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Jonathan Meades :: Cragside House (1/6)
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Cragside House - Space for Restoration
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Remembering the restoration of Cragside, the world's first hydroelectric house.
Cragside is a country house in the civil parish of Cartington in Northumberland, England. It was the first house in the world to be lit using hydroelectric power. Built into a rocky hillside above a 4 km² forest garden, it was the country home of Lord Armstrong and has been in the care of the National Trust since 1977.
Cragside, named after Cragend Hill above the house, was built in 1863 as a modest two-storey country lodge, but was subsequently extended to designs by Richard Norman Shaw, transforming it into an elaborate mansion in the Free Tudor style. At one point, the building included an astronomical observatory and a scientific laboratory.
Electricity
The generators, which also provided power for the farm buildings on the estate, were constantly extended and improved to match the increasing electrical demand in the house.
The Grade I listed[1] house is surrounded by one of Europe's largest rock gardens, a large number of rhododendrons and a large collection of mostly coniferous trees.
The documentary series Abroad Again in Britain by Jonathan Meades focused on Cragside in episode 2 (2005).
In 2007, Cragside reopened after undergoing "total refurbishment."
Cragside was featured during the 21 August 2011 episode of BBC One's Britain's Hidden Heritage programme.
The Observer, Sunday 1 April 2007 / Restored: the world's first hydroelectric house
William Armstrong had his most brilliant ideas while standing thigh-deep in water. The maverick Victorian inventor, who created the mechanisms that raise Tower Bridge in London and open Newcastle's Swing Bridge, was also a passionate fisherman and came up with the idea of hydraulic power at the age of 24 while trout fishing in the Dee in Dentdale.
This weekend, the largest monument to Armstrong's ingenuity is open to the public again after total refurbishment. Cragside, in Northumberland, was home to Armstrong for 30 years and was the first house in the world to be fitted with hydroelectricity. The incredible gadgets, from the rotating spit in the kitchen to the hydraulic lift, were all powered by a vast water pressure system housed in the basement.
Dubbed the 'palace of a modern magician' by one contemporary visitor, it boasted an early dishwasher, a Turkish bath and hot and cold running water. In completely refitting and rewiring the house for the first time, The National Trust had to commission 500 carbon-filament lamps.
In later life Armstrong described his moment of illumination that day in the river: 'I was lounging idly about, watching an old water-mill, when it occurred to me what a small part of the power of the water was used in driving the wheel, and then I thought how great would be the force of even a small quantity of water if its energy were only concentrated in one column.'
Armstrong became one of the richest men in Europe by inventing and manufacturing the Armstrong gun, a cannon. The son of a corn merchant from Newcastle upon Tyne, he founded one of the world's leading engineering firms, WG Armstrong, which sold hydraulic cranes around the world. He employed more than 20,000 men at his works on the Tyne. In 1869 he expanded the house he had built six years earlier on a country estate in Rothbury. The architect Richard Norman Shaw built Cragside by transforming a modest sporting lodge and Armstrong installed a hydroelectric generator in 1878, having dammed a nearby river to create a lake. He wanted to create a cutting-edge home to show important guests, including the King of Siam, the Shah of Persia, an Afghan prince, and the future King Edward VII and his wife Alexandra.
Armstrong eventually presented the patents for his guns to the British government and was knighted in gratitude in 1859. Then in 1887, Queen Victoria's jubilee year, he became the first engineer to be raised to the peerage, as Baron Armstrong of Cragside. The founder of Newcastle University, he died at Cragside at the age of 90 in 1900.
· Cragside, Rothbury, Northumberland (www.nationaltrust.org.uk))
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Buckingham Palace reshuffles key personnel in 'first step to bringing Prince Charles to the throne'/ Daily Mail.
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Preparing: Prince Charles, pictured with Camilla, is set to take control of the Royal Family media operation within weeks |
Sally Osman, left, will run a combines press office for both the Queen and Prince Charles in a move masterminded by the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Christopher Geidt, right.
Buckingham Palace reshuffles key personnel in 'first step to bringing Prince Charles to the throne'
MoS reveals Charles's aide will be media chief for entire Royal Household
Hugely significant move is 'transition to a change of reign'
By ELIZABETH SANDERSON AND KATIE NICHOLL
PUBLISHED: 18 January 2014 / http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2541862/Key-Palace-reshuffle-step-bringing-Prince-Charles-throne.html
It was an announcement that went largely unnoticed amid the obligatory national debate about the New Year’s Honours List.
There, among the gongs, was a second knighthood for the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Christopher Geidt, awarded, according to the citation, for ‘a new approach to constitutional matters... [and] the preparation for the transition to a change of reign’.
It was a surprising admission. It is widely acknowledged the Queen will never abdicate and the succession is rarely, if ever, talked about in official terms.
But behind the Palace gates, preparations are being made.
And in the clearest sign yet that Her Majesty is getting ready to pass the mantle on to her son, The Mail on Sunday can reveal that the Prince of Wales is preparing to take control of the Royal Family media operation within weeks.
For the past 20 years, the Queen and her heir have operated separate press offices from Buckingham Palace and Clarence House respectively.
They will now be run from one office at the Palace, with Prince Charles’s head of communications, Sally Osman, at the helm.
There is little doubting the significance of the move, masterminded by Sir Christopher, or the ways in which it will increase Prince Charles’s influence.
The merging of the two offices clearly represents an important change in the way the Monarchy will be run.
One Royal confidante said: ‘This is the first step to bringing Charles to the throne.’
Royal historian and biographer Hugo Vickers said: ‘It is quite normal for the private secretary to be given two knighthoods, one from the Queen, one from the Government.
‘Sir Christopher’s second knighthood was from the Government but to talk about transition in a citation is somewhat insensitive.
‘It seems very sensible to run the different offices under one umbrella, mainly because I don’t believe the Queen is in need of an all-spinning press secretary.
Since the Diamond Jubilee she is in an unassailable position. She’s nearly 88 and revered. At last people have got the point about her now.’
But another source said that Charles feels the need to consolidate his position.
‘He’s worried about being usurped by William and he’s conscious of how the public will react to Camilla when he becomes King.’
Hence the appointment of Ms Osman who, it is thought, will have the title director of communications for the Royal household plus Prince Charles.
Her remit will include the Queen, Prince Philip, The Prince of Wales, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry. Ms Osman, 54, began working for Prince Charles last summer. S
he was director of communications at the BBC for eight years before going to work for Sony Europe.
The final details are still being signed off, but it is believed James Roscoe, acting press secretary to the Queen, will be made press secretary to Her Majesty as well as joint head of news with Ed Perkins, who will retain his role as press secretary to the Cambridges and Prince Harry.
Kristina Kyriacou, one of the most influential members of Charles’s court, will retain her role as assistant communications secretary, charities and marketing.
Plans for the transformation began last autumn after the Queen’s then press secretary, Ailsa Anderson, resigned.
She is now director of communications for the Archbishop of Canterbury.
A former member of the Prince’s staff said: ‘Ailsa’s departure was very much the catalyst for change.’
The Queen is said to be fully supportive of the step-change, which was discussed with the whole family, not just the ‘core’ figures.
Charles is now the longest-serving heir apparent in British history, and although the Queen is still active and engaged they all agreed that plans should be made for a smooth transition.
One Royal insider said: ‘There is a feeling that Charles has been given an inch and taken a mile. Having said that, this would never have been done without the full co-operation of the Queen and Sir Christopher Geidt.’
Prince Charles was said to have a difficult relationship with the Queen’s previous private secretary, Sir Robin (now Lord) Janvrin. By contrast, he has a good rapport with former Scots Guard Sir Christopher, 52, who took over the post in 2007.
Like Charles, Sir Christopher is firmly wedded to the idea of a slimmed-down Monarchy, something that is believed to have upset Princes Andrew and Edward.
Historian and author Brian Hoey said: ‘Following Prince Charles’s attendance at the Commonwealth summit, where he was supported by Sir Christopher, this is yet another example of him setting out his stall in preparation for his future inheritance.’
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Daks Men Spring/Summer 2014 Show | Milan Men's Fashion Week MFW | FashionTV
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DAKS 120TH ANNIVERSARY starring paul and leah weller
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DAKS
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HRH The Duke of Edinburgh visited the company’s Larkhall factory in Scotland in recognition of its role in exporting goods worldwide. (Larkhall was built in 1948 to Simpson’s specifications and was opened by Harold Wilson who later became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The factory since closed in the early 2000s. DAKS was granted the Royal Warrant of Appointment by HRH The Duke of Edinburgh in 1956. Her Majesty The Queen and HRH The Prince of Wales granted the company with Royal Warrants in 1962 and 1982 respectively. The company developed a House Check in 1976 by Johnny Mengers, the Group Managing Director of the time and last family chairman. Representing the most luxurious fabrics and richest colours of camel and vicuna, and the check has since become iconic for the brand.  |
DAKS is a heritage British luxury fashion house, founded in 1894 by Simeon Simpson. The S Simpson brand became famous for its high quality ready-to-wear tailoring and later the patented self-supporting trouser design known as the DAKS trouser in the 1930s - the first self-supporting trouser in the world when the use of braces and belts were more common. Also renowned for its quality tailoring and iconic house check, the brand continues to produce high quality clothing with three Royal Warrants, selling in over 30 countries in more than 2000 shops, with strong recognition in the Far East it has become the number one non-domestic label in Korea. The label currently shows its menswear collections in Milan and womenswear collections at London Fashion Week. Since 1991, the company was acquired and has become a subsidiary of Japan listed company SANKYO SEIKO CO., LTD.(TYO:8018)
In 1894 Simeon Simpson, aged 16, rented a room on Middlesex Street, East London, with the intention of setting up a business in bespoke tailoring, focused on high standard craftsmanship. Several innovations of technology at the time were being introduced with machinery capable of making buttonholes and electric powered saws to cut many layers of fabric at once – Simpson saw the potential for such equipment for producing garments in higher quantities while still upholding quality tailoring techniques, aiming to improve ready-to-wear standards as no male or female professionals considered ready-to-wear for suitable attire at the time. Simpson’s methods proved successful in speeding up the process and he set up several factories within London, which soon required expansion in its early years through popularity of the label.
Alexander Simpson, his second son, joined the business aged 15 in 1917, and by 1929 had planned and opened a larger factory in Stoke Newington where production could be centralised, this again had to be enlarged a few years later.
20th century – DAKS and Simpsons Piccadilly
With the continued growth of the company Alexander Simpson began to take more control of the business, and in 1935 DAKS gained further fame for the S Simpson brand as an innovation in the tailoring world of the first self-supporting trouser. He went about to invent a way to support his trousers that wouldn’t need braces as these interrupted his swing whilst playing golf and caused his shirt to become untucked. The DAKS trouser was invented – it had a channel within the waistband at the back wherein an elasticated strip was attached at the sides with tabs attached to one of two buttons for adjustment. On the inside of the waistband were sewn-on rubber pads that gripped the shirt and stopped it from becoming loose. This happened in a world where to buy a pair of trousers of high quality one would have to have a bespoke pair made by a tailor, and thus this new design allowed the ease of ready-to-wear trousers. Simpson was so sure of his new design that he had 100,000 pairs made before being introduced to the public at a high price of 30 shillings in a time when a whole bespoke suit would cost 50 shillings. The trousers were available in many colours and fabrics that weren’t generally associated with menswear. They became so popular that the trousers were incorporated into suits and soon after a DAKS womenswear line was released, using the patented waistband for skirting.
The inception of the DAKS name was aiming to be something short, snappy and eye catching and is an arrangement of initials from the two men involved in its development – ‘AS’ for Alexander Simpson and ‘DK’ for his business associate Dudley Beck (his surname’s last letter was used so as to make a better sounding name than using a B hence why the name is capitalised. The advertising agent involved for the promotion of these new trousers, Sir William Crawford of WS Crawford Ltd thought up the idea to market them as ‘Dad’s Slacks’ as it had connotations of reliability and comfort whilst also sounding similar to the name DAKS.
At the turn of the 21st century when the company was acquired by Japanese group Sankyo Seiko Co. Limited in 1991, the S Simpson name was dropped and DAKS became the new brand name.
The ease-of-wear of the trousers and how they allowed movement, as intended from Simpson’s invention, led to DAKS being popular in sporting wear – kitting tennis, golf, motor racing, and football players, and even for the British Olympic team in 1960. The quality of S Simpson tailoring was such that the company was commissioned by the British Government at the time of the Second World War to produce military uniforms for Officers in the Army, Navy, Royal Airforce and Women’s Services even despite the semi-destruction of the Stoke Newington factory due to bomb damage and loss of electricity[10] – with about seven million garments made for military services being produced.
After the war when DAKS clothes were announced to start selling to the public again queues of people would form down Piccadilly, to which Simpson tailors would measure them in line and present suitable pairs of trousers to them when they got into the Simpsons of Piccadilly store.
Simeon Simpson’s son Alexander Simpson, who was then owner of the company, decided he wanted to find a ‘window’ for Simpson clothes in the heart of London. He founded Simpsons of Piccadilly when the Geological Museum had closed and the site to be auctioned. The new building was designed by architect Joseph Emberton as a new and revolutionary retail establishment, the shop front windows exhibited the first curved glass display in Great Britain and the largest in the world at the time, these were designed so that no reflection would be cast to obscure the displays inside. The outstanding feature of the shop’s interior was the travertine staircase that ran up through the centre of the store lit by a continuous window up the height of the building. The current lighting structure suspended through the staircase centre is the original from the 1930s as the building has since become a listed building.
The store opened in April 1936 by Sir Malcolm Campbell, the world famous motor-racing driver. and was famed for its visual merchandising and window displays by László Moholy-Nagy, a former director from the Bauhaus school. Opening the store was a highlight of Alexander Simpson’s vision, he died the following year of leukaemia aged just 34.
Simpsons continued to trade successfully in the Simpsons Piccadilly building for several decades more, helping officers and civilians during World War II, and in later years branched out to sell other clothing by designer labels such as Armani and Christian Dior. Since 1999 Simpsons stopped trading at the Piccadilly store and moved the renamed DAKS to a new flagship store and London offices to Old Bond Street, whilst moving to another new store on Jermyn Street which was recently refurbished in 2012 to focus on selling classic menswear. The original store was sold to bookseller Waterstone’s and now serves as their flagship store.
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| The new flagship store on Old Bond Street |
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El Ateneo Grand Splendid bookshop in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
El Ateneo Grand Splendid is one of the best known bookshops in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Situated at 1860 Santa Fe Avenue in Barrio Norte, the building was designed by the architects Peró and Torres Armengol for the empresario Max Glucksman (1875-1946), and opened as a theatre called Teatro Gran Splendid in May 1919. The ecleticist building features ceiling frescoes painted by the Italian artist Nazareno Orlandi, and caryatids sculpted by Troiano Troiani (whose work also graces the cornice along the Palacio de la Legislatura de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires.
The theatre had a seating capacity of 1,050, and staged a variety of performances, including appearances by the tango artists Carlos Gardel, Francisco Canaro, Roberto Firpo and Ignacio Corsini. Glücksman started his own radio station in 1924 (Radio Splendid), which broadcast from the building where his recording company, Nacional Odeón, made some of the early recordings of the great tango singers of the day. In the late twenties the theatre was converted into a cinema, and in 1929 showed the first sound films presented in Argentina.
The ornate former theatre was leased by Grupo Ilhsa in February 2000. Ilhsa, through Tematika, owns El Ateneo and Yenny booksellers (totaling over 40 stores), as well as the El Ateneo publishing house. The building was subsequently renovated and converted into a book and music shop under the direction of the architect Fernando Manzone; the cinema seating was removed and in its place book shelves were installed. Following refurbishment works, the 2,000 m² (21,000 ft² ) El Ateneo Grand Splendid became the group's flagship store, and in 2007 sold over 700,000 books; over a million people walk through its doors annually.
Chairs are provided throughout the building, including the still-intact theatre boxes, where customers can dip into books before purchase, and there is now a café on the back of what was once the stage. The ceiling, the ornate carvings, the crimson stage curtains, the auditorium lighting and many architectural details remain. Despite the changes, the building still retains the feeling of the grand theatre it once was. The Guardian, a prominent British periodical, named El Ateneo second in its 2008 list of the World's Ten Best Bookshops.
Since the restoration of the original bookstore, El Ateneo has built seven other locations (known under the same name) and are located in the city of Buenos Aires (Florida 340, Florida 629, Juramento, Gran Splendid) and also in the cities Córdoba, Rosario, and Tucumán.
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Mystery of the Lyubov Orlova: Ghost ship full of cannibal rats ‘could be heading for British coast’ VIDEO MV Lyubov Orlova Walk Around - Before it became a ghostship.Ghost riders: An unmanned Russian ship full of rats is adrift in the Atlantic - so, just how many other vagrant vessels are out there?
Mystery of the Lyubov Orlova: Ghost ship full of cannibal rats ‘could be heading for British coast’
ADAM WITHNALL Thursday 23 January 2014 / http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/mystery-of-the-lyubov-orlova-ghost-ship-full-of-cannibal-rats-could-be-heading-for-british-coast-9080103.html
A ghost ship carrying nothing but disease-ridden rats could be about to make land on Britain’s shore, experts have warned.
The infamous Lyubov Orlova cruise liner has been drifting across the north Atlantic for the better part of a year, and salvage hunters say there is a strong chance it is heading this way.
Built in Yugoslavia in 1976, the unlucky vessel was abandoned in a Canadian harbour after its owners were embroiled in a debt scandal and failed to pay the crew.
The authorities in Newfoundland tried to sell the hull for scrap – valued at £600,000 – to the Dominican Republic, but cut their losses when it came loose in a storm on the way.
Sending the ship off into international waters, Transport Canada said it was satisfied the Lyubov Orlova “no longer poses a threat to the safety of [Canadian] offshore oil installations, their personnel or the marine environment”.
Experts say the ship, which is likely to still contain hundreds of rats that have been eating each other to survive, must still be out there somewhere because not all of its lifeboat emergency beacons have been set off.
Two signals were picked up on the 12 and 23 March last year, presumably from lifeboats which fell away and hit the water, showing the vessel had made it two-thirds of the way across the Atlantic and was heading east.
A week later, an unidentified object of about the right size was spotted on radar just off the coast of Scotland – but search planes never verified the find.
Pim de Rhoodes, a Belgian salvage hunter who is among a number looking for the Lyubov Orlova off the UK coastline, told The Sun: “She is floating around out there somewhere.
“There will be a lot of rats and they eat each other. If I get aboard I'll have to lace everywhere with poison.”
The head of the Irish coastguard, Chris Reynolds, said the ship was more likely than not to still pose a threat.
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Adrift: The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency is keeping tabs on the empty MV Lyubov Orlova, but it may be lost at sea forever
Russian ghost cruise ship which vanished in the mists off Newfoundland two months ago and has now reappeared half way across the Atlantic
The MV Lyubov Orlova vanished en route to the Dominican Republic
Set sail from Canada bound for Caribbean where it was to be scrapped
Empty vessel has reappeared near the west coast of Ireland
Sighting of the ship reported by U.S. intelligence agency
By KERRY MCDERMOTT
PUBLISHED: 13:24 GMT, 22 February 2013 /
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All at sea: The ship was being towed to the Dominican Republic to be scrapped when it broke free
When this empty Russian cruise ship disappeared into the mist en route to the Caribbean, it was thought the abandoned vessel could be lost to the ocean forever.
But after spending almost two months adrift the ghostly liner is reported to have re-emerged near Ireland's west coast - thousands of miles from its intended destination.
The MV Lyubov Orlova - named after a famous Soviet actress - was being towed to the Dominican Republic to be scrapped when the cable pulling it snapped, leaving the Orlova to slip away as the crew on board the towing ship battled howling winds and 10ft waves to try in vain to reconnect the line.
The stranded liner, which had left Canadian shores on January 23, was later secured by the supply vessel Atlantic Hawk, but the ship drifted loose a second time, according to a report on the PhysOrg website
Maritime authorities in Canada could not pinpoint the location of the ship, which has no warning lights and a broken global positioning system.
But now a U.S. intelligence agency has reported that the Orlova was sighted 1,300 nautical miles from Ireland's west coast.
Canada's transport authority has said the abandoned ship is no longer its concern as the vessel has left the country's waters, with officials insisting the owner of the Orlova is responsible for its movements.
A document from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency states that the Lyubov Orlova was spotted at the co-ordinates 49-22.70N and 044-51.34W, or roughly 1,300 miles from the Irish coast.
The agency analyses satellite imagery and uses the results to create detailed maps for the U.S. government.
The empty liner is understood to be slowly drifting towards the European coastline.
Now home only to rats, the 1976-built ship once carried passengers on Antarctic cruises.
The ship was seized by authorities in Newfoundland in 2010 amid spiralling debts owed to charter firm Cruise North Expeditions after faults on board meant a scheduled cruise had to be cancelled.
She is understood to have been sold to Neptune International Shipping in February last year to be broken up.
Ghost riders: An unmanned Russian ship full of rats is adrift in the Atlantic - so, just how many other vagrant vessels are out there?
SAMUEL MUSTON / Thursday 23 January 2014 / http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ghost-riders-an-unmanned-russian-ship-full-of-rats-is-adrift-in-the-atlantic--so-just-how-many-other-vagrant-vessels-are-out-there-9081509.html
In happier times, the MV Lyubov Orlova was a pleasure ship, a cruiser accustomed to taking well-heeled Russian holidaymakers on adventure tours around the Arctic. Today, that same 295ft ship is bobbing somewhere off the coast of Ireland, its only passengers a horde of disease-ridden rats.
The trouble for the ship began last February. Set for the breakers yard, it was being towed from Canada to the Dominican Republic by an American-owned tug. A day into the journey, however, the line between the vessels broke. The tug tried to reconnect it, but was hampered by 35mph winds. It withdrew and the Orlova was left crewless and adrift.
The Canadian authorities, worried that the ship might collide with its offshore oil wells, sent another, larger boat that caught hold of the stricken vessel. It did not take it to port, however. Instead, it towed the Orlova beyond Canadian waters and let it drift out to sea.
Its lonely journey has now run to 12 months and as many as 2,000 nautical miles. The ship, having crossed the Atlantic, is now supposedly on Ireland's doorstep. Unsurprisingly, the Irish Coast Guard is unenthusiastic about the situation. "We don't want rats from foreign ships coming on to Irish soil," the director of the Irish maritime agency told the Irish Independent.
There is not a great deal that can be done to prevent the rats from establishing a beachhead, however, given that the ship has no location-finding devices on board and no one knows where it is exactly. As Gemma Wilkie, a spokesman for the British Chamber of Shipping points out, the situation is about as uncertain as it gets. "Clearly, the coastguard involved was vigilant in carrying out a search in response to the radar results showing an object of similar size off the Scottish coast – although as yet there has been no confirmed sighting of the ship in UK waters," she says.
Although the maritime authorities do not welcome such floating hazards, they are relatively sanguine about them. As John Murray, the maritime director of the International Chamber of Shipping, says, the chance of a collision with another ship is low. "Shipping containers and adrift crafts don't creep up on ships," he says. "Navigation warnings from other vessels and radar usually ensure they are spotted from quite a distance away. Ships navigate around them."
Still, though, the notion of a phantom vessel, disconnected from the world, is discomfiting. The most famous example is, of course, the Mary Celeste, the 100ft brigantine which was found floating, crewless but well-provisioned, in the Atlantic Ocean in 1872. Alas, though, the "ghost ship" is not a phenomena confined to the history textbook.
In June last year, the 69ft Nina, heading to Sydney from New Zealand, was caught in a storm. A text sent by the crew soon after indicated that they had survived unscathed. A search of nearly 500,000 square nautical miles has failed to find the vessel, however. A grainy image, which some have suggested may be the ship, was taken off the coast of New Zealand. It has not been seen since. The family of those on board have financed a private rescue but to little avail.
A Japanese fishing boat, the Ryou-Un Maru, also spent 11 months at sea without a crew. After slipping its moorings in March 2011 during the Tohoku earthquake, it drifted into US waters in April 2012. As it had been assumed sunk by the Japanese authorities, its registration had been cancelled and legally it no longer had an owner. The Americans took a pragmatic approach and sunk it in the Gulf of Alaska.
In some cases, though, when a small ship is being towed for scrap, breaks loose and cannot be caught, it is simply not reported and becomes an unquantified hazard for the shipping industry. Pleasure-boat cruisers and cross-channel ferrygoers need not worry unduly then. As Murray makes clear, such incidents are rare: "It would be inaccurate to think that ships are navigating through a thicket of abandoned boats."
Phantom ships are certainly an eerie spectacle but the chances, for most of us, of ever being visited by a ghost ship are slim to none.
"Made a little walk around the MV Lyubov orlova on the way to Antarctica. At the moment it is drifting around the North Atlantic. Abandoned with only rats as passengers."
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PARIS 1900 / 1930 La Belle époque Rare video, film d'époque france, expo...
“All the images shown below were taken using Autochrome Lumière technology. It's an early color photography process, patented in 1903 and invented by the famous French Auguste and Louis Lumière, populary known as Lumière Brothers - http://curiouseggs.com/extremely-rare-color-photography-of-early-1900s-paris/
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THE ARCHITECTURE OF WILLIAM LAWRENCE BOTTOMLEY
"Refined country houses, gracious urban dwellings, posh Broadway cafés, exotic nightclubs, and a high-rise apartment building that, 80 years after its construction, is still considered the epitome of tony living in Manhattan these are among the many achievements of William Lawrence Bottomley, one of the best American architects of the first half of the 20th century. During his 40-year career, Bottomley designed and executed over 180 commissions for his clients. An uncompromising perfectionist with refined taste, he oversaw virtually every facet of his projects, from interior ornamentation and decoration to the surrounding landscape design.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF WILLIAM LAWRENCE BOTTOMLEY is the first comprehensive study of this master architect and designer. Richly illustrated with archival photographs and floor plans, the book examines 34 of the architect s structures nationwide and includes a catalogue of 185 commissions and a comprehensive bibliography. With new discoveries revealed about Bottomley and his work in the illuminating essays of author Susan Hume Frazer, this volume represents a noteworthy addition to Acanthus Press distinguished series of publications documenting America s rich architectural legacy."
http://www.amazon.com/The-Architecture-William-Lawrence-Bottomley/dp/0926494236
http://www.amazon.com/The-Architecture-William-Lawrence-Bottomley/dp/0926494236
William Lawrence Bottomley, born February 24, 1883 in New York, New York, was a noted architect in twentieth-century New York, New York, Middleburg, Virginia and Richmond, Virginia. He is admired as one of the preeminent Colonial Revival designers of residential buildings in the United States and many of his commissions are situated in highly aspirational locations, including Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia.
Educated at the prestigious Horace Mann School in New York, Bottomley graduated from Columbia University in 1906 with a bachelor of science degree in architecture. In 1907 he studied at the American Academy in Rome, where he had received the McKim Fellowship in Architecture. In 1908 he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, in the atelier of Victor Laloux, where he studied until he returned to the US to practice formally as an architect in 1909.
William Lawrence married Harriet Townsend, a sculptor and writer, on August 26, 1909 at Beech Hill in Westport, New York. Harriet's love for gardening no doubt influenced William's strong alliance with landscape architect Charles Gillette. William and Harriet had three daughters: Harriet, Susan and Virginia.
In his 40-year career, William designed 186 commissions, the majority of which (40%) were in Virginia. "Bottomley's clients...while well-to-do, didn't have names with the lofty status of Rockefeller, Whitney, or Widener." Eleven of Bottomley's commissions are currently listed individually on the National Register of Historic Places. Eight of these are in Virginia.
River House is an apartment building located at 435 East 52nd Street in Manhattan, New York.
The River House was constructed in 1931 on the site of a former cigar factory. Originally, the building featured a pier where residents could dock their yachts, but that amenity was lost with the construction of FDR Drive. The building has a gated cobblestone courtyard featuring a fountain. The building's 26 story tower is decorated in an Art Deco style.
Historically, the co-op board was notoriously strict, turning away applicants who failed to meet strict liquidity requirements or whose "comings and goings would attract unwelcome publicity to the River House." Famously, Gloria Vanderbilt was rejected by the board in 1980. She accused the board of racism (she was in a relationship with black singer Bobby Short), while the board claimed that she had been rejected on her merits.[5] Other celebrities alleged to have been rejected by the board include Richard Nixon, Diane Keaton and Joan Crawford.
Parts of the lower levels of the building are leased to the River Club, a private club which counts slightly more than half of the building's shareholders among its 900 or so members. As of 2013 the members, who include David H. Koch and Aerin Lauder, pay approximately $10,000 in annual membership fees. The club includes a restaurant, an indoor pool and tennis courts.
After several years of negotiations where the club attempted to negotiate the purchase of its space, the co-op board listed the club's space for sale as a private residence. Featuring approximately62,000 square feet (5,800 m2 ), five floors and a private entrance, the board set an asking price of $130 million. If the asking price is met, it would be Manhattan's most expensive residence.
After several years of negotiations where the club attempted to negotiate the purchase of its space, the co-op board listed the club's space for sale as a private residence. Featuring approximately
November 6, 2013
Roiling the Waters at River House
By JACOB BERNSTEIN
On a recent afternoon, the River Club was far from bustling. The main dining room was closed, so a handful of elderly couples headed to the pool area, where a bar menu was being served. A man using a walker spoke with his lunch companions of a recent trip to an antiques show. An Elsie de Wolfe aesthetic prevailed in several nearby sitting rooms, where the tufted red leather furniture was unoccupied.
Members do not deny that in recent years, the place has appeared to be more shabby than shabby chic. The elevator breaks almost monthly, and the newest book a person can find in the library is likely a 20-year-old Grisham novel. For years, the club has been operating at a loss.
So few were shocked when River House, the storied co-op from which the River Club leases its space, put the property on the block in September. The board listed it at $130 million, offering it as a 62,000-square-foot residence, which would make it the most expensive home in New York City real estate history.
Perhaps more surprising was the reaction of the building’s well-heeled residents. In what looks like a case of the rich fighting over how to get richer, the ensuing feud has become, as John Allison, the co-op’s chairman, described it, “a thing of novel proportions.”
One resident, the fashion maven and socialite Deeda Blair, distributed a note warning about the impending demise of the club and what it would do to the character of the building. Meetings have been held almost weekly.
In mid-October, another letter went out to the co-op board with signatures from nearly 40 of the building’s owners, many of whom regard the club — with its indoor pool, tennis courts and restaurant — as an essential piece of the building’s DNA and a “value adder” to their apartments, which already lag behind Park Avenue and parts of the West Village. Among the residents who lent their names were the former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, the former ambassador Donald Blinken and the former magazine editor (and Bernard Madoff victim) Alexandra Penney.
“People who are fanatical about the River Club would say the River Club is the essence of River House,” Mr. Allison said. “Then there are other people who don’t feel that at all. It’s a mixed bag. And it’s complex.”
River House and the River Club were built on the site of a cigar factory in 1930, after the Great Depression had begun but before despair had set in. It was on a cul-de-sac at the edge of East 52nd Street overlooking the East River, and part of the lure for tycoons was that they could moor their yachts just outside the building.
The first president of the board was Kermit Roosevelt, better known as the second son of Theodore Roosevelt. Later, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive made boat storage impossible, but residents with pedigreed last names like Hearst and Rockefeller kept rolling in.
They loved the gated cobblestone courtyard where boxwoods predominated and a fountain with Poseidon sprouted water 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Inside, the apartments were both cozy and expansive, with fireplaces and views of the river and the 59th Street Bridge. On the occasions modernity knocked at the door, it was promptly turned away.
In 1980, Gloria Vanderbilt was being squired around town by the singer Bobby Short, who was black. When she tried to buy into the building, the board rejected her. A pitched battle ensued, with Ms. Vanderbilt accusing the building of racism. Carl Mueller, the board president at the time, told People Magazine, “I believe that the ceaseless flow of gossip column items about [Ms. Vanderbilt’s] comings and goings would attract unwelcome publicity to the River House.”
Diane Keaton and Joan Crawford were two other boldface names who received cold receptions. The building’s Old World aura has troubled some of its inhabitants. Holly Peterson, the author of a novel about New York society, “The Manny,” lived there with her father, Pete Peterson, when he moved in some 30 years ago.
“Even though there are many families that live in that building, there’s nothing collegial or warm or communal about the grounds or the way the building is structured or how it feels when you walk down the entranceways,” she said. “The feeling is more the Overlook Hotel in ‘The Shining’ than warm-bohemian-Upper-West-Side apartment building where everyone is sharing a common room and having potluck holiday parties with their neighbors.”
In recent years, property values in the building stagnated as new condominium buildings like 15 Central Park West broke records with the $88 million sale of Sanford Weill’s apartment in 2011. Young people were rejected at the River Club for wearing A.P.C. jeans with their Prada blazers, and walked out, never to return.
The place does have loyalists among the society set. Aerin Lauder is a member. So are David Koch and his wife, Julia. Of the 700 full-fledged members, most continue to pay dues of over $10,000 a year. Many bring their children, who receive tennis instruction and love the outdoor space.
“It’s where my girls learned to play foosball,” said Marina Rust Connor, a contributor to Vogue. “We love the club and can’t stand the idea of it not being there.” But with numerous residents of River House opting not to use the club (a little more than half of the building’s shareholders are members), board members began to argue that the apartment complex was effectively subsidizing the club’s existence at a lower than market rate. Capital improvements were becoming increasingly difficult to put off and the club’s lease of $2,000,000 a year was not enough to pay for them.
About four years ago, the board of River House determined that there was a need for a shift in approach, both at the club downstairs and at the apartment building itself. Residents were voicing concern that the building’s reputation for being exclusive was now scaring away buyers.
Soon enough, brokers began to receive messages that River House would no longer be dismissive of new-money types and movie stars. (Most notably, Uma Thurman purchased an apartment there earlier this year.) Meanwhile, with the lease for the River Club expiring at the end of 2013, the board began to renegotiate its terms. Talks dragged on for two years.
Then the River Club shifted its strategy, determining that it would be better off buying the space. The thinking on its part was that if a multimillion-dollar face-lift was necessary, it should own the space it was investing in.
The co-op board seemed to encourage this, and set a floor price of $32.5 million. But none of the club’s bids approached the asking price. The real estate market was soaring, and the board decided to put the space on the market to see what it could get.
In April of this year, Mr. Allison sent a 13,000-word document on the saga to shareholders in the building, complete with a four-page table of contents. This did not please people at the club, who were already annoyed at a two-year-long negotiations process with a seller who couldn’t seem to set a fixed price.
Still, amid all those words, some residents complained that he did not provide a lot of details about the actual offering plan, which included amenities like a separate parking garage with access through River House’s courtyard and all of the building’s lawn space. Nor did he subsequently give residents a heads-up about an interview he had given to The Wall Street Journal about the listing.
In a building where most residents ascribe to the belief that one’s name ought to appear in a newspaper only at birth, when you marry or die, the publicity went over badly.
“This article took the tenants of the River House by total surprise,” said a shareholder who did not want to be named because the building has discouraged owners from speaking to the news media. (Residents like Ms. Blair and Ms. Penney declined to comment; Mr. Kissinger was out of the country and unreachable, a person in his office said.)
“Learning about all this in The Wall Street Journal is not what one would call being transparent,” the shareholder said. “We feel strongly that some of the features of the sales offering would be quite detrimental to the River House’s shareholders’ quality of life, our homes and the character of the building. We feel strongly that we should have been informed by the board of the sales offerings of these terms.”
Mr. Allison said residents are operating from a number of misconceptions and he seemed to think they would be be more amenable to a sale to someone other than the River Club if a significant amount of money is offered for the space.
“I don’t want to count chickens before they hatch,” he said, “but if there were any funds left over, the building would have in effect an endowment.”
Plus, he added, there remains lots of space on the existing property to add all sorts of amenities.
“We have options to put in a pool, we have options to put in a world-class fitness center,” he said. “We have options to put in a place for fine dining.”
At the same time, both he and Charles G. Berry, the president of the River Club, say they continue to negotiate and are optimistic something may be worked out to keep the club, presuming it can come up with a competitive bid. And on Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Allison said the listing would no longer include the extra lawn space or a garage with access through the building, though he thought there may be space in the River Club for a garage, should an owner want to put one in.
Some people watching the drama unfold seem impressed that the building is at least making efforts to modernize.
“It’s admirable,” said Michael Gross, a real estate columnist for Avenue Magazine who wrote an article on the complex earlier this year. “They really are trying to kick the building into the present, and maybe what you’re hearing about resistance is just the old guard going, ‘No we like things the way they are.’ It’s like: ‘Daddy, don’t take my Kodachrome away. I don’t want to go digital.’ ”
But most agree that should it happen, the closing of the River Club would be the end of a certain kind of era.
“It’s not the final nail in the coffin of the WASP establishment, but it’s a big one,” Ms. Peterson said. “A big, fat, jumbo, mac daddy one.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 14, 2013
An article last Thursday about the River House co-op in Manhattan misstated the circumstances surrounding the placement of a large neon Pepsi billboard on the other side of the East River from the co-op. It was put up several years before the co-op board rejected Joan Crawford; it was not put there as an act of revenge by Ms. Crawford, who married Pepsi’s president in 1955 and was on its board starting in 1959.
June 09, 1980 Vol. 13 No. 23
Gloria Vanderbilt Charges Bigotry, but a Co-Op Says She Was Snubbed on Her
By Cherie Burns / Meritshttp://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20076676,00.html
Maybe the late Babe Paley was wrong. You can be too slim and too newly rich, or that anyway was the least ugly explanation of why the board of Manhattan's exclusive River House coop rejected Gloria Vanderbilt's $1.1 million bid to buy a two-story co-op.
In affidavits filed with both the New York State Supreme Court and New York City's Commission on Human Rights, Vanderbilt, a sleek 56, charged that the River House directors had acted on the supposition that black entertainer Bobby Short, her frequent escort, was the man she would be bringing home to dinner and domicile. Added Vanderbilt's lawyer, Thomas Andrews: "The seller's attorney asked whether Gloria intended to marry Mr. Short. It is none of their damned business."
Then the directors, stung by the publicity and the taunts of some of their East Side neighbors, denied that race had played any part in the Vanderbilt decision. Their real objection to Gloria, suggested board president Carl Mueller, was that she is a Seventh Avenue designer now better known for her jeans than for her genes (she is the great-great-granddaughter of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt). Though River House has several celebrity owners in residence, including Henry Kissinger and Josh Logan, Vanderbilt's renown was apparently regarded as tacky. "Fame which attends public service and professional achievement," Mueller declared loftily, "is to be distinguished from publicity which is the result of constant cultivation to promote commercial self-interest...I believe that the ceaseless flow of gossip column items about [Vanderbilt's] comings and goings would attract unwelcome publicity to the River House."
The directors also questioned whether, given the "up-and-down nature of the fashion business," Gloria's listed net worth of more than $7 million would be sufficient to back up her offer. "We are convinced that the longer she can drag this out, the more jeans she can sell," declared River House attorney Marion Epley, though he confided privately: "My daughters are furious with me for being against the 'Blue Jean Lady.'"
The financial question, at least, was swiftly laid to rest when Vanderbilt agreed to put $1 million in escrow on the co-op pending the resolution of what could be a lengthy court battle. Meanwhile, she may consider herself a comrade in rejection of Richard Nixon and Diane Keaton, both of whom were reportedly denied entry to River House. There is no danger, however, that the four-times-married heiress and her two at-home children, Carter, 15, and Anderson, 13, will find themselves out on the street. She has three other New York co-ops to her name.
As for Gloria's relationship with club singer Short, things couldn't be better, thank you, or any less likely to end at the altar. Recently the couple co-hosted a party at Maxwell's Plum for the performer's colleagues in the musical Black Broadway. Eubie Blake played piano, and Gloria and Bobby danced the evening away cheek-to-cheek. But a wedding? "I stand behind Gloria," says confirmed bachelor Short, "and I enjoy being with her, but I don't think there's any chance of our getting married. The people at River House have based their objection on a false assumption. That's not the way the world turns."
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"REMAINS OF THE DAY"
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Hornets of Kensington. Not fashion. Style.
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Bill Hornets The Guv’nor |
6 apr 2012
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The Bletchley Circle, Series 2 starts Monday 6th Jan on ITV at 9pm
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The Bletchley Circle / Season 2 / ITV / 4 Episodes/ 6 januari / 27 januari 2014.
The Bletchley Circle is a 2012 television mystery drama miniseries, set in 1952, about four women who used to work as codebreakers at Bletchley Park. A series of murders takes place that seem to have a pattern. The police apparently overlook the pattern, so the women start investigating themselves.On 8 May 2013 it was announced that ITV had ordered a second series
John Crace
theguardian.com, Thursday 6 September 2012 / http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2012/sep/06/the-bletchley-circle-tv-review
TV review: The Bletchley Circle; Wartime Farm
It's been a busy old week for Anna Maxwell Martin. Just two days after standing in the dock as Tina the prison warden in Jimmy McGovern's Accused, she was back as Susan the suburban housewife in The Bletchley Circle (ITV1). Having almost singlehandedly shortened the duration of the second world war by a couple of years with her code-breaking skills, Susan was understandably finding life on civvy street in the early 1950s rather boring until a serial killer appeared near her neck of the woods in London to liven things up.
The idea of a group of former Bletchley Park code-breakers banding together as crime-fighters is more promising for a new crime drama than many, although it required a large suspension of disbelief. Initially, Susan decided to tackle the killer alone and, having stumbled on the concentric theory of geographical profiling at least 20 years ahead of any other forensic psychologist, she persuaded her husband, Dim Tim, to get her an interview with the police commissioner at Scotland Yard, who immediately redeployed several dozen officers to hunt for a body no one knew was missing.
The police search was, however, unsuccessful and Susan was obliged to rope in some of her old wartime buddies. At which point, The Bletchley Circle threatened to dissolve into cosy, afternoon drama cliches, with the three other women all having their well-defined specialisms – Millie the Map Reader, Lucy the Memory Woman and Jean the Blagger – and only deciding to team up after having the obligatory scene in which they all agreed "this is never going to work".
While straying dangerously close to Rosemary and Thyme territory at times, The Bletchley Circle just about kept the right side of the line, thanks to a goodish plot, a strong cast and some unexpectedly stylish touches of 50s period noir. If it can keep the padding to a minimum – why is that every bloke in dramas with strong women leads is either dull, stupid or feckless? – and trust the intelligence of the viewers enough not to downsize the more cerebral, deductive sequences to barely a minute of round-table guesswork, then this is a series that may well have legs.
It can't be a coincidence that ITV's latest crime drama is set amid the rationing of the early 1950s; austerity is on everyone's minds right now and it was certainly very much on view in Wartime Farm (BBC2), the latest historical re-enactment from Ruth Goodman, Alex Langlands and Peter Ginn, the team that previously gave us Victorian Farm and Edwardian Farm.
I know it reflects poorly on me that I don't find Ruth a more engaging presenter: she's obviously a decent, intelligent person who knows her subject well. But something about her manner grates. It's the way she rolls her eyes when she sees the 1930s kitchen for the first time and exclaims: "How am I supposed to manage with that?" and insists on calling the two men "boys". She's too jolly-hockey-sticks, though at least she has a discernible personality, which is more than can be said for the men.
That said, Wartime Farm works far better than Edwardian Farm, which felt exactly the same as Victorian Farm, but with a few more gadgets. There is an immediacy in the way the team are forced to innovate in response to a situation that requires the upheaval of decades of traditional agricultural practices in a matter of weeks. Out had to go the inefficient livestock, and millions of acres had to go under the plough for crop farming.
At least that was the idea. We didn't actually see any cows, sheep or pigs get the chop in vast numbers – and something tells me we may not in future episodes either, as I can't see the real owner of Manor Farm near Southampton topping his entire herd just for the cameras. But there was a lot of enjoyment to be had as our intrepid trio tried to make an underground boring tool to stop a field becoming waterlogged. They failed. Ingloriously. Peter said: "I hope to God we don't have a wet summer, or the Ministry of Agriculture will be down on us like a ton of bricks." Stand by to be interned, Peter.
As ever with this programme, some of the enjoyment was almost certainly accidental. After one reconstruction of a night time manoeuvre by an auxiliary unit – think farmers with guns – the moustachioed officer said: "This has just been an exercise. There are no Germans." Captain Mainwaring couldn't have put it better. In wartime, you take your pleasures where you find them.
The Bletchley Circle – TV review
John Crace
The Guardian, Monday 6 January 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/jan/06/the-739-david-morrissey-sheridan-smith-tv-review
( …) One of the few good things about going back to work in January is that the TV programmers recognise that everyone, bar Carl and Sally who are cosying up in the sauna at the gym, is staying in and so they tend to raise their game. On any other night The Bletchley Circle (ITV) would have got star billing.
We've moved on a few years since the first series – "The Germans are now are friends and the Russians our enemies," said Millie the Map Reader, helpfully – but otherwise everything is still reassuringly the same. London is still rendered in 1950s noir and our four main characters, Susan, Millie, Jean and Lucy, are still largely unencumbered by the burden of any men – Susan looks set to dispense with her dreary husband, the nice-but-dim Tim – in whom the Foreign Office has noticed some well-hidden talent and charisma and now wants to post abroad – and are so free to resume their careers as amateur sleuths.
This time round, one of their former colleagues at Bletchley Park has been charged with murder and, as she didn't do it – obvs – the Famous Four have set out to find out just who did. So far they have turned up an adopted daughter, some top-secret files, a military coverup and a copy of Paradise Lost and failed to spot a suspicious man in a trilby who's been walking a few paces behind them. At times it threatens to get a bit too Enid Blyton as they wander round in a pack solving crimes and making sure they all have roughly the same number of lines each, but it never lapses into twee and hits a sweet enough spot for a wet Monday in January.
Title Directed by Written by Original air date UK Viewing Figures (millions)
Sourced by BARB; includes ITV1 HD and ITV1 +1
1 "Episode One" Andy De Emmony Guy Burt 6 September 2012 5.81
Seven(nine)[4] years after WWII, four women who worked as codebreakers at Bletchley Park have taken up mundane civilian lives. Susan, now a housewife, has collated data about a series of murders. She tries to convince the police she knows where another body is, but they are unable to locate it and dismiss her. Susan turns to her three friends. They work out where the next victim will be taken, find the body, then decide they are the only ones who can track down the killer.
2 "Episode Two" Andy De Emmony Guy Burt 13 September 2012 5.73
The women collate information about the schedules of trains the victims had been on and use this to identify potential suspects. Susan gives the police names of three potential perpetrators. As Susan gives the police the information, Jean and Lucy discover seven similar murders that the police think they have solved, but where the women believe innocent men have been framed and convicted. The police arrest one of the men who was among the names given to them by Susan after finding evidence connecting him to the victims. The women devise a plan to trap the killer using Lucy as bait but it backfires when she goes with the wrong man. Another suspect emerges from a top secret war department headed by Cavendish and Susan comes face to face with the killer at a closed mental hospital.
3 "Episode Three" Andy De Emmony Guy Burt 20 September 2012 5.37
Susan returns with the police but the killer has gone. Susan finds a coded message in her home with Cavendish's address, and going there finds him dead. A postcard on Cavendish's desk provides a clue; and Susan, following the thread, walks alone into a trap set for her by the killer.
Series 2
This series will be made up of two 2-part stories totalling four episodes.
# Title Directed by Written by Original air date UK Viewing Figures (millions)
Sourced by BARB; includes ITV1 HD and ITV1 +1
1 "Episode One" Jamie Payne Guy Burt 6 January 2014 5.46
Former Bletchley Park colleague Alice Merren (Hattie Morahan) is awaiting trial for the murder of a distinguished scientist (Paul McGann). Despite the overwhelming evidence, Jean is determined to prove Alice is innocent and reassembles the women to prove it. Their investigation reveals the misguided reason Alice is willing to hang for a crime she did not commit.
2 "Episode Two" Jamie Payne Guy Burt 13 January 2014 4.98
The circle's investigation discovers three men with chemical burns in a truck crash on Salisbury plain near the chemical warfare establishment at Porton Down. They suspect a high level cover-up involving the death of the scientist and the framing of Alice Merren and they themselves come under surveillance.
3 "Episode Three" Sarah Harding Guy Burt 20 January 2014 3.93 (Overnight)
Due to her notoriety Alice cannot get a job and Millie offers help. Millie is involved in the post war black market and when she disappears the women begin to look for her when the police will not take them seriously. Millie is being held hostage by Soho Maltese gangsters until her shady business partner Jasper (Rob Jarvis) pays money he owes them. While in captivity Millie discovers the gangsters are importing eastern European girls to be sold into prostitution.
4 "Episode Four" Sarah Harding Guy Burt 27 January 2014 3.89 (Overnight)
Jasper is murdered and corruption in the vice squad leads to no action by the police. The women plot to catch the gang red-handed by buying contraband goods, a ruse that enables Lucy to memorise the gangs encrypted ledger. The women return to Bletchley Park, now a college, where Alice's daughter is studying to take a Typex machine, from the derelict huts, and instead a find an old Enigma machine, but they still have to find a way to inform Customs and Excise about the contraband which includes the trafficked girls.
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Mr Selfridge, series 2 ITV
Mr Selfridge, series 2, episode 1, review
Mr Selfridge works more effectively when it doesn't take itself seriously, says Gabriel Tate
By Gabriel Tate / 19 Jan 2014 / The Telegraph / http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/tv-and-radio-reviews/10580316/Mr-Selfridge-series-2-episode-1-review.html
Remember Harry Selfridge? The man who opened his shop in 1909 with brio and bonhomie, flinging his arms wide (was Harry an early proponent of ‘hugging it out’?) and flashing those pearly whites? Well, things were a little different by 1914, as we rejoined Jeremy Piven's entrepreneur following a first series of multiplying business worries and self-inflicted marital trauma. At the start of this second series, he had become a brooding, bespectacled introvert, fielding press queries with a frown. These were, he intoned, "uncertain times". But you can’t keep a good grin down: it was the fifth anniversary of the central London department store, which meant throwing a party.
Having said that, Piven did seem to be reining in the razzle-dazzle a little. It was as if someone had actually reminded him that actors require a little directing to produce their best work, and need not try to outperform the spectacular production design. The result was less exhausting and more engaging, even if he still struggled with portraying the heavier end of the emotional range. It wasn’t such a problem with this opener, with Harry’s personal life in the ascendant as his estranged wife Rose returned and his young son pitched into the family business. And the supporting cast was more than capable of picking up the slack: it was a genuine thrill to see stalwarts of the stage such as Samuel West and Tom Goodman-Hill slumming it with such relish. Of the new additions, Aidan McCardle’s unambiguously villainous Lord Loxley and Polly Walker, playing ‘decadent’ nightclub owner and proto-feminist Delphine Day, made a real impression amid the whirl of characters and stories.
Elsewhere, sexual tension abounded – Harry and Mae, Agnes and Victor, Mrs Mardle and Mr Grove. While you couldn’t call all of it unconsummated after the bedhopping of the previous series, you could certainly deem it unresolved. And that’s before the late return of Spiral’s Gregory Fitoussi as Henri Leclair, even dishier now he’s dishevelled and, as seems likely, the proud bearer of "a past".
Mr Selfridge isn’t the sort of production to risk letting its viewers miss the point. Equally, it’s a drama that’s more comfortable the less seriously it takes itself. So it’s unfortunate that last night’s parting shot, in attempting to address one the grimmest narratives of the 20th century, instead provoked giggles with its ostentatious mise en scène: a newspaper strewn in the gutter, headline blaring "Archduke Franz Ferdinand Assassinated" mere seconds after a vendor has been heard shouting the same sentence not once, but twice. Like Downton Abbey, Mr Selfridge’s welcoming arms may do well to embrace the escapism and keep real human tragedy at a safe distance.Series 2 (2014)
series Title Directed by Written by Original air date Viewers (in millions)
UK viewers by BARB; figures include ITV HD and ITV +1 broadcasts
1 "Episode 1" Anthony Byrne Andrew Davies and Kate Brooke 19 January 2014 6.76
In 1914 the store is celebrating five years, Harry and wife Rose have become increasingly estranged,and he is thrilled when she returns to celebrate the fifth anniversary. There's still a rift between them exacerbated by the influence of novelist Delphine Day and their 15 year old son, Gordon, who wants to leave school and work in the store. Agnes Towler returns from Paris as head of departmental displays. Lady Mae's husband unexpectedly arrives in London and she hears him blackmail his way onto a government military committee amid rumours of impending war.
2 "Episode 2" Anthony Byrne Kate O'Riordan 26 January 2014 5.03 (Overnight)
The staff are worried Selfridge will return to America if war breaks out and to reassure them he organizes an Empire Exhibition in the Palm Court restaurant and a staff party. Trade unionists stir up the warehouse workers to demand more rights and Selfridge's son joins the meeting. The staff party is held, to Selfridge's apprehension, at Delphine's club at his wife's request. hoping it will reconcile them. Lord Loxley thwarts Lady Mae's plans to escape to their country house without him by renting it out and then invites himself to the party to meet Selfridge and Delphine lets it slip that Rose has met Henri Leclair.
3 "Episode 3" Rob Evans Kate Brooke 2 February 2014
Agnes struggles to get the empire exhibition ready, undermined by Mr Thackery and the rival departments needs, and Selfridge offers Henri Leclair, to her delight and Victor Colleano's displeasure, a job to assist her. Lord Loxley pays Selfridge a visit to tell him he can get Winston Churchill to open the event in return for information on leather suppliers, while Lady Mae discovers her husband is bankrupt, information she conceals from Selfridge. Mr Grove handed his final warning when late for work again pulls himself together and discovers 80% of the male staff are eligible for the army. Rose finds her son's, Gordon, collection of racy photos and they have a heart to heart over the relationship of his parents. War is declared between Britain and Germany.
4 "Episode 4" Rob Evans Dan Sefton 9 February 2014
With news of the first horrors of war in Belgium, the men of Selfridges clamour to sign up, while Rose, Delphine and Lady Mae organise a special chocolate sale to aid refugees - which goes down a treat in the store and proves inspirational for Miss Mardle. Thackeray suspects Henri is up to no good, Victor faces a family crisis and Loxley gets his shady money-making plans off the ground.
5 "Episode 5" 16 February 2014
6 "Episode 6" 23 February 2014
7 "Episode 7" 2 March 2014
8 "Episode 8" 9 March 2014
9 "Episode 9" 16 March 2014
10 "Episode 10" 23 March 2014 ↧
Josephine ... Encore ...Josephine: Desire, Ambition, Napoleon, by Kate Williams
Not tonight, Napoleon
JOSEPHINE: DESIRE, AMBITION, NAPOLEON BY KATE WILLIAMS
By JANE SHILLING
PUBLISHED: 18:15 GMT, 2 January 2014/ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-2532781/Not-tonight-Napoleon-JOSEPHINE-DESIRE-AMBITION-NAPOLEON-BY-KATE-WILLIAMS.html
...because you're short and fat and I'm having an affair
At a dinner in Paris in October 1795, a 32-year-old widow, Josephine de Beauharnais, was seated next to Napoleon Bonaparte, an obscure Corsican soldier six years her junior.
He was short, fat, scruffy and rude, but when he met Josephine, he was instantly captivated. ‘It was love... his first passion and he felt it with all the vigour of his nature,’ said his friend, August de Marmont.
Josephine, a mother of two who had been living on her wits in revolutionary Paris for eight years, was less entranced. The prospect of marriage to a penniless soldier was hardly glittering. Her friends thought Napoleon a joke. Her daughter, Hortense, begged her not to marry him.
‘I find myself in a lukewarm state,’ Josephine wrote of her suitor. But she wasn’t overwhelmed with prospective husbands so the wedding, a sparse affair, went ahead.
The following day, Napoleon left for Italy without his wife, setting a pattern of painful partings and blissful reunions that would last throughout their marriage.
Nothing in Josephine’s earlier life had suggested that her destiny was to become an Empress
She was born in 1763 on the French colony of Martinique, the eldest child of a plantation-owning family, and named Marie-Josephe-Rose, shortened to Yeyette.
Unencumbered by education, Yeyette and her sisters ran wild with the house servants and slave children, sucking on the sugar-cane which would rot her teeth so badly that a spiteful observer later described them as looking like cloves. (The enigmatic, close-lipped smile seen in all her portraits was her way of concealing her frightful dentition.)
When Yeyette was 15, her Aunt Edmee wrote from Paris suggesting that one of the girls be sent over to marry her lover’s 17-year-old son, the Vicomte Alexandre de Beauharnais. When Yeyette arrived, her bridegroom was appalled by the plump, shy, unsophisticated girl with a thick Creole accent.
He married her anyway, and sired a son and a daughter, but swiftly returned to his married mistress and demanded a separation.
Yeyette - now Josephine - retreated to a fashionable Paris convent, where she learned the art of seduction; losing weight and softening her Creole accent to an attractive, husky murmur. She took a string of aristocratic lovers.
When Revolution came in 1789, Josephine restyled herself as Citizen Beauharnais, exchanging her silk gowns for muslin dresses. Her husband was guillotined and she was imprisoned, but on August 6, 1794, the day she was due to be executed, she was released. A year later she met Napoleon.
Napoleon adored his new wife, and wrote copious love letters (‘I would be so happy if I could help undress you... Kisses on your mouth, your eyelids, your shoulder, your breast, everywhere...’) but Josephine remained lukewarm and began a wildly indiscreet affair with a Hussar lieutenant, Hippolyte Charles.
Unluckily for her, letters revealing the affair fell into the hands of the British editor of the Morning Chronicle, which published them in November 1798. Having been defeated by Nelson at the Battle of the Nile, Napoleon’s humiliation was complete. The world knew he was a cuckold.
Josephine retreated to her country house at Malmaison while Napoleon raged about divorce and refused to see her, so she rounded up her children and the three of them stood weeping outside his door at five in the morning.
Napoleon relented: ‘I could not bear the sobs of those two children,’ he later declared. But the balance of power in the relationship had shifted. The scruffy little general was now First Consul of France and a national hero. Josephine was merely his consort, vulnerable both to the hordes of beautiful women who longed to seduce Napoleon.
Yet Napoleon could never resist her. ‘We were a very bourgeois couple,’ he wrote, ‘sharing a bedroom and a bed’ - a most unusual habit at the time. Even after Napoleon was crowned Emperor and divorced Josephine for her inability to produce an heir, the love story continued.
Over the years, Josephine’s lazy affection for her husband had bloomed into deep devotion. The day after the divorce, as she wept at Malmaison, Napoleon went to console her and the couple walked hand-in-hand in the rain.
Josephine’s attachment never wavered. His name was on her lips when she died in 1814, aged 51 (her maid said that she died of grief). And her name was the last that Bonaparte spoke on his own deathbed, in exile on St Helena seven years later.
Kate Williams’s entrancing biography of Josephine is a sparkling account of this most fallible and endearing of women. Lazy, extravagant and not especially faithful, she was also kind, charming and possessed a quiet dignity.
Josephine: Desire, Ambition, Napoleon, by Kate Williams, review
When it came to the battle of the sexes, Empress Josephine was in a league of her own, discovers Virginia Rounding
By Virginia Rounding7:00AM BST 26 Oct 2013 / http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/historybookreviews/10402795/Josephine-Desire-Ambition-Napoleon-by-Kate-Williams-review.html
In this new biography of the Empress Josephine, first wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, Kate Williams (whose previous biographical subjects have included Emma Hamilton and the young Queen Victoria) embarks on a whirlwind tour of French history. She covers the conditions of slaves in Martinique, the turmoil of the Revolution and subsequent Terror, and the rise, apotheosis and downfall of Napoleon, in just over 300 pages. If the breathless pace of the writing does not entirely lend itself to in-depth analysis, it does suit the heroine of the tale.
For Josephine, like Napoleon, leaves one somewhat breathless. As Williams summarises her existence, she was “a mistress, a courtesan, a Revolutionary heroine, a collector, a patron and an Empress… in the words of one of her friends, 'an actor, who could play all roles’.”
For all the tempestuousness of the relationship between Napoleon and Josephine, they were a supremely well-matched couple – not only physically (it was sexual love that really bound them together) but also in their daring, their self-invention, their attainment of dazzling success out of humble beginnings.
Williams has made extensive use of the voluminous correspondence of both of these larger-than-life characters, from which it is clear that part of their mutual fascination was indeed this similarity of character.
Born Marie Josèphe Rose (it was Napoleon who later chose to call her Josephine) in 1763, into the sugar-plantation-owning Tascher de la Pagerie family, Josephine was no natural beauty nor endowed with any obvious talents. Her education was desultory, and she appeared destined to stay on Martinique and marry another plantation-owner. But Josephine had other ideas, and opportunity presented itself in the shape of a young man three years her senior, Alexandre de Beauharnais, the son of her aunt’s lover.
This turned out to be a hopeless marriage, but it did get Josephine out of Martinique and into France and it produced two children (Eugène and Hortense). After the collapse of the marriage, it was in the unlikely environment of the Panthémant convent in Paris that Josephine refined the arts of seduction, having realised that the exploitation of her sexual allure represented her only real means of survival.
Williams describes the process: “She softened her voice and lost her accent, practised the art of whispered suggestion and developed a husky, slow tone of voice that became one of her chief attractions. She learnt to cover her mouth with her handkerchief when she laughed, to hide teeth ruined by too much sugar as a child. She lost weight and discovered how to enhance her rather clumsy figure with clinging dresses, shawls and perfect carriage.”
Enormously adaptable, as well as often fortunate (Robespierre’s timely fall saved her from the guillotine, whereas Alexandre de Beauharnais was executed in July 1794), Josephine survived the Revolution and embarked on a series of liaisons with influential men.
As Williams succinctly remarks, “Women pondered the nature of her attraction. Men saw it immediately. She made them think of the boudoir.” She met Napoleon in 1795; the conqueror was conquered, and they married early the following year. And while Napoleon set out to build his empire and dominate Europe, Josephine concentrated on amassing artworks and vast quantities of jewellery.
It was Josephine’s failure to give Napoleon a son that led inevitably to her downfall, Napoleon reluctantly divorcing her in 1810, with her agreement, in order to marry Archduchess Marie-Louise of Austria. Williams brings out the sense of sadness on both sides over this decision.
Despite his determination to procure an heir, Napoleon did not find it easy to abandon Josephine and insisted she continue to be known and honoured as empress even after the divorce, while she sympathised with his need for a son and thus with his action in divorcing her, even while lamenting her fate.
Josephine died of pneumonia in May 1814, at the age of 50. Napoleon, in exile in Elba, learnt of her death from a newspaper and locked himself away for two days, refusing to eat. His last words, on his own deathbed seven years later, were “France, armée, tête d’armée, Joséphine.”
Ironically, given her inability to provide Napoleon with a son, Josephine’s descendants were prominent in French society. They included the two sons of her daughter Hortense: one, legitimate, became the Emperor Napoleon III; the other, illegitimate, was the redoubtable Duc de Morny (referred to only briefly by Williams in her epilogue as “Charles Auguste… a successful Paris businessman”.)
Morny’s ornate tomb in Père Lachaise encapsulates so much about this time and the people who inhabited it, in all their showiness and ersatz splendour. One can’t help admiring their sheer audacity while at the same time finding them (to use a word Williams perhaps overuses) “incredible”.
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| KATE WILLIAMS |
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ABBOTSFORD. The Queen has reopened Abbotsford, Sir Walter Scott's home in the Borders
The Queen has reopened Abbotsford, Sir Walter Scott's home in the Borders
The Queen keeps Scott’s majesty alive in the BordersIn his day, Walter Scott did more than anyone to bind Scotland and the monarchy, so it is fitting the Queen should reopen his home, Abbotsford
By Allan Massie / 04 Jul 2013/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/10159985/The-Queen-keeps-Scotts-majesty-alive-in-the-Borders.html
Sir Walter Scott died in September 1832, and was buried in the ruined Dryburgh Abbey. One hundred and fifty years later, a service of commemoration was held there. We had recently come to live in the Borders and went along, taking our black labrador, Smith, with us. As the congregation dispersed, two ladies approached and one said, “ You’ve brought your dog. Quite right too! Sir Walter would have been delighted.” They were Patricia and Jean Maxwell-Scott, Sir Walter’s great-great-great granddaughters, who still lived in the house he had built, his beloved Abbotsford, and cared for both the house and his memory devotedly.
In time they died, first Patricia and then Dame Jean, and nobody knew what was to become of Abbotsford, for there was no other family member able to shoulder the cost of its upkeep. Abbotsford had long been open to the public, but visitor numbers had fallen from a high of around 80,000 a year to little more than 30,000. Moreover, the building required extensive structural repairs.
Eventually, the executors of Dame Jean’s estate formed a trust. They needed £10 million for the work and for the construction of a visitor centre, and another £3 million for an endowment, so that, as Andrew Douglas-Home, one of the trustees, explained to me, Abbotsford could be self-financing and “not a burden on the public purse”.
The money for the work was raised, but they are still £2.4 million short of the sum needed for the endowment. Nevertheless the work has been done. The house, both the part built by Scott himself and the Victorian wing added by his granddaughter and her husband Sir James Hope-Scott, is now in prime order; and the visitor centre, which offers an interpretation of Scott’s life and work, along with a coffee bar and fine restaurant, has been built. It’s a tremendous achievement.
On Wednesday, Abbotsford was formally and appropriately reopened by Her Majesty the Queen. Formally, because formality is right on such occasions, and the Queen was attended by members of her bodyguard in Scotland, the Company of Archers, whose forest-green uniform was designed by Scott himself; appropriately, because the Queen in her youth had been a guest of Patricia and Jean at Abbotsford, and because Scott, by organising the visit of George IV to Scotland in 1822, the first time a reigning monarch had come north since the 17th century, had done more than anyone to bind Scotland and the monarchy together.
So it was a splendid and happy occasion, a blend of formality and informality as is our style in the Borders. There were some 550 guests, all local, and the mix was eclectic, ranging from a duke and a marquis, Knights of the Thistle, a sprinkling of politicians and such like, to mere scribblers. The young men who this summer carry the standard in the Common Ridings of Selkirk, where Scott was sheriff, and Galashiels and Melrose, were among those present. Sir Walter would have approved of that, too.
Abbotsford matters. It matters obviously to the Borders, and not only as the region’s prime tourist attraction. It matters to Scotland because Scott is our greatest writer, and knowing Abbotsford helps you to get to know and understand him. It matters to the United Kingdom because Scott was a British, as well as Scottish, patriot, who wrote of England as “our sister and ally”, and because his cultural influence throughout the Victorian Age was immeasurable – Kenneth Clark called the Houses of Parliament “a Waverley novel in stone”. It matters to the world because Scott was “the father of the European novel”.
Finally, it matters because his rich and complicated spirit still seems to breathe there. You come close to Walter Scott as you stroll through the rooms where he lived and worked. Patricia and Jean, who cared so tenderly for the house and his memory, can rest happy.
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| The last of his direct descendants to inhabit Abbotsford was his great-great-great-granddaughter Dame Jean Maxwell-Scott (8 June 1923 - 5 May 2004). She inherited it from her elder sister Patricia in 1998. The sisters turned the house into one of Scotland's premier tourist attractions after they had to rely on paying visitors to afford the upkeep of the house. |
1st April – 30th September,
10am – 5pm
1st October – 30th November,
10am – 4pm
Last entry one hour before closing time
Visitor Centre
Open all year
(excluding 25th – 26th December
and 1st – 2nd January)
1st April – 30th September,
10am – 5pm
1st October – 31st March,
10am – 4pm
Last orders for the restaurant one hour before closing time
Abbotsford is a historic country house in the Scottish Borders, at the town of Galashiels, near Melrose, on the south bank of the River Tweed. It was formerly the residence of historical novelist and poet, Walter Scott(Sir Walter Scott,Bt). It is a Category A Listed Building.
The nucleus of the estate was a small farm of 100 acres (0.40 km2), called Cartleyhole, nicknamed Clarty (i.e., muddy) Hole, and was bought by Scott on the lapse of his lease (1811) of the neighbouring house of Ashestiel. He first built a small villa and named it Abbotsford, creating the name from a ford nearby where previously abbots of Melrose Abbey used to cross the river. Scott then built additions to the house and made it into a mansion, building into the walls many sculptured stones from ruined castles and abbeys of Scotland. In it he gathered a large library, a collection of ancient furniture, arms and armour, and other relics and curiosities, especially connected with Scottish history, notably the Celtic Torrs Pony-cap and Horns and the Woodwrae Stone, all now in the Museum of Scotland.
The last and principal acquisition was that of Toftfield (afterwards named Huntlyburn), purchased in 1817. The new house was then begun and completed in 1824.
Ground plan of Abbotsford House.
The general ground-plan is a parallelogram, with irregular outlines, one side overlooking the Tweed; and the style is mainly the Scottish Baronial. Into various parts of the fabric were built relics and curiosities from historical structures, such as the doorway of the old Tolbooth in Edinburgh.
Scott had only enjoyed his residence one year when (1825) he met with that reverse of fortune which involved the estate in debt. In 1830 the library and museum were presented to him as a free gift by the creditors. The property was wholly disencumbered in 1847 by Robert Cadell, the publisher, who cancelled the bond upon it in exchange for the family's share in the copyright of Sir Walter's works.
Scott's only son Walter did not live to enjoy the property, having died on his way from India in 1847. Among subsequent possessors were Scott's son-in-law, John Gibson Lockhart, J. R. Hope Scott, QC, and his daughter (Scott's great-granddaughter), the Hon. Mrs Maxwell Scott.
The house was opened to the public in 1833, but continued to be occupied by Scott's descendants until 2004. The last of his direct descendants to inhabit Abbotsford was his great-great-great-granddaughter Dame Jean Maxwell-Scott (8 June 1923 - 5 May 2004). She inherited it from her elder sister Patricia in 1998. The sisters turned the house into one of Scotland's premier tourist attractions after they had to rely on paying visitors to afford the upkeep of the house. It had electricity installed only in 1962. Dame Jean was at one time a lady-in-waiting to Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, patron of the Dandie Dinmont Club, a breed of dog named after one of Sir Walter Scott's characters; and a horse trainer, one of whose horses, Sir Wattie, ridden by Ian Stark, won two silver medals at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea.
Scottish Borders Council is considering an application by a property developer to build a housing estate on the opposite bank of the River Tweed from Abbotsford, to which Historic Scotland and the National Trust for Scotland object.
Sir Walter Scott rescued the "jougs" from Threave Castle in Dumfries and Galloway and attached them to the castellated gateway he built at Abbotsford.
As Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire, Scott needed to spend part of the year in easy reach of the courtroom in Selkirk, so he spent legal terms in Edinburgh and legal vacations in the country. For a few years he rented a house at Ashestiel from a cousin, but in 1811 he bought his own ‘mountain farm’, as he described it, ‘on a bare haugh and bleak bank by the side of the Tweed’. It was called Newarthaugh on the deeds, but was Cartleyhole (and sometimes ‘Clarty Hole’) to local people. He immediately renamed it Abbotsford, after the ford across the Tweed below the house used in former times by the monks of Melrose Abbey.
Scott was in such a hurry to turn his bare bank into a paradise that he was already planting trees before taking full possession in May 1811. The existing farmhouse was small for a man with four children. Nevertheless, Scott’s first priority was not to enlarge the house but to acquire more land from his neighbours. With money flowing in from his poetry and early novels, he was able within a few years to expand the estate from 110 acres to 1400. At the same time he made some small improvements to the house, most of which were swept away by later stages of building. The stables which he built still survive, but not the kitchen, laundry and spare rooms housed in a building across the courtyard.
At no time was there a grand plan for the creation of Abbotsford. Scott’s initial intention was to keep the Cartleyhole farmhouse and add a few rooms to give his family more space. Abbotsford was not to be a mansion. Rambling, whimsical and picturesque were the expressions he used at different times to describe it.
So he filled in the courtyard to the west of the farmhouse with a Study, a Dining Room, an Armoury (which he referred to as his ‘Boudoir’) and a conservatory; the last of these has since been demolished. On the floors above there were two bedrooms, three dressing-rooms and three attic rooms. Below the main rooms were basement kitchens with windows looking out towards the Tweed. The new Dining Room was first used on the 8th of October 1818, but for dancing rather than dinner, as the carpentry work was still in progress.
Several professional architects, craftsmen, dilettante designers and friends contributed ideas and sketches. These included the architect Edward Blore, the cabinet-maker George Bullock and Scott’s friends, the artist James Skene and the actor Daniel Terry. But the principal architect was William Atkinson, who was responsible later for the remodelling of Chequers in Buckinghamshire. The building firm for the first phase at Abbotsford was Sanderson & Paterson of Galashiels. The interiors were decorated by David Ramsay Hay of Edinburgh, who later redecorated the Palace of Holyroodhouse for Queen Victoria.
By 1818 Scott was already talking of adding a library. Money continued to pour in from his writing and he took the opportunity of lengthy visits to London in 1819 and 1820 to discuss plans for a new phase of building work with Atkinson. The old farmhouse was to be demolished to make room for a large rectangular building housing an Entrance Hall, a new Study, a Library and a Drawing Room. John Smith of Darnick, a local stonemason, was eventually hired as the principal builder and Scott again acted as his own clerk of works. Windows, doors and woodwork were manufactured in London and much of the furniture and furnishings were acquired there too, either from Bullock’s workshop or from purchases made on Scott’s behalf by Daniel Terry. The cottage was pulled down in January 1822 and the new library, though not quite complete, was ready enough to be used as the venue for a Christmas ball in 1824. The drawing room too was in use for some time before the fireplace was installed and its distinctive, hand-painted wallpaper from China was hung.
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THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL - Official International Trailer HD
Wes Anderson's THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL recounts the adventures of Gustave H, a legendary concierge at a famous European hotel between the wars, and Zero Moustafa, the lobby boy who becomes his most trusted friend.
The Grand Budapest Hotel: Berlin 2014 – first look review
Wes Anderson's new film adapts the spirit of Stefan Zweig into a Ruritanian picaresque stuffed full of bizarre character studies
Andrew Pulver
theguardian.com, Thursday 6 February 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/feb/06/grand-budapest-hotel-review-berlin-2014-wes-anderson
Whatever the patchiness of the rest of its lineup, the Berlin film festival tends to start off with a bang, and this year is no exception: the world premiere of the new film from Wes Anderson, that master of archly sculpted dialogue and meticulous, retrofitted design. The arrival of The Grand Budapest Hotel is particularly appropriate, for this is the moment in the Anderson oeuvre when he turns to consider all things Mitteleuropäische – refracted, as a closing credit tells us, through the work of the prolific Austrian writer Stefan Zweig.
Zweig specialised in novellas – Letter from an Unknown Woman, Fear, The Royal Game – normally designed to illuminate some plangent melodrama in interwar Vienna. Without being a direct adaptation of anything specific, The Grand Budapest Hotel distils many of the story's elements. Anderson has concocted what is essentially a Ruritanian picaresque, stuffed full of bizarre character studies, and fashioned with his, by now familiar, handcrafted attention to detail. In fact, like much of Anderson's work, you get the feeling many of the scenes have been lifted directly from a sketchbook; certain sequences here are animated with little discernible effect on the general sensibility.
The central figure in the film is one Gustave H (Ralph Fiennes, on mercurial form), the concierge of the eponymous hotel, which is located not in Ruritania but an equally fictitious principality called Zubrowka. Gustave's activities are relayed to us via the very Zweig-esque device of an itinerant novelist (Jude Law) encountering the hotel's mysterious owner, one Zero Moustafa (F Murray Abraham, playing the rich, sonorous tones card for all it's worth), who unburdens himself of his childhood stint as a lobby boy back in the 1930s.
As seen through the eyes of Moustafa's younger self (played by Tony Revolori), Gustave's mastery of the concierge arts includes regularly seducing the desiccated female aristocrats who throng the hotel in its golden age. One of these, played with customary searchlight-through-fog brilliance by Tilda Swinton, leaves Gustave a valuable painting in her will; her scowling, posturing family, headed by Adrien Brody (who, it must be said, looks born to wear a hussar's uniform), will stop at nothing to deprive Moustafa of his inheritance.
In some hands, this convoluted, labyrinthine narrative would end up a sprawling mess, but such is Anderson's storytelling discipline – informed and sustained by the precision of the cinematography and set design – that it never gets away from him. As Gustave skips from hotel lobby to prison camp, from railway carriage to drawing room, the architecture of this picaresque remains entirely lucid. It helps, a little, that Anderson's clout has secured an instantly memorable A-list face for virtually every role, however small: Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe, Edward Norton, Saiorse Ronan, Jeff Goldbum, Harvey Keitel, Matthew Amalric … the list goes on.
With this film, Anderson has built a thoroughly likable vision of a prewar Europe – no more real, perhaps, than the kind of Viennese light-operetta that sustained much of 1930s Hollywood – but a distinctive, attractive proposition all the same. It's a nimblefooted, witty piece, but one also imbued with a premonitory sadness at the coming conflagration; the scenes where Gustave and Zero are threatened by jackbooted thugs are properly alarming. In this, the film reflects Zweig's own miserable death in 1942: a suicide pact in Brazil with his wife, exiled like so many Austrian Jews, his dreams of European unity shattered. Anderson's film is not a memorial to him, exactly; but it summons up, rather wonderfully, the spirit Zweig represents.
The Grand Budapest Hotel: new trailer released
Watch the new trailer for Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, starring Ralph Fiennes and Saoirse Ronan
By Matt Lewis 09 Jan 2014 / http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturevideo/filmvideo/cinema-trailers/10559388/The-Grand-Budapest-Hotel-new-trailer-released.html
A new trailer for Wes Anderson's whimsical comedy-drama The Grand Budapest Hotel has been released.
Featuring a highly impressive cast including Ralph Fiennes, Saorsie Ronan, Bill Murray, Edward Norton and Jude Law, The Grand Budapest Hotel recounts the adventures of Gustave H. (Fiennes), a legendary concierge at a famous hotel from interwar Europe, and Zero Moustafa (newcomer Tony Revolori), the lobby boy who becomes his most trusted friend. The latter's adolescent love interest is provided by Saorsie Ronan.
When a former guest of the hotel, played by Tilda Swinton with heavy prosthetics, turns up dead and a valuable painting of hers is surprisingly bequeathed to Gustave, questions are raised and the police, led by Edward Norton’s Henckels, get involved.
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