Books appear in many different formats, shapes, sizes and technologies. This autumn British Vogue: the Biography of an Icon will be available in three formats: the hardback version, the Kindle version and the audiobook. This last intrigues me. It is a combination of my words, an actor’s voice and a producer’s interpretation of both. And it is the melding of the three parts that can create a magical voice for the listener or can produce an inharmonious clang that sounds quite off note.
This time I have been very fortunate to have my book read by Katherine Manners, a British actress with a sparkling career on stage and film. She is also trained as a funeral and family celebrant and officiates at weddings, funerals, memorials and naming ceremonies, especially serving members of the LGBT community. Best of all she has just the right voice for my writing. And that matters. Too strident and my words sound as if they are created for am dram, too soft and they lose their way in a haze of aspirants. I think she has done an amazing job and I am so delighted that the audio book is now out.
People often ask me who my favourite editor/stylist/photographer was to write about. It is hard to say because each era produced not only great talent but fascinating reactions to the times. However, it would be difficult to overstate the importance of Lee Miller to Vogue during the Second World War and I love this short clip, read by Katherine, that describes Lee’s first experience of arriving in France to photograph a field hospital in August 1944.
Vogue September 1944, Lee Miller’s first report from France for Audrey Withers
Lee would go on to photograph and write about the liberation of Paris, the final battle ‘Nordwind’ in Alsace and her first-hand experience of the concentration camps of Ohrdruf, Buchenwald and Dachau. Although Audrey Withers only reproduced one image from those ghastly camps, she delivered Lee’s final diatribe against the Nazis almost unedited. It is an astonishing piece of writing for its undisguised anger and jarred with the upbeat message of the Victory issue in June 1945. Audrey may have lost her nerve over the images, but she knew exactly what she was doing by letting Lee’s disgust appear in print the magazine. This was my second opportunity to write about Lee Miller and Audrey Withers. I never tire of looking back at their extraordinary working relationship over an intense 18 months of the war. In Dressed for War I was able to devote a whole chapter to them and it is now the subject of LEE starring Kate Winslet with Andrea Riseborough as Audrey.
While Audrey is best known for her wartime work at Vogue, her successor, Ailsa Garland, is seldom celebrated. She edited Vogue for 4 years and oversaw the transformation of the magazine from the staid 1950s to the sexy, swinging sixties. She introduced David Bailey and Jean Shrimpton to her readers, she featured the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in 1963 and embraced the brilliant Vidal Sassoon. This clip marks that moment when the first green shoots of the new styles that came to define the decade were first seen.
Vogue January 1961
One of the most enjoyable aspects of researching and writing this book has been watching the magazine change month by month. It reflects the time period in which it comes out, and each editor interprets the world according to Vogue. The longest serving editor, Alexandra Shulman, was at the helm for 25 years and presided over the tumultuous events around the turn of the century, from the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, to the Millennium, 9/11 and the Arab Spring. Her editorship was bold, creative and full of fascinating journalism as well as glorious fashion shoots. One of my favourite moments was when fashion features editor Harriet Quick summed up the new attitude towards body shape in 2003. I sense Katherine Manners much enjoyed reading that chapter.
Vogue March 2003 ‘Body Beautiful’
Having had the most extraordinary fortnight following the discovery of Sandy Irvine’s boot on Everest and the subsequent media circus that resulted, I’m relishing the prospect of listening to Katherine reading words in my ear. If you are into audio books I do hope you will enjoy it as well.
For the first six months of 2024, I was busy and taken up with two projects. The first was the centenary celebration of the disappearance of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine on Mount Everest on 8 June 1924. The second was the completion of my biography of British Vogue which was in the final stages of proofs, and we were looking to pin down the pictures. It was a delightful juxtaposition. I enjoyed flitting between exquisite photoshoots by Nick Knight and Mario Testino in Vogue and the chilly black, white and blue world of the high Himalaya. While the book proofs were being tweaked and the index completed, I took part in several events to mark the Everest 100th anniversary. The first was at Shrewsbury School in February, the day the expedition set off from Liverpool on 29 February 1924. Then a seminar day on 26 April at Merton College, Oxford (Sandy Irvine’s college) on the day he got his first sighting of the mountain from Pang La Pass 100 years ago.
Sandy Irvine 1923 The Warden & Fellows of Merton College, Oxford
And finally the major celebration at the Royal Geographical Society in London, organised by Rebecca Stephens and the Himalayan Trust. This took place on 8 June, the exact date the two climbers were last seen by Captain Noel Odell ‘going strong for the top.’ It was an extraordinary and moving event and we all felt that the centenary of the greatest mountaineering mystery of all time had been well and truly put to bed. I even announced my intention to retire from Everest-related matters.
And so I returned to the rarified air of high fashion and Vogue history. Over the summer I finalised the selection of images for the plates section, saw the final proofs off to the setters and then, as readers of this blog will know, I was fortunate enough to see the book coming off the presses on 3 September. After a short but lovely walking holiday in Greece, I returned to a frenzy of pre-publication activity for the Vogue biography. There was a glitzy launch at Iconic Images Gallery in London and a Q&A with former Vogue editor, Alexandra Shulman at the V&A at which we discussed Vogue, clothes and other things that matter.
One of the issues we talked about was how all of us make fashion choices every day, even if we think we are not interested in fashion. We make a decision about whether it’s a jeans or dress day, whether it’s warm enough to wear shorts or a skirt without tights, whether we’re trying to dress to impress or simply to wear clothes appropriate for the task in hand. Our clothes tell others so much about who we are, what we are doing, and in the case of history, to what time period we belong. Audrey Withers, Vogue’s editor in the 1940s and 1950s, said she could date a dress to a season and tell you what was going on at the time politically and economically.
Imagine my surprise when I received a call one morning the following week from a high-altitude filmmaker in Kathmandu who wanted to talk about an old boot he had found in a glacier on Everest a few days earlier. The boot was leather with nails (for grip), meaning it had been used for climbing. There was a thick woollen sock poking out from the boot – brown and cream (café au lait?) which meant the wearer had been clear that he or she wanted to keep their feet warm at altitude. Actually, I knew it was a ‘he’ because no women were on Everest in the era of nailed leather boots. It matched in type, design and weight, the boot found on George Mallory’s body in 1999. Could it possibly be a boot belonging to Sandy Irvine? If so, that would blow all the most recent theories of the Chinese removing Irvine’s body from the mountain to smithereens. How could we possibly prove it? Simple, as it turns out. Stitched perfectly onto the sock was a Cash’s name tape: A. C. IRVINE.
This incredible find, made by climber/filmmaker Jimmy Chin when he was on his way down from the upper mountain, has opened up the whole mystery of Mallory and Irvine for the second time. And in the centenary year, a quarter of a century after Mallory’s body was found by Chin’s friend and mentor, Conrad Anker, in May 1999. The fact that Chin found only a boot and sock (with the foot too) is tantalising and begs the question as to what happened and where is the rest of Sandy Irvine’s body. I have studied the mystery of Mallory and Irvine for nearly 30 years, and I have spoken to many climbers, filmmakers, mountaineering historians, glaciologists and artists. I know that objects caught in glaciers are moved, crushed and spat out by the slow-moving rivers of ice. Andy Parkin, an artist in Chamonix, specialises in sculptures created from found and recycled objects, often crushed and changed by the Mont Blanc glacier. I knew from conversations with him how things can reappear years after they fell into the ice.
Mallory replica clothing recreated by Mike Parsons & Mary Rose from fragments found on his body in 1999(Mountain Heritage Trust)
Those who know the story of Mallory and Irvine well are aware of the sighting of ‘an English Dead’ by a Chinese climber in the 1970s. The body, as he described it to a Japanese climber a decade later, was sitting upright, as if asleep, and was wearing old fashioned clothing, puttees and red braces. Mountaineering historians Audrey Salkeld and Thomas Holzel concluded this could only be Sandy Irvine. They set off to find out if that was indeed the case, but their search was not successful. When Eric Simonson’s Anglo-American expedition set off in 1999 to search for Irvine’s body they contacted my father, Peter, and asked for a DNA sample so they could identify the remains if they found them. In the event, the climbers stumbled upon the remains of George Mallory. Photographs of his frozen body ricocheted around the globe and a whole new generation of Everest enthusiasts became hooked on the story.
One of those I spoke to frequently was Graham Hoyland, who was key to the 1999 expedition and is a relative of another member of the 1924 Everest team, Howard Somervell. In 2011 we were discussing yet another expedition planning to try to find Irvine’s body and he said: ‘I think it’s unlikely that they will find anything. There has been a lot of avalanche activity and probably landslides in the region of old camp VI. I reckon your great uncle will have been sluffed off the mountain and into the glacier.’ I distinctly recall that word sluffed. Since then, other expeditions have tried to find Sandy Irvine’s remains and all have failed. One recent expedition leader, Mark Synott, has gone on record to allege that the Chinese had taken Sandy Irvine’s body off the mountain. In the Daily Mail in April 2024 he is quoted: ‘We now have multiple sources all essentially saying the same thing: the Chinese found Irvine, removed the body, and are jealously guarding this information from the rest of the world – all to protect the claim that the 1960 Chinese team was the first to reach the summit…’
Well, that’s one theory that is well and truly put to bed now. Sandy Irvine’s body was never removed from Everest. That the boot is his, there is no doubt, thanks to the name label on the sock. And just for fun, the invoices for both the boot and the lambswool socks are in the archive of Merton College, Oxford. There is even a photograph of Sandy drying his socks at Shekar Dzong in the collection of the Royal Geographical Society. Sometimes history comes together beautifully, like a perfectly knitted woollen. And it turns out that clothes do matter.
Irvine’s bill for boots
These two images courtesy Sandy Irvine Archive, The Warden and Fellows of Merton College, Oxford
British Vogue: The Biography of an Icon Part 3 The Cover Story
This blog is the story of the jacket of my Vogue biography. The name ‘jacket’ raised quizzical smiles in the archives at Vogue House when I mentioned it. The immediate response of the archivists was to imagine Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent or Dior, while I was thinking about how on earth to sum up the content of this survey of a century in one image. Book covers matter, whatever the old adage might tell you. Some authors are so devoted to their designer that they will countenance no one else to touch their book jackets, or in the case of paperbacks, book covers. It is their brand. For my books, given the range of dates and subjects, it has been a one at a time process. I could not, for example, have the same sort of cover for this book as I did for a book about the Bridge on the River Kwai or Mount Everest.
Book production, like everything else, has its own language and is incomprehensible to most outside the industry. Books have cases, covers and jackets. The first thing one sees after printing is the uncased version, which is simply the book’s pages. It is a white block and looks wholly uninteresting (except to the author). It is then put in a case, which is a hard cardboard sheet that is creased in the middle to provide what will become the spine. It usually has the name of the book and the author on that spine. In my case, the black case was embossed with the title in silver. And then there is the jacket, which is the shiny, thick paper that wraps around the book and makes it stand out on the bookshelves of shops, supermarkets, airport stores and anywhere else the publisher plans to make it available for sale.
Books ready to be cased and showing a sneak preview of the endpapers
My book in its cover but without its glorious jacket
Me clutching a jacket, unfolded, at Clays on 2 September
The hunt for an image started in July 2023 when Maddy Price, my editor at Orion, sent through a couple of suggestions. Neither worked. It seemed to us that any image we might pick from the remarkable collection of fashion shoots over the last 108 years would date the book to a decade, and for some eagle-eyed aficionados, to a year or month. We had a conversation about it and decided that the only thing to do was to plump for a single, bold, plain colour with the title in gold or silver. It was not a wholly satisfactory solution, so we parked it for the while. Maddy got on with editing my manuscript and I went to France for a holiday.
I had met the photographer, Willie Christie, in December 2022 when he came to Oxford, and I interviewed about his time at Vogue in the 1970s. He had a brief but productive spell as a Vogue photographer, working with Grace Coddington who was then the fashion editor. He showed me a selection of photographs that were to be included in his book, due out the following year. ‘You should come to the launch’, he suggested. On 20 September 2023 that is exactly where I was to be found: at Iconic Images Gallery in London, admiring a small selection of his beautiful photographs with my friend Deb. I was very taken by a black and white image of model singing into a microphone with a pianist in the background. It felt so Hollywood and timeless.
Marie Helvin channels old Hollywood glamour, British Vogue 1974. Styled by Grace Coddington photograph by Willie Christie
Deb bought me a copy of Willie Christie’s book which I read on the train on the way back to Oxford that evening. Turning page after page of stunning images my eye was caught by the shot of a model wearing a John Bates dress against a slatted background lit from behind. The more I stared at it, the more I realised I had found exactly what I was looking for: an image that was timeless, beautiful, spoke of luxury and desire but also of movement and life. Had I not spotted this when I was reading Vogue of the 1970s? As soon as I got home, I looked up the 15 March 1977 issue and there it was, on page 100. But a muddy version of this crisp and lovely image in Willie Christie’s book. I remember reading a memo by editor Beatrix Miller from around that time complaining about the quality of black and white reproduction in Vogue.
‘Hit Looks’ fashion shoot by Willie Christie, styled by Grace Coddington, Vogue 15 March 1977
I sent a snap of the picture to Maddy Price the next morning and received an enthusiastic thumbs up. She passed it onto designer, Chevonne Elbourne, who mocked up a version of the jacket. The thing she realised was that she had to interpret Willie Christie’s image as a portrait shot, whereas his original was a square format, shot on a Hasselblad. With bated breath I forwarded her suggestion to Willie. Would he mind us messing around with his photograph? I knew he did not like his images to be cropped, but we had gone further and removed the slats. To my inexpressible delight he gave permission for us to use Chevonne’s design, and she was able to work on what has become the final version of the book’s jacket.
I now have most beautiful book jacket in my collection of cracking good jackets – Dressed for War, Fashion on the Ration and so forth. It is an image that conjures everything this book is about: luxury, beauty and style but also movement, life, energy and humour. If you chance to look beyond the cover, you will see Chevonne’s brilliant endpapers, which bring a blast of colour in the display of Vogue covers over the last 108 years. It is a very clever juxtaposition and I am in awe of her eye.
I would like to invite you to judge this book by its cover but beyond that, it is up to you whether you like my take on Vogue’s eye view of the 20th and 21st centuries. I owe a huge debt of thanks to Willie Christie for allowing us to interpret his glorious image from 1977 and to Chevonne Elbourne for working her magic on this and the other images from Condé Nast Publications that are included in the book.
My three favourite jackets to date in reverse order. Fashion on the Ration was published in 2015, Dressed for War in 2020 and British Vogue, the Biography of an Icon, in October 2024.
British Vogue: The Biography of an Icon Part 2 Editing and Production
When I talk to students about editing, I see them roll their eyes and look away. ‘Editing,’ I say in my most enthusiastic voice, ‘is where the magic happens.’ This is usually greeted with a plaintive ‘but I hate re-reading what I’ve written.’ To which I reply: ‘Poor tutor having to read it then.’ I know what they mean, though, and sometimes it is tough to look at your first draft and love it, but writing is a process, and it takes time. Imagine your first draft as information gathering, your second as a first bash at what could become the story, the third a less clumsy version of that and so on. When I finish my first draft it is an unwieldy, shifting pile of sand that has some form but is in serious need of beating into shape. It takes me as long to edit my manuscript until it reaches the form it will have for the editor as it does to write the draft in the first place. Sometimes it takes longer.
This is a screen shot of the comparison between draft 1 and 6 of my biography of Audrey Withers
Once I’ve finished the first draft, I walk away from it for at least a week, preferably a month. It didn’t happen in the case of this book as things conspired against me. But I did manage to get five days out of my writing room. I think it is important to switch from being a writer to a reader and by that, I mean, to see the story from other people’s perspective. Is there a story there? is the first question I ask myself. On the second read I’m looking for whether the narrative is in the right order. Sometimes this involves moving whole chapters from one place to another. Third read for me is historical accuracy. If I get a date wrong, it can undermine a reader’s trust in my research and once that trust is broken it is very hard to regain it. Over the course of six drafts, I make ever more detailed changes. The last version of the manuscript, which will be sent to the editor, is as good as I can make it. I play with individual words, try to find beautiful but clear metaphors and sprinkle the book with what my agent calls ‘fairy dust’. Only then, after this rigorous process, do I send my perfect book to my editor. That is what happened on 30 August 2023.
And then the fun started. Six weeks after she received the book, editor Maddy Price at Orion sent back her comments and thoughts on the whole book. It turned out that she had plenty to say and offered excellent ideas about where to cut paragraphs or whole stories, what needed to be added to make the narrative flow better and, heck yes, a conclusion. That is always the most difficult thing for me to write. With Vogue we had to decide where to end the book. By a stroke of luck for me, though sad for history, Condé Nast sold Vogue House in the spring of 2024 and with that the greatest chapter in the magazine’s life ended. The company had been in Vogue House at 1 Hanover Square for 66 years, taking on the 150-year lease in 1958 when Audrey Withers was the editor and female employees still had to wear gloves to work.
I had the manuscript with Maddy’s comments for six weeks and then, when I was happy that I had made the changes she wanted, it went to the copyeditor. Here is a person I greatly respect. They are barely ever mentioned when books are prepared for publication, but their role is key. Their job is to challenge the author and call them out on sloppy references. My copy editor on this book was Jane Selley. She was eagle-eyed and picked up several points where I needed to produce explanations or be clearer. The next person in line is the proofreader who is looking at the text in minute detail: checking grammar, removing wayward commas, making sure references tally and generally providing a toothcomb approach. Justyna Bielecka worked on this book and, like Jane, did a great job. All of the changes and tweaks get fed into a first proof which is the moment when I, as the writer, see the book laid out in the form it will finally appear in months down the road. It is thrilling, I’ll be honest.
What I sent to Maddy Price August 2023
The first proof 2024
There are then several more reads of the book in proof form and it is extraordinary how many changes one makes. My first proof had 451comments, ranging from changing a whole paragraph to correcting a spelling. The second had 115, the third 39, and the final version 22. Next comes the index and then the plates, which are the images that tell the story of the book visually. This is a lengthy and complicated process, especially in this case as I had over 70,000 images in my database to choose from. Eventually I whittled it down to just over 50 pictures and worked with the picture librarian at Condé Nast, Frith Carlisle, to clear permission to reproduce these glorious images in the book.
Once that was all put to bed and the cover finalised, the managing editor at Orion, Sarah Fortune, sent everything to the printer. For the first time in my writing life, I went to see my book coming off the presses. On Monday 2 September I drove to Clays in Bungay, Suffolk, with my friends Richard and Carol Pietrzak, to have a tour of the printing works and stand by the huge machine at the end of the production line that spat out copy after copy of my Vogue biography.
The wind picked up the first page of an uncased book and I saw the beautiful endpapers
It was a great thrill to get to handle a naked book ie, one without its casing, then to get a cased version and finally, to my delight, a jacketed book. And yes, it was warm, so I can truly say it was hot off the press.
These books were about to be shrink-wrapped and sent on their way to storage
My editor, Nina Sandleson, and I, looking ridiculously proud in our hi-vis jackets and earplugs
Now the book is ready to start its life on the shelves of bookshops throughout the country. We – that is the publisher and I – will do everything we can to promote the book and make people aware of its existence. But ultimately it is you, the reader, who makes the final decision as to whether this book is worthy of a place on your shelves. And that comes back to whether I have done enough work on the original manuscript to produce something that is entertaining and informative as well as beautiful to look at. That look is down to the publisher and the last person to be named – the designer, Chevonne Elbourne. She took Willie Christie’s beautiful image from March 1977 and created my favourite cover to date. In my next blog I will tell the story of the cover picture.
British Vogue: the Biography of an Icon Part 1: Research and Writing
Once the lightbulb moment has faded and the idea for a book begins to take shape, there comes the biggest task of all: research. For this book it has been huge but at the same time contained. The subject matter limited the amount of secondary material I needed to find but the primary research was enormous. I read every single issue of Vogue from September 1916 to December 2023, which was the cut off after which no new material could be introduced. That constituted 1,679 issues containing roughly 70,000,000 words and 8,500 fashion shoots with some 2,000,000 images. Taken as a whole it seemed overwhelming but reading 15 issues a day made it doable. Still, that was 111 days spread over three years. I spent at least 90 of those days in the archive at Vogue House, London and the remainder at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Vogue House on my last visit, 9 January 2024, to look at photographs for the plates section
The only way I could handle that much material was to create a complex database which now contains a full list of every article, regular column and fashion shoot in Vogue with the names of the contributors, models, photographers, stylists and hair and make-up artists. The database also contains the names of every celebrity featured in Vogue and comprises the greatest party list of all time. Some were surprising favourites, such as David Hockney, who has appeared in the magazine regularly over the last 60 years. Others were names from the world of fashion that are immediately recognisable, from Chanel and Patou, through Dior and Yves Saint Laurent, to Jean Muir, Vivienne Westwood and Stella McCartney. A few were names that were famous briefly and are known today only to a handful of people.
Taking just one step back from the magazine, I read the archive of Beatrix Miller, editor from 1965-1986. These papers were left to the Vogue Archive after her death in 2014 and had not been read. They contained delicious behind-the-scenes anecdotes in letters from readers that she received and replied to after every issue was published. Some are what you might expect: young women asking for advice on style or how to become a model (don’t give up the day job), or how to make a career in fashion (be prepared to start at the bottom). Some were letters of complaint about features or shoots, and some were just strange: ‘Dear Miss Miller, can you give me advice on how to get flying lessons for my daughter?’ one woman wrote in 1978. She received a courteous reply giving the name and address of a flying instructor in Surrey. Going back even earlier, I read the diaries of Harry Yoxall, Condé Nast Publications Managing Director for 40 years from 1923. He kept a weekly diary and tracked the first decade of British Vogue’s life as it struggled financially. By 1930 its dominance of the world of fashion magazines was established, and I argue that it has never been knocked off the top spot.
Harry Yoxall’s diaries were written in ink or typed in both English and French. They were a joy to read.
Then there were interviews I conducted with former Vogue writers, stylists and models whose lives, in many ways, were shaped by their relationship with the magazine. The overwhelming message I got when I interviewed people was: ‘don’t mess with Vogue. It was my family.’ People were deeply passionate about working for the magazine and I found again and again the reference to the Vogue family. It struck a chord. I worked at the Royal Academy of Arts in the 1980s and still feel deeply attached to the family atmosphere of the exhibitions office even 40 years later.
Finally there was material to be gathered from the Conde Nast Archive in New York. I had been there twice in 2018 when researching my biography Dressed for War of Vogue’s wartime editor, Audrey Withers. I had had the thrill of uncovering the memos between Audrey and Edna Woolman Chase that gave me the story of Vogue’s war. As Audrey and Cecil Beaton had destroyed the British archive in 1942 in the race to salvage paper, I had to rely on New York’s holding to paint the picture of British Vogue’s early years. By luck I had made good friends with a New Jersey man who shares my passion for historical detail. Ed Morrows was willing to do research on my behalf in the CN archives. Although there was nothing there pre-1931, he found a wonderful 19 page memo by Conde Nast himself entitled ‘The British Vogue Formula Report 1933’ in which he described the entire history of the establishment of British Vogue. Without Ed’s forensic research I, and therefore my readers, would have been deprived of some salient and delightful facts.
Usually when I write a book, I conduct all the research over the course of two or three years and then sit down to write in the peace and quiet of my home in springtime. That process normally takes three to four months. This book was huge and the material so overwhelming that I decided I would have to write it in three-decade chunks as I went along. I wrote the first three chapters in the early autumn of 2021, the next three in the winter of 2022, finishing in February, just before my father died, and the remaining five chapters over the spring and summer of 2023. This meant that I ended up with a huge, unwieldy first draft with big gaps where I’d noted research might go. On 26 June 2023 I wrote in my diary: ‘Walked into Vogue House at 07:45 and read the final issues to June 2020. With that I am done with reading Brogue in London. All the other issues are here [on my shelves at home].’ I also noted that I stuffed courgette flowers for supper that night.
On Tuesday 3 July I sat down to the first day of the final edit of my biography of Vogue. ‘Started with chapter 1 and struggled to make it flow. So much info in every sentence.’ That was my major problem: too much information. How to pick out the gems and produce a narrative for my reader that would not give them intellectual indigestion. My diary over the next seven weeks is filled with three different occupations: massaging the book, chapter by chapter, into submission, rowing with my crew and cooking. There is also a note about a cover that my editor, Maddy Price, sent me to have a look at. I wrote: ‘4/10 but we can work on this.’ The story of the cover will come in a future instalment of this blog.
Diary Entry for 26 July 2023 – rowing, writing, food – usually in that order
There are many cliches to describe pulling together a draft into a manuscript, but it’s never easy. On 10 July I had a complete meltdown over chapter 5, the 1950s, but two days later I’d regained perspective and was working well on the 1960s. And so it went on, up and down, while the rest of the world carried on oblivious. Carlos Alcaraz beat Novak Djokovic in five remarkable sets at Wimbledon as I worked on the 1970s. There were record temperatures in Phoenix, Arizona of 43C over a period of 19 days and wildfires in Switzerland as I entered the 1980s. The world turned and I rowed, and edited, cooked and edited, slept and edited until, on 26 July, I recorded in my diary: ‘wrote my conclusion and fed it into the whole book: 145,013 words.’ At the beginning of August, I spent a week teaching a writing course at Lumb Bank for the Arvon Foundation. It was a good excuse to step away from the manuscript and get much needed perspective. After that, over the course of 10 days, I did a final read and edit, sending it off to Maddy Price on 30 August at 12:45 pm. Two days later I was at St Pancras Station ready to catch the Eurostar to Avignon.
There was an crisis with a lost passport (not mine) but that is an story for another day…
Mallory & Irvine leaving Camp IV on 6 June 1924, taken by Noel Odell (C)Royal Geographical Society
On Saturday 8 June 2024 over 600 people gathered at the Royal Geographical Society in London to mark the 100th anniversary of the disappearance of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine. Among the crowd were more than 30 members of the Mallory family, 8 Irvines and a good showing of Odells, Nortons, Somervells and Morshead (from the 1922 expedition). It was a great event and one charged with more emotion than I had expected.
It all started with a reception for the family members where at least sixty of us gathered in the entrance hall. It was fun to renew friendships and meet other expedition party relatives. It is not often you can walk up to someone and ask boldly ‘so, who are you?’ and get a friendly response of ‘I’m a Norton/Somervell/Odell.’ Meantime a film made by the Alpine Club, Everest Revisited 1924-2024, which looks at the 1920s Everest expeditions, was premiered in the lecture theatre. It focuses on all the participants, including the sherpa and porters, as well as the two well-known protagonists. It offers a fascinating mixture of archive footage, interviews including Chris Bonington, Stephen Venables, Dawson Stellfox, and Leo Houlding in Mallory replica clothing, and thought-provoking commentary from Ed Douglas comparing the 1920s expeditions with today.
Leo Houlding, Graham Hoyland and I each gave a short illustrated talk to shed light on various aspects of the 1924 expedition. Leo talked about making the IMAX film The Wildest Dream on Everest in 2007. He remembered Conrad Anker calling him out of the blue in 2006 and asking him how he would like to play Sandy Irvine. ‘The easiest decision of my life’, he told us. Filming is a lengthy process and no more so than for IMAX which requires huge cameras, batteries and other gear, and a lot of hanging around as shots are set up. Tedious at the best of times but dangerous on Everest. Seeing the footage of him hugging his toes in a tent after standing out in the snow and wind at some bewilderingly high altitude brought home the intensity of the cold on the mountain. His description of climbing the second step without the use of the Chinese ladder was particularly fascinating to the eager experts in the audience. He summited late in the season – on 14 June 2007 – so the IMAX team could be assured of an empty summit.
Leo Houlding warming his toes with all his might (C)Leo Houlding
Graham led us into the story of his relative, Howard Somervell, who famously gave George Mallory his Kodak Vestpocket camera as he prepared to leave Camp IV with Sandy Irvine for the final summit bid. The question of whether, if the camera is ever found, there will be a film to be developed has continued to fascinate Graham – and tens of thousands of others. What he also brought to our attention were Somervell’s notes on barometric pressure on Everest which proved that the pressure was as low on 8/9 June 1924 as it was during the great storm of 1996 that killed so many climbers. Both Leo and Graham believe it is unlikely the two climbers made it to the summit, though not impossible.
I took the audience back to Sandy’s childhood so that they could get some sort of picture of the man who has always stood in Mallory’s shadow. When he wrote to his wife, Ruth, from the voyage to India, Mallory said of Sandy Irvine ‘he’ll be one to rely on for everything except, perhaps, conversation.’ This phrase has been quoted over the last 100 years to condemn poor Sandy Irvine as a slightly thick if very able sportsman. Nothing could be further from the truth, and I had fun talking about his wild childhood adventures, his engineering genius evident even at school and his great rowing prowess. I didn’t dwell on his love affairs as they have been well-covered, but believe me, he was active on all fronts.
A meeting to decide who would be invited to the 1924 expedition (C)Alpine Club
After the break Dr Wade Davis zoomed in from Vancouver to give us the most extraordinary and moving talk about the Everest team members from all 3 expeditions of the 1920s. All but a handful had been involved in the First World War. He talked movingly about how Dr Arthur Wakefield (doctor in 1922) had lost his faith after witnessing only 37 survivors of the more than 800 men from his regiment from Canada who were slaughtered on the first day of the Battle of the Somme; how Howard Somervell, on duty as a young surgeon that day, saw six acres of injured and dying men; how Colonel Edward Norton took part in almost every campaign in the War. It was a tour de force and at times it was almost too painful to contemplate what those men had witnessed. Wade is brilliant and he was able to offer light relief when discussing how the expedition members were chosen. George Finch was an Australian with a very colourful married life who was left out of 1921 on account of being off his food, tired and having lost weight (he was in the middle of a second, untidy divorce). He was allowed to go in 1922 and performed well but was dropped in 1924 with no reasonable explanation. Though this did leave a gap which was filled by Sandy Irvine. What came out of this talk was the humanity and bravery of the expedition members, but also the sadness of the loss of Mallory and Irvine. He quoted Edward Norton’s remarks at Base Camp in the aftermath: ‘We were a sad little party. We accepted the loss in that rational spirit which all of our generation had learnt in the Great War … but the tragedy was very near: our friends’ vacant tents and vacant places at table were a constant reminder to us.’
Norton wrote a letter to Sandy’s parents after their deaths, and I thought it would be fitting to quote from it at some length. I still find it moving today:
“Much that your son was to us I have already written of in various communiqués to the Times – From the word go he was a complete & absolute success in every way. He was spoken of by General Bruce in an early communiqué as our ‘experiment’ – I can assure you that his experimental stage was a short one as he almost at once became almost indispensable – It was not only that we leant on him for every conceivable mechanical requirement – it was more that we found we could trust his capacity, ingenuity & astonishingly ready good nature to be equal to any call. One of the wonderful things about him was how, though nearly 20 years younger than some of us, he took his place automatically without a hint of the gaucherie of youth, from the very start, as one of the most popular members of our mess.
The really trying times that we had throughout May at Camp III & the week he put in at Camp IV were the real test of his true metal – for such times inevitably betray a man’s weak points – & he proved conclusively & at once that he was good all through – I can hardly bear to think of him now as I last saw him (I was snowblind the following morning & never really saw him again) on the North Col – looking after us on our return from our climb – cooking for us, waiting on us, washing up the dishes, undoing our boots, paddling about in the snow, panting for breath (like the rest of us) & this at the end of a week of such work all performed with the most perfect good nature & cheerfulness.
Physically of course he was splendid – as strong as a horse – I saw him two or three times carry for some faltering porter heavier loads than any European has ever carried here before. He did the quickest time ever done between some of the stages up the glacier – one of his feats was to haul, with Somervell, a dozen or so porters loads up 150 feet of ice cliff on the way to the N. Col. As for his capacity as a mountaineer the fact that he was selected by Mallory to accompany him in the last & final attempt on the mountain speaks for itself.” As Norton himself said to Geoffrey Bruce when discussing Sandy Irvine, ‘men have had worse epitaphs.’
As we were marking the centenary in London, other commemorations were taking place around the country. In Birkenhead Dr Philip Walton put a candle in the window of 56 Park Road South, as Sandy’s mother had done in Wales when he disappeared. A light to show him the way home.
A candle in the window of 56 Park Road South
At Chester Cathedral’s evensong the choir and congregation processed to the stained-glass window in the cathedral’s cloisters dedicated to Mallory & Irvine. There they sang Psalm 121 and said prayers ‘in remembrance of their journey’.
Window in the cloisters of Chester Cathedral
Merton College flew the college flag at half-mast – a rare honour – and someone had laid flowers at the Irvine memorial in the college gardens. I had unveiled a blue plaque to Sandy Irvine on the wall of 56 Park Road South on Friday and the mayor of Birkenhead did the same for Mallory at 34 Slatey Road. It is extraordinary how this story of the disappearance of two men a century ago still touches people and moves them.
Merton College, Oxford, 8 June 2024
It has been a great journey and a huge joy to be involved in a quarter of a century of the Mallory and Irvine story. Now I am going to hand over to the next generation. I have loved getting to know great men and women from the world of mountaineering, including the wonderful Rebecca Stephens who led the event on Saturday on behalf of the Himalayan Trust. I am proud to call her a friend.
What can I say but thank you?
For anyone interested, there are exhibitions about Sandy Irvine and George Mallory at the following venues:
Merton College Oxford – see www.merton.ox.ac.uk for details
It is wonderful to celebrate the amazing achievements of extraordinary women on International Women’s Day. I’m very pleased to have heard so many female composers featured on radio 3 this morning, for example. And the newspapers are full of impressive profiles of women who have defied the odds, challenged misogyny or battled against fearsome prejudice. I am fascinated to read those stories. They are inspiring and valuable. They can also be a little intimidating and seem far removed from ordinary life.
I’d like to celebrate women who achieve extraordinary things every ordinary day. I was going to name some who I have found particularly inspiring, but I decided that might be either embarrassing to those I named or hurtful to those I leave out. So, I won’t. I’m going to start with carers, as I have quite a bit of first-hand experience at present of those who work in this field. There is so much criticism in the press about the care sector, but these women, and they are often women in my experience, are among the kindest and least complaining people you could meet. They cater for people’s most basic needs with professional kindness so that the person being helped can maintain as much dignity as possible given the circumstances. Emptying commodes, dressing wounds, showering frail bodies and administering food or medicine is hardly glamorous work but it is vital and I admire their dedication. They make people’s lives better even if they cannot cure the ills. If I have a plea, it is to recognise this vital work that will never cease to be needed.
Caring Hands, Cheshire 2023
There are women in every walk of life who achieve little miracles daily – nurses, police officers, firewomen, teachers, classroom assistants. Then there are those who volunteer, running everything and anything, from sports clubs to food banks. The Women’s Institute, born in the second summer of the First World War, is one enormous body of talent and generosity whose work I found so inspiring I wrote a book about their work in the Second World War. The spirit that helped over a quarter of a million members to keep the countryside ticking in those difficult years embodies everything I admire about women of that time. To hell with red-tape and wartime bureaucracy, they got on with making jam, collecting herbs for medicine, knitting millions of items for the Home Guard, the Merchant Marine and evacuees. And they sang and smiled their way through it.
Community Singing at Flamstead WI in Hertfordshire during the Second World War
Archivists and librarians are people I admire enormously. They are often women who work behind the scenes safe-guarding history and thus the national memory. I have worked in archives all over the world and often the incredible collections they protect are underappreciated by the people whose histories are being preserved. Those of you who read my biography of Audrey Withers will know that she destroyed the entire Vogue archive in February 1942. Why did she do it? It was an act of fervent patriotism, urged on by her star photographer, Cecil Beaton, for paper salvage to help the war effort. What a loss, though, to future generations. She believed she was doing the right thing at that moment in history, and one cannot criticise her motives, but it does point to the value of original archive material to the memory of the nation. Material, I might add, that celebrated women far more than men.
This image appeared in March 1942 Vogue showing the pulping of photographs for the war effort
My current project, a biography of British Vogue, is full of stories about inspirational women from every decade of the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as some men. The magazine may be about fashion on one level but it is a celebration of the achievements of women on so many others. Over the last 105 years Vogue has covered every topic of interest to women of any given era. I find it life-affirming and hugely impressive to think about the achievements of women from every walk of life.
Much has been made recently of the value of friendship. It is something that is now understood to help to encourage healthier living and even a longer life. Studies in Australia established that women who have close female friendships are less likely to suffer from multiple serious conditions in later life. 7,700 women were tracked over twenty years to see whether they went on to contract diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, cancer, depression and half a dozen other serious conditions. ‘Researchers found that women who reported the lowest level of satisfaction with their social relationships had double the risk of developing multiple conditions compared with those who reported the highest levels of satisfaction.’ I raise a toast to the women I row with four or five mornings a week in Oxford. We were out today despite the snow and we loved it. If it helps us to stay healthier longer, well that’s just a wonderful side effect.
With a dear friend in a double scull on the river at Oxford, December 2022
So yes to celebrating International Women’s Day on 8 March but I want to celebrate women every day of the year.
16 years ago, we decided to buy a dog. It would be a family pet but its owner, within the family, would be Richard. Tiggy was born in East Grinstead on 8 January 2007. She had a distinguished pedigree, beautiful markings and an enchanting black face. We picked her up when she was eight weeks old and she lived with us, in the heart of our noisy, energetic family, for 15 years and 7 months. Today we said goodbye to her. She was suffering from dementia, she had increasing mobility problems (she was always on the money when it came to trends), and she no longer had a good quality of life. It was the hardest decision I have ever taken. Period.
This Blog for a Dog is my love letter to the most wonderful, witty, funny, quirky, energetic, characterful creature I have ever met.
Tiggy went by several names. Tiggy, Tiggles and Mrs Woose were the most common ones we used. Towards the end of her life when she could no longer safely get upstairs to my office, we operated the ‘Stana-Woose-Lift’ which was Tiggy under one arm, cup of coffee or book in the other hand. It was a bit precarious, but it worked well. It was usually requested by loud barks of protest at being left on the wrong floor. All her life she had a way of making her feelings clear and in most instances she was easy to read. Her most enchanting form of communication was her smile. You don’t believe me that a dog can smile? This one could. If she saw one of us from a distance, say from the end of the garden or coming up the road, she would smile at us. Not with her mouth but with her entire body. She had a way of sashaying her hips, tilting her head to one side, twitching her ears up and back, and bounding towards you with a wave of affection that just shouted: ‘Hello! I love you, love you, love you!’ It was the most uplifting greeting, and it came from the heart.
Tiggy in full flight
Richard commented today that she was a dog that was extraordinarily in tune with nature. That may sound a strange thing to say about an animal, but it was true. More than any of our other dogs, she paid close attention to her environment. On summer evenings she would meander around the garden, sniffing at plants, investigating little spaces in the undergrowth or in the borders. She loved the smell of certain flowers and had a passion for lying in a Hebe bush close to the house. Often, she would ‘rearrange’ the bush to suit, which meant ripping off sprigs in order to make herself comfortable. She also interacted with the fauna, stalking squirrels oh-so-quietly, hunkered down like a lioness in the grass. She never caught one, but she often came close. She had rather more success with Sandy’s bantams, which she caught quite regularly. She never killed them; she simply caught them and then lay on them until one of us spotted her and called her off. The bantam, usually Snowy, would get up, shake herself, cluck crossly, and get back to doing what bantams do best, which is digging up the edges of my borders.
Tiggy in her favourite Hebe bush, May 2021
Unlike other Borders, Tiggy was not a thief, though she was an opportunist. In the summer one of her great loves was to attend the many rowing events we went to with the boys. She was well-behaved and had excellent recall, so we were always happy to have her off the lead. When she was about two, we were all on the towpath watching the racing at the City of Oxford Regatta. Simon was with Tiggy when he saw her stand up on her hind legs and very gently but firmly remove the ‘dog’ from a hot dog being held at a tempting height by Richard’s rowing coach. Triumph for Tiggy, fury on the part of the coach. He never liked her after that. On another occasion we had left a pepperoni pizza on the side in the kitchen to defrost. In retrospect it might have been too close to the edge. When we returned, we found the pizza on the floor. Part of the base, an almost perfect half-moon, remained on the floor and next to it a small pile of onions. She had eaten the pepperoni but spat out those pesky onions.
When we were out mountain biking Tiggy ran uphill but got a lift with Simon downhill
In her hey day she had not only great stamina for walks and mountain bike rides, but she had speed. Chris once clocked her doing 23mph on the footpath up our road. Not bad going for a little dog. Walking and running in the countryside close to home, in the Chilterns, the Lake District, Devon, Yorkshire and Northern Scotland, was her idea of bliss. She came on a dozen holidays to the Lakes and loved nothing better than to find a handsome rock on which to stand, ears blown back by the wind, staring at the world around her as if she owned it. She was sure-footed and unafraid of heights, so she was the ideal walking companion. She also enjoyed swimming, so a quick dip in a tarn or stream, preferably in pursuit of a stick, was always a pleasure.
Tiggy with me in the Lakes 2011
The only time Tiggy really frightened us was in the November of her first year in Oxford. She had taken herself off for a walk around the village and disappeared. I was on my way down from a film festival in the Lakes with Sandy when I had a call from a distraught Richard about his missing dog. He had been all round the neighbourhood looking for her but by the time it had turned to dusk, and she had not appeared, he concluded she must be dead in a ditch somewhere. I got back around 8pm and set off on my bike, searching like mad for her. In a moment of clarity, I remembered that our vet’s parents lived opposite. I dropped in, desperate but unsure of how they could help me. It was after all a Sunday night. They advised me to call the Dog Warden. I did this but had no joy. So I rang the police and asked if they had a Border Terrier with a harlequin collar in their care. ‘No,’ answered the constable on duty, ‘but I’ve got a Norfolk Terrier with a red, yellow and green diamond collar.’ Sounded promising. I dashed over to Oxford Police Station and burst into the reception. I suddenly got cold feet. ‘How will you know if it is my dog?’ I asked. ‘Oh, I think we’ll know.’ The policeman answered. They fetched the Norfolk Terrier from a room behind the desk and to my joy it was Tiggy.
I yelped with happiness and she squirmed with delight in the policeman’s arms. As he leant over the counter to let me take her, the excitement became too much and she piddled all over the policeman, the counter and the floor. ‘I think we can agree that is your dog.’ He said, looking ruefully over at his colleague and then down at his shoes. To date, Tiggy is the only member of our family to have spent time in a police cell.
Over the course of her long life – 15 years and 9 months equals about 110 in human years – she had many experiences and made countless friends. For several years when I was on the lecture circuit, she would come with me to theatres and halls, sometimes on her own, often with Mattie, her half-sister, who we acquired in 2011. She would walk onto the stage and either sit at my feet or clamber into her basket, often with her back to the audience. Sometimes she would stand up if there was applause at the end but as often as not, she was quite content simply to be there with me. It is a matter of record that when I took the dogs to lectures, I sold more books.
At home and in the garden she had two favourite play things. The first were tennis balls. She would run to catch them and not always give them back, so we usually had two or three when playing with her. If she particularly liked a ball she would roll on it, sometimes growling to herself, and then she would lie on her back, playing with the ball between her paws. It would slip out and she’d be after it again, rolling on it and repeating the same process over and over. Borders are known in Kent as otter dogs, and if you ever saw Tiggy lying on her back playing with a ball you could see why the name was so apposite. She could find a tennis ball in a hedge or under a plant with consummate ease. Once when I was waiting for the boys at school, she nipped into a bush next to the tennis court and came out with a ball. I congratulated her and told her to sit, but she was off again, into the bushes, and produced a second ball, and a third. By the end of about 15 minutes, she had laid 23 tennis balls at my feet.
Her other favourite toys were flowerpots. If I was planting, she would grab any flowerpot I had emptied and would dash off with it, as far away from me as she could. She would then have her own private game of chuck the pot. She would dive her head into the pot then fling it into the air and jump to catch it. The game could go on for several minutes until she got tired or the pot broke. She would then roll on it and chew the rim. For several years I had flowerpots with teeth marks in them. I still do have a few left and they will be a reminder of that game.
After swimming at Wallingford
There was the occasional funny mishap too. One sunny afternoon in Wallingford, Sandy and I had taken Tiggy for a walk along the riverbank on the opposite side to the rowing club. We were watching Simon training so had walked quite a few kilometres. As we headed back upstream Tiggy went down to the river’s edge for a drink. It was the cows’ drinking spot, so the beach was churned up and very muddy. By the time she re-joined us she had thick black mud halfway up her legs. We crossed into the final field where there were no cows but people lying around in the sun. I pointed to a couple who were topless and cuddling. I said: ‘In a bad film Tiggy would run across their backs leaving muddy footprints.’ To our horror that is exactly what she did. I don’t think she had planned it, but they were in her path and she saw no reason to divert. The boy was shocked but fortunately saw the funny side of it.
One final memory was of a photoshoot for my 50th birthday. We’d decided to have a family photograph taken and of course Tiggy was involved. The photographer had tried to get us to do characterful poses, but she was aiming at an outcome that would be too saccharine. Tiggy was in the centre of the group and was feeling mischievous. We were all piled up ready for the shot when she leapt up and started furiously licking Chris’s ear. We all fell about laughing and to this day it is the best family photograph we possess.
50th birthday photo 2010
There we are: a long life full of walkies and adventures. She leaves a huge gap in our family life but one that will be partially filled with the most wonderful memories of a dog who, for us at least, was like no other. She was a treasure and a joy, a constant, loyal, devoted companion, and a hilarious trouble-maker.
RIP Tiggy.
Richard and Simon with Tiggy at Iffley Lock, 2007
Richard trying to negotiate with Tiggy who, as a puppy, did not see the point of being on a lead
Tiggy was cremated on 29 September 2022 and her ashes are buried in the garden under our favourite tree. While we were building a new path this summer she insisted on lying on the freshly dug soil exactly where Chris was about to lay the weed membrane. So we thought it apposite to bury her little box there. She has a flat stone and a flowerpot on a stick to mark her grave.
This is the eulogy I gave for my father, Peter, at the Service of Thanksgiving we held for him in St Mary’s Church at Acton on 3 March 2022. I do not normally write about my immediate family but several people have asked me for a copy of the words I spoke so I thought I’d break a habit. My father lived a long life spanning ten decades. I remember him saying to me in 1999 ‘good gracious, I never imagined I would make the millennium.’ Well, he did. And another twenty years at that.
I’d like to stand up and talk about Daddy for two hours, but you’ll be glad to know that I will rein myself in and speak for just a few minutes.
Peter John Summers was born at Denna Hall at Burton on 6th May 1929. Over the next ten decades he acquired many more names: Pete, PJ, Daddy, Uncle Peter, FIL (Father-in Law), Grandpa, Great Grandpa. He also had any number of nicknames: Uncle Speeds, the Fat Controller and the Square Squire are just three of them. It is said that a person with many names is someone who is much loved. That is certainly the case with Peter. The messages of condolence we as a family have received over the last fortnight have been beautiful and heart-warming. Words like distinguished and gentleman keep cropping up.
Peter was indeed a gentle man. Throughout his life he eschewed conflict, but he was never afraid to stand his ground when he knew he was right. He did this in his own inimitable way, quite often with a deliberate, silent stare. It could be remarkably effective.
Peter was educated at home by a governess with boys from other local families, including the Behrends, Glazebrooks, Leaches, and Robin Higgin, until it was time to go to the Leas School at Hoylake. From the autumn term of 1939 the school was relocated to Glenridding on the southern tip of Ullswater in the Lake District. There he spent a happy year sharing a room above the post office with his life-long friend, Bill Glazebrook. From Glenridding he went to Shrewsbury School, following in the footsteps of his father and his mother’s five brothers.
Peter, 1947
After Shrewsbury he moved into National Service, joining the Signals, and spending three cold months in the autumn of 1947 at Catterick. As a young subaltern he was posted to Vienna for a year, living in barracks in the magnificent Gloriette at Schönbrunn Palace. This was the Vienna as depicted in the film the Third Man, made that same year – a city damaged beyond recognition by bombing, divided into four sectors, where the Black Market thrived, and Americans raced around in jeeps. Peter took it all in his stride and was enchanted by the people. He learned to speak German while playing chess with friends he made there. One of them, Geoff Schiffmann, had been a prisoner of war in the Lake District when Peter was at Glenridding as a schoolboy. He remained in touch with Geoff and Etti Schiffmann for the rest of their lives. He encountered Russian soldiers in Vienna and with his brilliant ear for languages, picked that up too. On returning to Britain, he took up his place at Clare College Cambridge, to study Russian and German.
Peter always had a strong pastoral side to his character. Now, with a degree and National Service behind him he told his tutor at Clare he wanted to work with refugees. He was persuaded against this and encouraged to join the family firm. His godfather, Neville Rollason, was sure there would be room for Peter’s youthful ideals and ambitions at The Works. One of the first roles he was given was to draw up a refuse disposal project. This would be the fastest way to learn about the people and purpose of every department in the company.
He joined the board of John Summers and Sons in 1960 with responsibility for staff training and communications. Seven years later the government nationalised the steel industry and Peter joined the new board of the Scottish and Northwest Group of the British Steel Corporation as Director of Personnel and Social Policy. At that time, he had a secretary called Bridget Johnson who we children all delighted in hearing say on the phone in the crispest of tones: ‘This is Bridget Johnson, your father’s secretary. Is your mother in, please?’ In 1973 the government announced it would phase out iron and steel making at Shotton. This ended eighty years of Summers’ family history but not Peter’s. He was given responsibility to assist some of the 6,500 people who would lose their jobs as a result. Thus started the second and most rewarding part of his business career.
As the Industry Coordinator for the Northwest, he moved into a new office, a little bungalow called Park House in Shotwick. From there he and his tiny team encouraged other industries to move to Deeside. My mother, Gillian, used to provide lunches for the Park House brigade and on one occasion had made a delicious coronation chicken. Peter’s PA, Felicity, asked him whether it was from Gillian’s own hens. He replied, ‘yes, this one was called Fred. I remember him well. He had a slight limp’. Peter claimed that Felicity became vegetarian thereafter.
Peter showing the managing director of Iceland Foods where his factory would be sited
He said of his work at Park House: ‘My job with BS Industry evolved continuously and provided me with some of the most rewarding experiences of my working life. Starting a small business from cold in an isolated bungalow spurred on by murmurings of polite disapproval, was an experience I wouldn’t have missed for anything.’ His first signing was Iceland Food and he received a frozen lobster every Christmas from then until he left Park House. For this work and the creation of over 4,400 jobs in 87 new factories, Peter was awarded the MBE. He retired in 1989 at the age of sixty.
What of Peter the family man? In 1957 he met Gillian Toosey, the daughter, as it happened, of a member of his mother’s tennis group in the early years of the century. They made a very handsome couple. With remarkable speed – almost certainly urged on by Gillian – the engagement was announced, and they married on a windy day in April 1958 to much rejoicing. A honeymoon to the South West of the UK and then the continent in Peter’s TR4 followed. He owned every model of the TR series over the course of almost thirty years. We all remember his love of his sports cars.
Peter and Gillian in Machynlleth, 1967
Four children followed between 1960 and 1967 – Julie (that’s me), Stephanie, Jeremy and Tim. Life at Delamere Manor, where he moved the family to in 1967, was busy, noisy and unbelievably cold. In 1973 came the oil crisis. The price of oil rose by 300 per cent and Peter turned off the central heating. He did not turn it on again for 45 years.
As children we were fascinated by his various rituals. One was the morning cold bath which he had every day of his life until he retired. Jeremy coined the phrase ‘One, Two, Three Wubbage!’ as Peter hopped into the bath and braced himself for a quick lie down. Another was his breakfast boiled egg which he enjoyed six days a week, latterly seven, until the last week of his life. He timed his egg to perfection on his watch and then solemnly removed it from the pan, ran it under a cold tap, popped it into a yellow egg cup and removed the top with what he called his Ei-Knipps. That, accompanied by toast and Gillian’s delicious marmalade, set him up for whatever the day would bring.
A few years before his retirement he and Gillian bought Fennywood Farm near Winsford. It was their home for more than three decades. They had a small number of cows, endless hens and part-time sheep. At one stage they had a lady who helped Gillian in the house called Anne Card. She had two stock phrases for anything that she found unusual. One was ‘It’s funny, really’ and the other was ‘it’s amazing what they can do nowadays’. One day the AI man came to deal with Peter’s heifers. Mrs Card asked him what the man was there to do and Peter began to explain that rather than having a bull on the farm, the cows would be artificially inseminated. As he was explaining the process as euphemistically as possible, he suddenly got the giggles, wondering which of the expressions she would employ. She rewarded him with a somewhat quizzical ‘it’s funny, really.’
He ran the 40-acre farm in conjunction with the land in North Wales he had bought from his grandfather, Willie Irvine, in the early 1960s. He never tired of telling the story of how Willie had purchased the land as a grouse shoot for his sons, Alec and Tur, and of how his grandfather had grown to love that area of North Wales between Corwen and Bala. Creini, as Peter’s land was known, comprised three farms, a lake and a mountain. He loved that place more than anywhere else on earth. We used to take the caravan to Creini for our summer holidays. Gillian and any number of children, cousins and friends slept in the caravan and awning but Peter always preferred to sleep in a tent some way from our noisy camp. One morning we woke to see his tent entirely surrounded by inquisitive cows.
In 1977 he employed the 17-year-old son of a neighbouring farmer to run Creini for him. Arwel Griffiths worked as Peter’s farm manager for over forty years. Together they learned how best to run the land and maintain the integrity of its unique loveliness. In the early 1980s he decided to learn Welsh and over the course of several summers he attended Coleg Harlech for total immersion in the language. He became proficient and could conduct business successfully in both English and Welsh.
For years sheep would be sent down to Fennywood to overwinter. Peter and Gillian spent many springs lambing up to 150 sheep in the barns there. He would keep lists of every lamb that was born on either farm. Recently he was going through his papers and uncovered a handwritten list of sheep from 1978. All carefully numbered in his meticulous hand, each column ruled with a straight line. He wrote slowly and carefully, making sure every letter in his signature was the right height and shape. As he got older his handwriting slowed down and it once took him 45 minutes to write a cheque.
Peter loved to count. He would note the number of posts and rails along a field edge. He calculated the difference in the number of minutes over the course of a calendar year between daylight and night-time. He had an astonishing eye for detail and, for most of his life, an extraordinary memory. When a few years ago he heard that the Rachmaninoff third piano concerto was about to be performed he hummed the first two bars and said ‘gosh, that’s not often played. I last heard it in 1954.’
Music was another part of his life that he shared with us children in his own way. His grand piano was in the drawing room at Delamere directly below my bed. We all remember him practising at night after supper and we listened while we drifted off to sleep as he played a Chopin nocturne or a Beethoven sonata. His love of opera, Wagner in particular, was elegantly balanced against his passion for the 1970s TV series, Dallas and later, Blind Date with Cilla Black.
As you have heard from Christopher, Peter was a regular church goer for all of his life. He loved the rhythm of the church calendar but was wary of new-fangled ideas and modern hymns. He often read the lesson with clear enunciation and measured speed. A good public speaker, he was a member of the 25 Club, a debating society on the Wirral, for over sixty years. I believe he was its longest serving member.
I cannot end without referring once more to his nicknames, the most affectionate and appropriate of which came not from his immediate family but from his nieces and nephews: Uncle Speeds. Peter did not move fast in comparison to Gillian and that gave rise to the nickname. He also had one habit which anyone who ever had supper at Fennywood will recognise. Towards the end of the evening, he would grab the table edge, half raise himself, and announce: ‘Right, I’m going to bed’. All conversation would stop and those around the table would wait expectantly for him to rise and take his leave. More often than not he would sit back down on his chair and the evening would continue. Then the process would be repeated, sometimes three or four times. One evening Erica Toosey, who was living at Fennywood, got so infuriated with him that she picked up a tea cosy, which was shaped like a hen, and put it onto his head. ‘Uncle Speeds, will you please go to bed!’ She exclaimed. If he did, history does not relate, but the habit continued until well past his 90th birthday.
At the end of his life Peter was afflicted with Alzheimer’s. This cruel disease robbed him of his memory and us of the pleasure of his witty company. He had for as long as we can remember been able to deliver the mot juste for any occasion. When Tim visited him in hospital the day before we eventually sprang him out and brought him home, he said, in answer to the question of ‘how have you been Dad?’
‘I’ve been all over Europe, casting an ever-diminishing shadow.’ He came home on a Friday a few weeks ago and was surrounded by love and care, thanks to the marvellous Lydia Rose team who have been looking after him and Gillian since 2020. He died quietly, peacefully on Tuesday 15th February with Gillian and me at his side. That diminishing shadow has now disappeared but the memories of Peter John Summers, Uncle Speeds, Dad, FIL, Grandpa, Great Grandpa will be around for a very, very long time.
As we stood on the start line at Eltham Palace at 6:30 on a grey, chilly morning with mizzle, all the first-timers felt a sense of anxiety about whether we would make it to Paris at all. These were of course private thoughts, but I could sense them in the exchanges or silence between group members, while solo-riders looked nervous. Even the seasoned cyclists who have one, two, three or in the case of Paul Harding, 23 Pedals to Paris under their belts there was a sense of uncertainty about the ride to come.
We set off after soon after 7am and wove our way out of London, stopping and starting at lights, slowing and bunching to get around parked cars, dodging potholes and drains, manhole covers and cobbles. As we negotiated the M25 roundabout and set off into the lovely Kent countryside the speed picked up, we fell into small groups of riders and began to get the sense of moving together. It was nothing short of thrilling for me, who has only ever cycled with one or two other riders. At one stage six of us cycled for 10 miles without stopping, pedalling along at a comfortable pace higher than I had ever averaged in training.
Out of London and over the M25. We split into groups and got rolling
Our first stop was at the Royal British Legion village at Aylesford where we were welcomed by flag waving, cheering employees of the RBL and volunteers who served us coffee, sausage rolls, Vienna whirls and all sorts of goodies that in normal times I would not eat at 10 o’clock in the morning. That was a sign of things to come. Whenever we stopped anywhere en route we could be assured a fantastic welcome, sustenance, encouragement and some gentle ribbing.
Day One ended with a monstrous hill into Dover which nearly blew my thighs, such was the build up of lactic acid as we struggled at snail’s pace in Grannie gear up the New Dover Road to Capel-le-Ferne. 120m of climbing over about 0.75km. Unrelenting and painful. Our ride captains, a magnificent and talented group of cyclists who looked after us, encouraged us, helped when we fell off or fell back, were there on that hill, 65 miles into our first day, to help those who struggled up it. Two of them cycled up the hill four times. I took my hat off to them so often over the next three days.
Waiting for the ferry below the White Cliffs
Once we arrived in Dover we were ushered onto The Spirit of Britain and had a welcome supper of fish and chips with a beer to replace the much-depleted sugar levels in our blood, which Simon assured me was a good cure. Later we learned that the consumption of alcohol on the Tour de France was only banned in 1960. Not for health reasons but because it was believed to be a stimulant.
As we rolled off the boat and onto the quayside the enormity of getting here struck us all. It was nothing short of magical to step onto continental soil for the first time since the pandemic broke out 18 months ago. For most of us it was the first time abroad and the emotions were very close to the surface. We pedalled to the great Fort Nieulay and put our bikes into safe storage for the night and made our way to the hotels. Never has Belgian beer, which Simon, Chris and I found a nearby café, tasted so good.
Calais Fort Nieulay: about as safe a bicycle store as you could ever wish for.
Day Two Calais to Abbeville
134.42 km (83.5 miles)
1,234m (4,049 feet) ascent
6.15 hours
This began with the collection of bikes from the Fort and our introduction to the ISE (International Sport Event) team who were to accompany us from Calais to Paris. This team comprised four cars and a dozen motorcycles, the latter being ridden by ex-gendarmes who earlier this summer has escorted the Tour de France. I freely admit that I was over-excited about the outriders and chatted to them. They were warm, friendly and completely into their BMW bikes.
Motorcycle Outriders
Our first ceremony was in Calais, soon after 8am. The Deputy Mayor, with special focus on sport, welcomed us to the town in a short speech which was followed by the laying of a wreath by Lieutenant General James Bashall CBE CB. Five minutes earlier I’d seen ‘Bash’ as everyone on the trip referred to him, in his RBL lycra. There he was in a dark suit laying a poppy wreath and speaking the Exhortation from Binyon’s poem For the Fallen. You know the words so well. ‘They shall grow not old as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.’ Alongside the general and the Deputy Mayor were two standard bearers: one from the town of Calais, the other from the Hertfordshire branch of the Legion. He, Paul, is the man who now has 24 Pedal to Paris under his belt and he does it on a recumbent bike with a huge union flag attached to a pole behind him. As the General finished the Exhortation, Paul repeated it in French. It was a powerful moment.
Paul Harding, veteran of 24 Pedal to Paris rides, with the RBL Hertfordshire Standard at Calais memorial
After the ceremony we gathered in front of the Town Hall where Lewis, our superb cheer-leader, organised us into three groups. The so-called Social Group would ride of first, followed 15 minutes later by Group 2 and 15 minutes after that Group 1 would sally forth. I had been advised earlier this year that Group 2 was a comfortable place to be as the speed was good but there was still time for conversation. Group 1 was for the super-speedy guys who wanted to ride in a proper peloton. The Social Group left at 9am and we divided into Groups 2 and 1. It looked as if everyone bar about six cyclists wanted to be in Group 2 so Lewis drew a line half way through the group and Chris, Simon and I ended up cycling with the back section which included the speedy guys.
A Group prepares to leave Calais Town Hall. Paul Harding, now in his cycling kit, can be seen on his recumbent bike with flag
Rolling out of Calais with our fabulous outriders halting traffic at every road junction was about as thrilling as it gets. Thirty of us poured in a liquid stream of cycling energy around corners, over crossroads, around round-abouts and out into the beautiful hilly countryside of the Pas de Calais. We were cycling over ground that had been trodden by millions of soldiers – both French and British – in the First World War and that just added to the sense of history that surrounded us all day.
The riding was great and the pace hot, which was fine until we hit a big hill and then I realised that what I saw as a wall the speedy riders saw as a minor rise. By lunchtime my legs were throbbing, and I decided that I wanted to be in a proper Group 2, not the souped-up version. Fortunately, others felt the same. Lunchtime was a buffet of baguettes made locally. We were told there were 37 different fillings on offer. They were delicious.
After lunch we went straight into the first hill, known in our ride brochures as Baguette Hill. We’d read about this in the forward planning emails but any amount of googling had left us none the wiser. It was only when we set off that we were told it was the nickname for the hill that came immediately after a lunch of baguettes on day 2 and that it was a test for us riding on full tummies. Predictably I found it very tough but soldiered on and spent the next 180 minutes riding some 72km (45 miles) without stopping. Our driver had failed to make the mid-afternoon break.
Preparing to leave Crecy-en-Ponthieu for Abbeville as one group
When we did finally stop in the beautiful village of Crécy-en-Ponthieu it took two ice lollies and three litres of water before I was able to concentrate on Dan’s short talk about the site of the Battle of Crécy in 1346, one of the earliest and most important battles of the Hundred Years’ War. From there we cycled as one group into Abbeville making the transition from countryside to urban streets with consummate ease thanks to our outriders. By now we all knew the commands for slowing down, speeding up, avoiding potholes. And then comes the ‘Stopping’ command. That was very welcome at the end of a long day.
Day Three Abbeville to Beauvais
107.34 km (67.14 miles)
751m (2,467 feet) ascent
4.59 hours
Abbeville War Memorial was the site of another moving ceremony at the beginning of day 3
The ceremony at the Abbeville War Memorial was attended by more standard bearers than the one in Calais. I was moved not only by the First World War standards but by those from the Second World War. One marked the ‘Prisoners 1939-1945’ which caught me out. France and Britain’s experiences of that war were poles apart. It made the wreath laying even more poignant.
We began the cycling with a steep climb which was painful on tired legs and I was glad I was in Group 2. The countryside was glorious: undulating roads through fields of corn, tobacco and sunflowers. Occasionally you would spot our tireless photographer disguised in a patch of sunflowers or lurking behind a signpost. His white motorcycle helmet was a giveaway and we always waved to him cheerfully even if our legs were burning at the top of a hill.
Our lunch spot on day 3 was in a sports stadium. There, on the sand, Dan created a reinterpretation of the Western Front during the First World War, using cyclists to represent the Allies and the Axis powers. He made them stand two steps apart and then talked us through every significant gain and loss on the Front. Each time one of them would be asked to step forward or back to mark a battle. What struck everyone was how little ground was fought over and what devastating losses and destruction resulted from that terrible war.
The make-up of the cyclists was biased heavily in favour of men. I’m not sure how many women there were but I would hazard a guess at about 10% (so 12-15 of us). That seemed to me to be not dissimilar from the make up of men to women in the First World War. We often forget how many women stepped up in both world wars to do their bit. On the Home Front from 1914-1918 hundreds of thousands of women worked in munitions factories and in men’s jobs on the trams, railways and in other roles. Then there were the female doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers and auxiliaries who worked in the dressing stations and hospitals in France and further afield in other theatres of the war.
In the Second World War women were active in uniform, albeit at a distance from the fighting. They worked on radar, on coding at Bletchley Park as well as nurses and ambulance drivers. Some flew planes from factories to airfields. And a sizeable number worked with the Special Operations Executive. I thought the story of Nancy Wake, known by the Germans as the White Mouse, might inspire the women cyclists. She was part of the French Resistance in Southern France during the battle for the liberation in 1944. Desperate to file a report for SOE HQ in London, but unable to make contact via radio, Nancy Wake grabbed a bicycle and claimed to have ridden some 172 miles in 24 hours. She said afterwards: ‘That part of my anatomy which is meant to give pleasure was on fire. I could neither sit nor stand for two days.’ That chimed with some of us. Imagine doing that distance on an old-fashioned bike without gel shorts, comfortable cycling shoes and under the constant threat of attack.
The steep hill after lunch. Not my speediest on hills but I made it
After lunch, and the inevitable steep hill to concentrate the mind, we sped across the countryside to the village of Auchy-la-Montagne where the village (population c. 570) had put on a magnificent welcome for us. As we entered Auchy we saw signs saying: ‘Welcome English Friends’ and ‘Auchy is Happy to Meet You.’ As we rounded the corner into a little area next the park and opposite the Mairie we saw gazebos with tables laden with cups of local wine and sweets, while members of the village’s veterans’ association waved us in, some holding flags.
This lovely village has welcomed the Pedal to Paris caravan every year and this time they presented the President with a huge cup to mark the 25th anniversary. The mayor was unable to attend but his representative told the story of the liberation of Auchy-la-Montagne in 1944 by the British 8th Army. The mayor is known to have said in the past: ‘we prefer you on your bicycles than in tanks.’ Two children were on the local council to give their age group a voice in local politics. They made a request to the RBL: could we find them an old-fashioned British telephone box that they could use as a library for book exchanges in the future. The general threw down the gauntlet to the cyclists to see if anyone could help. Let us hope someone can.
With hearts warmed by the welcome and the excellent rosé we pedalled off as a group to Beauvais for a ceremony at the war memorial. There was a sizeable crowd gathered in the park around the memorial already and we saw standard bearers from several veterans’ groups with a gap for Paul Harding. Like the General, Paul made a lightening change out of his lycra and into the uniform of an RBL Standard Bearer.
The Beauvais War Memorial Ceremony
The Mayor of Beauvais made a speech in French and English. He spoke of the collaboration between the Allies in the First World War. We had already been reminded by Dan that the French lost more men in 1914 than the British did in the entire war. Here we were, facing the Beauvais memorial, contemplating that appalling statistic. The mayor then talked about the Second World War when Beauvais had been invaded by the Germans. The British 8th Army liberated the town on 30 August 1944 and the mayor expressed the town’s enduring gratitude to their liberators. It was a humbling moment.
Beauvais had been extensively damaged during both wars and much of the older part of the city was all but destroyed. The cathedral was rebuilt in the ensuing years and as we cycled past it after the ceremony it was hard not to be moved by the resilience of this magnificent city.
Day Four – Beauvais to Paris
96.86 km (60.18 miles)
883.92 m (2,900 feet) ascent
4.40 hours
The Social Group leave Beauvais Fire Station where our bikes had been stored
The final day of the ride seemed to entail a lot of climbing. The weather had warmed up and it was with some considerable relief that we cycled into the aptly named village of Menucourt for our last baguette lunch of the ride. From there we set off as a single group for the last 40km (25 miles) to Paris. We were given strict instructions not to attempt to overtake other cyclists on this leg and to follow the car as closely as we could, especially once in Paris.
Group 1 race past our pit stop on the last day. They averaged over 24 mph and that with hills.
This was the moment when the motorcycle outriders were at their most brilliant. The closer we got to the capital the greater the number of cars on the roads and the larger the junctions. Sometimes we found ourselves streaming down the slow lane of a dual carriageway with cars zipping past us at high speed, but never once did we feel vulnerable. Our outriders had our backs and motorists who did not play fair were subject to gesticulations and whistles to keep them in place.
The last stop as we group to cycle into Paris. What anticipation
Entering Paris via St Germain-en-Laye, which occupies a large loop of the River Seine, we were now less than 20km from the Arc de Triomphe. This lovely suburb has a surprising link to the United Kingdom. In 1688 James II, King of England and VII of Scotland, exiled himself to the city where he remained for the final three years of his life. We crossed the Seine for the first and second times and headed towards the city centre itself. As we rounded the Place de la Porte Maillot we shouted ‘cobbles!’ Suddenly we were on the Avenue de la Grande Armée and there, in the near distance, the Arc de Triomphe. Tired legs, sore backsides, aching arms and bruised feet all vanished as we sped up the cobbles towards the Arc and over to a layby next to Avenue Foch.
Arrival at the Arc de Triomphe
Lewis and the wonderful RBL team greeted us with cheers and whistles ushering us to safety and towards a table with bottles of beer. It was a remarkable feeling and I am not sure I remember seeing so many smiling sweaty faces on one small patch of ground as I did that afternoon. We parked our bikes, took endless photographs and then made our way over the Avenue Foch to a tunnel which led us under the Charles de Gaulle Etoile and the entrance to the Arc de Triomphe itself. Currently the monument is in the process of being wrapped up for a Christo installation which gave it an even more wonderful air of grandeur.
Nous sommes arrivees
As we lined up in two rows either side of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier I had to blink hard not to let roll the tears of overwhelming emotion. Bash had once again, and for the last time on this trip, donned his dark suit and morphed into Lieutenant General James Bashall CBE CB, President of the Royal British Legion, which marked its centenary in May 2021. A representative of the mayor’s office gave a speech about the significance of the Unknown Soldier, the idea for which predates our British Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey by four years. This soldier represents the silent voice of all those lost in war and of Remembrance. Behind us we could see the Champs Elysées, the glorious rooftops of Paris and above us the blue sky and sunshine that had accompanied us all that last day.
After the wreath-laying we sang the National Anthem and the Marseillaise, whose words we had all learned (a bit) over the last few days. And then it was over. A girl standing next to me asked me to tell her what the French official had said in his speech. As I explained what it all meant the tears began to flow. I could not stop them. Everything about the ride, from the moment we conceived of the possibility of doing it, through the long hours of winter training, to the uncertainty of whether the RBL could even stage the ride given the pandemic, to the glorious moment at lunchtime on that day when I realised I, we, were going to make it. I have not cried like that for a very long time. We had witnessed something very special and each of us had gained a personal achievement.
“Here lies a French soldier who died for his country 1914-1918”
