Dad was christened William Lloyd Jones, with the second barrel added to the surname only at his father’s urging when he was on dangerous duty (Russian convoys) during the War. The thinking seemed to be that the enhancement of his name would protect him in some way. It was a life raft launched by deed poll. Dad was proud of the distinctive compound form that resulted, and I’ve mildly enjoyed inheriting it, though I can’t say I would go to war to defend my hyphen. The last of my film reviews to be published by the Independent, in 1997, appeared under a version of my name with the hyphen inserted in the only other place that is anatomically possible without rupturing tissue (Adam-Mars), which seemed a low blow, after the hundreds of pieces I had filed over the previous decade, but the injury, though curiously literal, was only symbolic. The component letters seem intractable for anagram-making purposes but can be persuaded to yield the pleasing nonsense of As Modern As Jam.
Though in two parts, the surname isn’t cumbersome, hardly taking any longer to pronounce than (say) Markham or Johnson. The schoolboy nicknames it made possible (Mars Bar, Marzipan) carried no great sting. Names can function as shields in a school setting, protecting the bearer from the more personal assaults of Fatty, Spotty, Speccy.
Dad himself experienced a little public teasing on the basis of the name, when his great friend Peter Thomas appeared against him in a case of sheep-stealing, and had fun with the formal introduction of counsel by saying, ‘My Lord, in this case I represent the Crown, while my learned friend Mr Ma-a-a-a-s-Jones … appears for the defence.’ Meh-eh-eh-ehs-Jones? I don’t know which transcription best conveys the fondly jeering bleat. It’s the massing of syllables that counts against Hedgepinshot-Mandeville-Pickwort (a minor character in The Apes of God) and even against Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, the organist of Gray’s Inn. When I read my first Guinness Book of Records as a child — I was slow to understand that reference books don’t have to be read from cover to cover — my eyes filled with tears when I imagined the schoolboy teasing that must have been meted out to the bearer of the longest surname in history: Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache. Yes, that was all surname, every bit of it, according to the Guinness Book of Records, and I wouldn’t have dreamed of questioning any such authority (in fact any book, at that time). It seemed a pity, though, that the name lacked the full complement of hyphens to give its freight-train length a proper set of couplings.
It bothered me that the British record was always smaller than the world record, less impressive, unless of course they happened to be the same thing. To my mind, over-instructed and under-informed as it was, pickled in the jingoism of ignorance, the British record should always be bigger than the world record, or what was the point of being British? My dogmatism would have made me a good little Red Guard, though in practice I didn’t join the Scouts or even the Wolf Cubs.
I should have kept firm mental hold of the British billion with its dozen zeroes, a thousand times larger than what the Americans had to offer. Our billion was the biggest in the world until 1975.
A year or two after the steam-engine cutaway another super-toy arrived, a meticulous balsa-wood model of a railway bridge, about four feet long. It must have been built as a visual aid for another case of Dad’s, but if I was ever told about the human disaster that led to the litigation I soon forgot it. This mighty piece of engineering did eventually find its place in our world. The model railway layout in the attic, mounted on trestle tables, had reached its maximum size until someone realized that it could extend beyond the awkward area (too narrow for a table) that limited it, by the installation of the providential bridge, which happened to be to scale, more or less. The model railway was already rather elaborate, so that the gala displays we gave for other Inn children required typed programmes and a lot of choreography if all our gadgets were to be properly shown off. After some bravura shunting to get the audience warmed up, a mailbag would be magically collected by a train that didn’t need to stop to pick it up, the giraffe sticking out above the carriage marked ZOO would lower its head in obedience to a concealed magnet inches before striking a low bridge, and (when pop culture had started to colonize and contaminate the Tri-ang Hornby arcadia) rockets fired from one train triggered the destruction of a carriage on another, the panels leaping apart from the impact of a spring-loaded arm whose final act was to detonate a cap, leaving a little wisp of acrid smoke to hang in the air of the attic. Applause.
Dad always told us when we were little that he could tell when someone was lying. With children this is a safe, self-fulfilling prophecy, and it certainly worked with us up to a certain age. But he also made out that his divination was just as effective outside the immediate context of family.
Dad was proud of having sized up a potential client called Kevin McClory as being honest, though McClory’s narrative had the odds stacked against it. He had taken it to a number of lawyers already, according to Dad, and none of them had thought there was any substance in his claims. This was the early 1960s. Kevin McClory’s story was that Ian Fleming had stolen work he had done for a James Bond screenplay and incorporated it without payment or credit into a James Bond novel, Thunderball. It wasn’t an easy claim to believe. Successful authors attract allegations of plagiarism as fine wool sings to the moth.
Was it likely that a writer with a reputation and a following would stoop to stealing another man’s ideas? Much more probable, surely, for a nonentity to be searching for a payoff in return for not making any more trouble. Nevertheless Dad looked him in the eyes, decided Kevin McClory was telling the truth and agreed to represent him.
In the fantasy I somehow absorbed of what happened in court Dad cross-examined the snooty Fleming, who of course drawled through his cigarette holder throughout, then finally broke down and admitted iniquity. The patient intellectual abrasion of cross-examination is the forensic equivalent of those mills of God which grind slow but grind exceeding fine. It was Dad’s special skill, thanks in part to a subtly aggressive instinct and in part to the hundreds of hours he put into mastering the material in all its aspects, and this was a complicated case, heard in front of Mr Justice Ungoed-Thomas, whose magnificent name makes him seem half Welshman and half mushroom.
In fact the case was settled, on humiliating terms for Fleming, without his going under Dad’s forensic dentist’s drill. McClory received damages and also the film rights to the contested story, which meant he could now make his own James Bond film, although he didn’t own film rights to the character of ‘James Bond’ outside a narrowly defined context.
Even so it was a tremendous result. Kevin McClory had suits made on Savile Row with ‘007’ embroidered on the inside breast pockets, now that he had a licence to make a killing. It must have been quite a payday for Dad too. A colleague of his remembered his fee for the case as being £10,000, not in today’s money but in 1963 pounds. And not in fact in pounds but guineas — the extra shilling over each twenty would go to his clerk. Dad loved to pronounce the abbreviation for guineas that appeared on chambers invoices (‘Guas’) the way it was written, as ‘gwahs’, and no wonder.