Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  The other thing that happened that year was that I was asked to go into politics. Richard Beith and his wife Margaret had moved to Scotland from Hampshire, where they had been enthusiastic activists for the Liberal Party. They liked music and were soon Ledlanet regulars, coming to most of our productions, and I came to know them well. One day, Richard approached me: they were looking for a Liberal candidate for the next election, and they thought my qualifications were right. At that point I belonged to no party, but my sympathies were with Labour, and I had always voted for them, although I was becoming very disillusioned with much Labour policy and the corruption that had infected Labour-controlled councils up and down the country. The arguments that I gave myself to accept the invitation were firstly that as a publisher I brought out many political books about causes in which I believed in order to influence public opinion, but I had never offered myself to put wrongs right, and it was cowardly not to put my own head on the block. Secondly, that the party for which I stood, as long as I was not positively opposed to it, was immaterial, so long as I had a platform to say what I wanted. I knew many Labour politicians, but Labour had never asked me to stand. Perhaps the real motive was my sense of adventure, my liking for doing something new and having a new experience – or perhaps it was just vanity. At any rate, after a little reflection, I accepted. This must have been in late 1969.

  1970 was the big Beethoven year, the bicentenary of his birth. We played much Beethoven that year, but I decided also to do something else and produce a documentary about his life in the collage style I had been developing ever since the Happening with Robert Burns. I produced a two-act text for two actors, one to play Beethoven and the other to narrate and to play a variety of other parts. The whole was to be interspersed with music, some of it taped, but with a live string quartet, led by Leonard Friedman, to play extracts from his three creative periods. I found a lookalike for Beethoven, the fine and then very popular actor Patrick Wymark, whom I had first met through his wife Olwen, whose plays I was publishing. I do not know what other lucrative acting jobs Patrick turned down, but he leapt at the chance to play Beethoven, about whom he felt as I did. The narrator was Leonard Maguire, who now lived in what had once been the back lodge at Ardargie. I had put a considerable number of sound effects into the script, and with the help of John Rushby-Smith, a friend of mine who worked as a sound engineer at the BBC, and the husband of Tanja’s best friend, I was able to get these made at the BBC in one of their studios for almost no cost. We needed the sound of an eighteenth-century coach swaying and groaning on the roads of the period, recorded conversations and piano and orchestral music. Having recorded piano music and a live string quartet not only reversed the normal logic, but would make the evening both musically and visually more memorable for the audience. John Rushby-Smith had the bright idea of having petards exploding in the dustbins outside the house as Napoleon’s army advanced on Vienna, the noise driving Beethoven to distraction, so that the first act could end with the crashing fortissimo bars of the Fifth Symphony as the composer shouts in agony and tears up his dedication of the Eroica to the French Emperor, whom he had earlier admired. John Rushby-Smith later wrote a little poem about my Beethoven production.

  Exploding dustbins in the grounds

  (Such proto-Bonapartian sounds

  Were, like the lighting, less than more on cue)

  Made Beethoven rip up his page

  Of dedication, quit the stage,

  Rush up the stairs and in a rage

  Upbraid the switchboard guy (I wonder who?).

  That kilted laird, somewhat aghast,

  Fair reeled as the unscripted blast

  Drowned out the E-flat B-flat E-flat theme

  Of the Eroica. And all

  Who’d gathered in Ledlanet’s hall

  Were stunned as from behind the wall

  “It’s all a fucking shambles!” came the scream.

  The first night was certainly accident-prone, but the audience who had come to see in the flesh the star of the BBC’s most popular television serial of that time, called The Power Game,24 in which Wymark plays a tough international tycoon, did not mind at all. Patrick did not have much time to learn the part, so we had to rig up a lectern with a concealed light for him to read much of it, and there were other problems. When Beethoven, having pronounced his dramatic and famous last words, collapses and lies still in death on his bed, the quartet plays the Cavatina from the Opus 130, a slow, rather weird and very moving piece of music, during which Grillparzer’s funeral oration is read by Leonard Maguire. Wymark could not control his emotion, and tears visibly came from his closed eyes. Also, I did not realize how precarious his health was. A heavy drinker, he had to constantly soothe his stomach with something warm and mild, and during the interval he had imbibed several glasses of rum and milk. But the second performance was much better, and with full houses we had a successful show and a good start to the Beethoven year.

  On the last night, we celebrated in the morning room, which was used by the orchestra on the occasions when we had one. Everyone had left except Jim Fraser, Robin Richardson, Patrick Wymark, Leonard Friedman, John Rushby-Smith and myself. Leonard wanted to play more music and started to play his violin, persuading Rushby-Smith, who was also a composer, to accompany him. They then moved to the drawing room, where there was a better piano, and Patrick Wymark, who by that time believed that he was Beethoven, went with them. Leaving Jim and Robin to their large brandies, I went too. John was an indifferent pianist, but inspired by Leonard, occasionally calling out changes of key and other instructions, he played better, as he said afterwards, than he ever had before in his life. Poor Patrick’s frustration at watching others make music which he so longed to do himself was terrible to see. He turned the pages of the piano score, but not being able to read properly was no real help, and he desisted and sat in frustration.

  Back in London, I had dinner one night with Tanja, John Rushby-Smith and his wife Uli, in Otello’s. John was looking very sheepish, because he was in trouble, his wife having just discovered that he was having an affair. When the two ladies had left us alone for a few minutes, he leant forward and said to me, “She knows you, by the way.” I had an intuition and was right: the other lady in question was Jenny Paull. It was not that long afterwards that their marriage finally broke up. He soon met someone else, Elaine Padmore, also at the BBC, where she initiated music programmes and was an announcer on Radio Three. Once they were a couple, I began to see them frequently, both in London and in Scotland. When they had a legal problem over the use of some land behind their house, I introduced them to Jimmy Ball, who worked out a solution very cleverly. Elaine went on to become Head of Radio Opera and then took on the Wexford Festival, about which I shall have more to say.

  I was now also in politics, and had been enlisted as the prospective candidate for parliament by the Scottish Liberal Party for Kinross and West Perthshire, where the MP was still Sir Alec Douglas-Home, no longer Prime Minister, but still a god to his party. I had done my bit against him by helping Willie Rushton in 1963, and now had been adopted myself. This officially took place at a meeting in Crieff in the autumn of 1969. I then spent a number of weekends going around the many small towns and villages in the constituency, one of the largest and perhaps the most scenically beautiful in Britain. There had been no Liberal candidate since Duncan Millar had run seven years earlier, and with the help of a growing committee, which had been reorganized and given new life by the Beiths, I found where the clusters of previous Liberal supporters lived, people who had had no chance to vote for a Liberal in many years. There were a considerable number of them: the party had always come second in elections in the past, but now the Scottish National Party was firmly in second place, and the Labour vote was tiny. The Labour Party used the constituency purely as a training ground for raw political hopefuls to get some experience. The common wisdom was that if the Tories were to put up a
black Labrador with a blue collar, it would get elected. In safe Labour constituencies the same was said of monkeys with red collars.

  Driving around the constituency took time. It was bordered by Fife and Stirlingshire in the south, and by the Trossachs in the West. It went north of Pitlochry to the borders of Inverness-shire, but did not include the city of Perth with its sizeable population. Before the constituency had accepted me, I had been grilled by Jo Grimond and George Mackie in the Liberal offices in the House of Commons, who had asked me several questions about my more controversial books and my involvement in the Edinburgh Festivals, which had led to press attacks, but they were short of candidates and found my general opinions on political and social issues acceptable.

  I attended meetings of the Scottish Liberal Party, which took place fairly regularly in different Scottish towns, and I remember a big meeting in Peebles, where David Steel was MP, together with Grimond and Russell-Johnston, one of the three sitting Scottish Liberals in parliament. Grimond and Lord Mackie made a point, some time in 1970, of dropping in on me at Ledlanet, and they left with little comment. As for local people in Kinross, and even more so in Milnathort, which was solidly Conservative, they knew I did not have a chance and saw the whole thing as a joke. Kinross, with its council estates, had a certain Labour following, but they knew that their own candidate, a young man, had even less chance than me. The SNP had quite a formidable lady, Elizabeth Whitley, the wife of the minister of St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh, Harry Whitley, whom I had met at a dinner party once with Bill Watson. It was he who had once denounced Salome at the Edinburgh Festival, saying that the bad weather was the judgement of the Lord on the Dance of the Seven Veils, which of course he had not seen.

  If I remember rightly, Sir Alec’s majority was 34,000, and he was of course the darling of the local aristocracy, who vied with each other to entertain him and offer hospitality. But little by little people stopped me to promise their vote, and I did quite well that way with farmers I called on in their fields or at home. I would drive to a village, visit two or three dozen houses, then go to the next and do the same. The point was to get my name known and my presence felt. Although those I spoke to were usually unwilling to tell you how they would vote, you could guess by their faces or by their saying “It won’t be Tory” or, more often, “It won’t be Labour”. Many would tell you that they wanted Scotland to be free of England, so they had to vote SNP, but that once independence was achieved they would vote Liberal.

  The election was called for early June 1970 and, with the summer season of Ledlanet Nights still to come, I was formally confirmed as the official candidate; the requisite number of names in support was found to enable me to stand, and Richard Beith organized all the paperwork. We rented a room in a building in Crieff as our headquarters, and the committee room was soon full of ladies addressing envelopes under the direction of an enthusiastic local widow, Margaret Begg. My agent was a shopkeeper in Pitlochry called Peter Roberts, a craftsman and stone-cutter who specialized in semi-precious stones, while Alan Clark became my shadow and companion, a kind of Sancho Panza. He was very short, not much above four feet tall, very broad and always kilted, somewhere in his forties. Wherever I went, he went with me, map-reading through the roads that criss-crossed the mountains and glens, talking to the crowds in market towns, picking individuals out of groups to come to talk to me, knocking on doors and keeping whoever opened them talking if it seemed likely I might win his or her vote, until I caught up. He knew the whole area well and told me where I could most usefully spend my time. We went into pubs together, shook hands and produced our arguments, handing out my campaign leaflet. On one side was my picture among a group of elected MPs, on the other I had summarized my policies in short sentences.

  I came across young men with families who told me that they did not bother to get a job, because family benefits were such they would have little more spending money if they worked, and I heard exaggerated stories from others of such men who drank in the pubs until closing time at three o’clock, then called a cab, saying they would be back at five-thirty. But the resentment of taxpayers against the welfare state was evident, especially among older people and the childless. It was a time of almost full employment, and many tradesmen and technicians were buying their houses on a mortgage, which put them into the middle classes. I sensed that here the men would vote Labour out of loyalty for the most part, but the wives, wanting lower taxes and more spending power, were leaning towards the Tories. Harold Wilson had lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen, which I felt was a great mistake. Few of those I met under twenty-one had any political knowledge or understanding of the issues before them, and I am sure that that applied as much to urban constituencies as to my rural one. Some evenings I had a group of six to ten helpers to knock on doors, and we would cover a whole village. One day I found a whole group of mourners inside a house just after a funeral and was told that the lady who had died had been looking forward to having a Liberal to vote for again.

  It was a sunny summer, and I was offered meals in many corners of the constituency by supporters. I addressed meetings in town halls and in the back rooms of pubs and hotels, with occasional summonses to attend a party gathering in Edinburgh or Glasgow to be lectured on policies and photographed with the Liberal MPs, of which there were only seven then in the whole of Britain.

  My sister, whose married name was Laptew, came up from London to help and, working from the Crieff committee rooms, was used largely as a courier to carry messages all over the constituency, the second largest in Britain. It was hard work, but I was enjoying every minute of it, most of the time out of doors in beautiful weather, addressing small crowds in village streets from the back of my Land-Rover, trudging up to farmhouses with Alan, often with my dog Shuna at my heels. By now she was ultra-obedient: she would sit quietly outside a gate while I went in to knock on the door, or wait in the car while I addressed a meeting. There was hostility in some places, mainly in the Tory heartland around Crieff, where Douglas-Home posters were everywhere. There were also many for the SNP, mainly on trees. The SNP supporters, who were nearly all very young, specialized in tearing down the few of mine we managed to get up.

  I had quite a large meeting in Aberfeldy and noticed a large number of young people at the back of the hall, which was surprising, because it was usually the middle-aged and elderly who came to hear me speak. Right from the beginning, I began to be heckled from those at the back, constantly interrupted in what I was saying, and it became obvious that these were young racialists who had probably done the same to all the other candidates. They were complaining about the number of black people coming into Britain, but if there was any part of the country where you very seldom saw a black face, it was there in central Perthshire. I pointed this out, without in any way agreeing with them. Then, suddenly, I had a spark of memory. “Listen to me, you young thugs,” I said. “I remember being in Pitlochry (which was only a few miles away) on the day that Italy came into the war. There was an Italian ice-cream shop where I bought my Beano and a penny cone. On that day I couldn’t, because the shop had been smashed up. People just like you, with their stupid prejudices, had ruined that man’s livelihood. He had nothing to do with Mussolini or Italy coming into the war. He was a Scottish Italian who made good ice cream.”

  At that moment a girl, who had been vociferously barracking me like all the others, shouted out in a strong local accent, “That was ma faither.” There was a silence. Then she began to hit her friends around her. “You’re wrong and he’s right,” she yelled. I began to talk again and was able to give an analysis of how and why some people had an instinctive and unreasoned – yes, instinctive – prejudice against others who were in some way different. Any fascist group could inflame that prejudice, which could quickly disappear once people came to know each other. We had fought a war against that fascism and what went with it. When I finished, to much applause and a few questions, all of th
em friendly, I knew I had won every vote in that room. The older people had seen the young silenced and converted by a member of their own group, and I knew that it would win me votes from others as the word went round the next day.

  About ten days before the election, I had a telephone call from Patrick Wymark. “What are you doing up there?” he asked. “Why didn’t you ask me to come and help?” He had been campaigning for the Labour candidate in Hampstead, but now he came back to Ledlanet to help me as a Liberal. We printed new posters to announce that “Sir John Wilder, from the popular TV series The Power Game, was to appear on all my platforms,” and from then on I spoke to full houses. I am not sure if it won me many votes, because it was Pat they came to hear. With him he brought his girlfriend, a young actress, Karin Fernald. She was poised and attractive, the daughter of John Fernald, Principal of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.