Friday Diary: David Parkin takes a look back at the week
YET another week started with a bank holiday – the difference is it doesn’t end with one any more. Like many people running a small business, I viewed the recent spate of bank holidays as the equivalent of a bed of nails to achieving monthly growth and the country’s wider economic recovery.
But I underestimated the effects of the Royal Wedding. Events of a week ago may just prove galvanising for the UK – providing the elusive feel-good factor for citizens and injecting a patriotic fervour not known for decades.
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LAST night Saviles Hall at the Royal Armouries celebrated its fifth birthday. The event venue was dressed beautifully and people spoke highly of it, but it doesn’t disguise the fact that this aircraft hangar-like structure will never be particularly loved by the people of Leeds.
However the man it is named after – Sir Jimmy Savile – is held more precious in his home city. And amid the welter of words at last night’s event, it was the eccentric Sir James, dressed in obligatory harlequin-style track suit and toting a Cuban cigar, who spoke the most sense.
He told the audience: “A city with history has a future – Rome, Paris…Leeds.”
The one-time host of Jim’ll Fix It went on to reminisce about how his home city had a rich history of providing a welcoming face to outsiders. He recalled the day in 1940 when 5,000 troops, recently evacuated from Dunkirk, had been brought by train to Leeds where they sat down on the stone slaps of City Square to spend the night. A young Jimmy Savile and his mother, “The Duchess”, made their way to the centre of Leeds with many other locals to approach exhaused squaddies and invite them to spend a night under their roof in a soft bed.
It is a history that the city must remember, cherish and be inspired by.
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We said goodbye to two people this week that you could describe as legends.
The world’s last known combat veteran of World War I, Claude Choules, died in Australia aged 110 this week.
His passing brought back memories of my days as a young news reporter in South Wales on the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme in 1996.
I was sent out to interview two veterans of the Great War, both well into their 90s, and it remains one of the most memorable experiences of my journalistic career.
I remember one veteran of the Somme recalling his experiences. He said: “It was not so much what I saw that has stayed with me, but the smell…it was the smell of death.”
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Former British, European and Commonwealth heavyweight champion boxer Sir Henry Cooper also passed on this week. My late grandfather was a champion police middleweight boxer during the 1930s who later served on the British Boxing Board of Control and he placed Our ‘Enry, who once floored Muhammad Ali, when he was then known as Cassius Clay, on a pedastal.
Henry Cooper was a man who conducted himself with style, grace and humility.
He is the last sportsman who I asked for an autograph. Compared to him, today’s sports stars appear to have feet of clay.
