Macaroni Cheese by Wilfred Pickles

Wilfred Pickles and his wife Mabel

From "As We Like it" Recipes by Famous People edited  by Kenneth Downey  (Arthur Barker, London 1950.)  There is much mention of rationing as in this recipe from Wilfred Pickles. Rather forgotten today but at one point his shows on BBC Radio and TV attracted millions. He also appeared as the grumpy father in Billy Liar (1963).

Macaroni

Here is the recipe I promised you: in these days of shortage of meat this is a recipe which is easy to make and all of the food is unrationed.

First, steam some macaroni in a pressure cooker for 10 minutes, then make a white sauce with grated cheese. Put this cheese sauce over the macaroni, fry some rings of onions crisp, grill some tomatoes and serve with hot, dry toast. And by gum it's grand!

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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Political and Royal gossip 1920s

Lady Elvery by William Orpen

A good letter, over 20 closely written pages. Indiscreet, gossipy ('The Prince of Wales was blotto..') from the inner circles of power and privilege in the mid 1920s. The recipent was Beatrice Elvery, Lady Glenavy (1881 - 1970). Irish artist and literary host, friend of Katherine Mansfield and friend of Shaw, Lawrence and Yeats. She modelled for Orpen and painted 'Éire' (1907) a landmark painting promoting the idea of an independent Irish state. The letter is from her husband Charles Henry Gordon Campbell, 2nd Baron Glenavy (1885–1963) politician and banker in England and Ireland.

Quite a good little show at the Londonderry's the other night. Great strong retainers at the door in short kilts of the Stewart tartan created an atmosphere of sex appeal, much fortified by the magnificent bosoms of the Marchioness Curzon which are said to have only reached their full bloom for the first time this season.

Eire by Beatrice
Elvery (1907)

The white face of Elinor Glynn, a a long green velvet gown, made our RC aboriginals visibly insecure: her walk is so sensuous as to suggest unimagined pleasures in love and is enhanced by some minor pelvic obstruction which necessitates a few swings with the right leg before she can take a step. Her daughters, married to a pair of peers or better, offer a pleasant contrast of blackheads and anaemia. Lady Jowett was escorted by Eddie Marsh who is still holding up wonderfully together...........We bumped into Gladys Cooper fresh from the theatre in full make up, on Londonderry's arm and a bodyguard of four young men........

On asking Lady Jowett how she explained Baldwin's remaining in public life she said the Baldwin family had a firm hold on the British public's imagination ever since she said, when asked whether she found it (illegible) to have so many children imposed upon her by her husband that 'each time she closed her eyes and thought of England'...........

On Friday McGilligan, Hogan and Fitzgerald went to dinner with the King. Everything gold including the forks.

But the king forgot it was Friday: the soup was a meat soup so the R.C's couldn't eat it and in the end, after a huge long dinner all they had was a bit of sole. a few peas and an ice cream. They rushed back here at midnight and gorged themselves on rolls and butter and tea. They said the Prince of Wales was blotto........

[Later he goes to a party at Buckingham Palace and his take on the queen's breasts is hilarious....  He spends a lot of time with Mark Gertler and Mary Hutchinson. The letters ends on a scrap of 'Irish Free State Delegation' paper.] I am writing to keep myself awake while Ramsay Macdonald meanders on about things he doesn't understand.....

The Grosvenor House Ice Rink

Best known as the venue for the most prestigious antiques fair in the world, the Great Room of London’s Grosvenor House Hotel (opened 1929) began life as a vast ice rink, where the rich and famous refined their skating skills. It is said that in 1933 the present Queen learned how to skate here. She must have been around the same age as some of the little girls being taught the basics by their elegantly dressed coach in this press photo dated 18th September 1931.

Unfortunately, under pressure from rival (and probably cheaper) establishments in the metropolis, the Grosvenor House Ice Rink was forced to close in 1935, after just six years of use. The space was then used as a grand ballroom, and afterwards as a conference venue. However, all the refrigeration machinery was left in situ underneath the present floor, where it can still be inspected.

Vincent Price sees a ghost..

Found in an anthology of  supernatural encounters by the famous - I Saw a Ghost edited by Ben Noakes (Weidenfeld, 1986)- this account by Vincent Price.

On 15 November 1958 I had an extraordinary glimpse of the unknown  whilst on a flight between Hollywood to New York   I was immersed in a book**  for most of the journey, but at one point, glanced idly out of the window.  To my horror I saw huge, brilliant letters emblazoned across a cloud bank spelling out the message "TYRONE POWER  DEAD".  it was a terrific shock, I began to doubt my senses when I realised that nobody else on the plane appeared to have seen them, but for a few seconds they were definitely there, like huge teletype, lit up with blinding light from within the clouds.  When I landed in New York I was told that Tyrone Power, had died (suddenly) a couple of hours earlier.

**In one account the book is a classic French novel - which might explain something. Also worth noting is that Power was a close friend of Price. The book bears a presentation to the artist Ronald Searle from Noakes. RS contributes a similar piece about being woken up in the South of France  by Laura West Perelman the late wife of his friend Sid Perelman (and sister of Nathaniel West) who announces to him 'Sid is Dead' - the next morning he receives a call telling him that Perelman had been found dead in his hotel room in New York during that same night.

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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Melly on Savile 1980

George Melly jazzman, writer and critic wrote about the now disgraced DJ Jimmy Savile in the book The Media Mob (Collins 1980) which was illustrated by Barry Fantoni. Melly was no fool and even something of a cynic but this encomium shows just how deeply Savile duped everybody...

He doesn't really do anything, he just is. The lock of inappropriate dyed hair over the craggy, patently heterosexual face, the eccentric but meaningless clothes, the cigar, the parrot cries of 'Howzabout about that guys'n gals', the flat Yorkshire accent:  none of it should add up and yet somehow it does. The reason, I believe, is that Savile  is that rarest of all human creatures, genuinely good right through, a kind of bizarre saint. He is genuinely odd, too, with big cars and his job as a hospital porter and his passion for physical endurance tests. But his goodness is manifest; people respond to it automatically.

At the same time George has this to say of the astronomer Patrick Moore for whom there was an outpouring of sentiment when he left the planet last year...

...tie awry, hair crackling electricity, he sprays out words at the speed of light as though attempting to bridge the vast and silent interstellar spaces which are his province..he reminds me of a werewolf just beginning to feel the effect of the full moon… I have never read a kindly word about [him].

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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The model for the Phantom of the Opera’s girl

It is now generally accepted that the Swedish diva Christine Nillson, afterwards Duchess de la Miranda ( 1843 – 1921), was the model for the Phantom’s lover, Christine Daee in Gaston Laroux’s novel The Phantom of the Opera (1910). Both figures have biographical facts in common—both were Swedish blondes with blue eyes, both sang at country fairs in Sweden to provide money for their parents and both trained in Paris.

During her brilliant career touring Europe as one of the greatest sopranos of her age—a direct rival of the Italian Adeleina Patti — Nillson must have sung before Laroux in Paris at least once, and the novelist, like so many other men of the time, was doubtless in thrall to her wonderful bel canto voice and Nordic physical beauty.

In 1887 Nillson married her second husband (Count Casa Miranda) and soon afterwards retired, to become one of the best known celebs in Europe. The undated, rather effusive letter to ‘Mrs Kennard’-- probably the now forgotten ‘horsey’ novelist ( a sort of late Victorian Jilly Cooper )--Mrs Edward Kennard ( 1850 - 1936 ) post-dates 1895, when the Hotel Metropole in Brussels opened its doors. As the singer mentions having recently stayed at this ultra exclusive resort of the rich and famous (both then and now), and as she was writing  to Kennard from the swanky Grand Hotel in Menton on the French Riveira, it seems likely that  post- retirement, she was still a very wealthy woman. [RH]

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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A Mussolini Howler

Mussolini by Marinetti

From a book of  of schoolboy howlers collected by Colin McIlwaine and published in London in 1930. Most howlers are short and many are online already ('a polygon is a dead parrot') , some rather odd ('A Molecule is a girlish boy') and some very silly ('The highest peak in the Alps is Blanc Mange'.) This is the last entry in the book and one of the longer howlers.

Mussolini is an ugly man. He wears the shirt of the Madonna, and when he smiles he makes people weep. He has been killed four times. The first time they wounded him in the nose, the second time in the forehead, but he himself they never wounded. He is a phenomenon, a thing that comes only once in 1000 years. He hardly ever sleeps, but shuts his eyes for 10 minutes, then goes and has a good wash and returns to work as fresh as a rose. He is a man of mystery. He can do everything and knows everything and loves playing the saxophone with his family. Galileo was charged with High Treason because he said that Mussolini moved round the sun, and not the sun around Mussolini.

Winston Churchill book lover and painter

With the 50th anniversary of Churchill's death in 2015 there will be  celebrations and (possibly) an exhibition of his paintings. Churchill, while not leading the free world, was something of an amateur painter. His paintings have become valuable.

He wrote a book called Painting as a Pastime (Odhams, London 1948) of which his daughter Mary (Soames) said: "it is pure enchantment to read, throbbing as it does with enthusiasm and encouragement to others to seize brush and canvas and have a go, as Winston himself had done before, when, under the flail of misfortune, he had discovered in painting a companion with whom he was to walk for the greater part of the long years which remained to him." This quotation from his book is not about painting but about books:

If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them – peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.

Churchill's own books are heavily collected and he obviously had a good working library. He probably did not have time for book collecting but certainly he had the right attitude about books.

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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The Table Talk of T.S. Eliot

Eliot was at a fashionable dinner party of London intellectuals where the conversation was rather stilted because everybody felt they had to say something profound in front of the great man (who said very little.) Eventually after an awkward silence the wife of an academic complained about her high electricity bills. The other guests were a little shocked that such trivial matter was being discussed, however Eliot suddenly came to life. "Are you on the night tariff?" he asked the woman and proceeded to discourse knowledgeably about reducing household bills.

Another instance where Eliot succeeded in flummoxing high minded intellectuals was at the Wednesday Club in 1956 - the writer Paul Bloomfield reported the following. Asked for his favourite passage of English prose, the great poet at once replied, assisting his performance with the appropriate gestures:

'Well,' cried Boss McGinty at last, 'is he here? Is Birdy Edwards here?' 
'Yes,' McMurdo answered slowly, 'Birdy Edwards is here. I am Birdy Edwards.' 

After a bemused silence, in which none knew, or cared to admit they knew, the source, Eliot pleasantly revealed it: Conan Doyle's The Valley of Fear.