DAILY EXPRESS Tuesday April 23 1974

.13

Pictur. Ltslie Lw)

to maintain!

Sir, John . . , poetry in car crashes

THEY may not look alike but they are one of a kind. On the left: Old School eccentric Sir John Betjeman,. the Poet Laureate. Above : New School eccentric Viviaij StanshaJl, song:writer and formerly of the Bonzo Dof Doodah Band, Drivine Sir Johtf^ through London in a Mini.is like taking a visitor from some other, exceptionally polite planet oh his first trip. ' Oh, what fiin." he exclaims at intervals. " What fun it all is." We turn along the Embankment.

"Oh, what a good way to come. Look at t h a t building. Very Dutch. Very, terj/ Dutch. Could be in Amsterdam, don't you think ? What fun." .We pass an amorphous bronze statue. " Dear me. Like a half-filled nlolar." Betjeman has the wayward mind of the true eccentric. He finds'poetrj' in stuccoed villas in Highgatc and car crashes on the bypass and the freckled limbs of strapping suburban tennis girls. He potters round a house in Chelsea ' where the walls are crammed with a, jumble of books, where A Century of

Creepy Stories nudges Koch's two volumes on centipedes. He is the. eccentric poet of the English middle class of bis time and they understand him as he does them. "The English are an eccentric people," he says, " but they're much nicer than other people. Don't you think ? " THE LITTLE notice on the door of Vivian Stanshall'sNorth London home says: 'f Beware of the Reptiles." Inside the front room the walls are lined with heated, lighted tanks of crawling tortoises, terrapins and mudskippers. " I like these things because

Stanshall once proclaimed they're so inefficient," says Stanshall. " They can't walk his intention to wear "great very well. They can't swim very tail wigs with flashing lights, wen. But they survive. . . ." and mice mnnins through my Upstairs in the house waits hair." He sometimes walked a bizarre world. The hind- the streets in a gorilla suit. He has, as a bizarre expert-', quarters of a life-size plastic zebra project over the stah- roent written down "snail well. TKe, room, beyond is music "-^composed by allowing: strewn with dead plastic hands, snails known as crochets and' quavers to crawl over a glass hollow legs, de\il masiis. B o o k s on magic, on sur- tank i:acked 'y a musical score. realism, on modern a r t . on Whom does he admire? As anthropology litter the shelves. always with Stanshall, the . "All t h i s ? " says Staflshall. answer is imexpected. " I collect it because I like it. 'Betjeman." he says, is the I behave the way I do becauseiI like it. I don't do it for pub- only man I have ever crossed licity, especially. .-the street to shake hands with.

THE VICTORI-A:N diarist Augustus Harerreading morning prayers to his household, always deleted from the prayer book any words he felt to be too favourable to God. "God," he explained, "is undoubtedly a gentleman, and no gentleman cares to be praised to his face." There speaks the true voice of the grand old eccentricity of England, the country which chose as its patron saint a Palestinian yOuth about .whom nothing is known except that he fought a mythical fight with a mythical dragon
.Englishmen dressing for m^mm^ma^m^^^am^mm^^^ammmimmmm^mmmmmmmmi^

most of his contemporaries did the library to share a bottle from above it. of port after a day's hunting. ' He rode into dinner on a However, anybody quarrying for strange behaviour in the brown bear, which bit him in English will find no richer vein the leg when he used his spurs. than that offered by the The Church,.of course, has Long, long ago, when I was English squires of the nine- contributed widely to the at Oxford, my tutora man teenth century.; . cE^logue of English oddities. of towering . authority in his The early Victorian cleric Jemmy Hirst, a Yorkshire subjectwas famous for giv- landowner Smith sometimes proaround 1840, was a ing tutorials from underneath keen if unconventional follower Sydney tected his health by wearing, a his study table. of hounds. He sometimes rode suit of rheumatic annour. each Since this was covered by a a large black bull, and hunted part of which could be filled h e a v y tablecloth reaching with the aid of a pack of pigs. with hot water. almost to the floor, the effect It is different nowadays. It Even his eccentricity was was that of beihe addressed dwarfed by that of the is no coincidence that the bv a cloth taoe-recbrder. Mind millionaire Shropshire squire most successful eccentric in you. he soolte better sense William Jivtton, who asked his the world, today is Mr. Howard from under that table than favourite horse Baronet - into Hughes, who is rich enough to remain invisible. Because; in general, the curse of the modern eccentric is over-exposure.

of odd behaviour beneath the psychological surface of the island race. The enduring basis of ecceiltricit>' is the absolute conviction that you are right, no matter what anvbody else thinks. Few true-born Englishmen have lacked this certainty.

dinner alone except for . , the hyenas in the African pk/^r l/^l AO r v n / ^ l l i bush, and ioining the mad U U U b L A o U K b I L L , on the day tlwt the dogs 19,Jhe .midday .sun . east'of Suez. ^are only the English remember an obscure Palestinian who shallow subsoil of the layers bought-a - and whom they mythical dragon chose, naturally, to be their patron saint

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The moment the ecentric breaks cover, he is freeted by a battery of pooping flashbulbs, a cacoohony of cackling camera crews. Under these pressures, the eccentric is sometimes changing. And "he is changing into a showman. Like'the S'lanish surreali.^t pointer Salvador Dali. a prettyfair hand with a brush, who might well have made a modest reoutation even if he had worn a grcv-lierrinsbone .uit and ioined the Reform Club. What he actually dfd was to make himself into a millionaire, b.v as.sociating . a competent painting technique with a bizarre. Meohistophelian personal anoearance, and doing things like walking into' New York hotels, orderincr honey and hot water, pouring the mixture into.. a glass and cutting off the flow with- a pair of .ccLssors. Yet the. ccnuine, one-off, orivate eccentric can .=1111 be. found. The Church of England continues to provide from its aliTiost inexhaustible reserves.: Therefore vicars who make train noises.,rectors who lie.on .beds of nails, end-even one-- t>ie cele'bfateri Reverpid Peter B*rkejt of Hilford in Somer'ei, whos.<iir *.<%iir','<i3!OT ntet'k^HiTO'' tall in thp <addle. dressed as a cowboy. May h*" never be outdrawn bv the Bishoi? of Bath and Wells..

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There is also . the most amiabje modern British eccentric o&s^Jl, the supprtpfttribt " Union JWtei; Hayward. the millionaire wMl^aved Lundv Jsland- ior JEnglaTid:- brought the iron shin Great Britain back to Bristo:; took a sheep to a cocktail party: and once telephoned a forbiddingly distinguished housemaster at S.!."} in the morning to enter a friend's new hai/j son for Kton. The first two of these wh"*Iv admirable activities of Mr. Hayward were sheer publicsnirlt. Of the last .two, it cannot be denied that the cocktail party must have broadened the sheep's social horizons, and that .even the 5.15 call as .a salutary reminder that all men nre equal, can ohiy have beneflt'd the Eton housemaster. Somewhere in the deaths of Enclish society lurk more of this superb species, struggline against the decline in the saietv of nations. They should be enpouraeed. In. 1974, we're going to need them.

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