Features
Clever bleeder
Yorkshire Cricket Club marketing manager James
Hogg explains to Viv Hardwick why he decided
to write a book about James Robertson Justice
VIRTUALLY nothing had been
recorded about the career of
popular British film comedy
actor James Robertson Justice
until North Yorkshire author
James Hogg decided to tell his
incredible story starting with the fact that
his subject had lived a lie for most of his life.
The bulky, bearded and big-voiced Justice,
who shot to fame thanks to the famous role
of Sir Lancelot Spratt in the Doctor In The
House film of 1954, invented a story that he
was born at a distillery on the Isle of Skye
and added a middle name of Robertson to
make himself sound Scottish.
"In fact he was born in South London and
it was all an elaborate hoax. His father
actually hated the Scots and said they
infested the world and used to mock Burns'
Night," says Hogg, who admits to playing
down the Walter Mitty side of his subject in
the book James Robertson Justice - What's
The Bleeding Time?
With a title taken from the best joke in the
1954 film, which inspired a series of sequels
and a TV series, the first-time author admits
to remaining amazed about the flamboyant
life of Justice going unrecorded.
"I was confused because much lesser
actors and actresses had had books written
about them, but there was genuinely nothing
about him even though he'd appeared in
some of the biggest films of the 20th century,
including Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and The
Guns Of Navrone. Even the obits I got from
The Times were merely a few pars," says
Hogg of the star of 87 films, who died in 1975.
The writer feels that the man, born James
Norval Harald Justice, in 1907, had little
recorded about himself because he didn't do
many interviews.
"That wasn't his thing. Acting was a job
that he fell into by chance and it paid him
enough money to pursue his other varied
interests. He acted for six months and then
spent the other six months, always the
summer, where he went wild-fowling and
hawking, fishing, drinking and fornicating
etc," he explains. How the Yorkshire Cricket
Club commercial manager decided to write a
book about Justice is almost another story in
itself.
"I've always been a part-time researcher
for Channel 4 and Sky and usually on British
comedy. I got a lot of people asking me about
James Robertson Justice and I was fan
myself and when I went in search of
information I came up with nothing. I
subsequently wrote to Betty Box (the prolific
British film producer) in 1993 and she kindly
invited me to Pinewood Studios for a chat. I
was in wonderland and we sat in the bar
surrounded by unbelievable people and I got
around 20,000 words in an afternoon all
about James. She loved him dearly, even
though he didn't like many people in the
industry, but he seemed to grab onto people
he trusted," explains Hogg, who discovered
that directors Ralph Thomas and
Yorkshireman Ken Annakin and actors
Leslie Phillips and Stanley Baxter were
among that small circle of friends.
Away from filming, Justice's reputation
extended much further and his friends
included Prince Philip who was only too
pleased to supply a foreword for Hogg's book,
which he decided to start writing about four
years ago after a website dedicated to Justice
provoked "an unbelievable response".
People from all over the world sent him
emails and members of Justice's wife's
family gave him a wide range of pictures to
be used in the book and then Tomahawk
Books arranged for Hogg to meet writer
Robert Sellers, who helped him edit the final
manuscript.
"Hey presto we had a book. The Duke of
Edinburgh had known James since the 40s
and I wrote to him speculatively and he, very
surprisingly, said send me the manuscript
and if I like what I see I'll do it'. I thought
bloody hell, he'll probably hate it', but he
loved it and sent me a list of corrections on
dates and places and wrote the most
generous foreword. It was fantastic. He's
written a few before, but never for a
biography. So to get the Queen's husband to
write the foreword for your first book is a bit
of a coup," says Hogg.
He was a bit anxious about telling anyone
at Yorkshire CC about the book in case the
club's chief executive disapproved.
"It's only now that people are starting to
find out and say I saw you on Look North
last night' and stuff like that. All my family
live in Middleham and are in the horse
racing business and none of them relate to
writing biographies. So I come across as a bit
of a Martian freak and I got asked why have
you written a book about him?'"
THE colourful life of Justice includes
being elected twice as rector of
Edinburgh University, partly on the
grounds of his claim to a Scottish birthright.
"Then I found out he'd fought in the
Spanish Civil War and was wanted for
murder in Germany and stuff like that. This
all came from friends who weren't associated
with the film side of his life," explains Hogg,
who unearthed that the actor, who spoke 20
languages, fled from Germany after a
shooting incident before joining the wartime
Navy and being invalided out in 1943.
"Stanley Baxter told me that he was
making the film, The Fast Lady, when they
all got called in Justice's dressing room and
there was champagne all round because it
was the anniversary of him killing his first
Nazi officer. He had a picture of himself with
a monocle in his League Of Nations police
force uniform. He was a professional ice
hockey player for three years and managed
the England team in 1932 in Austria where
they finished a very impressive seventh,"
says Hogg.
He also found that Justice somehow
charmed his way into the world of motor
racing and competed at the legendary
Brooklands racing circuit.
"He's one of these people who had
unbelievable charm and could talk
anybody into anything," adds the
author who blames Justice's slide
into obscurity on a stroke which
made him an uninsurable risk to
film-makers.
"He'd got divorced in 1968 and his
wife sued him on the grounds of
adultery and he didn't pay and she
took him to a bankruptcy court
and he had to sell his home in
Spinningdale, Scotland," says
Hogg.
Justice and his second wife,
actress Irina von Meyendorff,
were given a home on a friend's
Hampshire estate.
"He died penniless but he
didn't die unhappy. It's not as
tragic as it appears. He had a lot of
friends around him, the love of an
extraordinary women and I think he did
okay.
"James strikes me as one of
those clever buggers who
seemed to be able to do
anything and everything."
■ James Robertson Justice -
What's The Bleeding Time?
by James Hogg, published
by Tomahawk, is out now,
£12.99
11:09am Thursday 8th May 2008
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