Trailer for Paul Willetts' book 'Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms'

Here's a trailer for Paul Willetts' new book, 'Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms'. He's also written several other excellent books, including 'Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia', 'North Soho 999', and 'Members Only' (the biography of Paul Raymond).
http://www.paulwilletts.uk/2613837-watch-movie-trailer#0

From My Commonplace Book

"The man who cannot visualise a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot." - André Breton

Things I Miss #9

Until the 1980s I often used to see French people riding motorised bicycles - not mopeds but rather a normal bicycle fitted with a small engine. In every French film made between 1930 and 1970 the village priest is always shown riding one of these contraptions. Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot also rode one.

 

Overheard Conversation #9

In the street outside, someone talking loudly on their mobile phone:

"Yes, let's do that, you are a lovely man and he is in Russia now. Hello, nutter."

Random Memory #11

I once spent 3 months on the North Frisian island of Föhr (Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands takes place thereabouts). Lying on the beach watching German people fall off windsurfers while (through some fluke of the atmosphere) getting the BBC World Service on my Walkman and listening to an interview with Sunil Gavaskar. Hearing sonic booms from Danish F-16s. Talking to two rastas in Föhr's only nightclub, Erdbeerparadis. Realising the only three books in English on the hotel's bookshelves were 1984, a Pan anthology of tedious ghost stories, and a sumptuously bound copy of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Germans asking me, sternly, what I did all day and when I replied, "I'm writing poetry/a novel/a history of the Kwakiutl" suggesting I should walk around the perimeter of the island as it was only 82 km sq in size. Discussing bottle-screws with a Hobie Cat sailor. Days spent on very cold beaches, even in summer, reading Dashiell Hammett and Jim Thompson and David Goodis.

From the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue - H

HABERDASHER OF PRONOUNS. A schoolmaster.
To HANG AN ARSE. To hang back, to hesitate.
HANGMAN'S WAGES. Thirteen pence halfpenny; which, according to the vulgar tradition, was thus allotted: one shilling for the executioner, and three halfpence for the rope,—N. B. This refers to former times; the hangmen of the present day having, like other artificers, raised their prices. The true state of this matter is, that a Scottish mark was the fee allowed for an execution, and the value of that piece was settled by a proclamation of James I. at thirteen pence halfpenny.
HEARTY CHOAK. He will have a hearty choak and caper sauce for breakfast; i.e. he will be hanged.
HELL-BORN BABE. A lewd graceless youth, one naturally of a wicked disposition.
HERE AND THEREIAN. One who has no settled place of residence.
HIGH EATING. To eat skylarks in a garret.
HODMANDODS. Snails in their shells.
HOOK AND SNIVEY, WITH NIX THE BUFFER. This rig consists in feeding a man and a dog for nothing, and is carried on thus: Three men, one of who pretends to be sick and unable to eat, go to a public house: the two well men make a bargain with the landlord for their dinner, and when he is out of sight, feed their pretended sick companion and dog gratis.
HOP MERCHANT. A dancing master.
HOT STOMACH. He has so hot a stomach, that he burns all the clothes off his back; said of one who pawns his clothes to purchase liquor.
HUCKLE MY BUFF. Beer, egg, and brandy, made hot.
HUGOTONTHEONBIQUIFFINARIANS. A society existing in 1748.
HUM BOX. A pulpit.
HYP, or HIP. A mode of calling to one passing by. Hip, Michael, your head's on fire; a piece of vulgar wit to a red haired man.

Book Review - 'Operation Kronstadt' by Harry Ferguson

Operation Kronstadt by Harry Ferguson

As the recent unpleasantness in South Ossetia and the Ukraine shows, the Russian bear is never happier than when waving its claws and causing trouble. This excellent book recounts a little-known but similar period in Anglo-Russian relations.
 
By May 1919 the First World War was over and the “Red Terror” of the Bolsheviks had taken over as Britain’s biggest fear. The head of MI6, the wooden-legged Sir Mansfield Cumming, had a predicament: all his secret agents in Russia, save one, had been captured. The sole remaining agent, Paul Dukes, was cut off in Petrograd and needed to escape. Dukes was a 30-year-old concert pianist who had studied in St Petersburg, spoke fluent Russian, and was a master of disguise. Seldom more than a few steps (literally) from being captured by the Bolshevik secret service, the Cheka, Dukes managed not only to join the Red Army, the Communist Party, and the Petrograd Soviet, but even to penetrate the Cheka itself. The bloodthirsty Cheka, forerunner of the KGB and FSB, would often “interrogate” prisoners by scalping them alive, or feeding them feet-first into furnaces.
 
MI6 decided that the Royal Navy would help Dukes escape from Petrograd via the Gulf of Finland by using high-speed Coastal Motor Boats (CMBs or “skimmers”), as they were the only vessels fast enough to evade the Bolshevik gunners and “skim” over the minefields. Accordingly, Lieutenant Augustus “Gus” Agar and some like-minded chaps were smuggled into Finland with two CMBs, where they set up a secret base in a disused yacht club just across the Gulf from Kronstadt harbour. Kronstadt was, at the time, the most heavily defended harbour in the world, with fifteen coastal forts, and guns and minefields galore.
 
Although Dukes tried several times to rendezvous with Lieutenant Agar in the freezing waters of the Gulf, he was unsuccessful. He eventually escaped using a variety of disguises, via train and leaking rowing-boat through Latvia. On his return to Britain he was knighted for his spying, the only man in the annals of MI6 to achieve this distinction.
 
In the meantime the anti-Bolshevik White Russian garrison was trapped in one of the Gulf fortresses, Krasnaya Gorka, which was being shelled mercilessly by the Russian cruiser Oleg. The CMBs carried torpedoes and Lieutenant Agar asked for permission from London to attack the Oleg. Permission was refused but Lieutenant Agar decided to biff ahead anyway. On the night of 17^th June 1919, despite mechanical problems, his crew managed to fire one torpedo at the Oleg and sunk her. Lieutenant Agar was awarded an immediate Victoria Cross for his actions, though because the Russians put a price of £5,000 on his head he could not be publicly named and was always known as “the mystery VC”.
 
London then did a volte-face and decided a raid by seven CMBs into Kronstadt harbour itself would be a good idea. Against enormous odds, on 18^th August the attack was launched. Despite eight British sailors killed and nine captured, the CMBs managed to sink and damage three Russian cruisers. Two more VCs were awarded, and Lieutenant Agar received a DSO.
 
Harry Ferguson (apparently an ex-MI6 man himself) has researched the subject assiduously and has written a ripping yarn about these little-known exploits. Let us hope this book brings them to a wider audience.

(A version of this article first appeared in The Chap magazine.)

Neglected Author - Frederick Rolfe/Baron Corvo

"You call me mad, rash, incorrigible, proud, irreconcilable, deluded and all the rest," Frederick Rolfe once wrote to a critic. "But you must allow me to lead my life upon that higher and uncrowded plane where supernatural influences work unchecked... Have you not realised yet that it is not an ordinary, but an extraordinary man with whom you have to deal?"
 
Rolfe was indeed an extraordinary man. A self-styled baronet and priest, he was also, variously, a confidence trickster, pauper, schoolmaster, painter, pioneering photographer, blackmailer, and paedophile; and author of seven novels and various short stories. Rolfe’s vindictiveness and paranoia have become legendary, mainly through AJA Symon’s biography, The Quest for Corvo, and as the eponymous protagonist of Pamela Hansford Johnson’s roman a clef, The Unspeakable Skipton.
 
The son of a piano maker, Rolfe was born in 1860 into a Dissenting family. An early convert to Roman Catholicism, such was his religious ardour that at fourteen he had his breast tattooed with a cross.
 
His life became an obsessively fruitless quest to enter the priesthood. He was expelled from seminaries in England and Rome. Although the ostensible reason given for his expulsions were that he was spending too much time on poetry and painting, Rolfe had actually irritated the authorities by arguing violently with anyone who questioned his actions, and for his habit of running up numerous debts he had no hope of paying.
 
Although his hopes of entering the priesthood were at an end, he vowed to remain celibate for twenty years so he could be ready for the “call” if it ever came. It never did. He became convinced that all his hardships were the result of a Papist conspiracy against him. However, he did take to signing himself Fr. Rolfe - the abbreviation of Frederick being his way of suggesting he had a right to the traditional Catholic honorific, Father.
 
After the Rome debacle Rolfe settled in Hampshire, where he presented himself as Baron Corvo. According to him it was an honorary title bestowed upon him by the Duchess Sforza-Cesarini, a wealthy patron who had taken him in when he was homeless in Rome. He left Hampshire under a cloud of debt and fraud, and started afresh in Aberdeen. Within two months of securing a job as a photographer's assistant he was sacked, although he refused to accept his dismissal and had to be physically prevented from attending work by the police. After running up a huge bill at his lodgings he was eventually thrown out into the street in his pyjamas – when threatened with eviction Rolfe’s habit was to retire to bed and pretend it wasn’t happening.
 
Despite all this, Rolfe continued writing. He had adopted an arcane and idiosyncratic writing style, using archaic spelling designed to present an aesthetic “feel” to his work, and strewing his writing with foreign words. He wrote in green and heliotrope inks on sheets of paper and tacked them to his walls and then edited from there.
 
His most famous work is Hadrian VII, in which George Arthur Rose, an impoverished and oppressed writer, manages to be elected Pope – Rolfe’s greatest fantasy.
 
Rolfe spent the last five years of his troubled life in Venice. He applied for a job as a gondolier, but usually he relied on other people's generosity for his survival. In his last year, he somehow borrowed enough money to buy a dazzling gondola, draped in leopard and lynx skins, which he ostentatiously poled through the canals. Nevertheless, after a period of sleeping under tarpaulins on the canals, he died of "heart paralysis" on 25 October 1913 in a flat belonging to a friend.
 
His legacy is not only the myth of the man and his works, but also a medical condition known as Corvo's Syndrome - a quasi-delusional state in which an individual sees himself, not the incumbent, as the Pope of Rome.

(A version of this article first appeared in The Chap magazine.) 

Overheard Conversation #8

Woman in a restaurant to a waiter:

"I don't like avocado? But I still like avocado? So, can I have the avocado; but on the side? But not with the salad? So, the avocado salad, but without the avocado, but the avocado on the side?"

Things I Miss #8

In the early 1970s the news media reported a streaking epidemic, streaking being defined as running naked through a public place usually for a dare or as a prank. It appears to have started in the USA but quickly spread to the UK, so soon no major sporting event was complete without a streaker. Several cricket matches were enlivened by streakers, as was a 1974 England v France Rugby Union game when an iconic photograph was taken of the streaker, Michael O'Brien, with his genitals covered by a policeman's helmet. Another notable streaker was Erica Roe at Twickenham in 1982, and her name still resonates among rugby fans. A streaker interrupted the 46th Academy Awards in 1974, causing the host David Niven to remark,  "Isn't it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings?"

In 1974 a novelty song, "The Streak" by Ray Stevens, reached number one in the UK singles chart, with lyrics that included:

"He ain't crude, Boogity, Boogity
He ain't lewd, Boogity, Boogity
He's just in the mood to run in the nude

Oh, yes, they call him the Streak
Boogity, Boogity
He likes to turn the other cheek
Boogity, Boogity
He's always makin' the news
Wearin' just his tennis shoes
Guess you could call him unique."

From My Commonplace Book

"In the early 'eighties [1880s], while bangs and bustles were having their way with women, that variation of dandy known as the "dude" was invented: he wore trousers as tight as stockings, dagger-pointed shoes, a spoon "Derby," a single-breasted coat called a "Chesterfield," with short flaring skirts, a torturing cylindrical collar, laundered to a polish and three inches high, while his other neckgear might be a heavy, puffed cravat or a tiny bow fit for a doll's braids. With evening dress he wore a tan overcoat so short that his black coat-tails hung visible, five inches below the over-coat; but after a season or two he lengthened his overcoat till it touched his heels, and he passed out of his tight trousers into trousers like great bags."

- Booth Tarkington The Magnificent Ambersons

Random Memory #10

At university my kitchen walls were covered in pictures from magazines and newspapers, postcards, covers of pulp paperbacks, Sinatra LP covers, and other ephemera. The local pubs' salted peanuts were from a firm called Christie's, so the kitchen wall also featured empty packets amended in biro to celebrate famous Christie's: Agatha, Ian (film critic), John Reginald, Julie, and Stuart. The latter provoked puzzlement from a philistine housemate. I explained Start Christie was a Scottish anarchist, connected to The Angry Brigade, who'd spent many years in a Spanish prison for trying to assassinate Franco. The housemate thought about this for a while until the lightbulb flickered to life, and said, "Oh, right! Then when he came out of prison he started a peanut factory."