I am not one to hob-knob with the famous. The notorious and infamous are the kind of people that I avoid. Yet I have come across people that I admired - some by chance and some blood relations.
With many of these people I was too young or too shy to ask questions for interesting answers.
***
I must have met Kingsford Smith because he came to stay with us in the country, flew my mother around the skies from Farnborough Aerodrome and (he was Australian) delivered the Christmas mail from Sydney to Croydon Aerodrome in the record time (17 days in 1931) with my uncle aboard his Avro 10, Trimotor, Southern Star as flight engineer/navigator.
A postage stamp to commemorate the event and the crowds waiting at Croydon to greet them for press coverage, certainly made it a great event.
In the days of unreliable engines and aircraft, and when navigation was “by the seat of your pants”, Kingsford Smith spent his life breaking records for distance and difficulty in a most exceptional way and this combined with a great appetite for women and booze.
But famous he really was throughout the blossoming of endeavours in the sky.
I wonder if he even noticed me (aged 7) with my brother Nigel and sister June due to be flown by him above and around London in his aircraft which had just broken its skid at Croydon. Another pilot in a Clemm Bat was given the job to give us a “joyride” instead.
But I knew him - and famous he was as a highly skilled pilot and brave.
***
My aunt (one of my father’s sisters) married into the Smithers dynasty. They were a Stockbroking family and it was thought that they funded my uncle Walla (Sir Waldron Smithers) to be an MP to keep him out of the family business. His inclinations were more sporting.
This uncle Walla was an MP in the days when Members of Parliament really did care for the people of all classes who had put them in power. He was much loved by everyone.
One off from being the “Father of the House” uncle Walla asked more questions than any other MP, and because he passed through legislation for cab drivers to be enclosed as they drove their taxis around London, he never had to pay a fare as he was so popular with them. There’s fame for you.
I knew him well. He was incredibly strong and loved to fight me (ne of the two “vile jellies” in Macbeth, being my brother and me). Of course he won - that was until I discovered his Achilles Heel, and that was his ears. If I was able to grab an ear and twist it I had the measure of him.
***
I must have known my grandfather. It was said he came from farming stock which lead to him becoming a doctor and surgeon. He married my grandmother, a formidable woman who promoted his career as his eyesight began to fail. Because of this he gave up surgery for anaesthetics, a branch of medicine that was considered to be of minor importance at the time.
But he was a promotor of that profession, writing the five volumes of the bible of anaesthetics “Anaesthetics and their Administration”.
He was world famous, travelling the globe dispensing his knowledge and skills and making his name.
King Edward the VII was about to the crowned king, but fell ill and needed surgery - and an anaesthetist.
Treated almost as a servant by the surgeon who most reluctantly allowed grandfather to see the patient before surgery to acquaint himself with the medical situation, he conducted his skills so well that the King bestowed upon him a Knighthood.
Anaesthetics now became a legitimate and recognised part of medical care. He was the first anaesthetist to be Knighted, establishing its importance.
I call that as being famous, though few outside medicine may have known about it.
***
Having designed and part-built a one bedroomed studio house in the Berkshire Downs, I struggled to get back into the use of paint on canvas after a year-long circumnavigation of the globe drawing whatever interested me.
My book, “Harbours, Girls and a Slumbering World” about this voyage was to be published later (ISBN 0953017 4 9).
But despite using collages to see things from my mind rather than eye, I vegetated and put on weight. It was time to move on - literally and mentally.
A local estate agent told me that it was not possible to sell a one bedroom house in that part of the country. He was wrong.
Replying to my advertisement in the Daily Telegraph, a Francis Bacon telephoned and asked to see the house.
At that moment I saw my house and its simplicity as background material for a Bacon painting. He bought it immediately he saw it.
We got on very well together as he also did with my lovely old cottager neighbour where runner beans grew on covered trenches of excrement.
I had built into the house several ideas like a central column that concealed all pipes and drains so that they were invisible, an air duct to control the amount of air needed at the fire place to make the fire work well, and a false chimney built parallel and alongside the real chimney that would take in cold air from the outside and heat it by close proximity, by heat transfer, from the real one. This delivered fresh warmed air to the house’s one bedroom above.
There was also an under-heated kitchen floor and an under-heated studio floor paved with discarded marble washstand tops from people ridding themselves of washstands in favour of real plumbing through pipes which was becoming popular after the war.
Francis, now in residence, wanted to know more about these ideas, so invited me to come back a couple of times and even invited me to stay as a friend. But I did not feel like staying with Francis and his boyfriend George, who reclined on the soft surfaces I had designed where he combed his greasy hair.
Francis and I had much to talk about including the aforesaid ideas and of the value of chance in painting and that homosexuals were certainly not living in a twilight world.
When Francis sold up when George died, he returned to his Reece Mews home in London
There, and on the street should we meet, he would always cross the road to talk with me.
But I was not one of his drinking coterie and our friendship must have been refreshing to him as I sought nothing from our relationship.
World famous as he was, he was also just a very nice person. Others, I am sure, must have seen him quite differently.
***
Back in about early 2000 a man moved into a place in our street and was outside when we fell into conversation.
He turned out to be a journalist with a column in a motoring magazine. His name was James May, known, presumably, only by the readers of that magazine. No great fame there. But times have changed. Over the ensuing 25 odd years he and his partner, Sarah, have been our friends and we regularly exchange 6 o’clock drinks in our homes.
You might think that with international fame from Top Gear and Grand Tour to diverse programmes on such as history and mechanics that we locals might be plagued by crowds of screaming fans or bespeckled professors of history. But no, James, happily, is still the same man as that journalist who moved in just up the road all those years ago.
May he continue to be both famous, modest and our friend.
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