SKINFLINT'S CITY DIARY
London Weekend Television is still not paying a dividend but now that the £1 shares are changing hands for £2 there is an indication of better conditions ahead.
London Weekend's twenty-four storey office block on the South Bank is being opened by the Duke of Kent in June, accompanied by a good deal of junketing at the company's expense.
Some shareholders who were applicants for the original licence and also subscribers to the company's loan stock when London Weekend was under pressure, and certainly not fair weather friends, have rather pointedly not been asked to the celebrations. The Spectator, not unexepectedly, is on this list, since it is thought that their presence might give poor Aidan Crawley, the one-time chairman whom the paper's criticism unsaddled, a nasty turn.
Hardy Amies
Hardy Amies the dressmaker, talking on the Today programme on Radio 4 about the clothes he made for the Queen's visit t-) France: "The Queen has a very difficult job and no one knows it better than me."
National Trust
With house prices rising the National Trust is having little difficulty in letting the cottages and the smaller houses they possess, provided they are within reasonable distance of an urban centre. Some larger houses are still difficult to let Such a place is Woolbeading House near Midhurst which has lain empty for four years. This magnificent Caroline manor is estimated to need £250,000 spent on delapidations. With the present demand for fine large houses, the National Trust might put matters right by offering a sixty-to-one-hundred-year lease instead of the twenty-one-year leases they seem to like, conditional on a certain level of expenditure and of course on the public's being permitted entry occasionally. However, the leases should be freely transferable by sale so that the original tenant is in a position to use his lease as a bank security towards the cost of buying and renovation and so that in due time part of his original expense might be recovered when he wanted to move.
Michael Heseltine
Michael Heseltine, formerly of the Notting Hill Gate tenement property company, Kensington Leaseholds, and now Minister of Aerospace, is owner of Haymarket Publishing, who have announced that they have bought from Marshall Cavendish, for £1.5 million cash, the capital of Brittain Press.
Brittain Press was built up by the wellknown Fleet Street old-timer Bill Brittain, one time editor of the Sunday Dispatch. Only two years ago a very close acquaintance of mine introduced Brittain to Herbert Despard of Cannon Street Investments who let slip the opportunity to buy-out Brittain Press for £300,000. Bill Brittain went ahead and floated the company which he subsequently arranged to be taken over by Marshall Cavendish for £938,000 cash. Mar
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