One week with John Gulliver: Imagine: a school library filled by Holloway School's Old Camdenians Club

Published: 17 March 2011

Imagine: a school library filled by past pupils!

I COULDN’T quite believe it when I read the modestly-written letter that dropped onto my desk out of the blue this week.

It was headed “The Old Camdenians Club” – a club of old boys from Holloway School – and it relates how the club has begun collecting books written by former pupils: a total of more than 240 published books altogether! 

They range from the popular, written by the ex-Arsenal star, Charlie George and TV writer Laurence Marks, to heavier tomes from economists like Bob Pinker, a senior figure at the London School of Economics.

What a pool of talent spawned since the school was founded 102 years ago!

The letter was penned by club secretary George Ives, a pupil at the school in the post-war years when he lived above the New Copenhagen pub in York Way, Camden Town. He joined the school after being evacuated to Loughborough at the start of the Blitz.

Once a Holloway boy always a Holloway boy, it seems, and George just cannot get it out of his blood.

I looked up one of the alumni who attended a recent evening do at the school: the eminent artist Albert Irvin, who has become one of our leading abstract painters. The more I look into who went to the school the more amazed I become!

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His sense of humour helps Hugo Cope!

I HAVE a feeling that I may be wandering here into a faked battle between two poets but I am seduced by the sheer openness of one of them – Hugo Williams.

He and I both appear to share similar feelings about our fathers – a mixture of dislike (actually Hugo used the word, “loathing”) and affection.

He has written extensively about his father, and he assured me he must stop it.

All of this I elicited when I rang him last night (Thursday) at his Islington home. 

But there was an ulterior motive behind my call, so before he could draw me into his feelings about his father, I came out with it straight: “I must tell you, Hugo,” I said, 

“I want to talk to you about the poem in Saturday’s Guardian by Wendy Cope headed ‘A Villanelle for Hugo Williams’.”

Before we got onto that, I recalled how we met at Edinburgh two years ago at the launch of his beautiful book of poems about his father Hugh Williams, the very fine and very handsome film and stage actor of the 1940s and 1950s.

A good listener and a man of memory, he remembered me, partly because sitting next to him signing his book of poem was the venerable and great poet, Peter Porter, who died last year.

When I mentioned Wendy Cope’s poem in the Guardian he seemed surprised because it read – at least to me – a bit edgy: taking the mickey, however softly, and he had not seen it.

He told me that he had written a Villanelle and sent it to Wendy Cope and wondered what she had made of it.

In her reply she writes: 

What can I say? I’d like to be polite
But have you ever seen a Villanelle?
You ask me: ‘Have I got the rhyme-scheme right?’

Then she ends with: 
You seem dead keen to master them, despite
Your puzzling inability to tell Which bit goes where.
These lines, if not polite, Will be of use, I hope. The rhyme-scheme’s right.

When I read the first and last stanzas to him, he took it in good spirits. 

He assured me he and Wendy were very good friends, and that, in any case, he had a good sense of humour which I must admit one needs when absorbing words in print – about oneself.

But he explained, he had been attempting Villanelles for years, and particularly recommended those by WH Auden and Elizabeth Bishop,

I warmed to him and am determined to talk more to him, perhaps about fathers and what sons make of them.

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When classical and jazz collide

IF only more private companies opened up their premises to public events as the law firm of Hodge Jones and Allen does!

I do not wish to plug the concept of the Big Society, which I am quite dubious about, but if anything possibly lives up to that ill-conceived idea it is the modern jazz concert soon to be performed in the atrium of the firm’s offices in Euston.

Splendidly, the concert is to raise money for the children’s ward at the nearby University College London Hospital.

It will all turn around the music of Miles Davis under the baton of the classically trained  Peter Wiegold. 

“What we’re going to do is improvise in the kind of way that Miles Davis improvised, so we’ll get some riffs going and some solos,” Mr Wiegold told me. 

Weigold and his band are called “notes inégales”, which is a French term used to describe a genre of baroque music. Translated literally, it means “unequal notes”.

“It’s the closest classical music ever came to jazz,” Wiegold. explained. “It was the one time when classical music really swung, so that’s why I’ve borrowed the term.”

The band have played at leading venues including the ICA and the South Bank and were described in this newspaper as “one of the most exciting live things seen on a London stage”.

• The Post-Miles Davis jazz night is at Hodge Jones and Allen LLP, 180 North Gower  Street, NW1, on Thursday March 31 at 7pm. Tickets cost £20. 
To book call Andrew Ewbank on 020 7874 8345.

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A case where humanity is lost in the legalese 

I AM used to the cold and clinical language of a courtroom. That kind of detachment is perhaps how it should be.

But something stirred in me when I read a colleague’s transcript of a tragic story that unfolded at a coroner’s hearing in Westminster – a story about the last days of a tiny baby and her mother.

The baby, emaciated and quite dead, was found in a cot; his mother was arrested and died two days later from the final assault of HIV.

Altogether, an unimaginable scene obviously met the ambulance staff who had been called by the mother.

The Daily Mail seized on the fact that the mother was an illegal immigrant while the coroner appeared to be most concerned about the immense amount of public money wasted – reckoned to be around £1 million – on what he described as “this tragic story”.

The examination of a police witness as well as that of a pathologist who had conduced a post mortem on the baby went back and forth in the dry language of the courtroom.

But where in all this, I asked myself, was the terrible story of the woman dying from HIV, hardly able to move, presumably, and having to watch the last hours of her baby?

How important on the scale of things was the fact that the woman was an illegal immigrant? 

Or that money had been spent on her and the baby? All is lost, I believe, once we lose sight of the human story.

The woman, who was described as having been raped in Ethiopia, came here full of hope, had a baby and, for a moment, perhaps, dreamed of a better future.

Her end we know.  But she deserves more than being a statistic in the file kept on illegal immigrants.