In one of P. G. Wodehouse’s stories the attempts made by Oliver Sipperley, editor of the Mayfair Gazette, to inject some pep into the mag are hampered by poor old Sippy’s inability to ward off unwelcome contributions from his formidable prep school headmaster on recondite classical topics. I experienced not dissimilar difficulties when editing the Telegraph’s obituaries page as I was constantly being assured by the 2nd Viscount Camrose, the paper’s erstwhile deputy chairman, that one of his old sailing chums would make ‘a jolly good obit’ (though his brother, Lord Hartwell, always maintained that obits were a waste of news space). I came to dread the phrase ‘he was a convivial member of the Bembridge Sailing Club’ and developed an unhealthy prejudice against the Isle of Wight, fortified by the facts that both my ex-mother-in-law and indeed my own prep school headmaster were islanders.
As far as I was concerned, the Isle of Wight could remain a boil on the bottom of Hampshire — as it was in the original Buildings of England volume, published in 1967.
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