Tales of derring-do
Peter Levi
These tapes are an extraordinary series, all chosen by Sue Rodwell, who deserves a medal. It is extremely hard to describe their contents and the naming of each tape is arguable: except for 'The Navy', one can see that different titles might have been appropriate, since the selections are short on every subject, and do not last long enough to impose themselves. The readers are all excellent and many of them distin- guished. The contributions are a higgledy- piggledy pile in no chronological order and chosen for no obvious reason except at times for contrast. What the mind retains from such a diet is in general the sensation of a gentle variety, with certain startling paragraphs distinguished like mountain peaks. In 'The Navy' and in 'The Army', the mountains are largely horrors. For some reason which one can only guess at, `The Amy' is less terrifying. Most of the wars are recent. One would not like to have served under the Duke of Wellington or the Duke of Marlborough, but Welling- ton's officers seem to have had more fun. Marlborough despised his men even more unguardedly than Wellington.
But life in the lower reaches of society has always been awful and our noses are rubbed in this fact. Hanging at the yard- arm was an ordinary procedure carried out with ceremony by the whole fleet. Flogging was an affair of almost inconceivable bru- tality, much worse to read of here than in the relevant article in the English Historical Review, but in that case hanging and flog- ging were both in a kind of decadence as if the arm that administered them, or the pen that gave the order, were flagging. Yet the worst memory that remains from these
appalling contributions to the tapes is sure- ly the end of the Schamhorst in Arctic waters, which we are given in full detail by the officers concerned on the English side, including Alec Guinness. The weather, the freezing cold in which the German sur- — - vivors vanished, some yelling for mercy and others singing, the terrifying number of Schamhorst's assailants, her powerful and useless armaments and the sense that every ship was in peril make an unforgettable drama.
Of course there are some jollier moments, even in the naval tapes. The mil- itary ones furnish some interesting and unexpected moments, even for the battle of Waterloo, whose strange vignettes 30 years of desultory reading have not yet exhaust- ed. I never knew that the Iron Duke, pass- ing what must have looked to him like a forest of dark mushrooms, discerned the officers of the Brigade, and sent them a message deploring the use of umbrellas in the front line during battle. He said they were perfectly acceptable in St James's per- haps, but in the front line they were ridicu- lous. His battle against the impropriety of umbrellas probably had several stages. Certainly I had a friend who received what was called a severe reprimand in the Brigade for leading some troops on a route march while sheltering himself under an umbrella, in the early 1950s. I do not think it was the same subaltern or ensign who received his reprimand for smoking a cigar on a route march. At that time, no doubt, the Brigade of Guards was getting back to its old standards after the war was over: If Evelyn Waugh had smoked a cigar in the face of the enemy I doubt if anyone would have cared.
Evelyn Waugh does figure a number of times, particularly in the tapes of 'The Travellers' Gazette (Abroad Edition)', where a trip to Guyana was unenjoyable. The 'At Home Edition' is not so much English provincial travel as what the Span- ish and French visitors thought of that. Rochefoucauld was pleased with English houses, which were all cleaned every Satur- day, but perhaps he was just surprised that no one pissed on the stairs and that every house contained only one family. The past is a conundrum, and an anecdote does not crack it open.
What strikes one may be the most ridicu- lously small detail, such as (in 'Pastimes') the tirade of some military sportsman in 1914 against golf, or the crazy James I in a savage outcry against ,bowls. Sometimes one is fascinated to discover the origin of a custom; for instance, hoisting in a basket was an expression of public indignation and of course a wicked piece of bullying at Marlborough, where John Betjeman seems to have known it. Its origin must have been in the punishment of those who failed to pay their debts at cockfighting theatres in London and no doubt elsewhere. The vic- tim was put in a basket and hoisted to the rafters, where he was jeered at and proba- bly pelted. Still, you had to put up with hazards in every sport, and John Evelyn reports a mangled dog being flung up by a bull into the lap of a lady seated high above him. Come to that, my mother told me an appalling story of a heavyweight boxer whose teeth landed in the lap of someone she knew who had a ringside seat.
It is not possible to be fair, nor is it possi- ble to give marks for enjoyment. Personally I found the whole process paid diminishing returns. When Peter Pears goes to Mid- dlesborough he cleverly concentrates our attention on his fine, very heavy, pre-war suit and on the hazards of British Rail trav- el and the architectural horrors of the North. I have never seen Middlesborough town hall and now I long to do so and to
hear a concert there. But the journey is much like a railway journey 100 years earli- er and no doubt 100 years more will not improve it. There is about some of the best of these occasional anecdotes a sort of weariness. Someone asks, 'Is there no ennui in the Alps?', but the question could as well be asked in every one of the situa- tions that we have brought to our attention. It was, if I remember, Walpole who asked the question about ennui, but it could have been put as well by Evelyn Waugh or by the Spanish adventurer at the marriage of Queen Mary and King Philip at Winchester who chose rather to be impressed by the presence of six croziered and bemitred bishops. It is not the travelling in a hot-air balloon, even with England lying spread out like a map below you, or the bobbing up and down in the sea that really entice us to adventure.
A great deal, of course, depends on the recorder: everybody until the Paston Letters is boring, and even the most modern and interesting travel in a grand car to visit the most interesting man I have ever known is deadly dull if it is described by that ass Chips Channon. Knowing the roads, the kind of car and Captain Churchill injects a note of caution into the entire enterprise of these tapes; it is like knowing Evelyn Waugh. It is a curious fact that Smuts had known Churchill for 40 years: they must have met in the Boer war. Churchill had begun to collect art by buying an Egyptian royal necklace from the German consul in Luxor when he was a boy on leave from Eton because of the bad state of his lungs. The accumulation of works of art at North- cote was due to him and much richer than the conventional Chips allows. No doubt that story is for another day. Captain Churchill was well known for a rifle bullet that had gone right through his temples, in at one side and out at the other, in about 1916. He lived alone with a butler of a kind, and his avenue displayed a large notice offering swimming in his lake, men and boys only. Lunch there was usually fru- gal, but dinner was worse: a boiled egg and claret and water.
Military Gazette (Navy Edition and Army Edition), Travellers' Gazette (Abroad Edi- tion, At Home Edition), Sporting Gazette (Sports Edition, Pastimes Edition). Boxed set £14.99 each category, or £8.99 each. Running time 2 hours. Mr Punch Audio Ltd, 139 Kensington High Street, London W8 6SU.
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