Danskcolin: Tuesday April 12th 2022

A hugely unsatisfactory day. Mark the Gardener comes this morning at 10:30 am and chops up our broken trellis - the one that got blown down in a storm last week. That bit was good, but after that the day starts going downhill - oh dear!

Lois gives Mark his instructions for the morning

However, less satisfactory is that the rain stops just as Mark finishes his fertilising of the lawn - not the best signal from the weather, because a lot more rain is needed now apparently to make the fertilizer do its job properly - damn !!!!

How annoying the weather can be when it wants to be - my god! No rain in sight for at least a week!!!!

What a crazy country we live in !!!!!

14:30 Lois and I run the local U3A Intermediate Danish group - the only one in the UK. We start our meeting on Skype, only to find that Jeanette, the group's only genuinely Danish member, can't connect with us for some reason.

Jeanette, our Danish group's only genuinely Danish member,

seen here in happier times

We try clicking on various of the meaningless icons at random - the display has changed anyway: why can't these programs stay the same? They're always tinkering with them - they will not "let them lie". What madness !!!!

In the end we have to give up and hold the meeting without Jeanette. And what's the result? Danish text read out with horribly mangled pronunciation, without Jeanette to put us right, and, after that, some hugely dubious translations into English. Yikes!!!!

Come back Jeanette, all is forgiven: we NEED you, no doubt about that haha!!!

"We've redesigned Skype for you" - the bastards !!!!!

Why can't you leave it alone haha !!!!!

19:00 We try to lay the disappointments of the day to rest by murdering a couple of Magnum ice-creams left over after the weekend visit of our daughter Alison and her family. It's another example of what we're beginning to call the "weekend visit dividend". What madness!

end of the day and time to relax: we "murder" a couple of

Magnum ice-creams, as so-called "Floppy Dog" looks on

20:00 Lois's back has been playing up since the weekend, so she ducks out of her great-niece Molly's zoom yoga class. And her sect's usually Tuesday Bible Class is taking a 2 week break for Easter, so it's nice to be able to spend an evening on the couch together for once.

We watch a TV programme all about a figure from Lois's past, Robert Maxwell, the Czech-born publishing mogul.

Lois worked for Robert Maxwell in the late 1960's and early 1970's. She quit her job in Maxwell's Documentation Department in Headington Hall, Oxford, in the summer of 1972, so that we could get married and move to Cheltenham.

flashback to 1971: Lois takes 2 weeks off from her job in Maxwell's

Documentation Department to visit me in Tokyo

Lois has vivid memories of Maxwell flinging open the door of the Documentation Department office in Headington and bursting in, hoping to catch somebody not working. She says that he was a huge figure, both physically and otherwise, and that he used to somehow "fill the space of any room he was in", striking terror into the hearts of his underlings, who were always too nervous to make any decisions for themselves, without referring them to him - what madness !!!!

She also says that Maxwell had no real idea about his business worked. He would storm in and demand that a bunch of unsuitable or impractical changes be made to the Documentation Department's operations, which his staff would pretend to accept verbally but then not implement, in the sure knowledge that he would forget all about the ideas in a day or two. What madness (again) !!!!

The first part of this 3-part BBC documentary certainly bears out both of those impressions of Lois's - about the impotence of Maxwell's underlings, and about the great man's lack of understanding about his own business: also about the chaos in his own personal office, which Lois remembers well.

In the 1980's Maxwell started buying up newspapers in Britain like the Daily Mirror, and he also bought up a number of papers in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe: Berlin, Bulgaria and Hungary. But his grasp of the organisation seems to have been no better than when Lois remembers, as this executive recalls from the time.

The executive adds that Maxwell's Empire wasn't like a normal enterprise, with layers of delegation, boards and management. They were there on paper, but Maxwell didn't want people, other than himself, making decisions.

"This was the biggest one-man business you can imagine", the executive says. "His management team was scared of making decisions about anything. I remember that on one occasion somebody quite senior at the Mirror Group came to me, wanting a decision on what colour to paint the ladies' loo on the 5th floor. I said, "Ken, are you taking the piss?". He said, "No no no. I must have the publisher's decision on this matter". I said "Paint them yellow! And if there are any problems come to me!"

And as the years went by, Maxwell trusted his executives less and less, and he began bringing his own family members into top executive positions. Now, who does that remind you of haha! Yes, there were his sons Kevin and Ian who were brought in to take up senior positions, and, after he took over the New York Daily News, also his daughter Ghislaine.

flashback to the 1980's: Ian and Kevin Maxwell

Lois remembers Kevin, but mainly Ian, from her time working for Maxwell in the 1970's. "Ian was the nice one, she recalls".

Ghislaine was obviously Maxwell's favourite, however, and tonight we hear about an excruciatingly embarrassing phone call between the two of them consisting of a prolonged exchange of "meows" - what madness !!!!!

Incidentally, Maxwell's secretaries overheard all his phone calls because he always put his phone on "speaker" - he couldn't be bothered to pick up and hold the phone in his hand.

It's nostalgic tonight for Lois to see shots of Headington Hall, amid the complex where she used to work, and where Maxwell and his family used to live, in the big house. Everybody in the business thought Maxwell owned it, but we hear tonight that he was only leasing it from Oxford City Council.

Headington Hall, Oxford, where the Maxwell family lived in the 1960's and 1970's:

the Documentation Department, where Lois worked, was in

a converted barn (not shown haha!), just to the right of the big house

Maxwell liked to paint a image of himself as a great family man, but contributors to the programme say that he spent most of his time in London, and didn't actually see much of Betty and the children as they were growing up. And it was Betty that made sure the children all had a good education.

flashback to the 1960's:: Maxwell with Betty and the children.

Journalist and later newspaper editor Eve Pollard, who had been a Daily Mirror executive since 1968, says, "I'm sure he loved his children. I saw him being very fond of Ian and Kevin and Ghislaine, but it's the sort of love that can grab you by the throat as well as by the heart, and you never knew which way it would go."