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.

Curently reading....

      I am actually reading two novels at once, quite an unusual thing for me to do.  In the past I have occasionally suspended reading one novel to read another, say at Christmas when I might lay the current novel aside to read something more seasonal.  In the past this has included the Christmas books by Dickens, or Dylan Thomas's 'A Child's Christmas in Wales', or as last year the Collected Ghost Stories of M R James.
    The novels in this simultaneous read are 'Lord Jim' by Joseph Conrad and 'Serotonin' by Michel Houellebecq.  And what a difference a hundred years or so makes - from richness and complexity to something much more spare and lean, a observation both general and particular.  But then Houellebecq is a much more polemical, if not downright feral novelist.  Conrad, in comparison, a gentleman.  Really, I can't think of such an illassorted pair.  Amid so many glaring differences, yesterday evening (after I had published this little post) I realised that one of the subtle differences between these two novelists is that Houellebecq is writing in an age of consumerism and Conrad not.  It is enough for a contemporary novelist in attempting to define a character merely throw in a few brands for the reader to have some idea as to the taste, social position and wealth of the person described. (I think it may have Ian Fleming who started this trend.)

     I only started reading Conrad late last year with 'The Secret Agent' and was quite bowled over. I was reminded of Dickens, Dostoevsky and Conrad's contemporary Ford Madox Brown.  He is a great and subtle stylist. 

     I have to confess to being a little disappointed (so far) with 'Serotonin' though.  It lacks the venom, the sheer spite, of say 'Atomised' or 'Platform', or even the elegiac quality of 'The Map and the Territory' and 'Submission'.  Perhaps things will improve.

Old House

   Some pictures of my old house in Lincolnshire, some I posted on insta and others on here, and some have been languishing on a memory stick in my desk.  Can't help regret that the 'project' was never finished.  In retrospect it was, perhaps, one of the most integrated periods of my life.

St Mary, Swansea

     St Mary's is a big boned church. Victorian and hefty. Worldly. It stands on an old site in the centre of the city, the mother church of the city.  However the original church has long disappeared, and the current church is the replacement of a replacement, and, to be honest, doesn't move me much. 

     St Mary's is the work of Sir Arthur Blomfield (1829-99) - that prodigious but not exactly top-rank architect whom we have encountered before in Oundle. Alas this church, which dates from 1894-8, is one of his more pedestrian offerings. One can imagine any number of similar churches populating the Victorian suburbs of Britain, cold and dutiful. It replaces a Georgian church design by one of the Woodard brothers (William) who also designed St Anne's Bewdley.  Judging by photograph evidence it was quite rustic structure, with little of the Baroque polish of St Anne's. The eastern chapel - the Herbert Chapel - escaped the fell hand of Woodward and Blomfield only to fall under the fell hand of the Blitz when St Mary's was gutted.  The church was rebuilt (1954-9) by Sir Percy Thomas, Leslie Moore (the son of the great Temple Moore) having already resigned before work began. And Thomas's fell hand can be seen in the replacement for the Hebert Chapel - Gothic nearly stripped of all spirit, and feeling and looking like an electricity substation.

     Happily the interior is altogether of a different order of things, though in much need of repair. Even George Pace who did behaved himself reasonable well at St Mary's - the only really jarring object is the font cover.

     Well, I wrote those words in December 2023 and have only today gone back to St Mary's to take some photographs of the interior.  Sadly, I couldn't get into the rebuilt Herbert Chapel to see the reredos by the artist John Piper - it's all marbled paper rather like the reredos he designed for Newport Cathedral.  Even for a building of this scale the interior architecture is a little on the heavy side, and roof on the thin side a bit like one of those oddly skeletal roofs Pugin designed for his churches.  More heft required.  Alas, none of the furnings are quite up to the scale of the church though there are couple of fine icons.  As I said over a year ago now, all rather worldly.

British Transport Films: Elizabethan Express

At Platform 5, The Elizabethan,

A special express for the holiday season,

Summons its strength.

And the time to depart

Marks an ending for some,

But, for many, a start.

     When I reviewed British Transport Films' production 'Blue Pullman' back in 2021 I mentioned briefly another BTF film, 'Elizabethan Express' of 1954.  And much that I said then about 'Blue Pullman', and indeed 'An Artist looks at Churches' of 1959, could be said of this film.  Apologies in advance, then, if I repeat myself.

     'Elizabethan Express' is a film I've watched many times since I first saw it on C4 - and sometimes, strictly between you and me you understand, with tears in my eyes.  I certainly regard it as a favourite, even if at times it verges on the mawkish.  Whatever its faults, it is, however, a good example of how the BTF could produce a beautifully crafted short film (some 19mins)  'documentary'. I've used inverted commas because this film, like 'Blue Pullman', is really a piece of advertising, of a rather 'Reithian' stripe, making the travelling public aware of a 'new' non-stop express service, 'The Elizabethan', between London King's Cross and Edinburgh Waverley 'over the Tyne'.*  (It was Lord Reith (1887-1971), the first Director General of the BBC,  developed what are often referred to the Reithian Principles - a distillation of the BBC's mission - 'to inform, educate and entertain' the public.  The BTF and the wider Documentary Film Movement in Britain shared those principles, but perhaps not so explicitly.)

     'Elizabethan Express' was also an attempt to show that the newly nationalised rail service had put the War Years behind them - years when the railways were run into the ground by the War effort - eg the barest amount of maintenance and little if any new rolling stock.  Glamour, and comfort, this film announced, had returned. This attempt was made by the use of 'Heroic Materialism' of a much more potent variety than that on display in 'Blue Pullman'; the crossing of the Tweed via the Royal Border Bridge at Berwick is a marvel.  You could say that the train and specifically the engine - a pre-War Class A4 Pacific designed by Sir Nigel Gresley for LNER - is the star.  The narration describes the engine - The Silver Fox - in suitably heroic terms has having 'the speed of a greyhound and strength of a boar'.  Coupled with this celebration of technology is an appeal to the Wartime collective effort of a sort first seen on the big screen in Walter Summers's 'The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands' of 1924.  In 'Elizabethan Express' the narrative of the journey is interspersed with sections describing the work of all those toiling 'behind the scenes' to achieve the feat of what was then the longest non-stop passenger service in the world.  A slightly 'elite' train service as collective endeavor.

     The filming was quite an endeavor of itself, for unlike 'Night Mail' of 18 years earlier which re-constructed the interior of a night mail train in the studio for filming, 'Elizabethan Express' was filmed entirely on location.  Camera man (Billy Williams) and his assistant shared the footplate with driver and fireman.  Those repeated shots of the flank of the train, and (I think) the external shots of the engine in the water trough sequence, were shot just north of Peterborough where the Peterborough-Leicester line runs parallel to the East Coast Mainline for several miles.  But then the documentary film of this form is essentially a fiction of some sort; John Grierson (father of the British documentary film movement) called it 'dramatised reality'.

     Well, that has dealt with 'inform' and 'educate' and now for the 'entertain'.  This is mainly in the form of the narration written by Paul de Saux in doggerel.  An hommage to 'Nightmail', I presume, which had poetry written for it by W H Auden' no less.  No criticism of the actors who voiced the narration, Alan Wheatley & Howard Marion Crawford, but it is, it has to be said, a hit-and-miss affair.  Sometimes clunky: 'Watch them consistently filling the gaps in their faces with food'.  Sometimes rather affecting: 'The loud hiss of steam as the train seems to slow to the pace of a cloud breaks the afternoon task and disperses the dream'.  A quick nod also to the composer Clifton Parker who wrote the, at times Brittenesque, score.

* 'The Elizabethan' ran during the summer months.  It replaced the 'Capitals Limited' express in 1953, the year of the Coronation of Elizabeth II.  The Capitals Limited express, inaugurated in 1949, was a Post-War restoration(of sorts) of the non-stop 'Flying Scotsman' service which by then had been 'reduced' to a stopping service. According to Wiki, the 'Capitals Limited' made the non-stop journey between London and Edinburgh in 8 hours, 'The Elizabethan' in 6 hours 30 mins.  The service was withdrawn in 1963.

 

 Elizabethan Express

1954

Editor                    Tony Thompson
Cinematography  Billy Williams
Producer               Edgar Anstey

Last year in reading....

    Happy New Year!   The return of something I last did way back in 2016. I cannot believe it was quite so long ago.  Anyway here is (as far as I can remember) my fiction reading from this last year.  Discoveries were: 'Dr Zhivago', 'The Jewel in the Crown', and 'The Secret Agent'.  'Heretics of Dune', by Frank Herbert was, like 'God Emperor of Dune', was a much more impressive piece of fiction than 'Dune'. Only one real disappointment: 'Heat Wave' by Penelope Lively.