It seems perverse to contest reports of Dad’s pompousness when I had so much experience of it at first hand. But it happens that Dad passed on this incident, good-humouredly, as a compliment to me, and Ben Hytner made no appearance on his list of four-letter fellers, clearly rascal rather than weasel.
I’m not making claims for Dad’s modesty. I was in the room, after all, when he had a negotiation on the phone with American Express about how many of his honorifics — MBE, LLB — could be crammed onto his Gold Card. It was explained to him that there was a physical limit to the space available. Perhaps he imagined an exception being made in his case, and a special extended format devised for the credit card, making it as long as a chequebook, along the lines of the outsized platform ticket that used to be available at Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyllllantysiliogogogoch railway station.
After tough negotiation he agreed to drastic surgery on his first name and become Sir Wm. Very few people would ever see the form of words on that Gold Card but that wasn’t the point. His first name he had been given. Those qualifications had been earned.
He didn’t exactly come from nothing, but he came from a much less promising social background than most of those he came to call his brothers. The other case of over-developed self-esteem that I knew about in Gray’s Inn, Edward Gardner, was also a self-made man. Strictly speaking he can’t have suffered from judge-itis since he didn’t get as far as the bench, moving into politics instead. Dad had at least gone to university, to Aberystwyth and even Cambridge. Ted’s family ran a small jeweller’s in Preston, and he worked as a journalist after leaving school. After having an outstandingly ‘good war’ in the Navy, starting as an ordinary seaman and ending up as a Commander, he managed to read for the Bar directly. His political attitudes were more coherent than Dad’s, in that he not only opposed homosexual law reform but actively campaigned as an MP for the restoration of the death penalty, getting as far as a free parliamentary vote on the topic in 1983.
Underlying the self-importance must have been a sense of disbelief at how far he had come. He mastered Received Pronunciation, the vocal intonations of those in power, perhaps later in life than Dad did, so that it was only in his last illness that his children ever heard his underlying Preston voice. In a sense he died a stranger to them, emigrating to his home region of speech.
He once framed a half-smoked cigar he had been offered by Winston Churchill, with a plaque testifying to its provenance. There was also a time when he encountered difficulties (I have this from his daughter Sally) when re-entering the country after a holiday. It was pointed out to him that his passport had been defaced. He denied it. He was shown where handwritten letters had crudely been inserted. At last he protested at the unfairness of it all. ‘I have recently been knighted. By the Queen, in whose name as perhaps you know passports are issued. I am now Sir Edward Gardner. I haven’t defaced my passport, I have corrected it.’
Clearly neither of these men had acquired the knack of playing his achievements down, but then they didn’t go to the sort of school where such skills are taught, the informal sessions of self-deprecation practice beside the fives court.
It wasn’t his own crest that Dad displayed in the domestic spaces of the Gray’s Inn flat but the escutcheons of the four ships on which he had served during the War, Euryalus being the ship, or the crew, for which he felt the most fondness. I don’t know the position of the College of Arms on heraldry for ships.
One day soon after Dad’s life-reviews had been published, I fielded a phone call from a woman who expressed condolences, saying she had known my father long ago, and seemed anxious to know if my mother was still living. One of the obituaries had seemed to indicate that she had died first, but she wanted to be sure. I confirmed the fact, and then she told me that Dad had proposed to her in Malta during the War.
It seemed almost excessively scrupulous, to make sure there was no widow to consider before revealing an association which could hardly hurt her, going back as it did to a distant period, before he and Sheila had even met.
According to this Esmé-from-Malta, Dad had said she should marry him because he was going to be Prime Minister. He would drive her around in his Bentley. She knew he hadn’t become Prime Minister, but had he got as far as the Bentley of his dreams? I had to admit he had only got as far as a Jaguar Mk II, though that had seemed pretty much the best car in the world when we were children and urged him (in those days before a speed limit) to accelerate on the approach to humpback bridges.
It seemed that Dad’s courtship technique included a fair bit of jovial braggadocio. It was hard to believe he was in earnest rather than playing a part. I asked Esmé why she didn’t accept his proposal. Because she was Catholic, she said, and he wouldn’t commit himself to having any children of the marriage raised in the faith.
If he wasn’t willing to compromise on something that was so important to her, I wondered whether Dad had only been honing his wooing technique with this Esmé. ‘Do you think he was serious about you?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I know he was. He carved my name on his ukelele.’ There was no answer to that. We shared a moment of respectful silence, until I spoiled it by saying there was no answer to that.
Esmé had married another naval officer in the end, who had the advantage of being Catholic. She was now a widow, or she wouldn’t dream of making this phone call, but there was no possible harm now. She had moved to Britain with her husband, so this phone call was coming from Guildford rather than Valletta.
She said she had seen Dad once in London by accident. It was on the top deck of a 38 bus going along Theobald’s Road, just by Gray’s Inn. Dad and buses seems an unlikely pairing, but if forced to that extremity he would certainly choose the top deck, stronghold of smokers. ‘I was with my husband,’ Esmé said, ‘and Lloyd sat near me. He didn’t speak. He was wearing a bowler hat and I could see he was trembling.’
And you, Esmé? How did you feel? ‘How did I feel? I felt jolly glad I was wearing my new Marshall and Snelgrove hat.’
I had registered a faint shock at hearing her refer to Dad as ‘Lloyd’, his name in the family when he was growing up, discarded in favour of ‘Bill’ for his post-war life at the Bar. In a strictly limited sense her attachment to my father was deeper than my mother’s, by dint of going further into the past, reaching back to a simpler, more dreamy form of life, with luxury cars and offices of state lined up like ducks in a shooting gallery, his for the picking off.
At the end of our phone conversation Esmé mentioned that she sometimes came up to town. Would I care to join her one day for tea at the Ritz? I would, with pleasure.
Tea never came about. Perhaps I should have called 1471 and made a note of Esmé’s number (risking the discovery that she had withheld it), though I’m not sure I would have wanted to bother her.
It must have been a habit of Dad’s in those days to personalize the instruments he played. The guitar he took with him on active service ended up inscribed with the names of any number of shipmates. At the end of the War he took it to a shop on Denmark Street, hoping to get a good price, since many of the friends whose names it bore had attained high rank in the service. He was disappointed to be told that he had virtually destroyed its market value.