James Pembroke raises a glass to 30 years of convivial, bookish lunches
Back in 1996, prior to the domination of email and the internet, the working day at The Oldie was still a fairly gentle affair.
The postbag at our Poland Street office burst with crossword entries, the phone rang and most of us sat at computer-free desks. Richard Ingrams and Jeremy Lewis liked to sit on the first floor with the two ad salesmen, Tony West and Dave Sturge, and me. They enjoyed the banter.
Tony, who weighed in at 24 stone, sat at one end of the room with his back to the far wall. He had a strict regime: every morning, he had toast at home in Billericay followed by a Full English in Poland Street; he then managed to devour absent-mindedly nine sandwiches during the course of the day, while helping himself to fistfuls of crisps from a family bag in the top drawer of his desk. He was insatiable.
In pursuit of the ultimate office prank, two younger members of staff decided to move his desk by one inch closer to the wall every Friday evening so he might be panicked into reducing his girth. This went on for six months, engendering a cumulative anxiety in Tony but no change to his daily menu.
Unsurprisingly, it was Tony who, in early 1996, volunteered, ‘Why don’t we have a literary lunch like the Evening Standard ones at Grosvenor House?’
Richard and Jeremy said of the Foyle’s literary lunches, launched by Christina Foyle in 1930, that their decline was in parallel with the slow extinction of ladies in hats. Still – nothing ventured, nothing gained. I had already found the venue: Simpson’s- in-the-Strand. Brian Clivaz, the new manager, was so keen to have us for our first Oldie of the Year awards in February 1993 that he offered a three- course lunch with wine for £12.50 a head, all served by men in morning coats.
Our circulation was just 18,000 but the postbag assured us we had a devoted following, even though the magazine was a mere four years old. Yet we had never met the readers. Back then, the received wisdom among editors was to avoid them at all costs. Would they come?
We played it safe: the three authors at our first lunch on 7th May 1996, were regular contributors: Valerie Grove,Candida Lycett Green and John Michell, who all had books out. An avalanche of cheques arrived and so we invited the 120 surplus readers to a second lunch on 16th July, with John Mortimer, Edward Enfield and Deborah Kellaway.
By February 1997, we were on our sixth, hosting Robert Fox, Sir Rhodes Boyson and Barry Took.
Ingrams, who was performing in the weekly News Quiz and was a hero to three generations due to his battles at Private Eye, was a major draw.
The format was also spot on, and it is still the same 30 years later: drinks and book-signing at 12pm; a three-course lunch at 1pm, and then, after coffee, the clincher – Ingrams, with his hyper-low boredom threshold, insisted the three authors were to speak for no longer than ten minutes each. The current editor melodramatically passes them a note the moment they go past 601 seconds.
Very little has changed. The great loss is the presence of Barry Cryer (1935-2022), who was only too happy to introduce the authors with a few verses of matchless doggerel.
And the move to the National Liberal Club saw the disappearance of ‘The Sweepers’, a team of about four male readers who gathered up all the half- drunken bottles and then devoured them at the bar. Other irregular guests included Lionel Bart and Peter O’Toole.
The lunches were rowdier but Ingrams relished in the headmasterly role of bringing order to a room of raucous readers.
Heckling was not unusual. In 2015, Andrew Roberts, who was talking about his book, Elegy:
The First Day on the Somme, was taken to task by fellow speaker, Felix Dennis, for suggesting that the men went over the top with a spring in their step. Other readers joined in but Roberts kept going through the hail of bullets.
My most touching memory is standing in the book-signing queue for the
late Norman Tebbit behind one of the policemen who was at the Grand Hotel on the night of the IRA bomb. ‘Not sure I’ll buy his book,’ he told me. ‘I’ve really come all this way just to shake his hand and to tell him he’s the bravest man I’ve ever met.’
See the 'Lunch' tab on the website on how to book your tickets for the Oldie Literary Lunch
