitudes, throughout the years
when it was most important — and the most fun to remember.

As Roger Fulford perceived, style of humour was one of the
areas in which my father and mother differed from (I prefer to say
complemented) each other. These excerpts, from communications
that I had from each of them at various times, will perhaps
highlight the contrasting styles.

While he was visiting an old friend, the author Percy Lubbock,
at his villa near Via Reggio in Italy, my father sent me a postcard
in which he wrote:

I breakfast in bed every morning, getting up just in time
for a three-course lunch. The afternoon, however, is less
strenuous. The food is delicious and the waistline prospers.
But have we not all eternity to bant in?

NOTES

1. The now obsolete word 'bant', meaning in late Victorian
times to diet, derived from the name of William Banting, who in
1863 wrote the first book on low-carbohydrate diet 'as a service to
his fellow man' (a service which to some observers today might
put him in roughly the same category as the fictional Doctor
Frankenstein!)

2. It has come as no surprise to me to learn, lately, that my
father, who could summon from his capacious memory a literary
quotation to match every possible occasion, borrowed the final
rhetorical sentence almost verbatim from the nineteenth-century
essayist Thomas Carlyle, who used it in response to his wife's
insistence that he should rest.

It was in somewhat similar circumstances that my mother
wrote to me in January 1974 from Dorset, where she had spent
a family Christmas at the home of my elder sister Diana and her
husband, Alexander Viscount Hood. In response in each case to
a lifestyle more lavish than their own, my father revealed
epicurean leanings while my mother's were emphatically stoic.
She wrote:

We started dinner one night with caviar - a tiny little pot for
seven people. I made a mental note of the cost and rushed
upstairs and sent £5 to Help The Aged as a peace offering!
Caviar means nothing to me — kipper paste is more in my line!

My mother kept a diary during a short period of her life. She was
the eldest of six children. It was the strict custom of the day that,
as such, she should remain at home when the other fledglings had
flown, to be a help to her mother and a companion to her father.
Even in the emergency of world war, this rule applied; so when my
mother, already in her mid-twenties, expressed a wish to join the
VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachments) as many of her 
contemporaries were doing, the notion was sternly vetoed by my
grandfather. After much persuasion, he grudgingly agreed that she
could go with friends on a nursing course in East Anglia. While
there, she wrote to him to say that she would not be his daughter
if she did not enlist to do her bit.

The implied flattery did the trick and in July 1916, she went to
France. She was already engaged to my father (they eventually
married in 1919) and she was accompanied by his sister Rachel
Lyttelton and cousin Hermione (her friends on the course). It was
at the time of the prolonged Battle of the Somme and she was
posted immediately to a hospital outside Rouen, not far behind
the front-line trenches, her friends either with her or in hospitals
nearby.

During her time in France she kept the diary. As might be
expected of someone brought up in an aristocratic home where
reticence and self-control were instilled, her account was muted of
the horrors which she must have witnessed as convoys of wounded
and dying soldiers, many still in their teens, were brought in. At
one point she wrote of, 'the sadness and horror of seeing so much
suffering and death', adding characteristically, <! can remember it
all very distinctly, but think it best not to write down all the
details.' The following excerpts, however, paint a picture all the
more sombre for the juxtaposition of tragedy and the stuff of
holiday postcards home. She had arrived in France in mid-July,
and by 2 August was writing this:

I had my off-duty time this afternoon and sat and wrote letters
in the orchard near our quarters. Ogilvte, a young Australian of
eighteen years, who reminds me of a St Bernard puppy or a
young colt with large, loose-jointed limbs, is desperately ill in the
ward. He has a wound in the back which is infected with gas
gangrene and he is dying of septic poisoning. This evening I
stood by him all the time I was on duty so as to do the little that
could be done to make him more comfortable. He was very
restless but very patient and kept saying that he would be better
in the morning, but I do not think he will live till morning. It is
very sad and painful, and the thought of these young Australians
and Canadians dying so far from their homes is very affecting.

3 August. Went on duty and found that Ogilvie had died in the
night.

The manner in which this second entry continues, here abridged,
reveals the extraordinary mental adjustment that seems to click in
almost automatically in the grotesque circumstances of war:

I had my off-duty time in the afternoon and R. had an off-
day, so we went down to Rouen and met H. in the
cathedral. It is a heavenly cool and peaceful place to sit in.
The heat in the streets and trams is appalling and they are
both very crowded. I hate the feeling of being jammed up
among so many hot people. We stayed about three-
quarters of an hour and then went with H. who wanted to
cash a cheque at Cox's and do some shopping.

My mother was in France for eleven months before becoming ill
herself. The diary ends with her return to England, and this
epilogue:

A diary is a very egotistical thing, and it is rather difficult
not to make it sound as though one was the only person
who had done anything! The thing to remember is that
there are thousands of VADs and that I served less long
and with less powers of endurance than most of them!

It appears that her maternal grandmother, also called Madeline,
read the diary some time later. Using the generic nickname given
to generations ofWyndham andAdeane grandmothers she added,
in heavy pencil, this forceful postscript:

Gan-gan does not agree. She knows that you worked
hard and through many months after your bodily
strength had quite broken down, simply on your spirit,
determination and resolution . . . And therefore it was
heroic. M Wyndham, August 1918

My own experience of the horrors of front-line warfare was far
shorter, a mere five weeks in 1943 before a cocktail of illnesses
brought it to an end. The actual landing on the Salerno beachhead
was a protracted and brutal episode. In written and spoken
reminiscences, I have focussed on what some would call the
frivolous side, which is nowadays brought back to me frequently by
people whose names and faces I don't recognise saying such things
as, "I remember you playing your trumpet at Salerno, serenading us
at night with a jazzed-up version of The Last Post.' This was less
irreverent than it sounds nowadays, since the functional, as
opposed to ceremonial, purpose of that sombre bugle-call was
simply to convey to troops in the field the order 'Lights Out!'

Nevertheless it contrasts shockingly with a stronger memory I
have from that same period. A sergeant with whom I worked as a
signals officer was brought back into the battalion headquarters to
die. The once strong, handsome, confident man was trying to
raise his shattered body from the stretcher, crying pitifully,
Mummy, Mummy!' I am no psychiatrist, but putting that ever-
present but rarely summoned recollection alongside my mothers
more expansive memories does focus on the minds capacity to
divide itself, in moments of extreme and abnormal horror, into
two quite separate compartments, one for things of which 'it is
best not to write down all the details', the other for trips to the
shops or the beachhead trumpeting.

PS: A decade or more after the end of World War I, my mother
and father took me and my older sister Diana on a short holiday
to Bruges in Belgium from where we visited such places as the
notorious Hill 60 and the site of the vast long-distance cannon
nicknamed Big Bertha. I still have a small replica of a field-gun,
green with age and verdigris, to remind me of what fun it all was.
I imagine that, so far as we children were concerned, the purpose
of the visit was educational. For my mother, of course, it was a
different thing. I remember us, on one occasion, standing on high
ground overlooking a war cemetery, a huge field filled with row
upon row of small white crosses perfectly aligned like a battalion
on parade. In the silence, I glanced at my mother. Tears were
pouring down her face.

Bringing Roger Fulford into the hotchpotch leads me to observe
that the dividing line between silliness and eccentricity is narrow
but clearly defined. In 1933, he wrote a glorious book entitled
The Wicked Uncles, subtitled The Father Of Queen Victoria And
His Brothers. Of the five uncles, the most sympathetic - better,
perhaps, to say the least unattractive — was Adolphus Frederick,
Duke of Cambridge, whom the author describes as:

a grave disappointment to those sparkling letter-writers,
those acid diarists, those resourceful chatterers and the
Whig historians who are, in their respective spheres,
responsible for the history of England. There could be no
room in their pages or their talk for a prince who was
dutiful, sober, moral and honoured his father and mother.
Adolphus owes his place in this book of mine to an eccentricity
which appears to have spiralled out of control towards the end of
his life:

His finest and most eccentric efforts were reserved for church. He
became very deaf and always sat right in the front of the church,
where he was seen by the whole congregation. This might not
have been so serious if he had not made a practice of being heard
all over the church as well, in a running commentary on the
service. It was a common occurrence to hear in reply to the
clergyman's 'Let us pray,' an agreeable 'By all means' from the
Duke, or, in answer to a prayer for rain, Amen, but you won't get
it till the wind changes,', or, in answer to the sentence, 'For we
brought nothing into the world, neither may we carry anything
out,' the reply, 'True, true - too many calls upon us for that.'

Roger Fulfords account concludes:

A clergyman, who was in the congregation, taking no part
in the service, has given a graphic description of the Duke
in prayer: 'I had not caught what psalm the clerk had given
out and turning to look on my neighbours page, fidgety
restless HRH turns round and bawls loud enough to
drown the organ, "It begins at the third verse, the third
verse." All eyes turned on Royalty speaking to inferior
clergy. Royalty went on singing like a bull.

The Wicked Uncles by Roger Fulford (G P Putnam's Sons, New
York, 1933)

The Lyttelton family tree has its fair crop of eccentrics. I
believed until quite recently that I was named after the Humphrey
Lyttelton who was hanged in the aftermath of the Gunpowder
Plot for harbouring the conspirators, and that the name was
banned by the family from that day onwards until my father chose
it as an act of defiance. It appears that this is fantasy. A woman
attending one of my gigs in Worcestershire left for me a
photograph that she thought might interest me. It was of a plaque
in her nearby village church in memory of a Humphrey Lyttelton
who died a natural death some twenty years after the Plot.

Not long after that revelation, word reached me that yet another
Humphrey Lyttelton was buried in a tomb in a church at Kings
Norton, near Birmingham, during the same century. As my long-
running Radio 2 programme. The Best of Jazz, has for the last
decade been recorded in Birmingham, I took time off to see for
myself. And there it was, a large marble sarcophagus bearing the
name Humphrey Lyttelton, on the lid of which is a faded depiction
of a rather dashing-looking man with what used to be known as a
Van Dyke beard lying alongside his wife, who, it was believed,
shared the tomb with him. The belief was misguided. The
discovery of another tomb bearing his name in a church in nearby
Pershore revealed that, having had himself depicted alongside his
wife in Kings Norton, he had high-tailed it to Pershore, as fit as a
fiddle, to marry again and live for another twenty-odd years.

So far as I know, history does not record whether he was an
accomplished con man or an early Lyttelton eccentric. Personally,
I wish history would keep its mouth shut. The original
Gunpowder Plot theory at least offered some anecdotal 
compensation for having been christened Humphrey.

Its a consoling fact that these days, anyone named Humphrey
will soon become known as 'Humph'. When polite people of brief
acquaintance ask, 'Do you mind if I call you Humph?' I answer
eagerly, 'Oh, please do!' I didn't acquire the abbreviation in
childhood. Most of my close relatives have preferred Hump,
which I find less - well, comfy, though it does supply a fathomless
source of merriment whenever the warning 'Humps Ahead' is
encountered on the roadside.

When I began to draw cartoons for the Daily Mail in the late
forties, I signed them 'humph' with a small 'h'. So if there are any
disadvantages derived from the pen-name - such as finding
myself turning round enquiringly when large dogs bark 'Humph!
Humph!' in the street - I have perhaps only myself to blame.
I have suggested that I am not very keen on the name Humphrey.
It seems sort of stuffy and, were there such an adjective,
upholstery, like the padding on some rather musty old boarding-
house sofa. But it seems to be extraordinarily popular as a name
for animals. One has only to think of Humphrey, the famous
Downing Street cat, recently deceased but no doubt already
enshrined in history.

Fewer people are likely to know of a camel in Edinburgh Zoo
who, for the run of a promotional campaign during the Zoos brief
sponsorship of the Edinburgh International Jazz Festival, was
wittily renamed Humprey. I had my photograph taken with him,
but I can't say that we struck up a close relationship. Like camels
of any age, he looked moth-eaten and as if bits were quietly
dropping off him. Nevertheless I was pleased for him when, 
re-visiting the Zoo the following year, I saw that his original name,
Ptolemy II, had been restored, along with his dignity.

Then there was Guide Dog Humphrey, a magnificent Alsatian
whose photograph hangs in my loo. Again it was a publicity
promotion that brought us together. We were photographed in
one-sided conversation in the centre of a small but busy
roundabout on the outskirts ofWalsall - of all places to be seen
lying belly down on the grass talking to a dog!
I have postponed to the end the ill-fated budgerigar called
Humphrey who was adopted in my honour as a mascot by the
crew of a Royal Navy submarine. One day, when the hatches were
battened down and the vessel was submerged, Humphrey
managed to escape from his cage. In a tragically brief moment of
freedom, he flew straight into the ventilator fan. I imagine that
the captain of the vessel was still picking feathers out of his nostrils
when he wrote to me a few days later to break the sad news.

Some time in 2004, i received a postcard from a musical associate
saying that, on holiday in Egypt, he and his partner were gazing at
a statue that had been defaced with graffiti when she spotted, high
up, the name and date A Lyttelton 1839'. Coincidence, perhaps,
but it set my mind trawling through possible offenders among my
forebears. Its unlikely to have been Great Uncle Alfred Lyttelton,
who captained England at cricket and was Colonial Secretary in his
spare time. Very little information was ever handed down to me
about Great Uncle Arthur other than that he became Bishop of
Southampton, so I must put him down as unpromising. My money
would be on Great Uncle Albert, who provided much anecdotal
fodder in his time.

I have often told the story of one of Albert Victor Lytteltons
most famous exploits, but have lately discovered that I have
tweaked it out of recognition. It was my father who told it to me
in the first place, and fortunately his account appears in one of the
letters he wrote to Rupert Hart-Davis. Its better that he should
tell it himself:

Some day you might like to hear of my Uncle Albert. He
was not humdrum. He was a missionary. His face, his
saintliness and, to a certain extent, his clothes and his diet
were those of John the Baptist. He was insatiably curious.
When moving staircases came in, he tried to stop one by
holding on to one of the stationary knobs at the side. A
moment later he picked himself up from the floor, quite
satisfied by the proof that he could notstop it. Then he tried
(about sixty-odd) to go up the stairs that were coming doum^
and after a minute or so on what must have been exactly like
a treadmill, found out that that wouldn't do either.

From The Lyttelton-Hart-Davis Letters (John Murray)

I have no source of verification for the following story, nor do I
know where it came from. But it sounds in character.

When, as a missionary, Albert Lyttelton was posted to South
Africa, he had occasion to make a long train journey from
Johannesburg to Durban. He was waiting outside his house for
the cab that had been summoned to take him to the station,
which was overdue. Anxious about the time, he pulled his fob
watch by its chain out of his waistcoat pocket. Insecurely attached,
the watch flew off the chain and smashed on to the pavement.
Without hesitation, he went back indoors and took an ornate
ormolu clock off the mantelpiece. Thenceforward, his long
journey was uneventful as he rattled across the South African veld
holding the large clock carefully upright on his lap with its
pendulum ticking noisily.

Despite the somewhat fanatical John the Baptist appearance,
Albert was undoubtedly a sweet man, as this brief account of
another train journey suggests.

During a tiring journey in England, Albert went into an empty
waiting room to rest. Finding the narrow, slatted seating round
the walls unconducive to relaxation, he lay down on the floor. A
young couple entered the waiting room, chattering and laughing
until their eyes fell on the large, bearded and recumbent cleric and
they were struck dumb. Without moving, Albert opened one eye
and reassured them in a gentle voice, 'Not drunk. Just tired.'

The reader will have gathered that I'm riddled with doubt
about some of these stories handed down to me. Did I really have
a great-aunt on my mother's side, who became so small in her old
age that when she sat at the dinner table, food reached her mouth
solely by the force of gravity? (I detect my fathers imprint on that
one.) Once again, I turn for guidance to the Chairman:

It matters not if stories of our quirks and foibles pass,
through repetition and embroidery, from fact into fiction.
They are, after all, the stuff of immortality.

Chairman Humph, in Johnsonian mode

I certainly remember with affection my fathers sister, Maud
Wyndham (Wyndhams appear on both sides of my family, just to
be confusing). She was so vague that her utterances, wandering
through a maze of innumerable cul-de-sacs, rarely managed to
reach a full stop. But I have to take on trust the story that staying
with relatives in the country, she was asked by a solicitous host at
breakfast if she had been disturbed at dawn by the singing of the
birds. She answered, 'Oh, but not singing - yellin'!'

(Like many of her generation. Aunt Maud affected elements
of what is imprecisely known as a 'cockney accent', such as
dropping the terminal 'g' in 'yelling'. She would regularly use
'ain't' for 'aren't' in an otherwise lofty, aristocratic voice. I have
already noted the ubiquitous aberrations 'lorst' and 'gorn', which
I inherited but appear to have shed without trying. I imagine
they came from the same source. I learnt recently from the radio
that no less a person than Queen Victoria spoke her English
with this hybrid pronunciation, referring to soldiers as
'sodgers'.)

Aunt Maud wafts in and out of my memory like a welcome and
benign ghost. I was better acquainted with my father's youngest
brother, Richard Lyttelton, whose eccentricity was on a grander
scale.

It was thrown into high relief by the fact that Richard was a
businessman who eventually reached the position of President of
the Iron and Steel Federation. Despite this, he appeared to live in
the belief that bankruptcy was just around the corner. His city
attire, though conventional in that it involved the customary
black suit with pinstriped trousers, was so old that the trousers
had worn threadbare in several places and had been patched with
rectangles of plain black material. He clearly didn't believe that
this was in any way extraordinary. My father, who assisted Richard
with references and anecdotes whenever he had to speak on a
formal occasion, reported that his brother s dinner suit was so old
that it had turned green.

Richard was my godfather. On visits to Eton, he would quite
often remember the fact, pressing a ten-shilling note into my hand
when he left to go home. There were occasions when, in his
vagueness, he pressed it mistakenly into Anthony's hand,
unwittingly stoking the cousinly rivalry between us.

It was hard for him to forget my confirmation, and he came
down to Eton for the service. Afterwards, he gave me a 
monogrammed half-hunter gold watch from Mappin & Webb, which I
still have. I have no doubt that he handed it over with some sound
godfatherly advice, but it would have been delivered in such a
hesitant and meandering fashion that I would not have taken it in.
I do, however, remember his concern that I should tell him if in
any way it didn't perform properly, ending with the gloriously
orotund phrase, 'If not, I shall have words with Mappin not
wholly unaccompanied by Webb.' The watch has worked
perfectly for 62 years and is ticking away in a rather self-satisfied
way on my desk as I write.

Richard Lyttelton played a pivotal role in my life, since it was
through him that in the early forties, I and my cousin Anthony
came to spend eighteen months in the Guest Keen Baldwin
steelworks in South Wales.

He once came to see us at Port Talbot, to see how we were
getting on. We were in a managers office when someone came in
to say, 'Your uncles here.' We went out, to find him standing
amidst the massive entrails of the coke oven plant, looking, with
his formal black overcoat and hard-brimmed Homburg hat, as if
arriving at a board meeting. It was typical of his diffidence that he
hadn't come straight into the office himself, preferring to teeter
around amid the rubble in Monsieur Hulot fashion. As we
approached, he greeted us with, 'Oh... yes ... well, here we are.'
Then after a short, characteristic laugh - a single falsetto 'Ha!' 
he looked up at the overhead workings and said 'Pipes.' The
vagueness was clearly his way of bridging an awkward gap when
the conventional greeting 'Hello' eluded him.

My mother shared with her sister, Sibell Fulford, the belief that
the vagueness which Richard Lyttelton and his sister Maud
shared (and indeed the diffidence shown by the whole of that
generation of the family), stemmed from the domineering
character of my paternal grandmother. Try as I may, I can't ever
remember Granny on the move. She's always sitting in a chair, a
formidable figure, not unlike Queen Victoria in stature and
appearance, with both hands before her firmly pressing on the
handle of a walking stick in an attitude of authority. A story has
been handed down of how, as a child, my father made her a
crudely stitched stuffed tiger as a Christmas present, as children 
then and sometimes now are encouraged to do, only to have it
flung contemptuously across the room with the words, 'Don't
ever give me anything as horrible as that again.' And I remember
both my mother and Sibell recalling separately visiting the
family's London home in their courting days, to find their
respective husbands-to-be, both men in their thirties, while not
actually standing in the corner, at least being given a dressing-
down like naughty schoolboys.

There is evidence that Granny Cobham (somewhere along the
line the eldest Lyttelton sons acquired the tide of Viscount
Cobham) concealed a vein of eccentricity beneath the stern
exterior. When an old lady, she surprised visiting grandchildren
with the announcement, uttered slowly and with emphasis,
'Harrods ... never stop sending me ... riding breeches.'

Richard Lyttelton and his wife Judith lived in Highgate. At one
stage they took a holiday cottage in Epping Forest, to which my
cousin and I were often invited to help with DIY operations that
principally involved whitewashing the walls. Family gatherings
there were frequent.

On one occasion, at an informal lunch. Uncle Richard stood
behind my Aunt Sibell s chair, rather inexpertly opening a quart
bottle of cider. Having presumably been shaken up on its way to
the table, the bottle erupted with a hiss, the froth drenching my
aunt. She let out a shriek of surprise which would, in a normal
social situation, have prompted profuse apology and solicitous, if
ineffective, mopping of her person with a pocket-handkerchief.
From Uncle Richard came the familiar 'Ha!' and the comment,
'Ah ... yes, well... cottage noises!'

In Highgate Grove, Richard was a well-known and extremely
popular figure, often to be seen, before his eventual retirement,
setting off for his office in the City on his bicycle. As he whizzed
down Parliament Hill, peddling energetically, passers-by would
surely have spotted darting flashes of pink leg between trouser and
shoe. In the days of strict clothes rationing during and after World
War II, he conserved his coupons by giving up socks. The
financial advantages of this decision did not escape him and
though austerity eventually ended, he never wore them again.

I have not inherited the family pessimism in financial matters.
When I visited Uncle Richard once in the City, I took a taxi from
Swiss Cottage, where we then lived, without giving the matter a
thought, though I was at the time an impecunious art student.
Unwisely, I confessed the extravagance to Richard, whose response
was, 'Oh, well, yes, we can't have that... moneys money...' then
the familiar falsetto 'Ha!' The thought flashed through my mind
that he was going to offer me a free ride home in a company
limousine but, as expectations go, it wasn't very robust. When our
meeting was over, he came down with me to the street and walked
me to the bus stop, hovering until I was safely on board. I waited
until we were round a bend and out of sight before I hopped off
and hailed a taxi.

When it comes to answering the question 'Fact or fiction?' in
such recollections, I'm quite content to remain in a perpetual
quandary over the enviable cast of dotty relatives owned or invented
by the American humorous writer and cartoonist James Thurber. I
warm especially to his cousin several times removed (but luckily
not too far), Grade Shoaf, of whom he wrote in these terms:

She was confident that burglars had been getting into her
house every night for forty years. The fact that she never
missed anything was to her no proof to the contrary. She
always claimed that she had scared them off before they
could take anything, by throwing shoes down the hallway.
When she went to bed, she piled, where she could get at
them handily, all the shoes there were about her house. Five
minutes after she had turned off the light she would sit up
in bed and say, 'Hark!' Her husband, who had learned to
ignore the whole situation as long ago as 1903, would either
be sound asleep or pretend to be sound asleep. In either case
he would not respond to her tugging and pulling, so that
presently she would arise, tiptoe to the door, open it slightly
and heave a shoe down the hall in one direction, and its
mate down the hall in the other direction. Some nights she
threw them all, some nights only a couple of pairs.

Vintage Thurber James Thurber
Thurber came nearer to home with this reminiscence:

My mother thought - or rather, knew - that it was
dangerous to drive an automobile without gasoline; it fried
the valves or something. 'Now, don't you dare drive all over
town without gasoline!' she would say to us when we
started off.

Mothers tend, more often than fathers, to invite affectionate
mockery. Louis Armstrong recalled, in his first autobiography
Satchmo (Peter Davis Ltd, 1955) that if, as a child, he did something
foolish, his mother would persistently liken him to Fatty O'Butler,
meaning the rotund Hollywood comedian, Fatty Arbuckle.

My own mother had problems with names on the radio. It's not
unusual. When it comes to accurate identification, radio is a tricky
medium, relying solely on the ear, without back-up from the eye.
If ever I mention in my jazz programme the New Orleans-born,
and subsequently Ellingtonian clarinettist Barney Bigard, I expect
to receive queries from one or more listeners who assume that his
first name is Barnaby. And until she came more closely into focus
as my supremo on BBC Radio, I never quite got to grips with the
name of Jenny Abramsky. Was the surname O'Bramsky or just
plain Bramsky? In the latter option the forename Jennia or Gennia
seemed improbable. I'm sure she has not got where she is today
without being made aware of this confusion.

With my mother, there were two main stumbling blocks. One
was the erstwhile newsreader, Alvar Liddell (with the accent on
the last syllable). Thinking that he was Mr Bollidel, she felt at that
time that it was rather vulgar for a BBC newsreader to be known
as Al. Worse was the leader of the Scottish Symphony Orchestra
in days gone by who was regularly announced as J. Mouland
Begby. She once said to me, 'I can understand Jane Wool, though
it's not a common name. But who is Begby?'

It is indeed a mistake that conjures up a Thurberesque image of
a manic woman, manifestly at war with her male conductor,
sawing away furiously at the fiddle with a large, shapeless dog
called Begby at her elbow.

Having strayed into the realms of comic writing, I must pay
homage to two other heroes. The late Patrick Campbell's articles,
written for a variety of publications, stand as a reproach to that
Daily Mail deputy editor who scolded me, misquoting along the
way. To devote, as Campbell gloriously did, a whole article to a
sneeze is surely piling Ossa on Pelion and throwing in Olympus
for good measure. This extract from an essay headed 'The Stallion
Sneeze' describes the onset of what turned out to be a cataclysmic
explosion when, working at his desk and eating an ad hoc
breakfast at the same time, he had just popped a large tomato,
peppered and salted, into his mouth.

First this giant force got to work upon my jaws and
mouth, pressing out and hardening the delicate machinery
until with the teeth bared and the upper lip drawn back I
must have looked like Silver, the mad stallion, about to do
something unpleasant. At the same time this frightful
pressure squeezed my eyes shut and then shoved them
along the Eustacian tubes into my ears, where they flung
themselves against the drums, trying to get out. This
displacement of the eyes led almost immediately to a
change in the shape of the top of my head. It began to rise
into a point, with the subsidiary effect of drawing me right
up into the top left-hand corner of my high-backed chair,
so that it seemed that I retained a grip upon the floor only
with a single toe. For some time I held this pose, levitating,
teeth bared, lips curled, nostrils flaring, eyes gone, ears
bursting and nails dug deep into the upholstery. Then
everything blew up ...

Several paragraphs later, he describes the aftermath:

The extremely high muzzle velocity of the breakfast had
enabled it to reach and to penetrate every corner and
crevice of the room. It had got to the bookshelf and to the
Modigliani reproduction above it. It was on the door, the
ceiling and all four walls. It was in the typewriter. It had
even struck a portrait of me painted by an aunt of mine in
1954, where it had obliterated one eye. The other stared
back at me in outrage.

Prelude to a sneeze.

Nancy Banks-Smith — now, alas, only a sporadic television
reviewer in the Guardian newspaper — must stand as one of the
nations great comic writers. I search the bookstalls in vain for an
anthology of her articles. If it exists and I come across it, I hope
and expect that it would contain these comments on a TV
programme called Vegetable Plots. The programme was about an
autumn fayre in Ponders End.

The autumn show is a demonstration of vegetable love,
vaster than empires. Onions that look as if the Kremlin had
come to Ponders End and pupped. A pumpkin that took
two men to carry it. 'Stay there!' said Tony. 'Don't move!'
said Tommy, as if it might suddenly rise on its vast haunches
like a Sumo wrestler and attack . . . Bill's cabbages seemed
on the point of explosion. He trundled them in on a
wheelbarrow, which squealed in protest. Like Grandfathers
clock they were too big for the bench, so he stood them on
the floor. They peered out from beneath the bench with
bulging, deep green eyes fringed with vast lashes.

Nancy Banks-Smith in a television review in the Guardian

People often speak of an 'English sense of humour', and it's no
more accurate than most such generalisations. It's not a matter of
nationality. The distinction is between lateral and literal thinking.
I recall an edition of the long-running TV show Have I Got News
For You that brought together two great contemporary British
fantasists, Paul Merton and Ross Noble. Their interplay on the
programme was a masterclass in lateral thinking, the process of
leading a mundane thought or statement off on a trail of fantasy
that takes it far from its literal source.

This baffles those of a literal frame of mind, who can't follow
the trail. They in turn will be thought by lateral-thinkers to
resemble the horrid little boy at a children's party who shouts, 'It's
not him talking - its you!' at the ventriloquist who is doing his
best to create a fantasy. I recently heard someone on the radio -
and I can't attribute it since it came and went too quickly for me
to jot it down - quoting some high-ranking German personage as
saying, 'The German nation has many shortcomings but I'm glad
to say a sense of humour is not one of them!'

I have an account, given to me by the great comedian Les
Dawson, of a meeting that he and a colleague once had with a
female television producer. Read this story in any accent you
choose. Let's just say that the producer came from a culture in
which literal thinking predominates. She was interested in
transferring some of the Les Dawson shows for Yorkshire
Television on to her country's TV screens. Abortive' is the word
that immediately springs to mind, but the discussion went ahead.
As they read to her examples of sketches from some chosen scripts,
the eagerness slipped slowly but inexorably from her face, to be
replaced by blank incomprehension.

When it seemed that, in Arthur Daleys words, a 'nice little
earner' was going down the plughole, Les said in desperation that
his shows included what they called 'shorties' - wordless visual
cartoons that lasted no more than thirty seconds or so. Perking up
a little at the idea, she asked for an example. He then described
one in which he is first seen as a road sweeper at the far end of a
residential street. Without a word being spoken, he advances

slowly towards the camera, pushing his brush before him. When
he reaches the foreground of the shot, he lifts the corner of the
kerb, carpet-fashion, shoves the accumulated rubbish under it,
replaces it and shuffles on round the corner. Les and his colleague
looked at her expectantly as she pondered on what she had seen.
Then she shook her head sadly and said with a shrug, 'The trouble
is, at home we do not have these pavements that lift up.'

My own fondness for humour that leans towards the surrealistic
was honed in my teenage years by regular visits to the variety
theatre, usually with other siblings or cousins, booked and
presided over by my Aunt Maud who, as I have described earlier,
was herself surrealism personified.

Nothing in more modern theatre has excited me more than those
now extinct shows, with the widely varied acts logged by numbers on
an illuminated sign at the side of the stage. 'Yippee! Eight more to go!
... Oh dear, only two left!' Schoolboy emotions ebbed and flowed. I
may be amalgamating several visits into one experience when I recall
having seen Max Miller, Gracie Fields and the Mills Brothers in one
show. Small details alone remain: of the Mills Brothers singing 'Paper
Doll' with father Harry 'boom-boom-booming' in imitation of a
double bass; of Gracie, raucous and down-to-earth until the headscarf
was donned to herald the sentimental bits; of Max Millers wicked
eyes glinting and darting in the spotlight, an unnaturally vivid blue
like modern laser headlights.

One substantial memory that has stayed with me over the years
is of a favourite and now largely forgotten comedian, Sidney
Howard. Stout and pear-shaped, he walked with the careful gait
and out-turned hands of someone gingerly crossing a stream on a
plank, and spoke with the pomposity and frayed gentility of a
rather seedy butler. Relating this story in my own words, I'll try to
convey something of his ponderous delivery.

The Queen of some Ruritanian country summoned all the
magicians and conjurors in the realm to perform for her,
offering a lavish prize for the one whom she adjudged the
best. Things were not going well until it came to a performer
who, to launch his act, requested her to unclasp and hand to
him the priceless ruby pendant, suspended by a slim gold
chain, that adorned her capacious bosom. He took a mortar
and pestle and, while she watched in some dismay, placed the
precious jewel in it and ground it to dust. The assembled
company gasped as he opened a casement window and
scattered the dust to the four winds. After a dramatic pause,
he clapped his hands three times and a white dove, appearing
as if from nowhere, flew into the room bearing in its beak the
ruby, suspended on its gold chain and restored to its pristine
beauty. Overcome with relief and admiration, the Queen
summoned him to stand before her. In a gracious speech, she
pronounced him the winner of the contest. And then, as
drums rolled, she dipped her hand into her corsage and
presented him with a sofa and three easy chairs.

Without making exaggerated claims, it should be noted that
this tale, told at some time in the mid-thirties, pre-dated by at
least two decades the arrival of the so-called 'shaggy dog' story.

A recollection has occurred ...

I must confess that I'm not very fond of the word 'bullshit'.

The Revd Donald Soper, chatting in a TV green room as we
waited our call on a Terry Wogan radio show in the seventies
As an orator for many years on London's Speakers' Corner near
Marble Arch, the late Donald Soper must have been exposed to
the whole gamut of rude language. I respected his view on that
and, indeed, on pretty well everything else. But a distinction has
to be drawn between the origins of so-called 'rude words' and
their subsequent usage, much of it spread over such a large area as
to have become sanitised.
You can rarely check in at a surgery, hotel or airport
reception without seeing someone behind the desk staring
in blank incomprehension at a screen, jabbing frantically
at a keyboard and repeating over and over again the words
'Oh, shit!'

Chairman Humph, in high-tech mode

If any readers experience an involuntary intake of breath at my
use of that word, I must ask them to say what it means in that
context. The answer is, nothing, it's just a syllable that people find
effective for letting off steam. In fact, the more vehemently you
say it, the more appropriately onomatopoeic it sounds. In this
matter, I am on the side of freedom of speech. I could have used
euphemism, quoting the exasperated receptionists as saying, 'Oh,
crumbs!' or, more daringly, 'Oh, riddle!' But that would be both
inaccurate and absurd.

There are, indeed, situations in which it seems sensible to use the
word in its original meaning. You wouldn't expect me to say other
than that as humour is at the top of my list. It was from Les Dawson
that I heard a brief gag that defies euphemism or circumlocution.

In the early sixties, BBC radio ran a series of variety shows
called Home and Away. Two teams of artists and musicians were
assembled, the lucky ones touring British army barracks for four
nights in Germany, the losers appearing for one night at the
Nuffield Centre in London. I was one of the lucky ones. The show
in which I went to Germany included the Ronnie Aldrich Trio as
house band, impressionist Peter Goodright as the compere, Les
Dawson as the young, up-and-coming comic, Elkie Brooks as the
young, up-and-coming singer and myself as the not-so-young,
been-around-for-yonks jazz instrumentalist.

Each day, we travelled about two hundred miles from one army
station to another. Peter Goodright and Les Dawson sat together
on the coach, and at the start of each trip, they asked us to give
them a topic. They would then ad-lib a non-stop stream of gags
on the topic of the day until we reached our destination, honing
their skills as stand-up comedians are wont to do. In a marathon
on the subject of 'Holidays', Les came up with what I deem to be
the perfect joke — short, concise and with a false ending and a
punchline that lives up to the description:

The staff of a sewage farm in the North of England went
on a days outing to Blackpool. One of their number was
overcome by the fresh air and fainted. [Pause here to allow
tittering] ... It took seven buckets of shit to bring him
round!

If you recount that gag to your friends, you are free to insert a
euphemism - fertiliser, perhaps, or even Number Twos, you
quaint old thing - if you wish. But don't blame me if it collapses
like an under-baked souffle.

Another reason for the forthright use of an impolite word
occurred to me not long ago. It appeared on the wall of my local
doctors' surgery, a handwritten poster that drew attention to an
important, perhaps life-saving statistic. It was headed: 'SHIT!'
Underneath, it went on to say, 'Did you know that one gram of
poo contains one thousand varieties of bacteria?'

I may not have the statistic right, but the message is clear. Note
that the writer, having written the startling headline with bravado,
suffered a sudden spasm of guilt and retreated into childish
euphemism.

Here, with unaccustomed athleticism, I will do a somersault
and argue that euphemism too, has its place in humour, and the
more absurd the better.

No one would describe my father as a ghoul, but he did have a
fascination for murder trials, whether factual or fictional. He
always read through the crime reports in his local paper. After his
death, a cutting was found, brown and faded, in his desk. (There's
no doubt he kept it for its absurdity, rather than its gruesome
content.) It involved the murder of a young woman. In the
subsequent trial a policeman, referring to the facts of the case,
stated in evidence that, 'The body of the woman had been
decapitated and dismembered, but there was no evidence that she
had been interfered with.'

I have a story of my own which I have recounted many times
and which contains an example of ludicrous but rather endearing
euphemism that only the British Army could have conceived.

The scene was Wellington Barracks in London in the mid-
forties. One day, the Regimental Sergeant-Major in my wartime
regiment, the Grenadier Guards, left his quarters shortly after
dawn, and set off across the barrack square like a man-o'-war in
full sail to carry out his morning inspection. In the middle of the
square, his eye fell upon what in army regulations was known as a
'nuisance', standing proud and defiant on the tarmac. Finding a
culprit, he had him up before his company commander later that
same morning. (As a junior officer, I stood with others behind the
colonel, trying to keep a straight face.) The soldier gave as his
excuse that, on the way back from the pub the previous night, he
had been taken short. At this point the RSM interrupted, using
the archaic form of words demanded by King's Regulations. 'I
thank you, sir, for leave to speak!' The colonel nodded. 'I myself
examined the nuisance with my pace-stick and found it 'ard and
hobviously made with heffort!'

I tend to be Soperish (a short pause here while I persuade my
computers spell-check that 'Soperish' is OK) about the most
notorious four-letter word, except in moments of extreme anger
or frustration. Anglo-Saxon or not, it sounds to me ugly, brutish
and aggressive. When used frequently and indiscriminately, it
loses all point, becoming no more than a rather distressing speech
impediment. There are times, on the other hand, when it too can
be indispensable and euphemism-proof.

When I worked on the London Daily Mail as a cartoonist in
the late forties, I shared a room with the photo toucher-uppers.
Artists in their own way, they would in those days edit
photographs using grey paint and cotton buds to remove
unwanted backgrounds or, in the case of close-ups, facial
blemishes. In charge of them was a mild, middle-aged man called
Claude, who did his work perched on a high stool like a
Dickensian bookkeeper.

Among his team was a tall, leery, shark-faced man called Ted,
with black, patent-leather hair and an evil grin, whose primary
aim was to give Claude as hard a time as possible. One day,
having worked the morning shift, Ted went off to lunch at one
o'clock. Meanwhile, Claude came in for the afternoon shift and,
believing that Ted was on the same shift, mildly rebuked him on
his return for coming in late. 'Late?' said Ted in exaggerated
outrage, 'Whadyer mean, late? I've been 'ere since the-fuckin'-
smornin'!'

The next example invites a somewhat longer build-up. When
my friend and colleague tenor saxist Jimmy Skidmore died in
1998, the Order of Service at his funeral bore on the front, under
his name and photograph, not the conventional RIP but, in bold
letters, the initials KYB!.                 >

The first time I became aware of the significance of those
initials in Jimmy's life was in 1948, the year of the First
International Jazz Festival in Nice. He and I were there as
members of an ad hoc (in modern lingo, pick-up') British band
which joined the cast of American and European musicians
headed by Louis Armstrong.

The Nice Festival was a significant event as at least fifteen years
had elapsed since Louis Armstrong had last crossed the Atlantic.
(He hadn't appeared in England since 1933.) His arrival at the
Festival was akin to the return of a conquering hero. Most of the
cast had arrived in Nice before him and we all attended an official
reception in the Town Hall to welcome him. The huge room was
packed and there was a great roar of conversation as we awaited
his arrival.

I remember that moment well. Even before Louis came into the
room, the familiar gruff voice, thanks to its timbre and pitch, cut
through the excited hubbub. After applause and speeches, he was
eventually brought over to a table at which some of us were
already queuing to shake his hand and mumble a few words of
welcome. Jimmy Skidmore was ahead of me in the queue and I
watched as he reached the table, shook Louis Armstrong's hand
and bent forward to say something to him. I couldn't hear what
he said, but it was received with a guttural burst of laughter. When
I had paid homage myself, I caught up with Jimmy and asked him
what had so amused Armstrong. 'I just said, "Kiss your bum
later,"' was his answer.

It may be deduced from this that Jimmy Skidmore was what
the guardian of my childhood years. Nanny Viggers, used to call
a 'caution'. He was a dear man, who showed me great kindness
when I started working on the London jazz scene as an amateur.
In the late fifties, he joined my band, and for five years or so
enlivened its existence with fine tenor saxophone playing and a
nervy ebullience which was rarely short of outrageous but never
ill-intended. With his vigorous crop of sprouting black hair, lined
face, glass-shattering voice and formidable dental equipment
clearly intended by the Creator for a horse, he was not someone
whose presence in a room could be ignored.

Jimmy was still a member of my band in 1959 when I wrote (in
my book. Second Chorus, published by McGibbon and Kee), 'his
spiritual ancestry goes back to the era of music hall, of cheery
banter and cheeky backchat. Even in the most demure company
he will express himself in quite uninhibited terms - and then
dispel the shock with a huge, tusky grin which says, "Don't mind
me, ducks - I don't mean half I say.'"

On stage. Jimmy's noisy interjections and irrepressible humour
were not always welcomed by his fellow musicians. We were once
playing a late concert in a cinema in Bedford after the film
programme had finished. Jimmy was unable to pass up the
opportunity for mayhem offered by the spotlit silver screen
behind us. Joe Temperley, at one point playing a lyrical solo on
baritone saxophone, was bewildered to hear gusts of laughter from
the audience. He didn't know that Skidmore was creating hand
silhouettes of ducks and rabbits on the screen behind him.

I suffered a similar fate a few years after Jimmy had left my
band, when he and I were booked as guests with Harry
Stoneham's trio at a jazz pub in South London.

The layout of the Plough at Stockwell offered Jimmy a field day
of outrageousness. The route to the ladies' toilet passed alongside
the low bandstand, and visitors to it would run the gauntlet of a
battery of familiar 'Skidmore-isms'. It would be, 'Mention my
name and you'll get a good seat!' on their way in and, worse still,
'Could you hear us, darlin ? 'Cos we could hear you!' on the way
out. When he and I played there, he was in the throes of breaking
in a new set of lower-jaw dentures, which made blowing the
saxophone uncomfortable. I was in the middle of playing what
might well have been my best-ever solo on Duke Ellington's 'In A
Mellotone' when the laughter started. A quick check on the
trouser-zip eliminated the only possible reason for the irreverent
mirth that I could conceive, so I soldiered on to the end of the
solo, then turned to Jimmy for enlightenment. His bottom set of
false teeth was draped over his left ear.

On most occasions, the conciliatory 'Don't mind me, darlin"
turned aside wrath, one exception being an occasion in New
York when he addressed it to a cop who had pulled him up for
jaywalking. In seconds he was up against a wall with legs akimbo
and the cop's nightstick seriously threatening his dignity, if
nothing else. As his bandleader, I took most of the excesses in
my stride.

Jimmy was, in age and experience, senior to me, and sometimes
played the old soldier. He was the sole inventor of what I dubbed
the Skidmore Watch, a timepiece which contrived to be five
minutes slow when a concert was due to start and five minutes fast
by the time we approached the end, at which point he would tap
it pointedly as I prepared to announce a final number.

When he joined my band, he was suffering from a stomach
ulcer, and could drink only Harvey's Dry Sherry. After a
perforation put him in hospital for a month or two, he emerged
ulcer-free, rejoined the band and set about making up for lost
time. On occasion whisky got the better of him and the results
were spectacular. The story I have to tell involves swearing on a
grandiloquent scale, but cannot be euphemised.

When we played in Glasgow in the fifties, it was customary for
us to go after the show to the house of Norman McSwan, a
distinguished heart surgeon at Ruchill Hospital, an ardent jazz
enthusiast and a good friend to musicians. There we would join
his wife Margaret and some of their friends for a late night cup of
tea. After a short while, the friends would take their leave and
Margaret would say, 'Well, I'll be away to my bed.' Then the tea
would be replaced by a bottle or two of Scotch and we would
settle in for the rest of the night to listen to records and, as Nome's
generous libations took their toll, become more or less incoherent.

After one of these sessions, our trombonist John Picard, still
admirably in some control of his senses, undertook the task of
helping an incapacitated Jimmy Skidmore back to the hotel. It
was early dawn and we had to prepare almost immediately to leave
for Prestwick Airport to catch a flight back to London. John
packed Jimmy's case and saxophone and, when the time came, got
them and him on to the coach.

At the airport, after checking in, we went to the cafeteria to
await the call and, with the aid of black coffee, managed to induce
in Jimmy some signs of life. It was not altogether a wise move. The
room had filled up with passengers, most of them prim-looking
Scottish mothers with wide-eyed offspring in tow, perhaps
heading for school in England. Returning to something like
consciousness. Jimmy's first thought was for his saxophone, with
which he had lost touch. John reassured him that everything had
been taken care of, and he was duly grateful. Looking across the    4)
table, he mumbled, 'What a friend . . .'

There was an ominous pause. Many people in their lives have
experienced a vivid moment of presentiment just before some
disaster has occurred. Sitting round the table, we all held our
breath. Then, outrageousness having seeped back along with his
other faculties. Jimmy turned to the assembled company and
trumpeted, 'What a FU-U-U-U-UCKIN' friend!'

There I will leave Jimmy Skidmore with the valediction RIP or
perhaps, if it turns out that there is life after death, KYB!.

For anyone inclined to be prudish, difficulty arises when, in the
interests of euphemism, perfectly harmless words acquire a double
entendre.

Once, when we played at a public school in Dorset, my band
was invited by the Headmaster and his wife to join them and a few
friends and helpers for a light supper before the concert. We sat
round a large dining-room table eating chicken and salad. I was
placed next to the Heads wife, with our then bass player, Paul
Bridge, a ready laugher, on her other side. In the course of the
conversation, she said that she had heard my band play many
years earlier at a May Ball at Oxford. At that point, as often
happens at dinner tables, the general chatter petered out and, in
the brief silence, she turned to me and asked 'Do you still play a
lot of balls?' Paul had just taken a large mouthful of salad and the
ensuing explosion was seismic.

It used to be the custom, in polite society, to disguise
utterances of a dubious nature by translating them into a foreign
language, usually French. ^Pas devant les domestiques^ was the
phrase used by hostesses at dinner-parties to deflect anecdotes
that might offend or startle those waiting at table - whose own
language below stairs would probably have scorched the cutlery,
but no matter. Sometimes, using a foreign language itself can be
hazardous if the speaker is unsure or ignorant of its meaning.
Buck Clayton, one of the great jazz trumpeters, toured several
times with my band and became a close friend. It was he who
told me this cautionary tale.

Buck Clayton was in France with a band that included the
American tenor saxophonist Don Byas, who at that time lived in
Holland. When they played at the home town of their pianist,
Andre Persianny, he invited them all for a meal at the house of his
parents. In the taxi on the way. Buck suggested to Don Byas that
they should perhaps buy a bunch of flowers for their hostess. Byas
told him that, on the Continent, it was considered more
complimentary to offer just a single rose, to which Buck agreed.
He spoke no French so, on the way from the flower shop, he got
Don, who was fluent, to suggest a few suitable words in French to
accompany the presentation. Don obliged, and Buck duly
memorised and rehearsed them during the rest of the journey.

When they arrived at the house, Madame Persianny was at the
door to greet them. Holding out the rose on its prickly stalk, he
delivered the prepared speech, and was disconcerted when she
turned pale, then puce, and fled from the room. As Andre Persianny
ushered them hurriedly out into the street Buck turned to Don for
an explanation, to find him convulsed with malicious laughter.

I will leave readers to supply their own indelicate punchlines,
being, as listeners to I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue will know, an
innocent in these matters.

I am told, by persons whose comments and opinions I trust,
that the scripts for that BBC Radio 4 panel-game with which I am
furnished by a brilliant comic scriptwriter, lain Pattinson, are
riddled with innuendo and double entendre. There are, indeed,
occasions when some harmless line I have read from a card is
greeted by uproarious and somewhat crude laughter from the
audience. I am not offended by this, believing that, in this harsh
But competitive life, any sign of appreciation is welcome. Indeed,
I was flattered a few years ago when the Sunday Telegraph Magazine

had me, inexplicably, in a list of 'One Hundred National
Treasures', including in the citation the words 'jazz trumpeter,
broadcaster and [the capitals are mine] Purveyor of Blue Chip Filth
to Middle England.' For a brief moment I thought of buying a
small white van to have those words emblazoned under my name
on the side, but I have enough parallel careers to cope with already.

As for the Buck Clayton experience, I did once unknowingly
inflict on an innocent party a cruel joke along the Don Byas line.
In 1957, my band did a weekly series of fifteen-minute TV
programmes for Granada Television. The company was then in its
early days. The studios and offices were housed in a clutch of
single-storey buildings and it seemed to us that the atmosphere
was heavily suffused with a certain rakish glamour.

Our show, entitled Here's Humph, went out 'live' at 6.45 p.m.
on Fridays, from a studio set simulating a jazz club in which the
audience was encouraged to dance. We would take the 9.30 a.m.
train from Euston to Manchester, arriving at Granada in time for
lunch and a desultory afternoon rehearsal. On arrival the first
time, we were pleasantly surprised to find on a table in the band's
dressing room an array of bottles - whisky, gin, wine and beer,
together with all the necessary accompaniments. It has to be said,
in passing, that there were occasions when, as an announcers
voice boomed, 'It's 6.45 and here's Humph!' we went 'on air' with
no more than a fingertip s grasp of reality.

One Friday, during the gap between rehearsal and show, one of
the make-up girls, a big girl called Jenny, full of warmth and
laughter, came into the dressing room and asked if anyone could
speak Welsh. Having spent long family holidays in Harlech,
North Wales, between 1929 and the outbreak of World War II, I
had picked up a phrase or two, mostly from a woman who cooked
for us in a succession of rented houses. She had a mischievous
sense of humour, and taught me till I was pronunciation-perfect a
sentence the meaning of which she refused to divulge, saying no
more than, 'You'll find out one day!' The phrase 'Damia cathray

90

It

[


Note to Email readers, there are now several pages of photographs of Humph, with the following captions.

HL circa 1930, at the Babraham Hall home farm, discovering with a sickly grin that an
equestrian life was not for him.

At thirteen, wearing a duffed-up version
of the Eton College school uniform.



Heavily outnumbered at home with, left to right, sisters Diana, Helena, Rose and Mary.

Back in uniform. HL, left, with three fellow recruits at Caterham Barracks. On the right,
Trained Soldier Standerline, in charge of us. I don't know what he had to smile about?

Mission accomplished! 2nd Lieutenant Lyttelton standing behind HRH Princess Elizabeth,
who is doing her best to look like a Colonel-in-Chief of the Regiment.

Cartoonist on the Daily Mail, 1947, with pen poised over blank sheet of paper in the hope
that an idea will occur.



In Dubai, 1979. John Barnes (left) with Bruce Turner, who is probably squeaking.

On I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue in the
seventies. Chairman Humph in
(rare) genial mode.

he next titles are of shown 
Humph cartoons drawn for the Daily Mail, circa 1950:

1) 'And when you take the clocks down to put them forward, don't forget to put them back!'

2) 'It's the same every year - and he still calls it "seeing the New Year in"!'

3) 'You should be Chancellor of the Exchequer - you can free a pound quicker than any-
one I know.' (Note: This was a topical reference to the then Chancellor of the Exchequer,
R A Butler, and his plan to 'free the pound' from international currency restrictions.)

4) 'I think we'd better leave your father until Twelfth Night, too.'

Back to Photos.

The Clue team in a bout of rare athleticism. Left to right: Barry Cryer, Graeme Garden Willie
Rushton, Tim Brooke-Taylor.

Abstract. Painted by Luuk Add, an
artist in Thailand (see pp 159-60).

Into Oldham. Watercolour by Robert
Littleford, Oldham artist.

Section of the audience for the
Radiohead concert in South Park,
Oxford, 2001, photographed by a
trembling Diamond Geezer about
to go onstage.

diawl' has stayed with me ever since, shrouded in mystery until
very recently.

Certainly, I had no idea what it meant when I offered it to
Jenny, asking at the same time why she needed it. She explained
that she had, waiting for her in the make-up chair, the Archbishop
ofLlandaff, who was to be interviewed in a discussion programme
going out immediately after ours in another studio. She thought
that a little bit of Welsh might impress him. After a bit of hasty
coaching, she had memorised my little phrase sufficiently to hurry
back to her Archbishop. It was when we were packing up our
instruments after our show that she came into the studio, her
normally sunny expression eclipsed by what was obviously deep
distress. 'What on earth did you tell me to say to the Archbishop?'
she shouted. I said, 'I have no idea, it was just a bit of Welsh. Why,
what happened?'

She described, with much agitated heaving of her ample breast,
how, halfway through the application of the quite heavy make-up
required by TV in those days, she had leant forward and murmured
'Damia cathray cHawf into the prelates ear, hoping for a surprised
but genial response. The Archbishop rose to his feet, snatched the
protective towel from his shoulders and stormed out of the make-
up room, subsequently to appear for his interview with one half of
his face enhanced with Pancake make-up, the other au naturei

It was many decades later, while recording an I'm Sorry I
Haven't A Clue show programme in Rhyl, that I discovered from
the theatre manager that the sweet nothings I had given the poor
girl to breath into the Archbishops ear mean, 'Damn you and go
to the Devil!'

I have to confess that, having stored that Welsh phrase for so
many years in a memory file labelled 'Rude words', I was
disappointed to find it so inoffensive — to anyone, that is, barring
the then Archishop ofLlandaff.
Once or twice in the past pages I have strayed nervously into the
realms of high technology. Its a subject of which people of
advanced age, I have discovered, are assumed to be totally ignorant,
as they are of practically everything else in modern life. The early
signs of this assumption appear when one takes a handful of loose
change out of the trouser pocket - to pay for, say, a newspaper or
a bar of chocolate — to find ones wrist seized in an iron grip by the
zealous shop-assistant who then proceeds to pick the appropriate
coins from the palm of ones hand, muttering the while such empty
phrases as 'There you go* in a soothing voice. I'm not given to
cannibalism, but on these occasions I have to resist the primordial
urge to sink my teeth into the offender s own invasive wrist.

Having, as a recording musician, lived from the era of wax discs
in the forties to the digital wizardry of today, I have had perforce
to absorb at least a surface awareness of advancing technology,
while retaining a healthy scepticism that can be expressed in a
brace of thoughts.

'Progress' is Nature s way of reconciling the elderly to the
prospect of death.

Chairman Humph in ruminative mode

That is not, I think, an idiosyncratic notion. Many people who
have listened - perhaps on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme -
to some scientist predicting that computers will eventually usurp
almost every activity of the human brain, will have shared with me
the thought 'Not in my lifetime, thank goodness!'

I was once booked to give an after-dinner speech to the regional
heads of department for IBM. As often happens on these
occasions, the company chairman spoke first and proved a hard
act to follow. Having been upstaged in that way, I have since felt
no guilt in purloining his most successful story.

In a pub near IBM's offices in Hammersmith, to which many of
the company's employees would pop out for lunch, there was a
regular who was an avowed computerphobe. Perched on a stool at
the bar, he noisily aired his belief that the machines could do
nothing that couldn't be accomplished more quickly by pen and
paper. The IBM people got so fed up with his constant sniping
while they were eating their ploughman's lunch that they invited
him to their showrooms to see for himself what state-of-the-art
computers could do. When he continued to scoff, they took him
to a room that housed a top-secret model not yet revealed to the
public. They explained to the sceptical Luddite that it could answer
on the monitor screen any question put to it verbally. When he
guffawed in disbelief, they challenged him to ask it a question.

After a little thought he said, with a cunning look, 'Where is
my father now?' Within seconds the answer came up: 'Your father
is on the golf course at Sunningdale.' He turned to them with a
look of triumph. 'There you are — I told you they're a load of
rubbish. My father's been dead for four years!' Hardly had he
turned back to the screen when the words came up, 'No, the man
who married your mother has been dead for four years. Your
father is on the golf course at Sunningdale.'

What is the relevance of this anecdote? Only that when I once
told it to someone well versed in matters high-tech, he maintained
a straight face and solemnly observed that such an all-knowing
computer is perfectly conceivable and may already exist on the
drawing-board. Unbridled enthusiasm for such developments is
strictly for the young, the not-so-young having the responsibility
to utter words of caution.

Almost all good ideas, given time, will turn out to have
been bad ideas.

Chairman Humph in sceptical mode

John Naismith, our inspired producer on I'm Sorry I Haven't A
Clue, has a tendency to book us all, on out-of-town broadcasts,
into state-of-the-art, high-tech hotels of which decor, furnishings
and fittings are of a kind that fill the glossy 'style' magazines - and
indeed were effectively lampooned in the hilarious Jacques Tati
film Mon Oncle. During a recent series, we found ourselves in one
such hotel on the South Coast. Because the people running it did
their friendly best to welcome us, I will mention neither the
hotel's name nor its location. I reckon its gadgets and flummeries
alone, if not replaced, will put it out of business soon enough
without any help from me.

The first thing that struck me when I was shown into my
room was the bath. It stood, surprisingly, in the bedroom itself,
within an arm's reach of the bed, a huge white tub in which, at
six-foot, two-and-a-half inches in my stockinged feet, I could
happily have reclined full length and had space to execute a few
graceful backstrokes. What prevented me from achieving this
luxury was the fact that the bath, at least two-and-a-half feet
deep, was mounted on a foot-high red plinth. To get into it
would have demanded some basic training in mountaineering.
To get out of it would have required the assistance of the fire-
brigade. As a finishing touch, there was a potted plant perched
on one end, its long bare stem crowned by a few delicate white
blooms of some exotic variety. One false move in all the
floundering-about would tip a potful of soil into the water. The
sight of the whole ludicrous edifice would surely have prompted
even the Rev. Donald Soper to suspend his aversion to the word
'bullshit'.

Why, you may be asking yourselves, was the bath in the
bedroom? The answer is, because there was no place for it in the
'wet-room'. Wet-rooms are those that have a shower in the ceiling,
a plughole in the floor and gently sloping floor-tiles that drain
away the water. Described thus simply, it seems a good idea. No
stepping gingerly into a slithery cubicle, no fiddling with a
reluctant plastic curtain to keep it inside the shower as instructed.
Just get undressed, walk into the room, turn on a tap on the wall
and — whoosh!
The trouble is, a wet-room is a luxury that few cramped,
terraced seaside promenade hotels can easily accommodate. Our
ultra-modern establishment faced the problem head-on by
putting the washbasin, the WC and other facilities in the same
space, thus laying the foundation for a compendium of rotten
ideas. Before the shower was unleashed, all towels, hastily
discarded pyjamas, dressing gowns, toilet-bags, even loo-paper,
had to be removed. The guest going in fully dressed to wash the
hands before going down to breakfast or out on the town, had
only to turn a wrong tap to be thoroughly dowsed in water. lain
Pattinson, our scriptwriter, was not amused when he pulled a
string hanging from the ceiling, which he thought would turn on
the light, and brought the entire hotel staff rushing to his room in
the belief that he was a disabled person in need of help. In another
room, our guest on the programme, the glum-faced comedian,
Jack Dee, finding that his designer loo wouldn't flush properly,
took the designer lid off the designer cistern to investigate and it
slipped from his wet fingers on to the designer tiles, shattering
into a hundred designer pieces.

All this happened before my arrival, providing a prologue to
what I can only describe as a far-fetched Keystone comedy
routine, or perhaps a Monsieur Hulot episode discarded by
Jacques Tati as being too over-the-top.

John Naismith had come to the door of my room at 6 p.m. to
tell me that the taxis taking us to the theatre for the evening
performance were waiting outside. I called out to him that I was
all ready, then popped in to the wet-room to wash my hands. The
washbasin tap was a cleverly contrived all-in-one masterpiece of
industrial design, a single fitting that responded to a few deft
movements comparable to those required to open a safe - a
forward tilt to start the flow, a twist here to adjust the temperature, a turn there to control the jet.

My initial manoeuvre turned on the water at full jet, the
pressure of which blew the entire elongated spout from the wall
with a force that bounced it off my midriff back into the basin.
Water gushed unrestrained from the exposed hole in the wall. Like
the little Dutch boy of legend, I quick-wittedly jabbed my right
thumb on to the breach in the dam, partially stemming the flow
while I shouted to my producer outside the door to fetch help. Its
not easy to remain ice-cool on these occasions and it was a few
seconds before it occurred to me to turn off the tap. To do this, I
had to reach across with my left hand — the one, since I am right-
handed, least ready for split-second response. In its desperate
fumbling it turned the complex mechanism the wrong way,
further increasing the jet. The water arrogantly swept aside my
thumb and, with a surge that almost took my hand off at the
wrist, drenched me in a second from head to foot, from jacket to
skin, from carefully adjusted tie to colour-coordinated socks. For
a final touch, part of the cataract passed over my head and
shoulders to soak the bed behind me and water the pot plant on
the rim of the bath. With nothing further to lose, I fought my way
upstream to turn off the tap, then turned still dripping copiously
to the door just as John Naismith and a posse from Reception
arrived to see what all the shouting was about.

As I changed hurriedly into dry clothes, an apt thought
presented itself:

Todays disaster is tomorrow's anecdote.

Chairman Humph in soggy mode

A reader of acute perception will have grasped that I am not
completely at home with high-tech. When I bought my first
computer in the eighties, I was appalled to discover how soon I
started to talk to it. It used to be said that talking to oneself was
the first sign of madness. Surely talking to one's computer falls
into the same diagnostic category. When, in response to an e-mail,
I lingered in thought and was told sternly, 'You have been idle too
long,' my spontaneous reaction was to say out loud, 'Oooh, sorry,
sorry!' a knee-jerk response no doubt triggered by the distant
memory of schooldays, when I was only too familiar with that
reprimand. When I got to know the computer a bit better, I
became more assertive, uttering a testy 'C'mon, C'mON!' as it
dawdled through the lengthy process of booting up. (Booting up?
It should have been me doing the booting up.) I'm bound to say
that computer programmers seem to me singularly tactless.
Nobody wants to be accused, in their own home, of performing
an illegal operation, and the brutal diagnosis 'Fatal Error' might
well put someone of a nervous disposition into intensive care.

Talking of silliness, which we were seemingly weeks ago, this story
was told to me by the British jazz pianist Lenny Felix at three
o'clock in the morning in the Lyons Corner House, Tottenham
Court Road (ah yes, you could do things like that in the bad old
post-war days). I have put the narrative into my own words.

Lennie, known then by his real name, Lennie Jacobus, worked
in a small radio station in India in the immediate post-war years.
An Indian producer booked him to top the bill in a broadcast
variety show. At rehearsal during the day, the man, who was also
the show's compere, appeared immaculate in white suit, with hair
sleeked back and head full of grandiose ideas. These he outlined
to the motley cast with much reference to his show-business
experience and distinction. One of those ideas was that, for the
high spot of the show, he would announce Lennie with the words,
And now, ladies and gentlemen, the wizard of the keyboard,
Lennie J ... A ... C ... 0 ... B ... U ... S!' requiring the
pianist to play a crashing chord after each letter.

After rehearsal, the cast dispersed for a long break. On their
return, they were greeted by an apparition with white suit
crumpled, hair dishevelled and the voice of authority slurred and
barely articulate. Somehow, at the appointed time, the live
broadcast started and lurched along precariously until the time
came for the star of the show to be announced. The
compere/producer having, as drunks do, worked on the principle
that matters would be improved by further recourse to the bottle,
was by then totally smashed. In all circumstances, of course, the
show must go on. Peering fruitlessly at his clipboard, the man
embarked on the prepared introduction.

'Annow, laids an' ge'men, the wzzd of the keyboar', Lennie J ...'
(dutiful crash on the piano)'... V.. .' (rather more hesitant crash,
followed by a prolonged pause and heavy breathing) '. . . Six . . .'
(even longer pause, at the end of which Mr Showbusiness
shrugged his shoulders and collapsed, stupefied, into a chair).
Lennie, aborting a third crash in mid-descent, launched into his
set without further ceremony and continued until the red studio
light signalled the end of the show.


We have reached a rather giddy stage in this book when subjects
will start to spin on their heels through 360 degrees without any
warning. At some point in my early life, I memorised a passage
that for many years I assumed came from P G Wodehouse. When,
some years ago, the BBC invited me to present a programme in a
series about humour, I wanted to include it as a personal choice,
but was unable to use it because nobody, including some
Wodehouse experts, was able to confirm for copyright purposes
that he had written it. I have to ask, who else could it be?

The passage concerns a young man called Ffinch who travels to
a big country house in the Home Counties to dine with an
American tycoon from whom he hopes to get a job. After the meal,
the American takes him to the library for an interview. The
interview starts unpromisingly when the tycoon, who has punished
the port severely, takes a fountain pen from his breast pocket, puts
it in his mouth and applies a match to it. It is he who starts the
conversation. It must be read slowly, with impeccable timing:


Are you married, Winch?'

'Ffinch.'

'How d' you mean, Ffinch?

'My name is Ffinch.'

'What of it?'

'You called me Winch.'

'Why?'

'I suppose you thought it was my name.'

'What was?

'Winch.'

'But you said just now it was Ffinch.'

'It IS.

'Look here, young man, enough of this shilly-shallying. Let
your yea be yea and your nay be nay. If your name is Pinch,
speak it out like a man!'

They say that the Italian painter Giotto was able to draw a perfect
circle freehand, without using a compass. I once gained the
information from somewhere that the great pioneer of the oboe,
Leon Goossens, learned from glass-blowers the technique of
circular breathing, by which air can be expelled from the mouth
and, simultaneously, taken in through the nostrils to sustain an
unbroken note almost indefinitely. Circular dialogue such as the
passage above impresses me just as much, and I wish I had written
it myself. At least I can report a spontaneous example, oft told.

Years ago, on the outskirts of Bradford, I took part, with an
elderly and irascible passer-by, in the following verbal pas de deux.
Mine was the opening move. Pulling up alongside him, I wound
the passenger window down and leaned across.

'Excuse me, can you tell me the way to Bradford University?'

'Bradford University? There isn't one.'

Believing him to be hard of hearing, I raise my voice, repeating
myself in the process.

'Yes there is. Bradford University . . . Bradford University . . .
(crescendo) I'M LOOKING FOR BRADFORD UNIVERSITY!"

THERE ISN'T ONE!'

'THERE MUST BE ONE I'm playing 
THERE TONIGHT!'

I'M GOING TO A CONCERT

'WELL, WHERE IS IT, THEN?'

As one further example of the circular genre, I recall a little gem
from an old edition of Punch magazine.

The cartoon was by George Belcher. Like many of the Punch
artists of his generation, he was more of an illustrator than a
cartoonist in the modern sense. His charcoal drawings often
featured what used to be called charladies. In the cartoon in
question, it's a sturdy member of that noble profession who stands
in the centre of the picture, holding a feather duster and looking
disconsolately at the ruins of a large vase that has fallen from a
pedestal. She addresses the dismayed lady of the house who
surveys the scene from the doorway:

Charlady: 'Oh, ma'am, when I seen what I done, I sez to
meself. Good Lord, what 'ave you done?'

In the history of wordplay, that caption is timeless.

Another thought has occurred, prompted by I know not what.
Perhaps the keyword is silliness.

Youthful shyness is never outgrown. It's just that, as we
grow older, we learn how to handle it better.

Chairman Humph in philosophical mode

I don't think I have completely mastered how to handle it yet.
Certainly I was well into adulthood when I took a small step in
the direction of becoming a London clubman. Stationed near
London in 1946, while waiting for demob from the army, I was
invited many times by a fellow officer and great friend, Hugo
Charteris, to join him for lunch at his club, the Travellers.

Hugo, who later became a writer and died at a ridiculously
early age, was a man after my own heart, rebellious about army life
and even scruffier on parade than myself. This was largely due to
his ownership of a large and friendly golden retriever that would
chew anything it could close its teeth on, being particularly fond
of the leather belt and cap-band which his batman laid out on the
bed before a prestigious parade.

After several of our lunches together, Hugo suggested to me
that I should join the Travellers Club myself. I went along with
that, and he duly sponsored my candidature. Nobody blackballed
me, so I was elected, receiving a warm letter of welcome from the
secretary. When it came to breezing in there on my own, a new
boy amongst all those strangers ensconced in their leather-bound
armchairs and on the lookout for any breach of etiquette, I
postponed the moment. It has remained postponed until this day.

I once described myself as 'unclubbable', the word social
workers used to apply to loutish youths who hang about on street
corners instead of joining youth clubs. There have been
exceptions. In childhood, I was a 'Gugnunc'. I'll move to a new
paragraph now to let that momentous announcement sink in.

Gugnunc was the name of a club associated with the Daily
Mirror strip-cartoon called 'Pip, Squeak and Wilfred' which, alas,
few people now remember. (Things have come to a pretty pass
when you can't ring up a friend and discuss the latest episode. Strip
cartoons were the soap operas of their day.) So I have to explain that
Pip was a hearty dog of the pug variety. Squeak was a sleek penguin
and Wilfred was a hyperactive rabbit. There were other supporting
characters - Squeak had a relative called for quite obvious reasons
Auntie, who was also a penguin, but hairy. I have never seen a hairy
penguin, but if David Attenborough keeps at it, one is bound to
turn up sooner or later. There was also Popski, a canine anarchist (I
hope you're riveted by all this), who provided a bit of suspense by
never being seen without one of those spherical bombs with
spluttering fuses that used to identify anarchists in cartoons.

I seem to recall that Wilfred tended to hog the show, speaking
with a limited vocabulary of monosyllables - Ick, Goo, Boo, Par
and Nunc, the latter suggesting a classical education. These were
assembled into the passwords by which members of the Gugnuncs
identified each other. The idea was that one would confront
someone in the street with the challenge Tck, Ick, Par, Boo!' They
would, if they belonged to said club, respond with 'Goo, Goo,
Par, Nunc!' and brotherhood would be established. Non-members
would identify themselves by walking quickly away, trying not to
break into a run, while looking round anxiously for a policeman.
(I think I may have left some details out, but never mind, you get
the gist.)

It was only in very recent times that I discovered, when I had
almost abandoned hope, that one of the little team with whom I
lunch regularly in local pubs was once a Gugnunc. Now, I and Leo
Gibbons-Smith, a distinguished artist, former president of the
United Society of Artists and fellow octogenarian, quite often
exchange those passwords when we meet in the pub, while the
regulars at the bar exchange meaningful glances, their previous
assumptions confirmed.

I don't think I would ever have been a keen practising
Gugnunc. As a child, I was agonisingly shy. It was due to the wild
terror of being confronted by strangers that I once set fire to a
vicar. His name, suitably enough in this context, was Popham and
he was the parent of a boy in my father s House at Eton.

The fourth of June was what most people would describe as an
'open day' at Eton College. Parents would converge on the school,
fathers to relive their own schooldays; mothers, in their finery and
outrageous hats, to watch proudly as their embarrassed offspring
took part in events that went on through the day. It all culminated
in a firework display which itself ended with the National Anthem
and a sparkling and spluttering pyrotechnical representation of
George V and Queen Mary. It was during one such day that I, as
a small boy, unwittingly staged a small firework event of my own.

Wandering about the house, I was suddenly confronted by a
total stranger in clerical garb, who had walked in through the
open front door of Warre House to see my father. Not knowing
how to deal with the situation, I charged at him playfully and
butted him in the midriff, whereupon he burst into flames.
Appalled, I turned and fled while he slapped frenetically at his
waistcoat. In medieval times, I might have earned some notoriety
as a precocious agent of the Devil. The cause was, I'm afraid, more
mundane. He had in his waistcoat pocket a box of non-safety
Swan Vestas matches that the impact of my head had ignited.

Shyness overcame me, more embarrassingly, on my first day at
Sunningdale School, the still-flourishing family-run boarding
school to which I was consigned at the age of eight.

My parents had driven me there and handed me over to the
headmaster, Mr Crabtree. He and his wife assembled all the new
boys in their drawing room to welcome us to the school. The
nervous trauma of having just seen my fathers car disappearing
down the winding drive, and then finding myself in the middle of
a lot of strange, chattering boys who appeared to have made
friends already, manifested itself in the increasingly urgent
demands of my bladder. Too shy to interrupt the headmasters
welcoming speech and ask where the loo was, I burst into tears
and simultaneously peed on the carpet. I remember a fellow new
boy, clearly not destined for the diplomatic corps in later life,
crying, 'Look, he's dripping!'

I have never since subscribed to the notion that it helps to
build the character of eight-year-old children by taking them
from home and dumping them ('maroon was the appropriate
word in my case) in a strange place among strangers without so
much as a goodbye or farewell embrace. It was done with the best
of intentions. I have no doubt that, as they pulled away from the
school gates, my father comforted my mother with, 'Don't worry
- he'll be playing happily with new-found friends already.' If so,
he was whistling in the wind. For several terms, the dreadful
bouts of homesickness recurred - the apprehensive counting of
days as the end of the holidays approached, the journey on the
day in the family car - a 'tumbril' to me - and the subsequent
nocturnal sobbing under the blankets in the cubicle or
dormitory. To avoid the upset that the parting caused them, my
parents took to delegating the job of driving me to school to Mr
Vickery the odd-job man who, apart from occasionally muttering
the contradictory words, 'Come on, lad, be a man,' from beneath
a moustache of Lord Kitchener proportions, was able to remain
calmly detached throughout the journey.

Many years later, when I was a parent myself, I drove one
hundred and fifty miles to deliver our then eight-year-old son
Stephen to a sort of country-house camp in Wiltshire organised by
a fellow-parent at his school in North London. It would have been
his first extended absence from home and, though there were a few
friends of his there, a crescendo of heavy sighs from the passenger
seat of the car indicated that he was not ready for the experience.

When we arrived, the clouds of apprehension burst. It reached
a point at which the hosts suggested that the only way to stop the
uncontrollable sobbing was for me to hop in my car and drive off,
and that he would 'soon be playing happily with new-found
friends'. It was that moment, echoing my own experience on my
first day at Sunningdale, that persuaded me there and then to take
him to the car and drive us both one hundred and fifty miles
home. With chickenpox, glandular fever, tonsillitis, croup, scarlet
fever, mumps and two kinds of measles then on the menu of
childhood ailments, I didn't think it was necessary to add
homesickness.

To put the record straight, I should add that the tears rolled
when, after four years, it was time to leave Sunningdale. My days
there did have a profound influence on my future life, if not my
character. After a year or two, Mr Crabtree retired, to be replaced
by Geoffrey Dacre Fox. It would be hard to find two men less
alike in both appearance and style. Where Crabtree was crumpled
and grizzly, prone to outbursts of temper and a ferocious wielder
of the cane. Fox was sleek and unruffled, from the black hair, dark
and glossy as patent leather and greased flat, down to the ample
plus-fours and the co-respondent shoes. Crabtrees academic
stance was, broadly speaking, classical, and Fox's more open to
modern ideas. When he took over as Headmaster, the latter
continued the practice of reading to the assembled School on
Sunday mornings, but the story he chose was more likely to be
from the adventures of Bulldog Drummond than Barnaby Rudge.

I do however also recall Shakespeare readings in his drawing
room on other occasions. As usual, something quite silly has kept
it in my mind.

The memory is of Mr Fox sitting on a chair with the group of
boys sprawling round him on the carpet, each clutching a softback
school edition of the play in question. He used to allocate to us
the various roles in the scene. Once, the play was Richard II, in
which appear three servants to the king: Bushy, Bagot and Green.
One of our group was a boy called Brunei (I forget his first name)
who was the grandson, I believe, of the great engineer, Isambard
Kingdom Brunei.

It is well known to be a bad career move for a schoolboy,
especially in the early days of school life, to stand out from the
crowd. Poor Brunei had a bad time, largely due to his hair, a
prodigious black growth that sprouted above his ears at all angles
like some sort of ill-conceived winter headgear. Mr Fox was a
simpathetic man. I am sure it was with no malicious intent that
he caused a minor riot with the announcement, 'Brunei, you will
be Bushy'
Similarly, I doubt if Geoffrey Fox had any notion of the effect
it would have on my life when he modernised the annual school
concerts. With his encouragement, they became more like variety
shows, drawing on talent that had hitherto been regarded, if at all,
as inadmissibly lowbrow. I benefited from this on two scores.
Noticing my habit of scribbling fanciful doodles all over my
school books and, indeed, any other blank surface that offered
itself, he got me to channel the destructive tendency into a form
of entertainment then known as Lightning Cartoons (nowadays
occasionally resurrected on television in various forms). If I feel in
the mood for a good retrospective cringe, I recall standing in front
of an audiences of boys and parents with a layout pad mounted on
an easel, drawing puerile caricatures of well-known people -
Mahatma Gandhi, Stanley Baldwin, Charlie Chaplin - at the
same time spouting precocious-sounding patter that had been
concocted for me by Mr Fox.

More importantly, Geoffrey Fox encouraged one of the younger
masters who had an interest in jazz to form a band. Charlie
Sheepshanks (who subsequently became headmaster himself)
threw himself into moulding a 'jazz band' out of boys in some of
whom a talent for music or any other form of juvenile showbiz
had hitherto been unsuspected. Apart from the Swanee whistle,
which he himself played with more infectious enthusiasm than
finesse, the band consisted of kazoos and other toys that could be
blown or hit, the latter in my instance, since I was the drummer
(you must wait to learn how that came about). I have no doubt
that the sound we produced on the concert platform was
excruciating, but parents at school concerts are naturally inclined
to be indulgent, and we had fun. It was then that I discovered the
joy of making music in an ensemble, a crucial moment in any
young musicians life.

A cluster of thoughts intrudes here. For the first, Chairman
Humph has to give way to one of the greatest thinkers of
them all.
A woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on its hinder
legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it
done at all.

Samuel Johnson, from Boswells Life ofJohnson, 1793
(I append the date to ward off politically correct indignation)

Much the same might be said of both the Swanee whistle and
the kazoo.

There is a certain symmetry in the fact that one of the most
popular games in Im Sorry I Haven't A Clue is called 'Swanee Kazoo'
and calls upon the teams to perform brief duets on those
instruments, the more excruciating the better. The Swanee whistle
takes its name from the common corruption of Suwannee, a river
in South-East Georgia, USA. The 'Swanee' river was brought to the
world s attention by the American songwriter Stephen Foster, in his
song 'Old Folks At Home', published circa 1870, better known to
some as 'Way down upon the Swanee river' (I hope you're taking
notes. This burst of erudition isn't going to last forever).

The instrument operates on the bicycle pump principle. I
suppose the trombone is a better analogy, since it too relies on the
player to alter the notes by means of a slide, without the assistance
of keys or valves. Rhapsodising on the Swanee whistle is a hit-or-
miss affair, more often used nowadays for comedy effect. (I don't
know why I say nowadays — I'm sure the parents in the
early thirties, listening with rapt expressions of pride to the
Sunningdale jazz band sounding like a choir of drunken owls,
were in fact suffering agonies of suppressed laughter.)

The onomatopoeically named kazoo is hardly more reliable,
depending for its accuracy on the musical ear of the person who
hums or sings into it. My reference books are reticent as to its
origins. I guess that it was invented as a toy by some kindly person
to replace the primitive comb and tissue paper combination, the
tendency of which to make the lips itch must have nipped many
a musical career in the bud.
PS: I should add in fairness that both instruments have had
their place in jazz. The young Louis Armstrong played the Swanee
whistle quite attractively on a couple of recordings by his Hot Five
in the twenties (go to a piece called 'Who's It' for confirmation).
Such was his innate genius that he could probably have done as
well with a bicycle pump.

PPS: Later in that decade an ex-jockey and vocalist called Red
McKenzie held his own in stellar company blowing through comb
and paper (refer to 'One Hour' by the Mound City Blue Blowers,
1928), and the more high-tech kazoo makes a number of
appearances in the discographies.

PPPS: Followers of I'm Sorry I Haven t A Clu€w'i{[ have noticed
the minor phenomenon that the satirical comedian Jeremy Hardy,
who is unable to sing two consecutive notes in tune, can pitch
perfectly when doing it through a kazoo.

It just occurred to me that I have never properly explained my
association with 'the antidote to panel games', I'm Sorry I Haven't
A Clue. I should have done so when the topic of silliness arose,
since it has brought me to the peak of that desirable condition.

Towards the end of 1971, David Hatch, then wearing the twin
hats of actor and BBC producer, rang me to say that the cast of a
radio game-show called I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, of which he
was a member, were looking for a 'sister' show to fill in the periods
when their show was off the air. Graeme Garden had come up
with I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue. Would I be the chairman in a pilot
recording?

My experience of the few 'pilots' that I had previously done led
me to expect that I would be paid a studio fee to record a trial
show which would then disappear without trace, never to reach
the airwaves. So I agreed. With a team of Graeme, Tim Brooke-
Taylor, Bill Oddie and Jo Kendall, we recorded a 'live' programme
at London's Playhouse Theatre.
It was then totally improvised, not an easy thing to do in the
short time allotted to a radio show. I can remember the panellists
coming into the nearby Sherlock Holmes pub after the recording,
still ashen after the ordeal. Someone asked David Hatch what
chance there was of it ever being broadcast. His immediate answer
was, 'None, except possibly after lunch on Boxing Day when the
listeners are pissed.'

Nevertheless, he beavered away for the next month or two
among the BBC planners, and eventually rang me to say that the
show would start in February 1972. Barry Cryer and I shared
the job of chairman for the first series. Then I took over when he
joined Tim and Graeme in the regular team that, with the
addition ofWillie Rushton, became a fixture for many years. I am
told that the person who has periodically set up an unholy din on
the piano during much of that time is called Colin Sell.

What has come to be known as my 'feud' with Colin started
when, on one show many years ago (it may have been last year,
it just feels like many years ago), Barry Cryer addressed to me a
query about one of the musical games and Colin rose from the
piano stool and began to answer it, off-microphone, still wearing
the headphones he needs to supplement his faulty hearing. It
was a gross breach of elementary protocol and I was quite within
my rights to cut him off with a peremptory, 'I'm the chairman,
SIT DOWN!' Like many other things in the programme, it was
allowed to develop into a regular part of the show, to the extent
that Colin Sells mother, so he told me, once said to him, 'Why
do you allow that dreadful man to speak to you like that?'

If you suspect that Colin Sell and I are, in reality, good friends,
I would ask you to keep it to yourself. We don't want ugly
rumours like that to get around.

The freedom we have had, from a succession of producers, to
allow small incidents to become running gags in the show
sometimes has strange results.

Tim Brooke-Taylor and I sit alongside each other on stage. We
are both connoisseurs of throat lozenges, often sharing when one
or other of us has left his supply at home. During the preliminaries
to one show, there was some consternation when we found that
neither of us had brought any, relying on the other to have some at
the ready. When the audience was in and the show was under way,
Tim mentioned the dilemma more than once in the course of some
ad-libbing. Suddenly, a single lozenge landed on the stage, thrown
by a well-wisher in the circle. One of the team mentioned that the
whole pack would have been more generous. Within seconds, the
rest of the gold pack (we're talking Lockets here) came down in
front of us. Had one of our regulars come to the theatre with
pockets stuffed with assorted confectionery on the off-chance that
one would be mentioned? This was one running gag that we
hurriedly aborted. A Jumbo Toblerone or a bargain bag of Mars
Bars could have inflicted serious injury.

I drove to the Playhouse that first time asking myself what, with
an active day job, I thought I was doing, and how could I possibly
do it among four top comic actors. The second question answered
the first, and I have since clung to it to guide my on-air persona.
I treasure as a compliment the reference to me in a newspaper
review as 'the comatose chairman'.

It was a great blow when Willie Rushton died on 11 December
1996.

Up until then, the team had for many years been perfectly
balanced. From my seat in the centre of a crescent-shaped set,
perilously close to the predatory Samantha, I had plenty of time
to assess the distinct role which each played: Barry, filling the gaps
with a gag for every occasion and a miracle-workers ability to
bring back an old joke, alive and kicking, from the dead; Tim, the
ever-so-slightly posh Englishman showing a hint of vulnerability
that wins the sympathy of the audience (in early days, when I was
in charge of the scoring, I was once booed and hissed for
withholding points from him); Willie, lacing his gruff satire with
irritability just below the surface; and Graeme, content to sit for
minutes, inscrutable, until delivering a knockout punchline that
will bring a round to an abrupt end. It was a wide decision not to
try and replace Willie. Since then we have had a roster of talented
and hilarious guests who have, in their own ways, kept us afloat.

after Willie died, it was uplifting and extraordinary to witness
the love in which he was held throughout the country. At his
funeral, we all had the same story, of strangers crossing the street
to sympathise over our loss. I say extraordinary because he was not
a man who courted easy popularity. Its not that he didn't suffer
fools gladly. He didn't suffer them at all. Two anecdotes will
suffice, second-hand but, I hope, accurately presented.

Those who believe that after-dinner speaking is simply a matter
of rising to one's feet and spouting for twenty minutes or so have
it badly wrong. Speakers are usually required to attend the lengthy
dinner itself, sitting at the top table with the chairman and his
guests and, while eating, joining in the conversation among
complete strangers. When the host is hospitable and the company
is congenial, it can be enjoyable, though rendering the brain
numb by the time the call to stand up and scintillate arrives.

Willie Rushton once sat through a meal next to a chairman
who made no effort to entertain or even speak to him. With
corporate shop talk buzzing relentlessly around and across him, he
became increasingly bored and irritable, until the moment came
for him to make his speech. Then the chairman committed the
ultimate breach of etiquette by ending his cursory introduction
with the words, And I hope he's going to be funny because we're
paying him a large amount of money tonight.' As he rose from his
chair, Willie roared into the microphone,'... most of which is for
sitting next to you for an hour and a half!'

I must preface the next entry by saying in advance that the
object of one of Willies most scathing put-downs received it with
appreciative laughter.

In the years just before his death, Willie Rushton partnered
Barry Cryer in a two-man show called Two Old Farts, with Colin
Sell at the piano. It was Colin who told me this story while we were
assembling for Willies funeral at the Mortlake Crematorium.

On tour, Willie and Barry arrived at a theatre early in order to
rehearse for their evening performance which, being topical,
required special preparation. They found a blind piano tuner
already tuning the piano. They waited till he'd finished, then went
onstage themselves to begin work. Instead of packing up and
leaving, the tuner hung about, every now and then chipping in on
their rehearsal with suggestions or comments. The interruptions
were enough to light Willie Rushtons fuse and he became more and
more restive, eventually stumping off the stage and heading for the
sanctuary of the dressing room, normally a safe haven. But after a
minute or two, the man appeared in the doorway, like some
persistent spectre, this time rapping on about the virtues of the
Guide Dogs for the Blind Association and the dog they'd trained for
him. 'I'll let you see him if you like,' he piped and, despite the lack
of enthusiasm which Willie was by now radiating in a malevolent
aura, hurried off to fetch the animal, returning with a cry of 'Here
he is!' Without turning from the table where he was working, Willie
growled, 'How very cruel of them to give you a cat!'

I have a kazoo in the top drawer of my desk. The fact is, I have
found it impossible through life to shed my childhood fascination
for anything that will produce music, toy or otherwise. It's not just
nostalgia. Every now and then, I reach for my kazoo and hum a
few measures of a song into it. It has a curiously therapeutic effect,
bringing balm to the soul (a phrase which I will explain later if you
care to stick around). In the same drawer, there is a penny whistle.
This is not the same one that my father once bought me (actually
for a penny, so we're going back a bit). That was a present which
my father didn't hand over until he had taught himself one tune, a
Scottish ditty called 'Cock 0' The North'. Though more successful
on this than on the 'cello, he was definitely a one-tune man.
I suppose my subsequent curiosity about musical instruments
places me in the category known clumsily in jazz jargon as a
multi-instrumentalist. Today, the only instruments I play in
public are the trumpet, the clarinet and, occasionally, the tenor
horn (known in America perversely as an alto horn), though I
have strummed a guitar inexpertly onstage in the distant past and
can do a passable imitation of Count Basie for eight out of twelve
bars of 'St Louis Blues'.

Having blown the trumpet and the clarinet during a session at
the time-honoured jazz club at 100 Oxford Street (in the fifties,
for almost a decade, the Humphrey Lyttelton Club, now called
the 100 Club) I was accosted by a member of the audience who
asked, in a not altogether friendly manner, 'Do you play more
than one instrument to show off your virility?' It was a hot night
and the place was crowded, so I just said 'Yes,' over my shoulder
and ploughed on towards the band-room.

Had I had time and inclination to boast, I could have reeled off
a list of instruments I have owned, withholding the fact that most,
having been written off as failures or outgrown along the way,
were either discarded or consigned to a remote cupboard. Before
the trumpet became my ultimate destination, I became quite
adept on the mouth organ, as we used to know the harmonica.
Indeed, my first musical inspiration was Larry Adler, whose
photograph was on my bedroom wall for a while. I graduated to
the top-of-the-range Hohner model with the button at one end
that achieves the semitones and enables the player to negotiate any
required key. It came in what looked like a rosewood box, the feel
of which I can still recall in a burst of nostalgia.

The blues singer and harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson
made several visits to Britain in the sixties. My former colleague of
many years, pianist Stan Greig, accompanied him on various
occasions. On the first of these, there was discussion at the bar
beforehand as to what keys he favoured. 'Don't matter,' he said, 'I
play all the keys, man, all the keys.' Most blues harmonica players
use the fairly basic standard instrument in the one key, so Stan was
impressed. Sonny Boy picked up and opened a large, flat wooden
box with which he had arrived at the gig. Inside, neatly laid out in
their own slots, were a dozen basic instruments of various sizes,
one for each key. There you are,' he said. 'All the keys!'

The mouth organ is a vulnerable instrument, prone to blockage
by a wide variety of detritus if stuffed carelessly into a schoolboys
pocket. I went through a number of replacements before LarryAdler
came down off the bedroom wall to make way for Louis Armstrong,
and my cherished Hohner De-Luxe was ousted by the trumpet.

It was some time later, and in different circumstances, that I
met Larry Adler. He had come to live in London and for a while
had a radio chat show on the BBC. When he interviewed me, I
was then writing the restaurant column in Harpers 6' Queen, and
in his introduction, he said that I had the most enviable job in the
world, getting paid for eating. I remembered that, and when I left
the magazine I recommended him as a replacement. He took over,
but not for very long. I think perhaps it was a mistake, in the
context of haute cuisine, to mention his vasectomy quite so often.

One of the thousand ways in which I fell short of Larry Adler was
visually. To be frank, I didn't have the hands for it. In posed pictures
of him in action, his fingers curled back expressively like those of an
Indian dancer. In similar pose, I looked more like someone trying
to eat a buttered corn-on-the-cob without getting stains on his tie.
Most musicians will agree that, in their choice of an instrument in
which to specialise, the visual element plays a part.

I was led to the trumpet not only by the sound made by my
first idol, Nat Gonella, but also by the pictures which I saw in
the music magazines of Louis Armstrong in heraldic posture,
pointing the instrument skywards as if issuing a clarion call. I
was not aware, until I began to attract some publicity myself,
that this was almost certainly a photographer's notion. The
crude fact that I learned was that, if that noble posture is
adopted in practice, all the spit that accumulates in the
instrument runs back into the mouthpiece, creating a
'bubbling' performance in a literal and unfortunate sense.

From the Chairman Humph Trumpet Tutor', as yet unwritten

For no reason than that it may come in useful later, here's a
message by the jazz-loving Leonard Bernstein:

The gayest, wildest jazz always seems to have some hint of
pain in it...

Leonard Bernstein, speaking of the jazz 'sound' in a recorded
lecture entitled 'What is Jazz?'

I have discreetly kept to myself for many years the fact that when
I had my tonsils out at a tender age, I was given a banjolele by my
parents (more a small banjo than a ukelele) by way of compensation.

I was thrilled when I found it under the bed, but holding it and
looking at it adoringly was one thing, learning it quite another,
and it soon went. Quite honestly, it's not the sort of thing a chap
wants to talk about.

Why is the banjo so unpopular? For some years now, it has been
the object of ridicule among musicians, spawning an epidemic of
ribald and derisory jokes. The Irish and mothers-in-law are
nowadays relatively safe behind the protective screen of political
correctness, but the banjo and its perpetrators are fair game and
their persecution an open season.

Riddle'. If you go into a room and see a good banjo player,
a bad banjo player and a pink elephant, which one do you
talk to?

Answer. The bad banjo player. The other two are figments
of the imagination.

Example of a banjophobic joke
Banjophobia is not a contemporary phenomenon. In 1890, George
Bernard Shaw was the music critic of a London newspaper, the Star,
writing under the pseudonym Corno di Bassetto. His brief was a
broad one, taking in light entertainment as well as classical concerts
and recitals. On 14 March 1890, he reviewed a performance at the
International Hall in London by two brothers advertised as 'the
unique and incomparable Bohee Operatic Minstrels'. Shaw, like
Winston Churchill, knew the rhetorical power of arcane phraseology
to enhance mockery. It helps to read this with an Irish accent:

The Bohee Brothers are themselves banjoists, and would
have me believe that the Czar of Russia affects that weapon.
Had I known this last Sunday, I should have made a much
more vigorous speech in Hyde Park at the demonstration on
behalf of the Siberian exiles. If it be true that the Prince of
Wales banjoizes, then I protest against his succession to the
throne. The further suggestion that Mr Gladstone favours
the instrument is enough to bring that statesman down to
the International Hall with his axe. The banjo may be as
fashionable as the chimney-pot hat; but the Brothers Bohee
could no more reconcile me to the one than Messrs Lincoln
and Bennett to the other. The more feady they twanged the
more evident they made it that no skill of handling could
extenuate the enormities of the Ethiopian lute.

From the Collected Works of Corno di Bassetto

(Footnotes to the above: In this semantic minefield, a certain
amount of translation is necessary. I have searched the dictionary
in vain for 'banjoizing'. 'Feady too, is elusive, but I'll give it the
benefit of the doubt. Abraham Lincoln and Arnold Bennett
customarily wore the chimney-pot hat, which looked like a tall
and crumpled top hat that had seen better days. And Mr
Gladstone, like George Washington, regularly chopped down
trees as a respite from the affairs of State.)
As often happens when the unspeakable villain in a drama is
finally humiliated, I begin, by the end of Shaw's assault, to feel
sorry for the hapless Ethiopian lute (Shaw's phrase rolls off the
tongue impressively but is inaccurate — the instrument originated
in West Africa). Truth to say, I have little difficulty in turning
devils advocate on behalf of the instrument.

I once had a banjo in my own band. It was played by Freddy
Legon, who also played guitar. One night, in a concert in Rouen,
responding to wild calls for an encore from an overexcited French
audience, I stamped my foot to the beat in a reprise of 'Royal
Garden Blues' and brought it down on the neck of Freddy's banjo,
which he had unwisely laid on the floor. The blow reduced it to a
Jackson Pollock abstract of splintered wood and tangled strings. At
that time, I was on the cusp of a stylistic transition from traditional
jazz to what had been dubbed 'mainstream'. The word was coined
to describe a smoothly swinging style of music in which a banjo in
the rhythm section is more a hindrance than a help. I am aware
that it was, and perhaps still is, believed that the 'accident' was a
drastic gesture, a break for freedom on my part. Not true, but it's
a nice parable.

Much of the antipathy to the banjo in recent times derives from
what is known as the Trad Boom, a brief period between 1959 and
the arrival of the Beatles two years later. Recordings by traditional
jazz bands crept into the pop charts, and in a very short time the
landscape from Land's End to John O'Groats and across Europe
teemed with 'Trad' bands, every one featuring a banjo in its
rhythm section.

I imagine that the Bohee Brothers, who so disturbed Corno di
Bassetto, were skilled banjo technicians using the fingerpicking
style familiar in folk music. With some honourable exceptions,
the Trad banjoists tend to be strummers. And since the harmonic
structure of many of the tunes they play are basic, the strumming
often lingers tediously on one chord. Played properly, the
maligned instrument can sing with a sound that I choose to
describe as 'plangent'. That's not only because, in its meaning of
'plaintive or sad', the word conforms to Leonard Bernstein's
definition of the jazz voice as containing 'a hint of pain. Applied
to the banjo, it also sounds more than faintly onomatopoeic. So I
say, 'Plang away regardless, you banjoizers!'

While I was at Sunningdale School I started having lessons at
home on the military side drum. My father's brother Caryl
Lyttelton, a vicar who did much work in the East End of London,
gave me a battered old Boys' Brigade drum of the kind that is
hitched on to a belt round the waist. As usual, I fell in love with
it, to the extent that my mother, in search of a teacher, responded
to an advert in the local paper. One evening Mr Glass, a former
drum major in the Coldstream Guards, came to our house in
Eton. My mother proudly explained that i had taught myself
quite a lot on my Boys' Brigade drum, Mr Glass's answer was
'Don't worry, madam - I'll soon unlearn him all that.' And he
proceeded to do just that for several years.

Though there were many conventional hoops to go through
before fulfilment, I am sure it was the combined influence of
Sunningdale's headmaster Geoffrey Fox and Mr Glass at a formative age that laid the foundation of my ultimate career.

Ex-Drum Major Glass taught me many things and notably,
how to read drum music. In later life, when I led a band that made
much use of written music, I found myself finding it much easier
to read the rhythmic patterns on sight than the notes which dance
up and down on the page. Working then and now with musicians
who are expert sight-readers, I have much the same feeling of guilt
that I experienced when receiving awards as a restaurant critic in
the fifties and sixties. I can however claim that once I have, with
much labour in advance, mastered a piece of written music and
performed it a few times, I can thereafter throw the manuscript
away and remember it in perpetuity. That gives me the edge, I
argue, over those who still have to scrabble for the band part when
I call up an arrangement for the hundredth time.

I'm encouraged in this situation by another invaluable piece of
advice given to me by Mr Glass.

As a member of a theatre orchestra in Windsor, he once invited
me to sit with him in the orchestra pit for several performances of
The Mikado, even handing me the sticks on the last night to play
a brief roll on the drum to herald 'God Save The King'. When I
expressed indignation, as children do, at having been exposed to
such danger without warning, he said, 'Look, son — there was
nothing I gave you to play then that you don't play a hundred
times when you're practising at home.' He then added, pointing
out into the auditorium from which the audience was making its
shuffling exit, 'Never forget this. You've got the music in front of
you, they haven't. If you make a mistake, just carry on as if you
meant it. They'll never know.' I have been told that most concert
soloists of international repute have, at one time or another, fallen
back on that principle.

It was through Mr Glass's influence that my first great passion
in music was for military marches. We lived two miles away from
Windsor Castle and, more importantly to me, the Victoria
Barracks down the road that housed in rotation the regiments of
the Brigade of Guards. At half past ten in the morning, the band
in residence would lead a march up to the castle for the changing
of the guard. I was first taken to see this ritual by Mr Glass.
Thence forward through the short Easter holidays, I would be
there every morning opposite the main gate of the barracks,
holding my bicycle and waiting.

The parade would form up on the barrack square out of my
vision but I could hear the barked words of command. To this day,
I can without effort relive the charge of excitement triggered by the
distant words, 'By the left ... quick MARCH!' and the five-beat
roll on the drums which announced that the band was at last on its
way. It took thirty seconds or so for it to wheel into view at the
gate, and for the excitement to become almost orgasmic as the
brazen sound of a row of trombones hit me in the solar plexus.

It was through these excursions that I acquired another of my
enduring heroes. The name of Kenneth Alford became known to
me when I started buying gramophone records of the tunes to
which I thrilled on those marches to Windsor Castle and back.
(Mr Glass again introduced me to many of those tunes, not always
reliably. Even as a nine-year-old I knew enough French to realise
that 'Le Reve Passe' does not mean 'They shall not pass!') It was
much later that I learned that 'Kenneth J Alford' was a
pseudonym, concealing the true identity of Major Frederick
Joseph Ricketts, long-time Director of Music for the Royal
Marines.

His story turns out to be more romantic than that imposing
name and rank suggests. He was born in 1881, the son of a coal-
merchant in London's East End. Orphaned at the age of fourteen,
he joined the army by faking his age, and was soon recognised as
a musical prodigy. He was still a young man when, after training
at the Army School of Music at Kneller Hall, he became
bandmaster for the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and when
subsequently he took up his post with the Royal Marines.

It was while Kenneth Alford was with the Argylls that he wrote
his most famous march, 'Colonel Bogey. From the moment the
ink dried on his score, this masterpiece has been sorely traduced
over the years. For a start its title is, for reasons on which we
needn't dwell, liable to reduce small children to helpless giggles.
The corners of my mouth twitched, I'm sure, when I first heard it
from the mouth of Mr Glass.

Since then, of course, the tune has had to contend with not
one, but two sets of bawdy lyrics that have been attached to it over
the years by marching soldiers: 'Bollocks - and the same to you'
offers little in the way of subdety. But the other version, if not in
the Johnny Mercer or Ira Gershwin class, shows signs of some
poetic thought. I print it here as a tiny contribution to the sum of
satirical verse, and for the benefit of those who, nowadays, look
\      blank at any reference to it:

Hitler . . . has only got one ball,
"        Goering's ... are very, very small,
»       Himmler ... is somewhat simmler . . .
and as for Goebbels, he's noebbels at all.

(Propaganda-wise, the ditty might well have helped us to win
*     World War II. Alas, it has done little for 'Colonel Bogey. The
indignity came with the adoption of Kenneth Alford finely
constructed piece as the theme for the David Lean film Bridge On
'       The River Kwai. In providing the tune with what is known in the
trade as a'hook'in the form of the unison whistling of soldiers on
the march, Matthew Arnolds adaptation did a good job. But in
the process, it destroyed Kenneth Alford's own essential
|      trademark.

Pause for a brief moment of trauma. I had already written the
above words for the book when I watched an edition of the
\     highbrow television quiz University Challenge in which the
whistling' theme was played to the teams and they were asked to
name the composer. I had shouted 'Kenneth Alford!' at the TV set
|      (as one does in the privacy of one's living room) when I was aghast
to hear Jeremy Paxman give to the flummoxed contestants the
answer 'Malcolm Arnold'.

As a composer of military marches, Kenneth Alford is on a par
with the great American, John Philip Sousa. They have much in
common, notably the understanding that the primary purpose of
a military march is to impart a feeling of pride, confidence and
euphoria in those marching behind. It's the drill sergeants
injunction, 'Heads up ... chests out . . . shoulders back!' set to
music. But there is a not-so-subtle difference between the two of
them. As one might expect, the American had the edge when it
came to pizzazz - the flamboyance epitomised by 'The Star-
Spangled Banner' with its sparkling piccolos, cavorting
sousaphones and crashing cymbals. I've always thought of, and
admired, Sousa's marches as concert rather than functional music.
For one thing, the US Army marches differently from the British,
in short (dare I say, rather prissy) steps that demand a brisk tempo.
By contrast, the British Army has a measured tread that invites a
more laid-back and, in jazz parlance, swinging tempo. You can't
hurry 'Colonel Bogey'.

The quality that distinguishes Kenneth Alfords music more
than any other is his use of countermelody, as rich and subtle as
that of Duke Ellington in another idiom. In its original unbutchered form, 'Colonel Bogey' offers a supreme example. What
goes on behind the familiar opening themes is significant and
worthy of attention. But its with the arrival of the third theme
that a thrilling reversal takes places. Beneath the staccato diddle-
diddle-dum semi-quavers by which the tune is usually identified, a
sweeping melody unfolds.

Played by the band's middle-range instruments, the melody has
a logical beauty that relegates the overhead stuttering of the
cornets and clarinets to the status of what, in jazz, is called a riff.
Removed from its context and played with feeling by a choir of
'cellos, it could take its place among the most noble motifs of
orchestral music. To replace any part of Colonel Bogey with
whistling, for whatever reason, can only be described as
vandalism.

PS: Several theories exist as to the origin of the tune's title. I
take this to be the official one. When in the Argyll and Sutherland
Highlanders, Alford used to play golf with the colonel of the
regiment, an indifferent player who, instead of shouting 'Fore!'
when an erratic shot was heading for the cranium of some
unheeding bystander, whistled two piercing notes of alarm. Alford
used those notes to launch his tune. 'Colonel Bogey was a sly
reference to his senior's inability to score par on the golf course.

PPS: The origin of the 'Colonel Bogey' melody may have a
parallel in so-called popular music. Larry Adler always said that
George Gershwin wrote his song 'The Man I Love' in response to
a challenge, from another member oftheAlgonquin circle, to base
a tune on the three notes usually applied by musicians, tongue-in-
cheek, to the words 'Good evening, friends!'

Let's linger awhile on this subject of musical heroes. The names
of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington have constantly recurred
in this bumblebee excursion through my mind. Regarding the
latter, here's another thought, prompted by one of the Duke's
most magisterial pronouncements:

I have never understood why this thing that people call
jazz should take precedence over me!

This was Duke Ellington's somewhat aggrieved response
(eavesdropped by me when he was giving an interview to students
from the London School of Economics) to criticism in the
musical press that his London concerts in 1958 did not contain
enough jazz. He had more to say:

When Louis Armstrong plays 'Pennies From Heaven' or
Coleman Hawkins plays 'Body And Soul', they call it jazz.
But when Duke Ellington plays Ellington, they say it's not.
I don't understand that.

It's not difficult for us to understand the Dukes frustration.
Like Louis Armstrong, he was already established in his career as
a musician when, as the twenties unfolded, the infant word 'jazz'
made its first unsteady steps into common currency. It's an irony
that would not have been lost on Ellington that when the word
became what would now be called a style icon in the mid-
twenties, his name and his music were a fundamental part of the
culture that defined the Jazz Age.

Too much talk stinks up the place.

Duke Ellington, passim
The talking started in earnest towards the end of the twenties when
a body of people recognisable as jazz critics appeared on the scene
in both America and Europe. In order for them to pass judgement
on the music, they had first to define it. Rules, yardsticks, criteria,
whatever you like to call them, were established in order to answer
the question 'What is jazz?' By the time Duke gave his interview to
the students in London and, indeed beyond that up to the present
day, no one has ever come up with a plausible answer. But the rules
remain, constantly amended and updated.

The Cotton Club, where Duke Ellington and his orchestra
presided, was at the hub of Harlems entertainment scene in the
middle-to-late twenties. The air around it was redolent with the
spirit of jazz. Yet many of the performers who contributed to it —
Florence Mills, Ethel Waters, Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson, Adelaide
Hall and many more — would not, by todays criteria, be
acknowledged as jazz artists at all. We seem to have got ourselves
in a bit of a pickle, as Nanny Viggers used to say.

I suppose we have to accept that continuous sniping from one
quarter or another is the price of distinction in the arts. Happily,
history has a knack of correcting the most eccentric of critical
judgements, establishing a consensus that is more or less
consistent. For example, its now widely acknowledged that the
arrival of the young double bassist Jimmy Blanton in the
Ellingtonian ranks brought about a golden era in the orchestras
music in the early forties. At the same time it placed Blanton, in
the space of little more than two years in a tragically short life,
high among those players who have revolutionised their
instrument s role in the music.

One of the most influential critics of the day, Dave Dexter Jnr,
writing in the prestigious music magazine. Downbeat, earned for
himself a less enviable place in jazz history. He homed in especially
on some piano and bass duets that Blanton recorded with his

leader and which brought his nimble, buoyant playing into
sharp focus.
Quite possibly the most sickening, unmusical and
thoroughly disgusting sides the Duke has ever needled
(sic) are 'Body And Soul' and 'Mr J B Blues', which are
nothing more than duets by the leader and Jimmy
Blanton. The first title, a jazz classic revered by anyone
who has ever sat in on a session, is hacked, slashed and
brutally butchered by Blanton's bullish bass bowings. The
blues is easily as frightful with Jimmy thumping his strings
as well as sawing them. All standards for intonation are
forsaken ... a menu of bass-piano duets such as those
mentioned above might well prove disastrous to Ellington's
legion of fans, this scribbler included. Maybe it was a gag.

Dave Dexter Jnr in Downbeat, 1 June 1941

I needn't say much more about this, other than to invite the reader
to go over it again, assuming Rowan Atkinsons slack-cheeked
enunciation when it comes to the fever of alliterative consonants
halfway through.

To this day, arguments have raged and billions of words have
been expended in the bibliography of jazz on the subject of Duke
Ellington's compositions. Claims have been made, some by
disgruntled band members themselves, that many of Duke's most
famous themes were in fact contributed by them to his repertoire.
Some of these are acknowledged in composer credits — clarinettist
Barney Bigard appears as co-writer of 'Mood Indigo', and
trumpeters Bubber Miley and Cootie Williams on 'East St Louis
Toodle-oo' and 'Echoes of Harlem' respectively.

I have no urge to jump into the argument at the deep end so
late in the day. But in order to express a thought, let's just take a
more obvious example of apparent plagiarism. Duke Ellington's
Creole Love Call', vintage 1927, is built on themes recorded four
years earlier by King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band under the title of
Camp Meeting Blues'. Put side by side, Olivers blues is totally
forgettable while Ellingtons 'Creole Love Call* is a classic. Do we
rule the latter out of court on a technicality?

Always ready to help, I'll fish two quotations from the cloudy
waters of memory. It is not contested that Duke Ellington
arranged or orchestrated the borrowed motifs, developing them
into memorable compositions. So its reasonable to apply the
familiar fragment of dialogue that originated in a Punch cartoon
from the thirties, possibly by the great Frank Reynolds. I quote
from memory.

A vicar addresses an elderly parishioner who is tending his
garden.

'You and the Almighty have made a wonderful job of
this garden, George.'

George, grumpily: 'You should 'ave seen it when the
Almighty 'ad it to 'isself.'

The French essayist Michel de Montaigne said much the same
thing, applicable to composer and writer alike, though they
weren't quite so concise in the sixteenth century.

The bees plunder the flowers here and there but afterwards
they make honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme
or marjoram. Even so with the pieces borrowed from
others; he will transform and blend them to make a work
that is all his own, to wit, his judgement.

Bee or gardener, Duke Ellingtons work was all his.

The commonest question that any aspiring jazz musician must be
prepared to face is, 'Do you make it up as you go along?' The
answer is, 'Yes, but we in the trade prefer to call it improvisation.'
(Or rather, that's how it started. But always on the lookout for a
juicy paradox, I note that the more complex the music has become,
the more do eminent commentators resort to baby talk to describe
it. I suppose it all started back in the forties when Charlie Parker
and Dizzy Gillespie hoisted jazz on to a higher intellectual level 
and called it bebop. Nowadays, to be cool, you have to take the
dummy out of your mouth and say 'improv. But not here.)

Nothing has brought more confusion to the understanding of
jazz than the belief, enshrined in dictionary definitions, that it is
founded on improvisation. The word has hung about since the
music began, begging to be clearly explained. In its strict sense,
that of 'spontaneous invention, it never had a free reign in early
jazz. The musicians in a classic New Orleans band each had a
specific role to play - the trumpet to define the theme, the
trombone to provide the bass harmonies, the clarinet, freest of
them all, to weave a decorative countermelody. The layman's
question arises from the perception that, in New Orleans-style
bands — and for that matter, informal jam sessions — no one is seen
to be reading from written music.

The musicians are guided by the harmonic, melodic and
rhythmic shape of the tune, by the conventional role they have to
play and by the memory of the way they played the tune the night
before, and the years before that. In this way, if their ears are in
good working order, chaos is avoided. It may be improvisation of
a sort, but free it is not.

'Freedom' is an iconic word in the story of jazz development. As
applied to what, as long ago as the sixties, was labelled avant-
garde, it meant escape from the restrictions of preordained
melody, harmony, metre and tempo, all things which had guided
jazz performance from New Orleans to the so-called New Age.
(Watch out, another paradox coming.) The more jazz has fled
from these 'restrictions', the more verbiage has been expended in
critical efforts to pin it down. As I write these words, I can see on
my shelf across the room a book entitled The Freedom Principle:

Jazz After 1958 by John Litweiler, which is at least an inch-and-a-
half wide. I'm sure, were I to blow away the dust and open it, it
would contain a wealth of profound thought.
But I'm doing my best here not to pontificate. As the word
implies, that is the role of the Pontiff, and jazz has had its fill of
popes laying down the law and, in some instances, talking an
awful lot of papal bull in the process. Its best, perhaps, if I tell you
a story...

. In the sixties, I compered a BBC radio programme called Jazz
Club, which had been running for two decades and was by then
recorded in advance - fortunately, as it turned out. Its then
producer, Bryant Marriott, a musician himself, showed an
admirable willingness to give exposure to all kinds of jazz, avant-
garde not excluded. He booked, at regular intervals, a group called
the Spontaneous Music Ensemble. It was led by drummer John
Stevens and its members included trumpeter Kenny Wheeler,
saxophonist Trevor Watts and trombonist Paul Rutherford, all
musicians of great distinction. John himself died in 1994, after
achieving respect not only in the field of experimental jazz, but
also as a tireless worker in jazz education and encouragement at
the community level.

So there is no mockery involved in my story. Indeed it shows
the serious efforts the group made to explore the frontiers of jazz
innovation. As presenter, I introduced four of their broadcasts,
speaking to John Stevens before each one so that I could convey
to the studio audience and the radio listeners beyond, some
notion of how the group worked. On the first occasion, he told
me that their modus operandi was to establish a theme, be it a few
bars or even a few notes of written music, and to advance from it
in whatever direction their collective and spontaneous ideas might
take them. This seemed to me a logical extension of the method
employed by jazz musicians through the ages in their search for
individual freedom of expression.

But the logic didn't end there — in the band's next appearance
a few months later, John was eager to explain that they had
moved on. This time, there would be no theme, since its very
existence as a starting point imposed a restriction. They would
simply start to play, one musician taking a lead and the rest
following in what might be described, in literal terms, as a free-
for-all, though I was careful not to use that term in my introduction to the programme in case it should be interpreted as
mockery.

Had we now reached the end of the road in the quest for
freedom? The third broadcast by the group took a further step
that, with the wisdom of hindsight, the alert reader of this
narrative might already have anticipated. As John explained in our
pre-broadcast chat, it had been decided that, for one musician to
start to play before the others implied an element of dictatorship
which subverted the idea of total freedom.

What followed on the actual recording was the epitome of
reductio ad absurdum. Bryant Marriott's voice called over the
intercom, 'OK, stand by!' The red light came on and I made my
brief introduction to launch the broadcast, ending with, 'Here
they are, the Spontaneous Music Ensemble!' Nothing
happened. The musicians stood onstage, their eyes rolling, their
breath held, waiting for the spontaneous moment when they
would all start to play simultaneously. After a few long
moments of dead silence, Bryant came out of the recording
booth to ask in some desperation, 'Do you think you could
actually start to play?'

Well, eventually they did, but not before I had formulated the
thought that, if this was freedom, give me 32 bars of 'Won't You
Come Home, Bill Bailey any day. It was an unworthy thought. I
should have trusted a musician of John's palpable honesty to reach
something of the same conclusion. For, sure enough, by the
groups fourth broadcast, they had retraced their steps, with no
apparent loss of exploratory zeal.

A postscript to this thought is provided articulately - as one
would expect from the son of a distinguished novelist - by pianist
and composer Nick Weldon, in an autobiographical note to one
of his recordings:
There is a paradox in jazz and it is this. The more we strive
to be individual voices, improvising freely in our advanced
harmonic and rhythmic language, somehow the less
individual we sound, and the less freedom we seem to
have. If all the emphasis is on us as individuals and on the
way we deploy the elements of improvisation, then all we
achieve is the freedom to sound like ourselves all the time.
The freedom to sound exactly the same in every tune.

In searching so strenuously for our freedom, our own
prison do we make ... Yet in the days before jazz harmony
was written about, when Ben Webster could be content
simply to play the tune, barely embellished, and to
concentrate on improvising a mood for the song, somehow
players achieved more individuality. Another jazz paradox,
this, and the converse of the first, is the individual voice
should be given to the player who does not demand it...

A further thought occurs. In his reference to the tenor saxist Ben
Webster, a pillar of pre-modern jazz, Nick Weldon touches upon
the element, common to every other form of creative art, that we
can only call 'magic'. Today's jazz criticism seems to demand,
ludicrously to my mind, that with every performance a musician
should surprise by breaking the mould, being at the cutting edge
or extending the idiom, to borrow some fashionable cliches. I
would be happier if critics in general would switch off the
analytical mind and give the music a chance to weave its spell.
Perhaps they would give some evidence in the process that, like
the rest of us, they are sometimes just carried away.

I don't deny that one of jazz music's most distinctive assets is its
ability to surprise. That most perceptive of jazz commentators, the
American writer Whitney Balliett, entitled one of his volumes of
collected articles The Sound of Surprise. But there's yet another
paradox here, if you can stand it. It's to be found lurking in the
fact that most of Mr Balliett s articles were focussed not on 'live'
performance but on recordings by the great jazz performers.

If it was not for the historical fact that the birth of jazz
coincided with the invention of the gramophone or phono-
graph, jazz would never have taken root in the cultural soil
of America and, subsequently, the rest of the world.

Chairman Humph in disgruntled mode. He hasn't got a word
in edgeways for several pages

Given that, for most enthusiasts, jazz exists mainly in their record
collections, what price the sound of surprise? There may be surprise,
even shock, when we first put a recording of Louis Armstrongs
'West End Blues' or Charlie Parkers 'Ornithology' on the turntable
or the CD tray. Thenceforward, with every play, we know what's
coming. The surprise is gone. Yet, decades later, the recordings
remain timeless masterpieces. What's more, they were recorded by
musicians whose express purpose at the time was far from that of
making musical history. Let's turn for the last word on the subject
to Charlie Parker, the principle architect of Modern Jazz:

It's just music. It's playing clean and looking for the pretty
notes.

Charlie Parker, from an interview in Downbeat,
9 September 1949

At this point, a quotation from my father occurs, prompted by
that word magic' a while back.

When Pamela was teaching Humphrey divinity, and was
emphasising the incredible goodness of Christ, H, finding
the wings of his imagination tiring in the void, asked, 'Was
he as good as Father?' When P, as is supposed, answered
that he was even better, H gave up and has been an
agnostic ever since.

From a letter from George Lyttelton to Rupert Hart-Davis
(The Lyttelton—Hart-Davis Letters published by John Murray)

This is not strictly true. From childhood days, and through
Sunningdale preparatory school and Eton, I look back on a long
period of religious acceptance. After all, indoctrination continued
from mothers knee to quite thorough instruction at Sunningdale
and thence on to Eton where it intensified in the run-up to
confirmation.

After confirmation, I was authorised to attend Holy
Communion every Sunday in the Eton Upper Chapel. I recall
coming away from it with a distinctly holy feeling. I believe now
that it was chiefly light-headedness inspired less by the ceremony
itself than by the effect of an unaccustomed sip of red wine before
breakfast. My experience of alcohol had, up till then, been
confined to an investigative slurp of my father's whisky and soda
in much earlier childhood. It was shared with my elder sister when
we found his glass unattended on a sideboard. Finding that it
tasted like cat sick, we concluded that my father was either ill and
in need of strong and repulsive medication, or quite insane. Either
way, it was worrying for a while.

PS: I still think that the combination of whisky and soda tastes
like cat sick.

After I left school, belief gradually declined, lapsing into agnosticism and finally converting to atheism in a moment of conviction,
which struck me with great clarity, and no obvious trigger, as I was
driving homeward one morning past Luton on the M1. I mention
that detail to establish that 'revelation' works both ways.

My mother's belief was absolute. At some time during the
elongated period when I began to emerge from what I can best
describe as benign brainwashing, I remember assailing her with
sceptical views that I expected to develop into an argument. She
stopped it in its tracks by saying, 'I don't want to hear anything
about that because, if it's true, everything in life is meaningless.'
My father, on the other hand, though firmly wedded to the
principles — and the literature — of Christianity, quite often
allowed glimmers of agnosticism to show.

This is the moment to introduce into the kaleidoscope Ludovic
Kennedy (now rightly Sir Ludovic), a friend of Eton days who
played the drums in my first schoolboy band and whose company
(since we share memories and, I believe, a similar sense of
humour), I have enjoyed enormously in sporadic moments since.
He recounts a similar dialogue with his mother, though more
detailed and at an earlier age:

Was God watching us pray? I asked my mother. She
hesitated before replying but then said yes, she was sure he
was. All of us, I asked, and all of us at the same time, and
the people at the other church in the village as well? Yes,
my mother said, but not all that convincingly. How did he
manage that, I said, did he have a thousand pairs of eyes
and ears? Ah, said my mother, that was one of the
wonderful things about God, he could do things that
human beings couldn't do.

Ludovic Kennedy, All In The Mind-A Farewell To God
(published by Hodder and Stoughton, 1999)

When Ludovic's closely argued and scrupulously researched book
was published, it was interesting that it caused so little reaction.
On our last meeting, on the occasion of my eightieth-birthday
concert at Edinburgh in 2001, i wanted to ask him if he didn't feel
some disappointment at not having been burned at the stake.
When it came to it, the opportunity didn't arise. I suspect the
answer would have been 'Yes', but given with that mischievous
Tinkle in the eye that looks out from his book's dust cover.
No one can have lived through the jazz experience over the
decades without the realisation that human beings find it difficult
to absorb unfamiliar ideas unless they are clearly labelled. Classic,
Modern, Mainstream, Bebop, Post Bop, Free Form - these are just
a handful of the ludicrous sign-posts that have served over the
years to divert people from an understanding of a music that is
indefinable. The same applies to religion. The notion of a supreme
Someone who loves and protects us all individually and to whom,
though we have no idea what or where he is, we can speak and,
indeed, apply for an instant remedy to our problems is as
unbelievable to me as it was to the young Ludovic. Nor do I think
it sensible to prepare children for a long life on this planet by
teaching them to reiterate constantly, through prayer, that they are
unworthy sinners who must forever beg forgiveness. If that puts
me in the Humanist pigeonhole, so be it. Its a label that, as
Ludovic Kennedy goes to some lengths to affirm, does not rule
out the concept of spirituality.

The dichotomy in my parents' religious approach became
especially apparent when, between 1929 and the outbreak of war
a decade later, we went regularly to Harlech in North Wales for
the long summer holiday. Every Sunday, my mother would take
us to church. And every Sunday she would say, 'George, you are
coming with us, aren't you?' Ever ready with an apt and useful
literary quotation, my father's answer would always be the same.
'No. I shall be worshipping in the vast cathedral of immensity.' He
was referring specifically, as we children soon discovered, to the St
David's golf course.

Writing these words, it occurs to me that there is a link between
my fathers adherence to Christianity and, while it lasted, to my
own. His great passion was for literature, as will be apparent to
anyone who has read not only his long correspondence with
Rupert Hart-Davis, but also the publication of his Commonplace
Book (George Lytteltons Commonplace Book, published by Stone
Trough Books, 2002). My 'great passion', if I may repeat the lofty
phrase, is for music, to which I have, for as long as I remember,
been as susceptible as he was to poetry, which could on occasion
reduce him to tears.

As a small child, I could hardly bear to listen to the tragic
cadences of'Who Killed Cock Robin?', and when the song came
to the bit where all the birds in the air fell a-sighing and a-sobbing,
I was right there with them. I recall this very clearly because,
though so many years have gone by since then, the recollection of
those poignant words and, more importantly, the musical cadence
which carries them, still gives me a frisson of unaccountable
sadness.

In this context, I have another popular misquotation to hand.
Noel Coward had one of his characters in the play Private Lives
famously comment on 'the potency of cheap music', and the
quotation has often been attributed to the playwright himself. It's
a phrase which has the sort of ring that a famous quotation should
have if it is to carry through the ages. In fact, the words he actually
used were unrhythmical, flabby and of dubious grammar:

It's extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Noel Coward

To an unqualified admirer of Noel Coward's genius for felicitous
- and fastidious — phrase-making, the quotation is disappointing.
But where I question it is in the use of the word 'cheap',
presumably in its dictionary definition as 'easy to get, more showy
than sound, of little account'. Music is music, and its power to
move has nothing to do with class or economics.

The late Robin Ray once presented a BBC radio series called
The Tingle Factor. In it, weekly guests, more or less well known,
chose musical items which gave them the little charge of electricity
that sends a shiver down the spine and calls the hairs on the back
of the neck to attention. My selection, including as it did Louis
Armstrongs 1939 recording of 'Struttin' With Some Barbecue'
and Kenneth Alford's march 'The Standard of St George', clearly
left the spine and back hairs of my distinguished host unmoved
but caused his eyebrows some agitation.

When it came to what is commonly known as Handel's Largo,
sung on record by the greatest tenor of them all, Beniamino Gigli
(all right, discuss), I began to propound my theory that certain
musical cadences have a strange power to move the listener, citing
in evidence the notes that accompany 'all the birds in the air' from
'Who Killed Cock Robin?' It also occurs in the climactic
moments of the Largo, the lower harmony part of Abide With
Me' and Billy Fury's sixties hit 'Stairway to Paradise'. (I'm goose-
pimpling all over as I recite them). In the face of a blank look and
a hurried change of subject from Robin Ray across the studio
table, my cherished theory foundered and a valuable item of
profound musicology failed to reach the public domain.

I became aware then of the truth that one man's Tingle Factor
is another man's 'What's It All About, Alfie?' and that a roomful
of small children exposed to 'Who Killed Cock Robin?' would not
inevitably lead to an orgy of mass blubbing. I speak for myself
alone when I say that, if I look back at moments when I have
experienced what I might once have described as a surge of
religious fervour, I find that music has almost invariably been
responsible. Hymn singing at Eton College was far removed from
what has been described as the Anglican drone' familiar in poorly
attended parish churches. In the senior or 'Upper' chapel, it
involved five hundred or more boys whose voices had matured
from the croak of impending puberty to full-throated bellowing,
and it was not difficult to become inspired with something or
other in the midst of that.

In recent times, I have been to carol services in the Albert Hall
at Christmas solely to enjoy the freedom, in the security of
numbers, to bellow the harmonies of 'Hark, The Herald Angels
Sing' to my heart's content, while harbouring intact the
knowledge that if at any time a Herald Angel were to come
knocking on my door I would firmly but I hope, courteously
request him, her or perhaps it, to move on.

It's another memory that comes knocking on my door at this
very moment. Unfortunately, it's too threadbare to fill a chapter of
its own headed: MY PART IN THE FUNERAL OF KING
GEORGE V.

But there, its got its title nonetheless.

King George V's funeral took place at St George's Chapel in
Windsor Castle in 1936. At Eton College, we had an Officers'
Training Corps, an institution shared, I believe, by most public
schools. Through it we periodically had the opportunity to dress
up in khaki and play soldiers. A contingent from the Eton OTC
of which I was a member was invited, or more likely commanded,
to line part of the route to the chapel.

As the cortege slow-marched by, I recall feeling a sizeable lump
in the throat. Why? George V was, to a schoolboy, a remote figure,
all the more so since his voice, heard on rare broadcasts to the
nation, carried guttural traces of his Saxe-Coburg descent. I'm
unlikely to have been overcome with sorrow on behalf of Queen
Mary, though I did actually clap eyes on her once in Windsor
High Street when she stepped out of a Rolls-Royce almost into my
path and disappeared into a shop amid a flurry of equerries. Once
memorably described by Nancy Banks-Smith in the Guardian as
looking always as if she were revolving slowly while people threw
jewellery at her. Queen Mary gave me the impression, in her
outdoor clothes, so to speak, of an impenetrably stern figure that
had been stuffed into creaseless rigidity by an over-zealous
taxidermist.

So, no cause for a trembling lip there. As for the royal princes,
in step and expressionless behind the coffin in their assorted
military attire, I remember them as no more than animated
cardboard cut-outs — with the exception, perhaps, of Edward,

Prince of Wales, whose lop-sided eyebrows, one higher than the
other beneath a furrowed brow, made him look always as if he
were about to burst into tears (which, given the glum turn his life
took after the abdication, was probably the case).

I am aware, of course, that I have been fleshing-out a memory
as grey and fuzzy as an old newsreel with impressions acquired
from other sources. What I do know without doubt is that it was
the music from the band of the Brigade of Guards, by then halted
just beyond my sight, which got to me. They played a funeral
march, the melody of which, albeit in a major, rather than the
customary minor key, has stayed with me ever since. It requires no
more than four bars from the score of Handel's Dead March from
Saul, if intoned slowly to myself in the right sombre tones and
with an imaginary thump on the massed bass drums at the start
of each bar, to activate that icy tingle.


con Ped. sempre

Speaking of funerals, which we were, and the responses of
young children to television, which we weren't, at the age of seven
our second son David was watching Winston Churchill's funeral
with us in 1965.

A sombre thought occurred to him and he asked, with some
apprehension, Are people always killed when they reach 91?'

A totally unrelated story has just come into my mind. So,
exorcising in one go some of my least favourite cliches of
telephone-speak, bear with me while I run it past you. I'll get back
to you on spiritual matters later, 

Our first-born son, Stephen, is blessed with a resourceful wit that
has seen him through some awkward situations. At the age of ten,
he and a school friend amused themselves one afternoon outside
our house (which is called Alyn Close) by hitting small pebbles
from the gravel drive high into the air over Barnet Road with tennis
rackets. Fortunately, the road was less busy than it is nowadays.
Nevertheless it was inevitable that, sooner or later, one would fall on
a passing car. A man, his face puce with rage, stormed up the drive.
'You!' he shouted, pointing at Stephen. Are you belting stones?' He
was stopped in his tracks by Stephens calm answer, 'No, Alyn
Close.' I have since toyed, at times, with the idea of changing the
name of our house to Belting Stones - it has an aristocratic ring.

On the other hand, I'm not fond of stately homes. I saw plenty
of them in my youth, as almost every relative or friend whom I
visited lived in one. On one early occasion I had the traumatic
experience, for a schoolboy, of finding, when I went upstairs to
change for dinner, that the suitcase which had been taken to the
room by a member of the household staff on my arrival had been
unpacked and its crumpled contents laid out on the bed or stowed
away in drawers. I felt the same sense of violation that is expressed
by burglary victims when they discover that an intruder has been
rootling round among their belongings.

Clearly, I have never got over it. Sometimes while on tour, I am
booked by a promoter into a five-star hotel that has stately-home
pretensions. Uneasiness begins when I find myself driving up a
long gravel drive flanked by rhododendrons. It turns to panic
when, as I reach the portals, a man wearing a top hat, ankle-length
coat and, even in mid-summer, gloves - all quite often in a mock-
regal shade of pale blue - emerges, waving to waist-coated
minions to attack me and seize every item of my belongings. It's
not simply a Scrooge-like aversion to having to tip each one of
them at every stage of the journey from reception to bedroom,
though for a guest who discovers on the way up in the lift that he
has no loose change other than five pence and a few coppers, that
can be humiliating enough. Among other more serious
indoctrinations to which my upbringing exposed me was the
notion that, in life, there are a myriad things which are — to use a
dreaded phrase (now, I'm glad to say, largely extinct) - 'not done'.
By resolutely doing them throughout adult life, I have managed to
banish them. However, there are still places in which they make a
sneaky return, if given the chance — and five-star country-house
hotels are among them. For one thing, in the atmosphere of
hushed rectitude, nothing interesting ever happens. One has to
move down the ratings a bit for that.              

Years ago, I stayed with the band in a smallish hotel in
Shropshire. After the concert we sat up in the lounge talking and
drinking into the small hours. At 7 a.m. I was awoken by a
thunderous banging on my door. When eventually I managed to
grunt an audible response, a female voice called out cheerily, 'Be a
sport, love, let's 'ave yer sheets.'

It is clearly the ambition of those who build and run five-star
country hotels that they should attain the sort of style and
comfort of the big stately homes of old. I have news for them,
which can be conveyed in a few paragraphs.

My father was brought up in Hagley Hall, the family seat in
Worcestershire. In 1917, he wrote about it in these terms to his
friend, Charles Fisher, who was coming to stay for the first time.

Hagley is a place which might appear to some to possess
considerable drawbacks. The Black Country is close by
and sends forth a blight over the land when the wind is in
the north, and the rain often falls with pitiless
concentration when the wind goes to the south . . . the
house itself was built before comfort was much thought of,
and has changed little. Unless you were in luck your
general impression might be that there was no light,
natural or artificial, that the bells didn't ring, nor the
clocks go, nor the windows open, nor the taps run.

It's only fair to say that in recent times the house has been
smartened up and, indeed, opened to the public. Among the
historical exhibits in the hallway hangs the death warrant issued
after my ancestor, Humphrey Lyttelton, had been hung for his
part in the Gunpowder Plot. A musician friend who played at a
function there a year or two ago came back to tell me drily and
rather unkindly, 'Hey, they've got one of your write-ups framed in
the entrance!'

Though I went to Hagley often as a child, I have fewer sharp
memories of it than I have ofBabraham Hall in Cambridgeshire,
the home of my maternal grandparents. I have written quite a
bit here about its occupants. These are a few impressions of the
Hall itself.

Babraham Hall now houses the Babraham Institute, an
agricultural research establishment. It's an imposing, red-brick
building, stately enough but not handsome. It looks, as someone
said about the camel, as if it had been designed by a committee -
though an outline of its history in the Institute s brochure would
have us believe that the seemingly random medley of ornate
extrusions, chimney stacks and non-functional turrets was
designed in the Jacobean style by Philip Hardwicke in 1832 and
took five painstaking years to complete.

The interior, when my grandparents were there, was spacious
and gracious, pervaded by a subtle and evocative aroma that
sometimes revisits me in a whiff of nostalgia. But I couldn't then,
and I can't now, describe it or identify its origin. In the dining
room, from the walls of which the mounted heads of once four-
legged creatures, from a glum buffalo to dainty antelopes, stared
down with varied expressions of indignation, one might detect the
whiff of something less attractive.

In one corner, stood on its hind legs, was a more impressive
testimony to my grandfathers prowess as a big-game hunter. It
was a stuffed bear, standing I would guess about five-foot-six (I
was about to write 'in its stockinged feet' but that would have
been ridiculous. My grandfather would have run a mile from any
bear wearing stockings). With arms raised and teeth bared, it was
clearly intended to display snarling aggression. But the taxidermist
hadn't got it quite right and, wearing what resembled a silly grin,
the bear gave the impression of a very drunk undergraduate at a
college ball trying to entice a reluctant girlfriend on to the dance
floor to do the lambada. In the matter of bodily hygiene, stuffed
animals have a problem, and from this one, a musty smell
emanated of dried hair and decayed plaster. I know, because when
no adults were around we used to sneak in and dance with it.

In describing a house of such elegance and fragrant memories
it seems unfair to pick on a contrasting aspect, but I have to put
the record straight. I called the curious, asymmetrically positioned
turrets which sprout from the roof of Babraham Hall non-
functional, but there was one notable exception.

One of the turrets, rising from the ground floor to high above the
roof, housed at its base a loo — not the compact modern sort, but
one that depended on gravity to fulfil its function. So the cistern
was fixed to the wall high above the seat, from which altitude a
purposeful tug on the long chain could release a cataract that did
the trick. Looking upwards from the seat, the occupant had an
uninterrupted view of the sky through the glass-domed roof of the
turret high above. But in the hot summer months, that view was
clouded by the mass invasion of flies. There would be hundreds of
them, buzzing about in a frenzy of activity until, brief lifespan
exhausted, they dropped to the floor feet upwards with a tiny blip
that is the fly equivalent of a dull thud. The fact is that hygiene, of
the meticulous sort that we pursue today, was not high on the agenda
in stately homes. Laissez-faire ruled, and year by year nothing was
done to control or banish the flies. I must say they never bothered
me, minding their own business and leaving me to mine.

In this trilogy of stately homes, I suppose Longford Castle in
Wiltshire was the odd one out, in that I can't recall any
shortcomings where hygiene or comfort were concerned. The
sixteenth-century building was founded, and has been inhabited
ever since, by the Radnor family into which my mothers sister
Helena married. Its a splendid building and in contrast to
Babraham, all swooping symmetry.

Like Babraham, it was the scene of great family gatherings at
Christmas. Despite its age, there was nothing spooky about it, as
I recall, during the daytime. But at night, the huge corridors that
linked the bedrooms creaked loudly and ominously throughout
the dark hours, as if sending sinister messages to each other. It
didn't help that among the party games we played after dinner was
Murders, a forerunner of the current Cluedo, which involved
walking round alone in the dark waiting to be pounced on by a
selected murderer or to stumble over a shrieking victim. Even at
around twelve years old I wasn't too good in the dark and often
lay awake listening to the muttering floorboards and waiting for
sunrise and the reassuring dawn chorus.

One night when there were no games my cousin Anthony and
I were in his bedroom quite late listening to a dramatisation of
Jane Eyre on the radio. With the introduction of Grace Poole, the
housekeeper believed to be responsible for maniacal noises in the
night, we became uneasy and simultaneously decided to switch
off. After we had chatted for a while, curiosity got the better of us
and we switched on again, to hear nothing at first but heavy
breathing and scratching. It was broken by the tremulous voice of
Jane Eyre asking, 'Who's there?' More silence and then, suddenly,
a ghastly chuckle. We didn't wait to discover that it wasn't Grace
Poole at all but the deranged Mrs Rochester from upstairs. Our
heads almost met as we both dived for the off-switch.

Back in my room, I lay in a cold sweat listening to floorboards
whose every apprehensive creak seemed to herald the approach of
the staring-eyed lunatic whom I took to be Grace Poole. Once or
twice I distinctly heard a grotesque chuckle outside my door.
Looking back on it now, I think it might have been a pigeon on
the windowsill.


Where was I when I so rudely interrupted myself? Ah, spirituality.
It's important to detach the word, and the concept, from religion.
If that leaves me with a responsibility to define it, then I shall call
on that most magical of singers, Peggy Lee, to provide me with a
get-out clause.

Here's a song that doesn't need talkin about, just singin.

Peggy Lee, passim, introducing the Arthur Schwartz and
Dorothy Fields song, 'Make the Man Love Me'

I feel the same about the concept of spirituality, which is why I hand
over once again to Ludovic Kennedy, who puts it better than I can.

The Church has always assumed that they alone are the
guardians of the spiritual, and that a sense of the spiritual
plays no part in the make up of non-believers. They are
wrong ... I have gained more spiritual refreshment from
nature and from art than any other single source.

Ludovic Kennedy in his book All In The Mind

Making the perhaps unnecessary observation that 'nature' includes
my fellow human beings, I think that says it all. I avoid gingerly
the word 'transcendental' in all this. The fewer long words the
better. After all, that's what Nanny Viggers meant, way back in
those nursery days, when she would say, 'You're down in the
dumps — you need to do something to take you out of yourself

Where Ludo speaks of spiritual refreshment, I favour the term
that I've used earlier: 'balm to the soul' can be found anywhere.

It's so calming watching the Newtonian law of physics
played out on the snooker table.

Stephen Fry in the Independent's 'Quotes Of The Week',
7 May 2006

In the spirit of the rest of this hotchpotch, let's pursue that theme
and see where it takes us.

A view of Mount Snowdon on approaching Harlech from
Dolgellau on Sunday, 26 August 2001

Since Snowdon has been in that same place for thousands, if
not millions of years, it may seem quirky to pick on that one
particular date. But having spent ten family summer holidays in
Harlech between 1929 and the outbreak of World War II, and
returning several times to the area with my own family in the
seventies, I know all too well the unreliability of that view. Seen
from the south, Snowdon is indeed a noble mountain, rising in an
almost perfect triangle save for a little tick-shaped indentation,
like a mark of identification, on the western slope. Sometimes the
whole triangle is veiled in mist, at others there will be a persistent
cloud perching on top of the mountain like a barristers wig,
covering the peak. Even when the summer skies are clear blue, a
heat haze lends greyness to the distant silhouette. What I saw on
that day, driving to a gig in Harlech was, to me, unique.

The road northward from Barmouth to Harlech bends very
gradually to the right around a shoulder of high hills. Thus the
panorama of the Snowdon range to the north ofTremadoc Bay is
revealed to the traveller peak by peak with the tantalising
deliberation of a striptease. Driving us as children along that
route, my father, who exercised fiscal prudence when it came to
pocket money and the like, would offer a reward of a penny to the
first one of us to spot Snowdon. Of course, we shouted
optimistically as each elevation of the skyline appeared, rising to a
unison shriek of short-lived triumph when Mount Hebog, the
only serious pretender to the throne, hove in sight. Nearer to us
than Snowdon, Hebog was certainly impressive, though its
appearance - lumpish and with a plateau at the summit that looks
as if it had been sheared off by some massive low-flying aircraft 
serves only to emphasise the nobility of its neighbour.
I had a colleague with me in the car on that autumn day in
2001, and I played my fathers game. But even I was overwhelmed
by what we saw as we drove out of the village of Llandanwg and
rounded the corner. It was a warm late afternoon and the sky was
blue. In the light of approaching autumn, the outlines of
Snowdon were sharply etched, and the colours, a subtle blend
of purple, green and brown, clearly defined. For the first time ever,
I was looking at perfection. Trumpeters in full heraldic regalia
should have been there to play a fanfare. The green room in the
Theater Ardudwy where we played that evening has a balcony from
which the magnificent view could be seen and I went back to it
again and again, taking colleagues with me and enthusing until
their eyes glazed over and the sun went down. I have used the
word 'noble' more than once, and I know no better one for
Snowdon. Over the years I have marvelled at the magical way in
which, in the accident of geological evolution. Nature has
endowed that lump of rock with a grandeur and, yes, nobility
appropriate to the highest mountain in the principality of Wales.
Never has Snowdon proclaimed so loudly and imperiously, 'Look
at me - I am the King!' as on that August day five years ago.

OK, I've waxed lyrical, but that's the way balm to the soul
works. And a bit of waxing is no more than it deserves. That's why
I'm giving my recollections these portentous tides.

The brief moments involving Billie Holiday and Lester
Young in The Sounds of Jazz, an American TV programme)
vintage 1957

My copy of this video is old and scratchy, but a treasured
possession. In the course of it, Billie Holiday, after a short spoken
introduction in her then ravaged voice, starts to sing her song 'Billies
Blues', accompanied by a group of jazz giants. There comes a
moment when Lester Young, who up till then had wafted around the
studio in a haze of marijuana and/or alcohol, taking no part,
suddenly rises from the bottom of the screen like a spectre from the
sea to deliver one chorus of the blues. Both he and Billie were then
only months away from death, and the energy of his early playing
had ebbed to a vestigial point. Yet the simple melody that he played,
culminating in a profoundly moving phrase in the seventh and eight
bars that droops disconsolately at the end, is one of sheer beauty.

In the course of it, the camera cuts to Billie Holiday on her
stool a little way away. In their younger days, she and Lester Young
had established a closeness that bordered on a love affair. Since
then they had drifted apart. What was it that prompted him to
join the accompanying band unexpectedly when she started
to sing, the only time he showed any interest in taking part? And
as she nodded or shook her head at every turn of his solo, was it
in sadness and regret, as it appeared to be? We can't tell for certain.
But to me it has always been deeply moving to watch and, if we
admit the Greek principle of catharsis into the ingredients, balm
to the soul.

I have a postscript to the above. It comes from Volume 9 of the
theatre critic James Agate's monumental diary entitled Ego
(published by Harrap). In a letter to The Times in 1945, Agate
entered a discussion then rumbling on concerning England fast
bowler Tom Richardson and his failure to break the Australian
innings in the Manchester Test Match of 1896, which England
lost by a few runs. First he quotes the legendary cricket writer,
Neville Cardus, on Richardson's reaction when the match ended:

He stood at the bowling crease, dazed. Could the match
have been lost? Could it be that the gods had looked on and
permitted so much painful striving to go by unrewarded?
His body still shook from the violent emotion. He stood
there like some fine animal baffled at the uselessness of
great strength and effort in this world. A companion led
him to the pavilion, and there he fell wearily to a seat.

Agate then quotes the booming response of another writer, H J
Henley, to whom he had relayed Carduss words.

I won't have it! After the winning hit, Tom legged it to the
pavilion like a stag and got down two pints before
anybody else.

Agate's letter then goes on to observe that Cardus admitted to him
years later that he was not at the ground, being seven years old at
the time. H J Henley was fourteen and could have been there.
Agate himself was nineteen, and remembered it well.

In the minds eye, I can see two Australians and eleven
Englishmen legging it to the pavilion with the tall figure of
Tom Richardson leading by many yards.

The significance of my postscript is this (thanks for waiting).
Agate concluded his letter with these words:

If a historian should tell me that Napoleon remained
rooted to the field of Waterloo hours after the battle was
lost I should know that he was speaking essential truth;

that he skedaddled as fast as post-horses could leg it is
correctness of a lesser order. Cardus, who watched the
great match at the age of seven behind the bars of his
nursery window some miles away, had the secret of the
higher truth. But on the lower ground he taradiddled.

Likewise, if an eye-witness should tell me that after 'Billies Blues'
had been recorded Billie Holiday legged it out of the studio without
a backward glance, and that Lester admitted afterwards that he was
so stoned he didn't know she was there, I would have to accept it as
correctness, but of a lesser order. My account is the higher truth,
and will continue to give balm to the soul whenever I watch it.

The trees in Barnet Road, North London EN5, after a wet
winter

Recurring balm, this. On a trip to Italy with my band a few
years ago, I became irritated when, on a bus ride across the hills,
they rhapsodised about the wooded scenery, as if it were something
one had to go abroad to experience. When it comes to trees, I am
unashamedly nationalistic. Britain has the best trees in the world.
Driving on motorways the length and breadth of the country, the
variegated copses and woodlands are a constant joy. In autumn, the
colours are nothing short of balm to the soul. (On the German
autobahns, by contrast, travelling through those endless ever-so-
green conifers feels like a trip through a giant toothbrush.)

Where I live, behind my own trees, on Barnet Road, the
borough council has at some stage imposed a preservation order
on all trees. I drive into Barnet to do my shopping with a corridor
of magnificent foliage lining the road, as if I were a person of some
importance. It's all I can do not to take my hand off the wheel to
give that little upturned wave to left and right, like the Queen.

I've come to a diversion. In 2005, I was invited to a reception at
Buckingham Palace to celebrate British music. Five hundred
musicians were there, filling several rooms which were visited by
members of the royal family. I was lucky to be in a group of rock
musicians, jazz people and composers presented to the Queen, and
to witness a rather endearing moment when she met some of the
guitarists. The newspapers were eager to make something of her
question 'What do you do?' addressed to Eric Clapton but, to his
credit, he wouldn't play their game. When she moved on to Brian
May, the ex-member of Queen, she was more circumspect. 'Do you
play guitar too?' He answered, 'Yes, I played on your roof during
your Golden Jubilee party.' Like someone for whom a rather
disturbing mystery has been solved, she said, 'Oh, it was YOU!'

Who else would you want as a head of state? I was once
presented to the presidential Lady Thatcher, and experienced the
notorious Thatcher handshake that could, in one firm movement,
simultaneously welcome you and propel you sideways in the
direction of the exit. So I know where I stand on the matter.

Is it my imagination, or do all todays politicians look and
sound alike? Don't worry, I'm not about to embark on an in-depth
study of the trend towards uniformity at Westminster. This is just
my excuse to put in my favourite story about one of the great,
irreplaceable characters of the past.

George Brown, when Labour Foreign Secretary in Harold
Wilson's government, went to Peru to represent Britain at a large
international conference, taking with him a reputation (enviable
or unenviable, according to your viewpoint) as a formidable
drinker. This is my version.

At the end of the conference there was a banquet, held in a
huge ballroom with a band in attendance. Along one side of the
room was the top table, at which the statesmen sat and from
which they made speeches in turn. Across the floor was an area
occupied by Peruvian VIPs.

When the meal was over, George Brown spoke first, then sat
down and went to sleep. He was woken an hour or so later by the
band striking up. Looking around, he saw people beginning to
stand up, and assumed that the formalities were at an end and
dancing would begin. He got up, walked round the table, teetered
across the ballroom floor and made for a stately vision of
loveliness, dressed in red from head to foot, whom he had noticed
earlier in the evening.

He said to the vision of loveliness, 'Dear lady, would you do me
the honour of dancing this waltz with me?' The vision of    
loveliness looked down and answered, 'I will not dance with you
for three reasons. The first is, youre drunk. The second is, this is    ^
not a waltz, it's our Peruvian national anthem. And the third is, I
am not your "dear lady", I am the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima!'

If one stubbornly persists in blowing a trumpet at the age of 85,
one must expect questions on the lines of 'How on earth do you
keep going?' or sometimes, a more matey 'Where do you get your
puff from?' I shall address them later. But first I must cite, as some
sort of an inspiration, the example of Jack Jenkins. Some time
after we had our house built in Arkley, Hertfordshire in 1959, he
came to do our garden once a week, having recently retired from
Laings, the construction firm. When I say 'do the garden, I don't
just mean the hoeing and mowing.

One Friday I went out to tell him I was planning to make a fish
pond on the grass at the back. (You had to go outside to discuss
these things, he was a shy man who would never come inside the
house, even to drink a cup of tea.) My wife Jill and I were out all
day visiting the RSPB headquarters at Sandy. We returned to find
that, in our absence, he had dug a hole in the lawn large enough
to trap an elephant.

It was not unusual to look out on a Friday and see him — tall,
wiry, apple-cheeked, with his weathered cap a fixture on the small
head — carrying unaided great boulders of York stone or bags of
compost from one end of the garden to the other. In all the years
he was with us, he gave no indication that he would like us to call
him Jack — it was always Mr Jenkins or, when speaking of him in
his absence, Jenks. In the later years, when we guessed that he was
in his seventies, I was reluctant to ask him to take on heavy jobs.
I had learned from experience that the way to get him to volunteer
- to chop down a tree, perhaps, or move a summer-house - was
to say that I intended to hire a firm to undertake the work. His
answer was always the same: 'Oooh, you don't want to do that -
I'll 'ave it done next Friday.'

In 1987, the now historic hurricane flattened a quince tree that
Jill had planted many years earlier. It had reached a height of
about twenty feet, had for some time fruited quite prolifically and
was now lying flat on the grass. We never quite got around to
chopping it up, so it lay there till spring when, surprisingly, we
spotted leaves sprouting. It was still alive. Quince trees have
shallow roots that spread outwards below the grass. The collapse
had dragged them to the surface, but they were not severed.

I told Jenks that I would contact a firm of tree specialists to
see if it could be raised up again. 'Oooh, you don't want to do
that,' was the immediate response. The next Friday, he turned
up with block and tackle and raised the tree a few feet off the
ground. But he could go no further. Single-handedly, it was
impossible to stop it from swinging uncontrollably on the chain,
and he had to lower it. I thought then that a team from outside
was inevitable, but I didn't mention it. 'Oooh . . .' was written
all over Jenks's face.

The following Friday, he arrived with one of those elongated
car-jacks and a boot full of large chocks of wood. Thenceforward,
every week, he jacked the tree up a bit higher, inserting the wood
under it. Five Fridays later, the tree was upright. He had driven a
length of iron piping alongside the trunk, to which he had lashed
the tree with strong rope. For further security, he had brought in
cleft branches from other fallen trees to prop under the lower
boughs like crutches. Not long after that epic task was
completed, we had the sad news from his family that he had
suffered a stroke and could work no more. He was, they said, 83
years old.

Jenks must be long gone now. As for the tree, it survives and
flourishes to this day as a memorial to the old boy. Months after
the accident, when the roots had settled back, it was possible to
remove the props and unlash it from the iron pipe. Even more
fertile than before, every autumn it produces a crop of fruits
large and heavy enough to lay anyone out cold who might be
unlucky enough to be passing beneath as they fall. Until I got
bored with the routine I turned the hard, bitter quinces into a
fine claret-coloured jelly, achieving a record yield of 62 jars one
year and becoming in the process quite an expert. But that is
another story, and a rather sticky one, so if you don't mind we'll
leave it there.

A summer afternoon among friends in South Park, Oxford,
2001

One day in 2000, I received a letter from Jonny Greenwood, a
member of the group Radiohead. I had heard of them but knew
nothing of their music. After apologising for his 'cheek' in writing,
Jonny explained that they were having a problem with one of the
tracks for a forthcoming CD and, having recently heard some of my
early recordings, thought I might be able to help. The band thought
that something with a New Orleans flavour might fit the bill. The
idea sounded to me so far out as to be interesting, so I replied, asking
him to send me a tape of the song in question. When I played it, the
music and surrealistic lyrics were to me, utterly incomprehensible. To
put it in some sort of context, I borrowed a couple of their previous
albums from my daughter Georgina, who handed them over with
the cautionary words, 'You won't like it. Dad.' The more I heard, the
less likely it seemed that there could ever be a meeting of musical
minds. Then, at some point, a phrase or nuance in what I thought
was almost suicidally gloomy music struck a spark.

I met Jonny Greenwood in the BBC cafe at Broadcasting House,
bought him a strong coffee to bolster his resistance to shock, and
told him, as diplomatically as I could, that the only common
ground I could conceive lay in New Orleans funeral music of the
kind that, to this day, accompanies the deceased on the journey to
the cemetery. Happily, he neither strode from the room nor tipped
the coffee over my head, so I went further and suggested that, for
an example, he should listen to Louis Armstrongs 1956 recording
of the classic song, 'St. James Infirmary':

I went down to St James Infirmary,
Saw my baby there.

She was lyin on a long, white table,
So sweet, so cold, so fair.

The opening lines of 'St James Infirmary'

Primed with these cheering words, we all met in a studio near
Regent's Park - Jonny and Colin Greenwood, lead singer Thorn
York, a producer from Radiohead and, from my band, clarinettist
Jimmy Hastings, trombonist Pete Strange, bassist Paul Bridge and
drummer Adrian Macintosh.

Despite the tentative preliminaries at Broadcasting House, it
would be true to say that, when we started at two-thirty that
afternoon, we had no idea what they wanted, neither did they.
Lumping the two groups together, what went on that afternoon
and evening can be described as a stately pas de deux in which we
circled one another, getting slowly closer together. Seven hours,
innumerable cups of tea and several incipient but happily averted
nervous breakdowns later, we heard a playback; I said, 'That's it -
we wont get a better one than that.' After brief discussion. Thorn
agreed, adding, 'Right, we'll go and have something to eat and
then come back and do some more.' After seven hours
trumpeting, flexing and unflexing the precious cheek muscles, I
felt as if I had acquired the sagging jowls of a bloodhound. In the
most magisterial voice I could muster, I said, 'Oh no we won't.'

And we didn't. After they had subsequently mixed the track,
Jonny wrote to say that they were all happy. The song. Thorn
York's surrealistic 'Life in a Glass House', came out on their album
Amnesiac, and I must say I'm quite proud of it. The moment when
the band suddenly comes in, in funereal style, gives me a pleasant
frisson every time. In his introductory letter, Jonny had said that
he didn't want to use session musicians, who would just turn up,
play the notes and leave. The way he put it was, 'We want it to
sound as if you don't quite know what you're doing/ He certainly
got that!

The Radiohead experience didn't end there. When the album
came out, we performed the track 'live' on a special Radiohead
edition of Later with Jools Holland on TV. It was the first time we
saw and heard the band onstage and to me, it was a revelation.
The studio was quite small, the amplification stupendous, of a
kind from which, venturing too near a 'rock' tent at an open-air
ball or festival, we would usually flee like startled rabbits to
preserve our valuable eardrums. Yet somehow, Radiohead s music
had a musicality and richness of harmony - they are schooled
musicians - that made it tolerable even in the confined space.

I had seen posed studio photographs of the group on their
CDs, and had found difficulty in matching what looked like a
version of the Spanish Inquisition in modern dress, with the
friendly people with whom we had worked in the recording
studio. Even so, I was ill prepared for what happened when the
glowering image came to life onstage and the polite, cultured
young men with whom we collaborated so comfortably
transmogrified into dangerous madmen, lurching about with hair
flopping and limbs flailing in characteristic rock style.

For readers who have only seen Radiohead on stage or screen,
the following bit of dialogue may reassure — or perhaps destroy a
cherished image. Backstage earlier in the day, I was chatting with
Jonny Greenwood when his brother Colin came up:

JG: 'Have you rung Mum to say we're on tonight?'

CG: 'Not yet - if she watches, she'll only say what she
always says.'            „             ;

HL (unable to restrain his curiosity): 'What does she always
say?                                                        ,

Both: 'She says, "I watched like you said, but it wasn't
you."'        :

The following summer, we were invited by Radiohead to take part
in a mammoth concert that they were staging in Oxford s South
Park. They wanted us to do a half-hour set playing as we normally
do in our own concerts. I think the original plan was that we
would also join them in their set to perform the 'Life in a Glass
House' track, but it was by then pelting with rain so the idea was
aborted. As it was, I was awash with nervous adrenalin as I drove
down from the motorway into Oxford in a crawling queue of
excited Radiohead fans.

Then a car full of staring, pointing and, I imagined, mocking
young people overtook me. When the manic-looking driver
wound down his window, I braced myself against whatever
ribaldry might come. Then he gave a thumbs-up sign and shouted
'Mornington Crescent!' I had underestimated the power of I'm
Sorry I Haven't A Clue to smash down the generation barriers.

As a result, when we went onstage that afternoon, I felt almost
uncannily relaxed, a feeling that not even the sight of over fifty
thousand people in the field could dispel. In our set there was one
moment of sheer magic. When I had put together in advance a
programme of appropriately extrovert tunes, some suicidal urge
prompted me to make room for our version of Duke Ellington's
'Creole Love Call'. It starts pianissimo and, by the end, falls to a
whisper, prompting audiences at the back of a small room to catch
up on their conversations. At South Park, those fringes, seen from
the stage, were little more than blurs on the horizon.

Then, as we started Duke's familiar lilting riff, the whole field
went totally quiet and almost motionless, swaying slightly to the
music. Magic! It was a bonus when, in the e-mails sent to the
Radiohead website by members of the audience, we were
adjudged by many to be 'cool'; Kathy Stobart, my tenor-sax-
playing colleague of many years and then well into her seventies,
was singled out for special admiration by an audience few of
whom could have reached their thirties. As for me, I was
inordinately proud to see myself described as a diamond geezer.

Many of the nice things in my life have happened by accident.
You might say that it was the accident of World War II that was
responsible for most of that life itself. Before and during the war,
I was steadily on course for an OK career appropriate for a young
man brought up at private and public schools, with a commission
in the army thrown in. I would not have been the first Old
Etonian to dabble in jazz while holding down a proper job in one
or other of the professions. (It was a sign of the time that only an
elite catalogue of jobs was dignified by that description and art
and music were certainly not among them.)

It may not have been in Adolf Hitlers mind when he set out to
conquer the world, but in the event he did me a favour. By the
time I came out of the army, six years had elapsed since my formal
education ceased, so qualifying to follow in my father s footsteps
as an Eton schoolmaster had become unlikely. I was free to
become a vagabond by going to art school and playing jazz in my
spare time. Thus, when the war years receded into memory (most
of them, in my case, shooting straight out into oblivion at the
other end), the strand that began with my childish urge to hit or
blow anything from which music could be extracted became
interwoven, for a while, with the inborn compulsion to draw all
over any white surface that presented itself. Eventually the art
withdrew on to the sidelines and the trumpet-playing became a
job - no, dammit, a profession. And there I was, what Sidney
Bechet used to call a 'musicianer'. Ever since, if I dwell on the
careers I might have landed up in, I have been liable to wake up
in the night screaming.

The art of life is to know when to seize on accidents and
make them milestones.

Chairman Humph, waking from a long coma

It was through an accident that I have, hanging on my dining-
room wall, a picture called Into Oldham by Robert Littleford.

Some years ago, before a concert in Saddleworth, my band was
invited for drinks at the house of Lord Rhodes who, apart from
having been, as my mother used to put it, 'very big in wool', was
a patron of the arts and a sponsor of the festival at which we
played. In the course of the party, I found myself close to our
host, who was in conversation with another of his guests.
Hearing the name 'Helen Bradley' mentioned, I moved closer to
eavesdrop.

Never underestimate the power of positive eavesdropping.

Chairman Hu . . . Oh, go away. I prefer you when you're
comatose

The woman was asking Lord Rhodes if there was any artist in the
area showing the natural talent of Helen Bradley, whose book, And
Miss Carter Wore Pink, was a favourite with our children. Born near
Oldham in 1900, Bradley was in her sixties when she started to
paint her pictures to describe what life was like in her Edwardian
childhood. Thenceforward, her illustrations and paintings,
misleadingly termed 'naive' or 'primitive* because there was no
other way to describe them, became famous all over the world.

While I stood with my ears flapping like those of an African
elephant, I heard Lord Rhodes mention the name of Robert
Littleford in reply. Believing that a man who had framed Lowry
originals stacked against the walls of his living-room must know
what he was talking about, I went next morning to the
Saddleworth Arts Gallery, which was showing some of Littleford s
paintings.

Robert Littleford, also born near Oldham, enjoyed painting from
childhood but never had any tuition. At the age of 26, he was still
working on the dustcarts in Oldham when he had the urge to paint
in earnest. When I went to the gallery, I knew none of this, only
that Lord Rhodes had spoken of him in connection with Helen
Bradley. I was therefore ready to see painting with the quality of
unschooled innocence that characterises the 'naive' genre.

What I did see, and have continued to see since with growing
Incredulity, was landscapes technically perfect in every way - the
skies, the perspective, the capture of light, the balance of colours,
composition, all those qualities that art students and members of
watercolour societies strive for years to achieve - captured without
tuition or study. When human figures are involved, the feeling for
posture and movement is uncanny. The only 'naive' thing about
his work is the admission into his landscapes of cars, street signs,
lampposts and telephone boxes, all those things that amateur
landscape painters will walk miles to escape.

I left that gallery with one of his paintings. Since then, I
acquired two more when I opened an exhibition for him at
Salford Arts Gallery. Many will think it strange that a view of the
road from Huddersfield to Oldham on a rainy day, with the water
shining on a rooftop, the wheels of a car almost audibly
squelching through puddles on the road, and the receding murk
of Huddersfield barely discernible in the distance, should bring
balm to the soul of a southerner gazing at it over his porridge each
morning. But I have travelled that road so often, always in those
grey and drenching conditions, that it has acquired a strange
beauty, heavily laced with personal history and nostalgia.

Robert Littleford has never received more than a crumb of the
recognition he deserves. But, battling with poor health, he still
paints prolifically, never quite knowing how good his work is, and
still with no tuition but his own intuition. That he has not been
accorded another exhibition in his own area is bewildering. I am
not an art critic, but I can envisage a time, in some Antiques
Roadshow of the future, when someone will bring in a picture to
be valued and will be told by an expert who has done his
homework the story of Robert Littleford, the dustman from
Oldham, who conjured beautiful paintings out of nowhere.

I should perhaps mention here another artist whose work hangs
in my house. Luuk Add is a painter in Thailand specialising in
abstract work. The picture I have is of an imaginative structure of
tangled lines and shapes which, since some of the strokes are made
with a dry brush and are therefore indistinct, has a three-
dimensional appearance, as of twisted metal wire into which one
could put ones hand. The fact that I am describing it in this way
indicates that it does what an abstract should do, that is, to
stimulate the mind of the viewer. It is one of my favourite
acquisitions, which I have hung in my hallway where it provides,
if nothing else, a talking point, since LuukAdd was three years old
when he painted it, and is an elephant.

If you accuse me of stringing you along for the last paragraph,
I plead guilty, but do enter a plea of mitigation. I have done it to
draw attention to a worthy cause, that of elephant conservation.
Luuk Add, an orphan, was rescued from the streets of Bangkok,
where he survived by begging for bananas outside restaurants and
night clubs (it sounds more and more Toulouse-Lautrec as we go
on!) His artistic talent was discovered in the Elephant
Conservation Center in Lampang.

The picture is indeed delightful, and I acquired it from my
niece, Belinda Stewart-Cox, a distinguished worker for animal
conservation in the field, mainly in Thailand. The discoveries that
have been made about the ability of some, not all, elephants to
paint consistent, intelligent and highly individual pictures are, if
you look into them, rather spooky. You'll find yourself spooling
back through your memory to recall if you have ever said anything
derogatory about an elephant in its hearing. They have memories
like . . . well, an elephant.

PS: Luuk also plays the xylophone with rhythm and flair in the
Thai Elephant Orchestra established by Richard Lair in Lampang.

PPS: I guess I'd better quit while I'm ahead.

All this talk of paintings has flooded my mind with thoughts.
Out with them!

Since my years at Camberwell Art School in the late forties, I
have never been a regular visitor to art galleries, chiefly because until
quite late in life, I did it the wrong way. Like most people, I would
wander from room to room earnestly peering at everything on the
walls, and nothing is more wearing to the feet than wandering.
For me, it's always been striding out purposefully or nothing.

Mind you, my feet have never been much help to me since my
mother took me, aged twelve, to have my hammer toes rectified.
Two of the most distinguished orthopaedic surgeons in the land
had a go, with operations that in those days involved plaster of
Paris up to the knees, and legs horizontal for six weeks. (We'll
leave till another time the occasion when I found myself, due to
insuppressible wanderlust, hurtling down Windsor Hill in a self-
propelled bath chair, feet foremost, arms flailing, heading straight
for E V Tull's tea shop on the bend, to the horror of blue-rinsed
ladies having quiet afternoon tea in the window.)

To mention the names of those surgeons in podiatrists'
consulting rooms nowadays is to invoke a sharp intake of breath
and much adulatory eye-rolling. Far be it from me to besmirch
their posthumous reputations, which I'm sure are well deserved.
But there's no other way of explaining the twin shipwrecks that are
revealed when I remove my socks than to say the Mr Girdlestone
and Mr Foley successively buggered up my feet in my adolescent
years. And there's a word I wasn't going to use either.

It was a visit to Florence that Jill and I made back in the
seventies which brought it home to me that I was doing it all
wrong. The Uffizi Gallery is so vast that it was, in the short time
we had on a package tour, impossible to take it all in. We decided
to make a list of about four pictures in front of which we would
sit, one after the other, and just stare. In the event, I don't think
we got beyond the first one, finding enough balm to the soul in
Botticelli's Birth Of Venus to last a lifetime. Anyway, we had other
things to see. Balm to the soul of another kind was achieved in the
afternoon when we went on one of the coach trips round Rome
that the tour offered.

Sitting in front of us in the coach as we set off from the hotel
was an American Shelley Winters look-alike and her daughter, a
lumpish girl in her late twenties, I should guess. It wasn't long
before we - and I mean the whole coach-load of us - became
aware that they had suffered a mishap. That morning, the
daughter had left her purse in a taxi. She herself seemed resigned
to its loss, but Mom was hell-bent on tracking it down. She began
to interrogate the driver, a laconic Italian with the voice and style
of Victor Borge (yes, I know he's Danish, the driver just sounded
like him):

'Driver, d'you know a taxi driver called Luigi?'

'Madam, there are a thousand taxi-drivers in Rome, and most
of them are called Luigi.'

'But this one drove a yellow car.'

'They all drive yellow cars.'

And so it went on, until Mom began to notice statues along the
route. Temporarily diverted, she wanted to take a photograph of
each one as it appeared; in vain did the driver try to discourage
her.

'Madam, we are on our way to see Michelangelo's masterpiece.
These are all rubbish.'

'They may be rubbish to you but my daughter and I have never
been here before.'

When we eventually got to confront Michelangelo's David,
Mom and daughter had run out of film. There was a further stop
so that they could replenish their supply, by which time we were
running behind schedule and Victor Borge's patience was
becoming frayed. In the Pantheon, Mom's anxiety regarding the
lost purse returned.

'I'm gonna call all the taxi firms. Is there a phone in here?'

Victor resorted to sarcasm.       '       ^

'Madam, when the Romans built this place two thousand years
ago, they foolishly forgot to put in a telephone.'

Back on the coach, an argument started between mother and
daughter over the location of the Sistine Chapel. Once again,
Mom appealed to the driver.
'Driver, tell my daughter that chapel with drawings on the
ceiling is in Florence.'

Victor's voice had become strangulated.

'No, Madam, it's in Rome and we're on our way to see it now.'

Undeflated, Mom pondered a moment.

'Does that mean we don't have to go to Florence?'

We never got to see the Coliseum. But when we got back to
the hotel and disembarked, we gathered around Mom and
daughter to bid a fond goodbye. There were hugs and kisses on
every cheek, and watching this, I reflected on the niceness of
human beings.

I began this train of thought by reflecting on the good things in
my life that have happened by accident. I have a reason for
repeating the oft-told story of how I stumbled upon the
remarkable talent of American-born singer Stacey Kent. It has
been one of the pleasures of my job as presenter of The Best of Jazz
on BBC Radio 2 to find that, through the simple process of
playing things I like almost every Monday night for nigh on forty
years, I have sometimes given a boost or maybe a kick-start to the
career of a musician or singer who could benefit by it. - %

It was in the middle nineties that a New Yorker settled in
London called Stacey Kent, of whom I had never heard, sent me
a demo-tape, which I gathered up among some other things to
enliven a long journey to Oswestry in Shropshire where the band
had a gig. It happened to be the first tape that I put in my car's
cassette player when I set off up the motorway. I had no great
expectations - just another singer with a repertoire of standards was
my thought. I was pleasantly surprised and played it through
several times on the way to Oswestry and back. (I'm beginning to
sound like Saul of Tarsus - not a far-fetched notion as, for me too,
a revelation was involved.) By the time I got back home I had
become convinced that Stacey Kent was not only a good singer,
but a great one, and I said as much on the radio the following
Monday. I would have continued to say it to this day even if
nobody had concurred. Happily, there are now millions of people
round the world who have made the same discovery.

It was some weeks after that event that we actually met. It took
much less time for Stacey, and her tenor-playing husband Jim
Tomlinson (also an awesome talent), to start making appearances
with my band, leading to a long-running stage-show called
Between Friends. I would be leaving out a significant contribution
to the balm available to my soul if I didn't say that the chance
selection of Staceys tape on that journey to Oswestry and its
aftermath has led to an enduring friendship, across the
generations and across the ocean, that I can only describe as
miraculous.

Its now the moment to go back to Ludovic Kennedy and bring
two threads of narrative together.

In 2001, the year of my eightieth birthday, we had a concert at
the Queens Hall in Edinburgh as a celebration. The organiser
Mike Hart and the festival committee had the nice idea of
inviting Ludovic to the party as guest of honour, knowing that he
had been the drummer in my first band at Eton. Of course, his
wife, the former ballerina Moira Shearer, was also included in the
invitation. When I arrived in Edinburgh the day before the
concert, they told me that she was reluctant to come, since it was
'Ludovic s day.
However, the following morning, a message arrived that they
would both be there. In the course of our voluminous e-mail
correspondence, Stacey Kent had told me that The Red Shoes, the
film in which Moira Shearer shone in the forties, was one of her
favourites. She was on a train travelling up with the rest of the
band in an open carriage when I got the news, so I called her on
her mobile. I said, 'You told me once that The Red Shoes was a
favourite movie of yours. Well tonight, you're going to meet
Moira Shearer.'

From the crowded carriage, her response came.

'OH ... MY... GARD!'

That evening, we were backstage preparing for the concert
when the Kennedys arrived. Having seen Ludovic not long before
and heard of the cruel illnesses from which Moira suffered, I was
concerned that her appearance might be distressing to those of us
who remembered her in her Red Shoes days. It was a joy, therefore,
when they came into the green room for the party afterwards, to
see her radiant and, though walking with a stick, still with
recognisable poise and beauty.

A little while later, I sat with Ludo reminiscing while cameras
flashed and popped around us, and I glanced past him to see how
Moira was faring. Stacey Kent had of course dashed over to meet
her. I learned later that, on entering the room, Moira had gone
over to Tony Coe, one of my musical guests on the show, to
congratulate him on his saxophone playing, ending with, 'Can I
give you a kiss?' If he had not already been a devoted fan, he
would have become one then. With Stacey, Tony and several other
admirers standing or sitting on the floor around her, the lady who
had felt she would be an encumbrance was holding court. It was
a beautiful, beautiful sight.

A little while ago we were talking about longevity and the
recurring question 'How do you keep going?' When its put to me,
it's tempting, because there is no sensible answer, to be flip. A fan
from the past whom I met recently claimed that when he asked
that question some years ago, I replied, 'By not stopping.' I'm sure
he's thinking of someone else. Nowadays, when asked the secret, I
say 'Breathing,' which sounds hardly less facetious. But it's as near
to the truth as I can get.

At one stage in my life, in the mid-fifties, I was well on the way
to being a workaholic. My band had after eight years or so
metamorphosed from part-time status to fully professional,
meaning that the musicians no longer had other commitments to
maintain. All except me, that is. I was no longer working as a
cartoonist on the Daily Mail, but still producing the words (or
balloon-fillers) for the strip-cartoon 'Flook', the brain child of my
former musical colleague Wally 'Trog' Fawkes. On tour, I would
find myself writing the words for Flook in the morning,
travelling in a band coach all afternoon, doing two shows nightly
between six and ten-thirty and then, as often as not, staying up
most of the night carousing with members of the local jazz band.
I found the answer to this lethal schedule in a book on 'Painless
Childbirth' by Dr Grantley Dick-Reid who was then to
gynaecology what Dr Spock was to child-raising. The book came
into our house in 1955 when Jill was expecting Stephen, our
first-born.               .„,

A memory intrudes:

In the trendy post-war years, the notion was introduced that it
was a good thing for husbands to be present at the birth of a child.
I was therefore at the University College Hospital in London
when Stephen arrived. The uninvited memory is of the
gynaecologist shouting, when Jill took a premature breather in the
final stages, 'Come on, come on, we want more than the head!'

Idly thumbing through the Dick-Read book one day, as part of
the process of doing my bit, I came across the chapter on
relaxation. The exercises involved, not dissimilar to those in yoga,
seemed appropriate to my situation (though no baby was
involved, you understand). Its not enough to say that, having
mastered them, I have carried them out every single morning
since. I have added refinements of my own (though I should warn
*that some readers may think 'refinement' a not altogether
appropriate word) which, at the risk of sounding grandiloquent, I
will call the 'Humph Method'.

Stand back. Doctors Spock and Dick-Read, here I come!

FOREWORD. The following exercises are designed with
a threefold purpose:

1. To achieve total, restorative relaxation for both body
and mind.

2. To banish from the mind all debilitating anxieties and
negative thoughts.

3. To offer an escape route when an unwanted caller arrives
with the words, 'Yoo Hoo, it's me!' just as you are settling
down with a good book. As soon as you hear the front
door opening, throw yourself from your armchair on to
the floor, face upwards, and start right here. Whoever it is
will leave in a hurry, shouting apologies and be restrained
from calling the police by the certainty that they will
themselves be regarded as dangerously insane.

PHASE ONE. This can best be achieved in a prone
position. I have always preferred a comfortable bed - a thin
mat on the floor, as depicted in most yoga manuals, is
unnecessarily Spartan and indeed out of the question when,
through the passage of time. Natures upholstery has worn
thin. OK, so it's a bed. Lie on it spreadeagled, arms and legs
spread. Systematically relax every muscle in the body. As the
brain has little to do at this stage (it's best to keep it out of
it as much as possible) let the imagination provide some
figurative assistance towards a feeling that you are falling
through space. Having been taken by my father to see the
original King Kong movie in 1933 (he firmly believed that
being scared witless was good for our education) I choose to
visualise myself as the great gorilla in the final reel, having
been shot down by the US Air Force, falling, falling, from
the top of the Empire State Building in extreme slow
motion, so that I could be up, showered, dressed,
breakfasted and about my daily business by the time I would
otherwise have splatted on to the New York sidewalk.

PHASE TWO. Once you have reached this stage
approaching suspended animation, start deep breathing -
and I don't mean deep sniffing. A sudden hissing intake of
breath through the nostrils is useless and can damage the
sinuses. Contrary to the instructions I received as a boy at
Sunningdale School from Sergeant Buckle, the PE
instructor, the correct method is the exact opposite of
'Come on, lads, stomach in, chest out/ If in doubt, watch
a dog or cat in repose — its the abdomen, not the chest
cavity that goes up and down like a bellows.

PHASE THREE. The breathing, started when the
lungs are empty, should be slow and steady. With practice,
it can take as long as fifteen seconds to reach the point
when the lungs seem about to burst. Don't stop there.
Bringing the brain into play once more, another ten
seconds or so can be achieved by imagining that there are
other cavities extending as far as the collar-bones into
which air can be forced. At this point - and this is where
diligent practice and a steady nerve is required - hold your
breath. The feeling of calm and wellbeing induced, we
hope, by the relaxation in Phase One will keep at bay any
uneasy feeling of imminent asphyxia. (I have a friend, a
trained speech therapist, to whom I demonstrated the
technique during an informal get-together at her hospital.
She was interested enough to try it at home. She has not
been one of my successful patients. She reported when I
saw her next that whenever she reached this peak moment,
chest filled, breath held, she panicked, feeling that she
would get stuck there, like a kitten up a tree, unable to get
down. After urging perseverance, there was no other
suggestion I could make other than to get someone to call
the fire brigade.)

PHASE FOUR. It's now time to come down. You will
find that what I call the turn-arounds, the transitions from
breathing in and breathing out and vice versa, are the
hardest part of the exercise. You must try not to hold
your breath so long that your eyes begin to swivel
uncontrollably in their sockets and you release the pent-up
air in a great rush. Think what happens when you
suddenly let the air out of a balloon. Body weight and
force of gravity should prevent you from actually
ricocheting round the room and out of the window, but it
will leave you - well, deflated and with all control gone,
unable to repeat these phases several times as the exercise
requires. So, start to release the pent-up air slowly and
carefully, as if you were turning round on a narrow ledge
high up on a building (there's the old imagery back in
play). Remember, slowly and carefully. Don't fall off or you
will be projected violently into King Kong mode, and who
knows how you'll find your way back into ...

PHASE FIVE. Having to all intents and purposes
(that's tautology, isn't it? Oops, keep your mind on the job)
emptied your lungs, you will be faced with another
awkward turn-around. Again, slowly does it. Once you get
more air in the lungs the worst is over. Go back to Phase
One and repeat the whole process over again (now that is
tautology). You don't have to hold your breath more than
two or three times. Just keep the deep breathing going till
you, till you . . . Eh? What time is it? Eleven-thirty? I'm
sorry, I must have dropped off!'

EPILOGUE. If anxiety is your problem, I have two
additions to the exercise, which I believe are exclusive to
the Humph Method. The deep-breathing routine, if
performed properly, will have brought about the feeling of
relaxation and wellbeing. To lock the door, so to speak,
against any return of bad vibes, pick a moment when you
feel confidently at ease with the world, then slowly raise
your arm and direct a V sign at the ceiling, uttering at the
same time the dismissive expletive, 'Bollocks!' Overcome
those scruples and go for it. I've tried the more refined
alternative 'Fiddlesticks!' and it just doesn't work.
And the last thing. The good feeling you have attained may
need a top-up from time to time through the day. If you go into
the bathroom for any reason and catch a glimpse in the mirror of
that old expression - the furrowed brow, the turned-down mouth,
the grumpily sagging jowls, here's what you do. Go up to the
mirror, look straight at your reflection as if its another person -
an alter ego, if you like — and give it a knowing, conspiratorial
smile, with perhaps a wink for good measure, as if to say 'Nobody
else has got a clue, but we know, don't we!' You think I'm joking?
Well, try it — it'll take ten years off you in seconds.

Good heavens, is that the time? I started this book with a
question posed by my hero, Robert Benchley. Let me end with
another:

What is the disease which manifests itself in an inability to
^ leave a party until its all over and the lights are being put
out? ... I can't bring myself to say, 'Well, I guess I'll be
toddling along.' Sometimes even my host asks me if I
' mind if he toddles along to bed . . . It's that initial plunge
that I can't seem to negotiate. It isn't that I can't toddle
along. It's that I can't guess I'll toddle.

Well, I know the feeling. But I guess I'll toddle along now. It's
been fun.

The End.