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Published: 22 April, 2010

A PAINTER I have long admired, Robert Lenkiewicz, still makes the tabloids although he died eight years ago.
Now, one of his ­models, Bianca, is making headlines because she has become engaged to Earl Spencer.
Bianca is used to titles – at one time she was Lady Bianca Eliot, wife of Lord Jago Eliot.
Sadly, the marriage ended tragically when she came home to discover her husband dead in the bath. He had died after an epileptic fit.
Bianca, whom I met at a West End exhibition of Lenkiewicz’s works a year ago, was the daughter of one of the painter’s women friends, Karen Ciambriello.
Her husband Joseph also died in dramatic circumstances – the jack gave way when he was under vintage a Alpha Romeo.
Altogether, Lenkiewicz was said to have had 12 women friends and 11 children. Karen lived with Lenkiewicz in Plymouth for many years before his death in 2002.
He grew up in Fordwych Road, West Hampstead, where his parents ran a small hotel in the post-war years, before settling in Plymouth, and soon became acknowledged as one of Britain’s most imaginative painters, his canvases showing an obsession with death and women. But he also painted people many painters often don’t want to touch – including tramps, prostitutes and the handicapped.
After finishing at St Martin’s art school Lenkiewicz quickly established a reputation as a promising painter and was a friend of Francis Bacon.
But he soon tired of the fashionable London art scene. If there’s one thing Lenkiewicz wasn’t – it was a conformist.
An astonishing draughtsman, he started off with portraits in heavy oil, and was sometimes compared to Rembrandt.
Throughout his many liaisons his women friends seemed to get on with each other, and often they could be seen at shows of his work.
They even still keep in contact with each other, I hear. Measuring Lenkiewicz by what could be considered an eccentric life, you could say he was high in the league of Renaissance men.
It is difficult not to wonder whether some of his women friends may bump into each other as guests at the big wedding!

I have to wear a tag?

DOES any reader know a shoplifter?
I was haunted by this question this week after I had bought a waistcoat at the Edinburgh Woollen Mill shop in Edinburgh.
When I was about to put it on at home I discovered the assistant had forgotten to remove the plastic security tag.
In a surreal conversation when I rang the shop – it would have made a good script for a sit-com – the assistant told me: “I know your problem. You can remove it with pliers, that’s what shoplifters do!” 
I explained I wasn’t a shoplifter but asked if I might damage the waistcoat if I used pliers to tamper with it.
She agreed I could make a mess of the job and suggested I ask a chain store to help.
I trudged up and down Camden High Street on Tuesday begging for help at five chain stores – Currys, M&S, Sports Direct, JD Sport and GAP – but to no avail.  Each store used a different type of security tag. This might be of interest to shoplifters but it didn’t help me.
Fortunately, hours later I removed the tag with pliers closely following the instructions of the assistant.
Warning to readers:  Make sure the security tag has been removed when you leave a shop. Somehow, shoplifters  get to work in the shop with pliers before they step out.

Sniper who left no marks on Pete

I HEARD an almost unbelievable tale at the funeral of Parliament Hill historian Pete Richards this week.
Pete, the writer and political campaigner who lived in Highgate Road, recently passed away, aged 85. Friends and family gathered at the St Marylebone cemetery on Tuesday to celebrate his life, and among many stories of his fascinating life I heard a tale of how as a young soldier he became a Communist.
Pete was a despatch rider, zipping between units in northern France in the weeks after D-Day, carrying messages.
Labour councillor Roger Robinson, a friend of Pete’s, recalled his old comrade telling him the following story.
“Pete said he was carrying a copy of Marx’s Das Kapital in his back pocket when he was targeted by a German sniper,” recalled Roger.
“The sniper took a shot at him, and hit him in the bottom – exactly on the back pocket, where this heavy-bound volume happened to be. It stopped the bullet.
“Pete said it was another reason he turned to communism as a political philosophy.”
At the wake afterwards in the Vine pub on Highgate Road, I met artist Merfyn Edwards. Merfyn recalled how he asked Pete if he could paint him – and had handed over his effort at Pete’s 85th birthday party.
“He was a good friend,” said the artist. “He will be greatly missed.”

Bruised Hetty is full of praise for Whittington

DRAWN by an extravagantly blooming camellia in a Highgate garden, 104-year-old Hetty Bower somehow slipped and fell badly on the pavement in Highgate this week.
This story could have had an unhappy ending if it hadn’t been for the treatment she received at the Whittington A&E department, I hear.
They did every possible examination, including scans, X-rays and a blood test, and, after several hours, gave her the all-clear.
Hetty, I gather, cannot stop telling her friends at the Mary Feilding Guild home about how the A&E saved her life.
She is particularly pleased because a month ago she joined the protest march from Highbury Corner to Highgate, adding her voice to the campaign to save the threatened department.
A campaigner all her life, Hetty  remembers what life was like before we had a free health service.
“The doctors were
so professional and caring,” she told friends. “Where would I have gone if the A&E no longer existed? Then I would have had to be taken to the Royal Free – and look how far that is.”