RSS

Contact us

Thursday 20 November 2008

And Another Thing

What kind of pyjamas did President Kennedy wear in bed?

When I was a teenager my mother told me to beware of girls who wore pyjamas, as they were likely to be ‘bold’. I had no objections to bold girls, actually, but was not going to say so. When I was in my last year at Oxford, I had digs in the Iffley Road, run by a Mrs Norris, a fierce and strict lady always known as Aunt Norris, after the character in Mansfield Park. She would never allow girls in the digs but she made an exception for a pretty friend of mine called Betty Bingley, known as Grable because of her long, beautiful legs. The blonde must have put a spell on Aunt Norris, because when I was working late in the library, she was allowed to come in and wait for me in my room. She would get undressed and put on my pyjamas, and I would find her placidly lying in bed, her golden tresses spread over the pillows, reading Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War (in Greek of course), usually the bit about the Syracuse stone quarries in Book VII, and sipping a mug of Horlicks supplied by Aunt Norris and liberally laced with brandy ‘to keep out the cold’. I suppose Betty was ‘bold’.

Girls called pyjamas ‘pidgies’ in those days. They were thought not quite proper at some boarding schools, where nightdresses, or nighties, were de rigueur. On the other hand, some men would not, or did not, wear them either. Churchill, for instance, rejected them, not for the reason given by Curzon but because ‘I have such a tender skin that I can only wear silk next to it’, and put on at night a vest only, which did not come down to his waist. His doctor, Lord Moran, noted in his diaries while sharing sleeping quarters with Churchill in an uncomfortable bombing aircraft or one of their trips to a wartime conference, that the Prime Minister complained of both the heat and the cold but made no attempt to alter his attire, Moran catching glimpses of ‘a large, fat white bottom’.

By contrast, Dr Mousadeq, the postwar Iranian demagogue, the first Persian politician to raise the nationalist flag against Britain’s control of the country’s oil industry, was an outstanding pyjama man. In those days, the early Fifties, we were not obliged, happily, to take the Iranians too seriously, and Mousadeq was much relished as a delightfully comic figure. He usually made his pronouncements, or gave newspaper interviews, wearing a pair of pyjamas. Of course in Persia pyjamas were perfectly normal daytime wear, before the adoption of Western suits, but it is not clear that the old boy, who had a long lugubrious nose and melancholy face, and delighted to raise a laugh among Western newsmen, wore pyjamas for nationalist reasons. Indeed, he appeared to spend much of his time in bed. His pyjamas, moreover, were the thick striped kind worn by English boys at boarding schools — I had identical pairs — and Sir Marcus Sieff, chairman of Marks & Spencer, used to claim that Mousadeq had ‘obviously had them sent out from our shop in Oxford Street’. Mr Attlee, then Prime Minister, said that the pyjamas were ‘remarkably similar to my own’. Eventually the Americans, fed up with British dithering, staged a coup and Mr Mousadeq was forced to run for it, still wearing his pidgies. The Shah took over. I once interviewed him for TV, on his houseboat tethered to a jetty in the Caspian Sea. I looked anxiously for any sign of pyjamas, but could see none, though I discovered that the pram in which the infant crown prince reposed had solid gold fittings. The mullah who currently tyrannises Iran wears sombre ecclesiastical nightshirts.

More articles from: Paul Johnson | this section

Print this article  |  Email to a friend  |  Permalink  |   Comments (1)

Post this entry to:   del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Advertisement

Spectator Business | Apollo Magazine

Corporate | Advertising | Privacy | Terms

Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP

All Articles and Content Copyright ©2008 by The Spectator | All Rights Reserved