JAMES ROBERTSON JUSTICE

By the mid-1950s, and with National Service a threatening cloud on the horizon, my life seemed to be in a sort of limbo. I was not particularly enjoying work, either. As a weekly newspaper's junior district reporter already struggling to tame yet another threatening monster, namely the office-issue BSA motorcycle, my days seemed to offer little more than an unending round of collecting the names of mourners at funerals, visiting vicars, and writing up wedding report sheets. A day in the office was a day spent in a cloud of cigarette smoke surrounded by piles of paper.
On this particular day I arrived home from work to be met by my father saying, 'The story in town is that the Duke of Edinburgh has been out wildfowling, and there is a film star staying at the Bull Hotel,' which was the town's main watering hole. The film star in question was James Robertson Justice.
JRJ - he of the bulky body, beard, and booming voice - was hugely popular at the time. He was also a man of many talents. Born in 1907, he was a linguist and had been a motor racing driver, a lumberjack in Canada, secretary of the British Ice Hockey Association, and had fought in the Spanish Civil War and in World War Two with the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve.
Then in the late 1940s he entered the film business, some of his best known being Doctor in the House, Guns of the Navarone, Moby Dick, Capt Horatio Hornblower, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Scott of the Antartic, and Whisky Galore. His physicality and charismatic demeanour enabled him to dominate almost any scene.
I got out my bicycle and went into town, arriving with some trepidation at the Bull. It was a daunting prospect, not only because I was hoping to meet a film star but because, although 17 closing on 18, I had never been in a pub! In those days 'locals' tended to be dark, smoke-filled, unappealing places inhabited by grumpy old men intent at staring at anyone they did not know. But I went in. And they stared, unspeaking and unfriendly.
The sizeable bulk of JRJ was perched on a stool at the bar holding a pint, but he looked at me intently when I sidled across and meekly told him who I was. To be frank, he was kindness itself. He confirmed that he and the Duke of Edinburgh had indeed been out wildfowling for the day on the Sutton Bridge marshes, told me a little about it, and said he was staying at the Bull Hotel until the following day. My meek questioning was answered by JRJ in the only way he knew, his voice booming around the room. Everyone was listening, and grinning. 
Suddenly he picked up on my general discomfort, clambered down from his stool, and signalled for me to follow. We went out of the bar and into the cobbled yard under the old coaching archway, and there was his car and trailer, and several falcons tethered to specially erected posts.
We discussed the falcons, and then I asked him a real greenhorn question: 'How did you bring them?' JRJ looked at me with a sort of bemused contempt. 'In my car, boy. How do you think I brought them?' he thundered, his patience on the brink of collapse.
Thinking about it later, I realised his ploy of showing me the falcons was his way of avoiding having to say any more about the Duke of Edinburgh. After all, it was a private engagement, and ordinarily nothing would have been said about it at all. The local excitement soon died, of course, and the Bull drinkers were left alone again.