Self-satisfied
Richard Ingrams
A motley assortment of persons are being interviewed on Platform One, BBC-1's latest series of one-to-one confrontations. I saw Victor Matthews a week or so ago being handled with care by Richard Kershaw. Last week I myself was interviewed by Prof. Robert MacKenzie. I had not met the Professor before and was agreeably surprised to find that he is a genial, talkative soul fond of gossip and scandal. We had a very entertaining chat, both before and after the programme, discussing the indiscretions of politicians, but when we were on the air the Professor adopted a mask of solemnity, deploring the incursions of Private Eye into people's personal affairs — a theme which he harped on so much, to the exclusion of other more entertaining topics, that I found myself again recalling the excellent sentiments of William Cobbett on this subject — 'Amongst the persons whom I have heard express a wish to see the press what they call free and at the same time to extend the restraints on it with regard to people in their private life I have never that I know of met with one who had not some powerful motive of his own for the wish, and who did not feel that he had some vulnerable part about himself.' Joyce Grenfell who died last week had appeared a day or two before her death in Nancy, a biographical profile of her maternal aunt, Nancy Astor, written and narrated by John Grigg, Looking her usual ebullient self Mrs Grenfell recalled how the old girl used to chew gum and warm herself standing with legs aparland skirt hitched up in front of the fire. Almost everyone had a reasonably good word to say for her, even Claud Cockburn, inventbr of the phrase the Cliveden set, who told how, when introduced by John Strachey at the House of Commons, she spat at him — though he being tall and she rather short the projectile did not reach its target. The general bonhomie seemed largely misplaced and I was left feeling like Patrick Campbell who, after listening to a glowing account from Barbara Cartland of her wonderful mother, remarked, 'She sounds like a p-p-p-pretty good b-b-b-bitch to me'. The haggard and listless mien of Nancy's three surviving sons — the fourth, Lord Astor of Profumo fame, was tastefully not referred to — bore witness to the ravages that can be caused by an over-dominating mother. Nancy Astor's campaigns were largely concerned with sorting people out, usually the poor, and in partiCular discouraging the male of the species from drinking too much. But the rich were not left uninterfered with, and it is recounted that when visiting her sons at Eton she sometimes would stop boys and ask them, 'Have you cleaned your teeth today boy?' In not over-emphasising these unattractive sidelights John Grigg was doing no more than following the conventional attitude towards female emancipation whereby someone like Nancy Astor, the first woman MP, has to be regarded as something of a hero. It would not do to hint that this trail-blazer for Women's Lib was in fact an unattractive, interfering old battle-axe.
I do not know what influence Shirley Williams's mother, Vera Brittain, had on her but Shirley, like the Astor sons, has a rather battered and woe-begone air. I watched the final episode of Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth (BBC-2) and as so often felt thankful that I had missed the earlier instalments. Vera Brittain looked back in smugness to the years of her youth. Her parents were portrayed as unimaginative noddies sunk in provincial torpor. Her fellow students at Oxford had a similarly blinkered view of the world and when Vera made a passionate anti-war speech at the college debating society she was howled down by the idiotic undergraduettes. Only Miss Brittain, it seemed, was blessed with a proper sense of indignation at the injustice and cruelty of the world. Of course when young you tend to think your parents are fuddy-duddies and most of your contemporaries moronic, but when you look back from a distance you ought to be able to see that you yourself must have been fairly insufferable at the time. Vera Brittain seems never quite to have shed that youthful arrogance of hers. But again a strident self-satisfied woman making her own way in the world is nowadays the sort of figure we are all expected to admire.
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