Four British Films

   To the bf's for the weekend.  It was almost spontaneous.  Sunday afternoon after a hectic morning at a car boot sale and a trip to the amazing Ickworth House (more of that in the next post) we settled down for an afternoon watching films.  Four in all, all British and all Post-War, and all, bar one, pants.  As a fan of British films, a sometime defender of them against silly snobbery, I have to admit they were, on the whole, pretty bloody ropey.  To my shame.

   You might have noticed in previous blogs a reference to the 'Half-hour rule'.  I don't think that the first film 'Cup-Tie Honeymoon' reached the half-hour before we bailed out.  It was made in 1948 but looked a decade older.  The cast, which included Sandy Powell, would one might have thought, insured success.  Alas, they did not.
    For the second and third films we fast-forwarded to the Sixties and early Seventies, choosing from the BFI 'Flipside' editions. 'Bronco Bullfrog', black and white, and dating from 1969/70, the story of a teenage working class lad in the east end.  While the Middle classes were swanning around being Hippies and would-be bohemians, lads like these were 'skins'.  A not unimportant thing to remember when you next encounter something about 'Swinging London'.  These lives did not swing. Neither, for that matter, did most lives in Britain of whatever class.  That said the film, which used real people not actors, lacked a real dramatic pull.  It just wasn't taut enough.  The opening scene said it all.  A gang breaks into a café, and they start to rummage around for cash, and there fleetingly right at the back of the shot is a middle aged woman standing in what must be the kitchen out the back.  I presume that was the cafe's real owner.  Worthy, but dull.  And sloppy.
   'Privilege' dates from 1967 and was directed by Peter Watkins (of 'Culloden' and 'The War Game'), and certainly the most ambitious, and quite frankly, the most ludicrous of the four.  A faux documentary, it is the story of a pop star, Steven Shorter, played by Paul Jones, and I suppose it can be said to be a critique of the pop industry.  If only it stayed with that simple premise it might have actually scored some hits, but it then drifts all over the place becoming at the end a dystopian fantasy with the Church of England (I mean, the Church of England, I ask you.), in league with the government and capital, as the promoters of a new fascism. Quite frankly risible. The film just sprawls about, the politics of the director probably getting in the way of the telling the story.  At times it was like being hit on the head with a hammer. Perhaps all these three films lacked clearness and directness of vision.  None the characters had much depth, which probably doesn't much matter in the comedy 'Cup-Tie Honeymoon', but it certainly does in the other two particularly when their ambition was so obviously high.
   It was therefore with a great deal of relief that we turned to the final film 'The Lovers!'.  A succinct, crisp film version of the 1960s Granada sitcom.  The director was Herbert Wise, the script by Jack Rosenthal.  Suitable enough for a film whose origins were with Granada (from the North) Manchester was treated almost as a character in itself.  One of the better television spin-offs.  A film of some charm.

Cup-Tie Honeymoon 

1948

Director:                 John E Blakeley
Producer:               John E Blakeley
Cinematographer: Geoffrey Faithful

Bronco Bullfrog 

1969/70

Director:                 Barney Platt-Mills
Producer:               Andrew St John
Cinematographer: Adam Barker-Mill


Privilege 

1967

Director:                 Peter Watkins         
Producer:               Peter Watkins, John Heyman, Timothy Burrill, Albert Finney
Cinematographer: Peter Suschitzky

The Lovers! 

1973

Director:                 Herbert Wise
Producer:               Maurice Foster
Cinematographer: Robert Huke

Own work: Life Drawing XLII

   Life classes have resumed!  Here are my first efforts of the new term.  Both are in pencil-crayon.

St Mary, Sutterton

   Ss Peter & Paul was not the only church open in the neighbourhood. Nor the only church to have undergone a thorough-going Nineteenth century restoration, only handled by two lesser masters of the Gothic Revival - Edward Browning and James Fowler of Louth - the results, it has to be said, are less interesting.

   St Mary's stands close to the village street - before the building of by-pass this was the thunderous A17 between Newark and King's Lynn, and it must have been hell for residents.  Anyway St Mary's is a large big-boned sort of a church, perhaps a more work-a-day piece of architecture than Algarkirk, but still attractive with a short central tower and splendid crocketed spire.  The nave is the oldest portion - late Norman, though all the windows are later including the very complex Decorated west window.  Pevsner thought it wasn't beautiful, but you don't have to agree with him. The transepts and chancel are Early English, though much rebuilt.  The North transept is my favourite part of the church, spacious and very elegant.  And being cruciform the church has some delicious cross-vistas. The south transept and the chancel were rebuilt by Browning in 1861-3 and the chancel restored in 1879 by James Fowler and it is to him, I think, that we owe the mad tiles around the High Altar (looking very 'Sixties' in my photo).

Ss Peter and Paul, Algarkirk

But now I only hear,

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges of the drear,

And naked shingles of the world.

     It was the annual 'Heritage Open Days' over the weekend and, coincidentally, a visit from A on Saturday.  We headed out in the great level vastness of the fens, and the church of Ss Peter and Paul, Algarkirk.
     Ss Peter & Paul is one of those buildings that has been lurking on my list to visit for years, and it took some finding.  However we were greatly rewarded by our visit; the church is a real gem.  One of the great churches of Lincolnshire.  Stephen Dykes Bower, the twentieth century Gothic Revival architect, whom I was privileged to know, thought that on the whole the churches of Lincolnshire were rather disappointing for although their architecture can be pretty spectacular (esp on the silt fen like Algarkirk) the interiors were dull.  I can see his point.  Very few of them are furnished as well as they deserve.  Algarkirk is, however, an exception as it was the recipient of a major Victorian restoration by R C Carpenter in 1850-54.  He filled the church with stained glass and decorated the chancel with a Puginesque sumptuousness.  But I'm leaping ahead here.  Architecture first.
     Ss Peter & Paul is a large, rich and complex structure, cruciform, with just about every style of Medieval architecture on display - most memorably Decorated and Perpendicular Gothic. The chancel and transept windows are virtuosi works where the stone appears to have become malleable under the hand of the mason. The Perp contribution is the clerestory, paid for Nicholas Robertson (d.1492) whose monumental brass (between his two wives) lies in the nave. The interior is multi vista, even quirky because the chancel is wider than the crossing tower and there are west aisles to both transepts, which seems a fenland characteristic eg. St Nicholas Spalding. The church is also rather cave like with all the stained glass and bare-naked stone.  I think most of not all the roofs are Victorian, as are all the pews, and the rather spare Purbeck marble font. Down the centre of the nave are a series of black ledger stones to the Beridge family who for nearly three hundred years were the squarsons of this village, that is both Lords of the Manor and the parish priest. Possibly a unique occurrence. The chancel is the glory of the church - the organ, choir stalls, the reredos, the scissor-braced roof all designed by Carpenter.  When finished in the 1850s Carpenter's decoration must have glowed like the golden mosaics of Byzantium, but now the painting on the glass has faded away and the painted decoration is flaking from the wall. We were shown around by two members of the congregation who told us how the parish was undertaking the slow restoration of this unique and special building
     In the vestry is a window containing the last fragments of Medieval glass in the church. The sight of it put me in mind of the conversation we had earlier that day about the removal and destruction of public statuary in the United States. It is a complex issue but I instinctively recoil from the destruction of art. It is something barbaric. I do realise, however, that there are times when, perhaps, the removal of art may be justified.  I am thinking of the fall of totalitarian governments (of left and right) in Germany and Eastern Europe in the last century.  (Plenty of fascist imagery and buildings left in Italy though, and corresponding communist imagery and architecture in Russia.) However I am reminded of something that has been attributed to the American philosopher George Santayana about how a civilised nation does not tear out the history it doesn't like but merely turns the page. There is a lot to be said for that.  However groups such as Antifa, - that new 'Rule of the Saints' - for me, at least, represent a new un-civilization. In the same way as the Taliban destroying art in Afghanistan or the Puritans or other radical reformers smashing up churches in North-Western Europe in that great holocaust of imagery that was the Reformation, or monks coming out of their desert monasteries to descend on Alexandria to burn the great library there. History is full of these incidents. I expect that sooner or later Antifa and their like will be burning books in their drive for secular purity, rather like Savonarola in Renaissance Florence, or the Nazis.  As I may have said before in this blog the English philosopher T E Hulme called Romanticism 'spilt religion'.  It could happily be used to describe Antifa and other groups of the 'Regressive Left' with that desire for purity and where terms like 'white privilege' take the place of the religious concept of 'sin'.  

     Here in the UK one of the major daily papers has published two articles calling for the destruction of major landmarks in London, but that is a call made before by politicians of the left in Britain before by the likes of Ken Livingstone, who, I suspect, want to create a 'tabula rasa' as a precursor to major social and economic change in British society. It is not solely a phenomena of the left; there are plenty in business who destroy everything in the way of increased profits and politicians of both left and right led the post-war attack on the British industrial city, the consequences which are still with us today and seem impossible now to repair. I sometimes see the work of the Gothic Revival architects , such as Carpenter, as some sort of act of recompense for what was destroyed. It's not hard to find videos online of radical students in the United States shouting at other whites that they have no civilisation. One only has to look at this building, worn and tempered by the years, to see that they are wrong.
     In the church the conversation turned to the lack of religious literacy of the British public - not knowing the Lord's Prayer or using their mobile phones during marriage services.  I don't know how long churches like Algarkirk can survive with so small a congregation (12 - 15 a week) especially when there is so much to restore. I left feeling deeply unsettled. Sometimes it feels as though we are at the end of things.

And we are here as on a darkling plain,

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

St James, Lode

     A few days, last week, with the bf. Tuesday we rolled up in Lode, a village poised between the fen and the chalklands in east Cambridgeshire.  Quite attractive too, but perhaps lacking an identifiable centre.  The parish church is small and Victorian, by an architect that even I haven't heard of before (and I do know some pretty obscure ones) called Major Rohde Hawkins (1821-1884).  Be confused by his name - 'Major' is actually his Christian name, he never served in the British Army. Or any other.

     Anyway the church he built in Lode is a simple affair of aisles nave and chancel.  It is built of clunch, that chalk that can be used as a building stone - quite common in east Cambridgeshire - but is really too variable for exterior work.  Quite a run-of-the-mill building really, the best parts being the timber porch and, inside, the organ case. We weren't, however, there to look at a dim church by relatively obscure Victorian architect. We were there to look the additions made to the church in the 1960s by Sir Albert Richardson for Lord Fairhaven of Anglesey Abbey. The most important is the Lady Chapel.  The outside is box-y, almost devoid of mouldings apart from the Late Gothic windows, and gaunt, like an electricity sub-station.  The masonry is snecked and semi-boasted like that on Richardson's extension at Anglesey Abbey.  Perhaps, I have to say, a little disappointing - though it looks better in my photographs than I remember it.  The inside is, however lucid and calm, somewhat spiritual, with some beautifully detailed fittings, i.e. the pews and the altar rails. It's all spoiled however by a great pile of junk in the back corner - indeed spoiled like the rest of the church by needless clutter. The usual Anglican shamefulness. 

     The other addition is the vestry on the other side of the chancel.  The windows are a particularly beautiful design.  The other things to look for are the inscriptions both inside and outside the church to the Fairheavens, we thought they both were by David Kindersley.

Own work: Collage

     Spurred on by the work of three artists I really admire, John Piper, Mark Hearld and Ed Kluz I've recently returned to the medium of collage, exploring the 'folly in the wood' of an early watercolour and that haunts my sketchbooks.  I'm quite happy with the result.