The Chap Issue 119 - Silver Jubilee Edition

EXPAND YOUR MIND, REFINE YOUR WARDROBE

CLIVE OWEN

DAVID NIVEN

A PHILOSOPHER ONCE NOTED THAT PEOPLE LONG FOR IMMORTALITY BUT RUN OUT OF THINGS TO DO ON A RAINY AFTERNOON

LINDSAY DUNCAN

SILVER FOXES

SILVER VIXENS

DAVID BOWIE

ANDREW SCOTT HELEN MIRREN

of fi ce r s and sol d ie r s during t h e G r eat W ar to become Bar r o w , Hepburn & Gale Dispatch Boxes, notably for John Hepburn commences leat h er tanning in Bermondsey Samuel Bar r ow & B r ot h er is formed Hepburn & Gale me r ges with R oss & Co Ma k e and supply saddles, belts and cases to Hepburn & Gale me r ges with Samuel Bar r ow & B r ot h er Continue to ma k e and supply of fi cial government Chu r chill as Sec r eta r y of State Major contribution to t h e war e f fo r t, notably “ L ” Detachment, Special Air Se r vice Brigade HRH Princess Eli z abeth p r oclaimed Queen Eli z abeth II and of fi cially p h otog r ap h ed with h er Dispatch Boxes King Charles III's Coronation. The new Despatch Boxes of His Majesty’s Government display the new royal cypher of King Charles III

1760 1848 1901 1914 1920 1921 1939 1953 2023

Proper Chaps Carry Proper Bags. Proper Bags From Barrow Hepbur n & Gale.

‘Barrow, Hepburn & Gale have been making travel goods for generations, and although fashions are constantly on the change, their qualit y has always been superlative. They are supplied not only to the home market, but the whole world, for the good reason that British craf tsmanship in this class of goods has always been admired. At a time when a flourishing expor t trade is absolutely essential to the countr y ’ s sur vival, no manufacturer can do his countr y a bet ter ser vice than to produce goods so well made and designed that they may properly be called ambassadors of goodwill.’

Ever ything In Leather – The Stor y Of Barrow Hepburn & Gale, published in 1948.

t hechap@bar row hepburngale com | bar row hepburngale com | @bar row hepburnga l e

Editor: Gustav Temple

Picture Editor: Theo Salter

Circulation Manager: Andy Perry

Art Director: Rachel Barker

Sub-Editor: Romilly Clark

Subscriptions Manager: Jen Rainnie

Contributing Editors: Chris Sullivan, David Evans

The editor of The Chap for the last 24 years is also the author of The Chap Manifesto, The Chap Almanac, Around the World in 80 Martinis (Fourth Estate), Cooking For Chaps and Drinking For Chaps (Kyle Books) and How To Be Chap (Gestalten). He is currently working on a book without ‘Chap’ in the title.

SAM KNOWLES

By day Sam Knowles is a data storyteller; on summer Sundays he combines his passion for narrative and numbers on the cricket pitch. He is the co-refounder, scorer and match reporter for the Gentlemen of Lewes Cricket Club, whose exploits can be followed on Twitter @GoLCC_Lewes

CHRIS SULLIVAN

Chris Sullivan is The Chap’s Contributing Editor. He founded and ran Soho’s Wag Club for two decades and is a former GQ style editor who has written for Italian Vogue, The Times, Independent and The FT. He is now Associate Lecturer at Central St Martins School of Art on youth style cults. @cjp_sullivan

TORQUIL ARBUTHNOT

Torquil Arbuthnot is a social affairs journalist whose career started with The Chap in its early days. Torquil was ‘on the barricades’ at the very first Chap protest, Civilise the City, and continues the Great Work today by bringing traffic to a standstill on the Aldwych through the display of astounding pocket squares.

DAVID EVANS

David Evans is a former lawyer and teacher who founded popular sartorial blog Grey Fox Blog twelve years ago. The blog has become very widely read by chaps all over the world, who seek advice on dressing properly and retaining an eye for style when entering, whatever the age. @greyfoxstyle

RUBY DEMURE

Ruby Demure is an international starlet with a background in cabaret, clowing and singing, who burst on to the Brighton burlesque scene in 2007. Ruby also produces, programmes and stage manages shows for other artists, and she is currently writing her own cabaret show. @ruby_demure

Subscriptions

OLIVIER WOODESFARQUHARSON

Olivier Woodes-Farquharson is an adventurer, diplomat, voice actor and writer, although not always in that order. When not travelling to obscure places that may or may not exist, he is most likely to be found at Cheltenham Races – the best place to blood his latest tweed – or furiously foraging in the English countryside.

Stephen has been a TV channel controller, author (his first novel was published last year), media/culture commentator, occasional lecturer, movie consultant/ sales broker and amateur antiquarian. A habitué of Soho’s Colony Club scene during his younger years, Arnell now resides in bucolic Bedfordshire.

ACTUARIUS

Actuarius is an artist, essayist, photographer and journalist. A selfconfessed petrolhead, he mainly produces works based around his twin passions of Art Deco and mechanised transport, making the shortlist for the highly prestigious Guild of Motoring Writers Feature Writer of the Year in 2021.

Andrew Roberts read for The Bar in his (comparative) youth, but the lure of British cinema led him to take a PhD in this engrossing subject. The recent purchase of his Wolseley 6/99 is largely due to Carry On Cabby, Quatermass and the Pit, The Fast Lady and many other fine pictures from the golden age of British cinema.

Email chap@thechap.co.uk

Website www.thechap.co.uk

Instagram @TheChapMag

Facebook/TheChapMagazine

Twitter @TheChapMag

STEPHEN ARNELL

GUSTAV TEMPLE

ANDREW ROBERTS

THE CHAP MANIFESTO

1 THOU SHALT ALWAYS WEAR TWEED. No other fabric says so defiantly: I am a man of panache, savoir-faire and devil-may-care, and I will not be served Continental lager beer under any circumstances.

2 THOU SHALT NEVER NOT SMOKE. Health and Safety “executives” and jobsworth medical practitioners keep trying to convince us that smoking is bad for the lungs/heart/skin/eyebrows, but we all know that smoking a bent apple billiard full of rich Cavendish tobacco raises one’s general sense of well-being to levels unimaginable by the aforementioned spoilsports.

3 THOU SHALT ALWAYS BE COURTEOUS TO THE LADIES. A gentleman is never truly seated on an omnibus or railway carriage: he is merely keeping the seat warm for when a lady might need it. Those who take offence at being offered a seat are not really Ladies.

4 THOU SHALT NEVER, EVER, WEAR PANTALOONS DE NIMES. When you have progressed beyond fondling girls in the back seats of cinemas, you can stop wearing jeans.

5 THOU SHALT ALWAYS DOFF ONE’S HAT. Alright, so you own a couple of trilbies. Good for you - but it’s hardly going to change the world. Once you start actually lifting them off your head when greeting passers-by, then the revolution will really begin.

6 THOU SHALT NEVER FASTEN THE LOWEST BUTTON ON THY WAISTCOAT. Look, we don’t make the rules, we simply try to keep them going. This one dates back to Edward VII, sufficient reason in itself to observe it.

7 THOU SHALT ALWAYS SPEAK PROPERLY. It’s really quite simple: instead of saying “Yo, wassup?”, say “How do you do?”

8 THOU SHALT NEVER WEAR PLIMSOLLS WHEN NOT DOING SPORT. Nor even when doing sport. Which you shouldn’t be doing anyway. Except cricket.

9 THOU SHALT ALWAYS WORSHIP AT THE TROUSER PRESS. At the end of each day, your trousers should be placed in one of Mr. Corby’s magical contraptions, and by the next morning your creases will be so sharp that they will start a riot on the high street.

10 THOU SHALT CULTIVATE INTERESTING FACIAL HAIR. By interesting we mean moustaches, or beards with a moustache attached.

44

CONTENTS

8 AM I SILVER?

Readers reveal the salt and pepper in their barnets

14 SILVER VIXENS

Thelma Arkright on the few actresses who let their locks go natural on the silver screen

FEATURES

22 INTERVIEW: LINDSAY DUNCAN

Gustav Temple meets the elegant thespian to discuss her starring role in True Love

31 I WANT TO BE ALONE

Olivier Woodes-Farquharson on the most reclusive souls of all time

36 THE WELSH WIZARD

Chris Sullivan on Dr. William Price, arch-Druid, Chartist reformer, vegetarian, herbalist and all-round oddball

SARTORIAL FEATURES

44 SOCIETY OF SALOME

The merry band of aesthetes pays a visit to Leighton House

57 MR FISH

Freddie Anderson on the camp shirtmaker who played a huge part in the swinging sixties

64 THE MAN WHO FLED THE WORLD

Alexander Larman on the so-called ‘lost’ decade of David Bowie

70 GREY FOX COLUMN

David Evans reflects on how life has changed over the last twenty five years, sartorially and socially

CHAP SILVER JUBILEE

76 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CHAP

Torquil Arbuthnot, who was always there, gallops through the last quarter century of this publication

89 SILVER FOXES

Andrew Roberts on the silver-haired smoothies who charmed their way through the movies in the fifties and sixties

CHAP LIFE

100 ROYAL FLUSH

The concoctions members of the royal family decant into their coupé glasses when they want to get high

106 CRICKET

Sam Knowles puts the case for the humble quarter-century to be upgraded to a similar status as the half-century

ISSUE 119 • SPRING 2024

89

TRAVEL

112 BRIGHTON: THE SWEET SMELL OF EXCESS

Ruby Demure takes a walk on the seamier side of Britain’s favourite seaside town

116 GRESLEY’S SILVER JUBILEE

Actuarius on the streamlined railway locomotive that was built in 1935 to mark the Silver Jubilee of King George V

REVIEWS

128 ATTACK OF THE 50-FOOT SCREEN

An encounter with the makers of a new documentary about the notorious Scala Cinema in London’s King’s Cross, and all the louche misfits who lurked there

138 RIPLEY REVISITED

Stephen Arnell on the latest incarnation of Patricia Highsmith’s loveable anti-hero, starring Andrew Scott, and Tom Ripley’s previous iterations in cinema and television

147 BOOKS

New tomes on eccentric film director Brian Desmond Hurst, WWII deception officer Dudley Clarke, racing driver Dorothy Levitt and Catalonian restaurateur Oli Maxwell

153 AGEING DICKS

Upon the release of Monsieur Spade with Clive Owen, we look back at previous attempts to wring more action out of long-retired fictional detectives

162 CROSSWORD

Cover photo: © Alamy

Am I Silver

READERS WERE ASKED TO SEND US PHOTOS OF THEMSELVES PROUDLY BEARING THEIR SILVER HALLMARKS. THESE ARE THE RESULTS

Star Silver

“With your permission, sir,” writes William Walker (ret.) “might I present a little recitation entitled ‘When My Hair has Turned to Silver, I’ll Have The Richest Head in Town’?

Oh where the sorrel locks of yesteryear? such fulsome curls now thin and grey. But what’s lost above, is gained below, In the rich lip-weasel, plush and gay. Apologies for the doggerel, but when Madam Muse calls, one must at least have a go.” Indeed sir, and a thoroughly good ‘go’ we think you’ve had.

Craig Ferguson has nothing to look so grumpy about. He is sitting in what appears to be a first class railway carriage from the past, and is wearing a monocle. He is also wearing a rather splendid tie pin under his vintage necktie, and the lapels of his Prince-of-Wales check suit nearly reach his shoulders. So what if he’s going a bit thin on top?

Francis Giordanella is the head of a racket in Gozo that claims protection funds from tailor’s shops and vendors of ostrich-hide co-respondent shoes. That is why his hair has turned grey, although you should see his customers’ locks.

“What used to be a few grains amongst the pepper,” writes Adam Pearson, “is now probably a coronary inducing amount of Sodium Chloride. Oh well, here’s to growing older disgracefully.”

The adoption of an elegant birds-eye speckled suit is an excellent distraction, sir, and may even cause the hard of seeing to confuse it with your speckled locks.

David Edmunds cropped his photo so that we couldn’t see his hair. We can assume that there probably isn’t any; however, such a splendid beard more than compensates.

Jerry Tharapos from Melbourne, Australia, gave no comment when submitting his photograph, perhaps hoping not to draw attention to his button-down collar. There was no need, for we are perfectly happy to overlook this no-doubt ‘Down Under’ sartorial anomaly in favour of a rather splendid ‘full set’, whose tinges of grey only give it even more gravitas.

“Had my first grey hairs when I turned 18,” candidly writes Lee Tanner. “Too many years to contemplate later, my beard has taken over. Hair’s not too far behind though.”

Oh well, at least you’ve got a model boat on your sideboard.

“But for a lilly-livered smattering of Just for Men,” writes John M. Gilheany, and then stops abruptly. This is surprising, for there is much to explain here, not least why he chose to wear a studded leather belt.

“Let me introduce my friend the Count of Monte Pulciano,” writes Gary Horsfield, “known to his close chums as Jasper Ward... he has been a Silver Fox since the age of 18.”

Looks as though Jasper is so keen to tuck into his first glass of Montepulciano of the morning that he hasn’t even got time to dress.

“The attached photo depicts me in my guise as an 1812 RN Captain,” writes Mike Bell, “taking tea with the ladies in the Pump Rooms, Bath. And before you recoil in alarm and horror from what may appear to be a ‘man-bun’ on the back of my head, let me reassure you that it’s a ‘queue’, much favoured by the Georgian chap for keeping his longer locks in order.”

Too late, sir. A pity you chose to crop out the intriguing lady seated to your left, and we can only hope she fell for your ‘queue’ story too.

Mark England is a man of mystery and possibly a time traveller. He sent us two photographs, both grabbed from his field telephone and bearing a time stamp. The first (left), taken on 23rd December 2023, shows Mr. England clean shaven and is addressed to one ‘Olivia’.

The second (right), taken only six weeks later on 31st January 2024, shows him with a full handlebar moustache and goatee beard, addressed to ‘Jane’. Mark, is there something you are not telling us?

Also perched on a balcony of some sort is Steve Hibberd, although he is less of a rare bloom than an unsightly weed.

“Just sending in this pic of Lance for Am I Silver?,” writes Louise Holland. “He’s wearing an original 1929 sports blazer on our balcony in Kew Village.” A balcony with a lawn, madam?

Perhaps the whole of Kew maintains some form of micro-climate that makes such ideas possible. The spring flower that you have cultured, with its bold orange stripes and pale cream stem is very impressive; in fact one wonders whether Kew Gardens would be interested in viewing it?

“Please find a photo attached, for consideration in your “Am I Silver?” section,” writes Stephen Copp, “of the next edition of your excellent publication, the “Chap” magazine. I hope the photograph is not too serious, as I notice a degree of flippancy in many of the “Am I a chap?” type galleries. We have met at a few of the “Chap” Olympiads in the past, and I sincerely hope our paths cross again in the future!”

Sir, the photograph is not too serious “at all”. In fact it is “hilarious”.

Robin Shrubsole sounds like a madeup name, the sort of name a man would conjure up for himself, were he suddenly to have the urge to wear a 1970s nylon shirt twinned with a ladies’ Polyester scarf worn as a cravat and a tank top that probably throws sparks when worn near anything made of metal. And these pages would be the only suitable place in the world for such a man.

“My first silver hair arrived long before the appropriate anniversary,” writes Peter Crabb, “but it took a further 4 or 5 decades to properly qualify as a ‘silver fox’. I respectfully submit a photographic reproduction of my full set, in the hope that you find the shade of grey appropriate.”

Sir, the shade of grey is acceptable –but what, may one enquire, is that extra length of hair doing peeping over your shoulder? There is no shade of grey that would make this acceptable.

“Please find attached for your judgment, Am I Silver?” writes Pandora Harrison. “In this photo I am attending the Gala Nocturna Ball in Belgium dressed as St. Lucia, bringing light into the dark of winter.”

Madam, photographs that have had someone cropped out always beg the question – who and why?

The other question begged by this photograph is –didn’t the candles cause a fire hazard?

“Hi Chaps,” writes Lorraine. “Pamper Day, yours truly O’Naturel.”

Isn’t it spelled ‘au naturel’, madam, and doesn’t it mean ‘in the nude’? Nevertheless, it is impressive that your hair colour has changed to match the colour of its surroundings.

“Taken a while ago,” writes Helen Rigby, “at the Feria in Alcalá de los Gazules, Cádiz, Andalucía, Spain.”

The Feria in Alcala de los Gazules Fair, madam, could do with upgrading its decorations. One rusty lamp seems a little unceremonious. Did they have any Waltzers?

“My hair stubble (not visible in picture - I did shave before I left the house, I’m not an animal!),” writes Edward Marlowe, “is decidedly silver these days, even if there is less of it than ideal owing to my now being Of The Bald.”

Sir, there is only one silver fox/vixen in this picture and she is standing at heel and wearing a pink coat.

RIP Mimi 2010-2024

The exception to all this is of course Anne Bancroft, but then she was playing a role in the Graduate that defined her as an older woman seducing a younger man, so the grey streaks in her hair were probably added rather than subtracted

SILVER VIXENS

Thelma Arkright on that rare species on either side of the Atlantic in cinematic circles –the female star who kept her stardom while her hair turned grey

Nice as it would be to think that, like the gentlemen of Hollywood and Elstree/Pinewood (see page 89), certain glamorous actresses also allowed grey to seep into their locks, allowing it to lend them a roguish charm as they got older.

Sadly this was not the case, at least in Hollywood during the forties, fifties and sixties. While grey streaks in the barnet signalled ‘distinguished’ for the chaps, for the ladies it meant it was time to slap on some more hair dye, or even add more peroxide to hair that was naturally approaching the bottled shade of platinum they already had. The exception to all this is of course Anne Bancroft, but then Bancroft was playing a role in The Graduate (1967) that defined her as an older woman seducing a younger man (Dustin Hoffman), so the grey streaks in her hair were probably added rather than subtracted.

Add to this that most of the stills from Hollywood’s golden age are in black and white, so what the modern heart hopes is a mane of silver is more likely to have been blonde. However, there were one or two blonde bombshells that made it past the peroxide and into pastures grey. One such was Barbara Stanwyck, whose career in key midcentury films included Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve (1939) and William Castle’s downright weird

The Night Walker (1964) – “My lover is only a dream but he’s still more of a man than you.”

But while other female Hollywood stars of the forties, fifties and sixties faded into obscurity, Stanwyck put away the hair dye and resurrected herself as a television star in the 1980s, starring in Charlies Angels, The Thorn Birds and Dynasty, before being cast as the lead in Dynasty spinoff The Colbys (1985). Stanwyck’s luxuriant grey barnet was rather more convincing than her male counterpart Charlton Heston in his blonde altar-boy syrup.

Meanwhile, on this side of the Atlantic, it took a lot more effort – and a lot more peroxide – to grow old gracefully. Born Diana Fluck in Swindon, Diana Dors carved out a career during the fifties as the British Marilyn Monroe. The person behind this marketing ploy was her first husband, seedy publicist Dennis Hamilton, who secured her first Rolls Royce and set her up in a Thameside house, where together he and Dors would host sex parties, filmed via secret cameras in the bedrooms. On the plus side, Hamilton introduced Diana to his chums the Kray Twins. A little like Elvis Presley’s relationship with Colonel Tom Parker, Hamilton kept Dors away from creative fulfilment and inside a narrow box that paid the bills (though not HMRC, as it turned out).

It wasn’t until she divorced Hamilton that Diana’s career could have taken off properly, but

by then the age of blonde bombshells was over, and she didn’t have the svelte style of an Anne Bancroft or a Diane Keaton. Diana Dors settled into a round of forgettable sex comedies, though did show a glimpse of her true talent in arthouse obscurity Deep End (1970), in which she played an older woman trying to seduce a naïve young swimming pool attendant. The blonde wig nearly fell off during the steamier scenes, giving the impression that director Jerzy Skolimolski was deliberately playing on the faded legend of his second female star (the female lead was redhead Jane Asher).

Dors became a fixture on morning television during the 1980s, by which time her buoyant bouffant was a shade of platinum that could have been blonde, or white, or made of snow. By then she didn’t care, as she had shucked off her controlling first husband and was doling out dieting advice to the housebound. Still, Diana Dors had fared much better than the American counterpart on whom she was modelled, though fewer classic pop songs were written about her.

These days things are quite different, with, at least on these shores, a go-get-’em attitude towards

“When Jennifer Coolidge received her first Golden Globe for the role of Tanya McQuoid in The White Lotus, she boasted that she never bothered to work out or keep fit. Her hair may not be silver, but her soul certainly is. When you become a household name in your early sixties, you can have your hair coloured whatever you like”

female ageing that is helped enormously by our having several acting legends still regarded as being in their prime. In the case of Judi Dench, no-one really remembers her in BBC’s Armchair Theatre in the early sixties, so no-one was shocked when they saw her as a white-haired female M in Skyfall

Barbara Stanwyck

Dame Judi Dench

This is also true of Maggi Smith and Helen Mirren – they came into their own as actors when they were already older women. There was no young heartthrob version of themselves to be compared to. Helen Mirren did have a stellar career in her early thirties, but it was exclusively in theatre and arthouse films like O Lucky Man. Since only chinstroking intellectuals ever watched these films – and you certainly won’t find Lindsay Anderson’s work on Netflix – the actress was given carte blanche to relaunch her career many years later in the world of mainstream cinema as an ‘older woman’. It is noteworthy that just before becoming more familiar to wider television audiences in Prime Suspect (1991), Mirren was in Paul Schrader’s excellent The Comfort of Strangers (1990), in which she played opposite Christopher Walken and Rupert Everett in this dark tale by Ian McEwan adapted for the screen by Harold Pinter.

In the United States it’s the other way around. Legends in their youth such as Sandra Bullock and Michelle Pfeiffer simply use cosmetic surgery to try and perpetuate the youthful version of themselves, refusing (or cowtowing to Hollywood pressure) to

Dame Helen Mirren

Diana Dors

allow themselves to age. The exception to this is the marvellous Jennifer Coolidge, who was the only member of the cast of 2022’s The White Lotus to star in both season ones and two.

Coolidge started her career on Seinfeld, playing one of Jerry’s girlfriends. Since there is a new one of these in practically every episode, it is not one of television’s most memorable roles. Roles in grossout comedies like Legally Blonde and American Pie kept Coolidge in work throughout the first two decades of the 21st century, but it wasn’t until

“Jamie Lee Curtis didn’t get her first Oscar until the age of 64, for Everything Everywhere All At Once, having screamed her way through the eighties and nineties in slasher/horror movies for which few gongs are handed out”

The White Lotus that she achieved official legend status. When she received her first Golden Globe for the role of Tanya McQuoid, she boasted that she never bothered to work out or keep fit. Her hair may not be silver, but her soul certainly is. When you become a household name in your early sixties, you can have your hair coloured whatever you like.

Jamie Lee Curtis didn’t get her first Oscar until the age of 64, for Everything Everywhere All At Once, having screamed her way through the eighties and nineties in slasher/horror movies for which few gongs are handed out. It was only in Trading Places (1983) that she began to show her true colours, but it took the role as frumpy IRS inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdre, for which she had to hide her looks under a fat suit and a wig, to make the Academy sit up and pay attention. Her career followed a trajectory in exactly the other direction to Helen Mirren’s, leaving the serious, challenging roles until the latter years.

But the Hollywood actress who defies all the rules listed above, whichever side of the Atlantic, is Jane Fonda. Having started out as eye candy for the swinging sixties in Barbarella (1968), she crept

Jamie Lee Curtis

Lee Curtis in Everything Everywhere All At Once

into much more serious roles in socially conscious films like They Shoot Horses, Don’t They (1969) before winning Oscars for Klute (1971) and Coming Home (1978). Her hair colour adapted, chameleon-like, to whatever the roles demanded, and she even played an entire role speaking in fluent French (Jean-Luc Godard’s 1972 Tout Va Bien), which addressed social issues in France after the 1968 civil unrest.

Fonda never needed to make a comeback, as she had never gone away. Her 2015-2022 Netflix series Grace and Frankie, with Lily Tomlin, is still the platform’s longest-running series. She may have been under the cosmetic surgeon’s knife a few too many times, but then so has everyone else half her age in Hollywood. Jane Fonda is the standard bearer of the grey haired Hollywood maven, her silver coloured locks standing out like a beacon among younger actors. And she is not someone without controversy over more than her hair colour. How many of her younger colleagues would pose for a photograph in the centre of a global conflict –in Fonda’s case the Vietnam War – then spend the rest of their lives apologising to veterans for their anti-war views? n

Jane Fonda with Lily Tomlin in Grace and Frankie

Jennifer Coolidge

INTERVIEW: LINDSAY DUNCAN

22

RECLUSES

FEATURES

31

LINDSAY DUNCAN

“The fake cigarettes are herbal and

they’re

disgusting, and really difficult to keep alight, so you have to take enormous drags on them to keep them going. You try keeping a herbal cigarette alight while driving a car, with the roof down. However, the smoking is perfect for the character. Her stubborn refusal to attend to her health in any way delighted me”

Did you watch the Baftas last night?

It didn’t even occur to me. I’ve got one night off and I don’t want to dive into showbusiness on it. Even if it had occurred to me, I probably wouldn’t have watched it. I watched The West Wing instead.

I haven’t seen The West Wing, but I have seen the episode of Black Mirror you were in, about scandal and blackmail in British politics. That was quite a shocker, wasn’t it? It was a shocker, yes! I remember reading the script, and it’s not often you’re almost physically taken

aback. I was really proud to be in that; I thought it was great. Charlie Brooker has certainly made his mark with Black Mirror. I mean, you almost can’t go far enough these days.

Well, he can. He’s the only one who can.

So now you’re in a production of Dear Octopus at the National Theatre. Has it had good reviews?

I don’t know, I never read them. But that’s quite common for actors. It’s no use to me. I don’t want

Gustav Temple meets the star of stage and screen who recently took the lead in Channel 4’s OAP murder thriller Truelove

to know any detail that someone’s put out into the public, something you might be doing and you have to recreate it every night. If it’s negative it’s hard to get over, and if it’s positive you might go into a performance with too much vanity.

“I think the culture has changed with young actors. Maybe they have to spend so much money on coffee that they can’t afford to go out and eat in the evening! Photographers at press nights nowadays make a big thing of asking you to put your glass down, and I find that really difficult. It makes me quite bad tempered, because I’m a grown up”

Since we last spoke to you, when you were in Around the World in 80 Days, you have not been idle, have you? Have you always worked hard, with few gaps between projects?

No, I think when I was in my thirties and forties I was doing back to back theatre productions and I seemed to be working very hard. But theatre is very demanding, so I consciously don’t do as much. In this case, the timing worked out very well. Truelove had just come out when we started rehearsals for Dear Octopus.

How was it playing the lead in Truelove –not just the female lead but the actual lead? It must have been exhausting filming… for how long?

Four months, but it’s 9-5 and you feel supported. This is not luxury television or movie making, but there’s a car outside your house every morning, sometimes with a coffee. I loved every minute of it. With a camera, I like to be ‘on’ most days. You generate an energy that’s much easier to maintain. You’re absolutely plugged into the project. What I find less satisfying is to dip in and out on a film

“I recall being nearly physically taken aback by the script to Black Mirror”

project. It’s more like trying to jump on a moving vehicle and trying to catch up with the speed.

Did you ever take your work home with you, and suddenly feel like having a cigarette and a bottle of wine, like your character Phil? Oh God, no! The fake cigarettes are herbal and they’re disgusting, and really difficult to keep alight, so you have to take enormous drags on them to keep them going. You probably noticed quite a lot of smoking and driving. You try keeping a herbal cigarette alight while driving a car, with the roof down. However, the smoking is perfect for the character. Her stubborn refusal to attend to her health in any way delighted me.

Had you ever played such a sassy, chain smoking, fast driving live-for-the-moment character before?

I’ve played strong women quite a lot, but I don’t think I’ve ever played anyone quite like Phil. She’s on a very fine line of risking being unsympathetic, but I completely delighted in her uncompromising character.

Did you have to dig very deep to resonate with the character, or were there any similarities with your real personality?

No, she’s not like me at all. You’d have to ask other people, but for a start, I could never have hacked a career in the police force. I can take responsibility for acting, but taking responsibility for a whole team of people and being in life-and-death situations, added to the sexism that Phil would have encountered when she came through in the seventies; it still exists now but it would have been really tough. The only thing I might possibly share with her is her dry sense of humour. And in the end you find that her heart is big. You see someone quite brittle and self contained, who’s obviously not satisfied; she’s restless. You think, God she’s got a loving husband, a daughter who would like more from her, but she is very restless. But then you discover that her heart is generous and capable of great love, and she does love her husband even though it may not be the most fulfilling relationship.

Were there any of her actions that you morally disagreed with?

Just one more herbal cigarette for the road

With Phil Davis as husband Nigel

I’ve never been bothered about playing people who aren’t particularly likeable, because they’re usually very interesting. If they’ve got convictions of their own, you want to dig into that and find out what they are. There’s a strand in this that hasn’t really been talked about, and that’s the presence of the young policewoman. She is obviously from a different time, yet she’s actually the younger version of Phil. She’s ambitious, she’s focused, she’s intelligent, she doesn’t take no for an answer.

Was your off screen relationship with Kiran Sonia Sawar anything like your onscreen relationship, as in the rookie learning from the experienced mentor?

Oh God, she was more than capable of holding her own and didn’t need any help from me. We started early on having great jokes about her being my stalker because she looked at me too admiringly. So we had a great laugh.

What about the character of your husband played by Phil Davis? Do you think there are men who retire and disappear into a kind of inertia, perhaps more than women do?

The thing is I don’t know many men who’ve retired – but that’s showbiz! We don’t retire. But it’s years since I worked with Phil Davis, which was on a Mike Leigh film called Grown Ups. He was perfect for the role in this production, because his relationship with his wife is true love. It may have been difficult for them but he has got plans, like going a round the world cruise and so forth. They’re just not her plans. He wants to share his life with her but she has been unavailable for most of their marriage, working long hours and being passionate and driven about her life. But he hasn’t been part of that. But it’s all so hypothetical; if she hadn’t married a man like him, would she have had the career she wanted?

What I’m saying is that there’s real love in that relationship, even though neither of them are completely happy in it. We all want to talk about love, don’t we? We just have to find true love. And we want to see love out there in stories. We want to lay claim to it, even if it’s lost, or forgotten; it’s just part of our human nature.

But don’t we also want truth? When Phil finally gets together with the true love of her life, it seemed believable, because she is the type of personality who would not resist a desire as strong as that for moral reasons. It’s what would really happen. Absolutely, and we all want it to happen. Even though a lot of viewers will feel for her husband –you can feel two things at the same time. Your heart goes out to him but you just want her and Ken to be together. You want them to have great sex and to admit their love for each other, even if it can’t go anywhere.

As well as the bigger theme of whether assisted dying is right, was there also a theme of what purpose one should have in the days after retirement? Are you ever going to confront that question yourself? You seem to be busier now than ever.

I would never use that word ‘retire’ because it sounds like a kind of ending. I prefer the idea of a gentle segue into more free time. Like now I’m really excited about going away when I’ve finished

the play. I don’t have that running anxiety where I must know what the next project is. I don’t want to miss out on things because I’ve got eight shows a week. I don’t want to neglect other bits of me and my family.

However, it’s incredibly exciting to be in your seventies and working on different projects, with people of different ages. Although of course with Truelove nearly everyone else was my age, but at the moment on the play I’m working with lots of younger actors. I’ve also made short films with young filmmakers, which I love doing.

So is your real husband stuck at home playing solitaire while you’re out filming all day?

No, he’s an actor as well. Unfortunately this show is too long for the lovely aftershow dinners. We found that some places are closing earlier. When we were in our thirties, places seemed to be open much later. We were always in Joe Allens until very late. Joe Allens was the great post-show restaurant that started in New York. There was a lot of tablehopping and you could eat cheaply.

With her fictional true love Ken (Clarke Peters)

I miss those days. I think the culture has changed with young actors. Maybe they have to spend so much money on coffee that they can’t afford to go out and eat in the evening! Photographers at press nights nowadays make a big thing of asking you to put your glass down, and I find that really difficult. It makes me quite bad tempered, because I’m a grown up. That doesn’t mean I’m an alcoholic; and even if I were, that’s my business.

What do you think your character Phil would say in that situation?

Unprintable – and she certainly would not put that gin and tonic down.

I was in Soho the other night trying to get a drink at 11 pm after seeing a comedy show but there was literally nowhere open. So depressing! What’s the point of Soho? We live in a capital city and we should all be out there until the small hours.

Is it to do with the trend in young people not to drink so much?

Well it could be. We were a bunch of reprobates in my day. I’m not going to be judgemental – we were great! We weren’t drinking during a show or anything…

Well, some of you were. n

Truelove is on Channel 4

“Phil would certainly not put that gin and tonic down”

I WANT TO BE ALONE

There have always been extroverts and introverts. However, as Olivier WoodesFarquharson recounts, there are some who have taken the art of being a recluse to jaw-dropping extremes

Like it or not, we now live in a world where parading yourself online in almost any scenario appears to be the default, at least with the younger generation. As more mature members of society, it is resolutely not our role to judge them, although we can perhaps tut under our breath at what the shifting cultural sands have left us with. To a certain extent, self-promotion has always been innate, even if it has now reached biblical proportions and has become an absolute necessity for anyone with a product or idea to sell – and many who don’t. In contrast, ‘The Past’ always seemed to make greater allowances for those who were less inclined to prostrate themselves in front of cameras, letting them carry on living their secluded existence without bother – if they so chose. That said, some of the lengths that these recluses went to are worthy of

“The Simpsons even managed to get Thomas Pynchon into one of their episodes. The three photos that do exist of him show a surprisingly cheery character in his late teens with a set of teeth that look like they could easily eat an apple through a fence. Unlike Salinger and Lee, no-one even knows where he lives”

quiet admiration, even if it occasionally veered into just plain eccentric.

It should perhaps come as no surprise that the world of literature has produced more than a few recluses; those who write books often lead a solitary life by necessity and this often extends to when they are not writing, too. Perhaps surprisingly, US authors

“The overwhelming evidence is that Banksy is not one individual but a collective of artists working under that banner; some Banksy works would simply not be possible if it were just one person doing it overnight without being spotted. Although naturally denied, it seems that Robert del Naja of the group Massive Attack is centrally involved”

are the masters here. Many of us will likely have read the seminal 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, which brilliantly deconstructs the racial and class prejudices of 1930s Deep South America as seen through the eyes of a child. A huge success, Lee loathed the ensuing attention that she received, living for the next 40 years alone in a Manhattan apartment, with only her friend and fellow author Truman Capote keeping her company until he died. She proceeded to explain in a very rare later interview why she never wrote again: ‘I wouldn’t go through the pressure and publicity I went through with To Kill a Mockingbird for any amount of money. Second, I have said what I wanted to say, and I will not say it again.’ She stuck to her word until her death in 2016.

Yet Lee was a positively outgoing type when compared to JD Salinger. His prescient 1951 masterpiece The Catcher in the Rye, a visceral portrayal of teenage alienation in an increasingly superficial society, was infamously the book that was being read and held by Mark Chapman when he murdered John Lennon in 1980. As the novel’s popularity grew, Salinger moved from New York to New Hampshire to escape the attention. Hitherto relatively sociable,

J.D Salinger, never knowingly available for interview

it appears that a seemingly innocuous interview he gave for a local High School magazine triggered something in him, as he immediately cut off many friendships and other local links for no apparent reason. As with Lee, his published output shrank, although he was fine with that, as he later confirmed in a letter to a journalist (whom he obviously refused to meet): ‘Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.’ Except for a couple of blurry shots of an older Salinger in a supermarket car park, he managed to elude the media until his death at 91 in 2010.

The true reclusive literary master, though, must be Thomas Pynchon. Now 86 years old, there have been no confirmed photographs of him since 1955. Regardless of his literary prowess, that alone takes remarkable skill. A precocious genius who graduated two years early from school, his esoteric novels The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow remain classics to this day. He has published a novel every decade or so since the 1960s, and the makers of The Simpsons even managed to get him to record – remotely of course – a segment in one of their episodes. The three photos that do exist of him show a surprisingly

cheery character in his late teens with a set of teeth that look like they could easily eat an apple through a fence. Unlike Salinger and Lee, no-one even knows where he lives.

In contrast to the world of literature, one would have thought that the world of movie-making would be dripping with show-offs desperate to flaunt themselves. To be fair, the vast majority are indeed addicted to the camera, but surprisingly there are a few who at various stages have shunned the limelight to an alarming degree. Greta Garbo continues to be a benchmark here, helped along the way by the most famous line she uttered on screen - in the movie Grand Hotel - which happened to be: ‘I want to be let alone; I just want to be alone’. To a certain extent she was, as after her sudden retirement in 1948, she lived for decades in New York, going for a daily walk, often with photographers keen to catch a glimpse of her behind her sunglasses, yet she never said a word to any of them until her death in 1990, enigmatic to the end.

Meanwhile, during Garbo’s self-imposed seclusion, a US film-maker in the mid-1970s was looking like the next big thing. Terrence Malick had become a new darling of the US movie cognoscenti

The Simpsons’ attempt to track down Thomas Pynchon

with Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978), each a meditative and stylized treatise on transcendence. The normal response to this, of course, would have been to capitalise and develop further as an artist by making more excellent movies. Malick, for reasons never revealed, chose instead to disappear for 20 years, during which it is believed he lived in Paris writing screenplays. Then suddenly, in 1997 he returned to make another grand movie, The Thin Red Line, with a stunning cast and to much acclaim – all as though the previous two decades had never happened. He still insists on not being photographed where possible.

Even Malick though couldn’t hold a flame to the movie world’s most famous recluse, Howard Hughes. Although a successful film producer in the 1920s and 1930s, it was more as a business and aviation entrepreneur that he made his name and immense fortune. He dated almost every glamorous female of the age ... that is, until his ObsessiveCompulsive Disorder began to debilitate all his actions. An unremitting germophobe, he would wash his hands until they bled, and insist on eating the same dinner every night. He ended up living for 15 years in a Las Vegas Hotel, but never leaving it. Even his guards hardly ever saw him, and when they did they were presented by a lank-haired, semi-naked

feral creature with yellow two-inch fingernails, who would watch the trashy movie Ice Station Zebra literally hundreds of times with the volume on max. At least he wasn’t catching germs. When he finally died in 1976, his hair and beard were down to his waist and he weighed barely 90 pounds.

The world of music is not exempt from those who end up shunning the limelight that made their name. In the case of Syd Barrett, founder of prog rock legends Pink Floyd, the catalyst for his solo life was perhaps more obvious: psychedelics. Although other band members suspected that he may have been an undiagnosed schizophrenic, most noticed a sudden change in his personality in the late 1960s when he took a massive overdose of LSD and continued to have flashbacks for a long time thereafter – possibly augmented by his irresponsible flatmates spiking his morning coffee with more of the stuff each day so that he was on a never-ending trip. Eventually sacked by the band, he moved back in the 1970s to his home town of Cambridge, and gave no interviews until his death in 2006.

Even the dry world of finance has its posterboy recluse: Satoshi Nakamoto. He developed Bitcoin and devised the first blockchain database, thus introducing the world to the dubious pleasures of digital currency. This made him a hero to the

The world’s most famous recluse, Howard Hughes

Harper Lee: “I’ve said what I wanted to say and I will not say it again.”

money and tech nerds, but this was a hero without a face – or, just maybe, with many. To this day, no-one knows who Nakamoto is; the assumption is that it is a pseudonym, possibly but not necessarily for a Japanese man. By extension, it could easily be a group of people who worked it all out together. The only known photos of ‘Nakamoto’ have turned out to be faked.

The most famous pseudonym of a recluse in the art world is, of course, Banksy. ‘Recluse’ may be a stretch as Banksy certainly gets around, with his subversive stencil murals having been found in most continents over the last quarter of a century. Someone purporting to be Banksy has occasionally given phone interviews, usually tongue-in-cheek, with the main takeaway being that ‘his’ strong Bristol accent confirms the strong links he has with that city. However, as with Nakamoto, the overwhelming evidence is that Banksy is not one individual but a collective of artists working under that banner; some Banksy works would simply not be possible if made by one person overnight without being spotted. Although naturally denied, it seems that Robert del Naja of the group Massive Attack is centrally involved. A stencil artist himself in the 1980s, we also know from slips of the tongue in a couple of interviews that Banksy is fronted by someone called ‘Rob’, and it seems more than just a coincidence that Banksy artwork has often appeared in the same time and plsce where Massive Attack were performing. Then again, do we really want to know? The fun and mystery of our ignorance keep the enjoyment alive for many – not to mention adding zeros to the value of the artwork itself.

The final recluse worth shining a light on, though is not an individual or even a small group,

but an entire culture. If you have not heard of North Sentinel Island, you are hereby urged to look it up and find out more about the truly extraordinary people who are the Sentinelese. Located in the Andaman islands in the Bay of Bengal, and technically ‘governed’ by India – but in practice by absolutely no-one – in terms of reclusive longevity, the Sentinelese’s isolation beats all the others here by a cool 50,000 years, for that is how long anthropologists believe that this tribe have been separated from the rest of humanity, through choice. We know next to nothing about them, other than they don’t practice farming, wear no clothes, still use bow-and-arrows and hate to be disturbed. Attempts over the years to try to interact with them have met with aggression and even death. Efforts to bring over folk from other Andaman islands who speak the traditional languages of their respective lands have also failed, as the Sentinelese have been alone for so long as to have a language that has absolutely no link to any other. We can’t even accurately guess how many of them there are –estimates range from 500 down to 15 – and satellite imagery reveals nothing below the thick forest canopy of their small island home. They remain to many one of the greatest enigmas of the modern world, but Indian authorities rightly forbid anyone to approach them, not least as their resistance to modern diseases is very likely non-existent.

At first, we shake our heads in wonder at how this situation came to pass. Then again, when you look at some elements of the modern world – whether political, climate-related or just as a reflection on its sheer, unrelenting complexity – it’s occasionally tempting to think that it is the Sentinelese who have it right, and not us. n

A man claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto North Sentinel Island – you are not welcome

THE WELSH WIZARD

Chris Sullivan on the long and eventful life of Dr. William Price, arch-Druid, Chartist reformer, vegetarian, herbalist and all-round oddball

“Before losing his compass, William the elder fathered some seven children after marrying illiterate housemaid Mary Edmunds. Despite often being tied to his bed, Papa Price still managed to teach his offspring Latin”

There are some folk who, by virtue of their own eccentricity and idiosyncrasy, slip easily into legend, society not quite believing that this person actually walked the earth, ate, went to the toilet, farted and breathed air. One such is Dr. William Price, whose exploits in the 19th Century are beyond fiction, beyond belief and beyond comprehension. Fortunately, the visionary doctor’s exploits were not only well recorded but also photographed and, even though the images seem to be of a man from another far off realm of fantastic and far-fetched foible, he very much existed. Dr. William Price (1800-1893) was the third son of a clergyman, often seen from an early age running around the druidic stones of Pontypridd, South Wales baying at the moon in the nude. He was anti-authoritarian, eschewed the efficacy of modern medicines in favour of ancient herbal remedies, campaigned for the abolition of marriage (because it enslaved women) and opposed doctors, clergy, land owners politicians alike and ran around ranting against their existence. Undeniably Price was way ahead of the game: he believed in walking everywhere, was a vegetarian, supported conservation, healthy food and regular exercise,

Colour lithograph of Dr. Price by Newman & co

never wore socks (because he considered them unhygienic), washed all his coins because he believed they carried germs, refused to treat patients who were smokers unless they stopped, didn’t believe in owning land or property and regularly imbibed the sacred magic mushroom –all of which is perfectly acceptable today.

Price also believed that everybody, no matter what their standing, should be able to receive decent healthcare, and in 1842 established a system where miners paid a weekly stipend when well that

“William and Francis together shared an interest in Hinduism, Greek mythology, Egyptology and Neo Druidism, as well as the Psilocybin cubensis mushrooms that grew on the nearby hills”

William Price’s manifesto – entirely in Welsh

paid for their treatment when ill, thus influencing another great Welsh human rights pioneer born just 15 miles from Pontypridd, Aneurin Bevan, who in 1952 established the National Health Service.

Rather more at odds with common sense was that Price firmly believed that Homer had built Caerphilly castle and that all the great Greek philosophers were Welsh. The self-proclaimed chief druid of Wales, Price was also an eminent surgeon and the leader of the Chartists, whose storming of Newport in 1839 demanding equal representation in Parliament and equal rights for all men were met with the bullets of the dragoons, leaving 22 Chartists dead. To avoid a government imprisonment (but more likely his deportation to Australia) Price escaped to France disguised as a woman.

William Price was born on 4th March 1800 into a well-known and well-placed family in Rudry near Caerphilly, South Wales. His ancestors had been tanners and clergymen. Price’s grandfather opened a small blast furnace, while his father William graduated from Jesus College Oxford with a Masters of Arts degree before becoming a clergyman. He suffered from severe schizophrenia until he was officially listed as a ‘lunatic’ aged 30. Before losing his compass, William the elder fathered some seven children after marrying illiterate housemaid Mary Edmunds. Despite often being tied to his bed, Papa Price still managed to teach his offspring Latin.

Somehow, Price managed to wangle his way into becoming an apprentice for the renowned doctor Evan Edwards, and for five years flourished until he was accepted to study at the London Hospital in Whitechapel. Soon he was working alongside the most notable surgeons of the era and, aged 21, became the youngest ever member of the Royal College of surgeons. The good doctor turned his back on the monies that surgery might allow and moved to Pontypridd South Wales. He became surgeon for the Treforest Tinplate works and soon became a close friend of Francis Crawshay (son of the world’s richest man and its most prominent iron baron through his works in Merthyr Tydfil). When Crawshay’s wife was at death’s door during childbirth, Price did an emergency Caesarean, saving both mother and child from certain death.

William and Francis together shared an interest in Hinduism, Greek mythology, Egyptology and Neo Druidism, as well as the Psilocybin cubensis mushrooms that grew on the nearby hills.

Ostensibly they were proto hippies, Crawshay the ultimate rich kid slumming it with the good doctor, both wearing what many considered peasant garb and speaking Welsh.

Certainly, even then Price was renowned as a true advocate or Wales her language, culture and history at a time when she appeared lost along with her Druidic history. Price championed the idea of Welsh consciousness and changed the prevailing perception of its people far more than he has been credited for. He persuaded Lady Charlotte Guest (the wife of wealthy Merthyr Tydfil iron baron Josiah Guest) to, for the first time, translate the Mabinogion (a tome that tells of ancient Welsh legend) into English. He also prompted Lady Llanover to establish Eisteddfod, while reinventing the image of Welsh national costume.

This was a period when the sense of Welsh identity was at its lowest ebb, the people and their language considered inferior by the growing middle-class English-speakers who came to the principality as nouveau riche colliery owners and ironwork managers.

Price’s knowledge of Welsh history was vast, much of it due to his zeal for the manuscripts of antiquarian Edward Williams (1747-1826), a stonemason of the Vale of Glamorgan known by his bardic name of Iolo Morganwg. However, Iolo, whose great contribution to Welsh culture was the creation of the Gorsedd or bardic throne at the National Eisteddfod of Wales, had fabricated much of his evidence in an effort to re-ignite an interest in its celebrated past. He claimed that Glamorganshire was the epicentre of the Welsh people and where her Druidic ancestors had ruled the early Celtic society, before domination under Roman rule.

Iolo’s assertions have subsequently been questioned, as many of them were made while he was high on laudanum. Nevertheless, the bard’s influence was major and druidic lodges opened all over Wales, along with bardic circles and poetry societies who pledged to preserve and enhance the literary and oral history that is the cornerstone of Welsh Druidry.

William Price’s next move was to create a museum of Wales. He chose Y Maen Chwf, or the Rocking Stones, in the hills behind Pontypridd, where bards congregated and engaged in ancient druidic ceremonies. Here Price met Evan James, who was to pen the Welsh national Anthem Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau

Political reformers the Chartists, devoted to their six points of Parliamentary reform, needed inspiring leaders like Price. Knowing his influence over such a large workforce that could, in theory, see him mobilize an entire army of his own, they appointed Price as leader of Pontypridd and the surrounding valleys. For months he gathered support, using Welsh language lessons as a cover for gun training.

Price was the most radial of the Chartists. He craved the abolition of all religious, political and economic tyranny that oppressed the working people of Wales. In 1839 he was elected the leader of the Pontypridd Chartists and, in a secret candlelit ceremony, declared, “We must strike with all our might. I am with you all the way. I am Doctor William Price!”

That same year, the Newport Rising took place, when many of the Chartists and their

supporters rose up against the authorities, only to be quashed by soldiers, who killed a number of the revolutionaries. Price, knowing what would happen, kept his distance from the rebellion on that day. He fled to France disguised as a woman, where he became fluent in French. During a visit to the Louvre he saw a precious stone adorned with an image of a primitive bard addressing the moon, with a hieroglyphic inscription “in Druidic script, addressed to me from an Archdruid of Wales” some 2000 years previously. This stone declared that Price was his successor, who would revive Druidism and liberate Wales.

He immediately returned to Wales to continue the great work, and took to wearing emerald green clothing, a detail which had not been mentioned on the stone.

In 1881, the 81-year-old doctor married Gwenllian Llewellyn, a 21-year-old farm girl who in 1883 bore him his first child, whom Price named Iesu Grist (Welsh for Jesus Christ). When the child perished aged only five months, Price tried to cremate him on a mountain. The locals did not care for this and he was chased by an armed mob and almost burned on the fire himself. Price was arrested and put on trial by those who believed cremation was illegal.

At the trial Price appeared in a special outfit he had designed: white linen smock with scalloped collar and cuffs with a tartan shawl flung over one shoulder and his signature fox fur headdress. He won the case, arguing that cremation was healthier than burial. Cremation was subsequently declared legal in the UK.

None of this torment stopped Price from siring a daughter, Penelope, followed by son, also named Iesu Grist. Old Bill was ninety at the time, continuing to administer his magic to his patients right up to the week before his death on 25th January 1893. His final words were, “Bring me a glass of champagne” which he promptly drank and died soon after.

Dr. William Price’s immolation was the first official cremation in Wales. 20,000 people watched the event, drinking so much cider that the pubs of Llantrisant ran out of booze. At 7am Iesu Grist led the funeral procession dressed in a miniature version of his father’s outfit, his mother and sisters dressed in traditional Welsh costume. Today a statue of Price stands in the Bull Ring in Llantrisant. n

The Newport Rising by the Chartists in 1839

RAKER DRESS FREE-SPIRITED CHAPS WITH CLOTHES MADE IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

SOCIETY OF SALOME

44

PECULIAR TO MR FISH

57 THE

Sartorial

SOCIETY OF SALOME

MODELS:

VALERIE

PUGLIESE, JONNY HAART, OLGA JONARSKA, MARCUS ANTHONEY WALTERS, C.Y. CHAN, SHANNYN, JENNY DRAPER, RICHARD AND SAM DARTNALL

PHOTOGRAPHY: GUY CORBISHLEY @GUYCORBISHLEY

@SOCIETY.OF.SALOME

Society of Salome is an informal group founded in 2021, created to connect people interested in the fashion and culture of the Victorian, Edwardian and Art Deco periods. The group takes its name from one of Oscar Wilde’s most famous plays, Salome, published in 1893 and banned in Britain until the 1930s due to its controversial topic.

Society of Salome gathers several times a year at picnics, walks, museum visits and parties, with a dress code varying from the 1890s to the 1930s, depending on the occasion. The core aim of the group is to cultivate the beautiful aspects of the historical periods of interest, such as fashion, art, literature and intellectual concepts, while maintaining modern and progressive values, looking through a critical lens and contemplating the many diverse aspects of history.

Their events are welcoming towards everyone, whether lifelong vintage style wearers or just a beginner in the sphere of historical style.

These photographs were taken at the newly restored Leighton House in Kensington, where Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830-1896) hosted many of the Pre-Raphaelites during the decadent years of fin-de-siecle London. Designed by George Aitchison (1825-1910), Leighton House took 30 years to build, beginning in 1865.

During his frequent voyages to the Middle East, Leighton collected textiles, ceramics and artefacts that he brought back to display in his house. The largest collection of tiles, which line the Arab Hall extension, were collected during a trip to Damascus in 1873. Friends and colleagues, including Sir Richard Burton, would also gather curious and objets d’art for Leighton to add to his collection. Construction n began on the Arab Hall in 1877, his principal inspiration being the interior of a 12th century Sicilio-Norman palace named La Zisa in Palermo, Sicily.

Various craftsmen were assembled for the extension, including the potter William de Morgan, artist Walter Crane, sculptor Edgar Boehm and illustrator Randolph Caldecott. Walter Crane’s design for the gold mosaic frieze was constructed in Venice and then shipped over to Kensington in sections.

The final addition to the house was added only a few months before Leighton’s death in 1896. What had previously served as a roof terrace on the first floor was converted into the Silk Room, designed to house the many paintings by Leighton’s contemporaries, such as John Everett Millais, George Frederic Watts, John Singer Sargent, Albert Moore and Lawrence Alma-Tadema, as well as Leighton’s own paintings, regarded as significant Pre-Raphaelite works. n

DGD Sydney, Photograph: CTRL Media

LEFT: Sam Dartnall @mildly_strange & father Richard

LEFT: Olga Jonarska @berolinensis RIGHT: Jenny Draper @jdraperlondon

LEFT: Marcus Anthoney Walters @discount_count RIGHT: Tim Eyre

PECULIAR TO MR FISH

Freddie Anderson on the swinging sixties sensation that was Michael Fish, shirtmaker, dressmaker and dressing gown maker to Michael Caine, David Bowie, Mick Jagger and Muhammad Ali

The flamboyant party of the Swinging Sixties was abruptly shut down in 1973, as an oil embargo by Arab oil producers struck following the Yom Kippur War with Israel, rattling the West’s fiscal policies to the core, plunging the UK into recession, shaking Edward Heath’s government and marking the 1970s as the ‘decade that taste forgot’.

Three years earlier, in April 1970, a dinner party was held at Shugborough Hall, the former seat of the Earl of Lichfield. Bejewelled with a stylishly appointed necklace resting above a velvet jacket and with shirt at half-mast, Patrick, 5th Earl of Lichfield, was seated at the head of the

“A lot of top faces come to me, but I don’t give names; that’s not my bag,” Mr Fish said, “I don’t care about taste. I think taste is a word like love; it should be forgotten for fifty years; I don’t even know what it means”

“Like Jagger, soon-tobe demigod David Bowie was a master at bringing unconventional ways of dressing into the consciousness. Mr Fish produced the ‘man-skirt’ for the cover of the album The Man Who Sold the World, one of Bowie’s defining sartorial moments”

table in the state dining room on the occasion of his 31st birthday. With his trademark bouffant hair, he was conversing with fellow photographers David Bailey and Bryan Alexander, together with the multi-faceted star Joanna Lumley. Replying to Alexander’s assertion that photography school can enable one to produce good and quick pictures, Bailey retorted in his cockney accent, “I don’t know about your taste; you see, photography is all to do with taste. Whether it’s good or bad or indifferent, I mean at least it’s taste or a viewpoint.”

Meanwhile in London, at the Mr Fish boutique situated at 17 Clifford Street, Mayfair, the nefarious yet respected British writer Nik Cohn, especially known for his commentary on men’s fashion and music, was interviewing the eponymously named tailor Michael Fish, to gather material for his book, Today There are No Gentlemen (1971). On the subject of the clientele of Mr Fish boutique, which consisted of mostly rich and famous people, or those aspiring to be rich or famous, Mr Fish said, “A lot of top faces come to me, but I don’t give names; that’s not my bag.” He added, “I don’t care about taste. I think taste is a word like love; it should be forgotten for fifty years; I don’t even know what it means.”

You can’t really blame these contradictory views on taste of Mr Fish and his friend David Bailey on the change of era, coming as they do a full three years before the oil embargo cast its long shadow. Min Hogg, a cherished chronicler of old-world bohemianism, once opined that “taste is difficult to define”. If there was ever a period this declaration applied to, it was the Swinging Sixties, spearheaded by the revered aesthetes of the time, Christopher Gibbs, Lord Snowdon, and, of course, David Bailey, who probably wouldn’t have shared Mr Fish’s sentiment on taste. However, they

Mr Fish in his version of morning dress Christopher Gibbs (right), one of the great aesthetes of the day

Michael FIsh in one of his own pansexual creations

would have supported him, not just because of his revolutionary contribution to bespoke tailoring, but also because they knew he really was “Peculiar to Mr. Fish”.

Born in 1940 in Wood Green, North London, Fish came from humble beginnings. At age 15 he found himself working in the bright lights and gaiety of Shaftesbury Avenue for a clothing shop named Collets. It was there that he met Kenneth Williams. Whatever vocation you fall into as a freshman, when you require a source to give you the gumption to succeed, there’s nothing stronger than an inspirational mentor. In the form of Williams, Fish had found one. The next stop for Fish was the baroquesque Jermyn Street shop of New & Lingwood, where his peculiar traits, complimented by talent, didn’t go unnoticed. He transferred to Turnbull & Asser’s flagship store on the same street, and there he was reunited with Williams. By then, Williams was Managing Director of the now Royal Warrant holders, and it’s likely he was instrumental in employing Fish as a designer. Turnbull & Asser left an indelible impression on Fish, but it was reciprocated.

At the outset of the 1960s, the landscape of traditional bespoke tailoring was still gloomy, the younger generation inheriting their fathers’ stiff

way of dressing. In 2020, when the late Edward Sexton reopened his store at 36 Savile Row after a near 30-year absence, he said, “Back then it was a graveyard, with heavy curtains over windows, big heavy doors. You would walk down it and have no idea what was being sold.” On Jermyn Street the mood was similar. If there’s one eccentric creation that disrupted the staid direction of menswear it was the wide, five-inch cravat, better known as the kipper tie. The storied shirtmakers Turnbull & Asser, and the wider traditional tailoring scene, have Fish to thank for this invention. Edward Sexton is credited with rescuing the image of Savile Row twice, but it’s also right to recognise Williams and Fish as having a significant hand in changing attitudes towards Jermyn Street. Today, a selection of kipper ties labelled Peculiar to Mr. Fish are featured in the collections at the V&A, which puts the enormity of their input in shaping the Peacock Revolution into perspective.

Barry Sainsbury, a member of the Sainsbury dynasty, and according to Cecil Beaton, the best-looking man he’d ever seen, saw that in the mid-sixties the time was ripe to launch a new shop selling expensive, high-quality men’s attire. He and his new business partner, Michael Fish, eschewed properties in Savile Row, Jermyn Street and

Michael Fish shaping the peacock revolution

Bowie in his Mr Fish man-skirt

Carnaby Street because none of them represented the Peculiar to Mr. Fish movement, which ultimately saw them open an emporium at 17 Clifford Street in 1966. Recognising an embryonic vanguard of a new zeitgeist, the wealthy and quality-minded peacocks were drawn to Mr Fish, as his flamboyant pieces would more than fulfil their desire to be different, making the shop an instant success. He dressed the smart set, spanning artists, actors, aristocrats, musicians, and models, many of whom left a symbolic mark on the Swinging Sixties.

Before the arrival of Mr Fish, the Germanborn Jewish milliner Otto Lucas, who produced exquisite hats that adorned names such as Greta Garbo and Wallis Simpson, transcended religious and social barriers. Anti-Semitism was rife in the 30s and it was precarious to be an openly gay man. And so when he opened his atelier in Bond Street, Mayfair in 1932, it was a poignant moment, particularly for all of the Jewish Londoners who worked in the textile and garment industry. A rather unheralded aspect of London’s fashion history, ‘Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style’, an exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands that runs until April, really does help to define their incredible contribution. An elegant dresser and secretive man, Lucas used to

frequent The Colony Room, the fabled bohemian drinking haunt in Soho, overcoming social norms for Jewish and gay men. Mr Fish was also Jewish, and queer, so when he opened his haberdashery the year before the decriminalization of homosexual act, it was another significant moment in Jewish and gay history.

On 5th July 1969, Mick Jagger wore what appeared to be a floaty white dress for the Rolling Stones’ free concert in Hyde Park, which certainly altered what was deemed acceptable. Like Jagger, a soon-to-be demigod, David Bowie, was a master at bringing unconventional ways of dressing into the consciousness. Mr Fish produced the ‘man-skirt’, for the cover of the 1970 album The Man Who Sold the World, which was one of Bowie’s defining sartorial moments. It was on October 30 1974, in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), that arguably the most memorable robe of the century was revealed. Sporting a Mr Fish-designed dressing gown on entry into the ring for the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ fight against George Foreman, Muhammad Ali was victorious in what to this day is still considered the biggest sporting event of the century.

This is yet another example of Mr Fish’s monumental impact on popular culture, but it

Mr Fish measuring Michael Caine during a fitting for The Italian Job

shouldn’t detract from his unparalleled vision for more traditional tailored cuts. In this sphere, he is perhaps best known for his shirts, notably the psychedelic sort with which, along with other defining Mr Fish designs, you can now easily step back in time by visiting 34 Montague Square, Marylebone, the showroom belonging to Mason & Sons. Owned and run by amiable father and son David and Elliot, they’ve chosen the premises, formally the residence of legendary rock ‘n roll names such as John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix, as the natural ground to resurrect British heritage brands. It is now the home of, among other brands, Mr Fish, where you can inquire about purchasing a long list of Mr Fish designs. The taupe striped shirt famously worn by Michael Caine, notably when wearing the Yvan sunglasses at the airport with Margaret Blye in The Italian Job (1969), is an eminent piece that you can buy in a ready-to-wear size at Mason & Sons.

Fish was a stickler for luxurious fabrics, which would only make his design nuances more desirable. One day, strolling along Upper Tachbrook St, Pimlico, I swivelled on noticing Retromania Fara London, a renowned vintage shop. In the basement was hanging a yellow silk shirt labelled Peculiar to Mr Fish. It is true to say that never before or after that moment have I ever

felt such a sumptuous silk shirt. And I’m extremely glad to say I now own it!

However, Fish’s extravagance in selecting superior cloth, especially silk, would play a significant part in his downfall. On the surface, it appeared that the boutique was thriving, but it failed to stay financially buoyant. Sainsbury withdrew his support in 1969, but there was a flicker of light when Captain Fred Barker, heir to the Singer Sewing Machine, bailed the business out. However, it didn’t take long for him to become dissatisfied, and his investment dried up. As a result, the Mr Fish boutique closed in the mid 70s. As talented and influential as he was, he was unable to overcome these financial constraints – and possibly the blandness of the decade when taste truly did seem to be forgotten. Perhaps he was put on this earth to help shape the Swinging Sixties for his equally enigmatic sartorial contemporaries.

But Mr Fish didn’t completely disappear. He took a job with Sulka in New York, before becoming a director of the Embassy Club, Old Bond Street, a version of Studio 54. It was there that he continued to absorb the company of London’s glitterati. Although the great days don’t go on forever, it is indubitable that his transcendent designs certainly did play a part in the great days enjoyed by his followers. n

1969 poster from Valentino’s of New York

Patrick, Lord Lichfield, a big supporter of Mr Fish

Muhammad Ali inspects his Mr Fish dressing

THE MAN WHO FLED THE WORLD

Alexander Larman on the lost years of David Bowie, when the singer all but disappeared during the final decade of his life

Given how vital it was to his artistic development in the 1970s, there is something oddly fitting in the fact that David Bowie’s final concert proved to be in Germany, in the Eichenring venue of Scheeßel on 23rd June 2004. Towards the end of a gruelling tour designed to promote his latest album, Reality, he found himself unable to complete the gig, departing after The Man Who Sold The World. He explained to the crowd that it was due to a trapped nerve in his shoulder, but it soon became clear that he had suffered a heart attack, necessitating surgery, complete rest and the

cancellation of the remaining dates of the tour. An apocryphal comment ascribed to him was that he had remarked, “I tell you what, I won’t be writing a song about this one.”

Musicians in their fifties often suffer from physical strain, and so the general feeling towards Bowie was one of enormous sympathy, mixed with the expectation that he’d soon be performing live and recording again. Although no announcement was made of a new album or tour, he kept surprisingly busy in the months after his recuperation, making public appearances and appearing as a guest vocalist for artists as

“Well, fortunately, I’m not working, so I get out a lot. I am a New Yorker, very much, and I get out in New York. It’s just a place that I adore. And I love seeing new theatre; I love seeing new bands, art shows, everything. I get everywhere – very quietly and never above 14th Street. I’m very downtown”

disparate as Kashmir (on The Cynic, produced by Bowie’s long-time cohort Tony Visconti), TV on the Radio (on Province) and Arcade Fire. It was the latter band that he formed his closest association with, eulogizing them to anyone who would listen throughout 2005 and performing with them at

the Fashion Rocks event in September, playing their song Wake Up as well as his own Life on Mars

To the external observer, Bowie might have been resting, but he was anything but retired; he even contributed a new song, (She Can) Do That, a collaboration with the music producer BT, to the soundtrack of the Jamie Foxx film Stealth.

He gave an interview to promote Fashion Rocks to the journalist Dave Itzkoff in late 2005. More interested in discussing music he was listening to than clothing (“I’m really not very good at that… let’s talk about new bands!”), he nonetheless let slip some interesting personal details about his life. Blasé about the way in which, as a style icon, he had influenced countless men and women (“I’ve always been extremely lucky that there’s some designer or other who wants to give me clothes”), he took the opportunity to plug Arcade Fire, and offered an insight into how he spent his days. “Well, fortunately, I’m not working. So I’m resting. I get out a lot. I am a New Yorker, very much, and I get out in New York. It’s just a place that I adore. And

I love seeing new theatre; I love seeing new bands, art shows, everything. I get everywhere – very quietly and never above 14th Street. I’m very downtown.”

“Everybody knows me anyway, and they’re very quiet and respectful. New York’s New York. Nobody makes a big deal. The Bowie character, for me, is strictly to be used for the stage, so I can hide back away as David Jones. Right now, in the mountains, where I am at the moment, it’s David Jones. With my family I am David Jones, very much”

He delighted in his anonymity – “Everybody knows me anyway, and they’re very quiet and respectful. New York’s New York. Nobody makes a big deal” – and, in what would become a telling quote, mused on the potential end of the ‘David Bowie’ persona when he commented, “The Bowie character, for me, is strictly to be used for the stage, so I can hide back away as David Jones. Right now, in the mountains, where I am at the moment, it’s David Jones. With my family I am David Jones, very much.”

‘The Bowie character’ reappeared a few times more. He appeared as a special guest at a David Gilmour gig at the Royal Albert Hall in June 2006, crooning his way through Arnold Layne and, magnificently, Comfortably Numb, as well as performing a short three-song set at the Black Ball fundraiser in November that year, duetting with Alicia Keys on Changes and singing Fantastic Voyage and Wild Is The Wind. Nobody present at either gig guessed that they were to be, respectively, his last live performances in Britain and America,

Bowie in his adopted home of New York City

barring a brief cameo at a Ricky Gervais gig at Madison Square Garden in June 2007. The song he performed with Gervais, Pug Nosed Face, had been co-written by the two for the sitcom Extras, in which Bowie guest-starred as a suave version of himself; unlike many of the other celebrities who were caricatured in absurd ways, Bowie was allowed to retain his charisma as he sang a ballad mocking Gervais’ character Andy Millman as a ‘chubby little loser’ and ‘the clown that no-one laughs at’. It proved to be the very last time he appeared on television.

Likewise, what was a sporadic but consistent post-illness recording career seemed to end after an odd collaboration with the actress Scarlett Johansson, who released an album of Tom Waits covers. The two had appeared in the film The Prestige (although never on screen together) and she had jokingly asked Bowie if he would appear on her forthcoming album. Apparently on a whim, he headed into the studio in summer 2007 to sing backing vocals on two songs, Fanning Street

and Falling Down. Neither song is a classic, but Bowie’s suitably tortured drama counterpoints Johansson’s deliberately flat singing to entertaining effect. And that was that.

Records of what Bowie did between leaving the studio in 2007 and the grand return of 2013 are sketchy. He wasn’t entirely absent; he made a few public pronouncements, such as welcoming Obama’s election in 2008, and offered the odd soundbite here and there. The only musical contribution of note was when he re-recorded vocals and overdubs for a new version of Time Will Crawl, which then appeared on his iSelect album, a free compilation given away with the Mail on Sunday in June 2008; he contributed liner notes to the album, which mixed classics (Life On Mars) with more obscure songs, such as Some Are, which was previously a B-side recorded with Brian Eno, and these, in classic Bowie fashion, combined apparent openness with cryptic distance. He remarked of Life On Mars that “this song was so easy… being young was easy”, but a truer indication,

The Thin White Duke in The Prestige (2006)

perhaps, of his concerns lay in his comment on the disturbing Repetition that “I decided to write something on the deeply disturbing subject of wife abuse in the manner of a short-form drama… I had known more instances of this behaviour than I would have preferred to have been made aware of, and could not for the life of me imagine how someone could hit a woman, not only once but many, many times.”

Happily married to Iman and with a young daughter, Lexi, it is tempting to imagine that Bowie, wealthier than most could even dream of, would have preferred to have retired and left the music business altogether, embracing a quiet family life instead. Unfortunately, it is difficult for musicians of Bowie’s stature to disappear altogether, and rumours began to circulate that

he was near death, or that he had dementia. Despite commenting to Visconti that “I’ve got no interest in recording any new music… I’m done”, it seemed as if the only options available to him to refute the rumours were either to become a public figure – if not a musician – again, or to begin recording. Thus it was that, in late 2010, Visconti was contacted again, and unexpectedly asked whether he would be interested in collaborating on some demos.

The rest of Bowie’s old touring band soon received similar approaches, conducted in complete secrecy; they began recording what would become The Next Day in May 2011, based on a collection of songs that might well have formed a similar album to Heathen or Reality. All involved in the production signed non-disclosure

With Marion Cotillard and Gary Oldman in the video for The Next Day

agreements, but given how closely the musicians had worked with him before, such secrecy was unnecessary. (Visconti had jokingly mentioned to one of the band that ‘there’s a young singersongwriter called David Jones who wants to cut a record, and he needs our help.’) The recording process took Bowie and the band the best part of two years, with Bowie, at times, agonizing as to whether the material should be released at all, but finally, by the end of 2012, a collection of songs had taken shape.

On 7th January 2013, a wild rumour appeared late on Twitter. ‘David Bowie’s releasing a new song!’ There had been many of these stories, and all had been false, arising either from misunderstandings or wish fulfillment. However, this time, the stories proved to be true, and The

Next Day was heralded with the release of the first single, Where Are We Now? on 8th January. One of Bowie’s finest songs, it took an elegiac look at his time in Berlin – rare for a singer who tended to avoid autobiography – and the video, directed by the artist Tony Oursler, presented a fragile-looking Bowie wearing a T-shirt bearing the legend ‘Song of Norway’, an allusion to his former girlfriend, the actress Hermione Farthingale, who appeared in a film of that name. Nonetheless, his sudden and unexpected reappearance put an end to rumours of ill health, and once again stories of live gigs and interviews began to circulate.

Three years later, it was a rather different story. n

David Bowie, 8th January 1947-10th January 2016

Back in the studio with Tony Visconti

“The

The Chap is now twenty five years old and thriving; no mean feat in an age when print is reeling before digital media, and where short attention spans are encouraged by algorithms driving constant clicking and scrolling. I think of this illustrious organ as a baby boomer, born in an era when flat caps, baggy pleated trousers, trouser presses and minimal wardrobe sizes were the norm. Surely it’s lived through a time when men opened doors for ladies and walked on the outside of the pavement, when the only electric vehicles were used to deliver the milk in the small hours, and one emerged from the pub stinking of tobacco smoke. The Chap must know how to use a ring dial phone and remember flared trousers the first time round. It must have owned a Filofax and have had to touch up the rust on its British-made cars before selling them. Surely The Chap is older than a mere quarter of a century!

It’s with something of a shock that I realise this magazine, born in 1999, is actually Generation Z. As a ‘zoomer’ it will have received its first mobile

phone before its twelfth birthday, makes friends online, has incomprehensibly complex rules around dating, is a slave to tech and the internet, spurns avocados for crushed peas and tends to be highly gender fluid compared to previous generations.

Such Gen Z characteristics seem wrong for a magazine that refuses to recognise the existence of denim, has a column celebrating top hats, only reluctantly appears online, is full of adverts for tweed and advocates ‘thou shalt always doff one’s hat’. One exception would be the zoomer’s love of pre-loved (what was once called second hand, then vintage, but is now ‘pre-loved’). The twenty-somethings I know buy most of their clothes in charity shops or on online stores – hence the proliferation of flared trousers and the revival of seventies, eighties and even nineties styles – all of which I was very happy to leave behind. Readers of The Chap would approve of such a sustainable approach to buying clothes.

But the nice thing about The Chap is that, despite its tender years, it hasn’t adopted the

David during a photoshoot for Cordings & The Chap, photo by Peter Clark

whining, hypocritical, self-entitled characteristics of so many modern media. It’s a friendly ‘have a drink and a sausage roll’ sort of place, where everyone is accepted without resort to intolerance.

I entered my seventieth year in January. Having announced the arrival of my seventieth year, I was contacted by many kind people congratulating me for being seventy, which shows how poor our grasp of mathematics has become – because of course I’m 69. Having completed 69 years, I am in my seventieth. In the same way The Chap is now in its 26th year, which makes it 25 years old.

Mind you, I can’t talk about having a poor grasp of maths. I learned a lot of arithmetic as a lawyer training to be a schoolteacher in my fifties. When researching the number 25 for this column to celebrate the Silver Anniversary, I found I already knew that twenty five is a square number, that manganese has the atomic number 25 and that it’s not a prime number. However, the fact that 25 is the smallest decimal Friedman number and is also a Cullen number had previously escaped me and

made me realise how much we (or maybe just I) simply do not know.

For me the number 25 has long passed in too many respects. My twenty fifth wedding anniversary passed when The Chap was three years old and I reached the age of 25 in 1980. I was staying with a Swiss friend who had found a bottle of 1955 champagne in her cellar (which, like most Swiss cellars, was also a nuclear bomb shelter – a fact that proves the ultimate superiority of the Swiss when it comes to civil defence). We popped the bottle expecting 25-year-old champagne to be past it, but it was delicious. Nowadays I don’t drink champagne, much preferring English sparkling wine. Indeed, as you may have read, the French have realised that the chalk on which their vines grow in Champagne rather unpatriotically runs away from them and under La Manche to reappear in Southern England where so many delicious bubbly whites are produced. Realising this, the Champagne houses have been buying up English orchards in order to continue production over here

as climate change improves the conditions for the best bubbly in the world.

I’ve said before that style is much more than simply what you wear and what you look like. Part of style is developing manners and treating others as you’d like to be treated. The whole question of manners is now a minefield. Even twenty five years ago a man could quite easily comply with the injunction in The Chap Manifesto to ‘Always be courteous to the ladies’ by opening doors and buying the drinks. Nowadays gender politics and the quite understandable desire of women not to be patronised have muddied the waters, and many men find it hard to know how to behave. The answer, of course, is just to treat everyone equally. But how things have changed even in 25 years!

Sadly not everything changes for the good as time passes. Things are still far from equal when it comes to matters between men and women. Misogyny dies hard. Just think back over the last few years – from abusive and mysogynist leaders of western nations to the sexist attitudes ingrained

into much of social media and the dangers of the less reasonable aspects of gender politics, women still have a hard time. I read Katy Hessel’s The Story of Art (Without Men) recently and realised that very few women artists are well-known – even among contemporary artists. Having read the book, I wandered round the vast halls of The National Gallery in London looking for women artists. Believe me, there are few on show, but those that can be found seem to glow out from the surrounding male sameness. Things are changing, but far too slowly. As a baby boomer I grew up used to wives of my mother’s generation who were expected not to work outside the home, their lives restricted to child-rearing and housework. Nowadays women are everywhere in the workplace, yet are still expected to perform most household duties. Equality of the sexes is still to arrive.

But we all wish The Chap, a baby boomer at heart even if a zoomer in reality, a very happy 25th birthday. May its tongue in cheek, non-digital and egalitarian approach shine as a beacon in these confusing times. n

RAFFISH

EAU DE COLOGNE FROM THE CHAP

25 YEARS OF ANARCHO-DANDYISM

76

THE SILVER FOX

25 Years of Anarcho-Dandyism

With his inside information as former Chap literary editor, duelling correspondent and fire safety consultant, Torquil Arbuthnot provides a chronology of the publication from 1999 to the present day

“Gustav Temple is arrested for crimes against humanity. ‘Put the darbies on and tell the lads I went down swinging,’ he says, but after checking the paperwork, the Chief Constable realises there’s been a typing error and the warrant is actually for Vladimir Putin. Gustav Temple sues for wrongful arrest, but settles out of court when offered a ride in a Panda car”

Silver Jubilee

A chance meeting in the Portobello Road leads to the founding of The Chap magazine, when penniless artist Vic Darkwood chances upon boulevardier Gustav Temple’s market stall. Temple is selling “genuine” pieces of celebrity masonry, including fragments of Cary Grant’s rockery and Eva Peron’s ha-ha. While haggling over some Welsh slate from Lloyd George’s potting shed, Darkwood and Temple notice the unimprovable perfection of each other’s tweeds. After a few glasses of porter in a nearby hostelry, the magazine is born. The first edition immediately wins the Booker Prize.

The Chap rents agreeable offices in Soho above Mr Paul Raymond’s Revue Bar. Torquil Arbuthnot and Nathaniel Slipper give up lucrative careers as commodity brokers (specialising in bauxite, sisal and cheese) to join the editorial board of the magazine as etiquette correspondents. Their first article is the seminal “Anatomy of Doffing”, which identifies 73 different ways of doffing one’s hat. The Chap’s influence on headwear soon conquers the world and crooners like Mr Peterhouse Doherty and thespians like Mr Jonathan Deppington rarely saunter forth without sporting a trilby or a Fedora.

In 2001 The Chap notices it is over 80 years since the last Anglo-Afghan War and contacts the War Office. The War Office agrees it is about time we had another crack at Johnny Afghan and dispatches an expeditionary force. Vic Darkwood resigns from The Chap, saying he will take the Queen’s shilling and give the Taleban a bloody nose. He is last seen pretending to wait for an aeroplane at Croydon Airport, which closed in 1959. Darkwood is later discovered living in Tahiti under an assumed name, married with 27 wives and worshipped by the locals as a god.

Despairing ever more of the vulgarity of modern life, The Chap decides to take to the streets. The first ‘Civlise the City’ event takes place, when several dozen agreeable fellows saunter through the West End doffing their hats, assisting elderly ladies across the road and attempting to purchase pots of Lapsang Souchong in McDonald’s. One chap gets a little over-excited and suggests they march on Parliament and take over the government in a bloodless anarchodandyist coup. He is told to have a nice cup of tea instead. The contingent repair to the New Piccadilly Café for a sharpener and a plate of ham and eggs.

Mr Stephen Fry presents a new noctovisual programme entitled QI. The saintly Fry and his “researchers” do not have enough money to employ gag writers, and hit on the cunning wheeze of lifting jokes and witty aperçus straight from The Chap without acknowledgement.

The ratings for QI soar and the show wins a sideboardful of awards. After a public outcry, the staff of The Chap all receive OBEs “for services to the Stephen Fry industry”. Mr Fry’s one-time comedy partner, Mr Hugh Laurie, develops a psychosomatic limp and forgets to shave.

The Chap realises that the summer Olympics are taking place in Athens. Rather than sprint around some Greek building sites in tight clothing, sweating and getting muddy knees, The Chap inaugurates the first Chap Olympiad in Regent’s Park. The ceremony begins with the lighting of the Olympic pipe. Events include Freestyle Trouser Gymnastics, Synchronised Hat Doffing, Quill Throwing and Shouting at Foreigners. At the end of the competition, the winner of the gold cravat is carried on everyone’s shoulders and hurled into the duck pond. In a breathtaking act of plagiarism, London wins the bid to stage the Summer Olympic Games in 2012.

The England cricket team have not won the Ashes since 1986-1987. Realising that they do not stand a chance against the fit, bronzed supermen of the Australian team, they call in The Chap for assistance. They are set a gruelling fitness regime: each day begins with a full English breakfast followed by a Woodbine; a gentle twenty minutes in the nets; then a five-course lunch followed by a bracing walk stopping at every public house on the way; a game of billiards and The Times crossword for the more energetic; a slap-up dinner followed by a trip to the theatre to see Chu Chin Chow; and finally to bed no later than 2 ack-emma. This punishing regime, together with the surprise tactic of being completely useless on the field, ensures a glorious victory.

David Cameron becomes leader of the Conservative Party. In a vain attempt to suck up to the populace, he tells them to “Call me Dave” and omits to wear either a tie or a pocket-square. The Chap fears standards in the country have declined so far that the only civilised response is to climb a large piece of public sculpture. A base camp is established in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, while Messrs Temple, Attree and Arbuthnot conquer the summit of Miss Rachel Whiteread’s pretentious pile of plastic boxes. They are escorted from the Tate with their heads held high and their feet even higher.

2003

2004

2005

2006

The world enters a financial meltdown, partly caused by the subprime mortgage crisis in the USA. Fortunately The Chap has eschewed trusting its considerable earnings to something as volatile as the world’s stock markets. Instead it has invested its funds in South American pharmaceuticals, financing the production of agricultural crops for medicinal purposes. Distribution of these life-saving medicines is via a fleet of submarines, thereby bypassing tiresome customs restrictions.

The Large Hadron Collider is completed beneath the France–Switzerland border near Geneva. Nobody, least of all its inventors, is quite sure of its purpose or whether it will work. The Chap generously agrees to facilitate the first trial run of the machine, and donates an ounce of finest Pure Cyprian Latakia pipe tobacco for the experiment. When it is switched on, a low humming sound emanates from the Large Hadron Collider, followed by a shower of blue sparks and some numbers whizzing round on a big dial. The experiment is declared a roaring success and Gustav Temple is awarded half-dibs on the Nobel Prize for Physics.

2007

2008

FLÂNEUR

GENTLEMANLY SCENT FROM THE CHAP

The magazine formally becomes a staple of British life when a copy appears in an episode of Midsomer Murders. Gustav Temple is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but the prize is rescinded when his Interpol record comes to light. (An alternate winner is hastily chosen by sticking a pin in a list of the most boring, unreadable, contemporary Romanian poets.) Undaunted, Gustav Temple decides to ensure The Chap’s economic future by putting the magazine’s remaining funds on a six-dog accumulator at the Catford greyhound stadium. Unfortunately things do not go according to plan but fortunately generous donations from readers ensure the magazine’s survival.

Apple release their iPad, a scientifical instrument for viewing the interweb and playing the card game solitaire. Not to be outdone, The Chap boffins come up with the iChap. This consists of a folding campaign card table, the complete 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, an abacus, an exercise book, a propelling pencil, a copy of roguish gentleman’s magazine Knave and a Kodak Box Brownie. In a miracle of miniaturisation, the iChap fits neatly into a mahogany case that can be towed behind one’s bicycle or sent ahead by railway.

Kim Jong-il dies and his son and successor, Kim Jong Un, realises he needs a few pointers on being a ruthless dictator. He contacts the accounts department of The Chap and is sent on their punishing induction course at a college of further education in the Cotswolds. Here he is initiated into the dark arts of megalomania and arbitrary cruelty, including turning down perfectly reasonable expenses claims backed up with paper receipts. In grateful recognition, Kim Jong Un allows the magazine’s staff free use of his private golf course in Pyongyang and unlimited tokens for the vending machines in the clubhouse.

On 23rd April 2012, St George’s Day, some 120 dandies and dandizettes assemble outside number 3, Savile Row. The Chaps carry placards proclaiming, ‘Save Savile Row from Abercrombie & Fitch’. The Chaps’ belief is that you can go to practically any street in any city in Britain and buy the sorts of overpriced yobbo-chic peddled by Abercrombie & Fitch. You cannot, however, go to any street in the country to get a bespoke suit made, and this is why the trade should remain where it is. Mr. B the Gentleman Rhymer – long-term chap associate and musical aide-de-camp – strikes out the chords for the adapted Beatles’ ditty Give Three-Piece a Chance. The shirtless male employees of Abercrombie & Fitch can be seen gawping from the shop doorway.

2011

2012

Edward Snowden releases classified documents concerning mass surveillance by The Chap. There is a public outcry of tutting until it is discovered that the magazine’s ‘mass surveillance’ consists of (i) the editorial staff flicking through the London telephone directory looking for people with amusing surnames and then ringing them up saying, “You need to put some liniment on that”; and (ii) the Literary Editor, Lindsay Bagshaw, being cautioned by the police for reading newspaper articles over people’s shoulders on the 7.45 from Virginia Water to Waterloo.

King Juan Carlos I abdicates the Spanish throne. The throne is first formally offered to Gustav Temple, on the basis that he has O-Level Spanish and partied with Lady Docker on Majorca in the 70s. On being told the employment does not include luncheon vouchers or free tickets to the bullfights, Temple declines the offer and Juan Carlos’ son becomes King Felipe VI instead. Spanish dissident chaps, led by Colony Room refugee Paul Lawford, refuse to acknowledge the new king, insisting that Temple is the true Spanish monarch. They are given a bottle of Pedro Ximenez and a chorizo to silence them.

“A released inmate of Colney hatch Lunatic Asylum is given the Dadaist made-up name ‘Boris Johnson’”

2013

2014

The Paris Agreement is signed, whereby 195 nations agree to lower global carbon emissions. The Chap successfully lobbies for the following items to be exempt from the agreement: pipe and cigar smoke; exhaust emissions from Rolls-Royce Corniches and Silver Clouds; opium dens; boxes of matches; burning Scottish policemen inside wicker men, and faulty gas boilers because the little man from the village hasn’t been up to fix it yet.

The United Kingdom decides it has had enough of jumped-up Johnny Foreigner telling it what to do and votes to leave the European Union. It is a tribute to British pluck and derring-do that none of this has been thought through in any detail. The majority of ‘Europeans’ realise that life is better in Blighty than in Berlin, and that warm beer is more agreeable than chilled continental lager, and thus take to rubber boats in their thousands disguised as Afghan and Syrian refugees. The British passport is returned to its dark blue cover and no longer resembles the identity papers of a Maltese merchant seaman.

The painting ‘Salvator Mundi’ (or ‘Ointment of the World’), attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, is auctioned at Christie’s in New York City for $400 million, making it the most expensive work of art ever sold. This causes much mirth in the art department of The Chap, since the painting in question was knocked up by the office teaboy at a paint-by-numbers themed office awayday one wet weekend the previous September.

The gilets jaunes (or ‘yellow waistcoats’) movement takes to the streets of Paris to protest about something or other. The etiquette and tailoring departments of The Chap are drafted in to advise on the precise shade of gamboge to be used in the waistcoats. As many of the magazine’s staff are veterans of the 1968 evénements, they are also able to give pointers on the best way of levering up the cobblestones on the Boul’ Mich’ using just a mashie niblick.

The Chap decides to mount its most ambitious agit-fop performance, influenced by the nihilist and absurdist ideas of Tzara and Picabia. A recently released inmate of Colney hatch Lunatic Asylum is given the Dadaist made-up name ‘Boris Johnson’ and fitted with a crepe blond wig. With the agreement of the British Tourist Authority, ‘Boris Johnson’ is allowed to stand as Prime Minister and, because of a computer error, is elected. Staff at The Chap continue to write his speeches using the ‘automatic writing’ process pioneered by the surrealist André Breton.

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

Covid hits Britain. Staff at the magazine while away their tea breaks inventing a vaccine for the Covid virus. The vaccine is an agreeable mixture of Gentleman’s Relish, arrowroot, juniper berries, laudanum, tragacanth, Pimm’s No. 3 Cup, Marmite, peyote and a pinch of powdered rhino horn. Michael ‘Atters’ Attree hawks the vaccine round the pharmaceutical companies, and his negotiating skill ensures he signs over the world rights for a crisp £20 note and Charlotte Rampling’s telephone number.

After years of scientifical endeavour, stem cell research finally identifies the elusive ‘Chap’ gene. Under the microscope, this gene is found to consist of a double helix formed from two complementary strands of Turkish tobacco held together by hydrogen bonds between G&T and Man-at-C&A base pairs. It is considered too dangerous to let this gene loose on the world, so it is securely stored in an empty paint-tin in a lock-up garage in Lewisham.

Queen Elizabeth II dies after a lifetime’s service. It is a little-known fact that the Queen liked to start the day with a quick chortle over the latest ‘Am I Chap?’ photos (couriered over specially) before tucking in to her Weetabix. Buckingham Palace tasks Torquil Arbuthnot with redeeming Her Majesty’s betting slips, as her last flutter was successfully to back Saucy Boy, a 20-1 outsider in the 2.30 at Wincanton. As is traditional, The Chap runs the souvenir stand at the state funeral, and also takes 5% of ticket sales for cinema showings of It’s a Royal Knockout.

The International Criminal Court issues an arrest warrant for Gustav Temple for “crimes against humanity”. Realising that his past has finally caught up with him, Gustav Temple surrenders himself at New Scotland Yard, saying, “I’ve had a good run but it had to end sooner or later. It’s a fair cop but society’s to blame. Put the darbies on and tell the lads I went down swinging.” After checking the paperwork, the Chief Constable realises there’s been a typing error and the warrant is actually for Vladimir Putin. Gustav Temple sues for wrongful arrest but settles out of court when offered a ride in a Panda car.

The Chap celebrates its 25th anniversary. Rishi Sunak declares five days national holiday. The magazine is showered with honours, including the George Cross, the Peruvian Order of Purity and Truth, induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame and the freedom of the City of Preston. The staff of the magazine take it all with true British phlegm, murmuring, “Too kind…”, puffing reflectively on their churchwardens, and uncorking another bottle of Lidl own-brand cream sherry.

2021

2022

2023

2024

2020

THE SILVER FOX

Andrew Roberts on the few British film actors who aged and silvered gracefully, while maintining their gentlemanly elan

The art of the cinematic Silver Fox – those worldly gentlemen who can instantly access all very the best places – is both delicate and rare. If we restrict ourselves to a shortlist of British and British-born candidates, how very few qualify is remarkable. Roger Moore, whose gifts for light comedy were sorely underrated, not least by himself, never ventured along the SF pathway. Anthony Steel could have transformed into a Silver Fox but sabotaged his own career at the age of just 36. James Mason’s sardonically witty Yorkshire magnate in Georgy Girl was more a leading character performance than a Silver Fox.

Other names may be quickly dismissed. Rex Harrison seemed too coldly narcissistic; his 1954 vehicle, The Constant Husband, did not work, as it is

“Some might argue that we should consider Stewart Granger, an actor of undeniable elegance. Many of his films involved period costumes; at one point, he appeared as a fixture of television matinees, looking mildly perturbed as his wife transformed into a pillar of salt”

impossible to believe Margaret Leighton et al loved the main character more than the actor loved himself. Peter Sellers in There’s a Girl in My Soup, a combination of tail-end Swinging London and West End cinematic adaptation, demonstrated he was never suited to play the romantic lead. George Sanders initially looked to fit the template, but he was more the cad, delighting in such utterances as “I’d like to have your advice on how to live comfortably without working hard”.

Laurence Harvey might have achieved SF status had he not died at only 45, while the older, post-Steed Patrick Macnee was more the affable clubman than the Silver Fox. As for John Mills, his younger incarnation was ‘The Chap Next Door’ while the police superintendents and senior forces officers of his later years appeared suffused with barely contained resentment. A few other actors seemed tantalisingly en route to becoming a Silver Fox, but their careers dictated otherwise. Hide and Seek showed Ian Carmicheal’s SF potential. Nigel Patrick – ‘old darling’ – concentrated on stage work

after 1963’s The Informers, and Kenneth More’s wonderful performance in 1961’s The Greenage Summer hinted at unrealised Silver Fox possibilities. And that British cinema never saw fit to grant the supremely elegant John Le Mesurier a romantic lead is their loss – and ours.

Some might argue that we should also consider Stewart Granger, an actor of undeniable elegance. Many of his films involved period costumes; at one point, he appeared as a fixture of television matinees, looking mildly perturbed as his wife transformed into a pillar of salt. Stewart’s heyday was in the 1950s, when greying hair suited his dynamic persona; he was probably cinema’s finest exponent of the safari jacket. Yet what he lacked as an actor was a hitherto unmentioned aspect crucial to the Silver Fox – joie de vivre. This is as important an element to their image as that rare combination of elegance, experience and sartorial savoir-faire. This, inevitably, brings us to two gentlemen – Archibald Leach, aka Cary Grant and James David Niven.

Cary Grant, above in Charade (1963) and right, in To Catch a Thief (1955)

“When Niven starred in Vampira, a not-terriblygood horror comedy, he may be slumming, but he never acts as if he knows it. By contrast, when Anthony Steel was reduced to appearing in 1970s British sex comedies, he exuded bitterness and regret with every line”

If we first consider joie de vivre, simply witness Grant in the nightclub scene of Charade, engaging in a slapstick routine with a grace and apparent simplicity borne of decades of experience.

As Pauline Kael wrote: ‘When he and a woman are together, they can laugh at each other and at themselves. He’s a slapstick Prince Charming’. It is possible to imagine Niven in the role of Charade’s Peter Joshua, but aside from his engaging spiv in Waterloo Road, Granger on the screen appeared less carefree and more clenching his teeth against the vicissitudes of fate.

Meanwhile, David Niven could bring an atmosphere of jollity into the most unpromising of scenarios. 1953’s The Moon is Blue is a leaden cinematic adaptation of a theatrical comedy that achieved notoriety for annoying the Hollywood Production Code with the use of such naughty words as ‘virgin’. Its main achievement was redefining Niven’s screen image as the genial roue par excellence – a chap who belongs to all the finest clubs and will entertain a different mistress there in alternate weeks.

The second element is, of course, sartorial elegance. To behold Grant in North by Northwest is to marvel at his wardrobe that never commits the

David Niven with Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther (1963)

solecism of drawing attention to itself. Compared with our hero, the various law enforcement agents our hero variously encounters and avoids look as though they are wearing sackcloth. Niven rarely benefitted from the calibre of scripts that Grant enjoyed, and while The Pink Panther could have established him as a Silver Fox to rival To Catch a Thief, it emerged as a vehicle for Peter Sellers. For all that, Niven looks splendid throughout and remains one of the very few actors to convey grace and elegance while clad in a ski suit.

Thirdly, we need light and shade, as the Silver Fox must have a past that infers skill, daring and authority. We implicitly believe that John Robie of To Catch a Thief was a member of the French Resistance. Grant and Niven also excelled as figures who were not quite trustworthy and whom it would be unwise to cross. Johnnie Aysgarth in Suspicion does appear capable of murder, and Niven’s pitiful, broken fake Major of Separate Tables deservedly won him an Oscar. The elderly schoolteacher of Paper Tiger, who attempts to delude himself about his

wholly fictitious wartime exploits, further illustrates Niven’s talent for depicting characters whose social veneer is about to crack.

Furthermore, with both actors, their ambivalent pasts infuse their finest performances. Grant’s screen accent remained fascinatingly enigmatic throughout his stardom. His tones bore no traces of his native Bristol; at times he sounds less mid-Atlantic than faintly Australian. Yet, the actor frequently referred to Archibald Leach and regularly visited his home city. Jason Isaacs, who portrayed Grant in the biopic Archie, heard a tape of the actor’s offscreen voice and noted it was ‘much more English than you’d think’. Equally, the Niven of the Parkinson appearances and The Moon’s a Balloon was often far removed from the LieutenantColonel who refused to glorify his wartime career in print. He once told his friend Anthony Quayle, ‘Life’s so miserable that I feel its one’s duty to try and be cheerful and keep spirits up’.

The final element is dignity without pomposity. Grant retired from the screen at the age

David Niven with second wife Hjördis Paulina Genberg

of just 61. At the time of Charade’s release, he was 59 and so showered fully clothed in one indelible moment, while the script had Audrey Hepburn’s heroine pursuing him rather than vice versa. Roger

Ebert noted that when Niven starred in Vampira, a not-great horror comedy, ‘he may be slumming, but he never acts as if he knows it’. By contrast, when Anthony Steel was reduced to appearing in 1970s British sex comedies, he exuded bitterness and regret with every line.

Thus, we regretfully take our leave of these two silver foxes. If one wishes for a memory of Niven during his mature years, it is as the GP turned reluctant secret agent in Where the Spies Are; resolute, thoughtful and at pains to hide his vulnerability.

For Grant, it is the moment when Audrey Hepburn asks the ever-mysterious Joshua in Charade – “Do you know what’s wrong with you? Nothing.” As the former Mr. Leach once said: “I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me.” n

David Niven with Françoise Dorléac in Where the Spies Are (1965)

Niven slumming it in Vampira (1974)

100 ROYAL COCKTAILS

CHAP LIFE

CRICKET: 25 NOT OUT

ROYAL FLUSH

“Pemberton’s hugely popular cocaine-infused wine was suddenly illegal. He immediately altered the drink’s ingredients, substituting sugar syrup for the wine, dropped the word ‘wine’ from the label, and marketed the new soft drink as Coca-Cola, emphasizing its distance from the now banned world of alcoholic drinks by calling it the ideal temperance drink”

Gustav Temple samples the drinks associated with certain key members of the royal family through the centuries, providing cocktail recipes fit for a king

Not many British republicans would agree, but the principal purpose of the royal family is to set standards by which the rest of us should live our lives. Sartorially, this was most evident during the reign of Edward VII, whose fondness for the dinner jacket, the spatterdash, the Homburg and undoing the bottom button on one’s waistcoat entered mainstream menswear, and continues to exert its influence today.

So when it comes to what we pour down our gullets, there is a certain argument for looking towards the royal palaces and their booze cellars for inspiration. However, if we go back as far as Henry VIII in search of royal cocktails, we won’t find many littering the ample tables, for Tudor chaps sank beer, admittedly in vast quantities. It wasn’t until the reign of Queen Victoria that royals began instructing their servants to concoct mixed drinks for them. Queen Vic’s favourite pre-prandial tipple was apparently a half-and-half mix of red wine and 101

whisky in the same glass. There is no name for this ‘cocktail’, nor should there ever be.

Victoria was also partial to a new drink of her day, Vin Mariani. This blend of Bordeaux wine and coca leaves was first introduced in 1863 by Parisian chemist Angelo Mariani. It proved extremely popular all over Europe, helped by advertisements promoting Vin Mariani’s ability to restore strength, energy and vitality. This was not surprising, given that the drink contained, per ounce of wine, 6 milligrams of cocaine. The ethanol in the wine acted as a solvent and extracted the cocaine from the coca leaves, altering the drink’s effect. Once imitators in the US began producing similarly buzzy cocaine-infused beverages, Mariani decided to up the coca content in his drink to 7 mg.

The higher strength only increased its fans, which as well as Queen Victoria included Pope Leo XIII, Ulysses S. Grant, Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Edison, Alexander Dumas and Sarah Bernhardt. Vin Mariani capitalised on this by

“Berry Bros. & Rudd of St James’s invented a concoction that could safely be imbibed during the King’s ferocious drives in winter. But it wasn’t Edward’s alcohol consumption that concerned his aides; it was his catching a chill in the open carriage of his Daimler. Thus

the King’s Ginger was born, a ginger liqueur that anyone except members of the royal family may not drink while driving”

moving from marketing its energising properties to openly promoting its enjoyable effects as a stimulant. Vin Mariani continued getting everyone high until the early 20th century, when cocaine finally became outlawed worldwide.

One of Vin Mariani’s most popular imitators was Pemberton’s French Wine Coca, brewed in Atlanta. Its fame spread throughout the southeast of America and the demand for the tasty beverage was high. Its creator, John Stith Pemberton, was asked what was in it. “It is composed,” quoth Stith, “of an extract from the leaf of Peruvian Coca, the purest wine, and the Kola nut. It is the most excellent of all tonics, assisting digestion, imparting energy to the organs of respiration, and strengthening the muscular and nervous systems.”

In 1886, the nervous systems of the population of Atlanta had to undergo a much more violent shock: the introduction of Prohibition to their state. Pemberton’s hugely popular cocaine-infused

King Edward VII waits for his jalopy to be loaded with the King’s Ginger before taking her out for a spin

KING’S SUMMER CUP

200ml The King’s Ginger

75ml Lime juice

625ml Ginger ale

Mint leaves

Lime slices

Orange slices

Ice

Fill a large jug with ice, measure out all the ingredients and add to the jug. Stir gently. Serve garnished with mint leaves, slices of lime and orange.

wine was suddenly illegal. He immediately altered the drink’s ingredients, substituting sugar syrup for the wine, dropped the word ‘wine’ from the label, and marketed the new soft drink as Coca-Cola, emphasizing its distance from the now banned world of alcoholic drinks by calling it ‘the ideal temperance drink’.

Queen Victoria was not amused.

EDWARDIAN TIPPLES

Victoria’s son, the wide-of-girth gadabout Edward VII, enjoyed a tipple as much as his mother had. But the motor car was popularised during his reign and Edward’s aides were not happy about his tearing about the roads after a skinful, so they commanded his wine merchant, Berry Bros. & Rudd of St James’s (still trading today) to invent a concoction that could safely be imbibed during the King’s ferocious drives in winter. But it wasn’t only Edward’s alcohol consumption that concerned them; it was his

catching a chill in the open carriage of his Daimler. Thus the King’s Ginger was born, a ginger liqueur that anyone except members of the royal family may not drink while driving.

POSTWAR BOOZING

Postwar drinking habits among the royal family did not abate, though most of its hard drinking reputation was maintained single-handedly by Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, since her husband George VI was more devoted to the pleasures of Lady Nicotine.

The Queen Mum began her day’s drinking at midday with her own potent cocktail – two parts Dubonnet to one part gin. With lunch she took two glasses of red wine, usually Claret, then somehow abstained until 6pm, when she would look at her equerry Major Colin Burgess with a wry smile and say, “Colin, are we at the magic hour?”

Burgess would then mix her a dry martini, which was followed by two glasses of either pink

The Queen Mother with her favourite pre-prandial cocktail

champagne or Veuve Clicquot with dinner.

Our own dear departed Queen Elizabeth did not let the side down when it came to royal flushes. Continuing the tradition set by her own mother, she favoured a daily gin/Dubonnet cocktail before lunch, right up until she was 92. A glass of wine with lunch, sometimes a pre-prandial gin martini, then a couple of glasses with dinner, put her total daily consumption into the category of a binge drinker, according to current UK government standards.

Our current monarch is an equal devotee of the dry martini, rumoured to take one before dinner every single evening. Charles’ preferred martini ratio is a stunning 50/50, equal parts gin and dry vermouth. When travelling, the king brings his own supply of booze – mostly gin – but also his own glasses. It is not known whether this is because he is very fussy about the shape of his glass (perfectly reasonable) or whether he fears being poisoned (get a grip, Charles, we’re not living in Roman times).

And what of Windsor fils? What does the new Prince of Wales enjoy while gadding about the world, bearing on his shoulders the reputation of previous hellraising Princes of Wales? Well,

KAMIKAZE

3 parts Vodka

3 parts Triple sec

2 parts Lemon juice

2 parts Lime juice

5 Ice cubes

1 Lime wedge

Shake

Now then, what did Camilla say she wanted? Depth charge or Jaegerbomb?

over ice in a cocktail shaker and strain into a coupe glass.

it seems that William enjoys a cocktail called a Kamikaze. The Japanese word translates as ‘divine wind’, coined in the 12th century to describe an enormous storm that prevented a Mongolian armada from landing on Japanese shores. The word of course was used during WWII to describe Japanese pilots who would fly to their death in order to hit their target. The Kamikaze cocktail was created in a US army base in Japan during the War and was originally served as a shot.

The Princess of Wales has done more for maintaining the debauched reputation of former Princes of Wales (let’s not forget that the position was held by George IV, Edward VII and Edward VIII before they were crowned) than her husband. At the royal wedding, the cocktail she personally insisted was served to her guests was called a ‘Crack Baby’. The cocktail was created at Boujis, a highend bar in Kensington where the young royals used to consort with other wealthy folk. A measure of how the super rich behave themselves is that Boujis was forced to close in 2016 after a huge brawl outside the bar. The bar later reopened as a fine dining venue and no longer serves crack babies. n

CRACK BABY

25ml vodka

25ml passion fruit juice

25ml prosecco/ cava/ champagne

A dash of Chambord or cassis - no more than half a teaspoon

Serve in a shot glass in an exclusive London nightclub, or, if not convenient, in your living room.

It’s really hilarious that some people actually do this for a living

25 NOT OUT

Cricket Correspondent Sam Knowles puts the case for the humble quarter-century to be upgraded to a similar status to the half-century

“In March of that year England were touring Australia, and in Brisbane they played out a truly remarkable Test Match to celebrate the centenary of the first time the Aussies bashed the Poms. Remarkably, the rematch produced precisely the same outcome, this time with Her Maj looking on”

The last Silver Jubilee of note – preceding the most significant celebration of the genre, by which I mean that of The Chap, which this whole issue celebrates – was that of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II back in 1977. I’d wager London to a house brick that many readers of this esteemed publication have at least some vague flickering of a memory of that event, even if that memory is now but a faded and cracked commemorative mug distributed via primary school.

A CENTURY OF CRICKET

Back in 1977, cricket was a very different game from what it is today, but I’m not certain it was any less exciting. In March of that year England were touring Australia, and in Brisbane they played out a truly remarkable Test Match to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the first time the Aussies bashed the Poms. The game was played 100 years on and at the same ground as the very first. And, remarkably, it produced precisely the same outcome with Her Maj looking on.

Australia batted first and posted a paltrylooking 138, with fewer than half the team reaching double figures. Skipper Greg Chappell top scored with just 40, and the wickets were shared out between the England pace (Lever, Willis, Old) and spin (‘Deadly’ Derek Underwood) attack. But worse was to follow. In reply, the tourists could only muster 95, and England’s top scorer was their skipper – South African-born son-of-a-Scot Tony Greig, with 18.

The batters bucked their ideas up in the second innings, with Australia posting a dominant 419-9 declared. There were four half centuries, and a powerful ton from wicketkeeper and master of the Antipodean lip weasel, Rod Marsh. Another fine moustachioed Aussie hero, Dennis Lillee, scored a Silver Jubilee-tastic 25. We’ll come back to that score imminently. He also took 55% of all the English wickets, ending up with match-winning figures of 11-165. Chasing an improbable 463 for victory, England fell but 45 runs short, despite a player-of-the-match knock of 174 from the raffish,

Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson, stars of the Centenary Test in Melbourne, March 1977

chappish Derek Randall. 45 runs. Exactly the same delta between the teams as the first Australia vs England Test Match at Melbourne in 1877. You couldn’t make it up. With thanks to Cricinfo for the detail, where stats-hungry readers can relive every ball at www.espncricinfo.com

WHY 25 SHOULD BE THE NEW 50 OR 100

But it is Lillee’s contribution with the bat that I want to focus on. Historically, 25 has not been an important number in cricket. No-one ever celebrates a batter reaching a quarter century, even if it is a significant landmark on the way to something bigger. Oh yes, the HALF century matters, that half-way mark to the elusive ton. 50s – which in fact refer to any score between 50 and 99 – get recorded in the annals and the averages as a matter of routine. But the quarter century is ignored as an insignificant milestone on the road to greater things. Until now, that is.

Since the time of the 1977 Centenary Test, the game of cricket has morphed. Initially it was

from the five-day Test match – for many a chap the purest form of the game – to 60- then 50-over one day contests, with players sporting increasingly caddish, garish, polyurethane pyjamas. TV and sponsorship have shrunk it down still further, first to the Twenty20 battle – done and dusted in but three hours – and now to the Hundred, played out in but 120 minutes, with teams reduced to looking like walking packets of salty, fatty snacks, again for “sponsorship reasons”. Shorter and shorter. Less and less time to score runs. Fewer and fewer opportunities to reach 100, let alone 50.

A MANIFESTO FOR THE QUARTER CENTURY

In these shorter forms of the game, surely the mood is right for the quarter century to get its moment in the sun. And where better for the professional sport to turn for inspiration than its progenitor, its most amateur of cousins. Not just village cricket, but casual, non-league, Sunday cricket. It could be a classic example of the tail wagging the dog.

In Sunday cricket – often among the very shortest forms of the game, mainly because half the

Wicketkeeper and master of the Antipodean lip weasel, Rod Marsh

team get lost en route or because the other half of the team are too hungover from the night before to operate something as simple as a satnav – the quarter century is often a mark of great distinction. Indeed, in the limited-overs (limited-ability) form of the game enjoyed by so many on a Sunday, 25 is often the score on which a batter is required to retire to give other players a turn.

Two deals come with this “retirement”, but it is neither “retired out” nor “retired hurt”. The first deal is that they only have to retire at the end of the over in which they equal or pass the quarter century milestone. Say a batter – let’s call them Sophie or Craig – should start an over on 24*. If she or he goes all “Sir Garfield” and manages to slash, swat, and pepper each ball received over the hedge and into yonder cow field, church yard, or cold frame for six each time, their “retire at 25 tally” could be as much as 24 + (6*6) = 60. Now THERE’s something to aim for.

The second deal is that retirement is just “for now”. Any batter’s retirement is only temporary and doesn’t constitute a wicket having fallen. The sportsmanlike ceding of the crease to the next in

line means that the successful quarter centurion will be allowed back in, once all the other batters are out, and then they are permitted to score as many as they like. It’s just that the first 25 runs are the most important landmark.

ANSWERS ON A SCORECARD

So, as The Chap turns 25, to mark the Silver Jubilee of this splendid organ, we’ve decided to become the home of celebrating the quarter century in Sunday cricket, as the epitome of chappish sporting accolades, one that no-one else has hitherto chosen to garland.

As Sunday cricketers around the country think about “training” to get in shape for the new season – then turn over in their beds, pull up the covers and realise they’re Sunday cricketers after all – let’s hear from you about your Chappish Quarter Ton. The more ludicrous, comical, and contrived – but nonetheless true and verifiable – the better. We’ll award a Silver Jubilee Heirloom Mug to the most entertaining quarter century of the season, come the autumn.

Submissions on a scorecard, please. n

Derek Randall doffs his cap to Dennis Lillee at Melbourne, March 1977

BRIGHTON: THE SWEET SMELL OF EXCESS

112

120

TRAVEL

GRESLEY'S SILVER JUBILEE

THE SWEET SMELL OF EXCESS

“In January 1931 Time magazine reported that most chappish star of stage and screen, singer Maurice Chevalier, had been refused permission to sing in Cardiff because his manner was too flirtatious and his songs, being in French, were too suggestive. In response, the Alderman for Brighton is quoted as saying, “In Brighton any man can sing anything – well almost anything –in any language he knows”

Ruby Demure takes us on a walking tour of Brighton as it gears up for its month-long Fringe Festival in May

Nestled along the English coastline between the sparkling sea and the picturesque South Downs lies the weird and wonderful gemstone that is the City of Brighton and Hove. With its vibrant nightlife, rich heritage and diverse arts scene, part of Brighton’s lasting appeal is that you can be whatever you want to be here, and do it to excess.

A STAR IS BORN

For centuries people have been coming to Brighton to take in the sea air and to bathe in her cool waters. It was in the Georgian era that Brighton exploded into a fashionable hub for culture and art though, when the extravagant Prince Regent (later King George IV) transformed the city into a playground for the aristocracy.

Brighton owes much of its charm to the many eccentric characters who have called it home over the years and added their own stories to the legends of smugglers, ghosts, devils and fairies.

Everyone from Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Winston Churchill, Rudyard Kipling and Max Miller, to Lord Alfred Douglas, Dusty Springfield, Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier and many more besides have lived in Brighton over the centuries and left their secrets in its streets. In fact, Laurence Olivier once famously said that “There is a phrase: the sweet smell of success. And I can only tell you… it just smells like Brighton and its oyster bars.”

BRIGHTON ROCKS NOW

As you leave the train station in Brighton (because let’s be honest, the only thing worse than driving through Brighton is trying to find a parking space), you are greeted at the bottom of the hill by your first view of the sea. Even on the dullest of days, being able to see the horizon and the expanse of water in front of you screams freedom and opportunity. I remember this view from my first ever visit and feeling so instantly drawn in that I was compelled to explore Brighton’s labyrinthine streets. As I did,

Time Machine at Brighton Fringe, photo by Gess Puglieli

Black Market Burlesque, photo by Danny Fitzpatrick

I was confronted by a man walking a ferret on a lead and a violinist on a trapeze within my first ten minutes. Brighton is nothing if not unpredictable, and that is very much part of its beauty and attraction.

The city stands as a beacon of acceptance and celebration of diversity, and never is this more apparent than during the first weekend of August when Brighton hosts the most popular Pride festival in the UK. But this commitment to embracing selfexpression and welcoming people from all walks of life is evident all year round.

“There is art everywhere – some of it highbrow and cultured, lots of it anarchic, silly and often wildly inappropriate. As a cabaret performer myself, it has always been the unusual and vaudevillian that captures my imagination and where I feel most at home”

A wander through Brighton’s Lanes and North Laine areas allows visitors to take in some of the beautiful Regency architecture, as you explore the independent cafes, boutique shops and extensive choice of pubs and restaurants. Head through the Pavilion Gardens to see the magnificent Royal Pavilion in all its crazy glory. The golden domes and giant dragon shaped chandeliers are the physical embodiment of the extravagant and self-indulgent beauty and weirdness that Brighton does so well.

Head down to the sea to visit the famous Palace Pier, which Visit England named the second most visited tourist attraction in the UK in 2022. Try your luck in the arcades or try to find a spot on the pebbles to eat fish and chips and hide from the seagulls who will stop at nothing to steal your ice cream.

If that’s not your style, there’s something for all tastes in the art galleries under the arches, museums and outdoor cafes in the graffiti-daubed backstreets. Or you may just find yourself whiling away the

hours with a locally sourced, artisanal beverage and a fresh patisserie, people watching Brighton’s colourful residents from one of the city’s many beautiful parks or piazzas.

As long as you avoid West Street and the marauding packs of stag and hen parties, you’ll never be far from something to tickle your fancy.

ARTS APLENTY

In Brighton, it feels as though there is the possibility for adventure around every corner and at all times of year, but the city really comes alive in May when four major festivals all burst on to the scene at the same time. Brighton Fringe, Brighton Festival, The Great Escape and Artists Open Houses all take place during May, with Fringe delighting audiences until the first weekend in June. Just as the weather starts to heat up, the air begins to fill with music, as seemingly

every bar, theatre, and community hall becomes a venue, and artists, performers and excitable punters converge on Brighton’s streets.

There is art everywhere – some of it highbrow and cultured, lots of it anarchic, silly and often wildly inappropriate. As a cabaret performer myself, it has always been the unusual and vaudevillian that captures my imagination and where I feel most at home. Pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable and embracing the off the wall creative energy that cabaret brings to the stage. For this reason, my real love is Fringe theatre.

By its very definition, Fringe theatre developed outside of mainstream theatre, when eight groups of performers turned up uninvited to The Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and began performing in the streets. Since the dawn of this spontaneous artistic movement, Fringe Festivals have been

Cocktails, Brighton Fringe style

Mythos Ragnarok, photo by Danny Fitzpatrick

popping up all over the world, with millions of people travelling to enjoy art of every imaginable genre. The third largest Fringe festival in the world (and England’s largest arts festival) is Brighton Fringe. I’ve been lucky enough to perform at Brighton Fringe many times alongside some of the country’s best entertainers, and there is nothing I love more than stepping into the spotlight in front of an unsuspecting audience and inviting them to join me on a voyage into the unknown.

For me, Brighton Fringe is a celebration of art in all its forms, making it accessible to people of all ages, backgrounds and interests. Nothing is out of bounds and even the most unorthodox individuals will likely find something to suit their tastes.

In January 1931 Time magazine reported that

most chappish star of stage and screen, singer Maurice Chevalier, had been refused permission to sing in Cardiff because his manner was too flirtatious and his songs, being in French, were too suggestive. In response, the Alderman for Brighton is quoted as saying “In Brighton any man can sing anything –well almost anything – in any language he knows”. That spirit of anything goes lives on today, so get yourself down to the South Coast in May for the best flirtatious fun Brighton has to offer. n

Brighton Fringe runs from 3rd May-2nd June 2024

Brighton Festival and Brighton Open Houses run from 4th-26th May

The Great Escape runs from 15th–18th May

Brighton Pride is 3rd and 4th August

Der Wunderlich Review, photo by Danny Fitzpatrick

Gresley's Silver Jubilee

In some ways, the world after the Great War seemed to be one of limitless potential and promise. While the truth for many was one of struggling social change and recent trauma, there remained the beacon of emerging technology giving form to a bright future supposedly just around the corner. Radical advances were enthusiastically embraced by the burgeoning middle class and dissolute youth, driving them to a world of jazz, Art Deco and chic modernity. It was the age of mechanisation; a time when speed informed the design of everything from cars to staplers to cinemas. This was truly was the ‘Streamline Era.’

The early to mid-1930s saw the appearance of this evolving aesthetic on railways around the world, the ‘Flying Hamburger’ of Germany garnering column inches for the Third Reich, while Bugatti’s French railcar showed the combination of speed and style one would expect from such a

“So it was that Britain’s first streamlined train, the Silver Jubilee, was revealed to a largely unsuspecting world on 30th September 1935. The impractical blue accented silver, grey and stainless steel livery not only referenced the King’s Jubilee, but it was also tres chic”

distinguished marque. Streamlining on railways would continue beyond the 1940s, with science and styling applied to varying degrees, but it is

Actuarius on the streamlined railway locomotive that was built in 1935 to mark the King’s Silver Jubilee

the arrival of streamlined trains in Britain that is our focus. The catalyst was the project by London North Eastern Railway (LNER) to develop a highspeed service between Newcastle and London. While initiated in 1933, it was the impending Silver Jubilee of King George V in 1935 that provided the focus for both design and marketing.

As the LNER actively utilised the avant-garde end of the fashion spectrum to pursue revenue, it seems natural that the new service would be headed by a streamlined steam locomotive. However, dismissal as a la mode design ignores the visionary genius of Chief Mechanical Engineer Nigel Gresley. He had already produced the highly successful A1 to haul crack expresses in 1922, superseded by the improved but similar A3 later in that decade. Few locomotives posses the sublime proportions and grace of the A3, possibly one of the myriad factors in class member Flying

Scotsman becoming such a global superstar. Being the first locomotive verified as topping 100 mph in 1934 must have also helped. Another A3 was to snatch the speed crown off her in early 1935 when Papyrus, named after a racehorse and fulfilling her nominative destiny, raised the world rail speed record to 108 mph. These achievements were passed off as by-products of various tests at the time, hiding their real purpose of proving the capability to maintain the proposed schedule for the new, so far secret, service.

So it was that Britain’s first streamlined train, the Silver Jubilee, was revealed to a largely unsuspecting world on 30th September 1935. The impractical blue accented silver, grey and stainless steel livery not only referenced the King’s Jubilee, but it was also tres chic. This was no mere exercise in fashion, though. The new streamlined A4 was not simply an A3 clothed in haute couture. Subtle

Germany’s ‘Flying Hamburger’ set the bar for streamlined locomotives very high

internal refinement increased effectiveness, matching the promise of outward flair. Even capricious Serendipity lent a hand when a wind tunnel model

“Smartly accelerating the brand new carriages on the notorious climb out of Kings Cross, Potters Bar was passed at a remarkable 75 mph. Then Silver Link really got into her stride. Three-figure speeds were reached on the descent towards Huntingdon and held over the next 25 miles. With a peak of 112 mph seen twice, it suddenly seemed that Flying Scotsman’s 100 mph run of only a year before seemed rather passé”

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with a carelessly impressed thumbprint just behind the chimney was tested. It immediately solved the seemingly intransigent issue of smoke obscuring the forward view from the cab at speed.

As one would expect, the carriages were every bit as special as the motive power. Only one set of seven vehicles was ever built, sharing little with their less glamorous teak clad counterparts already in use. Aluminium doped Rexine covered steel skins gave a light and durable construction, valances underneath reducing the drag inducing gap to the rail. The usual cast iron stove was replaced by a lighter welded steel design, testament to the single minded pursuit of speed. Stainless steel flushframed windows were double-glazed and external excrescences minimised.

Comfort and style remained, helping to justify the premium ticket price of five shillings for First Class and three Shillings for Third (a quirk of the time meaning there was no Second Class.) Inside there was wood panelling mixed with painted Rexine under tubular light fittings. Plush seats and loose cushions ensured that the targeted business commuter would arrive promptly but unruffled, the ‘triplet’ dining carriages in the middle so that there would be no danger of starvation. A mere 198

LNER carriages were fitted with headsets, so passengers could listen to podcasts and such like

passengers had the opportunity to travel each way, leaving Newcastle at 10am and London at 5:30 pm for the return.

As a PR tool the Silver Jubilee was an immediate success, helped by the LNER’s superlative marketing team. Dramatic posters in the latest style, jigsaws, paperweights, clockwork models – all were utilised in the relentless promotion of this dashing glimpse into the excitingly dynamic future. Style is nothing without substance though and the question had to be “Would it deliver?”

The answer came on a test run three days before the introduction of the service, when Silver Link, the first A4, served notice of what was to come. Smartly accelerating the brand new carriages on the notorious climb out of Kings Cross, Potters Bar was passed at a remarkable 75 mph. Then Silver Link really got into her stride. Three-figure speeds were reached on the descent towards Huntingdon and held over the next 25 miles. With a peak of 112 mph seen twice, Flying Scotsman’s 100 mph run of only a year before suddenly seemed rather passé.

The introduction of the service scythed over an hour from the existing schedule, leaving a mere four hours to cover the 268-mile route. Over the next four years, the Silver Jubilee rarely ran at less

Passengers could hardly restrain themselves once the shellac hit the turntable

than capacity, and was equally rarely late. At the end of the first year of operations, the need for an extra carriage had already been established, with this finally happening in 1938. The service was also outstanding financially. In 1935 it made 16s 2d per mile against costs of 4s 2d, while the figures for more mundane services were 5s and 2s 6d respectively. The LNER would build on the Silver Jubilee’s success by introducing further A4s and other prestige services. However, war brought this glorious chapter of travel to an end and there was no place for these beacons of shining 1930s style in the austere postwar years that followed.

The service was not reinstated with the coming of peace and the carriages were scrapped sometime in the 1960s. None of the original four silver A4s made it into preservation. An ignoble end for one of the greatest and most important trains ever built. Trailblazer and record breaker; with its unique avant garde design, profitability and sheer outright performance the Silver Jubilee may well be the most successful product of the streamlined era that you’d never heard of. n

‘Excuse me, can you tell me where the non-smoking carriage is?’ ‘There isn’t one, dear.’

The A4 Streaks

Although Gresley’s A4 locomotive was introduced for the Silver Jubilee express service, only the first four of the 35-strong Doncaster-built class wore the train’s specific grey livery. The most radical development introduced during the three-year production run was the adoption of the Kylchap double chimney in 1938, with number 4468. A loco that fate decreed would be remembered for something else.

All were named mostly after birds, reflecting Gresley’s ornithological interests. Uniquely they carried four liveries during the LNER years: Silver Grey, Garter Blue, Garter Blue with stainless steel accents and Grass Green. Four locos, those named after countries and in blue with accents, were rostered to haul the Coronation express introduced in 1937 and running between London and Edinburgh. As with the Silver Jubilee, this had bespoke luxury carriages. Various other experiments in streamlining were tried by Gresley, some following the A4 style, but none had such impact or were to gain such popularity.

The A4's exploits and dramatic looks, no doubt helped by the LNER’s proactive marketing department, soon gained a fanbase who bestowed the somewhat inelegant nickname of ‘streaks’ on them. They had firmly established themselves as an intrinsic part of the East Coast Mainline when, once more, war came to Europe. During hostilities, the practical step of

removing the side valances from over the wheels was taken and these were never reinstated. However, unlike streamlined locomotives of other railways, they never bore the indignity of having the aerodynamic casing removed. The A4s carried on providing sterling service, sometimes reduced to hauling freight, until the end of steam in 1968.

The zenith of the A4’s career, though, came on 3rd July 1938, when locomotive no. 4468, named ‘Mallard’, was assigned to ‘brake tests.’ Heading a seven-carriage train plus dynomometer car, she hit 126 mph down Stoke Bank south of Grantham, setting a record that still stands for steam hauled trains today. Only six of the class were preserved: Mallard, which entered the national collection, three saved by private owners and one each donated to Canada and the U.S.A.

Those still in the UK have been through various ups and downs over the years, while those across the Atlantic slowly deteriorated in museums. However, with the 75th anniversary of Mallard’s record run approaching, the National Railway Museum (NRM) in York returned Dominion of Canada and Dwight D Eisenhower to British shores for a special year-long party. All six were reunited for the first time in over 40 years for ‘The Great Gathering’ on 3rd July 2013.

This started with the locos arranged around the NRM’s turntable and continued with events at York and Shildon until February 2014 and ‘The Great Goodbye.’ I caught them at York where, despite the bustling crowds, the sight of these six immaculate thoroughbreds stood silently side by side proved to be an emotional experience. Unprecedented attendances to the NRM proved the investment in the enterprise to be a wise one. It would appear that even after all this time, the Streaks are still capable of bewitching us.

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THE SCALA CINEMA

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RIPLEY RETURNS

ATTACK OF THE 50-FOOT SCREEN

“We had loads of tribes who went there, from the gay to the horror to the kung fu fans. They were very likely to become activists and actors and comedians, because people drawn to those careers have already put themselves outside the mainstream”

During the 1980s and 90s, the Scala Cinema in King’s Cross, London, was a mecca for the dispossessed, drawn like flies to the all-night screenings of cinematic oddities, often interspersed with live bands, all washed down with a cocktail of smuggled-in alcohol, drugs and anything to keep them awake until dawn. The notorious cinema has

been turned into a documentary by two people who lived through those long nights, one of them, Jane Giles, a programmer at the cinema and the other, Ali Catteral, a regular punter. Gustav Temple, also a Scala regular, met them to find out why they turned their attention to the other side of the camera and what they wanted to convey about the Scala’s glory days.

Gustav Temple meets the directors of a film documenting the heady days of the Scala Cinema in King’s Cross

CHAP: Jane, you were a programmer at the Scala when?

JANE GILES: The Scala opened in 1978 and I started work there in 1988, staying until 1992. So the programme was quite well established by the time I started there.

CHAP: Did you make your mark on the place, by programming films that hadn’t been shown before you started?

JG: When you look at the evolution of the Scala programming from 1978, you can see it go through different phases. It starts with foreign language arthouse and campaigning documentaries about social issues. Then in 1979 Stephen Woolley transformed it into this American repertory style cinema with a very vibrant programme. He was really into music so there were a lot of music films like The Girl Can’t Help It and punk films. Once they started trying double and triple bills and all-

nighters, you could see the ones that were sticking, especially when clubs like the Mix and Alice in Wonderland got involved.

CHAP: Did you have a specialist area of cinema that you wanted to push?

JG: I’d been going to the Scala as a punter since 1981 and what I really enjoyed were the gay films like Un Chant d’Amour and Taxi Zum Clo. As a heterosexual woman I was fascinated by films that showed men in a way that mainstream cinema didn’t. So what I brought to the mix was stuff from the London Filmmakers Co-op, and avant-garde surrealist films from the 20s to the 60s. I also really liked big bang-up mainstream hits like Mad Max and Blade Runner

CHAP: Ali, were you a regular at the Scala in its heyday? Did you know Jane when you were a punter?

ALI CATTERAL: No, I was going there when I was about 16 and she was strictly management.

CHAP: How did you two come together to make this film?

JG: Ali worked on the book of the Scala programmes that came out in 2018. The publisher brought him in because they needed a professional editor to whip my ungrammatical prose into something beautiful.

AC: We’re incredibly stubborn and get the job done at all costs. We’ve been on this extraordinary road tour promoting the film since last June, and Jason Wood at the BFI calls us the two hardest people working in showbusiness. We don’t turn anything down.

CHAP: You even didn’t turn this interview down!

JG [LAUGHTER]: This is the interview we’ve been waiting to do all along!

CHAP: Did you start with finding all the original footage like that and decide to make a film, or was it the other way round?

JG: When we did the book we found all this film footage of the cinema itself. We then compiled a very long list of people we wanted to interview, because we didn’t want it to be a story about the management, but about the audience. The Scala became a place where people found each other.

I read some articles by Ali about his experiences at the Scala, which he wrote very passionately about. The story of the disadvantaged teenager who washed up in this place and how it changed their life.

There’s no overarching ‘voice of god’ in the film. The very last thing we added was the film clips themselves, often because some of our interviewees were talking about a particular film. But most of them couldn’t remember the films; they remembered the smell of the seats and the building like it was yesterday. People like Nick Kent don’t have very clear memories, but he can remember 1972, which was very useful to us for the story of Iggy Pop and Lou Reed at the King’s Cross Cinema.

CHAP: Ali, when we met the other night you mentioned your theory about the

A cartoon of the Scala in its heyday by Viz cartoonist Davey Jones

building containing the imprint of the past?

Is this a supernatural theory or scientific?

AG: Yes, I don’t know whether you know about

“Stone tape theory posits that sounds and atmospheres will be absorbed by porous materials like masonry, brick or rock, to be replayed back over the decades. The Scala is emblematic of a building that has had such an extraordinarily rich history – a history of quite a lot of dispossessed people, like myself, and those emotions will seep into the porous flesh of the building”

stone tape theory? It posits that sounds and atmospheres will be absorbed by porous materials like masonry, brick or rock, to be replayed back over the decades. This is the explanation for ghosts to Fortean-minded people. The Scala is emblematic of a building that has had such an extraordinarily rich history – a history of quite a lot of dispossessed people, like myself, and those emotions will seep into the porous flesh of the building.

We invited Chris Watson, the co-founder of Sheffield electronic band Cabaret Voltaire and latterly David Attenborough’s sound engineer, to mic up the Scala with his box of tricks. We then fed his recordings at a subsonic level directly into the film. Then we got Mark Paling, a sound designer who’s worked with Ben Wheatley and Peter Strickland. So even if the audience isn’t consciously aware of it, they’ll still be picking up, at a deep gut level, the living, breathing Scala.

CHAP: Did you intend for the film to be an immersive, arthouse oddity in itself? Did you want it to be a film that could have been shown at the Scala in its heyday?

JG: We always knew what we didn’t want to do, and our code word for that was ‘Sky Arts documentary’.

We wanted to do something a bit more impressionistic, expressive and kaleidoscopic and, as you say, something that could have been shown at the Scala. The cinema showed very few documentaries, because they came from the digital technology of the late 90s. So for the last 15 years or so there’s been this explosion of documentaries. You can make a documentary over a five-year period, whereas with feature film the process has to be much quicker.

Had the Scala continued running from 1993 to 2023, it would have been showing these amazing documentaries like the Ramones End of the Century, Dig about the Dandy Warhols, all those fabulous, content-driven, edgy films where the form reflects the subject matter.

AC: Although flicking through the past Scala programmes, I was delighted to see that they did once show the Maysles Brothers Grey Gardens

CHAP: I love that film! Didn’t they also make The Salesman, an early documentary about bible salesmen?

JG: Yes, those films were always on 16mm, because they came out of little film society production companies. The Scala did have a 16mm projector and we used it to show a few rare music documentaries about Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.

AC: To go back to what Jane was saying earlier about what we didn’t want, let me say this clearly to

help future filmmakers – we didn’t want bin bags in Leicester Square! 90 per cent of arts documentaries about the late 70s and early 80s always have a shot of rubbish piled up in central London.

JG: 90 per cent of those documentaries also have a clip of Thatcher making that speech.

CHAP: How did you track down the people who are now famous who used to go to the Scala? I mean how did you know who they were?

AC: Lots of them came to us by chance. James O’Brien, who’s now impossibly famous, was talking on a podcast about the night he went to the notorious screening of A Clockwork Orange in 1993, which led to the closure of the Scala because it was screened without permission from Stanley Kubrick and led to a massive and expensive court case.

JG: We found Barry Adamson from the memoir he’d just published, in which he mentioned attending the Scala. Channel X (producers of The Detectorists, Shooting Stars etc) alerted us to Mary Harron, director of American Psycho. She’s Canadian but we didn’t know that she’d grown up in London and been to the Scala.

CHAP: Do you think the Scala did more than simply entertain a generation of misfits and weirdos? Did it lay the

groundwork for much of the cultural output of later decades?

AC: When you meet people who used to go there, there’s a little twinkle in the eye when they talk about the Scala. They remember what it was like being young and reckless and being imbued with the Scala spirit. The majority of them were possessed of let’s say freer minds, more open to culture in its most transgressive and subversive manifestations. It’s no exaggeration to say that the Scala was the foremost gay cinema in London at that time. We had loads of tribes who went there, from the gay to the horror to the kung fu fans. They were very likely to become activists and actors and comedians, because people drawn to those careers have already put themselves outside the mainstream.

JG: Many people have referred to the Scala as an alternative film education. When I was at film school there was the established curriculum, so anything outside of that would often be showing at the Scala and I saw it there.

CHAP: What do you plan to work on next?

Do you feel as though the Scala story has now been told and it’s time to move on to a film about something else?

JG: That’s a very good question. If we’d had the luxury of making a three-part Netflix documentary, it would have gone into much more detail about the pre-Scala days, as well as the end of the cinema. We might even have shown bin bags in Leicester Square!

AC: We do have an idea of making a film like 24-

hour Party People, a dramatization of the Scala story. Originally we planned to make a surreal sitcom, but when we started trying to write it, we realized what a huge discipline it is. Most comedy writers actually avoid it, and we’re not even comedy writers.

However, I do have another idea that I hope we get a visionary enough publisher for. This would be an oral history of 80s and 90s subculture, using the Scala as a peg to hang that on, from the many hours of outtakes from the footage for this film. Politics, gay activism, music, there was so much going on during that period. I’d love to work with Jane again, since we’re now creatively married.

CHAP: Could you work with Ali again, Jane?

JG: Of course… Ali, don’t say it! If you say what I think you’re going to say, I will literally never work with you again!

CHAP: What’s he going to say, do you think?

JG: Ali likes to call me his Doctor Frankenstein. Audiences always laugh, because it implies that I’m the monster, because they always get the monster mixed up with its creator.

AC: I wasn’t going to say that! All I wanted to say was that Jane is a force of nature and whatever she puts her mind to gets done. n

Scala!!! Or, the incredibly strange rise and fall of the world's wildest cinema and how it influenced a mixed-up generation of weirdos and misfits, is on BFI Player and on BluRay

FILM & TV RIPLEY RETURNS

With the forthcoming new Netflix series Ripley and the 25th anniversary of the cinema release of The Talented Mr Ripley, Stephen Arnell looks at the various portrayals of Highsmith’s talented murderer

“I am a gifted improviser. I lack your conscience and when I was young that troubled me. It no longer does. I don’t worry about being caught because I don’t believe anyone is watching. The world is not a poorer place because those people are dead. It’s one less car on the road. It’s a little less noise and menace”

An intelligent, cultured gentleman who dabbles in art, music and, occasionally, murder.

Author Patricia Highsmith on her creation

Tom Ripley

Who among us couldn’t hold a sneaking regard for Patricia Highsmith’s dapper sociopathic murderer Tom Ripley, especially in his choice of victims. He tended to knock off those who deserved it: the obnoxious Freddie Miles (The Talented Mr Ripley), snooping art collector Thomas Murchison (Ripley Under Ground) and the odious David Pritchard (Ripley Under Water). Ripley’s appeal also lies in the audience’s desire to see him get away with his various crimes, which are usually at the expense of the rich and arrogant, making it an especially vicarious pleasure for readers.

Speaking personally, Ripley’s thirst for revenge after being thoughtlessly insulted by expat picture framer Jonathan Trevanny (Ripley’s Game) strikes a chord, as someone who has never let a perceived slight be left unpunished in some way, no matter how petty.

He appreciates good looks in other men, that’s true. I’m not saying he’s very strong in the sex department. But he makes it in bed with his wife.

Patricia Highsmith

In terms of Ripley’s sexuality, it’s assumed he’s a repressed homosexual, or bisexual but, aside from his plot-driven experiments with cross-dressing (The Boy Who Followed Ripley) and self-hatred over his intense (and deadly) friendship with Dickie Greenleaf (The Talented Mr Ripley), he appears to enjoy a healthy sex life with French heiress wife Heloïse, who remains happily/wilfully blind to her husband's criminal enterprises.

Contrary to popular imagination, Tom is not without compassion and actively puts his life on the line to save others in The Boy Who Followed Ripley and Ripley’s Game. Although this could be argued as Ripley merely testing and examining his unique personality when under extreme stress. In the only film adaptation of Ripley’s Game (2002), a feline John Malkovich is my favourite incarnation of the character; when questioned by Dougray Scott’s Trevanny on why he went to his aid, Ripley replies,

Andrew Scott as the eponymous Ripley in the new Netflix series

“Ripley author Patricia Highsmith was something of an odd duck, as you may expect if you have read any of her novels. An alcoholic, chain-smoking depressive misanthrope, Highsmith had her fair share of ailments, including female hormone deficiency, an osteoporotic hump, Buerger’s disease, chronic anaemia, anorexia nervosa and eventually lung cancer”

“I don’t know, but it doesn’t surprise me. The one thing I know is we’re constantly being born.”

Some will see definite shades of Ripley in Barry Keoghan’s Oliver Quick from last year’s

Saltburn, but although there are definite (and I presume intentional) similarities, Quick is far more calculating than Ripley. Malkovich in Ripley’s Game claims to be “A gifted improviser. I lack your conscience and when I was young that troubled me. It no longer does. I don’t worry about being caught because I don’t believe anyone is watching. The world is not a poorer place because those people are dead. It’s one less car on the road. It’s a little less noise and menace.”

Other characters that have been compared to Ripley include Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy) in Red Eye (2002), Hughie Warriner (Billy Zane) from Dead Calm (1989) and Michael Keaton’s Carter Hayes (Pacific Heights, 1990), but these superficially charming killers lack both his complexity and audience sympathy.

I always thought it would be better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody.

Matt Damon in The Talented Mr Ripley, 1999

There have been many other interpretations of the character: Alain Delon as the pin-up version

Dougray Scott and John Malkovich in Ripley's Game (2002)

25%

in 1960’s Plein Soleil (where he’s caught at the end), Dennis Hopper’s incongruous cowboy (Wim Wenders’ The American Friend, 1997), the overly needy Matt Damon (1999’s The Talented Mr Ripley) and Matthew McConaughey/Tom Cruisewannabe Barry Pepper in the rarely seen, silly-butentertaining Ripley Under Ground (2005).

THE RETURN OF RIPLEY

2024 will see a new take on Ripley in the shape of Andrew ‘Hot Priest from Fleabag’ Scott, who at 47 seems a bit long in the tooth for the TV series version of The Talented Mr Ripley, although this story may just be part of the eight-hour season covering all five books in the series, during which Ripley does indeed age, though rather disgracefully. Whether Scott’s own homosexuality will play into the character remains to be seen; the actor was refreshingly matter-of-fact

when discussing his preferences back in 2013: “Mercifully, these days people don’t see being gay as a character flaw. But nor is it a virtue, like kindness. Or a talent, like playing the banjo. It’s just a fact. Of course, it’s part of my make-up, but I don’t want to trade on it.”

Interestingly, John Malkovich will also appear in the new series, as Dickie Greenleaf’s distraught father Herbert, who pays Tom to rescue his son from the supposed decadence of 1950s Italy. Ripley author Patricia Highsmith was something of an odd duck, as you may expect if you have read any of her novels. An alcoholic, chainsmoking depressive misanthrope, Highsmith had her fair share of ailments, including female hormone deficiency, an osteoporotic hump, Buerger’s disease, chronic anaemia, anorexia nervosa and eventually lung cancer. She was described as ‘a lesbian with a misogynist streak’ who nonetheless had affairs with men (including Arthur Koestler). On a lighter note, Highsmith

Andrew Scott in the title role in Netflix’s The Talented Mr Ripley

was also a big fan of pussycats and more unusually, garden snails. She had such a fondness for the character she had created that once, when asked to sign a photograph of herself for a fan, she signed it ‘Tom Ripley’.

THE MANY FACES OF PATRICIA HIGHSMITH

For those keen to explore movie adaptations of Highsmith’s non-Ripley work, there are several motion pictures to delve into, admittedly varying in quality but most at the very least watchable. These include her acclaimed atypical lesbian love story Carol (2015), Hitchcock’s classic Strangers on a Train (1951), Dites Lui Que Je L’aime (1977), Claude Chabrol’s The Cry of The Owl (1987), A Kind of Murder (2016, a version of her novel The Blunderer), and 2022’s Deep Water, a peculiar erotic thriller starring Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, a remake of the 1981 movie of the same name featuring Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant.

“Somewhere outside, there was a cat fight. Chester saw two mangy cats fighting on the edge of a roof, clinching in battle, falling over the edge together.”

The Two Faces of January, Patricia Highsmith

My favourite of the Ripley-free movies is Hossein Amini’s handsomely mounted fraudster thriller The Two Faces of January (2014), a crisp 136-minute ride with an excellent cast including Viggo Mortensen, Kirsten Dunst and Oscar Isaac. The themes of murder, swindling, foreign travel and identity-switching hew closely to Ripley preoccupations, which is probably why I enjoyed it so much, although Tom Ripley wouldn’t have come a cropper in the same situation.

Like a fair few English language productions of Highsmith novels, The Two Faces of January was a remake of Continental movie, in this case 1986’s German Die zwei Gesichter des Januars n

Ripley premieres on Netflix on 4th April

Andrew Scott prepares for acting in eight hours of Ripley

Patricia Highsmith’s

1. The Two Faces of January (2014): Grecian shenanigans (above) when a conman and his wife find themselves on the run from creditors.

2. Carol (2015): Sapphic goings-on in 1950s New York, based on Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt.

3. Deep Water (2022): A very odd snail-fancying Ben Affleck is intensely jealous of flirtatious wife Ana de Armas.

4. Dites Lui Que Je L’aime (1977): In this French version of This Sweet Sickness, Gérard Depardieu is obsessed with a childhood sweetheart.

5. Strangers on a Train (1951): Alfred Hitchcock’s ever-popular guide to murder swapping.

non-Ripley Top 5

Carol

Deep Water

This Sweet Sickness

Strangers on a Train

BOOK REVIEWS

By Gustav Temple

THE EMPRESS OF IRELAND

By Christopher Robbins (Slightly Foxed Editions, £20)

Rookie journalist Christopher Robbins is offered the job of writing a script for Brian Desmond Hurst, a film director he’s never heard of. The interview takes place in a shabby Belgravia flat, where rent boys and aristocrats keep drifting in and out during the meeting. Hurst and Robbins get through several bottles of champagne, before Hurst sends his new protégé out to the local off licence to get some Beaujolais, advising him to use the rear entrance and ask for credit. When he gets back, the milkman is grumbling to Hurst about not being paid and is offered a glass of Beaujolais to calm him down.

Thus begins a year-long employment with this eccentric 80-year-old gay film director, who has a genuine string of huge hits under his belt, including Scrooge, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Dangerous Moonlight and Playboy of the Western World. The script Robbins has been commissioned to write is based on the events leading up to the birth of Christ. He has no scriptwriting experience. Inexplicably, he is offered the job on the spot.

The job turns into a great adventure of working with this louche old queen, whose former associates include Sir Ralph Richardson, Larry Olivier, Vanessa Redgrave and Roger Moore. These days he consorts with camp former officers of the Welsh Guards. Asked whether he is bisexual, Hurst replies: “I’m trisexual. The Army, the Navy and the Household Cavalry.”

The Empress of Ireland brings to life the extraordinary character of Hurst, as the young writer accompanies him to his house in Tangier, where they encounter a string of Moroccan rent

boys and camp international playboys, one of whom has a huge house in the Rif Mountains entirely staffed by dwarves.

The book reads like a fantasy by JP Donleavy but is apparently all absolutely true. It paints a picture of the clandestine gay scene of London of the 1970s, peopled by characters

all trying to out-charm and outwit each other, but none coming close to the empress at the centre of it all, Brian Desmond Hurst. His own biographical tales are equally eccentric, when he eventually spills the beans to the young man who has become a sort of amanuensis. He tells of an aged French count who would appear at Hurst’s school in Paris in a carriage pulled by four horses. He takes the teenage Hurst back to his flat in the Bois de Bologne and serves him champagne that has not been chilled. Hurst turns him down purely on these grounds, his classmates nodding in agreement when he returns. “We understand. That is too much. You cannot be expected to make love on warm champagne.”

“Just when the reader’s sympathy for this caustic old queen, with his endless outrageous anecdotes, begins to pale, the author throws in a tale that shows a more tender, sensitive side to Brian”

Just when the reader’s sympathy for this caustic old queen, with his endless outrageous anecdotes, begins to pale, the author throws in a tale that shows a more tender, sensitive side to Brian. While driving through Morocco, they are approached by a young boy selling fish that has rotted in the sun. They drive on, but Hurst insists on turning back miles ahead, to go and buy this poor boy’s fish. When they can no longer find him, Hurst is devastated and cries all the way home. When probing into his employer’s origins, it turns out he was born on the outskirts of Belfast into an impoverished family, and christened Hans Moore Hawthorne – a combination of the names of all the locals who paid the minister a few shillings to have him named after them, because Hurst was born covered in a ‘lucky’ caul.

The Empress of Ireland is not enjoyable because it does something cliched like ‘capturing

a lost world’; it entertains wildly because the author, purely by chance, encountered a truly original character that even the finest novelist could not have invented.

EXTREME LUNCHING

By Oli Maxwell (Self published, £36)

The Chap editorial office receives quite a few self-published books, which range from unfunny ‘hilarious’ autobiographies to noble attempts at fantasy fiction that make no sense whatsoever. Thus when Extreme Lunching landed, it was given the usual circumspect inspection in kid gloves. It turns out that Extreme Lunching slipped through the net and would likely have found a publisher, had its author not been too busy travelling the world in search of the weirdest restaurants, and opening a restaurant in

Barcelona a few months before the covid pandemic. Oli Maxwell previously worked as a photographer in the nineties heyday of London, on magazines like The Face and ID. He then upped sticks to Barcelona for ‘cultural health’ reasons, where he learned all about the peculiarities of Catalonian cuisine. This book is the result of both his experiments with local ingredients and his general tips on extreme cookery.

Starting with the culinary equipment basics, Oli informs us that we must keep plenty of fish kettles, meat smokers, blow torches and cucumber bitters, if we are to take cooking seriously. His first recipe is for suckling pig, setting the stage for a series of recipes that are clearly not going to contain any vegan options. Following the great Spanish tradition of not wasting a single morsel of any slaughtered animal, elements like the brains of sheep, cows and pigs are put to excellent use, including ‘Cervelle de Veau au Beurre Noisette’. Many of the recipes could quite easily have come from the closely guarded recipe book of Aunt Dahlia’s coveted French chef Anatole (“God’s gift to the gastric juices”) in the PG Wodehouse books. Others, meanwhile, could have come from the journals of Hannibal Lecter.

Leg of Lamb Stuffed with Crab is Oli’s version of a recipe passed down to him by his eccentric godfather, who had served it at his first wedding at the Café Royal. Many of the recipes commence with an anecdote that reveal

“The chapter entitled ‘How Not to Open a Bar in a Plague’ tells the tragic tale of this man clearly destined to entertain and feed people (and get them very drunk), having his grand vision, detailed in the book, scuppered by an infected pangolin that shuts the world down”

the author’s gastronomic upbringing, including his duties, as a child, to serve cocktails and hors d’oeuvres to his parents’ dinner guests. He also provides a useful reading list, which includes such classics as Keith Waterhouse’s The Theory and Practice of Lunch, Keith Floyd’s Floyd’s Food and Fergus Henderson’s Nose to Tail Eating

The chapter entitled ‘How Not to Open a Bar in a Plague’ tells the tragic tale of this man clearly destined to entertain and feed people (and get them very drunk), having his grand vision, detailed in the book, scuppered by an infected pangolin that shuts the world down.

Nevertheless, we the readers can recreate what was the menu at Restaurant Gros, Barcelona, simply by reading this book and going in search of Durian fruit, Surströmming and Calçots.

FAST LADY

By Michael W. Barton (Butterfield Press, £40)

The story of Dorothy Levitt, British racing driver, speedboat pilot, aviatrix and journalist who set the women’s world land speed record and the women’s water speed record. In her spare time she taught Queen Alexandra and the Royal princesses to drive. Butterfield Press is a recent addition to the publishing world, putting out titles on vintage motoring and racing, with particular focus on Bristol Cars. This title tells the extraordinary tale of a woman born into a Jewish family, originally named Levi, in Hackney. Dorothy began her career as a secretary at the Napier Engineering Company.

It wasn’t long before Levitt was tearing around the country in early Edwardian motor vehicles, soon attracting the attention of the constabulary as a ‘scorcher’, someone who enjoys breaking the speed limit. She was summoned for speeding in Hyde Park in 1903 and fined £5. Her response, two years later, was to break the world record for the longest distance covered by a lady driver, taking an eight horsepower De Dion-Bouton from London to Liverpool and back

“Fast Lady fills in all the other remarkable details of Levitt’s eventful life, including setting the Women’s World Speed Record and becoming a member of The Aero Club of the United Kingdom in 1910, all while not being admitted to the newly built Brooklands Motor Circuit because she was a woman”

in two days, accompanied by an official observer, her pet Pomeranian Dodo and a revolver. In her 1909 book The Woman and the Car, Levitt advised women driving alone to carry a handgun in the glove compartment, as well as a little hand-mirror to help them see behind while driving, before the advent of wing mirrors.

Fast Lady fills in all the other remarkable details of Levitt’s eventful life, including setting the Women’s World Speed Record and becoming a member of The Aero Club of the United Kingdom in 1910, all while not being admitted to the newly built Brooklands Motor Circuit because she was a woman. Michael Barton has managed to piece together a speculative, though well researched, account of the ‘lost years’ of Dorothy’s life, for the last twelve years of her existence, after 1910, remain entirely undocumented. It makes for a sad and lonely end to what today would have been a glittering career in motor racing.

THE ILLUSIONIST: THE TRUE STORY OF THE MAN WHO FOOLED HITLER

By Robert Hutton (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £22)

Flicking through the dramatis personae of this book, readers of previous editions of this humble journal will immediately recognise a few names: David Niven, Jasper Maskelyne, the Shepheards Hotel; the latter featured in CHAP Winter 21 as the location of the creation of the Suffering Bastard cocktail. The subject of The Illusionist , Dudley Clarke, probably sank a good few Suffering Bastards, as he cruised the bar of this Cairo hotel frequented by British officers and spies.

Clarke’s job in the British Army was as deception officer, responsible for complicated, drawn-out strategies to fool the enemy into believing that something was about to happen to them, when in fact something entirely different was about to happen. Stage magician Jasper

“The Illusionist tells for the first time the dazzling tale of how, at a pivotal moment in the War, British eccentricity and imagination combined to thwart the Nazis and save innumerable liveson both sides. Clarke was so effective at deception that he managed to get through the whole war unnoticed, even by all the other officers around him in Shepheard’s Hotel”

Maskelyne was brought in to help with the technical side of things, for example creating an entire fake battalion of tanks made of plywood and canvas.

Clarke was also a key player, along with David Stirling, in the foundation of the Special Air Service and the Commandoes, with David Niven alongside him all the way. But while Niven was born and bred officer class, Clarke was more of an oddball outsider. “The lifestyle he aspired to – flat in Mayfair, cocktails at the Ritz, dinner at the Savoy – was that of an aristocratic officer in one of the army’s more socially exclusive regiments, a cavalryman, say. And although Clarke palled around Cairo with the officers of the Eleventh Hussars, he was himself an artilleryman, even if he still wore his Flying Corps wings. In a subtle way that only an Englishman of his generation could understand, this consumate insider was also an outsider.”

Clarke’s operations centre was like something out of Smiley’s People : a pair of flats on Sharia Kasr-El-Nil, formerly a high-class brothel whose continuing trade was a convenient smokescreen over what the British agents were doing. His fascination with Hollywood saw him invite the sound engineer who’d worked on Disney’s Fantasia to create a military soundscape on the beach, which would be so loud it would scare the hell out of the enemy and make them believe they were being invaded.

Clarke remained in Cairo throughout the whole of WWII, playing a huge role in the masterful hoodwinking of Rommel’s Desert Fox at the battle of El Alamein. The Illusionist tells for the first time the dazzling tale of how, at a pivotal moment in the War, British eccentricity and imagination combined to thwart the Nazis and save innumerable lives – on both sides. Clarke was so effective at deception that he managed to get through the whole war unnoticed, even by all the other officers around him in Shepheard’s Hotel. Needless to say, thanks to Clarke and his team of deceptionists, Erwin Rommel’s prediction that he would be “drinking champagne in the master suite at Shepheard’s soon” never came true. n

NEW ANTIQUARIAN BOOK DEPT

The Chap webular emporium now boasts a new category of desirable product: books either directly or indirectly related to The Chap oeuvre. From signed first editions of The Chap Manifesto to hardback copies of Stephen Potter’s One-upmanship series, with new books added weekly.

The literary chap will find much to mull over in the ‘Chap Books’ section of WWW.THECHAP.CO.UK

CHAP BOOKS

The antiquarian department of our online emporium offers classic chap books and rare gentlemanly tomes

Our webular emporium now hosts a category of product named Chap Books. The shelves of this category are regularly filled with books we consider suitable reading material for Chaps and Chapettes, with more tomes being added every week.

The range is broad – but not too broad, mercifully. Naturally the starting point is the books that have issued from this very stable: The Chap Manifesto, The Chap Almanac, Drinking For Chaps etcetera, plus the occasional rare out-of-print edition of How To Be Chap. Then we have the kind of books that, while not directly produced by this organisation, have nevertheless some form of connection, for example We Are Dandy by Chap contributors Rose

DIFFERENT CLASS

By Dermot Kavanagh

No other sport than football brings so many tears to so many men’s eyes, and so many books to the bookshelves with unshaven tattooed men on the covers. So when a football book comes along with a dust jacket bearing the image of a stylish black man in a Soul Boy version of a pinstriped demob suit, correspondent shoes and a rakishly-angled Fedora, it’s worth a look. Different Class is a different kind of football book, about a different kind of footballer. One who was also a dandy. And, as they said of one of the subject’s heroes, Fred Astaire, at the actor’s first audition – also dances.

Laurie Cunningham was the first black footballer to play for England. Before that he worked his way up the league from Leyton Orient to West Bromwich Albion, before being signed by Real Madrid in 1977. Sportswriter Dermot Kavanagh frequently mentions that Laurie Cunningham’s playing style was hugely influenced by his being a very good dancer. He spent as much time practising his dance moves with his girlfriend Nikki in their London flat as he did at training sessions. He and Nikki would spend hours perfecting Donald O’Connor’s famous backflip from Singin’ in the Rain.

The clubs where Laurie and Nikki danced were part of the Soul Boy scene that happened outside of mainstream culture in cramped, sweaty rooms in North London. The fashions were extreme: sharp doublebreasted suits, Oxford bags, co-respondent shoes, a

Callahan and Nathaniel Adams. The final, and broadest, category includes those books that have either influenced The Chap – step forward Stephen Potter, P.G. Wodehouse et al – or have provided invaluable resource material for the magazine. These would include tomes on vintage menswear, tailoring and the art of dressing.

Furthermore, each Chap Book purchased comes with a free Chap Bookmark, and these, should one wish, may also be purchased on their own in packs of five. So from a modestly-priced Penguin paperback of What Ho, Jeeves to the coffee-table splendour of Made in Britain, you are certain to find something to stimulate the eyes and the brain cells in Chap Books. The book reviewed below is currently on the shelves. n

Soul Boy variation of the Gatsby Look. They were devoted to vintage long before it became fashionable in the 1980s. Kavanagh recounts how much trouble Laurie and his chums would go to for the right threads, discovering dusty boxes of deadstock Demob suits in menswear emporia in Leyton (probably while his team-mates were training). He took his finds to a Jewish tailor in Stratford to have them copied and stamped with his own style.

Cunningham went on to play for Real Madrid for five years, becoming one of their star players. Such was the legend that, when he turned out for a match against bitter rivals Barcelona, the Catalan fans cheered Cunningham every time he got the ball.

Different Class is unavoidably a book about football, but it is as much about fashion, style, music, dancing and race. To neglect it because of the soccer would be to miss out on a gripping, poignant tale, extremely well told.

AGEING DICKS

Upon the release of this year’s Monsieur Spade with Clive Owen playing Sam Spade, Stephen Arnell looks back at previous attempts to wring more action out of long-retired detectives

There is a long-established tradition of taking famous literary or movie/TV characters and giving us a portrait of them either in youth or maturity. Such is the circumstance befalling Charles Dickens’ pickpocketing urchin The Artful Dodger, portrayed by Billy Jenkins in CBBC prequel Dodger and in Disney+’s The Artful Dodger by Thomas BrodieSangster (Game of Thrones/Wolf Hall) as the now reformed cutpurse, plying his trade as a sawbones in colonial Australia. A kind of Magwitch switcheroo, if you will.

Rita Ora played a female version of The Artful Dodger in 2021’s dire ‘free-running’ modern update Twist, where Michael Caine picked up a cheque for his subpar gangsterism Fagin, not a patch on his Scrooge from The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992).

“Paul Michael Glaser and the late David Soul made a cameo appearance in the 2004 Starsky & Hutch, flogging their Gran Torino to successors Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson. As for Peter Falk’s Columbo, with the exception of a 10-year break, he just carried on and on, the show running from 1968 to 1978, then 1989-2003”

THE LONG-ISH GOODBYE

Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down from high flat temples in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blonde Satan.

The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett

The ageing detective brought back to solve one last case – or the one he could never crack – is becoming an increasingly familiar trope. 2024 will see Clive Owen essay the role of Dashiell Hammett’s private detective Sam Spade in Monsieur Spade

Now in his early sixties, the sleuth is living in comfortable retirement in the south of France circa 1963. Written by talented industry veterans Scott Frank (The Queen’s Gambit/Get Shorty) and Tom Fontana (Homicide/Oz), Monsieur Spade sees Spade’s Occitanian reverie broken by the brutal murder of six nuns from the local convent and the return of a sinister figure from the shamus’ past.

Hopefully the mini-series will be more entertaining than Neil Jordan’s Marlowe (2022), which saw a miscast Liam Neeson play Raymond Chandler’s gumshoe in a spectacularly dull adaptation of John Banville’s The Black-Eyed Blonde (2014). A movie so lousy it (like Twist) was released as a Sky Original.

Incidentally, Monsieur Spade is set in the picturesque town of Bozouls, where the late actor Richard Belzer (1944–2023) had a home. Belzer starred as world weary Detective John Munch in Fontana’s NBC police drama Homicide: Life on the Street (1993-2000).

For Spade completists, 1975 witnessed the release of The Black Bird, a comedy (allegedly) sequel to The Maltese Falcon, starring George Segal as Sam Spade Jr. For their sins, Lee Patrick (Spade’s secretary) and Elisha Cook Jr (the gunsel) returned from the original movie. Interestingly (to some), in the same year as The Black Bird, Michael Caine featured as Leslie C. Tucker, a Cockney private dick in late 1940s Los Angeles in Peter Hyam’s pricey flop Peeper

Far better was 1982’s Hammett, with Frederick Forrest playing the author when he was just getting started as pulp fiction writer after his years as a

Liam Neeson as the silver-tongued gumshoe in Marlowe (2022) Ian McKellen as a nonagenarian Sherlock in 2015’s Mr Holmes

THE LAST DETECTIVE STANDING

Of course, Spade isn’t the only fictional detective to return years later than in their original incarnation. Witness Jim Rockford (James Garner) and Amos Burke (Gene Barry) who starred in

90s revivals of The Rockford Files and Burke’s Law respectively. Paul Michael Glaser and the late David Soul made a cameo appearance in the 2004 Starsky & Hutch, flogging their Gran Torino to successors Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson. As for Peter Falk’s Columbo, with the exception of a 10-year break, he just carried on and on, the show running from 1968 to 1978, then 1989-2003. Back in 2014 it was rumoured that Mark Ruffalo (not a bad choice) was interested in donning detective Columbo’s dishevelled mac in a movie reboot.

In the UK, Ian McKellen played a nonagenarian, dementia-stricken Sherlock in 2015’s Mr Holmes, while Denholm Elliott was a retired George Smiley investigating boarding school homicide in the overlooked A Murder of Quality (1991).

More relevant to Monsieur Spade, James Caan starred as Philip Marlowe in Chandler’s unfinished Poodle Springs (1998), also set in 1963. Caan was 58 at the time. Last year, the then 74-year-old Gerard Depardieu trudged the streets

Pinkerton operative. Elisha Cook Jr puts in another appearance.

James Caan as Philip Marlowe in Poodle Springs (1998)

Jack Nicholson in The Two Jakes (1990)

of 1950s Paris in Patrice Leconte’s big screen revival of Maigret. In recent years both Shaft and Rick Deckard (Blade Runner) returned after decades-long absences; in 2023 OCD investigator Adrian Monk solved his last case in a TV movie, 14 years after his ‘final’ appearance in the TV series Monk (2002-09).

And so to ‘Forget it’ Jake Gittes, immortalised by Jack Nicholson in Roman Polanski’s classic Chinatown (1974). A noticeably tubbier Nicholson returned to act and direct in 1990’s sequel The Two Jakes, a watchable enough effort, but hardly in the class of its predecessor. When it flopped at the box office, plans for a third movie were dropped. Entitled Gittes vs Gittes, the third picture would have been set in 1968, when no-fault divorce law went into effect in California, a 70+ year-old Jake presumably in the throes of splitting up with the old trouble and strife. Sounds an exciting movie.

Interviewed in 2007, Nicholson said of the abandoned third film, “We always planned on making three films. We wanted it all to be tied into

elemental things. Chinatown is obviously water. The Two Jakes is fire and energy. And the third film was meant to be about Gittes’ divorce and relate to air. The secrecy of Meg Tilly’s character (Faye Dunaway’s sister/daughter from Chinatown) was somehow to involve the most private person in California, Howard Hughes. That is where the air element would have come into the picture.”

Some sleuths have always been middle-aged – or older, such as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Poirot, both over sixty when their stories began, although a ‘Young Marple’ series was threatened a while back. As portrayed by John Thaw, Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse always looked to be nearing retirement, even though he was just 45 in his first outing as the crotchety detective back in 1987. To my knowledge, we have yet to see middle-aged versions of The Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew on screen, but it would hardly be beyond the bounds of possibility. Especially when recalling the Comic Strip’s updated adult version of the Famous Five. n

Clive Owen – never knowingly overdressed

HEIRLOOMS TO MARK OUR SILVER JUBILEE

This is a significant year for The Chap, in that we have completed 25 years of publication. We shall be marking this momentous milestone with the production of several heirlooms, all of which will be available from our online store.

These range from a pair of silver-hued lapel badges, a pocket square designed by Geoff Stocker, a silk necktie and a tankard-style Bone China mug, all bearing subtle signifiers of our Silver Jubilee.

The other manner in which we shall celebrate will be in the form of the Grand Silver Jubilee Ball, on 12th October at Conway Hall in London. Needless to say, this will be the party of the century, and those who do not attend will spend the rest of their lives wishing they had done so. There will be cabaret, live music, a louche compere and – you have been warned – there may even be speeches.

Until 2nd April, all the above items may be acquired in advance from: KICKSTARTER.COM/THECHAPSILVERJUBILEE

Instead of the usual price of £32.00 for four issues per year, the recipient will become an annual Chap subscriber for just £16.00, precisely half the usual cost, which still includes free postage. The offer is available in the EU and elsewhere in the world with extra shipping costs. The subscription can be cancelled after one year if no longer required.

www.thechap.co.uk/subscribe use

CROSSWORD

By Xeno

Solutions to crossword 118, CHAP Winter 23

ACROSS

Across

7. Silver copy is open (5)

7 Silver copy is open (5)

8. Conman used Wilder’s name (8)

9. French president pens first letter to Italy concerning pasta (8)

8 Conman used Wilder's name (8)

10. Joe’s supercar (6)

11. Stud seen after Blur audition getting mound of grass (8)

DOWN

1. “Some distance off, inbetween tee and green, I got lost” American admitted (7)

2 Alias may need changing to get to Southeast Asian country (8)

3 Hat made from furs of Frengle, Dingo and Rhea

2. Alias may need changing to get to Southeast Asian country (8)

9 French president pens first letter to Italy concerning pasta (8)

10 Joe's supercar (6)

12. Put down chap who is any Tom, Dick or Harry (6)

13. Interesting gifts Ian can make (11)

18. Eight gallons of lube spilled around Saint Helena (6)

3. Hat made from furs of Frengle, Dingo and Rhea (6)

4 Place on tv schedule is result of Murdoch's fortune (4,4)

4. Place on tv schedule is result of Murdoch ’s fortune (4,4)

5. I had one love but see why they say it ’s foolish behaviour (6)

11 Stud seen after Blur audition getting mound of grass (8)

20. This head of the table is a gas (8)

5 I had one love but see why they say it's foolish behaviour (6)

6. A silver design for new version (7)

12 Put down chap who is any Tom, Dick or Harry (6)

22/16. 25th anniversary of change to tube line (6,7)

23. Painter starts out cautious about money (8)

13 Interesting gifts Ian can make (11)

24. Toothy cadet arrests some revolutionary (8)

25. Could be silver that Giedroyc took in Bulgarianagreement (5)

6 A silver design for new version (7)

8. Under a tree on a wet day is where to find this unadventurous type (5-2-3-3)

8 Under a tree on a wet day is where to find this unadventurous type (5-2-3-3)

14. Controlling religious orders embrace half of prison’ s offenders (8)

18 Eight gallons of lube spilled around Saint Helena (6)

20 This head of the table is a gas (8)

22/16 25th anniversary of change to tube line (6,7)

23 Painter starts out cautious about money (8)

24 Toothy cadet arrests some revolutionary (8)

25 Could be silver that Giedroyc took in Bulgarian

15. Midday and not a single person outside, none even tried (8)

14 Controlling religious orders embrace half of prison's offenders (8)

16. See 22 Across

17. Sounds like Al’s brother, Lee, in a strange way (7)

15 Midday and not a single person outside, none even tried (8)

16 See 22 Across

19. Spells of bowling to follow, how match ends remains up in the air (6)

21. Manic Monday’s electric producer (6)

17 Sounds like Al's brother, Lee, in a strange way

19 Spells of bowling to follow, how match ends remains up in the air (6)