ONE WEEK WITH JOHN GULLIVER - Author AN Wilson on his close friend, the late Beryl Bainbridge

Published: 5 August, 2010

THE writer AN Wilson has been at it again.

If ever a person writes with effect, it is the Camden Town maestro.

When Beryl Bainbridge died, AN Wilson, a close friend, wrote an obituary, describing Beryl’s publisher Colin Haycraft and his wife, the novelist Alice Thomas Ellis – both long dead – as ‘monsters.’

The husband and wife, who lived close to Beryl’s Camden Town home, had been old friends of hers.

In his obituary in The Observer, AN Wilson let rip – effectively saying the publisher had cheated Beryl out of some of her deserved royalties while, presumably, his wife had looked on.

Ruffled, Beryl’s relatives responded with an angry letter to the Sunday newspaper. 

Now, AN Wilson’s acerbic tongue has wandered again – this time, likening his local MP, Frank Dobson, to a pig.

Labour can put a pig up in the parliamentary elections in Holborn and St Pancras, and it will get in, A N Wilson told an audience at the BBC’s Any Questions? radio show on Friday.

He wasn’t coy about naming Dobson when the chairman, Jonathan Dimbleby, asked who he was referring to.

At the end of the session, when all the panellists were asked what legacy they would like to leave behind, AN Wilson, the most modest of men, immediately responded: “My works!”

Young at heart of battle

TOBY Young jabbed away at Fiona Millar on a blog on the Telegraph’s website on Tuesday.

Wrong. wrong, wrong, he snarled about her opposition to outside sponsorship of secondary schools.

Young and other parents wants to set up their own school in Acton because they say there aren’t good schools to choose from in west London, while Millar argues that investment should be spent helping existing comprehensives that might be struggling.

They’ve debated this issue for months. Yet, you’d think they might find some common ground on education – after all, he is an ex-pupil of William Ellis School in Highgate, where Millar is now chairwoman of governors.

When fighting ceases on Christmas Day, they can fondly swap stories of goings on in Highgate Road.

Not so retiring Ms Salvoni

I FIRST met Elena Salvoni on her 86th birthday – perched on a stool in her famous Fitzrovia restaurant, Elena L’Etoile.

She was surrounded by a buzz of chatter, bustling waiters and hundreds of photographs of some of the our most celebrated actors – all signed to her with messages of goodwill.

She told me: “They won’t let me retire. They say ‘but people expect you to be here’. You may not know this – but I am very bad at doing nothing.”

That was four years ago – and how times change.

Ms Salvoni – the West End’s oldest maitre d’ – has been sacked from her own restaurant.

Her managers wrote to her last week to say that her old age – she turned 90 in April – has made her too expensive to insure and she must leave.

She told me: “The letter caught me completely out of the blue.

It was a real blow.

They’ve got my name up on the front of the restaurant.

Doesn’t that mean anything?”

Born in Islington to Italian parents, Ms Salvoni left school to work in the rag trade.

She told me she was a neighbour of Joe Orton’s and that her favourite meal was ravioli – with an Italian dessert.
Before the Second World War she sewed buttons on uniforms of army officers before taking jobs at Soho’s Bianci’s, L’Escargot and the Gay Hussar.

Andrew Hollett, a manager at Corus Hotels group, which owns the restaurant, said: “When Elena reached her 90th birthday we felt it was an appropriate time to retire.

“Our doors are always open to her. We look forward to welcoming Elena at the restaurant .”

It’s Bard news for the completists

IS it really possible that the home of Shakespeare, the Old Vic, has killed off a famous passage by the great master because it espouses the notion of ‘primitive communism’?

That is the fear of a publisher, Nicholas Jacobs, who has complained to the theatre’s management about a passage that has been left out in Sam Mendes’ current production of The Tempest.

It is known among scholars as Gonzalo’s Golden Age speech – Shakespeare’s vision of Utopia.

A future bent on egalitarian horizons with ‘riches, poverty and use of service – none,’ writes the master.

Gonzalo’s speech is considered to be among the most comic and subversive ever penned by the Bard.

Jacobs, who lives in Kentish Town, was so affronted when he saw the production that he complained to the theatre’s management.

“The management told me it was because the actor was ill the night I saw the play,” said Jacobs.

“I regarded this as a thin excuse and I was even offered a refund.

But when I reported that a friend told me the speech was still missing on another night, the management changed its tune and said it had been cut for ‘artistic reasons’.”

I note that the passage in question was lifted – almost word-for-word – from an earlier essay by the French humanist philosopher Michel de Montaigne, On Cannibals (circa 1580).

The Tempest, Shakespeare’s last solo play, was first performed around 1611.

Did the Old Vic, in omitting the speech, choose to take a moral stand against this blatant act of plagiarism?

Jacobs thinks not.

“It expresses a notion of primitive communism and I can’t help feeling the reason is political.

It has an American cast and I understand the production will tour the States.”

“Is there a link here?

“This may be crude thinking, as Brecht called it, but it’s ‘a crude world’.”

I understand that one or two well-known theatre critics are also becoming much exercised by the work of the censor at the Old Vic.