Lady Diana Cooper and Me

Thursday night was the National Maritime Museum's Sea Words dinner held at the Trafalgar Tavern in Greenwich (London). Husband and wife team Libby Purves and Paul Heiney, both marvellous writers and broadcasters, are at the helm of this delightful event where invited guests read sad, funny, serious and jolly poetry and prose on a maritime theme. There are sea songs too, like the heartbreaking 'Tom Bowling' and the pretty 'Lass Who Loved A Sailor'.

My husband, a naval man, read 'Putting to Sea' by Joseph Conrad and 'Casabianca', more popularly known as 'The Boy Who Stood on the Burning Deck' which always makes me cry. 'Sea Fever', by John Masefield my favourite poem from childhood was read by 17- year old Mike Perham, who returned this August from his solo circumnavigation of the globe. Handsome, urbane and incredibly funny Jeremy Nicholas did 'A Wobbly Walrus' by J. Prelutsky and brought the house down with Harris's attempted rendition of HMS Pinafore from 'Three Men in a Boat' by Jerome K Jerome. There was so much more I could mention but perhaps the highlight of the evening was John Julius Norwich furiously declaiming 'A Dirty Night on the Fastnet Rock' penned by a 12-year old boy in the 19th Century. As he said himself, it could never have been written by a 16-year old, say, because of its innocent use of absurd grandiose language. It was hilarious in its self-importance and wildly imagined images of the storm.

As many people will know, John Julius Norwich, now 80, is the son of fabled 20th Century aristocratic beauty, wit and socialite Lady Diana Cooper. I had a chance to ask him about her and she was, he said, the most wonderful mother with a huge sense of fun. He particularly remembered her collecting him from school in a cream convertible car and how they had chased fire engines. I think I might have done that myself but not in such style. John Julius is totally charming and still produces his annual anthology of favourite writing 'Christmas Crackers'.

Finally, I did manage to tell him that Lady Diana Cooper was my role model for wearing yachting caps.

Lady Diana Cooper

And Me - rowing the Thames earlier this century

Top image: courtesy The Peak of Chic

Below: from A Chequered Past by Peter Schlesinger

The Way They Were

Peter Schlesinger documented the jeunesse dorée of the 60s and 70s - and some not so young icons of his stylish world - in a delicious book of intimate portraits called A Chequered Past [pub. Thames & Hudson London 2003]. Our images of these people, like Manolo Blahnik, may have moved on so I thought it would be good to see the way they were. Many years ago I saw Cecil Beaton on Salisbury station wearing that very hat. You wouldn't have snapped such a great man on a camera phone even if they had been invented by then.



Wayne Sleep then Principal Dancer with the Royal Ballet. Paris, 1970. He is remembered for dancing with Princess Diana at the Royal Gala Performance at Covent Garden in 1985.



Fashion photographer Eric Boman with Paloma Picasso au naturel 1971



Moments later: Paloma after she had stumbled down the front steps in her wedgies and lay giggling on the gravel, not realizing that she had broken her foot.



Min Hogg, founding editor of World of Interiors 1978. The actor Rupert Everett cites her as a wicked practical joker. Who would've believed that?




Manolo Blahnik in a stylish take on pyjamas 1973



Blahnik revisits the famous image of Nancy Cunard for a drag ball at The Porchester Hall swimming pool and Turkish baths 1972



The fabulous socialite Lady Diana Cooper who had a penchant for yachting caps. This is in London, 1977 and not the Cowes Week Regatta. That would have been too utterly predictable.



Celia Birtwell, textile designer, whose partnership with Ozzie Clark was iconic in the 70s



Hockney draws Cecil Beaton at Reddish House 1969


Top: Cecil Beaton and David Hockney at Reddish House, Beaton's country house in Wiltshire