Each piece is hung on a special hanger inside a white bag made of a soft, smooth material called tyvek. Headdresses and accessories are on shelves. Everything is labelled: ‘Cinderella’, ‘Accessories Box’, ‘Sleeping Beauty King’, ‘Sleeping Beauty Queen’ …
Only one thing is kept on a mannequin. It’s a fat suit made for a rhine-maiden to wear in a nineties’ production of Wagner’s The Ring. The fat suits weren’t popular with the rhinemaidens because the maidens overheated – after each performance, the suits were stored off stage with buckets underneath them to collect sweat.
The tutus are kept in boxes. The ideal way to store a tutu would be on an individual mannequin moulded to the shape of the ballerina who wore it, but this is too expensive and takes up too much space, so the tutus are kept in tissue paper, in boxes. Each tutu and costume is packed in the way that is best for it.
Some are stored upside-down with the netting on top, others with the bodice on top. Each crease is carefully packed so that it’s not sharp and won’t create a fold. Some tutus take an hour to pack away. The collections team make puffs and rolls out of tissue and, once they have a big pile of them, they start to pack. They use as little tissue as possible as, over time, the tissue can stress the fabric.
The Sleeping Beauty dress from 1946 was packed netside-up so, when we opened the box and lifted out the tissue paper, we saw a mass of white netting, like down. The sixties’ dress was packed the right way up, with rolls of tissue paper underneath the bodice and tissue packed into the bust.
The tutus are packed two to a box. Beneath the sixties’ dress is another of Fonteyn’s dresses, the ‘Rose Adagio’ dress, and beneath her original 1946 dress is a tutu she wore to dance Odette in Swan Lake.
After we had put the beautiful Fonteyn tutus back to bed, we had a look at two ballet shoes. One was Margot Fonteyn’s, signed in her hand, kept in its original ‘Freed’ box. The other, much smaller slipper belonged to Ninette de Valois, the founder of The Royal Ballet. She danced in the shoes in the 1920s and later gave them to Fonteyn, as a gift, writing inside ‘Margot with love, Ninette de Valois 1954’.
We packed those away, in Judith’s special way – she can tell if anyone has been in her shoe boxes, as no one folds tissue in quite the same way.
Beside the shoes was a clothes rail with three costumes hanging on it. Judith took hold of one. ‘The greatest costume in here, for me, is this one,’ she said, and she unzipped a white bag to reveal a dark green chiffon dress. ‘It’s the dress Margot Fonteyn wore to dance Ondine in 1958.’ It was the first ballet Judith ever saw. Ondine, the sea goddess, first appears on stage shimmering in a fountain, looking like water. ‘I sat with my mother, up in the gods, and when Margot Fonteyn took the stage my mother dug me in the ribs – “Look! There she is!” I said, “No, that’s not her, that’s the light.” I’ll never forget that moment. Imagine the effect on an eight year old.’
Many years later, when Judith began working as the conservator of costumes at the Royal Opera House, she was handed a box. ‘I lifted the lid and I burst into tears,’ she told me. ‘It looked just like a piece of seaweed, but I knew it was the dress.’ The green slip is now in storage. ‘It keeps me happy,’ says Judith.
The other two costumes on the rail beside the green Ondine slip were a tiny-waisted waistcoat belonging to Nureyev – who so often danced with Fonteyn – and a gown worn by Doreen Wells when she danced the lead role in the sixties’ production of La Fille Mal Gardée.
I loved seeing those, because La Fille Mal Gardée was my first ballet, the one I remember seeing with my mum at the Royal Opera House.
[Dame Margot Fonteyn (1919–91)]
Margot Fonteyn dances ‘The Vision Scene’, in The Sleeping Beauty when the Lilac Fairy shows a handsome prince a vision of Princess Aurora.
[The tutu]
Margot Fonteyn danced ‘The Vision Scene’ hundreds of times in the pale blue, Lurex tutu, now kept carefully wrapped in tissue in the Royal Opera House’s historic costumes store.
[Margot Fonteyn’s tutu]
This beautiful, blue tutu has a bouncy silk net. The bodice is carefully decorated with hand drawn shapes and stitched on cord. It must have danced in the light as she moved.
ON THE DAY I VISITED, the club had just hosted the Olympics and was filled with workmen taking down the London 2012 multi-coloured signs and reinstating the traditional purple and green colours of Wimbledon. The museum itself was closed, but Honor Godfrey, curator of the museum took me behind the scenes. In the club’s museum stores are about 450 plans drawn up by architect Stanley Peach, who designed Centre Court, which opened in 1922.
Only two of the plans have been framed. The most striking is one from April 1921, which has been drawn in ink and coloured with watercolour paint. This is the plan for the creation of Centre Court, its focus that small patch of grass on which dreams come true, hopes are dashed and history is made.
The plan shows the whole of Centre Court: the court in the middle is drawn in ink; the seating areas are painted in blue and brown. The court, seats and all, is in the shape of a dodecagon – that’s with 12 equal sides – with entrances to the stands from five halls around it.
On the plan, to the east of the court is the tea lawn terrace, which runs the length of the court (again including the seats) and, beyond that, the tea lawn itself. ‘Taking tea was a major thing at Wimbledon,’ said Honor, as she showed me the plan. ‘What about strawberries?’ I asked. ‘Did they have those here in the twenties?’ ‘Oh yes,’ she replied. ‘Strawberries have always been here at Wimbledon.’ Stanley Peach made sure that there would be enough room – about 46 by 17 metres – in the Centre Court tea room for all to enjoy the drink Britain would be lost without.
To the west of the court are three further courts, painted in brown. They were not built in the end because, two years later, in 1924, No. 1 Court opened on that site. ‘I particularly like this,’ said Honor, pointing to the turning circle for the grass roller. We looked really closely at the plan to make out the words written on the lawnmower’s path: ‘Roller Access Road’ and, beneath that, it says ‘1 in 8 gradient’. Stanley Peach signed the plan and was involved at every stage of the process; he was skilful and meticulous, paying great attention to even the smallest of details.
Peach was described by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) as having a ‘quiet clear voice’, a ‘sense of humour’ and a ‘wide knowledge of humanity’. He’d trained as a doctor and worked as a surveyor in the Rockies before joining an architect’s practice at the age of 24. As well as Wimbledon, he worked on conserving St Paul’s Cathedral and was part of a group that first brought electricity to homes in Westminster.
One of the things in his mind when he was working on the plans for Centre Court was to make sure that the players had the best light conditions possible throughout the day. He designed the court so that no shadow would fall on it until after 7 p.m. Another was the crowd: he put a small piece of white paper, about the size of a one-pence piece, on to the court, and made sure it could be seen from every seat in the stand. Only about a hundred seats had a view partially restricted by columns.
The other framed plan by Stanley Peach is a much smaller, coloured sketch showing the complete layout of the club. According to Peach’s original design, Centre Court was not in the centre but in the far north of the ground. That is because it was first named Centre Court at its original location in nearby Worple Road, and the name stuck.
Honor showed me the most recent map of the site, and we could see that everything Peach designed remains pretty much the same now. The big change is that the club has doubled in size since 1921, and Centre Court is now the centre of the club, as the site has expanded northwards, on to what were once green playing fields. The tea lawn has been paved over, and is now the entrance you’ll walk across if you come in from Gate 4 or 5, as I did.
The plans came into the museum collection only quite recently. When the new retractable roof of Centre
Court was unveiled, the museum wanted to put on an exhibition about the history of the court, and wondered where the plans for it could be. The hundreds in the collection were unearthed in the cupboards of Stanley Peach’s architecture firm, now called Peach and Partners, and in the club surveyor’s office. The plans arrived all rolled up in tubes, some with tattered ends.
One by one, 200 blueprints and elevations, tracing cloths and photostats were taken out of their tubes, unrolled and prepared for conservation, protected by plastic covers. They are now kept in a big wooden plan chest in storage, while another 250 are yet to be conserved. The colourful Centre Court plan and the sketch of the whole of Peach’s new Wimbledon hang in the same room, mounted in their frames on racks, with other posters and paintings of and about Wimbledon.
We took a few other plans out of their drawers to get a feel for the collection. I looked at a blueprint for the committee and royal box, and for the clubhouse. This was a working drawing and showed where the kitchen, bar, press room, telephones and – most importantly – tea rooms, should go. This was Drawing 11812 – originally there must have been heaps more than now survive at the museum, plans used by contractors and carried around by Peach and the team of builders and surveyors as they built the tennis club.
I saw the less glamorous side of Centre Court, too: a drawing on tracing cloth for the gas and electricity supply. It’s quite dirty, as it was the original version used by the builders on the job. There are sketches of the iconic criss-cross balustrade and a photostat showing all the different columns used; the ground it was built on slopes, so all the columns are different heights. Now, there are only four super-columns instead. On other blueprints someone has drawn little caricatures of Mr Tennis and Mr Lawn.
When Centre Court opened it was a hit. The Architect’s Journal compared the court, with its 14,000 seats and standing spots, to a Roman amphitheatre, ‘like the Colosseum … the “arena” is simply a rectangle of vividly green turf, but it’s no less the centre of intense interest than was that other arena whose terrors provided the sport of an ancient Roman holiday.’
On day one of its opening, of course, it being England, and it being Wimbledon, it rained. People didn’t mind too much as it gave them a chance to check out the new grounds. It wasn’t until 3.30 in the afternoon that the King and Queen came into the royal box and the King banged a gong three times to open Wimbledon. The new Centre Court was revealed, in all its shadowless, smooth, green glory.
The first match began. The players were Colonel Kingscote and Mr Leslie Godfree. Mr Godfree served the first serve ever on Centre Court, and Colonel Kingscote whacked it straight into the net. Godfree pocketed the ball as a memento. His opponent’s poor start didn’t matter as he went on to win the match. The first match on the new Centre Court may have lacked the drama of some of the thousands of matches that have since been played there, but everyone was happy they’d been able to see a game at all, despite the drizzle. Due to the bad weather, only one more match was possible that day. There were a few muddy footprints on the court by sunset.
The Wimbledon museum store has plenty more treasures. There are two small storage rooms. The first one, which contains the plans, also houses paintings, postcards, greetings cards, tickets, passes, posters, sculptures and ceramics right from the early days, and up until the 2012 Olympics. There are also lots of costumes, from long white dresses and suits worn in the twenties to sexier little white dresses and men’s kit from more recent times. They’re all hanging in white bags, as if they were in a dry-cleaner’s.
Just next door to that room is the racket store. As you’d imagine, there are rows of tennis rackets, arranged chronologically, from the old wooden style, used in the 1870s and for the next hundred years, to the modern graphite rackets. Above the wooden rackets are lots of wooden presses, which the rackets were put away in. Players kept their rackets for years back then – they’d never have imagined that, in the future, players would swap rackets several times a match. It was interesting to see the moment graphite rackets arrived in the seventies represented in the museum’s collection. Some people used them right away, and others, like McEnroe, used wooden ones until the 1980s. There are some of his in the row, mixed in with the graphite.
Federer, Cash, Henman, Agassi – all of them have donated their rackets to the collection. Opposite them all, on the floor, is the biggest racket in the world, made for a shop promotion, and the biggest tennis ball. There was a sign on the shelf in the racket store that I liked, as it seemed so typically English – it looks like a big green table tennis bat, and it reads ‘End of Queue’. ‘There’s always a queue at Wimbledon,’ said Honor.
Honor pointed out four rackets that were used for the friendly mixed doubles match played on 17 May 2009, when Centre Court’s roof was first used. After years of pondering over and then planning the roof, finally the Wimbledon organizers had an ally against the haphazard English summer. Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf took on Tim Henman and Kim Clijsters; the winners were Agassi and Graf, the husband and wife team.
It takes about half an hour to close the roof, and to air condition the space inside it – so there isn’t too much condensation, which would make the grass all slippery – so the matches are played in the open whenever possible.
The museum doesn’t have the architect’s plans for the roof, because (of course) they are digital and stored on computer hard drives. In the future, the museum might ask for some printouts for the collection. They’re adding to it all the time. ‘It’s easier to collect things at the time,’ Honor said. I visited during the 2012 Olympics, just after Andy Murray had won his gold medal. He donated the kit he was wearing during the match to the museum. ‘Did you just walk up to Andy Murray and say, “Can I have your clothes?”’ I asked. ‘Something like that …’ laughed Honor.
[Stanley Peach’s Centre Court design]
The most striking of plans is from April 1921, drawn in ink and coloured with watercolours.
[Centre Court]
Peach made sure the players had the best light conditions for play and that no shadow would fall on Centre Court until after 7 p.m.
[The racket store]
I saw rows of tennis rackets, arranged chronologically, according to when they were used. Modern graphite rackets replaced wooden rackets from the 1970s, but not everyone took to them right away. McEnroe used wooden ones until the 1980s.
[Centre Court’s roof]
It takes about half an hour to close the roof and air condition the space inside it.
ALL OVER THE WORLD, ON New Year’s Eve, we humans like to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’: ‘For auld lang syne, my dear, for auld lang syne, we’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet, for auld lang syne.’ Which is a bit strange, considering how few of us know what ‘auld lang syne’ means (‘old times’ sake’), or why we cross our arms and hold hands with our neighbour while singing. Still, it is a fun thing to do and makes everyone glow with bittersweet hope and nostalgia.
The tradition all came about thanks to a piece of paper that is two centuries old and now lives in a black, combination-lock briefcase in a secret location within the Mitchell Library in Glasgow. Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns, took this piece of paper, laid it out on his writing desk and wrote the words to ‘Auld Lang Syne’ upon it in brown ink, using a sharpened feather. You can even see where Burns stopped to dip the quill’s nib into his inkwell, as the writing is inkier and stronger in parts.
I enjoyed looking closely at the poet’s surprisingly large and neat handwriting and seeing the words he immortalized on paper. As with so many of the objects I have seen in basements and cupboards, this piece of paper transported me back in time, to the moment of its creation. Although the words to the song have been set free into the world, it’s nice to know the original is carefully stored in the Mitchell Library. It’s best that the paper is kept out of the light, because it is already yellowed, and so fragile it looks as if it might turn into a puff of smoke if you were to blow on it. I couldn�
��t look at it without singing the words silently in my head.
The song spread across the world as the Scottish people did; they took their traditional song with them, and it caught on. The curators of the library told me that, in Scotland, the song is sung at the end of all kinds of events and celebrations, not just at the end of the year.
‘Auld Lang Syne’ really only became the global New Year’s anthem because of a Canadian singer called Guy Lombardo. For decades (1929–59), Lombardo performed a live broadcast from the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City on New Year’s Eve. Each year, his orchestra, the Royal Canadians, would play ‘Auld Lang Syne’ as part of the celebration. It was thanks to radio, then television, that the song became a real ‘tradition’.
Nowadays, in Times Square, New York, New Year is celebrated by thousands of people singing ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon, then comes a countdown to midnight itself, and a recording of Lombardo and the Royal Canadians playing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ brings in the New Year. The song that always follows is ‘New York, New York’ by Frank Sinatra.
The Scottish song has been interpreted differently in other parts of the world. The tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ is used as a graduation and funeral song in Taiwan. In Japan it is played to usher customers out of shops which are closing for the day; there, the tune is called ‘Glow of a Firefly’ and uses the same melody but different lyrics. Until 1972, ‘Auld Lang Syne’ was the national anthem of the Maldives. The song has also been played when the Union Jack is lowered when a British colony becomes independent, and is popular in Russia, where studying Robert Burns’s work is part of the curriculum in schools. In India, the melody was the inspiration for a song ‘Purano shei diner kotha’ (‘Memories of the Good Old Days’), by the great Bengali poet and writer Rabindranath Tagore, who also wrote the Indian national anthem, ‘Jana Gana Mana’, sung by children across India every morning at school.
The Secret Museum Page 30