Where did all the sweet people go?

To say someone was ‘sweet’ used to be quite common in Britain. We didn’t just use the word to describe our mothers and grandmothers, but a wide range of people, including public figures. But not any more. Public acts of sweetness, such as gently warning people that their shoelaces were untied, are now rare. Sweetness seems to be in terminal decline. Having just celebrated Valentine’s Day, now seems an appropriate time to ask why.

Sweetness is not just about niceness, or good manners, though both help. Sir Cliff Richard may be nice and well-mannered, but is he sweet? He’s a little too self-regarding — and self-regard and sweetness don’t go together. An essential element of sweetness is some unselfconscious eccentricity, mixed with kindness and a total absence of malice.

The actor Dennis Price, star of Kind Hearts and Coronets, was described by his fellow thespian Patrick Macnee as ‘one of the sweetest men who ever lived’. Price was modest and unselfconsciously eccentric: he kept chickens, ducks and wildfowl in his London flat. Margaret Rutherford  walked about in the winter with hot water bottles strapped to her: she too was very sweet. Dame Sybil Thorndike recalled an occasion when she and other actors were back-biting about fellow performers. ‘And then Margaret was speaking suddenly and saying wonderful things. She never said anything horrid about anybody. She was such a darling.’ Another sweet actor was the late Jeremy Brett, most famous for his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes, who, according to biographer Terry Manners, ‘would send flowers to men or women at the drop of a cue card’. When anybody said ‘Jeremy, you mustn’t keep doing that,’ Brett would reply, ‘Everybody loves flowers, don’t they?’

The television series Dad’s Army and its characters are the all-time epitome of sweetness — which  explains, I think, the extraordinary impact that the death of the nonagenarian actor Clive Dunn, a.k.a.