A Spectator footnote on David Cameron’s adventure in Brussels last week. In 1990, Nick Ridley gave a famous, prescient, ill-tempered interview to the paper in which he condemned the single currency as a ‘German racket’. He had to resign, and Mrs Thatcher’s fall was not long in coming. Last week, Ridley’s nephew, the Northern Ireland Secretary Owen Paterson, gave an interview to The Spectator in which he said that, since the eurozone seemed to be trying to form a new country, we should wrest the right to rule our own country back. Mr Paterson was not forced to resign, and Mr Cameron vetoed the proposed centralising treaty. Things have really changed, and will change a lot more.
Last week, I mentioned that our American friends the Frums came to stay and we all debated the euro. David and Danielle were also very kind to our labrador Dido, and advanced the interesting theory that the paws of all labradors smell of popcorn. Being English, I affected not to know what popcorn smells like, but the Frums are, in fact, right. Consultation with canine experts suggests that this property is unique to the breed. No one knows why.
One of the privileges of reviewing books is that one is sent scores of them free. My pile this year includes titles as various as The Concept of English Culture in the Cultural Biographies of Peter Ackroyd (by Tomasz Niedokos), The British Electric Industry 1990-2010 (by Alex Henney), and The Changing Face of Religion and Human Rights (by Clemens Nathan). Unfortunately, this privilege is also agony because it is so guilt-inducing. So much that is good has to be passed over inadequately read, as well as unreviewed. So I want to take this seasonal opportunity belatedly to mention two books which would be worth anyone’s time. The first, The Story of Your Life by James Lambie, is the complete history of the Sporting Life newspaper from its birth in 1859 to its death in 1998. It is wonderful to study a century and a half of British history entirely from the point of view of racing. Thus, in the Great War, the small oats allowance imposed by the government on racehorses was seen as the greatest indignity of the conflict. ‘While three million Britons are fighting for liberty abroad,’ wrote one correspondent, ‘three hundred faddists are filching away their liberties at home and paving the way for a Puritanical tyranny infinitely worse than anything our avowed enemies could have inflicted on us.’
As the film Warhorse reminds us, horses were a serious issue for many caught up in the first world war. Hunting on the top of the South Downs this month, I noticed the odd gait of a mare in front of me. Her hind legs seemed low-slung in relation to her body, like those of a giraffe. I asked the Master, Julia Caffyn, who was riding her, and she explained that the unusual shape was the result of breaking her ilium when a foal. Mrs Caffyn had been particularly anxious to keep the mare, whose name is Miss Whiskers, because she is in direct line from the battle-charger of her great-uncle, Sir Roland Gwynne. Gwynne was wounded at the Somme. Not wanting his beloved mare Jane to stay in France with some other officer, he persuaded his orderly to starve her deliberately enough to be shipped back to England. Then, from his hospital bed, he got a neighbour to pay the local farmers not to bid for her at auction at the Southampton remount depot, and bought her himself. He took Jane home, and got her pregnant to avoid requisition. Later he had her covered by a better horse. The strangely shaped but pretty mare I was standing beside is the eventual, ninth-generation, result. She herself is now expecting a foal in June, carried, in deference to her youthful injury, by a surrogate mother.
The other book I want to highlight is Settling The Bill, the memoirs of Bill Dugdale, who won the MC in the second world war, rode in the Grand National, was chairman of Aston Villa and of the National Water Council, and is the uncle (a fact he does not mention) of the Prime Minister. It is a funny, modest book, often powerful for what it does not say. He describes the battle of Anzio in 1944. At the end of a foul but successful night, Dugdale heard the news that ‘Chucks’ Lyttelton, his best friend from the age of eight, had been wounded. He went to the Casualty Clearing Station to find him: ‘I asked to see him and a sister said he was not there, but waved towards a line of about 30 blankets. I walked down the line looking at the labels until I saw one that said “Lt. J.A. Lyttelton, 5 G.G.’ I knew the worst — I was the only survivor of the Support Company Officers.’
Perhaps the two most famous parish churches in London are Holy Trinity, Brompton and the Brompton Oratory. The first is evangelical Anglican, the second traditional Roman Catholic. Each is the epitome of its type, and they are next-door neighbours. What a shame that they now confront a massive advertising hoarding the size of a house, which until recently shouted ‘Crystal Christmas’, advertising a brand of glass sold at a famous nasty nearby shop, and now touts Burberry. It might strike a blow for The Real Meaning Of Christmas if the two congregations were ecumenically to sneak out in the night and pull it down.
At this season, it has become traditional for this column to rely on our parish magazine for inspiration, especially on its regular feature on nature matters supplied by my wife. This year, she asks why it is ‘a partridge in a pear tree’, since the bird is rarely to be found there. She reports the theory that it derives from the introduction, in the 17th century, of the French partridge, which has gradually crushed our native grey. The French is ‘une perdrix’. So the original words offered a choice — ‘a partridge or oon pear-dree’.
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