Yesterday (Letters) Rupert Hart-Davis took his son, Adam, to Eton for his first half (Eton slang for term). I forgot to expand on what became of George Lyttelton’s nephew, Charles, mentioned in the letter.
Charles Lyttelton went on to captain Worcestershire, become the 10th Viscount Cobham and Governor General of New Zealand. I thought that reading six volumes of the Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters would take some time. A conscientious reader of The Waste Land should make an effort to understand its many literary and cultural references; by no means a straightforward project. Similarly with the Letters, I find constant diversions. So far I have only had to buy one book: Ego (vol two) by James Agate. Volume one wasn’t readily available. Agate was a writer, theatre critic and diarist writing in the first half of the last century. Ego is the title of his nine volumes of diaries. Apparently after he had published volume eight a friend asked him if nine would be Choral. If I enjoy volume two I will have to track down the rest.
I am not sufficiently interested in cricket to want to read Alan Ross’s Australia 55, of which RH-D says “as far as I know, it is the first account of an MCC tour written by a poet and including some account of that repellent continent, as well as descriptions of the Test Matches”. If you do like cricket this extract from Ross’s obituary in The Guardian may encourage you to read it.
John Woodcock, the Times cricket correspondent and editor of Wisden for many years, said recently that Alan’s Australia 55 is about the best cricket book ever written.
RH-D attends an Audit Feast at Christ’s Cambridge and sits beside Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, “an amiable little old man plastered with medals. Unprepared for such an honour , I could remember nothing about him except that when he was Ambassador in Turkey his valet stole and copied all his secret documents (did you read the book called Operation Cicero?) This fascinating but delicate subject seemed better unbroached …”
Fortunately I have read Operation Cicero as I don’t want to add to my reading list at such an early stage in the Letters. If you haven’t, it is by LC Moyzisch, who was “Cicero’s” Nazi handler.
I can only immediately recall one slightly awkward encounter over dinner. I was a guest at a dinner in the National Gallery to mark the opening of a Renoir exhibition and was put beside Lord Jay. Erroneously I believed him to be Peter Jay, one-time British Ambassador to the United States and son-in-law of James Callaghan. He was in fact Michael Jay, British Ambassador to France at the time of the Princess of Wales’s death. My sallies about the United States were received with undisguised irritation and looking back on it I must have seemed like Charles Ryder’s father pretending to believe that Charles’s friend, Jorkins, is American.
![Michael Jay, British ambassador to France (L) poses with Paris mayor Jean Tiberi at the entrance of the "Clos des Blancs Manteaux" garden and children's nature centre in Paris during a ceremony February 14 2001. The Park , dedicated to memory of Princess Diana ,was inaugurated more than three years [after she died in a Paris car crash.]](https://i0.wp.com/christopherbellew.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/IMG_1956.jpg?ssl=1)
My uncle Stanley ( my father’s brother and ,hence, a relative of yours) was an actor and the only film part I have ever heard of him playing was in the film of “Operation Cicero” as, I think, Sir Hugh Knatchbull- Hugessen.
I am most astonished and see, thanks to Wiki, that (Roger) Stanley Plowden was in good company – James Mason played Cicero. Plowden did not play Sir Hughe (sic) but a character called McFadden. The 1952 film is called 5 Fingers.
Prompted by your reading James Agate I have gone to my battered copy of Ego 8. Lots of Lyttleton on cricket. Ditto, Clifford Bax also on that deceptively terrifying game. CB was my grandmother Vera Bax’s third husband; her first was a very good all-round artist, Stanley North, who was a fine glass stainer. Her second was the writer and editor Filson Young, whom Agate credited (in Ego 8) with commissioning him to write the first serious film criticism (of Chaplin’s The Kid, 1921 ).
It happens that I am trying to unpick my responses to Brannagh’s version of John Osborne’s The Entertainer, and that has taken me back to Kenneth Tynan, for his take in 1957. Agate adored Tynan, and the fun there is that those two critics’ differences mirror rather beautifully the differences between, say, Harley Granville-Barker (or Rattigan) and JO. (A funny thing: FY’s son, Billy, was Rattigan’s commanding officer in Africa in WW2, and dramatically saved the script of Flare Path from a flying accident before in a different flight bringing the script to Puffin Asquith and Binky Beaumont, in lieu of Rattigan or the mail.)
But all of that was by way of saying that much of Ego 8 is taken up with the exchange of letters between CB and JA. Clifford is extraordinarily critical of his friend’s diaries and his theatrical criticism. He is very severe on Agate’s jokiness, just as a similarly reproduced series of letters reveal that Agate was severe on Tynan’s very similar taste for puns.