Latest news with #ChristopherHowse
Yahoo
01-04-2025
- Yahoo
The English high street: St Chad's Parade, Kirkby – the new town that went wrong
Christopher Howse is travelling the nation to speak to local people about their high street, including how it has changed and what they miss… This week, Christopher explores St Chad's Parade in Kirkby, Merseyside. A surprising thing I found in Kirkby was a system for hiring artificial white funeral flowers, spelling out DAD or NAN. 'Do you get them back?' I asked the cheery woman looking after the Kirby Krafts stall in the covered market. 'Touch wood,' she replied. In 2019, Kirkby, six miles from Liverpool, was voted the worst shopping destination in the country. A telling fact is that for 42 years from 1979, when Asda closed, Kirkby had no proper supermarket. Its hidden history is of frustrated hopes, decline, vandalism, demolition, corruption and broken promises. Kirkby is 'a byword for the failure of postwar overspill estates', according to the Liverpool volume of the Pevsner Architectural Guide. Liverpool council had bought 4,000 acres to settle people from city slums. In 1951 the population was 3,000; by 1961 it was 52,000 (with 48 per cent under 15). It then declined by a third. When Z-Cars, the police drama series, aired in 1962, its setting, Newtown, was loosely based on Kirkby, which one of the screenwriters described as a place where '50,000 displaced and truculent Merseysiders carry out a continuous war against authority and where crime and adolescent terror incubate'. But in the 1960s jobs were easy to find on the Kirkby industrial estate, where 25,000 worked. Then in 1971, the Thorn Electrical factory closed. By 1981, Kirkby's unemployment rate was 22.6 per cent, second only to Corby, where the steelworks had shut down. A local police superintendent reported in 1975 that 700 council homes a year were badly vandalised and 14,000 street lights had been destroyed in six months. 'Most shops have either bricked up their windows or covered them with permanent and unsightly metal grilles.' A celebrated photograph by Sefton Samuels from 1973 encapsulated it: children jumping on to mattresses from the balcony of a vandalised house. The Kirkby ski slope represented a low point. Built in 1974 facing a turn-off of the M57, it was abandoned in 1975 as unsafe. Tons of earth and rubbish had subsided. Its architect was jailed for taking bribes from its builder, also jailed, as was a former leader of Kirkby council. Most pitifully, Kirby was home to James Bulger, the toddler murdered in 1993, though he was abducted from a shopping centre in Bootle. So with some trepidation I set off on the 20-minute rail journey from Liverpool Central, up the Mersey for a bit, past decayed docks and the brushed-steel look of the new Everton stadium. A scheme to build the stadium at Kirkby in coordination with Tesco was abandoned in 2009. But at least Kirkby is now home to Liverpool FC's training ground. Past Fazakerley, birches fringe a golf course by the little river Alt, which joins the brook running through Kirkby. Viking kirks abound – Kirkdale, Ormskirk – but the middle k of Kirkby is silent. I dodged showers as clouds scudded over the tall saddleback red-sandstone tower of St Chad's in its patch of woodland. Pevsner remarked: 'How much better the town centre would have been if that magnificent building, rather than standing in splendid isolation, had been made its focal point.' The shopping street, St Chad's Parade, stands between neighbourhoods insipidly named Southdene, Westvale and Northwood. The 10,000 houses built in the first decade were low-rise, pleasant and functional. Most residents were glad to come to Kirkby, though in 1963, one woman told a researcher: 'They should have put the roughs in flats and the respectable ones in houses to look after gardens.' From the late 1960s a fourth neighbourhood, Tower Hill, was built, for 10,000 second-generation residents. Its seven-storey maisonette blocks were badly constructed. A protesting resident's placard read: 'Let's have homes not fungus cells.' In 1982 most of the town seemed to turn out to watch 140,000 sticks of gelignite blow up the huge Ranshaw Court flats, after only 10 years of existence. I found St Chad's Parade blustery. But a mother was sitting outside Costa Coffee with a cigarette and two young children eating something from bags from the Poundbakery opposite. At Costa it had cost me £6.75 for coffee and a bit of cake: not cheap. I sat near the mother outside. With gusto, bold posters in the Poundbakery window challenged prices at the nearby Greggs (a chain that, like the boy on the burning deck, is often the last shop standing when all around have fled). Beside a giant picture of a sausage roll, the PoundBakery declared: 'Size matters: 37 per cent bigger than Greggs. Still only £1.' I drank up and wondered if there was a loo. The cigarette mother kindly held the door as I manoeuvred my tray. Another lady told me the combination number for the lavatory. People here lack the methodical hostility often apparent in London. Kirkby town centre is known locally as the 'Towny'. At one end of St Chad's Parade is the covered market and at the other a public library in a grim grassy square formerly a car park. The Parade is pedestrianised with modest shops under square-columned arcades. A bold bird had built a nest in one of the thin trees by benches in the middle. It should be nice, but it's not. Like lockdown, it has a ghastly air of desertion. Of the 32 shops in the centre of the Parade, 10 are closed. Even the pawnbroker's is closed. A pair of security guards wandered by. Then came an old man with a matted beard, lashing out with his NHS crutch and shouting at no one: 'If there's one thing I hate it's f---ing lies.' He must have had a hard time of it for decades, when Kirkby has repeatedly been promised regeneration. A splash of colour in the Parade came from yellow melons, black grapes and orange 'tangies' outside the Banana Bunch greengrocer's. I breezily asked Jason, who runs it, how business was. 'Terrible.' He has traded for 30 years. He showed me a couple of pictures on his mobile of the Parade on St Valentine's Day this year at noon. One shot looks east, the other west. Not a single person is visible in either. Isn't the council doing anything? 'Nothing.' 'They need to get the rents down and fill up these empty units,' he said. 'People come along interested in opening a shop, and then when they learn the rents…' A friendly-sounding woman from Greggs popped in for a swede, some carrots, sprouts and potatoes. Jason chaffed her on the prices at the PoundBakery. He was cheerful with customers but didn't see much of a future in Kirkby. Only after a while did I notice there was hardly a non-white face. Only 3.3 per cent of Kirkby's population are not 'White British', compared with England's average of 25 per cent. A young woman outside had lived all her life in Kirkby: 'There are worse places.' I asked where people did their shopping. 'Morrisons,' she said, pointing eastward. Morrisons opened in 2021, with its own bakery, butcher's and fishmonger's. The council bought the whole town centre and land for Morrisons for £43.8 million in 2019 from a developer called St Modwen after development stalled. Morrisons sits in a big car park. People park, shop there and drive home without setting foot in the Parade. The car park is fringed by three takeaways offering drive-through service: KFC, McDonald's and Taco Bell. Neil, of Neil's Quality Meats, told the Liverpool Echo that customers said: 'We were promised a retail park, and got a fast food park.' In 2015, as Tesco finally pulled out from plans for Kirkby, a nine-ton iron limbless tree was erected in St Chad's Parade where a colourful clock tower had stood. 'Why wud they pit sumthing so pointless an ugly in d Towny?' asked a resident on Facebook. The sculptor also produced a 16ft sculpture of an elephant paddling a Viking boat. On the boat, inscribed roundels describe Kirkby. One gives memories from the years after the Second World War: 'We went to the Church Brook on school holidays – down to the brook to fish for tiddlers! A net made from Mum's old stockings in a stick … Then running up Mill Lane to hear Dick Barton on the radio and have some scouse.' As I crossed the brook on my walk to the station I saw three supermarket trolleys lying in the turbid water. From their silt-filled baskets grew spring shoots of regeneration. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
01-04-2025
- Telegraph
The English high street: St Chad's Parade, Kirkby – the new town that went wrong
Christopher Howse is travelling the nation to speak to local people about their high street, including how it has changed and what they miss… This week, Christopher explores St Chad's Parade in Kirkby, Merseyside. A surprising thing I found in Kirkby was a system for hiring artificial white funeral flowers, spelling out DAD or NAN. 'Do you get them back?' I asked the cheery woman looking after the Kirby Krafts stall in the covered market. 'Touch wood,' she replied. In 2019, Kirkby, six miles from Liverpool, was voted the worst shopping destination in the country. A telling fact is that for 42 years from 1979, when Asda closed, Kirkby had no proper supermarket. Its hidden history is of frustrated hopes, decline, vandalism, demolition, corruption and broken promises. Kirkby is 'a byword for the failure of postwar overspill estates', according to the Liverpool volume of the Pevsner Architectural Guide. Liverpool council had bought 4,000 acres to settle people from city slums. In 1951 the population was 3,000; by 1961 it was 52,000 (with 48 per cent under 15). It then declined by a third. When Z-Cars, the police drama series, aired in 1962, its setting, Newtown, was loosely based on Kirkby, which one of the screenwriters described as a place where '50,000 displaced and truculent Merseysiders carry out a continuous war against authority and where crime and adolescent terror incubate'. But in the 1960s jobs were easy to find on the Kirkby industrial estate, where 25,000 worked. Then in 1971, the Thorn Electrical factory closed. By 1981, Kirkby's unemployment rate was 22.6 per cent, second only to Corby, where the steelworks had shut down. A local police superintendent reported in 1975 that 700 council homes a year were badly vandalised and 14,000 street lights had been destroyed in six months. 'Most shops have either bricked up their windows or covered them with permanent and unsightly metal grilles.' A celebrated photograph by Sefton Samuels from 1973 encapsulated it: children jumping on to mattresses from the balcony of a vandalised house. The Kirkby ski slope represented a low point. Built in 1974 facing a turn-off of the M57, it was abandoned in 1975 as unsafe. Tons of earth and rubbish had subsided. Its architect was jailed for taking bribes from its builder, also jailed, as was a former leader of Kirkby council. Most pitifully, Kirby was home to James Bulger, the toddler murdered in 1993, though he was abducted from a shopping centre in Bootle. So with some trepidation I set off on the 20-minute rail journey from Liverpool Central, up the Mersey for a bit, past decayed docks and the brushed-steel look of the new Everton stadium. A scheme to build the stadium at Kirkby in coordination with Tesco was abandoned in 2009. But at least Kirkby is now home to Liverpool FC's training ground. Past Fazakerley, birches fringe a golf course by the little river Alt, which joins the brook running through Kirkby. Viking kirks abound – Kirkdale, Ormskirk – but the middle k of Kirkby is silent. I dodged showers as clouds scudded over the tall saddleback red-sandstone tower of St Chad's in its patch of woodland. Pevsner remarked: 'How much better the town centre would have been if that magnificent building, rather than standing in splendid isolation, had been made its focal point.' The shopping street, St Chad's Parade, stands between neighbourhoods insipidly named Southdene, Westvale and Northwood. The 10,000 houses built in the first decade were low-rise, pleasant and functional. Most residents were glad to come to Kirkby, though in 1963, one woman told a researcher: 'They should have put the roughs in flats and the respectable ones in houses to look after gardens.' From the late 1960s a fourth neighbourhood, Tower Hill, was built, for 10,000 second-generation residents. Its seven-storey maisonette blocks were badly constructed. A protesting resident's placard read: 'Let's have homes not fungus cells.' In 1982 most of the town seemed to turn out to watch 140,000 sticks of gelignite blow up the huge Ranshaw Court flats, after only 10 years of existence. I found St Chad's Parade blustery. But a mother was sitting outside Costa Coffee with a cigarette and two young children eating something from bags from the Poundbakery opposite. At Costa it had cost me £6.75 for coffee and a bit of cake: not cheap. I sat near the mother outside. With gusto, bold posters in the Poundbakery window challenged prices at the nearby Greggs (a chain that, like the boy on the burning deck, is often the last shop standing when all around have fled). Beside a giant picture of a sausage roll, the PoundBakery declared: 'Size matters: 37 per cent bigger than Greggs. Still only £1.' I drank up and wondered if there was a loo. The cigarette mother kindly held the door as I manoeuvred my tray. Another lady told me the combination number for the lavatory. People here lack the methodical hostility often apparent in London. Kirkby town centre is known locally as the 'Towny'. At one end of St Chad's Parade is the covered market and at the other a public library in a grim grassy square formerly a car park. The Parade is pedestrianised with modest shops under square-columned arcades. A bold bird had built a nest in one of the thin trees by benches in the middle. It should be nice, but it's not. Like lockdown, it has a ghastly air of desertion. Of the 32 shops in the centre of the Parade, 10 are closed. Even the pawnbroker's is closed. A pair of security guards wandered by. Then came an old man with a matted beard, lashing out with his NHS crutch and shouting at no one: 'If there's one thing I hate it's f---ing lies.' He must have had a hard time of it for decades, when Kirkby has repeatedly been promised regeneration. A splash of colour in the Parade came from yellow melons, black grapes and orange 'tangies' outside the Banana Bunch greengrocer's. I breezily asked Jason, who runs it, how business was. 'Terrible.' He has traded for 30 years. He showed me a couple of pictures on his mobile of the Parade on St Valentine's Day this year at noon. One shot looks east, the other west. Not a single person is visible in either. Isn't the council doing anything? 'Nothing.' 'They need to get the rents down and fill up these empty units,' he said. 'People come along interested in opening a shop, and then when they learn the rents…' A friendly-sounding woman from Greggs popped in for a swede, some carrots, sprouts and potatoes. Jason chaffed her on the prices at the PoundBakery. He was cheerful with customers but didn't see much of a future in Kirkby. Only after a while did I notice there was hardly a non-white face. Only 3.3 per cent of Kirkby's population are not 'White British', compared with England's average of 25 per cent. A young woman outside had lived all her life in Kirkby: 'There are worse places.' I asked where people did their shopping. 'Morrisons,' she said, pointing eastward. Morrisons opened in 2021, with its own bakery, butcher's and fishmonger's. The council bought the whole town centre and land for Morrisons for £43.8 million in 2019 from a developer called St Modwen after development stalled. Morrisons sits in a big car park. People park, shop there and drive home without setting foot in the Parade. The car park is fringed by three takeaways offering drive-through service: KFC, McDonald's and Taco Bell. Neil, of Neil's Quality Meats, told the Liverpool Echo that customers said: 'We were promised a retail park, and got a fast food park.' In 2015, as Tesco finally pulled out from plans for Kirkby, a nine-ton iron limbless tree was erected in St Chad's Parade where a colourful clock tower had stood. 'Why wud they pit sumthing so pointless an ugly in d Towny?' asked a resident on Facebook. The sculptor also produced a 16ft sculpture of an elephant paddling a Viking boat. On the boat, inscribed roundels describe Kirkby. One gives memories from the years after the Second World War: 'We went to the Church Brook on school holidays – down to the brook to fish for tiddlers! A net made from Mum's old stockings in a stick … Then running up Mill Lane to hear Dick Barton on the radio and have some scouse.' As I crossed the brook on my walk to the station I saw three supermarket trolleys lying in the turbid water. From their silt-filled baskets grew spring shoots of regeneration.
Yahoo
24-02-2025
- General
- Yahoo
A candid conversation with Mahatma Gandhi – and his warning for Britain
This article is published as part of The Telegraph's Greatest Interviews series, which revisits the most significant, informative and entertaining conversations with notable figures over our 170 year history. The below interview is introduced by Christopher Howse. It appears as it was originally published. Three days after the publication of this interview with Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948), the champion of Indian self-rule made his way by train the 45 miles from Bhatni Junction to Gorakhpur in the state of Uttar Pradesh. At every station at least 15,000 people waited to see him: Nunkhar, Deoria, Gauri Bazar, Chauri Chaura. At Deoria there were 35,000; even at the jungle station of Kusmhi 10,000 turned out. To set eyes on him was darshan – the auspicious sight of a deity or a holy person. His interviewer, Perceval Landon, 51, had made his name as a correspondent in the Boer War, starting a newspaper for the forces with Rudyard Kipling, who became a lifelong friend. With Kipling, he reported for The Telegraph in 1917 from the First World War mountain front of Britain's ally Italy. Landon had sent despatches from Lhasa, Tibet, and covered visits by two successive Princes of Wales to India in 1905 and 1921. The Gandhi interview was printed opposite the main leading article, which called it 'the most penetrating account of Gandhi which has so far been laid before English readers'. Under the headline of a biblical quotation – 'Not peace, but a sword' – The Telegraph declared that 'the Mahatma is gentle, kindly, refined, transparently candid, a thoroughly implacable and uncontrollable idealist' but concluded that he had 'fomented a movement that can hardly end without bloodshed and very grave disorder'. – Christopher Howse Yesterday I spent a long time in the frankest conversation with Mr. Gandhi, and at length succeeded in forming a complete, though almost incredible, estimate of his attitude io the campaign to which he has devoted every faculty and every moment of his life. 'No one understands Mr. Gandhi's crusade,' said a sage man to me in Bombay, 'who does not know Mr. Gandhi.' What I have to say, therefore, may probably seem, impossible to those who have never met this amazing and dangerous man, who in solitude bestrides the field of Indian sedition like a colossus. In truth he is alone. He does not seem to need lieutenants or councillors, who embarrass him with their practical suggestions as much as Mr. Gandhi bewilders them by his pure Utopianism. Whether they remain or desert him makes no difference; his appeal is to the lowest of the population, and his strength lies precisely in the fact that his teaching is a visionary reconstruction of the Golden Age based upon universal loving-kindness. He preaches to the heart and despises the head. And, therefore, he has no parallel in the world to-day, either in the semi-divine character of his influence or in the magnitude of the disaster which will attend his success. Seated on the floor in a small, barely-furnished room, I found the mahatma, clad in rough, white homespun. He turned up to me, with a smile of welcome, the typical head of the idealist – the skull well formed and finely modelled; the face narrowing to the pointed chin. His eyes are deep, kindly, and entirely sane; his hair is greying a little over the forehead. He speaks gently and well, and in his voice is a note of detachment which lends uncanny force to the strange doctrines that he has given up his life to teach. One could not imagine him ruffled, hasty, or resentful; not the least part of the moral supremacy in his crusade is his universally-known willingness to turn the other cheek to the smiter. From the first it must be realised that consciously his teaching has been influenced by that of Christ, for whom his admiration has long been the almost dominating feature of his spiritual life, and probably the external character of his daily activity has been modelled also upon Him. He made a curious observation during our conversation, which throws some light upon his interpretation of the Galilean Teacher. In answer to a remark of mine that Christ strictly abstained from interfering in politics, Mr. Gandhi answered, 'I do not think so; but, if you are right, the less Christ in that was He.' The achievement of an ideal world built upon selflessness and governed by loving-kindness alone, which has proved too much, for the Christian nations, seems to Mr. Gandhi a self-evident possibility. The danger, the very real danger, of the man lies in the fact that his belief is exactly that best calculated to appeal to the Oriental, and most certain, if adopted, to lead in India to internecine bloodshed and disintegration and – should our long patience become exhausted – to Indian servitude to some other Power more willing than ourselves to keep the sabre rattling in its sheath. It is precisely his idealism which makes him the worst enemy of his own people. Courteous, implacable, and refined, Mr. Gandhi explained to me the faith that was in him, and as he did so my hopes of an understanding between him and the English grew less and less. The hated civilisation and rule of England must go. I suggested the unprotected state of India should our work come to an end. If India has sufficient unity to expel the British, she can also protect herself against foreign aggression; universal love and soul force will keep our shores inviolate; It is by making armaments that war is made. But what of the religious antagonism between Hindu and Moslem? No trouble will come. I thought of the transfigured face of a certain distinguished Moslem follower of Mr. Gandhi, in the Punjab, and his eager anticipation of the day when the coast would be clear, and Islam would crush Hindu opposition and re-establish India as the Sovereign Moslem State – and I renewed the question: If trouble should ensue I shall be ready to accept it. If even all India were submerged in the struggle it would only be a proof that India was evil, and it d would be for the best. His attitude not unnaturally made me ask what he thought about Lenin. He said he did not know enough about Lenin, but in any case he would prefer Bolshevism to British rule. Unless what has been said before is borne in mind, this answer might seem to justify much that has been charged against Mr. Gandhi, but I am convinced that idealism uncontrolled and now uncontrollable, is at the root of every extravagant view enunciated by Mr. Gandhi. We agreed that Western and Eastern-standards were irreconcilable, but I asked him if he could find no good in Englishmen and English civilisation. He said it was not against individual Englishmen that he directed his campaign. He admitted that several Englishmen had shown a willingness to work unselfishly for India, and instanced Bradlaugh, Jardine, Wedderburn, and Montagu. Asked why; then, he opposed the reforms, he said that the justice they intended had been whittled away by those to whom their application had been entrusted. He would not admit that he could have carried on his campaign inside the Chambers by sending deputies – a remark which gives food for thought. Either he believes that the intense centralisation of the non-co-operative movement would be destroyed thereby, or he wishes as yet to avoid a definite issue between himself and the moderates. In any case his famous justification of his use of such bad products of British civilisation as railways and post offices, on the ground of helping the cause, should apply here also. His policy in this matter suggests weakness in political organisation. His bitterness against modern civilisation is at once the strength and weakness of his campaign. Presented as the protest of Hinduism against the Black Age in which we are now living, it makes a direct appeal to the country districts, whose antagonism to the large towns is one of the disregarded factors in the present Indian situation. He frankly admitted that in two matters, sanitation and organisation, he admired British methods, but he did not seem to realise that the latter covered almost the whole ground of our administration of India. Similar inconsistencies between Western and Eastern standpoints account for much in Mr. Gandhi's teaching, but he seems to forget that India has already attempted something like his Utopia and found it unpractical. Listening to Mr. Gandhi, one was again and again reminded of the beautiful vision of a world of selfless kindliness that Gaptama inculcated twenty-four centuries ago – a world that never existed, a vision which has left human nature unchanged. Coming to essentials, I asked him directly whether he did not see that his campaign of non-violence as he conducted it must inevitably result in violence, for which he must be held responsible. 'There will be no trouble unless the Englishmen begin it.' This was so like the German contention that France began hostilities that I asked him if he had said that he believed that the Government at Bihar had recently provoked violence. He said he did not believe it, and added, with a smile, that much was alleged of him that he had never said. Courteous and refined he remained to the end, but implacable he remained also, and I could only sum up my impression of my visit in the conviction that a pure idealist, whom the people of India reverenced as a god, must, through the very qualities which had enthroned him, end by delivering them over to bloodshed and misery. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Yahoo
24-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
When the Telegraph met Kaiser Bill – and he made foreign relations 10 times worse
This article is published as part of The Telegraph's Greatest Interviews series, which revisits the most significant, informative and entertaining conversations with notable figures over our 170 year history. The below interview is introduced by Christopher Howse. It appears as it was originally published. The Telegraph's interview with Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1908 put the cat among the international pigeons in the lead-up to the First World War. It caused as much ill-feeling against him in Germany as in Britain, by revealing his opinions. He said that a majority of Germans were unfriendly to England, and suggested that Germany's naval build-up was directed against Japan. His claim that he had been on Britain's side in the Boer war seemed to many incredible. The interview appeared opposite a leading article emphasising its historic status. Declared to be the record of a conversation with a 'representative Englishman', it had come from Colonel Edward Montagu-Stuart-Wortley, at whose castle the German Emperor had stayed in 1907. Meaning to improve Anglo-German relations, the professional soldier made notes of their conversations, which the Kaiser agreed could be published in The Daily Telegraph. After the hostile reaction, the Kaiser was filled with angry regret. – Christopher Howse We have received the following communication from a source of such unimpeachable authority that we can without hesitation commend the obvious message which it conveys to the attention of the public. Discretion is the first and last quality requisite in a diplomatist, and should still be observed by those who, like myself, have long passed from public into private life. Yet moments sometimes occur in the history of nations when a calculated indiscretion proves of the highest public service, and it is for that reason that I have decided to make known the substance of a lengthy conversation which it was my recent privilege to have with his Majesty the German Emperor. I do so in the hope that it may help to remove that obstinate misconception of the character of the Kaiser's feelings towards England which, I fear, is deeply rooted in the ordinary Englishman's breast. It is the Emperor's sincere wish that it should be eradicated. He has given repeated proofs of his desire by word and deed. But, to speak frankly, his patience is sorely tried, now that he finds himself so continually misrepresented, and has so often experienced the mortification of finding that any momentary improvement of relations is followed by renewed outbursts of prejudice, and a prompt return to the old attitude of suspicion. As I have said, his Majesty honoured me with a long conversation, and spoke with impulsive and unusual frankness 'You English,' he said, 'are mad, mad, mad as March hares. What has come over you that you are so completely given over to suspicions quite unworthy of a great nation? What more can I do than I have done? I declared with all the emphasis at my command, in my speech at Guildhall, that my heart is set upon peace, and that it is one of my dearest wishes to live on the best of terms with England. Have I ever been false to my word? Falsehood and prevarication are alien to my nature. My actions ought to speak for themselves, but you listen not to them, but to those who misinterpret and distort them. That is a personal insult which I feel and resent. To be for ever misjudged, to have my repeated offers of friendship weighed and scrutinised with jealous, mistrustful eyes, taxes my patience severely. I have said time after time that I am a friend of England, and your Press – or, at least, a considerable section of it – bids the people of England refuse my proffered hand, and insinuates that the other holds a dagger. How can I convince a nation against its will? 'I repeat,' continued his Majesty, 'that I am the friend of England, but you make things difficult for me. My task is not of the easiest. The prevailing sentiment among large sections of the middle and lower classes of my own people is not friendly to England. I am, therefore, so to speak, in a minority in my own land, but it is a minority of the best elements, just as it is in England with respect to Germany. That is another reason why I resent your refusal to accept my pledged word that I am the friend of England. I strive without ceasing to improve relations, and you retort that I am your arch-enemy. You make it very hard for me. Why is it?' Thereupon I ventured to remind his Majesty that not England alone, but the whole of Europe had viewed with disapproval the recent action of Germany in allowing the German Consul to return from Tangier to Fez, and in anticipating the joint action of France and Spain by suggesting to the Powers that the time had come for Europe to recognise Muley Hafid as the new Sultan of Morocco. His Majesty made a gesture of impatience. 'Yes,' he said, 'that is an excellent example of the way in which German action is misrepresented. First, then, as regards the journey of Dr. Vassel. The German Government, in sending Dr. Vassel back to his post at Fez, was only guided by the wish that he should look after the private interests of German subjects in that city, who cried for help and protection after the long absence of a Consular representative. And why not send him? Are those who charge Germany with having stolen a march on the other Powers aware that the French Consular representative had already been in Fez for several months when Dr. Vassel set out? Then, as to the recognition of Muley Hafid. The Press of Europe has complained with much acerbity that Germany ought not to have suggested his recognition until he had notified to Europe his full acceptance of the Act of Algeciras, as being binding upon him as Sultan of Morocco and. successor of his brother. My answer is that Muley Hafid notified the Powers to that effect weeks ago, before the decisive battle was fought. He sent, as far back as the middle of last July, an identical communication to the Governments of Germany, France, and Great Britain, containing an explicit acknowledgment that he was prepared to recognise all the obligations towards Europe which were incurred by Abdul Aziz during his Sultanate. The German Government interpreted that communication as a final and authoritative expression of Muley Hafid's intentions, and therefore they considered that there was no reason to wait until he had sent a second communication, before recognising him as the de facto Sultan of Morocco, who had succeeded to his brother's throne by right of victory in the field.' I suggested to his Majesty that an important and influential section of the German Press had placed a very different interpretation upon the action of the German Government, and, in fact, had given it their effusive approbation precisely because they saw in it a strong act instead of mere words, and a decisive indication that Germany was once more about to intervene in the shaping of events in Morocco. 'There are mischief-makers,' replied the Emperor, 'in both countries. I will not attempt to weigh their relative capacity for misrepresentation. But the facts are as I have stated. There has been nothing in Germany's recent action with regard to Morocco which runs contrary to the explicit declaration of my love of peace, which I made both at Guildhall and in my latest speech at Strassburg.' His Majesty then reverted to the subject uppermost in his mind – his proved friendship for England. 'I have referred,' he said, 'to the speeches in which I have done all that a Sovereign can to proclaim my goodwill. But, as actions speak louder than words; let me also refer to my acts. It is commonly believed in England that throughout the South African War, Germany was hostile to her. German opinion undoubtedly was hostile – bitterly hostile. The Press was hostile; private opinion was hostile. But what of official Germany? Let my critics ask themselves what brought to a sudden stop, and, indeed, to absolute collapse, the European tour of the Boer delegates who were striving to obtain European intervention? They were fêted in Holland; France gave them a rapturous welcome. They wished to come to Berlin, where the German people would have crowned them with flowers. But when they asked me to receive them – I refused. The agitation immediately died away, and the delegation returned empty-handed. Was that, I ask, the action of a secret enemy?' 'Again, when the struggle was at its height, the German Government was invited by the Governments of France and Russia to join with them in calling upon England to put an end to the war. The moment had come, they said, not only to save the Boer Republics, but also to humiliate England to the dust. What my reply? I said that so far from Germany joining in any concerted European action to put pressure upon England and bring about her downfall, Germany would always keep aloof from politics that could bring her into complications with a Sea Power like England. Posterity will one day read the exact terms of the telegram – now in the archives of Windsor Castle – in which I informed the Sovereign of England of the answer I had returned to the Powers which then sought to compass her fall. Englishmen who now insult me by doubting my word should know what were my actions in the hour of their adversity.' 'Nor was that all. Just at the time of your Black Week, in the December of 1899, when disasters followed one another in rapid succession, I received a letter from Queen Victoria, my revered grandmother, written in sorrow and affliction, and bearing manifest traces of the anxieties which were preying upon her mind and health. I at once returned a sympathetic reply. Nay, I did more. I bade one of my officers procure for me as exact an account as he could obtain of the number of combatants in South Africa on both sides, and of the actual position of the opposing forces. With the figures before me, I worked out what I considered to be the best plan of campaign under the circumstances, and submitted it to my General Staff for their criticism. Then I despatched it to England, and that document, likewise, is among the State papers at Windsor Castle, awaiting the serenely impartial verdict of history. And, as a matter of curious coincidence, let me add that the plan which I formulated ran very much on the same lines as that which was actually adopted by Lord Roberts, and carried by him into successful operation. Was that, I repeat, the act of one who wished England ill? Let Englishmen be just and say!' 'But, you will say, what of the German navy? Surely, that is a menace to England! Against whom but England are my squadrons being prepared? If England is not in the minds of those Germans who are bent on creating a powerful fleet, why is Germany asked to consent to such new and heavy burdens of taxation? My answer is clear: Germany is a young and growing Empire. She has a world-wide commerce, which is rapidly expanding, and to which the legitimate ambition of patriotic Germans refuses to assign any bounds. Germany must have a powerful fleet to protect that commerce, and her manifold interests in even the most distant seas. She expects those interests to go on growing, and she must be able to champion them manfully in any quarter of the globe. Germany looks ahead. Her horizons stretch far away. She must be prepared for any eventualities in the Far East. Who can foresee what may take place in the Pacific in the days to come, days not so distant as some believe, but days, at any rate, for which all European Powers with Far Eastern interests ought steadily to prepare? Look at the accomplished rise of Japan; think of the possible national awakening of China; and then judge of the vast problems of the Pacific. Only those Powers which have great navies will be listened to with respect, when the future of the Pacific comes to be solved; and if for that reason only Germany must have a powerful fleet. It may even be that England herself will be glad that Germany has a fleet when they speak together on the same side in the great debates of the future.' Such was the purport of the Emperor's conversation. He spoke with all that earnestness which marks his manner when speaking on deeply-pondered subjects. I would ask my fellow-countrymen who value the cause of peace to weigh what I have written, and to revise, if necessary, their estimate of the Kaiser and his friendship for England by his Majesty's own words. If they had enjoyed the privilege, which was mine, of hearing them spoken, they would doubt no longer either his Majesty's firm desire to live on the best of terms with England or his growing impatience at the persistent mistrust with which his offer of friendship is too often received. 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Telegraph
24-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Tony Hancock's guide to the trials – and errors – of being a household comic
This article is published as part of The Telegraph's Greatest Interviews series, which revisits the most significant, informative and entertaining conversations with notable figures over our 170 year history. The below interview is introduced by Christopher Howse. It appears as it was originally published. The Sunday Telegraph was still in its first year of publication when Philip Purser interviewed Tony Hancock. Hancock, meanwhile, was at a turning point in his career. In 1961 he was a highly paid, popular and critically admired television comedian. His despondent bloodhound face looked older than his years. His radio series Hancock's Half Hour, broadcast from 1954 to 1961, was scripted by the celebrated team of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, who afterwards wrote Steptoe and Son. From 1956, the radio series alternated with a television series with the same title. The plans outlined in this interview did not prosper. For the new television series from May 1961 he dropped his popular foil, Sid James. The series was to be his last. Yet, while he still had Galton and Simpson, episodes such as The Blood Donor and The Radio Ham proved classics. The two films in which he starred, The Rebel (1961) and The Punch and Judy Man (1962), were disappointing. Privately Hancock was aggressive and he had been drinking heavily since 1952. In 1968, in Australia, he committed suicide. As the humorist Arthur Marshall observed when he was a Sunday Telegraph columnist: 'Seldom has such a dazzling career disintegrated so quickly.' Philip Purser (1925-2022) stayed at The Sunday Telegraph as its valued television critic for another 26 years, until sacked by Sir Peregrine Worsthorne. – Christopher Howse I think I was about five when I decided I wanted to be a comic. My father kept a pub in Bournemouth where theatre people like Elsie and Doris Waters and Stainless Stephen used to stay. They took me backstage and I became interested. My father was a semi-professional comedian himself – a dude entertainer – top-hat and monocle. He did semi-professional concerts, club suppers – things like that. I used to listen to them all in the bar, and listen to the radio comics – Claude Dampier, Clapham and Dwyer – and go to the pictures. Will Hay was my favourite. A double feature, and half a bar of Palm toffee and 3½ hours in the dark, that was my idea of fun. Out of school My father died when I was 11. He'd always encouraged me enormously to do what I wanted, my mother, too. The only alternative aim I ever had was one time when I thought I might be a journalist. I was sent away to school – Bradfield – but I left there after a year. I removed myself because – well I don't know really. It was to try and get into the theatre. I started off fairly easily, because I started in troop shows. The large audiences in Ack-Ack were prepared to see anybody and anything. In those days anybody who could entertain was accepted. That was my Tommy Trinder period, with the brown and white shoes and turned up hat. I was 16 or 17. I used to go into the pubs and listen to the jokes, and if I heard one that got a laugh I used it. I ended up with the filthiest act. I didn't understand it until I was about 25. It was diabolical. I cleared a church hall in Bournemouth once. They walked out slowly row by row. It was very embarrassing, and it was then I decided I would not go on with the blue stuff. Like most people I have gained by being in the Forces, because for anyone who could get up and do anything – even imitate Popeye or something – it was such splendid opportunity. Acting sergeant From about 1944 to 1946, I was in the RAF Gang Show. We had a marvellous trip. Italy, North Africa, Sicily, Greece. We played under all sorts of conditions, on lorries, in tents, and all over the place. Peter Sellers and I were in charge of the wardrobe as acting sergeants, paid. We were near-professionals when we came out. After the war there was a very special atmosphere among the young comics and actors. We all seemed to know each other. We worked the Nuffield Centre and hung around the Windmill. Anyone who was working helped the others, paid for their laundry even. Things weren't always easy, I had a long period of doing nothing, slowly getting through the gratuity. In the hard winter of 1947 I spent most of my time in bed keeping warm. I got my turn at the Windmill during the 1948 Olympic Games, which was charming. It's difficult to get a laugh there anyway – they come to see the girls, not you – but when you get the Chinese pole-vaulting team in the front row it makes it seem even more difficult. But there was a change in comedy fashions about now which began to help me – a reaction to the patter style of people like Max Miller and Tommy Trinder. It was a return to a more subtle and more visual humour, I'd never been very hot on the patter stuff and my act was ready completely visual already. To TV with a sigh As a matter of fact when I tried radio I found it very difficult; I still feel a visual comic. The first broadcast got a laugh but it was a series of noises and silences as far as the audience at home was concerned. When I finally got into radio properly I really had to work harder than in any other medium. When we changed to television it was a sigh of relief. With the first series, which was on ITV, we had a lot of script difficulties. Nobody's fault really. We didn't understand how much preparation has to be done before you start. A tremendous amount of the work takes place before you get on the air. The first sketch (I suggested it myself) was about a coffee bar – plants gradually strangling all the guests, the espresso machine sinking through the floor. It is pretty difficult to get plants to strangle people. It needs about six months' preparation, really. I went back in the BBC and, for the first time, we did real situation comedy, with one episode going right through the half-hour. This could go wrong, too. There was one about trying to sell a house at the end of an airport runway that was a disaster. In the 25th minute the place was supposed to disintegrate, when the surveyor came in. After two minutes the table fell down, the mantelpiece just after, and the place fell apart generally. The surveyor, played by Dick Emery, came in glassy-eyed and we looked at each other and there was nothing to do. As I stood up my braces broke. That was another little novelty. That was the time when I decided that as soon as it was possible we would not do any more live television. We started pre-recording the shows, though still in one take, just as if they were on the air. In half an hour we may have five takes, sometimes only two or three, just to give us a chance to use different cameras in the studio, or eliminate quick costume changes. It is not very comfortable doing anything with one shoe half on. The writers. Alan Simpson and Ray Galton and myself, after six years together are very close, both professionally and in every other way. We think the same about humour, we think the same about things we want to achieve. It. does not absolutely bind us for ever, but we think in the same terms. We are going to do another four or five films with ABC. with whom we did The Rebel. That will be over four years. Then we hope to be able to put our own money into half-hour TV films, or, eventually, bigger films of which we can own the negative. We feel that so much stuff we've done has gone into thin air. We still have the scripts but none of the finished products. We haven't got the story for the next film yet, but as with the television series, we're moving away from plot – at least from plots that bind you down too much. We intend to have a story out of which emerge high spots of comedy, maybe for four or five minutes, to get them really rocking in the cinemas, Chaplin's City Lights, which I think is the finest full length comedy I have seen, has wonderful moments of comedy which come naturally out of the action. A lot of the older school of comics, Laurel and Hardy and Chaplin, stand up wonderfully well today. Among present-day comics I am most influenced by Jacques Tati. Monsieur Hulot's Holiday had some of the most inventive business comedy I have seen since Chaplin. I think I saw it about eight times, and each time I found something new to laugh at, and look at and enjoy. Mon Oncle was an advance in a way but not as hilarious by any means. Comedy's essence It seems to me that the essence of comedy is to be funny in itself. I mean it is not enough to stand and point and say 'Look at this, it is funny' or, worse still 'Look at me, I'm funny'. It puts the bloke who says that in a ludicrous position. You must be an essential part of it, and it a part of you. You take what you think is ludicrous both about yourself and other people. Any comedy that I do is based on attitudes and moods as against characterisation, really means you can be pompous one minute, and then the opposite. You take on a mood. People coming out with things, and doing things, that in everyday life they would restrain is a great source of comedy, of course. Natural antagonism. Like the Marx Brothers, all doing things that would be unacceptable. One realises why Groucho is so great. The idea of the 'little man' in comedy is mostly mistaken. Chaplin is always referred to as a little man. Sometimes he is extremely aggressive. Remember the scene in City Lights when he is in a Rolls-Royce and he gets out of the car, kicks a tramp in the stomach, picks up a cigar butt and drives off? Nowadays you would probably be advised not to do it. Only the great could get away with it. In the theatre I've done comparatively little in the theatre – two years, twice a night, in Talk of the Town at the Adelphi was enough for me. There is a strange difference between post-war and pre-war comics. We were put in the position of doing fresh material every week on radio, or whatever it was, and now it becomes necessary. There is no excitement in repetition. Admittedly, when you are in the theatre and have the audience really going it is a wonderful snowball of reaction, and very exciting, and it takes you out, of yourself It is difficult to avoid sounding pompous. but I do believe comedy is terribly important in the world today, and can really help when people say that you really have made them laugh, and they say it honestly, it is not a thing to throw away, and say it doesn't matter. It is a compliment. It is the real thing. I read a lot; mainly to put partly right an education that finished at 15. Mostly history. No particular period. I'm trying to do the lot, get a progression. You get some sort of evolutionary pattern which is highly connected with humour – the change-over from wearing things to keep warm to wearing things to look humorous. The evolution of the bowler hat. I've turned a wall of my study into a sort of chart I'm plotting it all on. Just now I am interested in the Stone Age. They seemed to settle in communities and keep up with the Ogs next door, become conventional, like today. I don't deliberately study people or make notes. That goes on automatically, I think. I do use a tape recorder a lot. You record everybody else's dialogue, and leave space for your own. (We've got a parrot that does a wonderful impression of me working away on the tape recorder upstairs, a sort of low-pitched grumble.) Status symbol Cicely, my wife, has been an enormous help – when I am working I am not particularly rewarding as a husband, because I do not stop – but, on the other hand, between high pressure spells we always have a good break when we can enjoy ourselves with each other. We spend quite a lot of time at home, and enjoy driving in the car. It's a 300 SL and I suppose it's our only real status symbol. Otherwise, except for the obvious fact that I don't want to go back to eating sausages in Baron's Court, I don't value money for any other purpose than to give me freedom to do the work I want to do. I am 37 and it is only the last two or three years that I have managed to put my finger on which way I would like to go. At one time I wouldn't go on to the stage without wearing a hat. This was a top hat and it made you feel someone. You start to work properly when you discard affectations and try and be what you are.
