Barmy Britain (7 page)
Authors: Jack Crossley
When the newly-weds left Buckingham Palace after the wedding breakfast Elizabeth hid her favourite corgi (Susan) under a rug in their carriage so that the dog could go with them.
Sunday Telegraph
When Elizabeth became Queen, Philip knew that he would have to keep one step behind her in public. But when the door is closed on the outside world he is very much the head of the family. There was an occasion at Sandringham when he was driving with the Queen in the passenger seat and an aide in the back. He was driving fast and the Queen asked him to slow down. Philip said: ‘One more peep out of you and you can walk the rest of the way.’
Daily Mail
Gyles Brandreth, author of
Philip and Elizabeth: Portrait of a Marriage
, says. She wears the crown, but he wears the trousers.
Sunday Telegraph
Tracy Borman is writing a biography of Henrietta Howard, a cultured woman of the 18th century, who for 20 years was the mistress of George II. The king actually preferred his wife, with whom he was in love, but duty was stern in those days and a monarch had to have a mistress. For all those years, seven days a week, he spent four hours alone with her (from 9pm). No doubt, at first, they did the obvious but eventually they seem to have just talked. One courtier said it worked because he was boring and she was deaf.
Simon Hoggart,
Guardian
Keeping the monarchy costs every man, woman and child in Britain the equivalent of one loaf of bread a year.
The Times
The Queen’s sharp eye for economy is well known in royal circles. Two footmen who were found together in a bath in the Royal Mews explained that they were helping Her Majesty’s drive to reduce gas bills.
Observer
To celebrate Queen Elizabeth II making history when, at 81 years and 243 days old, she became the oldest Monarch to sit on the English throne,
The Times
published 81 Facts About the Monarchy, including:
- Queen Elizabeth I owned the world’s first flushing toilet, presented to her by her godson, the inventor Sir John Harrington.
- Charles II (The Merry Monarch) fathered 13 children by his mistresses and none by his wife.
- George I and his mistress were known as the Elephant and Castle, because she was so tall and he was so fat.
- Queen Elizabeth II is the only British monarch to have been properly trained to change a spark plug.
- She demoted a footman for feeding her corgis whisky.
The Times
It is said that Prince Charles once chided Ronnie Scott, the jazz club man, for not paying his musicians enough. Ronnie asked the prince what made him think that. ‘Because they’re all smoking the same cigarette,’ replied Charles.
Daily Mail
The Icelandic Phallological Museum – believed to be the only museum of penises – has 245 examples from animals such as hamsters, horses and whales. It is looking for a human specimen, and diarist Jon Henley said it sounded like a eunuch opportunity.
Guardian
Changing Times:
- 1950 – Average age for a woman to lose virginity is 21. For men it is 20.
- 1960 – Average age for women to lose virginity is down to 19. For men it is 18.
- 2000 – Average person loses virginity at 16. One in five men and one in six women in the 16–24 age range have had more than ten partners.
Guardian
The
Proceedings
of the Royal Society
journal says men take the same pleasure out of looking at an attractive female as they do from having a curry.
Daily Telegraph
A couple mounted the stairs to the roof of a London theatre and then mounted each other – not knowing they were in full view of some Soho offices. Workers there filmed the encounter and shared it with the world on YouTube. Hundreds of thousands tuned in to the al fresco romp.
Independent on Sunday
A Durex survey revealed that Britons have sex an average 92 times a year. Greeks score 164, Brazilians 145, Russians and Poles 143.
The survey also said that most Britons are unhappy with their sex lives, but not as unhappy as the Japanese, who scored only 48 times a year.
Sun
Sir Ian McKellen got his kit off when playing King Lear and an anonymous theatregoer emailed Jon Henley’s diary: ‘Sir Ian is an actor with a large part.’
Guardian
Dan Jones, a painter and writer with a deep interest in the folklore of the playground, has gathered some 400 songs, mainly from schools in his own borough of Tower Hamlets in London’s East End. One of them has the catchy lyric:
Ooh, ah, I lost my bra
I left my knickers in my boyfriend’s car.
Guardian
Among chat up lines paraded in the
Independent on Sunday
:
- Excuse me, I’ve lost my phone number. Can I have yours?
- Do you believe in love at first sight or am I going to have to walk past you again?
- I was just wondering if you had any space in your handbag for my Ferrari keys.
- Your eyes are blue like the ocean and baby I’m lost at sea. (This one got the response: ‘You must be pissed, luv. My eyes are brown’.)
Independent on Sunday
A Dutchman was caught having sex with a sheep – but the case was thrown out of court because under Dutch law bestiality is not a crime unless it can be proved that the animal did not want to have sex.
Independent on Sunday
Ursula Andress’s emergence from the Caribbean in the 1962 James Bond film
Dr No
has been voted the best bikini scene ever. It was followed by a Morecambe and Wise skit which had a half-naked goddess emerging from the ocean inquiring seductively if there was anything they had been missing.
One of the funny men replied: ‘You haven’t got a chip pan?’
Daily Mail
The late George Melly, musician and author, was also an angler and tells the story of a Scotsman who was a virgin: ‘I’ve never been with a woman, but from what I hear it’s not unlike landing a salmon’.
The Times
A man has been placed on the sex offenders’ register for pleasuring himself with a bicycle.
The Observer
reported that the BBC News website used a photograph of a bicycle, but ‘one can only trust it is not the actual bicycle, as it is an offence to show victims of sex crimes.’
Observer
‘I don’t know if it is the same with you, Harold, but I find if I don’t have sex at least once every 24 hours, I get these goddamn headaches.’ The Sunday Times records this ‘hitherto unreported comment by President Kennedy to a speechless Harold Macmillan’.
Sunday Times
The
Kama Sutra
was first published in English in 1883, though it remained illegal until 1963. It would take the average couple three and a half years to try every one of the 529 positions described in the book.
Observer
The British Museum’s Secretum is a collection of Victorian erotica kept behind locked doors. It represents a magnificent obsession with male genitalia. About 30 people a year apply for permission to view. The majority are women.
Daily Mail
John Mortimer remembers ‘a terrible moment in my life when, at lunch with a girlfriend and her mother, I misjudged the legs under the table and started to caress the mother’.
Daily Mail
Retired agony aunt Claire Rayner says a memorable problem letter she received read: ‘My husband won’t make love to me in any way, even a kiss or a cuddle. His father’s the same’.
Daily Mail
Prime Minister Gordon Brown lost an eye as a 16-year-old rugby player and a rude MP told him: ‘I can always tell which is your false eye. It’s the one with warmth in it.’
Sun
Julian Glover’s review of Alistair Campbell’s diary says that the 750-page book ‘can be boiled down to a single sentence: “How me and Tony stuffed the media and changed the world”’.
Guardian
In the week when the Scottish National Party did rather well in the May 2007 elections Andrew Gimson of the
Daily Telegraph
produced a quote from a Scottish voter on SNP leader Alex Salmond: ‘That man is so pleased with himself, he’d drink his own bath water.’
Simon Hoggart commented: ‘Possibly that is a cleaned up version of something similar but more offensive.’
Guardian
A rare piece of wit in the House of Lords:
Lord Walpole asked Foreign Office Minister Lord Triesman: ‘I have a daughter in the Foreign Office. Can the FO teach her to speak English now that she has come back after four years in New York?’
Lord Triesman: ‘Some tasks may be beyond even the Foreign Office.’
Ephraim Hardcastle,
Daily Mail
Matt Faber’s son was surprised to learn that Margaret Thatcher was elected three times.
‘But, didn’t everybody hate her?’ he asked.
‘Well, certainly, many had that view of her, but as many felt as passionately the other way’, replied dad.
‘Ah,’ said the boy. ‘Like Marmite.’
Guardian Weekly
Under the headline O
NE
M
ILLION
I
MMIGRANTS
G
RANTED
B
RITISH
C
ITIZENSHIP IN
P
AST
D
ECADE
. The Times reported in May 2007 that among the main occupations given by Romanians and Bulgarians was Circus Artiste.
The Times
This is said to be Gordon Brown’s favourite joke (he has told it nine times in public in less than a year):
Former U.S. president Ronald Reagan was due to meet Olof Palme, then the Swedish prime minister. Mr Reagan was aware that Palme came from somewhere in Europe and not too far from Russia and asked his advisers:
‘Isn’t this man a Communist?’
‘No Mr President, he’s an anti Communist.’
‘I don’t care what kind of a Communist he is.’
Daily Telegraph
Some samples of ‘vexatious requests’ made under the Freedom of Information Act:
- The cost of the Prime Minister’s make-up.
- The number of eligible bachelors in the Hampshire police force.
- Amount spent on Ferrero Rocher chocolates by the Foreign Office.
- The number of sex acts perpetrated on Welsh sheep.
The Times
Harold Wilson liked to say of Tony Benn that ‘he immatures with age’.
Guardian
The suggestion that retiring PM Tony Blair might be given a bicycle as a leaving present should be resisted, writes David Thorpe, of Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. As a young neighbour of theirs near Durham in the 1960s he was a nuisance riding around ringing his bell.
The Times
Simon Hoggart writes: You could fill a book with quotes wrongly attributed to Winston Churchill. There’s no record of the reported occasion when Labour MP Bessie Braddock accused Winston of being drunk and his supposed reply was: ‘And you, madam, are ugly. But I shall be sober in the morning.’
Daily Mail
George Bernard Shaw cabled Winston Churchill: ‘Have reserved two tickets for my first night. Bring a friend if you have one’. Churchill replied: ‘Impossible to come first night. Will come second night if you have one.’
Reader’s Digest
In his memoirs, Churchill’s wartime driver recalls Winston’s predilection for wandering around with nothing on. Once, in the White House, Churchill had just taken a bath and was dictating to his secretary while naked. Roosevelt walked in, but Winston was not embarrassed. He said: ‘You see, sir, we have nothing to hide.’
Independent on Sunday
Tory MP Ann Winterton was dismissed from the Shadow Cabinet for telling a racist joke and Richard Ingrams wrote of the very poor quality of politicians’ jokes. But he remembered that Winston Churchill could crack a good joke. In his old age Winston was told by a fellow MP that his flies were undone. ‘Thank you,’ replied the old warrior, ‘but a dead bird never falls from the nest’.
Observer
In 1954 Winston Churchill was resisting efforts to persuade him to retire as prime minister. Harold Macmillan remembers that on January 26 Churchill rang at 9.00 am and asked him to go round to Number Ten. ‘I found him in bed, with a green budgerigar sitting on his head. A whisky and soda was by his side – of this, the little bird took sips’.
Sunday Times
Churchill wore artificial silk long johns, ‘the better to care for the delicate skin on one small part of my anatomy’.
Daily Mail
Before his first meeting with Charles de Gaulle, Churchill was instructed to be ready to kiss the French leader on both cheeks. ‘I’ll kiss him on all four if you insist,’ growled Winston. Andy Milne, Dilwyn, Hereford.
Daily Telegraph
For Winston Churchill, the underground Cabinet War Rooms used in World War II had two major deficiencies: no flush lavatories and no cellar of decent claret. To the horror of his staff, Churchill’s favourite station was the top floor of 10 Downing Street from where he could watch the full fury of the blitz. ‘He thought being underground was not a proper place for a Prime Minister to be,’ said his grandson, Nicholas Soames, MP.
Guardian
When Churchill was kicked out of office in the first election after World War II his legendary cook Georgina Landemare said: ‘I don’t know what the world’s coming to, but I thought I might make some tea’.
Half an hour before a big dinner, Georgina was often to be found sitting in her kitchen, with everything under control, reading
The Sporting Life
.
The Times
When Nicholas Soames was about six he went into Churchill’s working room at Chartwell and said: ‘Grandpa, is it true that you are the greatest man in the world?’ ‘Yes,’ said Churchill, ‘now bugger off’.
The Times
(from a footnote in Roy Jenkins’ biography)
Former London Mayor Ken Livingstone escaped censure after likening a Jewish reporter to a concentration camp guard because when the words were spoken he was wearing a cap and thus off duty.
Guardian
Richard Heller, who was Denis Healey’s political adviser, tells of the time when Denis referred to Mrs Thatcher ‘screaming like a fishwife’. This attracted complaints from fishwives ‘to whom he apologised’.
Guardian
Blackpool is often the venue of choice for political annual conferences – but they are small beer to the famous seaside resort, bringing in a mere 10,000 delegates. The real money spinner is the pigeon fanciers’ British Homing World Show of the Year, which attracts 25,000 each January (pigeons not included).
The Times
In the summer of 1969 Eric Campbell, of Harrogate, visited a friend who was temporarily renting the house of Roy Jenkins, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. ‘Perusing the great man’s impressive library I came across
Teach Yourself Economics.’
The Times
The 3rd Baron Lord Selsdon said that ‘after deep research’ he had broken down his fellow peers and peeresses into four categories:
- Bought their way in
- Wormed their way in
- Screwed their way in
- And – how did THEY get in?
Daily Mail
Former UK foreign secretary Lord Carrington got into his car to go to a function at Madame Tussaud’s waxworks and said to his chauffeur: ‘Now to the Chamber of Horrors’. He dozed off and woke up when the car stopped – outside the House of Lords.
Financial Times
Here is the advice from the House of Commons Commission on how to tidy up a broken light bulb:
- Put on protective gloves
- Put on protective mask
- Open sturdy box
- Pick up large fragments and place in box
- Sweep up splinters using stiff card or paper and place in box
- Clean area using damp cloth
- Place damp cloth in box
- Seal sturdy box using tape
- Label contents of box with labels and pen or paper
- Take sealed box to waste removal area and pass to waste disposal contractor
Daily Mail
Flora Edwards read a report on New York’s governor meeting a high class call girl in the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. The reporter went on to say that Bill Clinton embraced Monica Lewinsky there, John F Kennedy is rumoured to have used it for extramarital assignations, and ‘the Queen and Winston Churchill used the hotel’.
‘Whatever is he suggesting?’ asks Flora.
Daily Mail
Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service was based in 22-storey Century House, not far from Waterloo station. Its location was London’s worst kept secret… known only to every taxi driver, tourist guide and KGB agent in the city.
Daily Telegraph
A
Times
reader’s request for a collective noun for politicians produced the suggestions ‘An ignorance’, ‘A prattle’, ‘A thicket’, ‘A tornado (a spinning mass of hot air)’, ‘A dissemblance’, ‘A political asylum’, ‘A spinney’, ‘A forest (dense, wooden, parts may die yet remain in place for years)’.
Harold Macmillan once suggested that a suitable collective noun for a gathering of former prime ministers might be ‘A lack of principles’.
The Times
Tony Benn once asked Gandhi what he thought of British civilisation. Gandhi told him: ‘It would be a good idea’.
Daily Telegraph
While in London a child asked George W. Bush what the White House was like. ‘It is white,’ he said.
Sunday Telegraph
My seven-year-old niece’s autograph book was sent to No.10 and she received a photograph of the Prime Minister with a facsimile signature. She read out to us the accompanying note and it came out as ‘a photograph of the Prime Minister with a fake smile.’
Nigel Swann, Derbyshire.
Daily Telegraph
A
Times
reader was told that smoke bombs used for clearing gardens of moles cannot be bought in the UK because of EU rules. But some friends brought some over from France and they did the job. The reader signs off: ‘Could we please join the French EU? I’m sick of the British one.’
The Times