by John Pearson
So it was that when James Ramsden, chairman of the London Clinic, introduced him to the distinguished-looking fellow-patient who was recovering from an operation, he knew exactly who he was and felt honoured to be meeting him.
Sir George ‘Gubby’ Allen was one of the grandest of the grand old men of English cricket. The son of a former Police Commissioner, educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, he was one of the last of the great amateur all-rounders. He captained England against Australia in 1936, and is remembered for refusing to indulge in Douglas Jardine’s ruthless ‘bodyline bowling’ against the Australians in 1932, on the grounds that it ‘wasn’t cricket’.
Gubby came to be Paul’s ideal Englishman, and after his death in 1989 someone suggested he had been like an elder brother to him.
‘More like a father,’ he answered.
It was a telling remark from someone who had missed out badly over fathers, and Gubby became something Paul had always wanted – the sort of father figure who exemplified the virtues he was needing, self-discipline and courage in particular.
For any cricket lover, election to the Marylebone Cricket Club is one of life’s golden pinnacles, taking much time and influence to reach. If one is very lucky one is put down for the MCC at birth, and might just get elected in one’s thirties. But with Gubby President of the MCC, and Gibbs’s brother, Roger, a committee member, Paul’s election proved what everybody knows – that in England most doors open in the presence of extremely large amounts of money and the right connections.
But for Paul, election to the MCC was like acceptance into Paradise. Outcast no longer, he was entitled to wear one of the marks of English upper-class acceptance, the maroon and gold MCC tie (known among cricketers as ‘rhubarb and custard’). He also had the entrée to one of the last male bastions of England, the historic Long Room in the MCC Pavilion.
Sitting beside his friend, the great Gubby Allen, in this cricketing Valhalla, Paul could participate in the ritual of the national game, watching the batsmen pass through the Long Room as they strode out to bat, following their innings from the vantage point of the pavilion, and then applauding – or sitting in commiserating silence – on their return.
The Long Room experience did more than anything to draw Paul out from the isolated world he’d lived in for so long. Old cricketers will always talk about two things – cricket and themselves – and for Paul the idea of a cricket bore was inconceivable. Before long he was numbering some of the greatest names of cricket among his friends – the fine Australian all-rounder Keith Miller, Denis Compton, and the oldest surviving English Test Match captain, R. E. S. ‘Bob’ Wyatt. These great men treated Paul with the easy camaraderie experts tend to show to wealthy seekers after truth, and his natural shyness didn’t seem to matter.
Gubby continued to be very kind to Paul, but it would be pointless to pretend there wasn’t method to his kindness. He had been a crafty bowler in his time, and as a successful stockbroker and former treasurer of the MCC he was not financially naive. Cricket was seriously underfunded, and Gubby had long had plans to improve the standards of the game and the amenities at Lord’s cricket ground.
Paul soon agreed with him, and with Gubby to advise him he felt honoured to become the self-appointed godfather of English cricket. Soon he was dispatching anonymous donations to hard-pressed county sides, paying for schools for youthful cricketers, and helping a group of Britain’s worthiest recipients – old and needy cricketers – with pensions. Then in 1986 Paul crowned his benevolence to cricket by donating £3 million for a badly needed new spectator stand at Lord’s.
His £50 million donation to the National Gallery had earned Paul his knighthood and acceptance from the British establishment, but his support of cricket brought him something different – genuine and lasting popularity. And, paradoxically, while establishing his popular appeal, cricket also endeared him to the English upper classes.
He understood the game and genuinely loved it, and, from his private box in the new stand he had paid for, he could watch its arcane rituals as he sat in splendour, offering excellent champagne to his friends among the cricketing fraternity, and alleviating the boredom of the English summer. But as far as Paul’s private future was concerned, something more important still was taking place beneath the beechwoods in a long-forgotten valley in the Chilterns.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Wormsley
Even In The lost years of Paul’s addiction, when Christopher Gibbs was making weekly visits to Cheyne Walk, he had always found his friend ‘a very clever, funny, erudite man’; and, despite the anguish and the heroin, Gibbs insists that it was during these years that Paul taught him ‘most of what I know about books and the book arts, and everything I know about the movies, and much, much else besides’.
Having known each other so extremely well for many years, they had developed much in common – interests, tastes, a shared sense of humour – so that once his friend received his monster fortune after the sale of Getty Oil, Gibbs could see, better than anyone, how this vast amount of money could be used to rescue Paul and steadily enrich his life.
One of Gibbs’s many passions is his love for the English countryside, and even when Paul had seemed stuck for ever in the London Clinic he was already planning how to introduce him to the serious pleasures of country living.
When Paul left the clinic, it was obvious that, for all the talk about that ‘fairly modest lifestyle’ he intended leading, he would not reside exclusively in his flat beside the park for ever. But Gibbs knew Paul well enough to understand that in his present mood he had no interest in buying a stately home like Sutton Place, which would have worried and constricted him. It was because of this that he had pushed him into buying Wormsley.
At the time of the purchase, Gibbs saw Wormsley as little more than ‘a dullish house in a romantic setting’, but he could also see how something extraordinary could be made of it. The ‘romantic setting’ could become the ideal background for what he was envisaging for Paul, a place so perfect that it would satisfy his every need and whim and speed his recovery.
In fact the whole idea of creating such a house had been haunting Gibbs for years. He had always been deeply interested in architecture, and had become fascinated by a recurrent architectural fantasy – of an earthly paradise where its occupants could effortlessly find true happiness. In the past, the would-be paradises of the very rich have had many names – Xanadu, Shangri-La, Schifanoia, Sans Souci – but Gibbs had become particularly intrigued by an English version of this dream, that of re-creating Adam’s House in Paradise in the English countryside.
It was an idea associated with an unlikely figure who had come to fascinate both Paul and Gibbs because of his close connections with Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites – William Morris, the artist, typographer and early socialist, whose wife Rossetti was in love with.
Gibbs says that he has ‘always had a vision (which comes and goes like all things mystical) of an English paradise like the one in William Morris’s novel, News from Nowhere’. Paul was acquainted with this vision too. And here in this upland valley of the Chilterns, an area he had known since childhood, Gibbs saw how Wormsley could become a sort of rural paradise on earth. It could bring back Paul’s appetite for life, reunite him with his family, and make him happy.
Once the house was bought, a few visits were enough to make Paul equally enthusiastic, thus putting paid to his hermit life for ever.
Once started, work on Wormsley soon built up its own momentum, which would last for more than seven years, keep over a hundred men permanently employed and cost around £60 million. It would be such an extraordinary creation that, having seen it, one recent writer claimed that, ‘as the expression of one man’s taste on a grand scale, Wormsley has no equal in modern Britain’.
Even from the start it was obvious that more would be involved than just transforming ‘dullish’ Wormsley into the ‘fine country house’ Gibbs wanted for his friend. The house would
virtually need rebuilding – but, above all, Paul was concerned about housing his precious book collection. He had bought so many books by now that the bulk of them were in store in London warehouses, and he couldn’t wait to bring them all together in one building which would make a perfect library. But what was the perfect library?
The simplest solution would have been to have built an extension to the house in a style to match its eighteenth-century architecture, but as Gibbs put it, ‘It would have ended up looking like a nursing home.’ Instead he remembered seeing eighteenth-century houses in Ireland and the Scottish borders built close beside much older castles. A castle would also offer just the touch of fantasy that Wormsley needed, and someone suggested building it from local flint. No one had built a flint castle in England since the Normans, but Paul agreed to it.
He also wanted the most up-to-date modern cinema, along with unobtrusive garages, a nuclear-bombproof shelter, an indoor swimming-pool, a deer park and a four-acre lake. Wormsley had no lake, but Gibbs believed that any proper country house just had to have one. So an artificial lake would have to be created. And since there was no water for it, boreholes would have to be sunk and water pumped from depths of over 400 feet through the chalk to fill it.
The 1,500 acres of beechwood also needed careful reforestation. The fields required hedging, as the estate had been terribly neglected and Paul had set his heart on having a herd of his favourite long-horned old English cattle at Wormsley. But the first priority was to put the house and cottages in order. Paul desired a centre for his family, for now that relations with them were improving, he was already picturing himself with his children staying on the estate. The picturesque New Gardens Cottage was needed urgently for young Paul’s visit in December, which meant a rush to build a heated swimming-pool where he could continue his exercises.
For the future there still remained one all-important matter to consider – the creation of a cricket pitch, which Paul had also set his heart on. He was excited by what he’d read of the great days of English country house cricket – hot summer afternoons, white flannelled figures at the crease, and the effortless pursuit of the best game in the world. Before Wormsley was complete, it would need a perfect cricket pitch to match.
The creation of a billionaire’s Shangri-La in the Chilterns might all too easily have ended as a nightmare or a joke; for Paul, either would have been a personal disaster. It was really Gibbs who stopped this happening, thanks to the guidance he exerted and the experts he produced to work upon the project. For just as it was largely through his friends that he had helped Paul get his knighthood, so now he turned to other friends to bring his hopes for Wormsley to fruition.
With the wrong architect, the library castle could all too easily have become something from Disneyland – but Gibbs had in mind an architect he knew and trusted, Nicholas Johnston, a man with a talent for interpreting the whims of wealthy clients. Gibbs had known him even before he had made his name by designing a mock-Georgian extension to the Ian Flemings’ house near Swindon, and had grown to admire his taste and ingenuity. As Gibbs expected, Johnston got on well with Paul, and the Wormsley library is one of his most successful creations. From outside it is essentially a happy castle, living benignly with its next door neighbour, but, once inside, one sees what a sophisticated building Johnston, with his collaborator, Chester Jones, has created for its owner’s fabled book collection.
For ever since the sale of Getty Oil, Paul had been stepping up his spending on priceless books and manuscripts. Apart from buying Wormsley, this remained his one authentic self-indulgence, but even with virtually unlimited resources and an expert like Bryan Maggs to advise and buy for him, the days were over when one individual, however rich, could build a comprehensive major library. The books are simply unavailable today.
But there remain individual treasures to be bought – and Paul had been assembling a collection of what he calls ‘milestone books’ in the history of book production to enrich his library; among them a priceless twelfth-century gospel from the monastery of Ottobeuren in Germany, Flemish illuminated Books of Hours, and elaborate nineteenth-century French livres d’artiste, luxuriously printed and produced editions illustrated with original paintings by contemporary artists. The strength of the library consists in great bindings (a passion of Paul’s), English aquatint books, and wonderful examples of the private press movement.
Such books are a most recherché way of spending large amounts of money, and must have formed a very private source of pleasure to their owner. When converted into books, capital acquires a semi-sacred aura, and Johnston’s library, with its scholarly interior and carefully controlled humidity and temperature, has something of the atmosphere of a secular chapel built to serve the house beside it. On the ceiling are painted the stars in their courses as they were on the night of 7 September 1939 above the Ligurian Sea when Paul was born. When some of the treasures of the library have been brought up from the vaults and placed on display they make a splendid sight.
Once it was completed and the precious books had been reverently set in place on their barathea-covered bookshelves, Paul was soon pottering between the book-strewn sitting-room, where he habitually watched television, through the conservatory and into the leather-scented silence of his library – which soon became his favoured place for reading.
But as well as designing the library, Johnston also supervised the transformation of the run-down country mansion into an up-to-date vision of a perfect eighteenth-century country house.
Once again there was a danger of Wormsley exhibiting what Gibbs himself once called that ‘frightful uniformity of richness where everything shrieks that Mammon’s worshipped’. To avoid this happening at Wormsley, he introduced another friend whose work he trusted, the interior decorator David Mlinaric. An amiable charmer, Mlinaric is essentially a scholar who has made himself the Pope of the English classical interior – and like the Pope he tends to be infallible, as he has shown in his work for the Rothschilds at Warwick House, at the National Gallery in London, and for the British embassy in Paris.
At Wormsley the result of his extensive operations has been a very gentlemanly blend of comfort and understated opulence, together with a touch of the atmosphere you sometimes sense in great historic houses. The priceless carpets underfoot are very slightly worn. The new oak floors have been distressed artificially but as if by generations of the feet of gentry. And the furniture, mostly found by Gibbs, manages to look as if it had arrived at Wormsley over the last 250 years.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this curious period, when Wormsley and Paul Junior were being reinvented, was how effortlessly he became accepted by the English upper classes. This was something that his father had desperately wanted, having been infatuated with the English aristocracy, who were perfectly prepared to visit Sutton Place and eat his food and take his hospitality. But although intrigued by the old man and deeply fascinated by his money, the English upper classes never saw him as remotely belonging to their own subspecies of humanity.
But with Paul Junior it was different. Times had changed and his previous vices could be easily forgotten. In a way this seemed unfair, since until quite recently he had been exhibiting a much wider range of human failings than his father. But it is important to remember that while his father had become notorious for a particularly déclassé brand of meanness, none of Paul’s vices was particularly shocking to the British upper classes. Drink, drugs, marital carelessness and being beastly to one’s children are largely endemic to the English aristocracy, where they tend to be accepted on the grounds of eccentricity.
Paul had also made himself accepted through his love of cricket, which is widely taken as the purest proof of love for England. Indeed, at a time of faltering national self-confidence, there was something reassuring in the thought of this wealthy Californian taking England quite so seriously. His philanthropy also showed how genuinely he cared for his country of adoption, and there was a certain grandeur t
o his generosity. At a time when the native aristocracy had, by and large, abandoned the remotest interest in philanthropy, he was giving on a scale traditionally reserved for princes.
But another element in Paul’s acceptance lay in Wormsley. Had the house revealed that fatal touch of Mammon as Sutton Place had done, he’d not have stood a chance. But because Wormsley was so understated and romantic, with the correct class connotations in the décor and the furniture, it could not be faulted. Nor, by association, could its owner.
One must remember too that at Wormsley he was indulging in a massive exercise in pure nostalgia, and attempting what the English aristocracy had been doing since the Reformation but because of the expense can do no longer – creating a classic nobleman’s establishment in its entirety, complete with its castle, its mansion with its pillared portico, its home farm, deer park, lake and cricket pitch, together with one of the richest libraries in the country, crammed with treasures held in trust for future generations.
But the final element in Paul’s acceptance was the way that members of the royal family gave him their seal of personal approval. This had started when the Queen awarded him his KBE, but in 1987 there came a setback in his royal progress, making one realize just how delicate was his recovery.
Early that May he was due to be presented with the prestigious National Arts Collection Fund’s ‘Art Benefactor of the Year Award’ by Prince Charles at a dinner at the Dorchester. Paul had already shown that he was not averse to honours, but receiving them in public was a form of torture. On this occasion he was unable to go through with it and cried off, pleading toothache, shortly before he was due to arrive. Luckily, seventeen-year-old Tara was staying with him and, being commendably relaxed about such matters, collected the award for his father.