While hunting basking sharks he met the author Gavin Maxwell, an SOE instructor at Arisaig. “Frightful little pansy,” said J M Scott. “Wears dark glasses.”
While hunting basking sharks he met the author Gavin Maxwell, an SOE instructor at Arisaig. “Frightful little pansy,” said J M Scott. “Wears dark glasses.”
Maybe he was SOE’s instructor of looking dashing by wearing dark glasses.
With a sideline of looking dashing by wearing a cravat.
My teacher of French was known to have “fought with the Resistance” which I later interpreted as his having been in the SOE.
Dark glasses so he could look at a ring of bright water?
“From 1948 to 1953, Scott worked for The Daily Telegraph as its Arctic, mountaineering and wine correspondent.”
I guess he wanted to see if the wine tasted better at altitude?
Though I think it generally doesn’t. Cold thin dry air tends to reduce the taste of everything.
I love that sort of monstrously opinionated and magnificently rude material.
There’s a book about Otto Skorzeny – ‘Commando Extraordinary’ – in which the author describes speaking with Skorzeny in a restaurant in Madrid, and remarks on the irritating voice of a woman at a nearby table with words somewhat to the effect of ‘… spoken by the kind of woman who can be relied upon to say such things …’.
Then there was that very waspish art critic (is there any other kind?), Brian something-or-other*, who said of someone or other, ‘all she had to do was open her mouth for you to know all you needed to know about her’.
Reminds me of my late grandmother putting what she called ‘the wooblies’ on snooker players because their eyes were too close together.
Splendid and unrepentant.
*Sewell. I’ve just looked him up.
Anthony Blunt’s squeeze.
I recall reading a tattered paperback of his exploits by Herr Skorzeny years ago. It was remarkably self-aggrandizing and smug. Not recommended reading.
The same could be said of Sewell himself. The most irritating annunciation ever.
True.
Enunciation?
Reading his obit, I particularly liked:
“Scott recalled how a brief spell as an American gigolo required him to service the middle-aged, gargantuan heiress Hazel Guggenheim. She broke off from a bout of fellatio to top up on a family-size tub of walnut-ripple ice cream. She failed to pay Jeremy the agreed $100 fee”
Top bloke.
Couldn’t she have employed a Cadbury flake like normal people?
Hunting basking sharks is disgusting. Glad he’s dead.