A M D G

 

BEAUMONT UNION REVIEW

WINTER 2024

 

Going back through early Beaumont Reviews of the 1890s, I note that the Editorial was dropped after the first half dozen editions. However, I somehow have felt it necessary to follow Guy Bailey s excellent example of writing at least a few words by way of introduction. At this time of year, I always think back to the Beaumont Pantomime what a fine tradition it was, when inhibitions were forgotten, new talents came to the fore. From the days when the school was first founded acting and public speaking was at the forefront of our education whether it was in the classroom, speakeasy , societies, plays at all levels: it was hard to escape the methods used by our masters to encourage us to speak before an audience. Nothing in life is more important than the ability to communicate effectively. I came across a statement that people s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you re better off in the casket than delivering the eulogy. I cannot but help feeling that the Beaumont Jesuits tried to ensure that we were well prepared for both.

 

NEWS

 

LUNCH.

 

Need I say we had a great party and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. It was particularly rewarding to see both Philipp Mayer and Simon Li over from The States and Konrad Wallerstein from Thailand.

 

List of Attendees

Robert Wilkinson, Richard Sheehan, John Flood, Amanda Bedford, Bishop Jim Currie, Mike Morris, Paul Dutton, Nigel Courtney, Simon Li, Christopher McHugh, Guy Bailey, Paula Bailey, Philipp Mayer, Peter Bicknell, Derek Hollamby, Anthony Hussey, Chris Tailby, Konrad Wallerstein, Philip Critchley, Damian Russell, Chris Newling-Ward, Tony Outred. George Outred. Ned Gammell. Charlie Gammell, Colin Glennie, Oliver Hawkins, Rupert Lescher. Jeremy Connor, Paul Burden, Peter Burden, Ian Glennie, Patrick Burgess, Robert Bruce, Michael Burgess, Michael Hetreed, David Allen, Tim FitzGerald O Connor, Anthony Northey, Michael Newton, Martin Wells, Henry Hayward, Edwin de Lisle, Peter Savundra, Peter Peake, Barrie Martin, Roger Darby, Julian Langham, Ant Stevens, Michael Wortley, Nick Warren, Varyl Chamberlain, Toby Chamberlain, Anthony Tussaud, Jean- Pierre Vuarnoz, Philip Noble, Jonathan Johnson.

the demise of BUGS our Golfing Society the Mike Bedford Memorial Claret Jug was presented to Mandy by the retiring Hon Sec of the Society Nigel Courtney.

Anthony Northey (64) was in the Chair and reminisced on his schooldays and life after Beaumont. He like the majority of us had much to thank the J s and out masters for.

John Flood took the photos it always amuses me that they are best described as mug shots.

 

  

 

   

 

   

  

 

Please Note that we gather again next year at the Caledonian Monday 6^th October.

 

REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY

We arrived at Beaumont to be exhorted by Bill Boarding to Aim higher, further and smarter , the logo for Altitude PLC that had taken exclusive rights to the hotel for the weekend. I have previously commented on inane advertising and slogans ( particularly school s) and thank heavens it was not something that concerned us in our day. Be that as it may, just over 60 OBs, wives and family gathered at The War Memorial for our annual Remembrance Sunday Mass celebrated by Fr Michael Holman SJ. who had come down from Farm Street ( courtesy of Tony Outred). John Flood laid the wreath on behalf of The Beaumont Union. Union.

 

  

 

 

We enjoyed coffee and sustenance beforehand at St John s and our thanks as always to Phil Barr, the Headmaster and his Staff at St John s for their welcome. Lunch was taken at De Vere in our old Lower Line Refectory. The Hotel staff made every effort to look after us and we are grateful for their hospitality.

Despite The Memorial being cleaned a couple of years ago, it continues to suffer from pollution ( Heathrow flight path being mainly responsible) and repairs are also needed. We will continue to exhort De Vere to carry out the necessary maintenance.

 

OBITUARIES

Ronnie Goodchild (47) December 2023. Only just heard from his wife Susan.

David Flood (51) 15 September. The Major , Loyal supporter and a Knight of St Gregory.

Sir Patrick Sergeant (40). 18 September. Last OB to have fought in WW2. Financial Journalist, Entrepreneur, Grand Viveur aged 100.

Peter Johansen (59) 1st VIII, Aix-en-Provence and Hertford Oxford. Successful businessman and Director of The Swire Group. Died in Monaco 19^th October.

 

 

FAREWELL

 

29^th October we said farewell to The Major at the Mayfield School Chapel: a full congregation which included the following OBs:-

John Flood, Andrew Flood, Patrick Burgess, Mickey Burgess, Michael Wortley, Christopher Dunn, Barrie Martin, Peter Peake, Michael Newton, Chris Newling-Ward, Christopher Tailby, Mandy Bedford and Robert Wilkinson.

As per David s instructions we gathered in the sanctuary to sing The Pater Noster for him I would like to think we did him proud and certainly our rendition was much appreciated by the rest of the congregation.

 

For a man known as the most generous of hosts, John and the family had laid on an exceptional feast for us at David s much loved home at The Lake Street Manor.

 

 

FURTHER NEWS

SAVING Bentley’s Plans for St JOHN’S

John Green (Fundraising Manager & Data protection officer for the Jesuits)Wrote to Phil Barr ( Headmaster of St John’s)

“The Province archives team have some historic plans of St John's Beaumont that need preservation, details attached. The cost is c.£15K + VAT, but it is also something that could generate interest in the story of the school and the need to preserve this for future students.

There are a number of Trusts I am researching but wonder whether this project could also be something you could put before alumni networks. Either way it would be good to draw the connections between the plans and the school today.

Phil mentioned it to me at Remembrance Sunday  and followed it up:-

“I attach the document I spoke with you about on Sunday relating to the original Bentley plans for SJB. If you could please share with the BU and ask anyone who would like to contribute to the restoration fund to contact me direct.

  

“A collection of over 280 numbered architectural plans relating to the St. John’s Beaumont Jesuit school. The plans date from the mid to late 1800’s and are comprised of pencil and pen and ink drawings embellished with watercolours. Other media such as coloured pencil and copy pencil are also present. Ancillary material such as metal fasteners, postage stamps and various kinds of stickers are seen throughout the collection”.

Seasonal Greeting.

The post office have issued their ‘Christmas edition  which includes Giles Gilbert Scott’s Liverpool Cathedral. I think this is the first time an OB connection has appeared on a stamp since Colonel Justin McCarthy (31) on an Irish stamp in 1958.

 Glad to see that it is 1st Class!!

 

Books, Books and more Books.

 

John Appleby writes from Duncan BC that has finally published his book. It s quite an exercise starting a new career at this stage. We ll be heading for Toronto, on the way to Brazil, next month. We plan to catch up with Mike Petch - should have a few stories to share afterwards .

 

 

 

Synopsis

Dugald McPherson, a skilled seafarer, and Peter Arundel, a cynical opportunist from a wealthy family, are two Canadian naval officers who return from the Great War looking for something to do. Prohibition in the United States gives a place for Peter s banking family to use money that fell into their hands from the fall of European empires. Dugald s skills in handling small fighting boats and the people who work in that semi-legal trade get the business started, but there is no end to the obstacles in their way.

Available on AMAZON.

 

John did manage to meet up with fellow Canadian Mike Petch (59) in Toronto. Mike s family like John s had moved out to Vancouver in the late Fifties.

 

John tells his journey of self publishing further on in THE REVIEW.

 

AND ANOTHER

 

Gerard de Lisle has produced another family history. Following on from The Royal Navy & The Peruvian-Chilean War 1879-1881 seen through Diaries and Watercolours of Rudolph de Lisle, he has now edited The Nile Campaign 1884 -1885 again as seen through the Rudolph s letters and sketches.

 

 

  

 

Ed: I had the pleasure of attending the book launch at the East India Club and apart from seeing some old friends and making new, I can thoroughly recommend this latest edition to de Lisle history and indeed history in general. I had a personal interest as my own Regiment took part in the campaign, not on horses but camels.

 

Finely:-

 

A book about an OB The Fascist Frederick Samut. I provided some very limited information about his time at Beaumont to the author.

 

Explore the life of Captain Frederick Oloff Samut, whose journey took him from loyal British officer to ardent leader of Maltese fascism. Born into an influential imperialist family, his uncle was Achilles Samut, a minister with Strickland s government of 1927. He was at Beaumont for a couple of years leaving in 1909 for the Army Class at Wimbledon and then Sandhurst.

 

Samut initially served the British Empire but became disillusioned. He had served in the First World War, was severely wounded and was awarded an MC. After the War he married in India when he was posted there with Worcester Regiment. He retired with a pension from the Imperial authorities in 1933 having borne a heavy grudge against the British. He then embraced fascism and joined Sir Oswald Mosley s British Union of Fascists before founding the Union of Maltese Fascists, seeking to address Malta s social and economic challenges through a corporate state model that merged British fascist ideals with a distinct Maltese identity. This included having its own priest, a certain Father Paris who was also known to the British authorities as a fascist. They also had a weekly newspaper in English called Marching On, which has given its name to the book, this was distributed by its members in the streets of Valletta who wore arm-bands with fascist emblems. Although the fascists professed loyalty to the Crown, they often made incendiary declarations. Samut died in 1937, so we will never know where his loyalties were to lie.

 

Set against the backdrop of the 1930s, Gabriel Micallef s book delves into Samut s political transformation, the rise and fall of the UMF, and offers a unique perspective on the little-known history of Maltese fascism.

 

Samut s pamphlet The Corporate State and the Union of Maltese Fascists provide us with an excellent digest of their politics. Samut starts from the premise that every fascism has its own particular national characteristics. According to Samut, the core and universal principles of his own permutation of Maltese fascism was the concept of the benevolent dictatorship in contrast to the imposed dictatorship of British rule or a Stalinist dictatorship. For Samut, an Italian, German or Austrian dictatorship was a benevolent one. Naturally, free speech would be limited as it should serve the interests of the state. More specifically, Samut demanded suspension of the 1921 constitution and the installation of a Corporate State to solve all the local and social problems . Under the Corporate State, Maltese society would have been divided into different unions and associations, such as the employers, workers unions and others. Every association would have a number of members in the Union of Maltese Fascists and would be officially recognised by the state. Samut also demanded the development of industry and agriculture, a controlled migration programme to British colonies, new Maltese colonies abroad, and avoided the language question.

 

Final Word on BOOKS

Thank you to all of you who have bought my book Didn t He Do Well on National Hunt Racing at our Lunch and Remembrance Day much appreciated particularly as few of you knew much about the sport.

If anyone else would be interested in a copy which is sold for charity please Email me for details

 

ARTICLES

 

The Fascinating LYNE-STEPHENS

 

An article by Agromenes in Country Life (needless to say) caught my eye:-

 

 

 

These words reminded me that the story would end Stephen Lyne-Stephens (05) with his untimely death in 1923. But to start at the beginning:-

 

Yolande Duvernay was born in December 1812 in Versailles. Little is known about her youth, apart from the fact that she was brought up in poverty. Her domineering mother, only known as Madame Duvernay, had been a dancer in her youth and steered her six-year old daughter into the same direction. An underfed and poorly clad girl, she was enrolled in the School of Dance where pupils were known as petits rats de l Op ra.

 

Under control of their mothers, the rats spent their days in school and their evenings on the stage of the opera house, appearing in a variety of juvenile roles. Dance may have been a career for some in the end, for most girls it was an instruction into coquetterie and a pathway into the shady world of sex and abuse. Men of society kept an eye on ballet pupils and, through mothers who managed their daughters, made sexual assignations with the young rat of their choice. The school was a stage where mothers auctioned off their daughters. Some girls did make careers and Yolande fared particularly well. She was described as an elegant young woman and a graceful dancer. Aware of the situation, Madame Duvernay was intent to exploit her daughter s eye-catching presence. In 1831, Yolande became the mistress of Louis-D sir V ron, the newly appointed director of the Paris Op ra after the toppling of the Bourbon monarchy. He took her out of ballet school and promoted her straight into leading roles. She made her d but in Jean-Baptiste Blache s neo-classical ballet Mars et V nus ou Les fillets de Vulcain (1809). Having adopted the stage name Pauline Duvernay, she became the star of the theatre.

 

Her fame crossed the Channel where Princess Victoria loved her performances. Young William Makepeace Thackeray was in awe of her and, according to fellow dancer and friend Antoine Coulon, she was the idol of all the dandies in London. In October 1836, Pauline performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, where she danced the role of Florinda in the first London production of Le diable boiteux. Published as a novel set in Madrid by Alain-Ren Lesage in 1707 (translated as The Devil upon Two Sticks in 1708), the story was turned into a ballet by Jean Coralli in 1836. Her performance of an unusual Spanish-Cuban solo dance, the  cachucha , catapulted her to unequalled fame. Alone on stage, castanets in her hands, wearing a pink satin dress trimmed with black lace, she added a provocative twist to the curious steps of the dance (captured in a hand-coloured lithograph by John Frederick Lewis in February 1837). Society went wild. Men of all ages were eager to pay for the privilege of being near to her. The price (set by Madame Duvernay) was high. All rivals in the sale of sexual favours were outbid by a self-effacing, but immensely rich man. His name was Stephens Lyne-Stephens. His wealth was inherited.

It was little wonder that she attracted the attention of Stephen Lyne Stephens, a thirty-five year old heir to a fortune. He was not an aristocrat, and the family money had come from trade, a significant factor when questions of status within English society were raised. And there was a problem in that Yolande wasn t particularly keen on him as a potential lover. On the other hand, he was rich in a way that couldn t be ignored, especially by Yolande s mother.

Stephens, whose father spoiled him by providing a large allowance that enabled him to live a life of indulgence, extravagance and pleasure , seems to have failed at most of the things he tried, such as the army and politics. He clearly thought that having someone like Yolande as his mistress might bring him the admiration and respect of the type of persons he habitually associated with at the Garrick Club, Crockford s, and Newmarket race course. He was advised to contact Yolande s mother,

 

The Lyn-Stephens

Protestant glassmaker William Stephens was the illegitimate son of Cornish schoolmaster Oliver Stephens and servant girl Jane Smith. In 1746 he travelled to Portugal where one of his relations worked as a merchant. In 1755 he survived the Lisbon earthquake and during the next decade he made a living out of burning lime to provide mortar for rebuilding the city. In 1769, he was asked by Sebasti o Jos de Carvalho e Mel, 1st Marquis of Pombal, Secretary of the State of Internal Affairs in the government of Joseph I and its de facto head, to re-open a derelict glass factory which was located some ninety miles north of Lisbon. Such was the urgency to stimulate commercial activity that he was granted a number of lucrative privileges: exemption from all taxes; a monopoly of glass supply in Portugal and its colonies; and free use of fuel from the Royal pine forest. Joseph I died in 1777 and was succeeded by his eldest daughter Maria I who hated Pombal and his policies. The latter lost his position, but Stephens held on to his status and build a good working relationship with the new queen. That in itself was remarkable. She was a Catholic monarch who believed that her authority was derived from God; he was an illegitimate and foreign Protestant heretic and they enjoyed each other s company. William retained his privileges for almost forty years and build up an enormous fortune. After he died, unmarried and childless, his wealth was bequeathed to a cousin in London, Charles Lyne, who applied for Royal license to take the name Lyne-Stephens. Charles s inheritance made him the richest commoner in England. It became a cause c l bre and his only son and heir, Stephens Lyne-Stephens, who was MP for Barnstaple in Devon found himself in great demand by families with unmarried daughters. But Stephens was an unassuming young man who showed little interest in the company of women until the day he encountered Pauline Duvernay on stage at Drury Lane and after some financial negotiations she became his mistress. 

At that time, she was the mistress of another -the diplomat Charles, Marquis de la Valette, but in an arrangement negotiated between Count d Orsay (a friend of Stephens and himself a colourful French figure in British high society) and Yolande s greedy mother who took two-thirds of the cash deal, Stephens paid a considerable amount of money for the pleasure of owning the ballerina. Stephens provided Yolande with a comfortable lifestyle and a property in Kensington, whilst he remained at his father s estate in Portman Square, Marylebone, to keep up appearances. In 1837, he persuaded her to retire from the stage and live with him at his father s house. The latter felt uncomfortable with the arrangement (she demanded that he addressed her in French) and, in June 1843, he acquired Grove House in Wandsworth. Pauline remained Stephens s mistress for eight years. In 1845, out of the blue, the couple married at St Mary s Church in Putney for an Anglican service, followed by a Catholic one at Cadogan Terrace chapel in Chelsea. To keep a mistress in Victorian society was quietly accepted, but to marry in a mixture of religion was considered a social disgrace. Ostracised by relations and friends, London became a prison to them. When his father died in 1851, Stephens became the richest man in Britain. He bought H tel Mol , a grand mansion in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honor , acquired Lynford Hall near Thetford (Norfolk), as a hunting retreat and built up a celebrated art collection. The couple settled at Grove House.

 

 

The Grove estate was re-designed and built in the later eighteenth century by James Wyatt for the Dutch immigrant merchant and financier Joshua van Neck (the name was later anglicised as Vanneck). At his death in 1777, he was one of the richest men in Europe. Yolande settled in an environment of traditional wealth and she acquired her share of it. When Stephens died in 1860, he left his entire fortune to her. She became the nation s wealthiest woman, richer it was rumoured than Queen Victoria. She owned three grand estates in England and Paris, thousands of acres of land, and employed hundreds of staff. Yolande continued to live at Grove House, building a Romanesque mausoleum in its grounds. In addition, she acquired the 1863 sculptural group Fighting Bulls by Jean-Baptiste Cl singer which was sited in the gardens of Lynford Hall also as a memorial to her late husband. 

 

 

While her husband s will was placed in the infamous Court of Chancery and lawyers began to pore over every word, Yolande returned to her home in Paris: she didn t speak English well, nor did she have a great understanding of the English legal system. The large estates she had inherited needed managing properly. She obviously required advice and assistance, and it arrived in the shape of Colonel Edward Stopford Claremont, the British military attach in Paris. He was forty-two, slim, fit and with a military bearing , and six years younger than Yolande. He was also married and had six children. So, who was he?

 

The Claremonts

 

 

General Edward Stopford Claremont was a British soldier who was the United Kingdom's first military attach holding the post in Paris for 25 years.

Stopford Claremont was born in Paris in 1819 with the name Edward Charles John Stopford, the illegitimate   son of Lt-General the Hon Sir Edward Stopford  and Ana s Pauline Nathalie Aubert, known as Madamoiselle Anais , an actress in the Comedie- Francaise  His paternal grandfather was James 2^nd Earl of Courtown but the 3^rd Earl refused to allow him to use the sole name of Stopford because of his illegitimate status and so he was naturalised   in Britain by private act of Parliament in 1836 with the name of Edward Stopford Claremont

Stopford Claremont entered the Army in 1838 with a commission in what was to become The Royal Scots and by 1855 was a Major and attached to the French Army for the Crimean War. Later that year he was again promoted and awarded the CB. His service continued with the French with the Second Italian War of Independence and the Franco Prussian War

The Napoleon 111 said that Stopford Claremont was his favourite English officer and awarded him the Legion d Honneur and he was described as "Military Attache to Her Majesty's Embassy at Paris". In 1862 the Queen gave him the further honour of Groom of the Privy Chamber and the rank Major General and promoted again to Lt.-General in 1877. Stopford Claremont retired in 1881 with the honorary rank of full General. He was Honorary Colonel of The Bedfordshire Regiment from 1883 until his death in 1890.In 1843 He had married Frances Charlotte, daughter of General Sir George Wetherall

Did Claremont take advantage of her? There is no doubt that, as a soldier with a large family and insufficient pay to support it and keep up appearances as an officer, her money was an attraction.  After resigning from the army he became Yolande s financial and business adviser. She would have liked him to get rid his wife and marry her, but Claremont, afraid of the scandal it would cause, refused to consider a divorce. His solution was to move himself, and his wife and three of his children, to live with Yolande. If Yolande had been ostracised before, this new development was hardly likely to improve her standing in the eyes of the local bourgeoisie. They lived in a barely disguised m nage- -trois.

The relationship with Claremont continued until his death in 1890. Over the years Yolande had taken little interest in his children, apart from one of his sons, Teddy, who turned out to be less than reliable and accumulated large debts.

However, his youngest son Henry, did try to help her, and She took a shine to him and provided for the family. When she died, she left her personal fortune to him and his children on condition that they became Lyne-Stephens.

 

 

Despite her reputation, Yolande retained a devotion to her religion and early on she had a church built in the grounds at Thetford for the benefit of the Catholic community which she endowed. Her largest act of generosity was the church in Cambridge that was designed by Archibald Dunn, the father of an OB, together with Edward Hansom. Built between 1885-90, it was a statement of Catholic revival in a region not noted for its adherence to the faith.

 

The Claremont Lyne-Stephens

 

We now move to Henry Claremont now the very wealthy Henry Lyne-Stephens resident of Monte Carlo but he didn t live long to enjoy his fortune following Yolande to the grave in the same year.

Following Henry s demise, his wife Katherine married again to Colonel Raoul Paston- Bedingfeld the younger son of the 6^th Baronet of Oxburgh Hall, Norfolk. Raoul and Katherine had no children themselves except for the five young Lyne-Stephens from her previous marriage.

Lady Sybil Paston-Bedingfeld

The eldest daughter Sybil married her step-father s nephew Sir Henry Paston-Bedingfeld in 1904: Henry s two younger brothers were both at Beaumont Whisky Dick (80) and the equally hard drinking Charles (82), despite this advertisement, they sent their son and heir Henry to St Johns but he died there at the age of ten in 1917 and that was the end of the Bedingfeld connection with Beaumont. It would be Sybil who oversaw the gift of Oxburgh Hall to the National Trust and there is a bust of Yolande Lyne-Stephens that stands in the entrance lobby.

Sybil s younger sister Marie-Louise married Francis de Zulueta (93) best known as Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford and Fellow of Merton, New and All Souls and the father of Sir Philip (42) PS to Prime Ministers Eden and Macmillan.

 

Sybil s brother and the eldest of the Lyne-Stephens boys was Stephen who was sent to Beaumont in 1898 where he played in the 1^st XI before leaving in 1905 for Exeter College Oxford. In the Great War Stephen was commissioned in the West Yorkshire Regiment and was wounded and MID on a couple of occasions. After the War, he married Joan Northey the widow of an officer of the West Kents who had served under Stanhope Pedley (83) at Basra. Their happiness was short lived as Stephen was killed in a motoring accident in 1923.

 

 

There is no record of what happened to the Lyne-Stephens wealth: perhaps it is a case of the old adage First makes, Second enjoys, Third loses .

 

 

UNJUSTLY VILIFIED

 

 

I have written about Bobby de Casa Maury before, mainly as a society man and to a lesser extent his wartime service at Combined Operations which resulted in his resignation after the Dieppe fiasco in 1942. It so happened that I have just finished reading Max Hasting s book Operation Biting the first successful special forces raid into occupied France in which de Casa Maury played a key role and unlike other authors, Hastings is more sympathetic to this unlikely key intelligence officer.

I had hardly put the book down when I had a telephone call from a Vivian Bush who is a vintage Bentley enthusiast and has a car that he still races. As such, he was interested in Bobby during his time as Managing Director of Bentley in their racing heyday. He also had access to Mountbatten s Broadlands papers and archives. He , like myself, felt that Bobby had been unfairly treated and possibly there was the basis for a book. What further information did I have.

 

To begin with his background and time at Beaumont.

Bobby s father was also a Pedro (1848-1917), his Grandfather a Spanish judge /inspector in Cuba. Pedro senior married a Maury from the Catalan region of Spain. He made a fortune in banana plantations in Cuba but spent most of his life in Barcelona, London and Paris. He was influential in both the business and art world. He must also have been an important donor and benefactor to the Catholic Church as Pope Leo XIII created him a Marquis in 1897.

 

Pedro Jose was born 1896 and was often called Jack to differentiate him from his father but also known as Pedro and in later life Peter but was generally known as Bobby . He was sent to St John s Beaumont in 1903 at the age of 11. The only mention in the records show him as being awarded his Class prize and winning the 100 yards on sports day.

 

At Beaumont, his name does not often feature. He applied to join the Boat Club and passed the swimming test as they recruited him as a cox because of his small/ slight size. In 1912 he was part of the crew that won its first regatta beating Thames Rowing Club in the final at Staines and that despite the cox s lavish use of the rudder . All the crew except for Pedro served in WW1. One was gassed and never recovered, two were killed and another in WW2.They were awarded five MCs between them. The only other entry was that he was a member of The Debating Society and that a speech against professionalism in sport was particularly forceful. He left Beaumont in 1913 at the age of 17. A year younger than normal presumably it was felt unnecessary for him to sit the examinations.

 

Among his contemporaries in his year were other Spaniards, French, Mexican, Portuguese, Americans and Australians. His later friend Prince Jean-Louis Faucigny-Lucinge ( Known as Johnny) was several years behind him at Beaumont and they only got to know each other when they courted the two it girls Paula Gellibrand and Baba d Erlanger both marrying in 1923. Also, part of that set was Carlos de Beistequi who was at Beaumont with Pedro before going on to Eton. Pedro (Bobby) is often styled 1^st Marquis de Casa Maury, this is of course incorrect as this was his father.

 

Leaving aside the society years his marriage to Paula and then Freda Dudley Ward, one time mistress of King Edward VIII, we arrive at the setting up of Combined Operations. This came out of Dunkirk and Churchill s insistence that offensive action should continue against mainland Europe until such time that a proper liberation force could be a reality.

Churchill considered that the commander should be a rising star and eventually settled on Mountbatten whose choice was probably more controversial than that of Bobby.

Philip Ziegler in the Admiral s official biography wrote: Casa Maury was a rich, glamourous racing driver who had been conspicuous member of Mountbatten s set ( particularly Edwina s) before the war. His appointment stirred up resentment among the career officers, and he was often dismissed by them as a decorative playboy . Others defended him, Hughes Hallet ( Admiral and Naval operational Commander), for one believed that Casa Maury did his work with astonishing despatch, displaying considerable skill, artistry and imagination . He could not fairly be called a failure; what was certain, however, was that only exceptional success could redeem him in some people s eyes of the stigma of having got his job on the old-boy network. ( He was one of Dickie s Birds ).

 

Max Hastings in Operation Biting 27/28 February 1942 wrote:-

 

He chose as his chief of intelligence Bobby Marquis de Casa Maury for which this pre-war polo crony s credentials were hard to discern. Casa Maury was a 45 year old Cuban Spanish aristocrat who owned the Curzon cinema in Mayfair. After an earlier divorce, he married Freda Dudley-ward, long serving mistress of the Duke of Windsor when Prince of Wales. The Casa Maurys now occupied a grand house in Hamilton Terrace, St John s Wood.

 

A well- known racing driver before the war, the marquis had also become an RAF reservist. He was serving as an intelligence officer at West Country fighter stations when Mountbatten plucked him forth to join his own court at COHQ. Casa Maury inspired mistrust among the intelligence organisations as an outsider and foreigner, ( Damned Dago ) acknowledged to the man himself by Brigadier Robert Laycock, later Mountbatten s successor as CCO and incidentally married to Freda Casa Maury s daughter Angie as a wholly irrational prejudice against you in that you are a marquis and your name is not Smith, Jones or Robinson . Casa Maury was now accorded a leading role in planning the Bruneval raid. It was acknowledged that Bobby worked enormously hard, often sleeping in the office.

The brief he produced for the raid was exceptional and this was mainly due to his connection with General de Gaulle s intelligence chief in France Colonel Remy ( son Jean-Claude OB 48).

 

John Frost ( Raid Commander) expressed admiration for the almost incredible detail of the intelligence brief, largely provided by Roger Dumont ( Remy s operative) , through Remy, though Casa Maury at Combined Ops received the credit: the strengths, the billets, the weapons, morale and even the names of some Germans were known.

 

After the raid at the Prime Minister s personal debrief: - Mountbatten was recounting the action when Churchill interrupted, to ask who was responsible for the raid s excellent intelligence brief. Wing-commander Casa Maury, said the CO s chief complacently, glancing at his Cuban friend s angular features, who is standing beside me . The Prime Minister gave the marquis what Frost described as a beatific smile , then demanded What did we get out of this?

 

Next Raid and considered the Greatest Raid of All was St Nazaire 28^th March 1942

 

Combined Operations Headquarters worked closely with several intelligence organisations to plan the raid. The Naval Intelligence Division compiled information from a variety of sources. A detailed plan of the town of St Nazaire was provided by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and information on the coastal artillery nearby was provided by the War Office's Military Intelligence branch. Intelligence about the dock itself came from pre-war technical journals.

The Naval Operational Intelligence Centre selected the route and timing for the raid based on intelligence about the location of minefields and German recognition signals gleaned from Enigma  decryptions ( Bletchley Park) and knowledge of Luftwaffe patrols compiled by the Air Ministry's Air Intelligence Branch. It was Casa Maury s responsibility to pull all these plans together. It is worthy of note that

on 26 May 1941 Tom Kenny ( OB 27) when working with the French Resistance made a highly detailed technical sketch of the docks at St Nazaire. The neat style of the drawings reflects Tom's architectural training, and the apparent numbering system suggests these are just some of many- these were available to the planners.

 

The St Nazaire Raid was a success, achieved its objectives despite a heavy cost in lives. Intelligence couldn t be blamed for that they knew what they were facing.

 

Dieppe 19 August 1942. The most Disastrous raid of all.

 

Authors on the subject all seem to agree that The Dieppe raid was masterminded by Mountbatten. Originally relatively modest in scope, the plan grew ever more complicated in the early months of 1942, as COHQ staff and General Montgomery expanded the raid from an intended incursion on either side of Dieppe into a full-frontal assault on the town itself. While mistakes were made in the execution of the plan itself, the failure was partly owed to flawed intelligence reports. The attackers grossly underestimated the strength of the German garrison, and did not consider that the towering cliffs in the headlands made perfect gun nests, which gave the enemy easy pickings among invasion forces. True, Mountbatten was a sailor, with a swashbuckling attitude; but experienced soldiers such as Brooke and Montgomery also bought into the plan, which led to Churchill s sanction which he questioned soon afterwards. Few historians believe that the raid on Dieppe was anything other than an illogical, flawed plan with disastrous results.

 

The intelligence available was inaccurate incomplete and misleading. The information on the German defences, troop levels and beach conditions was hopelessly out of date. It's been suggested that more up to date information on some aspects was available through ULTRA (the top secret breaking of the German Enigma codes) but was never asked for or passed on.
 

Zeigler was to write:-

Whatever success Casa Maury may have enjoyed at the early stages of the war, there is no doubt that at this point he forfeited the respect of his fellow officers. I found him utterly useless (Admiral Baillie-Grohman at Naval operations before retiring ill). The official battle summary placed first among the causes of failure the absolute mistaken estimate of the extent of the German defences. Information about the number of German troops proved more or less correct, but their quality and their deployment were woefully misconstrued. There were excuses - last minute troop movements, hurried work to reinforce the defences of all the Channel ports but the intelligence failure remains.

 

In his Book, recently published, Operation Jubilee; Dieppe 1942: Patrick Bishop wrote:- Casa Maury relied almost totally on aerial reconnaissance to build a picture of the defences. These failed to identify guns hidden in the cliffs overlooking the town, which would lay down a murderous curtain of fire when the assault began. No serious attempt was made to discover the composition of the town beach ‑ vital given that this would be where the armour would go ashore. The heavy Churchill tanks carried out preoperational exercises on the south coast. But the shingle there bore little relation to the cricket ball-sized pebbles of Dieppe, which would literally stop a number of tanks in their tracks on the day. Doubts about the wisdom of the operation accumulated as July approached when the raid was due to be triggered. It went ahead.

 

Inevitably after the disaster all the service chiefs responsible blamed each other for the mistakes made but ironically both Mountbatten and Montgomery escaped sanction and indeed were rewarded with further promotion. There had to be a scapegoat and the obvious choice was Casa Maury the outsider. Bobby resigned before he was sacked: the only man to take responsibility for the debacle. From what has been written in books on the subject, it was justified.

 

However, both myself and Vivian Bush asked the question how did a man that despite the prejudices against him, did such an excellent job on both The Bruneval and St Nazaire briefs get it so wrong on Dieppe? What were the intelligence sources?

 

I think the answer appeared in The National Post in 2013 which was either, not available to authors, or which they chose to disregard or ignore:-

As the smoke cleared over the beaches of Dieppe over 80 years ago, and the magnitude over the previous day s German victory over the Canadian raiding force became clear, there was tremendous disappointment in London, agony in Ottawa, but no particular surprise in Berlin. Almost six weeks earlier, on July 9, 1942, Adolf Hitler had predicted with uncanny accuracy that Canadians were preparing to land on the French shores to relive German pressure on the Soviet Union in the east.

Harping on his great military accomplishments, Hitler declared, England may be faced with the choice either of immediately mounting a major landing in order to create a Second Front or losing Soviet Russia as a political and military factor. He then stated that the landings would take place in the area between Dieppe and Le Havre and Normandy.

How could the Nazi leader have foretold what was to happen on Aug. 19, 1942?

Unfortunately, not only was Hitler listening to transatlantic telephone conversations between British prime minister Winston Churchill and U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, he also had three spies collecting information about the ultimate destination of the Allied armada. Contrary to Guy Liddell s assertions that he controlled German spies operating in Britain, several had eluded the clutches of the counterintelligence B Section at MI-5.

As David Alan Johnson wrote in Righteous Deception: German Officers Against Hitler, both Churchill and Roosevelt thought that their top secret transatlantic telephone exchanges were secure. Alas, they were wrong. The scrambler the Allies used was a system called A-3, developed by Bell Telephone. Its radio frequency was altered constantly and even if the Germans were to tap into the line, they would not be able to decipher the conversation. But German intelligence not only bugged the line, they also developed countermeasures to unscramble the device. Technicians at Philips Electronics in Eindhoven, Netherlands, wrote Johnson, discovered how A-3 worked, and how to manipulate it so that conversations could be heard without interference. The British had Bletchley Park and the Germans had Eindhoven; two could play the code-cracking game. And the Nazis had been listening to these top level conversations since September 1941.

In addition to tapping into the secret conversations of the President and the Prime Minister, the Nazis had three gifted spies: one in England and two in France. A fanatical Welsh Nazi called Gwyn Evans, Der Druid ; a duplicitous French painter, Andre Lemoin, Moineau ; and, a turned former MI-6 agent, Raul Kiffer, Kiki, were among the authors of the disaster at Dieppe.

Der Druide was an Anglophobe who believed that Hitler s victory would result in Welsh independence. He was an accomplished musician. Leonard David, in his book The Druid and Johnson, and in his other book, German Spies and Saboteurs, describes how he landed a job as a concert organizer, arranging musical entertainment for Allied troops. The Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts was short of people who could organize and schedule their shows and concerts. He was the right man at the right place. His first job as an impresario entailed a string quartet concert for the Second Canadian Division. While Beethoven s Late Quartets were not exactly popular with the soldiers, variations on Strauss waltzes and Gilbert and Sullivan songs were warmly received. Soon he became a much sought after entertainer and CEMA issued him with clearance papers giving him access to military bases throughout Britain.

His favourite tactic was to identify and befriend officers who appeared stressed and drinking a lot. Early in June 1942, he approached a second lieutenant who was drowning his sorrows in quite a few pints of beer at the base pub. He joined him and bought him another drink. After a few rounds, while pretending to be bored, he discovered that the target of Operation Rutter was Dieppe and that it would take place on June 24. The intoxicated officer gave him the full details. And Der Druide duly informed his handlers in Germany. Although Rutter was changed to Jubilee and the date was moved to Aug. 19, the Germans were prepared and waiting.

Anthony Cave Brown s monumental Bodyguard of Lies provides fascinating information on the other two spies, operating in France: Kiffer and Lemoin.

Captain Heinz Eckert, a German military intelligence officer, was given the task of finding out where exactly the Allies were planning to land in France in 1942. Just as the British Double Cross system recruited German spies and used them as double agents, Eckert too recruited Raoul Kiffer Kiki, a former British agent affiliated with MI-6. Kiffer was also member of the influential French Union Interalliee,

(This was Pierre de Vomecourt s SOE Group: OB 19: which Kiffer betrayed)) which provided a forum for clandestine networking in support of the Allies. He was to prove his worth in a small picturesque village not far from Dieppe a few days before the landings.

His co-conspirator Lemoin was sympathetic to the Nazis but placed greater faith in money. Working with German intelligence in France, he used his modest gallery of marine life paintings as a cover to invite leaders of the French resistance, the Maquis, to come to his premises and conduct clandestine meetings. He pretended to be a patriot and insinuated himself into the confidences of unsuspecting Maquis fighters. The more secure resistance agents felt at his place, apparently immune from prying eyes, the more they confided in him. When the British launched Operation Overthrow to deceive the Nazis about the upcoming raid, MI-6 forged new links with the resistance in Dieppe. Lemoin, who had volunteered in the meantime, now became active in the struggle against the occupation and privy to the preparatory work.

The Maquis had been asked to inform locals that the Dieppe ladings were not the main thrust into France; and that the operation was only a raid. This was done to prevent the locals from rising up and then being at the mercy of the Germans after the Allies withdrew. The Maquis also launched an all-out effort collecting information on German defences in and around Dieppe. Lemoin passed on all these valuable documents to his German handlers in notes hidden behind the canvasses of his paintings of sea shells and mermaids. He eventually betrayed the Maquis to the Gestapo. (Interestingly, Lemoin s story ends abruptly after 1944. It is possible that he fled under a new identify, or was found out and disposed of by the Maquis.)

The plot thickened when a certain Madame Jeanette Desmoulins, who was active in the Free French movement led by Charles de Gaulle, entered the fray in Veules-les-Roses, not far from Dieppe. Both Kiffer and Lemoin were aware that Desmoulins was active in the Free French movement. They rightly suspected that she was in communication with her husband, who was in London co-ordinating intelligence between MI-6 and French networks such as Interalliee. Kiffer introduced Eckert to her, claiming that the German military intelligence officer was a Canadian spy engaged in reconnaissance prior to the anticipated landings. Eckert and Kiffer were fishing for more accurate information. Desmoulins hosted them and provided cover for their work.

 

Delighted to be of help to Canadians, she told Eckert that the BBC personal message, George will very soon embrace Janette, indicating that Dieppe would be the target, was about to be broadcast to alert the resistance network. Moreover, she put Eckert in touch with an anti-Nazi military engineer involved in the construction of the fortifications in Dieppe. The engineer, believing he was helping a Canadian spy, co-operated, and was disappeared by the Gestapo almost immediately. But Eckert assumed that secret information about Dieppe s defences had already been sent to London by resistance agents. He made sure that the local German commanders were alerted to the breach.

At this time, the German s launched Operation Porto II, which, to the Allies sorrow, succeeded brilliantly. Known as the Rundstedt Ruse, after German Field Marshall Karl Rudolf Gerd von Rundstedt, the Germans convinced the Dieppe planners that the port was very poorly defended by inferior troops. Even Churchill was hoodwinked, writing in his diary, From available intelligence Dieppe was held only by German low-category troops amounting to one battalion with supporting units making no more than 1,400 men in all. But this was inexplicable the Allies were still breaking German codes and had their own spies on the continent. There was plenty of information suggesting that the Germans were aware an attack was imminent and were even reinforcing the Dieppe area. But the men responsible for planning and conducting the raid had no idea. If there had been better sharing of information, the entire raid might have been called off.

When the Allied armada cast off its moorings from ports along the coast of Britain, its fate had already been sealed. The raid, badly conceived from the start, was doomed by the poor intelligence sharing among the Allies, leaks of vital information and spies who kept Hitler well-informed as to what the Allies were intending. More than 900 Canadians died in the raid, with thousands more captured. Of the 5,000 Canadians who set out to seize Dieppe, only 1,700 made it safely back to Britain. Few of them could have imagined that day how it only took three spies, and some sloppy sharing of intelligence, to lead them into catastrophe .

Conclusion.

Casa Maury took the blame for Intelligence which was entirely false though coming from sources that were thought to be reliable. Remy had already escaped to England before the planning stage but whether even he could have detected the double agents feeding false information within the organisation would be difficult to assess.

 

GISS - GOSS

GISS GOSS is THE REVIEW gossip column with tittle-tattle gleaned from various sources.

 

Gregarious and visionary! The true City gent who helped millions of Mail readers to manage their finances and drank Champagne every day until his death at 100: ROBERT HARDMAN remembers the life of former city editor Sir Patrick Sergeant

 

By Robert Hardman for The Daily Mail.

 

 

He was a shrewd and gregarious advertisement for all those things which are now so frowned upon in today's dreary, box-ticking corporate world.

Here was a man who followed his hunches, disliked swearing, believed strongly in making dull things fun and enjoyed a glass (if not a bottle) of champagne every day of his adult life right up to his death, announced yesterday, at the age of 100.

Along the way, Sir Patrick Sergeant also made the world of finance comprehensible to a new breed of investor, to the delight of millions of grateful Daily Mail readers over many decades.

For Sir Patrick was the visionary journalist who invented and built Euromoney magazine into one of the world's pre-eminent financial publications, helping to transform the Eurobond market from a fringe pursuit into a global phenomenon.

As City editor of the Daily Mail, he developed the idea of personal finance as something for everyone.

Thanks to him, owning a share or building up a nest egg was no longer an opaque and impenetrable process for the wealthy. Rather, it was open to all through this newspaper's award-winning Money Mail section.

Much imitated since, this was pioneering stuff in the Sixties when Sergeant took charge of the financial pages. Today's ordinary shareholder is in his debt.

As a young man, he had served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War and as a 'blue button' (junior clerk) on the London Stock Exchange.

By the time he finally retired from life as a journalist and, latterly, as a main board director of major companies which always valued his wisdom, he had come to know prime ministers, presidents, chancellors and titans of trade, industry and finance. Yet he never pulled his punches when criticism was in order.

Long into old age, he was still enjoying tennis, the odd cigar, champagne and, above all, family life.

He died on Wednesday at the family home, in Highgate, North London, which he shared with his wife, Gillian, through 72 years of marriage, until her death earlier this year.

The couple are survived by their daughters, Harriet, the author and journalist, and Emma, the distinguished painter, war artist and royal tour artist whom Prince Charles commissioned to sketch several trips, including the first royal tour of Ukraine.

As Viscount Rothermere, chairman of the Daily Mail and General Trust plc, said yesterday: 'Sir Patrick Sergeant personified the best of the British. From his heroics in WWII to being a legendary City editor of the Daily Mail to becoming the founder of a billion-pound company, he was, and is, an inspiration to so many of us who loved him very much.

'He was a huge presence, mentor and inspiration in my life. Sir Patrick never lost his sense of fun and optimism, love of hard work and duty to his readers, shareholders and employees; but, he always knew that his family came first and mattered the most.'

Sir Patrick was born on March 17, 1924, to George Sergeant, a wealthy coal merchant, and his wife, Rene. According to family legend, Rene went into labour while on a ship returning from France, cementing her son's lifelong love of the sea.

His mother's family were devout Catholics and he was sent to the Jesuit public school, Beaumont College, Windsor, where he excelled at sport, especially cricket, until his father ran into financial difficulties and he was forced to leave.

With war on the horizon, he enlisted as a Royal Navy cadet, showing a strong aptitude for code-making and code-breaking before going to sea at 18 as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve.

After serving in the Atlantic convoys, he took command of a corvette. 'He always said that he was very lucky in the war. The worst thing he remembered was finding a lifeboat full of dead men,' Emma recalled yesterday.

'His attempts at introducing the crew to a healthier diet were a disaster. But one of the reasons he never swore in later life was that he had endured so much swearing in the Navy that he said it put him off for life. The worst he would ever say about someone was that they were a 'twit'.'

During one leave ashore, he was attending a family reunion in London when an enemy bomb injured the guests so badly that his grandmother never recovered. Sergeant himself received facial injuries and was lucky not to be blinded by a shard of glass above his eye.

After the war, he embarked on a career in the City, starting at the bottom with long-established brokers Mullens & Co, but soon realised his talents lay elsewhere.

Sergeant was a fixture at every annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund where his champagne reception was a welcome antidote to some of the more earnest conference sessions.

In due course, Euromoney went from being a small British start-up to gobbling up its much larger American equivalent, Institutional Investor.

Immaculately dressed and a man of great charm and good humour, Sergeant was often mistaken for one of the City or Wall Street grandees about whom he was writing.

His journalism won him awards, while his business acumen and Euromoney bonuses made him Britain's highest-paid journalist during the boom times of the Thatcher years.

After he retired from the Mail in 1984, he joined its parent company's board, where he remained for years afterwards. Throughout it all, his greatest love was family life.

'We adored being with him and every holiday was a great adventure,' Harriet recalls. 'He was particularly keen on skiing and liked the finest powder snow, though the guide was always under instruction to find the broadest slopes as he had quite a wide turning circle.'

When, during a holiday in Thailand, Harriet expressed a determination to follow him into journalism, her father set her a task: she had to approach the Chinese embassy in Bangkok and ask if they would like to buy the British embassy and then ask the British embassy if they were prepared to sell the building to the Chinese.

'It was terrifying but it was great training for later life. However difficult a story might be, the main thing was just to turn up. As my father would say: 'If you turn up somewhere, something always happens'.'

There was one pursuit, however, in which Sergeant was ruthless, even with his own family. 'I had to give up family tennis in the end as he was just too competitive,' Emma recalls. 'He was always determined to win.' A keen member of the All England Club, he would organise an annual tournament with a family friend who ran the tennis department at Eton.

'Patrick loved tennis and used to bring a team of City friends to play against the school's 1st VI,' recalls one, who was at the school during the Eighties.

'It was always after A-Levels so there would be a pretty lavish picnic and Patrick's hospitality was legendary with the best wine. One year, the entire team had such a good time they were later found fast asleep in a field.'

Such was Sergeant's determination to win, even in his 80s, that he once turned up with an oddly familiar tennis partner former Wimbledon champion, Pat Cash.

Ultimately, it was that same competitive instinct which ensured he delivered the best for his staff, who were devoted to him, for his employers and, above all, for his readers.

Looking back on the recipe for success, he reflected: 'If we were to succeed, we must be different, educational and entertaining.'

( ED note: Sir Patrick and his Euromoney Organisation were always on the prowl for additions to their publishing empire. Almost 30 years ago they made a hostile bid and took over my wife s family firm Metal Bulletin and it s associated periodicals and books. At the time the MB board found Sergeant ruthless once he had decided that was what he wanted).

 

ACADEMIA

A letter from Tony Waldeck ( see correspondence) reminded me to include an article by Anthony Synnott which proved quite controversial. A reminder first of all of Anthony himself ( apart from having been Captain of The School and President of the Twice Nine Club)

 

Anthony Synnott after brief stints in the Royal Navy and the Jesuits, received a BSc (Econ) from the London School of Economics, an M.A. from the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, and his Ph.D. in Sociology from London University. He is currently Professor of Sociology, Concordia University. Anthony s research has ranged over many topics, including the body and senses, subjectivity (the eye and the I), men and masculinity, visual sociology, social problems, pink flamingoes, satire and cemeteries. His publications include over 50 articles in various Canadian, British, American, German, and Dutch journals and four major books: The Body Social: Symbolism, Self and Society (Routledge, 1993), Shadows: Social Issues and Problems in Canada (Prentice-Hall, 1996), Re-Thinking Men: Heroes, Villains and Victims (Ashgate, 2009), and (together with Constance Classen and David Howes) Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (Routledge, 1994). He is currently writing a blog on men s issues for Psychology Today

Anthony Synnott retired as Professor of Sociology and was appointed Professor Emeritus in June 2015. He remains an active member of the Centre.

 

Rethinking his-story

Sociologist Anthony Synnott comes not to bury men but to praise them and to critique misandry and victim feminists : -

What are little boys made of? Slugs and snails and puppy dogs tails, according to the well-known nursery rhyme. And little girls, it follows, are made of sugar and spice and all things nice. Anthony Synnott, a sociology professor at Concordia University, takes issue with such dictums of culture. Boys are taught early on that they are not nice, he writes. How sad.

And the ways men are defined have only deteriorated over the past 50 years, particularly within popular culture and in some domains of feminism, he says. In response, Dr. Synnott has written Re-thinking Men: Heroes, Villains and Victims (Ashgate, 2009) to set the record straight. In it, he strives to counter the rather unbalanced, jaundiced and misandric view of men which has become so prevalent and to praise men to recognize their massive and heroic contributions to social life and to civilization.

Dr. Synnott shakes things up within the first few pages, flipping the conventional notion of sexism on its head: The old male sexism, misogyny, he writes, has been replaced in part by egalitarian attitudes but also by a new sexism: misandry (the hatred of men).

For readers who may not yet view misogyny as a thing of the past, Dr. Synnott clarifies in an interview that misogyny and misandry exist side by side. My whole idea is to try to balance things out. If you think of women as victims, then think of men as victims; if you think of women as heroes, then think of men as heroes; if you think of men as villains and oppressive, well, let s look at a few female villains.

Under the subheading The Misandric Model: Female Supremacism, he summarizes how quickly society s values changed under the influence of feminist authors like Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan. According to Dr. Synnott, developments like the 1965 formation of the National Organization of Women were enlivened by two distinct processes: the demonization of men and the angelization of women.

In person, Dr. Synnott, a father of two boys, is courteous and quick to stress that his book is not meant to be critiquing feminism. It s meant to be critiquing misandric feminism, he specifies in a tidy British accent. But the two get tangled up, because if you want to empower women, the tendency is going to be to disempower men, to deligitimize men, to devalorize men.

In a section in the book entitled The Normalization of Sexism, Dr. Synnott argues: Perhaps the supreme achievement of the women s movement has been to critique the traditional gender hierarchy of Adam, and men in general. The supreme failure has been the failure to critique this new reversed gender hierarchy and this new sexism.

Yet certain feminists, such as Betty Friedan, cautioned against reverse sexism. Women s issues are symptoms of problems that affect everyone, she wrote in an article entitled Beyond Gender (Newsweek, 1995). The basis of women s empowerment is economic that s what is in danger now. And it can t be saved by countering the hatred of women with a hatred of men.

In person, Dr. Synnott does concede that Betty Friedan changed a little bit towards the end. In print, however, he doesn t mince words, labeling all feminists discussed in the book (except Camille Paglia, who is often critiqued by other feminists for being anti-feminist) as misandric, victim feminists: In the academic literature on gender, many feminists, both male and female, have demonized men as misogynists and hating women, he writes.

Given the boldness of his strikes against a wide range of authors, Dr. Synnott admits to being quite surprised by some of the positive attention he has received. Re-thinking Men denounces several theorists of men, such as American poet, activist, and leader of the Mythopoetic Men s Movement Robert Bly, and Michael Kimmel, an American sociologist who is the editor of Men and Masculinities and a spokesperson of NOMAS (the National Organization For Men Against Sexism). The book also paints a negative portrait of celebrated feminist writers like the aforementioned Ms. Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique; Alice Walker, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple; and Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women.

Yet, Dr. Synnott s book got a thumbs-up in the Canadian Journal of Sociology: Overall, Synnott presents a much needed addition to the literature and scholarship on men and masculinity that offers those interested in gender studies a fresh, balanced, humanist perspective, wrote Danielle Soulliere, a professor in sociology and criminology at the University of Windsor. The book was also recently selected as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice magazine, published by the American Library Association.

The accolades I wasn t expecting, because, as you saw, I take a few hits at people. Normally I avoid doing anything like that. I mean, I ve written a few books before, and I don t attack people, but they were so obnoxious.

Dr. Synnott s blog on the Psychology Today website has inspired a much more polarized reaction. After posting a couple of updated excerpts from his book, he was taken aback by the crudeness of people s responses. I wasn t expecting anything other than academic debate but there was bad language f against men and against women, misandry and misogyny. It was just quite a surprise.

Speaking about his book and its premise, Dr. Synnott says his students point out that this is not what they ve been taught before. It s a 180-degree switch for them to think of some of these ideas. They re much more used to the idea of victim feminism and men as oppressive of women.

Nevertheless, certain passages, apparently, can still ruffle feathers such as those criticizing feminists failure to recognize how patriarchy has, especially in the democracies, contributed substantially to women s empowerment and liberation. Of that passage, Dr. Synnott recounts: One woman said, So we should be grateful to be liberated by men? And I said, no no. We re just trying to set the historical records straight. It was men who had the power, and it was men who took the decisions, and you know, it wasn t Gloria Steinem.

Dr. Synnott also writes that, Men in patriarchy have not clung to power but have democratically shared power, transferred power, even at some cost to themselves. But does he think any transfer would have occurred had women like Gloria Steinem not spoken up? No. Probably not, he answers. Not so quickly. But that wasn t really the point. I m trying to think about this in terms of history rather than in terms of ideology.

Yet, many of Dr. Synnott s own goals seem profoundly ideological. One of his book s stated objectives is to valorize, or re-valorize, men just as the women s movement has valorized women. His Heroes chapter, which opens with, Let us now praise men and masculinity, mostly examines traditional masculine virtues, such as altruism and bravery. (Dr. Synnott had earlier careers in the Royal Navy and with the Jesuits.)

Here, he enumerates many of the politicians, adventurers and war veterans who made lists such as Time magazine s 100 most influential People of the Century, in addition to the real historical figures inscribed in our faiths: Moses and Abraham, Christ, the Buddha, and Mohammed.

Asked why he chose to focus on traditional male heroism, which has already been greatly documented, versus emerging models of masculinity, such as the stay-at-home Dad, Dr. Synnott replies: I wanted to show the shifting ideals, from knight to gentleman to self-made man. But also, I wanted to show that the knight is still out there fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, and people take this sort of thing for granted. And we shouldn t.

Mimicking Marilyn French, author of The War Against Women, Dr. Synnott names one of his chapters Victims: The Wars Against Men and affirms that men pay a high price for being men. It s laudatory that Dr. Synnott exposes the oppression of men. Any systemic oppression be it of men or women should be contested. Yet his highly comparative and occasionally sarcastic approach seems at times to undermine women s causes. On the topic of sexual harassment in the workplace, he categorically states: Women are harassed, men die. And, in an earlier chapter, he challenges the idea of female objectification by the media with: Beauty competitions do not kill women. Wars kill men.

Some might find that such comparisons trivialize and oversimplify women s issues. Not to mention the fact that wars kill women, too. Addressing the latter point, Dr. Synnott writes: Certainly women have been, and still are, massively victimized by war, but usually as civilians rather than combatants. Recalling the six-year Vietnam War, he underlines that eight U.S. service women were killed, and over 58, 000 men, and draws the conclusion that this does indicate that women have a privileged status in war whether they want it or not.

Whatever the case, since premature male death (however unjust it may be) in no way excuses the exploitation or harassment of women, one might argue that these issues would best be discussed in separate chapters. Or at least separate sentences.

In the interview, Dr. Synnott stresses that he s not suggesting women shouldn t speak out about harassment. I m just really irritated that people will focus on one thing and not the other.

In an effort to balance things out, he topples sugar and spice stereotypes by documenting various cases of female hostility to show that violence is not a uniquely male trait. Conversely, he aptly reminds readers that violence affects all people, not just women, pointing out that violent deaths are most frequent among men (albeit generally at the hands of other men). Some may find that he downplays male violence against women, though. The person who is most likely to kill a woman, he writes is not, as Steinem says so famously, a husband or lover in the isolation of their own home. It is the person who looks at her in the mirror: herself. But these feminists prefer to blame men!

As the interview comes to a close, Dr. Synnott is asked about the consequences of misandry. Ironically, his answer on how the internalization of a negative self-concept can become a self-fulfilling prophecy is reminiscent of a passage by Gloria Steinem. In her preface to Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, she writes: The more I talked to men as well as women, the more it seemed that inner feelings of incompleteness, emptiness, self-doubt, and self-hatred were the same people seemed to stop punishing others or themselves only when they gained some faith in their own unique, intrinsic worth. It s a fitting epilogue for both sexes. 

 

Our Loss: Their Gain.

 

Dom Edward Corbould, well known to many OBs who sent their sons to Ampleforth has died aged 92.

 

He had been the school s longest serving housemaster running St Edward s house . ( Known as the Jam Factory and designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott OB) as far as I m aware no master at Ampleforth was held in such affection and he certainly became the successor to our Monsignor Gilbey as the officiator at catholic society weddings!

You might say what has this to do with Beaumont. Well it could be said that if he had not been so bright he would have followed his elder brother John to Beaumont. His Telegraph Obituary made several errors ( typical) having John down as educated at Harrow and his death in 55 rather than 56.

 

They were the sons of the Rev. Kenneth Corbould a family descended from Robert 111 of Scotland, Henry V11 and William Nassau, Prince of Orange. The parents converted to Catholicism and were received into the church at Farm Street. It was natural that John should be sent to Beaumont from their Home at Dilham grange not far from Norwich. John, the elder by ten years from Edward ( with four daughter in-between) was sent to prep-school at Louth Lodge Lowestoft before starting at Beaumont in 1935. In his final year 1939/40 he was Captain of The School and Cricket ( second year running) and was also in the Rugby XV (Colours). He was then commissioned into the Coldstream Guards during the War. He then returned to studies at Oxford before joining Shell and sent to Colombo. Meanwhile Edward was sent to prep-school at Allhallows during those war years in the relative safety of the west country. A good sportsman especially cricket, he wished to emulate John and play at Lords. Fate intervened as in 1946 he won a scholarship to Ampleforth an opportunity his parents could not ignore, so to Yorkshire he went and his dreams of Lords with it!. The rest is history and Ampleforth gained one, if not, their most loved master and friend of the last half century. Sadly, John was to catch polio while in what was then Ceylon and died in 1956 and their father also died at the same time and their family home at Dilham had to be sold.

 

Colour of distinction

I was looking at wood preservatives for a project at home and low and behold I discover that CUPRINOL does a shade called BEAUMONT BLUE .

Whatever the occasion, whether transforming your garden furniture to create a beautiful setting for alfresco dining, combining bright colours for that modern and fun look, or creating a bright seaside summery coastal theme in your own garden, Cuprinol Garden Shades give a beautiful rich matt colour with up to 6 years weather protection .

 

This seems reminiscent of the Boxing colour - I can find no thread to connect Cuprinol to any OB, if anyone has a lead perhaps they would let me know.

Press Cutting (a love story)

 

The Trials of Self-Publication

John Appleby writes:-

I finally got there Night Runners of the Winter Seas is, courtesy of Amazon, in print 300 hard copies mailed to our house and available as a print or e-book from their website.

Since we, my wife Judy and I, failed to interest a commercial publisher in this endeavour, we opted to publish it ourselves. That meant we, as amateurs, undertook the roles for which a publishing company would have employed at least six professionals i.e. people who know what they re doing. Our effort to be like them is a story in itself as we tackled the editing, production, printing, promotion, sales, and distribution of this one single novel.

Many days began with the phrase, Oh s**t we forgot ...! or, Why don t these computers talk to one another? I was the writer and Judy edited and formatted. We rapidly found that computer programs do not necessarily transfer information smoothly from one to another, as versions configured on my computer looked completely different on hers, leading to much time spent formatting and then re-formatting.

Much of the textual problem lay, regrettably, with me. I started with a somewhat uneven background, having passed through two school systems, a university, a newspaper, radio stations, the army and the stock market, all of which left their mark on my writing style. Those different requirements fought with each other and made for some interesting, possibly even unintelligible, reading. Certainly, my handwriting was unintelligible, even to me; moreover, I never learned to type properly, so typographical errors and spelling mistakes outran even Word s unique capacity to supply homophones at the least convenient locations.

Judy bore the brunt of coping with my agglomerated writing style. Author Michael Crichton wrote, Books aren't written they're rewritten ... [this] is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it... We found this to be entirely applicable. In our case, after the seventh rewrite, I found a professional editor whose advice was to lose forty thousand words of the one hundred and thirty-nine thousand, eight hundred I had on offer. That needed another rewrite, which of course required further edits by Judy.

The final edition was produced with the help of friends who served as beta readers, together with one who painted a picture for the cover and another who

resurrected her professional skills as a copy editor. A graphic artist was hired to design a map depicting all the locations mentioned in the book, in hopeful anticipation that readers further afield would buy the book and have a better picture of the geography involved.

And then came Amazon. While we would have liked to have the book printed by a local company, their $20 price tag did not meet the requirements that we need to make a profit on 40% of the cover price. No one is going to pay $50 for a first novel by an unknown author. Amazon fit the bill, with a service that provides printing at a reasonable cost, listings of both print and ebook versions, a marketing platform, and space for reviews. Of course, it also has its own complexities, including several efforts trying to fit the map into the final Amazon text. We never did get it to show up on the e-book.

Social media, principally Facebook and LinkedIn, gives the simplest promotional tool. There are others, but they require us to sing Judy could manage this, but it would be better if I didn t.

We felt our 300 printed copies would be enough to service the market immediately at hand and this is now my job. I distributed flyers to individual stores by post and am now following them up in person. I am finding, unfortunately, that the flyer hasn t resulted in floods of phone calls requesting multiple copies; nor does anyone admit to even seeing it. Actually, I haven t had a single phone call, not even for one copy. Showing up in person is yielding more moderate success, although stores will rarely take more than three copies, and some will only take the items on consignment. A few pay cash we like them. We also look for opportunities to talk to groups of people book clubs, historical societies, anyone who ll listen.

The hope is that we can build enough volume to convince a conventional publisher to take on the book as a second printing, or failing that, acquire a distributor to get the book to more vendors without us necessarily eating up all our profits in gas money. At the very least, we hope to learn enough about the trade to make it easier to sell my next book.

 

A TALE OF CABS

John Marshall sent me a clip from Michael Caine s autobiography. Page 209 mentions Alec Guinness father of Mathew (58).

On the way back, I got into a different cab. I saw the driver clock me in his mirror. Hey I know you he said I noted encouragement. I was hoping for something about how brilliant type being in Batman. Instead, did you used to be Michael Caine?

 

Alex Guinness, that great British Theatre and film actor perhaps best known for his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars movies, but also acclaimed for his work with the greatest director of his era, David Lean in films like great expectations. Oliver twist the bridge on the river Kwai. He Told me he had similar luck with cabbies. He once got into the back of a cab and the driver said I know you, Alec opened his mouth to confirm that he was indeed Alec Guinness and the driver said no don t tell me I ll get it before you get out. I ll get your name. As Alec was paying the fare, the driver said with a flourish I ve got it! Telly Savalas.  

so Alec says no that s not it.

I bet you wish you was says the cabby. Alec nodded with a rueful Obi-Wan smile and walked off into the night. 

 

Another one

From the Editor:

Henry Hayward's (65) father Colonel Ted had one when he was with the Mounted Regiment in London, My brother Richard (62) told the story that when Ted was motoring towards Wellington Barracks he was hailed by a smart young man with bowler hat, brolie and Guards tie. " Cabbie,  take me to  the Officers Mess". "Certainly", replied Ted. When they arrived, both got out at the same time and started up the steps. "How much do I owe you, Cabbie". " It s Colonel, and I think  some champagne all round" replied Ted.

 

PHILIP STEVENS MEMOIRE

Chapter 15 I am no orator

I am no orator as Brutus is; but as you know me all, a plain, blunt man. Shakespeare, Mark Anthony's funeral oration over Caesar's body.

I was back the sort of work that Hendersons had offered, before the Hambros debacle. This was looking after families and their money, but this time not mass-market numbers of the unit trust management service, but dealing with a small number of customers with substantial wealth.

Clients began to arrive, some from the new Swiss connection, some introduced by lawyers who knew of my work, and many came as a result of introductions brought by colleagues in the investment banking side of Lazard Brothers.

Apart from my day job looking after private clients, and my part-time job looking after the valuable relationships with the Austrian and Spanish banks, there was another string to the bow. From my earliest days at Hendersons I had enjoyed public speaking in its various guises. Originally, I had learned some art of public speaking during the Wednesday evening speakeasy at Beaumont. The Army had built on that and given me two years of honing the skill. In this different financial world, it started with the marketing road-shows associated with estate duty planning at Chandler Hargreaves, had developed with selling the concept of the unit trust management service at Hendersons, but now at Lazard it took off to a new level.

The financial services industry was growing to serve with the first generation in history who had begun to have widespread disposable wealth. There were few banks, private banks or financial service companies with the resources to train their own staffs to the levels that would eventually become the minimum standards of acceptable qualification. A sub-industry grew up to cater for this training need, and hoteliers all over the world were grateful for the endless supply of people willing to travel far and stay for two or three nights at a time at conferences laid on by training organisations. I was one of this crowd of people attending such courses two or three times a year, enjoying the chances to meet other people in that same business, and enjoying the breaks from what sometimes seemed to be a fairly humdrum career.

Unit Trust Association conference, London.
This picture was the cover picture of that month s Financial Management magazine.

Why I was ever asked to attend such a conference as a speaker rather than a paying attendee I had no idea, but for the decade from about 1985 to 1995 I found myself booked a few times a year to speak at financial services conferences. It was a cloistered world; the supply of speakers who could stand up and deliver their message, and be rated highly by the delegates in their end-of-conference feed-back, was limited, and so the same two or three dozen of us tended to criss-cross Europe, speaking at conferences arranged by any one of a few organising companies. As time went on we tended to contact each other before accepting invitations to speak; we wanted to ensure that our social time at such events would be spent with congenial companions.

We spoke at conferences about the coming revolution of Banking Services for the Rich and Nearly Rich, at others about the trend for Cross Border Services for the International Affluent, about BancAssurance, a business idea that never really got off the ground but certainly gave a lot of conference organisers good revenue. I even spoke at conferences for credit card issuers, a topic about which my only knowledge had been obtained as a rather casual user of their expensive credit.

Conferences were always held in financial centres. London was popular, but less so than Geneva or Luxembourg, and Monte Carlo was bidding to be a venue. As the supply of wealth began to spread around the world the demand from new centres to pick the brains of older ones developed as well, and conferences began to spring up in Asia and the Americas. The style of the conference always depended on the location. Conferences in London were largely local affairs, with a sprinkling of earnest Americans, usually from the bulge-bracket banks seeking to work out what the locals were doing in private banking. The British locals were there, partly to ensure they maintained their annual quota of training hours and partly to meet their friends and rivals in congenial surroundings. Geneva tended to attract French and Italian delegates, whilst Zurich always produced a crop of serious and incredibly highly qualified Swiss bankers. Doctors of Economics would be common currency and it was common to find that senior civil servants and regulators from emerging financial markets would attend. I never quite worked out why this last group thought it worth paying a conference organiser money to hear me lecturing!

A fairly small handful of fellow-travellers on the speaking circuit were the mainstay of a business that at its peak was offering course and conferences on every aspect and minor topic relevant to wealth management or private banking. By far the most respected speaker was Jim Cooper. Jim had been taken out of some backwater of Lloyds Bank and told to build a business to rival the NatWest's market-leading private bank, Coutts & Co. He was certainly doing something that caught the eye, Lloyds Private Bank was the fastest growing and most written about business of its kind in Britain. One of Jim's particular theses was career commitment; the belief that any person who came from the main Lloyds Bank into the private bank would in effect be changing careers, and that there should be no going back if they decided they didn't like it or it didn't work out. He developed this theme and explained why it attracted the best bankers to consider the change of career emphasis, and went on to explain that private banking was essentially a relationship business, where the people dealing with the clients should be able to have a career that offered rewards at least as good as those of management. As time went on he delivered this message and its

developments with greater and greater conviction; nobody could be a success in private banking if they just saw it as another box to be ticked as part of the portfolio of experiences to be obtained in a general financial services career. During these conferences everyone wanted to sit at his table at meals, to learn more about how he was achieving the stunning growth that his private bank was recording, and all the time he made the same points about continuity and client-facing focus. It was a major surprise to me to telephone Jim after we had not met on the conference circuit for several months and be told that the only bank that had not listened to a word he had been preaching was his own, Lloyds Bank. He been hauled back into the main bank and was now General Manager in charge of major corporate relationships. His successor was a man with no private banking experience, and Lloyds Bank was unravelling the concept of a free-standing business, integrating everything back into the retail bank network. Within a couple of years Jim s work was all undone. In the meantime, other banks were busily implementing the blue-prints that Jim had taught them to imagine.

Charles was another respected speaker. He was an ex-policeman, had been head of the Art Robbery Squad, and was considered to be the world s leading expert on fraud and theft in the art world. He had two assets that were invaluable. The first was that his subject was always unknown to the audience, but interested them. The second was that he was a brilliant presenter in the lecture halls. Jim, Charles and I were regular speakers together.

Charles was helpful in other ways. Once I was asked to visit a potential client in his home in London. The house was incredible, full of the most wonderful oriental art objects of every kind. Knowing nothing about the subject, I was full of questions but my prospective client was reserved and answered few of them. Nothing came of the meeting, but a week or so later, I saw Charles at another conference. A passing mention of my recent house call attracted his attention. He felt that his former colleagues at Scotland Yard would be very interested to know that this man was in London again and even more interested to have an address for this him. Some years later a name in a Press report caught my eye; a major player in the international trade in looted antiquities had been sent to jail for a substantial term. I was glad he had not become a client.

Lazards allowed me freedom to take on engagements to discuss all these topics with our own competitors. They had seen the benefits of that approach in my work with Creditanstalt and Banco Herrero. I spoke at many other banks, in London and abroad, led seminars in various European bank s offices, and was once almost marched off the premises when I told one famously traditional bank that their proud clinging to ancient customs, including staff dress code, was a guarantee that the modern entrepreneur and wealth creator would see their proud tradition as a barrier to business rather than a pleasing proof of stability.

As a good boy scout, Be Prepared was a good motto. I had one stock talk that I could deliver to any audience at no notice. In essence it was about service. The theme was that private bankers and wealth managers are in the service industry, where servants serve. Clients had servants to run their households, wash their cars, raise their children and book their holidays. We were only servants who looked after their money. The housekeeper was more relevant to ease of life than we were, most of the time.

The man who washed the cars and did the garden was delivering results that were tangible and could be admired. The nanny s role was obviously far more important than ours. If we dropped down dead or moved to a new bank that they didn t like, clients would replace us in an instant, far more easily than they could change their housekeeper. The Swiss bankers, many of them richer than their clients, understood this at once. Most others, whether American or European, more naïve and less historically experienced over the generations, did not.

I always took the trouble to prepare to say something original and provocative. On one occasion, I realised that my audience was bored at the end of a long day. Lunch had been accompanied by wine, the organisers had given me a dull subject, the room was stuffy. I asked the projectionist to turn off his machine, suggested that we talk about something more interesting and asked a couple of questions. Who had ever been in the military? What were the results of learning military skills and transferring them to banking and client service? Almost at once, there was an animated debate going on between those, including all the Swiss, who had military national service experience and those who did not. I had nothing more to do, the lead organiser tried to moderate the discussion, everyone had something to say. Even those most deeply asleep awoke and became animated. One opinion was that the military are far too stupid ever to make good bankers, and the other was that civilians are too chaotic and disorganized ever to create and operate a complex business. Discussions went on long after the scheduled end of the session and on into the drinks party given by the conference sponsors. As a result, subsequent organisers became a bit prone to ask me to take the dreaded grave-yard slot in the timetable, after lunch on the second day. I didn t mind, it could be fun to try to deliver a talk that would keep everyone awake.

invitations came, to travel more than just around the European financial centres, and in September 1991 came the ultimate experience of life as a speaker on the conference circuit. Just three weeks before Freddie s second birthday Nicky and I flew to South Africa, leaving Antonia, aged 16, with her brothers, Eddie and Will in support, to look after him at home, with his godmother Diane hovering competently in the background. I was to speak at the first post-apartheid financial services conference, in Johannesburg, delivering two talks on aspects of the developed world s approach to wealth management for private clients. With no speaking engagement at the conference on the second day, Nicky and I found a young Sowetan undergraduate at the local university, and he took us to see the notorious Soweto township.

On a walk from the hotel we had already seen for ourselves the shop for local witch- doctors and shamans. Now we were to see Soweto itself. We passed the unemployed men at each illegal drinking den, skeletal horses feeding on the rubbish tips, the burned-out shacks on the streets and corners that demarked each section of the shanties tribal groupings from the others. We visited our guide s family in their own shanty, built of old packing cases and lined inside with plastic lorry sheeting. It was spotlessly clean, every single thing in the home had a use and a place to be kept. Drinking glasses were beer bottles, tops cut off and the edge polished smooth. Pride of place went to pictures of children in various stages of schooling: this family clearly intended to break out of the cycle of deprivation. We were less prepared for the smart quarter of Soweto, where substantial houses stood in their own grounds, with new cars parked in the driveways and where the ultimate status symbol for the upwardly mobile black family was white security guard.

 

One of countless illicit drinking dens

The destroyed shacks that marked boundaries between tribal areas in Soweto

The AIDS crisis was at its height, and we wanted to visit a clinic in Soweto to meet the medical staff there. A delightful nurse showed us round. She explained that prospects for the clinic were a little better now that it was expected that Nelson Mandela would soon be released after 26 years in prison. Nicky asked about AIDS. We only had one case, and he was cured by the power of prayer. It was a more hopeful answer

than the true reply, that the disease was rampant throughout the townships and there was nothing that could be done, with no money and no treatments.

We went to see the house that Mandela s wife, Winnie, had built in anticipation of his release from Robben Island.

We learned something of the problems of South Africa at dinner that evening. Local bank officials and others attending the conference made loud their condemnation of our behaviour that day. It was clear to us that not one of them had ever set foot in any of the settlement areas, that they considered the residents of them to be an alien species. None concealed their opinions that the black population were unfit to take part in leadership of political life, and those who had thought about the inevitable future saw the majority population as a dangerous interference in their own futures. Most sitting at our table seemed surprised that we were still alive.

After Johannesburg we had a few days to spare. A safari in northern South Africa, where we saw the rare painted dogs, a holiday in Western Australia with my sister, then a repeat performance of the Johannesburg conference in Sydney.

 

There was no safari in Sydney, but a night boat ride down Sydney Harbour, past the floodlit Sydney Opera House to eat fish and chips at Doyle s on the Rocks was a highlight of the stay. Having already heard my talks in Johannesburg, Nicky s choice for the next day was a trip behind the curtain at the opera house, and having heard my talk as well, I wished I could have been with her.

Having travelled that far it seemed only sensible to visit my employer s offices in Singapore and Tokyo. So it was that, after a trip that lasted 19 days, we arrived back at home. In total, I had spent about four hours speaking at two conferences, perhaps twelve hours in total at official receptions and symposia associated with them, and a dozen hours in the Singapore and Tokyo offices. Either Lazard Brothers didn t need my services much or I was fortunate in the abilities of my colleagues who were looking

after my clients in my absence. Apparently, our elder children didn t need us either: they and the two years old Freddie were all still alive and had not been taken into care.

Sometime after this trip, I was due for one of my regular meetings with one of the white South African families who were clients. The head of the family was pleased that I had visited Soweto, one of the very basic clinics and seen the hospital at Baragwanath, the main medical centre for the entire Soweto township. As a result, I came to learn that he was a participant in a group of white lawyers in London who organised legal representation for anti-apartheid campaigners caught up in the South African legal system. Much later, as we came to know each other better, I realised that he was far more than that, he was also a key figure in the negotiations that led ultimately to Nelson Mandela s release and the first all-nation election that followed.

Art Rutzen appeared at a conference in Geneva. We have met him, in Chapter 4, on the river Thames at Cookham, but chronologically that was actually well after this first meeting in Geneva. He was sales manager of Wells Fargo's private banking business in San Francisco, a short and immensely broad man who had been an international wrestler in his college days. His first appearance at a Swiss conference was a sensation; he had no plans to temper his message to the audience, and set about telling the ranks of assembled Swiss and other Middle European bankers that their way of doing business was over. His speaking style was modelled on his wrestling career - get them in a stranglehold and drag them round the ring until all will to resist has left them. He spoke about hunters, farmers and gatherers, about the product- based offering, and about the scientific art of identifying potential business opportunities and developing them. He spoke too about the seven-day-week culture. Saturday or Sunday would be a good day for taking clients and prospective clients to the ballgame. Art had the lease of a private box at the San Francisco 49-ers, the hottest ball game on the West Coast, and he would entertain a party of 24 at every game of the season. The rest of the weekend was for meeting colleagues, talking through last week and planning for next week. The effect on the Swiss audience was tremendous; this upstart, whose bank was more suited to the Wild West and stagecoaches than the high calling of private banking, actually had the effrontery to come to the spiritual home of private banking and tell the Swiss how to do it properly! He certainly caught their attention. At the end of his first presentation to a European audience, sitting stunned by the heresy of his presentation, I raised my hand to ask a question - When does a Wells Fargo banker get to smell the roses? In an oblique way I was asking about quality of life, or the work-life balance. Art was clear; a successful private banker is by definition happy, and being happy doing it why would he want to spend his waking hours not doing it? A good banker's family would be proud to see their daddy working so hard, and he would be proud to be so dedicated to the job. To his audience, this was an outrage, how could he tell Swiss bankers, whose own names told which banks they worked for, and frequently owned, that their centuries of genteel relationship banking was out of date and doomed to modernise or die? Art was not a soft option as a speaker, he knew what he wanted to say, and was certain in his own mind that his ideas were the brightest and the rightest. Inevitably he ended up running his own business, successfully, after a number of high-profile disagreements at Wells Fargo and elsewhere. He died in 2005, aged 57, the man who probably did more than anyone else to bring American private banking ideas to the rest of the world.

In 1994 Art was elected to the National Wrestling Hall of Fame, in the category of 'Outstanding American'. The Hall of Fame is on the university campus of Oklahoma State University in the small town of Stillwater about 75 miles north of Oklahoma City, on a crossroads on Route 35 to Wichita. Apart from the hall of fame, Stillwater proudly proclaims its status as the tenth largest city in Oklahoma, the 28th most populous state in the USA. I mention this geographical detail because I have never met anyone, apart from the people in this story, who has been there. Art invited me to attend the inauguration ceremony, offering what he saw as a singular honour, to join his family at the event. I was able to arrange to be in Miami leading an in-house seminar for a bank that was reviewing its private wealth management service, and the dates coincided nicely. I flew to Oklahoma and then was taken the 75 miles, along a dead- straight and level road north to Stillwater.

Art had one other non-family guest, a Boston lawyer whom I had come to know on the conference circuit. Joe Field and I had an afternoon to fill before the ceremonies, and we strolled round the university campus. Outside an outsized sports hall we stopped to listen to cheering and music, and went to see the show. It was the first weekend of the new university year and the final stages of audition for membership of the cheerleaders squad for the football team were in progress. The hall was full of hopeful dancers. All entrants had received a tape of music and dance instructions, and they were performing the set piece in groups of six at a time. Each girl had half a dozen fellow students there in support, and as Joe and I walked in the final rounds of routines were being performed. We sat in the tiered benches and watched. The last routine was danced and after a short delay the organisers announced that they were ready to announce the names of the successful applicants. Twenty successful candidates had been picked and four reserve names would be given out, in order of qualification. As each name was given the reaction was the same; a loud shriek 'Oh My Gaaahd!' and immediate bursting into tears, with the six supporters also in tears. As the list of successful applicants grew longer and the number of available places diminished, the tension began to rise, and each name's announcement was greeted with commensurately greater enthusiasm. Joe and I sat and watched this uniquely American rite of progress and wondered how it would all end. The announcer made great play with the last few names, milking the occasion for as much suspense as possible. At last the last name, the last shriek, Oh My Gaaahd, and the inevitable tears. We had not bargained for the reaction of the losers; there were probably a hundred of them, each with her six supporters. All of these also burst into tears, so we sat surrounded by some hundreds of weeping and near-hysterical female students. They were tall, slim and good-looking, and Joe and I would willingly have offered handkerchiefs all round. One of the young undergraduates saw our bewilderment and placed this event in context. Membership of the cheerleaders was a social accolade, conferring great prestige. Without a trace of awareness, she told us that the Pokies were indeed the leaders of female society in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

Not, possibly, still called the Pokies, but this is Oklahoma, after all

The actual induction into the American Wrestling Hall of Fame took place at a formal dinner. We joined Art and his family at their table, visitors to a State-owned university in a dry state, fearing that we would suffer the proceedings without a drink to fortify us. Rescue was at hand, a white-coated wine-waiter came to the table and leaned between Joe and me: 'What will you gentlemen be drinking? I can offer you... iced tea or iced coffee.' On that we had to rely to get us through the long evening.

The actual ceremony was ordained by the Hall of Fame's protocols. Eight persons were to be inducted this evening. The President of the Hall of Fame stood to conduct the proceedings, and for the first time I realised that I had misunderstood the name of the establishment; it is actually the N'al Wristlen Hawafame, pronounced as a single word, with a rising inflexion of the last syllable. The President announced the name of the inductee, recited his achievements in wrestling and in Art s case his achievements in the category of Outstanding American. Improperly, it occurred to me to think that in the case of at least one in the Outstanding American category, his ability to donate to the hall s funds was delicately mentioned as having been his claim to be an Outstanding American. The president then invited the inductee s chosen sponsor to complete the ceremony by placing a Hall of Fame Ring on the inductee s finger. That marked the moment when a man in the crowd became that uniquely American being, a Hall of Famer. The new Hall of Famer then burst into tears and made a speech. He thanked his ma and pa and his High School Wristlen Coach, he thanked his wife and assorted others for his success. He then hugged his tearful High School Wristlen Coach, and burst into tears again. This ceremonial induction was repeated eight times, once for each inductee: Joe and I suffered this, in the name of friendship, on a refreshment of yet more iced tea.

And then, as suddenly as they had started, the invitations to speak dried up; I had said all I wanted to say in those settings and once I had turned down a couple of invitations and explained why, that part of my life, an amusing and fulfilling adjunct to my professional life, was over.

Meanwhile, back at the day job, life was enjoyable. I was becoming good at what I did, my client base had grown to a respectable size, largely as a result of my being joined by a few substantially wealthy new clients. A somewhat more professional marketing atmosphere had been created with the arrival of Sandy and Jill, the former very experienced in marketing and selling products and services in the pensions world, the latter with similar skills in the world of inter-bank cooperation. The chief investment officer who had joined on the same day as David and myself left for other pastures, and was replaced by a very remarkable character. Craig was unique in my experience. He was not only much cleverer than most, and the City had its full share of clever people, he was intuitively able occasionally to identify moments when markets had simply got it wrong.

When markets get it wrong can be a dangerous time. John Maynard Keynes was famous for his saying Markets can be wrong for longer than you can remain solvent. Craig s skill was in identifying the moment when the wrong market was about to right itself. In September 1992 the Major government was desperately trying to keep sterling inside the ERM, the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. As the month went on, Craig was increasingly certain that the cost of supporting membership was crippling the country, and that we would leave within days. His way to profit was simple. Do not sell clients assets, but borrow against their value, immediately selling the borrowed sterling and buying Swiss Francs. When the UK left the ERM, sterling would fall in value, the francs could be sold and the sterling borrowings repaid, leaving a large surplus of profit to be added to the client s assets. There was very little risk that if the country didn t leave the ERM sterling would be stronger than the Swiss franc. There was a tiny chance of losing a little money, but a large chance of making a great deal of it. As the days went buy, Craig was more and more confident that the moment was imminent. On the morning of 16 September, he came past my desk one more time: Today s the day, have you borrowed all your clients can raise?

That evening, Norman Lamont appeared outside the Treasury, to announce that the UK had left the ERM. I had stayed in the office, and began to call my clients. The first call was to one who had taken the decision to borrow Swiss francs as far as she could. She picked up the phone, I had interrupted her watching Lamont s performance, and as soon as she heard my voice she asked whether she was ruined. I reassured her: my call was the first of the evening, because I wanted to let her know that for the first and probably only time in my career a client herself - had earned, by following my advice, a million pounds in ten minutes. Other calls that evening were also gratifying.

By the mid 1990s there were many comings and goings. Stuart Webb retired, David Steyn moved on and we saw a series of internal appointments as chief executive. All were parachuted in from the highly respected investment banking side of Lazard. Most of these parachutists had no greater aim than to roll up their parachutes and return to civilisation without damage to their careers where the real money was made. One or two tried hard to make the business work.

Growth in the private clients department brought an expansion of staff. My clients could now call for help from Sue, and for many she became their first port of call, because she knew what she was doing. Those more interested in the details of portfolio management called my new assistant, Julien, because he knew what he was talking about. I took care of the lunches with the clients, and eventually was able to offer them more rarefied hospitality. Through my work for the Swiss bank, I had many dealings with the new chairman of Lazard, often involving his secretary, Sarah. Lazard had a box at Covent Garden, used for client entertaining, but there seemed to be many times when nobody had booked the box. Sarah, who managed the bookings for the box, found that I had clients who would not mind being invited to the opera or ballet at very short notice, and so Nicky and I found ourselves regulars at Covent Garden. Usually, we took clients, sometimes lawyers who might have dealings with us through having mutual clients, and rarely, as a last resort, friends who might, possibly, one day in the future, be rich enough to become clients. One would assume that the box was never available for the big events, but most other users seemed only to want Mozart operas. My clients were more than willing to suffer Aida, La Boheme (Nicky cried all through that one, and still does when she sees it) or La Cenerentola. The ballet was even easier, because apart from Swan Lake or Giselle there was no appetite for it, so we saw lots of everything else. Would we ever have seen Irek Mukhamedov in La Bayadere if my colleagues had known anything about ballet?

A new arrival in the department needed to recruit an assistant, and asked me to help in the process. We put a small advert in the Financial Times, and were promptly flooded with applications. The job of creating a list of those to interview was daunting. After the interviews it was clear that all the gilded young men whom my new colleague had found acceptable were outshone by a young girl from Yorkshire, so my colleague reluctantly offered her the post. She was due to start on my birthday, 1 August 1996. A couple of days before Amanda joined us, my colleague took me to one side. He had realised that he would not be able to work well with a woman as his assistant, and suggested that she work with me, whilst my assistant, Julien, a more acceptable product of a good school, would transfer to work for him. My diary for 1 August records Julien moves, to run the portfolios for which his new boss is nominally responsible. Amanda, Sue and I celebrated her arrival and my birthday with champagne at the City Boot, our local wine bar. I little knew that this birthday drink was the beginning of a working relationship that would last for the rest of my career, and a great personal friendship that continues beyond it. We were to share many more bottles over the next fourteen years.

That evening, Nicky and I celebrated my birthday with ballet at Covent Garden. The principals were Mukhamedov, Darcy Bussell and Tetsuya Kamakawa. I realised that my colleagues who outranked me in rights to book the box really did know absolutely nothing about ballet.

My colleague Jill, the one who knew about inter-bank relationships, had moved to Singapore. The government there had a long-term plan to develop the island state as a global financial centre. To encourage banks to open offices there, the government would effectively finance the costs by ensuring that they would receive government contracts that justified the risk of opening. Jill went to open Lazard s new investment office, and the government awarded the office a large contract to manage assets for GSIC, the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation. The actual fund

management would be undertaken in London for the first year or so, while Jill built up a team. It took Jill little time to realise that this new office, and the resources available to her, would never give her the opportunity to build a decent business, so she jumped ship and took a similar post at a rival bank prepared to invest properly in the opportunity. Lazard now had a fund management business in Singapore with nobody in charge. Somebody in London thought that my experience as a soldier in Singapore nearly thirty years previously had qualified me to take on the task. For some several months I flew each month to Singapore, visited the neglected office, reported to GSIC that all was under control, and flew home again. It was inevitable that after this charade had been enacted three or four times GSIC cancelled the contract, somebody cleared the offices and the great Eastern expansion was over.

As we moved towards the end of the 1980s, I was becoming frustrated by the lack of commitment to the investment management business. Sue, Amanda and I had a good little business, but the lack of quality in other important areas was making it increasingly difficult to offer what we thought our clients deserved. The computer system was appallingly out of date; it was rumoured that its back-up was a machine in the Science Museum. The proposed new computer system was little more than a hope. Investment management was so bad that Amanda and I effectively opted out of the central research and portfolio creation processes. Craig had gone, replaced by anonymity. Christopher was long-retired, and much missed. I had discovered early on that he had completed his National Service in the King s Shropshire Light Infantry, which gave us a bond, helped by what I can only describe as a light infantry sense of humour.

Some client needs were not what I had wanted or expected. One of my most valued clients, personally and professionally, wanted us to take one of their offspring into what would effectively be an apprenticeship for a year. I knew the offspring and knew that we would not be able to do much to educate them in the ways of the financial world. In truth, I didn t want this a burden for year. However, I didn t want to offend by turning down the request, so went back to the office to consult the head boss. His reply was perfect advice. If I received the right price, would I want to take the offspring for the year? Yes? Good, then set the price, and I can promise you that we ll not let down the offspring or you.

I went to see the client. We certainly would be delighted to take the offspring in for a year. We would give training, provided by the most senior people in every part of the bank. The trainee would also be seconded to Lazard houses in Paris and New York, work in the Tokyo office and everywhere receive the best we could offer. Client was thrilled. In addition, we would pay the offspring the not inconsiderable salary that a trainee graduate joining the bank would earn; I really did believe that interns and work experience students should always actually work and be paid for their contribution. Client was even more pleased. We had to discuss money. To compensate for the amount of very senior time that would go into this apprenticeship, we would need to charge a truly eye-watering fee. Not quite so pleased, the client accepted. The offspring s salary would be added to the client s bill. Still acceptable. Travel and other direct costs associated with the year would also be charged. Gulp. Yes, but no more. Everyone was pleased in the end. We delivered an outstanding apprenticeship, the offspring did buckle down to justifying the very expensive time that was lavished in delivering it, and my team budget received all the income that came in from this year s

involvement. By the end, my head boss was suggesting that maybe I would like to set up a formal offering for offspring of other clients. No, I would not like.

Meanwhile, whilst Lazard s investment business floundered, other banks saw their investment management divisions flourish, grow and prosper greatly. Various people arrived at Lazard, all with missions to turn things around. One decided that I would have a better career if I had a life coach. Some person undertook the job, a professional from outside the company. Only in recent years have I seen his like again. If you watch Mrs Brown s Boys you will know Professor Clowne, pronounced Cloon, in whom you will recognise my erstwhile life coach s role model. I saw him off after one session.

Lazard in London merged the business under the umbrella of the successful Lazard investment business in New York, and now we had the spice of New York sending senior managers over the revive the barely living corpse. One always travelled accompanied by his second-in-command, a tall blonde, somewhat younger than himself. Seeing her, my mind always strayed to memories of the Oklahoma cheer- leaders, the Pokies. Managers and chief executives came and went. Nothing seemed to achieve the desired result of turning the business into a success. Long after I retired I met one of the several chief executives parachuted in from the investment bank to invigorate the division. Michael talked of his inability to turn the ship s rudder and asked why, in my opinion, the job had defeated him and many others. I had no answer, so I asked him a question in return. How much money did the bank take out of the division over the years, to pay your bonuses and profit shares, and how much did they reinvest? He took my point.

The truth was that the business was starved of resources, recruited poorly and was suffering as clients lawyers and accountants compared what different firms achieved for their clients. Amanda, Sue and I managed to avoid the general malaise, effectively by operating a business within the business, in a way that should never have been necessary, and which regulation would never permit today. We were left alone, apart from the occasional attempts by colleagues to remove clients from our care, and those we saw off with ease. One of the process-minded New Yorkers tried to work out how the three of us could formally take over the whole investment process of the private clients department, but we had enough to do without that distraction. Apart from that, his back-door way of integrating us into the mainstream did not appeal.

 

MOUNT BROGIE

 

 

 

Brogie on a mountain top in Spain. Courtesy Chris Newling- Ward via John Flood

 

 

 

Correspondence

 

From John Joss

 

I devoured the Review, but would like you to elaborate on your book, please.

 Here is my (invited) comment about John Marshall, re Los Angeles:

 

As a Northern California (San Francisco Bay Area) resident, I should look down on 'those Southerners.' But I don't. Los Angeles is a marvellous mystery, a collection of every imaginable human manifestation, from the sublime to the obscene, and everything in between. Brilliance and magnificence beyond comprehension, violence and brutality deeper than the depths. There are many oases of calm and dignity, interest and emotion, but each is 40 miles apart, a two-hour drive on the

congested freeways populated by demonic drivers. London is, bycomparison, vehicularly benign (you didn't expect THAT!). I've writtenabout LA, a lot, including in the (now completed) seven-book series.

 

 

Reading The Review always stirs my memories of St. Johns and Beaumont. A few include these:

 

At St. John's, Fr. Bernard Basset instilled in me a lifelong love of writing. A stern taskmaster, and stickler for correctness in every aspect of the written word, I owe him a debt of gratitude time can never erase. Of his books, I particularly loved The Noon Day Devil, about growing old. 

 

I have an ineradicable memory of Fr. Basset I must share with you. He came to California, and I was told he was coming. I made a point to meet him, and he was, as always, the man I had come to know, love, and respect. In my wife's presence, I asked him when his whimsical prediction that I would come to a bad end might be

expected. I asked him this within a couple of minutes of meeting him at the local Jesuit retreat, and he didn't remember me for a brief moment. I repeated my name (we were going back to 1942, remember), and he fell to his knees, and tool my hand, saying the most kind, generous and loving thing: "My dear man, how wonderful to see you after all these years." (NB I was by then in my late thirties, with three sprogs). My wife was gobsmacked, as  you might imagine: a Jesuit priests kneeling in front of me.

 I wanted to write Fr. Basset's biography. I had the perfect title:

 

"Bernard Basset: Hound of Heaven"

 

You mentioned Fr. Boyle, who was Rector when I was at Beaumont. Lean, ascetic, a strict disciplinarian, a formidable, indeed intimidating man. Those rimless spectacles. That terrifying look.

 

I was from time to time at the office door, waiting yet again to explain  away some infraction or grave sin I had committed, and my indelible  memory was the magnificent clock outside his office door, with its  remarkable mechanism. I've often wondered what became of it.

 

Mr. Clayton! An extraordinary musician, who taught me piano at St. John's, and (of course) played the organ at Beaumont. After evening service, we would all file out, to go to our dormitories, but I would sneak back to kneel at the back, under the organ, to hear his wonderful work filling the air with glorious music, often for fifteen or twenty minutes, admiring the rose window. If caught  there, I would no doubt end up outside Fr. Boyle's office, the next  day, looking at the clock. Remembering the ferula (at St. John's, many times--"Six of the best, Joss," from Fr. Dunphy.

 

AGAIN

 

Many thanks, as usual--and how I wish I could be with you on 7 Oct. Alas, a bridge too far (3,000 miles).

I will read the Summer edition shortly. Meantime, I re-read 'About' again, and found it profoundly apt. I'm reminded, in the phrase about a life attitude, of a quatrain from a poem I wrote long ago, which I may have quoted to you before, which applies to all the good men and women I have been blessed to know, from St.John's, through Beaumont, and on into the 'world:'

 

    Integrity's the inmost core of life.

    There is no substitute that you can find.

    Without it, all must end in sullen strife.

    And if you fool yourself, then you are blind.

 

From David Bulfield

( Ed: 10 wickets for 78 Lords 1954)

 

 

Many thanks for the article about David Kingsley. I was of course very interested and found his post-school failure inexplicable. He seemed to have both the necessary ability and mental stamina to do well and with 6 innings for Berkshire should have managed at least one score. I started in 56 with 19 not out and 49 and got 50 to begin in 1957 and I was certainly not a potential high-flyer. I think my performance suffered from a lack of concentration and I certainly remember Derek Shackleton saying to me around 1970 Don t you like batting after lunch? After I d got out yet again at 1.15pm for around 40.

Incidentally, I played a season with Jim Melville at Beaumont and with Mike Hywel-Davies a few times for Dorset. No comparison Mike was quite quick but Jim was a much better bowler - pace, out-swing and a good slower off-cutter and more consistent. I never played with or against Julian Murphy.

 

 

From Chris Forbes

 

n response to a line in the BU Review that a lot of BUs have lost touch, I write that I may not be included in their ranks.  Not being resident in the UK I have only ever attended one Lunch, and had to skip the recent one on October 8.  But I am committing to attend it next year or the year after.  My problem has been in arranging to be in striking distance of London at the right time.  However, this should be increasingly possible, for though I am resident in the US my wife is resident in Ireland and we travel to and fro several times a year, and can arrange our connecting flight to be via London, especially as BA now has a direct Pittsburgh/Heathrow flight.

.

After the death of my wife in 2015 I met Gillie at a TCD reunion in 2017.  We had overlapped at TCD for three years but had never met, though we had several mutual friends.  One thing led to another and we were married in 2019.

 

I read your excellent BU Reviews with great interest.  While I often skip over the horsey and military stories the story on the Guns of Navarone was rather good, certainly gripping. However, I often wish there was more news about my BU contemporaries but realize that this only comes with their input.  There were brief mentions of contemporaries like Michael Tussaud and Tom Scanlon, and a photo that included Geoff Kelly who was at TCD with me.  Please keep 'em coming as I love to read about old chums especially as their numbers are diminishing!

 

From Gerry Ford

 

My sister came to stay bringing some old family albums. A few years ago you published a series of photos by I think  CP Stevens.

This photo is from the same set.  The Stevens were close to my mother s family the Gilberts, and Geoffrey, my sisters godfather, was a special friend of my father at Beaumont. I love the fact that Geoffrey is still in his pyjamas while my father,3rd from left, is almost ready for parade. I wonder who the others are.  Geoffrey was killed in a car crash inTanzania where he was living and helping my sister, then a nun, run a teachers training college.

 

Ed Sadly lost in the mists of time circa 1929.

 

 

From Tom Scanlon

 

It s funny that, as I lay awake in the middle of last night, I found myself wondering about such things as: who were the last two Beaumont Captains of Cricket and whatever happened to Tommy Clayton: was he still there at the end (which would have been awful for him)?

Now I know the answers it s all in The Review!

I m happy to hear that you re writing the history of National Hunt racing. It wasn t for me, but my father was crazy about racing. He was an artist and I remember he did one fine impression of a race-course after everyone had gone home (inspired I think by Plumpton and Sandown Park, discarded betting slips and so on). He also spent ages working on a portrait of his favourite jockey, Martin Molony. 

Good to hear that you ll be writing about your great interest AND getting paid for it. You deserve it.

Sad to hear that no fewer than three of our contemporaries have died recently. When I arrived at Beaumont, Bill Gammell was one of five of us in the new Infirmary Dormitory for the youngest boys (age as in the Figures class at St. John s, I believe; the other three were Gerry McCaffrey, Charlie Poels and Steven Rousseau.)

Paul Burrough was my first best friend at Beaumont. Barney Capel-Dunn was indeed our left-arm spinner in the XI; I remember he had a very nice, if rather cutting, sense of humour.

 

 

From Simon Potter

Thanks for the new newsletter (interesting as ever), and the news that you are working on another book. Do let us know when it's available for customers! Thank you too for the mention of "Melyssa". I was tickled the other day to receive a sort of certificate about it from the USA which I attach - amusing really, considering it's rather a little squib!

 

 

Hope the lunch goes with a bang!

 

 

From Christopher McHugh

 

Thank you for yet another delightful Summer Review which I have much enjoyed reading, especially the article on college buildings.

I agree with you whole-heartedly about the nauseating political correctness of flying a pride flag. 

As regards your comment: 

"They have a whole month when we are supposed to bend over backwards to support their perceived  grievances when as a group they offer nothing to society." 

Captain McHugh's only observation is that at least, thank goodness, we are not supposed to bend over forwards to support their perceived grievances. That really would be dangerous!!! 

 

From Tony Waldeck

 

Was there, in the 1940's a Rector called Sinnot? I'd never heard of him but there's a debate here. A (unknown to me until all this) a jape where someone set up a faux public school. He had headed paper organised and wrote to headmasters of the leading public schools with scam suggestions. In the story the Rector of Beaumont is named as Sinnot which in itself looks questionable. Whatever, this Rector was among the recipients who did NOT fall for the prank. There was a contemporary of mine called Synot (spelling uncertain). Jesuit leaning families tend to be loyal. Apologies for bothering you with trivia!

 

Ed: Tony no there wasn t!  But I would love to know more about the scam if there is more to tell. Your near contemporary was Anthony Synnott who having tried the Navy ( father was Captain RN) and the Jesuits became a lecturer at Concordia in Canada and it reminds me to dig out one of his articles for the Review.

 

Tony again

Awfully sorry, the plot continues (Old buffers with nothing better to do). The reaction to your revelation about the rector not being Sinnot is this: Wikipedia is not always accurate. Can Robert tell us who was Rector of Beaumont during the war and just after? 

I can almost promise this will be the last irritation. On this matter, anyway!

 

Ed:  Firstly the Rectors for most of the War Fr Helsham apparently one of the most loved and idolised of our headmasters. He was followed for a short time by Fr Boyle until Sir Lewis Clifford took over in 1950  for the next six years.

       Secondly, John Sinnott was Rector of Wimbledon  College 1937 -50 when it  lost its independence status and became a state funded Grammar School.

Either Wikipedia have the name of the Rector incorrect or the school presumably this could only be settled by reading the Sneath letters

 

Ed ( for those in the dark)

H. Rochester Sneath (c. 1900  ?) is a fictional character, headmaster of the fictional Selhurst school, who was created by Humphrey Berkeley (Malvern)  in a series of hoax letters  to public school headmasters and public figures starting in 1948.

H. Rochester Sneath, MA, L-es-L, no longer exists. And if you wished to put your son's name on the waiting list for Selhurst School, Near Petworth, Sussex, you might have a little difficulty. It doesn't exist either. But, as this collection of Sneath's letters, and the replies, proves, you can fool most of the people most of the time. Particularly, it seems, if the people happen to be the head masters of those most English private institutions - public schools.

In early 1948, Sneath began his brief and glorious career. Letters, like canes, mortar-boards and jaundiced rugger balls, began to appear in head-magisterial offices, whose occupants, with two notable exceptions, appeared to find nothing strange in either Sneath's requests or his exhortations. Pompous, indignant, eccentric, pushing, toadying, or just plain dotty, the letters were answered with a seriousness which is scarcely credible. For he wrote of infestations of rats, of the possibility of 'engineering' Royal visits; of where to hire a private detective; of junior masters with club feet and warty noses; of ghosts, cricket, statues, new buildings, 'monster' reunions, and a host of other subjects.
George Bernard Shaw was puzzled.

Invention

Sneath was supposedly the headmaster  of Selhurst School ("near Petworth, Sussex) a prep school with 175 male students.

Selhurst School and Rochester Sneath were the inventions of Humphry Berkeley, then an undergraduate student at Pembroke College Cambridge. 

Berkeley ordered headed notepaper printed with Selhurst's letterhead. He arranged with the Royal Mail to have his post forwarded to his Cambridge address. After some time they refused to send mail from a non-existent address, so he would ask his correspondents to reply c/o Mrs Harvey-Kelly, at a Cambridge address which was that of a fellow student

Letters

Berkley's earliest letters as Sneath, written in March 1948, were to the headmasters of several British public schools.

The Master of Marlborough, F. M. Heywood, was livid when Sneath asked how he had "engineered" a recent visit of the Royal family. Next, he received a letter in which Sneath warned that he should not hire a French teacher, 'Robert Agincourt', because he had climbed a tree naked. Finally, when asked to recommend a private detective and a competent nursery maid, Heywood wrote back, "I am not an agency for domestic servants. I really must ask you not to bother me with this kind of thing."

Other letters included written by Sneath included:

A letter to the headmaster of Stowe  to ask if he should provide sex education for the school maids.

A complaint to the headmaster of Oundle  that the school chaplain was hopeless as a rat catcher.

Asking Haileybury or a reference for a teacher who had a club foot and warts.

Even the headmaster of Eton received a letter from Sneath, asking to apply for his job.

Some of the headmasters answered politely to a person they thought to be a fellow headmaster; one even recommended Selhurst to a parent of a prospective pupil.

Public figures soon found themselves receiving letters too: George Bernard Shaw received an invitation to speak at an annual celebration at Selhurst; he declined. Architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott  was informed of the possibility of designing a new main building for the school; he declined as well.Conductor Sir Adrian Boult was invited to conduct the school orchestra; he, like Shaw and Scott, was not enthusiastic.

Two of Sneath's correspondents detected the hoax: one was Walter Oakeshott of Winchester who declined an invitation because he was attending a commemoration of a remote ancestor at Salt Lake City, Utah. The other was John Sinnott, Rector of Beaumont When invited to lead an exorcism, Sinnott requested a packet of salt "capable of being taken up in pinches   be ready for him.

Exposure

On 13 April 1948, Sneath's letter was published in the Daily Worker  complaining of the difficulty in importing Russian textbooks for compulsory Russian lessons in his school.

The News Review asked to interview Sneath to discover more about this unusual school, but Sneath's "secretary", "Penelope Pox-Rhyddene", claimed he was ill. The journalist then visited Petworth to discover that there was no Selhurst School there, and subsequently turned up on the doorstep of Berkeley's friend's lodgings.

A story in the News Review on 29 April revealed that Berkeley was behind the hoax.

Berkeley was sent down (excluded from university) for two years.

After Sneath, and publication

Berkeley was later elected Conservative M P for Lancaster in the 1959 general election.

The Rochester Sneath letters were published in 1974 under the title The Life and Death of Rochester Sneath, together with drawings by Nicholas Bentley. 

BACK TO CORRESPONDENCE

From John Marshall

Published in The Oldie on Dec 6 2023 (I just discovered it.)

Doubt ( Lady Antonia Frazer)

 

Whenever I doubt 

I get out and about 

to Farm Street I go -

The journey is slow 

I mutter and murmur,

My resolve should be firmer 

Doubt? Kick it out.

Then I flop down on my chair.

They put it specially there.

So it s solid and true,

As I should be too.

I pray throughout Mass.

Doubt? 

Kick it out. 

Suddenly there s a change 

Just within range. 

The Host is held high 

Into the church sky.

Peace is retrieved 

I believe ..

 

2^nd MISSIVE

 

For 2.99, I purchased a postcard of St John s postmarked 1954 and addressed to a town near Liverpool and signed by a boy called Alastair. You of course will immediate identify that as Cridland. - probably be very interested to get it back. Doesn t he up north ?

Follow up:- The addressee is what looks like Mrs Kerr?? Is that possible. Jan 1954 St John s not. Alastair Kerr???

 

Ed:- Could be either - Neither are on the data base but  seems more likely Kerr who left 1960 for Newcastle University for Civil  Engineering.

 

 

L D S

 

AND A VERY HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL.