Spalding War Memorial

     Lincolnshire is perhaps not rich in the work of well-known architects, and what work there is tends to be on the small scale.  This small building, that might easily be mistaken for a mere garden pavilion, is a case in point.  It is, in fact, the War Memorial in the southern Lincolnshire market town of Spalding (I've mentioned it briefly before on this blog).  It is the work of the most important 20th century architect in Britain, Sir Edwin Lutyens.  It is his only work in the county.
     The memorial, which was unveiled in 1922, stands in the 18th century gardens of Ascoughfee Hall.  The billowing, cloud-like hedge on the right of first photograph is original, though grown to deformity with the years.  I think the pond too may be an original 'feature'.  Perhaps, then, a cramped place for the annual Remembrance Day commemoration.  It is an Italianate sort of design - Lutyens by this time had, to a great extent, abandoned the Arts and Crafts style for the Grand Manner of Classicism. However the spirit of the Arts and Crafts lived on in a building such as this; the roof is shod in pan tiles, and the cornice is constructed of stone and creasing tiles.  Inside, on the back wall are carved the names of the Fallen.  The floor of brick and stone recalls those he designed for his early country houses.  The Wiki article points out the similarity between the Spalding war memorial and the entrance pavilion Anneux British Cemetery at Cambrai
     In front stands the austere and enigmatic Stone of Remembrance which Lutyens had designed for the then Imperial War Graves Commission.

 

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 Landsdown 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 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 but 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 live, 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. 

'Serotonin'

      Well, I've finally finished reading 'Serotonin' by the French novelist Michel Houellebecq - that's one I was reading concurrently with Joseph Conrad's 'Lord Jim'.  Not a thing I would recommend, reading two novels simultaneously, for like having two masters 'either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other'.  Indeed, 'Serotonin' seemed a bit vapid compared to Conrad. It just doesn't have the heft.  Vapid too, compared to Houellebecq's earlier work.  As I wrote in an earlier post on these two book 'Serotonin' doesn't really stand up to say 'Atomised' of 'Platform'.  An opinion that, as you can see, hasn't changed.  At only one point did the novel hold my attention and that was when its focus shifted from navel-gazing to a putative insurrection by a group of well armed farmers.  It was both engaging and, finally, rather moving.  Alas, in a manner that echoed the half-hearted 'evenements' in 'Submission', neither the insurrection or Houellebecq's interest lasted that long, and the novel limped off to its conclusion.

BBC NOW: Back to the Brangwyn

      I feel I have to tread carefully here, and maybe it would be better if I just didn't bother, but I'm up for a challenge.  In any case I so loved the final piece in last night's concert at the Brangwyn Hall that I fell compelled to mark it in some way.  
     So to the programme - it's a good place to start.  There were three pieces: Higgins's 'A Monstrous Little Suite', Weinberg's Concert for Trumpet & Orchestra, and Shostakovich's 6th Symphony.  The conductor was Ryan Bancroft, and the trumpet soloist, Håkan Hardenberger.  Gavin Higgins was also present and, if I may say so, sporting a rather fine beard.  I suppose what connect these three works is a sense that each is haunted (perhaps too strong a word) by the past.

      'A Monstrous Little Suite' Op is a five movement suite based on Higgins's opera 'The Monstrous Child' of 2019.  It was rather like the 'Curate's Egg'.  There was some wonderful orchestration.  I warmed to the slow movements - an interval canon (?) started the 2nd movement but was quickly dropped.  It was all rather like the score to a 50/60s Hollywood thriller, with all that unease that sadly one all too often associates with contemporary Classical Music, but without the images it was all rather inexplicable.

     So to the Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra, Op 94, by Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-1996).  I like the Violin Concerto (1959), (I'm actually listening to it now) but I think this must be the first time I have attended a concert and actively hated a piece.  The bf wasn't that keen either, but we both opted for the British thing and politely applauded.  Points for 'pushing' the audience, but the first half was pretty much indigestible.

     Things were a good deal more digestible in the second half with Shostakovich 6.  A bit overlooked, I should think, being sandwiched between two mighty works the 5th and 7th symphonies.  The symphony is both, paradoxically, a balanced and unbalanced work.  By which I mean each movement is perfectly balanced of itself, but the entire work is slightly out of kilter, consisting of a mere three movements - adagio, scherzo and presto - of which the first is larger than the other two combined.  In addition the movements seem disconnected - Sibelius inflected Romanticism in the 1st movement to Neo-Classicism in the 3rd. The symphony's brevity, a mere half an hour or so, is not reflected in the music.  Nothing feels rushed; the opening adagio is expansive, solemn and at times mysterious; the other two movements lively, by turns capricious and, sometimes, bombastic.  The whole, for all its 'oddities' is quite compelling. It put a smile on my face.

'Girl Stroke Boy'

      In the last week or so the bf has been watching 'Up Pompeii' and 'Up the Chastity Belt' two films starring Frankie Howerd.  The first is a spin-off from the saucy BBC comedy series (1969-70) and the second is a 'spin-off of a spin-off' being essentially the same as 'Up Pompeii' but set in the Middle Ages.  The cast is largely the same (including several British actors who you might have expected to have known better).  However, I'm not here to be censorious. Both of these films are towards the milder end of the British Sex Comedy of the 1970s - and yes, it is a genre, and yes, we have watched both the 'confessions' series and the 'adventures' series.  I think the worst one we watched was Hazel Adair's 'Keeping it up Downstairs' of 1976. We certainly hit the bottom.*

     Both 'Up Pompeii' and 'Up the Chastity Belt' were directed by Ned Sherrin (1931-2001). Sherrin (aka 'Ned Twinky' re: 'Private Eye') is best remembered for bringing the satire boom of the early 1960s to the small screen with 'That was the Week That Was', and for presenting 'Loose Ends' on BBC Radio4.  His film making tends to be glossed over.  As, maybe, his long standing collaboration with writer and critic Caryl Brahms which resulted in at least nine stage and tv productions.  All of this preamble brings me, in a round about way, to last night's film: 'Girl Stroke Boy' of 1971.  Produced by Ned Sherrin and Terry Glinwood, directed by Bob Kellert.  It is, I suppose, an English version of the 1967 film, 'Guess who's Coming to Dinner'. The cast is pretty special: Joan Greenwood, Michael Horden with Clive Francis and Peter Straker ('Straker' on the publicity etc just to add to the ambiguity). Elizabeth Walsh, Patricia Routledge, Peter Bull, & Rudolph Walker also appear, fleetingly and unexpectedly, in the supporting roles.  It is based on a stage play the 'Girlfriend' written by David Percival.  I have tried, but I can find very little about it or the playwright. It however did not get the critical acclaim claimed on some websites.  It was a flop. Apparently.  Be that as it, may Ned Sherrin and Carol Brahms took it in hand and turned it into a film. One of the changes was to make 'Jo', the girlfriend in question, black.  The plot is simple: young man (Clive Francis) returns home for the weekend with his boyfriend (Straker) who is passed off as his girlfriend.  Chaos ensues.  The result is farcical, bordering on the absurd.  Greenwood and Horden over act wildly.  Sometimes it is very funny, other times cringe inducing.  Some beautiful cinematography, but it cannot quite escape its theatrical origins.  Very much of its time.  The review in 'Gay News', Suki J Pitcher was corrsucating - 'a good idea, which gets swallowed in a mess of theatrical jokes and finally drowns in a confused sea of innuendo.  Why Ned Sherrin thought this script, which flopped on the West End stage, was 'a strange comedy....perfect for the times', remains a mystery....'

     Among the extras on this Indicator cd are a charming interview with Peter Straker and a short film, of 1972, 'A Couple of Beauties' staring Pat Coombs, James Beck, and Bunny Lewis.  Terrible but oddly fascinating. 

Girl Stroke Boy

1971

Director                 Bob Kellat
Cinematogrpahy  Ian Wilson
Producer               Ned Sherrin and Terry Glinwood

*  The spin-off - and the sex- comedy are (perhaps) linked phenomena of the 1970s. There is certainly a blurring of the boundaries.  Both were hugely successful: 'On the Buses' was the 2nd most popular film of 1971, and 'Confessions of a Window Cleaner' the top grossing film of 1974.  But then the 1970s were a nadir for the British film industry, and they weren't that good elsewhere.

St Mary, Pembridge

    We were planning on stopping in Weobley, but a diversion pushed us north into unknown territory.  All, however, was not lost for we ended up on the road to Pembridge, and Pembridge was one of those places on a mental list of places to visit as we journey between the Infernal City and my family in Worcestershire.  For not only has the large parish church have a highly original detached bell-tower/bell-house but the village is filled to the brim with half-timbered buildings.

     The detached bell-house stands just north of the church, and it's quite the sight.  A low octagonal ground floor from which arises a massive spire constructed of timber looking like an upturned funnel.  Visitors have likened it to the timber spires you find in Essex and, further a field, the Scandinavian stave churches and the wooden churches of Eastern Europe.

    The church is built of the local sandstone.  Apart from some fragments of earlier work, and the vaulted north porch (which is later) it is wholly Decorated in style - lengthy nave with aisles and diminutive clearstory, transepts and long(ish) chancel.  Pevsner dates it all to c1320-60.  All the windows, I think, have Reticulated Tracery.  It's the sort of church that would have pleased the Cambridge Camden Society with their desire for correct Middle Pointed.  The exterior of the nave looks indeed like the work of one of their approved architects (like R C Carpenter).  The doors are original; the west door has bullet holes from the English civil war.

     Sadly the two restorations in the 19th century have left the interior bald, dark and dull. The best 19th century feature is the barrel vaulted chancel ceiling which has a nice cellure over the High Altar.  It should be painted. Some good monuments though, particularly in the chancel, and Medieval & Early Modern wall paintings around the s transept. Jacobean looking pulpit.  Sadly the church is crowded with clutter.

 

Own Work: Pages from a Sketch Book

      Just a few pages from an old sketch book I found this morning while having a sort out. Mostly architectural: some sketches towards finished paintings and finally three architectural daydreams: a design for a street of houses; a reconstruction of the nave of Elgin cathedral, and sketch design for the rebuilding of the choir of the abbey church at Holyrood in best Late Scots Gothic. A bit presumptuous of me really.