Odd boy out, p.2
Odd Boy Out, page 2
With two others, Jeremiah was convicted of High Treason and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. The quartering – which involved the dissecting of the condemned individual while they were still alive – was commuted by a merciful Prince Regent. Jeremiah was hanged outside Derby Gaol on 7 November 1817; then his head was cut off with an axe.
Two hundred years after Jeremiah’s death, I travelled to Pentrich and retraced his footsteps. I handled the block on which he was beheaded. I even found what is believed to be his unmarked grave. I keep a portrait of him on the wall at home, a print of a picture painted at the time of his arrest: ‘Jeremiah Brandreth, the Nottingham Captain, a correct likeness’. He is wearing white trousers, a blue tunic and a black stovepipe hat; he has wistful brown eyes, a full dark beard, and a clay pipe in his mouth; his hands and feet are manacled. He was known as ‘the hopeless radical’. I feel he had a good heart.
Jeremiah was a working man. The original Gyles Daubeney was an aristocrat. I am middle class, as most of my family have been for the past two hundred years. Not upper middle class (none of my sisters were debutantes), not lower middle class (we never called a napkin a serviette), just bang-in-the-middle middle class. I have a detailed family tree going back to 1767 and, on my father’s side, the branches hang heavy with professional men (solicitors, doctors, accountants, stockbrokers, bank managers, civil servants) and their wives – all housewives, of course.
My only granddaughter, Isolde, born in 2007, finds this difficult to believe, but up until the early 1960s to be a housewife and mother was the accepted lot of the middle-class woman. Even in the mid-1980s, when Isolde’s mother (my daughter Aphra, destined to be an environmental economist and politician) was a little girl, there were mothers who brought their offspring to nursery school having already cooked and served their husbands a full English breakfast. I remember one of these young mums always had a glass of dry sherry ready poured, alongside a dish of home-made cheese straws, waiting on the hall side table for her husband when he came home from his hard day at the office. When we went to dinner parties with these people, the men were expected to wear black tie and, after pudding, the ladies would withdraw to chat in the hostess’s bedroom or the drawing room, while their menfolk stayed at table, enjoying their port, brandy and cigars. Amazingly, that was less than forty years ago.
Not every female in the family tree was a housewife. Eugénie de Montijo (1826–1920, née Kirkpatrick, my father’s grandfather’s second cousin) was the last Empress of France, as the wife of Napoléon III. She ended her days in exile, in Farnborough. As a little boy, just after the First World War, my father was taken to see her there. (By appointment, you can visit her tomb in the crypt of St Michael’s Abbey, Farnborough. It’s magnificent. I’m hoping for something along the same lines myself.)
Dame Louisa Brandreth Aldrich-Blake (1865–1925) was one of the first British women to enter the world of medicine and the very first to obtain the degree of Master of Surgery. You will find a bust of her in a corner of Tavistock Square, not far from the London hospital where she spent most of her working life.
My father’s first cousin, Beryl Dean (1911–2001), was an artist, costume designer and ecclesiastical embroiderer. Sometime head of the Royal School of Needlework, you can find her remarkable creations (part Modernist, part Byzantine) in churches (St George’s Chapel, Windsor), museums (the V&A) – and our kitchen. She had a round face like a pale full moon, which she covered with a heavy dusting of white powder. She was resolutely minded but softly spoken, and a bit of a genius – possibly the only member of the family whose work will stand the test of time.
Sometimes I imagine my life as a movie from the 1950s, with Cousin Beryl played by Margaret Rutherford. Beryl’s best friend in real life was Auntie Hope, my father’s sister – to be played by Peggy Mount. Auntie Hope’s husband, Uncle Wilfrid, was an actuary (whatever that is), and for him I’d cast either Raymond Huntley or Richard Wattis. My father (because I loved him) has to be played by John Le Mesurier with a touch of Terry-Thomas. My mother (I loved her, too) can be Hattie Jacques.
In the 1970s when Auntie Hope was dying of cancer (this is for real now), she did not know it. In those days, because the outcome for cancer patients was so poor, they were often not told their diagnosis. At home, the disease, if mentioned at all, was referred to, in hushed tones, as ‘you-know-what’ or ‘the big C’. Auntie Hope was growing thinner and weaker by the day. My father (who to the end of his days said his nightly prayers kneeling by his bedside) prayed for a miracle. The local vicar suggested my parents take matters into their own hands by joining him on the parish pilgrimage to Lourdes. My parents spent money they hadn’t got, and went. And there, in the little market town in the foothills of the Pyrenees, where in the 1850s the Virgin Mary was said to have appeared to the young St Bernadette, they found the shrine, pushed past the other pilgrims, many on crutches and in wheelchairs, and successfully collected a phial of holy water from the grotto’s spring and brought it back home in triumph.
Many miracles have been credited to Bernadette, and my parents returned to Auntie Hope’s bedside full of hope. Their plan was to administer the holy water to the dying woman and await the miracle. Their challenge was that they couldn’t tell Auntie Hope what they were doing, or why. Their solution was to give her a cup of coffee made with the Lourdes water.
When Auntie Hope died a few hours later, my father took up the matter with the vicar.
‘How did you get her to drink the holy water?’ asked the vicar.
‘We boiled it and mixed it with her Nescafé.’
‘You boiled it?’ wailed the clergyman. ‘You boiled it! You boiled away its efficacy, you fool. Of course, the poor lady died.’
Not long after Auntie Hope’s death, her widowed husband, Uncle Wilfrid, proposed to Beryl, his late wife’s first cousin and also her lifelong best friend. Cousin Beryl accepted. At the wedding reception my father – Hope’s brother, Wilfrid’s brother-in-law, Beryl’s cousin – was invited to propose a toast to the happy couple.
He did so, with a flourish, inviting the assembled guests to raise their glasses: ‘To Wilfrid and Beryl – and the triumph of experience over Hope!’
My father’s little jokes didn’t always quite come off. If Uncle Wilfrid didn’t appreciate this one, he did not show it. Wilfrid had a dry sense of humour, but did not give much away. As well as having a second wife called Beryl, he had a younger sister called Beryl, too. She had been a dancer and was married to the actor Arnold Peters, who starred in the TV ads for Werther’s Original Toffees and played Jack Woolley in The Archers for thirty-one years. They were a lovely couple – and totally straightforward. Uncle Wilfrid was straightforward, too, and sensible, and solvent. I think that’s why my father may have resented him. My father was straightforward (decent and honest), but he wasn’t always sensible, and I now realise that he was never solvent.
His life was ruined by money worries.
It’s a mistake to think that the middle classes are always well off. They aren’t. My father, a good man and a successful solicitor, died when he did – in 1981, aged seventy-one – because he had run out of funds. There were other reasons (that we will come to) but, essentially, he died when he did because he had reached the end of his rope and couldn’t hang on.
I got my first glimmer of his money worries when I was about eight. My mother’s mother had just died and my father took me with him to the undertakers to make the arrangements for her funeral.
‘We’re going to Kenyon’s,’ he announced, almost gleefully. ‘They did Queen Victoria’s funeral. They’re the biggest and the best – and they’re family.’
And they were. My father’s grandfather’s first cousin had married Etta Kenyon, granddaughter of the founder of the firm.
‘We’ll get a special price,’ said my father.
And we did. I remember the experience because it was both amusing and embarrassing at the same time.
The first thing my father said to the undertaker was, ‘We’re family, don’t you know? We get the family rate.’
The undertaker was baffled, but obliging.
My father then told one of his favourite jokes – the one about the preacher at the funeral who promised the congregation that on the Day of Judgement there would be a fearful reckoning, leading to much ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth’. From the back of the church, one of the congregation called out, ‘What about them that’s got no teeth?’ The preacher thundered back, ‘Teeth will be provided!’
My father had false teeth. He belonged to the generation that did. One summer holiday, I remember, he lost them swimming off the beach in Dinard. They were washed out of his mouth by a wave. Two German girls, holidaymakers, joined us in the search for them and, miraculously, after an hour of frantic paddling and diving, one of them found them. My father was overjoyed. ‘The Fräulein’s found my fangs!’ he cried, jubilantly waving them in the air for all to see. He was an odd mixture of stoic stiff-upper-lip and eccentric exuberance.
The undertaker at Kenyon’s chuckled at the jokes as he and my father leafed through the catalogue of coffins on offer, my dad joshing cheerily that – ‘at no extra cost, please – we’re family’ – we’d need one that was extra-large and possibly reinforced – because his mother-in-law had been ‘a big girl and heavy with it’ – and then, after much humming and hawing, like an awkward young man with a wine list, choosing the second-cheapest casket on the menu.
When my father died and I organised his funeral, I went to Kenyon’s, of course. I wanted to ask for the family rate, but I was young at the time and hadn’t the nerve. Now I’d be bolder. Now, too, I reckon I’d get a discount without flaunting my family connections.
These days, I earn much of my living on the public-speaking circuit, giving motivational talks and hosting awards ceremonies. For three years running, I am proud to say that I have hosted the British Funeral Directors Awards. It’s a surprisingly jolly event, usually held at the Royal Lancaster Hotel, off Lancaster Gate. It’s a little different from other awards ceremonies, because at the BFDA, when you come up to the stage to collect your prize you don’t then return to your seat with it. No. When you have been handed your trophy, you are expected to shuffle backwards to the rear of the stage, where the curtains part briefly and you disappear behind them. The organisers know what they’re doing. There are two big prizes at the end of the evening. One is for the Crematorium of the Year, known as the Crème de la Crem. The other is the Lifetime Achievement Award – for thinking outside the box.
My father only ever asserted his kinship with the Kenyons when death was in the air. At other times, he was much prouder of another, more prominent if less useful, member of the family: his grandmother’s nephew, George R. Sims. You have probably never heard of him, but only a century ago his was a household name.
George R. Sims (1847–1922) was a celebrated journalist (the thinking man’s Piers Morgan), a popular poet (the Pam Ayres of his day), a successful playwright (as prolific as Alan Ayckbourn – at one time he had four shows running in the West End simultaneously), a novelist (he wrote best-selling detective stories), a breeder of bulldogs, a lover of boxing, a devotee of the turf, a bon vivant and a gambler. He made a fortune (earning £150,000 in royalties and fees in a good year – the equivalent of several million in today’s money) and lost much of it on the gaming tables and at the racing track. He also lived in high style (a mansion in Regent’s Park; his own coach and six horses) and gave away a great deal of cash to charity.
He was a good man. He wrote extensively about the plight of the London poor and came up with practical projects to help improve hygiene and housing in the East End. His campaign to secure the pardon and release of a Norwegian, Alfred Beck, who had twice been imprisoned because of mistaken identity, led to the establishment, in 1907, of the Court of Criminal Appeal.
For forty-five years, without missing a single Sunday, he wrote his weekly newspaper column, called ‘Mustard and Cress’. According to the Times obituarist:
… so attractive and original was the personality revealed in his abundant output—for he was a wonderfully hard worker—that no other journalist has ever occupied quite the same place in the affections not only of the great public but also of people of more discriminating taste.
In London, Paris and New York, the great public flocked to the theatre to see his melodramas, comedies and romances. He wrote Christmas pantomimes for Drury Lane, and his dramatic and sentimental ballads were performed in music halls and domestic parlours across the Empire. His most famous was the one that begins:
It is Christmas Day in the Workhouse,
And the cold bare walls are bright
With garlands of green and holly,
And the place is a pleasant sight …
If you have heard of him at all it is probably because of that one line: ‘It is Christmas Day in the Workhouse’. It was because of the poem’s success that he was nominated to succeed Alfred, Lord Tennyson as Poet Laureate in 1892.
Fame is fickle. Today, almost nobody knows George R. Sims. When my father was a boy, everybody knew George R. Sims. And George R. Sims knew everybody – from the Prince of Wales to London’s most notorious criminals (he had a fascination bordering on obsession with the identity of Jack the Ripper), from Gilbert and Sullivan to Oscar Wilde. He was especially happy to have a friendship with the American writer Ambrose Bierce. GRS collected several of Bierce’s ‘diabolical’ definitions before they appeared in print.
Acquaintance (n.) A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
Bore (n.) A person who talks when you wish him to listen.
Love (n.) A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
Sims collected witty people. He also collected actresses. He was married three times and widowed twice. He was twenty-eight when he married Sarah Collis; she was twenty-six. He was forty-one when he married Annie Harris; she was twenty-eight. He was fifty-four when he married Florence Wykes; she was twenty-seven. GRS met Birmingham-born Florrie (‘this charming young brunette’, a ‘dashing little damsel’, according to The Sketch of 23 October 1901) when she was playing the principal soubrette in a Sims musical, El Capitan, ‘around the suburbs’. Their marriage lasted until his death in 1922.
Between marriages, GRS had an affair with another of his leading ladies, one of the most celebrated actresses of the age: Mrs Patrick Campbell – the original Eliza Doolittle in Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and the lady who described marriage as ‘the deep, deep peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise longue’. Mrs Pat (as she was known – her real name was Stella) had a way with words. Famously, when GRS introduced her to some of his homosexual friends, she remarked, ‘My dear, I don’t care what they do, so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.’
My father delighted in telling me tales of our celebrated cousin – his life, his loves, his many triumphs, and the occasional disaster. Sims invented a hair tonic he claimed could cure baldness. He called it Tatcho (an anagram of Chatto – the name of his publisher) and marketed it big time.
Mr Geo R. Sims’ TATCHO for the hair and lack of hair
Tatcho is a brilliant, spiritous tonic, the colour of whisky, free from all grease
In bottles, 1/-, 2/9d, and 4/6d, at Chemists and Stores around the world
Around the world, alas, despite endorsements from the likes of Lady Collins, Lady Sykes, and the US Consul General in Tangiers, the public did not respond as hoped, and Sims and his business partners lost a lot of money on the venture.
To mark my sixty-fifth birthday, in 2013, at considerable cost, my darling wife managed to procure me a vintage shilling bottle of Tatcho, ‘Mr George R. Sims’ miracle hair restorer’.
If you know what I look like, you will know it doesn’t work.
2. The Pill Man
George R. Sims – the man you’ve never heard of – has coloured my whole life. In some ways, I think my life has ended up being a paler version of his.
The man who coloured my father’s whole life is someone you’ve never heard of either – but he, too, was once a household name. Better than that, he was one of the richest men in the world.
Benjamin Daubeney was born on 23 June 1809 in the English village of Newtown in Derbyshire, just down the road from the home of the soon-to-be-beheaded Jeremiah Brandreth in Sutton-in-Ashfield. Benjamin was the son of William Daubeney and Ann Brandreth. According to family legend, the Catholic Daubeneys did not approve of the union between their William and a daughter of the renegade Protestant Quaker Brandreth family and refused to recognise it. As a consequence, William Daubeney quickly disappeared from the scene. Ann Brandreth found a new partner, by the humbler name of Holmes; and young Benjamin came to be brought up between the Holmes household in the Midlands and his maternal grandparents’ home in the North-West.
Benjamin’s maternal grandfather was one Dr William Brandreth, a physician from Liverpool with a large practice in the poorer parts of the city and a reputation as something of a miracle-working medicine man. Since the 1770s this Dr Brandreth had been mixing his own special preparation of herbs and vegetable substances that produced remarkable results when taken for severe cases of constipation, biliousness, and almost every other ailment known to man, woman or child. These were Brandreth’s Pills – containing aloes, gamboge, colocynth and sarsaparilla, apparently ‘among the most powerful cathartic cannon in the botanical armoury’ – and the foundation of the family fortune.
From the age of nine, young Benjamin was assisting his old grandfather in the mixing of the potent medicine. At thirteen, Benjamin was out and about selling Dr Brandreth’s pills to local apothecaries and grocery stores. At sixteen, he was as good as running the family business. At eighteen, on Christmas Eve 1827 (I mention the date because I think it will make an affecting snow-filled scene when the film comes to be made), he married his first wife, Harriet Smallpage. At nineteen, in 1828, he abandoned his stepfather’s name of Holmes, put his Daubeney name on the back burner, and became ‘Benjamin Brandreth’ and, by agreement with the rest of the family, the sole proprietor of all rights in Dr Brandreth’s pills.
