Issue 26

MAGAZINE WINTER 2014 ISSUE 26

ÂŁ3.50

HORACE NICHOLLS Hilary Roberts celebrates the work of the First World War photographer

not just poppies The role that gardens play in wartime

by Christopher Woodward

A BAVARIAN IN BUSHEY Miranda Seymour on the artist Sir Hubert von Herkomer

The London Library Magazine / issue 26

12

Horace Nicholls’s poignant images captured many aspects of British life during the First World War, from women in munitions factories to hospital doctors treating disabled soldiers. After the war he became the Imperial War Museum’s first chief photographer. Hilary Roberts, Curator of Photography at the IWM, discusses his life and work.

C ontents 5 FROM THE LIBRARIAN 6 Contributors 8 BEHIND THE BOOK Recruiting for the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps, Trafalgar Square, London, 1918, by Horace Nicholls.

IWM Q 31083.

15 Christopher Woodward explores the unlikely part played by flowers and gardening in wartime, from the First World War until the recent conflicts in the Middle East. From growing marrows on the Somme to a British Army garden in Afghanistan, he charts the contrast between destruction and cultivation.

11 bibliotherapy Victoria Hislop had lost her writing rhythm until she discovered Stephen King’s On Writing

12 horace nicholls The photographs of the Home Front

by Nicholls highlight the impact of the First World War on civilian life, as Hilary Robert reports Illustration from War Plants (1916), author unknown.

18 On the centenary of his death in 1914, Miranda Seymour honours the life and work of the German artist Sir Hubert von Herkomer. He was a colourful figure in the art world and a successful portraitist in Victorian London, but was forgotten in a wave of patriotism during the First World War.

15 Not JUST POPPIES Christopher Woodward on the role of gardening in wartime

18 A BAVARIAN IN BUSHEY An appreciation of the artist and polymath Sir Hubert von Herkomer by Miranda Seymour

20 hidden corners

Anna Herkomer (née Weise), 1883, by Sir Hubert von Herkomer. Courtesy Bushey Museum and Art Gallery.

William Firebrace on the Library’s rich selection of scientific and imaginative works on the sea

24 MEMBERS’ NEWS

20 The oceans have been an enduring source of fascination for undersea explorers, novelists, scientists, photographers and ecologists. Their publications on the subject are scattered beyond the obvious S. Sea in the Library collections, and William Firebrace reports on the highlights of his investigation of the stacks.

The Library supplied Judith Flanders with a wide-ranging reading list for her book The Making of Home

31 EATING OUT

Jellyfish, from The Deep (2007), edited

by Claire Nouvian.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 3

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

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f rom the L I B R A R I A N In planning an issue of our magazine for November 2014, it seemed only right to give it something of a First World War theme. Hilary Roberts opens for us by introducing the powerful work of artist-photographer Horace Nicholls, whose beautifully composed images of life in a Britain at war shone a particular light on the role of women. Christopher Woodward then turns to the part played by gardens and gardening, not just in the expected sense of food production, but also the cultivation of flowers by all sides on the Western Front. Finally, in a moving ‘From the Archives’ section in Members’ News, Helen O’Neill reports on The London Library in the First World War – the staff who served and Library life while they were away.

Elsewhere, we mark another anniversary as Miranda Seymour reveals something of the wonderfully exuberant Victorian artist Sir Hubert von Herkomer, who died in March 1914. We turn to the sea as William Firebrace takes us into not so much Hidden Corners, as hidden depths! Victoria Hislop suggests some therapeutic reading for an all-too-familiar condition afflicting writers, and Judith Flanders reveals her reading around what makes a house a home.

On the cover

Male and female munition workers in a shell warehouse at the National Shell Filling Factory, Chilwell, Nottinghamshire, 1917, by Horace Nicholls. Detail from IWM Q 30018, Courtesy of Imperial War Museums.

We have much to report in Members’ News, where you will find details about a new series of small events to be held by and for members, and information about our impending search for the next Chairman of Trustees. It may be just my early training as a cataloguer but I suspect others too will be quietly interested to know that we are adopting a new cataloguing standard over the coming months. This is a once-in-a-generation change reflecting the ways in which online searching has radically altered approaches to finding information. And we continue our series introducing some of the staff and their roles, with the reflections of Amanda Stebbings, Head of Member Services.

With winter upon us I hope you continue to enjoy your reading – whether the London Library Magazine or all the treasures to be found on Library shelves.

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 14 November 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.

Editorial Publishers Jane Grylls and Kim Jenner Editor Mary Scott Design and Production Catherine Cartwright

Editorial Committee David Breuer Emma Marlow Helen O’Neill Peter Parker Philip Spedding Erica Wagner

Advertising Jane Grylls 020 7300 5661 Kim Jenner 020 7300 5658 Irene Michaelides 020 7300 5675 Development Office, The London Library 020 7766 4704

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

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 5

CONTRIBUTORS

William Firebrace Joined the LIBRARY IN 2010

William Firebrace is the author of two studies of European cities, Things Worth Seeing (2001) and Marseille Mix (2010). His book on the London Planetarium, The Missing Planet, will be published by the Architectural Association later this year, and Memo for Nemo, on the inhabitation of the undersea in fact and fiction, will follow in spring 2015.

Viktor Wynd’s Cabinet of Wonders With Photography by Oskar Proctor and Illustrations by the Theatre of Dolls

The artist and impresario Viktor Wynd takes readers on a tour of homes, private collections and museums that share his fondness for things arcane, desiccated, antique or just plain odd.

‘This is a dark romp through miscellanea of the macabre, our hand held by a true exquisite.’

Derren Brown ‘An insanely delightful how-to guide on becoming a mentally ill, cheerily obsessive eccentric hoarder told with lunatic humor and absolute joy. Viktor Wynd is a sick orchid who seems like the perfect man to me.’

John Waters

Judith Flanders

Photo Clive Barda.

Joined the LIBRARY IN 1981

Judith Flanders, a Canadian, has lived in London since the 1980s. She is the author of six books of social history. Her first, A Circle of Sisters (2001), was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award, and The Victorian House (2003) was nominated for the British Book Awards History Book of the Year. The Making of Home was published last month, while her first novel, Writers’ Block, came out in the spring.

Victoria Hislop

Joined the LIBRARY IN 2010

Victoria Hislop’s novel The Island (2005) was an international bestseller and sold over 3m copies worldwide, and her 2011 book The Thread, about Thessaloniki and its people, was shortlisted for a British Book Award. She has also published a collection of short stories set in Greece, The Last Dance (2012). Her latest novel, The Sunrise, is set in Cyprus in the 1970s, and was the bestselling title in the Times fiction list in its first week of publication.

Hilary Roberts

Joined the LIBRARY IN 2013

Hilary Roberts is the Imperial War Museum Research Curator of Photography and a specialist in the history of war photography.

Her most recent book, produced with Mark Holborn, is the highly praised The Great War: A Photographic Narrative (2013). Her next book, Lee Miller: A Woman’s War, will be published in October 2015, to accompany a major exhibition at Imperial War Museum London.

Miranda Seymour joined the LIBRARY IN 1984

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6 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Miranda Seymour is a critic, novelist and biographer, whose works include lives of Mary Shelley, Ottoline Morrell and Robert Graves, and an award-winning memoir, In My Father’s House (2008). Her most recent book is Noble Endeavours: The Life of Two Countries, England and Germany (2013). She is currently working on a joint study of Byron’s wife and daughter.

Christopher Woodward Joined the LIBRARY IN 1998

Christopher Woodward is Director of the Garden Museum, whose exhibition Gardens and War continues until 7 January 2015.

Christopher’s last article for the London Library Magazine was about writers and swimming, and he has just completed a swim of 105 miles along the River Thames from Oxford to London to raise money for the Museum’s development project.

Behind the

Book

Judith Flanders’ social history The Making of Home, published

by Atlantic Books last month, examines how houses turned into homes. She discovered some invaluable publications at the Library that aided her research.

‘

Judith Flanders’ The Making of Home (2014).

The Making of Home feels like a bookend to me. Four of my earlier books were about domesticity, so the question, when does a house stop being a house and turn into a home, became an urgent one. The London Library seemed the perfect place to explore the subject: once a house, presumably also a home, it is now home to books that underpin this long evolution.

 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719; London 1818 edn). Fiction.

Although Crusoe spends most of his time cast away on an island, this book – often claimed to be the first novel in English – is preoccupied with domesticity, giving whole pages over to descriptions of the mariner making himself ‘at home’ , even to the point where he is thrilled to discover, on an abandoned wreck, not the wherewithal to sail away, but a humble pot in which to make hot chocolate. This edition dates from a century after its first publication in 1719, but the engravings are a delight.  The Household and the Making of History: A Subversive View of the Western Past by Mary S. Hartman (Cambridge 2004). S. Social Science.

Not just subversive, but revolutionary in the way it convinces the reader to think about home, and history, this was the book that altered how I looked at the subject.

Hartman puts the family, not politics or war, or technology, at the centre, and as the starting-point of the Industrial Revolution.

Her thesis seems to me both obvious and profound. Outlined like this, so baldly, it sounds overweening, but Hartman is persuasive.  Imagined Interiors: Representing the Domestic Interior Since the Renaissance, ed. Jeremy Aynsley and Charlotte Grant

8 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

(London 2006). A. Furniture &c., 4to.

An essay in this book clarified how our ideas of home are often based more on imagination than actuality. Dutch goldenage art, it shows, is not an art of faithful reproduction. Inventories of the day tell us that the rooms in the paintings of Johannes Vermeer and his contemporaries were works of fiction, not fact: just 5 Leiden households had the brass chandeliers that appear routinely in the paintings; of 5,000 house inventories, only 9 had those familiar marble floors in their reception-rooms.

Where Vermeer saw his musical instruments is also unclear, as only one household in Delft owned a keyboard instrument.  The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene RochbergHalton (Cambridge 1981). S. Psychology.

This book contains a fascinating survey: 82 post-Second World War American families were asked about their homes, and while most began by describing it physically (the house was brick, or two-storey, or new), the single most common comment was the use of a value word to describe the building’s emotional meaning to its owners: it was ‘comfortable’ , ‘cosy’ or ‘relaxing’ .  Lost in the Taiga: One Russian Family’s Fifty-Year Struggle for Survival and Religious Freedom in the Siberian

’

Wilderness by Vasily Peskov, trans. Marian Schwartz (New York 1994). Biog. Lykov.

In the 1970s, a team of geologists in Siberia came across a hut they described as ‘a low, soot-blackened log kennel’ , consisting of one room only seven paces wide, with an earth floor and a single piece of furniture, a table. This was home to a family who had fled Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, and had somehow survived in complete isolation for nearly half a century. Five people were living in one room, with no sanitation, which was lit and warmed by firelight, ‘cramped, musty and indescribably filthy’; under bizarre circumstances, this family had recreated what had been the living conditions of most people, for most of history, and I became fascinated by their story.  The Little House Books by Laura Ingalls Wilder (1932–43; New York 2012 edn, 2 vols.). Children’s Books.

While there is much discussion about how much Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter collaborated with her mother in the writing of these books, and the fact that they are also presented as fiction, Wilder’s recreation of her childhood on the American frontier in the 1870s both describes the life that many led, and also gives an insight into the meaning and value of many household items, from iron nails (rare) to a china ornament (a symbol of civilisation).

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Where the World War Began

by Joseph Roth, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann Today, thirteen years after that first shot, I am seeing Sarajevo. Innocent, accursed city, still standing! Sorry sheath of the grimmest catastrophes.

Unmoved! No rain of fire has descended on it, the houses are intact, girls are just going home from school, though plaits are no longer in fashion. It’s one o’clock. The sky is blue satin. The station where the Archduke arrived, Death waiting for him, is some way outside the city. A wide, dusty, part-asphalted, part-gravel road leads left into the city. Trees, thickly crowned, dark and dusty, leftovers from a time when the road was still an avenue, are now irregularly sprinkled along its edge. We are sitting in a spacious courtesy bus from the hotel. We drive through streets, along the river bank – there, that corner is where the World War began. Nothing has changed. I am looking for bloodstains. They have been removed. Thirteen years, innumerable rains, millions of people have washed away the blood. The young people are coming home from school; did they learn about the World War? I wonder.

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BIBLIOTHERAPY

STEPHEN KING’s

ON WRITING Victoria Hislop recalls how a book on the craft of writing by the bestselling horror writer helped to put her back on track with completing her latest novel

‘

A little over a year ago, a fellow member of The London Library was telling me about a book he had just read. He did not know that I was hurtling towards a deadline on a novel, nor that I felt slightly ‘stuck’ .

But everything he said about this book somehow resonated. I left my laptop on my desk and literally ran to Hatchards. On their system, it said they had one copy and the assistant disappeared for at least 20 minutes to try and find it. Usually I would have lost patience, but for some reason I knew I had to wait. It was the first Stephen King book I had ever bought. To be honest, his thrillers are not the kind of books I would normally read, but his volume On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000) sounded as if it had been written for me.

It was the right book at the right time.

The idea for my novel The Sunrise was in place but for various reasons I had completely lost my writing rhythm. I don’t really believe in writer’s block, but I felt as if I had forgotten how to do my own job.

Once every three years, I produce a novel and for at least the first half of the schedule I am researching. This time, I had forgotten to get going with the writing part and the months had flown by. I had six months until my delivery date and though my ideas were all there, I had little to show for it.

Stephen (yes, it felt that personal) put me on track. His voice addressed me loud and clear from the first page and even though I don’t write thrillers, much of the advice is relevant to anyone who makes a living from putting words on a page.

Parts of On Writing are a memoir of King’s own writing career, and it made me feel better that I had never relied on drugs, cigarettes or alcohol to get going in the morning. A double macchiato from the little branch of Eat just round the corner from The London Library is all I

“Don’t wait for the muse … Writing is just another job like laying pipe”

’

need. Huge swathes of the book, however, were relevant and eye-opening, and I was immediately jolted out of my torpor.

King recalls answering a question from an interviewer on how he wrote.

‘One word at a time, ’ he answered. In the end it’s always that simple, whether you are writing something epic or just a short story. He gives basic practical advice

Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000), 2012 edition.

such as not having a telephone or TV in your writing room (easy if you are in The London Library) and tells you to draw the curtains. He even advises a blank wall. I followed his instructions to the last detail.

Word by word, this would be how my story would get written. I divided my total target number of words by the number of days until my deadline. As long as I put down 1,000 words each day (King’s recommended daily dose) I would meet my deadline.

His tone is uncompromising, sometimes brutal, but often funny too: ‘Don’t wait for the muse, ’ he says. ‘He’s a hard-headed guy who’s not susceptible to a lot of creative fluttering. This isn’t the Ouija board or the spirit world, but just another job like laying pipe. ’ And yes, that struck a chord too. Each morning, with my coffee in hand to drink on the steps of the Library, I walked past the huge development that has been emerging into the sky on the corner of Duke Street and St James’s Square. Every man on that site knew what task had to be achieved that day. And over the months, a huge, complex building has taken shape with every wire, every pane of glass, every length of pipe being put into place.

Writing a novel is such a simple task by comparison.

By the time this article is printed, my novel will be in the bookshops and the building in Duke Street almost completed.

The pipes were laid. Everything is in place.

It’s tempting to give a précis of On Writing, but it would be best just to advise anyone even the tiniest bit stuck, to read it.

King describes stories as being like fossils, simply waiting for excavation. Finally I have dug mine out, but without this book I think it would still be there, buried deep in the ground.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 11

Horace Nicholls

Artist-Photographer at War Horace Nicholls’s photographs of the Home Front during the First World War contributed much to our understanding of the war and its impact at home. Hilary Roberts celebrates his work.

Horace W. Nicholls (1867–1941) was one of Britain’s best-known photographers of the early twentieth century. Like many of his contemporaries, he believed that photography was an art form. But he also possessed an instinctive ability to tell a story through photographs. In this respect, Nicholls was one of the world’s first true photojournalists.

Nicholls made his name covering the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) and the ‘golden age’ of Edwardian Britain. He was too old to serve as a front-line soldier during the First World War, but photography offered him another means of contributing to Britain’s war effort.

In 1914, the potential of photography as a way of spreading wartime propaganda and distributing public information was poorly understood. Press photography, still in its infancy, was considered a security hazard. Nicholls spent the first years of the war as a freelance press photographer, hampered by strict wartime controls. When attitudes changed, an infrastructure for official photography was established to support the war effort, and Nicholls was appointed Britain’s first official Home Front photographer in early 1917. His wartime photography covered all aspects of life in Britain, but some of his best pictures highlight the enormous contribution of women to the war effort. As his many poignant photographs suggest, Nicholls was by no means detached from the subjects he photographed. His eldest son, George, was killed in action on the Western Front in 1917.

At the end of the war, Nicholls continued his association with the conflict by joining the staff of the new Imperial War Museum (IWM). As the IWM’s first chief photographer, he documented the most important public commemorations of the war, while securing Britain’s photographic record of the war for future generations.

12 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Women paint the exterior of Hammersmith District Railway station, c.1917. Women formed 37% of the British workforce during the First World War. IWM Q 31050.

Clockwise from top left British soldiers return from the trenches on leave, Victoria Station, London, c.1918.

IWM Q 30505.

Two schoolgirls harvest a marrow from a vegetable patch, London, c.1917.

IWM Q 31162.

A doctor takes a plaster cast prior to fitting a disabled soldier with an artificial limb at Queen Mary’s Hospital, Roehampton, Surrey, c.1918.

IWM Q 33684.

A selection of masks and prostheses used at 3rd London General Hospital, Wandsworth, to disguise facial disfigurement caused by shrapnel and bullets, c.1918.

IWM Q 30460.

Boy Scouts help in the kitchen of a YMCA hostel, London, c.1917. The Boy Scouts movement, established in 1907, undertook many tasks in support of the war effort.

IWM Q 30595.

Male and female munition workers in a shell warehouse at the National Shell Filling Factory, Chilwell, Nottinghamshire, 1917. This factory was the scene of a devastating explosion in 1918. 139 workers died in the accident.

IWM Q 30018.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 13

Clockwise from top left The coffin of the Unknown Warrior rests in the nave of Westminster Abbey before its final interment on Armistice Day, 11 November 1920.

IWM Q 31514.

Unveiling of the Cenotaph by HM King George V on Armistice Day, Whitehall, London, 11 November 1920.

IWM Q 31488.

A gallery in the newly opened Imperial War Museum, 1920. The Crystal Palace (which housed the Great Exhibition in 1851) was the museum’s first temporary home.

IWM Q 31451.

All photographs by Horace Nicholls, courtesy of Imperial War Museums.

Horace Nicholls’s photographs of the Boer War and Edwardian era are now preserved by the National Media Museum, Bradford.

His photographs of the First World War and post-war period are preserved by the Imperial War Museum Photograph Archive, London.

14 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

not just poppies Christopher Woodward, Director of the Garden Museum, explores the role of flowers and gardening at times of conflict, from tending trenches in the First World War to cultivating gardens in the Middle East today ‘It was an enchanted land, ’ wrote the painter William Orpen in troubled wonderment at the battlefield of the Somme. As a war artist in the winter of 1916 he had witnessed ‘water, shell holes and mud. The most gloomy dreary abomination of desolation the mind could imagine’ . We can picture the scene, but when Orpen saw it again in the summer of 1917 on a front where four hundred thousand had died, ‘No words could express the beauty’ . The mud was now baked a ‘pure, dazzling white’ and the ‘pale dark blue air’ was ‘thick with butterflies’ above the poppies and the swathes of blue flowers he did not name.

Orpen did not paint the abundance of wild flowers in the battle zone; frustratingly, nor did any other war artist.

In the current exhibition at the Garden Museum on the part played by flowers and gardening in the First World War, our curator Russell Clark had to reconstruct a lost story from photographs, letters, pamphlets, Pathé newsreels and curious artefacts such as shell-cases converted into jardinières. The Western world’s bloodiest war occurred at the climax of a century of floral sentimentalism and rural nostalgia. An insight into a dialogue between the forces of destruction and cultivation, which is, perhaps, timeless, is also offered by Kenneth Helphand in Defiant Gardens (2006), his definitive survey of making gardens in wartime. Most recently, photojournalist Lalage Snow has revealed gardens made in conditions of inconceivable adversity in Kabul and Gaza.

The exhibition was inspired by an anecdote and a medal. In his biography of Siegfried Sassoon, published in 2005, Max Egremont describes Winston Churchill’s confrontation with the poet. Why had a war hero – holder of the Military Cross – and country gentleman declared a public opposition to the continuation of the war, Churchill asked, when ‘war is the normal

German soldiers sitting in their trench garden, near Ypres, 1914. Courtesy of the Garden Museum Collection.

occupation of man’? Seeing Sassoon’s scorn he added, ‘gardening. War and gardening’ .

The medal in our collection – the country’s only collection of garden history – shows a cheerful sun rising over muddy rows of vegetables. It’s the prize for a vegetable-growing competition on the Western Front, awarded in the last summer of the war. Growing marrows on the Somme is explicable; indeed, you read of how in earlier centuries besiegers of cities dug vegetable beds in readiness for winter. Eight ounces of vegetables a day was the government’s recommendation for a British soldier on the front line, while at home food queues formed quickly in many towns, and a Pathé newsreel shows mothers protesting at the price of baby’s milk. A photograph shows Eton boys in striped caps learning to dig potatoes, in a government campaign that prefigured the better-known ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign of the Second World War. Three million acres

of grassland were ploughed up.

By 1915 each army was entrenched, and behind each line an infrastructure for growing food had been established; soldiers spent most of their lives behind the lines, and were only expected to be at Stand To – on duty in preparation for an attack – three days a month. A photograph shows soldiers lined up as if for bayonet practice; in fact, it depicts the Agriculture Directorate Farm at Amiens, and the instructor is demonstrating the correct use of the glass cloche. A second photograph shows an abandoned German trench on Vimy Ridge in August 1918, captured by 100,000 Canadians a few months before.

Sticks of celery grow, row on row, in the winding, muddy floor of the trench.

Perhaps harder to explain is growing flowers, not food, in the war zone. We have found at least a dozen photographs of what Helphand calls ‘trench gardens’ , and discovered written descriptions such as one by a Private who records 47 yards THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 15

From left Street shrine, Hackney, 1916, courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Library; Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps gardeners tending the graves of the war dead, Étaples, France, 1919, by Olive Edis, Imperial War Museums.

of trellis on which nasturtiums are trained.

A kilted Gordon Highlander waters a collection of flower pots. Major Irvine grins, arms folded on his chest, beside a miniature formal garden laid out behind the sandbags; he is killed three months later. His shrubs look as if they have been transplanted from a formal garden.

Elsewhere a former editor of The Garden magazine observes how soldiers uprooted wild flowers to plant in beds edged with debris. He saw the yellow celandine (a member of the poppy family that grows on grassy English banks) and the low, green arum commonly known as cuckoo-pint.

Hard to transplant, it may have withered quickly, but perhaps that did not matter.

The soldiers in these pictures could not determine their own safety, what they ate, or if they slept in a vermin-free bed; for them, a garden did not just represent hope, memories, and a desire for the spring, but a measure of control.

This cult of wildflower planting echoes the poetry of what Caroline Dakers in The Countryside at War 1914–18 (1987) called ‘the most literary of wars’ . As she explains, poetry anthologies sent to the front dealt overwhelmingly with landscape and Nature, rather than the cities in which the majority of the million men who volunteered in that first year lived.

George Marr, a young man from Newcastle who served as a machine16 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

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gunner on the Balkan Front and survived the war, is remembered by his family as an ‘incurable romantic’ . One day his granddaughter arrived at the front desk of the Garden Museum with an envelope addressed to his sweetheart, her grandmother, in 1917. Inside the envelope rustled the hand-pressed wild flowers he had picked in Greece. Perfectly preserved, this sift of flowers – wild carrot, corncockle, viper’s bugloss – is as moving as any manuscript.

Helphand points out that the French and Germans gardened too, and a letter by a philosophy student named Lothar Dietz provides our best insight into the psychology of spontaneous trench gardening. Dietz wrote to his family in November 1914 from a dug-out at Ypres, 60 yards from the British lines. He says that the bland words describing the conflict in the newspaper – ‘In Flanders today again only artillery activity’ – ignore the shattering of trees and bodies; as he writes, a corporal lies groaning beside him with three out of four limbs smashed, certain to die before a stretcher comes. ‘As one can’t possibly feel happy in a place where all nature has been devastated, we have done our best to improve things, ’ he writes. They sawed the tops off trees in a pine wood destroyed by shells and placed them on the ground of the trench; they had no roots, but would be green for a month. ‘Out of the gardens

“As one can’t possibly feel happy in a place where all nature has been devastated, we have done our best to improve things”

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of the ruined chateaux of Hollebecke and Camp we fetched rhododendrons, box, snowdrops and primroses, and made quite nice little flower-beds. ’ In the woods behind the dug-out – recently seized from the British in hand-to-hand fighting – comrades made dams and watermills: ‘we have planted whole bushes of willow and hazel with pretty catkins on them and little firs with their roots so that a melancholy desert is transformed into an idyllic grove. ’ In the morning they were woken by the twittering of thrushes. Dietz was killed four months after he wrote the letter.

Where the British and Germans diverged was in their attitudes to commemoration. Dietz and his comrades

not just poppies would be buried with solemn, bare monuments in the form of crosses, but the British decorated the earth with flowers.

Floral shrines are a recurrent British instinct: they appeared in Hackney in 1915. In Palace Street, 111 men had signed up from 77 houses, and on the wall of one of the terraced houses there was a memorial of freshly cut flowers combined with patriotic imagery and a list of the men who continued to serve. This was spontaneous; the next year – as a newsreel shows – Queen Mary gave official blessing to the practice in a visit to the East End. In 1918 200,000 people laid flowers at the flag-draped Maltese Cross erected as a temporary monument in Hyde Park.

A purplish poppy rustles in Private Marr’s envelope, but it is just one in the palette of expressive flowers; today the floral commemoration of the Great War has become a poppy monoculture. This is, of course, a consequence of the short poem written by a brave middle-aged Canadian doctor named John McCrae at a dressing station at Ypres, which was published in Punch in December 1915. Look at the original volume and what is surprising is the obscurity of that first publication. The words ‘Between the crosses, row on row …’ can just be picked out in a small text at the bottom of the page. The poppy cult also reflects the phenomenal fertility of the species: a single poppy head can contain up to 50,000 seeds, which can lie dormant for years. A battlefield, or a building site, will burst into blood-red life with poppies, but the flowers will pretty much vanish after that first year. At the Armistice – and with McCrae dead of pneumonia – a factory in France began to manufacture cloth poppies to raise money for refugees.

In the year 1921 the Royal British Legion raised over £100,000 from their sale.

By this date the Imperial War Graves Commission was employing over 1,300 gardeners on the Western Front, as Sarah Joiner tells us in a special edition of Garden History, the journal of the Garden History Society, published this autumn, on the theme of ‘Memorial Gardens and Landscapes’ . A network of nurseries had been established in France, and a consciously ‘English’ official style of planting continued what had begun as a spontaneous enlivening of the makeshift burials in the war. Gertrude Jekyll was not formally involved, although she

Sayed Habibullah, gardener at the British Army Forward Operating Base, Lashkar Gah, 2013. Photograph by Lalage Snow.

sketched a few planting plans based on her friend Edwin Lutyens’s designs; more importantly, perhaps, her country-garden style was all pervasive.

Many writers have pointed out the disjunct between the reality of life in England for the great majority of the population – whether in cities or in the countryside – and its romanticisation in patriotic imagery circulated by the government: copies of a poster depicting a pastoral scene entitled ‘Isn’t this worth fighting for?’ was put up in huts on the Western Front. Nevertheless, for many the sentiment was true: ‘Worth living for, ’ a soldier on leave wrote in the visitors’ book at Leith Hill Tower in Surrey, as Keith Greives and Jenifer White reveal in their essay on the role of landscape in commemorating loss in the same issue of Garden History. It is a sentiment our countryside benefited from: the land-holdings of the National Trust quadrupled by 1925 through gifts of land for open access in memory of the fallen; importantly, this memorial was not an edifice but the land itself.

The inspiration for this generosity was Lord Leconfield’s gift of Scafell Pike in 1924 in memory of local men, which also inspired the Fell and Rock Climbing Club to acquire 12 peaks in the Lake District in memory of fellow members. Is there a more moving memorial than the bronze tablet placed by the club high up on Great Gable? The editor

of the club’s journal described its unveiling in 1924: ‘If there is any communion with the spirits of dead warriors, surely they were very near that silent throng of climbers, hillwalkers and dalesfolk who assembled in soft rain and rolling mist on the high crest. ’ For me, a particularly moving – and more ambivalent – memory of the war is described in Kevin Rushby’s remarkable book, Paradise (2006). It is a recollection of a garden in Grantham, Lincolnshire, tended by the author’s grandfather, a machine-gunner in the war. He was temporarily blinded by gas at Cambrai in 1917 and recalled that ‘They said phosgene gas had the delicate scent of new-mown hay about it on first inhalation, a gentle arcadian nudge before it burned the life out of you. ’ Recovered, the grandfather became a gardener to two spinsters in Grantham, and after their death retained a vegetable garden bounded by two hedges, a wall and the river. It was a refuge from time and place, writes Rushby, an Eden in which the children played among vegetables and flowers cultivated side by side, their wildness in contrast to the ordered neatness of the house.

But the gardener’s hands that turned the rusty key in the door were the hands of a machine-gunner who, as a Lance-Corporal, had a finger on a trigger that fired 9,000 rounds in 10 days of battle. In the as-yet unwritten floral history of the world there is guilt as well as loss.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 17

A Bavarian in Bushey The Victorian artist Sir Hubert von Herkomer was as famous in his heyday as Millais and Sargent. His German origins encouraged neglect of his work – and the destruction of his extraordinary home, as Miranda Seymour relates Landsberg, a pretty little Bavarian town by the river Lech, is best known today for the elegant Art Nouveau prison in which Adolf Hitler was briefly incarcerated during the 1920s. Landsberg was where Hitler dreamed up Mein Kampf (1925), his blueprint for the Nazi party’s brutal regime of fascist dictatorship.

Out for a drive – the terms of his confinement were relaxed – Hitler must have noticed one of Landsberg’s proudest monuments: the Mutterturm, a fairy-tale Gothic tower. This fanciful creation was the nineteenth-century artist Sir Hubert von Herkomer’s flamboyant shrine to the mother who had given birth to him at Landsberg in 1849 and died there in 1878.

The Mutterturm was typical of Herkomer’s showmanship. Planning the wedding to his third wife at the tower in 1888, Herkomer decided that the ceremony should take place at sunrise.

Ten trumpeters and accompanying horn players from the Munich Opera House ranged themselves along the ramparts of the tower, sounding forth the glory of Sir Hubert’s love with a rousing performance from Lohengrin. Richard Wagner was probably quite gratified. ‘Sie hexen!’ (‘You

use witchcraft’), the Master had gasped, after seeing the watercolour portrait of himself conducting at the Albert Hall (the versatile Herkomer had sketched the composer entirely from memory).

Few figures more clearly symbolised in their lives the powerful connections between British and German culture in the years before the Great War than Herkomer. He spent three months each summer sketching and painting in his native Bavaria, and the remaining nine at Lululaund, the glorious Arts and Crafts-influenced schloss that he and his family built at Bushey in Hertfordshire.

The house was named in memory of the artist’s beloved second wife, Lulu Griffiths, who died in 1885, only a year after their marriage.

Herkomer’s fame in England was surpassed only by John Everett Millais and John Singer Sargent when he died in March 1914; today, his name is in danger of being forgotten. The Bavarian schloss in Bushey, already neglected by 1923, was demolished in an act of misguided patriotism in 1939. A preservation order belatedly protects a final relic, the Romanesque entrance through which,

Lululaund, the Bavarian schloss in Bushey, Hertfordshire, built by Herkomer and his family in the 1890s, and demolished in 1939. Courtesy of the Bushey Museum and Art Gallery, Hertfordshire.

18 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

in Herkomer’s heyday, such luminaries as Ellen Terry, Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling and Hans Richter (a regular conductor at the house of the orchestra accompanying Sir Hubert’s plays) entered Lululaund.

Small but admirable exhibitions at Landsberg and Bushey pay homage in this centenary year to Herkomer’s genius.

The Bushey Museum display includes the artist’s zither – Herkomer had once hoped to play with the Christy Minstrels, an American group formed in 1843 – and an elaborate oak bed carved by his talented father, Lorenz. In 2014, a year dedicated to the memory of a savagely fought war between Germany and Britain, more deserves to be done to honour the memory of a man who embodied the spirit, not of battle, but of the mutually regenerative culture shared by two great nations.

Bounderby-like in the way he loved to highlight the modesty of his origins, Herkomer was probably not exaggerating when he claimed that his impoverished father had sold the only cloak he owned in order to buy his son a suit. The Herkomers had little more than their talents to live on when they first arrived at Southampton in 1857. Hubert’s father, while struggling to make a living from making elaborately carved picture frames (buyers were hard to find), educated Hubert at home. In 1865, Lorenz took his son back to Bavaria and enrolled him at Munich’s art school.

When a life model was required for home practice, Lorenz obligingly stripped off.

Earning his daily bread during the 1870s as a prolific engraver, Herkomer was eagerly recruited by new magazines such as the Graphic. Vincent van Gogh, on whom the older artist’s dark subject matter and expressive style exerted a powerful influence, collected all Herkomer’s Graphic prints and frequently singled him out for praise. Figures such as the monumental working man in On Strike

Sir Hubert von Herkomer’s Self-Portrait, as a Young Man, c.1888; The Road Mender, 1887. Both paintings courtesy of the Bushey Museum and Art Gallery, Hertfordshire.

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Van Gogh collected Herkomer’s prints and singled him out for praise

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(1891), while symbolic of the troubles faced by England’s labouring poor, were frequently drawn from German models.

Another work of unashamedly Bavarian origin, The Toil of Day, went on show at the Royal Academy in 1873. The purchase price, £500, sufficed to buy a cottage and some land in Bushey, back then a tranquil community on the outskirts of London.

The investment marked the beginning of Herkomer’s lifelong connection to the Hertfordshire village.

Patriotic imagery was hugely marketable in Britain during the 1870s, and Herkomer’s The Last Muster, depicting ranks of old soldiers in the chapel of Chelsea’s Royal Hospital, was widely admired. But Herkomer’s deeper interest was always in using painting to critique the social conditions that he deplored.

Eventide (1878), a painting that helped to win the young artist a coveted Médaille d’honneur when it travelled to Paris in 1878, was set in a Soho workhouse.

Herkomer may have had a strong social conscience, but he also knew what sold. By the 1880s, he had found a lucrative métier as a portrait painter. Bankers, college principals, churchmen, actresses, the family Krupp: all queued for the honour of being immortalised by the artist.

In 1900, Herkomer was summoned to Berlin to do honour to the Kaiser, who had decorated him the previous year; he was later knighted by Edward VII in 1907. The meeting was, in Herkomer’s opinion, one between equals; the Kaiser was clearly as intelligent and creative as the artist himself.

The unlikely love affair ended when the Kaiser refused to pay up, having deemed the enamel portrait to be of insufficient size. Herkomer vented his feelings by crushing what seems from remaining sketches to have been a masterpiece, with a sledge-hammer. No further imperial commissions were forthcoming.

Portraiture was only one strand in Herkomer’s career as a man of limitless energy and ambition. At Bushey, he founded an art school that rapidly expanded from 20 to 500 students.

Transforming a ruined chapel in the gardens of Lululaund into a private playhouse, he produced, directed and invariably took the star role in short dramas that used pioneering lighting techniques. A moon that changed colour as it slowly traversed the tableau below was particularly admired. ‘I wish I might see it again – and again, ’ Ellen Terry wrote to the gratified director.

The building of Lululaund consumed much of the substantial income derived from Herkomer’s portrait-painting.

Cupboards covered in a layer of gold leaf, elaborate internal balconies, an engine house, a dairy and – a rare luxury in Victorian times – hot and cold running water for every guest-room: such a wealth of lavish detail cost a fortune.

In 1905 Herkomer set up Bavaria’s first motor race for touring cars and designed and bestowed a massive (and startlingly sexy) silver trophy upon the winner. Revived in 1997, the HerkomerKonkurrenz is still going strong. In 1912, Herkomer and his son Siegfried launched an ambitious new project: the Bushey Film Studios. No prizes are offered here for guessing who always played the leading role in the series of short films, of which a few fragments are preserved at Bushey Museum. The studios lived on after Herkomer’s death in 1914 as the headquarters of the British Actors Film Company. The doors closed for the last time in 1985, but the building has survived.

The epitaph on Herkomer’s grave in Bushey justly records him as a Master of Arts. Shockingly neglected today, Herkomer awaits the biographer in search of a lively and hugely entertaining subject.

The London Library owns a splendid portrait by him of Herbert Spencer, identified during the course of writing this short tribute, as well as many works by and about him, such as J. Saxon Mills’s Life and Letters of Sir Hubert Herkomer (1923).

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 19

HIDDEN CORNERS

WATER READINGS The Library’s collection of books on the ocean overflows from S. Sea into Fiction, S. Submarines and beyond, as William Firebrace discovers on his exploration of the shelves

The sea is a vast subject. In figures, which vary depending on whom one chooses to believe, the seas cover 71% of the earth’s surface, contain 1.3 billion cubic kilometres of water, occupy 95% of the earth’s living space and, according to the estimate of the most recent Marine Census of 2010, are inhabited by at least one million species, most of which are unknown. It would take a considerable amount of books to even begin to cover the theme, which has no easily defined limits. Library classification systems have their own logic, and their curious interconnections. The collection of books on the sea in The London Library is naturally centred around S. Sea, but flows over into S. Submarines, S. Ships and then on into natural history as well as fiction in works by Jules Verne, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Malcolm Lowry, William Golding and many others.

S. Sea has about 150 volumes dating from the early nineteenth century to the present, mainly in English with a fair smattering of French. The material covers exploration, ecology, waves and tides, the sea-shore and sea bed, related flora and fauna, as well as anthologies of sea stories and sea lore. Periodicals also has the complete set of the journals of the Historical Diving Society, the International Journal of Diving History. My own interest in reading and writing about the sea comes from a book I am currently completing titled Memo for Nemo, about the habitation of the sea both in reality and fiction, from the time of Jules Verne’s fictional submarine Nautilus up until today. The 12,000-volume library of the Nautilus, as described in Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, is the first travelling library of the sea, a vast personal collection that Captain Nemo has assembled before 20 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Commander Looking Through a Periscope, 1940, by Eric Ravilious, from James Russell’s Ravilious: Submarine (Mainstone Press, 2013). © The Estate of Eric Ravilious, DACS 2012, courtesy of the Mainstone Press.

bidding farewell forever to the land. There is something about the back section of The London Library, with its dim lighting, compressed spaces and metal gratings, which reminds me of the interior of a submarine. Nemo collected no more books after leaving land, so never had to confront The London Library’s problem of an evergrowing supply of books, or of devising complex literary classification systems.

In the mid-nineteenth century, at the time Verne was writing his novel, very little was known about what lay in the deep sea.

Since no one had been, there were any number of imaginary scenarios as to just

what it might be like, including theories that the deep sea was empty of any form of life, or that the bottom was covered with Urschleim, which was the source of all life. This combination of imagination and scientific exploration has continued ever since. With The Physical Geography of the Sea (1855), the American scientist Matthew Fontaine Maury produced one of the earliest attempts at a scientific investigation of the flow of currents, the marine meteorology of the ocean depths, and navigation. Maury’s book comes complete with various intriguing maps and charts. By contrast, Jules Michelet’s La Mer (1861, L.

French Lit.) set out another view of the sea, as a romantic, almost ecstatic location, the great fertile female being, nourishing and eternally productive, with tireless desires.

Verne’s description of the voyage of the Nautilus, inspired by both Maury and Michelet, started a vogue for the invention of unlikely undersea vessels and mixing science with narrative. H.G. Wells sent an explorer down in a metal sphere in his 1896 short story In the Abyss (included in his Complete Short Stories, 1974), to find aquatic humanoids occupying an undersea city. Other novelists had no hesitation in filling in the empty spaces of the oceans

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Michelet sets out a view of the sea as a great fertile female being, nourishing and eternally productive

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with the products of their imagination.

In The Maracot Deep (1929), Arthur Conan Doyle pitched bold adventurers, descending in a comfortably furnished metal cube, into battle against Atlanteans, and Dennis Wheatley, more accustomed to tales of devil worship in genteel surroundings, was inspired to write They Found Atlantis (1948), which features a struggle between good and evil on the sea floor. H.P. Lovecraft, in his 1926 short story The Call of Cthulhu (included in the Library’s volume of his Classic Horror Stories, 2013), imagined a whole alien civilisation of squid-like beings that had arrived from outer space and constructed loathsome undersea cities, which occasionally rise to the surface.

Alongside, and interlinked to this current of fantastic fiction, are various books in S. Sea and other shelfmarks written by those who actually explored the undersea, and made rather different discoveries. The first descents were made in the 1930s by the naturalist William Beebe and the engineer Otis Barton in

the bathysphere, a metal sphere that was lowered into the ocean hanging from a cable wound out from a surface vessel.

This was a perilous enterprise since if the cable snapped the sphere would quickly descend into the darkness. Beebe recorded the history of these explorations in Half Mile Down (1935), which included vivid descriptions of the fading of the surface light to a deep blue and then into utter darkness, and the first observations of bioluminescent creatures in their habitat.

Beebe was accused by various scientists of hallucinating. Barton wrote up his own version in his book Adventure: On Land and Under the Sea (1954, S. Natural History), which includes descriptions of his attempt to use the bathysphere for a fiction film directed by himself, with bathing beauties and undersea monsters.

Following on from Beebe there developed a fashion for books boasting the achievement of attaining ever-increasing depths. The extraordinary Swiss engineer Auguste Piccard invented and travelled both in the first balloon to ascend into the upper atmosphere as well as, in the late 1940s, the first bathyscaphe, a vessel controlling its own buoyancy and thus able to descend into the depths of the sea. He wrote up his memoirs, In Balloon and Bathyscaphe (1956), which is mainly concerned with technical details but also gives some good descriptions of the two often surprisingly similar locations.

The Frenchman Georges Houot, an early bathyscaphe pilot, wrote of his experiences in Two Thousand Fathoms Down (1955), but was then trumped by Piccard’s son Jacques who, with Seven Miles Down (1962), narrates the story of his voyage to the ocean’s deepest point, the Mariana Trench near the Philippines.

Until someone penetrates under the earth’s crust, in the style of Journey to the Centre of the Earth, this is deep as anyone can go.

These books are more concerned with the undersea adventure than what is actually to be found in the oceans, the voyagers having to peer out through diminutive windows of thick quartz into a small patch of illuminated water.

Descending into the aquatic abyss in bathyscaphes was expensive and dangerous. During the 1950s popular interest grew in the exploration of shallower areas of the undersea, which were warmer, inhabited by recognisable creatures, and

From top William Beebe and the bathysphere, from Richard Ellis’s Deep Atlantic (1996), picture courtesy of the Wildlife Preservation Society; Underwater Landscape by Crespo Island, illustration by Édouard Riou, from Jules Verne’s Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870), 1871 edition.

light enough to allow photography. These books set the style for diving as an exotic adventure, with threatening sea creatures, valiant hunters and exotic photography.

The Frenchman Jacques Cousteau was a bold diver and inventor, but also a master of various forms of popular media.

His first book, The Silent World (1953), provides evocative descriptions of his first diving experiments off Marseille, some hair-raising encounters with submarines and wrecks, and a growing awareness THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 21

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of the wonders of undersea creatures.

Cousteau awakened public fascination for what had been a neglected natural zone, and was one of the first to point out the dangers to its delicate ecology. There is a wide selection of Cousteau’s books on the shelves of The London Library; he was clearly a popular author at the time.

Among these are The Shark: Splendid Savage of the Sea (1970, S. Fishes, 4to.), The Whale: Mighty Monarch of the Sea (1972, S. Zoology, 4to.) and, best of all, Octopus and Squid: The Soft Intelligence (1973, S. Zoology, 4to.), which describes the octopus as a sympathetic and intelligent creature, quite contrary to the usual image of the beast as a horror of the seas. Cousteau was accused at the time of not being scientific, and also of sentimentality; both claims are true, but his books are fascinating and the photography atmospheric.

How can one follow the heroic period of undersea exploration pioneered by Beebe, Cousteau and Piccard? The oceans still remain comparatively unexplored today, with less than 1% of the sea bed having been visited and a minute proportion of the vast volume of waters explored. Much ocean exploration is now carried out by remote-controlled unmanned vehicles, which scan, photograph and document the depths.

This may well be the most efficient method to gather data, but without the presence of humans something of the sense of adventure has faded, reducing the flow of books describing a personal experience of the oceans. Dr Robert Ballard, an old-style explorer using the most up-to-date technology combining manned and unmanned vehicles, led the 1985 expedition that located the wreck of the Titanic, which he describes in The Discovery of the Titanic (1987, S. Shipwrecks, 4to.), then another to find the German battleship Bismark. Ballard was one of the earliest explorers to investigate the black smokers, the deepsea vents that give out heat and minerals from under the earth’s crust. The Eternal Darkness: A Personal History of Deep-Sea Exploration (2000) relates the story of his various undersea voyages in sophisticated submersibles, such the US vessel Alvin, and his growing awareness of the complexity of the undersea world.

Environmental concerns about the state of the oceans had begun in the 22 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Diver and Mediterranean octopus, from Jacques Cousteau’s Octopus and Squid (1973).

1950s, with Rachel Carson’s book The Sea Around Us (1951). Many contemporary publications now emphasise the ecological aspects of the oceans, increasingly threatened by the effects of climate change, the dumping of nuclear and other unwanted waste, overfishing and pollution. Callum Roberts’ Ocean of Life: How Our Seas Are Changing (2012) gives a thorough and detailed overview of these disturbing changes, concentrating on the rapidly vanishing fish supplies, and makes sensible suggestions as to how the oceans can be managed. Caspar Henderson’s The Book of Barely Imagined Beings (2012, S. Zoology) is an ingenious and highly readable bestiary, based on extended philosophical meditations on a variety of sea creatures, including pufferfish, starfish and thorny devils.

Leviathan or, The Whale (2008) by Philip Hoare updates Herman Melville’s Moby Dick on the natural history of cetaceans.

The coming-of-age novel The Highest Tide (2005) by Jim Lynch has as its main character a young man obsessed with Rachel Carson’s books, and describes the unexpected links between teenage sexuality and the life aquatic of the tidal flats on the Puget Sound. Meanwhile, LisaAnn Gershwin’s Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean (2013) is fairly typical of the current eco-warning mode of publications, and foretells the threat offered by various species of jellyfish, whose numbers are multiplying, driving

out most other forms of marine life.

Creatures such as the jellyfish that require low levels of oxygen will gradually inherit the once boundless oceans, the author claims, and ocean life will return to the way it was many millennia ago.

Such ecological concerns are very real, but some of these books follow on from the long tradition of seeing the oceans and their occupants as a threat, as set out by countless Hollywood B-movies with their monsters of the abyss. One might look to another book that mixes imagination, photography and a plea for an ecological approach, The Deep (2007, S. Sea, 4to.), edited by the French journalist Claire Nouvian. The book has many extraordinary photographs of the creatures of the deep sea: squid, jellyfish, fish, crustaceans.

Michelet’s mer/mère, the great female being, has proved infinitely fertile. The weirdness of these creatures, some of which resemble Freudian nightmares, is astounding, and their delicate and threatening beauty makes one shiver.

The seas can be scientifically documented, measured, scanned and observed, but they cannot be known through science alone; science needs to be balanced by imagination. Or, in terms of The London Library marine collection, one needs to remain on the move between S for Science, H for History, T for Topography, A for Art and F for Fiction, keeping in mind that these are a set of arbitrary divisions within one fluid realm.

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October 2014 – April 2015

On sale now

Wint er S e a s on A new season of plays and opera in our candlelit playhouse ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore The Knight of the Burning Pestle The Changeling L’Ormindo Farinelli and the King The Broken Heart Dido, Queen of Carthage

Pictured: Pauline McLynn in The Knight of the Burning Pestle

BRITAIN’S FIRST MUSEUM

A DIFFERENT KIND OF MEMBERS CLUB The Royal Over-Seas League is a unique, not-for-profit, private membership organisation that encourages international friendship and understanding through arts, social, music and humanitarian programmes.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 23

09/05/2014 11:58

MEMBERS’ News Changing cataloguing standards From January 2015 we are changing the way we catalogue both new and old acquisitions. The new standard we will adopt is called Resource Description and Access (RDA) and it is already replacing the Anglo American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd ed. (AACR2) in the US and the UK. It has been developed and tested by the Library of Congress among others and was adopted by the British Library in 2013. National libraries across Europe, such as the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, are also moving towards RDA. The change is driven by a need to improve the catalogue-searching experience for users. Online catalogues, or ‘discovery’ tools such as our forthcoming Primo, go beyond a library’s own holdings and interrogate millions of records worldwide so that searches often return large numbers of results. By changing the way we catalogue our collections we can make it easier for our members to find, identify, select and obtain the required item or items.

Before we can benefit fully from what RDA can offer we need to create a critical mass of data according to the new standard, which means that to begin with the visible changes will be minor. One example is that both English and Latin abbreviations will disappear from any record created after 1 January 2015. The familiar ‘et al.’ will be replaced by ‘and others’ and instead of ‘p.’ and ‘ill.’ we will have ‘pages’ and ‘illustrations’. The more profound changes will not be visible, but these are the ones that will eventually allow the results from a catalogue search to be grouped in meaningful clusters and will transform the way members can find information.

Members’ Room RE-OPENS Thank you to the many members who attended the drinks reception in the Members’ Room on 9 September to mark its reopening. We had a great turnout and received positive feedback from those who came. We will be hosting more member events over the coming months, which we hope will be of interest. You might also like to know that we will shortly be launching a monthly Members’ Games Night; details to be announced soon.

24 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

FORTHCOMING EVENTS Members’ Drinks RECEPTION Thursday, 27 November, 6.30pm – 8.30pm The Reading Room Complimentary refreshments courtesy of an anonymous donor Members are invited to invoke the spirit of Christmas early this year and join us for a special Members’ Drinks reception on 27 November to kick-start the festive season. This will be an ideal opportunity to meet fellow members socially and enjoy a drink or two in the Reading Room. Numbers are limited so an RSVP is essential. Please email events@londonlibrary. co.uk with your name and membership number and include ‘Christmas Drinks’ in the subject header.

Members’ Room Annexe Hire The Members’ Room annexe on the 6th floor is available for members to reserve, free of charge, to host self-managed events, writers’ workshops, poetry readings or study groups on Wednesday evenings between 5.30pm and 7.30pm throughout the year. There is no restriction on the nature of the meeting, but we do stipulate that it is available to fellow London Library members to attend, and that you are able to take on the management and any necessary administration required to run the event or group yourself. Capacity for the annexe is limited to a maximum of 12 people.

For more details and reservations of the Members’ Room annexe, please email reservations@londonlibrary.co.uk.

Ph.D. Student Networking Group Members’ Room annexe, 6th floor Are you currently studying for a Ph.D. and a regular user of the Library? Would you be interested in meeting other Ph.D. students for informal discussion, networking and support? The group’s first meeting takes place on Wednesday, 10 December at 6pm in the Members’ Room annexe and is open to any member currently involved with Ph.D. studies. If you are interested in being involved and would like more details, please email Library member Cleo Roberts at cleoetic@gmail.com.

FROM THE ARCHIVES books and bombs: the london library and the great war Helen O’Neill traces the impact of the Great War on all aspects of Library life between 1914 and 1919.

At the Library’s AGM in 1915, seven members of staff were 33,000 hospital admissions had been handled by his division. reported to be on active service; the following year the number The death of cataloguer Lance Corporal Ernest Newman had more than doubled. Research to date shows that sixteen men (Queen’s Westminster Rifles) was announced with sadness at the served, eight were wounded, three were killed in action and ten Library’s AGM in 1917, and an article appeared in the Morning returned to their posts at the Library after they were demobbed. Post about Private Charles Kennelly of the London Regiment So who were they and what impact did the war have on the (Royal Fusiliers) who died on the Western Front on 16 April 1917.

Library while they were away? The men were drawn from all Kennelly, a gifted cataloguer, had worked at the Library for over a departments of the Library. Library assistants in junior and senior decade before leaving for a senior post at the Athenaeum. Their roles, cashiers, cataloguers, four porters, and the housekeeper graves can be seen on the War Graves Commission website. all enlisted or were called up, and there was a tussle from March On the Home Front Hagberg Wright was an Honorary 1917 onwards over Christopher Purnell, the Sub-Librarian, as Secretary and Trustee of the Red Cross War Library and his the Library Committee instructed Charles Hagberg Wright, the appeals for books for wounded servicemen appear in several Librarian, to appeal against Purnell’s conscription at a tribunal newspapers during the war. He gave at least two lectures in the on the grounds that his post was essential to the Library’s work.

Reading Room to raise funds for Russian prisoners of war and Many of the men joined the there is a fleeting mention of a notice 16th London Regiment (Queen’s in the Issue Hall requesting books for Westminster Rifles). The porters Arnott German prisoners of war. The purchase and Rowe and the cashier James Bean of German books and periodicals was were called up in April 1916. David tricky during the war. The Library had William Kelly, 22 years old, followed to apply for a special licence to import a month later. He saw action as a them, which was granted then revoked, rifleman, serving from May 1916 to but later reinstated after an appeal – on March 1919 in France, Salonica and the condition that the material was Egypt. He was wounded in September locked away until the end of hostilities.

1918 during his second stint in France.

Air raids in the autumn of 1917 Arthur Edwin Davis, 25 and in charge of brought the war to the streets of Country Orders, was a rifleman with the London. The Library closed earlier 16th Rifle Brigade, and a letter written to allow staff to get home without by him survives at the National Archives difficulty. If proof of the difficulty in which he gives a succinct account of (and danger) were required, it arrived his service history: ‘I was attested on during the night of 30 September 17 November 1915 and called up for when a large piece of the casing of service on 3rd May 1916. Wounded at a German shell pierced one of the Ypres 3rd July 1917. Sent to England Library’s lavatories. The incident August 1917. Transferred to R.A.M.C. triggered a flurry of activity as the September 1918. Demobilised on 28th Library Committee considered the September 1919.’ need for nightwatchmen and the level Arthur’s injury, a gunshot wound of the Library’s insurance. The Times to the right thigh, resulted in treatment reported 51 casualties from the raids in two military hospitals before his two days later and photographs of transfer to the Royal Army Medical bomb damage in London can be seen Corps. His colleague A.S. White was in digitised collections on the IWM a junior Library assistant at home but website. during the war was a sergeant with I continue to search for the London the 6th London R.A.M.C., a first Library soldiers of the Great War, for line territorial division, which spent Alfred King who, I’m told by colleagues September 1916 to 1918 on the who carry our longest institutional Top Library porters Mr Rowe (far left) and Mr Channon (centre) Somme (apart from stints in Ypres and memory, was a motorcycle messenger both served and returned to work at the Library after they were Arras) ferrying the wounded from the demobbed; Mr Channon was 46 when he was called up. in Mesopotamia during the war, and Above The Library was a drop-off point for books distributed field of battle. He was awarded the for Library assistant J. Miller who was to wounded soldiers through the Red Cross War Library. This Military Medal in September 1917; by killed in action in 1918, his first name, advertisement, kept in the Library’s archive, dates from January 1918. the end of the following month almost regiment and place of burial unknown.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 25

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One of the greatest things we can do Philip spedding, development director, looks AT THE HISTORY OF FUNDRAISING AT THE LIBRARY

When Thomas Carlyle came up with the idea of The London Library, he believed that this astonishing resource could be paid for through membership subscriptions. This simple financial model has remained the guiding principle behind the Library’s finances ever since.

However, whilst membership fees may be able to cover most of the ordinary running costs, they are unlikely to be able to cover the extraordinary costs that every organisation is bound to face as it develops. Indeed, even before the Library opened in 1841, W.D. Christie, who was involved in its formation, wrote that other funds would need to be sought from ‘those, who fortunately not feeling the want [of a Library] themselves, will generously assist in the realization of a great public benefit’.

And so it has proved to be. From the original set-up costs through to buying the freehold of 14 St James’s Square in the 1870s and the subsequent building projects, The London Library has had to raise extra money beyond the membership for most of its life. In fact, it has done so with a level of persistence and success that would astound those who believe that cultural fundraising in the UK is a recent phenomenon that remains somewhat alien to the British sensibility.

The following table outlines the equivalent value today of some of the fundraising income that the Library has generated over the last 173 years: Date Fundraising activity/Gift

Value then Equivalent today *

1841 Prince Albert’s founding cash gift (given along with 24 volumes)

£50

1879 Debentures sold to buy 14 St James’s £21,000 Square

£64,000 £14,840,000

1929 Significant legacy from Major Prevost

£25,000

£6,050,000

1971 Special Literary Auction in aid of the Library

£25,000

£602,800

1972 Library Appeal

£533,000 £11,500,000

* 2014 Income value equivalent according to measuringworth.com

Today the Library benefits enormously from a significant number of people whose remarkable support has enabled the Library to grow and develop. Some have left generous bequests in their wills, others have kindly offered books that add important elements to the Library’s collection and some have shown extraordinary vision in helping the Library finance new projects.

However, at the heart of the Library’s ongoing fundraising 26 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

are the members of its Founders’ Circle. Created three years ago, the Founders’ Circle is an opportunity to bring together those who share the ambition of the founders, care about the Library and what it stands for, and have the means to help the Library meet the extraordinary costs it faces through their regular financial support.

In many ways, one of the most important elements of this support is that it is regular. The great challenge for any not-forprofit organisation is to develop realistic and sensible budgets at the start of the year and then act to ensure that the financial year proceeds as expected. Through their regular gifts to the Library, the members of the Founders’ Circle play a vital role in helping the Library to plan and budget better for new and occasionally unexpected challenges.

In return, we hope that the Founders’ Circle members gain a real sense of achievement in seeing the Library go from strength to strength. Last year Founders’ Circle members provided over £300,000 in additional philanthropic support towards the work of the Library, vital funds which help the Library to meet the increasing costs of ensuring that it can remain one of the finest lending libraries in the world.

To help our Founders’ Circle members enjoy their association and better understand the role of the Library, we curate a busy programme of exclusive events for them, offering opportunities to see other public and private libraries, hear from specialists in their field (this year’s guests have included the author and FT restaurant critic Nick Lander, the then Literary Editor of the Spectator, Mark Amory, and that Titan of the opera world Sir Thomas Allen) and attend some of the Library’s special events throughout the year.

Given that the Library continues to face extraordinary challenges, we are keen to encourage others who share its aspirations to consider joining like-minded individuals and become a member of the Founders’ Circle. There are three membership levels named after particularly important people in the Library’s history; Dickens, Thackeray (the Library’s first Treasurer) and Martineau. Membership starts at £1,500, of which about £1,000 is a donation that can generate tax relief of at least 25% for higher-rate tax payers.

More than anything, by joining the Founders’ Circle, you will be helping to develop one of the most remarkable libraries in the world. As Thomas Carlyle said in 1840: ‘The founding of a Library is one of the greatest things we can do with regard to results. It is one of the quietest of things; but there is nothing that I know of at bottom more important.’

If you are interested in finding out more about the Founders’ Circle, please contact Scarlett Millar on 020 7766 4719 or email scarlett.millar@londonlibrary.co.uk

MEMBERS’ NEWS

LOOKING AFTER MEMBERS SPOTLIGHT ON AMANDA STEBBINGS, HEAD OF MEMBER SERVICES we will investigate.

How did I end up at The London Library?

We do encourage our members to I never planned to be a librarian; it just share their experiences (good or bad, but happened. In my mind I wanted to be a I hope mostly good) and I gather all this marine explorer or a forensic pathologist, information and act on it, whether it has but a degree in Welsh wasn’t going to come to us in conversation, by email or take me in either of those directions, so through the suggestions book. You will librarianship it was. On leaving university have seen some of the changes we have with a Masters degree in librarianship, made in response to this feedback: the I moved straight into the public-library improved Wi-Fi signal in the basement and sector. The plan was to spend two or the literature stacks, for example, the extra three years in each professional post storage lockers, or (my particular favourite) before moving on to gain experience the new hat hooks in the Issue Hall, which elsewhere, only it didn’t work out quite should mean fewer hats being lost at the that way and I spent 19 years of my back of the coat cupboards. Although I career working in one local authority, joined the Library after the completion as a children’s librarian, library manager, of Phase 3A of the redevelopment Senior Librarian, and finally as Service project, I was able to be involved in the Development Team Leader (a clunky refurbishment of the Members’ Room. It title that included responsibility for was a perfect chance to address some of purchasing stock, organising inter-library the comments we had received about the loans, arranging and promoting readerThe new hat hooks in the Issue Hall. space and to make it a more welcoming development activities, overseeing and and sociable area. I hope that this is what developing the volunteer programme, updating the website, running the library social-media accounts, we have achieved; certainly the initial feedback is largely positive training staff, writing IT training sessions for the public, and and the informal re-launch event we held in September proved to anything else that came along). When the opportunity to head be very popular, with nearly 80 members attending.

In October we welcomed our new graduate trainees, the Member Services department at The London Library came along almost a year ago, I was ready to move into a new and Amy O’Donohoe and Jordan Murphy, to the Library. They will spend the next year with us, mainly in Member Services, but challenging post in a completely different environment.

Looking back, my first few weeks at The London Library were also working across the Library to gain as wide an experience hectic, with so many people to meet and things to learn, not least as possible before embarking on a postgraduate librarianship how to navigate successfully around the building (and apologies degree. For the Library it is a great way for our experienced, to anyone who came upon me on the morning when I accidentally long-standing members of staff to learn from recent graduates found myself on the mezzanine floor with no clear idea of how to about the latest teaching and innovation in the broader library get out). One of the things that struck me most was the affection sector. in which the Library is held, and how keen members are to work with the staff to maintain its traditions. It is not a situation I had What challenges lie ahead? come across, given the difficult and emotionally-charged climate One exciting development we are working on at the moment in which many library services currently operate, and this came as is the introduction of Primo, ‘discovery’ software that will work with our library management system, allowing members to a refreshing change. search both our print and electronic holdings simultaneously.

What would a typical day as Head of Member Services look From a single search in our catalogue you will soon be able to gain immediate access to any relevant journal articles that we like?

I’m not convinced there is such a thing as a typical day for me hold electronically, as well as being able to reserve books as you here. Certainly I have administrative work to do, but I do try to do now. One feature I think may be particularly useful is the spend at least part of every day on the Issue Desk or out and facility to tailor searches to your specific interests, save them and about in the building, checking that everything is as it should then receive notifications as new items on those topics become be, that all the lights and lamps are working, or hunting for available. It’s an amazing, incredibly powerful research tool, and wooden bookstands that have migrated from the reading rooms. the challenge for us will be to make it as user-friendly as possible.

We work hard to ensure that the Library is a comfortable and All the staff in the Issue Hall will be fully trained in Primo and welcoming environment for all members, so if you come across ready to help when we go live, so please feel free to ask if you something that doesn’t seem right, please let one of us know and would like to know more.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 27

28–30 NOVEMBER 2014

HAY FESTIVAL WINTER WEEKEND

Festive magic for all the family, with mulled wine, mince pies and tales of adventure – and a warm welcome to London Library members. Join us in Hay for Christmas inspiration...

hayfestival.org AFRICA

28 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

AMERICAS

ASIA

EUROPE

MIDDLE EAST

MEMBERS’ NEWS

Search for a new Chairman Over the next six months, the Library’s trustees will be looking for a new Chairman. The reason is that the second and final three-year term of our incumbent, Bill Emmott, set by the byelaws that were in place in 2009, expires in November 2015.

The appointment is in the hands of the trustees. While they can choose a Chairman from among their number, they do not have to. Bill had not been a Trustee before his appointment. The trustees will set up a sub-committee to handle the search, which will produce a short-list for interview by the full board in spring 2015. The plan is for the trustees to make an appointment in April or May, in good time for the Library’s Annual General Meeting in November.

What will they be looking for? Above all, the Chairman needs to be a mixture of an ambassador and an overseer. He or she needs to represent the Library, to promote it, to help raise funds and to recruit new members, all the while pushing the executive and the trustees to make sure the Library keeps on serving members’ needs and the cause of literature. At the same time, he or she must ensure that the Library is governed properly, according to Charity Commission rules, with the executive held to appropriate account.

Under the new byelaws, the new Chairman’s term will be four years, renewable once. Anyone who would like to apply can do so by writing to the sub-committee, c/o Sarah Farthing in the Librarian’s Office, or by email to chairmanship@londonlibrary.co.uk.

Literary prizes Congratulations to the following London Library members who have been nominated for literary awards and prizes.

John Campbell Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2014 for Roy Jenkins: A Well-Rounded Life.

Owen Sheers Shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize 2014 for Mametz.

Jenny Uglow Longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2014 for In These Times.

Karen Healey Wallace Shortlisted for the Best British Book in the Best British Book Design and Production Awards 2014, and Best Editorial Design in the Design Week Awards 2014 for The Perfect Capital.

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

CHRISTMAS CARD 2014 This year’s London Library’s Christmas card has been designed around the theme of ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ by illustrator, sculptor and designer David Lawrence.

The message inside reads, ‘With best wishes for Christmas and the New Year’.

Proceeds from the sale of the cards raise funds for the Library. You can purchase them by post, online or in person.

By post: Please complete the form below and send it to The London Library.

Online: londonlibrary.co.uk/shop The price for postal and online sales is £5.00 for a pack of 8 cards and envelopes (includes VAT, postage and handling).

In person: The cards are also on sale in the Library from Reception at £4.00 per pack.

ORDER FORM

YOUR NAME (BLOCK CAPITALS PLEASE)

Please send me:

_________________________________________________________

______ pack(s) of Christmas Cards, at £5.00 per pack: £______

ADDRESS ________________________________________________

TOTAL: £______

_________________________________________________________

Please make your cheque payable to ‘The London Library’ Please return this form to: The London Library, Christmas Card Orders, 14 St James’s Square, London SW1Y 4LG

_________________________________________________________ ____________________________ POSTCODE ________________

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 29

Authors’ FoundAtion grAnts And AwArds

The Authors’ Foundation gives grants to authors whose project is for a British publisher.

Additional grants Grants in memory of Taner Baybars, Roger Deakin, John Heygate, John C Laurence, Elizabeth Longford, Michael Meyer, Arthur Welton, and by the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation are also available.

Further details are given in the guidelines.

And

K Blundell trust AwArds

The K Blundell Trust gives grants to British authors under the age of 40 whose project is for a British publisher. The project must aim to increase social awareness, and can be fiction or non-fiction.

Next closing dates – April 30 2015 and September 30 2015 Full guidelines available from www.societyofauthors.org 020 7373 6642

Mystery, romance and history.

Start here.

We helped Coleridge and Joyce and thousands of other not-quite-so-famous writers.

Can we help you?

For more than 200 years the Fund has provided hardship grants and pensions to published writers at all stages of their careers.

If you are a published author of any genre the Royal Literary Fund can offer financial assistance.

A writing short course at City University London can bring out the best in you. Ask Melissa Bailey, author of The Medici Mirror. Her second novel is due for publication next year.

If you need help, contact: Eileen Gunn 020 7353 7159 eileen.gunn@rlf.org.uk www.rlf.org.uk

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All enquiries are treated in the strictest confidence.

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EATING OUT

This is an advertisement feature.To advertise please call Irene Michaelides on 020 7300 5675.

1 AL DUCA Serving modern Italian cuisine, Al Duca focuses on bringing out the very best elements of what is one of the most acclaimed gastronomic regions of the world. Simple fresh ingredients are skilfully combined in a wide range of traditional dishes, offered both in classic style and with a new twist, all following the owner Claudio Pulze’s ethos of reasonably priced good Italian food. Now serving breakfast. 4–5 Duke of York Street, SW1Y 6LA, 020 7839 3090. alduca-restaurant.co.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 3656. foxclublondon.com

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

6 FRANCO’S Some believe Franco’s was the first Italian restaurant in London, having served residents in St James’s since 1942. Open all day, Franco’s evolves and provides a menu for all occasions. The day starts with full English and continental breakfast on offer. The à-la-carte lunch and dinner menus offer both classic and modern dishes.

61 Jermyn Street, SW1Y 6LX, 020 7499 2211. francoslondon.com

3 BENTLEY’S OYSTER BAR AND GRILL Since 1916, Bentley’s has been serving its fish and chips and feeding the hungry masses. For almost 100 years, the grande dame of Swallow Street has served fresh oysters, grilled fish, shellfish platters and steaks, sourced from around the British Isles. The restaurant is now under the watchful eye of Michelinstarred chef Richard Corrigan.

11–15 Swallow Street, W1B 4DG, 020 7734 4756. bentleys.org

7 GETTI JERMYN STREET A modern Italian restaurant at the fast-paced heart of London’s West End, Getti Jermyn Street is an authentic Italian dining venue in London’s historic tailoring district, dedicated to offering a traditional and memorable Italian dining experience.

A splendid destination for locals and tourists alike, Getti Jermyn Street focuses on serving simple, regional dishes from mainland Italy. Private dining available.

16/17 Jermyn Street, SW1Y 6LT, 020 7734 7334. getti.com

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

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 glass of House Champagne.

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

9 GUSTOSO RISTORANTE & ENOTECA This home-style Italian dining room is found moments from Westminster Cathedral and Victoria Station.

Quietly situated and pleasingly intimate, Gustoso is the ideal place to unwind with friends or to enjoy a little romance. Cocktails are served from the bar and the menu is based around the Italian classics.

35 Willow Place, SW1P 1JH, 020 7834 5778. ristorantegustoso.co.uk

11 sartoria Sartoria, conveniently located on the corner of Savile Row and New Burlington Street, has become one of Mayfair’s favoured hang-outs. The elegant Milanese-style venue is ideal for a quick espresso or light lunch in the informal bar, or for unwinding over a long lunch or dinner in the luxurious restaurant. Sartoria is open Mon–Fri lunch and dinner; Sat dinner only.

20 Savile Row, W1S 3PR, 020 7534 7000. sartoria-restaurant.co.uk

10 the keeper’s house The recently opened Keeper’s House is the new home for artists and art lovers in the heart of Mayfair. Run by renowned restaurateur Oliver Peyton, of Peyton & Byrne, the concept is simple: modern British food, cooked using the freshest ingredients.

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

12 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

A DIFFERENT KIND OF MEMBERS CLUB The Royal Over-Seas League is a unique, not-for-profit, private membership organisation that encourages international friendship and understanding through arts, social, music and humanitarian programmes.

With membership benefits including accommodation and dining at clubhouses in London and Edinburgh, and reciprocal arrangements with over 80 clubs around the world, we offer our members a home away from home.

HOW TO JOIN Call +44 (0)20 7408 0214 (ext. 214 & 216) and quote ‘The London Library Magazine’ for special joining discounts, visit www.rosl.org.uk or email info@rosl.org.uk

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 31

09/05/2014 11:58

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