It was Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher, who famously averred that life’s only constant is change. Of course, he never lived in Richmond. If he had, he would have stumbled upon the classic exception: the metronomic monthly thud that is The Richmond Magazine alighting upon the doormats of the borough.
Can it really be 25 years since the first one?
Instinct says no, but the Gregorian calendar tells a different tale.
It was indeed 1998 when the RM put forth its first tender shoot, narrowly beating the Good Friday Agreement to the light of day.
The year when Titanic scooped 11 Oscars, and Madonna’s Ray of Light penetrated new musical worlds; when Arsenal did the league and cup double, led by a new French manager with the wild idea that orange juice made players fitter than beer.
And then Ian McEwan won the Booker Prize for Amsterdam: a darkly comic, combustible send-up of selfish ambition, in which the Foreign Secretary wants – among other, edgier pursuits – to take Britain out of Europe.
As if such things would happen in the real world. Time, therefore, for a brief glance in the rear view mirror.
As the RM’s first writer back in 1998 – less remarkable than the Good Friday Agreement, but a darn sight cheaper than anyone Wenger signed for Arsenal – as well as its former editor, sometime columnist and, more recently, all-purpose dinosaur battling cheerfully against extinction, I’ve been asked to pick out a few highlights from the past quarter of a century in print. An invidiously subjective task.
But here, with apologies to all the great interviewees and talented writers not mentioned in this sprint down memory lane, is a taste of our 25 years…
“Everyone needs a Willie”
Lady Thatcher famously remarked of her dependable deputy, Willie Whitelaw. What we needed, however, was a Dickie – and, in the end, we got two of them. Eccentric cricket umpire Dickie Bird was our very first interviewee, though it took two trips to get him, thanks to double booking by a lax PR.
“They’re fools, these people,” pronounced a dripping, discombobulated Bird by phone from the hotel shower. But it was the other, affectionately styled Dickie – aka Baron Attenborough of Richmond Upon Thames – who put the RM firmly on the local map with a long interview, conducted in his private cinema, in June 1999.
Priceless anecdotes and intimate selfrevelation from the much mourned grandee of the Green.
Tony Blair’s electoral honeymoon was well over by 2004
But during his ‘gap year’, in 1971-2, he was really rocking. With the help of London friend Alan Collenette, Blair organized gigs in the basement of the Vineyard Church on Richmond Hill. Decades later, during a clean-up at the church, posters advertising these epochal cultural landmarks came to light.
With the Iraq War controversy rumbling away in the background, Alan gave us an illuminating interview and permission to use some of his photos of the teenage impresario, and these images sparked a bidding war among the nationals.
The Daily Mail emerged victorious, donating £2,000 to charity in return for the right to republish.
Hello! was another title to come sniffing for an encore
Buying up the rights to Samantha Laurie’s feature on Annabel Goldsmith – wife of Sir Jimmy, mother of Zac and Jemima, nightclub eponym and chatelaine of Ormeley Lodge at Ham. In fact, back when she used to write – before her elevation to the rank of Managing Editor – Sam penned a wealth of classy interviews, as well as her superb column, Child’s Play.
“I can’t black out now,” an ailing Clive James told her in conversation back in 2010. “I’m just getting good.” True to his word, the Aussie polymath lasted for another decade, translating Dante’s Divine Comedy in the process.
No Nazis ever featured in the RM
But in March 2010 the star was Hermann Göring’s brother. In contrast to the vile Reichsmarschall, Albert Göring was a Schindleresque figure who used his influence to rescue European Jews from death.
Author William Hastings Burke explored all this in his book ThirtyFour – the number of key beneficiaries on Göring’s own list, submitted to the Allies after the war – and gave us a memorable interview on the back of it.
Hastings Burke also campaigned for Albert’s name to be included in the Righteous Among the Nations at Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem. The request was denied.
Also in 2010, a May feature sowed the seeds of an engaging biography by a stalwart of the BBC
Anita Anand – presenter of Any Answers? on Radio Four and a resident of Richmond – was on maternity leave when she came across our piece about Sophia Duleep Singh, an exiled Sikh princess who campaigned as an unlikely suffragette.
The main image showed Sophia, who lived in Faraday House at Hampton Court, selling The Suffragette outside Hampton Court Palace in 1913.
“It just leapt out at me because it looked completely wrong!” Anita later told The Bookseller. “I could see the woman was Indian. In fact, she looked like my auntie.” Cue years of research. The end result – Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary – came out in 2015.
One of the RM’s strengths during its first 16 years was Lucy Johnston’s writing on theatre, both in her Showtime column and in her striking full-length features.
With Richmond Theatre and the Orange Tree on the patch, Lucy’s list of interviewees reads like a theatrical Who’s Who. For Sir Alan Ayckbourn, however, she really went the extra mile – or, to be precise, about 250 of them.
A marathon midwinter trip to see the great man at home in Scarborough ended with Lucy stumbling across the threshold in the guise of a human snowball. It was well worth it though: Ayckbourn’s archivist told us later that her feature was one of the best in his collection.
By 2011, Gail Renard was a BAFTAwinning TV writer resident in Barnes.
But back in 1969, in her home city of Montreal, she was in bed. Well, sort of. Actually, it was John Lennon and his new wife, Yoko Ono, who were staging their famous ‘Bed-In for peace’ at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel.
Gail, a teenage Beatlemaniac, got in via the fire escape, asked for an interview for her school paper – and stayed for the whole eight days. Lennon even gave her the original handwritten lyrics to Give Peace a Chance. Four decades on Gail wrote a book – Give Me A Chance, My Eight Days with John and Yoko – and a witty piece (complete with iconic photo) in The Richmond Magazine.
April 2012 brought the centenary of the Titanic disaster.
Louise Patten – businesswoman, wife of former Education Secretary John Patten and a child of East Twickenham – is the granddaughter of Charles Lightoller, the only senior officer not to drown.
In her novel Good as Gold, Louise sensationally revealed what her grandfather had known all along: that the accident had resulted from confusion in the chain of command; that the profitled decision to sail on after impact had hastened the ship’s demise, costing numerous lives; and that White Star bosses had later covered up the truth. Louise dropped anchor with me during her brief publicity voyage and gave the RM a good-as-gold feature of its own.
You see some great athletes training in Bushy Park – immortal Olympian Mo Farah for one, and Fiona Adams, former Editor of the RM, for another.
Fiona’s efforts to keep up with Sir Mo proved unavailing, but she did catch him for a perfectly paced Q&A in 2017. Indeed, Fiona’s form in the editorial relay was always impressive, enabling her to carry the baton safely from 2015-20, interviewing the likes of Peter Wilkinson – cameraman to the late Queen – and the writer and broadcaster Samira Ahmed along the way.
But my own favourite memory dates from the summer of 2014, when Britain and Europe marked the centenary of the First World War.
The previous year, a chance conversation after a concert at Hampton Court with ex-Mayor of Richmond, Clare Head, had revealed an intriguing fact: the great-granddaughter of Archduke Franz Ferdinand – he whose assassination at Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 proved to be the catalyst for war – was living with her British husband, the PR consultant Anthony Bailey, near Richmond Bridge.
Princess Marie-Therese von Hohenberg promptly became my top target. And in July 2014, an interview with the couple (now sadly divorced) formed the heart of a WWI commemoration issue which also included, inter alia, a specially commissioned poem by Richmond writer Alan Franks and the story of how East Twickenham became a colony for Belgian refugees.
Distinctively local takes on an event of enduring global significance. The Richmond Magazine at its finest.
Richard Nye was Editor of The Richmond Magazine from 2007-14
