Lassie, Oscar and Chopin

My Miscellania for the coming days...

January 19

Some famous dogs from the world of entertainment.

Rin Tin Tin, the noted German Shepherd actor, was found by an American soldier on the battlefield in France in 1918 at an abandoned kennels used to train dogs for the German Imperial army. He was named after a female French doll.

He became a star of the silent movies, but like many others, his film career was killed by the talkies, because he couldn’t.

He appeared in a radio series, ‘The Wonder Dog,’ in the 1930s; most of his dog noises were provided by a dog imitator called Bob Barker who later hosted ‘The Price is Right’.

Greta Garbo owned one of his sons (Rin Tin Tin, not Barker).

Herman J. Mankiewicz, the famed scriptwriter of ‘Citizen Kane,’ refused to work on Westerns. When a studio attempted to assign him to a Rin Tin Tin picture, he submitted a script featuring the dog being frightened by a mouse and then taking a baby into a burning house.

Mrs Gaskell wrote a short story in which a collie called Lassie was with two brothers who become lost in a snow storm. When the younger one can no longer carry on, his brother ties a handkerchief round Lassie's neck and sends her home. The dog then leads a search party to the boys; the younger brother is saved, but the older one is dead. The later Lassie, long-running star of film and television, clearly owes much to Mrs G, apart, of course, from death.

Lassie, although a bitch, was played by a dog called Pal, and subsequently by his son, two grandsons and two great-grandsons. They all wore a hairpiece to cover the incongruous area.

The nephew of the man who used to train the collies played Pugsley in ‘The Addams Family’.

Toto in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ alongside Judy Garland - ‘We’re not in Kansas any more, Toto’ - was played by a female Cairn terrier called Terry, who appeared in 21 other films, less distinguished. She was paid $125 dollars a week, which was more than the Munchkins.

Moose was the scene-stealing Jack Russell who played Martin Crane’s dog Eddie in ‘Frasier’. As he got older, his son Enzo acted as his stunt double.

Nipper, the dog listening to his master’s voice on the record label of that name, was not, contrary to common belief, a Jack Russell. He was part bull terrier and part fox terrier, and is buried under what became the rear car park of the Kingston-upon-Thames branch of the Trustee Savings Bank.

January 20

John Ruskin died on this date in 1900. The life and work of the great Victorian polymath would, did and does fill countless volumes, even excluding the rather creepy concentration on his failed marriage to the beautiful Effie Gray, who left him after falling for John Everett Millais in the Trossachs.

Not quite so well known is Ruskin’s roadbuilding. While Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford where he had also founded The Ruskin School of Drawing, he discovered the picturesque village of North Hinksey while riding and was much taken with its rustic beauty.

One of the most restless minds ever would clearly not be satisfied with mere admiration: he conceived a plan for the village that would demonstrate both the high nobility and the social utility of labour.

This was to take the clever young men of Oxford away from such pointless activities as cricket, tennis and rowing and have them build a road across the marsh between North and South Hinksey, provided a much-needed (in his view) link between the two villages.

Bemusement at such an idea, so foreign to our age in just about every way, becomes wonder when contemplating his work force, which included the imperial administrator to come, Alfred Milner, the future historian and philsopher,Arnold Toynbee, Hardwick Rawnsley, a founder of the National Trust, and…Oscar Wilde, 19.

Indeed. There’s little point me telling you about it when we have Oscar’s account: ‘So out we went, day after day, and learned how to lay levels and to break stones, and to wheel barrows along a plank - a very difficult thing to do. And Ruskin worked with us in the mist and rain and mud of an Oxford winter, and our friends and our enemies came out and mocked us from the bank. We did not mind it much then, and we did not mind it afterwards at all, but worked away for two months at our road’.

You will have your own thoughts on this eerie precursor of Reading. And on the fate of the road: ‘Well, like a bad lecture it ended abruptly - in the middle of the swamp. Ruskin going away to Venice, when we returned the next term there was no leader, and the “diggers,” as they called us, fell asunder.’

Even so, Oscar wrote glowingly of the inspiration the road had given him: ‘And I felt that if there was enough spirit amongst the young men to go out to such a work as road-making for the sake of a noble ideal of life, I could from them create an artistic movement that might change, as it has changed, the face of England.

Some have doubted the extent of Wilde’s involvement, but they are not looking up at the stars.

January 21

Conductors, of the orchestral kind. Musical maestros, possessors of extraordinary ear, timing, memory and command, but forever questioned for their egos, alleged dictatorial tendencies, and, even, utility: what exactly do they do?

André Previn used to have a framed cartoon on display of a conductor standing at a podium and reading a set of instructions: ‘Wave the stick until the music stops, then turn around and bow.’

This is not the place for further learned discussion of the efficacy of varied styles with the baton. For my small, deeply unqualified and undistinguished part, I love a flamboyant conductor.

Yuri Simonov, born in 1941, was the youngest-ever chief conductor at the Bolshoi, appointed in 1970. Here he is conducting the Moscow Philharmonic playing Chopin’s Polonaise No 3, Op. 40-41. Irresistible, surely?