The Guide Oct 2013

the ISSUE 3 2013

GUIDE A GUIDE TO BRITAIN FROM BRITAIN’S BEST GUIDES

DIVINE WOMAN BETTANY HUGHES, TV PRESENTER AND HISTORIAN

LITERARY LIVES • CULTURAL TOURS IN LONDON AND BATH • LEGENDS, LIES AND LORE

Contents

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WELCOME

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NEWS Natural History Museum’s new 3D film, an arty house in Margate, new visitor centre at Stonehenge, the Mary Poppins movie and events from around the UK

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FEATURE

TOUR DE FORCE Two Blue Badge Guides tell us about their cultural tours – from London’s classical music scene to Jane Austen’s Bath

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Fact and fiction from British history

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INTERVIEW Author and presenter Bettany Hughes talks to Sophie Campbell about history, television and the X chromosome factor

Front cover photo courtesy of the BBC

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LITERARY PILGRIMAGES Marc Zakian visits the cities and landscapes that inspired Britain’s greatest writers

COVER STORY

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LEGENDS, LIES AND LORE

MY FAVOURITE Blue Badge Guides on views, bridges, statues and more

www.britainsbestguides.org

Our magazine introduces you to the work of talented and accomplished Blue Badge Tourist Guides Sue King, Chair to the Guild of Registered Tourist Guides

WELCOME TO ‘THE GUIDE’... where he is buried (without his heart which was interred in Stinsford, Dorset) and at Stonehenge, where his heroine Tess inevitably makes an appearance.

I am looking forward to a new film version of ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’, which is currently filming in Dorset.

Our interview features Telegraph journalist and Blue Badge Guide Sophie Campbell in conversation with the TV and radio historian Bettany Hughes.

The presenter talks about the ‘time travelling skills’ which are essential for making history accessible to a wider audience.

One comment Bettany made struck me as particularly pertinent: “I don’t think you can understand history fully

This magazine is produced by the Guild of Registered Tourist Guides – the national association for Blue Badge Guides (the highest guiding qualification in Britain.)

Email: theguide@blue-badge.org.uk • www.britainsbestguides.org

ENGLAND

LONDON

WALES

NORTHERN IRELAND

SCOTLAND

GREEN BADGE

ISSN: 2053-0439

Welcome to the third edition of The Guide. We hope you enjoy reading our magazine which introduces you to the work of talented and accomplished Blue Badge Tourist Guides. The theme for this issue is literature.

Britain’s towns and countryside have fired the imagination of many of its great authors. Our editor, Marc Zakian, takes a trip though the literary landscapes that inspired writers: from Dylan Thomas in south Wales to the Bronte sisters on the Yorkshire moors.

My Dorset schooldays brought me into contact with the county’s great novelist and poet Thomas Hardy. His influence spread across England, and I find myself talking about him in Westminster Abbey

unless you get out to see all these places – the structures, the battlefields.” That is what Blue Badge Guides do every day.

In our regular Tour de Force feature we visit Bath and find out how a history teacher turned Blue Badge Guide finally discovered Jane Austen’s genius.

Then we head to London where former royal bandsman Greg Laing takes us on a personal journey – through classical music to operetta and on to the pomp and circumstance of London’s military music.

So please come with us on a guided journey through time, accompanied by a host of historical, musical and literary characters.

Editor: Marc Zakian T: 020 7403 1115 E: marczakian@blueyonder.co.uk Project Manager: Maggie Barnes-Aoussou T: 020 7403 1115 E: marketing@blue-badge.org.uk Publisher: Guild of Registered Tourist Guides ©2013 Design and print: HMCA Services T: 01423 866985 W: hmcaservices.co.uk Display advertising: Andy Bettley T: 07846 979625 E: andy@hmca.co.uk

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NEWS

History, Culture

Lia Lalli Blue Badge Guide Italian & English

BLUE BADGE TOURIST GUIDES Blue Badge Tourist Guides are the official, professional tourist guides of the United Kingdom – recognised by the local tourist bodies and VisitBritain. The Blue Badge is the UK’s highest guiding qualification, awarded only after extensive training and thorough examination.

There are over 1000 Blue Badge Guides in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – each region has its own badge. We guide in all the UK’s major tourist attractions, as well as its cities and countryside.

The Blue Badge is the qualification of excellence in heritage guiding.

The Blue Badge is the UK’s highest guiding qualification The Guild of Registered Tourist Guides is the national association of Britain’s Blue Badge guides. Since its foundation in 1950, the Guild has dedicated itself to raising and maintaining the highest professional standards.

Our guides work in the UK’s museums, galleries, churches and lead walking, cycling and driver-guided tours throughout the country. Our members work in over 30 different languages. If it can be guided, we will guide it.

To find out more or to book: 0207 403 1115 guild@blue-badge.org.uk www.britainsbestguides.org

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A Knight at the Museum A London museum is bringing its collection to life with a new 3D film narrated by Sir David Attenborough.

The Night in the Natural History Museum explores the nocturnal life of the galleries and introduces some of the naturalist’s favourite creatures from the collection of over 70 million specimens.

Written and presented by Attenborough, it uses state of the art 3D technology and CGI effects to bring the inhabitants of the museum alive, showing their behaviour and movement in a new light. The film premieres on Sky 3D in December.

For a (daytime) guided visit to the Natural History Museum go to www.britainsbestguides.org

POPPINS OVER TO

HOLLYWOOD

It took 20 years for Walt Disney to convince PL Travers to give him the screen rights to ‘Mary Poppins’ – a new film, starring Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson, tells this story.

Pamela Lyndon Travers was born in Australia, but moved to England in 1924 where she began writing stories about a magical nanny. The book became a bestseller, and Walt Disney’s children begged their father to turn it into a film.

The author was so frustrated with Disney’s Americanisation of her story she sent Walt a photo of her Chelsea front door to show him what a London house should look like. Travers eventually went to Hollywood in 1961 to advise

and Events from around the UK

Art House Its front wall is slipping into the garden and its decaying interior open to the outside. This surrealist artwork is not in a museum, but stands on a street in seaside Margate.

British artist Alex Chinneck created the installation – called From the Knees of my Nose to the Belly of my Toes – by removing the facade of a derelict four-storey house and replacing it with a crumbling interior. The front wall curves outwards, appearing to slide into the street.

Houses clearly fascinate Chinneck; he is working on projects that include a row of upside-down shops next to London’s Blackfriars Bridge, and a house of wax bricks that will slowly melt during the course of a summer. Why the obsession with houses? “Architecture provides a fantastic canvas for sculpture,” he says “When you create artworks at that scale, they are impossible to ignore.”

Disney on bringing her character to the screen. The stern writer fought to keep the film faithful to the books, but was never happy with the movie adaptation and its songs – though she did pocket $2m for the rights. ‘Saving Mr Banks’ opens in autumn.

Critics are baffled by Tom Hanks’s decision to portray the Chicago raised Disney with a southern states accent. Londoners were similarly confused by Dick Van Dyke’s attempt at cockney in Mary Poppins.

PL Traver’s house in Chelsea will be given an English Heritage blue plaque, which will be unveiled in the coming months.

Inbrief TANKS FOR THE MEMORY Plans are underway for a First World War battlefield complete with barbed wire, shell craters and mud to be reconstructed in the English countryside.

History enthusiasts hope to attract 300,000 visitors a year to the £2million National Centre for the Great War near Cambridge.

South Cambridgeshire council is looking at plans which will see a living museum built to mark the 100th anniversary of the start The Great War in 1914.

The Western Front battlefield – the size of two football pitches – would be modelled on Flanders in 1917, with Allied and German trenches and a no-man’s-land.

The centre, which will be located at Hacker’s Fruit Farm in Dry Drayton, would also feature displays and demonstrations and an original WW1 battle tank.

For a guided tour of Cambridge go to www.visitcambridge.org

BELT IT LIKE BECKHAM The fashion for musical theatre film adaptations is set to continue over the next year. London’s West End stages are preparing to host a series of new shows, including a musical of ‘Bend It Like Beckham’.

We should also see the UK’s best known singleton singing in ‘Bridget Jones The Musical’ – with tunes by singer Lily Allen. ‘Finding Neverland’, a stage version of the film biography of JM Barrie, will feature music by and lyrics by Gary Barlow. The long awaited ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ should finally reach the stage as well as a musical version of ‘Made in Dagenham’, telling the story of the women machinists who went on strike in 1968 at the Ford car factory demanding equal pay.

Most of these productions have been in development for several years.

With the cost of staging a musical upwards of £750,000, plus £150,000 a week to run the show, the trend for theatre producers to rework successful films is likely to continue.

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News

A BOULDER SCHEME

A new visitor centre is opening at Stonehenge. The ÂŁ27m project includes a museum and improved facilities for the 900,000 annual visitors to the ancient monument.

The building is located about a mile-and-a-half from the stones, and visitors will be shuttled to Stonehenge by a land train. A road which runs alongside the henge will be closed and grassed over, returning the landscape to its historic setting. Stonehenge, built between 3,000 BC and 1,600 BC, is thought to have been used for a variety of religious ceremonies. A museum will explore the history of the henge, exhibiting objects found near the monument.

When all the work is completed next year, there will be an external gallery which will include five reconstructed Neolithic houses. Using archaeological evidence and authentic materials, the exhibition will allow visitors to walk into these houses to see how people may have lived 4,500 years ago.

The new visitor centre opens on the 18th December 2013. For a visit to Stonehenge with a Blue Badge Guide go to www.britainsbestguides.org

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900,000

Annual Visitors

Investigate a 5,000-year-old mystery Discover the story of England at over 400 inspirational sites, including the awe-inspiring Stonehenge.

Nr Amesbury, Wiltshire

For more information and to order a Group Visits Guide call 020 7973 3529 or email traveltrade@english-heritage.org.uk

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Interview: Bettany Hughes

DIVINE WOMAN

Author and presenter Bettany Hughes talks to Sophie Campbell about history, television and the X chromosome factor In 2011 the historian Bettany Hughes delivered the Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture, an annual talk organised by the Royal Television Society. ‘I wanted to know who the first female historian to present a television series was,’ she recalls. ‘The archivist came back, rather embarrassed, and said “It was you!”

In 2000 I’d made a programme about the Domesday Book called ‘Breaking the Seals’.’

There are so many women now in the field of television history: Mary Beard, Lucy Worsley, Amanda Vickery, Lucy Moore, Janina Ramirez, Suzannah Lipscomb and, no doubt, more in the pipeline. It’s not a story any more. Result.

Since coming to wider public notice in a BBC2 series on the history of Sparta (which, she points out, took four years of unpaid development and much lobbying before it hit the screen), Hughes is thriving in her portfolio world. She juggles a hectic career which she describes as ‘sort of Benedictine: one-third raw academic, onethird writing and one-third television.’

Her latest book, a biography of Istanbul, comes out in 2014/15, and a clutch of television programmes is in the offing.

She’s a judge for the annual ‘Heritage Angels Awards’, which acknowledge the unsung heroes of Britain’s heritage industry, and a passionate supporter of the charity ‘Classics for All’, which aims to get classical education into more state schools.

Oh, and she has two teenage daughters, neither of whom are particularly into history. They’re both studying Mandarin.

‘There’s no history of history in our family,’ she says, ‘my parents were actors, so there wasn’t much money and I didn’t go abroad until I was 17. All our holidays were in Britain, in the car or by bike. We’d cycle off to see the churches on Romney Marsh, or wherever. It was a brilliant childhood. I wouldn’t say they were particularly into history, but they did appreciate getting out and seeing things

and they passed that on to me and my brother.’

Hughes and her brother Simon – a professional cricketer and sports journalist – were brought up in Ealing, West London. She won a scholarship to study history at St Hilda’s College at the University of Oxford and afterwards started travelling in Europe, mainly in the Balkans, to research her postgraduate thesis. She soon realised that writing could fund her travelling and research.

‘The work I do is always practical and travel based,’ she says, ‘I don’t think you can understand history fully unless you get out to see all these places – the structures, the battlefields – it helps you to imagine it all. ’ It’s precisely because her work is so location based and visual that it is a perfect fit for television.

Until now the bulk of Hughes’ work has been in her specialist subject, the world of antiquity. From ‘The Hemlock Cup’, her book about Socrates, to ‘Divine Women’, last year’s three-part series on BBC2 focusing on the role of the female in early religions, and their gradual ousting by men. I wondered if this made Britain pale by comparison, a small, wet, Barbarian offshoot of Classical Europe.

‘The difference with the classical world doesn’t matter to me, really,’ she says thoughtfully, ‘If you go to Skara Brae – one of those sites on the edge of Britain – you can see what would have been a bedroom and there’s a little stone shelf where the woman of the house probably put her jewellery before she went to sleep. It’s so easy to relate to it, even though it was the Stone Age. They weren’t building the Parthenon, but they weren’t less sophisticated as human beings. It’s so fascinating.’

She explains that about 40,000 years ago we started ‘to become the humans we are today, and to tell stories about ourselves,’ adding that in many ways she loves it more when she has to work harder for a story –

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Interview: Bettany Hughes

Temple of of Mithras.

Courtesy of Museum of London Skara Brae courtesy of Historic Scotland

to ferret it out, when it’s not all there on a plate as it may be in Greece or Italy.

There are climatic reasons, she says, for the earlier development of the classical world. ‘History definitely begins with geography and meteorology: it was easier to have a settled life in Greece and that’s reflected in the archaeology.’ So it’s not our fault. It’s the weather.

There is a warmth and ease of delivery about Hughes that makes her a gift to television. She does a mean soundbite (Episode 1 of ‘Divine Women’ is called ‘When God Was a Girl’) and she’s genuinely enthused by her travels, from a prehistoric flint mine in Norfolk – Grime’s Graves, where she’s recently been filming – to the workaday River Thames in London, which she sees as one huge archaeological site and an incredible resource for all of us.

‘There are many sites that fascinate me in Britain,’ she says, ‘The Temple of Mithras in London, for instance, that’s very exciting.’ She’s referring to the Roman-era cult temple discovered under the City of London in the 1950s and soon to reappear, almost in its original position, as part of the new Bloomberg complex west of the Walbrook.

‘I’m a Londoner born and bred and I love the fact that we have 40ft of history beneath our feet,’ she says, ‘Lots of it is effluent or rubbish, that’s the story of us, in the discard of what’s gone before. The Mithras temple

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reminds us of the heady pleasure the Romans took in inhabiting old territory. We think of them freezing on Hadrian’s Wall but it’s important to remember that for them [Britain] was like discovering America. You get such an idea of the vigour of Roman culture. Also, Mithraism was an Eastern cult so you sense the familiarity between east and west at that time.’

Just reading Hughes’ website makes you want to lie down in a darkened room, her professional life is so busy At Grime’s Graves, near Thetford, she was fascinated by the fact you could go right down into the mine, as our Stone Age ancestors did. There archaeologists have found shaped flints, obviously worked and then put back in the mine as gifts to the earth, and antler pickaxes and human remains, possibly mining casualties, possibly propitiatory offerings (though not, she adds hastily, buried alive).

She reckons the mine produced around 5 million axes. It was a tool factory. It says something about life in Britain tens of thousands of years ago.

It’s the best sort of history.

Just reading Hughes’ website makes

you want to lie down in a darkened room, her professional life is so busy.

She is often in demand as an expert: she researched and wrote about one of the British Museum’s ‘100 Objects’ for Neil McGregor’s smash hit series on BBC Radio 4. ‘It was amazing,’ she says, laughing, ‘but also quite hard: I had to talk about the Warren Cup, which shows very explicit homosexual activity. The number of euphemisms I had to use for a daytime Radio 4 audience was really taxing.’

Still, she’s optimistic about the state of British history broadcasting today.

‘I think as a nation we grow up as creatures of memory,’ she says, ‘but it was almost as if the telly people didn’t want to dramatise it. Now they are, and our innate curiosity is being really catered to at last.’

Much of that catering is being done by women, using all sorts of methods to communicate their ideas, and happily batting away the more Neanderthal of criticisms.

So we owe a debt to Hughes, for breaking the seals on all those Domesday documents in front of a small television audience as the second millennium dawned. As you may have noticed I haven’t mentioned her age, looks or figure.

Quite an achievement, for a female historian on TV.

There is a warmth and ease of delivery about Hughes that makes her a gift to television

Factfile You can find details of Bettany Hughes’ upcoming books, lectures and television work on www.bettanyhughes.co.uk

Grimes Grave courtesy of English Heritage

Also see Heritage Angel Awards www.englishheritage.org.uk Classics for All www.classicsforall.org.uk

Roman head of Serapis

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S W O R R O S R U O Y N W O R

D

In October 1814 at London’s St Giles the vats in the Meux Company Brewery exploded. 323 gallons of beer gushed out into the streets. Two homes were swept away and a pub wall crashed onto a teenage employee Eleanor Cooper – one of seven people who lost their lives in the flood.

HEAD COUNT

King Charles I was tried for treason and beheaded in 1649. Some historians maintain that Oliver Cromwell – who signed Charles death warrant – allowed the king’s head to be sewn back onto his body so the family could pay its respects. Cromwell died in 1658 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

On 30 January 1661 – the 12th anniversary of the execution of Charles I – Cromwell’s body was exhumed, posthumously executed and the severed head displayed on a pole.

The head changed hands several times, before eventually being buried in the grounds of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in 1960.

POLITICAL HIS –TORY Tory derives from the Irish word tóraidhe ~ meaning outlaw, robber or brigand.

The Whigs were the original Liberal Party. The name was a shortening of whiggamore – a Scottish term for ‘cattle driver’.

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Breeching Etiquette The Romans wore togas so had no word for trousers.

When the legions conquered the Gauls, they adopted the Gaulish word for breeches: Bracca. This is the root of the French word for a codpiece – braguette (little trousers). So someone who shows off his breeches or codpiece is a braggart.

LEGEND

LIE

A

FACTS AND F YORKSHIRE BENCHMARK Scarborough boasts the longest railway bench in Britain. At 456 feet, this continuous seat at the town’s station is reputedly the longest in Europe, and maybe the world. It can hold 228 passengers.

DS

PARKER NOSE BEST Matthew Parker was Archbishop of Canterbury during the reign of Elizabeth I. He investigated every aspect of the church and sent priests detailed notes about how they should go about their business Parker was so annoying that he earned the nickname ‘Nosy Parker’ – a term we still use to describe a busybody.

ES,

AND

Y R O T IS H H IS IT R B M O FR N IO T FIC

The popular belief that witches were burned in medieval and Tudor England is a myth – the common form of execution for witchcraft in was hanging. Other punishments for witchcraft included cutting off a hand or ear, branding, whipping, dunking, stocks, jailing, fining and banishing.

A LOAD OF CRAPPER

SCARBOROUGH

Many people will tell you that Thomas Crapper invented the flushing loo – giving us the words for the place and activity of toileting.

The flushing toilet was known to the Minoans of ancient Crete. In the 1590s Englishman John Harington installed a flushing Ajax – jakes being an old slang word for toilet – at his manor in Kelston.

The device was ‘invented’ again in the late 18th century by Joseph Bramah, decades before Thomas Crapper (1836-1910) was born.

The word ‘crap’ comes from Medieval Latin crappa, meaning ‘chaff’.

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Feature

From a Welsh wordmaster to an Oxford mythmaker, Marc Zakian visits the cities and landscapes that inspired Britain’s greatest writers

LITERARY LIVES

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WALES

SWANSEA The Dylan Thomas Centre, Somerset Place, Swansea SA1 1RR, open 10am-4.30pm www.dylanthomas.com

DYLAN’S WALES 2014 is the centenary of the birth of Wales’s unofficial national poet: Dylan Thomas. Often remembered for his boozy bohemian behaviour in London and New York, his greatest poetry was written in suburban Swansea and an isolated boat house.

Dylan called Swansea his ‘ugly, lovely, town’ – an industrial revolution city dusty with coal mines and fogged by metal smelters. He grew

up at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive; a polite Edwardian house which clings on to the side of a hill at such a madcap angle it should long ago have slipped into the bay.

Baby Thomas’s view of the world was framed by the criss-cross glass panes which look down from the first-floor front bedroom onto Cwmdonkin Park. Little Dylan spent his childhood adventuring here. His schoolmaster

LAUGHARNE: The Boat House, Dylan's Walk, Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, SA33 4SD open 10am (10.30am in winter) -5.30pm (3.30pm winter)

dylanthomasboathouse.com CORRAN BOOKS King Street. Inside this stone shop is a Dickensian den of antiquarian editions.

Owned and run by former rock journalist George Tremlett, a friend and biographer of Dylan’s wife Caitlin.

For a guided tour of Dylan Thomas’s Wales visit: www.britainsbestguides.org

‘‘

I was born in a large Welsh industrial town at the beginning of the Great War: an ugly, lovely town (or so it was, and is, to me)

’’

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Feature

Laugherne boat house

Laugherne Castle

father urged his son to go to university, but Thomas junior soon discovered the nearby Uplands Tavern where a lifelong love affair with beer began.

The Thomas pub trail leads to the port. In Dylan’s day the haunt of sailor’s molls, it is now a shiny dockside marina.

If Swansea turned a blind eye to its wayward son when he was alive, they’re making up for it now: outside the Dylan Thomas Theatre, in Dylan Thomas Square, is a squat, gun-metal statue of the poet. Visitors rub his foot for good luck, and pay homage by offering him a sip of beer.

What the little Welsh fishing village of New Quay made of Thomas and his London girlfriend Caitlin when they moved here in 1944 is hard to imagine.

Even today New Quay is a glorious old fashioned bucket-and-spade town of ice-cream cones, slot machines, and whitewashed Gwely y Brecwast (bed and breakfast) houses.

The town’s single main street snakes past the Black Lion Hotel. Inevitably this tavern is New Quay’s monument to Dylan. Thomas called it his ‘pink washed pub waiting for Saturday night as an over-jolly girl waits for sailors’. Inside, on the wooden beams, is a quote from

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Thomas’ Birthplace

‘Under Milk Wood’: ‘Time passes. Listen.

Time Passes’. In sleepy New Quay it passes very slowly.

If there is one place which captures the soul of Dylan it is ‘the timeless, beautiful, barmy (both spellings)’ seavillage of Laugharne. Thomas remarked that he got off the bus here, and forgot to get back on. It’s not difficult to see why: a writer could not wish for a more romantic setting, with the raggedy remains of a castle standing watch over the green marshes and ‘heron-priested shore’ of the Taff estuary.

Thomas loved his Laugharne boathouse home, calling it a ‘seashaken house on a breakneck of rocks’. As I scaled the steep cliffside steps to visit, a local woman – who could have stepped from the pages of the Laugharne inspired ‘Under Milk Wood’ – told me it’s a miracle ‘the bugger ever got up ‘ere, being drunk all the time’. The inside is furnished as it was in Dylan’s time; a house-proud kitchen and a modestly neat lounge.

Dylan lived here from 1949 until he boozed himself to oblivion during a visit to New York in 1953. His body was brought back for burial in Laugharne’s Welsh gothic Saint Martin’s Church. A

Thomas junior soon discovered the nearby Uplands Tavern where a lifelong love affair with beer began simple white cross stands at the centre of the graveyard. Pilgrims bring tributes, from a white plastic toy horse, to an appropriately empty whisky bottle. Dylan is still here in spirit.

Why would he ever take the bus out of Laugharne?

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug © 2013 warner bros. entertainment inc.

OXFORD

TOLKEIN’S TOWN Oxford is a city born of studious seriousness, but its dreaming spires have ignited the imagination of some of the world’s greatest fantasy writers – the most celebrated being ‘The Inklings’.

This informal literary club met every week from the early 1930s at The Eagle and Child.

The pub – which they nicknamed ‘The Bird and Baby’ – is a relaxed, wood-panelled tavern which traces its history back to 1650. It takes its name from the legend of a noble born baby found in an eagle’s nest – a fantastical story that would sit perfectly in the pages of The Inklings most famous fellow: JRR Tolkein.

Tolkein arrived at Exeter College in 1911 to study English literature. A Finnish grammar book in the college library spurred his passion for inventing languages, in particular Quena, spoken by the Elves in The Lord of the Rings.

The well-thumbed grammar is still in Exeter’s library, complete with the ticket showing when the young writer borrowed it.

Commissioned into the Fusilliers during the First World War, Tolkein served on the Western Front. “By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead,” he said. 23 of his 56 classmates were killed in action, a trauma he summoned up in ‘The Lord of the Rings’ – when the heroes cross the ‘dead marshes’, pools filled with floating bodies.

He returned to his alma mater to work on the Oxford English Dictionary. Tucked away in the university’s Bodleian Library, he was tasked with researching Germanic words beginning with the letter W. Open volume 19 of the great dictionary and you will find his definitions of waggle and walrus.

In 1925 Tolkein became Professor of AngloSaxon at Pembroke College. At the same time he was writing the books that enthralled thousands of teenage fans. ‘The Hobbit’ first came to life at

Ian Mckellen as Gandalf in MGM’s fantasy adventure, ‘The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug’

his family house – 20 Northmoor Road. One summer he was given an enormous pile of exam papers to mark at home: “It was very laborious and, unfortunately, boring,” he recalled.

“I remember picking up a paper and one page was left blank. Glorious! Nothing to read. So I scribbled on it, I can’t think why, ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’.”

He was fascinated by the origin of place names. Tolkein overheard locals pronounce Oxford’s Woodhouse Way as ‘woodo’use’.

With his knowledge of early English he knew the name had nothing to with timber houses,

Exeter College, Turl Street, Oxford, OX1 3DP www.exeter.ox.ac.uk The Eagle and Child, 49 St Giles’, Oxford, OX1 3LU Wolvercote Cemetery, Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 8EE C.S Lewis. A fellow Inkling and close friend of Tolkein, C. S. Lewis was a novelist, poet, and academic – best known for writing ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’. Lewis taught at Magdalen College – his life story was told in the film ‘Shadowlands’.

The second in the ‘The Hobbit’ film trilogy, ‘The Desolation of Smaug’, is released in December.

but was a corruption of woodo wasser – an ancient term for a wild man of the woods.

This found its way into ‘The Lord of the Rings’, as the character Ghân-buri-Ghân, leader of the forest people.

Tolkien died in 1973 aged 81. He is buried in a simple grave at Oxford’s Wolvercote Cemetery next to his wife Edith. Beside her name is written Lúthien, next to his, Beren. In Tolkien’s mythology, Lúthien was the most beautiful of all the Children of Ilúvatar, and forsook her immortality for the love of mortal warrior Beren. When Beren was slain in battle she persuaded the gods to restore him to life.

Magical and moving.

For an Oxford guided visit go to: www.britainsbestguides.org

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Feature WORDSWORTH COUNTRY Wordsworth’s celebration of the flowered shores of Lake Ullswater is one of the greatest landscape poems in English literature. Its heartfelt innocent romanticism may seem naïve today, but this was radical stuff in the early 1800s. The idea that nature should be a celebrated in poetry and art was a reaction to the industrialisation sweeping across Britain.

William Wordsworth’s house, Dove Cottage, in the verdant Lake District setting of Grasmere, is where his passion for nature turned into poetry.

The poet and his sister took up residence here in 1799 and it was his home for the next eight years. Dove Cottage retains its stone floors, dark panelled rooms, coal fires and original furniture.

The garden was Wordsworth’s ‘work of our own hands’ – where he planted flowers and vegetables, watched birds and butterflies, read and wrote poetry.

Dove Cottage

Dove Cottage, Town End, Grasmere, Ambleside LA22 9SH www.wordsworth.org.uk For a guided visit to Wordsworth Country go to www.cumbriatouristguides.co.uk

“I wandered lonely as a Cloud, That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of dancing Daffodils” ~ Daffodils 1804

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Haworth Moor

GRASMERE

BRONTE COUNTRY The tragic story of three sisters has turned the parsonage in the small Yorkshire town of Haworth into the second most visited literary shrine in Britain.

In 1820 the remote Yorkshire village of Haworth welcomed its new vicar. The reverend Patrick Bronte took up residence in a bleak stone parsonage overlooking a rising tide of gravestones, softened only by trees.

He brought his six children with him: Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Branwell – the only boy – Emily and Anne. Thirty five years later all the children were dead, but during the three decades of their brief lives – inspired by the surrounding countryside – they wrote some of the most important novels and poems in the English language.

A year after taking up residence, Patrick’s wife, Mrs Bronte, died. The motherless children formed a tight bond; reading together in their study room, and walking hand in hand across the heathery moors.

The daughters were sent away to an austere school for the children of the clergy. The harsh environment proved too much for Maria and Elizabeth, who died before reaching their 12th birthdays. The girls returned to the shelter of Haworth, and it was six years before any of them left home again.

In this closed environment, the children’s imagination turned to plays and storytelling.

Writing on tiny books made from scraps of paper, they invented their own imaginary characters and countries. The stories were a refuge from the real world which they found so traumatic.

But they couldn’t hide forever. Charlotte took a job as a governess, and had a failed love affair

with a professor who never replied to her love letters. Branwell, the brilliant young boy who carried the hopes of the family on his shoulders, never fulfilled his destiny of becoming a famous artist, and turned to drink and drugs.

The strength of feeling that women should not be published, meant that when the three girls finally managed to see their poems in print, it was self-financed, with the pen names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.

But the poetry book was a failure. Emily took refuge in the solitude of the moors, roaming the hilltops with her dog. She poured her feelings into a novel, ‘Wuthering Heights’. Anne wrote a book about poor governess called ‘Agnes Grey’. But it was Charlotte’s book ‘Jane Eyre’, the story of a governess, that was a success.

A personal victory that she kept secret from her father.

Drink, laudanum and TB finally caught up with Branwell, who died in 1848. Emily caught a chill at Branwell’s funeral and a three months later she too died – her faithful dog howled at her door for days. Anne soon became ill; Charlotte took her to Scarborough, where she too died – buried there to spare her father another funeral.

Charlotte cut a lonely figure, a young woman who had lost her brother and two sisters in eight months. But in these melancholy years she became famous, writing two more novels, ‘Shirley’ and ‘Vilette’. In 1854, against her father’s wishes, she married a poor church curate. They moved into the in Bronte parsonage. One day she was caught in a rainstorm on the moors, she caught a chill which eventually took her life, aged only 38.

Charlotte Bronte

HAWORTH Bronte Parsonage Museum, Church Street, Haworth, Keighley, West Yorkshire, BD22 8DR www.bronte.org.uk For a guided visit to Bronte Country go to: www.britainsbestguides.org For information on Bronte Country go to: www.visitbradford.com

Emily took refuge in the solitude of the moors, roaming the hilltops with her dog. She poured her feelings into a novel, ‘Wuthering Heights’

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Tour de force Words and Photos: Marc Zakian

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Classical music in London and Jane Austen in Bath – two Blue Badge Guides tell us about their tours

TOUR DE FOR

TUNING INTO LONDON “At school I was a lazy toad. Always bottom of the class,” says Greg Laing. “But I could play the clarinet.

So when I left school I auditioned to join the army as a bandsman and was placed in the Scots Guard. I was 16, a boy soldier, which was OK because they didn’t send you anywhere you could be shot at until you were 18.

“For ten years my billet was Wellington Barracks, near Buckingham Palace. I learned to march, and got shouted at by the band sergeant major.

I wore the red uniform and did all the public duties – performing the trooping of the colour seven times. In one rehearsal we were lined up ready to march and I fainted. Got a good tongue lashing from the sergeant major for that. Don’t join the forces if you want sympathy.

“In 1986 I left the army, took a music degree, then taught and played. But I wasn’t a natural teacher and it’s difficult making a living as a freelance musician. One day my wife said to me:

CE

‘you don’t like teaching, you do like London, history and talking, so why not become a tour guide?’”

Greg completed his Blue Badge course in 2006 and began running classical music tours.“I often start in Covent Garden,” he says.“At the basement of a house on Maiden Lane which stakes a claim to be the world’s first recording studio. It’s where the American Fred Gaisberg made early recordings for The Gramophone Company – the forerunner of HMV and EMI. In 1898 he spotted Syria Lamonte – a singing barmaid at Rules Restaurant – who became HMV’s first ever solo recording artist.

“WS Gilbert was born in Exeter Street – a few hundred yards from the Savoy Theatre which staged Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas. They were so successful that a hotel was created next to the theatre for the audiences. But it all went wrong when Gilbert and Sullivan were involved in the ‘The Carpet Quarrel’. Producer Richard D’Oyly Carte wanted to buy a new

Horse Guards Parade

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Tour de force carpet for the theatre. Gilbert was against this. Sullivan sided with D’Oyly Carte and the partnership split.

“But The Savoy thrived as a celebrity hotel. Dame Nelly Melba, the Australian Singer, was a regular at the restaurant and the chef Escoffier created the Peach Melba and Melba Toast in her honour. Melba was the diva of her generation. She was paired with the new young Italian tenor Enrico Caruso in ‘La Boheme’.

During one performance she whispered to him ‘get off my stage you greasy foreigner’. The next night, while singing the aria ‘Your Tiny Hand is Frozen’, Caruso pressed a hot Italian sausage into her hand and squeezed her fingers together.

“The Lyceum is one of Covent Garden’s great theatres. Bram Stoker managed the celebrated 19th century actor Henry Irving here. They invited Franz Liszt to dine with them in the beefsteak room. I have this fantasy that if they had had the technology available, they could have made the world’s first ever gothic horror film together – stoker based Dracula on Irvin and Liszt composed dark, filmic scores.

“Covent Garden’s premier music venue is the Royal Opera House.

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The first theatre was built in the 1730s from the profits of ‘The Beggar’s Opera’. This was an antidote to the fashionable but formulaic Italian opera, which took its stories from ancient history. Each character had a set number of arias, which were basically an opportunity for the singer to show off. These divas were 18th century celebrity figures who everyone gossiped about. Factions grew, and fans would boo singers they disliked and cheer their favourites. “’The Beggar’s Opera’ was about London low life – prisoners in Newgate, prostitutes and thieves.

It was the first opera in English to portray ordinary characters and use dialogue rather than endless recitative.

It was an enormous success for its author John Gay and it made lots of money for the theater owner John Rich – it was said it made ‘Gay rich and Rich gay’ [happy]”.

“The Royal Opera House staged the first performance of Wagner’s ‘Ring Cycle’ in 1892. They had just installed electric lights in the auditorium, which they would dim – infuriating the society ladies who went to the opera just to be seen.

“Wagner visited London in 1839. He didn’t like the capital and it didn’t like

him – except for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The tradition of playing the bridal chorus from ‘Lohengrin’ at weddings is a direct result the monarch selecting the piece for the marriage of her daughter Princess Victoria. She also chose the wedding march from Mendelsohn’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’. The composer was a regular guest at Buckingham Palace, where he gave Victoria and Albert music lessons.

“Mendelsohn and Wagner were just two greats who visited London. Since the time of Handel there are very few major composers who have not visited or lived in the capital. No other city can boast two permanent opera houses, three major concert halls (The Royal Albert, Festival Hall and the Barbican) four music colleges, five symphony orchestras and three of the finest church music choirs in the world.

Taken together, they make London one of the world’s music capitals.

For a music tour with Greg contact him at: enigmalaing@btinternet.com or visit www.londonexcursions.co.uk

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Tour de force

“In 1965 I was a 17 year old doing my English A-Level”, says Andrew Butterworth.“I had to study Jane Austen’s Emma’.

I just didn’t get it.”

AUSTEN POWERS How a Blue Badge Guide finally fell for Jane Austen 24

The Crescent

“In 1965 I was a 17 year old doing my English A-Level”, says Andrew Butterworth. “I had to study Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’. I just didn’t get it – this society of genteel ladies living in posh houses, fretting about frocks and tea parties. It wasn’t a world I could relate to.”

Four decades later, after a career as a history teacher, Andrew is a Blue Badge Guide in Bath, a city that Austen lived in and wrote about. And he has come to admire the writer he once dismissed: “Ten years ago I read ‘Persuasion’ and realised that Austen’s insight into human character – though lost on my teenage self – was universal. Her writing revealed the character of Georgian Bath in a way no history book ever could – she has become a touchstone for all my city tours.”

“Jane came to Bath in 1801. She was 25, living in the house of her clergyman father who retired to the spa city with his wife and two unmarried daughters. The town was fading into obscurity; the fashion for wealthy Londoners to spend a season here had ended, and it was a retirement location for army officers and the shabby genteel. Austen called it a place where you can ‘be important at comparatively little expense.’

“The Austens were members of Bath’s middling sort. The Reverend George, Jane’s father, had an income of £600 a year – around £40,000 in today’s money. They rented a five storey terrace house in Sydney Place, and even though they didn’t live in the best part of town (exclusive addresses were the hillside Crescent and Circus) they had a cook, a housemaid and a manservant.

“When Jane’s father died in 1805 the family moved. Firstly to Gay Street, then Trim Street. This humiliating slip down the social ladder is reflected in ‘Persuasion’, when the protagonist Anne Elliot shocks her parents by announcing that she is going to visit her friend Mrs Smith, who is lodging in Westgate Buildings.

“Westgate Buildings are just around the corner from Trim Street. Today they are shops, but in Austen’s time it was the wrong end of town – near Avon Street and Milk Street, the prostitute filled slums of Bath.

“Some commentators believe her reduced circumstances led to the writer disliking the city. In 1808 Austen wrote to her sister: ‘It is two years tomorrow since we left Bath for Clifton – with what happy feelings of escape.’ But I think what made her unhappy was being moved from the Hampshire rectory where her father worked, to a place where she was obliged to take tea with dull city society.

“It didn’t help that she was expected to spend time with her wealthy elderly aunt Leigh Perrot. Mrs Leigh Perrot was the subject of scandal following a visit to a Bath Street haberdashers where she bought some black lace. The shop assistant followed her out of the premises and accused her of theft. The packet was opened, revealing 20 shillings worth of unpaid for white lace. At that time you could be transported

or even hung or stealing goods worth more than a shilling.

Leigh Perrot was imprisoned for several months and although she was eventually acquitted – it appears the shop wanted to frame her – the stain on the family reputation was implicit.

This dark side of the city was reflected in Austen’s ‘Sense and Sensibility’, when the cad Willoughby seduces Eliza Williams in Bath.

“But Bath did offer Austen some enjoyment. She loved its green hills and was an enthusiastic walker, going on regular treks to Charlcombe, Beechen Cliff, and the two mile hike to Weston. As a Georgian woman she would have forged the muddy tracks wearing ladies shoes, and long skirts.

“Another of her passions was Assembly the Assembly Rooms’ dances. The Rooms rooms opened in 1771, to cater for the wealthy people living on the hill above Bath. Today they are very much as they were during the Austen’s visits. The twice-weekly dances were where Bath society met – a chance for Jane to enjoy herself and observe Bath society.

“She also loved the theatre.

Austen was in Bath when the current Theatre Royal opened in 1805. We can be reasonably sure she saw a performance of a play called ‘Lovers Vows’, as the plot is echoed in ‘Mansfield Park’. The theatre also features in ‘Persuasion’. For some reason she had an aversion to musical concerts, and avoided the live orchestras in Sydney Gardens.

“Austen left Bath in the summer of 1806 and, as far as we know, never returned. But Bath never left Austen. During her five years in the city she barely wrote anything; was she unhappy here, or was she simply too busy? We will probably never know. But when she moved to her brother’s estate at Chawton in 1809 she looked back on her time in Bath for stories and locations. Her last novel, ‘Persuasion’, climaxes on Gravel Walk, a pathway behind The Circus, when Captain Wentworth finally wins the hand of Anne Elliot.

“I feel her presence in Bath. I often talk about the city through Austen’s writing and personal experience – a great way to illustrate the world of the early 1800s. My adolescent perception of her as a mousy, meek introvert has been replaced by admiration for a woman who revealed the inner life of England’s greatest Georgian city.”

For a Bath Tour featuring Jane Austen contact Andrew at: jawb1@hotmail.com or visit Sulis guides: www.sulisguides.com

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MY FAVOURITE Blue Badge Guides show you their favourite places around the UK ...REFLECTION …is inside Salisbury Cathedral, which has more than its fair share of unusual stories and details for guides to share with visitors. But its latest permanent addition, William Pye’s ‘Salisbury Font’, is photographed by nearly everyone I take there. Its still surface reflects the cathedral’s beautiful early English Gothic architecture and stained glass windows. Many people take a picture of the fountain, only to find their own reflection is part of the image.

Judi Cross, Blue Badge Guide for the South West judicross@gmail.com

...VIEW

...of London is from the top of St Paul’s Cathedral. As well as its significance as a place of worship, St Paul’s is a masterpiece of architectural heritage. With adventurous travellers I always head for the stairs and we climb above the main body of the church. The Whispering Gallery is well known, but the two upper viewing platforms less so. No matter how many times I make the ascent, I still find it a novelty. On the way up you can appreciate the engineering and structure of the dome, and once outside you have breathtaking views across the city.

Glyn Jones, London Blue Badge Guide gtjones9@gmail.com

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...PUBLIC ART

...BRIDGE …is the great engineer Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge. Completed after his death as his monument, it truly has the ‘wow! factor’. The autumn colours in the Avon Gorge below or the peregrine falcon swooping above add to its majesty. Its

romantic setting is popular for wedding photographs or for hopeful suitors to ‘pop the question’. The Bridge will celebrate its 150th anniversary in 2014, and open a new purpose-built visitor centre. I never tire of sharing it with visitors.

Mike Rowland, Blue Badge Guide, Bristol and Bath, mcr306@yahoo.co.uk

…let me introduce you to Taro Chiezo’s creation: half lamb, half banana, or ‘SuperLambBanana’.

It stands at 17ft tall and is a comment on genetically modified foods. It makes people smile, and has become second only to the city’s Liverbird it its iconic status. The original SuperLambBanana came to Liverpool in 1998, but in 2008 a trail of 125 smaller and fancifully decorated lamb bananas celebrated the city’s year as European Capital of Culture.

Harriet Gilmour, Blue Badge Tourist Guide for the Liverpool City Region harrietgilmour@gmail.com

...is a poignant sculpture of Sir Winston Churchill, located in Pines Garden, St Margaret’s Bay. The Oscar Nemon statue stands in a prominent position looking out towards the Dover Patrol Memorial on the white cliffs.

The Dover area resonates with historical importance that spans generations, and the placement of the statue in this location draws focus to the Second World War in particular.

SuperLambBanana ©Harriet Gilmour

...STATUE

Sue Duckworth, Blue Badge Guide for the South East info@factorfictiontours.co.uk

...PLACE …is Postman’s Park. Located in the heart of the City Of London, it provides not only a tranquil haven for Londoners and visitors alike but also encapsulates many aspects of London life: history, religion, tourism, commerce and social change.

George Frederick Watts’s memorial to heroic self sacrifice is a poignant reminder of ordinary people who lost their lives saving others and who might otherwise have been forgotten.

Donal O’Hagan, London Blue Badge Guide donal.ohagan@btinternet.com

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LAST WORD...

The tradition of criers goes back to Medieval England; before printing and newspapers became popular, it was the chief way of communicating news

LONDON CALLING

Alan Myatt is one of London’s last town criers. The tradition of criers goes back to Medieval England; before printing and newspapers became popular, it was the chief way of communicating news. Royal proclamations, local bylaws, market days and adverts were all announced by a bellman or crier.

The crier yells ‘Hear ye’ or ‘Oyez’ to get the crowd’s attention (Oyez comes

from the Anglo-Norman word for listen). Alan’s cry of ‘Oyez, Oyez, Oyez’ is the loudest in the world, verified at 112.8 decibels, by the Guinness Book of Records. He also set the record for vocal endurance, issuing a hundredword proclamation every 15 minutes for a period of 48 hours.

Alan has been the official town crier for Camden’s Stables Market for the last 18 years.