The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street has one of the most impressive entrances in London. The bronze doors to the Bank of England each has a caduceus, the wand of Mercury, patron god of bankers, and lions’ heads to scare off robbers. What they lack are keyholes. Interviewed by Country Life for a piece on famous front doors, Lord King of Lothbury, the bank’s former governor, says the doors can only be opened from inside. This caused some head-scratching, he admits, when the City was experiencing terrorist threats and he had to decide what to do if the entire building had to be evacuated suddenly. “How would we get back in?” he thought. His solution was reassuringly low tech. “We’d use a ladder and break in through a window,” he said.
Named Icon of the Year at the Harper’s Bazaar Women of the Year awards, Dame Joan Collins reflected on her new title. “I looked it up in the dictionary,” she said, “and it said an icon is a religious figure on a piece of wood. Well, I’m certainly not a religious figure and I’ve never thought of myself as a piece of wood — though I’ve worked with actors who were.”
Heartbreaking hero
It has been 50 years since Tony Christie released his single (Is This the Way to) Amarillo, a song that brought him fortune and fame. Well, up to a point. He recalls in Best of British magazine being in a recording studio in Los Angeles soon afterwards when John Lennon walked in. “I was gobsmacked,” Christie says of meeting his hero. Then Lennon asked: “Who’s got the brown Ford in the car park?” Christie raised his hand. “You’re blocking me in,” Lennon told him. “Shift it.”
Coward’s battle won
A playwright, composer, actor and director, Noël Coward was a man of many parts. Barry Day, who has edited a new anthology of Coward’s writings, reckons his true calling, though, was as a singer even if it took a while to bear fruit. In his teens he tried for the Chapel Royal choir but let the acting urge take over. “I made Callas look like an amateur,” Coward wrote, “and the poor organist fell back in horror.” He was turned down for being “too over-dramatic”. It was only during the war that Coward began to be noticed for his voice. “I hurtle up to the front and sing to the troops,” he wrote. “They are so sunk in mud they can’t escape.”
Linacre College, Oxford, is to change its name to honour Nguyen Thi Phuoung Thao, a Vietnamese benefactor. When the university’s Rewley House was renamed as Kellogg College in 1994, its crest adopted an ear of wheat to mark the donations of the Corn Flakes family. Since Thao made her money from a budget airline that put flight attendants in bikinis, some might look at the scallops on Linacre’s crest, below, and feel there is no need for a change.
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Nodding on the job
Sir Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London, sympathises with Boris Johnson and Joe Biden for being caught resting their eyelids at Cop26. He once nodded off during a lecture on the future of Nato in Brussels. The problem was that he was giving it. “I’d flown in overnight from the US and this was my second lecture of the day,” he says. “I woke myself up gibbering about ice cream to a bewildered audience. It still haunts me.”