The Royals with Roya and Kate - Your History: A new podcast from The Times

Episode Date: July 16, 2024

Today, we're sharing an episode of a new podcast from The Times.It's called Your History, and each week it uses the obituary pages of The Times to tell the stories of important and fascinating lives. This week Anna Temkin, deputy obituaries editor at The Times, explores the lives of the sex therapist Dr Ruth Westheimer and Royal cake decorator Eddie Spence.You can hear future episodes by following Your History wherever you listen to The Royals. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello listeners of The Royals, with you, Roya Nikar. And you, Kate Manzi. Today, something a little different. You've been reading obituaries, Roya. I have. Just the one obituary, actually. Do explain. Well, The Royals, with me, Roya, and you, Kate, isn't the only new podcast from The Times. What? I know, I know. But another of our newest offerings is a real delight,

so I'm not feeling too bitter about it. And you're on it. Yes, but regardless so what it is it's called Your History and it explores truly fascinating lives taken from the obits pages of the times and that can be amazing people from sport, from politics, from science. Royalty. Absolutely hence why we're talking about it because this week one of two obituaries featured on the podcast was a king of swords, the king of royal icing. So here bringing you your history is the deputy obituaries editor of the Times, Anna Temkin, and later a certain Roy Anika. Do enjoy. In today's episode of Your

History with me, Anna Temkin, we look back on the extraordinary life of Dr Ruth Westheimer, who escaped Nazi Germany as a child and found fame as a pioneering sex therapist in the 1980s, talking honestly in public about once-taboo bedroom topics. We'll also celebrate Eddie Spence, whose life became a worthy footnote in history, thanks to his skills as a cake decorator for the British royal family. Their stories are, in very different ways, a part of all our histories, yours and mine. For those joining me for the first time, this podcast is inspired by the words of Nelson Mandela, who said,

This podcast is inspired by the words of Nelson Mandela, who said, You can't really be proud of yourself if you don't know your history. That history and the world around us is shaped by the lives of many others. The woman who would become known simply as Dr Ruth was born Carola Ruth Segal, the only child in an Orthodox Jewish family in Weissenfeld in Germany in 1928. Her mother, Irma, was a housekeeper at the home where her father, Julius, lived in Frankfurt, and they married during the pregnancy to avoid the scandal of a birth outside wedlock. during the pregnancy to avoid the scandal of a birth outside wedlock. During the Holocaust, Ruth's life was saved by being sent to a children's home in Switzerland. But she later discovered that both her parents had been murdered. She said,

I was left with a feeling that because I was not killed by the Nazis, because I survived, I had an obligation to make a dent in the world. The Times obituary for Ruth Westheimer, read by Kaya Burgess. Ruth Westheimer was searching for work after she was sacked from her job teaching human sexuality at a university in Brooklyn, when she met a radio station boss who offered her a show on local radio. The time slot was not ideal, a 15-minute segment at midnight on Sundays, and the pay was so meagre it didn't cover her travel expenses. But it transpired that many New Yorkers had questions about sex in 1980, and they were keen to hear common-sense answers dispensed in a folksy but frank style by a petite and upbeat 50-something with a thick German accent.

A caller dubbed her Dr Ruth Ruth and the moniker stuck. The programme, titled Sexually Speaking, soon expanded in length and was syndicated nationally. By the mid-80s, Dr Ruth was the most famous sex therapist in America. She fronted Good Sex, a cable television show that aired five nights a week. She wrote newspaper columns, including for Playgirl magazine, and dozens of books. She leased her name to a board game, promoted products as varied as condoms, typewriters and chocolate mousse. And she appeared in One Woman or Two, a 1985 comedy film starring Gérard Depardieu and Sigourney Weaver. Westheimer knew that Sexually Speaking was a hit when a taxi driver recognised her as

she spoke. Comedians mocked her voice, which one wag described as a cross between Henry Kissinger and a canary. But Westheimer felt it was one of her biggest assets, giving her credibility because she sounded like Grandma Freud. If I had been young and pretty, she said, it wouldn't have worked. The most popular topics on her radio show were premature ejaculation and trouble-reaching orgasm. ejaculation and trouble reaching orgasm. I'm everybody's old-fashioned Jewish mother. I'm sympathetic and I talk straight, she told the Times in 1985. I believe in educating people to be sexual gourmets. In everyday life, we talk a lot about food and diets. We share the discoveries we've made in the kitchen, so why shouldn't we exchange recipes for better sexual functioning? Why keep the excitement of sexual exploration

to ourselves?' she said. Her efforts to bring sex education for children into the mainstream, her support of contraception and abortion, and her gay rights advocacy during the peak of the AIDS epidemic made her a target of conservative critics. One man attempted to make a citizen's arrest on her for lewd and immoral conduct while she gave a lecture at the University of Oklahoma. On a visit to a campus in North Carolina, she was assigned police protection when a group of religious fundamentalists planned a protest. Despite her perky catchphrase, get some, she cautioned against one-night stands and stressed the value of long-term relationships.

She described herself as old-fashioned and square. Though Westheimer preferred sexually explicit terms to euphemisms, she was coy in other respects. She declined to discuss her own sex life and did not insist that callers share details of their sexual preferences and histories, inviting them to talk generally or say they were asking for a friend. This was aimed at avoiding public embarrassment. She recalled one man at a seminar who admitted to becoming strongly aroused whenever he saw a cow. Nobody laughed, nobody said anything, because people are polite, she wrote in her 1987 autobiography All in a Lifetime. She added, But no one can tell me that his assistant didn't walk into his office the next day

to get his assignments for the week thinking just one thing. Moo. As a young girl in Nazi Germany, she had watched as her father was taken from their apartment by the SS and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Her father's detention qualified her for a kindertransport programme that took 100 Jewish children from Frankfurt to Switzerland. Clutching her favourite doll and expecting to see her parents again in six months, she was placed on a train to Hyden, a village near Lake Constance. She was housed with fifty other children in a

converted barn. Hyden was safe and scenic, but the youngsters were obliged to perform gruelling chores and were often treated callously. One of the managers of the home told the children they had been abandoned because their parents did not love them. Westheimer recalled that the mantra beaten into the children, sometimes literally, was, never complain, you're lucky to be alive. In 1941 she received a letter from a relative. Her parents and grandmother had emigrated, it said. In fact, they were deported to a Jewish ghetto in Łódź, Poland. At the end of the war, the children gathered each week as the staff read out lists of people who had survived the concentration camps. Westheimer waited in vain to hear her parents' names.

She later learned they had perished, almost certainly in Auschwitz. An increasingly committed Zionist, Westheimer relocated to Palestine aged 17 and lived on a kibbutz near Haifa. Deciding to train as a kindergarten teacher, she attended a seminary in Jerusalem and supported her education by working as a waitress until she was sacked for filling customers' cups up to the brim during a coffee shortage. Violence soared as British control over Palestine ended. Westheimer joined Haganah, an underground Zionist military organisation, in 1947 and was trained to use machine guns and hand grenades. Her commanders deployed her as a messenger and sniper, reasoning that her small stature,

standing at just 4 foot 7 inches, made her hard to spot. Perched on a rooftop, Westheimer watched over a roadblock. She was ordered to shoot any strangers she encountered on patrols who were unable to state the password. To her relief, she never had to fire her weapon in combat but was seriously injured when a bomb exploded outside the hostel where she lived. Shrapnel struck her all over her body, shredding the top of a foot. shrapnel struck her all over her body, shredding the top of a foot. In 1949, she met and married an Israeli soldier called David Barheim, and they moved to France so that he could attend medical school in Paris.

Meanwhile, Westheimer worked at a Jewish nursery school and studied psychology at the Sorbonne. The marriage ended in divorce. She decided to spend a few months visiting friends and relatives in the United States in 1956. While in New York, she secured a scholarship to a progressive university, the New School for Social Research, and took a master's degree in sociology. She discovered she was pregnant and married her French boyfriend Dan Bommer in 1957, but decided the union was not tenable. They divorced the following year. On a skiing trip, she met a telecommunications engineer Manfred Westheimer, a German Jew

who had been sent to live with an aunt in Kentucky during the war. They married in 1961. Westheimer found work with a family planning group and as a public health researcher at Columbia University, and in 1970 earned a doctorate in education from its affiliated Teachers College. She trained as a psychosexual therapist under Helen Singer Kaplan, an Austrian-American pioneer in the field. In addition to her media career, she saw clients at her office in Manhattan and spoke at universities. She lived in the same cluttered three-bedroom apartment for more than half a century,

but relished the trappings of her sudden celebrity, hobnobbing with the likes of Catherine Deneuve and Raquel Welch at parties. She also socialised with Bill Clinton, though was careful not to be seen with the President when the Monica Lewinsky affair erupted. At posh restaurants with tall tables, she now had enough confidence to ask waiters to provide phone books so she could elevate her seat. I always used to be too embarrassed to do it, she said. Clearly, one of the major benefits of becoming Dr Ruth is a significant increase in my chutzpah. Westheimer continued to write books and appear on television late in life, and visited the UK in 2019 for an Oxford Union debate on pornography. That year, a documentary film called Ask Dr Ruth returned her to the spotlight,

and even in her 90s, she was still dispensing saucy advice on her social media feed. Ruth Westheimer, the sex therapist, was born on 4 June 1928. She died on 12 July 2024 at the age of 96. This week in The Times, we published obituaries for two actresses, Shannon Doherty, known for her roles in the hit American TV shows Beverly Hills 90210 and Charmed, and Shelley Duvall, who starred opposite Jack Nicholson in The Shining, Stanley Kubrick's acclaimed, if notorious, 1980 horror movie.

Though it was Duvall's most famous role, filming it was the worst experience of her life. In fact, she likened it to serving in the Vietnam War. To create the psychological horror that Kubrick wanted to convey, the director went out of his way to antagonise his actors and keep them on the edge, and Duval bore the brunt of it. The infamous scene in which she holds a baseball bat because she's afraid that her deranged husband, played by Nicholson, is going to kill her, was shot by Kubrick 127 times, for no other reason,

it seemed, than to make her look more exhausted and drained. And yet, she came to recognise Kubrick's importance as a filmmaker, and acknowledged that he gave me the role of my life. On to sweeter things and the life of Eddie Spence, a cake decorator for the royal family, who grew up in the poorest part of Edinburgh and became known for his meticulous piping work, icing many of the cakes at the centre of the Windsor's big occasions. The Times obituary for Eddie Spence, read by Roya Neekar. In 2000, the King of Royal Icing, as Eddie Spence was known, met the late Queen when he was appointed MBE for his services to Sugarcraft. She knew all about me and we had quite a long chat, said the cake decorator,

who iced nine big occasion cakes for the royal family over a 71-year career. She was aware I'd done her sister's wedding cake, but I had to let her down when she thought I'd made hers. Although he didn't decorate the cake for Princess Elizabeth's wedding to Philip Mountbatten in 1947, Spence had spent an entire day hand-beating eggs for the cake's royal icing when he was a 14-year-old apprentice at J. W. Mackey's Bakery in Princess Street, Edinburgh. Known for his meticulousness when piping, Spence would within a few years become the go-to baker for the royal family.

Before her wedding to Anthony Armstrong Jones in 1960, Princess Margaret wrote a letter to Spence requesting something traditional. The four-tier cake for Prince Charles and to Spence requesting something traditional. The four-tier cake for Prince Charles and Diana Spence's wedding in 1981 was in the style of an elaborate Gothic church and emblazoned with their respective coats of arms. A slice of it sold in 2021 for £1,850.

At the height of his career Spence was designing 50 wedding cakes every week. He only decorated the cakes, never baked them. His favourite to make was for Queen Elizabeth's silver jubilee celebrations in 1977. Weighing 56 pounds and 21 inches tall, the opulent creation closely resembled the gold state coach with royal purple for the top of the carriage and the wheels, gold conch-blowing tritons at the front and the rear, symbolising Britain's naval

power, a plush red interior and detailed replicas of the painted panels on the sides. A royal icer should never discriminate, he once said, and recalled the time he was asked to make a cake but he was told it's only for next door's little boy. His response was this, it doesn't matter who it's for, you've got to look at it and say, I did that. You've got to make sure that the cake that you do, you're proud of. Edward Miller Spence was born on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh in 1932, in a tenement flat with no hot water or lavatory. His parents couldn't afford to keep him in school, and he began baking at Mackey's at the age of 13. Most started apprenticeships at 16, he said, so

he had a three-year head start. Because I was so small and couldn't reach everything, he recalled, they had to give me steps to use to reach the top shelves. His rise was swift. After joining confectionery, aged 15, he spent five months in the bread department. It was very heavy lifting, all those bags of flour, he said, before landing in the wedding cake department, aged 21. He was initially responsible for designing window displays, including painstakingly recreating Edinburgh's floral clock in icing. In 2010,

he published The Art of Royal Icing, and a year later appeared on Loose Women, teaching the presenters how to ice a cake, all of whom stood at least a foot taller than the shy, diffident Scott. all of whom stood at least a foot taller than the shy, diffident Scott. Position the pipe at a 45-degree angle, he instructed in his soft Scottish brogue. You've got to squeeze, stop, lay down. Squeeze, stop, lay down. Five years after designing the cake for the late Queen's golden wedding anniversary, Spence iced for her golden jubilee and in 2013 her diamond jubilee.

A year later, he recreated Prince Leopold's four-tier christening cake for an exhibition at Buckingham Palace and three years after that, he crafted a cake for the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh's 70th anniversary featuring sugar flowers to replicate the myrtle in her wedding

bouquet. It was to be his last one. He grudgingly decided to put down the pipe at the age of 85. Because his hands, he said, shook too much to spin the detail for which he'd become renowned. He still had a taste for sugar, he said, adding, I always have four spoons in my tea. Eddie Spence, the royal cake decorator, was born on the 14th of July 1932. He died on the 2nd of July 2024 at the age of 91. Thanks to Kaya and Roya, our readers this week. And do check out The Royals with Roya and Kate, where each week the royal correspondents of The Times and Sunday Times

give their unmatched insight into the inner workings of the monarchy. You can listen wherever you find your podcasts. Just search for The Royals with Roya and Kate. Just search for The Royals with Roya and Kate. There are so many life stories that shape our times. We publish two or three obituaries every day on thetimes.com. This week, for instance, we covered the singer Jewel Brown, who toured the world with Louis Armstrong, and Pal Enger, a career criminal who became notorious for

stealing Edvard Munch's masterpiece, The Scream. We also published obituaries for Haviland Smith, a CIA official who pioneered Cold War spycraft techniques, and Ken McGinley, a soldier who was sent to witness the testing of atomic and nuclear bombs on Christmas Island in 1958, and whose subsequent health problems led him to establish the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association. Thanks for listening to our podcast. The producer is Callum Macrae and the editor of Time's podcast is Stephen Titherington. Do get in touch, let us know what you like, what we miss, what we could do better, and what helps you

know your history better. I'm Anna.Temkin at thetimes.co.uk. You've been listening to an episode of Your History from The Times and Sunday Times. Each Tuesday, there's a new episode taken from the previous week's obituaries pages. And you can listen to previous episodes and future episodes by searching for Your History wherever you listen to your podcasts. Until next time, Roya, see you later. Bye.