The Duchess of Atholl

How and where does one begin when describing such an exceptionally experienced public woman as the Duchess of Atholl? I* might do worse than start at a meeting held in Essex Hall, Strand, when she was Parliamentary Secretary to the old Board of Education. Appointed by the Prime Minister, Mr Stanley Baldwin, and under the leadership of Lord Eustace Percy who, she said, was no shirker, she admits to feeIing honoured to be the second woman in English history to be a Minister, and she soon made it evident in her public life that she was never afraid to join the ranks of a minority group of people.

I had better not mention the number of years of my regular attendance at meetings at Essex Hall. I spoke there at a conference; I made reports there monthly during one period; I witnessed many exciting arguments; but never was any other meeting in that historic building so memorable to me as one at which the Duchess delivered one of her steady, thoughtful orations. She was no tub thumper, no rabble rouser, no player to the gallery, no provider of cheap wisecracks. She simply forced her head to take control of her emotions and just gave us facts, combined with ideals, very hard to challenge. There is| no need to add that after the meeting there was some animated discussion among groups in the corridor and in the Strand teashops.

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I once met…Luise Rainer

Sad to hear of the death of the film star Luise Rainer at 104, but as we (often) say in England, she had  'a good innings'. I met her in the mid 1990s when she must have been in her late 80s. Myself and the esteemed rock musician and bookseller Martin Stone travelled to her villa in the Italian part of Swizerland to buy some of her books. I recall she picked us up at the station in a smart and powerful car and took us along  winding, perilous mountain roads at considerable speed. Something of a white knuckle ride. She was full of energy and amusing chat. She told us that life was not very social in this part of Switzerland. When she had arrived she gave two enormous parties for everybody interesting in the neighbourhood. She had done this before at other houses in her long life and usually after these events you just sat back and waited for invitations to come in and your social life was 'sorted.' Sadly, she did not hear a word from anyone, apparently this was not untypical of the Italian Swiss. Lots of old friends had come to stay however. She told us  of a 100 year old British peer who had stayed for a month or two. Because of his great age she had hired a local nurse to look after him and Luise was rather surprised that he later willed this nurse a large sum of money!  We saw some good books including several presentation copies (a first of House of Incest by Anais Nin signed and presented to one of her husbands comes to mind). She was considering a move to London and asked me about  prices in the Knightsbridge area. I am sure she found London a lot more fun than the Alps…

She was a great beauty in youth and this could be seen even in old age. Luise had some good art on the walls and some sculpture. I recall a Sonia Delaunay and a Marie Laurencin. I guess she must have moved shortly after. In February this year I tweeted a happy 104th birthday to her and mentioned our trip to see her near Lake Como. I was amazed to get this tweet back from her "..would love to see photos of that trip if you have any…?" Sadly we took no photos, this being slightly  before the smart phone era. R.I.P. Luise, a truly great star!

Martin Stone wrote in with this (I had forgotten entirely about the snake!) :

That trip to see her did seem to leave a strong impression,didn't it? Sitting on the terrace with the lake far below, she announced she was leaving to live in London."But why go from here?"one of us said,"this is paradise.""Oh,I've had enough of Paradise",she said,"now I'm ready for Hell".

Do you remember the snake in the basement that we refused to dispose of for her? I thought that might have blown the deal...I also remember several Egon Schiele paintings/drawings and a sensational medieval triptych spotlighted- I think you tried to buy them with the books,and she said "No,Sotheby's Geneva next month! " Great lady.

I once met…King Richard Booth of Hay

Actually, I’ve met him twice. The first was in 1970, not too long after the Book Town of Hay-on Wye had started up. I was 18 and had only been collecting second-hand books for two years and could hardly pass up the prospect of a place entirely devoted to them. Back then there were only three shops—the Castle, where Booth lived, the Old Fire Station and the Old Cinema. My first visit, I seem to recall, had been with my parents, who had driven me up from Swansea. After that first taste of Hay I was hooked. It was on the second visit, again a day trip from home, but one that involved three buses, that I met Booth.

I was an impoverished schoolboy back then and spent all my pocket money, baby-sitting money and newspaper round cash on books. Because of this I justified to myself my nefarious practice of taking a pencil stub into the Old Cinema and writing my own prices on the books. As I saw it, if the experts at the counter didn’t challenge my prices that was their problem. Most didn’t, but on this one occasion the man at the desk turned out to be Booth himself. I recognised his face from a photo in the local paper, but there was nothing I could do. He had my book in his hand (I think it was a seventeenth century pocket Bible) and he suddenly looked very puzzled at something on the flyleaf. I heard him mutter 'This doesn’t look right' and he scribbled over my price, replacing it with his own, which was only a couple of pounds more. I remember going bright red, but I duly paid up, still content with my purchase.

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I once met… Anna Pavlova (and Adolf Hitler)

Found in Words Etc.,: A Miscellany (Wordspress, Haslemere 1973) this piece by author, art teacher, botanist and curator Wilfrid Jasper Walter Blunt (1901 - 1987). His meeting with Hitler is admittedly fleeting, his meeting with Pavlova slightly  more substantial, but he tells both anecdotes well..

My Friendships with the Famous

Name-dropping is a pleasant and a fairly innocuous pastime, indulged in even by Shakespeare's Hipolyta: "I was with Hercules and Cadmus once…". At a party, when conversation is flagging, I sometimes like to electrify the company by saying, quite casually, "The first time I met Hitler was…". Then, before I can be subjected to an embarrassing interrogation, I change the subject.

No publisher has ever shown the slightest eagerness to publish a full-length book on my relationship with the Führer; yet I feel that the world ought no longer to be deprived of some account of my first (and alas! last) unforgettable meeting with him. I cannot, unfortunately, remember the exact date but it was some time in the year 1929. I had gone with a German friend to the Café Hecht, in the Hofgarten in Munich; Hecht means "pike", but little did I guess how big a fish I was about to land. At the table next to ours six people were sitting - three men and three women - and on that table was a funny little flag with a swastika on it; I assumed that they were adherents of some esoteric oriental religious cult. The men were dressed in brown (like our Capuchins), and one of them sported a ridiculous little moustache.

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I once met….Sir Felix Dennis

The sad recent death of amateur poet, multimillionaire media mogul, and manic tree planter reminds me of the day I interviewed him back in 2008. Preparation is everything and knowing that this most eligible bachelor was rather fond of attractive young ladies, my magazine sent me to meet him with a pretty Dutch photographer in her twenties whose dress of choice was a very clinging all-leather cat suit. I can’t for the world think why she chose this particular outfit, but there you are.

In the Forest of Dennis
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I once met…Desmond Morris

A book dealer I knew mentioned in passing that the author of The Naked Ape and Manwatching was a passionate collector. But no-one had prepared me for what I encountered when I rang his doorbell in leafy North Oxford.

This zoologist was not a collector—he was a bibliomaniac! He admitted to visiting book fairs, second-hand bookshops, junk shops and auctions. At one time he mistakenly bought copies of books he already owned, but remedied this error by always carrying around a laptop containing a disk that listed  all the books in his library. And what a library ! He had had it built as an annexe to his large Victorian house and it was absolutely crammed with books, floor to ceiling, and a few of his own paintings were also displayed. He, of course, was a sort of Abstract Surrealist, strongly influenced by Miro. There was a lot of ethnographical art too—mainly pots and animal inspired pieces.

We talked for over three hours—some of the conversation was off the record. He told me that he came from a village near Swindon and as a youth had gone out with Diana Dors, whose real name was Diana Fluck. Books were part of his DNA. Morris’s great great grandfather had been a bookseller in old-town Swindon, while his great-grandfather, one William Morris, was a well known local historian and naturalist in Wiltshire. It was a book, Grew’s Comparative Anatomy of Stomach and Guts, which the zoologist later inherited from his library, that inspired him to study animals. From such an eclectic pedigree of learning arose  Morris’s extraordinary range of knowledge—which encompasses a range of art-related disciplines, of which Surrealism and ethnography was two, and a variety of scientific subjects, the most prominent being zoology. Whole stacks were devoted to two main interests—dogs and primates, but human psychology was strongly represented too. There was also a fair-sized section on English poetry and here Morris revealed that in the late 1940s he had met Dylan Thomas, who had shown a strong interest in one of the younger man’s own paintings that he happened to be carrying. Thomas offered to strike a deal. He would swap a manuscript of a poem he had recently written for this painting. It must have been a good painting (or a poor poem), because Morris declined the deal. Thomas died just a few years later at the height of his fame and Morris told me that he has regretted that mistake ever since.[RR]

I once met….. William Rees Mogg

Sent in by a Jot regular - this moving account. In the rare book trade he was renowned for having returned an expensive book he had bought from another bookseller, saying 'I did not find it as saleable as I had hoped.' Only someone as eminent as the ex-editor of The Times could get away with such an excuse. The shot below is of him with Mick Jagger at a TV discussion in 1967 after William Rees Mogg's 'Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel' editorial condemning a jail term handed to Mick for dope offences. At the time he was 10 years older than the great Stone.

This was after he’d left the editorial chair of The Times and was running the very posh Pickering and Chatto antiquarian bookshop in Pall Mall. Before I arranged to interview him I had mugged up on his tastes by reading the guide to book collecting that  he’d published a few years earlier. I must admit that I was a little intimidated by his reputation—not just as a high Tory patrician figure from the higher reaches of journalism—but also as someone whose refined tastes in Augustan literature were likely to show up my own thin knowledge of this area.

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I once met Alec Guinness

In a former incarnation I worked as a TV critic on the short lived London listings magazine Event. It was owned by Virgin and one of Branson's minions sent me to the BBC at White City to review Smiley's People. This was 1982. There was a showing and then a small reception with canapés and wines at which point they wheeled out the star Alec Guinness who with an assistant 'worked the room' - making critics feel good and hopefully thus obliged to write well of the TV series. It was actually very good ,and Guinness was the perfect Smiley.

At one point he was introduced to me and I said I liked the show. I had been an admirer of one of his directors, Robert Hamer, and mentioned him. His face brightened and he said he had been thinking about him that very morning. He did not seem to know that Hamer was something of a poet and asked me to send him some examples. I had vague ideas of publishing his work in a (very) slim volume. Guinness moved on and later, having received the copies of the poems he wrote from his house near Petersfield to thank me.

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I once met Borat’s cousin

His name is Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, and he is based at the Department of Psychology, Cambridge University, where he is a world authority on autism. In fact, I’ve interviewed him twice—firstly in 2000 at his rooms in Trinity College, and a few years later in his Department on the Trumpington Road. With a name like Baron- Cohen , and at a time when Ali G was beginning to do his famous TV stunts, I could hardly fail to ask him the obvious question. He didn’t flinch from the truth.

He’s not as tall as his cousin and doesn’t resemble him facially. He is very softly-spoken and, like many academics, was very precise and deliberate in his responses to my questions. On the first occasion we talked about the advantages and disadvantages of having Asperger’s Syndrome, which back then wasn’t the fashionable condition that it now is. He revealed that many high-achieving academics, most them mathematicians, engineers and physicists, functioned perfectly well in their chosen fields, although quite a few had problems in wider society. He argued that though those with Asperger’s Syndrome were often regarded as odd or unusual by their neural-normal colleagues and friends, it was wrong to demonise them. On the contrary, society should celebrate the fact that their abilities, which included often excellent memories, especially for facts, a liking for repetitive or routine work, and strong interests in systems analysis, were in high demand in the modern world. If all these positive attributes inevitably came with some negative aspects, most notably, a lack of social skills, including a sometimes shocking lack of tact and a brutal honesty, together with occasional disabling physical sensitivities, then that was a price society should be able to pay.

Thirteen years on, and two best-selling books later, Borat’s cousin has become a major academic guru in the field of autism studies, which has grown into a little cottage industry (see the catalogue of the publishers Jessica Kingsley and numerous online sites). Today, the annals of British achievement in the arts and sciences is being retrospectively raked over---with Bertrand Russell, Patricia Highsmith and Jonathan Swift-- emerging as Asperger’s candidates. Baron- Cohen’s most controversial book, The Essential Difference, which argues that male and female brains are wired differently, and that therefore it is possible for a female to have  a man’s brain, and vice versa, is required reading for anyone interested in transgender politics -- not an issue about which Borat himself would have had anything useful to say. [Thanks H]

I once met Francis Bacon

Not the essayist and improbable author of Shakespeare's plays, but the artist who yesterday broke the world record for highest sum ever achieved by an artist in auction.$142.2 million.

It must have been in the early 1980s, I had been viewing a book sale at Christies South Kensington ('CSK') in the days when they still had large lots of books in tea-chests and you would find the legendary Roger Elliott ('2 L's, 2 T's') and the writer /bouquiniste Alex Trocchi ploughing through them. I bumped into an old friend and he told me he was going to look at, and possibly buy, some precious stones at a sort of geology shop just off the King's Road. We made our way to his car through Reece Mews a cobbled street opposite the mighty auction rooms. Half way along we were hailed by an oldish but very lively man in what appeared to be a rubber mac, surmounted by a pleasing slightly waxy face - it was none other than the artist Francis Bacon who appeared to have lunched well and was on his way to his studio. We chatted for a moment and he asked us where we were going. We told him that we were off to buy some precious stones. Possibly he was about to invite us into his studio...however he replied 'So you're going abroad are you?' That was it. A slightly enigmatic remark. It seemed curious but it could be that, like Graham Greene, he took valuables with him when he went abroad to exchange or give as gifts - something practiced only by those with very long suits of cash.

Our colleague Martin Stone, guitar musician and book scout, met him a couple of times in Paris when he was working for Shakespeare & Co. He dined with him at the smart restaurant, next to the Whitman bookshop,  called La Bucherie. Martin reports that he was very good company- erudite, worldly and witty. Later at Reece Mews someone

made a fortune clearing a skip (dumpster) placed ouside  full of bits of half finished canvas, palettes and sketches..

See this Fortune article explaining why his tryptych of Lucian Freud made so much. It's basically about the rich getting richer.

I once met….Uri Geller

Sent in by a supporter of Jot for which many thanks...


It was in the spring of 2005 that I was dispatched to interview the great Spoon Bender himself. His assistant had given me an address in Sonning-on-Thames, that home of the more discerning glitterati. I found his place quite by chance. Well, you could hardly miss it. Glimpsed through trees at the end of a longish drive was a large and modern mansion of the Bishops Avenue School of architecture, complete with portico. There was also a pair of huge metal (unbent) gates flanked by brick pillars, one of which incorporated the inevitable entry phone. I phoned through, the gates opened slowly, and I started down the drive towards the house.

Geller himself answered the door--a slim, smiling figure with neat bouffant hair, greying slightly. He must have been in his late fifties but retained his boyish good looks. He guided me across the marble floor of an atrium that wouldn’t have disgraced the palace of a Hollywood A-lister. I looked for signs of spoons and there they were, all the cutlery he had deformed over the thirty or more years of his career, drooping from a dozen or more spray-painted skeletons of trees ranged around the walls in a parody of Santa’s grotto.

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I once met Jane Grigson

Sent in by faithful jotter R.M.Healey. My nearest thing to this was walking through Elizabeth David's hall past some serious antiquarian cookery  to get to the garret of her sister to buy some books. Belgravia?

I met the woman who has been called one of the greatest writers on food in the twentieth century in the early autumn of 1985. But I wasn’t so much interested in her own writings, but in her husband, the poet and critic Geoffrey Grigson, twenty three years her senior, who was slowly dying.

Earlier that year I had compiled a festschrift for Grigson’s 80th birthday and he had sent me a letter of thanks dictated by his daughter Sophie, who had not yet embarked on her own career as a TV chef and food journalist. At that time I hadn’t fully realised how ill he was (I think it was prostate cancer) because I plagued Jane with letters and phone calls begging to visit them both. Eventually, she relented and one weekday in October my girlfriend and I caught the coach from Victoria to Swindon.

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I once met….Bryan Forbes

It was in the summer of 1999 that the actor, screenwriter, director (Stepford Wives, Whistle Down the Wind, Séance on a wet Afternoon), turned crime writer, who died last May, had asked me to meet him at his second hand bookshop in Virginia Water.

It was an odd sort of shop—not the type one would come across in most provincial towns or indeed most parts of London. Here were no grubby leather-bound tomes in tottering piles, or cabinet of curiosities. I think it sold new as well as second books and indeed most volumes seemed to be of the twentieth century. I glanced around expecting to find rare books on golf or lawn tennis, classic American hard boiled thrillers or collections of recipes for cocktails.

But there no time to look further as Forbes appeared in person and we were soon speeding along in what was probably his Aston Martin to his home on the ultra- exclusive Wentworth estate. I only caught a glance of its exterior, but it seemed to be a huge and classic twenties film-star mansion, which it was, in the sense that Forbes later told me that as a young budding film star in the fifties he had bought it as a total wreck and had spent  many thousands of pounds doing it up. Something to admire, I thought.

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I danced with Wittgenstein

Almost everybody has met someone with a good story about someone well known that they had met - the 'I danced with a man, who danced with a girl, who danced with the Prince of Wales' phenomenon. Here is one just received about Wittgenstein - probably the greatest philosopher of the modern age.

One of our neighbours is a doctor in his 90s who remembers Wittgenstein at Guy's Hospital in the 1940s. He told me he had been recently invited to the unveiling of a new commemorative plaque recording Wittgenstein's time there but though fit and in excellent humour did not want to go to London.

Wittgenstein was working at Guy's Hospital as a  porter and was pointed out to him pushing a trolley. He was known to be some kind of genius and was working as a volunteer even though he was in his 50s. Sadly the doctor remembers nothing else about him. Online other  doctors from Guy's remember his skill at mixing ointment and his intense charisma. He was still working on the manuscript of Mathematik und Logik while there and through Dr R.T. Grant also became involved in valuable work on wound shock therapy. He was really more of a laboratory assistant than a porter but also was tasked with taking drugs to patients. My doctor friend says that Guy's at the time was pretty much run by Ward Sisters, persons who inspired awe and fear and it would be interesting to know what Ludwig's Ward Sister thought of him. The King's College site has a good piece on his time at the hospital - Portering and Philosophy.[D.O.]

I once danced with Ringo

Almost everybody has met someone with a good story about someone well known that they had met - the 'I danced with a man, who danced with a girl, who danced with the Prince of Wales' phenomenon. Here is one just received about Beatle Ringo Starr.The mention of Barbara Bach dates it in the early 1980s.

I got a minicab from Hammersmith to Heathrow and was chatting with the driver about Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists which he had read several times (I think I had a copy with me that I was going to read on the flight). As with so many other readers the book had radicalised him. He told me that he never called passengers 'Sir'. On that subject he mentioned that he had once driven Ringo Starr who told him he was the only driver he had ever had who did not call him 'Sir.'

Intrigued, I inquired about the great (and irascible) Fab Four drummer*. He had driven Ringo and Barbara Bach from London to a studio in Manchester. Ringo spent most of the journey rolling and smoking joints. At the end of the journey he gave my minicab driver a £100 tip, which he said was still the best tip that he had ever received...and he never called him 'Sir'!

*Of whom John Lennon said  when asked if Ringo was the best drummer in the world --"He's not even the best drummer in the Beatles..."

I once met Snoop Dogg

Winter, London,1997. It was at the Elbow Room in Notting Hill Gate, a bar and snooker hall. The occasion was  the Low, Howard, Spink advertising agencies  creative departments afternoon out and 'jolly.' Snoop Dogg was recording an interview with MTV - in the days when MTV was still cool. We noticed the rapper Snoop and his crew at the bar. His crowd  included his father who joined us admen in a game of pool. Being gentlemen and somewhat affeared of his entourage (blokes with big coats) we thought it best to let him win. He was in fact a good player and a very nice man known affectionately to all as 'Pops.' I also shook hands with Snoop Dogg (a soft, loose grip) and my boss insisted on having a picture of his dog ('Mr. Patch')  taken with the great man.  As I recall he was slightly mystified by this request but went along with it in good cheer.

Photo above is of Snoop with the late show-biz dog 'Lucky' not 'Mr. Patch.' Sent in by Damian - a longterm jotwatcher.

I nearly met….Mick Jagger

This is a new category -'I nearly met.' It could be very useful to future writers and biographers gathering info. Take it away Robin:

In fact, I nearly met him twice. About thirty years ago I was reliably informed that back in the late fifties, long before the Stones had been born, he and some mates used to practice in the front room of the home of our  neighbours, the Barton’s, in Woodland’s Park, a new housing estate in Joyden’s Wood, between Bexley and Dartford. I must have been about six at the time. The Bartons were our friends, but I knew nothing of rock music, or R & B, as Jagger and Richards would have called it.

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I once danced with…Lord Weinstock

We were sent this interesting reminiscence by a jotwatcher (thanks JWB). He points out that our 'I once met' posts depend on one having met a famous person. Many people have never met anyone famous - but almost everybody has met someone with a good story about someone well known that they had met - the 'I danced with a man, who danced with a girl, who danced with the Prince of Wales' phenomenon.* This greatly opens up the field so please  send more in...

I was at university with a guy who became an acclaimed professional cook. At one point in the late 1980s he was cooking for Lord Weinstock at his country mansion in Wiltshire. Lord Weinstock (1925-2002) was a billionaire entrepreneur and built the General Electric Company into one of Britain's leading industrial conglomerates. He remembers Lord W (a sort of Alan Sugar of his time but with much increased  sophistication) leaving for work some days in a private jet and then seeing him on the news addressing politicians in Europe and then seeing him chauffeured back up the drive in time for supper. He had a fine wine cellar and  was especially fond of Cheval Blanc vintages which he would drink with ice. I said this seemed like a faux pas and a waste of wine (red and £600+ a bottle)  but my culinary pal said that in matters of taste there were no rules and he couldn't possibly comment…

*What did he say? 'Topping floor!'

I once met…Dave Robinson

Sent in by a faithful jotter...an encounter with the mighty Dave Robinson of Stiff Records

It was the summer of 1979 and Stiff artistes—Wreckless Eric, Jona Lewie, and of course the Queen of Stiff, Lene Lovich, seemed to be everywhere. My neighbour in North Hertfordshire supplied marble fittings to the rich and famous. I occasionally helped him deliver these adornments locally. But this time we were going further afield---into trendy Battersea, where, according to my neighbour, a pop mogul called Dave Robinson wanted a marble bathroom delivered.

We arrived at the address, a large Victorian house which was in the process of being gutted. There were various people chatting in what looked like the sitting room. I didn’t recognise anyone who resembled Lene, but Eric, Ian Durie or Jona may have been there, as indeed could have been various members of Madness, who had yet to conquer the charts. At the time I don’t think I’d heard of Dave Robinson, but he was certainly present, and after we had struggled up the staircase with the various unwieldy stabs of marble, he duly signed the paperwork and we were off home.

My marble fittings neighbour was a crusty Tory in his early fifties, who, on the way back confided to me that he  thought Mick Jagger might dress smartly if he had wanted to impress someone like him. I think he was faintly proud that someone prominent in pop music had bought a bathroom suite from him. As for Mr Robinson, I sometimes wonder what he is doing now, 27 years on from the demise of his famous label. Can he still afford to live at that smart address in Battersea and if so do Suggs and Lene (who, incidentally is still touring) sometimes pop in for a chat.

I once met….Kenneth Griffiths

Younger movie goers may remember him as the irascible elderly wedding guest (‘ Don’t you think I know my own brother ?’ ) in Four Weddings and a Funeral but cineastes would prefer to see him as the enfant terrible of the British film industry, if you can call a man in his seventies, a child. Perhaps maverick is a better word. He wanted to make films of deeply controversial figures in history but often ran up against the usual stuffed shirts. He asked awkward questions about Britain’s imperial past, and about the British in Ireland. I had been invited to talk to him about his Boer War collection, but we ended up chatting about the time when the IRA came to tea.

He lived in a four story stuccoed Victorian house in Barnsbury called ‘Michael Collins House’. Griffith’s Boer War archive was huuuuuge. Said to be the largest of its kind in private hands, it occupied all four floors. Apparently Griffith’s interest had started when he worked in a stamp shop for a while and became interested in Boer War postmarks. It developed apace in 1952 when he went to South Africa to act with the Old Vic company and was taken around the battle sites by a friend.

In amongst the Boer War material were hundreds of books, pamphlets, prints and letters relating to the British radical tradition. Although a Protestant, the history of Irish nationalism was an abiding passion, which led to death threats from the UVF. He showed me the receipt he received for the postcard he sent to Bobby Sands before he died. In his 'Gladstone Corner' I saw a piece of one of trees that the great man used to cut down. When some IRA leaders came to tea one of them noticed a photo of Queen Victoria and remarked that she was 'a very interesting old lady'. However, the visitor 'was very uneasy with me from then on...' said Griffiths. [RMH]