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SUNDAY IMAGES / TWEED / Sixteen Times / TWEED ...
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Snowshill Manor Gloucestershire Near Broardway In The Costswolds
Snowshill Manor
The property is located in Snowshill. It is a typical Cotswold manor house, made from local stone; the main part of the house dates from the 16th century. It is a Grade II* listed building, having been so designated since 4 July 1960. Also listed are the brewhouse, the dovecote, some of the garden buildings, the wall and gate-piers, and the group of four Manor Cottages.
Snowshill Manor was the property of Winchcombe Abbey from 821 until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539[3] when the Abbey was confiscated by King Henry VIII, who presented it to his last queen, Catherine Parr. Between 1539 and 1919 it had a number of tenants and owners until it was purchased by Charles Paget Wade, an architect, artist-craftsman, collector, poet and heir to the family fortune. He restored the property, living in the small cottage in the garden and using the manor house as a home for his collection of objects. By the time of his death he had amassed over 22,000 objects. He gave the property and the contents of this collection to the National Trust in 1951.
The house contains an eclectic collection of thousands of objects, gathered over the years by Charles Paget Wade, whose motto was "Let nothing perish". The collection includes toys, Samurai armour, musical instruments, and clocks. Today, the main attraction of the house is perhaps the display of Wade's collection. From 1900 until 1951, when he gave the Manor to the National Trust, Wade amassed an enormous and eclectic collection of objects reflecting his interest in craftsmanship. The objects in the collection include 26 suits of Japanese samurai armour dating from the 17th and 19th centuries, bicycles, toys, musical instruments, and more.
Wade was an eccentric man and lived in the Priest's House while housing his collection in the manor. It is said to be haunted by a monk, and by the ghost of a young woman forced in 1604 to marry against her will in one of the upstairs rooms.
The garden at Snowshill was laid out by Wade, in collaboration with Arts and Crafts movement architect, M. H. Baillie Scott, between 1920 and 1923. Their elaborate layout resembles a series of outside rooms seen as an extension to the house. Features include terraces and ponds, and the gardens demonstrate Wade's fascination with colours and scents. As well as formal beds, the gardens include an ancient dovecote, a model village, kitchen garden, orchards and small fields with sheep.
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World's richest woman Liliane Bettencourt dies aged 94 / VIDEO:Liliane Bettencourt, l'héritiere l'Oreal est decedée - Une Querelle fami...
World's richest woman Liliane Bettencourt dies aged 94
Daughter announces death of heir to French L’Oreal empire, who was world’s 14th richest person
Angelique Chrisafis
Thursday 21 September 2017 17.39 BST Last modified on Thursday 21 September 2017 23.11 BST
Liliane Bettencourt, heir to the French L’Oreal hairspray empire and the world’s wealthiest woman, who was at the centre of a long-running French courtroom saga over alleged hangers-on who took advantage of her frailty to elicit money and gifts, has died aged 94.
Bettencourt, whose net worth was estimated at about €33bn (£29bn) this year, was the face of one of France’s biggest cosmetics conglomerates and had once captured the public’s imagination as the nation’s poor little rich girl.
She was the daughter of Eugène Schueller, a chemist and one-time Nazi sympathiser who made a fortune as the inventor of modern hair dye and founder of L’Oréal. Her mother died when she was five, leaving her alone with Schueller whose company she inherited.
Bettencourt hit the headlines in 2007 when members of her entourage were charged with exploiting her failing mental health – leading to a vast inquiry that threatened to engulf the then-president Nicolas Sarkozy.
When Bettencourt’s husband, the politician André Bettencourt, died in 2007, their daughter Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, decided to take legal action against her mother’s eccentric best friend, François-Marie Banier. The dandy photographer, artist and one-time society golden boy was accused of taking advantage of Bettencourt’s frailty to accept almost €1bn worth of gifts, including paintings, life insurance policies and a salary from L’Oreal.
Shocked domestic staff at Bettencourt’s mansion west of Paris whispered how the flamboyant Banier would pee in the flowerbeds, lie on Bettencourt’s bed with his shoes on and make requests for money.
Banier denied the allegations, but it was just the start of a multi-layered legal inquiry that became the nation’s soap opera.
The saga resulted in not only a public family feud but a major political scandal and courtroom drama when the investigation was extended to look at whether Sarkozy and other figures in his party had also taken advantage of the elderly Bettencourt, asking for money from her after it was declared that she had dementia.
The money, alleged to have been given in brown envelopes, was said to have funded Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential campaign.
The “Bettencourt affair” tarnished the latter half of Sarkozy’s presidency, and when he lost the 2012 election he was placed under formal investigation for illegal campaign financing and taking advantage of Bettencourt. But the charges against Sarkozy were dropped in October 2013 due to lack of evidence.
In 2015, the photographer Banier was convicted of exploiting Bettencourt and sentenced to three years in jail, fined €350,000 and ordered to pay €158m in damages. He appealed and last year received a suspended prison sentence and a fine but did not have to pay the vast damages.
In the meantime, other cases had opened around the affair, including a court case over the publication of secretly recorded conversations between Bettencourt and her wealth manager which were taped when her butler hid a recorder in her mansion.
Bettencourt had been declared unfit to run her own affairs in 2011 after a medical report showing she had suffered from “mixed dementia” and “moderately severe” Alzheimer’s disease since 2006. She was rarely seen in public after leaving the L’Oreal board in 2012.
“Liliane Bettencourt died last night at home,” her daughter Françoise Bettencourt Meyers said in a statement. “My mother left peacefully.”
Photographer jailed for multi-billion euro Bettencourt exploitation
François-Marie Banier has been sentenced to three years in jail and ordered to pay back €15m to L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt and her family
Angelique Chrisafis in Paris
@achrisafis
Thursday 28 May 2015 17.34 BST Last modified on Friday 29 May 2015 00.00 BST
A French celebrity photographer has been found guilty and sentenced to two and a half years in prison for exploiting the mental frailty of Liliane Bettencourt, the ageing L’Oréal shampoo heiress, who showered him with gifts including Picasso paintings, life insurance funds and millions of euros in cash.
François-Marie Banier, who had befriended Bettencourt, 25 years his senior, arguing that he was the only person who made her laugh, was given a three-year sentence – six months of which was suspended – and ordered to pay a fine of €250,000 and pay back over €15m to the Bettencourt family.
But judges cleared Eric Woerth, a former minister in Nicolas Sarkozy’s government and campaign treasurer for his 2007 presidential campaign. He was acquitted of charges of exploiting Bettencourt’s frailty by taking an envelope of cash from the weak and elderly billionaire who suffers from dementia.
Woerth was also cleared of charges of influence-peddling. He had been accused of using his position of influence to secure favours from Bettencourt’s financial manager – urging him to employ his wife in exchange for receiving the Legion of Honour, France’s highest decoration. The court acquitted him of all charges.
The Bettencourt saga began in more than seven years ago as a family feud between mother and daughter in one of the richest families in France, but it sparked a political scandal as well a raft of judicial investigations including on tax evasion and illegal party funding.
In 2007, Bettencourt’s daughter began legal action claiming that Banier, a Paris socialite and photographer, befriended her ageing mother and taken advantage of her frail state of mind to persuade her to give him more than €1bn in artworks, insurance policies and cash. The long-running case gripped France and sent shockwaves through the political class, tarnishing Sarkozy, who was placed under formal investigation for illegal campaign financing and taking advantage of Bettencourt after being voted out as president in 2015. Those charges against Sarkozy were dropped in October 2013 due to lack of evidence.
Banier, now 67, who first met Bettencourt, 92, when he photographed her for a magazine, presented himself in court as a rich and well-connected celebrity photographer, a charming eccentric who did not need the money.
Bettencourt, who is estimated to be worth €33bn (£24bn) by Forbes magazine, was alleged to have found a new best friend in the outrageous and eccentric Banier. She showered him with so many gifts that even his own lawyer admitted in court that he had been “drowning in gold” and briefly made him her sole heir.
The court had heard how Bettencourt had been suffering from increasing dementia and, by 2011, was unable to tell what year it was.
From 2006 to 2010, Banier received gifts from Bettencourt worth €414m, including life insurance policies, paintings by Picasso, Matisse and Mondrian, manuscripts and cash. In court, Banier conceded that just hearing the figures sparked “an enormous vertigo”. But he said Bettencourt chose to bestow the gifts, it “gave her immense pleasure to do it” and she had been of sound mind. He said she got angry if he tried to turn down gifts. Most of the value of the gifts was paid back before the court case.
Patrice de Mestre, Bettencourt’s wealth manager, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for exploiting her frailty, as was her former lawyer. Martin d’Orgeval, Banier’s partner, was found guilty on the same charges and received a suspended sentence.
Banier and de Mestre will appeal against the verdicts
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Bettencourt scandal: Key players
7 October 2013
From the section Europe Share this with Facebook Share this with Twitter Share this with Messenger Share this with Email Share
It started out as a dispute between the heiress to a cosmetics fortune and her family. Then the row over Liliane Bettencourt's finances escalated as far as the former French President, Nicolas Sarkozy.
The case against him has now been dismissed, but others are still facing prosecution.
The affair remains a tangled saga of names, connections, claims and rebuttals. The BBC News website profiles key players in the political drama that has gripped the French public.
Liliane Bettencourt
Reports say Bettencourt mother and daughter are not on speaking terms
The story starts with Liliane Bettencourt, now 87, and the richest woman in France.
She is the heiress to the L'Oreal cosmetics fortune and holds a 27.5% stake in the company.
Her total wealth is put at about 17bn euros ($21bn; £14bn).
Twenty years ago, she befriended the society photographer Francois-Marie Banier, 62.
Over the years, she gave him gifts worth around 1bn euros. These included cash, life insurance policies and artworks by Picasso and Matisse.
Her daughter, Francoise Bettencourt-Meyers, took the matter to court.
She said Mrs Bettencourt was mentally incompetent and had been exploited by Mr Banier.
Mrs Bettencourt said she was a free woman, in full control of her faculties, and her daughter would just have to accept it.
But the dispute has now widened far beyond its origins.
In 2010 prosecutors opened a separate investigation into Mrs Bettencourt's tax affairs after secret recordings of conversations between the heiress and her wealth manager came to light.
The recordings, made by Mrs Bettencourt's butler, were passed to the police by her daughter.
Transcripts published by the news website Mediapart appear to refer to undeclared bank accounts in Switzerland and the Seychelles.
Mrs Bettencourt admitted tax evasion and promised to put her affairs in order.
But Mrs Bettencourt's political connections came under the spotlight.
Prosecutors began a separate inquiry into Mrs Bettencourt's donations to Nicolas Sarkozy's conservative party, the UMP.
Nicolas Sarkozy
The Bettencourt affair contributed to negative publicity for Mr Sarkozy
The criminal investigation into the former French president for allegedly receiving illegal funding from Mrs Bettencourt has been dropped.
He lost his presidential immunity from prosecution in mid-June 2012, after his election defeat, and in July of that year, police carried out searches at his Paris home, offices and a law firm in which he owns shares.
It had been alleged that tens of thousands of euros were allegedly funnelled to Mr Sarkozy's 2007 presidential campaign by Mrs Bettencourt's office.
Individual campaign contributions in France are limited to 4,600 euros (£3,700) annually.
Mr Sarkozy had consistently rejected all accusations of impropriety.
Eric Woerth quit Mr Sarkozy's government in 2010 over the Bettencourt affair
The former French labour minister was also treasurer for the UMP for eight years.
He ran the party's finances at the time of the presidential election in 2007, when Mr Sarkozy was elected.
Mrs Bettencourt's former accountant Claire Thibout has accused Mr Woerth of taking delivery of undeclared campaign donations from the L'Oreal heiress. She says he received 150,000 euros in cash for the UMP in March 2007.
Mr Woerth has vehemently denied the accusations, saying he never received a single illegal euro. But the Bettencourt affair drove him to resign in 2010.
He said he was the victim of a witch hunt by the left because of his responsibility for pension reform and his plan to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62.
But in February 2012, he was put under criminal investigation for influence peddling - accused of securing France's highest award, the Legion d'honneur, for Mrs Bettencourt's financial manager, Patrice de Maistre.
In his previous role as budget minister, Mr Woerth had responsibility for pursuing tax dodgers.
Questions have now been raised about whether he turned a blind eye to Mrs Bettencourt's tax evasion.
A prosecutor says he informed the budget ministry of his suspicions about Mrs Bettencourt's tax affairs in January 2009. Mr Woerth denies having blocked an investigation.
He is expected to face trial for his alleged role in the affair.
Florence Woerth
To complicate matters still further, Mr Woerth's wife used to work for Mrs Bettencourt as an investment adviser.
She was employed by Patrice de Maistre, Mrs Bettencourt's wealth manager, but resigned in 2010 after she and her husband were accused of a conflict of interest.
In the secret tapes, Mr de Maistre says clearly that he gave the job to Mrs Woerth after being asked by Mr Woerth to employ her.
So far Patrice de Maistre is the only one of the suspects to have been detained
Patrice de Maistre was Mrs Bettencourt's wealth manager. His company, Clymene, had as its sole function the investment of the estimated 278m euros that Mrs Bettencourt drew annually from her stake in L'Oreal.
He was detained by Bordeaux police for 88 days in early 2012. He was released after posting bail of 4m euros.
He denies accusations by Claire Thibout, who says he asked her for 150,000 euros, which he promised to give "discreetly" to Eric Woerth at a dinner.
In the tapes recorded by Mrs Bettencourt's butler, he is heard to tell the heiress that Eric Woerth is "very nice, and also he's the man who is in charge of your taxes... He's a friend."
Investigators are interested in 4m euros which he allegedly transferred to France from a Bettencourt bank account in Switzerland in 2007-2009.
Mr de Maistre was awarded the Legion d'Honneur. Eric Woerth denies it was in return for employing his wife.
Mr de Maistre is also expected to face trial for his alleged role in the affair.
Claire Thibout says Mr Sarkozy received envelopes of Bettencourt cash before becoming president
Ms Thibout was formerly Mrs Bettencourt's accountant.
She told prosecutors that in March 2007, she had been involved in withdrawing 150,000 euros in cash from Mrs Bettencourt's accounts.
She said she herself took out 50,000 euros - the maximum she was authorised to withdraw - and handed the money to Patrice de Maistre.
Police have checked bank records and have confirmed the withdrawal.
The money was to be given to Mr Woerth in plain envelopes as a donation for the UMP, she said.
Ms Thibout admitted she herself had not witnessed the handover.
Francois-Marie Banier allegedly received expensive gifts from Mrs Bettencourt
Described as an aesthete, Francois-Marie Banier made his name as a photographer. His work has been published in Le Figaro and the New Yorker.
In his youth, Francois-Marie Banier was the friend of 1960s cultural icons like Salvador Dali and Samuel Beckett.
But his friendship with Mrs Bettencourt angered her family. Mrs Bettencourt's daughter, Francoise Bettencourt-Meyers, called him "the predator".
In December 2009, a court ruled that Mr Banier did have a criminal case to answer for "abuse of mental fragility".
Mr Banier went on trial in July 2010, but the case was quickly adjourned. He denied all the charges, saying he did not take advantage of Mrs Bettencourt.
In December 2010, he made an out-of-court settlement with Francoise Bettencourt-Meyers, under which he will not benefit from her mother's fortune.
But he remains under investigation by the authorities, and is expected to face trial for his alleged role in the affair.
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ANTÓNIO SÉRGIO ROSA DE CARVALHO ( Jeeves / Tweedland ) by MisjaB.
MisjaB published a very complete and kind profile article about JEEVES
(António Sérgio Rosa de Carvalho). Thanks Misja. Was a great pleasure to meet you. JEEVES
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Lady Lucan found dead at London home after being reported missing
See also:
lord lucan : my husband, Mon 05 Jun 2017 ITV / VIDEO: Lady Lucan Lady Lucan: I'm 'deeply sad' my marriage caused the nanny to die / Lord Lucan’s death certificate granted after more than 40 years
Lady Lucan found dead at London home after being reported missing
Aristocrat whose husband famously vanished more than four decades ago has been found dead in Westminster
Wednesday 27 September 2017 01.30 BST Last modified on Wednesday 27 September 2017 03.05 BST
Lady Lucan, whose husband famously vanished more than four decades ago, has been found dead at her home.
Police forced entry to the 80-year-old’s property in Westminster on Tuesday afternoon after she was reported missing, and found her unresponsive.
A spokesman for the Metropolitan police said: “Police attended an address in Westminster ... following concerns for the welfare of an elderly occupant. Officers forced entry and found an 80-year-old woman unresponsive.
“Police and London ambulance service attended. Although we await formal identification, we are confident that the deceased is Lady Lucan.”
Police said her death is being treated as unexplained but is not believed to be suspicious.
Her son, George Bingham, the 8th Earl Lucan, told the Daily Mail: “She passed away yesterday [Monday] at home, alone and apparently peacefully. Police were alerted by a companion to a three-day absence and made entry today [Tuesday].”
Lady Lucan, formerly Veronica Duncan, was one of the last people to see her husband John Bingham, the 7th Earl of Lucan, alive before he disappeared.
He vanished after the murdered body of Sandra Rivett, nanny to his three children, was found at the family home in Lower Belgrave Street, central London, on 7 November 1974.
Even though he was officially declared dead by the high court in 1999, Lucan has reportedly been sighted in Australia, Ireland, South Africa and New Zealand, and there are even claims that he fled to India and lived life as a hippy called “Jungly Barry”.
The same night as his disappearance, the attacker also turned on Lady Lucan, beating her severely before she managed to escape and raise the alarm at a nearby pub, the Plumber’s Arms.
Lucan’s car was later found abandoned and soaked in blood in Newhaven, East Sussex, and an inquest jury declared the wealthy peer the killer a year later.
Roger Bray was the first journalist on Lord Lucan’s doorstep the morning after the dramatic events unfolded, and wrote one of the first newspaper reports about the mystery.
Derrick Whitehouse, head barman at the Plumber’s Arms, told Bray that Lady Lucan “staggered” in and said: “I think my neck has been broken. He tried to strangle me.”
The barman said Lady Lucan was “just in a delirious state” and added: “She just said ‘I’m dying.’
“She kept going on about the children. ‘My children, my children,’ she said. She came staggering in through the door and I gave her all the assistance I possibly could. I’ve only seen her in here once before.”
Whitehouse told Bray that Lady Lucan had “various head wounds” that were “quite severe”, adding: “She was covered in blood. She’d been bleeding profusely when she came in.”
Earlier this year, Lady Lucan, formally named Veronica, Dowager Countess of Lucan, gave a TV interview in which she said she believed Lord Lucan had made the “brave” decision to take his own life.
Ahead of the hour-long documentary interview called Lord Lucan: My Husband, the Truth, Radio Times magazine shared some of what she had told director Michael Waldman.
She said: “I would say he got on the ferry and jumped off in the middle of the Channel in the way of the propellers so that his remains wouldn’t be found – I think quite brave.”
During the ITV programme, she spoke of her own depression and her husband’s violent nature following their marriage in 1963.
Describing how he would beat her with a cane to get the “mad ideas out of your head”, she said: “He could have hit harder. They were measured blows.
“He must have got pleasure out of it because he had intercourse [with me] afterwards.”
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On 26 September the fifth Daniel Marot lecture, organized by foundation Daniel Marot Fund in collaboration with foundation the Dutch interior, will take place in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam / VIDEO: Chatsworth House | Great England house | Home of Dukes of Devonshire Doc...
Jeeves was there yesterday:
On 26 September the fifth Daniel Marot lecture, organized by foundation Daniel Marot Fund in collaboration with foundation the Dutch interior, will take place in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.
On the occasion of the first lustrum, the Duke of Devonshire speaks of " Chatsworth, the history, the present and the future of an English country house
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Remembering: The Treasure Houses of Britain: 500 Years of Private Patronage and Art Collecting November 3, 1985 – April 13, 1986 / The National Gallery of Art
The Treasure Houses of Britain: 500 Years of Private Patronage and Art Collecting
November 3, 1985 – April 13, 1986
East Building, Upper Level and Mezzanine (35,000 sq. ft.)
This exhibition is no longer on view at the National Gallery.
Overview: 700 art objects from more than 200 country houses in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland illustrated 500 years of British collecting from the 15th century to the present. 17 period rooms were constructed to display the objects. This was the largest and most complicated exhibition undertaken to date by the National Gallery. Gervase Jackson-Stops, architectural advisor to the National Trust of Great Britain, chose paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, Diego Velázquez, Anthony van Dyck, Canaletto, and John Singer Sargent; sculpture by Praxiteles, Canova, and Henry Moore; furniture by Kent and Chippendale; Meissen, Sèvres, Chelsea, and Oriental porcelain; and drawings, tapestries, jewelry, armor, silver, and other decorative arts.
Organization: Jackson-Stops structured and selected the exhibition with Gaillard Ravenel and Mark Leithauser. Ravenel, Leithauser, and Jackson-Stops designed the exhibition to reflect each period of collecting, and Gordon Anson designed the lighting.
Sponsor: The exhibition, organized in conjunction with the British Council after 6 years of preparation, was made possible by a grant from Ford Motor Company, special funding from the 98th Congress, indemnities from Her Majesty's Treasury and the United States Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities, and by British Airways.
Attendance: 990,474
Catalog: The Treasure Houses of Britain: Five Hundred Years of Private Patronage and Art Collecting, edited by Gervase Jackson-Stops. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
Brochure: The Treasure Houses of Britain: Five Hundred Years of Private Patronage and Art Collecting, by Gervase Jackson-Stops, edited by William J. Williams. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1985.
A GALA FOR 'TREASURE HOUSES OF BRITAIN'
By BARBARA GAMAREKIAN, Special to the New York Times
Published: October 31, 1985
Members of the British aristocracy are here by the score to celebrate the largest exhibition ever held by the National Gallery of Art: ''The Treasure Houses of Britain.''
An extravagant start for almost two weeks of festivities surrounding the show, which opens to the public Sunday, took place tonight in the new Georgian-style ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Given by the hotel's owner, John B. Coleman and his wife, Virginia, the black-tie dinner dance honored the owners of ''The Magnificent Seven,'' the most-visited stately homes in England.
The owners and their houses are the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough of Blenheim Palace; Lord Montagu of Beaulieu; the Marquess and Marchioness of Tavistock of Woburn Abbey; Simon and Annette Howard of Castle Howard; Lord and Lady Romsey of Broadlands; the Earl and Countess of Harewood of Harewood House, and Michael and Vibeke Herbert. Mr. Herbert is the chief executive of Madame Tussaud's Ltd., owner of Warwick Castle.
The occasion, said Mr. Coleman, was ''a thank you'' to the lenders for their support of the National Gallery exhibition. For the gala, Mrs. Coleman wore a strapless scarlet Scaasi ball gown, and she, Mr. Coleman and Lord Montagu received the guests, announced by one of England's renowned toastmasters, Ivor Spencer. The menu for dinner was all-American: pumpkin soup, roast loin of veal stuffed with oyster dressing and cranberry and apple brown betty.
Among the guests were an assortment of American ambassadors, Cabinet officers and members of Congress as well as Susan and David Brinkley, Carolyn and Michael K. Deaver, Buffy and William Cafritz, Kathleen and Henry Ford 2d, and Jo Anne and Donald E. Petersen. Mr. Petersen is chairman of the Ford Motor Company, corporate sponsor of the ''Treasure Houses'' show.
Other guests included Evangeline Bruce in black velvet; her houseguest, the Duchess of Devonshire, in gray-green watered silk, and Bonnie Swearingen in an emerald Ungaro dress, worn with an emerald choker and earrings.
''It's an incredible schedule,'' the Duchess said. ''They have us running and busing.''
The idea of maintaining and insuring the future of privately owned country houses by opening them to the public - ''the stately home business,'' as the Marquess of Tavistock phrased it - was originated by the 13th Duke of Bedford in 1955. ''It was my father who took up the idea of opening up these homes to paying visitors,'' Lord Tavistock said.
The appellation ''The Magnificent Seven'' was ''thought up'' by the seven families ''as a marketing device,'' said the Duke of Marlborough, whose ancestral home, Blenheim Palace, the birthplace of Sir Winston Churchill, was visited by 380,000 people last year.
''We pool our ideas and our resources and use a joint leaflet,'' the Duke said. ''Every cent goes back into the business. It is a real challenge these days to keep these large homes going for the future. We consider ourselves to be custodians of the national heritage.''
But much of the talk was of the exhibition itself, which had been visited earlier in the day by a number of the lenders.
''I had expected a marvelous show, but it's beyond anything that I had anticipated,'' said Simon Howard, whose Castle Howard in Yorkshire starred in the televised dramatization of ''Brideshead Revisited.''
Lord Montagu, who called the exhibition ''a dream come true,'' said: ''I've been talking with Carter about this for more than seven years.'' He was referring to J. Carter Brown, director of the National Gallery.
Jerome Zipkin said, ''You need about a half-dozen trips to see it all.'' Mr. Zipkin, who was returning to New York on Thursday morning, added, ''I'm coming back for the big number,'' referring to the White House dinner on Nov. 9 for the Prince and Princess of Wales, patrons of the exhibition.
Lord Tavistock, who has lent several dozen objects to the show, including Antonio Canova's marble ''The Three Graces,'' said: ''It is an amazing experience to go around and see things that belong to you in the middle of a collection of works of art that is second to none in the world. We British have been magpies for centuries, and we are still at it - my wife and I just bought a painting in Tennessee, so we brought over 33 objects for the show, and we are going home with 34.''
Mr. Brown had suggested to a number of the British guests that tiaras might be appropriate for the American festivities. But Lady Tavistock arrived in Washington tiara-less.
''It is all because of my crazy idea,'' said her husband. ''I thought a case of tiaras would look unusual in the exhibition and suggested it to Carter, and he said, 'What a great idea -can I borrow a couple of yours?' So Henrietta's tiaras are locked up in a case at the National Gallery.''
No matter, said the Marchioness: ''Traveling with a tiara is such a performance. Your hair has to be woven into them, and I wouldn't think you would be able to find a hairdresser here who knows how.''
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SKULLS AND KEYS The Hidden History of Yale’s Secret Societies By David Alan Richards
A look inside Yale’s secret societies — and why they may no longer matter
Padlocks secure the front doors of the Skull and Bones society’s meeting hall, known as the “Tomb,” on Yale’s campus in New Haven, Conn. (DAVID ROBERTS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST)
By Helen Andrews September 28
Helen Andrews is a 2017 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow and has worked as an editor and a think tank researcher.
The younger brother of the poet Archibald MacLeish wrote a letter to his fiancee in 1917 complaining about how depressed and humiliated he felt at having been passed over by all of Yale’s secret societies. He had not even been tapped by Skull and Bones, where, through Archie, he was a legacy. “It almost kills me,” he wrote. “I want to get to France and forget the whole thing.”
It was a fateful choice of words. Kenneth MacLeish left school to join the Naval Reserve Flying Corps, deployed to France as a pilot and was shot down over Belgium on Oct. 14, 1918, less than a month before World War I ended. He was 24.
What is it about Yale’s secret societies that makes otherwise sensible people so awestruck? Why did young men like Kenneth MacLeish feel it was a matter of life and death whether they were admitted to the clubs? Strictly speaking, the Yale senior societies are not fundamentally different from the exclusive social clubs found at every other Ivy League school. But no one ever based a horror movie franchise around the Princeton dining clubs.
If it is the secrecy of these groups that you find appealing, “Skulls and Keys” is the wrong book for you. David Alan Richards admits at the beginning that “there will be no ‘secrets’ here that have not already, somehow and somewhere, been revealed at least once in print.” Richards is a Bonesman himself, so he could divulge hidden secrets if he wanted to, but apparently he decided that his book didn’t need to be spiced up with juicy insider details.
[How Harvard, Princeton and Yale discovered women]
Alas, without the juicy details, “Skulls and Keys” amounts to little more than a succession of anecdotes, some more interesting than others. Conservative readers will be gratified to learn that William F. Buckley Jr. refused to join the Fence Club if it continued to blackball his friend Thomas Guinzberg for being Jewish. But even the original Bonesmen of the 1830s would probably agree that their dirty jokes (“How did Demosthenes have such numerous progeny when he carried his stones in his mouth?”) did not need to be entered into the historical record.
The bagginess of this 800-plus-page tome is made worse by the fact that Richards is not a natural storyteller. (He is a lawyer by profession.) The fight that led to women finally being let into Skull and Bones in 1991 makes a gripping saga: keys to the tomb confiscated, lawsuits threatened, top-secret memos leaked and printed in the Wall Street Journal. Richards fumbles what should be the climax of his book. He waits until nearly the end of the book to mention that one of the undergraduate ringleaders in favor of admitting women was future Obama economic adviser Austan Goolsbee.
Richards’s microscopic view of his subject obscures the larger fact that Yale’s secret societies have long been in decline. They no longer have the cultural cachet they enjoyed in the days of John O’Hara and Dink Stover. Undergraduates walk past the brownstone tomb on High Street with no more interest than they walk past Yorkside Pizza. Membership is still sought after by the ambitious for networking purposes, but the secret societies have lost their glamor.
Their decline coincided with the increasingly meritocratic policies of the 1960s. That much is clear. Less clear is what precisely about that seismic cultural shift proved fatal. Mere egalitarianism was never the problem, since left-wing political commitments rarely stopped anyone from accepting admission to a society, even when outsiders accused them of hypocrisy. In 1971 a student columnist noted with indignation that the students inducted that year included “one black militant, a leading spokesman of last spring’s Mayday activities, [and] one of the organizers of the charity drive for New Haven.” How, he asked, can some of the “most outspoken defenders of the community last spring now be a member of a society that does nothing for the community?”
Old-timers would say things started going downhill when the clubs let women in. Resistance to going coed persisted surprisingly late. The first two times Skull and Bones considered admitting women, in 1971 and 1986, alumni committees voted against it unanimously. To give the fuddy-duddies their due, most secret societies throughout history, since the days of the first Freemasons, have been all male. Perhaps women are less easily impressed by silly costumes and creepy chanting.
Bart Giamatti, who served as president of Yale from 1978 to 1986, believed that the declining prestige of secret societies was an unavoidable consequence of diversity. “What a freshman in 1914 had heard of societies from his preparatory school masters and a freshman in 1944 might hear from one of his numerous classmates whose relatives had attended Yale, a freshman in 1974, more likely than not from a public high school, with no previous Yale ties, would not hear at all,” he wrote in 1978 in a history of his own secret society, Scroll and Key. “That ingrained consciousness of societies, that shared sense of what they meant . . . disappeared like smoke in the late sixties.”
[Five myths about college admissions]
Even after those public-school upstarts learned what secret societies were, they still were unfamiliar with conventions that were second nature to legacies: whether you were allowed to lobby societies in advance (no), how seriously to take the code of secrecy (very), even something as simple as the procedure for Tap Night, the traditional evening of robes and rituals when all the societies induct their new members. Seniors had to spell everything out to the juniors in advance, which rather diminished the mystique.
Harvard recently announced that it was considering barring students from joining fraternities, sororities and exclusive single-gender groups known as “final clubs.” Members of such clubs are already subject to penalties, including ineligibility for certain grants and fellowships. In July, the Committee on Unrecognized Single-Gender Social Organizations officially recommended a total ban.
Yale partisans may be tempted to take delight in the fact that their school has not taken such a humorless stand against a venerable form of undergraduate socializing. But the sad truth may be that, after a long slide into irrelevance, Yale secret societies are not important enough to be worth banning.
SKULLS AND KEYS
The Hidden History of Yale’s Secret Societies
By David Alan Richards
Pegasus. 821 pp
Skull and Bones was founded in 1832 after a dispute among Yale debating societies Linonia, Brothers in Unity, and the Calliopean Society over that season's Phi Beta Kappa awards. William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft co-founded "the Order of the Scull and Bones".
The society's assets are managed by the society's alumni organization, the Russell Trust Association, incorporated in 1856 and named after the Bones co-founder. The association was founded by Russell and Daniel Coit Gilman, a Skull and Bones member.
The first extended description of Skull and Bones, published in 1871 by Lyman Bagg in his book Four Years at Yale, noted that "the mystery now attending its existence forms the one great enigma which college gossip never tires of discussing." Brooks Mather Kelley attributed the interest in Yale senior societies to the fact that underclassmen members of then freshman, sophomore, and junior class societies returned to campus the following years and could share information about society rituals, while graduating seniors were, with their knowledge of such, at least a step removed from campus life.
Skull and Bones selects new members among students every spring as part of Yale University's "Tap Day", and has done so since 1879. Since the society's inclusion of women in the early 1990s, Skull and Bones selects fifteen men and women of the junior class to join the society. Skull and Bones "taps" those that it views as campus leaders and other notable figures for its membership.
The tomb before the addition of a second wing
The building was built in three phases: the first wing was built in 1856, the second wing in 1903, and Davis-designed Neo-Gothic towers were added to the rear garden in 1912. The front and side facades are of Portland brownstone in an Egypto-Doric style. The 1912 tower additions created a small enclosed courtyard in the rear of the building, designed by Evarts Tracy and Edgerton Swartwout of Tracy and Swartwout, New York. Evarts Tracy was a 1890 Bonesman, and his paternal grandmother, Martha Sherman Evarts, and maternal grandmother, Mary Evarts, were the sisters of William Maxwell Evarts, an 1837 Bonesman.
The architect was possibly Alexander Jackson Davis or Henry Austin. Architectural historian Patrick Pinnell includes an in-depth discussion of the dispute over the identity of the original architect in his 1999 Yale campus history. Pinnell speculates that the re-use of the Davis towers in 1911 suggests Davis's role in the original building and, conversely, Austin was responsible for the architecturally similar brownstone Egyptian Revival Grove Street Cemetery gates, built in 1845. Pinnell also discusses the "Tomb's" aesthetic place in relation to its neighbors, including the Yale University Art Gallery. In the late 1990s, New Hampshire landscape architects Saucier and Flynn designed the wrought iron fence that surrounds a portion of the complex.
The society owns and manages Deer Island, an island retreat on the St. Lawrence River. Alexandra Robbins, author of a book on Yale secret societies, wrote:
The forty-acre retreat is intended to give Bonesmen an opportunity to "get together and rekindle old friendships." A century ago the island sported tennis courts and its softball fields were surrounded by rhubarb plants and gooseberry bushes. Catboats waited on the lake. Stewards catered elegant meals. But although each new Skull and Bones member still visits Deer Island, the place leaves something to be desired. "Now it is just a bunch of burned-out stone buildings," a patriarch sighs. "It's basically ruins." Another Bonesman says that to call the island "rustic" would be to glorify it. "It's a dump, but it's beautiful."
Skull and Bones's membership developed a reputation in association with the "Power Elite".Regarding the qualifications for membership, Lanny Davis wrote in the 1968 Yale yearbook:
If the society had a good year, this is what the "ideal" group will consist of: a football captain; a Chairman of the Yale Daily News; a conspicuous radical; a Whiffenpoof; a swimming captain; a notorious drunk with a 94 average; a film-maker; a political columnist; a religious group leader; a Chairman of the Lit; a foreigner; a ladies' man with two motorcycles; an ex-service man; a negro, if there are enough to go around; a guy nobody else in the group had heard of, ever ...
— Lanny Davis, quoted by Alexandra Robbins
Like other Yale senior societies, Skull and Bones membership was almost exclusively limited to white Protestant males for much of its history. While Yale itself had exclusionary policies directed at particular ethnic and religious groups, the senior societies were even more exclusionary. While some Catholics were able to join such groups, Jews were more often not. Some of these excluded groups eventually entered Skull and Bones by means of sports, through the society's practice of tapping standout athletes. Star football players tapped for Skull and Bones included the first Jewish player (Al Hessberg, class of 1938) and African-American player (Levi Jackson, class of 1950, who turned down the invitation for the Berzelius Society).
Yale became coeducational in 1969, yet Skull and Bones remained fully male until 1992. The Bones class of 1971's attempt to tap women for membership was opposed by Bones alumni, who dubbed them the "bad club" and quashed their attempt. "The issue", as it came to be called by Bonesmen, was debated for decades. The class of 1991 tapped seven female members for membership in the next year's class, causing conflict with the alumni association. The Trust changed the locks on the Tomb and the Bonesmen instead met in the Manuscript Society building. A mail-in vote by members decided 368-320 to permit women in the society, but a group of alumni led by William F. Buckley obtained a temporary restraining order to block the move, arguing that a formal change in bylaws was needed. Other alumni, such as John Kerry and R. Inslee Clark, Jr., spoke out in favor of admitting women. The dispute was highlighted on an editorial page of The New York Times. A second alumni vote, in October 1991, agreed to accept the Class of 1992, and the lawsuit was dropped.
Judith Ann Schiff, Chief Research Archivist at the Yale University Library, has written: "The names of its members weren't kept secret—that was an innovation of the 1970s—but its meetings and practices were." While resourceful researchers could assemble member data from these original sources, in 1985, an anonymous source leaked rosters to Antony C. Sutton. This membership information was kept privately for over 15 years, as Sutton feared that the photocopied pages could somehow identify the member who leaked it. He wrote a book on the group, America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones. The information was finally reformatted as an appendix in the book Fleshing out Skull and Bones, a compilation edited by Kris Millegan and published in 2003.
Among prominent alumni are former President and Chief Justice William Howard Taft (a founder's son); former Presidents and father and son George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush; Supreme Court Justices Morrison R. Waite and Potter Stewart; James Jesus Angleton, "mother of the Central Intelligence Agency"; Henry Stimson, U.S. Secretary of War (1940-1945); U.S. Secretary of Defense (1951-1953) Robert A. Lovett, William B. Washburn, Governor of Massachusetts; and Henry Luce, founder and publisher of Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated magazines.
John Kerry, former U.S. Secretary of State and former U.S. Senator; Stephen A. Schwarzman, founder of Blackstone Group; Austan Goolsbee, Chairman of Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers; Harold Stanley, co-founder of Morgan Stanley; and Frederick W. Smith, founder of FedEx, are all reported to be members.
In the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, both the Democratic and Republican nominees were alumni. George W. Bush wrote in his autobiography, "[In my] senior year I joined Skull and Bones, a secret society; so secret, I can't say anything more." When asked what it meant that he and Bush were both Bonesmen, former Presidential candidate John Kerry said, "Not much, because it's a secret."
A document in Yale's archives suggests that 322 is a reference to the year 322 BC and that members measure dates from this year instead of from the common era. In 322 BC, the Lamian War ended with the death of Demosthenes and Athenians were made to dissolve their government and establish a plutocratic system in its stead, whereby only those possessing 2,000 drachmas or more could remain citizens. Documents in the Tomb have purportedly been found dated to "Anno-Demostheni". Members measure time of day according to a clock 5 minutes out of sync with normal time, the latter is called "barbarian time".
One legend is that the numbers in the society's emblem ("322") represent "founded in '32, 2nd corps", referring to a first Corps in an unknown German university.
Members are assigned nicknames (e.g., "Long Devil", the tallest member, and "Boaz", a varsity football captain, or "Sherrife" prince of future). Many of the chosen names are drawn from literature (e.g., "Hamlet", "Uncle Remus"), religion, and myth. The banker Lewis Lapham passed on his nickname, "Sancho Panza", to the political adviser Tex McCrary. Averell Harriman was "Thor", Henry Luce was "Baal", McGeorge Bundy was "Odin", and George H. W. Bush was "Magog".
Skull and Bones has a reputation for stealing keepsakes from other Yale societies or from campus buildings; society members reportedly call the practice "crooking" and strive to outdo each other's "crooks".
The society has been accused of possessing the stolen skulls of Martin Van Buren, Geronimo, and Pancho Villa.
The group Skull and Bones is featured in conspiracy theories, which claim that the society plays a role in a global conspiracy for world control. Theorists such as Alexandra Robbins suggest that Skull and Bones is a branch of the Illuminati, having been founded by German university alumni following the order's suppression in their native land by Karl Theodor, Elector of Bavaria with the support of Frederick the Great of Prussia, or that Skull and Bones itself controls the Central Intelligence Agency.
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The Gentleman's Handbook: The Essential Guide to Being a Man by Alfred Tong (Author), Jack Hughes (Illustrator)
"There's never been a tougher time to be a gentleman. In addition to the general vulgarity of the modern world, he has to contend with all manner of things: the challenges of social media, the practicalities of being metrosexual and still taken seriously at work, and juggling his finances in these cash strapped times.
Or does he? Who is this man who is seen slipping with ease between the office and the smartest parties, dressed in the most elegant clothes, oozing charisma and cool? Why, he is a man of style and taste. Let Alfred show you the way, with advice and tips on topics ranging from grooming and fashion, to getting ahead at work, romancing in the digital world and entertaining with style and panache.
Following the success of his first book, The Gentleman's Guide to Cocktails, Alfred presents a funny and clever guide for today's world, inspired by the finest gentlemen of all time.
Draft Table of Contents
Chapter 1 - Gentlemen of Note
Chapter 2 - Breakfast, The Third Wardrobe, Shaving and Skincare, Beards, Hair, Fragrance
Chapter 3 - Finding Your Own Style, Underwear, Casual Shirt, Casual Trousers, Knitwear, How a Suit Should Fit, Advice From a Savile Row Tailor, Ties, Socks, Shoes
Chapter 4 - The Journey Into Work, How to Write Well, Digital Communication, How to Get Good Handwriting, Body Language, How to Network, How to Pitch, The Art of Conversation, Office Politics
Chapter 5 - How to go out all night, How to order a cocktail, How to make cocktails, The Bluffer's Guide to Wine, Schmoozing, How to Party, The Office Party, How to Throw a Party, Dancing
Chapter 6 - The Ten Biggest Mistakes Men Make, Approaching Women, Online Dating, The Date, How to Get the Shag Pad Ready, The Joy of Sexting"
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Sunday Images / Just One / JEEVES in Paris
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BEST OF BRITANNIA LONDON - 12 / 13 OCTOBER 2017
BEST OF BRITANNIA LONDON -
12 / 13 OCTOBER 2017
BEST OF BRITANNIA IS PROUD TO BE AT THE FOREFRONT OF DISCOVERING THE FINEST EMERGING & HISTORIC BRITISH BRANDS.
BOB LONDON 2017 ADDRESS
The Boiler House
152 Brick Lane,
London
E1 6RU
Best of Britannia is an uplifting and inspirational retail and events platform for the growing number of people looking to purchase high quality products, made right here in Britain by people who take great pride in making things beautifully.
BOB is at the vanguard of a UK-wide phenomenon, as the manufacturing skills that were the foundation of Britain’s past prosperity undergo an extraordinary renaissance. From the Scottish Highlands to the South Downs, from Norwich to Penzance, we are witnessing the re-birth of the well-made object – the high-quality artefact, produced here by people who have honed their skills over generations. Craftsmen and women, artisans, designers and manufacturers have been curated and united here at BOB – we want to sell to the world the products from the men and women who have devoted themselves to their creation.
With the Creative Industries bringing a staggering collective £87 billion into the UK economy and employing 1 in every 11 people it is time that we started shouting about it from the rooftops, showing how proud we are of how brilliant we collectively are. It is time too, that both British retailer and consumer recognises the sheer quality of what is produced here and chooses to prioritise British-made goods over produce made elsewhere for which the provenance is less assured and for which the environmental impact of it reaching these shores is well-documented. The BOB team came together in 2012 and since then, we have devoted ourselves to building a collective of brands and their makers via, first an event platform and now an accompanying online retail platform.
We hope you come to BOB London to discover, order, purchase and enjoy the products available and the stories behind them which you can then relay on to your friends and families and thereby pass the baton on. Best of Britannia – 100% Futureproof.
Visit Best of Britannia if:
You want to discover new British brands, see how they are made and meet the people who make them
You want to find unique British-made product from over 150 brands including menswear, womenswear, childrenswear, footwear, accessories, jewellery, cycling, motoring, home furnishings and much, much more
You want to taste some of the best food and drink available in the UK from fine wines and cocktails to craft beers, from artisan chocolate to cheeses to chilli oils
You want to have your hair cut or beard sculpted by the best barbers in London
You want to be pampered in our wellbeing area
You want to shop till you drop
INTERVIEW WITH PATRICK GRANT
NOVEMBER 10, 2016 12.23
We had a chat with Fashion Designer, Judge on The Great British Sewing Bee and BOB Ambassador Patrick Grant to get his thoughts on BOB. How it resonates with his brand values, on why buying British is buying quality and the Launch of Community Clothing.
How do you feel about working with BOB? What got you involved in the first place and what inspires you about Best of Britannia?
BOB is an organisation who we really resonate with. It’s important to our economy that we keep these great clothing and textile makers as busy and as buoyant as we can, because not only is it part of our heritage, it should be part of our future.
A lot of people will look to you for not only your advice or expertise but also to say ‘Let’s get behind this’. Is that something that you feel is really important with working with Best of Britannia, but also with the various makers that you will work with?
BOB plays a very crucial role in not only promoting the idea of ‘Made in the UK’, but also actually making it possible by sharing knowledge, sharing contacts.
It’s about confidence too – we’ve got extraordinary makers in this country. I think they suffer from a lack of self-confidence and if we’re using their services we need to have great confidence in them. I think all the efforts of BOB and others are around giving people the confidence to bring manufacturing back into the UK.
Obviously the recent significant shift in the value of the pound makes it even more economically sensible to be looking to manufacture at home where you can. Who knows what will happen to the value of sterling over the next five years.
You’ve got a great story not only with Norton & Sons and E. Tautz but then with Community Clothing. How’s it going and what’s your next ambition for Community Clothing?
We officially launch our web-store and open our store in Blackburn for Community Clothing September 7. As a brand you can shop us from September 7, whereas before we ran a kick-starter campaign for almost a month where you could pre-order some pieces. But then we had to go away and manufacture those and deliver those. Now we will be available to buy just like any other British-made brand.
But the idea with Community Clothing is to try and fundamentally change the economics. Sometimes people have perceptions of ‘Made in Britain’ as somehow a bit crafty and maybe a bit “home-made” and I think that is a perception that is changing now as people see how many leading designer brands are making in great factories in the UK and how much effort is going into designing great products that’s made here.
The essential story is that it’s affordable to all: simple clothes that are affordable to all. I think for quite a long time there has been this feeling that British-made clothes have to be expensive and for good reason some of them are. Community Clothing uses simple, staple fabrics – everything is made in cotton or khaki cotton. This is not high-fashion, this is simple, stylish everyday clothes. But we wanted to see if there was a way we could have British-made clothes that were at high-street prices and priced at a level that meant that anybody can afford them, not just wealthy people.
It’s the third Buy British Day on October 1st. Why is it so important to “Buy British” and how often do you personally buy British?
For me buying British is synonymous with buying quality. It’s important to buy a good quality product. We don’t do a lot of cheap product here. We mostly do good quality, expensive product in the UK. And just as a general principle I like to buy things that are well-made that will serve their purpose not just for five minutes but for many, many years. We should buy less rubbish and buy fewer but better things – just as a general principal.
But also it is important – if we want our towns and communities across the UK to be vibrant in an increasingly post-industrial UK – that we keep what manufacturing we have actually going. What we have to do is rebuild what we have there because the service can only do a certain amount for us as a country in terms of jobs, but it can only extend so far. For many people jobs in manufacturing were what they would have done when they finished school, so for generations and families – father and son, father and grandfather, great grandfather would follow each other’s footsteps in the same industry. Town’s identities were built on these principles.
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Sunday Images / Ten times Cecil Beaton's Reddish House
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The Battle of Bosworth - British History's Biggest Fibs with Lucy Worsle...
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Start of a 'Mutiny'! - British History's Biggest Fibs with Lucy Worsley:...
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BBC Four British History's Biggest Fibs with Lucy Worsley / VIDEO: The Glorious Revolution -
Lucy Worsley explores how British history is a concoction of fibs and stories manipulated by whoever was in power at the time.
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"Nucky" / Vintage / "Apaches"
The importance of "The Vintage showroom" for the collectors of Vintage is well known http://www.thevintageshowroom.com/blog/
But what about the private collectors ?
Watch Out for "Nucky"
Tweedland revisits also the lost and forgotten world of the Paris "Apaches"
JEEVES / Tweedland
Apaches est un terme générique qui sert à désigner des bandes criminelles du Paris de la Belle Époque. Ce terme, qui fait florès vers 1900, résulte d'une construction médiatique basée sur un fait divers. En 1902, deux journalistes parisiens, Arthur Dupin et Victor Morris, nomment ainsi les petits truands et voyous de la rue de Lappe et « marlous » de Belleville, qui se différencient de la pègre et des malfrats par leur volonté de s'afficher.
Les Apaches se déplacent en bandes, avec des accoutrements spécifiques qui leur permettent de se distinguer. L'élément le plus important de leur habillement réside dans les chaussures. Quelles qu'elles soient, elles se doivent de briller, surtout aux yeux de leur bande ou de leur dulcinée. Un Apache n'hésitera d'ailleurs devant rien pour s'approprier la paire de bottines jaunes plus importante que son veston en lustrine noire (ou le bourgeron bleu) semi-ouvert sur une chemise fripée ou un tricot rayé et une ceinture en flanelle rouge, le pantalon patte d'éph de Bénard1 ou la casquette à pont (casquette à haute passe2) vissée au-dessus d'une nuque rasée et des cheveux lisses et pommadés ramenés en accroche-cœur3. Originaires des quartiers hauts de l'est parisien, comme Ménilmuche ou Belleville, ils investissent à la nuit tombée la Bastoche ou la Mouff'. Pour subvenir à leurs besoins, ils pratiquent, selon leur âge et leur expérience, le bonneteau (arnaque de rue), le proxénétisme ou encore l'escroquerie. Certains sont d'ailleurs particulièrement violents, n'hésitant pas à commettre des homicides.
La présence et le rôle actif des femmes dans les méfaits attribués aux Apaches ainsi que le libéralisme des attitudes qu'elles adoptent et affichent volontairement tranchent avec les mentalités de l'époque. Un exemple particulièrement relaté dans la presse du rôle des femmes dans cet univers fut celui d'Amélie Élie, immortalisée ensuite par Simone Signoret dans le film Casque d'or de Jacques Becker, et qui fut au centre d'une lutte entre deux souteneurs, Leca et Manda, en 1902.
Plus de 30 000 rôdeurs contre 8 000 sergents de ville : L'apache est la plaie de Paris. Nous démontrons plus loin, dans notre « Variété », que, depuis quelques années, les crimes de sang ont augmenté dans d'invraisemblables proportions. On évalue aujourd'hui à au moins 70 000 le nombre de rôdeurs — presque tous des jeunes gens de quinze à vingt ans — qui terrorisent la capitale. Et, en face de cette armée encouragée au mal par la faiblesse des lois répressives et l'indulgence inouïe des tribunaux, que voyons-nous ?... 8 000 agents pour Paris, 800 pour la banlieue et un millier à peine d'inspecteurs en bourgeois pour les services dits de sûreté. Ces effectifs qui, depuis quinze ans n'ont guère été modifiés, sont absolument insuffisants pour une population dont l'ensemble — Paris et banlieue — atteint, le chiffre énorme de 4 millions d'habitants. C'est ce que nous avons voulu démontrer dans la composition si artistique et si vivement suggestive qui fait le sujet de notre première gravure. »
« J'ai vu souvent des gens s'étonner de cette dénomination appliquée aux jeunes rôdeurs parisiens, dénomination dont ceux-ci se glorifient d'ailleurs, et il m'a paru curieux d'en rechercher l'origine. Je vous la donne telle qu'elle me fut contée.
C'est au commissariat de Belleville que, pour la première fois, ce terme fut appliqué à nos jeunes malandrins des faubourgs. Ce soir-là, le secrétaire du commissariat interrogeait une bande de jeunes voyous qui, depuis quelque temps, ensanglantait Belleville par ses rixes et ses déprédations et semait la terreur dans tout le quartier. La police, enfin, dans un magistral coup de filet, avait réussi à prendre toute la bande d'un seul coup, et les malandrins, au nombre d'une douzaine, avaient été amenés au commissariat où le « panier à salade » allait bientôt venir les prendre pour les mener au Dépôt. En attendant, les gredins subissaient un premier interrogatoire. Aux questions du secrétaire, le chef de la bande, une jeune « Terreur » de dix-huit ans, répondait avec un cynisme et une arrogance extraordinaires. Il énumérait complaisamment ses hauts faits et ceux de ses compagnons, expliquait avec une sorte d'orgueil les moyens employés par lui et par ses acolytes pour dévaliser les magasins, surprendre les promeneurs attardés et les alléger de leur bourse ; les ruses de guerre, dont il usait contre une bande rivale avec laquelle lui et les siens étaient en lutte ouverte. Il faisait de ses exploits une description si pittoresque, empreinte d'une satisfaction si sauvage, que le secrétaire du commissariat l'interrompit soudain et s'écria :
Apaches !... le mot plut au malandrin... Apaches ! Il avait lu dans son enfance les récits mouvementés de Mayne Reid, de Gustave Aimard et de Gabriel Ferry... Apaches !... oui l'énergie sombre et farouche des guerriers du Far West était assez comparable à celle que déployaient aux alentours du boulevard extérieur les jeunes scélérats qui composaient sa bande... Va, pour Apaches! Quand les gredins sortiront de prison — ce qui ne dut pas tarder, vu l'indulgence habituelle des tribunaux — la bande se reconstitua sous les ordres du même chef, et ce fut la bande des « Apaches de Belleville ». Et puis le terme fit fortune. Nous eûmes bientôt des tribus d'apaches dans tous les quartiers de Paris : tant et si bien que le mot prit son sens définitif et qu'on ne désigna plus, autrement les rôdeurs de la grande ville. Aujourd'hui l'expression est consacrée ; la presse l'emploie journellement, car les apaches ne laissent pas passer un jour sans faire parler d'eux... Il ne manque plus que de la voir accueillie par le dictionnaire de l'Académie... »
La paternité de l'expression est attribuée aux rédacteurs en chef des principaux journaux de l'époque qui relataient les faits de ces voyous (Le Matin et Le Petit Journal).
Une mise en avant croissante de grands procès apportent leur lot de fascination pour une frange de la population. Mais il faut sans doute aussi évoquer le rôle des grands journaux parisiens qui n'hésitent pas à mettre à la une les « exploits » de ces bandes et à entretenir ce sentiment d'insécurité, qui alimente le phénomène.
La population des faubourgs, initialement effrayée par ces bandes, de même que les patrons des troquets, les bougnats, des Auvergnats qui ne tardent pas à être assimilés aux yeux du peuple à ces malfrats, finissent par les lâcher sous la pression des journaux et les efforts de la police. En 1920, on commence à abandonner le terme d'Apaches, sans doute aussi à la suite des nombreuses pertes engendrées par la Première Guerre mondiale sur cette classe d'âge de la population. Le terme est cependant utilisé avec la montée du sentiment anti-américain en 1923 pour critiquer la conduite des Américains en France, notamment les bagarres et les expulsions de clients noirs imputées au « préjugé de race » américain. On affirme ainsi que Montmartre ne sera pas la colonie des Apaches
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Agatha Christie's Greenway A Home In Devon. VIDEO below
Greenway, also known as Greenway House, is an estate on the River Dart near Galmpton in Devon, England. Once the home of famed mystery author Agatha Christie, it is now owned by the National Trust.
t was first mentioned in 1493 as "Greynway", the crossing point of the Dart to Dittisham. In the late 16th century a Tudor mansion called Greenway Court was built by the Gilbert family. Greenway was the birthplace of Humphrey Gilbert. The present Georgian house was probably built in the late 18th century by Roope Harris Roope and extended by subsequent owners. The gardens may have been remodelled by landscape gardener Humphry Repton.
Greenway was bought by Agatha Christie and her husband Max Mallowan in 1938. The house was occupied by Christie and Mallowan until their deaths in 1976 and 1978 respectively, and featured, under various guises, in several of Christie's novels. Christie's daughter Rosalind Hicks and her husband Anthony lived in the house from 1968, until Rosalind's death in 2004.
The Greenway Estate was acquired by the National Trust in 2000. Greenway House is a Grade II* listed building. The gardens and parkland are Grade II listed in the National Register of Historic Parks and Gardens. The house and gardens are open to the public, as is the Barn Gallery. The large riverside gardens contain plants from the southern hemisphere, whilst the Barn Gallery shows work by contemporary local artists.
Agatha Christie frequently used places familiar to her as settings for her plots. Greenway Estate and its surroundings in their entirety or in parts are described in the following novels:
Five Little Pigs (1942)
The main house, the foot path leading from the main house to the battery overlooking the river Dart and the battery itself (where the murder occurs) are described in detail since the movements of the novel's protagonist at these locations are integral to the plot and the denouement of the murderer.
Towards Zero (1944)
The location of the estate opposite the village of Dittisham, divided from each other by the river Dart, plays an important part for the alibi and a nightly swim of one of the suspects.
Dead Man's Folly (1956)
The boat house of Greenway Estate is described as the spot where the first victim is discovered, and the nearby ferry landing serves as the place where the second real murder victim is dragged into the water for death by drowning. Other places described are the greenhouse and the tennis court, where Mrs. Oliver placed real clues and red herrings for the "murder hunt". The lodge of Greenway Estate serves as the home of Amy Folliat, the former owner of Nasse House.
ITV's Agatha Christie's Poirot episode "Dead Man's Folly" was filmed there.
Agatha Christie's home Greenway opens to the Devon public
Sophie Campbell gets a first peek at Agatha Christie’s holiday home, Greenway, which is now open to the public .
By Sophie Campbell11:14AM GMT 24 Feb 2009
Set into one side of the front portico at Greenway, Agatha Christie's former holiday home in South Devon, is an unobtrusive sandstone plaque. It is incised with arcane characters, like little rows of camping stools, and it was brought back from Iraq by her archaeologist husband, Sir Max Mallowan.
"Cuneiform script, from Nineveh," says Robyn Brown automatically, eyes busy elsewhere. "It should probably be in the British Museum." Brown is the National Trust's property manager at Greenway and has been overseeing the complex, labour-intensive two-year project to open the house and gardens to the public. We re-examine the golden slab for a second. "He wrote two books on Nineveh here at the house," she adds. "She never wrote here at all."
And there you have it, the key to Greenway, which opens to the public for the first time today. You won't see a writing desk, or a study used by the great crime writer when completing one of her 79 mysteries, although she came here every summer from 1938 until her death in 1976. There is no physic garden stocked with deadly nightshade or spotted hemlock. And while three novels and a couple of murders are recognisably set here (the artist Amyas Crale dies in the garden after drinking hemlock-laced beer, and the girl guide Marlene Tucker is found strangled in the boathouse), none were written in the house. Christie saw Greenway as a place of relaxation, not of work, as a chance to enjoy family, friends and the benevolent surroundings of the River Dart. It was also somewhere to indulge the family passion – or obsession – for collecting.
Greenway is a very Devonian house. It is no-fuss Georgian, the colour of clotted cream, beautifully sited on land swooping down to the river, and on sunny days – this is, after all, the English Riviera – it soaks up the rays until dusk. It occupies its own promontory on a bit of the river that bulges like a newly fed python, surrounded on three sides by water and backed by woods of ash, beech, Monterey pine and vast swathes of camellia and rhododendron.
It must have been an utterly private retreat, used first by the Mallowans, then by Christie's daughter Rosalind Hicks and her second husband Anthony – a talented gardener – who gifted it to the National Trust in 2000. After their deaths Christie's grandson, Mathew Prichard, donated all the contents as well, making Greenway a unique treasure. It is also a logistical nightmare; parking is desperately limited, access roads are narrow and they expect more than 600 visitors a day during the peak summer season. Frantic signals are going out to persuade people to come by boat (starting from Dartmouth and Dittisham this weekend), bus, bike, foot – anything but by car. What they are going to do with people like me, who decide to visit on a whim and just turn up, I hate to think.
The family would have entered the house through the portico facing the river, stepping into a simple three-storey façade, which had side extensions added in the early 19th century. We have to enter through a side route, but the interior has been planned to feel much as though the Hicks family is still in residence. The hall has a studded leather Baghdad chest, another Mallowan find, in which a body was discovered in one of his wife's novels. It also still has the dinner gong – which was beaten each evening, apparently, by the young Mathew to summon the adults to dine. In the inner hall, old gardening hats and a scarf lie on the table beside a white leather lifebelt with "Greenway House" painted on it.
It's in the library, though, that you first begin to realise that this was no ordinary family. The room looks straight out over the glorious river view, so its shades are pulled down to block the light, but even the dimness can't hide the shelves protected with neatly folded white tissue paper, furniture under creamy dust sheets and dozens of objects, each with its own ghostly nimbus of plastic (some of these coverings will remain until the formal opening, in June, as building work continues). Beneath the covers I can see tantalising details: the shiny yellow beaks and feet of a pair of Meissen eagles; part of the Hicks' ceramics collection, which also includes superb pieces by potters such as the Leaches and others. There is the bargeware – populist pottery, often with an inscription stamped on it – collected by Mallowan, the Hicks' studio glass and Rosalind Hicks' collection of books, including a complete set of Christie novels.
Around the walls is a blue-and-white mural painted by an American officer during the Second World War. The house was requisitioned and when the soldiers left, Christie kept the mural – which she considered a war memorial – but not the 14 latrines that they had built in the house. It was said that the dozens of magnolias in the garden – another collecting tic, which included a sumptuous creamy pink magnolia grandiflora planted by Mallowan, still erupting behind the Trust shop – reminded the officers of the scented blooms of steamy Louisiana.
The Morning Room is hung with Christie's collection of shell paintings, made by sailors for their sweethearts using shells painstakingly collected on their voyages. The Drawing Room holds the shelves of highly sentimental pottery belonging to her parents and grandmother. Elsewhere there are tapestries collected by Mathew Prichard's godparents, wooden Mauchline ware souvenirs collected by Anthony Hicks and Christie, and a cabinet of Verge watches belonging to Rosalind Hicks. There are papier maché objects inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and a charming collection of Stevengraphs – little silk bookmarks or pictures made by Thomas Stevens, a Coventry silk ribbon manufacturer – featuring early fire engines, English sports and mail coaches.
There is something delightful about it all. Not necessarily aesthetically (I still shudder at the thought of one piece of china, probably worth a fortune, featuring a parakeet screeching across the summit of what looks like a mountain of blue and white marshmallows), but because of its unpretentiousness and its ardour. You can almost feel the quiet, happy hours spent researching, hunting and later gloating over new acquisitions. Although Christie's taste in collectables was essentially Victorian, Greenway's simple colour scheme gives it the feel of a Modernist interior and a distinct sense that it has slid to an easy halt somewhere in the sunny Fifties or Sixties.
I take a walk down to the boathouse, zigzagging down through what feel like distinct climatic zones; glossy laurels and camellias giving way to delicate bamboos and shrubs as the land slides into the water. The boathouse looks out across slippery seaweed steps (a swift push, perhaps by a butler with a tray of cocktails… it's difficult not to start planning murders) to the Scold's Stone, marked by a red flag in mid-channel. This is where disobedient wives were apparently trussed up to drown in medieval times; those who failed to do so were stoned to death. I have a feeling that the camellia garden along the path was where Crale met his death at the bottom of a beer glass. In the end, I scuttle back up to the house, happier to be strolling through the walled gardens to see the peach and nectarine houses slumped against a south-facing wall, and soon to be restored to their full, fragrant glory.
As my visit ends, calls are coming in from France, Russia, China, Australia and elsewhere, requesting filming permission, visits and interviews. The house has filled with National Trust personnel assessing the best ways for visitors to be moved efficiently through the rooms.
The builders are finishing the visitor centre and running last-minute checks on the green heating and waste disposal systems. The smart new shop is being stocked with Trust products and Agatha Christie novels. There is a sense that nothing will ever be the same again at Greenway; all those billions of words are coming home to roost.
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Jeeves at his garden
There is only one referencial source of happiness: Mother Nature.
So, take the japanese advise and find a garden. Take a “Green Bath”. Feel the earth and watch “your” trees and plants grow.
Jeeves has a little cabin and a “landscape” garden in the best tradition of the Dutch “Volkstuinen”.
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The Mystery of Mata Hari
Exhibition MataHari “The Myth and the Girl”
14 oktober 2017 t/m 2 april 2018
Margaretha Geertruida "Margreet" MacLeod (née Zelle; 7 August 1876 – 15 October 1917), better known by the stage name Mata Hari, was a Dutch exotic dancer and courtesan who was convicted of being a spy for Germany during World War I and executed by firing squad in France.
Margaretha Zelle was born 7 August 1876, in Leeuwarden, in the province of Friesland in the Netherlands. She was the eldest of four children of Adam Zelle (2 October 1840 – 13 March 1910) and his first wife Antje van der Meulen (21 April 1842 – 9 May 1891). She had three brothers. Her father owned a hat shop, made successful investments in the oil industry, and became affluent enough to give Margaretha a lavish early childhood that included exclusive schools until the age of 13. Despite traditional assertions that Mata Hari was partly of Javanese, i.e. Indonesian, descent, scholars conclude she had no Asian or Middle Eastern ancestry and both her parents were Dutch.
Soon after Margaretha's father went bankrupt in 1889, her parents divorced, and then her mother died in 1891. Her father remarried in Amsterdam on 9 February 1893 to Susanna Catharina ten Hoove (11 March 1844 – 1 December 1913), by whom he had no children. The family fell apart, and Margaretha moved to live with her godfather, Mr. Visser, in Sneek. Subsequently, she studied to be a kindergarten teacher in Leiden, but when the headmaster began to flirt with her conspicuously, she was removed from the institution by her offended godfather. A few months later, she fled to her uncle's home in The Hague.
At 18, Zelle answered an advertisement in a Dutch newspaper placed by Dutch Colonial Army Captain Rudolf MacLeod (1 March 1856 – 9 January 1928), who was living in what was then the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and was looking for a wife. Zelle married MacLeod in Amsterdam on 11 July 1895. He was the son of Captain John Brienen MacLeod (a descendant of the Gesto branch of the MacLeods of Skye, hence his Scottish name) and Dina Louisa, Baroness Sweerts de Landas. The marriage enabled her to move into the Dutch upper class, and her finances were placed on a sound footing. They moved to Malang on the east side of the island of Java, traveling out on SS Prinses Amalia in May 1897, and had two children, Norman-John MacLeod (30 January 1897 – 27 June 1899) and Louise Jeanne MacLeod (2 May 1898 – 10 August 1919).
The marriage was an overall disappointment. MacLeod was an alcoholic and regularly beat his wife, who was twenty years younger and whom he blamed for his lack of promotion. He also openly kept a concubine, a socially accepted practice in the Dutch East Indies at that time. The disenchanted Zelle abandoned him temporarily, moving in with Van Rheedes, another Dutch officer. She studied the Indonesian traditions intensively for several months and joined a local dance company during that time. In correspondence to her relatives in the Netherlands in 1897, she revealed her artistic name of Mata Hari, the word for "sun" in the local Malay language (literally, "eye of the day").
At MacLeod's urging, Zelle returned to him, but his behavior did not change. She escaped her circumstances by studying the local culture. In 1899, their children fell violently ill from complications relating to the treatment of syphilis contracted from their parents, though the family claimed they were poisoned by an irate servant. Jeanne survived, but Norman died. Some sources maintain that one of MacLeod's enemies may have poisoned a supper to kill both of their children. After moving back to the Netherlands, the couple officially separated on 30 August 1902. The divorce became final in 1906. Zelle was awarded custody of Jeanne. MacLeod was legally required to pay support, which he never did, making life very difficult for Zelle and her daughter. During a visit of Jeanne with her father, MacLeod decided not to return Jeanne to her mother. Zelle did not have resources to fight the situation and accepted it, believing that while McLeod had been an abusive husband, he had always been a good father. Jeanne later died at the age of 21, also possibly from complications relating to syphilis.
In 1903, Zelle moved to Paris, where she performed as a circus horse rider using the name Lady MacLeod, much to the disapproval of the Dutch MacLeods. Struggling to earn a living, she also posed as an artist's model.
By 1905, Mata Hari began to win fame as an exotic dancer. She was a contemporary of dancers Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis, leaders in the early modern dance movement, which around the turn of the 20th century looked to Asia and Egypt for artistic inspiration. Critics would later write about this and other such movements within the context of Orientalism. Gabriel Astruc became her personal booking agent.
Promiscuous, flirtatious, and openly flaunting her body, Mata Hari captivated her audiences and was an overnight success from the debut of her act at the Musée Guimet on 13 March 1905. She became the long-time mistress of the millionaire Lyon industrialist Émile Étienne Guimet, who had founded the Musée. She posed as a Javanese princess of priestly Hindu birth, pretending to have been immersed in the art of sacred Indian dance since childhood. She was photographed numerous times during this period, nude or nearly so. Some of these pictures were obtained by MacLeod and strengthened his case in keeping custody of their daughter.[citation needed]
Mata Hari brought a carefree provocative style to the stage in her act, which garnered wide acclaim. The most celebrated segment of her act was her progressive shedding of clothing until she wore just a jeweled bra and some ornaments upon her arms and head. She was seldom seen without a bra as she was self-conscious about being small-breasted. She wore a bodystocking for her performances that was similar in color to her own skin.
Although Mata Hari's claims about her origins were fictitious, it was very common for entertainers of her era to invent colorful stories about their origins as part of the show. Her act was successful because it elevated exotic dance to a more respectable status and so broke new ground in a style of entertainment for which Paris was later to become world-famous. Her style and free-willed attitude made her a popular woman, as did her eagerness to perform in exotic and revealing clothing. She posed for provocative photos and mingled in wealthy circles. Since most Europeans at the time were unfamiliar with the Dutch East Indies, Mata Hari was thought of as exotic, and it was assumed her claims were genuine. One evidently enthused French journalist wrote in a Paris newspaper that Mata Hari was "so feline, extremely feminine, majestically tragic, the thousand curves and movements of her body trembling in a thousand rhythms." One journalist in Vienna wrote after seeing one of her performances that Mata Hari was "slender and tall with the flexible grace of a wild animal, and with blue-black hair" and that her face "makes a strange foreign impression."
By about 1910, myriad imitators had arisen. Critics began to opine that the success and dazzling features of the popular Mata Hari were due to cheap exhibitionism and lacked artistic merit. Although she continued to schedule important social events throughout Europe, she was held in disdain by serious cultural institutions as a dancer who did not know how to dance.
Mata Hari's career went into decline after 1912. On 13 March 1915, she performed in what would be the last show of her career. She had begun her career relatively late for a dancer, and had started putting on weight. However, by this time she had become a successful courtesan, known more for her sensuality and eroticism than for her beauty. She had relationships with high-ranking military officers, politicians, and others in influential positions in many countries. Her relationships and liaisons with powerful men frequently took her across international borders. Prior to World War I, she was generally viewed as an artist and a free-spirited bohemian, but as war approached, she began to be seen by some as a wanton and promiscuous woman, and perhaps a dangerous seductress.
During World War I, the Netherlands remained neutral. As a Dutch subject, Zelle was thus able to cross national borders freely. To avoid the battlefields, she travelled between France and the Netherlands via Spain and Britain, and her movements inevitably attracted attention. During the war, Zelle was involved in what was described as a very intense romantic-sexual relationship with a Russian pilot serving with the French, the twenty-five year old Captain Vadim Maslov, whom she called the love of her life. Maslov was part of the 50,000 strong Russian Expeditionary Force sent to the Western Front in the spring of 1916.
In the summer of 1916, Maslov was shot down and badly wounded during a dogfight with the Germans, losing his sight in both eyes, which led Zelle to ask for permission to visit her wounded lover at the hospital where he was staying near the front. As a citizen of a neutral country, Zelle would not normally be allowed near the front. Zelle was met by agents from the Deuxième Bureau who told her that she would only be allowed to see Maslov if she agreed to spy on Germany.
Before the war, Zelle had performed as Mata Hari several times before the Crown Prince Wilhelm, eldest son of Kaiser Wilhelm II and nominally a senior German general on the Western Front. The Deuxième Bureau believed she might be able to obtain information by seducing the Crown Prince for military secrets. In fact, his involvement was minimal and it was German government propaganda that promoted the image of the Crown Prince as a great warrior, the worthy successor to the august Hohenzollern monarchs who had made Prussia strong and powerful. They wanted to avoid publicizing that the man expected to be the next Kaiser was a playboy noted for womanizing, partying, and indulging in alcohol, who spent another portion of his time intriguing with far right-wing politicians, with the intent to have his father declared insane and deposed.
Unaware that the Crown Prince did not have much to do with the running of Army Group Crown Prince or the 5th Army, the Deuxième Bureau offered Zelle one million francs if she could seduce him and provide France with good intelligence about German plans. The fact that the Crown Prince had, before 1914, never commanded a unit larger than a regiment, and was now supposedly commanding both an army and an army group at the same time should have been a clue that his role in German decision-making was mostly nominal. Zelle's contact with the Deuxième Bureau was Captain Georges Ladoux, who was later to emerge as one of her principal accusers.
In November 1916, she was travelling by steamer from Spain when her ship called at the British port of Falmouth. There she was arrested and brought to London where she was interrogated at length by Sir Basil Thomson, Assistant Commissioner at New Scotland Yard in charge of counter-espionage. He gave an account of this in his 1922 book Queer People, saying that she eventually admitted to working for the Deuxième Bureau. Initially detained in Cannon Street police station, she was then released and stayed at the Savoy Hotel. A full transcript of the interview is in Britain's National Archives and was broadcast, with Mata Hari played by Eleanor Bron, on the independent station LBC in 1980. It is unclear if she lied on this occasion, believing the story made her sound more intriguing, or if French authorities were using her in such a way but would not acknowledge her due to the embarrassment and international backlash it could cause.
In late 1916, Zelle travelled to Madrid, where she met with the German military attaché, Major Arnold Kalle, and asked if he could arrange a meeting with the Crown Prince. During this period, Zelle apparently offered to share French secrets with Germany in exchange for money, though whether this was because of greed or an attempt to set up a meeting with Crown Prince Wilhelm remains unclear.
In January 1917, Major Kalle transmitted radio messages to Berlin describing the helpful activities of a German spy code-named H-21, whose biography so closely matched Zelle's that it was patently obvious that Agent H-21 could only be Mata Hari. The Deuxième Bureau intercepted the messages and, from the information they contained, identified H-21 as Mata Hari. The messages were in a code that German intelligence knew had already been broken by the French, suggesting that the messages were contrived to have Zelle arrested by the French.
General Walter Nicolai, the chief IC (intelligence officer) of the German Army, had grown very annoyed that Mata Hari had provided him with no intelligence worthy of the name, instead selling the Germans mere Paris gossip about the sex lives of French politicians and generals, and decided to terminate her employment by exposing her as a German spy to the French.
In December 1916, the French Second Bureau of the French War Ministry let Mata Hari obtain the names of six Belgian agents. Five were suspected of submitting fake material and working for the Germans, while the sixth was suspected of being a double agent for Germany and France. Two weeks after Mata Hari had left Paris for a trip to Madrid, the double agent was executed by the Germans, while the five others continued their operations. This development served as proof to the Second Bureau that the names of the six spies had been communicated by Mata Hari to the Germans.
On 13 February 1917, Mata Hari was arrested in her room at the Hotel Elysée Palace on the Champs Elysées in Paris. She was put on trial on 24 July, accused of spying for Germany, and consequently causing the deaths of at least 50,000 soldiers. Although the French and British intelligence suspected her of spying for Germany, neither could produce definite evidence against her. Supposedly secret ink was found in her room, which was incriminating evidence in that period. She contended that it was part of her makeup.
Zelle's principal interrogator was Captain Pierre Bouchardon, the man who was to prosecute her at her trial, who grilled her relentlessly. Bouchardon was able to establish that much of the Mata Hari persona was invented, and far from being a Javanese princess, Zelle was actually Dutch, which he was to use as evidence of her dubious and dishonest character at her trial. Zelle admitted to Bouchardon that she had accepted 20,000 francs from a German diplomat in the Netherlands to spy on France, but insisted she only passed on to the Germans trivial information as her loyalty was entirely to her adopted nation, France. In the meantime, Ladoux had been preparing a case against his former agent by casting all of her activities in the worst possible light, going so far as to engage in evidence tampering.
In 1917, France had been badly shaken by the Great Mutinies of the French Army in the spring of 1917 following the failure of the Nivelle Offensive together with a huge strike wave, and at the time, many believed that France might simply collapse as a result of war exhaustion. In July 1917, a new government under Georges Clemenceau, aka "le tigre", had come into power, utterly committed to winning the war. In this context, having one German spy for whom everything that went wrong with the war so far could be blamed was most convenient for the French government, making Mata Hari the perfect scapegoat, which explains why the case against her received maximum publicity in the French press, and led to her importance in the war being greatly exaggerated. The Canadian historian Wesley Wark stated in a 2014 interview that Mata Hari was never an important spy and just made a scapegoat for French military failures which she had nothing to do with, stating: "They needed a scapegoat and she was a notable target for scapegoating". Likewise, the British historian Julie Wheelwright stated: "She really did not pass on anything that you couldn’t find in the local newspapers in Spain". Wheelwright went on to describe Zelle as "...an independent woman, a divorcee, a citizen of a neutral country, a courtesan and a dancer, which made her a perfect scapegoat for the French, who were then losing the war. She was kind of held up as an example of what might happen if your morals were too loose”.
Zelle wrote several letters to the Dutch Ambassador in Paris, claiming her innocence. "My international connections are due of my work as a dancer, nothing else .... Because I really did not spy, it is terrible that I cannot defend myself".] The most terrible and heart-breaking moment for Mata Hari during the trial occurred when her lover Maslov – by now a deeply embittered man as a result of losing his eyes in combat – declined to testify for her, telling her he couldn't care less if she were convicted or not. It was reported that Zelle fainted when she learned that Maslov had abandoned her.
Her defence attorney, veteran international lawyer Édouard Clunet, faced impossible odds; he was denied permission either to cross-examine the prosecution's witnesses or to examine his own witnesses directly.[citation needed] Bouchardon used the very fact that Zelle was a woman as evidence of her guilt, saying: "Without scruples, accustomed to make use of men, she is the type of woman who is born to be a spy
Mata Hari herself admitted under interrogation to taking money to work as a German spy. It is contended by some historians that Mata Hari may have merely accepted money from the Germans without actually carrying out any spy duties. At her trial, Zelle vehemently insisted that her sympathies were with the Allies and declared her passionate love of France, her adopted homeland. In October 2001, documents released from the archives of MI5 (British counter-intelligence) were used by a Dutch group, the Mata Hari Foundation to ask the French government to exonerate Zelle as they argued that the MI5 files proved she was not guilty of the charges she was convicted of. A spokesman from the Mata Hari Foundation argued that at most Zelle was a low-level spy who provided no secrets to either side, stating: "We believe that there are sufficient doubts concerning the dossier of information that was used to convict her to warrant re-opening the case. Maybe she wasn't entirely innocent, but it seems clear she wasn't the master-spy whose information sent thousands of soldiers to their deaths, as has been claimed.".
Zelle was executed by a firing squad of 12 French officers just before dawn on 15 October 1917. She was 41. According to an eyewitness account by British reporter Henry Wales, she was not bound and refused a blindfold. She defiantly blew a kiss to the firing squad. Zelle has often been portrayed as a femme fatale, the dangerous, seductive woman who uses her sexuality to effortlessly manipulate men, but others view her differently: in the words of the American historians Norman Polmer and Thomas Allen she was "naïve and easily duped", a victim of men rather than a victimizer.
A 1934 New Yorker article reported that at her execution she wore "a neat Amazonian tailored suit, especially made for the occasion, and a pair of new white gloves" though another account indicates she wore the same suit, low-cut blouse and tricorn hat ensemble which had been picked out by her accusers for her to wear at trial, and which was still the only full, clean outfit which she had in prison. Neither description matches photographic evidence. Wales recorded her death, saying that after the volley of shots rang out, "Slowly, inertly, she settled to her knees, her head up always, and without the slightest change of expression on her face. For the fraction of a second it seemed she tottered there, on her knees, gazing directly at those who had taken her life. Then she fell backward, bending at the waist, with her legs doubled up beneath her." A non-commissioned officer then walked up to her body, pulled out his revolver, and shot her in the head to make sure she was dead.
Mata Hari's body was not claimed by any family members and was accordingly used for medical study. Her head was embalmed and kept in the Museum of Anatomy in Paris. In 2000, archivists discovered that it had disappeared, possibly as early as 1954, according to curator Roger Saban, when the museum had been relocated. It remains missing. Records dated from 1918 show that the museum also received the rest of the body, but none of the remains could later be accounted for.
Mata Hari's sealed trial and related other documents were scheduled to be declassified by the French Army in 2017, one hundred years after her execution.
The Frisian museum (Dutch: Fries Museum) in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, contains a "Mata Hari Room". Included in the exhibit are two of her personal scrapbooks and an oriental rug embroidered with the footsteps of her fan dance. Located in Mata Hari's native town, the museum is well known for research into the life and career of Leeuwarden's world-famous citizen. The largest ever Mata Hari exhibition has been opened in the Museum of Friesland on 14 October 2017, one hundred years after her death.
Mata Hari's birthplace is located in the building at Kelders 33. The building suffered smoke and water damage during a fire in 2013, but was later restored. Architect Silvester Adema studied old drawings of the storefront in order to reconstruct it as it appeared when Abraham Zelle, the father of Mata Hari, had a hat shop there. In 2016, an information centre (belevingscentrum) was created in the building displaying mementos of Mata Hari.
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Consolata Boyle / costume designer / Vídeo below: VICTORIA & ABDUL
Consolata Boyle is an Irish costume designer based in Dublin. She is a frequent collaborator of English director Stephen Frears and has been nominated twice for the Academy Award for Best Costume Design for her work on two of his films: The Queen (2006) and Florence Foster Jenkins (2016).
A graduate of University College Dublin in Archaeology and History, where she was involved in the University society Dramsoc, she trained in costume design at the Abbey Theatre and began her career in the early 1980s. She also did a postgraduate diploma in textiles at West Surrey College of Art & Design (now University for the Creative Arts).
Her many credits include Anne Devlin (1984), December Bride (1991), Into the West (1992), Widows' Peak (1994), Angela's Ashes (1999), Nora (2000), When Brendan Met Trudy (2001), The Iron Lady (2011), Miss Julie (2014) and Testament of Youth (2014). Her collaboration with Stephen Frears began with The Snapper in 1993 and continued with films including Mary Reilly (1996), The Queen (2006), Cheri (2009), Tamara Drewe (2010), Philomena (2013) and Florence Foster Jenkins (2016). Most recently, she designed the costumes for Frears' forthcoming 2017 film Victoria and Abdul, in which Dame Judi Dench will reprise her role as Queen Victoria alongside Ali Fazal as Abdul Karim.
As well as her two Oscar nominations, Boyle has been nominated for several other awards throughout her career as a costume designer and amongst those that she has won are an Emmy Award for the television film The Lion in Winter (2003), a Costume Designers Guild Award for The Queen (2006) and four Irish Film and Television Awards for The Queen (2006), Chéri (2009), The Iron Lady (2011) and Philomena (2013). Had she won the Oscar for which she had been nominated at the 89th Academy Awards (2017), she would have become the fifth Irishwoman to win a competitive Oscar after art director Josie MacAvin, make-up artist Michèle Burke, producer Corinne Marrinan and actress Brenda Fricker. She is married to Donald Taylor Black and they have one child. She lost to American designer Colleen Atwood.
Irish costume designer Consolata Boyle receives Oscar nomination
Amy Mulvaney
January 24 2017 1:29 PM
Consolata Boyle has landed an Oscar nomination for Best Costume Design.
The Dublin woman was nominated for her work on comedy-drama Florence Foster Jenkins, starring Meryl Streep.
Consolata has been working on costumes in theatre and film since the early 1980s and her credits include Angela's Ashes and The Iron Lady. She won an Emmy in 2004 for her work on The Lion in Winter, and was nominated for an Oscar in 2007 for Best Achievement in Costume Design for her work on The Queen.
"My journey in to the film industry was quite unexpected. I was working in theatre when I got the opportunity to work on a film, and I was fascinated by the art. I started doing very small films, then moved in to television and then in to bigger films. It was all a very natural progression and very organic, and I absolutely loved it," she told Weekend Magazine last year.
"Awards season is incredible because you go through all the rituals. The screenings, question and answer sessions and events all happen before the big event. It's great because everyone there is completely obsessed by film, and delightfully curious and enthusiastic."
Consolata has also worked on The Van, The Snapper and Into the West.
In a successful day for Irish film, Irish-Ethiopian actress Ruth Negga secured an Oscar nomination for Best Actress for her role in Loving, while Irish-funded The Lobster, staring Colin Farrell, secured Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
The 89th Academy Awards will be held at the Dolby Theatre at Hollywood and Highland Center in Hollywood on February 26 and will be hosted by Jimmy Kimmel.
HOW THE PERIOD COSTUMES IN JUDI DENCH'S 'VICTORIA AND ABDUL' HELP TELL A STORY THAT WAS ALMOST LOST TO HISTORY
Costume designer Consolata Boyle's turn-of-the-century wardrobe helps portray the unlikely friendship between Queen Victoria and her Indian Muslim teacher Abdul Karim.
FAWNIA SOO HOOSEP 22, 2017
Based on the novel "Victoria & Abdul: The True Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant," by Shrabani Basu, the Dame Judi Dench-starring film "Victoria and Abdul" sheds light on the close friendship between Queen Victoria and Indian servant-turned-confidante Abdul Karim. Out of fondness, the Queen (and Empress of India) bestowed privilege, power and land to the Muslim Indian spiritual guide (or "munshi"), which you can imagine did not go over well with the xenophobic court and royal servants during the aggressive late "imperial century" portion of the British colonial empire.
The true story of the unexpected (and then-controversial) royal friendship also brings the opportunity for a sweeping, prestige period drama by acclaimed director Stephen Frears — and the sumptuous costumes that come with it. Although, I do feel the need to mention: While the movie tries to emphasize cultural, ethnic and religious tolerance, it's hard to ignore Great Britain's cruel colonial history and the icky mystical Asian man portrayal of real person and colonial subject Abdul, played by Ali Fazal. That said, I'll leave the in-depth discussion to the film and culture critics and focus instead on the stunning 19th-century period costumes spanning the two cultures, created by Consolata Boyle.
The costume design is even more notable considering that much documentation of the Victoria and Abdul's relationship was destroyed and lost to history. Plus, Queen Victoria famously wore black — as many women in the Victorian period did — for her remaining 40 years after the passing of beloved husband Albert in 1861, calling for extreme creativity when designing dresses for a 2D film.
Of course, Boyle is no stranger to monumental period pieces, especially ones depicting British monarchs played by knighted thespians. She received her first Oscar nomination for the Frears-directed "The Queen," starring Dame Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II. (She earned her second nod for dressing American movie royalty Meryl Streep in "Florence Foster Jenkins" in 2016.) A longtime Frears collaborator, Boyle also worked with the director and Dench on the Oscar-nominated "Philomena."
While on a quick visit to sunny Los Angeles to promote the film, Boyle jumped on the phone to chat with me about how Queen Victoria's all black wardrobe did evolve as she found happiness and joy in her friendship, how costume reimagined the royal court tailor's cultural appropriation of Abdul's first outfit in Great Britain and what it's like working with the formidable Dame Judi Dench.
What challenges did you face when working with so much Victorian-era black? How did make Queen Victoria's dresses so dynamic for the big screen?
It is true that she wore black and so did much of her court and many people in the Victorian Era, to which she gave her name. There was so much death around — of children, of relations — and obviously she was in deepest mourning for Albert after he died, then various other relations would die, and then the mourning process would keep on going. But one thing that I was very aware of with all the black is that we could use as much texture as possible, and this really helped the lighting cameraman.
I had many conversations with mechanical and our lighting cameraman about how to make black have more depth and be less flat and less slightly light absorbing. In keeping with the fashion and facts of the time, there was a lot of heavy embellishment on the gowns and a lot of detail, a lot of embroidery, a lot of lace, a lot of layered on trim. Jet, which sparkles in light, was a very common decoration. Pleating, frilling and masses of ribbon was used in Victorian period to create texture and detail, and Victoria was a great person for adding embellishment and the use of jewelry.
But also, in order to help us tell her story as [the Queen's] relationship developed with Abdul, I used subtle different sorts of dark tones, like very dark gray or turf brown or purples, which were a mourning color, various purples and lavenders; then, of course, the traditional white, which is a very important later stage mourning color. The lace and actual white fabrics and silks used were part of the process of the mourning, but also helped the telling of our story as things lightened, particularly during their trips to Italy when she starts to rediscover joy, interest and the closeness of her friendship with Abdul.
How did you research how to design Abdul's costumes, especially since so much of the documentation had been destroyed?
Very, very deliberately, masses of visual reference were lost — particularly of him and of the two of them together — which there had been a lot of. But there was a enough. We did a massive amount of research and we found in various archives images of Abdul as he progressed through the royal household. When he started, that uniform he and [fellow Indian servant] Mohammed [played by Adeel Akhtar] were put in initially [above] is like a concoction of a Western version of what they think an Indian and a servant would wear. In many aways it echoes what the servants in the royal household wore — the gold-embellishment and trim — and it had a very Indian feel (or what the royal tailors perceive to be an Indian feel), which of course was always a made-up look.
Then, you could see as Abdul became 'munshi'— as she made him her 'munshi' and teacher — he started to wear more flamboyant, more traditional Indian clothing of high ranking [below]; a lot of silks, a lot of rich colors, a lot of surface details. As he progressed, and became more pompous and caused more discord in the royal household, his visual look added also to the disquiet and the racism [from] within the household, which is quite obvious to our story. So it was a progression from the very simple look of when he's in Agra as a lowly clerk and to the royal household where he's first a servant and then moves on to becoming dangerously close to the Queen, to the horror of everybody.
The beginning of the movie shows an aging Queen Victoria being woken and physically dressed by a procession of dressers and ladies-in waiting; how did that whole elaborate scene affect your job as the costume designer?
It was very important, right from when she's hauled out of bed, literally comatose, by her personal servants and her maids of the bed chamber, to when she starts the process, so that the actor feels the constraints of the corset and the feeling of the weight of the clothes of that period and how they would affect how people walked while bringing all this fabric around with them and whipping it around as they turned corners and how it limited what a person could do. All of that was very important to get that feeling.
But also Victoria's passivity and — through the feeling of sadness about that scene of dressing scene — of her literally being treated like a child and literally sticking her arms, like, her arms out, arms up, in you go, out you go. That kind of strange set up — this mixture from her servants of fear and yet arrogance — that comes with power and obviously, she's at an age and a frail woman at that point. She ends at the state banquet, and that obviously is the [culmination] of her dressing [with the] final look of how she is at her entrance and sitting at the head of the long table at the state banquet.
The state banquet scene in the beginning was spectacular in terms of the number of people in costume and the overall composition. How did you handle that?
I'm very lucky in that I had a brilliant team, and that particular scene was brought forward in the schedule, which obviously is everybody's nightmare working in film. It was a massive rush to get it ready. All of the ladies of the court and the gentlemen of the court and all of the servants and everything had to be completely right and yet have a flexibility, so you felt it was real and that people were not just costumed dummies — that everybody had a life and a background and a history of their own that every single person was unique. We worked very hard.
What was it like working for a second time with Dame Judi Dench, and how did your costumes to help put her in her role?
We worked very closely together. We have a lot of laughs. We worked our way through everything: the weight of the costumes, the amount of changes, how they expressed the woman, how we going to use the different dark colors to express the development of the relationship, that woman's character — and Judi just takes this. She has this wonderful instinctive skill — genius — and it's almost mysterious. It's wonderful, you observe it in some great actors. You cannot pin it down. She has this amazing ability to totally absorb the character and just seamlessly work [in] and it's like something that's intuitive in her. She opens herself up in every way, to life in every character she plays. She's completely fearless and watching that and being part of that was an absolute joy.
Homepage photo: Peter Mountain / Focus Features
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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