Intellectual ancestors part I

I remember reading in the Times some twenty years or so ago, a letter from a man who, in his youth in the 1920s, had met a woman in her nineties, whose first husband's first wife's first husband had been a friend of Oliver Cromwell. The long time scale was the result of very young people marrying very old people for dynastic reasons.

I forget the names and details, but if anyone can supply them, I shall be very grateful. It would have been very interesting to meet her and learn what she had learned about Cromwell from her husband. Also interesting is the idea of being five removes from meeting Oliver Cromwell.

There is I am sure something to be learned from everyone we meet.

I think it was Robert Graves who told the story of being patted on the head when still a baby by another poet (Swinburne, I think) who had been similarly honoured by Wordsworth. Graves's sister was our family doctor in the 1950s, so I can claim (as who, perhaps, cannot?) a physical connection with Wordsworth, a poet whom I do not much like.

While injecting me in the backside with anti-typhoid vaccine in 1963, she was anxious that I should think well of her brother.

"People think he's very pseudo," she said, "but he's really quite sincere."

I attended Graves's lectures when he was Oxford Professor of Poetry. He gave all of them in one term, not the usual three years, as he lived in Majorca and found travel irksome. They amounted to a sustained hatchet job on Virgil, even quoting a letter Graves claimed Virgil had written proving that he liked boys and fat women. His unjustified contempt for the Roman epicist drove me to read Homer, a far greater poet.

In 1962 I was at a dinner of the XX Club at New College, which was started by F. E. Smith, later Lord Birkenhead, whom Chesterton excoriated in one of his poems, Antichrist, or the reunion of Christendom. The two guests of honour were A. P. Herbert, who gave a witty and urbane speech, and Sir William Hayter, former H.M. Ambassador to the USSR in the 1950s. Hayter had, of course, known Krushchev, who had known Stalin, who had known Lenin.

Herbert was dressed in an old faded greenish dinner jacket, bought probably fifty or more years earlier or even inherited from his father. He recounted a slightly ribald but very funny exchange between Churchill and Bevin in the House of Commons urinals, which he heard while serving as the last M.P for Oxford University. Hayter described him as "very Edwardian".


I also met, by chance at an Oxford party, an oldish lady who introduced herself as Stella Aldwinckle, told me that her dog was a real Christian, and that she ran a riding school where she taught Christian Horsemanship, which concept she energetically and very convincingly described to me. I listened politely, but inwardly dismisssed her as a crackpot. Only ten years ago, via the internet, did I discover that she was a regular correspondent of Iris Murdoch, and was the founder of the Oxford Socratic Club where C. S. Lewis debated with Elisabeth Anscombe, who, said Lewis, "obliterated me as an apologist." Not a good idea too hastily to dismiss people with strange ideas as crackpots.

In the Wiltshire village where I was living ten years ago I met a man then in his seventies, who as a boy of fourteen working in a local big house, the home of I forget which lord, had before the war served dinner to Goering, or Goebbels, or Himmler, or Ribbentrop. Sadly I don't remember. Asked what he remembered of the German, he replied, "Not much. He seemed quite pleasant."

Tennyson wrote, "I am a part of all that I have met" and he might equally truthfully have written that all that he had met were a part of him.

Most of my family are dead and of my my more distant ancestors I know little more than names and old photographs, but rather more of my spiritual and intellectual ancestors, of whom many have been dead for centuries.


One, not so long dead, was a Mrs Wain, our neighbour in Welling, Kent. Emigrating to Canada, she gave me, a small boy, her hefty collection of shellac 78 rpm gramophone records, and so I spent hours listening to Italian opera, music hall, popular songs from the 1930s and 1940s, and funny monologues by Stanley Holloway. From her casual gift I learned to love music, and firmly believe that music is the greatest of the arts.









To be continued