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The first page of O Caledonia (1991),
Elspeth Barker’s only novel, features a
Scottish castle where at sunset a tall,
stained glass window spills its many
colours down the stone staircase,
shedding an unearthly glory.
Lying in this pool of colour is an “odd-
ly attired body, twisted and slumped in
bloody murderous death”. But this is
merely a decoy, a trick to fool the reader
into expectations of a gory whodunnit.
The novel, which was reissued last year
with an introduction by Maggie
O’Farrell, is instead full of literary tex-
ture and emotional paradox: fierce sen-
sitivity, tough tenderness, and savage
humour. And the words, like a good red
wine, leave an afterglow. In some ways
it can be read as autobiographical
fiction. She had heard for herself the
“mean whipping wind” that “whined
and skirmished” about the castle.
Born in Edinburgh in 1940, Elspeth
Langlands grew up in the windy neo-
gothic Drumtochty castle, Aberdeen-
shire, where her parents Robert and
Elizabeth Langlands ran a prep school
for boys and where she developed a pas-
sion for the classics. After St Leonard’s
School, an independent boarding
school in St Andrew’s, Fife, she went to
Oxford and read modern languages.
She was as vivid in person as her
writing, with sapphire blue eyes, wild
black hair and a luminous complexion.
In her twenties she married the poet
George Barker, having fallen in love
with his poetry before she met him.
He was not a reputable character,
already having ten children by three
previous wives. One of the bohemian
crowd in Soho in the Fifties and Sixties,
he was a prodigious drinker. This would
have charmed Elspeth, whose own
manners, as a “Scottish gentlewoman”,
were impeccable.
She met him in 1963, at a gathering
held by his second wife, Elizabeth
Smart, where he stood by the mantel-
piece, snarling. She knew the risks,
including that she would play second
string to the poetry, but she was in a
headlong, go-for-broke state of mind,
which, with all its hazards, was her way
of being. Generous and hospitable, over
the years of raising her own family she
welcomed the various ex-wives and
an anthology about grief called Loss.
There was never much money around
and she had to earn. She did this by
teaching classics at Runton school for a
while. She told the children that if they
did not listen, a giant octopus would
come out of the sea and grab them all.
Of course they couldn’t wait.
She also taught on the creative
writing courses at the University of East
Anglia and Norwich University of the
Arts, as well as a dozen courses for the
Arvon foundation. On one of these her
co-tutor, Barbara Trapido, was ready tobegin the session at 10 each morning.
“Where’s Elspeth?” she would inquire.
By noon Barker would appear, wearing
a succession of satin blouses in the
stained glass colours of purple, emerald
or red. Her lateness was because she
stayed up most nights talking and
drinking with her students until 4am,
regaling them with stories. She was
actually a shy person, but wine brought
out her innate sociability.
As a reviewer, always submitting her
handwritten copy by post, she was gen-
erous and insightful. Only one writertheir grown-up children into Bintry
House, the creaking 17th-century farm-
house in Itteringham, Norfolk, to the
delight of her own five children when
presented with unexpected older
siblings from faraway places. She loved
George Barker till the end, even after
she had married someone else.
Their 28 turbulent years together
were “vivid and passionate and trea-
sured”, she said in her husky, smoker’s
voice, stretching out the vowels. Their
children adored him.
Bintry House had a stream running
beneath it, with only bare earth and
flagstones between the kitchen and the
water, a sort of Wuthering Flats.
Saturday nights were drinking nights.
At dinner, George would read poetry
aloud, or sing, holding the room spell-
bound. Not everyone was a poetry
lover, not everyone could cope with
“the badness and madness”, but they
would still turn up on Saturday nights.
Many dramas and many parties took
place inside that house, as her olderdaughter Raffaella recounts in her
novel Come and Tell Me Some Lies.
Barker loved animals. Portia, a pot-
bellied pig, lived in the barn but took
forays into the kitchen to chuck a few
chairs around until given some scraps,
or to break a wine case and slurp up the
contents. Hens, which Barker said were
“romantic, racist and cruel”, also made
their way into the house, along with a
succession of dogs and cats and even a
Shetland pony. When her perplexed
second husband, the writer Bill Troop,
asked why she wanted a pony in the
house, she replied: “In the same way as
one likes to have a duck sitting on one’s
lap while watching television.”
Barker would have no truck with
death. “I am not a widow,” she insisted,
five years after her husband’s death, “I
am George’s wife.” She wrote eloquently
about the ensuing loneliness, that
disquieting sense of being “cast alone on
a wide, wide sea”. In 1997 she editedShe loved George Barker
till the end, even after
marrying someone else
Billy Watson
Child actor of the golden age of Hollywood who appeared with his brothers in the Capra classic Mr Smith Goes to Washington
In the 1930s, when a film director was in
need of a child or two for his latest
picture, the Watson youngsters could
expect a knock at the door of their
slightly ramshackle California home.
Their father would line them up and
ask: “What size and what sex?”
Billy Watson, the sixth of the nine
children, was picked many times — and
enjoyed a career that straddled the
silent era and the first 13 years of talkies,
among them such classics as Show Boat
(1936), The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn and Young Mr Lincoln (both 1939).
“We grew up just 500 yards from
Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios,
where our father worked as an actor
and horse-wrangler and played one of
the original Keystone Kops,” he
explained in 2017. “The director would
choose a kid and my dad just handed us
over the garden fence, and we’d go off
and film a movie.”
This was certainly the case when
Frank Capra was looking for boys to
play the offspring of beleaguered
Governor Hubert “Happy” Hopper in
his 1939 masterpiece Mr Smith Goes to
Washington. Billy, Delmar, Garry and
gap-toothed Harry joined four other
youngsters to play the squad of siblings
who, over a family dinner, excitedly
nominate their hero, idealistic Jefferson
Smith (James Stewart), as the next
senator for their state. At the climax of
the film, the Hopper boys are among the
hundreds of Boy Rangers who come to
Smith’s aid as he does battle with
corruption on the floor of the Senate.
Capra, recalled Watson, was a regular
at their home and had experienced the
mayhem of trying to get 11 people round
a dinner table, “so when he was
making Mr Smith and needed
some child actors, he said:
‘Let’s get the Watson kids —
that’ll drive everyone cra-
zy!’ ” Sixty years later, the
Watsons became the first
family to be honoured
with a star on the Holly-
wood Walk of Fame.
William Richard
Watson was born in
1923, in Los Angeles. His
father, Coy Watson, was a
mechanical technician,
stuntman and horse-wran-gler credited with creating the piano-
wire special effects used for Douglas
Fairbanks’ flying carpet in The Thief of
Bagdad (1924). His mother, Golda (née
Wimer), “washed and ironed costumes
from the movies”. They had five children
— Coy Jr, Vivian, Gloria, Louise and
Harry — when Billy was born; Delmar,
Garry and Bobs, who became the best-
known of them all, followed him.
The Watson offspring took on
movie-related jobs out of necessity.
“How my parents got through theDepression with nine kids I don’t know.
Times were tough and the 11 of us lived
in a small house. But the stars all knew
my dad and were always dropping in.”
Indeed, when Coy and Golda built
their house in Edendale, on the out-
skirts of Los Angeles, in the 1910s, they
did so just before two of the earliest
studios were established, one by
Colonel William Selig, the other by
Mack Sennett, who produced the Key-
stone Kop comedies.
Two Keystone contractors who
became neighbours and family friends
were a young married couple: Wallace
Beery and Gloria Swanson, who would
become two of the biggest stars of the
day. One of the Watson girls was named
after Gloria, who occasionally helped
Golda Watson out with childcare.
Like his elder brother Coy Jr, who had
made his screen debut as a baby in 1913
and became known as “the Keystone
Kid” due to the number of Keystone
movies in which he appeared, Billy
made his first film as a babe in arms. His
subsequent early films — including the
comedy Taxi 13 (1928), which featured
seven young Watsons — were silent but
he was kept busier during the 1930s, by
which time the children were amongthe most in-demand juvenile character
actors in Hollywood.
He bowed out of movies when he was
17 and, after serving in the US Coast
Guard during the war, worked as a com-
mercial photographer. None of the
children were encouraged to become
full-time actors. When MGM offered
the scene-stealer extraordinaire Bobs a
seven-year contract after his success in
the Spencer Tracy movie Boys Town,
Coy Watson turned it down, saying: “I
will not sell my son into slavery.” The
studio’s habit of pumping such juvenile
stars as Judy Garland full of pills was
already well-known.
Billy Watson is survived by his child-
ren Bill, Dennis and Rod. His wife, Sue,
died in 2008. “My biggest role,” Watson
said, “was opposite Katharine Hepburn
in The Little Minister in 1934. I had to
cry, because she was driving my father
to drink. I was only ten but I fell in love
with her, she was so beautiful.”Billy Watson, child actor, was born on
December 25, 1923. He died on February
17, 2022, aged 98
Watson in 1939 with
Walter Brennan and
Spencer Tracy Email: [email protected]incurred her wrath:
Robert Fraser,
whom she had in-
vited to write the
biography of
George, with Fa-
ber’s agreement.
When the first
draft came in she
reacted with fury
and astonishment.
“How could my
husband’s life story
have been taken
over in this way?”
After several more drafts, the book
was eventually published by Cape with
the title The Chameleon Poet. She still
thought it vulgar and dull, and refused to
authorise it. Many of her reviews and es-
says were published in Dog Days in 2012.
As a celebrated Norfolk writer, she
was often asked to review art exhibi-
tions. For one event, she began with
characteristic honesty: “I know very
little about painting and drawing and
don’t know what I like.” She visited the
studios of the three local artists
featured, not bothering with critical
theory but painting vivid word pictures
of the studios, the settings and the
artists themselves.
In her writing, Barker animated
everything, from the moody Aga,
which determined whether or not they
would eat, to the severed head that
turned out to be a giant puffball. Much
of her imagery seemed drawn from her
own experiences and observations. In
O Caledonia her young protagonist felt
she was “a despicable compound of ar-
rogance, covetousness and self-centred
rage, a seething, stinking mud spout”
who was not much loved. It is reason-
able to suppose that Barker shared
these feelings as a child, but as an adult
she was loving and lovable. Engaging,
talented, courageous, in some ways
dauntingly anarchic: she would garden
in stilettos and drive an untaxed car
wearing a blonde wig. She was never,
ever, dull.Elspeth Barker, author, was born on
November 16, 1940. She died of
complications arising from a stroke on
April 21, 2022, aged 81Barker, who was an animal lover, in 1991 and with her youngest daughter LilyElspeth Barker
Husky-voiced novelist who was raised in a windy castle, married to a bohemian poet and seemed to belong to a bygone era
SIMON TOWNSLEY/TIMES NEWSPAPERS LTD; ANNA MURRAY
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