EDITOR John Scott looked out of the tavern window at the cluster of trees that ringed the hay meadow. Then he finished his glass and passed the half-drunk bottle of hock back to the landlord.

 

“I’ll be back later to finish the rest,” he said.

 

But he never walked back to stand at the bar again. Instead, he was carried back feet first, dying, shot on the field behind the woodland he had gazed at thoughtfully. A needless death, in a needless duel.

 

It was a bitterly cold but clear moonlit night on February 16, 1821, as Scott, editor of The London Magazine, and barrister and literary critic, Jonathan Christie, stood facing each other behind the Chalk Farm Tavern near Primrose Hill, a well-known duelling ground in 19th century London.

 

It was a remote, wooded area relatively easy to reach by carriage, making it a convenient location for often illegal and potentially deadly encounters. 

 

The area was screened off from the nearest road by trees, ensuring privacy.

 

Scott, a Liberal, was affronted when the staunch Tory-backing Blackwood Magazine dismissed what they called the “Cockney School” of poets like John Keats. The argument turned into a fierce row over many months as the magazine ran more scandalising essays and reviews on several English writers. Lawsuits had followed.

 

Keats was referred to as a Cockney poet because he was a Londoner, born and raised in Shoreditch, and part of a group of Romantic poets who were mocked for their perceived lack of aristocratic background and sophistication. Critics claimed they had no understanding of the Romantic ideals of nature and countryside.

 

Scott, 36 was already an established London newspaper man, having edited The Statesman, The Censor, Drakard’s Stamford News, and The Champion. He had taken on the editorship of The London Magazine the year before and wrote much of the copy.

 

He campaigned for electoral reform, the abolition of slavery, Catholic emancipation, education for the poor, and an end to flogging in the British Army. He was not a man to back down in an argument.

 

Scott began a series of articles attacking Blackwood’s co-editor, John Lockhart, which provoked him into calling the London Magazine editor “a liar and a scoundrel”.

 

In February 1821, Lockhart’s London agent, Jonathan Henry Christie, made another provocative statement, and Scott challenged him to apologise or face the consequences.

 

And so it was that as Keats lay dying on his death bed in Rome, on February 16, 1821, the two men faced each other at Chalk Farm. Sadly, for Scott, his Second was not familiar with duelling codes.

 

As mist rolled across the low ground, and pistols were primed, Christie called to Scott: “You must not stand there; I see your head above the horizon; you give me an advantage.”

 

He was giving him every chance. The seconds consulted and the men calmly changed their positions, once more facing off.

 

In the first round, Christie, deliberately fired wide, which should have ended the process under the codes. However, because Scott’s second did not understand this, another round followed and they fired simultaneously. Christie, in defending himself, mortally wounded Scott in his right side between the lowest rib and the hip bone’.

 

Scott was taken to the Chalk Farm Tavern on an old door turned into a stretcher, where he died on 27 February “without a groan.” He left a wife, and two children Christie was charged with wilful murder but later found not guilty.

 

Christie was very remorseful, the court heard, even holding Scott’s hand while he was given medical care and crying that he wished it was him who had taken the bullet.

 

An editorial was published in the April issue of The London Magazine, to mark Scott’s passing with a sobering plea to raise money for his family.

The irony was that Keats never liked Scott.

 

FEARED EXPRESS CRITIC WHO
REACHED OUT TO THE AFTERLIFE

Freedom of the press in Britain means freedom to print such of the proprietor’s prejudices as the advertisers don’t object to — Hannen Swaffer

 

THE MAN stood looking across the Strand at the doors of the Savoy Hotel and smiled quietly to himself in a moment of reflection. He would remember this moment forever.

 

Lord Beaverbrook had called him “the greatest personality that ever walked down Fleet Street”; H.G. Wells had branded him “the most dangerous man in London”; and the theatre world agreed that he was “more abused, praised, hated and feared than any journalist living.”

 

It was March 1953, and A Who’s Who of British press and theatre had gathered to toast Daily Express show critic, Hannen Swaffer’s 50th year in Fleet Street.

 

Frank Owen, of the Daily Express, who dubbed Swaffer “the Pope of Fleet Street,” recalled the first sentence of Swaffer’s autobiography to the audience:

 

“I was born in 1879, as was Lord Beaverbrook, Lord Camrose, Lady Astor, and Joseph Stalin. What a vintage year: You may wonder why I still persist in going to the office every day. Well, without that I would die.”

 

And dying was something Swaffer knew all about. For he had a very close friend for over 40 years, who was already dead. He was Red Indian Silver Birch from the spirit world.

 

Through him he claimed he established contact with John Galsworthy, Douglas Fairbanks Sr, George V, Abraham Lincoln and his first boss, Lord Northcliffe.

 

“He gives me advice, but I tell him, Chief, I never obeyed you when you were alive, why should I obey you now?” Swaffer said.

 

Swaffer made so many enemies that he once thought it unsafe to enter the Savoy and often headed his column: ‘People Who Are Not Speaking to Me.’

 

He trained as a reporter at 16 on the Folkestone Express in Kent and joined the Daily Mail in 1903 starting a gossip column. In 1905, he was hired as news and art editor of Northcliffe’s Mirror, London’s first picture tabloid but in 1926, after Northcliffe’s death, Beaverbrook hired him as drama critic of the Express and his fame grew.

 

Swaffer fashioned a Bohemian personality of his own letting his hair grow over his ears, wearing flowing ties and a funereal black hat, purposely dropping cigarette ash all over himself.

 

At one time he was barred from twelve theatres and in 1929, he criticised American Actress Lillian Foster so hard, saying she had a voice like a ventriloquist’s doll, that she cornered him at his table in the Savoy and slapped him. “Throw this woman out!” demanded Swaffer. The headwaiter did. When Foster died, Swaffer’s lead story was: “This is the obituary of a very clever actress who ruined herself by slapping my face.”

 

But behind the scenes his real passion was spiritualism. A close friend of after-world believer Conan Doyle, whom he replaced as president of the National Union of Spiritualists, Swaffer made contact with Silver Birch through the medium and businessman Maurice Barbanel, who went into trances, and they formed a spiritualist circle that met every week for 40 years.

 

They invited guests who witnessed ectoplasm; direct voice contact; trumpet visions and materialisation.

 

Barbanel, with Swaffer’s help and writing skills, launched the Psychic News in 1932.

 

Shortly after Swaffer wrote a moving séance around a Christmas tree with children who had died.

 

He said: “What joy it is to hear the little ones from the other side of life exclaim in wonderment when they see the huge tree laden with toys of every description.

 

“Nearly forty people had been invited to attend the direct voice séance at which there was a big tree, covered with 300 toys from all over the country, for spirit children whose names were given. A huge doll was sent to Belle from someone overseas.

 

“It is hard for non-Spiritualists to understand, but these toys, were sent after the party to poor children living in London slums, who have astral counterparts.

“For over two hours, we sat listening to the voices of more than fifty spirit children, who all inspected the tree, chose their various toys – yes, and played with them.

Sometimes we heard a toy trumpet blown, “I am blowing two at once,” said one child as trumpets moved in the air. We heard little ones arguing about which fairy doll they could have. Boy after boy wanted a motor car.

“Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, also spoke, and gave me a special message from the other side.

“The chief lesson to be drawn from all this is the lesson to the bereaved parents: Your dead children are not dead. They are as human and as humorous as they were on Earth.”

Hannan Swaffer died on January 16, 1962, aged 73.

*****

Now, as us old hacks say … “a change of pace.

WHAT A SAD CARRY ON FOR COMEDY STARS WE TOOK TO OUR HEARTS

IN THE 1950s, Carry On comedy star Charles Hawtrey stole toilet rolls from Pinewood Studios; went home by bus and stuffed carrier bags with leftovers from the cast’s buffet to live on, according to a book I have just read that archives the curse of one of the most successful British movie franchises ever made.

 

We knew that the film sets at Pinewood and Elstree weren’t happy places following leaks on the poor morale of the stars on the film set in books, the Express and magazines over the years, but never the full extent of the historic truth. And it filtered down from the top.

 

The movie’s impresario, Peter Rogers, drove to the studios in a Rolls-Royce, which he changed every year, while star Joan Sims turned up in a second-hand Morris Minor 1100 and Bernard Bresslaw a Ford Zodiac.

 

Sims died broke and so did Hawtrey. He couldn’t even afford photographs of himself to sign for his fans. Both hit the bottle. To play the vampish Valeria in ‘Carry On Screaming’, Fenella Fielding had to buy her own cheap costume jewellery. And yet the films made millions.

 

The book, ‘When the Carry On Stopped’, by Dave Ainsworth, is a nostalgic look at those loved stars of the 50s and 60s and is packed full of anecdotes about life on the film set.

 

It reveals that Rogers was “as tight as a camel’s arse in a sandstorm”. The ‘Carry On’ series made so much money at the Box Office, that ‘Carry on Nurse’ finally eclipsed every British film produced in 1959.

 

But Rogers sadistically doled out paltry salaries and refused pay his actors a percentage of box office receipts. He bought a £3.5 million mansion in Buckinghamshire with a paddock and 15 acres that once belonged to actor Dirk Bogarde but only paid fees for the actors, including Sid James, between £2,000 and £5,000 per picture.

 

He didn’t share repeat fees when the films were shown on TV or used for clips. He and director Gerald Thomas ‘filled their boots with them’. Thomas went out and bought an Aston Martin with his dosh. There was even more money coming in for merchandise such as mugs and T-shirts, videos and DVD box sets.

 

All the stars including Barbara Windsor, Jim Dale, Kenneth Connor, Kenneth Williams and others must have gone to their graves bitter about their treatment.

 

•Production was scheduled to begin on another Carry On film in June 1988, but the deaths of Williams and Hawtrey that year, combined with a budget of £1.5 million, which was deemed too expensive, and its humour too old fashioned, led to its sad end.

*****

PS: Big thank you to my old mate, Top Gun, Ken Potter in Miami for dropping me a line correcting my mistake last week of mixing up George and Stephen Segal in my piece mentioning the 1992 movie Under Siege. It was Stephen, of course. Sorry all.

 

TERRY MANNERS

 

5 May 2025