Distant connexions, the contagion of acquaintance

I read 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 know 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 the poet and classicist Robert Graves who told the story of being patted on the head when still a baby by Swinburne, who had been similarly honoured by Wordsworth. Graves's sister, Rosalind Cooper, was my 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."

A Short Swinburnian Ode Adressed to a Shiten Shepherd

I make no claims for the following as poetry: it is simply angry verse, and the first line and metre are an imitation of A. C. Swinburne's poem Hymn to Proserpine ("Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean"), regretting the triumph of Christianity, and the decay of paganism. The words are said to have been spoken by the Julian the Apostate on his death-bed.


Please note the older pronunciation of 'victuals' as 'vittles', and you will get the reference.


Thou hast conquered, O pasty-faced *******!
The Church has grown weak, suffers scorn.
Our Faith that was manlier victuals
Has dwindled to muesli and quorn.

Of our Church Catholics once lived for, died for,
Now little's left here but the name.
The Light that your flock yearn and cry for,
Starved of fuel, is a weak, guttering flame.

You offer Our Lady's due: flowers 
On altars to strange heathen gods,
Fudge Doctrine, misusing your powers,
To affirm pagans, heretics, S**s.