Wednesday 8 July 2009

he got so fat that the bottom fell out of his car

I watched Whisky Galore the other night with two people who HAD NEVER HEARD OF JAMES ROBERTSON JUSTICE. I was shocked and saddened. He is one of the great picaresque characters, and here is a digest, culled from Wikipedia, the Spectator Review of What's The Bleeding Time (which I have ordered) and the website for same.

For a start, he's the one who looks like this:
He usually played doctors, admirals or other high status posh Scots. He was in Guns of Navarone. He was born in south London in 1907 to a Scots father who didn't like being Scots (which might have been one of the reasons for JRJ's professional Scottishness), studied Science at UCL and Geology at Bonn, both for a year. He played rugby at Blackheath alongside Johnny, the future Mr Fanny Craddock. He might have spoken twenty languages. He might not have, though. He was an accomplished linguist, but he was also a fibber.

He went to Canada, where he says he was a Mountie, but I don't think he was. He was head of the British Ice Hockey Association (he tended goals for London Lions - all sportsmen will tell you that goalies are nuts) and wanted to be a racing driver, but that didn't come off.

he fought, staggeringly briefly, in the Spanish Civil War. In WWII, as a navy reservist, he claimed to have been the last man shot at in anger with a bow and arrow. I think this was maybe by an Esquimau.

He started acting. He had presence but he couldn't remember lines, which had to be held up on boards. He said lines the way he said them, and that was that. It was a good way, though.

He was a great hunter: he was a friend of the Duke of Edinburgh and flew his peregrines at Sandringham; he was an expert fly fisherman but dynamited salmon; he shot ducks with a punt-mounted cannon and netted geese with rockets. Some of this is probably based in truth.

He was quite fruity. He was cited in lots of divorces and eventually married a long-term Prussian princess mistress who was described by someone as a bright version of Zsa Zsa Gabor. Here's a picture of her:

He also went on dates with Molly Parkin. This is her

After one at The Ivy she said he had 'his fingers in my Marks and Spencer knickers all through the meal'.

On a film set, someone laughed at his willy and he said, 'What you Cockney f***ers do not appreciate is the co-efficient of expansion'.

He had a temper.

He played Mozart on the bagpipes and was sometimes credited as Seamus Mòr na Feusag, which is Scots Gaelic for Big James with the Beard. He claimed to have been born under a distillery on the Isle of Skye (I'd be interested to know if he came up with this before or after Whisky Galore, and I'd like to have heard his tone of voice - I bet he sometimes made jokes other people took for fibs). He stood for Labour in North Angus and Mearns in 1950.

I'm going to quote the end of the Spectator review now:
The couple had settled on the Dornach Firth. Justice’s weight ballooned to 19 stone and the bottom of his car fell out as he was driving along. He suffered a stroke, started to babble in Danish, couldn’t get work, and was declared bankrupt. He and Irina were taken in by the heir to the Russell and Bromley shoe-shop chain — a man whom Irina married after Justice’s death. His ashes are interred under a cairn on Birichen Moor, in the Highlands.


Beat that with a stick.

1 comment:

John Finnemore said...

I cannot. But in my failed quest to decipher your clues, I made the acquaintance of Myron Teitelbaum, AKA Michael Tamar, AKA Dr. Amazing; the octogenarian stage hypnotist, doctor, actor, memory man, author, lawyer, screenwriter, and late-flowering 'premiere sexologist'. ("Read detail by detail how they do it in India.")

Also the author of seven screenplays, one of which concerns a human-looking robot who can control slot machines; and a sitcom, which asks and presumably answers the question: 'What happens when an urban refugee gets a fax machine?'

Here is a taste of his stage show.
'To the astonishment of the audience, Dr. Amazing would remember a number consisting of up to 20 digits when he recalled the powers of two up to the 64th power.'

I know someone like that.

Lastly, this: "Mrs Amazing says she doesn't know with whom she is sleeping at night. She has to ask if her bedmate is Dr. Amazing, Michael Tamar, Dr. Frankenstein, Kryptoman, a race car driver, or the lawyer-doctor she thought she married."

I wonder which she has her fingers crossed for?