I have a fiendishly difficult quiz for you today. Here is a list of men (clue: no women) and I simply want you to guess which one of them has this alphabet soup after his name, KT, GCVO, GBE, CB, TD, PC and what these ten men have in common.
Jeremy Bamber (convicted murderer), Sir James Dyson, Ben Nicholson, Benjamin Britten, WH Auden, Stephen Spender, Erskine Childers, Lord Reith, Donald Maclean (inventor of the eponymous toothpaste, sorry I mean Russian spy) and Sir Alan Lloyd Hodgkin (Nobel prize winner). In reverse order, they are all Old Greshamians. (Nul points if you thought they went to Eton.) Gresham’s in Norfolk was founded in 1555 as a free grammar school for forty boys. It went co-ed in the 1970s and I expect has some distinguished Old Girls but I only know that The Princess Royal is an ex officio Governor.
Quite why Lord Reith was sent to Gresham’s is a mystery but he is the holder of all those decorations and he has a lecture series on the BBC named after him to boot. The Reith Lectures are seventy years old this year and I wondered how they have evolved over that period. The first Reith Lecture was given by Bertrand Russell and he took twenty-eight minutes. This year’s lecturer is Margaret MacMillan and she spoke for twenty-eight minutes. I’m glad that the BBC haven’t lost their nerve and dumbed-down this excellent institution. Almost all The Reith Lectures are on the BBC iPlayer app so if you have a long car journey you might want to download some of them – I will listen to some of the earlier ones delivered by Robert Birley (Britain in Europe), Nikolaus Pevsner (The Englishness of English Arts), JK Galbraith (The New Industrial State), Richard Hoggart (Only Connect) and John Keegan (War in Our World). Perhaps first you should watch Reith being interviewed by John Freeman on Face to Face. It is ironic that in this clip Lord Reith says that he was give complete freedom to determine the salaries of BBC employees.