I was in Brighton yesterday, visiting a friend. Her partner comes from Wolverhampton.
When I arrived, she asked me: “Have you heard about Snow White?”
“Erm, no” I said, “No, I don’t think so.”
“Apparently,” she told me, “Radio 4 says the local panto in Wolverhampton this year is Snow White, but they have sacked the seven dwarfs… Sacked them! Suddenly!”
I looked at my friend.
“What on earth did they do?” I asked.
I had visions of the legendary mayhem and Bacchanalia which reportedly happened among the Munchkins during the filming of The Wizard of Oz.
“They didn’t do anything wrong,” my friend explained. “It was the economic recession and the soaring cost of dwarfs… The theatre is going to replace the dwarfs with children wearing masks.”
“It won’t be the same,” I replied. “Don’t Look Now would’t have been the same. Didn’t they think about the soaring cost of vertically-challenged people before they employed the seven dwarfs in the first place?”
“Radio 4 didn’t say.”
“That seems a bit remiss of them. Standards are falling at the BBC.”
“Yes,” my friend replied.
“We live in a strange and mysterious world,” I said.
“Yes,” my friend replied.
We had a cup of tea.
Later in the afternoon, in The Lanes, we picked up a leaflet for the Brighton Festival Fringe. At the top, it said: The third largest Fringe in the world.
“Brighton has always been billed as the second biggest,” my friend said.
“You’ve been shamed,” I ventured. “Edinburgh is by far the biggest arts festival in the world and the biggest Fringe. What on earth is the second biggest?”
“It’s a mystery to me,” said my friend.
So we went to Brighton’s always surreal-sounding Vegetarian Shoes shop and stared in the window. Nearby, was a man sitting on the ground outside a Native American shop; he was dressed as a Tibetan lama and was apparently talking on his mobile phone to his girlfriend; he had an English accent.
“They’re very popular in Germany,” my friend told me.
“Tibetan monks?” I asked.
“Native American artifacts.”
“I seem to remember reading,” I said, “that German movie-goers are very fond of Westerns, too. What’s that all about?”
“It’s a mystery to me,” said my friend.
“I can’t help feeling that, if Hitler had dressed in a Red Indian head-dress, it would have undermined his credibility,” I suggested.
My friend looked at me.
She said nothing.
Any news of Nicholas van Hoogstraten?” I asked, as we walked on. I’m always interested in people with unusual lives and my friend had once given me a biography of van Hoogstraten as a Christmas present.
By 1968 (aged 23), he simultaneously became Britain’s youngest millionaire and started a 4-year prison sentence for paying a gang to throw a grenade into the house of Rev Braunstein, a Jewish leader whose eldest son owed him £3,000. He later said of the people who threw the grenade: “These weren’t anarchists: they were businessmen, respectable people.”
In 2002, he was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for the manslaughter by two other men of business rival Mohammed Raja; a jury decided that “although he wanted Mr Raja harmed, he had not wanted him murdered”. He was released in 2004 after successfully appealing against his conviction on the grounds that “there was no foundation for a manslaughter case.” In 2005, Mohammed Raja’s family won £6 million in a civil action against van Hoogstraten after the court found that the balance of probabilities was “that the recruitment of the two thugs was for the purpose of murdering Mr Raja and not merely frightening or hurting him”. Van Hoogstraten reportedly told the BBC that the family would “never get a penny”.
“Is he still in Brighton?” I asked my friend.
“It’s a mystery to me,” my friend said. “Every now and then you hear stories. Some people say he’s in Zimbabwe.”
“Among friends, then,” I said.
“Not any more,” my friend said. “One story is he sold all his assets in this country and put all his money into Zimbabwe because he was so chummy with the regime but they fell out and he lost all his land there.”
The last time I heard van Hoogstraten, he was on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme defending Robert Mugabe’s ‘land reform’ policies.
“How’s van Hoogstraten mausoleum?” I asked.
“Crumbling,” my friend said.
By this point, we were passing a bronze statue of the British music hall star Max Miller.
“An interesting place, Brighton,” I said. “Max Miller and Nicholas van Hoogstraten were both equally at home here.”
“Yes,” said my friend.
“Bronze is very colourless for Max Miller,” I said.
“Yes,” said my friend.
Apparently Adelaide is the second biggest Fringe in the world.
And, according to Wikipedia, which is surprisingly accurate on such things, Nicholas van Hoogstraten has been reported to be worth £500 million, “though he has stated that his assets in the UK have all been placed in the names of his children”. His assets in property and farming in Zimbabwe were estimated to be worth over £200 million.
I don’t know what he is worth now or where he is. Nor does my friend.
All I know for certain is that life is tough for dwarfs in Wolverhampton.
SO IT GOES - John Fleming's blog 