The man who introduced the world to fainting goats (From Stroud News and Journal)

The man who introduced the world to fainting goats

A MAN who bought a house in the Stroud Valleys for the sake of an old piano, had a Mrs Robinson-type affair with a woman 10 years his senior when he was a student and some years later fed Eccles cakes to Dame Vera Lynn in the back of a vintage car is probably not run-of-the-mill.

Quentin Letts (Quentin because he was the fifth child and his father is a classicist) is now a freelance journalist and political sketch writer for the Daily Mail.

He lives with his wife and children at Scrubs' Bottom, near Bisley but started life 39 years ago in a prep school in Cirencester where his father was headmaster.

He was brought up, he says, with the smell of Dettol in his nostrils and with the sound in his ears of small boys clattering up and down stairs. He had to share his mother with dozens of other boys whose own mothers were many miles away and family meals were constantly interrupted by cries of "Please miss, I've been sick."

"It was a very happy childhood," he recalls, "but rather eccentric in many ways, and it made you quite good at overcoming shyness and just leaping in . I count myself quite shy but living in the middle of a school you just ignored that."

At the age of six Quentin joined the school as a pupil but two years later, because it was thought better that he move to a school where he could be just one of the boys, he started at The Elms in Malvern, possibly the oldest prep school in the land, founded in 1614, but also one of the smallest, with just 40 or so pupils.

Elgar

He loved it there and particularly remembers the beautiful views of the Malvern Hills. Another memory of that time is of Elgar's old piano rotting away in a hut. "Well it was reputed to have been played regularly by Elgar," he said.

When he was 13 he moved to a much larger school, Haileybury in Hertfordshire, where there were 650 boys and enormous grounds and he suddenly felt very small and insignificant.

"At the Elms I'd been captain of rugger, at Haileybury I was facing boys of 6ft 2in, with moustaches. I was a little roly-poly thing and completely terrified." He was also, as he says with characteristic self-deprecation, bunged in to the year above, where he found the work very hard and one of his strongest memories of the school is of being tired.

Four years later, after his A levels, he won an English Speaking Union scholarship for a year to a college in Kentucky where he loosely studied Liberal Arts and had a fantastic time.

Kentucky, he said, was a great shock. "I arrived wearing corduroy trousers and a tweed jacket and the temperature was 90 degrees with 80 percent humidity. I had just not anticipated the extreme heat of the mid-west in summer any more than I had expected the piercing cold of their winter."

Culture shock

Kentucky was also a culture shock for the privately-educated young Quentin. He found everything, from the food to the manners, strange. "They were awfully polite," he remembers, "with no touch of irony at all and no sense of rebellion. I wrote a satirical column in the college newspaper and upset the dean madly because he simply did not understand the humour."

It was 1980/81, the time of the Iranian hostages, when Jimmy Carter lost power, John Lennon was killed, Ronald Reagan was shot, the Pope was shot and the first space shuttle flight was made. "It was a terribly exciting time to be in America," he said.

The greatest impressions he brought back with him from the States were just how very right wing and grown up people of his own age were compared to those in Europe and also how hard everyone worked without the support of a welfare state.

"I was perplexed that some of my college friends were campaigning for Reagan when I had the knee-jerk view towards Thatcherite-Reaganite politics.

"My American contemporaries were paying their own fees and had to work nights to earn the money," he said. "But they were also driving their own cars and in some cases getting married at the age of 19.

"You realised in some senses how lucky we were in Britain but in others how pampered we were by the welfare state. Politically it taught me that a nation can become almost spoiled by a welfare state."

After Kentucky Quentin returned to England and spent a year in Oxford where his brother was an undergraduate. He lived in a house full of students but made ends meet by taking a range of jobs including barman, builder's labourer and dustman.

Again he was writing, producing a satirical monthly publication which he ran off on his father's old Gestetner machine and left copies under car windscreen wipers and in the libraries and common rooms of the Oxford colleges.

He also tried his hand at writing for newspapers and wrote occasional pieces for a local weekly free newspaper in Oxford.

Dublin

He then went to work for a while as a barman in Ibiza before being accepted by Trinity College Dublin (having failed, he said, to get into any of the English universities) where for four years he read medieval English and "a bit of classics."

He loved Dublin. "It was fabulous. Still very much Joyce's Dublin with pea-souper fogs, horses and carts in the streets and it was so small, a bit like Paris, that you could really get to know it." No-one, he contends, can understand Joyce's Ulysses unless they have walked around Dublin.

He drank lots of Guinness, studied very little and did quite a bit of acting and journalism. He came to love the Irish, and despite the fact that the politics were quite difficult at that time, the days of the Bobby Sands hunger strike and bombs going off, he says there was never any sense of antagonism towards him.

"I used to spend many a night at Slattery's in Capel Street, a noted Irish Republican pub, where they sang rebel songs and recounted the old tales of the heroes and it was easy to see how people could be sucked into the cause, but as a Brit I was tolerated."

It was while he was in Dublin that Quentin struck up a relationship with a woman 10 years older than himself. She lived in Belfast and he came to know Belfast very well. "It is one of the most underrated cities in the world," he said. "Very interesting and surprisingly middle class."

While still a student in Dublin he was granted a work visa for the States one summer, these being much easier to obtain than in England. He made his way to California and worked as a kitchen assistant in San Jose and a door-to-door salesman in San Francisco, where he tried to sell, without much success, the painting of house numbers on pavements.

The streets were so long there were often 5,000 houses and having the number on the pavement made it easier for the emergency services to find a particular house. "I was hopeless at selling," he said. "Particularly because a large proportion of the population were Hispanics and spoke very imperfect English. I made very little money but it was good fun and interesting."

At Trinity he started two magazines of his own, one a charity mag (it was the time of Bob Geldoff and a heightened awareness of the deprivations of the third world) that raised £10,000 for a charity working in Ethiopia.

Politics

He finally left Ireland in 1986 and went to Cambridge to study classical archaeology for a year. He says, again with modesty, that he was only accepted because he was the fourth generation of his family to study at Jesus College.

He found Cambridge dull after Dublin but came top (and bottom) of the class, because he was the only one in his year studying the subject.

Having always had an interest in politics, Quentin went to a public meeting in Cambridge and saw David Steel and David Owen standing on the steps of the building and was struck by their image of sleek politicians. "I was shocked by their preening vanity," he said. "David Owen's hair in particular was a triumph of hair oil over gravity."

After seven years as a student and semi-student he eventually embarked on a career in journalism and took a job with a company in Cardiff producing magazines for large companies. Publications with such fascinating titles as Fiat World and Peugeot Talbot News were his responsibility.

He did not find Cardiff exciting at that time, however, and headed for London after about six months as a freelance journalist working for the Evening Standard and by 1988 had a regular slot on the Peterborough column of the Daily Telegraph.

"I was one of those youths who were required to go to parties and drink far too much, often quite forgetting the stories I was supposed to be covering. But I was thrown in at the deep end as far as experience goes and I am grateful to Max Hastings (editor of the Daily Telegraph) for giving me that opportunity. I was glad to have been able to experience the end of Fleet Street."

He stayed at the Telegraph until 1995 and briefly did some political sketch writing. His memories from that time are of seeing Margaret Thatcher toppled, watching Geoffrey Howe make his resignation speech in the Commons and John Major's first appearances.

Trouble

"I was in terrible trouble with Max Hastings for describing John Major as a dreary prime minister," he said. "A furious memo came storming in from Max next morning delivered by an ashen-faced secretary. It was obvious that I had to go and confront him and find out what the problem was.

"He said I could not call the prime minister dreary and when I said: 'But Max he is,' I was told that unexciting would have been a far better word. I suppose I learnt something from that."

He was later sent to New York as an emergency correspondent when someone was ill and says he had a really exciting six or seven months, including following the Queen around the States just after the Gulf War.

"The Queen went to see the Gulf War room in Florida and I was one of the press pack allowed inside," he recalled. "As Prince Philip came into the room he tripped, went flying and put his hand out to steady himself just inches from a huge red button. It was just like a scene out of Dr Strangelove."

Fainting goats

It was during this time that Quentin had his biggest world scoop to date, involving fainting goats.

"I had heard that goats that would faint at loud sounds were being bred in Iowa. It made sense in the natural world because if one animal was lying on the ground it would be eaten while the rest of the herd got away.

"I wrote about it and it was one of the best followed stories I'd ever written, getting into papers all over the world."

Back in England after the Queen's tour Quentin was made editor of the Peterborough column which he considers to be one of the best jobs in Fleet Street.

"I had the license to do little pen portraits of politicians and was encouraged to be a gadfly," he said. " It was very satisfying to turn the knife."

He then left the Telegraph, poached by The Times to become bureau chief in New York for two years, from 1995 to 1997.

He flew back on May 1, 1997, just as Tony Blair had been voted in to office after years of Tory domination. He became a parliamentary sketch writer first for the Daily Telegraph and then for the Daily Mail before turning freelance.

He now works harder than he has ever done but says he was fed up with Canary Wharf and working in docklands. "It was hopeless, a bit like working in an industrial estate," he said.

Family

Somehow during his hectic life in newspapers Quentin managed to meet the girl of his dreams, Lois, and after eight years of courtship they were married after Lois proposed on February 29, 1996.

"We were married that summer at Bisley Church because I had bought this house (in an idyllic spot overlooking the Slad Valley) a year earlier, mainly because I needed somewhere to put the piano," he said.

The piano was from Oakley Hall, the prep school in Cirencester where Quentin had grown up and he was shattered when in the mid-1990s his parents had been forced to sell the school for housing development because they could no longer make it pay. He was given the grand piano from the school as a constant reminder of the home he had loved.

"In London I had the world's smallest flat so I bought this house to give the piano a home. It is lovely still having a base in Gloucestershire. I wanted to keep close to my Gloucestershire roots and when I saw the Stroud Valleys I fell in love straight away."

He and Lois now have two children, Claud (4) and Eveleen (3) and the family live quietly in the Slad Valley with Quentin spending just two days in London. He greatly enjoys cooking and cooks most of the meals for the family while Lois does the DIY and takes care of the children and the family finances. "She won't mind me saying that she can reduce fish fingers to something that looks like it was lost in Pompeii," he said of his wife's cooking.

Stroud

He says he loves Stroud and the Stroud Valleys. "Unlike other places in the county it has not been over developed (apart from the awful mess in Bussage) and still retains a feeling of the real Gloucestershire, not only the beauty of the landscape but also the goodness of the people.

"There is no sense of spray-on heritage. I just wish there was a way to give the area more self-belief," he added.

Despite having been a journalist all his life he does not see himself in the job forever, mainly because he feels the excitement has gone out of politics and there is a staleness amongst politicians, although from this he excludes Stroud's own MP David Drew. "He is one of the more interesting voices when he does speak up," he said.

Politicians he has most admired over the years include Neil Kinnock "He was a tremendous orator in the late 1980s," and more recently Lady Young, who led the attack in the House of Lords on gays. "I disagree with her views but the political courage with which she pursued that was remarkable to watch. To see this elderly woman in her bullet-proof tweed suit saying what she really believed was uplifting. This is what politics should be about, not about focus groups and spin doctors."

Outside the political sphere one of Quentin's fondest memories is of sharing a car with Dame Vera Lynn, the war-time singer, in the London to Brighton vintage car rally. "She was very keen on Eccles Cakes and at one point we had to stop the car so that she could buy some. Young people kept coming up to her as if she were a Hollywood film star. She touched the nation in a way that none of our leaders does now."

Despite his success in other areas of his life Quentin has one disappointment.

He spent two years writing a satirical political novel, partly set in Stroud and an England that has booted out its royal family, but as yet he has failed to get it published.

Undaunted he is having a crack at another novel and says that if all else fails he may well turn his hand to running a restaurant in some remote corner of the world.

Meanwhile he is happy live with his family in the house where a few years ago the Tina Turner song What's Love Got to Do With It, was written by the previous owner. "But it is such a remote spot that on the night the song writer found out it had reached the number one spot in the charts there was no-one he could tell but the sheep."