These just in.
In her London Review of Books review of Barbra Streisand's memoir My Name is Barbra, Malin Hay records:
By the time she returned home her ‘path was set’, and she arranged to graduate early from Erasmus Hall High School (where her classmates included Neil Diamond and the chess champion Bobby Fischer, who dressed ‘like some sort of deranged pilot’).
Did he really dress like that? When Fischer burst on to the international scene aged 15, he dressed like any other American teenager of the Fifties and wore a T-shirt. A few years later, he agreed to fly over to record a programme for the BBC because he had calculated that the schedule would allow him enough time to be measured for a Savile Row suit.
Certainly, he was well turned out for his world championship match against Boris Spassky - there was no sign of a deranged pilot then.
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Violet Coward doted on her son. He was blond-haired, blue-eyed, disarmingly bright, and he showed signs of being musical, reaching tiny fingers up to the piano in the parlour of the Cowards' semi-detached house, known as "Helmsdale", at 5 Waldegrave Road in Teddington.
Violet and her husband, Arthur, had befriended the local celebrity Robert [actually Richard] "R. D." Blackmore, bestselling author of Lorna Doone, and he agreed to become godfather to their child, sending a carriage drawn by a white pony to trundle the boy, resplendent in his Victorian skirts, around the streets of the prosperous Middlesex suburb.
But this was not Noel: it was his older brother Russell Arthur Blackmore Coward, who died, aged six, the year before Noel was born.
Because I think I already knew about Neil Diamond and Bobby Fischer being classmates of Barbra Streisand, R.D. Blackmore being the godfather of Noel Coward's brother is our Trivial Fact of the Day.
Later. As well as correcting my and Oliver Soden's errors, Richard James tells me that R.D. Blackmore and Noel Coward's father were both chess players.
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