Self-portrait as a Young Man, by Roy Strong — review

Eventually, all of Sir Roy Strong’s voluminous personal archive is going — like Alan Bennett’s — to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Riffling through it, he realised there was something missing: he had not adequately covered the years between 1935, when he was born, and 1967, when he became director of the National Portrait Gallery — as the Daily Mail put it in 1969, ‘Britain’s most improbable civil servant’. He has written this book to remedy the omission. That it is published by the Bodleian is yet another feather in Strong’s fedora.

If you were in the anti-Strong faction (I am not, but it does exist), you might summarise the rite of passage chronicled in the book as ‘from geek to freak’. It tells how an earnest swot from a lower-middle-class family in Enfield, with ‘bat ears’ (his phrase), turned himself into a Sixties dandy with a super-posh accent, a key figure in Swinging London.

That Mail story of 1969, by Donald McLachlan, was headlined: ‘Dr Roy Strong of the civil service tells how adorable it is to run the National Portrait Gallery’. McLachlan dwelt on Strong’s clothes — the wide-brimmed fedora, the outrageous ties, the suits with bell-bottom trousers, the Edwardian overcoat that was ‘almost a maxi’. Strong’s hair ‘owed more to the Beatles than to the Amadeus String Quartet’. He was ‘a startlingly mod figure in a world regarded as stuffy, old-fashioned and moribund’. Another journalist wrote: ‘He trots proudly through his domain like a dapper little troll.’ Private Eye called him ‘Patience Strong’ or ‘Dr Roy Strange’.

He was a gift to profile-writers. You only had to ask him any question to be rewarded by a quotable stream of entertaining preposterousness. McLachlan asked if he was an enthusiast for style:

I do like style, yes I do. I really can’t bear people who are mean, particularly with their hospitality … That doesn’t mean you have to have champagne and caviar.