Odd boy out, p.41
Odd Boy Out, page 41
What can we do? We must live out our lives. [A pause] Yes, we shall live, Uncle Vanya. We shall live all through the endless procession of days ahead of us, and through the long evenings. We shall bear patiently the burdens that fate imposes on us. We shall work without rest for others, both now and when we are old. And when our final hour comes, we shall meet it humbly, and there beyond the grave, we shall say that we have known suffering and tears, that our life was bitter. And God will pity us. Ah, then, dear, dear Uncle, we shall enter on a bright and beautiful life. We shall rejoice and look back upon our grief here. I have faith, Uncle, fervent, passionate faith. We shall rest. We shall rest. We shall hear the angels. We shall see heaven shining like a jewel. We shall see evil and all our pain disappear in the great pity that shall enfold the world. Our life will be as peaceful and gentle and sweet as a caress. I have faith; I have faith. [Wiping away her tears] My poor, poor Uncle Vanya, you are crying! [Weeping] You have never known what it is to be happy, but wait, Uncle Vanya, wait! We shall rest. We shall rest. We shall rest.
Corin Redgrave told me about the near-farcical family dispute over the final resting place for Sir Michael’s ashes. Corin, a passionate socialist, had bought a plot for them in Highgate Cemetery (for £600). Lynn wrote to her brother: ‘I quite understand that you would like to bury Dad’s ashes near Karl Marx. I should have preferred St Paul’s, the actors’ church in Covent Garden, and so would Mum, I think. But your choice means more to you than ours would to us, so you should go ahead.’
He didn’t. For almost nine years the matter lay unresolved: Sir Michael’s ashes remained unclaimed at Mortlake Crematorium. Eventually, Corin collected them and, for several weeks, the ashes kept him company in the boot of his car. ‘Strange as it might seem,’ he told me, ‘I felt comforted by them. After a while I began to wonder how I had ever managed without them. Alone in my car … I would play music to them, and even sing to them. Sometimes they would sing back, a distant, clear, pure, baritone – “every valley shall be exalted”. Once, when Radio Three was playing Haydn’s “Miracle” symphony, I could hear them laughing. It couldn’t last, of course, and it didn’t.’
Eventually Rachel, Michael’s widow, said, ‘I must take Michael’s ashes to St Paul’s, I’ve promised Lynn I would.’ And that’s where they now are.
Corin Redgrave was always a fine actor. Once Michael had died, I think he became a great one. Michael’s death set Corin free.
Pa, you gave me freedom from the start. By loving me so much, by telling me how wonderful I was, you made me believe in myself and freed me to do anything – anything at all.
I have been everywhere I ever wanted to go. I have met everyone I ever wanted to meet. I have done everything I ever wanted to do – except, perhaps, create a myth (like Oscar Wilde with that portrait in the attic) or a magic world (like Lewis Carroll with Wonderland). I have conducted an orchestra. I have milked a cow. I have flown Concorde. (Well, I sat in the cockpit and the pilot let me think I was landing the plane in New York.) It was days before the Concorde accident that killed 109 passengers and crew. I’ve had a lucky life.
Did I tell you that I became an MP? And a Lord Commissioner of the Treasury. That’s a senior government whip and the fellow who signs the government cheques. Every bit of government expenditure in the UK has to be signed off by a Treasury minister. The last mandate I signed was for £136 billion. The Treasury officials explained to me that with the really large amounts there has to be a co-signatory.
‘Who will that be?’ I asked. ‘The Prime Minister, as First Lord of the Treasury?’
‘No,’ they said. ‘It’s HM Treasury, so you’ll be signing the cheques with HM – Her Majesty.’
One day, when we’d both signed one of these huge cheques, I said to the Queen, ‘You know, Your Majesty, the way the government insists on both of us signing these cheques – I wonder which of the two of us it is that the government doesn’t trust?’
She had no answer to that.
Being an MP was quite draining. In the constituency I only met two types of people: people with problems, and people who knew they were right. But, in a small way, I like to think I left my mark. As a Private Members’ bill, I introduced the 1994 Marriage Act. Until my bill came along, if you wanted a civil wedding it had to happen in a register office – often quite a dull municipal building. Thanks to my Marriage Act, you can now get married in all sorts of fun places, from stately homes to grand hotels. It’s almost my proudest achievement, though when Michèle heard me being described on the car radio once as ‘the expert on the Marriage Act’ she crashed the gears laughing.
My other claim to fame is one you can see in Trafalgar Square. In the 1990s, when I was a parliamentary private secretary to the Secretary of State for National Heritage, walking through Trafalgar Square one day, I noticed an empty plinth in the north-west corner of the square. When I got to work, at the morning team meeting, I asked the department’s Permanent Secretary about it. He was a smooth man, wholly in the Sir Humphrey mould. He made enquiries and reported back. The plinth was originally intended to hold an equestrian statue of William IV, but had been left bare when the square was designed, due to insufficient funds.
‘Let’s find the funds and put something on it now,’ I said.
‘Excellent idea,’ purred the Permanent Secretary. ‘Do you have anything in mind?’
‘How about Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh?’ I suggested, quite seriously. ‘Britain’s contribution to children’s literature is greater than that of any other country in the world.’
‘Oh,’ murmured the Permanent Secretary. ‘I’m not sure about that. I think it needs to be a major historical figure.’
‘Margaret Thatcher, then?’
‘It’s Trafalgar Square. There are Nelson and two generals there already. I think it needs to be a military figure …’
‘Margaret Thatcher in her tank on the Falkland Islands?’
We came up with a happy compromise and invited the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce to explore the possibilities, which they did – and the rotating works of art that have adorned the plinth ever since are the happy result. Ken Clarke, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer and I was Treasury whip, was kind enough to say that I was like the character in Arnold Bennett’s novel The Card.
‘What’s he done?’ people asked. ‘Has he ever done a day’s work in his life? What great cause is he identified with?’
‘He’s identified,’ came the answer, ‘with the great cause of cheering us all up.’
I’ll settle for that.
When I lost my seat in parliament I decided not to fight again. What was the point? My lot were going to be in opposition for thirteen years, and I knew by then that government was the thing.
That’s when Michèle said to me, ‘Now’s the time to do whatever you’ve always most wanted to do.’
And that’s how I ended up in the West End in Zipp!, in Edinburgh playing Malvolio, and at the Riverside Studios in London playing Lady Bracknell. Thanks to you, Pa, I felt I could do anything.
My ultimate ambition, of course, was to play Hamlet. I used to joke that I’d played the part when I was young and it had not been a success. The critics didn’t like it; the audiences didn’t like it. In fact, the audiences came prepared not to like it. They threw eggs at me. I went on as Hamlet. I came off as omelette.
In the event, I was in my seventieth year when I appeared in Hamlet at the Park Theatre in London. Don’t worry, I didn’t take on the title role – though in this age of colour-blind gender-neutral casting, would anyone have dared to object if I had? I played old King Hamlet (the Ghost), believed to be Shakespeare’s part when the play was first staged.
According to the play, young Prince Hamlet is thirty. Michael Redgrave played the part at Stratford at fifty. Frank Benson was still playing it aged seventy-two. (What Basil Rathbone admired in Benson’s Hamlet was the way he spoke: ‘He understood that a voice at night sounds quite different. No other Hamlet caught that.’) Ian McKellen has just given us his second Hamlet, aged eight-two.
Hamlet is a revenge tragedy and a family drama. Ours was a family production. I played the father, my real-life son, Benet, played the son and his real-life wife, American actress Kosha Engler (The Wire, Victoria, the ‘voice’ of Maybelline) played both Ophelia and Gertrude. She played Laertes, too. And I played Polonius and Claudius, as well as the Ghost. It was directed by David Aula (a magician as well as a director) and Simon Evans (who became famous creating Staged on TV during lockdown, with David Tennant and Michael Sheen) and, amazingly, it worked.
At the end of one performance, we found Sir Derek Jacobi (who has played in Hamlet more times than any other actor alive) standing to applaud us. It was wonderful to spend two months working with my own son on Shakespeare’s greatest text. As a father, who could ask for anything more?
Hamlet is the single work of art about which more books have been written than any other. It’s a play about everything: life, death, love, lust, frailty, faith, sibling affection, sibling rivalry, suicide, revenge, repentance, murder. Supremely, it is a play about parental loss. At every performance, playing the Ghost, holding my son close to me, I saw you in my mind’s eye, Pa, as I spoke the line that has been reverberating in my head ever since:
Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me.
Michael Redgrave called his autobiography In My Mind’s Eye. The last time I saw Sir Michael onstage was in John Mortimer’s play A Voyage Round My Father. Olivier played the part, too, when Mortimer’s play was done on TV. I know from talking to Corin that Michael Redgrave was not easy to live with: he was self-absorbed, he drank too much, he was bisexual and had his male lover living in a shed in the garden.
Richard Olivier, Sir Laurence’s son, told me how for years he had felt ‘very bitter and resentful’ towards his father. As a child, Richard couldn’t understand why his father preferred to be onstage, rather than spending time with him. ‘As a child I felt I could never quite get his attention,’ he said. As a teenager (Richard went to Bedales, too), he didn’t know what was wrong with him. ‘I had this deep sense of loneliness and emptiness.’
We’ve voyaged round some rum fathers in these pages, haven’t we, Pa? Oscar Wilde, Lawrence Durrell, Robert Maxwell – remarkable men, for sure, but as fathers each left much to be desired. Kenneth Tynan’s wife told me that when Ken’s father died, Tynan (born and brought up in Birmingham) discovered that the father he knew as ‘Peter Tynan’ was in fact Sir Peter Peacock, a former mayor of Warrington, who had been leading a double life for more than twenty years, keeping two complete families living eighty miles apart. Ken’s mother was in on the secret. Kathleen Tynan told me that Ken trusted nobody in consequence.
Prince Charles used to complain about his father’s emotional repression and lack of empathy. The Duke of Edinburgh never made any complaints, but his father, Prince Andrew of Greece, broke up the family home before Prince Philip had turned ten and disappeared to the South of France, to live on a boat with his mistress.
Lord Montagu of Beaulieu’s father died when he was a small boy, but he wasn’t perhaps the best of role models. He had five daughters: two by his first wife, two by his second, and one by his personal assistant. (She was the model for the Rolls-Royce mascot, Spirit of Ecstasy.) Lord Montagu told me he felt lonely and isolated as a boy.
Christopher Robin told me there were times when he wished he and his father had never been born.
Beverley Nichols told me that he had tried to murder his father. He attempted to crush him to death with a cast-iron garden roller. ‘I regret to say I failed.’
Pa, you weren’t like any of those. You were simply the best – loving, loyal, kind, courteous, tolerant, good-humoured, self-sacrificing, indulgent. I see now from your diary that you were profoundly unhappy at times. I never knew that. You didn’t achieve all your worldly ambitions, I know, but I’ve managed a few of them for you, and your grandchildren are doing the rest, so as a team we’ve done it all. And by loving Ma, by loving us, by being there and being you, you showed me that family is the best thing in the world.
It turns out I’ve written this book for you.
I’ve got to go now. Michèle has promised me a slice of coffee and walnut cake when I’ve finished. Coffee and walnut’s my favourite.
It’s time for me to let go, Pa, time to say goodbye.
Adieu. Thank you for everything.
Ever your loving son,
Gyles
Epilogue: Journey’s end
Michèle will vouch for the truth of this. Moments after I’d finished typing the above, she knocked on my study door.
‘Have you brought the cake?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve brought this. It’s just arrived.’
She handed me a small package, addressed to me, postmarked Bristol.
Intrigued, I tore it open.
Inside was my father’s passport. Nothing else, no paperwork, no explanation, just a blue United Kingdom passport, Number M 466545, belonging to Charles Daubeney Brandreth, solicitor, born Hoylake, 11 July 1910.
I have no idea who sent it to me.
When my mother died in 2010, her flat was cleared by professional house clearers and I suppose the passport must have been left in one of her full-to-bursting cupboards or chests of drawers. Perhaps it ended up on eBay. Perhaps a collector of printed ephemera picked it up in a job lot and, deciding it was surplus to their requirements, thought it might be something to do with me, managed to find my address and sent it to me.
That’s not so extraordinary, I suppose, but that it should arrive at precisely this moment … well, coincidences do happen.
The cake, by the way, was delicious.
The tomb of Sir Gyles Daubeney at Westminster Abbey
Jeremiah Brandreth, executed 1817
Cousin Eugénie de Montijo, wife of Napoleon III and last Empress of France
A cure for every ailment: Allcock’s Plasters and Brandreth’s Pills
The founder of the family fortune: Benjamin Brandreth, 1809-1880
Tatcho – the George R Sims’ hair restorer
GB’s grandfather, Major Lance Addison, third from right, with fellow Indian Army officers
GB’s mother, Alice, with her older brother, John, and their mother, Mary Addison, in Rawalpindi in 1915
Charles Brandreth as Old Manoah in Milton’s Samson Agonistes, Oxford, 1930, second from left
GB’s father, far left, with his older brother, Benjamin, and his two sisters, Helen and Hope, at the outbreak of the First World War, 1914
Three generations of Brandreth barristers: Benjamin Brandreth, Charles Brandreth, Benet Brandreth – with young GB in 1961 trying on his father’s wig and young Cornelius Brandreth trying on his father’s QC’s wig in 2019
With Julian Fellowes, 1953
With Jane Sarah Dorothea Hoos, riding Muffin the Mule, Broadstairs, 1953
GB, ready to travel, 1954
GB on the balcony at Kensington Mansions, 1956
GB and Pa, 1954
GB and Ma, Broadstairs, 1956
GB, trying to look angelic, in the choir at Holy Trinity Brompton, London, 1957
GB giving his all on stage at the Pavilion on the Sands, Broadstairs, 1958, with Cecil Barker
Betteshanger School choir, summer 1959: GB front row centre; standing left, Major Douch and Mr Stocks; standing right, Mr Gargiulo and Mr Glading
GB at Betteshanger, the first summer, 1959, photographed by Mr Glading
GB with Ma, Pa and Ben on holiday in France, 1961
In Mr Glading’s room at Betteshanger, summer 1961
GB photographed by his girlfriend Jackie, 1963
GB as Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Bedales, 1963
GB losing the 1964 General Election, Bedales, 1964
GB on stage at Bedales, 1965
GB at New College, Oxford, 1968
GB with Pa and brother Ben, New College, 1969
GB’s 21st birthday at 5H Portman Mansions, London, 1969
Michèle Brown in the summer GB met her, 1968
The first Zuleika Dobson competition with the winner, Lady Annunziata Asquith, June 1968. Michèle Brown is sitting third from the left
Making a splash, GB’s first centre spread, Daily Mirror, 13th June 1968
Cinderella, Oxford Playhouse, 1968, with Eliza Manningham-Buller as the Fairy Queen and Caroline Bennitt as Cinderella
Opening night: from left to right: Diana Quick, first female President of the Oxford University Dramatic Society; Sir Michael Redgrave, who performed the Prologue; Archie Harradine, who wrote the pantomime; and GB, who produced it
GB and Michèle, Christmas 1969
GB interviewing the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, 1970
Created in Captivity: GB with his collection of prisoners’ art, holding a painting by double murderer Donald Hume, 1971
