William Miller - Gloucester Crescent: Me, My Dad and Other Grown-Ups

GLOUCESTER CRESCENT

William Miller is a television producer and media executive. His long career in television has included time as head of talent at BBC Worldwide, and he has worked with Nigella Lawson, Brian Cox, The Hairy Bikers, Kirstie Allsopp, Phil Spencer and many more, to help build their brands, businesses and develop their TV shows. In 2009 William returned to Gloucester Crescent where he now lives with his wife and two teenage daughters, three doors from his parents.

Me, My Dad and Other Grown-Ups

WILLIAM MILLER

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by
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Copyright William Miller, 2018

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN 978 1 78283 440 3

For Trine, Daisy, Stella and my parents, Rachel and Jonathan

W hen we were children, my father would take me and my brother up Primrose Hill. At the top hed look out across London, and tell us how hed spent his life moving very slowly around Regents Park, and had never lived anywhere else. With his arm outstretched hed take aim, squinting, his cheek resting on his arm, and draw a line across the city with his great big index finger. Pointing at a crescent of tall white houses at the bottom of Regents Park, hed tell us that this was where he was born. His finger would move over the park to St Johns Wood, where he lived before and after the war. Dropping to the bottom of Primrose Hill, hed point at the big bird cage in London Zoo, whose designer, Cedric Price, was best man at his wedding. Then hed swing back to the other side of the hill and to the mouldy basement flat on Regents Park Road where he and my mother moved after they got married. Finally, his finger would arc up over the rooftops of Chalcot Square and across the red-brick walls of my primary school on Princess Road. When he stopped, he would be pointing to where a mass of green trees explodes between the roofs of a circle of tall houses. Holding his finger steady, hed smack his lips and say, And this is where we are now Gloucester Crescent. You see, we havent gone very far in all that time.

The events in this story are a lifetime ago. More than forty years have passed, and I am married with my own family to take climbing up Primrose Hill. But the memories of my childhood and the community I grew up in are as vivid as ever. My parents moved to Gloucester Crescent in the 1960s, and over the next three decades great friendships were forged, hearts were broken, professional rivalries were fuelled and needless fallings-out took place as the celebrated occupants of Gloucester Crescent came together and allowed their lives to become entwined.

As children, we were free to roam across the back gardens and wander in and out of our neighbours houses. We explored, climbed trees and leaped over walls, spent hours in each others homes and crossed the invisible boundaries that our parents unconsciously created with their rivalries. My closest friends had parents much like mine: most had been educated at the same small collection of public schools and knew each other well from either Oxford or Cambridge and then through their work. Together theyd found a common and worthy cause to believe in, born out of the post-war euphoria of the 1945 Labour landslide, which created a radical new way of thinking: full employment, a cradle-to-grave welfare state and a national health service that would be free to all. The promise of a fairer society led our parents to become left-leaning, idealistic as well as anti-establishment, with a strong distaste for the old-school approach to authority and power. They made the conscious decision to give their children a radically different childhood from their own. We were sent to the local state schools, where we could mix with children from every walk of life, and were encouraged to be free spirits. They frequently left us to our own devices while they went off and expanded their utopian vision and pursued glittering careers. We all looked up to our gifted parents and hoped that one day we might be like them, but as we got older many of us found ourselves left behind and struggling to keep up. It began to seem that wed been part of an experiment driven by their principles, rather than their care. Despite the huge privilege of our birth, we were left feeling bewildered, and a few of us, like me, longed to escape to a way of life that was more structured and conventional.

Within this community and at the centre of the story are my parents, Jonathan and Rachel Miller. An ever-present figure in our home was their close friend (and one of my fathers three partners from Beyond the Fringe) Alan Bennett, who started off living in my parents basement and then bought the house across the road. Other friends in the street were the jazz singer and writer George Melly and his wife, Diana. In the mid-1970s the Mellys sold their house to another friend, Mary-Kay Wilmers, the ex-wife of the film director Stephen Frears. She later took over the editorship of the London Review of Books from my maternal uncle Karl Miller. Across from the Mellys were the artist David Gentleman and the Labour MP Giles Radice and, two doors away, the writer Claire Tomalin and her journalist husband, Nick. He was killed in Israel in 1973 by a Syrian missile while reporting on the Yom Kippur War, and she later married the playwright Michael Frayn, who in turn moved into the Crescent.

Immediately behind us, in Regents Park Terrace, were the eminent philosopher Sir A. J. Ayer (known to his friends as Freddie) and his American wife, the author and broadcaster Dee Wells, along with their son, Nick, and her daughter from a previous marriage, Gully Wells. Next to them were Shirley Conran and her sons, Jasper and Sebastian. Further along the Terrace were the writers Angus Wilson, V. S. Pritchett and A. N. Wilson. Across the road from us and next door to Alan Bennett were the novelist Alice Thomas Ellis (aka Anna Haycraft), her publisher husband Colin Haycraft and their six children. Colins publishing house, Duckworth, was based in an old piano factory rotunda at the top of the Crescent. They published many of my parents friends, including Oliver Sacks, Beryl Bainbridge, the American poet Robert Lowell (who was also my godfather) and his wife, Caroline Blackwood. Three doors from our house was Sir Ralph Vaughan Williamss widow, Ursula, and across the road from her the artistic director of the Royal Court, Max Stafford-Clark, who lived with his wife, Ann, and the son she had with Sam Spiegel, the producer of films like On the Waterfront, The African Queen and Lawrence of Arabia. There was also Miss Shepherd, the eccentric homeless woman who in the late 1960s arrived in the Crescent in her van and stayed for twenty years. After several years of moving her van up and down the Crescent, she eventually parked it in Alan Bennetts driveway, where she remained until she died in 1989. In nearby streets were others in my parents circle, such as the documentary film-maker Roger Graef, Kingsley Amis and his son Martin, Beryl Bainbridge, Sylvia Plath and Joan Bakewell.