Two Books / The History Of Gardening.

April 27, 2015, 7:45 am

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Gardeners will be astounded to discover how little of their craft is new. Most of the methods used today hark back to ancient civilizations and the gardens of Egypt, Rome, and Persia. Illustrated with hundreds of photographs and line drawings, An Illustrated History of Gardening is an authoritative tome tracing the history and development of this centuries-old craft. Grafting techniques, lawn care, propagation, irrigation, greenhousing, and specialty gardening are some of the topics thoroughly discussed, and illustrated, within this book. No less fascinating are the surveys of ideas about composting from ancient times through the experiments in commercially produced fertilizers carried out by early-American gardeners such as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin to a discussion of the relative merits of organic and chemical gardening. The gardener has always been a person of imagination and adaptability, and An Illustrated History of Gardening shows how this craft has survived for thousands of years.

http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-History-Gardening-Horticulture-Classic/dp/1558216936

An Historical Look at the Art of Gardening

http://www.northwestgardennews.com/id25.html

By Anthony Huxley, foreword by Charles Elliott

Copyright 1978, 1998

The LyonsPress, New York

ISBN: 1-55821-693-6.

"The Illustrated History of Gardening" by the late Anthony Huxley captures elements of what gardening must have been like in days long past, as well as a sense of more recent changes in how and why we toil in the earth. Published in 1978 and re-released with a foreword by Charles Elliott in 1998, the 352-page book provides unique insight into methods of cultivation ranging from irrigation to weed control, with a comprehensive look at the use of such tools and techniques throughout history.

A formidable and vast subject, Huxley does a good job of looking at a broad range of cultures and subjects, within the context of the "history of gardening." However, since it was written more than 20 years ago, Huxley also has managed to present his case from an era gone by: from the 1970s, the days when population growth and gas shortages necessitated smaller gardens and a renewed reliance on "community plots" and vegetable gardens. But mostly the book is dedicated to the evolution of gardening throughout history, and it remains interestingly relevant to gardening today.

The book is half what it says: an illustrated history. It is in fact a compilation of prose that addresses certain technologies, such as the evolution of irrigation methods, then contrasts them over a period of thousands of years. That in turn is supplemented by a collection of photographs and art, compiled by Maurice Michael and reprinted here in black and white.

From the plans for the St. Gall monastery and its "physic garden," dated 820 A.D., to a London rooftop in the recent 20th century, the use of art to explain antiquated methodology is particularly helpful. But Huxley also relies on the work of his predecessors, noted writers who range from Virgil to Emerson, to provide the background and sentiment of gardening throughout the centuries. When the modern gardener may have tired of learning about the latest trends and techniques, he or she will be fascinated to learn that many fundamentals of gardening today date back to the ancient civilizations and the gardens of Rome, Egypt and Persia.

According to Huxley, the earliest garden cultivators were believed to have lived around Jerichoin Palestine in 8,000 B.C. Such history is interesting not only because Huxley jumps around from century to century, but also because he compares a wide variety of cultures (Roman, Greek, English, Dutch) in looking at the evolution of gardening.

A chapter-by-chapter account leads the reader through the evolution of techniques of lawn care, gardening under cover and other topics, with a comprehensive look at essential operations and the development of garden tools. It is obvious that Huxley looks upon these times past with some longing. "In recalling primitive beginnings of cultivation, one is reminded of man's constant instinctive urge to have plants around him," Huxley writes. "Our gardens are echoes of the primeval green world in which our ancestors lived and evolved, a world which  we are all too busy destroying today."

In one of the many attributions featured in this book, Sir Francis Bacon, more than three centuries ago, said gardening is "the purest of human pleasures." He said it offered a "refreshment to the spirits of man." But it is the craft of gardening on which this book primarily focuses. "Gardeners are first of all artisans, only secondarily artists," notes Huxley.

In the newly added foreword, Charles Elliott explains that this historical volume "has less to do with theory than with things.""An Illustrated History" deals with the tools, techniques, devices, procedures and "all the paraphernalia that gardeners have invented, improved, employed successfully or otherwise ... over the centuries," Elliott explains.

The development of tools alone covers a wide breadth of topics, including, for example: planting beds, containers, hedges, fences, methods of sowing and planting, controlling pests, watering, feeding, training, forcing and protecting.

The artwork featured spans decades - as well as countries - but most date from the periods concerned. Many have not been published in years. And only in a few cases does Huxley include photographs or drawings of tools or devices that are still in use today. "The illustrations are a very important part of this book, and much time has been spent in searching for them," he explains.

Huxley also has made a point to use original quotes–and their original spellings. A Providence, Rhode Island, land grant dated 1681, for example, reads, "The northwestern Corner being bounded with a pine Tree... the Northeasterne Corner Bounding with an old Walnutt stumpe... the South Westerne Corner with a Chestnutt Tree." These attributions, Huxley notes, "may seem quaint." But such honest use of words is also refreshing and direct, and that's "all too seldom (seen) today," he adds. In many cases, the origin of the quotes is also historically significant.

While garden writers have penned their words in abundance during the last few centuries, that wasn't always the case. In some ancient civilizations, such writers were far and few between, or, like the Romans Columella and Pliny, were "virtually unique," says Huxley.

In the course of his study, Huxley also found it interesting that many cultures developed similar kinds of garden implements about the same periods, without having any connection or at all knowing what was happening in other parts of the world. He also felt it interesting that certain techniques, first developed out of practical necessity, later became full-fledged art forms in and of themselves. The basic plant bed is one such example.

Originally designed as a way to prevent stepping on plants, the technique developed into "pure design" and later, with the aid of improvements such as irrigation, led to the evolution of ornamental fountains, spouts, basins and more. Gardening as we know it has, of course, long since moved beyond the basic necessity of growing food. Throughout the years, people have been attracted to the earth and plants for reasons relating to leisure, diversion and decoration.

While looking at the past, Huxley also strives for modernity in his prose. In talking about ancient methods, he compares them to modern developments and the use of such techniques today. After all, he notes, "history only stopped yesterday." As with art, he sparingly incorporates references to modern equipment, stressing that it is in fact "the forgotten past which (most) fascinates."

Huxley died in 1992 at the age of 72. A member of Britain's intellectual aristocracy, he was related to Darwinsupporter T.H. Huxley, zoologist Sir Julian Huxley, and novelist Aldous Huxley. In 1949, he joined the staff of the weekly magazine, "Amateur Gardening." After that, his list of accomplishments is quite extensive: Throughout the years, he worked as editor, writer, lecturer, photographer, tour leader and more. He wrote nearly 40 books on the topic of plants, and was editor of the authoritative Royal Horticultural Society's "Dictionary of Gardening - the Illustrated History."

Of Huxley's talent for the historic, Elliott notes, "The combination of... pictures and Huxley's magpie taste for the odd fact will fascinate anyone who has ever pruned a rose or hoed a row of beans. Although there are plenty of bad or failed horticultural notions included along the way, Huxley makes plain that there's no call for us to feel superior to our predecessors."

Even the thoughtful gardener today, Elliott adds, "might strike an idea or two worth trying again today, even though it may be a couple of hundred–or thousand–years old. After all, we've still got caterpillars, if not Arcadian asses." In the end, Huxley stresses that gardening is a devotion which brings happiness to many. "Without green and flowering plants for pleasure as much as food, the world would be a much poorer place," he says.

The PleasureGarden: An Illustrated History of British Gardening

Scott-James, Anne; Lancaster, Osbert (illustrator)

From Roman peristyle to 20th century patio, Anne Scott-James conducts us through 2000 years of the English garden; to linger happily in simple enclosed courtyards of medieval days, and the formal showpieces of Jacobean England, and, later, to wander through sweeping, moody landscapes of the 18th century.

We learn of each age's distinguished botanists, designers, and architects who, together with contemporary social conditions and sheer fad and fashion, shaped these bowers of delight.

THE GARDEN OF EDEN

The Italian Renaissance inspired a revolution in private gardening. Renaissance private gardens were full of scenes from ancient mythology and other learned allusions. Water during this time was especially symbolic: it was associated with fertility and the abundance of nature.

The first public gardens were built by the Spanish Crown in the 16th century, in Europe and the Americas.

Garden à la française

The Garden à la française, or Baroque French gardens, in the tradition of André Le Nôtre.

The French Classical garden style, or Garden à la française, climaxed during the reign of Louis XIV of France(1638–1715) and his head gardener of Gardens of Versailles, André Le Nôtre (1613–1700). The inspiration for these gardens initially came from the Italian Renaissance garden of the 14th and 15th centuries and ideas of French philosopher René Descartes (1576–1650). At this time the French opened the garden up to enormous proportions compared to their Italian predecessor. Their gardens epitomize monarch and 'man' dominating and manipulating nature to show his authority, wealth, and power.

Renée Descartes, the founder of analytical geometry, believed that the natural world was objectively measurable and that space is infinitely divisible. His belief that "all movement is a straight line therefore space is a universal grid of mathematical coordinates and everything can be located on its infinitely extendable planes" gave us Cartesian mathematics. Through the classical French gardens this coordinate system and philosophy is now given a physical and visual representation.

This French formal and axial garden style placed the house centrally on an enormous and mainly flat property of land. A large central axis that gets narrower further from the main house, forces the viewer's perspective to the horizon line, making the property look even larger. The viewer is to see the property as a cohesive whole but at the same time is unable to see all the components of the garden. One is to be led through a logical progression or story and be surprised by elements that aren’t visible until approached. There is an allegorical story referring to the owner through statues and water features which have mythological references. There are small, almost imperceptible grade changes that help conceal the gardens surprises as well as elongate the gardens views.

These grand gardens have organized spaces meant to be elaborate stages for entertaining the court and guests with plays, concerts and fireworks displays. The following list of garden features were used:

 

The renaissance style gardens at Chateau Villandry

Allée

Axis

Bosquet

Canal

Cul de sac

Fountains

Grottos with rocaille

Orangerie

Parterre de broderie

Patte d'oie (Goose foot)

Tapis Vert

Topiary

MediterraneanGardens

Due to being an early hub for Western society and being used for centuries, Mediterranean soil was fragile, and one could think of the region’s landscape culture to be a conflict between fruitfulness and frugality. The area consisted largely of small-scale agricultural plots. Later, following World War II, Mediterranean immigrants brought this agricultural style to Canada, where fruit trees and vegetables in the backyard became common.

Anglo-Dutch formal gardens

Picturesque and English Landscape gardens

Forested areas played a number of roles for the British in the Middle Ages, and one of those roles was to produce game for the gentry. Lords of valuable land were expected to provide a bounty of animals for hunting during royal visits. Despite being in natural locations, forested manor homes could symbolize status, wealth and power if they appeared to have all amenities. After the Industrial Revolution, Britain’s forest industry shrank until it no longer existed. In response, the Garden City Movement brought urban planning into industrialized areas in the early 20th century to offset negative industrial effects such as pollution.

There were several traditions that influenced English gardening in the 18th century, the first of which was to plant woods around homes. By the mid-17th century, coppice planting became consistent and was considered visually and aesthetically pleasing. Whereas forested areas were more useful for hunting purposes in Britainduring the Middle Ages, 18th century patterns demonstrate a further deviation in gardening approach from practicality toward design meant to please the senses.

Likewise, English pleasure grounds were influenced by medieval groves, some of which were still in existence in 18th century Britain. This influence manifest in the form of shrubbery, sometimes organized in mazes or maze-like formations. And though also ancient, shredding became a common characteristic of these early gardens, as the method enabled light to enter the understory. Shredding was used to make garden groves, which ideally included an orchard with fruit trees, fragrant herbs and flowers, and moss-covered pathways.

The picturesque garden style emerged in England in the 18th century, one of the growing currents of the larger Romantic movement. Garden designers like William Kent and Capability Brown emulated the allegorical landscape paintings of European artists, especially Claude Lorraine, Poussin and Salvator Rosa. The manicured hills, lakes and trees dotted with allegorical temples were sculpted into the land.

By the 1790s there was a reaction against these stereotypical compositions; a number of thinkers began to promote the idea of picturesque gardens. The leader of the movement was landscape theorist William Gilpin, an accomplished artist known for his realistic depictions of Nature. He preferred the natural landscape over the manicured and urged designers to respond to the topography of a given site. He also noted that while classical beauty was associated with the smooth and neat, picturesque beauty had a wilder, untamed quality. The picturesque style also incorporated architectural follies—castles, Gothic ruins, rustic cottages—built to add interest and depth to the landscape

Controversy between the picturesque school and proponents of the more manicured garden raged well into the 19th century. Landscape designer Humphrey Repton supported Gilpin's ideas, particularly that of the garden harmonizing with surrounding landforms. He was attacked in the press by two rival theorists, Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price. Repton countered by highlighting the differences between painting and landscape gardening. Unlike a painting, the viewer moves through a garden, constantly shifting viewpoints.

The French landscape garden, also called the jardin anglais or jardin pittoresque, was influenced by contemporary English gardens. Rococo features like Turkish tents and Chinese bridges are prevalent in French gardens in the 18th century. The French Picturesque garden style falls into two categories: those that were staged, almost like theatrical scenery, usually rustic and exotic, called jardin anglo-chinois, and those filled with pastoral romance and bucolic sentiment, influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The former style is represented by the Désert de Retz and Parc Monceau, the latter by the Moulin Jolie.

The rusticity found in French Picturesque gardens is also derived from an admiration of Dutch 17th century landscape painting and works of French 18th century artists Claude-Henri Watelet, François Boucher and Hubert Robert.

English gardens: the common name in the English speaking world, of interpretations, derivations, and revivals in the style of the original LandscapeGardenexamples.

'Gardenesque' gardens

The 'Gardenesque' style of English garden design evolved during the 1820s from Humphry Repton's Picturesque or 'Mixed' style, largely under the impetus of J. C. Loudon, who invented the term.

In a Gardenesque plan, all the trees, shrubs and other plants are positioned and managed in such a way that the character of each plant can be displayed to its full potential. With the spread of botany as a suitable avocation for the enlightened, the Gardenesque tended to emphasize botanical curiosities and a collector's approach. New plant material that would have seemed bizarre and alien in earlier gardening found settings: Pampas grass from Argentina and Monkey-puzzle trees. Winding paths linked scattered plantings. The Gardenesque approach involved the creation of small-scale landscapes, dotted with features and vignettes, to promote beauty of detail, variety and mystery, sometimes to the detriment of coherence. Artificial mounds helped to stage groupings of shrubs, and island beds became prominent features.

The books of William Robinson describing his own "wild" gardening at Gravetye Manor in Sussex, and the sentimental picture of a rosy, idealized "cottage garden" of the kind pictured by Kate Greenaway, which had scarcely existed historically, both influenced the development of the mixed herbaceous borders that were advocated by Gertrude Jekyll at Munstead Wood in Surrey from the 1890s. Her plantings, which mixed shrubs with perennial and annual plants and bulbs in deep beds within more formal structures of terraces and stairs designed by Edwin Lutyens, set the model for high-style, high-maintenance gardening until the Second World War. Vita Sackville-West's garden at Sissinghurst Castle, Kent is the most famous and influential garden of this last blossoming of romantic style, publicized by the gardener's own gardening column in The Observer. The trend continued in the gardening of Margery Fish at East Lambrook Manor. In the last quarter of the 20th century, less structured Wildlife gardening emphasized the ecological framework of similar gardens using native plants. A leading proponent in the United States was the landscape architect Jens Jensen. He designed city and regional parks, and private estates, with a honed aesthetic of art and nature.

In the 20th century, modern design for gardens became important as architects began to design buildings and residences with an eye toward innovation and streamlining the formal Beaux-Arts and derivative early revival styles, removing unnecessary references and embellishment. Garden design, inspired by modern architecture, naturally followed in the same philosophy of "form following function". Thus concerning the many philosophies of plant maturity. In post-war United Statespeople's residences and domestic lives became more outdoor oriented, especially in the western states as promoted by 'Sunset Magazine', with the backyard often becoming an outdoor room.

Frank Lloyd Wright demonstrated his interpretation for the modern garden by designing homes in complete harmony with natural surroundings. Taliesin and Fallingwater are both examples of careful placement of architecture in nature so the relationship between the residence and surroundings become seamless. His son Lloyd Wright trained in architecture and landscape architecture in the Olmsted Brothers office, with his father, and with architect Irving Gill. He practiced an innovative organic integration of structure and landscape in his works.

Subsequently Garrett Eckbo, James Rose, and Dan Kiley - known as the "bad boys of Harvard", met while studying traditional landscape architecture became notable pioneers in the design of modern gardens. As Harvard embraced modern design in their school of architecture, these designers wanted to interpret and incorporate those new ideas in landscape design. They became interested in developing functional space for outdoor living with designs echoing natural surroundings. Modern gardens feature a fresh mix of curved and architectonic designs and many include abstract art in geometrics and sculpture. Spaces are defined with the thoughtful placement of trees and plantings. Thomas Church work in Californiawas influential through his books and other publications. In Sonoma County, Californiahis 1948 Donnell garden's swimming Pool, kidney-shaped with an abstract sculpture within it, became an icon of modern outdoor living.

In Mexico Luis Barragán explored a synthesis of International style modernism with native Mexican tradition. in private estates and residential development projects such as Jardines del Pedregal (English: Rocky Gardens) and the San Cristobal'Los Clubes' Estates in Mexico City. In civic design the Torres de Satélite are urban sculptures of substantial dimensions in Naucalpan, Mexico. His house, studio, and gardens, built in 1948 in Mexico City, was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2004.

Roberto Burle Marx is accredited with having introduced modernist landscape architecture to Brazil. He was known as a modern nature artist and a public urban space designer. He was landscape architect (as well as a botanist, painter, print maker, ecologist, naturalist, artist, and musician) who designed of parks and gardens in Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and in the United States in Florida. He worked with the architects Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer on the landscape design for some of the prominent modernist government buildings in Brazil's capitol Brasília.

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Remembering Margery Allingham and the Campion series, produced by the BBC ...

April 30, 2015, 2:05 am

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A Lagonda 16/80 featured extensively in the series. The car used in the series is now kept in Germany

Campion is a television show made by the BBC, adapting the Albert Campion mystery novels written by Margery Allingham. Two series were made, in 1989 and 1990, starring Peter Davison as Campion, Brian Glover as his manservant Magersfontein Lugg and Andrew Burt as his policeman friend Stanislaus Oates.

A total of eight novels were adapted, four in each series, each of which was originally broadcast as two separate hour-long episodes. Peter Davison sang the title music for the first series himself; in the second series, it was replaced with an instrumental version.

Series 1 - 1989

"Look to the Lady"

A mystery surrounding an ancient chalice. Features Gordon Jackson as Professor Cairey. Original air dates 22 and 29 January 1989.

Book first published in 1931.

"Police at the Funeral"

The death of a member of a wealthy family. Features Timothy West as Uncle William Faraday. Original air dates 5 and 12 February 1989.

Book first published in 1931.

"The Case of the Late Pig"

A man appears to have died twice. Features Michael Gough as Mr Hayhoe. Original air dates 19 and 26 February 1989.

Book first published in 1937.

"Death of a Ghost"

A painter's legacy leads to murder. Features Jean Anderson as Belle Lafcadio and Carole Ruggier as Rosa. Original air dates 5 and 12 March 1989.

Book first published in 1934.

Series 2 - 1990

"Sweet Danger"

The ownership of a tiny kingdom leads to a deadly treasure hunt. Features Lysette Anthony as Amanda Fitton and David Haig as Guffy Randall. Original air dates 12 and 19 January 1990.

Book first published in 1933.

"Dancers in Mourning"

A series of pranks, and worse, upset a leading theatre star and his bizarre household. Features Ian Ogilvy as Jimmy Sutane and Pippa Guard as Linda Sutane. Original air dates 9 and 16 February 1990.

Book first published in 1937.

"Flowers for the Judge"

Murder visits a respectable Londonpublishing house. Features Robert Lang as John Barnabas and Barrie Ingham as Ritchie Barnabas. Original air dates 23 February and 2 March 1990.

Book first published in 1936.

"Mystery Mile"

Campion must protect the family of an American judge on the trail of a sinister crime boss. Features Lisa Orgolini as Isobel Lobbett and Miles Anderson as Anthony Datchett. Original air dates 9 and 16 March 1990.

Book first published in 1930.

Margery Louise Allingham (20 May 1904 – 30 June 1966) was an English writer of detective fiction, best remembered for her "golden age" stories featuring gentleman sleuth Albert Campion.

Her breakthrough occurred in 1929 with the publication of The Crime at Black Dudley. This introduced Albert Campion, albeit originally as a minor character. He returned in Mystery Mile, thanks in part to pressure from her American publishers, much taken with the character. By now, with three novels behind her, Allingham's skills were improving, and with a strong central character and format to work from, she began to produce a series of popular Campion novels. At first she had to continue writing short stories and journalism for magazines such as The Strand Magazine, but as her Campion saga went on, her following, and her sales, grew steadily. Campion proved so successful that Allingham made him the centrepiece of another 17 novels and over 20 short stories, continuing into the 1960s.

Campion is a mysterious, upper-class character (early novels hint that his family is in the line of succession to the throne), working under an assumed name. He floats between the upper echelons of the nobility and government on one hand and the shady world of the criminal class in the United Kingdom on the other, often accompanied by his scurrilous ex-burglar servant Lugg. During the course of his career he is sometimes detective, sometimes adventurer. As the series progresses he works more closely with the police and MI6 counter-intelligence. He falls in love, gets married and has a child, and as time goes by he grows in wisdom and matures emotionally. As Allingham's powers developed, the style and format of the books moved on: while the early novels are light-hearted whodunnits or "fantastical" adventures, The Tiger in the Smoke (1952) is more character study than crime novel, focusing on serial killer Jack Havoc. In many of the later books Campion plays a subsidiary role no more prominent than his wife Amanda and his police associates; by the last novel he is a minor character. In 1941, she published a non-fiction work, The Oaken Heart, which described her experiences in Essex when an invasion from Germany was expected and actively being planned for, potentially placing the civilian population of Essex in the front line.

Margery Allingham: the Dickens of detective writing

Margery Allingham’s books show the evolution from well-plotted, bloodless stories to psychologically acute crime novels

By Jake Kerridge

6:30PM BST 12 Apr 2014 / http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/crimeandthrilerbookreviews/10761626/Margery-Allingham-the-Dickens-of-detective-writing.html

Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, James Bond, Philip Marlowe, Lord Peter Wimsey… Hardly a week goes by without a venerable fictional detective being de-mothballed so some new author can make a bit of cash out of their old-fashioned charm. Enjoyable as some of these new books are, I’m not sure we can say that all the original writers would have approved. But somebody who was an early adopter of the idea of a crime series being continued by other hands was Margery Allingham (1904-66), the creator of the aristocratic sleuth, Albert Campion. Virtually on her deathbed she decreed that her husband, Philip Youngman Carter, a former editor of Tatler, should keep the Campion saga going.

With an uxoriousness that he had not been notable for showing when his wife was alive, Carter carried out her wishes and wrote a number of Campions before his own death three years later. A manuscript he left unfinished has now been completed with a good deal of wit, style and Allingham-esque lightness of touch by Mike Ripley, the former crime fiction reviewer of this newspaper, under the title Mr Campion’s Farewell.

This seems like a good opportunity, then, to reassess Allingham’s work. Literary historians usually lump her together with Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and Ngaio Marsh as one of the “Queens of Crime” from the so-called Golden Age of English detective fiction – roughly, the period between the wars. The history of crime fiction in the 20th century has often been presented as the evolution of the “detective story” – bloodless, lightweight, prizing plot over characterisation – into the “crime novel”: grown-up, disturbing, psychologically acute. Allingham’s Campion novels offer a rare example of this evolution taking place within the work of one author.

She started off as perhaps the most frivolous of the lot. Christie and Sayers, both older than Allingham, were more deeply affected by the First World War (in their respective early books Poirot is a refugee and Peter Wimsey is recovering from shell shock). Allingham, born within a few months of Evelyn Waugh, was part of that post-war generation of Bright Young Things who devoted themselves with the utmost seriousness to levity, in reaction to the grim times just passed. Her early books are full of genial young toffs, ever ready with quips as they casually outwit master criminals and track down stolen treasures.

In The Crime at Black Dudley (1929), she introduced the gangly, bespectacled Mr Campion, who masks his intelligence behind a slightly irritating stream of sub-Bertie Wooster prattle. “Campion” is a pseudonym, used by our sleuth to hide the fact that he is of noble blood. Later in life, Allingham would imply that he was actually the Duke of York, the future George VI.

Queen of crime

You might not read Margery Allingham's detective novels for the plots, but her stories and insights are so irresistible that guests keep stealing them, discovers Jane Stevenson

Jane Stevenson

Saturday 19 August 2006 13.40 BST / http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/aug/19/fiction.shopping1

At least twice in my life I have owned the complete works of Margery Allingham, but I keep finding that some have gone astray. The detective-story collection is stockpiled in the spare bedroom, and over the years I have found that the Allinghams effortlessly top the list of Books Most Often Nicked (I stole half of them from my mother in the first place; thin wartime Penguins with brittle, browning paper and advertisements for Kolynos toothpaste or Craven "A"s in the back). Quite a few people pass through this house, and I can only think that guests pick up an Allingham to read in bed, get hooked and take it away. I can't think of any other writer who has quite this effect, certainly not among the interwar queens of crime.

Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh are fundamentally focused on "how". Their characterisation is crude, a bundle of quirks and characteristic utterances - Poirot's "little grey cells" - while the actual writing is un- demanding. Once the puzzle has been solved, there is no point in looking at the book again: if you accidentally pick up a Christie you've read before, you put it down again as soon as you realise it's the one where the murderer turns out to be the butler's identical twin brother. Gladys Mitchell's books you are sometimes, but not inevitably, pleased to revisit. She turned out more than 60 potboilers and an occasional perverse masterpiece (The Rising of the Moon is my personal favourite).

By contrast, all Allingham novels (except perhaps the first two) will, like those of Dorothy Sayers, stand a good deal of rereading. But for all her considerable intelligence and art, and her obvious feminism, Sayers's fiction is made hard to read by her snobbery and racism. She quite patently saw working-class people as lesser beings than the effortlessly superior Lord Peter, and she was profoundly anti-semitic. This is not a problem with Allingham, who was a person of genuinely wide human sympathy. For example, generally in interwar detective stories, charwomen feature as imbecilic, drunken crones. But Miss Diane in The Beckoning Lady is a precisely observed character with a history and something of an inner life, presented without condescension.

Allingham also has the enormous advantage over Sayers of being fond of her hero, but not in love with him. Albert Campion starts his career as a silly-ass-about-town in the Peter Wimsey mode, but he rapidly quietens down to a far more mature and reflective personality who is palpably affected by the changing textures of English life between the early 1930s and late 60s. Postwar, it is increasingly clear that Campion's real business is with counter-intelligence (Allingham hugely admired Le Carré), and the detective stories are merely interruptions to a professional life lived not in the books, but between them.

She is the least puzzle-minded of great detective-story writers. The question that always interests her most is "why". Her plotting is a device to express character: why specific people are led to do the things they do, a concern that significantly advanced the genre. One aspect of the enduring appeal of her books is that she was truly interested in how a life which seems monumentally weird from outside can be one particular person's normality. What "ordinary" means for a dodgy undertaker, perhaps, or a retired chorus girl. It is this capacity for observation which has often made people think of her as "Dickensian". Dickens invented surprisingly little, but walked about London(he was a great walker), and kept his eyes and ears open.

Allingham, as she moved about in shops, on trains or buses, in the street, did the same. As her books demonstrate, she was a shameless eavesdropper. Fat and friendly, she wandered through life looking innocuous and easy to talk to, and the troubled, the boastful or the just plain weird gravitated towards her. There is a certain advantage for a woman novelist in being middle-aged and overweight. You acquire a curious social invisibility: strangers sometimes carry on in front of you as if you weren't there; or if they chance to fall into conversation, they talk, on occasion, with a surprising lack of inhibition. Allingham's uncontrollable weight was a source of anxiety and distress in her life (it arose from a thyroid problem), and she was often sad and anxious, but she kept her griefs strictly to herself. The people she encountered found her charming, sympathetic and jolly, and she made good use of this. She listened, and she remembered - not merely to what people said, but to how they said it. She has as good an ear for the quirks of individual speech as any English novelist, and a great gift for seeing what was in front of her. As with Dickens, the panorama of human oddities she presents reflects reality. I was brought up in London, and I have been much given to mooching about talking to strangers. Over the years, I have encountered not a few Londoncharacters who could have come straight out of one of her books.

Another thing which makes her books worth revisiting is that she has such an acute sense of place. Many of them are love-songs to London itself, where she lived on and off throughout her life. She could do Mayfair when she wanted to, yet she was sharply observant of run-down working-class areas, which to her were not mean streets, but bursting with complex life. As she became more prosperous, however, she moved out to an old house in a small Essex village, Tolleshunt d'Arcy, though she maintained a pied-à-terre in Great Russell Street. Her two homes thus gave her two areas of focus: East Anglia/Essex and London. All the books are set in one or the other. In an interesting short story, a "lady of the manor" has a well-organised life that includes a monthly weekend in London. Her family do not enquire what she does there; but she is, in fact, meeting a lover. Allingham did no such thing, but as her character enters her little flat, arranged entirely without reference to the interest or convenience of her or anyone else, she becomes, in a fundamental sense, a different person. The story implies that even if Allingham's affair was with London in general rather than someone in particular, her two lives were very separate in her mind.

She is unusual among detective novelists in having a real understanding of the way the country works. Country life and city life are intricately textured in completely different ways; she understands a lot about both. I lived in the English countryside for a long time, and when I had to deal with much the sort of old fellows Allingham describes in books such as Mystery Mile, I often recalled, during tortuous negotiations, Amanda's philosophical advice with respect to questioning an old countryman - "not only will you not learn anything at all, but all your rabbits will die". Allingham could see that "coming the yokel" was often a deliberate strategy employed by tough and shrewd people to force negotiations on to their own ground, and by no means an indication of stupidity.

I doubt if anybody reads a Margery Allingham for the detection, since the plots are mostly fantastical to the point of campness. Her most interesting individual twist on the genre was to abandon detection entirely and write what I think of as a "convergence" story. That is, you, the reader, meet both the criminal and the detective early on. Thus suspense related to discovery is set entirely to one side, and the interest is transferred to questions of the villain's psychology and how, or if, the detectives catch up with him (The Tiger in the Smoke and Hide My Eyes are the classic instances). I imitated this structure in London Bridges, a fond homage to Allingham's thrillers in which all the "detection" that there is takes place on page 274 in the course of about two minutes.

Each one of her books has its own atmosphere. Not only is it distinctly located in a particular place, or places, but each one is a very precise reflection of the mood of the year in which it was written - which, again, is unusual in a crime novelist of her vintage. Interwar detective stories tended towards nostalgia and a certain fuzziness about dates which would make the books easier to reissue. Allingham's earliest books are like that, but the war made a great difference to her. She wrote a memoir of life in Tolleshunt in the first year of the war (The Oaken Heart), and this seems to have drawn her attention to the speed at which attitudes and mentalities were changing, a subject that came to fascinate her.

Thus the stories written during and after the war respond precisely to change. I am writing a biography of a man of Allingham's generation, the painter Edward Burra, and when I was reading up on social history, moving forward in time through his life, it occurred to me that her crisply observant evocation of the specific textures and concerns of the present moment would be very useful, precisely because she wasn't intentionally writing a commentary on the times. This turned out to be absolutely the case. Though her work is fantastical, it is rooted in observation of the differences between the formative experiences of one generation and the next.

She must have been one of the first writers to observe the alienating potential of tower blocks, even while the concrete was still setting in the first wave of postwar town planning. "It's not quite like a street," says a policeman in The China Governess, contemplating a tower-block corridor. "A lot can happen without the neighbours knowing." Equally, she was the first mass-market British writer to involve computers in a plot, as early as 1952 - a Hollerith, in fact, the punch-card precursor to true computers - in The Tiger in the Smoke

All the books include a murder and its resolution, and most of them also have a love story. The first is a genre requirement, the second an optional extra that allows Allingham to maintain the light-hearted tone she generally prefers. But if one looks at the deeper currents in her work, one theme that repeatedly arises is how individuals adapt to the changing world and, above all, to their own displacement by their natural successors. This is the central theme of More Work for the Undertaker, for example. Much of her work protests the refusal of one generation to recognise the legitimate needs of another; or looks at how they can coexist with mutual respect. Heavy themes for light fiction; but handled with such ease and grace that it is only in retrospect, if at all, that one realises the book has engaged with some very serious ideas.

From Coroner's Pidgin by Margery Allingham

"My dear man," said Gee-gee pityingly. "We can't have a row. After all, Johnny is who he is, isn't he? I know its fashionable to pretend to ignore that, but one doesn't really, does one? No, we can't have Johnny involved in anything definitely unpleasant. That's absurd, Johnny's sans reproche. I'll get this chap to see reason, but it's not going to be a walkover. Doctors have got completely out of hand, these days. I'll have to concentrate on him if you don't mind. I'll see you downstairs, shall I?"

The last remark was not a question and he opened the door again. He spoke once more before he disappeared.

"Thanks for the coffee. Awfully good of you. There's not a lot of help in the kitchen, I'm afraid."

"You'd be surprised," said Mr Campion briefly, and went downstairs.

He picked up his hat on the way and walked quietly out of the house. He met no one, and was thankful. The darkness swallowed him as he struck south-west purposefully. Having reached a decision he felt relieved; this was the end of them all, as far as he was concerned. There was just one more thing that must be done and then he'd wash his hands of them.

As he strode on through the misty darkness he tried to put the whole business out of his mind, but it was not so easy. After long years of practice he had developed a routine, and now, despite his inclinations, his brain persisted in carrying on quietly with the investigation. Every scrap of information which he had gathered in the twenty-four hours revolved before his inward eye, trying to slip into the pattern which was already forming. The discovery that Gold assumed automatically that Johnny was privileged beyond all the normal bounds of civilized behaviour, was one of these. It had been odd coming from him and had reminded Mr Campion of an incident of his own youth when the nurse of the small friend who had just pushed him into the Round Pond, had turned to his own avenging Nanna, and had said in exactly the same tone of startled protest:

"But he's a Duke."

At the age of four and a quarter, Mr Campion had taken a poor view of the excuse and did so now, with the added advantage of knowing that ninety-nine percent of the world agreed with him. All the same, he found it interesting to note that the remaining one per cent still existed, and was at large. Another little piece of the jigsaw slid into place.

Published May 2004

Lucas Books of Thorndon, Suffolk, ISBN 1903797-35,

Foreword:

Margery Allingham: an appreciation by Sara Paretsky

Introduction:

'Children not Sausages' by Andrew Taylor

CHAPTER 1: GROWING UP 1904 - 1920

'The Education of a Writer: Margery Allingham at Home and School' by Marianne van Hoeven

'The Rescue of the Rainclouds' by Margery Allingham

CHAPTER 2: AT THE POLYTECHNIC 1920 - 1922

'The Apothecary': a dramatic monologue by Margery Allingham

'"My Brain is Young; I still have strength": Margery Allingham's Dido and Aeneas' by Tony Medawar

'A Medal' by Margery Allingham

CHAPTER 3: THE YOUNG PROFESSIONAL 1923 - 1927

'The Genesis of Blackkerchief Dick' by B.A.Pike

'Green Corn' by Margery Allingham

CHAPTER 4: THE MYSTERY WRITER 1927 - 1933

'A Family Likeness: the place of Margery Allingham in the pantheon of detective-story writers' by Catherine Aird

'Albert Campion – the Truth' by Roger Johnson

'100 Lines for Albert Campion' by B.A.Pike

'The Inimitable Lugg' by Geraldine Perriam

'I Should Have Listened to Mother' by Catherine Cooke

'Classifying Amanda: female and femininity in the pre-war writing of Margery Allingham' by Marianne van Hoeven

'The Real Miss 1938' by Frank Swinnerton

'For Better or for Worse: a Sociologist and Crime-writer's View of Sweet Danger' by MichelleSpring

CHAPTER 5: MAXWELL MARCH 1933 - 1936

'Maxwell March' by B.A.Pike

'Re X Deceased' by Margery Allingham

'The Man from the Shadows' or 'The Man Who Died' by Margery Allingham

CHAPTER 6: 'FOR THE CONNOISSEUR' 1934 -1938

'Undertakers at the Funeral' by Nicholas Fuller

'Lafcadio: the Painter and Posterity' by John Sweetman

'Campion finds the Circus' by Shirley Purves

'Dancers in Mourning: From Page to Screen' by Susan Rowland

'Fashions in Shrouds: Fashions in Forensic Pathology' by Stephen Leadbeatter

CHAPTER 7: THE SHORT STORY WRITER

'Short and Sweet' by Martin Edwards

'The Public Spirit of Francis Smith' by Margery Allingham

'Six Against the Yard and 'It didn't work out'' by B.A.Pike

'A Proper Mystery' by Margery Allingham

'A New Sort of Web' by Amanda Whytenor

CHAPTER 8: MARGERY'S WAR 1939 - 1945

'"A fine sturdy piece of work": Margery Allingham reviewing for Time and Tide 1938-1944' by Julia Jones.

'Black Plumes: the 'forgotten' novel' by Susan Peters

'A Corner in Crime' by Margery Allingham

'Remembering Marge' by Oriel Malet

'The Permutations of James: some notes on Margery's Victorian ancestors' by Julia Jones

CHAPTER 9: THE POST-WAR YEARS 1946 - 1954

'Margery Allingham: an appreciation' by H.R.F. Keating

'Memories of Auntie Margery and Uncle Pip' by Guy M. Wilson

'Naming Names and Playing Games' by Jennifer Schofield

Margery and Lavinia: a letter from Edward Davis

'Margery Allingham's London' by Richard Cheffins

'From Albert to Albertine' by Jessica Mann

CHAPTER 10: 'THE JOLLY OLD FRUIT' 1955 - 1966

'Margery Allingham' by Natasha Cooper

'My Characters' by Margery Allingham

'Brief Encounter' by Margaret Yorke

'Londonmy Market Town' by Margery Allingham

'In the Eye of the Beholder: Quirky Museums of Margery Allingham' by B.J. Rahn

'Margery Allingham: a centennial appreciation' by Robert Barnard

'The Relay (1964): Margery Allingham on Ageing' by Margaret Kinsman

'Re-visiting Campion Country' by June Thomson

LISBON , PORTUGAL / April 2015

May 1, 2015, 12:10 am

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May 1, 2015, 6:36 am

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 The sporran (Scottish Gaelic for "purse"), a traditional part of male Scottish Highland dress, is a pouch that performs the same function as pockets on the pocketless kilt. Made of leather or fur, the ornamentation of the sporran is chosen to complement the formality of dress worn with it. The sporran is worn on a leather strap or chain, conventionally positioned in front of the groin of the wearer.

Since the traditional kilt does not have pockets, the sporran serves as a wallet and container for any other necessary personal items. It is essentially a survival of the common European medieval belt-pouch, superseded elsewhere as clothing came to have pockets, but continuing in the Scottish Highlands because of the lack of these accessories in traditional dress. The sporran hangs below the belt buckle; and much effort is made to match their style and design. The kilt belt buckle can be very ornate, and contain similar motifs to the sporran cantle and the Sgian Dubh. Early sporrans would have been worn suspended from the belt on one or other of the hips, rather than hung from a separate strap in front of the wearer.

When driving a car, dancing, playing drums, or engaging in any activity where a heavy pouch might encumber the wearer, the sporran can be turned around the waist to let it hang on the hip in a more casual position.

Day sporrans

Day sporrans are usually brown leather shovel pouches with simple adornment. These "day" sporrans often have three or more leather tassels and frequently Celtic knot designs carved or embossed into the leather.

Dress sporrans

Dress sporrans can be larger than the day variety, and are often highly ornate. Victorian examples were usually quite ostentatious, and much more elaborate than the simple leather pouch of the 17th or 18th centuries. They can have sterling or silver-plated cantles trimming the top of the pouch and a fur-covered face with fur or hair tassels. The cantle may contain intricate filigree or etchings of Celtic knots. The top of the cantle may have a set stone, jewel, or emblems such as Saint Andrew, a thistle, Clan, or Masonic symbols.

Animal mask sporrans

Animal mask sporrans are made from the pelts of mammals such as the badger, otter, fox, pine marten, or other small animals, with the head forming a flap that folds over the front and closes the opening at the top of the sporran.

Horsehair sporrans

Horsehair sporrans are most often worn as a part of regimental attire. Pipers will often wear the most flamboyant sporrans with long horsehair that swishes from side to side as the piper marches.

‘Home Fires’ / TONIGHT in ITV / ITV’s World War 2 drama series Home Fires will premiere on Sunday May 3rd at 9pm, it has been announced./ VÍDEO: Home Fires trailer | ITV

May 3, 2015, 1:41 am

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Acclaimed British actresses Francesca Annis and Samantha Bond will lead an impressive ensemble cast in new six-part drama Home Fires (previously Jambusters) for ITV.

The cast will also include, Ruth Gemmell (Utopia), Mark Bonnar (Line of Duty), Claire Rushbrook (Collision), Mark Bazeley (The Suspicions of Mr Whicher), Frances Grey (The Widower) and Ed Stoppard (Cilla).

ITV commissioned Home Fires earlier this year from producers ITV Studios.

The drama follows a group of inspirational women in a rural Cheshirecommunity with the shadow of World War II casting a dark cloud over their lives. The isolated village couldn’t feel further away from the impending bloodshed and battlefields and yet it is not immune from the effects of war. As the conflict takes hold, and separates the women from their husbands, fathers, sons and brothers, the characters find themselves under increasing and extraordinary pressures in a rapidly fragmenting world.

By banding together as the Great Paxford Women’s Institute, they will help maintain the nation’s fabric in its darkest hour, and discover inner resources that will change their lives forever.

Created and written by Simon Block (Lewis, The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall, Attachments) with episodes co -written by Mark Burt (Coronation Street, The Dumping Ground), and Tina Pepler (Downton Abbey, Princes in the Tower), Home Fires will be produced by the ITV Studios department overseen by Francis Hopkinson (Wallander, Lucan, Chasing Shadows).  The drama has been developed by Catherine Oldfield (Collision, Fingersmith, Foyle’s War) who executive produces alongside Francis. Sue de Beauvoir (Shetland, Strike Back) will produce episodes 1-3 and Jeremy Gwilt (Foyle’s War, Undeniable) episodes 4 - 6.

Home Fires is inspired by the non-fiction book ‘Jambusters’ written by Julie Summers, who is delighted production is about to commence and that she has secured an Alfred Hitchcock style role in the drama.

“I am thrilled to be appearing in a cameo role as a WI county organiser,” said Julie. “My grandmother, a life-long WI member, would undoubtedly approve of me wearing a hat.”

The series has been commissioned for ITV by Director of Drama Steve November and Controller of Drama Victoria Fea.

“We’re really delighted to have commissioned Home Fires,” said Steve November. “Great writing from Simon has given Julie Summers' wonderful book a fictional life.  The women are real and engaging and have fantastic spirit and attitude.  With World War II on the horizon, multiple strands of plot interweave to create a period drama full of jeopardy and intrigue, but also great humanity and modernity,” added Steve. 

Executive Producer Francis Hopkinson commented: "Thanks to Simon Block's brilliant script, inspired by Julie Summers's book, this series will take a fresh look at life on the Home Front, showing both the tragedies and the triumphs, and offering some wonderful roles for Britain's top actresses. We are delighted that ITV share our enthusiasm for the project."

The episodes 1-3 will be directed by Bruce Goodison (Our World War, My Murder, 10 Days to War) with Robert Quinn (Death in Paradise, Primeval) directing the final 3 episodes of the series. Filming will take place in Cheshirefrom September continuing until December.

The drama will also feature Rachel Hurd-Wood (Return of Sherlock Holmes), Leila Mimmack (Law & Order: UK), Claire Price (Doctors), Daniel Ryan (Mount Pleasant), Will Attenborough (Utopia), Clare Calbraith (Vera), Chris Coghill (The Driver), Brian Fletcher (The Passing Bells), Fenella Woolgar (Case Histories), Leanne Best (Lucan), Mike Noble (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time), Jacqueline Pilton (The Royal), Mark Umbers (Eternal Law), Jodie Hamblet (My Mad Fat Diary 2), Adam Long (Happy Valley), Paul Barnhill (Foyle’s War), Anthony Calf (Upstairs Downstairs), Nicola Sloane (Dancing on the Edge), Jim Whelan and Daisy Badger.

http://www.itv.com/presscentre/press-releases/production-commences-world-war-ii-drama-home-fires

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May 3, 2015, 1:44 am

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Ruth Rendell, crime writer, dies aged 85

May 3, 2015, 9:24 pm

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Ruth Rendell obituary

Crime novelist famed for her Inspector Wexford books who also wrote dark and chilling thrillers under the pen name Barbara Vine

 Stanley Reynolds

Saturday 2 May 2015  / http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/02/ruth-rendell-obituary-crime-writer

Ruth Rendell, Lady Rendell of Babergh, also known as Barbara Vine, who has died aged 85, was a literary phenomenon. From 1964, when her country copper, Reg Wexford, first stepped before the reading public in From Doon With Death, she wrote more than 50 crime novels and seven books of short stories. Many of them were adapted for television or made into feature films; the Wexford books in particular were an enormous success on TV, with the actor George Baker playing Wexford as a big, gruff, rural policeman, solving crime in the fictional Sussex town of Kingsmarkham.

But Rendell was never satisfied with producing the annual whodunnit. She demonstrated this when, rather than follow her first Wexford novel with more of the same, she daringly jumped away from the classic English mystery in her second book, To Fear a Painted Devil (1965), and gave readers a taste of the psychological thrillers to come.

The cliched view of Rendell is that she suddenly changed her style when, in the 1980s, she started writing as Barbara Vine, but the truth is that from the beginning, even in the Wexford tales, she concentrated more on character and psychology than old-fashioned police procedure. She wrote 24 Wexford books and produced an equal number of thrillers under the name Rendell. Her first novel as Barbara Vine was A Dark-Adapted Eye (1986), which won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe award. The next year, a second Barbara Vine, A Fatal Inversion, won her the Crime Writers’ Association Golden Dagger.

The big difference with the Barbara Vine stories was that in them she went inside the heads of her psychopathic killers and rapists. It was this that made them so dark and chilling, an uncomfortable read for fans of Wexford who were used to the protection of the country officer standing between them and an unsafe world. Because of this, Rendell’s fans fell into two rather warring camps, those who liked the Wexford stories and those who felt that Barbara Vine was a great “real” novelist breaking new ground. The books were all, however, bestsellers. There might also have been a third camp, those who loved her wonderful short stories. This was a dying, or dead, market in Britain, but Rendell was able to sell short stories in the US to publications such as the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

Although Rendell did not like the title often bestowed on her – queen of crime – calling it snide and sexist, she did not go along with the many reviewers, among them AN Wilson and PD James, who called her a great novelist. “Nobody in their senses is going to call me a first-class writer,” she said. “I don’t mind because I do the very best that I can and thousands, millions of people enjoy my books.”

A very private person, who could get prickly with interviewers, she nevertheless said that she was going to take an active part in politics when she was made a life peer in 1997. That year she had given £10,000 to the Labour election campaign. In the Lords, Rendell supported the bill to legalise assisted suicide: “The way I’m going it won’t be long, but all my aunts lived into their 90s.”.

Daughter of Ebba (nee Krause) and Arthur Grasemann, she was born in South Woodford, north-east London. Her mother, who had been born in Swedenand lived in Denmarkuntil she was 12, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and Ruth, an only child, was brought up in part by a housekeeper to whom, she said, she was much closer than she was to her mother. Her father she described as “endlessly patient, endlessly loving, and endlessly kind”. She put a lot of him into Wexford.

She went to Loughton high school, in Essex, and was, she said, very unhappy. But she began to find herself when she left school and became a journalist. She worked on the Chigwell Times and by the age of 22 was a top reporter. Trouble came her way when she wrote a story about an old deserted house and invented a ghost; the owner of the house threatened to sue. Shortly afterwards she skipped the annual meeting of a local tennis club and wrote the story up from the chairman’s pre-prepared speech of which she had a copy. After her piece appeared in print she learned that the chairman had dropped dead of a heart attack in the middle of delivering it. She quit before she was sacked.

Aged 20 she had married Don Rendell, a reporter whom she met when they were both covering an inquest. He became a financial journalist on the Daily Mail and for 10 years Rendell was a wife and mother. She described these as happy years but during that time she went through a long apprenticeship, writing six novels, all of which were rejected. When her seventh, From Doon With Death, was accepted by the small publishing house of John Long, she received £75 for it. “No interviews then,” she said, “nor for the next two novels.”

Later she was frequently interviewed, though she was never a willing subject. Asked once too often what she would have been if she hadn’t become a novelist, she said a country and western singer. It came as a shock when, during an interview oon Norwegian TV, she was handed a microphone and asked to sing. Asked on BBC Radio 4 about how she wrote her short stories, she said: “Oh they just come to me.” She described what drove her to write by saying: “I like to sit at a desk and type.”

Rendell claimed that, when writing her novels, she never did any research but “simply made things up”. Later on, she hired a researcher, but the great detail she gave her stories was the result, she said, of going on long walks, especially in London. She became an expert on parks in the capital.

Her hobby was changing houses; she moved 18 times. For several years, she lived in a pink 16th-century manor house set in 11 acres in Suffolk, before returning to London. Her only digression from a rather set, humdrum routine came when in 1975 she divorced her husband and then two years later remarried him. Asked why, she said that after they separated, she found she couldn’t live without him, because he was the sort of man with whom you could go on a 200-mile car trip and never have to say a word.

The Mystery Writers of America gave her three Edgars and the British Crimewriters’ Association awarded her several Golden and Silver Daggers. In 1991 she received the Cartier Diamond award for outstanding contribution to the crime genre. She showed no sign of slowing up: No Man’s Nightingale, published in 2013, was a classic Wexford; and in 2014 she created a new detective, Colin Quell, for The Girl Next Door.

Rendell was very generous and gave a large amount of money away. She was vice-president of the housing charity Shelter and raised money for Little Hearts Matter, which helps children with heart disease. She said she knew what it was like to have no cash, adding: “I don’t think it’s good for people to be born into money and not know what it is never to have it.”

Her husband died in 1999. She is survived by her son, Simon.

• Ruth Barbara Rendell, Lady Rendell of Babergh, writer, born 17 February 1930; died 2 May 2015

 Ruth Rendell, crime writer, dies aged 85

Creator of Inspector Wexford, who also wrote as Barbara Vine, was admitted to hospital after serious stroke in January

Alison Flood and Vanessa Thorpe

Saturday 2 May 2015 / http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/02/ruth-rendell-writer-dies-aged-85

Ruth Rendell, one of Britain’s best-loved authors, who delighted fans for decades with her dark, intricately plotted crime novels, has died at the age of 85, her publisher has announced.

Baroness Rendell of Babergh, the creator of Inspector Wexford and author of more than 60 novels, had been admitted to hospital after a serious stroke in January and died in London on Saturday morning. The statement from her publisher, Hutchinson, said her family had requested privacy.

The crime writer Val McDermid voiced the sorrow of many Rendell fans when she heard the news.

“Ruth Rendell was unique. No one can equal her range or her accomplishment; no one has earned more respect from her fellow practitioners,” McDermid said.

 “The broad church that is current British crime writing owes much to a writer who over a 50-year career consistently demonstrated that the genre can continually reinvent itself, moving in new directions, assuming new concerns and exploring new ways of telling stories. And doing it all in a smoothly satisfying prose style.”

Baroness Gail Rebuck, chair of Penguin Random House UK, of which Hutchinson is an imprint, said: “Ruth was much admired by the whole publishing industry for her brilliant body of work. An insightful and elegant observer of society, many of her award-winning thrillers and psychological murder mysteries highlighted the causes she cared so deeply about.

“She was a great writer, a campaigner for social justice, a proud mother and grandmother, a generous and loyal friend and probably the best read person I have ever met. Her many close friends in publishing and the House of Lords will greatly miss her wonderful company and her truly unique contribution to our lives.”

Susan Sandon, the managing director of Cornerstone, which runs Hutchinson, also paid tribute to Rendell’s life and work: “Ruth was beloved as an author and a friend – to me, and to so many of us. Her writing and her company enriched all our lives. Erudite, wise and endlessly entertaining, she will be so greatly missed.”

Rendell’s novels included the Inspector Wexford crime series and the psychological thrillers she wrote as Barbara Vine. Her debut, From Doon with Death, introduced the world to Wexford in 1964.

 “He sort of is me, although not entirely,” the author told the Observer in 2013 when the inspector made his 24th outing, in No Man’s Nightingale. “Wexford holds my views pretty well on most things, so I find putting him on the page fairly easy.”

Rendell landed her £75 publishing deal with Hutchinson after around a decade of life as a mother and housewife; she had been a journalist on the Chigwell Times, but resigned after it emerged that her report of a local tennis club dinner had been written without attending the event, meaning she missed the death of the after-dinner speaker during his speech.

Her novels, from A Judgement in Stone, which opens with the line: “Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read and write”, to last year’s The Girl Next Door, which sees the bones of two severed hands discovered in a box, cover topics from racism to domestic violence.

The books have, her friend Jeanette Winterson has said, been “a major force in lifting crime writing out of airport genre fiction and into both cutting-edge and mainstream literature”.

Ian Rankin said he had viewed Rendell as “probably the greatest living crime writer” and added that “if crime fiction is currently in rude good health, its practitioners striving to better the craft and keep it fresh, vibrant and relevant, this is in no small part thanks to Ruth Rendell”.

Rendell’s death closely follows that of fellow crime writer PD James, her good friend and political opponent in the House of Lords.

A tribute by the broadcaster and writer Mark Lawson this weekend called them “the George Eliot and Jane Austen of the homicidal novel: different minds and style but equal talent”. He credited them with saving British detective fiction from the disdain of serious literary critics.

The crime writer Simon Brett said Rendell’s output was astonishing and was amazed by her her transition into Vine.

“I cannot think of another example of an author who has moved up a gear so dramatically,” he said on Saturday. “I had always enjoyed her books but when the first Vine book, A Dark Adapted Eye, came out, it was such a change of style.

“I last saw her when she was giving a speech last year and she was mesmerising. Although it was always quite spooky, because she was so affable in person and yet you knew she could summon up dark places in her mind.”

Rendell told the Guardian two years ago: “Suspense is my thing. I think I am able to make people want to keep turning pages.

“I just wait until I’ve got a character and I think, why would anybody do that, what is it in their background, what is it in their lives makes them do it?”

Rendell won prizes including the Crime Writers’ Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for “sustained excellence in crime writing”, and, as a Labour life peer, helped pass a law preventing girls being sent abroad for female genital mutilation.

She was regularly in the Lords, and recently completed another novel for her publisher, Hutchinson, telling the Guardian in 2013 that she had no plans to retire.

“I couldn’t do that. It’s what I do and I love doing it. It’s absolutely essential to my life. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t write,” she said. “I’ll do it until I die, won’t I? If I can. You don’t know, but probably.”

Round 2 / Hacking Jacket / Late 60s , from My Collection ... Jeeves.

May 5, 2015, 6:30 am

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The Origins of The Hacking Jacket

BY ARCHIE HUME / http://www.ahume.co.uk/blog/index.php/the-origins-of-the-hacking-jacket/

“Traditionally, as the name suggests, a Hacking Jacket was a tweed jacket worn for riding. The key features of today’s Hacking Jackets remain unchanged and all owe their roots to maintaining a stylish appearance in the saddle.

The lapels on a Hacking Jacket meet mid-chest, the jacket is lightly tailored at the waist and there are three buttons. The origins of these features are functional and stylistic. All contribute to a secure, semi-fitted jacket that allows for free movement in the saddle. A longer lapel and any less than three buttons, and the jacket would be likely to gape.

A Hacking Jacket is traditionally cut a little longer, with a long single vent at the back. Again this is designed to create a more refined silhouette in the saddle. The single vent opens over the saddleback and the front panels sit neatly on the thigh. For the contemporary wearer the effect is equally flattering, creating as it does an elongated, elegant line.

The Hacking Jacket

The pockets are slanted on a Hacking Jacket to make it easier for a rider to access them in a seated position. Today they retain this heritage feature and you will also find an additional ticket pocket on a Hacking Jacket, just above the right pocket and slightly smaller in size.”(…) 

In: http://www.ahume.co.uk/blog/index.php/the-origins-of-the-hacking-jacket/

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The explicit mystery of the codpiece ...

May 6, 2015, 7:18 am

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A codpiece is a covering flap or pouch that attaches to the front of the crotch of men's trousers and usually accentuates the genital area. It was held closed by string ties, buttons, or other methods. It was an important item of European clothing in the 15th and 16th centuries

As time passed, codpieces became shaped and padded to emphasize rather than to conceal, reaching their peak of size and decoration in the 1540s before falling out of use by the 1590s. Scholars have noted that the appearance of Renaissance codpiece was coincident with aggressive spread of syphilis in the early 16th century, and suggest that it may have first served to allow extra room in the clothing for bandages or other dressings for the afflicted male member.

 Armor of the 16th century followed civilian fashion, and for a time armored codpieces were a prominent addition to the best full harnesses. A few of these are on display in museums today: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has one, as does the Higgins Armory in Worcester, Massachusetts; the armor of Henry VIII in the Tower of London has a codpiece. In later periods, the codpiece became an object of the derision showered on outlandish fashions. Renaissance humorist François Rabelais jokingly refers to a book titled On the Dignity of Codpieces in the foreword to his book The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel.

Wolf Hall TV show uses 'too small' Tudor codpieces for fear of baffling US audiences

Mark Rylance, the star of BBC's Wolf Hall, reveals the impressive codpieces of the Tudor court were made smaller out of respect for audiences

Hannah Furness By Hannah Furness, Arts Correspondent7:00AM GMT 12 Dec 2014 /

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/11288129/Wolf-Hall-TV-show-uses-too-small-Tudor-codpieces-for-fear-of-baffling-US-audiences.html

They may have been the crowning glory for any right-thinking Tudor gentleman, but it appears the traditional codpiece may be a little too much for American television viewers.

The stars of Wolf Hall, the BBC’s new period drama based on the novels of Hilary Mantel, have disclosed they have been issued with “smaller”-than average codpieces, out of respect for viewers' sensibilities.

Mark Rylance, who stars as Thomas Cromwell in the forthcoming BBC series, said programme-makers had decided on “very small codpieces” which had to be “tucked away”.

He suggested allowances had been made amid concerns about the taste of modern audiences, particularly in America, who “may not know exactly what’s going on down there”.

It is one of few concessions permitted by programme-makers, who have otherwise gone to remarkable lengths to ensure historical accuracy, including trips to Shakespeare’s Globe to learn sword-fighting, lessons in etiquette and bowing, and a comprehensive study on spoons.

Mantel has given her seal of approval to the production, issuing a statement of glowing praise for how it has been adapted on screen.

Saying she was pleased programme-makers had resisted the temptation to “patronise” the Tudors to make them “cute”, she said: “My expectations were high and have been exceeded.”

When asked about the costumes in a Q&A to launch the BBC show, alongside actors Damian Lewis and Claire Foy, Rylance said they “did take a while to put on” but praised the overall effect.

“I think the codpieces are too small,” he added. “I think it was a direction from our American producers PBS [the USpublic service broadcaster] – they like very small codpieces which always seemed to be tucked away.”

When asked to clarify, he said: “I wasn’t personally disappointed by the codpieces: I’m a little more used to them than other people from being at the Globe for ten years.

“But I can see for modern audiences, perhaps more in America, they may not know exactly what’s going on down there.”

Lewis, who plays Henry VIII, hinted there had been some on-set “giggling” over the matter, with the curtain-like effect of the male costumes finally making it a moot point.

“Codpieces at the time in the Tudor period were a symbol of virility and actually men of the court were encouraged to wear prominent cod pieces,” he said. “It was a symbol of your virility, your derring-do, your sense of adventure.

“They were encouraged, it was a fashion, and Henry liked them.”

Colin Callender, the executive producer, later clarified there had been “no hidden codpiece memo” handed down by PBS or the BBC.

Foy, who plays Anne Boleyn, added costumes had been created and worn with meticulous detail, with no zips or Velcro added for ease and constant vigilance about whether everyone on set had the correct attire.

As well as teaching the cast to swordfight and being taught the difference between the bows suitable for Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, programme-makers also paid particular attention to who would be joining in the relatively new fashion for using a spoon.

“We had to make a decision on whether Thomas More was a spoon kind of guy,” Peter Kosminsky, the director, said. “Anne Boleyn went for spoons in a big way.”

The team relied heavily on the scholarship of Hilary Mantel, who spent five years researching the Tudor court before writing the Man Booker Prize-winning novels.

Peter Straughan, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter, said had known “absolutely nothing” about Tudor history beforehand, joking he had kept a copy of the “Dummies Guide to Elizabethans” on his desk to help him along.

Callender added he hoped the drama would perfectly suit modern audiences, who have already enjoyed high-tension programmes such as Breaking Bad.

Referring to Cromwell’s mixed reputation, he said: “Modern audiences are fascinated by characters that cross moral lines, trapped between doing the right thing and surviving.”

Wolf Hall, a six-part series covering the first two novels of Mantel’s trilogy, is due for broadcast on BBC One in January.

A little article on the history of the codpiece…

Lucy Worsley / http://www.lucyworsley.com/a-little-article-on-the-history-of-the-codpiece/

‘There is no hidden codpiece memo.’

So says Colin Callendar, executive producer of the upcoming BBC Two drama series Wolf Hall, denying claims that the size of his stars’ codpieces were reduced beyond the point of historical accuracy to avoid offending or baffling an American audience.

Actor Damian Lewis did indeed describe the black velvet codpiece that came with his costume as Henry VIII as a ‘little dinky one.’  But it was Mark Rylance, playing Thomas Cromwell himself, who provided a possible reason why, claiming that ‘modern audiences, perhaps more in America’ might ‘not know exactly what’s going on down there.’

So what exactly is this controversial garment?  The codpiece is buttoned, or tied with strings, to a man’s breeches.  It takes its name from the word ‘cod’, middle English for both ‘bag’ and ‘scrotum’, and arose because medieval men wore hose – essentially, very long socks – beneath their doublets, and nothing else in the way of underwear.

When the fourteenth-century fashion for very short doublets emerged, the codpiece was invented to cover up the gap at the top of those hose.   If you believe ‘the Parson’ in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, it was a much-needed innovation.  He disliked the short doublets of his day because ‘Alas! Some of them show the very boss of their penis and the horrible pushed-out testicles that look like the malady of hernia’.

Originally just a triangle of cloth, the codpiece became more substantial and more decorative as time went on, until its decline in the late sixteenth century.

The codpiece, of course, forms part of the picture of Henry VIII that we all carry round in our heads.  In the portraits after Hans Holbein the Younger, Henry’s enormous codpiece emphasizes his virility, and hence his capacity for providing England with heirs to the throne.  It forms the very centerpiece of Holbein’s drawing (‘The WhitehallCartoon’) that gives us Henry’s definitive image.

None of Henry’s fabric codpieces survive, but the suit of his 1540 armour displayed at the Tower of London also has an enormous codpiece in metal, and its size suggests that Holbein was not exaggerating.  Female visitors to the Tower used to stick pins into its lining in the hope that this would increase their own fertility.

Codpieces also functioned a useful little purse for storing precious items like coins, or jewels, and tradition claims this as the origin of the expression ‘a man’s family jewels.’

They are garments that tend to arouse wonder and disbelief in post-Tudor viewers, so much so that the Museum of London has a whole drawer of codpieces that were catalogued, by a bashful Victorian curator, as ‘shoulder pads’.

But none of them were quite as big as the one worn by Rowan Atkinson as Edmund Blackadder, in his first, late-medieval, incarnation.  For his installation as Archbishop of Canterbury, Blackadder decides to wear his best and biggest codpiece.

‘Let’s go for the Black Russian,’ he tells Lord Percy.  ‘It always terrifies the clergy.’

"Housekeeping" Earl Bathurst in Cirencester Park

May 7, 2015, 11:08 pm

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Housekeeper jailed for stealing antiques and artwork from employer

Former show jumper Kim Roberts sentenced to three years after admitting to theft of items including a Picasso sketch from homes of wealthy countess

Steven Morris

Thursday 7 May 2015 14.16 BST / http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/may/07/housekeeper-jailed-stealing-antiques-art-kim-roberts-countess-bathurst-picasso

A former show jumper who stole antiques and art including a Picasso sketch and Ben Nicholson painting from a wealthy countess while working as her housekeeper has been jailed for three years.

Kim Roberts, 59, was told by a judge that her offences against Lady Bathurst were “greedy and calculated”.

Roberts admitted stealing from Bathurst’s homes in Cirencester, Gloucestershire, and south-west London. She also admitted taking a Volvo car from another former employer, the interior designer Emily Olympitis.

In addition she pleaded guilty to giving false details to employment agency Holland Park Staffing, which supplies butlers and nannies, so that previous convictions for dishonesty would not be discovered.

Her barrister, Simon Roberts, pleaded for leniency at Gloucester crown court saying she had had a “disastrous life” and was terrified of going to prison because she looked after her disabled son.

He pointed out that the artwork had not even been missed until she came to sell it. But Judge William Hart said the law was there to protect everyone, “whether prince or pauper”.

Ian Dixey, prosecuting, said Kim Roberts worked for a little under a month as a housekeeper for Bathurst in the spring of 2013.

Soon after she left, Roberts had a Nicholson painting valued. She was told it was worth £200,000, but dealers she spoke to were suspicious about where she had got it from. A gallery owner recognised it as belonging to Bathurst and contacted her.

Bathurst did not realise it was missing as it had been kept in a study, covered up. It was only then that she realised other property, including the Picasso sketch, were missing.

Police were called in and Roberts was arrested when she arrived at the Lansdowne Club in Mayfair, London, where she had arranged to meet a gallery owner hoping to sell the Nicholson painting.

Dixey said: “As Ms Roberts arrived at the club she was arrested. She was searched and items found in her handbag included a set of keys, which were to Lady Bathurst’s London flat.

“Her [Roberts’] home in Colyton [in Devon] was then searched and officers could immediately see there were a large number of items of value in the property. There were more than 50 items, mainly antique silver and things of that sort.

“When the defendant was interviewed she said that the Ben Nicholson painting and the Picasso sketch had in effect been given to her and that she was entitled to sell them.”

Roberts claimed that other items in her possession – such as a box with Bathurst’s name written on it – had been dumped. Items found had been taken from both Bathurst’s Gloucestershire and London homes.

Later police found that the car was driving had false number plates. It had been stolen from Olympitis in 2012.

Dixey said Roberts’ fraud against Holland Park Staffing involved changing the 6 in her date of birth 1956 on her driving licence to 8. This was clearly because she had a criminal record that she did not want to be discovered, he said.

The prosecutor said Roberts had been convicted of offences including deception, shoplifting and forgery in the late 1980s and 90s.

He told the court it was impossible to put a valuation on what she had stolen. “But it was in breach of trust and there were clearly items of sentimental value as well as high material value,” he said. “She worked for very wealthy people who perhaps did not miss things in the way that others might have done.”

Simon Burns, for Roberts, said she was “extremely contrite” but argued that it had not been ”elaborate or complicated” offending.

He told the court the paintings stolen would “not immediately have been missed” because they were “not on the walls being appreciated”.

The Picasso sketch, he said, was a “very simple’” one and not worth more than £100,000. The Nicholson still life from 1945 was worth between £80,000 and £120,000, he said.

Roberts’ motivation was that she had “fallen from her very comfortable position that she once enjoyed a long time ago”, Burns continued.

“She had been married comfortably and was looked after. But that marriage broke down. She has suffered from depression since 1987. The partners and relationships she has had have all failed. She has had what is quoted in the medical paperwork as a disastrous life.

“She suffered a severe road traffic accident which resulted in her contracting a brain tumour in 2001. The only thing she could do was domestic work. She became a housekeeper. It was not a career of choice.

“She was a single mum with a son who required constant care. He is 29 and she cares for him. He functions at the level of a 15-year-old and is on constant medication. She is extremely anxious about him and who is going to look after him if she is in prison. She had fallen on hard times and resorted to stealing to save herself from financial destitution.

“A lot of people speak highly of her. She has looked after a number of families. She was a horsewoman who competed as a show jumper at Hickstead. All that has been lost.”

Sentencing Roberts, the judge said “These were premeditated offences by you as an employee with the clearest intention of selling the items on. There is a greedy and calculated nature to your offending. What you did in effect was to repay your employer’s trust with avarice and dishonesty.

“Lady Bathurst is a wealthy woman from a wealthy family and you no doubt thought she could easily bear the loss, even if she did discover it. The fact she is wealthy is not a mitigating factor. The criminal justice system should protect all, whether prince or pauper.”

He praised the “integrity and professionalism” of the art dealers involved in the case and said it was thanks to their honesty that all the stolen property Roberts tried to sell was recovered.

The 9th Earl and Countess Bathurst, with Lord Apsley and Lady Rosie Bathurst (middle)

Allen Christopher Bertram Bathurst, 9th Earl Bathurst (born 11 March 1961), known as Lord Apsley till 2011, is a British peer and conservationist.

Born on 11 March 1961 as the eldest son of Henry Bathurst, 8th Earl Bathurst and Judith Mary Nelson, he lives with his wife Sara at Cirencester Park, the Bathurst family seat. With the death of his father on 16 October 2011, he became the 9th Earl Bathurst, of Bathurst in the County of Sussex (Great Britain, let. pat. 27 Aug 1772), 9th Baron Bathurst, of Battlesden in the County of Bedford (Great Britain, let. pat. 1 Jan 1712), and the 8th Baron Apsley, of Apsley in the County of Sussex (Great Britain, let. pat. 24 Jan 1771).

Bathurst married first Hilary George, 2nd daughter of John F. George on 31 May 1986. They divorced in 1994. With her he has two children, a son and a daughter:

Benjamin George Henry Bathurst, Lord Apsley (born 6 March 1990)

Lady Rosie Meriel Lilias Bathurst (born 1992)

On 5 June 1996, he married secondly Sara Chapman, currently named The Countess Bathurst, daughter of Christopher and Marguerite Chapman of Ilminster, Somerset.

Bathurst runs the Bathurst Estate, covering some 15,500 acres of countryside. It includes much of the village of Sapperton and Coates, including Pinbury Park, and lays claim to the principal source of the River Thames. Within the estate is the famous Ivy Lodge polo ground, Cirencester Park Polo Club being founded in 1894, making it the oldest playing ground in the United Kingdom. He also runs Cirencester Park Farms which farms 4,500 acres of arable crops, partially organic, and a herd of Gloucester Cattle.

As a conservationist, he has campaigned to preserve the rural countryside and various historic buildings. Most notably The Earl and Countess, as Lord and Lady Apsley, made headline news when they tried to save an historic building in The Cattle Market in Cirencester, built by the 6th Earl Bathurst for the Mansion's old Kitchen Garden. When they discovered it was to be demolished by the County Council to make way for a Leisure Centre, they threatened to chain themselves to the building to prevent the demolition going ahead. The problem was eventually solved when Bathurst negotiated with the demolition company to buy back the building and it was removed, brick by brick to the family estate.

Bathurst is a President of Cirencester Housing and Marshall of the St Lawrence Hospital Trust. He is also the founding Director of the annual Cotswold Show, held every July on the Bathurst Estate and a Patron of the Cotswolds Museum Trust. He is President of The Cirencester Hospital League of Friends, President of Cirencester Band, President of The Cirencester Male Voice Choir, Steward of The Cirencester Society in London, Patron of The Cirencester Cricket Club, and President of Cirencester Park Polo Club.

Bathurst is involved in the National Farmers Union. He is President of the Gloucestershire Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group (FWAG), a governor of the Royal Agricultural University, past President of the Three Counties Agricultural Society and Director of the Gloucestershire Farming Trust.

Cirencester Park is a country house in the parish of Cirencester in Gloucestershire, England, and is the seat of the Bathurst family, Earls Bathurst. It is a Grade II* listed building.

Allen Bathurst, the first Earl Bathurst (1684–1775), inherited the estate on the death of his father, Sir Benjamin Bathurst, in 1704. He was a Tory Member of Parliament and statesman who from 1714 devoted himself to rebuilding the house formerly known as Oakley Grove, which probably stands on the site of Cirencester Castle, and laying out the famous parkland.

In 1716 Bathurst acquired the extensive estate of Sapperton from the Atkyns family, including Oakley Wood, and went on to plant one of the finest landscape gardens in England, complete with park buildings, walks, seats, grottoes and ruins. They include Alfred’s Hall, now taken to be the earliest recorded Gothick garden building in England, which is also a grade II* listed building.

Allen Bathurst was raised to the peerage as a baron in 1711 and an earl in 1772, and was a patron of art and literature no less than a statesman. The poet Alexander Pope was a frequent visitor to Cirencester House; he advised on the lay-out of the gardens and designed the building known as Pope's Seat in the park, which commands a splendid view of woods and avenues. Jonathan Swift was another appreciative visitor.

The house contains portraits by Lawrence, Gainsborough, Romney, Lely, Reynolds, Hoppner, Kneller and many others, and a set of giant marble columns carrying busts, which are genuine antiques, collected in Italy by Lord Apsley, the son of the third earl, at the time of the Congress of Vienna in 1814.

There were additions to the house by Sir Robert Smirke about 1830.

Subsequent earls were patrons of the Arts and Crafts movement, when Ernest Gimson and the Barnsley brothers, Sidney and Ernest, settled at Pinbury Park on the Cirencester estate in 1894. Norman Jewson joined them in 1907, and describes his life as a student of Gimson in Sapperton in his classic memoir, By Chance I did Rove (1952).

The estate includes much of the villages of Sapperton and Coates, including Pinbury Park, and lays claim to containing the principal source of the River Thames.[citation needed]

Apsley House, at Hyde Park in London, was built for Lord Apsley, later the third earl Bathurst, Lord Chancellor, by the architect, Robert Adam. In 1807 the house was purchased by Richard Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley, who in 1817 sold it to his famous brother, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (who presented his portrait, today still in Cirencester House).

The house has the tallest yew hedge in Britain. The semi-circular hedge, which is 33 feet wide and 150 yards long, is believed to have been planted in about 1710. The tonne of clippings produced by its annual trimming are sold to pharmaceutical companies who use extracts as a key ingredient of Docetaxel, a chemotherapy drug used to treat breast, ovarian and lung cancer.

7th Earl Bathurst

The 8th Earl Bathurst

The 8th Earl Bathurst, who died on October 16 aged 84, was a junior Conservative minister at the Home Office and Lord-in-Waiting to the Queen, but his public offices never matched his private antics for originality and spice.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/sport-obituaries/8834975/The-8th-Earl-Bathurst.html

"Barmy" Bathurst, as he was known, inherited the earldom and Cirencester Park in Gloucestershire from his grandfather, the 7th Earl, in 1943, the year after his father, Lord Apsley, DSO, MC, MP, had been killed, and was a keen countryman who rode hard to hounds, as well as a just and jovial landlord.

He followed in the footsteps of the 1st Earl, – a former Tory MP for Cirencester and friend of Pope, Swift and Congreve who afforested 3,000 acres of the estate in 1720 – by becoming a keen forester himself and President of the Royal Forestry Society as well as Councillor for the Timber Growers' Association.

An apiarist and an able farmer, Bathurst was also the owner of "Jim" and "Joe", the last working oxen in this country. He ran Cirencester Park Polo Club and was active in local affairs – it was his job, among others, to hand out the Bledisloe Trophies to well-kept Cotswold villages. He was also a governor at the Royal Agricultural College for many years.

Henry Allen John Bathurst was born on May 1 1927 the eldest son of Allen Bathurst, Lord Apsley, and his wife Violet. He was educated at Eton College and Christ Church, Oxford. In 1948 he joined the military and served as a lieutenant in the 10th Royal Hussars and as a captain in the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars (TA).

In 1957 Bathurst became honorary secretary of the Agricultural Committee in the House of Lords and a Lord-in-Waiting to the Queen. He was Chancellor of the Primrose League from 1959 to 1961 as well, and, during this time, at was President of the Gloucestershire Branch of the Council for the Protection of Rural England.

His political career was short-lived, however, and reached its peak when he was appointed Joint Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office in 1961, only to be discharged the following year by Harold Macmillan in the "night of the long knives".

Thereafter, Bathurst retired to the family seat, though his work for the Tory Party continued under other guises: in 1968, to raise funds for the Party, he sold a 2nd Century Samian cup that had been found among Roman ruins on the estate in 1891.

Bathurst's duties at Cirencester Park included riding as Master of the Valley of The White Horse Hounds, the Gloucestershire pack kept by his family since the 1830s. He cut a dashing figure on a horse, and became the first English peer to ride a Russian horse to hounds, so keen was he to introduce Russian-bred horses to the local hunting fraternity.

In 1965, however, in order reduce costs for both hunts, he merged his own twenty couple with the local Vale of The White Horse pack. But he diversified into other equestrian pursuits, founding Cirencester Park Polo Club – venue of the famous chukka which saw the Prince of Wales come a cropper mid-swing and break his arm.

Scandal struck in the Eighties when, twice, (in 1982 and 1988), plantations of cannabis and opium poppies were found to be growing within the Park walls, tended by local opportunists who were later jailed. Bathurst weathered the ensuing press attention with the same grace as he employed in 1989, when he lost his driving licence for 15 months after a four-hour lunchtime "jolly" with friends.

In 1988 Bathurst had moved to a farmhouse on the estate to make way for Lord Apsley, his son and heir, yet he remained involved in the running of things. In 2003, driving through the Park on his way home from a polo match, his Landrover was overtaken on the grass verge by a Volkswagen Golf travelling at 40 to 50mph. Roused to heights of fury by this flagrant breach of the estate's 20mph speed limit, the 76-year-old Earl gave chase, flashing his lights, sounding his horn and engaging in off-road manoeuvres to try and get the offender to stop. But it was the Earl himself who was forced to stop – by the security team protecting Prince William, the car's driver.

Although Clarence House issued an apology, the Earl remained unrepentant: "There are rules in the polo club about driving on the estate, and people have to stick to them", he told an interviewer. "I don't care who it is, royalty or not – speeding is not allowed on my estate. If I was to drive like that in Windsor Park, I'd end up in the Tower." He did not recognise the Prince, he explained, observing that he "thought he was some young yob in a beat-up car".

Bathurst was Chairman of the Gloucestershire branch of the Country Landowners' Association from 1968 to 1971 and a Deputy Lieutenant for Gloucestershire from 1960 to 1986.

He married first, in 1959, Judith Nelson; they had two sons and one daughter. The marriage was dissolved in 1977 and the following year he married, secondly, Gloria, widow of David Rutherston.

His son Allen Christopher Bertram Bathurst, Lord Apsley, born in 1961, succeeds to the Earldom.

The 8th Earl Bathurst, born May 1 1927, died October 16 2011

London Builds Again (1945/6)

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Mute colour film shot by an amateur cinematographer of the construction of prefabricated housing in post-war London. The film has inter-titles throughout.

The film opens with a shot of St Paul's Cathedral, followed by a sign at the base of Nelson's Column reading 'The time of destruction is ended ... the era of reconstruction begins. H.M. the King". Another sign reads 'Save for reconstruction'. The demolition of a bomb-damaged building. Intertitles introduce the construction of Orlit Houses; a sign on-site reads 'Ministry of Works. Experimental Permanent Houses. Poplar Site'. The construction of the houses are shown from constructing the concrete frames through to the finished dwellings. A sign on-site reads 'Richard Costain Limited London SW1'. Mr George Tomlinson and Mr Charles Key, the Minister of Works open the first house in February 1946, watched by crowds of on-lookers. Detailed shots of the interior of one of the houses.

The Film and Video Archive of the Imperial War Museum was established in 1920, making it one of the first film archives in the world. It holds some 120 million feet of film and 6,500 house of video tape. A large proportion of material has been transferred to the Museum from the armed Services and other public bodies as the Archive is the official repository for these films.

More information about this film can be found via the Film and Video section of the Imperial War Museums on-line catalogue: www.iwmcollections.org.uk

Running time5mins

Matthew Nathan camera-operator and editor

Original format: 16mm

Berlin in July 1945 (HD 1080p color footage)

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That's how it looked like just after the Second World War in Berlin!

Fascinating moving pictures in color show the situation of the city in summer 1945, just after the Second World War and the capitulation of Germany. Daily life after years of war.

 Pictures from the destroyed city, the Reichstag, Brandenburger Tor, Adlon, Führerbunker, Unter den Linden, rubble women working in the streets, the tram is running again.

 A collage of archive material

produced by: Kronos Media

1945 / Berlin / London. Watch Vídeos below ...

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Tweed Ride Utrecht , 10 May 2015

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The keepers tweed fabric

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 A heavy duty densely woven tweed developed for outdoor use in the north of England and Scotland. It generally weighs anywhere from about 25 oz. per metre/yard to perhaps 32 oz.

(worn by the game keepers/managers on the estate)

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The Two Princes, the Française and the perfect murder … How Marguerite Alibert became Princess Fahmy and shot her husband at the Savoy …

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The cover-up that saved the Prince of Wales' murderess lover from the gallows

Prince of Wales had a relationship with Marguerite in the First World War

The Parisian courtesan went on to marry Prince Ali Fahmy of Eqypt

She shot him dead in the Savoy Hotel in 1923

By TONY RENNELL FOR MAILONLINE

PUBLISHED: 22:01 GMT, 15 March 2013 | http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2294153/The-cover-saved-Prince-Wales-murderess-lover-gallows.html

 

Shady character: Princess Marie Marguerite Fahmy, French wife of late Prince Ali Fahmy of Egypt, was a lover of the Prince of Wales

Late-night diners at the Savoy Hotel in London paused between mouthfuls and stared at each other in amazement.

At one of the tables an unseemly row had broken out — shrieks of rage from a bejewelled French woman in a chic satin Chanel gown, howls of anger from her youthful white-tie-and-tailed Middle Eastern husband.

‘Shut up, or I’ll smash this bottle of wine over your head,’ she screamed at the top of her voice.

‘And I’ll do the same to you,’ he hurled back, until waiters intervened to try to calm them down.

To those in the know, this was just another everyday argy-bargy in the volatile six-month marriage of 32-year-old Marguerite, high-class Parisian hooker and notorious gold-digger, and 22-year-old Prince Ali Fahmy, effeminate, filthy-rich Egyptian playboy, besotted with her and intensely jealous.

They were forever clawing and scratching each other, biting and kicking.

But it was more than that this time. A few hours later during a violent thunderstorm, that night in July 1923, there was more loud cursing and rowing in the corridor outside their suite — followed by the sound of three pistol shots fired in rapid succession.

Enigmatic: Madame Marguerite Fahmy who was accused of murdering her husband, Aly Bey Fahmy, in the Savoy Hotel, pictured in Paris

A hotel porter who rushed to investigate found Ali slumped against a wall in a pool of blood, a bullet through his head, and a hysterical Marguerite bending over his body and crying out, ‘J’ai lui tiré’ — ‘I’ve shot him.’

Murdered: Egyptian Aly Bey Fahmy was shot dead by his wife Marguerite Fahmy in 1923

If ever there was an open-and-shut murder case, this seemed it. The ambitious Marguerite — who had slept her way out of the gutter by selling her sexual favours, reeled in scores of wealthy lovers and landed a prince — seemed certain to be heading for a date with the hangman.

And yet, ten weeks later, after an Old Bailey trial that had Press and public agog at all the lurid sexual details unearthed, she was acquitted. It was one of the most sensational turnarounds in British legal history. How could this have happened?

The answer, according to author and barrister Andrew Rose in a new book, is equally sensational. He argues that friends of the then Prince of Wales — the hapless Edward VIII-to-be —  conspired to get her off the hook.

Why? To hush up the fact that she, a prostitute, had bedded the Prince on numerous occasions during the last 18 months of World War I while he was serving with the Army in France. Moreover, she had racy love letters from him to prove it.

The moment the news came out that Marguerite was under arrest in Holloway prison, a secret, high-level damage-limitation exercise was set in motion. The Prince’s intimate entourage of toffs, toughs and old Army chums went into overdrive to save him from embarrassment and ridicule.

They knew that in his early 20s the young and immature heir to the throne had enjoyed her delights — some of them had even dallied there too and discovered how well versed she was in the tricks of her trade.

Cover up: Prince of Wales, here in 1925, had met Marguerite in the last 18 months of the First World War while he was in the army in France

The Prince, a newcomer to such arts, had been initiated, bewitched and then become more than a little obsessed with the shapely body, auburn hair and sensuous mouth of the woman he knew as Mme Maggie Meller. She was adept at playing the dominatrix. He pursued her with slavish devotion at every opportunity, lavishing gifts on her.

She sent him an erotic novel with a strong lesbian theme. Foolishly he wrote letters to ‘mon Bebe’, as he called her, 20 of them at least, intimate, possibly rude about his father, King George V, often indiscreet about the conduct of the war, and definitely not the sort he would ever want the world to see.

And when in 1918 he dumped her for the arms of Mrs Freda Dudley-Ward, the first of his long-term mistresses, she pointedly reminded him she still had them, with a hint that she wanted money for their return.

Why Marguerite pulled back from blackmail at this point is unclear, but in time the Prince seemed reassured that, though ‘IT in Paris’ (the ungentlemanly term he now used for the woman he’d once adored) had not given up his billets-doux, she was not going to make trouble.

Now her arrest in London on a capital murder charge punctured that hope. The real possibility loomed of almost limitless public scandal descending on the Royal Family.

The first thing the Prince’s men did, according to author Rose, was to make a discreet approach to the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Archibald Bodkin, explain the delicacy of the situation and get him on board. He guaranteed a date for the Old Bailey trial in September, and they arranged for the Prince to be well out of the way then on a two-month tour of Canada.

But that wouldn’t stop Marguerite spilling out from the dock details of her boudoir activities with the royal rake or producing those incriminating letters if it suited her. There would have to be a deal to silence her — and the go-between for that transaction, Rose claims, was one Major Ernest Bald.

The debonair Bald had been one of Marguerite’s ‘intimates’ back in France, as had the man who now enlisted his help, his old commanding officer, ‘Bendor’ Grosvenor, the dissolute Duke of Westminster. ‘Bendor’ was a  disreputable womaniser and heavy drinker, and among the Prince’s closest confidantes.

Bald was sent to visit his old flame in Holloway jail and, though there is no record of what they discussed in frequent meetings in a white-washed room with barred windows over the next five weeks — talking in French so the watching wardress could not understand — Rose believes they horse-traded the Prince’s bedroom secrets for some sort of guarantee that she would get off.

From her cell, it seems Marguerite instructed her lawyer to arrange for the Prince’s letters to be handed back. She had stored them in Cairo and they were duly given to the British High Commission there and  dispatched to London.

But were they the real thing? Rose believes the Prince interrupted his summer holiday in Scotlandto dash to Londonto check their authenticity and that they were all accounted for. They weren’t. Marguerite had wisely kept some back for insurance.

The crucial part of the deal, however, was that she would make no mention of the Prince’s name in court, and that part of the bargain she kept in full.

A few days before the trial opened Lord Curzon, Foreign Secretary at the time, confided to his wife some gossip he’d heard: ‘The French girl who shot her so-called Egyptian prince in London and is going to be tried for murder, is the fancy woman who was the Prince’s “keep” [kept woman] in Paris during the war, and they were terribly afraid that he might be dragged in. [But] his name is to be kept out.’

In return, Rose claims, all the other details of her racy past would be left out of the court proceedings, too. And that, he adds, would undermine the prosecution’s case that she was a wicked, foul-tempered, violent woman who had killed her husband to get her hands on his fortune.

Caught with the smoking gun in her hand, Marguerite’s only possible line of defence was that she was a much-battered wife in fear of her life from a vicious and perverted husband. When she told him she was going to divorce him, he had gone berserk and she had shot him in self-defence.

And, says Rose, with the help of the Prince’s connections and the connivance of some leading Establishment figures, that is what her side set out to argue.

‘This was to be a show trial,’ he states, ‘but one with a difference. The authorities wanted Marguerite to be acquitted. A murder conviction would have been catastrophic for the Crown.’

The ground had been prepared. An inexperienced judge was assigned to hear the case and Rose believes he may well have been nobbled from the outset into steering the court away from Marguerite’s steamy past.

The prosecuting counsel was lacklustre and less than forensic in his approach, as if he knew the case was somehow stacked against him, whereas the defence lawyer, pleading Marguerite’s innocence, was the biggest legal star of the age. The theatrical, eye-catching Sir Edward Marshall Hall, orator and advocate extraordinaire, was widely hailed as the ‘Great Defender’.

Marshall Hall’s tactic was to besmirch Ali Fahmy’s reputation, appealing unashamedly to every evil racial stereotype to do so. Playing on prejudice common at the time, he conjured up an image of a respectable white woman  falling into the clutches of an unprincipled Arab with perverted sexual tastes.

The young Egyptian was presented as a cruel, promiscuous, bisexual. Driven by lust, he had forced her to have ‘unnatural’ intercourse that left her ‘torn’ in the most intimate of places. He beat her and threatened to kill her. For all his sophisticated  outward appearance, he was a beast, a devil.

The judge should have stopped Marshall Hall’s flow of unsubstantiated accusations against the dead man, but the lawyer was allowed to proceed with his rhetoric.

In the dock, Marguerite — a consummate actress as ever — sat with her head hanging limply forward and her black gloved right hand supporting her forehead. Her eyes were closed and tears trickled down her cheeks.

Similarly, Marshall Hall got away with muddying the waters over basic facts that damned Marguerite — that Ali had also been shot in the back and that she had pulled the trigger three times.

As for her own copious sins, her promiscuous past (and present), her naked ambition, her greed, her violent temper which had led her to horse-whip one ex-lover, the phalanx of wealthy men she had snared, exploited and cast aside — these were simply never mentioned. Witnesses who would have given evidence of her own threats to kill her husband were never called.

Instead, she was this ‘poor, wretched woman’, declaimed the Great Defender, ‘suffering the tortures of the damned’, who had fired the pistol in desperation as Ali ‘crouched like an animal, crouched like an Oriental . . .’

In his closing speech, his oratory soared to even greater heights as he invited the jury ‘to open the gates where the Western woman can go out, not into the dark night of the desert, but back to her friends, who love her in spite of her weaknesses.

‘Open the gate and let this Western woman go back into the light of God’s great Western sun.’

The judge’s summing-up took up the same theme. ‘We in this country put our women on a pedestal: in Egypt they have not the same views,’ he told the jury.

He declared Ali’s alleged sexual tastes ‘shocking, sickening and disgusting’. And he steered them towards a conclusion of justifiable homicide. ‘If her husband tried to do what she says, in spite of her protests, it was a cruel and abominable act.’

The jury took less than an hour to pronounce her Not Guilty and set her free. She was in the clear. So too was the Prince of Wales, his frolics with her wiped from the slate, thanks to his friends.

Also wiped clean, Rose admits, was much of the confirming evidence of the scheming he reckons had taken place to secure her release.

Her surprise acquittal is a matter of record. That it was achieved by a deliberate cover-up at the highest level has to rest on circumstantial evidence, and perhaps not surprisingly. ‘Smart plotters do not leave a paper trail,’ Rose writes. ‘Finding out what has been carefully concealed by clever people is challenging.’

Yet he remains convinced that ‘the Establishment, in the form of the Royal Household, the Director of Public Prosecutions and the trial judge, agreed to do whatever was necessary to preserve the reputation of the Prince of Wales, even if this meant interfering with due process of law. ‘Arguably,’ he says, ‘this created a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.’

Freed, Marguerite returned to France and cheekily tried to claim a slice of the vast wealth left by the husband she had gunned down. It didn’t work and she returned to her life-long trade of trapping wealthy men.

As for the Prince of Wales, he continued his pursuit of unsuitable women — with consequences, as the world knows, that cost him not only his reputation, but his crown, too.

The Prince, The Princess And The Perfect Murder by

Andrew Rose is published by Coronet on April 4

 "Andrew Rose first published the tale of Marguerite Alibert 12 years ago, in a book called Scandal at the Savoy. As crime stories go, it ticked all the right boxes: a sexy French adventuress shoots dead her creepy Egyptian husband at London's smartest hotel, stands trial for his murder and is acquitted." But Craig Brown in the Mail on Sunday had problems with Rose's updated version, The Prince, the Princess and the Perfect Murder, published because in the earlier book "he had missed an essential detail. The then Prince of Wales" had been one of the Marguerite's many lovers, as detailed in her "1934 memoir, which Rose describes as 'an essential source previously overlooked by Royal biographers'. And by you, too, matey!" In the Spectator, Selina Hastings felt that the "story of Marguerite … is fascinating not only for what it reveals of this far from appealing personality but for the social history of the time." But according to the Sunday Times's Peter Conradi, "However painstakingly he puts together the elements of the conspiracy, the evidence is thin and circumstantial."

Friday 19 April 2013 19.19 BST  / http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/19/critical-eye-book-review-roundup

Getting away with murder... and that's the author

By CRAIG BROWN FOR THE DAILY MAIL

PUBLISHED: 21:00 GMT, 6 April 2013 / http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-2304979/CRAIG-BROWNS-BOOK-OF-THE-WEEK-Getting-away-murder--thats-author-Review-The-Prince-Princess-Perfect-Murder-Andrew-Rose.html

THE PRINCE, THE PRINCESS AND THE PERFECT MURDER by Andrew Rose

Andrew Rose first published the tale of Marguerite Alibert 12 years ago, in  a book called Scandal At The Savoy. As crime stories go, it ticked all the right boxes: a sexy French adventuress shoots dead her creepy Egyptian husband at London’s smartest hotel, stands trial for his murder and is acquitted. Who could ask for anything more?

Marguerite Alibert was born in Paris in 1890, the daughter of a cab driver and a char lady. From an early age, she was, as they say, a bit of a goer: aged 16, she had a baby. To these 21st Century eyes, she looks a bit dumpy, not unlike the Queen Mother, but there was clearly something about her – ready availability, perhaps –that made gentlemen’s eyes swivel in their sockets.

Before long, she was taken up by one of Paris’s most influential madames, who apparently taught her all she needed to know. In Andrew Rose’s salivating words, Marguerite became ‘an expert in the arts of love’.

She certainly didn’t let her new expertise gather dust. ‘She’s been the mistress of nearly all my best customers, gentlemen of wealth and position in France, England, America and many other countries as well,’ her old boss proudly recalled, years later.

She embarked on a seven-year affair with a wealthy married man, who set her up in her own apartment, within which she carried on with several other men, too. Her wealthy suitor finally had a nervous breakdown and retreated to Bordeaux, but not before she had extracted 200,000 francs from him, plus a plush apartment with servants, and a stable full of horses.

From then on, there was no looking back, her bank account expanding with every new gentleman caller: a Belgian landowner, a handful of Americans, the owner of a chain of nitrate mines in Chile, the brother-in-law of the Grand Vizier of Turkey and so on. The plucky British, often so sluggish in matters of the flesh, even managed to field their own delegate in the shape of the Duke of Westminster.

In 1919, she married a serious young man called Charles Laurent, but she soon began yearning for the nightclubs. They were divorced within a year, leaving  her wealthy enough to expand her stable to ten horses, and to add a full-time groom and a chauffeur to her growing roster  of staff.

To cut a long story short, in Cairo she  set her cap at an Egyptian playboy and self-styled prince called Ali Fahmy, ‘a  millionaire umpteen times over’. To some, his home decoration – his Nubian servants all liveried, his furnishings all encrusted with diamonds – may have been a little too showy, but to Marguerite they were as plankton to a basking shark.

They married in January 1923. Within days bride and groom were threatening to kill each other, and punches were traded. In July they moved into a suite  in The Savoy Hotel in London, but, like  so many warring couples before  and since, soon discovered it only takes mutual hatred to turn luxury hotel suites into padded cells. A few days into their stay, Marguerite shot Ali dead in the hotel corridor. ‘What shall I do? I’ve  shot him,’ she exclaimed, as the night manager came running.

Marguerite was put on trial for murder, but was acquitted on the grounds of self-defence, thanks to a wonderfully over-the-top xenophobic attack on her victim by her defence barrister (‘He not only had the vilest of vile tempers, but was vile himself, with a filthy perverted taste . . .’).

As I have already said, Andrew Rose wrote a diverting account of this spectacular case 12 years ago. It is now, he assures us, ‘long out of print’. In the introduction to this new book, he confesses that soon after the publication of the original, he received a letter from Marguerite’s grandson telling him he had missed an essential detail. The then Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII) had, he said, been one of his grand- mother’s many lovers. This grandson then gave Rose a copy of his grandmother’s 1934 memoir, which Rose describes as ‘an essential source previously overlooked by Royal biographers’.

And by you, too, matey! It seems astonishing that the biographer of a famous murderer somehow never discovered that she had published an account of the case. This oversight means that in  Scandal At The Savoy there was not a single mention of the Prince of Wales. But Rose has now turned his incompetence to advantage by publishing a fresh account, this time introducing the Prince of Wales and bigging up his role to  bursting point.

Well, I say that this is a ‘fresh’ account, but in truth most of it is exactly the same, with entire sentences, paragraphs, pages, and even chapters copied out, word for word, from the original. All Rose has done is to shoehorn the Prince of Wales into  the narrative at every possible juncture, and many impossible junctures too.

His thesis is that the young Prince enjoyed sexual liaisons with Marguerite Alibert for 18 months from 1917, and that in its  anxiety to preserve his reputation, the British Establishment conspired in a cover-up, which in turn led to what  he now describes as ‘a show trial’, resulting in the foregone conclusion of Marguerite’s acquittal.       

Sadly, he presents no evidence for this conspiracy, other than what he calls a ‘remarkable’ letter from Lord Curzon (whom he styles, bizarrely, ‘Marquess Curzon’) to his wife telling her he had ‘heard a piece of news which may amuse you if you do not know it already’: the French girl who shot her husband used to be the ‘fancy woman’ of the Prince, and ‘his name is to be kept out’ of her trial. And that’s all.

Rose describes this as ‘incontrovertible contemporary evidence of this con-spiracy of silence’, yet Curzon clearly regarded the story as just another piece of tittle-tattle that was doing the rounds, and even thinks his wife may have heard it already: hardly evidence of a ‘conspiracy of silence’, still less a ‘show trial’. 

But when conspiracy theorists get the bit between their teeth, they won’t let anything get in the way. In their topsy-turvy worlds, lack of evidence is the  surest proof of a cover-up.

So speculation is transformed – hey presto! – into fact by compulsive use of slippery words and phrases such as ‘perhaps’, ‘must have been’, ‘arguably’, ‘no doubt’, ‘might’, ‘possibly’, ‘may have’ ‘there was a distinct possibility that . . .’

 Thus, early on we are told that, at their first meeting in a Parisrestaurant, ‘she no doubt hinted discreetly over coffee at the delights which awaited the Prince later that day’. Before the trial commenced ‘Perhaps on the journey down from Scotland, the Prince, often prey to dyspepsia, his mind awash with thoughts of Marguerite and the impending crisis, suffered abdominal twinges’, which is a pretty big ‘perhaps’, given that there is absolutely no evidence at all that the Prince was thinking about Marguerite, or that he even knew about the ‘impending crisis’. Two pages later, when the Prince is seen out and about enjoying himself, Rose says this is because he was ‘in denial’.

Rose inserts new phrases into the original manuscript so as to lend weight to the idea of a conspiracy. For instance, in the original book he wrote of the Judge: ‘Rigby Swift’s summing-up ended with a simple question’, but here the same sentence reads: ‘Rigby Swift’s summing-up, now heavily slanted in favour of the accused, ended with a simple question’.

Who knows where the truth lies?  I would guess yes to the affair with the Prince, no to a judicial conspiracy, and no to the ‘perfect murder’ of the title. Rose now argues that Marguerite planned the murder in advance (‘In my 1991 study of the trial, I had described the shooting as a crime passionel. It was nothing of the kind. This was murder for gain. An execution. A perfect murder’). But if so, why did she do it so cackhandedly, in a hotel corridor, in a manner that would guarantee her arrest, trial and humiliation?

Silliest of all, we hear that, after the trial, ‘a remarkable, wholly extraordinary, reunion of the Prince and Marguerite, the two wartime lovers, may have taken place, perhaps during the first month of 1924’. And, he may have added, pigs will fly – no doubt, perhaps, possibly, arguably – during the fifth month of 2013.

Sir Edward Marshall Hall, KC, (16 September 1858 – 24 February 1927) “Equally successful was the defence Marshall Hall gave to Madame (or Princess) Marguerite Fahmy in 1923 for the shooting death of her husband, Egyptian Prince Fahmy Bey at London's Savoy Hotel. The death of the Prince is frequently on lists of victims of the so-called Curse of the Pharaohs. Marshall Hall brought out Prince Fahmy's race and sexual habits, painting the victim as an evil minded foreigner who threatened a "white woman" for sexual reasons, whereupon she defended herself. The jury accepted it. The Egyptian ambassador wrote several angry letters to the newspapers criticizing Marshall Hall's blackening of the victim and Egyptians in general. In any case Madame Fahmy was acquitted. In his 2013 book The Prince, The Princess and the perfect Murder (published in the USA as "The Woman Before Wallis") Andrew Rose revealed that Madame Fahmy, real name Marguerite Alibert, a Frenchwomen of modest birth, had an 18-month long affair with the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, in Paris towards the end of World War I. Desperate efforts were made by the Royal Household to ensure that the Prince's name was not mentioned at her trial, a factor which contributed to her unmerited acquittal.” ( …) “A few weeks later on the morning of Sunday 1 July 1923 alimousine drove into Savoy Court and the Hotel doorman helped out a couple who were known to the hotel as the Prince and Princess Fahmy. They were accompanied by the Prince’s private secretary, Mr Said Enani. Accurately Prince Fahmy wasn’t really a prince but he did little to discourage the use of the title when away from Egypt. The 22 year Egyptian had met his bride to be, a woman ten years his senior, in Paris the year before -incidentally the year that Egypt was granted independence, if not overall control, by the British Government. To many people Marguerite was seen, at best, as a flirtatious gold-digger and more in love with his not inconsiderable fortune than the man himself. They had married in Egypt, first by a civil ceremony on 26th December and then followed by a Muslim wedding in January 1923 where Madame Fahmy, modestly veiled, proclaimed in Arabic ‘There is one God and Mohammed is His Prophet’. After a few days in London, which was experiencing a heatwave, Marguerite Fahmy summoned the Savoy’s doctor – she was suffering badly from external haemorrhoids. She alleged to Dr Gordon, while he was treating her, that her husband had ‘torn her by unnatural intercourse’ and was ‘always pestering her’ for this kind of sex. Already thinking about possible future divorce proceedings she repeatedly asked the doctor for ‘a certificate as to her physical condition to negative the suggestion of her husband that she had made up a story’. The doctor, although respectful, ignored her request. On the 9th July the couple went to Daly’s Theatre on Cranbourne Street off Leicester Square (where the Vue West End cinema now stands) to see, with hindsight the darkly ironic ‘The Merry Widow’. It had been an incredibly hot day and you can only imagine how uncomfortably warm the theatre must have been in those pre-air-conditioned days (although as far as a lot of the West End is concerned we’re still in those days). Not the ideal conditions for someone suffering from piles I would imagine. The main performers in Lehar’s popular operetta were the 22 year old Evelyn Laye and the Danish matinee idol Carl Brisson. The couple returned to the Savoy after the theatre for a late supper, however the meal was disrupted by a huge argument which had recently become almost a daily occurrence. Ali had even appeared in public with scratches on his face and Marguerite had been seen with dark bruises on her face ill-disguised with powder and makeup. The row this time degenerated to such an extent that Marguerite picked up a wine bottle and shouted in French ‘You shut up or I’ll smash this over your head.’ Ali replied ‘If you do, I’ll do the same to you.’ They eventually calmed down, not without the help of the head-waiter, and went to the ballroom to listen to the Savoy Havana Band. The house band no doubt would have been playing at one point Yes, We Have No Bananas or perhaps Ain’t We Got Fun both big hits that year. It wasn’t long before Marguerite, after refusing the offer of a dance with her husband, retired to her room. Mr Said Enani, as a witness in court a few weeks later, said that Mr Fahmy, in full evening dress, had decided to take a cab in the direction of Piccadilly even though the hot balmy weather had now turned into one of the worse thunderstorms in living memory. When asked the reason why he went, he said he did not know. Although we can perhaps presume that Ali was either visiting an unlicensed nightclub or on the search for either a male or female prostitute both of which frequented the area in high numbers around that part of the West End. At around 2.00am the hotel’s night porter passed the door to the Fahmy’s suite but heard a low whistle and looking back saw Ali Fahmy bending down apparently whistling for Marguerite’s little dog that had been following the night porter down the corridor. After continuing on his way for just three yards he suddenly heard three shots fired in quick succession. He ran back and saw Marguerite throw down a black handgun and also saw Ali slumped against the wall bleeding profusely from a wound on his temple from which splinger of bone and brain tissue protruded. ‘Qu’est-ce que j’ai fait, mon cher?’ (what have I done, my dear?’) Marguerite kept saying over and over again. Marshall Hall was almost 65 at the time of Marguerite’s trial and was a household name. He was six feet three, handsome for his age, and a commanding presence in the courtroom. He was commonly known, after being responsible for several famous acquittals, as ‘The Great Defender’. Marshall Hall’s final speech to the jury in defence of Marguerite, or Madame Fahmy as the press were now calling her, slowly became a character assassination of her dead husband. he portrayed him as a monster of Eastern amoral bisexual depravity. (Not too) subtly Hall accused both Prince Fahmy and his private secretary of being homosexuals. The public gallery consisted of many young women some of whom were noted to be barely eighteen. Marshall Hall looked up to the gallery saying ‘if women choose to come here to hear this case, they must take the consequences’. None of them left. Meanwhile he turned the attack on Ali to sodomy. Fahmy, said Hall, ‘developed abnormal tendencies and he never treated Madame normally’ Asking them to disregard the fact that the victim was younger than his wife. ‘Yes, he was only 23 years old,’ he told them. ‘But he was given to a life of debauchery and was obsessed with his sexual prowess.’ He went on to remind them that, as an Oriental man, his wife to him was no more than a belonging and that however much he may have acquired the outward signs of urbanity and sophistication, he was forever an Oriental under the skin. When Marguerite took the stand, she was encouraged by the Great Defender to describe her life as a Muslim bride and to a lot of observers this was when the case turned her way. She testified at one point how she had been sitting ‘in a state of undress in which her modesty would have forbidden her facing even her maid’, she had noticed a strange noise and she pulled aside the hangings that screened an alcove and ‘saw crouching there, where he could see every move she made, one of her husband’s numerous ugly, black, half-civilized manservants, who obeyed like slaves his every word’. She screamed for help, but when her husband, appeared from an adjoining room he only, laughed, saying that “He is nobody. He does not count. But he has the right to come here or anywhere you may go and tell me what you are doing." It was like a scene from Rudolph Valentino’s The Sheik, the extraordinarily popular film released the year before, and the women in the gallery were treating it as such. Before he summed up, the judge, referring to the public gallery said, ‘These things are horrible; they are disgusting. How anyone could listen to these things who is not bound to listen to them passes comprehension.’ However he had been swayed by Marshall Hall’s defence, that pandered to the prejudices of the tie, and during the summing up endorsed Marshall Hall by saying ‘We in this country put our women on a pedestal: in Egypt they have not the same views...' The jury, after less than an hour’s consideration, announced ‘not guilty’ to both the charges of murder and of manslaughter, and Madame Fahmy was discharged and was now a free woman. The prosecution was refused by the judge, seemingly in awe as much as anyone else to the Great Defender, to cross-examine Marguerite ‘as to whether or not she had lived an immoral life’, to show that she was ‘a woman of the world, well able to look after herself’. If she had been cross-examined properly the jury would have found out that not only had Marguerite been a teenage common prostitute in Bordeaux and in Paris and had an illegitimate daughter when she was just fifteen, but she had also become a trained high-class courtesan (it was said that she always spoke in a rather stilted French because of elocution lessons). Not only that but Marguerite’s husband was not alone in having inclinations towards the same sex: it was found out by a private detective hired by the prosecution that it was well known in Paris that Madame Fahmy “is addicted, or was addicted, to committing certain offences with other women and it would seem that there is nothing that goes on in such surroundings as she has been moving in Paris that she would not be quite well acquainted with..." The world’s press reported the case with undisguised glee, mostly portraying Mardame Fahmy as less than innocent in more ways than one. The French newspapers concentrated on the fact that the jury considered the case as if a crime passionnel defence was allowed in English law. After the verdict Marguerite soon left for Paris where she found out that she had no claim to her late husband’s fortune as he had left no will. After a failed, and slightly ludicrous plot where she pretended that she had been pregnant and subsequently borne a son (who would have been entitled to his father’s fortune). She was now almost a laughing stock in Parisian society and became relatively a recluse. She died on 2 January 1971 inParis. She never remarried.” Nickelinthemachine.com http://murderpedia.org/female.F/f/fahmy-marguerite.htm "ClICK" to enlarge images below

“Lord Peter Wimsey was a kind of Bertie Wooster with Brains” … The Unique, Unforgettable, Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter Wimsey/ BBC / VÍDEO /Ian Carmichael OBE - BBC Obituary

May 17, 2015, 5:57 am

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LORD PETER WIMSEY The Complete Collection starring Ian Carmichael. "No crust has even been more upper, no sleuth more of a hoot."—Los Angeles Times The acclaimed BBC dramas seen on PBS’ Masterpiece Theatre! Here at last are all five of the original BBC adaptations of Dorothy L. Sayers’ crime thrillers featuring Ian Carmichael as the brilliant aristocratic sleuth. Hailed by critics as one of the finest mystery series ever filmed, it was so successful on PBS’ Masterpiece Theatre that it single-handedly inspired the spin-off Mystery! Running at least three hours each, these dramas do full justice to Sayers’ vivid characters and elegant 1920s settings. THE MYSTERIES: Clouds of Witness, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Murder Must Advertise, The Nine Tailors, Five Red Herrings DVD SPECIAL FEATURES INCLUDE exclusive Ian Carmichael interviews, filmographies, interactive trivia and Dorothy L. Sayers materials.

Ian Carmichael starred as Wimsey in radio adaptations of the novels made by the BBC, all of which have been available on cassette and CD from the BBC Radio Collection. In the original series, which ran on Radio 4 from 1973–83, no adaptation was made of the seminal Gaudy Night, perhaps because the leading character in this novel is Harriet and not Peter; this was corrected in 2005 when a version specially recorded for the BBC Radio Collection was released starring Carmichael and Joanna David. The CD also includes a panel discussion on the novel, the major participants in which are P. D. James and Jill Paton Walsh. Gaudy Night was released as an unabridged audio book read by Ian Carmichael in 1993.

In How I Came to Invent the Character of Lord Peter Wimsey, Sayers wrote:
Lord Peter's large income... I deliberately gave him... After all it cost me nothing and at the time I was particularly hard up and it gave me pleasure to spend his fortune for him. When I was dissatisfied with my single unfurnished room I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly. When my cheap rug got a hole in it, I ordered him an Aubusson carpet. When I had no money to pay my bus fare I presented him with a Daimler double-six, upholstered in a style of sober magnificence, and when I felt dull I let him drive it. I can heartily recommend this inexpensive way of furnishing to all who are discontented with their incomes. It relieves the mind and does no harm to anybody.








“Lord Peter Wimsey burst upon the world of detective fiction with an explosive "Oh, damn!" and continued to engage readers in eleven novels and two sets of short stories; the final novel ended with a very different "Oh, damn!". Sayers once commented that Lord Peter was a mixture of Fred Astaire and Bertie Wooster, which is most evident in the first five novels. However, it is evident through Lord Peter's development as a rounded character that he existed in Sayers's mind as a living, breathing, fully human being. Sayers introduced detective novelist Harriet Vane in Strong Poison. Sayers remarked more than once that she had developed the "husky voiced, dark-eyed" Harriet to put an end to Lord Peter via matrimony. But in the course of writing Gaudy Night, Sayers imbued Lord Peter and Harriet with so much life that she was never able, as she put it, to "see Lord Peter exit the stage".


Sayers did not content herself with writing pure detective stories; she explored the difficulties of First World War veterans in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, discussed the ethics of advertising in Murder Must Advertise, and advocated women's education (then a controversial subject) and role in society in Gaudy Night. In Gaudy Night, Miss Barton writes a book attacking the Nazi doctrine of Kinder, Kirche, Küche, which restricted women's roles to family activities, and in many ways the whole of Gaudy Night can be read as an attack on Nazi social doctrine. The book has been described as "the first feminist mystery novel."


Sayers's Christian and academic interests are also apparent in her detective series. In The Nine Tailors, one of her most well-known detective novels, the plot unfolds largely in and around an old church dating back to the Middle Ages. Change ringing of bells also forms an important part of the novel. In Have His Carcase, the Playfair cipher and the principles of cryptanalysis are explained. Her short story Absolutely Elsewhere refers to the fact that (in the language of modern physics) the only perfect alibi for a crime is to be outside its light cone, while The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager's Will contains a literary crossword puzzle.


Sayers also wrote a number of short stories about Montague Egg, a wine salesman who solves mysteries.




“Lord Peter begins his hobby of investigation by recovering The Attenbury Emeralds in 1921. He also becomes good friends with Scotland Yard detective Charles Parker, a sergeant in 1921 who eventually rises to the rank of Commander. Bunter, a man of many talents himself, not least photography, often proves instrumental in Peter's investigations. However, Wimsey is not entirely well. At the end of the investigation in Whose Body? (1923) he hallucinates that he is back in the trenches. He soon recovers his senses and goes on a long holiday.


The next year, he travels (in Clouds of Witness, 1926) to the fictional Riddlesdale in North Yorkshire to assist his older brother Gerald, who has been accused of murdering Captain Denis Cathcart, their sister's fiancé. As Gerald is the Duke of Denver, he is tried by the entire House of Lords, as required by the law at that time, to much scandal and the distress of his wife Helen. Their sister, Lady Mary, also falls under suspicion. Lord Peter clears the Duke and Lady Mary, to whom Parker is attracted.


As a result of the slaughter of men in the First World War, there was in the UK a considerable imbalance between the sexes. It is not exactly known when Wimsey recruited Miss Climpson to run an undercover employment agency for women, a means to garner information from the otherwise inaccessible world of spinsters and widows, but it is prior to Unnatural Death (1927), in which Miss Climpson assists Wimsey's investigation of the suspicious death of an elderly cancer patient.


As recounted in the short story "The Adventurous Exploit of the Cave of Ali Baba", in December 1927 Wimsey fakes his own death, supposedly while hunting big game in Tanganyika, to penetrate and break up a particularly dangerous and well-organised criminal gang. Only Wimsey's mother and sister, the loyal Bunter and Inspector Parker know he is still alive. Emerging victorious after more than a year masquerading as "the disgruntled sacked servant Rogers", Wimsey remarks that "We shall have an awful time with the lawyers, proving that I am me." In fact, he returns smoothly to his old life, and the interlude is never referred to in later books.


During the 1920s, Wimsey has affairs with various women, which are the subject of much gossip in Britain and Europe. This part of his life remains hazy: it is hardly ever mentioned in the books set in the same period; most of the scanty information on the subject is given in flashbacks from later times, after he meets Harriet Vane and relations with other women become a closed chapter. In Busman's Honeymoon Wimsey facetiously refers to a gentleman's duty "to remember whom he had taken to bed" so as not to embarrass his bedmate by calling her by the wrong name.


There are several references to a relationship with a famous Viennese opera singer, and Bunter – who evidently was involved with this, as with other parts of his master's life – recalls Wimsey being very angry with a French mistress who mistreated her own servant. The only one of Wimsey's earlier women to appear in person is the artist Marjorie Phelps, who plays an important role in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. She has known Wimsey for years and is attracted to him, though it is not explicitly stated whether they were lovers. Wimsey likes her, respects her, and enjoys her company – but that isn't enough. In Strong Poison, she is the first person other than Wimsey himself to realise that he has fallen in love with Harriet.


In Strong Poison Lord Peter encounters Harriet Vane, a cerebral, Oxford-educated mystery writer, while she is on trial for the murder of her former lover. He falls in love with her at first sight. Wimsey saves her from the gallows, but she believes that gratitude is not a good foundation for marriage, and politely but firmly declines his frequent proposals. Lord Peter encourages his friend and foil, Chief Inspector Charles Parker, to propose to his sister, Lady Mary Wimsey, despite the great difference in their rank and wealth. They marry and have a son, named Charles Peter ("Peterkin"), and a daughter, Mary Lucasta.


While on a fishing holiday in Scotland, Wimsey instigates and takes part in the investigation of the murder of an artist, related in Five Red Herrings. Despite the rejection of his marriage proposal, he continues to court Miss Vane. In Have His Carcase, he finds Harriet is not in London, but learns from a reporter that she has discovered a corpse while on a walking holiday on England's south coast. Wimsey is at her hotel the next morning. He not only investigates the death and offers proposals of marriage, but also acts as Harriet's patron and protector from press and police. Despite a prickly relationship, they work together to identify the murderer.


Back in London, Wimsey goes undercover as "Death Bredon" at an advertising firm, working as a copywriter (Murder Must Advertise). Bredon is framed for murder, leading Charles Parker to "arrest" Bredon for murder in front of numerous witnesses. To distinguish Death Bredon from Lord Peter Wimsey, Parker smuggles Wimsey out of the police station and urges him to get into the papers. Accordingly Wimsey accompanies "a Royal personage" to a public event, leading the press to carry pictures of both "Bredon" and Wimsey. In 1934 Wimsey in (The Nine Tailors) must unravel a 20-year-old case of missing jewels; an unknown corpse; a missing World War I soldier believed alive; a murderous escaped convict believed dead and a mysterious code concerning church bells.


By 1935 Lord Peter is in continental Europe, acting as an unofficial attaché to the British Foreign Office. Harriet Vane contacts him about a problem she has been asked to investigate in her college at Oxford (Gaudy Night). At the end of their investigation, Vane finally accepts Wimsey's proposal of marriage.


The couple marry on 8 October 1935, at St. Cross Church, Holywell Street, Oxford, as depicted in the opening collection of letters and diary entries in Busman's Honeymoon. The Wimseys honeymoon at Talboys, a house in east Hertfordshire near where Harriet had lived as a child, that Peter has bought for her as a wedding present. There they find the body of the previous owner, and spend their honeymoon solving the case, thus having the eponymous "Busman's Honeymoon".


Over the next five years, according to Sayers' short stories, the Wimseys have three sons: Bredon Delagardie Peter Wimsey (born in October 1936 in the story "The Haunted Policeman"); Roger Wimsey (born 1938), and Paul Wimsey (born 1940). However, according to the wartime publications of The Wimsey Papers, published in The Spectator, the second son was called Paul. It may be presumed that Paul is named after Lord Peter's maternal uncle Paul Delagardie. "Roger" is an ancestral Wimsey name. Sayers told friends orally that Harriet and Peter were to eventually have five children in all.


In the final Wimsey story, the 1942 short story "Talboys", Peter and Harriet are enjoying rural domestic bliss with their three sons when Bredon, their first-born, is accused of the theft of prize peaches from the neighbour's tree. Peter and the accused set off to investigate and, of course, prove Bredon's innocence.”

Jeeves will be away ... for a period of 10 days.

May 19, 2015, 11:41 pm

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THE TRUE COST OF FASHION .'The True Cost' - Official Trailer

May 30, 2015, 2:44 am

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Review: ‘The True Cost’ Investigates High Price of Fashion Bargains

The True Cost

By JEANNETTE CATSOULISMAY

28, 2015 / http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/29/movies/review-the-true-cost-investigates-high-price-of-fashion-bargains.html

A distressing overview of the consequences of our addiction to fast fashion, “The True Cost” might suggest another exposé of corporate greed versus environmental well-being. That is certainly in evidence, but under the gentle, humane investigations of its director, Andrew Morgan, what emerges most strongly is a portrait of exploitation that ought to make us more nauseated than elated over those $20 jeans.

To learn who is paying for our bargains, Mr. Morgan dives to the bottom of the supply chain, to the garment factories of Cambodia and Bangladesh and the cotton fields of India, where he links ecological and health calamities to zealous pesticide use. Garment workers subsisting on less than $3 a day recount beatings by bosses who resent unionization and requests for higher wages. At the same time, a factory owner in Bangladesh — where the 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza building caused more than 1,000 deaths — tells us candidly that when retailers squeeze him, he must squeeze his employees.

“There are a lot of worse things they could be doing,” a former sourcing manager for the fashion brand Joe Fresh says about these unfortunates, echoing an all-too-familiar justification. A visit to Haiti, however, where millions of tons of our castoff clothing have clogged landfills and destroyed the local clothing industry, makes us wonder how much worse these people’s lives could become.

Offering few solutions beyond a single fair-trade fashion company, “The True Cost” — whose serene interludes compete with sickening recordings of Black Friday shopping riots and so-called clothing haul videos — stirs and saddens. Not least because it’s unlikely to reach the young consumers most in need of its revelations.

“The True Cost” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Toxic chemicals and obscene consumption.

‘The True Cost,’ a Different Kind of Fashion Documentary

Vanessa Friedman

MAY 28, 2015 / http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/29/fashion/the-true-cost-a-different-kind-of-fashion-documentary.html?_r=0

I suppose it was inevitable that after the spate of fashion brands embracing documentaries (see Dior, Gucci, Chanel, Valentino, Gaultier), many of which proved surprisingly effective pieces of industry propaganda, a director would come along to put the whole thing in context.

Sort of.

That director is Andrew Morgan, and his film is “The True Cost,” which probably gives you some idea of the subject. It premiered in Cannes, complete with a red carpet appearance by Livia and Colin Firth (Ms. Firth is one of the film’s executive producers and also appears on screen, as do — full disclosure — I, sitting next to her on a panel at a Copenhagen Fashion Summit). It will be screened Thursday night at the IFC Center in New York, with public showings beginning Friday, and open later in London, Los Angeles and Tokyo. It will also be available on iTunes and Netflix.

Viewers will get a feature-length look at the human and environmental cost of fast fashion, from workers in Bangladesh to cotton farmers in Texas, by way of India, Cambodia and Fifth Avenue. It is affecting and upsetting, and will probably make some consumers think twice about where they buy clothes — though arguably the sort of moviegoers attracted to a film like this already share its point of view.

Mr. Morgan, who also provides the narration, comes at his subject with the naïveté and enthusiasm of an amateur — he acknowledges that he didn’t think much about his clothes beyond style and cost until he started the film; he didn’t, that is, think about supply chain issues. This viewpoint gives the film’s difficult and multidimensional subject an easy-to-swallow accessibility.

But it also oversimplifies it to an extreme and, it seems to me, undermining degree.

Starting with the fact that, either for brevity or impact, Mr. Morgan conflates “fast fashion” with “fashion” writ large. And while he is condemning the Main Street megaliths for producing in sweatshops, he slips in photographs of high-end runway shows, implying that they also produce in sweatshops. Yet fashion (the “almost $3 trillion industry,” as he calls it) is not created equal, and fashion’s impacts are not equal. Sports brands have different problems from premium brands, many of which have their own factories, and premium brands have different problems from mass brands.

This is not to say that high-end fashion should not be taken to task for its failings, but simply that to police a sector effectively, or call it out on its shortcomings, you need to do it in an informed and realistic way. Otherwise you create openings for companies to dismiss the charges as irrelevant, which can taint the whole project.

(Not that any companies, aside from those known to have an ethical agenda like Stella McCartney and People Tree, appeared willing to speak to Mr. Morgan, which suggests they have their own fears about this subject. I think that was a big mistake. To begin to address the issues we first have to know what they are, thorns and all.)

Similarly, though lots of eye-popping statements are used, including that fashion is the second-most-polluting industry on the planet, after oil, they are unattributed. Because they are so powerful, this seems a surprising omission.

I emailed Mr. Morgan to ask about the pollution comment, and he wrote back that it came from both the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Danish Fashion Institute, and that the statement referred to the whole process used by the fashion industry. “The chemical industry” — which I mentioned in my query — “is now most often seen as being a part of other key industries, fashion being key among them,” Mr. Morgan wrote.

Still, “The True Cost” would not have been hurt if Mr. Morgan had taken a slightly more granular approach to his subject — had he, say, included the sources of his statistics, or limited himself to the biggest, most mass-market brands, as they touch the most people. He spent two years making the film, visiting 13 countries, and it’s hard not to feel in the end that he was overwhelmed by the scale of the problem. In trying to do everything, he skirted a lot of things, including acknowledging the shades of gray in this subject.

It’s too bad, because doing less might actually have added up to more.

Dior and I - Official International trailer

June 1, 2015, 4:19 am

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