Somebody, and to my shame I cannot remember who, gave me a compedium of Daily Telegraph obits which, in the nature of many Christmas and/or birthday gifts, disappeared into my book shelves more or less unopened. However, yesterday I finished a massive 'Spring Clean' of this garret, and yes, I know it's Autumn but that's how long it took - I'm a slow worker! Anyway, it is the sort of delightful book that you are always pleased to come across - unless you have a train or plane to catch! - because you cannot resist a dip or three into it.
By accident it fell open at the obit of my 'hero', Auberon Waugh, whose riveting ability to take logic to its hilarious end-point regularly cracked me up when I first began to read The Spectator all those years ago. The obit reminds me of his classic, posh officer fuck-up whilst doing his national service in the army - Royal Horse Guards, naturally:
Trying to unjam a Browning machine-gun in his armoured car, he managed to set it off and to fire, at point blank range, four bullets through his chest and shoulder, one through his arm and one through his left hand before he noticed what was happening and 'got out of the way pretty quick'. Horribly injured, he was still alert enough to say 'Kiss me, Chudleigh' to his Troop Sergeant, on whom the allusion was lost and who treated him afterwards with suspicion.
Waugh went on to enjoy a sprightly career in Fleet Street which, as Liberace's obit confirms, was no more gentlemanly back in the '50s than it is today. William Connor, writing under the pseudnym of 'Cassandra' for the Daily Mirror (and from whose scribblings I regularly steal the general title of 'Cockecarrots' to describe judges) went to see Libarace at the London Palladium where his, er, style hit prim, proper and still slightly impoverished 1956 London like an atom bomb. He described it thus:
"This deadly winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother-love."
The best joke of all was that Liberace denied his homosexuality and sued for libel and won £8k plus an apology. It does not say who the particular 'Cocklecarrot' was but I bet he enjoyed a few sherries with his fellow judges after the case!
The title of this compendium is "Tinker, Failure, Soldier, Jailer" which is a nice witticism that takes me straight to John le Carré and his world of mirrors. There is an obit for Lt. Col. T. A. Robertson who was the man who built up and ran the British XX Depatment inside MI5 during the war. This was, after the Bletchley Park code-breakers, the most successful of British intelligence operations in which, through a network of double-agents some of whom began the war as German operatives but were arrested and then turned, streams of utterly false information were carefully directed back to Germany. One of his greatest agents was 'Garbo' who was instrumental in making the Germans believe that the real invasion would come in at the Pas de Calais which kept a large number of their formations out of Normandy for some time.
Oh dear, this fascinating book could cause considerable disruption to my normal stream of blog posts - sorry did you say something . . . ?