Odd boy out, p.19
Odd Boy Out, page 19
Sunday, 30 April 1961
This is my last term at Betteshanger! A new system has been devised for the servers and leaders, starting this term. There are only going to be three boys who have any authority in the school and they are Webster, Wallace and myself. We are in charge downstairs, in the corridors, in the changing rooms, etc. We are the only boys who can use the head boy’s stairs, leading straight from the dorms down to outside Mr Stocks’ study, and we are to be given a special tie – maroon with a silver stripe. (They haven’t been bought yet.) A few boys object a little to me being made 2nd head boy as they were much senior last term and I wasn’t even a probationer server then, but all is well. I am allowed now to go to bed at last bed-bell which is at 8.30 p.m. (In the summer all bells are twenty minutes later than in winter.) My dorm is Brackenbury, where I was my first term, and there are ten boys: Bornoff (naughty), Tuckett ii (naughty), Burns (good), Anderson (naughty), Demery (good), Yeats ii (fair), Read (fair), Donald (fair) and Coackley (naughty) – and me. At first they were dreadful, but now they are behaving much better. The school play is going to be Twelfth Night and I am to be Feste the jester. Mr Glading is pleased because I shall have two songs (‘O mistress mine, where are you roaming?’ and ‘When that I was and a little tiny boy’) and he will be accompanying me!
Saturday, 27 May 1961
President Kennedy has announced that the Americans are going to land a man on the moon before the end of the decade – and I am not doing any art until I have done my CEE [Common Entrance exam]. I am doing extra Latin instead! I have learnt my lines for Feste and rehearsals are going well, but I have a lot of CEE work to do – history, science, geography, scripture, French, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, etc.! I am using the turquoise ink that Mr Glading has given me. I like it. And I am practising my signature. I can’t decide between ‘G. D. Brandreth’ and ‘Gyles Brandreth’. (Should my stage name be ‘Gyles Daubeney’?) I had tea with Mr Glading in his room. I sat on the bed. T.
Sunday, 18 June 1961
Twelfth Night has been and gone and I survived! I thought I wasn’t going to. My voice was half-gone. I was croaking badly, but the show must go on – and it did. Everyone seemed pleased and liked my black-and-white jester’s costume with cap and bells. Common Entrance is tomorrow!!! There has been a bad train accident in France with 24 people killed.
Friday, 30 June 1961
Two important things to report. 1. My Common Entrance done and dusted, I am now definitely going to go to Bedales, which is what I hoped. This is good news. 2. Not such good news. Mr Warren [the games master] walked me round the gravel path this afternoon and asked me about Mr Glading. He asked lots of questions. Lots. I said nothing. I said there was nothing to say. I think he believed me. (TTIHLM. IDM. INTBL.fn3)
Saturday, 15 July 1961
On Thursday we had the choir outing to Folkestone and, as on all my previous choir outings, it rained! We ate our packed lunches in the bus and then groups of boys set off, each with 8/6d in his pocket to find some form of entertainment. A lot went to see a film, Sink the Bismarck!, which is showing with When Comedy Was King (with Charlie Chaplin & Co.) which Pa and I saw together and enjoyed. Others saw VIP with James Robertson Justice, which is also meant to be extremely good and very funny. I, however, confined myself to looking around the shops and spent nothing! I shall go home with 30/- savings at the end of term.
Yesterday, le quatorze juillet, in the dining room on the French table at lunch we had a really gay meal, with, besides our school fish, tomato salad, cheese, fruit and WINE. The wine was Spanish! Vive la France! (On the French table everyone has to speak French.)
Mr Glading is leaving at the end of term.
Monday, 24 July 1961
My last Sports Day. I ran – as fast as I could. (Not fast enough!) I did the relay – and didn’t drop the baton. It was a sunny day. Ma and Pa came with all the other parents. Mr Burton asked Ma to present the prizes, which was an honour. Tonight I am going home. Goodbye Betteshanger. I will not miss Mr Warren, the gym, the changing rooms (they smell!), PT, cricket, etc. but I will miss Mr and Mrs Stocks, Mr and Mrs Burton, Major and Mrs Douch, Colonel Thomas, Miss Loewen, Willy Wardale [who ran the school tuck shop and general stores], the Art Room, the chapel, the boiler room, the Dutch Garden, the church. Lots in fact. This is the end of an era! ‘Come, come! No time for lamentation now, / Nor much more cause … Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new!’
13. Oscar Wilde and friends
My next school wasn’t Eton (founded 1440) or Winchester (1382), it was a place called Bedales, not as old or as eminent, though just as expensive (poor Pa), and very different – it had girls.
Bedales was founded in 1893 and became famous – notorious, even – as Britain’s first independent co-educational boarding school. ‘They eat their meals side by side’ marvelled the headline in one of the early articles about the school, whose aim was to be everything the English public school wasn’t (no beatings, no fagging, no bullying, no buggery), and whose ethos had a distinct egalitarian, Arts and Crafts, till-the-soil flavour to it. ‘Work of each for the weal of all’ was the school’s motto. Oscar Wilde sent his eldest son to Bedales.
The school’s founder, John Badley, was a disciple of William Morris, a Christian Socialist, with a first-class degree from Cambridge, married to a committed suffragette (who was a cousin of both Millicent Fawcett and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson), a man of ambition and progressive principles, abstemious (he neither drank nor smoked), tall, bearded, quietly spoken, but a natural leader. Even when he was young, around the school he was known as ‘the Chief’.
Mr Badley was born in 1865 and died, aged one hundred and one, in 1967. I knew him quite well. It’s because I knew him that I can say I have shaken the hand that shook the hand that wrote The Importance of Being Earnest. It’s one of my proudest boasts. And I shook Mr Badley’s hand almost on my first day at Bedales, in September 1961. One of the school’s traditions is that, after evening assembly, all the staff line up and as the children file out (there were 240 of us in my day), each pupil shakes hands with every teacher and says goodnight to them by name. The Chief was in the line-up because, though now in his mid-nineties and long-retired as headmaster, after his wife’s death, he had come to live in a bungalow attached to the sanatorium in the school grounds.
I got to know him because I played the board game Scrabble. Invented in America in 1948, Scrabble came to Britain in 1953, and was an instant Brandreth family favourite. As a child, I played thousands of games of Scrabble with my mother and my sister Ginny. In 1971, I founded the National Scrabble Championships. Later, I became a director of J. W. Spear & Sons, the company that made Scrabble. Later still, I was involved in selling the Scrabble brand to the global games giant Mattel. (That’s how I came to meet Barbie, by the way – yes, the original Barbie, daughter of Ruth Handler who created the Barbie doll and sold her to Mattel. I met the real Ken, too – in real life, Barbie’s brother, and … okay, another time. The point is: I have shaken hands with the guys who gave their names to the best-selling dolls of all time.) To this day, I am the proud president of the Association of British Scrabble Players.
Because I played Scrabble and talked about it at school (I was still talking too much), on alternate Wednesday afternoons during term-time I was sent to play Scrabble with the Chief. (Every other Wednesday, a more studious boy called Adam played chess with him. Adam, a nice guy who wore horn-rimmed glasses and was a bit of a loner, also played the double bass and, famously, was once caught in a sexual frenzy humping his double bass case in one of the school’s music practice rooms – but that’s another story …) I enjoyed these Wednesday Scrabble afternoons with the Chief (they continued for five years), even though I’m quite competitive and he won almost every game. His housekeeper, Anne, sat with us and kept the score. I think she cooked the books, but since she also cooked the scones, I didn’t argue.
I did sometimes protest. ‘You can’t play that, Chief.’
‘Why not? “Yex” is a perfectly good word. It means a small belch or a hiccup. And I’ve got the X on a triple-letter score, do you see?’
‘I do see – and I don’t like it. You’ve played it before, Chief.’
‘It’s one of my favourite words.’
‘I know it is, Chief. I’ve looked it up.’
‘It’s in the dictionary, isn’t it?’
‘It is, Chief – but the dictionary says it’s obsolete.’
‘It was current when I learnt it, Gyles.’
I loved taking tea with a man whose vocabulary was formed in the 1860s, in the heyday of Disraeli and Gladstone, when Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was Poet Laureate. I loved knowing a real Victorian who had been a friend of Oscar Wilde. We talked about Wilde a lot. I remember particularly a teatime not long after Winston Churchill had died, in January 1965. We had lemon sponge cake with butter icing and the Chief said that Churchill was the greatest Englishman of our time: ‘He possessed the cardinal virtue, courage.’ According to Mr Badley, Churchill’s speeches during the Second World War were more than brilliant pieces of well-crafted oratory: ‘They were expressions of courage that got into the national bloodstream and gave us courage, too.’
I asked him who were the greatest speakers he had heard in his long lifetime – he had been born a decade before Churchill. He said Sir Winston, David Lloyd George, and his personal friend, the Indian poet, Nobel laureate and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore. The Chief liked to quote Tagore: ‘You cannot cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.’
He liked to quote Bernard Shaw as well (he had known him, too): ‘Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.’
I told the Chief my favourite Wilde witticism: ‘After a good meal one can forgive anyone – even family.’
He told me his: ‘Murder is always a mistake. A gentleman should never do anything he cannot talk about at dinner.’
I said that I had read somewhere that Bernard Shaw described Oscar Wilde as ‘the greatest talker of his time − perhaps of all time’.
The Chief said that Shaw was right – but that Wilde was a conversationalist, not an orator. He also told me that much of Oscar’s famous ‘wit’ wasn’t spontaneous. It was worked on, rehearsed and studied. He recalled staying at a house party in Cambridge with Oscar and travelling back with him to London by train. Assorted fellow guests came to the station to see them on their way. At the moment the train was due to pull out, Wilde, standing at the carriage window, delivered a wonderful farewell quip, then the guard blew the whistle and waved his green flag, the admirers on the platform cheered, Oscar sank back into his seat and the train moved off. Unfortunately, it only moved a yard or two before juddering to a halt. The group on the platform gathered again outside the compartment occupied by Oscar and Mr Badley.
Oscar hid behind his newspaper and hissed at the Chief, ‘You talk to them now. They’ve had my parting shot. I only prepared one.’
The Chief told me that the reason why Oscar was such a wonderful conversationalist was that ‘he could listen as well as talk’. The Chief said, ‘Wilde always put himself out to be entertaining. He was a delightful person, charming and brilliant, with the most perfect manners of any man I ever met. Because of his imprisonment and disgrace he is seen nowadays as a tragic figure. That should not be his lasting memorial.’
But, of course, it is. It is impossible to view Oscar now except through the prism of his downfall. In 1895, when he was forty, at the height of his fame and fortune, and madly in love with Lord Alfred Douglas, ‘beautiful Bosie’, then twenty-four, Lord Alfred’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, left a card at Oscar’s club accusing him of ‘posing somdomite’.fn1 Urged on by Bosie, Wilde sued the Marquess for criminal libel, but it all went horribly wrong. Queensberry had a raft of rent boys waiting in the wings, ready to spill the beans about their wild nights with Oscar – some of them as young as sixteen. Wilde’s libel action collapsed. He could have fled the country, but for some reason – madness, or arrogance, or because his mother said she would never speak to him again if he did? – he stayed to face the music. He was arrested, charged and, at his second trial, found guilty, and then, on 25 May 1895, sentenced to the severest sentence the law allowed: two years’ imprisonment with hard labour.
In 1962, I read all about this for the first time in Pa’s copy of Famous Trials: Oscar Wilde. I relished the courtroom exchanges between Wilde and Queensberry’s counsel, Edward Carson QC.
Mr Carson: Do you drink champagne yourself?
Oscar Wilde: Yes. Iced champagne is a favourite drink of mine − strongly against my doctor’s orders.
Mr Carson: Never mind your doctor’s orders, sir.
Oscar Wilde: I never do.
It was gripping stuff. And heartbreaking, too. Overnight Oscar lost everything: his home, his children, his income, his reputation. For my fourteenth birthday, on 8 March 1962, I asked for a copy of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde and when the book arrived I set out to read it from cover to cover – yes, all 1,118 pages. I can’t have understood much, but I loved the language and learnt by heart his Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, including: ‘Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.’ Inside the book to this day is the faded green carnation I pressed between its pages on my birthday all those years ago.
This was the beginning of my lifelong fascination with Oscar Wilde. In the early 1970s, when I started producing plays professionally, one of the first I put on was a stage adaptation of The Trials of Oscar Wilde. Tom Baker played Wilde. This was after he had played Rasputin in the film Nicholas and Alexandra, and before his success as Doctor Who. I thought Tom was quite mad: he turned up for a month-long season in Oxford without any luggage, except for a toothbrush, and he looked like Harpo Marx, but he had a wonderful voice and a commanding presence, and the play worked, sort of. Later I did an audio version of The Trials with my friend Martin Jarvis, the best voice actor in the world, playing Wilde – and everybody else. Later still, I did a two-man version of The Trials in which I played Wilde and my son, Benet, then a young barrister himself, played Carson and the other lawyers. I introduced the performance, telling the audience my story of meeting Mr Badley at Bedales, explaining that I’d shaken the hand that shook the hand of Oscar Wilde.
From behind me, Benet piped up: ‘Can I say something, Dad?’
‘Yes.’
‘I had a tutor at Cambridge who, when he was very young, had had an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, so I can say I’ve shaken the hand that shook the hand that shook …’
The rest of his line was lost in laughter and applause.
I have known and become friends with most of the noted actors who have played Wilde in our time: Robert Morley, Donald Sinden, Vincent Price, Stephen Fry, Rupert Everett, Corin Redgrave, Nickolas Grace, Simon Callow, Gerard Logan. I remember interviewing Sir Michael Gambon once.
‘I shouldn’t do interviews,’ he growled at me from the corner of his dressing room, ‘because I don’t believe in them and I can’t be trusted.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. Years ago, when I did Oscar Wilde on the telly, a lad from the Birmingham Post asked me if I found it difficult playing the part of a homosexual. “No,” I said, “it comes to me quite easily. I used to be one.” The boy said, “Oh, really?” And I said, “Yes, but I was forced to give it up.” He didn’t look at me. He just scribbled away. Eventually, he said, “May I ask why?” And I replied, “It made my eyes water.” He didn’t get the joke. He didn’t know it was a joke.’
Of all the Wildes I have known, Micheál Mac Liammóir was the most hypnotic. Mac Liammóir was a phenomenon. Born Alfred Willmore in Kensal Rise in London in 1899, he reinvented himself as an Irishman and moved to Dublin where he founded the Gate Theatre with his partner, Hilton Edwards. In 1973, five years before he died, I asked him to come over to Oxford to take part in a gala fund-raiser that I put on at the Oxford Playhouse. I went to collect him from his room at the hotel and, though we had never met before, he treated me as if I’d been working for him all my life. ‘Ah, dear boy, there you are. Now …’ I helped him to tighten his truss. He could not have done it unaided. He looked like an ageing Pierrot on steroids. In broad daylight he was wearing full stage make-up: powdered face, mascara, lipstick – and an improbable wig that was too small for his domed head. For his fifteen-minute scene, he had insisted on bringing his own carpet with him from Dublin – he needed it, he said, so that he could find his way around the stage. He did a sequence from his one-man show, The Importance of Being Oscar, and his evocation of Wilde was a wonder to behold. There really was a strange magic in the air. Afterwards, in the wings, he held on to me, shaking with nervous energy, sweating profusely, but so happy – ‘So happy, dear boy!’ – that it had gone so well.
Over the years, I have edited collections of Wilde’s essays and fairy tales, and several compilations of his wit – some of which was studied (as Mr Badley showed me), but much of which was spontaneous. In court, under duress, he was questioned about a male brothel he had visited in Little College Street, in Westminster. Asked if he regarded Little College Street as ‘a respectable address’, he replied at once, ‘Perhaps not. It is very near the Houses of Parliament.’ In the 1990s, when I was an MP, my favourite place to be in the Palace of Westminster was the House of Commons Library – three long, high-ceilinged, book-lined rooms overlooking the River Thames. In those days we still had occasional all-night sittings in the Commons, and I would pass the time between votes in the library’s third room, the Quiet Room, where the non-political books were kept and where, usually, the only other occupants were the lean and hungry Peter Mandelson MP, New Labour’s Nosferatu, and a sozzled and shambling Old Labour lag who appeared to have no home to go to and spent his nights asleep (and snoring) on one of the Quiet Room’s green leather sofas. (When I became a government whip in the mid-1990s, I discovered there were two or three MPs with money, drink and marital problems who regularly managed to find nooks and crannies within the Palace of Westminster to doss down for the night.)
