Gyles Brandreth - The 7 Secrets of Happiness

O n 17 June 2013 I delivered the Baggs Memorial Lecture at the University of Birmingham.

Thomas Baggs, born in 1889, was a Birmingham University alumnus who went on to become a teacher, journalist and war correspondent for the Daily Mail, before pursuing a successful career in advertising and publicity for the American automobile industry. When he died in 1973, Mr Baggs bequeathed a substantial sum to the university to provide for an annual public lecture on the theme of Happiness what it is and how it may be achieved by individuals as well as nations.

Yehudi Menuhin, the virtuoso violinist, delivered the first lecture in 1976. Mine was the thirty-seventh. I spoke for an hour. There was an audience of 1,000-plus in the hall. The response was extraordinary and not what I am used to.

Here is one tweet, from someone called Grace Surman:

Fabulous lecture courtesy of Gyles Brandreth.

Just marvellous, brilliant, wonderful, best thing Ive ever heard, transformational

There were scores more all along similar lines:

Danann Swanton: Attended the annual Happiness Lecture tonight, thought-provoking & inspiring talk by Gyles Brandreth.

Judy Dyke: Excellent evening hearing Gyles Brandreth give the Happiness Lecture.

Entertaining, amusing and he gave us the 7 Secrets of Happiness.

It was these 7 Secrets of Happiness that caught the audiences attention. As I left the hall people asked me for a copy of the lecture and a copy of the Secrets. I had neither to give them.

That evening and over the next few days people began to tweet and re-tweet garbled versions of both.

Thats when I realised that I needed to write this book.

I agreed to give the Baggs happiness lecture at Birmingham as the springboard for a one-man show I was taking to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and then on a national and international tour. The stage show is called Looking for happiness and this, I suppose, is the book of the show. But its more than that: it is the culmination of a journey I have been on for about seventeen years since my best friend died, in 1996, and I lost my seat in parliament, in 1997.

My stage show is both larky and serious. This book is more serious than larky. I am here to explore the nature of happiness what it is and how you find it and to share with you those 7 Secrets. There will be occasional asides, personal stories and anecdotes, but I hope they are relevant. On my journey looking for happiness I travelled far and wide and met some remarkable men and women, from the Popes exorcist at the Vatican to Buddhist monks on the banks of the Mekong River in Cambodia. I even travelled to East Lothian in Scotland, to the birthplace of Samuel Smiles, the father of self-help books.

Memorably, in South Africa, at his home in Cape Town, I encountered Archbishop Desmond Tutu a bundle of joy, a man whose very presence spreads happiness around him. In New York, the week before he died, I had lunch with Quentin Crisp. We met in the Bowery Bar, on the Lower East Side, for crab cakes and whisky, and for two hours I sat and gazed in wonder at a ninety-year-old man with mauve hair the self-styled stately homo of England as he told me the secret of how to be happy. Remember that happiness is never out there, he said, its always in here. As he looked at me with watery eyes, he cupped his delicate hands around his heart.

In Copenhagen I met the Queen of Denmark and sat with her, alone in her study, as she told me what her father had told her about how to be a good monarch and happy, too. In Dubai, in another royal palace, I sat with Sheikh Mohammed bin Raschid al Maktoum and his entire government (they sat on a series of sofas facing us) as the ruler of Dubai and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates gave me what he said he hoped would prove good advice for life: Begin when you are sure of yourself, and dont stop because someone else is unsure of you.

It was closer to home, in Dublin, that I discovered the 7 Secrets of Happiness, with Dr Anthony Clare.

Anthony Clare (1942-2007) was a remarkable man, scholarly, amusing and wise. He was professor of psychiatry at Trinity College, Dublin, and medical director of St Patricks Hospital, Irelands first mental hospital. He held a doctorate in medicine, a masters degree in philosophy and was a fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He was best known, of course, for his series of perceptive radio interviews broadcast on BBC Radio 4: In the Psychiatrists Chair.

Anthony Clare and I were planning to write a book together about happiness, but then he died. (There is quite a lot of death in the pages that follow, but dont let it get you down. As Shakespeare reminds us: All that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity.) This book includes all that I learnt from Anthony Clare and what I have discovered since.

And what are my credentials? They dont amount to much. I am a former European Monopoly Champion and the founder of the National Scrabble Championships. I have been interested in fun and the importance of play and playfulness for a long time. I am a former chairman and now vice-president of the National Playing Fields Association which is how I came to meet the Duke of Edinburgh. (There is a word of advice from him in here, too.) Play, sport and recreation contribute to happiness, for sure. So does entertainment. I have written cosy murder mysteries as Oscar Wilde said, There is nothing quite like an unexpected death for lifting the spirits. I have produced plays. I have written about and appeared in pantomime. I have played Malvolio and Lady Bracknell in two of the English languages greatest comedies, Twelfth Night and The Importance of Being Earnest. In the 1980s, at TV-am, Britains first commercial breakfast television channel, I wore brightly-coloured jumpers because the stations Australian boss, Bruce Gyngell, was convinced that having the presenters wearing sunny colours made the viewers feel sunny too.

At around that time, I founded the Teddy Bear Museum in Stratford-upon-Avon which I hope brought happiness to some. Then in the 1990s, as a backbench MP, I introduced a private members bill that became the 1994 Marriage Act and for the first time allowed civil weddings to be held in venues other than register offices. I know that brought happiness to many. (As we all know, a wedding day is almost always a happy one. Its what comes after that causes the problems.)

There is a case for saying that my family has been in the happiness business for generations. My forebears include Jeremiah Brandreth in 1817 the last man in England to be beheaded for treason. He was a revolutionary, but a poor one, known at the time as the hopeless radical. I see myself as the hopeful radical. And my great-great-great-grandfather, Dr Benjamin Brandreth, went to America in the 1830s and made his fortune manufacturing and selling Happy Pills. These were little vegetable pills and they cured everything. Whatever the ailment, Brandreths Pills were the remedy. Dr Brandreth ended his days a multi-millionaire and a New York State Senator. He was also a pioneer of mass-market advertising. Thomas Baggs, of Birmingham University, would have admired him.

Baggs, incidentally, is a name with five letters like Gyles. This may be significant. Oscar Wilde believed that you need just five letters in your name if you are to make a mark on the world. He gave OSCAR and WILDE as two examples and PLATO and JESUS and JUMBO as three more. (In New York, Oscar was introduced to Jumbo the Elephant by Benjamin Brandreths friend and admirer, the circus owner, P T Barnum. The thought of Oscar Wilde meeting Jumbo the Elephant is a happy one, isnt it?)