Issue 24 - Summer 2014

gardens of the working classes Nineteenth-century novels and poetry supplied Margaret Willes with some fascinating details about the resourcefulness of the working-class gardener

the english fear of flats Philippa Lewis on the architectural history of flat-dwelling in England, and the nation’s reluctance to embrace the concept

Telling stories Michael Holroyd reflects on the narrative skills shared by the novelist and the biographer

catalogues of private art collectors The Library’s selection of handsome early volumes is admired by Michael Savage

MAGAZINE SUMMER 2014 ISSUE 24

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Le Carré (John) A Murder of Quality, 1962, first edition.

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Fleming (Ian) Casino Royale, 1953, first edition.

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Tolkien (J.R.R.) The Hobbit, or, There and Back Again, 1937, first edition.

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4 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

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London Library Magazine 14.05.2014

The London Library Magazine / issue 24

14

C ontents

Why are the English so resistant to living in flats? The construction of multistorey blocks of flats began in England’s cities in the 1850s, but it has taken decades for the flat to become a socially acceptable form of home on an equal footing with a house and garden, as Philippa Lewis explains.

7 FROM THE LIBRARIAN 8 Contributors 10 BEHIND THE BOOK Ethel F. Heddle’s Three Girls in a Flat (1896).

18

13 bibliotherapy Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals are a cure for homesickness for Fleur Adcock

Michael Holroyd reflects on the comparable story-telling skills required of a novelist and a biographer, as he publishes a novel in the UK after almost 50 years of writing best-selling biographies, and considers how sources of inspiration are shared between different art forms.

14 the english fear of FLATS Philippa Lewis offers an architectural and social analysis of the history of flat-dwelling in England Michael Holroyd’s A Book of Secrets (2010).

20 but the glory of the GARDEN lies in more than meets the eye The gardens of urban and rural workers in literature, by Margaret Willes

24 Hidden Corners Myles Birket Foster, A Cottage Garden (detail). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

24 Wealthy individuals, whether financiers or aristocrats, demonstrated their connoisseurship by publishing beautiful catalogues of their collections, and the Library has a splendid selection of these volumes, as Michael Savage has discovered.

18 TELLING STORIES Michael Holroyd recounts his experiences as a writer of biographies and fiction

20 The Victorian working classes were dedicated and enthusiastic gardeners, a fact reflected in novels and poetry of the time; Dickens, for example, refers to the pride Londoners took in creating a world of fantasy on their modest plots of land.

Margaret Willes reveals the results of her research into the subject.

Oliver Bullough discovered the subject for his latest book on Russia on the Library’s shelves, along with other titles that aided his research

Michael Savage on the Library’s important catalogues of private art collectors

26 MEMBERS’ NEWS

30 POETRY The winner of this year’s Cosmo Davenport-Hines Prize

31 EATING OUT

Chromolithograph of a salière (salt cellar), Urbino, 1550, from La Collection Spitzer (6 vols., 1890–3).

p

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 5

soulle mbar FLORISLONDON.COM

p

f rom the L I B R A R I A N With this issue we complete six full years of The London Library Magazine, so this seems an excellent time to thank all those members who have written for us so far, providing fascinating contributions – for no fee – on subjects as rich and varied as the Library’s own collections. There have been over 160 contributors to date and we could not produce the Magazine without you. Your efforts are warmly appreciated by us all, not least by those members who are no longer able to get to the Library as often as they once did but find the quarterly issues an excellent way to keep in touch with Library life.

Summer is a time for stories and after almost 50 years of writing biographies, Sir Michael Holroyd is about to publish a novel. He writes for us here on the complex interplay of stories from life and the imagination.

Is it just me or is there something peculiarly English about a fascination with homes and gardens, the rhythm of the seasons and of daily life in the perfectly ordinary natural world around us? This issue of our Magazine certainly seems to have tapped into it, with an exploration of the English aversion to living in flats by Philippa Lewis, reflections on workingclass gardening in literature by Margaret Willes, and a proposed remedy for homesickness from Fleur Adcock in Bibliotherapy, which convinced me I should not leave home without Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals in my bag.

On the cover

C.H. Mathews, Market Gardens and Brickfields in Hackney, East London (detail), 1852, watercolour. London Metropolitan Archives & City of London.

Oliver Bullough encourages us to look further afield – to twentieth-century Russia – in Behind the Book and, in Hidden Corners, Michael Savage shines a light on catalogues of private art collections.

Finally, be sure to turn to page 28 to meet my new Deputy, Mary Gillies, for a glimpse of what it takes to keep the Library running smoothly. We wish you a long, happy and bookfilled summer.

Inez T.P.A. Lynn Librarian

Published on behalf of The London Library by Royal Academy Enterprises Ltd. Colour reproduction by adtec. Printed by Tradewinds London. Published 30 June 2014 © 2014 The London Library. The opinions in this particular publication do not necessarily reflect the views of The London Library.

All reasonable attempts have been made to clear copyright before publication.

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Editorial Committee David Breuer Chloë Brookes Emma Marlow Helen O’Neill Peter Parker Erica Wagner

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Magazine feedback and editorial enquiries should be addressed to development@londonlibrary.co.uk

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 7

CONTRIBUTORS

Authors’ FoundAtion grAnts And AwArds

Fleur Adcock joined the library in 1982

And

K Blundell trust AwArds (open to writers under 40 years of age)

© Caroline Forbes.

Fleur Adcock was born in New Zealand but has lived in England since 1963. Her collections of poetry are: Poems 1960–2000 (2000), Dragon Talk (2010) and Glass Wings (2013). She has also published translations from Romanian and medieval Latin poetry, and edited several anthologies, including The Faber Book of 20thCentury Women’s Poetry. In 2006 she was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

Oliver Bullough joined the library in 2011

Next closing dates – september 30 2014 and April 30 2015

Oliver Bullough is a journalist and author who moved to Russia in 1999 to write for local newspapers and for Reuters. He stayed in Moscow, mainly reporting on the war in Chechnya, until 2006. He is currently Caucasus Editor for the Institute of War and Peace Reporting. He has written two books, Let Our Fame be Great (2010) and The Last Man in Russia (2013).

Full guidelines available from www.societyofauthors.org 020 7373 6642

Michael Holroyd joined the library in 1991

© Caroline Forbes.

Michael Holroyd has written Lives of Lytton Strachey, Augustus John and Bernard Shaw, as well as two volumes of family history and a group biography of two theatre families, the Irvings and the Terrys. He has been Chairman of the Society of Authors and is President Emeritus of the Royal Society of Literature. His new book is a short novel called A Dog's Life (2014), which he remembers beginning in his late teens.

Philippa Lewis

© Amy Gaspar-Slayford.

joined the library in 1969

Philippa Lewis has worked as a picture editor, photographer and writer. Until recently she ran the Edifice Architectural Photo Library. Her books include Everything You Can Do in the Garden Without Actually Gardening (2009) and Everyman's Castle: The Story of Our Cottages, Country Houses, Terraces, Flats, Semis and Bungalows, published this month.

Michael Savage

joined the library in 2013

Michael Savage is a dilettante art historian.

He has a Ph.D. in international relations, taught international political economy at Edinburgh University and now works in investment banking. He blogs at grumpyarthistorian.blogspot.com.

Chris Torry .

Chris Torry is a student nurse and an artist.

Prior to a Photography MA at Brighton, he studied English Literature at Sussex University.

He is interested in critical theory, language and people. When he is not working for the NHS he plays in a band, takes photographs and writes poetry.

Margaret Willes joined the library in 2005 Margaret Willes is an enthusiastic gardener and the former Publisher at the National Trust. Her previous books include The Making of the English Gardener: Plants, Books and Inspiration, 1560–1660 (2011). Her latest book is The Gardens of the British Working Class (2014).

8 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Master’s in Garden History

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Those interested in attending the seminars, but who do not wish to undertake research for a dissertation, may join the course as Associate Students, at a reduced fee.

For further details, Google ‘Buckingham Garden History’ Web: www.buckingham.ac.uk/gardenhistory Course enquiries Email: claire.prendergast@buckingham.ac.uk

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Behind the

Book

Travel writer Oliver Bullough knew what he wanted to write – a journey through the demographic and psychological collapse of the Soviet Union – but lacked a central character until he made a chance discovery at The London Library in an out-of-date book about 1980s dissidents. The book that resulted was The Last Man in Russia, published in paperback earlier this year.

‘

’

Oliver Bullough’s The Last Man in Russia (2013), 2014 paperback edition.

The subject of The Last Man in Russia, which asks why the Russian nation sank into massive alcoholism after the Second World War, is Dmitry Dudko, a renegade Orthodox priest. In the book I trace his life – from a collective farm via the Red Army and the Gulag to central Moscow where he preached against despair – and use it to explore the plight of the Russians.

 Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious and Human Rights by Ludmilla Alexeyeva, trans.

Carol Pearce and John Glad (Middletown, Connecticut, 1985). H. Russia.

I opened this book with, it must be said, low expectations. By 1985, the Soviet dissident movement had been crushed, and I was unsure what a survey of that dark time before the dawn of glasnost would have to tell me. But there, 251 pages in, I found the Orthodox priest Father Dudko (1922–2004), and read how he had rebelled against the stultifying conformity of the age he lived in. Alexeyeva described how the KGB had undermined and finally broken him. Here was the man I needed as the subject of my book, to personify the Russian nation’s heroic but tragic twentieth century.  Russia Goes Dry: Alcohol, State and Society by Stephen White (Cambridge 1996). S. Drink.

Everyone knows the Russians like a drink, but the appalling damage that vodka has wrought on their nation is a fact that few appreciate. According to UN estimates, their population will fall by 32 million between 2000 and 2050, largely caused by excessive drinking. In this book, White explores Mikhail Gorbachev’s ill-fated attempt to

10 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

ban booze. It was a short-lived campaign that was simultaneously a fantastic publichealth intervention and a dreadful political move, contributing as it did to the collapse of the whole country.  A Question of Madness by Zhores A. Medvedev and Roy A. Medvedev, trans. Ellen de Kadt (London 1971). Biog. Medvedev.

Why did the Russians start drinking themselves to death? This riveting account by the Medvedev twins, of how the Soviet authorities tried to have Zhores declared insane because he insisted on investigating a charlatan Stalin-era scientist, gives a clue.

It shows how the Soviet state was so corrupt that it would even use doctors to enforce its edicts. In a country with no hope of improvement, people gave up on the future and drank to today. Suicide, abortion and murder rates soared and it was only the lucky few – like the Medvedevs with their contacts in the West – whose fates were known.  Red Square at Noon by Natalia Gorbanevskaya, trans. Alexander Lieven (London 1972). H. Russia. To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter

by Vladimir Bukovsky, trans. Michael Scammell (London 1978). Biog. Bukovsky.

My Testimony by Anatoly Marchenko, trans. Michael Scammell (London 1969).

Biog. Marchenko. The Trial of the Four: A Collection of Materials on the Case of Galanskov, Ginzburg, Dobrovolsky and Lashkova 1967–8, compiled by Pavel Litvinov, trans. Janis Sapiets, Hilary Sternberg and Daniel Weissbort (London 1972). H. Russia.

Sadly, the Library has none of Dudko’s writings, but it does have an extensive stock of other dissident memoirs. These books show the steps that individuals took to ensure their voices were heard, and the consequences they suffered. I trawled these books obsessively, trying to assess the damage the Soviet system inflicted on the souls of ordinary Russians.  Moscow Stations: A Poem by Venedikt Erofeev, trans. Stephen Mulrine (London 1997). Fiction.

This outrageously good autobiographical novel, published after Erofeev’s death in 1990, took me right inside the head of a Russian alcoholic in the late 1960s. So much so, in fact, that I made a special trip to Moscow to take the train journey the book describes, reading the book and drinking all the way. I know of no better evocation of what it meant to live under totalitarianism, and of how Russians rebelled against the corrupt bureaucrats in their own way : by getting drunk.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 11

SuSAn EInzIG 1922 – 2009

MEMORIAL ExHIbITIOn

TEXT John Duncalfe Dr Hilary TEXT by by John Duncalfe & Dr& Hilary Diaper.

Diaper.

ForEworD Alexandre Nadal.

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ISbN 978-0-9567177-1-9 ISbN 978-0-9567177-1-9 ‘works on Paper’ shows many of Nadal’s ‘works on Paper’ shows many of Nadal’s preparatory oeuvre, many executed preparatory oeuvre, many executed ‘en‘en plein updated chronology plein air’air’ withwith updated chronology andand exhibition information from Nadal exhibition information from thethe Nadal archive authors. archive andand thethe authors.

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BIBLIOTHERAPY

When she is far from England and feeling homesick, the poet Fleur Adcock turns to the journals recording the changing seasons in the Lake District by a keen observer of nature

the Grasmere JOURNAls Dorothy wordsworth Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals has long been my desert island book because, apart from the inimitable companionship of Dorothy herself and the other characters she mentions, it comes with its own built-in geography; the two editions I possess even contain maps. I may imagine myself lying on some boring tropical beach and, as I watch the inexorably rising sea, taking consolation in a mental walk along one of Dorothy’s favourite routes and hearing her say, having refused an escort home: ‘This was very kind, but God be thanked, I want not society by a moonlit lake. ’ The journal also provides therapy for that ‘Oh to be in England’ feeling in the less fanciful context of prolonged visits to New Zealand where, even in the company of my much-loved extended family, there are times when my subconscious feels outraged by the ridiculousness of Christmas in mid-summer and unnatural dislocations in the patterns of seasonal vegetation. Dorothy was a reliable annalist of the comings and goings of plants.

In September 1977 I took up an Arts Council writer’s fellowship at Charlotte Mason College in Ambleside and began discovering the Lake District. I bought my first copy of Mary Moorman’s edition of Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth (1971) in the Dove Cottage bookshop in Grasmere, kept it on my bedside table, and when I had reached the end went back to the beginning. When it was worn out I bought another copy, which kept me going until Pamela Woof’s excellent edition, The Grasmere Journals, came out in 1991. The

journal does not date, except superficially: when my friend Angela Carter came to spend a weekend with me in May 1978 we went on a nature walk and found all but one of the wildflowers Dorothy recorded on the first page of her journal in May 1800. (Angela was much taken with the Wordsworths’ domestic relationships, and wrote an irreverent essay about them.)

Dorothy had been, like me, an excited newcomer to the Lake District when she arrived to set up house in Dove Cottage, Grasmere, with her two brothers, William and John, at the end of 1799. Having

Dorothy Wordsworth’s The Grasmere Journals (1897), 1991 edition edited by Pamela Woof.

lost her mother at six, she had been shunted from one relative to another, scarcely getting to know her brothers.

Her passionate sensibility and eager responsiveness were perfectly suited to the situation in which she now found herself: in a place of spectacular natural beauty and with the companionship of a poet-brother who would appreciate her detailed and ecstatic descriptions of it. She began her journal on the day he and John (a sea captain who was to die in a shipwreck in 1805) set out on foot for Yorkshire in May 1800. It was first published as The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth in 1897.

Everything is in it: she walks daily to Ambleside for the post, bakes bread and pies, has headaches, talks to neighbours, gathers flowers and mosses for their garden; William plants peas and works on a sonnet; Coleridge walks over Helvellyn to visit them; their swallows build a nest, it falls down (‘Poor little creatures they could not themselves be more distressed than I was’), they build another; beggars call at their door, and William uses Dorothy’s account of them in a poem.

It is all absorbingly real.

Her journal covers less than three years. My own stay in the Lakes lasted scarcely one, but by the end of it I had become ‘hefted’ to that particular patch – Ambleside, Rydal, Grasmere – like a Herdwick ewe that could return to it instinctively even after long absence.

My visits these days are not very frequent, but Dorothy’s journal is established in my head: a refuge for whenever I may feel I’m in the wrong place.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 13

the English fear of FLATS The English have always had an aversion to the idea of flat-dwelling, regarding it as alien and ‘foreign’. Philippa Lewis examines this peculiar national phenomenon.

Illustration of a block of mansion flats, Earl’s Court Square, London, by the architect R.A. Briggs, from Flats, Urban Houses and Cottage Homes, edited by W. Shaw Sparrow (1906).

14 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Hermann Muthesius, German architect and for a short time cultural attaché to London, concludes in his 1904 book Das englische Haus (English edition 1979, translated by Crosby Lockwood Staples) that ‘the Englishman sees the whole of life embodied in his house’ . He emphasises ‘house’ since, he writes, ‘Flat dwelling can only be regarded as an emergency substitute for living in a private house’ . The Scots in Edinburgh had come to terms with living horizontally rather than vertically as early as the fifteenth century, and urban Europeans and New Yorkers were slotting themselves happily into apartments during the late nineteenth century, so why were the English so prejudiced?

Flats were a well-established form by 1904. They fell into two distinct types, both of which had evolved in the 1850s. On the one hand there were the block dwellings built to improve the lot of the industrious poor, on the other the novel and convenient residences for the superior classes. There was a shortage of housing in a rapidly expanding capital, and the new wide streets, such as Victoria Street, Farringdon Road and Shaftesbury Avenue, swept away slums and provided building sites for multi-storey blocks of both types along their margins.

Philanthropists such as George Peabody, the founders of the Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Classes, and Sidney Waterlow with his Improved Industrial Dwellings Company, developed an economic system of large-scale buildings that provided flats for the working poor.

Such model housing in a healthy and sanitary environment and close to sources of employment also managed to return a modest 5 per cent to the builders and investors.

But the sheer size of these drab,

unornamented buildings shocked: they rose to five or six storeys and sheltered alarming numbers – as many as two hundred families per block. At a meeting of the Social Science Association in 1866 during a debate on ‘The Dwellings of the Labouring Classes’ , a Mr Rumsey from Cheltenham contended that it was not only smoke and polluted air ‘that destroy life, but it is to a still greater extent the exhalation and emanation from human bodies that cause evil … The evil reaches its climax in what are called model lodging houses’ . Even the admirable Mr Peabody, he asserted, was housing 625 people per acre, which was too many. George Gissing, in his novel Netherworld (1890), places the motherless Hewett family in Farringdon Buildings (completed in 1874 with a density of about 1,550 people per acre). His authorial voice jumps out of the narrative as he describes it: ‘vast, sheer walls, unbroken by even an attempt at ornament, row above row of windows in a mud-coloured surface, upwards, upwards … millions of tons of brute bricks and mortar, crushing the spirit as you gaze. ’ At the same time, builders and speculators were attempting to convince those at the other end of the social scale that the flat solved a housing problem . The Builder magazine announced in 1853 that a Mr Mackenzie had erected a fine set of buildings in Victoria Street ‘to supply what has long been a desideratum in London, namely complete residences on flats, as in Edinburgh and Paris’ . For those willing to abandon the security and privacy of their own front door it was vital that their new modus vivendi should in no way resemble that in a block dwelling. A resident porter ‘performs all the duties usually performed by a hall-porter in a private residence, and the hall and staircase are lighted at night at the expense of the proprietor’ . The American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne attended a party to hear Jenny Lind sing, given in 1856 by the playwright Mrs S.C. Hall at her flat in Ashley Place, just off Victoria Street in Westminster: ‘a handsome suite of apartments, arranged on the new system of flats, each storey constituting a different tenement … The plan is borrowed from the Continent, and seems rather alien to the traditionary habits of the English. ’ Hawthorne guessed right: living in a flat was alien and continued to be thought so for the next 70 years or so. Discussion on a paper given at the Royal Institute of

Illustration of Corporation Dwellings, Liverpool, from J. Birch’s Examples of Labourers’ Cottages Etc: With Plans for Improving the Dwellings of the Poor in Large Towns (1892).

British Architects in 1877, which proposed that flats were suitable for bachelors and childless families, was wound up by the President, Sir Charles Barry. He declared ‘that it would be difficult for the generality of Englishmen to imagine anything more miserable or uncomfortable’ , and accused the speaker of attempting to revolutionise not only ‘our houses, but our instincts, and habits and modes of life’ . Flats were ‘foreign’: an article in the Architect during this period stated that ‘it would be difficult to quote any custom of the French which English people might less readily fall in with’ . As Muthesius had observed, the English had a peculiar attachment to being at home, rather than out at the opera or strolling down a boulevard.

Even in the 1930s, John Gloag, an authority on architecture and furniture, objected to modern blocks of flats as being ‘continental’ and ‘foreign’ . Le Corbusier’s idea of a building as ‘a machine to live in’ was anathema to Gloag and his ilk: ‘To those who have mastered the art of comfort, the flat can never be more than an expedient, something of an impermanent convenience … these people have possessions, books, furniture and prejudices that would clash rather badly with the mechanistic functionality of the “machine to live in” flat. ’ Modernism was easy to mock, as William Heath Robinson and K.R.G. Browne showed in How to Live in a Flat (1936): ‘In the past few years blocks of flats resembling Utopian

prisons or Armenian glue factories have sprung up all over the place. ’ Early blocks of middle-class flats were generally named ‘Mansions’ in order to distance them from the working-class blocks of ‘Buildings’ and ‘Dwellings’ .

Grosvenor, Cumberland, Marlborough and Queen Anne’s were typically soothing Establishment names given to early mansion blocks, and lofty entrances involved much use of marble, mahogany and brass to emphasise their superior grandeur. The mansion flats featured lifts, whereas Peabody dwellers and their like had to toil up flights of stone steps. (The first council block to have a lift was Quarry Hill in Leeds, built in the late 1930s.) Lifts, however, engendered a further set of problems. They were thought to spread infection, and Mrs H.R. Haweis in The Art of Housekeeping (1889) described their lack of privacy as a grave disadvantage: ‘It is a bore going up and down with the same people in the same lift, and one ends up by going as seldom as possible. ’ One advantage of flat-life constantly flagged was that they could be managed with just one servant. However, unlike Parisian flats, there was no attic storey to which servants could be sent at night; nor, as in a house, could there be a basement or baize door. Architects and clients agonised about living in such close proximity to servants, who were usually tucked away in a room beyond the kitchen (which made their slops THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 15

Cover of sales brochure for Practical Flats: Northwood Hall, Hornsey Lane, Highgate, London (1935), detail.

Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture, Middlesex University.

a worry) and who could, it was feared, easily overhear conversations in the bedroom as they walked along the corridor. Although what was termed ‘the uncontrollable back door’ was avoided in flats, it was believed that some hall porters extorted a toll on deliveries going up in the service lift. The existence of a restaurant attached to many mansion blocks in theory reduced the need for a cook. Indeed restaurants remained a frequent feature in blocks of flats up to the Second World War. One of the most celebrated was the Isobar Restaurant run

by Philip Harben in the concrete modernist Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead for the benefit of its cosmopolitan residents; these included Agatha Christie and the Russian spy Arnold Deutsch, as well as Bauhaus émigrés Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and Lázló Moholy-Nagy.

The benefits of flat-life – freedom from servants and housekeeping – were perceived by the anti-flat brigade as a dangerous excuse for women to shirk their proper wifely duties. Gissing’s novel The Whirlpool (1897) has Hugh and Sybil Carnaby, newly returned from the Far East, living in Oxford and Cambridge Mansions in Marylebone: ‘For people like us, it’s mere foolery to worry with a house and a lot of servants. We’re neither of us cut out for that kind of thing.

Sybil hates housekeeping. Well, you can’t expect a woman like her to manage a pack of thieving, lying, lazy servants … If we have no children it will be alright. ’ The implication is that Sybil is also hostile to childbearing and, by extension, to a conventional family life. Hugh found that at the flat ‘it cost him a great effort to pretend to be at home’ .

The layout of flats had another serious 16 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

flaw, the closeness of bedroom to drawingroom. Muthesius had mentioned ‘the moral and ethical values that are inherent in the private house’ , a baffling statement until you realise that flats presented the entirely new problem of ‘indecent propinquity’ . This expression was coined by Edith Wharton in The Age of Innocence (1920), set in 1870s New York. Mrs Manson Mingott, too old to climb stairs, lives solely on the ground floor.

Her visitors are startled by ‘the foreignness of this arrangement, which recalled scenes in French fiction, and architectural incentives to immorality such as the simple American had never dreamed of’ .

Literature is invaluable for filling in the gaps left by architectural history.

Gissing, whose descriptions of domestic arrangements are frequently revealing, has a scene in his novel The Odd Women (1893), in which Monica Madden is compromised in a Bayswater flat by Mr Bevis, whose face is ‘gleaming with satisfaction’ . She ‘tried to forget that there was anything irregular in her presence here under these circumstances. In an ordinary drawing room, it could scarcely have mattered if Bevis had entertained her for a short space until his sister’s arrival; but in this little set of rooms it was doubtfully permissible to sit tête-à-tête with a young man under any excuse. And the fact of his opening the front door himself seemed to suggest that there was not a servant in the flat. ’ The building’s common entrance also leads to a misunderstanding as to whom exactly she is visiting.

As had been recognised at an early stage in their history, flats were particularly suitable for single people. Bachelors

had long lived in chambers, but women living independently could be perceived as threatening. The anonymity of a flat with its single entrance could hide moral laxity, and widows and divorcées living in them become suspect. Another of Gissing’s characters in The Odd Women, the widowed Mrs Luke Widowson, is living a life ‘of feverish aspiration’ in a Victoria Street flat. She holds court in perfumed air among costly and beautiful things with ‘opportunities of freedom … She lived at the utmost pace compatible with technical virtue’ . George Bernard Shaw opens his play The Philanderer (1893) in the Ashley Gardens flat of another widow, Grace Tanfield, whose morals are suggested by the presence of a yellow-backed French novel, and who receives theatre critic Leonard Charteris alone at past ten in the evening: ‘She is just now given up to the emotion of the moment. ’ In John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga (1922), Irene Forsyte is banished to a flat in Chelsea after her divorce from Soames.

‘

The anonymity of a flat could hide moral laxity, and widows and divorcées living in them became suspect

’

By the 1890s provision was finally being made for single working women, such as a block in York Street in Marylebone, built by the Ladies’ Residential Chambers Company. This and similar organisations were strictly run and hedged with rules to preserve the reputation of the inhabitants.

Undoubtedly one of the most agreeable was Waterlow Court in Hampstead Garden Suburb, funded by the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company at the instigation of Dame Henrietta Barnett in 1909. A serendipitous discovery in the Library, Three Girls in a Flat, by Ethel F. Heddle (1896), tells the story of well-bred girls in straitened circumstances taking up residence in a walk-up flat in Chelsea, to make their way in London and have ‘the glorious privilege of being independent’ even though it means living on porridge and rice.

The 1911 census listed flats for the first

THE ENGLISH fear of FLATS time. Unwieldy Georgian and Victorian terraces were sliced up into flats, and blocks were built apace. City councils were increasingly seeing flats as a solution to slum clearance, and some of the more adventurous English were beginning to see life in an all-electric service flat (no longer a Mansion, but a Court) with tiny rooms and a kitchenette as a possibility – even if it was only as a pied-à-terre or a seaside luxury. To others they still suggested unstable social standards: when in 1935 Chips Channon visited Wallis Simpson’s ‘little flat in Bryanston Court’ he was astonished to note that the Prince of Wales, dressed ‘in a short black coat and soft collar, checked socks and a tie’ , ‘shook and passed the cocktails, very much the “jeune homme de la maison” ’ .

The inhabitants of Dame Court in a 1938 novel by Charles Lorne called Flat to Let (another Library curiosity) are appropriately unconventional, some verging on the unpleasant: a businessman and his mistress; a young married couple (the husband thinks the flat is only ‘fit for a French tart’); a sexually predatory couple with ‘chairs covered in polar-bear skin’; a humourless couple who are political activists, their ‘sitting room made bleak with a Modigliani portrait’; and an overbearing aunt with a financially dependent niece. The central character is the hall porter of the newly built streamlined building, who wonders what people who came to live in the flat would ever have to do, ‘beyond listening to the wireless’ . Certainly among the ensuing affairs, cocktail parties, suicide and bankruptcy, there is little normal family life.

Possibly more startling and unhelpful to those contemplating life in a flat was a suggestion from H.I. Ashworth in Flats, Design and Equipment (1936) that, since flats could not be owned, they were detrimental to the nation as ‘a degree of acquisitiveness on the part of an individual tends to produce a communal stability’ . In tune with the times he regarded it best that families should, as thousands did during this decade, tie themselves to a mortgage on a suburban semi-detached house with its own front door and back garden.

This apparently pervasive English belief that only a house with an upstairs, downstairs, front door and garden can truly be called a home gets a late vitriolic airing in John Gloag’s contribution to Clough Williams-Ellis’s Britain and the Beast (1937).

He berates the young, childless flat-dwellers

Advertisement for Cementone finishes for concrete and cement featuring a tower block, from Architect’s Journal, 5 July 1956.

for ruining the country; instead of tending their back garden they ‘streak along the great traffic roads, down to the sea and back in a haze of fuel fumes; and then they sit down at home to quarrel over bridge while the loud speaker contributes sexual symphonies to the amenities of indoor life’ .

The urgent need to address housing shortages after the Second World War led to a decade of enthusiastic tower-block building. Piling flats ever higher became a symbol of prestige for towns and cities, a prestige made possible by government subsidies on each storey in excess of six, and deals on prefabricated materials made by

construction companies. When Ivy Hodge lit her stove to make a cup of tea in 1968, however, she caused a gas explosion that brought part of Ronan Point (22 storeys) in Newham, East London, tumbling down like a pack of cards, and the popularity of the tower block tottered. Out-of-order and vandalised lifts exacerbated the blight, and flats, yet again, became homes to avoid. Millions of English people now accept that they must live in flats, but in their hearts they believe what Nick Boles, the Housing Minister, stated in 2012, that everyone has a moral right ‘to a home with a little bit of ground round it to bring up your family in’ .

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 17

telling

stories

Michael Holroyd, whose novel A Dog’s Life is published by MacLehose Press next month, describes the role story-telling has played in his biographies, and the ways in which different branches of literature are connected Poets are expected to read from their works at literary festivals; novelists are allowed to give short readings; but what are called ‘non-fiction’ writers – historians, travel writers and biographers – are strongly discouraged from reading aloud at all.

Nevertheless I sometimes give readings and pretend that I am merely speaking from notes. At the end of a reading someone in the audience will occasionally come up and ask me: ‘Have you ever thought of being an actor?’ They never add the word ‘instead’ and I insist on taking the question as a compliment. But it can sound a rather back-handed one. What would an actor think of a member of the audience who, after a performance, went back stage and suggested she takes up writing?

What I aim to do when reading aloud is to give listeners the tone and rhythm of my work, how it sounded in my head when I was writing. It is, I believe, what any writer, whatever the genre, would want.

As to my abilities as an actor, they were severely put to the test some years ago when, in a television film, I played the challenging role of Michael Holroyd. He was welcoming back Bernard Shaw who, 40 years after his death, was eager to find out what had happened to his money.

Ian McKellen was a convincing GBS. But my friend A.N. Wilson, who reviewed the programme, failed to recognise me and accused the director of having employed some awful old hack to mouth poor Holroyd’s words.

18 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Michael Holroyd’s A Dog’s Life (2014), published by MacLehose Press. © Seymour Chwast, Pushpin Inc.

Some reviewers of my biographies have described me as a story-teller. I loved having stories read to me when I was a child and I started my career thinking I would write stories, which is to say novels.

But biographers, I discovered, can also tell stories. When writing people’s Lives, I have tried to combine thematic content with chronological narrative, the first holding readers on the page that is open before them, the second pulling them on to the next page, and both together creating

dramatic tension for the reader. But I cannot help remembering my parents warning me not to ‘tell stories’ , meaning ‘don’t lie’ . So my arrangement of fact and argument can appear, under the impulse of story-telling, like a novelist’s creation rather than the re-creation of a biographer.

I seem to have mixed several genres, becoming a novelist manqué who writes stories about actors, dramatists and other subjects, many of whom have previously found their way into novels. All this validates my belief that the various branches of literature are connected and benefit from that connection. This has been the case since William Shakespeare used Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577), Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives (1579) and John Florio’s translation in 1603 of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays – not to mention the Bible and Ovid. I remember Hilary Mantel saying at a Royal Society of Literature event that she read all the history books of a relevant period she could lay her hands on before beginning a historical novel, while Beryl Bainbridge indicated that she was careful to read nothing (but then Young Adolf, published in 1978, for example, was not wholly historical).

Fiction has often come to my aid while researching my biographies. I remember reading not only critical works and memoirs, but also novels and poems when preparing for my Life of Augustus John (1974). He was the prototype of John

Bidlake, the exuberant painter in Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point (1928), and also of Tenby Jones, ‘the lion of Chelsea’ , in Henry Williamson’s series of novels called A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (1951–69). There are glimpses of him too as Judy Johncock in Ronald Firbank’s Caprice (1917), as the artist Struthers in D.H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod (1922) and the sculptor Owen in Aleister Crowley’s The Diary of a Drug Fiend (1970). None of these peculiar sightings add to the facts of John’s life, but they help to place him in the culture of his time, as do the music-hall songs about him, the odes and addresses

by Oliver St John Gogarty and the poem

by R.S. Thomas on John’s portrait of W.B. Yeats’s biographer Joseph Hone.

While charting the interplay of several families in my biography A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers (2010), I made use of some extreme fictional creations, such as Virginia Woolf’s romantic vision of Vita Sackville-West’s lover, the novelist Violet Trefusis. She appears as the ravishing Sasha who speaks with such a voluptuous crepuscular voice in the opening chapter of Orlando (1928) – at the end of which she leaves Orlando desolate. For my Life of Lytton Strachey, I read Wyndham Lewis’s devastating pansy-clan caricature of him in The Apes of God (1930) as the crane-like giant Matthew Plunkett, with his high-piping ‘nasal stammer modelled on the effects of severe catarrh’ . These fictional images

of Trefusis and Strachey were so strong as to force their way from novels into my pages, illustrating the intoxication and the revulsion my subjects could arouse.

What you take from one branch of literature you may give to another. My Lives have provoked a ballad opera and several dramatic works, among them Christopher Hampton’s celebrated film Carrington (1995), in which Jonathan Pryce was Strachey, and a West End play called Bloomsbury (1974) by Peter Luke, with Strachey played by Daniel Massey.

(In a 1984 BBC television drama, Journey Into the Shadows: Portrait of Gwen John 1876–1939, Massey’s sister Anna was to take on the role of Augustus John’s sister Gwen John, about whom Margaret Forster wrote a novel, Keeping the World Away, published in 2006.) Peter Terson, Robert Bolt and several other dramatists wrote plays and film scripts based on my Life of Augustus John (the scripts are now at rest in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth).

A strong literature, it seems to me, thrives on the circulation of imaginative energy. Now I am approaching my second childhood, I find myself turning back to my early wish to publish a novel. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, I did write a novel that my father judged to be a libellous portrayal of the family. There was perhaps some validity in his criticism, though the story and background of my characters were quite different from the grandparents with

From left Bernard Shaw at Hammersmith Terrace, 1891, courtesy Michael Holroyd; Augustus John, early 1900s; Dora Carrington’s portrait of Lytton Strachey, c.1922, courtesy Michael Holroyd.

whom I grew up. But it shocked my father and I withdrew the book from my British publisher (though a version of it appeared in the United States in 1969).

My grandparents’ predicament in old age had led the family to hide in their house as if it were an asylum. Here they took uncomfortable shelter from a truly mad world that had not yet recovered from the horrors of the Second World War and that was preparing to enter the aggressive culture of financial competition that was wholly alien to them. This I witnessed and absorbed during my childhood and adolescence. It was as if they had become foreigners in their own country. How could I escape from such an atmosphere of anxiety and unhappiness? Not by writing a partly autobiographical novel, it seemed, but by entering other people’s lives – which is what I have been doing during most of my career.

But the impression of those early years has not left me, and now I am the same age as the characters in my novel, I must confront their predicament without sentimentality or excuse and, after more than half a century, finally publish my novel in a country they would not have recognised.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 19

but The Glory of the GARDEN lies in more than meets the eye From novels by Dickens and Disraeli to poetry by romantics and realists, works of literature presented Margaret Willes with some fascinating details about working-class gardeners If asked about the interests of Charles Dickens, I suspect that most people would place gardening and gardeners quite low down the list. But the novelist showed a marked interest in both working-class gardeners and working gardeners. He was a supporter of the Gardeners’ Benevolent Institution, founded by the head gardener, Joseph Paxton.

We now remember Paxton as the creator of the gardens at Chatsworth and the designer of the glass-house for the Great Exhibition in 1851, but he started life as the seventh son of an agricultural labourer. For many working gardeners in old age, or those who fell ill or incurred injury, the dreaded workhouse represented the future and, with his poverty-stricken childhood, Paxton recognised this. At a fund-raising dinner on 14 June 1852 for the Gardeners’ Benevolent Institution, Dickens described how ‘the poor man in crowded cities gardens still in jugs and basins and bottles; in factories and workshops people garden; and even the prisoner is found gardening in his lonely cell, after years and years of solitary

confinement’ .

When I was researching my book, The Gardens of the British Working Class, published in March, nineteenth-century novelists and poets supplied a rich seam of material on the subject. In his novels, Dickens provides an unparalleled resource for reconstructing the gardens of ‘ordinary gardeners’ in Victorian London. In The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), he describes the journey out of London taken by Little Nell and her grandfather. Passing out of the heartland of the city, they walk through the poorer areas to the north-west, coming upon brickfields ‘skirting gardens paled with staves of old casks, or timber pillaged from houses burnt down … mounds of dockweed, nettles, coarse grass and oyster shells, heaped up in rank confusion … At length these streets, becoming more straggling yet, dwindled and dwindled away, until there were only small garden patches bordering the road, with many a summer-house innocent of paint and built of old timber or fragments of a boat, green as the tough cabbage-stalks that grew about them. ’

E.H. Dixon, King’s Cross, London: The Great Dust-Heap, next to Battle Bridge and the Smallpox Hospital, 1837, Wellcome Library.

20 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

In Our Mutual Friend (1865), one of the most striking characters is Nicodemus Boffin, the Golden Dustman, who made a fortune out of his vast heap of rubbish and dust. Dickens may well have based this on actual dust heaps that apparently populated London. One stood near Columbia Road in Shoreditch, now the site of the famous Sunday flower market. Another, in King’s Cross, is depicted in an arresting image from the collection of the Wellcome Institute. Laid out below the mountain of dust are little allotments, some of them furnished with sheds. The watercolour by E.H. Dixon was painted in 1837, 11 years before the heap was removed to make way for the building of the railway terminus. Sadly, Dickens does not describe allotments or gardens cheek by jowl with Boffin’s enterprise, although he does describe a lattice-work arbour set atop the highest mound, where Boffin and his wife sat to read.

Dickens depicts modest London gardens in starkly realistic terms, but lays emphasis upon them as a source of pride and consolation to their owners. In Great Expectations (1860) he describes gardens to be found in the district of Walworth in south London: ‘It appeared to be a collection of back lanes, ditches and little gardens, and to present the aspect of a rather dull retirement. ’ One of these gardens belonged to Mr Wemmick, a clerk and thus a member of the lower middle classes, although his fellow gardeners may well have been working class and have shared his desire to enliven their dull retirement by creating a miniature world of fantasy. Wemmick’s house was a little castle fitted with Gothic windows, mounted by a gun that fired at nine o’clock every night. ‘ “Then at the back, ” said Wemmick, “out of sight so as not to impede the idea of fortifications – for it’s a principle with me … At the back, there’s a pig, and there are fowls and rabbits; then I knock together my own little frame, you see, and grow cucumbers; and you’ll judge at

supper what sort of salad I can raise. ” ’ Dickens’s reference to the brickfields passed by Little Nell is a reminder of how quickly London was growing in the nineteenth century, with streets of terraced houses gobbling up the market gardens that had surrounded the capital. Thousands of families were moving in, trying to escape from rural poverty. Their nostalgia for the countryside is captured in Little Dorrit (1857), where Mrs Plornish, the wife of a poor plasterer in Bleeding Heart Yard, has employed a man to paint a mural on the wall leading from the shop to the parlour, depicting the exterior of a thatched cottage, complete with old-fashioned flowers, the modest sunflower and hollyhock.

One way for the urban poor to bring a touch of the countryside into their homes was to undertake window gardening, in boxes, or in the jugs, basins and bottles that Dickens had mentioned in his speech to the Gardeners’ Benevolent Institution. This theme was taken up by the Revd Samuel Hadden Parkes, a curate at St George’s Bloomsbury. He encouraged his poor parishioners to maintain window gardens and displays of flowers in their homes, and organised competitions that produced splendid results, despite the lack of money, light and space. Another horticultural solution in overcrowded cities was the roof garden. In Our Mutual Friend, Dickens has Mr Riah, a Jewish moneylender, providing shelter for Jenny Wren and Lizzie Hexam, who could sit on his rooftop, leaning against a ‘blackened chimney-stack over which some humble creeper had been trained … A few boxes of humble flowers and evergreens completed the garden; and the encompassing wilderness of dowager old chimneys twirled their cowls and fluttered their smoke. ’ This description may have

poor man “ The in crowded cities gardens still in jugs and basins and bottles

”

been inspired by a roof garden set high above St Paul’s Churchyard, where his friend Elizabeth Kent, author of Flora Domestica: or, the Portable Flower-Garden (1823), lived with her stepfather, who ran a bookseller’s business.

The nostalgia for country gardens is described by many nineteenth-century writers and commentators, but did this Arcadian bliss exist? When Mary Russell Mitford published her series of sketches of Three Mile Cross in Berkshire, which were combined as Our Village (5 vols., 1824–32), she described her own ‘flower-yard’ in romantic terms, with its ‘walls, old and weather-stained, covered with hollyhocks, roses, honey-suckles’ . This provoked a furious outburst in verse from Thomas Hood, in ‘Our Village. – By a Villager’ , published in 1833, beginning ‘Our village, that’s to say not Miss Mitford’s village, but our village of Bullock Smithy’ . He paints a very different picture: ‘A weakly monthly rose that don’t blow, and a dead geranium, and a tea-plant with five black leaves and one green./ As for hollyhocks at the cottage doors, and honeysuckles and jasmines, you may go and whistle. ‘ The romanticisation of the cottage garden, as epitomised by the paintings of Helen Allingham, has to be treated with caution.

The playwright and comic writer Tom Taylor provides a poetic warning in ‘Old Cottages’ (1863). As the son of a Cumberland farm labourer, he writes with considerable feeling: The cottage-homes of England! Yes, I know How picturesque their moss and weatherstain, Their golden thatch, whose squared eaves shadows throw On white-washed wall and deep-sunk lattice pane …

All these I know – know, too, the plagues that prey On those who dwell in these bepainted bowers …

I wish the picturesqueness less, And welcome the utilitarian hand.

This debate was termed ‘the cottage controversy’ . The gardening activities of rural labourers also became a subject for political debate. From the 1790s some landowners, concerned about the effect of enclosures on the poorest, began to

Helen Allingham, ‘Peacock Cottage’, West Horsley, Surrey, c.1909.

advocate the provision of allotments. Their motives were not entirely philanthropic, for they were also alarmed by the rising demands of the poor rates. Opposition often came from farmers, who felt that allotments diverted workers from their duties to their employers and gave them unwelcome independence. Sometimes farmers accused their men of stealing tools and seeds for their plots. The rising Tory politician Benjamin Disraeli tackled the issues in his novel Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845). The two nations of his title were the rich and the poor. One of Disraeli’s substantial cast of characters was a brutal estate owner, Lord Marney, whose boast was that he was ‘tremendously fierce against allotments’ , declaring ‘I will take care that the population of my parishes is not increased. I build no cottages, and I destroy all I can. ’ Mr Trafford, in contrast, was a humanitarian mill-owner, building a model village with gardens to every cottage and encouraging his workmen to buy their leases. A third character was John Field, a Chartist. He attacked Trafford as a capitalist who aimed to divert the minds of his people from the ‘Five Points’ of Chartism (in fact, the movement had six) by allotting them gardens and giving them baths. In other words, he was distracting them from the important activity of gaining the vote for the working man.

As the century progressed, working men did get the vote with the Parliamentary Acts of 1867 and 1884, but the need for allotments became increasingly important for rural labourers, particularly with the THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 21

Charles Ginner, Bethnal Green Allotment, 1943. © Manchester City Galleries.

onset of the agricultural depression and the freezing, or reduction, of wages. Thomas Hardy in Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) describes an alternative system that was favoured by farmers. This was the potato field or ground, patches of land resting as fallow that could be offered to labourers, usually on a temporary basis, either free or at a rent if the labourer was not in the farmer’s employ.

By the nineteenth century the potato had become a staple part of the diet, and was often vital to keep the agricultural labourer’s family alive. Tess realised that she was late with her sowing of potatoes on her plot: ‘She found, to her dismay, that this was owing to their having eaten all the seed potatoes – that one last lapse of the improvident. ’ Having obtained some seed potatoes, she worked alongside her neighbours ‘till the last rays of the sun smote flat upon the white pegs that divided the plots … Nobody looked at his or her companions. The eyes of all were on the soil. ’ Market gardens were, of course, vital for feeding the growing towns and cities.

They came in all shapes and sizes, from one-man bands, aided by wife and family, to considerable enterprises. The novelist R.D. Blackmore cultivated a market garden of 11 acres in Teddington in Middlesex. Unlike most authors, his money came from his books rather than his business, following the success of Lorna Doone (1869). He claimed that he wrote in the afternoons to recover the £250 a year that he lost on specialising 22 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

in the cultivation of pears and vines. In 1890 he published Kit and Kitty, centred around a fruit farm in the Thames Valley run by Uncle Cornie. Blackmore describes him as wearing a baggy coat with roomy pockets ‘wherein he carried a hammer, a stick of string, a twist of bast, a spectacle-case full of wall nails, a peach knife, a little copper wire, and a few other things to suit the season’ .

Uncle Cornie, like Blackmore, faced all kinds of trials and tribulations in his attempts to make his market garden viable.

Another novelist cum market gardener was Mary Webb. Her most famous novel was Precious Bane (1924), equally famously parodied for its tale of rustic life with passionate undertones by Stella Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm (1932). But Webb knew her plants, selling the produce from her garden at the market in Shrewsbury.

In The Golden Arrow (1916), she provides a description of a healer’s home: ‘Her cottage stood among the white mounds, with a strip of garden at the back where she grew her “yarbs” . Here were horehound, tansy, penny-royal, balm o’Gilead, all-heal, mallow and a hundred more. ’ This serves as a reminder that, until the founding of the National Health Service in 1948, the garden was the source of most of the medicines and remedies for poor families.

There was a surprising paucity of material on working-class gardens in the literature of the twentieth century, and the most valuable, as in Webb’s novel, tended

to look back in time. Flora Thompson’s wonderfully perceptive picture of life in a deprived rural community, Lark Rise, was originally intended as a novel, but when the book was published in 1939, the first in the trilogy Lark Rise to Candleford, Oxford University Press did not have a fiction list, so it was billed as autobiography.

Thompson was born in 1876 at Juniper Hill, a hamlet on the border of Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire, and her books were replete with descriptions of the gardens and allotments of the labourers, the flowers, the medicinal remedies, and even the clothes they wore.

Raymond Williams likewise was looking back in his novel, Border Country (1960). He describes how Harry, a railway worker, took a cottage in the Black Mountains of Wales in the 1920s. Here he had a flower garden in front and a vegetable patch at the side, and persuaded his landlady to rent him further strips where he planted fruit bushes and trees, and potatoes. He also acquired four hives and installed a poultry run. When the General Strike threw him back on a weekly pay of 24 shillings, which was twice the wages earned by local labourers, he turned to selling flowers and salad vegetables to make ends meet.

Agricultural labourers, exhausted after a day’s hard work in the fields, probably found working in their gardens and allotments too much of a busman’s holiday. For factory workers and miners the change must have been welcome. D.H. Lawrence makes this clear in his writings. In Sons and Lovers (1913), he describes the plots belonging to the blocks of miners’ dwellings: ‘little front gardens with auriculas and saxifrage in the shadow of the bottom block, sweet Williams and pinks in the sunny top-block’ . Forty years later, he wrote in an essay how he had seen many a collier in his back garden looking down at a flower with an odd and remote sort of contemplation that showed a real awareness of the presence of beauty.

I found only a few references to the gardens of urban and rural workers in the twentieth-century fiction that I consulted, but there were other rich sources of information that I could turn to. Interviews with miners, agricultural labourers, servants and factory workers (men and women) provided me with a verbal resource, while photographs supplied visual references to build an overall picture of working-class gardeners.

.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 23 09/05/2014 16:23

HIDDEN CORNERS

catalogues of

Private Art Collections The volumes documenting the private collections of wealthy art buyers were designed to impress, with magnificent plates and leather bindings. Michael Savage examines a few of the fine examples to be found in the Library, some of them donated by the collectors themselves.

Before BP and Chatham House, and even before The London Library, the buildings in St James’s Square housed some of Britain’s finest private art collections. The politician and patron of the arts Sir Watkin Williams Wynn lived at number 20 from 1771, and commissioned Robert and James Adam to rebuild the house. Norfolk House at number 31 was built in 1722 and contained the picture collection of the dukes of Norfolk.

Both houses have been demolished, but there are paintings by Joshua Reynolds and examples of Adam furniture from number 20 in the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, and the music room from Norfolk House is at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

24 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Few people saw the treasures inside such great houses, but some of the grandest art collectors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries advertised their connoisseurship by publishing catalogues of their art collections.

In practice these books were as little seen as the houses. They were huge and expensive, with magnificent plates and extravagant leather bindings. The collectors who published them were more often arrivistes than aristocrats – financiers and businessmen such as Robert Benson, Joseph Widener and David David-Weill – although The London Library also has a catalogue of the highlights of the Duke of Devonshire’s collection. The best early catalogues included chromolithographic plates, which are stunning and can produce highly accurate images. Each object was first drawn, and then separate printing stones were created for each colour (some plates could have a dozen or more colours).

Catalogues were typically printed privately in small numbers, generally just a few hundred. Some were not even sold, but given away to libraries and friends of the collectors. Luckily for us, many were given to or purchased by The London Library, which consequently has a rich collection of these catalogues.

The lavish catalogue of the Spitzer Collection of sculpture and decorative art, La Collection Spitzer, by M. Emile Moliner (6 vols., 1890–3), includes some fine chromolithographs, as well as etchings of less important objects. Frédéric Spitzer, a leading dealer as well as a collector, is an intriguing figure. He fraudulently restored many objects and faked others, which were sold for high prices to leading collectors.

His own collection included many dubious objects, but also lots of incontestable masterpieces such as the outstanding bronze, Shouting Horseman c.1510–15,

by Andrea Riccio, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The chromolithographs in his catalogue are so realistic they could at first glance be mistaken for colour photographs.

The volumes on the Alfred de Rothschild collection (2 vols., 1884) feature early examples of photographic reproduction, with illustrations of his mainly Dutch and French pictures. There are photographs of the interiors of his property in Seamore Place in Mayfair on the first few pages, the goût Rothschild on display. The photographs of paintings show them with their frames; this catalogue was published in an era before the unfortunate convention of reproducing pictures shorn of context, baldly set against the white page.

The banker David David-Weill’s catalogues (3 vols., 1926–8) demonstrate a similar aesthetic, and the illustrations include works that are now famous highlights of major museums, such as François Boucher’s A Lady on Her Day Bed (1743), now in the Frick Collection in New York.

Many of the early gifts to the Library were solicited by Sir Charles Hagberg Wright, Secretary and Librarian from 1893 until his death in 1940, and some are bound with letters addressed to him from the collectors or authors. The catalogue of John Pierpont Morgan’s collection of miniatures (4 vols., 1906–8) has a note from the author, G.C. Williamson, replying to Wright’s letter requesting the other volumes, explaining that one of the volumes is already in the Library, and that the other one had

been prepared in manuscript but never published, so he was ‘not in a position to do the library the good turn to which you refer’ . There is a signed letter from John G. Johnson – a famous American lawyer who also created a superb art collection, which is now housed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art – bound in the catalogue of his collection (3 vols., 1913–14).

Most interesting of all are Robert Benson’s own copies of both the illustrated and unillustrated editions of his catalogue (1913–14). The former, which had a print run of just 125 copies, includes his pencil annotations, with his identification of Martin Colnaghi as the unnamed rogue dealer he refers to in the text, who overcleaned pictures. Benson was a British investment banker and a knowledgeable and discriminating collector of Italian Renaissance art, and sold his entire collection to the dealer Joseph Duveen in 1927. Many of his pictures are now the star attractions at American museums, particularly the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Another reason The London Library has a strong collection of these books is that they have not ‘deaccessioned’ them, a horrid word for a horrid practice. It is a great shame that many other libraries have done so, because the catalogues remain useful as well as beautiful. The text is sometimes superficial, and the illustrations may seem outmoded as technology moves on, but they are often attractive and superbly produced books, with beautiful bindings and high-quality printing on thick handmade paper with gilt edges. These early catalogues are vital records of the history of art collecting, and often show pictures at a particular moment in their history, looking quite different from their state today, after a century or more of cleaning and restoration.

These catalogues are important documentary sources, but the accompanying text is rarely edifying. The volume on the Spitzer Collection was written by famous specialist connoisseurs like Wilhelm von Bode, and included only short catalogue entries. Other works were written by non-specialists whose job was collation rather than scholarship, hagiography rather than art criticism, with earlier attributions repeated unquestioningly. Several were written by librarians rather than art historians.

For example, the Devonshire Collection

catalogue (1901) was written by the House of Lords librarian S. Arthur Strong, and the Pierpont Morgan catalogue by the banker’s librarian. In the introduction to the Devonshire catalogue, Strong defends himself against any potential offence caused by his personal opinions on attributions, writing that ‘if old attributions have been questioned, and in certain cases abolished, this has not been in forgetfulness of the respect that is still due to an old Opposite and above Chromolithograph of vase by Antonio Patanazzi, from volume 1 of La Collection Spitzer (6 vols., 1890–3); an interior at tradition with a pedigree, as Seamore Place, one of Alfred de Rothschild’s properties, from volume 1 of Works of Art, Collection of Alfred de Rothschild (2 vols., 1884). against a new critic without a document’.

The contrast with more recent unknown even to specialists. There is a catalogues is stark. It is still enormously fine picture of The Last Communion of St expensive to publish good-quality art books, Jerome reproduced in the Benson catalogue and even costly museum catalogues need that is given to Sandro Botticelli. The prime hefty subsidies. But good colour printing version is now considered to be a different has become ubiquitous, and catalogues of picture, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art private collections now aim to stand out by in New York, but the Benson picture also virtue of the excellence of scholarship as seems of high quality. I do wonder where much as their luxurious printing and fine it is now; it may well turn out to be at least binding. It has become a source of pride for partially by Botticelli himself, but it is not collectors to commission serious critical reproduced in any of the recent books on texts from prominent scholars. the artist.

The catalogues of the Kann Collection The last great catalogue of a private (2 vols., 1907) and the Widener Collection collection was the Thyssen-Bornemisza (1931) are revealing of early twentiethCollection, which has not been completed century taste. Rodolphe Kann, another and seems regrettably to have been banker–collector, must have been an abandoned (13 vols., 1986–95). The impressive connoisseur. At a time when published volumes are superb, and there were few reliable catalogues raisonnés admirably candid where there are and many optimistic attributions, he bought questions about quality or authenticity. pictures of consistently high quality whose The volume on seventeenth-century attributions have generally stood the test of Dutch pictures, written by Ivan Gaskell, is time. The highlights of his collection were uncompromisingly harsh in its judgements; held to be the paintings by Rembrandt, a recent catalogue raisonné of Jacob van mostly late works that were especially Ruisdael even defends the quality of esteemed. But he also had some dreadful one of the Thyssen pictures in response daubs that cannot be by Rembrandt. to Gaskell’s opinions on the work. The It is tempting to respond smugly, and Lehman Collection catalogues published condescend to a less knowledgeable age, by the Metropolitan Museum, which now but humility is perhaps a better response. owns Lehman’s art, are of a similarly high Such mistaken attributions show us that standard (15 vols., 1987–2012). there is an element of contingency to taste, Some private collections are still and should serve as a reminder that today’s being catalogued today: volumes on the confident opinions may seem similarly daft Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon to the next generation of critics.

Manor, Buckinghamshire, and on the Old catalogues record the history of Norton Simon collection, now a museum taste, and the history of illustrated books. in southern California, for example, are still They also show pictures that have otherwise being published and added to the Library’s been forgotten. Museums are accessible collection. These books continue to inspire to all, but private collections are often art lovers and inform connoisseurs.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 25

MEMBERS’ News the london library annual lecture 2014 The 23rd London Library Annual Lecture was delivered at the Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts on 30 May 2014 by Sarah Churchwell, Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of East Anglia.

In her illuminating lecture, The Secret History of the ‘American Dream’, Sarah traced the emergence of this clichéd expression, discussing its roots in the early twentieth century and the debates that drove it into the heart of American popular culture. Was it simply an ideal invented to address the same troubling questions about immigration and nationalism, education and job creation, economic and cultural breakdown, individual ambition and social responsibility that continue to define our society today? Find out more in an abridged version of Sarah’s lecture, which will be published on the Library’s website from July and in the autumn issue of the Magazine.

Elsewhere at the Hay Festival, members of The London Library once again featured significantly in the roster of prestigious writers, thinkers and performers at the 10-day festival, from Stephen Fry on Shakespeare and Mervyn King on the economy to Charles Moore on Margaret Thatcher and Lucy Hughes-Hallett on her multi-award winning book The Pike. Two events with Max Hastings and Jeremy Paxman addressed The Great War, one of the key themes of the festival, and a wide

variety of subjects elsewhere in the programme were covered by Ian McEwan, Simon Schama, John Julius Norwich, Philip Hook, Sebastian Faulks, Tom Holland and Simon Thurley, among others.

Our thanks and congratulations to Peter Florence and the entire Hay team for another successful festival.

Sarah Churchwell.

Diary Date join us at the London Library 2014 AGM The 173rd Annual General Meeting of The London Library will be held in the Reading Room on Wednesday, 5 November 2014 at 6pm. Please feel free to join other members, staff and trustees in the Issue Hall for a glass of wine from 5.30pm.

the LONDON LIBRARY in the news The Library was delighted to win a 2014 RIBA London Regional Award in May in recognition of the architectural excellence of the first stage of our ambitious capital project designed by Haworth Tompkins. The first stage involved several phases amounting to a £19m construction project (all paid for by generous donations to our Development Appeal Fund from members and other supporters) concluding with the hugely well-received Reading Room and Writers’ Room refurbishments.

The Library was also one of four projects shortlisted for the RIBA London English Heritage Award for Preserving the Historical Environment, and, to cap it all, our architects, Haworth Tompkins, were named RIBA London Architect of the Year.

The London Library’s Times Room was the recent filming location for 1914–1918, The Railway War, a special episode of Michael Portillo’s Railway Journeys series for BBC Television commissioned for the First World War anniversary in 2014, due to be broadcast this summer. The programme features an illustrated representation of the war chest in the form of a rare and remarkable map produced by the Daily Mail in 1914 depicting ‘The War Strength of the Great Powers’, sold by the newspaper for two shillings. The programme also features first26 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

hand reportage from The Times in July 1914.

Celebrated contemporary Russian writers and critics gathered in the capital in March for the 5th Slovo Russian Literature Festival, Academia Rossica’s annual celebration of Russian literary culture in the UK. This year, for the first time, The London Library was host to the ceremony for the Rossica Prize, awarded to the best translation of Russian text in the English-speaking world. The winner was Angela Livingstone for her translation of Phaedra by Marina Tsvetaeva.

London Library Blog The London Library’s blog provides rich insight into the Library’s significant literary and cultural footprints both past and present. Folklore and Fairy Tales, visual propaganda from the Reformation, the mysterious provenance of a rare Russian manuscript and a series looking back to prominent past members represent just some of our recently covered topics.

New articles are posted regularly at blog.londonlibrary.co.uk.

Literary Prizes Congratulations to London Library members who have won or been nominated for recent literary awards and prizes.

Jonathan Aitken Shortlisted for the 2014 Paddy Power Political Biography of the Year for Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality.

M.J. Carter Longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction for The Strangler Vine.

David Crane Shortlisted for the 2014 PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History for Empires of the Dead.

Matthew d’Ancona Shortlisted for the 2014 Paddy Power Practical Politics Book of the Year for In It Together: The Inside Story of the Coalition Government.

William Dalrymple Shortlisted for the 2014 PEN HessellTiltman Prize for History for Return of a King.

Richard Davenport-Hines Winner of the 2014 Paddy Power Political History Book of the Year for An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo.

Sebastian Faulks Shortlisted for the 15th Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Jeeves and the Wedding Bells.

Antonia Fraser Shortlisted for the 2014 Paddy Power Political Book of the Year for Perilous Question: The Drama of the Great Reform Bill 1832.

Max Hastings Shortlisted for the 2014 Paddy Power Political History Book of the Year for Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett Winner of the 2014 Paddy Power Political Biography of the Year for The Pike.

Margaret MacMillan Winner of the 2014 Paddy Power International Affairs Book of the Year for The War that Ended Peace, which was also a finalist in the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s 2013 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.

Simon Sebag Montefiore Winner of the 2014 Paddy Power Political Fiction Book of the Year for One Night in Winter.

Charles Moore Winner of the 2014 Paddy Power Political Book of the Year for Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, which has also been shortlisted for the 2014

Orwell Book Prize.

Jeremy Paxman Shortlisted for the 2014 Paddy Power Political History Book of the Year for Great Britain’s Great War. Gideon Rachman Shortlisted for the 2014 Orwell Journalism Prize.

Peter Snow Shortlisted for the 2014 Paddy Power Political History Book of the Year for When Britain Burned the White House.

Ben Wilson Shortlisted for the 2014 Paddy Power Political Book of the Year for Empire of the Deep.

If you have been shortlisted or received an award or prize, please do let us know. Email development@ londonlibrary.co.uk.

Graduation Gifts Gift membership of The London Library can make a wonderful graduation present for young people leaving university who will no longer have access to a college library or electronic resources such as JSTOR. Membership of The London Library keeps the world of knowledge at their fingertips and is an ideal gift to nurture a continued interest in learning.

Young Person Gift Membership is available at the discounted rate of £238 (for the under 25s). Gift Vouchers can also be purchased in denominations of £50 and £100 and can be used towards the cost of membership. Purchase online at londonlibrary.co.uk/join or from the Membership Office.

SPOUSE MEMBERSHIP SHARE YOUR PASSION FOR THE LONDON LIBRARY It’s the perfect birthday or anniversary gift with a difference.

Spouse/partner membership £238 a year (£19.83 a month) www.londonlibrary.co.uk/join Spouse membership is open to partners of annual/life members residing at the same address.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 27

keeping the show on the road SPOTLIGHT ON mary gillies deputy librarian Last summer, Mary Gillies fought off stiff competition to become our new Deputy Librarian and has now been in post for six months. We asked her about the role and its significance for members.

Your job title suggests you deputise for the Librarian but we suspect there is more to it than that.

Oh yes! As Deputy Librarian I have three key areas of focus. The first is HR. The Library is fortunate in having dedicated staff who are passionate about the Library and about what they do, but as a responsible employer we need to look out for their well-being, ensure fair treatment and offer opportunities for development.

Not to mention making sure that we keep up with the many (constantly changing) requirements of employment law.

As part of the Library’s Executive Team I also play a role in strategic planning and development. The Library is a unique place, and it has served and continues to serve its members and legacy well by charting its own course, but this requires wellthought-out strategy in a fast-changing sector – even more so with increasing technological advancements. We are conscious of the need to continue improving our existing service, developing or introducing new aspects to it where possible. In part this strategic planning and development is about being open and responsive to feedback from members, such as recognising where clearer guidance regarding the Library’s rules may improve the Library environment or responding to a need identified by members, such as an improved Members’ Room, which we have planned for later this year. The other part of strategic planning, though, is keeping an eye on the future and on developments in the profession and how these might benefit members. We are very excited by the prospect of introducing one of these later this year, the discovery tool, Primo, which will offer members a quicker, more effective way to search our collections, including e-resources, and retrieve the results online.

As well as strategic planning and development, each member of the Executive has specific responsibility for particular aspects of the Library’s work. What might be seen as the more traditional library functions are split between the Librarian and the Deputy Librarian: the Librarian focuses on working with heads of departments responsible for the Library’s collections, including collection development, cataloguing and archives, while the Deputy Librarian works with those who cover everything to do with service provision – keeping the show on the road, if you like.

So what does it take to keep the show on the road?

Members are mainly aware of the staff visible in the Issue Hall but there is a lot more to it than that. For example, we have staff behind the scenes offering the same standard of service by telephone, email or post to those members unable to visit the Library much or at all in person. As members can request books in 28 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

advance online, there is also a lot of fetching of books from the shelves – on Tuesday 22 April alone we retrieved and set aside 188 books requested by members over the Easter weekend.

Conversely, there is Mary Gillies. also a lot of putting books back where they belong. All staff play a role in this and I’m sure most members will have noticed them at some time despite their best efforts to be unobtrusive – never easy when hauling heavy trolleys through the stacks or lugging armfuls of books up dozens of stairs to reach the right shelves!

Member Services staff are also out and about supervising the reading rooms and individual study spaces scattered round the Library, ensuring all is in order, and we have a (tiny) IT team working constantly to keep our hardware and software up and running. Then there is the whole area of membership administration, keeping track of subscriptions, answering questions from potential members and giving them a brief tour to encourage them to join, staffing the reception desk and providing in-depth induction tours for new joiners. All vital work to keep the Library going.

I can see you are not going to be bored. What sort of libraries have you worked in before?

My background is mainly in public libraries (of all shapes and sizes), but I have also worked in academic libraries. For most of my career I have held front-facing roles, being very much part of the delivery of a service as well as being responsible for shaping it. I have also been involved in a number of projects, from refurbishing libraries to reshaping or creating new services.

You came here first in October 2012 in a temporary role as Reader Services Manager. Did that help you prepare for this role?

I saw the Reader Services Manager role as a fantastic opportunity to work in an iconic environment and a real chance to see the Library at work day-to-day. It also enabled me to play a part in the phased Development Project with the refurbishment of the main Reading Room and Writers’ Room and, probably most important for me, to have contact with members. It has been a real joy to work somewhere held in such affection by its users.

Members I have talked to have been overwhelmingly positive about the Library, eager to share what they love about it or how they have been inspired just by being here. This experience provided valuable insights when the opportunity arose to apply for the Deputy Librarian role.

MEMBERS’ NEWS You call The London Library unique. Is it really very different from other places you have worked?

As you might expect, I believe all libraries are wonderful places but there are a number of things that make The London Library very special indeed. Apart from the obvious ones – engaged staff and members, a fascinating history and interesting collections – there is the atmosphere. The Library is such a hive of activity but there is a respectful co-existence to be found, almost as if members share a common endeavour, even though they are working on individual and varied projects. Public libraries are wonderful places but by their very nature there is such a diversity of use that there is not really any sense of shared experience. Walking around the Library I am fascinated by how focused our members seem and yet there is still a sense of ideas and resources being shared by a community of respectful and supportive individuals. I think it is in part this sense of the Library as a community or collaboration between institution, staff and members that gives members more of a sense of ownership and responsibility for the Library than I have felt elsewhere. Members are keen to share their experiences of the Library with me and with other staff, as well as in the Suggestions Book; we receive (and welcome) visits, telephone calls, letters and emails telling us what members are happy with, ways we could develop or improve, or when things have not been what they could or should have been. I am particularly concerned to address the things not going well and, reviewing what has been raised recently, there do seem to be some simple steps we could take.

Such as …?

The Library tries very hard to be a welcoming and inviting environment for members, allowing them to use space and resources as they need without intruding too much. In many ways it is a place of unwritten rules, where guidance is given on library etiquette with an expectation that common sense, courtesy and respect for staff and fellow members alike will ensure the maintenance of a calm, quiet, studious environment. I suspect, though, that this can sometimes lead to a confusing lack of clarity

especially in the context of a general relaxing of rules in other libraries (much to the exasperation of many of my professional colleagues elsewhere – for example, a student recently sent out for a pizza to be delivered to him at a university library and seemed genuinely baffled as to why this might be an issue!). To try to address this we have recently reviewed and refined our rules.

non-observance of the ‘‘The printed Regulations – the Committee cannot too often repeat – is in all ways the most serious evil with which this Institution has to contend

’’

Report of the Committee of The London Library to the 14th General Meeting of the Subscribers, 26 May 1855.

So what’s in these new rules?

Well, some rules have disappeared altogether. For example, there is no longer a rule preventing members having more than one new English work out at any one time – if someone can read more than one new book in a fortnight then that is fine. On the whole, though, we have responded to member requests for greater clarity by writing down some of the unwritten rules that relate to library etiquette and introducing or refining rules about the use of mobile technology. I hope that these rules will strike most members as eminently sensible and an aid to maintaining the Library as a pleasant and productive space. (continued overleaf)

Member Etiquette The London Library Rules can be found on the Library’s website (londonlibrary.co.uk/londonlibraryetiquette) and printed copies may be obtained from the Membership Office. Our top three ...

Mobile phones (Rule C16) Mobile phone usage has been steadily rising in the Library with a tendency to creep further and further away from ‘permitted’ areas and into the Library in general. As a result, mobile phone use is now the issue that we receive by far the most negative comments about. To address this, the new rule states: ‘The use of mobile devices for telephone calls or other audible communications (e.g. video conferencing) is not permitted anywhere in the Library except the Members’ Room.’ Even where use is permitted, we would urge members to be considerate of others and keep the number and frequency of calls to a minimum to limit disturbance.

Food and drink (Rule C14) We recognise that many members spend a substantial amount

of time in the Library and that this is made more comfortable by staying hydrated. To enable this we permit members to carry water in a screw-top container with them in the Library. Food and drink represents a significant risk to the Library’s collections. To mitigate this risk, the rule states: ‘The consumption or storage of food or drink (other than water in a screw-top container, which must be kept closed when not in use) is not permitted anywhere in the Library except the Members’ Room.’

Bags and cases (RULE C2) The Library has always requested that members limit what they bring with them into the building. Rule C2 now clarifies what is and isn’t allowed. ‘All bags and cases (including laptop cases and large handbags) measuring more than 29 x 21 x 10 cm (about the size of an A4 sheet of paper and the depth of a hardback book) must be left at the lockers provided in the Issue Hall and may not be taken beyond that point. Clear plastic bags in which to carry laptops, pens and pencils and other essential items into the Library are freely available at Reception.’

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 29

A rule is only a rule if it is enforced. How will you do that without spoiling the Library’s characteristic atmosphere?

It is my firm belief that the majority of members currently act in accordance with London Library etiquette and will be entirely at home with the revised rules. Some members, however, have been showing less awareness of the Library as a shared space and failing to give consideration to others. While I know that staff would much rather spend their time helping and supporting members than policing them, they will be taking a proactive approach to alerting these members to the rules and to ensuring that they are observed. I am sure no member intends to offend or disregard others; I think it is more that we sometimes get caught up in what we are doing. No doubt I have been guilty myself of thinking, ‘I’ll just answer my phone really quickly; it will be a two-second call in which I am monosyllabic and as quiet as a mouse – how could that possibly disturb anyone?’ The problem is, it is never two seconds and we are never as quiet as we think.

I would ask members to bear with us as we provide clearer information to help maintain a positive environment for all. If you are concerned by any behaviour in the Library I would urge you to speak to a member of staff who will be happy to try and address any issues. Although I am somewhat dubious about the

power of a plethora of notices, we will also refresh our notices and look at placing them more strategically.

Sounds like a busy time ahead.

How have you found being in the spotlight?

Yes, definitely a busy time but an exciting one for staff and members.

I have enjoyed my time in the spotlight and I hope it helps put a Amanda Stebbings. face to the name so that members feel they can approach me. This also seems like a good time to introduce our new Head of Member Services, Amanda Stebbings, who comes to us with a wealth of experience. We are both keen that members feel they can speak to us about anything to do with the Library, so the next time you see either of us, feel free to introduce yourselves.

By the way, what was that about an improved Members’ Room?

Well, there will be more on that in a future issue but suffice to say we have listened to feedback and hope to make the room a little less like a dentist’s waiting room!

PHILIP SPEDDING APPOINTED AS DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR We are delighted to announce the appointment of Philip Spedding as our new Development Director. Philip joins the Library from Arts & Business and took up his new post on 1 May 2014 to head the Library’s fundraising, marketing and communications teams.

A key priority is to secure funding for the Library’s core activities and special projects, which include the retrospective cataloguing project, care of the Library’s archives and, of course, completion of our major capital redevelopment work. In addition to the Library’s fundraising activity, Philip will manage the Library’s Philip Spedding. communications, external partnerships, member recruitment and retention initiatives.

During his time at Arts & Business, which fosters private and public sector partnerships for arts organisations, Philip worked in a number of roles, becoming Director in 2012. He worked closely with the Prince of Wales, helping to create and launch both The Prince’s Foundation for Children and the Arts (raising £1m in launch funding) and the Prince of Wales Medal for Arts Philanthropy, which honours major donors to the arts.

Educated at Eton before studying at the University of British Columbia for a Bachelor of Commerce in Finance, Philip worked as an actor for several years in theatre, film and TV. His first fundraising post was at the Almeida Theatre, raising money for the Almeida’s theatre and opera programme. He then moved to the Young Vic, setting up a new Development department and establishing fundraising schemes, including a series of gala events that continues today.

Philip is a recognised tax expert on philanthropy matters and has advised the government in the development of legislation to support giving. He is a frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines, and is often quoted in the media on cultural fundraising matters and interviewed on the radio and television.

30 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Poetry Cosmo Davenport-Hines, who was the youngest life member of The London Library, died on 9 June 2008, aged 21. The Cosmo Davenport-Hines Prize was set up at King’s College London in his memory. Chris Torry’s poem is this year’s winner.

Sarah Talk about traffic lights as if they are a natural disaster The river, fast and heavy, is the colour of dry blood Full of iron ore after yesterday’s flooding This time Sarah shows up smiling The mass she carries at her core Sends out bursts of whatever it is that moves her limbs Like solar flares from a black sun She narrates herself incessantly Lies on her back on the floor Stretches out her body Says she is going to buy a boat Says she is going to move to the city Chris Torry

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Surrounded by casts from the RA Collection, diners can enjoy seasonal dishes in the restaurant or cocktails in the garden bar.

Royal Academy of Arts, Piccadilly, W1J 0BD, 020 7300 5881. keepershouse.org.uk

4 CUT AT 45 PARK LANE Created by chef founder Wolfgang Puck, CUT at 45 Park Lane is a modern American steak restaurant.

Enjoy prime beef, pan-roasted lobster, sautéed fresh fish and seasonal salads, accompanied by an exceptional wine list of over 600 wines, featuring one of the largest selections of American wines in the UK. Breakfasts are another highlight and on Sunday relax with brunch as you listen to live jazz.

45 Park Lane, W1K 1PN, 020 7493 4554. dorchestercollection.com

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8 Green’s Restaurant & Oyster Bar ‘Excellent fish – a most enjoyable place.

It reminded me of treats with my father when I was young.’ Elizabeth Jane Howard Established in 1982, Green’s is inspired by seasonality and renowned for classic British fish, meat and game dishes. Quote ‘London Library’ when making a reservation or on arrival and receive a complimentary summer cocktail.

36 Duke Street St James’s, SW1Y 6DF, 020 7930 4566. greens.org.uk

5 THE FOX CLUB Situated a stone’s throw from Green Park and the famous Hyde Park, the Fox Club Dining Room is one of London’s best-kept secrets and a lunch-time essential. The modern European menu changes on a weekly basis, offering refined excellence without being pretentious. The effect is a change from the jaded palate of life. The Fox Club now offers a delightful afternoon tea from 3–5pm.

46 Clarges St, W1J 7ER, 020 7495

020 7734 4756. bentleys.org

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2 BELLAMY’S RESTAURANT Located in central Mayfair (near New Bond Street), Bellamy’s Restaurant offers a classic French brasserie menu with an affordable famous-name wine list. The Oyster Bar menu includes Bellamy’s famous ‘open’ sandwiches. Le patron mange ici. The restaurant and Oyster Bar are open Mon–Fri lunch and dinner; Sat dinner only.

18–18a Bruton Place, W1J 6LY, 020 7491 2727. bellamysrestaurant.co.uk

3656. foxclublondon.com

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ristorantegustoso.co.uk

13 WILTONS Established in 1742, Wiltons enjoys a reputation as the epitome of fine English dining in London. The atmosphere is perfectly matched with immaculately prepared fish, shellfish, game and meat. Choose from an exclusive wine list. Open for lunch and dinner, Mon–Fri, and dinner Saturday. To make a reservation, please quote The London Library Magazine.

55 Jermyn Street, SW1Y 6LX, 020 7629 9955. wiltons.co.uk THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 31

travel and exploration

Wednesday 3 December 2014 Knightsbridge, London

BritisH colUMBia first nation Album relating to the career of Col. R.C. Moody, Royal Engineers, including 2 salt prints and approximately 90 albumen prints, nineteenth century half morocco, 4to, [1850/60s] Sold for ÂŁ15,000

closing date for entries Friday 10 October 2014 contact +44 (0) 20 7393 3828 books@bonhams.com

bonhams.com/books Prices shown include buyer’s premium. Details can be found at bonhams.com