My Churchill years
Sir: I was deeply shocked to see in your issue of 20 April that you had chosen to print, under the bizarre heading 'Ala, alas' (I have at no time in my 73 years been called Ala by anyone) a letter from a Mr Borys Villers (sic) which was actionably libellous where it was not quite simply incorrect. In it the writer said he 'was amazed to read in illiterate Alastair For- bes's Diary (30 March) that he visited Claudie (Worsthorne) in the Lister, where she was for such a short time before her death'. He must himself be illiterate in the most fundamental sense of the word, for the Diary in question made no mention at all of the Lister, a hospital with which I am perfectly familiar, having been a frequent visitor there, though never to Claudie Worsthorne, who in between her two stays
LETTERS
returned to the Kensington apartment to which she and her husband had fairly recently moved. It was long after I had sent to the couple what Perry called my 'charac- teristically sweet words about Claudie's illness' that, since I happened to be staying in London around the corner, I saw Claudie getting painfully out of a minicab and helped her along the path to her threshold, where the conversation I refer- red to took place.
I have no recollection of a 'first' or indeed any subsequent 'meeting' with your correspondent, whose spelling of what I understand to be his deed poll change of name is certainly idiosyncratic. My Oxford friends have now told me he is by profes- sion an inventor, which, in the light of his letter, sure figures. I did indeed visit Randolph in the course of both his unsuc- cessful electoral contests with Michael Foot at Devonport. In the first, in 1950, I remember staying with him at Salcombe in the house he was renting from Paul Galli- co, the famous best-selling author. My fellow-guest was Perry's Fleet Street Fairy Godmother, Lady Pamela Berry. It was of course British Rail and not Clement Attlee who put at Winston Churchill's disposal, no doubt at the Tory Party's expense, the reserved carriage on which he travelled from Paddington to Plymouth, arriving predictably late. For the benefit of the dockyard workers who had missed the big open-air meeting, Churchill appeared at the window of the Astors' house on Ply-. mouth Hoe, to be greeted by loud Labour boos. To this sound he brilliantly re- sponded with: `I love to hear boos. They tell me that in Socialist countries they are forbidden,' and this got a cheer. No 'snide jokes' whatsoever behind Sir Winston's back were made by me, but when Ran- dolph had triumphantly trumpeted that he had discovered a fishmonger called Chur- chill whom he was going to take to meet his papa at the station, I could not resist predicting that the Daily Mirror's front page would next morning splash a 'Fish- monger meets Warmonger' picture. This was thought to be quite a good joke at the time. My only opportunity to 'admire the presence', as Villers so quaintly puts it, occurred in fact at the very luncheon he says I was forbidden by Randolph to attend. I sat on the opposite side of the table to the great man, whom after all I had known for going on for 20 years, quite near enough to hear his in the circumstances quite kindly rebuke of the hotel waiter who had served him his oysters on the flat instead of the hollow shell, a rebuke remembered by at least one other survivor of that meal whose memory I have con- sulted over the weekend. The idea of Randolph giving me orders or myself obeying them is too absurd to be believed by anyone who knew us and there are still a few about.
As to Mr Villers calling me in print a `hack' he had better look up the transcript of R. S. Churchill v Ainsworth & Odhams Press Ltd in which a 1956 jury awarded Randolph £5,000 plus costs for being called just that, after evidence had been called in his favour from inter alios Michael Foot himself and Ian Gilmour, then Editor- Proprietor of The Spectator, both still available to testify for me in the same sense. Verb. sap. As for reader Graham's criticism of your tolerance of my Diary, I can only say how grateful I am for your congratulations on them and your assur- ance that you will order me to harness another troika of them before long. I am sure that on reflection Mr Villers will wish to withdraw and apologise and that your Letters Editor will wish that he had chosen to publish instead my more equable letter of the same date.
Alastair Forbes
1837 Chateau d'Oex, Switzerland
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