'Checkered Past: A Visual Diary of the '60s and '70s'

But I sat back and looking forward

My shoes were high and I had scored

I'd bolted through a closing door

I would never find myself feeling bored

     I've been neglecting the blog of late, certainly neglecting the visual side of things, not being that happy.  It's all become a bit wordy.  Then lunchtime, for some reason, I suddenly thought of Peter Schlesinger's wonderful book 'Checkered Past: A Visual Diary of the '60s and '70s', published 2003 by Vendome Press.  I discovered this book on Ben Pentreath's Inspiration Blog over a decade ago now, and it has been a firm favourite of mine ever since.  It is a book of a slightly melancholic beauty.  Schlesinger's photographs are ravishing, sometimes possessing an ethereal quality, the result I think of the use of film.

     'Checkered Past' documents the American artist's ten years, or so, living in London from the late '60s to the late '70s.  When David Hockney returned to Britain in 1968, Schlesinger - then his lover - followed.  They settled in the then slightly seedy Notting Hill in w London.  In those days those grand stucco houses were subdivided into flats and bedsits.  It was a life poised between the bohemian and the Beau Monde.  A life that included, amongst a cast of seemingly thousands, such 'Somethingofthechamelon' favourites Cecil Beaton, Patrick Proctor, David Hockney, Min Hogg, Gala Mitchell, and Celia Birtwell; the social, the arts, applied arts and the intellectual. Socialites and plutocrats.  A life partially covered in Jack Hazzan's 1973 film 'A Bigger Splash', which purportedly covers the aftermath of the end of Schlesinger's relationship with David Hockney, and the creation of one of Hockney's most well known paintings, 'Portrait of an Artist'.

     It is a world that is slowly slipping from our grasp.  It essentially ended in the mid-70s after the Oil crises.  I think it was Sir Roy Strong, who moved in the same circles, who said that it was the last social great period, or words to that effect.  Certainly a more colourful world both in terms of the visual but also the character of those depicted.  There was definitely more place for the eccentric and the intellectual.

Checkered Past: A Visual Dairy of the 60s & 70s  Peter Schlesinger, Vendome Press, 2003

I'm ready for my close-up now Mr DeMille.

    

     The last time I visited Brighton I stayed the weekend with my friend Richard.  He lived in Brunswick Place in a top floor flat. Unhappily, the weekend did not go well.  However, on Sunday we walked into the centre of Brighton the back way, along Landsdowne Rd etc., avoiding the vile Western Avenue.  At the far end we paused for me to take some pictures of the somewhat eccentric Gothick Wykeham Terrace - all grey and white stucco and pinnacles - when a first floor window opened and voiced called out 'I'm ready for close-up now, Mr DeMille.'  He, Michael, then invited us in, at one point leaving us - two strangers - alone in his sitting room while he went downstairs to the kitchen.  The sitting-room was 'pure' Late Sixties/Early Seventies - white painted Gothic book shelves and a lime green carpet.  It was all rather stylish.  He returned some minutes later with some headed note paper and an invitation to tea sometime.  I remember him announcing that at one time he 'had Roy Strong on one side of me and Flora Robson and her sisters on the other.'  Or words to that effect.

     Sadly, I never returned for tea and never saw Michael or Richard again.  I wish I had, particularly Michael as he was a hoot and I was keen to record his house, but that weekend spelt the end of my friendship with Richard.  We last spoke at the beginning of lockdown, but alas, I think Richard must of died during those grim months.  

     This has turned out to be a less than cheerful introduction to a post about a couple of books by Sir Roy Strong, or as they used to call him in Private Eye, Dr Strange, than intended. However it is just about the only anecdote I have about the man, so it will have to do.

     Roy Strong is a bit of National Treasure.  Quite the Renaissance man: scholar, curator, writer (Author of some 43 (!) books, some in collaboration with his late wife, the designer Julia Trevelyan Oman), garden designer and maker, aesthete, dandy and habitue of the Beau Monde.  And I must say I'm a fan.  His first volume of published diaries 'The Roy Strong Diaries 1967-1987' is quite one of my favourite books and along with 'A Chequered Past' by Peter Schlesinger opens a window on the fascinating, now long vanished, interlocking worlds of Bohemia and the Beau Monde in Late Sixties/Early Seventies London.  A world essentially ended by the Oil Crisis of 1973.
    Therefore imagine my excitement when the bf announces he's found a cache of Strong's books for sale at Aberglasney.  After some toing and froing, I ended up with these five books.  The books that interest me most are the autobiographical 'Roy Strong: Self-portrait as a young man', 2013, and the 'The Renaissance Garden in England' 0f 1978 & 1998. (This is the paperback 1998 edition)

     'Roy Strong: Self Portrait as a Young Man' fleshes out part of that period covered in 'The Roy String Diaries'.  It is fascinating, partly because my own background shares some similarities with his - lower middle class and living in a 'semi', though I didn't actually live in suburbia, but (as I've said before) in a small market town in Lincolnshire.  I suspect that our tastes, and attitudes, are pretty much the same: 'a committed Royalist; an Oxford Movement Christian; a lover of Old England, its great houses, churches and landscape; in short, at this stage of my life, a prototype of the later Young Fogeys, conservative by instinct and not at all an Angry Young Man of the Colin Wilson/John Osbourne variety.'  (All that said, I suspect that Osbourne was probably more culturally conservative than assumed at the time.)
   At times this book reads like an Evelyn Waugh novel with our hero ascending the 'greasy pole' from Winchmore Hill in Enfield to Keeper of the National Portrait gallery at 32 and eventually Director of the V&A at 38.  If I remember rightly from the Diaries enjoying some very long lunches in the process and all the while encountering a whole flight personalities and eccentrics in the process, often immensely talented and but tragically flawed: the critic and exhibition maestro Dickie Buckle, and the artist Astrid Zydower spring to mind.  There is wonderful photograph - very 'Sixties' - of Buckle, Strong, and Buckle's assistant, Joe Predera.  They are standing amidst the chaos of the hang for the ground breaking Cecil Beaton exhibition of 1968.  Buckle looks like he's nicked his shirt from a production of Swan Lake, giving him the look a particularly robust and brassy barmaid. It seems to sum up a whole era.

    

     'The Renaissance Garden in England' is one of Strong's more academic works, a very 'Warburg Institute'* book, showing the influence of Strong's PhD tutor at the Warburg, Dame Frances Yates.  Yates (1899-1981) was another of those eccentric figures in Strong's life, a historian whose field of study was the Renaissance esoteric tradition; her published books such as 'Giordano Bruni and the Hermetic Tradition', and 'The Rosicrucian Enlightenment', reflect this.  Rather like the other books I have mentioned in this post it sheds light on a lost world, for very few of the gardens discussed in this book actually survive.  A world of great formal gardens full of symbolism and allegory, of grottos and mechanical wonders, places where the esoteric and the scientific were not yet estranged.
     Given that dearth of source materials ie gardens, Strong relies on written descriptions and contemporaneous paintings, drawings and prints.  Quite fascinating those prints in themselves.  Only one Hollar, but there are a small number taken from the wonderful 'Britannia Illustrata' of 1709.  In addition there is a liberal sprinkling of poetry of the period.  The result of all this is a rich, polymathic, satisfying bricolage of a book, the design of which appears to me, at least, to be heavily influenced by Mark Girouard's books such as 'Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan House' which were designed by Girouard's wife Dorothy.

*  The Warburg Institute is part of the University of London.  It was originally established in Hamburg in 1909.  In 1933, with the rise of the Nazi Party to power in Germany, the Institute was relocated to London.