In April 1967 Tony Scotland, a cub reporter for Australia’s ABC television news, drove with a cameraman from Hobart to a sheep station in Fingal to interview Lord Talbot de Malahide, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat who had edited a book about Tasmanian flora.
This was a delicate assignment. Lord Talbot was a retired British ambassador to Laos who divided his time between his family’s Tasmanian property and one of Ireland’s grandest castles. He was fearsomely well-connected, peppery and ‘not good with people’. ABC had been trying for years to interview him, and he only grudgingly allowed in the cameras to publicise the book. Scotland, a 22-year-old English public schoolboy, wondered why he’d been given the job. His cameraman smiled knowingly.
Undercover, an ingenious combination of memoir and biography, begins with Scotland being greeted imperiously by his host and grilled on ‘where I came from, who my people were, where I’d been to school’. He was flattered to receive so much attention from the 4th Baron Talbot de Malahide in the UK peerage, who was also the 7th Baron Talbot of Malahide in the Irish peerage, but preferred the English title with its romantic ‘de’. Milo Talbot, born in 1912, had inherited the titles in 1948 when his uncle, who kept a fine stable at Malahide Castle in County Dublin, dropped dead of a heart attack after a titanic row with his groom. His successor also had quite a temper, but his frostiness evaporated over lunch with his interviewer.
It didn’t take Scotland long to work out why. His eye fell on some books stacked together on the bottom shelf of Talbot’s library.
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