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PADDYWHACKED!

Day Scilly Wilson nearly drowned

and his pet lab was in the doghouse

Wilson and his old pal Golden Labrador Paddy

 

THE MORNING Cloud cast a shadow over the Isles of Scilly beach when best-selling novelist and Fleet Street journalist Isabel Wolff and her family were on a cycling and rock pooling holiday one summer — but it wasn’t an act of nature.  

 

That day they plucked more than shrimps and crabs out of the sea — they saved Leader of the Opposition Harold Wilson from drowning in a boating accident in freezing temperatures.

 

How embarrassing would it have been if the story had broken? The Prime Minister at the time was Edward Heath, a renowned racing yachtsman in his boat Morning Cloud. And so began a series of cover-ups and silences for the family.

 

It worked for a while but a month later the story broke and all hell broke loose in the Labour Press Office. They needed a scapegoat.

 

It was August 10, 1973, and the family were cycling along an isolated bay 28 miles off the Cornish coast when Isabel’s 10-year-old brother Matthew spotted an empty rubber dinghy racing out to the open sea.

 

The family watched as it sped towards the horizon and wondered whose it was. Then her father heard a cry, she said over 40 years later in an archived BBC follow-up interview. Above the strong wind, they could just about make out a distressed male voice and see a man frantically clinging to the side of a motor launch.

 

Little did they know it was the loud, bench-thumping Labour leader, who normally only ever shouted in the Commons. Isobel’s father, nuclear engineer Paul Wolff cupped his hands and yelled: “What’s the trouble?”

The head popped up again and the man shouted back: “I can’t get into my boat. Fetch a dinghy!”

 

Her father replied: “Can you hold on?”

 

“Yes, for a bit!”

 

The family peddled furiously down to the bay where they found Wilson’s pining labrador Paddy chained up at a fisherman’s hut and Isabel stroked his ears while her father rushed off to find a dinghy with his older son Simon. Then she noticed a tag around the Lab’s neck. His name was Paddy. It couldn’t be? Could it? Was it the famous Paddy, you-know-who’s dog?

 

Out at sea, Simon managed to climb onto Wilson’s boat and drag Wilson on board like a ‘sack of potatoes’.

 

Twenty minutes later father and son rowed back with bedraggled Wilson squashed between them but as they got near the shore, the former wily politician tried to find his sea legs and stand up but nearly toppled them all into the drink. Simon had to force him down.

 

They took the white-faced, amateur sailor back to the beach, looking shocked, in his drenched shirt and shorts with his hair plastered to his scalp, and teeth chattering. He swore them to secrecy.

 

“Wilson thanked the family but declined their offer of the loan of a bike to get back to his bungalow and plodded home with Paddy.

NOVELIST: Isabel Wolff

The family continued with their day out and ate their picnic lunch on the beach.  Isabel’s father explained that Wilson had slipped into the sea while attempting to step from his rubber dinghy onto his motor launch. The dinghy had then shot away from him and sped off.

 

Unable to pull himself into the boat, he had been left hanging on to the fender ropes for dear life. He’d told them that he’d been feeling sea-sick and his arms felt “numb” and were giving out.

 

“Dad then swore us all to secrecy — if the story got out it could ruin the opposition leader’s holiday, and our own,” Isabel said. Paul had promised the embarrassed politician to keep things quiet.

 

But the story eventually leaked out back home the following month in their local paper the Rugby Advertiser. Within hours it was picked up by the nationals and made front page news. Isabel said the family hadn’t told anyone.

 

The Daily Mirror claimed: ‘My dog tipped me in!” Even though Paddy was chained up on the beach. That made Isabel angry, she said. For in a piece of Labour spin, Wilson’s press secretary, Joe Haines, apparently blamed the labrador and there was even a photo of culprit Paddy, who was “in the doghouse”. 

 

The incident was extremely embarrassing for Wilson, because of Heath’s reputation as a world-class yachtsman. There were even cartoons of him grinning at the news on board his yacht, Morning Cloud.

 

But the story didn’t end there, for years later Isabel, now a top chick lit writer, revealed that the next day, the family went down to Porthcressa and by chance saw Wilson coming off the beach.

 

“I remember thinking that he’d be happy to see us again.” she said, “perhaps he’d even ask us to tea? But to my surprise I saw a flash of irritation cross his face when he saw us.

 

“My father greeted him and asked how he was. He replied that he felt all right, if rather stiff, and that he had spent the rest of the day in bed. Then he hurried away, and we didn’t see him again. Not even a letter.

 

Isobel’s first novel, The Trials of Tiffany Trott, came in 1997 when The Daily Telegraph asked her to write a comic column. HarperCollins commissioned her to turn it into a book. 

 

FLEET STREET SAM’S

DIARY OF SEXY PEPYS

Samuel Pepys wrote about his sex life in code

 

You can’t walk far in Fleet Street without being haunted by the memory of Samuel Pepys. His ghost is everywhere — plaques and statues; the pubs he drank in; the meeting rooms; book shops and art, even ashtrays for tourists.

He was born across the road from the Black Lubyanka, in Salisbury Court, five centuries ago and later went to St Paul’s School, going on to become our foremost diarist and chronicler. In our time we grew up with his work, learning about the Great Fire of London; the Black Death and the execution of King Charles II among other historic events.

 

But I never knew this son of a tailor and a washerwoman, born in February 1633, was not as famous in life as he is now because he didn’t tell anybody he was writing a diary, and partly because few would have cared had they known. It was just a private diary like most people kept, except it was seven volumes. A wonderful window to life in his day.

 

He was secretive too, he never showed his innermost thoughts to anyone, keeping them under lock and key. He wrote some of it in shorthand and disguised his romantic liaisons by writing them up in foreign languages because they were full of his detailed sexual antics. 

 

They never told us baby boomers about them when we were at school learning about him. His affairs, quickies and sexual fumblings were many,  just like his friend, randy Charles II.

 

The trouble was his detailed diary from 1660 to 1669 wasn’t published until the 19th century.

 

There’s much more too. He was violent to his French wife Elizabeth; was obsessively jealous of her and he was accused of being a traitor three times, spending his early life penniless.

 

He served as an official on the Board of the Navy, although amazingly he had no seafaring experience, and rose to become Chief Secretary to the Admiralty, thanks to his friendship with Charles. When the money started coming in, women flocked to him and he wrote graphic accounts of his sexual liaisons with them across London.

 

He had regular mistresses and affairs with servants, barmaids and friends, sleeping with wives, daughters and mothers of colleagues. He took sex where he got it in the back alleys of Fleet Street and the city, churchyards, homes, backrooms, carriages, taverns, theatre stalls and even church pews.

All are documented. A lady once produced a pin from her pocket and threatened to prick him if he fumbled with her again.

 

Pepys drank in some of the pubs we did in Fleet Street and many more no longer there — The Devil Tavern, at No2; Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese (of course); The Green Dragon in Popinjay Alley, parallel to Shoe Lane; and The Cockpit.

 

When he died in 1703 in Clapham, aged 70 and blind, he had amassed a £500,000 fortune.    

 

MYSTERY MAN FROM THE PAST

WITH A PERFECT GOLD FILLING

 

Like other hacks I have traipsed around the crypt of St Bride’s a handful of times, just because I had the opportunity and although I found it fascinating because I love history, I never properly considered what was there and the secrets it held.

 

I never realised that it was only when St Bride’s was a smouldering shell after the devastation of WWII and the bulldozers moved in that archaeologists were able to add 1000 years to the known history of our journalists’ church. And suddenly, for me, the bones really did come to life.     

They uncovered so much, not least of all dentistry, which was risky in the 17th century. People feared it, as some folk bled to death at the hands of the Fleet Street back street butchers. Others just died in pain from their bad teeth and in the new excavations one jaw was dug up with a giant abscess on it. The victim just suffered until he died.

 

There were other bones that told a story too. Not least the 45-year-old man with the gold tooth. He was found in St Bride’s lower churchyard, the burial place for the poorer people of the parish and was linked to the Bridewell workhouse and debtor’s jail. He must have been affluent once to be able to afford his fine tooth. It was such good workmanship that the gold filling was intact three centuries on. Friends must have looked after him at the burial because good teeth and any gold were extracted both from the dead and the living for some extra money.

 

This ground was consecrated in 1610 to cope with the overcrowded burial conditions outside the church that upset the wealthier parishioners congregating above.

 

Workhouses were awful places. My grandfather William Saunders, who left me his handwritten life story, recalls the day his mother took him to visit what they laughingly called the hospital in the Charing Cross workhouse. He writes: “There was barely enough room to stand between the beds, but they weren’t real beds, they were cardboard boxes shaped like coffins. Even as a young boy, I guessed my own granddad was packaged up and ready to go.” 

 

For the St Bride’s male skeleton to still have the tooth in his upper jaw with the gold filling intact, was quite something. Especially since it was the norm for such precious fillings to be removed from the deceased and sold.

 

Unfortunately, with no coffin plate, it wasn’t possible to know who the Man with the Gold Tooth was, or exactly when he died. The area of the excavation of the burial ground was dated 1770–1849, but he would have had a high pain threshold. There were no numbing agents at the time.     

Gold, however, was an excellent material with it being inert and, so, not harmful being in the mouth.

 

The hundreds of other bones, catalogued in the upper St Bride’s crypt, came from the years after Christopher Wren designed and rebuilt the church in 1672, following the Great Fire of 1666.

 

STORY BITE: The term Waterloo Teeth comes from the removal of teeth from thousands of soldiers who died during the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

They were later ripped out on the battlefield and sold by gangs of body snatchers for false molars. Jewellers and blacksmiths worked with them to fashion cosmetic dental creations in society.

 

FANCY THAT: The oldest tooth filling was discovered in Italy, made by an Ice Age dentist 13,000 years ago and made of bitumen. Holes were scraped out of people’s teeth in their gums by stone tools. Ughh!

 

TERRY MANNERS

 

27 January 2025