I have always been a bit ambivalent about having a birthday on January 1. It was certainly a wonderfully convenient date when you were asked (as you often were back in school) to provide your age “in years and months”: no struggling with the maths, like there was for those unfortunates with the bad luck to be born on (say) February 20. And I have sometimes enjoyed the fancy that those of us born with the year are a bit of an exclusive (albeit motley) club: members include the anthropologist James Frazer (1854), the spy Kim Philby (1912), the dramatist Joe Orton (1933), the Labour politician Gerry Fowler (1935) and the philosopher Myles Burnyeat (1939). I knew both Fowler and Burnyeat, and we treated our shared date rather like a freemasonry handshake.
That said, my enthusiasm was mitigated early on by the downsides of being a new year baby. No one had much cash or energy for a great celebration, and definitely not for a worthwhile present. If you were born on January 1, the best you could do was to confess a little sheepishly a few minutes after the chimes of Big Ben that it was actually your birthday – and receive some drunken congratulations.
So it was with some admiration that I discovered in the 1980s – when I started to work on Frazer (and the connections between his career as an anthropologist and his training as a classicist) – that towards the end of his life he went in for extravagant birthday parties. By the 1930s Frazer was a national celebrity. “He discovered why you believe what you do” ran the headline in the News Chronicle, above a report of his notably extravagant party in 1937 (“He has changed the world … not as Mussolini has changed it, with coloured shirts and castor oil; nor as Lenin has changed it, boldly emptying the baby of the humanities with the filthy bath of Tsarism … He has changed it by altering the chemical composition of the cultural air that all men breathe.”)
The report included a description of the festivities. “Notables from many lands made their way to the Grosvenor Hotel, Victoria yesterday afternoon to do honour to an old man with a neat white head … He stood beneath the golden bough of mistletoe, specially brought from Norway as a symbol of his life-work.” There was, we are told, a large cake with eighty-three candles, a firework display (which Frazer particularly liked) and the performance of a short operetta composed by Lady Frazer, on the theme of her husband’s work, The Singing Wood.
It might have been a bit over the top, I thought (and, predictably perhaps, Lady Frazer is often blamed for being the one who didn’t know where to stop). But at least they triumphed over that inauspicious date for a party. Except, as I soon realized, they didn’t. In 1937, and on the other birthdays up to his death in 1941, they carefully postponed celebrations till later in January, to make sure of a good turnout.
As for me, I had thought of celebrating my seventieth (minus the fireworks and the operetta), which fell on January 1, 2025. But I still haven’t quite got round to it. Maybe postpone it till this year … ?
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