When Warden Pember, grasping my hand across the high table in the hall of All Souls College, pronounced, “Admitto te socium Collegii Omnium Animarum”, he awarded me, it seemed, the key to a magic garden. All Souls is a place of calm and beauty, learning and wit, with a tradition of good living, the finest academic club in the world. The magic lay not only in the harmony and fragrance of the garden, but also in the fascinating creatures that inhabited its groves. The unique reputation of All Souls fellowships had caused many of the most brilliant young Oxford men of successive generations to compete for them. After a nominally probationary period of two years, imposing a modest, almost formal requirement of specified research and a minimum of residence in term-time, which could be fulfilled by “pernoctating” from London or coming down for weekends, a Fellow was required by statute only to attend termly College meetings to continue to qualify for his status and a basic emolument which before World War Two stood at 50 pounds a year. This meant that many who sought and won prize fellowships could pursue careers at the Bar, in politics, diplomacy, the Church, the civil service, business or finance. Thus some of the ablest men in public life, as well as some of the best scholars in Oxford, were or had been Fellows of All Souls.
The College has been by social critics as a temple of privilege, and by envious dons elsewhere a cosmopolitan club masquerading as an academic institution. Neither label is altogether undeserved, though whatever truth either held has faded. The College’s earnest aspirations, fortified by increased wealth, have made it much more academic a body than it was when I was a junior Fellow, through the addition of more research fellows and a class of short-term Visiting Fellows drawn from the topmost scholars of the world in many disciplines. But your truly authentic, dinkum All Souls man remains the Fellow by examination or Prize Fellow. Every year the College elected by competitive examination two junior Fellows, usually men who had just taken their Final Schools. (I have written “men”, since in my day only men were admitted: All Souls fellowships of every class are now open to women on equal terms.) A good First in the Schools, though not formally required, was generally regarded as necessary to put you in the league of candidates. Much importance was attached to the general and essay papers, which tested an aspirant’s range of knowledge, literary skill and capacity for thought. It was enough that the specialist assessors, nominated to aid the whole body of Warden and Fellows in their decision, should certify the candidate to be worthy in his own subject, if he shone in the papers which all could appreciate. After one recent election meeting at which no fellowship had been awarded my wife asked Lord Sherfield, a senior Fellow, what the College was looking for, but had not found: he answered, “Brains, my dear Margaret, brains.” A viva voce examination, conducted by the whole body of Fellows, at which each candidate had to translate into English an unseen passage in a classical or foreign language, was a test less of linguistic ability than of savoir faire. There was also a kind of social examination, in the shape of an invitation to dine in College with the Fellows one Saturday evening, an occasion known as the “Cherry tart dinner”, from the legend that this dish was always served to test how the candidate got rid of the stones, proof or disproof of gentle manners and social self-confidence. Whether any cerebrally scintillating young man was ever eliminated for failure at this hurdle (getting drunk, sitting mute, or boring everybody) is not on record; for it is a stern rule that all deliberations on the examination are forever secret. There was indeed a cautionary tale of a contemporary of mine from an Anglo-Indian service family who was said to have held forth on Indian affairs after dinner and eventually to have asked his principal inquisitor in a patronising tone, “Have you ever been in India?” The said Fellow was Viscount Simon, who had been very recently chairman of the famous Commission on Indian constitutional reform. Certainly the gentleman was not elected, but it may have been for other reasons.
Prize Fellows were elected for seven years, and even if not resident had rights to rooms and commons in College. At the end of seven years they were usually re-elected (unless, of course, they had meanwhile become Fellows of other colleges), provided that they were unmarried and had taken a due part in the life of the College. The penalty for marriage was a relic of the old celibacy ordinances which had long governed the ancient English universities, but this era it had become a common-sense rule of thumb; for a married man, perhaps with children, could not (unless he were a resident don) treat the College as an academic wife, to be visited often and cherished as his own. (I had married two years before my seven-year fellowship expired.) However, the loss of several young Fellows in action and the suspension of elections, during the war of 1914-18 had left the College’s numbers very depleted, and precedent was overridden by the re-election of a number of former married Prize Fellows, among them some of the most distinguished members in my day—Bob Brand, Geoffrey Dawson, Dougie Malcolm, Donald Somervell and others.
There were other classes of Fellow, too: professors whose chairs were attached to All Souls, a few research Fellows, and former Fellows re-elected by reason of their high academic or public distinction—colloquially known as “distinguished man Fellows”—who in other colleges would have been Honorary Fellows. Cabinet Office was a recognised qualification, hence the present membership of Quintin Hailsham, Keith Joseph and Douglas Jay. All these made a formidable company for a young man to be thrown into. It is, of course, an illusion to imagine that eminent men of high intellect commonly talk like Dr Johnson or the Rev Sydney Smith or Mr Gladstone, or like articles in learned journals. A great merit of the All Souls mixture of worldliness and learning is that, in such a society, learning, like charity, vaunteth not itself, and worldliness is not puffed up. Talk was rarely pontifical, and never sheltered from common-sense scrutiny behind the professional jargon or private language of intellectual cliques. Many of the company were not “intellectuals” in the sense in which the term is commonly used today, often with opprobrium. The distinction between I and non-I is both as subtle and as real as that between U and non-U.
When I was elected, a legendary generation had not long passed away: Walter Ralegh, the literary scholar, who reputedly had dominated the talk in coffee room; Alfred Edgeworth, the classical economist, sharp-tongued and fearless of persons; Warden Anson, constitutional lawyer, who had combined the Headship of the College with membership of Parliament for the University; and Cosmo Lang, the golden-voiced charmer, who after many years as Lord Mallard, the College’s traditional master of revels, had been obliged to forsake his fellowship upon being translated from the Archbishopric of York to that of Canterbury; for the archbishop of Canterbury is ex officio Visitor of the College, and therefore cannot be one of its governing members. As the lowest-ranking Fellow when Lang paid his first Visit in his new role, I held a candle for him to read his oration, while in his high-pitched melodious voice he spoke of the joy that he had had in that society, and the sorrow he suffered in being separated from it. Like an acolyte I stood beside him, sharing a little pool of light amid the shadows of the Common Room, never desecrated by the glare of electricity. This chamber is not, as its name might suggest, a sitting room, but a sort of inner dining room, where small dinners are set, and to which on bigger occasions the company repair from Hall for dessert and wine, discarding on the way their academic gowns. Here the Warden himself, though taking his due place at the head of table, was traditionally a guest, who left early at the signal of a formal toast to his health. On festive nights a Fellow called after the All Souls heraldic emblem the Lord Mallard, is president of that place, as the Sub-Warden is at other times. Dougie (Sir Dougal) Malcolm succeeded Lang as Lord Mallard, and was himself succeeded by Geoffrey Faber, founder of the publishing firm.
How a Lord Mallard is chosen is a mystery—certainly by some such non-arithmetical pursuit of consensus as in pre-Heath days served to pick a new leader of the Tory party. The choice, however, was limited; for he must be of senior standing, and a convivial personality, and above all capable of singing well, at gaudies, the Mallard Song. Is it the childishness, or the complexity, of human beings that makes the singing of a traditional song, private to a group, as strong a means as any other of binding them together in sentiment and loyalty? The Mallard Song of All Souls is modern compared with the College itself, a mere couple of centuries old, but the singing of it is a tradition which stirs the feelings of all but the most cynical. As dinner ends, the Lord Mallard strikes up, following each verse with the chorus sung solo, after which all repeat the chorus in unison.
Chicken, turkey, bustard, capon,
Let other hungry mortals gape on;
As for our choice, ’tis not at all hard,
It was a swapping, swapping mallard.
Oh! by the blood of King Edward,
Oh! by the blood of King Edward,
It was a swapping, swapping mallard.
And so on to the end:
Then let us sing and dance a galliard
Unto the memory of the mallard,
And as the mallard doth in pool,
We’ll dabble, duck and dive in bowl.
Oh! by the blood of King Edward ...
Recent Lord Mallards have invented and inserted a topical verse or two, with personal allusions, to everyone’s delight.
To millions of British people in the 1930s, Archbishop Lang was known chiefly for one thing, his preachment to Edward the Eighth on the King’s affair with Mrs Simpson; to them he was, with Prime Minister Baldwin, the power behind the Abdication. Many thought him a prig, which he was not; he was certainly more than a bit of a snob, who loved royalty and sought to preserve its mystique from the marriage of a self-willed monarch to a divorced commoner. (Soon after Edward the Eighth succeeded, an aged courtier said to me: “The trouble about that young man is that he doesn’t like ladies and gentlemen.”) But the archbishop would have the duty of crowning the new king, anointing him with oil in a rite which sanctified his accession and confirmed him as supreme governor of the English Church: in conscience he had no option but to advise as he did. The legend of Lang in All Souls was of a man of great social and conversational charm. I knew none of that for myself, but I do recall an occasion which fitted into that picture. The Balliol Society held a dinner in London to celebrate the fact that through the translation of Lang to Canterbury and the elevation of William Temple to York both Archbishops were Balliol men (but how different). As we sought our places at table there was a great hubbub of greetings between old friends and acquaintances. The toastmaster, scarlet-coated, medal-hung, hammered for audience and proclaimed sonorously: “My Lord Chairman, your Royal Highness, your Excellencies, your Graces, my Lords and gentlemen, pray silence for grace by his Grace, the Archbishop of Canterbury!” And, in the hush that followed, Lang said quietly: “For food and friends, thank God.”
There was one Fellow of All Souls, far senior even to those departed luminaries, still living and regularly visiting the College. Cholmondeley was the last Fellow for Life, elected as Founder’s Kin under the old statutes which were abolished by the reforms of 1873. Now Rector of Adlestrop, rising 90 when I was elected, he brought into the troubled world of the late 1920s a breath of a long-past age, with his silver-buckled shoes and his courtly manners, a dear soul who talked as readily with junior Fellows as with those whose membership also went back to the days of Queen Victoria, more readily indeed, for he had little in common with academic intellectuals or political nabobs.
Elsewhere in Oxford there were other long-lived figures. When my father was an undergraduate at the Queen’s College, in the late 1880s, Dr William McGrath was its Provost, and already of such an age that the College was speculating as to his successor; he was still Provost when I was an undergraduate forty years later. Under his portrait in Queen’s hall the dates of his Headship had been entered ready for completion: “Provost, 1873-18—” Long ago the last digit had been obviously painted out and a 9 substituted. When I was a young man Provost McGrath still took his afternoon airing in a horse-drawn open carriage. To return to All Souls—of those most senior figures I remember best Sir Charles Oman and Sir Charles Grant Robertson. They were both great talkers. Professor Oman, a famed historical scholar, with a head of curly white hair, eyes twinkling behind glasses, chattered happily about almost anything; for he had a truly photographic memory for all he had read. Although Politics were not much his line, in those days of academic privilege he was Member of Parliament for the University (to be ousted later by AP Herbert); in the House of Commons he spoke rarely, usually on questions of currency, not because he was an economist but because he was a numismatist, a dedicated authority on coins. To play Bridge with him, as sometimes happened when a second table was scratched together after a gaudy, was an excruciating experience; for while playing his hand somewhat erratically he would at the same time carry on a couple of bubbling conversations with others around the table. Sometimes, on gaudy nights, he would sing in Common Room, his pièce de résistance being a long ballad of the Peninsular War, whose tune I remember better than the words. Another song of his was “Abdul Abulbul Ameer”, but my memory links it rather with that distinguished lawyer John Archibald. Dougie Malcolm’s favourite was “The Laird o’ Cockpen.” Grant Robertson, a much more political animal, also a historian, and chronicler of All Souls itself, had forsaken formal teaching when he became Vice-Chancellor of Birmingham University; but he was a teacher by nature, and would lecture copiously among his contemporaries and juniors, little heeding if their attention wandered, raising the question, “Can an interesting man be a bore?” But he was well worth listening to, for his mind was sharp, his opinions vigorous and his knowledge vast.
Among the company were professional politicians too, as well as such amateurs. (It was an age before opinion polls took much of the gamble out of election results: the All Souls betting book records a sweep on the 1929 general election in which the sophisticated participants were so wrong that the pool was won by a Fellow who, professing total ignorance, simply divided the number of seats equally between Liberals, Conservatives and Labour, the actual result being 59, 260, 287.) Edward Wood, later Earl of Halifax, Foreign Secretary and Ambassador to Washington, became Viceroy of India in 1929 as Lord Irwin, and we saw little of him at All Souls in my earliest days, but later he came often. He was the ideal of the country-gentleman politician, as much at home on his Yorkshire land or in the hunting field—despite his withered arm—as in Parliament or Oxford common rooms, pious without pomposity, distinguished and assured but without superiority towards his juniors, tolerant of differing opinion. We were members of a society in which all were equal and outside honours, titles or position conferred no status though they earned respect. All Souls could then boast two Viceroys of India, separated by only one regime, Lord Harding’s. Chelmsford was to me a cooler and more remote figure than Halifax, and over the years it is Lady Chelmsford and their beautiful daughter Margaret Thesiger who stand out the more clearly in my memory. His Viceroyalty had been notable as much for the decisive steps that were taken in India’s constitutional advance as for the internal troubles that beset the raj towards the end of his term; though outshone in public personality by the dynamic, fluent and controversial Edwin Montagu, the Viceroy contributed more than was then generally realised to the epoch-making Montagu-Chelmsford report and the subsequent Indian constitution, and without his steady leadership and his influence with his provincial Governors and top civil servants they could not have carried with them the Government of India as a whole. An element of naïvété in his character is suggested by his interjection in a trifling conversation at the All Souls breakfast table about the best way of stropping safety-razor blades: “Did you say you made a blade last three weeks! I didn’t know you threw them away—I’ve used the same blade ever since I came home from India.” He talked more with his contemporaries than with the young, but he was totally modest and never laid down the law. It was a great loss to the College when, having just been elected Warden to succeed Dr Pember, he suddenly died; for he would have brought dignity and eminence to the Headship in the change-laden 1930s. He was succeeded by a Warden as different in character as could have been chosen, within a year, from the varied spectrum of the College. Professor George Adams, one of the most lovable of men, whose hospitality and kindness to me and my family in the last phase of the war, when London was an unsafe place for children, shine brightly in the recollection of dark times. By nature eclectic in outlook and never ready to take a difference of opinion as opposition, he incurred a memorable jibe: on seeing him in the High on the way to lecture in the Examination Schools on political institutions, someone said, “There goes Professor Adams to give his famous imitation of the British Commonwealth.”
But the best-known political personage of our number in those days was John Simon (then Sir John, later Viscount). Even more, perhaps, than Halifax and the Munich-time “appeasers”, Simon has suffered from simplistic judgment on character and policy both by the emotionally committed of those days and by a younger generation who followed their lead. Simon was indeed a bogeyman to me and others like me in the 1930s; for his part in the humiliation of the League in the Manchurian affair, his attitude towards the Optional Clause of the Hague Statute, and his foreign policy generally, made him appear a principal enemy of that idealistic internationalism which was embodied in the League of Nations, or at least in the sentiments of young people like me towards it. History may find more sense than error in his policies, though to me their tenor still seems to me timid and short-sighted, as does the substance of the Simon Report on Indian constitutional reform. His intellectual brilliance and forensic skill made his opinions seem the colder and less humane, just as a layman often thinks about a legal judgment or argument, that it declares to be right in law what he feels to be wrong in justice. He seemed a cold fish. This was an incomplete view of him as a man. In later years I found him surprisingly willing to seek and take advice from a much younger man on such a matter as the Nationality Bill 1949, and I knew of the friendships he had made with local people of modest station around his home at Fritwell in Oxfordshire. Nothing could have been more touching than his devotion to his wife, a woman of much less social and intellectual parts than himself, whom he could so easily have neglected for the world and people among whom he shone. I have a moving recollection of him at a party of ours in Tite Street about 1950, taking care of her all the time, and of those two elderly people walking away arm-in-arm. Here was no icicle. In All Souls, though, to a junior Fellow he did seem more aloof and more frostily cerebral than others of equal distinction.
Then there were the bishops. The age had not ended in which the Church was accepted as a proper and normal career for scholars and gentlemen. The Bishops of Durham and Gloucester were both very strong characters, imparting, each in his own way, a special flavour to any talk in which they took part. Hensley Henson of Durham did not come often to College, nor share much in general conversation. In gleaming top-hat and impeccable gaiters, he seemed to have stepped straight out of a Spy cartoon. He had a wit of steel, capable of cutting down an argument or an arguer with one sentence. If his theology scandalised traditionalists his opinions were sternly Tory, with a streak of radical cynicism bred of uncompromising reason. Cuthbert Headlam of Gloucester was even more uniformly conservative. Quite irrationally, his rooted Toryism seemed to me incongruous with his Northern accent—he used the short ‘a’ in words like ‘castle’—so unlike the speech of the Southern gentry. To Bishop Headlam the “labouring classes”—with a short ‘a’—were a pastoral flock, but most certainly sheep.
The College bursars were Geoffrey Faber and EL Woodward, later to become Sir Geoffrey and Sir Llewellyn for their services to literature and learning. Faber was founder of a rising publishing firm—it was he who persuaded me to write my first book, “The Economics of a Changing World”, which scarcely added to his profits—Woodward a busy lecturer and tutor in modern history, yet they managed the finances, estates and buildings of a rich college and all its domestic affairs. This seemed perfectly natural in the age of the amateur. They were both good talkers and good friends to me. Arnott, the College cook, was excellent at his profession, a delightful shy man so French in his manner, his skill and his habit of going early every day to the market to choose for himself the meat, fish and vegetables, that I am sure his real name must have been Arnot. All Souls had splendid wine, too, despite the legend that when central heating was installed in the Codrington Library the unlagged pipes were laid through the cellars, so that the wine nearly boiled. In those days we were drinking daily the vintage ports of 1904 and 1908, clarets and burgundies of 1912, all great years. Once, for a day on the river, punting with a girl friend, I asked Arnott to pack me a picnic lunch and a bottle of champagne. This turned out to be Veuve Clicquot 1914, the most famous champagne vintage of the century. Fortunately the girl was educated enough to appreciate it. Not so a young American lady with a famous family name, one of the guests at a dinner party that my friend de Witt Hendee Smith and I gave before a Commem Ball, who flashed at me a look of disgust at my bad manners when I did not offer her a cigarette between courses and between wines of precious vintages.
The Senior Fellows whom I came to know best were those connected with The Round Table—Bob Brand, Dougie Malcolm, Geoffrey Dawson, Lionel Curtis—but of them I shall write later in a different context. The senior academic Fellows were as fascinating company as those who at weekends escaped to Oxford from a wider world. Sir William Holdsworth, Chichele Professor of Law, was a specially remarkable character. Tall and broad-shouldered—he had been a champion punter on the Thames—he wore a great moustache whose vigorous peaks could be seen on either side of his head from behind, a unique phenomenon before the wartime cult in the Royal Air Force. To a junior Fellow his capacity for port after dinner was his most impressive trait, for it was the former’s duty to stay until the last of his seniors had left the table in Common Room, in case another bottle of wine had to be opened. The butler was banished from that sanctuary when the port was circulated, leaving a bin of wine which the Junior Fellow, dubbed in this role “Mr Screw”, had to decant if it was needed. This was a dread function for me on nights when many were present and the port decanter was passed to Mr Screw at the foot of the table; for the corks in the bottles that we were then drinking crumbled like biscuits, and it was almost impossible to decant the wine without fragmenting the cork and having to pour the wine through a strainer, a shameful resort to which one hated to confess. Holdsworth liked his port, and on ordinary week-nights would sit on with Mr Screw, drinking from a dock glass, about twice the capacity of a normal port glass. Had I kept pace with him I would have been too fuddled to do much more than go to bed, but eventually Holdsworth would say, “Well, I must go and do some work,” take a big pinch of snuff and stride off to his rooms to labour until the small hours on his revision of Blackstone’s Commentaries or some other work of legal learning.
Richard Pares and Leslie Rowse were of the middle rank of All Souls dons, and often each was a catalyst for the wit of the other. Pares, historian of the West Indies, though sharp-tongued when aroused or irritated, was a man of great charm and gentleness of character, which seemed to grow with the progressive disease that carried him off so young. AL Rowse has told the world of his early life in his books and other writings, and has revealed much of his own character. Today he is known to the world not only for his immense knowledge of the Elizabethan age, his fluent though oddly flawed literary skill and his energetic output years after his contemporaries have sunk into senile silence, but also for his intolerance of criticism, the venom of his criticism of others, and his breath-taking self-applause. In his younger days these traits, though present in a degree, were much less apparent. He was a man of wit and humour, a stimulating talker, a genial friend. As the years passed, however, the College became split, as the world at large evidently is in his own eyes, into his admirers and his critics, whom he sees as enemies. There was one election to the Wardenship in which some Fellows wanted him chosen, while others said, “Over my dead body”. (I write from hearsay, not from inside knowledge, for to disclose such things as an elector would be an unforgivable breach of College etiquette.) Some called him “the Cardinal”; he had the superiority, the dogmatism and the distinction from ordinary men of a traditional Prince of the Church. No doubt humility does not come easily to the socially and intellectually successful who start from humble backgrounds, nor magnanimity to those who have trodden the path to fame by immense industry in a jealous and competitive world, as the academic world unhappily is.
Another younger Fellow, a couple of years senior to me, was John Foster, later Sir John, QC, MP. He was then the acknowledged eccentric of the College. He was awed by no man and no tradition. It was told of him that when he was “vivaed” for his Fellowship, he was asked by the Warden, as was still the time-honoured procedure, to choose either a Latin or a Greek passage from a paper handed to him and to translate it aloud, and that he abruptly declined. Taken aback, Warden Pember said: “You may take your time, Mr Foster, and do your best; we will help you out if need be.” “No, Mr Warden, I’m sorry, but it would be a waste of your time.” So he was allowed to leave, and whether his intransigence was forgiven because his papers were so excellent, or his courage was counted for merit, he was elected, and proceeded to wreck other minor traditions of the College. A teetotaller by taste rather than conviction, he was said to have put a head of froth on the port when decanting it as Mr Screw. It was then also one of Mr Screw’s duties to mix the salad, a task which John Foster performed to such effect that the practice was promptly abolished. His fearlessness and his caustic tongue made people think him tough-hided and ruthless; he was in fact a compassionate man, a lasting friend and a sympathetic counsellor. When he was on the library committee of All Souls, they had to deal with a young assistant who had been stealing books: it was the hardboiled lawyer who pleaded passionately with the punitive dons not to prosecute but to allow the misguided young man another chance in life. Witness, too, his lifelong devotion to his “old aunt”, Miss Carruthers, actually his former governess, who had brought him up when his father and mother parted, whom he supported, shared his homes with and took with him everywhere. If he neither drank alcohol nor smoked, his other appetites were voracious. (His sexual appetite, I am told, though notoriously extensive, was not equally intense.)
When he was staying in a country house for the weekend a whispered conversation took place between the host and his butler at the Sunday evening dinner table. “I see Mr Foster wants some more ginger ale.” “I am afraid we have no more, my Lord.” “But I told you to get in plenty.” “Yes, my Lord, I ordered a crate, but Mr Foster has drunk it all.” John’s stories, mostly of the courts, were often outrageous, and he would as readily tell them in a London salon as in an Oxford smoking-room. I have seen a stout middle-aged Marchioness, at a musical soirée, convulsed by a story which no one else I know would have dared to tell among ladies.
Close to him in seniority was Roger Makins, now Lord Sherfield. A passion for fast cars gripped him then, as I believe it still does. One is unlikely nowadays to have the experience of being driven through Headington at 80 miles an hour while the driver as well as his passengers eat sandwiches. Fifty years ago, with bad roads and comparatively slow cars (except for the Bentleys and Lagondas and the like), it took me just about the same time to drive from Oxford to central London in a snub-nosed Morris as it took me in a Jaguar in the 1960s, before the opening of the M40 motorway; for there was comparatively little traffic, especially at night. High Wycombe was a smallish town, and London did not begin at Gerrards Cross. Only the motorways have much altered average speeds from door to door since the era of the popular motor car began, sixty years ago. On the other hand, traffic congestion at nodal points was often much worse in those days: in Oxford, on a Whitsun bank holiday around 1930, it took me nearly an hour to drive up the High Street from Long Wall to Carfax, less than half a mile. Right up to the second world war, the most comfortable and safest time to drive was at night; for there would be few other vehicles about and the headlights of approaching cars gave warning even round corners. How different from the misery of night-time driving today in face of the constant flash and dazzle of oncoming traffic!
One other of my All Souls contemporaries I must celebrate here, my electoral “twin”, Archie Campbell, academic lawyer and emeritus professor of Edinburgh University. He was some four years older than me, having read Greats and gone on to take a BCL. His intellectual brilliance was masked by his cheerful wit, his pleasure in the good things of life, and his enjoyment of the company of less scholarly mortals. He looked too pink, drank rather too much at gaudies, took little exercise and suffered from duodenal ulcers and other ailments, so that one would have hesitated to insure his life at standard premiums; as I write, he is 84 and his company is as entertaining as ever, a living tribute to the virtues of wine and the toughness of the Scots.
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