Eric Dier, who scored England's opening goal against Russia this evening, is the grandson of Ted Croker, the former secretary of the Football Association.
Showing posts with label Trivia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Trivia. Show all posts
Eric Dier features in Trivial Fact of the Day
Eric Dier, who scored England's opening goal against Russia this evening, is the grandson of Ted Croker, the former secretary of the Football Association.
Trivial Fact of the Week links Blow-Up and the Double Deckers
Nicholas Whyte has been ploughing a lonely furrow with a series of posts on the early 1970s children's television series Here Come the Double Deckers.
Although this fell precisely into my era, I fear I can recall disliking it at the time. Even then I sensed it was peopled with stage-school brats and aimed too shamelessly at the American market.
As a result I viewed the later careers of two of its stars - Brisnley Forde of Aswad and Peter Firth - with mild scepticism.
I struggled with Spooks in particular. MI5 just would not employ a former member of the Double Deckers and that is the end of the matter.
Still, I am the last blogger qualified to complain about obscure enthusiasms, and Nicholas's latest Double Deckers post has turned up a top piece of trivia. In fact he wins my Trivial Fact of the Week award.
That trivia concerns an episode of the show called Barney, in which the children befriend an entertainer down on his luck and (inevitably) put on a show with him.
Barney was played by Julian Chagrin, who a few years before had been one of the tennis players watched by David Hemmings at the end of Antonioni's Blow-Up. You can see this scene in the video above, which Nicholas included in his own post.
He calls it "the very odd 1966 film Blow-Up," but I think he meant to call it "a key moment in both the creation and the examination of the myth of Swinging London".
Nicholas also reveals that Chagrin appeared as the secret lemonade drinker in the R.White's television commercials.
The song in them was sung by Ross MacManus, the father of Elvis Costello.*
But you knew that already.
* I like Carl Wilson's observation that "a secret lemonade drinker" sounds like a line from one of Elvis Costello's own songs.
Al Murray is the great nephew of Stephen Murray
But our Trivial Fact of the Week reveals that he is also the great nephew of the actor Stephen Murray.
A young person writes: Who was Stephen Murray?
Only the star of the radio comedy The Navy Lark, Sir Francis Walsingham to Glenda Jackson's Elizabeth R on television and star of such post-war films as London Belongs to Me and The Magnet.
The Stains: Bored
I came across a tweet the other day that suggested the actor David Hemmings had lived briefly in Shrewsbury High Street. That is hard to reconcile with what I know of his life, but it did lead me to this record.
The Stains were a Shrewsbury punk band whose original vocalist was Dom Estos. And Dom Estos was Dominic Hemmings, the adopted son of David Hemmings.
His mother was Genista Ouvry, who acted under the name Jenny Lewes. Dominic had already been born when Hemmings met her during a two-week repertory engagement in Leicester in 1960 and they fell in love. They married shortly afterwards and Hemmings adopted Dominic, but the marriage did not last.
A few more snippets...
The band turn up in a letter to the Guardian by Mark Webb in 2010:
I was amazed to read of Kevin Rowland's antipathy towards ironed creases in jeans ... In the 70s, playing drums in Dom Estos And The Stains, we got a gig supporting Dexys Midnight Runners at Shrewsbury Music Hall. Dexys got the bigger dressing room, but we had the electric socket. A knock on the door and Mr Rowland appears: "Hello, lads. Can I plug in my iron to do my trousers?"Dom Estos appears still to be making music, under the name Dominic Ouvry, as part of Liquid Vision.
And a little googling suggests Genista Ouvry used the name Jenny Lewes because Lewes was her mother's maiden name.
Not only that: it suggests she was a direct descendant of George Henry Lewes, Victorian man of letters and partner of George Eliot (or Mary Ann Evans).
Noosha Fox: Georgina Bailey
A little bit of Continental sophistication from 1977 which reached no. 31 in the British charts.
Some sources claim it was banned by the BBC, but as this video comes from an episode of Top of the Pops that seems unlikely.
Noosha Fox was originally the singer with the band Fox. They had three top 20 hits, but she was less successful as a solo artist.
She is also the mother of the doctor and science journalist Ben Goldacre. Sadly, she was to busy with her music career to teach him to comb his hair.
Lord Lucan, John Aspinall and George Osborne
A new theory about what happened Lord Lucan after he murdered Sandra Rivett in 1974 emerged this week.
According to the Daily Mail, he shot himself and was then fed to a tiger at John Aspinall's zoo in Kent.
I don't believe a word of it, but the Lucan story has always fascinated me.
The best picture of John Aspinall is to be found in John Pearson's The Gamblers, but a few quotes will suffice.
Here is the Daily Express from 2013:
"Aspinall was a total crook," says Sir Rupert [Mackeson] now. "He started in the days when gambling was illegal away from racecourses. His mother Lady Osborne was a real force behind the operation."
Aspinall and his mother were charged with "keeping a common gaming house" but were acquitted on a technicality in 1958. ...
Aspinall opened the Clermont in 1962 after gambling had been legalised and its founder members included five dukes, five marquesses and nearly 20 earls.
Aspinall was determined to relieve the bluebloods of their money and use the funds to finance his private zoo where he bred tigers.
"He employed crooked dealers and used a wide range of techniques for cheating," says Sir Rupert. "He encouraged rich people, young aristocrats and in particular rich divorcees, to come to his club. A lot of people were ruined. Lucan lost a fortune and so became a house player for Aspinall."Some of the money Aspinall fleeced from the aristocracy went to fund his zoos and wildlife breeding projects. But lest you feel too warm to him about that, read this anonymous blog post:
Both Howletts and Port Lympne seemed to attract human disaster. Aspinall's daughter-in-law, Louise, was bitten by a tiger cub and needed 15 stitches. A boy of 10 had his arm ripped off by a chimpanzee at Port Lympne, and was awarded £132,000 in damages. Bindu, an English bull elephant, crushed a "bonding" keeper to death at Howletts and later Darren Cockrill, who was crushed by an elephant at Port Lympne in February 2001.
In 1994, the local council banned the keepers from entering the tiger cages after one of their number, Trevor Smith, was killed at Howletts.My reason for writing about Aspinall, beyond the Lucan and tiger story, is his mother. Because Lady Osborne is also the grandmother of George Osborne.
Her first husband was Dr Robert Aspinall and John was the child of that marriage (though John is said to have discovered in later life that he was not Robert's son and to have found and supported his real father).
Her second was Sir George Osborne. They had four children together, and George Osborne is the son of the third of them.
He was famously christened Gideon, but changed his name to George, in honour of his grandfather who was dead by then, at the age of 13.
So that is my Trivial Fact of the Day.
It also explains why you can find headlines like:
Lord Lucan 'told George Osborne's grandmother he was planning to kill his WIFE days before he murdered his nanny and then drowned himself days later'
Alan Rickman's brother is a member of Harborough District Council
Alan Rickman's sad death last week revealed that his brother Michael is a member of Harborough District Council.
The Leicester Mercury has published a short article, quoting his tweets, where he thanks fans for their kind messages and says simply and movingly "I am broken."
Michael Rickman is the Conservative member for the Nevill ward, which includes the villages around Hallaton and Medbourne.
It is named after Nevill Holt, which most literary theorists now believe to be the inspiration for Bonkers Hall.
Back in the 1980s the SDP's only county councillor in Leicestershire was the brother of the film director Stephen Frears.
David Bowie, economics and education
I have come across two reactions to the death of David Bowie that take us well beyond the world of music.
Stumbling and Mumbling - written by Chris Dillow and always interesting - quotes Danny Finkelstein before rightly taking issue with him:
He [Finkelstein] writes:
David Bowie – undoubtedly one of the artistic geniuses of the past 50 years – was the great product and great producer of consumer capitalism…He was subversive because capitalism is subversive, overturning the status quo, restless, and profoundly democratic.
I disagree. It is markets that are subversive; capitalists would much rather keep the status quo and the profits rolling in. Danny says that Bowie “was possible because in a consumer capitalist society nobody can ultimately stop anybody doing anything.” But surely the word “capitalist” is superfluous in that sentence?Chris goes on to draw a very different moral from Bowie's career:
He only became wealthy after setting up his own management company. This tells us a lot. People don’t become rich by merely by being creative. They get rich from ownership rights: in was only when Bowie claimed these that he prospered. In this sense, capitalism is a means of exploitation.
The conflation of capitalism with markets irritates me because I suspect it is a means whereby the right smuggles in support for inequality. Many of the virtues it claims for capitalism are in fact the virtues of markets, and in conflating the two the right thus gives the impression that the case for capitalism is stronger than it in fact is.Kevin Maguire, writing on Politics Home, also questions modern pieties (and incidentally introduces our Trivial Fact of the Day):
There’s a lesson in the likelihood that a young David Bowie would today be considered an unfortunate teenager failed by his school, with Bromley Technical High’s staff fearing a dreaded visit from Ofsted’s inspectors.
His single O Level, in art – a subject taught by fellow rocker Peter Frampton’s father, Owen, self-evidently an inspirational schoolmaster – fell a long way short of the five good GCSEs, including English and Maths, or its equivalent, that is considered by many of us, never mind officialdom, as a pretty good yardstick ...
I raise Bowie’s less than sparkling academic qualifications not to dismiss the importance of GCSEs, NVQs, Baccalaureates, Highers, A Levels, Degrees or A N Other certificate you care to name if it signifies achievement. Everybody, from pupils and parents to teachers and Education Secretaries, deserves applause if they’re striving to raise standards and, especially, improve the prospects of kids from poorer homes who too often are left behind.
But Bowie, the boy from Brixton born into a working class home who finished school with that single O Level, is a reminder that passing exams isn’t everything; a dearth of formal qualifications is not the end of the world.I do wonder how many of today's IT millionaires were chided for "messing about with computers" by their teachers in the 1980s.
