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In the early 1970s, the young British actor and up-and-coming film star James Fox famously threw over his career for evangelical work among university students in the north of England, initially supporting himself with a mundane day job as a salesman
In the early 1970s, the young British actor and up-and-coming film star James Fox famously threw over his career for evangelical work among university students in the north of England, initially supporting himself with a mundane day job as a salesman for a telephone sanitising service. Fox’s eccentric decision is usually portrayed as some sort of nervous breakdown triggered by the disturbing nature of the film Performance - in which he had recently starred with Mick Jagger – due to which he had become ensnared by some “cult” (I’m sure I’ve read somewhere –incorrectly – that it was the Plymouth Brethren). This, though, is something of a myth, which has persisted despite the rather more measured and nuanced account provided by the man himself now more than forty year ago. Comeback at first glance looks like a typical Hodder & Stoughton Christian memoir, and in the US the work was handled by the evangelical publisher Eerdmans. However, only the last few chapters are concerned with Fox’s religious conversion and what came after, and despite the book’s title his decision to return to acting is dealt with only at the very end. Readers who are interested primarily in an actor’s reminiscences can enjoy Fox’s account of his early life and career without fear of being “preached at”. The surname Fox, of course, is synonymous with acting and theatreland. James’ father Robin was a theatrical agent whose roster included family friend Robert Morley; in due course Robin and Morley went into the production business together, partnering with Robin’s secretary Ros Chatto (the since much-reported intimacy between Robin and Chatto is not mentioned, perhaps because Chatto was still alive at the time). Two of Robin’s sons became actors, while the third (who died recently) was a theatrical producer, and the next generation has produced a whole crop of household names. Fox had a couple of small roles in films as a child, but his parents were less than enthusiastic about his decision to take things further after schooling at Harrow by attending drama school in London – Fox writes that they were “resigned” to their son’s ambition. After a spell of national service in Kenya, Fox took a day job at Fortnum’s and then Marks & Spencer (his parents with friendly with the Sieffs) before Tony Richardson cast him in a small role in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (this was long before Richardson became James’s brother’s father-in-law). After some TV work (initially as “William Fox” – “James” is his middle name), Fox’s big break came with The Servant, opposite Dirk Bogarde. His career to took him to Hollywood, where he befriended Roget Vadim and Jane Fonda, and then Rome. Fox’s conversion to Christianity came at the end of the 1960s, while he was staying in a hotel in Blackpool over Christmas during a theatrical production of Doctor in the House. In the breakfast room, he met a man named Bernie Marks, who engaged with him in discussions about the Bible. Marks found a receptive listener, but only in part because of Performance: while in Rome, Fox had already written in his diary about “the wasteful, evil life into which I have let myself fall”. The role of Performance was “to turn me from drugs as a means of self-discovery and spiritual discovery and from the free and uninhibited use of sex as a means of seeking permanent happiness”. He had already bought a New Testament six months before meeting Marks. Marks was involved with an American organisation called the Navigators, and Fox went on to meet with American missionaries from the group in Manchester. At one point, he writes, he found himself “drawn into some teaching to do with certain experiences and gifts of the Holy Spirit”, but the comment is enigmatic and he also writes of building relationships with mainstream Anglican evangelicals at St Helen’s Church in Bishopsgate, where Rev Dick Lucas was the vicar. Fox is self-critical about some of his actions shortly after converting: he accuses himself of writing an “insensitive” letter breaking off contact with a friend, and of an uncaring self-righteousness. Fox initially continued with theatre acting, but in Glasgow he was fired from a production after prioritising a Navigators conference over his work, and he then experienced the early death of his father from lung cancer. This brought about his decision to commit to Navigators work, supporting himself first as a telephone sanitiser salesman and then by working for an estate agency. However, fame is difficult to shake off, and Fox recalls one manager who was “incredulous” to have encountered him in business setting rather than on the screen. Fox returned to his profession (aside from a religious film) a decade later, not long before this book came out. He retained some scruples about his choice of roles, and he declined The French Lieutenant’s Woman on advice that he would give offence to Christians. However, he accepted the role of a gay character in a television play by Trevor Griffiths called Country, because he considered it a serious work. As a Christian actor, perhaps he also wanted to signal to friends like Bogarde (who provided the foreword to this book) that he was no anti-gay bigot (there’s also a non-judgemental account of some schoolboy homosexual experiences). While at drama school Fox began a relationship with Sarah Miles, and he later had a girlfriend named only as “Amanda”. Through his Christian work he met Mary Piper, a former theatre nurse at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. They married, and a photo in the book shows them with their four children – one of whom these days is notorious as a far-right activist with belligerent Christian nationalist views far removed from his father’s evangelicalism. ...more |
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The supposed identification of Count Dracula with the fifteenth-century Wallachian ruler Vlad III Țepeș (“The Impaler”) is today so embedded in popular culture that it is perhaps surprising to learn that there is some debate over the matter. This is
The supposed identification of Count Dracula with the fifteenth-century Wallachian ruler Vlad III Țepeș (“The Impaler”) is today so embedded in popular culture that it is perhaps surprising to learn that there is some debate over the matter. This is despite hints dropped by the Count himself as recorded by his reluctant and bewildered houseguest Jonathan Harker, as well as Abraham Van Helsing’s assertion that “he must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land.” As explained by Kim Newman in his foreword to this translation of a Turkish account of Dracula, “literary and film Draculas” of recent decades that reference Vlad owe a great deal to a 1972 study called In Search of Dracula, by Radu Florescu and Raymond T. McNally; however, Newman describes their work as “this by-no-means-uncontentious book”, while Leslie Klinger’s New Annotated Dracula (reviewed here), refers to its “erroneous theory”. In contrast, the Turkish Dracula story presented here, first published in 1928, is unambiguous. The title Dracula in Istanbul is borrowed from a 1953 film adaptation (the first to show the Count crawling down the outside of his castle), but when the book came out it was called Kazıklı Voyvoda, or The Impaling Voivode. The text records Resuhî Bey, a Sufi scientist strongly reminiscent of Van Helsing, immediately recognising the vampire as “responsible for the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people, and tens of thousands of Turks, near the Danube River”, and in his pep talk to his band of vampire-hunters he recounts old stories of Vlad’s atrocities and violations of the rules of embassy. While Dracula in London was an exotic foreign aristocrat, in Istanbul he was an ancient national enemy whose defeat is a matter of patriotic imperative as much as public safety and private justice. Unlike Van Helsing, Resuhî was able to rely on local knowledge in the battle against the vampire. As recorded by his old student Afif Bey (a counterpart to John Seward, although without Seward’s drug habit), Resuhî’s father was from Of, and Resuhî grew up hearing his cousins’ “witch stories”. In Turkish terms, Resuhî tells Afif, Count Dracula is a “Cadı” (witch) or “Hortlak” (ghoul), words Afif would have known had he “dealt with the stories (folklore) of Trabzon and its surrounding areas, or even had spoken with people who came from the Rumeli and Skopje areas”. In such places there were societies called “cadıcı” and “hortlakçi” to fight against such malign supernatural entities. According to Ali Riza Seyfioğlu, Kazıklı Voyvoda was assembled from documents “wrapped in old newspaper” that he found abandoned on a Bosphorus ferry. The English-language translation is presented by the American publisher as an “unauthorized version” of Stoker’s novel and as “bootlegged”, but perhaps the 1920s setting allows us to see it (unlike the Icelandic version reviewed here) instead as a sequel: “Failed in London, Try Istanbul”. For some reason, however, Dracula found himself doomed to act out a variation of the scenario he went through in London a couple of decades before (and perhaps before that in Wisborg), with uncannily close Turkish equivalents of all the main antagonists he had faced in England. The 1953 film, directed by Mehmet Muhtar, is the focus of an afterword by Iain Robert Smith, following which some movie stills are reproduced. ...more |
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Publishers are occasionally shamed into withdrawing fabricated “misery memoirs”, but this is never likely to happen to the works of genre pioneer Beatrice Sparks, who between 1971 and 2005 produced a stream of “edited diaries” and interview material
Publishers are occasionally shamed into withdrawing fabricated “misery memoirs”, but this is never likely to happen to the works of genre pioneer Beatrice Sparks, who between 1971 and 2005 produced a stream of “edited diaries” and interview material that supposedly revealed the inner lives of troubled and tragic American teens. Sparks was denounced as a fraud long before Emerson’s book-length treatment, but publishing executives apparently remain unconcerned about the reputational risk of continuing to make money off a wretched oeuvre that falsely claims the authority of personal experience: a collected edition branded as a series of “Anonymous Diaries” is currently available from Simon & Schuster under its “Books for Young Readers” imprint, while one edition of Spark’s first success and most famous work, Go Ask Alice, is sold by Penguin Random House through its “Vintage Classics” imprint. Meanwhile, Kindle editions in the UK are handled by HarperCollins e-books. The ethical issue has largely been resolved as far it can be by fudging over whether the books should be categorised as “non-fiction” or “fiction”, although the fabulations extend to Sparks’s self-presentation as a credentialed psychologist and to endorsements from non-existent medical professionals with stereotypically American Jewish names. And even if you take the most indulgent view of “artistic license”, nothing can excuse her 1979 Jay’s Journal, which took a genuine document entrusted to her by the bereaved mother of a depressive teen who had died by suicide and turned it into a salacious story of Satanic ritual and demonic encounter – subjects that had nothing to do with the circumstances. Names and details were changed, but only barely, and “Jay” was quickly identified as Alden Barrett of Pleasant Grove, Utah, very close to Sparks’s home in Provo (a city that, according to Emerson, “leads the nation in white-collar crime”, particularly “affinity fraud”). Sparks was a Mormon housewife in her fifties who had done some jobbing writing over the years when she hit on the potential of jumping on moral panic bandwagons. The protagonist of Go Ask Alice is a drug addict, although the drug in question was not, as one might expect, heroin or cocaine or even marijuana, but rather LSD. This was perfect for pitching to Art Linkletter, who blamed LSD for his daughter’s suicide. Sparks had a line to Linkletter through a previous writing gig as part of a team churning out motivational essays that would then be recorded by Linkletter onto vinyl for sale through a multi-level marketing scheme, and through Linkletter’s son Jack she got a contract from Prentice Hall. To her chagrin, however, the book deal meant that the work would be credited to “Anonymous”. Go Ask Alice was a sensation that spawned a TV movie featuring Andy Griffith and William Shatner; her follow-up VOICES proved a dud, but Alice gave her credibility when she approached Alden Barrett’s mother. Emerson keeps referencing to a minimum, and the literary tone is informal and conversational (the author is successful pocaster), even novelistic in places. The author is interested not just in Sparks’s life and works, but also in wider events that contributed to her rise (she eventually reached the National Book Awards). The narrative thus follows some odd twists and turns, including imaginative reconstructions of Albert Hofmann discovering LSD in 1943, and of Richard Nixon formulating his “War on Drugs”. One of Sparks’s early writing jobs brought Sparks into contact with the cartoonist Joseph Barbera; we not just told that Barbera established a line of comic books, but also what was likely going through his head when he decided to do so. This approach does mean, though, that Aldren Barrett’s short life gets the in-depth and sympathetic treatment he deserved. The Satanic Panic, of course, was/is a multi-stranded phenomenon, even if a writer confines themselves just to the USA (Sparks made an appearance in London in 1981, although no details seem to be available beyond a press photograph) there is a great deal of material to sift through. Emerson takes an impressionistic approach, briefly name-checking the likes of the McMartin Preschool, Michelle Remembers, and the career of Ken Lanning. As a comparator to Sparks, Emerson introduces the notorious Lauren Stratford, described holding forth on Oprah as “a kind of horseshit savant, lying about everything you could imagine” (I was sorry not to see a reference here to the famous exposure of Stratford in the evangelical Cornerstone magazine). Gregory Reid, a pastor who championed Stratford, credits Jay’s Journal with allowing his own repressed memories of abuse to resurface. In the last part of the book, Emerson describes how Sparks’s “psychologist” persona was shaped and how experiences with teens at Brigham Young University fed into Go Ask Alice (although for privacy reasons details are changed). He also describes his own visit to Pleasant Grove and to Alden Barrett’s former home. ...more |
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Jun 08, 2026 07:46AM
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There are only two Jameses who are generally known to the educated public, and even then many people who read (or watch adaptations of) Henry James don’t know that his brother was the famous philosopher and psychologist William James, while students
There are only two Jameses who are generally known to the educated public, and even then many people who read (or watch adaptations of) Henry James don’t know that his brother was the famous philosopher and psychologist William James, while students who are assigned The Varieties of Religious Experience or some other work of William may not be made aware that he was the sibling of the famous literary writer. Their sister Alice, debilitated for much of her life by illness, has some posthumous fame due to her published diaries, but there were also two younger brothers, Garth and Robertson, who unlike their celebrated older brothers saw action in the Civil War. And Henry James was himself more properly “Henry James Jr” until his writings eclipsed those of his Swedenborg-inspired theologian father, a liberal-minded patriarch whose attitudes towards life were a reaction against his own father, a prosperous merchant and local worthy referred to by Lewis as “William James of Albany” to distinguish him from his grandson. The Jameses synthesises the lives of all seven individuals, along with details about their relatives, spouses and even to some extent their in-laws (Alice’s domestic partner Katharine Loring also gets her due). Henry James Sr was one of eight children borne by Catharine Barber James (William James of Albany’s third wife, following two early bereavements), and his wife Mary Robertson Walsh had sister, Catherine, who was an important presence in the life of the third generation as “Aunt Kate” (although mentioned only briefly, Henry also had a sister, Ellen, who married the son of Martin Van Buren). Aunt Kate makes it onto the cover of the book, as does Alice Howe Gibbens, who married William James. Lewis’s interest in in-laws even extends to a short appendix about the “strange death” by suicide of Alice Gibben’s father Daniel, who got caught up in a Reconstruction-era corruption scandal. Lewis’s task required the assimilation of a huge amount of material, including a wealth of family papers both in archives and in private hands, as well as familiarity with a variety of subjects: readers interested primarily in intellectual and literary themes are rewarded with judicious summaries and analyses of Wlliam’s and Henry’s writings, but they may find material about the younger brothers and the Civil War a bit of sidetrack – although the fact of having had two younger siblings who had seen warfare while they had not had some lasting impact on Henry and James. Lewis’ account of their military exploits is also lively, perhaps enhanced by Lewis’s own experience as a veteran of World War II. Alice James’s ailments are a way into the world of nineteenth-century medicine – Lewis does not speculate as to what diagnoses such as “rheumatic gout” actually were, but the symptoms suggest some form of myalgic encephalomyelitis before her final breast cancer. Inevitably, there are some longeurs, such as William James’ interminably introspective (and indecisive) letters to his fiancée and wife (occasionally enlivened with flashes of barely euphemised sexual desire, or tactlessly frank appreciations of other women – particularly the young Pauline Goldmark). Although Henry Sr inherited just a fraction of his father’s immense wealth, he “is said to have murmured ‘leisured for life’” when a court finally confirmed his entitlement. His son Henry Jr is quoted as saying “we were never in a single case, I think, for two generations, guilty of a stroke of business”, although Lewis sees this as misleading, “for the phenomena of money and business agitated the Jamesian mind… to a degree which it is difficult, or even impossible, to match elsewhere in our literary and intellectual history” (by “our”, of course, Lewis is addressing his fellow American readers rather than compatriots of Charles Dickens). It also overlooks the younger brothers’ post-military business affairs, which were botched – perhaps Henry Jr meant “a stroke of successful business”. William and of course Henry Jr interacted with many currents of intellectual life on both sides of the Atlantic, but the “family narrative” angle means that the primary focus is on the ongoing family dialogue. Even Henry James’s famous friendship with Edith Wharton appears scattered over just a few pages, despite Lewis being the author of a comparably large (and prize-winnng) volume about her. Emerson is sporadic presence; William James studied under Louis Agassiz, and through Emerson he got to meet Herman Grimm (son of one of the brothers) and W.C. Dilthey in Germany. One interesting circle is William James’s association with a group of philosophers in Britain called the “Scratch Eight”, which along with James comprised the “intellectually elusive “ Shadworth Hodgson, Edmund Gurney, James Sully, Leslie Stephen and G. Croom Robertson, the editor of Mind. Gurney, with Henry Sidgwick, were founders of the Society of Psychical Research, a subject with which James became increasingly interested following the death of an infant son; James and his wife Alice were impressed by sessions with the Boston medium Leonora Piper. However, it is disappointing to get only a passing mention of Sigmund Freud, despite the day they spent together shortly before James’ death that is described in Gay’s biography of Freud (reviewed here). Henry James’ correspondence with H.G Wells is quoted, and an encounter with G.K. Chesterton in Rye in Sussex noted, but there is no mention of E.F. Benson. William and Henry’s habits of transatlantic peregrinations go back to childhood: their father seems to have been restless and frequently moved residence, and 1844 saw the family lease a property in Windsor for the summer: “it was called Frogmore Cottage”, Lewis mentions insouciantly, and although he describes the location he doesn’t seem aware of its fame in Britain or the fact that their landlady ultimately would have been the young Queen Victoria. It was here that Henry Snr suffered what he called (using a Swedenborgian term) a “vastation”, later described as “a perfectly insane and adject terror”, a malign presence “raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life”. Lewis attempts to interpret the “squatting horror” while observing that “one proceeds cautiously with such occult matters”. William James describes his own later experience of sudden hallucinatory “philosophic pessimism”, although attributed to a correspondent, in Varieties of Religious Experience. Henry James was also interested in what he calls “the visitable past”; in 1870s London he cultivated Anne Benson Proctor, who was full of memories of “Keats and Shelley, Byron and Coleridge and [Walter] Landor”; another Byronic encounter was in Italy with Contessa Gamba, whose husband was the nephew of Byron’s mistress Teresa Guiccioli and who possessed unpublished letters. Recounting the story, Henry was told in turn about one Captain Silsbee, who was said to have lodged with the elderly Claire Clairmont and her niece with the aim of getting hold of letters of Byron and Shelley – the story inspired James’s The Aspern Papers. The last part of the book is an appendix on the “later Jameses”. After such an extensive narrative of nearly 600 pages it is tempting to leave aside an extra essay of 40 pages (in smaller type, to boot!), but it is worth the time and is written in slightly more informal style – it is also here where the author notes his personal contact with some James descendants. William James had four surviving children, and the narrative includes details of their childhood experiences with their parents and “Uncle Henry”. One son, Harry (or Henry III), was a lawyer (and astute investor) who won a Pulitzer for his biography of Charles W. Eliot. A grandson of William James through another son was John Sumner Runnells James, who worked for CIA; this James was an addict and alcoholic, and his daughter recalls he and her step-mother destroying relics of William James’ expedition to Brazil with Louis Agassiz “amid much boozy merriment”. William James’s daughter Peggy, meanwhile, became a university confidant of Marianne Moore. Edward James, a son of Robertson James, offended Uncle Henry by publishing a criminal libel against the Prince of Wales. ...more |
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In the mid-sixteenth century, a sensational three-volume work published in Venice by Tommaso Giunti transformed Europe's understanding of its place in the wider world. Delle navigationi et viaggi, or "Journeys and Navigations", with cartography by Gi
In the mid-sixteenth century, a sensational three-volume work published in Venice by Tommaso Giunti transformed Europe's understanding of its place in the wider world. Delle navigationi et viaggi, or "Journeys and Navigations", with cartography by Giacomo Gastaldi, brought together an array of travel accounts pertaining to Asia, Africa and the Americas, all translated into Italian and including classified material that had been "leaked" to the work's industrious but initially anonymous editor, a studious Venetian official named Giovambattista (or Giovanni Battista) Ramusio. This Earthly Globe tells the story of Ramusio's life and political times, along with some long digressive narrative retellings taken from some of his sources. Most of the explorers and travellers he drew on were near-contemporaries; one such was Antonio Pigafetta, a survivor of the Magellan expedition. Pigafetta's manuscript Diary was initially of interest European monarchs and the pope more for describing a new route to the Spice Islands than for the extraordinary feat of the first circumnavigation of the world, and Charles V kept his copy under lock and key - early plans to publish it in Venice fell through due to a printer's avarice and the appearance rival volume derived from interview material. Other travellers whose writings made their way into Ramusio's project include Cadamostro, who under the patronage of the Portuguese prince Henry the Navigator had explored West Africa a few decades previously; Hasan al-Wazzan, a captured Muslim diplomat from Fez who had been imprisoned in the Castel Sant’Angelo; a delegation sent by the King of Portugal to make contact with Prester John's descendants in Ethiopia; and Ludovico di Varthema, an Italian who had visited Mecca (disguised as a Muslim), India and the Spice Islands. For China, however, Ramusio relied primarily on rather older source: Marco Polo, famous but long dismissed as a fabulist until Ramusio tracked down an early manuscript copy owned by the Ghisi family. Ramusio and his father Paolo were intimates of the legendary Venetian publisher Aldus Manutis, who specialised in printing editions of Latin and Greek classical works, and the author speculates that a new edition of Strabo's Geography that Ramusio helped bring to fruition following Aldus's death was his "point of departure for a new geography that would take into account the extraordinary discoveries of his time". We are told more than is strictly necessary for the book’s main theme about how Ramusio helped to secure a manuscript of Pliny the Younger#s Letters for Aldus while on a diplomatic mission to France as an aide to Alvise Mocenigo ("whether they obtained them from the resident abbot or whether they secretly smuggled them out of the Abbaye de Saint-Victor with the help of some conniving friar is unclear"); similarly off the point, but interesting, are details of a visit that Aldus received Erasmus, and of how Ramusio's friend Pietro Bembo, at the time one of Aldus’s "star writers and editors", was prevented by the authorities from dedicating a novel to his lover Lucretia (Lucrezia) Borgia – Venice feared the reaction of her husband, the Duke of Ferrara. Di Robinant’s style is informal, but the digressive travel accounts mean that Ramusio himself sometimes disappears from view – and in the case of Marco Polo, who had been dead more than two hundred years before Ramusio’s project was conceived, there’s a sense of a familiar journey being retrod. There is postscript in which the author visits Ramusio’s villa, which by happy coincidence had been purchased by a geographer named Francesco Vallerani. ...more |
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As of 2025, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" is among the most popular songs played at funerals in the UK, and jokes from Monty Python's Life of Brian are embedded in the country's popular culture. Meanwhile, one of the film's creators, Micha
As of 2025, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" is among the most popular songs played at funerals in the UK, and jokes from Monty Python's Life of Brian are embedded in the country's popular culture. Meanwhile, one of the film's creators, Michael Palin, is widely regarded as one of television's most genial and sympathetic presenters, meeting all sorts of people as he criss-crosses the globe making travel programmes. This book, by contrast, recalls a time when "Monty Python" was a byword for controversy and offence. Monty Python: The Case Against is a short work, its double-column presentation broken up by reproductions of primary sources scattered through the pages: Hewison is an old friend of Palin since university days, and the publisher, Eyre Methuen, appears to have an extensive archive of legal materials and other correspondence relating to its responsibility for producing Python-related tie-in books. While Brian raised the spectre of Britain's then-archaic blasphemy laws, the books and records (the latter produced by Charisma Records) meant navigating issues relating to "copyright, libel and obscenity", and there were also corporate censorship battles: the higher echelons of the BBC were troubled by some of the material they were broadcasting (although they didn’t always understand it, on one occasion misinterpreting a severed arm in a sketch as a "big penis"), and the "mutilation" of their material in the US led to Pythons acting as litigants for a change. American law does not recognise "moral rights", but judges in New York were prepared to consider that cutting up their work might be financially damaging and that "to call the resulting programme 'Monty Python' might be a misdirection under the Lanham Act". The matter was settled, but the Pythons had "made a contribution to the new laws of the entertainment industry." On the issue of copyright, there was an early skirmish when a firm of ukulele tutors objected to the reproduction of some sheet music in a spoof advertisement; more serious was when a copyright clearance for "Annie's Song" on an LP was disputed on the grounds both that the permission had not been for a parody and that the new lyrics were defamatory of John Denver. A curiosity of obscenity law was that whereas a jury trial might be persuaded to throw out a prosecution case, the law also allowed the police simply to seize materials and ask a magistrate to authorise their destruction. The Pythons did bend when proportionate, agreeing to remove a passing sexual reference from a printed monologue to prevent a publishing schedule being derailed. The battle over Brian, of course, is the most celebrated controversy, and the title for Chapter 5 – "This Sick Enterprise" – is taken from a quote from the Nationwide Festival of Light, which overlapped with Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers and Listeners Association. A few years previously, NVLA had successfully sued Gay News over a "blasphemous" poem, and the Pythons turned to the paper's barrister, John Mortimer, for advice. Given the litany of comdemnation from various clerics, it is interesting that Graham Chapman received a supportive hand-written letter from a canon of St George's, Windsor (from the acknowledgements identifiable as James Atherton Fisher), who based on his reading of the script and a tape of the dialogue took the view that, while the film may be offensive, it "is not meant to be blasphemous and that it is extracting the maximum comedy out of false religion… and out of all who use religion as a cover for their particular form of sin". The publisher of the tie-in book was also nervous until the film was cleared for release by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) as an "AA" without cuts; however, the printer still refused to handle it after taking advice from John Smyth, the barrister who had previously brought the case against Gay News (more recently, it has come to light that Smyth was a notorious flagellomanic obsessed with beating boys, and may have been responsible for a fatality in Africa – the discovery of the scandal led to the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury over his knowledge of Smyth's predilections). The final chapter deals with the furore around the release of the film, focusing on the USA and the UK but also surveying other countries. In Britain, local councils could censor what cinemas were allowed to show, creating a bizarrely haphazard approach: Hewison quotes James Ferman, the Secretary of the BBFC as describing West Yorkshire as "the most heavily-censored area in the English-speaking world – and that includes South Africa." The Pythons refused to allow a compromise where some cinemas offered to exhibit the film as an "X" certificate. Abroad, Norway worked around censorship by simply not giving certain lines Norwegian subtitles, which had minimal impact in a country where English is widely understood. As expected, this chapter also includes an account of the famous TV chat-show clash with Malcolm Muggeridge and Mervyn Stockwood. ...more |
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Arthur Conan Doyle never revealed how he came to meet John Watson, although one theory noted by Leslie Klinger is that it was at the Phoenix Masonic Lodge, which Doyle joined in 1887. Whatever the circumstances, we know that Doyle became Watson’s col
Arthur Conan Doyle never revealed how he came to meet John Watson, although one theory noted by Leslie Klinger is that it was at the Phoenix Masonic Lodge, which Doyle joined in 1887. Whatever the circumstances, we know that Doyle became Watson’s collaborator and agent, and within the same year he arranged for Watson’s account of a double-murder investigation in London to be published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual. The first part of the work introduced Watson’s flatmate Sherlock Holmes, the world’s first self-described “consulting detective”, while in the second half another author (most likely Doyle himself) filled in the American background to the case, which involved Mormonism, forced marriage and revenge. A second long adventure appeared three years later in Lippincourt’s magazine, after which a further 58 stories about Holmes – mostly, but not all narrated by Watson – were famously published in the Strand magazine and collected into a series of books. Klinger’s “New Annotated Edition” in three volumes covers the complete canon of four novels and 56 stories, and alongside a wealth of general historical and geographical contextualisation his notes draw on decades of “Holmesian” (or, as Americans prefer, “Sherlockian”) scholarship. Like Bram Stoker (Klinger’s New Annotated Draculareviewed here), Watson and Doyle hid many names and locations behind pseudonyms, and a close reading of the stories – which were published over four decades – reveal numerous continuity muddles, character inconsistencies and arguable interpretations of events. For example, was Watson wounded in Afghanistan in the shoulder or in the leg? Or do both versions cover a more embarrassing anatomical location? Why does Watson in “The Adventure of the Empty House” present Holmes’s survival of his encounter with Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls as a great revelation, when the stories that follow demonstrate that everyone must have known about his return to London for some time already? One tempting explanation is that Doyle made the whole thing up as he went along: this is the approach taken by the Oxford Sherlock Holmes, which is concerned with Doyle’s supposed sources. Holmesians, however, for the most part reject this reductionist perspective, instead suggesting ingenuous (and sometimes tortuous) explanations and inferences that either resolve problems or put a different light on events (including how Holmes botched some cases or was taken in by false mitigations). Even among Holmesians, though, there are reservations about the authenticity of some of the material: “The Mazarin Stone”, for example, seems to be a pastiche based on a play script by Doyle, and it is notable that scientists even now are unable to explain or replicate the simian transformation described in “The Creeping Man”. One “fundamentalist” theory is that Holmes really did perish in Switzerland, but Watson or Doyle fabricated his return for financial reasons. On the other hand, similarity in “The Problem of Thor Bridge” to an incident related by the Austrian criminologist Hans Gross need not imply a derivative story, but rather that the individuals concerned were themselves inspired by Gross’s work. Although real identities are for the most part obscured, a few historical figures appear as themselves: most famously, A Study in Scarlet features Brigham Young, although Klinger notes that he is described as being younger than he actually was during the exodus to Utah, and that the size of the his entourage is too large (a few hundred rather than Doyle’s “nigh ten thousand” – Klinger also disputes allegations of forced conversions and of the continuation of the “Danite” secret society). More usually, though, real identities have had to inferred: according to Klinger, the character of Birdy Edwards in The Valley of Fear is “beyond question” the Pinkerton detective James McParlan, although their subsequent histories diverge. Holmes describes his grandmother as a sister to the French painter Vernet, although the family produced several painters and so it’s not clear which one is intended. There are also some more speculative connections, such as the suggestion that a figure met by Holmes at the Lyceum in The Sign of the Four was Bram Stoker himself, or that Holmes may have met M.R. James during the “Adventure of the Three Students” or worked against the Russian agent Dorijev in Tibet. Some of the notes also locate Holmes within a wider literary universe, although again the claims are speculative. Given Holmes’s French grandmother, might C. Auguste Dupin have been his grandfather, despite Holmes’s dismissive assessment of the French detective’s abilities? Might Nero Wolfe have been his son by Irene Adler? Was the unnamed politician mentioned in The Veiled Lodger “Dollmann” from The Riddle of the Sands? Was Fred Porlock, Moriarty’s minion in The Valley of Fear, actually Adolf Verloc from Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent? Was the dictator Murillo, mentioned in The Adventure of Wsiteria Lodge, actually the “Tiger of Haiti” Mayes, described in Arthur Morrison’s The Red Triangle? There also may be links with other non-Holmes Doyle stories, with Lady Frances Carfax perhaps related to Lord Rufton from “How the Brigadier Triumphed in England”. The “Great Hiatus” – the period when Holmes was thought be dead – has created a lot of Holmesian scope for this kind of thing. Did Holmes visit Shangri-La during this period? Was he a secret agent who, disguised as a Chinese official, rescued Rider-Haggard’s Ludwig Horace Holly from execution? Did Moriarty also survive, and reinvent himself as Fu Manchu? I was sorry to get rid of my old one-volume edition of facsimile reprints from the Strand, but the New Annotated Edition is far superior: Klinger notes textual variations between different editions, as well as material excised or amended from manuscripts. All the Strand illustrations by Sidney Paget and others are reproduced, as well as images from other editions (mostly American, but also including a German edition of A Study in Scarlet). The notes include the continuity recaps for serialised stories, and the extra material that appeared when the stories were collected into books are also present: prefaces by Watson and by Doyle, and a short essay by Joseph Bell. Klinger also provides a long introduction, titled “The World of Sherlock Holmes” (there is also a short foreword by John Le Carré, confusingly called the “Introduction”), as well as short essays on various themes attached to particular stories, and a chronology. ...more |
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The anti-Catholic "Popish plot" conspiracism that gripped England and Scotland in the late 1670s is synonymous with the name of Titus Oates. However, in this classic account of the affair J.P. Kenyon cautions that although "even today some Catholic a
The anti-Catholic "Popish plot" conspiracism that gripped England and Scotland in the late 1670s is synonymous with the name of Titus Oates. However, in this classic account of the affair J.P. Kenyon cautions that although "even today some Catholic apologists refer to the Plot as 'Oates's Plot'… this is to flatter him. The King's mystifying foreign policy produced a general feeling of apprehension and instability, and the ebullient self-confidence of his Catholic courtiers and hangers-on accentuated it". One of these courtiers was Edward Coleman (or Colman), secretary to Charles II's Catholic sister-in-law, Mary of Moderna. Coleman seems to have been a hapless figure, who as described by Kenyon "lived in an unreal world of his own". Coleman believed that the prospects of Catholics in England would be improved if Charles were less dependent on Parliament, and he entered into intrigues with the French court to bring this about. His scheming reflected "the delusion of all those outside the inner circle of power, that confessors and mistresses were significant political figures - more significant, indeed, than trusted and accredited ministers of state" – but although his efforts were ineffective he unwisely retained compromising correspondence that came to light in 1678, when he was accused by Oates to Charles and the Privy Council. Oates may have made a lucky guess, or he may have been given a tip-off by the Earl of Danby, the Lord Treasurer, who saw Colman as a bad influence. What happened next set the conditions for a perfect storm of conspiracism: the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, to whom Oates had given a full deposition just before Colman's arrest. The case remains one of English history's great unsolved crimes - three men were convicted of the murder on the basis of false testimony, but later exonerated. Treason trials followed: Coleman was hanged, drawn and quartered towards the end of 1678; and "between June 20th and August 27th, 1679, and including those tried in London, fourteen Catholics were executed; one layman, two Franciscans, four seminary priests and seven Jesuits. To these must be added two reprieved for special reasons, and one who died in prison before execution." Oates's supposed credibility was due to a period he had spent in France and Spain as "Fr Ambrose" – prior converting to Catholicism he had been a Baptist and an Anglican cleric, and he had just been dismissed from a position as a naval chaplain due to an allegation of homosexuality. He fared poorly as a novice at the English College at Valladolid and as a mature student St Omers, unable to master Latin, engaging in "bawdy and blasphemous conversation" and exhibiting homosexual tendencies, and at length he had been expelled back to London by the Provincial, Thomas Whitbread – who was to become one of Oates's victims. Having repudiated Catholicism (claiming that his conversion had been a pretence all along), Oates now claimed to have been the confidante of plotters at the highest levels. As Kenyon archly puts it: "Once it was accepted that such men would, half a dozen at a time, put their hands to letters detailing their treasonable plans, and consign their secrets to an ex-Anabaptist homosexual, then the rest followed." Difficulties were glossed over: Oates's testimony relied on impossible and inconsistent dates; he was unable to recognise Coleman (he blamed poor candlelight); and his checkered past already included a prior perjury charge at Hastings in Sussex, where his father Samuel Oates had been given the living of All Saints Church by a London physician named Sir Richard Barker: "There he eagerly joined in his father's quarrel with a prominent local family, the Parkers, but he made the mistake of accusing young William Parker of sodomy and his father of treasonable words. The elder Parker's case went up to the Privy Council, which exonerated him, and the local magistrates dismissed the case against his son." It was to escape the perjury charge that he took the position as a naval chaplain.* Kenyon suggests Oates's father may have prompted him to accuse Sir William Goring and Sir John Gage, two Catholics Sussex landowners. His allegations were also in some cases far-fetched: his "psychotic mind", in Kenyon’s judgement, was most in evidence in his suggestion of conspiracies between Jesuits and Cromwellians. Why were he and co-accusers such as Israel Tonge ("a crazy clergyman… a mental casualty of the Civil Wars") and William Bedloe taken so seriously? Kenyon explains: a seventeenth-century treason trial was not an attempt to ascertain the truth or administer justice, except in a punitive sense. It was a morality play, staged as a demonstration of government power, an affirmation of kingly authority, and a warning to the unwary.Judges could "coerce" juries, and it was generally understood that treason was so serious but difficult to prove that the accused were not to be allowed counsel or to sub poena witnesses, or even to be given a copy of the indictment against them – a way of proceeding that is "baffling and unpleasant" to modern readers. Bedloe, who when asked in court by one of his victims, Richard Langhorne, to clarify the extent of his allegations, "brazenly" replied that "Things may occur to my memory hereafter, which do not now" – the perennial boast of the false accuser. Kenyon's narrative is based on close readings of primary sources, although he also engages with earlier scholarly treatments (in particular, that Sir John Pollock) and even gives dues to a book about Godfrey’s murder by "the American detective story writer John Dickson Carr". He also dips into group psychology, quoting Neil Smelser's Theory of Collective Behaviour and through him Anselm Strauss (cited only as "Strauss", and without any specific reference). This is particularly pertinent to reports of "night riders", mysterious horsemen supposedly either seen or heard across the country. Although at times conversational in tone, parts of the text quite demanding. The trials held under Lord Chief Justice of England William Scroggs, with George Jeffreys as Recorder, are described in detail and at length, and it is not always clear that indviduals mentioned in passing in one place will become significant later on in the narrative, requiring a bit of back-and-forth. * Footnote: The MP for Hastings, Sir Denny Ashburnham of Broomham, was asked about the matter in court. He was "pitiably embarrassed" that his knowledge about it and of Oates's history of dishonesty going back to childhood might undermine the Crown's case, and Scroggs "got rid of" him "quickly enough". Ashburnham was a distant cousin of the Ashburnhams of Ashburnham and also son-in-law of John Ashburnham "the Cavalier". ...more |
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For many people in Britain of a certain age, the word "Granada" evokes not the sunshine and medieval romance of city in Spain, but rather the slate tiles and chimney pots of a modest Edwardian terrace under a damp and gloomy sky in the north of Engla
For many people in Britain of a certain age, the word "Granada" evokes not the sunshine and medieval romance of city in Spain, but rather the slate tiles and chimney pots of a modest Edwardian terrace under a damp and gloomy sky in the north of England. This is because for a long time a shot of some Salford rooftops formed the backdrop for the end credits to Coronation Street, a nationally popular soap opera of everyday life, which would sign off by fading into the logo and name of the programme maker: Granada, a regional franchise holder for independent (i.e. commercial) television. Granada Television had offices and studios in Manchester, but the larger Granada Group was based in London. It was headed by Sidney Bernstein, an Ilford-born second-generation Jewish migrant with a background in theatre and cinema. Bernstein first used "Granada" as an appropriately exotic name for a lush a new cinema that opened in Dover in Kent in 1930; as described by Moorehead: The entire town came to gape at a décor of such splendour that an admiring critic was reduced to describing it as a compromise between Russia and Spain. There was an enormous entrance hall, overlooked by a balcony with carved stone balustrades; there were Moorish arches and a feeling of 'infinity beyond'.Bernstein had commissioned a Russian theatre director, Theodore Komisarjevsky, as the designer, and it was the first of what would become a chain; similarly exuberant "Granada" cinemas next appeared at Walthamstow and Woolwich, although at the latter location a colour scheme "based on early church manuscripts with lines of gold, grey and red" had to be revised at the last minute for aesthetic reasons. The greatest triumph was at Tooting, where "the Grand Canal in Venice, the Ca D'Oro, the Palazzo Cavalli, and the Palazzo Foscari, all had had their say; so had thirteenth- and fourteenth-century French Gothic". Bernstein, born in 1899, famously joked about having been born with a silver screen in his mouth: by the time he left school aged 15 his father Alexander was already running theatres and cinemas, and renting out cinema equipment. In the 1920s, Sidney helped set up the Film Society with Iris Barry and Ivor Montagu, and following war work as an advisor to the Ministry of Information – which included organising the filming of horrors uncovered at the liberated Nazi camps – he moved for a short time into Hollywood film production, partnering with Alfred Hitchcock on Under Capricorn and Rope. The family business, however, had evolved into cinema almost by chance: Alexander was originally primarily a property developer, and his first foray into entertainment came about after he bought a plot of land in Edmonton. He planned to build some shops, and judged that a theatre would be a draw; the Edmonton Empire opened in 1908, and although Alexander "knew nothing about music halls", he wisely let the building out to experienced music hall professionals. Marie Lloyd performed at the Edmonton Empire just before she died, even though Sidney Bernstein had released her from her obligation when he heard that she was ill. By this time, music hall programmes had started to incorporate a "bioscope" segment into their entertainments, and Alexander had moved into building cinemas. Like Lloyd, Alexander died in 1922, at which point Sidney took complete control of the theatres and cinemas while his brother Cecil took charge of the property empire. As well as running cinemas, Bernstein was approached to organise private viewings for Lloyd George in Scotland and the Royal family at Sandringham. Although not an intellectual, Bernstein was interested the potential of cinema as a serious art form: Iris Barry, who at the Spectator was "one of the first serious critics of the cinema", became a close friend (and later, his ex-wife's mother-in-law), and it was through her that he was involved with the creation of the Film Society, which brought over European films for showings in London. He befriended Sergei Eisenstein, although there was some conflict in 1929 when he arranged for the Society to show Battleship Potemkin as a double bill with John Grierson's Drifters. Grierson felt the pairing was slight intended to question his originality, and Eisenstein was not pleased either (alas for them both, the two films are now bundled together on the British Film Institute's 2012 Blu-ray edition, which explicitly memorialises the "momentous" 1929 showing). Bernstein's war work included advising on pro-British messaging in films in the USA, and a 10-week visit to North Africa, where he was involved in the organisation of cinemas and the distribution of British films. He was particularly keen to visit the front line, having been refused enlistment in the First World War due to breathing difficulties caused by a sports injury that had disfigured his nose. In April 1945, he was in Germany: At the end of April 1945 the allies entered Buchenwald. Next day, towards the end of the afternoon, they reached Belsen. The following morning, on 22 April, Sidney came to the concentration camp. He stayed all day. That night he visited the nearest journalists' camp and persuaded an old friend, Alan Moorehead, of the Express, to go in and write about what he had seen. Then he drank an entire bottle of whisky; it had, friends remembered later, no effect on him at all.(Alan Moorehead, it just so happens, was the biographer's father). Bernstein persuaded the Allies to create a documentary about the camps, and for Alfred Hitchcock to offer his services – the biographer follows Bernstein's lead in calling Hitchcock the "director", although his involvement was from a distance in London, working through the footage and advising. For various reasons, the film was shelved before completion, but it was broadcast in 1984, under the title German Concentration Camps Factual Survey; this was the year after the biography was published, and one wonders whether the book helped build momentum for its release. Bernstein was opposed to the idea of commercial television – Moorehead's account of the various objections to commercial television draws attention to a less-remembered moral panic of the 1950s – but once it was clear that was going to happen anyway he decided to make a bid for a franchise. ITV Granada is still going strong, the last of the original ITV companies still in business. Bernstein did not have much affinity with Coronation Street, although he appreciated its popular appeal (and cheapness); he was more interested in documentary exposés and pushing the boundaries of the Television Act: Sidney… didn't really believe in impartiality. By letter and by meeting they fought, backwards and forwards, advancing one step, retreating the next. They fought about drunken driving, they fought about the monarchy, suicide and hire purchase. They fought, passionately, about 'What the Papers Say'. Jeremy Isaacs remembers Sir Robert Fraser coming to Granada and telling the assembled 'Searchlight' team that every single episode of the series had been a direct infringement of the Television Act in that it had expressed a single point of view. And when 'Searchlight' came to an end and 'World in Action' was born they fought about a naval prison in which a young man hanged himself (the programme was cancelled)…Granada also brought theatre into people's homes, most notably with a production of Look Back in Anger. It was Bernstein who persuaded Kenneth Clark that the National Theatre ought to include television cameras. In the 1960s, Bernstein also moved into publishing, first buying MacGibbon & Kee, then a half share in Jonathan Cape (company history reviewed here), and then Rupert Hart-Davis. At this time, Hart-Davies the company was owned by Harcourt Brace, but Rupert Hart-Davis the man (biography reviewed here) retained his position and had the right of veto. Their meeting went well, although Bernstein made a faux pas by reminiscing about Komisarjevsky – he had forgotten that Hart-Davis's wife Peggy Ashcroft had left Hart-Davis for the Russian. Bernstein entered paperback publishing by purchasing Panther from Joseph Pacey, who "chose to sell to him rather than an American company who had offered more money". The various interests were eventually branded as Granada, with Paladin Books created in 1970 for "highbrow non-fiction". Although not billed as the "authorized biography" the book is obviously just that: it was published by Jonathan Cape, and his biographer was a family friend. Moorhead writes that much of her work was based on "many hours of conversation that I had with Lord Bernstein over eighteen months", as well as access to "his papers and archives". Something unauthorized might have been a very dicey prospect during his lifetime, given his infamously litigious reputation, although there's no sense that anything has been covered up. However, a biographer has to be wary of sounding hagiographic, and so we read about conflict and arguments with his father and of times when he would "explode into irrational anger" and "stalk through the offices complaining that the telephone directories were in the wrong order, or that too much stationery was being hoarded", as a contrast to his generally courteous and fastidious impression. On politics, Bernstein "started out in the 1920s as a champion of the underdog, believing that socialism could improve the lot of man", and he remained a Labour supporter for his entire life. During the 1930s, he worked with Otto Katz and Ellen Wilkinson in supporting Spanish Republicans and refugees from Franco; later in life, he became a patron of Israeli causes, including advising on a non-profit television station and funding research into patterns of immigration to Israel ("Emmanuel Marx of Tel Aviv's Faculty of Social Sciences… said that it was due to the Bernstein Research Fund that social anthropology was established as an academic discipline in Israel"). Some aspects of Bernstein's personal life are handled discreetly: he first married aged 36, but there are no references to younger romantic entanglements. Some "human interest" background detail is trivial but revealing, such as an account of how after renting out the country property of Long Barn from Harold Nicholson and Vita Sackville-West he clashed with the latter over the care of some rare plants in the garden, winning the argument by paying for an official of the Royal Horticultural Society to inspect them and adjudicate. ...more |
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In October 1917, the First World War had been dragging on for three years, the stagnation epitomised by the ongoing inability to dislodge German forces at Passchendaele. In response, Britain's prime minister, David Lloyd George, invited a party that
In October 1917, the First World War had been dragging on for three years, the stagnation epitomised by the ongoing inability to dislodge German forces at Passchendaele. In response, Britain's prime minister, David Lloyd George, invited a party that included France's new premier Paul Painlevé and the South African general Jan Smuts for unofficial talks on how unity of command might transform the Allies' prospects. The venue for the meeting was Chequers, the Buckinghamshire country home of Arthur Lee MP, although Lee yielded the role of host – and his bedroom – to Lloyd George. This was the first time that the sixteenth-century house had been put at the disposal of a prime minister, two months before the Chequers Estate Act designated it as the future official country residence of the serving prime minister from the time that Arthur Lee and his wife Ruth relinquished their interest. The Lees moved out in 1921, and since then it has been used by all Prime Ministers aside from Bonar Law, whose premiership was cut short by mortal illness after 209 days (even Liz Truss used the property for "farewell parties" towards the end of her 45-day reign in 2022). The author of this book, of course, is the wife of John Major, and it was written and published while he was in office. Many of the historical details have been culled from previously published works and memoirs, but her choice of material is judicious and shaped into a pleasing narrative overview. The book is heavily illustrated both with newly commissioned photographs by Mark Fiennes and older black-and-white images for comparison. Lee, the son of a clergyman, was a former military man and diplomat, and while serving as military attaché at the British Embassy in Washington he had married Ruth Moore, the wealthy daughter of the New York banker John Godfrey Moore. The Lees took a lifetime tenancy of Chequers in 1909, and contracted Reginald Blomfield to undertake numerous restoration works, including the removal of Victorian pseudo-gothic accretions. The owner at this time was an aristocrat named Henry Astley, and after his death in an aviation accident in 1912 Ruth and her sister Faith took the opportunity to make an outright purchase from his widow May Kinder (a former comedy actress), which they then gifted to Arthur. However, being childless, Arthur and Ruth saw donation to the nation as the best way to preserve the legacy of their domestic vision. The 1917 Act covers all bases politically: It is not possible to foresee or foretell from what classes or conditions of life the future wielders of power in this country will be drawn. Some may be as in the past men of wealth and famous descent; some may belong to the world of trade and business; others may spring from the ranks of the manual toilers. To none of these in the midst of their strenuous and responsible labours could the spirit and anodyne of Chequers do anything but good. In the city-bred man especially, the periodic contact with the most typical rural life would create and preserve a just sense of proportion between the claims of town and country. To the revolutionary statesman the antiquity and calm tenacity of Chequers and its annals might suggest some saving virtues in the continuity of English history and exercise a check upon too hasty upheavals, whilst even the most reactionary could scarcely be insensible to the spirit of human freedom which permeates the countryside of Hampden, Burke and Milton.The last part of the book is on "political life at Chequers", treating each prime minister in turn and ending with personal anecdotes of how she and John received at different times various foreign leaders, such as the Clintons and Boris Yeltsin – famously, John Major took Yeltsin to the local pub, the Bernard Arms (now gone), which opened up especially for them after Yeltsin knocked on the door. Prime ministers resident at Chequers also sometimes patronised that other village establishment, the local church: a service attended by Harold Macmillan and Dwight Eisenhower saw "the largest congregation since Janet Attlee's wedding"; the vicar, the Rev. Cyril White, "had preached to every Prime Minister since Baldwin". This account of Chequers in the twentieth century is preceded by a more general history and guided tour. The estate's distinctive name refers to the chequer-board (or, more precisely, a chequered tablecloth) on which the monarch's finances were tallied in the medieval period; in the twelfth century, the land on which the house would be built was transferred from the Knights Hospitallers to Elias Ostiarius, an official of the Court of the Exchequer who took the name "De Scaccario" or "de Chekers" to reflect his responsibility for setting up the table. The estate may simply reflect his name, although antiquarians theorised that it may have been the place where payments were made. De Scaccario's great-daughter married a landowner named William de Alta Ripa, whose name in Norman French, "Haut Rive", evolved into Dawtrey and then Hawtrey – a surname that is commemorated at Chequers with the Hawtrey Room. The last male Hawtrey in residence was William Hawtrey, a founder of the Muscovy Company of London in the sixteenth century, and it was he who rebuilt the house as the Tudor residence it is today. This Hawtrey was also for a time the reluctant custodian of Lady Mary Grey, a granddaughter of Henry VIII's sister Mary and the younger sister of the ill-fated Lady Janes Grey. Mary had been packed off to Chequers following an "indiscreet" marriage, and her attic room remains known as the "Prison Room". The house then passed down through various families through intermarriage – William Hawtrey's granddaughter Mary was contracted into a child marriage ("by special licence of the Archbishop of Canterbury") to Francis Wolley, the son of Elizabeth’s Latin secretary, and after their deaths, Chequers Court (as it was known then) passed to Mary's sister Bridget, wife of Sir Henry Croke. Henry's granddaughter, another Mary, married John Thurbarane, having been wooed with notes scribbled into the margins of a copy of Paradise Lost, and their daughter Joanna married first one Colonel Edmund Rivett and after his death Sir John Russell, grandson of Oliver Cromwell through his daughter Frances. It was a Russell descendant, Rosalind Frankland Russell, who married into the Astley family; thus the purchase from May Kinder in 1917 was the first time the house had ever been sold rather an inherited – but given so many female inheritors it seems appropriate that the seller was a woman selling to two other women. Introducing the "guidebook" part of the book, Major writes that "Chequers can never be open to the public and I like to think Arthur Lee would have no objection to this book, which takes the reader behind the scenes of an intriguing part of our national heritage". As well as describing the architecture and décor, Major notes various artefacts: Cromwell memorabilia; a table used by Napoleon on St Helena; a ring once owned by Elizabeth I; and various paintings, including a work formely attributed to Rembrandt that Lee purchased from the Earl of Ashburnham's collection and a Rubens that according to legend had been "touched up" by Winston Churchill. Of particular interest, though, are the items on the bookshelves in the Long Gallery, collected by different owners over the years: The most treasured is an exquisitely illuminated fifteenth-century manuscript Missal from Bressanone in the Tyrol, immaculately preserved in its original velvet binding with gilt bosses and clasps. The other is a first edition of Albertus Magnus’ Paradise Animae, printed in, Cologne in 1483, seven years before Caxton first brought printing to England. There is a first printed edition (1503) of all but four of Euripides’ tragedies, added to the library by Sir George Russell, as well as sixteenth-century first editions of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Thermophoriazusae and a translation by Erasmus of Lucian of Samosata’s Saturnalia (published in Cologne), with the arms of Louis XIII on the binding. In a first illustrated edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1688) are Sergeant Thurbarne’s annotations; and a sixteenth-century volume of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs has Sir Robert Croke’s name inscribed on the fly-leaf.Less fortunate is The Gollywogg Book, which recalls when Faith Moore brought a number of the grotesque dolls to the house for auction as a fundraising effort in the First World War: "The book remains in the second floor corridor, where Golliwogg lived, which is still known as the Golliwogg Corridor". Hopefully that is no longer the case. Of course, every country house needs a touch of the uncanny, and Lloyd George thought his dog Chong could see a ghost: "Chong was particularly restless in the Long Gallery, where his master liked to rest in the afternoon. With his eyes fixed on one spot in the room, the dog used to set up a persistent barking." ...more |
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