In the 1960s, at a time when I took myself more seriously, I went to work for the Observer in what I mistakenly believed was a rather important position. One afternoon, soon after my arrival, a stranger walked into the office I shared with two other people. He was neat, quite short and stocky, and, I seem to remember, he wore a pale tweed jacket. He had a pleasant light tenor voice and the air, perhaps, of a popular geography master at a prep school.
The stranger strolled nonchalantly round the small room dictating letters to the person I regarded as ‘my’ secretary. ‘Dear Mrs Coleridge, Thank you for your letter. I must confess I have never met a man who earned his living as a flange wrangler, but it sounds a most interesting job . . . Dear Mr Clifton, It was so kind of you to send me your father’s copy of the Swahili phrase-book, which I shall always treasure . . . Dear G. W. Hurst, I very much enjoyed your observations about Japanese waltzing mice . . .’
This man, I soon discovered, was Paul Jennings, creator of the ‘Oddly Enough’ column, up in town from his home in East Bergholt and replying to his fan mail. (This could be irritating for any self-important young journalist to listen to, particularly for one with no fans of his own.) The performance was repeated every two or three weeks; he would arrive, dictate a few politely surreal letters, click his briefcase shut, give a jovial wave and leave.
Of course, I made up those letters, but they reflect the flavour of ‘Oddly Enough’ and, in fact, on two or three occasions over the years he did write about the phenomenon of Japanese waltzing mice. The humour of his column, which appeared in the Observer from 1949 until 1966, was based on whimsy and wordplay. Whimsy has come to be despised by smart modern humorists, but in Jennings it came fortified with a sharp intelligence and a rich imagination.
A few years later, I found my
Subscribe or sign in to read the full article
The full version of this article is only available to subscribers to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly. To continue reading, please sign in or take out a subscription to the quarterly magazine for yourself or as a gift for a fellow booklover. Both gift givers and gift recipients receive access to the full online archive of articles along with many other benefits, such as preferential prices for all books and goods in our online shop and offers from a number of like-minded organizations. Find out more on our subscriptions page.
Subscribe now or Sign inIn the 1960s, at a time when I took myself more seriously, I went to work for the Observer in what I mistakenly believed was a rather important position. One afternoon, soon after my arrival, a stranger walked into the office I shared with two other people. He was neat, quite short and stocky, and, I seem to remember, he wore a pale tweed jacket. He had a pleasant light tenor voice and the air, perhaps, of a popular geography master at a prep school.
The stranger strolled nonchalantly round the small room dictating letters to the person I regarded as ‘my’ secretary. ‘Dear Mrs Coleridge, Thank you for your letter. I must confess I have never met a man who earned his living as a flange wrangler, but it sounds a most interesting job . . . Dear Mr Clifton, It was so kind of you to send me your father’s copy of the Swahili phrase-book, which I shall always treasure . . . Dear G. W. Hurst, I very much enjoyed your observations about Japanese waltzing mice . . .’ This man, I soon discovered, was Paul Jennings, creator of the ‘Oddly Enough’ column, up in town from his home in East Bergholt and replying to his fan mail. (This could be irritating for any self-important young journalist to listen to, particularly for one with no fans of his own.) The performance was repeated every two or three weeks; he would arrive, dictate a few politely surreal letters, click his briefcase shut, give a jovial wave and leave. Of course, I made up those letters, but they reflect the flavour of ‘Oddly Enough’ and, in fact, on two or three occasions over the years he did write about the phenomenon of Japanese waltzing mice. The humour of his column, which appeared in the Observer from 1949 until 1966, was based on whimsy and wordplay. Whimsy has come to be despised by smart modern humorists, but in Jennings it came fortified with a sharp intelligence and a rich imagination. A few years later, I found myself employed in the whimsy trade and I came to appreciate the quiet brilliance of Paul Jennings. I wished I had taken the opportunity to get to know him better. The great J. B. Morton wrote the Introduction to the first book of collected ‘Oddly Enough’ pieces (and articles for other publications, including Punch) which appeared in 1950. He observed that the humour of Paul Jennings was English, which was certainly true, and he added: ‘Mr Jennings has Chesterton’s habit of seeing familiar things as though he had suddenly noticed them for the first time, so they are a surprise to him.’ This neatly sums up the Jennings approach and he must have been thrilled at such praise from the creator of the ‘Beachcomber’ column where everything was dazzlingly surprising. The sport of wordplay can be seen in the titles of Jennings’ books – such as Even Oddlier, Oddly Bodlikins, Next to Oddliness and I Said Oddly, Diddle I? In 1963 Penguin published a pretty definitive selection called The Jenguin Pennings and in 1983 Methuen brought out a retrospective volume entitled Golden Oddlies. His most often quoted conceit was his piece called ‘Ware, Wye and Watford’ in which he explored ‘the vast English treasury of subconscious meaning’ in place names. If someone tells you ‘I’m feeling a little wembley today’, you know you are dealing with a fan of Jennings, who defined the word as ‘suffering from a vague malaise’. According to Jennings, beccles is an ailment in sheep, ilkley means having large eyebrows, cromer is a mistake or bungle – as in ‘you made a cromer there’ - and stevenage is an ancient nominal rental paid to a lord of the manor. Humorous writers today would scorn the idea of making jokes about the perils of touch typing and the way the words come out skew-whiff but Jennings could pull it off with one neat observation. Qwertyuiop, he suggested, would be a good onomatopoeic word for a corkscrew, the qw-erty suggesting the squeak of the cork being turned in the bottle and the ui-OP being the sound of it coming out. He loved language and languages. Instructions in German and French on how to use a public telephone enchanted him. After seeing the 1951 film Quo Vadis (Hollywood’s version of ancient Rome) he was inspired to write his own film treatment, with all the great cinema clichés in Latin. Nonne aliquis tibi dixit te pulchram esse? the hero says when he first meets the heroine (‘Did anyone ever tell you you’re beautiful?’). After this we get all the old Hollywood favourites – from ‘So that’s your game’ (Sic illud est ludus tuus) to ‘You stay out of this, sister’ (Tu mane ex hoc, soror). Paul Jennings was born in 1918 and educated at King Henry VIII School, Coventry, and at the Benedictine school Douai Abbey. He first contributed to Punch when he was a lieutenant in the Royal Signals. He worked for a time for the Central Office of Information and it was probably there that he became a connoisseur of official jargon. After a spell in advertising he joined the Observer in 1949. One of his early pieces, which appeared in the Spectator in 1948, was more satire than whimsy. It was called ‘Resistentialism’ and was a blistering spoof on the currently fashionable Existentialism. Developed by Paul-Marie Ventre, who haunted the Café aux Fines Herbes on the Left Bank in Paris, Resistentialism was based on the proposition Les choses sont contre nous or ‘Things are against us’. Some people who have seen Ventre’s plays, Jennings wrote, are apt to think that Resistentialism is largely a matter of sitting inside a wet sack and moaning, but of course it is much more than that. Its influence has also spread to art and music. He goes on to describe, in the most elaborately scholarly terms, the essence of the philosophy, how it involves such concepts as the unfoldability of newspapers and how toast tends to fall marmalade-side down more often on more expensive carpets. In short, it is an early exposition of Sod’s Law in intellectual fancy dress. I can’t imagine Paul Jennings ever walking briskly down the street; he was a natural stroller, always on the lookout for interesting names on brass plates on buildings, and if he spotted one of those mysterious cast-iron notices you still see rusting on bridges or railway crossings he would pause and patiently read it to the end. A sign saying ‘Activated Sludge’ caught his attention and unleashed a fantasy, as did the ‘Submerged Log Company’ and ‘Glass Benders’. He loved lists, particularly those found in obscure Board of Trade pamphlets. How happy he would be today, with the minutiae of European Union directives and treaties. He relished joke-shop catalogues, listing ‘dehydrated worms, impossible spoon joke, wobbly matchbox with key, best joke moustaches . . .’ He delighted in the list of thirty-seven Shetland telephone exchanges before they became part of the Aberdeen zone in July 1951 – ‘Mid Yell, Vidlin, Voe, Fetlar . . .’ and he was cleared for take-off on another flight of fancy. I am intrigued by Jennings’s friend Harblow who appears on several occasions in his pieces, usually as ‘my friend Harblow’. Like clubby chaps of the past, he is referred to only by his surname. I imagine a tweedy fellow of few words, with a pipe and a moustache. An old-fashioned man’s man. Was he made up or did he really exist? Clues in the columns suggest he was a friend from army days and in early writings there are several accounts of motoring in France with Harblow in Jennings’s 1928 Austin Seven. It’s possible, from a study of the various Oddlies, to piece together a partial portrait of a subtly comic character: Harblow had a mongrel dog called Jim, was a bit of a hypochondriac, a noisy gargler, thought he knew about plumbing but didn’t. He also knew his rights. In a piece called ‘Money Back’, Jennings describes a visit to a London tea-room with Harblow where they encounter an unsatisfactory peach melba. He steels himself as he realizes that his friend is about to lodgea complaint. ‘Harblow, I thought bitterly, is the sort of man who would ask for his money back at the cinema if the projectionist, the manager and all the usherettes were shot dead by bandits two minutes before the end of the film.’ Paul Jennings also liked to turn to light verse and he was capable of coming up with some lines which would certainly have impressed that supreme rhymester Ogden Nash. Expressing his indignation at his discovery that it was possible to buy tinned beetroot, he wrote of:Foods which depress you, like the books of Schopenhauer, And are not worth your trouble with the tin and the openhauer. And I share his admiration for postmen: Postmen don’t seem to mind cold and rain, they seem impervious. They are the nicest people in the Civil Servious.I saw Paul Jennings just once after we had both left the Observer. It was in a South London pub, close to Trinity Church, in Southwark, and he was one of a jolly crowd. I realized they must have been a choir who had just finished rehearsing in the nearby church. He was laughing and joking with his friends. Music made him happy. I wanted to go up to him and tell him how much I had come to admire his work, but I was too shy. So I’m saying it now.
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 40 © Oliver Pritchett 2013
About the contributor
Oliver Pritchett has given up full-time whimsy production in order to concentrate on idle fancy.