Maskelyne joined the Royal Engineers when the Second World War broke out, thinking that his skills could be used in camouflage. A story runs that he convinced sceptical officers by creating the illusion of a German warship on the Thames using mirrors and a model. Maskelyne was trained at the Camouflage Development and Training Centre at FarnhamCastle in 1940. He found the training boring, asserting in his book that "a lifetime of hiding things on the stage" had taught him more about camouflage "than rabbits and tigers will ever know". The camoufleur Julian Trevelyan commented that he "entertained us with his tricks in the evenings" at Farnham, but that Maskelyne was "rather unsuccessful" at actually camouflaging "concrete pill-boxes". Brigadier Dudley Clarke, the head of the 'A' Force deception department, recruited Maskelyne to work for MI9 in Cairo. He created small devices intended to assist soldiers to escape if captured and lectured on escape techniques. These included tools hidden in cricket bats, saw blades inside combs, and small maps on objects such as playing cards. Maskelyne was then briefly a member of Geoffrey Barkas's camouflage unit at Helwan, near Cairo, which was set up in November 1941. He was made head of the subsidiary "Camouflage Experimental Section" at Abbassia. By February 1942 it became clear that this command was not successful, and so he was "transferred to welfare"—in other words, to entertaining soldiers with magic tricks. Peter Forbes writes that the "flamboyant" magician's contribution was. either absolutely central (if you believe his account and that of his biographer) or very marginal (if you believe the official records and more recent research). His nature was "to perpetuate the myth of his own inventive genius, and perhaps he even believed it himself". However, Clarke had encouraged Maskelyne to take credit for two reasons: as cover for the true inventors of the dummy machinery and to encourage confidence in these techniques amongst Allied high command. Maskelyne's book about his exploits, Magic: Top Secret, ghost-written, was published in 1949. Forbes describes it as lurid, with "extravagant claims of cities disappearing, armies re-locating, dummies proliferating (even submarines)—all as a result of his knowledge of the magic arts". Further, Forbes notes, the biography of Maskelyne by David Fisher was "clearly under the wizard's spell". In his book, Maskelyne claims his team produced dummy men, dummy steel helmets, dummy guns by the ten thousand, dummy tanks, dummy shell flashes by the million, dummy aircraft... A study by Richard Stokes argues that much of the story concerning the involvement of Maskelyne in counterintelligence operations as described in the book "Magic: Top Secret" was pure invention and that no unit called the "Magic Gang" ever existed. Maskelyne's role in the deception war was marginal. Christian House, reviewing Rick Stroud's book The Phantom Army of Alamein in The Independent, describes Maskelyne as "one of the more grandiose members" of the Second World War desert camouflage unit and "a chancer tasked with experimental developments, who fogged his own reputation as much as any desert convoy". David Hambling, writing on Wired, critiques David Fisher's uncritical acceptance of Maskelyne's stories: "A very colorful account of Maskelyne’s role is given in the book The War Magician—reading it you might think he won the war single-handed". Hambling denies Maskelyne's supposed concealment of the Suez Canal: "In spite of the book's claims, the dazzle light/s were never actually built (although a prototype was once tested)". In 2002 The Guardian wrote: "Maskelyne received no official recognition. For a vain man this was intolerable and he died an embittered drunk. It gives his story a poignancy without which it would be mere chest-beating"

That's magic

Which is where Jasper Maskelyne came in. He was the most famous magician of the 30s and that superbly eerie name still carries a certain resonance. A dapper man. Patent-leather hair parted in the middle, matinee idol moustache, a fluent dancer's figure. "A handsome bugger," as one desert rat recalled, without, you felt, excessive warmth. Another said: "He wasn't easy to get on with. He was a hard taskmaster. His favourite expression - it didn't matter if you were a colonel or a private - was 'Go to hell!'"
In Maskelyne's memoirs, the basis of Magic at War (Channel 4), he tends to repeat the phrases "I think I may say without undue vanity..." and "I think I may say without particular vanity..." Have a little guess which quality one can confidently credit him with.
All the Maskelynes were magicians. A Maskelyne invented the coin-in-the-slot lavatory door and was, therefore, responsible for the enduring euphemism of spending a penny, which has defied inflation and decimalisation.
On the outbreak of war, he was posted to the western desert. Resisting the army's assumption that he was good for nothing but amusing the troops, he collected a group of like-minded mavericks to work on camouflage. He called them his crazy gang. An electrician, chemist, stage-scenery maker, architect, picture restorer, painter and a carpenter who, he added, had never earned more than £3 a week in his life.
For his first trick he made jeeps look like tanks with a superstructure of plywood. (As the jeep scuttled across the sand it looked endearingly like an old lady at the seaside holding up her skirts.) For his second, he made tanks look like trucks. For his big finish, and David Copperfield would appreciate this, he made AlexandriaHarbour and the Suez Canalvanish. German bombers were misdirected to a mock Alexandriabuilt in an adjacent bay and the Suez canalwas masked with mirrors.
This trick was so clever I could not understand it even when a professor of physics and astronomy explained it. Particularly when a professor of physics and astronomy explained it. He devised a spinning mirrored cone which split a searchlight beam into a dazzling vortex nine miles wide at the top. Imagine a spinning shuttlecock with feathers of light. Then he filled the night sky with shuttlecocks.
Dr Badsey of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst said drily, "A number of people with unusual jobs end up writing How I Won the War Single-Handedly. You are not actually under oath when writing your own memoirs."
Nobody can deny that Maskelyne helped to win the Battle of El Alamein. Montgomery's counter-attack was coming from the north. It was, therefore, crucial that Rommel should expect it from the south. Maskelyne mass-produced, as he put it, "Tricks and swindles and devices intended to bewilder and mislead the crop-headed Axis commanders." His 2000 dummy tanks left dummy tracks and spat dummy gunfire. The airwaves were full of dummy bustle: "People rivetting things together and muffled oaths as they dropped hammers on their toes." Rommel calculated that the dummy pipeline could not be completed before November so he went home on leave. Monty attacked. Making Rommel vanish was Maskelyne's masterpiece.
Somehow you feel that, because the ghost army never existed, it is still there, sweating, swearing, waiting for the order to attack.

 http://www.helenrappaport.com/

Ashcombe House, also known as Ashcombe Park, is a Georgian manor house, set in 1,134 acres (4.59 km2) of land, on Cranborne Chase, in the parish of Berwick St. John, near Salisbury, in Wiltshire, UK. The house is about equidistant between the villages of Berwick St. John and Tollard Royal. It is listed on the Statutory List of Buildings of Special Architectural or Historic Interest as a Grade II structure by English Heritage.
There have been several buildings on the site. The first house was built in 1686 by a local squire, Robert Barber. Only some fifty years later, in 1740, the Barber family entirely demolished the 1686 house and rebuilt on the site.
In 1750 Anne Wyndham inherited the house. The next year she married the Hon. James Everard Arundell, third son of the 6th Baron Arundell of Wardour. In 1754 the architect Francis Cartwright largely remodelled the interior of the house for the Arundells.
In 1815 the Ashcombe Estate was purchased from Lady Arundell by Thomas Grove the younger of Ferne House for £8,700. Thomas Grove's grandson Sir Walter demolished most of the 1740 house in around 1870. Sir Walter later sold Ashcombe House to the 13th Duke of Hamilton, who in turn sold Ashcombe to Mr R. W. Borley of Shaftesbury after World War I.
The present-day Ashcombe House was originally part of the much larger mid-eighteenth century structure, and is an L-shaped three-bay survival of the eastern wing. There is a five-bay orangery close to the house.



The photographer and designer Cecil Beaton first visited the house in 1930, taken there by the sculptor Stephen Tomlin together with the writer Edith Olivier. He was later to write of his first impression of the house, as he approached it through the arch of the gatehouse:

None of us uttered a word as we came under the vaulted ceiling and stood before a small, compact house of lilac-coloured brick. We inhaled sensuously the strange, haunting - and rather haunted - atmosphere of the place ... I was almost numbed by my first encounter with the house. It was as if I had been touched on the head by some magic wand.

That same year Mr Borley rented Ashcombe House to Beaton for £50 a year, a very small rent, on the condition that Beaton would make improvements to the house, which was all-but derelict. Beaton employed the Austrian architect Michael Rosenauer to make substantial alterations to the material of the house, including a passageway through the house to unite the front and the back, and elongating the windows. Plumbing and electricity were installed. The artist Rex Whistler designed the Palladian front door surround, with its pineapple made from Bath stone. Urns were positioned on the roof and the orangery was converted into Beaton's studio.
Beaton entertained lavishly at Ashcombe House, and his houseguests included many notable people of the time, including actors and artists such as Tallulah Bankhead, Diana Cooper, Ruth Ford and Lord Berners. Artists Whistler, Salvador Dalí, Christian Bérard and Augustus John and stage designer Oliver Messel painted murals in the house, and Dalí used it as the backdrop of one of his paintings. Little remains of the Beaton-era interior design, although in the "circus room", which once contained a Whister-designed bed shaped like a carousel, one mural of a lady on a circus horse remains, painted during a hectic weekend party when all guests wielded paintbrushes.
Beaton's lease expired in 1945 and he was heartbroken to be forced to leave the house: his biographer Hugo Vickers has stated that Beaton never got over the loss of Ashcombe. Beaton detailed his life at the house in his book Ashcombe: The Story of a Fifteen-Year Lease, first published in 1949 by B. T. Batsford. The dustjacket of the first edition of the book featured a painting by Whistler, with the orangery on the left of the painting (on the back cover) and Ashcombe House itself to the right, on the front cover; this image has been reproduced on the cover of the 1999 publication of the book.
In 1948 Beaton designed a fabric, which is still available, which he named "Ashcombe Stripe" after Ashcombe House.
Right up until his death in 1980 Beaton owned a late eighteenth century painting of the house, thought to have been painted around 1770. It is now held at the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum in Salisbury, Wiltshire, bought from a sale of Beaton's collections held by Christie's auctioneers.
Beaton's landlord, Hugh Borley, R. W. Borley's son, lived in the house from 1946 until his death in 1993. He grew increasingly eccentric and resented the fame which Beaton's book had brought to the house, refusing all offers to sell it and chasing off sight-seers with dogs or threatening them with guns.



On the Beaton track
When Cecil Beaton was forced to leave Ashcombe, it broke his heart. His biographer, Hugo Vickers, reveals the story behind an extraordinary sale.
Ashcombe requires an owner with exquisite taste
By Hugo Vickers (in Telegraph 09 Jun 2001)

IT is not often that a terrestrial paradise comes on to the market. Ashcombe is an elegant Georgian house, rich in romantic legend and lost in the valleys near Win Green, on the borders of Dorset and Wiltshire. Its heyday was the period between 1930 and 1945, when it was leased by photographer, designer and aesthete Cecil Beaton. Then an iron curtain fell, and few were admitted to the mysterious domain. Its owner, Hugh Borley, winced at the mention of the name Beaton. He never forgave the acrimony that surrounded Beaton's departure, and was livid at the memory of the photographer and his camp followers in fancy costumes, parading in the chalk valleys and upsetting the pheasants. He resented the publication of Beaton's book, Ashcombe, in 1949, and what he deemed the "notoriety" that it brought to the house.

From then on, when not occupied with his rolling acres and the rearing of his pheasants, Mr Borley's chief concern was to keep fascinated devotees from invading his territory. He set his dogs on Lord Snowdon, chasing him up the hill, and threatened to shoot more than one distinguished architectural historian.

Charged with the task of writing Beaton's authorised biography, I wrote Mr Borley a courteous letter and was rewarded with an unnecessarily rude message on my answering machine. Nevertheless, I did meet him and I did see Ashcombe in November 1983, largely through the kindness of one of the few neighbours he trusted. I was taken there under the assumed name of Richard Reynolds. Down the steep hill we drove, past signs marked "Private" and into the jaws of three barking, golden Labradors. Passing under an arch, at last I saw the much described view, which never loses its impact, of the sturdy little manor house nestling at the foot of a vivid green lawn.

We tracked down the owner to the kitchen garden. He looked like a retired naval commander - short, stout, hard-boned, clean-shaven - and was wearing a woollen waistcoat, a grubby red tie and a gold chain from button-hole to breast pocket. His fingernails were un-cared for, and he was missing a tooth in the lower jaw. He was smoking a pipe.

We were invited in, and I was surprised to find that the interior managed to be both miniature and grand. Behind the house was a horseshoe of steep hills. Mr Borley took us into his sitting-room, threw open the French windows and proudly showed us the sweeping view along the valley beneath. The conversation, in which I took little part, concerned the men of the estate, the foreman and the shepherds. He was clearly fastidious about tax and regularly consulted a scrapbook into which he had pasted various clippings relating to VAT.
This dreary pragmatism was a far cry from the romantic era of Beaton, who was lured to the house by the sculptor Stephen Tomlin, who said that it was "a sort of Grand Meaulnes place". When Beaton walked under the arch in 1930, with Tomlin and Edith Olivier, he fell in love with it at once: "None of us uttered a word as we came under the vaulted ceiling and stood before a small, compact house of lilac-coloured brick. We inhaled sensuously the strange, haunting - and rather haunted - atmosphere of the place".
There had been a larger house on this site, which had passed through many hands before descending into the Arundell family. In April 1815, Charlotte Grove (who spent her entire life within walking distance of her home, Ferne, at Berwick St John), recorded that her brother, Thomas, bought the Ashcombe estate for £8,700. "The business relative to Ashcombe finally settled", she wrote, "& it is my brother's. [How happy this has made me.]" Thomas Grove's grandson, Sir Walter, pulled down the imposing manor house in about 1870, and later sold the estate - and Ferne - to the wheelchair-bound 13th Duke of Hamilton. After the First World War, the Duke sold it to Mr R W Borley of Barton Hill House, Shaftesbury, the former owner of the Grosvenor Arms. He was Hugh Borley's father.
Borley senior rented it to Cecil Beaton for £50 a year, on the understanding that various improvements would be made. Beaton put in plumbing and electricity, and converted what was then a derelict cottage into the gem of a house that it is today. The Austrian architect, Michael Rosenauer, set about elongating the windows and making a passageway through the house to unite the front and back. Rex Whistler designed the front doorway, with its pineapple made from Bath stone. Urns were positioned on the roof; unconventional statues took up their poses in the gardens, the orangery was converted into a studio and doves fluttered about.
As for the interior, it was adorned in a clutter of baroque fantasy. White colours, as favoured by Syrie Maugham, provided a backdrop for a profusion of glass, shells and feathers, and the talents of Beaton's friends - from Salvador Dali, Christian Berard and Rex Whistler, to Oliver Messel, Augustus John, Francis Rose, and Lord Berners - were much in evidence. Little of this survives today - though the so-called circus room, which once sported a bed designed like a carousel roundabout, still has one mural of a lady on a circus-horse, which was painted during a frenetic weekend party when all guests wielded paintbrushes.
The result was a dream haven, where, at least so far as the image was concerned, life was a sylvan idyll. During Beaton's tenure there was a fete champetre, films were made, and many a beauty posed on the lawn. There were weekend parties, romps, tiffs and moments of blissful happiness tempered with abject despair. The actress Ruth Ford disported herself under a tree; Lady Diana Cooper leafed through the photograph albums in the yachting cap she would still wear half a century later. Guests meandered down into the valley to take tea in a deserted omnibus.
Beaton's father urged his son not to pour money into rented accommodation, and he had a point. The Borleys watched in the wings, and when the lease ran out, they clawed it back, taking advantage of all his improvements while erasing most of the eccentricity. Beaton never got over the loss of Ashcombe and frequently returned to gaze down into the valley, only once daring to sneak down for a furtive look.
Hugh Borley, the man I met, moved into the house in 1946 and lived there until his death in 1993. About three times a year, American millionaires wrote imploring him to sell it. "Name your price," they said, but he never budged. As he grew older and more disagreeable, he came to rely on whisky for solace, and the house fell into decline. As the deathwatch beetle invaded room after room, Borley closed the doors and never went in again. He slept under ancient blankets, and, when he died, there were enough empty whisky bottles on site to fill a lorry.
Shortly before his death, Borley ran out of money and sold the property to the present owners, David and Toni Parkes, on the understanding that he would eke out his last days in the house he loved. Since 1993, the Parkses have restored the house to its full glory, savouring the Beaton connection to the full. In 1999, their friend and neighbour, David Burnett of Dovecote Press, republished Ashcombe. For the launch, Beaton's family and friends gathered at the house, some after an absence of 50 years, others for the first time. It was my strange privilege to cast off my Richard Reynolds disguise and, at a spot not far from where Borley's ashes lay, tell the guests that the launch was a literary version of the falling of the Berlin Wall.
Ashcombe is now on the open market for the first time in its long history, and the astonishing sum of £9 million is being asked for it. This would amaze both Beaton and Borley, but besides the romantic legend, this is a property of substance.
Seeing it again on a glorious May day, I needed no convincing that this is a unique place. The house may be small, with only six bedrooms, but the studio opposite has seven, as well as a large room, presently used for billiards, which would be ideal for parties. Beaton wrote: "None of the rooms possessed the disadvantages of being cottagey and each window seemed to have a more dazzling view than the last."
The main view looks down one of several valleys, but the 1,134-acre estate contains three superb chalk valleys, another six-bedroom house, a farmhouse, two cottages and a bungalow. The pheasant and partridge shoot, which has been built up over the last eight years, is a legend in itself. (Since 1998, 15,638 partridges and 20,233 pheasants have been brought down.) There is even a Quaker burial ground.
Anything connected with Cecil Beaton draws unbridled enthusiasm. I remember the numerous visitors who came to Reddish House, Broad Chalke, where Beaton subsequently lived, when it was for sale in 1980. We kept brief notes on all who came, swiftly placing those who did not want to see the boiler-room into the "rubberneck" category.
Ashcombe needs a new owner with that rare combination of considerable financial resources and exquisite taste. But it is unlikely that he will feel other than Beaton, who relished being "the master upon Olympia, looking down upon my heavenly world".






Shortly before Borley's death, the house was sold in a private sale, to David and Toni Parkes, who set about restoring the house. They were friends with the director of the Dovecote Press, which republished Beaton's book on Ashcombe on its fiftieth anniversary in 1999, and so a special launch party was held at the house. When the house came up for sale in 2001, the first time it had been on the open market since just after World War I, there was a great deal of interest. Madonna and Guy Ritchie were the successful purchasers, after they were told by Hugo Vickers, Beaton's biographer, of its being up for sale. Like Beaton, the couple were similarly struck by their first encounter with the house:

"We just fell in love with it," Madonna explains. "In the summertime it's the most beautiful place in the world." The memory of their day at Ashcombe "just stayed with us, haunted us for a really long time," she remembers. Eventually they could resist its lure no longer, and Ashcombe was theirs.

In 2002 the couple erected 12 foot high security gates without first obtaining the necessary Listed Building Consent, but were granted retrospective permission. Recent building work at the house includes a large extension, roof alterations and conversion; and a March 2008 planning application for a swimming pool at the house has been approved. In May 2008 it was reported that the couple were considering selling the house; in October 2008 with the news of the couple's impending divorce it was stated that Guy Ritchie will receive the estate as part of the divorce settlement. On 3 March 2009, planning permission was granted to Ritchie by Salisbury District Council for the creation of a sporting lake on the estate. It is situated on land to the north west of Lower Ashgrove Farm.
The grounds of the house are noted for their re-established wildlife, including fallow deer. The grounds are also noted as one of the top game bird shooting venues in the country: The Field magazine voted it one of the UK's ten top venues for pheasant shooting. Public rights of way run through the grounds, and are open to the public all year round.


Madonna bids for Cecil Beaton's £9m home
By Angela Pertusini, Property Editor
08 Aug 2001

MADONNA, the American pop star, was said yesterday to be on the verge of buying Ashcombe, a large estate in Dorset which was once the home of the photographer Cecil Beaton and carries a guide price of £9 million.

Ashcombe was only put on the market in the middle of June but interest in the 1,200 acre estate has been such that FPD Savills, the agency handling the sale, asked potential buyers to submit their "best and final" offers by Aug 1.

This means that the house could be sold for much more than its guide price.

The singer, who has viewed the six-bedroom Georgian house and its land more than once, is believed to be among the bidders and the sale is expected to be formalised by the end of the week.

This is the first time that Ashcombe has been for sale on the open market since the First World War. It is an exceptionally private house, hidden in its own valleys which contain one of the country's best shoots

A spokesman for Cluttons, the country homes agency, said: "Madonna has had people scouring the country for the 'right' estate. She is known to want something with a shoot because her husband is a keen sportsman. Ashcombe is a very attractive prospect and bound to generate attention from someone of her means."
The property is within easy reach of her home in central London and close to the Wiltshire estate of Sting and his wife, Trudie Styler. They are close friends of the singer and first introduced her to her husband, Guy Ritchie.
Ashcombe became the weekend retreat of London society during Beaton's residency. He was a generous host who, having restored the house in exchange for a very low rent, entertained there on a lavish scale, regularly inviting figures such as Tallulah Bankhead, Diana Cooper and Lord Berners to stay.
Friends including Rex Whistler, Salvador Dali and Augustus John returned his hospitality by painting murals. Leaving his home of 14 years when the lease expired in 1945 was said to have broken Beaton's heart.
The present owners, David and Toni Parkes, bought Ashcombe from Beaton's landlord, Hugh Borley, in the early Nineties. He had let the house deteriorate during the 50 years he lived there but the Parkes have restored it meticulously.


In her 40s – author , songstress, actress, filmmaker – Madonna has influence and reach that may be global, but her base for family and friends is focused on and English country estate. Hamish Bowles talks to this ever-evolving force about her film and book, and the pleasures of commitment.
“Who would have thunk it?” says Madonna with a laugh. “The last thing I thought I would do is marry some laddish, shooting, pubgoing nature lover – and the last thing he thought he was going to do was marry some cheeky girl from the Midwest who doesn’t take no for an answer!”
In the warm ivory sanctuary of her office in her ambassadorial Georgian town house in London, Madonna is on the latest turn of the roller coaster that is her thrilling, adventuresome, and fecund life. The room, its walls expensively craquelure’d to resemble fractured eggshells, its pale taffeta curtains billowing in the chill English breeze, is more Hollywood boudoir than office. Propped against the fireplace, newly arrived from her rambling Wallace Neff-designed twenties hacienda in Los Angeles, sits Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Monkey; Madonna wanted to enjoy it privately for a few days before it is sent off to Tate Modern as one of the stars of their blockbuster Kahlo retrospective. On the mantel, nestling between a brace of glamorous Francis Picabia portraits, is Kahlo’s traumatic My Birth. “She’s a bit shocking, that one,” says Madonna, who clearly does not shy from unsettling images. Elsewhere in this room is Helmut Newton’s photograph of a perfectly groomed glamazon with a large gun in her mouth, and on an art tour of the house, Madonna points out the photographer Collier Schorr’s life-size portrait of a beautiful flaxen-haired boy in Hitler Youth costume. “People don’t know what to think when they come here and see this photograph,” she tells me. “I’ll let them be… confused.” Does Madonna, who presented the prestigious Turner Prize at the Tate in December 2001 (where she introduced herself as Mrs. Guy Ritchie), collect Brit Art, too? “I have a Francis Bacon,” she says coyly. “Does that count?”
Speaking in carefully modulated tones, dressed with faux-bourgeois sobriety (this afternoon in Issa’s prim satin blouse with a print of flying ducks, black Kate Hepburn pants, and Marc Jacobs teal lizard shoes), a flotilla of charming, noiseless assistants close at hand and a courtly husband making polite but distracted small talk, she has the air of an Edwardian dollar princess – the moneyed American belles who were married off to impecunious British nobles in the golden age – and the fragile beauty and substantial real estate to match. But no one understands metamorphosis better than Madonna; she even named her 2004 tour “Re-Invention.” That tour is the subject of Madonna’s documentary I’m Going to Tell You a Secret, directed by Jonas Akerlund and to be released later this year. In some ways the new movie is a pendant to 1991′s Truth or Dare, which a mellower Madonna now admits “in some ways is hard for me to watch. I was a very selfish person. You go through periods of your life where the world does revolve around you, but you can’t live your whole life that way. On the other hand, I kind of admire my spunk and directness!”

The new movie “starts with the struggle of a dancer trying to get into a show” and ends with Madonna’s controversial trip to Israel (to visit Rachel’s tomb as part of a Kabbalah experience) and a sweetly naive vision of peace in our time expressed in footage of a Palestinian and an Israeli boy walking together in friendship. “If I’m going to take people through a journey of my life, they are going to see all my journeys, and I hope they will also be moved by it,” she explains.
“The feeling in Israel is like no other place,” says Madonna. In Jerusalem she had “a sense of really going back in time… that I was being pulled into something. I felt very comfortable there. It’s weird; on the one hand it’s a very desperate place that could erupt at any time… it’s also very special – that’s why everyone wants to claim ownership of it. It’s not one of those places that beckon everybody, [but] I’m a bit of an excitement junkie.”
Aside from Jerusalem and its attendant dangers, Madonna’s movie takes you on an adventure to some of the key cities of her tour, Los Angeles, New York, Las Vegas, Dublin, and Paris among them – a giddy round of athleticism and lightning costume changes. For these cinematically inspired costumes, Madonna collaborated for the first time with Christian Lacroix, creating the armorial embroidered corsets that she adored. Meanwhile Karl Lagerfeld designed exquisite Weimar Kabaret-ish costumes (these ultimately proved too fragile to attach Madonna’s monitoring system to. “I was really bummed out because I loved what he did,” she says. “But I still have them – they might show up somewhere!”). Her friend Stella McCartney designed the “Savile Row three-piece-suit number.”
It was McCartney who created Madonna’s 2000 wedding dress. “You wanna see it?” she asks conspiratorially, struggling with a vast ivory vellum tome filled with the pictures the world’s media didn’t get to see: “No one’s seen these pictures except my closest friends.” For the record, McCartney produced a remarkably classical dress of ivory duchesse satin, with an hourglass eighteenth-century corset bodice (“a real boob squisher!” laughs Madonna) and an acreage of crinoline skirts dramatically billowing into an endless train. The nineteenth-century lace veil was found in an antiques market and secured with Grace Kelly’s Cartier tiara. Mr. Ritchie wore a kilt. “You can’t get married in Scotland and not wear a kilt,” says Madonna, who later put kilted pipers in her show. “It’s like, ‘Don’t show me things – you never know what’s gonna show up in one of my shows!’” laughs Madonna. “But I love to work that way.”

Since her marriage brought her here, Madonna has become England’s latest national treasure; the nation even has its own pet name for her – Madge – a parallel honor to the satirical weekly Private Eye’s anointing Queen Elizabeth “Brenda.” “I did hate it when they first started calling me that,” Madonna confides, “and then a friend told me that it was short for ‘Your Majesty,’ so I was ‘OK. I like it!’ Well, anyway,” she adds, “they’re stuck with me!”
It was not always a love affair. Madonna’s first trip to London in 1982, with her friend, dancer Martin Burgoyne, was financed by their bartending jobs at New York’s East Village bar Lucky Strike. “We used to rob the cash register blind!” she says matter-of-factly. When they had saved enough to hit London, “we went out to some nightclubs, and I met Boy George in the [Vivienne Westwood] World’s End stuff. He was just this force to be reckoned with, and I was very intimidated,” Madonna remembers. “He was really mean to me… he’s still mean to me!” Nevertheless, Madonna “found the whole thing quite heady. I couldn’t believe how seriously everybody took their looks and fashion and stuff – it was all very exciting and, yes, influential to a certain extent.”
But by the time Madonna returned a year later, she was riding the crest of her first success, and her relationship with the country unraveled. “Once I became famous I couldn’t stand London, because the press was so horrible to me,” she explains. “I didn’t understand the whole mentality of the tabloids; I thought, God, they’re so vicious. And this place was really different 20 years ago. Everything was closed up. The streets were dead on Sundays. There were no good restaurants. It was a very, very, very different place, and I had absolutely no inkling that I would have the life I have here [now].”
Since she met Guy Ritchie, the “scope of my world has changed,” she continues. “At the time, I didn’t see the funny side of it, but now I love England and want to be here and not in America. I see England as my home. And I now know how to ride. I know how to shoot. I know how to fish. I could be a connoisseur of ales if I wanted to – I never used to like the stuff, but when you’re married to Guy Ritchie you spend a lot of time in pubs, and I learned to like it!” Of her marriage she says, “The whole point of being in a relationship and having children is that you learn to love… unconditionally. That’s the best contribution to making the world a better place. It’s so nice sometimes just to go into my children’s bedrooms and listen to them breathe. It has forced me to get out of myself.”
It was Trudie Styler who played cupid when Madonna was invited for tea to her Jacobean mansion in Wiltshire. Here she remembers the “long, sweeping staircase… [where] all of her children were lined up – like the von Trapp family! I went down the line meeting them all, and then at the end of the line was Guy.” Madonna was stopped dead in her tracks by the strapping 30-year-old auteur of the nouvelle vague gangster movie Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, an eye-popping directorial debut. (This, together with his sometime Mockney accent – think Michael Caine in Alfie – belies a respectably patrician past. Ritchie cherishes fond boyhood memories of Loton Park, his stepfather Sir Michael Leighton’s estate, on the Welsh borders, where he developed his passion for hunting and fishing.) Of this first electric meeting Madonna admits simply, “My whole life flashed before me. It did.”
Madonna never set out to become a classic British lady of the manor, however, until fate intervened when she was introduced to Hugo Vickers, Cecil Beaton’s suave biographer, through a mutual friend in 1998. They discussed his Beaton books, including one charting the improbable romance of Beaton and Greta Garbo (“good and juicy,” says Madonna). They maintained an E-mail relationship, and sometime later Vickers sent one asking whether Madonna remembered Beaton’s beloved house, which was now for sale. Madonna told Guy, who, as she says, “has always wanted to live in the countryside. He’s the country person – not me. He loves nature and animals.” And so, imagining that it might provide an amusing day’s jaunt, but with no intention of buying anything, they arranged a visit.

Ashcombe, however, casts a very potent spell. Nearby are the Druidical worship sites of Avebury and Stonehenge; there is a Celtic burial ground hidden in one of Ashcombe’s deep, romantic coombes. “That part of the world has something very mystical about it,” says Madonna. “there was a reason that those druids dragged those stones [there]! That part of the world’s got some kind of pull for both of us.”
The house sits in a landscape of almost unimaginable beauty, cradled in the warm embrace of its own green valley, dramatic hills rising steeply on all sides but parting ahead to reveal distant fields. Cecil Beaton would recall that he was “almost numbed by my first encounter with the house. It was as if I had been touched on the head by some magic wand.”
Madonna and Guy were similarly entranced. They sat beneath the immemorial ilex trees that shade the house; Madonna photographed Guy there, fringed by wild grasses, and the ethereal result now sits on her office desk. “We just fell in love with it,” Madonna explains. “In the summertime it’s the most beautiful place in the world.” The memory of their day at Ashcombe “just stayed with us, haunted us for a really long time,” she remembers. Eventually they could resist its lure no longer, and Ashcombe was theirs.
Although the estate embraces more than 1,000 acres of roiling hills and valleys, nothing remains of Ashcombe House itself, a stately mansion built in 1686 but dismantled for its brick and stone two centuries later. Half the elegant stable block (converted into a studio by Beaton) and a cozy dairy house remained. Beaton’s frivolous decorating at Ashcombe was legendary, and he willfully ignored the building’s honest farmhouse integrity. The carousel bed that the neo-romantic artist Rex Whistler had made for him is long gone, but the splendid Palladian stone door surround that he designed is still in place, deftly transforming the house from cottage to mansion.
By the time the Ritchies arrived, the house was “kind of in ruins. There was a kitchen the size of a shoebox, and the top floor was just an attic full of rats and mice.” They created a labyrinth of romantic attic bedrooms, and an extension that mirrors the elegance of the stable block. While it suggests an eighteenth-century orangery, or a French pavilion, it contains a cavernous space that serves as kitchen, informal dining room, and living room in the modern family vernacular.
“To me, Ashcombe is a reflection of me and my husband in many ways because it reflects our willingness to make a commitment,” says Madonna. “Not necessarily to each other but to the idea of having a home somewhere, instead of living like gypsies.” The house also offers physical testament to the couple’s improbable union. Here, classic England meets pampered Hollywood; a place where cozy kilim-covered sofas, family silver, and sporting prints meet silky oyster-colored carpet, state-of-the-art sound systems, and luxuriant hothouse flowers. Where Cecil Beaton’s brilliantly dust-jacketed diaries jostle the 22 volumes of the Zohar, the couple’s Kabbalah reading material, on the bookshelves.
Cecil Beaton loved the place with “blind devotion.” When Beaton’s fifteen-year lease expired and he was evicted to make way for the landlord’s son, he wrote an elegiac book to assuage his great loss, a postwar requiem for the giddy, carefree thirties, the years of dressing-up, of masquerade and artifice. “We played; we laughed a lot; we fell in love,” he wrote. For Beaton, the place was “essentially an artist’s abode,” and he invited the great creative talents and stylemakers of the day to share his Eden: the writer H. G. Wells, and artists Salvador Dali, Augustus John, Christian Berard, and Graham Sutherland. They were joined by the period’s flamboyant style mavens, the Marchesa Casati, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Mona Harrison Williams, and Diana Vreeland among them.

When Madonna’s in residence she plays “lots of guitar; I go for lots of long walks, ride my bike. It’s a very physical place, a place for adventure. You can choose to go there to work in a very undistracted way and a very contemplative way, or you can go there and get lost in the environment. I always feel really melancholic when I’m driving away. I think if you’re a photographer, if you’re a painter, if you’re a writer it’s the perfect place to be,” says Madonna. “You feel protected because you’re sunk into that valley, and as far as the eye can see you can’t see another house. It’s a kind of buffer against the world.” Currently, Madonna is busy working on her new album (“basically all dance music”) with collaborator Stuart Price, which she hopes to release by the end of the year. She is also in the planning stages of a tour for summer 2006 and writing children’s morality tales. Her latest contribution to the world of children’s literature, Lotsa de Casha (Callaway), in which the richest man in the world loses everything but gains a friend (“There’s more to life than fame and fortune – something much more deep and profound,” says Madonna), follows The English Roses, her first foray into writing for children, itself the first of eight planned volumes; “The English Roses are going to take over the world!” Madonna says, laughing. Madonna’s own engaging children – Lourdes (Lola), eight, who has the preternatural grace and poise of a girl who takes her ballet lessons very seriously, and Rocco, four, a mischievous doppelganger for his dad – have “never watched television,” says their mum crisply. “They’re fine. I don’t think they miss it… my daughter is a voracious reader, and I’m very pleased about that.”
“Do you actually read the newspapers here?” Madonna queries later. “What does one read here? I don’t read newspapers. We don’t read magazines… and no television. At the end of the day they’re all noise.”
The Ritchies have more fun creating their own amusements. To celebrate their fourth wedding anniversary, Madonna set out “to re-create a Cecil Beaton weekend of folly. I invited all my friends, and we all had to put on a show, so to speak. It was so much fun – we moved all the furniture around in the Studio, and we created a stage and we put red velvet curtains up. Gwyneth and Stella and Chris composed a song together, which was brilliant – a spoof on American Life, only they called it American Wife. Gwyneth did fantastic rap and Stella sang background vocals and, well, Chris played the piano. Tracey Emin [the anarchic British artist] and Zoe Manzi [the beauteous art consultant] wrote a poem and took turns reciting stanzas from it. Sting played the lute, and Trudie read some sonnet. David Collins [the droll interior designer] sang ‘Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Ritchie’ [after Noel Coward's "Mrs. Worthington," an acid admonition to a relentless stage mother and her talentless child] – and my daughter was in it as well, playing the little girl!”
For the Guy Ritchies’ contribution, Madonna tracked down a copy of the mock Restoration play The Town Wench or Chastity Rewarded that British film producer John Sutro had composed for Beaton’s celebrated fete champetre of 1937, and performed a scene from it. “It’s really funny – and so bawdy,” laughs Madonna. For Madonna, Ashcombe is “one of those places that are very conducive to bringing a group of people down. I’d love to do it more, but it’s unbelievably complicated for my friends to each have a free weekend on the same weekend!”

For Truth or Dare’s director, Alek Keshishian, what Madonna “really has is confidence in pulling off whatever she decides to wear – it’s a childlike confidence, like playing dress-up in the attic.” While still antic, Madonna’s relationship with fashion has evolved. “I connect to fashion when I need to collaborate with somebody on something. I do love people like Galliano and Gaultier and Olivier [Theyskens]. I do think they’re real artists. I’d go to them. You can draw a line between craftsmanship and artistry and just facade. We live in a culture and a society that’s obsessed with the surface of things. I’ve worked with all those photographers; I know how much they like to retouch!”
Madonna’s interest in her clothes and her costumes over the years is perhaps more curatorial these days. A team of experts is working on cataloging and conserving the extensive collection, currently stored in an L.A. warehouse. “I’ve kept everything,” says Madonna. “The ‘Like a Virgin’ dress. Pieces that Gaultier had made from the Blonde Ambition tour. All the costumes from all of my shows, all the dancers’ costumes, everyone’s costumes.” She has ruthlessly destroyed all the duplicate and triplicate costumes (“Because we didn’t want anything to end up on the internet. When you don’t want anyone else to have it… you burn it”). “My goal is a traveling exhibit, like the Jackie Kennedy show,” she says. “Not just costumes but video imagery and film and interviews and concert footage, so it’s a multimedia kind of journey that you go on.”
Today, her various closets are brimming with country clothes instead of the designer extravaganzas of yore. Even her urban wardrobe, heavy on Prada, Miu Miu, and McCartney, often has a rustic brogue. “Lots of tweeds and lots of caps and sensible walking shoes – it’s hopeless to walk around that estate with a pair of heels!” says Madonna. “I don’t shoot anymore, but I had a lot of suits made for it.” The estate is run as a highly successful shoot – one of the top five in Britain. Pheasants and partridges emerge from every copse and thicket, tottering lazily by; a brazen cock pheasant will even join Madonna’s beloved chickens scrambling for the feed scattered over the stableyard’s cobblestones.
After the madness of her public life, Ashcombe provides the perfect refuge; “it’s like a big vortex; it sucks me in,” says Madonna, who comes to dread the moment “when you leave that bowl of comfort and you go back into the big bad world. And it’s just so teeming with life,” she adds. “There’s a pigeon that keeps flying back – for years now, like a carrier pigeon. He keeps showing up in our backyard.” Madonna has been thinking about this homesick bird, for later in our conversation she says, “maybe that’s Cecil Beaton? He did show up timely for the Vogue shoot, I have to say! I’m sure Cecil’d be very happy to know that I lived in his house. He probably does know.” ( In Vogue Magazine Aug. 2005 Photographs Tim Walker )












Madonna may be about to put her home in Wiltshire on the market. (06 May 2008 The Telegraph)
It is reported that the singer, whose latest album Hard Candy is currently number one in the album charts fighting off competition from Portishead and Duffy, is contemplating selling the house in Ashcombe for £12 million, £3 million more than she bought it for in 2001.The house was the setting for Madonna’s tweedy phase, during which she took up traditional English pursuits such as clay pigeon shooting and riding.
It was also the scene of her battle with the Countryside Agency over the right to let ramblers roam over some parts of the grounds of the house, a case which she eventually won.
Madonna’s husband, Guy Ritchie commented in a recent interview that he was concerned about how difficult it was to buy a house in London, saying: "The natives are being left behind because the big money came in and if it wanted something it bought it and made a fortune. It's impossible to buy a house in Central London unless you have 10 million quid."
Aside from their home in Ashcombe, the couple are believed to own six houses in London, as well as a house in Beverly Hills and an apartment in New York.

The Wiltshire homes and lifestyle of Sir Cecil Beaton are the focus of a new exhibition which opens in the spring. Shown top, is a painting of Ashcombe by Rex Whistler, in the 1930s – once home to Sir Cecil, and now owned by film director Guy Ritchie. Pictured above, is a photograph of Dorian Leigh in the sitting room of Reddish House, in the 1950s – Sir Cecil transformed this building to one of artistic excellence. He died here in 1980 Sir Cecil Beaton exhibition By West Country Life  |  Posted: February 15, 2014 http://www.westerndailypress.co.uk/Sir-Cecil-Beaton-exhibition/story-20619778-detail/story.html He photographed everyone from Winston Churchill to Mick Jagger, and turned one corner of the West into the party retreat for the world's A-list celebrities. And now a generation after the death of Sir Cecil Beaton, a new exhibition is revealing for the first time how his private life in Wiltshire shaped his ascent to become the pre-eminent portrait photographer, designer and artist of the 20th century. Beaton took up residence at Ashcombe House in Wiltshire in 1930 and spent 15 years there, entertaining many notable figures of the time. The house, which is now owned by film director Guy Ritchie, with pop queen Madonna living there for a time before their split, became the place for 1930s celebrities to spend their weekends, at Beaton's sometimes lavish events. After the war, he ended the lease, and three years later, he bought Reddish House, five miles east of Broad Chalke in south Wiltshire. The house became his own sanctuary from a stellar career which saw him photograph virtually every beautiful famous woman, film star, actress or singer, as well as notable royalty and politicians. Everything Beaton did, he did with greatness – he turned his hand from portrait photography to set and costume design on Broadway and in Hollywood, winning four Tony Awards in New York and three Oscars: one for costume designs on the iconic film Gigi in 1958, and two for costume and art direction on 1964 classic My Fair Lady. He transformed Reddish House from a brusque gentleman's country pad into a place of artistic excellence. Those Oscar-winning costumes for the likes of Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins were stored in Reddish's upper floor, in cages that were installed at the turn of the century for indoor illicit cock-fighting. Awarded a knighthood in 1972, he passed away at Reddish in 1980, leaving behind an unrivalled legacy of portrait photography, art and design. Now, the nearby Salisbury Museum is to devote its entire summer exhibition to one of the city's most famous sons. Cecil Beaton at Home explores the private retreats created by the artist at both Ashcombe and Reddish. Curated by Andrew Ginger, the exhibition aims to reveal Beaton, the man behind the camera, through his life in Wiltshire. The exhibition will go as far as recreating the extravagant interiors and gardens of his Wiltshire creations, unfolding his private life, his unique talent for self-promotion, his uncertain pursuit of love – he struck up relationships with a string of men, as well as many of the beautiful women he photographed – notably Greta Garbo. "Beaton's two houses near Salisbury were his refuge from a madly heavy workload," said curator Andrew Ginger, who is director of Beaudesert Ltd and The Cecil Beaton Fabric Collection. "Beaton described his life in the country as 'an oasis of luxury and civilisation,' which was both restorative and inspirational to his work. The design of his home was approached with the same attention to detail as any theatrical production," he added. Cecil Beaton was just one of the extraordinary creative talents that have lived, and continue to live in the Wessex region, added Adrian Green, the museum's director. "The local aspect is vital. Our exhibitions are designed to reflect local interest – and also to appeal to a large national and international audience." Highlights of the exhibition include a show-stopping recreation of Beaton's "circus bed" complete with unicorns, sea horses, Neptune and barley-twist posts. Made by specialist bed-makers Beaudesert Ltd, the bed will be the central display in a reconstructed room lined with copies of murals by close friends Oliver Messel and Rex Whistler. Pages of Beaton's visitors' book will reveal a dazzling list of royalty, artists and other guests who enjoyed Beaton's lavish hospitality. Beaton's love life is sympathetically handled, including his complicated affair with Greta Garbo, and his only live-in partnership with Kin Hoitsma, the athletic 30-year old Californian academic who Beaton met when he was 60. The supportive roles of his mother Esther and secretary, Eileen Hose, are given equal prominence. But the exhibition will give a new insight into how his home life, lavish and stunning homes and the entertaining he did in Wiltshire shaped his stellar career. "Reuniting many previously unseen photographs, artworks, furniture and possessions from both homes, the show offers fascinating insights into Beaton's interior life and creative inspirations," said Mr Green. "Sir Cecil was one of Britain's most successful exports of the 20th century. "His iconic portraits and fashion photography for American Vogue, his Oscar winning sets and costume, as well as theatre, ballet and opera designs, continue to captivate and inspire generations of young designers across the world. "Sketches of his interiors painted with the left hand after his stroke, give a poignant sense of the hidden vulnerabilities and willpower of the man," he added. "Beaton also made exquisite paintings of local children, which will be on display alongside listening stations where locals recount first-hand memories of their talented neighbour. Sculptures, paintings, fancy dress costumes, vintage photographs, original letters, diaries, decorative elements, catalogues, scrapbooks and press cuttings will also be displayed to create a truly immersive experience within the museum's galleries. "Exhibits include loans from the Victoria & Albert Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, private collections, and the Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby's," he added. His portfolio of portrait photographs reads like a 'Who's Who?' of art, film, royalty and beauty of the middle 50 years of the 20th century. From a portrait of Lady Diana Cooper in 1928, which established him as a photographer of note, he went on to capture some prominent names during the 1930s, from Pablo Picasso to Aldous Huxley and Salvador Dali. After Lillian Gish in 1929, he probably made his name as a photographer of beautiful women with the famous portrait picture of Marlene Dietrich in 1935, and of royalty with Helen of Greece & Denmark, the Queen Mother of Romania in 1937. Within two years of the start of the war, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle had posed for portrait photographs, and within two years from the end of the war, a new generation of Hollywood stars had been captured by his lens: Greta Garbo, Yul Brynner, Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando. In the two years after being the official photographer for the Queen's Coronation, he'd photographed Grace Kelly, Joan Crawford and also taken perhaps his most enduring image – that of Marilyn Monroe in 1956.

Eileen Ford in 1948, a year after setting up the Ford agency with her husband, Jerry. Photograph: Nina Leen/Time & Life Pictures

Eileen and Jerry Ford in 2008. Photograph: Scott Wintrow/Getty Images

Top modelling agent Eileen Ford dies at 92

http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Sisters-Style-All-American-Preppy/dp/0847842177

Does a neglected masterpiece by Jane Austen enshrine her first love affair? Who was Vita Sackville West's real grandfather? What clues are there to the identity of 'Walter', doyen of Victorian pornographers? When and why did P.G. Wodehouse mutate from hack to genius? Was Oscar Wilde really down and out in Paris? Was Brideshead really Madresfield? These and other excursions into literary or social history have developed out of Mark Girouard's spare time enthusiasms, as diversions from his main occupation as an architectural historian. In nine essays he calls attention to points that have not been noticed before, corrects fallacies that have got into general circulation, suggests, identifies, redates, refutes, or pours a little cold water on unjustified romanticisms. Three further essays sample another enthusiasm, his own family background, and introduce characters such as the dwarf who had to stand on a bench to address the South African Parliament, the colonial governor who fell in love with his niece, and the dowager duchess with whom he spent his childhood on the edge of the park at Chatsworth. http://www.amazon.com/Enthusiasms-Mark-Girouard/dp/0711233292 Mark Girouard Mark Girouard was born in 1931. He is a British architectural writer, an authority on the country house, leading architectural historian, and the biographer of James Stirling. He worked for Country Life magazine until 1967. He was Slade Professor of Fine Art from 1975 to 1976, and was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1987. Among his many books are Elizabethan Architecture (2009) and Life in the English Country House (1978).

Douglas Blain, Secretary of the Spitalfields Trust with Mark Girouard at 9 Elder St.

What are Saddle Shoes? http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-saddle-shoes.htm Throw off that pleated skirt, baggy sweater, bobby sox and loafers and grab your poodle skirt and saddle shoes, it's time to rock and roll! In the post-war era of jive, jitterbug and The King, Elvis Presley, a two-toned snappy shoe replaced the respectable penny loafer. That crazy new footwear was the saddle shoe and it bunny-hopped and bee-bopped its way into popular culture. The classic saddle shoe is a dress-style shoe with a leather white toe box and back, and a black instep and vamp, which includes the throat, tongue and eyelets. The instep and vamp together form a shape much like a saddle in the center of the shoe, hence the name. A contrasting black strip also ran up the rear of the shoe at the back of the heel, often with a buckle at the top. The rubberized composite low-heeled sole was coral colored. With the popularity of the saddle shoe other two-toned colors emerged, including black shoes with white saddles, white shoes with red, and tan shoes with brown. At one time or another it's likely that nearly every conceivable color combination has found its way into the saddle shoe. In 1957 Elvis Presley thrilled a generation in Jailhouse Rock with his ultra-cool blue eyes, sexy gyrations and deep resonate voice -- and he did it in saddle shoes as well as in another up and coming shoe that would eventually replace the saddle shoe: the humble sneaker. James Dean, who died in 1955 at the age of 24, was another icon and lightening rod for youth. One of the most famous photographs of James Dean shows him standing in jeans and sneakers. With Dean and Presley both embracing this new trend it was just a matter of time before saddle shoes ended up at the back of the closet, and sneakers took their place up front. Still, despite the more casual dress of today's fashions, saddle shoes continue to be widely available at most department stores, bearing testament to their enduring appeal. They bring to mind an era of innocence, naivety, youth and the sounds of a generation caught between the greasers of the '50s and the hippies of the '60's. Their classic look and styling has endured the changing times, and on those occasions when sneakers won't due, saddle shoes remain a hip choice for eclectic shoe lovers everywhere. Try a pair on and see if you don't feel the magic!

 June 17, 2009

The Imitation Game, directed by Headhunters' Morten Tyldum is due for release next year.

 A Harrington jacket is a lightweight waist-length jacket, made of cotton, polyester, wool or suede — usually with traditionally Fraser tartan or check-patterned lining. The first Harrington-style jackets were made by British clothing companies Grenfell of Burnley, Lancashire and Baracuta of Stockport, Cheshire in the 1930s. As of 2012, Baracuta still makes the same model, the G9. Elvis Presley popularized the Baracuta G9 when he wore it in his 1958 movie King Creole. This style of jacket earned the nickname Harrington because it was worn by the character Rodney Harrington (played by Ryan O'Neal) in the 1960s prime time soap opera Peyton Place.

This is one of my favorite films ... a great story about loneliness,"gentilless", true humanity in distress, keeping on the gentleman's code as weapon against dispair ... and a great sense of humor ... besides a remarkable visit in London to Saville Row, John Lobb, ... etc...etc
Yours ... Jeeves


An Englishman Abroad
Directed by John Schlesinger
Written by Alan Bennett
Starring Alan Bates
Coral Browne
Charles Gray
Distributed by BBC
Release date 29 November 1983
Running time 60 min
Country UK
Language English


"How can he be a spy?" says Guy Burgess in Moscow, as he quotes the attitude of his former fellow British upper-class diplomats, "He goes to my tailor."

He's talking to Coral Browne, an Australian actress who was appearing as Gertrude in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Hamlet in Moscow. It's 1958. She has visited Burgess in his drab apartment which he shares with his government-sanctioned male lover, an aging youth who speaks no English. Burgess has barely learned a few words of Russian. "I know what I've done to deserve him," he says, "but I don't know what he's done to deserve me."

Burgess, along with Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt comprised the Cambridge Four. They were a group of Cambridge undergraduates who, in the Thirties, were recruited to become Soviet spies. Although they were products of proper English upper-class breeding, they disliked intensely the very aspects of English life that provided their own privileges. The Soviet system seemed so much better. Burgess was a most unlikely spy. He was flamboyantly gay, often flamboyantly drunk and talked too much about what he was doing. After all, he says, "There's no point in having a secret if you make a secret of it." Throughout WWII he and Maclean, working in Britain's Foreign Office, regularly delivered copies of secret Allied plans to their Soviet controller. Even though much evidence pointed their way, no action was taken. They eventually had to flee Britain in 1951 and finally showed up in Moscow in 1956. Kim Philby did far more damage before he was eased out in a gentlemanly way. And Blunt, an art historian, was publicly identified by the British government only in old age after years of cover-ups. After all, he was advisor to the Queen on art matters and had received a knighthood. The old-boy network wanted no embarrassments.

Coral Browne wound up in Burgess' Moscow apartment because he went to one of the Hamlet performances. As usual, he was drunk. He found his way to her dressing room by accident and proceeded to vomit in her basin. She was not amused and hadn't the slightest idea who he was. When she had to leave for the second act, Burgess managed to steal her soap, cigarettes and face powder before leaving. "One should have asked," he tells her later. "One is such a coward." But later he slipped a note under the door asking her to lunch and to bring a tape measure. Burgess wanted gossip from London, but Browne didn't know anyone in his upper-class circles. He wants to be taken seriously, but seems merely charmingly superficial. Burgess is a self-destructive, self-aware drunk, yet also a proud Englishman. More than anything else, he wants Browne to take his measurements and order some suits for him from his Savile Row tailor when she returns to London. She agrees, but only because she sees no reason why anyone, even a traitor, shouldn't have a suit if he wants. At the end of this marvelous one hour program, most of which is spent with Burgess and Browne talking to each other, we see Guy Burgess jauntily walking over a Moscow bridge wearing a perfectly tailored suit, hand-crafted leather shoes on his feet, a well-cut topcoat over his shoulders and holding up a black umbrella to ward of the beginning snow. Passing him are the comrades in their drab clothing and fur hats, some curious about this unusual creature in their midst. Guy Burgess has become a very well-dressed Englishman...well, English traitor...abroad.

This is a fine example of what an excellent, subtle writer Alan Bennett is. The tone is amusing and wry, but Bennett slips a sharp knife in as he shows the complacency of so many of the British upper-class, as well as the self-delusional foolishness of Burgess. And Bennett makes us appreciate the spine of Coral Browne, unwilling to paint people with the colors the British establishment would have her use. "I'm just an actress," she says, "I've never been interested in politics. But if this is communism I don't like it because it's dull...their clothes are terrible and they can't make false teeth. What else is there?""The system," Burgess replies, and he's serious.

As excellent as Bennett is, Alan Bates as Burgess and Coral Browne playing herself match him. Browne may have no great passion one way or the other toward English traitors, but she's not about to let others tell her who she can and can't see, even in Moscow. More to the point, she has Guy Burgess' number. People in England can call him anything they like; he'll make amusing conversation out of their anger or contempt. But the idea that they might think he now regrets having to live in Moscow makes him vulnerable. Bates is so good an actor he lets us be amused by Burgess, even like him, but also be somewhat disgusted by him...all at the same time.

This came out on a VHS tape years ago, and can still be tracked down. Hopefully, it will see a DVD issue. Even more hopefully, it will be paired with Alan Bennett's A Question of Attribution, an almost equally amusing and trenchant teleplay about Anthony Blunt. Cambridge Spies, the British TV miniseries which tells the story of Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt, also is well worth watching.



Guy Burgess erupts by accident in the dressing room of Coral Brown,which is in Moskow playing Hamlet, in a state of intoxication and feeling desperately sick...


After a desperate run to the washing basin ... he develops a eccentrinc conversation with Coral ... that finds him charming "malgré" his manners ... but after some questions that d'ont reveal the identity of this strange intruder ... she leaves ... leaving the gentleman in distress behind ... which enables him to take with him the soap, together with the booze etc ...





In the corridor he comes to a "close encounter" with another actor, that is actually a old "chap" from Cambridge ... which recognises him as Guy Burgess ... Burgess disappears along the corridor ... without giving any sign of recognition ...



The actor tells Coral about the strange encounter in the corridor with Guy Burgess ... like this Coral becomes aware about the idendity of the strange but charming intruder ...


Later at her strange and depressing hotel she receives a message from Guy with his adress and inviting her to have lunch with her ...


She starts a kind of endless enquiry to this adress that give us the opportunity to feel the Kafka ambiance of paranoia of the Soviet Regime ... She starts being followed by the secret police ...




She goes to the British Embassy, only to be received by two snobish and priggish young "eton" boys ... that refuse to help her ... and irritate her tremendously ...






One secretary that has enough of being "bullyed" by the arrogant boys tries to help her , but is watched and stopped by one of the boys that is watching her from the stairs ...




She has no other choice than going back to the streets followed by the secret state police and keep on asking the way ... until that she founds someone that will take her ... if she pays him with her silk scarf ...




Finally she comes to the adress .... a terrible ensemble of distressing and shabby social flats ....





Inside the shabby and messy apartement Guy is wayting for her in a chaotic manner ... burns the squalid lunch ... and is able to offer her proudly a tomato ...




He hides his lonelyness by "chatting"about known people from the past ... and about England ... finally he reveals what he wants to ask her ... that will become the only "key" possible to civilisation and his "secret garden" in the inospite desert of Moscow ... Does she wants to take some measures to order a suit from his taylors ... some shoes from his shoemaker ... some pyjamas ?? ...









They listen to the only record he has .... and that he keeps on listening ... an english song ... they say goodbye and she leaves .... to London



In London we can follow her visits to Saville Row .... to John Lobb in st James Street ... etc ... and we can feel by the reactions .... the degree of more or less gentleness and real humanity of people ... concerning her mission ...



















Finally we can see Guy in the glorious moment where he can walk again in his "shining armour" ... full of dignity and panache ... at the sound of "For He Is an Englishman"