The Original Fast Talker - 1 August 2003

Two famous centenarians have died.

I pause to let the freakishness of that sentence sink in.

For in hearing it I hope you at once realised it would have been, 30 years ago, an impossible sentence to write or read.

Thirty years ago you read in the papers that somebody somewhere had died at the age of 101 - that's the only reason they got their name in the papers. they were otherwise obscure, it was simply a newsworthy feat for anybody to reach a hundred.

But since everywhere, in what we used to call the civilised world and what we now tactfully call the developed world, since the population of the old and very old is increasing every year or two it's no longer a shock to find centenarians among the famous.

The death of these two men ominously underlines the topic I touched on last week, to which I'll give one more darting mention just so that listeners who unaccountably weren't paying attention will appreciate the wonderful - or if you're in your 50s, say - the daunting novelty of that first sentence.

A quick, sketched-in background.

In the spring of 1937 President Franklin Roosevelt put through Congress the first national pension fund.

It was called the Social Security Act and since then we've subtracted from everything we earned 10% for our old age pension.

The Social Security Fund has always been regarded as a separate budget - separate from the regular government budget, not to be touched for any other purpose than paying out pensions to the retiring old.

But, as I gloomily announced, the fact of people living longer has meant a gradual, unstoppable rise in the number of pensions, as against the number of healthy, younger working folks, who pay for those pensions.

The result has been a warning going out to especially the baby boomer generation - the youngsters now in their 50s - that 10 or 15 years from now there may be little or no pension for them.

And this week I read a singularly bleak dispatch from Europe, from one of two highly dependable institutions, as safe, as we said in the long ago, as safe as the Bank of England.

They regretted to inform their already retired workers - Your pension next year, we're sorry to say, will not be $35,000 but $26,000 due to the firm's laying off of so many thousands of workers or in the case of a bank, going belly up.

So you see the grim reaper is not reaping fast enough for the young middle aged who, however, I hope will be good sports and join in celebrating the good lives of these two centenarians who were born earlier enough not to have to worry about their pensioners' dollars - even though one of them had, it was calculated, 260 million reasons for not needing the government pension.

And who would he be? Leslie Townes Hope, son of a stonemason who decided, along with about 10 million other working people in Europe, to ride the wave of immigrants that crashed on these shores at the turn of the 19th Century, right up to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.

By then the young and already sassy 11 year old had found school in Cleveland, Ohio, a pretty dull business, whereas he thought the Vaudeville theatre, at its peak then, was a joy with its red-nosed comics and pretty girls, tap dancers, its familiar types - the henpecked husband, the strident mother-in-law, the sneaky little brother. A comic reflection of everything that was awful at home.

In his early teens he learned a little dancing, worked up a routine with a girlfriend, then with an old dancer and then as the male dancer partner of - wait for it - two Siamese twins.

For about 15 years he was a minor figure in Vaudeville, until he found what was to be his essential role - himself, as a stand up comic, a harmless show off, failing con man, the ever-ready rescuer of damsels in distress. Except he'd be happier if they rescued themselves.

One of his writers frankly explained: "Bob thought we'd invented a character for him, it was in fact there already - it was nobody but Bob Hope. We simply wildly exaggerated his own characteristics - the woman chaser, the coward, the cheap guy."

Once the character was established Hope was on his way - from small town Vaudeville to the big time and on to Broadway musicals and 58 movies, and in the late 1940s and early 50s the first and only entertainer to become the number one star in the movies and in radio and in television.

But he was something beyond being the nation's chief entertainer, the obvious host at every kind of national festival - the Oscar ceremonies, a presidential birthday, political conventions - he was also the one and only court jester and he had the jester's unique freedom to mock and lampoon the king himself.

He knew and bantered with every president from Franklin Roosevelt to Clinton. And I believe Roosevelt was the only one who, on public occasions, he did not mock or mimic - that was not just that Roosevelt had such a patrician presence but because Roosevelt was a cripple.

But Hope's barbs at the political foibles of the president's party, of any party, were evenly distributed.

After the surprising landslide election of his fellow film and TV star Ronald Reagan he said: "Boy, what a victory for the Reagans - or as they're now called, Dynasty."

As for the thoroughly beaten Democrat candidate, Walter Mondale, he sighed: "Mondale said God had no place in politics. apparently God feels the same way about Mondale."

If that was the whole story I frankly doubt I'd be talking about Bob Hope.

After all there has to be at any time the top film comedian, the best television host, the most listened-to radio wise cracker.

That these three titles all belonged to one man is remarkable. But about Bob Hope the man, there was another more remarkable and I'd say truly heroic side which was not exposed to millions of his theatre, movie and radio audience, but only to the estimated 11 million men who found themselves in remote lands, fighting for good or ill for this country, in Europe, in North Africa, in Malaysia, the Aleutians, in the jungles of the Pacific islands, then in Korea and in Vietnam, wherever American soldiers, sailors, marines and the air forces were based and in many places where they were actually under fire when the well-known stage coward joked bravely on.

More than his unfailing ability to make all sorts of people laugh under various conditions. what endeared him to the whole nation and the people of besieged allies in distant lands were these tours of the armed forces.

And whatever may be the picture in your head of a famous song and dance man entertaining the troops it should be corrected by the sight of some of the frightful desert and jungle dumps that made do as stages, by the appalling range of climates he commuted between.

Most of all it should be understood that all his life Bob Hope hated flying. And the 20 years of his army tours were done before the arrival of the jet plane, that rides, that flies above the weather.

Mostly the vehicle was the DC-3, called the workhorse of the war. No food or drink, bucket seats if you're lucky, a thin mattress on the floor to sleep on.

For over 30 years Bob Hope bounced around in every hazard of weather, suffered many a scary accident. it was a miracle that his iron constitution survived over two million miles in the air in - you can truly say - the service of his country.

There's a move in the Senate to have him buried in the National Military Cemetery in Washington. It is no more than his due.

The second remarkable centenarian was a very different breed: an English lawyer of great distinction - Hartley Shawcross - once attorney general, chief British judge at the Nuremberg trial, a handsome, compact, crinkly-eyed, bushy-browed, cheerful man who was at one time eagerly pursued to think of himself in 10 Downing Street.

There was a moral obstacle to this ambition. In the trial of the Nazis he came down witheringly against the plea that "we were underlings, we were only obeying orders".

"There comes a time in every life," Shawcross told them, "when conscience must defy the leader's orders."

Such a man would never become a loyal political leader.

So in his early 50s he quit politics and spent the rest of his long life performing innumerable good works.

There is a warning lesson in Lord Shawcross's life for all attractive, middle-aged ladies who find themselves working for a very old man.

When he was 95 Lord Shawcross proposed to an attractive old friend.

She accepted him but the English courts, at the urging of indignant relatives, did not.

So they skipped off to Gibraltar, married and Shawcross enjoyed six more years of married bliss.

It should be a warning - and I speak feelingly - to any attractive woman who takes for granted the harmlessness of a very old man.

Watch out. At all times, keep up your guard.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.