Five Poems

Letters

Vol. 26 No. 14 · 22 July 2004

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