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Terry Jones and Posy Simmonds |
Monty Python star celebrates the life of Brien
THE life of Alan Brien, journalist and broadcaster was celebrated by friends and relatives yesterday (Wednesday) at the Actor’s Church in Covent Garden – and they heard Monty Python star Terry Jones reveal the debt Camden Town owes to Alan.
Before reciting one of the author’s favourite poems – My Beloved Compares Herself to a Pint of Stout by Paul Durcan – he said playwright Sir Arnold Wesker gave Alan the credit for turning the Roundhouse into an arts venue.
Terry Jones said Alan told Sir Arnold the Roundhouse had been bought by a property developer who did not know what to do with the old engine shed.
So Alan asked Sir Arnold if he could persuade him to give it to Centre 42 [Wesker’s arts group]. “It was Alan that made the Roundhouse an iconic building for the arts,” he said.
His widow Jane revealed that although Alan was struck down by a rare form of dementia called Lewy Body disease, he was always brave, stoical and cheerful, calling his hallucinations “free cinema”.
Biographer Valerie Grove, who lives in Highgate said: “We were both from the North-east and people from the North-east always get on with each other. He had such a large presence, and I have never known anyone to be able to hold a table’s attention like him.
“In the 1960s, my economics master insisted I read the Statesman every week and I was able to recite from memory a column he had written.”
She read the passage, which typified Alan’s wit: “I remember noting, when I first came to London, how often the names of stores in the ads sounded like the baby-talk of the Nanny Mafia in Kensington Gardens – ‘Don’t be so Selfridge, Master Fortnum. Eat up your Harrods, and then you can have a Gorringe. I know a child once died of the Whiteleys after too many Burberries.”
Those celebrating Alan’s life were also treated to Bloomsbury folk singer Bob Davenport singing two traditional songs from the north east and a version of William Blake’s Jerusalem.
Among the crowd was writer Paul Johnson, Observer film critic Philip French, his son, crime writer Sean French, author Deborah Moggach and illustrator and writer Posy Simmonds. They headed to the Garrick club to listen to trad jazz by Highgate’s Wally Fawkes and Ian Christie.
A teacher who turned ‘wild boys’ into men
IT was a wild place, Holloway Boys’ School.
Once a boy, probably high on a drug, started wandering around the classroom in a daze.
A teacher just grabbed him by the face and pushed his head into the window, smashing the glass.
That took place in the mid-1970s.
But before I could stop and ask the boy who witnessed it, now a man in his 40s, what happened next, he sailed on talking non-stop about Holloway School in Islington.
“It was a wild place,” he said. “The boy must have been on ‘sugar’ [cocaine, to the
uninitiated] – that was the sort of place it was.”
We were talking in a pub in Whitehall on Monday evening after an emotional get-together of old pupils and teachers of Holloway in the 1970s and 1980s in memory of one of the best-loved teachers there, Jeffrey Gordon, who died recently (see page 10).
In glowing terms, the old boys remembered the man who had turned their lives around. They had been a bit wild. They thought nothing of bunking off. They dreamt impossible dreams – they’d be football stars, they’d make a million in business before they were 30.
Lives without direction. Dreams you can find today in secondary schools, I suppose.
But Jeffrey would always say: What happens if your dream doesn’t come off? Have you got a back-up plan?
Jeffrey, who had been a factory worker for years, was a down-to-earth teacher, with a hatred of racial prejudice. Was it a coincidence that most of the old boys who turned up for the get-together at a committee room in the Commons, hosted by Islington MP Jeremy Corbyn, were either Indian, Pakistani or Afro-Caribbean?
What struck me about them on Monday evening over drinks in the pub was their charisma and ability to command attention.
All of them had taken their A-levels, pushed and prodded by Jeffrey.
I spoke to four of them – one had become a surveyor, another a computer engineer, another a fireman, active in the Fire Brigades Union, another a social worker.
Most vocal of all was a man who now ran a successful black cab firm. After school he spent nine years in the Met where he had met prejudice.
“One bloke, a sergeant named Mike, asked me my name: ‘I said Nuresh.’ What can we call you then, Joe, maybe?
“I said, ‘Yes, you can call me Joe, if I can call you Charlie.’
“That silenced him!”
Jeffrey who had given umpteen lessons on racial prejudice had clearly left his mark.
As one of the old boys was leaving the pub, he said: “Tonight so many of us turned up and it made me think – Jeffrey saved so many lives, but I’ve never saved one! Now I want to do what Jeffrey did!”
Later, I thought that boys who get their kicks today from petty crime and destructive behaviour, would have similar personalities – sharp minds, easily bored, but with charisma and able to command attention.
In Holloway, 30 years ago, similar boys from similar poor families had Jeffrey to show them the way forward.
Wood for the Xmas tree
ROLLING Stone’s guitarist Ronnie Wood has been keeping a low profile holed up in a rented Hampstead flat since news of his alleged fling with a young Russian bartender broke a few months ago.
But a little bird tells me the village’s newest resident will break his hermitage to switch on the Hampstead Christmas lights next Saturday at 4pm. In a distinct change of scene for the legendary rocker, Mr Wood will headline a bill of reindeers and carol-singers at the Hampstead High Street event.
Bert’s tribute brought the House down
I WAS late but still just in time to catch the magnificent voice of Bob Davenport booming through the hall at Cecil Sharp House on Saturday at the centenary tribute for Britain’s greatest folklorist – Bert Lloyd.
As the programme unfolded it seemed as if anyone who was anyone in recent folk history was on show in a hall packed with 500 folk lovers from all over the country.
And rightly so, to remember a man who had been a whaler, a journalist, a producer of memorable BBC
specials, a translator of Kafka and the murdered Spanish poet Lorca, and someone who still found time to be a prominent figure of the left!
After Frankie Armstrong, now virtually blind, and a haunting Bulgarian mountain singer, and then the smokey voice of Norma Waterson, I over-indulged in CD purchases!
Aren’t we lucky in Camden to have so many great venues: the Roundhouse, the Koko club, the Dublin Castle, and Cecil Sharp House, all within a few hundred yards of each other?
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