One Week with JOHN GULLIVER: October 21 - Grand Old Man of Letters, John Heath-Stubbs - Blind Torriano poet to be remembered with plaque
Published: 21 October 2010
by JOHN GULLIVER
John Heath-Stubbs remembered
ONE of our Grand Old Men of Letters, John Heath-Stubbs – once talked about as a possible poet laureate – will be remembered next Wednesday with the unveiling of a plaque outside his Queen’s Park home.
John, who died four years ago aged 88, was an enthusiast for the poetry evenings at Torriano Meeting House, run by the late John Rety.
Though blind, Heath-Stubbs got around to venues and readings with the help of friends.
Alan Brownjohn, a poet and novelist, became friends with him at Oxford and admired him for his “bravery” in dealing with his progressive blindness, which developed in the 1960s.
“He was an English gentleman who got us all thinking about shape and form,” said Brownjohn, who lives in Belsize Park.
Leonie Scott-Matthews, founder of Pentameters Theatre in Hampstead, remembered Heath-Stubbs reading alongside Dannie Abse at a poetry event held at the venue in 1968.
“We used to say he had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of past cultures – he was almost Byzantine,” she said.
‘What is the Labour Party, if not a moral force?’
I HAVE heard New Labour savaged before but not in the sylvan tones delivered by one of its chief critics, left-wing John Cruddas, MP, on Tuesday.
Social and economic polices weren’t dissected by Cruddas in the annual lecture held to honour the founder of the NHS, Aneurin Bevan, at the Commons.
New Labour had failed, he said, because it lost its “identity”, its “respect” for “ordinary” people, and because it had developed a “dessicated materialism” – a
place where “people sink or swim.”
He quoted the Labour intellectual Philip Gould, who said that his parents “wanted to do what was right, not what was aspirational”.
He also quoted the Latin American Bishop, Oscar Romero, who was assassinated in the 1970s. People, said Romero, should “aspire to be more not to have more”.
Labour, according to Cruddas, was a “moral force” or it was nothing. He turned away from Cameron’s Big Society and said Labour’s vision should be the Good Society. In Bevan’s days, in the 1940s, the Labour Movement was one of “civility, liberty and self-education.”
Cruddas wasn’t harking back nostalgically to the past – as he saw it, he was talking about what Labour needs to be today.
‘My word is my bond’ – and other superannuated sayings
I WAS half-hoping I would hear the Confessions of a Banker when I dropped in to the Bishopsgate Institute for a talk by a former City investment dealer.
Nothing too prurient, I assumed, but a talk that would give me the inside story of the Square Mile.
The opening minutes by Philip Augar were a bit off-putting.
Scholarly, with a habit of pressing his fingers together as if in prayer, Augur didn’t set me on fire.
He also delivered his talk in the quietest voice I have ever heard from a public speaker.
Then came the Latin bit.
On the screen were the words “Dictum, Meum Pactam” that had a certain ring about them.
They meant, he said with a smile: “My Word is My Bond.”
This motto, he emphasised, had dominated his banking deals when he started out in the City in the late 1970s, fresh from university.
He repeated the motto as if he himself still could not believe that once it had been possible to conduct deals involving millions of pounds – and all with a nod and a handshake.
It was a portrait of a chivalrous and old-fashioned business life verging on the unbelievable, almost belonging to the age of Enlightenment.
But a mixture of fast-moving Wall Street deals, the abolition of banking controls promoted by Margaret Thatcher, and the appearance of High Street “casino” banks, had brought that era to an end, he said.
It had been replaced by sheer greed – the sort of greed exemplified by Gekko’s “greed is good” speech in the film Wall Street.
From his appearance, his style of delivery, it didn’t surprise me to hear Augar describe how he had given up high finance, and now earned a living writing about the City instead.
Though a reformed man he still believed banks – better regulated and without the gambling element – performed a useful social service.
Wasn’t he being romantic?
Was he trapped in his own past?
And today’s crisis? Was it a one-off?
Not in Augar’s opinion. Unless regulations were tightened – and there was little sign of that – another crisis would hit Britain in 10 or 15 years, he said, in answer to a question from the audience .
The future looked bad.
• Reckless – The Rise and Fall of the City, 1997-2008. By Philip Augar. Vintage Books, £8.99
The columnist’s final comment
JOURNALISTS come and go, I suppose, and are rarely remembered.
But somehow the name Ian McKay is anchored in the annals of post-war journalism.
A feature writer for the News Chronicle – it was killed off by its owner, Cadbury’s, in 1960 – Ian’s prose sang with wit and beauty, and should be studied on university journalism courses.
He was very much a Labour man – and wouldn’t keep quiet about it, according to veteran journalist Geoffrey Goodman, who told me this story about him at a bash on Monday to commemorate the death of both the News Chronicle and its sister London evening paper, the Star.
“I remember a fantastic speech he made at the Labour conference in Morecambe in 1951,” Geoffrey said. “He said: ‘I never imagined I’d be financed by Cadbury’s to preach the gospel of socialism’. “Then after his speech he walked outside on Morecambe Bay and dropped dead right there and then! It was so tragic. He was one of the greatest columnist any national newspaper ever had.”
Before joining the bash held by the old News Chron journalists I dropped into another reunion at the Cheshire Cheese pub in Fleet Street of old staff of the Star .
Cutting the cake was a Star old hand, Sydney Rennert.
Blooming marvellous news, Tom!