The Day Harry Waved To Dick

In   about 1958 our extended family enjoyed a motoring holiday, of the camping kind, down to and around the south of England. My memory tells me that the midland town of Leicester was the tidiest town I had ever seen. I am not sure whether it is currently living up to that. I also recall the warm Kentish camping fields and balmy evenings.

A murmur had gone around the crowd outside Buckingham Palace; cars were being positioned by the palace door, one of them dressed with the royal standard. There was a  gentle ripple of animated excitement. The Queen and Prince Philip were then driven out the gate barely ten feet from where we stood. What a surprise.

A day later Dickie Hope the Ushaw Moor overman, my grandfather, was walking along Downing Street at a time when such a thing was possible;  out popped a man from number ten called Harold Macmillan - prime minister no less - Dickie waved and Harold waved back; it was two Tories in brief communication. I am 95%  sure that Dickie was a Tory  so let us go with that. Harry was!

Harry and Dick led two very different lives; both experienced privilege  and power but only one walked the international stage; the other observed, arbitrated, and instructed dirty dust covered men hundreds of feet below Durham's earth.

Harry had eight years start on Dick but it was not a real race because one was destined for Eton and Oxford,  just as the other was destined for  an an elementary school in Sleetburn.  As Ridley pointed out in 1999,

'Mother Nature has plainly not entrusted the determination of our intellectual capacities to the blind fate of a gene or genes; she gave us parents, learning, language, culture and education to program  ourselves with'.

That being the case  Dick was not even in the stalls at Epsom but he was a lovely and honourable person, just like his parents and siblings.

WB