The tabloids shout out about everyone, however obscure, in show business or sport. They reserve space to report some particularly grisly kind of death met by these unfortunate people. Perhaps they don’t count as an obituary, but are just the usual reporting of the daily horror stories.
The specialist magazines are the most rewarding. The Poultry World and the Goat Society’s Monthly Journal sometimes produce a winner but my favourite appeared in Horse & Hound in the days when fox hunting was perfectly all right.
It began: ‘So Beatrice has galloped over and taken the last fence into the great unknown’, and went on to describe the life of an indomitable country woman wedded to field sports, that special breed which only exists in these islands. It ended: ‘Gallop on blithe spirit, and may you find your heaven in a good grass country.’
I hope she did and I hope there is still no plough in heaven.
There is something mysterious about bread. I don’t mean pale, floppy loaves steamed to death by ‘bakers’, but the homemade sort, mixed, kneaded and cooked by human hand in a real oven.
Bread is uncertain, in that the same recipe followed by different people produces very different versions of the ‘staff of life’. Perhaps it is something to do with the yeast, alive and almost kicking. Perhaps this magic agent reacts to the mood of the breadmaker or the oven. Whatever the reason the variations are very much part of the charm.
Children who have never tried homemade bread are apt to fall upon it and devour slice after slice, ending with a deeply satisfied sigh and ‘I can’t eat another thing. I’m full’.
Fancy recipes with different tastes, from herbs and bananas to tomatoes and olives, are easy to surprise people with, but are no good for everyday. For the best treat, you should wait till August to beg some wheat straight off the combine, put it through the coffee grinder and see if the resulting bread is not a revelation.
To be in the swim you must change your name. Steel has turned into Corus, which makes you think vaguely of singing, but I bet the steelworkers don’t feel much like singing just now; Woolworth suddenly became Kingfisher, a flash of blue on a quiet river and not exactly the image of the old sixpenny high-street stores. Now the post office is to be called something so odd – not a real name but a concoction of letters, like the name of a film star’s baby – that I’ve already forgotten what it is. I suppose stamps and postmen will go the same way. The Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts is to drop the Royal (of course) and twist itself round till it becomes the Historical Manuscripts Commission. I wonder if that is sharp enough for 2001. Why not call it the Pony Club or the Delphinium Commission? Then it might make an impact. They say that the V & A is threatening to follow this extraordinary fashion because it used to get confused with the clothes shop C & A. I can hardly believe this. If true, what will Victoria & Albert turn into? Maskelyne & Devant? No, that is out of date. Morecambe & Wise more likely. And I’m longing to know what the National Gallery will choose, and Waterloo station, the Royal Observatory, Madame Tussaud’s and the rest of the institutions we were brought up with. I fervently hope that John Lewis and Peter Jones won’t turn into the Two Ronnies. I love all four too much to contemplate it. Chatsworth has been lumbered with the same name for 450 years, which is far too long. It is time for a change. Suggestions on a postcard, please.
There are some rare treats to come. Elvis is back with a bang and can be seen in all the big cities in a tour beginning in Newcastle. This incredible show is a deeply moving experience – I know because it came to this country last year. There he is on a vast screen in a vast arena, thousands of fans gazing at his beautiful face and inspired by his extraordinary voice. As if this wasn’t enough, his real old band surrounds the screen, playing live – the inimitable pianist, the guitarist, the wild drummer and the rest. The Sweet Inspirations, the singers who accompanied him, take clothes a few sizes bigger than in the olden days, but they still make everyone feel happy. It is the man himself who dominates, as he always did, and the adoring fans drink it in, knowing every word and every gesture, unable to sit still in their seats till the whole arena erupts in clapping and shouting to celebrate the greatest entertainer ever to walk on a stage. ELVIS LIVES. He is often seen in supermarkets. I wish he would call at our London Farm Shop in Elizabeth Street.
Last week I had lunch with three friends, two of whom live abroad and come to London about once a year. The talk ranged over all kinds of subjects and it is refreshing to discover how untouched they are by the pounding of the media. They have never heard of Jeffrey Archer (‘Is he one of the Archers?’); think a microwave is something to do with hairdressing; mix up Laura Ashley with sex-change April of that ilk; and ask if Cecil Parkinson is a photographer (vague memories of Norman and Beaton no doubt). Hoping for even more surprising gaps in their general knowledge test, my London-dwelling friend and I cast another fly, but this time with no success. They have heard of Mr Blair.
I wonder if it is computers which think up such strange names and addresses for the customers of the firms for which they work. Or is it specially dotty secretaries whose minds are on other things while they write? I should love to know. Some are wildly imaginative and endow the customer with a different character, or even another nationality, from the steady old English people they really are. One mail order company thinks I am called ‘Mr/Ms Hess Of’, the subject of an undiscovered poem by Edward Lear perhaps, or a German ex-royalty. (They have kindly sent me an ‘Exceptional Customer Award suitable for framing and displaying in the Hess Of Home’.) A friend is the Viscountess Mrrrrrrrrrr. She finds it difficult to pronounce and thinks it sounds as if she is getting into a cold bath. Another friend, who is an architect, has become Mr Jebb Ariba, which suggests he was born in Ghana or Nigeria. Liberty’s (no upstart mail order company here, but an old-established firm who you might think would get it right) sent a proper letter on beautiful paper. Below the date is written ‘Duchess D.E.V., Chatsworth, Chatsworth, Chatsworth, Bakewell, Derbyshire.’ It begins ‘Dear Sir’ and goes on to describe a dress of ‘Tana lawn in a floral print of particularly feminine style and two colourways’. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that a Sir might prefer trousers. And I know Chatsworth is big but it really isn’t necessary to repeat it three times as it is quite easy to find if mentioned just once. I look forward with interest to more and better names and addresses on the brightly coloured pamphlets which announce that you’ve won £25,000. Look closer and you find that, alas, you are the only person on the list who has not. Odd.
I know the Turner Prize is stale buns now, as it happened months ago, but I missed it at the time and have since become fascinated by how it is decided. Someone at the Tate kindly sent the bits of paper about it, written in a special language which is not easy to understand. The photos of the prize-winning works of art don’t help much either. It seems that the prize is given to a ‘British artist under fifty for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work in the twelve months preceding 30 June’. It is awarded by a jury consisting of four, or sometimes five, good men and true, and a foreman (sorry, chairman). The jurors have a wonderful opportunity to find the artist guilty and sentence him to a term of no work and generally keeping quiet for however many years his art deserves. Amazingly, instead of doing this they give him £20,000. I’m all for people giving each other £20,000 as often as possible, but the reason in this case seems so very strange. According to the press release, last year’s winner is said to ‘play an interesting game with the relationship between art and reality’ and has a ‘refined sensibility in the handling of materials which range from hardboard and crushed steel to asphalt’. Very nice. In one of his exhibits, according to the foreword of the brochure, ‘lurks the gap left by a shifted saucepan lid’. Good. A runner-up showed a glass case called ‘A Thousand Years’. Inside was a box of house flies, a piece of rotting meat (I think) and what looks like an electric fly-killer. As the proprietor of a butcher’s shop, I am pleased to see the meat, but – oh we
ll. Another runner-up says, ‘I access people’s worst fears.’ A third competitor uses dogs’ messes. Dogs’ messes are my worst fears and too often accessed in this house. There will be lots of fine artist’s material when I get a new puppy, so I hope he’ll come and give me a hand to our mutual advantage. And so it goes on – but why drag poor old Turner into it? Channel 4 gives the money for the prize. I like Jon Snow, his ties and his news, but I think I shall have to give him up for a bit.
Could some clever reader tell me what a quantum leap is and where I can see one performed? Who the chattering classes are and where I can listen to them? And what a learning curve is and how I can climb on to one?
Chatsworth
Thirty Years’ Progress
Clearing out a drawer last week I found the minutes of a meeting held on 6 July 1965. Those present were Tim Burrows (then Currey & Co.’s Secretary to the Trustees), Hugo Read (then Chatsworth agent), Dennis Fisher (then Comptroller) and myself.
The familiar worries of expenditure exceeding income on house and garden were discussed and various large jobs needing to be done were listed.
‘Mr Fisher and Mr Read mentioned the following which would probably require attention in the next four years: –
Greenhouses – repairs and renewal of heating system.
Connection of the house to the new main drain.
Renewal of roof over north side of house sometime in the next twenty years.’
Apart from these, and the possible redecoration of the library, they ‘could not foresee any major expense for which they would have to call in outside contractors, but emergencies might arise and they thought it would be prudent to allow between £7,000 and £10,000 a year for major items which their own staff could not cope with’. I wonder what we four would have thought had we known then the number of ‘special jobs’ which have cropped up every year and have been successfully completed since 1965?
The minutes continued – ‘Mr Burrows enquired if there was any possibility of increasing the takings from the public. It was agreed that the provision of a café or other catering facilities (which would bring in more money) would not only spoil the present character of the place but would also very likely cause more trouble than it was worth by encouraging people to leave much litter about the gardens.’
At that time the only refreshment provided for our visitors was the cold tap in the wall by the Lodge which now carries a notice ‘Water for Dogs’.
It was much the same with the shops. The idea was it was unfair, and greedy, to expect people to part with more money than the entrance fee (then 5/- for adults and 3/6 for children for house and garden). It only dawned on me slowly that people actually wanted to take something away to remind them of their visit and that they were hungry and thirsty as well. Now a lot of people come on purpose to eat and to shop.
Thanks to those who look after the restaurant and the shops, they are generally thought to be the best of their kind. The reason I am bold enough to say this is because of the number of people who ask to come and see how both these thriving departments are run. Not only are we all very proud of them, but they are two highly successful businesses providing what accountants call ‘a significant contribution’ to the house and the estate.
We have come a long way in thirty years. Perhaps we ought to become consultants!
Memories of Chatsworth in 1950
Andrew and I, Emma aged seven and Sto six, lived in Edensor House with an extraordinary number of domestic staff, squeezed into what are now flats, and a frightening butler who would tell anyone who would listen that he had known better places. If we had more than three people to stay they lodged at Moor View (a cottage at the top of the village) and were soon known as the Suicide Squad. There were horses in the Edensor House stables and the Estate Office was in the upstairs rooms.
There were no cattle grids in the park – hence the wires still above the garden walls at Edensor to prevent the deer helping themselves to flowers and vegetables. Deer, cattle and sheep regularly wandered out of the park at Edensor and Calton Lees, but they didn’t get far because there were always people about on foot or bicycle to herd them back in. Everyone walked or cycled. There were two cars in Edensor – the vicar’s and ours.
Meanwhile, Chatsworth was looked after by the Comptroller. Ilona and Elizabeth Solymossy, Hungarian sisters, arrived there in 1948. The Hungarian sisters, trained as a teacher and a chemist, came to England as refugees in 1938 and worked as cook and housemaid to my sister-in-law Kathleen Hartington (née Kennedy) in her house in Smith Square, London, after she was widowed. Kathleen died in a plane crash in May 1948 and in August that year my mother-in-law persuaded them to come to Chatsworth to organise the mammoth task of cleaning the dirty old house in readiness for re-opening to the public in 1949. They, and their Eastern European staff (no English people would do such work at that time), were well settled here by 1950. They lived in the Bachelor Passage and the Cavendish Passage.
After they had been here a few years one was less likely to open a drawer and discover, as I once did, a miniature of Duchess Georgiana, a Women’s Institute programme of 1932, a bracelet given by Pauline Borghese to the Bachelor Duke to hide a crack in the marble arm of a statue of Venus and a crystal wireless set.
It was then that I began to realise the extraordinary devotion to the house which had been shown by the comptroller Mr Shimwell and his men since the family left in 1939. To the surprise of our advisors later in the 1950s, there was no dry rot, thanks to the vigilance of those years.
I remember five or six joiners, greatly charming and always ready for a chat. What they did all day I don’t know, but the clocks chimed as one on the hour, an eerie sound in the huge empty rooms. Mr Maltby was the Head House Carpenter, a most loveable character who had ‘put the house away’ in eleven days in September 1939 to make it ready for the school which was being evacuated to Chatsworth, and so he was an encyclopaedia of knowledge as to where furniture and all the rest was heaped and whence it came – he remembered where it was placed before the dormitories and classrooms took over in 1939.
The Solymossys used to tie up their heads in dusters, like Beatrix Potter’s Miss Moppet, and attack a room at a time, their whole staff working together till it was clean and then on to the next one. There was a fog of dust everywhere and by afternoon their faces were unrecognisable. They worked very hard, but the rooms remained sadly shabby. There was rationing not only of food and petrol, but everything was hedged about with regulations. You had to get a permit to spend £150, the maximum allowed in a year for repairs and redecoration irrespective of the size of house, so there was no chance of making it look better.
My father-in-law lived alternately at Churchdale and at Compton Place in Eastbourne and spent the weeks in London, and my mother-in-law always went with him. After Andrew’s elder brother, Billy Hartington, was killed in 1944 I never remember him entering the house at Chatsworth. From time to time he came to the garden, but that was all.
It was a sad place, cold, dark, empty and dirty. Even so, there was something compelling in the atmosphere and it was always an excitement to explore the shuttered rooms, but the spirit of the place had gone and only an incurable optimist could guess it would ever return.
On 26 November 1950 my father-in-law died suddenly while at his favourite occupation of chopping wood in the garden at Compton Place. Andrew was in Australia at the time. He came home to the sadness of losing his father and to worries over the death duties that affected the lives of so many connected to Chatsworth as well as the immediate family. 1950 was not a cheerful year for this place.
The Olden Days Brought Up To Date…And Now
My sisters and I were brought up close to the land. We knew it from the sharp end – trying to augment our meagre pocket money by keeping hens and goats and selling their produce to our long-suffering mother. She had a real chicken farm whose slender profit paid our governess. Only the soft-shelled and cracked eggs came into the kitchen and Nancy use
d to say the only chickens we had to eat were the ones that died. Not quite true, but – oh, what would the Health Police make of that? I expect there is a law against children keeping chickens now, but those were the days of freedom before the office wallahs spent happy hours thinking of ways to stop us doing anything we fancy.
A rule invented in the early 1930s was the tuberculin testing of cows. My mother had a herd of Guernseys that produced superb milk, cream and butter for the house as well as for sale. She had a deep mistrust of anything scientific, including doctors. When she was told that three cows had reacted to the test she hurried off to the cowshed. As always in such cases, they were the best-looking animals in the herd. ‘What, get rid of those beautiful creatures? Certainly not. The children can have the milk.’ And have it we did, with no ill-effects.
Forty years passed and in the 1970s the Environment was invented. At Chatsworth, we began to get letters from teachers who had brought their pupils round the house and wanted to take them on to the surrounding land to learn how it is used. Reading their questions and comments brought home to me that what I knew so intimately when I was young is a closed book to most children now.
Ignorance has escalated as ‘family farms’, with their mixed livestock, have all but disappeared. Animals and birds are shut away in buildings and all people see as they dash along the roads are some Friesian cows, a few sheep and unknown crops, fenced off in fields where humans are not welcome.
All in One Basket Page 6