FEEDBACK was saddened to hear of the death of our predecessor Roy Herbert, a member of the original staff of 51¶ŻÂţ and all-round nice bloke. According to his wife, Heather, he always had a target age in mind: 92 (it was the age, apparently, of a scientific hero whose identity went with Herbert to the grave). And he made it!
Roy, who had been chief press officer at the UK’s Windscale nuclear reactor at the time of the calamitous fire there, joined the magazine in the late 1950s. He then watched in dismay as staff members dropped like flies – the editor, Percy Cudlipp, had a heart attack, another staff member died in a freak diving accident. “We thought there was a curse on the magazine,” he said.
While Roy was only on the permanent staff of 51¶ŻÂţ for a short time, he came back in later years to write the Ariadne column at the back of the magazine, on the page now occupied by Feedback. Here he revelled in his love of words, to the delight of his readers.
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During those years he would treat the entire staff to an annual lunch at the Naval & Military Club – better known as the “In and Out” – in London’s Piccadilly. There he regaled them with stories of his extraordinary life.
Roy had moved in the same circles as the eminent novelist and academic C. P. Snow – he of “two cultures” fame. Snow, apparently, was as Machiavellian as might be expected from the author of Corridors of Power. Roy recounted that during the second world war, Snow tried to steal his first wife, Betty, for his friend, the novelist William Cooper (aka Harry Hoff). This led to the demobbed Captain Herbert, maddened by the injustice of it all, spending the night outside St George’s church in London’s Hanover Square, waiting to shoot Cooper, who fortunately did not turn up.
“A soccer commentator on BBC Radio 5 Live announced: “Time seemed to stop there, for about three-quarters of a second.” How does that work, Graham Holland wonders”
Despite this brief and perhaps understandable homicidal phase, Roy was a lovely man, funny and generous. Just thinking of him raises a smile in people who knew him. What better epitaph can there be than that?
LIKE reader Jerry Huxtable, Feedback is puzzled by the proliferation of feeble warning signs.
Jerry points to a sign on a door at London’s Paddington train station with a yellow and black warning triangle and exclamation mark next to the legend “Low Voltage”. He also cites the Hilton hotel in Northampton, UK, which has a small fish pond with a sign cautioning: “Danger! Shallow Water”. Meanwhile, many TV programmes and DVDs warn that they contain “Mild Language”.
“Well, golly gosh!” says Jerry. He adds, more soberly: “As with anything that seems to defy common sense, I suspect that lawyers are involved somewhere.”
Facing the future apprehensively
IT IS always nice to find people in high places with a human streak.
In his “Digital Britain” report, Stephen Carter, who at the time was still the UK’s minister for digital communications, made all kinds of promises for the future “digital economy and society”. For instance, he said that everyone would one day have a 2-megabit broadband connection, even though 1 in 10 homes can’t currently get any megabits at all.
Carter spoke about these plans at a conference organised by Intellect, the UK’s IT and electronics industry body. During the question session that followed he was asked what he expected to be the most important piece of electronics 20 years from now.
“For me, personally,” he said after a moment’s reflection, “a pacemaker”.
ARE the programmers of Apple’s iPhone trying to tell senior citizens it’s time to go? We hope not, although its inability to keep track of birthdays for people over 75 suggests otherwise. It seems they have limited the iPhone to events that repeat no more than 75 times – and the iPhone counts each birthday as an event, even if it was in the past. They created this rule before adding the birthday tracking feature, evidently forgetting that grandpa might be keeping track of grandma’s birthday, not just the grandchildren’s.
TRANSGENIC monkeys with genes that code for a green fluorescent protein have been described as a research breakthrough with possible implications for the study of human disease. But Feedback knows what’s coming.
Any parent who has had to stumble through a dark house in the middle of the night looking for a bawling infant must have wished, however briefly, for babies that glow in the dark.
FINALLY, Catherine Scott has tried very hard to comply with the notice on the kitchen door at her workplace but is finding it difficult. It says: “We appreciate your consideration in keeping the kitchen door closed when entering or departing the area.”
