Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  With so many children and bench seating, we were able to get nearly a hundred extra bodies into each performance, but so great was the demand for tickets that we could have sold out each performance twice over. It was an enormous success, loved by the audience of all ages. We had a children’s choir from a Fife school, dressed as angels, to sing the lovely lullaby chorus that ended the first act, and many eyes in the audience were wet. I decided that we must revive Hansel and Gretel for Christmas the next year to accommodate those who had been unable to get a seat and those would want to come back. Colclough’s set, made out of materials obtained from Jim Fraser, was a marvel of imaginative creation, and I do not think it cost even ten pounds. There were many grumbles coming from the Arts Council in Edinburgh. We had ignored their directive not to have a Christmas production and had made it work at a profit to ourselves, with the additional boon of excellent press reviews. Our ingenuity in doing things on a shoestring did not make us popular, because it showed up other organizations who were more conventional and bureaucratic. I was lucky in having Jim Fraser to contribute so much, materials as well as cash, and an active committee that did so many things in their own time and with their own money, happy to be part of a success story that was much talked about. I realized, too, the enormous advantage of owning your own premises, where, if you wanted, you could rehearse all night, as Ande Anderson in particular liked to do, and being so remote that there were no neighbours to complain. We were looking forward to the next step: a new building in which we could do so much more. Then we would be in reality what we were often called, a Scottish Glyndebourne. I was determined however that Ledlanet would never have the snobbery of Glyndebourne. We did encourage our audiences to dress up, and I always did myself, usually in a kilt, but that was because I knew people enjoyed doing so: it made the evening more festive. But no one ever felt uncomfortable because they were not in a dinner jacket.

  I did have one awkward moment. David Nicholson, our first flute, was also Father of the Chapel, the spokesman for the Musicians’ Union. One day, just before a performance – I think it was Alceste – he said that the orchestra wanted to talk to me, and I joined them in the dining room, which was their green room. Then David said that they were entitled, aside from their normal union rates of pay, to full expenses calculated as from where they lived to the nearest station, which was Perth, considerably to the north of Ledlanet, and from there the taxi fare. As they usually piled five into a mini with their instruments and shared the petrol for the thirty miles from Edinburgh and forty-four from Glasgow, and one of them lived only two miles away, I thought this was very unfair and said so. David, speaking for the eighteen people in the room, told me that they had to insist on the union expenses and they would not play that night for the audience, already sitting in their seats a few yards away, unless I agreed. Sweating, I said, “I have to agree, but this may well be the last straw that closes us down, and that won’t help you either.”

  “You agree then,” said David.

  “Well, yes. I said so.”

  “Good. Now we’re going to give the money back to you as a donation.”

  The point of the whole exercise was to satisfy the union, but even more to use us against other organizations whose circumstances were much better than ours, but who constantly complained that we were getting away with what they couldn’t. They had put me through the wringer first, and then made their gesture. Our programmes always listed our donors, so I put their individual names in our programmes from then on, which was appreciated, as it was not expected.

  The various theatrical bodies in Scotland would meet about three times a year, and during the Sixties they formed a Federation of Scottish Theatres. We would meet in the towns where the theatres, mostly repertories, were located. The various musical organizations would also meet, but always in Edinburgh, and I belonged to both. Joint problems were discussed, co-operations investigated and friendships made. We all visited each other’s performances when we could find the time. Scotland is not a big country culturally, in spite of its big land area, and those who did something in the arts found it very useful to keep in touch and support each other, because there was still a deeply ingrained Calvinist puritanism that was suspicious of them, and a section of the population that considered the arts a waste of money that should go on other things.

  I had long admired the German theatrical organizations that had trade-union support, which encouraged people who work together to go in groups to the theatre and the opera, and I suggested that we might invite a representative of the Freie Volksbühne to come from Berlin to tell us how they functioned. A representative duly came to our meeting in the Byre Theatre in St Andrews, and at his own expense. The chairman was Alex Patterson, who managed the Byre, a worthy man, but with a rather unbending Scottish dourness and not much imagination. I had expected that we would listen to our guest and question him, and that our two-hour meeting would be devoted to nothing else. But Alex had prepared an agenda where the Freie Volksbühne was the third or fourth item, and after only a few minutes he wanted to move on to whatever came next. I protested that the man had come all the way from Berlin and deserved at least an hour of our time, but got nowhere and felt very embarrassed.

  During 1973 I was elected chairman, and a meeting was held at Ledlanet. I made sure everyone had a good lunch and invited those who could to stay for the performance that evening. Giles Havergal, director of the Glasgow Citizens Theatre, was very funny, because Joan Knight from Perth Theatre, the retiring Chair, had been very insistent he attend. “One can miss a few things in the theatre, but meetings never!” he intoned, pulling his eyelids. It was that day that I proposed that we produce a monthly calendar of all arts events going on in Scotland to be distributed around public places, hotels and wherever people could see them. Some time later this actually happened.

  The musical meetings were chaired for some years by John Noble, who never missed an opportunity of voicing his dislike of Wagner. As Peter Hemmings, general manager of Scottish Opera, programmed as much Wagner as possible, and put on the first Ring Cycle to be performed in Scotland, there was always some contention at the meetings. When Noble died, John Rankin, a retired director of the Bank of Scotland, replaced him, and things went on in exactly the same way.

  One person who gave me much support at Ledlanet was Kenneth Ireland. He was the director of the Pitlochry Festival Theatre, a martinet with a heart of gold whose main defect was an ego and a vanity of which I am sure he was unaware, although it was obvious enough to everyone who met him. Pitlochry put on five plays every year during a two-month summer season in what was at first a canvas-covered building, though the festival later moved into a permanent one. The seasons eventually became longer to cover the whole tourist season. Plays were added one by one as the summer progressed until during the last month it was possible to stay for five days and see a different play each night. The repertory would vary from Victorian melodramas and the London hits of a few years earlier to an occasional play by a contemporary English, Scottish or European playwright, and I did manage to sell Kenneth a few of the plays I was publishing. With time, the repertoire became more ambitious, and usually there was one play in a season that offered the audience – which was not a highbrow one in any sense – some challenge. Kenneth Ireland gave me much good practical advice and always insisted on paying for his ticket at Ledlanet and for whatever he consumed, because he knew we needed every penny. He was originally an accountant, and he ran his theatre with competence and efficiency, working both staff and actors very hard. But he made some enemies and was eventually deposed by a new chairman he had brought in, who wanted to exercise power himself. Afterwards, everything soon became slacker. Ireland could not believe what was happening to him, had a stroke and thereafter retired to Edinburgh, becoming very reclusive. His contribution to Scottish culture is much underrated.

  After Idomeneo, I had planned to revive Hansel and Gretel and had planned a num
ber of concerts for the Christmas season, starting with Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers. Then came the big shock. Bettina had asked if a friend of hers could visit Ledlanet. I saw no objection, and she looked all over the house. She was an American lawyer who Bettina had sent to make trouble. She subsequently wrote a report, for which she was in no way qualified – but that did not matter – on the fire hazards of the house. We knew there were certain things that needed doing, but the regulations in question were designed for much larger theatrical spaces, not for a country house with several exits and large windows giving onto the ground outside from the room surrounding the hall where the audience sat. As we expected work to start on a new building the following year, we did not want to spend money on renovations that would be out of date in a short time. The report was sent to the Scottish Arts Council, the fire authorities, to the County Clerk, to the local MP and several other bodies. One day, a man came with a summons that revoked our licence to give performances, and all attempts to do something to reverse it were useless.

  I cancelled the Christmas season except for the Monteverdi Vespers and a carol concert, which were given in Kinross Town Hall, and arranged on those two nights for the Green Hotel nearby to cater for our audience after the concerts. This was at the time of the big coal miners’ strike, which was crippling the country, and electricity could only be used three days a week for heating. The hall was heated for the Vespers in the evening, but not for the rehearsals during the day, which made it difficult for the orchestra to play or the singers to sing in a freezing-cold room. I myself had a bad cold, and went several times to the pub to dose myself with whisky. After the performance, which was a particularly good one in spite of all the problems, I circulated around the tables at the Green Hotel, then ate and drank myself, and started to drive back to Ledlanet, five miles away. Some malicious person had told the police to follow me. As I drove off, a police car came round the bend behind me, followed me onto the main road and stopped me. I was breathalysed, then taken to the police station for a blood test. Because of my cold and the whisky, I was over the limit.

  Although we could not give performances at Ledlanet, we could hold a ball, and we had one on Hogmanay. At five minutes to midnight, a police car pulled up at the front door and a policeman handed me a summons to appear in court for drink-driving. “I didn’t want to spoil the New Year for you, so I’m giving you this during the old year,” said the police officer. I have never understood the logic of that.

  * * *

  Certain years stand out in my memory with particular pain, and 1974 was one of them. The closure of Ledlanet was a severe blow, but I was certain that I would find a way of getting it open again, and of course our plans were well advanced for the new building, but unfortunately the Gulbenkian Foundation and later Scottish Arts Council withdrew their funding support. The architects who had done the work and who had been verbally promised by Jim Fraser that they would be paid began to ask for money on account, and Jim, having become moody, put them off. He had in the meantime become the Conservative candidate for Dunfermline, where I had for a time been the prospective Liberal candidate. Both Better Books shops were now in real trouble. I had employed Paule Thévenin, previously manager of Hachette’s International shop in London, to open a big department of French books in Edinburgh, but it had developed too slowly. We were selling at French prices, much lower than any other British shop, but I was unsuccessful in breaking down the ingrained buying habits of those British institutions that bought French books. Daphne Kennedy-Fraser, a very well-meaning but unpushy woman who was on the Ledlanet board and had developed an infatuation for Leonard Friedman, which was much joked about, had previously worked at the Edinburgh University Library. The library was still buying its books from France, with long delays and paying heavy carriage charges, whereas they could have got them at French prices and no carriage charges only a few yards away. The Librarian, however, would not come to look, and Daphne was unable to persuade him to order from us.

  Paule was a lovely person, but I could not hurry her. I asked her to make up a list of the most essential titles of French literature, so that I could do a mailing, but months passed and she never finished it. Every French speaker in Edinburgh came into the bookshop to chat and gossip with Paule, but few bought anything, and they took up time when she should have been doing other things and completing the list. I had found, through Victor Herbert, a backer for the London shop who put some money in. He was Russ MacLain, an Irish American who had made money out of IOS during its boom days as an investment manager, and unlike Victor had not lost it all again. But Russ wanted some control and constantly changed my policies to make it less of an intellectual and more of a general bookshop, cutting down on stock-buying, and many of our regular customers began to go elsewhere on Charing Cross Road.

  In the February election, Jim Fraser ran for parliament. He gave some parties in his suite in the King Malcolm Hotel in the town, but didn’t receive very many votes. At the end of the month, I went skiing again in Val d’Isère, this time taking Melissa with me. I skied down a hollow at full speed in order to have the momentum to get up a steep incline on the other side, and just then a lady cut across my path. I either had to go straight into her at speed or throw myself sideways. I did the latter and badly smashed up my leg, having to be taken down in an ambulance sled. It was the first time I had ever had a serious skiing accident. The two ligaments of my left leg were seriously stretched. I could have had an operation in Val d’Isère to tighten them, a risky business, but the local doctor had a bad reputation. I decided to wait until I was back in London, and by then it was too late. I did have an operation to remove the cartilage some months later, but that did little good, and I now had a permanent bad leg that would frequently go stiff on me so that I could not walk.

  Back in Britain, now on crutches, I tackled my problems, but found my lack of mobility a big handicap. I was still trying to keep the membership of Ledlanet together, and one day I was in Glasgow, where I was trying to meet one of our more generous supporters to get a cheque from him, but it was rush hour, and every time a taxi came near someone else rushed ahead of me to catch it. When I finally caught one, it was too late: the man had left his office.

  During the time I was skiing, the Edinburgh directors of Better Books had held a meeting and decided to close the French section. Knowing little of my negotiations with French publishers, from whom we had our large stock on consignment, they had a sale, selling the French books at give-away prices and dismissing Paule. All the books could have been sent back for full credit, but we now had to pay for books we had remaindered.

  My morale was now very low. The situation was bad in London as well. I had found a new shop, right up at the top of Charing Cross Road, next door to Centre Point, and we closed the original shop and the smaller one that had held poetry and film books. A Ledlanet patron, an architect, who had occasionally been generous and for whom we had mounted a few chamber concerts in his house in the Cleish Hills across the valley, volunteered to design the new shop without charging us, but the firm of which he had been a partner sued us for the work done. Eventually I had to put the London Better Books into the hands of the receivers while I looked for new capital. I never found it, and the receivers sold the fifty-one-per-cent stake in the Scottish company to a remainder dealer called Kevin Connolly. So much for “holding companies” and what I had learnt from Professor Saitzev…

  I had also lost my right to drive for a year. On the ninth of January, I was fined in the Kinross Sheriffs Court and had to surrender my driving licence, which meant that I was now dependent on being driven to and from Ledlanet. This also meant that I spent less time there and more in the London office. I see from my opera record that I went much more to the opera in London that year than I had been able to do in the years when Ledlanet Nights was taking up so much of my time.

  The shooting parties continued, both that January and in August, when the grouse season sta
rted, but by the autumn my leg was constantly letting me down: one false step and it would seize up most painfully. I learnt, once I could abandon the crutches, to walk with great care, but I had to have frequent physiotherapy and heat treatment.

  The long calvary of being constantly summoned to court by Bettina on one pretext or another was continuing, and I felt that my solicitors were not representing me very well. On occasion, I represented myself to save money. That summer, to escape again, I went to the Bregenz Festival with Melissa to hear some music and relax from my woes.

  During the summer of 1974 I was invited to Ireland to open a literary festival at Listowel. Liam Miller of Dolmen Press, who published a quality list of Irish authors in fine collectors’ editions, had arranged the visit, and we lunched together in Dublin with the poet Thomas Kinsella, and then caught a train to our destination. I had prepared a little speech, but we were in the public library and everyone present was standing, all eyeing the tables at the side, filled with plates of canapés and bottles of wine. Nobody would want to listen to me for long, so I ditched what I had prepared, said how pleased I was to be there and let the party begin. The first person I talked to was Tom Walsh, founder and director of the Wexford Festival, and we soon became great friends. From then on, every time I went to the Festival – and after Ledlanet had closed I did not miss many – I would go to his lunchtime parties and spend time with him, eventually publishing his big book about opera under Napoleon III, Second Empire Opera.28 He was a genial man who shared my love of books and music, had an impressive library and a wonderful collection of records, and I would often meet him outside Ireland.