In search of Louis T Stanley

Sports Review by Louis T Stanley, published by MacDonald, covered the sporting world from September 1950 to August 1951, and is full of good things and quirky paragraphs. It was the year when Randolph Turpin won the Middleweight Championship of the World by outpointing Sugar Ray Robinson at Earls Court. This – one of the greatest performances by any British boxer, given that many judge Robinson to have been the greatest pound-for-pound boxer of all time, provoked an instant number from the great folk-singer Ewan McColl celebrating “the night our Randy /beat up that Sugar Candy/ and won the right to wear the crown.” (He lost it a few months later in the return fight in Madison Square Garden, but never mind.)

In the autumn of 1950 Stanley notes, “a fair-haired fourteen year-old apprentice set the crowds talking” when he rode his fortieth winner at Brighton and consequently lost his apprentice’s weight allowance. Mr Stanley sagely opined that young Lester Piggott “has the makings of a champion jockey.”

Or how about this paragraph, appropriate in the year in which the Olympic Games have been postponed? It was headed “Taxation Claim”: “The Treasury had demanded £15,000 from the British Olympic Association. That amounts to half the profits of the 1948 Olympic Games held in London. As a result only top athletes will be sent to Helsinki for the 1952 Games instead of a complete British team. The association has announced that Helsinki expenses would be at least £25,000.”

It’s a splendid book, almost as agreeable a time-consumer as Wisden. I’ve dipped into it for years – I think it may have been a Christmas present. Apart from the mass of interesting and often odd information, each month is preceded by an elegant essay on some sport associated with that time of the year, essays rich in picture-making. Nostalgia is invited.  “Hunting,” we are told “is the soul of the English countryside” – not a popular view today, I suppose. Twickenham “has a unique atmosphere. The towering double-tiered stands running the length of the ground. In a winter’s gloom the lighting of cigarettes at half-time look like thousands of fire-flies”. Lovely.

But who, I found myself wondering the other day, was Louis T Stanley? Well, I knew he wrote a lot about golf. Indeed I have another of his books, Green Fairways, essays on golf, some historical, some from, apparently, his memories of the game between the wars. This was published in 1947, and a prefatory note reveals that all these pieces had first been published in The Field and that he was the magazine’s golf correspondent. They are very interesting and, given the style and content, one might quite reasonably assume that Mr Stanley was an agreeable old buffer.

Still, I googled Wikipedia. First surprise: Stanley was born in 1912. So, not such an old buffer in 1947. Then his claim to notice was the time he had spent as the chairman of BRM, the British attempt to challenge the Italian and German domination of Grand Prix racing. His appointment came about because his second wife was the sister of Sir Alfred Owen, the industrialist who financed the marquee. Somewhat to my surprise I found that BRM wasn’t quite the flop I remembered. Over the years the car won 17 Grand Prix, about ten per cent of those in which they competed; quite respectable.

Stanley – I discovered from another entry – was far from popular. He was arrogant, overbearing, snobbish and opinionated. The picture of the amiable buffer was darkening. On the other hand, as I learned from an obituary in The Independent he was the man chiefly responsible for creating the International Grand Prix Medical Service in 1967 “whose mobile hospital aimed at creating a minimum level of care for drivers at a time when safety was widely neglected.” “He also showed enormous courage by deliberately walking through flaming wreckage during subsequent tests of the fireproof suits that were being introduced.”

Jackie Stewart, who drove for BRM early in him, found him “brutally frank”, but “rather liked him”. Not everyone did. One who certainly didn’t was his stepdaughter, Bobbie Neates. She detested him, perhaps feared him also, and was curious about his origins, concerning which he had always been reticent, to say the least. She looked into them, and a few years ago published a book about him, with the title, Conspiracy of Secrets. Her investigation convinced her that he was illegitimate, his father the Liberal Prime Minister H H Asquith, his mother, Venetia Stanley, originally a close friend of Asquith’s daughter Violet (later Bonham-Carter).

Well, of course, it’s been known for years that Asquith was infatuated with Venetia Stanley, writing letters to her even as he presided over meetings of his wartime Cabinet, but the assumption has been that this was an “amitie amoureuse” with at most a bit of groping under a travelling rug in the back seat of motor-cars. That’s certainly as far as his admiring biographer Roy Jenkins was prepared to go. Mrs Neates however says a child was born, given to foster-parents and everything hushed up. Wikipedia prudently says the allegation is “unsubstantiated”, and, not having read Conspiracy of Secrets I don’t know what evidence is offered for the story. I would add only that if it is true, it seems rather imprudent to have given the baby his mother’s surname.

Be that as it may, all this takes one rather far from my notion of him as The Field’s old bufferish golf correspondent, and also leaves me wondering  about the early and middle years of his life. It’s established – I think – that he read Theology at Cambridge (Emmanuel College). But, born in 1912 – if the date is correct – he would have been only 29 when we declared war on German in September 1939. So did he spend the war years pottering around golf courses and writing charming essays for The Field? The idea doesn’t quite tally with what is remembered of his energetic time with BRM and engagement in Formula One racing. A biography seems called for.

Meanwhile, pondering on his stepdaughter’s allegations, that one of the essays in Green Fairways is entitled “Statesmen As Golfers”. Might there be something illuminating about Asquith? Alas no. He begins with Parnell who wasn’t a golfer but “might have been a more rational being” if he had taken to the game. Then he recalls that Ramsay MacDonald said “Golf is to me what his Sabine Farm was to Horace – a solace and an inspiration” and that his favourite links was Spey Bay. He writes of a photograph of Lloyd George playing golf at Cannes with the Prime Ministers of Italy and France “during a lull in the 1922 International Conference., and remarks on M Briand’s curious grip as he tried to escape from a bunker.” He says that Arthur Balfour “was largely responsible for the increased popularity of the game in England …” and had “a remarkable memory for caddies. Once on the tee he recognized his opponent’s caddie as a boy who had on a former occasion caddied for him, and smiled at him in recognition. The boy was frightfully pleased. Turning to his fellow caddie, he said, ‘Ye see hoo we Conservatives ken ane anither’.”  If this was about the time of the 1906 election, he might have been met with the reply: “aye, ye’re sae few, ye can a’ ken each other.” As indeed has often been the case since.

But what, you may ask, of Asquith the golfer? Alas, very little, merely a story of how at St Andrews, he was once so displeased with his new putter that he gave it to his caddie saying he never wanted to see it again.

American Presidents still play golf, even if not always in the true spirit of the game. But do Prime Ministers?