The French connection

'He had selected some stones from the beach, written "A Present From Margate" on each one in felt-tip and tried to sell them in cafés'

Yesterday I was talking about the desirability of acquiring a verbal defect to set you apart from other people, a Frank Muir or Jonathan Ross "r", a Thomas Sutcliffe Northern "a", and so on. This works best if the rest of your speech is quite unremarkable. I know someone who went to live "oop" North a few years ago, and who deliberately did acquire that northern elongated vowel that turns "pub" into "poob", though the rest of his speech stayed virtually the same. Never mind – he was being very clever because that one vowel change makes him sound Northern. That's all it takes.

I once had a wonderful lesson in just how little it does take from Jonathan Routh, pioneer of Candid Camera and author of the Good Loo Guide. He came as a guest years ago on a Punch staff coach outing to Margate, way back when Edward Heath was still PM. As we approached Broadstairs, Jonathan rose and insisted that we went to visit Edward Heath's parents' home. We should, he said, pretend we were a coachload of French tourists who had come for that sole purpose, and make inquiries for their whereabouts at Broadstairs Tourist Office. Everyone thought this was a grand idea, as long as Routh organised it, and pretty soon we had drawn up outside Broadstairs Tourist Information.

"I will take someone with me, preferably a French-speaker," said Routh. I volunteered.

"Leave all the talking to me, Miles" said Routh. "Pretend you don't understand any English. Talk to me in French if you like. I shall talk to them in English with a heavy French accent. But listen carefully. After a few sentences I will talk to them in plain English without an accent, and they will never notice. They never do."

"Yes, sir?" said the polite tourist official, when we got to the counter.

"We are a group of French tourists who 'ave come to visit ze 'ouse of ze parents of Monsieur 'Eass, your Prime Minister. Please, where ees eet?"

"Oh, good God," said the man, sotto voce and looking a bit faint. "Brian, can you come and help? There's a busload of French tourists who ... It's not open to the public, monsieur!"

"No matter," said Routh. "We will just have a look. And have our photographs taken."

"Oh no, you can't ... they might not like that, you see, it's a private house ... Brian! Can you come and help!"

As the conversation progressed, Jonathan got less and less French, and more and more English, until he had reverted to his normal speech. Neither Brian nor the other official noticed that he was no longer French – they talked loudly, and slowly, and heatedly, and addressed him as "Monsieur", until we went away.

After that we did actually go and have a look at Mr and Mrs Heath's house, but Jonathan Routh's urge to masquerade had worn off by then, and we carried straight on to Margate and then went our various ways. When later we compared notes on what we had all been doing during the afternoon (I had spent most of the time on the dodgems), Jonathan Routh revealed that he had adopted another pose. He had selected some of the better stones from the beach, written "A Present From Margate" on each one in felt-tip, and gone from table to table in cafés and tea rooms trying to sell them.

"And did you get anywhere?" I asked him.

"I found quite a few takers," he said. "You always do."

I wish I had got to know Jonathan better, as his brand of quiet theatricality always appealed to someone gloomily introspective and desperately shy like me. I think in later life he went off to Jamaica to live, where he spent his time painting. He was quite good at painting detailed landscapes in a naive, primitive, Portal Gallery sort of a way, but couldn't really do people.

He could, however, do Queen Victoria. He perfected a way of painting Queen Victoria's outline – white bun, black billowing dress – which was instantly recognisable, and so started putting her into every landscape as the representative figure. After a while you have to start thinking of reasons why Queen Victoria should be in every one of your paintings, so he did a book of excellent paintings of Jamaica entitled something like Queen Victoria's Secret Visit to Jamaica, and everyone was happy.

Oops. This piece wasn't going to be about Jonathan Routh at all. More about speech defects some other day, then.