THE MAN WHO SIDED WITH MISCHIEF
Ferdinand Mount remembers John Wells
IN HIS wise and charming history of the House of Lords (his last book, published only three months before he died on 11 January, at the age of 61), John Wells describes wandering out of the Chamber after seeing Margaret Thatcher intro- duced. Almost immediately he bumps into Mary Wilson, who had once said she would like to bite him for writing Mrs Wil- son's Diary. Now she greets him as an old friend. Then he bumps into the legendary Cockney photographer, Terence Donovan, who jerks a thumb in the direction of a glazed door and whispers, 'Guess 'oo I got in there — 01' Fatcher!' Then coming out into the sunlight, finally bumps into Michael Foot, wearing a yellow suit and brandishing a shillelagh, and asks him if he had seen the ceremony: 'Certainly not.' `Oh, I thought you would have enjoyed watching the enthronement.' Enthrone- ment,' the old people's tribune chuckles, En-tomb-ment, you mean! En-tomb- ment.'
Wells could not help bumping into peo- ple. He accumulated friends like burrs. According to the austerer tendency at Pri- vate Eye, he only mixed with celebrities like Princess Margaret and Peter Sellers, but when I met him, it was usually with a decayed clergyman, or a disgraced school- master, or actors now unemployable, or mysterious figures from the heyday of the Third Programme. He spoke a good deal of his father, sometime Rural Dean of Bognor, and often visited his old school, Eastbourne College. He was clergy-boned and went about disguised as a prep-school- master, in dung-coloured tweed jacket and trousers too heavy for the time of year. Nobody could have been less stuck-up or less inclined to forget people or places he had once known. His 50th birthday party lasted three days, in order to accommo- date the crowd.
It must have been about then that he first contracted the lymphoma which he held at bay for a decade and which then came back at a gallop last autumn. His last weeks in the Charing Cross Hospital were more crowded with appointments than a doctor's surgery, clergymen being strongly represented, an archbishop or two, of course, but also a flock of priests, of all denominations, each feeling it his duty to crack jokes with the funniest man (after Peter Cook) of his generation, and too shy to offer the spiritual counsel which he said he wouldn't mind a bit of, except for one who said, 'If I may get a little professional for a moment. . . . '
I first came to know him at Oxford where we cackled together in the back row of David Luke's Nietzsche lectures. Friedrich Nietzsche would have come high on the list of all the characters Wells found irresistibly comic — Selwyn Lloyd, Harold Wilson, Denis Thatcher, Roy Jenkins. If available, Nietzsche would cer- tainly also have become a friend, as did Luke, the greatest of modern German translators, whom John consulted on lin- guistic matters, confessing to a puritan belief that 'If I've been enjoying myself too much, then it's time to go off and translate an obscure German play.' He translated Danton's Death for Jonathan Miller as well as a lot of French plays — Cyrano, Le manage de Figaro, Feydeau's Le Dindon. As an actor he appeared in Bartholomew Fair at the Round House, The Philan- thropist at Chichester and Travels With My Aunt all over the place. Among his latest productions — like much of his work underrated because of his obsessive mod- esty — was the film of Princess Caraboo, a true story about a girl who turned up in `Got any change, guy?' Bristol in 1817 claiming to be an Oriental princess. It shows all his delicacy of touch as well as his gift for ripe character (the peerless Jim Broadbent being seen at his best).
For The Spectator, he wrote regularly on the press in the mid-Sixties and then a diverting column, 'Afterthought', for four years. Later, he reviewed books for the then editor Alexander Chancellor, who became his brother-in-law through John's long overdue and very happy marriage to Teresa (no one could have nursed her more devotedly through her near-fatal ill- ness than he did, as she did him through his fatal one). He also wrote an excellent history of the London Library and a smor- gasbordful of restaurant columns. There must be some kind of writing or perform- ing he didn't do, but I can't think what. Never found the best focus for his talents, I hear the Prodnoses cry. But variousness is not a failing, it merely spreads the pleasure wider.
What will be best remembered is, of course, his collaboration with Richard Ingrains on Mrs Wilson's Diary and Dear Bill, his lyrics in Joan Littlewood's stage version of the former, and his play, Anyone for Denis?, based on the latter, which he starred in and which ran for more than a year at the Whitehall Theatre, attracting among others the Thatchers themselves who stuck it out and claimed to have had a lovely evening. To this day I am not sure whether they realise what a good turn John did them by turning Denis into one of the immortals, along with Jeeves and Moles- worth.
`Despite his grand connections,' the Times intoned in the best obituarese, `Wells was always on the political Left, partly due to the influence of the former Daily Worker political journalist Claud Cockburn' — which though not exactly untrue somehow misses the point, giving the impression of Cockburn conducting conscious-raising seminars on economic policy. What Wells, like Cockburn, was on the side of was mischief and mockery. The great cause he was associated with was the Card's: that of cheering us all up, or if that sounds too chirrupy, of reconciling us to our absurdities. He could not help human- ising his targets, and his targets could not resist liking him. In his generation he car- ried on the enterprise begun by his great friend John Betjeman, that of teaching the English to be fond of each other, even if they lived in the suburbs. Far from being snobbish, I should have thought the two Johns did as much as anyone to undermine class hostility.
But there we are: no more the wild cack- le, the shake of the floppy forelock, the upper lip sticking out like some dubious rubber appliance. I am not sure whether Willy Rushton took John for his model when drawing the little crusader with the crumpled sword on the masthead of Private Eye. But it does look very like him.
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