Hugo Williams’s latest collection is West End Final, which came out last year. His selection of Betjeman’s poetry has recently been reissued by Faber.
A downloadable PDF version of this article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
From Ross Hibbert
Arthur Askey did not shout ‘Wakey Wakey’, as Hugo Williams suggests (LRB, 15 April). He used to kick off his act with ‘Hello, playmates, how do you do?’ The Wakey Wakey man was the bandleader Billy Cotton, who might have come in useful at a line’s end somewhere in a poem about memory loss.
Ross Hibbert
Stoke-on-Trent
Vol. 26 No. 15 · 5 August 2004
From Hugo Williams
Ross Hibbert is quite right that it was Billy Cotton, not Arthur Askey, who shouted out ‘Wakey Wakey!’ (Letters, 22 July). Silly me. Hibbert might have picked up another howler in the same poem, ‘All the Cowboys’ Horses’. It was, of course, Alan Ladd and not James Stewart who starred in Shane.
Hugo Williams
London N1