Malcolm Redfellow learns something new every day ...

Friday, 5th March, 2010: The Ham & High is crap

Someone did well to get together an obituary - half a tabloid page - for Michael Foot, albeit a cut-and-paste job, from freely-available sources. This was an important local story: Foot lived and died in the patch, in a fine terraced house stuffed with books, books, and books, as the archetypal Hampstead intellectual.

Foot's morning dander, with the shaggy Dizzy leading, out of Pilgrim's Lane, past the children's playground, and onto the Heath was a feature of Hampstead life. As was finding him on the 24 bus, with senior citizen's pass, on the way to Parliament. Virtually a door-to-door service.

Then, twice in the obituary we read the same error:

In 1949 he married his sweetheart and faithful supporter Jill Craigie, with whom he had three children...

Mr Foot was predeceased by his wife Jill Craigie and is survived by his three children.

That must come as a surprise to the three imaginary children.

For the record, Jill Craigie had a daughter by her first marriage to Claude Begbie-Clench. While still married to her second husband, Jeffrey Dell, she and Foot had a ten-day stay in the Negresco, Nice, and Jill became pregnant . She had an abortion, and was unable to conceive thereafter.

When the Ham & High had Gerald Isaaman as editor, it was the finest in the land, famously, the only "local" with a foreign policy.

Standards continue to slide.

Now it is little more than a resting place for Lib Dem hand-outs.
Sphere: Related Content