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Harlots, Housewives and Heroines: a 17th Century History for Girls, BBC Four.by Dr Lucy Worsley

 Harlots, Housewives and Heroines: a 17th Century History for Girls, BBC Four, review
Chris Harvey reviews the BBC documentary Harlots, Housewives and Heroines: a 17th Century History for Girls, which looks at the lives of women in Restoration England.
By Chris Harvey, 23 May 2012 in The Telegraph
Everyone’s favourite Curator at Royal Palaces, Lucy Worsley, was back on our screens in BBC Four’s Harlots, Housewives and Heroines: a 17th Century History for Girls. And not only was she striding purposefully around in a dramatic red coat, but also modelling the autumn/winter collections of the 1650s and 1660s to show us the changing fashions for women in the puritan era of Oliver Cromwell and the court of Charles II.
The Cromwell look was a heavy black uniform with no hair or flesh showing, which Worsley said made her feel “very submissive”; the Restoration look, she soon realised, was “little more than a negligee” that felt as if it could “just suddenly fall off”.
Worsley, though, was interested in the negligee wearers, spinning an unusual line on the gender politics of the time: the concept of powerful “career mistresses” as a new breed of woman, possessors of a new type of wealth and influence. She visited Althorp to show
us a wall hung with portraits of beautiful women, many of them mistresses of Charles II. The King faced them from an opposite wall, competing lock for lock for most luxurious hairstyle.
Worsley told us the stories of the already married Barbara Villiers, who bore Charles five children, and was made Duchess of Cleveland; and Louise Renée, whom the King made Duchess of Portsmouth. She also visited the site of the pad where Charles installed his most celebrated mistress, Nell Gwynn, to show us a fetchingly racy portrait.
Worsley imagined a modern equivalent: “A leading member of the Royal family acknowledging a mistress, her being a Cockney actress, her being photographed nude by Mario Testino; and circulating the images for everybody to see.” Sounded plausible to me.
Worsley’s very good at those odd little conjunctions between then and now, and engaging company, as ever. Plus she looks great in a cardie.

TV review: Harlots, Housewives and Heroines: 17th Century History for Girls
Lucy Worsley has a winning manner, but her sexed-up History for Girls is a bit lame
Zoe Williams in
The Guardian, Tuesday 22 May 2012 23.00

A fondness for dressing up … Lucy Worsley in Harlots, Housewives and Heroines: A 17th Century History for Girls. Photograph: BBC/Silver River/Lauren Jacobs
Lucy Worsley has a pert, interrogative manner, and a lot of cardigans, and a fondness that I can only think is unique in someone of her age and intelligence for putting on dressing-up clothes. Here she is as a puritan, 10 years before the fun starts, in the 1650s. She tells us Cromwell was a manic depressive, which I think is a bit rum. If you're going to posthumously diagnose someone with a mental illness, you'd at least say bipolar. The restoration of Charles II brought in a different atmosphere altogether, in which women cast off their modest flaps of ear-covering muslin and started to wear something more like a nightie, liable to fall off at any moment. "These must have been erogenous zones," says Worsley, stroking the area above her collarbones. Not exactly, love. I think if you look at the portraits, the appeal of the garment is that you can see everybody's bristols.

Here's what I imagine was the pitch for Harlots, Housewives and Heroines: 17th Century History for Girls (BBC4) – it's a new era for women in England, in which they garner unprecedented power by sleeping with the king. It's totally different from Cromwellian times, but I think Cromwell, rather than his successor, was the aberration, outlawing not just shagging around but also Christmas and baiting bears. You wouldn't conclude that the Restoration Court was a great place for bears; merely that bears enjoyed more social events than they would have done in the previous, bizarre decade. That's going to be my next pitch. 17th Century History for Bears: 1660, and you've never had it so good.

I found the intrigues unremarkable. "For the first time in history," she says of the wrangle between Charles's mistress and his wife, "it wasn't clear who'd come out on top." Sort of. Certainly, it was the first time in history since it wasn't clear who'd come out on top between Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn. "And that's another hold [Barbara Palmer] has over the king, her ability to reproduce." I don't know if you'd call this a USP.

Of course, we know these were licentious times, because Pepys recalls coming in his pants (or, as he puts it, "But here I did make myself to do la cosa by mere imagination") and Rochester writes a play called Sodom, in which he recasts the plague and the fire of London as God's punishment for the King's behaviour. "His sceptre and his … dash … are of equal length," Worsley quotes Rochester. "He's saying he's got a big one." No, no, no. The line runs on: "his sceptre and his prick are of a length/ and she may sway the one who plays with th'other." It's a metaphor for a king who governs with his dick. It really has nothing to tell us about the actual length of anything. Without wishing to be rude to the telly historian, whose manner I find winning, the thesis is lame and the exposition hobbles it further. Charles II was by no means the first king to sleep with women he wasn't married to, give them money, and listen to them; he won't be the last. If you could have extrapolated that any of these women had an impact on his kingship, then we'd be talking. But it looks from this as though all they did was squabble and gamble, and that's all the king did, too: have japes, shag around, manage not to get beheaded. Just on that last score, it probably looked like a triumph to him but, historically speaking, it was the 17th century governance equivalent of having Boris Johnson as mayor.

Oh, but there was one thing – Charles II's actual wife, Catherine of Braganza, left a lasting legacy to the women of England by introducing tea. "It changed the lives of women because now women had tea parties." Mmmm. I'm just going to leave that there.

Dr Lucy Worsley is a British historian and curator.
Worsley was born in Reading but when she was a week old went to live in Canada. Her father is a geologist and expert in glaciers and permafrost and Emeritus Professor at Reading University; her mother a consultant in educational policy and practice.
Before going to university Worsley attended St Bartholomew's School, Newbury. She graduated from New College, Oxford in 1995 with a first-class honours BA degree in Ancient and Modern History and in 2001 was awarded a D.Phil from the University of Sussex for a thesis on The Architectural Patronage of William Cavendish, first Duke of Newcastle, 1593-1676. In 2005 she was elected a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London; she was also appointed visiting professor at Kingston University. She is known for having a rhotacism (a speech impediment which makes her pronounce her r's as w's).
Worsley is Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, the independent charity looking after the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, Kensington Palace State Apartments, the Banqueting House in Whitehall and Kew Palace in Kew Gardens. She is currently overseeing the £12 million refurbishment of the Historic Royal Palaces, state apartments and gardens.
In 2011 she presented the four-part television series If Walls Could Talk exploring the history of British homes, from peasant's cottages to palaces; and the three-part series Elegance and Decadence: The Age of the Regency.
In 2012 she co-presented the three-part television series Antiques Uncovered, with antiques and collectibles expert expert Mark Hill  and (broadcast at the same time) Harlots, Housewives and Heroines, a three part series on the lives of women after the Civil War and the Restoration of Charles II .

Historian and writer Dr Lucy Worsley, currently presenting Harlots, Housewives and Heroines, about Restoration women. Photograph: Richard Saker

The death of celebrety historians is much exaggerated

Don’t write celebrety TV historians off just yet – as long as they don’t stray for their expertise.

By Richard J. Evans in The Guardian Sunday 27 May 2012

For about 15 years, history has been experiencing a popularity boom. History books now sell more than 5 million copies a year in the UK and feature regularly in the bestseller lists. You can hardly switch on your television without seeing Simon Schama, David Starkey, Niall Ferguson or their younger, often female rivals holding forth in some exotic or historic location. Natasha's Dance, Orlando Figes' study of 19-century Russian culture, was advertised on huge posters in London's tube stations. The latest volume in Dominic Sandbrook's multi-volume history of postwar Britain is prominently displayed in bookshops across the land. "History," a BBC television producer is said to have remarked, "is the new gardening."

Not surprisingly, younger academics are keen to jump on the media bandwagon, given the continuing relative decline in academic pay and the continuing absolute increase in the amount of work they are forced to do by the burgeoning audit culture; continuing cuts in teaching funding; and steep rises in student fees, leading students to make ever-increasing demands on their time. When I set out in the academic profession decades ago, nobody would have thought of using a literary agent or being trained as a television presenter. Now it's almost a matter of course for our more ambitious younger colleagues – as Sir Keith Thomas, chair of the judges of the prestigious Wolfson history prize, has recently complained.

A case in point was Amanda Foreman, whose Oxford history thesis was considered, as they all are, for publication in the respectable but little-read Oxford Historical Monographs series and, after lengthy consideration by a battery of referees, turned down. It was too late anyway: it had already appeared in print as Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire, entered the bestseller lists, and been set up for filming with Keira Knightley in the title role. Meanwhile, its young author had featured in a promotional photograph standing naked behind a pile of copies of her book large enough to avoid any serious unseemliness.

Yet the compromises Foreman had to make to reach a wide audience did not in the end seriously undermine the book's scholarship, any more than putting the notes at the end of the book instead of at the foot of the page, or using them for the discussion of academic disputes, instead of the actual text, means the end of academic respectability. Sandbrook's writings on postwar Britain, Starkey's on the Tudor monarchy, Schama's on the early modern Netherlands, and many other, similar books manage to combine popular appeal with solid scholarship. It's when they abandon the latter for the former that they get into trouble. The latest row involving Orlando Figes concerns allegations of poor scholarship, misattributions and basic factual mistakes. But this isn't a consequence of his celebrity; allegations of the same kind have been made against obscure academic historians in the past as well.

Celebrity historians are especially likely to get into trouble if they desert their own field of expertise and enter the rough-and-tumble of political debate. David Starkey aroused accusations of racism when he said on television that the summer riots of 2011 showed that white people had "become black". Historians who court controversy by being provocative are likely to get more than they bargain for. Two years ago, Niall Ferguson's much-publicised divorce drew down upon him the kind of fake moral disapproval combined with salacious and intrusive comment usually reserved for footballers or soap-opera stars. Perhaps one of the outcomes of the Leveson inquiry will be to put an end to this kind of reporting, though, unfortunately, one suspects it won't.

Does all this mean the death of the celebrity historian? Are the media and the public getting fed up with the whole phenomenon of popular history? Will we go back to the old style of television history programmes – where there was no historian to be seen, only visual images backed by an anonymous voice- over read out by an actor? Is the day of the bestselling history book and the big advance finally over?

Despite all the media controversy, there's no sign of it. History continues to have a broad popular appeal, and long may it continue to do so. Good publishers and television producers know that history works best when written or presented by a historian who really knows the subject, such as Thomas Asbridge on the Crusades or David Reynolds on postwar international summits. It's when historians leave the territory of their expertise, get things wrong, appear on Question Time, host chatshows or write newspaper columns, that they become real celebrities; and, as some of them have found out, you become a celebrity at your peril.

HHH: At Court 1/5

Remembering ... Keith Irvine.

An English Country Stylist, Unrepentant

By PENELOPE GREEN in The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com

Published: October 23, 2008

KEITH IRVINE turned 80 last week and threw himself a garage sale to celebrate. “A very elegant garage sale,” he said dryly, raising silvery eyebrows.

GREAT SCOT The decorator Keith Irvine, wearing his Graham clan tartan in his ballroom, has downsized, auctioning off 200 objects that he's collected.

A day into his ninth decade, he spent the morning moving furniture at Doyle New York, the genteel auction house on East 87th Street, in preparation for the sale of about 200 of his antiques and decorative objects, which was held yesterday. He was putting the finishing touches on the displays he had assembled for the sale; in one was a red Louis XVI-style chair he seemed particularly reluctant to part with. “I could just eat that chair,” he said sadly, patting it.

“Chippy made me do it,” he continued, referring to his wife. “She said she keeps bumping into things.”

Mr. Irvine, a Scotsman who has practiced English decorating with a theatrical flair for more than 60 years for clients like Katharine Graham, Jacqueline Onassis and Pat Buckley, has recently moved his business from Manhattan to his farmhouse in Putnam County, north of the city, and winnowed the results of a lifetime’s worth of voracious collecting. While his birthday may have marked him, as he likes to say, as “the oldest living decorator in captivity,” Mr. Irvine said he had no plans to retire, although Thomas Fleming, his business partner of nearly five decades, left the firm last year. Saddened by their parting and a year of ill health, Mr. Irvine said he is glad to be finally looking at the back of what he described as “my annus horribilis, as the Queen said.”

Nearly half a century ago, the English country house look brought fame to Parish-Hadley and other American companies, yet their versions of it were paler and a little more restrained than the originals they aspired to. It was in Mr. Irvine’s interiors, lapped with chintz, paisley throws, Staffordshire pottery, Regency chairs and armadas of pillows, that you could glimpse the real thing: rooms that were eccentric, a bit arch and oh-so-slightly frayed.

If Sister Parish, the grande dame of American decorating, created interiors that spoke softly and whispered of privilege and provenance, Mr. Irvine was after a bolder effect, and tended to work for clients who had the stomach for it.

“We all borrow from the Old World,” said the designer Mario Buatta, who once worked as Mr. Irvine’s assistant and said that Mr. Irvine taught him all he knows. “But Keith has the knack of the real Englishman. His settings are a little more dramatic, a little more idiosyncratic. He has flair.”

Mr. Irvine was born in Scotland and educated in England. He served in Southeast Asia after World War II, where he learned a few things, like how to wear a sarong and what his life’s work would be: included in one care package from his mother was the latest Vogue and a new magazine, House & Garden, which introduced him to the idea of interior decoration. (By his own account hopeless at school, Mr. Irvine is fond of saying that he was educated by Condé Nast and Warner Brothers.) He met his wife, Chippy, at the Royal College of Art in London, after which he went to work for his hero, the autocratic and imperious English decorator John Fowler.

Mr. Irvine’s first job in New York was with Sister Parish, whom he loathed. “Domineering old dictator,” he said. He lasted nine months, then set up his own business, with clients Mrs. Parish declined to work for, in 1959.

Describing his own style, Mr. Irvine said, “I like an edge of grandeur, but I like it knocked down a bit.”

He fingered an eight-foot-long petit-point bell pull given to him by Mr. Fowler. In front of it was a small chair, “a little piece of Edwardian nonsense,” Mr. Irvine said dismissively. “It’s not my period, but it adds a bit of sauce.”

It is Mr. Irvine’s opinion that decorating right now has no sauce whatsoever, the expression of a culture that’s afraid to commit. Take, for example, he said, “the modern habit of propping pictures against the wall. It’s A, sort of pretentious and B, tentative.”

He continued: “And that applies to color; they’re scared of it too. Most of the rooms today end up looking like some set piece from Crate & Barrel. I don’t mean to knock Crate & Barrel, because it’s a great resource, but you don’t have to emulate their showroom.”

Mr. Irvine loves gold-framed convex Regency mirrors, anything with a key pattern, miniature furniture, Oushak rugs “that look like they’re on their last week” and needlepointed mottos on pillows.

He frowned at a wooden bench upholstered in gold lamé. “That’s waterproof gold lamé, not really my thing,” he said. “That was a job that ended in tears.” He added that the client “sent a whole truckload of stuff back, saying, ‘I don’t want it and I’m not paying for it.’ ”

“There used to be ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “Now they have no manners and too much money.”

He stopped again at a red velvet récamier, which was freighted with a cargo of needlepoint pillows, and looked up at the Chinese painted screen behind it. Mr. Irvine said that the screen was made from painted panels and that he had found papers documenting the panels’ trip from China to a ship in Brooklyn. He used a few of the panels in the offices of the Wells Rich Greene advertising agency, which he decorated in the 1960s. He added, “When I told Mary Wells” — a principal of the agency — “she said, ‘They came from Brooklyn? Just like all of us.’ ”

Mr. Irvine said he worked for Ms. Wells until one Friday night when she phoned him to say that she had bought a house in Acapulco and to ask if he would fly down the next morning with her and take a look.

“I told her I don’t work on Saturdays,” Mr. Irvine said. “And Billy Baldwin did her next five houses.”

“I’d rather not be devoured by my clients,” he explained. “Still, it was a stupid move.”

Mr. Irvine can be balky. In the 1980s, he said he suffered a midlife crisis, which he expressed by building an addition to his early 19th-century farmhouse. The addition included a very grand ballroom, and did not include any input from his wife.

“It was very irritating,” she said in a phone interview last week. Mrs. Irvine, who has written 13 books on architecture and decorative arts, took her revenge by threatening to have an image of the new wing engraved on expensive stationery emblazoned with the words “Keith’s Erection.”

The stationery never materialized, and Mrs. Irvine persuaded her husband to cut the ballroom in half. Some of the objects they filled the addition with made their way to the sale at Doyle, including a tufted mahogany reading chair covered in an old tiger-print fabric, a fine example of Mr. Irvine’s credo that furniture should look as if “it’s just drifted into a room,” and not as if it was bought new for the job. Other pieces aren’t budging, like the watercolor of Mr. Irvine as Queen Victoria, painted by his wife.

(That tiger-print chair sold for $2,375; the Chinese screen, $12,500. Indeed, most of the objects sold for well above their estimates: the entire sale totaled $320,775, which includes a 25 percent commission paid to the auction house, and was at the high end of the auction house’s estimate of $207,145 to $329,780.)

Mr. Irvine may not be retiring, but he admitted that he is working on a roman à clef, “a polite tell-all,” he said.

It’s a murder mystery, and its working title is “I Want It All.”

Interior decorator Keith Irvine steamed into New York Harbor in 1957 and immediately embarked on designing the unique, inspired interiors that have ensured him a place at the pinnacle of his field. His designs are characterized by feeling—wit, grandeur, comfort, drama—as well as by exquisite use of color, pattern, lighting, furniture, and accessories. Born in Scotland and trained in his profession in London—notably by the decorating legend John Fowler—Irving combines old-world wisdom and new-world enthusiasm in his mostly traditional rooms and houses. The first book on his work, Keith Irvine: A Life in Decoration—written by Irvine and his wife, noted design writer Chippy Irvine—is at once illustrated autobiography, collection of work, and elucidation of design philosophy.

Irvin is known worldwide as an originator of the English country house look—a look not inherited, the decorator points out, but invented in the twentieth century. His characteristic played-down grandeur includes signature touches such as authoritative use of antiques of all eras, exquisite painted effects, rare scenic wallpaper, faded old carpets (his favorites are those that "look as though they might be in their last week"), spirited English and French chintzes, and loads of busts and books ("one can never have too many!").

Included in the book are more than twenty-five projects—including homes for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Katherine Graham, Rex and Mercia Harrison, and Joan Kennedy—illustrated with exceptional color photographs drawn from Irvine's own archive. Irvine also presents his most personal projects—those designed for his own family.

in http://www.tower.com

White Mischief 3. "The Bolter" by Frances Osborne.

Decline and fall of a flapper
Frances Osborne's The Bolter lovingly lays to rest the ghost of the eternally frivolous but diehard manhunter Idina Sackville, says Robert McCrum
Robert McCrum
The Observer, Sunday 4 May 2008

The Bolter
by Frances Osborne

At heart, The Bolter is a work of family exorcism by the great-granddaughter of a scandalous Edwardian woman, Idina Sackville. Like all such family reckonings, it contains both less, and more, than meets the eye. Perhaps nothing is more seductive than the fascinated contemplation of distant shames. In coming to terms with an exceedingly high-spirited skeleton in her ancestral cupboard, Frances Osborne also paints an enthralling portrait of upper-class English life just before, during and immediately after the Great War. 'In an age of wicked women,' writes Osborne, 'Idina pushed the bounds of behaviour to extremes.' How can we not read on?

The child of conventionally irresponsible, moneyed parents from a family dating to the Conquest, lovely, weak- chinned Idina haunted the bars and ballrooms of Edwardian London like a character in fiction. She was inseparable from a black Pekingese named Satan, cultivated an immaculate, more than slightly dangerous, image and married one of the youngest, richest and best-looking of the available millionaires a year before the Great War broke out.

After her marriage fell apart, she lived the life of a flapper until the crash of 1929 ended her revels. Twice divorced before she was 30, she fled to Kenya, the spiritual home of the damned and the beautiful. There, in a dissolute spiral of house parties, gin-fuelled country club binges and long weekends of wife- swapping, Idina became the focus of the Happy Valley set, a complicit witness to the thrilling excesses first described by James Fox in White Mischief.

Idina was, in fact, only a spectator at the 'Jock' Delves Broughton murder trial, but she was certainly close to the principals. In Kenya, her bed was apparently known as 'the battleground', she welcomed her guests from a green onyx bath and encouraged the kind of heartless gaiety typical of her class and generation. In this version, her life was certainly the stuff of fiction. Painted by Orpen and photographed by Cecil Beaton, she lived in a world that, on Osborne's account, lay somewhere between Wodehouse and The Waste Land, but was probably closest to the Waugh of Vile Bodies and A Handful of Dust.

So, with half an eye on her market, Osborne writes that her great-grandmother's life was 'uncannily reflected' in 'the Bolter' of the great Nancy Mitford novels, Love in a Cold Climate, The Pursuit of Love and Don't Tell Alfred. This makes commercial sense, but it's slightly misleading. Osborne presents no real evidence that Mitford was writing more specifically than about a familiar Edwardian type. Idina Sackville was the kind of woman who excited gossip and her behaviour was, no doubt, shocking to her family, but if she can be found between the pages of a novel, it's a now forgotten interwar bestseller. In her day, Idina Sackville inspired the fictional character of Iris Storm, the tragic heroine of Michael Arlen's bestseller The Green Hat. This was a role that would be played by Greta Garbo in the film version, A Woman of Affairs. 'There is some taste in us that is unsatisfied,' says Iris Storm. 'Life's best gift is the ability to dream of a better life.'

To her family, possibly, Idina Sackville was a 'bolter', but she was also a tragic figure of a young woman whose life was broken by the catastrophes of 1914-18. It is in its evocation of these seismic years that Frances Osborne's book becomes truly interesting.

The Edwardian England in which Idina Sackville came of age was a fun palace of champagne breakfasts, boating regattas and thé dansants, but it was also cruelly oppressive to unmarried women. If you were single, you were chaperoned until you found a husband. If you were divorced, you were beyond the pale.

Idina was unmarried, at first; her mother, Muriel de la Warre, was divorced. In this socially perilous situation, it's hardly surprising that, as Osborne writes, in her rather breathless prose: 'Idina threw herself into the rounds of bals blancs with abandon. Nobody forgot a dance with her.' Soon, she had landed a fiancé, a dashing cavalry officer named David Euan Wallace, an heir to one of Scotland's richest families and a close friend of Stewart Menzies, the fabled British intelligence chief, and model for 'C'.

For a few months, the newlyweds enjoyed a late-Edwardian idyll, dinner at the Ritz, nights out at the theatre, dancing to ragtime on the gramophone until the small hours. Briefly, it seems, Idina was happy and fulfilled. Then the war came. Wallace was dispatched to the Western Front where, as a junior officer, he was lucky to survive. Occasional leave was frantic and distressing. Slowly, Idina's perfect match unravelled, pulled apart by loneliness, boredom and desperation. Osborne, who has done a prodigious amount of valuable social research, is particularly good on the strangely opulent life of the home front, the comforts of infidelity, the cabaret nights of the women left behind and the caprices of soldiers on leave looking for a good time.

Rather contradicting the title of her book, Osborne makes it clear that it was Wallace's 'Edwardian friendships' with girls named Barbie, Dickie and Avie that wrecked his marriage to Idina. At least to start with, she was less a 'bolter' than a 'bolteree'. Once the war was over, not surprisingly, Idina found a lover of her own, the first of many, and plunged into a jazz-age haze of morphine, cigarette smoke and American cocktails. At the age of 25, a full-blown flapper with two small children, cruising the streets of London in her Hispano-Suiza, her life was already emotionally derailed.

Frivolous, rich, sexy, achingly fashionable, but not (you suspect) too bright, she remarried and set sail for Kenya and Happy Valley. Osborne notes that her great grandmother once again 'had bolted'. On the evidence of her book, Idina's behaviour looks rather more like a desperate expression of a quest for 'the dream of a better life'. I think it is commendable that, in the absence of hard evidence about Idina's feelings, Osborne does not indulge in speculation, but sometimes the reader does long to know more about the emotions seething beneath the surface.

In Kenya, this already sad tale becomes sadder and darker. Osborne paints a picture of an abandoned woman, tormented by unsatisfied sexual appetites, becoming a social outlaw. She was, writes Osborne, reported to have had 'lovers without number' and would teach her men 'how to touch the four strategic points on a skirt that would make a pair of stockings slide to the floor'. On her rare interludes in London, her friends were Oswald 'Tom' Mosley, one of the most promiscuous men in a madly promiscuous age, and Tallulah Bankhead, who taught her how to bathe in champagne. (Just open a case and pour.)

The closing 100 pages of this compelling biography slide into a minor key. By the time war broke out again, in 1939, Idina was on her fifth husband and still living the life of Riley in the heady highlands of Kenya. Such a creature was ill-suited to the age of austerity and by 1955 she was dead, from cancer. She left behind half-a-dozen hairbrushes, several pots of cold cream, scent bottles with silver trimmings, nail files, a glove-stretcher, a cocktail dress and a large, black taffeta bow. After her death, a tender portrait of her first husband was found by her bedside. In reporting this touching detail, we can see that Frances Osborne has probably made her peace at last.

Goddess of Mischief
By DOMINIQUE BROWNING
Published: June 30, 2009 in Sunday Book Review. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com

Alcohol. Cocaine. Promiscuity. Nympho­mania. Wife swapping. Divorce. Profligate spending. ­Sixties swingers? Merely rocking in their cradles. The beautiful and damned of New York’s Roaring Twenties? Neophytes vomiting on the sidewalks. It was the British colonialists in 1920s Africa, the Happy Valley set, who took partying to mythic heights, or depths, depending on your perspective. They didn’t stop until their lives were in smithereens. And the internationally celebrated and reviled high priestess of this crowd — as James Fox called her in “White Mischief” ­— was Idina Sackville (yes, English majors, related to Vita), a rich, smart, slender, blue-eyed, tawny-haired, elegant, narcissistic fashion plate of a woman who painted her nails green, and had a black Pekingese named Satan and a green onyx tub filled with Champagne from which she entertained her dinner guests. She was divorced five times by the end of World War II.
When she was 13, Frances Osborne, author of “The Bolter,” a weirdly rumbustious and harrowing biography that takes us from London to Newport to Kenya, discovered that this insanely glamorous character was her great-grandmother. Osborne became haunted by the feeling that her ancestor was “beneath my skin”; this was mixed with revulsion when Osborne became the mother of two boys and fully appreciated the profound mess Sackville had made of her own life. Naturally it was only a matter of time before she began to dig up family secrets. Everyone knows that British attics, having belonged to generations of the same inbred aristocratic families, are much better endowed than our impoverished American ones — we move around too often and we have tag sales. Out of countless trunks and boxes of letters and diaries pours the unremittingly sad story of a legendary woman, and an unnerving portrait of upper-crust London and colonial Africa in the early 20th century.

Devotees of Nancy Mitford’s “Love in a Cold Climate” will instantly recognize “the Bolter.” She is a seductive, charming, mysterious shadow of a character, but that’s fiction for you. The truth is tawdry. In an “age of bolters,” Sackville was notorious. The book opens with a surreal scene in 1934 at Claridge’s Hotel. A 19-year-old boy is seeing his mother for the first time in 15 years. He has had to find out his mother’s name, for Sackville had abandoned her rich, charming, handsome (and philandering, but everyone was) husband and her two sons, ages 4 and 3, to live on a farm in British East Africa.

Osborne’s descriptions of life in upper-class Edwardian London, “an age overflowing with millionaires,” are bracing. Adultery is commonplace. The country enters World War I, and while husbands and entire families of sons are obliterated on French battlefields, Sackville’s set is desperate for fun, injecting morphine, attending “bottle parties” and downing vats of White Ladies, whiskey sours and Bronxes. (“The Bolter” does double duty as a history of cocktails.) Osborne vividly describes a social class unhinged by too much money and too much death. By 1921, “nudity was all the rage.” Women were dancing on tables, wearing transparent dresses. One hostess greeted her guests “wearing nothing but a famous string of family pearls which reached her pubic hair.”

Sackville’s husband falls in love with the architect Edwin Lutyens’s daughter, prompting Sackville’s first bolt. From there the narrative moves to Mombasa, where Osborne deftly sketches in the milieu of a colonial empire, with its 600-mile Iron Snake, the Uganda Railway, which would make it possible for the British to control Egypt and the Nile. “All that was needed was farmers,” Osborne writes, “for no fewer than two and a half million acres needed tending to. . . . Given the unwillingness of the indigenous people to surrender their lands, all the better, went the thinking, that the territory should be occupied by men who knew how to handle a rifle.” With the end of the war, Britain was flooded with soldiers who wanted a new life; Africa was “an earthly paradise” whose landscape was “genuinely familiar, indeed almost Scottish,” and would provide food for a hungry Europe.

Africa became Sackville’s true love. Over the course of five marriages, she would build — and leave — three farms, working side by side with the African laborers. “Like the local Kikuyu tribesmen and much to their amazement,” Osborne writes, “she both walked and rode barefoot” over thorny fields. But she also kept servants, rode out on safari for weeks at a time and partied hard. She thrived on sexual adventure and set up a mirror over her bed so as not to miss anything. Osborne is fascinating on the social rounds of this new African empire. We catch glimpses of the Sitwells; Cecil Beaton; Stephen Spender; and Beryl Markham, Karen Blixen and their lover Denys Finch Hatton. People met at weekend house parties, races and livestock auctions. Sackville was a magnet. Within several years of her arrival, there were so many partners changing beds that it became a political scandal, with the British government appalled at the inability of the colonial administration to control the miscreants. “The joke ‘Are you married, or do you live in Kenya?’ was doing the rounds.” The Crash of 1929 seems to have done little to stop the dizzying frivolity. The spending never stops. And the houses! The extravagance of the furnishings!

At some point, as the Happy Valley crowd sank into an addled haze, I wanted to cover my eyes — probably during the “sheet game”: men would hide behind a sheet strung across the room, circles were cut into it through which a woman would grope a hand, a nose, an elbow, to identify the owner; as the alcohol content went up, the holes in the sheet were cut lower, and the men unbuttoned their trousers.

Sackville is finally reunited with her eldest son, but the chaos does not end. World War II arrives and Sackville’s newfound connection to her family is cut short. The last decades of her life are unbearably sad; she seems cursed. It can be hard to appreciate Sackville’s incessant charm, her ability to engage and seduce anyone she wanted, her generous and kind nature, and her capacity for lifelong friendship. But the reader falls under her sway, too.

Osborne’s mother had kept Idina Sackville a secret from her children, scarred as she had been, during her own adolescence, by scandalized whispers: “I didn’t want you to think her a role model. . . . You don’t want to be known as ‘the Bolter’s’ granddaughter.” Well, actually, she does. To her credit, Osborne doesn’t sanitize her family’s shenanigans (though we don’t hear much about Sackville’s relations with the Africans except for rumors that some fled for fear of being asked to bed their mistress). Yet none of it would have been broadcast if it didn’t add to some sort of ultrasmart cachet; there’s a faint whiff of bragging in these pages. Enough time has passed that a notorious relative simply casts a sequined halo of glamour over her descendants, an inherited chic. Osborne is still haunted — and thrilled. Which leads to a problem American readers may have with this book: the tedium of meaningless names dropping to the ground. After a while, I couldn’t keep track of all the families. I have the distinct feeling that any British readers even remotely related to the upper classes (a relatively small club with an outsize reputation) would experience a tribal frisson of recognition; these are, after all, the grandparents of their classmates. “The Bolter” is a feast for the Anglophile; followers of the charmingly bizarre blog An Aesthete’s Lament will find long-lost soul mates. But give me love in a cold climate any day

White Mischief

White Mischief 1.

White Mischief is a 1987 film dramatising the events of the Happy Valley murder case in Kenya in 1941, when Sir Henry "Jock" Delves Broughton was tried for the murder of Josslyn Hay, Earl of Erroll.
Based on a book by the Sunday Times journalist James Fox (originally researched with Cyril Connolly for an article in December 1969), it was directed by Michael Radford.

With much of the rest of the world at war, a number of bored British aristocrats live dissolute and hedonistic lives in a region of Kenya known as Happy Valley, drinking and indulging in decadent sexual affairs to pass the time.
On a January day in 1941, Josslyn Hay, the philandering Earl of Erroll, is found dead in his automobile in a remote location. The Earl has a royal pedigree but a somewhat sordid past and a well-deserved reputation for carrying on with other men's wives.
Lady Diana Broughton is one such woman. She is the beautiful wife of Sir John Henry Delves Broughton, known to most as "Jock," a man at least twice her age. Diana has a pre-nuptial understanding with her husband that should either of them fall in love with someone else, the other will do nothing to impede the romance.
Diana has indeed succumbed to the charms of the roguish Earl of Erroll, whose local conquests also include the drug-addicted American heiress Alice de Janze and the somewhat more reserved Nina Soames. It appears that Diana expects to divorce Broughton and marry the Earl, and, true to his word, Broughton publicly toasts their affair in front of them at a club in Nairobi.
The resentment he feels privately is known only to Broughton and possibly to old friend Jack Soames. In any case, the Earl's murdered corpse is found not far from Broughton's estate, and before long Broughton is charged with the crime.
Diana is distraught over losing her lover, as is Alice, who openly masturbates near his coffin. A local plantation owner, Colville, quietly offers Diana advice and solace, ultimately surprising her by proposing marriage.
Broughton stands trial. There are no witnesses to the crime and the physical evidence is incriminating but circumstantial. He obviously had the motive and means, but is found innocent and the scandal comes to an end.

The film ends with de Janze dying of drug overdose then Broughton shooting himself while mutual friends party round her grave. In fact, de Janze shot herself, on 30 September 1941, while Broughton eventually returned to England and committed suicide by a drug overdose in Liverpool in December 1942, over a year later.

"Oh God … not another fucking beautiful day !"


Greta Scacchi as Lady Diana Broughton
Joss Ackland as Sir Henry "Jock" Delves Broughton, Baronet Broughton
Charles Dance as Josslyn Hay, Earl of Erroll
Sarah Miles as Alice de Janzé
Geraldine Chaplin as Nina Soames
Ray McAnally as Morris
Murray Head as Lizzie
John Hurt as Gilbert Colvile
Trevor Howard as Jack Soames
Susan Fleetwood as Lady Gwladys Delamere
Catherine Neilson as Lady June Carberry
Hugh Grant as Hugh Dickinson
Alan Dobie as Sir Walter Harragin
Jacqueline Pearce as Idina Sackville