Untold Stories (76 page)

I never knew him but this was not true, apparently, of Terence Rattigan, who liked his handle used, perhaps because for all the usual reasons (absence abroad, earning too much money in Hollywood and dallying
with his own sex) he'd been quite a long time acquiring it. Anyone making too much of such marks of distinction these days, though, runs the risk of being thought arrogant or foolish, the elevation is too small to insist upon without incurring ridicule. Besides knights, dames and commanders of the British Empire are now commonplace. Indeed there are so many it might save time (and some heartache) if the honour was just handed out along with the final diploma at drama school.

Opera singers and musicians generally don't have to wait so long and tend to be upgraded quite early in their careers, presumably because going to the opera or to concerts is one of the chief recreations of the great and the good who decide such things. If it takes longer in the theatre it's partly because plays can involve thought, more so anyway than opera, and so are a less satisfactory evening out for the great and the good, who have been thinking all day (or like to think so).

Sportsmen and women are less likely to figure in the upper reaches of the honours list because sport is popular and popularity is thought to be its own reward, though in more and more sports, football in particular, popularity equals advertising and that is not its own reward at all.

Still there is snobbery here. To sing like a bird and to run like the wind are both gifts of equal merit, the value society sets on them something else entirely. But an honours system that was truly democratic and which mirrored the public's concerns and enthusiasms would be just as unacceptable as the system now prevailing.

The occasions on which honours can be publicly displayed are limited, though I suppose a knighthood or even a CBE printed before or after one's name in a chequebook may procure you a deferential glance from the counter clerk, but how often these days do you see a counter clerk? And it won't cut much ice at the cashpoint.

One of the few occasions when honours can be flaunted is at a funeral, on top of the coffin, but that's hardly going to warm the heart. Alec Guinness was immensely pleased to be awarded the CH but said that since he was now too fat to get into his tails the only time anyone was likely to see it was when it was on his coffin. Even this unique opportunity was nearly
let slip as when it came to the funeral the decoration was not to be found and only retrieved in the nick of time from the bottom of the wardrobe.

If English society was regularly on parade, graded in order of rank so that as honours accrued someone could see themselves move up towards the head of the queue, the knights ahead of the CBEs, the CHs ahead of the knights and the OMs out in front of them all … if everybody periodically had to number off as one used to do on the parade ground there would be more to be said for the honours system. But the consolation of honours is for the most part private, sported perhaps in the bedroom or in front of the dressing-table mirror. An officer in the Scots Guards who won the MC for gallantry during the Anzio campaign referred in the mess to ‘my new brooch' and honours at least enable men so inclined to indulge in a taste for jewellery. Or so Sir Steven Runciman used to say, whose breast bristled with Balkan baubles.

One drawback with honours nowadays is that they are not always permanent and the Queen, particularly, is an Indian giver. I have never read a patent of knighthood or the terms of appointment to the various orders but I should be surprised if they find it necessary to emphasise that appointments to the order are only during good behaviour and can be summarily withdrawn. This, though, can happen for a variety of offences, ranging from treason (Anthony Blunt), peculation (I. Jack Lyons) to fraud over VAT (Lester Piggott).

There was something unseemly about the speed with which Her Majesty demoted her ex-Keeper of Pictures when she had known for years what his situation was and enjoyed his jokes nevertheless. It may be, though, that snatching back the riband of a champion jockey distressed Her Majesty more than the demotion of a mere art historian.

Currently there is some discussion as to whether Jeffrey Archer's perjury should lose him his peerage. I don't see why not, though it might be helpful for the future if honorands were given a tariff of possible offences, a guide to how low they are permitted to sink before they are summarily undubbed.

Another distinction that is more liberally distributed nowadays (and
not, I think, retractable) is the honorary degree. However well deserved these bestowals are, it has to be said that, showbiz having penetrated every corner of the nation's life, university governing bodies nowadays tend to compose their annual honours list with an eye to maximum coverage in the media. Largesse has to be orchestrated.

John Gielgud was the most self-centred of men but paradoxically quite modest. Awarded an honorary degree by the University of Cambridge, he thought nothing of it, taking the conferring of this coveted distinction as not unlike one of the innumerable other award ceremonies in which he regularly figured. Finding he had a slight cold the day before the ceremony, he had no hesitation in telephoning to say he wouldn't be coming.

‘But you must,' wailed the official in question (whom Gielgud should have been playing). ‘We need you. You're top of the bill.'

As the pleasure of wives is adduced as a reason for accepting a knighthood, with honorary degrees, if justification is necessary, it's likely to be the pride of parents, particularly when the university in question is on home ground. It would certainly have given pleasure to my parents that the first honorary degree I was offered, an Hon. D. Litt., should have come from the University of Leeds, where I was born and brought up. Neither of my parents had been entirely clear what a university was, but by that time it had ceased to matter as my father was dead and my mother scarcely knew who I was, and whatever was left of my family did nothing to swell the (quite sparse) attendance.

Though I had never attended the university I knew it well, had been to lectures there and worked in its Brotherton Library, so I was pleased to have been approached. And I was glad in the finish to have gone through the process once at least, though it left me in the end thinking that it was not one I would be anxious to repeat.

I was teamed with the novelist Barbara Taylor-Bradford, who is also Leeds-born and indeed had been in the same class as me at primary school in Armley, though neither of us could remember the other. The proceedings involved two more or less formal meals with the ceremony sandwiched between them. For this one had to parade in a ludicrous hat
and lurid gown (mine, I think, pink) and stand on a public stage alongside the University Chancellor while the Registrar read out a record of one's achievements.

The Chancellor of Leeds at this time was the Duchess of Kent and she did her job conscientiously and well, favouring me with a kindly (though occasionally quizzical) smile throughout this exhaustive recitation which I frequently wanted to interrupt if only to excuse what I saw as some of its less glowing achievements – appearances on
Countdown
, for instance, or
Desert Island Discs
.

The embarrassment attendant on the declamation of this well-meaning indictment I was not ever anxious to repeat and, since eating with people I don't know has always been a powerful deterrent, that and the two formal meals honorary degrees always seem to involve has been sufficient to put me off for good. Such offers as have come my way since I have managed to sidestep, saying generally that it's honour enough to have been thought of, which, indeed, is true. Still, it seems a touch mean-spirited, but there's an element of self-preservation in refusal also. Honorary degrees do not come without strings. While there is no formal obligation, an honorand must expect to be invited to address all sorts of gatherings of staff or students in the donor university, invitations which are hard to refuse once you're on the strength. If you enjoy such occasions all well and good, but talks have to be written and addresses composed and I write little enough as it is. Best to steer clear.

Better still, though, to be light-hearted about it. As President of the Royal Society and goodness knows what else, Sir Peter Medawar was showered with honorary degrees and used to say that his ambition was to get one from a university beginning with every letter of the alphabet. This seems as sensible a reason for accepting an honorary degree as any other, though hardly one to which most honorands aspire.

My own university is Oxford. I have an honorary fellowship at my college, Exeter, which gave me great pleasure when I was elected in 1987. It came as a surprise, though, in 1998 when I was asked if I would accept an honorary D.Litt. from the university itself, the surprise stemming (I
hope) partly from modesty but also because I assumed the university had written me off a few years previously, a story best told in an extract from my diary.

I'd had no communications from Oxford since that time so I was dou bly surprised when in November 1998 the university was in touch again. More diary:

There was some adverse comment in the press, notably from Paul Johnson, but nothing was said to make me feel I should have acted differently. What surprised and to some extent saddened me was that while I had quite a few letters in support from members of the public I had none from anyone in the University itself.

I don't know the circumstances and have never bothered to find out but I imagine the Murdoch post can't have been set up without some dissent at the time. If so it must have died down or been forgotten by 1998, when I made my own protest. Or it may be that university finances are now so tight that anyone involved in academic fundraising feels that they have to take money where they can find it. My closest friend at Oxford, David Vaisey, who had had to raise funds for the Bodleian Library, took this view, which I can sympathise with without thinking it right.

As it is I never read about some new depth to Murdoch's turpitude or the lies and hypocrisy of his newspapers without feeling that they demean the university which took his money to fund an appointment that bears his name. What, I wonder, do they teach there?

Finally I come back to that question from the audience with which I started and which I used to have to deflect. Nowadays, since it's no longer a secret and can be looked up on the Internet, I can go into the circumstances in more detail and without seeming to be showing off.

I was offered a CBE in the Birthday Honours in 1988 ‘for services to
literature'. I didn't have much hesitation in declining it because, whatever doubts I may have about the honours system in general, the government through which the award came was still headed by Mrs Thatcher and I didn't want anything from that particular handbag.

It's true, though, that I had some regrets about refusing it because I longed to do it with a joke but couldn't think of one. There was a gap between the letter arriving and my letter of refusal and it might have been thought that I was agonising over the decision. In fact I just couldn't come up with a witty way of putting it. Of course in the unlikely event of the prime minister actually seeing my letter she was even more unlikely to have seen the joke: that was part of the trouble.

The list on which I did not figure was published on Saturday, 6 June, which happened also to be the day of Russell Harty's funeral. Russell would never have dreamed of refusing anything and would have been only too delighted to be singled out by Mrs Thatcher, or even by General Pinochet. Dead, and therefore knowing all things, he would have been infuriated by my piece of cheek.