P.J.Proby

Who remembers P.J.Proby? He was that twenty something, good looking Texan, born James Marcus Smith, who with his jet black hair tied back an  energetic, gyrating act and hit single covers from West Side Story ( 'somewhere there’s  a place for us…) was the sensational new male vocal act in 1965---a sort of Elvis lookalike, but with a better voice, many thought, than the King of Rock himself. Then he split his pants, not once but twice, and was banned from the BBC and from just about every venue in the UK. By then he had a fleet of Rolls Royces a yacht and Lear Jet and homes in Beverley Hills and Chelsea, but nowhere to sing, at least in the UK, which had become his adopted home.

Frustrated, he still recorded the odd album, and once the split pants furore had died down, he took to the stage in various musicals.   Before too long, however, he had an alcohol problem and a failed marriage. The cars and properties were liquidated, but he continued to sing and act, most notably playing Elvis. But the drinking continued. Other marriages went under. His lowest point came in 1985, according to a cutting from a magazine  collected by Peter Haining, when he was snapped in his Bolton bedsit slumped on a sofa clutching a can of Special Brew—still just 47,but hardly recognisable as the sleek mid sixties sex symbol. By then he was reduced to gigs in northern clubs, but with a reputation as a ‘no show’. Haining seems to have been fascinated by the singer’s fall from grace,

John Hayward---‘the most malicious man in London’

This photo, which is inscribed on the reverse, 'Rose Macaulay (centre) and John Hayward' was found amongst a large collection of press photographs that included a number of other shots of celebrated British cultural figures from the forties and fifties. Judging from the physical condition of the identified figures, it must date from the mid fifties. Hayward had suffered from muscular dystrophy since his twenties and eventually became wheelchair- bound. I suspect that the other two individuals in the shot were his ‘carers’, although observant Jotwatchers may know better. Even though Hayward was said to be light in weight, I can’t imagine the spindly Rose  having the energy to propel him across the grass. Incidentally, does Rose come into the category of Very Tall British Female Novelists**, along with Virginia Woolf ?

The photo makes Hayward, with his thick lips and mischievous mien, resemble top notch Modernist Wyndham Lewis. Nor were these facial features the only attributes they held in common. Both were disabled, though Lewis only became blind in his late sixties. Both were close to T. S. Eliot, though the much younger Hayward was more of a literary groupie than the intellectual equal of the poet, though his various editions of poetry gave him a certain cachet.  In 1926, while still an undergraduate at Cambridge, he had met Eliot for the first time. They got on well and Hayward developed the friendship with letters and invitations to the lonely Eliot to visit him at his home.

Unknown cat poem...

Found in an expensive leather bound book on golf courses from 1909 these tipped in poems. They appear to be the work of one Wilfrid A Mellor. The second poem about a cat is a sort of prequel to Eliot's Old Possum, not quite up there with Eliot but a bravura performance which we quote in its entirety:

Upon a velvet sunny lawn
In pose unmatched by graceful fawn
The furry hero lay 
While ever in his drowsing brain
He dreamt his battles o'er again
And amorous conquests gay

Of days when over his crouching foes
With cruel teeth and barbed toes
He posed his iron sway
Of nights when in the moon-lit air
He serenaded maiden fair
Both black and white and grey

And now when years had left their trace
When tattered ears and war scarred face
Had followed in their train
Under the walled gardens trees
He purred and dozed and took his ease
And dreaming lived again

Written in the front of the book are these words:'This book belongs to Wilfrid A Mellor of Hyde Park Mansions. Whoever shall steal it, or sell it, in any way alienate it from him, or mutilate it, let him be anathema maranatha.'

Shackleton's Phantom Guide

Came across this article in the Winter 1948 Occult Review by the intrepid cinematographer J.C. Bee-Mason, a war photographer in France, Belgium and Russia, and cinematographer to Ernest Shackleton on his last expedition south and other Arctic expeditions. He was obsessed with bee-keeping (hence the hyphenated “Bee” in his name) and filmed documentaries about bees.There is quite a bit about him on the web including his belief that if you ate a hundred pounds of good honey every year you would live to 100. Sadly JCB only made into his early 80s. Part of the interest in the piece is the acknowledged influence of Shackleton's experience on some lines in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
- But who is that on the other side of you?

This phenomenon  has been called by the author John Geiger the 'third man factor' - the experience of people at the very edge of death who feel the presence of an incorporeal being who encourages them and guides them to safety. Geiger tells the stories of 9-11 survivors, mountaineers, astronauts, explorers and prisoners of war who have reported this feeling…

Shackleton's Phantom Guide by J.C. Bee- Mason M.B.E.

About 30 years ago the world was staggered by the story of possibly the most wonderful feat of endurance ever made by man.

Shackleton – who died 26 years ago in January – Worsley, and a seaman named Crean, after enduring a journey of 500 miles in a ship's lifeboat in the Antarctic in midwinter, crossed the glaciers and crevasses of South Georgia to obtain help for their shipmates left stranded on Elephant Island. The men at the whaling station were astonished when they saw three men dragging slates down the mountains which had never before been crossed by man.

Shackleton, in his book South, says : "...when I look back at those days I do not doubt that Providence guided us. I know that during that long march of 36 hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it often seemed to me that we were four, not three. Worsley and Crean had the same idea."

Arctic Expedition

I first met Shackleton when I sailed with him on the Quest, and I heard him describe the journey when we were entertained by the members of the English Club at Lisbon. I don't know why, but I had a feeling that he invented the story "we were four not three", knowing it would appeal to the general public.

In 1925, I was a  member of the British Arctic Expedition to Franz Josef Land. Worsley was our leader. We sailed in a little brigantine of about 126 tons register. She had an auxiliary. In pack-ice off  Spitzbergen we broke our propeller and had to carry on under sail. Near Franz Josef Land we got caught in heavy ice and the ship looked like being pinched, so Worsley ordered us to sleep fully dressed in polar kit and be prepared to leave the ship at a moment's notice. He said to me: "if we do, we must walk over the ice to Siberia and God knows how many of us will get there."

Spirit Guidance

It is when men see death staring them in the face, they are more inclined to confide in one another. Whilst pacing the deck one night with Worsley, listening to the timbers of our poor old ship groaning under the ice pressure, I said to Worsley, "Skipper the something I want to ask you." He said "What is it."  I replied: "In Shackleton's book South, he says that, when you were dragging that sledge over South Georgia, you had a feeling there were four men in the party and not three. Is that really true?" Worsley answered: "Yes, Crean was the first to mention it. Whilst he and I were unloading the sledge at the whaling station he said to me, "All the time I was pulling that sledge I had a feeling there were four of us." I replied, "So did I – I wonder if Shackleton did?" Shackleton was standing a few yards away unpacking his kit. I went up to and said, "Crean tells me he had a feeling there were four of us pulling that sledge and curiously enough I had the same feeling, in fact I kept looking around and to see who the fourth man was," Shackleton stopped what he was  doing and said "Worsley, there were four of us."

[The intrepid Bee-Mason recounts a similar occasion in Bolivia's 'Green Hell' with Julian Duguid in 1928, of being surrounded by Toba savages (who torture their captives to death) and not being afraid because 'Like Shackleton's party on the ice- we were not alone.']

The Table Talk of T.S. Eliot

Eliot was at a fashionable dinner party of London intellectuals where the conversation was rather stilted because everybody felt they had to say something profound in front of the great man (who said very little.) Eventually after an awkward silence the wife of an academic complained about her high electricity bills. The other guests were a little shocked that such trivial matter was being discussed, however Eliot suddenly came to life. "Are you on the night tariff?" he asked the woman and proceeded to discourse knowledgeably about reducing household bills.

Another instance where Eliot succeeded in flummoxing high minded intellectuals was at the Wednesday Club in 1956 - the writer Paul Bloomfield reported the following. Asked for his favourite passage of English prose, the great poet at once replied, assisting his performance with the appropriate gestures:

'Well,' cried Boss McGinty at last, 'is he here? Is Birdy Edwards here?' 
'Yes,' McMurdo answered slowly, 'Birdy Edwards is here. I am Birdy Edwards.' 

After a bemused silence, in which none knew, or cared to admit they knew, the source, Eliot pleasantly revealed it: Conan Doyle's The Valley of Fear.