November: Drawn in Kensington - Linley Sambourne House

Linley Sambourne, the famous Punch cartoonist posing

Sunday, 1st November 

"I called for Anne Rosse at her uncle's house in Stafford Terrace, a house bought by her grandfather, Linley Sambourne, the  Punch cartoonist of the 1880s.  It is a period piece, untouched.  It is choc-a-bloc with art nouveau. The Morris-papered walls are plastered with old photographic groups and Sambourne drawings, the frames touching each other, weird clocks galore, stained-glass windows, Victorian walking-sticks and parasols.  Anne and I walked round the pretty back streets by Holland Park, and took a bus to the Ritz, where Michael joined us at 1 o'clock and Oliver [Messel]* at 2 o'clock.  We talked over the luncheon table till 4.  Oliver is a camouflage major in Norwich.  He has discovered Ivory's  disused Assembly Rooms, made them into his headquarters, and is redecorating them."
[*Artist and designer, brother of Lady Rosse] 

Ancestral Voices  James Lees-Milne 1942

The rich, darkly cluttered Victorian interiors of Linley and Marion Sambourne's Kensington home are  just as Lees-Milne describes, but relieved by lamps, mirrors, and the light reflecting off the glass-framed pictures and photographs covering the walls,

Two views of the Drawing Room  

© Linley Sambourne collection, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

This family home at 18 Stafford Terrace was part of the artistic life of Kensington in the 1880s, dominated by Lord Leighton in nearby Holland Park  Road.  It was preserved almost unchanged by Lady Rosse, remembering her happy childhood, and the Victorian Society, until it was passed to the local authority and opened to the public in 1980.

Linley Sambourne made a good living from his drawings for Punch, but he had to follow the editor's directions.  He wrote to James Whistler  to warn him that he would be satirised for his libel case against the critic John Ruskin, who had so strongly derided Whistler's Falling Rocket  painting.  "I am in a manner obliged to take up any subject the editor points out….I have every sympathy with you in what must be a most trying and irritating time".

Working to deadlines and aiming for a range of accurately drawn characters,  he used posed photographs as a source for figures in his cartoons, and turned one of the bathrooms into a workroom, with a marble-lined developing tank in place of the bath.

Marion Sambourne posing for a Punch cartoon drawing © RBKC Sambourne collection

He used family and servants for these photos, and professional models for artistic and nude poses;  when I first visited in the 1980s many of these were hung in the workroom;  I still remember one (maidservant or model?) of a nude young woman in profile, wearing nothing but a pair of black stockings, and looking as unconcerned as if she were just washing dishes.

As well as the stylish 'aesthetic' furnishings, the family records, photographs, diaries and correspondence were also preserved, now part of the Linley Sambourne archives;  Marion Sambourne's diaries in particular give a fascinating picture of daily life for a well-off Victorian  family and their artist friends.

and see: rbkc.gov.uk/18 Stafford Terrace;  The Holland Park Circle, Susan Dakers 

October: John Evelyn - home thoughts from abroad

Friday 1st October 1943

"A taxi motored me to Wotton House where I lunched and spent the afternoon.  Today it belongs to John Evelyn, just as it belonged to the diarist John Evelyn in the seventeenth century.

  Pen drawing of Wotton House, by Evelyn 1640.  © British Library, Evelyn Archive

It is a long rambling, untidy house.  The nucleus of it is Jacobean, and a few rich doorways of that period survive upstairs.  But the present Evelyn's grandfather spoilt the house in every conceivable way in the 1870s. In the hideous Ruskin-style library are many rare books, including some 200 of Evelyn's own; also royal seals, miniatures and nineteenth-century busts.  There are innumerable family portraits , including three of John Evelyn, of which the Kneller is the most remarkable.

John Evelyn, c.1687  by Sir Godfrey Kneller  © The Royal Society 

There is a table carved by Grinling Gibbons, whom Evelyn discovered, and an Italian ebony cabinet* in which Evelyn's manuscript diaries were found.  The army have occupied most of the house during the war.  They allowed a fire to blacken the original door cases, walls and ceiling of the dining-room.  Could Evelyn have called in Wren to design this room?.  The garden, now a wilderness, has a mound cut into terraces by Evelyn, and below it a temple on Doric columns, which he built.  All the trees are magnificent, and the beeches are said to have been planted by him."

Ancestral Voices   James Lees-Milne 

John Evelyn travelled extensively in France and Italy as a young man during the Civil War.  In his Diary he records (exhaustively) all the palaces, gardens, churches and art treasures he saw in France and the great cities of Italy:  visiting Genoa, Pisa, Lucca, Florence, Leghorn, Rome and Naples. Full of interesting insights, describing the people and customs,  he only occasionally mentions the food and weather, unless it affected his progress. He travelled by coach, on horse-back, and felucca (subject to storms) and by horse-drawn barge and boat from Bologna and Ferrara along the Po marshes to embark for Venice.  From Venice he journeyed home via Switzerland (he was ill with smallpox in Geneva) and France, where he married the English ambassador's young daughter, Mary Browne, in June 1647.  He left Paris for Calais at the end of September 1647, where he had first arrived four years before, and reached London late on 2nd October.

John Evelyn in 1648  by Robert Walker  © National Portrait Gallery

Having only just returned myself from Bologna airport, after several long days of amazing sightseeing in the Emilia-Romagna, I was struck by this poem Evelyn wrote in Naples in February 1645, well before his travels were ended.  Was he remembering the tranquil family home and its gardens at Wotton? 

"I left this Ode, …as the Non ultra of my Travells; sufficiently sated with rolling up and downe, and resolving with my selfe to be no longer an Individuum vagum, if ever I got home againe;...

Happy the man who lives content
With his own Home, & Contintent:
Those chiding streames his banks do curb
Esteemes the Ocean to his Orb;
Round which when he a Walke dos take,
Thinks t'have perform'd as much as Drake:
For other tongues he takes no thought
Then what his Nurse or Mother taught:
He's not disturb'd with the Rude Cries
Of the Procaccio's Up & Rise;
But being of his Faire possess'd
From Travelling sets up his rest:
In her soft armes no sooner hurl'd
But he enjoys another World,
Scornes Us who Travell Lands & Seas,
Thinkes there's no countries like to his:
If then at Home, such Joyes be had,
Oh, how un-wise are We, how Mad!"

Diary of  John Evelyn  edited E.S. De Beer

*I wrote about Evelyn's Italian ebony cabinet in an earlier blog (Jan 2016): see  "A Collector's Cabinet"

September: a visit to Constable country

Willy Lott's Cottage, Dedham Vale;  watercolour, grey ink   John Constable 1832  © British Museum 

Friday, 1st September
"A crisp, chilly morning, with that whiff of melancholy in the air.  Autumn is well on the way.  I would not mind if only I felt well, clear-headed and un-drugged.  Sisson* took me to Flatford Mill which the N.T. has acquired.  I love Constable, but I do not love this place.  It has been made a travesty of the totally unpretentious, rural, domestic scene of one of England's greatest painters.  Today the manor house is too picture postcardy for words.  Willy Lott's Cottage is abominably whimsy inside.  Sisson favours whitewashing or white painting all interior beams, I am glad to say. I concur with nearly all his ideas.  The Mill itself is still relatively unspoilt, and the island garden, with fat box hedges and old apple trees is full of charm.

We drove to Thorington Hall.  It has a rather neglected look, and the furniture inside -- well!  The house has had evacuees, and not been inhabited as a private house since the war, which explains much.

Thorington Hall's landmark octagonal, star-topped chimneys at Stoke-by-Nayland

Paycocke's House  elaborate carved frontage 

I left the Sissons after luncheon, and drove to Paycocke's, that hideously over-restored house in Coggeshall.  The tenants' bogus French furniture most inappropriate.  Sisson and I would like to whitewash all the harsh new brick nogging on the street elevation."

Prophesying Peace  James Lees-Milne 1944

Dedham Vale and Dedham Church  John Constable 1828 

© National Gallery of Scotland

Flatford Mill, Thorington Hall, and Paycocke's House in Coggeshall, near Colchester  were all acquired by the National Trust.  They represent the prosperity of the Stour and other  East Anglian river valleys where, like the medieval monks before them, Tudor butchers progressed from keeping  flocks of sheep to becoming wealthy cloth merchants, with river transport to major ports like Ipswich (where Cardinal Wolsey's father was a butcher-cum-grazier and merchant). By the eighteenth century cloth manufacture moved north and the cloth-fulling mills were converted to grain mills, like Flatford, where the Constable family farmed, and shipped their flour down to Pin Mill near Ipswich.

Dedham Lock and Mill   John Constable 1820  ©V&A Museum

*Marshall Sisson was an architect who lived in Shermans House in Dedham; in August the next year Lees-Milne stayed with the Sissons for the weekend:  "Sisson and I walked to Flatford Mill, where we watched the milling crowds bathing, running, jumping and enjoying themselves".  Prophesying Peace  1945  James Lees-Milne

Maybe they walked along Fen Lane, which was Constable's boyhood path from East Bergholt to school in Dedham?

Fen Lane, East Bergholt  John Constable 1817  © Tate Britain

July: Phoenix London 1944.

Saturday, 1st July

"All afternoon planes came over…….

At 6 I met James at Kings Bench Walk and we tubed to East Aldgate.  We walked down the Commercial Road to the river. God, the squalor, the desolation and the dreariness of the East End! We passed one beautiful church, burnt out, which I said must be by Vanbrugh.  J. identified it from his pocket guide-book as St. George's-in-the-East, by Hawksmoor.  The pinnacled square towers like those of All Souls gave the clue. "

St. George's-in-the-East,  1714-26, by Nicholas Hawksmoor (successor to Wren and Vanbrugh)

The church interior was destroyed by an incendiary bomb in the Blitz (and remodelled in the 1960s) but Hawksmoor's 160-foot tower and turrets survived.  This was one of his six landmark London churches; here at St George's he used his rejected designs for the tower of  St. Alfege-with-St. Peter which had been turned down by the Church Commissioners.

"We were smartly dressed underneath, but wore over our suits dirty old burberries buttoned up to the chin..  We went into a pub for a drink, and a robot [V1 or doodlebug] came over, nearer and nearer, exploding a few yards away. The pub keeper turned us out and shut the door, saying he had had enough for one day.  We wished him good luck.  'All the best,' he said.
We wandered through Wapping, to Wapping Old Stairs where Judge Jeffreys was captured trying to escape to France dressed as a sailor.  Then to the Prospect of Whitby on the water, with its rickety galleries built over the river on piles."

"We found Philip Toynbee there with a pretty little girl, a Communist.  We sat together on the gallery drinking beer and eating sandwiches, watching large boats struggle up the river, pirouette in front of us and retreat into the docks.  From here Jamesey saw his first robot .  It scurried through the clouds at a great rate and seemed to be circling and not going straight.  By 9.30 the inn was full, and a piano and a clarinet were playing hot music.  Women sang into a harsh microphone, sailors stamped, and  peroxide blondes and the worst characters of London danced like dervishes.  It was a strange, gay, operatic scene. ...
Slept in John Fowler's Anderson shelter on the top bunk, which was very luxurious, although there were as many as five of us in the shelter. A noisy night, but quieter at dawn. Incessant jokes and hoots of laughter non-stop.  In fact we laughed ourselves to sleep. Nobody woke before 10.15."

Prophesying Peace James Lees-Milne 1944

The Prospect of Whitby is one of London's oldest riverside pubs, frequented by Pepys, as well as Judge Jeffreys who lived nearby, and Thackeray, Turner, Dickens and Whistler among many.  Built in 1520, it was known as the Devil's Tavern for the smugglers and thieves it attracted. In 1777 it was renamed The Prospect, after a Whitby collier of that name which was moored nearby.

 .

Its rebuilt street facade, No. 57 Wapping Wall, E1.  The flagstone floor is its oldest part.

It would be appropriate if those hanging baskets contained fuchsias,  for the story is that in the Prospect a sailor sold an unknown plant to a nurseryman, and so the fuchsia was introduced to England.  

It was  Frenchman Charles Plumier who discovered the fuchsia in the Caribbean c. 1703, and named it after the 16th century botanist Leonhart Fuchs (this helps with the spelling as the English pronounciation has softened the 'k' sound).  Various versions mention a Captain Firth of Hammersmith and a plantsman, Mr Lee; what is confirmed is that in 1788 Kew Gardens acquired a fuchsia plant from a Captain Firth,  and the Prospect of Whitby was always a meltingpot of classes and occupations, where a sailor might have met a nurseryman, and was a source of exchanges of all kinds, for centuries here on the Thameside.

   Wappng from Rotherhithe  J.M. Whistler  c. 1861  

Images all Wikimedia Commons.

May in Norfolk: dangerous ladies

Blickling Hall, Norfolk  © National Trust

Thursday, 1st May, 1947

"It is May Day and pouring and blowing icily.  Stopped at Cawston church to gaze my fill at the fourteenth-century roof and painted panels of saints on the screen.   At Blickling made my peace with the caretakers and Miss O'Sullivan who is always nice to me. Alec* came over and had some useful suggestions for arranging furniture.  The rooms now filled do not look any more beautiful because the furniture is on the whole poor. The house was today open for the first time, and only twenty people came. So we need not have fussed ourselves."  (*Alexander Penrose)

Caves of Ice  James Lees-Milne, 1947

Blickling Hall (built 1616) was one of Lees-Milne's favourite houses, although when he visited in May 1942 the RAF were occupying the house, not without causing some damage,  and a sea of Nissen huts was in the grounds.  In 1984 he met the teenage actors who were performing a play to celebrate the National Trust's acquisition of Blickling from Philip Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian,  in 1941.  "I am apparently the only person left who remembers Lord Lothian, [Donald] Matheson and the place in pre-war days." 

Although few people would have recognised it, Blickling Hall was seen in cinemas across England in 1945 and 46 when its exterior was used to represent "Maryiot Cells", the Buckinghamshire home of scandalous "Lady Skelton".  This was Margaret Lockwood's iconic film with James Mason, The Wicked Lady, in which the heroine sheds corsets and morals and turns highwayman herself.  Audiences both sides of the Atlantic were shocked and enthralled by their favourite stars in this period drama.

Gainsborough Film Studio poster c. 1945

Publicity film still for  "The Wicked Lady" (*from a story by Magdalen King-Hall)
 with Margaret Lockwood and James Mason

A more famous and charismatic lady associated with Blickling Hall is Anne Boleyn, as it was the home of her father Sir Thomas Boleyn, and Anne is thought to have been born there (around 1504)  although at that period Blickling Hall was still a moated late-medieval manor house.

Drawing of Queen Anne by Hans Holbein, © Royal Collection

Most of the contemporary portraits of Anne were destroyed after her death, and the accuracy of later paintings is open to doubt.  This miniature portrait was in the collection of Horace Walpole, at Strawberry Hill, when it was thought to represent Queen Katharine of Aragon.

Possibly Anne Boleyn, c. 1532-3  Lucas Hornbout

© 9th Duke of Buccleuch Trust

Returning to her childhood home, Anne is believed to haunt Blickling on May 19th, the date of her execution in 1536, carrying her bloody head with her.  She is driven, it is said, in a coach with flaming headless horses and driver; meanwhile, her over-ambitious father, Thomas Boleyn, later himself executed for his political scheming,  is condemned on the same night to cross a dozen bridges before cockcrow, driving from Blickling to Wroxham, every year for a thousand years.

View of the South Front  Entrance   © National Trust

Blickling is also famous for its Library, the collection of Sir Richard Ellys, which was brought to the House in 1740.  Among its 12,500 volumes are sure to be histories of the House and Estate, its famous occupants, and its ghosts.

The Library in the Long Gallery at Blickling

© National Trust

Today the gardens at Blickling are as beautiful as the house:  

"The first sight of the entrance front from the public road is so famous and breathtaking that every passing motorist halts instinctively to take a longer look.  But the secret of the place is only discovered late in the day among the trees and flowering shrubs that stretch upwards from the east side of the house.  Never has there been a garden quite like it, not at least since the eighteenth century,…Great arches of beech and oak form choirs and aisles, and under them grow azaleas, rhododendron, magnolias and wild bluebell."  Nigel Nicolson, 1978

April: the stones of Avebury, "a more delightful indagation"

Thursday, 2nd April, 1946

"…I drove with Eardley straight to Avebury.  He took me round the Circle.  He is madly keen on Avebury and rather peevish about my lack of enthusiasm and disrespect for the ugly stones which Keiller* has dragged from the ground into the light of day.  I cannot approve of the proposal to destroy the old village inside the Circle.  I admit that the empty sections of the Circle are impressive where the terraces have been cleaned of scrub and are neatly cropped by sheep; but to remove medieval cottages and clear away all traces of habitation subsequent to the Iron Age seems to me pedantic and a distortion of historical perspective.  We walked round the Manor garden.  Eardley was bored by the house because it is not classical and is romantic. Today's fashionable distaste for the romantic in English country houses is as overemphasised as was the Edwardians' for the classical and regular.""

Ancestral Voices  James Lees-Milne, 1946

Avebury Manor  © National Trust

It was John Aubrey, writer and antiquarian, whose careful study of the Avebury henge brought it to the attention of scholars.  Later travellers like Celia Fiennes and John Evelyn would record their visits to Stonehenge, but Avebury's apparently random stones were not widely noticed or remarked upon before 1649 when Aubrey chanced upon them during a hunt;  he stopped to look more closely and caught up with the hunt later.

"The morrow after Twelfth Day Mr Charles Seymour and Sir William Button met with their pack of hounds at the Grey Wethers….
'Twas here that our game began and the chase led us at length through the village of Avebury, into the closes there: where I was wonderfully surprised at the sight of those vast stones of which I had never heard before; as also at the mighty bank and graffe [ditch] about it .  I observed in the enclosures some segments of rude circles, made with those stones, whence I concluded they had been in the old time complete.  I left my company a while, entertaining myself with a more delightful indagation [investigation]: and then (steered by the cry of hounds) overtook the company, and went with them to Kennet, where was a good hunting dinner provided."  7th January 1649 (from his Monumenta Britannica ms.)

John Aubrey, engraving by C.F. Wagstaff after a drawing by William Faithorne, c. 1666 in the Ashmolean Museum

Aubrey gave Charles II a personal tour of the Avebury stones during the King's progress to Bath in the summer of 1663, just as James I  on seeing Stonehenge in 1620 had asked his Royal architect, Inigo Jones, to research the origins of that monument.

"I brought with me a draught of it donne by memorie only; but well enough resembling it, with which his Majesty was pleased: gave me his hand to kiss, and commanded me to waite upon him at Marlborough when he went to Bath with the Queen (which was about a fortnight later) which I did: and the next day when the Court were on their journie, his Majesty left the Queen and diverted to Avebury where I showed him that stupendous antiquity with the view thereof.   He and His Royal Highness the Duke of York were well pleased."  John Aubrey

 West Kennet Avenue, Avebury

In the seventeenth century, both Stonehenge and even more so Avebury's circles were in poor condition, with their sarsen stones buried, broken and removed; at Avebury they had been incorporated into village houses and the surrounding ditches filled in.  Nevertheless, the Royal visit put these  mysterious ancient monuments on the map for wealthy educated travellers.

Salisbury Plain was "eminent for many barrow or butts that are thick all over the plaine, and this of Stoneage, that is reckoned one of the wonders of England how such prodigeous stones should be brought there; ...  the story is that none can count them twice alike, they stand confused;"  Celia Fiennes, c. 1680s

Celia Fiennes counted only 91 but John Evelyn with difficulty counted 95 in July 1654, and thought  these sarsens were brought from Avebury.  In his Diary he describes the rural landscape, "for evenness, extent, Verdure, innumerable flocks, to be one of the most delightful prospects in nature and put me in mind of the pleasant lives of the Shepherds we reade of in Romances and truer stories:"  He also  mentions the barrows and mounds in the vicinity, as "antient intrenchments, or places of burial after bloudy fights:"

Indefatigable Samuel Pepys visited both Stonehenge and Avebury in June 1668. Like his friend Evelyn  he comments on the countryside: riding "over the downes, where the life of the shepherds is, in fair weather only, pretty",  and believes the profusion of stones around easily supplied both Stonehenge and Avebury.  He is told the legend of Silbury Hill, so called from one King Seale buried there, and sees from his coach, "one place with great high stones pitched round, which, I believe, was once some particular building, in some measure like that of Stonage".  

West Kennet Long Barrow  © National Trust

Even older than Avebury and Stonehenge is the West Kennet Long Barrow, a neolithic burial chamber c. 3650 BC.  Excavations in 1955-56 found it to have been used for burials for around a thousand years, at which period the entrance had been blocked off.   I went inside with a history group on a field trip once and it was a very eerie experience which I would not really wish to repeat.

* The revival of the Avebury complex is the result of Alexander Keiller's efforts to rescue and restore the stone circles and avenues in the 1930s,  and the history of the stones and his years of work is on view in the Manor House museum.  Objects he found while excavating the stones run from very early pottery shards through Roman coins and later carvings, to a piece of a Keiller's marmalade pot from 1900, found while digging up stone 14.  However, in his process of recreating the ancient site, the buildings and history of many later centuries were swept away.  James Lees-Milne's comments on the method Keiller chose are still a matter of controversy today.

March: Art treasures in Warwickshire

Upton House, near Banbury

Friday, 1st March 1946:

"I reached Upton [House, Warwickshire] at 6.30 to stay the night with the Bearsteds.  He and Lady B. both charming, with unassuming manners of the well-bred.  Hubert Smith arrived just in time for dinner, his car having broken down.

At midnight Lord B. took me round the house. Inside there is nothing of consequence architecturally save a  few early eighteenth-century chimneypieces and a beautiful Coleshill-style staircase, rearranged by Lord B. and extended.  Morley Horder, architect, built on to the house in the 1920s.  But heavens, the contents!  There is a lot of good Chippendale-style furniture and some marvellous Chelsea china of the very best quality.  It was badly packed away during the war when the house was occupied by a bank, and some on unpacking found to be damaged.  The picture collection superb, as fine as any private collection in England.  Many of the pictures are not yet back from the Welsh caves where they were stored with the National Gallery pictures.

It is only the garden he is offering with the house, but he wishes to include all the works of art.  So does his son who is to inherit."
Caves of Ice     James Lees-Milne, 1946

Upton House from the south  Anthony Devis c. 1784  © National Trust

View of the gardens and park

Lord Bearsted and his sister Mrs Nellie Ionides* were both great art collectors, as was their father Marcus Samuel the 1st Viscount, co-founder of the Shell Oil company.    Walter Samuel Bearsted, 2nd Viscount, acquired Upton House in 1927 and began remodelling it.  The wonderful art on display  includes original paintings for Shell Oil posters by well known British artists.   Here are just two:

 Farmers Use Shell    John Armstrong  1939 

© artist's estate  (Shell Art Collection loan) 

Charwomen Use Shell    Edward Ardizonne  1938

© artist's estate (Shell Art Collection loan)

Walter Samuel Bearsted was a  trustee of the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery, and Chairman of the Whitechapel Gallery;  both he and his son Richard wanted to bequeath the family collection to the National Trust.

The range and quality of the collection, which includes works by Stubbs, Hogarth, Brueghel, Canaletto, Tiepolo, Van der Goes - the list goes on, and many more can be seen at artuk.org.  Here are just three of nearly 200 paintings, selected almost at random.  

Crossing the Ford     Thomas Gainsborough c. 1750     © National 'Trust

Young man with a Pink     Hans Holbein the Younger 1533    © National Trust

Love among the Ruins   Edward Burne-Jones* 1894  © National Trust
*Burne-Jones was a friend of Nellie Ionides' father in law, Luke Ionides, and painted his sister, her husband Basil's Aunt Aglaia.

Cecil Beaton's diary

"Friday, 30th July

...At 5.30 I went to tea with Emerald……The Princess de Polignac came in and said to Emerald, 'This charming young man came to dinner with me, and wrote me a beautiful letter.  Then, if you please, he sent me Tom Jones--but in a rare edition of two volumes of priceless value.'  This frightened me stiff for I asked myself how much that villainous Nancy would  charge me for this book.

I joined Jamesey at Rule's restaurant… I said that more people ought to keep diaries, but the trouble was that the most unscrupulous diarists were too scrupulous when it came to putting personal truths on paper. James said that Cecil [Beaton's] diary would be the chronicle of our age, that we would only live through it.  I said Eddy Sackville West kept one.  James said, 'We could not be hoisted to posterity on two spikier spikes.' "

Ancestral Voices  James Lees-Milne

Rituals of composition: the Chairman's desk

"He demanded from his underlings the strictest observance of infinitesimal minutiae.  For instance, every object on his desk had to be arranged each morning with meticulous exactitude.  The edges of the in-tray must be flush with those of the out-tray.  The silver calendar, turned for the day, two inches to the left of the clock.  Pencils, newly sharpened, and clean nibs in pen-holders.  The penwiper at right angles to the blotter, freshly filled.  Telephones and inter-communicator slightly staggered at an angle of, say, 22 degrees from the chair.  Envelope rack within easy reach without necessitating undue stretching, yet not so close that the elbow had to be unnaturally crooked.  If the softest of the three India rubbers was not found on the left-hand side of the row on the allotted tray and adjacent to the red (not blue) sealing wax, Sir Roderick's displeasure could be terrible."

Another Self   James Lees-Milne
(on the desk arrangement of Sir Roderick Jones, Chairman of Reuters)

8th November 1947

"Wrote another contribution to my N.T. Guide.  I sold 120 books for £6 to a shop in the Fulham Road, which I happened to pass by; and finished reading Coryat's Crudities.  Also went to the National Gallery to see the pictures which have been recently cleaned.  The exhibition is the ultimate vindication of cleaning.  I do not think any reasonable man could still object to it being done by an expert with the scientific care that the Gallery undoubtedly takes.   I am inclined to think that  the photographs taken after cleaning make the originals look more scraped and chalky than in fact they do.  I reached this conclusion after comparing the detailed photograph of a satyr's face in Rubens's Silenus with the painted face on the canvas."     Saturday, 8th November

Caves of Ice  James Lees-Milne

At West Wycombe Park

"Sunday 8th February

Still freezing hard and the drive desperately dangerous and slippery.  Eddy is here again, and Cecil Beaton came last night.  He is quite grey, and darts like a bird.  He is flagrantly twentyish.  He must be very successful if money-making is an indication.  I do not mean to be critical for he is an artist.  Jamesey likes him and I find him very sympathetic though a little alarming.  This morning on my return from Mass at High Wycombe I gave him an hour's typewriting lesson; and made him use all his fingers too.  He showed promise.  Towards the end we started gossiping, and then I saw how entertaining and sharp he is."

Ancestral Voices  James Lees-Milne