by Rachel Cooke
† Peter Sellers sent up Nancy – he called her Nancy Lisbon – in a sketch on his 1957 album Songs for Swingin’ Sellers, in which she was sent to interview Major Rafe Ralph, a horse dealer turned rock-star manager, at his home in Mount Street, Mayfair. The sketch was written by Frank Muir and Denis Norden, and Sellers played all the parts. With its hints about double lives, it was quite close to the bone.
* Sheila did a lot of childcare. ‘She was one of the family quite quickly,’ says Nick Werner Laurie. ‘And she was the one who was there most often.’
† In a letter to Beaverbrook at this time, Nancy also refers to needing more space, and a garden, for ‘her’ – i.e. Joan’s – children.
* This quotation is taken from Ginette’s memoir And Now It’s Sables. Ginette does not mention that Joan had also died. In fact, Joan is not mentioned anywhere in the book.
† Jacobs, who was gay, is best known as the lawyer of the Beatles and Brian Epstein. He also represented Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland and Liberace. He hanged himself in 1968.
* See The Adventures of Margery Allingham, a biography by Julia Jones.
* Of the several hundred post-war buildings listed since 1987, only a handful were designed (in fact, co-designed) by women. By 2003 there were, according to my calculations, just eight. Two were domestic houses: 3 Church Walk in Aldeburgh, Suffolk (1963–4), which was designed by H. T. and Elizabeth Cadbury-Brown, and Creekvean in Feock, Cornwall (1964–7), which was designed by Team 4 (Richard and Su Rogers, Norman and Wendy Foster). The Pilkington offices in St Helens and the Passfields Estate in Catford, London were designed by Fry, Drew and Partners (Maxwell Fry and his wife Jane Drew). The four remaining buildings, and by far the most important on such a list, were designed by Alison and Peter Smithson.
* ‘I was a real Tabitha Twitchit,’ Alison told the journalist, Valerie Grove, in 1987, ‘ . . . always losing her children.’ (Tabitha Twitchit is a Beatrix Potter character, the mother of Moppet, Mittens and Tom Kitten.)
* Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969), last director of the Bauhaus, emigrated to America in 1937, after the Nazis declared his work un-German. In the US he was appointed the head of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he designed many campus buildings, most notably Crown Hall. His other great works are the Villa Tugendhat at Brno in the Czech Republic (1930), and the Farnsworth House at Piano in Illinois (1951). Mies’s less-is-more style utilises minimal framework and the idea of free-flowing space. He was a glass and steel man, and a bona fide architectural genius.
† Alvar Aalto, the Finnish architect (1898–1976). Mrs Tittlemouse is the proud owner of a bentwood rocker that Aalto, a keen designer of chairs and stools, would have admired for its clean lines.
‡ The Villa Shodhan was built between 1951 and 1956 for Shyamubhai Shodhan, an Indian mill owner. Usually when discussing the work of Le Corbusier, the Swiss-born architect who was the Smithsons’ major influence, people talk about such things as pilotis (stilts) and plasticity, but the Villa does indeed resemble a home an animal might build, albeit on a giant scale. Side on, its rooms look like a warren or a nest – a feeling its roof garden only emphasises. Other Tittlemousian features include the ramps that lead to the main and mezzanine levels; its natural climate control system; and the connectivity of its inner spaces.
* Gordon Ryder was excused war service thanks to a climbing accident. He left his teaching post in 1948 to work with Berthold Lubetkin on the first plans for the new town of Peterlee, and later became famous as half of the Ryder & Yates partnership, designers of outstanding modernist architecture in the north-east and elsewhere.
* Before Alison’s arrival in London, Peter and Crosby, a South African emigre, enjoyed an ‘intense dialogue’ about the future of architecture. It came to an end, however, when Peter married. Afterwards, Peter said, he felt he didn’t ‘necessarily need anyone else’, but Crosby would be influential on the Smithsons’ careers and was probably more responsive than his peers when it came to the idea of a female architect. He had begun his career in the office of Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, a place he described as ‘a hopeful, laughing place, a nest of eaglets’. Drew (190–96) was so determinedly feminist that in the early years of her practice, when Fry was on overseas service with the Royal Engineers, she only employed women. In 1953 Crosby became technical editor of Architectural Design under Monica Pidgeon. Pidgeon’s appointment as editor in 1946 had made the magazine’s owners so nervous they insisted that male names – Erno Goldfinger, Denys Lasdun – sit beside hers on the masthead as consultants, the better to reassure advertisers and readers.
* I first visited Smithdon High School on a trip organised by the Twentieth Century Society, which campaigns to safeguard the heritage of British architecture from 1914 onwards. As our coach pulled up I was listening to a conversation between two professors of architecture, one British (let us call him Tweed), the other American (Seersucker). ‘Oh,’ said Seersucker, gazing out of the window. ‘I always forget how small it is. Gosh. I mean, it isn’t even remotely on the same scale as Mies.’ Poor Tweed was crushed.
* In the Eighties, the lower panes of each window were changed to black sandwich panels. This certainly ensures no knickers can be seen, but it also ruins the building’s careful symmetry. Smithdon was originally heated by under-floor coils, but they were slow-responding. As Pevsner explains, they ‘could not compete with the cold of the exposed N side, but roasted the greenhouse-like S classrooms when the sun shone, even in winter. A temperature gradient of up to 30 degrees C could exist in any season across the width, and the frame distorted the more.’ Conventional heating was installed in 1990–1.
* The school was photographed by Reginald Hugo de Burgh Galwey for Architectural Review and Architects’ Journal. He gave it a ‘noir’ feel, holding his camera close to the floor, the better to emphasise the height of the interior. It was also shot by the Smithsons’ friend Nigel Henderson, with the architects themselves – and Ronald Jenkins of Ove Arup and Partners (the building’s engineer) – arranged in and around it. These photographs anticipate the album covers of the Sixties. Photographs were vital to architects in post-war Britain because it was so difficult to travel. Peter Smithson first encountered the work of Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology Campus – Smithdon High School’s chief influence – in Architectural Journal in 1946, ‘an act of publication that completely changed my life’.
† Alison was not shy when it came to proclaiming the building’s greatness. On a trip to see the school with the architect Trevor Dannatt, she claimed, ‘There’s been nothing like it since Inigo Jones.’ John Winter, another distinguished architect of the period, told me: ‘She used to say: “We’re the best architects in the world.” It wasn’t very English at all.’
* The general public thought the Skylon and the Dome of Discovery terribly exciting and modern, but most young architects were rather less impressed. Peter Smithson disliked its ‘dowdy English jokiness . . . [the work of] Punch cartoonists made solid’. Trevor Dannatt says: ‘As young bloods of a Corbusian persuasion, we were critical. We felt it was full of whimsy. I liked the Lansbury Estate, but even at the time, we thought it was retro.’ (The Lansbury Estate was, and still is, to be found at Poplar in the East End; it was built on a bomb site and includes Britain’s first purpose-built pedestrianised shopping area, Chrisp Street Market.)
* As Jonathan Meades points out, Banham had an embarrassing fondness for ‘both beardie hep-cat jazz talk and after-dinner speaker’s bumptious archaisms, hath wrought, etc’. Incidentally, I agree with Meades when he argues that, had Banham not written his essay, or had he at least dreamt up a less loaded-sounding term for this new aesthetic than Brutalism, ‘the fate of buildings in this idiom might have been happier, for their opponents . . . would not have had the ammunition of what seems like a nomenclatural admission of culpable aggression’. Banham went on to devote an entire book to the New Brutalism. Don’t, whatever you do, try reading it.
* They spent a year working on a design for Coventry. Their design had a can-tilevered concrete shell roof, resembling a giant clam – but the moderators chose instead Basil Spence’s more traditional basilica. Peter later dismissed Graham Sutherland’s altar tapestry and John Piper’s window – both commissioned by Spence – as ‘Festival of Britain trivia’, though he never saw either of them in the flesh. In their designs for Sheffield University, the Smithsons put lecture halls away from faculty buildings and linked them with a raised walkway, a feature that would become commonplace in British universities in the Sixties. The idea of ‘streets in the sky’, inspired by Nigel Henderson’s photographs of the East End, first became reality at Park Hill in Sheffield (Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, 1957–61).
* The book, published in 1983, was called AS in DS: An Eye on the Road and was shaped like a DS. Roland Barthes wrote an ode to the Citroen DS in his 1957 book, Mythologies: ‘I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.’
† Alison once threw a glass of red wine over the architect James Stirling when he poked fun at one outfit by unrolling its exaggerated collar and tying it on top of her head. After her death some of her clothes were donated to the Fashion Museum, Bath, by her daughter Soraya. Among the items in this collection is Mary Quant’s famous hessian pinafore; two brightly coloured harlequin-style unitards (these were much clearly much worn; their heels have even been darned); a silver dress with cut-outs in the torso, à la Bodymap; and a silver polyurethane trouser suit with matching boots. Not bad for a mother of three.
* In the former camp was Brendan Behan, who visited Leeds and ‘saw, with interest as a former slum dweller and building worker, the beautiful flats at Quarry Hill estate’. In the latter was John Betjeman, a founding member of the Victorian Society, who spoke out against the proposed demolition of the City of London’s ‘impressive, vast and exquisitely detailed’ Coal Exchange to make way for the widening of Lower Thames Street.
* ‘Pop art,’ he wrote, ‘is Popular (designed for a Mass Audience), Transient (short-term solution), Expendable (easily forgotten, Low Cost, Mass Produced, Young (aimed at youth), Wicked, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big Business.’
* How did the Sugdens whizzy modern house go down with friends and family? ‘It’s nobbut a West Riding weaving shed,’ said Derek’s father-in-law, a Yorkshireman. ‘ It’s the ugliest house you’ve ever seen!’ said his mother-in-law.
* Here is Simon Smithson, now a distinguished architect himself, on life with his parents: ‘We would come back from school, poke our noses round the door of the studio and then go upstairs and make ourselves some toast. At 6.45 they would come up and make dinner, and afterwards they would read or go back to work. Up until I was about eleven there was a level of ignorance [on my part]. After that, it was traumatic because they were wildly different to other parents: the food we ate, the fact we didn’t get a telly until very late, even the fact we had a dishwasher and central heating. They were architecturally politicised: they believed in the idea that architecture could improve society. So they sent me to Holland Park, the first custom-built comprehensive [designed by Leslie Martin for the LCC, Holland Park opened in 1958]. For them, it must have been a pleasure to go there. But I was very marked by it, aesthetically and culturally. It was chaos, and I was bullied. All my neighbourhood friends went to public school. Your objective [when young] is to be normal. You become very conscious of the differences. Only when you’re older do you say: “That was amazing.”‘
* Her daughter Samantha now uses another of these red boxes as a drinks cabinet. Samantha also owns two of Alison’s sculptures: a world made entirely of coral; and an island crafted from a tree stump.
† Simon Smithson: ‘I don’t know how they kept going, emotionally. [Alison] was enormously confident about her own abilities. But going through long periods without work, you saw occasional bouts of crisis – though she had a game face because it was important not to show the chink in your armour.’
* Access to the flats in Corb’s monsterwork is provided by a dark, internal corridor: fine for the sunny Mediterranean, but not so great for gloomy Blighty.
* In 2009, English Heritage ignored the advice of its commissioners and refused to recommend such a proposal. The then culture secretary also issued a certificate of immunity, which means it cannot be considered for listing again until 2014.
* Walter’s garden does rather lend itself to Agatha Christie-style fantasies. But there is also something elemental about the battle of the Fishes; a Freudian would say they were about rather more than mere taste. In We Made a Garden, Margery compares plants to babies – ‘they know when an amateur is handling them’ – and described how she would look after ailing specimens out of sight of Walter, knowing that otherwise he would pull them up: ‘Often I would go out and find a row of sick-looking plants laid out like a lot of dead rats.’ Walter had two daughters from his first marriage, but Margery was childless.
* This was one of Lloyd George’s several efforts to neutralise Northcliffe, whose newspapers were then so powerful they could bring down governments. Northcliffe was agreeable because, like the prime minister, he believed it was vital that the US join the war on the side of the Allies; he also hoped to ensure that the supply of munitions and goods from America would be stepped up.
* To give just one example: on 7 May 1915 the Lusitania, a ship that had briefly been the largest passenger ship in the world, was sunk by a U-boat with the loss of 1195 lives.
* Northcliffe had objected to Fish’s decision – made at the behest of the Newspaper Proprietors Association – to cut the wages of newspaper compositors. He then wrote a piece in the Mail about this, in which he referred to Walter as ‘the mysterious Mr Fish’ and complained that he had not been informed of the decision, which would involve the ‘welfare of hundreds of families’. He also noted that Walter was young, and had not yet travelled much. It was these remarks that prompted Walter to sue. In the end, egos were soothed, the suit was dropped and Fish remained in his job until 1930.
* Frieda, incidentally, was married to the proprietor of El Vino, the legendary Fleet Street watering hole.
* ‘Knew it was something you didn’t do . . .’ Does this refer to their affair? I don’t know, but I can’t help but wonder.
† They saw the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard, the home of the eighteenth-century botanist John Bartram in Philadelphia, the Thomas Jefferson gardens at Monticello, Virginia and many more. She was also introduced to the work of Beatrix Farrand, a niece of Edith Wharton, through a visit to the garden at Dunbarton Oaks in Washington. Margery had not realised before how much English gardens had been Americanised: she was very struck by the fact that the mop-headed crimson bergamot that grew so casually at East Lambrook had once provided acampfire brew for the Oswego; by the fact that the forebears of her beloved asters grew wild in parts of the US.
* Margery describes these social changes vividly in We Made a Garden. When she and Walter first bought their house, the pantry window was frosted so no one could see the maid washing up. ‘It never occurred to us, the architect or the builder how dull it was for the poor girl to be shut off like that. When the war came and I spent hours at the sink, I adopted my sister’s suggestion and had clear glass put in that window.’
* The dig for victory. People missed their flowers almost as passionately as they missed oranges, sugar and bacon. When the government banned
the movement of flowers by rail in 1943, there was even an outbreak of smuggling. According to Tim Richardson, in English Gardens in the Twentieth Century, flowers were transported in suitcases and even coffins; and cauliflowers had their hearts ripped out, after which they were filled with anemones.
* Johnston, an American by birth, was later one of Margery’s many correspondents.
* In 1968, Perry was the first woman to join the RHS Council. As Catherine Horwood points out in Gardening Women, even in the late Sixties, when women were winning many prestigious RHS medals, the concept of female representation on its council continued to be controversial. The subject was raised at its AGM and members were told that ‘at present’ the available women did not have ‘as useful experience’ as the available men. When Enid Bagnold, the author of National Velvet, wrote to The Times about this, saying Gertrude Jekyll would be rolling in her grave, Lord Aberconway, the president of the RHS, described the ensuing fuss as ‘a little storm in ladies’ teacups’. Even now, the RHS has a tendency to be male-dominated: in 2011, for instance, the garden judges at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show were all men.