It Just Occurred to Me?

The Reminiscences & Thoughts of Chairman Humph

Humphrey Lyttelton

• Publisher: Portico
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781909396050
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música jazz

The legendary band leader and jazz trumpeter, broadcaster and humorist looks back at his extraordinarily rich and varied life and the many colourful characters he has known and played with - from Duke Ellington to Louis Armstrong. He also recalls his early life as the son of a famous housemaster at Eton, where he was educated.

IT JUST OCCURRED TO ME …

Does the average man get enough sleep? What is ‘the average man’? What is ‘enough sleep’? What is ‘does’?

Robert Benchley, opening one of his humorous articles in the New Yorker

And what an opening! It’s one of many things in print and in conversation that I wish I had thought of myself. But, as the neglectful picnicker so rightly says when berated for leaving the tin-opener out of the hamper, you can’t think of everything.

It is, nevertheless, just the sort of opening I need to get this book off the launching pad. When I say to people that I’m working on a book, the first question that comes back at me like a Federer return of service is ‘Oh, really – what’s it about?’ If I tell the truth and say that it’s a random hotchpotch of thoughts and experiences that have occurred to me over the years, they tend to utter that meaningful syllable ‘Mmmm …’ and turn away with a thought-bubble appearing above their heads saying: ‘I’m not sure I want to read a hotchpotch – give me a book that’s got a beginning, a middle and an end.’ It’s hardly more enticing if I adopt a cunning expression and say, ‘Ah, you’ll have to read it and see,’ suggesting as it does that they must plough through two hundred or so pages in the hope that the answer will be revealed at the very end, like the denouement in a whodunnit.

Nevertheless, a hotchpotch of thought and memories it is. If that sounds vague, then I must ask, what else but vague are random thoughts and memories? There’s no butler of the mind to usher them in – ‘A thought to see you, sir – it wishes to discuss existentialism.’ No, mostly they just wander in and out of the room uninvited, like children, cats or hospital cleaners. For instance, it just occurred to me as I read these paragraphs through, that in the last few minutes I’ve written the word ‘nevertheless’ twice without having the slightest idea what it means. So I’ve taken the dictionary off the shelf and it says, ‘for all that, notwithstanding’. I’m sorry, but I haven’t the faintest idea what they mean either, now I come to look at it. How easy it is for thoughts to run away with you, and you do have to be careful. One doesn’t want to incur the charge of ‘piling Pelion on Ossa’. I first heard that quotation when I was working on the Daily Mail as a cartoonist in the late forties.

The job came about through what I suppose could be termed the Young Pals’ Act. In the band known as George Webb’s Dixielanders, wherein I made my debut as an ensemble member (or, as we say in the trade, ‘sideman’), the clarinettist was Wally Fawkes, who doubled as an illustrator on the Daily Mail under the pen-name of Trog. When I formed my own band in 1948, Wally came in as a founder member. To compound the association, during those years we were both students at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. At one point in these events, Wally tipped me off that he was about to start a daily strip-cartoon on the Mail (it became the long-running ‘Flook’ saga) and that his job livening up the columns with little pen-and-ink drawings would fall vacant. His words were on the lines of, ‘Get some samples of your stuff together and go in to see the Features editor. I’ve already primed him.’ He had indeed. The man barely glanced at my work before saying, ‘You start tomorrow.’ And that led to eight years on the Daily Mail during which I graduated to pocket cartoonist and, for a year or two, librettist for ‘Flook’.

It was during my stint on the Mail that I absorbed one of the prime rules of journalism, which I will promote here to a position among the thoughts of Chairman Humph that pepper this book:

Whatever assignment you are offered, say ‘yes’ first and learn about it afterwards.

Chairman Humph in advisory mode

There was a one-off concert held in London that brought together the Ted Heath Orchestra and the classical French horn virtuoso, Denis Brain. Knowing of my jazz association, the deputy editor of the paper sent me off to review it for the Features page. I have little recollection of the music or what I said about it. But it led to my being offered a regular column in the paper writing reviews of gramophone records of all kinds.

Years later, following the above precept, I found myself writing restaurant reviews in Harpers & Queen magazine. In a moment of self-doubt, I said to George Melly, who had been doing the film reviews for the Observer, ‘I’m sure they’re going to find out one day that I know nothing about it.’ His answer was convoluted but true: ‘Yes, but in my experience, by the time they find out you know nothing about it, you will know something about it.’

My method of acquiring belated knowledge about the classical music which I was given to review in the Mail was to plunder any articles I could find in specialist magazines – predominantly the Gramophone – and rewrite them in my own authoritative words. Although I was in my mid-twenties when I came out of the wartime army, I was in the first flush of youth so far as writing was concerned and, with the arrogance of youth, I picked on all the contentious bits and exaggerated them, lambasting conductors and recording companies alike. After two or three columns, I was sent for by the deputy editor and rebuked for, as he said, ‘piling Pelion on Ossa’. I had never come across that phrase before but I got the gist and was duly humbled. When, years later, I looked it up in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, I found out that the man had got the quotation upside down.

Three times they endeavoured to pile Ossa on Pelion, no less, and to roll leafy Olympus on top of Ossa: three times our Father scattered the heaped-up mountains with a thunderbolt.

Virgil, writing about mountains in his fanciful way

Had I known that my little column had, albeit unwittingly, been compared to the cataclysmic events that Virgil was describing, I would have been quite flattered. As it was, the deputy editor’s rebuke rumbled on, changing the subject and teaching me, in the process, another ground-rule of popular journalism.

He reminded me that my column took up about eight column-inches on the Features page of the paper, an area designed as an oasis of light, entertaining relief for our readers amidst the weightier matters discussed on the news and comment pages. ‘The last thing those readers want,’ he said, ‘is someone taking up precious space fulminating over some conductor who has taken the Scherzo movement of Beethoven’s Seventh too fast. All that is for the specialist magazines.’ (Little did he know that that was where it came from.) ‘You’d do better to aim your piece at someone who hates classical music and doesn’t own a gramophone. If you can get HIM to read your column, you’re doing something useful.’

It was advice that I readily embraced when that letter came from Queen magazine asking if I would write a one-off ‘guest’ restaurant review. Their regular writer, the outspoken Linda Blandford, had spoken out once too often about some lofty establishment whose owners were threatening to sue, so she had been hastily transferred to a safer department of the magazine. In accordance with the advice about journalistic assignments stated earlier by Chairman Humph, I said ‘yes’ to the offer and set about cobbling together a piece that used up the handful of restaurants I knew well from family outings.

It led, rather alarmingly, to eight years as restaurant reviewer for what became Harpers & Queen. At the end of it I left, feeling rather sick. I had picked up a couple of Food-writer of the Year Awards along the way, so I must have done something right. But if anything, that reinforced the uneasy feeling that I was, in fact, a fraud. But food-writing (the very terminology looks more and more absurd the longer you stare at it) was altogether less ponderous then than it is today. The journalist, novelist and historian Raymond Postgate had founded the Good Food Club in the mid-fifties to be a focal point for lovers of food and drink across the nation. Their amateur reports were invited and published in the Good Food Guide, the pages of which exuded a kind of fraternal enthusiasm. It was not called the Good Food Guide for nothing. It was Postgate’s idea that it would indeed be a guide to let readers know where, in whatever benighted city or town they found themselves, they could find the best food. Here’s a thought in passing:

Nowadays, it’s still possible to find oneself in an Indian restaurant the very interior of which arouses deep foreboding. To establish peace of mind, be sure to order up poppadams first before committing yourself to other dishes. If, when they arrive, the first nibble suggests they have been deep-fried in rancid badger-fat, make your excuses and leave. Cooked in the same pan, the rest of the meal will shuttle you into intensive care quicker than you can say ‘murghee mossala’.

Chairman Humph, the former food-writer in cautionary mode

Though my Harper’s articles were largely concerned with restaurants in London or the Home Counties, I wrote them in much the same helpful spirit as the early Good Food Guide, always bearing in mind the reader in Carlisle, in the dentist’s waiting room or under the hairdryer, who travels south perhaps once in a decade and is on a permanent diet. In the process, I found myself enjoying the writing more and more, the food less and less. George Melly told me that he and his band used to buy the magazine to read my pieces on their band bus, taking bets as to how many columns I would cover each week before actually getting round to mentioning a restaurant.

And that leads me to another reason why I began to recoil from the whole bon viveur nonsense in which I was becoming embroiled:

‘Fifty Thousand Flies Can’t Be Wrong.’

The late Ronnie Scott’s generic term for the roadside transport cafes in which touring musicians took their sustenance before motorways arrived

The fact is that any touring musician, then and now, who adopts a high-minded attitude to gastronomy will starve to death. My experiences travelling around with a band at all hours of the day and night instilled in me, early on, a principle which, as a food-writer, I had to suppress in my Harpers & Queen days.

The term ‘good food’ is not an absolute, it depends on circumstances.

Chairman Humph in argumentative mode

An interviewer once asked me, licking his lips in expectation, where I would choose to go and what I would eat, to unwind after a concert or a long day in front of a microphone. When I answered, ‘Home, to a bowl of cornflakes and a Kit Kat’, his expression ping-ponged rapidly between shock-horror and the realisation that he might have stumbled on a minor scoop. I could have gone further, recalling that while driving home down the M1 in its early days, I had often drooled in anticipation of the splendid egg, sausage, beans and chips dispensed through the night at the Granada Service Area, Toddington. The team of West Indian ladies there knew just when to rescue the eggs from the sizzling hell of the griddle.

In later years, I have avoided night driving, staying over in roadside hotels – most of which have been crushed by the onward march of takeovers and mergers into a dire uniformity.

There’s no doubt about it – food is one of the pillars of joie de vivre. It’s true – why talk about it?

Albert Rizk, Lebanese restaurateur who entertained my band to bursting point at lunch in his little Tivoli Restaurant outside Beirut. At a rough estimate, he himself tipped the scales in the region of twenty stone

There is, it must be said, very little joie de vivre to be gleaned nowadays from the fare available in hotels when the weary musician returns from work at dead of night. Room-service menus, if they exist, will usually offer dishes that can be ordered after 11 p.m. But most of them seem to have been specially selected to sabotage the subsequent night’s sleep, consisting of a choice between curry or a ‘pasta bake’ that arrives steaming under a duvet of molten cheese. I can only think that this lethal choice was devised by a deranged insomniac, offering as it does a night of life-threatening reflux in the first instance and ghastly nightmares in the second. But I didn’t come here to become a food-writer all over again, especially as we seem to have reached, by reductio ad absurdum, the topic of sandwiches.

Once, in recent times, finding myself in a hotel that offered no room service of any kind, I rang Reception. A girl, young in voice, answered and I asked if sandwiches were available. They were, and the following dialogue ensued:

‘What sandwiches do you have?’

‘Ham, roast beef or cheena.’

‘What was that last one?’

‘Cheena.’

‘I don’t know what that is.’

‘You know, CHEENA.’

At this point I began to feel my age. She was clearly offering some fashionable product that the whole world knew about except me. I became testy.

‘But I don’t know what cheena is!’

She wasn’t sounding too relaxed herself.

‘It’s a fish!’

‘WHAT SORT OF FISH?’

‘CHEENA!!!’

It was very late at night, and I was not at my brightest. But the sinking pebble did eventually hit the river bed and, since tuna is more digestible than the other options, I did indeed order a round. The episode does raise a serious point about contemporary speech. I have a family friend of long standing, Caroline Cole, who in mid-life is studying for a degree in Medieval English at Oxford, a discipline which spills over into the English language in general. It’s a subject about which we often argue over a friendly meal. We belong to opposing camps, with myself upholding principles about grammar and pronunciation learned at my father’s knee (George Lyttelton having been a schoolmaster who, in his time, numbered among the pupils in his literature classes George Orwell, Aldous and Julian Huxley, Christopher Hollis and other literary lions who passed through Eton College).

Caroline belongs to the school which insists that English, as a living language, is constantly developing and should not be inhibited by pedantic rules. We once clashed over the contemporary habit, which has spread across barriers of class and generation and even nationality, of dropping the letter ‘t’ in favour of a weak glottal stop that converts the word ‘Saturday’ into ‘Sa’urday’. (With a name like Lyttelton, I have had to respond to its translation into Lew’on – to rhyme with Isaac New’on – or face excommunication from a large section of the English-speaking world). In our argument, I cited the word ‘charity’, and she put up a stout defence of ‘chari’y’. With malice aforethought I asked her to apply the ‘new’ pronunciation to the word ‘chastity’. For the rest of the evening she kept returning to ‘chas’i’y’ but eventually got the giggles and had to concede the point. I held in reserve a story that might have clinched it earlier. Another friend, a retired deputy head teacher, told me that a colleague of hers, crossing the school playground, came on some small boys who had split into teams and were shying stones at a tin can. As she passed, one of the boys pointed excitedly at a successful teammate and claimed loudly, “e’i’i’!”

If one makes the not far-fetched assumption that the primary purpose of language is to communicate, then it’s surely not pedantry to suggest that words should be pronounced in a way that is comprehensible. If I am careering along a motorway hoping that my car radio will warn me of any impending disruption, it’s not helpful to be told by a traffic reporter that there are ‘keys on the raid ahead’. In the split second that it takes to translate that into ‘queues on the road ahead’ I could be straight up the back end of a lorry.

Some people lay at the door of Australian soap operas the blame for the widespread demotion of the noble syllable ‘oo’ into something squeezed out of the front of the mouth, turning ‘news’ into ‘knees’ and ‘views’ into ‘vees’. But the ailment once described by a wit as ‘Irritating Vowel Syndrome’ is not confined to any social class. As a corrective to any unseemly rush of pedantry to the head, there is plenty of archive material in the form of old films and newsreels to remind us that it was once ‘standard’ among judges, Pathé News commentators, film actors and other educated people to pronounce, for instance, the word ‘adversary’ as ‘edversary’. Flashbacks to the Nuremburg trial in 1945–6 reveal the then Sir Geoffrey Lawrence QC (later Lord Oaksey), the senior presiding judge at the Nuremburg Trial, sentencing the Nazi war criminals, not once but repeatedly, to ‘death by henging’.

That was, and rarely still is, just one of several upper-class aberrations. The quacking, silly-ass accent assumed by actors and comedians to portray ‘toffs’ is in real life a rarity. Among a variety of public school accents, there is one that restores the balance in favour of the ‘oo’ sound by using it to the almost total exclusion of all others, turning words such ‘Wimbledon’ and ‘Bristol’ into ‘Woombledon’ and ‘Broostle’. I remember Prime Minister Anthony Eden, at the time of the Suez crisis, telling an anxious nation in an orgy of vowel mangling, ‘We will do oovrythoong we cairn to protect our vah-ital oonterests.’ I must leave to others to judge whether I speak with a recognisable Old Etonian accent. I deny it, but I would, wouldn’t I? Without consciously trying, I seem to have shed, at some stage along the way, the usage of ‘orf’ (in place of ‘off’) with which I was brought up. Indeed, I once, in my argumentative youth, scored a rare, if not unique, victory over my father in the matter of language.

It w...