Robin Mills met Tanya Bruce-Lockhart in Beaminster.
Born in July ’43, I was a war baby. My parents married very young in 1938 – my father, Guy, was in the RAF and my mother, Judy, barely out of school. War was looming. With only a couple of days to celebrate their marriage, my father borrowed a Tiger Moth aeroplane to fly his new bride to honeymoon in Paris. Having given my mother full instructions on safety procedure, they took off from a little airfield in Suffolk with the wedding party waving them on their way. Within minutes, my father turned to shout something to my mother which she supposed was an order to bail out! Without hesitation, she threw herself with parachute from the plane and landed in a ploughed field with a broken ankle! My father, having rescued her, chided her for mistakenly hearing his ‘I love you’ for an instruction to evacuate. Not at all amused, my mother spent the first day of her marriage in Ipswich hospital. When war came my father joined Bomber Command and was seconded to the SOE, flying little Lysander aircraft into Northern France to drop off or rescue agents from behind enemy lines, landing at night in rough terrain with the dim lights of the Resistance to guide him in. He was the bravest of the brave, and there is a granite memorial to him near Thouars as a mark of gratitude from the Free French.
Meanwhile, my brother, Sauvan, was born but died tragically aged two and a half of meningitis whilst my father was on active service. From the SOE he joined the Pathfinder Squadron, headed up by my godfather Air Vice-Marshall Don Bennett. Guy was shot down and killed over Germany in 1944, poignantly on my mother’s birthday. He is buried in a War Cemetery at Durnbach close to Munich. I hope to return there sometime soon with my son, Jamie, with Mummy’s ashes to reunite them both at last.
My grieving mother had lost both her husband and her son and now I had to fulfil both losses. With the support of my grandmother, my mother had to rely on her own courage and resourcefulness to care for us both. She remarried in 1948 but my step-father and I never had a comfortable relationship as I was my father’s child and not his – I think he always felt jealous of my father, the war hero. Living in north London I was educated in what can only be described as a happy environment but the school had little academic ambition. I was both bored and restless and would probably be diagnosed now as ADHD! I was always being moved up a year in order to harness my energy and took O levels and A levels at a ridiculously early age with, curiously, some distinction.
Dispatched to Paris to learn a language, I persuaded myself that the headmistress had been a collaboratrice during the war, and after two terms I implored my mother to rescue me. Back in London, I reluctantly did a secretarial course which led to my first job as a junior journalist for a weekly magazine Woman’s Own. After two years on the home features desk I needed a change. This coincided with London Weekend Television winning the contract for ITV’s weekend programming and I presented myself as a girl Friday soon after. As the company grew, the creative heads of department arrived including Humphrey Burton as Head of Arts and Frank Muir as Head of Entertainment. Frank plucked me from my coffee making dogs-body duties to join him as his general factotum; working together was great fun until he felt I needed to spread my wings and become a programme researcher. About this time, I had a holiday in Marbella, well before it became a celebrity hot spot. There I met a stray dog – one of many – in a very distressed state. I nursed the dog, Rikki, back to life and decided to get him to England. After six months’ quarantine Rikki was liberated and I started to take him to work with me at Wembley Studios. A disagreeable studio manager complained regularly about Rikki’s ‘free range’ and subsequently banned him. I appealed to Frank, indicating that my working association with the company depended on Rikki and me, or neither of us. Frank wrote to the Chairman, explaining that I had rescued what I believed to be an animal of canine origin, but the vet had recognised that this was not a dog but a very rare species of hornless Andalusian goat! Frank saw nothing in the terms of employment that ‘goats’ were banned. The chairman agreed and said he had met the most amiable beast in a corridor. The ‘goat’ stayed on at LWT and so did I. Soon promoted to work on ‘live’ programmes with Simon Dee, David Jacobs, and David Frost, I set about being a celebrity hunter for them all, although some bookings were catastrophic!
Eventually, I joined Humphrey Burton as producer on his arts magazine series Aquarius, alongside Russell Harty. He and I were then offered a slot for a late night chat show which became Russell Harty Plus. Russell was an unknown and needed ‘branding,’ so I ensured that we were invited to first nights, premieres, star parties, etc. He hated it as he was shy and loathed being in the spotlight. On one occasion, after the Royal Premiere of Funny Girl, I had ordered a limo to meet us. Unknown to me Russell had cancelled the limo and booked his regular Ford Cortina with the dodgy aerial. Cars were being hailed – HM the Queen, the American Ambassador and Russell Harty. I threw myself into what I thought was our limo only to be asked by the driver glumly whether I was with the American Ambassador’s party! In dismay, I had to clamber out into the rain, only to retreat into the Ford Cortina! We also made a film bringing together Sir William Walton who lived on Ischia and Dame Gracie Fields who lived on Capri – using the Bay of Naples as a backcloth. Sadly, they had absolutely nothing to say to each other in spite of their northern roots. The sun shone but conversation was icy!
When Russell joined the BBC, I returned to Aquarius, working on films such as The Treasures of the Hermitage where I was constantly tailed, in what was then Leningrad, by men in black, and The Great Gondola Race which featured the restoration of buildings in Venice racked by the elements. Then Humphrey returned to the BBC, and Melvyn Bragg joined LWT to head up his critically acclaimed and eclectic South Bank Show series. I think he was a bit unsure about Rikki and the manner in which the dog brought programme meetings to an early conclusion with his chemical emissions! However, we all got used to each other.
From LWT I was asked to join Granada Television, and the latter part of my career in TV was to work with the choreographer Kenneth Macmillan, bringing his ballets to ITV. I loved my time in telly and still miss those days very much.
In January 1981 I met my husband Gordon Giles, a banker, and we quickly became engaged. That February my mother was diagnosed with a brain tumour resulting in major surgery, and our wedding plans for July were set aside as Gordon was diagnosed with testicular cancer. We brought our wedding forward, and a small group of our friends and family joined us at Southwark. There was a brief weekend in Somerset before Gordon had to start treatment at the Marsden. At the hotel, I managed to set fire to my heavily lacquered hairdo as a result of lighting a ferocious Calor gas fire. With my mother having lost her hair, Gordon about to lose his and the dog being hairless as a result of mange – we became the heirless family which was not so funny. Gordon and champion jockey Bob Champion had treatment at the same time; both were amazingly gallant about the horrors of chemo-therapy. Both survived. Against all the odds, after Gordon finished treatment, our son Jamie was born. Jamie was barely 18 when his father died tragically in 2002 from pancreatic cancer.
I got to know this part of Dorset through friends who lived in the Bride Valley, and Gordon and I decided to buy a weekend retreat in Uploders which I still had when he died. On my own, I felt isolated in a village especially with Jamie away at school in Wiltshire. Moving to Beaminster I also hoped – and failed – to be anonymous. Happily I became involved with the Beaminster Festival for Music and the Arts and its Director for ten years. With contacts from my time in TV, I was able to expand the festival considerably. Meanwhile, the internationally respected Bridport Prize for Creative writing, hosted by the Bridport Arts Centre, was going from strength to strength and after several meetings with the then director, Chris Huxley, the idea of the Bridport Literary Festival was developed. Now in its 15th year, BridLit has charitable status and attracts audiences who wish to banish the blues of November with programme of events to enlighten and enjoy. Apart from books, my three delights are my son Jamie, my dog Lily and rhinos -but that’s another story.
First published in May 2019
