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JEEVES ... will be away for two weeks.
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Coming Soon : Chris Steele-Perkins’ book "A Place In The Country".
Holkham Hall: a modern-day Downton
There’s a butler, a gamekeeper, a cook – and everyone swears it’s nothing like Downton Abbey. But what keeps a country estate alive in 2014? Magnum photographer Chris Steele-Perkins spends a year at Holkham Hall in Norfolk
Words: Photographs:
The Guardian, Friday 17 October 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/oct/17/holkham-hall-norfolk-a-modern-day-downton-abbey?CMP=fb_gu
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Gamekeepers at Holkham Estate, Norfolk. Photograph: Chris Steele-Perkins/Magnum |
Pass between the gatehouses, down the sweeping drive towards Holkham Hall, and you enter a time warp. Fallow deer cluster scenically under broad oaks, geese honk as they rise from the silver lake. It could almost be 1764, the year the grand house was completed, shortly after the death of Thomas Coke, the first Earl of Leicester.
The estate is now run by Viscount Thomas Coke, the son of the seventh Earl of Leicester. Photographs by Chris Steele-Perkins, who documented the 25,000-acre estate in Norfolk
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Lord and Lady Coke with their four children. Photograph: Chris Steele-Perkins/Magnum |
Holkham has diversified into 48 different businesses serving both aristocratic and popular tastes, from a boutique hotel to a caravan park and 300 houses, mostly let to local people. There are 200 full-time and 150 seasonal staff – including six gamekeepers and a butler, but also a conservation manager and education officer, too. Holkham’s walled estate is open to the public, hosting concerts and festivals. Each year, more than half a million people visit Holkham’s beach, which is a national nature reserve and, unusually, is entrusted to the privately owned estate rather than the government’s wildlife body Natural England.
The Cokes (pronounced “Cook”) are more generous over public access than most great estates, but they are wary of the media. David Horton-Fawkes, estates director, admits they were nervous about giving access to Steele-Perkins, a member of the Magnum collective who has documented poverty around Britain
In fact, Steele-Perkins found a bustling, busy estate which he likens to “a well-run ship”. “I started to think of the estate in nautical terms,” he notes in an introduction to his book of these photographs. “A long time ago I had spent a week on the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible where the crew was organised into myriad teams, but worked together as an organic whole when needed. Holkham is similar: building maintenance, farming, forestry, gamekeeping, with their officers and their petty officers and their ratings, in effect.”
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A woodcock shooting party with beaters. Photograph: Chris Steele-Perkins/Magnum |
For much of the 20th century, country piles such as Holkham were an endangered species. Prohibitive death duties between the wars caused the break-up of many great estates, which were sold for development, handed over to the National Trust or, incredibly, demolished. Holkham held 42,000 acres in the late 1940s when the fourth earl, another Thomas Coke, tried to pass it to the National Trust. That deal never happened and the Cokes were down to their last 25,000 acres in 1973 when Edward, father of the current incumbent, began running the estate. “When he took over in 1973, every facet was losing money,” says Viscount Coke, 49, who lives in part of the hall with his wife Polly and their four children.
When Coke returned to his family seat aged 28, after Eton , university and the army, he remembers his father looking at him and saying, “What are you doing here?” The seventh earl (who is still alive) managed a mix of farming, forestry and shooting, with a few tourists visiting the house, and he didn’t need any help. So the young heir began by looking after a large caravan park – “We’d prefer to say holiday park,” Coke says, “we’ve invested a lot on landscaping and making it nice” – which had returned to the estate after the local council’s lease ended.
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Groundsmen at work. Photograph: Chris Steele-Perkins/Magnum |
Twenty years ago, 75% of Holkham’s turnover came from the land. Now, tourism and leisure make up 55% of turnover; farming and property rentals are only 40%. Coke was given full control of the estate seven years ago and appointed Horton-Fawkes two years ago. “For a landowner, I’m not bad at this customer service sort of thing, but David introduced me to a whole new level,” Coke says. “I don’t think I’ve uttered the word ‘punter’ for the last few years – I have to say things like ‘guest’.” Such openness has been rewarded: Coke is surprised that his walled garden is now tended by 23 volunteers. “I always thought people would happily volunteer for the National Trust, but to volunteer for Little Lord Fauntleroy living in a big house – it’s amazing we’ve got to that position.”
In many ways, the estate resembles any other modern corporation. Coke has introduced board meetings and non-executive directors, “people with experience from outside”. Senior staff recently visited Volvo’s HQ in Gothenburg to see how they did business, and they already have some unusual incentives in place: if an employee doesn’t perform a task on time, they must bake a cake. Coke is not exempt although, he admits, when called upon he “made two loaves of bread in the breadmaker”.
Coke and his wife have a private staff of three, compared with 50 in the Downton era, though this does include a butler. When Coke took over the estate, he says, “I thought, ‘Dad had a butler, I’m not going to have one’ – but it’s such a big house.” The butler, Steele-Perkins notes, is “quite young and nothing like the butler of fiction”. He wears full butler attire only for formal occasions, and Steele-Perkins spent time with the staff while they prepared for one such event: a black-tie dinner for 24 people. “Laying the table, lining up the glasses, took hours.”
Steele-Perkins was surprised to find that even among themselves, staff refer to their bosses as “Lord” and “Lady”. Horton-Fawkes says that Tom and Polly “lost a lot of sleep” over this. “They are very approachable, and didn’t want that deferential relationship,” he says. Nevertheless, they decided to retain a traditional formality to “reinforce the boundary between work and home”.
As for the staff, it seems that old habits die hard. “I quite like saying ‘Lord Coke’, that formality seems right for the estate,” says Sarah Henderson, Holkham’s conservation manager. Kevan McCaig, the head gamekeeper, who was previously employed by the royal family at Sandringham , says he is “more comfortable” calling his boss Lord Coke. “In different places I’ve worked I’ve never called anybody by their first name,” he says.
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A cricket match in front of the hall. Photograph: Chris Steele-Perkins/Magnum |
McCaig lives in a cottage in the grounds. Only one member of staff lives in the hall itself: the head of security. But while he was working there, Steele-Perkins was able to stay in the house. “It could be quite spooky,” he says, “coming back there at night, torch in hand, after dining at one of the pubs that Holkham owns, footsteps echoing down stone paved corridors above the haunted cellars, a whisper of wind around the windows…” Over the course of the year, as the family got to know him better, he graduated from the butler’s quarters to the guest bedrooms. He remembers one night staying in a bedroom with Italian Renaissance paintings on the wall - a room which, he recalls, “had a footprint bigger than that of my whole house in London
• Chris Steele-Perkins’ book A Place In The Country, from which these photographs are taken, is published by Dewi Lewis next month, priced £25.
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Steele-Perkins was born in Rangoon, Burma in 1947 to a British father and a Burmese mother; but his father left his mother and took the boy to England at the age of two. He went to Christ's Hospital and for one year studied chemistry at the University of York before leaving for a stay in Canada. Returning to Britain, he joined the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, where he served as photographer and picture editor for a student magazine. After graduating in psychology in 1970 he started to work as a freelance photographer, specializing in the theatre, while he also lectured in psychology.
By 1971, Steele-Perkins had moved to London and become a full-time photographer, with particular interest in urban issues, including poverty. He went to Bangladesh in 1973 to take photographs for relief organizations; some of this work was exhibited in 1974 at the Camerawork Gallery (London). In 1973–74 he taught photography at the Stanhope Institute and the North East London Polytechnic.
In 1975, Steele-Perkins joined the Exit Photography Group with the photographers Nicholas Battye and Paul Trevor, and there continued his examination of urban problems: Exit's earlier booklet Down Wapping had led to a commission by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation to increase the scale of their work, and in six years they produced 30,000 photographs as well as many hours of taped interviews. This led to the 1982 book Survival Programmes. Steele-Perkins' work included depiction from 1975 to 1977 of street festivals, and prints from London Street Festivals were bought by the British Council and exhibited with Homer Sykes' Once a Year and Patrick Ward's Wish You Were Here; Steele-Perkins' depiction of Notting Hill has been described as being in the vein of Tony Ray-Jones.
Steele-Perkins became an associate of the French agency Viva in 1976, and three years after this, he published his first book, The Teds, an examination of teddy boys that is now considered a classic of documentary and even fashion photography. He curated photographs for the Arts Council collection, and co-edited a collection of these, About 70 Photographs.
In 1977 Steele-Perkins had made a short detour into "conceptual" photography, working with the photographer Mark Edwards to collect images from the ends of rolls of films taken by others, exposures taken in a rush merely in order to finish the roll. Forty were exhibited in "Film Ends".
Work documenting poverty in Britain took Steele-Perkins to Belfast, which he found to be poorer than Glasgow, London, Middlesbrough, or Newcastle, as well as experiencing "a low-intensity war".
He stayed in the Catholic Lower Falls area, first squatting and then staying in the flat of a man he met in Belfast. His photographs of Northern Ireland appeared in a 1981 book written by Wieland Giebel. Thirty years later, he would return to the area to find that its residents had new problems and fears; the later photographs appear within Magnum Ireland.
He stayed in the Catholic Lower Falls area, first squatting and then staying in the flat of a man he met in Belfast. His photographs of Northern Ireland appeared in a 1981 book written by Wieland Giebel. Thirty years later, he would return to the area to find that its residents had new problems and fears; the later photographs appear within Magnum Ireland.
Steele-Perkins photographed wars and disasters in the third world, leaving Viva in 1979 to join Magnum Photos as a nominee (on encouragement by Josef Koudelka), and becoming an associate member in 1981 and a full member in 1983. He continued to work in Britain, taking photographs published as The Pleasure Principle, an examination (in colour) of life in Britain but also a reflection of himself. With Philip Marlow, he successfully pushed for the opening of a London office for Magnum; the proposal was approved in 1986.
Steele-Perkins made four trips to Afghanistan in the 1990s, sometimes staying with the Taliban, the majority of whom "were just ordinary guys" who treated him courteously. Together with James Nachtwey and others, he was also fired on, prompting him to reconsider his priorities: in addition to the danger of the front line:
. . . you never get good pictures out of it. I've yet to see a decent front-line war picture. All the strong stuff is a bit further back, where the emotions are.
A book of his black and white images, Afghanistan, was published first in French, and later in English and in Japanese. The review in the Spectator read in part:
These astonishingly beautiful photographs are more moving than can be described; they hardly ever dwell on physical brutalities, but on the bleak rubble and desert of the country, punctuated by inexplicable moments of formal beauty, even pastoral bliss . . . the grandeur of the images comes from Steele-Perkins never neglecting the human, the individual face in the great crowd of history.
—Philip Hensher
The book and the travelling exhibition of photographs were also reviewed favorably in the Guardian, Observer, Library Journal, and London Evening Standard.
Steele-Perkins served as the President of Magnum from 1995 to 1998. One of the annual meetings over which he presided was that of 1996, to which Russell Miller was given unprecedented access as an outsider and which Miller has described in some detail.
With his second wife the presenter and writer Miyako Yamada (山田美也子), whom he married in 1999, Steele-Perkins has spent much time in Japan, publishing two books of photographs: Fuji, a collection of views and glimpses of the mountain inspired by Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji; and Tokyo Love Hello, scenes of life in the city. Between these two books he also published a personal visual diary of the year 2001, Echoes.
Work in South Korea included a contribution to a Hayward Gallery touring exhibition of photographs of contemporary slavery, "Documenting Disposable People", in which Steele-Perkins interviewed and made black-and-white photographs of Korean "comfort women". "Their eyes were really important to me: I wanted them to look at you, and for you to look at them", he wrote. "They're not going to be around that much longer, and it was important to give this show a history." The photographs were published within Documenting Disposable People: Contemporary Global Slavery.
Steele-Perkins returned to England for a project by the Side Gallery on Durham's closed coalfields (exhibited within "Coalfield Stories"); after this work ended, he stayed on to work on a depiction (in black and white) of life in the north-east of England, published as Northern Exposures.
In 2008 Steele-Perkins won an Arts Council England grant for "Carers: The Hidden Face of Britain", a project to interview those caring for their relatives at home, and to photograph the relationships. Some of this work has appeared in The Guardian, and also in his book England, My England, a compilation of four decades of his photography that combines photographs taken for publication with much more personal work: he does not see himself as having a separate personality when at home. "By turns gritty and evocative," wrote a reviewer in The Guardian, "it is a book one imagines that Orwell would have liked very much."
Steele-Perkins has two sons, Cedric, born 16 November 1990, and Cameron, born 18 June 1992. With his marriage to Miyako Yamada he has a stepson, Daisuke and a granddaughter, Momoe.
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| http://www.holkham.co.uk/ |
Holkham Hall is an 18th-century country house located adjacent to the village of Holkham, Norfolk, England. The house was constructed in the Palladian style for Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester (fifth creation) by the architect William Kent, aided by the architect and aristocrat Lord Burlington.
Holkham Hall is one of England's finest examples of the Palladian revival style of architecture, and severity of its design is closer to Palladio's ideals than many of the other numerous Palladian style houses of the period. The Holkham estate, formerly known as Neals, had been purchased in 1609 by Sir Edward Coke, the founder of his family fortune. It is the ancestral home of the Coke family, the Earls of Leicester of Holkham.
The interior of the hall is opulently but, by the standards of the day, simply decorated and furnished. Ornament is used with such restraint that it was possible to decorate both private and state rooms in the same style, without oppressing the former. The principal entrance is through the "Marble" Hall, which leads to the piano nobile, or the first floor, and state rooms. The most impressive of these rooms is the saloon, which has walls lined with red velvet. Each of the major state rooms is symmetrical in its layout and design; in some rooms, false doors are necessary to fully achieve this balanced effect.
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Holkham was built by first Earl of Leicester, Thomas Coke, who was born in 1697. A cultivated and wealthy man, Coke made the Grand Tour in his youth and was away from England for six years between 1712 and 1718. It is likely he met both Burlington—the aristocratic architect at the forefront of the Palladian revival movement in England—and William Kent in Italy in 1715, and that in the home of Palladianism the idea of the mansion at Holkham was conceived. Coke returned to England, not only with a newly acquired library, but also an art and sculpture collection with which to furnish his planned new mansion. However, after his return, he lived a feckless life, preoccupying himself with drinking, gambling and hunting, and being a leading supporter of cockfighting. He made a disastrous investment in the South Sea Company and when the South Sea Bubble burst in 1720, the resultant losses delayed the building of Coke's planned new country estate for over ten years. Coke, who had been made Earl of Leicester in 1744, died in 1759—five years before the completion of Holkham—having never fully recovered his financial losses. Thomas's wife, Lady Margaret Tufton, Countess of Leicester (1700–1775), would oversee the finishing and furnishing of the House.
Although Colen Campbell was employed by Thomas Coke in the early 1720s, the oldest existing working and construction plans for Holkham were drawn by Matthew Brettingham, under the supervision of Thomas Coke, in 1726. These followed the guidelines and ideals for the house as defined by Kent and Burlington. The Palladian revival style chosen was at this time making its return in England. The style made a brief appearance in England before the Civil War, when it was introduced by Inigo Jones. However, following the Restoration it was replaced in popular favour by the Baroque style. The "Palladian revival", popular in the 18th century, was loosely based on the appearance of the works of the 16th-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio. However it did not, adhere to Palladio's strict rules of proportion. The style eventually evolved into what is generally referred to as Georgian, still popular in England today. It was the chosen style for numerous houses in both town and country, although Holkham is exceptional for both its severity of design and for being closer than most in its adherence to Palladio's ideals.
Although Thomas Coke oversaw the project, he delegated the on-site architectural duties to the local Norfolk architect Matthew Brettingham, who was employed as the on-site clerk of works. Brettingham was already the estate architect, and was in receipt of £50 a year (about 7,000 pounds per year in 2014 terms in return for "taking care of his Lordship's buildings". William Kent was mainly responsible for the interiors of the Southwest pavilion, or family wing block, particularly the Long Library. Kent produced a variety of alternative exteriors, suggesting a far richer decoration than Coke wanted. Brettingham described the building of Holkham as "the great work of [my life]", and when he published his "The Plans and Elevations of the late Earl of Leicester's House at Holkham", he immodestly described himself as sole architect, making no mention of Kent's involvement. However, in a later edition of the book, Brettingham's son admitted that "the general idea was first struck out by the Earls of Leicester and Burlington, assisted by Mr. William Kent".
In 1734, the first foundations were laid; however, building was to continue for thirty years, until the completion of the great house in 1764.
The Palladian style was admired by Whigs such as Thomas Coke, who sought to identify themselves with the Romans of antiquity. Kent was responsible for the external appearance of Holkham; he based his design on Palladio's unbuilt Villa Mocenigo,] as it appears in I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura, but with modifications.
The plans for Holkham were of a large central block of two floors only, containing on the piano nobile level a series of symmetrically balanced state rooms situated around two courtyards. No hint of these courtyards is given externally; they are intended for lighting rather than recreation or architectural value. This great central block is flanked by four smaller, rectangular blocks, or wings, and at each corners is linked to the main house not by long colonnades—as would have been the norm in Palladian architecture—but by short two-storey wings of only one bay.
The external appearance of Holkham can best be described as a huge Roman palace. However, as with most architectural designs, it is never quite that simple. Holkham is a Palladian house, and yet even by Palladian standards the external appearance is austere and devoid of ornamentation. This can almost certainly be traced to Coke himself. The on-site, supervising architect, Matthew Brettingham, related that Coke required and demanded "commodiousness", which can be interpreted as comfort. Hence rooms that were adequately lit by one window, had only one, as a second might have improved the external appearance but could have made a room cold or draughty. As a result the few windows on the piano nobile, although symmetrically placed and balanced, appear lost in a sea of brickwork; albeit these yellow bricks were cast as exact replicas of ancient Roman bricks expressly for Holkham. Above the windows of the piano nobile, where on a true Palladian structure the windows of a mezzanine would be, there is nothing. The reason for this is the double height of the state rooms on the piano nobile; however, not even a blind window, such as those often seen in Palladio's own work, is permitted to alleviate the severity of the facade. On the ground floor, the rusticated walls are pierced by small windows more reminiscent of a prison than a grand house. One architectural commentator, Nigel Nicolson, has described the house as appearing as functional as a Prussian riding school.
The principal, or South facade, is 344 feet (104.9 m) in length (from each of the flanking wings to the other), its austerity relieved on the piano nobile level only by a great six-columned portico. Each end of the central block is terminated by a slight projection, containing a Venetian window surmounted by a single storey square tower and capped roof, similar to those employed by Inigo Jones at Wilton House nearly a century earlier. A near identical portico was designed by Inigo Jones and Isaac de Caus for the Palladian front at Wilton, but this was never executed.
The flanking wings contain service and secondary rooms—the family wing to the south-west; the guest wing to the north-west; the chapel wing to the south-east; and the kitchen wing to the north-east. Each wing's external appearance is identical: three bays, each separated from the other by a narrow recess in the elevation. Each bay is surmounted by an unadorned pediment. The composition of stone, recesses, varying pediments and chimneys of the four blocks is almost reminiscent of the English Baroque style in favour ten years earlier, employed at Seaton Delaval Hall by Sir John Vanbrugh. One of these wings, as at the later Kedleston Hall, was a self-contained country house to accommodate the family when the state rooms and central block were not in use.
The one storey porch at the main north entrance was designed in the 1850s by Samuel Sanders Teulon, although stylistically it is indistinguishable from the 18th century building.
Inside the house, the Palladian form reaches a height and grandeur seldom seen in any other house in England. It has, in fact, been described as "The finest Palladian interior in England."[20] The grandeur of the interior is obtained with an absence of excessive ornament, and reflects Kent's career-long taste for "the eloquence of a plain surface". Work on the interiors ran from 1739 to 1773. The first habitable rooms were in the family wing and were in use from 1740, the Long Library being the first major interior completed in 1741. Among the last to be completed and entirely under Lady Leicester's supervision is the Chapel with its alabaster reredos. The house is entered through the "Marble" Hall (the chief building fabric is in fact Derbyshire alabaster), modelled by Kent on a Roman basilica. The room is over 50 feet (15 m) from floor to ceiling and is dominated by the broad white marble flight of steps leading to the surrounding gallery, or peristyle: here alabaster Ionic columns support the coffered, gilded ceiling, copied from a design by Inigo Jones, inspired by the Pantheon in Rome. The fluted columns are thought to be replicas of those in the Temple of Fortuna Virilis, also in Rome. Around the hall are statues in niches; these are predominantly plaster copies of classical deities.
The hall's flight of steps lead to the piano nobile and state rooms. The grandest, the saloon, is situated immediately behind the great portico, with its walls lined with patterned red Genoa velvet and a coffered, gilded ceiling. In this room hangs Rubens's Return from Egypt. On his Grand Tour, the Earl acquired a collection of Roman copies of Greek and Roman sculpture which is contained in the massive "Statue Gallery", which runs the full length of the house north to south. The North Dining Room, a cube room of 27 feet (8.2 m) contains an Axminster carpet that perfectly mirrors the pattern of the ceiling above. A bust of Aelius Verus, set in a niche in the wall of this room, was found during the restoration at Nettuno. A classical apse gives the room an almost temple air. The apse in fact, contains concealed access to the labyrinth of corridors and narrow stairs that lead to the distant kitchens and service areas of the house. Each corner of the east side of the principal block contains a square salon lit by a huge Venetian window, one of them—the Landscape Room—hung with paintings by Claude Lorrain and Gaspar Poussin. All of the major state rooms have symmetrical walls, even where this involves matching real with false doors. The major rooms also have elaborate white and multi-coloured marble fireplaces, most with carvings and sculpture, mainly the work of Thomas Carter, though Joseph Pickford carved the fireplace in the Statue Gallery. Much of the furniture in the state rooms was also designed by William Kent, in a stately classicising baroque manner.
So restrained is the interior decoration of the state rooms, or in the words of James Lees-Milne, "chaste", that the smaller, more intimate rooms in the family's private south-west wing were decorated in similar vein, without being overpowering. The long library running the full length of the wing still contains the collection of books acquired by Thomas Coke on his Grand Tour through Italy, where he saw for the first time the Palladian villas which were to inspire Holkham.
The Green State bedroom is the principal bedroom; it is decorated with paintings and tapestries, including works by Paul Saunders and George Smith Bradshaw. It is said that when Queen Mary visited, Gavin Hamilton's "lewd" depiction of Jupiter Caressing Juno "was considered unsuitable for that lady's eyes and was banished to the attics"
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"HUSKY"
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Husky was founded in 1965 by retired American airman Steve Gulyas and his wife Edna/ - Husky Ltd in Tostock, Husky was sold in 90’s to Described in http://shoptrotter.com/brands/husky-1965/: “Husky is an Italian clothing brand, founded in 1965, which gained instant popularity with its Husky jacket, designer by a retired American airman Steve Gulyas and his wife Edna. Comfortable and weather-proof Husky jacket soon became a favourite hunting outfit for Queen Elizabeth and other members of the english Royal Family. Nowadays Husky offers much wider choice of comfy and weather-proof clothing, perfect for a hunting or a fishing trip.” |
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INTERMEZZO ... REMAINS OF THE DAY ...
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The urgent need of slowing down in the way we experience and approach art in a Museum.
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Fighting for a snapshot of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. Some psychologists suggest that taking a slower, more contemplative approach at museums could make visitors more likely to connect with the art. GUIA BESANA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES |
The Art of Slowing Down in a Museum
OCTOBER 9, 2014 / New York Times / http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/travel/the-art-of-slowing-down-in-a-museum.html?referrer=&_r=0
Stephanie Rosenbloom
Ah, the Louvre. It’s sublime, it’s historic, it’s … overwhelming.
Upon entering any vast art museum — the Hermitage, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art — the typical traveler grabs a map and spends the next two hours darting from one masterpiece to the next, battling crowds, exhaustion and hunger (yet never failing to take selfies with boldface names like Mona Lisa).
What if we slowed down? What if we spent time with the painting that draws us in instead of the painting we think we’re supposed to see?
Most people want to enjoy a museum, not conquer it. Yet the average visitor spends 15 to 30 seconds in front of a work of art, according to museum researchers. And the breathless pace of life in our Instagram age conspires to make that feel normal. But what’s a traveler with a long bucket list to do? Blow off the Venus de Milo to linger over a less popular lady like Diana of Versailles?
“When you go to the library,” said
James O. Pawelski, the director of education for the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, “you don’t walk along the shelves looking at the spines of the books and on your way out tweet to your friends, ‘I read 100 books today!'” Yet that’s essentially how many people experience a museum. “They see as much of art as you see spines on books,” said Professor Pawelski, who studies connections between positive psychology and the humanities. “You can’t really see a painting as you’re walking by it.”
James O. Pawelski, the director of education for the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, “you don’t walk along the shelves looking at the spines of the books and on your way out tweet to your friends, ‘I read 100 books today!'” Yet that’s essentially how many people experience a museum. “They see as much of art as you see spines on books,” said Professor Pawelski, who studies connections between positive psychology and the humanities. “You can’t really see a painting as you’re walking by it.”
There is no right way to experience a museum, of course. Some travelers enjoy touring at a clip or snapping photos of timeless masterpieces. But psychologists and philosophers such as Professor Pawelski say that if you do choose to slow down — to find a piece of art that speaks to you and observe it for minutes rather than seconds — you are more likely to connect with the art, the person with whom you’re touring the galleries, maybe even yourself, he said. Why, you just might emerge feeling refreshed and inspired rather than depleted.
To demonstrate this, Professor Pawelski takes his students to the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia
Julie Haizlip wasn’t so sure. A scientist and self-described left-brain thinker, Dr. Haizlip is a clinical professor at the School of Nursing and the Division of Pediatric Critical Care at the University of Virginia
“I have to admit I was a bit skeptical,” said Dr. Haizlip, who had never spent 20 minutes looking at a work of art and prefers Keith Haring, Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock to Matisse, Rousseau and Picasso, whose works adorn the Barnes.
Any museumgoer can do what Professor Pawelski asks students such as Dr. Haizlip to do: Pick a wing and begin by wandering for a while, mentally noting which works are appealing or stand out. Then return to one that beckons. For instance, if you have an hour he suggests wandering for 30 minutes, and then spending the next half-hour with a single compelling painting. Choose what resonates with you, not what’s most famous (unless the latter strikes a chord).
Indeed, a number of museums now offer “slow art” tours or days that encourage visitors to take their time. Rather than check master works off a list as if on a scavenger hunt, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, who oversees the education programs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
Initially, nothing in the Barnes grabbed Dr. Haizlip. Then she spotted a beautiful, melancholy woman with red hair like her own. It was Toulouse-Lautrec’s painting of a prostitute, “AMontrouge” — Rosa La Rouge.
“I was trying to figure out why she had such a severe look on her face,” said Dr. Haizlip. As the minutes passed, Dr. Haizlip found herself mentally writing the woman’s story, imagining that she felt trapped and unhappy — yet determined. Over her shoulder, Toulouse-Lautrec had painted a window. “There’s an escape,” Dr. Haizlip thought. “You just have to turn around and see it.”
“I was actually projecting a lot of me and what was going on in my life at that moment into that painting,” she continued. “It ended up being a moment of self-discovery.” Trained as a pediatric intensive-care specialist, Dr. Haizlip was looking for some kind of change but wasn’t sure what. Three months after her encounter with the painting, she changed her practice, accepting a teaching position at the University of Virginia ’s School of Nursing
Professor Pawelski said it’s still a mystery why viewing art in this deliberately contemplative manner can increase well-being or what he calls flourishing. That’s what his research is trying to uncover. He theorized, however, that there is a connection to research on meditation and its beneficial biological effects. In a museum, though, you’re not just focusing on your breath, he said. “You’re focusing on the work of art.”
Previous research, including a study led by Stephen Kaplan at the University of Michigan
Ms. Jackson-Dumont, who has also worked at the Seattle Art Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Whitney Museum of American Art, said travelers should feel empowered to “curate” their own experience. Say, for example, you do not like hearing chatter when you look at art. Ms. Jackson-Dumont suggests making your own soundtrack at home and taking headphones to the museum so that you can stroll the galleries accompanied by music. “I think people feel they have to behave a certain way in a museum,” she said. “You can actually be you.”
To that end, many museums are encouraging visitors to take selfies with the art and post them on social media. (In case you missed it, Jan. 22 was worldwide "MuseumSelfie" day with visitors sharing their best work on Twitter using an eponymous hashtag.) Selfie-takers often pose like the subject of the painting or sculpture behind them. To some visitors that seems crass, distracting or antithetical to contemplation. But surprisingly, Ms. Jackson-Dumont has observed that when museumgoers strike an art-inspired pose, it not only creates camaraderie among onlookers but it gives the selfie-takers a new appreciation for the art. In fact, taking on the pose of a sculpture, for example, is something the Met does with visitors who are blind or partially sighted because “feeling the pose” can allow them to better understand the work.
There will always be certain paintings or monuments that travelers feel they must see, regardless of crowds or lack of time. To winnow the list, Ms. Jackson-Dumont suggests asking yourself: What are the things that, if I do not see them, will leave me feeling as if I didn’t have a New York
The next time you step into a vast treasure trove of art and history, allow yourself to be carried away by your interests and instincts. You never know where they might lead you. Before leaving the Barnes on that March afternoon, Dr. Haizlip had another unexpected moment: She bought a print of the haunting Toulouse-Lautrec woman.
“I felt like she had more to tell me,” she said.
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PARIS
Stephanie Rosenbloom is The Getaway columnist for the Travel section. Previously, she was a New York Times staff reporter for Style where she wrote about American social trends including fashion, technology and love in a digital age. Prior to that she was the retailing reporter for Business Day, where she wrote about money and happiness and covered companies like Walmart, Saks and Macy’s during the financial crisis of 2008.
She appears regularly in New York Times videos and is a featured writer in “The New York Times, 36 Hours: 150 Weekends in the USA & Canada ” (Taschen, 2011) and “The New York Times Practical Guide to Practically Everything” (St. Martin ’s Press, 2006)
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"Slow Art is an emerging movement evolving out of a philosophy of art and life expounded by the artist Tim Slowinski. Later developments in Slow Art have been championed by such proponents as Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic and columnist for the New York Times. It advocates appreciating an art work in itself as opposed to a rapid, flitting witnessing of art common in a hectic societal setting. One of its central tenets is that people often seek out what they already know as opposed to allowing the artist to present a journey or piece in its entirety." |
At Louvre, Many Stop to Snap but Few Stay to Focus
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: August 2, 2009 / http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/arts/design/03abroad.html
At the Louvre the other day, in the Pavillon des Sessions, two young women in flowered dresses meandered through the gallery. They paused and circled around a few sculptures. They took their time. They looked slowly.
The pavilion puts some 100 immaculate objects from outside Europe on permanent view in a ground floor suite of cool, silent galleries at one end of the museum. Feathered masks from Alaska , ancient bowls from the Philippines
The young women were unusual for stopping. Most of the museum’s visitors passed through the gallery oblivious.
A few game tourists glanced vainly in guidebooks or hopefully at wall labels, as if learning that one or another of these sculptures came from Papua New Guinea or Hawaii or the Archipelago of Santa Cruz, or that a work was three centuries old or maybe four might help them see what was, plain as day, just before them.
Almost nobody, over the course of that hour or two, paused before any object for as long as a full minute. Only a 17th-century wood sculpture of a copulating couple, from San Cristobal in the Solomon Islands, placed near an exit, caused several tourists to point, smile and snap a photo, but without really breaking stride.
Visiting museums has always been about self-improvement. Partly we seem to go to them to find something we already recognize, something that gives us our bearings: think of the scrum of tourists invariably gathered around the Mona Lisa. At one time a highly educated Westerner read perhaps 100 books, all of them closely. Today we read hundreds of books, or maybe none, but rarely any with the same intensity. Travelers who took the Grand Tour across Europe during the 18th century spent months and years learning languages, meeting politicians, philosophers and artists and bore sketchbooks in which to draw and paint — to record their memories and help them see better.
Cameras replaced sketching by the last century; convenience trumped engagement, the viewfinder afforded emotional distance and many people no longer felt the same urgency to look. It became possible to imagine that because a reproduction of an image was safely squirreled away in a camera or cell phone, or because it was eternally available on the Web, dawdling before an original was a waste of time, especially with so much ground to cover.
We could dream about covering lots of ground thanks to expanding collections and faster means of transportation. At the same time, the canon of art that provided guideposts to tell people where to go and what to look at was gradually dismantled. A core of shared values yielded to an equality among visual materials. This was good and necessary, up to a point. Millions of images came to compete for our attention. Liberated by a proliferation, Western culture was also set adrift in an ocean of passing stimulation, with no anchors to secure it.
So tourists now wander through museums, seeking to fulfill their lifetime’s art history requirement in a day, wondering whether it may now be the quantity of material they pass by rather than the quality of concentration they bring to what few things they choose to focus upon that determines whether they have “done” the Louvre. It’s self-improvement on the fly.
The art historian T. J. Clark, who during the 1970s and ’80s pioneered a kind of analysis that rejected old-school connoisseurship in favor of art in the context of social and political affairs, has lately written a book about devoting several months of his time to looking intently at two paintings by Poussin. Slow looking, like slow cooking, may yet become the new radical chic.
Until then we grapple with our impatience and cultural cornucopia. Recently, I bought a couple of sketchbooks to draw with my 10-year-old in St. Peter’s and elsewhere around Rome, just for the fun of it, not because we’re any good, but to help us look more slowly and carefully at what we found. Crowds occasionally gathered around us as if we were doing something totally strange and novel, as opposed to something normal, which sketching used to be. I almost hesitate to mention our sketching. It seems pretentious and old-fogeyish in a cultural moment when we can too easily feel uncomfortable and almost ashamed just to look hard.
Artists fortunately remind us that there’s in fact no single, correct way to look at any work of art, save for with an open mind and patience. If you have ever gone to a museum with a good artist you probably discovered that they don’t worry so much about what art history books or wall labels tell them is right or wrong, because they’re selfish consumers, freed to look by their own interests.
Back to those two young women at the Louvre: aspiring artists or merely curious, they didn’t plant themselves forever in front of the sculptures but they stopped just long enough to laugh and cluck and stare, and they skipped the wall labels until afterward.
They looked, in other words. And they seemed to have a very good time.
Leaving, they caught sight of a sculptured effigy from Papua New Guinea
They thought for a moment. “Nyah-nyah,” they said in unison. Then blew him a raspberry.
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Michael Kimmelman Author Michael Kimmelman is an American author, critic, columnist and pianist. He is the architecture critic for The New York Times and has written on issues of public housing, public space, infrastructure, community development and social responsibility. Wikipedia Born: Books: The accidental masterpiece, Portraits Education: Nominations: Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. |
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Remembering the great Jimmy Edwards . Watch the VÍDEO bellow /Whacko! [1960]/ Hold on! It takes some seconds to start ...
Jimmy Edwards, DFC (23 March 1920 – 7 July 1988) was an English comedic script writer and comedy actor on both radio and television, best known as Pa Glum in Take It From Here and as the headmaster "Professor" James Edwards in Whack-O!
Edwards was born James Keith O'Neill Edwards in Barnes, London St Paul 's Cathedral School , at King's College School in Wimbledon, London , and later at St John's College , Cambridge
He served in the Royal Air Force during World War II, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross. His Dakota was shot down at Arnhem
Edwards was a feature of London theatre in the immediate post-war years, debuting at London
Graduating to television, he appeared in Whack-O, also written by Muir and Norden, and the radio panel game Does the Team Think?, a series which Edwards also created. In 1960 a film version of Whack-O called Bottoms Up was made, written by Muir and Norden. On TV he also appeared in The Seven Faces of Jim, Six More Faces of Jim, and More Faces of Jim, in guest slots in Make Room for Daddy and Sykes, in Bold As Brass, I Object, John Jorrocks Esq, The Auction Game, Jokers Wild, Sir Yellow, Doctor in the House, Charley's Aunt and Oh! Sir James! (which he also wrote).
He was the subject of This Is Your Life in 1958 when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews at the BBC's Piccadilly 1 Studio.
Edwards also starred in The Fossett Saga in 1969 as James Fossett, an ambitious Victorian writer of penny dreadfuls, with Sam Kydd playing Herbert Quince, his unpaid manservant, and June Whitfield playing music-hall singer Millie Goswick. This was shown on Fridays at 8:30 pm on LWT; David Freeman was the creator.
In December 1958, Jimmy Edwards played the King in Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella at the London Coliseum with Kenneth Williams, Tommy Steele, Yana and Betty Marsden. In April 1966, Edwards performed at the last night of Melbourne Britain
Edwards frequently worked with fellow comedian Eric Sykes, acting in the short films written by Sykes: The Plank (1967), which also starred Tommy Cooper; alongside Arthur Lowe and Ronnie Barker in the remake of The Plank during 1979; and in Rhubarb (1969), which again featured Sykes. The films were unusual in that although they were not silent, there was no dialogue other than various grunts and sound effects.
Edwards and Sykes also toured UK London 's West End and also extensive tours of the Middle East and Australia
Jimmy Edwards published his autobiography, Six of the Best, in 1984, as a follow-up to Take it From Me. Among his interests were brass bands, being a vice-president of the City of Oxford Silver Band
Edwards was a lifelong Conservative and in the 1964 general election stood as a candidate in Paddington North, without success. He was a devotee of fox hunting at Ringmer, near Lewes. He also served as Rector of Aberdeen University for three years during the 1950s, a university that has a history of appointing celebrities and actors as their honorary rector.
He was married to Valerie Seymour for eleven years. During the 1970s, however, he was publicly outed as a lifelong homosexual, much to his annoyance. After the ending of his marriage, there were press reports of his engagement to Joan Turner, the actress, singer and comedienne, but these came to nothing and were suspected to be a publicity stunt by both of them. His home was in Fletching, East Sussex, and he died in London in 1988 at the age of 68 from pneumonia.
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Rowing Blazers: Olympic Medallists Share Their Stories
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Rowing Blazers by Jack Carlson.
A new book reveals the history of the rowing blazer – and explains why Dutch rowers have to wear blazers covered in sweat, beer and river water
Posted by
Lauren Cochrane
Friday 4 July 2014
theguardian.com
• "New clubs in Australia , America and Japan Oklahoma City
• Rowing Blazers by Jack Carlson is out on July 7.
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The Return of the Desert Boots.
C. & J. Clark International Ltd, trading as Clarks , is a British, international shoe manufacturer and retailer. It was founded in 1825 by Quaker brothers Cyrus and James Clark in Street, Somerset , England
The company's best known product is the Desert Boot – a distinctive ankle height boot with crepe sole usually made out of calf suede leather traditionally supplied by Charles F Stead & Co tannery in Leeds . Officially launched in 1950 the Desert Boot was designed by Nathan Clark (great-grandson of James Clark).
Nathan Clark was an officer in the Royal Army Service Corps posted to Burma in 1941 with orders to help establish a supply route from Rangoon to the Chinese forces at Chongqing whilst also launching a series of offensives throughout South East Asia . Before leaving home his brother Bancroft had given him the mission to gather any information on footwear that might be of use to the company whilst he was travelling the world. The Desert Boot was the result of this mission.
His discovery of the Desert Boot was made either at Staff College in 1944 or on leave in Kashmir where three divisions of the old Eighth Army (transferred to the Far East from North Africa) were wearing ankle high suede boots manufactured in the bazaars of Cairo. Nathan sent sketches and rough patterns back to Bancroft, but no trials were made until after he returned to Street and cut the patterns himself.
The Desert Boot was cut on the men’s Guernsey Sandal last and sampled in a neutral beige-grey 2mm chrome bend split suede. The company’s Stock Committee reacted badly to the sample and dismissed the idea as it ‘would never sell’. It was only in his capacity as Overseas Development Manager that Nathan had any success with the shoe after introducing it to Oskar Schoefler (Fashion Editor, Esquire) at the Chicago Shoe Fair in 1949. He gave them substantial editorial credits with colour photographs in Esquire in early 1950. Bronson Davies subsequently saw these articles and applied to represent the company in selling them across the USA , long before they were available in the UK Britain Regent Street , featuring a Union Jack sewn into the label, targeted at tourists. Lance Clark is widely credited with popularising them in Europe during the 1960s.
The Desert Boot have been manufactured at Shepton Mallet, small scale production having initially occurred at Street. During the course of time, Whitecross factory in Weston-Super-Mare was subcontracted to relieve Shepton factory of the manufacture of the Desert Boot, before the Bushacre factory at Locking Road , Weston-Super-Mare was constructed in 1958. The Desert Boot was manufactured there until closure of the factory in 2001. As for the rest of the Clarks range, the Desert Boots are now produced in the Far East under careful supervision to assure the quality, look and feel are absolutely consistent with the original vision of Nathan Clark at a democratic price in line with the Quaker values of the family.
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"INTERMEZZO" ... Remains of the Day .
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The Meinertzhagen Mystery. "The Life and Legend of a Colossal Fraud.", by Brian Garfield.
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“Tall, handsome, charming Col. Richard Meinertzhagen (1878–1967) was an acclaimed British war hero, a secret agent, and a dean of international ornithology. His exploits inspired three biographies, movies have been based on his life, and a square in He bamboozled them all. Meinertzhagen was a fraud. Many of the adventures recorded in his celebrated diaries were imaginary, including a meeting with Hitler while he had a loaded pistol in his pocket, an attempt to rescue the Russian royal family in 1918, and a shoot-out with Arabs in A compelling read about a flamboyant rogue, The Meinertzhagen Mystery shows how recorded history reflects not what happened, but what we believe happened.” |
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Early biographers largely lionized him, until after his fraud was documented, but T. E. Lawrence, a sometime colleague in 1919 and again 1921, described him more ambiguously and with due attention to his violence: “Meinertzhagen knew no half measures. He was logical, an idealist of the deepest, and so possessed by his convictions that he was willing to harness evil to the chariot of good. He was a strategist, a geographer, and a silent laughing masterful man; who took as blithe a pleasure in deceiving his enemy (or his friend) by some unscrupulous jest, as in spattering the brains of a cornered mob of Germans one by one with his African knob-kerri. His instincts were abetted by an immensely powerful body and a savage brain....” — T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1926 While in Meinertzhagen's second wife, the ornithologist Anne Constance Jackson, died in 1928 at age After Anne's death his companion was Theresa "Tess" Clay, thirty-three years his junior.Meinertzhagen lived at No. 17 and Theresa at No. 18 Kensington Park Gardens, Notting Hill, Meinertzhagen himself traced the "evil" side of his personality to a period during his childhood when he was subjected to severe physical abuse at the hands of a sadistic schoolmaster when he was at Fonthill boarding school in “Even now I feel the pain of that moment, when something seemed to leave me, something good; and something evil entered into my soul. Was it God who foresook me, and the devil took his place. But whatever left me has never returned, neither have I been able to entirely cast out the evil which entered me at that moment ... The undeserved beatings and sadistic treatment which were my lot in childhood so upset my mind that much of my present character can be traced to Fonthill.” The Meinertzhagen Mystery Richard Meinertzhagen has inspired three biographies since his death in 1967 and was lauded as one of the grand elder statesman of espionage and ornithology.His diaries provided source material for historians and books, for countless exploits of arms and wit against the enemies of the Brian Garfield's 2007 book The Meinertzhagen Mystery attempts to show that he bamboozled them all, that Meinertzhagen lived (as the subtitle of the book states) "The Life and Legend of a Colossal Fraud." Detailed in 352 pages are the many ways in which he was a liar and a charlatan. It debunks many myths and proves that previously accepted "facts" about his life and feats are untrue, including the famous haversack incident, which Meinertzhagen neither came up with nor carried out. Meinertzhagen recorded in his published diaries three meetings on separate dates with Adolf Hitler. Although Meinertzhagen was in "People’s views of Meinertzhagen seldom coincide, but one mystery that connects the dots even while it obscures them is this: How and why did such a large number of diverse people of prominence share knowledge of his fakery — or at least suspect it — and choose not to disclose it?"  |
Richard J Meinertzhagen: Unravelling of a life built on lies
HE WAS celebrated as both a military hero and ace ornithologist. But new evidence suggests Richard J Meinertzhagen was a master hoaxer and a killer.
By: James ParryPublished: Mon, July 19, 2010 / http://www.express.co.uk/expressyourself/187699/Richard-J-Meinertzhagen-Unravelling-of-a-life-built-on-lies
JULY 1928, on a country estate in the Scottish Highlands. A woman lies dying on the lawn, bleeding profusely from a firearm wound to her head.
The weapon lies smoking nearby and standing over her, looking down, is her husband: Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen. There is no one else at the scene.
These are the only known facts about a strange incident in the life of a man who became a legend in his own time.
Well-built and with an equally imposing personality, Meinertzhagen was lauded as a dashing soldier and as one of the most renowned ornithologists of his generation. An inveterate adventurer, he travelled to remote parts of the world on military duty and in search of wildlife, discovering new species and amassing a huge collection of specimens.
So well regarded was he as a public figure that his observations were taken on trust and entered unquestioningly into the natural history records. His status as a protagonist in some of the most important chapters of 20th-century history remained equally uncontested until well beyond his death in 1967.
Such blind faith proved sadly misplaced. There is now compelling evidence that Meinertzhagen was a killer and a thief and that his versions of certain events range from the grossly exaggerated to the completely fictitious. We may never know exactly what happened that summer’s day in Scotland but it is becoming clear that this once revered figure was at best a deluded fantasist and at worst a scheming and manipulative fraudster.
Born in 1878 to a wealthy and well-connected banking family with homes in London
As a teenager he audaciously invited Henry Morton Stanley to Mottisfont and listened to the great explorer’s accounts of his expeditions to find David Livingstone. After a brief and unsuccessful stint at a City banking fi rm the young Meinertzhagen joined the army and in 1899 set sail with the Royal Fusiliers for Bombay India to East Africa and thence to the Middle East .
Here he undertook various intelligence missions, often dressed in local garb. His diaries recount his friendship with figures such as TE Lawrence (“of Arabia ”) as well as his central role in many daring Boy’s Ownstyle escapades behind enemy lines.
In one entry he recounts how in Tanganyika in 1916 he crept into a German encampment, killed an officer in his tent and then sat down and tucked into his victim’s Christmas meal, remarking: “Why waste that good dinner?”
Meinertzhagen also writes of his role in a daring rescue carried out in 1918 of a member of the incarcerated Russian royal family, claiming to have bundled one of the Tsar’s daughters on to a plane as it was taking off from a field near Ekaterinburg.
She was “much bruised and brought to England Egypt
After rushing to his tent to get his gun, he was about to fire before realising just in time that the seal was in fact Mrs Waters-Taylor, the wife of his commanding officer, out for a spot of skinny-dipping while her husband sat watching and smoking a large cigar.
After leaving the army in 1925 Meinertzhagen continued what he called “my other work”, undercover on secret missions. His diaries reveal how these included helping the Spanish rid their country of Soviet agents – he claimed to have killed 17 of them – and three meetings in Berlin
On his first such visit Meinertzhagen writes how, when Hitler greeted him with a Nazi salute and “Heil, Hitler!”, he replied in kind with “Heil, Meinertzhagen!” He claims to have smuggled a revolver into Hitler’s office and that he had the chance to shoot him, later lamenting his failure to do so and thus change the course of history.
The unlikely and almost laughable nature of some of these encounters was not seriously challenged at the time and Meinertzhagen’s curious web only started to unravel in the Nineties when scientists were studying the collection of more than 20,000 bird specimens he had donated to the British Museum
Close examination has now revealed that he had stolen these from other collections and then relabelled them as his own, complete with fabricated data on when and where he had shot them. The ultimate scale of Meinertzhagen’s ornithological deceptions is still being uncovered but bird science is being turned on its head as a result.
Birds believed extinct because he had lied about their location have been discovered alive and well. Analysis of the other aspects of his life, especially his military exploits, is revealing equally spectacular deceits. Particularly intriguing is his relationship with Lawrence of Arabia.
The two were room-mates at the Versailles conference in 1919 but Meinertzhagen’s affection for Lawrence Lawrence Lawrence
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Brian Garfield and his wife Bina divide their time between homes in He is happy to answer questions from readers - e-mail briagar@aol.com. The writer was born in 1939. His first published book was written when he was 18. He grew up in More than 20 million copies of his books have been published worldwide. He is an Army veteran and a past-President of the Western Writers of America and of the Mystery Writers of America (the only writer to have served in both offices). Nineteen films are based on his writings, and more are in the hopper for 2011 and beyond -- "The Fabulist", based on Garfield's recent biography "The Meinertzhagen Mystery" (Garfield is one of its producers); "Death Wish", an MGM remake written and directed by Sylvester Stallone; an updated remake of "Hopscotch" (Garfield is one of the executive producers); an as yet untitled Baldwin Entertainment Group film based on Garfield's novel "Manifest Destiny"; others as well. The Hyde Park / Baldwin Entertainment Group production “Death Sentence”, with Kevin Bacon, Kelly Preston, John Goodman and Aisha Tyler, based on In the 1950s Brian Garfield toured as an itinerant musician with “The Palisades”, a jazz-rock-blues band that had a top-40 hit with “I Can’t Quit” (Calico Records) - they appeared on “American Bandstand” and other programs. Having performed as jazz, blues, and rock-&-roll artist, and having written and/or produced Westerns, mysteries, hard-boiled crime novels, spy stories, and a musical comedy movie (“Legs”, about the Rockettes, co-produced by Radio City Music Hall), he claims to have worked in nearly all the original Anglo-American popular arts. Inevitably his publishers’ frequent complaint has been that he and his work cannot be type-cast. (His excuse: "If the writer ever gets bored, Heaven help the reader.") He is completing a new thriller for 2011 publication. His most recent new book was THE MEINERTZHAGEN MYSTERY (Potomac Books, 2007; paperback February 2008) and it was yet another departure -- a nonfiction biography of a British hero of science and warfare and espionage whose exploits, Brian discovered and here proved, were largely hoaxes, even though Richard Meinertzhagen fooled many high-ranking friends like Winston Churchill, T. E. Lawrence and Ian Fleming. A film about the young Theodore Roosevelt's real adventures as a rancher in Dakota Territory, based on Brian won the Edgar Award for "Hopscotch" (best novel; basis for the awards-nominated movie "Hopscotch" with Walter Matthau, Glenda Jackson and Sam Waterston, directed by Ronald Neame; the film was written and co-produced by Garfield) and has been nominated for several other prizes. His seminal novel "Death Wish" defined a crime-writers’ genre and became the basis for a series of five Charles Bronson action-movies. A remake is planned at MGM by Sylvester Stallone. Others among his more than sixty books and films are "Wild Times" (finalist for the American Book Award; basis for the television mini-series with Sam Elliott, Ben Johnson and Dennis Hopper), "Recoil", "Relentless" (filmed in 1977 with the late Will Sampson), "Kolchak’s Gold,""Necessity" (filmed in 1983), "Line of Succession,""Fear in a Handful of Dust" (filmed as "Fleshburn"), "The Last Hard Men" (filmed in 1976 with James Coburn, Charlton Heston and Barbara Hershey), and the cult-favorite movie original "The Stepfather" (1987, with its stunning performance by Terry O'Quinn). Among his nonfiction books are "Western Films: A Complete Guide," the recent "The Meinertzhagen Mystery", and the classic nonfiction history book "The Thousand-Mile War: World War II in Alaska and the Aleutians," the first full-scale history of the only World War II campaign fought on North American soil; the book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, is used by the U. S. Navy as a text on North Pacific warfare, and for years has been the bestselling title published by the University of Alaska Press. To see online interviews with Brian, go to Internet Links http://noveljourney.blogspot.com/2007/01/author-interview-brian-garfield.html ; http://www.popmatters.com/pm/features/article/55623/historian-interview-with-brian-garfield/ ; http://wicn.org/audio/inquiry-brian-garfield-the-meinertzhagen-mysteryl-the-life-and-legend-of-a-colossal-fraud And to ask the writer a question, write to him at briagar@aol.com . |
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Scandalous women of the 19th century
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VÍDEO/ Kate Summerscale: How she discovered the story of Isabella Robinson. Mrs Robinson's Disgrace by Kate Summerscale .
Mrs Robinson's Disgrace by Kate Summerscale: review
A fascinating personal diary opens up the world of the middle classes in 1850, says Philippa Gregory, reviewing Mrs Robinson's Disgrace by Kate Summerscale.
By Philippa Gregory / 07 Jun 2012 / The Telegraph / http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/9316823/Mrs-Robinsons-Disgrace-by-Kate-Summerscale-review.html
Isabella Robinson was a Victorian wife who married for convention; a mother of three boys; a romantic; a diarist; a highly sexed woman who described herself as “an independent and constant thinker”.
“Aha,” says the blue-stocking reader (for this is she), “one of our own. This is a woman who is going to think and imagine and write herself into trouble.”
And so she does. She buys one of the new stationery products, a personal diary, and she follows the advice of the manufacturer, Letts: “Use your diary with the utmost familiarity and confidence, conceal nothing from its pages nor suffer any other eye than your own to scan them.”
In this diary, Mrs Robinson narrates the progress of her crush on a young married man; her erotic dreams of him; and the high point of their affair, in a closed carriage – “I leaned back at last in silent joy in those arms I had so often dreamed of and kissed the curls and smooth face so radiant with beauty that had dazzled my outward and inward vision.”
She wrote in the language and literary conventions of a romantic novel, with herself as a narrator-heroine. This diary created a record of her inner, secret life which could be read in so many ways: by her enraged husband as a court document to prove her adultery; by the newspaper readers for scandalised titillation; and now by Kate Summerscale as a chronicle on which to base a new book analysing reality, literary versions, and history.
Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace describes the affair between this lonely, passionate, intelligent woman and a younger man, from their first meeting in Edinburgh when she was a regular and welcome visitor in the house where he lived with his wife and mother-in-law to the time when, at a hydrotherapy spa run by him as the resident doctor, they walked together alone, lay on dry fern, and – as she wrote in her diary – “I shall not state what followed.”
This highly wrought account of their encounters was stolen by Mrs Robinson’s husband, a vindictive and bad-tempered man whose own moral position, as father to two illegitimate daughters, did not prevent him taking the high ground with his wife, and suing for divorce on the grounds of her adultery. He offered her own writing as the only material evidence.
Mrs Robinson’s defence was to claim that the diary was a fiction – a hallucinatory account of dreams and fantasies. Her lawyer explained that she suffered from nymphomania or erotomania, that a uterine condition had driven her mad with lust. Her private writing had to be offered up by herself as proof of her own madness. Faced with the choice of describing herself either as a sexually active woman or as insane, Mrs Robinson chose to save her reputation for chastity by sacrificing her reputation for sanity. In so doing, she cleared the reputation of the man she loved, and saved his marriage and his business.
Summerscale has rescued this extraordinary story from the archives, and set it into the context of a time when the debate about women, sexuality and marriage reached a new level of anxiety. She takes us into the heart of the sexual double standards of Victorian England, where a woman would lose her husband, children, property and reputation if adultery was proved. Meanwhile, a husband’s adultery was condoned: he could only be divorced if he was guilty of sexual or physical abuse of his wife. A conduct book of the time advised of the “inalienable right of all men to be treated with deference, and made much of in their own houses”.
Summerscale gives us a considered and complex view of Mrs Robinson’s world – Madame Bovary and Charles Darwin walk through these pages; her lover’s brother-in-law fakes his own death because of his horror of masturbation; gynaecologists avoid using a speculum for fear of their patients’ pleasure; and the divorce courts have to clear women from the public gallery because the material is so disturbing.
As one would expect from the author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (2008), Summerscale’s prize-winning analysis of a Victorian murder and its detective, the material here is handled with confident subtlety. The history goes from the individual to the individual’s world with seductive ease. Mrs Robinson is no cardboard feminist heroine in this account: Summerscale is unsparing about her heroine’s silliness, flirtatiousness and emotional neediness. The judges at the divorce court, ostensibly the very bastions of patriarchy, are thoughtful and considerate, and their even-handed ruling is described in detail.
As in The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, readers are allowed to form their own opinion as to guilt and motive. This is a highly considered social history teased out from a fascinating personal document, and Summerscale takes the reader through layer upon layer of understanding as this extraordinary divorce case opens up the world of 1850 middle-class England and the women who fitted themselves into its strictures.
Mrs Robinson's Disgrace by Kate Summerscale – review
This fine cultural history uncovers an engrossing landmark divorce case
Alexandra Harris
The Guardian, Wednesday 9 May 2012/ http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/09/mrs-robinsons-disgrace-kate-summerscale-review
The chief exhibits from Kate Summerscale's deservedly bestselling and prizewinning last book, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, are still hanging about rather grotesquely in my mind. The mutilated body of a boy in the water closet, a sash window slightly open, a bloodstained nightdress stuffed into the boiler. Summerscale's reconstruction of the infamous murder investigation at Road Hill House was also a cross-examination of Victorian domestic life and its most disturbing secrets. Now, in Mrs Robinson's Disgrace, she uses the same techniques of historical sleuthing to reconstruct the events that brought one couple to the divorce courts in 1858. As before, she follows the clues outwards from this one case to the larger anxieties, prejudices and cover-ups that shaped it. Summerscale puts Victorian middle-class society back in the dock, and again it is both horrifying and salutary to follow the questioning from the gallery.
The chief exhibit this time is a diary. No blood, no corpse in the privy, just an ordinary Letts diary of the sort that is currently half price in Smith's. But this too is a relic of passions that could not be contained and which are exposed in the end to the scrutiny of a nation. The unfortunate diarist, Isabella Robinson, fell in love with a man who was not her husband and wrote her feelings down. That was her crime, that was her ruin, and that was all it took to cause a scandal of major proportions. Her husband, the industrialist Henry Robinson, had a range of mistresses and two illegitimate children, but no matter. For a woman the standards were different. After all, she didn't even own her diary.
The man she loved was the married doctor Edward Lane , pioneer homeopath and proprietor of an advanced hydropathy establishment in Surrey where patients were prescribed a bewildering number of different kinds of bath. Isabella spent time at Edward's spa, and in his study, but did they embark on an affair? Nothing in Edward's letters proved it – he was too careful a correspondent. Isabella, on the other hand, wrote in her diary a day-by-day narrative of her erotic longing and the dreamed-of reciprocation that began one afternoon in the Surrey countryside when Edward turned to her on the plaid picnic rug and kissed her.
In her diary Isabella was the heroine of her own romantic novel. She described the misery of her marriage to the insensitive Henry, her ennui and entrapment, the great redeeming joy of evenings spent reading poetry with Edward. She wrote out her fantasies and expressed the full force of her desire. She stopped just short of recording everything ("I rested among the dry fern. I shall not state what followed"), but she included in her diary much more than was licensed in any contemporary fiction. In France , Gustave Flaubert was at work on his great novel of adultery, Madame Bovary, but it would be banned from publication in England
Henry Robinson was one of the first to sue for divorce under the new Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, a landmark act that for the first time made divorce a possibility for middle-class couples. If Mr Whicher's investigation at Road Hill was the original whodunnit, Robinson v Robinson & Lane was the "original" divorce, the ancestor of more than 100,000 divorces that took place in the UK
And what an agonising mess it was. Isabella's diary was proof of her lustfulness but it did not prove anything conclusively against Edward. Could it be used against her and not against him? The only way to save Edward's reputation (as everyone was eager to do, at Isabella's expense) was to discredit the diary as the raving of a sex-obsessed lunatic. By a skewed logic more perverse than anything Isabella could dream up, a sane woman was now reinvented as an erotomaniac driven mad by a conveniently identified uterine disease.
At every stage this "real-life" story is a skein of fictions. Coleridge and Shelley taught Isabella what a love affair might be, and how she might construct herself as its heroine. The lawyers, too, learned their lines from literature. In court they fantasised a gothic tale in which Isabella's madness poisoned a whole respectable milieu. Summerscale is a subtle interpreter of the interplay between action and literary imagination, as was clear in Mr Whicher. A large part of her fascination with the Road Hill case lay in its influence on subsequent detective fiction. If the literary connections in Mrs Robinson are less compelling (and it should be said that Isabella is not going to vie with Emma Bovary for literary immortality), they are crucial to the vivid anatomy of an 1850s mind.
Summerscale might have been more upfront about her own methods of narration in a book so concerned with reading, writing and the interpretation of documents. There are potentially significant gaps and doubts in a story she strives hard to render as a polished whole. It comes as a surprise, for example, late in the day that Summerscale has not read Isabella's diary, the fateful book having been lost or, more likely, destroyed. She has had to piece together her account from extracts published in legal reports. She has made careful use of correspondence, but how representative are the letters that survive? Foraging in the footnotes in an effort to find out, I couldn't help feeling that discussion of these matters would have left us better equipped to read Isabella and her times.
As a guide to mid-Victorian cultural life, however, Summerscale is simply superb, and she sets a fine example of what cultural history can do. Isabella has her head examined by a phrenologist, so we get a miniature history of phrenology and its implications. (A large cerebellum meant excess "amativeness"; Isabella's cerebellum was very large indeed.) To understand Edward and his Moor Park
In other hands, admittedly, this might become tiresome. But Summerscale has a knack of judging just how much we want to know. So she keeps adding strands to the web: divorce law, diary-writing, Victorian dream theory, gentlemen's advice on the advantages of erotic encounters in bumpy carriages. She knows that the settings, too, are eloquent: Henry's big white villa in Caversham where nobody is happy, the sandy soil of the Surrey hills, the precise qualities of Edward's study with its many doors, and the foul smells from the Thames that filter into a hot Westminster courtroom at the stinking centre of the British empire.
Sensing a silence or slight misunderstanding between two characters, Summerscale prods a bit, and the door flies open to a whole new set of stories. It's like watching someone going straight to the secret compartment in a many-drawered cabinet. Edward's friend and brother-in-law, George Drysdale, needn't have figured at all in Isabella's story, except that he turns out to cast a shadow across the whole affair. He faked his own death out of shame for his sexual fixations, resurrected himself, failed to cauterise his penis, and went on to write the first guide to contraception. That's the kind of obscure but astonishing life story we keep glimpsing in the background.
And we glimpse too, at a distance, famous people going about their business, like Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. When not decoding Isabella, the phrenologist is feeling George Eliot's cerebellum; Charles Dickens is leaving Boulogne just as Isabella gets there; and who should be strolling at Moor Park but Charles Darwin, so relaxed by his bath treatments that he said he "did not care one penny how any of the birds and beasts had been formed". He didn't stop caring for long, of course: he was at work that year on The Origin of Species, refining his theory of evolution even as Isabella reconciled herself to atheism and wondered what the absence of God might mean for the future of sexual relations.
At every turn Isabella's experience is contiguous with that of the people who were deciphering and shaping her world. But ultimately it is Isabella herself who stands as exhibit A in this engrossing investigation of a society casting judgment on itself and trying, with much confusion, to make up the rules.
• Alexandra Harris's Virginia Woolf is published by Thames & Hudson.
June 22, 2012 /
The Scarlet Diary / The New York Times
By ANDREA WULF / http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/books/review/mrs-robinsons-disgrace-by-kate-summerscale.html?pagewanted=all
MRS. ROBINSON’S DISGRACE
The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady
By Kate Summerscale
303 pp. Bloomsbury . $26.
On Nov. 15, 1850, 37-year-old Isabella Robinson went to a party in Edinburgh Edward Lane . Later she noted in her diary that he was “handsome” and “fascinating,” the first of many entries describing her feelings for Lane, a married medical student 10 years her junior.
Isabella was herself unhappily married to Henry Robinson, a curmudgeonly businessman and civil engineer who also had a mistress and two illegitimate children. In fact, Isabella despised this “uneducated,” “selfish” and “harsh-tempered” man, who, in turn, treated her with contempt. Robinson was, she told herself, only interested in money, while she yearned for the intellectual stimulation that could be found at the home the Lanes shared with Mrs. Lane ’s mother, Lady Drysdale, among their circle of literary and scientific friends.
Upon finishing his studies, Lane opened a fashionable spa for hydropathy at Moor Park in Surrey , where his patients — including Charles Darwin — underwent a fanciful range of water cures to calm their irritable nerves. Isabella visited regularly, sometimes to be treated, sometimes just as a family friend — but always, as her diary revealed, to be nearer to Lane. In those years, her journal’s pages were infused with unrequited longing for the young doctor, whose every word and gesture was weighed and judged. Isabella was downhearted when he “hardly looked at me,” ecstatic when she sat next to him at a lecture. They talked about Byron, God, hot-air balloons and Coleridge’s poems, and went on walks that left her “too much roused to sleep.”
There was much sadness in Isabella’s diary, moments when “all is dark to me,” but also descriptions of dreams “of romantic situations, and Mr. Lane .” Kate Summerscale argues, convincingly, that these pages, like a novel, could “conjure up a wished-for world, in which memories were colored with desire.” Then, in October 1854, during a visit to Moor Park
A little more than a year later, in the spring of 1856, those words were enough to shatter her world. When Isabella fell ill and, delirious with fever, mumbled the names of other men, her suspicious husband read the diary. He promptly took it and their children and left her, then filed for divorce.
In her hugely enjoyable account of a sensational 1860 English murder case, “The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher,” Summerscale demonstrated her talent for forensic investigation. Once again, in “Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace,” she prods, scrutinizes and examines, employing a real-life historical episode to shed light on Victorian morality and sensibilities. This time, however, the chief evidence she presents to tell her fascinating story isn’t a corpse but a diary. Just as she used the killing of a child in her previous book to provide insight into mid-19th-century domestic life and the rise of detective novels, Summerscale now uses Isabella and Henry Robinson’s scandalous divorce case to explore such diverse subjects as the era’s romantic novels, peculiar health fads and views of marriage.
Until 1858, the union between a husband and wife could be dissolved only by an individual act of Parliament, which was extremely expensive and therefore unobtainable for all but the very rich. Yet in that year, the new Court of Divorce and Matrimonial Causes made the severing of such bonds affordable, thus bringing it to the middle class. The Robinson case was one of the first to arrive at the court.
Summerscale is graciously evenhanded in her depiction of Isabella, who, despite being vilely neglected in her marriage and treated appallingly during the trial, was also a flawed character. It’s difficult to warm to her when, for example, she fumbles around with Lane inside a carriage while her son is perched up top with the driver or when she writes about “dear little innocent Mrs. L,” sitting with her baby just after Isabella has amused herself with Mrs. Lane’s husband in the shrubbery.
The court proceedings make for disturbing but engrossing reading. The contents of Isabella’s diary were divulged to the lawyers and judges and reprinted in the newspapers. Her innermost feelings, wishes and dreams were revealed at breakfast tables across the country. And, as if her situation weren’t awful enough, her lawyers argued that she was a sex maniac who had created an imaginary erotic life. Since the diary was Henry Robinson’s only proof of his wife’s adultery, her lawyers insisted that parts of it were fictional — the product of her “uterine disease,” evidence merely of temporary insanity. Medical witnesses explained that her condition could cause sexual delusions and nymphomania. The newspapers gorged on every detail.
“Isabella’s defense,” Summerscale writes, “was far more degrading than a confession of adultery would have been.” By agreeing to her lawyers’ strategy, she sacrificed herself for Lane, whose career was at stake. If Isabella wasn’t lying, how many female patients would be willing to seek treatment at his spa? Desperate and decidedly ungallant, Lane described his reputed paramour as “a vile and crazy woman” who was “goaded on by wild hallucinations.”
The question was and is — did Isabella really have an affair with Edward Lane or was it all wishful thinking? The end of the court case is surprising, and to give it away would be an insult to Summerscale’s cleverly constructed narrative. But she stresses that one thing is clear: the diary “may not tell us, for certain, what happened in Isabella’s life, but it tells us what she wanted.”
Andrea Wulf’s latest book, “Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens,” has just been published.
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Kate Summerscale (born 1965) is an award-winning English writer and journalist. Summerscale was brought up in She is the author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House,based on a real-life crime committed by Constance Kent and investigated by Jack Whicher, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction 2008, and the bestselling The Queen of Whale Cay, about Joe Carstairs, 'fastest woman on water', which won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1998 and was shortlisted for the 1997 Whitbread Awards for biography. She formerly worked for The Independent and from 1995 to 1996 she wrote and edited obituaries for The Daily Telegraph. She is the former literary editor of The Daily Telegraph Her articles have appeared in The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph. She has also judged various literary competitions including the Booker Prize in 2001. |
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The petit Théâtre of Marie-Antoinette
The Petit Théâtre de la Reine (English: The Queen's Theatre) is a small theatre at
Mique's exterior is plain, simple, and even severe. The interior is rich with gold, blue, and white decoration. The interior is a wooden room painted to resemble marble. The stage machinery still exists.
In 1780, the Queen and her friends played Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny's Le Roi et le fermier (The King and the Farmer, 1762) in the little theatre. The original forest set and rustic cottage set have survived. They were restored in the 19th century. They were in use in February 2012 for performances of Le Roi at the Versailles Opera.
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Les Petits Appartements à Versailles, by Richard Mique. VÍDEO Marie-Antoinette intime 5-9
The fame of the petit appartement de la reine rests squarely in the hands of the last queen of France during the Ancien Régime. The restored state of the rooms that one sees today at Versailles closely replicate the petit appartement de la reine as it appeared during Marie-Antoinette’s day (Verlet, 1937). Modifications of the petit appartement de la reine for Marie-Antoinette began in 1779 (Verlet 1985, p. 585).
In this year, Marie-Antoinette ordered her favorite architect, Richard Mique to cover all wall of the petit appartement de la reine with white satin embroidered with floral arabesques, ostensibly to give a decorative cohesion to the rooms. The cost of the fabric was 100,000 livres; the hangings were entirely replaced with wood paneling in 1783 (Verlet 1985, p. 586).
In 1781, to commemorate the birth of the first dauphin, Louis XVI commissioned Richard Mique to redecorate the cabinet de la Méridienne (1789 plan #6) (Verlet 1985, p. 586). It was in this room that Marie-Antoinette would choose the clothing she would wear that day.
In this same year, the bibliothèque – occupying the site of the petite galerie of Marie Leszczyńska – (1789 plan #7) and the supplément de la bibliothèque – occupying the pièce des bains of Maria Leszczyńska – (1789 plan #8), and, additionally, a room for the toilette à l’anglaise[6] a pièce des bains and a salle des bains were arranged, opening on the cour de Monsieur (Verlet 1985, p. 403).
The last major modification to the petit appartement de la reine occurred in 1783, when Marie-Antoinette ordered a complete redecoration of the grand cabinet intérieur. The costly embroidered hangings were replaced with caved gilt paneling by Richard Mique. The new décor caused the room to be renamed the cabinet doré (Verlet 1985, p. 586).
Of all the features of the petit appartement de la reine, the so-called secret passage that links the grand appartement de la reine with the appartement du roi is one that has become a legend in the history of Palace of Versailles. The passage actually dates from the time of Marie-Thérèse, and had always been a suite of service rooms that also served as a private means by which the king and queen could communicate with each other (1740 plan #1-4; 1789 plan #1-4). It is true, however, that Marie-Antoinette, who was sleeping in the chambre de la reine in the grand appartement de la reine, escaped from the Paris mob on the night of 5/6 October 1789 by using this route. The entrance to the so-called secret passage is through a door located on the west side of the north wall of the chambre de la reine.
Richard Mique was born at Nancy, the son of Simon Mique, an architect and entrepreneur of Lunéville and grandson of Pierre Mique also an architect. Following their example, he became an architect in the service of duke Stanislas Leszczyński, ex-king of Poland and father of Maria Leszczyńska, the consort of King Louis XV of France. Following the death of Héré de Corny, Mique participated as premier architecte in Stanislas' grand plans for reordering and embellishing Nancy, his capital as Duke of Lorraine. Stanislas made him a chevalier of the Order of Saint-Michel and maneuvered unsuccessfully to have Mique placed on the payroll of the Bâtiments du Roi.
Following his patron's death in February 1766, Mique was called to France the following October, at the suggestion of Maria Leszczyńska's Polish confessor. His official career in France was initially stymied by the influence of Ange-Jacques Gabriel, premier architecte. His main clients were a series of royal ladies. For Maria Leszczyńska, he built a convent, prominently sited in the town of Versailles, on lands at the edge of the park belonging formerly to Madame de Montespan's Château de Clagny, of which eleven hectares were consigned to the queen by her husband, Louis XV. At the queen's death, her daughter Madame Adélaïde completed the project.
Mique must have gained the confidence of the dauphin and the dauphine for, upon the accession of the dauphin as Louis XVI in 1774, he was appointed intendant et contrôleur général des bâtiments du Roi; he succeeded Gabriel as premier architecte to Louis XVI the following year, thus overseeing the last works carried out at Versailles before the French Revolution. He purchased a seigneurie in Lorraine, which completed his transformation to courtier-architect.
He laid out the queen's garden at the Petit Trianon from 1774 to 1785 in collaboration, it is believed (though without documentary evidence) with the painter Hubert Robert. The design — "one of the first instances... of pre-Victorian kitsch" (Higonnet 2002) — was based on sketches by the comte de Caraman, an inspired amateur of gardening. Mique was also responsible for the Hameau de la Reine, a mock farming village built around an artificial lake at the northeastern corner of the estate.
During the Revolution, he was arrested along with his son as participants in a conspiracy to save the life of Marie Antoinette, whose favorite architect he had been. He was brought before a revolutionary tribunal and, after a summary trial on 7 July 1794, both father and son were condemned to death and executed the following day. This was just three weeks before the fall of Robespierre and the end of the Reign of Terror.
Pierre de Nolhac, the historian of the Château de Versailles, in Le Trianon de Marie-Antoinette (1914), found Mique to have been "un artiste savant, habile, et digne de plus de gloire". A street in the city of Versailles commemorates his name.
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The Riot Club Trailer
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The Riot Club .
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The Universal Pictures film The Riot Club set for release in September 2014 is a film adaptation of Laura Wade's play Posh |
Laura Wade: ‘It’s the last time they can let their hair down’
Laura Wade’s play Posh ushered in the Tory government in 2010. Is the film version, The Riot Club, here to bury the Bullingdon boys’ era of inequality? She explains why she feels sorry for Cameron and co
Emine Saner
The Guardian, Sunday 21 September 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/sep/21/laura-wade-the-riot-club-posh-interview
Laura Wade certainly has lucky timing. Her play Posh opened in 2010, less than a month before the general election, and the film version, renamed The Riot Club, has just come out in the runup to another one. Centering on the despicable activities of the 10 members of an Oxford
Wade began adapting the play for the screen between the sell-out first run at the Royal Court and its transfer to the West End two years later (with impeccable timing again, a month after the MP Nadine Dorries complained about the “arrogant posh boys” running the country). “The 2010 production had the boys living under a Labour government and feeling like their backs were up against the wall because of that,” says Wade. “By 2012, that had to change – we had moved into a Tory government by then, so it was more about the boys feeling that, despite the fact their people were in power, they were still feeling disempowered or they lived in a world that didn’t really understand them.”
When Posh opened, it was described as a leftist call to arms, but Wade says she always felt that wasn’t quite accurate – besides, she’s far too careful and nuanced to declare outright class war. “I think that makes it sound rather soapboxy and I didn’t think it was,” she says. “It was certainly something that aimed to ask questions about the behaviour of wealthy and privileged people. I feel quite happy to be asking whether there are certain ways of behaving with the privilege that your life has given you that might be less helpful to the rest of society.” Also inescapable, and uncomfortable, was the fact that, for all their revolting views - and ultimately heinous acts that play out in that room of the country pub, the boys were actually rather fun – their jokes were funny, they were clever and charming. “I’ve had these boys living in my head for seven years now,” she says with a laugh. “But it’s quite entertaining. There are lots of knob gags. It helps that I have the sense of humour of an eight-year-old boy.”
Wade, whose name is always mentioned in pieces on talented young female playwrights, started writing Posh in 2007, the year that famous photograph of Bullingdon club members came out, showing Cameron, Johnson and privileged others, all floppy hair and supreme confidence. She was interested in the drinking societies, “because of the idea of a group of young men who would know that they were likely, after college, to end up in quite powerful positions. It was interesting to me that they had a real sense of their own history, their family history and where they stood in terms of that continuum. They are existing at a time when, in a sense, they and their families are the least powerful they’ve ever been, so what was it like for the boys of that generation? And it being a long way from my own experience [Wade is state-school, non-Oxbridge educated], it was anthropologically interesting. What makes people behave like that?”
What did she come up with? A sense of entitlement, and the knowledge that the damage (in life, as in the play, venues are trashed) could be magicked away with a big cheque? “It’s partly youth, and that’s often the excuse given for it. But also the idea that’s expressed in the film that college is the last time when they can really let their hair down because they know that later on in life there will be people looking at them. It felt that there was quite a lot of pressure on the boys, both academically and from family and history. That’s not intended to excuse their behaviour, but to explain it.”
The 2012 production came out after the youth riots the previous summer. “What struck me during the last year was the ton of bricks that came down on all the people who were involved,” Wade said at the time. “It’s said that we all do silly things when we’re young, but some of us get slapped in prison, and some of us don’t.”
When one character rants “I’m sick to fucking death of poor people”, it seemed suitably dramatic back in 2010, but now those in government have been accused, more with weary resignation, of exactly that. “There seems to be a lot of political action over the past few years that’s been about vilifying people who are unfortunate enough to need benefits and things that are intended to stir up bad feeling among people. Poverty ought to be considered a misfortune rather than a moral failing.”
The other striking thing is the misogyny – the young men hire an escort and expect her to perform oral sex on them; when she refuses they consider raping the pub landlord’s daughter. Again, back in 2010, it seemed shocking; now, in the midst of a so-called rape culture, it seems horrifyingly prescient. “It seemed, when writing the characters, that they had so little experience of women. That scene in the play, which continues to exist in the film, where they’ve hired an escort, and she turns up and she’s a real person, they don’t know how to handle it because they haven’t spent enough formative time with women to really treat them as rounded human beings. There’s that kind of casual misogyny that underpins quite a lot of what they do.” In a broader sense she can see that politically: “Recent policy has disadvantaged women disproportionately.”
With this film, and Downton Abbey having just begun its fifth series, what does she think the enduring appeal of the upper classes is? “I think we’re fascinated by the idea of aristocracy, particularly now when the structure of society has changed. I feel like Downton is working up to the point where they all have to move out of the house, and it goes over to the National Trust. I think it seems to appeal on a number of different levels. It’s about a world that doesn’t exist any more but we imagine ourselves into, whether we imagine ourselves as a below-stairs maid or one of the daughters of the family.”
Against this class nostalgia, the wealth gap widens, inequality seems ever more entrenched, and there doesn’t seem to be a huge swell of anger about it. “No, it’s surprising, isn’t it?” says Wade. “It’s surprising that people aren’t more up in arms about inequality. Maybe it’s because everybody is so busy trying to keep their own head above water.”
Still, she seems at pains to find sympathy for her characters. Isn’t that hard when, in the real world, the power networks she writes about having worked so well, those young men of the dining clubs are now presiding over public-sector reform, benefit cuts, the bedroom tax? “It always, for me, comes down to empathy and how much you are able to understand how other people with less privileged backgrounds get on,” she says. “If you don’t have that experience yourself, what are you doing to find out about it? I think the piece suggests that the boys in the club don’t understand, or take the time to try to find out. It’s important for me not to blame anyone – we don’t choose what background we come from, what school we go to – but it’s how you choose to behave and use the lucky cards you’ve been dealt at birth
Posh Britain
In new film The Riot Club, based loosely on the antics of the notorious Bullingdon boys, a gaggle of toffs trash restaurants for larks. Who are these people, how did they turn out like this – and what does it tell us about privilege today?
Stuart Jeffries
Sunday 21 September 2014 / The Guardian / http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/sep/21/-sp-posh-britain-the-riot-club-bullingdon-privilege
The posh, like the poor only more noisily, are always with us. Consider the new film The Riot Club. It is, you’d think, a devastating critique of Britain’s ruling classes, an adaptation of state-school-educated dramatist Laura Wade’s 2010 play Posh, which, by dramatising the wretched roistering of a restaurant-ruining university dining society closely resembling the real-life Bullingdon Club to which so many of our current rulers belonged, skewered the sense of entitlement to power of a privileged, wealthy, public school and Oxbridge elite. The play, at least, was timely: it was staged just as that elite was about to become the government and put its collective foot more firmly on the throat of the poor than previous administrations.
When Michael Billington reviewed Posh in 2010, he complained it was too implacable. “[Wade’s] argument would be even stronger if it admitted that, even within the ranks of the bluebloods, there were occasional spasms of doubt and decency.” But what made Posh bad drama for Billington made it good politics (certainly if you’re of a socialist persuasion): why dramatise the decency of the posh when we, if only figuratively, should be strangling George Osborne with Boris Johnson’s entrails?
But in that shift from stage to screen the implacableness of that rage got lost. Instead of evisceration, celebration. Guardian film editor Catherine Shoard reporting from the Toronto
What happened? The drama got co-opted by posh. It wasn’t just because the film is produced by David Cameron’s one-time roommate and fellow Etonian Peter Czernin, though you’d think that didn’t help. Czernin, incidentally, is a member of the Howard de Walden family. His mother, Hazel, Baroness de Walden, is holder of the 400-year-old baronetcy created by Elizabeth I in 1597 for Thomas Howard for his role in defeating the Spanish armada. In 2012, the family’s worth was estimated to be £2.2bn, and family members, including Czernin, benefited from multimillion dividends on the De Walden Estates properties in central London London
Nor is The Riot Club’s dismal political switcheroo explained by the fact that its stars come from posh acting dynasties, though that probably doesn’t help either. One of the leads in the film is Max Irons, son of Sinead Cusack and Jeremy Irons (still celebrated for playing Oxbridge arse-kisser Charles Ryder in the 1981 TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited). Max attended the Dragon School in Oxford (boarding fees per term: £8,980; day fees per term: £6,230), as did so many other thespians – Tom Hiddlestone, Emma Watson, Hugh Laurie – whom one wouldn’t balk at calling posh. Another lead is Freddie Fox, son of Edward Fox and Joanna David, who attended and was expelled from Bryanston (boarding fees per term: £11,162). Freddie, 25, incidentally, told the Radio Times that he has taken to speaking with a Mancunian accent while working on the Manchester-based TV series Cucumber: “I decided I was going to stay in the accent until the job’s done. Of course, my parents hate it.”
But what the preponderance of posh in The Riot Club throws into relief is the complaint, now made almost weekly, that aspiring actors from disadvantaged backgrounds can’t get a break. Dame Judi Dench has disclosed that she receives begging letters from kids who can’t afford the cost of drama school training. David Morrissey makes a similar complaint, arguing that creative industries have an “intern culture” that is failing people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
In this sense, acting is a microcosm of Britain Britain ’s school-age population attend private schools, but half the cabinet – including Cameron (Eton), Clegg (Wesminster) and Osborne (St Paul
Dench and Morrissey have a good point. One way of addressing it would be if we stopped making films about posh people starring posh people and produced by posh people. Aspirant actors from disadvantaged backgrounds might get a toe-hold.
What was most loathsome about The Riot Club is different from the foregoing. It’s the betrayal of the rage that made the play worth seeing in the first place. In the New Statesman recently, Cambridge Cambridge
The Riot Club, then, recreates Brideshead’s deferential culture of fondness for posh at the moment when we least need it. Why? Because the fledgling meritocracy of postwar Britain United Kingdom Scotland
Now the Uppers are back in power – a cabinet teeming with Etonians, the standing disgrace that is a posh clown as London
One laughable attempt to circumvent this problem is for our rulers to pretend to be what they are not. It’s what Slavoj Zizek calls fetishistic disavowal. What does that mean? It means Cameron presenting himself as blokey Dave in his polo shirt, doing the dishes; it means George Osborne telling us we’re all in this together (quite so: when you’ve been evicted because of the bedroom tax, or come back from being ritually humiliated at the jobcentre, don’t you head off to Corfu to cheer yourself up, chilling on the yacht of a Russian billionaire chum?).
But what Cameron, Clegg and Osborne disavow so vehemently (and their vehemence merely confirms what they disavow) is that they are posh. That’s why, quite possibly, the photograph of Cameron posing with his Bullingdon Club mates when he was an Oxford
So what is posh? I know, I know – I can’t believe I got this far through the article without defining my terms either. But posh is hard to define, especially when we’re in a hall of mirrors in which the posh disavow what they are and the goalposts of posh move so fast. Consider the Queen. She’s posh, right? Well, yes, but less posh than she was. In her 1950 Christmas broadcast, for instance, when she said “had” it rhymed with “bed”. Thirty years later, according to researchers at Australia ’s Macquarie University
Posh is also more difficult to define once you realise that the term is relative. “Oh golly, oh gosh, come and lie on the couch with a nice bit of posh from Burnham-on-Crouch,” sang Ian Dury on Billericay Dickie. Really? Can you be posh and from Burnham-on-Crouch??
But real posh is something else. The Guardian’s Etonian film critic Derek Malcolm got close to it once when told me that his old school had conferred on him an “effortless sense of superiority”. That, I suspect, is part of what it is to be posh: certainly my lifelong sense of inferiority marks me out as Downer not Upper, non-U not U.
And then there is another definitional problem. The posh don’t like the word posh. “Posh?” exclaims Templer reprovingly to his wife in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, his 12-volume anatomising of 20th-century English posh. “Sweetie, what an awful word. Please never use it in my presence again.”
And then there is the grubby industry of wannabe-posh style fascists who make their pennies from unconvincingly stipulating what posh is and how to become it. Apparently, you should never, ever, say toilet. “In high society, the T word is worse than the F word,” explained self-styled adjudicator of posh William Hanson. “Avoid using it at all costs or prepare for social relegation. Lavatory is the smartest word.”
But this sort of elitist cobblers doesn’t get to the heart of posh.
One founding text of postwar posh is a paper called U and Non-U by professor of linguistics Alan Ross, published in Encounter in 1955. Ross argued that the upper classes were no longer better educated, richer, or cleaner than those not of their class. What distinguished the upper classes from the rest was the way they spoke.
U-speakers said sorry, not pardon, argued Ross, listened to the wireless not radio, and deployed table napkins not serviettes. Rubbish, retorted Evelyn Waugh in Noblesse Oblige: “There is practically no human activity or form of expression which at one time or another in one place or another I have not heard confidently condemned as plebeian, for generations of the English have used the epithets as general pejoratives to describe anything which gets on their nerves.” In his 2004 book, Mind the Gap: The New Class Divide in Britain
It doesn’t need to. It can rule effectively by affecting to be what it is not. Indeed so much of what it is to be posh has been erased as the old elite has reasserted its hold on the British throat. The posh may not smell better, think better, be richer, speak differently from the rest of us. They have erased their apparent distinctions while reinforcing their real ones, a very British version of Leo Strauss’s noble lie.
Will the posh always be with us, degrading our lives and diminishing our opportunities? Yes, unless we abolish private schools. The postwar dream was otherwise: welfare state and education reforms were designed to create a humane, fairer Britain
The seven rules of being posh
After 25 years of living in Britain
Tim Dowling
The Guardian, Monday 22 September 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/sep/22/poshness-foreigners-view
Distant observers of the UK
I can’t pretend to be an expert on the subject, but after nearly a quarter of a century in Britain
1 There is no one kind of poshness. There are actually seven distinct types: poshness of birth; poshness of wealth; of accent; of education; also, the poshness of excellent taste, as well as the poshness of eccentric and exuberant vulgarity; and, finally, the poshness of assumed superiority. Some of these are inextricably linked, and some quite naturally overlap, but almost no one is possessed of all seven.
2 As a term of description or abuse, “posh” has an incredibly elastic definition. At one end of the scale you can accuse someone of being posh for owning a dishwasher. At the other extreme you will hear people saying, “The thing is, the Queen isn’t actually posh at all.”
3 Posh people aren’t usually snobs. They just don’t have very much to resent.
4 The most virulent form of snobbery operates entirely within the middle classes. This makes sense, because none of them is properly posh, and yet virtually all of them have dishwashers. If you are truly middle class, all you can see around you are other middle-class people doing it wrong. When you satirise the middle class in literature or on screen, they are both your target and your audience.
6 Far and away the poshest thing you can do is wilfully mispronounce your surname, as if the basic rules of vowels, consonants and syllables simply didn’t apply to you, and then oblige strangers to follow your lead.
7 The next-poshest thing you can do is have a freezing bathroom.
The Bullingdon Club was founded over 200 years ago. Petre Mais claims it was founded in 1780 and was limited to 30 men, and by 1875 it was considered "an old Oxford 1796. In 1805 cricket at Oxford University
The Wisden Cricketer reports that the Bullingdon is "ostensibly one of the two original Oxford University Oxford Oxford
Today, the Bullingdon is still primarily a dining club, although a vestige of the Club's sporting links survives in its support of an annual point to point race. The Club President, known as the General, presents the winner's cup, and the Club members meet at the race for a champagne breakfast. The Club also meets for an annual Club dinner. Guests may be invited to either of these events. There may also be smaller dinners during the year to mark the initiation of new members. The club often books private dining rooms under an assumed name, as most restaurateurs are wary of the Club's reputation for causing considerable drunken damage during the course of dinner.
A photograph of former Bullingdon Club members wearing their club uniforms, including Prime Minister David Cameron and Mayor of London Boris Johnson was revealed in 2007. The copyright owners have since refused permission to use the picture.
A number of episodes over many decades have become anecdotal evidence of the Club's behaviour. Infamously, on 12 May 1894 and again on 20 February 1927, after dinner, Bullingdon members smashed almost all the glass of the lights and 468 windows in Peckwater Quad of Christ Church, along with the blinds and doors of the building. As a result, the Club was banned from meeting within 15 miles of Oxford.
While still Prince of Wales, Edward VIII had a certain amount of difficulty in getting his parents' permission to join the Bullingdon on account of the Club's reputation. He eventually obtained it only on the understanding that he never join in what was then known as a "Bullingdon blind", a euphemistic phrase for an evening of drink and song. On hearing of his eventual attendance at one such evening, Queen Mary sent him a telegram requesting that he remove his name from the Club.
Andrew Gimson, biographer of Boris Johnson, reported about the club in the 1980s: "I don't think an evening would have ended without a restaurant being trashed and being paid for in full, very often in cash. [...] A night in the cells would be regarded as being par for a Buller man and so would debagging anyone who really attracted the irritation of the Buller men."
Dinners in recent years, being relatively low key, have not attracted press attention, though in 2005, following damage to a 15th-century pub in Oxfordshire during a dinner, four members of the party were arrested; the incident was widely reported. A further dinner was reported in 2010 after damage to a country house. In February 2013, the Daily Mirror reported that an initiation for a new member to the Club involved burning a £50 note in front of a beggar.
In the last few years, the Bullingdon has been mentioned in the debates of the House of Commons in order to draw attention to excessive behaviour across the British class spectrum, and to embarrass those increasingly prominent Conservative Party politicians who are former members of the Bullingdon. These most notably include David Cameron (UK Prime Minister), George Osborne (UK Chancellor of the Exchequer) and Boris Johnson (Mayor of London). Hansard records eight references to the Bullingdon between 2001 and 2008. Johnson has since tried to distance himself from the club, calling it "a truly shameful vignette of almost superhuman undergraduate arrogance, toffishness and twittishness."
The Bullingdon is not currently registered with the University of Oxford
The club was active in Oxford in 2008/9, although not currently registered with the University, and the retiring proctors' oration recited an incident which, not being on University premises, was outside their jurisdiction: "some students had taken habitually to the drunken braying of ‘We are the Bullingdon’ at 3 a .m. from a house not far from the Phoenix Cinema. But the transcript of what they called the wife of the neighbour who went to ask them to be quiet was written in language that is not usually printed". The members therefore received an Anti-Social Behaviour Contract from the Thames Valley Police, threatening the more common ASBO. The proctor concluded in March 2009: "So I am pleased to say that, except perhaps at the highest level of national politics, the Bullingdon Club this year has been quiescent."
The Bullingdon is satirised as the Bollinger Club (Bollinger being a notable brand of champagne) in Evelyn Waugh's novel Decline and Fall (1928), where it has a pivotal role in the plot: the mild-mannered hero is blamed for the Bollinger Club's destructive rampage through his college and is sent down. Tom Driberg claimed that the description of the Bollinger Club was a "mild account of the night of any Bullingdon Club dinner in Christ Church
Waugh mentions the Bullingdon by name in Brideshead Revisited. In talking to Charles Ryder, Anthony Blanche relates that the Bullingdon attempted to "put him in Mercury" in Tom Quad one evening, Mercury being a large fountain in the centre of the Quad. Blanche describes the members in their tails as looking "like a lot of most disorderly footmen", and goes on to say: "Do you know, I went round to call on Sebastian next day? I thought the tale of my evening's adventures might amuse him." This could indicate that Sebastian was not a member of the Bullingdon, although in the 1981 TV adaptation, Lord Sebastian Flyte vomits through the window of Charles Ryder's college room while wearing the famous Bullingdon tails. The 2008 film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited likewise clothes Flyte in the Club tails during this scene, as his fellow revellers chant "Buller, Buller, Buller!" behind him.
A fictional Oxford dining society loosely inspired by clubs like the Bullingdon forms the basis of Posh, by Laura Wade, a play staged in April 2010 at the Royal Court Theatre , London
The TV series Trinity, set in a "Trinity College
In February 2012 Colman's, the company whose mustard is used by the club for its initiation rites, launched a TV advert in the UK featuring a comic minotaur character who is dressed in the Bullingdon Club uniform of teal blue long-tailed frock coat and mustard yellow waistcoat; and whose voice, mannerisms and blonde haircut all parody those of former club member and London Mayor Boris Johnson.
The Universal Pictures film The Riot Club set for release in September 2014 is a film adaptation of Laura Wade's play Posh
The Riot Club, review: 'hilarious but lacking political bite'
A parody of the Oxford Bullingdon Club from the director of An Education presents a lewdly behaved gathering of young British thesps, says Tim Robey
By Tim Robey11:47AM BST 18 Sep 2014 / http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/11078311/The-Riot-Club-review-hilarious-but-lacking-political-bite.html
How do you parody something that already seems beyond parody? Twice, in 1894 and 1927, The Bullingdon Club - a hell-raising society of elite Oxford University students whose past members have included David Cameron, Boris Johnson and George Osborne - smashed every window in Peckwater Quad of Christ Church College
Laura Wade's 2010 play, Posh, dealt with a still-reported Bullingdon habit of trashing their dining establishments beyond recognition, and tossing a cheque at the landlord on the way out. It now reaches the screen as The Riot Club, starring a braying, lewdly behaved gathering of silver-spoon-reared young British thesps.
Hearing the word "legend!" exclaimed anachronistically by men in wigs, as the eponymous club is founded in days of yore, supplies the first hint of the Hogarthian tableau of terrible behaviour that Danish director Lone Scherfig intends. She then plunges us into surely the most ridiculous account of Oxford
Talk about revisiting Brideshead: this is meant to be now, though only the use of mobile phones as a plot device separates us from a lavish and lamplit Edwardian debauch.
We soon get to the key location where most of the play was set: The Bull's Head, a village gastropub with fine-dining pretensions, far from Oxford
Whereas on stage the landlord's daughter (Downton Abbey’s Jessica Brown Findlay, down-poshed) was the one eventually propositioned for a ludicrous amount of money, Wade here brings in another fresher, the "bootstrappy regional" sympathetically played by Holliday Grainger, to suffer this indignity. Her arrival comes as a shock to Miles, her nominal new boyfriend, whose phone has been wickedly hijacked to send a fake SOS text and beckon her along.
Wade's play was an enjoyably scathing broadside against the niche grotesqueries of a barely-existent social class. It lacked subtlety, really: you knew exactly what position it was bound to strike, and the uncomprehending servility of the pub minions felt a little easy and patronising. Still, there was a pungency to the writing which has been heavily diluted here, along with its political bite.
Some of the supporting performances are so hammily spiteful and giggly they let the side down, but the film is perfectly cast in its main roles. If director Scherfig proved anything with Carey Mulligan in An Education, it's how to make the cream of our acting talent come out looking even more promising than when they entered. Claflin has a hard, bitter edge to him - he's a lone wolf, seeing what he can get out of this bunch, seizing his chances to pounce.
Booth affects a raffish nonchalance that's perfect for a character whose corruption and predatory contempt for women are papered over by a veneer of charm. And Irons, given range for a lot more doubt and self-awareness than Miles had on stage, is hugely impressive, wobbling on a thin line throughout between being seduced and horrified. This whole business could have been an emotional vacuum - a sticky wicket, really. But they sock it about like opening batsmen who know exactly what they're doing.
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Prince Charles urges action against climate change 'before it is too late'
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Last Mitford sister, Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, dies at 94
Last Mitford sister, Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire , dies at 94
BBC NEWS / 24 September 2014
Deborah, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire , and the last surviving Mitford sister, has died aged 94.
Her son, the Duke of Devonshire, announced the death in a statement from Chatsworth House, her stately home.
Prince Charles said he was "saddened" by the news, saying he "adored and admired" Deborah and would "miss her so very much".
The Mitford sisters fascinated - and sometimes scandalised - British society in the 1940s.
Unity was a friend of Hitler; Diana, the second wife of British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley; Jessica, a left-wing activist, and Nancy, a novelist and historian.
Deborah, like her elder sister Pamela, was more focused on home life.
Nonetheless, along with her siblings, during her lifetime she moved in the same circles as Sir Winston Churchill, John F Kennedy and Evelyn Waugh.
She also accompanied her sister Unity to tea with Hitler in 1937, was painted by Lucian Freud, and amassed a collection of Elvis Presley memorabilia.
Nicknamed the "housewife duchess", she made Chatsworth in Derbyshire one of the most successful and profitable stately homes in England
The statement from her son said: "It is with great sadness that I have to inform you that Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire , has passed away peacefully this morning."
It added that an announcement about funeral arrangements would be made shortly.
Prince Charles said: "My wife and I were deeply saddened to learn of the death of the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire , whom both of us adored and admired greatly.
"She was a unique personality with a wonderfully original approach to life, and a memorable turn of phrase to match that originality.
"The joy, pleasure and amusement she gave to so many, particularly through her books, as well as the contribution she made to Derbyshire throughout her time at Chatsworth, will not easily be forgotten and we shall miss her so very much."
Born Deborah Vivien Freeman-Mitford on 31 March 1920, the duchess was the sixth daughter of the 2nd Baron Redesdale.
The Mitfords' childhood at their family home in the Oxfordshire village of Swinbrook was immortalised in Nancy
Her parents made a poor job of hiding their disappointment that Deborah had not been born a boy, leaving Thomas their only son.
The Mitfords' father disapproved of educating girls, famously insisting that hockey would make their ankles fat, and Deborah spent her formative years skating and hunting.
Her sister Unity's infatuation with Hitler saw the young Deborah invited to tea with the German dictator, although the visit made little impression on her.
"If you sat in a room with Churchill," she later recalled, "you were aware of this tremendous charisma. Kennedy had it too. But Hitler didn't - not to me anyway."
At Chatsworth, the Duchess took on a major role in running the house and its garden, which have been used in a number of film and TV productions, and she ran the estate's farm shop.
In July 2002, the duchess and her husband spoke out against the government's proposed ban on fox hunting.
Made a dame in 1999, she became the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire in 2004 after her husband died and their son inherited his title.
She penned a number of books including the autobiographical Wait for Me: Memoirs of the Youngest Mitford Sister, which was published in 2010.
The Dowager Duchess of Devonshire obituary
Last of the famous Mitford sisters, she became a successful chatelaine of Chatsworth House
Veronica Horwell
The Guardian, Wednesday 24 September 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/sep/24/the-dowager-duchess-of-devonshire
Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire , who has died aged 94, was for more than half a century the chatelaine of Chatsworth House, the great stately home and estate in Derbyshire. In that time she did much to promote it as a favourite public destination.
But she started out as the youngest of the Mitford sisters – the country chick of that sophisticated brood, the extraordinary offspring of Lord Redesdale and his wife, Sydney. Although sister Nancy's claim that Debo could imitate a hen expelling an egg might have been a joke, Debo did drive the cart delivering the Mitford henhouse eggs to the station. While Nancy
She was born at Asthall Manor, Oxfordshire, but equine bliss ended at 16 when the Mitfords sold their next country house: at 17, Debo's closest sibling, Jessica – "Decca"– eloped without a word, a letdown slightly ameliorated by the £1,000 libel settlement the Daily Express paid Debo for wrongly naming her as the runaway, which she squandered on a fur coat. She came out as a debutante in 1938 at a ball given by her doting father at the Mitfords'London Germany
The answer was Lord Andrew Cavendish, also 18, younger son of the Duke of Devonshire, encountered at the races. He joined the Coldstream Guards, while Debo and her mother went to Berne to collect Unity, who had put a bullet through her brain but survived, severely damaged; they coped with Unity's resultant moodiness and incontinence through the first year of war. But then, nothing organic fazed Debo – when travelling to Mull by train, she milked her beloved goat in the first-class waiting room at Stirling : "Which I should not have done since I only had a third-class ticket."
Debo wrote to Diana – in Holloway for supporting her fascist husband, Oswald Mosley – about her impending nuptials: "I do wish you weren't in prison. It will be vile not having you to go shopping with, only we're so poor I shan't have much of a trousseau." Debo married Cavendish in the bomb-damaged St Bartholomew the Great, in London
But Debo was never a serious snob, considering class an irritant: "The biggest pest that has ever been invented". Her husband became heir to the dukedom on the death of his brother in 1944 and succeeded unexpectedly early when his father died in 1950, 14 weeks before the date on which the estates would have escaped 80% death duties. The couple inherited a directory of property, principally Chatsworth House, with 175 rooms, 50 of them huge, and a £5m revenue bill incurring £1,000 interest a day. It took 17 years to clear the debt, with failed appeals to the high court and the sale of Rembrandts, a Poussin and superfluous ancestral accommodation, including Hardwick Hall, also in Derbyshire.
In 1959 they moved in "over the shop" at Chatsworth, made over to a trust, and they kept an Irish holiday castle, Lismore. Nancy, a connoisseur of aristocratic chilblains, wrote to Diana: "Debo has become the sort of English duchess who doesn't feel the cold." They transferred to Chatsworth to help repair it for the first round of stately-home-openings. Debo did the decor, the grandest of shabby chic – she continued the house tradition of gold-leafing the exterior window frames, but only because it lasted longer than paint and she liked the glow on gloomy November days.
She was a competent businesswoman ("I am very good at spending money and she is very good at making it," conceded the Duke), managing her share portfolio and the Chatsworth enterprises; hers was the signature printed on the labels of Chatsworth Food Ltd's chutney and Cumberland sauce; she served in the farm shop "until they installed the mechanical till which I was too stupid to operate".
But the estate's 6,000 farmed acres, which Debo could name field by field – Mrs Vickers's Breeches, Big Backsides, Old Zac's Pingle – stimulated her more than the house's silver steward and the 2,000 lightbulbs, which were powered by an updated wonder of Victorian hydraulic engineering. As she aged, she took delight in the continuity of the details in the house, securing her closet every day with a rare late-17th-century lock.
Few other presidents of the Royal Agricultural Society or the Royal Smithfield Club could recite a flock's afflictions as she could – "Orf scrapie, swayback, blackleg, water mouth or rattlebelly, scab and footrot, scad or scald"– or work with a sheepdog, and she appreciated a whippet or two about her feet.
Debo's book Farm Animals (1991) featured rare breeds of fowl, Buff Cochins and Wesummers, which she raised; the Chatsworth farmyard was a teaching aid for cityfolk. She liked to cite the boy from a school in Sheffield who watched the milking demo. "He gave me such a look and said, 'I think it's the most disgooosting thing I've ever seen in me life, I'm never going to drink milk again."
The Devonshire marriage weathered revelations during an Old Bailey trial in 1985 that the Duke, for all the family motto "secure by caution", had been careless with his chequebooks while furnishing the London flats of young female acquaintances. He was generous to his Duchess, too, over the years commissioning a collection of bejewelled insect brooches, which she wore pinned to ribbons as they left quite dreadful holes in frocks. In 1999 she was made a DCVO, a dame in the Royal Victorian Order. At the 50th anniversary of the couple's accession to the ducal title, Debo swanned into the marquee in a costume created for a Victorian duchess at a 19th-century Chatsworth thrash: she found its whaleboning very supportive.
Following her husband's death in 2004 she remained active as a writer, producing a memoir, Wait for Me!, in 2010. Three of her children died at birth. Her son Peregrine succeeded to the dukedom, and she is also survived by her daughters Emma and Sophia.
• Deborah Vivien Cavendish, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, stately home owner and writer, born 31 March 1920; died 24 September 2014
Broadcast on Tuesday 14 December 2010.
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Downton Abbey Series 5. ITV: Downton Abbey Series 5 Official trailer
Downton Abbey review – Down There Abbey, more like: they are all sex-mad
The aristocratic Crawley clan are back – and it’s all going on upstairs, downstairs and in my lady’s chamber
Sam Wollaston
The Guardian, Monday 22 September 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/sep/22/downton-abbey-review-sex-mad
Rump of yellow labrador, wagging faithfully towards big cedar and Jacobean-style stately, accompanied by tinkly easy-listening piano and soaring strings. It’s back: Downton Abbey (ITV, Sunday), posh soap – more Howard’s Way than Howards End … I know, I did that one before, but I like it, OK? I’m plagiarising myself.
She (presumably) – the lab – is called Isis, unfortunately. Well, the Crawleys weren’t to know what that would come to mean, 90 years down the road (Downton has now reached 1924). Likewise when they named their (as yet unseen) cat Al Shabaab …
So what’s going on? Dark clouds are gathering. No, not the iClouds with the sex tapes, clouds of change. “I feel a shaking of the ground I stand on,” says poor Carson. Earthquake, is it? Suicide attack by Isis, the caliphate hound? No, just momentous social upheaval. The village wants Carson, not his Lordship, to chair their war memorial committee, and it has put Carson in a fearful tizzy.
On top of that, the country has elected a Labour prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, son of a farm labourer and a housemaid, who is upsetting the old order, like Carson. The downstairs people are starting to look at those stairs with thoughts of ascending. Even Daisy is considering bettering herself. While above, the toffs are beginning the long slow slide towards irrelevance.
Not that they’re going quietly. “They’ve cast the net wide tonight,” says the Dowager Countess, clinging on with old-lady claws to the past and to every fibre of her own snobbishness, on noticing that a teacher has been invited to dinner. A teacher! Imagine! It gets worse – she, the teacher, Sarah, Tom’s new love interest – has an opinion too, and isn’t afraid to express it, over the soup. A woman, with a brain, and an opinion, who wants a conversation, whatever next? No wonder people are upset. “The nature of life is not permanence but flux,” laments Carson.
“Just so, even if it does sound faintly disgusting,” replies Mrs Hughes. Mrs Hughes! What the … are you suggesting what I think you are, flux without the l?
And that’s not the end of the filth. It seems everyone is having carnal thoughts; if not actually doing sex, then at least waking up to its existence. Even Bates, officially the most sexless man on television, wants in. “I can think of one thing,” he says, when Anna says there’s nothing they can do about not having children. “Mr Bates!” she says, which is presumable what he goes and does, sulkily.
There’s more; this is the sex episode, Down There Abbey. Lady Mary, who still hasn’t decided between her two suitors (zzzzzz), decides the best way to make up her mind about Lord Gillingham is to shag him. Not exactly how she puts it, but it’s certainly what she means. “Even now, we must decide whether we want to spend our lives with someone without spending any real time with them, let alone … you know,” she tells prudish Anna.
This new one too, aristo sex-pest Lady Anstruther (Anna Chancellor, joining briefly), entices James the servant toy boy upstairs. Upstairs, downstairs, in my lady’s chamber, for flux and everything else. Maybe that iCloud was overhead after all; now it’s burst and is raining down a deluge of smut. But then Lady Edith carelessly sets fire to the place, which puts a stop to things before the earth can move again.
“Save the dog,” shouts Lord Grantham. It’s reassuring that he’s thinking of the dog before the servants – the old way isn’t quite over yet. And by the time the fire brigade arrives, Isis has been taken out of the crisis, and is safe and wagging again, on the drive. I’m glad, she’s the only character I care about.
Picture preview: Episode two
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A new guest joins the Crawley family for dinner, but will he be welcome by all? |
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Will Miss Bunting and Branson's friendship develop further? |
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Can Edith live the truth without telling the truth? |
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Will Daisy's unrest continue as she pursues further study? |
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