Gilbert Adair: The orphan has lost not only his parents but his status

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This post is about another essay by Gilbert Adair, but first a quotation from Sammy Going South by W.H. Canaway. If you've not seen the movie, this is a novel about a 10-year-old British boy whose parents are killed by an RAF raid on Port Said during the Suez Crisis of 1956:

Reminded by the scene he had witnessed, he thought, I’m an orphan! The idea intrigued him. He said aloud, "I'm an orphan!" savouring the words in the air. Then he said, experimentally, “My mummy and daddy are dead,” and wished he hadn't said it, for it made him feel sad. To say "I'm an orphan" sounded not sad, but – well, important. He repeated the words again.

In his essay 'Dr Barnardo's Orphans', Adair discusses this status once enjoyed by orphans:

The prominence accorded to the orphan by nineteenth-century novelists - not only Dickens, not only in this country - became in consequence rather hypertrophied when compared to his actual footing on the social hierarchy, both qualitatively and quantitatively; and, in a much-quoted witticism from The Importance of Being Earnest (Lady Bracknell's observation that the loss of both parents resembled 'carelessness'), Wilde, no devotee of Dickensian sentimentality, mocked what might be called the rampant orphanomania of the Victorians.

But, as Adair says, time moved on and the absence of war and disease meant there were no longer the waves of orphans there had once been. After the Second World War the term came to acquire a foreign, Third World connotation - Korean orphans, Vietnamese orphans. Meanwhile, Barnardo's was diversifying its childcare activities, moving far beyond just the provision of homes for orphans.

Adair, emphasising he means to respect to the children and that he is concerned only with their public image, says the result is that:

There now strikes one as something dated and irreducibly kitschy about an orphan: a Barnardo Boy reminds one of nothing so much as a Bisto Kid. In effect, the social specificity of a nineteenth-century orphan was contingent upon an uncompromisingly normative conception of society, from which he was therefore – if in this manner alone – not alienated, since he had been assigned a codified place within it, however luckless.

Today, or at least in 1986, when Adair's Myths & Memories was published:

When what would have been regarded until quite lately as unimaginable anomalies compete with each other for the attention of the sociologist, the social worker and the investigative journalist (single-parent families, lesbian mothers, test-tube babies), the orphan has lost not only his parents but his status.

It's worse than that. The Children and Young Persons Act 1969 sought to remove the stigma if criminality from children who broke the law and treat them like any other children who are in need of care. But its effect was to spread that stigma to all children in public care.

So it is thar, today, orphans being moved between care placements are likely to find themselves put in handcuffs. We have turned being an orphan into a crime.

Reader's Voice. So your diagnosis is that we have lost the concept of the "well-behaved orphan".

Liberal England replies: Precisely. But I can console myself that I did manage to slip the phrase into my book chapter on Oliver Twist.

Gilbert Adair and when Jacques Derrida came to Loughborough

Today I thought of the writer Gilbert Adair, looked up his Guardian obituary from 2011 and found this gem:

He once told us on the arts desk of what had happened when he rang one of his publishers. "You aren't by any chance Red Adair," asked a secretary to whom his name clearly meant nothing. "No," he snapped back, "I'm unread Adair."

After I'd shared that on Bluesky, I dug out his book Myths & Memories, a collection of essays about and memories of British culture.

In one of the essays, 'Derrida Didn't Come', he writes about a conference at the Institute of Contemporary Arts that made an uneasy attempt to come to terms with literary theory:

The third tactic, and undoubtedly the most radical, is that, simply, of non-appearance. It has, I venture to suggest, become so axiomatic of these events for the most prestigious guests to fail to arrive that their absence now qualifies as almost an intrinsic part of their experience. Thus, at the ICA, neither Jacques Derrida nor Nathalie Sarraute, the two stars of the seminar, 'disappointed' our expectations, if one may so phrase it, by making an appearance.

Derrida did turn up sometimes. I know that because I once heard him give a paper to a literary conference at Loughborough University. And, thanks to a news story on the university website about an academic who later wrote a play about the occasion, I can tell you that this conference took place in November 2001. 

Besides the essays, Adair's book contains 400 random memories of news stories and popular culture from when he was young: 

70. I remember reading Nineteen Eighty-four when the year itself seemed to belong to some dim and unknowable future.

192. I remember the Danish musical humorist Victor Borge, each of whose one-man shows seemed a tremendously prestigious affair.

265. I remember Michael Fagin, the intruder who breezed into the Queen's bedroom.

355. I remember Fyfe Robertson.

If I were setting down 400 of my own such memories today, 15 years after his death, I might include:

1. I remember Gilbert Adair

The man who invented Aero bars

Yesterday's revelation that Veronica Watkins was the woman who put the bubbles into Wispa, reminded me of another trivial fact.

The process for getting the bubbles into Aero bars was invented by the novelist Nigel Balchin. This fact is referred to in passing by Gilbert Adair and you can learn all about Balchin's work for Rowntree's in an article from The Psychologist (.pdf file).

Balchin is probably best remembered today as the author of the novel The Small Back Room, which was filmed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

Shepperton Babylon again

One of my favourite books of recent months in Matthew Sweet's Shepperton Babylon, which I reviewed here earlier. (I also quoted Gilbert Adair's review of it on my anthology blog Serendib.)

Now it has another admirer. Daniall Quinn has written a full and favourable review of it on his blog The Obscurer - with the added interest that he was a schoolfriend of Sweet's.

Martin Scorsese defends British cinema

Yesterday on Serendib I quoted Gilbert Adair's review of Shepperton Babylon from the Spectator. What I did not quote was the part where he upheld the critical orthodoxy that British films are no good.

In today's Sunday Times Martin Scorsese does not share this view. The interviewer Jasper Gerard reports (you may need to register) that Scorsese is planning a documentary on British cinema:

His documentary will focus more on earlier British films that influenced him: "Everything from The Shape of Things to Come, to Green for Danger to The Happiest Days of Your Life to The Carol Reed films, particularly The Third Man." He reels off an impressive list - from film noir to Ealing comedies - with such enthusiasm you almost find yourself agreeing when he says he can't understand why so many British directors seek to ape big-is-best Hollywood style.

The Rank Organisation has lost its charm

Sad news in the Guardian: the Rank Organisation has severed the last of its links with film industry by selling "its Deluxe unit, dedicated to DVD distribution and technical support".

As the report emphasises, Rank's involvement in the movie business was once huge:

By 1946, the Rank Organisation was as big as any Hollywood studio. It had a staff of 31,000. (By comparison, the National Health Service employed 34,000 people on its inception.) Rank invested in every aspect of the film business, from labs to distribution, from meteorologists (to predict when it would be sunny enough to shoot) to its eccentric Highbury-based "charm school", where various good-looking women and statuesque men were taught diction and deportment in the hope they would turn into stars.

This scale of the Rank Organisation's film business will not be a surprise to anyone who has read Shepperton Hollywood, the book I have been enthusing about recently.

Matthew Sweet writes so well that I wanted to quote great chunks of it on my anthology blog Serendib. Conveniently, Gilbert Adair's review in the Spectator puts together some of Sweet's most striking facts into one paragraph, so I have posted it there under the title "You Tickle Me Spitless, Baby". You'll have to read it to see why.