MY FIRST ENCOUNTER with history was being taught to play chess by a friend of my parents, John Liulf Swinton. John was some twenty years older than my mother, but enjoyed a similar intellect, and he taught me to play before I even started school. Where’s the history in that? The answer is in the stories that came out while he was trying to instruct me on the King’s Gambit or the Bishop’s Opening, for John’s father was Major General Sir Ernest Dunlop Swinton KBE, CB, DSO, RE, credited with inventing the tank and appointed official war correspondent on the Western Front by Lord Kitchener.

Being the son of such a man must have been a hell of a thing to live up to. That’s possibly why I remember John as a somewhat nervy man whose wife rather dominated him. Ellen Schroeder Swinton certainly scared the life out of me when I was young. Later, for reasons best known to herself, she became our cook, but I found her food quite unpalatable, the main reason being her long, greasy hairs that got entangled in the contents. She’d frequently, and rightly, scold me for folding over the bread on a jam sandwich when I should have been cutting it, but I’m sure she had a good heart as she often gave me her loose change. Even as a kid always on the lookout for some extra sweet money I was loath to take her coins, though, as they were always dirty and stuck together with something unsavoury of, I suspected, human origin. I always gave the money a seriously good clean. Indeed, even as I write this a historic queasiness washes over me. I always thought she was Swedish or Norwegian. It turns out she was Danish. The actress Tilda Swinton is related somehow – I believe Ernest was her great-uncle, which makes her John’s niece, but that doesn’t really affect the action here.

Putting history on hold for a moment, unless you count the history of cooks, let me wander briefly onto the subject of cooks. Our first was Cookie Dawson, who had a rather bland brown dog and still wrote to Father Christmas. I chanced to see her list of festive wants one year and it was headed by something called a ‘dunlopillo,’ which seriously made me question whether I’d go on writing to Santa when I got to an age where a dunlopillo was the one thing that would make me shriek with joy on Christmas morning. Cookie Durr was tall and quite austere, while Ann Brice, a Geordie through and through, was jolly decent and sent me birthday cards and the like. Somehow she never had the ‘Cookie’ tag attached to her like the others. Her son Leslie, who was to die tragically young in a road accident, gave me my first vinyl records. Whether it was stuff he’d grown out of and suddenly found uncool or whether it was simply a philanthropic moment I couldn’t say, but I was certainly grateful and it started me on a long and winding road.

In any child’s life there is a queue of adults asking you the tricky question ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ My answer, even at a tender age, was that I had no intention of growing up. I’d seen the film Peter Pan and knew categorically that such a thing was possible. On the off-chance that I was wrong I usually went for veterinary surgeon or archaeologist. Once I’d ascertained that a vet dealt with sick animals and not frisky types that were full of life, I came down firmly on the side of archaeology. Uncle Jack Haslam (Uncle Zak when I was younger as I had some trouble with my ‘J’s) had other ideas. He was a larger-than-life, dominant character who felt that my future was in the chemical industry of the north. I didn’t quite see it that way, but was reluctantly wheeled around massive and forbidding factories that neither excited nor inspired. Bleaching, dyeing and other unnamed aspects of it had, I suspect, been founded the previous century to work in tandem with the great Lancashire cotton industry. It was not talked about that much, but there was an underlying sadness, in the only son of Jack and his wife Dorothy having been killed in a car accident. More than that I was never told, nor did I seek further information. Their house was called Brooklands as Jack had raced there in his younger days, and by coincidence I would attend Brooklands College years later. I must have been seen as the lad designated to step into the role they’d assumed their son would take, with a view to one day becoming lord and master. My dreams and aspirations, though, lay elsewhere and not in the dark satanic mills of Lancashire, where affluence and effluence had become acceptable bedfellows.

I guess I was about eight years old when I went on my first archaeological dig. Not an official dig, you understand, but Ken Lewis, the father of two friends of mine, Brian and Jeremy, invited me to join them on their part-time forays into the past. I warmed to it immediately and was soon identifying arrowheads, scrapers, borers, sickle blades and other prehistoric tools. Spotting knapped flints, the bulb of percussion and those little fissures incurred by the shock of knapping became second nature. If I’m walking over likely terrain, I still look to the ground, where others may look to the sky. As other children gathered flowers, conkers, acorns or tadpoles, I’d arrive home with pockets full of stones. My mother was supportive, my father bemused.

I haunted Weybridge Museum when I could, listening to the stories of the curator, Dorothy Grenside, herself, I suspect, a great age. I discovered later that this lovely old lady had been a champion swimmer, a tennis player, an eminent watercolour artist and poet, and one of the pioneering women motorists. I only knew her as someone who fired my enthusiasm for exploring the past. I was able to track down and buy a copy of her 1917 book of poems, Open Eyes. Museums now have a designer air about them; then they had nothing more than rows and rows of display cases with the name of the piece and the donor handwritten in ink on a small, yellowing card. Having had a deep fascination with history from an early age, the lure of a museum was great.

A favourite spot for us flint hunters was somewhere we called ‘Flint Hill’. That wasn’t its proper name, if indeed it had one, but it was close to the deep railway cutting between Walton-on-Thames and Weybridge and the excavations a century earlier must have churned up thousands of Neolithic implements, many of which ended up in our box room jostling with the model railway for shelf space. I found looking for flints exacting, rewarding and highly compelling. Complete arrowheads were something of a rarity as their fragile tips tended to snap easily, but the more solid tools were usually complete and slipped comfortably into your hand. Great workmanship, and it was extraordinary to wonder who had held it in 4000 or even 9000 BC, only to be discovered in an age that those toolmakers could never have imagined. Our findings were fashioned before the discovery and use of copper, bronze and iron, and on the site of what to them would have been a terrifying vast iron road haunted by monsters with red eyes that pierced the night, shrieking and belching steam.

When I left home I donated thousands of Palaeolithic and Neolithic flints, Roman pottery, ammonites, crystals and a whole range of historic goodies to the Weybridge Museum. I kept one tin trunk full, but on a clear-out one day my father tipped the contents out into the garden. ‘Well it’s where they came from,’ was the reply to my indignant pose. I made sure that I was well out of reach before chipping in with, ‘Huh, if it had been a trunk full of golf balls you wouldn’t have thrown them away.’ My mother, more of a garden habituee than my father, encountered New Stone Age craftsmanship for years to come, almost breaking her ankle on the bigger items and snapping many of the more delicate pieces.

At Brooklands College, alongside my classes in English literature and British Constitution and art, I started to go out with Vivien Berry, with whose sister I was studying. Vivien lived at Laleham, some 7 or 8 miles from Walton-on-Thames, but I was happy to miss the last bus back to Walton for a few extra minutes with her. Those ‘extra minutes’, though, were often taken over by Major Berry with a few tales of life in the military. I knew any canoodling had come to an end when he marched in with the opening gambit, ‘Have I ever told you about this particular skirmish in Burma…?’ The pipe would be filled, tapped on the hearth, lit and the tales would begin. In youth it drew a sigh of exasperation; as an adult the response would be, ‘Hey look, we can kiss goodnight anytime, but these Burma tales are gripping.’ It’s good that our paths still cross and Vivien and I are able to catch up and flatter each other that the years haven’t altered us too much! At least we recognise each other so it must be vaguely true.

While I was at Brooklands College I got involved in a major archaeological find after a series of aerial photographs that had been taken of the River Wey just by the ‘wall of death’, a steeply banked section of the old Brooklands motor racing circuit, revealed the grass growing in a different direction. This was intriguing. It seemed in all probability that the meadow we’d all sat on and walked on had once been a reasonably substantial building. Very slowly, once the dig began, the outline of a sizeable structure emerged, but it was, of necessity, an extremely pedestrian process. The eventual consensus was that we had located the lost manor of Hundulsham, once the domain of Bishop Odo, William the Conqueror’s half-brother. Research revealed that it had passed through many hands over the centuries but the family that held it the longest were the Wodehams. In 1290 they had 2 acres at the rent of one rose per annum. Very romantic. By 1324 they held 80 acres at a rent of 6 shillings, the area later expanding to almost 100 acres.

All was well until the late fifteenth century, when the descendants of Sir Bartholomew Reed, former Lord Mayor of London, seized Hundulsham from the Wodehams, who later would contest the ownership. When challenged over the legality of his claim, William Reed denied that there had ever been a manor there. The Reeds were very powerful, with many connections, so whether he demolished the manor to prove a point or whether nobody dared question his word and it fell into disrepair, we’ll never know. There is no further reference to the building or to any future families living there, so it seemed that we were the first to re-discover the lost manor of Hundulsham. One of the areas that I worked on was a room where a tiled hearth had gone from vertical to horizontal, so maybe the Reeds did destroy the property. I had some of the tiles at home for many years. I’m not sure where they went, but I can make a shrewd guess. Maybe a future historian will discover them cheek by jowl with the Neolithic tools and be totally baffled. The demolition of Hundulsham would hardly have mattered to the Reeds, for they had other houses, including Otelands (later Oatlands), which they gave to Henry VIII in a part-exchange deal, and plenty of land. How marvellous it would be to stroll down the meadow today and look for any artefacts that still remain. Marvellous but impossible.

The site is now home to a delightfully attractive sewage plant, easily visible from the train as it leaves Weybridge station heading south-west. Underneath it somewhere is a rose that was handed over for a year’s rent. How indiscriminate progress is. I haven’t checked to see if I am a descendant of the power-hungry, avaricious, bullying Reeds of Weybridge. Surely not?

The great British inventor Barnes Wallis had his office at Vickers Armstrong, later BAC, on the Brooklands site and came to the college to give us the odd lecture. He was inspirational, engaging and still so full of excitement for the future. He would show us, by demand of course, unseen footage of the testing of his revolutionary (pun intended) bouncing bombs at Reculver in 1943. One of his sons was our chemistry teacher at Woking.

Even in the years at Radio One and TV Centre, my enthusiasm for the past didn’t dim and on more than one occasion I managed to sneak something historical into the shows. On Saturday Superstore in the mid ’80s, I did several outside broadcasts from a major dig at York, complete with hard hat and trowel, for the York Archaeological Trust alongside historian Richard Kemp. The site of Anglo-Saxon York had apparently been a puzzle for many years, but now it had been located on the area previously occupied by the Redfearn Glassworks at Fishergate. The extensive dig also produced finds from a nearby twelfth-century former Gilbertine priory, which assisted with study into the cemetery population, health, diet, appearance and life expectancy. The Gilbertines were unique in that they were the only totally English religious order, having been founded in the 1130s by Gilbert of Sempringham (later St Gilbert), a parish priest from Lincolnshire. They disappeared with the Dissolution of the Monasteries, so it was fascinating to re-discover elements of their existence. We dug, uncovered, washed, examined and filed. I was also delighted to launch the trust’s Archaeological Scholarship. I was enrolled onto its committee of stewards and received various papers for discussion, but alas geography and travelling time meant me falling by the wayside after a while. That summer they did find part of a Roman helmet in pretty good condition with an embossed rosette. An exciting dig. I still have my certificate confirming that I am not only a fully fledged Viking but also a comrade in arms of Erik Bloodaxe and ‘entitled to conquer, plunder or trade in any lands encountered’. Take me on and you’re also dealing with my pal Mr Bloodaxe.

On a broadcasting trip to Jamaica a year or two back with Adventures in Radio we were informed of an old site that had just been uncovered when some dense undergrowth had been cleared. The remains were of old Colonial buildings, with even older Spanish architecture underneath, the homes of those long gone. I was invited into what had been a crypt. The question as to what had happened to the occupants was answered as we stumbled across a handful of old graves. These were the last resting places of English settlers. All was still, hot and humid with not a breath of wind, as someone muttered, ‘There must be ghosts in a place like this.’ The supervisor overheard and turned on us with a loud mocking laugh, barking, ‘There are no such things as ghosts.’ At that very moment we heard a mighty crack and looked up to see a massive section of a huge tree break away and crash towards us from a great height. Weighing, we guessed afterwards, somewhere in the region of half a ton, it missed one or two of us by no more than a couple of feet. There was absolute silence. Everyone was shocked. Our organiser, Tim Jibson, went as white as a sheet and was shakier than an amusing jelly in the shape of Shakin’ Stevens. No such things as ghosts?

I also enjoy sporting history and a long-term part-time project is the ultimate book of the history of the FA Cup Final, with a write-up of every final, photographs of every winning side and a whole load of facts to boot. It’ll be full of useful and fascinating stuff: for instance jazz musician Humphrey Lyttelton’s uncles both played for the Old Etonians in the 1876 final, and the 1878 final between Wanderers and Royal Engineers was refereed by a Bastard. A forerunner of many, you may think. Perhaps, but he was the only genuine Bastard, Mr S. R. Bastard in point of fact.

I also wrote a screenplay about the 1873 FA Cup Final between the Old Etonians and Blackburn Olympic. I was originally cast as consultant to Julian Fellowes, but he proved to be too busy so I landed the role and was delighted with the result. Taking in football history, social history and relationships on and off the field, it examines the eve of the professional era and the first time that the FA Cup went north. The Old Etonians, Old Harrovians, Old Carthusians, Oxford University and Royal Engineers had had it all their own way until the working-class teams from the north brought in training, diets and … money! The game would never be the same again.

My interest in history led me to becoming increasingly involved with the Heritage Foundation and the blue plaques they erected. Initially commemorating comedians, they soon progressed to plaques for all areas of the entertainment industry. For several years, I was the vice-president and Robin Gibb the president. We shared a love of history and with the foundation’s chairman, David Graham, were involved with erecting plaques for such luminaries as Sir Norman Wisdom, Sir John Mills, Peter Cook, Keith Moon, Kenneth Williams, Joe Meek and Jerome Kern.

The Kern plaque, unveiled by Robin and Les Misérables lyricist Herbert Kretzmer, had a special meaning for me. A few years earlier I’d watched the Kern biopic, Till the Clouds Roll By, and had become strangely obsessed by one particular scene. This depicted Jerome and his manager cycling through an English village. One of them gets a puncture and the manager goes to find help, leaving Kern by this quaint rose-covered cottage, featuring the delightfully un-English address (on the US-style mailbox!) of something like 1093 Main Street. Intriguing how England was perceived by Hollywood film moguls. He wandered in through the open door, sat down at the very conveniently placed piano and played until a young lady appeared, questioning his presence. In a nutshell he thought she was the maid, when in fact she was the daughter of the house, and they subsequently fell in love. Why I became dead set on finding out in which village these events played out in real life I have no idea. It plagued me for weeks. I googled, I researched, I drew a blank. Three months later I was having dinner with some friends on a steam train in Kent. I asked whether they still lived by Walton Bridge. They did.

‘Do you know that, on the very spot where your house is, both Turner and Canaletto, at different times obviously, painted the old bridge?’ I asked them.

‘We did, but do you know the two pubs across the river?’

‘Yes I do, The Swan and the Anglers.’

‘What do you know about the Swan?’

‘More than you imagine. I often played in the garden when I was a kid and I did my very first paid gig, singing and playing guitar, for a friend’s eighteenth birthday in the main room, of which a photograph still exists.’

‘Ah, but what you probably don’t know is that the room in which you played your first paid gig was the room in which the American songwriter Jerome Kern was playing the piano when he met his wife-to-be.’

I was utterly speechless. They had no idea of my quest and were equally speechless when I told them the story. It transpired that Kern had married Eva Leale, the landlord’s daughter, at St Mary’s Church, Walton-on-Thames, sixty years before I was confirmed at the same altar. Who can possibly say what made me so obsessed and that there would be a double link between us? I was so delighted to be able to organise a blue plaque for the man who wrote such classics as ‘Old Man River’, ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, ‘The Way You Look Tonight’ and ‘I’ve Told Every Little Star’.

Among the regular guests at the Heritage Foundation’s post-plaque lunches were a number of Bomber Command veterans. They were clearly disappointed that their efforts, and more importantly those of the 55,500 Allied aircrew who perished keeping our country free from oppressors, had never been recognised. From the first-voiced thoughts at Foundation functions that something be done about the injustice, we initially raised small sums for a memorial that, like Topsy, ‘just growed’. As the wheels turned, the Daily Telegraph and later the Daily Express championed the cause and more people became involved, including Jim Dooley, formerly of the hit group The Dooleys, with Robin Gibb adding his profile and passion to the project as well as his time and energy. Architect Liam O’Connor was brought in and benefactors stepped up in the shape of Lord Ashcroft, John Caudwell and Richard Desmond. The scheme now had legs and began to take shape. Liam was responsible for the design of the memorial which he wanted to be in keeping with nearby monuments designed by his architectural hero, Aston Webb. Philip Jackson was responsible for the sculpture that provides the memorial’s focus, depicting a Bomber Command crew home from a mission. There was to be no triumph or jingoism in the seven 9-foot-high figures. They display fatigue and exhaustion, with eyes to the sky, praying that their pals make it home too.

The Ministry of Defence came in for some criticism for not assisting with funds, especially after many veterans exposed themselves financially by putting up their own money. Other veterans missed out on applying for tickets for the unveiling, but very movingly, many people returned theirs so that the airmen could attend in order to pay tribute to their mates. HM the Queen, flanked by many members of the royal family, unveiled the sculpture in Green Park on 28 June 2012, with an Avro Lancaster dropping red poppy petals over the park. Vanessa Brady and I sat in the sunshine, feeling very patriotic and knowing that justice had been done for the boys of Bomber Command. Robin would have been so proud, but at least his name is, quite rightly, carved on the monument.

I met Vanessa at one of Robin and Dwina’s garden parties. I say met, we were actually pushed together by Dot Most the wife of my first publisher, Dave Most. We began a gradual relationship that increased with time. It was only after a few weeks that she revealed that we’d almost met back in the mid ’80s. It seems that we were both at a function and our eyes met as she walked across the room. As she was with a group of friends I didn’t really have the bottle (or the glass) to go and talk to her. So being a useless bloke, I sent someone else to ask on my behalf. Wrong. Back came the answer, in the negative. By the time she decided to make another trip across the room, I’d gone … as they say in the song, ‘Who know where, who knows when.’ But we did meet again years later.

Three years ago I discovered that if I’d asked her myself she’d have agreed quite willingly to a glass of something from the Champagne region, with the implication that she would have been happy for the conversation to blossom as the prunus in May, from that point. I was swift to point out that I hadn’t arrogantly dispatched a Pony Express rider to do my dirty work, it was simply shyness. You know the score. Striding purposefully towards a table hidden round a corner and containing half a dozen girls to talk to just one of them, demands nerves of steel and several acres of confidence. Then there is the question of approach. The comedic? The smouldering? The domineering? It’s a tough call. That’s why I sent in the troops. Well … man at arms. After the passing of half an hour VB claims she noticed I’d gone, as she rounded the corner on her way to the ladies room. I claim she couldn’t restrain herself and just had to see whether I was still there. Maybe the truth lies somewhere between the two. Being a carpe diem kind of chap I should have seized the moment and also heeded Horace’s quantifying follow-up, Quam minimum credula postero, and not put my trust in tomorrow. This tomorrow was a long time coming and it was just after Robin and I had been on stage singing Massachusetts.

Robin and I were always keen to pursue plaques that were more historical than necessarily showbusiness. Sadly my old pal passed away in 2012, but I feel he’s very much a part of the British Plaque Trust, a registered charity that we set up in 2013. In October of that year, with my fellow trustees, Vanessa Brady, Ian Freeman and Major Ian Mattison, we erected a blue plaque at Wembley Stadium to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Football Association. Relatives of the Founding Fathers of football, who drew up the rules back in 1863, were flown in from the USA and New Zealand to join those closer to home. The former West Ham United and England player Sir Trevor Brooking made a speech and unveiled the plaque, assisted by one of the youngest descendants present. The FA historian and I both said a few words and a QR tag was later fixed to the plaque, meaning that future generations will be able to not only download the FA history directly from the plaque, but also watch a recording of the blue plaque ceremony. I was delighted that my friends Sir William and Lady McAlpine were able to attend, as the McAlpine family had built the original Wembley Stadium in 1923. This delightful couple live with herds of deer, a tribe of meercats, a full size railway line complete with engines and rolling stock, a family of capybaras, a railway museum, a fleet of dogs, a flock of alpacas and anything and anyone else that turns up.

Our next plaque commemorated Denmark Street, London, Britain’s Tin Pan Alley, which was the centre for the UK’s publishers and songwriters from the ’20s and where the likes of the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, the Kinks, Donovan and hundreds of others began their careers. The heartbeat of the small street, just off the north end of the Charing Cross Road, was the Giaconda café, where the musicians and writers would hang out, in the hope of getting a gig or picking up a publishing deal. The café is still there, (re-opening this summer) with the blue plaque letting the world know that this is where many of the most successful songwriters began a journey that resulted in phenomenal sales around the planet. Donovan flew in to unveil the plaque, performing a song that he’d written specially for the occasion, appropriately called ‘Tin Pan Alley’. I say unveiled, but the cord failed to pull the curtain away, so most of the unveiling shots were of my backside as I perched precariously on a ladder to remove the curtain by hand. Several of Tin Pan Alley’s most successful songwriters attended, including Don Black, Tony Hiller, Barry Mason, Bill Martin, Mitch Murray, Guy Fletcher and John Carter. Thanks to the efforts of our PR guru, Dan Kirkby, with whom I worked at Radio One, the event made all the main news bulletins on ITV and BBC as well as getting into more than 100 newspapers. Guy is terrific company and we’ve spent many a happy evening or weekend together along with his lovely wife Cherry. A source of wisdom and knowledge in the music industry, he commands great respect as the Chairman of PRS for Music. When I was lucky enough to receive the British Academy of Composers, Songwriters and Authors Gold Badge of Merit in 2011 it was Guy from whom I received it during the annual lunch at the Savoy Hotel.

My interest in history also involves diving off on a whim to various Civil War battle sites such as Edgehill or Naseby. I have been known to wander over Wars of the Roses sites too, like Barnet and Bosworth Field, in fact anywhere that has some fascinating historical attachment. Many people get excited at seeing a celebrity. I get excited about famous buildings, rivers, monuments and the like.

Family history is also a passion, starting with my father’s old football programmes and newspaper match reports, such as this write-up from an FA Amateur Cup match: ‘A dominating share in Walton’s performance was taken by their halves, of whom Read, a keen tackler and thoughtful distributor of the ball, was outstanding.’ The old man’s fair play was also reported in another match: ‘There was a cry of “Hands, ref.,” when a shot from Bunce hit Read’s wrist on its way through the penalty area, but with Read making no attempt to play the ball with his hand, the incident was not deliberate or serious enough to warrant a penalty.’ Here, that fleeting moment in time, that cry from the crowd, that incident, is again committed to print, my father, the pre-war lad at centre-half, not knowing that he’d soon be playing in the chilling-sounding War League North. I have several cards from that period summoning him to Manchester United’s ground for training. Another newspaper cutting sees the young Read sitting proudly in the middle of the front row of the Guildford City team.

Prior to joining the Army at the outbreak of war my father was accepted for service in Division A of the Metropolitan Police War Reserve, stationed at Hyde Park. The acceptance letter is dated 26 April 1939, so they clearly knew that something was in the wind.

I’ve enjoyed poring through family history from a very young age and that interest has never waned. I have my great-grandmother’s vehicle registration card from 1928, which declares: ‘This council has been informed that a registered motor vehicle NC 2606 has been transferred to you.’ The car was a Calthorpe, made by a Birmingham manufacturer that produced some 5,000 high-quality cars after World War One but by the end of the ’20s had ceased production altogether. I read somewhere that fewer than ten have survived. I wonder if NC 2606 is one of them. Nestling next to the registration card is one of many speeches given by my grandmother, this one being dated October 1954:

Look, here’s a menu from a dinner-dance at the Grand Hotel in Manchester in November 1946, the evening being rounded off with the seasonal Pouding de Noel with Sauce Rhum. No etymological wrestling needed that night, even for the uneducated. I note that post-pud, my godfather proposed a toast to the King and the Royal family, followed by a few well-chosen words from my grandmother. Public speaking was a baton taken up by my mother, who declaimed at dozens and dozens of dinners, sometimes in rhyme, usually with wit, often with an edge and certainly with a full glass. She was definitely a character. She was much loved by my friends for her joie de vivre, sense of humour, intellect and eccentricity, and she had the ability to see through the vainglorious and denounce the charlatan, sometimes to the point of embarrassing bluntness. She could also be belligerent, dogmatic and dismissive. She was one of the ‘Oh get on with it, stop feeling sorry for yourself’ school, the ‘We don’t talk about things like that in public’ brigade and the ‘I’ll keep your feet firmly on the ground’ tribe.

My mother was also highly capable and unflappable in an emergency. There was a ghastly accident across the road from us when a lorry knocked down and killed a young girl who was cycling with her mother and sister. Taking charge, Mater was first on the scene, coping with a distraught mother, a panicking truck driver and an almost delirious sister. The lorry had virtually run over the girl’s head, but my mother was at the front, organising, keeping everyone calm and on a firm rein and dealing with the trauma, before the emergency services arrived. Exceptional. On the other hand she could be downright offensive. I was probably about fifteen and girls were beginning to filter into our crowd. One of them, not a girlfriend, came to call for me one day, and clearly didn’t meet with my mother’s approval, for as we were leaving, and within earshot, she flared her nostrils, raised her eyebrows and hissed, ‘I don’t think so, do you?’ Reminiscent of Lady Chetwode’s supposed comment about John Betjeman, her future son-in-law, ‘We invite people like that to tea, but we don’t marry them.’

Latterly she imagined scenarios. Here’s a typical example. The telephone rings. I run down the corridor to answer it. Pretty normal stuff. I’m possibly breathing slightly more heavily than usual. ‘Hello.’

It’s Mater. ‘We don’t say “Hello”, we give our number.’

I’ve had that one since I was four years old. I still haven’t learned. ‘OK.’ I’m still breathing deeply.

‘Oh, I’ve clearly interrupted something of a personal nature.’

I have to disappoint her. ‘If you really want to know, I’m playing table-tennis.’

‘Oh, it’s none of my business.’

‘Maybe not, but I’m still playing table-tennis.’

‘Hmph! And how do play table-tennis by yourself?’

‘It may come as a cataclysmic shock that I’m not proficient enough to play by myself.’

‘There’s no need to be rude, just because I’ve caught you out.’

‘Caught me out doing what?’

‘Whatever you were doing.’

‘I was playing table-tennis!’

‘Hmph, that’s what you call it, is it?’

‘Would you prefer ping-pong?’

‘There’s no need to be funny.’

‘I’m not. I’m playing table-tennis.’

‘What, with one hand, while you’re talking on the phone along the corridor?’

‘Well, clearly I’m not playing now because I’m talking to you.’

‘So who’s the girl you said you’re playing with?’

‘I’m not playing with a girl.’

‘Oh well, it’s clearly none of my business.’

‘If you really want to know I’m playing with some friends.’

‘You don’t get out of breath playing table-tennis.’

‘You do if you play properly. Anyway what did you call for?’

‘Oh, it doesn’t matter if you’re … “busy”.’ Click.

Mingling with the Calthorpe motor, the speeches, the football write-ups et al. is my great-grandfather’s Gospel According to St John, Active Service 1914–1915. This small book of some seventy pages also carries the words ‘Please carry this in your pocket and read it every day’. It has a personal message from Lord Roberts dated August 1914 urging my great-grandfather, and others, to ‘put your trust in God’. There are eight hymns at the back, including ‘When I Survey the Wondrous Cross’, ‘Rock of Ages’ and ‘Abide with Me’. The final page is a ‘Decision Form’, a declaration to be signed with both name and address, the confession beginning, ‘Being convinced that I am a sinner…’

I could fill a book with historical accumulations from the family. As for photographs, our lot were queuing up as soon as Fox-Talbot exclaimed, ‘I’ve just had a negative thought.’ Shots of my great-great-grandparents and some of their peers, looking fairly sombre, in keeping with the period, various cars that would now be worth a fortune, unidentifiable folk, my grandfather dressed in whatever daft garb he thought would look hilarious for the camera. In his finest comedic moment in a ballroom somewhere, he takes Elvis literally, as you may recall from Chapter 2, and is the only one on the dance-floor waltzing with a wooden chair. My grandmother’s fox fur can be seen draped round his neck in this rather splendid snap. Also caught on camera are a procession of family dogs resignedly adorned with hats, necklaces and sunglasses, my mother and my grandmother in full flow at some of the aforementioned speeches, my great-grandparents standing upright and proud for the camera, my great-grandfather sporting his waxed moustache, my father the boy chorister looking cherubic outside a church, youthful cricket teams now almost a century old, for whom the Great Umpire’s finger was raised long ago, snaps of pipes, firmly clenched in white teeth, boating parties on the Thames, ancestors taking off across heathland with a pack of upright-tailed beagles, Army boys in khaki shorts, a headless relative on a carousel, another playing a banjo in camp, friends lifting the casing of Bluebird, which held the Land Speed Record, back onto its wheels. Why? I have no idea. I wish I’d discovered a lot of these photographs when there were folk around to answer questions. There are photos of weddings, dinner parties and a thousand other events captured and frozen in time, that pose more questions than they give answers.

I have fairly complete histories of the two main houses I’ve owned. The Aldermoor at Holmbury St Mary had been built in the early 1860s for Henry Tanworth Wells RA, whose best-known paintings include Victoria Regina, depicting Victoria being informed that she was now the monarch and Volunteers at the Firing Point. Wells’s circle included Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, John Ruskin and William Frederick Yeames. He also hosted the fifth Earl Spencer, and William Gladstone was a not infrequent guest while Prime Minister. Wells’s closest confidant was the Gothic revivalist architect George Edmund Street, who designed the law courts and who almost certainly had a major hand in designing the house. The Wells and Steet families also intermarried. In the ’20s and ’30s, the famous Harrison sisters, Beatrice, May and Margaret, performed regularly in the drawing room, around the time Beatrice was enticing some poor unsuspecting nightingale to sing along to her cello in her garden at Oxted, for a clutch of patient BBC sound engineers. It was a privilege to walk in the footsteps of these people who’d contributed much to our country. In ‘Elizabethan Dragonflies’ I wrote, ‘The Jekyll-haunted gardens now are mine, I walk at will down long, untrodden tracks.’ The house’s 23 acres and twenty-two rooms were full of history, with the oldest tree, a yew, being dated at something like 600 years old. Makes one wonder what was on the spot at the time. The property was 850 feet above sea level and, despite being some 25 miles from the coast, from the top windows, when the conditions were right, one could see the Channel glistening through the Shoreham Gap. There were a few cracking parties at the house that may well have rivalled those of Victorian and Edwardian incumbents. How often do you see Rick Parfitt from Status Quo and David Cassidy wiping the spinach and gruyère quiche from their mouths to join Beatles tribute band, Cavern to knock out a few favourites? Or David Grant and his girlfriend Carrie disappearing for an hour or two into the azaleas only to re-emerge as an engaged couple, eventually marry and live happily ever after. Or the guy who did the catering spending fifteen minutes warning his staff of the dangers of walking into the plate glass doors in the conservatory only to do it himself five minutes later and break his nose? Or the Marquess of Worcester and Lord Johnson Somerset with a mouth full of vol-au-vents singing along to the Tremeloes playing live by the rhododendrons? Those were fun days and I wish I’d kept the house and not listened to my ‘advisers’. Years after I sold it for £550,000 it went for something like £4.5 million. Any ‘sight’ would have been good; foresight, hindsight, second sight, insight.

Then there was Little Brinsbury Farm, dating back to 1195 when the stronghold belonged to Brynis. Thomas de Brunnesbury and his delightfully named wife Celestrial lived on the site from 1327 until 1377, but the first mention of the building that I bought is in 1618. I have a list of the incumbents from then right through to World War One, a fascinating swathe of history.

In the spring of 2014, I persuaded BBC Berkshire at Caversham, which is where I broadcast from Monday to Friday, to let me bring in three archaeologists with their top-of-the-range metal detectors onto their vast acreage as there had been people living on the site since Saxon times and the area had never been explored. I was allowed to head this up and wield my own metal detector. During the dig we discovered that man had been there even before that, as I found knapped flints and tools from, I would guess, the Upper Palaeolithic – over 10,000 years ago. We also unearthed some medieval tokens and a beaten silver penny from the Commonwealth period, when Cromwell’s troops briefly held Charles I captive in a house on the site. The grounds yielded Elizabethan buckles, a variety of buttons worn by young Georgian dandies and ammunition from the Civil War through to World War Two. There have been plenty of coins to go with that penny from the mid-1600s, including several from the reigns of George II, George III, Victoria, Edward VIII and George V. No hint of the Romans yet, but one of our goals is to try and locate the site of the Elizabethan manor. It almost certainly wasn’t on the site of the current house, which was rebuilt on a site for which we have the 1720s design and layout of gardens. Capability Brown added his expertise to the gardens, but his work is now largely undetectable. I hope we can bring in geophysics at some point. The ‘Big Dig’, as the BBC have named it, continues.