Vol. 34 No. 1 · 5 January 2012
pages 37-39 | 6522 words
Diary
Alan Bennett
6 January. The alterations we have been having done are now pretty much finished, thanks to Max, a young Latvian who’s unsmiling but an excellent carpenter and Eugene, much jollier and from New Zealand who has supervised it all. Walking round the job this evening R. is shocked to discover in the bathroom above the bath a crudely made wooden cross. He takes this to be the work of Max who, scarcely out of his teens, already has two children and is, I imagine, Catholic. R., whose feelings about religion are more uncompromising than mine, finds the cross disturbing and is determined to ask Eugene to tell Max to take it down. I’m less exercised by it, seeing it as some sort of dedication, the sort of thing (though more crude) that a medieval workman might have put up at the completion of a job. We are both of us wrong as when Eugene is approached he explains it is not a cross at all but a makeshift coathanger he has rigged up over the bath in order to dry his anorak.
Alan Bennett’s Diary for 2011, which appears in the issue dated 5 January 2012, is now online for subscribers. In this podcast he reads extracts.
Letters
Vol. 34 No. 2 · 26 January 2012
From Bernard Richards
Alan Bennett reminisces about the ‘arrangements’ by ‘someone (first name forgotten) Hartley’ (LRB, 5 January). It was Fred Hartley (1905-80), who also published under the name ‘Iris Taylor’. He was appointed head of BBC Light Music in 1946. You can hear him on the British Light Music Classics Series, though I ought to be wary about publicising this, since one of those tasteless sparks who choose the music for Essential Classics on Radio 3 might decide to slap one of these vile concoctions slap bang next to a movement from a Beethoven sonata, say, or a snippet of Missa Solemnis.
Bernard Richards
Brasenose College, Oxford
From Patrick Renshaw
Alan Bennett misunderstood the few minutes he heard of the 29 August Prom devoted to Hollywood music. When MGM sold some of its real estate in the late 1960s all the original scores of its musicals were destroyed. The music he heard that night has been resurrected by John Wilson, who spent a year watching the films over and over so that he could painstakingly reconstruct the original scoring. He would spend a whole weekend on just four bars. To equate this with what Fred Hartley used to do for the Palm Court Orchestra on the Home Service every Sunday night belittles Wilson’s remarkable achievement.
Patrick Renshaw
Sheffield
From Keith Johnson
I was very pleased to read Alan Bennett’s thoughtful mention of the passing of the great British trumpeter, Maurice Murphy. Murphy was one of the greatest trumpeters of the last hundred years. Recognition of his artistry extended far beyond the fame he acquired for his performance of the trumpet solo in Star Wars. His passing was mourned around the world, not only by those of us who are members of the professional trumpet community, but by many who listen to and love great orchestral playing.
Keith Johnson
University of North Texas, Denton
From John Amson
Alan Bennett tells us that in the TLS review of Ian Kershaw’s The End there is a picture of Goebbels, during an inspection of the Volkssturm in Silesia in 1945, ‘shaking hands with Willi Hübner, a child of 16’, who happens to be standing next to a Peter Cook lookalike, also in the Volkssturm. In my copy of The End the only picture of Goebbels and the Volkssturm shows a wide street on a very rainy day in Berlin on 12 November 1944, and a long column of middle-aged men parading past the dais, months before the battle of Lauban in Silesia in March 1945. However, in Antony Beevor’s Berlin: The Downfall 1945, there is a picture identical to the one you reproduced, which shows the same smiling Goebbels decorating ‘a Hitler Youth after the recapture of Lauban’, but we are not told the name or age of the child standing next to ‘Peter Cook’. How did Alan Bennett or the TLS know the name and age of that child?
John Amson
Anstruther, Fife
Vol. 34 No. 3 · 9 February 2012
From Jane Morris
Alan Bennett writes in his Diary about an RAF Whitley returning from a raid over Dortmund that had to make an emergency landing near Austwick in Yorkshire (LRB, 5 January). The pilot of the plane was Leonard Cheshire’s younger brother, Christopher, whom my husband met when he was writing a biography of Leonard. His airfield was Middleton St George, but they overshot it and became lost, flying on until the fuel tanks were nearly dry. He had to take a chance, found a field and glided down into it. He recalled how the aircraft rolled to a stop just a few feet from the dry-stone wall at the field’s end. That was in 1941. In August that year he was shot down, taken prisoner and became a member of the team that organised the Great Escape.
Jane Morris
Harrogate
