One Week With John Gulliver - Illtyd Harrington gets letter from Prince Philip

Published: 24 June, 2010

SAY what you will about the views of Prince Charles on conservation but they seem to run in the family.

My colleague Illtyd Harrington, literary editor of the New Journal, received a letter the other day from the prince’s father, Prince Philip with whom he has been exchanging corres­pondence since the 1970s.

“Thank you very  much for writing on my birthday,” wrote Prince Philip.

“It seems to come round a bit quicker every year.

“It’s strange that so many people cannot see the connection between the problems of this world and its constantly growing human population.”

Illtyd tells me that in his days of leadership in the Greater London Council in the 1970s he had several discussions with Prince Philip about the rainforests, population growth and the ruthless exploitation of raw materials.

Once, Prince Philip encouraged him to save a Jacobean house in west London and supported his committee that planted 100,000 trees in Buckinghamshire.

“Prince Philip was very supportive and spent a few days encouraging local people,” Illtyd told me.

Both of them had served in the forces in Malta – Prince Philip as a naval commander and Illtyd as a conscript in the Royal Air Force.

Once, at a dinner at the Palace in the mid-1970s, a remark by Illtyd made headlines.

Discussing the problems of inner cities Illtyd clashed with the chief constable of Manchester, pointing out that where he lived lies outside the city while the only two people at the table who lived in the inner city were himself, a council tenant, and his Royal Highness who lived in a Royal palace.

I gather Prince Philip smiled broadly at this.

Sexism an old problem for women?

TWO women who challenge the way we think, former broadcaster Anna Ford and writer Sheila Rowbotham, were in fine fighting mood on Monday evening.

Even jokes went under Rowbotham’s microscope as she spoke about her new book, Dreamers of a New Day, at the British Library.

“In the 1920s,” she said, “women joked about sex in a way that would have been unheard of previously.

“When American writer Dorothy Parker invited a friend for a round-table lunch, he arrived after having played a round of tennis and his shirt was open, revealing much chest hair. Parker joked, ‘Well Frank, I see your flies are open higher than usual’.

“This would have been inconceivable for someone to have said 20 years earlier.”

After Rowbotham was edged out of her post at Manchester University two years ago, student protests erupted, and she was supported by Anna Ford, a former Manchester University chancellor.

Rowbotham, who lives in Kentish Town, recalled her involvement in the Arsenal Women’s Liberation Group in Highbury in the 1970s and said there was still much inequality between the sexes.

“Women always seem to get older so much earlier,” she said.

“When Gillian Duffy confronted Gordon Brown, everyone described her as ‘this old grandmother’.

But when some old man who is from the World Bank is speaking about the economy, no one remarks on his age.”

Ford said: “Charles Wheeler worked until he was 83.

There’s certainly no equivalent woman working at the BBC with grey hair and who is in her 80s.”

She said it is a scandal that, in terms of pay in universities, there is a differential of 18 per cent between men and women.

Ending on a rousing note,  Rowbotham quoted the American feminist of the 1890s, Lois Waisbrooker.

“The first step is to believe that it can be done,” she said. “The second step is to believe that it will be done – and the last step is to do it.”

Political wolves at our doors...

A WOMAN has left me wondering afresh about the political pygmies running our government.

I also wondered what the brilliant writer Vasily Grossman would have made of them.

Last week Vasily’s 80-year-old daughter Yekaterina Korotkova-Grossman appeared at a Bloomsbury book festival run by the London Review of Books where she left a clue.

Her father joined the trenches during the last world war as a correspondent, reporting the titanic battles of Stalingrad, Moscow and Berlin.

His books were devoured by millions of ordinary Russians.

Even after falling out with the state, with his books banned and years spent on a blacklist, he remained “optimistic about human nature”, Yekaterina revealed.

“Yes, he believed man can improve – that there is no such person who is only wicked,” she said.

Yekaterina was finally able, under Perestroika, to have his famous banned book Life and Fate dusted off.

Listening to her, I was reminded of a line in the book: If man “wants to defend his culture from wolves and snowstorms, he must keep his broom, spade, and rifle always to hand.

If he goes to sleep; if he thinks about something else for even  a year or two, then everything is lost.”

Have Vasily’s words come back to haunt us, I wondered, have we let down our guard against our own political wolves?

• Grossman’s Life and Fate (Vintage) and Everything Flows (Harvill Secker) are now available in hardback

O’Hagan loses ‘faith’ in millionaires

IT set out as a conversation on religion, culture and the arts between three thinkers.

But that didn’t stop one of them blasting the “millionaires” in the Con-Lib-Dem coalition.

I wasn’t surprised though to hear the writer Andrew O’Hagan almost spit out the word “disgusting” when he referred to “three-quarters” of the Cabinet who were millionaires with a “faith” yet they had gone ahead and cut pilot schemes for free school meals for poor children.

True, O’Hagan, who lives in Belsize Park, has proved himself a critic of a lot of political and cultural norms in the past.

A couple of years ago in the magazine The London Review of Books he wrote a bold article saying that as a child himself on a poor housing estate in Scotland he got up to unintentional cruel tricks that were somewhere similar to the ones that killed the toddler James Bulger.

In Glasgow over the weekend I dropped in to hear O’Hagan, who was part of a panel at a packed meeting held on Saturday at St Simon’s Church – the other speakers were the Rev Kathy Gallagher, writer and activist and respected theologian Professor Werner Jeanrond.

In the house he grew up in, O’Hagan said, there were no books but lots of bookies’ red-topped pens.  

He agreed with a phrase of the famous poet Seamus Heaney, with whom he had visited Wales, that whatever the faults of the church it had built a “structure of conscience”.

He criticised politicians and the BBC for their lack of a “vision” and urged Obama and the Taliban to meet – and keep away from religion.

“It’s important to look the enemy in the eye and try to reach for an understanding,” he said.

• O’Hagan has just published a new novel, The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog – and of his friend Marilyn Monroe.