Resemblances - My father and Churchill

Especially when Churchill was a youngish man, he looked like my father. My father also looked like Peter Ustinov, and had the same kind of voice. But the Churchill thing is the strangest - they also had exactly the same handwriting. I saw Churchill's writing in the War Cabinet Rooms and could hardly believe the close resemblance.

Sometimes they dredge up a new old pic of Churchill and I have the odd feeling I am looking at my father - or even my brother. There is the same moody intelligence, an abstracted look. I know him so well I almost am the same person - that's how I felt about my father, sometimes.

My father could make you believe he was an amazing, wonderful man, and he traded on this ability, without actually being in any way amazing or wonderful, but he was competent and intelligent, a professional engineer. It was a pity he wanted so much to be more than that, and messed up in business, losing all his money. That was not his only problem. He also like to charm women and to have their admiration. He liked making them laugh. Women of his own class tended to see through him and find him lacking in substance - and he hated their low opinion, so he always went for women of a lower social strata. He used to say he hated "school marms" (educated middle-class women) and refused to come to Parents' evenings. My mother used to ask me with an imploring face if she had to go? I said she had to. The "school marms" intimidated her and she had no idea what to ask them. I advised her to "ask Jackie's mum what she asks". But really, the other mums mostly gave her that excluded feeling too.

A man not unlike my father 

I read something recently about Churchill's relationship with his brother - he tended to bask in the public gaze himself, and not wish his brother to gain the limelight at all. I suppose as children they were in competition for limited parental attention, and that formed Churchill's personality. It must have been very strange to know that your mother is the King's mistress. All the rejection that Churchill suffered in his childhood later came out as depression. But he had a very brave, buoyant personality.

Like Churchill, my father went to boarding school at the age of 7, and was part of that system. He didn't look back at his schooldays with much affection. You wonder if it was emotionally damaging. The only things it gave him were a sense of superiority and the door to Cambridge University. He used to mention Cambridge a lot - but he said , when my mother criticised him for showing off, that going to Cambridge is something worth showing off about.!!

Coming Up Trumps by Baroness Jean Trumpington

This autobiography has been dictated to someone - it reads exactly like someone having a long, hard chat. So this book is very good company. In one part it gets rather boring as the author talks about old friends she knew in the old days with whom she played tennis, or went to Ascot, or had "such fun". But there are a few anecdotes that did make me smile.

Here is one from Jean's early days as a wife of a fellow of Queen's College, Cambridge:

"One small fly in the ointment was that my early attempts at cooking were a bit hit and miss, and sometimes dropped as well. My first tossed salad was tossed  straight in the dustbin because I made it with a cabbage and not a lettuce."

"My early attempts at entertaining were similarly disastrous. The first thing I did was to invite the porter to tea, confusing the college porter with the college master.... There were a lot of undergraduates around when I issued this invitation and they killed themselves laughing. I had no idea I was doing anything peculiar. To his great credit, the porter came to tea and a jolly nice time we had."

Jean's husband was frustrated at not being made a Professor of History, so he went back to teaching at Eton, and then to be headmaster of the Leys School, where Jean enjoyed being the headmaster's wife.

"Only once did my behaviour really infuriate Barker. It was three weeks before the end of our last term. For seventeen years we had been at The Leys, and for seventeen years, on every Speech Day, it had been by job - my only job - to walk around the edge of the indoor swimming pool, terrified I would fall in, holding the various cups to be presented to the winners of the swimming gala. In this seventeenth year, when I had paraded around the pool for the final time, with the final cup, I jumped in, at the deep end, fully clothed, in my best Speech Day dress. The masters were astonished, the boys beside themselves with delight.  Of course, almost the entire school followed me in, to 'save' me. Barker wouldn't speak to me for three weeks afterwards. I'm not surprised. It was so naughty, But so funny. I had suffered all those years and I just wanted a little bit of fun."

Later Jean is made Mayor of Cambridge and has yet more fun: she wears a large gold chain to every function and is followed everywhere by a mace-bearer, in his own ceremonial robes, with a huge gold mace, so she insists he follow her onto, for example, the dodgems at the fair, and on the fairground horses!


This shows the Mace-bearer wearing his robes and showing his mace to the Queen. He is supposed to use it to defend the Mayor.
 

Here you can see her have fun on HIGNFY

Another hazard for Cambridge Uni

If it's not MI5 trying to recruit you, it's the local constabulary. Apparently they are keen to find out which members of the student body are joining political groups. This was in the Guardian yesterday. It's amazing because the sort of political activity the police officer is talking about is a campaign against cuts in public spending - a perfectly legitimate political issue. On the Guardian website there are video clips of this police officer telling the student what he is to find out about his follow students, taken by the student he is trying to recruit. My friend who is a lecturer jokes that he has been a police informant for years and gets a preferential rate of £35 for his information. ha ha.

An officer monitoring political campaigners attempted to persuade an activist in his 20s to become an informant and feed him information about students and other protesters in return for money.

But instead the activist wore a hidden camera to record a meeting with the officer and expose the surveillance of undergraduates and others at the 800-year-old institution.

The officer, who is part of a covert unit, is filmed saying the police need informants like him to collect information about student protests as it is "impossible" to infiltrate their own officers into the university.

The Guardian is not disclosing the name of the Cambridgeshire officer and will call him Peter Smith. He asks the man who he is trying to recruit to target "student-union type stuff" and says that would be of interest because "the things they discuss can have an impact on community issues".

here is the link