Top trivia: Shirley Williams and Softly Softly

While writing my recent posts on Softly Softly: Task Force I've had at the back of my mind a memory of reading that Frank Windsor, who played Barlow's sidekick John Watt, and his wife had lived in a commune with Shirley Williams and her then husband, the philosopher Bernard Williams.

It sounds unlikely, but it turns out to be two-thirds true.

Shirley and Bernard Williams shared a house in Holland Park with the publisher Hilary Rubinstein and his wife Helge for 14 years.

Part of the house was let as a flat, and the tenants were Frank and Mary Windsor.

Shirley Williams' autobiography Climbing the Bookshelves gives a flavour of life in the house:

Back at Phillimore Place the child population had multiplied. The Rubinsteins' third, Mark, was born a few weeks before Rebecca, and our tenants Frank Windsor, the TV actor of such noted series as Z Cars, and his wife Mary had produced a daughter, Amanda. 

Looking after them all was much easier than it would have been for a nuclear family living on on its' own. All the adults worked outside the home, but at different times of the day. I was usually away in the afternoons and evenings, since the main vote in Parliament was at 10 p.m. following several hours of debate, so I was often around in the mornings, at least until I became a minister. 

Bernard would be at home during the university vocations and Helge, who was a marriage guidance counsellor, conducted many of her consultations at home too. 

There was always a familiar adult around, for the small but significant crises that erupt in family life, the scratched knee or the dead goldfish. So the stress and guilt that afflict so many families were minimised.

Ladies and gentleman, we have our Trivial Fact of the Week.