GYPSIES, NUNS AND SWEETIES  –  ALL IN THE MIDNIGHT HOUR

W Six Times, Bertie Bassett and Three Nuns tobacco.  

Not long ago, and for the first time in a while, I stayed awake in the small hours, listening to Radio 3 and thinking about Bill Chapman, Carnforth and the Today programme. 

Bill, one of my closest friends, died earlier this year at the age of 88. People will say, as they do, that it was a decent innings but one minute we were talking about the old days in the wine trade and he was forgetting a couple of things (most unusual) and the next  –  or only a few weeks later, vascular dementia had finished him. Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald played their part at the wake, his football friends were there in force and Chelsea did him proud in the matchday programme.  

That was it, really, except that La Barca, the Waterloo Italian restaurant where we met two or three times a year, announced there would be a regular Bill Chapman day on April 11 to mark his passing. It will be quite a day in 2025. 

I thought I knew most of Sinatra’s songs but the other night, on a programme largely given over to jazz, Radio 3 played The Gypsy, which I had never heard before in my 75 years. Chap goes to see the gypsy lady because he thinks his lover may have someone else, the gypsy tells him that all is well, he is briefly reassured but then the doubts reassert themselves. Well, we’ve all been there; you pay good money for sound advice and then find your innate pessimism staging a recovery.  

Frank’s phrasing is immaculate, as always, and I wanted to tell Bill about it but then I remembered I couldn’t. He never missed a Sinatra concert and there were always racing faces in the audience at the Royal Albert Hall or wherever  –  Charles Benson, Epsom trainer Terry Mills and Catford greyhound bookie John Humphreys. The latter pair even named their horses after famous Sinatra songs, Where Or When winning the Group 1 Queen Elizabeth II Stakes at Ascot in 2002. 

I couldn’t sleep at all after The Gypsy and wouldn’t have wanted to when Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto came on. Just listening to it again made me think that the lingering (and utterly ‘correct’) looks exchanged by Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard would not have seemed quite as sad or poignant without the music. And as for Carnforth, well, that would have been just another station on the Lancaster to Barrow-in-Furness line. Brief Encounter, with its own heritage centre, helped it achieve rather more than its allotted 15 minutes of fame. 

A few hours previously I’d been reading an article about Garry Richardson’s 40 years plus on the Radio 4 Today programme. It may be an ancient term of endearment but Garry was, and is, a thoroughly good egg. 

In the early 1980s, when we lived in the Newbury area, we sometimes travelled to and from Broadcasting House together. I was responsible for quite a few sports bulletins at 7.25 and 8.25 and tried to include a bit more information about racing via the tips, which became a source of some amusement during Garry’s much longer tenure and were eventually dropped altogether, which was a shame. 

I loved it, and that’s the truth. W Six Times, I explained, stood for ‘Waited With, Will Win When Wanted’. He was one of the horses which contributed to Michael Dickinson’s twelve-winner haul on Boxing Day, 1982. Brian Redhead and John Timpson were the presenters and I took a chance or two as regards brand names (frowned upon at the BBC in those days).  

There was a Bertie Bassett Handicap and I said we couldn’t mention the product or we’d be in Allsorts of trouble. Or there was the time Three Nuns tobacco flirted with sponsorship and it was hard to resist the old joke about ‘None yesterday, none today and none tomorrow.’ Redhead stifled a laugh and then, when I heard a strange, gurgling noise like a burst pipe, I realised Timpson had joined in. 

You learn as you go along. My dad must have told me the Three Nuns joke when I was in short trousers but I dare say a large chunk of Middle England (Radio 4 devotees, in other words) had never heard it before.  

If you were responsible for the late sports bulletin the previous evening, followed by the early-morning shift, you had the rest of the day off. I was also working for Exchange Telegraph, or more particularly the Prestel offshoot, which was meant to challenge Ceefax, though it never quite happened.  

Otherwise I’d have gravitated towards Soho, the French pub and  Bianchi’s restaurant on Frith Street if I’d had a few winners. I ate there only rarely, needless to say, and only once at Wheeler’s on Old Compton Street, where Valentine Lamb recruited me for the Irish Field, a job which lasted 32 years. 

Wheeler’s fascinated me. It was an up-market fish restaurant but rather more famous for its oyster bar upstairs. The most famous oysterman, Tim from Brighton, could open between 400 and 600 shells in an hour if business was brisk, which it invariably was. Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud would lunch there after an early ‘livener’ in the French and those were the days when Freud was still gambling quite heavily. That all came to an end when his paintings started selling for millions; it was the risk which turned him on  –  no risk, no point betting. 

Bacon, who had a wicked sense of humour, would sometimes ask the head chef, a Chinaman called Mr Song, how his health was, just to hear him say: ‘Oh, mustn’t glumble.’ 

The proprietor Bernard Walsh would often let distinguished painters (especially Bacon) sign the bill because he knew he’d be paid when they sold a painting. He was also a very keen racing man and the story went round that he was watching a race he’d sponsored on television when he died in 1981. Jeffrey Bernard wrote a generous tribute to him in his Low Life column in the Spectator. 

Bernard did his best work at around that time and made the point that, although Wheeler’s had expanded and become a chain  –  the best-known being Whitstable, hence the Whitstable oyster  –  the one that really mattered was the original on Old Compton Street. 

It’s never mentioned now but there was a Wheeler’s at the lower end of Park Street in Bristol and it was there that I spotted Brian Chinn, who was a generous and gregarious host but a dangerous man. 

Chinn trained the 1984 Grand Annual Chase winner Mossy Moore, with Jonjo O’Neill riding off ten stones exactly. I assume this was under permit and, who knows, maybe he had assistance but there is no doubt Chinn was the official trainer. Later on he masterminded a scam whereby a ‘tame’ bank manager agreed mortgages which were clearly suspect. Those failing to pay were soon put under deeply unpleasant pressure and the local press in Bristol had a field day  –  or several days  –  surrounding the court when Chinn came to trial and was sent down for three years. 

It’s a lot to think about in the middle of the night, though I suppose I’ve often been awake at 3am in the course of a long gambling life. Every now and then something happens which makes it all seem worthwhile, like having my photograph taken by Ed Whitaker outside Caraffini, another Italian restaurant just around the corner from Sloane Square. 

Well, let’s be honest, I looked a bit too young (not a spring chicken, just a bit too young) in the previous one the Racing Post was using. Ed didn’t stay for a drink but I thought I might have one. A glass of Soave, perhaps, but then I saw the waiter was already bringing it. 

‘It’s generally Soave, I think?’ he said. 

‘Yes, may the winds be kind,’ I murmured, like a clever Dick. 

‘Ah, Mozart,’ he smiled. Turned out he knew far more about Cosi Fan Tutte and the balcony scene than I did. 

Bill would have found it very funny. He knew more about The Gypsy and an Italian waiter knew more about Mozart.  

Funny thing is, I really didn’t mind at all. 

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