The Oldie July 2021

Sasha Swire (p33) is the daughter of Sir John Nott, MP for St Ives, and wife of Hugo Swire, MP for East Devon. Her book, Diary of an MP’s Wife, is an indiscreet account of life as a political plus-one. Gareth Neame (p14) is a BAFTA, Emmy and Golden Globe award-winning TV and film producer and executive. His credits include Downton Abbey – the film version was number one in Britain and America. Graham Little (p24) is a Northern Irish TV producer, writer and presenter. He has worked in television for 20 years. He’s represented Ireland at elephant polo and sumo-wrestling. Earl Spencer (p10) wrote Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier, Killers of the King and To Catch a King: Charles II’s Great Escape. His new book, The White Ship, is out in paperback…

* Have Oldie-readers who wear glasses ever thought where specs come from? The answer lies in a new book, Through the Looking Glasses: The Spectacular Life of Spectacles, by Travis Elborough. Elborough, himself bespectacled, traces the history of spectacles back to late-13th-century Florence. In a sermon at Santa Maria Novella church, given between 1303 and 1306, Friar Giordano da Pisa declared that it had been ‘20 years since the art of making spectacles, which have made for good vision, one of the most useful arts on earth, was discovered’. Elborough takes his history up to Marilyn Monroe, who played the extremely shortsighted Pola Debevoise in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953). In real life, Monroe was short-sighted but was rarely seen in specs. When she was offered the part in Millionaire, she was…

Legendary ’80s chocolate bar wrapper found in Fairford Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard Man found with drugs hidden in intimate area Matlock Mercury Rejected bike rack is coming to Stamford Stamford Mercury £15 for published contribution NEXT ISSUE The August issue is on sale on 28th July 2021. FREE SAMPLE COPY If you have a friend who would like a free sample of The Oldie, tell them to call 0800 8565867. GET THE OLDIE APP Go to App Store or Google Play Store. Search for Oldie Magazine and then pay for app. OLDIE BOOKS The Best of The Oldie Cartoons 1992-2018, The Oldie Annual 2020 and other Oldie books are available at: www.theoldie.co.uk/readers-corner/shop Free p&p. OLDIE NEWSLETTER Go to the Oldie website; put your email address in the red SIGN UP box.…

‘I love him – I really do.’ I am taking tea with Mary Archer at the Old Vicarage, Grantchester, and she is not talking about her husband, Jeffrey. She is talking about the other man in her life: Rupert Brooke. Dame Mary, 76, a chemist of distinction and chair of the Science Museum, is noted as a cool customer, but get her onto the subject of her favourite poet, who once lodged in the house where the Archers now live, and she throws caution to the wind. W B Yeats described Brooke as the handsomest young man in England – ‘And he was,’ cries Mary with shining eyes. ‘And bisexual?’ I ask. ‘Irresistible,’ says Mary happily. She is infectiously passionate about Brooke – his looks, his personality, his letters, his diaries, his prose and travel…

To the south coast, for a quick flit across to the Normandy coast – precisely 77 years and two days after my father landed there on D-Day Plus One. I’m not a lieutenant in a Sherman tank, of course, but a historian on a mission: to try to locate anything that might remain of the White Ship – ‘the medieval Titanic’– whose tragic sinking changed the course of history by depriving the Normans of William Ætheling, the sole legitimate heir to the English throne. Carnage ensued, out of which the Plantagenets took possession of the crown for more than 300 years, till the Tudors saw them on their way. We set off for Normandy in June in glorious sunshine, with the Channel as still as a millpond. Three and a half hours…

It was 7th July 1981, and I was at Lord’s, thinking, not for the last time, ‘Funny business, cricket.’ One moment, the nation’s basking in the all-round splendours of your performance. The next, you’re a laughing-stock. Little did I know that I was about to meet the embodiment of this boom-and-bust cycle. To the side of the pavilion there was a small writing room. I was sitting there alone, smoking a small cigar, when the second of the summer’s Tests with Australia ended in a draw. It was Ian Botham’s 12th match as captain of England, and he hadn’t won any of them. People were now calling for him – once the golden boy of cricket – to be sacked. There were a few boos from the crowd as he trudged off the…