Here’s to Humph!
Pub close to I Haven’t Got A Clue Tube station is renamed after jazz musician
Published: 27 May 2010
by DAN CARRIER
IT has become a landmark in British radio culture and, fittingly, was invented in a pub.
Now the legendary Mornington Crescent slot on the Radio 4 comedy quiz I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue has prompted a watering hole opposite the station in Camden High Street to re-name itself the Lyttelton Arms after the panel show’s host, Humphrey Lyttelton.
According to Chairman Humph, as he was called, the game was invented solely to annoy the producer of the radio series.
The story goes that the comics were all in a pub instead of being hard at work when the producer appeared: “Quick,” said Humph, “let’s invent a game with rules he’ll never understand.”
The game relies on the wit of the players and loosely involves leaping around London locations and the Tube map in a form of word association – until someone reaches Mornington Crescent.
Previously called The Crescent, new pub owners Butlers and Mitchell closed it for a nine-week re-fit – and friends and fellow I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue panellists say it is now another fitting tribute to the trumpeter, cartoonist and comic, who died in 2008.
Regular panelist Jeremy Hardy said he thought Humph, who lived in Hampstead, would have enjoyed the fact there was a pub with his name above it.
He told the New Journal: “I think he’d be really chuffed, although he was not an egotist.
“There’s the Lyttelton Theatre but it was a different branch of the family.
“He did not inherit a lot with the Lyttelton name – and perhaps it is fitting that while his posher family have a theatre, the jazz musician has a pub.
“It is also great that the name is somewhere that is associated with his career.
“Jazz was of course his first love but he really loved doing Clue and it brought him lots of new fans who would not have followed his jazz career.
“I hope they have space for jazz bands – he would be very pleased about that.”
The pub has plans for Sunday sessions of trad jazz, which Lyttelton did so much to help bring to Britain in the 1950s.
Fellow panellist Barry Cryer said that Humph would have shrugged off the accolade – but secretly been cock-a-hoop.
He said: “Humph would have been quite charmed by it but would have very, very quickly changed the subject.
“But underneath his calm exterior, he would have absolutely loved it. If you paid him a compliment he’d be delighted but would never have shown it.”
Lyttelton Arms manager Ian Thomson said: “We just wanted to honour a legend.
“His name is linked with Mornington Crescent. It was such a funny Tube station and he established it in the public’s eye as not just a place to go past on your way to Camden Town.
“People who sit on the Tube and and see the name think of Humph.”