Untold Stories

by Alan Bennett

  Still there is snobbery here. To sing like a bird and to run like the wind are both gifts of equal merit, the value society sets on them something else entirely. But an honours system that was truly democratic and which mirrored the public’s concerns and enthusiasms would be just as unacceptable as the system now prevailing.

  The occasions on which honours can be publicly displayed are limited, though I suppose a knighthood or even a CBE printed before or after one’s name in a chequebook may procure you a deferential glance from the counter clerk, but how often these days do you see a counter clerk? And it won’t cut much ice at the cashpoint.

  One of the few occasions when honours can be flaunted is at a funeral, on top of the coffin, but that’s hardly going to warm the heart. Alec Guinness was immensely pleased to be awarded the CH but said that since he was now too fat to get into his tails the only time anyone was likely to see it was when it was on his coffin. Even this unique opportunity was nearly let slip as when it came to the funeral the decoration was not to be found and only retrieved in the nick of time from the bottom of the wardrobe.

  If English society was regularly on parade, graded in order of rank so that as honours accrued someone could see themselves move up towards the head of the queue, the knights ahead of the CBEs, the CHs ahead of the knights and the OMs out in front of them all … if everybody periodically had to number off as one used to do on the parade ground there would be more to be said for the honours system. But the consolation of honours is for the most part private, sported perhaps in the bedroom or in front of the dressing-table mirror. An officer in the Scots Guards who won the MC for gallantry during the Anzio campaign referred in the mess to ‘my new brooch’ and honours at least enable men so inclined to indulge in a taste for jewellery. Or so Sir Steven Runciman used to say, whose breast bristled with Balkan baubles.

  One drawback with honours nowadays is that they are not always permanent and the Queen, particularly, is an Indian giver. I have never read a patent of knighthood or the terms of appointment to the various orders but I should be surprised if they find it necessary to emphasise that appointments to the order are only during good behaviour and can be summarily withdrawn. This, though, can happen for a variety of offences, ranging from treason (Anthony Blunt), peculation (I. Jack Lyons) to fraud over VAT (Lester Piggott).

  There was something unseemly about the speed with which Her Majesty demoted her ex-Keeper of Pictures when she had known for years what his situation was and enjoyed his jokes nevertheless. It may be, though, that snatching back the riband of a champion jockey distressed Her Majesty more than the demotion of a mere art historian.

  Currently there is some discussion as to whether Jeffrey Archer’s perjury should lose him his peerage. I don’t see why not, though it might be helpful for the future if honorands were given a tariff of possible offences, a guide to how low they are permitted to sink before they are summarily undubbed.

  Another distinction that is more liberally distributed nowadays (and not, I think, retractable) is the honorary degree. However well deserved these bestowals are, it has to be said that, showbiz having penetrated every corner of the nation’s life, university governing bodies nowadays tend to compose their annual honours list with an eye to maximum coverage in the media. Largesse has to be orchestrated.

  John Gielgud was the most self-centred of men but paradoxically quite modest. Awarded an honorary degree by the University of Cambridge, he thought nothing of it, taking the conferring of this coveted distinction as not unlike one of the innumerable other award ceremonies in which he regularly figured. Finding he had a slight cold the day before the ceremony, he had no hesitation in telephoning to say he wouldn’t be coming.

  ‘But you must,’ wailed the official in question (whom Gielgud should have been playing). ‘We need you. You’re top of the bill.’

  As the pleasure of wives is adduced as a reason for accepting a knighthood, with honorary degrees, if justification is necessary, it’s likely to be the pride of parents, particularly when the university in question is on home ground. It would certainly have given pleasure to my parents that the first honorary degree I was offered, an Hon. D. Litt., should have come from the University of Leeds, where I was born and brought up. Neither of my parents had been entirely clear what a university was, but by that time it had ceased to matter as my father was dead and my mother scarcely knew who I was, and whatever was left of my family did nothing to swell the (quite sparse) attendance.

  Though I had never attended the university I knew it well, had been to lectures there and worked in its Brotherton Library, so I was pleased to have been approached. And I was glad in the finish to have gone through the process once at least, though it left me in the end thinking that it was not one I would be anxious to repeat.

  I was teamed with the novelist Barbara Taylor-Bradford, who is also Leeds-born and indeed had been in the same class as me at primary school in Armley, though neither of us could remember the other. The proceedings involved two more or less formal meals with the ceremony sandwiched between them. For this one had to parade in a ludicrous hat and lurid gown (mine, I think, pink) and stand on a public stage alongside the University Chancellor while the Registrar read out a record of one’s achievements.

  The Chancellor of Leeds at this time was the Duchess of Kent and she did her job conscientiously and well, favouring me with a kindly (though occasionally quizzical) smile throughout this exhaustive recitation which I frequently wanted to interrupt if only to excuse what I saw as some of its less glowing achievements – appearances on Countdown, for instance, or Desert Island Discs.

  The embarrassment attendant on the declamation of this well-meaning indictment I was not ever anxious to repeat and, since eating with people I don’t know has always been a powerful deterrent, that and the two formal meals honorary degrees always seem to involve has been sufficient to put me off for good. Such offers as have come my way since I have managed to sidestep, saying generally that it’s honour enough to have been thought of, which, indeed, is true. Still, it seems a touch mean-spirited, but there’s an element of self-preservation in refusal also. Honorary degrees do not come without strings. While there is no formal obligation, an honorand must expect to be invited to address all sorts of gatherings of staff or students in the donor university, invitations which are hard to refuse once you’re on the strength. If you enjoy such occasions all well and good, but talks have to be written and addresses composed and I write little enough as it is. Best to steer clear.

  Better still, though, to be light-hearted about it. As President of the Royal Society and goodness knows what else, Sir Peter Medawar was showered with honorary degrees and used to say that his ambition was to get one from a university beginning with every letter of the alphabet. This seems as sensible a reason for accepting an honorary degree as any other, though hardly one to which most honorands aspire.

  My own university is Oxford. I have an honorary fellowship at my college, Exeter, which gave me great pleasure when I was elected in 1987. It came as a surprise, though, in 1998 when I was asked if I would accept an honorary D.Litt. from the university itself, the surprise stemming (I hope) partly from modesty but also because I assumed the university had written me off a few years previously, a story best told in an extract from my diary.

  10 August 1990. An invitation from the Vice-Chancellor at Oxford to a fund-raising dinner at Merton. ‘It will be an opportunity,’ he writes, ‘to tell you something about the university’s current achievements.’ Since one of the university’s current achievements is the establishment of the Rupert Murdoch Chair in Communications, I feel disinclined to attend, and write back saying that if the university thinks it’s appropriate to take Rupert Murdoch’s money perhaps they ought to approach Saddam Hussein to found a chair in Peace Studies. [A pained letter eventually comes back saying the university has been most careful to ensure the money came from The Times and not from the less reputable sections of the Murdoch empire. A visit
to the university Department of Economics would seem to be in order.]

  I’d had no communications from Oxford since that time so I was dou bly surprised when in November 1998 the university was in touch again. More diary:

  17 November. I’m looking forward to a quiet morning’s work when out of the blue [sic] a letter comes from Oxford offering an honorary degree. This distinction is what Larkin called ‘the big one’ and when he got his letter he uncharacteristically bounded up the stairs to tell Monica Jones the good news. I sit looking at mine and wondering about it for most of the morning, wishing I could just say ‘Delighted’ and have done with it. But ever since the establishment of the Rupert Murdoch Chair in Language and Communication I’ve felt disaffected with the University. I’m aware of the arguments about bad money being put to good uses but I still think that Murdoch’s is not a name with which Oxford should have associated itself. So, eventually, I write back saying no and explaining why.

  Of course I am aware that writing (and publishing) this may be sneered at as showing off, and that if one does turn something down it’s proper to keep quiet about it. But this refusal isn’t for my own private moral satisfaction: Murdoch is a bully and should be stood up to publicly and so, however puny the gesture, it needs to be in the open.

  I wish I could say that this refusal leaves me with a warm feeling of having done the right thing, but not a bit of it. I end up, as so often when I have tried to get it right, feeling I’ve slightly made a fool of myself, so that I wonder whether after more momentous refusals martyrs ever went to their deaths not in the strong confidence of virtue but just feeling that they had somehow muffed it.

  There was some adverse comment in the press, notably from Paul Johnson, but nothing was said to make me feel I should have acted differently. What surprised and to some extent saddened me was that while I had quite a few letters in support from members of the public I had none from anyone in the University itself.

  I don’t know the circumstances and have never bothered to find out but I imagine the Murdoch post can’t have been set up without some dissent at the time. If so it must have died down or been forgotten by 1998, when I made my own protest. Or it may be that university finances are now so tight that anyone involved in academic fundraising feels that they have to take money where they can find it. My closest friend at Oxford, David Vaisey, who had had to raise funds for the Bodleian Library, took this view, which I can sympathise with without thinking it right.

  As it is I never read about some new depth to Murdoch’s turpitude or the lies and hypocrisy of his newspapers without feeling that they demean the university which took his money to fund an appointment that bears his name. What, I wonder, do they teach there?

  Finally I come back to that question from the audience with which I started and which I used to have to deflect. Nowadays, since it’s no longer a secret and can be looked up on the Internet, I can go into the circumstances in more detail and without seeming to be showing off.

  I was offered a CBE in the Birthday Honours in 1988 ‘for services to literature’. I didn’t have much hesitation in declining it because, whatever doubts I may have about the honours system in general, the government through which the award came was still headed by Mrs Thatcher and I didn’t want anything from that particular handbag.

  It’s true, though, that I had some regrets about refusing it because I longed to do it with a joke but couldn’t think of one. There was a gap between the letter arriving and my letter of refusal and it might have been thought that I was agonising over the decision. In fact I just couldn’t come up with a witty way of putting it. Of course in the unlikely event of the prime minister actually seeing my letter she was even more unlikely to have seen the joke: that was part of the trouble.

  The list on which I did not figure was published on Saturday, 6 June, which happened also to be the day of Russell Harty’s funeral. Russell would never have dreamed of refusing anything and would have been only too delighted to be singled out by Mrs Thatcher, or even by General Pinochet. Dead, and therefore knowing all things, he would have been infuriated by my piece of cheek.

  Having turned down the CBE, I thought that would be the end of honours for me so I was more surprised to be offered a knighthood in the New Year’s Honours for 1996. Admittedly it was quite a thin year so there may have been some scraping of the barrel, but I felt more ungracious saying no this time if only because it seemed kind that someone in the prime minister’s office still thought it worthwhile to persist.

  Again, though, I was mortified not to be able to get a joke out of this gran rifiuto. The nearest I got to humour was to think, quite genuinely, that being a knight would be like wearing a suit every day of one’s life. This didn’t seem quite funny enough, though, so I just said No, thank you. Richard Eyre claims that apropos honours I quoted Virginia Woolf as saying she had been brought up not to accept gifts from strangers. I’ve no recollection of this or of knowing that Virginia Woolf said anything of the sort. (It’s a bit pert for her, I would have thought.) Still, it would have done at a pinch.

  Suit, though, has something to do with it as I felt it wouldn’t suit me, or would suit the me I was still trying not to be, though at sixty-one (my age when it was offered) I ought, I felt, to have a firmer grip on my character than I did or do. With writers, much more than actors, there must always be the suspicion that a knighthood means that they have arrived but at the wrong place. Self-regard, though, is boundless and, lest it be thought that this refusal has much to do with modesty, when the list of those who had turned down honours was leaked in the newspapers I cared enough to note (I hope wryly) how obscurely placed I was on the list and that sometimes I wasn’t even mentioned at all.

  Retrospective though most honours are, arising as they do out of services rendered, it’s still hard not to feel that to be given an honour certainly at a higher level is to be in some sense enlisted or even leashed. It’s a restraint, even if only in point of good manners: someone who has just been honoured by Downing Street might feel less ready on that score openly to criticise Downing Street. It’s nothing so vulgar as being bought off; simply that most people would think it not quite the thing to do. An honour is not just a trinket; it’s also a contract.

  In my case, though, it would be hypocritical to pretend that I do not sometimes wonder about all these refusals and what lies behind them, and also that I do not have occasional regrets. Writing can be a pretty cheerless business and going through a bad patch I sometimes think it would be a consolation to be a sir … not that it would help. But it’s not much of a regret and it passes.

  Why I have this recusatory temperament, though, is quite hard to sort out but it must in part have to do with my father. He was naturally modest and reluctant to push himself forward and would never have thought he had anything to push himself forward about. As a child I was something of a show-off, which pained him, so I can see this refusal of honours has to do with atoning for that and is, in part anyway, an attempt to please my dead parent. It’s futile, of course; there is no pleasing the dead and he would probably think I was making too much of a fuss anyway and would do better taking them and have done.

  Still, I was brought up not to be beholden to anybody; my parents never liked to be under an obligation or to owe someone a favour, particularly someone outside the family – an attitude not uncommon in their class and circumstances. And this has, I think, been passed on to me, whose class and circumstances are very different.

  If not being beholden is part of it and something that I’ve inherited, my own history plays a part and in particular something that happened in 1954 during my last months of National Service.

  I had spent my obligatory two years very happily at the Joint Services School for Linguists, stationed most of the time at Cambridge where we wore civilian clothes, did no drill or military training and, though we enjoyed the status of officer cadets, it wasn’t like being in the army at all and we were virtually undergraduates. Sometime in the
spring of 1954 we were sent for three days to WOSB, a unit in Hampshire where we went through a series of tests to assess our suitability for a commission. These tests were to do with qualities of leadership, man management and nerve under fire. I had no hopes of passing but much to my surprise (and, I think, largely due to my acting abilities) I did. The next stage, though, involved a longer performance, a fortnight at Mons barracks in Aldershot. Still, it was reckoned to be a pushover and almost impossible to fail. I failed.

  Those of us who had fallen at this or the earlier hurdle were then busted to private and spent the last month or so of National Service at the Intelligence Corps depot at Maresfield, the foulest camp I have ever been in and made worse by the fact that plain to view were those ten or so colleagues who had passed both stages and now idled about the camp with their swagger sticks and peaked caps as fully-fledged second lieutenants.

  At the time it seemed a joke, this abrupt turnaround a farewell lesson in the absurdities of military service. But in retrospect I can see that it marked, if it did not actually cause, a change in my way of looking at things.

  Mons had been a failure and, though I was only twenty, my life up till then had been one of unbroken success. I had passed the eleven plus, always been among the top of the class, done well in all but sport and after school and higher school certificates had ended up with a scholarship to Oxford. This army test, ludicrous though it was, was my first taste of failure, no less bitter because I knew the object of my ambition was contemptible in every possible way: I think I only wanted to be an officer because the uniform was smarter.

  When I joined the army aged eighteen I had been a committed Christian, right-wing, censorious and, so far as I could predict, destined to become an Anglican clergyman. In the army this conventional façade began to break down and in a conventional way; I began to smoke and to swear and occasionally to get drunk. So if this failure at Mons was a turning point, like most turning points it had been in the offing for some time. But a failure it was. I had not got my platoon dry-shod across the flooded stream; the guerrilla attack I led scoured the Hampshire countryside and did not even locate the foe. And it mattered. Even after two years of its insanities I still believed in authority, even the authority of the army. No longer.