Tolkien review – affecting biopic of the Lord of the Rings
creator
3 / 5 stars 3 out of 5 stars.
This refreshing origins story, starring Nicholas Hoult,
traces the early life of JRR Tolkien as he makes friends at Oxford, finds love
and faces the horror of war
Peter Bradshaw
@PeterBradshaw1
Thu 2 May 2019 13.00 BST Last modified on Fri 3 May 2019
14.25 BST
A sweet innocence and high-mindedness pervade this movie
from screenwriters David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford and the Finnish director
Dome Karukoski. It’s about the early life of JRR Tolkien – who, like CS Lewis,
became a staggeringly successful author but remained an unworldly Oxford don to
the end of his days, never dreaming of the kind of mega-celebrity and
super-wealth that writers such as JK Rowling or George RR Martin enjoy.
Nicholas Hoult plays the doe-eyed young John Ronald Reuel
Tolkien, an orphaned boy at King Edward’s School, Birmingham, with a brilliant
facility for languages who makes three good friends there (his “fellowship”)
and falls shyly in love with the young woman at his boarding house, Edith Bratt
(Lily Collins), but who is forced by his Catholic guardian into choosing
between early marriage and going up to Oxford.
The story is told via flashbacks from his soldier’s
existence at the Somme in 1916, worrying about his schoolroom comrades and
agonising over the love he might have lost. There are various moments that are
supposed to be goosebump-inducing premonitions of Tolkien’s future created
world (at the Somme, he has a batman called Sam, played by Craig Roberts) and
visions of dragons in the midst of the western front carnage. But the film,
understandably perhaps, can’t reconcile his romantic and mythic vision of
battle with the banal horror of the first world war.
I very much enjoyed the young Tolkien’s prewar ecstatic
conversion to the world of philology at Oxford, with Derek Jacobi’s
sharp-tongued professor telling him to write a 5,000-word essay on the Norse
influence on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight before teatime. (Sadly, the film
doesn’t show him having to do that.)
This is a very male world and perhaps the inner life of
Edith remains a mystery (as perhaps it might have been for Tolkien), but its
earnestness and idealism are refreshing.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien CBE FRSL ( 3 January 1892 – 2
September 1973) was an English writer, poet, philologist, and academic, who is
best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord
of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.
He served as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of
Anglo-Saxon and Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1945 and
Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton
College, Oxford, from 1945 to 1959. He was at one time a close friend of C. S.
Lewis—they were both members of the informal literary discussion group known as
the Inklings. Tolkien was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British
Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972.
After Tolkien's death, his son Christopher published a
series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts,
including The Silmarillion. These, together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the
Rings, form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented
languages, and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda and
Middle-earth within it. Between 1951 and
1955, Tolkien applied the term legendarium to the larger part of these
writings.
While many other authors had published works of fantasy
before Tolkien, the great success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings led
directly to a popular resurgence of the genre. This has caused Tolkien to be
popularly identified as the "father" of modern fantasy literature—or,
more precisely, of high fantasy.In 2008, The Times ranked him sixth on a list
of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". Forbes ranked him
the 5th top-earning "dead celebrity" in 2009.
The star of one of the 20th century’s most famous and
controversial images was 90
May 17th 2018
THE photograph, by Ruth Orkin, was called “American Girl in
Italy, Florence, 1951”. Whenever it surfaced, in restaurants, in students’
rooms, on T-shirts, on tote bags, so did the questions for Ninalee Allen Craig,
who walked at its heart through a phalanx of Italian men. They stared and
leered; one grabbed his crotch; their calls were almost audible. Wasn’t she
afraid? Surely she was upset? Her downcast eyes, that clutch of her shawl,
strongly suggested both those things.
Then she would laugh her boisterous full laugh and say, not
at all. On the contrary, she was imagining she was Dante’s Beatrice. She had
studied the “Divine Comedy” with Robert Fitzgerald at Sarah Lawrence in New
York, and had fallen in love with that notion of unattainable beauty. Her
dollar-a-night hotel was on the Arno, and she had a corny postcard of a
Victorian painting by Henry Holiday that showed Beatrice walking by the river,
in shining white, ignoring the stricken Dante, who pressed his pounding heart
at the sight of her. Who knew whether her very own Dante might not be standing
on some corner, while she swept luminously by?
In 1951, Ninalee Craig, then using the name "Jinx
Allen", went on a six-month tour of Europe. While in Florence, Italy, she
met photographer Ruth Orkin and the two became friends. Orkin photographed
Craig as she walked around Florence capturing images of her shopping at
markets, flirting in cafés, viewing landmarks, and other travel experiences.
The most iconic of the photos is known as American Girl in Italy and shows
Craig walking down a street being ogled by a group of men.
Many interpret the photograph as one of harassment and
chauvinism.[6] In 2014, Craig said: "At no time was I unhappy or harassed
in Europe". "[The photograph is] not a symbol of harassment. It's a
symbol of a woman having an absolutely wonderful time!" She has also noted
that "Italian men are very appreciative, and it's nice to be appreciated.
I wasn't the least bit offended."
Later life
After her trip, Craig returned to New York City and worked
as a teacher and an ad writer. She was married to an Italian and lived with him
in Milan, but later divorced. After returning to New York, she met a Canadian
man, married him, and moved to Toronto. She had a large extended family,
including 10 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
Ninalee Craig: The woman made famous by the ‘American Girl
in Italy’ photos
‘American Girl in Italy’ has adorned the walls of homes for
generations. For its subject, Ninalee Craig, it was a symbol of a woman having
a wonderful time
In August 1951, at a dollar-a-night hotel in Florence, two
American women came face-to-face in the hallway one morning.
One was Ruth Orkin, a promising 29-year-old photojournalist
who was seeking a subject for a magazine photo spread about the experiences of
women travelling abroad alone – a rare thing to do at the time.
The other was Ninalee Allen, a 23-year-old adventure-seeking
graduate of Sarah Lawrence College who had been travelling solo for months
through France, Spain and Italy. She called herself “Jinx” because she thought
it sounded exciting.
“She was beautiful, luminescent and, unlike me, very tall,”
Orkin later told The New York Times. Allen agreed to the photo shoot as a lark,
and off they went through the streets of Florence.
Imagining she was Beatrice from Dante’s Divine Comedy, one
of her favourite books, Allen held her shawl, stood straight and strode past
more than a dozen men leering at her from all directions at the corner of
Piazza della Repubblica.
Orkin ran ahead, Allen recalled, and “took one picture,
asked me to back up, and took a second. That’s all that was done at that
location, two pictures.” It took about 35 seconds.
“I spoke only to the two men on the motor scooter,” she said
1995. “I yelled to them to tell the others not to look at the camera.”
In less than one minute, Orkin had captured what would
become one of the more indelible photographs of the era: “American Girl in
Italy”.
The photo appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine as part of a
1952 photo essay entitled “When You Travel Alone...” and included advice on
“money, men and morals to see you through a gay trip and a safe one”.
The caption with the photo of Allen read: “Public admiration
… shouldn’t fluster you. Ogling the ladies is a popular, harmless and
flattering pastime you’ll run into in many foreign countries. The gentlemen are
usually louder and more demonstrative than American men, but they mean no
harm.”
Over the decades, the photo was reprinted and hung in dorm
rooms, became artwork for homes, appeared in calendars and on postcards and, to
some, captured the reality of street harassment or cat-calling long before it
was part of the public consciousness. One man, with his hand over his crotch,
was airbrushed out in some reproductions.
“Oh, and that poor soul touching himself? I was used to it,”
Allen wrote in The Guardian in 2015 under her married name, Ninalee Craig. “It
was almost like a good luck sign for the Italian man, making sure the family
jewels were intact. When it was first published, that was occasionally
airbrushed out but I would never consider it to be a vulgar gesture.”
The photograph invited many interpretations, each adding to
its meaning and power. It accompanied stories about harassment, victimhood and
the female psyche. In November 2017, a restaurant in Philadelphia removed the
photograph after complaints from customers.
It all began to grate on Craig, who said the image
represented nothing more than admiration and curiosity and was “a symbol of a
woman having an absolutely wonderful time”. That she stood six feet tall, she
added, may also have explained the gawking.
“Women look at that picture and feel indignant, angry,” she
said. “They say, ‘That poor woman. We should be able to walk wherever we want
to and not be threatened.’ As gently as I can, I explain I was not feeling
fear. There was no danger because it was a far different time.”
Craig, who has died in Toronto aged 90, went on to marry a
Venetian count and a Canadian steel industry executive.
Born Ninalee Allen in Indianapolis in the late Twenties, her
father was the personnel director for LS Ayres, a department store, and her
mother was a home-maker. She studied art history at Sarah Lawrence in
Bronxville, New York, and graduated in 1950.
After her months-long travels in Europe, she settled in New
York City and became a copywriter at the J Walter Thompson advertising company.
One day, she wrote in The Guardian, she saw the Orkin photo
“blown up in Grand Central Station, used as part of a promotion by Kodak, which
horrified my father. He had no idea I was walking around Italy in that way.”
She married Achille Passi, a widowed Venetian count, in
1959, and raised her stepson. She lived in the Passi family villa in Treviso,
near Venice, and once described his family as a “very old family where you’re
only in the newspaper twice in your life – once when you’re born and once when
you die. Period.”
Nine years after the photo of her appeared in Cosmopolitan,
it ran in a Time-Life picture book about Italy. The caption identified her, and
her mother-in-law was “apoplectic”, Craig said in 1995. The man on the scooter
who appears to be gazing at her backside was a cousin of her husband. Her name
was not included in future publications, at the Passi family’s request.
After divorcing Passi in the 1970s, she returned to New York
and met Robert Ross Craig. In a freakish coincidence, he also had a connection
to the Orkin photo: he knew one of the two men sitting on the scooter parked
near her. “My God,” he told her, “that’s my business partner in Italy. That’s
Carlo Marchi!”
They were married from 1978 until his death in 1996. In
addition to her stepson, of Venice, survivors include three stepsons from her
second marriage; 11 grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.
Craig remained close friends with Orkin, who died in 1985
after a noted career in photography and filmmaking.
“I wouldn’t say the picture has changed my life but I’ve had
so much amusement from it over the years,” Craig wrote in 2015. “And more free
meals at Italian restaurants than you’ll ever know.”
Ninalee Craig (Jinx), American icon, born 6 November 1927,
died 2 May 2018
To open the huge, leather-bound volumes, smelling faintly of
mildew, that contain the glossy monochrome pages of Country Life magazine from
1907, the year the body that was to become the CLA was founded, is to glimpse a
vanished world.
I am in my forties, yet my father was an Edwardian, born in
1903. I shot with him once before he died, so the gents in tweeds demonstrating
how to shoot birds on the left without moving the feet (or taking the pipe out
of the mouth) do not seem so very far distant.
Country Life offers an editorial about “The cost of owning
an estate”, a fascinating insight into the rural economy of the time. The owner
of the estate used as an example gave employment to 74 men, excluding tenants.
The total was made up as follows: house and stables, 26; garden, 20; keepers,
3; labourers, 22.
Such an estate might have been worth £250,000 to £500,000 at
1907 prices, its outgoings added up to £14,370 compared with a total income of
£14,900. Then, as now, the ownership of land was not likely to attract
capitalists who were not born into it as a way of life – unless for social
reasons, or for sport.
The three decades leading up to the foundation of what
became known as the Central Land Association (to distinguish it from county
associations) were a hard, often profitless time for agriculture, caused by the
global marketplace of the British Empire.
Home-produced wheat hit its lowest price for 150 years in
1894.
For the countryside the years before the First World War
were a time of political and financial uncertainty. A number of rural interests
felt the need to band together to make sure their views were represented, or
saw the opportunity to exert more influence.
In 1907 came a pamphlet, The Land and the Social Problem, by
Algernon Tumor, a high-ranking civil servant and former private secretary to
Benjamin Disraeli. In it, he criticised British agriculture for failing to
adapt to changing conditions and blamed politicians for their lack of foresight
in their treatment of the industry. He advocated the co-operation of owners,
tenants and workers in the common interest. His manifesto represented the
conception of the CLA.
Copies of the pamphlet were circulated to general approval
and a meeting was held on April 19th, 1907, in the junior Carlton Club. Those
present were well-connected and had between them a wealth of political
experience. It was chaired by Walter Long, a patrician Tory and former
President of the Board of Agriculture under Lord Salisbury.
The minutes, in his handwriting, still exist in an exercise
book in Reading’s Museum of English Rural Life.
Present beside Tumor were the fourth Earl of Onslow, the
Earl of Harrowby and several MPs and landowners including Christopher Tumor,
nephew of Algernon, a large Lincolnshire landowner and author of several books
on agriculture. The meeting decided to appoint officers of what was initially
proposed to be called the Landholders’ Central Association. From the beginning
the association tended to be an organisation of owners and land agents – other interests
having their own organisations. The National Farmers’ Union – developed from
the Lincolnshire Farmers Union – was founded within a year of the CLA in 1908.
On the face of it, the survival of such an organisation
after a century would appear to be surprising, given that the world that gave
birth to is has vanished utterly. I suspect the clue to the CLA’s survival goes
back to that original meeting and the thinking of its founders, who decided
that they would engage with the interests of the day in a liberal,
forward-thinking way, and not as a club of reactionaries. Lord Onslow, its
first chairman, said of the Landowners’ Central Association: “It will endeavour
to get rid of a rather stick-in-the-mud attitude on the part of some
landowners…if we agree upon a constructive and progressive policy we shall have
nothing to fear in the future.” Those still sound like wise words as the CLA
enters its second century.
The assault on land, 1907 – 2007
The assault on the land, 1907 - 2007History of the CLALooking
back on a century of landowners trying to influence the political ideas of the
day, it is remarkable how many policies – such as a tax on land – are cyclical,
returning in various guises, often without success. Yet it is also worth
celebrating the ultimate demise of a really bad idea from the years of the
great ideological divide, land nationalisation.
As we now know, this idea caused poverty and squalor
wherever it was tried, in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and even Kenneth
Kaunda’s Zambia as late as 1970. It exercised the founders of the CLA for more
than 30 years. We owe it to their good sense that it was not tried here.
The frontal attack on private property was seldom as fierce
as after the Liberal landslide of 1906. The followers of the Liberal
Chancellor, Lloyd George, openly favoured land nationalisation, following penal
taxation. The first was seen off, but not the latter.
The CLA’s founders, including the Earl of Onslow, its
chairman, and its president, Walter Long, wisely did not engage in partisan
attacks. They successfully argued for Lloyd George to deduct maintenance when
assessing estate income. Meanwhile two committees appointed by the Liberal
Government reported in 1912 and 1913 in favour of state ownership of land, as a
panacea for depression in agriculture and supposed insecurity of tenure.
These were worrying times for the CLA, as its annual report
acknowledged in 1912:
“Probably at no time in the history of our country has there
been a greater need for a strong non-party organisation to watch over and
safeguard the interests of agriculture and to form and develop a sound and
progressive land policy…By this means only will it be possible successfully to
meet the attack directed against the landed interest by those who, without
knowledge or experience of rural conditions and for reasons quite unconnected
with the welfare of the industry, seek to make sweeping and revolutionary
changes which, it is believed, would be disastrous, not only to agriculture,
but to the country generally.”
To add insult to injury, CLA members felt its leaders had
failed to state their case forcibly enough at a crucial time and membership
fell.
The First World War killed off Lloyd George’s land taxation
plans. It briefly strengthened the fortunes of agriculture and convinced the
CLA that it needed to be more organised in representing landowners, rather than
tenants and farm workers. Nevertheless, the renamed Central Landowners’
Association was confronted by Lloyd George’s National Government in 1920 with
the decision to withdraw support for agriculture. There followed a decade and a
half of agricultural recession.
The CLA had its victories, the greatest of which, the
de-rating of agricultural land and buildings, came about in the 1928 budget.
Its membership was bolstered by thousands of new owner occupiers – one of the
many reasons why by the mid 1930s land nationalisation had faded into the
background. But over the interwar years, and worse still in the years following
the Second World War when many country houses were demolished, the break up
estates through taxation and death duties had wide repercussions.
Employment in agriculture tumbled. Crafts died out. Estates
became dependent on mass-produced materials from outside. Instead of
nationalisation, we got a halfway house for bankrupt estates, the National
Trust. Was this really desirable?
Over a century, you could argue that landowners have escaped
the worst. The urban masses no longer want to appropriate their land. In part
this is due to the pragmatic lobbying skills of the CLA, which have been
respected by politicians of both sides. But the landowner has found himself
bound increasingly, like Gulliver, by a multiplicity of gossamer threads which
affect his freedom to use the land and even his leisure.
Conflicting Interests
Trespassers may legally be shot under a number of
circumstances in the United States and South Africa. In Britain the rights of
landowners have always been more tenuous. Over here, landowners have to think
hard before uttering the words: “Get off my land!” if they dare do it at all.
You might wonder why public access to the countryside has
been such a bone of contention over the last century, and so time-consuming for
the CLA. The proximity of the industrial towns, with their burgeoning
populations, to the high moors and fells was the flashpoint for change. Access
to the hills became the focus of ideological protest after the First World War,
culminating in the great mass trespass in 1932 on the Duke of Devonshire’s land
at Kinder Scout, part of the Dark Peak, in which five ramblers were sent to
jail for up to six months after an affray with gamekeepers.
The Hobhouse committee set up by the post-war Attlee
government recommended in 1947 not only the creation of national parks, but
also public access to the open countryside. This led to the National Parks and
Access to the Countryside Act of 1949, in which open country was defined as
mountain, moor, heath, down, cliff and foreshore. The amazing thing is that a
government otherwise hell-bent on nationalising promised to pay landowners
compensation for giving up their right to exclude people from land not on a right
of way.
The leaders of the CLA were probably too pressed dealing
with the thicket of legislation produced by that Labour Government, which
included the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act and the 1947 Agriculture Act,
to do more than utter a quick sigh of relief. They did take the lead in urging
the Government to write and publicise a Country Code, urging people to kept to
footpaths, close gates, keep their dogs under control and put out picnic fires.
The Country Code had to be revised when the Countryside and
Rights of Way Act 2000 received royal assent. In one of his more brilliant
coups-de-theatre Tony Blair appointed Ewen Cameron, now Lord Cameron, a former
president of the CLA, to head the Countryside Agency charged with bringing in
the new right. It is probably the case that the right came in more sensitively
as a result – though the biggest rollbacks came from individual landowners on
appeal.
The Greening of Farm Policy
It is a measure of the influence of the CLA that what it has
called on governments for the past 25 years to do – replacing subsidies for
food production with support for farming aimed at benefiting the wider rural
environment and economy – has now come to be the “direction of travel” for the
three main parties.
The story of the greening of farm policy is one of the
little-known achievements of Britain’s landowning organisation, and it is a
story worth telling, not only because it is, perhaps, unexpected, but because
it is so seldom told. One reason is the CLA’s sensitive relationship with the
National Farmers’ Union, set up in 1908.
The distinction between the two organisations was relatively
obvious at the beginning. The CLA, by and large, represented landlords. It
began at a disadvantage, and has had to trust to the persuasiveness of its
brightest thinkers instead of megaphone diplomacy. The NFU, at the beginning,
represented farmers, then overwhelmingly tenants.
Now over 60 percent of CLA members own 100 acres of less,
and only 4 percent own 1,000 acres or more. Many farmers and landowners are
members of both bodies. But the distinction between the CLA’s outlook and that
of the NFU remains. As someone put it: “The NFU are the profit and loss
account. The CLA are the balance sheet.”
In other words, the people who arguably worry most about
protecting their assets, which also happen to be the country’s and the
countryside’s, are those who would like to believe their offspring will be
managing them in 50 years time. From the first, the CLA was far closer than the
NFU to being an environmental organisation.
For its first 50 years the CLA was largely preoccupied with
ownership issues: land nationalisation, land tax, death duties, forestry, the
de-rating of agricultural tenancies and the removal of tithes. Then, as now,
landowners derived much of their income from outside farming. Indeed, there is
some evidence to show that in all but a few boom years of the last century,
non-farming activities have produced more income.
The relationship to farming changed, however, in 1947, when
landowners were given statutory recognition and new duties as partners in the
drive for greater home food production under the Labour government’s
Agriculture Act. The priority was growing cheap food for a starving and
bankrupt Europe. There began the post-war extension of the dig-for-victory era,
which lasted 30 years.
These years saw great changes. Hedges were pulled out,
wetlands drained, watercourses dredged and canalised and millions of acres of
moorland and permanent pasture were “improved” by farmers with grants from the
Ministry of Agriculture, sometimes to the rueful regret of landlords.
The crucial change came in 1973 with UK entry into the
Common Market. In Brussels, there was a growing sense that the EU budget was
limited. Its finance ministers looked for an excuse to deal with excessive
spending of agriculture and the resultant butter and grain mountains and wine,
milk and olive oil lakes.
Around the early 1980s the CLA became, by reason of its
culture, the purveyor of solutions to a political class that had decided things
could not go on as they were. A recurrent theme among progressive landowners
and leaders of the CLA was the feeling that: “I think I’m damn good at what I
do. If my neighbour farms very badly, but you continue subsidising him to farm
in that way, you will eventually put me out of business.” Then as now, the
CLA’s predisposition was towards the classical Anglo-American case for free
enterprise and free trade.
In the late 1980s the CLA published a paper which argued
that public subsidy purely for production should be switched to a menu of
environmental services. At the time I wondered how realistic they were, and
whether anyone was listening.
It turns out they were pushing at an open door in MAFF.
Reform started in the second half of the 1980s with the Alure (Agriculture,
Land Use and the Rural Environment/Economy) package, the abolition of
production grants, the creation of environmentally sensitive areas, the Farm
Woodland Scheme and the subtle introduction of the “duty clause” in the 1986
Agriculture Act, which meant the ministers had for the first time to have
regard to the wider rural economy, the enjoyment of the countryside by the
people, and the rural environment. The support of the CLA gave the ministers of
the time confidence to push the measures through.
When you look back to the late 1980s today, agricultural
reform seems to have moved at a glacial pace. Environmental groups would argue
that vastly more money needs to be moved from Pillar I, production support, to
Pillar II, environment and rural development. But the developed world has
accepted the argument that there should be free trade in agricultural goods and
protection of the environment. And all who love the countryside can thank the
CLA for its part in winning that argument.
This is an edited version of a series of articles written by
Charles Clover to mark the centenary of the CLA.
Charles Clover is an environmental journalist, author, and
columnist for The Sunday Times.
Planning and Conservation – the state weighs in
A J P Taylor wrote that before 1914 a law-abiding Englishman
had little contact with the state. He could travel without a passport, own a
weapon and, on his own land, shoot almost anything he liked and build what he
wished.
This is the world into which the CLA was born in 1907. That
the world has changed so much since is testament not only to the tightening
grip of the state, but also to the growth of an increasingly wealthy middle
class. The latter competed for the land previously under the control of aristocratic
landowners, and had the time and resources to develop an interest in planning,
animal welfare and nature conservation.
A pre-1914 landowner might find Parliament telling him he
must sell land. That came with the increasing role of the state in providing
public infrastructure. But by and large it did not tell him how to build on
land he owned. That came with the post-war Attlee government and the Town and
Country Planning Act 1947, the birth of the modern planning system.
The report of Lord Justice Scott’s committee, produced in
1942, had recommended that all new building should be in existing settlements
unless there was some overwhelming reason why it should be in open countryside.
Another of Scott’s recommendations was that fertile land should be retained in
agricultural use. This, a novel idea at the time, was emphasised in the CLA’s
evidence.
In case the 20th century looks like a story of constant
encroachment of private rights by the state, it is worth celebrating one high
water mark, Crichel Down. Crichel Down, near Wimborne in Dorset, was 300 acres
of land owned by Mary Anna Marten. The land had been compulsorily purchased in
1937 as a bombing range for the Air Ministry. When it was no longer needed
after the war, it was not offered back to the family, as it should have been by
policy agreed by the Government at the time at the instigation of the CLA, but
was passed to the Commissioner of Crown Lands, who found a new tenant.
Eventually, after local feeling had been whipped up, the
press enlisted, and political connections utilised, Parliament came to realise
that a major injustice had been perpetrated. The Conservative Minister of
Agriculture, Sir Thomas Dugdale, was forced to order a public inquiry. The
Martens got their land back.
Gloria Vanderbilt, an American heiress who became a
successful model, designer, writer and artist, has died, her son Anderson
Cooper announced on Monday on CNN. She was 95.
“Gloria Vanderbilt
was an extraordinary woman who loved life and lived it on her own terms,”
Cooper said. “She was a painter, a writer and designer but also a remarkable
mother, wife and friend. She was 95 years old, but ask anyone close to her and
they’d tell you she was the youngest person they knew – the coolest and most
modern.”
Gloria Laura Morgan Vanderbilt was born on 24 February 1924 and
lived a storied life from infancy. Her father was the renowned rake Reginald
Vanderbilt, the great-grandson of the railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Her mother, who married in her teens, was more of a party girl than an
attentive parent.
When Gloria was 18 months old, her father died of cirrhosis
of the liver, aged just 45. She received a $5m trust fund which her mother used
to fund a lavish socialite lifestyle full of travel and affairs.
I always feel that
something wonderful is going to happen. And it always does
Gloria Vanderbilt
Gloria’s paternal aunt, the sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt
Whitney, founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art, ultimately sued for
custody of the little girl, resulting in her becoming the most famous American
child of her time. The 1934 trial in the case became a tabloid sensation trial
that resulted in Gloria being called a “poor little rich girl” amid bitter
family drama.
“For five hours Mrs
Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt … listened to a tight-lipped nurse denounce her with
virtual relish as a cocktail-crazed dancing mother, a devotee of sex erotica
and the mistress of a German prince … it was a blistering tale no skin lotion
could soothe,” Town & Country reported.
The courtroom devolved into chaos when a French maid
testified that “Mrs Vanderbilt was in bed reading a paper and there was [the
royal] Lady Milford Haven beside the bed with her arm around Mrs Vanderbilt’s
neck and kissing her just like a lover”.
The judge ejected the press. After seven weeks of testimony,
he awarded custody to Whitney.
In 2016, Vanderbilt told the Associated Press the “poor
little rich girl” moniker “bothered me enormously … I didn’t see any of the
press, the newspapers were kept from me. I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t
feel poor and I didn’t feel rich. It really did influence me enormously to make
something of my life when I realized what it meant.”
Her foray into the world of fashion started at age 15 as a
Harper’s Bazaar model and at 17, after spending seven years with the “rigid”
Gertrude, she moved to Hollywood. Vanderbilt dated stars and vowed to marry the
aviation and movie mogul Howard Hughes, but instead wed his press agent,
Pasquale di Cicco. The marriage caused Whitney to write Gloria out of her will.
Gloria, who came into her trust at age 21, in 1945, wound up
divorcing Di Cicco, claiming routine beatings. One day later she married a
63-year-old conductor, Leopold Stokowski. They had two sons and their marriage
lasted a decade.
Her next two marriages were to the film director Sidney
Lumet and the writer Wyatt Emory Cooper. Other romances included Frank Sinatra,
whom she described as “kind of just the most amazing person in my life”, Errol
Flynn and Marlon Brando.
“I’ve had many, many loves,” Vanderbilt told the Associated
Press in 2004. “I always feel that something wonderful is going to happen. And
it always does.”
Vanderbilt married Lumet in 1956 and lived with him and her
children in a 10-room duplex penthouse on Gracie Square in New York. She
divorced him to marry Cooper in 1963. Their elder son, Carter, a Princeton
graduate and editor at American Heritage, killed himself in 1988 at age 23,
leaping from his mother’s 14th-floor apartment as she tried to stop him.
Vanderbilt’s fame increased dramatically in the late 1970s,
when she partnered with the clothing-maker Mohan Murjani to sell designer jeans
that featured her name on the back pockets – a move that earned $10m in 1980,
Bloomberg noted. After her success in designer jeans, Vanderbilt branched out
into shoes, scarves, table and bed linens, designer fragrances and china,
through her company, Gloria Concepts.
Her wide-ranging career also included art, as well as memoir
and fiction writing. At 85 she wrote an erotic novel called Obsession which
told the story of a woman becoming obsessed with her deceased husband’s
relationship with a dominatrix. Excerpts leaked to a tabloid sent shockwaves
through the New York elite.
The New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser described the
143-page book as “pure, elegant, unadulterated smut” that could be “easily read
with one hand”. But Vanderbilt told the New York Times she wasn’t embarrassed
at all.
“I don’t think age has anything to do with what you write
about,” she said. “The only thing that would embarrass me is bad writing, and
the only thing that really concerned me was my children. You know how children
can be about their parents. But mine are very intelligent and supportive.”
Cooper was also unfazed.
“I’m often surprised by my mom but am always supportive of
anything she does,” the CNN anchor said. “She’s totally unique and cool.”
This Is My Half of the Castle: The Eccentric Living
Arrangements of Aristocrats
Having a big house helps keep your problems hidden from the
outside world: The Duke and Duchess of Norfolk occupied different wings of their
stately home while separated.
Tom Sykes
Updated 04.13.17 3:07PM ET / Published 08.25.16 1:00AM ET
Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast
Like many aristocratic couples of their generation, my
paternal grandfather, the writer Christopher Sykes, and his wife, Camilla, née
Russell, had separate bedrooms.
Camilla was a famous beauty in her youth and when I knew
her, in her 70s, she still proudly asserted her right to look fabulous. Her
room at their substantial house in a small Dorset village—where they had moved
in 1952, having no further use for the city after the king died—was an
Aladdin’s cave of jewelry, powders, perfume, pills, shoes, and foreign clothing
piled high on elegant mother of pearl-inlaid tables and overflowing from lacquered
chests of drawers.
She entertained visitors, including her husband, on an
upholstered love seat, a sofa that resembled two armchairs joined together but
facing each other, thereby forcing you to stare straight into her eyes when
sitting on it.
Christopher, a writer who was famous for his love of what in
1980s England was still considered to be an eccentric French pastry, a
mysterious thing called a croissant—vast quantities of which were bought at a
specialist baker in London and frozen; not for nothing did we call him Fat
Grandpa—had a separate bedroom lined with his beloved history books.
He would sometimes emerge from here in the evenings wearing
a glamorous silk dressing gown. His own room was tidy and very, very male. He
couldn’t have borne to be surrounded by Camilla’s fripperies. They both had
separate dressing rooms as well.
The separate bedrooms were a simple acknowledgement of the
fact that, although married, they liked their own space too.
However, I think even they would have drawn the line at the
living arrangements of the Duke and Duchess of Norfolk, who have spent the past
five years of their life living in separate wings of the 11th-century Arundel
Castle after their relationship hit a rough patch. Georgina stayed in the more
homey west wing, long the family home, while Edward decamped several hundred
yards to the more Spartan east wing, which had been used to house staff in days
gone by.
Happily, the duke has now moved back into the west wing,
rejoining his wife—the queen, a close friend, is said by the Mail on Sunday to
be “delighted” at the rapprochement—although after all those years of enjoying
their own space, it would be a fair bet that they are still sleeping in
separate bedrooms.
For the Norfolks, their dispersal around Arundel Castle was
a way to live separate lives while avoiding the trauma of divorce, which they
refused to consider for both practical and religious reasons. The Norfolks are
among the most senior lay Catholics in the otherwise largely Protestant United
Kingdom.
They nobly refused an invitation to the royal wedding of
William and Kate, as they did not wish to hypocritically sit next to each
other.
However, the banishment of one’s partner (or their own
voluntary exile) to a dower house or distant section of the building is by no
means a foible unique to the Northumberlands. It is a well-documented part of
upper class British life.
A similar situation developed in the case of an Irish
aristocrat I know. In this case the wife remained in the big house while the
husband, who suffered from severe depression, moved into the gate lodge at the
bottom of the drive.
“What are we supposed to do?” the châtelaine told me when
explaining the developments a few years ago. “There’s no sense getting
divorced, or there will be nothing left for the kids.”
She started an affair with a musician quite openly and
encouraged her husband to do something similar. He did not, and has since died.
Out of the tragedy, a glimmer of salvation is that the estate has been
successfully preserved for her children.
The sheer size of most stately homes allows for troubled
marriages to be given time and space to heal—or not heal—without outsiders
being any the wiser.
And the tradition of separate bedrooms for the master and
mistress of the house provides a useful cover behind which to hide marital
breakdown. While not as completely standard as some reports suggest, separate
rooms were certainly very common before World War II in any sizable house, even
when the relationship was untroubled.
Marie Stopes, writing in 1918, advised provision of a single
bed “in a nearby dressing room for when either of the partners desires
solitude.”
The custom has even made its way into fiction: In Downton
Abbey, occasional references are made to the fact that Lord Grantham has his
own room, even though he usually sleeps in Cora’s bed.
The queen and Prince Philip observed the habit of sleeping
in separate rooms—a fact that was only made public after an intruder broke into
the queen’s bedroom in the most shocking security lapse at Buckingham Palace on
record.
The break-in was said to have been facilitated by the fact
that the queen insists on sleeping with the windows open—Philip prefers the
windows closed, hence his desire for his own room.
Prince Charles and Camilla have separate bedrooms at
Highgrove, Charles’s house, but Camilla goes one step further and has kept her
own family house, which predates her marriage to Charles and to which Charles
is not, as a rule, invited. It’s very much “her place,” say sources.
There is evidence that, as many of the middle classes now
occupy houses of comparable size to small manor houses, they are starting to
emulate this aristocratic habit. According to one survey, some 9 percent of
married (or partnered) British couples now sleep in separate rooms. In Japan,
the figure is 28 percent.
My grandparents would certainly have approved.
Christopher Hugh Sykes FRSL (17 November 1907 – 8 December
1986) was an English author. Born into a well-off northern English landowning
family, he was the second son of the diplomat Sir Mark Sykes (1879–1919), and
his wife, Edith (née Gorst). His sister was Angela Sykes, the sculptor. His
uncle, also Christopher Sykes, was, for a time, a close friend of Edward VII.
Educated at Downside School and Christ Church, Oxford, Sykes
was, for a time in his youth, in the Foreign Office, including a stint as an
attaché (1928–29) in the British Embassy in Berlin, where Harold Nicolson was
then Counsellor. This was followed by a year (1930–31) at the British Legation
in Teheran. An early hero was Aubrey Herbert, remembered now as the man who
inspired John Buchan's classic thriller, Greenmantle.
Though Sykes thought of making politics his career, his
stammer and also his artistic and imaginative disposition indicated that
political life was not for him. At the School of Oriental Studies in London, he
devoted himself to Persian studies in 1933 before travelling in Central Asia
during 1933–34 with Robert Byron, who later wrote The Road to Oxiana recounting
their long expedition in what was then an almost unexplored country. In the
book, Byron states that Sykes was given an order to leave Persia, but they
could negotiate that he leaves via Afghanistan with Byron.
On their return to England, Sykes and Byron wrote a novel
together under the name of Richard Waughburton, Innocence and Design, published
in 1935. A little later, Sykes and Cyril Connolly planned a book with the title
of The Little Voice. In common with other projects of Connolly's, the book
never got beyond the planning stages. Sykes published in 1936 a biography of
the German Persianist Wilhelm Wassmus; he did not, during later years, include
this volume in his list of his publications. A memoir of Byron, killed at sea
in 1941, was included in Sykes' best-selling book, Four Studies in Loyalty.
Sykes had an eventful war. Having held, like his famous
father, a Territorial Army commission in The Green Howards in 1927–30, he was
commissioned in 1939 as a reserve officer in the regiment's newly formed 7th
Battalion. In June 1940, Sykes joined SO1 (later Special Operations Executive
[SOE]), where he was personal assistant to Colonel Cudbert Thornhill. In
October 1941, Sykes was sent out to Tehran as Deputy Director of Special
Propaganda (DDSP) under diplomatic cover (Second Secretary at the British Legation)
in the aftermath of the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran, where he remained until
November 1942, when he was transferred to Cairo. Out of a job because his
department had been wound up, Sykes found time to write a light novel, High
Minded Murder (1944), something of a roman à clef, set in wartime Cairo where
Graham Greene's sister Elizabeth was living(Sykes mentions Greene himself in
his biography of Waugh). Meanwhile, after failing to find any position as an
intelligence officer in the Middle East, Sykes returned to the UK in May 1943,
volunteered for the Special Air Service (SAS), and was posted to the Commando
Training Depot at Achnacarry Castle, Invernesshire on 1 July 1943. As an SAS
officer, Sykes, who spoke fluent French but could not pass as a native,
undertook extremely hazardous work with the French Resistance: an experience
which, like his friendship with Byron, was depicted in Four Studies in Loyalty
(dedicated to the town of Vosges), this time in that book's last chapter.
Nowadays Sykes is especially remembered for his biography of
his friend Evelyn Waugh, whom he met after the success of Waugh's Vile Bodies.
He introduced Waugh to the socialite Diana Cooper, aka Lady Stitch. He praised
Brideshead, Waugh's Catholic epic (the two were both Catholics, but with the
notable difference—mentioned by Waugh's son Auberon when reviewing Sykes's book
in the November 1975 issue of Books and Bookmen – that whereas Waugh converted
to Roman Catholicism in his twenties, Sykes was a cradle Catholic) though
admitting to his dislike of the character Julia Flyte. Sykes makes some
interesting comparisons between scenes in Waugh's books and those of William M
Thackeray - the fox hunting scene in a Handful of Dust is compared to that in
Barry Lyndon.
Sykes is also remembered to a lesser extent, for his history
of the British Mandate of Palestine, Crossroads to Israel (1965). He also wrote
several books of fiction and lives of Orde Wingate (published 1959 - Sykes drew
attention to Wingate as the possible basis for Waugh's character Brigadier
Ritchie Hook in The Sword of Honour trilogy, in his biography of Waugh) the
general sometimes known as the "Lawrence of Judea" (a phrase that
Wingate deplored); Lady Astor, who, born in Virginia, was one of the first
women to sit in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom; and Adam von Trott
zu Solz, executed following his part in the failed 20 July plot to assassinate
Hitler.
After 1945 Sykes worked for many years in BBC Radio, where
he helped to get Waugh's broadcast on P G Wodehouse, who was captured in Le
Touquet by the Germnas, on air, as well as writing for several British and
American periodicals, including The New Republic, The Spectator, Books and
Bookmen, The Observer and the short-lived English Review Magazine. He was
invested as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.[citation needed]
Marriage and family
He married Camilla Georgiana, daughter of Sir Thomas
Wentworth Russell (great-grandson of the 6th Duke of Bedford)[4] on 25 October
1936.Their son, Mark Richard Sykes (born 9 June 1937), by his second marriage,
is father to six children including New York-based fashion writer and novelist
Plum Sykes. The writer and photographer, Christopher Simon Sykes, is a
nephew.[citation needed] Writer/journalist Tom Sykes is a grandson.
Christopher Simon Skyes
In 1975, Christopher Simon Sykes received a phone call from
Mick Jagger, a personal friend, inviting him to document the Rolling Stones on
their upcoming 40-show Tour Of The Americas ’75, a.k.a T.OT.A. ‘75 . According
to Sykes, “’I had absolutely free and total access. I was in a very privileged
position because I’d come to keep a diary, I’d been recommended by Rupert
Lowenstein and I knew Mick. I was more of a friend than a rock photographer.”
Sykes dove head first into the assignment by photographing every aspect of the
tour, keeping a daily diary, even collecting memorabilia such as backstage
passes, the tour manager’s newsletters, even hotel keys. The resulting
photographs are an insider’s view of the grueling and infamously decadent life
on the road for ‘The Greatest Rock ‘n Roll Band in the World’.
The tour proved just as exhausting for Sykes as it did for
the Stones. Returning to England, Sykes shifted his focus to what has become a
lifelong project: photographing the UK’s great country homes and gardens,
including his own family estate, Sledmere House. Sykes is a regular contributor
to House & Garden, World of Interiors, Vogue and author of several
noteworthy books.
Sledmere House is a Grade I listed Georgian country house,
containing Chippendale, Sheraton and French furnishings and many fine pictures,
set within a park designed by Capability Brown.
In June 2019, the Wallace Collection and Manolo Blahník will
present An Enquiring Mind: Manolo Blahník at the Wallace Collection. The
exhibition features a personally selected edit of shoe designs from Blahník’s
private archives set amongst the masterpieces of the Wallace Collection. This
exciting venture juxtaposes an icon from the world of contemporary fashion with
Wallace’s outstanding collection that has been an inspiration to artists since
it opened to the public in 1900.
A rare opportunity to see excellence in contemporary design
alongside the exceptional quality of the Wallace Collection’s own art
works.
Partnership between Manolo Blahník and the Wallace
Collection
Free - no need to book!
Manolo Blahník Talk Series
The exhibition will be accompanied by an exciting programme
of evening panel discussions.
– Monday 17 June – Goya and Shoes - SOLD OUT!
– Monday 1 July – The Classical Influence in Art and Design
- SOLD OUT!
Throughout the period, men continued to wear the coat,
waistcoat and breeches of the previous period. However, changes were seen in
both the fabric used as well as the cut of these garments. More attention was
paid to individual pieces of the suit, and each element underwent stylistic
changes. Under new enthusiasms for outdoor sports and country pursuits, the
elaborately embroidered silks and velvets characteristic of "full
dress" or formal attire earlier in the century gradually gave way to
carefully tailored woollen "undress" garments for all occasions
except the most formal. This more casual style reflected the dominating image
of "nonchalance." The goal was to look as fashionable as possible
with seemingly little effort. This was to be the new, predominant mindset of
fashion.
Coats
The skirts of the coat narrowed from the gored styles of the
previous period. Waistcoats extended to mid-thigh to the 1770s and then began
to shorten. Waistcoats could be made with or without sleeves.
As in the previous period, a loose, T-shaped silk, cotton or
linen gown called a banyan was worn at home as a sort of dressing gown over the
shirt, waistcoat, and breeches. Men of an intellectual or philosophical bent
were painted wearing banyans, with their own hair or a soft cap rather than a
wig.
A coat with a wide collar called a frock coat, derived from
a traditional working-class coat, was worn for hunting and other country
pursuits in both Britain and America.
Shirt and stock
Shirt sleeves were full, gathered at the wrist and dropped
shoulder. Full-dress shirts had ruffles of fine fabric or lace, while undress
shirts ended in plain wrist bands.[2]
Breeches, shoes, and stockings
Knee-length breeches fitted snugly and had a fall-front
opening.
Low-heeled leather shoes fastened with buckles were worn
with silk or woollen stockings. Boots were worn for riding. The buckles were
either polished metal, usually in silver—sometimes with the metal cut into
false stones in the Paris style—or with paste stones, although there were other
types. These buckles were often quite large and one of the world's largest
collections can be seen at Kenwood House.
Hairstyles and headgear
Wigs were worn for formal occasions, or the hair was worn
long and powdered, brushed back from the forehead and "clubbed" (tied
back at the nape of the neck) with a black ribbon. Wigs were generally now
short, but long wigs continued to be popular with the older generation. Wigs
were made with a lot of white powder.
Wide-brimmed hats turned up on three sides called
"cocked hats"—called tricorns in later eras—were worn in mid-century.
The macaroni
The trend of the macaroni grew out of the tradition of those
who partook of the Grand Tour. Elite men in the 18th century would travel
abroad across Europe, namely Italy, to broaden their cultural depth. These men
adopted foreign fashions and tastes and brought them back to England where they
interpreted them further. The original macaroni of the 1760s was characterized
by elaborate dress consisting of short and tight trousers, large wigs, delicate
shoes and small hats. As the general population of English males became exposed
to the luxurious appeal of the macaroni trend, they began to adopt and
replicate the trends they saw. By the 1770s, any man could appear as if they
themselves had been on the Grand Tour-based solely on their outward appearance.
The macaroni and the subsequent imitators were criticized
for being gender ambiguous and effeminate. Frequently, the macaroni fashion
trend was the subject of satirical caricatures and pamphlets. Their large
costume like wigs and short coats, which deeply contrasted the masculine
British dress of the time, were ridiculed for their frivolity and were said to
be threatening the stability of gender difference, thereby undermining the
nation's reputation. The question of farce and inauthenticity comes into play
as well because by dressing as a macaroni, one claimed the status and the means
of an elite who went on the Grand Tour.
Although many mocked the macaroni for their outwardly
eccentric characteristics, some celebrated them for their commitment to the
demonstration of personal identity. The idea of a unique character was becoming
an important concept that spanned many types of media including books and
prints as Britain wanted to distinguish itself from France.
In 2019, GANT is celebrating 70 years as a premium preppy
American Sportswear brand. From creating superior quality shirts in 1949 to
building a full wardrobe of American Sportswear icons over the past seven
decades, GANT has evolved into becoming one of the most influential brands
within its field. Embarking on this anniversary year, the brand is celebrating
its heritage by honoring the sportswear icons and paying tribute to its curious
culture, defined by the credo Never Stop Learning.
The curious mindset is an integral part of GANT’s DNA, and
leads all the way back to the company’s founding 70 years ago on the American
East Coast universities. Over the past seven decades, the brand has driven
product innovation by reinventing, refining and perfecting the American
Sportswear icons. The Button-Down Shirt, the Club Blazer, the Chino Pant, the
Piqué, the Heavy Rugger, the GANT Varsity Jacket, and the Cable Knit have all
been crucial building blocks in the brand’s 70-year long success story. Introduced
on the American East Coast, these icons have been polished into more
sophisticated versions of themselves through their adoption into Europe.
From 7th until 14th of each month February, March, April,
May, August, September and October they will offer double points on their
loyalty program for each icon product bought.
Seven Decades Seven Icons is released globally on 7th
February as part of a year-long celebration.
