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Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles writes: As private secretary to the Foreign Office’s permanent under-secretary, I had quite a bit to do with Robert Fellowes (obituary, July 31). My best memory of him involved an incident during the Queen’s epic visit to the United States in 1991.
Things got off to an awkward start when, during the welcoming ceremony on the White House lawn, President George HW Bush (who was tall) forgot to pull out a “riser” hidden under the lectern for the Queen to stand on as she replied to the president. So what the world saw, and the media joyfully reported, was “the Talking Hat!”.
The next day the Queen had to address a joint session of Congress. In the car to Capitol Hill, she was uncharacteristically anxious, fretting about how her speech would be received. Robert tentatively ventured “Ma’am, why don’t you start with a joke, to break the ice”. As she rose to speak, she began, in a slow deadpan fashion, but in cut-glass tones: “I do hope you can all see me today.” The chamber erupted, in a prolonged standing ovation.
Stephen Green writes: Lord Fellowes was my chairman for part of the time that I was curator of the MCC’s library, museum and archives at Lord’s.
In my younger days I used to take part in a sponsored walk from Trafalgar Square to Canterbury Cathedral in aid of the work undertaken by St Martin-in-the-Fields for the homeless. Robert Fellowes was one of my most generous sponsors. I used to enjoy filling in the sponsorship form and giving his address as Buckingham Palace, SW1.
As was evidenced in his support for prison reforms he had great sympathy for the underdog.
Humphrey Walters writes: In 1987 I approached David English, editor of the Daily Mail to give me some free publicity for a charity event I was running for the Royal Marsden hospital. In his charming way he agreed provided I did something for him. The “something” was to run the London Marathon in 1989 to raise money to build a swimming pool for a boys’ club in Rotherhithe, near the newspaper’s print works.
I had four months to get fit enough to complete 26 miles. Everyone I spoke to said it couldn’t be done, would damage my knees, hips and ankles and I was mad. All except John Anderson (obituary, July 29), who immediately told me he would give me a regime to get me through and I would be able to complete the event. I was three stone over weight and he explained that burst athletes — 100m runners — have fast-twitch muscle. Long-distance runners have slow-twitch muscle, but he said: “Unfortunately you have no twitch muscle, so we will work on your muscle make-up and your weight will fall off you.”
I completed the marathon in 4 hours 15 minutes. Since then I have run 48 marathons and 150 half-marathons and am 82 years old. I attribute my good health and motivation to this wonderful man.
Robert Rhodes KC writes: Perhaps the most brilliant essay in Professor Frederick Crews’s (obituary, August 7) The Pooh Perplex was his spoof Marxist essay on Winnie-the-Pooh in which he said that England had “a bourgeois aristocracy, a bourgeois bourgeoisie, and a bourgeois proletariat”.Some might think that observation is as true today as when it was written 60 years ago.
Mary Kenny writes: You allude in your obituary to Edna O’Brien (July 29) to copies of her first novel, The Country Girls, being “ceremoniously burnt” because it offended Irish morals. No evidence of the event has been forthcoming.
In November 2015 the late Father Tom Stack, a priest I knew, who was a man of literature, wrote to The Irish Times, seeking any witness who had information about this alleged book-burning. Father Stack travelled to Co Clare and investigated every possible source, but no evidence was produced, and no witness (even under cover of anonymity) came forward.
O’Brien, whom I knew, was hurt by the rebuffs she initially received from her community, but she admitted later, at interview, that “maybe it was just a very small fire”. Surely if a book-burning was “ceremonious”, someone would have seen it?
Michael Oatley CMG, OBE writes: In 1972 when Northern Ireland descended into chaos and the British government responded by imposing direct rule, Dennis Trevelyan (obituary, August 12), at that time an under-secretary in the Home Office, was one of the senior officials who accompanied Willie Whitelaw, the secretary of state, to Belfast to set up shop in Stormont and rule the province.
For most of them Northern Ireland was as foreign, and its politics as little understood, as a holiday destination might have been, and their attempts to grasp control of the situation reflected this. One afternoon relaxing briefly in the Culloden Hotel, where they were billeted, Dennis amused himself by designing a coat of arms for the Whitelaw team. I sadly can only remember one of the four quarters. This was a row of three hooks drawn somewhat as one might have been found in a medieval torture chamber. Their significance in Dennis’s view was that whenever the secretary of state was encouraged to make a statement of policy it was afterwards found to have been a mistake. But we were obliged to live with it. Hooked.
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