Own work: Covehithe Church

     My latest collage; 'Covehithe Church' on the coast of Suffolk. A vast church that was partially demolished in the end of the 17th century as surplus to requirements, and a smaller, much smaller church erected within the ruins. A rather M R James sort of place. 22cms x 10.4 cms on watercolour paper.

Exhibition

   

 

     I am pleased to announce my next exhibition will be at Aberglasney Gardens, Carmarthenshire 22.03.24 - 28.03.24.  The gardens are open 10am-5pm everyday.  Do pop along if you can!

'The Jewel in the Crown'

 

    '....the spectacle of two nations in violent opposition, not for the first time nor as yet for the last because they were then still locked in an imperial embrace of such long standing and subtlety it was no longer possible for them to know whether they hated or loved one another, or what it was that held them together and seemed to have confused the image of their separate destinies....' 

 

       In 1977 Barbara Pym, after years of critical neglect, was shortlisted for the Booker prize for her late novel 'Quartet in Autumn'.  The prize however was in the end awarded to Paul Scott for 'Staying on', a novel set in post-independence India.  Being a Pym fan I've often regretted that she lost that November evening in 1977, as she never seemed quite to have received the acclaim due to her in her own lifetime.¹ 
     However reading 'Jewel in the Crown' - the first novel of the 'Raj Quartet' - I have modified my opinion.  Scott was obviously a profoundly talented writer, well deserving of such public recognition, which seems particularly poignant when one considers that he was too ill to attend the award ceremony - cancer and alcoholism.  He died the following March.

 

      'This is the story of a rape, of the events that led up to it and followed it, and of the place in which it happened.'

 

     'The Jewel in the Crown' is set in those turbulent years at the end of the British Raj. In particular it focuses on the events in the fictional north Indian city of Mayapore in the midst of World War II when in the wake of the Viceroy's declaration of war against the Axis Powers and the successful Japanese assault on Burma the Indian National Congress mounted the 'Quit India Campaign'.  In the resultant violence two English women resident in Mayapore are assaulted, one sexually.  And it is this period in the history of India that Scott experienced first-hand as an officer in the British Army in the subcontinent and Burma.

     'The Jewel in the Crown', which has no single linear narrative as such, pieces together from various witnesses the story of these two women.  There are letters, diary entries and records of conversations; the result is more like a dossier.  However, the compiler of this dossier, whether journalist or academic, remains unknown, though we can surmise that this research is undertaken some years after independence.  The result is utterly compelling, a dazzling piece of literature.

 

     Mayapore consists of two areas; the original city and the cantonment which housed the British military and civilians.  I think I should add here that these cantonments were constructed all over sub-continent in the wake of the Indian Mutiny/Rebellion of 1857.  In the case of Mayapore this segregation of communities is further enforced by the presence of a river and a railway line between them.  The characters and therefore the plot, however, inhabit a third, intermediate, space between those two sometimes harsh realities.  I do not mean these characters are necessarily outsiders; Lady Chatterjee for instance is certainly no outsider, being very well connected socially in both communities; but others such as the perceptive Sister Ludmilla, who is rather like an Orthodox yurodivy (a fool-in-Christ), most certainly are.  She is rather like a piece of driftwood that the tides of life and fate have left stranded in the city.  

     It is through her eyes that we first encounter Hari Kumar, oddly Nehru-like² and adrift between cultures, and Ronald Merrick, the local police superintendent, on what is their first meeting; and through her observations of that inauspicious event, we learn that Merrick is homosexual:

     'It was so with the policeman.  The policeman saw him too.  I always suspected the policeman.  Blond, also good looking, he also had sinews [like Kumar], his arms were red and covered with fine blond hairs; and his eyes were blue, the pale blue of a child's doll; he looked right but didn't smell right.  To me, who had been about in the world, he smelt all wrong.  "And who is that?" he said.  "Also one of your helpers?  The boy there?  The boy washing at the pump?"

      I would argue that from this passage (with its sly, 'under-the-radar' homo-eroticism) in which sister Ludmilla stresses the similarities between the two men, and from what is said later in the novel, that Kumar too is homosexual.  As I was working on this post, and in particular on this scene, I began to wonder about Scott's own sexuality; it turns out that although he was married (unsuccessfully) he was himself homosexual.  I cannot help but feel that somehow that knowledge, for me at least, changes the dynamic of the relationship between Kumar and Merrick, and between the characters and the author. Perhaps not in a comfortable way.  

     Both men, however, regardless, or because of their sexuality, attempt to pursue a relationship with clumsy, awkward Daphne Manners, and it is this fierce little tragedy played out against the vast flow of history that forms the core this novel.

     There is something of the French and Russian nineteenth century novel about 'The Jewel in the Crown' in its scope.  A vast, sprawling sort of book echoing a vast and complex setting. In a sense it is an attempt (perhaps in the manner of Dostoevsky) to understand, or even define India, which is as much a creation of the British administration and British and European political thought as much as anything else.  It is a hybrid polity.  This attempt to reach such a definition (if such a thing is possible) is something that also occupied the mind of another British writer of the 20th century, E M Forster in 'A Passage to India' - it must be either audacity or hubris that made Forster think he reduce India to 'God si Love', but then he was one for the apophthegm. One gets a sense, particularly towards the end of the novel, not only that 'India' is something that the British could not, or would not, understand but that the leaders of the independence movement were little different.  But then the struggle for Independence was at some level a conflict of elites. India was, like Post-War Britain to be a seed-bed for elite-driven utopian planning. For Nehru, schooled in late nineteenth century British socialism of the Fabian variety, India was to be transformed into the image of the nation whose rule he rejected.  Indeed the whole process of independence was fraught with paradox. That isn't meant as a criticism.  We all exist in some sort of paradox; it's all part of the human condition.

 

 

1 There is a marvellous, gently melancholic drama of that day, 'Miss Pym's Day Out', written by James Runcie for the BBC series 'Bookmark', and starring Patricia Routledge.  It's quite easy to find on YouTube.

 2 Hari Kumar was educated in England at the fictional public school Chillingborough, before the death of his father caused him to return to India. Jawaharlal Nehru was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge.  He jokingly referred to himself as 'the last Englishman to rule India'.

 

'Bluebeard's Castle'

 Last night we watched 'Herzog Blaubarbs Burg' (Bluebeard's Castle) a relatively unknown film by Michael Powell, the British director, that he made for German broadcaster Suddeutscher Rundfunk in 1963. It was, essentially, a cinematic production of Bartok's one-act opera of 1911, 'Bluebeard's Castle', starring Norman Foster as Bluebeard and Ana Raquel Sarte as Judit and what a visually stunning piece of work it is.  'Bluebeard's Castle comes at a point when after the failure of his 1960 film 'Peeping Tom' he was, according to Wiki, 'ostracised' by the British film industry and he found it hard to find work in the UK.
     The film virtually disappeared after broadcast until last year (2023) when, after restoration, it was released as a dvd by the BFI. The result if an absolute real visual treat.  The sets are spectacular but ethereal, the work of the designer Hein Heckroth who had worked with Powell and Emeric Pressburger on 'The Red Shoes', 1948, and 'Tales of Hoffman', 1951.

Bluebeard's Castle

1963

Director                 Michael Powell
Cinematogrpahy  Hannes Staudinger
Producer               Norman Foster

Peterborough Cathedral II: The Minster Precinct

     I have a vague recollection of my first visit to the Minster Precinct - the name at Peterborough for the close.  I was with my mother and my aunt, and I was very young though walking.  I think that we must have driven to Peterborough in my aunt's car, because we had walked from the car park in Bishop's Rd., the one, I think, that stands on the site of the Derby Yard.  That first visit became something I wanted to repeat on subsequent trips to the city. A bit of a treat. It may have been there that I cemented my love of architecture, that and the many family holidays in Scotland.  Perhaps afterwards I was taken to Woodcocks* on Bridge St. for tea. 
     It shouldn't be a surprise, then, that the Precinct is a favourite of mine.  There is something so eminently civilised about the place, and it is still after all those intervening years a real pleasure to walk through, even though it appears that many of the houses are now rented out as offices and there are too many cars parked about. But a refuge still from the surrounding city. 

     Historically the Precinct was much larger, running s to the river Nene, while to the north there was a deer park.  You could think of the whole complex as a model of the Heavenly Jerusalem.

 

     Anyway the Precinct comprises a number of distinct areas. To the west of the cathedral is a large open space, originally the great court of the Abbey.  Now called the 'Galilee Court', it appears to have been called 'The Close' or 'The Minster Close' until at least the end of the 19th century.  Buildings line the s and w sides. The west side contains, amongst other buildings, The Outer Gate that leads to the city centre, the former chapel of St Thomas a Beckett, and a fine terrace of brick houses built by the Earl Fitzwilliam in 1726.  The long range of buildings on the s, partly Medieval and partly 19th century, contains the proud, Medieval Bishop's Gate that leads naturally enough to the Bishop's Palace.  Both gate and palace were originally built to serve the Medieval abbots. The north side is mainly occupied by the stout garden wall of The Deanery.  Alas as a piece of urbanism the Minster Close doesn't quite work; the city intrudes a little and there isn't enough sense of enclosure and the space just bleeds away in places.  In the 18th century the effect was perhaps quite different for the western part of the great lawn was planted as an orchard.

       North and east of the cathedral is an extensive churchyard: the Lay Folks, and Monks Cemeteries. Beyond that is a ring of large secluded houses for the cathedral clergy.

       Finally to the south, and my favourite part, are the remains of the monastic buildings with all sorts Post Reformation houses built in and around them.  The cloisters were destroyed in the Civil War by those in pursuit of the Second Coming, leaving only the w and s walls standing; the entire e range including chapter house has gone and a later house occupies the site. However the space, sometimes referred to as 'Laurel Court', remains, and it this amalgam, this bricolage, of architectural styles and periods, narrow lanes and enclosed public spaces that is so deeply satisfying. I am reminded of those beautiful topographical watercolours, by the likes of Cotman and Turner of Medieval buildings as they were around 1800, before they were restored by those searching for architectural purity.  

     And that m'dears is yer lot for now on Peterborough as in Laurel Court my phone died and you'll have to wait until my summer trip to London for pictures of the cathedral interior.

* Woodcooks was a proper sort of place, with a shop on the ground floor selling baked goods & confectionery, and a wood-panelled cafe upstairs with starched white linen tablecloths on the tables.  It was, as far as I managed to discover, one of two branches in Peterborough.  There were other branches in Oakham, Uppingham and Stamford, and much further east in King's Lynn.  The Bridge St building was itself a bit of a confection being, to judge from photographs, a Victorian version of 'Merrie England' with half-timbering, oriel windows, and steep gables.  I don't know when it closed exactly - late 60s/early 70s?  The building was subsequently demolished and some wretchedly utilitarian structure put up in its place. For shame.

Peterborough Cathedral I: The Exterior

      On the Friday I left London for a few hours and took a trip north by train to Peterborough, to continue a project to visit all the Anglican cathedrals within easy reach of London - one visit per stay in London.  Oddly, considering I lived near Peterborough for many years, the cathedral has never yet been a subject for a blogpost, but by the time I started this blog I had grown to dislike the city.  It had by then become merely a place to change buses or catch a train.  There were other places, pleasanter places, to do shopping.  Like far too many cities in the UK Peterborough has suffered greatly in the 20th century from rapacious Modernity.  I'd go so far to say that by & large our market towns are very good, but our cities are poor.

     Peterborough stands on the Fen edge, at the place where the river Nene enters the Fens; was this then the last bridging point of the river before the sea, or perhaps the tidal limit of the river? And does that explain the siting of the abbey at what was then called Medeshamstede?  Importantly for the construction of the cathedral the site is just w of the Limestone Belt - it stands at the eastern tip of the 'Nassaburgh Limestone Plateau' - and it is of stone from the belt, oolitic limestone, specifically from the quarries at Barnack on the n side of the plateau which the then abbey owned, that the cathedral is constructed.  Work commenced c1118 after a fire destroyed the previous church, but the site is much older; the second abbey on the site was founded c,965, the first abbey though dates to c650 and was founded by King Peada of Mercia 'in regione Gyruiorum'* sometime after he had conquered that part of the country.  It is connected to another early monastic site locally, Castor just west of the city in the Nene valley. Like Peterborough Castor was a royal foundation; in the case of Castor the founders were Peada's daughters Kynesburgha and Kyneswitha.  What I find more intriguing, however, is that although it has long been know that Castor sits within the remains of a (large) Roman structure the same has recently been found to be true of Peterborough.  So the site is very, very much older than suspected.
     The abbey, Benedictine, continued until dissolved in 1539.  In 1541 it was reconstituted as a Cathedral - part of Henry VIII's attempts to re-structure the church. In the intervening two years it apparently functioned a collegiate church. The diocese, which was carved out of the vast diocese of Lincoln, consists of the Soke of Peterborough and the county of Northamptonshire.  In the upheavals of the 17th century the cathedral suffered mightily, though perhaps not as badly as Lichfield. The cathedral underwent two major restorations in the 19th century, firstly by Blore and then Pearson.  Leslie Moore, son of Temple Moore, and then George Pace worked here mid-century, but latter didn't do too much damage.  Thankfully.
     And now to the architecture.  Perhaps, because it's so familiar to me, Peterborough always strikes me as a work-a-day sort of building; apart from the w end it has a straightforward masculine quality to it, with none of the complexity of, say, Lincoln.  Perhaps also because it is essentially a Norman building, robust and powerful, even a little remorseless at times in its logic.  And - dare I say it? - monotonous.  The scale is large - 471 ft long and 180 across the transept. You certainly have to admire the ambition and the audacity of the original masons, and the abbot who commissioned them. Apart from the extraordinary Early English w front, which seems to define any logic, there are few further additions to the structure, which furthers the sense of homogeneity.  There are some elegant Geometric Decorated Tracery in the s transept chapels; more importantly there is the 14th central tower (rebuilt by Pearson), and New Building.  This was the last addition to the structure, built as an ambulatory around the e end under the patronage of Abbot Kirkton.  The master mason, it is suggested, is likely to have been John Wastell - the new Building has detailing very similar to King's College Chapel, Cambridge where Wastell was master mason from 1508 onwards.

     Likely Geometric Dec was the Lady Chapel, which, like the Lady Chapel at Ely, stood to the north of the chancel; it was five bays long and aisle-less.  Sadly it was demolished after the Restoration to provide building materials to repair the great damage done to the cathedral by the Parliamentarians during the Civil War: the church survived largely intact but the cloister and the monastic buildings were wrecked.  Thankfully the two fine processional doors between the church and the cloister survived. There was also an additional octagonal wooden storey to the central tower, and a lead spire to the nw tower.  Both now gone sometime in the 18th century.

     The west front deserves a paragraph to itself.  At some 156ft wide, it really is quite something like an immense scaenae frons; unique in the British Isles and, I think, in Europe.  I'm not sure architectural historians or critics are that fond of it per se, impressed though they may be by the scale and the concept which verges on the sublime.  The design can be best thought of consisting of two layers, one behind the other.  The outer layer consists of three immense arches, that apart from the central arch have little relationship to what's going on in the building behind.  Pevsner calls them 'niches' which seems an understatement.  These arches, in fact, form a sort of loggia. At each end of the facade are big, square turrets (or are they towers?), each capped with later stone spires; they are probably there to act as buttresses.  Over the arches are three massive gables; the central one being a continuation of the nave roof.  Historians seem quick to look to Lincoln cathedral for inspiration for this design, but ignore the remains of the massive w front of the abbey church at Bury St Edmunds (another Benedictine house).  The great width of the facade like that at Bury is explained by the presence of a Western transept (there was also one at Ely), but unlike those transepts, the one at Peterborough  is a narrow, blink-and-you-miss-it affair, which also attempts to combine the western transept with a two towered facade.  Ely has a single central west tower, and Bury, depending on the re-construction, three or five. It is this western transept that forms the inner layer.  Its external projection are the two towers peaking over the two outer gables. Unhappily the s tower has never been attempted, as its absence does detract from the over all composition.  Finally in the middle - a little oddly for some critics - is a Perpendicular Gothic porch.  Ruskin, for one, thought without the porch, the w front would be the finest in Europe.

Apologies for the photography.  It was a more overcast day than I had anticipated. I decided not to pack my camera and, instead, use my phone.  A mistake.

     

* 'in the region of the Gyrwe'.  That is the 'North Gyrwe', an Anglo-Saxon statelet.  The territory is coterminous with the current Soke of Peterborough.  The Nasaabugh Hundred is an old name for the Soke.

'The Reckoning'

     The other night we sat down to watch 'The Reckoning', a British film of 1970 based on the 1967 novel 'The Harp That Once' by Patrick Hall.  Both were new to me, and I'm tempted to add that after some 111 minutes I'm not that surprised.  In fact the novel seems to have disappeared without trace; it was very hard to find out anything about it online.  The film is work of director Jack Gold - perhaps best remembered for 'The Naked Civil Servant' - and stars the Scottish actor Nicol Williamson, Rachel Roberts, and Anne Bell.  Score by Malcolm Arnold.  All names to conjure with, but the result is oddly flat, directionless, like so many movies of the period. It just somehow sprawls about.  As the bf pointed out the female leads have little to do and Rachel Roberts, for one, is seriously under utilised.  It reminded me in many ways of Mike Hodges' 'Get Carter' (an all together superior film) - the returnee, the violence, revenge, industrial city in decline and general 'It's grim-up-north'.  Indeed some of the best scenes are those of working class Liverpool, a city then falling fast into decay.  So much for the Swinging Sixties and the Mersey Beat.  Gold makes it clear with one lingering shot that Modernist mass housing is not the answer.  However, 'The Reckoning' just lacks the grit, the sheer piss-and-vinegar 'elan vital' of 'Get Carter'.  
     After watching this film you might even suspect that Jack Gold (wrongly, I should think) was a misanthrope.  It certainly isn't easy to work out which class he disliked more, the industrial working or the managerial middle.

The Reckoning

1969

Director                 Jack Gold
Cinematogrpahy  -
Producer               Ronald Sheldo