The Cleveland Street Scandal.

November 26, 2014, 11:27 pm

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The Cleveland Street scandal occurred in 1889, when a homosexual male brothel in Cleveland Street, Fitzrovia, London, was discovered by police. At the time, sexual acts between men were illegal in Britain, and the brothel's clients faced possible prosecution and certain social ostracism if discovered. It was rumoured that one client was Prince Albert Victor, who was the eldest son of the Prince of Wales and second-in-line to the British throne, though this rumour has never been substantiated. The government was accused of covering up the scandal to protect the names of any aristocratic patrons. Another client was said to be Lord Arthur Somerset, an equerry to the Prince of Wales. Both he and the brothel keeper, Charles Hammond, managed to flee abroad before a prosecution could be brought. The male prostitutes, who also worked as telegraph messenger boys for the Post Office, were given light sentences and no clients were prosecuted. After Henry James FitzRoy, Earl of Euston, was named in the press as a client, he successfully sued for libel. The British press never named Prince Albert Victor, and there is no evidence he ever visited the brothel, but his inclusion in the rumours has coloured biographers' perceptions of him since. The scandal fuelled the attitude that male homosexuality was an aristocratic vice that corrupted lower-class youths. Such perceptions were still prevalent in 1895 when the Marquess of Queensberry accused Oscar Wilde of being an active homosexual.

In July 1889, the Metropolitan Police uncovered a male brothel operated by Charles Hammond in London's Cleveland Street. Under police interrogation, the male prostitutes and pimps revealed the names of their clients, who included Lord Arthur Somerset, an Extra Equerry to the Prince of Wales. At the time, all homosexual acts between men were illegal, and the clients faced social ostracism, prosecution, and at worst, two years' imprisonment with hard labour.

The resultant Cleveland Street scandal implicated other high-ranking figures in British society, and rumours swept upper-class London of the involvement of a member of the royal family, namely Prince Albert Victor. The prostitutes had not named Albert Victor, and it is suggested that Somerset's solicitor, Arthur Newton, fabricated and spread the rumours to take the heat off his client.Letters exchanged between the Treasury Solicitor, Sir Augustus Stephenson, and his assistant, Hamilton Cuffe, make coded reference to Newton's threats to implicate Albert Victor.

The Prince of Wales intervened in the investigation; no clients were ever prosecuted and nothing against Albert Victor was proven. Although there is no conclusive evidence for or against his involvement, or that he ever visited a homosexual club or brothel,[38] the rumours and cover-up have led some biographers to speculate that he did visit Cleveland Street,[39] and that he was "possibly bisexual, probably homosexual".[40] This is contested by other commentators, one of whom refers to him as "ardently heterosexual" and his involvement in the rumours as "somewhat unfair". The historian H. Montgomery Hyde wrote, "There is no evidence that he was homosexual, or even bisexual."

Somerset's sister, Lady Waterford, denied that her brother knew anything about Albert Victor. She wrote, "I am sure the boy is as straight as a line ... Arthur does not the least know how or where the boy spends his time ... he believes the boy to be perfectly innocent." Lady Waterford, however, also believed Somerset's protestations of his own innocence. In surviving private letters to his friend Lord Esher, Somerset denies knowing anything directly about Albert Victor, but confirms that he has heard the rumours, and hopes that they will help quash any prosecution. He wrote, "I can quite understand the Prince of Wales being much annoyed at his son's name being coupled with the thing but that was the case before I left it ... we were both accused of going to this place but not together ... they will end by having out in open court exactly what they are all trying to keep quiet. I wonder if it is really a fact or only an invention of that arch ruffian Hammond." He continued, "I have never mentioned the boy's name except to Probyn, Montagu and Knollys when they were acting for me and I thought they ought to know. Had they been wise, hearing what I knew and therefore what others knew, they ought to have hushed the matter up, instead of stirring it up as they did, with all the authorities."

The rumours persisted; sixty years later the official biographer of King George V, Harold Nicolson, was told by Lord Goddard, who was a twelve-year old schoolboy at the time of the scandal, that Albert Victor "had been involved in a male brothel scene, and that a solicitor had to commit perjury to clear him. The solicitor was struck off the rolls for his offence, but was thereafter reinstated." In fact, none of the lawyers in the case was convicted of perjury or struck off during the scandal, but Somerset's solicitor, Arthur Newton, was convicted of obstruction of justice for helping his clients escape abroad, and was sentenced to six weeks in prison. Over twenty years later in 1910, Newtonwas struck off for twelve months for professional misconduct after falsifying letters from another of his clients, the notorious murderer Dr Crippen. In 1913, Newtonwas struck off indefinitely and sentenced to three years imprisonment for obtaining money by false pretences.

During his life, the bulk of the British press treated Albert Victor with nothing but respect and the eulogies that immediately followed his death were full of praise. The radical politician, Henry Broadhurst, who had met both Albert Victor and his brother George, noted that they had "a total absence of affectation or haughtiness". On the day of Albert Victor's death, the leading Liberal politician, William Ewart Gladstone, wrote in his personal private diary "a great loss to our party". However, Queen Victoria referred to Albert Victor's "dissipated life" in private letters to her eldest daughter, which were later published and, in the mid-20th century, the official biographers of Queen Mary and King George V, James Pope-Hennessy and Harold Nicolson respectively, promoted hostile assessments of Albert Victor's life, portraying him as lazy, ill-educated and physically feeble. The exact nature of his "dissipations" is not clear, but in 1994 Theo Aronson favoured the theory on "admittedly circumstantial" evidence that the "unspecified 'dissipations' were predominantly homosexual".Aronson's judgement was based on Albert Victor's "adoration of his elegant and possessive mother; his 'want of manliness'; his 'shrinking from horseplay'; and his 'sweet, gentle, quiet and charming' nature", as well as the Cleveland Street rumours and his opinion that there is "a certain amount of homosexuality in all men". He admitted, however, that "the allegations of Prince Eddy's homosexuality must be treated cautiously."

Rumours that Prince Albert Victor may have committed, or been responsible for, the Jack the Ripper murders were first mentioned in print in 1962. It was later alleged, amongst others by Stephen Knight in Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, that Albert Victor fathered a child with a woman in the Whitechapel district of London, and either he or several high-ranking men committed the murders in an effort to cover up his indiscretion. Though such claims have been repeated frequently, scholars have dismissed them as fantasies, and refer to indisputable proof of the Prince's innocence. For example, on 30 September 1888, when Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes were murdered in London, Albert Victor was over 500 miles (over 800 km) away at Balmoral, the royal retreat in Scotland, in the presence of Queen Victoria, other family members, visiting German royalty and a large number of staff. According to the official Court Circular, family journals and letters, newspaper reports and other sources, he could not have been near any of the murders. Other fanciful conspiracy theories are that he died of syphilis or poison, that he was pushed off a cliff on the instructions of Lord Randolph Churchill or that his death was faked to remove him from the line of succession.

Albert Victor's posthumous reputation became so bad that in 1964 Philip Magnus called his death a "merciful act of providence", supporting the theory that his death removed an unsuitable heir to the throne and replaced him with the reliable and sober George V. In 1972, Michael Harrison was the first modern author to re-assess Albert Victor and portray him in a more sympathetic light. In recent years, Andrew Cook has continued attempts to rehabilitate Albert Victor's reputation, arguing that his lack of academic progress was partly due to the incompetence of his tutor, Dalton; that he was a warm and charming man; that there is no tangible evidence that he was homosexual or bisexual; that he held liberal views, particularly on Irish Home Rule; and that his reputation was diminished by biographers eager to improve the image of his brother, George.

The conspiracy theories surrounding Albert Victor have led to his portrayal in film as somehow responsible for or involved in the Jack the Ripper murders. Bob Clark's Sherlock Holmes mystery Murder by Decree was released in 1979 with "Duke of Clarence (Eddy)" played by Robin Marshall. Jack the Ripper was released in 1988 with Marc Culwick as Prince Albert Victor. Samuel West played "Prince Eddy" in The Ripper (1997) and Albert Victor as a child (with Jerome Watts and Charles Dance playing the character at older ages) in the TV miniseries Edward the Seventh, which starred West's father Timothy West as the title character. The Hughes brothers' From Hell was based on the graphic novel of the same name by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, and was released in 2001. Mark Dexter portrayed both "Prince Edward" and "Albert Sickert". The story is also the basis for the play Force and Hypocrisy by Doug Lucie.

A pair of alternative history novels, written by Peter Dickinson, imagine a world where Albert Victor survives and reigns as Victor I. In Gary Lovisi's parallel universe Sherlock Holmes short story, "The Adventure of the Missing Detective", Albert Victor is portrayed as a tyrannical king, who rules after the deaths (in suspicious circumstances) of both his grandmother and father. The Prince also appears as the murder victim in the first of the Lord Francis Powerscourt crime novels Goodnight Sweet Prince,[108] and as a murder suspect in the novel Death at Glamis Castle by Robin Paige. In both The Bloody Red Baron by Kim Newman and the novel I, Vampire by Michael Romkey, he is a vampire. In the former, he is the British monarch during World War I.

"Set against the vivid backdrop of this demi-monde, Theo Aronson presents the first full account of the curious life of Queen Victoria's grandson, Prince Albert Victor, known as Prince Eddy. The author explores the Prince's upbringing, his university and military careers, his alleged "secret marriage," his links with the Jack-the-Ripper murders, his early death, and, above all, his sexual orientation. For it was this that linked the young Prince's name to the Cleveland Street Scandal, the notorious homosexual brothel case that led to an extraordinary cover-up by the British government. " Prince Eddy...presents Victorian male homosexuality as a vibrant folk culture, one that pervaded all official institutions. Students of the erotic will love this book, and so will royal-watchers, but arbiters of sexual purity should hate it, for Mr. Aronson displays an underground culture that exposed its judges as upright liars."--Nina Auerbach, New York Times Book Review. B&W photos."

The Cleveland Street Scandal | London 1889 | Telegraph Rent Boys

The Cleveland Street Scandal

http://clevelandstreetscandal.com/

HISTORICAL NOTES: In 1889, the year in which this scandal takes place, it is legal for girls aged 12 and boys aged 14 to marry (with parental consent). Most people started work at the age of 6 (or younger) to help support their families and men had a life expectancy of just 40-45 years of age. Male homosexuality was illegal and punishable, if convicted of buggery, to penal servitude for life or for any term of not less than ten years. The death penalty for buggery had only recently been abolished in 1861.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century a gentleman by the name of Charles Hammond ran a male brothel located at No 19 Cleveland Street in London, just north of Oxford Streetnear Tottenham Court Road.

Hammond catered for a largely aristocratic clientele and for a number of years the existence of his establishment remained unknown to the authorities.

This all changed on 4th July 1889 when a telegraph boy called Charles Swinscow was searched as part of an ongoing investigation into money theft at his employers, the General Post Office. Eighteen shillings were found in his pockets, which at the time was worth more than a weeks salary to such a young man. Swinscow was taken in for questioning as part of the police operation.

When asked how he came to have such a large sum of money in his possession, Swinscow panicked and confessed he'd been recruited by Charles Hammond to work at a house in Cleveland Street where, for the sum of four shillings, he would permit the brothel's clients to "have a go between my legs" and "put their persons into me".

He then identified a number of other young telegraph boys who were also renting themselves out in this manner at the Cleveland Streetestablishment, leading to the apprehension and questioning of Henry Newlove, Algernon Allies and Charles Thickbroom.

Who Was Involved:

Henry Horace Newlove         16 yrs  Telegraph Boy - GPO 'Recruiter' for Hammond

Charles Thomas Swinscow    15 yrs  Telegraph Boy - First boy arrested for 'theft'

George Alma Wright  17 yrs  Telegraph Boy - 'Performed' with Newlove for voyeurs

Charles Ernest Thickbroom    17 yrs  Telegraph Boy

William Meech Perkins          16 yrs  Telegraph Boy - ID's Lord Alfred Somerset as a 'client'

Algernon Edward Allies        19 yrs  Houseboy - The Marlborough Club, used by Lord Somerset

George Barber            17 yrs  George Veck's 'Private Secretary' and boyfriend

John Saul        37 yrs  Infamous London rent boy - Possibly aka Jack Saul

                         

Charles Hammond     35 yrs  Brothel keeper of 19 Cleveland Street, London

George Daniel Veck

aka Rev George Veck

aka Rev George Barber

40 yrs  Ex General Post Office (GPO) employee, sacked for indecency with Telegraph boys. Lives at 19 Cleveland Street. Kept a coffee house in Gravesend, Kent. Has an 18 year old 'son' that travels with him.

PC Luke Hanks                     Police officer attached to the General Post Office

Mr Phillips                 Snr postal official who questions Swinscow with Hanks

Mr C H Raikes                      The Postmaster General

Mr James Monro                   Metropolitan Police Commissioner

Frederick Abberline   46 yrs  Police Chief Inspector, infamous for the 'Jack the Ripper' investigations in 1888, London's Whitechapel district

PC Richard Sladden             Police officer who carried out observations on the Cleveland Street brothel following Swinscow's arrest

Arthur Newton                      Lord Arthur Somerset's solicitor. Later to defend Oscar Wilde at his trial in 1895 and notorious murderer Dr Crippen

                         

Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence  25 yrs  Rumoured to be a 'Brothel Client' - Went on a seven month tour of British India in Sept 1889 to avoid the press & trials

Colonel Jervois of the

2nd Life Guards

            'Brothel Client' - Winchester Army Barracks

Lord Arthur Somerset

aka Mr Brown            37 yrs  'Brothel Client' - Named in Allies letters as 'Mr Brown'

Henry James Fitzroy

39 yrs  Accused of being a 'Brothel Client' - Earl of Euston

                         

Sir Augustus Stephenson                  Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP)

Hon Hamilton Cuffe             Assistant DPP - Six years later he would prosecute Oscar Wilde at his trial in 1895 as the Director of Public Prosecutions

Ernest Parke              Journalist - North London Press

After The Arrests

The officer in charge of the case, Chief Inspector Frederick Abberline, procured a warrant to arrest Charles Hammond on a charge of conspiracy to "to commit the abominable crime of buggery", but when he went to Cleveland Street, he found that Hammond had already disappeared.

The police made arrangements to observe the comings and goings at No 19 Cleveland Street, noting that a 'Mr Brown' called there on the 9th and 13th July 1889, following which on the 25th July both Swinscow and Thickbroom identified Mr Brown as one of the their clients.

Mr Brown was followed by police back to army barracks in Knightsbridge where he was soon identified as Lord Arthur Somerset, a younger son of Henry Charles Somerset, 8th Duke of Beaufort, a Major in the Royal Horse Guards and equerry to Edward, Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII.

Papers were sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions with a view to prosecuting Lord Arthur on a charge of gross indecency. The Prince of Wales was incredulous when he heard of it

"I won't believe it, any more than I should if they accused the Archbishop of Canterbury" he said.

Despite this gesture of support, Lord Somerset placed the matter in the hands of his solicitor Arthur Newton who contacted the DPP simply to mention the fact that his client, if prosecuted, might well name the Duke of Clarence whilst he was giving evidence in court.

Given that Albert, Duke of Clarence was the eldest son of the Prince of Wales and second in line to the throne, it was clear that the government would not want his name associated with the homosexual brothel at Cleveland Street. The authorities appeared to drag their heels over the matter, and in bringing Lord Arthur Somerset to trial, allowing him the opportunity to flee abroad. By the 18th October he was safely in Boulogne, France. He remained in exile for the remainder of his life and eventually died in the French Riviera in 1926.

But whilst Somerset escaped prosecution, the same could not be said of the unfortunate 'rent boys' caught up in the investigation. Swinscow together with Henry Newlove, Algernon Allies and Charles Thickbroom were brought before the Old Bailey in September 1889 and charged with gross indecency. They were all convicted. Newlove received a sentence of four months with hard labour whilst the others each got nine months.

This might have been the end of the story had it not been for a journalist named Ernest Parke, who ran a story on 28th September 1889 inthe 'North London Press', claiming that the "heir to a duke and the younger son of a duke" had frequented Cleveland Street.

Again, on the 16th November he went so far as to name both Arthur Somerset and Henry James Fitzroy, the Earl of Euston, as the men in question and dropped a broad hint to his readers, by referring to a gentleman "more distinguished and more highly placed", that a member of the royal family was also involved.

Ernest Parke believed that it was safe to name the two young aristocrats as they had both fled the country. He was correct as far as Lord Arthur Somerset was concerned, but the Earl of Euston was not, as he thought, in Peru, but rather in England, and thus in order to defend his reputation felt obliged to bring a charge for criminal libel against Edward Parke.

The trial was heard at the Old Bailey on the 19th January 1890. Whilst Henry Fitzroy admitted that he had been to 19 Cleveland Streethe claimed that it was all a mistake. According to his own testimony, he had only gone there after being given a card touting a 'tableaux plastique' (nude women) at the address, and that once he realised the true nature of the establishment, made his excuses and left.

Ernest Parke however produced a witness named John Saul, who went into some detail describing the kind of services that he had provided for Henry Fitzroy at Cleveland Street. Being a self-confessed prostitute, Saul's evidence was easily 'discredited' and so Ernest was found guilty of libel without justification and sentenced to one year's imprisonment with hard labour.

One more trial was to arise as a result of the Cleveland Streetscandal in respect of the activities of Arthur Newton, defence solicitor to the aforementioned Arthur Somerset who, it was believed, had helped Somerset evade justice. Newton was brought before the court on the 12th December 1889 and charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice for allegedly interfering with witnesses and arranging their disappearance to France.

He was convicted but received the relatively mild punishment of six weeks in prison. He was even allowed to resume his legal practice afterwards and was later to become better known for representing the author and playwright Oscar Wilde.

This was still not quite the end of the matter as the MP Henry Labouchère, a noted campaigner against 'homosexual vice', who had earlier been responsible for including the offence of 'gross indecency' within the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, became convinced that some kind of 'cover-up' had been launched by the authorities.

On the 28th February 1890 he tried to persuade Parliament to establish a committee to investigate the whole affair, but his motion was defeated by a vote of 204 to 66. Henry felt so strongly on the matter that he became over animated during the debate on his motion and he was suspended from Parliament for a week.

 Finally...

Thus the Cleveland Street Scandal passed into history and ceased to be a matter of contemporary significance, however, from evidence that has since become available, it now appears that the Duke of Clarence was indeed a likely client of the Cleveland Street brothel. If indeed it were true, it would be very likely that some kind of damage limitation exercise was carried out at the highest levels of the British Government to protect him.

I grateful acknowledge the following works used in my research:

The Cleveland Street Affair - Colin Simpson, Lewis Chester & David Leitch

The Cleveland Street Scandal - H Montgomery Hyde

Cleveland Street'The Musical' - Glenn Chandler & Matt Devereaux

Inside story: 19 Cleveland Street

Officially, this house no longer exists, thanks to an 'indescribably loathsome scandal'. But Matthew Gwyther finds life goes on there

By Matthew Gwyther12:00AM BST 21 Oct 2000 / http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/4811529/Inside-story-19-Cleveland-Street.html

IF you wander up and down Cleveland Street in the fashionable Fitzrovia area of London, you will look in vain for Number 19. Officially, it no longer exists. This is because the house was once the venue for one of the most notorious sleaze stories in late-Victorian Englandand was quietly removed from the Land Register.

"Den of infamy": Lord Arthur Somerset, at the heart of the Fitzrovia based scandal

The "indescribably loathsome scandal", as one newspaper called it, began in the late summer of 1889 when PC 718, Luke Hanks of the General Post Office's own police force, stopped and interviewed a 15-year-old telegraph boy called Charles Swinscow, who worked at St Martin's Le Grand and who had been found carrying 18 shillings. This was the equivalent of two months' wages, and he was immediately accused of stealing.

Swinscow protested that he had earned the money by "going to bed with gentlemen" at the rate of four shillings a time at Number 19. He revealed that several other telegraph boys did the same thing to supplement their wages.

Scotland Yard put the house under watch and confirmed that "a number of men of superior bearing and apparently good position" were frequent visitors. When they finally raided Number 19, the owner, Charles Hammond, had already fled to France after a tip-off. (Hammond pocketed the other 16 shillings of each sovereign that customers paid for the boys' services.)

Some of the men calling at the house were, indeed, of good position, and when word got out of their identity, the scandal began. They were said to include Lord Arthur Somerset, son of the Duke of Beaufort, the Earl of Euston and a Colonel Jervoise from Winchester. Worse, was the speculation that Prince Albert Victor, or Prince Eddy, eldest son of the Prince of Wales, was another visitor.

Although his name was never mentioned in the British press, the American and French newspapers discussed his alleged involvement quite openly. The affair was to cause the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, no end of embarrassment.

The evidence against Lord Arthur was strong. The police had letters to him from one of the prostitutes and several statements from other boys. He was allowed to escape to Vienna and resigned from the Guards and the royal household. He died in Francein 1926.

The events at the "den of infamy", as the Illustrated Police News termed the establishment in Cleveland Street, led to three trials. One was for commissioning acts of impropriety; one for libel, in which the Earl of Euston sued Ernest Parke, the editor of The North London Press (circulation 4,500), for defaming him; and one for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice because witnesses were spirited out of the country.

At the first trial, Henry Newlove and George Veck (who had tried to escape dressed as a vicar) were found guilty of procurement but received light sentences of less than a year. (Within a decade, Oscar Wilde was to be sentenced to two years' hard labour for similar offences.)

During the second trial, Euston claimed in the box that he had attended the house in the belief that he was going to watch heterosexual poses plastiques, or the Victorian version of a strip show. Despite some compelling evidence in his favour, Parke received 12 months in jail, which the Victorian writer Frank Harris described as "infamous and vindictive". Prince Eddy was sent off to India on a lengthy tour of duty.

The renumbered house is now divided into three flats, and Flat Two - where the bedrooms used to be - is owned by a German chef, Michael von Hruschka. He is the boss at The Birdcage in nearby Whitfield Streetand has been hailed by Vogue as one of London's leading exponents of "Bohoco", or bohemian cool. Typical menus at his restaurant might include deep-fried maggots, crickets and scorpions served with a soy sauce dip.

Unfortunately, Mr von Hruschka has injured his back and finds it nearly impossible to stand for long periods at his stove. So his two-bedroom flat is now for sale. It is fairly small, the kitchen is contained in an alcove off the living room and the carpets need a clean, but the asking price for this blue plaque-free piece of history is a cool £280,000 - about double its value two years ago. Such prices are not uncommon for Noho (north of Soho) or Fitzrovia, which has been hailed as "the new Docklands" by some, although the view from this section of Cleveland Street is restricted to the wall of UniversityCollegeHospital.

Mr von Hruschka's business partner, Caroline Faulkner, from whom he bought the place, acknowledges that the area is a "very-on-the-edge sort of place. It's still a bit seedy". But as an added incentive, the purchaser will get a free meal for two at The Birdcage.

The flat can be viewed through Foxtons in Mayfair on 020 7973 2000.

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Paddington - Trailer 2 - In Cinemas November 28

November 30, 2014, 6:06 am

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November 30, 2014, 6:06 am

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Paddington is a 2014 comedy film, directed by Paul King and written by King and Hamish McColl and produced by David Heyman. The film is based on Paddington Bear by Michael Bond. The film stars Hugh Bonneville, Sally Hawkins, Julie Walters, Jim Broadbent, Peter Capaldi and Nicole Kidman, with Ben Whishaw as the voice of Paddington. The film was released in the UKon 28 November 2014.

A young bear originally from Peru with a passion for all things British travels to Londonin search of a home. Finding himself lost and alone at Paddington station, he begins to realise that city life is not all he had imagined. This is until he meets the kindly Brown family, who read the label around his neck—"Please look after this bear"—and offer him a temporary haven.

Directed by     Paul King

Produced by   David Heyman

Screenplay by

Paul King

Hamish McColl

Based on         Paddington Bear

by Michael Bond

Starring          

Hugh Bonneville

Sally Hawkins

Julie Walters

Jim Broadbent

Peter Capaldi

Nicole Kidman

Ben Whishaw

Music by         Nick Urata

Cinematography         Erik Wilson

Edited by        Mark Everson

Production

company        

Heyday Films

StudioCanal

Distributed by            StudioCanal

Release dates 

28 November 2014

Running time  95 minutes

Country         

United Kingdom

France

Language        English

Budget            $50–55 million

Homicidally ever after: did Paddington really need a murderer?

Megalomaniacs, murdering ice queens, deadly robo-cats … why are nice fluffy kids’ films such as Paddington and Postman Pat being overrun by violent villains? Nicholas Barber can’t bear to watch

Nicholas Barber

The Guardian, Monday 10 November 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/nov/10/kids-films-villains-paddington

The new trailer for the imminent Paddington Bear film may have upset the purists among us – it’s all a bit too Harry Potter for my liking – but in general it’s fairly faithful to Michael Bond’s original bear-out-of-water stories. There’s the battered suitcase and the floppy hat. There’s the Brown family and their grumpy neighbour. There’s Paddington’s knack for making a mess and causing a kerfuffle. There’s the ice queen who’s scheming to kill him and display his taxidermicised hide in the Natural History Museum. And there’s the … waaaaiiiit a minute. I may not have read every one of Bond’s books, but I’m pretty sure that the trailer’s peroxide Cruella de Vil impersonator, as played by Nicole Kidman, has strutted in from a different franchise altogether.

We shouldn’t be too surprised. Just as films based on British sitcoms always pack their characters off on a sunshine holiday, no one seems capable of putting an innocent children’s programme on the big screen without turning it into a borderline horror movie. Earlier this year, Postman Pat: The Movie took a fluffy television series about rural village niceness and added in the one element that it had always lacked: a megalomaniac who planned to conquer the world with his army of cybermen. And in 2005, The Magic Roundabout film had Dougal and his chums racing to stop an evil wizard bringing about a new ice age with the aid of his skeleton henchmen. It was almost inevitable, then, that Paddington would be landed with a bloodthirsty nemesis, too. But it’s still as depressing as a mouldy marmalade sandwich.

I admit, I have a personal stake in this: my six-year-old daughter is probably the planet’s most squeamish film-watcher. She refuses point blank to sit through scenes of extreme danger or cruelty, so our viewing options are severely limited. Snow White is out. Sleeping Beauty is out. Finding Nemo was a never-to-be-repeated disaster. The Jungle Book is tolerable as long as we fast-forward past the Shere Khan bits. And Frozen is a favourite because it doesn’t include a typically gothic Disney villain – one reason, I suspect, why it’s now the highest-grossing cartoon ever released. But beyond those … well, think of the last film you saw that was aimed at small children, and the chances are that the characters were almost stabbed, poisoned, melted, or eaten by dinosaurs.

It’s a rule of thumb that goes back to Bambi’s mother being shot by hunters. Actually, it goes right back to the days when no fairytale was complete without someone being blinded or shut in an oven. We’ve always been keen, it seems, on children’s stories that traumatise their target audience. But maybe it’s time for a change. I’ve heard the fashionable academic argument that these macabre narratives prepare youngsters for the fear and grief that await them in later life. But I’m not convinced that the makers of the Postman Pat movie ever had such noble goals in mind when they threw in a homicidal robo-cat with laser-beam eyes. I’m not convinced, either, that the most valuable lesson that our offspring can learn is: “The people you love will die.” They’ll learn it soon enough, anyway, and, when that day comes, it’s not going to be any less painful because they’ve seen Finding Nemo. Wouldn’t it be more helpful to teach them some slightly cheerier lessons? How about, “You can be adventurous without putting yourself in mortal danger” or, “Life can be thrilling even if you’re not being menaced by a criminal mastermind”? In the meantime, shoving some death and destruction into a kids’ film is simply the laziest, least imaginative way of padding it out. And Paddington does not need padding.

I’m not saying that nerve-shredding terror doesn’t have its place in toddlers’ entertainment – perish the thought – and I accept that not every child is as pathetically wimpy as mine. But I’m sure that there must be some other wusses of her age out there. Don’t they deserve to see Paddington without the whole thing turning darker than darkest Peru?

Perhaps we could introduce a quota – say, one children’s film which doesn’t feature a murderous psychopath for every two which do. After all, there are countless grown-up comedies which don’t put their characters in life-threatening peril, so it seems perverse that there are so few of them for pre-teens. Besides, children’s television manages to enthrall and delight its viewers without making them blub their eyes out. Trust me, I watch it for hours and hours and hours every week. But as much as I treasure the time spent with my daughter in front of Old Jack’s Boat and Abney & Teal, I still wish we could watch the odd film together, too.

• Paddington is out on 28 November.

Paddington review – a bear-hug of a family treat

Ben Whishaw proves the perfect voice for a CGI Paddington as endearing as the old 70s favourite

Mark Kermode, Observer film critic

 The Observer, Sunday 30 November 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/nov/30/paddington-review-bear-hug-family-treat

What headline-grabbing scandals have attended the return of Paddington Bear! First, there was his conscious uncoupling from Colin Firth (too old, apparently); next came Nicole Kidman’s announcement that his new movie was too scary for her kids; then outrage as the censors slapped a PG-rating on scenes of innuendo, dangerous behaviour, and extreme marmalade. Now, perhaps most shockingly, comes the revelation that a 21st-century computer-generated big-screen bear can be every bit as endearingly entertaining as his 70s TV stop-motion counterpart. Paddington’s creator, Michael Bond, says he “slept soundly” after seeing the new movie, and those in search of a family-friendly festive film treat will doubtless do the same.

Abandoning darkest Peru after an earthquake, our diminutive hero arrives in Londonwhere he proceeds to wreak healing havoc in the home of the Browns; uptight dad Henry (Hugh Bonneville), vivacious mum, Mary (Sally Hawkins), and troubled kids in need of some bear-based bonding. Nicole Kidman’s trigger-happy taxidermist Millicent has other plans, however, seducing creepy neighbour Mr Curry (a splendidly sniffy Peter Capaldi) into helping her steal and stuff the new arrival. It’s terrifically good-hearted fare, painting a colourful portrait of London as a multicultural melting pot with a just a hint of old school Poppins charm.

The jokes are good too, ranging from laugh-out-loud observations about the transformative effects of parenthood (and knowing mentions of “exotic wrestlers”) to slapstick bathroom episodes. Ben Whishaw turns out to be the perfect voice of Paddington (sorry, Colin), his lilting diction at once childlike and wise, his delivery naive yet oddly noble. “Please look after this bear”, says the tag around Paddington’s neck. Rest assured, they have.

Revisiting The Gentlemen's Clubs of London by Anthony Lejeune From 1980, to re-edition in 2012

December 2, 2014, 2:53 am

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  From 1980, to re-edition in 2012

Clubland is another country, redolent of the past but, for its few thousand often influential inhabitants, an integral part of life. It is a place either luxurious or a bit shabby, full of serendipitous historical relics and portraiture accumulated over three centuries, offering splendid wine and food at various levels of delight and disappointment. Covering more than 30 clubs, The Gentlemen s Clubs of London is illustrated with new photography, archival material and engravings of both grand vistas and quaint details. The narrative is a distillation of old records and recollections, published histories and accounts, clubland anecdotes and not least the author s own experience as a veteran clubman of many years standing. For those who have never stepped inside clubland s marble halls, there will be many revelations for clubmen themselves, the chance to exalt the advantages or bemoan the peculiarities of their own institution. With its beautiful new photography and archival material, this is a book to treasure. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gentlemens-Clubs-London-Anthony-Lejeune/dp/190676820X Review THREE CENTURIES OF COMFORTABLE SANCTUARY  The clubs of London- for nearly three centuries home from home to a remarkable range of characters - have never looked more inviting than in this sumptuously illustrated volume, a long-awaited new edition of a book first published in 1979. The Garrick with its glorious theatrical paintings, Boodle's with fires burning in the grates and impressive red leather chairs, the Reform with its abundance of marble, the Oxford and Cambridge with its white and gold Saloon, the Travellers with the most beautiful columned library in London, and the Beefsteak with an open timbered roof like a medieval great hall: with the loss of so many aristocratic mansions between the two world wars and the devastation of the City's livery halls during the Blitz, these are London's grandest and best- furnished interiors. London clubs owe their origin in large part to a hospitable Scotsman William Macall who created Almack's, for a while the capital's most fashionable assembly rooms. In Pall Mall he appointed Edward Boodle to run one part and William Brooks ran the other. Though it sounds like an 18th-century club, Buck's was conceived in 1918 in war-ravaged France by Captain Herbert Buckmaster and other young Blues officers who decided that if they made it back to England they would start a club. This they did the following June in an 18th-century terrace house still retaining the atmosphere of a home. P. G. Wodehouse was to say in old age that, apart from its lack of a swimming pool, Buck's was the nearest thing to his idea of the Drones Club. White's, the oldest surviving club, started life in 1693 as White's Chocolate House, run by Francesco Bianco. The RAF Club began with a £350,000 gift from Viscount Cowdray which enabled the club to buy the lease of 128 Piccadilly and is now kept alive by the largest membership of any club - 17,000 and almost 8,000 associate members. The Caledonian Club, founded in 1891, came to its present premises in 1946, a splendid Georgian Revival mansion of 1912 built as a very grand private house. The kitchens of the Reform Club designed for the club's famous chef Alexis Soyer were 'spacious as a ballroom and white as a young bride' according to Viscountess Mandeville. The Guards Club owed its foundation in 1810 to the concern of the Prince Regent and the Duke of Wellington who felt that Guards' officers returning from Spain needed an alternative to the gambling hells in St James's and the chop-houses and taprooms where they were wont to get into drunken brawls. The Garrick was founded in 1831 by the writer and art collector Francis Mills as a 'society in which actors and men of education and refinement might meet on equal terms' and moved to its splendid palazzo in 1864. Lejeune tells a nice story of two Guards' officers who sank into comfortable armchairs at the Oxford and Cambridge Club (while their own club was closed). One exclaimed: 'These middle class fellows know how to do themselves well.' Slowly the elderly member opposite lowered his newspaper to reveal the Duke of Wellington, Chancellor of Oxford University. To Lejeune one club is superior to all others - White's. When an anxious member asked Wheeler, the genial long-serving barman, if the bar was still open, he replied, 'Bless my soul, sir, it has been open for 200 years'. --The Times http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gentlemens-Clubs-London-Anthony-Lejeune/dp/190676820X#customerReviews

"Great idea, very poor book"

By Paul C on 3 Jun 2012

"I was hugely looking forward to this book, and became progressively more annoyed when its publication date kept being pushed back by months at a time. The reason soon became clear. This has all the hallmarks of a rush job, with an increasingly grumpy publisher eventually forcing his author to produce enough words whatever the cost to quality or accuracy. The introduction to the text - a great chance to reflect on the revival of clubland since the original edition of the early 1980s - is very disappointing. Its byline - Anthony Lejeune and Friends - smacks of aforementioned bodge job. The pieces on the individual clubs are lacklustre cut-and-paste rehashes of the original edition. Most information included is available for free on Wikipedia. The new photographs are lovely but some pages of plates are filled out with pictures of random items that are only tangentially relevant to the subject in hand. Hugely disappointing and a waste of (rather a lot) of money."

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gentlemens-Clubs-London-Anthony-Lejeune/dp/190676820X#customerReviews

"Disappointingly full of errors"

By C W. Raper on 9 May 2012

"What a shame. The issue of an updated version of Anthony Lejeune's classic book on London Clubs should have been a great opportunity to celebrate the survival of so many of them, and to produce new photographs. The photographs are there, but the rest is a great disappointment. The text is a bowdlerised version of the original, lacking much of its wit. There are some odd omissions (why has the RAC been dropped?). And there are far, far too many unforgivable mistakes. A bust of Hermes in the Library at the Travellers' is described as "the head of a beautiful woman". The late Victorian drawing room of the Oxford and Cambridge Club, originally part of the house of Princess Marie Louise, is described as being by Smirke. The fireplaces in the same room are dated to a decision of the Committee in 1836... One could go on.

The new photos are generally excellent, but really this is a sloppy production that does no favours to Anthony Lejeune's reputation. The original version of the book can still be bought second-hand, and is a much better purchase."

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gentlemens-Clubs-London-Anthony-Lejeune/dp/190676820X#customerReviews

Saint Laurent / 2014 by Bertrand Bonello.

December 4, 2014, 12:55 am

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Saint Laurent is a 2014 French biography drama film co-written and directed by Bertrand Bonello, and starring Gaspard Ulliel as Yves Saint Laurent, Jérémie Renier as Pierre Bergé and Louis Garrel as Jacques de Bascher. The supporting cast features Léa Seydoux, Amira Casar, Aymeline Valade and Helmut Berger. The film centers on Saint Laurent's life from 1967 to 1976, during which time the famed fashion designer was at the peak of his career.The film competed for the Palme d'Or in the main competition section at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival and was released in theatres on 24 September 2014.

 It has been selected as the French entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 87th Academy 

The 'unofficial' YSL biopic – watch the new trailer

The trailer for the second, 'unofficial' Yves Saint Laurent biopic has been released. Here are five things we've learned from it

Posted by

Lauren Cochrane

Wednesday 23 July 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/fashion-blog/2014/jul/23/unofficial-yves-saint-laurent-biopic-watch-new-trailer

The trailer for the second Yves Saint Laurent biopic – simply titled Saint Laurent– has been released. Unlike the first film, this one's unofficial and, even though it's in French and our language skills are limited, it seems decidedly more dramatic than the first. Here is what we learned when we watched it.

Alicia Drake’s The Beautiful Fall was a set text

The 2006 book was a romp through 1970s fashion in Paris, telling all on Saint Laurent, friend and rival Karl Lagerfeld and other friends. Anyone who has read it (and no doubt everyone on set did) will recognise a cast of characters including Jacques de Bascher (lover of Saint Laurent and Lagerfeld), Betty Catroux and Loulou de la Falaise.

There’s a fashion-friendy cast

Saint Laurent is played by Gaspard Ulliel, who starred in a Chanel ad in 2010, while Prada campaign girl Léa Seydoux is De la Falaise and model Aymeline Valade is Catroux. How appropriate.

You don’t need access to archives for fabulous clothes

Saint Laurent’s partner, Pierre Bergé, sanctioned use of clothes from the archives for March’s official biopic. This one still manages to reference the Russian collection, "le smoking" and the controversial 40s collection. And that’s just in the trailer.

Going out in 70s Parislooks like the most fun ever

If the official biopic focused on Saint Laurent’s work, there’s a bit more of the play here, judging by the trailer. It’s only right. Going on Drake, the designer’s extra-curricular activities – out all night at Le Sept, long languid holidays in Morocco, that affair with de Bascher – were high drama just asking for celluloid.

Snakes are a thing

They appear slithering across notebooks and on Ulliel’s lap at one point. We have no idea what this means, but it looks pretty great.

Cannes 2014 review: Saint Laurent- a smirking deification

2 / 5 stars

This second biopic of the fashion designer in as many years is cut from the same cloth as the first: swooning, self-absorbed and strangely lacking in any wider interest in society

Peter Bradshaw

Saturday 17 May 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/may/17/saint-laurent-cannes-2014

Bertrand Bonello's Saint Laurent is a celebratory and swooningly submissive tribute to the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent. It is hugely narcissistic, colossally long - and for all its apparently feminised sensibility and solemn talk of Saint Laurent's pioneering sympathy with women, it is as macho and phallus-worshipping as any Schwarzenegger action movie. This butterfly doesn't get broken on any wheel - it smashes the wheel to pieces.

It is in fact arguably superior to a recent, similar movie on the same subject - Jalil Lespert's Yves Saint Laurent - which contrived to look like a YSL corporate in-house video. This film is handsomely designed and photographed and does take a keener look at Saint Laurent's desperate loneliness and his shallow, jaded pleasures, although it is no less forgiving, no less respectful, no less convinced of Saint Laurent's importance as a popular artist, and really no better at persuading the non-fashionista laity, which I confess includes me.

Saint Laurent is played by Gaspard Ulliel: far more thrustingly sexy than Pierre Niney's boy aesthete in the previous movie. Jeremie Renier is his lover and business partner, Pierre Bergé, the man who cosseted and protected the creative man himself while shrewdly building the corporate brand. He forgave his lover's adventures with drugs and boys, perhaps because Bergé suspected that these fleeting moments of sensuality were somehow connected to Saint Laurent's inspiration at the drawing board and his mastery of fashion's ephemeral art.

This skittering, hectic world is interrupted by immense stretches of exquisite ennui - languor and longueur combined. Saint Laurentis surrounded by an entourage of hangers-on, lovers and admirers, all of whom appear to have the same cynical smirk. They are often to be seen draped around couches, rugs, nightclub banquettes - smoking and smirking, drenched in sophisticated decadence and self-congratulation. Sometimes they and Saint Laurent himself are shown waking from the previous night's debauch, and their bleary demeanour doesn't change much. Almost everyone has a lit cigarette in the mouth - perfectly plausible for the 60s and 70s. One assistant, Loulou (Lea Seydoux) even fixes a model's collar with a cigarette on the go, surely putting her at risk of getting fag-ash down the back of the neck.

In the atelier itself, during the day, Saint Laurent is coolly authoritative. He inspects a model's outfit and muses: "We could raise the crotch to avoid whiskering. Or we could play on the whiskering." His staff are serious, soberly professional, dressed in white jackets like dentists or lab assistants - and not outrageously obnoxious like Saint Laurent's associates of the night, who are given to pouring out champagne pyramid-towers, like George Best. But are the jet-setting party animals supposed to be obnoxious? We are invited to compare them to the figures that populated Proust's belle époque. Well - maybe. Visconti had his Damned. Perhaps these people are supposed to be the Blessed. The point could be to show what it all cost Saint Laurent - and yet it doesn't actually seem to have cost him that much: he grows to a pampered old age, not very conspicuously interested in anyone or anything but his dog. Perhaps it is that they are entirely without affect, like a tableau by Warhol, who writes Saint Laurent a fan letter here.

Finally, Saint Laurent is a well made but bafflingly airless and claustrophobic film, like being with fashion's very own Tutenkhamen , living and dying inside his own richly appointed tomb - and sentimentally indulged to the last.

Awards.

The Return of the duffle ( duffel ) coat .

December 5, 2014, 1:32 am

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A duffle coat, or more correctly duffell coat, is a coat made from duffel, a coarse, thick, woollen material. The name derives from Duffel, a town in the provinceof Antwerp in Belgium where the material originates. Duffle bags were originally made from the same material. Although the material is named after the town Duffle, it is commonly believed that the Duffle family (later changed to Duffel or Duffell) are responsible for the spread of the garment, a notion which, despite being debatable, is contested by few mainstream regional academics.

The duffle coat owes its popularity to the British Royal Navy, who issued a camel-coloured variant of it as an item of warm clothing during World War I. The design of the coat was modified slightly and widely issued during World War II and made by "Original Montgomery", the oldest surviving company chosen by the British Admiralty in the early 1890`s to make the first duffle coats. In the Navy, it was referred to as a "convoy coat".Field Marshal Montgomery was a famous wearer of the coat, as a means of identifying himself with his troops, leading to another nickname, "Monty coat".

Large stocks of post-war military surplus coats available at reasonable prices to the general public meant that these coats became a ubiquitous and popular item of clothing in the 1950s and 1960s. The British firm Gloverall purchased surplus military supply of coats after World War II and in 1954 started producing their own version of the Duffle coat. They have continued to make the Monty ever since and still do. Gloverall made in the 50's what is known as today's Duffle by using leather fastenings and Buffalohorn toggles with a double-faced check back fabric. Every Duffle coat you see today in that configuration is a copy of that original made by Gloverall.

http://www.dufflecoatsuk.co.uk/history/history.html

1860

The first design template is received from the Admiralty (Royal Navy) to create a universal utility garment for all ranks to share when at sea. The Ideal Clothing Company makes duffels for first time.

1890

Expedition to Antarctica is the first recorded use by Royal Navy marines of the duffel as an official part of the uniform,Duffel development is confirmed as a semi double breasted design with asymmetric closing held together with wooden toggles and sitting at mid thigh length.

1915

Duffel development is confirmed as a semi double breasted design with asymmetric closing held together with wooden toggles and sitting at mid thigh length.Duffels now in wide use across the Royal Navy.Many officers in the British Army swap their great coats for the less formal duffel and the use of the duffel

1942

Duffels in use on motor torpedo boats as well as destroyers.Fabric is now mainly made in Yorkshireafter protests by local politicians. Submariners issued with duffels which prove unsuitable in the extremely confined spaces and a lighter version of the original blazer (so called because either they were red or they were first used on HMS Blazer) is made instead

1945

In the First World War becomes a talking point of great note as officers had never been allowed to wear such a `rough all ranks` item of clothing before. Young officer called Bernard Law Montgomery champions the idea of copying the Royal Navy idea of a universal utility garment and he takes to wearing his duffel at all times Deliveries of unofficial duffels to the British Amy begin.

1956

Duffels still not recognized as proper attire but are in increasing use amongst younger go ahead officer types. New design is longer, double breasted but still closed with wooden toggles and held on with rope tapes Outbreak of World War 2 and Montgomery is quickly promoted to run the Africa campaign- he is always photographed in his by now instantly recognizable duffel

1960's

SAS first formed as a specials operation unit behind Rommels lines- standard kit is duffel coat,Following mass demobilisation of Army and Navy personnel over a million duffel coats are returned to military stores Military

1976

Flood Europewith surplus duffels and they become the choice of poor intellectuals everywhere. First duffel made with horn toggles as a fashion item ,Duffel sits alongside USparka as a statement of anti establishment rebellion,Viscount Montgomery of Alamein dies.

1987

Ideal Clothing Company, part of Tibbett plc, changes name to Montgomery as a celebration of 100 years after Montgomery's birth.

Paddington fashion; THE HISTORY OF... DUFFEL COATS

SUSANNAH CONWAY   Sunday 20 December 1998 / http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/paddington-fashion-the-history-of-duffel-coats-1193476.html

TO BE trendy this season you need only sport a decorative hood attached to your coat or top, yet the best-looking hoods around can be found on that most classic of coat shapes: the duffel coat.

Fashioned with big pockets, check lining and the ubiquitous toggles, this knee-length coat was created for the British Royal Navy in the Second World War to protect its men against the biting winds of the Atlantic and North Sea. The design evolved from the need for practicality and the original duffel had a very roomy cut that allowed it to be worn over another coat. The big hood was designed to fit over the officers' peaked naval caps and the use of toggle fastenings instead of buttons meant the coats could be fastened and unfastened while wearing thick gloves.

The word "duffel" originally referred to a heavy woollen cloth, similar to that which was used to make the coats, manufactured in the Belgian town of Duffel. After the War, civilians began wearing army surplus duffel coats and, in 1953, British company Gloverall started manufacturing a commercial men's duffel coat. Women wore the smaller sizes of the men's coat until the late Sixties, when duffel coats cut specifically for women arrived on the market.

Duffel coats are worn across the world and are particularly popular with the Japanese - 40 per cent of Gloverall's market is in Japan. Well- known manufacturers of the duffel coat include Burberry and Aquascutum, as well as Gloverall, whose customers can be split into two main camps: the older customer who shops at a gentleman's outfitters and the young and trendy whose influences come out of the music scene - Liam Gallagher famously wears one. A cashmere Aquascutum duffel coat features in the January '99 issue of FHM and duffel coats are now being made for all seasons with neoprene, nylon, elysian and cashmere versions all available.

Duffel coats are always popular with children and perhaps the most famous owner of a duffel coat is Paddington Bear, who first sported one in Michael Bond's book A Bear Called Paddington published in 1958.

Susannah Conway

Black Sheep .... by CHRISTOPHER OTHEN.

December 8, 2014, 12:17 am

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Murdered Earls, bisexual public school men, and war heroes with dark secrets. The political power of Britain’s upper classes may have declined in recent years but their instinct to lie, cheat, murder and steal is as strong as ever. CHRISTOPHER OTHEN, author of 'FRANCO'S INTERNATIONAL BRIGADES: ADVENTURERS, FASCISTS, AND CHRISTIAN CRUSADERS IN THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR' (amazon.co.uk or amazon.com), is your guide through a library of wrong doing. Please check your morals at the door.

 http://www.brightreview.co.uk/ARTICLE-Black-Sheep.html

Black Sheep

One Hundred Years of Bankrupt British Aristocrats, Corrupt Golden Youths, and Frankly Untrustworthy Remittance Men

In a hurry? Read the summary here.

Sitting comfortably? Then put a new cigarette in its ivory holder and refresh your whisky and soda. Get the servants to stoke the fire because these old houses can get so cold at night. And make sure your service revolver in the desk drawer is loaded. Captain Grimes is coming round tonight to discuss the accounts. The little matter of those post-dated cheques in the mess tin. You might be forced to take the gentleman’s way out. Or you might be forced to shoot Captain Grimes.

The wealthiest stratum of our society has always prided itself on loyalty, tradition, and devotion to duty. But too many of the aristocrats, trust fund beneficiaries and members of the officer class who sit at the apex of Britain’s social triangle have a moral backbone like a bit of wet spaghetti. From Rupert Bellville to Simon Raven, the Earl of Erroll to John Aspinall, the most respectable part of the country has churned out black sheep on a production line scale.

So put away that portfolio of artistic French photographs and leave answering the love note from your brother’s wife until later. Let’s take a stroll through the last one hundred years of bankrupt aristocrats, corrupt golden youths, and frankly untrustworthy remittance men. Books and the odd flick will be our signposts. I’ll be your guide. We’ll start gently, with some flawed heroes. Let’s go back to the days when we still had an Empire … .

Edwardian & First World War

Rupert Brooke was the archetypal golden youth. The kind liked by young girls and bachelor schoolmasters. Handsome, boyish, and a poet, he was the son of Rugby's headmaster and born into privilege. Michael Hasting's 1967 'Rupert Brooke: The Handsomest Young Man In England' is a comprehensive scrapbook of Brooke's world and acquaintances (with, for no good reason, two identical photographs of T E Hume) but the text is poor. Better biographies include Nigel Jones’ 'Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth' (1999).

In the years before the First World War Brooke founded the 'Neo-Pagans', a small middle-class grouping of friends that were part answer to Germany's Wandervogel and part back-to-nature ramblers. Paul Delaney's 1987 book The Neo-pagans: Friendship and Love in the Rupert Brooke Circle looks at the group in detail although its main selling point was the first publication of a Brooke letter graphically detailing a homosexual encounter.

Brooke preferred girls overall but had a nightmarish time of it. One relationship with Catherine 'Ka' Cox led to an abortion. Brooke had a mental breakdown. It did not help that Cox was entangled with the Lytton Strachey's Bloomsbury set, the effete imitators of all things artistic and French, and a whirlpool of sexual ambiguity that Brooke was trying to escape.

Cox would later die mysteriously in west Cornwall. Writer Paul Newman has investigated the rumours that link the death with occultist Aleister Crowley in 'The Tregerthen Horror'. Crowley, essentially an 1890s figure, who became known as the 'Wickedest man in the World' by the tabloids for his very public experiments with Golden Dawn ritual magic using sex and drugs, has many biographies. Two of the most recent are by Tobias Churton and Richard Kaczynski.

Brooke was well-off enough to travel to Germany, Americaand Tahiti in the years before the First World War but his money could not compare with the truly wealthy aristocracy. Julian Grenfell, the son of Lady Desborough and product of Eton and OxfordUniversity, gets a sympathetic portrait in Nicholas Mosley's 1976 biography.

A man of action with a poetic side to him Grenfell tried hard to give meaning to his privileged life with a book of philosophy. Its rejection by publishers, orchestrated by his concerned mother, led to a breakdown. When he recovered Grenfell rejoined the parentally approved path and signed up with the army.

In 1914 he enthusiastically threw himself into the war, his letters home describing it as a 'picnic' and full of hunting talk. He liked war. His poem 'Into Battle', is an enthusiastic praise of combat that combines Nietzsche with English pastoralism and has been much criticised by pacifists since. He also wrote poems attacking the 'red faced majors at the base', in Siegfried Sassoon's phrase, but these are less well known.

Grenfell died in 1915, hit by a shell splinter. Brooke died earlier the same year of disease en route to the Gallipoli campaign. In 1916 the short story writer Hector Hugh Munro ('Saki') was killed by a German sniper in France. His last words, to a comrade: 'Put that bloody cigarette out!'

It was the kind of black humour that would have been appreciated by a man whose mother was killed by a cow and whose elegant, malicious short stories are still fresh today. Munro was less wealthy than Grenfell and Brooke but from the same background. He perfected the languid, cigarette held between drooping fingers aesthete's pose but underneath was a tough man, right-wing even by Edwardian Imperialist standards. He worked as a journalist, notably in Tsarist Russia, before finding his role as a short story writer. He was homosexual to his fingertips. AJ Langguth’s 1982 biography has the full story. The war seemed to Munro, like many others, a chance to throw off stale, soft civilian life and re-invent himself as a soldier. He refused a commission.

Roaring Twenties

Denys Finch Hatton bridged the Edwardian and Twenties eras. Another golden youth, he attended Etonwith other upper class sons of privilege like Grenfell, Patrick Shaw-Stewart and the devoutly Catholic Ronald Knox. He did languid, disinterest in worldly success charisma better than anyone. At a university golf match he gave his opponent an advantage and was heckled from the crowd by an outraged professor: 'Remember you are playing for your college not for yourself!'

Born into wealth, country houses and vast estates Hatton had little interest in competition.

'Remember you are playing for neither,' he replied.

Hatton was charismatic but slipped through life so elegantly that he seems more shadow than man. Sara Wheeler’s' 2006 biography 'Too Close to the Sun: The Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton' devotes most of its pages to Karen Blixen, neurotic Danish author of 'Out Of Africa' (many years later a Robert Reford/Meryl Streep film) and Hatton's lover.

The pair met in Kenya where Hatton decamped before the First World War to fail as a farmer but succeeded as a Great White Hunter. He brought down leaping lions with seconds to spare on rich men's safaris, useful experience for the now forgotten East African campaign of the Great War. The only front in the war where a fire fight between British and German troops was disrupted by a charging rhino.

'Close To The Sun' succeeds despite the absence of its subject because the scenery and supporting cast come to vivid life. Africa is a character, all orange sunsets and chattering wildlife. The day players are well drawn. Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen fought alongside Hatton in the Africa campaign but the splenetic old Africa hand is best know for his pre-war peace negotiations with a rebellious tribe. He arranged a meeting, strode forward to shake the rebel chief's hand then pulled a revolver with his spare paw and shot the man. Meinertzhagen got the Victoria Cross. Brian Garfield's 'The Meinertzhagen Mystery: The Life and Legend of a Colossal Fraud' (2007) debunks many of the old soldier’s adventures. Meinertzhagen later claimed members of the Tsar's family escaped the Bolsheviks and that he tried to assassinate Hitler. He discovered the Giant Forest Hog (Hylochoerus meinertzhageni).

Hatton was peripherally linked with the dissolute HappyValleyset of 1920s Kenya. Never too decadent himself - he preferred to spend his evenings with the classics and a gramophone, although he had a fondness for the Ballets Russe - Hatton occasionally mixed with Josslyn Victor Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll, the Valley's leading light. Blond haired charmer Erroll had hero worshipped the older man at Eton. Out in Africa Erroll went through other men's wives at a rapid pace but avoided the cocaine and morphine used by others in his circle.

James Fox's 1982 'White Mischief' tells the HappyValley story as he tries to puzzle out who shot Erroll in the head at close range at a deserted cross roads one night in 1940. Was it Diana Broughton, Erroll's latest lover? Or Sir Henry ‘Jock’ Broughton, Diana's cuckold husband who was charged, acquitted and committed suicide? The book spawned 'White Mischief' the movie with Charles Dance as Erroll, an actor who has perfected the art of the disinterested glance.

Errol Trzebinski’s 2000 'The Life and Death of Lord Erroll: The Truth Behind the Happy Valley Murder' claims the dead man's brief membership of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists led the Secret Services to assassinate him. Not much evidence for that. Mosley himself was another son of privilege who moved from conservative right to socialist Left then out to Fascism. Many books about him but his son Nicholas''Rules of the Game/Beyond the Pale: Memoirs of Sir Oswald Mosley and Family' (1991) and Robert Skidelsky's 1975 biography are good. Recent works like Martin Pugh’s 2005 ‘'Hurrah for the Blackshirts!: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars' and Stephen Dorril’s 2006 'Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism' were well reviewed.

The best answer to the Erroll murder was given by 2005 BBC programme 'Julian Fellowes Investigates A Most Mysterious Murder'– The Case of the Earl of Errol’ in which the aristocrat actor/screen writer claimed Jock Broughton really was responsible. Wife Diane was in the car at the time and had to wear a scarf after to hide the bullet track in her neck. Fellowes claimed to speak from personal knowledge.

Another murdered wartime aristocrat was Sir Harry Oakes whose mysterious 1943 death in the Bahamas - bludgeoned and burned in his bed - spawned a host of conspiracy theories. James Owen's 'A Serpent in Eden: The Greatest Murder Mystery of All Time' (2006) is a readable account of the murder and subsequent trial of Oakes' son-in-law Count Alfred de Marigny, a dubiously titled Mauritian of French descent, who like Jock Broughton escaped gaol despite much suspicion. Respectable Bahamians were put off by his two-tone ‘co-respondent’ shoes.

The wife-swapping HappyValley set were a dark reflection of England's Bright Young Things. DJ Taylor's 'Bright Young People' (2007) is a comprehensive look at the media darlings who partied through the 1920s, most aristocrats, most rich. Bottle parties, swimming pool parties, paper chases, fatal car crashes, tuxedos and Brilliantine. Taylor's book exhausts the seam of London's fun loving rich in the roaring twenties.

A few of the more outstanding BYTs deserve their own books. Lawrence Whistler's book on his brother Rex, 1975’s 'Laughter and the Urn', describes a talented artist who decorated the Tate Gallery dining room in Roccoco style and was brought into the BYT world through his friendship with Stephen Tennant. The son of Scottish peer Lord Glenconner, Tennant was aesthete of the aesthetes and campest of the camp, although he lacked any other talents. He was war hero and poet Seigfreid Sasoon's great love. Phillip Hoare’s 1992 biography 'Serious Pleasures: Life of Stephen Tennant' is a heavy weight account of a feather light life.

Part-time BYT, and advisor to Fox's 'White Mischief', Cyril Connolly was a famously underachieving old Etonian who investigated the Erroll case in the 1960s for a magazine article. Connolly did Eton and Oxfordin the twenties but came to prominence the following decade. He went through a number of wives, the most tempestuous being Barbara Skelton. At a dinner party where Connolly was making a pig of himself, with food round his mouth:

Skelton: [contemptuously] What’s that on your face?

Connolly: Hate.

His best remembered work, 1938's 'Enemies of Promise', is a portmanteau of literary criticism and public school memoir. Short pieces 'Where Engels Fears To Tread', a parody of upper class BYT aesthete turned Communist Brian Howard, and ‘Death of an Elizabethan', a surprisingly reverent review of a memoriam book on a right-wing aristocrat pilot who died young, stand up better. They can be found in 'The Condemned Playground', a 1944 collection of essays with a frightening drawing of Connolly by Augustus John as frontispiece. Brian Howard is the subject of Marie-Jaqueline Lancaster's 1968’s 'Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure'.

Howard and Connolly were contemporaries of Evelyn Waugh, the dominant literary novelist of the twenties. Waugh was not aristocratic but liked to associate with them. Selina Hasting's 1994 biography is a monumental account of the misanthropic aesthete but his circle at Oxford Univeristy is better brought to life in Martin Stannard’s 1987 'Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years, 1903-39' and Humphrey Carpenter’s 1992 'The Brideshead Generation: Evelyn Waugh and His Friends'. Oxfordprovided the material for much of Waugh's best seller 'Brideshead Revisited'' - languid men of 'convenient bisexuality', in writer Anthony Powell's words, blazing through family fortunes on the manicured lawns of Oxford colleges.

It was a world of champagne bottles, limited poetry editions, Victoriana obsessions and gay crushes. 'Brideshead Revisited' was an extensive ITV series in 1981, and a less successful 2008 film. Waugh's 1930 'Vile Bodies' was made into a 2003 film by Stephen Fry as 'Bright Young Things'. Watchable but Fry softens Waugh's sharp edges. The novel was written while Waugh's marriage to Evelyn Gardener was falling apart. She ran off with a BBC employee called John Heyward. Waugh wrote a 1959 biography of Catholic priest Ronald Knox, one of the rare survivors from Denys Finch Hatton’s pre-war circle.

Powell's own 1983 memoirs 'To Keep the Ball Rolling' provide a clinically detached look at the time. Bevis Hiller’s 1984 biography of John Betjeman's early years (Young Betjeman) has much on the mix of snobbery, aestheticism, and reaction that made up the lives of the rich in Oxford at the time. Also worth checking out are 'Poet Ed' about Edward James, fabulously rich Oxford man and patron of Surrealism, and Mark Amory’s 1988 biography of 'Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric'. Like Hatton, Berners was a bridging figure between Edwardian aristocracy and twenties Bright Young Things, although unlike him also fat, eccentric, musical, and homosexual. Both books are light on atmosphere but fill in the gaps.

Harold Acton's 1948 'Memoirs of an Aesthete' should have been essential from the poet who was the central figure in that circle but are instead a rather dim reflection of that time. Acton declaimed poetry through a megaphone (an Edith Sitwell touch) to rowers returning from the Isis.

Some of the Brideshead generation were made of tough stuff, like Robert Byron, subject of James Knox’s 2003 biography. Angry homosexual Byron travelled widely, wrote well on architecture, and hated Nazis and Turks. His 1937 'The Road to Oxiana' is still in print and was Bruce Chatwin's favourite book.

Not everyone stayed in Britain. In the twenties Paristhrobbed with avant garde art, a cheap cost of living and loose morals. American and British writers and artists, some even talented, descended on the bohemian sectors to live life to the full. Englishman English painter Christopher Wood juggled an in depth knowledge of the latest French techniques with bisexuality and opium addiction. Jean Cocteau liked him. He returned to England and spent time in Cornwall, then in the early days of its life as an artist colony. His work is faux-naif. In 1930 Wood threw himself under a train. Richard Ingleby’s 1995 biography is thorough. Sebastian Faulkes included him as one of his three portraits in the same year's 'The Fatal Englishman'.

For an American version see Harry Crosby, scion of a wealthy Boston family but prominent in the avant garde Parisart world of the 1920s with Black Sun Press, publishing Ernest Hemingway among others. Crosby abused drugs, wife swapped, and made dramatic gestures. His poetry was limited. He died in a 1929 suicide pact with his mistress in a friend's New York apartment. Geoffrey Wolff’s biography 'Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby' (1977) is excellent.

Hungry Thirties

Martin Green's 1976 'Children of the Sun: A Narrative of Decadence in EnglandAfter 1918' is an unconvincing attempt to connect the aesthetes of the twenties with the Fascists of the thirties. Its main attraction is a nice photograph of Randolph Churchill as a young man before Winston's son got fat and red-faced. Randolph has never had a critical enough biographer to turn in a good book on this ultimate son of privilege. His own son's 1996 biography is anaemic, while an earlier anthology of recollections 'The Young Unpretender' (1971), edited by Kay Halle, entertaining but all surface.

The rich kept their heads down in the Hungry Thirties as political extremes ramped up across Europe. Denys Finch Hatton's old schoolmate Ronald Knox and social climbing Jesuit Martin D'Arcy converted some, including Evelyn Waugh, to Catholicism. A few went political. Roger Griffiths' 1980 'Fellow Travellers Of The Far-Right' gives a good summary of the extreme right fringe, with a fair sprinkling of titled names.

Yuri Modin’s My Five Cambridge Friends about Philby and co gives an inside look at the militant left version. The Spanish Civil War radicalised many. Stansky & Abrahams’ 'Journey to the Frontier' (1966) details the lives of John Cornford and Julian Bell, the first a Communist, the second a fellow traveller. Cornford was a good conventional poet whose dedication to Marx gives his verse real attack ('Understand the weapon/ understand the wound'). Poetry ran in the family - his mother Frances was a friend of Rupert Brooke and wrote the 'Apollo golden haired' quatrain about him. Bell was a less talented poet who knew many of the Cambridgespy ring around Philby. Both died in Spain.

Rupert Bellville was one of the few who fought in Spainfor Franco. The heir to Papillon Hall, a Leicestershire country house redesigned by Edward Lutyens but already crumbling, the argumentative pilot joined the Spanish Falange militia in the early days of the war thanks to contacts in the Andalusian sherry industry. He was best known for arriving in Santander by aeroplane to congratulate the victorious Nationalist troops only to find it was still in the hands of the Republicans. He narrowly escaped a firing squad. Oxford graduate Peter Kemp contributed more to Franco's cause, first in the Carlist Requetes and later in the Foreign Legion. Those two and others can be found in my 'Franco's International Brigades: Adventurers, Fascists, and Christian Crusaders in the Spanish Civil War' (2013).

Second World War

BYT Rex Whistler died just after D-Day in France. Cecil Beaton heard he got drunk and fell under a lorry but the truth was a more heroic end as a tank commander during a mortar barrage. The apparent fading of the aristocracy was commemorated in Waugh's 'Brideshead Revisited' and also in Keith Douglas' wartime poem 'Aristocrats', although with greater distance. Douglas himself was a man of action, leaning leftwards but entranced by rightist sentiments of army discipline and patriotism. He also died just after D-Day. Desmond Graham's 1974 Keith Douglas, 1920-1944: A Biography is thorough.

Others let the side down. John Amery, son of Secretary of State for India Leopold Amery, was in France when it fell. He threw his lot in with the Germans, broadcast propaganda to Britain and tried to organise a British Waffen-SS unit. Caught in Italy at the end of the war, by future television personality Alan Whicker, Amery was hanged for Treason. Adrian Weale covers British traitors in 'Renegades: Hitler's Englishmen' (1994). A good read but his composite biography of Amery and Sir Roger Casement, 'Patriot Traitors' (2001), is best avoided.

Bad things also happened on the home front. Neville Heath just pretended to be a gentleman. A fantasist RAF pilot with a taste for whipping young girls, he killed at least two during the war and was hanged for it. Francis Selwyn lifts the stone in 1988’s 'Rotten to the Core: Life and Death of Neville Heath', as does Sean O'Connor in the 2013 'Handsome Brute: The Story of a Ladykiller'.

On the winning side John Heyward emerged out of the jungles of Burmawith a native bride, less than five feet high and bought from one of the 'more primitive tribes' - at least according to Anthony Powell. The man for whom Evelyn Waugh's wife left him, Heyward deserves a biography of his own. Something of a womaniser, he toured Europe in the twenties and thirties, married the former Mrs Waugh and was sacked from the BBC for his involvement in the divorce. He leant to the right and had an exciting war in the Far East. Post-war he drank himself into a stupor and eventually committed suicide. Powell’s unofficial biographer Michael Barber provides glimpses of an interesting character.

Barber's biography of Powell (2004) is relatively tame, the estate not being particularly helpful as they had Hilary Spurling in the wings for an official version. Barber's writing is as elegant and juicy as always but his prose is better served in the 1996 biography 'The Captain'. Its subject is an inferior writer to Powell but far more interesting person, the frankly satanic Simon Raven ...

Post-War

'Is it true you like both men and women?' an officer asked Simon Raven during the writer's doomed attempt at a career in the British Army after the Second World War.

'I like all four kinds.'

'Four kinds?'

'Male and female. Amateur and professional.'

Raven attended Charterhouse public school but was forced to leave a few terms early for homosexual adventures too blatant for the authorities to ignore. Raven joined the army for National Service just as the empire ended in India, much to his disappointment ('I liked the sound of Sahib Raven'). On release he made it through CambridgeUniversity seducing students of both sexes. He got Susan Kilner pregnant so did the decent thing by marrying her. They lived separate lives, an arrangement aided by Raven rejoining the Army. He was shifted around a number of colonial hotspots, like the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, where he did his best to avoid too much action before being kicked out for gambling debts. A telegram once arrived from Susan: 'Mother and baby starving STOP Please send money soonest'.

'Sorry no money STOP,' he replied. 'Suggest eat baby'.

Or so the story goes. It says something about Raven's capacity for scandalous behaviour that even his friends liked to tell the telegram story. He was happy to repay the favour and one of his memoirs was pulped after libel proceedings. Raven was a gifted writer with a flowing, exact style that owed equal amounts to a Classical education and a love of Evelyn Waugh's early work. His plotting and characterisation could not always keep up. Much of his extremely limited success was due to the louche tone of his early novels - homosexual army affairs and murder (first book 'The Feathers of Death', 1959), right-wing secret societies (the same year’s not very good 'Brother Cain'), and sexual vampires (1960’s 'Doctors Wear Scarlet' made into under funded 1970 psychedelic horror movie 'Incense For The Damned' aka 'Blood Suckers').

His reputation rests on roman fleuve 'Alms for Oblivion' written in conscious imitation of Powell's superior 'A Dance to the Music of Time' series, which had begun thirteen years earlier in 1951. Raven does high class sleaze like no-one else but the best books are 1966’s 'Sabre Squadron', a thriller set in Allied occupied Germany informed by Raven's own posting there, although let down by an incompletely imagined central Jewish character, and 'Fielding Gray' (1967), the definitive dark side of public school novel, whose plot influenced Stephen Fry's 1991 debut novel 'The Liar'.

Raven lived precariously, bouncing checks, writing novels, and dining well. By the 60s the slim, vulpine army officer had become round and red-faced. He was kept afloat through the generosity of his publisher Anthony Blond, like Raven bisexual, unlike him rich. His memoirs 'Jew Made in England' (2004) are disjointed but never dull, particularly on his friendships with the more raffish figures in the post-war world. He knew Alan Clark before the historian became a Tory MP. The clipped, arrogant and athletic Clark was son of Lord Clark (of cultural tv series 'Civilisation' fame - the book version, illustrated or not, is a good read). Clark once told Blond he lived in Albany, the set of bachelor apartments in central London, because it needed only a single word of direction to a taxi driver.

'Two words,' said Blond.

Clark looked puzzled.

Blond explained - 'Albany, please.'

Clark's Diaries ('Into Politics', 'In Power', and 'The Last Diaries' - 2000, 1993 and 2002 respectively) mix politics, cars, affairs and hypochondria, and make a more sympathetic figure of Clark than many thought possible. A 2009 authorised biography by Ion Trewin provided a fuller picture. Reviewers were polarised, less by the book than by their reactions to Clark's personality.

Aspinall & Co

Blond was also friends with John Aspinall and James Goldsmith from his days at Oxford. All were part of a hard drinking, hard gambling set. Aspinall and Goldsmith were ambitious and wanted to be rich. Aspinall went on make his money in gambling, first with floating Chemin de Feu games around Mayfairand then with the Clermont Club in Berkley Square. Goldsmith became an international asset stripper, admired and hated.

Douglas Thompson's 2007 'The Hustlers: Gambling, Greed and the Perfect Con' is a good account of Aspinall's career up until the sale of the Clermont Club in the late 1960s. Great cast of gambling characters - Lord Derby ('a failing salesman in a rented dinner jacket,' according to Simon Raven who once won £900 at Chemmy in the late 50s, subsequently losing a lot more), SAS founder David Stirling who shrugged off a loss of £174,500 in one night during 1959, and John Bingham, Lord Lucan ('thick as two planks,' according to Mark Birley, founder of Annabel's nightclub) soon to be wanted for murder.

Thompson does a good job even though he describes a louche 50s resort in France where British aristocrats and gangsters mixed with European playboys and actresses as a place 'you could lie on the beach and look at the stars or vice versa'. The book attracted controversy with its revelation that Aspinall routinely cheated gamblers at the Clermont with the help of Billy Hill, London's top gangster. Aspinall's family denied it, his business partner confirmed it.

'The Real Casino Royale' was a 2009 Channel 4 documentary based on Thompson's book. The interviews and archive footage are good, the reconstructions less convincing. The actor playing Lucan looks more like Kaiser Wilhelm and Billy Hill's hat is inexplicably four sizes too big. Back in 2000 Adam Curtis created ‘The Mayfair Set’ for the BBC, a documentary on Thatcherite capitalism that used the regulars of the Clermont Club as its hook. Goldsmith got the lion's share of the spotlight. The four parter is Curtis' usual mix of insight, archive footage and conspiracy theory.

Meanwhile up the road in Cadogan Square, November 1971, an expatriate American mother and son had a row. The son stabbed his mother to death. Barbara Bakeland was fabulously rich, married into the family that invented Bakelite, but had eccentric ideas about curing son Anthony of his homosexuality. She slept with him. This did not help his paranoid schizophrenia. The tale is told well in 'Savage Grace: The True Story of a Doomed Family' (1985) an oral biography by Natalie Robbins and Steven M L Aronson. It was turned into a movie in 2007.

The Clermont had passed into the hands of the Playboy organisation by 1974 when Lord Lucan attempted to murder his estranged wife but killed the children's nanny Sandra Rivett by mistake. By this time his gambling debts were so high he worked as a house gambler for Aspinall. And he drank. Surprisingly few books have been written about the crime although it gripped the country and, with Lucan vanished the night of the murder and never seen again, continues to fascinate. Most books are written by retired policemen to boost their pensions and hinge on new theories about Lucan's whereabouts ie. MacLaughlin and Hall’s discredited 'Dead Lucky - Lord Lucan: The Final Truth' (2003).

John Pearson's 2005 'The Gamblers' is a joint biography of Aspinall and Goldsmith and those around them but has a fairly clear overview of the Lucan murders. 'Bloodlines', a straight to DVD 1997 movie made with Irish money, is a well informed dramatisation although it goes off the rails at the end with Lucan battling gangsters on a cliff top. It follows, at least partly, Pearson's theory that Lucan was killed by gangsters - presumably linked to Billy Hill, although this is never explicitly stated.

Another Clermont gambler accused of murder, Claus von Bulow was acquitted of the 1979 murder of his wife. 'Reversal Of Fortune', a 1991 Hollywood movie of the trial based on attorney Alan Dershowitz's book, is watchable. Jeremy Irons exudes Von Bulow's dark charm:

Dershowitz: We have one thing in our favour.

Von Bulow: What's that?

Dershowitz: Everybody hates you.

Von Bulow: [Swallows a mouthful of food, gestures with his fork] It's a start.

James Goldsmith ended his days with a luxurious Mexican hideaway, more money than he knew what to do with and the Reform Party, a vehicle to bash pro-European MPs. Hutchins & Midgley's 1998 biography 'Goldsmith: Money, Women and Power' is the latest available. He died in 1997 of cancer. He outlived Aspinall, Billy Hill and most of his gambling cronies, including the weak willed artist Dominic Elwes, who he helped drive to suicide for a perceived betrayal to the press after the Lucan murders. Elwes was father to actor Cary, star of 1984's 'Another Country' about public school boys discovering homosexuality and Communism in the thirties.

To everyone's surprise Raven outlived them all. The novels declined in quality as he got older but he made money working on television drama scripts. His last words in hospital were 'Who's paying for all this, I'd like to know?'

Not everyone was dressed up in a dinner jacket losing money at Berkley Square. In the 1960s Robert Fraser was a top modern art dealer, friend of the Rolling Stones (present at the Redlands bust) and heroin addict. While learning the art trade in early 1960s New York he impressed friends by dropping coin change on the floor as not worth carrying around. Harriet Vyner’s 1999 oral biography 'Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser' is a good read. In the seventies he headed for India and AIDS.

Africa and Elsewhere

Darker Englishmen were about by the time of Lucan's disappearance. In fiction Frederick Forsythe's anonymous English assassin in 1971's 'The Day of the Jackal' summed up the new type of ruthless, amoral and probably dangerously rightist well spoken types. The 1973 film with Edward Fox was good.

Andy Beckett’s 2002 book 'Pinochet in Piccadilly: Britain and Chile's Hidden History' covers the real life ground, although at heart it is an overgrown article about links between Margaret Thatcher and Chilean dictator General Pinochet pumped up with speculation about right-wingers around David Stirling in the 1970s. 'The Wilson Plot: How the Spycatchers and Their American Allies Tried to Overthrow the British Government' provides background to Stirling's activities with allegations that members of the establishment believed Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson was a KGB agent.

But golden youths made a comeback with writer Bruce Chatwin. Educated, talented, bisexual Chatwin had made his mark at auctioneers Sotheby’s but burst onto the wider world as journalist and author. His icy, etched style and love of the esoteric – from nomads to Ernst Junger, Russian Futurism to Jackie Kennedy - made him great but in his lifetime he was known primarily as a travel writer. Non-fiction 1989 collection 'What am I Doing Here' is essential, 1988 novel 'Utz' good and Nicholas Shakespeare's 1999 biography very good.

Chatwin loved Africa and experienced the grim aftermath of an attempted 1976 coup in Benin when he was suspected of being one of the foreign mercenaries involved under the command of Frenchman Bob Denard, who tells his side of the story in 'Corsaire de la Republique'.

Forsythe's third novel 'The Dogs of War' about overthrowing a corrupt African dictatorship was based on his apparently real attempt to put together an earlier coup in Equatorial Guinea. Thirty years later Englishman Simon Mann tried the same deal with the help of, among others, Mark Thatcher - son of the former Prime Minister and ultimate remittance man. The coup went wrong and Mann ended up in a hellhole jail in Equatorial Guinea. The tale is told well in 'The Wonga Coup: Simon Mann's Plot to Seize Oil Billions in Africa' by Adam Roberts (2006).

For a fictionalised account of recent black sheep see Edward St Aubyn's three semi-autobiographical novels 'Never Mind', 'Bad News' and 'Some Hope', most recently combined in 2006's 'Some Hope: A Triology'. The 1982 film 'Privileged' about rich types at OxfordUniversityhas its fans. Woody Allen’s 'Match Point' (2005) should not work, with its luxurious London apartments masquerading as down market hovels, unsubtle Dostoevsky references, and rich families who like both the opera and Andrew Lloyd Weber. But it succeeds because Allen, inadvertently, taps into a fantasy of London upper class life that bears little relation to the truth but feels like a warm champagne bath to anyone who enjoyed 'Brideshead Revisited'' and wants a version with mobile phones and murder. All that despite the script originally having been set in the Hamptons.

For other American film versions of this type see Whit Stillman's 1990 'Metropolitan' and 1998 'The Last Days of Disco'. Also the off-beat take of 'A New Leaf' (1971) with Walther Mathau, oddly convincing as a playboy running short of money, despite having a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp.

Dealing With Grimes

Well, there you have it. One hundred years of bankrupt aristocrats, corrupt golden youths, and frankly untrustworthy remittance men. Perhaps it gave you some ideas. Grimes is due soon. Best pick a spot to greet him. By the roaring fireplace, beneath the portrait of the seventh Earl? Or looking reflectively at the Big Game trophies on the wall, with their brass plaques? That gazelle put a bit of a fight. Or perhaps behind the door with a poker in your hand? Yes, that might be the best place. Bon chance old chap. Give Grimes my regards.

Tamara de Lempicka.

December 10, 2014, 12:32 am

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She was born Maria Górska in Warsaw, Congress Poland under the rulership of the Russian Empire, into a wealthy and prominent family. Lempicka was the daughter of Boris Gurwik-Górski, a Russian Jewish attorney for a French trading company, and Malwina Dekler, a Polish socialite who met him at one of the European spas. Maria had two siblings and was the middle child. She attended a boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland, and spent the winter of 1911 with her grandmother in Italyand on the French Riviera, where she was treated to her first taste of the Great Masters of Italian painting. In 1912, her parents divorced, and Maria went to live with her rich Aunt Stefa in St. Petersburg, Russia. When her mother remarried, she became determined to break away to make a life of her own. In 1913, at the age of fifteen, while attending the opera, Maria spotted the man she became determined to marry. She promoted her campaign through her well-connected uncle, and in 1916 she married Tadeusz Łempicki (1888–1951) in St. Petersburg—a well-known ladies' man, gadabout, and lawyer by title, who was tempted by the significant dowry.

In 1917, during the Russian Revolution, Tadeusz Łempicki was arrested in the dead of night by the Bolsheviks. Maria searched the prisons for him and after several weeks, with the help of the Swedish consul, she secured his release. They traveled to Copenhagenthen to London and finally to Paris, to where Maria's family had also escaped.

                                                                                                   

In Paris, the Lempickis lived for a while from the sale of family jewels. Tadeusz proved unwilling or unable to find suitable work, which added to the domestic strain, while Maria gave birth to Kizette Lempicka. Her sister, the designer Adrienne Gorska, made furniture for her Parisapartment and studio in the Art Deco style, complete with chrome-plated furniture.The flat at 7 Rue Mechain was built by the architect Robert Mallet-Stevens known for his clean lines.

Lempicka's distinctive and bold artistic style developed quickly, influenced by what André Lhote sometimes referred to as "soft cubism" and by the "synthetic cubism" of Maurice Denis, epitomizing the cool yet sensual side of the Art Deco movement. For her, Picasso "embodied the novelty of destruction". She thought that many of the Impressionists drew badly and employed "dirty" colors. Lempicka's technique would be novel, clean, precise, and elegant.

For her first major show, in Milan, Italy in 1925, under the sponsorship of Count Emmanuele Castelbarco, Lempicka painted 28 new works in six months. A portrait would take three weeks of work, allowing for the nuisance of dealing with a difficult sitter; by 1927, Lempicka could charge 50,000 French francs for a portrait, a sum equal to about US$2,000 then and more than ten times as much today. Through Castelbarco, she was introduced to Italy's great man of letters and notorious lover, Gabriele d'Annunzio. She visited the poet twice at his villa on Lake Garda, seeking to paint his portrait; he in turn was set on seduction. After her unsuccessful attempts to secure the commission, she went away angry, while d'Annunzio also remained unsatisfied.

In 1925, Lempicka painted her iconic work Auto-Portrait (Tamara in the Green Bugatti) for the cover of the German fashion magazine Die Dame. As summed up by the magazine Auto-Journal in 1974, "the self-portrait of Tamara de Lempicka is a real image of the independent woman who asserts herself. Her hands are gloved, she is helmeted, and inaccessible; a cold and disturbing beauty [through which] pierces a formidable being—this woman is free!" In 1927 Lempicka won her first major award, the first prize at the Exposition Internationale des Beaux Arts in Bordeaux, France, for her portrait of Kizette on the Balcony.

Lempicka's distinctive and bold artistic style developed quickly, influenced by what André Lhote sometimes referred to as "soft cubism" and by the "synthetic cubism" of Maurice Denis, epitomizing the cool yet sensual side of the Art Deco movement. For her, Picasso "embodied the novelty of destruction". She thought that many of the Impressionists drew badly and employed "dirty" colors. Lempicka's technique would be novel, clean, precise, and elegant.

For her first major show, in Milan, Italy in 1925, under the sponsorship of Count Emmanuele Castelbarco, Lempicka painted 28 new works in six months. A portrait would take three weeks of work, allowing for the nuisance of dealing with a difficult sitter; by 1927, Lempicka could charge 50,000 French francs for a portrait, a sum equal to about US$2,000 then and more than ten times as much today. Through Castelbarco, she was introduced to Italy's great man of letters and notorious lover, Gabriele d'Annunzio. She visited the poet twice at his villa on Lake Garda, seeking to paint his portrait; he in turn was set on seduction. After her unsuccessful attempts to secure the commission, she went away angry, while d'Annunzio also remained unsatisfied.

In 1925, Lempicka painted her iconic work Auto-Portrait (Tamara in the Green Bugatti) for the cover of the German fashion magazine Die Dame. As summed up by the magazine Auto-Journal in 1974, "the self-portrait of Tamara de Lempicka is a real image of the independent woman who asserts herself. Her hands are gloved, she is helmeted, and inaccessible; a cold and disturbing beauty through which pierces a formidable being—this woman is free!"In 1927 Lempicka won her first major award, the first prize at the Exposition Internationale des Beaux Arts in Bordeaux, France, for her portrait of Kizette on the Balcony.

In Paris during the Roaring Twenties, Tamara de Lempicka became part of the bohemian life: she knew Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and André Gide. Famous for her libido, she was bisexual. Her affairs with both men and women were conducted in ways that were considered scandalous at the time. She often used formal and narrative elements in her portraits, and her nude studies produced overpowering effects of desire and seduction. In the 1920s she became closely associated with lesbian and bisexual women in writing and artistic circles, such as Violet Trefusis, Vita Sackville-West, and Colette. She also became involved with Suzy Solidor, a night club singer at the Boîte de Nuit, whose portrait she later painted.

Her husband eventually tired of their arrangement and abandoned her in 1927. They were divorced in 1931 inParis.

Obsessed with her work and her social life, Lempicka neglected more than her husband; she rarely saw her daughter. When Kizette was not away at boarding school (France or England), the girl was often with her grandmother Malvina. When Lempicka informed her mother and daughter that she would not be returning from America for Christmas in 1929, Malvina was so angry that she burned Lempicka's enormous collection of designer hats; Kizette watched them burn, one by one

Kizette was neglected, but also immortalized. Lempicka painted her only child repeatedly, leaving a striking portrait series: Kizette in Pink, 1926; Kizette on the Balcony, 1927; Kizette Sleeping, 1934; Portrait of Baroness Kizette, 1954–5, etc. In other paintings, the women depicted tend to resemble Kizette.

In 1928, her longtime patron the Baron Raoul Kuffner von Diószeg (1886–1961) visited her studio and commissioned her to paint his mistress. Lempicka finished the portrait, then took the mistress' place in the Baron's life. She travelled to the United States for the first time in 1929, to paint a commissioned portrait for Rufus Bush and to arrange a show of her work at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. The show went well but the money she earned was lost when the bank she used collapsed following the Stock Market Crash of 1929.

Lempicka continued both her heavy workload and her frenetic social life through the next decade. The Great Depression had little effect on her; in the early 1930s she was painting King Alfonso XIII of Spainand Queen Elizabeth of Greece. Museums began to collect her works. In 1933 she traveled to Chicago where she worked with Georgia O'Keeffe, Santiago Martínez Delgado and Willem de Kooning. Her social position was cemented when she married her lover, Baron Kuffner, on 3 February 1934 inZurich (his wife had died the year before). The Baron took her out of her quasi-bohemian life and finally secured her place in high society again, with a title to boot. She repaid him by convincing him to sell many of his estates in Eastern Europe and move his money to Switzerland. She saw the coming of World War II from a long way off, much sooner than most of her contemporaries. She did make a few concessions to the changing times as the decade passed; her art featured a few refugees and common people, and even a Christian saint or two, as well as the usual aristocrats and cold nudes.

After Baron Kuffner's death from a heart attack on 3 November 1961 on the ocean liner Liberté en route to New York, she sold most of her possessions and made three around-the-world trips by ship. Finally Lempicka moved to Houston, Texasto be with Kizette and her family. (Kizette had married a man named Harold Foxhall, who was then chief geologist for the Dow Chemical Company; they had two daughters.) There she began her difficult and disagreeable later years. Kizette served as Tamara's business manager, social secretary, and factotum, and suffered under her mother's controlling domination and petulant behavior. Tamara complained that not only were the paints and other artists' materials now inferior to the "old days" but that people in the 1970s lacked the special qualities and "breeding" that inspired her art. The artistry and craftsmanship of her glory days were unrecoverable. In 1978 Tamara moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico, to live among an aging international set and some of the younger aristocrats. After Kizette's husband died of cancer, she attended her mother for three months until Tamara died in her sleep on March 18, 1980. She was cremated and her ashes were scattered over the volcano of Popocatepetl on 27 March 1980 by her Mexican friend Victor Manuel Contreras and her daughter Kizette.

In the winter of 1939, Lempicka and her husband started an "extended vacation" in the United States. She immediately arranged for a show of her work in New York, though the Baron and Baroness chose to settle in Beverly Hills, California, living in the former residence of Hollywooddirector King Vidor. She cultivated a Garboesque manner. The Baroness would visit the Hollywood stars on their studio sets, such as Tyrone Power, Walter Pidgeon, and George Sanders and they would come to her studio to see her at work. She did war relief work, like many others at the time; and she managed to get Kizette out of Nazi-occupied Paris, via Lisbon, in 1941. Some of her paintings of this time had a Salvador Dalí quality, as displayed in Key and Hand, 1941. In 1943, the couple relocated to New York City. Even though she continued to live in style, socializing continuously, her popularity as a society painter had diminished greatly. They traveled to Europefrequently to visit fashionable spas and so that the Baron could attend to Hungarian refugee work. For a while, she continued to paint in her trademark style, although her range of subject matter expanded to include still lifes, and even some abstracts. Yet eventually she adopted a new style, using palette knife instead of brushes. Her new work was not well received when she exhibited in 1962 at the Iolas Gallery. Lempicka determined never to show her work again, and retired from active life as a professional artist.

Insofar as she still painted at all, Lempicka sometimes reworked earlier pieces in her new style. The crisp and direct Amethyste (1946), for example, became the pink and fuzzy Girl with Guitar (1963). She showcased at the Ror Volmar Gallery in Paris from 30 May to 17 June 1961.

Lempicka lived long enough for the wheel of fashion to turn a full circle: before she died a new generation had discovered her art and greeted it with enthusiasm. A retrospective in 1973 drew positive reviews. At the time of her death, her early Art Deco paintings were being shown and purchased once again. A stage play, Tamara, was inspired by her meeting with Gabriele D'Annunzio and was first staged in Toronto; it then ran in Los Angeles for eleven years (1984–1995) at the VFW Post, making it the longest running play in Los Angeles, and some 240 actors were employed over the years. The play was also subsequently produced at the Seventh Regiment Armory in New York City. In 2005, the actress and artist Kara Wilson performed Deco Diva, a one-woman stage play based on Lempicka's life. Her life and her relationship with one of her models is fictionalized in Ellis Avery's novel The Last Nude,  which won the American Library Association Stonewall Book Awards Barbara Gittings Literature Award for 2013.

The good old naughty days

In life Tamara de Lempicka was a Left Bankbisexual with an appetite for bohemian living. Her work, though, portrays the dubious glamour and discipline of fascism

Fiona MacCarthy

Saturday 15 May 2004 / http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/may/15/art

If there is a single image that encapsulates art deco, it is Tamara de Lempicka's self-portrait Tamara in the Green Bugatti. It was commissioned for the cover of the German magazine Die Dame, which defined her as "a symbol of women's liberation". The tight, post-cubist composition of the painting; the muted, sophisticated colour; the sense of speed and glamour; her blonde curl edging out of the head-hugging Hermès helmet; her long leather driving gauntlets; her lubricious red lips. Clearly this is a woman who means business - even to the extent of mowing down a few pedestrians.

Her time was the 1920s: a period of transition, an era in which functionalism merged with fantasy and formal social structures lurched into the frenetic. In essence, De Lempicka was a classicist, having admired Renaissance painting since her adolescent travels in Italy. But she astutely combined traditional portraiture with advertising techniques, photographic lighting, vistas of the tower architecture of great cities.

Her milieu was the glittery and scintillating Parisof the years between the wars, a place of high style and lascivious behaviour. With a callous authenticity, De Lempicka depicted the shifting morals of a Paris where nothing was precisely what it seemed. She lived and worked on the bisexual fringes of a society where there were no rules beyond the demands of style and entertainment. She was the great go-getter, a believer in exploiting one's resources to the ultimate. Her iconic green Bugatti wasn't green in reality but yellow. Nor was it even a Bugatti but a Renault. "There are no miracles," she stated with her icy realism. "There is only what you make."

Who was she? De Lempicka shuffled the facts of her biography much as she meddled with her birth date. Tamara Gurnick-Gorzka was born in Moscow - or could it have been Warsaw? - in 1898 or so, to a wealthy Polish mother and a cosmopolitan Russian father. Her background of social confidence and ease was to prove an advantage to a portraitist: she confronted her sitters on equal terms. In St Petersberg, she met Tadeusz Lempicki, a tall, saturnine attorney of noble family and, at the age of 14, announced her love for him. They were married just before the Russian revolution. Lempicki was arrested by the Bolsheviks but his wife secured his release.

Like other exiled White Russians, they arrived in Pariswith no money, having abandoned their possessions. They now had a child, Kizette. Tadeusz Lempicki remained unemployed and moody. Tamara's portrait of her husband shows the queasy self-importance of the glamour boy displaced. These were years of deprivation, in which Tamara herself became determined to succeed as a professional artist. "My goal," she later wrote, "was never to copy, to create a new style, bright, luminous colours and to scent out elegance in my models." She became a prime interpreter of modernity.

De Lempicka's painting is a thing of gloss and gesture. In her early days in Paris, she enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and absorbed the work of the old masters, especially admiring Bronzino. In some ways, De Lempicka is a mannerist reborn. She went on to study in the studio of the symbolist Maurice Denis, a highly decorative painter who instilled the sense of discipline and structure in her work.

Her most influential mentor was the painter and critic André Lhote, perpetrator of a less strident, gentler-coloured form of cubism, a style easily acceptable to the bourgeoisie. In her early Paris paintings, De Lempicka employed this "synthetic cubist" method, an accumulation of small geometric planes used to startlingly voluptuous effect in images of women reclining, women bathing, women embracing, laconically stroking one another's thighs. The blatant display of the naked female body was a feature of art deco - this was, after all, the era of Josephine Baker shaking her banana skins. De Lempicka's pair of pointing-breasted giantesses, The Friends, disport themselves in front of a futuristic stage set of skyscrapers, a 1920s fantasy of big city sex.

But her images of female nudity also recalled the French neo-classical tradition. Her group painting Women Bathing is the Left Bank lesbian version of Ingres's luscious harem composition The Turkish Bath. The critics' divination of "perverse Ingrism" in De Lempicka's paintings did her burgeoning popularity no harm. In real life, she acted up to it, displaying her own tall, slender, curvy body outstretched on a divan, wearing a titillating white satin robe with marabou feather adornments. Tamara played her own art deco goddess of desire.

She was a workaholic, permitting interruptions in her nine-hour painting sessions only for such necessities as champagne, a massage and a bath. She sold herself shrewdly and by 1923 was beginning to exhibit in small galleries in Paris. The next year, her work was shown at the Salon des Femmes Artistes Modernes in Paris, and in 1925 she had her first solo exhibition in Milan.

Her social life advanced in parallel, displaying the full force of Tamara's "killer instinct" (her daughter's description). There was something predatory in the way she acquired so many lovers of both sexes, many of whom were also her models and her patrons. The model for her painting Beautiful Rafaela was picked up in the street and seduced with aplomb. The portrait throbs with an intense erotic energy. The liaison continued for a year.

Tamara gave up on Tadeusz and, brandishing diamond bracelets from wrist to shoulder, joined the European avant-garde celebrities: Marinetti, Jean Cocteau, Gabriel d'Annunzio. She visited d'Annunzio at his notorious villa Il Vittoriale in Gardone where, unusually, she resisted his advances and, equally unusually, failed to paint his portrait - a singular loss to the De Lempicka oeuvre. She was a spectacular attender of Natalie Barney's afternoons "for women only" and claimed to have snorted cocaine with André Gide.

Thanks to her contacts in the world of the Paris couturiers, De Lempicka always looked fabulous. Photographed in the right light, she could be Greta Garbo's sister. She made her entrance at smart parties in magnificent garments donated by Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli.

In the late 1920s, De Lempicka acquired her most important patrons, Doctor Pierre Boucard and his wife. Boucard was a medical scientist, inventor of Lacteol, a cure for indigestion. He had become an avid modernist and already owned several De Lempicka nudes, including her most flamboyant lesbian painting, Myrto, Two Women on a Couch. He now offered her a two-year contract to paint portraits of himself, his wife and daughter, also asking for an option on any other paintings she produced.

This sudden financial stability allowed her to buy a three-storey house and studio on Rue Mechain on the Left Bank. She commissioned its refurbishment by Robert Mallet-Stevens, the most brilliant French modernist designer of the time. With its svelte grey interior, chrome fittings and American cocktail bar it gave De Lempicka the setting of ultimate urban smartness to which she had long aspired.

A contemporary architectural photograph shows the new studio in all its pristine glory. There in the centre on its easel is the portrait of Madame Boucard, completed in 1931, a sophisticated and accomplished painting that tells us as much about De Lempicka as it does about the sitter. De Lempicka is the connoisseur of textiles, jewels, hairstyles, the cut of the garment, the swathe of the mink stole: no other painter of the period gives us so precise a reading of its material values. Madame Boucard is posed like a Renaissance courtesan, her right nipple erect beneath the oyster satin bodice. She's a figure of power, with something of the brutal allure of Wallis Simpson. What she tells us is that every sex act has its price.

Size mattered in the Europeof that time. De Lempicka's male portraits show gigantic caddishness. Spiv-shouldered Doctor Boucard, with his test tube and his microscope, looks more the slick sharp man about town than man of healing. Count Fürstenberg Herdringen is a glass-eyed monster in a Frenchman's navy beret. Most frightening of all is the colossal portrait of the Grand Duke Gabriel Constantinovich, with his gold-braided uniform and empty, sneering face.

De Lempicka was an artist of the Fascist superworld: her portraits were allied to the "call to order" movement, the return to monumental realism in European art. Her art exudes the dark and dubious glamour of authoritarian discipline. When she paints the Duchesse de la Salle, the Duchess is in jackboots, one hand thrust in her pocket in an attitude of menace. It is a tremendous portrait, painted with the sheer theatrical enjoyment, the unerring sense of decor, of De Lempicka's best work.

In 1933 she remarried. Baron Raoul Kuffner was the owner of vast estates donated to his family of stockbreeders and brewers by Emperor Franz-Josef for supplying the Hapsburg court. De Lempicka had already portrayed her future husband as a dandy desperado, gazing out inscrutably from behind hooded lids. She had also painted - and in doing so disposed of - his previous mistress, the Andalusian dancer Nana de Herrera, selecting her as model for the most overtly decadent of the "damned women" in the notorious Group of Four Nudes .

De Lempicka was never a consistent painter. As with many ruthless people, her swagger could give way to a strain of awful mawkishness: cubism and kitsch. Once she became Baroness Kuffner, Tamara lost direction. The urge for fame, and indeed subsistence, left her. The age of art deco, in which she thrived, was over. Her sentimental studies of old men with guitars and lachrymose mother superiors are a dreadful anti-climax after the bitchy candour of her portrait of lesbian nightclub owner Suzy Solidor.

The political terrors of Europe in the 1930s were impinging: she and the baron, on holiday in Austria, were appalled to have their breakfast on the hotel verandah interrupted by a singing parade of Hitler Youth. In 1939, urged by Tamara, who was partly Jewish, Kuffner sold his estates in Hungaryand they moved to the US. In New York, she tried abstract expressionism unsuccessfully, and was reduced to the role of a chic curiosity, "the painting baroness".

De Lempicka died in 1980 inMexico, having directed that her ashes be scattered over the crater of volcanic MountPopocatepetl. The woman who in her lifetime was described as "a little hot potato" came to a suitably inflammatory end. Her expensively dressed rogues gallery of portraits, though hardly great art, add up to a unique and alarming social document, recording the seductive surface textures of a European society en route to self-destruct.

October 24, 1999

Glitter Art

The life of a Deco painter who was as sybaritic as her subjects.

By GLYN VINCENT / https://www.nytimes.com/books/99/10/24/reviews/991024.24vincent.html

Jean Cocteau once said of the painter Tamara de Lempicka that she loved ''art and high society in equal measure.'' If her pursuit of society resulted in opened doors and enviable pleasures, two-timing the art world would also prove to be the bane of her existence. ''To artists she appeared to be an upper-class dilettante, and to the nervous haute bourgeoisie she seemed arrogant and depraved,'' Laura Claridge writes in ''Tamara de Lempicka: A Life of Deco and Decadence.''

A Polish-Russian aristocrat, Lempicka barely escaped the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1918, she landed in a drab little hotel room in Pariswith her unemployed husband and a small child. Within a few years, marshaling her innate talent, her wit and Greta Garbo looks, she became the most talked about Art Deco painter of her time. To this day, her erotic portraits of stylish sybarites are enduring testaments to the novelty-loving materialism and decadence of the glittering 1920's.

There was nothing ordinary about Lempicka; even her name clings to the tongue like an exotic marmalade. Flamboyant (paradoxically remaining true to herself while being a slave to fashion) and imperious, she pinned down her husbands like butterflies in a case, gave lavish parties for hundreds and indulged in every vice that came her way. In the Paris salon of the poet Natalie Barney, she sniffed cocaine and drank sloe gin fizzes laced with hashish among the likes of Andre Gide. On the banks of the Seine, she picked up sailors and female prostitutes. After her nocturnal debauches, she painted until dawn. Her life style (and her ''affair'' with the Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio) sent her first husband, Tadeusz Lempicki, packing into the arms of a plump heiress.

Lempicka's second marriage was to the Hungarian Jewish Baron Raoul Kuffner, which necessitated a second flight, this time from Hitler's Europe to the United States. In New York and Hollywood (where she was known as ''the Baroness with a paintbrush'') she saw her career rise and plummet -- only to have her work rediscovered in the 1970's and 80's (she died in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 1980) and collected by celebrities like Madonna and Jack Nicholson.

It is Claridge's ambition that Lempicka, whom she calls ''one of the 20th century's most important and iconoclastic artists,'' be returned to her rightful place in the limelight. But her rush to enshrine Lempicka in the pantheon of modern art's greatest masters sometimes results in breathy pronouncements and lapses of judgment that disrupt an otherwise lucid and interesting account of Lempicka's life and art.

In uncovering Lempicka's life, Claridge, the author of ''Romantic Potency: The Paradox of Desire,'' has surmounted a serious handicap. There were no diaries and few letters and documents to consult; most previous accounts of Lempicka's life have been based on her deliberate lies and improvised anecdotes. Claridge establishes that Tamara Gurwik-Gorska was born around 1895 in Moscow -- not, as she insisted, in 1898 (or later) in Warsaw. Her mother, Malvina Dekler, came from wealthy Polish bankers; her father, Boris Gurwik-Gorski, was a successful Russian Jewish merchant. He disappeared early in Lempicka's childhood, and she fairly well erased him and her Jewish heritage from her memory. She grew up in the hierarchical, class-conscious atmosphere of the haute bourgeoisie during la belle époque. She attended finishing school, visited Warsaw, St. Petersburg, Paris, and made annual tours of Italy, where she first fell in love with the Renaissance masters that were to become an important influence on her work.

By 1910, Lempicka was spending most of her time at her wealthy aunt's opulent residence in St. Petersburg. It was there that she acquired her taste for luxury, and, at a costume ball, she set her sights on her future husband, a handsome Polish lawyer named Tadeusz Junosza-Lempicki. The couple's idyllic, spoiled existence -- traipsing from avant-garde cafe gatherings to society teas -- was cut short by the Russian Revolution. The Cheka arrested Tadeusz, and Lempicka was left to her own devices to free her husband and escape to Paris. ''Paradoxically,'' Claridge writes, Lempicka the painter ''would not have existed without the Russian Revolution. Her expulsion from a predestined life of privilege transformed her into a modern woman.''

In Paris, Lempicka, who had early on shown talent as an artist, took up painting to support her family. To a sleek Cubist style she added the disciplined finish and melancholy light of Renaissance painting. She painted beautiful if somewhat dim-looking women -- half mannequins, half animals, with blood red lips and translucent eyes staring Belliniesquely at heaven, awaiting, it seems, not a message from God but an elixir to slake their restless ennui.

By the mid-20's, Lempicka's portraits of aristocrats and prostitutes were being exhibited in the Paris salons. Her ''Autoportrait: Or, Woman in the Green Bugatti'' (1929) was so often reproduced it became a sort of advertisement for the new modern woman -- independent, stylish and sexually liberated. Lempicka's success allowed her to mingle with avant-gardists like Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dali and Filippo Marinetti, but she remained disengaged from the progressive, leftist artistic climate of her time. Aloof and wild, she was fundamentally anti-intellectual. At home, too, she remained at sea. An absent wife, she used her artistic life to excuse her infidelities. A rigid perfectionist, she abused her daughter, Kizette. After her first marriage fell apart she suffered from severe bouts of depression that were to plague her for the rest of her life.

By the mid-1930's the neo-classical and decadent elements of Lempicka's painting made her suspect to both the left-wing critics and the fascists. Lempicka's place in the art world would not be resolved by her move to the United States in 1939. With her wealthy second husband's money she continued her frenetic socializing, while her representational painting quickly became an anachronism, overshadowed by Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. In the 1960's she largely gave up her career and came to resemble a demanding, eccentric socialite more than an influential painter.

Claridge argues that Lempicka has been denied her rightful place in modern art history because she was a woman whose background was politically incorrect, and suggests a re-examination of Modernism is in order. She may not be up to that task, but she has contributed a well-deserved and sympathetic account of Lempicka's life.

Glyn Vincent is writing a biography of the artist Ralph Albert Blakelock.

By John Gross

Published: September 4, 1987 / http://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/04/books/books-of-the-times-517687.html

PASSION BY DESIGN: The Art and Times of Tamara de Lempicka. By Baroness Kizette de Lempicka-Foxhall as told to Charles Phillips. Illustrated. 191 pages. Abbeville Press.

TAMARA DE LEMPICKA -you may not recognize her name, but there is a fair chance that you have seen her face. It gazes out from one of her most frequently reproduced paintings, the ''Auto-Portrait'' of 1925, also known as ''Tamara in the Green Bugatti.'' The young blond driver sits at the wheel of her car, with full red lips and sensuous eyes, gloved and helmeted like an aviator (though the helmet looks curiously metallic) -the perfect image of modernity, 1925 vintage, and the embodied spirit of Art Deco.

During the 1920's and 30's, while she was living in Paris, Tamara de Lempicka established herself as the quintessential Art Deco painter. No one who has seen them could readily forget the stylized portraits and nudes that she painted at that time, with their dramatic shadows and frozen drapery, their sub-Cubist backgrounds of planes and angles and skyscrapers. They have a hard, chrome and enamel feel to them, and yet they contrive to be full of individual character, too.

By the time she left for America, shortly before World War II, Lempicka's reputation was in decline. The dealers lost interest in her, and for many years her work, when it attracted attention at all, looked hopelessly dated.

Then, in the late 1960's, she began to share in the revived fortunes of Art Deco in general, and by the end of the 70's she had once more come into her own. A retrospective exhibition was held in Paris in 1972; a deluxe book about her, edited by Franco Maria Ricci, was published in 1977; since then the prices paid for her paintings have risen sharply, and there has even been a play about her (''Tamara,'' which was first produced in Hollywood in 1984 and will be coming to New York in the fall).

In spite of this she has remained an elusive, somewhat mysterious figure, and there was certainly room for a more extended study of her life than the two or three sketches that are all that has been available up until now. ''Passion by Design'' sets out to fill the gap; it also offers a handsome selection of the paintings (most of them reproduced in color) and photographs taken from Lempicka's own albums.

The text has an unusual history. After Lempicka died in 1980 her daughter, the Baroness Kizette de Lempicka-Foxhall, began to collect her letters and papers and start making notes of her own. Her relationship with her mother had been a difficult one; she was anxious to set down the story in a way that would, in the words of Charles Phillips, ''banish the ghost,'' and at the same time do Lempicka justice - to produce a book without any trace of ''Mommie Dearest,'' as it were.

In 1986 she met Mr. Phillips, and they agreed to collaborate. Mr. Phillips, as he explains, took down the Baroness's story, edited it and recast it in the third person; he has also supplemented it with his own research and material drawn from interviews with Lempicka's friends and acquaintances.

There is no reason in principle why such a method shouldn't have worked, but in practice the results are not very satisfactory. For much of its length, the book provides no more than a trickle of information, bulked out with feeble anecdotes and historical ''background'' of the most banal variety. The Jazz Age is summed up as ''the decade between the last machine gun burst in the trenches on the Marne and the first splat of bone and blood on the sidewalks of Wall Street''; the 1930's are ushered in with the news that ''before long a strange little man who looked remarkably like Charlie Chaplin would play on the turmoil of worldwide depression to get himself elected ruler of Germany.''

Still, let us be thankful for those hard facts about Lempicka that we are given - about her years in Paris in particular. She arrived there with her husband in 1918, both of them refugees from the Russian Revolution (Tamara herself was Polish); her life in exile felt empty, and she turned to painting at the suggestion of her sister, enrolling as a student with the painters Maurice Denis and Andre Lhote.

Her subsequent success brought her into contact with many leading artists and writers of the time (she painted a striking portrait of Andre Gide, for example), but she also kept one foot firmly in the world of smart society. The list of the friends she painted reads like a random dip into the Almanach de Gotha - the Marquis d'Afflitto, the Duchesse de la Salle, Count Furstenburg-Hendringen, the Grand Duke Gabriel Constantinovich - though a glance at their portraits will confirm that she was no mere flatterer.

One of the most oddly contorted and powerful of her portraits was of a Spanish dancer, Nana de Herrera. It was commissioned by Nana de Herrera's lover, a wealthy Hungarian called Baron Kuffner, and the authors describe it as ''something of an assassination''; shortly after it was finished Lempicka replaced the dancer as Kuffner's mistress. He was only one of her many conquests, but the most enduring of them: it was as Baroness Kuffner (they had been married in 1933) that she sailed with him to Americain 1939.

The American years were spent in Hollywood, in New Yorkand then, after Kuffner's death in 1962, inHouston. Apart from Hollywood, where Lempicka made a certain splash, they sound like a prolonged anticlimax, and by the time she moved to Mexico, in 1978, she had plainly become an impossible mother, and a fairly impossible person. But she did achieve one last grand gesture, asking for her ashes to be scattered from the air over the volcano Popocatepetl. Her request was honored.

A book with its share of colorful moments, then; but on the whole it is the pictures that are its justification. And not all of them, either - a few are pure kitsch; but the best of them have an electrifying impact.

---

Mr. Turner, by Mike Leigh.

December 11, 2014, 11:18 pm

≫ Next: Remembering The "Ursula" Suit.

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Mr. Turner is a 2014 British biographical drama film, written and directed by Mike Leigh, and starring Timothy Spall, Dorothy Atkinson, Paul Jesson, Marion Bailey, Lesley Manville, and Martin Savage. The film concerns the life and career of British artist J. M. W. Turner (played by Spall). It premiered in competition for the Palme d'Or at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, where Spall won the award for Best Actor and cinematographer Dick Pope received a special jury prize for the film's cinematography.

Leigh has described Turner as "a great artist: a radical, revolutionary painter," explaining, "I felt there was scope for a film examining the tension between this very mortal, flawed individual, and the epic work, the spiritual way he had of distilling the world."

A look at the last quarter century of the great British painter J. M. W. Turner. Profoundly affected by the death of his esteemed father, loved by his housekeeper, Hannah Danby, whom he takes for granted and occasionally exploits sexually, he forms a close relationship with a seaside landlady with whom he eventually lives incognito in Chelsea, where he dies.

Throughout all this, Turner travels, paints, stays with the country aristocracy, visits brothels, is a popular if anarchic member of the Royal Academy of Arts, has himself strapped to the mast of a ship so that he can paint a snowstorm, and is both celebrated and reviled by the public and by royalty.

Mr. Turner had its premiere at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, where it competed for the Palme d'Or, with Timothy Spall winning the Best Actor award and cinematographer Dick Pope winning the Vulcan Award. Entertainment One are scheduled to release the film in the United Kingdomon 31 October 2014. Sony Pictures Classics will handle the United Statesdistribution, with a scheduled release date of 19 December 2014. It is scheduled to be screened in the Special Presentations section of the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival.

Directed by     Mike Leigh

Produced by   Georgina Lowe

Written by      Mike Leigh

Starring           Timothy Spall

Dorothy Atkinson

Marion Bailey

Paul Jesson

Lesley Manville

Martin Savage

Music by         Gary Yershon

Cinematography         Dick Pope

Edited by        Jon Gregory

Production

company        

Film4

Focus Features International

Lipsync Productions

Thin Man Films

Xofa Productions

Distributed by            Entertainment One

Release dates 

15 May 2014 (Cannes)

31 October 2014 (United Kingdom)

19 December 2014 (United States)

Running time  150 minutes

Country          United Kingdom

Language        English

Impressions of Mr Turner: a film researcher’s view from books to screen

Premiere of director Mike Leigh’s film ends a collaborative creative process that started more than two years ago

Jacqueline Riding

Friday 31 October 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/oct/31/mr-turner-making-mike-leigh-film

On a sunny afternoon in December two years ago, the cast and crew of the film Mr Turner – then only known as Untitled 13 – gathered in central Londonfor a read through. Only there was no read through, because there was no script.

Mike Leigh’s film-making process is intensive and collaborative, with character, action and dialogue gradually emerging from months of research, discussion and improvisation – and he told us that this method is broadly the same whatever the subject. It was a process that would develop over six months of rehearsals, and a four-month shoot.

At the initial stage there was a lot of reading (the books on JMW Turner alone can be measured by the yard), and site visits and dossiers to be created – of Turner’s family, partners, fellow artists, friends, patrons, associates – out of which the time span of the film is settled, themes and events are defined, characters are selected and actors cast. We managed to get agreement from a large number of museums and galleries to use their images and selected hundreds of works that could be included in the set-piece reconstructions, such as Turner’s Queen Anne Street gallery and the magnificent 1832 RoyalAcademy summer exhibition. The next research stage was a sort of actors’ art/history boot camp, which happened alongside the actors’ sessions with Mike, because everything and anything that was read or experienced might find its way into the character, the scene and the dialogue.

This meant a lot of work for each actor, particularly Timothy Spall, playing Turner. For a character such as Turner, one challenge is knowing when to stop. With others, such as his close companion Sophia Booth (played by Marion Bailey) and his housekeeper Hannah Danby (Dorothy Atkinson), surprisingly little had been written about them, considering the gamut of Turner biographies.

But to give an indication of the overall scale and scope of the research covered: in early December 2012 there were 40 actors, which gradually expanded to 76 as the rehearsal period went on, until the characters included a monarch, a barber, an earl, an art critic, a sherry merchant, an evangelical Anglican, a doctor, a slave ship carpenter, a photographer, an army officer, an architect, two prostitutes and 15 artists (including the great man himself).

The research took us from KensingtonPalaceto Berry Bros & Rudd fine wine merchants, from the RoyalHospitalMuseumin Chelsea to the RoyalLondonHospitalat Whitechapel, and from Sir John Soane’s Museum to Margate and Twickenham (Turner’s House). Paul Jesson (playing William Turner senior) had lessons in traditional wet shaving, while Leo Bill (as the photographer John JE Mayall) had sessions on daguerreotype photography with expert David Burder.

I spent months in the British Library and the London Library – the latter packed full of wonderful material such as an 1813 housekeeping manual that provided a useful contemporary recipe for a pig’s head stuffing, using brains and bread crumbs, and early travel guides to Kent.

There were sessions for the “artists” in the library and archive of the RoyalAcademy, hands-on pigment and oil-paint classes at Winsor & Newton fine art materials and back at U13 central, group discussions on art theory, history and practice. At the Royal Museums and Old Royal Naval College at Greenwich, the same group covered everything from Lord Nelson, Trafalgar and the Temeraire to decorative history painting and European marine art – the latter courtesy of my sister, Christine Riding, who happened to be curating the major exhibition, Turner and the Sea, which Leigh opened in November 2013.

From early on, some form of reconstruction of Turner’s most famous painting, The Fighting Temeraire, was discussed. Clearly computer-generated imagery would be required, but the reality was very different to Turner’s vision. It is known that the Royal Navy had stripped the ship of anything useful, including her masts, and that she was taken up the Thames to Rotherhithe by two tugs and that her last journey to the breaker’s wharf began on the morning of 5 September 1838 to take advantage of the spring tides. No masts, no ethereal glow, no lone jaunty tug, no elegiac sunset.

But then Turner’s painting is essentially a construct of his own imagination using the bare facts of the event as a starting point. That the scene in the film shows a masted war ship and a sunset, with Turner and his companions Clarkson Stanfield (Mark Stanley) and David Roberts (Jamie Thomas King) taking a boat down the Thames to see her, is following Turner’s lead – an imagined scene full of poignant historical resonances, and a little knowing humour, based on the event and in this case the painting it stimulated. I believe the result is spectacular.

A highlight of one rehearsal involved seven actors, including Spall and Josh McGuire (Turner’s champion John Ruskin), which began with a discussion on gooseberries and then segued into the relative merits of Claude Lorrain (then, as now, a revered French 17th-century painter) and Turner’s own representations of the sea.

In the film, you are watching months, years actually, of preparation and graft, gradually evolved from improvisations, then honed into an elegant, funny and revealing five-minute scene. Ultimately, my role was to provide information, to advise, to avoid any howlers and then to stand back. For, as Mike says, this is a movie, not a documentary.

The author was the lead researcher on Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner

The real Mr Turner: has Mike Leigh’s film got its man?

Jonathan Jones /  Friday 31 October 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/oct/31/turner-mike-leigh-film-timothy-spall

Timothy Spall plays the painter as a rough diamond, a blast of the roistering 18th century in the moralising Victorian era

Timothy Spall’s Turner is a strange, magnificent being. He gurns, he growls, he mumbles and grumbles. It is impossible not to be fascinated and moved by him. His onscreen death made me cry. But how much does this great plum pie of a man churning his way through a 19th-century Englandresemble the actual JMW Turner, who was born in 1775 and died in 1851?

The real Turner was a lot more handsome and elegant, at least in his own eyes. Spall’s Turner admits that “when I look in the mirror, I see a gargoyle”. Real Turner, when he was about 24 years old – much younger than when we meet him in the film – gazed in the mirror and saw a handsome, debonair, fiercely perceptive youth, his wide open eyes looking straight ahead, seeing everything.

It is those eyes that contain the true Turner. It is in their fiery vision of nature, myth and history that all his secrets can be found.

Turner lives in his paintings. You only have to stroll through Tate Britain’s Clore Gallery, which displays works from the copious bequest of his own work that Turner left the nation, or visit the same museum’s Late Turner exhibition, to realise that most of the painter’s time, energy and emotion must have gone into producing sketches, watercolours and oil paintings. The sex life and affairs whose enigmas drive the film did not matter to him except as light relief from all that exhausting work.

In short, the real Turner was not as cuddly as Leigh makes him. He was a driven artist. He wanted to compete not just with contemporaries such as John Constable – who in the film looks appropriately downtrodden by Turner’s remorseless artistic strength – but Poussin, Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci. He did it – he painted himself into the pantheon of the greatest artists of all time. There is no evidence that he cared who he hurt to get there.

Spall’s Turner is a rough diamond. Really rough. We see him spurn a former mistress and refuse to acknowledge paternity of their children; completely true. We also see him drawing a prostitute in a brothel – again, true to what is known about him. But the greatness of Spall’s acting lies in humanising a man who at times seems so brutal and cold. When he thinks about the daughter whose funeral he didn’t attend, he weeps. When he makes the prostitute pose, he also weeps. Is it guilt?

Leigh and Spall are just as blind as the moralising Victorians were to what is likely to have been Turner’s real attitude to love, sex and family responsibilities: he probably never felt a shred of anxiety about any of it. Where he came from, loving and leaving was natural. For he came from the 18th century.

Turner was the victim of a culture clash. He grew up and became an artist in the freewheeling Georgian age, when London was full of Hogarthian rakes and Moll Flanders types on the make. Even coffee houses frequently doubled as brothels. Don’t even ask about the bathhouses. As the Cambridge historian Vic Gatrell, whose recent book The First Bohemians delves into the artistic and sexual scene of 18th-century Covent Garden, told me: “I don’t think he’s self-conscious about his libertine ways.”

Eighteenth-century libertinism was simply the culture that shaped young Turner. He was born in Maiden Lane, close by Covent Garden, then the heart of London’s gambling, drinking and commercial sex district. His father was a barber, his mother was mentally ill, perhaps schizophrenic, and ended up in the notorious Bedlam hospital. It was, says Gatrell, a bohemian world.

This Londonof loose morals was remote from the same city in which he died in 1851. In the course of his lifetime, British manners were transformed. The freedoms of the Georgian age had become constrained by starched collars and cast-iron respectability. Turner’s great critical champion, John Ruskin, was one of the most Victorian of Victorians, and when he went through Turner’s artistic bequest at the National Gallery, he felt ill. He found not just the landscapes he loved, but sketches “of the most shameful sort – the pudenda of women – utterly inexcusable and to me inexplicable”. Ruskin revealed that he burned most of Turner’s erotic art, for the good of his hero’s reputation and the national soul. Strangely enough, he seems to have been lying. Tate Britain has now located enough of Turner’s sexy watercolours to establish that Ruskin never did burn them – or if he did destroy some, there must really have been a lot.

This was the second shock Ruskin and other Victorian Turner fans had suffered. The first was when he died in the secret Chelsea home he shared with his last lover, Mrs Booth, a Margate landlady. Leigh is on firmer ground in making this relationship touching and warm – they were both old enough and their life together lasted long enough for it to have been emotional, not just a libertine’s last fling.

In Turner’s painting Apollo and Python in Tate Britain, the ancient Greek god Apollo has just slain a horrific serpentine monster. Turner surrounds Apollo with golden light. He is the embodiment of reason and – literally – enlightenment. The monster Python lies tangled in the branches of devastated trees, its viscera spewing out. Its jaws are almost invisible in the darkness that envelops this part of the picture. Looking into that gloom, you start to notice something disturbing. There are other monsters in the dark. A glittering eye, a gruesome set of fangs glisten in the shadows. Python is dead, but unreason lives on. More monsters are creeping forward to threaten all that is good.

Is this painting autobiographical? It might be an exploration of the artist’s own dark side. He may be thinking of his mother’s madness. Was he scared of going mad himself? Yet any such personal feelings are translated by Turner to the lofty level of history painting. His art aspires all the time to say things not about him, but about the human condition. Apollo and Python is one of the greatest of all paintings of a Greek myth because it so deeply and resonantly reveals the poetry and philosophy of the ancient legend – that it is a story about reason, unreason and the nature of civilisation.

The inarticulacy of Spall’s Turner is true to life. He was mocked for it – and again it comes from his unvarnished London childhood. He came “out of the people, out of the plebs”, says Gatrell. But there’s always going to be something missing from our understanding of Turner if we only listen to his sometimes stumbling words. His paintings, truly, are where the real Mr Turner can be found. In them he does not stumble. He never has – Ruskin was right to insist – a mean or ignoble thought. Apollo and Python is unutterably profound. It is in his works of unparalleled insight and nuance that we encounter the real Mr Turner – the genius.

Remembering The "Ursula" Suit.

December 14, 2014, 2:38 am

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Early in the war Philips and his crew had become dissatisfied with the conventional garb of oilskins and designed a special form of clothing more suitable for submarines. Ursula's navigating officer, Lt Lakin, was a keen motorcyclist and wore a one-piece motorcycling suit made by Barbour. Philips asked the company to adapt the suit, splitting it into jacket and trousers and adding a hood. The suit became standard watch-keeping clothing in Royal Navy submarines.

Picture  showing the lookout left of camera in his Royal Navy issue Ursula Suit.

Bons baisers de la Côte d'Azur

December 16, 2014, 9:01 pm

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Gerald and Sara Murphy / Watch Vídeo bellow : "Bons baisers de la Côte d'Azur"

December 16, 2014, 9:01 pm

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 Gerald Clery Murphy and Sara Sherman Wiborg were wealthy, expatriate Americans who moved to the French Riviera in the early 20th century and who, with their generous hospitality and flair for parties, created a vibrant social circle, particularly in the 1920s, that included a great number of artists and writers of the Lost Generation. Gerald had a brief but significant career as a painter.

Gerald Clery Murphy (March 25, 1888 – October 17, 1964) was born in Bostonto the family that owned the Mark Cross Company, sellers of fine leather goods. He was of an Irish American background.

Gerald was an aesthete from his childhood onwards. He was never comfortable in the boardrooms and clubs for which his father was grooming him. He failed the entrance exams at Yale three times before matriculating, although he performed respectably there. He joined DKE and the Skull and Bones society :237 He befriended a young freshman named Cole Porter (Yale class of 1913) and brought him into DKE. Murphy also introduced Porter to his friends, propelling him into writing music for Yale musicals.

Sara Sherman Wiborg (November 7, 1883 – October 10, 1975) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, into the wealthy Wiborg family. Her father, manufacturing chemist and owner of his own printing ink and varnish company Frank Bestow Wiborg, was a self-made millionaire by the age of 40, and her mother was a member of the noted Sherman family, daughter of Hoyt Sherman, and niece to Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman. Raised in Cincinnati, her family moved to Germanyfor several years when she was a teenager, so her father could concentrate on the European expansion of his company. The Wiborg family was easily accepted into the high society community of 20th-century Europe. While in Europe, Sara and her sisters Hoytie and Olga sang together at high-class assemblies. Upon returning to the United States, the Wiborgs spent most of their time in New York City and, later, East Hampton, where they built the 30-room mansion "The Dunes" on 600 acres just west of the Maidstone Club in 1912. It was the largest estate in East Hampton up to that time. WiborgBeach in East Hampton is named for the family.

In East Hampton Sara Wiborg and Gerald Murphy met when they were both adolescents. Gerald was five years younger than Sara, and for many years they were more familiar companions than romantically attached; they became engaged in 1915, when Sara was 32 years old. Sara's parents did not approve of their daughter marrying someone "in trade," and Gerald's parents were not much happier with the prospect, seemingly because his father found it difficult to approve anything that Gerald did.

After marrying they lived at 50 West 11th Streetin New York City, where they had three children. In 1921 they moved to Paristo escape the strictures of New Yorkand their families' mutual dissatisfaction with their marriage. In Paris Gerald took up painting, and they began to make the acquaintances for which they became famous. Eventually they moved to the French Riviera, where they became the center of a large circle of artists and writers of later fame, especially Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Fernand Léger, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Archibald MacLeish, John O'Hara, Cole Porter, Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley.

Prior to their arrival on the French Riviera, the region was experiencing a period when the fashionable only wintered there, abandoning the region during the high summer months. However, the activities of the Murphys fueled the same renaissance in arts and letters as did the excitement of Paris, especially among the cafés of Montparnasse. In 1923 the Murphys convinced the Hotel du Cap to stay open for the summer so that they might entertain their friends, sparking a new era for the French Riviera as a summer haven. The Murphys eventually purchased a villa in Cap d'Antibes and named it Villa America; they resided there for many years. When the Murphys arrived on the Riviera, lying on the beach merely to enjoy the sun was not a common activity. Occasionally, someone would go swimming, but the joys of being at the beach just for sun were still unknown at the time. The Murphys, with their long forays and picnics at La Garoupe, introduced sunbathing on the beach as a fashionable activity.

 They had three children, Baoth, Patrick, and Honoria. In 1929, Patrick was diagnosed with tuberculosis. They took him to Switzerland, and then returned to the U.S. in 1934, where Gerald stayed in Manhattanto run Mark Cross, serving as president of the company from 1934 to 1956; he never painted again. Sara settled in Saranac Lake, New York to nurse Patrick, and Baoth and Honoria were put in boarding schools. In 1935, Baoth died unexpectedly of meningitis as a complication of measles, and Patrick succumbed to TB in 1937. Archibald MacLeish based the main characters in his play J.B. on Gerald and Sara Murphy.

Later they lived at "The Dunes", once the largest house in East Hampton. By 1941, the house proved impossible to rent, sell or even maintain; the Murphys had it demolished, and they themselves moved to the renovated dairy barn.

Gerald died October 17, 1964 inEast Hampton, two days after his friend Cole Porter. Sara died on October 10, 1975 inArlington, Virginia.

Nicole and Dick Diver of Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald are widely recognized as based on the Murphys, based on the marked physical similarities, although many of their friends, as well as the Murphys themselves, saw as much or more of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald's relationship and personalities in the couple than the Murphys. Ernest Hemingway's couple in Garden of Eden is not explicitly based on this pair, but given the similarities of the setting (Nice) and of the type of social group portrayed, there is clearly some basis for such an assumption. Interestingly, guests of the Murphys would often swim at Eden Roc, an event emulated in Hemingway's narrative.

Calvin Tomkins's biography of Gerald and Sara Murphy Living Well Is the Best Revenge was published in 1971, and Amanda Vaill documented their lives in the 1995 book Everybody Was So Young. Both accounts are balanced and kind, unlike some of their portrayals in the memoirs and fictitious works by their many friends, including Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

In 1982, Honoria Murphy Donnelly, the Murphys' daughter, with Richard N. Billings, wrote Sara & Gerald: Villa America and After.

On July 12, 2007, a play by Crispin Whittell entitled Villa America, based entirely on the relationships between Sara and Gerald Murphy and their friends had its world premiere at the Williamstown Theatre Festival with Jennifer Mudge playing Sara Murphy.

At Comte Étienne de Beaumont's automotive ball 1924

May 24, 1998

What a Swell Party It Was

A new study of Gerald and Sara Murphy examines their life with the Lost Generation and their later disappointments.

By BROOKE ALLEN / http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/24/reviews/980524.24allent.html

EVERYBODY WAS SO YOUNG

Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story.

By Amanda Vaill.

Illustrated. 470 pp. Boston:

Houghton Mifflin

 Some 50 years after meeting Gerald and Sara Murphy, a still dazzled Donald Ogden Stewart wrote: ''Once upon a time there was a prince and a princess: that's exactly how a description of the Murphys should begin. They were both rich; he was handsome; she was beautiful; they had three golden children. They loved each other, they enjoyed their own company, and they had the gift of making life enchantingly pleasurable for those who were fortunate enough to be their friends.''

Gerald and Sara Murphy were, to many of their contemporaries, the beautiful couple of the 1920's, and they left their mark on many works of art about the period: F. Scott Fitzgerald's ''Tender Is the Night,'' Ernest Hemingway's ''Snows of Kilimanjaro,'' Philip Barry's ''Holiday,'' Archibald MacLeish's ''J.B.,'' John Dos Passos'''Big Money'' and Pablo Picasso's ''Woman in White,'' among others. Yet the Murphys' life together was no fairy tale; in the end it came very close to tragedy. Amanda Vaill, a skillful and compassionate writer, gives us their story in a marvelously readable biography, ''Everybody Was So Young.'' It is not the first telling of the tale, but it is the most important -- more comprehensive than Calvin Tomkins's ''Living Well Is the Best Revenge'' (1971) and more graceful than the telling by Honoria Murphy Donnelly, the Murphys' daughter, and Richard N. Billings, ''Sara & Gerald: Villa America and After'' (1982).

Sara Sherman Wiborg and Gerald Clery Murphy became friends as adolescents in the hothouse social world of New York in the first decade of the 20th century. Gerald's father was proprietor of the Mark Cross Company, purveyor (as it still is) of luxury leather goods. Sara's father was an exceedingly rich industrialist, and Sara spent much of her youth at their 30-room East Hampton, N.Y., mansion, The Dunes, or traveling around Europe with her parents and sisters, celebrating the coronation of George V in London, hobnobbing with the English aristocracy, and generally, Vaill writes, ''living life as one of the matched pieces of her mother's luggage.'' She performed the role with a natural grace but chafed in it, finding an unexpected outlet for her feelings in a budding friendship with Gerald Murphy, an awkward prep-school boy five years her junior.

Sara was attracted by Gerald's reflective nature, quiet sense of humor and habit of questioning convention. An esthete from his earliest years, he was uncomfortable in the boardrooms and clubrooms for which he was being groomed. The grooming process was not proceeding smoothly: he flunked the Yale entrance exams three times, although he eventually matriculated there and performed respectably, creating what he later called ''the likeness of popularity and success.''

Gerald and Sara did not become engaged until 1915, when Sara was 32 years old, over the hill in those days. Although Gerald was perfectly well off and eligible, her parents could hardly bring themselves to countenance their daughter marrying someone ''in trade.'' The senior Murphys also greeted the news gloomily, not so much because they had objections to Sara as because they seemed incapable of approving anything Gerald did: he had been, his father said, a ''great disappointment'' to him; Gerald's vision of life was ''unsound and warped.''

Considering their cold and withholding families and what Sara called ''the heavy hand of chaperonage'' that had always weighed firmly upon them, it is no surprise that the young Murphys looked upon their marriage not as a tie but as the beginning of glorious freedom. ''Think of a relationship that not only does not bind, but actually so lets loose the imagination!'' Gerald wrote. The Murphys cherished a Tolstoyan ideal of husband and wife working and living side by side. But this way of life was hard to bring to fruition within their parents' sphere of influence. And so in 1921, after Gerald had served in the Army's air units during World War I and had spent a stint learning landscape architecture at Harvard, the Murphys sailed for Paris with their three small children -- Honoria, Baoth and Patrick -- drawn there by the favorable exchange rate, the distance from their families and the galvanizing new artistic life of the French capital. The belle epoque was over, and the Murphys enthusiastically entered the modern age, which they were to ornament.

Too much, perhaps, has been written about Paris in the 20's, and certainly more than enough about the Murphys and their circle; nevertheless, Vaill's version is elegantly written and well worth perusing. Joyce, Miro, Picasso, Man Ray, Stravinsky, Hemingway, Beckett, Brancusi, Leger, Balanchine, Fitzgerald, Isadora Duncan: everyone, it seemed, was in Paris, and the Murphys -- generous, stylish and hospitable -- knew and entertained them all. ''The Murphys were among the first Americans I ever met,'' Stravinsky said, ''and they gave me the most agreeable impression of the United States.''

Their Paris apartment was modern and unconventional, but it was at the Villa America, their house at Cap d'Antibes on the Riviera, that the Murphys came into their own and made their indelible impression on their contemporaries; it was there that they seemed most to embody the period and its esthetic. Until their day the Cote d'Azur had been strictly a winter resort, practically deserted during the hot summer months. From 1923 the Murphys almost single-handedly made it fashionable, inviting exotics like the Fitzgeralds, the Picassos, Hemingway and his first and second wives and Fernand Leger to their little beach of La Garoupe.

Gerald, who, in the words of a friend, ''always became a native of wherever he was,'' adopted a casual wardrobe that in subsequent years would become what amounted to a Cap d'Antibes uniform: striped sailor jersey, espadrilles and knitted fisherman's cap. Sara was very much the striking beauty that Fitzgerald would bring to life as Nicole Diver in ''Tender Is the Night,'' her face ''hard and lovely and pitiful,'' her bathing suit ''pulled off her shoulders,'' her characteristic rope of pearls setting off her deep tan. Around them they created a perpetual aura of luxury, celebration and fun. ''Sara est tres festin,'' Picasso remarked approvingly, as he watched her setting the picnic cloth with flowers and ivy.

Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald became particular friends of the Murphys. ''We four communicate by our presence rather than by any means,'' Gerald told them. ''Currents race between us regardless.'' But it was never a friendship between equals: the Fitzgeralds were younger and far less stable, and the very qualities that attracted them to the Murphys -- the older couple's inherited wealth and their unthinking generosity, their glamour and their air of settled contentment with each another and with their children-- made Fitzgerald envious and defensive.

In spite of the talent and intelligence the Murphys prized, F. Scott Fitzgerald was without a doubt one of the foremost boors of 20th-century American letters. Even the tolerant Gerald admitted that Scott ''really had the most appalling sense of humor, sophomoric and -- well, trashy.'' Murphy himself was all too often the butt of Fitzgerald's drunken venom. Yet never once did he grudge Fitzgerald affection, praise, financial and moral support. It was Murphy who bailed Fitzgerald out in 1939 and kept his daughter in Vassar; he and Sara were among the few to show up at Fitzgerald's funeral the following year. Fitzgerald, however, proved himself an unreliable friend, fostering, as did Hemingway, the image of Gerald Murphy as a spoiled dilettante.

But Murphy, modest about his gifts as he was, was no dilettante. He had unexpectedly taken up painting soon after his arrival in Paris, after seeing an exhibition of work by Picasso, Derain, Gris and Braque. ''There was a shock of recognition which put me into an entirely new orbit,'' he later wrote. ''If that's painting,'' he told Sara, ''that's the kind of painting that I would like to do.'' He began to study with the futurist artist Natalia Goncharova and, along with Sara, to help paint scenery for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.

Murphy was an infinitely slow and meticulous painter with a small output in his brief career. His surviving works formed the nucleus of a Museum of Modern Art exhibition in 1974 that John Russell, then a New York Times art critic, called ''a distinct contribution to the history of modern American painting.'' These works, striking and contemporary, show him to have been a sort of pop artist before Pop Art; they garnered considerable attention at the Salon des Independants of the 1920's and had a marked influence upon the better-known Stuart Davis, among others. Art in Americamagazine, reviewing the posthumous 1974 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, judged him to be ''an astonishingly original, witty and prophetic painter.''

The Murphys' seemingly charmed life ended abruptly, and forever, in 1929 when tuberculosis was diagnosed in their youngest son, Patrick. Gerald put away his paintbrushes, never, so far as anyone knows, to touch them again, and for the next seven years he and Sara poured all their energies into their son. They spent much of that time at a Swiss sanitarium, where they gallantly tried to keep life and hope going by creating the festive atmosphere that was their specialty.

Then in 1935, to everyone's shock, their elder son, Baoth, who had always been vigorous and healthy, suddenly developed meningitis and died. A year later Patrick lost his long battle at the age of 16. ''Life itself has stepped in now and blundered, scarred and destroyed,'' Gerald wrote to Fitzgerald. ''In my heart I dreaded the moment when our youth and invention would be attacked in our only vulnerable spot -- the children.'' Fitzgerald responded, ''The golden bowl is broken indeed, but it was golden.''

In 1937 the Murphys returned to New York for good. From this period, their marriage underwent a shift. It seems probable (although Vaill is very discreet, perhaps too much so) that Gerald's primary orientation was homosexual; but Sara had always been the most important thing in his life, their marriage paramount. Now, differences that had always existed between the two became more clearly defined, and to a certain extent they distanced themselves from one another. ''You are surprised anew periodically that 'warm human relationship' should be so necessary to you and less to me,'' Gerald wrote to Sara. ''Yet nothing is more natural under the circumstances. You believe in it (as you do in life), you are capable of it, you command it. I am less of a believer (I don't admire human animals as much).''

The Mark Cross Company was on the verge of bankruptcy and in 1934 Gerald took it over at last, spending the remainder of his working years turning it back into a prosperous concern. As an elderly man he lived the life he had fled as a youth, going to an office and lunching every day at Schrafft's. He never spoke about his painting or about his dead sons. Sara threw herself into volunteer work with children.

They entertained old friends and made new ones, like Edmund Wilson, Dawn Powell and Calvin Tomkins, who wrote a long article for The New Yorker about the Murphys, ''Living Well Is the Best Revenge,'' later published in book form. (Gerald liked the article but not the title: he had never wanted revenge on anyone, he said.) Gerald died in 1964, Sara 11 years later.

Other writers, even old friends, did not treat the Murphys as kindly as Tomkins did. Hemingway's posthumous memoir, ''A Moveable Feast,'' called them rich ''bastards.'' Vaill quotes portions deleted from the published book in which Hemingway nastily -- and unforgivably, considering their generosity to him -- commented, ''They were bad luck to people but they were worse luck to themselves and they lived to have all that bad luck finally.'' Gerald reacted with his odd, characteristic blend of sympathy and resigned detachment: ''What a strange kind of bitterness -- or rather accusitoriness . . . . What shocking ethics! How well written, of course.''

Brooke Allen is a writer and critic who reviews frequently for The New Criterion and The Wall Street Journal

Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy Paperback – August 27, 2007

by Deborah Rothschild (Editor), Calvin Tomkins (Introduction)

Paris in the 1920s—art, literature, the Lost Generation. The glitterati who inhabited this legendary world—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Cole Porter, Man Ray, Dorothy Parker, and a host of others—were members of an intimate circle centered around Sara and Gerald Murphy. Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy is a captivating and absorbing collection of essays examining through images and text the Murphys' influence on a remarkable constellation of artists. The book also explores Gerald Murphy's abbreviated career as a painter, his artistic legacy, and the complex nature of his motivation and vision. This beautifully illustrated volume features essays by art historian Deborah Rothschild and such Murphy scholars as Calvin Tomkins, Amanda Vaill, Linda Patterson Miller, Kenneth Silver; curators Dorothy Kosinski and Kenneth Wayne; artist/writer Trevor Winkfield; musicologist Olivia Mattis; and poet and author William Jay Smith.

Modern Love

Gerald and Sara Murphy at work and at play.

BY PETER SCHJELDAHL / http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/08/06/modern-love

Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara & Gerald Murphy,” at the Williams College Museum of Art, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, is an immensely satisfying show about fine, complicated people who loved life in exemplary ways, in superb company, and suffered misfortune. It is also an art show that centers on seven paintings by Gerald, all that remain of the fourteen he is known to have made in the nineteen-twenties. (The others were lost, owing largely to his own indifference.) In addition, there is work by Picasso, Léger, Gris, and other modern masters whom the Murphys befriended, supported, and, at times, inspired. Without it, tales of Gerald and Sara, moderately wealthy and irrepressibly sociable Jazz Age American expatriates in France, would be mainly deluxe gossip, filtered through their friend F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night,” in which they figure as the charismatic Dick and Nicole Diver. Their story was vivified by Calvin Tomkins in his 1962 New Yorker Profile and later book, “Living Well Is the Best Revenge,” and by Amanda Vaill in her 1998 biography, “Everybody Was So Young.” Tomkins and Vaill are among the ten essayists in the show’s catalogue, who, led by the curator Deborah Rothschild, neglect no aspect of Murphyana, including the long-veiled sidelight of Gerald’s homosexuality. Usually, I’m unbeguiled by the rich and glamorous, and I attended “Making It New” in a resisting mood. Then I looked.

Gerald’s paintings are a gold standard that backs, with creative integrity, the paper money of the couple’s legend. He started by assisting on sets for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, with quick lessons from the painter Natalia Goncharova. His work consists of crisply hard-edged, cunningly composed, subtly colored, semi-abstract pictures of machinery, common objects, architectural fragments, and, in a disturbing final image, a wasp battening on a pear. Numerous influences are plain, but Gerald jumped ahead of his time with a laconic style that was prescient of big-scale abstraction and of Pop art. (If one of the lost paintings, “Boatdeck”—a sensation at the 1924 Salon des Indépendants, in Paris—had survived, it surely would be an icon of modernism. Eighteen feet high by twelve wide, it billboarded transatlantic cultural intercourse with a tremendous image of ocean-liner structures.) “Watch” (1925), depicting clockwork, achieves a spankingly representational translation of Cubism. “Razor” (1924), which monumentalizes a safety razor, a fountain pen, and a matchbox, might enable future archeologists to reimagine the essential theory and practice of modern art, should every other example perish. It is by a man who wasn’t really an artist.

Gerald’s father owned Mark Cross, the luxury-goods business; Sara’s was a printing magnate. Gerald’s family was Irish Catholic, from Boston; Sara’s a union of Norwegian and pedigreed American, from Illinois. They met at a party in East Hampton, in 1904, when she was twenty-one and he sixteen. Friendship became romance after his graduation from Yale, where he was popular but unhappy. She seems to have taken in stride his confessed attraction to men, which he strove to suppress. They married in 1915 and soon had a girl and two boys. Gerald volunteered for military service not quite in time to fight in the First World War. He then studied landscape architecture at Harvard. William James, Jr., the son of the philosopher, painted Sara’s portrait—an astonishingly lovely and telling picture, which is in the show. In June of 1921, the culturally ambitious Murphys decamped for England. By September, they were in Paris, where they found old friends, notably Cole Porter, and plunged into circles of the avant-garde, primarily that of the Russians around Diaghilev and Stravinsky. Picasso, having married the ballerina Olga Khokhlova, was a frequent presence. To celebrate the première of Stravinsky’s ballet “Les Noces,” in 1923, Gerald and Sara threw a fabled all-night party on a barge on the Seine. The same year, Gerald and Porter collaborated on a riotously successful jazz ballet, “Within the Quota,” a burlesque on American culture.

Porter and his wife, Linda, had introduced the Murphys to Antibes, a resort where, at the time, few people stayed in the summer. In 1923, they bought a seaside chalet, dubbed Villa America, and helped to change that. They hosted the Picassos and close to everybody else who counted in adventurous art and literature. American visitors included Man Ray, Archibald MacLeish, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and, of most consequence, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. (For the atmospherics of Villa America, consult the incandescent opening pages of “Tender Is the Night.”) Anecdotes abound. Questions linger. Did Picasso bed Sara? That sturdy rumor is probably untrue, though the artist was smitten, as were many other men. Sara’s features are suggested in certain of his “neoclassical” paintings—“Woman Seated in an Armchair” (1923) gives dazzling evidence in the show—but Picasso was on a break, at the time, from being obsessed with particular women. His masterpiece involving the Murphys, “The Pipes of Pan” (1923), was based on a photograph of himself clowning on the beach with a stiffly posing Gerald.

Two things intrigue me in accounts of the Murphys’ conduct. One is how effectively Gerald concealed his sexual ambivalence. Even his sophisticated intimates Fitzgerald and Hemingway seem uncertain, though Hemingway had occasion to deplore a shifty unreliability, compounded of guilt and fear, at Gerald’s core. (His gradual disaffection became outright cruelty in “A Moveable Feast,” where he sneered at “the understanding rich.”) Also striking is the fact that Gerald and Sara collected only American folk art. The abnegation bespeaks a will to remain participants in, rather than patrons of, the creative life. Their expressive means included decorative flair (white walls and black satin in the villa) and wit (Sara wore her pearls to the beach because, she explained, they wanted sunning). Rothschild writes that Gerald “meticulously planned, intellectualized, and expended great effort in order to make each moment a beautiful event.”

The idyll disintegrated in 1929, owing to financial setbacks and, most gravely, the onset of their younger son Patrick’s fatal tuberculosis. Amid years of frantic efforts to save Patrick, their other son, Baoth, died suddenly, of meningitis; both boys were gone by 1937. The family had returned to America, where Gerald took over Mark Cross, then on the brink of bankruptcy, and, grudgingly, spent the rest of his working life preserving it. The hospitality of their home in Snedens Landing, just up the Hudsonfrom New York City, seems to have been a sweet but pale afterimage of their former salon. (Sara instructed Calvin Tomkins in the right way to drink champagne—with eyes raised to the trees above.) Gerald had all but closed an iron door on the memory of his meteoric painting career when, in 1960, the DallasMuseumfor Contemporary Arts mounted a revival. He later remarked, “I’ve been discovered. What does one wear?” The seven paintings and the odd minor work on paper, seen together, really do project a career, which was strongest at the start. The grotesquerie of “Wasp and Pear” (1929), with its hints of psychic turmoil, may have been a gambit to check a slide into overly exquisite effects. At any rate, it’s unlikely that Gerald, had he continued, would have improved. What he used in his art, he used up.

The Murphys served Fitzgerald as symbols of the great theme of the Lost Generation: romantic disappointment, given intensity by the majesty of the dreams at stake. Gerald seemed to concur in a letter to Fitzgerald in 1935, praising “Tender Is the Night.” (Sara hated the book.) He wrote, “Only the invented part of our life—the unreal part—has had any scheme, any beauty.” But this came amid the trauma of Baoth’s death. (“Life itself has stepped in now and blundered, scarred, and destroyed.”) In fact, Gerald and Sara lived well, with dignity, from start to finish. The most revelatory and moving item in the show for me is a letter from Zelda Fitzgerald, following Scott’s death, in 1940. She writes that Scott’s love of the Murphys reflected a “devotion to those that he felt were contributing to the aesthetic and spiritual purposes of life.” There is a world of excitement and woe in that conflation of the aesthetic and the spiritual. It’s a madness, which life will punish. ♦

The "British Warm" Overcoat.

December 18, 2014, 8:25 pm

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 The British Warm was a woollen overcoat that takes its fabric and styling from the great coats worn by officers during the First World War. Taupe coloured, the coat is double-breasted with peak lapels and slightly shaped. It falls just above the knee, sports leather buttons, and often, has epaulettes (although we find that these are best omitted for non-military wear).

The most characteristic aspect of the British warm is the fabric itself: a heavy, slightly fleecy melton cloth, distinctive in its colouring. The name comes from Melton Mowbray, a town in Leicestershire, England, where this thick, tightly woven, napped cloth was first woven for riding and hunting garments. Patrick has secured a reserve of this cloth from one of Britain’s oldest mills. Woven to a reassuringly warm 32oz, it is unusual to find a piece that conforms so closely to the original spec. Today, the British Warm is a perennial classic that works equally well worn over a suit in the city or dressed down for a more casual look at the weekend. The military overtones ensure that it looks distinct, much as one would expect of a piece of clothing that is still worn on Parades today.

http://www.h-huntsman.com/blog/introducing-the-british-warm-overcoat

 During the First World War, Crombie temporarily switched its production to British military uniforms.

 The Crombie company records note that during the war, the British government had to coerce many important manufacturers into accepting military contracts due to the very small margin of profit, compared to the much more lucrative private export opportunities still available. Crombie, however, voluntarily undertook large government contracts throughout the war – despite the low profit – in order to keep its personnel fully employed.

 Such became the extent of Crombie's production that ultimately one tenth of all greatcoats worn by British soldiers and officers were made from Crombie cloth. The term "British Warm" was coined at this time to describe this Crombie coat. The name remains synonymous with Crombie to this day.

http://www.crombie.co.uk/heritage/

Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles / VÍDEO: Les Ombres de la Villa HD (Villa Noailles à Hyères 83400)

December 21, 2014, 12:38 am

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Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles were patrons of the arts. Their 'hotel' at Place des Etats-Unis was restored in modern style in 1926 by Jean-Michel Franck, and was a focus for a large circle.

Charles financed Man Ray's film Les Mystères du Château de Dé (1929), which centers around Villa Noailles in Hyères. He also financed Jean Cocteau's film Le Sang d'un Poète (1930) and Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalì's L'Âge d'Or (1930). Charles and his wife appeared in Les Mystères du Château de Dé as well as Le Sang d'un Poète.

In 1929 or 1930, Charles made possible the career of Dali by purchasing in advance a large work for 29,000 francs, thus enabling Dali and Gala to return from Paristo Port Lligat and devote themselves to his art.

The de Noailles had an extensive correspondence with Francis Poulenc and commissioned him on two occasions. He received 25000 Francs for Aubade, which he wrote for one of their balls at Place des États-Unis where it premiered on 18 June 1929. Le Bal Masqué, inspired by Max Jacob's Le Laboratoire Central, was written for a private celebration on 20 April 1932 at the municipal theatre in Hyères.Max Jacob's Le Laboratoire Central, was written for a private celebration on 20 April 1932 at the municipal theatre in Hyères.

Marie-Laure de Noailles, Vicomtesse de Noailles (31 October 1902 – 29 January 1970) was one of the 20th century's most daring and influential patrons of the arts, noted for her associations with Salvador Dalí, Balthus, Jean Cocteau, Ned Rorem, Man Ray, Luis Buñuel, Francis Poulenc, Wolfgang Paalen, Jean Hugo, Jean-Michel Frank and others as well as her tempestuous life and eccentric personality. She and her husband financed Ray's film Les Mystères du Château de Dé (1929), Poulenc's Aubade (1929), Buñuel and Dalí's film L'Âge d'Or (1930), and Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet (1930)

She was born Marie-Laure Henriette Anne Bischoffsheim, the only child of Marie-Thérèse de Chevigné, a French aristocrat, and Maurice Bischoffsheim, a Paris banker of German Jewish and American Quaker descent. One of her great-great-great-grandfathers was the Marquis de Sade, and her maternal grandmother, Laure de Sade, Countess de Chevigné, inspired at least one character in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Her nephew Philippe Lannes de Montebello was the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Her stepfather was the French playwright Francis de Croisset, and her former sister-in-law, Jacqueline de Croisset, became the third wife of actor Yul Brynner.

After a brief romance with the artist Jean Cocteau, Marie-Laure Bischoffsheim married, in 1923, Charles, Vicomte de Noailles (26 September 1891 – 28 April 1981), a son of François Joseph Eugène Napoléon de Noailles, grandson of Antonin-Just-Léon-Marie de Noailles and younger brother of the 6th Duc de Mouchy (father of Philippe François Armand Marie de Noailles), himself a cadet of the French ducal house of Noailles. The couple had two daughters:

Laure Madeleine Thérèse Marie de Noailles, later Madame Bertrand de La Haye Jousselin (1924–1979);

Nathalie Valentine Marie de Noailles, former wife of Alessandro Perrone (1927–2004).

Marie-Laure de Noailles and her husband moved to the fabled hôtel particulier at 11 Place des États-Unis in Paris, which was built by her grandfather Bischoffsheim. Its interiors, which were redecorated in the 1920s by French minimalist designer Jean-Michel Frank, vanished in the 1980s, due to a subsequent owner's redecoration and remodelling. In 1936 she acquired Wolfgang Paalen´s object Chaise envahie de Lierre in André Breton´s Galerie Gradiva and decorated her bathroom with it. Today the interiors have been renovated by Philippe Starck and house the Musée Baccarat and the headquarters of Baccarat, the crystal company.

In the 1920s, the Noailles built the Villa Noailles near Hyères. She had an affair with the young Igor Markevitch. In the 1950s she had a long-term affair with the surrealist painter Óscar Domínguez.

In 1923, they signed a contract with the architect Robert Mallet-Stevens to build a summer villa in the hills above the city of Hyères. Construction took three years, and eventually also included a triangular Cubist garden designed by Gabriel Guevrekian.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the couple were important patrons of modern art, particularly surrealism; they supported film projects by Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, and Luis Buñuel; and commissioned paintings, photographs and sculptures by Balthus, Giacometti, Constantin Brâncuși, Miró, and Dora Maar. Villa Noailles features prominently in Man Ray's film Les Mystères du Château de Dé.

In 1940 the villa was occupied by the Italian Army and turned into a hospital. From 1947 until 1970, the villa was the summer residence of Marie-Laure. She died in 1970, and the house was purchased by the city of Hyèresin 1973. Charles de Noailles died in 1981.

The villa is now used as an arts center and for special exhibits.

James Lord was a guest there in the mid-fifties. In his book Picasso and Dora: a memoir he writes: "...an undistinguished cubist extravaganza of reinforced concrete set atop a high hill, within the ancient walls of a Saracen fortress. It had been designed in the late twenties by a fashionable architect named Mallet-Stevens, contained something like fifty rooms and was surrounded by a large garden." He recalls the room, where Marie-Laure tried to seduce him: "...a large salon at Saint-Bernard which had no windows but was lighted from above by a bizarre cubist skylight which occupied almost all the ceiling, adding to the sense of existing outside time in a stranded ocean liner." The beauty of the location did not help, however, the "redoutable viscountess" in conquering his chastity.

The CubistGardendesigned by Gabriel Guevrekian.

Exposition permanente: Charles et Marie-Laure de Noailles, une vie de mécènes

 http://www.villanoailles-hyeres.com/view2.php?id_article=179

Le projet consiste à redonner au public les clefs pour appréhender la « petite maison intéressante à habiter » de Charles et Marie-Laure de Noailles et (re)découvrir l’extraordinaire mécénat qu’ils ont mené de 1923 à 1970. L’exposition aborde tous les aspects de cette expérience et explore les liens entre les différents domaines de la création qu’ils ont pu aborder.

Cette exposition prend place dans la partie initiale de la villa : dans les salons, les salles à manger, les chambres d’ami du rez-de-jardin, les chambres de Monsieur et de Madame, la chambre d’ami du dernier étage (environ 250m2 au total). Elle fera le lien par sa scénographie avec la création contemporaine.

Direction du projet

Jean-Pierre Blanc est directeur de la villa Noailles (centre d’art) et fondateur du Festival International de Mode et de Photographie à Hyères. Il est membre de l’association des directeurs de centres d’art.

Commissaires

Raphaèle Billé. Commissaire d’exposition indépendante, historienne d’art, spécialisée dans les arts décoratifs de l’entre-deux-guerres. Elle co-réalise plusieurs expositions du cycle Documents, à la villa Noailles en 2006 et 2009 et a collaboré à plusieurs publications sur l’histoire du mobilier métallique.

Stéphane Boudin-Lestienne. Historien d’art, chargé de mission à la villa Noailles, il est commissaire des expositions du cycle Documents, présentées à la villa Noailles depuis 2003.

Alexandre Mare. Éditeur, critique, commissaire d’exposition, ancien directeur de la Galerie Marion Meyer à Paris, il enseigne l’Histoire du livre et de l’édition à l’Université du Havre et à Paris X. Critique littéraire d’Artpress et de la Revue des Deux Mondes, il a publié une monographie sur l’artiste Michel Aubry, Salle d’armes (Marion Meyer Éditions), un essai, Sexe ! Le trouble du héros (Moutons électriques éditeurs) et il prépare actuellement la publication de la correspondance de René Crevel aux Editions du Seuil.

Principe du projet

Confiée à David Dubois, la scénographie tient compte de la contrainte de refaire « l’histoire en son lieu même ». Le projet s’oriente vers une exploitation du lieu la plus discrète et la plus respectueuse possible de la cohérence originale des espaces. Les volumes et les installations d’origine doivent rester lisibles et ne pas entrer en conflit avec des interventions contemporaines qui revendiquent leur identité propre. Accueillant la création sous toutes ses formes, la villa Noailles devient ainsi un exemple de réutilisation du patrimoine architectural, non seulement dans son ouverture aux artistes contemporains, mais aussi dans le rapport à son propre passé.

La signalétique, confiée à Frédéric Teschner, doit accompagner cette scénographie en essayant de produire le minimum de repères possible. Certaines « références » aux usages des propriétaires sont réactivées comme des introductions à la culture du lieu. Ainsi est envisagée, en partenariat avec Sèvres - Cité de la céramique, la création de vases par différents designers pour accueillir les bouquets de fleurs. Cette idée renvoie à l’une des raisons d’être du bâtiment, implanté dans un jardin bouquetier, fierté des Noailles.

Les aménagements paysagers du lieu, imaginés avec Christophe Ponceau, prolongent cette démarche.

David Dubois, scénographie

Designer, il est diplômé de l’Ensci-les Ateliers (2003) et présente pour la première fois son travail à la villa Noailles en 2004 (Débuts). Il réalise depuis de nombreuses scénographies à la villa et une commande pour l’une des chambres de résidence (2007/2008). Il est représenté et édité par la galerie kreo, édité par FR66 et auto-produit certaines de ses créations. Il est enseignant à l’ESAD (Reims). Certaines de ses pièces appartiennent aux collections permanentes du Mudam (Luxembourg).

Frédéric Teschner, identité graphique du projet et édition

Diplômé de l’ENSAD de Paris, il collabore avec des architectes, des designers, de jeunes chorégraphes, des galeries (In Situ, kreo) et le Théâtre de Gennevilliers. À partir de 2003, il conçoit les identités visuelles de plusieurs expositions pour le Centre Pompidou, le Mémorial de la Shoah, le MAC/VAL, le Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris. Il travaille également avec des centres d’art (villa Noailles, Cneai, DCA, Association de centres d’art contemporain) ou des institutions du ministère de la Culture et de la Communication telles le CNAP (Centre national des arts plastiques) ou la DAP (Direction des arts plastiques). Il enseigne le design graphique à l’ESAD d’Amiens et à l’EHAD (Genève).

Christophe Ponceau, aménagements des jardins

Paysagiste-scénographe, (École Boulle et Architecte DPLG), il collabore avec le paysagiste Gilles Clément à partir de 1997 et commence une activité de scénographe. Il réalise la partie végétale de l’exposition Le Jardin planétaire (Grande Halle de la Villette, Paris) en 2000 et est en charge de la programmation d’interventions contemporaines du Parc de la Ferté-Vidame depuis 2006.

Savile Row tailor fears overseas threat to rich tapestry of tradition. Dege & Skinner / Savile Row.

November 15, 2014, 10:12 pm

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Peter Ward, production director at Dege & Skinner, Saville Row, making a suit. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

Savile Row tailor fears overseas threat to rich tapestry of tradition

Shirtmaker believes buyouts detract from street’s fashion cachet, with only two family-owned tailoring houses left on Savile Row

Karl West

The Guardian, Friday 14 November 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2014/nov/14/savile-row-tailoring-foreign-buyout-threat-hong-kong

Robert Whittaker traces his razor sharp knife around a paper template to cut a perfect shoulder panel for a cotton shirt.

Whittaker, 61, is one of a dying breed – skilled craftsmen who precisely measure and cut shirts for the rich, the famous and royalty.

He has been cutting shirts since 1968, leaving school at 15 to learn his trade on Jermyn Street in Mayfair, central London. He has worked at Dege & Skinner, the Savile Row tailoring house, since 1992 making shirts costing from £234-£450 each – and there is a minimum order of four.

Dege & Skinner is one of only two family-owned tailoring houses (along with Henry Poole & Co) left on Savile Row, which has been at the heart of London’s bespoke tailoring business for more than a century. Next year marks Dege & Skinner’s 150th anniversary.

This “golden mile of tailoring” has produced suits for Prince Charles, Winston Churchill, Muhammad Ali, Duke Ellington, Lord Nelson and Napoleon III.

“We are the only firm in Savile Row now doing bespoke shirt making. And I don’t think there are any left on Jermyn Street,” Whittaker mourns.

Like much of Britain’s once vibrant tailoring and textiles industries, most of these traditional skills have been lost as factories in China, Turkeyand other cheap labour markets grabbed the work.

“It’s a bit of a dying art. But there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be kept going,” says Whittaker, who is passing on his knowledge and experience to apprentice Tom Bradbury, 20.

William Skinner is the third successive generation of his family to become managing director of the tailoring house and is committed to safeguarding the Savile Row traditions and keeping the business in the family.

It has three royal warrants – from the Queen, the sultan of Oman, and the king of Bahrain. About 25% of its business comes from military tailoring and it makes all the uniforms for princes William and Harry.

A browse through a rail of half made suits dotted with tailor’s chalk marks reveals a long grey coat with a poppy still in the button hole. A brown tag hangs from the lapel with the name Prince William scrawled on it. “Oh yes, that was the coat he wore on Sunday [for the remembrance service],” says Skinner casually.

He says the everyday customer is the core of the business, but these royal appointments are important “cream”.

Michael Skinner, William’s father and the company chairman, was at the Queen’s coronation in 1953 when he, his father and John Dege dressed the peers of the realm for the occasion.

There is concern that the overseas buyout of Savile Row firms, neighbours of Dege & Skinner, may have an impact on quality. Photograph: Graham Turner/the Guardian

But much has changed since. In the last 10 years several venerable Savile Row brands have fallen on hard times and been hoovered up by overseas investors.

Hong Kong’s Fung family, headed by billionaire patriarch William Fung, now owns four of the street’s best known names: Gieves & Hawkes; Hardy Amies, formerly the Queen’s official dressmaker; Kent & Curwen; and Kilgour.

Skinner is concerned that buyouts like these may affect quality. He is also worried about the use of the Savile Row brand for the sale of clothing that is not true bespoke.

“The fact that some firms up and down Savile Row are being bought is good to preserve the name,” he says. “But when that happens, sometimes the traditional values of tailoring can be diminished.”

Are some of these firms now making clothing in China? “I don’t know but I would guess that they are. Hardy Amies doesn’t do tailoring now and has no ladieswear [which is what it was famous for].”

Hardy Amies, which designed the dress for the Queen’s silver jubilee portrait, is now just a brand name to sell clothing to places like China, where the public have an insatiable appetite for British heritage products.

“Savile Row is world renowned for making clothes,” Skinner says. “So if someone can attach the Savile Row brand to a suit and knock it out around the world – it’s prestige, it adds a cachet.”

The Savile Row Bespoke Association was set up in 2004 to protect and promote the practices and traditions of the street. It has trademarked the name Savile Row Bespoke and takes legal action against those that infringe the brand.

“We could outsource tailoring to China, but then we wouldn’t be a Savile Row tailor,” Skinner says. “I believe in doing what we say we do.”

The Dege & Skinner boss is also concerned that the Fung takeover may encourage landlords to raise rents on the Mayfair street. “A bigger conglomerate, with deeper pockets, can afford to pay higher rents – so any rent rise would hurt them less than it hurts us,” he says.

The firm signed a 15-year lease on its base at 10 Savile Row in 2011 and has a rent review in June 2016. There is always a battle between tenants, the council and landlords about how to categorise Savile Row – is it a retail street, or not?

Skinner has no doubts: “Savile Row is not an A1 retail street (which command higher rents), like Bond Street or Regent Street. It’s a destination street. We are maintaining the rich culture and tapestry of this city.

“It could be quite easy for me to say ‘I’m fed up of paying rent here’ and move a mile away or wherever, but it wouldn’t be the same.”

Dege & Skinner is certainly preparing for the future. A tour behind the scenes at 10 Savile Row reveals a warren of rooms, stairs and corridors

Skinner proudly points out the young people – the next generation of Savile Row tailors – who are busily measuring, stitching and cutting. Some are already fully qualified tailors and cutters; others are apprentices who are learning their craft under the tutelage of more experienced practitioners.

“That highlights our belief in the future of the bespoke tailoring business. We have invested in the future of the trade, because we are confident about the future of the trade. We have a good business model; we make money and we reinvest it in the company. We are not a museum piece by any means.”

Preserving traditional skills is one thing. The bigger problem for the artisans of Savile Row is its brash, young neighbours on Bond Street, home to London’s designer brand elite.

A suit from Dege & Skinner starts at £3,800 and could take 10 weeks to make; a buyer could be in and out of Prada or Armani within 10 minutes with a suit that cost half that.

“Some people feel very at home with that and Bond Streethas been very successful,” Skinner admits. “But if you have something made for you – that’s the ultimate luxury.

“A lot of people don’t want to go into a high street shop, they want the relationship and the service that we give. As long as we can maintain that, there’s every chance of surviving.”

The sharp-suited tailor recalls learning about well-known places in Londonwhen he was at school. The teacher asked the class which trade or profession was linked with areas such as Harley Street, Fleet Street, HattonGarden.

“When the teacher said Savile Row, my hand shot up,” he smiles. “I felt immensely proud of that and I want to maintain that. We’ll do our damnedest to keep it going

Established in 1865, Dege & Skinner is one of only two family-run bespoke tailoring houses to remain in Savile Row and the only one to cut bespoke shirts on the premises. In 2015, we celebrate our 150th anniversary as a bespoke tailor so would like to invite customers to contact us with any stories, recollections or anecdotes about the company. If there is something you would like to share, please contact Cass Stainton on +44 (0)207 287 2941 or c.staintonpr@gmail.com A new chapter of our company’s history started in 2012, as we moved our workshops into the basement underneath the shop at Number 10 and extended our Lease by 15 years. Renowned experts in military uniforms, civilian and sports clothing, all ‘Made in England‘, the Skinner family has been dressing royalty, businessmen, professionals, the military and discerning individuals for almost a century and a half. Current Chairman Michael Skinner was at The Queen’s Coronation at Westminster Abbey in 1953, when he, his father and John Dege dressed the Peers of the Realm for the Royal occasion. http://dege-skinner.co.uk/about-us/history/

"Robert Whittaker traces his razor sharp knife around a paper template to cut a perfect shoulder panel for a cotton shirt."

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December 23, 2014, 1:52 am

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THE COVERT COAT

December 25, 2014, 6:18 am

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The Covert coat is very similar to the Chesterfield, but it was designed for hunting and the outdoors. Therefore, it had to be tailored from particularly sturdy material – the so-called Covert cloth, named after the covert bushes. It was designed to protect its wearer from mud, bush encounters, and of course the weather. For that reason, it had to be very heavy (29 or 30 ounces a yard), sturdy, and durable. Today, the fabric is not quite as heavy anymore, but it is still a tweed material made to last. It always comes in a brownish-green color because it does not show the dirt very much. A Covert coat usually has the following:     Single-breasted with a fly front     Notched lapels     Made of brown-green Covert cloth     Short topcoat that is just a little longer than the jacket beneath     Signature four (sometimes five) lines of stitching at the cuffs and hem, and optionally on the flap of the chest pocket     Center vent     Two flap pockets with optional ticket pocket     The collar is constructed either of Covert cloth or velvet     Poacher’s pocket (huge inside pocket that can accommodate a newspaper or an iPad)  http://www.artofmanliness.com/2012/12/11/mans-guide-overcoats/

Downton Abbey for Text Santa - part two

December 27, 2014, 3:59 am

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Downton Abbey for Text Santa - part one ( Watch Part Two Bellow )

December 27, 2014, 3:59 am

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Text Santa

 George Clooney Downton Abbey Text Santa special (video)

Friday 19 December at 8pm on ITV

ITV’s annual charity appeal Text Santa is back to put the Fun into Fundraising with this jam-packed three-hour show. It’s the time of year to help those near.

 It’s Christmas at Downton and Lord Robert Crawley (Hugh Bonneville) seems to be facing financial ruin once again. He’s beginning to wonder if his family may be better off without him but divine intervention in the form of a very special heavenly body gives him a view of what life would really be like without his guiding spirit.

Presenting duos Ant and Dec, Phillip Schofield and Christine Bleakley, and Paddy McGuinness and Alesha Dixon will each host an hour of this all-star cast and present their own special segments.

Throughout the evening, the amazing work of the six UKbased charities supported by Text Santa will be highlighted by well-known faces. This year’s charities are Teenage Cancer Trust, Guide Dogs, Marie Curie Cancer Care, Alzheimer’s Society, WellChild and Together for Short Lives.

http://www.itv.com/presscentre/press-releases/george-clooney-downton-abbey-text-santa-special-

video

Debutantes / VÍDEO / SEE BELLOW.

December 29, 2014, 1:32 am

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 Debutantes

Timewatch, 2001-2002

A film examining the debutante experience of 1939 through the eyes of a colourful collection of debs and debs' delights, including the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, the Duke of Wellington, and the Duchess of Northumberland. While Europe was steeling itself in the face of fascist aggression, the upper-class marriage market was in full swing, and here the participants talk vividly about the parties, ballgowns and broken hearts.

In the United Kingdom, the presentation of débutantes to the Sovereign at court marked the start of the British social season. Applications for young women to be presented at court were required to be made by ladies who themselves had been presented to the Sovereign; the young woman's mother, for example, or someone known to the family. A mother-in-law who herself had been presented might, for example, present her new daughter-in-law.

The presentation of debutantes at court was also a way for young girls of marriageable age to be presented to suitable bachelors and their families in the hopes of finding a suitable husband. Bachelors, in turn, used the court presentation as a chance to find a suitable wife. Those who wanted to be presented at court were required to apply for permission to do so; if the application was accepted, they would be sent a royal summons from the Lord Chamberlain to attend the Presentation on a certain day. According to Debrett's, the proceedings on that day always started at 10am. As well as débutantes, older women and married women who had not previously been presented could be presented at Court.

On the day of the court presentation the débutante and her sponsor would be announced, the debutante would curtsy to the Sovereign, and then she would leave without turning her back.

The court dress has traditionally been a white evening dress, but shades of ivory and pink were acceptable. The white dress featured short sleeves and white gloves, a veil attached to the hair with three white ostrich feathers, and a train, which the débutante would hold on her arm until she was ready to be presented. Débutantes would also wear pearls but many would also wear jewellery that belonged to the family.

After the débutantes were presented to the monarch, they would attend the social season. The season consisted of events such as afternoon tea parties, polo matches, races at Royal Ascot, and balls. Many débutantes would also have their own "coming-out party" or, alternatively, a party shared with a sister or other member of family.

The last débutantes were presented at Court in 1958 after Queen Elizabeth II abolished the ceremony. Attempts were made to keep the tradition going by organising a series of parties for young girls who might otherwise have been presented at Court in their first season (to which suitable young men were also invited) by Peter Townend.[1] However, the withdrawal of royal patronage made these occasions increasingly insignificant, and scarcely distinguishable from any other part of the social season.[2]

However, the expression "débutante" or "deb" for short continues to be used, especially in the press, to refer to young girls of marriageable age who participate in a semi-public upper class social scene. The expression "deb's delight" is applied to good looking unmarried young men from similar backgrounds.