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A Talent to Amuse

Thirty years or so ago, we always shopped on a Friday morning at a local supermarket, and for a number of weeks we observed a strange phenomenon in the car park. Cars would arrive at, say, five to nine – but instead of everyone leaping out and going about their business, not a door opened until five seconds past the hour, when with one accord everyone sprang from their cars and made for the lift. The reason: at nine, Arthur Marshall stopped reading the latest instalment of his autobiography, Life’s Rich Pageant (1984).

Marshall was one of those people who become extremely well-known and indeed well-loved, and who delight and entertain, without seeming actually to have made any effort (Joyce Grenfell is another example). His talent was remarkable, incorrigible and effervescent. Life’s Rich Pageant goes some way to explaining how he did it, while at the same time being a hugely enjoyable read.

The title of the book was inevitable. He first heard the phrase from Harry Secombe, some time in the 1970s, and asked where it came from. ‘From you,’ said Secombe – and indeed Marshall found that he’d used it in a recording he had made in the late 1930s. The compilers of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations having failed to find it anywhere else, had attributed it to him.

His parents sent him first to the kindergarten section of the Froebel Institute in Hammersmith, then to a co-educational school overlooking Barnes Common, and finally to a preparatory boarding-school on the Hampshire coast. Each experience was, he said, more traumatic than the last. Happiness came at Oundle, which he loved, and then at Cambridge where he naturally graduated to the university dramatic society, appearing in several leading roles and according to Noël Annan acting Michael Redgrave ‘clear off the stage’ as Lady Cecily in Shaw’s Captain Brassbound’s Conversion. But after Cambridge it turned out that he simply wasn�

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Thirty years or so ago, we always shopped on a Friday morning at a local supermarket, and for a number of weeks we observed a strange phenomenon in the car park. Cars would arrive at, say, five to nine – but instead of everyone leaping out and going about their business, not a door opened until five seconds past the hour, when with one accord everyone sprang from their cars and made for the lift. The reason: at nine, Arthur Marshall stopped reading the latest instalment of his autobiography, Life’s Rich Pageant (1984).

Marshall was one of those people who become extremely well-known and indeed well-loved, and who delight and entertain, without seeming actually to have made any effort (Joyce Grenfell is another example). His talent was remarkable, incorrigible and effervescent. Life’s Rich Pageant goes some way to explaining how he did it, while at the same time being a hugely enjoyable read. The title of the book was inevitable. He first heard the phrase from Harry Secombe, some time in the 1970s, and asked where it came from. ‘From you,’ said Secombe – and indeed Marshall found that he’d used it in a recording he had made in the late 1930s. The compilers of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations having failed to find it anywhere else, had attributed it to him. His parents sent him first to the kindergarten section of the Froebel Institute in Hammersmith, then to a co-educational school overlooking Barnes Common, and finally to a preparatory boarding-school on the Hampshire coast. Each experience was, he said, more traumatic than the last. Happiness came at Oundle, which he loved, and then at Cambridge where he naturally graduated to the university dramatic society, appearing in several leading roles and according to Noël Annan acting Michael Redgrave ‘clear off the stage’ as Lady Cecily in Shaw’s Captain Brassbound’s Conversion. But after Cambridge it turned out that he simply wasn’t good enough to get work as an actor; his parents declined to support him while he tried to make his way, and he returned to Oundle – as a master – and remained there happily for over twenty years. He must have been a delight as a teacher. Set to take Scripture, as the boys read their way stolidly through St Matthew: ‘“Oh, do please stop!’ I cried, adding in the silence that fell, “isn’t this all perfectly ghastly? What are we to do? . . . I tell you what, have any of you heard of Aldous Huxley?”’ They spent the rest of the term reading their way through Huxley, H. G. Wells and Lytton Strachey. The boys all scored zero for Scripture, but the headmaster, the amiable Dr Kenneth Fisher, made no comment. It was shortly after this that Marshall discovered Angela Brazil’s school stories, and devised a series of three-minute monologues for himself as the school nurse, Nurse Dugdale (‘Blanche Doubleday, dee-ah, what are you doing?’). The great French revue producer André Charlot engaged him to appear on his late-night BBC radio show, he made five records for Columbia, and Ivor Novello invited him to perform at a private party on his birthday in his famous flat above the Strand theatre for an audience consisting almost entirely of performers Marshall had idolized for years. Once again the headmaster of Oundle cast an indulgent eye on his spare-time activity – and his annual end-of-school-year revues became increasingly ambitious. His scripts for radio were so well-honed that he began to be known as a writer, and the New Statesman of all magazines (for he was soundly right-wing) invited him to contribute as early as 1935. His annual review of the best books for girls was eagerly awaited, not only by his subjects, who included Miss Brazil, Winifred Darch and Dorita Fairlie Bruce, but by the magazine’s subscribers. The war rather interrupted his radio career, though from time to time Nurse Dugdale still made an appearance. He was summoned to the War Office as an interpreter (French and German) and all too soon found himself in Northern France, where he dealt with his shyness when faced by intimidating senior staff officers in a typical manner:

Because of my admiration for Angela Brazil, I chose to imagine that we were all in a vast girls’ school: Headmistress, Miss Gladys Gort: school colours, khaki and black: School motto, Don’t Look Back Or You Might See Something Nasty. All the junior girls were dead nuts on that new and dashing little hockey mistress, Miss Brenda Montgomery, and with this phantasy the tensions gradually eased. Forgive the apparent idiocy, inspired by personal need and inadequacy rather than by disrespect.

He found that he had to report regularly to Montgomery, and became sadly distracted during the Field Marshal’s long lectures on Field Security:

I became fascinated, inconsequentially, by the elegance and length of his nose. Could all of it possibly be real? I met it again some years later, when its owner came to lecture at Oundle and I sat next to him at lunch, when all the old wonderment returned. Dare one give it an investigative tweak? Better not, perhaps. He was a pleasant man to meet in private and when in relaxed mood, but in public and when lecturing one wished him otherwise, for the boastful victor and really rather sad braggart emerged, a cut below the Churchills and Alexanders and Eisenhowers.

He smiled his way grimly through the retreat and evacuation from Dunkirk: ‘Smiles were rare, but when things are very bad my nervous reaction is to wear a look of inane cheerfulness, quite horrible to behold.’ Tottering ashore at Folkestone the troops found welcoming faces:

Kind WI ladies dispensed sweets (‘How about some chocky’, one kept saying, red-eyed, as we filed past) . . . The windows of houses all along the line were open and were filled with people waving and cheering and shouting. Children stood on embankments and fluttered flags, cars blew their horns. ‘Good heavens,’ somebody said, ‘whatever would they have done if we had won?’

He became an ADC to Mountbatten, and clearly hero-worshipped him – not perhaps unreasonably, for his way of giving an order was, ‘Now, Marshall, will you run along and do that for me?’ Back in France after D-Day, he became an Intelligence Officer, eventually Lieutenant-Colonel Marshall, MBE, on General Eisenhower’s staff. He lived for a while on Hitler’s private yacht with, among others, the captured German generals Jodl and Keitel. At lunch one day, a couple of German workmen appeared, sawed through the throat of the bust of Hitler which stood in the dining-room, and carried the head off in a sack: all in complete silence. After the war, it was business as usual – largely show business. ‘A Date with Nurse Dugdale’ continued on radio and he wrote sketches for Hermione Gingold and others. His playwriting career was unsuccessful, though his adaptation of the French farce Cactus Flower did well. He continued to write for the New Statesman, then (allegedly sacked for being too kind about Mrs Thatcher) for the Sunday Telegraph and the Spectator. Several collections of his book reviews were published – and highly readable they are, for they usually consisted of 800 words of reminiscence and anecdote, and, with luck, a final paragraph about the book under review. Extremely well-known in England by the end of his life (he died in 1989) Marshall never made it in America, though he often visited, staying with his great friends Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, always remaining stolidly British: in the mornings, on his walk,  polite greetings of ‘Hi!’ were to be heard.

As I have never been able to manage ‘Hi!’ with conviction, I settled for ‘Good afternoon’. This, uttered in my prim English accent, gave much pleasure. In shops, old grandmothers were hauled down from upstairs to hear me speak. I was asked if I knew the Queen. ‘Only to wave to,’ I said . . .

He was a very private but always delightful man – approachable and with the endearing habit of remembering (or at least appearing to remember) who one was. He was gay, but would have been extremely uncomfortable with any idea of ‘coming out’, even I suspect to very close friends. For the last fifteen years of his life he lived happily in retirement at Christow in Devon with a partner, like himself a retired schoolmaster. Marshall’s endearing niceness and shrewd but never cruel wit made for success on radio and TV – he was best-known as a permanent member of the BBC television Call My Bluff team. As Frank Muir said, ‘He wrote the way he talked, and he talked the way he lived, and in its own quiet way it all worked beautifully.’ For himself, he recalled the moment in a debate at school, when

I said, and plainly by mistake, something or other that made everybody laugh, and laugh satisfactorily loudly and long . . . What a splendid sound! And I made laughter a prime consideration in life . . . I have sought laughter out wherever possible. My ears are ever cocked for it. Not a very lofty aim in life, perhaps, but I don’t for one moment regret it.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 48 © Derek Parker 2015


About the contributor

Derek Parker lives in Sydney with his wife Julia and two wire-haired fox terriers. He has lately been revising some of his early books and making them available on the Internet. The enthusiasm of readers has so far been supportable.

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