13 NOVEMBER 1964, Page 10

Last Post Sad news that Julian Maclaren-Ross died last week—ironically,

one saw the obituaries after reading the admirable first instalment of his Memoirs of the Forties in the current issue of the London Magazine. And it is as a man of the 1940s that Maclaren-Ross will be remembered, above all for his memorable stories of army life in The Stuff to Give the Troops (1944) and his tales of the War-time Bohemia of Soho and Fitzrovia that lin- gered on until the early 1950s. More recently, Maclaren-Ross had abandoned Soho for Notting Hill, where he would be seen in the Catherine Wheel on Kensington Church Street invariably carrying his silver-topped cane. He was much in- terested in the cinema and the theatre and it is a pity that his many talents never really fused to produce the great novel about the 1940s which many confidently expected him to write. Now it's too late.